p s 1169 ms ■907 opy 3 class __2^z/^ book 4^ ^ 7" copi^htn^ '^p^j^\s cdpyright dep081k bryant and thoreau s,j;o « v;^.s:w« r ~^-'<^ ^ copyright, i^oy, by the bibliophile society all rights reserved '^'^ ■^m^-* v.». \ introduction 1 by professor curtis hidden page d deep were my musings in life's early blossom :? 'mid the twilight of mountain-groves wandering long, wrote bryant in a poem first printed by the new york review for february, 1826. bryant had just come to new york, in 1825, to be associate editor of this newly founded magazine. he had at last decided to give up his profession of the law, which was so irk some ; no longer to . . . scrawl strange words with the barbarous pen, and mingle among the jostling crowd. where the sons of strife are subtle and loud, but to return to the "calm life" of thought and poetry — that won my heart in my greener years, and to have the courage to be, for better or for worse, a man of letters. this decision had been reached only after much reflection and hesitation, after many nightly wanderings ix among the mountain-woods of great bar rington, — after long musings under the stars. he was twenty-four or twenty-five when he thus spoke of his "greener years" as already belonging to the distant past — a mood that need not surprise us in the young man who had written thanatopsis at the age of six teen or seventeen ; and he was thirty when he finally came to this decision, which marked the turning-point in his life. these deciding years were also the most fruitful, in poetic production, of all his hfe. from 1824 to 1826 he wrote more than twice as many poems as in any other three years; and among these poems are many of his most characteristic and best, such as autumn woods, the lapse of time, mutation, monu ment mountain, november, a forest hymn, the death of the flowers, "i cannot forget with what fervid devotion," the new moon, the journey of life, and october; and espe cially several poems of the stars, including the hymn to the north star, the song of the stars, the firmament, and the con junction of jupiter and venus. yet it is probable that not half the poems written dur ing these years are preserved. bryant was al x ways the sternest critic of his own writings. of a series of three odes, written a few years earlier, he has included only one in his works. of the many poems written for miss fair child, before she became mrs. bryant, we have but one — "o fairest of the rural maids." so it may well be that in choosing for publication only what he considered his best, he rejected, in this important period, many characteristic poems which, in view of the small total amount of his work, we can ill afford to lose. musings would seem to be one of these. though in the case of bryant it is particularly difficult to judge of dates by in ternal evidence — so little did his thought and style change from the beginning to the end of his work, from thanatopsis to the flood of years — yet i feel almost safe in assigning our poem to the year 1825 ; the more so since it is a poem of autumn, and since the comet of encke, which he speaks of in the poem and names in his note, was visible in september and october of that year. in any case, musings is thoroughly char acteristic of bryant. no one but he, in the early part of the nineteenth century in amer ica, could have written the beautiful lines — xi . . . was breathing incense o'er the pall of the shrouded earth : and dark and tall . . . stood up the gray old trees. he speaks again of ''tail gray trees" in the firmament, written at great barrington in 1825. we find "tall and dark," again ending a line, in the forest hymn, also written in 1825. indeed, bryant seems to have realized that he had a tendency to overwork these too easily coupled adjectives; for in monument mountain he later changed his original read ing of 1824, "these gray old rocks," to "these reverend rocks." nowhere has he used the phrase more effectively than in this brief tenth line of musings, which stands out bold and alone among the longer lines. we find here also not a few other phrases that are still more distinctively characteristic of bryant, such as "the shrouded earth," "the scarf of years," "the lovely vestal throng." the central thoughts of the poem, as well as their phrasing, may be closely paralleled in bryant's well-known work of this period. it would seem that from the time when he wrote thanatopsis he could hardly conceive of earth otherwise than as "the great tomb of xii man," "one mighty sepulchre." so here, he calls it . . . one vast chamber of the dead: a mighty mausoleum, where nature lay shrouded: and the tread of man gives out a hollow sound, as from a tomb. the journey of life is of all bryant's pub lished poems the one which most closely re sembles musings; in fact, it is the expression, condensed into three brief stanzas, of the same succession of thoughts and moods. to make this entirely clear one has but to quote the first two lines of each stanza, — beneath the waning moon i walk at night and muse on human life . . . the trampled earth returns a sound of fear — a hollow sound, as if i walked on tombs . . . and i, with faltering foot-steps, journey on, watching the stars that roll the hours away . . . after bryant had written the journey of life (and we know that this was in 1826), he perhaps laid aside the poem musings, thinking that he had given the essence of it in his briefer lyric. we may be permitted, xiii however, to prefer the more full and free and spontaneous version, and may even find it more beautiful than the other. it may lead us more gently and persuasively to the mood of quiet acceptance and aspiration which bryant drew so often from converse with night and the stars. "the thoughtful stars," he calls them in the firmament; he was ever their poet and devotee, and they never failed to bring him inspiration and "sweet com mune." most of all he loved the pleiades — "the gentle sisters," as he names them here — the group of sister-stars ... the gentle seven, as he says again in a later tribute, the con stellations. through all his long life, devoted more to public service than to poetry, and for the most part "in city pent," he needed only to walk alone at night, and toward the eternal stars again aspire, in order to find again the memories of his youth, and the nature-inspiration which was the inmost essence of his genius. new york, february, 1907. xiv /^^. r^v.^/tcd ^^^j^ a-c..^ /w.:^ «^' ij.^'v.* ' j u^^'oj -z^^fcr zw<^ ,^^22^/ ^*c^z^ '^ clri'^^ -e<«l^^ yi«^.^^e^' ,«2*t,^ ayx/^ a[z„^.*^..izr■ ^ ^#>«v *^^*^ 'jw*^^ /!<:*<stz^*-*^ */fi^jli pg-^ -g^^x^e^-h»^ j ' >u!;t>xj l > y» im j 'ii njc k i i ifcl b l ^j. ^tu.^ .^^ ^-*^ .^^^t^ v /t<>^/>-/ :*^ *^ j'.^vfcr ^^^cj^ijr ^oc**^^ ^— /?h,^r^ /«t-«*^ ^^t^n^ /m-a.^t~^ /lc-^i^jc^ -^^e^tu-^^ ''0i4,i^ ^(..a^'f-y ^*t*^yv_ l-p^-r-^ — ^^t«< tv ^-^-rrut^ tu^r-^ cu^ ^ /f^^. / 7^ ^ >^ i/ x y /■ ,^4^j^j^i ;^a ipait' musings i pass'd on my nightly path alone; no friendly form was hovering near, no friendly voice was in mine ear, but the night wind's wailing tone. on the wide drear field no autumn bloom look'd gay, no flowret's rich perfume was breathing incense o'er the pall of the shrouded earth : and dark and tall and sighing to the passing breeze stood up the gray old trees. i pass'd on my nightly path alone and my weary feet trode faintly on : i look'd around me — the desolate earth to wan and sorrowful thoughts gave birth and flung its own dark-woven stole and its damp chill breathings o'er my soul and my spirit was heavy : it is sad to look on this beautiful earth when clad in its robes of darkness ; as it were but one vast chamber of the dead: xvii 'aas^sasnsshn a mighty mausoleum, where nature lay shrouded: and the tread of man gives out a hollow sound, as from a tomb. i look'd around o'er the desolate earth: there was no ray of gladness there: i turn'd away. and look'd to the glorious heavens afar, where the stranger orb,^ in his flaming car, rode on his destined way: like a proud and bloody conqueror, bearing the banner of his war, arrayed in his golden robes of fame. and crown'd with a victor's diadem. i look'd to the lovely vestal throng of shining stars, and they smiled on me with a kind and gentle sympathy — for i have lov'd them long: from youth to manhood i have lov'd with each pure and bright divinity to hold sweet commune: i have rov'd. in boyhood's hours of glee, and since the sombre scarf of years was over me, full many a night beneath their canopy of light. and felt my soul grow pure and bright ' the comet of encke xviii f t11 i iiijiii iti*a*jmiaifh•■ ■ 'tt■■ r'-'^^'irtrr"-h"1 as i gaz'd on them : and yet it cheers my spirit, when the phantom fears of the far future darkly rise, like storms in autumn's mellow skies, and memories of sorrow roll. like mountain mists, upon my soul. i lov'd them all : each one had power to chase the shades of my dark hour: each one was dear: but yet, than all that sate within night's regal hall, — as round some sultan's haram throne sit the bright dames, — more sweetly shone, to me, my own lov'd pleiades; when glancing through the old elm trees, that proudly rear'd their leafy dome around my boyhood's peaceful home. as the eyes of gentle sisters, they sent down their mild and tranquil ray. when years had roll'd and on their wings were borne away life's blossomings. their gentle smile, serene and calm. came o'er my heart, a healing balm. for it brought in all the glow of truth the hallow' d memories of youth. xix 'z*;*,^,,^ ^f'*^ ^a^ ^^*^ u-vtj^ ^^<*^ ^xvtst, ^^.^ji^^ct^ ^^-^<:^5^s>*w^-^,^ p-^'-'^y ;^^<. ^:;:^ ^^^-^ ^ ^ --^c^/^ ^--^t>^ ^^z.-^^^ . . ^"^ ^. ^ ^^^-c-'*!:^. *$^*-**=^?^ .^^'"^%'z^ ^^^.-^^ , introduction the ballad here printed for the first time, through the liberality of mr. bixby, is proba bly the earliest of the extant verses of the author. no date can with certainty be given it; but very likely it was written during his college life, which ended in the summer of 1837. it was during those years at harvard that he read tasso's jerusalem delivered, and still earlier, like many young poets, he had delighted in the easy, flowing verse of mrs. hemans. this ballad (perhaps the only one he ever wrote) savors of both tasso and mrs. he mans. in the service, written in 1840, are traces of this early interest in godfrey of boulogne and the crusades; and portions of the service may have been written a year or two before it was offered to margaret fuller for the dial, in 1840, and by her declined. this ballad was never offered anywhere for printing, i fancy, but cherished by some aunt or cousin into whose hands it fell, and thus preserved in the thatcher family at bangor, xxiii maine, where mr. bixby found it in 1906, along with later verses unknown to the pub lic, which appeared in the bibliophile so ciety's recent thoreau publication. the poetical product of thoreau's youth was much larger than he ever allowed to ap pear in print; nor did the whole of it fall into the hands of his literary executors, — his sis ter sophia, emerson, ellery channing, har rison blake, e. h. russell and myself. i name these six persons, because all of us have, first or last, had a hand in the work of presenting his writings to the public. to these might be added mr. henry salt, his english biographer, who edited in london the only collection of his poems aiming at com pleteness which has yet appeared. several persons aided mr. salt in this collection, notably, mr. blake, myself and miss anna ward, of spenser, mass. but none of these eight persons ever had all thoreau's verses in hand, or even within their knowledge. sophia thoreau may possibly be the exception, but i doubt it. f. b. sanborn concord, massachusetts, january 28, 1907. xxiv mae&n^km^. i ! ".i.xuy 1 godfrey of boulogne the moon hung low o'er provence vales, t was night upon the sea ; fair france was wooed by afric gales, and paid in minstrelsy; along the rhone there moves a band. their banner in the breeze, of mail-clad men with iron hand. and steel on breast and knees : the herdsman following his droves far in the night alone. read faintly through the olive groves, — t was godfrey of boulogne. the mist still slumbered on the heights. the glaciers lay in shade. the stars withdrew with faded lights. the moon went down the glade. proud jura saw the day from far. and showed it to the plain ; she heard the din of coming war but told it not again : the goatherd seated on the rocks. dreaming of battles none, xxvii was wakened by his startled flocks, — 't was godfrey of boulogne. night hung upon the danube's stream, deep midnight on the vales; along the shore no beacons gleam, no sound is on the gales ; the turkish lord has banished care, the harem sleeps profound, save one fair georgian sitting there, upon the moslem ground; the lightning flashed a transient gleam, a flaring banner shone, a host swept swiftly down the stream, — 't was godfrey of boulogne. t was noon upon byzantium, on street and tower and sea; on europe's edge a warlike hum, of gathered chivalry: a troop went boldly through the throng of ethiops, arabs, huns, jews, greeks and turks, — to right their wrong; their swords flashed thousand suns. their banner cleaved byzantium's dust. and like the sun it shone; their armor had acquired no rust, — t was godfrey of boulogne, xxviii jun 24 1907 library of congress lililllllillllllll 015 863 381 4 the service by henry david thoreau contents i. qualities of the recruit ii. what music shall we have? iii. not how many, but where the enemy are i. qualities of the recruit _spes sibi quisque._ virgil each one his own hope. the brave man is the elder son of creation, who has stept buoyantly into his inheritance, while the coward, who is the younger, waiteth patiently till he decease. he rides as wide of this earthâ��s gravity as a star, and by yielding incessantly to all the impulses of the soul, is constantly drawn upward and becomes a fixed star. his bravery deals not so much in resolute action, as healthy and assured rest; its palmy state is a staying at home and compelling alliance in all directions. so stands his life to heaven, as some fair sunlit tree against the western horizon, and by sunrise is planted on some eastern hill, to glisten in the first rays of the dawn. the brave man braves nothing, nor knows he of his bravery. he is that sixth champion against thebes, whom, when the proud devices of the rest have been recorded, the poet describes as â��bearing a full-orbed shield of solid brass,â�� â��but there was no device upon its circle, for not to seem just but to be is his wish.â�� he does not present a gleaming edge to ward off harm, for that will oftenest attract the lightning, but rather is the all-pervading ether, which the lightning does not strike but purify. so is the profanity of his companion as a flash across the face of his sky, which lights up and reveals its serene depths. earth cannot shock the heavens, but its dull vapor and foul smoke make a bright cloud spot in the ether, and anon the sun, like a cunning artificer, will cut and paint it, and set it for a jewel in the breast of the sky. his greatness is not measurable; not such a greatness as when we would erect a stupendous piece of art, and send far and near for materials, intending to lay the foundations deeper, and rear the structure higher than ever; for hence results only a remarkable bulkiness without grandeur, lacking those true and simple proportions which are independent of size. he was not builded by that unwise generation that would fain have reached the heavens by piling one brick upon another; but by a far wiser, that builded inward and not outward, having found out a shorter way, through the observance of a higher art. the pyramids some artisan may measure with his line; but if he gives you the dimensions of the parthenon in feet and inches, the figures will not embrace it like a cord, but dangle from its entablature like an elastic drapery. his eye is the focus in which all the rays, from whatever side, are collected; for, itself being within and central, the entire circumference is revealed to it. just as we scan the whole concave of the heavens at a glance, but can compass only one side of the pebble at our feet. so does his discretion give prevalence to his valor. â��discretion is the wise manâ��s soulâ�� says the poet. his prudence may safely go many strides beyond the utmost rashness of the coward; for, while he observes strictly the golden mean, he seems to run through all extremes with impunity. like the sun, which, to the poor worldling, now appears in the zenith, now in the horizon, and again is faintly reflected from the moonâ��s disk, and has the credit of describing an entire great circle, crossing the equinoctial and solstitial colures,â��without detriment to his steadfastness or mediocrity. the golden mean, in ethics, as in physics, is the centre of the system, and that about which all revolve; and, though to a distant and plodding planet it be the uttermost extreme, yet one day, when that planetâ��s year is complete, it will be found to be central. they who are alarmed lest virtue should so far demean herself as to be extremely good, have not yet wholly embraced her, but described only a slight arc of a few seconds about her; and from so small and ill-defined a curvature, you can calculate no centre whatever; but their mean is no better than meanness, nor their medium than mediocrity. the coward wants resolution, which the brave man can do without. he recognizes no faith but a creed, thinking this straw, by which he is moored, does him good service, because his sheet-anchor does not drag. â��the house-roof fights with the rain; he who is under shelter does not know it.â�� in his religion the ligature, which should be muscle and sinew, is rather like that thread which the accomplices of cylon held in their hands, when they went abroad from the temple of minerva,â��the other end being attached to the statue of the goddess. but frequently, as in their case, the thread breaks, being stretched; and he is left without an asylum. the divinity in man is the true vestal fire of the temple, which is never permitted to go out, but burns as steadily, and with as pure a flame, on the obscure provincial altars as in numaâ��s temple at rome. in the meanest are all the materials of manhood, only they are not rightly disposed. we say, justly, that the weak person is â��flat,â��â��for, like all flat substances, he does not stand in the direction of his strength, that is, on his edge, but affords a convenient surface to put upon. he slides all the way through life. most things are strong in one direction; a straw longitudinally; a board in the direction of its edge; a knee transversely to its grain; but the brave man is a perfect sphere, which cannot fall on its flat side, and is equally strong every way. the coward is wretchedly spheroidal at best, too much educated or drawn out on one side, and depressed on the other; or may be likened to a hollow sphere, whose disposition of matter is best when the greatest bulk is intended. we shall not attain to be spherical by lying on one or the other side for an eternity, but only by resigning ourselves implicitly to the law of gravity in us, shall we find our axis coincident with the celestial axis, and by revolving incessantly through all circles, acquire a perfect sphericity. mankind, like the earth, revolve mainly from west to east, and so are flattened at the pole. but does not philosophy give hint of a movement commencing to be rotary at the poles too, which in a millennium will have acquired increased rapidity, and help restore an equilibrium? and when at length every star in the nebul㦠and milky way has looked down with mild radiance for a season, exerting its whole influence as the polar star, the demands of science will in some degree be satisfied. the grand and majestic have always somewhat of the undulatoriness of the sphere. it is the secret of majesty in the rolling gait of the elephant, and of all grace in action and in art. always the line of beauty is a curve. when with pomp a huge sphere is drawn along the streets, by the efforts of a hundred men, i seem to discover each striving to imitate its gait, and keep step with it,â��if possible to swell to its own diameter. but onward it moves, and conquers the multitude with its majesty. what shame, then, that our lives, which might so well be the source of planetary motion, and sanction the order of the spheres, should be full of abruptness and angularity, so as not to roll nor move majestically! the romans â��made fortune sirname to fortitude,â�� for fortitude is that alchemy that turns all things to good fortune. the man of fortitude, whom the latins called _fortis_ is no other than that lucky person whom _fors_ favors, or _vir summae fortis_. if we will, every bark may â��carry cã¦sar and cã¦sarâ��s fortune.â�� for an impenetrable shield, stand inside yourself; he was no artist, but an artisan, who first made shields of brass. for armor of proof, _mea virtute me involvo_,â��i wrap myself in my virtue; â��tumble me down, and i will sit upon my ruins, smiling yet.â�� if you let a single ray of light through the shutter, it will go on diffusing itself without limit till it enlighten the world; but the shadow that was never so wide at first, as rapidly contracts till it comes to naught. the shadow of the moon, when it passes nearest the sun, is lost in space ere it can reach our earth to eclipse it. always the system shines with uninterrupted light; for as the sun is so much larger than any planet, no shadow can travel far into space. we may bask always in the light of the system, always may step back out of the shade. no manâ��s shadow is as large as his body, if the rays make a right angle with the reflecting surface. let our lives be passed under the equator, with the sun in the meridian. there is no ill which may not be dissipated like the dark, if you let in a stronger light upon it. overcome evil with good. practice no such narrow economy as they, whose bravery amounts to no more light than a farthing candle, before which most objects cast a shadow wider than themselves. nature refuses to sympathize with our sorrow; she has not provided _for_, but by a thousand contrivances _against_ it: she has bevelled the margin of the eyelids, that the tears may not overflow on the cheeks. it was a conceit of plutarch, accounting for the preference given to signs observed on the left hand, that men may have thought â��things terrestrial and mortal directly over against heavenly and divine things, and do conjecture that the things which to us are on the left hand, the gods send down from their right hand.â�� if we are not blind, we shall see how a right hand is stretched over all,â��as well the unlucky as the lucky,â��and that the ordering soul is only right-handed, distributing with one palm all our fates. what first suggested that necessity was grim, and made fate to be so fatal? the strongest is always the least violent. necessity is my eastern cushion on which i recline. my eye revels in its prospect as in the summer haze. i ask no more but to be left alone with it. it is the bosom of time and the lap of eternity. to be necessary is to be needful, and necessity is only another name for inflexibility of good. how i welcome my grim fellow, and walk arm in arm with him! let me too be such a necessity as he! i love him, he is so flexile, and yields to me as the air to my body. i leap and dance in his midst, and play with his beard till he smiles. i greet thee, my elder brother! who with thy touch ennoblest all things. then is holiday when naught intervenes betwixt me and thee. must it be so,â��then is it good. the stars are thy interpreters to me. over greece hangs the divine necessity, ever a mellower heaven of itself; whose light gilds the acropolis and a thousand fanes and groves. ii. what music shall we have? each more melodious note i hear brings this reproach to me, that i alone afford the ear, who would the music be. the brave man is the sole patron of music; he recognizes it for his mother tongue; a more mellifluous and articulate language than words, in comparison with which, speech is recent and temporary. it is his voice. his language must have the same majestic movement and cadence that philosophy assigns to the heavenly bodies. the steady flux of his thought constitutes time in music. the universe falls in and keeps pace with it, which before proceeded singly and discordant. hence are poetry and song. when bravery first grew afraid and went to war, it took music along with it. the soul is delighted still to hear the echo of her own voice. especially the soldier insists on agreement and harmony always. to secure these he falls out. indeed, it is that friendship there is in war that makes it chivalrous and heroic. it was the dim sentiment of a noble friendship for the purest soul the world has seen, that gave to europe a crusading era. war is but the compelling of peace. if the soldier marches to the sack of a town, he must be preceded by drum and trumpet, which shall identify his cause with the accordant universe. all things thus echo back his own spirit, and thus the hostile territory is preoccupied for him. he is no longer insulated, but infinitely related and familiar. the roll-call musters for him all the forces of nature. there is as much music in the world as virtue. in a world of peace and love music would be the universal language, and men greet each other in the fields in such accents as a beethoven now utters at rare intervals from a distance. all things obey music as they obey virtue. it is the herald of virtue. it is godâ��s voice. in it are the centripetal and centrifugal forces. the universe needed only to hear a divine melody, that every star might fall into its proper place, and assume its true sphericity. it entails a surpassing affluence on the meanest thing; riding over the heads of sages, and soothing the din of philosophy. when we listen to it we are so wise that we need not to know. all sounds, and more than all, silence, do fife and drum for us. the least creaking doth whet all our senses, and emit a tremulous light, like the aurora borealis,ses the vein in marble, and the grain in wood, so music brings out what of heroic lurks anywhere. it is either a sedative or a tonic to the soul. i read that â��plato thinks the gods never gave men music, the science of melody and harmony, for mere delectation or to tickle the ear; but that the discordant parts of the circulations and beauteous fabric of the soul, and that of it that roves about the body, and many times for want of tune and air, breaks forth into many extravagances and excesses, might be sweetly recalled and artfully wound up to their former consent and agreement.â�� a sudden burst from a horn startles us, as if one had rashly provoked a wild beast. we admire his boldness; he dares wake the echoes which he cannot put to rest. the sound of a bugle in the stillness of the night sends forth its voice to the farthest stars, and marshals them in new order and harmony. instantly it finds a fit sounding-board in the heavens. the notes flash out on the horizon like heat lightning, quickening the pulse of creation. the heavens say, now is this my own earth. to the sensitive soul the universe has her own fixed measure, which is its measure also, and as this, expressed in the regularity of its pulse, is inseparable from a healthy body, so is its healthiness dependent on the regularity of its rhythm. in all sounds the soul recognizes its own rhythm, and seeks to express its sympathy by a correspondent movement of the limbs. when the body marches to the measure of the soul, then is true courage and invincible strength. the coward would reduce this thrilling sphere-music to a universal wail,â��this melodious chant to a nasal cant. he thinks to conciliate all hostile influences by compelling his neighborhood into a partial concord with himself; but his music is no better than a jingle, which is akin to a jar,â��jars regularly recurring. he blows a feeble blast of slender melody, because nature can have no more sympathy with such a soul than it has of cheerful melody in itself. hence hears he no accordant note in the universe, and is a coward, or consciously outcast and deserted man. but the brave man, without drum or trumpet, compels concord everywhere, by the universality and tunefulness of his soul. let not the faithful sorrow that he has no ear for the more fickle and subtle harmonies of creation, if he be awake to the slower measure of virtue and truth. if his pulse does not beat in unison with the musicianâ��s quips and turns, it accords with the pulse-beat of the ages. a manâ��s life should be a stately march to an unheard music; and when to his fellows it may seem irregular and inharmonious, he will be stepping to a livelier measure, which only his nicer ear can detect. there will be no halt, ever, but at most a marching on his post, or such a pause as is richer than any sound, when the deeper melody is no longer heard, but implicitly consented to with the whole life and being. he will take a false step never, even in the most arduous circumstances; for then the music will not fail to swell into greater volume, and rule the movement it inspired. iii. not how many, but where the enemy are â��whatâ��s brave, whatâ��s noble, letâ��s do it after the high roman fashion. shakespeare when my eye falls on the stupendous masses of the clouds, tossed into such irregular greatness across the cope of my sky, i feel that their grandeur is thrown away on the meanness of my employments. in vain the sun, throâ�� morning and noon rolls defiance to man, and, as he sinks behind his cloudy fortress in the west, challenges him to equal greatness in his career; but, from his humbleness he looks up to the domes and minarets and gilded battlements of the eternal city, and is content to be a suburban dweller outside the walls. we look in vain over earth for a roman greatness, to take up the gantlet which the heavens throw down. idomeneus would not have demurred at the freshness of the last morning that rose to us, as unfit occasion to display his valor in; and of some such evening as this, methinks, that grecian fleet came to anchor in the bay of aulis. would that it were to us the eve of a more than ten yearsâ�� war,â��a tithe of whose exploits, and achillean withdrawals, and godly interferences, would stock a library of iliads. better that we have some of that testy spirit of knight errantry, and if we are so blind as to think the world is not rich enough nowadays to afford a real foe to combat, with our trusty swords and double-handed maces, hew and mangle some unreal phantom of the brain. in the pale and shivering fogs of the morning, gathering them up betimes, and withdrawing sluggishly to their daylight haunts, i see falsehood sneaking from the full blaze of truth, and with good relish could do execution on their rearward ranks, with the first brand that came to hand. we too are such puny creatures as to be put to flight by the sun, and suffer our ardor to grow cool in proportion as his increases; our own short-lived chivalry sounds a retreat with the fumes and vapors of the night; and we turn to meet mankind, with its meek face preaching peace, and such non-resistance as the chaff that rides before the whirlwind. let not our peace be proclaimed by the rust on our swords, or our inability to draw them from their scabbards; but let her at least have so much work on her hands as to keep those swords bright and sharp. the very dogs that bay the moon from farmyards oâ�� these nights, do evince more heroism than is tamely barked forth in all the civil exhortations and war sermons of the age. and that day and night, which should be set down indelibly in menâ��s hearts, must be learned from the pages of our almanack. one cannot wonder at the owlish habits of the race, which does not distinguish when its day ends and night begins; for, as night is the season of rest, it would be hard to say when its toil ended and its rest began. not to it â��returns day, or the sweet approach of even or morn, or sight of vernal bloom, or summerâ��s rose, or flocks or herds, or human face divine; but cloud instead, and ever-during dark surrounds. and so the time lapses without epoch or era, and we know some half-score of mornings and evenings by tradition only. almost the night is grieved and leaves her tears on the forelock of day, that men will not rush to her embrace, and fulfill at length the pledge so forwardly given in the youth of time. men are a circumstance to themselves, instead of causing the universe to stand around, the mute witness of their manhood, and the stars to forget their sphere music and chant an elegiac strain, that heroism should have departed out of their ranks and gone over to humanity. it is not enough that our life is an easy one; we must live on the stretch, retiring to our rest like soldiers on the eve of a battle, looking forward with ardor to the strenuous sortie of the morrow. â��sit not down in the popular seats and common level of virtues, but endeavor to make them heroical. offer not only peace-offerings but holocausts unto god.â�� to the brave soldier the rust and leisure of peace are harder than the fatigues of war. as our bodies court physical encounters, and languish in the mild and even climate of the tropics, so our souls thrive best on unrest and discontent. the soul is a sterner master than any king frederick; for a true bravery would subject our bodies to rougher usage than even a grenadier could withstand. we too are dwellers within the purlieus of the camp. when the sun breaks through the morning mist, i seem to hear the din of war louder than when his chariot thundered on the plains of troy. the thin fields of vapor, spread like gauze over the woods, form extended lawns whereon high tournament is held; before each van prick forth the aery knights, and couch their spears, till thickest legions close. it behoves us to make life a steady progression, and not be defeated by its opportunities. the stream which first fell a drop from heaven, should be filtered by events till it burst out into springs of greater purity, and extract a diviner flavor from the accidents through which it passes. shall man wear out sooner than the sun? and not rather dawn as freshly, and with such native dignity stalk down the hills of the east into the bustling vale of life, with as lofty and serene a countenance to roll onward through midday, to a yet fairer and more promising setting? in the crimson colors of the west i discover the budding hues of dawn. to my western brother it is rising pure and bright as it did to me; but only the evening exhibits in the still rear of day, the beauty which through morning and noon escaped me. is not that which we call the gross atmosphere of evening the accumulated deed of the day, which absorbs the rays of beauty, and shows more richly than the naked promise of the dawn? let us look to it that by earnest toil in the heat of the noon, we get ready a rich western blaze against the evening. nor need we fear that the time will hang heavy when our toil is done; for our task is not such a piece of day-labor, that a man must be thinking what he shall do next for a livelihood,â��but such, that as it began in endeavor, so will it end only when no more in heaven or on earth remains to be endeavored. effort is the prerogative of virtue. let not death be the sole task of life,â��the moment when we are rescued from death to life, and set to work,â��if indeed that can be called a task which all things do but alleviate. nor will we suffer our hands to lose one jot of their handiness by looking behind to a mean recompense; knowing that our endeavor cannot be thwarted, nor we be cheated of our earnings unless by not earning them. it concerns us, rather, to be somewhat here present, than to leave something behind us; for, if that were to be considered, it is never the deed men praise, but some marble or canvas, which are only a staging to the real work. the hugest and most effective deed may have no sensible result at all on earth, but may paint itself in the heavens with new stars and constellations. when in rare moments our whole being strives with one consent, which we name a yearning, we may not hope that our work will stand in any artistâ��s gallery on earth. the bravest deed, which for the most part is left quite out of history,â��which alone wants the staleness of a deed done, and the uncertainty of a deed doing,â��is the life of a great man. to perform exploits is to be temporarily bold, as becomes a courage that ebbs and flows,â��the soul, quite vanquished by its own deed, subsiding into indifference and cowardice; but the exploit of a brave life consists in its momentary completeness. every stroke of the chisel must enter our own flesh and bone; he is a mere idolater and apprentice to art who suffers it to grate dully on marble. for the true art is not merely a sublime consolation and holiday labor, which the gods have given to sickly mortals; but such a masterpiece as you may imagine a dweller on the tablelands of central asia might produce, with threescore and ten years for canvas, and the faculties of a man for tools,â��a human life; wherein you might hope to discover more than the freshness of guidoâ��s aurora, or the mild light of titianâ��s landscapes,â��no bald imitation nor even rival of nature, but rather the restored original of which she is the reflection. for such a masterpiece as this, whole galleries of greece and italy are a mere mixing of colors and preparatory quarrying of marble. of such sort, then, be our crusade,â��which, while it inclines chiefly to the hearty good will and activity of war, rather than the insincerity and sloth of peace, will set an example to both of calmness and energy;â��as unconcerned for victory as careless of defeat,â��not seeking to lengthen our term of service, nor to cut it short by a reprieve,â��but earnestly applying ourselves to the campaign before us. nor let our warfare be a boorish and uncourteous one, but a higher courtesy attend its higher chivalry,â��though not to the slackening of its tougher duties and severer discipline. that so our camp may be a palã¦stra, wherein the dormant energies and affections of men may tug and wrestle, not to their discomfiture, but to their mutual exercise and development. what were godfrey and gonsalvo unless we breathed a life into them and enacted their exploits as a prelude to our own? the past is the canvas on which our idea is painted,â��the dim prospectus of our future field. we are dreaming of what we are to do. methinks i hear the clarion sound, and clang of corselet and buckler, from many a silent hamlet of the soul. the signal gun has long since sounded, and we are not yet on our posts. let us make such haste as the morning, and such delay as the evening. henry d. thoreau _july, 1840_. 1854 slavery in massachusetts by henry david thoreau i lately attended a meeting of the citizens of concord, expecting, as one among many, to speak on the subject of slavery in massachusetts; but i was surprised and disappointed to find that what had called my townsmen together was the destiny of nebraska, and not of massachusetts, and that what i had to say would be entirely out of order. i had thought that the house was on fire, and not the prairie; but though several of the citizens of massachusetts are now in prison for attempting to rescue a slave from her own clutches, not one of the speakers at that meeting expressed regret for it, not one even referred to it. it was only the disposition of some wild lands a thousand miles off which appeared to concern them. the inhabitants of concord are not prepared to stand by one of their own bridges, but talk only of taking up a position on the highlands beyond the yellowstone river. our buttricks and davises and hosmers are retreating thither, and i fear that they will leave no lexington common between them and the enemy. there is not one slave in nebraska; there are perhaps a million slaves in massachusetts. they who have been bred in the school of politics fail now and always to face the facts. their measures are half measures and makeshifts merely. they put off the day of settlement indefinitely, and meanwhile the debt accumulates. though the fugitive slave law had not been the subject of discussion on that occasion, it was at length faintly resolved by my townsmen, at an adjourned meeting, as i learn, that the compromise compact of 1820 having been repudiated by one of the parties, "therefore,... the fugitive slave law of 1850 must be repealed." but this is not the reason why an iniquitous law should be repealed. the fact which the politician faces is merely that there is less honor among thieves than was supposed, and not the fact that they are thieves. as i had no opportunity to express my thoughts at that meeting, will you allow me to do so here? again it happens that the boston court-house is full of armed men, holding prisoner and trying a man, to find out if he is not really a slave. does any one think that justice or god awaits mr. loring's decision? for him to sit there deciding still, when this question is already decided from eternity to eternity, and the unlettered slave himself and the multitude around have long since heard and assented to the decision, is simply to make himself ridiculous. we may be tempted to ask from whom he received his commission, and who he is that received it; what novel statutes he obeys, and what precedents are to him of authority. such an arbiter's very existence is an impertinence. we do not ask him to make up his mind, but to make up his pack. i listen to hear the voice of a governor, commander-in-chief of the forces of massachusetts. i hear only the creaking of crickets and the hum of insects which now fill the summer air. the governor's exploit is to review the troops on muster days. i have seen him on horseback, with his hat off, listening to a chaplain's prayer. it chances that that is all i have ever seen of a governor. i think that i could manage to get along without one. if he is not of the least use to prevent my being kidnapped, pray of what important use is he likely to be to me? when freedom is most endangered, he dwells in the deepest obscurity. a distinguished clergyman told me that he chose the profession of a clergyman because it afforded the most leisure for literary pursuits. i would recommend to him the profession of a governor. three years ago, also, when the sims tragedy was acted, i said to myself, there is such an officer, if not such a man, as the governor of massachusettswhat has he been about the last fortnight? has he had as much as he could do to keep on the fence during this moral earthquake? it seemed to me that no keener satire could have been aimed at, no more cutting insult have been offered to that man, than just what happenedthe absence of all inquiry after him in that crisis. the worst and the most i chance to know of him is that he did not improve that opportunity to make himself known, and worthily known. he could at least have resigned himself into fame. it appeared to be forgotten that there was such a man or such an office. yet no doubt he was endeavoring to fill the gubernatorial chair all the while. he was no governor of mine. he did not govern me. but at last, in the present case, the governor was heard from. after he and the united states government had perfectly succeeded in robbing a poor innocent black man of his liberty for life, and, as far as they could, of his creator's likeness in his breast, he made a speech to his accomplices, at a congratulatory supper! i have read a recent law of this state, making it penal for any officer of the "commonwealth" to "detain or aid in the... detention," anywhere within its limits, "of any person, for the reason that he is claimed as a fugitive slave." also, it was a matter of notoriety that a writ of replevin to take the fugitive out of the custody of the united states marshal could not be served for want of sufficient force to aid the officer. i had thought that the governor was, in some sense, the executive officer of the state; that it was his business, as a governor, to see that the laws of the state were executed; while, as a man, he took care that he did not, by so doing, break the laws of humanity; but when there is any special important use for him, he is useless, or worse than useless, and permits the laws of the state to go unexecuted. perhaps i do not know what are the duties of a governor; but if to be a governor requires to subject one's self to so much ignominy without remedy, if it is to put a restraint upon my manhood, i shall take care never to be governor of massachusetts. i have not read far in the statutes of this commonwealth. it is not profitable reading. they do not always say what is true; and they do not always mean what they say. what i am concerned to know is, that that man's influence and authority were on the side of the slaveholder, and not of the slaveof the guilty, and not of the innocentof injustice, and not of justice. i never saw him of whom i speak; indeed, i did not know that he was governor until this event occurred. i heard of him and anthony burns at the same time, and thus, undoubtedly, most will hear of him. so far am i from being governed by him. i do not mean that it was anything to his discredit that i had not heard of him, only that i heard what i did. the worst i shall say of him is, that he proved no better than the majority of his constituents would be likely to prove. in my opinion, be was not equal to the occasion. the whole military force of the state is at the service of a mr. suttle, a slaveholder from virginia, to enable him to catch a man whom he calls his property; but not a soldier is offered to save a citizen of massachusetts from being kidnapped! is this what all these soldiers, all this training, have been for these seventy-nine years past? have they been trained merely to rob mexico and carry back fugitive slaves to their masters? these very nights i heard the sound of a drum in our streets. there were men training still; and for what? i could with an effort pardon the cockerels of concord for crowing still, for they, perchance, had not been beaten that morning; but i could not excuse this rub-a-dub of the "trainers." the slave was carried back by exactly such as these; i.e., by the soldier, of whom the best you can say in this connection is that he is a fool made conspicuous by a painted coat. three years ago, also, just a week after the authorities of boston assembled to carry back a perfectly innocent man, and one whom they knew to be innocent, into slavery, the inhabitants of concord caused the bells to be rung and the cannons to be fired, to celebrate their libertyand the courage and love of liberty of their ancestors who fought at the bridge. as if those three millions had fought for the right to be free themselves, but to hold in slavery three million others. nowadays, men wear a fool's-cap, and call it a liberty-cap. i do not know but there are some who, if they were tied to a whipping-post, and could but get one hand free, would use it to ring the bells and fire the cannons to celebrate their liberty. so some of my townsmen took the liberty to ring and fire. that was the extent of their freedom; and when the sound of the bells died away, their liberty died away also; when the powder was all expended, their liberty went off with the smoke. the joke could be no broader if the inmates of the prisons were to subscribe for all the powder to be used in such salutes, and hire the jailers to do the firing and ringing for them, while they enjoyed it through the grating. this is what i thought about my neighbors. every humane and intelligent inhabitant of concord, when he or she heard those bells and those cannons, thought not with pride of the events of the 19th of april, 1775, but with shame of the events of the 12th of april, 1851. but now we have half buried that old shame under a new one. massachusetts sat waiting mr. loring's decision, as if it could in any way affect her own criminality. her crime, the most conspicuous and fatal crime of all, was permitting him to be the umpire in such a case. it was really the trial of massachusetts. every moment that she hesitated to set this man free, every moment that she now hesitates to atone for her crime, she is convicted. the commissioner on her case is god; not edward g. god, but simply god. i wish my countrymen to consider, that whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can ever commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it. a government which deliberately enacts injustice, and persists in it, will at length even become the laughing-stock of the world. much has been said about american slavery, but i think that we do not even yet realize what slavery is. if i were seriously to propose to congress to make mankind into sausages, i have no doubt that most of the members would smile at my proposition, and if any believed me to be in earnest, they would think that i proposed something much worse than congress had ever done. but if any of them will tell me that to make a man into a sausage would be much worsewould be any worsethan to make him into a slavethan it was to enact the fugitive slave lawi will accuse him of foolishness, of intellectual incapacity, of making a distinction without a difference. the one is just as sensible a proposition as the other. i hear a good deal said about trampling this law under foot. why, one need not go out of his way to do that. this law rises not to the level of the head or the reason; its natural habitat is in the dirt. it was born and bred, and has its life, only in the dust and mire, on a level with the feet; and he who walks with freedom, and does not with hindoo mercy avoid treading on every venomous reptile, will inevitably tread on it, and so trample it under footand webster, its maker, with it, like the dirtbug and its ball. recent events will be valuable as a criticism on the administration of justice in our midst, or, rather, as showing what are the true resources of justice in any community. it has come to this, that the friends of liberty, the friends of the slave, have shuddered when they have understood that his fate was left to the legal tribunals of the country to be decided. free men have no faith that justice will be awarded in such a case. the judge may decide this way or that; it is a kind of accident, at best. it is evident that he is not a competent authority in so important a case. it is no time, then, to be judging according to his precedents, but to establish a precedent for the future. i would much rather trust to the sentiment of the people. in their vote you would get something of some value, at least, however small; but in the other case, only the trammeled judgment of an individual, of no significance, be it which way it might. it is to some extent fatal to the courts, when the people are compelled to go behind them. i do not wish to believe that the courts were made for fair weather, and for very civil cases merely; but think of leaving it to any court in the land to decide whether more than three millions of people, in this case a sixth part of a nation, have a right to be freemen or not! but it has been left to the courts of justice, so calledto the supreme court of the landand, as you all know, recognizing no authority but the constitution, it has decided that the three millions are and shall continue to be slaves. such judges as these are merely the inspectors of a pick-lock and murderer's tools, to tell him whether they are in working order or not, and there they think that their responsibility ends. there was a prior case on the docket, which they, as judges appointed by god, had no right to skip; which having been justly settled, they would have been saved from this humiliation. it was the case of the murderer himself. the law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free. they are the lovers of law and order who observe the law when the government breaks it. among human beings, the judge whose words seal the fate of a man furthest into eternity is not he who merely pronounces the verdict of the law, but he, whoever he may be, who, from a love of truth, and unprejudiced by any custom or enactment of men, utters a true opinion or sentence concerning him. he it is that sentences him. whoever can discern truth has received his commission from a higher source than the chiefest justice in the world who can discern only law. he finds himself constituted judge of the judge. strange that it should be necessary to state such simple truths! i am more and more convinced that, with reference to any public question, it is more important to know what the country thinks of it than what the city thinks. the city does not think much. on any moral question, i would rather have the opinion of boxboro' than of boston and new york put together. when the former speaks, i feel as if somebody had spoken, as if humanity was yet, and a reasonable being had asserted its rightsas if some unprejudiced men among the country's hills had at length turned their attention to the subject, and by a few sensible words redeemed the reputation of the race. when, in some obscure country town, the farmers come together to a special town-meeting, to express their opinion on some subject which is vexing the land, that, i think, is the true congress, and the most respectable one that is ever assembled in the united states. it is evident that there are, in this commonwealth at least, two parties, becoming more and more distinctthe party of the city, and the party of the country. i know that the country is mean enough, but i am glad to believe that there is a slight difference in her favor. but as yet she has few, if any organs, through which to express herself. the editorials which she reads, like the news, come from the seaboard. let us, the inhabitants of the country, cultivate self-respect. let us not send to the city for aught more essential than our broadcloths and groceries; or, if we read the opinions of the city, let us entertain opinions of our own. among measures to be adopted, i would suggest to make as earnest and vigorous an assault on the press as has already been made, and with effect, on the church. the church has much improved within a few years; but the press is, almost without exception, corrupt. i believe that in this country the press exerts a greater and a more pernicious influence than the church did in its worst period. we are not a religious people, but we are a nation of politicians. we do not care for the bible, but we do care for the newspaper. at any meeting of politicianslike that at concord the other evening, for instancehow impertinent it would be to quote from the bible! how pertinent to quote from a newspaper or from the constitution! the newspaper is a bible which we read every morning and every afternoon, standing and sitting, riding and walking. it is a bible which every man carries in his pocket, which lies on every table and counter, and which the mail, and thousands of missionaries, are continually dispersing. it is, in short, the only book which america has printed and which america reads. so wide is its influence. the editor is a preacher whom you voluntarily support. your tax is commonly one cent daily, and it costs nothing for pew hire. but how many of these preachers preach the truth? i repeat the testimony of many an intelligent foreigner, as well as my own convictions, when i say, that probably no country was ever rubled by so mean a class of tyrants as, with a few noble exceptions, are the editors of the periodical press in this country. and as they live and rule only by their servility, and appealing to the worse, and not the better, nature of man, the people who read them are in the condition of the dog that returns to his vomit. the liberator and the commonwealth were the only papers in boston, as far as i know, which made themselves heard in condemnation of the cowardice and meanness of the authorities of that city, as exhibited in '51. the other journals, almost without exception, by their manner of referring to and speaking of the fugitive slave law, and the carrying back of the slave sims, insulted the common sense of the country, at least. and, for the most part, they did this, one would say, because they thought so to secure the approbation of their patrons, not being aware that a sounder sentiment prevailed to any extent in the heart of the commonwealth. i am told that some of them have improved of late; but they are still eminently time-serving. such is the character they have won. but, thank fortune, this preacher can be even more easily reached by the weapons of the reformer than could the recreant priest. the free men of new england have only to refrain from purchasing and reading these sheets, have only to withhold their cents, to kill a score of them at once. one whom i respect told me that he purchased mitchell's citizen in the cars, and then throw it out the window. but would not his contempt have been more fatally expressed if he had not bought it? are they americans? are they new englanders? are they inhabitants of lexington and concord and framingham, who read and support the boston post, mail, journal, advertiser, courier, and times? are these the flags of our union? i am not a newspaper reader, and may omit to name the worst. could slavery suggest a more complete servility than some of these journals exhibit? is there any dust which their conduct does not lick, and make fouler still with its slime? i do not know whether the boston herald is still in existence, but i remember to have seen it about the streets when sims was carried off. did it not act its part well-serve its master faithfully! how could it have gone lower on its belly? how can a man stoop lower than he is low? do more than put his extremities in the place of the head he has? than make his head his lower extremity? when i have taken up this paper with my cuffs turned up, i have heard the gurgling of the sewer through every column. i have felt that i was handling a paper picked out of the public gutters, a leaf from the gospel of the gambling-house, the groggery, and the brothel, harmonizing with the gospel of the merchants' exchange. the majority of the men of the north, and of the south and east and west, are not men of principle. if they vote, they do not send men to congress on errands of humanity; but while their brothers and sisters are being scourged and hung for loving liberty, whilei might here insert all that slavery implies and isit is the mismanagement of wood and iron and stone and gold which concerns them. do what you will, o government, with my wife and children, my mother and brother, my father and sister, i will obey your commands to the letter. it will indeed grieve me if you hurt them, if you deliver them to overseers to be hunted by bounds or to be whipped to death; but, nevertheless, i will peaceably pursue my chosen calling on this fair earth, until perchance, one day, when i have put on mourning for them dead, i shall have persuaded you to relent. such is the attitude, such are the words of massachusetts. rather than do thus, i need not say what match i would touch, what system endeavor to blow up; but as i love my life, i would side with the light, and let the dark earth roll from under me, calling my mother and my brother to follow. i would remind my countrymen that they are to be men first, and americans only at a late and convenient hour. no matter how valuable law may be to protect your property, even to keep soul and body together, if it do not keep you and humanity together. i am sorry to say that i doubt if there is a judge in massachusetts who is prepared to resign his office, and get his living innocently, whenever it is required of him to pass sentence under a law which is merely contrary to the law of god. i am compelled to see that they put themselves, or rather are by character, in this respect, exactly on a level with the marine who discharges his musket in any direction he is ordered to. they are just as much tools, and as little men. certainly, they are not the more to be respected, because their master enslaves their understandings and consciences, instead of their bodies. the judges and lawyerssimply as such, i meanand all men of expediency, try this case by a very low and incompetent standard. they consider, not whether the fugitive slave law is right, but whether it is what they call constitutional. is virtue constitutional, or vice? is equity constitutional, or iniquity? in important moral and vital questions, like this, it is just as impertinent to ask whether a law is constitutional or not, as to ask whether it is profitable or not. they persist in being the servants of the worst of men, and not the servants of humanity. the question is, not whether you or your grandfather, seventy years ago, did not enter into an agreement to serve the devil, and that service is not accordingly now due; but whether you will not now, for once and at last, serve godin spite of your own past recreancy, or that of your ancestorby obeying that eternal and only just constitution, which he, and not any jefferson or adams, has written in your being. the amount of it is, if the majority vote the devil to be god, the minority will live and behave accordinglyand obey the successful candidate, trusting that, some time or other, by some speaker's casting-vote, perhaps, they may reinstate god. this is the highest principle i can get out or invent for my neighbors. these men act as if they believed that they could safely slide down a hill a little wayor a good wayand would surely come to a place, by and by, where they could begin to slide up again. this is expediency, or choosing that course which offers the slightest obstacles to the feet, that is, a downhill one. but there is no such thing as accomplishing a righteous reform by the use of "expediency." there is no such thing as sliding up hill. in morals the only sliders are backsliders. thus we steadily worship mammon, both school and state and church, and on the seventh day curse god with a tintamar from one end of the union to the other. will mankind never learn that policy is not moralitythat it never secures any moral right, but considers merely what is expedient? chooses the available candidatewho is invariably the deviland what right have his constituents to be surprised, because the devil does not behave like an angel of light? what is wanted is men, not of policy, but of probitywho recognize a higher law than the constitution, or the decision of the majority. the fate of the country does not depend on how you vote at the pollsthe worst man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning. what should concern massachusetts is not the nebraska bill, nor the fugitive slave bill, but her own slaveholding and servility. let the state dissolve her union with the slaveholder. she may wriggle and hesitate, and ask leave to read the constitution once more; but she can find no respectable law or precedent which sanctions the continuance of such a union for an instant. let each inhabitant of the state dissolve his union with her, as long as she delays to do her duty. the events of the past month teach me to distrust fame. i see that she does not finely discriminate, but coarsely hurrahs. she considers not the simple heroism of an action, but only as it is connected with its apparent consequences. she praises till she is hoarse the easy exploit of the boston tea party, but will be comparatively silent about the braver and more disinterestedly heroic attack on the boston court-house, simply because it was unsuccessful! covered with disgrace, the state has sat down coolly to try for their lives and liberties the men who attempted to do its duty for it. and this is called justice! they who have shown that they can behave particularly well may perchance be put under bonds for their good behavior. they whom truth requires at present to plead guilty are, of all the inhabitants of the state, preeminently innocent. while the governor, and the mayor, and countless officers of the commonwealth are at large, the champions of liberty are imprisoned. only they are guiltless who commit the crime of contempt of such a court. it behooves every man to see that his influence is on the side of justice, and let the courts make their own characters. my sympathies in this case are wholly with the accused, and wholly against their accusers and judges. justice is sweet and musical; but injustice is harsh and discordant. the judge still sits grinding at his organ, but it yields no music, and we hear only the sound of the handle. he believes that all the music resides in the handle, and the crowd toss him their coppers the same as before. do you suppose that that massachusetts which is now doing these thingswhich hesitates to crown these men, some of whose lawyers, and even judges, perchance, may be driven to take refuge in some poor quibble, that they may not wholly outrage their instinctive sense of justicedo you suppose that she is anything but base and servile? that she is the champion of liberty? show me a free state, and a court truly of justice, and i will fight for them, if need be; but show me massachusetts, and i refuse her my allegiance, and express contempt for her courts. the effect of a good government is to make life more valuableof a bad one, to make it less valuable. we can afford that railroad and all merely material stock should lose some of its value, for that only compels us to live more simply and economically; but suppose that the value of life itself should be diminished! how can we make a less demand on man and nature, how live more economically in respect to virtue and all noble qualities, than we do? i have lived for the last monthand i think that every man in massachusetts capable of the sentiment of patriotism must have had a similar experiencewith the sense of having suffered a vast and indefinite loss. i did not know at first what ailed me. at last it occurred to me that what i had lost was a country. i had never respected the government near to which i lived, but i had foolishly thought that i might manage to live here, minding my private affairs, and forget it. for my part, my old and worthiest pursuits have lost i cannot say how much of their attraction, and i feel that my investment in life here is worth many per cent less since massachusetts last deliberately sent back an innocent man, anthony burns, to slavery. i dwelt before, perhaps, in the illusion that my life passed somewhere only between heaven and hell, but now i cannot persuade myself that i do not dwell wholly within hell. the site of that political organization called massachusetts is to me morally covered with volcanic scoriae and cinders, such as milton describes in the infernal regions. if there is any hell more unprincipled than our rulers, and we, the ruled, i feel curious to see it. life itself being worth less, all things with it, which minister to it, are worth less. suppose you have a small library, with pictures to adorn the wallsa garden laid out aroundand contemplate scientific and literary pursuits and discover all at once that your villa, with all its contents is located in hell, and that the justice of the peace has a cloven foot and a forked taildo not these things suddenly lose their value in your eyes? i feel that, to some extent, the state has fatally interfered with my lawful business. it has not only interrupted me in my passage through court street on errands of trade, but it has interrupted me and every man on his onward and upward path, on which he had trusted soon to leave court street far behind. what right had it to remind me of court street? i have found that hollow which even i had relied on for solid. i am surprised to see men going about their business as if nothing had happened. i say to myself, "unfortunates! they have not heard the news." i am surprised that the man whom i just met on horseback should be so earnest to overtake his newly bought cows running awaysince all property is insecure, and if they do not run away again, they may be taken away from him when he gets them. fool! does he not know that his seed-corn is worth less this yearthat all beneficent harvests fail as you approach the empire of hell? no prudent man will build a stone house under these circumstances, or engage in any peaceful enterprise which it requires a long time to accomplish. art is as long as ever, but life is more interrupted and less available for a man's proper pursuits. it is not an era of repose. we have used up all our inherited freedom. if we would save our lives, we must fight for them. i walk toward one of our ponds; but what signifies the beauty of nature when men are base? we walk to lakes to see our serenity reflected in them; when we are not serene, we go not to them. who can be serene in a country where both the rulers and the ruled are without principle? the remembrance of my country spoils my walk. my thoughts are murder to the state, and involuntarily go plotting against her. but it chanced the other day that i scented a white water-lily, and a season i had waited for had arrived. it is the emblem of purity. it bursts up so pure and fair to the eye, and so sweet to the scent, as if to show us what purity and sweetness reside in, and can be extracted from, the slime and muck of earth. i think i have plucked the first one that has opened for a mile. what confirmation of our hopes is in the fragrance of this flower! i shall not so soon despair of the world for it, notwithstanding slavery, and the cowardice and want of principle of northern men. it suggests what kind of laws have prevailed longest and widest, and still prevail, and that the time may come when man's deeds will smell as sweet. such is the odor which the plant emits. if nature can compound this fragrance still annually, i shall believe her still young and full of vigor, her integrity and genius unimpaired, and that there is virtue even in man, too, who is fitted to perceive and love it. it reminds me that nature has been partner to no missouri compromise. i scent no compromise in the fragrance of the water-lily. it is not a nymphaea douglasii. in it, the sweet, and pure, and innocent are wholly sundered from the obscene and baleful. i do not scent in this the time-serving irresolution of a massachusetts governor, nor of a boston mayor. so behave that the odor of your actions may enhance the general sweetness of the atmosphere, that when we behold or scent a flower, we may not be reminded how inconsistent your deeds are with it; for all odor is but one form of advertisement of a moral quality, and if fair actions had not been performed, the lily would not smell sweet. the foul slime stands for the sloth and vice of man, the decay of humanity; the fragrant flower that springs from it, for the purity and courage which are immortal. slavery and servility have produced no sweet-scented flower annually, to charm the senses of men, for they have no real life: they are merely a decaying and a death, offensive to all healthy nostrils. we do not complain that they live, but that they do not get buried. let the living bury them: even they are good for manure. the end . a plea for captain john brown by henry david thoreau [read to the citizens of concord, mass., sunday evening, october 30, 1859.] i trust that you will pardon me for being here. i do not wish to force my thoughts upon you, but i feel forced myself. little as i know of captain brown, i would fain do my part to correct the tone and the statements of the newspapers, and of my countrymen generally, respecting his character and actions. it costs us nothing to be just. we can at least express our sympathy with, and admiration of, him and his companions, and that is what i now propose to do. first, as to his history. i will endeavor to omit, as much as possible, what you have already read. i need not describe his person to you, for probably most of you have seen and will not soon forget him. i am told that his grandfather, john brown, was an officer in the revolution; that he himself was born in connecticut about the beginning of this century, but early went with his father to ohio. i heard him say that his father was a contractor who furnished beef to the army there, in the war of 1812; that he accompanied him to the camp, and assisted him in that employment, seeing a good deal of military life, more, perhaps, than if he had been a soldier, for he was often present at the councils of the officers. especially, he learned by experience how armies are supplied and maintained in the fieldâ��a work which, he observed, requires at least as much experience and skill as to lead them in battle. he said that few persons had any conception of the cost, even the pecuniary cost, of firing a single bullet in war. he saw enough, at any rate, to disgust him with a military life, indeed to excite in him a great abhorrence of it; so much so, that though he was tempted by the offer of some petty office in the army, when he was about eighteen, he not only declined that, but he also refused to train when warned, and was fined for it. he then resolved that he would never have anything to do with any war, unless it were a war for liberty. when the troubles in kansas began, he sent several of his sons thither to strengthen the party of the free state men, fitting them out with such weapons as he had; telling them that if the troubles should increase, and there should be need of him, he would follow, to assist them with his hand and counsel. this, as you all know, he soon after did; and it was through his agency, far more than any otherâ��s, that kansas was made free. for a part of his life he was a surveyor, and at one time he was engaged in wool-growing, and he went to europe as an agent about that business. there, as everywhere, he had his eyes about him, and made many original observations. he said, for instance, that he saw why the soil of england was so rich, and that of germany (i think it was) so poor, and he thought of writing to some of the crowned heads about it. it was because in england the peasantry live on the soil which they cultivate, but in germany they are gathered into villages, at night. it is a pity that he did not make a book of his observations. i should say that he was an old-fashioned man in respect for the constitution, and his faith in the permanence of this union. slavery he deemed to be wholly opposed to these, and he was its determined foe. he was by descent and birth a new england farmer, a man of great common sense, deliberate and practical as that class is, and tenfold more so. he was like the best of those who stood at concord bridge once, on lexington common, and on bunker hill, only he was firmer and higher principled than any that i have chanced to hear of as there. it was no abolition lecturer that converted him. ethan allen and stark, with whom he may in some respects be compared, were rangers in a lower and less important field. they could bravely face their countryâ��s foes, but he had the courage to face his country herself, when she was in the wrong. a western writer says, to account for his escape from so many perils, that he was concealed under a â��rural exteriorâ��; as if, in that prairie land, a hero should, by good rights, wear a citizenâ��s dress only. he did not go to the college called harvard, good old alma mater as she is. he was not fed on the pap that is there furnished. as he phrased it, â��i know no more of grammar than one of your calves.â�� but he went to the great university of the west, where he sedulously pursued the study of liberty, for which he had early betrayed a fondness, and having taken many degrees, he finally commenced the public practice of humanity in kansas, as you all know. such were _his humanities_, and not any study of grammar. he would have left a greek accent slanting the wrong way, and righted up a falling man. he was one of that class of whom we hear a great deal, but, for the most part, see nothing at allâ��the puritans. it would be in vain to kill him. he died lately in the time of cromwell, but he reappeared here. why should he not? some of the puritan stock are said to have come over and settled in new england. they were a class that did something else than celebrate their forefathersâ�� day, and eat parched corn in remembrance of that time. they were neither democrats nor republicans, but men of simple habits, straightforward, prayerful; not thinking much of rulers who did not fear god, not making many compromises, nor seeking after available candidates. â��in his camp,â�� as one has recently written, and as i have myself heard him state, â��he permitted no profanity; no man of loose morals was suffered to remain there, unless, indeed, as a prisoner of war. â��i would rather,â�� said he, â��have the small-pox, yellow fever, and cholera, all together in my camp, than a man without principle.... it is a mistake, sir, that our people make, when they think that bullies are the best fighters, or that they are the fit men to oppose these southerners. give me men of good principles,â��god-fearing men,â��men who respect themselves, and with a dozen of them i will oppose any hundred such men as these buford ruffians.â��â�� he said that if one offered himself to be a soldier under him, who was forward to tell what he could or would do, if he could only get sight of the enemy, he had but little confidence in him. he was never able to find more than a score or so of recruits whom he would accept, and only about a dozen, among them his sons, in whom he had perfect faith. when he was here, some years ago, he showed to a few a little manuscript book,â��his â��orderly bookâ�� i think he called it,â��containing the names of his company in kansas, and the rules by which they bound themselves; and he stated that several of them had already sealed the contract with their blood. when some one remarked that, with the addition of a chaplain, it would have been a perfect cromwellian troop, he observed that he would have been glad to add a chaplain to the list, if he could have found one who could fill that office worthily. it is easy enough to find one for the united states army. i believe that he had prayers in his camp morning and evening, nevertheless. he was a man of spartan habits, and at sixty was scrupulous about his diet at your table, excusing himself by saying that he must eat sparingly and fare hard, as became a soldier or one who was fitting himself for difficult enterprises, a life of exposure. a man of rare common sense and directness of speech, as of action; a transcendentalist above all, a man of ideas and principles,â��that was what distinguished him. not yielding to a whim or transient impulse, but carrying out the purpose of a life. i noticed that he did not overstate anything, but spoke within bounds. i remember, particularly, how, in his speech here, he referred to what his family had suffered in kansas, without ever giving the least vent to his pent-up fire. it was a volcano with an ordinary chimney-flue. also referring to the deeds of certain border ruffians, he said, rapidly paring away his speech, like an experienced soldier, keeping a reserve of force and meaning, â��they had a perfect right to be hung.â�� he was not in the least a rhetorician, was not talking to buncombe or his constituents anywhere, had no need to invent anything but to tell the simple truth, and communicate his own resolution; therefore he appeared incomparably strong, and eloquence in congress and elsewhere seemed to me at a discount. it was like the speeches of cromwell compared with those of an ordinary king. as for his tact and prudence, i will merely say, that at a time when scarcely a man from the free states was able to reach kansas by any direct route, at least without having his arms taken from him, he, carrying what imperfect guns and other weapons he could collect, openly and slowly drove an ox-cart through missouri, apparently in the capacity of a surveyor, with his surveying compass exposed in it, and so passed unsuspected, and had ample opportunity to learn the designs of the enemy. for some time after his arrival he still followed the same profession. when, for instance, he saw a knot of the ruffians on the prairie, discussing, of course, the single topic which then occupied their minds, he would, perhaps, take his compass and one of his sons, and proceed to run an imaginary line right through the very spot on which that conclave had assembled, and when he came up to them, he would naturally pause and have some talk with them, learning their news, and, at last, all their plans perfectly; and having thus completed his real survey he would resume his imaginary one, and run on his line till he was out of sight. when i expressed surprise that he could live in kansas at all, with a price set upon his head, and so large a number, including the authorities, exasperated against him, he accounted for it by saying, â��it is perfectly well understood that i will not be taken.â�� much of the time for some years he has had to skulk in swamps, suffering from poverty and from sickness, which was the consequence of exposure, befriended only by indians and a few whites. but though it might be known that he was lurking in a particular swamp, his foes commonly did not care to go in after him. he could even come out into a town where there were more border ruffians than free state men, and transact some business, without delaying long, and yet not be molested; for said he, â��no little handful of men were willing to undertake it, and a large body could not be got together in season.â�� as for his recent failure, we do not know the facts about it. it was evidently far from being a wild and desperate attempt. his enemy, mr. vallandigham, is compelled to say, that â��it was among the best planned and executed conspiracies that ever failed.â�� not to mention his other successes, was it a failure, or did it show a want of good management, to deliver from bondage a dozen human beings, and walk off with them by broad daylight, for weeks if not months, at a leisurely pace, through one state after another, for half the length of the north, conspicuous to all parties, with a price set upon his head, going into a court room on his way and telling what he had done, thus convincing missouri that it was not profitable to try to hold slaves in his neighborhood?â��and this, not because the government menials were lenient, but because they were afraid of him. yet he did not attribute his success, foolishly, to â��his star,â�� or to any magic. he said, truly, that the reason why such greatly superior numbers quailed before him was, as one of his prisoners confessed, because they _lacked a cause_â��a kind of armor which he and his party never lacked. when the time came, few men were found willing to lay down their lives in defence of what they knew to be wrong; they did not like that this should be their last act in this world. but to make haste to _his_ last act, and its effects. the newspapers seem to ignore, or perhaps are really ignorant of the fact, that there are at least as many as two or three individuals to a town throughout the north who think much as the present speaker does about him and his enterprise. i do not hesitate to say that they are an important and growing party. we aspire to be something more than stupid and timid chattels, pretending to read history and our bibles, but desecrating every house and every day we breathe in. perhaps anxious politicians may prove that only seventeen white men and five negroes were concerned in the late enterprise, but their very anxiety to prove this might suggest to themselves that all is not told. why do they still dodge the truth? they are so anxious because of a dim consciousness of the fact, which they do not distinctly face, that at least a million of the free inhabitants of the united states would have rejoiced if it had succeeded. they at most ongh we wear no crape, the thought of that manâ��s position and probable fate is spoiling many a manâ��s day here at the north for other thinking. if any one who has seen him here can pursue successfully any other train of thought, i do not know what he is made of. if there is any such who gets his usual allowance of sleep, i will warrant him to fatten easily under any circumstances which do not touch his body or purse. i put a piece of paper and a pencil under my pillow, and when i could not sleep, i wrote in the dark. on the whole, my respect for my fellow-men, except as one may outweigh a million, is not being increased these days. i have noticed the cold-blooded way in which newspaper writers and men generally speak of this event, as if an ordinary malefactor, though one of unusual â��pluck,â��â��as the governor of virginia is reported to have said, using the language of the cock-pit, â��the gamest man he ever saw,â��â��had been caught, and were about to be hung. he was not dreaming of his foes when the governor thought he looked so brave. it turns what sweetness i have to gall, to hear, or hear of, the remarks of some of my neighbors. when we heard at first that he was dead, one of my townsmen observed that â��he died as the fool diethâ��; which, pardon me, for an instant suggested a likeness in him dying to my neighbor living. others, craven-hearted, said disparagingly, that â��he threw his life away,â�� because he resisted the government. which way have they thrown _their_ lives, pray?â��such as would praise a man for attacking singly an ordinary band of thieves or murderers. i hear another ask, yankee-like, â��what will he gain by it?â�� as if he expected to fill his pockets by this enterprise. such a one has no idea of gain but in this worldly sense. if it does not lead to a â��surpriseâ�� party, if he does not get a new pair of boots, or a vote of thanks, it must be a failure. â��but he wonâ��t gain anything by it.â�� well, no, i donâ��t suppose he could get four-and-sixpence a day for being hung, take the year round; but then he stands a chance to save a considerable part of his soul,â��and _such_ a soul!â��when _you_ do not. no doubt you can get more in your market for a quart of milk than for a quart of blood, but that is not the market that heroes carry their blood to. such do not know that like the seed is the fruit, and that, in the moral world, when good seed is planted, good fruit is inevitable, and does not depend on our watering and cultivating; that when you plant, or bury, a hero in his field, a crop of heroes is sure to spring up. this is a seed of such force and vitality, that it does not ask our leave to germinate. the momentary charge at balaclava, in obedience to a blundering command, proving what a perfect machine the soldier is, has, properly enough, been celebrated by a poet laureate; but the steady, and for the most part successful, charge of this man, for some years, against the legions of slavery, in obedience to an infinitely higher command, is as much more memorable than that, as an intelligent and conscientious man is superior to a machine. do you think that that will go unsung? â��served him rightâ��â��â��a dangerous manâ��â��â��he is undoubtedly insane.â�� so they proceed to live their sane, and wise, and altogether admirable lives, reading their plutarch a little, but chiefly pausing at that feat of putnam, who was let down into a wolfâ��s den; and in this wise they nourish themselves for brave and patriotic deeds some time or other. the tract society could afford to print that story of putnam. you might open the district schools with the reading of it, for there is nothing about slavery or the church in it; unless it occurs to the reader that some pastors are _wolves_ in sheepâ��s clothing. â��the american board of commissioners for foreign missionsâ�� even, might dare to protest against _that_ wolf. i have heard of boards, and of american boards, but it chances that i never heard of this particular lumber till lately. and yet i hear of northern men, and women, and children, by families, buying a â��life membershipâ�� in such societies as these. a life-membership in the grave! you can get buried cheaper than that. our foes are in our midst and all about us. there is hardly a house but is divided against itself, for our foe is the all but universal woodenness of both head and heart, the want of vitality in man, which is the effect of our vice; and hence are begotten fear, superstition, bigotry, persecution, and slavery of all kinds. we are mere figure-heads upon a hulk, with livers in the place of hearts. the curse is the worship of idols, which at length changes the worshipper into a stone image himself; and the new englander is just as much an idolater as the hindoo. this man was an exception, for he did not set up even a political graven image between him and his god. a church that can never have done with excommunicating christ while it exists! away with your broad and flat churches, and your narrow and tall churches! take a step forward, and invent a new style of out-houses. invent a salt that will save you, and defend our nostrils. the modern christian is a man who has consented to say all the prayers in the liturgy, provided you will let him go straight to bed and sleep quietly afterward. all his prayers begin with â��now i lay me down to sleep,â�� and he is forever looking forward to the time when he shall go to his â��_long_ rest.â�� he has consented to perform certain old established charities, too, after a fashion, but he does not wish to hear of any new-fangled ones; he doesnâ��t wish to have any supplementary articles added to the contract, to fit it to the present time. he shows the whites of his eyes on the sabbath, and the blacks all the rest of the week. the evil is not merely a stagnation of blood, but a stagnation of spirit. many, no doubt, are well disposed, but sluggish by constitution and by habit, and they cannot conceive of a man who is actuated by higher motives than they are. accordingly they pronounce this man insane, for they know that _they_ could never act as he does, as long as they are themselves. we dream of foreign countries, of other times and races of men, placing them at a distance in history or space; but let some significant event like the present occur in our midst, and we discover, often, this distance and this strangeness between us and our nearest neighbors. _they_ are our austrias, and chinas, and south sea islands. our crowded society becomes well spaced all at once, clean and handsome to the eye, a city of magnificent distances. we discover why it was that we never got beyond compliments and surfaces with them before; we become aware of as many versts between us and them as there are between a wandering tartar and a chinese town. the thoughtful man becomes a hermit in the thoroughfares of the market-place. impassable seas suddenly find their level between us, or dumb steppes stretch themselves out there. it is the difference of constitution, of intelligence, and faith, and not streams and mountains, that make the true and impassable boundaries between individuals and between states. none but the like-minded can come plenipotentiary to our court. i read all the newspapers i could get within a week after this event, and i do not remember in them a single expression of sympathy for these men. i have since seen one noble statement, in a boston paper, not editorial. some voluminous sheets decided not to print the full report of brownâ��s words to the exclusion of other matter. it was as if a publisher should reject the manuscript of the new testament, and print wilsonâ��s last speech. the same journal which contained this pregnant news, was chiefly filled, in parallel columns, with the reports of the political conventions that were being held. but the descent to them was too steep. they should have been spared this contrast, been printed in an extra at least. to turn from the voices and deeds of earnest men to the _cackling_ of political conventions! office seekers and speech-makers, who do not so much as lay an honest egg, but wear their breasts bare upon an egg of chalk! their great game is the game of straws, or rather that universal aboriginal game of the platter, at which the indians cried _hub, bub!_ exclude the reports of religious and political conventions, and publish the words of a living man. but i object not so much to what they have omitted, as to what they have inserted. even the _liberator_ called it â��a misguided, wild, and apparently insane ... effort.â�� as for the herd of newspapers and magazines, i do not chance to know an editor in the country who will deliberately print anything which he knows will ultimately and permanently reduce the number of his subscribers. they do not believe that it would be expedient. how then can they print truth? if we do not say pleasant things, they argue, nobody will attend to us. and so they do like some travelling auctioneers, who sing an obscene song in order to draw a crowd around them. republican editors, obliged to get their sentences ready for the morning edition, and accustomed to look at everything by the twilight of politics, express no admiration, nor true sorrow even, but call these men â��deluded fanaticsâ��â��â��mistaken menâ��â��â��insane,â�� or â��crazed.â�� it suggests what a _sane_ set of editors we are blessed with, _not_ â��mistaken menâ��; who know very well on which side their bread is buttered, at least. a man does a brave and humane deed, and at once, on all sides, we hear people and parties declaring, â��i didnâ��t do it, nor countenance _him_ to do it, in any conceivable way. it canâ��t be fairly inferred from my past career.â�� i, for one, am not interested to hear you define your position. i donâ��t know that i ever was, or ever shall be. i think it is mere egotism, or impertinent at this time. ye neednâ��t take so much pains to wash your skirts of him. no intelligent man will ever be convinced that he was any creature of yours. he went and came, as he himself informs us, â��under the auspices of john brown and nobody else.â�� the republican party does not perceive how many his _failure_ will make to vote more correctly than they would have them. they have counted the votes of pennsylvania & co., but they have not correctly counted captain brownâ��s vote. he has taken the wind out of their sails, the little wind they had, and they may as well lie to and repair. what though he did not belong to your clique! though you may not approve of his method or his principles, recognize his magnanimity. would you not like to claim kindredship with him in that, though in no other thing he is like, or likely, to you? do you think that you would lose your reputation so? what you lost at the spile, you would gain at the bung. if they do not mean all this, then they do not speak the truth, and say what they mean. they are simply at their old tricks still. â��it was always conceded to him,â�� _says one who calls him crazy_, â��that he was a conscientious man, very modest in his demeanor, apparently inoffensive, until the subject of slavery was introduced, when he would exhibit a feeling of indignation unparalleled.â�� the slave-ship is on her way, crowded with its dying victims; new cargoes are being added in mid ocean; a small crew of slaveholders, countenanced by a large body of passengers, is smothering four millions under the hatches, and yet the politician asserts that the only proper way by which deliverance is to be obtained, is by â��the quiet diffusion of the sentiments of humanity,â�� without any â��outbreak.â�� as if the sentiments of humanity were ever found unaccompanied by its deeds, and you could disperse them, all finished to order, the pure article, as easily as water with a watering-pot, and so lay the dust. what is that that i hear cast overboard? the bodies of the dead that have found deliverance. that is the way we are â��diffusingâ�� humanity, and its sentiments with it. prominent and influential editors, accustomed to deal with politicians, men of an infinitely lower grade, say, in their ignorance, that he acted â��on the principle of revenge.â�� they do not know the man. they must enlarge themselves to conceive of him. i have no doubt that the time will come when they will begin to see him as he was. they have got to conceive of a man of faith and of religious principle, and not a politician or an indian; of a man who did not wait till he was personally interfered with, or thwarted in some harmless business, before he gave his life to the cause of the oppressed. if walker may be considered the representative of the south, i wish i could say that brown was the representative of the north. he was a superior man. he did not value his bodily life in comparison with ideal things. he did not recognize unjust human laws, but resisted them as he was bid. for once we are lifted out of the trivialness and dust of politics into the region of truth and manhood. no man in america has ever stood up so persistently and effectively for the dignity of human nature, knowing himself for a man, and the equal of any and all governments. in that sense he was the most american of us all. he needed no babbling lawyer, making false issues, to defend him. he was more than a match for all the judges that american voters, or office-holders of whatever grade, can create. he could not have been tried by a jury of his peers, because his peers did not exist. when a man stands up serenely against the condemnation and vengeance of mankind, rising above them literally _by a whole body_,â��even though he were of late the vilest murderer, who has settled that matter with himself,â��the spectacle is a sublime one,â��didnâ��t ye know it, ye liberators, ye tribunes, ye republicans?â��and we become criminal in comparison. do yourselves the honor to recognize him. he needs none of your respect. as for the democratic journals, they are not human enough to affect me at all. i do not feel indignation at anything they may say. i am aware that i anticipate a little, that he was still, at the last accounts, alive in the hands of his foes; but that being the case, i have all along found myself thinking and speaking of him as physically dead. i do not believe in erecting statues to those who still live in our hearts, whose bones have not yet crumbled in the earth around us, but i would rather see the statue of captain brown in the massachusetts state-house yard, than that of any other man whom i know. i rejoice that i live in this age, that i am his contemporary. what a contrast, when we turn to that political party which is so anxiously shuffling him and his plot out of its way, and looking around for some available slaveholder, perhaps, to be its candidate, at least for one who will execute the fugitive slave law, and all those other unjust laws which he took up arms to annul! insane! a father and six sons, and one son-in-law, and several more men besides,â��as many at least as twelve disciples,â��all struck with insanity at once; while the same tyrant holds with a firmer gripe than ever his four millions of slaves, and a thousand sane editors, his abettors, are saving their country and their bacon! just as insane were his efforts in kansas. ask the tyrant who is his most dangerous foe, the sane man or the insane? do the thousands who know him best, who have rejoiced at his deeds in kansas, and have afforded him material aid there, think him insane? such a use of this word is a mere trope with most who persist in using it, and i have no doubt that many of the rest have already in silence retracted their words. read his admirable answers to mason and others. how they are dwarfed and defeated by the contrast! on the one side, half brutish, half timid questioning; on the other, truth, clear as lightning, crashing into their obscene temples. they are made to stand with pilate, and gessler, and the inquisition. how ineffectual their speech and action! and what a void their silence! they are but helpless tools in this great work. it was no human power that gathered them about this preacher. what have massachusetts and the north sent a few _sane_ representatives to congress for, of late years?â��to declare with effect what kind of sentiments? all their speeches put together and boiled down,â��and probably they themselves will confess it,â��do not match for manly directness and force, and for simple truth, the few casual remarks of crazy john brown, on the floor of the harperâ��s ferry engine-house,â��that man whom you are about to hang, to send to the other world, though not to represent _you_ there. no, he was not our representative in any sense. he was too fair a specimen of a man to represent the like of us. who, then, _were_ his constituents? if you read his words understandingly you will find out. in his case there is no idle eloquence, no made, nor maiden speech, no compliments to the oppressor. truth is his inspirer, and earnestness the polisher of his sentences. he could afford to lose his sharpâ��s rifles, while he retained his faculty of speech,â��a sharpâ��s rifle of infinitely surer and longer range. and the _new york herald_ reports the conversation _verbatim!_ it does not know of what undying words it is made the vehicle. i have no respect for the penetration of any man who can read the report of that conversation, and still call the principal in it insane. it has the ring of a saner sanity than an ordinary discipline and habits of life, than an ordinary organization, secure. take any sentence of itâ��â��any questions that i can honorably answer, i will; not otherwise. so far as i am myself concerned, i have told everything truthfully. i value my word, sir.â�� the few who talk about his vindictive spirit, while they really admire his heroism, have no test by which to detect a noble man, no amalgam to combine with his pure gold. they mix their own dross with it. it is a relief to turn from these slanders to the testimony of his more truthful, but frightened, jailers and hangmen. governor wise speaks far more justly and appreciatingly of him than any northern editor, or politician, or public personage, that i chance to have heard from. i know that you can afford to hear him again on this subject. he says: â��they are themselves mistaken who take him to be a madman.... he is cool, collected, and indomitable, and it is but just to him to say, that he was humane to his prisoners.... and he inspired me with great trust in his integrity as a man of truth. he is a fanatic, vain and garrulous,â�� (i leave that part to mr. wise) â��but firm, truthful, and intelligent. his men, too, who survive, are like him.... colonel washington says that he was the coolest and firmest man he ever saw in defying danger and death. with one son dead by his side, and another shot through, he felt the pulse of his dying son with one hand, and held his rifle with the other, and commanded his men with the utmost composure, encouraging them to be firm, and to sell their lives as dear as they could. of the three white prisoners, brown, stephens, and coppoc, it was hard to say which was most firm....â�� almost the first northern men whom the slaveholder has learned to respect! the testimony of mr. vallandigham, though less valuable, is of the same purport, that â��it is vain to underrate either the man or his conspiracy.... he is the farthest possible removed from the ordinary ruffian, fanatic, or madman.â�� â��all is quiet at harperâ��s ferry,â�� say the journals. what is the character of that calm which follows when the law and the slaveholder prevail? i regard this event as a touchstone designed to bring out, with glaring distinctness, the character of this government. we needed to be thus assisted to see it by the light of history. it needed to see itself. when a government puts forth its strength on the side of injustice, as ours to maintain slavery and kill the liberators of the slave, it reveals itself a merely brute force, or worse, a demoniacal force. it is the head of the plug uglies. it is more manifest than ever that tyranny rules. i see this government to be effectually allied with france and austria in oppressing mankind. there sits a tyrant holding fettered four millions of slaves; here comes their heroic liberator. this most hypocritical and diabolical government looks up from its seat on the gasping four millions, and inquires with an assumption of innocence: â��what do you assault me for? am i not an honest man? cease agitation on this subject, or i will make a slave of you, too, or else hang you.â�� we talk about a _representative_ government; but what a monster of a government is that where the noblest faculties of the mind, and the _whole_ heart, are not _represented_. a semi-human tiger or ox, stalking over the earth, with its heart taken out and the top of its brain shot away. heroes have fought well on their stumps when their legs were shot off, but i never heard of any good done by such a government as that. the only government that i recognize,â��and it matters not how few are at the head of it, or how small its army,â��is that power that establishes justice in the land, never that which establishes injustice. what shall we think of a government to which all the truly brave and just men in the land are enemies, standing between it and those whom it oppresses? a government that pretends to be christian and crucifies a million christs every day! treason! where does such treason take its rise? i cannot help thinking of you as you deserve, ye governments. can you dry up the fountains of thought? high treason, when it is resistance to tyranny here below, has its origin in, and is first committed by, the power that makes and forever recreates man. when you have caught and hung all these human rebels, you have accomplished nothing but your own guilt, for you have not struck at the fountain head. you presume to contend with a foe against whom west point cadets and rifled cannon _point_ not. can all the art of the cannon-founder tempt matter to turn against its maker? is the form in which the founder thinks he casts it more essential than the constitution of it and of himself? the united states have a coffle of four millions of slaves. they are determined to keep them in this condition; and massachusetts is one of the confederated overseers to prevent their escape. such are not alltheir escape. such are not all the inhabitants of massachusetts, but such are they who rule and are obeyed here. it was massachusetts, as well as virginia, that put down this insurrection at harperâ��s ferry. she sent the marines there, and she will have to pay the penalty of her sin. suppose that there is a society in this state that out of its own purse and magnanimity saves all the fugitive slaves that run to us, and protects our colored fellow-citizens, and leaves the other work to the government, so-called. is not that government fast losing its occupation, and becoming contemptible to mankind? if private men are obliged to perform the offices of government, to protect the weak and dispense justice, then the government becomes only a hired man, or clerk, to perform menial or indifferent services. of course, that is but the shadow of a government whose existence necessitates a vigilant committee. what should we think of the oriental cadi even, behind whom worked in secret a vigilant committee? but such is the character of our northern states generally; each has its vigilant committee. and, to a certain extent, these crazy governments recognize and accept this relation. they say, virtually, â��weâ��ll be glad to work for you on these terms, only donâ��t make a noise about it.â�� and thus the government, its salary being insured, withdraws into the back shop, taking the constitution with it, and bestows most of its labor on repairing that. when i hear it at work sometimes, as i go by, it reminds me, at best, of those farmers who in winter contrive to turn a penny by following the coopering business. and what kind of spirit is their barrel made to hold? they speculate in stocks, and bore holes in mountains, but they are not competent to lay out even a decent highway. the only _free_ road, the underground railroad, is owned and managed by the vigilant committee. _they_ have tunnelled under the whole breadth of the land. such a government is losing its power and respectability as surely as water runs out of a leaky vessel, and is held by one that can contain it. i hear many condemn these men because they were so few. when were the good and the brave ever in a majority? would you have had him wait till that time came?â��till you and i came over to him? the very fact that he had no rabble or troop of hirelings about him would alone distinguish him from ordinary heroes. his company was small indeed, because few could be found worthy to pass muster. each one who there laid down his life for the poor and oppressed was a picked man, culled out of many thousands, if not millions; apparently a man of principle, of rare courage, and devoted humanity, ready to sacrifice his life at any moment for the benefit of his fellow man. it may be doubted if there were as many more their equals in these respects in all the countryâ��i speak of his followers onlyâ��for their leader, no doubt, scoured the land far and wide, seeking to swell his troop. these alone were ready to step between the oppressor and the oppressed. surely they were the very best men you could select to be hung. that was the greatest compliment which this country could pay them. they were ripe for her gallows. she has tried a long time, she has hung a good many, but never found the right one before. when i think of him, and his six sons, and his son-in-law, not to enumerate the others, enlisted for this fight, proceeding coolly, reverently, humanely to work, for months if not years, sleeping and waking upon it, summering and wintering the thought, without expecting any reward but a good conscience, while almost all america stood ranked on the other sideâ��i say again that it affects me as a sublime spectacle. if he had had any journal advocating â��_his cause_,â�� any organ, as the phrase is, monotonously and wearisomely playing the same old tune, and then passing round the hat, it would have been fatal to his efficiency. if he had acted in any way so as to be let alone by the government, he might have been suspected. it was the fact that the tyrant must give place to him, or he to the tyrant, that distinguished him from all the reformers of the day that i know. it was his peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. i agree with him. they who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others. such will be more shocked by his life than by his death. i shall not be forward to think him mistaken in his method who quickest succeeds to liberate the slave. i speak for the slave when i say, that i prefer the philanthropy of captain brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots me nor liberates me. at any rate, i do not think it is quite sane for one to spend his whole life in talking or writing about this matter, unless he is continuously inspired, and i have not done so. a man may have other affairs to attend to. i do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but i can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable. we preserve the so-called peace of our community by deeds of petty violence every day. look at the policemanâ��s billy and handcuffs! look at the jail! look at the gallows! look at the chaplain of the regiment! we are hoping only to live safely on the outskirts of _this_ provisional army. so we defend ourselves and our hen-roosts, and maintain slavery. i know that the mass of my countrymen think that the only righsharpâ��s rifles and revolvers is to fight duels with them, when we are insulted by other nations, or to hunt indians, or shoot fugitive slaves with them, or the like. i think that for once the sharpâ��s rifles and the revolvers were employed in a righteous cause. the tools were in the hands of one who could use them. the same indignation that is said to have cleared the temple once will clear it again. the question is not about the weapon, but the spirit in which you use it. no man has appeared in america, as yet, who loved his fellow man so well, and treated him so tenderly. he lived for him. he took up his life and he laid it down for him. what sort of violence is that which is encouraged, not by soldiers, but by peaceable citizens, not so much by laymen as by ministers of the gospel, not so much by the fighting sects as by the quakers, and not so much by quaker men as by quaker women? this event advertises me that there is such a fact as deathâ��the possibility of a manâ��s dying. it seems as if no man had ever died in america before; for in order to die you must first have lived. i donâ��t believe in the hearses, and palls, and funerals that they have had. there was no death in the case, because there had been no life; they merely rotted or sloughed off, pretty much as they had rotted or sloughed along. no templeâ��s veil was rent, only a hole dug somewhere. let the dead bury their dead. the best of them fairly ran down like a clock. franklin,â��washington,â��they were let off without dying; they were merely missing one day. i hear a good many pretend that they are going to die; or that they have died, for aught that i know. nonsense! iâ��ll defy them to do it. they havenâ��t got life enough in them. theyâ��ll deliquesce like fungi, and keep a hundred eulogists mopping the spot where they left off. only half a dozen or so have died since the world began. do you think that you are going to die, sir? no! thereâ��s no hope of you. you havenâ��t got your lesson yet. youâ��ve got to stay after school. we make a needless ado about capital punishment,â��taking lives, when there is no life to take. _memento mori!_ we donâ��t understand that sublime sentence which some worthy got sculptured on his gravestone once. weâ��ve interpreted it in a grovelling and snivelling sense; weâ��ve wholly forgotten how to die. but be sure you do die nevertheless. do your work, and finish it. if you know how to begin, you will know when to end. these men, in teaching us how to die, have at the same time taught us how to live. if this manâ��s acts and words do not create a revival, it will be the severest possible satire on the acts and words that do. it is the best news that america has ever heard. it has already quickened the feeble pulse of the north, and infused more and more generous blood into her veins and heart, than any number of years of what is called commercial and political prosperity could. how many a man who was lately contemplating suicide has now something to live for! one writer says that brownâ��s peculiar monomania made him to be â��dreaded by the missourians as a supernatural being.â�� sure enough, a hero in the midst of us cowards is always so dreaded. he is just that thing. he shows himself superior to nature. he has a spark of divinity in him. â��unless above himself he can erect himself, how poor a thing is man!â�� newspaper editors argue also that it is a proof of his _insanity_ that he thought he was appointed to do this work which he did,â��that he did not suspect himself for a moment! they talk as if it were impossible that a man could be â��divinely appointedâ�� in these days to do any work whatever; as if vows and religion were out of date as connected with any manâ��s daily work; as if the agent to abolish slavery could only be somebody appointed by the president, or by some political party. they talk as if a manâ��s death were a failure, and his continued life, be it of whatever character, were a success. when i reflect to what a cause this man devoted himself, and how religiously, and then reflect to what cause his judges and all who condemn him so angrily and fluently devote themselves, i see that they are as far apart as the heavens and earth are asunder. the amount of it is, our â��_leading men_â�� are a harmless kind of folk, and they know _well enough_ that _they_ were not divinely appointed, but elected by the votes of their party. who is it whose safety requires that captain brown be hung? is it indispensable to any northern man? is there no resource but to cast these men also to the minotaur? if you do not wish it, say so distinctly. while these things are being done, beauty stands veiled and music is a screeching lie. think of him,â��of his rare qualities!â��such a man as it takes ages to make, and ages to understand; no mock hero, nor the representative of any party. a man such as the sun may not rise upon again in this benighted land. to whose making went the costliest material, the finest adamant; sent to be the redeemer of those in captivity. and the only use to which you can put him is to hang him at the end of a rope! you who pretend to care for christ crucified, consider what you are about to do to him who offered himself to be the savior of four millions of men. any man knows when he is justified, and all the wits in the world cannot enlighten him on that point. the murderer always knows that he is justly punished; but when a government takes the life of a man without the consent of his conscience, it is an audacious government, and is taking a step towards its own dissolution. is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong? are laws to be enforced simply because they were made? or declared by any number of men to be good, if they are _not_ good? is there any necessity for a manâ��s being a tool to perform a deed of which his better nature disapproves? is it the intention of law-makers that _good_ men shall be hung ever? are judges to interpret the law according to the letter, and not the spirit? what right have _you_ to enter into a compact with yourself that you _will_ do thus or so, against the light within you? is it for _you_ to _make up_ your mind,â��to form any resolution whatever,â��and not accept the convictions that are forced upon you, and which ever pass your understanding? i do not believe in lawyers, in that mode of attacking or defending a man, because you descend to meet the judge on his own ground, and, in cases of the highest importance, it is of no consequence whether a man breaks a human law or not. let lawyers decide trivial cases. business men may arrange that among themselves. if they were the interpreters of the everlasting laws which rightfully bind man, that would be another thing. a counterfeiting law-factory, standing half in a slave land and half in a free! what kind of laws for free men can you expect from that? i am here to plead his cause with you. i plead not for his life, but for his character,â��his immortal life; and so it becomes your cause wholly, and is not his in the least. some eighteen hundred years ago christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, captain brown was hung. these are the two ends of a chain which is not without its links. he is not old brown any longer; he is an angel of light. i see now that it was necessary that the bravest and humanest man in all the country should be hung. perhaps he saw it himself. i _almost fear_ that i may yet hear of his deliverance, doubting if a prolonged life, if _any_ life, can do as much good as his death. â��misguidedâ��! â��garrulousâ��! â��insaneâ��! â��vindictiveâ��! so ye write in your easy-chairs, and thus he wounded responds from the floor of the armory, clear as a cloudless sky, true as the voice of nature is: â��no man sent me here; it was my own prompting and that of my maker. i acknowledge no master in human form.â�� and in what a sweet and noble strain he proceeds, addressing his captors, who stand over him: â��i think, my friends, you are guilty of a great wrong against god and humanity, and it would be perfectly right for any one to interfere with you so far as to free those you willfully and wickedly hold in bondage.â�� and referring to his movement: â��it is, in my opinion, the greatest service a man can render to god.â�� â��i pity the poor in bondage that have none to help them; that is why i am here; not to gratify any personal animosity, revenge, or vindictive spirit. it is my sympathy with the oppressed and the wronged, that are as good as you, and as precious in the sight of god.â�� you donâ��t know your testament when you see it. â��i want you to understand that i respect the rights of the poorest and weakest of colored people, oppressed by the slave power, just as much as i do those of the most wealthy and powerful.â�� â��i wish to say, furthermore, that you had better, all you people at the south, prepare yourselves for a settlement of that question, that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it. the sooner you are prepared the better. you may dispose of me very easily. i am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled,â��this negro question, i mean; the end of that is not yet.â�� i foresee the time when the painter will paint that scene, no longer going to rome for a subject; the poet will sing it; the historian record it; and, with the landing of the pilgrims and the declaration of independence, it will be the ornament of some future national gallery, when at least the present form of slavery shall be no more here. we shall then be at liberty to weep for captain brown. then, and not till then, we will take our revenge. we will take our revenge. wild apples by henry david thoreau contents the history of the apple-tree the wild apple the crab how the wild apple grows the fruit, and its flavor their beauty the naming of them the last gleaning the â��frozen-thawedâ�� apple the history of the apple-tree it is remarkable how closely the history of the apple-tree is connected with that of man. the geologist tells us that the order of the _rosaceã¦_, which includes the apple, also the true grasses, and the _labiatã¦_, or mints, were introduced only a short time previous to the appearance of man on the globe. it appears that apples made a part of the food of that unknown primitive people whose traces have lately been found at the bottom of the swiss lakes, supposed to be older than the foundation of rome, so old that they had no metallic implements. an entire black and shrivelled crab-apple has been recovered from their stores. tacitus says of the ancient germans that they satisfied their hunger with wild apples, among other things. niebuhr[1] observes that â��the words for a house, a field, a plough, ploughing, wine, oil, milk, sheep, apples, and others relating to agriculture and the gentler ways of life, agree in latin and greek, while the latin words for all objects pertaining to war or the chase are utterly alien from the greek.â�� thus the apple-tree may be considered a symbol of peace no less than the olive. [1] a german historical critic of ancient life. the apple was early so important, and so generally distributed, that its name traced to its root in many languages signifies fruit in general. î�á¿�î»î¿î½ (mä�lon), in greek, means an apple, also the fruit of other trees, also a sheep and any cattle, and finally riches in general. the apple-tree has been celebrated by the hebrews, greeks, romans, and scandinavians. some have thought that the first human pair were tempted by its fruit. goddesses are fabled to have contended for it, dragons were set to watch it, and heroes were employed to pluck it.[2] [2] the greek myths especially referred to are the choice of paris and the apples of the hesperides. the tree is mentioned in at least three places in the old testament, and its fruit in two or three more. solomon sings, â��as the apple-tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons.â�� and again, â��stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples.â�� the noblest part of manâ��s noblest feature is named from this fruit, â��the apple of the eye.â�� the apple-tree is also mentioned by homer and herodotus. ulysses saw in the glorious garden of alcinous â��pears and pomegranates and apple-trees bearing beautiful fruit.â�� and according to homer, apples were among the fruits which tantalus could not pluck, the wind ever blowing their boughs away from him. theophrastus knew and described the apple-tree as a botanist. according to the prose edda,[3] â��iduna keeps in a box the apples which the gods, when they feel old age approaching, have only to taste of to become young again. it is in this manner that they will be kept in renovated youth until ragnarã¶kâ�� (or the destruction of the gods). [3] the stories of the early scandinavians. i learn from loudon[4] that â��the ancient welsh bards were rewarded for excelling in song by the token of the apple-spray;â�� and â��in the highlands of scotland the apple-tree is the badge of the clan lamont.â�� [4] an english authority on the culture of orchards and gardens. the apple-tree belongs chiefly to the northern temperate zone. loudon says, that â��it grows spontaneously in every part of europe except the frigid zone, and throughout western asia, china and japan.â�� we have also two or three varieties of the apple indigenous in north america. the cultivated apple-tree was first introduced into this country by the earliest settlers, and is thought to do as well or better here than anywhere else. probably some of the varieties which are now cultivated were first introduced into britain by the romans. pliny, adopting the distinction of theophrastus, says, â��of trees there are some which are altogether wild, some more civilized.â�� theophrastus includes the apple among the last; and, indeed, it is in this sense the most civilized of all trees. it is as harmless as a dove, as beautiful as a rose, and as valuable as flocks and herds. it has been longer cultivated than any other, and so is more humanized; and who knows but, like the dog, it will at length be no longer traceable to its wild original? it migrates with man, like the dog and horse and cow; first, perchance, from greece to italy, thence to england, thence to america; and our western emigrant is still marching steadily toward the setting sun with the seeds of the apple in his pocket, or perhaps a few young trees strapped to his load. at least a million apple-trees are thus set farther westward this year than any cultivated ones grew last year. consider how the blossom-week, like the sabbath, is thus annually spreading over the prairies; for when man migrates he carries with him not only his birds, quadrupeds, insects, vegetables, and his very sward, but his orchard also. the leaves and tender twigs are an agreeable food to many domestic animals, as the cow, horse, sheep, and goat; and the fruit is sought after by the first, as well as by the hog. thus there appears to have existed a natural alliance between these animals and this tree from the first. â��the fruit of the crab in the forests of franceâ�� is said to be â��a great resource for the wild boar.â�� not only the indian, but many indigenous insects, birds, and quadrupeds, welcomed the apple-tree to these shores. the tent-caterpillar saddled her eggs on the very first twig that was formed, and it has since shared her affections with the wild cherry; and the canker-worm also in a measure abandoned the elm to feed on it. as it grew apace, the bluebird, robin, cherry-bird, king-bird, and many more, came with haste and built their nests and warbled in its boughs, and so became orchard-birds, and multiplied more than ever. it was an era in the history of their race. the downy woodpecker found such a savory morsel under its bark, that he perforated it in a ring quite round the tree before he left it,â��a thing which he had never done before, to my knowledge. it did not take the partridge long to find out how sweet its buds were, and every winter eve she flew, and still flies, from the wood, to pluck them, much to the farmerâ��s sorrow. the rabbit, too, was not slow to learn the taste of its twigs and bark; and when the fruit was ripe, the squirrel half-rolled, half-carried it to his hole; and even the musquash crept up the bank from the brook at evening, and greedily devoured it, until he had worn a path in the grass there; and when it was frozen and thawed, the crow and the jay were glad to taste it occasionally. the owl crept into the first apple-tree that became hollow, and fairly hooted with delight, finding it just the place for him; so, settling down into it, he has remained there ever since. my theme being the wild apple, i will merely glance at some of the seasons in the annual growth of the cultivated apple, and pass on to my special province. the flowers of the apple are perhaps the most beautiful of any tree, so copious and so delicious to both sight and scent. the walker is frequently tempted to turn and linger near some more than usually handsome one, whose blossoms are two thirds expanded. how superior it is in these respects to the pear, whose blossoms are neither colored nor fragrant! by the middle of july, green apples are so large as to remind us of coddling, and of the autumn. the sward is commonly strewed with little ones which fall still-born, as it were,â��nature thus thinning them for us. the roman writer palladius said: â��if apples are inclined to fall before their time, a stone placed in a split root will retain them.â�� some such notion, still surviving, may account for some of the stones which we see placed to be overgrown in the forks of trees. they have a saying in suffolk, england,â�� â��at michaelmas time, or a little before, half an apple goes to the core.â�� early apples begin to be ripe about the first of august; but i think that none of them are so good to eat as some to smell. one is worth more to scent your handkerchief with than any perfume which they sell in the shops. the fragrance of some fruits is not to be forgotten, along with that of flowers. some gnarly apple which i pick up in the road reminds me by its fragrance of all the wealth of pomona,[5]â��carrying me forward to those days when they will be collected in golden and ruddy heaps in the orchards and about the cider-mills. [5] the roman goddess of fruit and fruit-trees. a week or two later, as you are going by orchards or gardens, especially in the evenings, you pass through a little region possessed by the fragrance of ripe apples, and thus enjoy them without price, and without robbing anybody. there is thus about all natural products a certain volatile and ethereal quality which represents their highest value, and which cannot be vulgarized, or bought and sold. no mortal has ever enjoyed the perfect flavor of any fruit, and only the godlike among men begin to taste its ambrosial qualities. for nectar and ambrosia are only those fine flavors of every earthly fruit which our coarse palates fail to perceive,â��just as we occupy the heaven of the gods without knowing it. when i see a particularly mean man carrying a load of fair and fragrant early apples to market, i seem to see a contest going on between him and his horse, on the one side, and the apples on the other, and, to my mind, the apples always gain it. pliny says that apples are the heaviest of all things, and that the oxen begin to sweat at the mere sight of a load of them. our driver begins to lose his load the moment he tries to transport them to where they do not belong, that is, to any but the most beautiful. though he gets out from time to time, and feels of them, and thinks they are all there, i see the stream of their evanescent and celestial qualities going to heaven from his cart, while the pulp and skin and core only are going to market. they are not apples, but pomace. are not these still idunaâ��s apples, the taste of which keeps the gods forever young? and think you that they will let loki or thjassi carry them off to jã¶tunheim,[6] while they grow wrinkled and gray? no, for ragnarã¶k, or the destruction of the gods, is not yet. [6] jã¶tunheim (_ye_(r)_tâ�²-un-hime_) in scandinavian mythology was the home of the jotun or giants. loki was a descendant of the gods, and a companion of the giants. thjassi (_tee-assy_) was a giant. there is another thinning of the fruit, commonly near the end of august or in september, when the ground is strewn with windfalls; and this happens especially when high winds occur after rain. in some orchards you may see fully three quarters of the whole crop on the ground, lying in a circular form beneath the trees, yet hard and green,â��or, if it is a hillside, rolled far down the hill. however, it is an ill wind that blows nobody any good. all the country over, people are busy picking up the windfalls, and this will make them cheap for early apple-pies. in october, the leaves falling, the apples are more distinct on the trees. i saw one year in a neighboring town some trees fuller of fruit than i remember to have ever seen before, small yellow apples hanging over the road. the branches were gracefully drooping with their weight, like a barberry-bush, so that the whole tree acquired a new character. even the topmost branches, instead of standing erect, spread and drooped in all directions; and there were so many poles supporting the lower ones, that they looked like pictures of banian-trees. as an old english manuscript says, â��the mo appelen the tree bereth the more sche boweth to the folk.â�� surely the apple is the noblest of fruits. let the most beautiful or the swiftest have it. that should be the â��goingâ�� price of apples. between the fifth and twentieth of october i see the barrels lie under the trees. and perhaps i talk with one who is selecting some choice barrels to fulfil an order. he turns a specked one over many times before he leaves it out. if i were to tell what is passing in my mind, i should say that every one was specked which he had handled; for he rubs off all the bloom, and those fugacious ethereal qualities leave it. cool evenings prompt the farmers to make haste, and at length i see only the ladders here and there left leaning against the trees. it would be well if we accepted these gifts with more joy and gratitude, and did not think it enough simply to put a fresh load of compost about the tree. some old english customs arthem described chiefly in brandâ��s â��popular antiquities.â�� it appears that â��on christmas eve the farmers and their men in devonshire take a large bowl of cider, with a toast in it, and carrying it in state to the orchard, they salute the apple-trees with much ceremony, in order to make them bear well the next season.â�� this salutation consists in â��throwing some of the cider about the roots of the tree, placing bits of the toast on the branches,â�� and then, â��encircling one of the best bearing trees in the orchard, they drink the following toast three several times:â�� â��â��hereâ��s to thee, old apple-tree, whence thou mayst bud, and whence thou mayst blow, and whence thou mayst bear apples enow! hats-full! caps-full! bushel, bushel, sacks-full! and my pockets full, too! hurra!â��â�� also what was called â��apple-howlingâ�� used to be practised in various counties of england on new-yearâ��s eve. a troop of boys visited the different orchards, and, encircling the apple-trees, repeated the following words:â�� â��stand fast, root! bear well, top! pray god send us a good howling crop: every twig, apples big; every bow, apples enow!â�� â��they then shout in chorus, one of the boys accompanying them on a cowâ��s horn. during this ceremony they rap the trees with their sticks.â�� this is called â��wassailingâ�� the trees, and is thought by some to be â��a relic of the heathen sacrifice to pomona.â�� herrick sings,â�� â��wassaile the trees that they may beare you many a plum and many a peare; for more or less fruits they will bring as you so give them wassailing.â�� our poets have as yet a better right to sing of cider than of wine; but it behooves them to sing better than english phillips did, else they will do no credit to their muse. the wild apple so much for the more civilized apple-trees (_urbaniores_, as pliny calls them). i love better to go through the old orchards of ungrafted apple-trees, at whatever season of the year,â��so irregularly planted: sometimes two trees standing close together; and the rows so devious that you would think that they not only had grown while the owner was sleeping, but had been set out by him in a somnambulic state. the rows of grafted fruit will never tempt me to wander amid them like these. but i now, alas, speak rather from memory than from any recent experience, such ravages have been made! some soils, like a rocky tract called the easterbrooks country in my neighborhood, are so suited to the apple, that it will grow faster in them without any care, or if only the ground is broken up once a year, than it will in many places with any amount of care. the owners of this tract allow that the soil is excellent for fruit, but they say that it is so rocky that they have not patience to plough it, and that, together with the distance, is the reason why it is not cultivated. there are, or were recently, extensive orchards there standing without order. nay, they spring up wild and bear well there in the midst of pines, birches, maples, and oaks. i am often surprised to see rising amid these trees the rounded tops of apple-trees glowing with red or yellow fruit, in harmony with the autumnal tints of the forest. going up the side of a cliff about the first of november, i saw a vigorous young apple-tree, which, planted by birds or cows, had shot up amid the rocks and open woods there, and had now much fruit on it, uninjured by the frosts, when all cultivated apples were gathered. it was a rank wild growth, with many green leaves on it still, and made an impression of thorniness. the fruit was hard and green, but looked as if it would be palatable in the winter. some was dangling on the twigs, but more half-buried in the wet leaves under the tree, or rolled far down the hill amid the rocks. the owner knows nothing of it. the day was not observed when it first blossomed, nor when it first bore fruit, unless by the chickadee. there was no dancing on the green beneath it in its honor, and now there is no hand to pluck its fruit,â��which is only gnawed by squirrels, as i perceive. it has done double duty,â��not only borne this crop, but each twig has grown a foot into the air. and this is _such_ fruit! bigger than many berries, we must admit, and carried home will be sound and palatable next spring. what care i for idunaâ��s apples so long as i can get these? when i go by this shrub thus late and hardy, and see its dangling fruit, i respect the tree, and i am grateful for natureâ��s bounty, even though i cannot eat it. here on this rugged and woody hillside has grown an apple-tree, not planted by man, no relic of a former orchard, but a natural growth, like the pines and oaks. most fruits which we prize and use depend entirely on our care. corn and grain, potatoes, peaches, melons, etc., depend altogether on our planting; but the apple emulates manâ��s independence and enterprise. it is not simply carried, as i have said, but, like him, to some extent, it has migrated to this new world, and is even, here and there, making its way amid the aboriginal trees; just as the ox and dog and horse sometimes run wild and maintain themselves. even the sourest and crabbedest apple, growing in the most unfavorable position, suggests such thoughts as these, it is so noble a fruit. the crab nevertheless, _our_ wild apple is wild only like myself, perchance, who belong not to the aboriginal race here, but have strayed into the woods from the cultivated stock. wilder still, as i have said, there grows elsewhere in this country a native and aboriginal crab-apple, â��whose nature has not yet been modified by cultivation.â�� it is found from western new york to minnesota and southward. michaux[7] says that its ordinary height â��is fifteen or eighteen feet, but it is sometimes found twenty-five or thirty feet high,â�� and that the large ones â��exactly resemble the common apple-tree.â�� â��the flowers are white mingled with rose-color, and are collected in corymbs.â�� they are remarkable for their delicious odor. the fruit, according to him, is about an inch and a half in diameter, and is intensely acid. yet they make fine sweet-meats, and also cider of them. he concludes, that â��if, on being cultivated, it does not yield new and palatable varieties, it will at least be celebrated for the beauty of its flowers, and for the sweetness of its perfume.â�� [7] pronounced _mee-shå�;_ a french botanist and traveller. i never saw the crab-apple till may, 1861. i had heard of it through michaux, but more modern botanists, so far as i know, have not treated it as of any peculiar importance. thus it was a half-fabulous tree to me. i contemplated a pilgrimage to the â��glades,â�� a portion of pennsylvania, where it was said to grow to perfection. i thought of sending to a nursery for it, but doubted if they had it, or would distinguish it from european varieties. at last i had occasion to go to minnesota, and on entering michigan i began to notice from the cars a tree with handsome rose-colored flowers. at first i thought it some variety of thorn; but it was not long before the truth flashed on me, that this was my long-sought crab-apple. it was the prevailing flowering shrub or tree to be seen from the cars at that season of the year,â��about the middle of may. but the cars never stopped before one, and so i was launched on the bosom of the mississippi without having touched one, experiencing the fate of tantalus. on arriving at st. anthonyâ��s falls, i was sorry to be told that i was too far north for the crab-apple. nevertheless i succeeded in finding it about eight miles west of the falls; touched it and smelled it, and secured a lingering corymb of flowers for my herbarium. this must have been near its northern limit. how the wild apple grows but though these are indigenous, like the indians, i doubt whether they are any hardier than those back-woodsmen among the apple-trees, which, though descended from cultivated stocks, plant themselves in distant fields and forests, where the soil is favorable to them. i know of no trees which have more difficulties to contend with, and which more sturdily resist their foes. these are the ones whose story we have to tell. it oftentimes reads thus:â�� near the beginning of may, we notice little thickets of apple-trees just springing up in the pastures where cattle have been,â��as the rocky ones of our easter-brooks country, or the top of nobscot hill in sudbury. one or two of these perhaps survive the drought and other accidents,â��their very birthplace defending them against the encroaching grass and some other dangers, at first. in two yearsâ�� time â��t had thus reached the level of the rocks, admired the stretching world, nor feared the wandering flocks. but at this tender age its sufferings began: there came a browsing ox and cut it down a span. this time, perhaps, the ox does not notice it amid the grass; but the next year, when it has grown more stout, he recognizes it for a fellow-emigrant from the old country, the flavor of whose leaves and twigs he well knows; and though at first he pauses to welcome it, and express his surprise, and gets for answer, â��the same cause that brought you here brought me,â�� he nevertheless browses it again, reflecting, it may be, that he has some title to it. thus cut down annually, it does not despair; but, putting forth two short twigs for every one cut off, it spreads out low along the ground in the hollows or between the rocks, growing more stout and scrubby, until it forms, not a tree as yet, but a little pyramidal, stiff, twiggy mass, almost as solid and impenetrable as a rock. some of the densest and most impenetrable clumps of bushes that i have ever seen, as well, on account of the closeness and stubbornness of their branches as of their thorns, have been these wild-apple scrubs. they are more like the scrubby fir and black spruce on which you stand, and sometimes walk, on the tops of mountains, where cold is the demon they contend with, than anything else. no wonder they are prompted to grow thorns at last, to defend themselves against such foes. in their thorniness, however, there is no malice, only some malic acid. the rocky pastures of the tract i have referred toâ��for they maintain their ground best in a rocky fieldâ��are thickly sprinkled with these little tufts, reminding you often of some rigid gray mosses or lichens, and you see thousands of little trees just springing up between them, with the seed still attached to them. being regularly clipped all around each year by the cows, as a hedge with shears, they are often of a perfect conical or pyramidal form, from one to four feet high, and more or less sharp, as if trimmed by the gardenerâ��s art. in the pastures on nobscot hill and its spurs they make fine dark shadows when the sun is low. they are also an excellent covert from hawks for many small birds that roost and build in them. whole flocks perch in them at night, and i have seen three robinsâ�� nests in one which was six feet in diameter. no doubt many of these are already old trees, if you reckon from the day they were planted, but infants still when you consider their development and the long life before them. i counted the annual rings of some which were just one foot high, and as wide as high, and found that they were about twelve years old, but quite sound and thrifty! they were so low that they were unnoticed by the walker, while many of their contemporaries from the nurseries were already bearing considerable crops. but what you gain in time is perhaps in this case, too, lost in power,â��that is, in the vigor of the tree. this is their pyramidal state. the cows continue to browse them thus for twenty years or more, keeping them down and compelling them to spread, until at last they are so broad that they become their own fence, when some interior shoot, which their foes cannot reach, darts upward with joy: for it has not forgotten its high calling, and bears its own peculiar fruit in triumph. such are the tactics by which it finally defeats its bovine foes. now, if you have watched the progress of a particular shrub, you will see that it is no longer a simple pyramid or cone, but out of its apex there rises a sprig or two, growing more lustily perchance than an orchard-tree, since the plant now devotes the whole of its repressed energy to these upright parts. in a short time these become a small tree, an inverted pyramid resting on the apex of the other, so that the whole has now the form of a vast hour-glass. the spreading bottom, having served its purpose, finally disappears, and the generous tree permits the now harmless cows to come in and stand in its shade, and rub against and redden its trunk, which has grown in spite of them, and even to taste a part of its fruit, and so disperse the seed. thus the cows create their own shade and food; and the tree, its hour-glass being inverted, lives a second life, as it were. it is an important question with some nowadays, whether you should trim young apple-trees as high as your nose or as high as your eyes. the ox trims them up as high as he can reach, and that is about the right height, i think. in spite of wandering kine and other adverse circumstance, that despised shrub, valued only by small birds as a covert and shelter from hawks, has its blossom-week at last, and in course of time its harvest, sincere, though small. by the end of some october, when its leaves have fallen, i frequently see such a central sprig, whose progress i have watched, when i thought it had forgotten its destiny, as i had, bearing its first crop of small green or yellow or rosy fruit, which the cows cannot get at over the bushy and thorny hedge which surrounds it; and i make haste to taste the new and undescribed variety. we have all heard of the numerous varieties of fruit invented by van mons[8] and knight.[9] this is the system of van cow, and she has invented far more and more memorable varieties than both of them. [8] a belgian chemist and horticulturist. [9] an english vegetable physiologist. through what hardships it may attain to bear a sweet fruit! though somewhat small, it may prove equal, if not superior, in flavor to that which has grown in a garden,â��will perchance be all the sweeter and more palatable for the very difficulties it has had to contend with. who knows but this chance wild fruit, planted by a cow or a bird on some remote and rocky hillside, where it is as yet unobserved by man, may be the choicest of all its kind, and foreign potentates shall hear of it, and royal societies seek to propagate it, though the virtues of the perhaps truly crabbed owner of the soil may never be heard of,â��at least, beyond the limits of his village? it was thus the porter and the baldwin grew. every wild-apple shrub excites our expectation thus, somewhat as every wild child. it is, perhaps, a prince in disguise. what a lesson to man! so are human beings, referred to the highest standard, the celestial fruit which they suggest and aspire to bear, browsed on by fate; and only the most persistent and strongest genius defends itself and prevails, sends a tender scion upward at last, and drops its perfect fruit on the ungrateful earth. poets and philosophers and statesmen thus spring up in the country pastures, and outlast the hosts of unoriginal men. such is always the pursuit of knowledge. the celestial fruits, the golden apples of the hesperides, are ever guarded by a hundred-headed dragon which never sleeps, so that it is an herculean labor to pluck them. this is one and the most remarkable way in which the wild apple is propagated; but commonly it springs up at wide intervals in woods and swamps, and by the sides of roads, as the soil may suit it, and grows with comparative rapidity. those which grow in dense woods are very tall and slender. i frequently pluck from these trees a perfectly mild and tamed fruit. as palladius says, â��and the ground is strewn with the fruit of an unbidden apth the fruit of an unbidden apple-tree.â�� it is an old notion, that, if these wild trees do not bear a valuable fruit of their own, they are the best stocks by which to transmit to posterity the most highly prized qualities of others. however, i am not in search of stocks, but the wild fruit itself, whose fierce gust has suffered no â��inteneration.â�� it is not my â��highest plot to plant the bergamot.â�� the fruit, and its flavor the time for wild apples is the last of october and the first of november. they then get to be palatable, for they ripen late, and they are still, perhaps, as beautiful as ever. i make a great account of these fruits, which the farmers do not think it worth the while to gather,â��wild flavors of the muse, vivacious and inspiriting. the farmer thinks that he has better in his barrels; but he is mistaken, unless he has a walkerâ��s appetite and imagination, neither of which can he have. such as grow quite wild, and are left out till the first of november, i presume that the owner does not mean to gather. they belong to children as wild as themselves,â��to certain active boys that i know,â��to the wild-eyed woman of the fields, to whom nothing comes amiss, who gleans after all the world,â��and, moreover, to us walkers. we have met with them, and they are ours. these rights, long enough insisted upon, have come to be an institution in some old countries, where they have learned how to live. i hear that â��the custom of grippling, which may be called apple-gleaning, is, or was formerly, practised in herefordshire. it consists in leaving a few apples, which are called the gripples, on every tree, after the general gathering, for the boys, who go with climbing-poles and bags to collect them.â�� as for those i speak of, i pluck them as a wild fruit, native to this quarter of the earth,â��fruit of old trees that have been dying ever since i was a boy and are not yet dead, frequented only by the wood-pecker and the squirrel, deserted now by the owner, who has not faith enough to look under their boughs. from the appearance of the tree-top, at a little distance, you would expect nothing but lichens to drop from it, but your faith is rewarded by finding the ground strewn with spirited fruit,â��some of it, perhaps, collected at squirrel-holes, with the marks of their teeth by which they carried them,â��some containing a cricket or two silently feeding within, and some, especially in damp days, a shelless snail. the very sticks and stones lodged in the tree-top might have convinced you of the savoriness of the fruit which has been so eagerly sought after in past years. i have seen no account of these among the â��fruits and fruit-trees of america,â�� though they are more memorable to my taste than the grafted kinds; more racy and wild american flavors do they possess, when october and november, when december and january, and perhaps february and march even, have assuaged them somewhat. an old farmer in my neighborhood, who always selects the right word, says that â��they have a kind of bow-arrow tang.â�� apples for grafting appear to have been selected commonly, not so much for their spirited flavor, as for their mildness, their size, and bearing qualities,â��not so much for their beauty, as for their fairness and soundness. indeed, i have no faith in the selected lists of pomological gentlemen. their â��favoritesâ�� and â��non-suchesâ�� and â��seek-no-farthers,â�� when i have fruited them, commonly turn out very tame and forgetable. they are eaten with comparatively little zest, and have no real _tang_ nor _smack_ to them. what if some of these wildings are acrid and puckery, genuine _verjuice_, do they not still belong to the _pomaceã¦_, which are uniformly innocent and kind to our race? i still begrudge them to the cider-mill. perhaps they are not fairly ripe yet. no wonder that these small and high-colored apples are thought to make the best cider. loudon quotes from the herefordshire report that â��apples of a small size are always, if equal in quality, to be preferred to those of a larger size, in order that the rind and kernel may bear the greatest proportion to the pulp, which affords the weakest and most watery juice.â�� and he says, that, â��to prove this, dr. symonds of hereford, about the year 1800, made one hogshead of cider entirely from the rinds and cores of apples, and another from the pulp only, when the first was found of extraordinary strength and flavor, while the latter was sweet and insipid.â�� evelyn[10] says that the â��red-strakeâ�� was the favorite cider-apple in his day; and he quotes one dr. newburg as saying, â��in jersey â��t is a general observation, as i hear, that the more of red any apple has in its rind, the more proper it is for this use. pale-faced apples they exclude as much as may be from their cider-vat.â�� this opinion still prevails. [10] an english writer of the seventeenth century. all apples are good in november. those which the farmer leaves out as unsalable, and unpalatable to those who frequent the markets, are choicest fruit to the walker. but it is remarkable that the wild apple, which i praise as so spirited and racy when eaten in the fields or woods, being brought into the house, has frequently a harsh and crabbed taste. the saunter-erâ��s apple not even the saunterer can eat in the house. the palate rejects it there, as it does haws and acorns, and demands a tamed one; for there you miss the november air, which is the sauce it is to be eaten with. accordingly, when tityrus, seeing the lengthening shadows, invites melibå�us to go home and pass the night with him, he promises him _mild_ apples and soft chestnuts. i frequently pluck wild apples of so rich and spicy a flavor that i wonder all orchardists do not get a scion from that tree, and i fail not to bring home my pockets full. but perchance, when i take one out of my desk and taste it in my chamber i find it unexpectedly crude,â��sour enough to set a squirrelâ��s teeth on edge and make a jay scream. these apples have hung in the wind and frost and rain till they have absorbed the qualities of the weather or season, and thus are highly _seasoned_, and they _pierce_ and _sting_ and _permeate_ us with their spirit. they must be eaten in _season_, accordingly,â��that is, out-of-doors. to appreciate the wild and sharp flavors of these october fruits, it is necessary that you be breathing the sharp october or november air. the out-door air and exercise which the walker gets give a different tone to his palate, and he craves a fruit which the sedentary would call harsh and crabbed. they must be eaten in the fields, when your system is all aglow with exercise, when the frosty weather nips your fingers, the wind rattles the bare boughs or rustles the few remaining leaves, and the jay is heard screaming around. what is sour in the house a bracing walk makes sweet. some of these apples might be labelled, â��to be eaten in the wind.â�� of course no flavors are thrown away; they are intended for the taste that is up to them. some apples have two distinct flavors, and perhaps one-half of them must be eaten in the house, the other out-doors. one peter whitney wrote from northborough in 1782, for the proceedings of the boston academy, describing an apple-tree in that town â��producing fruit of opposite qualities, part of the same apple being frequently sour and the other sweet;â�� also some all sour, and others all sweet, and this diversity on all parts of the tree. there is a wild apple on nawshawtuck hill in my town which has to me a peculiarly pleasant bitter tang, not perceived till it is ns on the tongue. as you eat it, it smells exactly like a squash-bug. it is a sort of triumph to eat and relish it. i hear that the fruit of a kind of plum-tree in provence is â��called _prunes sibarelles_, because it is impossible to whistle after having eaten them, from their sourness.â�� but perhaps they were only eaten in the house and in summer, and if tried out-of-doors in a stinging atmosphere, who knows but you could whistle an octave higher and clearer? in the fields only are the sours and bitters of nature appreciated; just as the wood-chopper eats his meal in a sunny glade, in the middle of a winter day, with content, basks in a sunny ray there, and dreams of summer in a degree of cold which, experienced in a chamber, would make a student miserable. they who are at work abroad are not cold, but rather it is they who sit shivering in houses. as with temperatures, so with flavors; as with cold and heat, so with sour and sweet. this natural raciness, the sours and bitters which the diseased palate refuses, are the true condiments. let your condiments be in the condition of your senses. to appreciate the flavor of these wild apples requires vigorous and healthy senses, _papillã¦_[11] firm and erect on the tongue and palate, not easily flattened and tamed. [11] a latin word, accent on the second syllable, meaning here the rough surface of the tongue and palate. from my experience with wild apples, i can understand that there may be reason for a savageâ��s preferring many kinds of food which the civilized man rejects. the former has the palate of an outdoor man. it takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild fruit. what a healthy out-of-door appetite it takes to relish the apple of life, the apple of the world, then! â��nor is it every apple i desire, nor that which pleases every palate best; â��t is not the lasting deuxan i require, nor yet the red-cheeked greening i request, nor that which first beshrewed the name of wife, nor that whose beauty caused the golden strife: no, no! bring me an apple from the tree of life.â�� so there is one _thought_ for the field, another for the house. i would have my thoughts, like wild apples, to be food for walkers, and will not warrant them to be palatable, if tasted in the house. their beauty almost all wild apples are handsome. they cannot be too gnarly and crabbed and rusty to look at. the gnarliest will have some redeeming traits even to the eye. you will discover some evening redness dashed or sprinkled on some protuberance or in some cavity. it is rare that the summer lets an apple go without streaking or spotting it on some part of its sphere. it will have some red stains, commemorating the mornings and evenings it has witnessed; some dark and rusty blotches, in memory of the clouds and foggy, mildewy days that have passed over it; and a spacious field of green reflecting the general face of nature,â��green even as the fields; or a yellow ground, which implies a milder flavor,â��yellow as the harvest, or russet as the hills. apples, these i mean, unspeakably fair,â��apples not of discord, but concord! yet not so rare but that the homeliest may have a share. painted by the frosts, some a uniform clear bright yellow, or red, or crimson, as if their spheres had regularly revolved, and enjoyed the influence of the sun on all sides alike,â��some with the faintest pink blush imaginable,â��some brindled with deep red streaks like a cow, or with hundreds of fine blood-red rays running regularly from the stem-dimple to the blossom-end, like meridional lines, on a straw-colored ground,â��some touched with a greenish rust, like a fine lichen, here and there, with crimson blotches or eyes more or less confluent and fiery when wet,â��and others gnarly, and freckled or peppered all over on the stem side with fine crimson spots on a white ground, as if accidentally sprinkled from the brush of him who paints the autumn leaves. others, again, are sometimes red inside, perfused with a beautiful blush, fairy food, too beautiful to eat,â��apple of the hesperides, apple of the evening sky! but like shells and pebbles on the sea-shore, they must be seen as they sparkle amid the withering leaves in some dell in the woods, in the autumnal air, or as they lie in the wet grass, and not when they have wilted and faded in the house. the naming of them it would be a pleasant pastime to find suitable names for the hundred varieties which go to a single heap at the cider-mill. would it not tax a manâ��s invention,â��no one to be named after a man, and all in the _lingua vernacula?_[12] who shall stand god-father at the christening of the wild apples? it would exhaust the latin and greek languages, if they were used, and make the _lingua vernacula_ flag. we should have to call in the sunrise and the sunset, the rainbow and the autumn woods and the wild flowers, and the woodpecker and the purple finch, and the squirrel and the jay and the butterfly, the november traveller and the truant boy, to our aid. [12] _lingua vernacula_, common speech. in 1836 there were in the garden of the london horticultural society more than fourteen hundred distinct sorts. but here are species which they have not in their catalogue, not to mention the varieties which our crab might yield to cultivation. let us enumerate a few of these. i find myself compelled, after all, to give the latin names of some for the benefit of those who live where english is not spoken,â��for they are likely to have a world-wide reputation. there is, first of all, the wood-apple (_malus sylvatica_); the blue-jay apple; the apple which grows in dells in the woods (_sylvestrivallis_), also in hollows in pastures (_campestrivallis_); the apple that grows in an old cellar-hole (_malus cellaris_); the meadow-apple; the partridge-apple; the truantâ��s apple (_cessatoris_), which no boy will ever go by without knocking off some, however _late_ it may be; the sauntererâ��s apple,â��you must lose yourself before you can find the way to that; the beauty of the air (_decus aã«ris_); december-eating; the frozen-thawed (_gelato-soluta_), good only in that state; the concord apple, possibly the same with the _musketa-quidensis;_ the assabet apple; the brindled apple; wine of new england; the chickaree apple; the green apple (_malus viridis_);â��this has many synonyms; in an imperfect state, it is the _cholera morbifera aut dysenterifera, puerulis dilectissima;_[13]â��the apple which atalanta stopped to pick up; the hedge-apple (_malus sepium_); the slug-apple (_limacea_); the railroad-apple, which perhaps came from a core thrown out of the cars; the apple whose fruit we tasted in our youth; our particular apple, not to be found in any catalogue,â��_pedestrium solatium;_[14] also the apple where hangs the forgotten scythe; idunaâ��s apples, and the apples which loki found in the wood; and a great many more i have on my list, too numerous to mention,â��all of them good. as bodã¦us exclaims, referring to the culti-vated kinds, and adapting virgil to his case, so i, adapting bodã¦us,â�� â��not if i had a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths, an iron voice, could i describe all the forms and reckon up all the names of these _wild apples_.â�� [13] the apple that brings the disease of cholera and of dysentery, the fruit that small boys like best. [14] the trampâ��s comfort. the last gleaning by the middle of november the wild apples have lost some of their brilliancy, and have chiefly fallen. a great part are decayed on the ground, and the sound ones are more palatable than before. the note of the chickadee sounds now more distinct, as you wander amid the old trees, and the autumnal dandelion is half-closed and tearful. but still, if you are a skilful gleaner, you may get many a pocket-full even of grafted fruit, long after apples are supposed to be gone out-of-doors. i know a blue-pearmain tree, growing within the edge of a swamp, almost as good as wild. you would not suppose that there was any fruit left there, on the first survey, but you must look according to system. those which lie exposed are quite brown and rotten now, or perchance a few still show one blooming cheek here and there amid the wet leaves. nevertheless, with experienced eyes, i explore amid the bare alders and the huckleberry-bushes and the withered sedge, and in the crevices of the rocks, which are full of leaves, and pry under the fallen and decaying ferns, which, with apple and alder leaves, thickly strew the ground. for i know that they lie concealed, fallen into hollows long since and covered up by the leaves of the tree itself,â��a proper kind of packing. from these lurking-places, anywhere within the circumference of the tree, i draw forth the fruit, all wet and glossy, maybe nibbled by rabbits and hollowed out by crickets and perhaps with a leaf or two cemented to it (as curzon[15] an old manuscript from a monasteryâ��s mouldy cellar), but still with a rich bloom on it, and at least as ripe and well kept, if not better than those in barrels, more crisp and lively than they. if these resources fail to yield anything, i have learned to look between the bases of the suckers which spring thickly from some horizontal limb, for now and then one lodges there, or in the very midst of an alder-clump, where they are covered by leaves, safe from cows which may have smelled them out. if i am sharp-set, for i do not refuse the blue-pearmain, i fill my pockets on each side; and as i retrace my steps in the frosty eve, being perhaps four or five miles from home, i eat one first from this side, and then from that, to keep my balance. [15] robert curzon was a traveller who searched for old manuscripts in the monasteries of the levant. see his book, ancient monasteries of the east. i learn from topsellâ��s gesner, whose authority appears to be albertus, that the following is the way in which the hedgehog collects and carries home his apples. he says: â��his meat is apples, worms, or grapes: when he findeth apples or grapes on the earth, he rolleth himself upon them, until he have filled all his prickles, and then carrieth them home to his den, never bearing above one in his mouth; and if it fortune that one of them fall off by the way, he likewise shaketh off all the residue, and walloweth upon them afresh, until they be all settled upon his back again. so, forth he goeth, making a noise like a cart-wheel; and if he have any young ones in his nest, they pull off his load wherewithal he is loaded, eating thereof what they please, and laying up the residue for the time to come.â�� the â��frozen-thawedâ�� apple toward the end of november, though some of the sound ones are yet more mellow and perhaps more edible, they have generally, like the leaves, lost their beauty, and are beginning to freeze. it is finger-cold, and prudent farmers get in their barrelled apples, and bring you the apples and cider which they have engaged; for it is time to put them into the cellar. perhaps a few on the ground show their red cheeks above the early snow, and occasionally some even preserve their color and soundness under the snow throughout the winter. but generally at the beginning of the winter they freeze hard, and soon, though undecayed, acquire the color of a baked apple. before the end of december, generally, they experience their first thawing. those which a month ago were sour, crabbed, and quite unpalatable to the civilized taste, such at least as were frozen while sound, let a warmer sun come to thaw them, for they are extremely sensitive to its rays, are found to be filled with a rich, sweet cider, better than any bottled cider that i know of, and with which i am better acquainted than with wine. all apples are good in this state, and your jaws are the cider-press. others, which have more substance, are a sweet and luscious food,â��in my opinion of more worth than the pine-apples which are imported from the west indies. those which lately even i tasted only to repent of it,â��for i am semi-civilized,â��which the farmer willingly left on the tree, i am now glad to find have the property of hanging on like the leaves of the young oaks. it is a way to keep cider sweet without boiling. let the frost come to freeze them first, solid as stones, and then the rain or a warm winter day to thaw them, and they will seem to have borrowed a flavor from heaven through the medium of the air in which they hang. or perchance you find, when you get home, that those which rattled in your pocket have thawed, and the ice is turned to cider. but after the third or fourth freezing and thawing they will not be found so good. what are the imported half-ripe fruits of the torrid south to this fruit matured by the cold of the frigid north? these are those crabbed apples with which i cheated my companion, and kept a smooth face that i might tempt him to eat. now we both greedily fill our pockets with them,â��bending to drink the cup and save our lappets from the overflowing juice,â��and grow more social with their wine. was there one that hung so high and sheltered by the tangled branches that our sticks could not dislodge it? it is a fruit never carried to market, that i am aware of,â��quite distinct from the apple of the markets, as from dried apple and cider,â��and it is not every winter that produces it in perfection. the era of the wild apple will soon be past. it is a fruit which will probably become extinct in new england. you may still wander through old orchards of native fruit of great extent, which for the most part went to the cider-mill, now all gone to decay. i have heard of an orchard in a distant town, on the side of a hill, where the apples rolled down and lay four feet deep against a wall on the lower side, and this the owner cut down for fear they should be made into cider. since the temperance reform and the general introduction of grafted fruit, no native apple-trees, such as i see everywhere in deserted pastures, and where the woods have grown up around them, are set out. i fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. ah, poor man, there are many pleasures which he will not know! notwithstanding the prevalence of the baldwin and the porter, i doubt if so extensive orchards are set out to-day in my town as there were a century ago, wrhen those vast straggling cider-orchards were planted, when men both ate and drank apples, when the pomace-heap was the only nursery, and trees cost nothing but the trouble of setting them out. men could afford then to stick a tree by every wall-side and let it take its chance. i see nobody planting trees to-day in such out-of-the-way places, along the lonely roads and lanes, and at the bottom of dells in the wood. now that they have grafted trees, and pay a priee for them, they collect them into a plat by their houses, and fence them in,â��and the end of it all will be that we shall be compelled to look for our apples in a barrel. this is â��the word of the lord that came to joel the son of pethuel. â��hear this, ye old men, and give ear, all ye inhabitants of the land! hath this been in your days, or even in the days of your fathers?... â��that which the palmer-worm hath left hath the locust eaten; and that which the locust hath left hath the canker-worm eaten; and that which the canker-worm hath left hath the caterpillar eaten. â��awake, ye drunkards, and weep! and howl, all ye drinkers of wine, because of the new wine! for it is cut off from your mouth. â��for a nation is come up upon my land, strong, and without number, whose teeth are the teeth of a lion, and he hath the cheek-teeth of a great lion. â��he hath laid my vine waste, and barked my fig-tree; he hath made it clean bare, and cast it away; the branches thereof are made white.... â��be ye ashamed, o ye husbandmen! howl, o ye vine-dressers!... â��the vine is dried up, and the fig-tree languisheth; the pomegranate-tree, the palm tree also, and the apple-tree, even all the trees of the field, are withered: because joy is withered away from the sons of men.â��[16] [16] joel, chapter i., verses 1â��12. civil disobedience henry david thoreau by henry david thoreau published for the new york thoreau fellowship liberty library boonton, new jersey 1 first printed under the title “resistance to civil government” in 1849 in the first number of aesthetic papers, edited by elizabeth peabody. c iv il d iso be die n c f. i heartily accept the motto, "that government is best which governs least,” and i should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also i believe, “that government is best which governs not at all,” and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. the objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government. the standing army is only an arm of the standing government. the government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it. witness the present mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for, in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure. this american government, what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? it has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will. it is a sort of wooden gun to the people themselves. but it is not the less necessary for this; for the people 4. c i v i l id is o b e d i e n c e must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed on, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage. it is excellent, we must all allow. yet this government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. it does not keep the country free. it does not settle the west. it does not educate. the character inherent in the american people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way. for government is an expedient by which men would fain succeed in letting one another alone; and, as has been said, when it is most expedient, the governed are most let alone by it. trade and commerce, if they were not made of india-rubber, would never manage to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way; and, if one were to judge these men wholly by the effects of their actions and not partly by their intentions, they would deserve to be classed and punished with those mischievous persons who put obstructions on the railroads. but, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, i ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it. after all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule, is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor bec 1 v i l d is o b e d e n c e 5 cause this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. but a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?—in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree resign his conscience to the legislator? why has every man a conscience, then? i think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. it is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. the only obligation which i have a right to assume is to do at any time what i think right. it is truly enough said, that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. a common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. they have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. now, what are they? men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power? visit the navy yard, and be hold a marine, such a man as an american government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black 6 c i v i l d is o b e d i e n c e arts, a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments, though it may be, “not a drum was heard, not a funeral note, as his corse to the rampart we hurried; not a soldier discharged his farewell shot o'er the grave where our hero we buried.” the mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. they are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, &tc. in most cases there is no free. exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. they have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. others, as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders, serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as god. a very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so neces. sarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it. a wise man will only be useful as a man, and will not submit to be “clay,” and “stop a hole to keep the wind away,” but leave that office to his dust at least c i v i l d is o b e d i e n c e 7 “i am too high-born to be propertied, to be a secondary at control, or useful serving-man and instrument to any sovereign state throughout the world.” he who gives himself entirely to his fellow-men appears to them useless and selfish; but he who gives him. self partially to them is pronounced a benefactor and philanthropist. how does it become a man to behave toward this american government to-day? i answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. i cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave's government also. all men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. but almost all say that such is not the case now. but such was the case, they think, in the revolution of '75. if one were to tell me that this was a bad government because it taxed certain foreign commodities brought to its ports, it is most probable that i should not make an ado about it, for i can do without them. all machines have their friction; and possibly this does enough good to counterbalance the evil. at any rate, it is a great evil to make a stir about it. but when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, i say, let us not have such a machine any longer. in other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, i think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. what 8 c 1 v i l d is o b e d e n c e makes this duty the more urgent is the fact, that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army. paley, a common authority with many on moral questions, in his chapter on the “duty of submission to civil government,” resolves all civil obligation into expediency; and he proceeds to say, “that so long as the interest of the whole society requires it, that is, so long as the established government cannot be resisted or changed without public inconveniency, it is the will of god that the established government be obeyed, and no longer. . . . . this principle being admitted, the justice of every particular case of resistance is reduced to a computation of the quantity of the danger and grievance on the one side, and of the probability and expense of redressing it on the other.” of this, he says, every man shall judge for himself. but paley appears never to have contemplated those cases to which the rule of expediency does not apply, in which a people, as well as an individual, must do justice, cost what it may. if i have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, i must restore it to him though i drown myself. this, according to paley, would be inconvenient. but he that would save his life, in such a case, shall lose it. this people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people. in their practice, nations agree with paley; but does any one think that massachusetts does exactly what is right at the present crisis? “a drab of state, a cloth-o'-silver slut. to have her train borne up, and her soul trail in the dirt.” practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in massac i v i l id is o b e d i e n c e 9 chusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the south, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to mexico, cost what it may. i quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home co-operate with, and do the bidding of, those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless. we are accustomed to say, that the mass of men are unprepared; but improvement is slow, because the few are not materially wiser or better than the many. it is not so important that many should be as good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere; for that will leaven the whole lump. there are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves children of washington and franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing, who even postpone the question of freedom to the question of free-trade, and quietly read the prices-current along with the latest advices from mexico, after dinner, and, it may be, fall asleep over them both. what is the price. current of an honest man and patriot to-day? they hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. they will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret. at most, they give only a cheap vote, and a feeble countenance and god. speed, to the right, as it goes by them. there are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one vir. tuous man. but it is easier to deal with the real possessor of a thing than with the temporary guardian of it. 1 o c i. v. i. l. d. is o b e d i e n c e all voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. the character of the voters is not staked. i cast my vote, perchance, as i think right; but i am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. i am willing to leave it to the majority. its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. it is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. a wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. there is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. when the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. they will then be the only slaves. only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote. i hear of a convention to be held at baltimore, or elsewhere, for the selection of a candidate for the presidency, made up chiefly of editors, and men who are politicians by profession; but i think, what is it to any independent, intelligent, and respectable man what decision they may come to? shall we not have the advantage of his wisdom and honesty, nevertheless? can we not count upon some independent votes? are there not many individuals in the country who do not attend conventions? but no. i find that the respectable man, so called, has immediately drifted from his position, and despairs of his country, when his country has more reason to despair of him. he forthwith adopts one of c i v i l id is o b e d i e n c e 11 the candidates thus selected as the only available one, thus proving that he is himself available for any purposes of the demagogue. his vote is of no more worth than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hireling native, who may have been bought. o for a man who is a man, and, as my neighbor says, has a bone in his back which you cannot pass your hand through! our statistics are at fault: the population has been returned too large. how many men are there to a square thousand miles in this country? hardly one. does not america offer any inducement for men to settle here? the american has dwindled into an odd fellow, one who may be known by the development of his organ of gregariousness, and a manifest lack of intellect and cheerful self-reliance; whose first and chief concern, on coming into the world, is to see that the almshouses are in good repair; and before yet he has lawfully donned the virile garb, to col. lect a fund for the support of the widows and orphans that may be, who, in short, ventures to live only by the aid of the mutual insurance company, which has promised to bury him decently. it is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. if i devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, i must first see, at least, that i do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders. i must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too. see what gross inconsistency is tolerated. i have heard some of my townsmen 12 c i v i l d is o b e d i e n c e say, “i should like to have them order me out to help put down an insurrection of the slaves, or to march to mexico; see if i would go," and yet these very men have each, directly by their allegiance, and so indirectly, at least, by their money, furnished a substitute. the soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war, is applauded by those whose own act and authority he disregards and sets at naught; as if the state were penitent to that degree that it hired one to scourge it while it sinned, but not to that degree that it left off sinning for a moment. thus, under the name of order and civil government, we are all made at last to pay homage to and support our own meanness. after the first blush of sin comes its indif. ference; and from immoral it becomes, as it were, unmoral, and not quite unnecessary to that life which we have made. the broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it. the slight reproach to which the virtue of patriotism is commonly liable, the noble are most likely to incur. those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support, are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform. some are petitioning the state to dissolve the union, to dis. regard the requisitions of the president. why do they not dissolve it themselves—the union between them. selves and the state-and refuse to pay their quota into the treasury? do not they stand in the same relation to the state that the state does to the union? and have c i v il. d. i. s. o b e d i e n c e 13 not the same reasons prevented the state from resisting the union which have prevented them from resisting the state? how can a man be satisfied to entertain an opinion merely, and enjoy it? is there any enjoyment in it, if his opinion is that he is aggrieved? if you are cheated out of a single dollar by your neighbor, you do not rest satisfied with knowing that you are cheated, or with saying that you are cheated, or even with petitioning him to pay you your due; but you take effectual steps at once to obtain the full amount, and see that you are never cheated again. action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. it not only divides states and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine. unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. they think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. but it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. it makes it worse. why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? why does it not cherish its wise minority? why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have them? why does it always crucify christ, and excommunicate cop14 c i v i. l. d. i. s. o b e d i e n c e ernicus and luther, and pronounce washington and franklin rebels. one would think, that a deliberate and practical denial of its authority was the only offense never contemplated by government; else, why has it not assigned its definite, its suitable and proportionate penalty? if a man who has no property refuses but once to earn nine shillings for the state, he is put in prison for a period unlimited by any law that i know, and determined only by the discretion of those who placed him there; but if he should steal ninety times nine shillings from the state, he is soon permitted to go at large again. if the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth, certainly the machine will wear out. if the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, i say, break the law. let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. what i have to do is to see, at any rate, that i do not lend myself to the wrong which i condemn. as for adopting the ways which the state has provided for remedying the evil, i know not of such ways. they take too much time, and a man's life will be gone. i have other affairs to attend to. i came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad. a man has not everything to do, but something; and because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong. it is not my business to be petitioning the governor or the legislature any more than it is theirs to petition me; c i v i l d is o b e d i e n c e 15 and, if they should not hear my petition, what should i do then? but in this case the state has provided no way: its very constitution is the evil. this may seem to be harsh and stubborn and unconciliatory; but it is to treat with the utmost kindness and consideration the only spirit that can appreciate or deserves it. so is all change for the better, like birth and death, which convulse the body. i do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their support, both in person and property, from the government of massachusetts, and not wait till they constitute a majority of one, before they suffer the right to prevail through them. i think that it is enough if they have god on their side, without waiting for that other one. moreover, any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already. i meet this american government, or its representative, state government, directly, and face to face, once a year—no more—in the person of its tax-gatherer; this is the only mode in which a man situated as i am necessarily meets it; and it then says distinctly, recognize me; and the simplest, most effectual, and, in the present posture of affairs, the indispensablest mode of treating with it on this head, of expressing your little satisfaction with and love for it, is to deny it then. my civil neighbor, the tax-gatherer, is the very man i have to deal with, for it is, after all, with men and not with parchment that i quarrel,-and he has voluntarily chosen to be an agent of the government. how shall he ever know well what he is and does as an officer of the government, or as a man, until he is obliged to consider whether he shall treat me, his neighbor, for whom he has respect, as 16 c i v i l d is o b e d i e n c e a neighbor and well-disposed man, or as a maniac and disturber of the peace, and see if he can get over this obstruction to his neighborliness without a ruder and more impetuous thought or speech corresponding with his action. i know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom i could name, if ten honest men only,–ay, if one honest man, in this state of massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in america. for it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be what is once well done is done forever. but we love better to talk about it that we say is our mission. reform keeps many scores of newspapers in its service, but not one man. if my esteemed neighbor, the state's ambassador, who will devote his days to the settlement of the question of human rights in the council chamber, instead of being threatened with the prisons of carolina, were to sit down the prisoner of massachusetts, that state which is so anxious to foist the sin of slavery upon her sister, though at present she can discover only an act of inhospitality to be the ground of a quarrel with her, the legislature would not wholly waive the subject the following winter. under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. the proper place to-day, the only place which massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the state by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. it is there that the fugitive slave, and the mexican prisoner on parole, and the indian come to plead the wrongs of his race should find them; on c i v i l d is o b e d i e n c e 17 that separate, but more free and honorable ground, where the state places those who are not with her but against her, the only house in a slave state in which a free man can abide with honor. if any think that their influence would be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict the ear of the state, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person. cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. a minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. if the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the state will not hesitate which to choose. if a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the state to commit violence and shed innocent blood. this is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible. if the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, “but what shall i do?’ my answer is, “if you really wish to do anything, resign your office.” when the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished. but even suppose blood should flow. is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? through this wound a man's real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death. i see this blood flowing now. i have contemplated the imprisonment of the offender, rather than the seizure of his goods,-though both 18 c iv i l d is o b e d i e n c e will serve the same purpose, because they who assert the purest right, and consequently are most dangerous to a corrupt state, commonly have not spent much time in accumulating property. to such the state renders comparatively small service, and a slight tax is wont to appear exorbitant, particularly if they are obliged to earn it by special labor with their hands. if there were one who lived wholly without the use of money, the state itself would hesitate to demand it of him. but the rich man,—not to make any invidious comparison, is always sold to the institution which makes him rich. absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue; for money comes between a man and his objects, and obtains them for him; and it was certainly no great virtue to obtain it. it puts to rest many questions which he would otherwise be taxed to answer; while the only new question which it puts is the hard but superfluous one, how to spend it. thus his moral ground is taken from under his feet. the opportunities of living are diminished in proportion as what are called the “means” are increased. the best thing a man can do for his culture when he is rich is to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor. christ answered the herodians according to their condition. “show me the tribute money,” said he;—and one took a penny out of his pocket;-if you use money which has the image of caesar on it and which he has made current and valuable, that is, if you are men of the state, and gladly enjoy the advantage of caesar's government, then pay him back some of his own when he demands it; “render therefore to caesar that which is caesar's, and to god those things which are god's,”—leaving them no wiser c 1 v i l. d. i so b e d e n c e 19 than before as to which was which; for they did not wish to know. when i converse with the freest of my neighbors, i perceive that, whatever they may say about the magnitude and seriousness of the question, and their regard for the public tranquillity, the long and the short of the matter is, that they cannot spare the protection of the existing government, and they dread the consequences to their property and families of disobedience to it. for my own part, i should not like to think that i ever rely on the protection of the state. but, if i deny the authority of the state when it presents its tax-bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. this is hard. this makes it impossible for a man to live honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in outward respects. it will not be worth the while to accumulate property; that would be sure to go again. you must hire or squat somewhere, and raise but a small crop, and eat that soon. you must live within yourself, and depend upon yourself always tucked up and ready for a start, and not have many affairs. a man may grow rich in turkey even, if he will be in all respects a good subject of the turkish government. con. fucius said: “if a state is governed by the principles of reason, poverty and misery are subjects of shame; if a state is not governed by the principles of reason, riches and honors are the subjects of shame.” no. until i want the protection of massachusetts to be extended to me in some distant southern port, where my liberty is endangered, or until i am bent solely on building up an estate at home by peaceful enterprise, i can afford to refuse allegiance to massachusetts, and her right to my property and life. it costs me less in every sense to incur 2o c i v i l d is o b e d i e n c e the penalty of disobedience to the state, than it would do obey. i should feel as if i were worth less in that case. some years ago, the state met me in behalf of the church, and commanded me to pay a certain sum toward the support of a clergyman whose preaching my father attended, but never i myself. “pay,” it said, “or be locked up in the jail.” i declined to pay, but, unfortunately, another man saw fit to pay it. i did not see why the schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest, and not the priest the schoolmaster; for i was not the state's schoolmaster, but i supported myself by voluntary subscription. i did not see why the lyceum should not present its tax-bill, and have the state to back its demand, as well as the church. however, at the request of the selectmen, i condescended to make some such statement as this in writing –"know all men by these presents, that i, henry thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which i have not joined.” this i gave to the town clerk; and he has it. the state, having thus learned that i did not wish to be regarded as a member of that church, has never made a like demand on me since; though it said that it must adhere to its original presumption that time. if i had known how to name them, i should then have signed off in detail from all the societies which i never signed on to; but i did not know where to find a complete list. i have paid no poll-tax for six years. i was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as i stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, i could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution c i v i-l d is o b e d i e n c e 21 which treated me as if i were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. i wondered that it should have concluded at length that this was the best use it could put me to, and had never thought to avail itself of my services in some way. i saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as i was. i did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. i felt as if i alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax. they plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. in every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for they thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall. i could not but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let or hindrance, and they were really all that was dangerous. as they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish my body; just as boys, if they cannot come at some person against whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog. i saw that the state was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and i lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it. thus the state never intentionally confronts a man's sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. it is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. i was not born to be forced. i will breathe after my own fashion. let us see who is the strongest. what force has a multitude? they only can force me who obey a higher law than i. they force me to become like themselves. i do not hear of men 22 c i v i l id is o b e d i e n c e being forced to live this way or that by masses of men. what sort of life were that to live? when i meet a government which says to me, “your money or your life,” why should i be in haste to give it my money? it may be in a great strait, and not know what to do: i cannot help that. it must help itself, do as i do. it is not worth the while to snivel about it. i am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society. i am not the son of the engineer. i perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. if a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man. the night in prison was novel and interesting enough. the prisoners in their shirt-sleeves were enjoying a chat and the evening air in the doorway, when i entered. but the jailer said, “come, boys, it is time to lock up;" and so they dispersed, and i heard the sound of their steps returning into the hollow apartments. my room-mate was introduced to me by the jailer, as “a first-rate fellow and a clever man.” when the door was locked, he showed me where to hang my hat, and how he managed matters there. the rooms were whitewashed once a month; and this one, at least, was the whitest, most simply furnished, and probably the neatest apartment in the town. he naturally wanted to know where i came from, and what brought me there; and, when i had told him, i asked him in my turn how he came there, presuming him to be an honest man, of course; and, as the world goes, i believe he was. “why,” said he, “they accuse me of burning a barn; but i never did it.” as c i v i l id is o b e d i e n c e 23 near as i could discover, he had probably gone to bed in a barn when drunk, and smoked his pipe there; and so a barn was burnt. he had the reputation of being a clever man, had been there some three months waiting for his trial to come on, and would have to wait as much longer; but he was quite domesticated and contented, since he got his board for nothing, and thought that he was well treated. he occupied one window, and i the other; and i saw, that, if one stayed there long, his principal business would be to look out the window. i had soon read all the tracts that were left there, and examined where former prisoners had broken out, and where a grate had been sawed off, and heard the history of the various occupants of that room; for i found that even here there was a history and a gossip which never circulated beyond the walls of the jail. probably this is the only house in the town where verses are composed, which are afterward printed in a circular form, but not published. i was shown quite a long list of verses which were composed by some young men who had been detected in an attempt to escape, who avenged themselves by singing them. i pumped my fellow-prisoner as dry as i could, for fear i should never see him again; but at length he showed me which was my bed, and left me to blow out the lamp. it was like traveling into a far country, such as i had never expected to behold, to lie there for one night. it seemed to me that i never had heard the town-clock strike before, nor the evening sounds of the village; for we slept with the windows open, which were inside the grating. it was to see my native village in the light of * 24 c i v il. d. i. s. o b e d i e n c e the middle ages, and our concord was turned into a * rhine stream, and visions of knights and castles passed before me. they were the voices of old burghers that i heard in the streets. i was an involuntary spectator and auditor of whatever was done and said in the kitchen of the adjacent village-inn, a wholly new and rare experience to me. it was a closer view of my native town. i was fairly inside of it. i never had seen its institutions before. this is one of its peculiar institutions; for it is a shire town. i began to comprehend what its inhabitants were about. in the morning, our breakfasts were put through the hole in the door, in small oblong-square tin pans, made to fit, and holding a pint of chocolate, with brown bread, and an iron spoon. when they called for the vessels again, i was green enough to return what bread i had left; but my comrade seized it, and said that i should lay that up for lunch or dinner. soon after he was let out to work at haying in a neighboring field, whither he went every day, and would not be back till noon; so he bade me good-day, saying that he doubted if he should see me again. when i came out of prison, for some one interfered, and paid that tax,-i did not perceive that great changes had taken place on the common, such as he observed who went in a youth, and emerged a tottering and grayheaded man; and yet a change had to my eyes come over the scene,—the town, and state, and country, greater than any that mere time could effect. i saw yet more distinctly the state in which i lived. i saw to what extent the people among whom i lived could be trusted as good neighbors and friends; that their friendship was for summer weather only; that they did not greatly c i v i l d is o b e d i e n c e 25 propose to do right; that they were a distinct race from me by their prejudices and superstitions, as the chinamen and malays are; that, in their sacrifices to humanity, they ran no risks, not even to their property; that, after all, they were not so noble but they treated the thief as he had treated them, and hoped, by a certain outward observance and a few prayers, and by walking in a particular straight though useless path from time to time, to save their souls. this may be to judge my neighbors harshly; for i believe that many of them are not aware that they have such an institution as the jail in their village. it was formerly the custom in our village, when a poor debtor came out of jail, for his acquaintances to salute him, looking through their fingers, which were crossed to represent the grating of a jail window, “how do ye do?” my neighbors did not thus salute me, but first looked at me, and then at one another, as if i had returned from a long journey. i was put into jail as i was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. when i was let out the next morning, i proceeded to finish my errand, and having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour, for the horse was soon tackled,—was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the state was nowhere to be seen. this is the whole history of “my prisons.” i have never declined paying the highway tax, because i am as desirous of being a good neighbor as i am of being a bad subject; and as for supporting schools, i am doing my part to educate my fellow-countrymen now. it is for no particular item in the tax-bill that i refuse to 26 c iv i l id is o b e d i e n c e pay it. i simply wish to refuse allegiance to the state, to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually. i do not care to trace the course of my dollar, if i could, till it buys a man or a musket to shoot one with, the dollar is innocent, but i am concerned to trace the effects of my allegiance. in fact, i quietly declare war with the state, after my fashion, though i will still make what use and get what advantage of her i can, as is usual in such cases. if others pay the tax which is demanded of me, from a sympathy with the state, they do but what they have already done in their own case, or rather they abet injustice to a greater extent than the state requires. if they pay the tax from a mistaken interest in the individual taxed, to save his property, or prevent his going to jail, it is because they have not considered wisely how far they let their private feelings interfere with the public good. this, then, is my position at present. but one cannot be too much on his guard in such a case, lest his action be biased by obstinacy, or an undue regard for the opinions of men. let him see that he does only what belongs to himself and to the hour. i think sometimes, why, this people mean well; they are only ignorant; they would do better if they knew how: why give your neighbors this pain to treat you as they are not inclined to? but i think again, this is no reason why i should do as they do, or permit others to suffer much greater pain of a different kind. again, i sometimes say to myself, when many millions of men, without heat, without ill will, without personal feeling of any kind, demand of you a few shillings only, without the possibility, such is their constitution, of retractc i v i l d is o b e d i e n c e 27 ing or altering their present demand, and without the possibility, on your side, of appeal to any other millions, why expose yourself to this overwhelming brute force? you do not resist cold and hunger, the winds and the waves, thus obstinately; you quietly submit to a thousand similar necessities. you do not put your head into the fire. but just in proportion as i regard this as not wholly a brute force, but partly a human force, and consider that i have relations to those millions as to so many millions of men, and not of mere brute or inanimate things, i see that appeal is possible, first and instantaneously, from them to the maker of them, and, secondly, from them to themselves. but, if i put my head deliberately into the fire, there is no appeal to fire or to the maker of fire, and i have only myself to blame. if i could convince myself that i have any right to be satisfied with men as they are, and to treat them accordingly, and not according, in some respects, to my requisitions and expectations of what they and i ought to be, then, like a good mussulman and fatalist, i should endeavor to be satisfied with things as they are, and say it is the will of god. and, above all, there is this difference between resisting this and a purely brute or natural force, that i can resist this with some effect; but i cannot expect, like orpheus, to change the nature of the rocks and trees and beasts. i do not wish to quarrel with any man or nation. i do not wish to split hairs, to make fine distinctions, or set myself up as better than my neighbors. i seek rather, i may say, even an excuse for conforming to the laws of the land. i am but too ready to conform to them. indeed, i have reason to suspect myself on this head; and each year, as the tax-gatherer comes round, i find 28 c i v i l d is o b e d i e n c e myself disposed to review the acts and position of the general and state governments, and the spirit of the people, to discover a pretext for conformity. “we must affect our country as our parents, and if at any time we alienate our love or industry from doing it honor, we must respect effects and teach the soul matter of conscience and religion, and not desire of rule or benefit.” i believe that the state will soon be able to take all my work of this sort out of my hands, and then i shall be no better a patriot than my fellow-countrymen. seen from a lower point of view, the constitution, with all its faults, is very good; the law and the courts are very respectable; even this state and this american government are, in many respects, very admirable, and rare things, to be thankful for, such as a great many have described them; but seen from a point of view a little higher, they are what i have described them; seen from a higher still, and the highest, who shall say what they are, or that they are worth looking at or thinking of at all? . however, the government does not concern me much, and i shall bestow the fewest possible thoughts on it. it is not many moments that i live under a government, even in this world. if a man is thought-free, fancy-free, imagination-free, that which is not never for a long time appearing to be to him, unwise rulers or reformers cannot fatally interrupt him. i know that most men think differently from myself, but those whose lives are by profession devoted to the study of these or kindred subjects, content me as little as any. statesmen and legislators, standing so completec i v i l d is o b e d i e n c e 29 ly within the institution, never distinctly and nakedly behold it. they speak of moving society, but have no resting-place without it. they may be men of a certain experience and discrimination, and have no doubt invented ingenious and even useful systems, for which we sincerely thank them; but all their wit and usefulness lie within certain not very wide limits. they are wont to forget that the world is not governed by policy and expediency. webster never goes behind government, and so cannot speak with authority about it. his words are wisdom to those legislators who contemplate no essential reform in the existing government; but for thinkers, and those who legislate for all time, he never once glances at the subject. i know of those whose serene and wise speculations on this theme would soon reveal the limits of his mind's range and hospitality. yet, compared with the cheap professions of most reformers, and the still cheaper wisdom and eloquence of politicians in general, his are almost the only sensible and valuable words, and we thank heaven for him. comparatively, he is always strong, original, and, above all, practical. still his quality is not wisdom, but prudence. the lawyer's truth is not truth, but consistency, or a consistent expediency. truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing. he well deserves to be called, as he has been called, the defender of the constitution. there are really no blows to be given by him but defensive ones. he is not a leader, but a follower. his leaders are the men of '87. “i have never made an effort,” he says, “and never propose to make an effort; i have never countenanced an effort, and never mean to countenance an effort, to disturb the arrange30 c i v i l id is o b e d i e n c e ment as originally made, by which the various states came into the union.” still thinking of the sanction which the constitution gives to slavery, he says, “because it was a part of the original compact, let it stand.” notwithstanding his special acuteness and ability, he is unable to take a fact out of its merely political relations, and behold it as it lies absolutely to be disposed of by the intellect, what, for instance, it behooves a man to do here in america to-day with regard to slavery, but ventures, or is driven, to make some such desperate answer as the following, while professing to speak absolutely, and as a private man,—from which what new and singular code of social duties might be inferred? “the manner,” says he, “in which the governments of those states where slavery exists are to regulate it, is for their own consideration, under their responsibility to their constituents, to the general laws of propriety, humanity, and justice, and to god. associations formed elsewhere, springing from a feeling of humanity, or any other cause, have nothing whatever to do with it. they have never received any encouragement from me, and they never will.” they who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced up its stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the bible and the constitution, and drink at it there with reverence and humility; but they who behold where it comes trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more, and continue their pilgrimage toward its fountainhead. no man with a genius for legislation has appeared in america. they are rare in the history of the world. 1. these extracts have been inserted since the lecture was read. c i v i l d is o b e d i e n c e. 31 there are orators, politicians, and eloquent men, by the thousand; but the speaker has not yet opened his mouth to speak, who is capable of settling the much-vexed questions of the day. we love eloquence for its own sake, and not for any truth which it may utter, or any heroism it may inspire. our legislators have not yet learned the comparative value of free-trade and of freedom, of union, and of rectitude, to a nation. they have no genius or talent for comparatively humble questions of taxation and finance, commerce and manufactures and agriculture. if we were left solely to the wordy wit of legislators in congress for our guidance, uncorrected by the seasonable experience and the effectual complaints of the people, america would not long retain her rank among the nations. for eighteen hundred years, though perchance i have no right to say it, the new testament has been written, yet where is the legislator who has wisdom and practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which it sheds on the science of legislation? the authority of government, even such as i am willing to submit to, for i will cheerfully obey those who know and can do better than i, and in many things even those who neither know nor can do so well,—is still an impure one: to be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent of the governed. it can have no pure right over my person and property but what i concede to it. the progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual. even the chinese philosopher was wise enough to regard the individual as the basis of the empire. is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? is it not possible to take a step further to: 32 c i v i l d is o b e d i e n c e wards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? there will never be a really free and enlightened state, until the state comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. i please myself with imagining a state at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose, if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. a state which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious state, which also i have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen. ” paradise (to be) regained[1] by henry david thoreau we learn that mr. etzler is a native of germany, and originally published his book in pennsylvania, ten or twelve years ago; and now a second english edition, from the original american one, is demanded by his readers across the water, owing, we suppose, to the recent spread of fourierâ��s doctrines. it is one of the signs of the times. we confess that we have risen from reading this book with enlarged ideas, and grander conceptions of our duties in this world. it did expand us a little. it is worth attending to, if only that it entertains large questions. consider what mr. etzler proposes: â��fellow men! i promise to show the means of creating a paradise within ten years, where everything desirable for human life may be had by every man in superabundance, without labor, and without pay; where the whole face of nature shall be changed into the most beautiful forms, and man may live in the most magnificent palaces, in all imaginable refinements of luxury, and in the most delightful gardens; where he may accomplish, without labor, in one year, more than hitherto could be done in thousands of years; may level mountains, sink valleys, create lakes, drain lakes and swamps, and intersect the land everywhere with beautiful canals, and roads for transporting heavy loads of many thousand tons, and for travelling one thousand miles in twenty-four hours; may cover the ocean with floating islands movable in any desired direction with immense power and celerity, in perfect security, and with all comforts and luxuries, bearing gardens and palaces, with thousands of families, and provided with rivulets of sweet water; may explore the interior of the globe, and travel from pole to pole in a fortnight; provide himself with means, unheard of yet, for increasing his knowledge of the world, and so his intelligence; lead a life of continual happiness, of enjoyments yet unknown; free himself from almost all the evils that afflict mankind, except death, and even put death far beyond the common period of human life, and finally render it less afflicting. mankind may thus live in and enjoy a new world, far superior to the present, and raise themselves far higher in the scale of being.â�� it would seem from this and various indications beside, that there is a transcendentalism in mechanics as well as in ethics. while the whole field of the one reformer lies beyond the boundaries of space, the other is pushing his schemes for the elevation of the race to its utmost limits. while one scours the heavens, the other sweeps the earth. one says he will reform himself, and then nature and circumstances will be right. let us not obstruct ourselves, for that is the greatest friction. it is of little importance though a cloud obstruct the view of the astronomer compared with his own blindness. the other will reform nature and circumstances, and then man will be right. talk no more vaguely, says he, of reforming the world,â��i will reform the globe itself. what matters it whether i remove this humor out of my flesh, or this pestilent humor from the fleshy part of the globe? nay, is not the latter the more generous course? at present the globe goes with a shattered constitution in its orbit. has it not asthma, and ague, and fever, and dropsy, and flatulence, and pleurisy, and is it not afflicted with vermin? has it not its healthful laws counteracted, and its vital energy which will yet redeem it? no doubt the simple powers of nature, properly directed by man, would make it healthy and a paradise; as the laws of manâ��s own constitution but wait to be obeyed, to restore him to health and happiness. our panaceas cure but few ails, our general hospitals are private and exclusive. we must set up another hygeian than is now worshipped. do not the quacks even direct small doses for children, larger for adults, and larger still for oxen and horses? let us remember that we are to prescribe for the globe itself. this fair homestead has fallen to us, and how little have we done to improve it, how little have we cleared and hedged and ditched! we are too inclined to go hence to a â��better land,â�� without lifting a finger, as our farmers are moving to the ohio soil; but would it not be more heroic and faithful to till and redeem this new-england soil of the world? the still youthful energies of the globe have only to be directed in their proper channel. every gazette brings accounts of the untutored freaks of the wind,â��shipwrecks and hurricanes which the mariner and planter accept as special or general providences; but they touch our consciences, they remind us of our sins. another deluge would disgrace mankind. we confess we never had much respect for that antediluvian race. a thorough-bred business man cannot enter heartily upon the business of life without first looking into his accounts. how many things are now at loose ends. who knows which way the wind will blow to-morrow? let us not succumb to nature. we will marshal the clouds and restrain the tempests; we will bottle up pestilent exhalations, we will probe for earthquakes, grub them up; and give vent to the dangerous gases; we will disembowel the volcano, and extract its poison, take its seed out. we will wash water, and warm fire, and cool ice, and underprop the earth. we will teach birds to fly, and fishes to swim, and ruminants to chew the cud. it is time we had looked into these things. and it becomes the moralist, too, to inquire what man might do to improve and beautify the system; what to make the stars shine more brightly, the sun more cheery and joyous, the moon more placid and content. could he not heighten the tints of flowers and the melody of birds? does he perform his duty to the inferior races? should he not be a god to them? what is the part of magnanimity to the whale and the beaver? should we not fear to exchange places with them for a day, lest by their behavior they should shame us? might we not treat with magnanimity the shark and the tiger, not descend to meet there on their own level, with spears of sharksâ�� teeth and bucklers of tigerâ��s skin? we slander the hyã¦na; man is the fiercest and cruelest animal. ah! he is of little faith; even the erring comets and meteors would thank him, and return his kindness in their kind. how meanly and grossly do we deal with nature! could we not have a less gross labor? what else do these fine inventions suggest,â��magnetism, the daguerreotype, electricity? can we not do more than cut and trim the forest,â��can we not assist in its interior economy, in the circulation of the sap? now we work superficially and violently. we do not suspect how much might be done to improve our relation to animated nature; what kindness and refined courtesy there might be. there are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. the keeping of bees, for instance, is a very slight interference. it is like directing the sunbeams. all nations, from the remotest antiquity, have thus fingered nature. there are hymettus and hybla, and how many bee-renowned spots beside? there is nothing gross in the idea of these little herds,â��their hum like the faintest low of kine in the meads. a pleasant reviewer has lately reminded us that in some places they are led out to pasture where the flowers are most abundant. â��columella tells us,â�� says he, â��that the inhabitants of arabia sent their hives into attica to benefit by the later-blowing flowers.â�� annually are the hives, in immense pyramids, carried up the nile in boats, and suffered to float slowly down the stream by night, resting by day, as the flowers put forth along the banks; and they determine the richness of any locality, and so the profitableness of delay, by the sinking of the boat in the water. we are told, by the same reviewer, of a man in germany, whose bees yielded more honey than those of his neighbors, with no apparent advantage; but at length he informed them that he had turned his hives one degree more to the east, and so his bees, having two hours the start in the morning, got the first sip of honey. here, there is treachery and selfishness behind all this; but these things suggest to the poetic mind what might be done. many examples there are of a grosser interference, yet not without their apology. we saw last summer, on the side of a mountain, a dog employed to churn for a farmerâ��s family, travelling upon a horizontal wheel, and though he had sore eyes, an alarming cough, and withal a demure aspect, yet their bread did get buttered for all that. undoubtedly, in the most brilliant successes, the first rank is always sacrificed. much useless travelling of horses, _in extenso_, has of late years been improved for manâ��s behoof, only two forces being taken advantage of,â��the gravity of the horse, which is the centripetal, and his centrifugal inclination to go a-head. only these two elements in the calculation. and is not the creatureâ��s whole economy better economized thus? are not all finite beings better pleased with motions relative than absolute? and what is the great globe itself but such a wheel,â��a larger tread-mill,â��so that our horseâ��s freest steps over prairies are oftentimes balked and rendered of no avail by the earthâ��s motion on its axis? but here he is the central agent and motive power; and, for variety of scenery, being provided with a window in front, do not the ever-varying activity and fluctuating energy of the creature himself work the effect of the most varied scenery on a country road? it must be confessed that horses at present work too exclusively for men, rarely men for horses; and the brute degenerates in manâ��s society. it will be seen that we contemplate a time when manâ��s will shall be law to the physical world, and he shall no longer be deterred by such abstractions as time and space, height and depth, weight and hardness, but shall indeed be the lord of creation. â��well,â�� says the faithless reader, â��â�¯â��life is short, but art is long;â�� where is the power that will effect all these changes?â�� this it is the very object of mr. etzlerâ��s volume to show. at present, he would merely remind us that there are innumerable and immeasurable powers already existing in nature, unimproved on a large scale, or for generous and universal ends, amply sufficient for these purposes. he would only indicate their existence, as a surveyor makes known the existence of a water-power on any stream; but for their application he refers us to a sequel to this book, called the â��mechanical system.â�� a few of the most obvious and familiar of these powers are the wind, the tide, the waves, the sunshine. let us consider their value. first, there is the power of the wind, constantly exerted over the globe. it appears from observation of a sailing-vessel, and from scientific tables, that the average power of the wind is equal to that of one horse for every one hundred square feet. â��we know,â�� says our authorâ�� â��that ships of the first class carry sails two hundred feet high; we may, therefore, equally, on land, oppose to the wind surfaces of the same height. imagine a line of such surfaces one mile, or about 5,000 feet, long; they would then contain 1,000,000 square feet. let these surfaces intersect the direction of the wind at right angles, by some contrivance, and receive, consequently, its full power at all times. its average power being equal to one horse for every 100 square feet, the total power would be equal to 1,000,000 divided by 100, or 10,000 horsesâ�� power. allowing the power of one horse to equal that of ten men, the power of 10,000 horses is equal to 100,000 men. but as men cannot work uninterruptedly, but want about half the time for sleep and repose, the same power would be equal to 200,000 men.... we are not limited to the height of 200 feet; we might extend, if required, the application of this power to the height of the clouds, by means of kites.â�� but we will have one such fence for every square mile of the globeâ��s surface, for, as the wind usually strikes the earth at an angle of more than two degrees, which is evident from observing its effect on the high sea, it admits of even a closer approach. as the surface of the globe contains about 200,000,000 square miles, the whole power of the wind on these surfaces would equal 40,000,000,000,000 menâ��s power, and â��would perform 80,000 times as much work as all the men on earth could effect with their nerves.â�� if it should be objected that this computation includes the surface of the ocean and uninhabitable regions of the earth, where this power could not be applied for our purposes, mr. etzler is quick with his replyâ��â��but, you will recollect,â�� says he, â��that i have promised to show the means for rendering the ocean as inhabitable as the most fruitful dry land; and i do not exclude even the polar regions.â�� the reader will observe that our author uses the fence only as a convenient formula for expressing the power of the wind, and does not consider it a necessary method of its application. we do not attach much value to this statement of the comparative power of the wind and horse, for no common ground is mentioned on which they can be compared. undoubtedly, each is incomparably excellent in its way, and every general comparison made for such practical purposes as are contemplated, which gives a preference to the one, must be made with some unfairness to the other. the scientific tables are, for the most part, true only in a tabular sense. we suspect that a loaded wagon, with a light sail, ten feet square, would not have been blown so far by the end of the year, under equal circumstances, as a common racer or dray horse would have drawn it. and how many crazy structures on our globeâ��s surface, of the same dimensions, would wait for dry-rot if the traces of one horse were hitched to them, even to their windward side? plainly, this is not the principle of comparison. but even the steady and constant force of the horse may be rated as equal to his weight at least. yet we should prefer to let the zephyrs and gales bear, with all their weight, upon our fences, than that dobbin, with feet braced, should lean ominously against them for a season. nevertheless, here is an almost incalculable power at our disposal, yet how trifling the use we make of it. it only serves to turn a few mills, blow a few vessels across the ocean, and a few trivial ends besides. what a poor compliment do we pay to our indefatigable and energetic servant! â��if you ask, perhaps, why this power is not used, if the statement be true, i have to ask in return, why is the power of steam so lately come to application? so many millions of men boiled water every day for many thousand years; they must have frequently seen that boiling water, in tightly closed pots or kettles, would lift the cover or burst the vessel with great violence. the power of steam was, therefore, as commonly known down to the least kitchen or wash-woman, as the power of wind; but close observation and reflection were bestowed neither on the one nor the other.â�� men having discovered the power of falling water, which after all is comparatively slight, how eagerly do they seek out and improve these _privileges?_ let a difference of but a few feet in level be discovered on some stream near a populous town, some slight occasion for gravity to act, and the whole economy of the neighborhood is changed at once. men do indeed speculate about and with this power as if it were the only privilege. but meanwhile this aerial stream is falling from far greater heights with more constant flow, never shrunk by drought, offering mill-sites wherever the wind blows; a niagara in the air, with no canada side;â��only the application is hard. there are the powers too of the tide and waves, constantly ebbing and flowing, lapsing and relapsing, but they serve man in but few ways. they turn a few tide mills, and perform a few other insignificant and accidental services only. we all perceive the effect of the tide; how imperceptibly it creeps up into our harbors and rivers, and raises the heaviest navies as easily as the lightest chip. everything that floats must yield to it. but man, slow to take natureâ��s constant hint of assistance, makes slight and irregular use of this power, in careening ships and getting them afloat when aground. the following is mr. etzlerâ��s calculation on this head: to form a conception of the power which the tide affords, let us imagine a surface of 100 miles square, or 10,000 square miles, where the tide rises and sinks, on an average, 10 feet; how many men would it require to empty a basin of 10,000 square miles area, and 10 feet deep, filled with sea-water, in 6â¼ hours and fill it again in the same time? as one man can raise 8 cubic feet of sea-water per minute, and in 6â¼ hours 3,000, it would take 1,200,000,000 men, or as they could work only half the time, 2,400,000,000, to raise 3,000,000,000,000 cubic feet, or the whole quantity required in the given time. this power may be applied in various ways. a large body, of the heaviest materials that will float, may first be raised by it, and being attached to the end of a balance reaching from the land, or from a stationary support, fastened to the bottom, when the tide falls, the whole weight will be brought to bear upon the end of the balance. also when the tide rises it may be made to exert a nearly equal force in the opposite direction. it can be employed wherever a _point dâ��appui_ can be obtained. â��however, the application of the tide being by establishments fixed on the ground, it is natural to begin with them near the shores in shallow water, and upon sands, which may be extended gradually further into the sea. the shores of the continent, islands, and sands, being generally surrounded by shallow water, not exceeding from 50 to 100 fathoms in depth, for 20, 50, or 100 miles and upward. the coasts of north america, with their extensive sand-banks, islands, and rocks, may easily afford, for this purpose, a ground about 3,000 miles long, and, on an average, 100 miles broad, or 300,000 square miles, which, with a power of 240,000 men per square mile, as stated, at 10 feet tide, will be equal to 72,000 millions of men, or for every mile of coast, a power of 24,000,000 men.â�� â��rafts, of any extent, fastened on the ground of the sea, along the shore, and stretching far into the sea, may be covered with fertile soil, bearing vegetables and trees, of every description, the finest gardens, equal to those the firm land may admit of, and buildings and machineries, which may operate, not only on the sea, where they are, but which also, by means of mechanical connections, may extend their operations for many miles into the continent. (etzlerâ��s mechanical system, page 24.) thus this power may cultivate the artificial soil for many miles upon the surface of the sea, near the shores, and, for several miles, the dry land, along the shore, in the most superior manner imaginable; it may build cities along the shore, consisting of the most magnificent palaces, every one surrounded by gardens and the most delightful sceneries; it may level the hills and unevennesses, or raise eminences for enjoying open prospect into the country and upon the sea; it may cover the barren shore with fertile soil, and beautify the same in various ways; it may clear the sea of shallows, and make easy the approach to the land, not merely of vessels, but of large floating islands, which may come from, and go to distant parts of the world, islands that have every commodity and security for their inhabitants which the firm land affords.â�� â��thus may a power, derived from the gravity of the moon and the ocean, hitherto but the objects of idle curiosity to the studious man, be made eminently subservient for creating the most delightful abodes along the coasts, where men may enjoy at the same time all the advantages of sea and dry land; the coasts may hereafter be continuous paradisiacal skirts between land and sea, everywhere crowded with the densest population. the shores and the sea along them will be no more as raw nature presents them now, but everywhere of easy and charming access, not even molested by the roar of waves, shaped as it may suit the purposes of their inhabitants; the sea will be cleared of every obstruction to free passage everywhere, and its productions in fishes, etc., will be gathered in large, appropriate receptacles, to present them to the inhabitants of the shores and of the sea.â�� verily, the land would wear a busy aspect at the spring and neap tide, and these island shipsâ��these _terr㦠infirmã¦_â��which realise the fables of antiquity, affect our imagination. we have often thought that the fittest locality for a human dwelling was on the edge of the land, that there the constant lesson and impression of the sea might sink deep into the life and character of the landsman, and perhaps impart a marine tint to his imagination. it is a noble word, that _mariner_â��one who is conversant with the sea. there should be more of what it signifies in each of us. it is a worthy country to belong toâ��we look to see him not disgrace it. perhaps we should be equally mariners and terreners, and even our green mountains need some of that sea-green to be mixed with them. the computation of the power of the waves is less satisfactory. while only the average power of the wind and the average height of the tide were taken before, now the extreme height of the waves is used, for they are made to rise ten feet above the level of the sea, to which, adding ten more for depression, we have twenty feet, or the extreme height of a wave. indeed, the power of the waves, which is produced by the wind blowing obliquely and at disadvantage upon the water, is made to be, not only three thousand times greater than that of the tide, but one hundred times greater than that of the wind itself, meeting its object at right angles. moreover, this power is measured by the area of the vessel, and not by its length mainly, and it seems to be forgotten that the motion of the waves is chiefly undulatory, and exerts a power only within the limits of a vibration, else the very continents, with their extensive coasts, would soon be set adrift. finally, there is the power to be derived from sunshine, by the principle on which archimedes contrived his burning-mirrors, a multiplication of mirrors reflecting the rays of the sun upon the same spot, till the requisite degree of heat is obtained. the principal application of this power will be to the boiling of water and production of steam. â��how to create rivulets of sweet and wholesome water, on floating islands, in the midst of the ocean, will be no riddle now. sea-water changed into steam, will distill into sweet water, leaving the salt on the bottom. thus the steam engines on floating islands, for their propulsion and other mechanical purposes, will serve, at the same time, for the distillery of sweet water, which, collected in basins, may be led through channels over the island, while, where required, it may be refrigerated by artificial means, and changed into cool water, surpassing, in salubrity, the best spring water, because nature hardly ever distils water so purely, and without admixture of less wholesome matter.â�� so much for these few and more obvious powers, already used to a trifling extent. but there are innumerable others in nature, not described nor discovered. these, however, will do for the present. this would be to make the sun and the moon equally our satellites. for, as the moon is the cause of the tides, and the sun the cause of the wind, which, in turn, is the cause of the waves, all the work of this planet would be performed by these far influences. â��but as these powers are very irregular and subject to interruptions; the next object is to show how they may be converted into powers that operate continually and uniformly for ever, until the machinery be worn out, or, in other words, into perpetual motionsâ�� . . . â��hitherto the power of the wind has been applied immediately upon the machinery for use, and we have had to wait the chances of the windâ��s blowing; while the operation was stopped as soon as the wind ceased to blow. but the manner, which i shall state hereafter, of applying this power, is to make it operate only for collecting or storing up power, and then to take out of this store, at any time, as much as may be wanted for final operation upon the machines. the power stored up is to react as required, and may do so long after the original power of the wind has ceased. and though the wind should cease for intervals of many months, we may have by the same power a uniform perpetual motion in a very simple way.â�� â��the weight of a clock being wound up gives us an image of reaction. the sinking of this weight is the reaction of winding it up. it is not necessary to wait till it has run down before we wind up the weight, but it may be wound up at any time, partly or totally; and if done always before the weight reaches the bottom, the clock will be going perpetually. in a similar, though not in the same way, we may cause a reaction on a larger scale. we may raise, for instance, water by the immediate application of wind or steam to a pond upon some eminence, out of which, through an outlet, it may fall upon some wheel or other contrivance for setting machinery a going. thus we may store up water in some eminent pond, and take out of this store, at any time, as much water through the outlet as we want to employ, by which means the original power may react for many days after it has ceased. . . . such reservoirs of moderate elevation or size need not be made artificially, but will be found made by nature very frequently, requiring but little aid for their completion. they require no regularity of form. any valley, with lower grounds in its vicinity, would answer the purpose. small crevices may be filled up. such places may be eligible for the beginning of enterprises of this kind.â�� the greater the height, of course, the less water required. but suppose a level and dry country; then hill and valley, and â��eminent pond,â�� are to be constructed by main force; or, if the springs are unusually low, then dirt and stones may be used, and the disadvantage arising from friction will be counterbalanced by their greater gravity. nor shall a single rood of dry land be sunk in such artificial ponds as may be wanted, but their surfaces â��may be covered with rafts decked with fertile earth, and all kinds of vegetables which may grow there as well as anywhere else.â�� and, finally, by the use of thick envelopes retaining the heat, and other contrivances, â��the power of steam caused by sunshine may react at will, and thus be rendered perpetual, no matter how often or how long the sunshine may be interrupted. (etzlerâ��s _mechanical system_).â�� here is power enough, one would think, to accomplish somewhat. these are the powers below. oh ye millwrights, ye engineers, ye operatives and speculators of every class, never again complain of a want of power; it is the grossest form of infidelity. the question is, not how we shall execute, but what. let us not use in a niggardly manner what is thus generously offered. consider what revolutions are to be effected in agriculture. first, in the new country a machine is to move along, taking out trees and stones to any required depth, and piling them up in convenient heaps; then the same machine, â��with a little alteration,â�� is to plane the ground perfectly, till there shall be no hills nor valleys, making the requisite canals, ditches, and roads as it goes along. the same machine, â��with some other little alterations,â�� is then to sift the ground thoroughly, supply fertile soil from other places if wanted, and plant it; and finally the same machine, â��with a little addition,â�� is to reap and gather in the crop, thresh and grind it, or press it to oil, or prepare it any way for final use. for the description of these machines we are referred to â��etzlerâ��s _mechanical system_, pages 11 to 27.â�� we should be pleased to see that â��_mechanical system_,â�� though we have not been able to ascertain whether it has been published, or only exists as yet in the design of the author. we have great faith in it. but we cannot stop for applications now. â��any wilderness, even the most hideous and sterile, may be converted into the most fertile and delightful gardens. the most dismal swamps may be cleared of all their spontaneous growth, filled up and levelled, and intersected by canals, ditches and aqueducts, for draining them entirely. the soil, if required, may be meliorated, by covering or mixing it with rich soil taken from distant places, and the same be mouldered to fine dust, levelled, sifted from all roots, weeds and stones, and sowed and planted in the most beautiful order and symmetry, with fruit trees and vegetables of every kind that may stand the climate.â�� new facilities for transportation and locomotion are to be adopted: â��large and commodious vehicles, for carrying many thousand tons, running over peculiarly adapted level roads, at the rate of forty miles per hour, or one thousand miles per day, may transport men and things, small houses, and whatever may serve for comfort and ease, by land. floating islands, constructed of logs, or of wooden-stuff prepared in a similar manner, as is to be done with stone, and of live trees, which may be reared so as to interlace one another, and strengthen the whole, may be covered with gardens and palaces, and propelled by powerful engines, so as to run at an equal rate though seas and oceans. thus, man may move, with the celerity of a birdâ��s flight, in terrestrial paradises, from one climate to another, and see the world in all its variety, exchanging, with distant nations, the surplus of productions. the journey from one pole to another may be performed in a fortnight; the visit to a transmarine country in a week or two; or a journey round the world in one or two months by land and water. and why pass a dreary winter every year while there is yet room enough on the globe where nature is blessed with a perpetual summer, and with a far greater variety and luxuriance of vegetation? more than one-half the surface of the globe has no winter. men will have it in their power to remove and prevent all bad influences of climate, and to enjoy, perpetually, only that temperature which suits their constitution and feeling best.â�� who knows but by accumulating the power until the end of the present century, using meanwhile only the smallest allowance, reserving all that blows, all that shines, all that ebbs and flows, all that dashes, we may have got such a reserved accumulated power as to run the earth off its track into a new orbit, some summer, and so change the tedious vicissitude of the seasons? or, perchance, coming generations will not abide the dissolution of the globe, but, availing themselves of future inventions in aerial locomotion, and the navigation of space, the entire race may migrate from the earth, to settle some vacant and more western planet, it may be still healthy, perchance unearthy, not composed of dirt and stones, whose primary strata only are strewn, and where no weeds are sown. it took but little art, a simple application of natural laws, a canoe, a paddle, and a sail of matting, to people the isles of the pacific, and a little more will people the shining isles of space. do we not see in the firmament the lights carried along the shore by night, as columbus did? let us not despair nor mutiny. â��the dwellings also ought to be very different from what is known, if the full benefit of our means is to be enjoyed. they are to be of a structure for which we have no name yet. they are to be neither palaces, nor temples, nor cities, but a combination of all, superior to whatever is known. earth may be baked into bricks, or even vitrified stone by heat,â��we may bake large masses of any size and form, into stone and vitrified substance of the greatest durability, lasting even thousands of years, out of clayey earth, or of stones ground to dust, by the application of burning mirrors. this is to be done in the open air, without other preparation than gathering the substance, grinding and mixing it with water and cement, moulding or casting it, and bringing the focus of the burning mirrors of proper size upon the same. the character of the architecture is to be quite different from what it ever has been hitherto; large solid masses are to be baked or cast in one piece, ready shaped in any form that may be desired. the building may, therefore, consist of columns two hundred feet high and upwards, of proportionate thickness, and of one entire piece of vitrified substance; huge pieces are to be moulded so as to join and hook on to each other firmly, by proper joints and folds, and not to yield in any way without breaking.â�� â��foundries, of any description, are to be heated by burning mirrors, and will require no labor, except the making of the first moulds and the superintendence for gathering the metal and taking the finished articles away.â�� alas! in the present state of science, we must take the finished articles away; but think not that man will always be a victim of circumstances. the countryman who visited the city and found the streets cluttered with bricks and lumber, reported that it was not yet finished, and one who considers the endless repairs and reforming of our houses, might well wonder when they will be done. but why may not the dwellings of men on this earth be built once for all of some durable material, some roman or etruscan masonry which will stand, so that time shall only adorn and beautify them? why may we not finish the outward world for posterity, and leave them leisure to attend to the inner? surely, all the gross necessities and economies might be cared for in a few years. all might be built and baked and stored up, during this, the term-time of the world, against the vacant eternity, and the globe go provisioned and furnished like our public vessels, for its voyage through space, as through some pacific ocean, while we would â��tie up the rudder and sleep before the wind,â�� as those who sail from lima to manilla. but, to go back a few years in imagination, think not that life in these crystal palaces is to bear any analogy to life in our present humble cottages. far from it. clothed, once for all, in some â��flexible stuff,â�� more durable than george foxâ��s suit of leather, composed of â��fibres of vegetables,â�� â��glutinatedâ�� together by some â��cohesive substances,â�� and made into sheets, like paper, of any size or form, man will put far from him corroding care and the whole host of ills. â��the twenty-five halls in the inside of the square are to be each two hundred feet square and high; the forty corridors, each one hundred feet long and twenty wide; the eighty galleries, each from 1,000 to 1,250 feet long; about 7,000 private rooms, the whole surrounded and intersected by the grandest and most splendid colonnades imaginable; floors, ceilings, columns with their various beautiful and fanciful intervals, all shining, and reflecting to infinity all objects and persons, with splendid lustre of all beautiful colors, and fanciful shapes and pictures. all galleries, outside and within the halls, are to be provided with many thousand commodious and most elegant vehicles, in which persons may move up and down like birds, in perfect security, and without exertion. any member may procure himself all the common articles of his daily wants, by a short turn of some crank, without leaving his apartment; he may, at any time, bathe himself in cold or warm water, or in steam, or in some artificially prepared liquor for invigorating health. he may, at any time, give to the air in his apartment that temperature that suits his feeling best. he may cause, at any time, an agreeable scent of various kinds. he may, at any time, meliorate his breathing air,â��that main vehicle of vital power. thus, by a proper application of the physical knowledge of our days, man may be kept in a perpetual serenity of mind, and if there is no incurable disease or defect in his organism, in constant vigor of health, and his life be prolonged beyond any parallel which present times afford. â��one or two persons are sufficient to direct the kitchen business. they have nothing else to do but to superintend the cookery, and to watch the time of the victuals being done, and then to remove them, with the table and vessels, into the dining-hall, or to the respective private apartments, by a slight motion of the hand at some crank. any extraordinary desire of any person may be satisfied by going to the place where the thing is to be had; and anything that requires a particular preparation in cooking or baking may be done by the person who desires it.â�� this is one of those instances in which the individual genius is found to consent, as indeed it always does, at last, with the universal. these last sentences have a certain sad and sober truth, which reminds us of the scripture of all nations. all expression of truth does at length take the deep ethical form. here is hint of a place the most eligible of any in space, and of a servitor, in comparison with whom, all other helps dwindle into insignificance. we hope to hear more of him anon, for even a crystal palace would be deficient without his invaluable services. and as for the environs of the establishment, â��there will be afforded the most enrapturing views to be fancied, out of the private apartments, from the galleries, from the roof, from its turrets and cupolas,â��gardens as far as the eye can see, full of fruits and flowers, arranged in the most beautiful order, with walks, colonnades, aqueducts, canals, ponds, plains, amphitheatres, terraces, fountains, sculptural works, pavilions, gondolas, places for public amusement, etc., to delight the eye and fancy, the taste and smell. . . . the walks and roads are to be paved with hard vitrified, large plates, so as to be always clean from all dirt in any weather or season. . . . the channels being of vitrified substance, and the water perfectly clear, and filtrated or distilled if required, may afford the most beautiful scenes imaginable, wile a variety of fishes is seen clear down to the bottom playing about, and the canals may afford at the same time, the means of gliding smoothly along between various sceneries of art and nature, in beautiful gondolas, while their surface and borders may be covered with fine land and aquatic birds. the walks may be covered with porticos adorned with magnificent columns, statues, and sculptural works; all of vitrified substance, and lasting forever, while the beauties of nature around heighten the magnificence and deliciousness. â��the night affords no less delight to fancy and feelings. an infinite variety of grand, beautiful and fanciful objects and sceneries, radiating with crystalline brilliancy, by the illumination of gas-light; the human figures themselves, arrayed in the most beautiful pomp fancy may suggest, or the eye desire, shining even with brilliancy of stuffs and diamonds, like stones of various colors, elegantly shaped and arranged around the body; all reflected a thousand-fold in huge mirrors and reflectors of various forms; theatrical scenes of a grandeur and magnificence, and enrapturing illusions, unknown yet, in which any person may be either a spectator or an actor; the speech and the songs reverberating with increased sound, rendered more sonorous and harmonious than by nature, by vaultings that are moveable into any shape at any time; the sweetest and most impressive harmony of music, produced by song and instruments partly not known yet, may thrill through the nerves and vary with other amusements and delights. â��at night the roof, and the inside and outside of the whole square, are illuminated by gas-light, which in the mazes of many-colored crystal-like colonnades and vaultings, is reflected with a brilliancy that gives to the whole a lustre of precious stones, as far as the eye can see. such are the future abodes of men. . . . such is the life reserved to true intelligence, but withheld from ignorance, prejudice, and stupid adherence to custom.â�� ... â��such is the domestic life to be enjoyed by every human individual that will partake of it. love and affection may there be fostered and enjoyed without any of the obstructions that oppose, diminish, and destroy them in the present state of men.â�� ... â��it would be as ridiculous, then, to dispute and quarrel about the means of life, as it would be now about water to drink along mighty rivers, or about the permission to breathe air in the atmosphere, or about sticks in our extensive woods.â�� thus is paradise to be regained, and that old and stern decree at length reversed. man shall no more earn his living by the sweat of his brow. all labor shall be reduced to â��a short turn of some crank,â�� and â��taking the finished article away.â�� but there is a crank,â��oh, how hard to be turned! could there not be a crank upon a crank,â��an infinitely small crank?â��we would fain inquire. no,â��alas! not. but there is a certain divine energy in every man, but sparingly employed as yet, which may be called the crank within,â��the crank after all,â��the prime mover in all machinery,â��quite indispensable to all work. would that we might get our hands on its handle! in fact no work can be shirked. it may be postponed indefinitely, but not infinitely. nor can any really important work be made easier by co-operation or machinery. not one particle of labor now threatening any man can be routed without being performed. it cannot be hunted out of the vicinity like jackals and hyenas. it will not run. you may begin by sawing the little sticks, or you may saw the great sticks first, but sooner or later you must saw them both. we will not be imposed upon by this vast application of forces. we believe that most things will have to be accomplished still by the application called industry. we are rather pleased after all to consider the small private, but both constant and accumulated force, which stands behind every spade in the field. this it is that makes the valleys shine, and the deserts really bloom. sometimes, we confess, we are so degenerate as to reflect with pleasure on the days when men were yoked like cattle, and drew a crooked stick for a plough. after all, the great interests and methods were the same. it is a rather serious objection to mr. etzlerâ��s schemes, that they require time, men, and money, three very superfluous and inconvenient things for an honest and well-disposed man to deal with. â��the whole world,â�� he tells us, â��might therefore be really changed into a paradise, within less than ten years, commencing from the first year of an association for the purpose of constructing and applying the machinery.â�� we are sensible of a startling incongruity when time and money are mentioned in this connection. the ten years which are proposed would be a tedious while to wait, if every man were at his post and did his duty, but quite too short a period, if we are to take time for it. but this fault is by no means peculiar to mr. etzlerâ��s schemes. there is far too much hurry and bustle, and too little patience and privacy, in all our methods, as if something were to be accomplished in centuries. the true reformer does not want time, nor money, nor co-operation, nor advice. what is time but the stuff delay is made of? and depend upon it, our virtue will not live on the interest of our money. he expects no income, but our outgoes; so soon as we begin to count the cost the cost begins. and as for advice, the information floating in the atmosphere of society is as evanescent and unserviceable to him as gossamer for clubs of hercules. there is absolutely no common sense; it is common nonsense. if we are to risk a cent or a drop of our blood, who then shall advise us? for ourselves, we are too young for experience. who is old enough? we are older by faith than by experience. in the unbending of the arm to do the deed there is experience worth all the maxims in the world. â��it will now be plainly seen that the execution of the proposals is not proper for individuals. whether it be proper for government at this time, before the subject has become popular, is a question to be decided; all that is to be done, is to step forth, after mature reflection, to confess loudly oneâ��s conviction, and to constitute societies. man is powerful but in union with many. nothing great, for the improvement of his own condition, or that of his fellow men, can ever be effected by individual enterprise.â�� alas! this is the crying sin of the age, this want of faith in the prevalence of a man. nothing can be effected but by one man. he who wants help wants everything. true, this is the condition of our weakness, but it can never be the means of our recovery. we must first succeed alone, that we may enjoy our success together. we trust that the social movements which we witness indicate an aspiration not to be thus cheaply satisfied. in this matter of reforming the world, we have little faith in corporations; not thus was it first formed. but our author is wise enough to say that the raw materials for the accomplishment of his purposes are â��iron, copper, wood, earth chiefly, and a union of men whose eyes and understanding are not shut up by preconceptions.â�� aye, this last may be what we want mainly,â��a company of â��odd fellowsâ�� indeed. â��small shares of twenty dollars will be sufficient,â��â��in all, from â��200,000 to 300,000,â��â��â��to create the first establishment for a whole community of from 3,000 to 4,000 individualsâ��â��at the end of five years we shall have a principal of 200 millions of dollars, and so paradise will be wholly regained at the end of the tenth year. but, alas, the ten years have already elapsed, and there are no signs of eden yet, for want of the requisite funds to begin the enterprise in a hopeful manner. yet it seems a safe investment. perchance they could be hired at a low rate, the property being mortgaged for security, and, if necessary, it could be given up in any stage of the enterprise, without loss, with the fixtures. mr. etzler considers this â��address as a touchstone, to try whether our nation is in any way accessible to these great truths, for raising the human creature to a superior state of existence, in accordance with the knowledge and the spirit of the most cultivated minds of the present time.â�� he has prepared a constitution, short and concise, consisting of twenty-one articles, so that wherever an association may spring up, it may go into operation without delay; and the editor informs us that â��communications on the subject of this book may be addressed to c.f. stollmeyer, no. 6, upper charles street, northampton square, london.â�� but we see two main difficulties in the way. first, the successful application of the powers by machinery (we have not yet seen the â��mechanical system,â��) and, secondly, which is infinitely harder, the application of man to the work by faith. this it is, we fear, which will prolong the ten years to ten thousand at least. it will take a power more than â��80,000 times greater than all the men on earth could effect with their nerves,â�� to persuade men to use that which is already offered them. even a greater than this physical power must be brought to bear upon that moral power. faith, indeed, is all the reform that is needed; it is itself a reform. doubtless, we are as slow to conceive of paradise as of heaven, of a perfect natural as of a perfect spiritual world. we see how past ages have loitered and erred. â��is perhaps our generation free from irrationality and error? have we perhaps reached now the summit of human wisdom, and need no more to look out for mental or physical improvement?â�� undoubtedly, we are never so visionary as to be prepared for what the next hour may bring forth. î�á½³î»î»îµî¹ ï�ὸ î¸îµá¿�î¿î½ î´â�� á¼�ï�ï�î¹ ï�î¿î¹î¿á¿¦ï�î¿î½ ï�á½»ï�îµî¹. the divine is about to be, and such is its nature. in our wisest moments we are secreting a matter, which, like the lime of the shell fish, incrusts us quite over, and well for us if, like it, we cast our shells from time to time, though they be pearl and of fairest tint. let us consider under what disadvantages science has hitherto labored before we pronounce thus confidently on her progress. â��there was never any system in the productions of human labor; but they came into existence and fashion as chance directed men.â�� â��only a few professional men of learning occupy themselves with teaching natural philosophy, chemistry, and the other branches of the sciences of nature, to a very limited extent, for very limited purposes, with very limited means.â�� â��the science of mechanics is but in a state of infancy. it is true, improvements are made upon improvements, instigated by patents of government; but they are made accidentally or at hap-hazard. there is no general system of this science, mathematical as it is, which develops its principles in their full extent, and the outlines of the application to which they lead. there is no idea of comparison between what is explored and what is yet to be explored in this science. the ancient greeks placed mathematics at the head of their education. but we are glad to have filled our memory with notions, without troubling ourselves much with reasoning about them.â�� mr. etzler is not one of the enlightened practical men, the pioneers of the actual, who move with the slow deliberate tread of science, conserving the world; who execute the dreams of the last century, though they have no dreams of their own; yet he deals in the very raw but still solid material of all inventions. he has more of the practical than usually belongs to so bold a schemer, so resolute a dreamer. yet his success is in theory, and not in practice, and he feeds our faith rather than contents our understanding. his book wants order, serenity, dignity, everything,â��but it does not fail to impart what only man can impart to man of much importance, his own faith. it is true his dreams are not thrilling nor bright enough, and he leaves off to dream where he who dreams just before the dawn begins. his castles in the air fall to the ground, because they are not built lofty enough; they should be secured to heavenâ��s roof. after all, the theories and speculations of men concern us more than their puny execution. it is with a certain coldness and languor that we loiter about the actual and so called practical. how little do the most wonderful inventions of modern times detain us. they insult nature. every machine, or particular application, seems a slight outrage against universal laws. how many fine inventions are there which do not clutter the ground? we think that those only succeed which minister to our sensible and animal wants, which bake or brew, wash or warm, or the like. but are those of no account which are patented by fancy and imagination, and succeed so admirably in our dreams that they give the tone still to our waking thoughts? already nature is serving all those uses which science slowly derives on a much higher and grander scale to him that will be served by her. when the sunshine falls on the path of the poet, he enjoys all those pure benefits and pleasures which the arts slowly and partially realize from age to age. the winds which fan his cheek waft him the sum of that profit and happiness which their lagging inventions supply. the chief fault of this book is, that it aims to secure the greatest degree of gross comfort and pleasure merely. it paints a mahometanâ��s heaven, and stops short with singular abruptness when we think it is drawing near to the precincts of the christianâ��s,â��and we trust we have not made here a distinction without a difference. undoubtedly if we were to reform this outward life truly and thoroughly, we should find no duty of the inner omitted. it would be employment for our whole nature; and what we should do thereafter would be as vain a question as to ask the bird what it will do when its nest is built and its brood reared. but a moral reform must take place first, and then the necessity of the other will be superseded, and we shall sail and plough by its force alone. there is a speedier way than the â��mechanical systemâ�� can show to fill up marshes, to drown the roar of the waves, to tame hyã¦nas, secure agreeable environs, diversify the land, and refresh it with â��rivulets of sweet water,â�� and that is by the power of rectitude and true behavior. it is only for a little while, only occasionally, methinks, that we want a garden. surely a good man need not be at the labor to level a hill for the sake of a prospect, or raise fruits and flowers, and construct floating islands, for the sake of a paradise. he enjoys better prospects than lie behind any hill. where an angel travels it will be paradise all the way, but where satan travels it will be burning marl and cinders. what says veeshnoo sarma? â��he whose mind is at ease is possessed of all riches. is it not the same to one whose foot is enclosed in a shoe, as if the whole surface of the earth were covered with leather?â�� he who is conversant with the supernal powers will not worship these inferior deities of the wind, waves, tide, and sunshine. but we would not disparage the importance of such calculations as we have described. they are truths in physics, because they are true in ethics. the moral powers no one would presume to calculate. suppose we could compare the moral with the physical, and say how many horse-power the force of love, for instance, blowing on every square foot of a manâ��s soul, would equal. no doubt we are well aware of this force; figures would not increase our respect for it; the sunshine is equal to but one ray of its heat. the light of the sun is but the shadow of love. â��the souls of men loving and fearing god,â�� says raleigh, â��receive influence from that divine light itself, whereof the sunâ��s clarity, and that of the stars, is by plato called but a shadow. _lumen est umbra dei, deus est lumen luminis._ light is the shadow of godâ��s brightness, who is the light of light,â�� and, we may add, the heat of heat. love is the wind, the tide, the waves, the sunshine. its power is incalculable; it is many horse-power. it never ceases, it never slacks; it can move the globe without a resting-place; it can warm without fire; it can feed without meat; it can clothe without garments; it can shelter without roof; it can make a paradise within which will dispense with a paradise without. but though the wisest men in all ages have labored to publish this force, and every human heart is, sooner or later, more or less, made to feel it, yet how little is actually applied to social ends! true, it is the motive-power of all successful social machinery; but, as in physics we have made the elements do only a little drudgery for us,â��steam to take the place of a few horses, wind of a few oars, water of a few cranks and hand-mills,â��as the mechanical forces have not yet been generously and largely applied to make the physical world answer to the ideal, so the power of love has been but meanly and sparingly applied, as yet. it has patented only such machines as the almshouses, the hospital, and the bible society, while its infinite wind is still blowing, and blowing down these very structures too, from time to time. still less are we accumulating its power, and preparing to act with greater energy at a future time. shall we not contribute our shares to this enterprise, then? [1] _the paradise within the reach of all men, without labor, by powers of nature and machinery. an address to all intelligent men._ in two parts. by j.a. etzler. part first. second english edition. london, 1842. pp. 55. ' ^ i *^'^>'l a*' 0' -'-' ^/.>°.:..'''^°c°v::;;>>. /^^r*^% -,o .ko^^ ;^^.^%. ^ \..„,%, •.. "/...., ,^-./-°' /,,.„, °».-•;/. 1 ^ friemp 5hi17 lwee e ey hemry r thvrebv ^' copyright, 1910 by elbert hubbard €^cla278:i.o3 p-§ c friendship hile we float here, far from that tributary stream on whose banks our friends and kindred dwell, our thoughts, like the stars, come out of their horizon still; for there !• circulates a finer blood than lavoisier has discovered the laws of— the blood, not of kindred merely, but of kindness whose pulse still beats at any distance and forever. after years of vain familiarity, some distant gesture or unconscious behavior, which w^e remember, speaks to us w^ith more emphasis than the wisest or kindest words. we are sometimes made aware of a kindness long passed, and realize that there have been times w^hen our friends' thoughts of us were of so pure and lofty a character that they passed over us like the w^inds of heaven unnoticed; w^hen they treated us not as what we were, but as what we aspired to be. there has just reached us, it may be, the nobleness of some such silent behavior, not to be forgotten, not to be remembered, and we shudder to think how^ it fell on us cold, though in some true but tardy hour w^e endeavor to w^ipe off these scores. in my experience, persons, when they are made the subject of conversation, though w^ith a friend, are commonly the most prosaic and trivial of facts. the universe seems bankrupt as soon as we begin to discuss the character of individuals. our discourse all runs to slander, and our limits 9 grow narrow^er as we advance. how is it that w are impelled to treat our old friends so ill when we obtain new ones? the housekeeper says, *' i never had any new crockery in my life but i began to break the old." i say, let us speak of mushrooms and forest-trees, rather. yet, we can sometimes afford to remember them in private. c friendship is evanescent in every man's experience, and remembered like heat-lightning in past summers. fair and flitting, like a summer cloud, there is alw^ays some vapor in the air, no matter how long the drought; there are even april showier s j2*. surely from time to time, for its vestiges never depart, it floats through our atmosphere. it takes place, like vegetation, in so many materials, because there is such a law^, but always without permanent form, though ancient . and familiar as the sun and moon, and as sure to come again. the heart is forever inexperienced. they silently gather, as by magic, these never failing, never quite deceiving visions, like the bright and fleecy clouds in the calmest and clearest days isv the friend is some fair, floating isle of palms eluding the mariner in pacific seas. many are the dangers to be encountered, equinoctial gales and coral-reefs, ere he may sail before the constant trades. but w^ho w^ould not sail through mutiny and storm, even over atlantic waves, to reach the fabulous, retreating shores of some continent man ? columbus has sailed westw^ard of these isles, by the mariner's compass, but neither he nor his successors have found them. we are no nearer than plato w^as. the earnest seeker and hopeful discoverer of this new^ 'world alw^ays haunts 10 the outskirts of his time, and walks through the densest crowd uninterrupted, and, as it w^ere, in a straight line. who does not walk on the plain as amid the columns of tadmore of the desert? there is on the earth no institution which friendship has established; it is not taught by any religion; no scripture contains its maxims. it has no temple, nor even a solitary column. there goes a rumor that the earth is inhabited, but the shipwrecked mariner has not seen a footprint on the shore. the hunter has found only fragments of pottery and the monuments of inhabitants. however, our fates at least are social ^ our courses do not diverge ; but as the w^eb of destiny is woven it is fulled, and we are cast more and more into the center s*. men naturally, though feebly, seek this alliance, and their actions faintly foretell it. we are inclined to lay the chief stress on likeness and not on difference, and in foreign bodies we admit that there are many degrees of w^armth below^ blood-heat, but none of cold above it. one or two persons come to my house from time to time, there being proposed to them the faint possibility of intercourse. they are as full as they are silent, and wait for my plectrum to stir the strings of their lyre. if they could ever come to the length of a sentence, or hear one, on that ground they are dreaming of ! they speak faintly, and do not obtrude themselves ^ they have heard some new^s which none, not even they themselves, can impart. it is a w^ealth they bear about them which can be expended in various ways. w^hat came they out to seek ? 11 no word is oftener on tlie lips of men thani friendship, and indeed no thought is more familiar to their aspirations is^ all men are dreaming of it, and its drama, which is always a tragedy, is enacted daily. it is the secret of the universe. you may thread the town, you may wander the country, and none shall ever speak of it, yet thought is everyw^here busy about it, and the idea of what is possible in this respect affects our behavior toward all new^ men and women, and a great many old ones. nevertheless, i can remember only tw^o or three essays on this subject in all literature ^ no "wonder that the mythology, and arabian nights, and scott's novels and shakespeare entertain us— we are poets and fablers and novelists and dramatists ourselves. we are continually acting a part in a more interesting drama than any w^ritten. we are dreaming that our friends are our friends^ and that we are our friends' friends. our actual friends are but distant relations of those to \vhom we are pledged. we never exchange more than three w^ords w^ith a friend in our lives on that level to which our thoughts and feelings almost habitually rise. one goes forth prepared to say, ** sw^eet friends ! " and the salutation is, **damn your eyes !" but, never mind; faint heart never w^on true friend, o my friend, may it come to pass, once, that when you are my friend i may be yours, v of what use the friendliest disposition even, if there are no hours given to friendship, if it is forever postponed to unimportant duties and relations? friendship is first. friendship last. but it is equally impossible to forget our friends, u and to make them answer to our ideal. "when they say farewell, then indeed w^e begin to keep them company. how often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends, that we may go and meet their ideal cousins ^ i would that i were worthy to be any man's friend. what is commonly honored with the name of friendship is no very profound or powerful instinct. men do not, after all, love their friends greatly 3k i do not often see the farmers made seers and wise to the verge of insanity by their friendship for one another. they are not often transfigured and translated by love in each other's presence. i do not observe them purified, refined and elevated by the love of a man. if one abates a little the price of his wood, or gives a neighbor his vote at town-meeting, or a barrel of apples, or lends him his wagon frequently, it is esteemed a rare instance of friendship. nor do the farmers' wives lead lives consecrated to friendship. i do not see the pair of farmer friends of either sex prepared to stand against the -world. there are only two or three couples in history. to say that a man is your friend, means commonly no more than this, that he is not your enemy s*. most contemplate only ^vhat would be the accidental and trifling advantages of friendship, as that the friend can assist in time of need, by his substance, or his influence, or his counsel; but he w^ho foresees such advantages in this relation proves himself blind to its real advantage, or indeed w^holly inexperienced in the relation itself. such services are particular and menial, compared w^ith the perpetual and all-embracing service w^hich it is s*. even the utmost good w^ill and 13 harmony and practical kindness are not sufficient for friendship, for friencls do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody. we do not wish for friends to clothe and feed our bodies (neighbors are kind enough for that), but to do the like office to our spirits. for this, few are rich enough, however w^ell disposed they may be. €l think of the importance of friendship in the education of men. it w^ill make a man honest; it will make him a hero; it will make him a saint. it is the state of the just dealing with the just, the magnanimous w^ith the magnanimous, the sincere w^ith the sincere, man with man. " why love amon^ the virtues is not known. is that love is them all contract in one." all the abuses which are the object of reform with the philanthropist, the statesman and the housekeeper, are unconsciously amended in the intercourse of friends ^ a friend is one w^ho incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting from us all the virtues, and who can appreciate them in us. it takes tw^o to speak the truth— one to speak, and another to hear. how can one treat w^ith magnanimity mere w^ood and stone ? if we dealt only w^ith the false and dishonest, w^e should at last forget how to speak truth. in our daily intercourse with men, our nobler faculties are dormant and suffered to rust. none w^ill pay us the compliment to expect nobleness from us. "we ask our neighbor to suffer himself to be dealt w^ith truly, sincerely, nobly; but he answ^ers **no," by his deafness. he does not even hear this prayer. he says practically, ** i w^ill be content if you treat me as no better than i should be, as deceitful, mean, dishonest and selfish." for the 14 most part, we are contented so to deal and to be dealt with, and we do not think that for the mass of men there is any truer and nobler relation possible. a man may have good neighbors, so called, and acquaintances, and even companions, wife, parents, brothers, sisters, children, ^vho meet himself and one another on this ground only. the state does not demand justice of its members, but thinks that it succeeds very w^ell w^ith the least degree of it— hardly more than rogues practise — and so do the family and the neighborhood. even w^hat is commonly called friendship is only a little more honor among rogues. but sometimes w^e are said to love another; that is, to stand in a true relation to him, so that w^e give the best to, and receive the best from, him. between whom there is hearty truth there is love; and in proportion to our truthfulness and confidence in one another, our lives are divine and miraculous, and answer to our ideal. there are passages of affection in our intercourse w^ith mortal men and w^omen, such as no prophecy had taught us to expect, w^hich transcend our earthly life, and anticipate heaven for us. "what is this love that may come right into the middle of a prosaic goffstown day, equal to any of the gods ; that discovers a new^ w^orld, fair and fresh and eternal, occupying the place of this old one, when to the common eye a dust has settled on the universe ; which w^orld can not else be reached, and does not e^istl w^hat other words, w^e may almost ask, are memorable and worthy to be repeated than those which love has inspired ? it is wonderful that they were ever uttered. they 15 are few and rare, indeed; but, like a strain of music, they are incessantly repeated and modulated by the memory s^ all other words crumble off w^ith the stucco which overlies the heart. we should not dare to repeat them now aloud. we are not competent to hear them at all times. the books for young people say a great deal about the selection of friends ; it is because they really have nothing to say about friends. they mean associates and confidants merely. **know^ that the contrariety of foe and friend proceeds from god." friendship takes place betw^een those who have an affinity for one another, and is a perfectly natural and inevitable result 3^ no professions nor advances w^ill avail. even speech, at first, necessarily has nothing to do with it: but it follows after silence, as the buds in the graft do not put forth into leaves till long after the graft has taken. it is a drama in which the parties have no part to act 3. "we are all mussulmans and fatalists in this respect i^ impatient and uncertain lovers think that they must say or do something kind whenever they meet; they must never be cold. but they w^ho are friends do not do what they think they must, but what they must. even their friendship is in , one sense but a sublime phenomenon to them. i €l the true and not despairing friend w^ill address his friend in some such terms as these : **i never asked thy leave to let me love thee— i have a right. i love thee not as something private and personal, w^hich is your own, but as something universal and w^orthy of love, which i have found. oh, how i think of you ! you are purely good ie you are infinitely good. i can trust you forever. i did not think that humanity was so rich. give me an opportunity to live. ** you are the fact in a fiction — you are the truth more strange and admirable than fiction. consent only to be what you are. i alone will never stand in your w^ay. **this is what i would like: to be as intimate with you as our spirits are intimate, respecting you as i respect my ideal. never to profane one another by word or action, even by a thought. between us, if necessary, let there be no acquaintance. '*i have discovered you; how can you be concealed from me?" the friend asks no return but that his friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace his apotheosis of him. they cherish each other's hopes. they are kind to each other's dreams. c though the poet says, ** 't is the pre-eminence of friendship to impute excellence," yet w^e can never praise our friend, nor esteem him praiseworthy, nor let him think that he can please us by any behavior^ or ever treat us w^ell enough ^ that kindness w^hich has so good a reputation elsewhere can least of all consist w^ith this relation, and no such affront can be offered to a friend, as a conscious good w^ill, a friendliness which is not a necessity of the friend's nature. €lthe sexes are naturally most strongly attracted to one another, by constant constitutional differences, and are most commonly and surely the complements of one another i^ how natural and easy it is for man to secure the attention of w^oman to what interests himself 3»^ men and 17 women of equal culture, thrown together, are sure to be of a certain value to one another, more than men to men. there exists already a natural disinterestedness and liberality in such society, and i think that any man w^ill more confidently carry his favorite books to read to some circle of intelligent w^omen, than to one of his ow^n sex. the visit of man to man is w^ont to be an interruption, but the sexes naturally expect one another. yet friendship is no respecter of sex ; and perhaps it is more rare betw^een the sexes than between two of the same sex. friendship is, at any rate, a relation of perfect equality. it can not w^ell spare any outw^ard sign of equal obligation and advantage sv the nobleman can never have a friend among his retainers, nor the king among his subjects. not that the parties to it are in all respects equal, but they are equal in all that respects or affects their friendship. the one's love is exactly balanced and represented by the other's. persons are only the vessels which contain the nectar, and the hydrostatic paradox is the symbol of love's law^. it finds its level and rises to its fountainhead in all breasts, and its slenderest column balances the ocean. love equals s-wiit and slo^v. and high and lew. racer and lame. the hunter and his game. the one sex is not, in this respect, more tender than the other. a hero's love is as delicate as a maiden's. confucius said, ** never contract friendship w^ith a man that is not better than thyself." it is 18 the merit and preservation of friendship, that it takes place on a level higher than the actual characters of the parties would seem to warrant. the rays of light come to us in such a curve that every man whom we meet appears to be taller than he actually is. such foundation has civility. my friend is that one whom i can associate w^ith my choicest thought. i alw^ays assign to him a nobler employment in my absence than i ever find him engaged in ; and i imagine that the hours which he devotes to me were snatched from a higher society. the sorest insult which i ever received from a friend was, w^hen he behaved w^ith the license which only long and cheap acquaintance allows to one's fault, in my presence, w^ithout shame, and still addressed me in friendly accents. beware, lest thy friend learn at last to tolerate one frailty of thine, and so an obstacle be raised to the progress of thy love. friendship is never established as an understood relation ^ do you demand that i be less your friend that you may know it ? yet what right have i to think that another cherishes so rare a sentiment for me ? it is a miracle which requires constant proofs. it is an exercise of the purest imagination and the rarest faith. it says by a silent but eloquent behavior: ** i w^ill be so related to thee as thou canst imagine; even so thou mayest believe. i will spend truth — all my wealth —on thee," and the friend responds silently through his nature and life, and treats his friend with the same divine courtesy. he knows us literally through thick and thin. he never asks for a sign of love, but can distinguish it by the features which it naturally wears. we never 19 need to stand upon cefemony -with him with regard to his visits. wait not till i invite thee, but observe that i am glad to see thee when thou comest. it would be paying too dear for thy visit to ask for it. where my friend lives there are riches and every attraction, and no slight obstacle can keep me from him. let me never have to tell thee what i have not to tell. let our intercourse be w^holly above ourselves, and draw^ us up to it. the language of friendship is not words but meanings. it is an intelligence above language. one imagines endless conversations w^ith his friend, in w^hich the tongue shall be loosed, and thoughts be spoken without hesitancy, or end; but the experience is commonly far otherw^ise. acquaintances may come and go, and have a word ready for every occasion ; but what puny word shall he utter w^hose very breath is thought and meaning ? suppose you go to bid farewell to your friend w^ho is setting out on a journey ; w^hat other outw^ard sign do you know^ of than to shake his hand ? have you any palaver ready for him then; any box of salve to commit to his pocket; any particular message to send by him; any statement w^hich you had forgotten to make as if you could forget anything? ^ no; it is much that you take his hand and say farew^ell ; that you could easily omit; so far custom has prevailed. it is even painful, if he is to go, that he should linger so long. if he must go, let him go quickly. have you any last words ? alas, it is only the w^ord of words, which you have so long sought and found not ; you have not a first word yet. there are few even whom i should venture to call earnestly by their most proper 20 natnes. a name pronounced is the recognition of the individual to whom it belongs. he who can pronounce my name aright, he can call me, and is entitled to my love and service. the violence of love is as much to be dreaded as that of hate. w^hen it is durable it is serene and equable. even its famous pains begin only with the ebb of love, for few are indeed lovers, though all would fain be s^ it is one proof of a man's fitness for friendship that he is able to do without that w^hich is cheap and passionate 3^. a true friendship is as w^ise as it is tender. the parties to it yield implicitly to the guidance of their love, and know no other law^ nor kindness. it is not extravagant and insane, but w^hat it says is something established henceforth, and w^ill 1 ear to be stereotyped. it is a truer truth, it is better and fairer news, and no time will ever shame it, or prove it false. this is a plant which thrives best in a temperate zone, w^here summer and w^inter alternate with one another. the friend is a necessarious, and meets his friend on homely ground; not on carpets and cushions, but on the ground and on rocks they w^ill sit, obeying the natural and primitive laws s** they ^vill meet w^ithout any outcry, and part without loud sorrow. their relation implies such qualities as the w^arrior prizes ; for it takes a valor to open the hearts of men as w^ell as the gates of cities. c friendship is not so kind as is imagined; it has not much human blood in it, but consists with a certain disregard for men and their erections, the christian duties and humanities, w^hile it purifies the air like electricity. there may be the sternest tragedy in the relation of two more than usually 21 innocent and true to thjeir highest instincts. we may call it an essentially heathenish intercourse, free and irresponsible in its nature, and practising all the virtues gratuitously ^ it is not the highest sympathy merely, but a pure and lofty society, a fragmentary and godlike intercourse of ancient date, still kept up at intervals, which, remembering itself, does not hesitate to disregard the humbler rights and duties of humanity. it requires immaculate and godlike qualities full grown, and exists at all only by condescension and anticipation of the remotest future. we love nothing w^hich is merely good and not fair, if such a thing is possible. nature j puts some kind of blossom before every fruit, ^ not simply a calyx behind it. w^hen the friend comes out of his heathenism and superstition, and breaks his idols, being converted by the i precepts of a newer testament ; w^hen he forgets \ his mythology, and treats his friend like a christian, or as he can afford; then friendship ceases to be friendship, and becomes charity; that principle which established the almshouse is now beginning with its charity at home, and establishing an almshouse and pauper relations there s». s*. s for the number \vhich this society admits, it is at any rate to be be^un with one, the noblest and greatest that we know, and whether the world w^ill ever carry it further, whether, as chaucer affirms, ''there be mo sterres in the skie than a pair," remains to be proved; "and certaine he is well begone. among a thousand that findeth one." w^e shall not surrender ourselves heartily to any while ^ve are conscious that another is more deserving of our love. yet friendship does not stand for numbers ; the friend does not count his friends on his fingers; they are not numerable. the more there are included by this bond, if they are indeed included, the rarer and diviner the quality of the love that binds them ik i am ready to believe that as private and intimate a relation may exist by which three are embraced, as betw^een tw^o. indeed, we can not have too many friends; the virtue which w^e appreciate w^e to some extent appropriate, so that thus ^ve are made at last fit for every relation of life. a base friendship is alw^ays of a narro"wing and exclusive tendency, but a noble one is never exclusive; its very superfluity and dispersed love is the humanity which sweetens society, and sympathizes with foreign nations ; for though its foundations are private, it is in effect a public affair and a public advantage, and the friend, more than the father of a family, deserves w^ell 23 of the state. c. the only clanger in friendship is that it will end. it is a delicate plant though a native j*. the least un worthiness, even if it be unknown to one's self, vitiates it. let the friend know that those faults which he observes in his friend his own faults attract. there is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspected. by our narrowness and prejudices 'we say, ** i will have so much and such of you, my friend, no more." perhaps there are none charitable, none wise, none disinterested, noble, and heroic enough for a true and lasting friendship. i sometimes hear my friends complain finely that i do not appreciate their fineness. i shall not tell them whether i do or not. as if they expected a vote of thanks for every fine thing w^hich they uttered or did! who knows but it w^as finely appreciated? j*. it may be that your silence was the finest thing of the tw^o. there are some things w^hich a man never speaks of, which are much finer kept silent about. to the highest communications w^e only lend a silent ear. our finest relations are not simply kept silent about, but buried under a positive depth of silence, never to be revealed. it may be that we are not even yet acquainted 3^ in human intercourse the tragedy begins, not w^hen there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood. then there can never be an explanation. "what avails it that another loves you, if he does not understand you ? such love is a curse. what sort of companions are they who are presuming always that their silence is more expressive than yours ? how foolish, and 24 inconsiderate, and unjust, to conduct as if you were the only party aggrieved! has not your friend always equal ground of complaint ? no doubt my friends sometimes speak to me in vain, but they do not know w^hat things i hear which they are not aware that they have spoken. i know^ that i have frequently disappointed them by not giving them w^ords w^hen they expected them, or such as they expected. 'whenever i see my friend i speak to him, but the expector, the man with the ears, is not he. they will complain, too, that you are hard. o ye that would have the cocoanut wrong side outwards, when next i weep i will let you know^. they ask for w^ords and deeds, when a true relation is word and deed. if they know not of these things, how can they be informed ? w^e often forbear to confess our feelings, not from pride, but for fear that we could not continue to love the one who required .^us to gvve such proof of our affection. i know a woman who possesses a restless and intelligent mind, interested in her ow^n culture, and earnest to enjoy the highest possible advantages, and i meet her w^ith pleasure as a natural person w^ho not a little provokes me, and, i suppose, is stimulated in turn by myself. yet our acquaintance plainly does not attain to that degree of confidence and sentiment which women, w^hich all, in fact, covet. i am glad to help her, as i am helped by her; i like very well to know^ her w^ith a sort of stranger's privilege, and hesitate to visit her often, like her other friends. my nature pauses here, i do not well know w^hy 3^ perhaps she does not make the highest demand on me, a religious demand. some, 25 •with whose prejudices or peculiar bias i have no sympathy, yet inspire me with confidence, and i trust that they confide in me also as a religious heathen at least— a good greek 3< i, too, have principles as w^ell founded as their ow^n. if this person could conceive that, w^ithout w^ilfulness, i associate with her as far as our destinies are coincident, as far as our good geniuses permit, and still value such intercourse, it w^ould be a grateful assurance to me. i feel as if i appeared careless, indifferent and without principle to her, not expecting more, and yet not content w^ith less. if she could know that i make an infinite demand on myself, as w^ell as on all others, she would see that this true though incomplete intercourse is infinitely better than a more unreserved but falsely grounded one, without the principle of growth in it. for a companion, i require one w^ho will make an equal demand on me with my ow^n genius. such a one will always be rightly tolerant. it is suicide and corrupts good manners to welcome any less than this. i value and trust those w^ho love and praise my aspiration rather than my performance. if you w^ould not stop to look at me, but look 'whither i am looking and farther, then my education could not dispense with your company. my love must be as free as is the eagle's "wing. hovering o'er land and sea and everything. i must not dim my eye in thy saloon, i must not leave my sky and nightly moon. 26 be not the fowler's net "which stays my flight. and craftily i« set t' allure the sight. but the favoring gale that bears me on. and still doth fill my sail when thou art gone. i can not leave my sky for thy caprice. true love w^ould soar as high as heaven is. the eagle would not brook her mate thus ^^on. who trained his eye to look beneath the sun. nothing is so difficult as to help a friend in matters tvhich do not require the aid of friendship, but only a cheap and trivial service, if your friendship wants the basis of a thorougfh, practical acquaintance. i stand in the friendliest relation, on social and spiritual grounds, to one who does not perceive w^hat practical skill i have, but when he seeks my assistance in such matters, is wholly ignorant of that one whom he deals with ; does not use my skill, which in such matters is much greater than his, but only my hands. i know another, who, on the contrary, is remarkable for his discrimination in this respect ; who know^s how to make use of the talents of others w^hen he does not possess the same ; knows when not to look after or oversee, and stops short at his man. it is a rare pleasure to serve him, which all laborers know. i am not a little pained by the other kind of treatment. it 27 is as if, after the friendliest and most ennobling intercourse, your friend should use you as a hammer and drive a nail with your head, all in good faith; notwithstanding that you are a tolerable carpenter, as well as his good friend, and would use a hammer cheerfully in his service. this want of perception is a defect which all the virtues of the heart can not supply. the good how can ^^e trust ? only the "wise arc just. the good we use. the w^ise "we can not choose. these there are none above; the good they know^ and love. but are not known again by those of lesser ken. they do not charm us w^ith their eyes. but they transfix -with theitt.advice; no partial sympathy they feel "with private w^oe or private w^eal. but with the universe joy and sigh, "whose know^ledge is their sympathy. confucius said: **to contract ties of friendship with any one, is to contract friendship with his virtue. there ought not to be any other motive in friendship." but men wish us to contract friendship w^ith their vice also. i have a friend who wishes me to see that to be right w^hich i know^ to be wrong. but if friendship is to rob me of my eyes, if it is to darken the day, i w^ill have none of it ^ it should be expansive and inconceivably liberalizing in its effects. true friendship can afford true kno^vledge. it does not depend on darkness and ignorance. a w^ant of discernment can not be an ingredient in it. if i can see my friend's virtues more distinctly than another's, his faults, too, are made more conspicuous by contrast. 'we have not so good a right to hate any as our friend ^ faults are not the less faults because they are invariably balanced by corresponding virtues, and for a fault there is no excuse, though it may appear greater than it is in many ways. i have never known one who could bear criticism, who could not be flattered, who w^ould not bribe his judge, or w^ho was content that the truth should be loved always better than himself. if tw^o travelers would go their way harmoniously together, the one must take as true and just a view of things as the other, else their path w^ill not be strewn with roses. yet you can travel profitably and pleasantly even with a blind man, if he practises common courtesy, and w^hen you converse about the scenery ^vill remember that he is blind but that you can see; and you will not forget that his sense of hearing is probably quickened by his w^ant of sight. otherwise you w^ill not long keep company. a blind man and a man in w^hose eyes there w^as no defect w^ere w^alking together, w^hen they came to the edge of a precipice. **take care! my friend," said the latter; **here is a steep precipice; go no farther this way." '*i know better," said the other, and stepped off. it is impossible to say all that we think, even to our truest friend s*. "we may bid him farewell forever sooner than complain, for our complaint is too w^ell grounded to be uttered. there is not so good an understanding betw^een any two, but the exposure by the one of a serious fault in the other will produce a misunderstanding in proportion to its heinousness. the constitutional 29 differences which always exist, and are obstacles to a perfect friendship,' are to the lips of friends forever a forbidden theme j** they advise by their w^hole behavior. nothings can reconcile them but love. they are fatally late w^hen they undertake to explain and treat w^ith one another like foes. who w^ill take an apology for a friend? they must apologize like dew and frost, which are off again with the sun, and which all men know in their hearts to be beneficent s^k the necessity itself for explanation; what explanation will atone for that ? true love does not quarrel for slight reasons, such mistakes as mutual acquaintances can explain aw^ay, but, alas! how^ever slight the apparent cause, only for adequate and fatal and everlasting reasons, w^hich can never be set aside. its quarrel, if there is any, is ever recurring, notwithstanding the beams of affection which invariably come to gild its tears; as the rainbow, however beautiful and unerring a sign, does not promise fair weather forever, but only for a season. i have known two or three persons pretty well, and yet i have never know^n advice to be of use but in trivial and transient matters. one may know^ what another does not, but the utmost kindness can not impart what is requisite to make the advice useful. w^e must accept or refuse one another as ^ve are. i could tame a hyena more easily than my friend. he is a material which no tool of mine ^'ill work. a naked savage will fell an oak -with a firebrand and wear a hatchet out of the rock by friction, but i can not hew the smallest chip out of the character of my friend, either to beautify or to deform it. 30 the lover learns at last there is no person quite transparent and trustworthy, but every one has a devil in him that is capable of any crime in the long run. yet, as an oriental philosopher has said, ** although friendship between good men is interrupted, their principles remain unaltered. the stalk of the lotus may be broken, and the fibers remain connected." ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without. there may be courtesy, there may be even temper and \vit and talent and sparkling conversation, there may even be good w^ill— and yet the humanest and divinest faculties pine for exercise ^ our life without love is like coke and ashes. men may be as pure as alabaster and parian marble, elegant as a tuscan villa, sublime as niagara; and yet if there is no milk mingled w^ith the wine at their entertainments, better is the hospitality of goths and vandals. my friend is not of some other race or family of men, but flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone. he is my real brother. i see his nature groping yonder so like mine. we do not live far apart. have not the fates associated us in many \vays? is it of no significance that we have so long partaken of the same loaf, drank at the same fountain, breathed the same air. summer and winter felt the same heat and cold; that the same fruits have been pleased to refresh us both, and we have never had a thought of different fiber the one with the other ? nature doth have her dawn each day. but mine are far between ; content, i cry, for sooth to say. mine brightest are i w^een. 31 for when my sun doth deign to rise. though it be her noontide. her fairest field in shadow lies. nor can my light abide. sometimes i bask me in her day. conversing with my mate. but if w^c interchange one ray. forthwith her heats abate. through his discourse i climb and see. as from some eastern hill, a brighter morrow^ rise to me than lieth in her skill. as 't 'were two summer days in one, tw^o sundays come together. our rays united make one sun with fairest summer weather. ' as surely as the sunset in my latest novenjjber shall translate me to the ethereal 'world, and remind me of the ruddy morning of youth ; as surely as the last strain of music "which falls on my decaying ear shall make age to be forgotten, or, in short, the manifold influences of nature survive during the term of our natural life, so surely my friend shall forever be my friend, and reflect a ray of god to me, and time shall foster and adorn and consecrate our friendship, no less than the ruins of temples/ i5*» as i love nature, as i love singing birds, and gleaming stubble, and flo'wing rivers, and morning and evening, and summer and winter, i love thee, my friend. but all that can be said of friendship is like botany to flow^ers. how can the understanding take account of its friendliness ? even the death of friends will inspire us as 32 much as their lives. they will leave consolation to the mourners, as the rich leave money to defray the expenses of their funerals, and their memories will be incrusted over with sublime and pleasing thoughts, as their monuments are overgrown with moss. this to our cis-alpine and cis-atlantic friends. €l also this other word of entreaty and advice to the large and respectable nation of acquaintances, beyond the mountains; greeting: my most serene and irresponsible neighbors, let us see that we have the w^hole advantage of each other; we w^ill be useful, at least, if not admirable, to one another s*. i know that the mountains w^hich separate us are high, and are covered w^ith perpetual snow, but despair not. improve the serene nvinter weather to scale them. if need be, soften the rocks with vinegar. for here lie the verdant plains of italy ready to receive you. nor shall i be slow on my side to penetrate to your provence. strike then boldly at head or heart or any vital part. depend upon it, the timber is well seasoned and tough, and will bear rough usage; and if it should crack, there is plenty more w^here it came from. i am no piece of crockery that can not be jostled against my neighbor w^ithout danger of being broken by the collision, and must needs ring false and jarringly to the end of my days, w^hen once i am cracked; but rather one of the old-fashioned w^ooden trenchers, which at one while stands at the head of the table, and at another is a milkingstool, and at another is a seat for children, and finally goes down to its grave not unadorned with honorable scars, and 33 does not die till it is. worn out. nothing can shock a brave man but dulness. think how many rebuffs every man has experienced in his day ; perhaps has fallen into a horse-pond, eaten fresh-water clams, or worn one shirt for a w^eek without washing. indeed, you can not receive a shock unless you have an electric affinity for that ^vhich shocks you. use me, then, for i am useful in my w^ay, and stand as one of many petitioners from toadstool and henbane up to dahlia and violet, supplicating to be put to my use, if by any means ye may find me serviceable; whether for a medicated drink or bath, as balm and lavender; or for fragrance, as verbena and geranium; or for sight, as cactus; or for thoughts, as pansy. these humbler, at least, if not those higher uses. ah, my dear strangers and enemies, i w^ould not forget you. i can well afford to welcome you. let me subscribe myself. yours ever and truly— your much obliged servant ^ "we have nothing to fear from our foes ; god keeps a standing army for that service ; but w^e have no ally against our friends, those ruthless vandals. 34> 11^ love hat the essential difference between man and woman is that they should be thus attracted to one another, no one has satisfactorily answ^ered. perhaps w^e must • acknow^ledge the justness of the distinction w^hich assigns to man the sphere of wisdom, and to w^oman that of love, though neither belongs exclusively to either. man is continually saying to ^ w^oman, ** why will you not be more w^ise ? " woman is continually saying to man, ** w^hy w^ill you not be more loving?" it is not in their w^ills to be wise or to be loving; but unless each is both ^wise and loving there can be neither w^isdom nor love. all transcendent goodness is one, though appreciated in different w^ays, or by different senses. in beauty we see it, in music we hear it^ in fragrance w^e scent it, in the palatable the pure palate tastes it, and in rare health the whole bo^y feels it. the variety is in the surface or manifestation; but the radical identity we fail to express. the lover sees in the glance of his beloved the same beauty that in the sunset paints the w^estern skies 3» it is the same daimon, here lurking under a human eyelid, and there under the closing eyelids of the day. here, in small compass, is the ancient and natural beauty of evening and morning. w^hat loving astronomer has ever fathomed the ethereal depths of the eye ? ik j*. 39 the maiden conceals a fairer flower and sweeter fruit than any calyx in the field; and, if she goes w^ith averted face, confiding in her purity and high resolves, she will make the heavens retrospective, and all nature humbly confess its queen ik 3^ under the influence of this sentiment, man is a string of an aeolian harp, which vibrates w^ith the zephyrs of the eternal morning. there is at first thought something trivial in the commonness of love jk so many indian youths and maidens along these banks have yielded in ages past to the influence of this great civilizer. nevertheless, this generation is not disgusted nor discouraged, for love is no individual's experience; and though w^e are imperfect mediums, it does not partake of our imperfection ; though we are finite, it is infinite and eternal ; and the same divine influence broods over these banks, whatever race may inhabit them, and perchance still w^ould even if the human race did not d^vell here. perhaps an instinct survives through the intensest actual love, w^hich prevents entire abandonment and devotion, and makes the most ardent lover a little reserved ik it is the anticipation of change. for the most ardent lover is not the less practically wise, and seeks a love w^hich w^ill last forever. considering how few poetical friendships there are, it is remarkable that so many are married. it would seem as if men yielded too easy an obedience to nature without consulting their genius. one may be drunk w^ith love w^ithout being any nearer to finding his mate 3k there 40 is more of good nature than good sense at the bottom of most marriages. but the good nature must have the counsel of the good spirit or intelligence. if commonsense had been consulted, how many marriages would never have taken place; if uncommon or divine sense, how^ few^ marriages such as we witness w^ould ever have taken place ! our love may be ascending or descending. what is its character, if it may be said of it : " we must respect the souls above. but only those belo"w -we love "? love is a severe critic. hate can pardon more than love. they who aspire to love -worthily, subject themselves to an ordeal more rigid than any other. is your friend such an one that an increase of worth on your part will rarely make her more your friend ? is she retained— is she attracted— by more nobleness in you, by more of that virtue which is peculiarly yours; or is she indifferent and blind to that ? is she to be flattered and won by your meeting her on any other than the ascending path? then duty requires that you separate from her. love must be as much a light as a flame. "where there is not discernment, the behavior even of the purest soul may in effect amount to coarseness. a man of fine perceptions is more truly feminine than a merely sentimental w^oman. the heart is blind ; but love is not blind. none of the gods is so discriminating. in love and friendship the imagination is as much exercised as the heart ; and if either is outraged 41 the other will be estranged. it is commonly the imagination which is wounded first, rather than the heart, — it is so much the more sensitive. comparatively, we can excuse any offense againstthe heart, but not against the imagination. the imagination knows — nothing escapes its glance from out its eyrie— and it controls the breast ^ my heart may still yearn toward the valley, but my imagination will not permit me to jump off the precipice that debars me from it, for it is wounded, w^ounded, its wings are clipped and it can not fly even descendingly. our ** blundering hearts!" some poet says sk the imagination never forgets ; it is a re-membering. it is not foundationless, but most reasonable, and it alone uses all the knowledge of the intellect. love is the profoundest of secrets is** divulged, even to the beloved, it is no longer love. as if it were merely i that loved you. when love ceases, then it is divulged. in our intercourse with one we love, w^e wish to have answered those questions at the end of which we do not raise our voice ; against w^hich w^e put no interrogation -mark, — answered w^ith the same unfailing, universal aim toward every point of the compass. i require that thou knowest everything without being told anything. i parted from my beloved because there was one thing which i had to tell her. she questioned me. she should have known all by sympathy. that i had to tell it her was thedifferencebetw^eenus, — the misunderstanding. c a lover never hears anything that is told, for that is commonly either false or stale ; but he hears things taking place, as the sentinels heard 42 trenck mining in the ground, and thought it was moles. the relation may be profaned in many ways. the parties may not regard it with equal sacredness. 'what if the lover should learn that his beloved dealt in incantations and philters! "what if he should hear that she consulted a clairvoyant! 3-^ the spell w^ould be instantly broken s^ 3k if to chaffer and higgle are bad in trade, they are much w^orse in love. it demands directness as of an arrow. there is danger that w^e lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, w^hile considering w^hat she is to us alone. the lover w^ants no partiality. he says, **be so kind as to be just." " can'st thou love with thy mind and reason with thy heart? can'st thou be kind. and from thy darling part ? " can'st thou range earth, sea and air. and so meet me every w^here ? through all events i w^ill pursue thee. through all persons i will woo thee," ** i need thy hate as much as thy love. thou wilt not repel me entirely w^hen thou repellest w^hat is evil in me." " indeed, indeed, i can not tell. though i ponder on it w^ell, "which w^ere easier to state. all my love or all my hate. surely, surely, thou wilt trust me when i say thou dost disgust me; o i hate thee with a hate that would fain annihilate; 43 " yet, sometimes, against my will. my dear friend, i love thee still. it were treason to our love. and a sin to god above. one iota to abate of a pure, impartial bate." it is not enough that we are truthful ; we must cherish and carry out high purposes to be truthful about. it must be rare, indeed, that we meet with one to whom we are prepared to be quite ideally related, as she to us. we should have no reserve; we should give the whole of ourselves to that society ; we should have no duty aside from that. one who could bear to be so wonderfully and beautifully exaggerated every day. i would take my friend out of her low self and set her higher, infinitely higher, and there know her. but, commonly, men are as much afraid of love as of hate. they have low^er engagements. they have near ends to serve. they have not imagination enough to be thus employed about a human being, but must be coopering a barrel, forsooth ! 'what a difference, w^hether, in all your walks, you meet only strangers, or in one house is one who knows you, and tvhom you know ! to have a brother or a sister ! to have a gold mine on your farm! ^ to find diamonds in the gravel-heaps before your door ! how rare these things are! to share the day with you,— to people the earth. w^hether to have a god or a goddess for companion in your walks, or to walk alone with hinds and villains and carles. w^ould not a friend enhance the beauty of the landscape as much as a deer or hare ? everything 44 would acknow^ledge and serve such a relation ; the corn in the field, and the cranberries in the meadow. the flowers would bloom, and the birds sing, with a new impulse. there w^ould be more fair days in the year. the object of love expands and grows before us to eternity, until it includes all that is lovely, and we become all that can love. 45 marriage he subject of sex is a remarkable one, since, though its phenomena concern us so much, both directly and indirectly, and, sooner or later, it occupies the thoughts of all, yet all mankind, as it were, agree to be silent about it, at least the sexes commonly one to another. one of the most interesting of all human facts is veiled more completely than any mystery. it is treated with such secrecy and awe as surely do not go to any religion ^ i believe that it is unusual even for the most intimate friends to communicate the pleasures and anxieties connected w^ith this fact, —much as external a£fair of love, its comings and goings, are bruited. the shakers do not exaggerate it so much by their manner of speaking of it, as all mankind by their manner of keeping silence about it. not that men should speak on this or any subject without having anything worthy to say ; but it is plain that the education of man has hardly commenced,— there is so little genuine intercommunication. in a pure society, the subject of marriage would not be so often avoided from shame and not from reverence, winked out of sight, and hinted at only, but treated naturally and simply,— perhaps simply avoided, like the kindred mysteries. it can not be spoken of for shame, how can it be acted of? but, doubtless, there is far more purity, as w^ell as more impurity, than is apparent. 51 men commonly couple with their idea of marriage a slight degree at least of sensuality ; but every lover, the world over, believes in its inconceivable purity sk s^ if it is the result of a pure love, there can be nothing sensual in marriage ilk chastity is something positive, not negative. it is the virtue of the married especially isw all lusts or base pleasures must gvve place to loftier delights! they who meet as superior beings can not perform the deeds of inferior ones. the deeds of love are less questionable than any action of an individual can be, for, it being founded on the rarest mutual respect, the parties incessantly stimulate each other to a loftier and purer life, and the act in which they are associated must be pure and noble indeed, for innocence and purity can have no equal. in this relation we deal w^ith one w^hom w^e respect more religiously even than we respect our better selves, and we shall necessarily conduct as in the presence of god. "what presence can be more aw^ful to the lover than the presence of his beloved ? if you seek the w^armth even of affection from a similar motive to that from w^hich cats and dogs and slothful persons hug the £re, because your temperature is low through sloth, you are on the downw^ard road, and it is but to plunge yet deeper into sloth. better the cold affection of the sun, reflected from fields of ice and snow^, or his warmth in some still w^intry dell. the warmth of celestial love does not relax, but nerves and braces its enjoyer. warm your body by healthful exercise, not by cowering over a stove. w^arm your spirit by performing independently noble 62 deeds, not by ignobly seeking the sympathy of your fellows who are no better than yourself. a man^s social and spiritual discipline must answer to his corporeal. he must lean on a friend w^ho has a hard breast, as he w^ould lie on a hard bed. he must drink cold w^ater for his only beverage. so he must not hear sweetened and colored w^ords, but pure and refreshing truths. he must daily bathe in truth cold as spring w^ater, not w^armed by the sympathy of friends. can love be in aught allied to dissipation ? let us love by refusing, not accepting, one another. lov e and lust are^ far ^sunder. xhe one is good, "tke other ba3. when the affectionate synipathize by their higher natures, there is love ; but there is danger that they w^ill sympathize by their lower natures, and then there is lust. it is not necessary that this be deliberate, hardly even conscious ; but, in the close contact of affection, there is danger that w^e may stain and pollute one another, for we can not embrace but w^ith an entire embrace. we must love our friend so much that she shall be associated w^ith our purest and holiest thougnts alone ik when there is impurity, we have '* descended to meet," though we knew it not. cthe luxury of affection,— there 's the danger. there must be some nerve and heroism in our love, as of a w^inter morning. in the religion of all nations a purity is hinted at, which, i fear, men never attain to. we may love and not elevate one another. the love that takes us as it finds us degrades us. w^hat w^atch we must keep over the fairest and purest of our affections, lest there be some taint about them ! may we so love as never 53 to have occasion to repent of our love ! c, there is to be attributed to sensuality the loss to language of how many pregnant symbols ? flowers, w^hich, by their infinite hues and fragrance, celebrate the marriage of the plants, are intended for a symbol of the open and unsuspected beauty of all true marriage, w^hen man*s flowering season arrives. virginity, too, is a budding flower, and by an impure marriage the virgin is deflowered isv whoever loves flowers, loves virgins and chastity. love and lust are as far asunder as a flower-garden is from a brothel. j. biberg, in the amaenitates botanicae^ edited by linnaeus, observes (i translate from the latin): '* the organs of generation, "which, in the animal kingdom, are for the most part concealed by nature, as if they w^ere to be ashamed of, in the vegetable kingdom are exposed to the eyes of all ; and, when the nuptials of plants are celebrated, it is wonderful w^hat delight they afford to the beholder, refreshing the senses w^ith the most agreeable color and the sweetest odor; and, at the same time, bees and other insects, not to mention the humming-bird, extract honey from their nectaries, and gather wax from their effete pollen." linnaeus himself calls the calyx the thalamus, or bridal chamber ; and the corolla the aulaeum, or tapestry of it, and proceeds to explain thus every part of the flow^er. 'who know^s but evil spirits might corrupt the flow^ers themselves, rob them of their fragrance and their fair hues, and turn their marriage into a secret shame and defilement? already they are of various qualities, and there is one w^hose 54 nuptials fill the lowlands in june with the odor of carrion. the intercourse of the sexes, i have dreamed, is incredibly beautiful, too fair to be remembered. i have had thoughts about it, but they are among the most fleeting and irrecoverable in my experience. it is strange that men will talk of miracles, revelation, inspiration, and the like, as things past, w^hile love remains. a true marriage w^ill differ in no w^ise from illumination. in all perception of the truth there is 2l divine ecstacy, an inexpressible delirium of joy, as when a youth embraces his betrothed virgin. the ultimate delights of a true marriage are one w^ith this. no w^onder that out of such a union, not as end, but as accompaniment, comes the undying race of men. the womb is a most fertile soil. some have asked if the stock of men could not be improved, — if they could not be bred as cattle. let love be purified, and all the rest w^ill follow. a pure love is thus, indeed, the panacea for all the ills of the w^orld. the only excuse for reproduction is improvement. nature abhors repetition <^ beasts merely propagate their kind; but the offspring of noble men and w^omen w^ill be superior to themselves, as their aspirations are. by their fruits ye shall know them. ^^^ 55 here endeth " friendship, love, and marriage,** three essays written by henry d. thoreau. and preserved in a printed book by the roycrofters, at their shop, which is in east aurora, erie county, new york, a. d., mcmx one copy del. to cat. div. i.:c 7 1310 .z^'-^vv^v^.^ ^ ^. .^j ./> .s.^ oo^ x^^^. * a> .n\,%s?, •-^^^^' " .$^-%-, ■r,:'>>---->°.y:.x'---^>*:-i;;:.: vyc€*' -r '^^^. ". </> ^^ .' a^^ '^^. ^.. v^ v^^x. .i^->:■•>:•;■ 0. o^ ^^ deacidified using the bookkeeper process. neutralizing agent: magnesium oxide treatment date: .... jan 1999 ^ bbrkeeper ^ preservation technologies, lp. \^ 1 1 1 thomson park drive p* cranberry township, pa 16066 i / (724) 779-21 1 1 .3^% xo°^ <\ ^ , x xo^^ epess a word y>^^ t^^ maiive woods z q < < h u q z < < hi z o u to oq u q r ?■ library of congress two cooles received apn 22 1907 veoyrtffttt entry f/ci lu zoifyo/ lass cl w^c., no, / y v > ^ /' copy b. ^ to those seeking rest. recreation. health, sport with rod or gun. or to live close to and to study nature in its primitive state. this booklet is dedicated copyriglitfd iy07 by c. c. garland introduction pages 5 to 3 1 of this booklet is an excerpt from " ktaadn " and " the maine woods," published by houghton, mifflin & co., and written by henry david thoreau, who visited mt. ktaadn (katahdin) in august, 1 846, and whose description of that trip was first published in 1 848. thoreau, a close observer of nature and a writer of fine english diction and whose works become more and more valued as literary productions, was one of that eminent group of writers of his day, among whom are william cullen bryant, edgar allen poe, henry wadsworth longfellow, ralph waldo emerson, john greenleaf whittier, oliver wendall holmes, james russell lowell, nathaniel hawthorne, margaret fuller, richard henry dana, george william curtis and william ellery channing, most of whom were his close, personal friends. this excerpt only treats of that portion of thoreau's ktaadn trip com mencing at ambajejus lake, to the top of the mountain, and back to the west branch of the penobscot, on his return journey. it is over a portion of this route that one journeys in visiting debsconeag. the means of transporta tion are much easier, quicker and cheaper today than were those of thoreau's time, yet the grandeur of scenery and the wildness of the country remain about the same. pages 33 to 40 of this booklet treat of the debsconeag outing camps at debsconeag, ktaadn, rainbow lake and hurd pond, all located in the famous ktaadn region. full information giving particulars " how to get there," rates of board, transportation and all other desired informatian will be found in these pages. 3 mt. ktaadn is .situitcd in pistatacjuis county, between the west and east branch of the penobscot l^ivcr, in the heart of maine's unbroken wilderness. unlike most large mountain peaks, ktaadn stands alone; a view from it being unobstructed by other \\\v,\\ mount, uns. many persons who have (limbed most of the high mountains of the world say that ktaadn is not only the most interesting, but that a finer and more extended view can be obtained from it than from any other mountain on this continent, if not m the world. for a more minute descri()tion read what i horeau says of it herein. the easiest, quickest, best and cheapest way to get to ktaadn, is to make debsconeag your starting [)oint and to have our mr. c. c. garland, make all arrangements for you. (see page 37.) illustrations. no picture can do justice to these camps, it being practically impossible to take good photographs of them, owing to their high location. the camps and scenery about them must be seen to be appreciated. debsconeag falls "ktaadn" by thoreau " in the next nine miles, which were the extent of our voyage, and which it took us the rest of the day to get over, we rowed across several small lakes, poled up numerous rapids and thoroughfares, and carried over four portages. i will give the names and distances, for the benefit of future tourists. first, after leaving ambejijis lake, we had a quarter of a mile of rapids to the portage, or carry of ninety rods around ambejijis falls; then a mile and a half through passamagamet lake, which is narrow and river-like, to the falls of the same name, — ambejijis stream coming in on the right; then two miles through katepskonegan lake to the portage of ninety rods around katepskonegan falls, which name signifies " carrying-place,"— passamagamet stream coming in on the left ; then three miles through pockwockomus lake, a slight expansion of the river, to the portage of forty rods around the falls of the same name,— katepskonegan stream coming in on the left; then three quarters of a mile through aboljacarmegus lake, similar to the last, to the portage of forty rods around the falls of the same name ; then half a mile of rapid water to the sowadnehunk dead-water, and the aboljacknagesic stream. this is generally the order of names as you ascend the river : first, the lake, or, if there is no expansion, the dead-water ; then the falls ; then the stream emptying into the lake, or river above, all of the same name. first we came to passamagamet lake, then to passamagamet falls, then to passa magamet stream, emptying in. this order and identity of names, it will be perceived, is quite philosophical, since the dead-water or lake is always at least partially produced by the stream emptying in above; and the first fall below, which is the outlet of that lake, and where that tributary water makes its first plunge, also naturally bears the same name. at the portage around ambejijis falls i observed a pork barrel on the shore, with a hole eight or nine inches square cut in one side, which was set against an upright rock ; but the bears, without turning or upsetting the barrel, editor's nutk:since thoreau's time the spelling has been changed of many of the indian names, which he enumerates. ,^, katepskonegan has been corrupted into the word debsconeag. ka epskonegan lake as herein mentioned is now known as debsconeag dead-water . katet^skot egan fa is, as debsc.meag falls: passamagamet lake, as passamagamet dead wa e?; i'ockwockomus lake, as pockwockomus dead-water .a ...ijacknagesicstreani, as abol stream; .aboljacarmegus lake, as abol dead-water; aboljacarmegus falls, as abol falls ; atjd ivturch brook (see page 13) as katahdm stream. r^}^ ) i-^n r »>. v ''■*■ -.; \/(e.vy,^ fron top mt >\arahdlh. had gnawed a hole in the opposite side, which looked exactly hke an enor mous rat-hole, big enough to put their heads in; and at the bottom of the barrel were still left a few mangled and slabbered slices of pork it is usual for the lumberers to leave such supplies as they cannot conveniently carry along with them at carries or camps, to which the next comers do not scruple to help themselves, they being the property commonly, not of an individual, but a company, who can afford to deal liberally. 1 will describe particularly how we got over some of these portages and rapids in order that the reader may get an idea of the boatman s life. at ambe,i,is falls, for mstance, there was the roughest path imaginable, cut through the woods; at f^rst uphill, at an angle of nearly forty-five degrees, over rocks and logs without end. this was the manner of the portage. we (\rst carried over our baggage, and deposited it on the shore at the other end; then, returning to the batteau, we dragged it up the h.ll by the painter, and onward, with frequent pauses, over half the portage. but this was a bunglmg way and would soon have worn out the boat. commonly, three men walk over with a batteau weighing from three to five or six hundred pounds on their heads and shoulders, the tallest standing under the middle of the boat, which is turned over, and one at each end, or else there are two at the bows more cannot well take hold at once. but this requires some practice, as well as strength, and is in any case extremely laborious, and wearing to the consti tution, to follow. we were, on the whole, rather an invalid party and could render our boatmen but little assistance. our two men at length took the batteau upon their shoulders, and, while two of us steadied it, to prevent it from rocking and wearing into their shoulders, on which they placed their hats folded, walked bravely over the remaining distance, with two or three pauses. in the same manner they accomplished the other portages. with this crushing weight they must climb and stumble along over fallen trees and slippery rocks of all sizes, where those who walked by the sides were contin ually brushed off, such was the narrowness of the path. but we were fortun ate not to have to cut our path in the first place. before we launched our boat, we scraped the bottom smooth agam, with our knives, where it had rubbed on the rocks, to save friction. • , to avoid the difficulties of the portage, our men determmed to warp up" the passamagamet falls; so while the rest walked over the portage with the baggage, i remamed in the batteau, to assist in warping up. we were in the midst of the rapids, which were more swift and tumultuous than soon any we had poled up, and had turned to the side of the stream for the pur pose of warping, when the hoalmen, who felt some pride in their skill, and were ambitious to do something more than usual, for my benefit, as i surmised, took one more view of the rapids, or rather the falls; and, in answer to our question, whether we couldn't get up there, the other answered that he guessed he'd trv it. so we pushed again into tlic midst of the streim, and began to slrue;gle with the current. 1 sat m the middle of the boat to trim it, moving slightly to the right or left as it grazed a rock. with an uncertain and wavering motion we wound and bolted our way up, until the bow was actually raised two feet above the stern at the steepest pitch ; and then, when every thing depended upon his exertions, the bowman's pole snapped in two ; but before he had time to take the spare one, which 1 reached him, he had saved himself with the fragment u{)on a rock ; and so we got up by a hair's breadth; and uncle george e.xclaimed that that was never done before, and he had not tried it if he had not known whom he had got in the bow, nor he in the bow. if he had not known him in the stern. at this place there was a regu lar portage cut through the woods, and our boatmen had never known a batteau to ascend the falls. as near as 1 can remember, there was a perpen dicular fall here, at the worst place of the whole penobscot river, two or three feet at least. 1 could not sufficiently admire the skill and coolness with which they performed this feat, never speaking to each other. the bowman, not looking ijehind, but knowing exactly what the other is about, works as if he worked alone. now sounding in vain for a bottom in fifteen feet of water, while the boat falls back several rods, held straight only with the greatest skill and exertion ; or, while the sternman obstinately holds his ground, like a turtle, the bowman springs from side to side with wonderful suppleness and dexterity, scanning the rapids and the rocks with a thousand eyes ; and now, having got a fjite at last, with a lusty shove, which makes his pole bend and (juiver, and the whole boat tremble, he gains a few feet upon the river. to i\d(\ ti) llir danger, the poles are liable at any time to be caught between the rocks, and wrenched out of their hands, leaving them at the mercy of the rapids, the rocks, as it were, lying in wait, like so many alligators, to catch tlwin 111 llirir teeth, and jerk them from your hands, before you have stolen an eflectual shove against their palates. f he pole is set close to the boat, and the prow is made to overshoot, and just turn the corners of the rocks, in the verv ti<th of llic rapids. nothing but the length and lightness, and the slight drauv-'lit <i| ihibaltcau, enables titrm to make anv headwav. the bowman must (juickly choose liis course; lliere is no time to deliberatefrequently the boat is shoved between rocks where both sides touch, and the waters on either hand are a perfect maelstrom. half a mile above this two of us tried our hands at poling up a slight rapid ; and we were just surmounting the last difficulty, when an unlucky rock confronted our calculations ; and while the batteau was sweeping round irrecoverably amid the whirlpool, we were obliged to resign the poles to more skillful hands. katepskonegan is one of the shallowest and weediest of the lakes, and looked as if it might abound in pickerel. i he falls of the same name, where we stopped to dine, are considerable and quite picturesque. here uncle george had seen trout caught by the barrelful ; but they would not rise to our bait at this hour. half-way over this carry, thus far in the maine wilderness on its way to the provinces, we noticed a large, flaming, oak hall hand-bill, about two feet long, wrapped round the trunk of a pine, from which the bark had been stripped, and to which it was fast glued by the pitch. this should be recorded among the advantages of this mode of advertising, that so, possibly, even the bears and wolves, moose, deer, otter, and beaver, not to mention the indian, may learn where they can fit themselves according to the latest fashion, or, at least, recover some of their own lost garments. we christened this the oak hall carry. the forenoon was as serene and placid on this wild stream in the woods, as we are apt to imagine that sunday in summer usually is in massachusetts. we were occasionally startled by the scream of a bald-eagle, sailing over the stream in front of our batteau ; or of the fish-hawks, on w hom he levies his contributions. there were, at intervals, small meadows of a few acres on the sides of the stream, waving with uncut grass, which attracted the attention of our boatmen, who regretted that they were not nearer to their clearings, and calculated how many stacks they might cut. two or three men sometimes spend the summer by themselves, cutting the grass in these meadows, to sell to the loggers in the winter, since it will fetch a higher price on the spot than in any market in the state. on a small isle, covered with this kind of rush, or cut grass, on which we landed to consult about our further course, we noticed the recent track of a moose, a large, roundish hole in the soft, wet ground, evincing the great si/e and weight of the aniinal that made it. they are fond of the water, and visit all these island meadows, swimming as easily from island to island as they make their way through the thickets on land. now and 10 then we passed what mccauslin called a pokelogan, an indian term for what the drivers might have reason to call a poke-logs-in, an inlet that leads no where. if you get in, you have got to get out again the same way. these, and the frequent " run-rounds " which come into the river again, would embarrass an inexperienced voyager not a little. the carry around pockwockomus falls was exceedingly rough and rocky, the batteau having to be lifted directly from the water up four or five feet on to a rock, and launched again down a similar bank. the rocks on this portage were covered with the dents made by the spikes in the lumberers' boots while staggering over under the weight of their batteaux ; and you could see where the surface of some large rocks on which they had rested their batteaux was worn quite smooth with use. as it was, we had carried over but half the usual portage at this place for this stage of the water, and launched our boat in the smooth wave just curving to the fall, prepared to struggle with the most violent rapid we had to encounter. the rest of the party walked over the remainder of the portage, while i remained with the boatmen to assist in warping up. one had to hold the boat while the others got in to prevent it from going over the falls. when we had pushed up the rapids as far as possible, keeping close to the shore, tom seized the painter and leaped out upon a rock just visible in the water, but he lost his footing, notwithstanding his spiked boots, and was instantly amid the rapids; but recovering himself by good luck, and reaching another rock, he passed the painter to me, who had followed him, and took his place again in the bows. leaping from rock to rock in the shoal water, close to the shore, and now and then getting a bite with the rope round an upright one, 1 held the boat while one reset his pole, and then all three forced it upward against any rapids. this was " warping up." when a part of us walked round in such a place, we generally took the precaution to take out the most valuable part of the baggage for fear of being swamped. as we poled up a swift rapid for half a mile above aboljacarmegus falls, some of the party read their own marks on the huge logs which lay piled up high and dry on the rocks on either hand, the relics probably of a jam which had taken place here in the great freshet in the spring. many of these would have to wait for another great freshet, perchance, if they lasted so long, before they could be got off. it was singular enough to meet with property of theirs which they had never seen, and where they had never been before, thus detained by freshets and rocks when on its way to them. 11 ik s^h pt i i ^ ^^m9 iuk i/^i on mubo _ x > methinks that must be where all my property lies, cast up on the rocks on some distant and unexplored stream, and waiting for an unheard-of freshet to fetch it down. o make haste, ye gods, with your winds and rains, and start the jam before it rots ! the last half mile carried us to the sowadnehunk dead-water, so called from the stream of the same name, signifying " running between mountains," an important tributary which comes in a mile above. here we decided to camp, about twenty miles from the dam, at the mouth of murch brook and the aboljacknagesic, mountain streams, broad off from ktaadn, and about a dozen miles from its summit, having made fifteen miles this day. we had been told by mccauslin that we should here find trout enough ; so, while some prepared the camp, the rest fell to fishing. seizing the birch poles which some party of indians, or white hunters, had left on the shore, and baiting our hooks with pork, and with trout, as soon as they were caught, we cast our lines into the mouth of the aboljacknagesic, a clear, swift, shallow stream, which came in from ktaadn. instantly a shoal of white chivin {leucisci pulchelli), silvery roaches, cousin-trout, or what not, large and small, prowling thereabouts, fell upon our bait, and one after another were landed amidst the bushes. anon their cousins, the true trout, took their turn, and alternately the speckled trout, and the silvery roaches, swallowed the bait as fast as we could throw in ; and the finest specimens of both that i have ever seen, the largest one weighing three pounds, were heaved upon the shore, though at first in vain, to wiggle down into the water again, for we stood in the boat ; but soon we learned to remedy this evil ; for one, who had lost his hook, stood on shore to catch them as they fell m a perfect shower around him — sometimes, wet and slippery, full in his face and bosom, as his arms were outstretched to receive them. while yet alive, before their tints had faded, they glistened like the fairest flowers, the product of primitive rivers ; and he could hardly trust his senses, as he stood over them, that these jewels should have swam away in that aboljacknagesic water for so long, so many dark ages; — these bright fluviatile flowers, seen of indians only, made beauti ful, the lord only knows why, to swim there ; i could understand better for this, the truth of mythology, the fables of proteus, and all those beautiful sea monsters, — how all history, indeed, put to a terrestrial use, is mere history ; but put to a celestial, is mythology always. but there is the rough voice of uncle george, who commands at the frying-pan, to send over what we've got, and then you may stay till morning. 13 the pork sizzles and cries for fish. luckily for the foolish race, and this particularly foolish generation of trout, the night shut clown at last, not a little deepened by tli<dark side of ktaadn, which, like a permanent shadow, reared itself from the eastern bank. lescarbot, writing in i 609, tells us that the sieur champdore, who, with one of the people of the sieur de monts, ascended some fifty leagues up the st. john in 1 608, found the fish so plenty, "c|u'en mettant la chaudiere sur le feu ils en avoient pris suffisamment pour eux disner avant (jue i'eau fust chaude." their descendants here are no less numerous. so we accompanied tom into the woods to cut cedar-twigs for our bed. while he went ahead with the axe and lopped off the smallest twigs of the flat-leaved cedar, the arbor-vitae of the gardens, we gathered them u[), and returned with them to the boat, until it was loaded. our bed was made with as much care and skill as a roof is shingled ; beginning at the foot, and laying the twig end of the cedar upward, we advanced to the head, a course at a time, thus successfully covering the stub-ends, and producing a soft and level bed. for us six it was about ten feet long by six in breath. this time we lay under our tent, having pitched it more prudently with reference to the wind and the flame, and the usual huge fire blazed in front. supper was eaten off a large log, which some freshet had thrown up. this night we had a dish of arbor-vitae, or cedar-tea, which the lumberer sometimes uses when other herbs fail, — "a quart of arbor-vitae. to make him strong and mighty," but i had no wish to repeat the experiment. it had too medicinal a taste for my palate. there was the skeleton of a moose here, whose bones some indian hunters had picked on this very spot. in the night 1 dreamed of trout-fishing ; and, when at length i awoke, it seemed a fable that this painted fish swam there so near my couch, and rose to our hooks the last evening, and i doubted if i had not dreamed it all. so i arose before dawn to test its truth, while my companions were still sleeping. there stood ktaadn with distinct and cloudless outline in the moonlight ; and the rippling of the rapids was the only sound to break the stillness. standing on the shore, i once more cast my line into the stream, and found the dream to be real and the fable true. the speckled trout and silver>' roach, like fly ing-fish, sped swiftly through the moonlight air, describing bright arcs on the dark side of ktaadn, until moonlight, now fading into daylight, brought satiety to my mind, and (he minds of my companions, who had joined me. h by six o'clock, havins^ mounted our packs and a good blanketful of trout, ready dressed, and swung up such baggage and provision as we wished to leave behind upon the tops of saplings, to be out of the reach of bears, we started for the sutimit of the mountain, distant, as uncle george said the boat men called it, about four miles, but as i judged, and as it proved, nearer four teen. he had never been any nearer the mountain than this, and there was not the slightest trace of man to guide us farther in this direction. at first, push ing a few rods up the aboljacknagesic, or " open-land stream, " we fastened our batteau to a tree, and traveled up the north side, through burnt lands, now partially overgrown with young aspens and other shrubbery ; but soon, re crossing this stream, where it was about fifty or sixty feet wide, upon a jam of logs and rocks, and you could cross it by this means almost anywhere, — we struck at once for the highest peak, over a mile or more of comparatively open land, still very gradually ascending the while. here it fell to my lot, as the oldest mountain-climber, to take the lead. so, scanning the woody side of the mountain, which lay still at an indefinite distance, stretched out some seven or eight miles in length before us, we determined to steer directly for the base of the highest peak, leaving a large slide, by which, as 1 have since learned, some of our predecessors ascended, on our left. this course would lead us parallel to a dark seam in the forest, which marked the bed of a torrent, and over a slight spur, which extended southward from the main mountain, from whose bare summit we could get an outlook over the country, and climb directly up the peak, which would then be close at hand. seen from this point, a bare ridge at the extremity of the open land, ktaadn presented a different aspect from any mountain 1 have seen, there being a greater propor tion of naked rock rising abruptly from the forest ; and we looked up at this blue barrier as if it were some fragment of a wall which anciently bounded the earth in that direction. setting the compass for a northeast course, which was the bearing of the southern base of the highest peak, we were soon buried in the woods. we soon began to meet with traces of bears and moose, and tho^e of rabbits were everywhere visible. the tracks of moose, more or less recent, to speak literally, covered every square rod on iuc sides oi the mountain ; and these animals are probably more numerous there now than ever before, being driven into this wilderness, from all sides, by the settlements. the track of a full-grown moose is like that of a cow. or larger, and of the young, like that of a calf. sometimes we found ours(>lvcs ir.welinu; in faint paths, which they had 16 made, like cow-paths in the woods, only far more indistinct, being rather open ings, affording imperfect vistas through the dense underwood, than trodden paths ; and everywhere the twigs had been browsed by them, clipped as smoothly as if by a knife. the bark of trees was stripped up by them to the height of eight or nine feet, in long, narrow strips, an inch wide, still showing the dintinct marks of their teeth. we expected nothing less than to meet a herd of them every moment, and our nimrod held his shooting-iron in readiness ; but we did not go out of our way to look for them, and, though numerous, they are so wary that the unskillful hunter might range the forest a long time before he could get sight of one. they are sometimes dangerous to encounter, and will not turn out for the hunter, but furiously rush upon him and trample him to death, unless he is lucky enough to avoid them by dodging round a tree. the largest are nearly as large as a horse, and weigh sometimes one thousand pounds ; and it is said that they can step over a five-foot gate in their ordinary walk. they are described as exceedingly awkward-looking animals, with their long legs and short bodies, making a ludicrous figure when in full run, but making great headway, nevertheless. it seemed a mystery to us how they could thread these woods, which it required all our suppleness to accomplish, — climbing, stooping, and winding, alternately. they are said to drop their long and branching horns, which usually spread five or six feet, on their backs, and make their way easily by the weight of their bodies. our boatmen said, but i know not with how much truth, that their horns are apt to be gnawed away by vermin while they sleep. their flesh, which is more like beef than venison, is common in bangor market. we had proceeded on thus seven or eight miles, till about noon, with frequent pauses to refresh the weary ones, crossing a considerable mountain stream, which we conjectured to be murch brook, at whose mouth we had camped, all the time in woods, without having once seen the summit, and ris ing very gradually, when the boatmen beginning to despair a little, and fear ing that we were leaving the mountain on one side of us, for they had not entire faith in the compass, mccauslin climbed a tree, from the top of which he could see the peak, when it appeared that we had not swerved from a right line, the compass down below still ranging with his arm, which pointed to the summit. by the side of a cool mountain rill, amid the woods, where the water began to partake of the purity and transparency of the air, we stopped to cook some of our fishes, which we had brought thus far in order to save our hard bread and pork, in the use of which we had put ourselves on short 17 allowance. we soon had a fire blazing, and stood around it, under the damp and sombre forest of firs and birches, each with a sharpened stick, three or four feet in length, upon which he had spitted his trout, or roach, previously well gashed and salted, our sticks radiating like the spokes of a wheel from one centre, and each crowding his particular fish into the most desirable ex posure, not with the truest regard always to his neighbor's rights. thus we regaled ourselves, drinking meanwhile at the spring, till one man's pack, at least, was considerably lightened, when we again took up our line of march. at length we reached an elevation sufficiently bare to afford a view of the summit, still distant and blue, almost as if retreating from us. a torrent, which proved to be the same we had crossed, was seen tumbling down in front, literally from out of the clouds. but this glimpse at our whereabouts was soon lost, and we were buried in the woods again. the wood was chiefly yellow birch, spruce, fir, mountain-ash, or round-wood, as the maine people call it, and moose-wood. it was the worst kind of traveling ; some times like the densest scrub-oak patches with us. the cornel, or bunch berries, were very abundant, as well as solomon's seal and mooseberries. blueberries were distributed along our whole route ; and in one place the bushes were drooping with the weight of the fruit, still as fresh as ever. it was the seventh of september. such patches afforded a grateful repast, and served to bait the tired party forward. when any lagged behind, the cry of "blueberries " was most effectual to bring them up. even at this elevation we passed through a moose-yard, formed by a large flat rock, four or five rods square, where they tread down the snow in winter. at length, fearing that if we held the direct course to the summit, we should not find any water near our camping-ground, we gradually swerved to the west, till, at four o'clock, we struck again the torrent which i have mentioned, and here, in view of the summit, the weary party decided to camp that night. while my companions were seeking a suitable spot for this purpose, i improved the little daylight that was left in climbing the mountain alone. we were in a deep and narrow ravine, sloping up to the clouds, at an angle of nearly forty-five degrees, and hemmed in by walls of rock, which were at first covered with low trees, then with impenetrable thickets of scraggy birches and spruce-trees, and with moss, but at last bare of all vegetation but lichens, and almost continually draped in clouds. following up the course of the torrent which occupied this, — and i mean to lay some emphasis on this word up, — pulling myself up by the side of perpendicular falls of twenty or thirty feet, by 19 the roots of firs and birches, and then, perhaps, walking a level rod or two in the thin stream, for it took up the whole road, ascending by huge steps, as it were, a giant's stairway, down which a river flowed, 1 had soon cleared the trees, and paused on the successive shelves, to look back over the country. the torrent was from fifteen to thirty feet wide, without a tributary, and seemingly not diminishing in breadth as i advanced ; but still it came rushing and roarmg down, with a copious tide, over and amidst masses of bare rock, from the very clouds, as though a waterspout had just burst over the mountain. leaving this at last, i began to work my way, scarcely less arduous than satan's anciently through chaos, up the nearest, though not the highest peak. at first scrambling on all fours over the tops of ancient black spruce-trees {abies nigra), old as the flood, from two to ten or twelve feet in height, their tops flat and spreading, and their foliage blue, and nipped with cold, as if for centuries they had ceased growing upward against the bleak sky, the solid cold. i walked some good rods erect upon the tops of these trees, which were overgrown with moss and mountain-cranberries. it seemed that in the course of time they had filled up the intervals between the huge rocks, and the cold wind had uniformly leveled all over. here the principal of vege tation was hard put to it. there was apparently a belt of this kind running quite round the mountain, though, perhaps, nowhere so remarkable as here. once slumping through, i looked down ten feet, into a dark and cavernous re gion, and saw the stem of a spruce, on whose top i stood, as on a mass of coarse basket-work, fully nine inches in diameter at the ground. these holes were bears' dens, and the bears were even then at home. this was the sort of garden 1 made my way over, for an eighth of a mile, at the risk, it is true, of treading on some of the plants, not seeing any path through it, — certainly the most treacherous and porous country i ever traveled. " nigh foundered on he fares. treading the crude consistence, half on foot. half flying. " but nothing could exceed the toughness of the twigs, — not one snapped under my weight, for they had slowly grown. having slumped, scrambled, rolled, bounced, and walked, by turns, over this scraggy country, i arrived upon a side hill, or rather side-mountain, where rocks, gray, silent rocks, were the flocks and herds that pastured, chewing a rocky cud at sunset. they looked at me with hard gray eyes, without a bleat or a low. this brought me to the skirt of a cloud, and bounded my walk that night. but i had already seen that 21 maine country when i turned about, waving, flowing, rippling down below. when i returned to my companions, they had selected a camping-ground on the torrent's edge, and were resting on the ground ; one was on the sick list, rolled in a blanket, on a damp shelf of rock. it was a savage and dreary scenery enough ; so wildly rough, that they looked long to find a level and open space for the tent. we could not well camp higher, for want of fuel ; .and the trees here seemed so evergreen and sappy, that we almost doubted if they would acknowledge the influence of fire ; but fire prevailed at last, and blazed here, too, like a good citizen of the world. even at this height we met with frequent traces of moose, as well as of bears. as there was no cedar, we made our bed of coarser feathered spruce ; but at any rate the feathers were plucked from the live tree. it was, perhaps, even a more grard and desolate place for a night's lodging than the summit would have been, being in the neighborhood of those wild trees, and of the torrent. some more aerial and finer-spirited winds rushed and roared through the ravine all night, from time to time arousing our fire, and dispersing the embers about. it was as if we lay in the very nest of a young whirlwind. at midnight, one of my bed-fellows, being startled in his dreams by the sudden blazing up to its top of a fir-tree, whose green boughs were dried by the heat, sprang up, with a cry, from his bed, thinking the world on fire, and drew the whole camp after him. in the morning, after whetting our appetite on some raw pork, a wafer of hard bread, and a dipper of condensed cloud or waterspout, we all together began to make our way up the falls, which i have described ; this time choosing the right hand, or highest peak, which was not the one i had approached before. but soon my companions were lost to my sight behind the mountain ridge in my rear, which still seemed ever retreating before me, and i climbed alone over huge rocks, loosely poised, a mile or more, still edging toward the clouds ; for though the day was clear elsewhere, the summit was concealed by mist. the mountain seemed a vast aggregation of loose rocks, as if some time it had rained rocks, and they lay as they fell on the mountain sides, nowhere fairly at rest, but leaning on each other, all rock ing stones, with cavities between, but scarcely any soil or smoother shelf. they were the raw materials of a planet dropped from an unseen quarry, which the vast chemistry of nature would anon work up, or work down, into the smiling and verdant plains and valleys of earth. this was an undone extremity of the globe ; as in lignite, we see coal in the process of formation. at length i entered within the skirts of the cloud which seemed forever 23 drifting over the summit, and yet would never be gone, but was generated out of tfial pure air as fast as it flowed away ; and when, a quarter of a mile farther. 1 reached the summit of the ridge, which those who have seen in clearer weather say is about five miles long, and contains a thousand acres of table-land. i was deep within the hostile ranlis of clouds, and all objects were obscured by them. now the wind would blow me out a yard of clear sun light, wherein i stood ; then a gray, dawning-light was all that it could ac complish, the cloud-line ever rising and falling with the wind's intensity. sometimes it seemed as if the summit would be cleared in a few moments, and smile in sunshine ; but what was gained on one side was lost on another. it was like sitting in a chimney and waiting for the smoke to blow away, it was. in fact, a cloud factory, these were the cloud-works, and the wind turned them off down from the cool, bare rocks. occasionally, when the windy columns broke m to me, i caught sight of a dark, damp crag to the right or left ; the mist driving ceaselessly between it and me. it reminded me of the creations of the old epic and dramatic poets, of atlas, vulcan, the cyclops, and prometheus. such was caucasus and the rock where pro metheus was bound. /eschylus had no doubt visited such scenery as this. it was vast, titanic, and such as man never inhabits. some part of the be holder, even some vital part, seems to escape through the loose grating of his ribs as he ascends. he is more lone than you can imagine. there is less of substantial thought and fair understanding in him than in the plains where men inhabit. his reason is dispersed and shadowy, more thin and subtile, like the air. vast, titanic, inhuman nature has got him at disadvantage, caught him alone, and pilfers him of some of his divine faculty. she does not smile on him as in the plains. she seems to say sternly. why came ye here before your time. this ground is not prepared for you. is it not enough that i smile in the valleys ? 1 have never made this soil for thy feel, this air for thy breathing, these rocks for thy neighbors. i cannot pity nor fondle thee here, but forever relentlessly drive thee hence to where 1 am kind. why seek me where i have not called thee, and then complain because you find me but a stepmother? shouldsl thou freeze or starve, or shudder thy life away, here is no shrine, nor altar, nor any access to my ear. "chaos and ancient night. i come no spy with i)ur|)ose to explore or to disturb the secrets of your rcalni, but as my way lies through your spacious empire up to light." 24 the tops of mountains are among the unfinished parts of the globe, whither it is a slight insult to the gods to climb and pry into their secrets, and try their effect on our humanity. only daring and insolent men, perchance, go there. simple races, as savages, do not climb mountains, — their tops are sacred and mysterious tracts never visited by them. pomola is always angry with those who climb to the summit of ktaadn. according to jackson, who, in his capacity of geological surveyor of the state, has accurately measured it,— the altitude of ktaadn is 5300 feet, or a little more than one mile above the level of the sea, — and he adds, " it is then evidently the highest point in the state of maine, and is the most abrupt granite mountain in new england." the peculiarities of that spacious table land on which i was standmg, as well as the remarkable semi-circular precipice or basin on the eastern side, were all concealed by the mist. 1 had brought my whole pack to the top, not knowing but i should have to make my descent to the river, and possibly to the settled portion of the state alone, and by some other route, and wishing to have a complete outfit with me. but at length, fearing that my companions would be anxious to reach the river before night, and knowing that the clouds might rest on the mountain for days, i was com pelled to descend. occasionally, as i came down, the wind would blow me a vista open, through which i could see the country eastward, boundless forests, and lakes and streams, gleaming in the sun, some of them emptying into the east branch. there were also new mountains in sight in that direction. now and then some small bird of the sparrow family would hit away before me, unable to command its course, like a fragment of the gray rock blown off by the wind. i found my companions where i had left them, on the side of the peak, gathering the mountain-cranberries, which filled every crevice between the rocks, together with blueberries, which had a spicier flavor the higher up they grew, but were not the less agreeable to our palates. when the country is settled, and roads are made, these cranberries will perhaps become an article of commerce. from this elevation, just on the skirts of the clouds, we could overlook the country, west and south, for a hundred miles. there it was, the state of maine, which we had seen on the map, but not much like that, — immeasurable forest for the sun to shine on, that eastern stuff we hear of in massachusetts. no clearing, no house. it did not look as if a solitary traveler had cut so much as a walking-stick there. countless lakes, — moosehead in the southwest, forty miles long by ten wide, like a gleaming 25 silver i)lattcr at the end of ihe table ; chesuncook, eighteen long by three wide, without an island ; millinocket, on the south, with its hundred islands ; and a hundred others without a name ; and mountains, also, whose names, for the most part, are known only to the indians. the forest looked like a firm grass sward, and the effect of these lakes in its midst has been well compared, by one who has since visited this same spot, to that of a " mirror broken into a ihousand fragments, and wildly scattered over the grass, reflecting the full blaze of the sun." it was a large farm for somebody, when cleared. according to the gazetteer, which was printed before the boundary question was settled, this single penobscot county, in which we were, was larger than the whole state of vermont, with its fourteen counties ; and this was only a part of the wild lands of maine. we are concerned now, however, about natural, not political limits. we were about eighty miles, as the bird flies, from bangor, or one hundred and fifteen, as we had ridden, and walked, and paddled. we had to console ourselves with the reflection that this view was probably as good as that from the peak, as far as it went ; and what were a mountain without its attendant clouds and mists ? like ourselves, neither bailey nor jackson had obtained a clear view from the summit. setting out on our return to the river, still at an early hour in llic day, we decided to follow the course of the torrent, which we supposed to be murch brook, as long as it would not lead us too far out of our way. we thus traveled about four miles in the very torrent itself, continually crossing and re crossing it, leaping from rock to rock, and jumping with the stream down falls of seven or eight feet, or sometimes sliding down on our backs in a thin sheet of water. 1 his ravine had been the scene of an extraordinary freshet in the spring, ap|)arently accompanied by a slide from the mountain. it must have been filled with a stream of stones and water, at le:ist twenty feet above the present level of the torrent. lor a rod or two, on either side of its channel, the trees were barked and si)lintered up to their tops, the birches bent over, twisted, and sonietirnes finely split, like a stable-broom ; some, a foot in diam eter, snap|)ed off, and whole clumps of trees bent over with the weight of rocks |)iled on them. in one place we noticed a rock, two or three feet in diameter, lodged nearly twenty feet high in the crotch of a tree. for the whole four miles, we saw but one rill emj)tying in, and the volume of water did not seem to be increased from the first. we traveled thus very rapidly with a downward impetus, and grew remarkably expert in leaping from rock to rock, lor jr.ip wimust, .uid leap we dul. wlullici there was any rock at 26 the right distance or not. it was a pleasant picture when the foremost turned about and looked up the winding ravine, walled in with rocks and the green forest, to see, at intervals of a rod or two, a red-shirted or green-jacketed mountaineer against the white torrent, leaping down the channel with his pack on his back, or pausing upon a convenient rock in the midst of the torrent to mend a rent in his clothes, or unstrap the dipper at his belt to take a draught of the water. at one place we were startled by seeing, on a little sandy shelf by the side of the stream, the fresh print of a man's foot, and for a moment realized how robinson crusoe felt in a similar case ; but at last we remembered that we had struck this stream on our way up, though we could not have told where, and one had descended into the ravine for a drink. the cool air above and the continual bathing of our bodies m mountain water, alternate foot, sitz, douche, and plunge baths, made this walk exceedingly re freshing, and we had traveled only a mile or two, after leaving the torrent, before every thread of our clothes was as dry as usual, owing perhaps to a peculiar quality in the atmosphere. after leaving the torrent, being in doubt about our course, tom threw down his pack at the foot of the loftiest spruce-tree at hand, and shinned up the bare trunk some twenty feet, and then climbed through the green tower, lost to our sight, until he held the topmost spray in his hand. mccauslin, in his younger days, had marched through the wilderness with a body of troops, under general somebody, and with one other man did all the scouting and spying service. the general's word was, " throw down the top of that tree, and there was no tree in the maine woods so high that it did not lose its top in such a case. i have heard a story of two men being lost once in these woods, nearer to the settlement than this, who climbed the loftiest pine they could find, some six feet in diameter at the ground, from whose top they dis covered a solitary clearing and its smoke. when at this height, some two hundred feet from the ground, one of them became dizzy, and fainted in his companion's arms, and the latter had to accomplish the descent with him, alternately fainting and reviving, as best he could. to tom we cried, where away does the summit bear ? where the burnt lands ? the last he could only conjecture ; he descried, however, a little meadow and pond, lying probably in our course, which we concluded to steer for. on reaching this secluded meadow, we found fresh tracks of moose on the shore of the pond, and the water was still unsettled as if they had fled before us. a little farther, in a dense thicket, vve seemed to be still on their trail. it was a small 27 meadow, of a few acres, on the mountain side, concealed by the forest, and perhaps never seen by a white man before, where one would think that the moose might browse and bathe, and rest in peace. pursuing this course, we soon reached the open land, which went sloping down some miles toward the penobscot. perhaps i most fully realized that this was primeval, untamed, and for ever untamable nature, or whatever else men call it, while coming down this part of the mountain. we were passing over " burnt land," burnt by lightning, perchance, though they showed no recent marks of fire, hardly so much as a charred stump, but looked rather like a natural pasture for the moose and deer, exceedingly wild and desolate, with occasional strips of timber cross ing them, and low poplars springing up, and patches of blueberries here and there. 1 found myself traversing them familiarly, like some pasture run to waste, or partially reclaimed by man ; but wiien i reflected what man, what brother or sister or kinsman of our race made it and claimed it, i expected the proprietor to rise up and dispute my passage. it is difficult to conceive of a region unin habited by man. we habitually presume his presence and influence every where. and yet we have not seen pure nature, unless we have seen her thus vast and drear and inhuman, though in the midst of cities. nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. 1 looked with awe at the ground i trod on, to see what the powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. this was that earth of which we have heard, made out of chaos and old night. here was no man's garden, but the unhandseled globe. it was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor wood land, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste land. it was the fresh and natural surface o' the planet earth, as it was made forever and ever, — to be the dwelling of man we say, — so nature made it, and man may use it, if he can. man was nol to be associated with it. it was matter, vast, terrific, — not his mother earth that we have heard of, not for him to tread on, or be buried in, — no, it were being too familiar even to let his bones lie there, — the home, this, of necessity and fate. there was clearly felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. it was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites, — to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we. we walked over it with a certain awe, stopping, from time to time, to pick the blueberries which grew there, and had a smart and spicy taste. perchance where our wild pines stand, and leaves lie on their forest floor, in concord, there were once reapers, and husbandmen planted grain ; 29 but here not even the surl.icc had hccri scaircu hy man, hut it was a specimen of what god saw lit to make this world. what is it to he admitted to a museum, to see a myriad of particular tilings, compared with being shown some star's surface, some hard matter in its home ! 1 stand in awe of my body, this matter to which 1 am bound has become so strange to me. i fear not spirits, ghosts, of which i am one, — ihaf my body might, but i fear bodies, 1 tremble to meet them. \\ hat is this i itan that has possession of me ? 1 alk of mysteries ! think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks ! the solid earth ! the actual world ! the common sense ! contact ! contact ! who are we ? where are we ? erelong we recognized some rocks and other features in the landscape which we had purposely impressed on our memories, and, quickening our pace, by two o'clock we reached the batteau. here we had expected to dine on trout, but in this glaring sunlight they were slow to take the bait, so we were compelled to make the most of the crumbs of our hard bread and our pork, which were both nearly exhausted. meanwhile we deliberated whether we should go up the river a mile farther, to gibson's clearing, on the sowadnehunk, where there was a deserted log-hut, in order to get a half inch auger, to mend one of our spike-poles with. there were young spruce trees enough around us, and we had a spare spike, but nothing to make a hole with. but as it was uncertain whether we should find any tools left there, we patched up the broken pole, as well as we could, for the downward voyage, in which there would be but little use for it. moreover, we were unwilling to lose any time in this expedition, lest the wind should rise before we reached the larger lakes, and detain us ; for a moderate wind produces quite a sea on these waters, in which a batteau will not live for a moment ; and on o.ie occa sion mccauslin had been delayed a week at the head of the north twin, wiirii is only four miles across. we were nearly out of provisions, and ill prepared in this respect for what might possibly prove a week's journey round by the shore, fording innumerable streams, and threading a trackless forest, should any accident happen to our boat. it was with regret that we turned our backs on chesuncook, which mccauslin had formerly lugged on, and the allegash lakes. i here were still longer rapids and portages above ; among the last the rippogenus portage, which he described as the most diffuult on the river, and three miles long. the whole length of the penobscot is two hundred and seventy-dve miles, and 30 we are still nearly one hundred miles from its source. hodge, the assistant state geologist, passed up this river in 1837, and by a portage of only one mile and three quarters crossed over into the allegash, and so went down that into the st. john, and up the madawaska to the grand portage across to the st. lawrence. his is the only account that i know of an expedition through canada in this direction. he thus describes his first sight of the latter river, which, to compare small things with great, is like balboa's first sight of the pacific from the mountains of the isthmus of darien. " when we first came in sight of the st. lawrence, " he says, " from the top of a high hill, the view was most striking, and much more interesting to me from having been shut up in the woods for the two previous months. directly before us lay the broad river, extending across nine or ten miles, its surface broken by a few islands and reefs, and two ships riding at anchor near the shore. beyond, extended ranges of uncultivated hills, parallel with the river. the sun was just going down behind them, and gilding the whole scene with its parting rays." about four o'clock, the same afternoon, we commenced our return voy age, which would require but little if any poling." o 1j mb fe*-m kr *^3 ckt'*" ^'^ ^j m| 2^ ^^ ^ -am si 1 *p ^ 31 v 1-}, ^ /'• ■;. ,.^ >n i^iarvi \ \ ' \. ^i^ l^lft af de-bscohhag the debsconeag outing camps are conducted as a public outing resort. located near mt. ktaadn, in piscat aquis county, maine, and were formerly owned by the debsconeag fish & game club. they are known also as garland's camps. they will continue to be under the popular and efficient management of mr. c. c. garland, who first established and conducted these camps for the club. home camps. the home camps, or principal camps of this group, are located on the north shore of first debsconeag lake facing south. these consist of a gen eral camp containing an assembly room, formerly the club-house, and a separate dining-room and kitchen building, several sleeping lodges or small cottages arranged for parties and families, and tents having board floors and log walls upon which the tent rests, making the combined walls about six to seven feet in height. these camps are substantially and comfortably built of peeled logs and have commodious covered piazzas. all these camps are kept immaculately clean and are comfortably furnished with spring beds, mattresses, clean linen and bedding, easy chairs and open franklin stoves. the floors of the tents extend to form a commodious piazza, which, with the tent proper, is covered with a large fly, protecting the tent from both the sun and rain. these tents are furnished with spring beds, easy chairs, and toilet articles the same as the cottages. they have become most popular and are as much sought after as the private camps. all tents and camps give privacy to ladies. the sanitation about these premises is carefully looked after. bathing. excellent sand beaches near by afford good facilities for an invigorating bath in the crystal waters of debsconeag. the greater percentage of the camps' guests resort to these beaches daily. be sure to take your bathing suit with you. 33 tefc canoeing. canoeing facilities could be no better and tlie variety and beauty of scenery cannot be surpassed. f'robably there is no place in maine where so many different canoe and fishing trijjs and daily picnic excursions can be taken as from debsconeag. the table. i o set a table unefjualled in the maine woods, serving in season all the delicacies of forest and stream, is the aim of the management. this camp has its own vegetable garden and hennery and draws lilxially from the bangor markets. to those persons tired and worn out frf)m business cares, recovering from pneumonia, having nervous prostration, bronchial or catarrhal troubles, insomnia, constipation, stomach troubles, hay fever (unknown at debsconeag), pleurisy, or needing a change from any course, we offer special advantages, and solicit correspondence regarding the same. 1 o such, our table will be found attractive. no alcoholics or tuberculous patients, or any person who would be objectionable to other guests, will be entertained at these camps. the atmos phere at debsconeag will be found cool, dry and bracing. the spring water is absolutely pure and soft and many persons are greatly benefitted by its use. it comes to the table clear as crystal, cool as ice water, from a near-by cave. fishing. no part of maine has as great a variety of fishing, as is here found in something like 30 lakes and ponds within a radius of three miles of the home camps. trout being especially abundant. large numbers of gamy lake i rout are taken in front of these camps, in first debsconeag lake, many weighing from 12 to 20 [)ounds and measuring three feet in length. rainbow lake camps. 1 he rainbow lake camps consist of a large two story main camp in which is the diriiiig-room and kitchen, and two separate log sleeping lodges. i (ills are also used during the warm months. i loretofoie these camps have been used as outl\ing cam|w ; this season they will be run lnc^ependent of the home camps and will be in charge of a competent man and his wife, who will cater to the roiiilorl of their guests. 34 canoes are kept here for rental to guests at the rate of fifty cents per day. at rainbow, one can come closer in touch with nature, with the usual discomforts eliminated, than at any far distant camp in the maine woods. the beds are of woven wire, piled high with fresh-picked fir, fragrant with the breath of the forest. the menu contains just such articles as are closely associated with primitive forest life, but which are cooked in a manner superior to that of the average woodsman. one's fishing may be done comfortably from the mammoth rocks on the lake shore, from canoes or from a large log float anchored near by the camps for that purpose. rainbow lake is an ideal location for either a permanent stay or for a few days' side trip from the main camps at debsconeag. the distance from these is about six miles, but one-half of it is made by water, the balance being over well cleared trails. in traveling between these camps, four lakes and ponds are traversed, on each of which are kept relays of canoes, thus render ing carrying of canoes unnecessary. the average person can make the trip in three hours. rainbow lake's famous trout. in rainbow lake, five miles long by a mile wide, there are more square tailed trout than m any other body of water of the same size in the country. the bottom is covered with great boulders, from beneath which bubble the springs from which the lake is fed, and in the interstices of which the trout hide. it is one of the most unique sights to lower a bait toward one of these rocky formations. for a moment there is not a fish to be seen ; then from a dozen crevices the trout come flashing toward the surface, each anxious to secure the coveted morsel. a few seconds after, every trout has again dis appeared, save those struggling at the leader, and so wonderfully clear is the water that they may be distinctly seen at a depth of 40 feet. it may seem exaggeration to say that " square-tailed " or " brook trout " (salmo fontinalis) may be taken at any time in this lake at any time, day or night ; but one has only to try to be convinced. unlike trout in general, those at rainbow take the fly in the warmest weather, and bite well at all seasons, chiefly during the mornings and evenings. these fish make a strenuous fight when hooked, are firm in flesh, light pink in color, and will be found of a delicious flavor. they vary in size from one quarter pound to five pounds, 35 >|alhl»oiv'^i.££p/m()i0fl6f v *.. 1 f^aine>ow camp ktaadn camp. close to the southwest slide trail, near the timber line, leading up ktaadn, is a finely constructed and comfortable camp, another of this group, built especially for the use of our guests wishing to climb the mountain. this camp is kept furnished with cooking utensils and blankets, but not with sup plies. the latter are toted by the guides accompanying each party. by a measurement made in 1 906, the height of mt. ktaadn at west peak, its highest point, is 5268 feet above the sea. making the ascent of ktaadn is a feature of a stay at debsconeag, this being the nearest point of departure. {the management will make special arrangements to tal^e parties from their homes to the mountain and return arranging all details and paying all bills, for a fixed sum.) probably the best route upon the mountain is over the abol-ktaadn stream trail. the distance, via the west branch, from debsconeag to the foot of the trail is about six miles. parties visiting the mountain should plan on taking three days from debsconeag. the first day the ktaadn camp should be made ; the second day, visit the top of the mountain and return to the ktaadn camp ; and the third day, return to the home camps. by carrying out this program, haste at no time need be made, and the trip will be found a comparatively easy one. ktaadn stream along the mountain trail may be fished on both the first and third days if one is so inclined. hurd pond (more properly a lake) is one mile north of the home camps ; is about two miles wide by three miles long. its waters are wonderfully clear ; is well stocked with trout, lake trout, and some good sized landlocked salmon are here taken. on the shore of the lake, about three miles from debsconeag, we have for the convenience of our guests a small outlying camp. here one can spend the day or a few days by taking supplies from the home camp. guide laws. non-residents of the state of maine are not allowed to enter upon the wild lands of the state and camp, or kindle fires thereon, while engaged in climbing or fishing without being in charge of a registered guide during the months of may, june, july, august, september, october and november, but // is not necessary for a non-resident to employ a guide, prodded he is stopping with the omner of a "registered camp" and does not camp, or kindle fires, '^hese camps are registered camps. 37 rates and accommodations. persons wishing to visit debsconeag and other camps, will do well to write early for accommodations. rates of board and lodging, $14.00 per week and upwards. guides' board at the home camps, $1.50 per day. rates at rainbow lake camps, a uniform rate of $2.00 per day. guides' wages are $3.00 per day and their board ; this rate includes the use of one canoe. canoes and boats may be hired at the rate of fifty cents per day or three dollars per week. a supply of standard rods and fishing tackle, moccasins, heavy wool maine socks, cigars and tobacco, eire kept for sale at the home camps, so that one leaving home on short notice is sure to find here all he may need for his comfort and pleasure on arrival. to these camps, guests may bring their own guides, canoes and outfits, or, upon proper notice, the manager will supply guides, and all, or any part of an outfit, including tents and canoes. reliable registered guides make their headquarters at these camps. camera. you should not fail to take your camera and plenty of films with you, that you may carry home pleasant memories of the picturesque scenery and of live game so plentiful in this region. baggage. visitors to these camps should avoid bringing heavy baggage. grips and bags are preferable to trunks and are less expensive to transport. trunks may be left at the south twin house and contents there transferred to grips, bags, or telescope cases. how to get there. buy tickets to south twin, maine. a through sleeper leaves boston ua boston & maine, maine central and bangor & aroostook r. r., about 7.00 p. m., and arrives at south twin about 6.00 o'clock the following morning. the last train leaving boston arrives at south twin about 1 0.00 o'clock the next morning, but the sleeper is switched off at milo junction, hence we recommend taking the train leaving boston about 7.00 p. m. this gives ample time to make any shifts of outfit before taking the steamer, which leaves south twin, after the arrival of the train from the west, about 1 0.00 a. m. 39 apr 22 1907 (trains only stop at south twin on siknal, or notice to the conductor on the train.) the south i win i louse is located at south i win, wlicre one s trunks and heavy baggage may be left during his slay in the woods. steamers operated by capt. pearl s. willey, who handles our business on the lakes, start from south twin daily except sunday, about 10.30 a. m. after the arrival of the train from the west, for ambejijis, return ing in season for [)assengers to take the afternoon train for the west. at ambejijis these steamers are met daily, sunday excepted, by competent employees of these camps with canoes or boats to carry passengers and their baggage to debsconeag. the "debsconeag" post office is located at the home camps, which is also a u. s. weather bureau station. mail arrives and departs daily, except sunday. the nearest express and telegraph office is south twin. correspondence is solicited and will receive prompt attention. address all communications to c. c. garland, manager, debsconeag, piscataquis county, maine. v • ;i; v'^ 40 the shortest, quickest, only direct route to the great forest recreation region of northern maine solid vestibuled trains. pullman sleeping and parlor cars. dining cars. strictly modem equipment and service throughout. "in the maine woods" our 1907 guidebook offering most attractive news and views oi northern maine's famous fishing, hunting and recreation region — a book of 1 92 pages with over 100 actual maine woods scenes — mailed for 15 cents in stamps. address geo. m. houghton, passenger traffic manager, bangor. maine library of congress 013 995 722 7 threepence on the duty of civil diso be die ince by h. d. thoreau º uniform with “civil disobedience.” 40 pages. foap. 8vo. 3d. post free, 3%d. rubayat of omar khayyám translated by edward fitzgerald. a complete reprint of the first (1859) edition of fitzgerald's translation of this famous gem of the persian philosopher poet of the simple life. * the ball no question makes of ayes and noes, but right or left as strikes the player goes; and he that toss'd thee down into the field, he knows about it a -he knows—he knows.” (quatraº. 50 ºn this edition.) nº. 3 of the simple life series. a new series of inexpensive, tasteful booklets treating of social justice, religious truth, and the meaning and way of life. the simple life press, 1903, 5, water lane, ludgate hill, e.c. a. --tº a . in º º on the duty of civil disobedience the simple life series. a new series of inexpensive, tasteful booklets treating of social justice, religious truth, and the meaning and way of life, sincerely and unaffectedly. many will be reprints of wellknown gems of thought, many will be new. published by the simple life press 5, water lane, ludgate hill, london, e.c. if you would care to be kept informed of new issues, or to have a little catalogue of important books and pamphlets issued by the general press, which will be published quarterly (gratis), please send a post card. the s.l.p. will be happy to procure for you any progressive literature you may find a difficulty in obtaining, or to help with advice, if possible. estimates for the production of leaflets, pamphlets, and booklets, tastefully and economically, furnished with pleasure. now ready, the first volumes of the series. no. 1. tolstoy and his message. by ernest. howard crosby, author of plain talk in psalm and parable. the story of tolstoy's life and a study of his teaching, by a personal friend. feap. 8vo, 96 pages. antique paper. artistic covers, dark green on olivine, 6d. net., post free, 7d. (a shilling cloth edition also in preparation.) no. 2. even as you and i : fables and parables of the life to-day. by bolton hall, author of things as they are, etc., etc. an authorized popular edition of this unique book. uniform with no. 1. fcap. 8vo, 96 pages. antique paper. artistic covers, dark green on olivine, 6d, net, post free, 7d. (a shilling cloth edition in preparation.) no. 3. the rubaiyat of omar khayyam. translated by edward fitzgerald, with the translator's life of omar, and the notes. feap. 8vo, 40 pages. antique paper. artistic covers, dark green on olivine, 3d., post free, 3}d. o no. 4. an essay on the duty of civil disobedience. by henry david thqreau, author of walden, or life in the woods, etc.. a reprint of this classic essay on the supremacy of the individual conscience. feap. 8vo, 40 pages. antique * artistic covers, dark green on oliviné, 3d., post free, 3}d. others in are/aration.) on the duty of civil disobedience by henry david thoreau author of “walden : or life in the woods”; “a week on the concord”; etc. the simple life press 5 water lane london e c 1903 “all our liberties are due to men who, when their conscience has compelled them, have broken the laws of the land.” pr. clifford. “i think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. it is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. . . . the few men who serve the state with their consciences also, necessarily resist it for the most part.” (duty of civil disobedience.) note to this edition thoreau wrote his famous essay, on the duty of civil disobedience, as a protest against an unjust but popular war and the immoral but popular institution of slave-owning. he did more than write—he declined to pay his taxes, and was hauled off to gaol in consequence. who can say how much this refusal of his hastened the end of the war and of slavery 2 at the present day, intellectual detachment from the state, and individual defiance of its behests when these are opposed to conscience, are more difficult, and apparently more futile, than in thoreau's time. the unit seems of less importance in the mass. it is all the more imperative, therefore, that the facts that the mass is composed of units and the conscience of the mass is the aggregate conscience of the units, and that the individual is still the sole responsible guardian of his own conscience and the co-guardian of the public conscience, should be fully recognized. the constant circulation of this essay of thoreau, in which the matter is probed to its bottom with the clearness of sight given to a man when he cares nothing for personal “ consequences,” cannot, therefore, but be of service, and of increasing service with the increasing dominance of the state, to the whole body politic. “those few who serve the state with their consciences as well as with their bodies, cannot but resist it for the most part, and are commonly termed its enemies.” a. c. f. 6 on the duty of civil disobedience i heartily accept the motto—“that government is best which governs least ’’; and i should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also i believe—“that government is best which governs not at all ”; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. government is at best but an expedient ; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. the objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government. the standing army is only an arm of the standing government. the government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it. witness the present mexican war (1849), the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for, in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure. this american government—what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavouring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity ? it has not 7 8 (wit the øuty ot the vitality and force of a single living man ; for a single man can bend it to his will. it is a sort of wooden gun to the people themselves. but it is not the less necessary for this ; for the people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have. governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed on, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage. it is excellent, we must all allow. yet this government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. it does not keep the country free. it does not settle the west. it does not educate. the character inherent in the american people has done all that has been accomplished ; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way. for government is an expedient by which men would fain succeed in letting one another alone ; and, as has been said, when it is most expedient, the governed are most let alone by it. trade and commerce, if they were not made of india-rubber, would never manage to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way; and, if one were to judge these men wholly by the effects of their actions and not partly by their intentions, they would deserve to be classed and punished with those mischievous persons who put obstructions on the railroads. but, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, i ask for, not at once no government, but at once civil øigobeoience 9 a better government. let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it. after all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule, is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. but a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience 2–in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable p must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator p why has every man a conscience, then 2 i think that we should be men first, and subjects afterwards. it is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. the only obligation which i have a right to assume is to do at any time what i think right. it is truly enough said, that a corporation has no conscience ; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. law never made men a whit more just ; and, by means of their respect for it, even the welldisposed are daily made the agents of injustice. a common and natural result of an undue respect for law is that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and io on the øuty of all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. they have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned ; they are all peaceably inclined. now, what are they p men at all p or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power p visit the navy-yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an american government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts— a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments, though it may be— not a drum was heard, not a funeral note, as his corse to the rampart we hurried ; not a soldier discharged his farewell shot o'er the grave where our hero we buried. the mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. they are the standing army, and the militia, gaolers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. in most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense ; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. they have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. civil øigobeoience it others—as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders—serve the state chiefly with their heads ; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as god. a very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part ; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it. a wise man will only be useful as a man, and will not submit to be “clay,” and “stop a hole to keep the wind away,” but leave that office to his dust at least :— i am too high-born to be propertied, to be a secondary at control, or useful serving-man and instrument to any sovereign state throughout the world. he who gives himself entirely to his fellow-men appears to them useless and selfish ; but he who gives himself partially to them is pronounced a benefactor and philanthropist. how does it become a man to behave toward this american government to-day p i answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. i cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave's government also, all men recognize the right of revolution ; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. but almost all say that such is not the case now. but such was the case, they think, in the revolution of ’75. i 2 qm the øuty of if one were to tell me that this was a bad government because it taxed certain foreign commodities brought to its ports, it is most probable that i should not make an ado about it, for i can do without them. all machines have their friction ; and possibly this does enough good to counterbalance the evil. at any rate, it is a great evil to make a stir about it. but when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, i say, let us not have such a machine any longer. in other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, i think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. what makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army. paley, a common authority with many on moral questions, in his chapter on the “duty of submission to civil government,” resolves all civil obligation into expediency; and he proceeds to say, “that so long as the interest of the whole society requires it, that is, so long as the established government cannot be resisted or changed without public inconveniency, it is the will of god that the established government be obeyed, and no longer. . . . this principle being admitted, the justice of every particular case of resistance is reduced to a computation of the quality of the danger and grievance on the one side, and of the probability and expense of recivil ºigobeoience i3 dressing it on the other.” of this, he says, every man shall judge for himself. but paley appears never to have contemplated those cases to which the rule of expediency does not apply, in which a people, as well as an individual, must do justice, cost what it may. if i have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, i must restore it to him though i drown myself. this, according to paley, would be inconvenient. but he that would save his life, in such a case, shall lose it. this people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people. in their practice, nations agree with paley ; but does any one think that massachusetts does exactly what is right at the present crisis 2 a drab of state, a cloth-o'-silver slut, to have her train borne up, and her soul trail in the dirt practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the south, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to mexico, cost what it may. i quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, co-operate with, and do the bidding of, those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless. we are accustomed to say that the mass of men are unprepared ; but improvement is slow, because the few are not materially wiser or better than the many. it is not so important that many i4 on the euty of should be as good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere, for that will leaven the whole lump. there are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them ; who, esteeming themselves children of washington and franklin [cromwell and gladstone p] sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing ; who even postpone the question of freedom to the question of free-trade, and quietly read the prices-current along with the latest advices from mexico, after dinner, and, it may be, fall asleep over them both. what is the price-current of an honest man and patriot to-day 2 they hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition ; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. they will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret. at most, they give only a cheap vote, and a feeble countenance and god-speed, to the right, as it goes by them. #there are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man. but it is easier to deal with the real possessor of a thing than with the temporary guardian of it. all voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions ; and betting naturally accompanies it. the character of the voters is not staked. i cast my vote, perchance, as i think right , but i am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. i am willing to leave it to the majority. civil （)isobedience i5 its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. it is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. a wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. there is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. when the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. they will then be the only slaves. only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote. i hear of a convention to be held at baltimore, or elsewhere, for the selection of a candidate for the presidency, made up chiefly of editors, and men who are politicians by profession ; but i think, what is it to any independent, intelligent, and respectable man what decision they may come to 2 shall we not have the advantage of his wisdom and honesty, nevertheless p can we not count upon some independent votes ? are there not many individuals in the country who do not attend conventions p but no : i find that the respectable man, so called, has immediately drifted from his position, and despairs of his country, when his country has more reason to despair of him. he forthwith adopts one of the candidates thus selected as the only available one, thus proving that he is himself available for any purposes of the demagogue. his vote is of no more worth than that of any uni6 qn the øuty of principled foreigner or hireling native, who may have been bought. oh for a man who is a man, and, as my neighbour says, has a bone in his back which you cannot pass your hand through our statistics are at fault : the population has been returned too large. how many men are there to a square thousand miles in this country p hardly one. does not america offer any inducement for men to settle here 2 the american has dwindled into an odd fellow, —one who may be known by the development of his organ of gregariousness, and a manifest lack of intellect and cheerful self-reliance ; whose first and chief concern, on coming into the world, is to see that the almshouses are in good repair ; and, before yet he has lawfully donned the virile garb, to collect a fund for the support of the widows and orphans that may be ; who, in short, ventures to live only by the aid of the mutual insurance company, which has promised to bury him decently. it is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong ; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him ; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. if i devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, i must first see, at least, that i do not pursue them, sitting upon another man’s shoulders. i must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too. see what gross inconsistency is tolerated. i have heard some of my townsmen say, “i should civil øigobeofence i 7 like to have them order me out to help put down an insurrection of the slaves, or to march to mexico—see if i would go " , and yet these very men have each, directly by their allegiance, and so indirectly, at least, by their money, furnished a substitute. the soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war ; is applauded by those whose own act and authority he disregards and sets at naught ; as if the state were penitent to that degree that it hired one to scourge it while it sinned, but not to that degree that it left off sinning for a moment. thus, under the name of order and civil government, we are all made at last to pay homage to and support our own meanness. after the first blush of sin comes its indifference ; and from immoral it becomes, as it were, unmoral, and not quite unnecessary to that life which we have made. the broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it. the slight reproach to which the virtue of patriotism is commonly liable, the noble are most likely to incur. those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support, are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform. some are petitioning the state to dissolve the union, to disregard the requisitions of the president. why do they not dissolve it themselves, —the union between themselves and the state, b 18 qn the euty of —and refuse to pay their quota into its treasury 2 do not they stand in the same relation to the state, that the state does to the union ? and have not the same reasons prevented the state from resisting the union, which have prevented them from resisting the state p how can a man be satisfied to entertain an opinion merely and enjoy it 2 is there any enjoyment in it, if his opinion is that he is aggrieved 2 if you are cheated out of a single dollar by your neighbour, you do not rest satisfied with knowing that you are cheated, or with saying that you are cheated, or even with petitioning him to pay you your due ; but you take effectual steps at once to obtain the full amount, and see that you are never cheated again. action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations ; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. it not only divides states and churches, it divides families ; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine. unjust laws exist : shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavour to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once 2 men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. they think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. but it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. it makes it worse. why is it not more civil øigobeoience i9 apt to anticipate and provide for reform 2 why does it not cherish its wise minority p why does it cry and resist before it is hurt p why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults and do better than it would have them 2 why does it always crucify christ, and excommunicate copernicus and luther, and pronounce washington and franklin rebels 2 one would think that a deliberate and practical denial of its authority was the only offence never contemplated by government ; else, why has it not assigned its definite, its suitable and proportionate penalty p if a man who has no property refuses but once to earn nine shillings for the state, he is put in prison for a period unlimited by any law that i know, and determined only by the discretion of those who placed him there ; but if he should steal ninety times nine shillings from the state, he is soon permitted to go at large again. if the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go : perchance it will wear smooth — certainly the machine will wear out. if the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil ; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, i say, break the law. let your life be a counterfriction to stop the machine. what i have to do is to see, at any rate, that i do not lend myself to the wrong which i condemn. as for adopting the ways which the state has provided for remedying the evil, i know not of 2o on the ºuty of such ways. they take too much time, and a man's life will be gone. i have other affairs to attend to. i came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad. a man has not everything to do, but something ; and because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong. -it is not my business to be petitioning the governor or the legislature any more than it is theirs to petition me; and if they should not hear my petition, what should i do then p but in this case the state has provided no way : its very constitution is the evil. this may seem to be harsh and stubborn and unconciliatory ; but it is to treat with the utmost kindness and consideration the only spirit that can appreciate or deserves it. so is all change for the better, like birth and death, which convulse the body. i do not hesitate to say that those who call themselves abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their support both in person and property, from the government of massachusetts, and not wait till they constitute a majority of one, before they suffer the right to prevail through them. i think that it is enough if they have god on their side, without waiting for that other one. moreover, any man more right that his neighbours constitutes a majority of one already. i meet this american government, or its representative, the state government, directly, and face to face, once a year—no more—in the person of its tax-gatherer ; this is the only mode in which a man situated as i am necessarily meets it ; and civil øigobeoience 2 i it then says distinctly, recognize me ; and the simplest, the most effectual, and, in the present posture of affairs, the indispensablest mode of treating with it on this head, of expressing your little satisfaction with and love for it, is to deny it then. my civil neighbour, the tax-gatherer, is the very man i have to deal with, for it is, after all, with men and not with parchment that i quarrel, —and he has voluntarily chosen to be an agent of the government. how shall he ever know well what he is and does as an officer of the government, or as a man, until he is obliged to consider whether he shall treat me, his neighbour, for whom he has respect, as a neighbour and welldisposed man, or as a maniac and disturber of the peace, and see if he can get over this obstruction to his neighbourliness without a ruder and more impetuous thought or speech corresponding with his action. i know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom i could name—if ten honest men only—ay, if one honest man, in this state of massachusetts ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this co-partnership, and be locked up in the county gaol therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in america. for it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be : what is once well done is done for ever. but we love better to talk about it : that we say is our mission. reform keeps many scores of newspapers in its service, but not one man. if my esteemed neighbour, the state's ambassador, who will 22 on the øuty of devote his days to the settlement of the question of human rights in the council chamber, instead of being threatened with the prisons of carolina, were to sit down the prisoner of massachusetts, that state which is so anxious to foist the sin of slavery upon her sister—though at present she can discover only an act of inhospitality to be the ground of a quarrel with her—the legislature would not wholly waive the subject the following winter. under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. the proper place to-day, the only place which massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the state by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. it is there that the fugitive slave, and the mexican prisoner on parole, and the indian come to plead the wrongs of his race, should find them ; on that separate but more free and honourable ground, where the state places those who are not with her but against her—the only house in a slave state in which a free man can abide with honour. if any think that their influence would be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict the ear of the state, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person. cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. a minority is civil øigobeoience 23 powerless while it conforms to the majority ; it is not even a minority then ; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. if the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the state will not hesitate which to choose. if a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the state to commit violence and shed innocent blood. this is, in fact, the definition of a peaceful revolution, if any such is possible. if the taxgatherer or any other public officer asks me, as one has done, “but what shall i do p’’ my answer is, “if you really wish to do anything, resign your office.” when the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished. but even suppose blood should flow. is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded ? through this wound a man's real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death. i see this blood flowing now. i have contemplated the imprisonment of the offender rather than the seizure of his goods— though both will serve the same purpose—because they who assert the purest right, and consequently are most dangerous to a corrupt state, commonly have not spent much time in accumulating property. to such the state renders comparatively small service, and a slight tax is wont to appear exorbitant, particularly if they are obliged to earn it by special labour with their hands. 24 (wit the øuty of if there were one who lived wholly without the use of money, the state itself would hesitate to demand it of him. but the rich man—not to make any invidious comparison—is always sold to the institution which makes him rich. absolutely speaking, the more money the less virtue ; for money comes between a man and his objects, and obtains them for him ; and it was certainly no great virtue to obtain it. it puts to rest many questions which he would otherwise be taxed to answer; while the only new question which it puts is the hard but superfluous one, how to spend it. thus his moral ground is taken from under his feet. the opportunities of living are diminished in proportion as what are called the “means '' are increased. the best thing a man can do for his culture when he is rich is to endeavour to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor. christ answered the herodians according to their condition. “show me the tribute-money,” said he—and one took a penny out of his pocket— if you use money which has the image of caesar on it, and which he has made current and valuable —that is, if you are men of the state, and gladly enjoy the advantages of caesar's government, then pay him back some of his own when he demands it; “render therefore to caesar that which is caesar's, and to god those things which are god’s ”—leaving them no wiser than before as to which was which ; for they did not wish to know. when i converse with the freest of my neighbours, i perceive that, whatever they may say about the magnitude and seriousness of the quescivil øigobedience 25 tion, and their regard for the public tranquillity, the long and the short of the matter is, that they cannot spare the protection of the existing government, and they dread the consequences to their property and families of disobedience to it. for my own part, i should not like to think that i ever rely on the protection of the state. but, if i deny the authority of the state when it presents its tax-bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. this is hard. this makes it impossible for a man to live honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in outward respects. it will not be worth the while to accumulate property ; that would be sure to go again. you must hire or squat somewhere, and raise but a small crop, and eat that soon. you must live within yourself, and depend upon yourself, always tucked up and ready for a start, and not have many affairs. a man may grow rich in turkey even, if he will be in all respects a good subject of the turkish government. confucius said: “if a state is governed by the principles of reason, poverty and misery are subjects of shame ; if a state is not governed by the principles of reason, riches and honours are the subjects of shame.” no : until i want the protection of massachusetts to be extended to me in some distant southern port, where my liberty is endangered, or until i am bent solely on building up an estate at home by peaceful enterprise, i can afford to refuse allegiance to massachusetts, and her right to my property and life. 26 qn the øuty of it costs me less in every sense to incur the penalty of disobedience to the state than it would to obey. i should feel as if i were worth less in that case. some years ago the state met me in behalf of the church, and commanded me to pay a certain sum towards the support of a clergyman whose preaching my father attended, but never i myself. “pay,” it said, “ or be locked up in the gaol.” i declined to pay. but, unfortunately, another man saw fit to pay it. i did not see why the schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest, and not the priest the schoolmaster ; for i was not the state's schoolmaster, but i supported myself by voluntary subscription. i did not see why the lyceum should not present its tax-bill, and have the state to back its demand, as well as the church. however, at the request of the selectmen, i condescended to make some such statement as this in writing : “ know all men by these presents, that i, henry thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which i have not joined.” this i gave to the town clerk ; and he has it. the state, having thus learned that i did not wish to be regarded as a member of that church, has never made a like demand on me since ; though it said that it must adhere to its original presumption that time. if i had known how to name them, i should then have signed off in detail from all the societies which i never signed on to ; but i did not know where to find a complete list. i have paid no poll-tax for six years. i was civil øigobedience 27 put into a gaol once on this account for one night; and as i stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, i could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if i were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. i wondered that it should have concluded at length that this was the best use it could put me to, and had never thought to avail itself of my services in some way. i saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through before they could get to be as free as i was. i did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. i felt as if i alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax. they plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. in every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder ; for they thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall. i could not but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let or hindrance, and they were really all that was dangerous. as they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish my body ; just as boys, if they cannot come at some person against whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog. i saw that the state was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, 28 qn the øuty of and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and i lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it. thus the state never intentionally confronts a man's senses, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. it is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. i was not born to be forced. i will breathe after my own fashion. let us see who is the strongest. what force has a multitude 2 they only can force me who obey a higher law than i. they force me to become like themselves. i do not hear of men being forced to live this way or that by masses of men. what sort of life were that to live p when i meet a government which says to me, “your money or your life,” why should i be in haste to give it my money p. it may be in a great strait, and not know what to do : i cannot help that. it must help itself ; do as i do. it is not worth the while to snive1 about it. i am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society. i am not the son of the engineer. i perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. if a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies ; and so a man. i have never declined paying the highway tax, because i am as desirous of being a good neighbour as i am of being a bad subject ; and as for qívil ſºigobeofence 29 supporting schools, i am doing my part to educate my fellow-countrymen now. it is for no particular item in the tax-bill that i refuse to pay it. i simply wish to refuse allegiance to the state, to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually. i do not care to trace the course of my dollar, if i could, till it buys a man or a musket to shoot one with ; the dollar is innocent, but i am concerned to trace the effects of my allegiance. in fact, i quietly declare war with the state, after my fashion, though i will still make what use and get what advantage of her i can, as is usual in such cases. if others pay the tax which is demanded of me from a sympathy with the state, they do but what they have already done in their own case, or rather they abet injustice to a greater extent than the state requires. if they pay the tax from a mistaken interest in the individual taxed, to save his property, or prevent his going to gaol, it is because they have not considered wisely how far they let their private feelings interfere with the public good. this, then, is my position at present. but one cannot be too much on his guard in such a case, lest his action be biassed by obstinacy, or an undue regard for the opinions of men. let him see that he does only what belongs to himself and to the hour. i think sometimes, why, this people mean well; they are only ignorant; they would do better if they knew how ; why give your neighbours this pain to treat you as they are not inclined to ? but i think again, this is no reason 30 on the ºuty of why i should do as they do, or permit others to suffer much greater pain of a different kind. again, i sometimes say to myself, when many millions of men, without heat, without ill-will, without personal feeling of any kind, demand of you a few shillings only, without the possibility, such is their constitution, of retracting or altering their present demand, and without the possibility, on your side, of appeal to any other millions, why expose yourself to this overwhelming brute force p you do not resist cold and hunger, the winds and the waves, thus obstinately ; you quietly submit to a thousand similar necessities. you do not put your head into the fire. but just in proportion as i regard this as not wholly a brute force, but partly a human force, and consider that i have relations to those millions, as to so many millions of men, and not of mere brute or inanimate things, i see that appeal is possible, first and instantaneously, from them to the maker of them, and, secondly, from them to themselves. but if i put my head deliberately into the fire, there is no appeal to fire or to the maker of fire, and i have only myself to blame. if i could convince myself that i have any right to be satisfied with men as they are, and to treat them accordingly, and not according, in some respects, to my requisitions and expectations of what they and i ought to be, then, like a good mussulman and fatalist, i should endeavour to be satisfied with things as they are, and say it is the will of god. and, above all, there is this difference between resisting this and a purely brute or natural force, that i can resist this civil øigobeoience 3 i with some effect ; but i cannot expect, like orpheus, to change the nature of the rocks and trees and beasts. i do not wish to quarrel with any man or nation. i do not wish to split hairs, to make fine distinctions, or set myself up as better than my neighbours. i seek rather, i may say, even an excuse for conforming to the laws of the land. i am but too ready to conform to them. indeed, i have reason to suspect myself on this head ; and each year, as the tax-gatherer comes round, i find myself disposed to review the acts and position of the general and state governments, and the spirit of the people, to discover a pretext for conformity. we must affect our country as our parents, and if at any time we alienate our love or industry from doing it honour, we must respect effects and teach the soul matter of conscience and religion, and not desire of rule or benefit. i believe that the state will soon be able to take all my work of this sort out of my hands, and then i shall be no better a patriot than my fellowcountrymen. seen from a lower point of view the constitution, with all its faults, is very good ; the law and the courts are very respectable ; even this state and this american government are, in many respects, very admirable and rare things, to be thankful for, such as a great many have described them ; but seen from a point of view a little higher, they are what i have described them ; seen from a higher still, and the highest, 32 qn the øuty of who shall say what they are, or that they are worth looking at or thinking of at all p however, the government does not concern me much, and i shall bestow the fewest possible thoughts on it. it is not many moments that i live under a government, even in this world. if a man is thought-free, fancy-free, imaginationfree, that which is not never for a long time appearing to be to him, unwise rulers or reformers cannot fatally interrupt him. i know that most men think differently from myself; but those whose lives are by profession devoted to the study of these or kindred subjects, content me as little as any. statesmen and legislators, standing so completely within the institution, never distinctly and nakedly behold it. they speak of moving society, but have no resting-place without it. they may be men of a certain experience and discrimination, and have no doubt invented ingenious and even useful systems, for which we sincerely thank them ; but all their wit and usefulness lie within certain not very wide limits. they are wont to forget that the world is not governed by policy and expediency . . . the lawyer's truth is not truth, but consistency, or a consistent expediency. truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrongdoing. . . . they who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced up this stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the bible and the constitution, and drink at it there with reverence and civil disobedience 33 humility ; but they who behold where it comes trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more, and continue their pilgrimage toward its fountain-head. . . . for eighteen hundred years, though perchance i have no right to say it, the new testament has been written ; yet where is the legislator who has wisdom and practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which it sheds on the science of legislation ? the authority of government, even such as i am willing to submit to—for i will cheerfully obey those who know and can do better than i, and in many things even those who neither know nor can do so well—is still an impure one : to be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent of the governed. it can have no pure right over my person and property but what i concede to it. the progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress towards a true respect for the individual. even the chinese philosopher was wise enough to regard the individual as the basis of the empire. is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government 2 is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man p there will never be a really free and enlightened state until the state comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. i please c 34 qn the ºutg of myself with imagining a state at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbour ; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbours and fellow-men. a state which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious state, which also i have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen. “the cost of disobedience.” by one who has tried it. on april 26, 1902, a polite and even friendly individual handed me a communication from none other than the king himself—not because of my intimate acquaintance with the king, but because of his need of money—demanding of me the sum of £2 16s. 6d. for unpaid income tax, £1 6s. 8d. for the letter, and an appearance before the king's remembrancer, royal courts of justice, strand, ilondon. i learned from a friend in the law, that to comply strictly with the command and enter an appearance, would involve needless and useless expense, so the following reply was sent : civil ºfgobeoſence 35 derby, may 7, 1902. to the king's remembrancer, london. i have received a command from the king to enter an appearance at your office to answer him concerning certain articles to be objected against me, viz., that he wants £2 16s od, from me (which i have not paid) to carry on his wars. with every wish to oblige, i cannot see it is to any one's advantage that i should make an expensive journey to london in order to present myself at the high court. i, therefore, content myself with stating here the precise grounds upon which i decline to afford that assistance which the king demands of me. i am engaged in peaceful industry, and receive in recompence for my work a certain sum of money. perhaps it is more than i deserve—but no matter. although i feel that there are many legitimate claims upon my service and my wealth, it is a fact that i cannot and do not comply with them all. there are so many poor people who have no clothes, houses, food, or land. and yet the king, who himself—along with his associates—has an abundance of these things, demands of me two pounds and sixteen shillings. unfortunately, i am not in ignorance of the meaning of this demand ; it is not for food, clothing or lands to succour some hapless folk, or even to meet the personal needs of the king himself; but that he and his government may have the wherewithal to murder men like you and me. there is not a shadow of doubt as to this ; in fact, i have blood on my hands already. in 190o an officer appeared in my workroom and suggested i should pay the income tax. as i rung the counters on the table, he (saying to himself, no doubt, “that’s the sort of tax-payer we like ’’) said to me: “you will have the satisfaction of knowing that we are going to crush the boers with this.” the following year, without any doubt that i was by my action supporting the very crimes i had been denouncing, i paid the tax under protest. this year i simply stand still, and advise the king's government to send the hat round to those who approve of their work. if i were asked to help in matters harmonious to my conscience—to feed the starving indians, to uplift the millions of destitute poor, to reclaim to the labourer his 36 on the ſputy of rightful share of land, i should find it impossible to decline. but no ; i am too well aware that the state is an organised violence existing by virtue of army, navy, police, prisons, judges and hangmen, and that in handing over £2 16s, od. to the king, i am helping the governing classes to maintain that flagrant injustice by which they have gradually disinherited millions upon millions of the workers of the world. i have learned, too, and cannot now forget, that this vast oppression is maintained by power of a vaster evil—the perversion of the truth. for the teaching of that jesus whom men call god is to the effect that we should love each other—before all things that ; that we should not hurt or destroy, but always help our fellows. such teaching, which i believe, abolishes all force, disregards all patriotisms, and urges that men should stop and think what folly they are committing. it is the simplest, most practical, and necessary teaching for the modern world. and yet, how stands the case ! like this: there are men paid thousands a year to promulgate this grand doctrine of practical life. they deny it, flout it; openly, brazenly ; and so successful is their false prophecy that the whole world is gone after them. it remains, then, for the few individuals (and they are many, nevertheless), whose perceptions of the real needs of human life is clear, to do the work the churches are neglecting, to testify to the truth they see, come what may. that is why i, a nonentity, without any feeling of personal hostility to you or any other officers of the king and government, find myself compelled to take the stand i do. a christian cannot wage war or help others to wage it for him. —i am, yours sincerely, william l. hare. the correspondence explains itself. the objection to assist the king in doing what appears to be wrong seems simple, to say the least. if we are to judge from the great blackstone, it has also the merit of being constitutional ; for he says, “no subject of england can be constrained to pay any aids or taxes, even for the defence of the civil øigobeofence 37 realm or the support of the government, but such as are imposed by his own consent.” how is it then, that for withholding that consent, i find myself inundated with papers, blue, yellow, and white, personally solicited and threatened with divers pains and penalties, and finally arrested and imprisoned 2 ay there's the rub. the terms of the warrant were unmistakable. the faithful sheriff of the county was to search out and seize all goods, chattels, lands, houses, tenements and messuages belonging to the said w. l. h., and to hold them unto our sovereign lord the king ; failing the discovery of such goods and chattels the sheriff was to scour the bailiwick in search of the body of w. l. h., to seize and possess it, and bring it unto our sovereign lord the king. the royal command was obeyed to the letter. the body of the editor of the candlestick was taken to one of his majesty's establishments, lodged and fed at his expense, and finally sold to friends for the sum of £7 i4s. 1d. that is how the king got his money. how was the price arrived at 2 like this : £ s. d. item. contribution to cost of king's wars 2 16 o -writing one letter from the king (cost about 1.d.) . . . . . i 6 8 -part of judge's salary for trying case (without hearing it) . . i i4 5 -part of sherift's salary for finding the body . . . . . i i7 o £7 i4 i 38 civil ºf 3obeofence in such cases there is no sentence or period of imprisonment prescribed. it is “pull devil, pull baker’’; you simply wait. i was told of former prisoners whose fate was somewhat as follows: (1) discharge by doctor's orders after io months ; (2) discharge by doctor's orders after ii months ; (3) discharge after 14 months ; the released prisoner died in a few days. the terms are, frankly, those of the highway robber, your money or your life. you thought, did you not, that force was an outworn instrument ; that people relied upon reason and law. i have shewn you that force is at the back of your every act of government, and that the way to bring down the edifice of tyranny which is on your backs is to decline to support it. w. l. h. 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street, e.c. life aſ without principle by henry david thoreau author of “walpen,” “the duty of civil disobedience,” etc * º º º º º º anusociºus bºº xºlº, illinus london : arthur c. fifield the simple life press 44 fleet street e.c 1905 “if a man were to place himself in an attitude to bear manſu//y the greatest evil that can be inflicted on him, he would find suddenly that žhere was no such evil to bear, his braze back would go a-begging. when atlas got his back made up, that was al/ that was required. the world rests on principles.” — h. d. thoreau, lab, | lab. bequeſ |º life without principle t a lyceum, not long since, i felt that the lecturer had chosen a theme too foreign to himself, and so failed to interest me as much as he might have done. he described things not in or near to his heart, but toward his extremities and superficies. there was, in this sense, no truly central or centralising thought in the lecture. i would have had him deal with his privatest experience, as the poet does. the greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what i thought, and attended to my answer. i am surprised, as well as delighted, when this happens; it is such a rare use he would make of me, as if he were acquainted with the tool. commonly, if men want anything of me, it is only to know how many acres i make of their land,since i am a surveyor, or, at most, what trivial news i have burdened myself with. they never will go to law for my meat; they prefer the shell. a man once came a considerable distance to ask me to lecture on slavery ; but on conversing with him, i found that he and his clique expected seven-eighths of the lecture to be theirs, and only one-eighth mine ; so i declined. i take it for granted, when i am invited to lecture anywhere— for i have had a little experience in that business, —that there is a desire to hear what i think on 5 6 life without principle some subject, though i may be the greatest fool in the country, and not that i should say pleasant things merely, or such as the audience will assent to ; and i resolve, accordingly, that i will give them a strong dose of myself. they have sent for me and engaged to pay for me, and i am determined that they shall have me, though i bore them beyond all precedent. so now i would say something similar to you, my readers. since you are my readers and i have not been much of a traveller, i will not talk about people a thousand miles off, but come as near home as i can. as the time is short, i will leave out all the flattery, and retain all the criticism. let us consider the way in which we spend our lives. this world is a place of business. what an infinite bustle ! i am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. it interrupts my dreams. there is no sabbath. it would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. it is nothing but work, work, work. i cannot easily buy a blank book to write thoughts in ; they are commonly ruled for dollars and cents. an irishman, seeing me making a minute in the fields, took it for granted that i was calculating my wages. if a man was tossed out of a window when an infant, and so made a cripple for life, or scared out of his wits by the indians, it is regretted chiefly because he was thus incapacitated for—business | i think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business. there is a coarse and boisterous money-making fellow in the outskirts of our town, who is going to build a bank-wall under the hill along the edge life without principle 7 of his meadow. the powers have put this into his head to keep him out of mischief, and he wishes me to spend three weeks digging there with him. the result will be that he will perhaps get some more money to hoard, and leave for his heirs to spend foolishly. if i do this, most will commend me as an industrious and hardworking man ; but if i choose to devote myself to certain labours which yield more real profit, though but little money, they may be inclined to look on me as an idler. nevertheless, as i do not need the police of meaningless labour to regulate me, and do not see anything absolutely praiseworthy in this fellow's undertaking, any more than in many an enterprise of our own or foreign governments, however amusing it may be to him or them, i prefer to finish my education at a different school. if a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. as if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down | most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. but many are no more worthily employed now. for instance : just after sunrise, one summer morning, i noticed one of my neighbours walking beside his team, which was slowly drawing a heavy hewn stone swung under the axle, surrounded by an atmosphere of industry, his day's work begun, his brow 8 life without principle commenced to sweat, a reproach to all sluggards and idlers, pausing abreast the shoulders of his oxen, and half turning round with a flourish of his merciful whip, while they gained their length on him. and i thought, such is the labour which the american congress exists to protect, honest, manly toil, honest as the day is long, -that makes his bread taste sweet, and keeps society sweet,_which all men respect and have consecrated ; one of the sacred band, doing the needful but irksome drudgery. indeed, i felt a slight reproach, because i observed this from a window, and was not abroad and stirring about a similar business. the day went by, and at evening i passed the yard of another neighbour, who keeps many servants, and spends much money foolishly, while he adds nothing to the common stock, and there i saw the stone of the morning lying beside a whimsical structure intended to adorn this lord timothy dexter's premises, and the dignity forthwith departed from the teamster's labour, in my eyes. in my opinion, the sun was made to light worthier toil than this. i may add, that his employer has since run off, in debt to a good part of the town, and, after passing through chancery, has settled somewhere else, there to become once more a patron of the arts. the ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. to have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle, or worse. if the labourer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him he is cheated—he cheats himself. if you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly. those services which the community life without principle 9 will most readily pay for, it is most disagreeable to render. you are paid for being something less than a man. the state does not commonly reward a genius any more wisely. even the poet-laureate would rather not have to celebrate the accidents of royalty. he must be bribed with a pipe of wine; and perhaps another poet is called away from his muse to gauge that very pipe. as for my own business, even that kind of surveying which i could do with most satisfaction my employers do not want. they would prefer that i should do my work coarsely and not too well—ay, not well enough. when i observe that there are different ways of surveying, my employer commonly asks which will give him the most land, not which is most correct. i once invented a rule for measuring cord-wood, and tried to introduce it in boston ; but the measurer there told me that the sellers did not wish to have their wood measured correctly,–that he was already too accurate for them, and therefore they commonly got their wood measured in charlestown before crossing the bridge. the aim of the labourer should be, not to get his living, to get “a good job,” but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its labourers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it. # it is remarkable that there are few men so well employed, so much to their minds, but that a little money or fame would commonly buy them off from their present pursuit. i see advertiseio life without principle ments for active young men, as if activity were the whole of a young man's capital. yet i have been surprised when one has with confidence proposed to me, a grown man, to embark in some enterprise of his, as if i had absolutely nothing to do, my life having been a complete failure hitherto. what a doubtful compliment this is to pay me ! as if he had met me half-way across the ocean beating up against the wind, but bound nowhere, and proposed to me to go along with him if i did, what do you think the underwriters would say p no, no i am not without employment at this stage of the voyage. to tell the truth, i saw an advertisement for able-bodied seamen, when i was a boy, sauntering in my native port, and as soon as i came of age i embarked. the community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man. you may raise money to tunnel a mountain, but you cannot raise money enough to hire a man who is minding his own business. an efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the community pay him for it or not. the inefficient offer their inefficiency to the highest bidder, and are for ever expecting to be put into office. one would suppose that they were rarely disappointed. perhaps i am more than usually jealous with respect to my freedom. i feel that my connection with and obligation to society are still very slight and transient. those slight labours which afford me a livelihood, and by which it is allowed that i am to some extent serviceable to my contemporaries, are as yet commonly a pleasure to me, and i am not often reminded that they are a necessity. so far i am successful. but i forelife without principle ii see that, if my wants should be much increased, the labour required to supply them would become a drudgery. if i should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, i am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for. i trust that i shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage. i wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. there is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living. all great enterprises are self-supporting. the poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it makes. you must get your living by loving. but as it is said of the merchants that ninety-seven in a hundred fail, so the life of men generally, tried by this standard, is a failure, and bankruptcy may be surely prophesied. merely to come into the world the heir of a fortune is not to be born, but to be still-born, rather. to be supported by the charity of friends, or a government pension,-provided you continue to breathe, by whatever fine synonyms you describe these relations, is to go into the almshouse. on sundays the poor debtor goes to church to take an account of stock, and finds, of course, that his outgoes have been greater than his income. in the catholic church, especially, they go into chancery, make a clean confession, give up all, and think to start again. thus men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up. as for the comparative demand which men make on life, it is an important difference between two, that the one is satisfied with a level success, i2 life without principle that his marks can all be hit by point-blank shots, but the other, however low and unsuccessful his life may be, constantly elevates his aim, though at a very slight angle to the horizon. i should much rather be the last man,—though, as the orientals say, “greatness doth not approach him who is for ever looking down ; and all those who are looking high are growing poor.” it is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting a living : how to make getting a living not merely honest and honourable, but altogether inviting and glorious ; for if getting a living is not so, then living is not. one would think, from looking at literature, that this question had never disturbed a solitary individual’s musings. is it that men are too much disgusted with their experience to speak of it 2 the lesson of value which money teaches, which the author of the universe has taken so much pains to teach us, we are inclined to skip altogether. as for the means of living, it is wonderful how indifferent men of all classes are about it, even reformers, so called,—whether they inherit, or earn, or steal it. i think that society has done nothing for us in this respect, or at least has undone what she has done. cold and hunger seem more friendly to my nature than those methods which men have adopted and advise to ward them off. the title wise is, for the most part, falsely applied. how can one be a wise man, if he does not know any better how to live than other men p —if he is only more cunning and intellectually subtle p does wisdom work in a treadmill p or does she teach how to succeed by her example? is there any such thing as wisdom not applied to life without principle i3 life 2 is she merely the miller who grinds the finest logic p. it is pertinent to ask if plato got his living in a better way or more successfully than his contemporaries, or did he succumb to the difficulties of life like other men p did he seem to prevail over some of them merely by indifference, or by assuming grand airs 2 or find it easier to live, because his aunt remembered him in her will p the ways in which most men get their living, that is, live, are mere makeshifts, and a shirking of the real business of life, chiefly because they do not know, but partly because they do not mean, any better. the rush to california, for instance, and the attitude, not merely of merchants, but of philosophers and prophets, so called, in relation to it, reflect the greatest disgrace on mankind. that so many are ready to live by luck, and so get the means of commanding the labour of others less lucky, without contributing any value to society and that is called enterprise ! i know of no more startling development of the immorality of trade, and all the common modes of getting a living. the philosophy and poetry and religion of such a mankind are not worth the dust of a puff-ball. the hog that gets his living by rooting, stirring up the soil so, would be ashamed of such company. if i could command the wealth of all the worlds by lifting my finger, i would not pay such a price for it. even mahomet knew that god did not make this world in jest. it makes god to be a moneyed gentleman who scatters a handful of pennies in order to see mankind scramble for them. the world’s raffle a subsistence in the domains of nature a thing to be raffled for what a comment, what a i4 life without principle satire, on our institutions ! the conclusion will be, that mankind will hang itself upon a tree. and have all the precepts in all the bibles taught men only this p and is the last and most admirable invention of the human race only an improved muck-rake 2 is this the ground on which orientals and occidentals meet p did god direct us so to get our living, digging where we never planted,—and he would, perchance, reward us with lumps of gold p god gave the righteous man a certificate entitling him to food and raiment, but the unrighteous man found a fac-simile of the same in god's coffers, and appropriated it, and obtained food and raiment like the former. it is one of the most extensive systems of counterfeiting that the world has seen. i did not know that mankind were suffering for want of gold. i have seen a little of it. i know that it is very malleable, but not so malleable as wit. a grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom. the gold-digger in the ravines of the mountains is as much a gambler as his fellow in the saloons of san francisco, what difference does it make, whether you shake dirt or shake dice p if you win, society is the loser. the gold-digger is the enemy of the honest labourer, whatever checks and compensations there may be. it is not enough to tell me that you worked hard to get your gold. so does the devil work hard. the way of transgressors may be hard in many respects. the humblest observer who goes to the mines sees and says that gold-digging is of the character of a lottery; the gold thus obtained is not the same thing with the wages of honest toil. but, practi. life without principle i5 cally, he forgets what he has seen, for he has seen only the fact, not the principle, and goes into trade there—that is, buys a ticket in what commonly proves another lottery, where the fact is not so obvious. after reading howitt's account of the australian gold-diggings one evening, i had in my mind's eye all night the numerous valleys, with their streams, all cut up with foul pits, from ten to one hundred feet deep, and half-a-dozen feet across, as close as they can be dug, and partly filled with water, the locality to which men furiously rush to probe for their fortunes, uncertain where they shall break ground,-not knowing but the gold is under their camp itself, sometimes digging one hundred and sixty feet before they strike the vein, or then missing it by a foot, turned into demons, and regardless of each other's rights, in their thirst for riches, whole valleys, for thirty miles, suddenly honeycombed by the pits of the miners, so that even hundreds are drowned in them,-standing in water, and covered with mud and clay, they work night and day, dying of exposure and disease. having read this, and partly forgotten it, i was thinking, accidentally, of my own unsatisfactory life, doing as others do ; and with that vision of the diggings still before me, i asked myself why i might not be washing some gold daily, though it were only the finest particles, why i might not sink a shaft down to the gold within me, and work that mine. there is a ballarat, a bendigo, for you, -what though it were a sulky\gully ? at any rate, i might pursue some path, however solitary and narrow and crooked, in which i could walk with love and reverence. i6 life without principle wherever a man separates from the multitude, and goes his own way in this mood, there indeed is a fork in the road, though ordinary travellers may see only a gap in the paling. his solitary path across-lots will turn out the higher way of the two. men rush to california and australia as if the true gold were to be found in that direction ; but that is to go to the very opposite extreme to where it lies. they go prospecting farther and farther away from the true lead, and are most unfortunate when they think themselves most successful. is not our native soil auriferous p does not a stream from the golden mountains flow through our native valley p and has not this for more than geologic ages been bringing down the shining particles and forming the nuggets for us p. yet, strange to tell, if a digger steal away, prospecting for this true gold, into the unexplored solitudes around us, there is no danger that any will dog his steps, and endeavour to supplant him. he may claim and undermine the whole valley even, both the cultivated and the uncultivated portions, his whole life long in peace, for no one will ever dispute his claim. they will not mind his cradles or his toms. he is not confined to a claim twelve feet square, as at ballarat, but may mine anywhere, and wash the whole wide world in his tom. howitt says of the man who found the great nugget which weighed twenty-eight pounds, at the bendigo diggings in australia : “he soon began to drink; got a horse, and rode all about, generally at full gallop, and, when he met with people, called out to inquire if they knew who he was, and then kindly informed them that he was ‘the bloody wretch that had found the nugget,” life without principle i7 at last he rode full speed against a tree, and nearly knocked his brains out. i think, however, there was no danger of that, for he had already knocked his brains out against the nugget. howitt adds, “he is a hopelessly ruined man.” but he is a type of the class. they are all fast men. hear some of the names of the places where they dig : “jackass flat,” “sheep's-head gully,” “murderer's bar,” etc. is there no satire in these names p let them carry their ill-gotten wealth where they will, i am thinking it will still be “jackass flat,” if not “murderer's bar,” where they live. the last resource of our energy has been the robbing of graveyards on the isthmus of darien, an enterprise which appears to be but in its infancy; for, according to late accounts, an act has passed its second reading in the legislature of new granada, regulating this kind of mining ; and a correspondent of the tribune writes: “in the dry season, when the weather will permit of the country being properly prospected, no doubt other rich guacas [that is, graveyards] will be found.” to emigrants he says: “do not come before december ; take the isthmus route in preference to the boca del toro one ; bring no useless baggage, and do not cumber yourself with a tent; but a good pair of blankets will be necessary; a pick, shovel, and axe of good material will be almost all that is required '': advice which might have been taken from the burkey’s guide. and he concludes with this line in italics and small capitals: “if you are doing well at home, stay there,” which may fairly be interpreted to mean, “if you are getting a good living by robbing graveyards at home, stay there.” b i8 life without principle but why go to california for a text? she is the child of new england, bred at her own school and church. it is remarkable that among all the preachers there are so few moral teachers. the prophets are employed in excusing the ways of men. most reverend seniors, the illuminati of the age, tell me, with a gracious, reminiscent smile, betwixt an aspiration and a shudder, not to be too tender about these things, to lump all that, that is, make a lump of gold of it. the highest advice i have heard on these subjects was grovelling. the burden of it was, it is not worth your while to undertake to reform the world in this particular. do not ask how your bread is buttered ; it will make you sick, if you do, and the like. a man had better starve at once than lose his innocence in the process of getting his bread. if within the sophisticated man there is not an unsophisticated one, then he is but one of the devil's angels. as we grow old we live more coarsely, we relax a little in our disciplines, and, to some extent, cease to obey our finest instincts. but we should be fastidious to the extreme of sanity, disregarding the gibes of those who are more fortunate than ourselves. in our science and philosophy, even, there is commonly no true and absolute account of things. the spirit of sect and bigotry has planted its hoof amid the stars. you have only to discuss the problem whether the stars are inhabited or not, in order to discover it. why must we daub the heavens as well as the earth p. it was an unfortunate discovery that dr. kane was a mason, and that sir john franklin was another. but it was a more cruel suggestion that possibly that was the life without principle iq reason why the former went in search of the latter. there is not a popular magazine in this country that would dare to print a child’s thoughton important subjects without comment. it must be submitted to the d.d.’s. i would it were the chickadee-dees. you come from attending the funeral of mankind to attend to a natural phenomenon. a little thought is sexton to all the world. i hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society. most with whom you endeavour to talk soon come to a stand against some institution in which they appear to hold stock—that is, some particular, not universal way of viewing things. they will continually thrust their own low roof, with its narrow skylight, between you and the sky, when it is the unobstructed heavens you would view. get out of the way with your cobwebs, wash your windows, i say! in some lyceums they tell me that they have voted to exclude the subject of religion. but how do i know what their religion is, and when i am near to or far from it p i have walked into such an arena and done my best to make a clean breast of what religion i have experienced, and the audience never suspected what i was about. the lecture was as harmless as moonshine to them. whereas, if i had read to them the biography of the greatest scamps in history, they might have thought that i had written the lives of the deacons of their church. ordinarily, the inquiry is, where did you come from ? or, where are you going 2 that was a more pertinent question which i overheard one of my auditors put to another once : “what does he lecture for p’’ it made me quake in my shoes. 2o life without principle to speak impartially, the best men that i know are not serene, a world in themselves. for the most part they dwell in forms, and flatter and study effect only more finely than the rest. we select granite for the underpinning of our houses and barns ; we build fences of stone ; but we do not ourselves rest on an underpinning of granitic truth, the lowest primitive rock. our sills are rotten. what stuff is the man made of who is not co-existent in our thought with the purest and subtilest truth p i often accuse my finest acquaintances of an immense frivolity; for, while there are manners and compliments we do not meet, we do not teach one another the lessons of honesty and sincerity that the brutes do, or of steadiness and solidity that the rocks do. the fault is commonly mutual, however; for we do not habitually demand any more of each other. that excitement about kossuth, consider how characteristic, but superficial, it was 1–only another kind of politics or dancing. men were making speeches to him all over the country, but each expressed only the thought, or the want of thought, of the multitude. no man stood on truth. they were merely banded together, as usual, one leaning on another, and all together on nothing ; as the hindoos made the world rest on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent, and had nothing to put under the serpent. for all fruit of that stir we have the kossuth hat. just so hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary conversation. surface meets surface. when our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. we rarely meet a man who can tell us any news life without principle 2 i which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbour; and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not. in proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office. you may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while. i do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper a week. i have tried it recently, and for so long it seems to me that i have not dwelt in my native region. the sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees, say not so much to me. you cannot serve two masters. it requires more than a day's devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day. we may well be ashamed to tell what things we have read or heard in our day. i do not know why my news should be so trivial,—considering what one's dreams and expectations are, why the developments should be so paltry. the news we hear, for the most part, is not new to our genius. it is the stalest repetition. you are often tempted to ask why such stress is laid on a particular experience which you have had, that, after twenty-five years, you should meet hobbins, registrar of deeds, again on the side walk. have you not budged an inch, then p such is the daily news. its facts appear to float in the atmosphere, insignificant as the sporules of fungi, and, impinge on some neglected thallus, or surface of our minds, which affords a basis for them, and hence a parasitic growth. we should wash ourselves clean of such news. of what consequence, though our planet 22 life without principle explode, if there is no character involved in the explosion ? in health we have not the least curiosity about such events. we do not live for idle amusement. i would not run round a corner to see the world blow up. all summer, and far into the autumn, perchance, you unconsciously went by the newspapers and the news, and now you find it was because the morning and the evening were full of news to you. your walks were full of incidents. you attended, not to the affairs of europe, but to your own affairs in massachusetts fields. if you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events that make the news transpire, h thinner than the paper on whichitis printed,—then these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them. really to see the sun rise or go down every day, so to relate ourselves to a universal fact, would preserve us sane for ever. nations ! what are nations p tartars, and huns, and chinamen . like insects, they swarm. the historian strives in vain to make them memorable. it is for want of a man that there are so many men. it is individuals that populate the world. any man thinking may say with the spirit of lodin– i look down from my height on nations, and they become ashes before me;— calm is my dwelling in the clouds; pleasant are the great fields of my rest. pray, let us live without being drawn by dogs, esquimaux-fashion, tearing over hill and dale, and biting each other's ears. life without principle 23 not without a slight shudder at the danger, i often perceive how near i have come to admitting into my mind the details of some trivial affair, h the news of the street; and i am astonished to observe how willing men are to lumber their minds with such rubbish, to permit idle rumours and incidents of the most insignificant kind to intrude on ground which should be sacred to thought. shall the mind be a public arena, where the affair of the street and the gossip of the tea table chiefly are discussed ? or shall it be a quarter of heaven itself, an hypaethral temple, consecrated to the service of the gods p i find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant that i hesitate to burden my attention with those which are insignificant, which only a divine mind could illustrate. such is, for the most part, the news in newspapers and conversation. it is important to preserve the mind's chastity in this respect. think of admitting the details of a single case of the criminal court into our thoughts, to stalk profanely through their very sanctum sanctorum for an hour, ay, for many hours to make a very bar-room of the mind's inmost apartment, as if for so long the dust of the street had occupied us, the very street itself with all its travel, its bustle, and filth, had passed through our thoughts’ shrine ! would it not be an intellectual and moral suicide 2 when i have been compelled to sit spectator and auditor in a court room for some hours, and have seen my neighbours, who were not compelled, stealing in from time to time, and tiptoeing about with washed hands and faces, it has appeared to my mind's eye that, when they took off their hats, theirs ears suddenly expanded into vast hoppers for 24 life without principle sound, between which even their narrow heads were crowded. like the vanes of windmills, they caught the broad but shallow stream of sound, which, after a few titillating gyrations in their co brains, passed out the other side. i wondered if, when they got home, they were as careful to wash their ears as before their hands and faces. it has seemed to me, at such a time, that the auditors and the witnesses, the jury and the counsel, the judge and the criminal at the bar, if i may presume him guilty before he is convicted,—were all equally criminal, and a thunderbolt might be expected to descend and consume them all together. by all kinds of traps and signboards, threatening the extreme penalty of the divine law, exclude such trespassers from the only ground which can be sacred to you. it is so hard to forget what it is worse than useless to remember if i am to be a thoroughfare, i prefer that it be of the mountain brooks, the parnassian streams, and not the town sewers. there is inspiration, that gossip which comes to the ear of the attentive mind from the courts of heaven. there is the profane and stale revelation of the bar-room and the police court. the same ear is fitted to receive both communications. only the character of the hearer determines to which it shall be open, and to which closed. i believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality. our very intellect shall be macadamised, as it were, its foundation broken into fragments for the wheels of travel to roll over ; and if you would know what will make the most durable pavement, surpassing rolled stones, spruce blocks, and asphaltum, you have only to look into some life without principle 25 of our minds which have been subjected to this treatment so long." if we have thus desecrated ourselves, as who has not 2–the remedy will be by wariness and devotion to reconsecrate ourselves, and make once more a fane of the mind. we should treat our minds—that is, ourselves—as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention. read not the times. read the eternities. conventionalities are at length as bad as impurities. even the facts of science may dust the mind by their dryness, unless they are in a sense effaced each morning, or rather rendered fertile by the dews of fresh and living truth. knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven. yes, every thought that passes through the mind helps to wear and tear it, and to deepen the ruts, which, as in the streets of pompeii, evince how much it has been used. how many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them,-had better let their peddling carts be driven, even at the slowest trot or walk, over that bridge of glorious span by which we trust to pass at last from the farthest brink of time to the nearest shore of eternity i have we no culture, no refinement, but skill only to live coarsely and serve the devil p-to acquire a little worldly wealth, or fame, or liberty, and make a false show with it, as if we were all husk and shell, with no tender and living kernel to us p shall our institutions be like those chestnut-burrs which contain abortive nuts, perfect only to prick the fingers ? america is said to be the arena on which the battle of freedom is to be fought; but surely it 26 life without principle cannot be freedom in a merely political sense that is meant. even if we grant that the american has freed himself from a political tyrant, he is still the slave of an economical and moral tyrant. now that the republic—the res-publica—has been settled, it is time to look after the res-privata, the private state,_to see, as the roman senate charged its consuls, “ne quid res privata detrimenti caper et,” that the private state receive no detriment. do we call this the land of the free ? what is it to be free from king george and continue the slaves of king prejudice p what is it to be born free and not to live free ? what is the value of any political freedom but as a means to moral freedom p. is it a freedom to be slaves, or a freedom to be free, of which we boast 2 we are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outmost fences only of freedom. it is our children's children who may perchance be really free. we tax ourselves unjustly. there is a part of us which is not represented. it is taxation without representation. we quarter troops, we quarter fools and cattle of all sorts upon ourselves. we quarter our gross bodies on our poor souls, till the former eat up all the latter's substance. with respect to a true culture and manhood, we are essentially provincial still, not metropolitan,— mere jonathans. we are provincial, because we do not find at home our standards,--because we do not worship truth, but the reflection of truth, because we are warped and narrowed by an exclusive devotion to trade and commerce and manufactures and agriculture, and the like, which are but means, and not the end. so is the english parliament provincial. mere country bumpkins, they betray themselves, when life without principle 27 -any more important question arises for them to settle, the irish question, for instance,—the english question why did i not say ? their natures are subdued to what they work in. their “good breeding ” respects only secondary objects. the finest manners in the world are awkwardness and fatuity, when contrasted with a finer intelligence. they appear but as the fashions of past days, mere courtliness, knee-buckles and small-clothes, out of date. it is the vice, but not the excellence of manners, that they are continually being deserted by the character; they are cast-off clothes or shells, claiming the respect which belonged to the living creature. you are presented with the shells instead of the meat, and it is no excuse generally that, in the case of some fishes, the shells are of more worth than the meat. the man who thrusts his manners upon me does as if he were to insist on introducing me to his cabinet of curiosities when i wished to see himself. it was not in this sense that the poet decker called christ “the first truegentleman that ever breathed.” i repeat, that in this sense the most splendid court in christendom is provincial, having authority to consult about transalpine interests only, and not the affairs of rome. a praetor or proconsul would suffice to settle the questions which absorb the attention of the english parliament and the american congress. government and legislation these i thought were respectable professions. we have heard of heaven-born numas, lycurguses, and solons, in the history of the world, whose names at least may stand for ideal legislators; but think of legislating to regulate the breeding of slaves, or the exportation of tobacco / what have divine legislators 28 life without principle to do with the exportation or the importation of tobacco p what humane ones with the breeding of slaves p suppose you were to submit the question to any son of god, and has he no children in the nineteenth century pisit a family which is extinct 2 —in what condition would you get it again p what shall a state like virginia say for itself at the last day, in which these have been the principal, the staple productions p what ground is there for patriotism in such a state p i derive my facts from statistical tables which the states themselves have published. a commerce that whitens every sea in quest of nuts and raisins, and makes slaves of its sailors for this purpose ! i saw, the other day, a vessel which had been wrecked, and many lives lost, and her cargo of rags, juniper berries, and bitter almonds were strewn along the shore. it seemed hardly worth the while to tempt the dangers of the sea between leghorn and new york for the sake of a cargo of juniper berries and bitter almonds. america sending to the old world for her bitters is not the sea brine, is not shipwreck, bitter enough to make the cup of life go down here 2 yet such, to a great extent, is our boasted commerce; and there are those who style themselves statesmen and philosophers who are so blind as to think that progresss and civilization depend on precisely this kind of interchange and activity,+ the activity of flies about a molasses hogshead. very well, observes one, if men were oysters. and very well, answer i, if men were mosquitoes. lieutenant herndon, whom our government sent to explore the amazon, and, it is said, to extend the area of slavery, observed that there was wanting there “an industrious and active population, who life without principle 29 know what the comforts of life are, and who have artificial wants to draw out the great resources of the country.” but what are the “artificial wants '' to be encouraged 2 not the love of luxuries, like the tobacco and slaves of, i believe, his native virginia, nor the ice and granite and other material wealth of our native new england ; nor are “the great resources of a country’’ that fertility or barrenness of soil which produces these. the chief want, in every state that i have been into, was a high and earnest purpose in its inhabitants. this alone draws out “the great resources '' of nature,and at last taxes her beyond her resources; for man naturally dies out of her. when we want culture more than potatoes, and illumination more than sugar plums, then the great resources of a world are taxed and drawn out, and the result, or staple production, is—not slaves, nor operatives, but men, those rare fruits called heroes, saints, poets, philosophers, and redeemers. in short, as a snowdrift is formed where there is a lull in the wind, so, one would say, where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up. but the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at length blows it down. what is called politics is comparatively something so superficial and inhuman, that, practically, i have never fairly recognised that it concerns me at all. the newspapers, i perceive, devote some of their columns specially to politics or government without charge ; and this, one would say, is all that saves it ; but, as i love literature, and, to some extent, the truth also, i never read those columns at any rate. i do not wish to blunt my sense of right so much. i have not got to answer for having read a single president's message. a 30 life without principle strange age of the world this, when empires, kingdoms, and republics come a-begging to a private man's door, and utter their complaints at his elbow ! i cannot take up a newspaper but i find that some wretched government or other, hard pushed, and on its last legs, is interceding with me, the reader, to vote for it, more importunate than a italian beggar ; and if i have a mind to look at its certificate, made, perchance, by some benevolent merchant's clerk, or the skipper that brought it over, for it cannot speak a word of english itself, i shall probably read of the eruption of some vesuvius, or the over-flowing of some po, true or forged, which brought it into this condition. i do not hesitate, in such a case, to suggest work, or the almshouse; or why not keep its castle in silence, as i do commonly p. the poor president, what with preserving his popularity and doing his duty, is completely bewildered. the newspapers are the ruling power. any other government is reduced to a few marines at fort independence. if a man neglects to read his daily times, government will go down on its hands and knees to him, for this is the only treason in these days. those things which now most engage the attention of men, as politics and the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions of human society, but should be unconsciously performed, like the corresponding functions of the physical body. they are infra-human, a kind of vegetation. i sometimes awake to a half consciousness of them going on about me, as a man may become conscious of some of the processes of digestion in a morbid state and so have the dyspepsia, as it is called. it is as if a thinker submitted himself life without principle 3i to be rasped by the great gizzard of creation. politics is, as it were, the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its two opposite halves—sometimes split into quarters, it may be, which grind on each other. not only individuals, but states, have thus a confirmed dyspepsia, which expresses itself, you can imagine by what sort of eloquence. thus our life is not altogether a forgetting, but also, alas ! to a great extent, a remembering of that which we should never have been conscious of, certainly not in our waking hours. why should we not meet, not always as dyspeptics, to tell our bad dreams, but sometimes as eupeptics, to congratulate each other on the ever-glorious morning. i do not make an exorbitant demand, surely. the higher life from thoreau's private letters do believe that the outward and the inward life correspond ; that if any should succeed to live a higher life, others would know of it; that difference and distance are one. to set about living a true life is to go a journey to a distant country, gradually to find ourselves surrounded by new scenes and men ; and as long as the old are around me, i know that i am not in any true sense living a new or a better life. the outward is only the outside of that which is within. men are not concealed under habits, but are revealed by them ; they are their true clothes. i care not how curious a reason they may give for their abiding by them. circum32 the higher life stances are not rigid and unyielding, but our habits are rigid. we are apt to speak vaguely sometimes, as if a divine life were to be grafted on to or built over this present as a suitable foundation. this might do if we could so build over our old life as to exclude from it all the warmth of our affection, and addle it, as the thrush builds over the cuckoo's egg, and lays her own atop, and hatches that only ; but the fact is, we—so there is the partition—hatch them both, and the cuckoo's always by a day first, and that young bird crowds the young thrushes out of the nest. no. destroy the cuckoo's egg, or build a new nest. change is change. no new life occupies the old bodies;–they decay. it is born, and grows, and flourishes. men very pathetically inform the old, accept and wear it. why put up with the almshouse when you may go to heaven p it is embalming, no more. let alone your ointments and your linen swathes, and go into an infant’s body. you see in the catacombs of egypt the result of that experiment, that is the end of it. i do believe in simplicity. it is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest man thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. when the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all encumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. so simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. probe the earth to see where your main roots run. i would stand upon facts. why not see, use our eyes p do men know nothing 2 i know many men who, in common things, are not to be deceived ; who the higher life 33 trust no moonshine ; who count their money correctly, and know how to invest it; who are said to be prudent and knowing, who yet will stand at a desk the greater part of their lives, as cashiers in banks, and glimmer and rust and finally go out there. if they know anything, what under the sun do they do that for p do they know what bread is p or what it is for p do they know what life is p. if they knew something, the places which know them now would know them no more for ever. this, our respectable daily life, in which the man of common sense, the englishman of the world, stands so squarely, and on which our institutions are founded, is in fact the veriest illusion, and will vanish like the baseless fabric of a vision ; but that faint glimmer of reality which sometimes illuminates the darkness of daylight for all men reveals something more solid and enduring than adamant, which is in fact the corner-stone of the world. men cannot conceive of a state of things so fair that it cannot be realised. can any man honestly consult his experience and say that it is so p have we any facts to appeal to when we say that our dreams are premature p did you ever hear of a man who had striven all his life faithfully and singly toward an object and in no measure obtained it p if a man constantly aspires, is he not elevated p did ever a man try heroism, magnanimity, truth, sincerity, and find that there was no advantage in them 2 that it was a vain endeavour p. of course we do not expect that our paradise will be a garden. we know not what we ask. to look at literature;— how many fine thoughts has every man had c 34 the higher life how few fine thoughts are expressed yet we never have a fantasy so subtile and ethereal, but that talent merely, with more resolution and faithful persistency, after a thousand failures, might fix and engrave it in distinct and enduring words, and we should see that our dreams are the solidest facts that we know. but i speak not of dreams. what can be expressed in words can be expressed in life. my actual life is a fact, in view of which i have no occasion to congratulate myself; but for my faith and aspiration i have respect. it is from these that i speak. every man's position is in fact too simple to be described. i have sworn no oath. i have no designs on society, or nature, or god. i am simply what i am, or i begin to be that. i live in the present. i only remember the past, and anticipate the future. i love to live. i love reform better than its modes. there is no history of how bad became better. i believe something, and there is nothing else but that. i know that i am. i know that another is who knows more than i, who takes interest in me, whose creature, and yet whose kindred, in one sense, am i. i know that the enterprise is worthy. i know that things work well. i have heard no bad news. as for positions, combinations, and details, what are they p in clear weather, when we look into the heavens, what do we see but the sky and the sun ? if you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. but do not care to convince him. men will believe what they see. let them see. pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life, as a dog does his master's chaise. do the higher life 35 what you love. know your own bone : gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still. do not be too moral. you may cheat yourself out of much life so. aim above morality. be not simply good ; be good for something. all fables, indeed, have their morals ; but the innocent enjoy the story. let nothing come between you and the light. respect men as brothers only. when you travel to the celestial city, carry no letter of introduction. when you knock, ask to see god—none of the servants. in what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions : know that you are alone in the world. thus i write at random. i need to see you, and i trust i shall, to correct my mistakes. perhaps you have some oracles for me. >k -k >k >k >k “we must have our bread.” but what is our bread p is it baker's bread p methinks it should be very home-made bread. what is our meat p is it butcher's meat p what is that which we must have p is that bread which we are now earning sweet p is it not bread which has been suffered to sour, and then been sweetened with an alkali, which has undergone the vinous, acetous, and sometimes the putrid fermentation, and then been whitened with vitriol p. is this the bread which we must have p man must earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, truly, but also by the sweat of his brain within his brow. the body can feed the body only. i have tasted but little bread in my life. it has been mere grub and provender for the most part. of bread that nourished the brain and the heart, scarcely any. there is absolutely none, even on the tables of the rich. there is not one kind of food for all men. you must and you will feed those faculties which you 36 the higher life exercise. the labourer whose body is weary does not require the same food with the scholar whose brain is weary. men should not labour foolishly like brutes, but the brain and the body should always, or as much as possible, work and rest together, and then the work will be of such a kind that when the body is hungry the brain will be hungry also, and the same food will suffice for both ; otherwise the food which repairs the waste energy of the overwrought body will oppress the sedentary brain, and the degenerate scholar will come to esteem all food vulgar, and all getting a living drudgery. how shall we earn our bread is a grave question ; yet it is a sweet and inviting question. let us not shirk it, as is usually done. it is the most important and practical question which is put to man. let us not answer it hastily. let us not be content to get our bread in some gross, careless, and hasty manner. some men go a-hunting, some a-fishing, some a-gaming, some to war; but none have so pleasant a time as they who in earnest seek to earn their bread. it is true actually as it is true really ; it is true materially as it is true spiritually, that they who seek honestly and sincerely, with all their hearts and lives and strength, to earn their bread do earn it, and it is sure to be very sweet to them. a very little bread, a very few crumbs are enough, if it be of the right quality, for it is infinitely nutritious. let each man, then, earn at least a crumb of bread for his body before he dies, and know the taste of it, that it is identical with the bread of life, and that they both go down at one swallow. our bread need not ever be sour or hard to digest. what nature is to the mind she is also to the body. as she feeds my imagination, she will feed my body; for what she says she means, and is ready to do. the higher life 37 she is not simply beautiful to the poet's eye. not only the rainbow and sunset are beautiful, but to be fed and clothed, sheltered and warmed aright, are equally beautiful and inspiring. there is not necessarily any gross and ugly fact which may not be eradicated from the life of man. we should endeavour practically in our lives to correct all the defects which our imagination detects. the heavens are as deep as our aspirations are high. so high as a tree aspires to grow, so high it will find an atmosphere suited to it. every man should stand for a force which is perfectly irresistible. how can any man be weak who dares to be at all p even the tenderest plants force their way up through the hardest earth, and the crevices of rocks; but a man no material power can resist. what a wedge, what a beetle, what a catapult, is an earnest man | what can resist him p it is a momentous fact that a man may be good or he may be bad; his life may be true, or it may be false ; it may be either a shame or a glory to him. the good man builds himself up ; the bad man destroys himself. but whatever we do we must do confidently (if we are timid, let us, then, act timidly), not expecting more light, but having light enough. if we confidently expect more, then let us wait for it. but what is this which we have p. have we not already waited 2 is this the beginning of time 2 is there a man who does not see clearly beyond, though only a hair's-breadth beyond where he at any time stands p if one hesitates in his path, let him not proceed. let him respect his doubts, for doubts, too, may have some divinity in them. that we have but little faith is not sad, but that we have but little faithfulness. by faithfulness faith is earned. 38 the higher life when, in the progress of a life, a man swerves, though only by an angle infinitely small, from his proper and allotted path (and this is never done quite unconsciously, even at first; in fact, that was his broad and scarlet sin, ah, he knew of it more than he can tell), then the drama of his life turns to tragedy, and makes haste to its fifth act. when once we thus fall behind ourselves, there is no accounting for the obstacles which rise up in our path, and no one is so wise as to advise, and no one so powerful as to aid us while we abide on that ground. such are cursed with duties, and the neglect of their duties. for such the decalogue was made, and other far more voluminous and terrible codes. these departures,--who have not made them 2– for they are as faint as the parallax of a fixed star, and at the commencement we say they are nothing, that is, they originate in a kind of sleep and forgetfulness of the soul when it is naught. a man cannot be too circumspect in order to keep in the straight road, and be sure that he sees all that he may at any time see, that so he may distinguish his true path. >k >k :k -k >k as for conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, i do not think much of that: let not your right hand know what your left hand does in that line of business. it will prove a failure. just as successfully can you walk against a sharp steel edge which divides you cleanly right and left. do you wish to try your ability to resist distension ? it is a greater strain than any soul can long endure. when you get god to pulling one way and the devil the other, each having his feet well braced,—to say nothing of the conscience sawing transversely,–almost any timber will giveway. butler & tanner, the selwood printing works, frome, and london. new publications of arthur. c. fifield, 44, fleet street, london, e.c. additions to the simple life series “i have seemed to myself to observe of late years a falling off in, the market for idealism. i am all the more pleased to find volumes such as these issued in the ‘simple life series' appearing in steadily increasing numbers.”—to-day, march 1, 1905. no. 18. life without principle. by h. d. thoreau. 40 pages, 3d. post free, 3%d. cloth, 6d. nett. post free, 7d. “this is one of thoreau's most characteristic and finest essays, ranking with emerson's splendid ‘man, the reformer.’” no. 1g. a siding at a railway station. by james anthony froude. 40 pages, 3d. post free, 3}d. cloth, 6d. nett. post free, 7d. by special permission of messrs. longmans & co., this beautiful allegory from ‘short studies on great subjects’ is now included in the ‘simple life series.” it is hardly too much to say that in its large, kindly, wise humanity this parable recalls the parables of the gospels. no. 20. in praise of walking. four classic gems of the open air, containing “walking and the wild,’ by thoreau; ‘the open road,” by walt whitman; ‘on going a journey,” by w. hazlitt; and “the exhilarations of the road,” by john burroughs. 96 pages, 6d, nett. post free, 7d. cloth, gilt top, 1s. nett. post free, 1s. 2d. the very book for a holiday, especially for a tramping or cycling tour. facts about flogging. by joseph collinson. 2nd edition. a new and revised edition of a little book which made a strong impression on its first appearance. it is a storehouse of facts about this brutalising practice. 6d. nett. by post, 7d. the diary of and translations of other spiritual verse. by george an old soul. macdonald. a new and cheaper edition. cloth, 2s. nett. by post, 2s. 4d. the diary of an old souz is one of dr. macdonald's best known and most beautiful lyrics, and the steadily growing circle of admirers of his profound spiritual insight will welcome this cheaper edition. the edition is limited and will not be reprinted in its present form. cr. 8vo. 3oo pages. the game by bolton hall. new and cheaper edition. large fºcap. 8vo. of life. cloth, 2s. nett. by post, 2s. 3d. a new series of mr. hall's wise and pungent parables of modern life, especially useful to teachers and lecturers on social reforms. a limited number only. london: arthur c. fifield, 44, fleet street, e.c. arthur. c. fifield’s new publications. by ernest grosby. l broad-cast. new chants and songs of labour, life and freedom. crown 8vo. 128 pages. cloth gilt, 1s. 6d. nett. post free, 1s. 9d. just published. edward carpenter: poet and prophet. an illuminative essay, with selections, and portrait of carpenter. 64 pages. 6d. nett. post free 7d. new edition. just published. by henry s. salt. richard 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salome hocking (author of beginnings, some old cornish folk, etc.). belinda the backward i a romance of modern idealism, crown 8vo. 192 pages. cloth gilt. 2s. nett. post free, 2s. 4d. just published. by godfrey blount (author of the gospel of simplicity, etc.). for our count ry's sake : an essay setting forth the true conditions under which a return to the land and the revival of country life and crafts are possible. demy 8vo. 64 pages. 6d. nett. post free, 7d. just published. by george macdonald. fairy tales by george, macdonal-d. . a new edition of eight of these exquisite fancies, with title-page and thirteen illustrations by arthur hughes. crown 8vo. handsome cloth gilt, gilt top. 434 pages. 4s. 6d. nett. just ready. “the children of the present day are indeed to be congratulated on the re-discovery of these delightful stories.”—daily news. “full of naïve enchantments.”— athenæum. by edward carpenter. prisons, police, and punishment. being chapters on the causes and treatment of crime. crown 8vo. 160 pages. cloth gilt. 2s. nett. post free, 2s. 4d. london : arthur c. fifield, 44, fleet street, e.c. | the maude versions of tolstoy. * * * “better translators, ºotº ſor anowledge of the two ſanguages and ſº zenetration into the very meaning of the zeafter trans/area ºf ºzoº &e ºvented.”–leo tolstoy. resurrection, with 33 illustrations by pasternak. crown 8vo. cloth gilt, 4s. 6d. nett. popular edition, cloth, 2s. 6d. nett. paper, 6d. over 3oo, ooo copies solº. “this is genius at its high-water mark. the reader absorbed in the story will scarcely be conscious that he is absorbing a religion and a philosophy.”—vew jºozºº times. sevastopol, and other stories, with portrait and map, cloth, 2s. 6d. nett. paper, 6d. * a series of sketches so apparently simple that the artist's subtle selection of his types is lost sight of by usin the cumulative effect of the staggering whole.”—the academy. plays. with illustrations. crown 8vo. cloth, 2s. 6d. nett, vºrº with the 2s. 6d. edition of ‘a’esurrection" and “sevastopol.” “nobody who cares for real drama can afford to let this volume go unread.”– the academy. what is art 2 paper, is nett. cloth, 1s 6d. nett. “whoever is really conversant with art, recognises in it the voice of the master.”—g. bernard shaw in the daiſy chrozºice. works by aylmer maude. a peculiar people: the doukhobors. crown 8vo, cloth gilt. with 17 illustrations, 6s. nett. “mr. maude traces succintly but really comprehensively the history of this strange sect, its ideals, its failures, its successes, its persecutions, and its final establishment, with the future still to be decided, in canada . . . a most instructive, sane, sympathetic, and distinctly entertaining account of a human oddity.”–ezening standard. tolstoy and his problems. crown swo. cloth, 1s. 6d. nett. paper, is nett. second edition. “we have greatly enjoyed reading this manly book.”–7%e athenazzº. “mr maude's long and intimate acquaintance with tolstoy enables him to speak with a knowledge probably not possessed by any other englishman.”—wozning post. the zºorººg chaffers of this book may be obtained separately ºn gaºlet zorºn iº, each. leo tolstoy: a short biography. right and wrong. war and patriotism. 2d. essays on art. archibald constable & co, lºn. 16 james street, haymarket. crown svo. 92 pages. canvas gilt belinda º a the backward by salome hocking . author of beginnings, “some old cornish folk, etc. a book of especial interest to all who have been attracted by the recent communistic and tolstoyan colonies in england. it is the first authentic record. * all who have ºy deſire for communal and novel attempts at existence will find ºe boºk worth perusal -/9*deº ſº. “an eminently readablºnd straightforward account. it is free from all unkindliness to colonists, but the author has a sense of humour, and saw thingsºnot seen by the too earnest crank. zºº age. * her story does not ºn the blithedale romance, but we have found some charmiºhe way she tells it—her simple style, her unaffected self ºvelatiºn, and her sympathetic presentment . *_ º of the ºpes a hºleºn. zºe zººey. jus㺠fcblished a new book by the aºhor of “plain talk in psalm and parable.” crºwn syo. 128 pages. cloth gilt is 6d, nett. by pºst, is 98. brca d-c as t. new chants and s s of labour, life, and fººedorn by erººst crosºy * mr. crosby is º brave a fighter on the side of human progress, and he poulºut his words with such splendiddar ing, and says so many courageous things that want saying, that we cannot but wish him a wide public in england and america. we can promise our readers that they will find in zºroad caº much that will hearten them, much that will cheer them, and not a little that will set them thinking.”—vew age. * mr. crosby is a true poet of democracy. . . there is nothing in recent verse quite so remarkable as the series of town pictures. -sussex /jºy aſºº’s. | “there is a good deal of thought, force, and descriptive power in the book. zºe zºnes. london: arºus c. fifield, 44, fleet st. e.c. i ps 3042 fv13 > r book . m a gopglit n? copyright deposit. a thoreau calendar a thoreau calendar edited by annie russell marble new york thomas y. crowell & co. publishers p^^ copyright, igog by thomas y. crowell & co. published, september, 1909 the university press, cambridge, u.s.a. ci. a 24 4;; 6 4 aui tt 1909 prefatory note there are few writings in english literature which surpass the pages of thoreau for unique ness and variety of theme and sententious phrasing. as he had a strong, distinctive personality, so his literary expressions were original and forceful. his books contain many nuggets of study and experience on nature, economics, books, ethics, religion, and a score of other topics. sometimes the tone is that of blunt practicality ; in other passages, the spiritual or poetic note prevails. it has always been difficult to classify thoreau's writings because of their variety of subject and lack of coherent plan ; he said frankly, " it is wise to write on many themes, that so you may find the right and inspiring one." thoreau is associated in memory with the transcendentalist movement of his time and community, and three of the lead ing exponents of this philosophy, in america, were his friends and neighbors, — emerson, alcott, and ellery channing. while thoreau was philosophic by nature, he did not invent nor accept any definite theory or program of living for mankind [ v ] in general. he was as pronounced in non conformity as emerson, and almost as mystical in certain moods as alcott, and he preached the " gospel of the simple life " with as much vigorous radicalism as any of its advocates have done. he studied his own body, mind, and soul, and de termined to live so that he might meet his individ ual needs. he urged no one to follow this special method of living, but rather he appealed to every reader to find out his own needs and conditions and utilize them for self-improvement. his con ception of a noble character included the qualities of sincerity, purity, justice, contentment, industry tempered by leisure for spiritual refreshment, and a constant, loving study of nature. to a marked degree he realized these traits in his mature years. although he was sometimes prejudiced and unin formed on certain phases of life, although he seemed to many acquaintances only an egoist of unusual type, yet he practiced his own text, " be resolutely and faithfully what you are ; be humbly what you aspire to be." in selecting these quotations the editor has chosen from the books published during thoreau's life or prepared for publication largely in accord with his suggestions to family and friends. the aim has been to represent the significant aspects of his life and teachings. many longer passages, which might reveal more fully his personality, 2 ? [ vi ] january january first if a man constantly aspires, is he not elevated ? did ever a man try heroism, magnanimity, truth, sincerity, and find that there was no advan tage in them ? that it was a vain endeavor ? letters to various persons. january second who shall describe the inexpressible tenderness and immortal life of the grim forest, where nature, though it be mid-winter, is ever in her spring, where the moss-grown and decaying trees are not old, but seem to enjoy a perpetual youth; and blissful, innocent nature, like a serene infant, is too happy to make a noise, except by a ic^ tinkling, lisping birds and trickling rills ? the maine woods. january third i think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. we may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow else where. nature is as well adapted to our [ i ] weakness as to our strength. the incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well-nigh incur able form of disease. ivalden. january fourth books of natural history make the most cheerful winter reading. i read in audubon with a thrill of delight, when the snow covers the ground, of the magnolia, and the florida keys, and their warm sea-breezes ; of the fence-rail, and the cotton-tree, and the migrations of the rice-bird ; of the breaking up of winter in labrador, and the melting of the snow on the forks of the missouri ; and owe an accession of health to these reminis cences of luxuriant nature. natural history of massachusetts. january fifth so is each one's world but a clearing in the forest, so much open and inclosed ground. a walk to ivachusett. january sixth what is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented ? not my or thy great-grandfather's, but our great-grandmother nature's universal, vegetable, botanic medicines, by which she has kept herself young always, outlived so many old parrs in her day, and fed her health with their decaying fatness. ivalden. january seventh think of the importance of friendship in the education of men. it will make a man honest; it will make him a hero ; it will make him a saint. it is the state of the just dealing with the just, the magnanimous with the magnanimous, the sincere with the sincere, man with man. a iveek on the concord ri'uer. january eighth say what you have to say, not what you ought. any truth is better than make-believe. tom hyde, the tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked if he had anything to say. " tell the tailors," said he, " to remember to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch." his companion's prayer is forgotten. ivalden. january ninth nature confounds her summer distinctions at this season. the heavens seem to be nearer the earth. the elements are less reserved and distinct. water turns to ice, rain to snow. the day is but a scandinavian night. the winter is an arctic summer. a ivinler walk. [ 3] january tenth there is, indeed, a tide in the affairs of men, as the poet says, and yet as things flow they circu late, and the ebb always balances the flow. all streams are but tributary to the ocean, which itself does not stream, and the shores are un changed but in longer periods than man can measure. a week on the concord ri'ver. january eleventh when winter fringes every bough with his fantastic wreath. and puts the seal of silence now upon the leaves beneath ; when every stream in its pent-house goes gurgling on its way. and in his gallery the mouse nibbleth the meadow hay ; methinks the summer still is nigh. and lurketh underneath. as that same meadow-mouse doth lie snug in that last year's heath. a winter walk. january twelfth it is so hard to forget what it is worse than useless to remember. anti-slavery and reform papers. [4] january thirteenth i say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. if there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? if you have any enter prise before you, try it in your old clothes. ivalden. january fourteenth but cowardice is unscientific ; for there cannot be a science of ignorance. there may be a science of bravery, for that advances ; but a retreat is rarely well conducted ; if it is, then is it an orderly advance in the face of circumstances. massachusetts natural history. january fifteenth simplify, simplify. instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one ; instead of a hun dred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion. our life is like a german con federacy, made up of petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a german cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment. w aid en. [5] january sixteenth at least let us have healthy books, a stout horse rake or a kitchen range which is not cracked. let not the poet shed tears only for the public weal. he should be as vigorous as a sugar maple, with sap enough to maintain his own verdure, beside what runs into the troughs, and not like a vine, which being cut in the spring bears no fruit, but bleeds to death in the en deavor to heal its wounds. a week on the concord ri'ver. january seventeenth why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises ? if a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drum mer. let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. it is not im portant that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak. shall he turn his spring into summer ? walden. january eighteenth the strongest wind cannot stagger a spirit ; it is a spirit's breath. a just man's purpose can not be split on any grampus or material rock, but itself will split rocks till it succeeds. cape cod. [6] january nineteenth if there is nothing new on the earth, still the traveler always has a resource in the skies. they are constantly turning a new page to view. the wind sets the types on this blue ground, and the inquiring may always read a new truth there. a week on the concord rinjer. january twentieth to enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to ex clude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come. walking. january twenty-first why should we live with such hurry and waste of life ? we are determined to be starved be fore we are hungry. men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches to-day to save nine to-morrow. as for work., we have n't any of any consequence. we have the saint vitus' dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still. walden. january twenty-second what avails it though a light be placed on the top of a hill, if you spend all your life directly [ 7 ] under the hill ? it might as well be under a bushel. cape cod. january twenty-third most people with whom i talk, men and women even of some originality and genius, have their scheme of the universe all cut and dried, — very dry\ i assure you, to hear, dry enough to burn, dry-rotted and powder-post, methinks, — which they set up between you and them in the shortest intercourse; an ancient and tottering frame with all its boards blown off. they do not walk without their bed. tf^alden. january twenty-fourth why should not we meet, not always as dys peptics, to tell our bad dreams, but sometimes as ^wpeptics, to congratulate each other on the ever-glorious morning ? anti-slanjery and reform papers. january twenty-fifth now chiefly is my natal hour. and only now my prime of life. i will not doubt the love untold. which not my worth nor want hath bought. which wooed me young and wooes me old. and to this eveninc); hath me brouiiht. a week on the concord river, [8] january twenty-sixth men are in the main alike, but they were made several in order that they might be various. if a low use is to be served, one man will do nearly or quite as well as another; if a high one, indi vidual excellence is to be reo-arded. o walking. january twenty-seventh however mean your life is, meet it and live it ; do not shun it and call it hard names. it is not so bad as you are. it looks poorest when you are richest. the faultfinder will find faults even in paradise. love your life, poor as it is. ivalden. january twenty-eighth behind every man's busy-ness there should be a level of undisturbed serenity and industry, as within the reef encircling a coral isle there is always an expanse of still water, where the depositions are going on which will finally raise it above the surface. a week on the concord ri^ver, january twenty-ninth follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour. wauen. [9] january thirtieth no face welcomed us but the fine fantastic sprays of free and happy evergreen trees, waving one above another in their ancient home. the maine woods. january thirty-first art is as long as ever, but life is more inter rupted and less available for a man's proper pursuits. it is not an era of repose. we have used up all our inherited freedom. antislavery and reform papers. [ 10 ] february february first there can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and has his senses still. there was never yet such a storm but it was ^olian music to a healthy and innocent ear. walden. february second let no one think that i do not love the old ministers. they were, probably, the best men of their generation, and they deserve that their biographies should fill the pages of the town histories. if i could but hear the " glad tidings" of which they tell, and which, perchance, they heard, i might write in a worthier strain than this. cape cod. february third methinks that must be where all my property lies, cast up on the rocks on some distant and un explored stream, and waiting for an unheard-of [■■ ] freshet to fetch it down. o make haste, ye gods, with your winds and rains, and start the jam before it rots ! the maine woods. february fourth yet i rarely failed to find, even in mid-winter, some warm and springy swamp where the grass and the skunk-cabbage still put forth with peren nial verdure, and some hardier bird occasionally awaited the return of spring. walden. february fifth how could the patient pine have known the morning breeze would come, or humble flowers anticipate the insect's noonday hum, — till the new light with morning cheer from far streamed through the aisles, and nimbly told the forest trees for many stretching miles ? a week on the concord rp-ver. february sixth god himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. and we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the per .' petual instilling and drenching of the reality that [ '^j surrounds us. the universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions ; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. waljen. february seventh in the coldest and bleakest places, the warmest charities still maintain a foothold. a cold and searching wind drives awav all contagion, and nothing can withstand it but what has a virtue in it ; and accordingly, whatever we meet with in cold and bleak places, as the tops of mountains, we respect for a sort of sturdy innocence, a puritan toughness. a winter walk. february eighth this world is but canvass to our imaginations. i see men with infinite pains endeavoring to realize to their bodies, what i, with at least equal pains, would realize to my imagination, — its capacities ; for certainly there is a life of the mind above the wants of the body and inde pendent of it. a week on the concord river. february ninth when we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any per manent and absolute existence, — that petty fears [ 13 ] and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. walden. february tenth there is no ill which may not be dissipated, like the dark, if you let in a stronger light upon it. a iveek on the concord ri-ver. february eleventh such is oftenest the young man's introduction to the forest, and the most original part of himself. he goes thither at first as a hunter and fisher, until at last, if he has the seeds of a better life in him, he distinguishes his proper objects, as a poet or naturalist it may be, and leaves the gun and fish-pole behind. fvalden. february twelfth it is true actually as it is true really ; it is true materially as it is true spiritually, that they who seek honestly and sincerely, with all their hearts and lives and strength, to earn their bread, do earn it, and it is sure to be very sweet to them. letters to various perrons. february thirteenth in proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, [ h j nor weakness weakness. if you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost ; that is where they should be. now put the foundations under them. ifalden, february fourteenth in society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. when we should still be growing children, we are already little men. walking. february fifteenth nothing can rightly compel a simple and brave man to a vulgar sadness. while i enjoy the friendship of the seasons i trust that nothing can make life a burden to me. walden. february sixteenth behold the difference between the oriental and the occidental. the former has nothing to do in this v/orld ; the latter is full of activity. the one looks in the sun till his eyes are put out; the other follows him prone in his westward course. a week on the concord ri-ver. [ 15 ] february seventeenth in the winter, warmth stands for all virtue, and we resort in thought to a trickling rill, with its bare stones shining in the sun, and to warm springs in the woods, with as much eagerness as rabbits and robins. the steam which rises from swamps and pools, is as dear and domestic as that of our own kettle. a winter walk. february eighteenth if a man has faith he will co-operate with equal faith everywhere ; if he has not faith, he will continue to live like the rest of the world, what ever company he is joined to. to co-operate, in the highest as well as the lowest sense, means to get our living together. walden. february nineteenth but after all, man is the great poet, and not homer or shakspeare •, and our language itself, and the common arts of life are his work. a week on the concord river. february twentieth but there is no such thing as accomplishing a righteous reform by the use of "expediency." there is no such thing as sliding up hill. in morals, the only sliders are back-sliders. anti-sla-uery and reform papers. [ i6 ] february twenty-first when we would rest our bodies we cease to support them; wc recline on the lap of earth. so when we would rest our spirits, we must recline on the great spirit. letters to various persons. february twenty-second in the winter, the botanist needs not confine himself to his books and herbarium, and give over his out-door pursuits, but may study a new department of vegetable physiology, what may be called crystalline botany, then. massachusetts natural history. february twenty-third music is the sound of the universal laws pro mulgated. it is the only assured tone. there are in it such strains as far surpass any man's faith in the loftiness of his destiny. things are to be learned which it will be worth the while to learn. a week on the concord rvuer. february twenty-fourth how far men go for the material of their houses ! the inhabitants of the most civilized cities, in all ages, send into far, primitive forests, beyond the bounds of their civilization, where the moose and bear and savage dwell, for their pine-boards [ 17 ] for ordinary use. and, on the other hand, the savage soon receives from cities, iron arrow points, hatchets, and guns, to point his savageness with. ivauen. february twenty-fifth my spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the out ward dreariness. give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness ! walking. february twenty-sixth it must be confessed that the pilgrims possessed but ^tw of the qualities of the modern pioneer. they were not the ancestors of the american backwoodsmen. they did not go at once into the woods with their axes. they were a family and church, and were more anxious to keep to gether, though it were on the sand, than to explore and colonize a new world. cape cod. february twenty-seventh often the body is warmed, but the imagination is torpid ; the body is fat, but the imagination is lean and shrunk. a week on the concord ki-ver. [ '8 ] february twenty-eighth it would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. it is nothing but work, work, work. i cannot easily buy a blank-book to write thoughts in ; they are commonly ruled for dollars and cents. anti-sla'-very and reform papers. february twenty-ninth in the winter, i stop short in the path to admire how the trees grow up without forethought, regardless of the time and circumstances. they do not wait as man does, but now is the golden age of the sapling. earth, air, sun, and rain, are occasion enough ; they were no better in primeval centuries. the " winter of their dis content " never comes. massachusetts natural history. [ 19 ] march march first any of the phenomena of winter are sug gestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. we are accustomed to hear this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant ; but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of summer. ivauen. march second happy the man who observes the heavenly and the terrestrial laws in just proportion ; whose every faculty, from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head, obeys the law of its level ; who neither stoops nor goes on tiptoe, but lives a balanced life, acceptable to nature and to god. letters to various persons. march third if we could listen but for an instant to the chaunt of the indian muse, we should under^;tand why he vv'ill not exchange his sava«;eness for civillza tion. a ifick en the concord river. [ 21 j march fourth but, on more accounts than one, i had had enough of moose-hunting. i had not come to the woods for this purpose, nor had i foreseen it, though i had been willing to learn how the indian manceuvred ; but one moose killed was as good, if not as bad, as a dozen. the after noon's tragedy, and my share in it, as it affected the innocence, destroyed the pleasure of my adventure. the maine ivoods. march fifth it is true, i never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it. walden. march sixth the mariner who makes the safest port in heaven, perchance, seems to his friends on earth to be shipwrecked, for they deem boston harbor the better place ; though perhaps invisible to them, a skillful pilot comes to meet him, and the fairest and balmiest gales blow off that coast, his good ship makes the land in halcyon days, and he kisses the shore in rapture there, while his old hulk tosses in the surf here. cape cod. [ 22 ] march seventh a sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plow instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end. the scholar requires hard and serious labor to give an impetus to his thought. he will learn to grasp the pen firmly so, and wield it gracefully and effectively, as an axe or a sword. a week o?i the concord rinjer. march eighth we commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. i should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom i knew as well. un fortunately, i am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. ivalden. march ninth i think that i cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless i spend four hours a day at least, — and it is commonly more than that, — sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly en gagements. you may safely say, a penny for your thoughts, or a thousand pounds. walking. [ 23] march tenth the ears were made, not for such trivial uses as men are wont to suppose, but to hear celestial sounds. the eyes were not made for such grovelling uses as they are now put to and worn out by, but to behold beauty now invisible. a fveek on the concord ki^er. march eleventh probably if our lives were more conformed to nature, we should not need to defend ourselves aeainst her heats and colds, but find her oui constant nurse and friend, as do plants and quadrupeds. a winter walk. march twelfth the earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit, — not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. its throes will heave our exuviae from their graves. walden. [ 24] march thirteenth a man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful, — while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly. which is the best man to deal with, — he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all ? ifalking. march fourteenth a true politeness does not result from any hasty and artificial polishing, it is true, but grows naturally in characters of the right grain and quality, through a long fronting of men and events, and rubbing on good and bad fortune. a jveek on the concord ri-ver. march fifteenth drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction, — a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the muse. so will help you god, and so only. every nail driven should be as another rivet in the machine of the universe, you carrying on the work. walden. [ ^5 ] march sixteenth what is any man's discourse to me, if i am not sensible of something in it as steady and cheery as the creaic of crickets ? in it the woods must be relieved against the sky. massachusetts natural history. march seventeenth yet these men had no need to travel to be as wise as solomon in all his glory, so similar are the lives of men in all countries, and fraught . with the same homely experiences. one half the world knows how the other half lives. a iveek on the concord ri'ver. march eighteenth to be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live, according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. it is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. fvauen. march nineteenth what fire could ever equal the sunshine of a winter's day, when the meadow mice come out by the wallsides, and the chicadee lisps in the defiles of the wood ? the warmth comes directly from the sun, and is not radiated from the earth, [ ^6 ] as in summer ; and when we feel his beams on our backs as we are treading; some snowy dell, we are grateful as for a special kindness, and bless the sun which has followed us into that by-place. • a winter walk. march twentieth it is but thin soil where we stand ; i have felt my roots in a richer ere this. i have seen a bunch of violets in a glass vase, tied loosely with a straw, which reminded me of myself. — i am a parcel of vain strivings tied by a chance bond together, dangling this way and that, their links were made so loose and wide, methinks, for milder weather. a week on the concord ri'ver. march twenty-first our whole life is startlingly moral. there is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice. goodness is the only investment that never fails. wauen. march twenty-second do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it. anti-sla'-very and reform papers. [ 27 ] march twenty-third but if we would appreciate the flow that is in these books, we must expect to feel it rise from the page like an exhalation, and wash away our critical brains like burr millstones, flowing to higher levels above and behind ourselves. a week on the concord ri'uer. march twenty-fourth we do not realize how far and widely, or how near and narrowly, we are to look. the greater part of the phenomena of nature are for this reason concealed from us all our lives. xhe gardener sees only the gardener's garden. here, too, as in political economy, the supply answers to the demand. nature does not cast pearls before swine. autumnal tints. march twenty-fifth so easy is it, though many housekeepers doubt it, to establish new and better customs in the place of the old. you need not rest your reputation on the dinners you give. ivalden. march twenty-sixth may we not see god ? are we to be put off and amused in this life, as it were with a mere alle [ 28 ] gory ? is not nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely ? a li^eek on the concord ri'ver. march twenty-seventh in society you will not find health, but in nature. unless our feet at least stood in the midst of nature, all our faces would be pale and livid. massachusetts natural history. march twenty-eighth let a man take time enough for the most trivial deed, though it be but the paring of his nails. the buds swell imperceptibly, without hurry or confusion, as if the short spring days were an eternity. a week on the concord river. march tweny-ninth perhaps the time will come when every house even will have not only its sleeping-rooms, and dining-room, and talking-room or parlor, but its thinking-room also, and the architects will put it into their plans. a yankee in canada, march thirtieth we do not live by justice but by grace. as the sort of justice which concerns us in our daily intercourse is not that administered by the judge [ ^-9 ] so the historical justice which we prize is not arrived at by nicely balancing the evidence. anti-sla'very and reform papers. march thirty-first near the end of march, 1845, i borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by walden pond, nearest to where i intended to build my house, and began to cut down some tall arrowy white pines, still in their youth, for timber. it is difficult to begin without borrowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your fellow-men to have an interest in your enterprise. the owner of the axe, as he released his hold on it, said that it was the apple of his eye ; but i returned it sharper than i received it. walden. [ 30] april april first in the long run men hit only what they aim at. therefore, though they should fail im mediately, they had better aim at something high. walden. april second the little rill tinkled the louder, and peopled all the wilderness for me ; and the glassy smooth ness of the sleeping lake, laving the shores of a new world, with the dark, fantastic rocks rising here and there from its surface, made a scene not easily described. it has left such an im pression of stern, yet gentle, wildness on my memory as will not soon be effaced. the maine woods. april third the change from storm and winter to serene and mild weather, from dark and sluggish hours to bright and elastic ones, is a memorable crisis which all things proclaim. it is seemingly instantaneous at last. walden. [ 31 ] april fourth the tree of knowledge is a tree of knowledge of good and evil. he is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn something by behavior as well as by application. a week on the concord river. april fifth all that is told of the sea has a fabulous sound to an inhabitant of the land, and all its products have a certain fabulous quality, as if they be longed to another planet, from sea-weed to a sailor's yarn, or a fish-story. in this element the animal and vegetable kingdoms meet and are strangely mingled. cape cod. april sixth every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. we are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them. walden. [ 32 ] april seventh the landscape-painter uses the figures of men to mark a road. he would not make that use of my figure. i walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets, menu, moses, homer, chaucer, walked in. walking. april eighth how many mornings, summer and winter, be fore yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have i been about mine ! no doubt, many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise, farmers starting for boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers going to their work. walden. april ninth a book should contain pure discoveries, glimpses of terra firma.^ though by shipwrecked mariners, and not the art of navigation by those who have never been out of sight of land. a week on the concord river. april tenth so simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. probe the earth to see where your main roots run. letters to various persons. [ 33 ] april eleventh but chaucer is fresh and modern still, and no dust settles on his true passages. it lightens along the line, and we are reminded that flowers have bloomed, and birds sung, and hearts beaten, in england. before the earnest gaze of the reader, the rust and moss of time gradually drop off, and the original green life is revealed. he was a homely and domestic man, and did breathe quite as modern men do. a week on the concord rv~uer. april twelfth the first sparrow of spring ! the year begin ning with younger hope than ever ! the faint silvery wafblings heard over the partially bare and moist fields from the bluebird, the song sparrow, and the red-wing, as if the last flakes of winter tinkled as they fell ! what at such a time are histories, chronologies, traditions, and all written revelations ? ivalden. april thirteenth genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning's flash, which per chance shatters the temple of knowledge itself, — and not a taper lighted at the hearth-stone of the race, which pales before the light of common day. walking, [ 34] april fourteenth there are some things which a man never speaks of, which are much finer kept silent about. to the highest communications we only lend a silent ear. our finest relations are not simply kept silent about, but buried under a positive depth of silence, never to be revealed. a week on the concord ri'ver. april fifteenth it is true, we are such poor navigators that our thoughts, for the most part, stand off and on upon a harborless coast, are conversant only with the bights of the bays of poesy, or steer for the public ports of entry, and go into the dry docks of science, where they merely refit for this world, and no natural currents concur to individualize them. ivalden. april sixteenth the most interesting thing which i heard of, in this township of hull, was an unfailing spring, whose locality was pointed out to me, on the side of a distant hill, as i was panting along the shore, though i did not visit it. perhaps, if i should go through rome, it would be some spring on the capitoline hill i should remember the longest. cape cud. [ 35 ] april seventeenth one generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels. walden. april eighteenth tell shakspeare to attend some leisure hour, for now i 've business with this drop of dew. and see you not, the clouds prepare a shower, — i '11 'meet him shortly when the sky is blue. a week on the concord river. april nineteenth i suspect that, if you should go to the end of the world, you would find somebody there going farther, as if just starting for home at sundown, and having a last word before he drove off. the maine woods. april twentieth we do not learn much from learned books, but from true, sincere, human books, from frank and honest biographies. a week on the concord river. april twenty-first as i stand over the insect crawling amid the pine needles on the forest floor, and endca\'or ing to conceal itself from my sight, and ask myself why it will cherish those humble thoughts and hide its head from me who might, perhaps, l 36 ] be its benefactor and impart to its race some cheering information, i am reminded of the greater benefactor and intelligence that stands over me, the human insect. walden. april twenty-second the rarest quality in an epitaph is truth. if any character is given it should be as severely true as the decision of the three judges below, and not the partial testimony of friends. a week on the concord ri^er. april twenty-third methinks i see the thousand shrines erected to hospitality shining afar in all countries, as well mahometan and jewish, as christian, khans, and caravansaries, and inns, whither all pilgrims without distinction resort. the landlord. april twenty-fourth between whom there is hearty truth there is love ; and in proportion to our truthfulness and confidence in one another, our lives are divine and miraculous, and answer to our ideal. a week on the concord ri'uer. [ 37 ] april twenty-fifth a lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. it is earth's eye ; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. the fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows. ivalden. april twenty-sixth humor is not so distinct a quality as, for the purposes of criticism, it is commonly regarded, but allied to every other, even the divine faculty. the familiar and cheerful conversation about every hearthside, if it be analyzed, will be found to be sweetened by this principle. anti-sla'uery and reform papers. april twenty-seventh for a companion, i require one who will make an equal demand on me with my own genius. such a one will always be rightly tolerant. it is suicide and corrupts good manners to welcome any less than this. i value and trust those who love and praise my aspiration rather than my performance. a week on the concord ri-ver, [ 38 ] april twenty-eighth as every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring is like the creation of cosmos out of chaos and the realization of the golden age. ivalden. april twenty-ninth only their names and residence make one love '" fishes. i would know even the number of their fin-rays, and how many scales compose the lateral line. i am the wiser in respect to all knowledges, and the better qualified for all for tunes, for knowing that there is a minnow in the brook. methinks i have need even of his sympathy, and to be his fellow in a degree. massachusetts natural history. april thirtieth shadows, referred to the source of light, are pyramids whose bases are never greater than those of the substances which cast them, but light is a spherical congeries of pyramids, whose very apexes are the sun itself, and hence the system shines with uninterrupted light. but if the light we use is but a paltry and narrow taper, most objects will cast a shadow wider than themselves. a iveek on the concord ria/er. [ 39 ] may may first n the midst of this labyrinth let us live a thread of life. we must act with so rapid and resistless a purpose in one direction that our vices will necessarily trail behind. letters to various persons, may second i 've heard within my inmost soul such cheerful morning news, in the horizon of my mind have seen such orient hues, as in the twilight of the dawn, when the first birds awake, are heard within some silent wood. where they the small twigs break. a ifeek on the concord river. may third our life is frittered away by detail. an honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten [ 41 ] toes, and lump the rest. simplicity, simplicity, simplicity ! i say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail. wauen. may fourth there is thus about all natural products a certain volatile and ethereal quality which represents their highest value, and which cannot be vulgarized, or bought and sold. mid apples. may fifth the meadow flowers spring and bloom where the waters annually deposit their slime, not where they reach in some freshet only. a man is not his hope, nor his despair, nor yet his past deed. a week on the concord river. may sixth under the one word, house, are included the school-house, the alms-house, the jail, the tavern, the dwelling-house ; and the meanest shed or cave in which men live contains the elements of all these. but nowhere on the earth stands the entire and perfect house. excursions. [ 42 ] may seventh no doubt another may also think for me ; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself. walden. may eighth a friend is one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting from us all the virtues, and who can appreciate them in us. it takes two to speak the truth, — one to speak, and another to hear. a week on the concord ri'ver. may ninth it is generally supposed that they who have long been conversant with the ocean can fore tell by certain indications, such as its roar and the notes of sea-fowl, when it will change from calm to storm ; but probably no such ancient mariner as we dream of exists ; they know no more, at least, than the older sailors do about this voyage of life on which we are all embarked. cape cod. may tenth nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. what [ 43 ] if equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners ? one piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon. ivalden. may eleventh nature has taken more care than the fondest . parent for the education and refinement of her children. consider the silent influence which flowers exert, no less upon the ditcher in the meadow than the lady in the bower. when i walk in the woods, i am reminded that a wise purveyor has been there before me ; my most delicate experience is typified there. excursions. may twelfth can there be any greater reproach than an idle learning ? learn to split wood, at least. the necessity of labor and conversation with many men and things, to the scholar is rarely well remembered; steady labor with the hands, which engrosses the attention also, is unquestionably the best method of removing palaver and senti mentality out of one's style, both of speaking and writing. a jveek on the concord ri-ver. [ 44 ] may thirteenth it was a very inspiriting sound to walk by, filling the whole air, that of the sea dashing against the land, heard several miles inland. instead of having a dog to growl before your door, to have an atlantic ocean to growl for a whole cape ! on the whole, we are glad of the storm, which would show us the ocean in its angriest mood. cape cod. may fourteenth when i think of the benefactors of the race, whom we have apotheosized as messengers from heaven, bearers of divine gifts to man, i do not see in my mind any retinue at their heels, any car-load of fashionable furniture. ivalden. may fifteenth in may and june the woodland quire is in full tune, and given the immense spaces of hollow air, and this curious human ear, one does not see how the void could be better filled. each summer sound is a summer round. excursiuns. [ 45 ] may sixteenth the very timber and boards and shingles of which our houses are made, grew but yesterday in a wilderness where the indian still hunts and the moose runs wild. new york has her wilderness within her own borders; and though the sailors of europe are familiar with the soundings of her hudson, and fulton long since invented the steamboat on its waters, an indian is still necessary to guide her scientific men to its head-waters in the adirondac country. the maine woods. may seventeenth as if you could kill time without injuring eternity. walden. may eighteenth surely the fates are forever kind, though nature's laws are more immutable than any despot's, yet to man's daily life they rarely seem rigid, but permit him to relax with license in summer weather. he is not harshly reminded of the things he may not do. a week on the co)uorj ri-uer. [ 46 ] may nineteenth how prompt we are to satisfy the huno-er and thirst of our bodies, how slow to satisfy the hunger and thirst of our souls. letters to various persons. may twentieth we loiter in winter while it is already spring. in a pleasant spring morning all men's sins are forgiven. such a day is a truce to vice. while such a sun holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may return. through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors. walden. may twenty-first you can hardly convince a man of an error in a life-time, but must content yourself with the reflection that the progress of science is slow. if he is not convinced, his grand-children may be. a week on the concord rluer. may twenty-second i would say to the society for the diffusion of useful knowledge, sometimes, — go to grass. you have eaten hay long enough. the sprino has come with its green crop. the very cows are driven to their country pastures before the end of may; though 1 have heard of one unnatural farmer who kept his cow in the barn [ 47 ] and fed her on hay all the year round. so, frequently, the society for the diffusion of use ful knowledge treats its cattle. ivalking. may twenty-third still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door and lintel and the sill are gone, unfold ing its sweet-scented flowers each spring, to be plucked by the musing traveller; planted and tended once by children's hands, in front-yard plots, — now standing by wall-sides in retired pastures, and giving place to new-rising forests; — the last of that stirp, sole survivor of that family. jvatden. may twenty-fourth 7^he world seemed decked for some holyday or prouder pageantry, with silken streamers flying, and the course of our lives to wind on before us like a green lane into a country maze, at the season when fruit trees are in blossom. a we£k on the concord ri'ver. may twenty-fifth ^ the flowers of the apple are perhaps the most beautiful of any tree's, so copious and so delicious to both sight and scent. the walker is fre quently tempted to turn and linger near some [ 4« j more than usually handsome one, whose blossoms are two thirds expanded. how superior it is in these respects to the pear, whose blossoms are neither colored nor fragrant ! ivild apples. may twenty-sixth i would not subtract anything from the praise that is due to philanthropy, but merely demand justice for all who by their lives and works are a blessing to mankind. i do not value chiefly a man's uprightness and benevolence, which are, as it were, his stem and leaves. ivauen. may twenty-seventh it may be that the forenoon is brighter than the afternoon, not only because of the greater trans parency of its atmosphere, but because we naturally look most into the west, as forward into the day, and so in the forenoon see the sunny side of things, but in the afternoon the shadow of every tree. a week on the concord ri^er. may twenty-eighth c^ it is remarkable what a serious business men ' make of getting their dinners, and how univer sally shiftlessness and a grovelling taste take refuge in a merely ant-like industry. better go [ 49 ] without your dinner, i thought, than be thus everlastingly fishing for it like a cormorant. of course, viewed from the shore.^ our pursuits in the country appear not a whit less frivolous. cape cod. may twenty-ninth in my walks i would fain return to my senses. what business have i in the woods, if i am thinking of something out of the woods ? i suspect myself, and cannot help a shudder, when i find myself so implicated even in what are called good works, — for this may sometimes happen. walking, may thirtieth the indescribable innocence and beneficence of nature, — of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter, — such health, such cheer, they afford forever ! and such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all nature would be affected, and the sun's brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a just cause grieve. walden. [ 50 ] may thirty-first and to be admitted to nature's hearth costs nothing. none is excluded ; but excludes him self. you have only to push aside the curtain. letters to various persons. ,~f [ 51 ] june june first 'o run on my bank can drain it, for my wealth is not possession but enjoyment. letters to various persons. june second the morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. then there is least somnolence in us ; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. ivalden. june third thank god, no hindoo tyranny prevailed at the framing of the world, but we are freemen of the universe, and not sentenced to any caste. a week on the concord river. june fourth nature has from the first expanded the minute blossoms of the forest only toward the heavens, above men's heads and unobserved by them. [ 53 ] we see only the flowers that are under our feet in the meadows. ivalking. v june fifth what is it gilds the trees and clouds. and paints the heavens so gay, but yonder fast abiding light with its unchanging ray ? lo, when the sun streams through the wood, upon a winter's morn, where'er his silent beams intrude the murky night is gone. a week on the concord river. june sixth you will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. i would gladly tell all that i know about it, and never paint " no admittance " on my gate. walden. june seventh nature will bear the closest inspection ; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. she has no interstices; every part is full of life. i explore, too, with pleasure, the sources of the [ 54 ] v5o myriad sounds which crowd the summer noon, and which seem the very grain and stuff of which eternity is made. excursions. june eighth we do not avoid evil by fleeing before it, but by rising above or diving below its plane ; as the worm escapes drought and frost by boring a few inches deeper. a week on the concord ri'ver. june ninth no people can long continue provincial in /r, character who have the propensity for politics f (y and whittling, and rapid travelling, which the yankees have, and who are leaving the mother country behind in the variety of their notions and inventions. the possession and exercise of practical talent merely are a sure and rapid means of intellectual culture and independence. t/ie maine woods. june tenth the restless ocean may at any moment cast up a whale or a wrecked vessel at your feet. all the reporters in the world, the most rapid stenog raphers, could not report the news it brings. cape cod. [ 55 ] june eleventh a man may esteem himself happy when that which is his food is also his medicine. there is no kind of herb that grows, but somebody or other says that it is good. i am very glad to hear it. it reminds me of the first chapter of genesis. a week on the concord river. june twelfth we are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do ; and yet how much is not done by us ! or, what if we had been taken sick ? how vigilant we are ! determined not to live by faith if we can avoid it ; all the day long on the alert, at night we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to uncertainties. ifauen. june thirteenth why should not our whole life and its scenery be actually thus fair and distinct ? all our lives want a suitable background. they should at least, like the life of the anchorite, be as impres sive to behold as objects in the desert, a broken shaft or crumbling mound against a limitless horizon. a ifeek on the concord ri'ver. june fourteenth the pines have developed their delicate blossoms on the highest twigs of the wood every summer [ 56 ] for ages, as well over the heads of nature's red children as of her white ones; yet scarcely a farmer or hunter in the land has ever seen them. excursions. june fifteenth to read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. it requires a train ing such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. ivalden. june sixteenth homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. it is next to beauty, and a very high art. some have this merit only. a week on the concord ri'ver. june seventeenth moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking. when a traveller asked words worth's servant to show him her master's study, she answered, " here is his library, but his study is out of doors." excursions. [ 57 ] june eighteenth the morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted ; but few are the ears that hear it. olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere. jvalden. june nineteenth but special i remember thee, wachusett, who like me standest alone without society. thy far blue eye, a remnant of the sky, seen through the clearing or the gorge, or from the windows on the forge, doth leaven all it passes by. nothing is true, but stands 'tween me and you. thou western pioneer who know'st not shame nor fear, by venturous spirit driven. under the eaves of heaven. and can'st expand thee there, and breathe enough of air ? upholding heaven, holding down earth, thy pastime from thy birth. not steadied by the one nor leaning on the other; may i approve myself thy worthy brother ! a walk to wachusett. [ 58 ] june twentieth heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads. if^alden. june twenty-first the present hour is always wealthiest when it is poorer than the future ones, as that is the pleasantest site which affords the pleasantest prospect. letters to various persons. june twenty-second the friend asks no return but that his friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace his apotheosis of him. they cherish each other's hopes. they are kind to each other's dreams. a iveek on the concord riuer. june twenty-third what avails it that you are christian, if you are not purer than the heathen, if you deny yourself no more, if you are not more religious ? i know of many systems of religion esteemed heathenish whose precepts fill the reader with shame, and provoke him to new endeavors, though it be to the performance of rites merely. ivalden. [ 59 ] june twenty-fourth in the night" the eyes are partly closed or retire into the head. other senses take the lead. the walker is guided as well by the sense of smell. excursions. june twentyfifth what exercise is to the body, employment is to the mind and morals. letters to various persons. june twenty-sixth but it is fit that the past should be dark ; though the darkness is not so much a quality of the past as of tradition. it is not a distance of time, but a distance of relation, which makes thus dusky its memorials. what is near to the heart of this generation is fair and bright still. a jveek on the concord ri-uer. june twenty-seventh we should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion. ivauen. june twenty-eighth other seeds i have which will find other things in that corner of my garden, in like fashion, almost any fruit you wish, every year for ages, [ 60 j until the crop more than fills the whole garden. you have but little more to do, than throw up your cap for entertainment these american days. perfect alchemists i keep, who can transmute substances without end ; and thus the corner of my garden is an inexhaustible treasure-chest. the succession of forest trees. june twenty-ninth i shall be a benefactor if i conquer some realms from the night, if i report to the gazettes any thing transpiring about us at that season worthy of their attention, — if i can show men that there is some beauty awake while they are asleep, — if i add to the domains of poetry. night and moonlight. june thirtieth no man who acts from a sense of duty ever puts the lesser duty above the greater. no man has the desire and ability to work on high things, but he has also the ability to build himself a high staging. letters to various persons. [ 6i ] july july first all the world reposes in beauty to him who preserves equipoise in his life, and moves serenely on his path without secret violence ; as he who sails down a stream, he has only to steer, keeping his bark in the middle, and carry it round the falls. a week on the concord ri^er. july second it is never too late to give up our prejudices. no way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. walden. july third live your life, do your work, then take your hat. i have no patience towards such conscientious cowards. give me simple laboring folk, who love their work. whose virtue is a song to cheer god along. a week on the concord ri'ver. [ 63 ] july fourth to-day it was the purple sea, an epithet which i should not before have accepted. there were distinct patches of the color of a purple grape with the bloom rubbed off. but lirst and last the sea is of all colors. cape cod. july fifth many men walk by day; few walk by night. it is a very different season. take a july night, for instance. about ten o'clock, — when man is asleep, and day fairly forgotten, — the beauty of moonlight is seen over lonely pastures where cattle are silently feeding. on all sides novelties present themselves. instead of the sun there are the moon and stars, in stead of the wood-thrush there is the whip-poor will, — instead of butterflies in the meadows, fire-flies, winged sparks of fire ! who would have believed it .'' night and moonlight. july sixth rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. i sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attend ance, but sincerity and truth were not ; and i went away hungry from the inhospitable board. the hospitality was as cold as the ices. walden. [ 64 ] july seventh bring a spray from the wood, or a crystal from the brook, and place it on your mantel, and your household ornaments will seem plebeian beside its nobler fashion and bearing. it will wave superior there, as if used to a more refined and polished circle. it has a salute and a response to all your enthusiasm and heroism. massachusetts natural history. july eighth poetry is so universally true and independent of experience, that it does not need any particular biography to illustrate it, but we refer it sooner or later to some orpheus or linus, and after ages to the genius of humanity, and the gods themselves. a week on the concord ri'ver. july ninth i am alarmed when it happens that i have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. in my afternoon walk "^^i'/v i would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society. excursions. july tenth but we had hardly got out of the streets of bangor before i began to be exhilarated bv the sight of the wild fir and spruce-tops, and those [ 65 ] of other primitive evergreens, peering through the mist in the horizon. it was like the sight and odor of cake to a schoolboy. the maine woods. july eleventh the true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first but his last fruits also. walden. july twelfth some youthful spring, perchance, still empties with tinkling music into the oldest river, even when it is falling into the sea, and we imagine that its music is distinguished by the river gods from the general lapse of the stream, and fulls sweeter on their ears in proportion as it is nearer to the ocean. a week on the concord ri'ver. july thirteenth there is, however, this consolation to the most way-worn traveler, upon the dustiest road, that the path his feet describe is so perfectly symboli cal of human life, — now climbing the hills, now [ 66 ] descending into the vales. from the summits he beholds the heavens and the horizon, from the vales he looks up to the heights again. he is treading his old lessons still, and though he may be very weary and travel-worn, it is yet sincere experience. a walk to wachusett. july fourteenth there is something singularly grand and impres sive in the sound of a tree falling in a perfectly calm night like this, as if the agencies which overthrow it did not need to be excited, but worked with a subtle, deliberate, and conscious force, like a boa-constrictor, and more effectively then than even in a windy day. if there is any such difference, perhaps it is because trees with the dews of the night on them are heavier than by day. the maine woods. july fifteenth i would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion. walden. as we have said, nature is a greater and more perfect art, the art of god ; though, referred to herself, she is genius, and there is a similarity between her operations and man's art even in [ 67 ] the details and trifles. when the overhanging pine drops into the water, by the sun and water, and the wind rubbing it against the shore, its boughs are worn into fantastic shapes, and white and smooth, as if turned in a lathe. a week on the concord ri'ver. july sixteenth my " best " room, however, my withdrawing room, always ready for company, on whose car pet the sun rarely fell, was the pine wood behind my house. thither in summer days, when distinguished guests came, i took them, and a priceless domestic swept the floor and dusted the furniture and kept the things in order. wauen. july seventeenth but there are spirits of a yet more liberal culture, to whom no simplicity is barren. there are not only stately pines, but fragile flowers, like the orchises, commonly described as too delicate for cultivation, which derive their nutriment from the crudest mass of peat. these remind us, that, not only for strength, but for beauty, the poet must, from time to time, travel the logger's path and the indian's trail, to drink at some new and more bracing fountain of the muses, far in the recesses of the wilderness. t/ie maine ll'oods. [ 68 ] july eighteenth be not simply good ; be good for something. letters to various persons. july nineteenth it was a singular experience, that long acquaint ance which i cultivated with beans, what with planting, and hoeing, and harvesting, and thresh ing, and picking over, and selling them, — the last was the hardest of all, — i might add eating, for i did taste. i was determined to know beans. walden. july twentieth when i visit again some haunt of my youth, i am glad to find that nature wears so well. the landscape is indeed something real, and solid, and sincere, and i have not put my foot through it yet. a week on the concord river. july twenty-first 1 went to the woods because i wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if i could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when i came to die, discover that i had not lived. walden. [ 69 ] july twenty-second unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barn-yard within our horizon, it is belated. that sound commonly reminds us that we are growing rusty and antique in our employments and habits of thought. his philosophy comes down to a more recent time than ours. there is something suggested by it that is a newer testa ment, — the gospel according to this moment. excursions. july twenty-third we had come away up here among the hills to learn the impartial and unbribable beneficence of nature. strawberries and melons grow as well in one man's garden as another's, and the sun lodges as kindly under his hill-side, — when we had imagined that she inclined rather to some few earnest and faithful souls whom we know. a week on the concord river. july twenty-fourth i was struck by this universal spiring upward of the forest evergreens. the tendency is to slender, spiring tops, while they are narrower below. not only the spruce and fir, but even the arbor-vitfe and white-pine, unlike the soft, spreading second-growth, of which i saw none, [ 70] all spire upwards, lifting a dense spear-head of cones to the light and air, at any rate, while their branches straggle after as they may ; as indians lift the ball over the heads of the crowd in their desperate game. in this they resemble grasses, as also palms somewhat. the hemlock is com monly a tent-like pyramid from the ground to its summit. the maine ivoods. july twenty-fifth rescue the drowning and tie your shoe-strings. take your time, and set about some free labor. h^auen. july twenty-sixth we often love to think now of the life of men on beaches, — at least in midsummer, when the weather is serene ; their sunny lives on the sand, amid the beach-grass and the bayberries, their companion a cow, their wealth a jag of drift wood or a few beach-plums, and their music the surf and the peep of the beach-bird. cape cod. july twenty-seventh we are as happy as the birds when our good genius permits us to pursue any outdoor work [ 71 ] without a sense of dissipation. our pen-knife glitters in the sun ; our voice is echoed by yonder wood ; if an oar drops, we are fain to let it drop again. a week on the concord ri'uer. july twenty-eighth who knows but if men constructed their dwell ings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they / \ /^ are so engaged ? but alas ! we do like cowbirds 1 u 7 and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which w' other birds have built, and cheer no traveler with their chattering and unmusical notes. walden. july twenty-ninth honest traveling is about as dirty work as you can do, and a man needs a pair of overalls for it. a yankee in canada. july thirtieth there is always room and occasion enough for a true book on any subject ; as there is room for more light the brightest day and more rays will not interfere with the first. a week on the concord river. [ 72 ] july thirty-first it is remarkable that men do not sail the sea with more expectation. nothing remarkable was ever accomplished in a prosaic mood. the heroes and discoverers have found true more than was previously believed, only when they were expecting and dreaming of something more than their contemporaries dreamed of, or even themselves discovered, that is, when they were in a frame of mind fitted to behold the truth. cape cod. [ 73 ] augusl august first 'j\ ytorning brings back the heroic ages. -*-^-*i was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimag inable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when i was sitting with door and win dows open, as i could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. it was homer's requiem ; itself an iliad and odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. there was something cosmical about it; a standing adver tisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world. ivalden. august second the only fruit which even much living yields seems to be often only some trivial success, — the ability to do some slight thing better. we make conquest only of husks and shells for the most part, — at least, apparently, — but some times these are cinnamon and spices, you know. letters to various persons. [ is ] august third so near along life's stream are the fountains of innocence and youth making fertile its sandy margin ; and the voyageur will do well to re plenish his vessels often at these uncontaminated sources. a week on the concord river. august fourth it is true, i came as near as is possible to come to being a hunter and miss it, myself; and as it is, i think that i could spend a year in the woods, fishing and hunting, just enough to sus tain myself, with satisfaction. this would be next to living like a philosopher on the fruits of the earth which you had raised, which also attracts me. the maine woods. august fifth most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life, that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. their fin gers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. walden. [ 76 ] august sixth early apples begin to be ripe about the first of august ; but i think that none of them are so good to eat as some to smell. one is worth more to scent your handkerchief with than any perfume which they sell in the shops. the fragrance of some fruits is not to be forgotten, along with that of flowers. mid apples. august seventh the very uprightness of the pines and maples asserts the ancient rectitude and vigor of nature. our lives need the relief of such a back ground, where the pine flourishes and the jay still screams. a fveek on the concord rifer. august eighth it is not every truth that recommends itself to the common sense. nature has a place for the wild clematis as well as for the cabbage. some expressions of truth are reminiscent, — others merely sensible^ as the phrase is, — others prophetic. excursions. august ninth for many years i was self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain storms, and did my duty faithfully ; surveyor, if not of highways, [ 11 ] then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility. walden. august tenth if with fancy unfurled you leave your abode, you may go round the world by the old marlborough road. the old marlborough road. august eleventh there are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and re pose of nature. all laborers must have their nooning, and at this season of the day, we are all, more or less, asiatics, and give over all work and reform. a week on the concord river. august twelfth the amount of it is, if a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. a man sits as many risks as he runs. walden. [ 78 ] august thirteenth when i detect a beauty in any of the recesses of nature, i am reminded, by the serene and retired spirit in which it requires to be contem plated, of the inexpressible privacy of a life, — how silent and unambitious it is. the beauty there is in mosses must be considered from the holiest, quietest nook. excursions. august fourteenth in summer we live out of doors, and have only impulses and feelings, which are all for action, and must wait commonly for the stillness and longer nights of autumn and wholly new life, which no man has lived ; that even this earth was made for more mysterious and nobler inhabitants than men and women. a iveek on the concord river. august fifteenth the cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful. before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must be stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful living be laid for a foundation : now, a taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors, where there is no house and no housekeeper. walden. [ 79 ] august sixteenth truly the stars were given for a consolation to man. we should not know but our life were fated to be always grovelling, but it is permitted to behold them, and surely they are deserving of a fair destiny. we see laws which never fail, of whose failure we never conceived ; and their lamps burn all the night, too, as well as all day, — so rich and lavish is that nature which can afford this superfluity of light. a walk to wachusett. august seventeenth the hero then will know how to wait, as well as to make haste. all good abides with him who waiteth wisely ; we shall sooner overtake the dawn by remaining here than by hurrying over the hills of the west. be assured that every man's success is in proportion to his average ability. a week on the concord ri'ver. august eighteenth in autumn, even in august, the thoughtful days begin, and we can walk anywhere with profit. beside, an outward cold and dreariness, which make it necessary to seek shelter at night, lend a spirit of adventure to a walk. cape cod. [ 80 ] august nineteenth the finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. yet we do not treat our selves nor one another thus tenderly. walden. august twentieth by the twentieth of august, everywhere in woods and swamps, we are reminded of the fall, both by the richly spotted sarsaparilla-leaves and brake.s, and the withering and blackened skunk cabbage and hellebore, and, by the river-side, the already blackening pontederia. autumnal tints. august twenty-first there have been heroes for whom this world seemed expressly prepared, as if creation had at last succeeded ; whose daily life was the stuff of which our dreams are made, and whose presence enhanced the beauty and ampleness of nature herself. a week on the concord ri<ver. august twenty-second the words which express our faith and piety are not definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures. walden. [ 8i ] august twenty-third i have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of walking, that is, of taking walks, — who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering : which word is beautifully derived from " idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going a la sainte terre" to the holy land, till the children exclaimed, "^ there goes a sainte-terrer" a saunterer, — a holy-lander. if^alking. august twenty-fourth the light-house lamps a few feet distant shone full into my chamber, and made it as bright as day, so i knew exactly how the highland light bore all that night, and i was in no danger of being wrecked. unlike the last, this was as still as a summer night. cape cod. august twenty-fifth there is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate, — not a grain more. the actual objects which one man will see from a particular hill-top are just as different from those which another will see as the beholders are different. autunmal tints. [ 82 ] august twenty-sixth why is it that the priest is never called to con sult with the physician ? it is because men believe practically that matter is independent of spirit. but what is quackery ? it is com monly an attempt to cure the diseases of a man by addressing his body alone. there is need of a physician who shall minister to both soul and body at once, that is, to man. now he falls between two stools. walden. august twenty-seventh the poet will write for his peers alone. he will remember only that he saw truth and beauty from his position, and expect the time when a vision as broad shall overlook the same field as freely. a week on the concord ri'ver. august twenty-eighth from my experience with wild apples, i can understand that there may be reason for a savage's preferring many kinds of food which the civilized man rejects. the former has the palate of an out-door man. it takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild fruit. what a healthy out-of-door appetite it takes to relish the apple of life, the apple of the world, then ! ff^ild apples. [ 83 ] august twenty-ninth the breakers looked like droves of a thousand wild horses of neptune, rushing to the shore, with their white manes streaming far behind ; and when, at length, the sun shone for a mo ment, their manes were rainbow-tinted. also, the long kelp-weed was tossed up from time to time, like the tails of sea-cows sporting in the brine. cape cod. august thirtieth we worship not the graces, nor the parcae, but fashion. she spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. jvalden. august thirty-first my life is like a stroll upon the beach, as near the ocean's edge as i can go. my tardy steps its waves sometimes o'erreach. sometimes i stay to let them overflow. my sole employment 't is, and scrupulous care. to place my gains beyond the reach of tides. each smoother pebble, and each shell more rare. which ocean kindly to my hand confides. i have but few companions on the shore. they scorn the strand who sail upon the sea. yet oft i think the ocean they 've sailed o'er is deeper known upon the strand to me. [ 84 ] the middle sea contains no crimson dulse, its deeper waves cast up no pearls to view. along the shore my hand is on its pulse, and i converse with many a shipwrecked crew. a week on the concord ri'ver. [ 85 ] september september first tf you would get exercise, go in search of the ■^ springs of life. think of a man's swinging dumb-bells for his health, when those springs are bubbling up in far-off pastures unsought by him ! walking. september second sometimes a mortal feels in himself nature, not his father but his mother stirs within him, and he becomes immortal with her immortality. from time to time she claims kindredship with us, and some globule from her veins steals up into our own. a iveek on the concord river. september third undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as adam. but man's capacities have never been measured ; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any prece dents, so little has been tried. ivalden. [ 87 ] september fourth there are nights in this climate of such serene and majestic beauty, so medicinal and fertilizing to the spirit, that methinks a sensitive nature would not devote them to oblivion, and perhaps there is no man but would be better and wiser for spending them out of doors, though he should sleep all the next day to pay for it. night and moonlight. september fifth in fact, the deeper you penetrate into the woods, the more intelligent, and, in one sense, less countrified do you find the inhabitants ; for al ways the pioneer has been a traveler, and, to some extent, a man of the world ; and, as the distances with which he is familiar are greater, so is his information more general and far reach ing than the villagers'. the maine jvoods. september sixth there is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness. i know of no redeeming qualities in myself but a sincere love for some things, and when i am reproved i fall back on to this ground. a iveek on the concord ri-ver, [ 88 ] september seventh sailors making the land commonly steer either by the wind-mills or the meeting-houses. in the country, we are obliged to steer by the meeting-houses alone. yet the meeting-house is a kind of wind-mill, which runs one day in seven, turned either by the winds of doctrine or public opinion, or more rarely by the winds of heaven, where another sort of grist is ground, of which, if it be not all bran or musty, if it be not plaster^ we trust to make bread of life. cape cod. september eighth a great grief is but sympathy with the soul that disposes events and is as natural as the resin on arabian trees. . . . the same everlasting seren ity will appear in the face of god, and we will not be sorrowful if he is not. letters to various persons. september ninth and now that we have returned to the desultory life of the plain, let us endeavor to import a little of that mountain grandeur into it. we will remember within what walls we lie, and under stand that this level life too has its summit, and why from the mountain-top the deepest valleys have a tinge of blue. a walk to wachusett. [ 89 ] september tenth some tumultuous little rill, purling round its storied pebble, tinkling to the self-same tune. from september until june, which no drought doth e'er enfeeble. silent flows the parent stream, and if rocks do lie below. smothers with her waves the din, as it were a youthful sin. just as still, and just as slow. a week on the concord ri'ver. september eleventh with the autumn begins in some measure a new spring. the plover is heard whistling high in the air over the dry pastures, the finches flit from tree to tree, the bobolinks and flickers fly in flocks, and the goldfinch rides on the earliest blast, like a winged hyla peeping amid the rustle of the leaves. massachusetts natural history. september twelfth it is not worth the while to let our imperfections disturb us always. the conscience really does not, and ought not to, monopolize the whole of [ 90 ] our lives, any more than the heart or the head. it is as liable to disease as any other part. a week on the concord ri<ver. september thirteenth most persons visit the sea-side in warm weather, when fogs are frequent, and the atmosphere is wont to be thick, and the charm of the sea is to some extent lost. but i suspect that the fall is the best season, for then the atmosphere is more transparent, and it is a greater pleasure to look out over the sea. the clear and bracing air, and the storms of autumn and winter even, are necessary in order that we may get the impression which the sea is calculated to make. cape cod. september fourteenth for my part, i feel that with regard to nature i live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world into which i make occasional and tran sional and transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the state into whose territories i seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper. walking. september fifteenth happy we who can bask in this warm september sun, which illumes all creatures, as well when they rest as when they toil, not without a feeling [ 91 ] of gratitude ; whose life is as blameless, how blameworthy soever it may be, on the lord's mona-day as on his suna-day. a week on the concord river. september sixteenth if, then, we would indeed restore mankind by truly indian, botanic, magnetic, or natural means, let us first be as simple and well as nature our selves, dispel the clouds which hang over our own brows, and take up a little life into our pores. ivalden. september seventeenth it is the living spirit of the tree, not its spirit of turpentine, with which i sympathize, and which heals my cuts. it is as immortal as i am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still. the maine ivoojs. september eighteenth nature strews her nuts and flowers broadcast, and never collects them into heaps. this was the soil it grew in, and this the hour it bloomed in; if sun, wind, and rain came here to cherish and expand the flower, shall not we come here to pluck it ? a week on the concord river. [ 92 ] september nineteenth no wonder that alexander carried the iliad with 'k him on his expeditions in a precious casket, a written word is the choicest of relics. it is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. it is the work of art nearest to life itself. walden. september twentieth as the season advances, and those birds which make us but a passing visit depart, the woods become silent again, and but i^v^ feathers ruffle the drowsy air. but the solitary rambler may still find a response and expression for every mood in the depth of the wood. massachusetts natural history. september twenty-first when, at rare intervals, some thought visits one, as perchance he is walking on a railroad, then in deed the cars go by without his hearing them. but soon, by some inexorable law, our life goes by and the cars return. walking. september twenty-second art is not tame, and nature is not wild, in the ordinary sense. a perfect work of man's art would also be wild or natural in a good sense. [ 93 ] ? man tames nature only that he may at last make her more free even than he found her, though he may never yet have succeeded. a week on the concord river. september twenty-third when formerly i was looking about to see what i could do for a living, some sad experience in conforming to the wishes of friends being fresh in my mind to tax my ingenuity, i thought often and seriously of picking huckleberries; that surely i could do, and its small profits might suffice, — for my greatest skill has been to want but little, — so little capital it required, so little distraction from my wonted moods, i foolishly thought. walden. september twenty-fourth as i love nature, as i love singing birds, and gleaming stubble, and flowing rivers, and morning and evening, and summer and winter, i love thee, my friend. a week on the concord rinjer. september twenty-fifth by the twenty-fifth of september, the red maples generally are beginning to be ripe. some large ones have been conspicuously changing for a week, and some single trees are now very brilliant. i notice a small one, half a mile off [ 94 ] ^ across a meadow, against the green wood-side there, a far brighter red than the blossoms of any tree in summer, and more conspicuous. autumnal tints. september twenty-sixth the harvest moon had just risen, and its level rays began to light up the forest on our right, while we glided downward in the shade on the same side, against the little breeze that was stirring. the lofty, spiring tops of the spruce and fir were very black against the sky, and more distinct than by day, close bordering this broad avenue on each side ; and the beauty of the scene, as the moon rose above the forest, it would not be easy to describe. the maine woods. september twenty-seventh even the death of friends will inspire us as much as their lives. they will leave consolation to the mourners, as the rich leave money to de fray the expenses of their funerals, and their memories will be incrusted over with sublime and pleasing thoughts, as their monuments are overgrown with moss. a week on the concord ri<ver. [ 95 ] september twenty-eighth when we have returned from the sea-side, we sometimes ask ourselves why we did not spend more time in gazing at the sea ; but very soon the traveler does not look at the sea more than at the heavens. cape cod. september twenty-ninth i think that the change to some higher color in a leaf is an evidence that it has arrived at a late and perfect maturity, answering to the maturity of fruits. it is generally the lowest and oldest leaves which change first. but as the perfect winged and usually bright-colored insect is short lived, so the leaves ripen but to fall. autumnal tints. september thirtieth what is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen ? will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer ? read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity. walden. [ 96 ] october october first am astonished at the singular pertinacity and endurance of our lives. the miracle is, that what is /v, when it is so difficult, if not irrj possible, for anything else to be; that we walk on in our particular paths so far, before wc fall on death and fate, merely because we must walk in some path ; that every man can get a living, and so few can do any more. so much only can i accomplish ere health and strength are gone, and yet this suffices. a week on the concord ri-ver. october second but of much more importance than a knowledge of the names and distinctions of color is the joy and exhilaration which these colored leaves excite. already these brilliant trees throughout the street, without any more variety, are at least equal to an annual festival and holiday, or a week of such. autumnal 'tints. [ 97 ] october third the true man of science will know nature better by his finer organization ; he will smell, taste, see, hear, feel, better than other men. his will be a deeper and finer experience. we do not learn by inference and deduction, and the appli cation of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy. massachusetts natural history. october fourth the tops of mountains are among the unfinished parts of the globe, whither it is a slight insult to the gods to climb and pry into their secrets, and try their effect on our humanity. only daring and insolent men, perchance, go there. simple races, as savages, do not climb mountains, — their tops are sacred and mysterious tracts never visited by them. pomola is always angry with those who climb to the summit of ktaadn. the maine ivoods. october fifth some hours seem not to be occasion for any deed, but for resolves to draw breath in. we do not directly go about the execution of the purpose that thrills us, but shut our doors behind us, and ramble with prepared mind, as if the half were already done. a jveek on the concord ri-ver. [ 98 ] october sixth now, too, the first of october, or later, the elms are at the height of their autumnal beauty, great brownish-yellow masses, warm from their sep tember oven, hanging over the highway. their leaves are perfectly ripe. i wonder if there is any answering ripeness in the lives of the men who live beneath them. autumnal tints. october seventh this life is not for complaint, but for satisfaction. letters to various persons. october eighth the intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. ivalden. october ninth every wild-apple shrub excites our expectation thus, somewhat as every wild child. it is, per haps, a prince in disguise. what a lesson to man ! so are human beings, referred to the highest standard, the celestial fruit which they suggest and aspire to bear, browsed on by fate ; and only the most persistent and strongest genius defends itself and prevails, sends a tender scion upward at last, and drops its perfect fruit on the ungrateful earth. poets and philosophers and [ 99 ] / 2 statesmen thus spring up in the country pastures, and outlast the hosts of unoriginal men. wild apples. october tenth columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before. he obeyed it, and found a new world for castile and leon. the herd of men in those days scented fresh pastures from afar. walking. october eleventh the child should have the advantage of ignorance as well as of knowledge, and is fortunate if he gets his share of neglect and exposure. a week on the concord ri'ver. october twelfth individuals, like nations, must have suitable broad and natural boundaries, even a consider able neutral ground, between them. i have found it a singular luxury to talk across the pond to a companion on the opposite side. walden. october thirteenth look at yonder swamp of maples mixed with pines, at the base of a pine-clad hill, a quarter of a mile off, so that you get the full effect of [ 100 ] the bright colors, without detecting the imper fections of the leaves, and see their yellow, scarlet, and crimson lires, of all tints, mingled and contrasted with the green. autumnal tints. october fourteenth the late walker or sailor, in the october even ings, may hear the murmurings of the snipe, circling over the meadows, the most spirit-like sound in nature ; and still later in the autumn, when the frosts have tinged the leaves, a solitary loon pays a visit to our retired ponds, where he may lurk undisturbed till the season of moulting is passed, making the woods ring with his wild laughter. massachusetts natural history. october fifteenth for this is the secret of successful sauntering. he who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. fvalking. [ loi ] october sixteenth in the hues of october sunsets, we see the portals to other mansions than those which we occupy, not far off geographically. a week on the concord river. october seventeenth do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. turn the old ; re turn to them. things do not change ; we change. sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. god will see that you do not want society. if i were confined to a corner of a garret all my days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while i had my thoughts about me. ivalden. october eighteenth cape cod is the bared and bended arm of massa chusetts : the shoulder is at buzzard's bay ; the elbow, or crazy-bone, at cape mallebarre ; the wrist at truro ; and the sandy fist at province town, — behind which the state stands on her guard, with her back to the green mountains, and her feet planted on the floor of the ocean, like an athlete protecting her bay, — boxing with northeast storms, and, ever and anon, heav ing up her atlantic adversary from the lap of [ 102 ] earth, — ready to thrust forward her other fist, which keeps guard the while upon her breast at cape ann. cape cod. october nineteenth it is a great pleasure to escape sometimes from the restless class of reformers. what if these grievances exist ? so do you and i. a week on the concord ri'ver. october twentieth how beautiful, when a whole tree is like one great scarlet fruit full of ripe juices, every leaf, from lowest limb to topmost spire, all aglow, especially if you look toward the sun ! what more re markable object can there be in the landscape ? visible for miles, too fair to be believed. if such a phenomenon occurred but once, it would be handed down by tradition to posterity, and get into the mythology at last. autumnal tints. october twenty-first the works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. they have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically. walden. [ 103 ] y october twenty-second one who pressed forward incessantly and never rested from his labors, who grew fast and made infinite demands on life, would always find him self in a new country or wilderness, and sur rounded by the raw material of life. he would be climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest-trees. walking. october twenty-third i do not see what the puritans did at this season, when the maples blaze out in scarlet. they certainly could not have worshiped in groves then. perhaps that is what they built meeting houses and fenced them round with horsesheds for. autumnal tints. october twenty-fourth the new testament is remarkable for its pure morality ; the best of the hindoo scripture, for its pure intellectuality. a week on the concord rl-ver. october twenty-fh^th to a philosopher all nezvs.^ as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. walden. [ ^04 ] october twenty-sixth by the twenty-sixth of october the large scarlet oaks are in their prime, when other oaks are usually withered. they have been kindling their fires for a week past, and now generally burst into a blaze. autumnal thits. october twenty-seventh it was worth the while to lie down in a country where you could afford such great fires ; that was one whole side, and the bright side of our world. the maine woods. october twenty-eighth we are sometimes made aware of a kindness long passed, and realize that there have been times when our friends' thoughts of us were of so pure and lofty a character that they passed over us like the winds of heaven un noticed ; when they treated us not as what we were, but as what we aspired to be. a week on the concord rinjer. october twenty-ninth most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in [ 105 j trade ; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing. ivalden. october thirtieth october is the month for painted leaves. their rich glow now flashes round the world. as fruits and leaves and the day itself acquire a bright tint just before they fall, so the year / near its setting. october is its sunset sky ; november the later twilight. autumnal tints. october thirty-first i am the autumnal sun, with autumn gales my race is run ; when will the hazel put forth its flowers, or the grape ripen under my bowers ? when will the harvest or the hunter's moon. turn my midnight into mid-noon ? i am all sere and yellow. and to my core mellow. the mast is dropping within my woods. the winter is lurking within my moods. and the rustling of the withered leaf is the constant music of my grief. a week on the concord river. [ io6 ] november november first tt is not enough that we are truthful ; we "*■ must cherish and carry out high purposes to be truthful about. letters to various persons. november second it is pleasant to walk over the beds of these fresh, crisp, and rustling leaves. how beauti fully they go to their graves ! how gently lay themselves down and turn to mould ! — painted of a thousand hues, and fit to make the beds of us living. so they troop to their last resting place, light and frisky. autumnal tints. november third there is a peculiar interest belonging to the still later flowers, which abide with us the approach of winter. there is somethinowitch-like in the to appearance of the witch-hazel, which blossoms late in october and in november, with its irregu lar and angular spray and petals like furies' hair, or small ribbon streamers. a iveek on the concord riiier. [ 107 ] november fourth standing quite alone, far in the forest, while the wind is shaking down snow from the trees, and leaving the only human tracks behind us, we find our reflections of a richer variety than the life of cities. a winter walk. november fifth hardly a man takes a half hour's nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, " what 's the news ? " as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels. some give directions to be waked every half hour, doubtless for no other purpose ; and then, to pay for it, they tell what they have dreamed. walden, november sixth a mountain-chain determines many things for the statesman and philosopher. the improve ments of civilization rather creep along its sides than cross its summit. how often is it a barrier to prejudice and fanaticism ? a walk to wachusett. november seventh look up at the tree-tops and see how finely nature finishes off her work there. see how the pines spire without end higher and higher, [ io8 ] and make a graceful fringe to the earth. and who shall count the finer cobwebs that soar and float away from their utmost tops, and the myriad insects that dodge between them. a week on the concord ri'ver. november eighth the jesuit missionaries used to say, that, in their journeys with the indians in canada, they lay on a bed which had never been shaken up since the creation, unless by earthquakes. the maine woods. november ninth a queen might be proud to walk where these gallant trees have spread their bright cloaks in the mud. i see wagons roll over them as a shadow or a reflection, and the drivers heed them just as little as they did their shadows before. autumnal tints. november tenth what we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance ; ignorance our negative knowledge. walking. november eleventh silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as [ 109 ] after disappointment ; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkw-ard a figure he may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality disturb us. a week on the concord rinjer. november twelfth all health and success does me good, however far off and withdrawn it may appear ; all disease and failure helps to make me sad and does me evil, however much sympathy it may have with me or i with it. jvalden. november thirteenth all apples are good in november. those which the farmer leaves out as unsalable, and unpalat able to those who frequent the markets, are choicest fruit to the walker. but it is remark able that the wild apple, which i praise as so spirited and racy when eaten in the fields or woods, being brought into the house, has fre quently a harsh and crabbed taste. jvild apples. november fourteenth most go in and shut their doors, thinking that bleak and colorless november has already come, [ iio ] when some of the most brilliant and memorable colors are not yet lit. autumnal taints. november fifteenth a town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that sur round it. a township where one primitive forest waves above, while another primitive forest rots below, — such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. in such a soil grew homer and confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the reformer eating locusts and wild honey. walking. o november sixteenth read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all. a week on the concord river. november seventeenth light-winged smoke, icarian bird, melting thy pinions in thy upward flight. lark without song, and messenger of dawn, circling above the hamlets as thy nest; or else, departing dream, and shadowy form of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts; [ i^i ] by night star-veiling, and by day darkening the light and blotting out the sun ; go thou my incense upward from this hearth, and ask the gods to pardon this clear flame. jvalden. november eighteenth i think that i may venture to say that every white-pine cone that falls to the earth naturally in this town, before opening and losing its seeds, and almost every pitch-pine one that falls at all, is cut off by a squirrel, and they begin to pluck them long before they are ripe, so that when the crop of white-pine cones is a small one, as it commonly is, they cut off thus almost every one of these before it fairly ripens. the succession of forest trees. november nineteenth every sunset which i witness inspires me with the desire to go to a west as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down. he appears to migrate westward daily, and tempt us to follow him. he is a great western pioneer whom the nations follow. jvalking. november twentieth a perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is ex tremely rare. for the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought ; as if we could [ ^12 j be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens with out their azure. the most attractive sentences are, perhaps, not the wisest, but the surest and roundest. a week on the concord ri'-ver. november twenty-first i believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, and christianity and candles have been introduced. walden. november twenty-second the civilized man not only clears the land per manently to a great extent, and cultivates open fields, but he tarnes and cultivates to a certain extent the forest itself. by his mere presence, almost, he changes the nature of the trees as no other creature does. the maine woods. november twenty-third let us see if we cannot stay here where he hns put us, on his own conditions. does not his law reach as far as his light ? the expedients of the nations clash with one another, only the absolutely right is expedient for all. a week on the concord ri'ver. [ 1^3 ] november twenty-fourth books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. they have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or em perors, exert an influence on mankind. italden, november twenty-fifth i trust that we shall be more imaginative, that our thoughts will be clearer, fresher, and more ethereal, as our sky, — our understanding more comprehensive and broader, like our plains, — our intellect generally on a grander scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers and mountains and forests, — and our hearts shall even corre spond in breadth and depth and grandeur to our inland seas. walking. november twenty-sixth occasionally, when threading the woods in the fall, you will hear a sound as if some one had broken a twig, and, looking up, see a jay peck ing at an acorn, or you will see a flock of them at once about it, in the top of an oak, and hear them break them off. the succession of forest trees. [ 114 ] o november twenty-seventh how many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book, walden. november twenty-eighth we do not wish for friends to feed and clothe our bodies, — neighbors are kind enough for that, — but to do the like office to our spirits. for this few are rich enough, however well disposed they may be. a iveek on the concord river. november twenty-ninth though winter is represented in the almanac as an old man, facing the wind and sleet, and drawing his cloak about him, we rather think of him as a merry wood-chopper, and warm blooded youth, as blithe as summer. a mnter ivalk. november thirtieth we know not yet what we have done, still less what we are doing. wait till evening, and other parts of our day's work will shine than we had thought at noon, and we shall discover the real purport of our toil. as when the farmer has reached the end of the furrow and looks back, he can best tell where the pressed earth shines most. a week on the cottcord ri'ver. [ 115 ] december december first jy^jy^-j j/ ^ fl/tf/ qjp .. > the unconsciousness of man is the con sciousness of god. deep are the foundations of sincerity. even stone walls have their foundation below the frost. a week on the concord ri'ver. december second but i would say to my fellows, once for all, as long as possible live free and uncommitted. it makes but little difference whether you are com mitted to a farm or the county jail. ivalden. december third out on the silent pond straightway the restless ice doth crack. and pond sprites merry gambols play amid the deafening rack. eager i hasten to the vale. as if i heard brave news. how nature held high festival, which it were hard to lose. [ 117 ] excursions. december fourth what a coarse and imperfect use indians and hunters make of nature ! no wonder that their race is so soon exterminated. i already, and for weeks afterward, felt my nature the coarser for this part of my woodland experience, and was reminded that our life should be lived as ten derly and daintily as one would pluck a flower. the maine ivoods. december fifth here is no apology for neglecting to do many things from a sense of our incapacity, — for what deed does not fall maimed and imperfect from our hands ? — but only a warning to bungle less. a week on the concord ri-ver. december sixth the bottom of the sea is strewn with anchors, some deeper and some shallower, and alternately covered and uncovered by the sand, perchance with a small length of iron cable still attached, — to which where is the other end ? so many un concluded tales to be continued another time. cape cod. [ ii8 ] december seventh the light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. only that day dawns to which we are awake. there is more day to dawn. the sun is but a morning star. jvalden. december eighth sometimes our fate grows too homely and famil iarly serious ever to be cruel. consider how for three months the human destiny is wrapped in furs. a week on the concord ri'ver. december ninth talk of burning your smoke after the wood has been consumed ! there is a far more impor tant and warming heat, commonly lost, which precedes the burning of the wood. it is the smoke of industry, which is incense. letters to various persons. december tenth no man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes ; yet i am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched, clothes than to have a sound conscience. il^ walden. [ 119 1 7 december eleventh some minds are as little logical or argumentative as nature; they can offer no reason or ''guess," but they exhibit the solemn and incontrovertible fact. if a historical question arises, they cause the tombs to be opened. a jfeek on the concord river. december twelfth 1 must walk toward oregon, and not toward europe. and that way the nation is moving, and i may say that mankind progress from east to west. excursions. december thirteenth likewise we look in vain, east or west over the earth, to find the perfect man ; but each repre sents only some particular excellence. the landlord. december fourteenth ^ i learned this, at least, by my experiment : that if one advances confidently in the direction or his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success un expected in common hours. he will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; [ 120 ] or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. walden. december fifteenth talk of mysteries ! — think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — ^ rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth ! the actual world ! the common sense! contact! contact! who are we? where are we ? ^ ""^ rhe maine woods. december sixteenth some poems are for holidays only. they are polished and sweet, but it is the sweetness of sugar, and not such as toil gives to sour bread. the breath with which the poet utters his verse must be that by which he lives. a week on the concord riuer. december seventeenth to him who contemplates a trait of natural beauty no harm nor disappointment can come. the doctrines of despair, of spiritual or political tyranny or servitude, were never taught by such as shared the serenity of nature. surely good courage will not flag here on the atlantic border, as long as we are flanked by the fur countries. [ 121 ] 1f'^:x there is enough in that sound to cheer one under any circumstances. the spruce, the hemlock, and the pine will not countenance despair. massachusetts natural history. december eighteenth be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need, though it be your example which leaves them far behind. if you give money, spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them. tvalden, december nineteenth a truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and per fect, as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of the west or in the jungles of the east. excursions. december twentieth who would neglect the least celestial sound, or faintest light that falls on earthly ground, if he could know it one day would be found that star in cygnus whither we are bound. and pale our sun with heavenly radiance round? a iveek on the concord river. [ 122 ] december twenty-first up goes the smoke as silently and naturally as the vapor exhales from the leaves, and as busy disposing itself in wreathes as the housewife on the hearth below. it is a hieroglyphic of man's life, and suggests more intimate and important things than the boiling of a pot. a winter walk. december twenty-second this further experience also i gained. i said to myself, i will not plant beans and corn with so much industry another summer, but such seeds, if the seed is not lost, as sincerity, truth, sim plicity, faith, innocence, and the like, and see if they will not grow in this soil, even with less toil and manurance, and sustain me, for surely it has not been exhausted for these crops. walden. december twenty-third it would really be no small advantage if every college were thus located at the base of a moun tain, as good at least as one well-endowed pro fessorship. it were as well to be educated in the shadow of a mountain as in more classical shades. a week on the concord river. [ 123 ] december twenty-fourth if you would feel the full force of a tempest, take up your residence on the top of mount wash ington, or at the highland light, in truro. cape cod. december twenty-fifth our life without love is like coke and ashes. men may be pure as alabaster and parian marble, elegant as a tuscan villa, sublime as niagara, and yet if there is no milk mingled with the wine at their entertainments, better is the hos pitality of goths and vandals. a week on the concord river. december twenty-sixth in any weather, at any hour of the day or night, i have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick, too ; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment ; to toe that line. iralden. december twenty-seventh but through all this dreariness we seemed to have a pure and unqualified strain of eternal melody, for always the same strain which is a dirge to one household is a morning song of rejoicing to another. cape cod. [ 124 ] december twenty-eighth it is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no per severing, never-ending enterprises. our expe ditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we set out. half the walk is but retracing our steps. -^__,..-^ y^ v excursions. december twenty-ninth the true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morn ing or evening. it is a little star-dust caught, a segrtient of the rainbow which 1 have clutched. ivalden. december thirtieth why should not we, who have renounced the king's authority, have our national preserves, where no villages need be destroyed, in which the bear and panther, and some even of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be "civil ized off the face of the earth," — our forests, not to hold the king's game merely, but to hold and preserve the king himself also, the lord of creation, — not for idle sport or food, but for inspiration and our own true recreation ? or shall we, like villains, grub them all up, poaching on our own national domains ? the maine woods. [ 125 ] december thirty-first so we saunter toward the holy land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in autumn. excursions. [ 126 ] library of congress 016 225 924 6 i library nivkrsity of california davis r. sir walter raleigh sir walter raleigh by henry david thoreau lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts introduction by franklin benjamin sanborn edited by henry aiken metcalf boston : mdcdv printed exclusively for members of the bibliophile society library university of california r* a i/to copyright, 1905, by the bibliophile society all rights reserved what makes a hero ? an heroic mind expressed in action, in endurance proved : and if there be pre-eminence of right, derived through pain well suffer'd, to the height of rank heroic, 'tis to bear unmoved, not toil, not risk, not rage of sea or wind, not the brute fury of barbarians blind, but worse, ingratitude and poisonous darts launched by the country he had served and loved. sir henry taylor, heroism in the shade. ix preface the discovery of an unpublished essay by thoreau on sir walter ralegh is an event of great interest in the world of letters, as being the earliest contribution to literature, of de cided scholarly value, of its distinguished author. the original manuscript was pur chased by mr. william k.bixby, of st. louis, from mr. edward h. russell, of worcester, massachusetts, to whom nearly all of the mss. and journals of thoreau came by in heritance ; and it is to the generosity of its present owner (mr. bixby) that the members of the bibliophile society are indebted for the privilege of possessing such an exceed ingly rare item of americana. when mere fragments of hitherto unpub lished compositions of our foremost ameri can writers are so eagerly sought, it seems strange that a well-rounded work of perhaps xi the most original of the noteworthy group of concord (massachusetts) thinkers should have remained unknown for nearly sixty years. this is a veritable treasure wherewith still further to enrich the bibliography of the publications of our society. it may be well here to remark that sim ultaneously with this volume the society has issued thoreau's journey west, the entirely unpublished ms. notes of which were dis covered among the author's journals, and purchased by mr. bixby at the same time he acquired the sir walter ralegh. we are therefore permitted to bring out, as com panion pieces, first editions of the first inedited important manuscript written by thoreau, and also this narrative of his western jour ney, which preceded his death by only a few months. these two items will doubtless prove to be one of the most important lit erary "finds" of the season. we are fortunate, moreover, in having a special introduction to each of them pre pared by franklin benjamin sanborn, the greatest living authority on thoreau, of whom he was a life-long friend and neighbor. xii there are three drafts of the manuscript of sir walter ralegh, each one differing in certain respects from the other two, and all of which have been used in the prepa ration of this volume. the third, and final, draft, in its careful elaboration, and the skilful weaving together of its parts, is a dis tinct improvement over the first ; and there are some indications, even in this last draft, that the author may have had a still further revision in contemplation. we are so wont only to associate thoreau with his own immediate world of nature, that a work like this in which he ventures so far afield, and in which he deals with so much jthat is stirring, presents him to us in an entirely new light. perhaps, at first, we may wonder what there was in common between the retiring, home-loving citizen of concord, and this adventurous knight of "the spacious days of great elizabeth," which should make sir walter ralegh his favorite character in english history. but we have only to study the career of this sturdy devonshire worthy to come under the spell of his enduring charm and real manliness; to xiii admire the unswerving loyalty with which he ever served his country ; and to feel, with robert louis stevenson, that " god has made nobler heroes, but he never made a finer gen tleman than walter ralegh." to every patriotic american this heroic figure should appeal with a special enthu siasm, since, as charles kingsley has said, " to this one man, under the providence of almighty god, the whole united states of america owe their existence." henry aiken metcalf xiv introduction by franklin benjamin sanborn the finding of a sketch of sir walter ralegh (as he usually spelt his own name) among the manuscripts of thoreau will be a surprise to most readers. but the sub ject lay along the lines of his earlier read ings after leaving harvard college, and the sketch, though not so early among his writ ings as the service, edited by me in 1902, and those parts of the week that first came out in the dial (1840-44), belongs in that active and militant period of his life. it was probably prepared for publication in the dial, and would have been published there, had not fate and the lack of paying sub scribers abruptly stopped that quarterly in the summer of 1 844. the readings from ralegh's history of the world began about 1842, as we see by the earlier "journals, and the handwriting and some other circumstances about the three drafts of the sketch fix the date as not later than 1844. his poetical scrap book, into which he copied most of those verses of ralegh's and ben jonson s time that appear in the week, along with many others, and which ellery channing had before him in writing his thoreau the poet naturalist, opens with three pages copied from the works of ralegh, and contains in its pages, 130-142, the poetic pieces ascribed to ralegh in this sketch. it was this commonplace book that thoreau used in preparing his week for the press in 1848-49, and nothing appears there of later date. the last extracts therein which can be certainly dated are from the massachusetts quarterly review of septem ber, 1848, on hindoo philosophy. the paging of the book in pencil is later, and so is a list of pages which shows what therein thoreau had used in his papers for print ing. the long passages about alexander and epaminondas are in the scrap-book at pages 236-7; and that fine passage about the starry influences stands in the scrap book on page 235, and in the list of used pages is crossed out. the poem of du bartas quoted afterwards does not seem to be in the scrap-book. of course, since thoreau wrote on ralegh, now more than sixty years, much has been learned and printed concerning his problem atical career, which still remains in some points doubtful, in none more so, per haps, than in the true authorship of the poems ascribed to him by his contempo raries, and long after by bishop percy. thoreau seems to have been guided in his judgment of ralegh as the real author of disputed poems, by his inner conscious ness of what the knightly courtier ought to have written. nor did he live long enough to see the fragments of an undoubted poem by ralegh, the continuation of cynthia, which was found after thoreau's death among the numerous papers of the cecils at hatfield house. in its form it is the poorest of all the verses ascribed to ralegh ; yet it has good lines, and a general air of magnanimous re gret. it is a fragment in the unmistakable [3] handwriting of ralegh, with all his pecul iarities of spelling, such as " soon " for sun, " yearth " for earth, " sythes " for sighs, and " perrellike " for pearl-like. the cynthia of which it is a continuation is irrecover ably lost, but was mentioned by spenser in his colin clout's come home again, as early as 1593, where he calls ralegh "the shep heard of the ocean/' and says, his song was all a lamentable lay of great unkindness and of usage hard, of cynthia, the lady of the sea, which from her presence faultless him debarred. that, of course, must have been written some time after 1592; the continuation is be lieved by archdeacon hannah to have been written soon after the death of elizabeth (his cynthia) and during his own early imprisonment in the tower. thoreau's favorite among ralegh's poems was the lie, or as he preferred to call it, the soul's errand, which was long disputed as ralegh's, but is now certainly known to be his, by the direct testimony of two contemporary manuscripts, "and the still stronger evi dence," says hannah, " of at least two [4] contemporary answers, written during his lifetime, and reproaching him with the poem, by name or implication." thoreau had at first taken it for ralegh's without doubt ; then found, in a newspaper of 1843, a version of it ascribed to joshua sylvester, the translator of du bartas, which led him to doubt its being ralegh's, and to alter his version of the text. this later version he read at the concord funeral of john brown (december 2, 1859), prefacing it with these words : " the well-known verses called the soul's errand, supposed by some to have been written by sir walter raleigh, when he was expecting to be executed on the following day, are at least worthy of such an origin, and are equally applicable to the present case. hear them/' and he pro ceeded to read them in my hearing. but on a blank page in the scrap-book he wrote in pencil," assigned to raleigh by percy, as written the night before his execution. but it appeared in poetical rhapsody in 1608, yet, as davison says, may have been written the night before he expected to have been executed in 1603. it is found among syl vester's poems, and by ritson given to davi son. it also occurs in lord pembroke's poems, and exists in two copies in the harleian mss." to this comment, written in 1843-44, archdeacon hannah added in 1870, "it can be found in mss. more than ten years earlier than 1608, in 1596/1595, or 1593. there are five other claimants, but not one with a case that will bear the slightest exami nation. for the claim of richard edwards we are indebted to a mere mistake of ellis's; for that of f. davison to a freak of ritson's; that of lord essex is only known from the correspondence of percy, who did not be lieve it; and those of sylvester and lord pembroke are sufficiently refuted by the mu tilated character of the copies which were printed among their posthumous writings." thoreau evidently had his faith in ralegh's authorship shaken by the attribu tion to sylvester in 1843, anc ^ tne printing then of the extended (rather than mutilated) copy as found in sylvester, which he pro ceeded to compare with his earlier copy. as a result, the verses read by him at the [6] brown funeral were amended from the syl vester copy. hannah has a theory worth citing: "we find grounds for supposing that ralegh marked each crisis of his his tory by writing some short poem, in which the vanity of life is proclaimed, under an aspect suited to his circumstances and age. his first slight check occurred in 1589, when he went to visit spenser in ireland ; and more seriously a little later, when his secret marriage sent him to the tower. the lie, with its proud, indignant brevity, would then exactly express his angry temper. the pilgrimage belongs more naturally to a time when he was smarting under the rude ness of the king's attorney at his trial in 1603. the few lines, even such is time, mark the calm reality of the now certain doom ; they express the thoughts appropri ate for the night now known to be indeed the last, when no room remained for bitter ness or anger, in the contemplation of im mediate and inevitable death." i may observe that thoreau adds a little to the tale of the occasion of these lines in the scrap-book where he copies them. [7] he writes, " sir walter raleigh the night before his death." (in some copies thus entitled : " verses said to have been found in his bible in the gatehouse at west minster ;." archbishop sancroft, who has transcribed the lines, calls them his " epitaph made by himself, and given to me of him, the night before his suffering.") the silent lover is thought to have been sent to elizabeth ; the walsingham verses, which thoreau thought characteristic of ralegh, do not seem so to me, and hannah says, " i think it very improbable that ralegh wrote this ballad." it sounds more like campion. as in that chapter of the service which he has called the soldier, so in this essay thoreau shows a decided taste for war as against an inglorious state of peace, and sees little harm in the constant ardor of his hero for a fight against irish kernes, spanish war ships, and the armies of austria and spain, against which he had contended from his warlike youth, when he absented himself from the university to learn the art of war. although less inclined, as he grew older, to [8] use the language of campaigns and battle fields, thoreau never quite gave up this belligerent attitude. he was pugnacious, and rather annoyed by those ostentatious preachers of international peace who mixed themselves in with the anti-slavery and temperance reformers of his period. one such, henry c. wright, an aggressive non resistant, was specially satirized by him in his journal for june 17, 1853, ^ e ann i~ versary of bunker hill battle, and perhaps chosen on that account to make a demon stration against war in concord, whose chief reputation had once been that it opened the war of the revolution. it may be mentioned, parenthetically, in passing, that thoreau's grandmother, mary jones of weston, daughter of the tory colonel jones of the provincial militia, on the day of bunker hill in 1775 came over from weston to concord to carry a basket of cherries and other good things to a tory brother immured in concord jail for bring ing in supplies from halifax to the british troops besieged in boston. she was but a girl, but she soon married rev. asa dunbar, [9] who also was inclined to be a tory, and did not join the patriots until he went to reside in keene, n. h., as a lawyer, giving up his clerical profession, since there were few parishes that would tolerate a minister who was not a sincere patriot. of the jones family some were tories and some patriots, the rest, among them mrs. dunbar, were neutral. on the contrary, thoreau's grand father on the other side was in the revolu tionary service as a privateer. for whatever reason, this particular peace advocate was not attractive to thoreau, who thus spoke of him in his "journal, as was first noted by channing in his life of thoreau ; " they addressed each other constantly by their christian names, and rubbed you con tinually with the greasy cheek of their kindness. i was awfully pestered with the benignity of one of them. . . . he wrote a book called a kiss for a b/ow, and he be haved as if i had given him a blow, was bent on giving me the kiss, when there was neither quarrel nor agreement between us. ... he addressed me as ' henry ' within one minute from the time i first laid [10] eyes on him ; and when i spoke he said, with drawling, sultry sympathy, 'henry, i know all you would say, i understand you perfectly, you need not explain anything to me.' he could tell in a dark room, with his eyes blinded, and in perfect stillness, if there was one there whom he loved. . . . what a relief to have heard the ring of one healthy, reserved tone." this satirical tone is seldom found in the essay on ralegh, which, like most of the essays and verses before 1845 are m a sei "i us an d often para doxical spirit, suggesting laughter only by their extravagance, which the young author did not seem to perceive. the tone of the service was probably sug gested by those numerous discourses on peace and non-resistance to which he was obliged to listen from 1840 to 1848, and which he resented then, as he also did in 1859 when writing with some heat on the capture and martyrdom of john brown, which he com pared to that of ralegh. " i speak for the slave," he said, "when i say that i prefer the philanthropy of captain brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots me nor liberates me. for once the sharp rifles and the revolvers were employed in a right eous cause. i do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but i can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable." he listened with much in terest to brown's account of his fights in kansas, when i had introduced him to brown in his father's house at concord, in feb ruary, 1857, anc ^ noted down many of their particulars ; and when the civil war came on, he was as earnest as any one that it should be fought to its just conclusion, the destruc tion of slavery. in this he was unlike his english friend thomas cholmondeley, who wrote to him from shrewsbury, april 23, 1 86 1 : "these rumors of wars make me wish that we had got done with this brutal stupidity of war altogether ; and i believe, thoreau, that the human race will at last get rid of it, though, perhaps, not in a creditable way ; but such powers will be brought to bear that it will become mon strous even to the french. dundonald de clared to the last that he possessed secrets which, from their tremendous character, would make war impossible. so peace may be begotten from the machinations of evil." lord dundonald, who had fought by sea for the south americans and the greeks, was a good sample of a modern ralegh ; but he would not have aroused in thoreau the interest which he had felt in ralegh. it was the literary as well as the knightly quality in the elizabethan that attracted the concord man of letters ; and the burden of this long-lost essay will be found to be chiefly literary. ralegh, like his friends, sidney and spenser, is one of the romantic figures in english literature more admired than read in these later days ; they are in dispensable to him who would know all the resources of poesy in our native tongue. i was therefore surprised and rather grieved to hear dr. holmes say, as we were re turning together to boston from the break fast given to mrs. stowe at newton, many years since, that he had never read the verses ascribed to ralegh. nobody now reads the history of the world, probably thoreau was its latest american reader, except those whom some historical task required them to [13] go through with it. he was also the last reader of davenant's gondibert, upon which many an adventurous youth has been stranded. but thoreau, like emerson and charles lamb, whose researches in elizabethan fields aided him, and are acknowledged in his com monplace book, from 1839 until 1845 ma de a faithful study of that copious and racy literature that filled the century from surrey and wyatt to crashaw and vaughan, and in this scrap-book before me more than forty authors of that period are quoted, some of them at much length. the edit ors of thoreau's dozen volumes should have had this scrap-book before them when seek ing the source of the quotations in which he so abounds. let us not seek to overvalue this treasure trove of an author to whom each successive year brings a new army of readers, and of whom every reader becomes a warm ad mirer. it is not a finished piece of english like many of his essays ; he had not in 1 844 reached that perfection in his style, nor that ripeness of thought which walden and the later writings display. it belongs, rather, with that collection of literary essays with which the bulk of his narrative of the week is so increased, and its qualities so much enriched. but it shows how early his profound conceptions got a striking expression, and how even earlier his far reaching judgments on men and things en titled him to the name of scholar and sage. few youths of new england ever ex hibited sooner in life, or practised more seriously and effectively, the arts and gifts that produce works of permanent literary value. such is every completed essay of thoreau that i have seen ; and i must now have seen them nearly all. the rev elations of his unprinted journals are now to be tested, upon their publication ; but they will not decrease or check his growing fame. sir walter raleigh perhaps no one in english history better represents the heroic character than sir walter raleigh, for sidney has got to be almost as shadowy as arthur himself. ra leigh's somewhat antique and roman vir tues appear in his numerous military and naval adventures, in his knightly conduct toward the queen, in his poems and his employments in the tower, and not least in his death, but more than all in his con stant soldier-like bearing and promise. he was the bayard of peaceful as well as war like enterprise, and few lives which are the subject of recent and trustworthy history are so agreeable to the imagination. not withstanding his temporary unpopularity, he especially possessed the prevalent and popu lar qualities which command the admira tion of men. if an english plutarch were to be written, raleigh would be the best greek or roman among them all. he was one whose virtues if they were not distinct ively great yet gave to virtues a current stamp and value as it were by the very grace and loftiness with which he carried them ; one of nature's noblemen who possessed those requisites to true nobility without which no heraldry nor blood can avail. among sav ages he would still have been chief. he seems to have had, not a profounder or grander but, so to speak, more nature than other men, a great, irregular, luxuriant na ture, fit to be the darling of a people. the enthusiastic and often extravagant, but always hearty and emphatic, tone in which he is spoken of by his contemporaries is not the least remarkable fact about him, and it does not matter much whether the current stories are true or not, since they at least prove his reputation. it is not his praise to have been a saint or a seer in his generation, but "one of the gallantest worthies that ever england bred." the stories about him testify to a character rather than a virtue. as, for instance, that " he was damnable proud. old sir robert harley of bramp ton-brian castle (who knew him) would [18] say, 'twas a great question, who was the proudest, sir walter or sir thomas over bury, but the difference that was, was judged on sir thomas's side ; " that " in his youth his companions were boisterous blades, but generally those that had wit ; " that on one occasion he beats one of them for mak ing a noise in a tavern, and "seals up his mouth, his upper and nether beard, with hard wax." a young contemporary says, "i have heard his enemies confess that he was one of the weightiest and wisest men that the island ever bred; " and another gives this character of him, " who hath not known or read of this prodigy of wit and fortune, sir walter raleigh, a man unfortu nate in nothing else but in the greatness of his wit and advancement, whose eminent worth was such, both in domestic policy, foreign expeditions, and discoveries, in arts and literature, both practic and contempla tive, that it might seem at once to conquer example and imitation." and what we are told of his personal ap pearance is accordant with the rest, that " he had in the outward man a good presence, in a handsome and well-compacted person;" that "he was a tall, handsome, and bold man ; " and his "was thought a very good face/' though " his countenance was some what spoiled by the unusual height of his forehead." " he was such a person (every way), that (as king charles i says of the lord strafford) a prince would rather be afraid of, than ashamed of," and had an "awfulness and ascendency in his aspect over other mortals;" and we are not disappointed to learn that he indulged in a splendid dress, and " notwith standing his so great mastership in style, and his conversation with the learnedest and polit est persons, yet he spake broad devonshire to his dying day." 1 such a character as this was well suited to the time in which he lived. his age was an unusually stirring one. the discovery of america and the successful progress of the reformation opened a field for both the intel lectual and physical energies of his generation. the fathers of his age were calvin and knox, and cranmer, and pizarro, and garcilaso ; and its immediate forefathers were luther 1 all the notes are in the back of the volume. and raphael, and bayard and angelo, and ariosto, and copernicus, and machiavel, and erasmus, and cabot, and ximenes, and co lumbus. its device might have been an an chor, a sword, and a quill. the pizarro laid by his sword at intervals and took to his let ters. the columbus set sail for newer worlds still, by voyages which needed not the pat ronage of princes. the bayard alighted from his steed to seek adventures no less arduous than heretofore upon the ocean and in the western world ; and the luther who had re formed religion began now to reform politics and science. in raleigh's youth, however it may have concerned him, camoens was writing a heroic poem in portugal, and the arts still had their representative in paul veronese of italy. he may have been one to welcome the works of tasso and montaigne to eng land, and when he looked about him he might have found such men as cervantes and sidney, men of like pursuits and not altogether dissimilar genius from himself, for his contemporaries, a drake to rival him on the sea, and a hudson in western [21] adventure ; a halley, a galileo, and a kep ler, for his astronomers; a bacon, a beh men, and a burton, for his philosophers; and a jonson, a spenser, and a shakespeare, his poets for refreshment and inspiration. but that we may know how worthy he himself was to make one of this illustrious company, and may appreciate the great activ ity and versatility of his genius, we will glance hastily at the various aspects of his life. he was a proper knight, a born cavalier, who in the intervals of war betook himself still to the most vigorous arts of peace, though as if diverted from his proper aim. he makes us doubt if there is not some worthier apology for war than has been dis covered, for its modes and manners were an instinct with him ; and though in his writ ings he takes frequent occasion sincerely to condemn its folly, and show the better policy and advantage of peace, yet he speaks with the uncertain authority of a warrior still, to whom those juster wars are not simply the dire necessity he would imply. in whatever he is engaged we seem to see a plume waving over his head, and a sword dangling at his side. born in 1552, the last year of the reign of edward vi, we find that not long after, by such instinct as makes the young crab seek the seashore, he has already marched into france, as one of " a troop of a hundred gentlemen volunteers," who are described as " a gallant company, nobly mounted and accoutred, having on their colors the motto, finem det mlhi virtus ' let valor be my aim/ ' and so in fact he marched on through life with this motto in his heart always. all the peace of those days seems to have been but a truce, or casual interruption of the order of war. war with spain, especially, was so much the rule rather than the exception that the navi gators and commanders of these two nations, when abroad, acted on the presumption that their countries were at war at home, though they had left them at peace; and their re spective colonies in america carried on war at their convenience, with no infraction of the treaties between the mother countries. raleigh seems to have regarded the span iards as his natural enemies, and he was not backward to develop this part of his [23] nature. when england was threatened with foreign invasion, the queen looked to him especially for advice and assistance; and none was better able to give them than he. we cannot but admire the tone in which he speaks of his island, and how it is to be best defended, and the navy, its chief strength, maintained and improved. he speaks from england as his castle, and his (as no other man's) is the voice of the state ; for he does not assert the interests of an individual but of a commonwealth, and we see in him re vived a roman patriotism. his actions, as they were public and for the public, were fit to be publicly rewarded ; and we accordingly read with equanimity of gold chains and monopolies and other emoluments conferred on him from time to time for his various services, his military successes in ireland, " that commonweal of common woe," as he even then described it ; his enterprise in the harbor of cadiz ; his capture of fayal from the spaniards ; and other exploits which perhaps, more than anything else, got him fame and a name during his lifetime. if war was his earnest work, it was his pastime too; for in the peaceful intervals we hear of him participating heartily and bear ing off the palm in the birthday tourna ments and tilting matches of the queen, where the combatants vied with each other mainly who should come on to the ground in the most splendid dress and equipments. in those tilts it is said that his political rival, essex, whose wealth enabled him to lead the costliest train, but who ran very ill and was thought the poorest knight of all, was wont to change his suit from orange to green, that it might be said that " there was one in green who ran worse than one in orange." none of the worthies of that age can be duly appreciated if we neglect to consider them in their relation to the new world. the stirring spirits stood with but one foot on the land. there were drake, hawkins, hudson, frobisher, and many others, and their worthy companion was raleigh. as a navigator and naval commander he had few equals, and if the reader who has at tended to his other actions inquires how he filled up the odd years, he will find that they were spent in numerous voyages to america for the purposes of discovery and coloniza tion. he would be more famous for these enterprises if they were not overshadowed by the number and variety of his pursuits. his persevering care and oversight as the patron of virginia, discovered and planted under his auspices in 1584, present him in an interesting light to the american reader. the work of colonization was well suited to his genius ; and if the necessity of england herself had not required his attention and presence at this time, he would possibly have realized some of his dreams in planta tions and cities on our coast. england has since felt the benefit of his experience in naval affairs ; for he was one of the first to assert their importance to her, and he exerted himself especially for the improvement of naval architecture, on which he has left a treatise. he also composed a discourse on the art of war at sea, a sub ject which at that time had never been treated. we can least bear to consider raleigh as a courtier ; though the court of england at that time was a field not altogether un worthy of such a courtier. his competitors for fame and favor there were burleigh, leicester, sussex, buckingham, and, be it remembered, sir philip sidney, whose ar cadia was just finished when raleigh came to court. sidney was his natural com panion and other self, as it were, as if nature, in her anxiety to confer one speci men of a true knight and courtier on that age, had cast two in the same mould, lest one should miscarry. these two kindred spirits are said to have been mutually at tracted toward each other. and there, too, was queen elizabeth herself, the centre of the court and of the kingdom ; to whose service he consecrates himself, not so much as a subject to his sovereign, but as a knight to the service of his mistress. his inter course with the queen may well have begun with the incident of the cloak, for such continued to be its character afterward. it has in the description an air of romance, and might fitly have made a part of his friend sidney's arcadia. the tale runs that [a?] the queen, walking one day in the midst of her courtiers, came to a miry place, when raleigh, who was then unknown to her, taking off his rich plush cloak, spread it upon the ground for a foot-cloth. we are inclined to consider him as some knight, and a knight errant, too, who had strayed into the precincts of the court, and practised there the arts which he had learned in bower and hall and in the lists. not but that he knew how to govern states as well as queens, but he brought to the task the gallantry and graces of chivalry, as well as the judgment and experience of a practical modern englishman. " the queen," says one, " began to be taken with his elocution, and loved to hear his reasons to his demands ; and the truth is she took him for a kind of oracle, which nettled them all." he rose rapidly in her favor, and became her indis pensable counsellor in all matters which concerned the state, for he was minutely acquainted with the affairs of england, and none better understood her commercial in terests. but notwithstanding the advantage of his wisdom to england, we had rather [28] think of him taking counsel with the winds and breakers of the american coast and the roar of the spanish artillery, than with the queen. but though he made a good use of his influence (for the most part) when obtained, he could descend to the grossest flattery to obtain this, and we could wish him forever banished from the court, whose favors he so earnestly sought. yet that he who was one while " the queen of england's poor captive," could sometimes assume a manly and independent tone with her, appears from his answer when she once exclaimed, on his asking a favor for a friend, " when, sir walter, will you cease to be a beggar?" "when your gracious majesty ceases to be a benefactor." his court life exhibits him in mean and frivolous relations, which make him lose that respect in our eyes which he had acquired elsewhere. the base use he made of his recovered influence (after having been banished from the court, and even suffered imprisonment in consequence of the queen's displeasure) to procure the disgrace and finally the execution of his rival essex (who had been charged with treason) is the foulest stain upon his escutcheon, the one which it is hardest to reconcile with the nobleness and generosity which we are inclined to attribute to such a character. revenge is most un heroic. his acceptance of bribes afterwards for using his influence in behalf of the earl's adherents is not to be excused by the usage of the times. the times may change, but the laws of integrity and magnanimity are immutable. nor are the terms on which he was the friend of cecil, from motives of policy merely, more tolerable to con sider. yet we cannot but think that he fre quently travelled a higher, though a parallel, course with the mob, and though he had their suffrages, to some extent deserves the praise which jonson applies to another, that to the vulgar canst thyself apply, treading a better path not contrary. we gladly make haste to consider him in what the world calls his misfortune, after the death of elizabeth and the accession of james i, when his essentially nobler [30] nature was separated from the base com pany of the court and the contaminations which his loyalty could not resist, though tested by imprisonment and the scaffold. his enemies had already prejudiced the king against him before james's accession to the throne, and when at length the english nobility were presented to his majesty (who, it will be remembered, was a scotchman), and raleigh's name was told, " raleigh ! " exclaimed the king, " o my soule, mon, i have heard rawly of thee." his efforts to limit the king's power of introducing scots into england contributed to increase his jealousy and dislike, and he was shortly after accused by lord cobham of participating in a conspiracy to place the lady arabella stuart 2 on the throne. owing mainly, it is thought, to the king's resentment, he was tried and falsely con victed of high treason ; though his accuser retracted in writing his whole accusation before the conclusion of the trial. in connection with his earlier behavior to essex, it should be remembered that by his conduct on his own trial he in a great measure removed the ill-will which existed against him on that account. at his trial, which is said to have been most unjustly and insolently conducted by sir edward coke on the part of the crown, "he an swered," says one, "with that temper, wit, learning, courage, and judgment that, save that it went with the hazard of his life, it was the happiest day that ever he spent." the first two that brought the news of his condemnation to the king were roger ash ton and a scotsman, " whereof one affirmed that never any man spake so well in times past, nor would in the world to come ; and the other said, that whereas when he saw him first, he was so led with the common hatred that he would have gone a hundred miles to have seen him hanged, he would, ere he parted, have gone a thousand to have saved his life." another says, " he behaved himself so worthily, so wisely, and so tem perately, that in half a day the mind of all the company was changed from the extrem est hate to the extremest pity." and an other said, " to the lords he was humble, but not prostrate; to the jury affable, but not [3*] ' fawning ; to the king's counsel patient, but not yielding to the imputations laid upon him, or neglecting to repel them with the spirit which became an injured and hon orable man." and finally he followed the sheriff out of court in the expressive words of sir thomas overbury, " with admirable erection, but yet in such sort as became a man condemned." raleigh prepared himself for immediate execution, but after his pretended accom plices had gone through the ceremony of a mock execution and been pardoned by the king, it satisfied the policy of his enemies to retain him a prisoner in the tower for thirteen years, with the sentence of death still unrevoked. in the meanwhile he solaced himself in his imprisonment with writ ing a history of the world and cultivating poetry and philosophy as the noblest deeds compatible with his confinement. it is satisfactory to contrast with his mean personal relations while at court his con nection in the tower with the young prince henry (whose tastes and aspirations were of a stirring kind), as his friend and instructor. [33] he addresses some of his shorter pieces to the prince, and in some instances they seem to have been written expressly for his use. he preaches to him as he was well able, from experience, a wiser philosophy than he had himself practised, and was particularly anxious to correct in him a love of popular ity which he had discovered, and to give him useful maxims for his conduct when he should take his father's place. he lost neither health nor spirits by thir teen years of captivity, but after having spent this, the literary era of his life, as in the retirement of his study, and having written the history of the old world, he began to dream of actions which would supply mate rials to the future historian of the new. it is interesting to consider him, a close pris oner as he was, preparing for voyages and adventures which would require him to roam more broadly than was consistent with the comfort or ambition of his freest contemporaries. already in 1595, eight years before his imprisonment, it will be remembered he had undertaken his first voyage to guiana in [34] person ; mainly, it is said, to recover favor with the queen, but doubtless it was much more to recover favor with himself, and ex ercise his powers in fields more worthy of him than a corrupt court. he continued to cherish this his favorite project though a prisoner; and at length in the thirteenth year of his imprisonment, through the in fluence of his friends and his confident assertions respecting the utility of the expe dition to the country, he obtained his release, and set sail for guiana with twelve ships. but unfortunately he neglected to procure a formal pardon from the king, trusting to the opinion of lord bacon that this was unnecessary, since the sentence of death against him was virtually annulled, by the lives of others being committed to his hands. acting on this presumption, and with the best intentions toward his country, and only his usual jealousy of spain, he un dertook to make good his engagements to himself and the world. it is not easy for us at this day to realize what extravagant expectations europe had formed respecting the wealth of the new [35] world. we might suppose two whole con tinents, with their adjacent seas and oceans, equal to the known globe, stretching from pole to pole, and possessing every variety of soil, climate, and productions, lying un explored to-day, what would now be the speculations of broadway and state street ? the few travellers who had penetrated into the country of guiana, whither raleigh was bound, brought back accounts of noble streams flowing through majestic forests, and a depth and luxuriance of soil which made england seem a barren waste in comparison. its mineral wealth was reported to be as in exhaustible as the cupidity of its discoverers was unbounded. the very surface of the ground was said to be resplendent with gold, and the men went covered with gold-dust, as hottentots with grease. raleigh was in formed while at trinidad, by the spanish governor, who was his prisoner, that one juan martinez had at length penetrated into this country ; and the stories told by him of the wealth and extent of its cities surpass the narratives of marco polo himself. he is said in particular to have reached the city [36] of manoa, to which he first gave the name of el dorado, or the gilded," the in dians conducting him blindfolded, not re moving the veil from his eyes till he was ready to enter the city. it was at noon that he passed the gates, and it took him all that day and the next, walking from sunrise to sunset, before he arrived at the palace of inga, where he resided for seven months, till he had made himself master of the lan guage of the country. these and even more fanciful accounts had raleigh heard and pondered, both before and after his first visit to the country. no one was more familiar with the stories, both true and fabulous, respecting the discovery and resources of the new world, and none had a better right than he to know what great commanders and navigators had done there, or anywhere. such information would naturally flow to him of its own accord. that his ardor and faith were hardly cooled by actual observa tion may be gathered from the tone of his own description. he was the first englishman who ascended the orinoco, and he thus describes the adja [37] cent country : " on the banks were divers sorts of fruits good to eat, besides flowers and trees of that variety as were sufficient to make ten volumes of herbals. we relieved ourselves many times with the fruits of the country, and sometimes with fowl and fish : we saw birds of all colors, some carnation, some crimson, orange tawny, purple, green, watched [watchet], and of all other sorts, both simple and mixt ; as it was unto us a great good passing of the time to behold them, besides the relief we found by killing some store of them with our fowling pieces, without which, having little or no bread, and less drink, but only the thick and troubled water of the river, we had been in a very hard case." the following is his description of the waterfalls and the province of canuri, through which last the river runs. " when we run to the tops of the first hills of the plains adjoining to the river, we beheld that wonderful breach of waters which ran down caroli : and might from that mountain see the river how it ran in three parts above twenty miles off; there appeared some ten [38] or twelve overfalls in sight, every one as high over the other as a church tower, which fell with that fury, that the rebound of waters made it seem as if it had been all covered over with a great shower of rain : and in some places we took it at the first for a smoke that had risen over some great town. for mine own part, i was well persuaded from thence to have returned, being a very ill footman ; but the rest were all so desirous to go near the said strange thunder of waters, as they drew me on by little and little, into the next valley, where we might better discern the same. i never saw a more beau tiful country, nor more lively prospects, hills so raised here and there over the valleys, the river winding into divers branches, the plains adjoining without bush or stubble, all fair green grass, the ground of hard sand, easy to march on either for horse or foot, the deer crossing in every path, the birds towards the evening singing on every tree with a thousand several tunes, cranes and herons of white, crimson, and carnation perching on the river's side, the air fresh, with a gentle easterly wind ; and every stone [39] that we stopped to take up promised either gold or silver by his complexion." in another place he says : " to conclude, guiana is a country never sacked, turned, nor wrought ; the face of the earth hath not been torn, nor the virtue and salt of the soil spent by manurance." to the fabulous accounts of preceding ad venturers raleigh added many others equally absurd and poetical, as, for instance, of a tribe " with eyes in their shoulders and their mouths in the middle of their breasts," but, it seems to us, with entire good faith, and no such flagrant intent to deceive as he has been accused of. " weak policy it would be in me," says he, " to betray my self or my country with imaginations ; neither am i so far in love with that lodg ing, watching, care, peril, diseases, ill savors, bad fare, and many other mischiefs that ac company these voyages, as to woo myself again into any of them, were i not assured that the sun covereth not so much riches in any part of the earth." some portion of this so prevalent delusion respecting the pre cious metals is no doubt to be referred to the [40] actual presence of an abundance of mica, slate, and talc and other shining substances in the soil. "we may judge," says macaulay, " of the brilliancy of these deceptious appear ances, from learning that the natives ascribed the lustre of the magellanic clouds or nebulae of the southern hemisphere to the bright reflections produced by them." so he was himself most fatally deceived, and that too by the strength and candor no less than the weakness of his nature, for, generally speak ing, such things are not to be disbelieved as task our imaginations to conceive of, but such rather as are too easily embraced by the understanding. it is easy to see that he was tempted, not so much by the lustre of the gold, as by the splendor of the enterprise itself. it was the best move that peace allowed. the expe ditions to guiana and the ensuing golden dreams were not wholly unworthy of him, though he accomplished little more in the first voyage than to take formal possession of the country in the name of the queen, and in the second, of the spanish town of san thome, as his enemies would say, in the name of himself. perceiving that the spaniards, who had been secretly informed of his designs through their ambassador in england, were prepared to thwart his endeavors, and resist his progress in the country, he procured the capture of this their principal town, which was also burnt, against his orders. but it seems that no particular exception is to be taken against these high-handed measures, though his enemies have made the greatest handle of them. his behavior on this occasion was part and parcel of his constant character. it would not be easy to say when he ceased to be an honorable soldier and became a freebooter ; nor indeed is it of so much importance to inquire of a man what actions he performed at one and what at another period, as what manner of man he was at all periods. it was after all the same raleigh who had won so much re nown by land and sea, at home and abroad. it was his forte to deal vigorously with men, whether as a statesman, a courtier, a navigator, a planter of colonies, an accused person, a prisoner, an explorer of continents, or a military or naval commander. [42] and it was a right hero's maxim of his, that " good success admits of no examina tion ; " which, in a liberal sense, is true conduct. that there was no cant in him on the subject of war appears from his say ing (which indeed is very true), that "the necessity of war, which among human ac tions is most lawless, hath some kind of affinity and near resemblance with the ne cessity of law." it is to be remembered, too, that if the spaniards found him a rest less and uncompromising enemy, the in dians experienced in him a humane and gentle defender, and on his second visit to guiana remembered his name and wel comed him with enthusiasm. we are told that the spanish ambassador, on receiving intelligence of his doings in that country, rushed into the presence of king james, exclaiming " piratas, piratas! " " pirates, pirates ! " and the king, to gratify his resentment, without bringing him to trial for this alleged new offence, with characteristic meanness and pusillanim ity caused him to be executed upon the old sentence soon after his return to england. [43] the circumstances of his execution and how he bore himself on that memorable oc casion, when the sentence of death passed fifteen years before was revived against him, after as an historian in his confinement he had visited the old world in his free im agination, and as an unrestrained adventurer the new, with his fleets and in person, are perhaps too well known to be repeated. the reader will excuse our hasty rehearsal of the final scene. we can pardon, though not without limi tations, his supposed attempt at suicide in the prospect of defeat and disgrace ; and no one can read his letter to his wife, written while he was contemplating this act, with out being reminded of the roman cato, and admiring while he condemns him. " i know," says he, " that it is forbidden to destroy ourselves ; but i trust it is for bidden in this sort, that we destroy not our selves despairing of god's mercy." though his greatness seems to have forsaken him in his feigning himself sick, and the base methods he took to avoid being brought to trial, yet he recovered himself at last, and [44] happily withstood the trials which awaited him. the night before his execution, be sides writing letters of farewell to his wife, containing the most practical advice for the conduct of her life, he appears to have spent the time in writing verses on his con dition, and among others this couplet, on the snuff of a candle. cowards may fear to die ; but courage stout, rather than live in snuff, will be put out. and the following verses, perhaps, for an epitaph on himself: even such is time, that takes on trust our youth, our joys, our all we have, and pays us but with earth and dust; who in the dark and silent grave, when we have wandered all our ways, shuts up the story of our days ! but from this earth, this grave, this dust, the lord shall raise me up, i trust ! his execution was appointed on lord mayor's day, that the pageants and shows might divert the attention of the people ; but those pageants have long since been for gotten, while this tragedy is still remem [45] bered. he took a pipe of tobacco before he went to the scaffold, and appeared there with a serene countenance, so that a stranger could not have told which was the con demned person. after exculpating him self in a speech to the people, and without ostentation having felt the edge of the axe, and disposed himself once as he wished to lie, he made a solemn prayer, and being directed to place himself so that his face should look to the east, his characteristic answer was, " it mattered little how the head lay, pro vided the heart was right/' the execu tioner being overawed was unable at first to perform his office, when raleigh, slowly raising his head, exclaimed, " strike away, man, don't be afraid." " he was the most fearless of death," says the bishop 3 who at tended him, " that ever was known, and the most resolute and confident, yet with reverence and conscience." but we would not exaggerate the importance of these things. the death scenes of great men are agreeable to consider only when they make another and harmonious chapter of their lives, and we have accompanied our [46] hero thus far because he lived, so to speak, unto the end. in his history of the world occurs this sentence : " o eloquent, just, and mighty death ! whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded ; what none hath dared, thou hast done ; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised : thou hast drawn to gether all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with those two narrow words hie iacet!" perhaps raleigh was the man of the most general information and universal accom plishment of any in england. though he excelled greatly in but few departments, yet he reached a more valuable mediocrity in many. " he seemed," said fuller, " to be like cato uticensis, born to that only which he was about/' he said he had been " a soldier, a sea-captain, and a courtier," but he had been much more than this. he embraced in his studies music, ornamental gardening, painting, history, antiquities, chemistry, and many arts beside. espe [47] cially he is said to have been a great chemist, and studied most in his sea voyages, " when he carried always a trunk of books along with him, and had nothing to divert him/' and when also he carried his favorite pictures. in the tower, too, says one, "he doth spend all the day in distillations ; " and that this was more than a temporary recreation ap pears from the testimony of one who says he was operator to him for twelve years. here also "he conversed on poetry, phi losophy, and literature with hoskins, his fellow-prisoner," whom ben jonson men tions as " the person who had polished him." he was a political economist far in advance of his age, and a sagacious and in fluential speaker in the house of commons. science is indebted to him in more ways than one. in the midst of pressing public cares he interested himself to establish some means of universal communication between men of science for their mutual benefit, and actually set up what he termed " an office of address " for this purpose. as a mathe matician, he was the friend of harriot, dee, and the earl of northumberland. as an [48] antiquarian, he was a member of the first antiquarian society established in england, along with spelman, selden, cotton, cam den, savile, and stow. he is said to have been the founder of the mermaid club, which met in fleet street, to which shake speare, ben jonson, fletcher, beaumont, carew, donne, etc., belonged. he has the fame of having first introduced the potato from virginia and the cherry from the ca naries into ireland, where his garden was ; and his manor of sherborne 4 " he beautified with gardens, and orchards, and groves of much variety and delight." and this fact, evincing his attention to horticulture, is re lated, that once, on occasion of the queen's visiting him, he artificially retarded the ripening of some cherries by stretching a wet canvas over the tree, and removed it on a sunny day, so as to present the fruit ripe to the queen a month later than usual. not to omit a more doubtful but not less celebrated benefit, it is said that on the re turn of his first colonists from virginia in 1586 tobacco was first effectually intro duced into england, and its use encouraged [49] by his influence and example. and finally, not to be outdone by the quacks, he invented a cordial which became very celebrated, bore his name, and was even administered to the queen, and to the prince henry in his last illness. one febure writes that " sir walter, being a worthy successor of mithri dates, matheolus, basil valentine, paracel sus, and others, has, he affirms, selected all that is choicest in the animal, vegetable, and mineral world, and moreover manifested so much art and experience in the preparation of this great and admirable cordial as will of itself render him immortal." we come at last to consider him as a literary man and a writer, concerning which aspect of his life we are least indebted to the historian for our facts. as he was heroic with the sword, so was he with the pen. the history of the world, the task which he selected for his prison hours, was heroic in the undertaking and heroic in the achievement. the easy and cheerful heart with which he endured his confinement, turning his prison into a study, a parlor, and a laboratory, and his prison [50] yard into a garden, so that men did not so much pity as admire him; the steady pur pose with which he set about fighting his battles, prosecuting his discoveries, and gathering his laurels, with the pen, if he might no longer with regiments and fleets, is itself an exploit. in writing the his tory of the world he was indeed at liberty ; for he who contemplates truth and universal laws is free, whatever walls immure his body, though to our brave prisoner thus employed, mankind may have seemed but his poor fellow-prisoners still. though this remarkable work interests us more, on the whole, as a part of the history of raleigh than as the history of the world, yet it was done like himself, and with no small success. the historian of greece and rome is usually unmanned by his subject, as a peasant crouches before lords ; but raleigh, though he succumbs to the imposing fame of tradition and antedi luvian story, and exhibits unnecessary rever ence for a prophet or patriarch, from his habit of innate religious courtesy, has done better than this whenever a hero was to be dealt with. he stalks down through the aisles of the past, as through the avenues of a camp, with poets and historians for his heralds and guides ; and from whatever side the faintest trump reaches his ear, that way does he promptly turn, though to the neglect of many a gaudy pavilion. from a work so little read in these days we will venture to quote as specimens the following criticisms on alexander and the character of epaminondas. they will, at any rate, teach our lips no bad habits. there is a natural emphasis in his style, like a man's tread, and a breathing space between the sentences, which the best of more modern writing does not furnish. his chapters are like english parks, or rather like a western forest, where the larger growth keeps down the underwood, and one may ride on horse back through the openings. 6 " certainly the things that this king did were marvellous, and would hardly have been undertaken by any man else : and though his father had determined to have invaded the lesser asia, it is like enough that he would have contented himself with some part thereof, and not have discovered the river of indus, as this man did. the swift course of victory, wherewith he ran over so large a portion of the world, in so short a space, may justly be imputed unto this, that he was never encountered by an equal spirit, concurring with equal power against him. hereby it came to pass, that his actions, being limited by no greater op position than desert places, and the mere length of tedious journeys could make, were like the colossus of rhodes, not so much to be admired for the workmanship, though therein also praiseworthy, as for the huge bulk. for certainly the things performed by xenophon, discover as brave a spirit as alexander's, and working no less exquisitely, though the effects were less material, as were also the forces and power of command, by which it wrought. but he that would find the exact pattern of a noble commander, must look upon such as epaminondas, that encountering worthy captains, and those bet ter followed than themselves, have by their singular virtue over-topped their valiant ene mies, and still prevailed over those that [53] would not have yielded one foot to any other. such as these are do seldom live to obtain great empires; for it is a work of more labor and longer time to master the equal forces of one hardy and well-ordered state, than to tread down and utterly sub due a multitude of servile nations, com pounding the body of a gross unwieldy empire. wherefore these parvopof en fes, men that with little have done much upon ene mies of like ability, are to be regarded as choice examples of worth ; but great con querors, to be rather admired for the sub stance of their actions, than the exquisite managing : exactness and greatness concur ring so seldom, that i can find no instance of both in one, save only that brave roman, caesar." of epaminondas he says, "so died epaminondas, the worthiest man that ever was bred in that nation of greece, and hardly to be matched in any age or country; for he equalled all others in the several virtues, which in each of them were singu lar. his justice, and sincerity, his temper ance, wisdom, and high magnanimity, were [54] no way inferior to his military virtue ; in every part whereof he so excelled, that he could not properly be called a wary, a val iant, a politic, a bountiful, or an industrious, and a provident captain ; all these titles, and many others being due unto him, which with his notable discipline, and good conduct, made a perfect composition of an heroic gen eral. neither was his private conversation unanswerable to those high parts, which gave him praise abroad. for he was grave, and yet very affable and courteous; resolute in public business, but in his own particular easy, and of much mildness ; a lover of his people, bearing with men's infirmities, witty and pleasant in speech, far from insolence, master of his own affections, and furnished with all qualities that might win and keep love. to these graces were added great ability of body, much eloquence and very deep knowledge of philosophy and learn ing, wherewith his mind being enlightened, rested not in the sweetness of contempla tion, but broke forth into such effects as gave unto thebes which had ever been an underling, a dreadful reputation among all [553 people adjoining, and the highest command in greece." for the most part an author only writes history, treating it as a dead subject ; but raleigh tells it like a fresh story. a man of action himself, he knew when there was an action coming worthy to be related, and does not disappoint the reader, as is too com monly the case, by recording merely the traditionary admiration or wonder. in com menting upon the military actions of the ancients, he easily and naturally digresses to some perhaps equal action of his own, or within his experience; and he tells how they should have drawn up their fleets or men, with the authority of an admiral or general. the alacrity with which he ad verts to some action within his experience, and slides down from the dignified imper sonality of the historian into the familiarity and interest of a party and eye-witness, is as attractive as rare. he is often without re proach the caesar of his own story. he treats scipio, pompey, hannibal, and the rest quite like equals, and he speaks like an eye-witness, and gives life and reality to the [56] narrative by his very lively understanding and relating of it ; especially in those parts in which the mere scholar is most likely to fail. every reader has observed what a dust the historian commonly raises about the field of battle, to serve as an apology for not mak ing clear the disposition and manoeuvring of the parties, so that the clearest idea one gets is of a very vague counteraction or standing over against one another of two forces. in this history we, at least, have faith that these things are right. our author describes an ancient battle with the vivacity and truth of an eye-witness, and perhaps, in criticising the disposition of the forces, say ing they should have stood thus or so, some times enforces his assertions in some such style as "i remember being in the harbor of cadiz," etc., so that, as in herodotus and thucydides, we associate the historian with the exploits he describes. but this comes not on account of his fame as a writer, but from the conspicuous part he acted on the world's stage, and his name is of equal mark to us with those of his heroes. so in the present instance, not only his valor as a [57] writer, but the part he acted in his genera tion, the life of the author, seems fit to make the last chapter in the history he is writing. we expect that when his history is brought to a close it will include his own exploits. however, it is hardly a work to be consulted as authority nowadays, except on the subject of its author's character. the natural breadth and grasp of the man is seen in the preface itself, which is a ser mon with human life for its text. in the first books he discusses with childlike ear nestness, and an ingenuity which they little deserved, the absurd and frivolous questions which engaged the theology and philosophy of his day. but even these are recommended by his sincerity and fine imagination, while the subsequent parts, or story itself, have the merit of being far more credible and lifelike than is common. he shows occasionally a poet's imagination, and the innocence and purity of a child (as it were) under a knight's dress, such as were worthy of the friend of spenser. the nobleness of his nature is everywhere apparent. the gentleness and steady heart with which he cultivates phi [58] losophy and poetry in his prison, dissolving in the reader's imagination the very walls and bars by his childlike confidence in truth and his own destiny, are affecting. even astrology, or, as he has elsewhere called it, " star-learning," comes recommended from his pen, and science will not refuse it. "and certainly it cannot be doubted," says he, " but the stars are instruments of far greater use, than to give an obscure light, and for men to gaze on after sunset : it being manifest, that the diversity of seasons, the winters and summers, more hot and cold, are not so uncertained by the sun and moon alone, who alway keep one and the same course; but that the stars have also their working therein. "and if we cannot deny, but that god hath given virtues to springs and fountains, to cold earth, to plants and stones, minerals, and to the excremental parts of the basest living creatures, why should we rob the beautiful stars of their working powers ? for seeing they are many in number, and of eminent beauty and magnitude, we may not think, that in the treasury of his wisdom, who is [j9] infinite, there can be wanting (even for every star) a peculiar virtue and operation ; as every herb, plant, fruit, and flower adorning the face of the earth, hath the like. for as these were not created to beautify the earth alone, and to cover and shadow her dusty face, but otherwise for the use of man and beast, to feed them and cure them ; so were not those uncountable glorious bodies set in the firmament, to no other end, than to adorn it ; but for instruments and organs of his divine providence, so far as it hath pleased his just will to determine. "origen upon this place of genesis, let there be light in the firmament, &c. 9 affirmeth, that the stars are not causes (meaning per chance binding causes ; ) but are as open books, wherein are contained and set down all things whatsoever to come ; but not to be read by the eyes of human wisdom : which latter part i believe well, and the saying of syracides withal ; that there are hid yet greater things than these be, and we have seen but a few of his works. and though, for the capacity of men, we know somewhat, yet in the true and uttermost virtues of herbs and plants, [60] which our selves sow and set, and which grow under our feet, we are in effect igno rant; much more in the powers and working of celestial bodies. . . . but in this question of fate, the middle course is to be followed, that as with the heathen we do not bind god to his creatures, in this supposed necessity of destiny ; and so on the contrary we do not rob those beautiful creatures of their powers and offices. . . . and that they wholly di rect the reasonless mind, i am resolved : for all those which were created mortal, as birds, beasts, and the like, are left to their natural appetites ; over all which, celestial bodies (as instruments and executioners of god's provi dence) have absolute dominion. . . . and saint augustine says, deus regit inferiora corpora per superiora ; ' god ruleth the bodies below by those above/ ... it was there fore truly affirmed, sapiens adiuvabit opus astrorum, quemadmodum agrlcola terrae na turam; ' a wise man assist eth the work of the stars, as the husbandman helpeth the nature of the soil/ . . . lastly, we ought all to know, that god created the stars as he did the rest of the universal ; whose in [61] fluences may be called his reserved and un written laws. . . . but it was well said of plotinus, that the stars were significant, but not efficient, giving them yet something less than their due: and therefore as i do not consent with them, who would make those glorious creatures of god virtueless: so i think that we derogate from his eternal and absolute power and providence, to ascribe to them the same dominion over our immortal souls, which they have over all bodily sub stances, and perishable natures : for the souls of men loving and fearing god, receive in fluence from that divine light it self, whereof the sun's clarity, and that of the stars, is by plato called but a shadow, lumen est umbra dei, et deus est lumen luminis; < light is the shadow of god's brightness, who is the light of light/" we are reminded by this of du bartas's poem on the probability of the celestial orbs being inhabited^ translated by sylvester : 8 i '11 ne'er believe that the archarchitect with all these fires the heavenly arches deck'd only for shew, and with their glistering shields t* amaze poor shepherds, watching in the fields; [62] i'll ne'er believe that the least flow'r that pranks our garden borders, or the common banks, and the least stone, that in her warming lap our kind nurse earth doth covetously wrap, hath some peculiar virtue of its own, and that the glorious stars of heav'n have none. nor is the following brief review and exal tation of the subject of all history unworthy of a place in this history of the world: " man, thus compounded and formed by god, was an abstract, or model, or brief story in the universal : . . . for out of the earth and dust was formed the flesh of man, and therefore heavy and lumpish ; the bones of his body we may compare to the hard rocks and stones, and therefore strong and durable ; of which ovid : inde genus durum sumus experiensque laborum, et documenta damus, qua simus origine nati: from thence our kind hard-hearted is, enduring pain and care, approving, that our bodies of a stony nature are. his blood, which disperseth it self by the branches of veins through all the body, may be resembled to those waters, which are carried by brooks and rivers over all the [63] earth ; his breath to the air, his natural heat to the inclosed warmth which the earth hath in it self, which, stirred up by the heat of the sun, assisteth nature in the speedier procreation of those varieties, which the earth bringeth forth ; our radical moisture, oil or balsamum (whereon the natural heat feedeth and is maintained) is resembled to the fat and fertility of the earth ; the hairs of man's body, which adorns, or overshadows it, to the grass, which covereth the upper face and skin of the earth ; our generative power, to nature, which produceth all things; our determinations, to the light, wandering, and unstable clouds, carried everywhere with uncertain winds ; our eyes to the light of the sun and moon ; and the beauty of our youth, to the flowers of the spring, which, either in a very short time, or with the sun's heat, dry up and wither away, or the fierce puffs of wind blow them from the stalks ; the thoughts of our mind, to the motion of angels ; and our pure understanding (for merly called mens, and that which always looketh upwards) to those intellectual natures, which are always present with god; and lastly, our immortal souls (while they are righteous) are by god himself beautified with the title of his own image and similitude." but man is not in all things like nature : " for this tide of man's life, after it once turneth and declineth, ever runneth with a perpetual ebb and falling stream, but never floweth again, our leaf once fallen, springeth no more ; neither doth the sun or the sum mer adorn us again with the garments of new leaves and flowers." there is a flowing rhythm in some of these sentences like the rippling of rivers, hardly to be matched in any prose or verse. the following is his poem on the decay of oracles and pantheism : "the fire which the chaldeans wor shipped for a god, is crept into every man's chimney, which the lack of fuel starveth, water quencheth, and want of air suffocateth: jupiter is no more vexed with juno's jeal ousies ; death hath persuaded him to chas tity, and her to patience ; and that time which hath devoured it self, hath also eaten up both the bodies and images of him and his; yea, their stately temples of stone and [65] dureful marble. the houses and sumptuous buildings erected to baal, can no where be found upon the earth ; nor any monument of that glorious temple consecrated to diana. there are none now in phoenicia, that la ment the death of adonis; nor any in libya, creta, thessalia, or elsewhere, that can ask counsel or help from jupiter. the great god pan hath broken his pipes ; apollo's priests are become speechless ; and the trade of riddles in oracles, with the devil's telling men's fortunes therein, is taken up by coun terfeit egyptians, and cozening astrologers." in his discourse of war in general y (com mencing with almost a heroic verse, " the ordinary theme and argument of history is war/') are many things well thought, and many more well said. he thus expands the maxim that corporations have no soul : " but no senate nor civil assembly can be under such natural impulses to honor and justice as single persons. . . . for a ma jority is nobody when that majority is sepa rated, and a collective body can have no synteresis, or divine ray, which is in the mind of every man, never assenting to evil, 66] but upbraiding and tormenting him when he does it: but the honor and conscience that lies in the majority is too thin and diffu sive to be efficacious ; for a number can do a great wrong, and call it right, and not one of that majority blush for it. hence it is, that though a public assembly may lie under great censures, yet each member looks upon himself as little concerned: this must be the reason why a roman senate should act with less spirit and less honor than any single roman would do." he then in the same treatise leaps with easy and almost merry elasticity from the level of his discourse to the heights of his philosophy : " and it is more plain there is not in nature a point of stability to be found; every thing either ascends or declines: when wars are ended abroad, sedition begins at home, and when men are freed from fight ing for necessity, they quarrel through am bition." and he thus concludes this discourse: "we must look a long way back to find the romans giving laws to nations, and their consuls bringing kings and princes bound in chains to rome in triumph ; to see men go to greece for wisdom, or ophir for gold ; when now nothing remains but a poor paper remembrance of their former condition. it would be an unspeakable advantage, both to the public and private, if men would consider that great truth, that no man is wise or safe, but he that is honest. all i have designed is peace to my country ; and may england enjoy that blessing when i shall have no more proportion in it than what my ashes make ! " if his philosophy is for the most part poor, yet the conception and expression are rich and generous. his maxims are not true or impartial, but are conceived with a certain magnanimity which was natural to him, as if a selfish policy could easily afford to give place in him to a more universal and true. as a fact evincing raleigh's poetic cul ture and taste, it is said that, in a visit to the poet spenser on the banks of the mulla, which is described in colin clout's come home again, he anticipated the judgment of posterity with respect to the faerie [68] g>ueene, and by his sympathy and advice encouraged the poet to go on with his work, which by the advice of other friends, among whom was sidney, he had laid aside. his own poems, though insignificant in re spect to number and length, and not yet collected into a separate volume, or rarely accredited to raleigh, deserve the distinct attention of the lover of english poetry, and leave such an impression on the mind that this leaf of his laurels, for the time, well nigh overshadows all the rest. 7 in these few rhymes, as in that country he describes, his life naturally culminates and his secret as pirations appear. they are in some respects more trustworthy testimonials to his char acter than state papers or tradition ; for poetry is a piece of very private history, which unostentatiously lets us into the secret of a man's life, and is to the reader what the eye is to the beholder, the charac teristic feature which cannot be distorted or made to deceive. poetry is always im partial and unbiassed evidence. the whole life of a man may safely be referred to a few deep experiences. when he only sings a more musical line than usual, all his actions have to be retried by a newer and higher standard than before. the pleasing poem entitled a 'descrip tion of the country's recreations* also printed among the poems of sir henry wotton, is well known. the following, which bears evident marks of his pen, we will quote, from its secure and continent rhythm : false love and true love as you came from the holy land of walsingham, met you not with my true love by the way as you came ? how shall i know your true love, that have met many one, as i went to the holy land, that have come, that have gone. she is neither white nor brown, but as the heavens fair ; there is none hath a form so divine, in the earth or the air. such a one did i meet, good sir, such an angelic face ; who like a queen, like a nymph did appear, by her gait, by her grace : [70] she hath left me here all alone, all alone as unknown, who sometimes did me lead with herself, and me loved as her own : what 's the cause that she leaves you alone, and a new way doth take : who loved you once as her own and her joy did you make ? i have loved her all my youth, but now, old as you see, love likes not the falling fruit from the withered tree : know that love is a careless child and forgets promise past, he is blind, he is deaf, when he list, and in faith never fast : his desire is a dureless content, and a trustless joy ; he is won with a world of despair, and is lost with a toy. of women-kind such indeed is the love, or the word love abused ; under which, many childish desires and conceits are excused : but true love is a durable fire in the mind ever burning ; never sick, never old, never dead, from itself never turning. [71] the following will be new to many of our readers : the shepherd's praise of his sacred diana prais'd be diana's fair and harmless light ; prais'd be the dews, wherewith she moists the ground ; prais'd be her beams, the glory of the night ; prais'd be her power, by which all powers abound ! prais'd be her nymphs, with whom she decks the woods ; prais'd be her knights, in whom true honor lives ; prais'd be that force by which she moves the floods ! let that diana shine, which all these gives ! in heaven, queen she is among the spheres; she mistress-like, makes all things to be pure ; eternity in her oft-change she bears ; she, beauty is ; by her, the fair endure. time wears her not ; she doth his chariot guide ; mortality below her orb is plac'd ; by her the virtues of the stars down slide ; in her is virtue's perfect image cast ! a knowledge pure it is her worth to know : with circes let them dwell that think not so ! though we discover in his verses the vices of the courtier, and they are not equally sus tained, as if his genius were warped by the frivolous society of the court, he was capa [72] ble of rising to unusual heights. his genius seems to have been fitted for short flights of unmatched sweetness and vigor, but by no means for the sustained loftiness of the epic poet. one who read his verses would say that he had not grown to be the man he promised. they have occasionally a strength of character and heroic tone rarely expressed or appreciated; and powers and excellences so peculiar, as to be almost unique specimens of their kind in the lan guage. those which have reference to his death have been oftenest quoted, and are the best. the soul's errand* deserves to be remembered till her mission is accomplished in the world. we quote the following, not so well known, with some omissions, from the commencement of his pilgrimage give me my scallop-shell of quiet, my staff of faith to walk upon ; my scrip of joy, immortal diet ; my bottle of salvation ; my gown of glory, (hope's true gage) and thus i '11 take my pilgrimage. [73] blood must be my body's balmer, no other balm will here be given, whilst my soul, like quiet palmer, travels to the land of heaven, over all the silver mountains, where do spring those nectar fountains : and i there will sweetly kiss the happy bowl of peaceful bliss, drinking mine eternal fill flowing on each milky hill. my soul will be adry before, but after, it will thirst no more. in that happy, blissful day, more peaceful pilgrims i shall see, that have cast off their rags of clay, and walk apparell'd fresh like me. but he wrote his poems, after all, rather with ships and fleets, and regiments of men and horse. at his bidding, navies took their place in the channel, and even from prison he fitted out fleets with which to realize his golden dreams, and invited his companions to fresh adventures. raleigh might well be studied if only for the excellence of his style, for he is remark able even in the midst of so many masters. all the distinguished writers of that period [74] possess a greater vigor and naturalness than the more modern, and when we read a quo tation from one of them in the midst of a modern authority, we seem to have come suddenly upon a greener ground and greater depth and strength of soil. it is as if a green bough were laid across the page, and we are refreshed as if by the sight of fresh grass in midwinter or early spring. you have constantly the warrant of life and ex perience in all you read. the little that is said is supplied by implication of the much that was done. the sentences are verdu rous and blooming as evergreen and flowers, because they are rooted in fact and expe rience; but our false and florid sentences have only the tints of flowers without their sap or roots. where shall we look for standard english but to the words of a stand ard man? the word which is best said came very near not being spoken at all ; for it is cousin to a deed which would have been better done. it must have taken the place of a deed by some urgent necessity, even by some misfortune, so that the truest writer will be some captive knight after all. [75] and perhaps the fates had such a design, when, having stored raleigh so richly with the substance of life and experience, they made him a fast prisoner, and compelled him to make his words his deeds, and trans fer to his expression the emphasis and sin cerity of his action. the necessity of labor, and conversation with many men and things, to the scholar, is rarely well remembered. steady labor with the hands, which engrosses the attention also, is the best method of removing palaver out of one's style both of talking and writing. if he has worked hard from morning till night, though he may have grieved that he could not be watching the train of his thoughts during that time, yet the few hasty lines which at evening record his day's experi ence will be more musical and true, than his freest but idle fancy could have furnished. he will not lightly dance at his work who has wood to cut and cord before nightfall in the short days of winter, but every stroke will be husbanded and ring soberly through the wood ; 10 and so will the stroke of that scholar's pen, when at evening this records [76] the story of the day, ring soberly on the ear of the reader long after the echoes of his axe have died away. the scholar may be sure he writes the tougher truths for the calluses on his palms. they give firmness to the sen tence. we are often astonished at the force and precision of style to which hard-work ing men unpractised in writing easily attain, when required to make the effort ; as if sincerity and plainness, those ornaments of style, were better taught on the farm or in the workshop than in the schools. the sen tences written by such rude hands are ner vous and tough, like hardened thongs, the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine. the scholar might frequently emulate the propriety and emphasis of the farmer's call to his team, and confess, if that were written, it would surpass his labored sentences. from the weak and flimsy periods of the politician and literary man we are glad to turn even to the description of work, the simple record of the month's labor in the farmer's almanac, to restore our tone and spirits. we like that a sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could [77] have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end. the scholar requires hard labor to give an impetus to his thought ; he will learn to grasp the pen firmly so, and wield it grace fully and effectually as an axe or sword. when we consider the weak and nerveless periods of some literary men, who perchance in feet and inches come up to the standard of their race, and are not deficient in girth also, we are amazed at the immense sacrifice of thews and sinews. what ! these proportions, these bones, and this their work ! hands which could have felled an ox have hewed this fragile matter which would not have tasked a lady's fingers. can this be a stalwart man's work, who has a marrow in his back and a tendon achilles in his heel? they who set up stonehenge did somewhat, if they only laid out their strength for once, and stretched themselves. yet after all the truly efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task, surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure, and then do but what he likes best. he is anxious only about the kernels of time. though the hen [78] should set all day she could lay only one egg, and besides, she would not have picked up the materials for another. a perfectly healthy sentence is extremely rare. but for the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought. as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure. the most attractive sentences are perhaps not the wisest, but the surest and soundest. they are spoken firmly and conclusively, as if the author had a right to know what he says ; and if not wise, they have at least been well learned. at least he does not stand on a rolling stone, but is well assured of his footing ; and if you dispute their doctrine, you will yet allow that there is truth in their assurance. raleigh's are of this sort, spoken with entire satisfaction and heartiness. they are not so much philosophy as poetry. with him it was always well done and nobly said. his learning was in his hand, and he carried it by him and used it as adroitly as his sword. aubrey says, " he was no slug; without doubt had a wonderful waking spirit, and great judgment to guide it." he wields [793 his pen as one who sits at ease in his chair, and has a healthy and able body to back his wits, and not a torpid and diseased one to fet ter them. in whichever hand is the pen we are sure there is a sword in the other. he sits with his armor on, and with one ear open to hear if the trumpet sound, as one who has stolen a little leisure from the duties of a camp; and we are confident that the whole man, as real and palpable as an englishman can be, sat down to the writing of his books, and not some curious brain only. such a man's mere daily exercise in literature might well attract us, and cecil has said, " he can toil terribly." raleigh seems to have been too genial and loyal a soul to resist the temptations of a court; but if to his genius and culture could have been added the temperament of george fox or oliver cromwell, perhaps the world would have had reason longer to remember him. he was, however, the most generous nature that could be drawn into the precincts of a court, and carried the courtier's life almost to the highest pitch of magnanimity and grace of which it was capable. he was liberal and [80] generous as a prince, that is, within bounds ; brave, chivalrous, heroic, as a knight in armor but not as a defenceless man. his was not the heroism of a luther, but of a bayard, and had more of grace than of honest truth in it. he had more taste than appetite. there may be something petty in a refined taste, it easily degenerates into effeminacy. it does not consider the broadest use, and is not con tent with simple good and bad, but is often fastidious, and curious, or nice only. his faults, as we have hinted before, were those of a courtier and a soldier. in his coun sels and aphorisms we see not unfrequently the haste and rashness of the soldier, strangely mingled with the wisdom of the philosopher. though his philosophy was not wide nor pro found, it was continually giving way to the generosity of his nature, and he was not hard to be won to the right. what he touches he adorns by a greater humanity and native nobleness, but he touches not the truest nor deepest. he does not in any sense unfold the new, but embellishes the old, and with all his promise of origi nality he never was quite original, or steered [81] his own course. he was of so fair and sus ceptible a nature, rather than broad or deep, that he delayed to slake his thirst at the near est and most turbid wells of truth and beauty; and his homage to the least fair and noble left no room for homage to the all-fair. the misfortune and incongruity of the man appear in the fact that he was at once the author of the maxims of state and the soul's errand. when we reconsider what we have said in the foregoing pages, we hesitate to apply any of their eulogy to the actual and historical raleigh, or any of their condemnation to that ideal raleigh which he suggests. for we must know the man of history as we know our contemporaries, not so much by his deeds, which often belie his real charac ter, as by the expectation he begets in us and there is a bloom and halo about the char acter of raleigh which defies a close and literal scrutiny, and robs us of our critical acumen. with all his heroism, he was not heroic enough ; with all his manliness, he was servile and dependent; with all his as pirations, he was ambitious. he was not [82] upright nor constant, yet we would have trusted him ; he could flatter and cringe, yet we should have respected him ; and he could accept a bribe, yet we should confi dently have appealed to his generosity. such a life is useful for us to contemplate as suggesting that a man is not to be meas ured by the virtue of his described actions, or the wisdom of his expressed thoughts merely, but by that free character he is, and is felt to be, under all circumstances. even talent is respectable only when it indicates a depth of character unfathomed. surely it is better that our wisdom appear in the con stant success of our spirits than in our busi ness, or the maxims which fall from our lips merely. we want not only a revelation, but a nature behind to sustain it. many silent, as well as famous, lives have been the result of no mean thought, though it was never adequately expressed nor conceived ; and per haps the most illiterate and unphilosophical mind may yet be accustomed to think to the extent of the noblest action. we all know those in our own circle who do injustice to their entire character in their conversation [83] and in writing, but who, if actually set over against us, would not fail to make a wiser impression than many a wise thinker and speaker. we are not a little profited by any life which teaches us not to despair of the race; and such effect has the steady and cheer ful bravery of raleigh. to march sturdily through life, patiently and resolutely looking grim defiance at one's foes, that is one way; but we cannot help being more attracted by that kind of heroism which relaxes its brows in the presence of danger, and does not need to maintain itself strictly, but, by a kind of sympathy with the universe, generously adorns the scene and the occasion, and loves valor so well that itself would be the defeated party only to behold it; which is as serene and as well pleased with the issue as the heavens which look down upon the field of battle. it is but a lower height of heroism when the hero wears a sour face. we fear that much of the heroism which we praise nowadays is dyspeptic. when we consider the vast xerxean army of reformers in these days, we cannot doubt that many a grim soul goes silent, the hero of some small intestine war ; and it is somewhat to begin to live on corn bread solely, for one who has before lived on bolted wheat; but of this sort surely are not the deeds to be sung. these are not the arthurs that inflame the imaginations of men. all fair action is the product of enthusiasm, and nature herself does nothing in the prose mood, though sometimes grimly with poetic fury, and at others humorously. there is enthusiasm in the sunrise and the summer, and we imagine that the shells on the shore take new layers from year to year with such rapture as the bard writes his poems. we would fain witness a heroism which is literally illustrious, whose daily life is the stuff of which our dreams are made ; so that the world shall regard less what it does than how it does it ; and its actions unsettle the common standards, and have a right to be done, however wrong they may be to the moralist. mere gross health and cheerfulness are no slight attraction, and some biographies have this charm mainly. for the most part the best man's spirit makes a fearful sprite to [85] haunt his grave, and it adds not a little there fore to the credit of little john, the cele brated follower of robin hood, reflecting favorably on the character of his life, that his grave was " long celebrous for the yield ing of excellent whetstones." a great cheerfulness indeed have all great wits and heroes possessed, almost a profane levity to such as understood them not, but their religion had the broader basis of health and permanence. for the hero, too, has his religion, though it is the very opposite to that of the ascetic. it demands not a nar rower cell but a wider world. he is per haps the very best man of the world ; the poet active, the saint wilful ; not the most godlike, but the most manlike. there have been souls of a heroic stamp for whom this world seemed expressly made ; as if this fair creation had at last succeeded, for it seems to be thrown away on the saint. such seem to be an essential part of their age if we con sider them in time, and of the scenery if we consider them in nature. they lie out be fore us ill-defined and uncertain, like some scraggy hillside or pasture, which varies from [86] day to day and from hour to hour, with the revolutions of nature, so that the eye of the forester never rests twice upon the same scene ; one knows not what may occur, he may hear a fox bark or a partridge drum. they are planted deep in nature and have more root than others. they are earth-born (yrjytveis), as was said of the titans. they are brothers of the sun and moon, they be long, so to speak, to the natural family of man. their breath is a kind of wind, their step like that of a quadruped, their moods the seasons, and they are as serene as nature. their eyes are deep-set like moles or glow worms, they move free and unconstrained through nature as her guests, their motions easy and natural as if their course were al ready determined for them ; as of rivers flowing through valleys, not as somewhat finding a place in nature, but for whom a place is already found. we love to hear them speak though we do not hear what they say. the very air seems forward to modulate itself into speech for them, and their words are of its own substance, and fall naturally on the ear, like the rustling of leaves and the crackling of the fire. they have the heavens for their abettors, for they never stood from under them, and they look at the stars with an answering ray. the distinc tions of better and best, sense and nonsense, seem trivial and petty, when such great healthy indifferences come along. we lay aside the trick of thinking well to attend to their thoughtless and happy natures, and are inclined to show a divine politeness and heavenly good-breeding, for they compel it. they are great natures. it takes a good deal to support them. theirs is no thin diet. the very air they breathe seems rich, and, as it were, perfumed. they are so remarkable as to be least re marked at first, since they are most in har mony with the time and place, and if we wonder at all it will be at ourselves and not at them. mountains do not rise perpen dicularly, but the lower eminences hide the higher, and we at last reach their top by a gentle acclivity. we must abide a long time in their midst and at their base, as we spend many days at the notch of the white mountains in order to be impressed by the [88] scenery. let us not think that alexander will conquer asia the first time we are in troduced to him, though smaller men may be in haste to re-enact their exploits then. " would you have such an herculean actor in the scene, and not his hydra ? " u they must sweat no less to fit their properties than to express their parts." the presence of heroic souls enhances the beauty and ampleness of nature herself. where they walk, as vergil says of the abodes of the blessed, largtor hie campos aether et lumlne vestit purpureo: solemque suum^ sua sidera norunt. here a more copious air invests the fields, and clothes with purple light ; and they know their own sun and their own stars. 11 but, alas ! what is truth ? that which we know not. what is beauty ? that which we see not. what is heroism ? that which we are not. it is in vain to hang out flags on a day of rejoicing, fresh bunting, bright and whole ; better the soiled and torn remnant which has been borne in the wars. we have considered a fair specimen of an englishman in the sixteenth century ; but it behoves us to be fairer specimens of ameri can men in the nineteenth. the gods have given man no constant gift, but the power and liberty to act greatly. how many wait for health and warm weather to be heroic and noble ! we are apt to think there is a kind of virtue which need not be heroic and brave, but in fact virtue is the deed of the bravest ; and only the hardy souls venture upon it, for it deals in what we have no ex perience, and alone does the rude pioneer work of the world. in winter is its cam paign, and it never goes into quarters. " sit not down," said sir thomas browne, "in the popular seats and common level of virtues, but endeavor to make them heroical. offer not only peace-offerings, but holocausts, unto god." in our lonely chambers at night we are thrilled by some far-off serenade within the mind, and seem to hear the clarion sound and clang of corselet and buckler from many a silent hamlet of the soul, though actu ally it may be but the rattling of some farm er's waggon rolling to market against the morrow. 12 [90] notes from the first tentative draft of the ms. of thoreau's sir walter raleigh i. another and kindred spirit contemporary with raleigh, who survives yet more exclusively in his reputation, rather than in his works, and has been the subject perhaps of even more and more indiscriminate praise, is sir philip sidney ; a man who was no less a presence to his contem poraries, though we now look in vain in his works for satisfactory traces of his greatness. who, dying at the age of thirtytwo, having left no great work behind him, or the fame of a single illustrious exploit, has yet left the rumor of a character for heroic impulses and gentle behavior which bids fair to survive the longer lives and more illustrious deeds of many a worthy else, the splendor of whose reputation seems to have blinded his critics to the faults of his writings. so that we find his arcadia spoken of with vague and dubious praise as " a book most famous for rich conceits and splendor of courtly expressions." with regard to whom also this reason is assigned why no monument should be erected to him, that " he is his own monument whose memory is eternized in his writings, and who was born into the world to show unto our age a sample of ancient virtue," and of whom another says, "it was he whom queen elizabeth called her philip ; the prince of orange, his master ; and whose friendship my lord brook was so proud of, that he would have no other epitaph on his grave than this: ' here lieth sir philip sidney's friend.' " from raleigh y by edmund gosse 2. arabella stuart (born about 1575) was james i's first cousin, the daughter of charles stuart, fifth earl of lennox, lord darnley's elder brother. about 1588 she had come up to london to be presented to elizabeth, and on that occasion had amused raleigh with her gay accomplishments. the legal quibble on which her claim was founded was the fact that she was born in england, whereas james as a scotchman was supposed to be ex cluded. arabella was no pretender ; her descent from margaret, the sister of henry viii, was com plete, and if james had died childless, and she had survived him, it is difficult to see how her claim could have been avoided in favor of the suffolk line. 3. dr. robert tounson, then dean of westminster, who became bishop of salisbury. [gosse.] 4. there is a pleasant legend that raleigh and one of his half-brothers were riding up to town from plymouth, when raleigh's horse stumbled and threw him within the precincts of a beautiful dorsetshire estate, then in possession of the dean and chapter of salisbury, and that raleigh, choos ing to consider that he had thus taken seisin of the soil, asked the queen for sherborne l castle when he arrived at court. it may have been on this occasion that elizabeth asked him when he would cease to be a beggar, and received the reply, " when your majesty ceases to be a benefactor." [gosse.] 5. this passage about alexander and epami nondas is preceded in ralegh, as copied by thoreau in the scrap-book, by some general remarks on that remarkable quality in a few men which ralegh seems to have felt in himself, which, as he wrote, " guided handfuls of men against multitudes of equal bodily strength, contrived victories beyond all hope and discourse of reason, converted the fearful passions of his own followers into magna nimity, and the valor of his enemies into coward ice. such spirits have been stirred up in sundry ages of the world, and in divers parts thereof, to erect and cast down again, to establish and to de stroy, and to bring all things, persons and states to the same certain ends which the infinite spirit 1 sherborne came into ralegh's possession in 1592. ed. [93] of the universal, piercing, moving and governing all things, hath ordained." it was passages like this, in his speech and writings, that laid ralegh open to the charge of atheism, which seems to have been first brought against him at the same time that his friend the poet marlowe was similarly accused, in 1592-3, and may have been one of the reasons why queen elizabeth withdrew her favor from ralegh about that time. the definite accusations against marlowe, which were sent to queen elizabeth in june, 1592, apparently, were from the mouth of one richard baine, who was hanged for felony two years after, and contained these words, perhaps pointing towards ralegh : " that one richard cholmelei hath confessed that he was persuaded by marlowe's reason to become an atheist. these things shall by good and honest men be proved to be his opinions and common speeches, and that this marlowe doth not only hold them himself, but almost in every company he cometh, persuadeth men to atheism, willing them not to be afraid of bugbears and hobgoblins, and utterly scorning both god and his ministers. . . . he saith, moreover, that he hath quoted a number of contrarieties out of the scriptures, which he hath given to some great men, who in convenient time shall be named." that ralegh was one of these " great men " is highly probable ; at any rate, the accusation of atheism was then secretly brought against him, and was likely to have weighed with [94] elizabeth. ralegh, with sidney, is believed to have. been one of the english circle who associated with giordano bruno, during his short residence in england, a few years before sidney's death ; and bruno also made himself liable to a like charge of atheism. [f. b. sanborn.] 6. these lines appear in the fourth day of the first week of sylvester's version of guillaume salluste du bartas's divine weeks and works, pp. 102-3 of the edition of 1613. sylvester adds, at the end of those quoted, continuing the sentence, but shine in vain, and have no charge precise but to be walking in heaven's galleries, and through that palace up and down to clamber as golden gulls about a prince's chamber. this conceit of the influence of the stars was gen eral in ralegh's day. his friend sidney, in his sonnet xxvi, has the same thought as ralegh, but turns it to a compliment to stella, though dusty wits dare scorn astrology, and (fools) can think those lamps of purest light whose numbers, way, greatness, eternity, promising wonders, wonder do invite, to have for no cause birthright in the sky, but for to spangle the black weeds of night ; or for some brawl, which in that chamber high they should still dance, to please a gazer's sight. [95] for me, i do nature unidle know, and know great causes great effects procure, and know, those bodies high rule o'er the low ; and if these rules did fail, proof makes me sure, who oft forejudge my after-following race by only those two stars in stella's face. in what follows, concerning the powers and bod ily nature of man, ralegh uses what was a com monplace of his period, but expresses this quaint conceit with more grace than was customary, and closes it with that touch of regret so familiar in him, though in expression he may borrow from the sicilian lament of moschus for bion. and so poetical is his prose at times, that thoreau very properly calls the passage on the decay of oracles a " poem/' [f. b. san born.] from thoreau's second draft of the ms. 7. aubrey says, cc i well remember his study [at durham-house] which was on a little turret that looked into and over the thames, and had the prospect, which is as pleasant, perhaps, as any in the world, and which not only refreshes the"eie-sight, but cheers the spirits, and (to speake my mind) i believe enlarges an ingeniose man's thoughts." perhaps it was here that he composed some of his poems. [96] 3. a description of the country's recreations quivering fears, heart-tearing cares, anxious sighs, untimely tears, fly, fly to courts ; fly to fond worldlings' sports, where strain'd sardonic smiles are glosing still, and grief is forc'd to laugh against her will ; where mirth's but mummery ; and sorrows only real be ! fly from our country pastimes ! fly, sad troop of human misery ; come, serene looks, clear as the crystal brooks, or the pure azur'd heaven, that smiles to see the rich attendance of our poverty. peace, and a secure mind, which all men seek, we only find. abused mortals ! did you know where joy, heart's-ease, and comforts grow, you'd scorn proud towers, and seek them in these bowers, where winds sometimes our woods perhaps may shake, but blustering care could never tempest make ; nor murmurs e'er come nigh us, saving of fountains that glide by us. here's no fantastic masque, nor dance, but of our kids, that frisk and prance : nor wars are seen, unless upon the green [97] two harmless lambs are butting one the other, which done, both bleating run, each to his mother ; and wounds are never found, save what the plough-share gives the ground. here are no false entrapping baits, to hasten too too hasty fates ; unless it be the fond credulity of silly fish, which, worldling-like, still look upon the bait, but never on the hook : nor envy, unless among the birds, for prize of their sweet song. go ! let the diving negro seek for gems hid in some forlorn creek ; we all pearls scorn, save what the dewy morn congeals upon each little spire of grass, which careless shepherds beat down as they pass ; and gold ne'er here appears, save what the yellow ceres bears. blest, silent groves ! o may ye be for ever mirth's best nursery ! may pure contents for ever pitch their tents upon these downs, these meads, these rocks, these moun tains, and peace still slumber by these purling fountains ! which we may every year find when we come a fishing here ! [98] the soul's err and i go, soul, the body's guest, upon a thankless errand ; fear not to touch the best the truth shall be thy warrant go, since i needs must die, and give them all the lie. go, tell the court it glows, and shines like painted wood ; go, tell the church it shews what's good, but does no good. if court and church reply, give court and church the lie. tell potentates, they live acting, but o their actions ! not lov'd, unless they give; nor strong, but by their factions. if potentates reply, give potentates the lie. 1 this poem (also called the lie and the farewell) has been given as written by sir walter ralegh, the night before bis execution , which was october 29, 1618 ; but it had already appeared in davison's rhapsody, in 1608; and it is also to be found in a ms. collection of poems in the british museum, which has the date of 1596. with the title, the lie, it is printed by davison with many variations, e. g., say to the court it glows, and shines like rotten wood, &c. , &c. ed. [99] tell men of high condition, that rule affairs of state, their purpose is ambition ; their practice only hate. and if they do reply, then give them all the lie. tell those that brave it most, they beg for more by spending ; who in their greatest cost seek nothing but commending. and if they make reply, spare not to give the lie. tell zeal it lacks devotion ; tell love it is but lust ; tell time it is but motion ; tell flesh it is but dust : and wish them not reply, for thou must give the lie. tell age it daily wasteth ; tell honor how it alters ; tell beauty that it blasteth ; tell favor that she falters : and as they do reply, give every one the lie. tell wit how much it wrangles in fickle points of niceness ; tell wisdom she entangles herself in over-wiseness : and if they do reply, then give them both the lie. [ 100 ] tell physic of her boldness ; tell skill it is pretension; a tell charity of coldness ; tell law it is contention : and if they yield reply, then give them still the lie. tell fortune of her blindness ; tell nature of decay ; tell friendship of unkindness ; tell justice of delay : and if they do reply, then give them all the lie. tell arts they have no soundness, but vary by esteeming ; tell schools they lack profoundness, and stand too much on seeming. if arts and schools reply, give arts and schools the lie. tell faith it's fled the city ; tell how the country erreth ; tell manhood, shakes off pity ; tell virtue, least preferreth. and if they do reply, spare not to give the lie. so, when thou hast, as i commanded thee, done blabbing; although to give the lie deserves no less than stabbing yet stab at thee who will, no stab the soul can kill. [10!] 10. the allusion here is doubtless to thoreau's intimate companion of forty years from early in 1843, ell er y channing, who in the winter of 1843-44 was chopping cordwood on the road from concord to lincoln, near where thoreau and his friend, stearns wheeler of lincoln, had a cabin in the woods for study and amusement. channing's experiences that winter gave occa sion to the making of a poem, the woodman^ which gave title to his third book of verses, pub lished in 1849 (the year when the week came out) and was reprinted in 1902, with omissions and additions, from the channing mss. in poems of sixty-five tears. thoreau himself had some times been a wood-cutter ; indeed, his range of manual employments, as he wrote his harvard class secretary in 1847, ma de him " a surveyor, a gardener, a farmer, a painter (i mean a house painter), a carpenter, a mason, a day-laborer, a pencil-maker, a etc." in a letter to horace greeley, of may, 1848, thoreau said that he had supported himself by manual labor at a dollar a day for the past five years, and yet had seen more leisure than most scholars found. he added, "there is no rea son why the scholar, who professes to be a little wiser than the mass of men, should not do his work in the dirt occasionally, and by means of his superior wisdom make much less suffice for him. a wise man will not be un [102] fortunate, how then would you know but he was a fool ? " his friend emerson, however, did not find that the laborer's strokes that he used himself in his "pleached garden" helped him to better strokes of the pen ; and so employed alcott, chan ning, and thoreau now and then to make the laborer's strokes for him, while he meditated in his study or walked the woods and fields. [f. b. sanborn.] ii. this trait of cheerfulness was thoreau's own, and should be named in all mention of him, especially in the long endurance of his last illness. it is well known that the son and namesake of horace mann was the companion of thoreau on that long journey to the unsettled parts of min nesota in 1 86 1, from which he returned only to linger and die in may, 1862. mrs. mann, the mother of young horace (who himself did not long survive), thus wrote in may of that year to her sister, mrs. hawthorne : " i was made very happy to-day by seeing miss thoreau, whose brother died such a happy, peaceful death, leav ing them all so fully possessed of his faith in the immortal life that they seem almost to have entered it with him. they said [meaning mrs. thoreau, her sister, louisa dunbar, and his other aunts, as well as sophia, his sister], they never could be sad in his presence for a moment; he had been the happiest person they had ever known, [103] all through his life, and was just as happy in the presence of death. this is the more remarkable, as he was still in the prime of life, with a vivid sense of its enjoyments. but he was nearer to the heart of nature than most men. sophia said to-day that he once told her when looking at a pressed flower that he had walked 10,000 miles to verify the day on which that flower bloomed. it grew four miles from his home, and he walked there every day in the season of it for many years. . . . he seemed to walk straight into heaven. it is animating and inspiring to see a great or a good man take that last step with his thoughts about him, and intent upon the two worlds whose connection he sees with the clairvoyance that death gives. i know it well, and i could fully sympa thize in her sense of her brother's continued pres ence. death is not the word to use for such a transit, but more life, for which we as yet have no word." in a letter to thoreau's good friend at new bedford, daniel ricketson (printed in anna and walton ricketson's memoir of their father, p. 142), sophia, under date of may 20, 1862, said : " during henry's long illness i never heard a murmur escape him, or the slightest wish ex pressed to remain with us ; his perfect content ment was truly wonderful. none of his friends seemed to realize how very ill he was, so full of life and good cheer did he seem. one friend, [ 104] as if by way of consolation, said to him, c well, mr. thoreau, we must all go/ henry re plied, c when i was a very little boy i learned that i must die, and i set that down, so of course i am not disappointed now. death is as near to you as it is to me/ . . . the de votion of his friends was most rare and touch ing. he would sometimes say c i should be ashamed to stay in this world after so much had been done for me ; i could never repay my friends/ ' in this last sally of his wit, which was as marked in its expression during his illness as in his vig orous days of rambling and writing, we see not alone the humor, but likewise that strict sense of obligation which he had from boyhood. he wished to receive nothing gratis except from na ture herself; his debts, unlike those of many poets, must always be punctually paid. [f. b. sanborn.] 12. in this description of virtue, thoreau made some use of the ms. afterward printed in mr. sanborn's edition, in which he quoted the same passage from sir thomas browne, but without giving the author's name. a portion of the illus tration of the clarion and corselet is also found in the service. that this whole ralegh sketch was given as a winter lecture in the concord ly ceum is rendered probable by his speaking here of " waiting for warm weather," and of a winter campaign. if the records of that lyceum were complete we might find the very evening on which he read it there, not later, i am sure, than 1845. [f. b. sanborn.] [106] this book is due on the last date stamped below renewed books are subject to immediate recall library, university of california, davis book slip-35m-7,'62(d296s4)458 273352 thoreau, h.d. sir walter raleigh. call number: da86.22 r2 tii6 273852 ps 3053 a3 ait library of r> * vtc one hundred and fifty copies printed, no. henry d. thoreau, age 44. from an ambrotype by dunshee, of new bedford, mass., taken in august, 1861. thoreau died the following spring. . some unpublished letters of henry d. and sophia e. thoreau a chapter in the history of a still-born book ' ' he noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his self-made laws." the kasldah of haji abdu el-yezdl edited with a prefatory note by samuel arthur jones printed on the marion press m jamaica, queensborough, new-york 1899 libra university of califo2idj copyright, 1898, by samuel arthur jones. illustrations. opp. page henry d. thoreau, age 44 . title home of the thoreau family . 22 henry d. thoreau, age 39 . . 37 henry d. thoreau, age 37 . . 53 sophia e. thoreau 72 burial-plot of the thoreau family 80 from negatives by alfred w. hosmer, concord, mass. prefatory note. learning that thoreau had once a western correspondent, and knowing that these of his letters had not been published, it occurred to the slightly irascible and some what eccentric ex-professor that it were worth while to make search therefor: possibly that correspondence might be recovered. thoreau's cor respondent was found without diffi culty, an aged and venerable man, and to the great surprise of the ex-professor the holographs were transferred to his keeping, and are used by the present editor in prepar ing the text of this book. vii thoreau's letters are in themselves but a trifle, yet they give character istic glimpses of him; those of his sister reveal a phase of his character that is not so widely known as it de serves, and in justice to a dead man should be. the story of these simple letters is briefly as follows: george bipley's review of walden; or, life in the woods, led a distant reader to write to ticknor and company for a copy, the chief incitement being the liberal citations from the book itself. upon receiving the volume it was almost literally devoured; a somewhat pe culiar spiritual experience had pre pared the way for it with that remote reader; he then found it sweet in the mouth, and after forty years it has not proven bitter in the belly. viii of course the book had "found" its reader, as coleridge would say of such a divine conjunction, and like the famishing charity boy, that par ticular reader wanted "some more." that earnest man, reading walden, and one of the few of that day able to read it ' between the lines/ reading and pondering under the burr-oaks in the silence of the forest solitude, " felt like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken." from the title-page of walden he learned that thoreau was also the author of another book, a week on the concord and merrimack rivers. failing to obtain a copy of this from the publishers of walden or any other rource then known to him, ix the seeker managed to get thoreau's address and made application directly to him ; and there the correspondence begins. thoreau and his western corre spondent never met, though at one point of the hopeless journey to min nesota in search of health one hour's ride would have brought them to gether; but the doomed pilgrim knew that he must speedily return to put his house in order, for he was not deceived in regard to his bodily con dition. "i think," he wrote to mr. ricketson, "that, on the whole, my health is better than when you were here ; but my faith in the doctors has not increased." the correspondence with sophia e. thoreau arose from a letter of condolence, on the death of her brother, written more than a month after that event. a subsequent visit to concord brought the distant mend and the thoreau survivors face to face : it was the res angustce domi alone that had prevented such a meeting with thoreau himself. the visitor from afar was tenderly re ceived by both the mourning mother and sister and thoreau's friends al cott and channing. before returning, the pilgrim was requested by both mrs. thoreau and sophia to select from the library of his departed friend some books for keepsakes. thus it came that both the ex-professor and the present editor saw and touched the very copy of lempriere's clas sical dictionary that had been tho reau's when he was an undergraduate in harvard college, the first fly leaf bearing the autograph: "d. h. thoreau." this is written in ink, xi while on the succeeding leaf is the pencilled inscription, "mr. . . . from s. e. thoreau." the book selected as a memento for the visitor's wife is an american edition of the specta tor, two volumes in one, philadel phia, 1832. on the title-page is an autograph, in a fine clerkly hand: " j. thoreau." it is the signature of thoreau's father, a man, according to one biographer, "who led a plodding, unambitious and respectable life in concord village." it is not men tioned whether he 'kept a gig'; but commend us always to the 'plodder' who, from his scanty means, provides his family book-shelf with a substan tially bound and well printed copy of the spectator. one can readily be lieve that such a man was respected, gigless though he be ; but few would have the hardihood to declare that a xii father who furnishes the spectator for his children's reading is 'unambi tious.' perhaps the highest ambition lies in a wise forecast that is not for one's self; "but brutus says he was (un) am bitious ; and brutus is an honorable man." the sterling native worth of tho reau's western correspondent was quickly discerned by not only tho reau's mother and sister: thoreau's friends recognized and honored it. the transparent-souled alcott was moved to the highest issues of friend ship, as sundry inscribed presentation copies of the writings of that belated platonist amply testify; and william ellery channing, the "man of genius, and of the moods that sometimes make 3 xiii genius an unhappy boon," was thawed into human warmth, as specially in scribed copies of his books perhaps the most elusive " first (and only that) editions" that ever mocked the book hunter's desire amply show, on those precious shelves, where the ex professor and the present editor saw them for the first and only time. one who has been allowed access to those richly laden shelves may be allowed, without violating the sanctity of hos pitality, to bear witness to the sim plicity, sincerity, and serenity invest ing the eventide of a true life with that ineffable splendor which has in it the soul's strongest assurance of a dayspring beyond the mists of life's mirage. the froude letter and that which authenticates it are not considered irrelevant. the english historian's xiv letter to the concord " loafer" is in troduced to show that although his first book was 'despised and rejected' of men, thoreau had the assurances that are always vouchsafed to the sol itary thinker, and these from sources so diverse as oxford university, just ly proud of the achievements of its scholars, and the primeval oak forest of a remote young state, a raw set tlement, as it had been called only fifty years before.* it is not whence the apprehension, the agreement, the assent; it is who agrees, assents, and by the cordial handgrasp conveys * "at ypsilanti i picked up an ann arbor newspaper. it was badly printed, but its con tents were good; and it could happen nowhere out of america that so raw a settlement as that at ann arbor, where there is difficulty in procuring decent accommodations, should have a newspaper." harriet martineau. society in america, xv to the solitary scholar, whose medi tations have disturbed mammon's market-place, the calm, unfaltering courage that is ever a marvel to the multitude, which quietly 'bears the fardels' of unthinking servitude. the difference between the fibre of a froude and a thoreau will be quickly distinguished by those who have read the exculpatory preface especially w r ritten for the second edi tion of froude's nemesis of faith. froude faced the angry storm of in censed detraction with the courage of a well-equipped scholar and the dig nity of a true gentleman; neverthe less he had made an ' explanation': not the whole world could have moved thoreau's lips to anything other than a smile of infinite commis eration; he would not have foregone a single furlong of his accustomed xvi 'walk'; he might indeed have whis pered to his own heart, " time cannot bend the line which truth hath writ." the present editor has assured himself that froude's presentation copy of his self-sacrificing nemesis of faith is to this day in emerson's library at the old home, but he has not been able to learn that froude also sent a copy to thoreau; so it is a safe inference that thoreau read emerson's. a phrase in froude's letter to thoreau shows conclusively that thoreau had learned of froude from emerson and that thoreau had read froude's ill-starred nemesis the "wild protest against all au thority, divine and human," as that gentlest of quakeresses, caroline fox, xvii terms it. froude writes this phrase within inverted commas: "not on ac count of his [emerson's] word, but because i myself have read and know you." this can refer only to a complimentary copy of a week on the concord and merrimack riv ers that had been previously sent to froude either by thoreau or their mutual friend emerson. thoreau himself has recorded that of his still-born book some ' seventy-five copies were given away.' froude's nemesis of faith could transmit no seismic tremors to the man who would have nothing be tween him and heaven not even a rafter. the blue dome with its in scrutable mystery: nothing must ob struct the soul's view of that! the chapter in thoreau's week en titled "sunday" could readily cany xviii to froude the assurance that possibly he, too, had "builded better than he knew," that very possibly the angry angli can hierarchy had merely mistaken a church colic for a universal cata clysm. these two recalcitrants never touched hands, albeit the ' steam bridges' were both commodious and convenient their perigeum occurred during froude's much later visit to emerson, and it was in sleepy hol low burying-ground ; but that peri helion was sadly incomplete : six feet of graveyard mould and death, the mystery of mysteries, intervened. for both of them now, no more of that mystery. oh, the boon of 'cross ing the bar'! xix a word in regard to the unusual manner in which the letters are pre sented to the reader. one with whom, of all men living, the present editor is best acquainted (an effete ex-professor, gouty, grouty, and gray headed) made these letters the sub ject of a lecture delivered in aid of a women's gymnasium ("more pow er to their elbows ! " said the ex-pro fessor) located it is not necessary to specify where. the text as written for that occasion has been followed : a convenience which all editors will fully appreciate. at the risk of marring the symmetry of the printed page the labor-saving editor will take the liberty of superposing such patches of his own plain homespun upon the ex-professor's tapestry as occasion seems to demand (though he may be tempted of the devil to xx take undue advantage of so rare an opportunity ) . being himself ' ' as mild a mannered man as ever cut a throat," he owes it to himself to gently but plainly deprecate the ex-professor's lapses into the sarcastic. both the editor and herr teufelsdrockh be lieve that sarcasm is the devil's patois. as that is perilous stuff, he '11 have none of it; the ex-professor must stand for his own petard: a proposition which he will be the last man to reject. the typewritten text of the ex professor's lecture is disfigured with pen-and-ink interlineations, and this is something so unusual that one who knows him so well as doth the editor could not resist the very natural curi osity which led to the asking for an explanation. this, as it fell from the ex-professor's lips, is too characteristic 4 xxi of him to be withheld; so it shall be shared with the reader though this complaisance involves the editor in not a little personal peril. be it known then, first of all, that the ex-professor himself takes tho reau very seriously ; does not by any possible interpretation consider him a " glittering generality," but rather a "blazing ubiquity" wherever and whenever the blunt, plain truth is needful which time and place he also believes is always and every where. perhaps an excerpt from the ex-professor's lecture on "thoreau" will best serve to show his attitude. (this lecture, it may be as well to add, was written for and delivered in a nameless territory where 'suc cess' is a matter of the bank-book rather than of that old-fashioned he brew book.) xxii "i am chiefly desirous of enforcing one consideration regarding this man thoreau, namely: that the brief epi sode in his life by which he is com monly known the shanty life at walden pond was not the vagary of an enthusiast. reared in a family to every member of which 'life was something more than a parade of pre tensions, a conflict of ambition or an incessant scramble for the common objects of desire/ thoreau never lost sight of the high ideal which inspired that humble household. "while yet an undergraduate he believed that the mere beauty of this world transcended far all the con venience to which luxury would de base it. he then thought 'the order of things should be somewhat re versed; the seventh should be man's day of toil,, wherein to earn his living xxiii by the sweat of his brow, and the other six his sabbath of the affections and the soul, in which to range this widespread garden, and drink in the soft influences and sublime revelations of nature.' "with darkened eyes milton dreamed of paradise lost; with an unfaltering trust in the beneficence of god thoreau went forth in the broad daylight to find it. who shall say of him that he failed of his quest; who shall declare to the struggling millions of earth's toilers that paradise is, in deed, irretrievably lost! "once before there came to the race a man wearing a garment of camel's hair, eating locusts and wild honey, and bearing a message: per haps this, too, is the veiled purpose of him who abode in that much-de rided shanty at walden pond. xxiv "do we not hear the sounds as of satanic revelry coming from high places in the land; is not every hreeze burdened with the muttered curses of ill-requited labor toiling for the task-masters until the sweat of the brow is that of a gethsemane which is only the devil's? "the message-bringer to the nine teenth century said: simplify your lives! it is indeed a simple message, but it is fraught with terrible mean ing for us all. if the foundations of this republic are to remain unshaken in the stress of the struggle that is even now looming darkly before us, it is the application, by all, of tho reau's teachings that will avert or mitigate the disaster; if the end is to be only ravined ruin, then will his memory live in literature as our everlasting reproach." xxv verily our ex-professor doth take thoreau seriously; but there are other matters that he takes as seri ously, namely, the misconceptions of thoreau by all and sundry inepti tudes; and on such occasions the ex professor certainly forgets the ameni ties but righteous wrath hath also its own peculiar amen! having said this much, it is due the reader that he should be allowed to get a glimpse of the ex-professor in a ' spate/ here is an instance from the same lecture : "now let us return to the shanty at walden pond wherein thoreau dwelt alone for some two and a half years, supporting himself solely by his own labor and living so 'close to the bone.' lowell has written that thoreau went there in the self-asser tive mood of a hermit whose seclusion is a declaration of his non-dependence xx vi upon civilization. 'his shanty life was a mere impossibility, so far as his own conception of it goes, as an entire independency of mankind. the tub of diogenes has a sounder bot tom. thoreau's experiment actually presupposed all that complicated civil ization which it theoretically abjured. he squatted upon another man's land; he borrows an axe; his boards, his nails, his bricks, his mortar, his books, his lamp, his fish-hooks, his plough, his hoe, all turn state's evidence against him as an accomplice in the sin of that artificial civilization which rendered it possible that such a per son as henry d. thoreau should ex ist at all.' i question whether in all the history of criticism a blinder mis conception can be found." [just here the ex-professor was xxvll evidently heated. he took the cus tomary sip of water with which the professional lecturer prepares his learned larynx for its next innings. having returned the handkerchief to the left hand coat-tail pocket, the ex-professor resumed.] "in the two royal-octavo volumes edited by professor norton, letters of james russell lowell, there is a photogravure showing the poet sit ting on the ground, by the bole of an ancient elm. his hat is off, his hair is parted in the middle (and this was fifty years ago!), his head is thrown forward so as to put his face in the most favorable position for pictorial effect; his whole attitude is of studied ease, and the hand nearest the spec tator is kid-gloved! oh, the signi ficance of that picture! posing under xxviii an elm in whose branches the robins had built their nests long before the norsemen's prow had grated upon the sands of the new england coast; the small birds singing around the petted poet, the fragrance of summer filling the air, the scented breeze toy ing with his curled locks, and he car rying into that sanctuary the kid glove of 'society 7 ! is this the man to comprehend the aim and purpose of thoreau, this leather and pru nella combination of 'civilization' and 6 culture ' ! "yes; i am aware that i am speaking of a dead man, of a man whose pig weighed more than he thought it would, if one may judge from the tone of his own early let ters; of one whose living tongue tasted the seducing sweetness of earthly fame; but there is another 5 xxix dead man, one who was called away 'in the midst of his broken task, which none else can finish,' and him the kid-gloved favorite of fame and fashion has flouted. there is a time for all things; a time for the sweet charity of silence, a time also for as serting the grandeur of simple and sincere manhood : brown-handed man hood that never saluted nature with a kid glove. de mortuis nil nisi bonum? yes; i'll stand by that sentiment; but it can also be read, de mortuis nil nisi verum : it is well also to stand by that! "it was thoreau's purpose at wai den pond to find out just how much of lowell's confessedly ' complicated civilization' was absolutely necessary in order that man's sojourn in nature might be as sane and serene as be came an immortal soul. did he not plainly write, 'i went to the woods because i wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life [kid gloves not being found in that inventory], and see if i could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when i came to die, discover that i had not lived. i did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did i wish to practice resigna tion, unless it was quite necessary. i wanted to live deep and suck all the marrow out of life, to live so sturdily and spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experi xxxi ence, and be able to give a true ac count of it in my next excursion/ "in my next excursion that jour ney made with closed eyes and folded hands; hands not kid-gloved; bare hands to lay hold on the realities be yond this vanity fair that we in our ignorance call 'life.' "of a truth, lowell, a clergyman's son, could not read the simple chart by which the son of the concord pencil-maker shaped his course amidst the sunken rocks of conventionality." but the ex-professor's foibles are making us forget the pen-and-ink in terlineations that are yet awaiting their explanations. "i did not imagine," said the ex professor on the morning after his lecture on the letters, "that any but xxxn sensible people would sit an hour to hear an old fellow talk about tho reau; but, sir, on going to the ap pointed place, i found myself, and most unexpectedly, facing a parlour full of frills and fine linen. an ex ceedingly well-dressed young man sat down at the piano, and he was im mediately joined by another even more extraordinarily arrayed. one played and the other warbled some thing in a tongue unknown to the builders of babel, 1 11 warrant. i have never in all my life felt so much out of place since the only woman to whom i ever proposed laughed outright in my face. but there was no escape ; i was fairly in for it, and i did some curious think ing whilst that nice young man was warbling. the music ceased, and there was a small storm of kid-gloved hand xxxiii clapping. that disconcerted me still more; for there was my audience applauding some artistic noise which i felt in my very bones they did not understand. i had to make peace with myself before i could begin with my exposition of the thoreau letters ; so i just told them right out what i had been thinking of whilst they were listening to that incompre hensible singing. i told them i had been thinking of the rude homeliness of that shanty at walden pond, and that my peculiar environment just then nearly paralyzed me, and only that i had the courage of my convic tions, i could not read the thoreau letters then and there. just then a distinguished-looking gentleman, with the greatest expanse of shirt-front i had ever seen during all my earthly career, adjusted an english monocle xxxiv to his right eye and politely stared at me. worse than all, it had not en tered my mind that i should have bought a pair of kid gloves for the occasion. "it is astonishing how much 'pun ishment 7 well-bred people will take fully as smilingly as do all the 'fancy'; but i held them down, sir, for a full hour of torment; and cer tainly some things got into the talk that were not in the text. the next day a friend, whose wife was present, told me that when she was putting on her cloak, behind a screen in the robing room, she heard one ultra fashionable lady say to another of the same species: "well, i never was bored so in all my life!" then i knew that i had scored a success. suppose i had talked down to the level of hei: comprehension!" xxxv the ex-professor thereupon filled his pipe; the present editor found himself filled with reflections of which there is no need to make farther mention. xxxvi some unpublished let ters of henry d. and sophia e. thoreau. some unpublished let ters op henry d. and sophia e. thoreau. the fboude episode. how strangely human lives are interlinked: the chain of in fluences beginning and ending how little we know where and when. at the first reading of emerson's each and all, who is not startled by the lines nor knowest thou what argument thy life to thy neighbor's creed hath lent. is not that enquiry a 'flash-light' for the soul? 3 into these mysterious relations and influences time and space enter not. far remote is the little monastery at zwolle, and five centuries have passed since the meekest of pietists put aside his pen, but if there is in this world to-day a spiritual influence of potent puissance it is thomas of kempen's imitatio christi. the serene monk has vanished, and only omniscience knoweth what argument his secluded life hath lent to the variant creeds of millions, who are now his 'neighbors' in that civitas dei the son of monica has made known to us. say you, all that was so long ago! well, would it lose anything of its mysteriousness if it were of this downright to-day? that which we call " to-day" also hath its mysteries, and not the least of them is this interlinking of our 4 lives through and by these occult influences. here we are gathered to-night, some five hundred and twenty years after the birth of thomas a kempis, avowing his influence upon our lives. he that was thomas a kempis had lain in his grave twenty-one years before the prow of the pinta was pointed towards the new world, yet here are we upon a beautiful pe ninsula "peninsulam amoenam " therein, and actually indebted to a lady now in italy, and whom it is little likely that any one of us hath ever met, indebted, i say, to this remote stranger for the privilege of reading a letter written fifty years ago, never yet published, and having an interesting bearing upon the mat ter that you have come together to hear about. " 145 via rasella, rome, dec'r 17, 1897. " really, there is not much to tell about the froude letter. miss sophia thoreau sent for me, a few weeks before her death, to give me some last instructions and to ask my assis tance in distributing personal things; and at the same time she gave me several letters for myself, among them this, knowing that i would value them as autographs. "my impression is that she feared people would think it too flattering, and for that or some other reason she did not at that time care to have it published. "she gave me other letters and manuscripts, requesting me to place them with my own hands in one of the trunks deposited in the concord 6 town library, which were to be passed on to mr. blake (i think that was his name); i mean thoreau's literary executor. had she wished this letter to be published she would undoubtedly have placed it with the manuscripts which i was to put in one of the boxes from which mr. blake was to select material for pub lication. "i once showed it to mr. emer son, who thought mr. blake should see it at once; but as it was given to me and not to him, and as i felt certain miss thoreau did not wish it published at that time, i did not act upon this advice. "i have often wondered why she did not put it with the papers which were to be placed in the box of man uscripts. her action was no doubt intentional, as we read the letter over 7 together about three weeks before her death : at the same time, i think there can be no harm in publishing it now." so far as pertains to our purpose to-night i might go on at once to the froude letter, but in so doing i should shirk a duty to the dead, for the discharging of which i am sure you will allow me a few moments. if you should open a certain life of thoreau you could read therein, "mrs. thoreau, with her sister lou isa, and her sisters-in-law, sarah, maria, and jane thoreau, took their share in the village bickerings"; and also that mrs. thoreau indulged in " sharp and sudden flashes of gossip and malice " : this and much else that is derogatory. now mrs. thoreau died in 1873, and yet, in 1897, and 8 so casually, the lady whose letter i am reading thus testifies to the high quality of the women of the thoreau family: "the women of the thoreau fam ily seem to me quite as remarkable as the men; and people who knew john thoreau considered him even cleverer and more promising than henry and greatly lamented his un timely death. certainly both helen, whom i never knew, and sophia, whom i knew well, were exception ally clever women. sophia was ex tremely witty, a brilliant conversa tionalist, and her love of nature made her the most delightful of companions for a ramble through the woods and meadows. " 'aunt maria' was, at the time i knew her, -a sweet, gentle old lady 6 9 who occasionally wrote me charm ing letters. mrs. thoreau, henry's mother, was full of kind feeling for everybody, and had a generous, help ful spirit. she was most kind to all the children of her acquaintance, often devising entertainments for them; and i still have a vivid re collection of the boxes of home-made sweets she used to send to me when i was away at school." are you quite ready to believe that "gossip and malice" could find an abiding place in such a heart as this? now have we reached the letter written when froude had burned his ships and was submitted to the slings and arrows of the " black dragoons" on whom john sterling had also turned his back. 10 manchester, september 3, 1849. dear mr. thoreau: i have long intended to write to you, to thank you for that noble ex pression of yourself you were good enough to send me. i know not why i have not done so; except from a foolish sense that i should not write until i had thought of something to say that it would be worth your while to read. what can i say to you except ex press the honour and the love i feel for you. an honour and a love which emerson taught me long ago to feel, but which i feel now l not on account of his word, but because i myself have read and know you.' when i think of what you are of what you have done as well as what you have written, i have the 11 right to tell you that there is no man living upon this earth at pres ent, whose friendship or whose notice i value more than yours. what are these words! yet i wish ed to say something and i must use words, though they serve but seldom in these days for much but lies. in your book and in one other from your side of the atlantic, "margaret" i see hope for the com ing world; all else which i have found true in any of our thinkers (or even yours] is their flat denial of what is false in the modern popular jargon but for their positive af firming side, they do but fling us back upon our own human nature to hold on by that with our own strength. a few men here and there do this as the later romans did but mankind cannot, and i have gone 12 , near to despair. i am growing not to despair, and i thank you for a helping hand. well, i must see you some time or other. it is not such a great mat ter with these steam bridges. i wish to shake hands with you and look a brave man in the face. in the mean time i will but congratulate you on the age in which your work is cast: the world has never seen one more pregnant. god bless you ! your friend (if you will let him call you so), j. a. froude. there is so much between the lines here that one must go back to the middle of the present century for a clue. in 1849 froude, then a fel low of exeter college, oxford, pub 13 lished a book the nemesis of faith which, immediately following in the wake of the "oxford movement," gave a disagreeable shock to angli can churchmen, lay and cleric. the scholarly fellow of exeter college had been coquetting with catholicism. he had managed to lose the faith of his fathers, but had utterly failed to find any surrogate ; before him surged a weltering waste, pitiless storm, and blinding darkness, and no place where on to plant his way-worn feet. the obnoxious book was burned in the quadrangle by the senior fel low of oriel college; u the old, fa miliar faces" either looked askance at the audacious doubter or were wholly averted; the quarterlies were flooded with condemnatory reviews, in which even lay journalism participated, and this in america as well as great 14 britain, and the author's every hope of place and preferment in the estab lished church perished beyond all expectation of resurrection: for him there was no "benefit of the clergy." it was a pitiful immolation, because a self-immolation. as carlyle grimly told froude he should have " burned his own smoke." the nemesis of faith is not a wholesome book to read, because it is not the doubt that is born of men tal and therefore spiritual health. one need only read froude's previ ous publication, the shadows of the clouds, to discover the morbid mind. the nemesis of faith is wholly de structive and in such high matters it is so fatally easy to destroy it has not the shadow of an endeavor to provide a shelter for the soul: that is left naked, houseless, and homeless to 15 the pitiless peltings of the storm of doubt and unbelief. it was a moral suicide in a moment of desperate aberration, a soul's tragedy. emerson knew some time before that something of this nature was im minent. he wrote in his journal for april, 1848: "i had an old invita tion from mr. clough, a fellow of oriel, and last week i had a new one from dr. daubeny, the botanical pro fessor. i went on thursday. i was housed close upon oriel, though not within it, but i lived altogether upon college hospitalities, dining at exeter college with palgrave, froude, and other fellows, and breakfasting next morning at oriel with clough, dr. daubeny, etc. they all showed me the kindest attentions, .... but, much more, they showed me them selves; who are so many of them 16 very earnest, faithful, affectionate, some of them highly gifted men; some of them, too, prepared to make great sacrifices for conscience's sake. froude is a noble youth to whom my heart warms; i shall soon see him again. truly i became fond of these monks of oxford." evidently there was one man in america to whom the devastating nemesis of faith did not come as a surprise. of course thoreau learned of froude from emerson's lips, and read emerson's copy of that " incen diary" book. that thoreau should send froude a copy of his own first book then falling still-born from munroe's press was only natural, considering the downrightness of that chapter in the work fancifully termed "sunday." froude's letter to thoreau c 17 is the acknowledgment of the gift, and what an acknowledgment: "i have a right to tell you that there is no man living upon this earth at present, whose friendship or whose notice i value more than yours." these men had so much in com mon. thoreau also had forsaken the faith of his fathers; but a serener 'pagan' never shattered the shrines of the saints. he could say, as an other of our latter-day renunciants has said, "i need no assurances, i am a man who is preoccupied of his own soul." thoreau was too solidly self-centred to need assurances; yet he had be come an author, and, being flesh and blood, his heart went out to his book as doth a mother's to her first-born. but howsoever interpenetrated by a conviction, howsoever possessed by 18 % it, howsoever driven by it, even to the forsaking of all that makes life dear, howsoever swerveless and in domitable in service thereto, never theless the solitary thinker becomes as an armed host so soon as his con viction is shared by another. "i have gone near to despair. i am growing not to despair, and i thank you for a helping hand." such is the assurance that this long-hidden letter earned to thoreau. his still-born book had found one fellow-man who believed it. one can readily imagine thoreau reading that old letter in the leafy solitude of walden woods, and the thought of his heart is written upon his sunburnt face: "my book may be a sealed volume to the multitude, ' caviare to the general/ but here is one to whom it is intelligible, speak ing audibly to the soul of him. it is 19 enough if the book were written for him alone: is not every true book written for only him who can under stand its message?" froude had written, " i congratulate you on the age in which your work is cast." never did any compliment go farther astray. thoreau had been obliged to publish at his own risk, and he had gone deeply into debt for the edition of one thousand volumes. little heed did the 'age' take of his 'cast.' four years after the date of froude's assuring letter, thoreau wrote in his journal: "for a year or two past my publisher, falsely so called, has been writing from time to time to ask what disposition should be made of the copies of a week on the concord and merrimack rivers still on hand, and at last suggesting 20 '* that he had use for the room they oc cupied in his cellar. so i had them all sent to me here, and they have arrived to-day hy express, filling the man's wagon, 706 copies out of an edition of 1000, which i bought of munroe four years ago, and have been ever since paying for and have not quite paid for yet. the wares are sent to me at last, and i have an opportunity to examine my purchase. they are something more substantial than fame, as my back knows, which has borne them up two flights of stairs to a place similar to that to which they trace their origin. of the remaining 290 and odd, 75 were given away, the rest sold. i now have a library of nearly 900 volumes, over 700 of which i wrote myself. is it not well that the author should behold the fruits of his labor? my 21 works are piled up on one side of my chamber as high as my head, my opera omnia. this is authorship, these are the works of my brain. there was just one piece of good luck in the venture. the unbound copies were tied up by the printer four years ago in stout paper wrap pers, and inscribed: h. d. thoreau, concord river, 50 cops. so munroe had only to cross out "river" and write "mass.," and de liver them to the express-man at once. i can now see what i write for, the result of my labors. never theless in spite of this result, sitting beside the inert mass of my works, i take up my pen to-night to record 22 g w a 2 p^ cd ct5* =" 5 s' o & ^ cd w cd 5 r 3 p g g ^ cd hi. ir^ 1139 mrs ? ^ cd o % what thought or experience i may have had, with as much satisfaction as ever. indeed i believe that the result is more inspiring and better for me than if a thousand had bought my wares. it affects my privacy less and leaves me freer." from all that i can learn of tho reau, i find no reason to doubt the sincerity of this imperturbability. i believed it to be sincere before i knew of the froude letter; i am as sured of it now that i have read it. such are the secret sustainments of the thinker, and such sustainments should be and ever will be vouch safed; for is not he who brings a message to men an ambassador from the most high, and do not even the ravens feed such ministers plenipo tentiary? 23 the assurance of the fellow of exeter college was grateful to the graduate of harvard; but belief is not the accident of a diploma or the prerogative of the aristocracy of let ters. thoreau was to have another assurance, dearer no doubt to him be cause its source was so much nearer the soil. 24 ii. the beothee and sistee. in one of the quietest of american villages there dwelt an earnest reader of the weekly tribune in the days when horace greeley was at his best. in one issue thereof he found george ripley's review of thoreau's second book, walden, or, life in the woods. the reviewer had made many lengthy citations from this most awakening work, and the reading of these set aflame the heart of the distant reader. he wrote to the publishers for and ob tained a copy. from the title-page of walden he learned that thoreau was also the author of another book, the still-born week on the concord d 25 and merrimack rivers. this parti cular work the michigan man soon found that he could not get from the publishers of walden, nor could they inform him where it might be had, so utterly had munroe's publication dis appeared from the market. but the tang of walden had " touched the spot" and the hungry man was ra venous for a taste of the week. he had to write to thoreau himself ask ing where that book could be bought; and thus began the correspondence, which i shall read with whatever of explanation i may be able to give. please bear in mind the situation: piled up in that garret-chamber, 'as high as my head,' are the seven hun dred rejected books cast into the "age" and by it most unmistakably cast out. four years had they lain in munroe's cellar, more than once 26 had he tried to get rid of them, and at last had 'suggested 7 that while there appeared to be no earthly use for them, he, james munroe, 'had use for the room they occupied in his cel lar.' for two years and two months had they found friendly shelter in the garret of john thoreau. behold ! an enthusiastic letter from a distant stran ger; one man who will not rest until he has read the ignored week. ob serve, if you please, the quiet calm of thoreau's reply. concord, jan. isth, 1856. dear sir: i am glad to hear that my " wai den" has interested you that per chance it holds some truth still as far off as michigan. i thank you for your note. the " week" had so poor a pub 27 usher that it is quite uncertain whe ther you will find it in any shop. i am not sure but authors must turn booksellers themselves. the price is $ 1.25. if you care enough for it to send me that sum by mail (stamps will do for change), i will forward you a copy by the same conveyance. as for the "more" that is to come, i cannot speak definitely at present, but i trust that the mine be it silver or lead is not yet exhausted. at any rate, i shall be encouraged by the fact that you are interested in its yield. yours respectfully, henry d. thoreau. ["so poor a publisher," indeed. it was this same james munroe that published emerson's nature; and it took him twelve years to sell an edi tion of five hundred copies. verily, 28 " authors must turn booksellers them selves." "the price is $1.25." a copy of the first edition of thoreau's week for one dollar and twenty-five cents! go to, thou author-bookseller, thou art not up to the trade values of books! every one of the very vol umes that james munroe had no 'room' for, now finds warm welcome to the selectest of private libraries at eighteen dollars a copy! if the reader wishes to recognize those cop ies which were bought from thoreau himself he will turn to page 396. on the bottom margin he will find six lines written in pencil and by tho reau himself: the addition being so much of the original text as was overlooked by the compositor. ed.] it is hardly fair that i should go any fartheruntil i have told you 29 some little about thoreau's michi gan correspondent. he was born in 1817, the same year as thoreau, and was once a student at oberlin, ohio. "they wanted to make a ' preacher' of me," said he quickly adding in the manner of one who has just missed a peril, "gracious! i had a narrow escape." in fact, my aged friend has all the qualifications for thoreau's 'sunday school.' pity it is, but his 'doxy is not orthodoxy be cause it is n't your 'doxy. his is the doubt that is born of the supremest humility. pew indeed are they that understand it ; but it matters not. whosoever has read walden will readily understand what that book had in it for the "wandering sheep" that had escaped from the oberlin fold; they will as readily imagine with what haste he forwarded the 30 one dollar and a quarter for a copy of the week. concord, feb. 10, '56. dear sir: i forwarded to you by mail on the 31st of january a copy of my " week" post paid, which i trust that you have received. i thank you heartily for the expression of your interest in " walden" and hope that you will not be disappointed by the " week" you ask how the former has been received. it has found an audience of excellent character, and quite numerous, some 2000 copies having been dispersed. i should con sider it a greater success to interest one wise and earnest soul, than a million unwise and frivolous. you may rely on it that you have the best of me in my books, and that 31 / am not worth seeing personally, the stuttering, blundering clod-hopper that i am. even poetry, you know, is in one sense an infinite brag and exaggeration. not that i do not stand on all that i have written but what am i to the truth i feebly utter! i like the name of your county may it grow men as sturdy as its trees. methinks i hear your flute echo amid the oaks. is not yours, too, a good place to study theology? i hope that you will erelong recover your turtle-dove, and that it may bring you glad tidings out of that heaven in which it disappeared. yours sincerely, henry d. thoreau. ["i am not sure but authors must turn booksellers themselves." indeed! 32 "i should consider it a greater success to interest one wise and earnest soul than a million unwise and frivolous!" no wonder that james munroe had not cellar-room for the books of such a "stuttering, blundering clod-hop per." ed.] after reading the week the michi gan man wished to share the good tid ings of great joy with others. there was a distant relation, an upright member of an orthodox sect; he must have a copy of the week: it may show him how fast asleep he is! the book was mailed to the somnolent saint from thoreau direct; but it had been as well to have sent a copy of eliots indian bible. my aged friend chuckles when he tells you that this very copy of the week was subsequently borrowed by 6 33 a presbyterian preacher and never returned! on the same occasion a copy of both walden and the week were ordered for a brother in california. these arrived safely; and they were read and pondered under the shade of the great sequoias, in the silence of the forest primeval. both author and reader are long since where no shadows cloud the page. in the lu men siccum of eternity the thinker has learned "what argument his life to his brother's creed had lent." concord, may 31st, '56. dear sir: i forwarded by mail a copy of my " week" post paid to . . . . , accord ing to your order, about ten days ago, or on the receit [sic] of your note. i will obtain and forward a copy 34 ' of " walden " and also of the " week" to california, to your order, post paid, for $2.60. the postage will be between 60 and 70 cents. i thank you heartily for your kind intentions respecting me. the west has many attractions for me, parti cularly the lake country and the in dians, yet i do foresee what my en gagements may be in the fall. i have once or twice came near going west a-lecturing, and perhaps some winter may bring me into your neigh borhood : in which case i should probably see you. yet lecturing has commonly proved so foreign and irk some to me, that i think i could only use it to acquire the means with which to make an independent tour another time. as for my pen, i can say that it is not altogether idle, though i have 35 finished nothing new in the book form. i am drawing a rather long bow, though it may be a feeble one, but i pray that the archer may re ceive new strength before the arrow is shot. with many thanks, yours truly, henry d. thoreau. when forwarding the money for the last books ordered, a likeness of thoreau was solicited, and having learned in some way that thoreau was "poor," a five-dollar bill was enclosed in payment for the books and the desired picture, and it was requested that thoreau should keep the balance "for his trouble." the reply to this kindly device is charac teristic. 36 henry d. thoreau, age 39. from a daguerreotype by b. d. maxham, of "worcester, mass., taken in 1856. concord, saturday, june 2lst, '56. dear sir: on the 12 ult. i forwarded the two books to california, observing your directions in every particular, and i trust that uncle sam will dis charge his duty faithfully. while in worcester this week i obtained the accompanying daguerreotype which my friends think is pretty good though better looking than i. books and postage . . $2.64 daguerreotype ... .50 postage .... .16 3.30 500 3 30 you will accordingly find 1 70 enclosed with my shadow. yrs henry d. thoreau. 37 thoreau had a poor throat for charity soup, no matter how taste fully it had been flavored. " books and postage, $2.64; daguerreotype and its postage, .66; total, $3.30. balance due you $1.70, and you will accordingly find $1.70 enclosed with my shadow." this holograph pre sents the poorest chirography of them all, the signature differing markedly from all the others. yes, there was a shadow on his face when he wrote, for this is the only letter signed, curtly enough, "yrs." instead of the accustomed "yours truly" or "sin cerely." a little matter, do you say? pre cisely ; but did it never occur to you that the significances of life are in just its "little matters"? it is what we do and how, when not the great world is the spectator, but when the 38 self is alone with the selfhood; then the undertone of character is heard, the 'still small voice' speaking audi bly to the soul above all the roaring din of the mighty babylon of which so many of us are in such cowardly dread. that now aged man with whom thoreau was then corresponding is indeed a most remarkable man. but i question if he is at all adapted for the latitude and longitude of [the editor takes the liberty of sup pressing the name.] no; we are like the baltimore oysters labelled "extra selects." we should only mortify in a can of common oysters; so we have an uncommon can of our own. the name, it is true, isn't 'blown in the bottle'; but it is stamped on our "tin." i do not believe we would allow such an one as thoreau's corre 39 spondent in our select can ; nor do i believe thoreau would have written a line to an "extra select." how ever, this sterling man, who owes little to the school and less to the college, had vouchsafed unto him the divine gift of insight. he is one of that rare few who are endowed with prescient foresight; most of us have only a purblind hindsight. we see the landscapes of life only after they have been passed, we discern the great ones of life only after they are dead we are the "extra selects"! [the editor is utterly unable to ac count for this rude and wholly un warrantable outburst. not a city of its size contains more people that are 'nice to know'; not any the largest city outdoes it in culture and elegant refinement the ex-professor was 40 recently asked if he did not mean that we are the " extra elects." his reply is not adapted for polite ears. though it may cost him the friend ship of the ex-professor, the editor trusts that he, at least, has done his duty to society.] thoreau's meaning in this universe is no more a secret to this untutored man dwelling in remote michigan than it was to the learned fellow of exeter college or to that graduate of harvard who pitched his tent in con cord and taught america to think. can you imagine what it implies to have "discovered" thoreau in those early days; or do you imagine that nature's "extra selects" are marked with a stencil-plate? try and im agine what a consuming fervor is enkindled when a true book is speak / 41 ing to the soul of a man his heart with hero-worship all aflame. if you have been capable of doing this, then you can conceive what fervid letters were sent, in those earlier days, from one earnest man in the distant west to that imperturbable and self-pos sessed man in "old concord," and that conception will invest the next of thoreau's letters with something deeper than the mere surface-reading shows. concord, july 8th, '57. dear sir: you are right in supposing that i have not been westward. i am very little of a traveller. i am gratified to hear of the interest you take in my books; it is additional encourage ment to write more of them. though 42 my pen is not idle, i have not pub lished anything for a couple of years at least. i like a private life, and cannot bear to have the public in my mind. you will excuse me for not re sponding more heartily to your notes, since i realize what an interval there always is between the actual and im agined author and feel that it would not be just for me to appropriate the sympathy and good will of my un seen readers. nevertheless, i should like to meet you, and if i ever come into your neighborhood shall endeavor to do so. can't you tell the world of your life also? then i shall know you, at least as well as you me. yours truly, henry d. thoreau. 43 they never met in the flesh ; but there is an old man in the west pa tiently waiting for a meeting where heart answers unto heart as face unto face in the refiner's silver. an unbroken silence of more than two years followed this last letter. in the interval america was preparing to make history; chapters that should be written with her best blood and the first page with that of a hero a man in whom was incarnated the high purpose of the lord god om nipotent. there, in virginia, captain john brown lay captive, " wounded and in prison." even an abolition paper called him a ' madman' for that which he had tried to do. the doughfaces of the north sweat clam mily; the " friends of the union" trembled for the safety of that fabric ; 44 universal consternation petrified the people. in that supreme moment a single voice was lifted up in the vestry-room of the little church in concord wherein the first american congress had held solemn delibera tions. it was a voice that spake un der a protest in which joined alike whig, democrat, and abolitionist. "that speech should not be uttered; it is unwise, injudicious; it will do more harm than good," etc., etc. "i did not send to you for advice, but to announce that i am to speak" and speak he did. it was sunday even ing, the thirtieth of october. the very next evening that intrepid voice was heard again, in tremont temple, and yet again in worcester on the wednesday following. it was the voice of one man; one man in fifty millions having the courage of his 45 convictions; one man god-appointed to show a nation its way as the dark ness was gathering around it and not a politician had the courage to strike a match to light the flickering tallow-dip of policy. the western man read accounts of this one fearless voice, and wrote to thoreau asking for the words he alone had dared to speak. concord, nov. 24th, '59. dear sir: the lectures which you refer to were reported in the newspapers, after a fashion. the last one in some half dozen of them, and if i possessed one, or all, i would send them to you, bad as they are. the best, or at least longest one of the boston lecture was in the boston "atlas and bee" of nov. 2nd. may be 46 half the whole [speech]. there were others in the " traveller," the " jour nal," (fee., of the same date. i am glad to know that you are interested to see my things, and i wish i had them in printed form to send to you. i exerted myself con siderably to get the last discourse printed and sold for the benefit of browrfs family but the publishers are afraid of pamphlets, and it is now too late. i return the stamps which i have not used. i shall be glad to see you if i ever come your way. yours truly, henry d. thoreau. this holograph is very striking in its mute significance. the words seemed to leap from thoreau's pen. 47 in fifteen different instances two words are written without taking the pen from the paper, in eight others three are thus continuously written, and in one line there are four impe tuously chained together. there is nothing of this in the other five holographs. but, curiously, the sig nature to this last is the largest, bold est, clearest, and by far the best of them all. it reminds one of john hancock's sign-manual on the de claration of independence. surely, massachusetts writes a fine hand on occasion ! there remained for thoreau only two years and a half of his lehrjahre: then he was " translated." trans lated? do they not say that of a bishop when he is exalted? even so; but is not thoreau also a " bishop of souls"? there is now no obscur 48 ing rafter between him and the un speakable one who clothed him in clay that he might do his appointed work in the universe this little world his seed-field. yes, it is the right word; it is his sorrowing sis ter's word. he was "translated" one beautiful spring morning. it was on the sixth of may, 1862. and now that sister is the concord correspondent of him who long had waited and hoped for thoreau to "come this way." concord, june 24th, 1862. dear sir: it gives me pleasure to acknow ledge your note of the 18th itistant, and i desire to thank you for the very friendly sympathy which you have manifested for us in this season of sorrow and affliction, g 49 my mother and myself are the only surviving members of a fam ily once numbering six. my elder brother, for whom you enquire, died twenty years ago, next a precious sister was called, and three years since my dear father left us. my brother henry's illness com menced a year ago last december. during seventeen months never a murmur escaped him. i wish that i could describe the wonderful sim plicity and child-like trust with which he accepted every experience. as he said, "he never met with a disappointment in his life, because he always arranged so as to avoid it." "he learned when he was a very little boy that he must die, and of course he was not disappointed when his time came." indeed we cannot 50 fed that lie has died, but rather [has] been translated. on one occasion he remarked to me that he considered perfect disease as agreeable as perfect health, since the mind always conformed to the condition of the body. i never knew any one who set so great a value on time as did my brother; he continued to busy him self all through his sickness, and dur ing the last few months of his life he edited many papers for the press, and he did not cease to call for his manuscripts till the last day of his life.* while we suffer an irreparable loss in the departure of my most * " no man ever lived who paid more ardent and unselfish attention to his business." john weiss. 51 gifted brother, still we are comforted and cheered by the memory of his pure and virtuous soul; and it is a great consolation to know that he possessed a spirit so attuned to the beauties and harmonies of nature that the color of the sky, the fra grance of the flowers and the music of the birds ministered unceasingly to his pleasure. he was the hap piest of mortals. this world a par adise. " where there is knowledge, where there is virtue, where there is beauty, where there is progress, there is now his home" you ask the name of my brother's traveling companion. mr. . . . , a near neighbor and intimate friend, most frequently accompanied him in his walks. in the lines on page twenty-second of "the week" you 52 henry d. thoreau, age 37. from a crayon portrait drawn in 1854 by samuel w. rowse. the original is in the concord free library. will find a reference to this same friend. mr. . . . wrote the lines sung at my brother's funeral. so sincere is his friendship for henry, that, i doubt not, any token of esteem you may bestow for his sake, upon him, will be acceptable. within a few weeks we have had some photographs taken from a crayon portrait of my brother. the crayon drawing was made two years before henry sent you his dauguer reotype. will you accept the inclosed picture? his friends all consider it an excellent likeness. my mother unites with me in very kind regards to yourself. it would afford us plea sure to see you at any time. concord is the home of many worthies, em erson, alcott, hawthorne, channing, &c., all valued friends of my brother. 53 / trust that you may be attracted to this neighborhood. yours very truly, s. e. thoreau. p. s. i received, by to-day's mail, a very appreciative notice of my brother from the pen of storrow higginson, formerly a pupil in mr. sanborn's school. i think the article would interest you. it is contained in the may number of the u harvard magazine." in the "atlantic month ly" for august you may look for a memorial by mr. emerson. "he considered perfect disease as agreeable as perfect health, since the mind always conformed to the condi tion of the body." where is there a more memorable observation? one month before, sophia had written to mr. ricketson: "you ask me for 54 some particulars regarding henry's illness. i feel like saying that henry was never affected, never reached by it. i never saw such a manifestation of the power of spirit over matter. very often i have heard him tell his visitors that he enjoyed existence as much as ever. he remarked to me that there was as much comfort in perfect disease as in perfect health, the mind always conforming to the condition of the body." there is the difference of a single word in these two statements: " com fort" in one letter, " agreeable" in the other. if the sentiment had been "cooked" for dramatic effect, there would not have been the shadow of a variation. of all writers, thoreau is he whom we must read believingly. indeed, he had long before left evidence of 55 the unimpeachable truthfulness of this remarkable death-bed declaration. "i am confined to the house by bronchitis, and so seek to content myself with that quiet and serene life there is in a warm corner by the fireside, and see the sky through the chimney-top. sickness should not be allowed to extend farther than the body. we need only retreat far ther within us, to preserve uninter rupted the continuity of serene hours to the end of our lives. as soon as i find my chest is not of tempered steel and my heart of adamant, i bid goodby to them and look out for a new nature. i will be liable to no acci dents." journal, feuy 14th, 1841. twenty-two years later, brought to the supreme test, he proved the 56 genuineness of his philosophy. he takes his place beside socrates, epic tetus, marcus aurelius: "a soul supreme, in each hard instance tried." the crayon portrait now in the concord free library was drawn by samuel worcester rowse, and may safely be accepted as 'an excel lent likeness' of thoreau without a beard. writing from england to professor norton, the poet clough bears this testimony to the fidelity of eowse's crayons: "child brought me your present of emerson's picture, which is really, i think, the best por trait of any living and known-to-me man that i have ever seen. it is a great pleasure to possess it." one year later, he had not changed his h 57 mind: "when is rowse coming over? will you give him a letter to me? i continue to think his picture of emerson the best portrait i know of anyone i know." sophia thoreau's letter was writ ten seven weeks after her brother's death, the fresh wound still bleed ing. poor, stricken, lonely sister! bereaved of such a brother, mourn ing for the 'irreparable loss/ yet prouder of her brother dead than of the countless carcases strutting in the sunlight and kept from stinking on ly by the cheap salt of civilization. poor sophia! she was quoting from her recollections of that beautiful spring day when emerson spoke the eulogy over her brother's coffin. but, pardonably enough, she had mis quoted. emerson had said : " his soul was made for the noblest society; he 58 had in a short time exhausted the capabilities of this world; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home." he also said: "the scale on which his studies pro ceeded was so large as to require longevity, and we were the less pre pared for his sudden disappearance. the country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost. it seems an injury that he should leave in the midst of his broken task, which none else can finish, a kind of indignity to so noble a soul that it should depart out of nature before yet he has been shown to his peers for what he is. but he, at least, is content." my friends, having the clear testimony of his sister's letter and also emerson's confirmation of tho 59 reau's deep * content/ can we not say with that sister, "of course he was not disappointed when his time came." but, can such a life be in any sense a failure, in any sense be incomplete ; is an early home-call an * injury'; is it indeed an ' indignity' to be summoned from this pitiful vanity fair by the master of the vineyard? concord, oct. 20, 1862. dear friend: absence from home together with illness must be my apology for not before acknowledging your last kind letter. certainly it will give me much pleasure to present the walking-cane which you propose to send to mr. . . . . , who feels keenly the depar 60 ture of my precious brother, and who will value any token of friendship shown to his memory. i am very glad that you have seen higginson's article. it was an out burst of affection from his young heart which gratified me much. i was fortunate lately in receiving from mr. emerson a specimen of the " edelweisse" gnaphalium leonto podium, which was sent to him by a friend who brought the plant from tyrol. how i wish dear henry could have seen it. i can never tell you how much i enjoyed copying and reading aloud my brother's manuscripts last winter when he was preparing them for the press. the paragraph which you quote from the essay on " walking" impressed and charmed me particu larly, i remember; and i am glad 61 to hear you express your satisfaction in regard to the whole article. i doubt not that ere this you have enjoyed the paper on "autumnal tints." i am sure that my dear brother went to his grave as grace fully as the leaves in autumn. [ the poor sister means, as undisturbedly as the leaf flashes into all the gleaming glory of the rainbow and silently obeys the divine behest that ordains its death when autumn winds grow chill.] oh! that you could have known him personally: he was wonderfully gifted in conversation. [aye; and now there is only silence and the patient waiting for the gra cious manumission of death!] thank you for the hints relating to yourself and family. what you say about enjoying the days as if they were made expressly for your 62 self denotes a spirit of rare content ment, which i am happy to know you possess. my mother joins with me in kind regards to yourself and family. trusting to see you at some future time, i remain, very truly yours, s. e. thoreau. there has been no abatement in that 'spirit of rare contentment.' that quiet home in the west is radiant therewith, as i can testify. cheerful and serene, the old-time friend of thoreau and " mother" are meekly waiting, " their faces shining with the light of duties beautifully done." 63 concord, march 4th, 1863. dear friend: i am happy to inform you of the safe arrival of the cane. the pack age reached me last evening. it was with mingled feelings of pleasure and pain that i looked on this gift a rare instance of friend ship, most worthily bestowed. i handed the cane at once to mr. . . . . , who expressed great satis faction. the article is very chaste and beautiful. i should like to know the name of the wood. allow me to thank you for this token; it would have been fully ap preciated by my departed brother. mr will communicate with you. [which he certainly did and after the manner of his species.] 64 it may interest you to know that our afflictions have been heightened by an accident which happened to my dear mother, early in the season: she fell down a long staircase, breaking her right arm and other wise seriously injuring herself. now, however, she is slowly recovering, and joins with me in very kind re membrances to yourself and family. yours truly, 8. e. thoreau. "allow me to thank you." the italics are in the original. "mr. . . . will communicate with you" though in what manner this deponent saith not. this is the meaning of the itali cised "me." well, here is the t com munication' from the recipient of a most unique cane, originally designed i 65 for thoreau himself, but arriving from distant california too late. concord, march 4, 1863. dear sir: the cane arrived at this place last evening and was delivered to me, in perfect order. x. y. z. i have in my keeping the very express-receipt that was issued to the donor of the cane, and it contains just as much pathos as the recipient's " communication" and not an iota less! this cold-storage 'communica tion' of mr. x. y. z. is sui generis and yet we are told that only the amphibia have oval blood-corpuscles. the cane was of manzanita wood, the handle was made from a buffalo horn, and the silver mountings were 66 engraved with appropriate quotations from thoreau's writings. it was a pious thank-offering from the two brothers one in the far west and the other in california; but death was swifter than friendship, and the belated tribute was given to the dead man's dearest friend. x. y. z.'s note let contains just sixteen words, not one of which will spell "thanks"; but there are two and one-half pages of " complementary mottoes," nine teen in all: as if this grateful friend of thoreau had said, "two can play at that game!" verily, we are "fear fully and wonderfully made." i hold in my hand sophia tho reau's last letter to the western man. her mother had died, the broken home had become to the solitary mourner as a grave ; its every room was haunted by the "old familiar 67 faces," but the dear lips are silent and that is the silence that kills. concord, may 24th, 1873. dear mr : after several weeks 9 absence, i re turned yesterday to concord, to find the volume of poems you had so kindly forwarded, and without stop ping to cut the leaves i hasten to thank you most heartily for this friendly remembrance. just now i am about to leave concord, and shall make my home in bangor, maine. mr. f. b. san born' s family will occupy my house. perhaps you are aware that my precious mother departed a year since. you will be interested to know that mr. channing has written a memoir of my brother, which will soon appear. 68 mr. x. y. z. is as whimsical as ever not calling at my house or recognizing me on the street for the past six years. we are looking for mr. emer son's return [from europe] and the town will give him a cordial recep tion. i hope you may see our village again: its charms increase from year to year. i promise myself much pleasure in the poems when a little leisure is af forded me. please excuse this hasty note and believe me, yours truly, 8. e. thoreau. twelve days after the burial of her brother henry, sophia thoreau wrote to mr. daniel ricketson: "profound joy mingles with my grief. i feel as 69 if something beautiful had happened not death." and something beautiful had in deed happened another of the countless miracles that surround us here: a soul leveling this lift that it may go on to a higher; a soul that also had for its last countersign the " j5quanimitas" of the dying roman emperor; a soul that found 'per fect disease as agreeable as perfect health'; a soul to which this world was a paradise a " paradise re gained" by the clear sanity of su preme submission to the maker; a soul that at the home-call left the only paradise it had ever seen and the purest delights that mere man can ever know, left all as serenely and grandly as the setting sun sinks through the purple glory whose last refulgence gives the promise of another day. 70 sophia thoreau bade farewell to the " charming village" wherein she had known the unspeakable delight of companionship with such a brother and also the unutterable pang of part ing which that i something beautiful' we call 'death' entails. think of her loneliness, of her last visit to that quiet hilltop in sleepy hollow: fa ther, mother, sister, and brothers there; she the last lone lingerer here. she was in bangor two short years, and then " something beauti ful" happened again: a family re union where the amaranth forever blooms, where there is no night, where never a tear is known save those of that divine compassion which is "touched with the feeling of our infirmities." 71 sophia e. thoreau. from a daguerreotype found among her effects after her death. heretofore unpublished. appendix. two visits to concord, mass. from an old diary. sept. 1st, 1863. arrived at concord about 5 p. m. stopped at the middlesex house. soon after, went across the way to a book store and bought a copy of the " boston com monwealth." on the first page found tho reau's poem "the departure," in this roadstead i have ridden. this is the first publication of it. i accepted it as a sort of introduction meant for me. this [place] appears like a quite orderly, staid new england town and somewhat re minds me of oberlin, ohio, twenty years ago. somehow, i feel a singular contentedness and as if my good genius had, for the time, got the upper hand of all obstacles and alone presided. in the morning, if my health will permit, intend viewing some scenes and places more dear to me than i can well tell. 73 sept. 2nd. after breakfast went into the "old" and also the "new" burying ground; then to the new cemetery "sleepy hollow." the ground is rolling and finely shaded with pines and oaks. did not find what i was in pursuit of. enquired of a man at work there where the thoreaus' burying place was. he said, "at the new grounds." i also asked if i pronounced the name thoreau right. went to the place specified and found one grave with headstone marked, "john thoreau, jr.," and another near by newer and unmarked. then left for the walden woods by the old lincoln road. found the pond, beanfield and site of thoreau's house. the beanfield is now growing trees, pine, birch, etc., in rows, quin cunx order a fine sight! p. m. to the old battle-ground back of the old manse. found two other men there, visitors like myself. one of them read off the inscriptions on the monument in a clear, loud tone of voice, bordering somewhat on the pompous. after supper at the hotel, called upon the thoreaus, mother and sister. found them rather expecting me. was made quite wel come and urgently requested to get my things from the hotel and stop with them did so. they are decidedly bright-appearing women 74 the mother, i should say, about sixty-five, the daughter [sophia] forty. the conversa tion drifted readily to [the subject of] the son and brother. mr. x. called and planned a walk for both of us to-morrow. found him sociable and attentive. during the evening more talk about thoreau's last illness. his mother said: "why, this room [their parlor] did not seem like a sick-room. my son wanted flowers and pictures and books all around here 5 and he was always so cheerful and wished others to be so while about him. and during the nights he wanted the lamp set on the floor and some chairs put around it so that in his sleepless hours he could amuse himself with watching the shadows." sept. 4. fitful sleeping last night: too full of thinking. this a. m. called upon alcott with miss thoreau. had a fine interview with him. he talked about carlyle, tho reau, books, his own experience, etc. i did not see his daughter louise. she had just come back from the army hospital at wash ington j had lost part of her hair and so was unpresentable. this p. m., x. y. z. and i took our walk. went off to the s. w. of the village (on 'the old marlborough road/ i think) and finally struck concord river in a curve where x. said 75 he and thoreau used to go in bathing. x. wanted me to repeat that performance with him; i let him go in, while i took notes. the opposite and sunward bank is lined with a thick growth of evergreens which cast their dark shadow into the water below. the faint ripple on its surface gave the view the appear ance of an inverted forest seen through a huge sheet of frosted glass. from here we went up on to the concord cliffs. x. showed me the hollowell place, baker farm, and the house where john field the irishman once lived. thence to walden pond through a growth of young timber, where x. showed me a patch, a rod or so square, of "american yew" [taxus canadensis] which, he said, thoreau was very partial to, not showing it to everybody. from the pond and house-plot (the building itself has been moved away some three miles north) through the deserted beanfield, to the lincoln road where, following north, through a hollow, x. pointed out to me, a few rods away, "blister's spring," whither i went, lay down and took a good, cold drink to the memory of the writer who has given it its consequence. sept. 4th. at home with the thoreau fam ily. p. m. went with miss thoreau up, n. w., on to the hill ( "nashawtuck"? ). a fine view ! ponkawtasset off to the n. e. a mile or so. 76 the assabet, at the north of us, winding its way to the concord river below. the old north bridge, the monument near by and the village spread out in its beauty. sept. 5th. a. m. took a ride with the two misses thoreau, maiden aunts of thoreau, and sophia. called on mr. [edmund] hosmer not at home. then on mr. platt; a pleasant time with him. afterwards drove to mr. bull's home. he is the originator of the con cord grape that i had already sent for. found mr. b. a splendid talker and an enthusiastic garden man. p. m. went alone to walden pond. took a swim in it. called at the patch of american yew and at the cliffs. evening with the thoreaus at their home. sept. 6th. before breakfast, visited the "new" burying ground. found thoreau's grave. after breakfast, took quite a walk, n. e. of the town and mostly in the woods. (i have doubtless crossed and recrossed the dear, absent man's path so many times in this morning's trip!) found, on my return, that mr. hosmer had been at the thoreaus' to re turn my call of yesterday. went soon after dinner to see him and stayed there until x. came, by agreement, to visit the "estabrook country" (they call it) to take a look at the thoreau hut. it had been moved there some 77 years before. took a memento, a broken shingle, as a fitting emblem. here is the field of boulders, some from eight to ten feet high, and such clumps of barberry bushes ! evening at mrs. horace mann's with miss thoreau. met there miss elizabeth peabody, mrs. mann's sister, and her eldest son [mrs. horace mann's], who accompanied thoreau on his trip west seeking health. found the young man greatly interested in botany. miss pea body spoke very feelingly and freely of mar garet fuller of blessed memory. sept. itli. arose rather early this morning and took a walk westward some mile and a half to a mill on the assabet. on returning, found a branch from a young maple already turned of a fire-red, a part of which i broke oft 2 and took back with me and threw up into the branches of an evergreen that faced one side of the thoreau house. after breakfast, it caught mrs. thoreau's eye and she began wondering what it meant. when i showed her, she exclaimed: "there! that was just like my son, henry." i couldn't help but feel a little flattered. afternoon. took a ride up the assabet with mr. s. that was a very pleasant inter view : mr. s. seemed so easily to make it such he talked so kindly and well of thoreau. 78 after this, called upon mr. alcott, in com pany with x., also upon mr. emerson. a pleasant fifteen or twenty minutes' interview. mr. emerson enquired if i knew much about the michigan university; spoke in high terms of president tappan ; asked if the young men of the west were not, some of them at least, seeking for more light and truth. after dinner, when i bade the thoreaus good bye, mrs. thoreau's sister, having come down from her room, stood at the foot of the stairs weeping. it was a tender leave-taking. second visit to concord. eleven years later. august 27th, 1874. at the middlesex house once more, arriving a little after noon. dined and then started for walden pond. on my way out, on the lincoln road, i stopped at blister's spring, and as it had become a sacred fountain, i lay down and deliberately drank seven swallows of its cool, clear water to the memory of its absent poet. and now upon the site -of that house in which henry 79 thoreau lived nearly thirty years ago, i sit writing up this diary of to-day. it is a beautiful place! the book "walden," telling of his life here, first notified me of its author and his writings: that formed an epoch in my life. the cabin is gone, long since moved away, but, thank god ! they cannot move this foun dation nor the pleasant memories. passed along the pond side toward the s. w. to find the concord cliffs. found a man in charge of the picnic grounds on the railroad side of the pond, of whom i enquired the way. he had never heard of such a place, but i got there all the same. the vale, lake, river run ning through it, looked much as they did eleven years ago. the [irishman's] house on the baker farm has disappeared. went around west and north to the village, and then to sleepy hollow cemetery. i found all the tho reau graves (the remains having been removed thither since my visit, eleven years ago) up back on a little, shaded hill, and having neat, plain brown headstones. a little farther on i found a short, thick slab of marble, at the head of a grave and on it was marked "hawthorne." a silent farewell to the graves of the thoreaus and then i went to the hotel. after supper went to visit once more the old 80 3 a w cd 8 * o a ^ " ^ t e ch p & h3 02 3 iii cd h. 8 ^ i battle-ground and the monument. on my re turn, took a look at the new monument (erect ed to the memory of the fallen friends in the late war) standing on the public square. when here before in '63, it was war time and soldiers were being mustered into service, and they were encamped on the same open square. now only some of their names are on record there. such is life! aug. 29th. arose at 5 o'clock and took an early walk on north side of r. e. this is a grand old town! how quiet and restful the people seem! after breakfast went to call upon x. his housekeeper went up stairs and notified him, and he came down with quite a visible scowl on his countenance, but when i told him who i was, he soon called me to mind, brightened up, was quite cordial and made me welcome to his room below, for read ing, writing, and so forth. i accepted this offer with pleasure, in the meantime making an arrangement for a walk together in the afternoon. 2 o'clock, p. m. started out with mr. x. for a trip of over one and a half or two miles s. e., on what they call the old virginia road, to see the house where thoreau was born. i found my companion a little captious and uneasy i did not keep to the foot-path k 81 beside the road! in our conversing, i forgot to do it, which seemed to annoy him. (his whims showed themselves otherwise during that walk.) we found the house; x. was good-natured and communicative; he pointed out to me the corner room wherein channing's "poet-na turalist" first saw daylight. we returned by the way of mr. alcott's, took tea with the fam ily and stayed there until nearly nine o'clock. the older daughter, louise, was away from home, but i met her sister may. she is quite an artist; bright, active, a good talker, some what forward, and she reminded me of some shrewd, sprightly young man that had tra velled. she is quite busy, painting and selling her work her father said to raise money for taking a third trip to europe. for a few moments i thought of patronising her a little ; so, pricing a piece of her painting on a black panel about the size of a chair slat, i found it to be $25.00. i " threw up the sponge." mr. a. read to me from the manuscript of a forthcoming book. i liked it much, but x. became visibly restive (a. noticed it) and fi nally left the room to go and talk with the wo men. afterwards, x. evidently felt that he had misdone, so on leaving he protested that he was interested in hearing a.'s writings read by 82 him, and he made an appointment thereupon to go with me there tomorrow afternoon for that very purpose. returned to the hotel at 9.30 p. m. (the idea of repeating that call at alcotfs to gratify a whim!) aug. 30th. up at six o'clock for a walk past the old monument and up ponkawtasset hill, on the side of which william ellery channing once lived and got the credit for going farther to visit thoreau in his hut in midwinter than any other living man "that was not a poet!" it was pleasant to stand there and see the placid concord running through the meadows, where thirty-five years ago, near this time of the year, henry thoreau and his brother rowed down this stream upon that trip on the account whereof were strung the beads that glitter and gleam in thoreau's first book. in the afternoon, called upon x. to go to mr. alcott's to hear him read. a. did " read " ; and x. and i sat and [x.] very civilly listened to him. during the reading mrs. alcott came in, and i had the pleasure of making farther ac quaintance with her. she seemed a kind, sweet, motherly woman. after the reading broke up, a pleasant general chat ensued.* * "a general chat" and alcott, the great converger, present! we trust that our diarist is truthful. ed. 83 tea was announced, and contrary to my in tention, i ate there again. after that alcott gave me some of his books. mr. s. had learned that i was in town. so he found x. and myself and invited us to his house this evening. i found that he was liv ing in the thoreau home of eleven years ago. in the meantime mrs. thoreau has died, and her daughter, sophia, gone to live with rela tives in maine. he gave me some interesting information about william b. wright, author of "the brook and other poems," shelley's later publishers, walt whitman, john bur roughs, wilson flagg, etc. after which cake and ale were served, and x. and i left. aug. 31st. arose this morning about four o'clock and started for a last visit to walden pond. i shall probably not see it again. here i sit with my back against a little pine sap ling, now growing on the site where once stood the hut. a few feet in front of me is a small but gradually increasing pile of stones to which every friend of thoreau is expected to add his unit. i brought one up from the pond as my contribution and pencilled on it the word " bethel." i also set out near by a plant of "life-everlasting" that i had found while on the way here. as i sit here facing the pond, i observe on 84 my left, about fourteen or fifteen rods distant, a grove of those tall "arrowy" pines, such as thoreau used for his house-building twenty nine years ago. there is apparently not a breath of air stirring. birds are singing about me and even the hum of an occasional mos quito is still heard. i left the pond, passing out by the beanfield. the grove of trees that thoreau planted thereon in payment for his occupancy, looked quite sorry from the effects of a fire that had run through there some time previously. a very genial last visit to x. he gave me a number of books, just as he had done at my first visit. as i bade him good bye, saying this would be my last visit to concord that i should not see it again, he answered: "oh, yes, you will." 85 our last glimpse of thoreau's western cor respondent shall be a fragment from one of his letters to thoreau's sister, sophia. " i often meet your brother in my dreams and with this peculiarity about these meet ings: while, as you know, our nightvisions are often abnormal, grotesque, and disap pointing, in this case i uniformly find my high ideal of him while [i am] awake, fully sustained. occasionally he has become as it were transfigured to me, beyond my power to describe. so i have for some time been in the habit of associating him with the north pole star, as through every hour of the twenty-four it keeps its one position in the heavens." it is much to have inspired such a friend ship, and it passeth riches to have been capa ble of such an inspiration. it fitly marks an epoch in a man's life. 86 this book is due on the last date stamped below renewed books are subject to immediate recall limited circulation library, university of california, davis book shp-50m-8,'63(d9954s4)458 jones, s. a. some unpublished cau number: ps3053 a3 1899 308452 3051 e9 1887 main fttoerstoe literature series of forest ees and wild apples by henry d. thoreau 7 ith a biographical sketch by ralph waldo emerson houghton, mifflin and company 4 park street ; new york : 11 east seventeenth street chicago : 28 lakeside building (3tlje ritoers ibe 2dt)e htoeretoe literature series the succession of forest trees and wild apples by henry d. thoreau with a biographical sketch by ralph waldo emerson houghton, mifflin and company boiton : 4 park street ; new york : 11 east seventeenth street chicago : 28 lakeside building (cfc lltocrsifce threes, copyright, 1863, bv ticknor & fields. copyright, 1887, by houghton, mifflin & co. ail rights reserved. pllt .*&amp;lt;\ the riverside press, cambridge, mass., u. s. a. electrotyped and printed by ii. 0. houghton & company. preface. the biographical sketch by emerson which pre cedes the two papers by thoreau, here printed, has this advantage over most biographies, that it helps one to understand the real man, and does not shut up the reader s interest in a knowledge of the mere circumstances of thoreau s life. it is like a portrait which carries the eye straight to the character of the man portrayed, and does not arrest it at the dress or decorations. indeed, emerson was so impressed by the life and character of thoreau that he forgot to mention the fact of his death. thoreau died may 6, 1862. the only full narrative of his life is to be found in the volume henry d. thoreau, contributed jy his friend and fellow-townsman, f. b. sanborn, to lfte series of american men of letters. thoreau s own writings, however, furnish a still fuller account of his observations and thoughts. the first to appear was a week on the concord and merrimac rivers, published in 1849. it was a nar rative of the adventure which he and his brother enjoyed ten years before, shortly after he graduated from college, when in a boat of their own making iv preface. they followed the concord river to where it ente the merrimac, then went up that river to its sourc , and finally back to the starting-place at concor&amp;lt; lii 1845 he built a hut in the woods by walde.i pond, where he lived for two years, watching th life in woods and pond and air. walden 9 published in 1854, is his most famous book, and contains the record of his experience as a hermit. these two books were the only ones by thoreau published in his lifetime, but he contributed occasionally to periodi cals, and he kept full journals. after his death his printed papers were gathered, and his journals drawn from to make excursions in field and forest, the maine woods, cape god, letters to various per sons, a yankee in canada, early spring in mas sachusetts, and summer. the two papers which fol low, as well as emerson s sketch, are from the volume of excursions. &amp;gt; v* /&amp;lt; v-^rifs r ; , ?s. t ^ -* v &amp;lt; v * i * *{ \ contents. biographical sketch of thoreau by ralph waldo em erson . ...... ,.; the succession of forest trees ..... 33 wild apples. the history of the apple tree . . . -53 the wild apple ........ 62 the, crab .......... 64 how the wild apple grows ..... 65 the fruit, and its flavor ...... ^ their beauty ........ ^ 6 the naming of them ....... ^ kq the last gleaning ....... the &quot;frozen-thawed&quot; apple ..... 81 &amp;lt;&amp;lt;: biographical sketch of thoreau by ralph waldo emerson. henry david thoreau was the last male de scendant of a french ancestor who came to this coun try from the isle of guernsey. his character exhibited occasional traits drawn from this blood, in singular combination with a very strong saxon genius. he was born in concord, massachusetts, on thejl2th ofjjuly, 1817. he was graduated at harvard college in 1837, but without any literary distinction. an icon oclast in literature, he seldom thanked colleges for their service to him, holding them in small esteem, whilst yet his debt to them was important. after leaving the university, he joined his brother in teach ing a private school, which he soon renounced. his father was a manufacturer of lead-pencils, and henry applied himself for a time to this craft, believing he could make a better pencil than was then in use.; after completing his experiments, he exhibited his work to chemists and artists in boston, and having obtained their certificates to its excellence and to its equality with the best london manufacture, he re turned home contented. his friends congratulated him that he had now opened his way to fortune, but he replied, that he should never make another pencil. &quot; why should i ? i would not do again 8 biographical sketch of thoreau. what i have done once.&quot; he resumed his endless walks and miscellaneous studies, making every day some new acquaintance with nature, though as yet never speaking of zoology or botany, since, though very studious of natural facts, he was incurious of technical and textual science. at this time, a strong, healthy youth, fresh from college, whilst all his companions were choosing their profession, or eager to begin some lucrative employ ment, it was inevitable that his thoughts should be exercised on the same question, and it required rare decision to refuse all the accustomed paths, and keep his solitary freedom at the cost of disappointing the natural expectations of his family and friends : all the more difficult that he had a perfect probity, was exact in securing his own independence,*and in hold ing every man to the like duty. but thoreau never faltered. he was a born protestant. he declined to give up his large ambition of knowledge and action for any narrow craft or profession, aiming at a much more comprehensive calling, the art of living well. if he slighted and defined the opinions of others, it was only that he was more intent to reconcile his practice with his own belief. never idle or self indulgent, he preferred, when he wanted money, earn ing it by some piece of manual labor agreeable to him, as building a boat or a fence, planting, grafting, sur veying, or other short work, to any long engagements. with his hardy habits and few wants, his skill in wood-craft, and his powerful arithmetic, he was very competent to live in any part of the world. it would cost him less time to supply his wants than another. he was therefore secure of his leisure. a natural skill for mensuration, growing out of his biographical sketch of thoreau. 9 mathematical knowledge, and his habit of ascertaining the measures and distances of objects which interested him, the size of trees, the depth and extent of ponds and rivers, the height of mountains, and the air-line distance of his favorite summits, this, and his inti mate knowledge of the territoiy about concord, made him drift into the profession of land-surveyor. it had the advantage for him that it led him continually into new and secluded grounds, and helped his studies of nature. his accuracy and skill in this work were readily appreciated, and he found all the employment he wanted. he could easily solve the problems of the surveyor, but he was daily beset with graver questions, which he manfully confronted. he interrogated every cus tom, and wished to settle all his practice on an ideal foundation. he was a protestant a voutranw, and few lives contain so many renunciations. he was tsred to no profession ; he never married ; he lived alone ; he never went to church ; he never voted ; he refused to pay a tax to the state ; he ate no flesh, he drank no wine, he never knew the use of tobacco ; and, though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun. he chose wisely, no doubt, for himself to be the bachelor of thought and nature. he had no talent for wealth, and knew how to be poor without the least hint of squalor or inelegance. perhaps he fell into his way of living without forecasting it much, but ap proved it with later wisdom. &quot; i am often reminded,&quot; he wrote in his journal, &quot; that, if i had bestowed on me the wealth of croesus, my aims must be still the same and my means essentially the same.&quot; he had no temptations to fight against, no appetites, no passions, no taste for elegant trifles. a fine house, 10 biographical sketch of thoreau. dress, the manners and talk of highly cultivated people were all thrown away on him. he much preferred a good indian, and considered these refinements as impediments to conversation, wishing to meet his companion on the simplest terms. he declined invi tations to dinner-parties, because there each was in every one s way, and he could not meet the individ uals to any purpose. &quot; they make their pride,&quot; he said, &quot; in making their dinner cost much ; i make my pride in making my dinner cost little.&quot; when asked at table what dish he preferred, he answered, &quot; the nearest.&quot; he did not like the taste of wine, and never had a vice in his life. he said, &quot; i have a faint recollection of pleasure derived from smoking dried lily-stems before i was a man. i had com monly a supply of these. i have never smoked any thing more noxious.&quot; he chose to be rich by making his wants few, and supplying them himself. in his travels, he used the railroad only to get over so much country as was un important to the present purpose, walking hundreds of miles, avoiding taverns, buying a lodging in farmers and fishermen s houses, as cheaper and more agree able to him, and because there he could better find the men and the information he wanted. there was somewhat military in his nature, not to be subdued, always manly and able, but rarely tender, as if he did not feel himself except in opposition. he wanted a fallacy to expose, a blunder to pillory, i may say required a little sense of victory, a roll of the drum, to call his powers into full exercise. it cost him nothing to say no ; indeed, he found it much easier than to say yes. it seemed as if his first in stinct on hearing a proposition was to controvert it, biographical sketch of thoreau. 11 so impatient was he of the limitations of our daily / thought. this habit, of course, is a little chilling to the social affections ; and though the companion would in the end acquit him of any malice or untruth, yet it mars conversation. hence, no equal com panion stood in affectionate relations with one so pure and guileless. &quot; i love henry,&quot; said one of his friends, 4 hbut i cannot like him ; and as for taking his arm, i should as soon think of taking the arm of an elm-tree.&quot; yet, hermit and stoic as he was, he was really fond of sympathy, and threw himself heartily and childlike into the company of young people whom he loved, and whom he delighted to entertain, as he only could, with the varied and endless anecdotes of his experiences by field and river ; and he was always ready to lead a huckleberry party or a search for chestnuts or grapes. talking, one day, of a public discourse, henry re marked, that whatever succeeded with the audience was bad. i said, &quot;who would not like to write something which all can read, like robinson cru soe ? and who does not see with regret that his page is not solid with a right materialistic treatment, which delights everybody ? &quot; henry objected, of course, and vaunted the better lectures which reached only a few persons. but, at supper, a young girl, understanding that he was to lecture at the lyceum, sharply asked him, &quot; whether his lecture would be a nice, interest ing story, such as she wished to hear, or whether it was one of those old philosophical things that she did not care about.&quot; henry turned to her, and bethought himself, and, i saw, was trying to believe that he had matter that might fit her and her brother, who were to sit up and go to the lecture, if it was a good one for them. 12 biographical sketch of thoreau. he was a speaker and actor of the truth, born such, and was ever running into dramatic situations from this cause. in any circumstance, it interested all by standers to know what part henry would take, and what he would say ; and he did not disappoint expec tation, but used an original judgment on each emer gency. in ,1845 he built himself a small framed house on the shores of walden pond, and lived there two years alone, a life of labor and study. this ac tion was quite native and fit for him. no one who knew him would tax him with affectation. he was jmore unlike his neighbors in his thought than in his action. as soon as he had exhausted the advantages of that solitude, he abandoned it. in 1847, not ap proving some uses to which the public expenditure was applied, he refused to pay his town tax, and was put in jail. a friend paid the tax for him, and he was released. the like annoyance was threatened the next year. but, as his friends paid the tax, not withstanding his protest, i believe he ceased to resist. no opposition or ridicule had any weight with him. he coldly and fully stated his opinion without affect ing to believe that it was the opinion of the company. it was of no consequence if every one present held the opposite opinion. on one occasion he went to the university library to procure some books. the librarian refused to lend them. mr. thoreau re paired to the president, who stated to him the rules and usages which permitted the loan of books to resi dent graduates, to clergymen who were alumni, and to some others resident within a circle of ten miles radius from the college. mr. thoreau explained to the president that the railroad had destroyed the old scale of distances, that the library was useless, yes, biographical sketch of thoreau. 13 and president and college useless, on the terras of his rules, that the one benefit he owed to the col lege was its library, that, at this moment, not only his want of books was imperative, but he wanted a larq-e number of books, and assured him that he, o thoreau, and not the librarian, was the proper custo dian of these. in short, the president found the peti tioner so formidable, and the rules getting to look so ridiculous, that he ended by giving him a privilege which in his hands proved unlimited thereafter. no truer american existed than thoreau. his preference of his country and condition was genuine and his aversation from english and european man ners and tastes almost reached contempt. he listened impatiently to news or bon mots gleaned from london circles ; and though he tried to be civil, these anec dotes fatigued him. the men were all imitating each other, and on a small mould. why can they not live as far apart as possible, and each be a man by him self? what he sought was the most energetic na ture ; and he wished to go to oregon, not to london. &quot; in every part of great britain,&quot; he wrote in his diary, &quot; are discovered traces of the romans, their funereal urns, their camps, their roads, their dwellings. but new england, at least, is not based on any ro man ruins. we have not to lay the foundations of our houses on the ashes of a former civilization.&quot; but, idealist as he was, standing for abolition of slavery, abolition of tariffs, almost for abolition of government, it is needless to say he found himself not only unrepresented in actual politics, but almost equally opposed to every class of reformers. yet he paid the tribute of his uniform respect to the anti slavery party. one man, whose personal acquaint* i / &quot; a i/ v 14 biographical sketch of thoreau. ance he had formed, he honored with exceptional re gard. before the first friendly word had been spoken for captain john brown, after the arrest, he sent no tices to most houses in concord, that he would speak in a public hall on the condition and character of john brown, on sunday evening, and invited all to come. the republican committee, the abolitionist committee, sent him word that it was premature and not advisable. he replied, &quot; i did not send to you for advice, but to announce that i am to speak.&quot; the hall was filled at an early hour by people of all par ties, and his earnest eulogy of the hero was heard by all respectfully, by many with a sympathy that sur prised themselves. it was said of plotinus that he was ashamed of his body, and t is ver} r likely he had good reason for it, that his body was a bad servant, and he had not skill in dealing with the material world, as happens often to men of abstract intellect. but mr. thoreau was equipped with a most adapted and serviceable body. he was of short stature, firmly built, of light complexion, with strong, serious blue eyes, and a grave aspect, his face covered in the late years with a becoming beard. his senses were acute, his frame well-knit and hardy, his hands strong and skilful in the use of tools. and there was a wonderful fitness of body and mind. he could pace sixteen rods more accurately than another man could measure them with rod and chain. he could find his path in the woods at night, he said, better by his feet than his eyes. he could estimate the measure of a tree very well by his eye ; he could estimate the weight of a calf or a pig, like a dealer. from a box containing a bushel or more of loose pencils, he could take up with his biographical sketch of thoreau. 15 hands fast enough just a dozen pencils at every grasp. he was a good swimmer, runner, skater, boatman, and would probably outwalk most countrymen in a day s journey. and the relation of body to mind was still finer than we have indicated. he said he \ wanted every stride his legs made. the length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing. if shut up in the house, he did not write at all. he had a strong common sense, like that which rose flammock, the weaver s daughter, in scott s romance, commends in her father, as resembling a yardstick, which, whilst it measures dowlas and dia per, can equally well measure tapestry and cloth of gold. he had always a new resource. when i was planting forest-trees, and had procured half a peck of acorns, he said that only a small portion of them would be sound, and proceeded to examine them, and select the sound ones. but finding this took time, he said, &quot; i think, if you put them all into water, the good ones will sink ; &quot; which experiment we tried with success. he could plan a garden, or a house, or a barn ; would have been competent to lead a &quot; pacific exploring expedition &quot; ; could give judicious counsel in the gravest private or public affairs. he lived for the day, not cumbered and mortified by his memory. if he brought you yesterday a new proposition, he would bring you to-day another not less revolutionary. a very industrious man, and set ting, like all highly organized men, a high value on his time, he seemed the only man of leisure in town, always ready for any excursion that promised well, or for conversation prolonged into late hours. his trenchant sense was never stopped by his rules of daily prudence, but was always up to the new occasion. 16 biographical sketch of thoreau. he liked and used the simplest food, yet, when some one urged a vegetable diet, thoreau thought all diets a very small matter, saying that &quot;the man who shoots the buffalo lives better than the man who boards at the graham house.&quot; he said, &quot; you can sleep near the railroad, and never be disturbed : nature knows very well what sounds are worth at tending to, and has made up her mind not to hear the railroad-whistle. but things respect the devout mind, and a mental ecstasy was never interrupted.&quot; he noted what repeatedly befell him, that, after receiving from a distance a rare plant, he would presently find the same in his own haunts. and those pieces of luck which happen only to good play ers happened to him. one day, walking with a stranger, who inquired where indian arrow-heads could be found, he replied, &quot; everywhere,&quot; and, stooping forward, picked one on the instant from the ground. at mount washington, in tuckerman s ravine, thoreau had a bad fall, and sprained his foot. as he was in the act of getting up from his fall, he saw for the first time the leaves of the arnica mollis. 1 his robust common sense, armed with stout hands, keen perceptions, and strong will, cannot yet account for the superiority which shone in his simple and hid den life. i must add the cardinal fact, that there was an excellent wisdom in him, proper to a rare class of men, which showed him the material world as a means and symbol. this discovery, which sometimes yields to poets a certain casual and interrupted light, serving for the ornament of their writing, was in him 1 a plant with healing virtue, found in the mountains hampshire and new york, and also about lake superior. biographical sketch of thoread. 17 an unsleeping insight; and whatever faults or ob structions of temperament might cloud it, he was not disobedient to the heavenly vision. in his youth, he said, one day, &quot; the other world is all my art : my pencils will draw no other ; my jack-knife will cut nothing else ; i do not use it as a means.&quot; this was the muse and genius that ruled his opinions, conver sation, studies, work, and course of life. this made him a searching judge of men. at first glance he measured his companion, and, though insensible to some fine traits of culture, could very well report his weight and calibre. and this made the impression of genius which his conversation sometimes gave. he understood the matter in hand at a glance, and saw the limitations and poverty of those he talked with, so that nothing seemed concealed from such ter rible eyes. i have repeatedly known young men of sensibility converted in a moment to the belief that this was the man they were in search of, the man of men, who could tell them all they should do. his own dealing with them was never affectionate, but superior, didactic, scorning their petty ways, very slowly conceding, or not conceding at all, the prom ise of his society at their houses, or even at his own. &quot; would he not walk with them ? &quot; &quot; he did not know. there was nothing so important to him as his walk; he had no walks to throw away on company.&quot; visits were offered him from respect ful parties, but he declined them. admiring friends offered to carry him at their own cost to the yel lowstone eiver, to the west indies, to south america. but though nothing could be more grave or considered than his refusals, they remind one in quite new relations of that fop brummel s reply to j 18 biographical sketch of thoreau. the gentleman who offered him his carriage in a shower, &quot; but where will you ride, then ? &quot; and what accusing silences, and what searching and ir resistible speeches, battering down all defences, his companions can remember. mr. thoreau dedicated his genius with such entire love to the fields, hills, and waters of his native town, that he made them known and interesting to all read ing americans, and to people over the sea. the river on whose banks he was born and died he knew from its springs to its confluence with the merrimack. he had made summer and winter observations on it for many years, and at every hour of the day and night. the result of the recent survey of the water com missioners appointed by the state of massachusetts he had reached by his private experiments, several years earlier. every fact which occurs in the bed, on the banks, or in the air over it; the fishes, and their spawning and nests, their manners, their food; the shad-flies which fill the air on a certain evening once a year, and which are snapped at by the fishes so ravenously that many of these die of repletion ; the conical heaps of small stones on the river-shallows, one of which heaps will sometimes overfill a cart, these heaps the huge nests of small fishes ; the birds which frequent the stream, heron, duck, sheldrake, loon, osprey ; the snake, musk-rat, otter, woodchuck, and fox, on the banks ; the turtle, frog, hyla, and cricket, which make the banks vocal, were well known to him, and, as it were, townsmen and fellow creatures ; so that he felt an absurdity or violence in any narrative of one of these by itself apart, and still more of its dimensions on an inch-rule, or in the exhi bition of its skeleton, or the specimen of a squirrel or biographical sketch of thoreau. 19 a bird in brandy. he liked to speak of the manners of the river, as itself a lawful creature, yet with exact ness, and always to an observed fact. as he knew the river, so the ponds in this region. one of the weapons he used, more important than microscope or alcohol-receiver to other investigators, was a whim which grew on him by indulgence, yet appeared in gravest statement, namely, of extolling his own town and neighborhood as the most favored centre for natural observation. he remarked that the flora of massachusetts embraced almost all the impor tant plants of america, most of the oaks, most of the willows, the best pines, the ash, the maple, the beech, the nuts. he returned kane s &quot; arctic voy age &quot; to a friend of whom he had borrowed it, with the remark that &quot; most of the phenomena noted might be observed in concord.&quot; he seemed a little envious of the pole, for the coincident sunrise and sunset, or five minutes day after six months : a splendid fact, which annursnuc l had never afforded him. he found red snow in one of his walks, and told me that he expected to find yet the victoria regia in concord. he was the attorney of the indigenous plants, and owned to a preference of the weeds to the imported plants, as of the indian to the civilized man; and noticed with pleasure that the willow bean-poles of his neighbor had grown more than his beans. &quot; see these weeds,&quot; he said, &quot; which have been hoed at by a million farmers all spring and summer, and yet have prevailed, and just now come out triumphant over all lanes, pastures, fields, and gardens, such is their vigor. we have insulted them with low names, too, as pig weed, wormwood, chickweed, shad-blossom.&quot; he 1 a hill in concord on the border of acton. 20 biographical sketch of thoreau. says, &quot; they have brave names, too, ambrosia, stel laria, amelanchier, amaranth, etc.&quot; i think his fancy for referring everything to the meridian of concord did not grow out of any igno rance or depreciation of other longitudes or latitudes, but was rather a playful expression of his conviction of the indiiferency of all places, and that the best place for each is where he stands. he expressed it once in this wise : &quot; i think nothing is to be hoped from you, if this bit of mould under your feet is not sweeter to you to eat than any other in this world, or in any world.&quot; the other weapon with which he conquered all ob stacles in science was patience. he knew how to sit immovable a part of the rock he rested on until the bird, the reptile, the fish, which had retired from him, should come back and resume its habits, nay, moved by curiosity, should come to him and watch him. it was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him. he knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own. he knew every track in the snow or on the ground, and what creature had taken this path before him. one must submit abjectly to such a guide, and the reward was great. under his arm he carried an old music-book to press plants ; in his pocket, his diary and pencil, a spy-glass for birds, microscope, jack-knife, and twine. he wore straw hat, stout shoes, strong gray trousers to brave shrub-oaks and smilax, and to climb a tree for a hawk s or a squirrel s nest. he waded into the pool for the water-plants, and his strong legs were no insignificant part of his armor. on the day i speak of he looked for the menyanthes, detected it across biographical sketch of thoreau. 21 the wide pool, and, on examination of the florets, de cided that it had been in flower five days. he drew out of his breast-pocket his diary, and read the names of all the plants that should bloom on this day, whereof he kept account as a banker when his notes fall due. the cypripedium not due till to-morrow. he thought that, if he waked up from a trance in this swamp, he could tell by the plants what time of the year it was within two days. the redstart was flying about, and presently the fine grosbeaks, whose bril liant scarlet makes &quot; the rash gazer wipe his eye,&quot; 1 and whose fine clear note thoreau compared to that of a tauager which has got rid of its hoarseness. presently he heard a note which he called that of the night-warbler, a bird he had never identified, had been in search of twelve years, which always, when he saw it, was in the act of diving down into a tree or bush, and which it was vain to seek ; the only bird which sings indifferently by night and by day. i told him he must beware of finding and booking it, lest life should have nothing more to show him. he said, u what you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come full upon, all the family at dinner. you seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it you become its prey.&quot; his interest in the flower or the bird lay very deep in his mind, was connected with nature, and the meaning of nature was never attempted to be defined by him. he would not offer a memoir of his observa 1 sweet rose ! whose hue, angry and brave, bids the rash gazer wipe his eye : thy root is ever in its grave, and thou must die. virtue : george herbert. 22 biographical sketch of thoreau. tions to the natural history society. &quot; why should i? to detach the description from its connections in my mind would make it no longer true or valuable to me; and they do not wish what belongs to it.&quot; his power of observation seemed to indicate addi tional senses. he saw as with microscope, heard as with ear-trumpet, and his memory was a photographic register of all he saw and heard. and yet none knew better than he that it is not the fact that imports, but the impression or effect of the fact on your mind. every fact lay in glory in his mind, a type of the order and beauty of the whole. his determination on natural history was organic. he confessed that he sometimes felt like a hound or a panther, and, if born among indians, would have been a fell hunter. but, restrained by his massachusetts culture, he played out the game in this mild form of botany and ichthyology. his intimacy with animals suggested what thomas fuller records of butler the apiologist, that &quot; either he had told the bees things or the bees had told him.&quot; snakes coiled round his leg ; the fishes swam into his hand, and he took them out of the water ; he pulled the woodchuck out of its hole by the tail, and took the foxes under his protecr tion from the hunters. our naturalist had perfect magnanimity ; he had no secrets : he would carry you to the heron s haunt, or even to his most prized bo tanical swamp, possibly knowing that you could never find it again, yet willing to take his risks. no college ever offered him a diploma, or a profes sor s chair ; no academy made him its corresponding secretary, its discoverer, or even its member. per haps these learned bodies feared the satire of his presence. yet so much knowledge of nature s secret biographical sketch of thorea u. 23 and genius few others possessed, none in a more large and religious synthesis. for not a particle of respect had he to the opinions of any man or body of men, but homage solely to the truth itself ; and as he dis covered everywhere among doctors some leaning of courtesy, it discredited them. he grew to be revered and admired by his townsmen, who had at first known him only as an oddity. the farmers who employed him as a surveyor soon discovered his rare accuracy and skill, his knowledge of their lands, of trees, of birds, of indian remains and the like, which enabled him to tell every farmer more than he knew before of his own farm ; so that he began to feel a little as if mr. thoreau had better rights in his land than he. they felt, too, the superiority of character which ad dressed all men with a native authority. indian relics abound in concord, arrow-heads, stone chisels, pestles, and fragments of pottery ; and on the river-bank, large heaps of clam-shells and ashes mark spots which the savages frequented. these, and every circumstance touching the indian, were im portant in his eyes. his visits to maine were chiefly for love of the indian. he had the satisfaction of seeing the manufacture of the bark-canoe, as well as of trying his hand in its management on the rapids. he was inquisitive about the making of the stone arrow-head, and in his last days charged a youth set ting out for the eocky mountains to find an indian who could tell him that : &quot; it was well worth a visit to california to learn it.&quot; occasionally, a small party of penobscot indians would visit concord, and pitch their tents for a few weeks in summer on the river bank. he failed not to make acquaintance with the best of them ; though he well knew that asking ques 24 biographical sketch of thoreav. tions of indians is like catechizing beavers and rab bits. in his last visit to maine he had great satis faction from joseph polis, an intelligent indian of oldtown, who was his guide for some weeks. he was equally interested in every natural fact. the depth of his perception found likeness of law throughout nature, and i know not any genius who so swiftly inferred universal law from the single fact. he was no pedant of a department. his eye was open to beauty, and his ear to music. he found these, not in rare conditions, but wheresoever he went. he thought the best of music was in single strains ; and he found poetic suggestion in the humming of the telegraph wire. his poetry might be bad or good; he no doubt wanted a lyric facility and technical skill ; but he had the source of poetry in his spiritual perception. he was a good reader and critic, and his judgment on poetry was to the ground of it. he could not be de ceived as to the presence or absence of the poetic element in any composition, and his thirst for this made him negligent and perhaps scornful of superfi cial graces. he would pass by many delicate rhythms, but he would have detected every live stanza or line in a volume, and knew very well where to find an equal poetic charm in prose. he was so enamored of the spiritual beauty that he held all actual written poems in very light esteem in the comparison. he admired ^eschylus and pindar; but, when some one was co*mmending them, he said that ^eschylus and the greeks, in describing apollo and orpheus, had given no song, or no good one. &quot; they ought not to have moved trees, but to have chanted to the gods such a hymn as would have sung all their old ideas out of biographical sketch of thoreau. 25 their heads, and new ones in.&quot; his own verses are often rude and defective. the gold does not yet run pure, is drossy and crude. the thyme and mar joram are not yet honey. but if he want lyric fine ness and technical merits, if he have not the poetic temperament, he never lacks the causal thought, show ing that his genius was better than his talent. he knew the worth of the imagination for the uplifting and consolation of human life, and liked to throw every thought into a symbol. the fact you tell is of no value, but only the impression. for this reason his presence was poetic, always piqued the curiosity to know more deeply the secrets of his mind. he had many reserves, an unwillingness to exhibit to pro fane eyes what was still sacred in his own, and knew well how to throw a poetic veil over his experience. all readers of &quot; walden &quot; will remember his myth ical record of his disappointments : &quot; i long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle dove, and am still on their trail. many are the trav ellers i have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks, and what calls they answered to. i have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud ; and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.&quot; l his riddles were worth the reading, and i confide, that, if at any time i do not understand the expression, it is yet just. such was the wealth of his truth that it was not worth his while to use words in vain. his poem entitled &quot; sympathy &quot; reveals the tenderness under that triple steel of stoicism, and the intellec tual subtilty it could animate. his classic poem on 1 walden, p. 20. 26 biographical sketch of thoreau. &quot; smoke &quot; suggests simonides, but is better than any poem of simonides. his biography is in his verses. his habitual thought makes all his poetry a hymn to the cause of causes, the spirit which vivifies and con trols his own. &quot; i hearing get, who had but ears, and sight, who had but eyes before ; i moments live, who lived but years, and truth discern, who knew but learning s lore.&quot; and still more in these religious lines : &quot;now chiefly is my natal hour, and only now my prime of life ; i will not doubt the love untold, which not my worth or want have bought, which wooed me young, and wooes me old, and to this evening hath me brought.&quot; whilst he used in his writings a certain petulance of remark in reference to churches or churchmen, he was a person of a rare, tender, and absolute religion, a person incapable of any profanation, by act or by thought. of course, the same isolation which be longed to his original thinking and living detached him from the social religious forms. this is neither to be censured nor regretted. aristotle long ago explained it, when he said, &quot; one who surpasses his fellow-citizens in virtue is no longer a part of the city. their law is not for him, since he is a law to himself.&quot; thoreau was sincerity itself, and might fortify the convictions of prophets in the ethical laws by his holy living. it was an affirmative experience which refused to be set aside. a truth-speaker he, capable of the most deep and strict conversation ; a physician to the wounds of any soul ; a friend, knowing not only biographical sketch of thoreau. 27 the secret of friendship, but almost worshipped by those few persons who resorted to him as their con fessor and prophet, and knew the deep value of his mind and great heart. he thought that without re ligion or devotion of some kind nothing great was ever accomplished : and he thought that the bigoted sectarian had better bear this in mind. his virtues, of course, sometimes ran into extremes. it was easy to trace to the inexorable demand on all for exact truth that austerity which made this willing hermit more solitary even than he wished. himself of a perfect probity, he required not less of others. he had a disgust at crime, and no worldly success could cover it. he detected paltering as readily in dignified and prosperous persons as in beggars, and with equal scorn. such dangerous frankness was in his dealing that his admirers called him &quot;that ter rible thoivau,&quot; as it inspoke when silent, and was still present \shen lie had departed. i think the severity of his ideal interfered to deprive him of a healthy sufficiency of human society. the habit of a realist to find things the reverse of their appearance inclined him to put every statement in a paradox. a certain habit of antagonism defaced his earlier writings, a trick of rhetoric not quite outgrown in his later, of substituting for the obvious word and thought its diametrical opposite. he praised wild mountains and winter forests for their domestic air, in snow and ice he would find sultriness, and com mended the wilderness for resembling rome and paris. &quot; it was so dry, that you might call it wet.&quot; the tendency to magnify the moment, to read all the laws of nature in the one object or one combina tion under your eye, is of course comic to those who 28 biographical sketch of thoreau. do not share the philosopher s perception of identity. to him there was no such thing as size. the pond was a small ocean ; the atlantic, a large walden pond. he referred every minute fact to cosinical laws. though he meant to be just, he seemed haunted by a certain chronic assumption that the sci ence of the day pretended completeness, and he had just found out that the savans had neglected to dis criminate a particular botanical variety, had failed to describe the seeds or count the sepals. &quot; that is to say,&quot; he replied, &quot; the blockheads were not born in concord ; but who said they were ? it was their un speakable misfortune to be born in london, or paris, or rome ; but, poor fellows, they did what they could, considering that they never saw bateman s pond, or nine-acre corner, or becky-stow s swamp. besides, what were you sent into the world for, but to add this observation ? &quot; had his genius been only contemplative, he had been fitted to his life, but with his energy and practi cal ability he seemed born for great enterprise and for command ; and i so much regret the loss of his rare powers of action, that i cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. wanting this, instead of engineering for all america, he was the captain of a huckleberry party. pounding beans is good to the end of pounding empires one of these days ; but if, at the end of years, it is still only beans ! but these foibles, real or apparent, were fast van ishing in the incessant growth of a spirit so robust and wise, and which effaced its defeats with new triumphs. his study of nature was a perpetual or nament to him, and inspired his friends with curi biographical sketch of thoreau. 29 osity to see the world through his eyes, and to hear his adventures. they possessed every kind of in terest. he had many elegancies of his own, whilst he scoffed at conventional elegance. thus, he could not bear to hear the sound of his own steps, the grit of gravel ; and therefore never willingly walked in the road, but in the grass, on mountains and in woods. his senses were acute, and he remarked that by night every dwelling-house gives out bad air, like a slaughter house. he liked the pure fragrance of melilot. 1 he honored certain plants with special regard, and, over all, the pond-lily, then, the gentian, and the mikania scandens? and &quot; life-everlasting,&quot; and a bass tree which he visited every year when it bloomed, in the middle of july. he thought the scent a more orac ular inquisition than the sight, more oracular and trustworthy. the scent, of course, reveals what is concealed from the other senses. by it he detected earthiness. he delighted in echoes, and said they were almost the only kind of kindred voices that he heard. he loved nature so well, was so happy in her solitude, that he became very jealous of cities, and the sad work which their refinements and artifices made with man and his dwelling. the axe was always de stroying his forest. &quot; thank god,&quot; he said, &quot; they cannot cut down the clouds ! &quot; &quot; all kinds of figures are drawn on the blue ground with this fibrous white paint.&quot; i subjoin a few sentences taken from his unpub lished manuscripts, not only as records of his thought and feeling, but for their power of description and literary excellence. 1 sweet clover. 2 climbing hemp-weed. 30 biographical sketch of thoreau. &quot; some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk/ &quot; the chub is a soft fish, and tastes like boiled brown paper salted.&quot; &quot; the youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and at length the middle-aged man con cludes to build a wood-shed with them.&quot; &quot; the locust z-ing.&quot; &quot; devil s-needles zigzagging along the nut-meadow brook.&quot; &quot; sugar is not so sweet to the palate as sound to the healthy ear.&quot; &quot; i put on some hemlock-boughs, and the rich salt crackling of their leaves was like mustard to the ear, the crackling of uncountable regiments. dead trees love the fire.&quot; &quot; the bluebird carries the sky on his back.&quot; &quot; the tanager flies through the green foliage as if it would ignite the leaves.&quot; &quot; if i wish for a horse-hair for my compass-sight, i must go to the stable; but the hair-bird, with her sharp eyes, goes to the road.&quot; &quot; immortal water, alive even to the superficies.&quot; &quot; fire is the most tolerable third party.&quot; &quot; nature made ferns for pure leaves, to show what she could do in that line.&quot; &quot; no tree has so fair a bole and so handsome an in step as the beech.&quot; &quot; how did these beautiful rainbow-tints get into the shell of the fresh-water clam, buried in the mud at the bottom of our dark river ? &quot; &quot; hard are the times when the infant s shoes are second-foot.&quot; biographical sketch of thoreau. 31 &quot; we are strictly confined to our men to whom we give liberty.&quot; &quot; of what significance the things you can forget ? a little thought is sexton to all the world.&quot; &quot; how can we expect a harvest of thought who have not had a seed-time of character ? &quot; &quot; only he can be trusted with gifts who can present a face of bronze to expectations.&quot; &quot; i ask to be melted. you can only ask of the metals that they be tender to the fire that melts them, to naught else can they be tender.&quot; there is a flower known to botanists, one of the same genus with our summer plant called &quot; life everlasting,&quot; a gnaphalium like that, which grows on the most inaccessible cliffs of the tyrolese moun tains, where the chamois dare hardly venture, and which the hunter, tempted by its beauty, and by his love, (for it is immensely valued by the swiss maid ens,) climbs the cliffs to gather, and is sometimes found dead at the foot, with the flower in his hand. it is called by botanists the gnaphalium leontopo* dium, but by the swiss edelweiss? which signifies noble purity. thoreau seemed to me living in the hope to gather this plant, which belonged to him of right. the scale on which his studies proceeded was so large as to require longevity, and we were the less prepared for his sudden disappearance. the country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost. it seems an injury that he should leave in the midst his broken task, which none else can finish, a kind of indignity to so noble a soul, that he should depart out of nature before yet he has been 1 pronounced a del-vice. 32 biographical sketch of thoreau. really shown to his peers for what he is. but he, at least, is content. his soul was made for the noblest society ; he had in a short life exhausted the capa bilities of this world ; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home. the succession of forest trees. every man is entitled to come to cattle-show, even a transcendentalist ; l and for my part i am more interested in the men than in the cattle. i wish to see once more those old familiar faces, whose names i do not know, which for me represent the middle sex 2 country, and come as near being indigenous to the soil as a white man can ; the men who are not above their business, whose coats are not too black, whose shoes do not shine very much, who never wear gloves to conceal their hands. it is true, there are some queer specimens of humanity attracted to our festival, but all are welcome. i am pretty sure to meet once more that weak-minded and whimsical fel low, generally weak-bodied too, who prefers a crooked stick for a cane ; perfectly useless, you would say, only bizarre, fit for a cabinet, like a petrified snake. a ram s horn would be as convenient, and is yet more curiously twisted. he brings that much indulged bit of the country with him, from some town s end or other, and introduces it to concord groves, as if he had promised it so much sometime. so some, it seems 1 the name transcendentalist was given to emerson, thoreau, and others of similar ways of thinking. 2 concord is in middlesex county, massachusetts, and this paper was an address read to the middlesex agricultural so ciety at the fair commonly called a cattle-show. 34 thorea u. to me, elect their rulers for their crookedness. but i think that a straight stick makes the beat cane t and an upright man the best&quot; ruler. or why ~clibose a man to&quot;3b&quot;^ialn work~^who~ is distinguished for his oddity ? however, i do not know but you will think that they have committed this mistake who invited me to speak to you to-day. in my capacity of surveyor i have often talked with some of you, my employers, at your dinner-tables, after having gone round and round and behind your farming, and ascertained exactly what its limits were. moreover, taking a surveyor s and a naturalist s lib erty, i have been in the habit of going across your lots much oftener than is usual, as many of you, per haps to your sorrow, are aware. yet many of you, to my relief, have seemed not to be aware of it ; and when i came across you in some out-of-the-way nook of your farms, have inquired, with an air of surprise, if i were not lost, since you had never seen me in that part of the town or county before ; when, if the truth were known, and it had not been for betraying my secret, i might with more propriety have inquired if you were not lost, since i had never seen you there before. i have several times shown the proprietor the shortest way out of his wood-lot. therefore, it would seem that i have some title to speak to you to-day ; and considering what that title is, and the occasion that has called us together, i need offer no apology if i invite your attention, for the few moments that are allotted me, to a purely scien tific subject. at those dinner-tables referred to, i have often been asked, as many of you have been, if i could tell how it happened, that when a pine wood was cut the succession of forest trees. 35 down an oak one commonly sprang up, and vice versa. to which i have answered, and now answer, that i can tell, that it is no mystery to me. as i am not aware that this has been clearly shown by any one, i shall lay the more stress on this point. let me lead you back into your wood-lots again. when, hereabouts, a single forest tree or a forest springs up naturally where none of its kind grew be fore, i do not hesitate to say, though in some quarters still it may sound paradoxical, that it came from a seed. of the various ways by which trees are known to be propagated, by transplanting, cuttings, and the like, this is the only supposable one under these circumstances. no such tree has ever been known to spring from anything else. if any one as serts that it sprang from something else, or from noth ing, the burden of proof lies with him. it remains, then, only to show how the seed is transported from where it grows to where it is planted. this is done chiefly by the agency of the wind, water, and animals. the lighter seeds, as those of pines and maples, are transported chiefly by wind and water ; the heavier, as acorns and nuts, by animals. in all the pines, a very thin membrane, in appear ance much like an insect s wing, grows over and around the seed, and independent of it, while the latter is being developed within its base. indeed, this is often perfectly developed, though the seed is abortive ; nature being, you would say, more sure to provide the means of transporting the seed than to provide the seed to be transported. in other words, a beautiful thin sack is woven around the seed, with a handle to it such as the wind can take hold of, and it 36 thorea u. is then committed to the wind, expressly that it may transport the seed and extend the range of the spe cies ; and this it does as effectually as when seeds are sent by mail in a different kind of sack from the patent-office. there is a patent-office at the seat of government of the universe, whose managers are as much interested in the dispersion of seeds as anybody at washington can be, and their operations are infi nitely more extensive and regular. there is then no necessity for supposing that the pines have sprung up from nothing, and i am aware that i am not at all peculiar in asserting that they come from seeds, though the mode of their propaga tion by nature has been but little attended to. they are very extensively raised from the seed in europe, and are beginning to be here. when you cut down an oak wood, a pine wood will not at once spring up there unless there are, or have been, quite recently, seed-bearing pines near enough for the seeds to be blown from them. but, adjacent to a forest of pines, if you prevent other crops from growing there, you will surely have an extension of your pine forest, provided the soil is suitable. as for the heavy seeds and nuts which are not furr nished with wings, the notion is still a very common one that, when the trees which bear these spring up where none of their kind were noticed before, they have come from seeds or other principles sponta neously generated there in an unusual manner, or which have lain dormant in the soil for centuries, or perhaps been called into activity by the heat of a burning. i do not believe these assertions, and i will state some of the ways in which, according to my observation, such forests are planted and raised. the succession of forest trees. 37 every one of these seeds, too, will be found to be winged or legged in another fashion. surely it is not wonderful that cherry-trees of all kinds are widely dispersed, since their fruit is well known to be the favorite food of various birds. many kinds are called bird-cherries, and they appropriate many more kinds, which are not so called. eating cherries is a bird like employment, and unless we disperse the seeds occasionally, as they do, i shall think that the birds have the best right to them. see how artfully the seed of a cherry is placed in order that a bird may be compelled to transport it in the very midst of a tempting pericarp, so that the creature that would de vour this must commonly take the stone also into its mouth or bill. if you ever ate a cherry and did not make two bites of it, you must have perceived it right in the centre of the luscious morsel, a large earthy residuum left on the tongue. we thus take into our mouths cherry-stones as big as peas, a dozen at once, for nature can persuade us to do almost anything when she would compass her ends. some wild men and children instinctively swallow these, as the birds do when in a hurry, it being the shortest way to get rid of them. thus, though these seeds are not provided with vegetable wings, nature has impelled the thrush tribe to take them into their bills and fly away with them ; and they are winged in another sense, and more effectually than the seeds of pines, for these are carried even against the wind. the consequence is, that cherry-trees grow not only here but there. the same is true of a great many other seeds. but to come to the observation which suggested these remarks. as i have said, i suspect that i can 38 thorea u. throw some light on the fact, that when hereabouts a dense pine wood is cut down, oaks and other hard woods may at once take its place. i have got only to show that the acorns and nuts, provided they are grown in the neighborhood, are regularly planted in such woods ; for i assert that if an oak-tree has not grown within ten miles, and man has not carried acorns thither, then an oak wood will not spring up at once, when a pine wood is cut down. apparently, there were only pines there before. they are cut off, and after a year or two you see oaks and other hard woods springing up there, with scarcely a pine amid them, and the wonder commonly is, how the seed could have lain in the ground so long with out decaying. but the truth is, that it has not lain in the ground so long, but is regularly planted each year by various quadrupeds and birds. in this neighborhood, where oaks and pines are about equally dispersed, if you look through the thick est pine wood, even the seemingly unmixed pitch-pine ones, you will commonly detect many little .oaks, birches, and other hard woods, sprung from seeds car ried into the thicket by squirrels and other animals, and also blown thither, but which are overshadowed and choked by the pines. the denser the evergreen wood, the more likely it is to be well planted with these seeds, because the planters incline to resort with their forage to the closest covert. they also carry it into birch and other woods. this planting is carried on annually, and the oldest seedlings an nually die ; but when the pines are cleared off, the oaks, having got just the start they want, and now secured favorable conditions, immediately spring up to trees. the succession of forest trees. 39 the shade of a dense pine wood is more unfavor able to the springing up of pines of the same species than of oaks within it, though the former may come up abundantly when the pines are cut, if there chance to be sound seed in the ground. but when you cut off a lot of hard wood, very often the little pines mixed with it have a similar start, for the squirrels have carried off the nuts to the pines, and not to the more open wood, and they commonly make pretty clean work of it ; and moreover, if the wood was old, the sprouts will be feeble or entirely fail ; to say nothing about the soil being, in a measure, exhausted for this kind of crop. if a pine wood is surrounded by a white-oak one chiefly, white-oaks may be expected to succeed when the pines are cut. if it is surrounded instead by an edging of shrub-oaks, then you will probably have a dense shrub-oak thicket. i have no time to go into details, but will say, in a word, that while the wind is conveying the seeds of pines into hard woods and open lands, the squirrels and other animals are conveying the seeds of oaks and walnuts into the pine woods, and thus a rotation of crops is kept up. i affirmed this confidently many years ago, and an occasional examination of dense pine woods con firmed me in my opinion. it has long been known to observers that squirrels bury nuts in the ground, but i am not aware that any one has thus accounted for the regular succession of forests. on the 24th of september, in 1857, as 1 was pad dling down the assabet, in this town, i saw a red squirrel run along the bank under some herbage, with something large in its mouth. it stopped near the 40 thoreau. foot of a hemlock, within a couple of rods of me, and, hastily pawing a hole with its forefeet, dropped its booty into it, covered it up, and retreated part way up the trunk of the tree. as i approached the shore to examine the deposit, the squirrel, descending part way, betrayed no little anxiety about its treasure, and made two or three motions to recover it before it finally retreated. digging there, i found two green pig-nuts joined together, with the thick husks on, buried about an inch and a half under the reddish soil of decayed hemlock leaves, just the right depth to plant it. in short, this squirrel was then engaged in accomplishing two objects, to wit, laying up a store of winter food for itself, and planting a hickory wood for all creation. if the squirrel was killed, or neg lected its deposit, a hickory would spring up. the nearest hickory tree was twenty rods distant. these nuts were there still just fourteen days later, but were gone when i looked again, november 21, or six weeks later still. i have since examined more carefully several dense woods, which are said to be, and are apparently ex clusively pine, and always with the same result. for instance, i walked the same day to a small but very dense and handsome white-pine grove, about fifteen rods square, in the east part of this town. the trees are large for concord, being from ten to twenty inches in diameter, and as exclusively pine as any wood that i know. indeed, i selected this wood be cause i thought it the least likely to contain anything else. it stands on an open plain or pasture, except that it adjoins another small pine wood, which has a few little oaks in it, on the southeast side. on every other side it was at least thirty rods from the nearest the succession of forest trees. 41 woods. standing on the edge of this grove and look ing through it, for it is quite level and free from un derwood, for the most part bare, red-carpeted ground, you would have said that there was not a hard-wood tree in it, young or old. but on looking carefully along over its floor i discovered, though it was not till my eye had got used to the search, that, alternating with thin ferns and small blueberry bushes, there was, not merely here and there, but as often as every five feet and with a degree of regularity, a little oak, from three to twelve inches high, and in one place i found a green acorn dropped by the base of a pine. i confess, i was surprised to find my theory so perfectly proved in this case. one of the principal agents in this planting, the red squirrels, were all the while curiously inspecting me, while i was inspecting their plantation. some of the little oaks had been browsed by cows, which resorted to this wood for shade. after seven or eight years, the hard woods evi dently find such a locality unfavorable to their growth, the pines being allowed to stand. as an evidence of this, i observed a diseased red-maple twenty-five feet long, which had been recently prostrated, though it was still covered with green leaves, the only maple in any position in the wood. but although these oaks almost invariably die if the pines are not cut down, it is probable that they do better for a few years under their shelter than they would anywhere else. the very extensive and thorough experiments of the english have at length led them to adopt a method of raising oaks almost precisely like this, which some what earlier had been adopted by nature and her 42 thoreau. squirrels here; they have simply rediscovered the value of pines as nurses for oaks. the english ex perimenters seem early and generally to have found out the importance of using trees of some kind as nurse-plants for the young oaks. i quote from lou don what he describes as &quot; the ultimatum on the sub ject of planting and sheltering oaks,&quot; &quot; an abstract of the practice adopted by the government officers in the national forests &quot; of england, prepared by alex ander milne. at first some oaks had been planted by themselves, and others mixed with scotch pines ; &quot; but in all cases,&quot; says mr. milne, &quot;where oaks were planted actually among the pines, and surrounded by them, [though the soil might be inferior,] the oaks were found to be much the best.&quot; &quot;for several years past, the plan pursued has been to plant the inclosures with scotch pines only, [a tree very similar to our pitch pine,] and when the pines have got to the height of five or six feet, then to put in good strong oak plants of about four or five years growth among the pines, not cutting away any pines at first, unless they happen to be so strong and thick as to overshadow the oaks. in about two .years, it becomes necessary to shred the branches of the pines, to give light and air to the oaks, and in about two or three more years to begin gradually to remove the pines altogether, taking out a certain number each year, so that, at the end of twenty or twenty-five years, not a single scotch pine shall be left; although, for the first ten or twelve years, the plantation may have appeared to contain nothing else but pine. the advantage of this mode of planting has been found to be that the pines dry and ameliorate the soil, destroying the coarse grass the succession of forest trees. 43 and brambles which frequently choke and injure oaks ; and that no mending over is necessary, as scarcely an oak so planted is found to fail.&quot; thus much the english planters have discovered by patient experiment, and, for aught i know, they have taken out a patent for it ; but they appear not to have discovered that it was discovered before, and that they are merely adopting the method of nature, which she long ago made patent to all. she is all the while planting the oaks amid the pines without our knowledge, and at last, instead of government officers, we send a party of wood-choppers to cut down the pines, and so rescue an oak forest, at which we wonder as if it had dropped from the skies. as i walk amid hickories, even in august, i hear the sound of green pig-nuts falling from time to time, cut off by the chickaree over my head. in the fall, i notice on the ground, either within or in the neigh borhood of oak woods, on all sides of the town, stout oak twigs three or four inches long, bearing half-a dozen empty acorn-cups, which twigs have been gnawed off by squirrels, on both sides of the nuts, in order to make them more portable. the jays scream and the red squirrels scold while you are clubbing and shak ing the chestnut-trees, for they are there on the same errand, and two of a trade never agree. i frequently see a red or gray squirrel cast down a green chestnut bur, as i am going through the woods, and i used to think, sometimes, that they were cast at me. in fact, they are so busy about it, in the midst of the chest nut season, that you cannot stand long in the woods without hearing one fall. a sportsman told me that he had, the day before, that was in the middle of october, seen a green chestnut bur dropt on our 44 thorea u. great river meadow, fifty rods from the nearest wood, and much farther from the nearest chestnut-tree, and he could not tell how it came there. occasionally, when chestnutting in midwinter, i find thirty or forty nuts in a pile, left in its gallery, just under the leaves, by the common wood-mouse. but especially, in the winter, the extent to which this transportation and planting of nuts is carried on is made apparent by the snow. in almost every wood you will see where the red or gray squirrels have pawed down through the snow in a hundred places, sometimes two feet deep, and almost always directly to a nut or a pine-cone, as directly as if they had started from it and bored upward, which you and i could not have done. it would be difficult for us to find one before the snow falls. commonly, no doubt, they had de posited them there in the fall. you wonder if they remember the localities, or discover them by the scent. the red squirrel commonly has its winter abode in the earth under a thicket of evergreens, frequently under a small clump of evergreens in the midst of a decidu ous wood. if there are any nut-trees which still re tain their nuts, standing at a distance without the wood, their paths often lead directly to and from them. we, therefore, need not suppose an oak stand ing here and there in the wood in order to seed it, but if a few stand within twenty or thirty rods of it, it is sufficient. i think that i may venture to say that every white pine cone that falls to the earth naturally in this town, before opening and losing its seeds, and almost every pitch-pine cone that falls at all, is cut off by a squirrel, and they begin to pluck them long before they are ripe, so that when the crop of white-pine cones is a the succession of forest trees. 45 small one, as it commonly is, they cut off thus almost every one of these before it fairly ripens. i think, moreover, that their design, if i may so speak, in cut ting them off green, is, partly, to prevent their open ing and losing their seeds, for these are the ones for which they dig through the snow, and the only white pine cones which contain anything then. i have counted in one heap, within a diameter of four feet, the cores of 239 pitch-pine cones which had been cut off and stripped by the red squirrel the previous winter. the nuts thus left on the surface, or buried just beneath it, are placed in the most favorable circum stances for germinating. i have sometimes wondered how those which merely fell on the surface of the earth got planted ; but, by the end of december, i find the chestnut of the same year partially mixed with the mould, as it were, under the decaying and mouldy leaves, where there is all the moisture and manure they want, for the nuts fall first. in a plen tiful year, a large proportion of the nuts are thus covered loosely an inch deep, and are, of course, somewhat concealed from squirrels. one winter, when the crop had been abundant, i got, with the aid of a rake, many quarts of these nuts as late as the tenth of january, and though some bought at the store the same day were more than half of them mouldy, i did not find a single mouldy one among these which i picked from under the wet and mouldy leaves, where they had been snowed on once or twice. nature knows how to pack them best. they were still plump and tender. apparently, they do not heat there, though wet. in the spring they were all sprouting. 46 thorea u. loudon says that &quot; when the nut [of the common walnut of europe] is to be preserved through the winter for the purpose of planting in the following spring, it should be laid in a rot-heap, as soon as gathered, with the husk on, and the heap should be turned over frequently in the course of the winter.&quot; here, again, he is stealing nature s &quot; thunder.&quot; how can a poor mortal do otherwise ? for it is she that finds fingers to steal with, and the treasure to be stolen. in the planting of the seeds of most trees, the best gardeners do no more than follow nature, though they may not know it. generally, both large and small ones are most sure to germinate, and suc ceed best, when only beaten into the earth with the back of a spade, and then covered with leaves or straw. these results to which planters have arrived remind us of the experience of kane and his com panions at the north, who, when learning to live in that climate, were surprised to find themselves steadily adopting the customs of the natives, simply becoming esquimaux. so, when we experiment in planting forests, we find ourselves at last doing as nature does. would it not be well to consult with nature in the outset ? for she is the most extensive and ex perienced planter of us all, not excepting the dukes of athol. 1 in short, they who have not attended particularly to this subject are but little aware to what an extent quadrupeds and birds are employed, especially in the fall, in collecting, and so disseminating and planting the seeds of trees. it is the almost constant employ ment of the squirrels at that season, and you rarely 1 the dukes of athol, in scotland, were famous for their plantations of trees. the succession of forest trees. 47 meet with one that has not a nut in its mouth, or is not just going to get one. one squirrel-hunter of this town told me that he knew of a walnut-tree which bore particularly good nuts, but that on going to gather them one fall, he found that he had been an ticipated by a family of a dozen red squirrels. he took out of the tree, which was hollow, one bushel and three pecks by measurement, without the husks, and they supplied him and his family for the winter. it would be easy to multiply instances of this kind. how commonly in the fall you see the cheek-pouches of the striped squirrel distended by a quantity of nuts ! this species gets its scientific name tamias, or the steward, from its habit of storing up nuts and other seeds. look under a nut-tree a month after the nuts have fallen, and see what proportion of sound nuts to the abortive ones and shells you will find ordinarily. they have been already eaten, or dis persed far and wide. the ground looks like the plat form before a grocery, where the gossips of the village sit to crack nuts and less savory jokes. you have come, you would say, after the feast was over, and are presented with the shells only. occasionally, when threading the woods in the fall, you will hear a sound as if some one had broken a twig, and, looking up, see a jay pecking at an acorn, or you will see a flock of them at once about it, in the top of an oak, and hear them break them off. they then fly to a suitable limb, and placing the acorn under one foot, hammer away at it busily, mak ing a sound like a woodpecker s tapping, looking round from time to time to see if any foe is approach ing, and soon reach the meat, and nibble at it, hold ing up their heads to swallow, while they hold the 48 thorea u. remainder very firmly with their claws. neverthe less, it often drops to the ground before the bird has done with it. i can confirm what william bartrarn wrote to wilson, the ornithologist, that &quot; the jay is one of the most useful agents in the economy of na ture, for disseminating forest trees and other nucifer ous and hard-seeded vegetables on which they feed. their chief employment during the autumnal season is foraging to supply their winter stores. in perform ing this necessary duty they drop abundance of seed in their flight over fields, hedges, and by fences, where they alight to deposit them in the post-holes, etc. it is remarkable what numbers of young trees rise up in fields and pastures after a wet winter and spring. these birds alone are capable, in a few years time, to replant all the cleared lands.&quot; i have noticed that squirrels also frequently drop their nuts in the open land, which will still further account for the oaks and walnuts which spring up in pastures, for, depend on it, every new tree comes from a seed. when i examine the little oaks, one or two years old, in such places, i invariably find the empty acorn from which they sprung. so far from the seed having lain dormant in the soil since oaks grew there before, as many believe, it is well known that it is difficult to preserve the vi tality of acorns long enough to transport them to eu rope ; and it is recommended in london s arboretum^ as the safest course, to sprout them in pots on the voyage. the same authority states that &quot; very few acorns of any species will germinate after having been kept a year,&quot; that beechmast &quot; only retains its vital properties one year,&quot; and the black-walnut &quot;seldom more than six months after it has ripened.&quot; i have the succession of forest trees. 49 frequently found that in november, almost every acorn left on the ground had sprouted or decayed. what with frost, drought, moisture, and worms, the greater part are soon destroyed. yet it is stated by one botanical writer that &quot; acorns that have lain for centuries, on being ploughed up, have soon vege tated.&quot; mr. george b. emerson, in his valuable report on the trees and shrubs of this state, says of the pines : &quot; the tenacity of life of the seeds is remarkable. they will remain for many years unchanged in the ground, protected by the coolness and deep shade of the forest above them. but when the forest is re moved, and the warmth of the sun admitted, they immediately vegetate.&quot; since he does not tell us on what observation his remark is founded, i must doubt its truth. besides, the experience of nurserymen makes it the more questionable. the stories of wheat raised from seed buried with an ancient egyptian, and of raspberries raised from seed found in the stomach of a man in england, who is supposed to have died sixteen or seventeen hun dred years ago, are generally discredited, simply be cause the evidence is not conclusive. several men of science, dr. carpenter among them, have used the statement that beach-plums sprang up in sand which was dug up forty miles inland in maine, to prove that the seed had lain there a very long time, and some have inferred that the coast has receded so far. but it seems to me necessary to their argument to show, first, that beach-plums grow only on a beach. they are not uncommon here, which is about half that distance from the shore ; and i remember a dense patch a few miles north of us, twenty-five miles in 50 thorea u. land, from which the fruit was annually carried to market. how much further inland they grow, i know not. dr. charles t. jackson speaks of finding &quot; beach-plums &quot; (perhaps they were this kind) more than one hundred miles inland in maine. it chances that similar objections lie against all the more notorious instances of the kind on record. yet i am prepared to believe that some seeds, espe cially small ones, may retain their vitality for centu ries under favorable circumstances. in the spring of 1859, the old hunt house, so called, in this town, whose chimney bore the date 1703, was taken down. this stood on land which belonged to john winthrop, the first governor of massachusetts, and a part of the house was evidently much older than the above date, and belonged to the winthrop family. for many years i have ransacked this neighborhood for plants, and i consider myself familiar with its productions. thinking of the seeds which are said to be sometimes dug up at an unusual depth in the earth, and thus to reproduce long extinct plants, it occurred to me last fall that some new or rare plants might have sprung up in the cellar of this house, which had been covered from the light so long. searching there on the 22d of september, i found, among other rank weeds, a species of nettle (urtica urens), which i had not found before; dill, which i had not seen growing spontaneously ; the jerusalem oak, which i had seen wild in but one place; black nightshade, which is quite rare hereabouts ; and common tobacco, which, though it was often cultivated here in the last century, has for fifty years been an unknown plant in this town, and a few months before this not even i had heard that one man in the north part of the town the succession of forest trees. 51 was cultivating a few plants for his own use. i have no doubt that some or all of these plants sprang from seeds which had long been buried under or about that house, and that that tobacco is an additional evidence that the plant was formerly cultivated here. the cellar has been filled up this year, and four of those plants, including the tobacco, are now again extinct in that locality. it is true, i have shown that the animals consume a great part of the seeds of trees, and so, at least, effectually prevent their becoming trees ; but in all these cases, as i have said, the consumer is compelled to be at the same time the disperser and planter, and this is the tax which he pays to nature. i think it is linnaeus who says, that while the swine is rooting for acorns, he is planting acorns. though i do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, i have great faith in a seed a, to me, equally mysterious origin for it. con vince me that you have a seed there, and i am pre pared to expect wonders. i shall even believe that the millennium is at hand, and that the reign of jus tice is about to commence, when the patent office, or government, begins to distribute, and the people to plant the seeds of these things. in the spring of 1857 i planted six seeds sent to me from the patent office, and labelled, i think, &quot; poitrine jaune grosse&quot; l large yellow squash. two came up, and one bore a squash which weighed pounds, the other bore four, weighing together pounds. who would have believed that there was 310 pounds of poitrine jaune grosse in that corner of my garden? these seeds were the bait i used to 1 pronounced pwah-treen zhone yroce. 52 thoreau. catch it, my ferrets which i sent into its burrow, my brace of terriers which unearthed it. a little myste rious hoeing and manuring was all the abracadabra 1 presto-change that i used, and, lo ! true to the label, they found for me 310 pounds of poitrine jaune grosse there, where it never was known to be, nor was before. these talismen had perchance sprung from america at first, and returned to it with una bated force. the big squash took a premium at your fair that fall, and i understood that the man who bought it intended to sell the seeds for ten cents a piece. (were they not cheap at that ?) but i have more hounds of the same breed. i learn that one which i dispatched to a distant town, true to its in stincts, points to the large yellow squash there, too, where no hound ever found it before, as its ancestors did here and in france. other seeds i have which will find other things in that corner of my garden, in like fashion, almost any fruit you wish, every year for ages, until the crop more than fills the whole garden. you have but lit tle more to do than throw up your cap for entertain ment these american days. perfect alchemists i keep who can transmute substances without end, and thus the corner of my garden is an inexhaustible treasure chest. here you can dig, not gold, but the value which gold merely represents ; and there is no sign or blitz 2 about it. yet farmers sons will stare by the hour to see a juggler draw ribbons from his throat, though he tells them it is all deception. surely, men love darkness rather than light. 1 a charm once used by the superstitious. 2 a swiss juggler who was a favorite performer in new eng. land between 1850 and 1860. his trained canaries were one of the wonders of the day. wild apples. the history of the apple-tree. it is remarkable how closely the history of the apple-tree is connected with that of man. the geologist tells us that the order of the rosacece, which includes the apple, also the true grasses, and the lubiatce, or mints, were introduced only a short time previous to the appearance of man on the globe. it appears that apples made a part of the food of that unknown primitive people whose traces have lately been found at the bottom of the swiss lakes, supposed to be older than the foundation of rome, so old that they had no metallic implements. an entire black and shrivelled crab-apple has been re covered from their stores. tacitus says of the ancient germans, that they satisfied their hunger with wild apples, among other things. niebuhr * observes that &quot; the words for a house, a field, a plough, ploughing, wine, oil, milk, sheep, apples, and ethers relating to agriculture and the gen tler ways of life, agree in latin and greek, while the latin words for all objects pertaining to war or the chase are utterly alien from the greek.&quot; thus 1 a german historical critic of ancient life. 54 thoreau. the apple-tree may be considered a symbol of peace no less than the olive. the apple was early so important, and so generally distributed, that its name traced to its root in many languages signifies fruit in general. m^xoj/ [melon], in greek, means an apple, also the fruit of other trees, also a sheep and any cattle, and finally riches in general. the apple-tree has been celebrated by the hebrews, greeks, romans, and scandinavians. some have thought that the first human pair were tempted by its fruit. goddesses are fabled to have contended for it, dragons were set to watch it, and heroes were employed to pluck it. 1 the tree is mentioned in at least three places in the old testament, and its fruit in two or three more. solomon sings, &quot; as the apple-tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons.&quot; and again, &quot;stay me with flagons, comfort me with ap ples.&quot; the noblest part of man s noblest feature is named from this fruit, &quot; the apple of the eye.&quot; the apple-tree is also mentioned by homer and herodotus. ulysses saw in the glorious garden of alcinoiis &quot;pears and pomegranates and apple-trees bearing beautiful fruit.&quot; and according to homer, apples were among the fruits which tantalus could not pluck, the wind ever blowing their boughs away from him. theophrastus knew and described the apple-tree as a botanist. according to the prose edda, 2 &quot; iduna keeps in a box the apples which the gods, when they feel old 1 the greek myths especially referred to are the choice of paris and the apples of the hesperides. 2 the stories of the early scandinavians. the history of the apple-tree. 55 ag^ approaching, have only to taste of to become young again. it is in this manner that they will be kept in renovated youth until ragnarok &quot; (or the de struction of the gods). i learn from loudon 1 that &quot; the ancient welsh bards were rewarded for excelling in song by the token of the apple-spray ; &quot; and &quot; in the highlands of scotland the apple-tree is the badge of the clan lamont.&quot; the apple-tree belongs chiefly to the northern tem perate zone. loudon says, that &quot; it grows spontane ously in every part of europe except the frigid zone, and throughout western asia, china, and japan.&quot; we have also two or three varieties of the apple in digenous in north america. the cultivated apple tree was first introduced into this country by the earliest settlers, and is thought to do as well or bet ter here than anywhere else. probably some of the varieties which are now cultivated were first intro duced into britain by the romans. pliny, adopting the distinction of theophiastus, says, &quot; of trees there are some which are altogether wild, some more civilized.&quot; theophrastus includes the apple among the last; and, indeed, it is in this sense the most civilized of all trees. it is as harm less as a dove, as beautiful as a rose, and as valua ble as flocks and herds. it has been longer culti vated than any other, and so is more humanized ; and who knows but, like the dog, it will at length be no longer traceable to its wild original ? it migrates with man, like the dog and horse and cow: first, perchance, from greece to italy, thence to england, 1 an english authority on ( : ne culture of orchards and gar dens. 56 thorea u. thence to america; and our western emigrant is still marching steadily toward the setting sun with the seeds of the apple in his pocket, or perhaps a few young trees strapped to his load. at least a million apple-trees are thus set farther westward this year than any cultivated ones grew last year. consider how the blossomweek, like the sabbath, is thus annually spreading over the prairies ; for when man migrates he carries with him not only his birds, quadrupeds, insects, vegetables, and his very sward, but his orchard also. the leaves and tender twigs are an agreeable food to many domestic animals, as the cow, horse, sheep, and goat ; and the fruit is sought after by the first, as well as by the hog. thus there appears to have existed a natural alliance between these animals and this tree from the first. &quot; the fruit of the crab in the forests of france &quot; is said to be &quot; a great resource for the wild-boar.&quot; not only the indian, but many indigenous insects, birds, and quadrupeds, welcomed the apple-tree to these shores. the tent-caterpillar saddled her eggs on the very first twig that was formed, and it has since shared her affections with the wild cherry ; and the canker-worm also in a measure abandoned the elm to feed on it. as it grew apace, the bluebird, robin, cherry-bird, king-bird, and many more, came with haste and built their nests and warbled in its boughs, and so became orchard-birds, and multiplied more than ever. it was an era in the history of their race. the downy woodpecker found such a savory morsel under its bark, that he perforated it in a ring quite round the tree before he left it, a thing which he had never done before, to my knowledge. the history of the apple-tree. 57 it did not take the partridge long to find out how sweet its buds were, and every winter eve she flew, and still flies, from the wood, to pluck them, much to the farmer s sorrow. the rabbit, too, was not slow to learn the taste of its twigs and bark ; and when the fruit was ripe, the squirrel half-rolled, half-carried it to his hole ; and even the musquash crept up the bank from the brook at evening, and greedily de voured it, until he had worn a path in the grass there ; and when it was frozen and thawed, the crow and the jay were glad to taste it occasionally. the owl crept into the first apple-tree that became hollow, and fairly hooted with delight, finding it just the place for him ; so, settling down into it, he has re mained there ever since. my theme being the wild apple, i will merely glance at some of the seasons in the annual growth of the cultivated apple, and pass on to my special province. the flowers of the apple are perhaps the most beau tiful of any tree, so copious and so delicious to both sight and scent. the walker is frequently tempted to turn and linger near some more than usually hand some one, whose blossoms are two thirds expanded. how superior it is in these respects to the pear, whose blossoms are neither colored nor fragrant ! by the middle of july, green apples are so large as to remind us of coddling, and of the autumn. the sward is commonly strewed with little ones which fall still-born, as it were, nature thus thinning them for us. the roman writer palladius said : &quot; if apples are inclined to fall before their time, a stone placed in a split root will retain them.&quot; some such notion, still surviving, may account for some of the stones which 58 thorea u. we see placed to be overgrown in the forks of trees, they have a saying in suffolk, england, &quot; at michaelmas time, or a little before, half an apple goes to the core.&quot; early apples begin to be ripe about the first of august ; but i think that none of them are so good to eat as some to smell. one is worth more to scent your handkerchief with than any perfume which they sell in the shops. the fragrance of some fruits is not to be forgotten, along with that of flowers. some gnarly apple which i pick up in the road reminds me by its fragrance of all the wealth of pomona, 1 car rying me forward to those days when they will be collected in golden and ruddy heaps in the orchards and about the cider-mills. a week or two later, as you are going by orchards or gardens, especially in the evenings, you pass through a little region possessed by the fragrance of ripe ap ples, and thus enjoy them without price, and without robbing anybody. there is thus about all natural products a certain ^/&quot; volatile and ethereal quality which represents their highest value, and which cannot be vulgarized, or bought and sold. no mortal has ever enjoyed the perfect flavor of any fruit, and only the godlike among men begin to taste its ambrosial qualities. for nectar and ambrosia are only those fine flavors of every earthly fruit which our coarse palates fail to perceive, just as we occupy the heaven of the gods without knowing it. when i see a particularly mean man car rying a load of fair and fragrant early apples to market, i seem to see a contest going on between him and his horse, on the one side, and the apples on the other, 1 the roman goddess of fruit and fruit-trees. the history of the apple-tree. 59 and, to my mind, the apples always gain it. pliny says that apples are the heaviest of all things, and that the oxen begin to sweat at the mere sight of a load of them. our driver begins to lose his load the moment he tries to transport them to where they do not belong, that is, to any but the most beautiful though he gets out from time to time, and feels of them, and thinks they are all there, i see the stream of their evanescent and celestial qualities going to heaven from his cart, while the pulp and skin and core only are going to market. they are not apples, but pomace. are not these still iduna s apples, the ; taste of which keeps the gods forever young? and think you that they will let loki or thjassi carry them off to jotunheim, 1 while they grow wrinkled and gray ? no, for ragnarok, or the destruction of the gods, is not yet. there is another thinning of the fruit, commonly near the end of august or in september, when the ground is strewn with windfalls ; and this happens especially when high winds occur after rain. in some orchards you may see fully three quarters of the whole crop on the ground, lying in a circular form beneath the trees, yet hard and green, or, if it is a hillside, rolled far down the hill. however, it is an ill wind that blows nobody any good. all the country over, people are busy picking up the windfalls, and this will make them cheap for early apple-pies. in october, the leaves falling, the apples are more distinct on the trees. i saw one year in a neighboring town some trees fuller of fruit than i remember to 1 jotunheim ( ye(r}f-un-hime) in scandinavian mythology was the home of the jb tun or giants. loki was a descendant of the gods, and a companion of the giants. thjassi (tee-assy} was a giant. 60 thorea u&amp;gt; have ever seen before, small yellow apples hanging over the road. the branches were gracefully droop ing with their weight, like a barberry-bush, so that the whole tree acquired a new character. even the topmost branches, instead of standing erect, spread and drooped in all directions ; and there were so many poles supporting the lower ones, that they looked like pictures of banian-trees. as an old english manu script says, &quot;the mo appelen the tree bereth the more sche boweth to the folk.&quot; surely the apple is the noblest of fruits. let the most beautiful or the swiftest have it. that should ^be the &quot; going &quot; price of apples. between the fifth and twentieth of october i see the barrels lie under the trees. and perhaps i talk with one who is selecting some choice barrels to fulfil an order. he turns a specked one over many times before he leaves it out. if i were to tell what is passing in my mind, i should say that every one was specked which he had handled; for he rubs off all the bloom, and those fugacious ethereal qualities leave it. cool evenings prompt the farmers to make haste, and at length i see only the ladders here and there left leaning against the trees. it would be well if we accepted these gifts with more joy and gratitude, and did not think it enough simply to put a fresh load of compost about the tree. some old english customs are suggestive at least. i find them described chiefly in brand s &quot; popular an tiquities.&quot; it appears that &quot;on christmas eve the farmers and their men in devonshire take a large bowl of cider, with a toast in it, and carrying it in state to the orchard, they salute the apple-trees with much ceremony, in order to make them bear well the the history of the apple-tree. 61 next season.&quot; this salutation consists in &quot; throwing some of the cider about the roots of the tree, placing bits of the toast on the branches,&quot; and then, &quot; encir cling one of the best bearing trees in the orchard, they drink the following toast three several times : here s to thee, old apple-tree, whence tliou mayst bud, aud whence thou mayst blow, and whence thou mayst bear apples enow ! hats-full ! caps-full ! bushel, bushel, sacks-full ! and my pockets full, too ! hurra ! also what was called &quot; apple-howling &quot; used to be practised in various counties of england on new year s eve. a troop of boys visited the different orchards, and, encircling the apple-trees, repeated the following words : &quot; stand fast, root ! bear well, top ! pray god send us a good howling crop : every twig, apples big ; every bow, apples enow ! &quot; &quot; they then shout in chorus, one of the boys accom panying them on a cow s horn. during this cere mony they rap the trees with their sticks.&quot; this is called &quot; wassailing &quot; the trees, and is thought by some to be &quot; a relic of the heathen sacrifice to pomona.&quot; herrick sings, &quot; wassaile the trees that they may beare you many a plum and many a peare ; for more or less fruits they will bring as you so give them wassailing.&quot; our poets have as yet a better right to sing of cider than of wine ; but it behooves them to sing betier than english phillips did, else they will do no credit to their muse. 62 thoreau. the wild apple. so much for the more civilized apple-trees (urba niores, as pliny calls them). i love better to go through the old orchards of ungrafted apple-trees, at whatever season of the year, so irregularly planted : sometimes two trees standing close together ; and the rows so devious that you would think that they not only had grown while the owner was sleeping, but had been set out by him in a somnambulic state. the rows of grafted fruit will never tempt me to wander amid them like these. but i now, alas, speak rather from memory than from any recent experience, such ravages have been made ! some soils, like a rocky tract called the easter brooks country in my neighborhood, are so suited to the apple, that it will grow faster in them without any care, or if only the ground is broken up once a year, than it will in many places with any amount of care. the owners of this tract allow that the soil is excel lent for fruit, but they say that it is so rocky that they have not patience to plough it, and that, to gether with the distance, is the reason why it is not cultivated. there are, or were recently, extensive or chards there standing without order. nay, they spring up wild and bear well there in the midst of pines, birches, maples, and oaks. i am often surprised to see rising amid these trees the rounded tops of apple trees glowing with red or yellow fruit, in harmony with the autumnal tints of the forest. going up the side of a cliff about the first of no vember, i saw a vigorous young apple-tree, which, planted by birds or cows, had shot up amid the rocks and open woods there, and had now much fruit on it, the wild apple. 63 uninjured by the frosts, when all cultivated apples were gathered. it was a rank wild growth, with many green leaves on it still, and made an impression of thorni ness. the fruit was hard and green, but looked as if it would be palatable in the winter. some was dang ling on the twigs, but more half-buried in the wet leaves under the tree, or rolled far down the hill amid the rocks. the owner knows nothing of it. the day was not observed when it first blossomed, nor when it first bore fruit, unless by the chickadee. there was no dancing on the green beneath it in its honor, and now there is no hand to pluck its fruit, which is only gnawed by squirrels, as i perceive. it has done double duty, not only borne this crop, but each twig has grown a foot into the air. and this is such fruit ! bigger than many berries, we must admit, and carried home will be sound and palatable next spring. what care i for iduna s apples so long as i can get these ? when i go by this shrub thus late and hardy, and see its dangling fruit, i respect the tree, and i am grateful for nature s bounty, even though i cannot eat it. here on this rugged and woody hillside has grown an apple-tree, not planted by man, no relic of a former orchard, but a natural growth, like the pines and oaks. most fruits which we prize and use de pend entirely on our care. corn and grain, potatoes, peaches, melons, etc., depend altogether on our plant ing ; but the apple emulates man s independence and enterprise. it is not simply carried, as i have said, but, like him, to some extent, it has migrated to this new world, and is even, here and there, making its way amid the aboriginal trees ; just as the ox and dog and horse sometimes run wild and maintain them selves. 64 thorea u. even the sourest and crabbedest apple, growing in the most unfavorable position, suggests such thoughts as these, it is so noble a fruit. the ckab. nevertheless, our wild apple is wild only like myself, perchance, who belong not to the aboriginal race here, but have strayed into the woods from the cultivated stock. wilder still, as i have said, there grows else where in this country a native and aboriginal crab apple, &quot; whose nature has not yet been modified by cultivation.&quot; it is found from western new york to minnesota and southward. michaux 1 says that its ordinary height &quot; is fifteen or eighteen feet, but it is sometimes found twenty-five or thirty feet high,&quot; and that the large ones &quot; exactly resemble the common apple-tree.&quot; &quot; the flowers are white mingled with rose-color, and are collected in corymbs.&quot; they are remarkable for their delicious odor. the fruit, ac cording to him, is about an inch and a half in diame ter, and is intensely acid. yet they make fine sweet meats, and also cider of them. he concludes, that &quot; if, on being cultivated, it does not yield new and palatable varieties, it will at least be celebrated for the beauty of its flowers, and for the sweetness of its perfume.&quot; i never saw the crab-apple till may, 1861. i had heard of it through michaux, but more modern bot anists, so far as i know, have not treated it as of any peculiar importance. thus it was a half-fabu lous tree to me. i contemplated a pilgrimage to the &quot; glades,&quot; a portion of pennsylvania, where it was said to grow to perfection. i thought of sending to 1 pronounced mee-sho , a french botanist and traveller. how the wild apple grows. 65 a nursery for it, but doubted if they had it, or would distinguish it from european varieties. at last i had occasion to go to minnesota, and on entering michi gan i began to notice from the cars a tree with hand some rose-colored flowers. at first i thought it some variety of thorn ; but it was not long before the truth flashed on me, that this was my long-sought crab apple. it was the prevailing flowering shrub or tree to be seen from the cars at that season of the year, about the middle of may. but the cars never stopped before one, and so i was launched on the bosom of the mississippi without having touched one, experienc ing the fate of tantalus. on arriving at st. an thony s falls, i was sorry to be told that i was too far north for the crab-apple. nevertheless i suc ceeded in finding it about eight miles west of the falls ; touched it and smelled it, and secured a linger ing corymb of flowers for my herbarium. this must have been near its northern limit. how the wild apple grows. but though the.se are indigenous, like the indians, i doubt whether they are any hardier than those back woodsmen among the apple-trees, which, though de scended from cultivated stocks, plant themselves in distant fields and forests, where the soil is favorable to them. i know of no trees which have more dif ficulties to contend with, and which more sturdily resist their foes. these are the ones whose story we have to tell. it oftentimes reads thus : near the beginning of may. we notice little thickets of apple-trees just springing up in the pastures where cattle have been, as the rocky ones of our easter brooks country, or the top of nobscot hill in sud 66 thoreau. bury. one or two of these perhaps survive the drought and other accidents, their very birthplace defending them against the encroaching grass and some other dangers, at first. in two years time t had thus reached the level of the rocks, admired the stretching world, nor feared the wandering flocks. but at this tender age its sufferings began : there came a browsing ox and cut it down a span. this time, perhaps, the ox does not notice it amid the grass ; but the next year, when it has grown more stout, he recognizes it for a fellow-emigrant from the old country, the flavor of whose leaves and twigs he well knows ; and though at first he pauses to welcome it, and express his surprise, and gets for answer, &quot; the same cause that brought you here brought me,&quot; he nevertheless browses it again, reflecting, it may be, that he has some title to it. thus cut down annually, it does not despair ; but, putting forth two short twigs for every one cut off, it spreads out low along the ground in the hollows or between the rocks, growing more stout and scrubby, until it forms, not a tree as yet, but a little pyramidal, stiff, twiggy mass, almost as solid and impenetrable as a rock. some of the densest and most impene trable clumps of bushes that i have ever seen, as well on account of the closeness and stubbornness of their branches as of their thorns, have been these wild-apple scrubs. they are more like the scrubby fir and black spruce on which you stand, and sometimes walk, on the tops of mountains, where cold is the demon they how the wild apple grows. g7 contend with, than anything else. no wonder they are prompted to grow thorns at last, to defend them selves against such foes. in their thorniness, how ever, there is no malice, only some malic acid. the rocky pastures of the tract i have referred to for they maintain their ground best in a rocky field are thickly sprinkled with these little tufts, reminding you often of some rigid gray mosses or lichens, and you see thousands of little trees just springing up between them, with the seed still at tached to them. being regularly clipped all around each year by the cows, as a hedge with shears, they are often of a per fect conical or pyramidal form, from one to four feet high, and more or less sharp, as if trimmed by the gardener s art. in the pastures on nobscot hill and its spurs they make fine dark shadows when the sun is low. they are also an excellent covert from hawks for many small birds that roost and build in them. whole flocks perch in them at night, and i have seen three robins nests in one which was six feet in di ameter. no doubt many of these are already old trees, if you reckon from the day they were planted, but in fants still when you consider their development and the long life before them. i counted the annual rings of some which were just one foot high, and as wide as high, and found that they were about twelve years old, but quite sound and thrifty ! they were so low that they were unnoticed by the walker, while many of their contemporaries from the nurseries were al ready bearing considerable crops. but what you gain in time is perhaps in this case, too, lost in power, that is, in the vigor of the tree. this is their pyram idal state. 68 thorea u. the cows continue to browse them thus for twenty years or more, keeping them down and compelling them to spread, until at last they are so broad that they become their own fence, when some interior shoot, which their foes cannot reach, darts upward with joy : for it has not forgotten its high calling, and bears its own peculiar fruit in triumph. such are the tactics by which it finally defeats its bovine foes. now, if you have watched the progress of a particular shrub, you will see that it is no longer a simple pyramid or cone, but out of its apex there rises a sprig or two, growing more lustily perchance than an orchard-tree, since the plant now devotes the whole of its repressed energy to these upright parts. in a short time these become a small tree, an inverted pyramid resting on the apex of the other, so that the whole has now the form of a vast hour-glass. the spreading bottom, having served its purpose, finally disappears, and the generous tree permits the now harmless cows to come in and stand in its shade, and rub against and redden its trunk, which has grown in spite of them, and even to taste a part of its fruit, and so disperse the seed. thus the cows create their own shade and food ; and the tree, its hour-glass being inverted, lives a second life, as it were. it is an important question with some nowadays, whether you should trim young apple-trees as high as your nose or as high as your eyes. the ox trims them up as high as he can reach, and that is about the right height, i think. in spite of wandering kine and other adverse cir. cumstances, that despised shrub, valued only by small birds as a covert and shelter from hawks, has its blos how the wild apple grows. 69 som-week at last, and in course of time its harvest, sincere, though small. by the end of some october, when its leaves have fallen, i frequently see such a central sprig, whose progress i have watched, when i thought it had for gotten its destiny, as i had, bearing its first crop of small green or yellow or rosy fruit, which the cows cannot get at over the bushy and thorny hedge which surrounds it, and i make haste to taste the new and undescribed variety. we have all heard of the nu merous varieties of fruit invented by van mons 1 and knight. 2 this is the system of van cow, and she has invented far more and more memorable varieties than both of them. through what hardships it may attain to bear a sweet fruit ! though somewhat small, it may prove equal, if not superior, in flavor to that which has grown in a garden, will perchance be all the sweeter and more palatable for the very difficulties it has had to contend with. who knows but this chance wild fruit, planted by a cow or a bird on some remote and rocky hillside, where it is as yet unobserved by man, may be the choicest of all its kind, and foreign poten tates shall hear of it, and royal societies seek to propa gate it, though the virtues of the perhaps truly crabbed owner of the soil may never be heard of, at least, beyond the limits of his village ? it was thus the porter and the baldwin grew. every wild -apple shrub excites our expectation thus, somewhat as every wild child. it is, perhaps, a prince in disguise. what a lesson to man ! so are human beings, referred to the highest standard, the \ 1 a belgian chemist and horticulturist. 2 an english vegetable physiologist. 70 thorea u. celestial fruit which they suggest and aspire to bear, browsed on by fate ; and only the most persistent and strongest genius defends itself and prevails, sends a tender scion upward at last, and drops its perfect fruit on the ungrateful earth. poets and philosophers and statesmen thus spring up in the country pastures, and outlast the hosts of unoriginal men. such is always the pursuit of knowledge. the celestial fruits, the golden apples of the hesperides, are ever guarded by a hundred-headed dragon which never sleeps, so that it is an herculean labor to pluck them. this is one and the most remarkable way in which the wild apple is propagated ; but commonly it springs up at wide intervals in woods and swamps, and by the sides of roads, as the soil may suit it, and grows with comparative rapidity. those which grow in dense woods are very tall and slender. i frequently pluck from these trees a perfectly mild and tamed fruit. as palladius says, &quot; and the ground is strewn with the fruit of an unbidden apple-tree.&quot; it is an old notion, that, if these wild trees do not bear a valuable fruit of their own, they are the best stock by which to transmit to posterity the most highly prized qualities of others. however, i am not in search of stocks, but the wild fruit itself, whose fierce gust has suffered no &quot; inteneration.&quot; it is not my &quot; highest plot to plant the bergamot.&quot; the fruit, and its flavor. the time for wild apples is the last of october and the first of november. they then get to be palatable, for they ripen late, and they are still, perhaps, as the fruit, and its flavor. 71 beautiful as ever. i make a great account of these fruits, which the farmers do not think it worth the while to gather, wild flavors of the muse, vivacious and inspiriting. the farmer thinks that he has better in his barrels; but he is mistaken, unless he has a walker s appetite and imagination, neither of which can he have. such as grow quite wild, and are left out till the first of november, i presume that the owner does not mean to gather. they belong to children as wild as themselves, to certain active boys that i know, to the wild-eyed woman of the fields, to whom nothing comes amiss, who gleans after all the world, and, moreover, to us walkers. we have met with them, and they are ours. these rights, long enough insisted upon, have come to be an institution in some old countries, where they have learned how to live. i hear that &quot;the custom of grippling, which may be called apple-gleaning, is, or was formerly, practised in herefordshire. it consists in leaving a few apples, which are called the gripples, on every tree, after the general gathering, for the boys, who go with climbing poles and bags to collect them.&quot; as for those i speak of, i pluck them as a wild fruit, native to this quarter of the earth, fruit of old trees that have been dying ever since i was a boy and are not yet dead, frequented only by the wood pecker and the squirrel, deserted now by the owner, who has not faith enough to look under their boughs. from the appearance of the tree-top, at a little dis tance, you would expect nothing but lichens to drop from it, but your faith is rewarded by finding the ground strewn with spirited fruit, some of it, per haps, collected at squirrel-holes, with the marks of 72 thoreau. their teeth by which they carried them, some con taining a cricket or two silently feeding within, and some, especially in damp days, a shell-less snail. the very sticks and stones lodged in the tree-top might have convinced you of the savoriness of the fruit which has been so eagerly sought after in past years. i have seen no account of these among the &quot; fruits and fruit-trees of america,&quot; though they are more memorable to my taste than the grafted kinds ; more racy and wild american flavors do they possess, when october and november, when december and january, and perhaps february and march even, have assuaged them somewhat. an old farmer in my neighborhood, who always selects the right word, says that &quot; they have a kind of bow-arrow tang.&quot; apples for grafting appear to have been selected commonly, not so much for their spirited flavor, as for their mildness, their size, and bearing qualities, not so much for their beauty, as for their fairness and soundness. indeed, i have no faith in the selected lists of pomological gentlemen. their &quot; favorites &quot; and &quot; non-suches &quot; and &quot; seek-no-farthers,&quot; when i have fruited them, commonly turn out very tame and forgetable. they are eaten with comparatively little zest, and have no real tang nor smack to them. what if some of these wildings are acrid and puck ery, genuine vei juice, do they not still belong to the pomacece, which are uniformly innocent and kind to our race? i still begrudge them to the cider-mill. perhaps they are not fairly ripe yet. no wonder that these small and high-colored apples are thought to make the best cider. loudon quotes from the &quot; herefordshire report.&quot; that &quot; apples of a small size are always, if equal in quality, to be pre the fruit, and its flavor. 73 f erred to those of a larger size, in order that the rind and kernel may bear the greatest proportion to the pulp, which affords the weakest and most watery juice.&quot; and he says, that, &quot; to prove this, dr. sy monds, of hereford, about the year 1800, made one hogshead of cider entirely from the rinds and cores of apples, and another from the pulp only, when the first was found of extraordinary strength and flavor while the latter was sweet and insipid.&quot; evelyn l says that the &quot; red-strake &quot; was the favor ite cider-apple in his day ; and he quotes one dr. newburg as saying, &quot; in jersey t is a general obser vation, as i hear, that the more of red any apple has in its rind, the more proper it is for this use. pale faced apples they exclude as much as may be from their cider-vat.&quot; this opinion still prevails. all apples are good in november. those which * the farmer leaves out as unsalable, and unpalatable to those who frequent the markets, are choicest fruit to the walker. but it is remarkable that the wild apple, which i praise as so spirited and racy when eaten in the fields or woods, being brought into the house, has frequently a harsh and crabbed taste. the saunterer s apple not even the saunterer can eat in the house. the palate rejects it there, as it does haws and acorns, and demands a tamed one ; for there you miss the november air, which is the sauce it is to be eaten with. accordingly, when tityrus, seeing the lengthening shadows, invites meliboeus to go home and pass the night with him, he promises him mild apples and soft chestnuts. i frequently pluck wild apples of so rich and spicy a flavor that i wonder all orchardists do not get a scion from that tree, and i 1 an english writer of the seventeenth century. 74 thoreau. fail not to bring home my pockets full. but per chance, when i take one out of my desk and taste it in my chamber i find it unexpectedly crude, sour enough to set a squirrel s teeth on edge and make a jay scream. these apples have hung in the wind and frost and rain till they have absorbed the qualities of the weather or season, and thus are highly seasoned, and they pierce and sting and permeate us with their spirit. they must be eaten in season, accordingly, that is, out-of-doors. to appreciate the wild and sharp flavors of these october fruits, it is necessary that you be breathing the sharp october or november air. the out-door air and exercise which the walker gets give a differ ent tone to his palate, and he craves a fruit which the sedentary would call harsh and crabbed. they must be eaten in the fields, when your system is all aglow with exercise, when the frosty weather nips your fin gers, the wind rattles the bare boughs or rustles the few remaining leaves, and the jay is heard screaming around. what is sour in the house a bracing walk makes sweet. some of these apples might be labelled, &quot; to be eaten in the wind.&quot; of course no flavors are thrown away ; they are in tended for the taste that is up to them. some apples have two distinct flavors, and perhaps one-half of them must be eaten in the house, the other out doors. one peter whitney wrote from northborough in 1782, for the proceedings of the boston acad emy, describing an apple-tree in that town &quot; produc ing fruit of opposite qualities, part of the same apple being frequently sour and the other sweet ; &quot; also some all sour, and others all sweet, and this diversity on all parts of the tree. the fruit, and its flavor. 75 there is a wild apple on nawshawtuck hill in my town which has to me a peculiarly pleasant bitter tang, not perceived till it is three-quarters tasted. it remains on the tongue. as you eat it, it smells ex actly like a squash-bug. it is a sort of triumph to eat and relish it. i hear that the fruit of a kind of plum-tree in provence is &quot; called prunes sibarelles, because it is impossible to whistle after having eaten them, from their sourness.&quot; but perhaps they were only eaten in the house and in summer, and if tried out-of-doors in a stinging atmosphere, who knows but you could whistle an octave higher and clearer ? in the fields only are the sours and bitters of na ture appreciated; just as the wood-chopper eats his meal in a sunny glade, in the middle of a winter day, with content, basks in a sunny ray there, and dreams of summer in a degree of cold which, experienced in a chamber, would make a student miserable. they who are at work abroad are not cold, but rather it is they who sit shivering in houses. as with temperatures, so with flavors ; as with cold and heat, so with sour and sweet. this natural raciness, the sours and bit ters which the diseased palate refuses, are the true condiments. let your condiments be in the condition of your senses. to appreciate the flavor of these wild apples requires vigorous and healthy senses, papillae 1 firm and erect on the tongue and palate, not easily flattened and tamed. from my experience with wild apples, i can under stand that there may be reason for a savage s prefer 1 a latin word, accent on the second syllable, meaning here the rough surface of the tongue and palate. 76 thoreau. ring many kinds of food which the civilized man rejects. the former has the palate of an out-door man. it takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild fruit. what a healthy out-of-door appetite it takes to relish the apple of life, the apple of the world, then ! &quot; nor is it every apple i desire, nor that which pleases every palate best ; tis not the lasting deuxan i require, nor yet the red-cheeked greening i request, nor that which first beshrewed the name of wife, nor that whose beauty caused the golden strife : no, no ! bring me an apple from the tree of life.&quot; so there is one thought for the field, another for the house. i would have my thoughts, like wild ap ples, to be food for walkers, and will not warrant them to be palatable, iftasted in the house. their beauty. almost all wild apples are handsome. they can not be too gnarly and crabbed and rusty to look at. the gnarliest will have some redeeming traits even to the eye. you will discover some evening redness dashed or sprinkled on some protuberance or in some cavity. it is rare that the summer lets an apple go without streaking or spotting it on some part of its sphere. it will have some red stains, commemorating the mornings and evenings it has witnessed ; some dark and rusty blotches, in memory of the clouds and foggy, mildewy days that have passed over it ; and a spacious field of green reflecting the general face of nature, green even as the fields ; or a yellow ground, which implies a milder flavor, yellow as the harvest, or russet as the hills. their beauty. 77 apples, these i mean, unspeakably fair, apples not of discord, but of concord ! yet not so rare but that the homeliest may have a share. painted by the frosts ?&amp;gt; some a uniform clear bright yellow, or red, or crimson, as if their spheres had regularly revolved, and enjoyed the influence of the sun on all sides alike, some with the faintest pink blush imagin able, some brindled with deep red streaks like a cow, or with hundreds of fine blood-red rays running regularly from the stem-dimple to the blossom-end, like meridional lines, on a straw-colored ground, some touched with a greenish rust, like a fine lichen, here and there, with crimson blotches or eyes more or less confluent and fiery when wet, and others gnarly, and freckled or peppered all over on the stem side with fine crimson spots on a white ground, as if accidentally sprinkled from the brush of him who paints the autumn leaves. others, again, are some times red inside, perfused with a beautiful blush, fairy food, too beautiful to eat, apple of the hes perides, apple of the evening sky! but like shells and pebbles on the sea-shore, they must be seen as they sparkle amid the withering leaves in some dell in the woods, in the autumnal air, or as they lie in the wet grass, and not when they have wilted and faded in the house. the naming of them. it would be a pleasant pastime to find suitable names for the hundred varieties which go to a single heap at the eider-mill. would it not tax a man s in vention, no one to be named after a man, and all in the lingua vernocula ? l who shall stand godfather 1 lingua verna cula, common speech. 78 thoreau. at the christening of the wild apples? it would ex haust the latin and greek languages, if they were used, and make the lingua vernacula flag. we should have to call in the sunrise and the sunset, the rainbow and the autumn woods and the wild flowers, and the woodpecker and the purple finch, and the squirrel and the jay and the butterfly, the november traveller and the truant boy, to our aid. in 1836 there were in the garden of the london horticultural society more than fourteen hundred distinct sorts. but here are species which they have not in their catalogue, not to mention the varieties which our crab might yield to cultivation. let us enumerate a few of these. i find myself compelled, after all, to give the latin names of some for the benefit of those who live where english is not spoken, for they are likely to have a world wide reputation. there is, first of all, the woodapple (mains syl vatica) ; the blue-jay apple ; the apple which grows in dells in the woods (sylvestrivallis), also in hol lows in pastures (campestrivallis) ; the apple that grows in an old cellar-holo (jmalus cellaris) ; the meadowapple ; the partridgeapple ; the truant s apple (cessatoris), which no boy will ever go by without knocking off some, however late it may be ; the saunterer s apple, you must lose yourself be fore you can find the way to that ; the beauty of the air (decus a eris) ; december-eating ; the frozen thawed (gelato-solutd), good only in that state ; the concord apple, possibly the same with the musketa quidensis ; the assabet apple ; the brindled apple ; wine of new england ; the chickaree apple ; the green apple (mains viridis) ; this has many the last gleaning. 79 synonyms ; in an imperfect state, it is the cholera morbifera aut dysenterifera, puerulis ddectisslma ; 1 the apple which atalanta stopped to pick up ; the hedge apple {malus sepium) ; the slug apple (limacea) ; the eailroadapple, which perhaps came from a core thrown out of the cars ; the apple whose fruit we tasted in our youth ; our particular apple, not to be found in any catalogue, pedestrium so latium ; 2 also the apple where hangs the forgotten scythe ; iduna s apples, and the apples which loki found in the wood ; and a great many more i have on my list, too numerous to mention, all of them good. as bodseus exclaims, referring to the culti vated kinds, and adapting virgil to his case, so i, adapting bodseus, &quot; not if i had a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths, an iron voice, could i describe all the forms and reckon up all the names of these wild apples&quot; the last gleaning. by the middle of november the wild apples have lost some of their brilliancy, and have chiefly fallen. a great part are decayed on the ground, and the sound ones are more palatable than before. the note of the chickadee sounds now more distinct, as you wander amid the old trees, and the autumnal dandelion is half-closed and tearful. but still, if you are a skilful gleaner, you may get many a pocket-full even of grafted fruit, long after apples are supposed to be gone out-of-doors. i know a blue-pearmain tree, growing within the edge of a swamp, almost as 1 the apple that brings the disease of cholera and of dysen tery, the fruit that small boys like best. 2 the tramp s comfort. 80 thoreau. good as wild, you would not suppose that there was any fruit left there, on the first survey, but you must look according to system. those which lie exposed are quite brown and rotten now, or perchance a few still show one blooming cheek here and there amid the wet leaves. nevertheless, with experienced eyes, i explore amid the bare alders and the huckleberry bushes and the withered sedge, and in the crevices of the rocks, which are full of leaves, and pry under the fallen and decaying ferns, which, with apple and alder leaves, thickly strew the ground. for i know that they lie concealed, fallen into hollows long since and covered up by the leaves of the tree itself, a proper kind of packing. from these lurking-places, anywhere within the circumference of the tree, i draw forth the fruit, all wet and glossy, maybe nib bled by rabbits and hollowed out by crickets and perhaps with a leaf or two cemented to it (as curzon l an old manuscript from a monastery s mouldy cellar), but still with a rich bloom on it, and at least as ripe and well kept, if not better than those in barrels, more crisp and lively than they. if these resources fail to yield anything, i have learned to look between the bases of the suckers which spring thickly from some horizontal limb, for now and then one lodges there, or in the very midst of an alder-clump, where they are covered by leaves, safe from cows which may have smelled them out. if i am sharp-set, for i do not refuse the blue-pearmain, i fill my pockets on each side ; and as i retrace my steps in the frosty eve, being perhaps four or five miles from home, i 1 robert curzor was a traveller who searched for old manu scripts in the monasteries of the levant. see his book, an* dent monasteries of the east. the &quot;frozen-thawed&quot; apple. 81 eat one first from this side, and then from that, to keep my balance. i learn from topsell s gesner, whose authority ap pears to be albertus, that the following is the way in which the hedgehog collects and carries home his apples. he says : &quot; his meat is apples, worms, or grapes : when he findeth apples or grapes on the earth, he rolleth himself upon them, until he have filled all his prickles, and then carrieth them home to his den, never bearing above one in his mouth ; and if it fortune that one of them fall off by the way, he likewise shaketh off all the residue, and walloweth upon them afresh, until they be all settled upon his back again. so, forth he goeth, making a noise like a cart-wheel ; and if he have any young ones in his nest, they pull off his load wherewithal he is loaded, eating thereof what they please, and laying up the residue for the time to come.&quot; the &quot;frozen-thawed&quot; apple. toward the end of november, though some of the sound ones are yet more mellow and perhaps more edible, they have generally, like the leaves, lost their beauty, and are beginning to freeze. it is fingercold, and prudent farmers get in their barrelled apples, and bring you the apples and cider which they have engaged ; for it is time to put them into the cellar. perhaps a few on the ground show their red cheeks above the early snow, and occasionally some even preserve their color and soundness under the snow throughout the winter. but generally at the begin ning of the winter they freeze hard, and soon, though undecayed, acquire the color of a baked apple. before the end of december, generally, they ex 82 thoreau. perience their first thawing. those which a month ago were sour, crabbed, and quite unpalatable to the civilized taste, such at least as were frozen while sound, let a warmer sun come to thaw them, for they are extremely sensitive to its rays, are found to be filled with a rich, sweet cider, better than any bottled cider that i know of, and with which i am better acquainted than with wine. all apples are good in this state, and your jaws are the cider-press. others, which have more substance, are a sweet and luscious food, in my opinion of more worth than the pine apples which are imported from the west indies. those which lately even i tasted only to repent of it, for i am semi-civilized, which the farmer will ingly left on the tree, i am now glad to find have the property of hanging on like the leaves of the young oaks. it is a way to keep cider sweet without boiling. let the frost come to freeze them first, solid as stones, and then the rain or a warm winter day to thaw them, and they will seem to have bor rowed a flavor from heaven through the medium of the air in which they hang. or perchance you find, when you get home, that those which rattled in your pocket have thawed, and the ice is turned to cider. but after the third or fourth freezing and thawing they will not be found so good. what are the imported half -ripe fruits of the torrid south to this fruit matured by the cold of the frigid north ? these are those crabbed apples with which i cheated my companion, and kept a smooth face that i might tempt him to eat. now we both greedily fill our pockets with them, bending to drink the cup and save our lappets from the overflowing juice, and grow more social with their wine. was there the &quot;frozen-thawed&quot; apple. 83 one that hung so high and sheltered by the tangled branches that our sticks could not dislodge it ? it is a fruit never carried to market, that i am aware of, quite distinct from the apple of the markets, as from dried apple and cider, and it is not every winter that produces it in perfection. the era of the wild apple will soon be past. it is a fruit which will probably become extinct in new england. you may still wander through old orchards of native fruit of great extent, which for the most part went to the cider-mill, now all gone to decay. i have heard of an orchard in a distant town, on the side of a hill, where the apples rolled down and lay four feet deep against a wall on the lower side, and this the owner cut down for fear they should be made into cider. since the temperance reform and the general introduction of grafted fruit, no native apple trees, such as i see everywhere in deserted pastures, and where the woods have grown up around them, are set out. i fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. ah, poor man, there are many pleasures which he will not know ! notwith standing the prevalence of the baldwin and the porter, i doubt if so extensive orchards are set out to-day in my town as there were a century ago, when those vast straggling cider-orchards were planted, when men both ate and drank apples, when the pomace-heap was the only nursery, and trees cost nothing but the trouble of setting them out. men could afford then to stick a tree by every wall-side and let it take its chance. i see nobody planting trees to-day in such out-of-the-way places, along the 84 thorea u. lonely roads and lanes, and at the bottom of dells in the wood. now that they have grafted trees, and pay a price for them, they collect them into a plat by their houses, and fence them in, and the end of it all will be that we shall be compelled to look for our apples in a barrel. this is &quot; the word of the lord that came to joel the son of pethuel. &quot; hear this, ye old men, and give ear, all ye inhab itants of the land ! hath this been in your days, or even in the days of your fathers ? . . . &quot; that which the palmer-worm hath left hath the locust eaten ; and that which the locust hath left hath the canker-worm eaten ; and that which the canker worm hath left hath the caterpillar eaten. &quot; awake, ye drunkards, and weep ! and howl, all ye drinkers of wine, because of the new wine ! for it is cut off from your mouth. &quot; for a nation is come up upon my land, strong, and without number, whose teeth are the teeth of a lion, and he hath the cheek-teeth of a great lion. &quot; he hath laid my vine waste, and barked my fig tree ; he hath made it clean bare, and cast it away ; the branches thereof are made white. . . . &quot; be ye ashamed, o ye husbandmen ! howl, o ye vine-dressers ! . . . &quot; the vine is dried up, and the fig-tree languisheth ; the pomegranate-tree, the palm-tree also, and the ap ple-tree, even all the trees of the field, are withered : because joy is withered away from the sons of men.&quot; 1 1 joel, chapter i., verses 1-12. books of especial interest to observers of nature. louis agassiz. life and correspondence. edited by his wife, elizabeth gary agassiz. with portraits, illustrations, ami index. new edi tion. crown 8vo, gilt top, $2.50 ; half calf, $4.50. l. h. bailey, jr. talks afield, about plants and the science of plants. with one hundred illustrations. 16mo, $1.00. &quot;talks afield, by professor l. h. bailey, adds another to the short list which this country as yet affords of readable scientific books on plants. american naturalist. frank bolles. land of the lingering snow. chronicles of a stroller in new england from january to june. 16mo, $1.25. an outdoor book containing an account of walks to arlington heights, and other points in old cambridge and boston, the ipswich dunes, mt. wachusett, the concord and sudbury rivers, mt. chocorua, and highland light. they de scribe the scenery of these pleasant tours ; mention the trees and flowers ob served ; speak of the birds noticed on the way, their habits and songs ; and record the impressions and thoughts which such leisurely tramps in scenes and circumstances so delightful would naturally inspire. at the north of bearcamp water. chronicles of a stroller in new england from july to december. 16mo, $1.25. mr. bolles gives us another book, comprising a chronicle of summer, au tumn, and early winter life in the white mountains. the bearcamp valley and the sandwich range form a singularly beautiful country for a naturalist s rambles, and these are the theatre in which storm, moonlight, and sunshine, birds, beasts, insects, and flowers play parts in a charming drama of nature. john burroughs. wake robin. new edition, revised. illustrated. winter sunshine. new edition, revised. birds and poets, with other papers. locusts and wild honey. pepacton, and other sketches. fresh fields. signs and seasons. indoor studies. 16mo, each $1.25. the minuteness of his observation, the keenness of his perception, give him a real originality, and his sketches have a delightful oddity, vivacity, and freshness. the nation (new york). ralph waldo emerson. nature, and seven other essays. 32mo, 40 cents. forest scenes. by william cullen bryant, henry wadsworth long fellow, fitz-greene halleck, and alfred b. street, fully illustrated. 4to, full gilt, $2.50. little classics. vol. 16. nature. 18mo, red edges, $1.00. contents : a-hunting of the deer, charles d. warner ; dogs, philip g. hamerton ; in the hemlocks, john burroughs ; a winter walk, henry d. thoreau; buds and bird voices, nathaniel hawthorne; the fens, charles kingsley; ascent of the matterhorn, edward whymper; ascent of mount tyndall, clarence king ; the firmament, john ruskin. olive thorne miller. birdways. 16mo, $1.25. a very dainty and enjoyable volume. ... it is written by a genuine bird lover, and one who has with the most patient care watched the ways and the peculiarities of her feathered friends, while the book is so prettily and un affectedly written that it would be charming to read it for its english alone. boston courier. in nesting time. 16mo, $1.25. h. a. page. life and aims of h. d. thoreau. a study. &quot; little classic n style. 18mo, $1.00. edward sprague rand, jr. bulbs. eleventh edition. beautifully illustrated, and with ap pendices. 12mo, $2.50. this volume is the only work on the subject, and is an exhaustive treatise upon the culture of bulbs. ... a practical and valuable work like this de serves a large sale. boston daily adveitiser. flowers for the parlor and garden. twenty-sixth edition. illus trated. 12mo, $2.50. a complete manual for the cultivation of all plants commonly grown in the parlor, garden, and greenhouse, with notes on wardian cases, hardy shrubs, and wild flowera garden flowers : how to cultivate them. new edition, revised, with additions. illustrated. 12mo, $2.50. a treatise on the culture of hardy ornamental trees, shrubs, annuals, herbaceous and bedding plants ; describing many thousand plants alphabet ically arranged ; constituting, in fact, a botanical dictionary and manual of culture. orchids. a description of the species and varieties grown at glen ridge, near boston, with lists and descriptions of other desirable kinds. prefaced by chapters on the culture, propaga tion, collection, and hybridization of orchids ; the construction and management of orchid houses ; and a glossary of botan ical terms and significance of their names. 12mo, $3.00. popular flowers, and how to cultivate them. tenth edition, with appendix. revised, enlarged, and illustrated. crown 8vo, $2.00. rhododendrons. fourth edition. newly revised. 12mo, $1.50. he enumerates every plant which belongs or groups with the rhododendron and kalmia, and tells us where to get them and how they are best cultivated. . . . every one who reads such a book becomes imbued with horticultural en thusiasm. the nation (new york), the window gardener. fifth edition, greatly enlarged. 12mo, $1.25. frank b. sanborn. life of h. d. thoreau. in &quot; american men of letters &quot; series. with portrait. 16mo, gilt top, $1.25; half morocco, $3.00. mrs. harriet beecher stowe. queer little people. illustrated. small 4to, $1.25. w. c. strong. fruit culture and the laying out and management of a country home. 16mo, $1.00. it has the weight of authority. it is a compact work, sensible and perfectly intelligible ; scientific, yet not too technical ; and adapted well to meet the practical wants of the public. there are helpful illustrations, and we have no hesitation in commending the book. the congregationalist (boston). bradford torrey. birds in the bush. 16mo, $1.25. a rambler s lease. 16mo, $1.25. the foot-path way. 16mo, $1.25. mr. torrey is at once a lover of birds and a scientific student of ornithology, two characters that are not always combined, and his studies here presented appeal about equally to those who have a genuine love for birds in the bush, and to those who are merely curious as tg the structure and habits of feathered creatures. new york commercial advertiser. charles dudley warner. in the wilderness. adirondack essays. new edition, enlarged. &quot; little classic &quot; style. 18mo, 75 cents. my summer in a garden. new edition, enlarged. 16mo, $1.00. this is a set of humorous papers describing the experiences of an amateur who busies himself for the first time with the cultivation of a garden, humor ous with that quiet humor in which, as well as in its very antipodes, the wildljr extravagant, the americans seem to excel. the spectator (london). houghton, mifflin and company, 4 park street, boston, mass. fob reading and literature classes in grammar schools. high schools, and academies. $tejsterpiecejs of american literature* 12mo, 470 pages, $1.00, net, postpaid. with a portrait of each author. contents. irving : biographical sketch ; rip van winkle. bryant : biographical sketch ; thanatopsis ; to a waterfowl. franklin : biographical sketch ; poor richard s al manac ; letter to samuel mather ; letter to the rev. dr. lathrop, boston ; letter to benjamin webb. holmes : biographical sketch ; grandmother s story of bunker hill battle; the ploughman; the chambered nautilus ; the iron gate. hawthorne : biographical sketch ; the great stone face ; my visit to niagara. whittier : biographical sketch ; snow-bound ; the ship-builders ; the worship of nature. thoreau : biographical sketch ; wild apples. o reilly: biographical sketch; the pilgrim fa thers. lowell : biographical sketch ; books and libraries ; essay on lincoln [with lincoln s gettysburg speech] ; the vision of sir launfal. emerson : biographical sketch ; behavior ; boston hymn. webster : biographical sketch ; address delivered at the laying of the corner-stone of bunker hill monument, june 17, 1825. everett : biographical sketch ; from &quot; the char acter of washington.&quot; longfellow : biographical sketch ; evangeline. houghton, mifflin and company, 4 park street, boston ; 11 east hth street, new york; 29 lakeside building, chicaqq. john burroughs s books. fresh fields. contents: nature in england; english woods; a contrast; in carlyle s country ; a hunt for the nightingale ; english and american song birds; impressions of some english birds; in wordsworth s country; a glimpse of english wild flowers; british fertility ; a sunday in cheyne row ; at sea. birds and poets, with other papers. contents : birds and poets ; touches of nature ; a bird med~ ley; april; spring poems; our rural divinity; before genius ; before beauty ; emerson; the flight of the eagle. locusts and wild honey. contents : the pastoral bees ; sharp eyes ; is it going to rain ? speckled trout ; birds and birds ; a bed of boughs ; birds nesting ; the halcyon in canada. pepacton, and other sketches. contents : pepacton, a summer voyage ; springs ; an idyl of the honey-bee ; nature and the poets; notes by the way; foot-paths ; a bunch of herbs; winter pictures. wake robin. illustrated. revised and enlarged edition. also in riverside aldine series. $1.00. contents : the return of the birds ; in the hemlocks ; adi rondac; birds -nests ; spring at the capital; birch browsings; the bluebird ; the invitation. winter sunshine. new edition, revised and enlarged, with frontispiece illustration. contents : winter sunshine ; exhilarations of the road ; the snow walkers ; the fox ; a march chronicle ; autumn tides ; the apple ; an october abroad. signs and seasons. contents : a sharp lookout ; a spray of pine ; hard fare ; tragedies of the nests; a snow storm ; a ta&amp;lt;te of maine birch; winter neighbors ; a salt breeze; spring relish; a river view; bird enemies; phases of farm life ; roof-tree. indoor studies. contents : henry d. thoreau ; science and literature ; science and the poets; matthew arnold s criticism; arnold s views of emerson and carlyle ; gilbert white s book ; a malformed giant ; brief essays ; an egotistical chapter. ear.h volume, 16mo, f/ilt top, $1.25. houghton, mifflin and company, 4 park street, boston, mass. little classics. edited by rossiter johnson. eighteen handy volumes, con taining many of the choicest complete stories, sketches, and short poems in english literature. 18 vols., 18mo, tastefully bound. $1.00 each ; the set in box, 18 vols. cloth, $18.00 ; half calf, or half morocco, $35.00. this series of books is remarkably well adapted for suppl* mentary readers and for school libraries. i. exile. x. childhood. ii. intellect. xi. heroism. iii. tragedy. xii. fortune. iv. life. xiii. narrative poems. v. laughter. xiv. lyrical poems. vi. love. xv. minor poems. vii. romance. xvi. nature. viii. mystery. xvii. humanity. ix. comedy, xviii. authors. other volumes in preparation. too much praise cannot be accorded the projectors of this series it lays, for a very small sum, the cream of the best writers before tae reader of ordinary means. n. y. commercial advertiser. the whole form a bijou library of literary delights such as ha* never before been gathered. altogether we can cordially com mend the &quot; little cosies &quot; to all lovers of the best things in books. buffalo courier. we advise all who intend to jonrnay by land or sea to rmei ber the &quot;little classics,&quot; which are books of all others for the ocket or the satchel. congregationalist. houghton, mifflin and company, * park street, boston, mhm. arithmetic in two books. *iarren colbnrn s first lessons, 35 cents, *h. n, wheeler s second lessons, 60 cents. *answers to the second lessons, paper, 20 cents. first lessons. second lessons. a revised and enlarged edition of warren colburn s first lessons (intellectual arithmetic upon the inductive method of instruc tion), was published in 1884. wheeler s second lessons, although complete in itself, has been prepared to follow colburn s first lessons. its brevity, the em phasis that it places on fundamental principles and their applications, and the omission of useless subjects, will make it acceptable, it is hoped, to those teachers and business men throughout the united states who demand that the essen tials of arithmetic shall be better taught than now, and in less time, and that the non-essentials shall be omitted. these two books form a complete course in arithmetic, which is charac terized throughout by a careful application of the inductive method of in struction, by the aid of which the pupil is led to regard a new? word as a labor-saving device for the expression of an idea, a definition as a brief state ment of the net result of personal observation and thought, and a rule as a brief statement of how ke has done something. descriptive circulars of colburn s first lessons and wheeler s second lessons, including sample pages, will be sent to any ad dress on application. *a new and revised edition of andrews and stoddard s latin grammar. by henry preble, $1.12. we take pleasure in announcing that we have just published a new and carefully revised edition of this widely famous book. while the new edition retains so far as possible the valuable features of the old edition, it embodies the results of modern scholarship, and is designed to be the best possible combination of practicability and scientific accuracy. the favor with which the new edition has already been received by teachers in preparatory schools and by professors in colleges warrants us in assuring all teachers of latin that they will find it well worthy of their care ful examination. houghton, mifflin and company, 4 park street, boston, mass. american statesmen. *a series of biographies of men conspicuous in the political history of the united states. edited by john t. morse, jr. the object of this series is to furnish volumes which shall embody the compact result of extensive study of the many influences which have combined to shape the politi cal history of our country. the volumes now ready are as follows : john quincy adams. by john t. morse, jr. alexander hamilton. by henry cabot lodge. john c. calhoun. by dr. h. .von holst. andrew jackson. by prof. w. g. sumner. john randolph. by henry adams. james monroe. by pres. daniel c. gilman. thomas jefferson. by john t. morse, jr. daniel webster. by henry cabot lodge. albert gallatin. by john austin stevens. james madison. by sydney howard gay. john adams. by john t. morse, jr. john marshall. by a. b. magruder. samuel adams. by james k. hosmer. thomas h. benton. by theodore roosevelt. henry clay. by hon. carl schurz. 2 vols. patrick henry. by moses coit tyler. gouverneur morris. by theodore roosevelt. martin van bur en. by edward m. shepard. george washington. by henry cabot lodge. 2 vols. benjamin franklin. by john t. morse, jr. john jay. by george pellew. lewis cass. by andrew c. mclaughlin. abraham lincoln. by john t. morse, jr. 2 voi* others to be announced hereafter. each volume, gilt top, $1.25 ; half morocco, $2.50. modern classics. a library of thirty-four beautiful volumes, containing many of the best complete stories, essays, sketches, and poems in modern literature, including selections from the most celebrated authors of england and america, and translations of masterpieces by continental writers. in several instances the selections from an author are accom panied by a biographical essay by another eminent author, an arrangement which cannot fail to lend greater interest to both portions of the book and add materially to its value for use in schools. dr. william t. harris, who says &quot;it is an unrivalled list of ex cellent works/ has designated volumes 4, 6, 8, 15, 16, 18, and 26 as suitable for intermediate schools; volumes 1, 15, 16, 17, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31, 32, for grammar schools ; and volumes 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 19, 20, 21, 23, and 29 for high schools. the list of volumes is as follows : i.longfellow. evangeline. 1 he courtship of miles stand ish. favorite poems. 2. emerson. culture, behavior, beauty. books, art, elo quence. power, wealth, illusions. 3. emerson. nature. love, friendship, domestic life. suc cess, greatness, immortality. 4. whittier. snow-bound. the tent on the beach. fa vorite poems. 5. lowell. the vision of sir launfal. the cathedral. fa vorite poems. 6. fields. in and out of doors with charles dickens. dickens. a christmas carol. fields. barry cornwall and some of his friends. 7. coleridge. the ancient mariner. favorite poems. wordsworth. favorite poems. 8. fouqub. undine. sintram. st. pierre. paul and virginia. 9. dr. john brown. rab and his friends. marjorie flem ing. thackeray. john leech. 10. tennyson. enoch arden. in memoriam. favorite poemst 11. tennyson. the princess. maud. locksley hall. 12. e. c. stedman. elizabeth barrett browning, an essay. mrs. browning. lady geraldine s courtship. robert browning. favorite poems. 33. carlyle. goethe, an essay. goethe. the tale. favorite poems. 14. carlyle. schiller, an essay. schiller. the lay of the bell, and fridolin. favorite poems. 15. carlyle. burns, an essay. burns. favorite poems. scott. favorite poems. 16. macaulay. byron, an essay. byron. favorite poems. hood. favorite poems. 17. macaulay. milton, an essay. milton. l allegro, ii penseroso. gray. elegy in a country churchyard, etc. 18. goldsmith. * the deserted village, etc. cowper. favorite poems. mrs. hemans. favorite poems. 19. carlyle. characteristics. shelley. favorite poems. keats. the eve of st. agnes, etc. 30. pope. an essay on man. favorite poems. moore. favorite poems. 21. carlyle. the choice of books. lamb. essays from elia. southey. favorite poems. 22. thomson. spring, summer, autumn, winter. 23. campbell. the pleasures of hope. favorite poems. rogers. pleasures of memory. 24. shakespeare. sonnets. songs. leigh hunt. favorite poems. 25. herbert. favorite poems. collins, dryden, marvell. favorite poems. herrick. favorite poems. 26. macaulay. lays of ancient rome, and other poems. aytoun. i ys of the scottish cavaliers. 27. charles kingsley. favorite poems. owen meredith. favorite poems. stedman. favorite poems. 28. fields. nathaniel hawthorne, an essay. hawthorne. tales of the white hills. legends of new england. 29. carlyle. oliver cromwell. hawthorne. a virtuoso s collection. legends of the province house. 30. holmes. favorite poems. my hunt after &quot; the captain.&quot; si. lowell. my garden acquaintance. a moosehead journal bloomfield. the farmer s boy. 32. howells. a day s pleasure. buying a horse. flitting. the mouse. a year in a venetian palace. 33. holmes. selections from the breakfast-table series and from pages from an old volume of life. 34. thackeray. lighter hours, including dr. birch and his youn&amp;lt;r friends, selections from the book of snobs and from the roundabout papers, the curate s walk. tastefully bound and stamped, 75 cents each. * school edition neatly and substantially bound in cloth, 40 cents, net. a pamphlet containing the table of contents of each vo!ubnb will be sent free on application. houghton, mifflin and company, 4 park street, boston, mass. cjit librae for poung people. a series of volumes devoted to history, biography, mechan ics, travel, natural history, and adventure. with maps, por traits, etc. designed especially for boys and girls who are laying the foundation of private libraries. each volume, uniform, 16mo, 75 cents. 1. the war of independence. by john fiske. 2. george washington: an historical biography. by hor ace e. scudder. 3. birds through an opera-glass. by florence a. mer riam. 4. up and down the brooks. by mary e. bamford. 5. coal and the coal mines. by homer greene. 6. a new england girlhood. by lucy larcom. 7. java : the pearl of the east. by mrs. s. j. higginson. 8. girls and women. by e. chester. 9. a book of famous verse. selected by agnes repplier. 10. japan: in history, folk-lore, and art. by william elliot griffis, d. d. other books in preparation. rolfe s students 9 series of standard english poems for schools and colleges. a carefully revised text ; copious explanatory and critical notes ; numerous elegant illustrations. 1. scott s lady of the lake. 2. scott s marmion. 3. tennyson s princess. 4. tennyson s selected poems. 5. the young people s tennyson. 6. byron s childe harold. 7. scott s lay of the last minstrel. 8. tennyson s enoch arden, and other poems. 9. morris s atalanta s race, and other tales. price, per volume, 75 cents ; to teachers, for examination, 47 cents. houghton, mifflin & co., 4 park street, boston, mass. j. c. berkeley libraries tuan period t home use departmen1 2lmoinstcks precreereeree pits eee ca eer rtd nt : bi sae psa rics eyeeey cfs cornell university library bought with the income of the sage endowment fund given in i89i by henry williams sage ‘ornell university library thani through the year with thoreau a bi feed hallaae ate 2s td — ees pond n at walde hous 8 thoreaw: site of through the year with thoreau by herbert w. gleason ‘ sketches of nature from the writings of henry d. thoreau a v with corresponding photographic illustrations boston and new york houghton mifflin company the riverside press cambridge 1917 1 be 509305 copyright, 1906, by houghton, mifflin « co. copyright, 1917, by herbert w. gleason all rights reserved published july 1917 “there is no flower so sweet as the four-petalled flower which science much neglects ; one grey petal it has, one green, one red, and one white.” emerson. preface thoreau writes in his journal, under date of december 10, 1856: “it is remarkable how suggestive the slightest drawing as a memento of things seen. for a few years past i have been accustomed to make a rude sketch in my journal of plants, ice, and various natural phenomena, and though the fullest accompanying description may fail to recall my experience, these rude outline drawings do not fail to carry me back to that time and scene. it is as if i saw the same thing again, and i may again attempt to describe it in words if i choose.” the present volume is an endeavor to go a step beyond thoreau’s sketches and to reproduce, with the aid of photographs, some of the outdoor scenes and natural phenomena in which he delighted and which he has so graphically described. the series of views is limited, of necessity, but a sufficient number are given to illustrate thoreau’s method of nature-study as well as to emphasize anew the accuracy and felicity of his nature-descriptions. it is hoped, also, that this combination of verbal and pictorial representation will stimulate to a wider apprehension and a more vivid realization of the beautiful in nature, — thus continuing, in a measure, thoreau’s self-appointed mission. [ vii j variety has been sought, first of all, in the selection of subjects, though obviously many of thoreau’s favorite themes could not be included, — being beyond the scope of the camera, — such as the music of the telegraph harp, the crowing of chanticleer, the fragrance of sweet-fern, the chirping of crickets, the flavor of wild apples, the “‘z-ing”’ of locusts, ete. in the arrangement of subjects the course of the seasons has been followed, although it has not been possible always to keep an exact succession of dates. the quotations are chiefly from the journal, the page numbers referring to the walden edition of 1906. it has not been deemed necessary to indicate in every case where an ellipsis occurs. the journal being largely a commonplace-book, thoreau would occasionally interject comments quite remote from the subject in hand; and therefore, in order to secure greater simplicity and conciseness, sometimes a brief portion of the original journal entry is here omitted. in two or three instances, also, a very slight verbal alteration has been made. in reading these journal extracts it should be remembered that they were never considered by thoreau as finished literature. they were frequently writ‘ten hurriedly, with his own convenience solely in view, and left for final polishing and arrangement at some later date. yet this very fact adds a flavor of sincerity and piquancy to the journal which would perhaps have been lost in a studied preparation, with c ik j more attention given to proportion and correlation. thoreau himself says, “i do not know but thoughts written down thus in a journal might be printed in the same form with greater advantage than if the related ones were brought together into separate essays.” with respect to the photographs, it may be said that they were taken by the author with the sole purpose of securing, in every case, as close a correspondence as possible with thoreau’s description. artistic considerations were wholly secondary. boston, april, 1917. contents and illustrations site of thoreau’s house at walden pond introduction thoreau’s journals at the leaning hemlocks frontispiece from crest of fair haven hill across river to conantum up river and down river from hubbard’s bridge thoreau’s cove, walden pond walden pond in may and in december spaulding’s farm and cranberry meadow spring: sand foliage . willow catkins . skunk-cabbage winkle-like fungi the old marlborough road cn. crossbills at the leaning hemlocks . cowslips houstonias mayflowers wood anemones rabbits and partridges (rabbit in gots a partridge nest bird-foot violets fringed polygala may foliage . barn swallow vesper sparrow (bay-wing) ddd sf w 10 12 14 16 16 1¢ 20 20 22 24 24 [ xi j apple blossoms beauty of wild apples . loring’s pond : a lilac bush — the last nanad a a home rhodora wild pink ferns in the woods flowering dogwood summer: pincushion galls a nighthawk’s nest , red-winged blackbirds and nest clintonia early morning fog ee ncwaliew uiak hill | buttercups by the roadside . lupines lady’s-slippers wild calla lily great fringed orchis white pond mountain laurel trees reflected in the river wild roses water-lilies orientation of young pine shoots a june landscape from fair haven hill white clover tarbell’s spring a waving rye-field yellow and red lilies an old unfrequented road 26 26 28 30 30 32 32 36 36 38 40 42 44 44 46 46 48 50 50 52 54 56 58 60 60 62 64 66 68 ~ xiii j blueberries and huckleberries . : : : ‘ 70 yew berry. : : : : ‘ : : . 72 rattlesnake-plantain ‘ 5 ; 3 ‘ ‘ 12 rose mallow . : ; ; ‘ ‘ ‘ 5 . a cinnamon ferns in clintonia swamp ‘ , ‘ 76 autumn: beautiful fungi ‘ : : ‘ ; ‘ : 80 lane in front of tarbell’s ‘ ‘ : . f . 82 sunset on the river . : ; ‘ é : ‘ 84 goldenrod. 2 3 ; 3 : é ‘ . 86 fall asters ‘ : . : ‘ 5 i 88 witch-hazel . ‘ ‘ ‘ : : . 90 october reflections on the resdhiet : ‘ 3 92 sun-lighted tufts of andropogon . ‘ é j » 992 cobweb drapery in barrett’s mill. : ‘ , 94 fringed gentian. : : 3 : 2 ‘ . 96 fallen leaves. ; i : ‘ zs ‘ ‘ 98 late green ferns . : ; . ‘ i ‘ . 100 polypody . : : : . 100 nature’s decoration of an old sa i ‘ : . 102 november woods. : : i 104 fair haven bay through ine woods ‘ 3 2 . 106 shrub oak leaves. : ‘ i ‘ ‘ . 108 winter: a winter scene from lee’s cliff. é ‘ : . 112 frost crystals. : ‘ a , ji . . 114 architecture of the snow ‘ 3 . a : . 116 tracks in the snow . j ‘ : “ . 118 after the ice storm ; i ‘ ‘ : . 120 heavy snow on pitch pines. ‘ : ‘ . 122 [ xiv j the swamp in winter . 124 a lodging snow ‘ z 126 the brook in winter. i ‘ ‘ ‘ ; 128 the river as a winter highway ‘ ‘ ; . 128 the tracks of a fox. ; i ; . : . 130 icicle “‘organ-pipes”’ 132 north branch near harrington’s . 132 134 winter (poem) . ‘ “ ‘ i é : introduction ‘‘above man’s aims his nature rose. the wisdom ofa just content made one small spot a continent, and tuned to poetry life’s prose.” henry davin tuoreav was born in concord, massachusetts, july 12, 1817, and died there, may 6, 1862. with the exception of brief periods of absence during childhood and youth, a few excursions in adult years to the maine woods, the white mountains, cape cod, quebec, and other easily reached localities, and one longer trip to minnesota in 1861 in the effort to recover his health, his whole life was spent within the limits of his native town. this was a distinction in which he rejoiced. ‘i cannot but regard it,” he says, “‘as a kindness in those who have the steering of me that, by the want of pecuniary wealth, i have been nailed down to this my native region so long and steadily, and made to study and love this spot of earth more and more. what would signify in comparison a thin and diffused love and knowledge of the whole earth instead, got by wandering?” and yet there are intimations here and there in his journal that he would have delighted in extensive travel abroad. few men have ever lived who possessed so keen an appreciation of the attractiveness of the out[ xvi j ward world, and few have been so thoroughly alive to the advantages of world-wide travel. but this experience was denied him, and all he could say was, “t have travelled a great deal — in concord.” and thoreau’s travels were to some purpose. they did not. terminate with his own enjoyment. for the greater part of his life he kept a careful and extended record of his daily excursions and observations, accompanied with a multitude of first-hand — often elaborate — moral and philosophical meditations and generalizations, all written in a chaste and picturesque style, and all intended to serve a literary purpose. thoreau’s vocation was that of a writer, — he had as many trades, he declared, as he had fingers, but literature was his chosen field, — and all his activity, whether bodily or mental, was devoted to this one end. thirty-seven good-sized closely written volumes! contain the story of his “travels,” while other volumes, previously written, were used in the makingup-of the two books which were published during his lifetime, a week on the concord and merrimack rivers, 1 with regard to these manuscript volumes, thoreau’s complaint will be recalled: ‘‘i cannot easily buy a blank book to write thoughts in; they are all ruled for dollars and cents!’? channing tells us that, in consequence of this difficulty, thoreau was accustomed to purchase blank paper and bind up his journals to suit himself. he was extremely economical in the use of his material, oftentimes writing on the backs of old letters and crowding his journal pages with notes. in one case, however (as shown in the photograph reproduced herewith), there was a conspicuous departure from this rule, for he devotes an entire page to the single entry: “ feb. 3d. five minutes before 3 p.m. father died.” [ xvi j and walden. it was from this storehouse, also, that the books entitled excursions, the maine woods, and cape cod, were prepared, partly by thoreau himself and partly by his literary executors; and when thoreau’s complete works were published for the first time, in 1906, the journal filled fourteen of the twenty volumes.! “for a long time,”’ he once wrote, ‘“‘i was reporter to a journal, of no very wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, i got only my labor for my pains. however, in this case my pains were their own reward.” “pains” for thoreau, doubtless, but great satisfaction, delight, and inspiration for thousands of readers in after years. in his studies afield thoreau sought to cover a wide range of subjects, — botany, zodlogy, geology, archeology, etc., — while in writing up his notes he combined the ethical, the esthetic, and the scientific with the literary. naturally, such a voluminous produc1 as indicating the lack of appreciation on the part of his fellow townsmen toward thoreau, the following incident was told the writer by the late colonel thomas wentworth higginson. travelling one day on the railway with judge e. rockwood hoar, an eminent citizen of concord, colonel higginson happened to remark that there was some likelihood of henry thoreau’s journals being published. ‘‘henry thoreau’s journals?” exclaimed judge hoar. “pray tell me, who on earth would care to read henry thoreau’s journals?” the answer to judge hoar’s query was found in the fact that when these journals in their complete form were first announced for publication (with some misgivings, it is said, on the part of the publishers), the entire edition was subscribed for before half the volumes were printed. [ xvi j tion, made up of contributions from such a variety of sources, often written hastily and without revision, is not free from defects; but they are defects which are easily passed over by the discriminating reader in the face of so much that bears the hall-mark of genius. thoreau’s journal may be compared to a choice turkish rug, of original, intricate, and yet admittedly beautiful pattern. the lines of the pattern do not all run geometrically true, and occasionally, here and there, a strand appears which is not quite in tune with its surroundings. notwithstanding, the pattern is singularly consistent, harmonious, and satisfying, every feature contributing faithfully to the unity of the design. the colors are fast, even when subjected to the most rigorous tests; there is no needless fringe or superficial lustre; while in point of durability, it promises to outlast a thousand rugs of the ordinary sort. thoreau’s interest, in all his outdoor studies, was centred chiefly upon life. the rocks and ledges held his attention only as they revealed a story of change. thawing sand overflowing the snow was to him a welcome token of nature’s vitality. he delighted in running brooks, but stagnant pools were of value only as mirrors for the living landscape. november, with its bareness and desolateness, was the hardest month of the year for him to get through. as for museums, with their stuffed specimens, he positively hated them — “catacombs of nature.’ he felt compelled to visit davngilul ouaymausi [ xix ] them at rare intervals to get confirmation for some of his scientific observations, but he queries, ‘‘ what right have mortals to parade these things on their legs again, with their wires, and, when heaven has decreed that they shall return to dust again, to return them to sawdust?” and he affirms, ‘“‘i have had my right-perceiving senses so disturbed in these haunts as to mistake a veritable living man for a stuffed specimen, and surveyed him with dumb wonder as the strangest of the whole collection.” thoreau was a naturalist of the best type, but he was no “‘collector.”” in emerson’s phrase, he “named all the birds without a gun, loved the wood-rose and left it on its stalk.”” once when a farmer came to him and offered to him as a naturalist a two-headed calf which his cow had brought forth, thoreau was utterly disgusted and began to catechize himself, asking what enormity he had committed that such an offer should be made to him! and not merely life, but human life was the thing of greatest concern in his estimation, around which everything else must revolve. ‘‘nature must be viewed humanly to be viewed at all,” he declares; “that is, her scenes must be associated with humane affections, such as are associated with one’s native place, for instance. a lover of nature is preéminently a lover of man.” “i am not interested in mere phenomena, though it were the explosion of a planet, only as it may have lain in the experience of a human being.”’ and once-more: “nature is beautiful only as [ xx j a place where a life is to be lived. it is not beautiful to him who has not resolved on a beautiful life.” never was greater mistake made than to charge thoreau with being a misanthrope. his aloofness from men and his contempt for the conventionalities of society were due to the fact that his ideals were so much higher than those which he found generally prevailing. one of his most pregnant utterances is quoted by dr. edward emerson, himself a boy-friend of thoreau’s: “if i do not keep step with others it is because i hear a different drummer. let a man step to the music which he hears, however measured and however far away.” thoreau’s glorification of concord — not historical or literary or social or agricultural concord, but outdoor concord — is the supreme compelling feature of his journal writing. no writer in all literature has so exalted the place of his birth and recorded so fully and so entertainingly its manifold attractions. gilbert white of selborne is a remote second. and thoreau was absolutely sincere. “i have never got over my surprise,” he writes, “‘that i should be born into the most estimable place in the world, and in the very nick of time too.”” winter and summer, day and night, through cold and heat, he explored the fields and woods and water-courses of concord, rejoicing in the recurrence of the seasons, and invariably returning with new treasures of beauty or interest for his journal record. “i take all these walks to every point of [ xxi the compass, and it is always harvest-time with me. i am always gathering my crop from these woods and fields and waters, and no man is in my way or interferes with me.’ so intimate was his relation with these outdoor surroundings and the fleeting phenomena of the year that he could say, “these regular phenomena of the seasons get at last to be simply and plainly phenomena or phases of my life. almost i believe the concord river would not rise and overflow its banks again, were i not here.”’ he illustrated absolutely his own dictum: “to insure health, a man’s relation to nature must come very near to a personal one; he must be conscious of a friendliness in her; when human friends fail or die, she must stand in the gap to him. i cannot conceive of any life which deserves the name, unless there is a certain tender relation to nature. this it is which makes winter warm, and supplies society in the desert and wilderness.” he was ever “looking into nature with such easy sympathy as the blue-eyed grass in the meadow looks in the face of the sky.” one cannot escape the impression, in reading thoreau’s journal, that he considered concord’s resources in the realm of nature-study practically boundless. he was continually noting correspondences between the phenomena of his limited environment and those of foreign climes. emerson records that on returning a borrowed volume of kane’s arctic explorations, he remarked that “‘most of the phenomena noted might [ xxi j be observed in concord.” sometimes this extolling of his native region was too much for the patience of his listeners. one lady — the mother of senator hoar — complained, ‘‘ henry talks about nature just as if she had been born and brought up in concord.” (this remark, of course, was intended as a mild criticism, but concord people to-day are inclined to view it as really involving a threefold compliment: a compliment to the speaker for her unconscious discernment of thoreau’s genius, a compliment to thoreau for his lofty appreciation of nature, and a compliment to nature herself as indicating her good sense in being willing to be born and brought up in concord!) it is not necessary, however, to assume that nature wears a special halo in concord. doubtless mr. emerson was correct in saying: “‘i think his fancy for referring everything to the meridian of concord did not grow out of any ignorance or depreciation of other longitudes or latitudes, but was rather a playful expression of his conviction of the indifferency of all places, and that the best place for each is where he stands. he expressed it once in this wise: ‘i think nothing is to be hoped from you, if this bit of mould under your feet is not sweeter to you to eat than any other in this world, or in any world.’” or, as thoreau said in another place: “think of the consummate folly of attempting to go away from here! when the constant endeavor should be to get nearer and ‘nearer here. take the shortest way round and stay at home. [ xxii | a man dwells in his native valley like a corolla in its calyx, like an acorn in its cup.” the simple facts are these. concord is a typical new england town. outside of the village which clusters around the post-office, court-house, and churches, the inhabitants are chiefly farmers, who preserve much of the simplicity of early colonial days — or they did in thoreau’s time — while considerable areas of land still remain uncultivated. in its landscape features concord presents a pleasing combination of field and meadow, hill and dale, lake and river, swamp and woodland. in the spring and summer there is everywhere a luxuriance of floral and animal life, varied and lovely; in autumn there are the brilliant tints of departing foliage and an abundance of fruits; in winter there is the soft purity of the snow and the delicate beauty of frost crystals. the visitor to concord at any season of the year does not need to discount thoreau’s enthusiasm to appreciate the true charm of his surroundings. to be sure, the hills of concord are tame as compared with those found in many towns of northern and western new england, yet the views from their summits are peculiarly picturesque and appealing. not long ago the writer piloted to the crest of fair haven hill — one of thoreau’s dearest shrines — an english friend with whom he had recently been mountain-climbing in the canadian rockies. this friend, a world-wide traveller and an alpinist of international fame, notwithstanding [ xxiv j that he was fresh from scenes of superlative grandeur in the canadian alps, was enthusiastic over the view from this little hill, declaring it one of the most beautiful he had ever seen. after all, thoreau’s comment applies to any view, from whatever summit: “there is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate, — not a grain more’’; and if he could see more from annursnack hill than most people can see from the top of pike’s peak, — why, the simple truth is that he was better prepared to appreciate what he saw. the years which have passed since thoreau wrote the last page in his journal have witnessed many changes in concord — some of which he would have welcomed but most of which he would have deplored. white pond and the leaning hemlocks were long ago “‘prophaned”’ by the railway. baker farm, lee’s ' hill, conantum, fair haven hill, nashawtuc, punkatasset, bear hill, and three friends’ hill are crowned by sumptuous private residences. large areas over which thoreau used to roam, exulting in their wildness and freedom, are now placarded everywhere with the forbidding sign ‘‘no trespassing.” clamshell bank, that priceless (to him) relic of indian days, comes within the domain of a large hospital. the j. p. brown farm now belongs to the concord country club, and its extensive grass lands in which thoreau took peculiar delight have been'converted into an elaborate golf course, nut meadow brook, which from crest of fair haven hill across river to conantum [ xxv ] flows through the centre, forming a notable hazard. flint’s pond has been made a source of water-supply for lincoln and concord, and bateman’s pond is staked out with a rowing course for a boys’ private school near by. thoreau and his co-saunterer channing were desperately aggrieved one day to find that “‘a new staring house” had been erected just beyond hubbard’s bridge, “thereby doing irreparable injury to a large section of country for walkers.” “it obliges us,”’ he complained, “‘to take still more steps after weary ones to reach the secluded fields and woods,” and they talked of petitioning the owner to remove the house and thus abate a nuisance. what would the two friends say to-day on finding the same house, not only greatly enlarged and made still more conspicuous, but surrounded by a whole cluster of similar ornate dwellings? and then looking in the opposite direction, imagine their indignation on beholding the sacred slopes of fair haven hill taken up with “‘gventlemen’s estates,” with their lawns, gardens, and tennis courts! but there has been one compensation for this private appropriation of choice portions of the landscape. “‘no shooting” is a more frequent sign than “no trespassing,”” and these extensive estates thus guarded are proving places of refuge for many forms of wild life which in thoreau’s day were the free booty of unrestrained hunters. partridges and gray squirrels are multiplying, pheasants (lately introduced) [ xxxvi are thriving, rabbits rear their young undisturbed, and even deer have been repeatedly seen in concord within recent years, — the last-named a circumstance which thoreau would have rejoiced to record in letters of gold. there are, however, many sections of concord which remain in practically the same state of wildness which made them so attractive to thoreau, and one can easily find the same birds and flowers and witness the same phenomena of the advancing seasons. best of all, walden pond —the one locality in concord which is most closely associated with thoreau in the public mind — is little changed from what it was when thoreau built his famous hut by its shore and there lived the unique hermit life of which he has given so full an account in walden. for a number of years the fitchburg railroad took advantage of its proximity to the pond to exploit it as a picnic resort, and every summer thousands of people were brought to its shores to enjoy “a day off”: boating on the pond, swinging in the pines, patronizing the lemonade-stands and bowling-alleys, and then going away and leaving the usual assortment of lunch-boxes, waste paper, peanut-shells, etc., — the whole a proceeding which would surely have brought sorrow to thoreau’s heart. but there came a blissful day when the picnic buildings burned up, and they were never replaced, so that once more the pond assumed its serene attitude and has retained it ever since. much up river and down river from hubbard’s bridge [ xxxvil j] of the preservation of the beauty of walden is due to the ‘‘emerson children” (dr. edward waldo emerson and mrs. edith emerson forbes), who own a great portion of the land bordering the pond and are determined that no changes shall take place so long as it is in their control. close by the site of thoreau’s hut, at the head of the “deep cove,” there has been erected a huge cairn of stones, each visitor to the spot contributing a stone to the pile. this commemorative idea originated with bronson alcott, the concord philosopher, whose axe thoreau borrowed when he began the construction of his hut, and whom he afterwards described as “the man of most faith of any alive.” alcott’s tribute to thoreau has often been quoted: — “much do they wrong our henry wise and kind, morose who name thee, cynical to men, forsaking manners civil and refined to build thyself in walden woods a den, — then flout society, flatter the rude hind. we better knew thee, loyal citizen! thou, friendship’s all-adventuring pioneer, civility itself would civilize.”’ there is an indescribable charm about the scenery of new england which is most keenly felt by those whose early life has been passed under its spell. it was the lot of the writer to be exiled (speaking subjectively) from new england for a period of some sixteen years, this period being spent in the state of minnesota. there was much of interest found in [ xxvii j the new surroundings; but the fertility of the prairies, the wide reach of the primitive forests, the novelty and affluence of the wild flowers and birds, did not prevent an occasional craving for the sight of a bit of new england barrenness, — such as a rocky pasture, bounded by stone walls and dotted with creeping junipers, or a few of new england’s commonest flowers, — buttercups, or houstonias, or ox-eye daisies. it was at this time that the writer first became acquainted with the portions of thoreau’s journal published in the eighties by his friend, mr. h. g. o. blake; and the reading of these, with their vivid delineation of characteristic new england scenes, sacredly cherished in memory, aroused a passionate longing to visit the region so intimately described by thoreau and enjoy a ramble among his beloved haunts. consequently, at the close of the “exile” above noted, an early opportunity was seized to visit concord, with camera in hand, and many photographic mementos were taken of localities associated with thoreau. but this was only the beginning. during the fifteen years succeeding, the writer has made frequent pilgrimages to concord, under all conditions of season and weather, searching out places and objects described by thoreau, treading in his footsteps so far as they were discoverable, and bringing back photographs of all that was most interesting.! out of many hundred views thus taken 1 lest any should assume that the fondness for new england scenery thoreau’s cove, walden pond [ xxix 7] a brief series is chosen for reproduction in this volume. some of the experiences in connection with these concord excursions are perhaps worth noting. first of all, they were self-rewarding, entirely apart from their historical or personal interest. a breezy walk over concord meadows or uplands far exceeds in exhilaration and inspiration any afternoon upon a golf course or any conceivable trip in a motor-car. confirmation was found again and again of thoreau’s descriptive accuracy. certain flowers, for example, were traced unerringly merely from his journal notes. confirmation, likewise, of the thoroughness of his observations in the field was frequently noted. repeatedly upon these rambles some scene or object was photographed simply because it seemed to possess exceptional interest, without reference to any relation which it might have to thoreau, and then afterwards it was found that the identical scene or object was carefully described in his journal. very few facts in the realm of natural history escaped his recording pen. here avowed is due to a lack of acquaintance with other regions more famous for their grandeur, it may be stated that during this same period the writer made two trips to alaska, six to california and the pacific coast, three to the grand cajion of arizona, seven to the canadian rockies, two to yellowstone park, and three to the rocky mountains of colorado. yet, after every one of these trips, it was a genuine delight to return to the simple beauty of new england. [ xxx ] still another confirmation, of a different sort, was found in the duplication of thoreau’s experience with regard to the solitariness of his walks. more than once he comments upon this. ‘‘there are said to be two thousand inhabitants in concord, and yet i find such ample space and verge, even miles of walking every day in which i do not meet nor see a human being, and often not very recent traces of them. methinks that for a great part of the time, as much as it is possible, i walk as one possessing the advantages of human culture, fresh from the society of men, but turned loose in the woods, the only man in nature, walking and meditating to a great extent as if man and his customs and institutions were not.” it seems strange, but it is a fact, that during all these fifteen years of frequent rambling among the fields and woods of concord the writer has never yet met with a single other person bent upon a similar errand. this, of course, merely happened so; we did not chance to meet, that is all. the “walking association”? of concord has not yet disbanded, and it is not fair to conclude that thoreau’s gospel of the outdoor life which he so vigorously preached has been wholly lost upon the residents of his native town. there was a peculiar fascination in hunting down localities to which thoreau had given names after an arbitrary method of his own, and without any regard whatever for their possible recognition by xu walden pond in may and in december [ xxxl ] other people. ripple lake, cardinal shore, bittern cliff, owl-nest swamp, arethusa meadow, curlypate hill, purple utricularia bay, bidens brook, hubbard’s close, — these and many similar names are capitalized and otherwise dignified in his journal records just as if he were speaking of london or paris or new york. but where were these places? it was useless to appeal to residents of concord. they might as well have been situated in siberia or patagonia. even persons still living who had known thoreau personally and had occasionally been with him on some of his walks were hopelessly in the dark as to most of them. ellery channing, author of a life of thoreau, and his most frequent walking companion, who lingered forty years after the death of his friend and associate, was appealed to in connection with two or three localities, but his memory was afterwards proved to be sadly at fault. it was only by a careful comparison of all the journal references to each locality, the examination of a large number of thoreau’s manuscript surveys preserved in the concord library, and especially by following out on the ground thoreau’s tramps afield, that finally the greater number of these localities were identified. one amusing incident occurred in connection with the effort to locate ‘“spaulding’s farm.” readers of the volume entitled excursions will perhaps recall that thoreau makes this farm the subject of one of [ xxxi 7] his most notable parables: “i took a walk on spaulding’s farm the other afternoon. i saw the setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. its golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble hall. i was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable and shining family had settled there in that part of the land called concord, unknown to me. j saw their park, their pleasure-ground, beyond through the wood, in spaulding’s cranberry meadow,” etc. but the most diligent inquiry failed to locate this place. finally, a good lady of concord came to the rescue. she said, “it know an old man who used to drive a butcher’s cart through this part of the country, and he will know if anybody does.” so, meeting him shortly after, she said, ““mr. d., can you tell me where spaulding’s farm used to be in concord?” “spaulding’s farm?” —the old man thought a moment. “there never was any such place in concord, ma’am.” “‘but henry thoreau says there was, in his journal.” “henry thoreau?” — with an expression of undisguised contempt — “i knew henry thoreau | ever since he was a boy, and i never had much of an opinion of him. and i hain’t seen nothing since to change my mind!” but spaulding’s farm was eventually discovered, —not in concord, but in carlisle, the village just to the north which used to be a part of concord, — and a visit to the farm proved most interesting. the dee ae <7 ora spaulding’s farm and cranberry meadow [ xxx j old homestead, aged two hundred years, still stands; the “‘cranberry meadow”’ was readily found, but the “stately pine wood”’ long since fell before the axe. it must have been a magnificent grove, judging from the size of the stumps which still remain. needless to say, no vestiges of the ‘“‘altogether admirable and shining family”’ were discovered, but thoreau would doubtless find, if he were living to-day, that they had simply removed their domicile to some other part of concord. it is curious to note how little thoreau was esteemed by most of his fellow villagers. he was commonly regarded as a sort of ne’er-do-well, squandering his time in roaming over the fields and up and down the river, rarely shooting or fishing, and with no sensible object in view. to be sure, he sometimes did a job at surveying or whitewashing or fence-building, and he helped his father occasionally at pencil-making; but that he actually had a “profession’” — such an idea could not be tolerated for a moment. yet thoreau had a profession, and this is his own statement of it: — “ my profession is to be always on the alert to find god in nature, to know his lurking places, to watch for and describe all the divine features which i can detect in nature.” this profession he followed faithfully and unswervingly. nothing more deeply impresses itself upon the mind of one who reads thoreau’s journal sympathetically, especially if that reading be in the [ xxxiv ] atmosphere of the scenes which he describes, than the conviction that thoreau possessed a profoundly religious nature. he would not have chosen the adjective, but it is abundantly evident that his walks afield were to him religious excursions, — seasons of communion with the unseen. to quote a modern phrase, he was ever seeking to be “in tune with the infinite.””’ that was a significant remark which he made upon his dying bed to his aunt, who, with kindly intent, urged him to “make his peace with god.” he simply said, “‘i have never quarreled with him.” notwithstanding his misjudged criticism of the churches and his intolerance of creeds, he possessed a creed of his own, and it is well worth quoting: — “t know that i am. i know that another is who knows more than i, who takes interest in me, whose creature, and yet whose kindred, in one sense, am i. i know that the enterprise is worthy. i know that things work well. i have heard no bad news.” if we were to search for the crowning moral of thoreau’s life and writings, perhaps we could find it nowhere more truly or more beautifully expressed than in the words of ralph waldo emerson, his neighbor and friend: — “the rounded world is fair to see, nine times folded in mystery: though baffled seers cannot impart the secret of its laboring heart, throb thine with nature’s throbbing breast, and all is clear from east to west.” i. spring c2] sand foliage frew phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut! on the railroad through which i passed on my way to the village, a phenomenon not very common on so large a scale, though the number of freshly exposed banks of the right material must have been greatly multiplied since railroads were invented. the material was sand of every degree of fineness and of various rich colors, commonly mixed with a little clay. when the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before. innumerable little streams overlap and interlace one with another, exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, which obeys half way the law of currents, and half way that of vegetation. .. . it is truly a grotesque vegetation, whose forms and color we see imitated in bronze, a sort of architectural foliage more ancient and typical than acanthus, chiccory, ivy, vine, or any vegetable leaves. walden, 336, 337. 1 the ‘‘deep cut” was despoiled of its magnitude some years ago, a large section of its easterly bank being removed for grading purposes elsewhere. sufficient of the original sand-and-clay formation still remains, however, to furnish annually the same unique phenomenon in which thoreau delighted. h. w. g. c3] marcu 2, 1854. the sand foliage is vital in its form, reminding me of what are called the vitals of the animal body. i am not sure that its arteries are ever hollow. they are rather meandering channels with remarkably distinct sharp edges, formed instantaneously as by magic. how rapidly and perfectly it organizes itself! ... on the outside all the life of the earth is expressed in the animal or vegetable, but make a deep cut in it and you find it vital; you find in the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. no wonder, then, that plants grow and spring in it. the atoms have already learned the law. let a vegetable sap convey it upwards and you have a vegetable leaf. no wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, which labors with the idea thus inwardly. the overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. journal, vi, 148. c4] willow catkins marcu 2, 1859. the willow catkins by the railroad have now all crept out about an eighth of an inch, giving to the bushes already a very pretty appearance when you stand on the sunny side, the silvery-white specks contrasting with the black scales. seen along the twigs, they are somewhat like small pearl buttons on a waistcoat. go and measure to what length the silvery willow catkins have crept out beyond their scales, if you would know what time o’ the year it is by nature’s clock. journal, xu, 4. marcu 20, 1858. at hubbard’s wall, how handsome the willow catkins! those wonderfully bright silvery buttons, so regularly disposed in oval schools in the air, or, if you please, along the seams which their twigs make, in all degrees of forwardness, from the faintest, tiniest speck of silver, just peeping from beneath the black scales, to lusty pussies which have thrown off their scaly coats and show some redness at base on a close inspection. these fixed swarms of arctic buds spot the air very prettily along the hedges. they remind me somewhat by their brilliancy of the snow-flecks which are so bright by contrast at this season when the sun is high. is not this, perhaps, the earliest, most obvious, awakening of vegetable life? journal, x, 310. eo apri 11, 1856. you take your way along the edge of some swamp that has been cleared at the base of some south hillside, where there is sufficient light and air and warmth, but the cold northerly winds are fended off, and there behold the silvery catkins of the sallows, which have already crept along their lusty osiers, more than an inch in length, till they look like silvery wands, though some are more rounded, like bullets. the lower part of some catkins which have lost their bud-scales emit a tempered crimson blush through their down, from the small scales within. the catkins grow longer and larger as you advance into the warmest localities, till at last you discover one catkin in which the reddish anthers are beginning to push from one side near the end, and you know that a little yellow flame will have burst out there by tomorrow, if the day is fair. journal, vit, 276. le] skunk-cabbage marcu 18, 1860. i examine the skunk-cabbage, now generally and abundantly in bloom all along under clamshell. it is a flower, as it were, without a leaf. all that you see is a stout beaked hood just rising above the dead brown grass in the springy ground now, where it has felt the heat, under some south bank. the single enveloping leaf, or “spathe,” is all the flower that you see commonly, and those are as variously colored as tulips and of similar color, — from a very dark almost black mahogany to a light yellow streaked or freckled with mahogany. it is a leaf simply folded around the flower, with its top like a bird’s beak bent over it for its further protection, evidently to keep off wind and frost, with a sharp angle down its back. these various colors are seen close together, and their beaks are bent in various directions. journal, xin, 199. winkle-like fungi apri 13, 1854. saw an old log, stripped of bark, either poplar or maple, four feet long, — its whole upper half covered with that handsome winkle-like fungus. they are steel-colored and of a velvety appearance, somewhat semicircular, with concentric growths of different shades, passing from quite black le esl within through a slaty-blue to (at present) a buff edge. beneath cream-color. there are many minute ones a tenth of an inch in diameter, the shell-like leaf or ear springing from one side. the full-grown are sometimes united into one leaf for eight or nine inches in one level along the log, tier above tier, with a scalloped edge. they are handsomest when two or more are opposed, meeting at their bases, and make a concentric circle. they remind you of shells, also of butterflies. the great variety and regularity of the shading are very interesting. they spring from a slight base, rising by a narrow neck. they grow on stumps and other dead wood on land, even driftwood left high, just as some marine shells, their relatives, grow on driftwood. journal, v1, 196. ee the old marlborough road when the spring stirs my blood with the instinct to travel, i can get enough gravel on the old marlborough road. nobody repairs it, for nobody wears it; it is a living way, as the christians say. not many there be who enter therein, only the guests of the irishman quin. what is it, what is it, but a direction out there, and the bare possibility of going somewhere? great guideboards of stone, but travellers none; cenotaphs of the towns named on their crowns. it is worth going to see where you might be. what king did the thing, i am still wondering; set up how or when, by what selectmen, 1 hest sag g by = eo gourgas or lee, clark or darby? they’re a great endeavor to be something forever; blank tablets of stone, where a traveller might groan, and in one sentence grave all that is known; which another might read, in his extreme need. i know one or two lines that would do, literature that might stand all over the land, which a man could remember till next december, and read again in the spring, after the thawing. if with fancy unfurled you leave your abode, you may go round the world by the old marlborough road. excursions, 215. [10 ] crossbills at the leaning hemlocks aprin 13, 1860. as i was paddling [up the assabet] past the uppermost hemlocks i saw two peculiar and plump birds near me on the bank there which reminded me of the cow blackbird and of the oriole at first. i saw at once that they were new to me, and guessed that they were crossbills,! which was the case, —male and female. the former was dusky-greenish (through a glass), orange, and red, the orange, etc., on head, breast, and rump, the vent white; dark, large bill; the female more of a dusky slate-color, and yellow instead of orange and red. they were very busily eating the seeds of the hemlock, whose cones were strewn on the ground, and they were very fearless, allowing me to approach quite near. . . . they were very parrot-like both in color (especially the male, greenish and orange, etc.) and in their manner of feeding, — holding the hemlock cones in one claw and rapidly extracting the seeds with their bills, thus trying one cone after another very fast. but they kept their bills a-going so that, near as they were, i did not distinguish the cross. i should have looked at them in profile. at last the two hopped within six feet of me, and one within four feet, and 1 the crossbills photographed were found near the “leaning hemlocks,” — the identical locality noted by thoreau, — only they were of the white-winged species, while the birds thoreau saw were evidently red crossbills. the occurrence of either species in concord is still a rare event. h. w. g. c1] they were coming still nearer, as if partly from curiosity, though nibbling the cones all the while, when my chain fell down and rattled loudly, — for the wind shook the boat, — and they flew off a rod. in bechstein i read that “it frequents fir and pine woods, but only when there are abundance of the cones.” it may be that the abundance of white pine cones last fall had to do with their coming here. the hemlock cones were very abundant too, methinks. journal, x11, 245, 246. [12] cowslips aprit 6, 1853. to second division brook. one cowslip, though it shows the yellow, is not fairly out, but will be by to-morrow. how they improve their time! not a moment of sunshine lost. one thing i may depend on: there has been no idling with the flowers. they advance as steadily as a clock. nature loses not a moment, takes no vacation. these plants, now protected by the water, just peeping forth. i should not be surprised to find that they drew in their heads in a frosty night. journal, v, 98. aprix 11, 1856. i might have said on the 8th: behold that little hemisphere of green in the black and sluggish brook, amid the open alders, sheltered under a russet tussock. it is the cowslips’ forward green. look narrowly, explore the warmest nooks; here are buds larger yet, showing more yellow, and yonder see two full-blown yellow disks, close to the water’s edge. methinks they dip into it when the frosty nights come. journal, vi, 276. [13 ] april 29, 1852. the season is most forward at the second division brook, where the cowslip is in blossom, — and nothing yet planted at home, — these bright-yellow suns of the meadow, in rich clusters, their flowers contrasting with the green leaves, from amidst the all-producing, dark-bottomed water. a flower-fire bursting up, as if through crevices in the meadow. they are very rich, seen in the meadow where they grow, and the most conspicuous flower at present, but held in the hand they are rather coarse. but their yellow and green are really rich, and in the meadow they are the most delicate objects. their bright yellow is something incredible when first beheld. journal, u1, 479, 480. [ 147 houstonias april 24, 1853. houstonias. how affecting that, annually at this season, as surely as the sun takes a higher course in the heavens, this pure and simple little flower peeps out and spots the great globe with white in our america, its four little white or bluish petals on a slender stalk making a delicate flower about a third of an inch in diameter! what a significant, though faint, utterance of spring through the veins of earth! journal, v, 112. may 5, 1860. there are some dense beds of houstonia in the yard of the old conantum house. some parts of them show of a distinctly bluer shade two rods off. they are most interesting now, before many other flowers are out, the grass high, and they have lost their freshness. i sit down by one dense bed of them to examine it. it is about three feet long and two or more wide. the flowers not only crowd one another, but are in several tiers, one above another, and completely hide the ground, — a mass of white. counting those in a small place, i find that there are about three thousand flowers in a square foot. they are all turned a little toward the sun, and emit a refreshing odor. here is a lumbering humblebee, probing these tiny flowers. it is a rather ludicrous sight. of course they will not support him, except a little [15 j where they are densest; so he bends them down awkwardly (hauling them in with his arms, as it were), one after another, thrusting his beak into the tube of each. it takes him but a moment to dispatch one. it is a singular sight, a humblebee clambering over a bed of these delicate flowers. journal, x1, 278. [ 16 j mayflowers (epigha repens) apri 4, 1859. the epigzea looks as if it would open in two or three days at least, — showing much color. the flower-buds are protected by the withered leaves, oak leaves, which partly cover them, so that you must look pretty sharp to detect the first flower. these plants blossom by main strength, as it were, or the virtue that is in them, — not growing by water, as most early flowers, — in dry copses. journal, x11, 114. aprril 29, 1852. the mayflower on the point of blossoming. i think i may say that it will blossom to-morrow. the blossoms of this plant are remarkably concealed beneath the leaves, perhaps for protection. it is singularly unpretending, not seeking to exhibit or display its simple beauty. it is the most delicate flower, both to eye and to scent, as yet. its weather-worn leaves do not adorn it. if it had fresh spring leaves it would be more famous and sought after. journal, 111, 480. wood anemones april 28, 1856. many anemone nemorosa in full bloom at the further end of yellow thistle meadow, in that warm nook by the brook, some probably a day or two there. i think that they are thus early civ on account of miles’s dam having broken away and washed off all the snow for some distance there, in the latter part of the winter, long before it melted elsewhere. it is a warm corner under the south side of a wooded hill, where they are not often, if ever before, flooded. journal, vu, 315. may 2, 1855. the anemone is well named, for see now the nemorosa, amid the fallen brush and leaves, trembling in the wind, so fragile. journal, vu, 352. may 9, 1852. to trillium woods. these low woods are full of the anemone nemorosa, half opened at this hour and gracefully drooping, — sepals with a purple tinge on the under side, now exposed. they are in beds and look like hail on the ground; their now globular flowers spot the ground white. journal, tv, 40. [18 j rabbits and partridges wzrat is a country without rabbits and partridges? they are among the most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times; of the very hue and substance of nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground, — and to one another; it is either winged or it is legged. it is hardly as if you had seen a wild creature when a rabbit or a partridge bursts away, only a natural one, as much to be expected as rustling leaves. the partridge and the rabbit are still sure to thrive, like true natives of the soil, whatever revolutions occur. if the forest is cut off, the sprouts and bushes which spring up afford them concealment, and they become more numerous than ever. that must be a poor country indeed that does not support a hare. our woods teem with them both, and around every swamp may be seen the partridge or rabbit walk, beset with twiggy fences and horsehair snares, which some cow-boy tends. walden, 310. lag j a partridge nest may 7, 1855. a partridge flew up from within three or four feet of me with a loud whir, and betrayed one cream-colored egg in a little hollow amid the leaves. may 12. i find the partridge-nest of the 7th partially covered with dry oak leaves, and two more eggs only, three in all, cold. probably the bird is killed. may 26. the partridge which on the 12th had left three cold eggs covered up with oak leaves is now sitting on eight. she apparently deserted her nest for a time and covered it.! journal, vu, 363, 371, 390. 1 these entries illustrate a habit of thoreau’s — examples of which abound in the journal — of following up an interesting subject so as to make a complete record. bradford torrey remarks that thoreau’s pronunciation of the family name, which was very much like the adjective “‘thorough,’’ suggests a conspicuous trait in his character. h. w. g. [ 20 ] bird-foot violets (viola pedata) may 10, 1858. how much expression there is in the viola pedata! i do not know on the whole but it is the handsomest of them all, it is so large and grows in such large masses. i have thought there was a certain shallowness in its expression, yet it spreads so perfectly open with its face turned upward that you get its whole expression. journal, x, 411. may 17, 1853. the v. pedata presents the greatest array of blue of any flower as yet. the flowers are so raised above their leaves, and so close together, that they make a more indelible impression of blue on the eye; it is almost dazzling. i blink as i look at them, they seem to reflect the blue rays so forcibly, with a slight tinge of lilac. journal, v, 165. fringed polygala may 17, 1853. the fringed polygala surprises us in meadows or in low woods as a rarer, richer, and more delicate color, with a singularly tender or delicate-looking leaf. as you approach midsummer, the color of flowers is more intense and fiery. the reddest flower is the flower especially. our blood is not white, nor is it yellow, nor even blue. journal; v, 164. [. ea may 27, 1852. the fringed polygala near the corner spring is a delicate flower, with very fresh tender green leaves and red-purple blossoms; beautiful from the contrast of its clear red-purple flowers with its clear green leaves. journal, iv, 74. [22 j may foliage may 17, 1852. now the sun has come out after the may storm, how bright, how full of freshness and tender promise and fragrance is the new world! the woods putting forth new leaves; it is a memorable season. so hopeful! these young leaves have the beauty of flowers.... do i smell the young birch leaves at a distance? most trees are beautiful when leafing out, but especially the birch. after a storm at this season, the sun comes out and lights up the tender expanding leaves, and all nature is full of light and fragrance, and the birds sing without ceasing, and the earth is a fairyland. the birch leaves are so small that you see the landscape through the tree, and they are like silvery and green spangles in the sun, fluttering about the tree. journal, tv, 61, 62. [ 23 ] may 22, 1854. now the springing foliage is like a sunlight on the woods. i was first attracted and surprised when i looked round and off to conantum, at the smooth, lawn-like green fields and pasturing cows, bucolical, reminding me of new butter. the air so clear — as not in summer — makes all things shine, as if all surfaces had been washed by the rains of spring and were not yet soiled or begrimed or dulled. you see even to the mountains clearly. the grass so short and fresh, the tender yellowishgreen and silvery foliage of the deciduous trees lighting up the landscape, the birds now most musical, the sorrel beginning to redden the fields with ruddy health, — all these things make earth now a paradise. how many times i have been surprised thus, on turning about on this very spot, at the fairness of the earth! journal, v1, 289. [ 24 j barn swallow may 20, 1852. a barn swallow accompanied me across the depot field, methinks attracted by the insects which i started, though i saw them not, wheeling and tacking incessantly on all sides and repeatedly dashing within a rod of me. it is an agreeable sight to watch one. nothing lives in the air but is in rapid motion. journal, tv, 66. vesper sparrow (bay-wing) may 12, 1857. while dropping beans in the garden at texas just after sundown, i hear from across the fields the note of the bay-wing, and it instantly translates me from the sphere of my work and repairs all the world that we jointly inhabit. it reminds me of so many country afternoons and evenings when this bird’s strain was heard far over the fields. the spirit of its earth-song, of its serene and true philosophy, was breathed into me, and i saw the world as through a glass, as it lies eternally. some of its aboriginal contentment, even of its domestic felicity, possessed me. what he suggests is permanently true. as the bay-wing sang many a thousand years ago, so sang he to-night. in the beginning god heard his song and pronounced it good, and hence it has endured. ... i ordinarily plod along a sort of white [ 25 ] washed prison entry, subject to some indifferent or even grovelling mood. i do not distinctly realize my destiny. i have turned down my light to the merest glimmer and am doing some task which i have set myself. i take incredibly narrow views, live on the limits, and have no recollection of absolute truth. mushroom institutions hedge me in. but suddenly, in some fortunate moment, the voice of eternal wisdom reaches me even, in the strain of the sparrow, and liberates me, whets and clarifies my senses, makes me a competent witness. journal, 1x, 363-65. [ 26 ] apple blossoms may 21, 1852. the earlier apple trees are in bloom, and resound with the hum of bees of all sizes and other insects. to sit under the first apple tree in blossom is to take another step into summer. the apple blossoms are so abundant and full, white tinged with red; a rich-scented pomona fragrance, telling of heaps of apples in the autumn, perfectly innocent, wholesome, and delicious. journal, tv, 67. the flowers of .the apple are perhaps the most beautiful of any tree’s, so copious and so delicious to both sight and scent. the walker is frequently tempted to turn and linger near some more than usually handsome one, whose blossoms are twothirds expanded. how superior it is in these respects to the pear, whose blossoms are neither colored nor fragrant! excursions, 294. beauty of wild apples! appues, these i mean, unspeakably fair, — apples not of discord, but of concord! yet not so rare but 1 thoreau’s enthusiastic essay on “wild apples”’ is still admirably up-to-date, so far as concord is concerned. both when in flower and in fruit, the wild apple trees of concord form a strong attraction for the walker. h. w. g. ; [27 j that the homeliest may have a share. painted by the frosts, some a uniform clear bright yellow, or red, or crimson, as if their spheres had regularly revolved, and enjoyed the sun on all sides alike, — some with the faintest pink blush imaginable, — some brindled with deep red streaks like a cow, or with hundreds of fine blood-red rays running regularly from the stem-dimple to the blossom end, like meridional lines, on a straw-colored ground, — some touched with a greenish rust, like a fine lichen, here and there, with crimson blotches or eyes more or less confluent and fiery when wet, — and others gnarly, and freckled or peppered all over on the stem side with fine crimson spots on a white ground, as if accidentally sprinkled from the brush of him who paints the autumn leaves. others, again, are sometimes red inside, perfused with a beautiful blush, fairy food, too beautiful to eat,— apple of the hesperides, apple of the evening sky! excursions, 314, 315. [ 28 ] loring’s pond may 17, 1852. to loring’s pond. the different color of the water at different times would be worth observing. to-day it is full of light and life, the breeze presenting many surfaces to the sun. there is a sparkling shimmer on it. it is a deep, dark blue, as the sky is clear. the air everywhere is, as it were, full of the rippling of waves. this pond is the more interesting for the islands in it. the water is seen running behind them, and it is pleasant to know that it penetrates quite behind and isolates the land you see, or to see it apparently flowing out from behind an island with shining ripples. journal, tv, 60. a lilac bush — the last remnant of a home?! still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door and lintel and the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet-scented flowers each spring, to be plucked by the musing traveller; planted and tended once by children’s hands, in front-yard plots, — now standing by wallsides in retired pastures, and giving 1 thoreau’s reference in this description is to the lilac bushes (some of which still exist) marking the former residences on brister’s hill of some colored families. the bush in the photograph is more interesting as being the sole relic of the old homestead on conantum to which thoreau refers several times. (see journal, vol. x, p. 364.) h. w. g. [ 29 ] place to new-rising forests; — the last of that stirp, sole survivor of that family. little did the dusky children think that the puny slip with its two eyes only, which they stuck in the ground in the shadow of the house and daily watered, would root itself so, and outlive them, and house itself in the rear that shaded it, and grown man’s garden and orchard, and tell their story faintly to the lone wanderer a half-century after they had grown up and died, — blossoming as fair, and smelling as sweet, as in that first spring. i mark its still tender, civil, cheerful, lilac colors. walden, 290. [30 ] rhodora may 17, 1853. the rhodora is peculiar for being, like the peach, a profusion of pink blossoms on a leafless stem. may 23. i see the light purple of the rhodora enlivening the edges of swamps — another color the sun wears. it is a beautiful shrub seen afar, and makes a great show from the abundance of its bloom unconcealed by leaves, rising above the andromeda. is it not the most showy high-colored flower or shrub? flowers are the different colors of the sunlight. journal, v, 163, 185. may 17, 1854. the splendid rhodora now sets the swamps on fire with its masses of rich color. it is one of the first flowers to catch the eye at a distance in masses, —so naked, unconcealed by its own leaves. journal, v1, 277. wild pink may 30, 1854. the pink is certainly one of the finest of our flowers and deserves the place it holds in my memory. it is now in its prime on the south side of the heywood peak, where it grows luxuriantly in dense rounded tufts or hemispheres, raying out on every side and presenting an even and regular sur i face of expanded flowers. it is associated in my mind with the first heats of summer, or those which announce its near approach. journal, vi, 317, 318. june 1, 1853. the tufts of pinks on the side of the peak by the pond grow raying out somewhat from a centre, somewhat like a cyme, on the warm dry side-hill, — some a lighter, some a richer and darker, shade of pink. with what a variety of colors we are entertained! yet most colors are rare or in small doses, presented us as a condiment or spice. much of green, blue, black, and white, but of yellow and the different shades of red far less. the eye feasts on the colors of flowers as on titbits; they are its spices. journal, v, 212. [ 32 ] ferns in the woods may 26, 1853. now is the time to walk in low, damp maple copses and see the tender, luxuriant foliage that has pushed up, mushroom-like, before the sun has come to harden it — the ferns of various species and in various stages, some now in their most perfect and beautiful condition, completely unfolded, tender and delicate, but perfect in all their details, far more than any lace-work — the most elaborate leaf we have. so flat, just from the laundry, as if pressed by some invisible flat-iron in the air. unfolding with such mathematical precision in the free air, — green, starched and pressed, —might they not be transferred, patterns for mechlin and brussels? journal, v, 190. flowering dogwood (cornus florida) may 27, 1853. the cornus florida now fairly out, and the involucres are now not greenish-white but white tipped with reddish — like a small flock of white birds passing, — three and a half inches in diameter, the larger ones, as i find by measuring. it is something quite novel in the tree line. journal, v, 192. may 24, 1858. to new york by railroad. all through connecticut and new york the white invo cae lucres of the cornel (c. florida), recently expanded, some of them reddish or rosaceous, are now conspicuous. it is not quite expanded in concord. it is the most showy indigenous tree now open. journal, x, 442. ii. summer e 36 | pincushion galls june 1, 1853. the pincushion galls on young white oaks are now among the most beautiful objects in the woods, coarse woolly white to appearance, spotted with bright red or crimson on the exposed side. it is remarkable that a mere gall, which at first we are inclined to regard as something abnormal, should be made so beautiful, as if it were the flower of the tree; that a disease, an excrescence, should prove, perchance, the greatest beauty, —as the tear of the pearl. journal, v, 210. a nighthawk’s nest june 1, 1853. walking up this side-hill, i disturbed a nighthawk eight or ten feet from me, which went, half fluttering, half hopping, the mottled creature, down the hill as far as i could see. without moving, i looked about and saw its two eggs on the bare ground, on a slight shelf of the hill, without any cavity or nest whatever, very obvious when once you had detected them, but not easily detected from their color, — a coarse gray formed of white spotted with a bluish or slaty brown or umber, a stone — granite — color, like the places it selects. i advanced and put my hand on them, and while i stooped, seeing a shadow on the ground, looked up and saw the bird, lar which had fluttered down the hill so blind and helpless, circling low and swiftly past over my head, showing the white spot on each wing in true nighthawk fashion. when i had gone a dozen rods, it appeared again higher in the air, with its peculiar flitting, limping kind of flight, all the while noiseless, and, suddenly descending, it dashed at me within ten feet of my head, like an imp of darkness, then swept away high over the pond, dashing now to this side now to that, on different tacks, as if, in pursuit of its prey, it had already forgotten its eggs on the earth. i can see how it might easily come to be regarded with superstitious awe. journal, v, 214, 215. [ 38 4 red-winged blackbirds and nest june 1, 1857. a red-wing’s nest, four eggs, low in a tuft of sedge in an open meadow. what champollion can translate the hieroglyphics on these eggs? it is always writing of the same character, though much diversified. while the bird picks up the material and lays the egg, who determines the style of the marking? when you approach, away dashes the dark mother, betraying her nest, and then chatters her anxiety from a neighboring bush, where she is soon joined by the red-shouldered male, who comes scolding over your head, chattering and uttering a sharp phe-phee-e. journal, 1x, 397. june 6, 1856. how well suited the lining of a bird’s nest, not only for the comfort of the young, but to keep the eggs from breaking! fine elastic grass stems or root-fibres, pine-needles, or hair, or the like. these tender and brittle things which you can hardly carry in cotton lie there without harm. journal, vu, 368. july 30, 1852. what a gem is a bird’s egg, especially a blue or a green one, when you see one, broken or whole, in the woods! i noticed a small blue egg this afternoon washed up by flint’s pond and half buried by white sand, and as it lay there, alternately cao] wet and dry, no color could be fairer, no gem could have a more advantageous or favorable setting. probably it was shaken out of some nest which overhung the water. i frequently meet with broken eggshells where a crow, perchance, or some thief has been marauding. and is not that shell something very precious that houses that winged life? journal, 1v, 268, 269. [ 40 ] clintonia june 2, 1853. clintonia borealis, a day or two. this is perhaps the most interesting and neatest of what i may call the liliaceous plants we have. its beauty at present consists chiefly in its commonly three very handsome, rich, clear dark-green leaves. they are perfect in form and color, broadly oblanceolate with a deep channel down the middle, uninjured by insects, arching over from a centre at the ground, sometimes very symmetrically disposed in a triangular fashion; and from their midst rises the scape a foot high, with one or more umbels of “‘ green bell-shaped flowers,” yellowish-green, nodding or bent downward, but without fragrance. in fact, the flower is all green, both leaves and corolla. the leaves alone —and many have no scape — would detain the walker. its berries are its flower. a single plant is a great ornament in a vase, from the beauty of its form and the rich, unspotted green of its leaves. journal, v, 218, 219. — eareaeae c41 ] june 13, 1852. the clintonia borealis (gray) is a handsome and perfect flower, though not high-colored. i prefer it to some more famous. but gray should not name it from the governor of new york. what is he to the lovers of flowers in massachusetts? if named after a man, it must be a man of flowers. rhode island botanists may as well name the flowers after their governors as new york. name your canals and railroads after clinton, if you please, but his name is not associated with flowers.! journal, iv, 95. 1 the clintonia was so named by rafinesque, in 1832, not by dr. gray, in honor of governor de witt clinton, who was a naturalist of some note, although chiefly famous in connection with the building of the erie canal. h. w. g. [ 42 ] early morning fog from nawshawtuct hill june 2, 1853. 4 a.m. to nawshawtuct. i go to the river in a fog through which i cannot see more than a dozen rods, — three or four times as deep as the houses.... now i have reached the hilltop above the fog at a quarter to five, about sunrise, and all around me is a sea of fog, level and white, reaching nearly to the top of this hill, only the tops of a few high hills appearing as distant islands in the main. it is just like the clouds beneath you as seen from a mountain. it is a perfect level in some directions, cutting the hills near their summits with a geometrical line, but puffed up here and there, and more and more toward the east, by the influence of the sun. it resembles nothing so much as the ocean. you can get here the impression which the ocean makes, without ever going to the shore. men — poor simpletons as they are — will go toa panorama by families, to see a pilgrim’s progress, perchance, who never yet made progress so far as to the top of such a hill as this at the dawn of a foggy morning. all the fog they know is in their brains. the seashore exhibits nothing more grand or on a larger scale. how grand where it rolls off northeastward over ball’s hill like a glorious ocean after a storm, just lit by the rising sun! it is as boundless as the view from the highlands of cape cod. they are exaggerated billows, [ 43 j the ocean on a larger scale, the sea after some tremendous and unheard-of storm, for the actual sea never appears so tossed up and universally white with foam and spray as this now far in the northeastern horizon, where mountain billows are breaking on some hidden reef or bank. it is tossed up toward the sun and by it into the most boisterous of seas, which no craft, no ocean steamer, is vast enough to sail on. journal, v, 216, 217. [ 44 j buttercups by the roadside june 4, 1860. the clear brightness of june was well represented yesterday by the buttercups along the roadside. their yellow so glossy and varnished within, but not without. surely there is no reason why the new butter should not be yellow now. journal, x11, 328. lupines ! june 5, 1852. the lupine is now in its glory. it is the more important because it occurs in such extensive patches, even an acre or more together, and of such a pleasing variety of colors, — purple, pink, or lilac, and white, — especially with the sun on it, when the transparency of the flower makes its color changeable. it paints a whole hillside with its blue, making such a field (if not meadow) as proserpine might have wandered in. its leaf was made to be covered with dewdrops. i am quite excited by this prospect of blue flowers in clumps with narrow intervals. such a profusion of the heavenly, the elysian, color, as if these were the elysian fields. they say the seeds look like babies’ faces, and hence the flower is so named. no other flowers exhibit so much blue. 1 for various reasons (chiefly increased pasturage) the lupines in concord have largely disappeared. repeated visits to the localities noted by thoreau have failed to reveal more than an occasional straggling plant. h. w.g. [ 45 j that is the value of the lupine. the earth is blued with them. yet a third of a mile distant i do not detect their color on the hillside. perchance because it is the color of the air. it is not distinct enough. you passed along here, perchance, a fortnight ago, and the hillside was comparatively barren, but now you come and these glorious redeemers appear to have flashed out here all at once. who planted the seeds of lupines in the barren soil? who watereth the lupines in the fields? journal, tv, 81, 82. [46 j lady’s-slippers june 5, 1856. everywhere now in dry pitch pine woods stand the red lady’s-slippers over the red pine leaves on the forest floor, rejoicing in june, with their two broad curving green leaves, — some even in swamps, — upholding their rich, striped, red, drooping sacks. journal, vit, 365. wild calla lily (calla palustris) june 7, 1857. to river and ponkawtasset with m. pratt. pratt has got the calla palustris, in prime, — some was withering, so it may have been out ten days, — from the bog near bateman’s pond; also orzalis vtolacea, which he says began about last sunday. journal, 1x, 409. june 9, 1857. to violet sorrel and calla swamp.! the calla is generally past prime and going to seed. i had said to pratt, “it will be worth the while to look for other rare plants in calla swamp, for i have observed that where one rare plant grows there 1 this illustrates thoreau’s habit of giving names of his own choosing to certain localities in concord, the particular names oftentimes being suggested by the discovery of some rare plant, as in this case. minot pratt was a devoted lover of plants and introduced a number of wild species not previously found in concord. he was one of the few residents of concord who appreciated thoreau’s outdoor studies. h. w. g. [47 ] will commonly be others.” carrying out this design, this afternoon, i had not taken three steps into the swamp barelegged before i found the naumbergia thyrsiflora [tufted loosestrife] in sphagnum and water, which i had not seen growing before. journal, 1x, 411. july 2, 1857. to gowing’s swamp. calla palustris (with its convolute point like the cultivated) at the south end of gowing’s swamp. having found this in one place, i now find it in another. many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual eye, 2.¢., we are not looking for it. so, in the largest sense, we find only the world we look for. journal, 1x, 466. [ 48 ] great fringed orchis june 8, 1854. find the great fringed orchis out apparently two or three days. two are almost fully out, two or three only budded. a large spike of peculiarly delicate pale-purple flowers growing in the luxuriant and shady swamp amid hellebores, ferns, golden senecios, ete. it is remarkable that this, one of the fairest of all our flowers, should also be one of the rarest, — for the most part not seen at all. i think that no other but myself in concord annually finds it. that so queenly a flower should annually bloom so rarely and in such withdrawn and secret places .as to be rarely seen by man! the village belle never sees this more delicate belle of the swamp. how little relation between our life and its! most of us never see it or hear of it. the seasons go by to us as if it were not. a beauty reared in the shade of a convent, who has never strayed beyond the convent bell. journal, v1, 337, 338. june 15, 1852. here also, at well meadow head, i see the fringed purple orchis, unexpectedly beautiful, though a pale lilac purple, — a large spike of purple flowers. why does it grow there only, far in a swamp, remote from public view? it is somewhat fragrant, reminding me of the lady’s-slipper. is it not significant that some rare and delicate and beautiful flowers should be found only in unfrequented [ 49 j wild swamps? there is the mould in which the orchis grows. yet i am not sure but this is a fault in the flower. it is not quite perfect in all its parts. a beautiful flower must be simple, not spiked. it must have a fair stem and leaves. this stem is rather naked, and the leaves are for shade and moisture. it is fairest seen rising from amid brakes and hellebore, its lower part or rather naked stem concealed. where the most beautiful wild-flowers grow, there man’s spirit is fed, and poets grow. it cannot be high-colored, growing in the shade. nature has taken no pains to exhibit it, and few that bloom are ever seen by mortal eyes. the most striking and handsome large wild-flower of the year thus far that i have seen. journal, rv, 103, 104. [ 5° ] white pond june 14, 1853. to white pond. how beautifully the northeast shore curves! the pines and other trees so perfect on their water side. there is no rawness nor imperfection to the edge of the wood in this case, as where an axe has cleared, or a cultivated field abuts on it; but the eye rises by natural gradations from the low shrubs, the alders, of the shore to the higher trees. it is a natural selvage. it is comparatively unaffected by man. the water laves the shore as it did a thousand years ago. such curves in a wood bordering on a field do not affect us as when it is a winding shore of a lake. this is a firmer edge. it will not be so easily torn. journal, v, 251. mountain laurel june 23, 1852. the mountain laurel, with its milkwhite flower, in cool and shady woods, reminds one of the vigor of nature. it is perhaps a first-rate flower, considering its size and evergreenness. its flowerbuds, curiously folded in a ten-angled pyramidal form, are remarkable. a profusion of flowers, with an innocent fragrance. it reminds me of shady mountainsides where it forms the underwood. journal, tv, 130. [ 51 ] june 17, 1853. the mountain laurel by walden in its prime. it is a splendid flower, and more red than that in mason’s pasture.! its dry, dead-looking, brittle stems, as it were leaning over other bushes or each other, bearing at the ends great dense corymbs five inches in diameter of rose or pink tinged flowers, without an interstice between them, overlapping each other, each often more than an inch in diameter. a single one of which would be esteemed very beautiful. it is a highlander wandered down into the plain. journal, v, 269, 270. 1 a single bush of mountain laurel is still to be found in mason’s pasture, but with the exception of where it has been planted for the adornment of private estates the mountain laurel in concord (as thoreau says in another place) is “as rare as poetry.”” h. w.g. [ 52 ] trees reflected in the river june 15, 1840. i stood by the river to-day considering the forms of the elms reflected in the water. for every oak and birch, too, growing on the hilltop, as well as for elms and willows, there is a graceful ethereal tree making down from the roots, as it were the original idea of the tree, and sometimes nature in high tides brings her mirror to its foot and makes it visible. anxious nature sometimes reflects from pools and puddles the objects which our grovelling senses may fail to see relieved against the sky with the pure ether for background. ’ it would be well if we saw ourselves as in perspective always, impressed with distinct outline on the sky, side by side with the shrubs on the river’s brim. so let our life stand to heaven as some fair, sunlit tree against the western horizon, and by sunrise be planted on some eastern hill to glisten in the first rays of the dawn. journal, 1, 139, 140. wherever the trees and skies are reflected, there is more than atlantic depth, and no danger of fancy running aground. we notice that it required a separate intention of the eye, a more free and abstracted vision, to see the reflected trees and the sky, than to see the river bottom merely; and so there are manifold visions in the direction of every object, and even [, 33 j the most opaque reflect the heavens from their surface. some men have their eyes naturally intended to the one and some to the other object. two men in a skiff, whom we passed hereabouts, floating buoyantly amid the reflections of the trees, like a feather in mid-air, or a leaf which is wafted gently from its twig to the water without turning over, seemed still in their element, and to have delicately availed themselves of the natural laws. their floating there was a beautiful and successful experiment in natural philosophy, and it served to ennoble in our eyes the art of navigation; for as birds fly and fishes swim, so these men sailed. it reminded us how much fairer and nobler all the actions of man might be, and that our life in its whole economy might be as beautiful as the fairést works of art or nature. concord and merrimack rivers, 47, 48. [ 54 ] wild roses june 15, 1853. here are many wild roses northeast of trillium woods. we are liable to underrate this flower on account of its commonness. is it not the queen of our flowers? how ample and highcolored its petals, glancing half concealed from its own green bowers! there is a certain noble and delicate civility about it, — not wildness. it is properly the type of the rosacee, or flowers among others of most wholesome fruits. it is at home in the garden, as readily cultivated as apples. it is the pride of june. in summing up its attractions i should mention its rich color, size, and form, the rare beauty -of its bud, its fine fragrance, and the beauty of the entire shrub, not to mention the almost innumerable varieties it runs into. i bring home the buds ready to expand, put them in a pitcher of water, and the next morning they open and fill my chamber with fragrance. this, found in the wilderness, must have reminded the pilgrim of home. journal, v, 256. [ 55 ] june 25, 1852. methinks roses oftenest display their high colors, colors which invariably attract all eyes and betray them, against a dark ground, as the dark green or the shady recesses of the bushes and copses, where they show to best advantage. their enemies do not spare the open flower for an hour. hence, if for no other reason, their buds are most beautiful. their promise of perfect and dazzling beauty, when their buds are just beginning to expand, — beauty which they can hardly contain, — as in most youths, commonly surpasses the fulfillment of their expanded flowers. the color shows fairest and brightest in the bud. journal, iv, 142. [, 56 water-lilies june 19, 1853. exquisitely beautiful, and_ unlike anything else that we have, is the first white lily just expanded in some shallow lagoon where the water is leaving it, — perfectly fresh and pure, before the insects have discovered it. how admirable its purity! how innocently sweet its fragrance! how significant that the rich, black mud of our dead stream produces the water-lily, — out of that fertile slime springs this spotless purity! journal, v, 283. june 16, 1854. again i scent the white waterlily, and a season i had waited for is arrived. how indispensable all these experiences to make up the summer! it is the emblem of purity, and its scent suggests it. growing in stagnant and muddy water, it bursts up so pure and fair to the eye and so sweet to the scent, as if to show us what purity and sweetness reside in, and can be extracted from, the slime and muck of earth. i think i have plucked the first one that has opened for a mile at least. what confirmation of our hopes is in the fragrance of the water-lily! i shall not so soon despair of the world [57] for it, notwithstanding slavery, and the cowardice and want of principle of the north. it suggests that the time may come when men’s deeds will smell as sweet. such, then, is the odor our planet emits. who can doubt, then, that nature is young and sound? if nature can compound this fragrance still annually, i shall believe her still full of vigor, and that there is virtue in man, too, who perceives and loves it. it is as if all the pure and sweet and virtuous was extracted from the slime and decay of earth and presented thus in a flower. the resurrection of virtue!... the foul slime stands for the sloth and vice of man; the fragrant flower that springs from it, for the purity and courage which springs from its midst. it is these sights and sounds and fragrances put together that convince us of our immortality. journal, vi, 352, 353. 1 an instance of thoreau’s intense feeling on the slavery question, which found extended expression in his famous addresses on john brown. (see the volume cape cod and miscellanies, pp. 409 and 441; also numerous entries in the journal, vols. xm and xu.) h. w. g. [ 58 j orientation of young pine shoots june 23, 1852. there are interesting groves of young soft white pines eighteen feet high, whose vigorous yellowish-green shoots of this season, from three to eighteen inches long, at the extremities of all the branches, contrast remarkably with the dark green of the old leaves. i observe that these shoots are bent, and, what is more remarkable, all one way, i.e., to the east, almost at a right angle the topmost ones, and i am reminded of the observation in henry’s adventures, that the indians guided themselves in cloudy weather by this mark. all these shoots, excepting those low down on the east side, are bent toward the east. i am very much pleased with this observation, confirming that of the indians. i was singularly impressed when i first observed that all the young pines in this pasture obeyed this law, without regard to the direction of the wind or the shelter of other trees. to make myself more sure of the direction, as it was not easy to determine it exactly, standing on one side, where so many shoots were bent in the air, i went behind the trees on the west till the bent shoot appeared as a straight line, and then, by observing my shadow and guessing at the time of day, i decided that their direction was due east. this gives me more satisfaction than any observation which i have made for a long time. this is true of the rapidly growing shoots. how long [ 59 j will this phenomenon avail to guide the traveller? how soon do they become erect? a natural compass. how few civilized men probably have ever made this observation, so important to the savage! how much may there have been known to his woodcraft which has not been detected by science! at first i remarked the shoots of a distinct yellowish green, contrasting with the rest of the tree, then that they were not upright but bent more or less, and next that they were all inclined one way, as if bent by the wind, and finally that they were all bent east, without regard to the wind. journal, 1v, 136, 137. 1 in his journal entry for the next day, describing a trip to white pond, thoreau frankly but sadly remarks: “i am disappointed to notice to-day that most of the pine-tops incline to the west, as if the wind had to do with it.” [ 60 ] a june landscape from fair haven hill june 30, 1860. generally speaking, the fields are. not imbrowned yet, but the freshness of the year is preserved. standing on the side of fair haven hill the verdure generally appears at its height, the air clear, and the water sparkling (after the rain of yesterday), and it is a world of glossy leaves and grassy fields and meads. seen through this clear, sparkling, breezy air, the fields, woods, and meadows are very brilliant and fair. the leaves are now hard and glossy (the oldest), yet still comparatively fresh, and i do not see a single acre of grass that has been cut yet. the river meadows on each side the stream, looking toward the light, have an elysian beauty. a light-yellow plush or velvet, as if some gamboge had been rubbed into them. they are by far the most bright and sunnylooking spots, such is the color of the sedges which grow there, while the pastures and hillsides are darkgreen and the grain-fields glaucous-green. journal, x11, 380. white clover june 29, 1851. there is a great deal of white clover this year. in many fields where there has been no clover seed sown for many years at least, [ 61 ] it is more abundant than the red, and the heads are nearly as large. also pastures which are close cropped, and where i think there was little or no clover last year, are spotted white with a humbler growth. and everywhere, by roadsides, garden borders, etc., even where the sward is trodden hard, the small white heads on short stems are sprinkled everywhere. as this is the season for the swarming of bees, and this clover is very attractive to them, it is probably the more difficult to secure them; at any rate it is the more important to secure their services now that they can make honey so fast. it is an interesting inquiry why this year is so favorable to the growth of clover. journal, 11, 271, 272. [ 62 ] tarbell’s spring jury 5, 1852. how cheering it is to behold a full spring bursting forth directly from the earth, like this of tarbell’s, from clean gravel, copiously, in a thin sheet; for it descends at once, where you see no opening, cool from the caverns of the earth, and making a considerable stream. such springs, in the sale of lands, are not valued for as much as they are worth. i lie almost flat, resting my hands on what offers, to drink at this water where it bubbles, at the very udders of nature, for man is never weaned from her breast while this life lasts. how many times in a single walk does he stoop for a draught! journal, tv, 188. july 12, 1857. i drink at every cooler spring in my walk these afternoons and love to eye the bottom there, with its pebbly caddis-cases, or its white worms, or perchance a luxurious frog cooling himself next my nose. sometimes the farmer, foreseeing haying, has been prudent enough to sink a tub in one, which secures a clear deep space. .. . when a spring has been allowed to fill up, to be muddied by cattle, or, being exposed to the sun by cutting down the trees and bushes, to dry up, it affects me sadly, like an institution going to decay. sometimes i see, on one side the tub, — the tub overhung with various wild plants and flowers, its edge almost completely [ 63 ] concealed even from the searching eye, — the white sand freshly cast up where the spring is bubbling in. often i sit patiently by the spring i have cleaned out and deepened with my hands, and see the foul water rapidly dissipated like a curling vapor and giving place to the cool and clear. sometimes i can look a yard or more into a crevice under a rock, toward the sources of a spring in a hillside, and see it come cool and copious with incessant murmuring down to the light. there are few more refreshing sights in hot weather. journal, 1x, 477, 478. [ 64 ] a waving rye-field july 8, 1851. here are some rich rye-fields waving over all the land, their heads nodding in the evening breeze with an apparently alternating motion; 1.e., they do not all bend at once by ranks, but separately, and hence this agreeable alternation. how rich a sight this cereal fruit, now yellow for the cradle, — flavus! it is animpenetrable phalanx. i walk for half a mile beside these macedonians, looking in vain for an opening. there is no arnold winkelried to gather these spear-heads upon his breast and make an opening for me. this is food for man. the earth labors not in vain; it is bearing its burden. the yellow, waving, rustling rye extends far up and over the hills on either side, a kind of pinafore to nature, leaving only a narrow and dark passage at the bottom of a deep ravine. how rankly it has grown! how it hastes to maturity! i discover that there is such a goddess as ceres. these long grain-fields which you must respect, — must go round, — occupying the ground like an army. the small trees and shrubs seen dimly in its midst are overwhelmed by the grain as by an inundation. they are seen only as indistinct forms of bushes and green leaves mixed with the yellow stalks. there are certain crops which give me the idea of bounty, of the alma natura. they are the grains. potatoes do not so fill the lap of earth. this rye excludes everything else and takes possession of the soil. eee the farmer says, “‘next year i will raise a crop of rye”’; and he proceeds to clear away the brush, and either plows it, or, if it is too uneven or stony, burns and harrows it only, and scatters the seed with faith. and all winter the earth keeps his secret, — unless it did leak out somewhat in the fall, — and in the spring this early green on the hillsides betrays him. when i see this luxuriant crop spreading far and wide in spite of rock and bushes and unevenness of ground, i cannot help thinking that it must have been unexpected by the farmer himself, and regarded by him as a lucky accident for which to thank fortune. journal, 11, 293, 294. eee) yellow and red lilies july 19, 1851. heavily hangs the common yellow lily (lilium canadense) in the meadows. journal, 11, 320. july 7, 1852. when the yellow lily flowers in the meadows, and the red in dry lands and by woodpaths, then, methinks, the flowering season has reached its height. they surprise me as perhaps no more can. now i am prepared for anything. journal, tv, 201. july 9, 1852. the red lily, with its torrid color and sun-freckled spots, dispensing, too, with the outer garment of a calyx, its petals so open and wide apart that you can see through it in every direction, tells of hot weather. it is a handsome bell shape, so upright, and the flower prevails over every other ‘part. it belongs not to spring. journal, tv, 206, 207. july 11, 1852. the yellow lily is not open-petalled like the red, nor is its flower upright, but drooping. on the whole i am most attracted by the red. they both make freckles beautiful. journal, tv, 219. [67 j having reloaded, we paddled down the penobscot, which, as the indian remarked, and even i detected, remembering how it looked before, was uncommonly full. we soon after saw a splendid yellow lily (lilium canadense) by the shore, which i plucked. it was six feet high, and had twelve flowers, in two whorls, forming a pyramid, such as i have seen in concord. we afterward saw many more thus tall along this stream, and also still more numerous on the east branch, and, on the latter, one which i thought approached yet nearer to the liliwm superbum. the indian asked what we called it, and said. that the “loots” (roots) were good for soup, that is, to cook with meat, to thicken it, taking the place of flour. they get them in the fall. i dug some, and found a mass of bulbs pretty deep in the earth, two inches in diameter, looking, and even tasting, somewhat like raw green corn on the ear. the maine woods, 209. [88°] an old unfrequented road juty 21, 1851. now i yearn for one of those old, meandering, dry, uninhabited roads, which lead away from towns, which lead us away from temptation, which conduct to the outside of earth, over its uppermost crust; where you may forget in what country you are travelling; where no farmer can complain that you are treading down his grass, no gentleman who has recently constructed a seat in the country that you are trespassing; . . . along which you may travel like a pilgrim, going nowhither; where travellers are not too often to be met; . . . where the walls and fences are not cared for; where your head is more in heaven than your feet are on earth; .. . where it makes no odds which way you face, whether you are going or coming, whether it is morning or evening, mid-noon or midnight; where earth is cheap enough by being public; where you can walk and think with least obstruction, there being nothing to measure progress by; where you can pace when your breast is full, and cherish your moodiness; where you are not in false relations with men, are not dining nor conversing with them; by which you may go to the uttermost parts of the earth. journal, 11, 322. [ 69 ] juty 23, 1851. on such a road (the corner) } i walk securely, seeing far and wide on both sides, as if i were flanked by light infantry on the hills, to rout the provincials, as the british marched into concord, while my grenadier thoughts keep the main road. that is, my light-armed and wandering thoughts scour the neighboring fields, and so i know if the coast is clear. with what a breadth of van i advance! i am not bounded by the walls. i think more than the road full. journal, 11, 339. 1 thoreau would hardly apostrophize the corner road (?.¢., the road to nine-acre corner) to-day, for it has been carefully graded and macadamized; the root fences, the little brook crossing the road, and other features so attractive to him have disappeared, and there are plenty of “no trespassing” signs on either hand. instead of walking securely, his ‘‘ grenadier thoughts” would be chiefly occupied in the effort to avoid disaster from the frequently passing automobiles! h. w. g. ei blueberries and huckleberries july 24, 1853. the berries of the vaccinium vacillans [low blueberry] are very abundant and large this year on fair haven, where i am now. indeed, these and huckleberries and blackberries are very abundant in this part of the town. nature does her best to feed man. the traveller need not go out of the road to get as many as he wants; every bush and vine teems with palatable fruit. man for once stands in such relation to nature as the animals that pluck and eat as they go. the fields and hills are a table constantly spread. wines of all kinds and qualities, of noblest vintage, are bottled up in the skins of countless berries, for the taste of men and animals. to men they seem offered not so much for food as for sociality, that they may picnic with nature, — diet drinks, cordials, wines. we pluck and eat in remembrance of her. it is a sacrament, a communion. the not-forbidden fruits, which no serpent tempts us to taste. slight and innocent savors, which relate us to nature, make us her guests and entitle us to her regard and protection. it is a saturnalia, and we quaff her wines at every turn. this season of berrying is so far respected that the children have a vacation to pick berries, and women and children who never visit distant hills and fields and swamps on any other errand are seen making haste thither now, with half their domestic utensils in their hands. the lowe a woodchopper goes into the swamp for fuel in the winter; his wife and children for berries in the summer. journal, v, 330, 331. julyy 6, 1852. the early blueberries ripen first on the hills, before those who confine themselves to the lowlands are aware of it. when the old folks find only one turned here and there, children, who are best acquainted with the locality of berries, bring pailfuls to sell at their doors. for birds’ nests and berries, give me a child’s eyes. but berries must be eaten on the hills, and then how far from the surfeiting luxury of an alderman’s dinner! journal, tv, 196. [ 72] yew berry aveust 10, 1858. am surprised to find the yew with ripe fruit, where i had not detected fertile flowers. it fruits very sparingly, the berries growing singly here and there, on last year’s wood, and hence four to six inches below the extremities of the upturned twigs. it is the most surprising berry that we have: first, since it is borne by an evergreen, hemlock-like bush with which we do not associate a soft and bright-colored berry, and hence its deep scarlet contrasts the more strangely with the pure, dark evergreen needles; and secondly, because of its form, so like art, and which could be easily imitated in wax, a very thick scarlet cup or mortar with a dark-purple bead set at the bottom. my neighbors are not prepared to believe that such a berry grows in concord. journal, x1, 90, 91. rattlesnake-plantain avucust 19, 1851. by the marlborough road i notice the richly veined leaves of the neottia pubes_cens, or veined neottia, rattlesnake-plantain. i like this last name very well, though it might not be easy to convince a quibbler or proser of its fitness. we want some name to express the mystic wildness of its rich leaves. such work as men imitate in their embroidery, unaccountably agreeable to the eye, as if it weed answered its end only when it met the eye of man; a reticulated leaf, visible only on one side; little things which make one pause in the woods, take captive the eye. journal, 11, 407. auaust 27, 1856. these oval leaves [of the rattlesnake-plantain], perfectly smooth like velvet to the touch, about one inch long, have a broad white midrib and four to six longitudinal white veins, very prettily and thickly connected by other conspicuous white veins transversely and irregularly, all on a dark rich green ground. is it not the prettiest leaf that paves the forest floor? journal, 1x, 28. [ 74 j rose mallow (marsh hibiscus) avueust 16, 1852. hibiscus moscheutos (?), marsh hibiscus, apparently, n. barrett’s. perchance has been out a week. i think it must be the most conspicuous and showy and at the same time richcolored flower of this month. it is not so conspicuous as the sunflower, but of a rarer color, — “pale rosepurple,” they call it, — like a hollyhock. it is surprising for its amount of color, and, seen unexpectedly amid the willows and button-bushes, with the mikania twining around its stem, you can hardly believe it is a flower, so large and tender it looks, like the greatest effort of the season to adorn the august days, and reminded me of that great tender moth, the attacus luna, which i found on the water near where it grows. i think it must be allied to southern species. it suggests a more genial climate and luxuriant soil. it requires these vaporous dog-days. journal, iv, 297, 298 [ 75 j avueust 18, 1852. to joe clark’s and hibiscus bank. . . . the hibiscus flowers are seen a quarter of a mile off over the water, like large roses, now that these high colors are rather rare. some are exceedingly delicate and pale, almost white, just rosetinted, others a brighter pink or rose-color, and all slightly plaited (the five large petals) and turned toward the sun, now in the west, trembling in the wind. so much color looks very rich in these localities. the flowers are some four inches in diameter, as large as water-lilies, rising amid and above the button-bushes and willows, with a large light-green tree-like leaf and a stem half an inch in diameter, apparently dying down to a perennial (?) root each year. a superb flower. where it occurs it is certainly, next to the white lily, if not equally with it, the most splendid ornament of the river. . . . as i made excursions on the river when the white lilies were in bloom, so now i should make a hibiscus excursion. journal, tv, 299, 301. etd cinnamon ferns in clintonia swamp avucaust 23, 1858. i go through [clintonia swamp], wading through the luxuriant cinnamon fern, which has complete possession of the swamp floor. its great fronds, curving this way and that, remind me of a tropical vegetation. they are as high as my head and about a foot wide; may stand higher than my head without being stretched out. they grow in tufts of a dozen, so close that their fronds interlace and form one green waving mass. there in the swamp cellar under the maples. a forest of maples rises from a forest of ferns. my clothes are covered with the pale-brown wool which i have rubbed off their stems. journal, x1, 118. september 24, 1859. stedman buttrick’s handsome maple and pine swamp is full of cinnamon ferns. i stand on the elevated road, looking down into it. the trees are very tall and slender, without branches for a long distance. all the ground, which is perfectly level, is covered and concealed, as are the bases of the trees, with the tufts of cinnamon fern, now a pale brown. it is a very pretty sight, these northern trees springing out of a groundwork of lae] ferns. it is like pictures of the tropics, except that here the palms are the undergrowth. you could not have arranged a nosegay more tastefully. it is a rich groundwork, out of which the maples and pines spring. journal, xi, 344. ti. autumn [, 8e: j beautiful fungi september 1, 1856. with r. w. e[merson] to saw mill [brook]. we go admiring the pure and delicate tints of fungi on the surface of the damp swamp there, following up along the north side of the brook. there are many very beautiful lemon-yellow ones of various forms, some shaped like buttons, some becoming finely scalloped on the edge, some clubshaped and hollow, of the most delicate and rare but decided tints, contrasting well with the decaying leaves about them. there are others also pure white, others a wholesome red, others brown, and some even a light indigo-blue above and beneath and throughout. when colors come to be taught in the schools, as they should be, both the prism (or the rainbow) and these fungi should be used by way of illustration, and if the pupil does not learn colors, he may learn fungi, which perhaps is better. you almost envy the wood frogs and toads that hop amid such gems, — some pure and bright enough for a breastpin. out of every crevice between the dead leaves oozes some vehicle of color, the unspent wealth of the year. ; journal, 1x, 50, 51. c 81 j october 10, 1858. the simplest and most lumpish fungus has a peculiar interest to us, compared with a mere mass of earth, because it is so obviously organic and related to ourselves, however mute. it is the expression of an idea; growth according to a law; matter not dormant, not raw, but inspired, appropriated by spirit. if i take up a handful of earth, however separately interesting the particles may be, their relation to one another appears to be that of mere juxtaposition generally. i might have thrown them together thus. but the humblest fungus betrays a life akin to my own. it is a successful poem in its kind. there is suggested something superior to any particle of matter, in the idea or mind which uses and arranges the particles. journal, x1, 204. [ 82 ] lane in front of tarbell’s september 4, 1851. the lane in front of tarbell’s house, which is but little worn and appears to lead nowhere, though it has so wide and all-engulfing an opening, suggested that such things might be contrived for effect in laying out grounds. (only those things are sure to have the greatest and best effect, which like this were not contrived for the sake of effect.) an open path which would suggest walking and adventuring on it, the going to some place strange and far away. it would make you think of or imagine distant places and spaces greater than the estate. it was pleasant, looking back just beyond, to see a heavy shadow (made by some high birches) reaching quite across the road. light and shadow are sufficient contrast and furnish sufficient excitement when we are well. now we were passing the vale of brown and tarbell, a sunshiny mead pastured by cattle and sparkling with dew, the sound of crows and swallows heard in the air, and leafy-columned elms seen here and there shining with dew. the morning freshness and unworldliness of that domain! the vale of tempe and of arcady is not farther off than are the conscious lives of men from their opportunities. our life is as far from corresponding to its scenery as we are distant from tempe and arcadia; that is to say, [ 83 ] they are far away because we are far from living natural lives. how absurd it would be to insist on the vale of tempe in particular when we have such vales as we have! journal, 11, 454. [ 84 ] sunset on the river september 6, 1854. there are many clouds about and a beautiful sunset sky, a yellowish (dunnish?) golden sky, between them in the horizon, looking up the river. the beauty of the sunset is doubled by the reflection. being on the water we have double the amount of lit and dun-colored sky above and beneath. the reflected sky is more dun and richer than the real one. take a glorious sunset sky and double it, so that it shall extend downward beneath the horizon as much as above it, blotting out the earth, and let the lowest half be of the deepest tint, and every beauty more than before insisted on, and you seem withal to be floating directly into it. it was in harmony with this fair evening that we were not walking or riding with dust and noise through it, but moved by a paddle without a jar over the liquid and almost invisible surface, floating directly toward those islands of the blessed which we call clouds in the sunset sky. journal, vit, 19. [ 85 j we never tire of the drama of sunset. i go forth each afternoon and look into the west a quarter of an hour before sunset, with fresh curiosity, to see what new picture will be painted there, what new panorama exhibited, what new dissolving views. can washington street or broadway show anything as good? every day a new picture is painted and framed, held up for half an hour, in such lights as the great artist chooses, and then withdrawn and the curtain falls. and then the sun goes down, and long the afterglow gives light. and then the damask curtains glow along the western window. and now the first star is lit, and i go home. journal, 111, 179. [, #6 j goldenrod (solidago nemoralis) september 12, 1859. to moore’s swamp and great fields. i stand in moore’s swamp and look at garfield’s dry bank, now before the woods generally are changed at all. how ruddy ripe that dry hillside by the swamp, covered with goldenrods and clumps of hazel bushes here and there, now more or less scarlet. the goldenrods on the top and the slope of the hill are the solidago nemoralis, at the base the taller s. altissima. the whole hillside is perfectly dry and ripe. many a dry field now, like that of sted buttrick’s on the great fields, is one dense mass of the brightgolden recurved wands of the solidago nemoralis (a little past prime), waving in the wind and turning upward to the light hundreds, if not a thousand, flowerets each. it is the greatest mass of conspicuous flowers in the year, and uniformly from one to two feet high, just rising above the withered grass all over the largest fields, now when pumpkins and other yellow fruits begin to gleam, now before the woods are noticeably changed. such a mass of yellow for this field’s last crop! who that had botanized here in the previous month could have foretold this more profuse and teeming crop? all ringing, as do the low grounds, with the shrilling of crickets and locusts and frequented by honey-bees (i.e., the gold er enrod nemoralis). the whole field turns to yellow, as the cuticle of a ripe fruit. this is the season when the prevalence of the goldenrods gives such a ripe and teeming look to the dry fields and to the swamps. the s. nemoralis spreads its legions over the dry plains now, as soldiers muster in the fall. it is a muster of all its forces, which i review, eclipsing all other similar shows of the year. fruit of august and september, sprung from the sun-dust. the fields and hills appear in their yellow uniform. there are certain fields so full of them that they might give their name to the town or region, as one place in england is called saffron walden. perhaps the general prevalence of yellow is greater now when many individual plants are past prime. journal, xu, 320-22. [88 j fall asters? september 14, 1856. now for the aster tradescanti along low roads, like the turnpike, swarming with butterflies and bees. some of them are pink. how ever unexpected are these later flowers! you thought that nature had about wound up her affairs. you had seen what she could do this year, and had not noticed a few weeds by the roadside, or mistook them for the remains of summer flowers now hastening to their fall; you thought you knew every twig and leaf by the roadside, and nothing more was to be looked for there; and now, to your surprise, these ditches are crowded with millions of little stars. they suddenly spring up and face you, with their legions on each side the way, as if they had lain in ambuscade there. the flowering of the ditches. call them travellers’ thoughts, numerous though small, worth a penny at least, which, sown in spring and summer, in the fall spring up unobserved at first, successively dusted and washed, mingled with nettles and beggar-ticks as a highway harvest. a starry meteoric shower, a milky way, in the flowery kingdom in whose aisles we travel. let the traveller bethink himself, elevate and expand his thoughts somewhat, that his successors may oftener hereafter be cheered by the sight of an aster nove-anglie@ or spectabilis here and there, to 1 the photographs are of the a. tradescantt and the a. nove-anglie. [ 89 ] remind him that a poet or philosopher has passed this way. the gardener with all his assiduity does not raise such a variety, nor so many successive crops on the same space, as nature in the very roadside ditches. there they have stood, begrimed with dust and the wash of the road so long, and made acquaintance with passing sheep and cattle and swine, gathering a trivial experience, and now at last the fall rains have come to wash off some of that dust, and even they exhibit these dense flowery panicles as the result of all that experience, as pure for an hour as if they grew by some wild brook-side. journal, 1x, 82, 83. [ 90 ] witch-hazel there is something witchlike in the appearance of the witch-hazel, which blossoms late in october and in november, with its irregular and angular spray and petals like furies’ hair, or small ribbon streamers. its blossoming, too, at this irregular period, when other shrubs have lost their leaves, as well as blossoms, looks like witches’ craft. certainly it blooms in no garden of man’s. concord and merrimack rivers, 379. ocrobeer 9, 1851. to conantum. the witchhazel here is in full blossom on this magical hillside, while its broad yellow leaves are falling. it is an extremely interesting plant, — october and november’s child, and yet reminds me of the very earliest spring. its blossoms smell like the spring, like the willow catkins; by their color as well as fragrance they belong to the saffron dawn of the year, suggesting amid all these signs of autumn, falling leaves and frost, that the life of nature, by which she eternally flourishes, is untouched. it stands here in the shadow on the side of the hill, while the sunlight from over the top of the hill lights up its topmost sprays and yellow blossoms. its spray, so jointed and angular, is not to be mistaken for any other. [ lie on my back with joy under its boughs. while its [91 ] leaves fall, its blossoms spring. the autumn, then, is indeed a spring. all the year is a spring. i see two blackbirds high overhead, going south, but i am going north in my thought with these hazel blossoms. it is a faery place. this is a part of the immortality of the soul. journal, 111, 59, 60. [ 92 ] october reflections on the assabet october 17, 1858. up assabet. methinks the reflections are never purer and more distinct than now at the season of the fall of the leaf, just before the cool twilight has come, when the air has a finer grain. just as our mental reflections are more distinct at this season of the year, when the evenings grow cool and lengthen and our winter evenings with their brighter fires may be said to begin. one reason why i associate perfect reflections from still water with this and a later season may be that now, by the fall of the leaves, so much more light is let in to the water. the river reflects more light, therefore, in this twilight of the year, as it were an afterglow. journal, x1, 216, 217. sun-lighted tufts of andropogon octtober 16, 1859. when we emerged from the pleasant footpath through the birches into witherell glade, looking along it toward the westering sun, the glittering white tufts of the andropogon scopartus, lit up by the sun, were affectingly fair and cheering to behold, ... their glowing half raised a foot or more above the ground, a lighter and more brilliant whiteness than the downiest cloud presents. [ 93 ] how cheerful these cold but bright white waving tufts! they reflect all the sun’s light without a particle of his heat, or yellow rays. a thousand such tufts now catch up the sun and send to us his light but not heat. his heat is being steadily withdrawn from us. light without heat is getting to be the prevailing phenomenon of the day now. journal, x1, 391, 392. novembeer 8, 1859. the tufts of purplish withered andropogon in witherell glade are still as fair as ever, soft and trembling and bending from the wind; of a very light mouse-color seen from the side of the sun, and as delicate as the most fragile ornaments of a lady’s bonnet; but looking toward the sun they are a brilliant white, each polished hair (of the pappus?) reflecting the november sun without its heats, not in the least yellowish or brown like the goldenrods and asters. journal, x11, 442. [ 94 ] cobweb drapery in barrett’s mill october 19, 1858. ride to sam barrett’s mill. am pleased again to see the cobweb drapery of the mill.1_ each fine line hanging in festoons from the timbers overhead and on the sides, and on the discarded machinery lying about, is covered and greatly enlarged by a coating of meal, by which its curve is revealed, like the twigs under their ridges of snow in winter. it is like the tassels and tapestry of counterpane and dimity in a lady’s bedchamber, and i pray that the cobwebs may not have been brushed away from the mills which i visit. it is as if i were aboard a man-of-war, and this were the fine “rigging” of the mill, the sails being taken in. all things in the mill wear the same livery or drapery, down to the miller’s hat and coat. i knew barrett forty rods ° off in the cranberry meadow by the meal on his hat. barrett’s apprentice, it seems, makes trays of black birch and of red maple, in a dark room under the mill. i was pleased to see this work done here, a wooden tray is so handsome. you could count the circles of growth on the end of the tray, and the dark heart of the tree was seen at each end above, producing a semicircular ornament. it was a satisfaction to be reminded that we may so easily make * when this photograph was taken, the miller, on being told the purpose of the photograph, remarked, ‘‘oh, yes, those are the same cobwebs that thoreau saw here fifty years ago!”” h. w. g. [ 95 j] our own trenchers as well as fill them. to see the tree reappear on the table, instead of going to the fire or some equally coarse use, is some compensation for having it cut down. journal, x1, 224, 225. [ 96 j fringed gentian ocrobeerr 19, 1852. at 5 p.m. i found the fringed gentian now somewhat stale and touched with frost, being in the meadow toward peter’s. probably on high, moist ground it is fresher. it may have been in bloom a month. it has been cut off by the mower, and apparently has put out in consequence a mass of short branches full of flowers. this may make it later. i doubt if i can find one naturally grown. at this hour the blossoms are tightly rolled and twisted, and i see that the bees have gnawed round holes in their sides to come at the nectar. they have found them, though i had not. “full many a flower is born to blush unseen” by man. an hour ago i doubted if fringed gentians were in concord now, but, having found these, they as it were surrender, and i hear of them at the bottom of n. barrett’s orchard toward the river, and by tuttle’s (?). they are now, at 8 a.m., opening a little in a pitcher. it is too remarkable a flower not to be sought out and admired each year, however rare. it is one of the errands of the walker, as well as of the bees, for it yields him a more celestial nectar still. it is a very singular and agreeable surprise to come upon this conspicuous and handsome and withal blue flower at this season, when flowers have passed out of our minds and memories; the latest of all to begin to bloom, unless it be the witch-hazel, when, excepting the latter, flowers are reduced to that small spartan c97 ] cohort, hardy, but for the most part unobserved, which linger till the snow buries them, and those interesting re-appearing flowers which, though fair and fresh and tender, hardly delude us with the prospect of a new spring, and which we pass by indifferent, as if they only bloomed to die. vide bryant’s verses on the fringed gentian. it is remarkable how tightly the gentians roll and twist up at night, as if that were their constant state. probably those bees were working late that found it necessary to perforate the flower. journal, tv, 390. [ 98 ] fallen leaves for beautiful variety no crop can be compared with this. here is not merely the plain yellow of the grains, but nearly all the colors that we know, the brightest blue not excepted: the early blushing maple, the poison sumach blazing its sins as scarlet, the mulberry ash, the rich chrome yellow of the poplars, the brilliant red huckleberry, with which the hills’ backs are painted, like those of sheep. the frost touches them, and, with the slightest breath of returning day or jarring of earth’s axle, see in what showers they come floating down! the ground is all parti-colored with them. but they still live in the soil, whose fertility and bulk they increase, and in the forests that spring from it. they stoop to rise, to mount higher in coming years, by subtle chemistry, climbing by the sap in the trees; and the sapling’s first fruits thus shed, transmuted at last, may adorn its crown, when, in after years, it has become the monarch of the forest. it is pleasant to walk over the beds of these fresh, crisp, and rustling leaves. how beautifully they go to their graves! how gently lay themselves down and turn to mould! — painted of a thousand hues, and fit to make the beds of us living. so they troop to their last resting-place, light and frisky. they that soared so loftily, how contentedly they return to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay [ 99 j at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high! they teach us how to die. one wonders if the time will ever come when men, with their boasted faith in immortality, will lie down as gracefully and as ripe. excursions, 269, 270. c 100 |] late green ferns octoser 31, 1857. in the lee farm swamp i see two kinds of ferns still green and much in fruit, apparently the aspidium spinulosum and cristatum. they linger thus in all moist clammy swamps under the bare maples and grape-vines and witch-hazels, and about each trickling spring which is half choked with fallen leaves. what means this persistent vitality, invulnerable to frost and wet? why were these spared when the brakes and osmundas were stricken down? ... even in them i feel an argument for immortality. death is so far from being universal. to my eyes they are tall and noble as palm groves, and always some forest nobleness seems to have its haunt under their umbrage. journal, x, 149, 150. polypody november 2, 1857. it is very pleasant and cheerful nowadays, when the brown and withered leaves strew the ground and almost every plant is fallen or withered, to come upon a patch of polypody on some rocky hillside in the woods, where, in the midst of the dry and rustling leaves, defying frost, it stands so freshly green and full of life. the mere greenness, which was not remarkable in the summer, is positively interesting now. my thoughts are with the [ 101 ] polypody a long time after my body has passed. the brakes, the sarsaparilla, the osmundas, the solomon’s-seals, the lady’s-slippers, have long since withered and fallen. the huckleberries and blueberries, too, have lost their leaves. the forest floor is covered with a thick coat of moist brown leaves. but what is that perennial and springlike verdure that clothes the rocks, of small green plumes pointing various ways? it is the cheerful community of the polypody. it survives at least as the type of vegetation, to remind us of the spring which shall not fail. these are the green pastures where i browse now. why is not this form copied by our sculptors instead of the foreign acanthus leaves and bays? journal, x, 153, 154. [ 102 | nature’s decoration of an old stump novemsber 4, 1857. how swift nature is to repair the damage that man does! when he has cut . down a tree and left only a white-topped and bleeding stump, she comes at once to the rescue with her chemistry, and covers it decently with a fresh coat of gray, and in course of time she adds a thick coat of green cup and bright cockscomb lichens, and it becomes an object of new interest to the lover of nature! suppose it were always to remain a raw stump instead! it becomes a shelf on which this humble vegetation spreads and displays itself, and we forget the death of the larger in the life of the less. journal, x, 160. novemeber 8, 1858. nature has many scenes to exhibit, and constantly draws a curtain over this part or that. she is constantly repainting the landscape and all surfaces, dressing up some scene for our entertainment. lately we had a leafy wilderness, now bare twigs begin to prevail, and soon she will surprise us with a mantle of snow. some green she thinks so good for our eyes, like blue, that she never banishes it entirely, but has created evergreens. each phase of nature, while not invisible, is yet not too distinct and obtrusive. it is there to be found when we look for it, but not demanding our atten [ 108 j tion. it is like a silent but sympathizing companion in whose company we retain most of the advantages of solitude, with whom we can walk and talk, or be silent, naturally, without the necessity of talking in a strain foreign to the place. i go across n. barrett’s land and over the road beyond his house. the aspect of the great meadows is now nearly uniform, the new and exposed grass being nearly as brown and sere as that which was not cut. thus nature has been blending and harmonizing the colors here where man had interfered. journal, x1, 296-98. [ 104 j november woods novemmber 8, 1850. the stillness of the woods and fields is remarkable at this season of the year. there is not even the creak of a cricket to be heard. of myriads of dry shrub oak leaves, not one rustles. your own breath can rustle them, yet the breath of heaven does not suffice to. the trees have the aspect of waiting for winter. the autumnal leaves have lost their color; they are now truly sere, dead, and the woods wear a sombre color. summer and harvest are over. the hickories, birches, chestnuts, no less than the maples, have lost their leaves. the sprouts, which had shot up so vigorously to repair the damage which the choppers had done, have stopped short for the winter. everything stands silent and expectant. if i listen, i hear only the note of a chickadee, — our most common and i may say native bird, most identified with our forests, — or perchance the scream of a jay, or perchance from the solemn depths of these woods i hear tolling far away the knell of one departed. thought rushes in to fill the vacuum. as you walk, however, the partridge still bursts away. the silent, dry, almost leafless, certainly fruitless woods. you wonder what cheer that bird can find in them. the partridge bursts away from the foot of a shrub oak like its own dry fruit, immortal bird! this sound still startles us. dry goldenrods, now turned gray and white, lint [ 105 ] our clothes as we walk. and the drooping, downy seed-vessels of the epilobium remind us of the summer. perchance you will meet with a few solitary asters in the dry fields, with a little color left. the sumach is stripped of everything but its cone of red berries. journal, 1, 85. [ 106 j fair haven bay through the woods novemmber 6, 1853. climbed the wooded hill by holden’s spruce swamp and got a novel view of the river and fair haven bay through the almost leafless woods. how much handsomer a river or lake such as ours, seen thus through a foreground of scattered or else partially leafless trees, though at a considerable distance this side of it, especially if the water is open, without wooded shores or isles! it is the most perfect and beautiful of all frames, which yet the sketcher is commonly careful to brush aside. i mean a pretty thick foreground, a view of the distant water through the near forest, through a thousand little vistas, as we are rushing toward the former, — that intimate mingling of wood and water which excites an expectation which the near and open view rarely realizes. we prefer that some part be concealed, which our imagination may navigate. journal, v, 480. [ 107 ] november 21, 1850. i saw fair haven pond with its island, and meadow between the island and the shore, and a strip of perfectly still and smooth water in the lee of the island, and two hawks, fish hawks perhaps, sailing over it. i did not see how it could be improved. yet i do not see what these things can be. i begin to see such an object when i cease to understand it and see that i did not realize or appreciate it before, but i get no further than this. how adapted these forms and colors tomy eye! a meadow and an island! what are these things? yet the hawks and the ducks keep so aloof! and nature is so reserved! i am made to love the pond and the meadow, as the wind is made to ripple the water. journal, 11, 107. e 108 a shrub oak leaves novemmber 29, 1857. again i am struck by the singularly wholesome colors of the withered oak leaves, especially the shrub oak, so thick and firm and unworn, without speck or fret, clear reddishbrown (sometimes paler or yellowish brown), its whitish under sides contrasting with it in a very cheerful manner. so strong and cheerful, as if it rejoiced at the advent of winter, and exclaimed, “winter, come on!” it exhibits the fashionable colors of the winter on the two sides of its leaves. it sets the fashions, colors good for bare ground or for snow, grateful to the eyes of rabbits and partridges. this is the extent of its gaudiness, red brown and misty white, and yet it is gay. the colors of the brightest flowers are not more agreeable to my eye. journal, x, 214. december 1, 1856. the dear wholesome color of shrub oak leaves, so clean and firm, not decaying, but which have put ona kind of immortality, not wrinkled and thin like the white oak leaves, but fullveined and plump, as nearer earth. well-tanned leather on the one side, sun-tanned, color of colors, color of the cow and the deer, silver-downy beneath, turned toward the late bleached and russet fields. what are acanthus leaves and the rest to this? emblem of my winter condition. i love and could em [ 109 j brace the shrub oak with its scanty garment of leaves rising above the snow, lowly whispering to me, akin to winter thoughts, and sunsets, and to all virtue. covert which the hare and the partridge seek, and i too seek. rigid as iron, clean as the atmosphere, hardy as virtue, innocent and sweet as a maiden is the shrub oak. in proportion as i know and love it, i am natural and sound as a partridge. i felt a positive yearning toward one bush this afternoon. there was a match found for me at last. i fell in love with a shrub oak. journal, 1x, 145. iv. winter [tae 7] a winter scene from lee’s cliff december 7, 1856. take my first skate to fair haven pond. ... that grand old poem called winter is round again without any connivance of mine. as i sit under lee’s cliff, where the snow is melted, amid sere pennyroyal and frost-bitten catnep, i look over my shoulder upon an arctic scene. i see with surprise the pond a dumb white surface of ice speckled with snow, just as so many winters before, where so lately were lapsing waves or smooth reflecting water. i hear, too, the familiar belching voice of the pond. it seemed as if winter had come without any interval since midsummer, and i was prepared to see it flit away by the time i again looked over my shoulder. it was as if i had dreamed it. but i see that the farmers have had time to gather their harvests as usual, and the seasons have revolved as slowly as in the first autumn of my life. the winters come now as fast as snowflakes. it is wonderful that old men do not lose their reckoning. it was summer, and now again it is winter. nature loves this rhyme so well that she never tires of repeating it. so sweet and wholesome is the winter, so simple and moderate, so satisfactory and perfect, that her children will never weary of it. what a poem! an epic in blank verse, enriched with a million tinkling rhymes. it is solid beauty. it has been subjected to the vicissitudes of millions of years of the [113 ] gods, and not a single superfluous ornament remains. the severest and coldest of the immortal critics have shot their arrows at it and pruned it till it cannot be amended. journal, 1x, 165, 167, 168. [ 114 j] frost crystals deecember 21, 1854. walden is frozen over, apparently about two inches thick. it is very thickly covered with what c. calls ice-rosettes, 7.e., those small pinches of crystallized snow, — as thickly as: if it had snowed in that form. i think it is a sort of hoar frost on the ice. journal, vu, 88. january 1, 1856. on the ice at walden are very beautiful great leaf crystals in great profusion. the ice is frequently thickly covered with them for many rods. they seem to be connected with the rosettes, — arunning together of them. they look like a loose web of small white feathers springing from a tuft of down, as if a feather bed had been shaken over the ice. they are, on a close examination, surprisingly perfect leaves, like ferns, only very broad for their length and commonly more on one side the midrib than the other. they are so thin and fragile that they melt under your breath while looking closely at them. journal, vu, 77. [115 ] december 23, 1837. in the side of the high bank by the leaning hemlocks, there were some curious crystallizations. wherever the water, or other causes, had formed a hole in the bank, its throat and outer edge, like the entrance to a citadel of the olden time, bristled with a glistening ice armor. in one place you might see minute ostrich feathers, which seemed the waving plumes of the warriors filing into the fortress, in another the glancing fan-shaped banners of the lilliputian host, and in another the needle-shaped particles, collected into bundles resembling the plumes of the pine, might pass for a phalanx of spears. the whole hill was like an immense quartz rock, with minute crystals sparkling from innumerable crannies. i tried to fancy that there was a disposition in these crystallizations to take the forms of the contiguous foliage. journal, 1, 21, 22. [ 116 7 architecture of the snow dercember 25, 1851. a wind is now blowing the light snow into drifts, especially on the lee, now the south, side of the walls, the outlines of the drifts corresponding to the chinks in the walls and the eddies of the wind. the snow glides, unperceived for the most part, over the open fields until it reaches an opposite wall, which it sifts through and is blown over, blowing off from it like steam when seen in the sun. as it passes through the chinks, it does not drive straight onward, but curves gracefully upwards into fantastic shapes, somewhat like the waves which curve as they break upon the shore; that is, as if the snow that passes through a chink were one connected body, detained by the friction of its lower side. it takes the form of saddles and shells and porringers. it builds up a fantastic alabaster wall behind the first, — a snowy sierra. astonishingly sharp and thin overhanging eaves it builds, even this dry snow, where it has the least suggestion from a wall or bank, — less than a mason ever springs his brick from. this is the architecture of the snow. journal, 11, 154. ate deecember 25, 1856. a strong wind from the northwest is gathering the snow into picturesque drifts behind the walls. as usual they resemble shells more than anything, sometimes prows of vessels, also the folds of a white napkin or counterpane dropped over a bonneted head. there are no such picturesque snow-drifts as are formed behind loose and open stone walls. journal, 1x, 197. [ 118 ] tracks in the snow january 1, 1854. the snow is the great betrayer. we might expect to find in the snow the footprint of a life superior to our own, of which no zoélogy takes cognizance. is there no trace of a nobler life than that of an otter or an escaped convict to be looked for in the snow? shall we suppose that that is the only life that has been abroad in the night? it is only the savage that can see the track of no higher life than an otter. why do the vast snow plains give us pleasure, the twilight of the bent and half-buried woods? is not all there consonant with virtue, justice, purity, courage, magnanimity? are we not cheered by the sight? and does not all this amount to the track of a higher life than the otter’s, a life which has not gone by and left a footprint merely, but is there with its beauty, its music, its perfume, its sweetness, to exhilarate and recreate us? where there is a perfect government of the world according to the highest laws, is there no trace of intelligence there, whether in the snow or the earth, or in ourselves? no other trail but such as a dog can smell? is there none which an angel can detect and follow? none to guide a man on his pilgrimage, which water will not conceal? is there no odor of sanctity to be perceived? is its trail too old? have mortals lost the scent? the great game for mighty hunters as soon as the first snow falls is purity, for, earlier than any rabbit or fox, it is abroad, [119 ] and its trail may be detected by curs of lowest degree. did this great snow come to reveal the track merely of some timorous hare, or of the great hare, whose track no hunter has seen? is there no trace nor suggestion of purity to be detected? if one could detect the meaning of the snow, would he not be on the trail of some higher life that has been abroad in the night? a life which, pursued, does not earth itself, does not burrow downward but upward, which takes not to the trees but to the heavens as its home, which the hunter pursues with winged thoughts and aspirations, — these the dogs that tree it, — rallying his pack with the bugle notes of undying faith, and returns with some worthier trophy than a fox’s tail, a life which we seek, not to destroy it, but to save our own? journal, vi, 43, 44. [ 120 ] after the ice storm! january 1, 1853. this morning we have something between ice and frost on the trees, etc. the whole earth, as last night, but much more, is encased in ice, which on the plowed fields makes a singular icy coat a quarter of an inch or more in thickness. this frozen drizzle, collected around the slightest cores, gives prominence to the least withered herbs and grasses. where yesterday was a plain, smooth field, appears now a teeming crop of fat, icy herbage. the stems of the herbs on their north sides are enlarged from ten to a hundred times. what a crash of jewels as you walk! the most careless walker, who never deigned to look at these humble weeds before, cannot help observing them now. the drooping birches along the edges of woods are the most feathery, fairy-like ostrich plumes of the trees, and the color of their trunks increases the delusion. the weight of the ice gives to the pines the forms which northern trees, like the firs, constantly wear, bending and twisting the branches; for the twigs and plumes of the pines, being frozen, remain as the wind held them, and new portions of the trunk are exposed. 1 an ice-storm such as thoreau describes so intimately is by no means an annual occurrence in concord. indeed, in his entire journal thoreau mentions only one other similar phenomenon. it required some years of “watchful waiting” before the opportunity arrived to secure photographs illustrating thoreau’s description. the single view herewith reproduced gives only a bare suggestion of the beauty of the outdoor world under such conditions. h. w. g. f 121 | seen from the north, there is no greenness in the pines, and the character of the tree is changed. the willows along the edge of the river look like sedge in meadows. the sky is overcast, and a fine snowy hail and rain is falling, and these ghost-like trees make a scenery which reminds you of spitzbergen. i see now the beauty of the causeway, by the bridge alders below swelling into the road, overtopped by willows and maples. the fine grasses and shrubs in the meadow rise to meet and mingle with the drooping willows, and the whole make an indistinct impression like a mist, and between this the road runs toward those white ice-clad ghostly or fairy trees in the distance, — toward spirit-land. journal, 1v, 436-38. [ i22 ] heavy snow on pitch pines january 7, 1852. this afternoon, in dells of the wood and on the lee side of the woods, where the wind has not disturbed it, the snow still lies on the trees as richly as i ever saw it. it was just moist enough to stick. the pitch pines wear it best; their plumes hang down like the feathers of the ostrich or the tail of the cassowary, so purely white, — i am sorry that i cannot say snowy white, for in purity it is like nothing but itself. from contrast with the dark needles and stems of the trees, whiter than ever on the ground. the trees are bent under the weight into a great variety of postures, — arches, etc. their branches and tops are so consolidated by the burden of snow, and they stand in such new attitudes, the tops often like canopies or parasols, agglomerated, that they remind me of the pictures of palms and other oriental trees. sometimes the lower limbs of the pitch pine, under such plumes and canopies, bear each their ridge of snow, crossing and interlacing each other like lattice-work, so that you cannot look more than a rod into the rich tracery. journal, 11, 177. [115 ] december 23, 1837. in the side of the high bank by the leaning hemlocks, there were some curious crystallizations. wherever the water, or other causes, had formed a hole in the bank, its throat and outer edge, like the entrance to a citadel of the olden time, bristled with a glistening ice armor. in one place you might see minute ostrich feathers, which seemed the waving plumes of the warriors filing into the fortress, in another the glancing fan-shaped banners of the lilliputian host, and in another the needle-shaped particles, collected into bundles resembling the plumes of the pine, might pass for a phalanx of spears. the whole hill was like an immense quartz rock, with minute crystals sparkling from innumerable crannies. i tried to fancy that there was a disposition in these crystallizations to take the forms of the contiguous foliage. journal, 1, 21, 22. ea6. 7 architecture of the snow dscrember 25, 1851. a wind is now blowing the light snow into drifts, especially on the lee, now the south, side of the walls, the outlines of the drifts corresponding to the chinks in the walls and the eddies of the wind. the snow glides, unperceived for the most part, over the open fields until it reaches an opposite wall, which it sifts through and is blown over, blowing off from it like steam when seen in the sun. as it passes through the chinks, it does not drive straight onward, but curves gracefully upwards into fantastic shapes, somewhat like the waves which curve as they break upon the shore; that is, as if the snow that passes through a chink were one connected body, detained by the friction of its lower side. it takes the form of saddles and shells and porringers. it builds up a fantastic alabaster wall behind the first, — a snowy sierra. astonishingly sharp and thin overhanging eaves it builds, even this dry snow, where it has the least suggestion from a wall or bank, — less than a mason ever springs his brick from. this is the architecture of the snow. journal, 111, 154. [117 j december 25, 1856. a strong wind from the northwest is gathering the snow into picturesque drifts behind the walls. as usual they resemble shells more than anything, sometimes prows of vessels, also the folds of a white napkin or counterpane dropped over a bonneted head. there are no such picturesque snow-drifts as are formed behind loose and open stone walls. journal, 1x, 197. l428] tracks in the snow january 1, 1854. the snow is the great betrayer. we might expect to find in the snow the footprint of a life superior to our own, of which no zodlogy takes cognizance. is there no trace of a nobler life than that of an otter or an escaped convict to be looked for in the snow? shall we suppose that that is the only life that has been abroad in the night? it is only the savage that can see the track of no higher life than an otter. why do the vast snow plains give us pleasure, the twilight of the bent and half-buried woods? is not all there consonant with virtue, justice, purity, courage, magnanimity? are we not cheered by the sight? and does not all this amount to the track of a higher life than the otter’s, a life which has not gone by and left a footprint merely, but is there with its beauty, its music, its perfume, its sweetness, to exhilarate and recreate us? where there is a perfect government of the world according to the highest laws, is there no trace of intelligence there, whether in the snow or the earth, or in ourselves? no other trail but such as a dog can smell? is there none which an angel can detect and follow? none to guide a man on his pilgrimage, which water will not conceal? is there no odor of sanctity to be perceived? is its trail too old? have mortals lost the scent? the great game for mighty hunters as soon as the first snow falls is purity, for, earlier than any rabbit or fox, it is abroad, [119 j and its trail may be detected by curs of lowest degree. did this great snow come to reveal the track merely of some timorous hare, or of the great hare, whose track no hunter has seen? is there no trace nor suggestion of purity to be detected? if one could detect the meaning of the snow, would he not be on the trail of some higher life that has been abroad in the night? a life which, pursued, does not earth itself, does not burrow downward but upward, which takes not to the trees but to the heavens as its home, which the hunter pursues with winged thoughts and aspirations, — these the dogs that tree it, — rallying his pack with the bugle notes of undying faith, and returns with some worthier trophy than a fox’s tail, a life which we seek, not to destroy it, but to save our own? journal, vi, 43, 44. [. 120 |] after the ice storm! january 1, 1853. this morning we have something between ice and frost on the trees, etc. the whole earth, as last night, but much more, is encased in ice, which on the plowed fields makes a singular icy coat a quarter of an inch or more in thickness. this frozen drizzle, collected around the slightest cores, gives prominence to the least withered herbs and grasses. where yesterday was a plain, smooth field, appears now a teeming crop of fat, icy herbage. the stems of the herbs on their north sides are enlarged from ten to a hundred times. what a crash of jewels as you walk! the most careless walker, who never deigned to look at these humble weeds before, cannot help observing them now. the drooping birches along the edges of woods are the most feathery, fairy-like ostrich plumes of the trees, and the color of their trunks increases the delusion. the weight of the ice gives to the pines the forms which northern trees, like the firs, constantly wear, bending and twisting the branches; for the twigs and plumes of the-pines, being frozen, remain as the wind held them, and new portions of the trunk are exposed. 1 an ice-storm such as thoreau describes so intimately is by no means an annual occurrence in concord. indeed, in his entire journal thoreau mentions only one other similar phenomenon. it required some years of “watchful waiting’? before the opportunity arrived to secure photographs illustrating thoreau’s description. the single view herewith reproduced gives only a bare suggestion of the beauty of the outdoor world under such conditions. h. w. g. e -agae ] seen from the north, there is no greenness in the pines, and the character of the tree is changed. the willows along the edge of the river look like sedge in meadows. the sky is overcast, and a fine snowy hail and rain is falling, and these ghost-like trees make a scenery which reminds you of spitzbergen. i see now the beauty of the causeway, by the bridge alders below swelling into the road, overtopped by willows and maples. the fine grasses and shrubs in the meadow rise to meet and mingle with the drooping willows, and the whole make an indistinct impression like a mist, and between this the road runs toward those white ice-clad ghostly or fairy trees in the distance, — toward spirit-land. journal, tv, 436-38. [ 122 |] heavy snow on pitch pines january 7, 1852. this afternoon, in dells of the wood and on the lee side of the woods, where the wind has not disturbed it, the snow still lies on the trees as richly as i ever saw it. it was just moist enough to stick. the pitch pines wear it best; their plumes hang down like the feathers of the ostrich or the tail of the cassowary, so purely white, — i am sorry that i cannot say snowy white, for in purity it is like nothing but itself. from contrast with the dark needles and stems of the trees, whiter than ever on the ground. the trees are bent under the weight into a great variety of postures, — arches, etc. their branches and tops are so consolidated by the burden of snow, and they stand in such new attitudes, the tops often like canopies or parasols, agglomerated, that they remind me of the pictures of palms and other oriental trees. sometimes the lower limbs of the pitch pine, under such plumes and canopies, bear each their ridge of snow, crossing and interlacing each other like lattice-work, so that you cannot look more than a rod into the rich tracery. journal, 111, 177. [ 123 ] january 30, 1841. the trees covered with snow admit a very plain and clean light, but not brilliant, as if through windows of ground glass; a sort of white darkness it is, all of the sun’s splendor that can be retained. you glance up these paths, closely imbowered by bent trees, as through the side aisles of a cathedral, and expect to hear a choir chanting from their depths. you are never so far in them as they are far before you. their secret is where you are not and where your feet can never carry you. the snow falls on no two trees alike, but the forms it assumes are as various as those of the twigs and leaves which receive it. they are, as it were, predetermined by the genius of the tree. so one divine spirit descends alike on all, but bears a peculiar fruit in each. the divinity subsides on all men, as the snowflakes settle on the fields and ledges and takes the form of the various clefts and surfaces on which it lodges. journal, 1, 184, 185. [ 124 j the swamp in winter january 10, 1856. i love to wade and flounder through the swamp now, these bitter cold days when the snow lies deep on the ground, and i need travel but little way from the town to get to a nova zembla solitude, — to wade through the swamps, all snowed up, untracked by man, into which the fine dry snow is still drifting till it is even with the tops of the water andromeda and half-way up the high blueberry bushes. i penetrate to islets inaccessible in summer, my feet slumping to the sphagnum far out of sight beneath, where the alder berry glows yet and the azalea buds, and perchance a single tree sparrow or a chickadee lisps by my side, where there are few tracks even of wild animals; perhaps only a mouse or two have burrowed up by the side of some twig, and hopped away in straight lines on the surface of the light, deep snow, as if too timid to delay, to another hole by the side of another bush; and a few rabbits have run in a path amid the blueberries and alders about the edge of the swamp. this is instead of a polar sea expedition and going after franklin. there is but little life and but few objects, it is true. we are reduced to admire buds, even like the partridges, and bark, like the rabbits and mice, — the great yellow and red forward-looking buds of the azalea, the plump red ones of the blueberry, and the fine sharp red ones of the panicled andromeda, [ 125 j sleeping along its stem, the speckled black alder, the rapid-growing dogwood, the pale-brown and cracked blueberry, etc. even a little shining bud which lies sleeping behind its twig and dreaming of spring, perhaps half concealed by ice, is object enough. i feel myself upborne on the andromeda bushes beneath the snow, as on a springy basketwork, then down i go up to my middle in the deep but silent snow, which has no sympathy with my mishap. beneath the level of this snow how many sweet berries will be hanging next august! journal, vit, 99, 100. [ 126 ] a lodging snow january 20, 1855. in many instances the snow had lodged on trees yesterday in just such forms as a white napkin or counterpane dropped on them would take,— protuberant in the middle, with many folds and dimples. an ordinary leafless bush supported so much snow on its twigs — a perfect maze like a whirligig, though not in one solid mass — that you could not see through it. sometimes the snow on the bent pitch pines made me think of rams’ or elephants’ heads, ready to butt you. in particular places, standing on their snowiest side, the woods were incredibly fair, white as alabaster. indeed, the young pines reminded you of the purest statuary, and the stately full-grown ones towering around affected you as if you stood in a titanic sculptor’s studio, so purely and delicately white, transmitting the light, their dark trunks all concealed. and in many places, where the snow lay on withered oak leaves between you and the light, various delicate fawn-colored and cinnamon tints, blending with the white, still enhanced the beauty. i doubt if i can convey an idea! of the appearance of the woods yesterday, as you stood in their midst and looked round on their boughs and twigs laden 1 this is thoreau’s conclusion after more than ten pages of attempted description of the beauty of concord woods under their burden of snow. needless to say, no photograph, or series of photographs, can be more successful. h. w. g. [ wey | with snow. it seemed as if there could have been none left to reach the ground. these countless zigzag white arms crossing each other at every possible angle completely closed up the view, like a light drift within three or four rods on every side. the wintriest prospect imaginable. journal, vit, 122, 123, 128. [ 128 ] the brook in winter january 12, 1855. perhaps what most moves us in winter is some reminiscence of far-off summer. how we leap by the side of the open brooks! what beauty in the running brooks! what life! what society! the cold is merely superficial; it is.‘summer still at the core, far, far within. journal, vu, 112. january 31, 1852. i observed this afternoon, on the turnpike, that where it drifts over the edge of a brook or a ditch, the snow being damp as it falls, what does not adhere to the sharp edge of the drift falls on the dead weeds and shrubs and forms a drapery like a napkin or a white tablecloth hanging down with folds and tassels or fringed border. or perhaps the fresh snow merely rounds and whitens thus the old cores. journal, 111, 260. the river as a winter highway january 20, 1856. it is now good walking on the river, for, though there has been no thaw since the snow came, a great part of it has been converted into snow ice by sinking the old ice beneath the water, and the crust of the rest is stronger than in the fields, because the snow is so shallow and has been so moist. [ 129 ] the river is thus an advantage as a highway, not only in summer and when the ice is bare in the winter, but even when the snow lies very deep in the fields. it is invaluable to the walker, being now not only the most interesting, but, excepting the narrow and unpleasant track in the highways, the only practicable route. the snow never lies so deep over it as elsewhere, and, if deep, it sinks the ice and is soon converted into snow ice to a great extent, beside being blown out of the river valley. here, where you cannot walk at all in the summer, is better walking than elsewhere in the winter. , journal, vu, 121. [ 180 ] the tracks of a fox prruaps of all our untamed quadrupeds, the fox! has obtained the widest and most familiar reputation, from the time of pilpay and sop to the present day. his recent tracks still give variety to a winter’s walk. i tread in the steps of the fox that has gone before me by some hours, or which perhaps i have started, with such a tiptoe of expectation as if i were on the trail of the spirit itself which resides in the wood, and expected soon to catch it in its lair. i am curious to know what has determined its graceful curvatures, and how surely they were coincident with the fluctuations of some mind. i know which way a mind wended, what horizon it faced, by the setting of these tracks, and whether it moved slowly or rapidly, by their greater or less intervals and distinctness; for the swiftest step leaves yet a lasting trace. sometimes you will see the trails of many together, and where they have gamboled and gone through a hundred evolutions, which testify to a singular listlessness and leisure in nature. when i see a fox run across the pond on the snow, with the carelessness of freedom, or at intervals trace his course in the sunshine along the ridge of a hill, i give up to him sun and earth as to their true proprie1 in spite of numerous fex-hunters, with their packs of trained hounds, reynard manages to survive in concord, and it is still true — though to a less degree than in thoreau’s day — that “‘his recent tracks give variety to a winter’s walk.” h. w. g. [131 ] tor. he does not go in the sun, but it seems to follow him, and there is a visible sympathy between him and it. sometimes, when the snow lies light and but five or six inches deep, you may give chase and come up with one on foot. in such a case he will show a remarkable presence of mind, choosing only the safest direction, though he may lose ground by it. notwithstanding his fright, he will take no step which is not beautiful. his pace is a sort of leopard canter, as if he were in no wise impeded by the snow, but were husbanding his strength all the while. he runs as though there were not a bone in his back. excursions, 117, 118. [ 132 ] icicle “organ-pipes” february 14, 1852. at the cliffs, the rocks are in some places covered with ice; and the least inclination beyond a perpendicular in their faces is betrayed by the formation of icicles at once, which hang perpendicularly, like organ pipes, in front of the rock. they are now conducting downward the melting ice and snow, which drips from their points with a slight clinking and lapsing sound, but when the sun has set will freeze there and add to the icicles’ length. where the icicles have reached the ground and are like thick pillars, they have a sort of annular appearance, somewhat like the successive swells on the legs of tables and on bed-posts. there is perhaps a harmony between the turner’s taste and the law of nature in this instance. the shadow of the water flowing or pulsating behind this transparent icy crust or these stalactites in the sun imparts a semblance of life to the whole. journal, 111, 303. north branch near harrington’s frsruary 27, 1852. the main river is not yet open but in very few places, but the north branch, which is so much more rapid, is open near tarbell’s and harrington’s, where i walked to-day, and, flowing with full tide bordered with ice on either side, l, ies j sparkles in the clear, cool air, —a silvery sparkle as from a stream that would not soil the sky. half the ground is covered with snow. it is a moderately cool and pleasant day near the end of winter. we have almost completely forgotten summer. this restless and now swollen stream has burst its icy fetters, and as j stand looking up it westward for half a mile, where it winds slightly under a high bank, its surface is lit up here and there with a fine-grained silvery sparkle which makes the river appear something celestial,— more than a terrestrial river, — which might: have suggested that which surrounded the shield in homer. if rivers come out of their icy prison thus bright and immortal, shall not i too resume my spring life with joy and hope? have i no hopes to sparkle on the surface of life’s current? journal, 111, 322. [ 134 ] winter when winter fringes every bough with his fantastic wreath, and puts the seal of silence now upon the leaves beneath; when every stream in its penthouse goes gurgling on its way, and in his gallery the mouse nibbleth the meadow hay; methinks the summer still is nigh, and lurketh underneath, as that same meadow mouse doth lie snug in that last year’s heath. . and if perchance the chickadee lisp a faint note anon, the snow is summer’s canopy, which she herself put on. fair blossoms deck the cheerful trees, and dazzling fruits depend; the north wind sighs a summer breeze, the nipping frosts to fend, [ 135 j bringing glad tidings unto me, the while i stand all ear, of a serene eternity, which need not winter fear. excursions, 176, 177. che viverside press cambridge . massachusetts u.s.a a i ie i a if t bhat ee se cae if i ea rgr har er ce i ah siena ae ea remi eae beat ehestet beate vel ib nial ae i md het nite te aace ha sa bite) hi ma | eee it hat sess ie ae in titara: es eee shr rete re nese erred sars pee bee baat erect remasiaaeea eet riverside literature series thoreau's katahdin and chesuncook houghton mrfflin co. a maine woods highway hitoeraide literature katahdin and chesuncook bt henry d. thoreau fbom "the maine woods" abridged and edited by / clifton johnson houghton mifflin company boston : 4 park street ; new york : 85 fifth a vena* chicago : 378-388 wabaah avenue cftc hibrrsi&c press cambrtbge copyright 1909 by houghton mifflin company all rights reserved illustrations a maine woods highway .... frontispiece a bateau 2 katahdin from ambejijis lake 20 winter logging 26 river-drivers at work 26 poling up-stream . 30 running down-stream 30 summit of katahdin 42 a loggers' camp 68 a cow moose 68 a backwoods farm 78 2217810 introduction thoreau's the maine woods is a forest classic an idyl of the wilderness. it is a record of three journeys to the bor ders of civilization and beyond into almost pathless forests, seldom visited at that time except by loggers and a few hunt ers and indians, and retaining nearly intact their primeval loneliness. perhaps no writer has ever lived who was better fitted than thoreau to enjoy such a region and to transmit his enjoy ment of it to others. for while he was a person of culture and refinement, with a college education, and had for an intimate friend so rare a man as ralph waldo emerson, he was half wild in many of his tastes and impatient of the restraints and artificiality of the ordinary social life of the towns and cities. he liked especially the companionship of men who were in close contact with nature. to talk with some rude farmer or fisherman or hunter gave him real delight. thus, in the maine woods, we find him lingering fondly over the char acteristics and casual remarks of the loggers, explorers, and other pioneers; and most of all he seems to have been fas cinated by the indians, who still retained many of their abo riginal instincts and ways. as the years pass, thoreau's literary fame steadily in creases. he was a careful and accurate observer, more at home in the fields and woods than in village and town, and having a gift of piquant originality in recording his impres sions. the play of his imagination is keen and nimble ; yet his fancy is so well balanced by his native common sense that it does not run away with him, and his genuineness and the truth of what he relates have never been questioned. it is to be noted also that he was no hunter, that his in quisitiveness into the ways of the wild creatures carried with it no desire to shoot them, and that to his mind the killing of game for mere sport was akin to butchery. indeed, the kindly vi introduction and sympathetic spirit constantly manifest in his pages is very attractive, and the fellowship one gains with him through his written words is to a young reader a distinct help in character building. the maine woods was, of course, not written for young people, and in its complete form it contains much that would have but little interest for them ; yet the charm of the subject, and the fact that thoreau was himself in most ways simple and childlike in his enjoyment of nature, make a great deal of the book exceptionally attractive to youthful readers. the text as here presented omits the portions an average boy or girl would find difficult or dull, and the resulting narrative is both lively and informing. it covers two of thoreau's three expeditions into the woods one made in a logger's bateau with two experienced frontiersmen for guides; the second in a birch-bark canoe under the guidance of its indian owner. the account is practically complete, for in cutting down the original book nothing really essential has been sacrificed. the omissions consist largely of meditations which have no thing to do with the main story, and of some of the multiplicity of details that thoreau recorded. but while much has been eliminated, the text is still thoreau's own, and is in no wise rewritten. only at rare intervals has a minor word or two been supplied to make connections where portions have been omitted. i think the student will find the narrative as it now stands clear and delightful, and that this presentation of experiences on the streams and lakes and in the forests of the primitive american wilderness will be perused not as a task, but as a pleasure. the author was one of the world's master writers in his chosen field, and in what he says he stimulates a love not only for nature, but for simple ways of living, and for all that is sincere and unaffected in human life wherever found. clifton johnson. hadley, massachusetts. map of thoreau's maine woods bancrc katahdin l on the 31st of august, 1846, 1 left concord in mas sachusetts for bangor and the backwoods ofmaine, intending to accompany a relative of mine engaged in the lumber trade, as far as a dam on the west branch of the penobscot. 2 from this place, which is about one hundred miles by the river above bangor and five miles beyond the last log hut, i proposed to make ex cursions to mount katahdin, 3 and to some of the lakes of the penobscot. it is unusual to find a camp so far in the woods at that season, when lumbering operations have ceased, and i was glad to avail myself of the cir cumstance of a gang of men being employed there at that time in repairing the injuries caused by the great freshet in the spring. i was fortunate also in the season of the year, for in the summer myriads of black flies, mosquitoes, and midges, or, as the indians call them, "no-see-ems," make traveling in the woods almost impossible; but now their reign was nearly over. tuesday, september 1, 1 started with my compan ion in a buggy from bangor for "up river," expecting to be overtaken the next day night at mattawamkeag 4 point, some sixty miles off, by two more bangoreans, who had decided to join us in a trip to the mountain. 1 thoreau used the less familiar form " ktaadn " for the name of the mountain and the title of this paper, a spelling which is supposed to represent the indian pronunciation more accurately than that now more commonly in use. the word is an indian one, of course, and, as thoreau notes, is said to mean " highest land." 2 pe-nob'skot. 3 ka-tah'din. 4 mat-a-wam'keg. 2 katahdin within a dozen miles of bangor we passed through the village of oldtown, at the falls of the penobscot. these falls furnish the principal power by which the maine woods are converted into lumber. here is a close jam at all seasons ; and then the once green tree becomes lumber. here your inch, your two and your three inch stuff begin to be, and mr. sawyer marks off those spaces which decide the destiny of so many pros trate forests. through this steel riddle is the arrowy maine forest relentlessly sifted, till it comes out boards, clapboards, laths, and shingles. think how stood the white-pine tree on the shore of chesuncook, 1 its branches soughing with the four winds, and every in dividual needle trembling in the sunlight think how it stands with it now sold, perchance, to the new england friction-match company! there were in 1837, as i read, two hundred and fifty sawmills on the penobscot and its tributaries above bangor. to this is to be added the lumber of the kennebec, androscog gin, passamaquoddy, 2 and other streams. no wonder that we hear so often of vessels which are becalmed off our coast, being surrounded a week at a time by float ing lumber from the maine woods. the mission of men there seems to be, like so many busy demons, to drive the forest all out of the country, from every soli tary beaver-swamp and mountain-side, as soon as possible. at oldtown we walked into a bateau-manufactory. the making of bateaux is quite a business here. they are light and shapely vessels, from twenty to thirty feet long, and only four or four and a half wide, sharp at 1 chft-sun'kook. 2 ksn-e-bgk', an-dro-skog'in, p&s-a-mi-kw5d'i. katahdin 3 both ends, and reaching seven or eight feet over the water, in order that they may slip over rocks as gently as possible. they are made very slight; only two boards to a side, commonly secured to a few light maple or other hard-wood knees. the bottom is left perfectly flat. they told us that one wore out in two years, or often in a single trip. the ferry here took us past the indian island. as we left the shore, i observed a short, shabby-looking indian, just from "up river," land on the oldtown side, and, drawing up his canoe, take out a bundle of skins in one hand, and an empty keg in the other, and scramble up the bank with them. the island seemed deserted to-day, yet i observed some new houses among the weather-stained ones ; but generally they have a very forlorn and cheerless look, being all back side and woodshed, not homesteads. the church is the only trim-looking building. we landed in milford, and rode along the east side of the penobscot, having a more or less constant view of the river, and the indian islands in it, for they re tain all the islands as far up as the mouth of the east branch. the river seemed shallow and rocky, and interrupted by rapids, rippling and gleaming in the sun. everywhere we saw signs of the great freshet this house standing awry, and that where it was not founded, and that other with a waterlogged look, as if it were still airing and drying its basement, and logs with everybody's marks upon them, and sometimes the marks of their having served as bridges, strewn along the road. at sundown, leaving the river road awhile, we went by way of enfield, where we stopped for the night. 4 katahdin the next morning we drove along through a high and hilly country, and came into the houlton * road at lincoln. learning that there were several wigwams here, on one of the indian islands, we left our horse and wagon and walked through the forest half a mile to the river, to procure a guide to the mountain. it was not till after considerable search that we discovered their habitations small huts, in a retired place, where the scenery was unusually soft and beautiful, and the shore skirted with pleasant meadows and graceful elms. we paddled ourselves across to the island in a canoe which we found on the shore. near where we landed sat an indian girl, ten or twelve years old, on a rock, washing, and humming a song meanwhile. a salmon-spear, made wholly of wood, lay on the shore, such as they might have used before white men came. it had an elastic piece of wood fastened to one side of its point, which slipped over and closed upon the fish, somewhat like the contrivance for holding a bucket at the end of a well-pole. as we walked up to the nearest house, we were met by a sally of a dozen wolfish-look ing dogs. the occupant soon appeared, with a long pole in his hand, with which he beat off the dogs while he parleyed with us a stalwart, but dull and greasy-looking fellow, who told us that there were in dians going " up river " he and one other. and who was the other ? louis neptune, who lives in the next house. well, let us go over and see louis together. the same doggish reception, and louis neptune makes his appearance a small, wiry man, with puckered and wrinkled face. the same questions were put to louis, and the same information obtained, 1 h&l't'n. katahdin 5 while the other indian stood by. it appeared that they were going to start by noon, with two canoes, to go up to chesuncook to hunt moose to be gone a month. " well, louis, suppose you get to the five islands, just below mattawamkeag, to camp, we walk on up the west branch to-morrow four of us and wait for you at the dam, or this side. you overtake us to-morrow or next day, and take us into your canoes. we pay you for your trouble." "ye'," replied louis; "maybe you carry some provision for all some pork some bread and so pay." these men were slightly clad in shirt and pantaloons. they did not invite us into their houses, but met us outside. we left the indians, thinking ourselves lucky to have secured such guides and companions. there were very few houses along the road, yet they did not altogether fail. there were even the germs of one or two villages just beginning to expand. the beauty of the road itself was remarkable. the vari ous evergreens delicate and beautiful specimens of the larch, arbor-vita?, ball spruce, and fir-balsam, from a few inches to many feet in height lined its sides ; while it was but a step on either hand to the grim, un trodden wilderness, whose tangled labyrinth of living, fallen, and decaying trees only the deer and moose, the bear and wolf, can easily penetrate. about noon we reached the mattawamkeag, and put up at a house where the houlton stage stops. after dinner we strolled down to the "point," formed by the junction of the two rivers, which is said to be the scene of an ancient battle between the eastern indians and the mohawks, and searched there carefully for relics, but we found only some flakes of arrowhead stone, 6 katahdin some points of arrowheads, one small leaden bullet, and some colored beads, the last to be referred, perhaps, to early fur-trader days. the mattawamkeag, though wide, was a mere river's bed, full of rocks and shallows at this time, so that you could cross it almost dry-shod in boots. before our companions arrived, we rode on up the houlton road seven miles to molunkus, 1 where the aroostook 2 road comes into it, and where there is a spacious public house in the woods. there was no other evidence of man but this huge shingle palace in this part of the world; but sometimes even this is filled with travelers. i looked off the piazza round the cor ner of the house up the aroostook road, on which there was no clearing in sight. there was a man just adven turing upon it this evening in a rude, original wagon a mere seat with a wagon swung under it. here, too, was a small trader who kept a store in a box over the way, behind the molunkus sign-post. i saw him standing in his shop door. his shop was so small, that, if a traveler should make demonstrations of entering, he would have to go out by the back way and confer with his customer through a window about his goods. i think that there was not more than one house on the road to molunkus. at that place we got over the fence into a new field, planted with potatoes, where the logs were still burning between the hills; and, pull ing up the vines, found good-sized potatoes, nearly ripe. the mode of clearing and planting is, to fell the trees, and burn once what will burn, then cut them up into suitable lengths, roll into heaps, and burn again ; then, with a hoe, plant potatoes where you can come at 1 mi-lunk'us. 2 a-robs'took. katahdin 7 the ground between the stumps and charred logs. for a first crop the ashes suffice for manure, and no hoeing is necessary the first year. in the fall cut, roll, and burn again, and so on, till the land is cleared ; and soon it is ready for grain. let those talk of poverty and hard times who will in the towns and cities; cannot the emigrant who can pay his fare to new york or boston pay five dollars more to get here, and be as rich as he pleases, where land virtually costs nothing, and houses only the labor of building, and he may begin life as adam did ? we returned to the mattawamkeag, where shortly afterward our companions arrived. early the next morning we had mounted our packs, and prepared for a tramp up the west branch, my companion having turned his horse out to pasture, thinking that a bite of fresh grass and a taste of run ning water would do him as much good as backwoods fare and new country influences his master. leaping over a fence, we began to follow an obscure trail up the northern bank of the penobscot. there was now no road further, the river being the only highway, and but half a dozen log huts to be met with for thirty miles. on either hand, and beyond, was a wholly un inhabited wilderness, stretching to canada. neither horse nor cow, nor vehicle of any kind, had ever passed over this ground ; the cattle, and the few bulky articles which the loggers use, being got up in the winter on the ice, and down again before it breaks up. the evergreen woods had a decidedly sweet and bracing fragrance; the air was a sort of diet-drink, and we walked on buoyantly in indian file, stretching our legs. occa sionally there was a small opening on the bank, made 8 katahdin for the purpose of log-rolling, where we got a sight of the river always a rocky and rippling stream. the roar of the rapids, the note of a whistler duck on the river, of the jay and chickadee around us, and of the pigeon woodpecker in the openings, were the sounds that we heard. this was what you might call a brand new country ; the only roads were of nature's making, and the few houses were camps. there are three classes of inhabitants who either frequent or inhabit the country which we had now en tered : first, the loggers, who for the winter and spring are far the most numerous, but in the summer, except a few explorers for timber, completely desert it; sec ond, the few settlers i have named, the only perma nent inhabitants, who live on the verge of it, and help raise supplies for the former; third, the hunters, mostly indians, who range over it in their season. we crossed one tract, on the bank of the river, of more than a hundred acres of heavy timber, which had just been felled and burnt over, and was still smoking. our trail lay through the midst of it, and was well-nigh blotted out. the trees lay at full length, four or five feet deep, and crossing each other in all directions, black as charcoal, but perfectly sound within, still good for fuel or for timber. soon they would be cut into lengths and burnt again. here were thousands of cords, enough to keep the poor of boston and new york amply warm for a winter, which only cumbered the ground and were in the settler's way. and the whole of that solid and interminable forest is doomed to be gradually devoured thus by fire and no man be warmed by it. at crocker's log hut, at the mouth of salmon river, seven miles from the point, one of the katahdin 9 party commenced distributing a store of small cent picture-books among the children to teach them to read, and also newspapers, more or less recent, among the parents, than which nothing can be more accept able to a backwoods people. i walked through salmon river with my shoes on, it being low water, but not without wetting my feet. a few miles farther we came to ' mann howard's," at the end of an extensive clear ing, where there were two or three log huts in sight at once. the next house was fisk's, ten miles from the point at the mouth of the east branch. our course here crossed the penobscot. one of the party, who entered the house in search of some one to set us over, reported a very neat dwelling, with plenty of books, and a new wife, just imported from boston. having with some difficulty discovered the trail again, we kept up the south side of the west branch, or main river, passing by some rapids, the roar of which we heard through the woods, and, shortly after, some empty loggers' camps. though we saw a few more afterward, i will make one account serve for all. these were such houses as the lumberers of maine spend the winter in. there were the camps and the hovels for the cattle, hardly distinguishable, except that the latter had no chimney. these camps were about twenty feet long by fifteen wide, built of logs, hemlock, cedar, spruce, or yellow birch one kind alone, or all to gether, with the bark on; two or three large ones first, one directly above another, and notched together at the ends, to the height of three or four feet, then of smaller logs resting upon transverse ones at the ends, each of the last successively shorter than the other, to 10 katahdin form the roof. the chimney was an oblong hole in the middle, three or four feet in diameter, with a fence of logs as high as the ridge. the interstices were filled with moss, and the roof was shingled with long splints of cedar, or spruce, or pine, rifted with a sledge and cleaver. the fireplace was in shape like the chimney, and directly under it, defined by a log fender on the ground and aheap of ashes, with solid benches of split logs running round it. here the fire usually melts the snow and dries the rain before it can descend to quench it. the faded beds of arbor-vitse leaves extended under the eaves on either hand. there was the place for the water-pail, pork-barrel, and wash-basin, and generally a dingy pack of cards left on a log. these houses are made comfortable by huge fires. usually the scenery about them is drear and savage ; and the logger's camp is as completely in the woods as a fungus at the foot of a pine in a swamp ; no outlook but to the sky overhead ; no more clearing than is made by cutting down the trees of which it is built, and those which are necessary for fuel. if only it be well sheltered and convenient to his work, and near a spring, he wastes no thought on the prospect. they are very proper forest houses, the stems of the trees collected together and piled up around a man to keep out wind and rain made of living green logs, hanging with moss and lichen, and with the curls and fringes of the yellow birch bark, and dripping with resin, fresh and moist, and redolent of swampy odors, with that sort of vigor and peren nialness about them that toadstools suggest. the logger's fare consists of tea, molasses, flour, pork (sometimes beef), and beans, a great proportion of the beans raised in massachusetts find their market katahdin 11 here. on expeditions it is only hard-bread and pork, often raw, slice on slice, with tea or water, as the case may be. the primitive wood is always and everywhere damp and mossy, so that i traveled constantly with the im pression that i was in a swamp ; and only when it was remarked that this or that tract, judging from the qual ity of the timber on it, would make a profitable clear ing, was i reminded, that if the sun were let in it would make a dry field. the woods hereabouts abounded in beech and yellow birch, spruce, cedar, fir, and hem lock ; but we saw only the stumps of the white pine, some of them of great size, these having been already culled out. only a little spruce and hemlock had been logged. the eastern wood which is sold for fuel in massachusetts all comes from below bangor. it was the pine alone that had tempted any but the hunter to precede us on this route. eighteen miles from the point brought us in sight of mccauslin's, or " uncle george's," as he was famil iarly called by my companions, to whom he was well known, where we intended to break our long fast. his house was in the midst of an extensive clearing on the opposite bank of the penobscot. so we collected on a point of the shore, that we might be seen, and fired our gun as a signal, which brought out his dogs forthwith, and thereafter their master, who in due time took us across in his bateau. this clearing was bounded ab ruptly, on all sides but the river, by the naked stems of the forest, as if you were to cut only a few feet square in the midst of a thousand acres of mowing, and set down a thimble therein. he had a whole heaven and horizon to himself, and the sun seemed to be journey 12 katahdin ing over his clearing only the livelong day. here we concluded to wait for the indians. mccauslin had been a waterman twenty-two years, and had driven on the lakes and headwaters of the penobscot five or six springs in succession, but was now settled here to raise supplies for the lumberers and for himself. he entertained us a day or two with true scotch hospitality, and would accept no recom pense for it, a man of a dry wit and shrewdness, and a general intelligence which i had not looked for in the backwoods. in fact, the deeper you penetrate into the woods, the more intelligent, and, in one sense, less countrified do you find the inhabitants ; for always the pioneer has been a traveler, and, to some extent, a man of the world ; and, as the distances with which he is familiar are greater, so is his information more general and far reaching than the villager's. if i were to look for a narrow, uninformed, and countrified mind, as opposed to the intelligence and refinement which are thought to emanate from cities, it would be among the rusty inhabitants of an old-settled country, on farms all run out and gone to seed with life-ever lasting, in the towns about boston, and not in the backwoods of maine. supper was got before our eyes in the ample kitchen, by a fire which would have roasted an ox. many whole logs, four feet long, were consumed to boil our tea-kettle birch, or beech, or'maple; and the dishes were soon smoking on the table, late the armchair, against the wall, from which one of the party was expelled. the arms of the chair formed the frame on which the table rested; and when the round top was turned up against the wall, it formed the back of the katahdin , 13 chair and was no more in the way than the wall itself. this, we noticed, was the prevailing fashion in these log houses, in order to economize in room. there were piping-hot wheaten cakes, the flour having been brought up the river in bateaux, and ham, eggs, and potatoes, and milk and cheese, the produce of the farm; and also shad and salmon, tea sweetened with molasses, and sweet cakes, in contradistinction to the hot cakes not sweetened, the one white, the other yellow, to wind up with. such we found was the prevailing fare, along this river. mountain cranber ries, stewed and sweetened, were the common dessert. everything here was in profusion, and the best of its kind. butter was in such plenty that it was commonly used, before it was salted, to grease boots with. in the night we were entertained by the sound of raindrops on the cedar splints which covered the roof, and awaked the next morning with a drop or two in our eyes. it rained and drizzled and gleamed by turns, the livelong day. what we did there would per haps be idle to tell ; how many times we buttered our boots, and how often a drowsy one was seen to sidle off to the bedroom. when it held up, i strolled up and down the bank, and gathered the harebell and cedar berries ; or else we tried by turns the long-han dled axe on the logs before the door. one while we walked over the farm and visited his well-filled barns with mccauslin. there were one other man and two women only here. he kept horses, cows, oxen, and sheep. the potato-rot had found him out the previous year and got half or two thirds of his crop. oats, grass, and potatoes were his staples; but he raised, also, a few carrots and turnips, and " a little corn for 14 katahdin the hens," for this was all that he dared risk, for fear that it would not ripen. melons, squashes, sweet corn, beans, tomatoes, and many other vegetables could not be ripened there. the few settlers along this stream were obviously tempted by the cheapness of the land mainly. when i asked mccauslin why more settlers did not come in, he answered that one reason was they could not buy the land, it belonged to individuals or companies who were afraid that their wild lands would be settled, and so incorporated into towns, and they be taxed for them ; but to settling on the state's land there was no such hindrance. for his own part, he wanted no neighbors he did n't wish to see any road by his house. neighbors, even the best, were a trouble and expense, especially on the score of cattle and fences. they might live across the river, perhaps, but not on the same side. the chickens here were protected by the dogs. as mccauslin said, " the old one took it up first, and she taught the pup, and now they had got it into their heads that it would n't do to have anything of the bird kind on the premises." a hawk hovering over was not allowed to alight, but barked off by the dogs circling about underneath; and a pigeon, or a "yellow-ham mer," as they called the pigeon woodpecker, on a dead limb or stump, was instantly expelled. it was the main business of their day, and kept them constantly coming and going. one would rush out of the house on the least alarm given by the other. the house, which was a fair specimen of those on this river, was built of huge logs, which peeped out everywhere, and were chinked with clay and moss. katahdin 15 it contained four or five rooms. there were no sawed boards, or shingles, or clapboards about it ; and scarcely any tool but the axe had been used in its construction. the partitions were made of long clapboard-like splints, of spruce or cedar, turned to a delicate salmon color by the smoke. the roof and sides were covered with the same, instead of shingles and clapboards, and some of a much thicker and larger size were used for the floor. these were all so straight and smooth that they answered the purpose admirably, and a careless observer would not have suspected that they were not sawed and planed. the chimney and hearth were of vast size, and made of stone. the broom was a few twigs of arbor-vitse tied to a stick ; and a pole was suspended over the hearth, close to the ceiling, to dry stockings and clothes on. i noticed that the floor was full of small, dingy holes, as if made with a gimlet, but which were, in fact, made by the spikes, nearly an inch long, which the lumberers wear in their boots to prevent their slipping on wet logs. just above mc causlin's, there is a rocky rapid, where logs jam in the spring; and many "drivers" are there collected, who frequent his house for supplies. these were their tracks which i saw. the next morning, the weather proving fair enough for our purpose, we prepared to start, and, the indians having failed us, persuaded mccauslin to accompany us in their stead, intending to engage one other boat man on the way. a strip of cotton cloth for a tent, a couple of blankets, which would suffice for the whole party, fifteen pounds of hard bread, ten pounds of pork, and a little tea, made up " uncle george's " pack. the last three articles were calculated to be provision 16 katahdin enough for six men for a week, with what we might pick up. a tea-kettle, a frying-pan, and an axe, to be obtained at the last house, would complete our outfit. we were soon out of mccauslin's clearing and in the evergreen woods again. the obscure trail made by the two settlers above, which even the woodman is some times puzzled to discern, ere long crossed a narrow open strip in the woods overrun with weeds, where a fire had raged formerly. at the end of three miles we reached shad pond. thomas fowler's house is four miles from mccauslin's, on the shore of the pond, at the mouth of the millinocket * river. fowler was just completing a new log hut, and was sawing out a win dow through the logs when we arrived. he had begun to paper his house with spruce bark turned inside out. as we stood on the pile of chips by the door, fish hawks were sailing overhead. tom pointed away over the lake to a bald eagle's nest, which was plainly visible more than a mile off, on a pine, high above the sur rounding forest, and was frequented from year to year by the same pair. there were these two houses only there, his low hut and the eagle's airy cartload of fagots. thomas fowler was persuaded to join us, for two men were necessary to manage the bateau, which was to be our carriage. tom's pack was soon made, for he had not far to look for his waterman's boots and a red flannel shirt. red is the favorite color with lum bermen ; and red flannel is reputed to possess some mysterious virtues, to be most healthful and convenient in respect to perspiration. in every gang there will be a large proportion of red birds. we took here a poor i akm-nok'gt. katahdin 17 and leaky bateau, and began to pole up the millinocket two miles to the elder fowler's, in order to avoid the grand falls of the penobscot, intending to ex change our bateau there for a better. the millinocket is a small, shallow, and sandy stream, full of what i took to be lamprey eels' or suckers' nests, and lined with musquash l cabins, but free from rapids, accord ing to fowler, excepting at its outlet from the lake. he was at this time engaged in cutting the native grass rush-grass and meadow-clover, as he called it on the meadows and small, low islands of this stream. we noticed flattened places in the grass on either side, where, he said, a moose had laid down the night before. old fowler's is the last house. here our new bateau was to be carried over the first portage of two miles round the grand falls, on a horse-sled made of sap lings to jump the numerous rocks in the way ; but we had to wait a couple of hours for them to catch the horses, which were pastured at a distance amid the stumps, and had wandered still farther off. the last of the salmon for this season had just been caught, and were still fresh in pickle, from which enough was ex tracted to fill our empty kettle. the week before, they had lost nine sheep here by the wolves. the surviving sheep came round the house, and seemed frightened, which induced them to go and look for the rest, when they found seven dead and two still alive. these last they carried to the house, and, as mrs. fowler said, they were merely scratched in the throat and had no more visible wound than would be produced by the prick of a pin. she sheared off the wool from their throats, and washed them, and put on some salve, and 1 the indian name for the muskrat. 18 katahdin turned them out, but in a few moments they were miss ing and had not been found since. in fact, they were all poisoned, and those that were found swelled up at once, so that they saved neither skin nor wool. at length, after we had dined, the horses arrived, and we hauled our bateau out of the water and lashed it to its wicker carriage, and, throwing in our packs, walked on before, leaving the boatmen and driver, who was tom's brother, to manage the concern. the route, which led through the wild pasture where the sheep were killed, was in some places the roughest ever traveled by horses, over rocky hills where the sled bounced and slid along like a vessel pitching in a storm ; and one man was necessary to stand at the stern, to prevent the boat from being wrecked. when the runners struck a rock three or four feet high, the sled bounced back and upwards at the same time ; but, as the horses never ceased pulling, it came down on the top of the rock, and so we got over. this portage probably followed the trail of an ancient indian carry round these falls. by two o'clock we, who had walked on before, reached the river above the falls, and waited for the bateau. we had been here but a short time when a thunder-shower was seen coming up from the west, and soon the heavy drops began to patter on the leaves around us. i had just selected the prostrate trunk of a huge pine, five or six feet in diameter, and was crawling under it, when, luckily, the boat arrived. it would have amused a sheltered man to witness the manner in which it was unlashed and whirled over, while the first waterspout burst on us. it was no sooner adjusted than we might have been seen all stooping to its shelter and wriggling under like so many eels. when all were katahdin 19 under we propped up the lee side, and busied ourselves whittling thole-pins for rowing; and made the woods ring, between the claps of thunder, with such boat songs as we could remember. the horses stood sleek and shining with the rain, drooping and crestfallen, while deluge after deluge washed over us ; but the bot tom of a boat may be relied on for a tight roof. after two hours' delay, a streak of fair weather appeared in the northwest, promising a serene evening for our voyage ; and the driver returned with his horses, while we made haste to launch our boat, and commence our voyage in good earnest. there were six of us, including the two boatmen. with our packs heaped up near the bows, and ourselves disposed as baggage to trim the boat, with instructions not to move in case we should strike a rock, we pushed out into the first rapid. with uncle george in the stern and tom in the bow, each using a spruce pole about twelve feet long, pointed with iron, and poling on the same side, we shot up the rapids, the water rushing and roaring around, so that only a practiced eye could distinguish a safe course, or tell what was deep water and what rocks, frequently grazing the latter, with a hundred narrow escapes. i, who had had some experience in boating, had never experienced any half so exhilarating before. we were lucky to have exchanged our indians for these men, who, together with tom's brother, were reputed the best boatmen on the river, and were at once indispensable pilots and pleasant companions. the canoe is smaller, more easily upset, and sooner worn out ; and the indian is said not to be so skillful in the management of the bateau. he is, for the most part, less to be relied on, 20 katahdin and more disposed to sulks and whims. the utmost familiarity with dead streams, or with the ocean, would not prepare a man for this peculiar navigation; and the most skillful boatman anywhere else would here be obliged to take out his boat and carry round a hun dred times, still with great risk, as well as delay, where the practiced bateau-man poles up with comparative ease and safety. the hardy " voyageur" pushes with incredible perseverance and success quite up to the foot of the falls, and then only carries round some perpen dicular ledge, and launches again to struggle with the boiling rapids above. the indians say that the river once ran both ways, one half up and the other down, but that, since the white man came, it all runs down, and now they must laboriously pole their canoes against the stream, and carry them over numerous portages. in the summer, all stores the grindstone and the plow of the pioneer, flour, pork, and uten sils for the explorer must be conveyed up the river in bateaux; and many a cargo and many a boatman is lost in these waters. in the winter, however, which is very equable and long, the ice is the great highway, and the logger's team penetrates even two hundred miles above bangor. imagine the solitary sled-track running far up into the snowy and evergreen wilder ness, hemmed in closely for a hundred miles by the forest, and again stretching straight across the broad surfaces of concealed lakes ! we were soon in the smooth water of the qua kish 1 lake, and took our turns at rowing and paddling across. it is a small, irregular, but handsome lake, shut in on all sides by the forest, and showing no traces 1 kwa'kish. katahdin 21 of man but some low boom in a distant cove, reserved for spring use. the spruce and cedar on its shores, hung with gray lichens, looked at a distance like the ghosts of trees. ducks were sailing here and there on its surface, and a solitary loon laughed and frolicked for our amusement. joe merry mountain appeared in the northwest, and we had our first view of katahdin, its summit veiled in clouds, like a dark isthmus con necting the heavens with the earth. after two miles of smooth rowing, we found ourselves in the river again, which was a continuous rapid for one mile, to the dam, requiring all the strength and skill of our boatmen to pole up it. this dam is a quite important and expensive work for this country, raising the whole river ten feet, and flooding some sixty square miles by means of the innu merable lakes with which the river connects. it is a lofty and solid structure, with sloping piers, some distance above, made of frames of logs filled with stones, to break the ice. we filed into the rude loggers' camp at this place, without ceremony, and the cook, at that moment the sole occupant, at once set about preparing tea for his visitors. his fireplace, which the rain had converted into a mud-puddle, was soon blazing, and we sat down on the log benches around it to dry us. on the well flattened and somewhat faded beds of arbor-vitae leaves, which stretched on either hand under the eaves behind us, lay an odd leaf of the bible, and we found emerson's address on west india emancipation, also an odd number of the westminster review and a pamphlet entitled " history of the erection of the monument on the grave of myron holly." this was 22 katahdin the reading-matter in a lumberers' camp in the maine woods, thirty miles from a road, which would be given up to the bears in a fortnight. these things were well thumbed and soiled. this gang was necessarily com posed of men not bred to the business of dam-building, but who were jacks-at-all-trades, handy with the axe and other simple implements, and well skilled in wood and water craft. we had hot cakes for our supper even here, white as snowballs, but without butter, and the never-failing sweet cakes, with which we filled our pockets, foreseeing that we should not soon meet with the like again. such delicate puff balls seemed a singular diet for backwoodsmen. there was also tea without milk, sweetened with molasses. when we had returned to the shore, we made haste to improve the little daylight that remained. this camp was the last human habitation of any kind in this di rection. beyond there was no trail ; and the river and lakes, by bateaus and canoes, was considered the only practicable route. we were about thirty miles by the river from the summit of katahdin, though not more than twenty, perhaps, in a straight line. it being about the full of the moon, and a warm and pleasant evening, we decided to row by moonlight to the head of the north twin lake, lest the wind should rise on the morrow. after one mile of river, or what the boatmen call " thoroughfare," we entered the lake just after sundown. this is a noble sheet of water. there was the smoke of no log hut nor camp of any kind to greet us, still less was any traveler watching our bateau from the distant hills. not even the indian hunter was there, for he hugs the river like ourselves. no face welcomed us but the fine fantastic sprays of katahdin 23 free and happy evergreen trees, waving one above another in their ancient home. at first the red clouds hung over the western shore as gorgeously as if over a city, and the lake lay open to the light with even a civ ilized aspect, as if expecting trade and commerce, and towns and villas. the shores rose gently to ranges of low hills covered with forests; and though the most valuable white pine timber had been culled out, this would never have been suspected by the voyager. we were on a high table-land between the states and canada, the northern side of which is drained by the st. john and chaudiere, 1 the southern by the penobscot and kennebec. there was no bold, moun tainous shore, but only isolated hills and mountains. the country is an archipelago of lakes. their lev els vary but a few feet, and the boatmen by short portages, or by none at all, pass easily from one to another. they say that at very high water the penob scot and the kennebec flow into each other, or at any rate, that you may lie with your face in the one and your toes in the other. none of our party but mccauslin had been above this lake, so we trusted to him to pilot us, and we could not but confess the importance of a pilot on these waters. while it is river, you will not easily forget which way is up-stream, but when you enter a lake, the river is completely lost, and you scan the distant shores in vain to find where it comes in. a stranger is, for the tune at least, lost, and must set about a voyage of discovery to find the river. to follow the windings of the shore when the lake is ten miles, or even more, in length, and of an irregularity which will not soon be i sho'dysr'. 24 katahdin mapped, is a wearisome voyage, and will spend his time and his provisions. they tell a story of a gang of ex perienced woodmen sent to a location on this stream, who were thus lost in the wilderness of lakes. they cut their way through thickets, and carried their bag gage and their boats over from lake to lake, sometimes several miles. they carried into millinocket lake, which is on another stream, and is ten miles square, and contains a hundred islands. they explored its shores thoroughly, and then carried into another, and another, and it was a week of toil and anxiety before they found the penobscot river again, and then their provisions were exhausted, and they were obliged to return. while uncle george steered for a small island near the head of the lake, we rowed by turns swiftly over its surface. the shores seemed at an indefinite distance in the moonlight. occasionally we rested on our oars, while we listened to hear if the wolves howled, for this is a common serenade, and my companions affirmed that it was the most dismal and unearthly of sounds, but we heard none this time. only some utterly un civilized, big-throated owl hooted loud and dismally in the drear and boughy wilderness, plainly not ner vous about his solitary life, nor afraid to hear the echoes of his voice there. about nine o'clock we reached the river, and ran our boat into a natural haven between some rocks, and drew her out on the sand. this camping-ground mc causlin had been familiar with in his lumbering days, and we heard the sound of the rill which would supply us with cool water emptying into the lake. the first business was to make a fire, an operation which was a katahdin 25 little delayed by the wetness of the fuel and the ground, owing to the heavy showers of the afternoon. the fire is the main comfort of the camp, whether in summer or winter, and is about as ample at one season as at an other. it is as well for cheerfulness as for warmth and dryness. some were dispersed to fetch in dead trees and boughs, while uncle george felled the birches and beeches which stood convenient, and soon we had a fire some ten feet long by three or four high, which rapidly dried the sand before it. this was calculated to burn all night. we next proceeded to pitch our tent; which operation was performed by sticking our two spike-poles into the ground in a slanting direction, about ten feet apart, for rafters, and then drawing our cotton cloth over them and tying it down at the ends, leaving it open in front, shed-fashion. but this even ing the wind carried the sparks on to the tent. so we hastily drew up the bateau just within the edge of the woods before the fire, and propping up one side three or four feet high, spread the tent on the ground to lie on ; and with the corner of a blanket, or what we could get to put over us, lay down with our heads and bodies under the boat, and our feet and legs on the sand toward the fire. at first we lay awake, talking of our course. but at length we composed ourselves seriously to sleep. it was interesting when awakened at midnight to watch the motions of some one of the party, who had got up to arouse the fire and add fresh fuel; now lugging a dead tree from out the dark, and heaving it on, now stirring up the embers, or tiptoeing about to observe the stars. thus aroused, i too brought fresh fuel to the fire, and then rambled along the sandy shore 26 katahdin in the moonlight. the little rill tinkled and peopled all the wilderness for me ; and the glassy smoothness of the sleeping lake, laving the shores, with the dark, fantastic rocks rising here and there from its surface, made a scene not easily described. later, we were one after another awakened by rain falling on our ex tremities ; and as each was made aware of the fact by cold or wet, he drew up his legs, until gradually we had all sidled round so that our bodies were wholly pro tected. when next we awoke, the moon and stars were shining again, and there were signs of dawn in the east. we had soon launched and loaded our boat, and, leaving our fire blazing, were off again before break fast. the lumberers rarely trouble themselves to put out their fires, such is the dampness of the primitive forest ; and this is one cause, no doubt, of the frequent fires in maine. the forests are held cheap after the white pine has been culled out ; and the explorers and hunters pray for rain only to clear the atmosphere of smoke. the woods were so wet to-day, however, that there was no danger of our fire spreading. after poling up half a mile of river, we rowed across the foot of pamadumcook 1 lake, and passed into deep cove, a part of the same lake, and, rowing across this, by an other short thoroughfare entered ambejijis 2 lake. at the entrance to a lake we sometimes observed the unhewn timbers of which booms are formed, either secured together in the water, or laid up on the rocks and lashed to trees, for spring use. it was easy to see that driving logs must be an exciting as well as arduous and dangerous business. all winter long the logger goes on piling up the trees which he has trimmed and 1 pam-a-dum'kook. 2 am-b6-je'jls. copyright, 1909, by william lyman underwood winter logging copyright, 1u09, by william lyman underwood kiver-dkiveks at work katahdin 27 hauled in some dry ravine at the head of a stream, and then in the spring he stands on the bank and whistles for rain and thaw, ready to wring the perspiration out of his shirt to swell the tide, till suddenly, with a whoop and halloo from him, a fair proportion of his winter's work goes scrambling down the country, followed by his faithful dogs, thaw and rain and freshet and wind, the whole pack in full cry, toward the mills. every log is marked with the owner's name, cut with an axe or bored with an auger, so deep as not to be worn off in the driving, and yet not so as to injure the timber; and it requires considerable ingenuity to invent new and simple marks where there are so many owners. when the logs have run the gauntlet of in numerable rapids and falls, with more or less jamming and bruising, those bearing various owners' marks be ing mixed up together, since all must take advantage of the same freshet, they are collected at the heads of the lakes and surrounded by a boom to prevent their being dispersed by the wind. then they are towed across the lake by a windlass, and, if circumstances permit, with the aid of sails and oars. sometimes, not withstanding, the logs are dispersed over many miles of lake surface in a few hours by winds and freshets, and thrown up on distant shores, where the driver can pick up only one or two at a time and return with them to the thoroughfare ; and before he gets his flock well through ambejijis or pamadumcook, he makes many a wet and uncomfortable camp on the shore. he must be able to navigate a log as if it were a canoe, and be as indifferent to cold and wet as a musk rat. he uses few tools a lever commonly of rock maple, six or seven feet long with a stout spike in it, 28 katahdin and a long spike-pole with a screw at the end of the spike to make it hold. the boys along shore learn to walk on floating logs as city boys on sidewalks. some times the logs are thrown up on rocks in such posi tions as to be irrecoverable but by another freshet as high, or they jam together at rapids and falls, and accumulate in vast piles, which the driver must start at the risk of his life. such is the lumber business, which depends on many accidents, as the early freez ing of the rivers that the teams may get up in season, a sufficient freshet in the spring to fetch the logs down, and many others. ambejijis struck me as the most beautiful lake we had seen. we rowed to near the head of it, and push ing through a field of lily-pads, landed, to cook our breakfast, by the side of a large rock. our breakfast consisted of tea, with hard-bread and pork, and fried salmon, which we ate with forks whittled from alder twigs off strips of birch-bark for plates. the tea was without milk to color or sugar to sweeten it, and two tin dippers were our teacups. this beverage is as indispensable to the loggers as to any gossiping old women in the land, and they no doubt derive great comfort from it. in the next nine miles, we rowed across several small lakes, poled up numerous rapids and thorough fares, and carried over four portages. at the portage around ambejijis falls i observed a pork-barrel on the shore, with a hole eight or nine inches square cut in one side. the barrel was set against an upright rock, but the bears, without turning or upsetting it, had gnawed a hole in the opposite side, which looked exactly like an enormous rat-hole, big katahdin 29 enough to put their heads in ; and at the bottom of the barrel were still left a few mangled and slabbered slices of pork. it is usual for the lumberers to leave such supplies as they cannot conveniently carry along at carries or camps, to which the next comers do not scruple to help themselves. at this portage there was the roughest path imaginable cut through the woods ; at first up hill, at an angle of nearly forty-five degrees, over rocks and logs without end. we first carried over our baggage, then returning to the bateau, we dragged it up the hill by the painter, and onward, with frequent pauses, over half the portage. but this was a bungling way, and would soon have worn out the boat. com monly, three men walk over with a bateau weighing from three to five or six hundred pounds on their heads and shoulders, the tallest standing under the middle of the boat, which is turned over, and one at each end. more cannot well take hold at once. this requires some practice, as well as strength, and is in any case extremely laborious. we were, on the whole, rather an invalid party, and could render our boatmen but little assistance. our two men at length took the bateau upon their shoulders, and while two of us steadied it, to pre vent it from rocking and wearing into their shoulders, on which they placed their hats folded, walked bravely over the remaining distance, with two or three pauses. in the same manner they accomplished the other por tages. with this crushing weight they must climb and stumble along over fallen trees and slippery rocks of all sizes, where those who walked by the sides were con tinually brushed off, such was the narrowness of the path. but we were fortunate not to have to cut our path in the first place. before we launched our boat, 30 katahdin we scraped the bottom smooth with our knives, where it had rubbed on the rocks, to save friction. to avoid the difficulties of the portage, our men de termined to "warp up" the passamagamet 1 falls; so while the rest walked over the portage with the baggage, i remained in the bateau, to assist in warping up. we were soon in the midst of the rapids, which were more swift and tumultuous than any we had poled up, and had turned to the side of the stream for the purpose of warping, when the boatmen, who felt some pride in their skill, and were ambitious to do something more than usual, for my benefit as i surmised, took one more view of the falls, pushed again into the midst of the stream, and began to struggle with the current. i sat in the middle of the boat to trim it, moving slightly to the right or left as it grazed a rock. with an un certain and wavering motion we wound and bolted our way up, until the bow was actually raised two feet above the stern at the steepest pitch; and then, when everything depended upon his exertions, the bowman's pole snapped in two ; but before he had time to take the spare one, which i reached him, he had saved himself with the fragment upon a rock ; and so we got up by a hair's breadth. uncle george exclaimed that that was never done before, and he had not tried it if he had not known whom he had got in the bow, nor he in the bow, if he had not known him in the stern. i could not sufficiently admire the skill and cool ness with which they performed this feat, never speak ing to each other. the bowman, not looking behind, bu,t knowing exactly what the other is about, works as l pss-d-md-gsm'st. polixg up-stream kuxmng down-stream katahdin 31 if he worked alone. now sounding in vain for a bottom in fifteen feet of water, while the boat falls back several rods, held straight only with the greatest skill and exertion ; or, while the sternman obstinately holds his ground, the bowman springs from side to side with wonderful suppleness and dexterity, scanning the rapids and the rocks ; and now, having got a bite at last, with a lusty shove, which makes his pole bend and quiver, and the whole boat tremble, he gains a few feet upon the river. to add to the danger, the poles are liable at any time to be caught between the rocks, and wrenched out of their hands, leaving them at the mercy of the rapids the rocks, as it were, lying in wait, like so many alligators, to catch the poles in their teeth, and jerk them from your hands, before you have stolen an effectual shove. nothing but the length and lightness, and the slight draught of the bateau, enables them to make any headway. the bowman must quickly choose his course; there is no time to deliberate. frequently the boat is shoved between rocks where both sides touch, and the waters on either hand are a perfect maelstrom. half a mile above this, two of us tried our hands at poling up a slight rapid, and we were just surmounting the last difficulty when an unlucky rock confounded our calculations; and while the bateau was sweep ing round irrecoverably amid the whirlpool, we were obliged to resign the poles to more skillful hands. the forenoon was serene and placid. we were occasionally startled by the scream of a bald eagle, sailing over the stream in front of our bateau, or of the fish hawks on whom he levies his contributions. there were at intervals small meadows of a few acres 32 katahdin on the sides of the streams, waving with uncut grass, which attracted the attention of our boatmen, who regretted that they were not nearer to their clear ings, and calculated how many stacks they might cut. two or three men sometimes spend the summer by themselves, cutting the grass in these meadows, to sell to the loggers in the winter, since it will fetch a higher price on the spot than in any market in the state. on a small isle covered with this grass we noticed the recent track of a moose. they are fond of the water, and visit all these island meadows, swimming as easily from island to island as they make their way through the thickets on land. the carry around pockwockomus 1 falls was ex ceedingly rough and rocky, the bateau having to be lifted directly from the water up four or five feet on to a rock, and launched again down a similar bank. the rocks on this portage were covered with the dents made by the spikes in the lumberers' boots while staggering over under the weight of their bateaux; and you could see where the surface of some large rocks on which they had rested their bateaux was worn quite smooth with use. we carried over but half the usual portage at this place, and launched our boat in the smooth wave just curving to the fall, pre pared to struggle with the most violent rapid we had to encounter. the rest of the party walked over the remainder of the portage, while i remained with the boatmen to assist in warping up. one had to hold the boat while the others got in, to prevent it from going over the falls. when we had pushed up the rapids as far as possible, keeping close to the shore, tom seized 1 pok-wok'o-mus. katahdix 33 the painter and leaped out upon a rock just visible in the water, but he lost his footing, notwithstanding his spiked boots, and was instantly amid the rapids ; but recovering himself, and reaching another rock, he passed the painter to me, who had followed him, and took his place again in the bows. leaping from rock to rock in the shoal water, close to the shore, and now and then getting a bite with the rope round an upright one, i held the boat while one reset his pole, and then all three forced it upward. when a part of us walked round at such a place we generally took out the most valuable part of the baggage, for fear of being swamped. as we poled up a swift rapid for half a mile above abol jacarmegus 1 falls, some of the party read their own marks on the huge logs which lay piled high and dry on the rocks on either hand, the relics probably of a jam which had taken place here in the great freshet in the spring. many of these would have to wait for another great freshet, perchance, if they lasted so long, before they could be got off. it was singular enough to meet with property of theirs which they had never seen, and where they had never been before, thus detained by freshets and rocks when on its way to them. the last half mile carried us to the sowadnehunk 2 deadwater. here we decided to camp, about twenty miles from the dam, at the mouth of murch brook and the aboljacknagesic, 3 mountain streams, broad off from katahdin, and about a dozen miles from its summit. 1 a-bol-j&k-a-me'gus. now commonly abbreviated to abol (a'bol). 2 sou-ad-ne-hunk'. 8 a-bol-jak-na-gsss'ik. now, like the above, abbreviated to abol. 34 katahdin we had been told by mccauslin that we should here find trout enough; so, while some prepared the camp, the rest fell to fishing. seizing the birch poles which some party of indians, or white hunters, had left on the shore, and baiting our hooks with pork, and with trout as soon as they were caught, we cast our lines into the aboljacknagesic. instantly a shoal of white chivin, silvery roaches, or what not, prowling thereabouts, fell upon our bait, and one after another were landed amidst the bushes. anon their cousins, the trout, took their turn, and alternately the speckled trout and the silvery roaches swallowed the bait as fast as we could throw in ; and the finest specimens of both that i have ever seen, the largest one weighing three pounds, were heaved upon the shore, though at first to wriggle down into the water again, for we stood in the boat ; but soon we learned to remedy this evil, for one of us, who had lost his hook, stood on shore to catch them as they fell in a perfect shower around him sometimes, wet and slippery, full in his face and bosom, as his arms were outstretched to receive them. while yet alive, before their tints had faded, they glistened like the fairest flowers, the pro duct of primitive rivers, seen of indians only, made beautiful, the lord only knows why, to swim there ! but there is the rough voice of uncle george, who commands at the frying-pan. the pork sizzles, and cries for fish. the night shut down at last, not a little deepened by the dark side of katahdin, which, like a permanent shadow, reared itself from the eastern bank. we accompanied tom into the woods to cut cedar twigs for our bed. while he went ahead with the axe, and lopped off the smallest twigs of the flat-leaved katahdin 35 cedar, the arbor-vitae of the gardens, we gathered them up, and returned with them to the boat, until it was loaded. our bed was made with as much care and skill as a roof is shingled ; beginning at the foot, and laying the twig end of the cedar upward, we advanced to the head, a course at a time, thus successively cover ing the stub-ends, and producing a soft and level bed. for us six it was about ten feet long by six in breadth. this time we lay under our tent, having pitched it more prudently with reference to the wind and the flame, and the usual huge fire blazed in front. supper was eaten off a large log, which some freshet had thrown up. this night we had a dish of arbor-vitae or cedar tea, which the lumberer sometimes uses when other herbs fail, but i had no wish to repeat the experiment. it had too medicinal a taste for my palate. there was the skeleton of a moose here, whose bones some indian hunters had picked on this very spot. i arose before dawn while my companions were still sleeping. there stood katahdin with distinct and cloudless outline in the moonlight ; and the rippling of the rapids was the only sound to break the stillness. standing on the shore, i once more cast my line into the stream. the speckled trout and silvery roach sped swiftly through the moonlight air until daylight brought satiety to my mind, and the minds of my companions, who had joined me. by six o'clock, having mounted our packs and a good blanketful of trout, ready dressed, and swung up such baggage and provision as we wished to leave behind on the tops of saplings, to be out of the reach of bears, we started for the summit of the mountain. uncle george had never been any nearer the mountain 36 katahdin than this, and there was not the slightest trace of man to guide us farther. at first, pushing a few rods up the aboljacknagesic, we fastened our bateau to a tree, and traveled up the north side, through burnt lands, now partially overgrown with young aspens and other shrubbery. soon, recrossing this stream, upon a jam of logs and rocks, and you could cross it by this means almost anywhere, we struck at once for the highest peak. this course would lead us parallel to a dark seam in the forest, which marked the bed of a tor rent, and over a slight spur, from whose bare summit we could get an outlook over the country, and climb directly up the peak, which would then be close at hand. seen from this point, katahdin presented a different aspect from any mountain i have seen, there being a greater proportion of naked rock rising abruptly from the forest; and we looked up at this blue barrier as if it were some fragment of a wall which anciently bounded the earth in that direction. setting the compass for a northeast course, we were soon buried in the woods. we soon began to meet with traces of bear and moose, and those of rabbits were everywhere visible. the tracks of moose, more or less recent, covered every square rod on the sides of the mountain; and these animals are probably more numerous now there than ever before, being driven into this wilderness, from all sides, by the settlements. the track of a full grown moose is like that of a cow, or larger. some times we found ourselves traveling in faint paths, which they had made, like cow-paths in the woods, only far more indistinct, being rather openings, afford ing imperfect vistas through the dense underwood, katahdin 37 than trodden paths; and everywhere the twigs had been browsed by them, clipped as smoothly as if by a knife. the bark of trees was stripped up by them to the height of eight or nine feet, in long, narrow strips, an inch wide, still showing the distinct marks of their teeth. we expected nothing less than to meet a herd of them every moment, and our nimrod held his shoot ing-iron in readiness; but, though numerous, they are so wary that the unskillful hunter might range the forest a long time before he could get sight of one. they are sometimes dangerous to encounter, and will not turn out for the hunter, but furiously rush on him and trample him to death, unless he is lucky enough to avoid them by dodging round a tree. the largest are nearly as large as a horse, and weigh sometimes one thousand pounds ; and it is said that they can step over a five-foot gate in their ordinary walk. they are described as exceedingly awkward-looking animals, with their long legs and short bodies, making a ludi crous figure when in full run, but making great head way nevertheless. it seemed a mystery to us how they could thread these woods, which it required all our suppleness to accomplish climbing, stooping, and winding, alternately. they are said to drop their long and branching horns on their backs, and make their way easily by the weight of their bodies. their flesh, which is more like beef than venison, is common in bangor market. we had proceeded seven or eight miles, till about noon, with frequent pauses to refresh the weary ones, cross ing a considerable mountain stream, which we con jectured to be murch brook, at whose mouth we had camped, all the time in woods, without having once 38 katahdin seen the summit, and rising very gradually, when the boatmen beginning to despair a little, and fearing that we were leaving the mountain on one side of us, for they had not entire faith in the compass, mccauslin climbed a tree, from the top of which he could see the peak, when it appeared that we had not swerved from a right line. by the side of a cool mountain rill, amid the woods, where the water began to partake of the purity and transparency of the air, we stopped to cook some of our fishes, which we had brought thus far in order to save our hard-bread and pork. we soon had a fire blazing, and stood around it, under the damp and sombre forest of firs and birches, each with a sharpened stick, three or four feet in length, upon which he had spitted his trout, or roach, previously well gashed and salted, our sticks radiating like the spokes of a wheel from one centre, and each crowd ing his particular fish into the most desirable exposure. thus we regaled ourselves, drinking meanwhile at the spring, till one man's pack, at least, was considerably lightened, when we again took up our line of march. at length we reached an elevation sufficiently bare to afford a view of the summit, still distant and blue, almost as if retreating from us. a torrent was seen tumbling down in front. but this glimpse at our whereabouts was soon lost, and we were buried in the woods again. the wood was chiefly yellow birch, spruce, fir, mountain-ash, and moose-wood. it was the worst kind of traveling. bunch-berries were very abundant as well as solomon's-seal and moose-berries. blueberries were distributed along our whole route; and in one place the bushes were drooping with the weight of the fruit, still as fresh as ever. such patches katahdin 39 afforded a grateful repast, and served to bait the tired party forward. when any lagged behind, the cry of "blueberries" was most effectual to bring them up. even at this elevation we passed through a moose yard, formed by a large flat rock, four or five rods square, where they tread down the snow in winter. at length, fearing that if we held the direct course to the summit, we should not find any water near our camp ing-ground, we gradually swerved to the west, till, at four o'clock, we struck again the torrent which i have mentioned, and here, in view of the summit, the weary party decided to camp that night. while my companions were seeking a suitable spot for this purpose, i improved the little daylight that was left in climbing the mountain alone. we were in a deep and narrow ravine, sloping up to the clouds at an angle of nearly forty-five degrees, and hemmed in by walls of rock, which were at first covered with low trees, then with impenetrable thickets of scraggy birches and spruce trees, and with moss, but at last bare of any vegetation but lichens, and almost con tinually draped in clouds. following the course of the torrent, pulling myself up perpendicular falls of twenty or thirty feet, by the roots of firs and birches, and then perhaps walking a level rod or two in the thin stream, for it took up the whole road, ascending by huge steps, as it were, a giant's stairway, down which a river flowed, i had soon cleared the trees and paused to look back over the country. the torrent was from fifteen to thirty feet wide, without a tributary, and seemingly not diminishing in breadth as i advanced ; but still it came rushing and roaring down, with a copious tide, over and amidst masses of bare rock, 40 katahdin from the very clouds, as though a waterspout had just burst over the mountain. leaving this at last, i began to work my way up the nearest peak, at first scram bling on all fours over the tops of ancient black spruce trees, from two to ten or twelve feet in height, their tops flat and spreading, and their foliage blue and nipped with cold, as if for centuries they had ceased growing upward against the bleak sky. i walked some rods erect upon the tops of these trees, which were overgrown with moss and mountain cranberries. it seemed that in the course of time they had filled up the intervals between the huge rocks, and the cold wind had uniformly leveled all over. there was ap parently a belt of this kind running quite round the mountain. once, slumping through, i looked down ten feet, into a dark and cavernous region, and saw the stem of a spruce, on whose top i stood as on a mass of coarse basket-work, fully nine inches in diameter at the ground. these holes were bears' dens, and the bears were even then at home. this was the sort of garden i made my way over, certainly the most treach erous and porous country i ever traveled. but nothing could exceed the toughness of the twigs not one snapped under my weight, for they had slowly grown. having slumped, scrambled, rolled, bounced, and walked by turns, over this scraggy country, i arrived upon a side-hill where gray, silent rocks were the flocks and herds that pastured. this brought me to the skirt of a cloud, and bounded my walk that night. when i returned to my companions, they had se lected a camping-ground on the torrent's edge, and were resting ; one was on the sick list, rolled in a blanket on a damp shelf of rock. it was savage and dreary katahdin 41 scenery, so wildly rough that they looked long to find a level and open space for the tent. we could not well camp higher for want of fuel ; and the trees here seemed so evergreen and sappy that we almost doubted if they would acknowledge the influence of fire; but fire prevailed at last and blazed like a good citizen of the world. it was perhaps a more grand and desolate place for a night's lodging than the summit would have been, being in the neighborhood of those wild trees, and of the torrent. some more aerial and finer-spirited winds rushed and roared through the ravine all night, from time to time arousing our fire and dispersing the embers about. it was as if we lay in the very nest of a young whirlwind. at midnight, one of my bedfellows, being startled in his dreams by the sudden blazing up to its top of a fir-tree, whose green boughs were dried by the heat, sprang up with a cry from his bed, think ing the world on fire, and drew the whole camp after him. in the morning, after whetting our appetite on some raw pork, a wafer of hard-bread, and a dipper of con densed cloud or waterspout, we began to make our way up the falls ; this time choosing the highest peak, which was not the one i had approached before. but soon my companions were lost to my sight behind the mountain ridge in my rear, and i climbed alone over huge rocks, loosely poised, a mile or more, still edging toward the clouds ; for though the day was clear else where, the summit was concealed by mist. the moun tain seemed a vast aggregation of loose rocks, as if some time it had rained rocks, and they lay as they fell, nowhere fairly at rest, but leaning on each other with cavities between. they were the raw materials 42 katahdin of a planet dropped from an unseen quarry, which the vast chemistry of nature would anon work up into the smiling and verdant plains and valleys of earth. at length i entered within the skirts of the cloud which seemed forever drifting over the summit, and yet would never be gone, but was generated out of that pure air as fast as it flowed away. when i reached the summit of the ridge, which those who have seen it in clearer weather say is about five miles long and contains a thousand acres of table-land, i was deep within the hostile ranks of clouds, and all objects were obscured by them. now the wind would blow me out a yard of sunlight, wherein i stood ; then a gray, dawn ing light was all it could accomplish, the cloud-line ever rising and falling with the wind's intensity. some times it seemed as if the summit would be cleared in a few moments and smile in sunshine ; but what was gained on one side was lost on another. it was like sitting in a chimney and waiting for the smoke to blow away. it was, in fact, a cloud-factory. occasionally, when the windy columns broke in to me, i caught sight of a dark, damp crag to the right or left ; the mist driving ceaselessly between it and me. some part of the beholder seems to escape between the loose grating of his ribs as he ascends. he is more lone than you can imagine. vast, titanic, inhuman nature has got him at disadvantage. she does not smile on him as in the plains. she seems to say sternly: "why came ye here before your time? this ground is not prepared for you. is it not enough that i smile in the valleys? i have never made this soil for thy feet, this air for thy breathing, these rocks for thy neighbors. i cannot pity nor fondle thee here, but katahdin 43 forever relentlessly drive thee hence to where i am kind." at length, fearing that my companions would be anxious to reach the river before night, and knowing that the clouds might rest on the mountain for days, i was compelled to descend. occasionally, as i came down, the wind would blow a vista open, through which i could see the country eastward, boundless forests, and lakes and streams, gleaming in the sun. now and then some small bird of the sparrow family would flit away before me, unable to command its ' course, like a fragment of the gray rock blown off by the wind. i found my companions where i had left them, gathering the mountain cranberries, which filled every crevice between the rocks, together with blueberries, which had a spicier flavor the higher up they grew. from this elevation, just on the skirts of the clouds, we could overlook the country, west and south, for a hundred miles immeasurable forest no clearing, no house ! it did not look as if a solitary traveler had cut so much as a walking-stick there. countless lakes moosehead in the southwest, forty miles long by ten wide; chesuncook, eighteen long by three wide; and a hundred others ; and mountains, also, whose names, for the most part, are known only to the indians. the forest looked like a firm grass sward, and the effect of these lakes in its midst has been well compared to that of a "mirror broken into a thousand fragments, and wildly scattered over the grass, reflecting the full blaze of the sun." setting out on our return to the river, still at an early hour in the day, we decided to follow the course of the 44 katahdin torrent as long as it would not lead us too far out of our way. we thus traveled about four miles in the very torrent itself, continually crossing and recrossing it, leaping from rock to rock, and jumping with the stream down falls of seven or eight feet, or sometimes sliding down on our backs in a thin sheet of water. this ravine had been the scene of an extraordinary freshet in the spring, apparently accompanied by a slide from the mountain. for a rod or two, on either side of its channel, the trees were barked and splin tered up to their tops, the birches bent over, twisted, and sometimes finely split, like a stable-broom; some,' a foot in diameter, snapped off, and whole clumps of trees bent over with the weight of rocks piled on them. in one place we noticed a rock, two or three feet in diameter, lodged nearly twenty feet high in the crotch of a tree. for the whole four miles we saw but one rill emptying in, and the volume of water did not seem to be increased from the first. at one place we were startled by seeing, on a little sandy shelf by the side of the stream, the fresh print of a man's foot; but at last we remembered that we had struck this stream on the way up, and one had de scended into the ravine for a drink. after leaving the torrent, being in doubt about our course, tom threw down his pack at the foot of the loftiest spruce tree at hand, and shinned up the bare trunk some twenty feet, and then climbed through the green tower, lost to our sight, until he held the topmost spray in his hand. " where away does the summit bear? where the burnt lands? "we cried. the last he could only conjecture ; he descried, how ever, a little meadow and pond, lying probably in our katahdin 45 course, which we concluded to steer for. on reaching this secluded meadow, we found fresh tracks of moose on the shore of the pond, and the water was still unsettled as if they had fled before us. a little far ther, in a dense thicket, we seemed to be still on their trail. pursuing this course, we soon reached the open land, which went sloping down some miles toward the penobscot. perhaps i most fully realized that this was primeval, untamed, and forever untamable nature, while coming down this part of the mountain. we were passing over " burnt lands," though they showed no recent marks of fire, hardly so much as a charred stump, but looked rather like a natural pasture for the moose and deer, exceedingly wild and desolate, with occa sional strips of timber crossing them, and low poplars springing up, and patches of blueberries here and there. ere long we recognized some rocks and other features in the landscape, and, quickening our pace, by two o'clock we reached the bateau. here we had expected to dine on trout, but in this glaring sunlight they were slow to take the bait, so we were compelled to make the most of the crumbs of our hard-bread and our pork, which were both nearly exhausted. about four o'clock, the same afternoon, we com menced our return voyage, which would require but little if any poling. in shooting rapids the boatmen use large and broad paddles, instead of poles, to guide the boat with. though we glided so swiftly, and often smoothly, down, where it had cost us no slight effort to get up, our present voyage was attended with far more danger, for if we fairly struck one of the thousand 46 katahdin rocks by which we were surrounded, the boat would be swamped in an instant. when a boat is swamped under these circumstances, the boatmen commonly find no difficulty in keeping afloat at first, for the cur rent keeps both them and their cargo up for a long way down the stream ; and if they can swim, they have only to work their way gradually to the shore. the greatest danger is of being caught in an eddy behind some large rock, and being carried round and round under the surface till they are drowned. mccauslin pointed out some rocks which had been the scene of a fatal accident of this kind. sometimes the body is not thrown out for several hours. in shooting the rapids, the boatman has this problem to solve: to choose a safe course amid a thousand sunken rocks, scattered over a quarter or half a mile, at the same time that he is moving steadily on at the rate of fifteen miles an hour. stop he cannot; the only question is, where will he go ? the bowman chooses the course with all his eyes about him, striking broad off with his paddle, and drawing the boat by main force into her course. the sternman faithfully follows the bow. we were soon at the aboljacarmegus falls. anxious to avoid the delay, as well as the labor, of the portage here, our boatmen went forward first to reconnoitre, and concluded to let the bateau down the falls, carry ing the baggage only over the portage. jumping from rock to rock until nearly in the middle of the stream, we were ready to receive the boat arid let her down over the first fall, some six or seven feet perpendicular. the boatmen stand upon the edge of a shelf of rock in from one to two feet of rapid water, one on each side of the boat, and let it slide gently over, till the katahdin 47 bow is run out ten or twelve feet in the air ; then, let ting it drop squarely, while one holds the painter, the other leaps in, and his companion following, they are whirled down the rapids to a new fall, or to smooth water. in a very few minutes they had accomplished a passage in safety, which would be as foolhardy for the unskillful to attempt as the descent of niagara itself. having carried round pockwockomus falls, our oars soon brought us to the katepskonegan * carry, where we decided to camp, leaving our bateau to be carried over in the morning. one shoulder of each of the boatmen showed a red spot as large as one's hand, worn by the bateau on this expedition; and this shoulder, as it did all the work, was perceptibly lower than its fellow, from long service. the drivers are accustomed to work in the cold water in the spring, rarely ever dry ; and if one falls in all over, he rarely changes his clothes till night, if then even. mccauslin said soberly that he had seen where six men were wholly under water at once, at a jam, with their shoulders to handspikes. if the log did not start, then they had to put out their heads to breathe. the driver works as long as he can see, from dark to dark, and at night has not time to eat his supper and dry his clothes fairly, before he is asleep on his cedar bed. we lay that night on the very bed made by such a party, stretching our tent over the poles which were still standing, but re-shingling the damp and faded bed with fresh leaves. in the morning we carried our boat over and 1 ka-tep-sko-ne'gan. now commonly called debsconeag (deb-sko neg'). 48 katahdin launched it, making haste lest the wind should rise. the boatmen ran down passamagamet, and soon after ambejijis falls, while we walked round with the baggage. we made a hasty breakfast at the head of ambejijis lake, on the remainder of our pork, and were soon rowing across its smooth surface, under a pleasant sky, the mountain being now clear of clouds in the northeast. taking turns at the oars, we shot rapidly across deep cove, the foot of pamadumcook, and the north twin, at the rate of six miles an hour, the wind not being high enough to disturb us, and reached the dam at noon. the boatmen went through one of the log sluices in the bateau, where the fall was ten feet at the bottom, and took us in below. here was the longest rapid in our voyage. now amid the eddies, now darting to this side of the stream, now to that, gliding swift and smooth near to our destruction, or striking broad off with the paddle and drawing the boat to right or left with all our might, in order to avoid a rock, we soon ran through this mile, and floated in quakish lake. after such a voyage, the troubled and angry waters, which once had seemed terrible and not to be trifled with, appeared tamed and subdued ; they had been bearded and worried in their channels, pricked and whipped into submission with the spike-pole and pad dle, gone through and through with impunity, and all their spirit and their danger taken out of them, and the most swollen and impetuous rivers seemed but playthings henceforth. i began, at length, to under stand the boatman's familiarity with, and contempt for, the rapids. "those fowler boys," said mrs. mc causlin, " are perfect ducks for the water." they had katahdin 49 run down to lincoln, according to her, thirty or forty miles, in a bateau, in the night, for a doctor, when it was so dark they could not see a rod before them, and the river was swollen so as to be almost a con tinuous rapid, so that the doctor cried, when they brought him up by daylight, " why, tom, how did you see to steer?" "we did n't steer much only kept her straight." and yet they met with no accident. when we reached the millinocket opposite to tom's house, and were waiting for his folks to set us over, for we had left our bateau above the grand falls, we discovered two canoes, with two men in each, turning up this stream from shad pond, one keeping the oppo site side of a small island before us, while the other ap proached the side where we were standing, examining the banks carefully for muskrats as they came along. the last proved to be louis neptune and his com panion, on their way up to chesuncook after moose; but we hardly knew them. at a little distance they might have been taken for quakers, with their broad brimmed hats, and overcoats with broad capes, seeking a settlement in this sylvania or, nearer at hand, for fashionable gentlemen the morning after a spree. met face to face, these indians in their native woods looked like the sinister and slouching fellows whom you meet picking up strings and paper in the streets of a city. there is, in fact, a remarkable and unexpected resem blance between the degraded savage and the lowest classes in a great city. the one is no more a child of nature than the other. neptune at first was only anx ious to know what we "kill," seeing some partridges in the hands of one of the party, but we had assumed too much anger to permit of a reply. we thought 50 katahdin indians had some honor before. but " me been sick. oh, me unwell now. you make bargain, then me go." they had in fact been delayed by a drunken frolic, and had not yet recovered from its effects. they had some young musquash in their canoes, which they dug out of the banks with a hoe, for food. so they went on up the millinocket, and we kept down the bank of the penobscot, leaving tom at his home. thus a man shall lead his life away here on the edge of the wilderness, in a new world ; shall live, as it were, in the primitive age of the world, a primitive man. he lives three thousand years deep into time. can you well go further back in history than this ? ay ! ay ! for there turns up but now into the mouth of millinocket stream a still more ancient and primitive man. in a bark vessel sewn with the roots of the spruce, with hornbeam paddles, he dips his way along. he builds no house of logs, but a wigwam of skins. he eats no hot bread and sweet cake, but musquash and moose-meat and the fat of bears. he glides up the millinocket and is lost to my sight, as a more dis tant and misty cloud is seen flitting by behind a nearer, and is lost in space. so he goes about his destiny. after having passed the night, and buttered our boots for the last time, at uncle george's, whose dogs almost devoured him for joy at his return, we kept on down the river the next day about eight miles on foot, and then took a bateau, with a man to pole it, to matta wamkeag, ten more. at the middle of that very night, we reached oldtown, where we heard the confused din and clink of a hundred saws, which never rest, and at six o'clock the next morning one of the party was steaming his way to massachusetts. katahdin 51 what is most striking in the maine wilderness is the continuousness of the forest. except the burnt lands, the narrow intervals on the rivers, the bare tops of the high mountains, and the lakes and streams, the forest is uninterrupted. it is even more grim and wild than you had anticipated, a damp and intricate wilderness. the aspect of the country, indeed, is universally stern and savage, excepting the distant views of the for est from hills, and the lake prospects. the lakes are something which you are unprepared for ; they lie so exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine fringe on their edges. these are riot the artificial forests of an english king. here prevail no forest laws but those of nature. the aborigines have never been dispossessed, nor nature disforested. it is a country full of evergreen trees, of silver birches and watery maples, the ground dotted with insipid small, red berries, and strewn with moss-grown rocks a country diversified with innumerable lakes and rapid streams, peopled with trout, salmon, shad, pickerel, and other fishes ; the forest resounding at rare intervals with the note of the chickadee, the blue jay, and the woodpecker, the scream of the fish hawk and the eagle, the laugh of the loon, and the whistle of ducks along the solitary streams; at night, with the hooting of owls and howling of wolves; in summer, swarming with myriads of black flies and mosquitoes, more formidable than wolves to the white man. such is the home of the moose, the bear, the caribou, the wolf, the beaver, and the indian. who shall describe the inexpressible tenderness and immortal life of the grim forest, where the decaying trees seem to enjoy a perpetual youth; and nature, like a serene infant, is 52 katahdin too happy to make a noise, except by a few tinkling, lisping birds and trickling rills? i am reminded by my journey how exceedingly new this country still is. we have advanced by leaps to the pacific, and left many a lesser oregon and california unexplored behind us. though the railroad and the telegraph have been established on the shores of maine, the indian still looks out from her interior mountains to the sea. there stands the city of bangor, fifty miles up the penobscot, at the head of navigation, the prin cipal lumber depot on this continent, like a star on the edge of night, still hewing at the forests of which it is built, already overflowing with the luxuries and re finement of europe, and sending its vessels to spain, to england, and to the west indies for its groceries and yet only a few axemen have gone " up river," into the howling wilderness which feeds it. twelve miles in the rear is the indian island, the home of the penob scot tribe, and then commence the bateau and the canoe ; and sixty miles above, the country is virtually unmapped and unexplored, and there still waves the virgin forest of the new world. chesuncook at five p. m., september 13, 1853, 1 left boston, in the steamer for bangor. it was a warm and still night, and the sea was as smooth as a small lake in summer, merely rippled. the passengers went singing on the deck till ten o'clock. now we see the cape ann lights, and now pass near a small village-like fleet of mackerel fishers at anchor. from the wonders of the deep we go below to yet deeper sleep. and then the absurdity of being waked up in the night by a man who wants the job of blacking your boots! i trusted that these old customs were abolished. they might with the same propriety insist on blacking your face. i heard of one man who complained that somebody had stolen his boots in the night ; and when he had found them, he wanted to know what they had done to them they had spoiled them he never put that stuff on them ; and the bootblack narrowly escaped paying damages. anxious to get out of tha whale's belly, i rose early, and joined some old salts who were smoking by a dim light on a sheltered part of the deck. i was proud to find that i had stood the voyage so well. we watched the first signs of dawn through an open port ; but the day seemed to hang fire. at length an afri can prince rushed by, observing, "twelve o'clock, gentlemen!" and blew out the light. it was moon rise. so i slunk down into the monster's bowels again. we reached bangor about noon. when i arrived, 54 chesuncook my companion that was to be had gone up river, and engaged an indian, joe aitteon, a son of the governor, to go with us to chesuncook lake. joe arrived by cars at bangor that evening, with his canoe and a compan ion who was going to join him in moose-hunting at chesuncook when we had done with him. they took supper at my friend's house and lodged in his barn. the next morning, joe and his canoe were put on board the stage for moosehead lake, sixty and odd miles distant, an hour before we started in an open wagon. we carried hard-bread, pork, smoked beef, tea, sugar, etc., seemingly enough for a regiment. it rained all day and till the middle of the next fore noon, concealing the landscape almost entirely ; but we had hardly got out of the streets of bangor before i began to be exhilarated by the sight of the wild fir and spruce tops, and those of other primitive evergreens, peering through the mist in the horizon. it was like the sight and odor of cake to a schoolboy. he who rides and keeps the beaten track studies the fences chiefly. near bangor, the fence-posts, on ac count of the frost's heaving them in the clayey soil, were not planted in the ground, but were mortised into a beam lying on the surface. afterwards the prevailing fences were log ones, with sometimes a virginia fence, or else rails slanted over crossed stakes ; and these zigzagged or played leap-frog all the way to the lake, keeping just ahead of us. the houses were far apart, commonly small and of one story. there was very little land under cultivation, yet the forest did not often border the road. we saw large flocks of pigeons, and several times came within a rod or two of partridges in the road. my companion said that in one journey out chesuncook 55 of bangor he and his son had shot sixty partridges from his buggy. the mountain-ash was now very handsome, as also the hobble-bush, with its ripe purple berries mixed with red. the canada thistle was the prevailing weed, the roadside in many places, and fields not long cleared, being densely filled with it as with a crop, to the exclusion of everything else. there were also whole fields full of ferns, now rusty and withering. there were many late buttercups, and fire-weed com monly where there had been a burning, and the pearly everlasting. i noticed occasionally very long troughs which supplied the road with water, and my compan ion said that three dollars annually were granted by the state to one man in each school-district, who provided and maintained a suitable water-trough by the roadside for the use of travelers. maine is banish ing bar-rooms from its highways and conducting the mountain springs thither. at a fork in the road about twenty miles from moose head lake, i saw a guide-post surmounted by a pair of moose-horns, with the word "monson" painted on one blade, and the name of some other town on the other. they are sometimes used for ornamental hat trees, in front entries. we reached monson after dark. at four o'clock the next morning, still in the rain, we pursued our journey. in many places the road was in that condition called repaired, having just been whittled into the required semi-cylindrical form with the shovel and scraper, with all the softest inequalities in the middle, like a hog's back with the bristles up. as you looked off each side of the bare sphere into the horizon, the ditches were awful to behold. 50 chesuncook at a tavern hereabouts the hostler greeted our horse as an old acquaintance, though he did not remember the driver. he said that he had taken care of that little mare for a short time a year or two before at the mount kineo l house, and thought she was not in as good condition as then. every man to his trade. i am not acquainted with a single horse in the world, not even the one that kicked me. we got our first view of moosehead lake a suitably wild-looking sheet of water, sprinkled with small, low islands, which were covered with shaggy spruce and other wild wood seen over the infant port of greenville. there was no summer road any farther in this direction, but a winter road, that is, one passable only when deep snow covers its inequalities, up the east side of the lake about twelve miles. i was here first introduced to joe. he had ridden all the way on the outside of the stage, the day before, in the rain, and was well wetted. he was a good looking indian, twenty-four years old, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion. he had worked a good deal as a lumberman. at eight o'clock the steamer, with her bell and whistle, scaring the moose, summoned us on board. she is chiefly used by lumberers for the transportation of themselves, their boats, and supplies. there were but few passengers : a st. francis indian, two explorers for lumber, three men who landed at sandbar island, and a gentleman who lives on deer island, eleven miles up the lake ; these, i think, were all beside our selves. the lake is much broken by islands, and the scenery 1 kin'e-o. chestjncook 57 is varied and interesting. mountains were seen on all sides but the northwest, their summits now lost in the clouds. you see but three or four houses for the whole length of the lake, or about forty miles, and the shore is an unbroken wilderness. the prevailing wood seemed to be spruce, fir, birch, and rock maple. you could easily distinguish the hard wood from the soft, or " black growth," as it is called, at a great distance, the former being smooth, round-topped, and light green, with a bowery and cultivated look. mount kineo, at which the boat touched, is a peninsula with a narrow neck, about midway the lake on the east side. the precipice on the land side of this is so high and perpendicular that you can jump from the top, many hundred feet, into the water, which makes up behind the point. we reached the head of the lake about noon. the weather had in the meanwhile cleared, though the mountains were still capped with clouds. the steamer here approached a long pier projecting from the northern wilderness, and built of some of its logs, and whistled, where not a cabin nor a mortal was to be seen. at length a mr. hinckley, who has a camp at the other end of the " carry," appeared with a truck drawn by an ox and a horse over a rude log-rail way through the woods. the next thing was to get our canoe and effects over the carry into the penobscot river. this railway from the lake to the river occu pied the middle of a clearing two or three rods wide and perfectly straight through the forest. we walked across while our baggage was drawn behind. there was a very slight rise above the lake and at length a gradual descent to the penobscot, which i 58 chesuncook was surprised to find here a large stream from twelve to fifteen rods wide. at the north end of the carry, in the midst of a clearing of sixty acres or more, there was a log camp with a house adjoining, for the accommodation of the carry-man's family and passing lumberers. we now proceeded to get our dinner and to pitch the canoe. joe took a small brand from the fire and blew the heat and flame against the pitch on his birch, and so melted and spread it. sometimes he put his mouth over the suspected spot and sucked, to see if it admitted air ; and at one place where we stopped he set his canoe high on crossed stakes, and poured water into it. i heard him swear once, during this operation, about his knife being as dull as a hoe. at mid-afternoon we embarked. our birch was nineteen and a half feet long by two and a half at the widest part, and fourteen inches deep, and painted green. this carried us three with our baggage. we had two heavy, though slender, rock-maple paddles. joe placed birch-bark on the bottom for us to sit on, and slanted cedar splints against the cross-bars to pro tect our backs, while he himself sat upon a cross-bar in the stern. the baggage occupied the middle of the canoe. we also paddled by turns in the bows, now sitting with our legs extended, now sitting upon our legs, and now rising upon our knees ; but i found none of these positions endurable, and was reminded of the complaints of the old jesuit missionaries of the torture they endured from long confinement in constrained positions in canoes, in their voyages from quebec to the huron country ; but afterwards i sat on the cross bars, or stood up, and experienced no inconvenience. chesuncook 59 it was deadwater for a couple of miles. the river had been raised about two feet by the rain, and lumberers were hoping for a flood sufficient to bring down the logs that were left in the spring. its banks were seven or eight feet high and densely covered with spruce, fir, arbor-vitse, birch, maple, beech, ash, aspen, many civil-looking elms, now imbrowned, along the stream, and at first a few hemlocks. the immediate shores were also densely covered with alder, willows, and the like. there were a few lily-pads along the sides. many fresh tracks of moose were visible where the water was shallow and on the shore, and the lily-stems were freshly bitten off by them. after paddling about two miles, we turned up lobster stream, which comes in from the southeast. joe said that it was so called from small fresh-water lobsters found in it. my companion wished to look for moose signs, and intended, if it proved worth the while, to camp up that way. the kingfisher flew be fore us, the pigeon woodpecker was seen and heard, and nuthatches and chickadees close at hand. we saw a pair of moose-horns on the shore, and i asked joe if a moose had shed them ; but he said there was a head attached to them, and i knew that they did not shed their heads more than once in their lives. after ascending about a mile and a half, we re turned to the penobscot. just below the mouth of the lobster we found quick water, and the river ex panded to twenty or thirty rods in width. the moose tracks were quite numerous and fresh here. we noticed in a great many places narrow and well-trod den paths by which they had come down to the river, and where they had slid on the steep and clayey bank. 60 chesuncook their tracks were either close to the edge of the stream or in shallow water ; the holes made by their feet in the soft bottom being visible for a long time. they were particularly numerous where there was a small bay bordered by a strip of meadow, or separated from the river by a low peninsula covered with grass, wherein they had waded back and forth and eaten the pads. at one place, where we landed to pick up a duck, which my companion had shot, joe peeled a canoe birch for bark for his hunting-horn. he then asked if we were not going to get the other duck, for his sharp eyes had seen another fall in the bushes a little farther along, and my companion obtained it. we reached, about sundown, a small island at the head of what joe called the moosehorn deadwater (the moosehorn, in which he was going to hunt that night, coming in about three miles below), and on the upper end of this we decided to camp. after clearing a small space amid the dense spruce and fir trees, we covered the damp ground with a shingling of fir-twigs, and, while joe was preparing his birch horn and pitch ing his canoe, for this had to be done whenever we stopped long enough to build a fire, and was the principal labor he took upon himself at such times, we collected fuel for the night, large wet and rotting logs, which had lodged at the head of the island, for our hatchet was too small for effective chopping; but we did not kindle a fire lest the moose should smell it. joe set up a couple of forked stakes, and prepared half a dozen poles, ready to cast one of our blankets over in case it rained in the night. we also plucked the ducks which had been killed for breakfast. while we were thus engaged in the twilight, we chesuncook 61 heard faintly from far down the stream, what sounded like two strokes of a woodchopper's axe, echoing dully through the grim solitude. when we told joe of this he exclaimed, " by george, i'll bet that was a moose! they make a noise like that." at starlight we dropped down the stream as far as the moosehorn, joe telling us that we must be very silent, and he himself making no noise with his paddle while he urged the canoe along with effective impulses. it was a still night and suitable for this purpose, for if there is wind the moose will smell you, and joe was very confident that he should get some. the harvest moon had just risen, and its level rays began to light up the forest on our right, while we glided downward in the shade on the same side, against the little breeze that was stirring. the lofty, spiring tops of the spruce and fir were very black against the sky, close bordering this broad avenue on each side; and the beauty of the scene, as the moon rose above the forest, it would not be easy to describe. a bat flew over our heads, arid we heard a few faint notes of birds from time to time, or the sudden plunge of a musquash, or saw one crossing the stream before us, or heard the sound of a rill emptying in, swollen by the recent rain. about a mile below the island, when the solitude seemed to be growing more complete every moment, we suddenly saw the light and heard the crackling of a fire on the bank, and discovered the camp of the two explorers; they standing before it in their red shirts and talking of the adventures of the day. we glided by without speaking, close under the bank, within a couple of rods of them ; and joe, taking his horn, imi tated the call of the moose, till we suggested that they 62 chesuncook might fire on us. this was the last we saw of them, and we never knew whether they detected or sus pected us. i have often wished since that i was with them. they search for timber over a given section, climbing hills and often high trees to look off ; explore the streams by which it is to be driven, and the like; spend five or six weeks in the woods, they two alone, a hun dred miles or more from any town, roaming about, and sleeping on the ground where night overtakes them, depending chiefly on the provisions they carry with them, though they do not decline what game they come across; and then in the fall they return and make report to their employers. experienced men get three or four dollars a day for this work. it is a solitary and adventurous life. this discovery accounted for the sounds we had heard, and destroyed the prospect of seeing moose yet awhile. at length, when we had left the explorers far behind, joe laid down his paddle, drew forth his birch horn, a straight one about fifteen inches long and three or four wide at the mouth, tied round with strips of the same bark, and, standing up, imitated the call of the moose ugh-ugh-ugh, or oo-oo-oo-oo, and then a prolonged oo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o, and listened attentively for several minutes. we asked him what kind of noise he expected to hear. he said that if a moose heard it, he guessed we should find out ; we should hear him coming half a mile off ; he would come close to, perhaps into, the water, and my companion must wait till he got fair sight, and then aim just behind the shoulder. the moose venture out to the riverside to feed and chesuncook 63 drink at night. earlier in the season the hunters do not use a horn to call them out, but steal upon them as they are feeding along the sides of the stream, and often the first notice they have of one is the sound of the water dropping from its muzzle. an indian whom i heard imitate the voice of the moose, and also that of the caribou and the deer, using a much longer horn than joe's, told me that the first could be heard eight or ten miles, sometimes; it was a loud sort of bellowing sound, clearer and more sonorous than the lowing of cattle, the caribou's a sort of snort, and the small deer's like that of a lamb. at length we turned up the moosehorn. this is a very meandering stream, only a rod or two in width, but comparatively deep, fitly enough named moose horn, whether from its windings or its inhabitants. it was bordered here and there by narrow meadows between the stream and the endless forest, affording favorable places for the moose to feed, and to call them out on. we proceeded half a mile up this, as through a narrow, winding canal, where the tall, dark spruce and firs and arbor-vitae towered on both sides in the moonlight, forming a perpendicular forest-edge of great height. in two places stood a small stack of hay on the bank, ready for the lumberer's use in the winter, looking strange enough there. again and again joe called the moose, placing the canoe close by some favorable point of meadow, but listened in vain to hear one come rushing through the woods, and concluded that they had been hunted too much thereabouts. we saw, many times, what to our imaginations looked like a gigantic moose, with his horns, peering from out the forest-edge, but we saw 64 chesuncook the forest only, and not its inhabitants, that night. so at last we turned about. there was now a little fog on the water, though it was a fine clear night above. several times we heard the hooting of a great horned owl, and told joe that he would call out the moose for him, for he made a sound considerably like the horn. but joe answered that the moose had heard that sound a thousand times and knew better; and oftener still we were startled by the plunge of a musquash. once, when we were listening for moose, we heard come faintly echoing from far through the moss-clad aisles a dull, dry, rushing sound with a solid core to it, yet as if half smothered under the grasp of the luxu riant and fungus-like forest, like the shutting of a door in some distant entry of the damp and shaggy wilder ness. when we asked joe in a whisper what it was, he answered, "tree fall." there is something singularly grand and impressive in the sound of a tree falling in a perfectly calm night like this, as if the agencies which overthrow it did not need to be excited, but worked with a subtle, deliberate, and conscious force, like a boa-constrictor, and more effectively then than even in a windy day. if there is any such difference, perhaps it is because trees with the dews of the night on them are heavier than by day. having reached the camp, about ten o'clock, we kindled our fire and went to bed. each of us had a blanket, in which he lay on the fir-twigs with his extremities toward the fire. it was worth the while to lie down in a country where you could afford such great fires. we had first rolled up a large log, some eighteen inches through and ten feet long, for a back log, to last all night, and then piled on the trees to the chesuncook 65 height of three or four feet, no matter how green or damp. in fact, we burned as much wood that night as would, with economy and an air-tight stove, last a poor family in one of our cities all winter. it was very agreeable, as well as independent, thus lying in the open air, and the fire kept our uncovered extremities warm enough. the jesuit missionaries used to say that in their journeys with the indians in canada they lay on a bed which had never been shaken up since the creation, unless by earthquakes. it is surprising with what impunity and comfort one who has always lain in a warm bed in a close apartment, and studiously avoided draughts of air, can lie down on the ground without a shelter, roll himself in a blanket, and sleep before a fire, in a frosty autumn night, just after a long rain-storm, and even come to enjoy and value the fresh air. ' i lay awake awhile, watching the ascent of the sparks through the firs, and sometimes their descent in half-extinguished cinders on my blanket. they were as interesting as fireworks, going up in endless, suc cessive crowds, each after an explosion, in an eager, serpentine course, some to five or six rods above the treetops before they went out. when we awoke in the morning, there was consid erable frost whitening the leaves. we heard the sound of the chickadee and a few faintly lisping birds, and also of ducks in the water about the island. before the fog had fairly cleared away, we paddled down the stream again. these twenty miles of the penobscot between moosehead and chesuncook lakes are comparatively smooth, but from time to time the water is shallow and rapid, with rocks or gravel-beds 66 chesuncook where you can wade across. i looked very narrowly at the vegetation as we glided along close to the shore, and frequently made joe turn aside for me to pluck a plant. horehound, horsemint, and the sensitive fern grew close to the edge, under the willows and alders and wool-grass on the islands. it was too late for flowers, except a few asters, goldenrods, etc. in sev eral places we noticed the slight frame of a camp amid the forest by the riverside, where some lumberers or hunters had passed a night, and sometimes steps cut in the muddy or clayey bank in front of it. we stopped to fish for trout at the mouth of a small stream called ragmuff. here were the ruins of an old lumbering-camp, and a small space which had for merly been cleared and burned over was now densely overgrown with the red cherry and raspberries. while we were trying for trout, joe wande'red off up the ragmuff on his own errands, and when we were ready to start, was far beyond call. so we were compelled to make a fire and get our dinner here, not to lose time. some dark-reddish birds, with grayer females, and myrtle-birds hopped within six or eight feet of us and our smoke. perhaps they smelled the frying pork. they suggested that the few small birds found in the wilderness are on more familiar terms with the lumber man and hunter than those of the orchard and clearing with the farmer. i have since found the canada jay and partridges equally tame there, as if they had not yet learned to mistrust man entirely. joe at length returned, after an hour and a half, and said that he had been two miles up the stream explor ing and had seen a moose. as we continued down the stream i asked him how the ribs of the canoe chesuncook 67 were fastened to the side rails. he answered, " i don't know, i never noticed." talking with him about subsisting wholly on what the woods yielded, game, fish, berries, etc., i sug gested that his ancestors did so; but he answered that he had been brought up in such a way that he could not do it. "yes," said he, "that's the way they got a living, like wild fellows, wild as bears. by george ! i shan't go into the woods without provision hard bread, pork, etc." he had brought on a barrel of hard-bread and stored it at the carry for his hunting. however, though he was a governor's son, he had not learned to read. my eyes were all the while on the trees, distinguish ing between the black and white spruce and the fir. you paddle along in a narrow canal through an end less forest, and the vision i have in my mind's eye, still, is of the small, dark, and sharp tops of tall fir and spruce trees, and pagoda-like arbor-vitses, crowded together on each side, with various hard woods inter mixed. at one place we saw a small grove of slen der sapling white pines, the only collection of pines that i saw on this voyage. here and there, however, was a full-grown, tall, and slender, but defective one. all the rest of the pines had been driven off. how far men go for the material of their houses ! the inhabitants of the most civilized cities, in all ages, send into far, primitive forests, beyond the bounds of their civilization, where the moose and bear and sav age dwell, for their pine boards. and, on the other hand, the savage soon receives from cities iron arrow points, hatchets, and guns, to point his savageness with. 68 chesuncook the solid and well-defined fir-tops, like sharp and regular spearheads, black against the sky, gave a pe culiar dark and sombre look to the forest. the spruce tops have a similar but more ragged outline. i was struck by this universal spiring upward of the forest evergreens. not only the spruce and fir, but even the arbor-vitse and white pine, all spire upwards, lifting a dense spearhead of cones to the light and air, while their branches straggle after as they may. about six miles below ragmuff we turned up a small branch called pine stream to look for moose signs. we soon reached a small meadow which was for the most part densely covered with alders. as we were advancing along the edge of this, i heard a slight crackling of twigs deep in the alders, and turned joe's attention to it ; whereupon he began to push the canoe back rapidly. we had receded thus half a dozen rods when we spied two moose standing just on the edge of the open part of the meadow which we had passed, not more than six or seven rods distant, looking round the alders' at us. they made me think of rabbits, with their long ears and half-inquisitive, half-fright ened looks, the true denizens of the forest, filling a vacuum which now first i discovered had not been filled for me. our nimrod hastily stood up, and, while we ducked, fired over our heads one barrel at the foremost ; where upon this one dashed across the meadow and up a high bank. at the same instant the other, a young one, but as tall as a horse, leaped out into the stream in full sight, and there stood for a moment and uttered two or three trumpeting squeaks. the second barrel was leveled at the calf, and when we expected to see it drop, a loggers camp a cow moose chesuncook 69 after a little hesitation it, too, got out of the water, and dashed up the hill. from the style in which they went off, and the fact that our hunter was not used to stand ing up and firing from a canoe, i judged that we should not see anything more of them. the indian said that they were a cow and her calf a yearling, or perhaps two years old. it was but two or three rods across the meadow to the foot of the bank, which, like all the world thereabouts, was densely wooded ; but as soon as the moose had passed beyond the veil of the woods there was no sound of footsteps to be heard from the soft, damp moss which carpets that forest, and long before we landed perfect silence reigned. joe said, "if you wound 'em moose, me sure get 'em." we all landed at once. my companion reloaded ; the indian fastened his birch, threw off his hat, adjusted his waistband, seized the hatchet, and set out. he told me afterward that before we landed he had seen a drop of blood on the bank when it was two or three rods off. he proceeded rapidly through the woods with a pe culiar elastic and stealthy tread, looking to right and left on the ground, and stepping in the faint tracks of the wounded moose, now and then pointing in silence to a single drop of blood on the handsome shining leaves of the clintonia borealis, which on every side covered the ground, or to a dry fern-stem freshly broken, all the while chewing some leaf or else the spruce gum. after following the trail about forty rods in a pretty direct course, stepping over fallen trees and winding between standing ones, he at length lost it, for there were many other moose-tracks there, and returning once more to the last blood-stain, traced it a little way and lost it again, and gave it up entirely. he traced a few steps, 70 chesuncook also, the tracks of the calf; but, seeing no blood, soon relinquished the search. i observed, while he was tracking the moose, a cer tain reticence or moderation in him. he did not com municate several observations of interest which he made, as a white man would have done. at another time, when we heard a slight crackling of twigs and he landed to reconnoitre, he stepped lightly and grace fully, stealing through the bushes with the least pos sible noise, in a way in which no white man does as it were, finding a place for his foot each time. we pursued our voyage up pine stream, and soon coming to a part which was very shoal and also rapid, we took out the baggage and proceeded to carry it round, while joe got up with the canoe alone. we were just completing our portage when joe found the cow moose lying dead in the middle of the stream, which was so shallow that it rested on the bottom with hardly a third of its body above water. it had run about a hundred rods and sought the stream, cutting off a slight bend. no doubt a better hunter would have tracked it to this spot at once. my companion went in search of the calf again. i took hold of the ears of the moose, while joe pushed his canoe down-stream toward a favorable shore, and so we made out, though with some difficulty, its long nose frequently sticking in the bottom, to drag it into still shallower water. it was a brownish black, or a dark iron-gray, on the back and sides, but lighter beneath and in front. the extreme length was eight feet and two inches. another cow moose, which i have since measured in those woods, was six feet from the tip of the hoof to the shoulders, and eight feet long. chesuncook 71 a white hunter told me that the male was sometimes nine feet high to the top of the back, and weighed a thousand pounds. only the male has horns, and they rise two feet or more above the shoulders, which would make him in all, sometimes, eleven feet high ! the moose is singularly grotesque and awkward to look at. it reminded me of the camelopard, high before and low behind, and no wonder, for like it, it is fitted to browse on trees. the upper lip projected two inches beyond the lower for this purpose. joe proceeded to skin the moose with a pocket-knife; and a tragical business it was to see the ghastly naked red carcass appearing from within its seemly robe. at length joe had stripped off the hide and dragged it to the shore. he cut off a large mass of the meat to carry along, and another, together with the tongue and nose, he put with the hide on the shore to lie there all night, or till we returned. i was surprised that he thought of leaving this meat thus exposed by the side of the carcass, not fearing that any creature would touch it; but nothing did. this stream was so withdrawn, and the moose tracks were so fresh, that my companions, still bent on hunting, concluded to go farther up it and camp, and then hunt up or down at night. half a mile above this, as we paddled along, joe, hearing a slight rustling amid the alders and seeing something black, jumped up and whispered, " bear ! " but before the hunter had discharged his piece, he corrected himself to " beaver! hedgehog ! " the bullet killed a large hedgehog more than two feet and eight inches long. after about a mile of still water, we prepared our camp just at the foot of a considerable fall. little chopping was done 72 chesuncook that night, for fear of scaring the moose. we had moose-meat fried for supper. it tasted like tender beef, with perhaps more flavor. after supper, the moon having risen, we proceeded to hunt a mile up this stream, first "carrying" about the falls. we launched the canoe from the ledge over which the stream fell, but after half a mile of still water suitable for hunting, it became rapid again, and we were compelled to make our way along the shore, while joe endeavored to get up in the birch alone, though it was very difficult for him to pick his way amid the rocks in the night. we on the shore t^und the worst of walking, a perfect chaos of fallen and drifted trees, and of bushes projecting far over the water, and now and then we made our way across the mouth of a small tributary on a network of alders. so we went tumbling on in the dark, being on the shady side, effectually scaring all the moose and bears that might be thereabouts. at length we came to a standstill, and joe went forward to reconnoitre ; but he reported that it was a continuous rapid as far as he went, with no prospect of improve ment. so we turned about, hunting back to the camp through the still water. i got sleepy as it grew late, and fairly lost myself in sleep several times ; but all at once i would be aroused by the sound of joe's birch horn in the midst of all this silence calling the moose, ugh, ugh, oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo, and i prepared to hear a furious moose come rushing and crashing through the forest, and see him burst out on to the little strip of meadow by our side. but i had had enough of moose-hunting. i had been willing to learn how the indian manoeuvred ; but one moose killed was as good, if not as bad, as a dozen. chesuncook 73 the afternoon's tragedy, and my share in it, destroyed the pleasure of my adventure. i think that i could spend a year in the woods, fishing and hunting just enough to sustain myself, with satisfaction. this would be next to living like a philosopher on the fruits of the earth which you had raised. but this hunting of the moose merely for the satisfaction of killing him, not even for the sake of his hide, without making any extraordinary exertion or running any risk yourself, is too much like going out by night to some woodside pasture and shooting your neighbor's horses. these are god's own horses, poor, timid creatures, that will run fast enough as soon as they smell you, though they are nine feet high. joe told us of some hunters who a year or two before had shot down several oxen by night, somewhere in the maine woods, mistaking them for moose. and so might any of the hunters, and what is the difference in the sport, but the name ? in the former case, having killed one of god's oxen, you strip off its hide, because that is the common trophy, and, moreover, you have heard that it may be sold for moccasins, cut a steak from its haunches, and leave the huge carcass to smell to heaven for you. it is no better than to assist at a slaughter-house. this afternoon's experience suggested to me how base or coarse are the motives which commonly carry men into the wilderness. the explorers and lumberers generally are all hirelings, paid so much a day for their labor, and as such they have no more love for wild nature than wood-sawyers have for forests. other white men and indians who come here are for the most part hunters, whose object is to slay as many moose and other wild animals as possible. but could not 74 chesuncook one spend some weeks or years in the solitude of this vast wilderness with other employments than these employments perfectly sweet and innocent and ennobling? i already, and for weeks afterward, felt my nature the coarser for this part of my woodland experience, and was reminded that our life should be lived as tenderly and daintily as one would pluck a flower. with these thoughts, when we reached our camping ground, i decided to leave my companions to continue moose-hunting down the stream, while i prepared the camp, though they requested me not to chop much nor make a large fire, for fear i should scare their game. in the midst of the damp fir wood, high on the mossy bank, about nine o'clock of this bright moon light night, i kindled a fire, when they were gone, and, sitting on the fir-twigs, within sound of the falls, wrote down some of the reflections which i have here expanded. as i sat there, i remembered how far on every hand that wilderness stretched, before you came to cleared or cultivated fields, and wondered if any bear or moose was watching the light of my fire. strange that so few ever come to the woods to see how the pine lives and grows and spires, lifting its evergreen arms to the light to see its perfect success. most are content to behold it in the shape of many broad boards brought to market, and deem that its true success. but the pine is no more lumber than man is; and to be made into boards and houses is no more its true and highest use than the truest use of a man is to be cut down and made into manure. can he who has discovered only some of the values of whale bone and whale-oil be said to have discovered the true chesuncook 75 use of the whale ? can he who slays the elephant for his ivory be said to have " seen the elephant " ? these are petty and accidental uses; just as if a stronger race were to kill us in order to make buttons and flageolets of our bones; for everything may serve a lower as well as a higher use. every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine-trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it. is it the lumberman, then, who is the friend and lover of the pine, stands nearest to it, and understands its nature best ? no ! no ! it is the poet ; who does not fondle it with an axe, nor tickle it with a saw, nor stroke it with a plane, who knows whether its heart is false without cutting into it, who has not bought the stumpage of the township on which it stands. all the pines shudder and heave a sigh when that man steps on the forest floor. i have been into the lumber-yard, and the carpenter's shop, and the lampblack-factory, and the turpentine clearing ; but when at length i saw the tops of the pines waving and reflecting the light at a distance high over all the rest of the forest, i realized that the former were not the highest use of the pine. it is not their bones or hide or tallow that i love most. it is the living spirit of the tree, not its spirit of tur pentine, with which i sympathize and which heals my cuts. ere long the hunters returned, not having seen a moose, but bringing a quarter of the dead one, which, with ourselves, made quite a load for the canoe. after breakfasting on moose-meat, we returned down pine stream on our way to chesuncook lake. just below the mouth of this stream were the rapids 76 chesuncook called pine stream falls. joe ran down alone while we walked over the portage, my companion collecting spruce gum for his friends at home, and i looking for flowers. near the lake were islands, and a low, meadowy shore with scattered trees slanted over the water. there was considerable grass ; and even a few cattle were pastured there. on entering the lake we had a view of the moun tains about katahdin, like a cluster of blue fungi of rank growth, apparently twenty-five or thirty miles distant, their summits concealed by clouds. the clear ing to which we were bound was reached by going round a low point. chesuncook lake is called eighteen miles long and three wide. ansell smith's, the principal clearing about this lake, appeared to be quite a harbor for bateaux and canoes, and there was a small scow for hay. there were five other huts with small clearings on the oppo site side of the lake. one of the smiths told me that they came here to live four years before. as we approached the log house, a dozen rods from the lake and considerably elevated above it, the pro jecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irreg ularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look. it was a low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments. the walls were well clayed between the logs, which were large and round, except on the upper and under sides, and as visible inside as out, successive bulging cheeks gradually lessening upward. as for ornamentation, there were the lichens and mosses and fringes of bark. we certainly leave the handsomest paint and clap boards behind in the woods, when we strip off the chesuncook 77 bark. for beauty, give me trees with the fur on. this house was designed and constructed with the freedom of stroke of a forester's axe, without other compass and square than nature uses. wherever the logs were cut off by a window or door, that is, were not kept in place by alternate overlapping, they were held one upon another by very large pins, driven in diagonally on each side and then cut off so as not to project beyond the bulge of the log, as if the logs clasped each other in their arms, these logs were posts, studs, boards, clapboards, laths, plaster, and nails, all in one. where the citizen uses a mere sliver or board, the pioneer uses the whole trunk of a tree. the house had large stone chimneys, and was roofed with spruce bark. one end was a loggers' 'camp, for the boarders, with the usual fir floor and log benches. thus this house was but a slight departure from the hollow tree, which the bear still inhabits being a hollow made with trees piled up, with a coating of bark like its original. the cellar was a separate building, like an ice-house, and it answered for a refrigerator at this season, our moose-meat being kept there. there was a large barn, part of whose boards had been sawed by a whip-saw ; and the saw-pit, with its great pile of dust, remained before the house. there was also a blacksmith's shop, where plainly a good deal of work was done. the oxen and horses used in lumbering operations were shod, and all the iron-work of sleds, etc., was repaired or made here. smith owned two miles down the lake by half a mile in width. there were about one hundred acres cleared. he cut seventy tons of hay this year on this 78 chesuncook ground, and twenty more on another clearing, and he uses it all himself in lumbering operations. there was a large garden full of roots, turnips, beets, car rots, potatoes, etc. they said that they were worth as much here as in new york. there was the usual long-handled axe of the primi tive woods by the door, and a large, shaggy dog, whose nose, report said, was full of porcupine quills. i can testify that he looked very sober. this is the usual fortune of pioneer dogs, for they have to face the brunt of the battle for their race. if he should invite one of his town friends up this way, suggesting moose-meat and unlimited freedom, the latter might pertinently inquire, " what is that sticking in your nose ? " when a generation or two have used up all the enemies' darts, their successors lead a comparatively easy life. no doubt our town dogs still talk, in a snuffling way, about the days that tried dogs' noses. how they got a cat up there i do not know, for they are as shy as my aunt about entering a canoe. i wondered that she did not run up a tree on the way ; but perhaps she was bewildered by the very crowd of opportunities. twenty or thirty lumberers, yankee and canadian, were coming and going, and from time to time an indian touched here. in the winter there are some times a hundred men lodged here at once. the white pine tree was at the bottom or farther end of all this. it is a war against the pines. i have no doubt that they lived pretty [much the same sort of life in the homeric age, for men have always thought more of eating than of fighting. then, as now, their minds ran chiefly on the " hot bread and sweet cakes " ; chesuncook 79 and the fur and lumber trade is an old story to asia and europe. i doubt if men ever made a trade of heroism. after a dinner at which apple-sauce was the greatest luxury to me, but our moose-meat was oftenest called for by the lumberers, i walked across the clearing into the forest, southward, returning along the shore. for my dessert, i helped myself to a large slice of the chesuncook woods, and took a hearty draught of its waters with all my senses. the shore was of coarse, flat, slate rocks, often in slabs, with the surf beating on it. they said that in winter the snow was three feet deep on a level here that the ice on the lake was two feet thick clear, and four feet including the snow-ice. we lodged here sunday night in a comfortable bed room. the sight of one of these frontier houses built of great logs, whose inhabitants have unflinchingly main tained their ground many summers and winters in the wilderness, reminds me of famous forts, like ticon deroga or crown point, which have sustained mem orable sieges. they are especially winter-quarters, and at this season this one had a partially deserted look, as if the siege were raised a little, the snow-banks being melted from before it, and its garrison accord ingly reduced. i think of their daily food as rations; a bible and a greatcoat are munitions of war, and a single man seen about the premises is a sentinel on duty. early the next morning we started on our return up the penobscot. our host allowed us something for the quarter of the moose which we had brought, and which he was glad to get. two explorers from chamberlain 80 chesuncook lake started at the same time that we did. red flannel shirts should be worn in the woods, if only for the fine contrast which this color makes with the evergreens and the water. thus i thought when i saw the forms of the explorers in their birch, poling up the rapids be fore us, far off against the forest. we stopped to dine at ragmuff. my companion wandered up the stream to look for moose while joe went to sleep on the bank, and i improved the opportunity to botanize and bathe. soon after starting again, while joe was gone back in the canoe for the frying-pan, which had been left, we picked a couple of quarts of tree-cranberries for a sauce. i was surprised by joe's asking me how far it was to the moosehorn. he was pretty well acquainted with this stream, but he had noticed that i was curious about distances and had several maps. he, and indians gen erally with whom i have talked, are not able to de scribe dimensions or distances in our measures with any accuracy. he could tell, perhaps, at what time we should arrive, but not how far it was. we saw a few wood ducks, sheldrakes, and black ducks. we also heard the note of one fish hawk, and soon after saw him perched near the top of a dead white pine, while a company of peetweets were twittering and teeter ing about over the carcass of a moose on a low sandy spit just beneath. we drove the fish hawk from perch to perch, each time eliciting a scream or whistle, for many miles before us. our course being up-stream, we were obliged to work much harder than before, and had frequent use for a pole. sometimes all three of us paddled together, standing up. about six miles from moosehead, we began to see the mountains east of the chesuncook 81 north end of the lake, and at four o'clock we reached the carry. three indians were encamped here, including the st. francis indian who had come in the steamer with us. one of the others was called sabattis. 1 joe and the st. francis indian were plainly clear indian, the other two apparently mixed indian and white. we here cooked the tongue of the moose for supper having left the nose, which is esteemed the choicest part, at chesuncook, it being a good deal of trouble to prepare it. we also stewed our tree-cranberries, sweetening them with sugar. this sauce was very grateful to us who had been confined to hard-bread, pork, and moose-meat. while we were getting supper, joe commenced cur ing the moose-hide, on which i had sat a good part of the voyage, he having already cut most of the hair off with his knife. he set up two stout forked poles on the bank, seven or eight feet high, and as much asunder, and having cut slits eight or ten inches long, and the same distance apart, close to the edge, on the sides of the hide, he threaded poles through them, and then, placing one of the poles on the forked stakes, tied the other down tightly at the bottom. the two ends were tied with cedar-bark to the upright poles, through small holes at short intervals. the hide, thus stretched and slanted a little to the north, to expose its flesh side to the sun, measured eight feet long by six high. we decided to stop here, my companion intending to hunt down the stream at night. the indians invited us to lodge with them, but my companion inclined to go to the log-camp on the carry. this camp was close 82 chesuncook and dirty, and had an ill smell, and i preferred to ac cept the indians' offer, if we did not make a camp for ourselves; for though they were dirty too, they were more in the open air and were much more agreeable, and even refined, company than the lumberers. the most interesting question at the lumberers' camp was, which man could " handle " any other on the carry. so we went to the indians' camp or wigwam. it was rather windy, and therefore joe concluded to hunt after midnight if the wind went down. the two mixed-bloods, however, went off up the river for moose at dark. this indian camp was a slight, patched-up affair, which had stood there several weeks, built shed fashion, open to the fire on the west. if the wind changed, they could turn it round. it was formed by two forked stakes and a cross-bar, with rafters slanted from this to the ground. the covering was partly an old sail, partly birch-bark securely tied on, and coming down to the ground on the sides. a large log was rolled up at the back, and two or three moose-hides were spread on the ground with the hair up. various articles of their wardrobe were tucked around the sides and corners, or under the roof. they were smoking moose meat in front of the camp over the usual large fire. two stout forked stakes, four or five feet apart and five feet high, were driven into the ground at each end, and then two poles ten feet long were stretched across over the fire, and smaller ones laid on these a foot apart. on the last hung large, thin slices of moose-meat smoking and drying, a space being left open over the centre of the fire. they said that it took three or four days to cure this meat, and it would keep a year or more. refuse pieces lay about on the ground in differ chesuncook 83 ent stages of decay, and some pieces also in the fire, half buried and sizzling in the ashes, as black and dirty as an old shoe. these last i at first thought were thrown away, but afterwards found that they were being cooked. a tremendous rib-piece was roasting before the fire, being impaled on an upright stake forced in and out between the ribs. there was a moose-hide stretched and curing on poles, and quite a pile of cured skins close by. they had killed twenty-two moose within two months, but, as they could use very little of the meat, they left the carcasses on the ground. altogether it was about as savage a sight as was ever witnessed. there were many torches of birch-bark, shaped like straight tin horns, lying ready for use on a stump outside. for fear of dirt we spread our blankets over their hides so as not to touch them anywhere. the st. francis indian and joe alone were there at first, and we lay on our backs talking with them till midnight. they were very sociable, and, when they did not talk with us, kept up a steady chatting in their own lan guage. while lying there listening to the indians, i amused myself with trying to guess at their subject by their gestures, or some proper name introduced. it was a purely wild and primitive american sound and i could not understand a syllable of it. these were the sounds that issued from the wigwams of this country before columbus was born. i felt that i stood, or rather lay, as near to the primitive man of america that night as any of its discoverers ever did. meanwhile, joe was making and trying his horn, to be ready for hunting after midnight. the st. francis 84 chesuncook indian also amused himself with sounding it, or rather calling through it ; for the sound is made with the voice, and not by blowing through the horn. the latter ap peared to be a speculator in moose-hides. he bought my companion's for two dollars and a quarter, green. its chief use is for moccasins. one or two of these in dians wore them. the st. francis indian could write his name very well, tahmunt swasen. i asked sabattis, after he came home, if the moose never attacked him. he answered that you must not fire many times, so as to mad him. "i fire once and hit him in the right place, and in the morning i find him. he won't go far. but if you keep firing, you mad him. i fired once five bullets, every one through the heart, and he did not mind 'em at all ; it only made him more mad." i asked him if they did not hunt them with dogs. he said that they did so in winter, but never in the sum mer, for then it was of no use ; they would run right off straight and swiftly a hundred miles. another indian said that the moose, once scared, would run all day. a dog will hang to their lips and be carried along till he is swung against a tree and drops off. they cannot run on a "glaze," though they can run in snow four feet deep ; but the caribou can run on ice. they commonly find two or three moose together. they cover themselves with water, all but their noses, to escape flies. an indian, whom i met after this at oldtown, told me that the moose were very easily tamed, and would come back when once fed, and so would deer. the indians of this neighborhood are about as familiar with the moose as we are with the ox, having associated with them for so many generations. chesuncook 85 there were none of the small deer up there ; they are more common about the settlements. one ran into the city of bangor two years before, and jumped through a window of costly plate glass, and then into a mirror, where it thought it recognized one of its kind , and out again, and so on, leaping over the heads of the crowd, until it was captured. this the inhabitants speak of as the deer that went a-shopping. i had put the ears of our moose, which were ten inches long, to dry with the moose-meat over the fire, wishing to preserve them ; but sabattis told me that i must skin and cure them, else the hair would all come off. i asked him how he got fire, and he produced a little box of friction matches. he also had flints and steel and some punk. " but suppose you upset, and all these and your powder get wet." "then," said he, " we wait till we get to where there is some fire." i pro duced from my pocket a little vial containing matches, stoppled water-tight, and told him that though we were upset, we should still have some dry matches, at which he stared without saying a word. late at night the other two indians came home from moose-hunting, not having been successful, aroused the fire, lighted their pipes, smoked awhile, took some thing strong to drink, ate some moose-meat, and, find ing what room they could, lay down on the moose hides ; and thus we passed the night, two white men and four indians side by side. when i awoke in the morning the weather was driz zling. one of the indians was lying outside, rolled in his blanket, on the opposite side of the fire, for want of room. joe had neglected to awake my companion and he had done no hunting that night. the indians baked 86 chesuncook a loaf of flour bread in a spider on its edge before the fire for their breakfast ; and while my companion was making tea, i caught a dozen sizable fishes in the penobscot. after we had breakfasted by ourselves, one of our bedfellows, who had also breakfasted, came along, and, being invited, took a cup of tea, and finally, taking up the common platter, licked it clean. the rain prevented our continuing any longer in the woods ; so, giving some of our provisions and uten sils to the indians, we took leave of them. this being the steamer's day, i set out for the lake at once. i walked over the carry alone and waited at the head of the lake. i noticed at the landing, when the steamer came in, one of our bedfellows, who had been moose hunting the night before, now very sprucely dressed in a clean white shirt and fine black pants, a true indian dandy, who had evidently come over the carry to show himself to any arrivers on the north shore of moose head lake. midway the lake we took on board two middle-aged men, with their bateau, who had been exploring for six weeks as far as the canada line. i talked with one of them, telling him that i had come all this distance partly to see where the white pine, the eastern stuff of which our houses are built, grew, but that i had found it a scarce tree; and i asked him where i must look for it. with a smile he answered that he could hardly tell me. however, he said that he had found enough to employ two teams the next winter. what was consid ered a "tip-top" tree now was not looked at twenty years ago, when he first went into the business. one connected with lumbering operations at ban gor told me that the largest pine belonging to his firm, chesuncook 87 cut the previous winter, " scaled " in the woods four thousand five hundred feet, and was worth ninety dollars in the log at the boom in oldtown. they cut a road three and a half miles long for this tree alone. we reached monson that night, and the following day rode to bangor. the next forenoon we went to oldtown. a catholic priest crossed to the island in the same bateau with us. the indian houses are framed, mostly of one story, and in rows one behind another at the south end of the island, with a few scattered ones. i counted about forty, not including the church and what my companion called the council-house. the last was regularly framed and shingled like the rest. there were several of two stories, quite neat, with front yards inclosed , and one at least had green blinds. here and there were moose-hides stretched and drying about them. there were.no cart-paths, nor tracks of horses, but footpaths; very little land cultivated, but an abundance of weeds, indigenous and naturalized ; more introduced weeds than useful vege tables, as the indian is said to cultivate the vices rather than the virtues of the white man. yet this village was cleaner than i expected. the children were not particularly ragged nor dirty. the little boys met us with bow in hand and arrow on string and cried, " put up a cent." verily the indian has but a feeble hold on his bow now, but the curiosity of the white man is insatiable, and from the first he has been eager to witness this forest accomplishment. alas for the hunter race ! the white man has driven off their game, and substituted a cent in its place. i saw an indian woman washing at the water's edge. she stood on a rock, and after dipping the clothes in the stream, 88 chesuncook laid them on the rock, and beat them with a short club. the graveyard was crowded with graves and overrun with weeds. we called on governor neptune, who lived in a little "ten-footer," one of the humblest of them all. when we entered the room, which was one half of the house, he was sitting on the side of the bed. there was a clock hanging in one corner. he had on a black frock coat, and black pants, much worn, white cotton shirt, socks, a red silk handkerchief about his neck, and a straw hat. his black hair was only slightly grayed. he was no darker than many old white men. he told me that he was eighty-nine ; but he was going moose-hunting that fall, as he had been the previous one. probably his companions did the hunting. we saw various squaws dodging about. one sat on the bed by his side and helped him out with his stories. they were remarkably corpulent, with smooth, round faces, apparently full of good-humor. while we were there, one went over to oldtown, returned, and cut out a dress, which she had bought, on another bed in the room. the governor said that he could remem ber when the moose were much larger; that they did not use to be in the woods, but came out of the water, as all deer did. " moose was whale once. away down merrimac way, a whale came ashore in a shallow bay. sea went out and left him, and he came up on land a moose." but we talked mostly with the governor's son-in law; and the governor, being so old and deaf, per mitted himself to be ignored while we asked questions about him. the former said that there were two polit ical parties among them one in favor of schools and chesuncook 89 the other opposed to them. the first had just pre vailed at the election and sent their man to the legis lature. neptune and aitteon and he himself were in favor of schools. he said, "if indians got learning, they would keep their money." a very small black puppy rushed into the room and made at the governor's feet, as he sat in his stockings with his legs dangling from the bedside. the governor rubbed his hands and dared him to come on, entering into the sport with spirit. an indian was making canoes behind a house and i made a faithful study of canoe-building. i thought that i should like to serve an apprenticeship at that trade for one season, going into the woods for bark with my " boss," making the canoe there, and returning in it at last. while the bateau was coming over to take us off, i picked up some fragments of arrowheads on the shore, and one broken stone chisel, which were greater novelties to the indians than to me. the indians on the island appeared to live quite happily and to be well treated by the inhabitants of old town. we visited veazie's mills, just below the island, where were sixteen sets of saws. on one side they were hauling the logs up an inclined plane by water-power ; on the other, passing out the boards, planks, and sawed timber, and forming them into rafts. i was surprised to find a boy collecting the long edgings of boards as fast as cut off, and thrusting them down a hopper, where they were ground up beneath the mill, that they might be out of the way ; otherwise they accumulate in vast piles by the side of the building, increasing the danger from fire, or, floating off, they 90 chesuncook obstruct the river. this was not only a sawmill, but a gristmill, then. the inhabitants of oldtown and bangor cannot suffer for want of kindling stuff, surely. some get their living exclusively by picking up the driftwood and selling it by the cord in the winter. in one place i saw where an irishman, who keeps a team and a man for the purpose, had covered the shore for a long distance with regular piles, and i was told that he had sold twelve hundred dollars' worth in a year. another, who lived by the shore, told me that he got all the material of his out-buildings and fences from the river; and in that neighborhood i perceived that this refuse wood was frequently used instead of sand to fill hollows with, being apparently cheaper than dirt. no one has yet described for me the difference be tween that wild forest which once occupied our oldest townships and the tame one which i find there to-day. the civilized man not only clears the land permanently to a great extent, and cultivates open fields, but he tames and cultivates to a certain extent the forest itself. by his mere presence, almost, he changes the nature of the trees as no other creature does. the sun and air, and perhaps fire, have been introduced. it has lost its wild, damp, and shaggy look ; the countless fallen and decaying trees are gone, and consequently that thick coat of moss which lived on them is gone too. the earth is comparatively bare and smooth and dry. the most primitive places left with us are the swamps. the surface of the ground in the maine woods is every where spongy and saturated with moisture. i noticed that the plants which cover the forest floor there are such as are commonly confined to swamps with us orchises, creeping snowberry, and others. chesuncook 91 the greater part of new brunswick, the northern half of maine, and adjacent parts of canada, not to mention the northeastern part of new york and other tracts farther off, are still covered with an almost unbroken pine forest. but a good part of maine is already bare and commonplace. we seem to think that the earth must go through the ordeal of sheep pasturage before it is habitable by man . every sizable pine and oak, or other forest tree, cut down within the memory of man ! as if individual speculators were to be allowed to export the clouds out of the sky, or the stars out of the firmament, one by one. we shall be reduced to gnaw the very crust of the earth for nutri ment. at this rate, we shall all be obliged to let our beards grow, if only to hide the nakedness of the land and make a sylvan appearance. the farmer sometimes talks of "brushing up," as if bare ground looked better than that which wears its natural vesture as if the wild hedges, which perhaps are more to his children than his whole farm besides, were dirt. i know of one who deserves to be called the tree-hater. you would think that he had been warned by an oracle that he would be killed by the fall of a tree, and so was resolved to anticipate them. the journalists think that they cannot say too much in favor of such "improvements" in husbandry; but these "model farms " are commonly places merely where somebody is making money. nevertheless, it was a relief to get back to our smooth, but still varied landscape. for a permanent residence, it seemed to me that there could be no comparison between this and the wilderness, necessary 92 chesuncook as the latter is for a resource and a background, the raw material of all our civilization. the wilderness is simple, almost to barrenness. the partially culti vated country it is which chiefly has inspired, and will continue to inspire, the strains of poets. perhaps our own woods and fields, with the primitive swamps scattered here and there in their midst, but not pre vailing over them, are the perfection of parks and groves, gardens, arbors, paths, vistas, and landscapes. they are the natural consequence of what art and refinement we as a people have the common which each village possesses, its true paradise, in compari son with which all elaborately and willfully wealth constructed parks and gardens are paltry imitations. the poet's, commonly, is not a logger's path, but a woodman's. the logger and pioneer have preceded him, like john the baptist; eaten the wild honey, it may be, but the locusts also; banished decaying wood and the spongy mosses which feed on it, and built hearths and humanized nature for him. but there are spirits of a yet more liberal culture, to whom no simplicity is barren. there are not only stately pines, but fragile flowers, like the orchises, commonly described as too delicate for cultivation, which derive their nutriment from the crudest mass of peat. these remind us that, not only for strength but for beauty, the poet must from time to time travel the logger's path and the indian's trail, to drink at some new and more bracing fountain of the muses, far in the recesses of the wilderness. the kings of england formerly had their forests " to hold the king's game," for sport or food, some times destroying villages to create or extend them ; and chesuncook 93 i think that they were impelled by a true instinct. why should not we have our national preserves, in which the bear and panther, and some even of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be "civilized off the face of the earth," our forests, not for idle sport or food, but for inspiration and our own true recreation? or shall we grub them all up, poaching on our own national domains? pronouncing vocabulary of indian names aboljacarmegus ; a-b51-j5k-a-me'gus. aboljacknagesic ; a-bol-j&k-na-gesslk. these two words are now usually abbreviated to abol (at)ol). ambejijis ; 5m-b6-je'jis. androscoggin ; sn-dro-skogln. aroostook ; a-rdbs'tdok. chesuncook; ch&-sun'ko6k. katahdin, ka-tah'din. katepskonegan ; ka-tsp-sko-ne'gan ; now commonly called debsco neag (dsb-k&-neg'). kennebec ; kfcn-6-bsk'. kineo ; kin'e-o. mattawamkeag ; mst-a-w&m'keg. millinocket ; mil-i-n5k'st. molunkus ; mo-lunk'us. pamadumcook ; psm-a-dum'kook. passamagamet ; pss-a-ma-gxm'st. passamaquoddy ; pas-a-ma-kw5d'i. penobscot ; p6-n5b'sk5t. pockwockomua ; pok-wok'6-mus. quakish ; kwa'kish. sabattis ; sa-baf!a. sowadnehunk ; sou-ad-ne-h&nk'. cambridge . massachusetts u . s . a a 000119758 1 6 &k liberty luminants extracted largely from the writings of montaigne, paine, thoreau, emerson and tolstoy-gaul, anglo-saxons, slav-each secure on fame's eternal bead roll. "for always in thine eyes, 0 liberty! shines that high light whereby the world is saved; and though thou slay us, we will trust in thee. " comradie of common people, will you; won't yot, can't "*y become as little children," and. in reading these lines and between these lines, catch now-and-again glints of the glory that mother liberty holds in solution for the race when the units will trust her? both sides must in justice be heard before righteous judgment can be rendered. a tract for the times for free distribution. henry bool, publisher, ithaca, n. y. earnest invitation for open-minded reading of this tbookst is hereby extended. should you not cars to r#ed, retain or band to a friend who will do so, publsber will look upon it as a favor to haw it returned to him. "-*written by john hay in lang-sye days, whea, it would4 som, true liberty-sap was in him lab, l c. t i dedication. these excerpts are dedicated to the fouith estate in the hope that such goodly company may-perchance-induce it to boost the hoary movement in favor of ignorance less, and help along the modern movement for public enlightenment more, despite the following lamentable facts as set down in the "confessions of a provincial editor," that: "the ultimate editor of a small newspaper is the advertiser, the biggest advertiser is the politician." this is a maxim experience has ground with its heel into the fabric of my soul. we all remember emerson's brilliant; ly un-new-england advice, "hitch your wagon to a star." this saying is of no value to newspapers, for they find stars poor motive power. theoretically, it must be granted that newspapers, of all business ventures, should properly be hitched to a star. yet i have found that if any hitching is to be done it must be to the successful politician. amending mr. emerson, i have found it the best rule to "yoke your newspaper to the politician in power." * * * i have reached the "masses." i tell people what they knew before hand, and thus flatter them. aiming to instruct them, i should offend. god is with the biggest circulations, and we must have them even if we appeal to class prejudice now and then. "paracelsus."-atlantic monthly, march, 1902. introduction. "above all nations is humanity." emblematic of this now much obscured truth, and devoid of art or method, there are here stitched together sincere thoughts from the intellect of about all the "civilized" nations of this earth. even the "barbarian" boer, filipino, and cuban, can be depended on for grist to this god's liberty mill. indeed, in the words of the hibernian metaphor, no adult "can open his mouth without putting his foot in it," as to undying love for freedom. "one can lead a horse to water, but fifty can't make it drink." now in a way that's much the same, opportunity may be offered for the slaking of mental thirst, and yet the offer be far from accepted of the very ones that should be the most famished. yet it is essential for each genus homo to taste for itself or be merely human driftwood. you are here and now offered a few drops from the bucket of emancipation literature. it is to be hoped you will drink thereof. liberty luminants. chains are not other than chains though fashioned of gold, i cry; nor is liberty less than a boon, though thou hast but a cup and a crust. better a bed in the fields and a man's heart at dawn in the sky than a luxury great as a king's where a voice ever utters, "thou must." -william francis barnard. self-ownership. as taught by montaigne. do thy deed and know thyself. a wise man never loses anything if he have himself. you and a companion are theatre enough to one another, or you to yourself. the greatest thing in the world is for a man to know that he is his own. you are no more to concern yourself how the world talks of you, but how you are to talik to yourself. we must break the knot of our obligations, how strong soever, and hereafter love this or that, but espouse nothing but ourselves. we ought to hold with all our force, both of hands and teeth the use of the pleasures of life that one after another our years snatch away from us. myself am the matter of my book; there's no 6 reason thou should'st employ thy leisure about so frivolous and vain a subject. therefore, farewell.-from the preface!to his essays. to speak less of one's self than, what one really is, is folly, not modesty; and to take that for current pay which is under a man's value is pusillanimity -and cowardice. retire yourself into yourself, but first prepare yourself there to receive yourself; it were folly to trust yourself in yout own hands if you cannot govern yourself. we have lived long enough for others; let us, at least, live out the small remnant of life for ourselves; let us now call in our thoughts: nd intentions to ourselves. it is a wretched and dangerous thing to depend upon others; we ourselves, in whom is ever the most just and safest dependence, are not sufficiently sure. i have nothing mine but myself. it is not enough to get remote from the public; 'tis not enough to shift the soil only; a man must flee from the popular conditions that have taken possession of his soul, he must sequester and come again to himself. let us so order it that our content may depend wholly upon ourselves; let us dissolve all obligations that ally us to others; let us obtain this from ourselves, ithat we may live alone in good earnest and live at our ease too. render true report. i am of opinion -that a man must be very cautious how he values himself and equally conscientious to give a true report, be it better, or worse, impartially. if i thought myself perfectly good and wise i would rattle it out to some purpose. my trade and art is to live; he that forbids me to speak according to my own sense, experience and practice, may as well enjoin an architect not to speak of building according to his own knowledge, but according to that of his neighbor; * "^ *1 i; '* -* 7 according to the knowledge of another and not according to his own. our own death does not sufficiently terrify and trouble us; let us, moreover, charge ourselves with those of our wives, children and family: our own affairs do not afford us anxiety enough; let us undertake those of our neighbors and friends, still more to break our brains and torment us. as for the fine saying, with which ambition and avarice palliate their vices, that we are not born for ourselves but for the public, let us boldly appeal to those who are in public affairs; let them,lay their hands upon their hearts and then say whether, on the contrary, they do rather aspire to titles and offices and that tumult of the world to make their private advantage at the public expense. the laws keep up their credit, not by being just, but because they are laws; 'tis the mystle foundation of their authority; they have no other, and it well answers their purpose. they are often made by fools, still oftener by men who, out of hatred to equality fail in equity; but always by men, vain and irresolute authors. there is nothing so much, nor so giossly, nor so ordinarily faulty, as the laws. whoever obeys them because they are just, does not justly obey them as he ought. in our ordinary actions there is not one of a thousand that concern ourselves. he that thou seest scrambling up the ruine of the wall, furious and 'transported, against whom, so many shots are levelled; and that other all over seears,.1pale and fainting with hunger, and yet resolved rather to die than to open the gates to him; dost thou think 'that these men,are there upon their own account? no; peradventure in the behalf of one whom they never saw and who never concerns himself for their pains and danger, but,lies wallowing the while in sloth and pleasure. 8. revolt. rail, spirit of revolt, thou spirit of life, child of the ideal, daughter of the far-away truth! without thee nations drag on in a living death; without thee is stagnation and arrested growth: without thee europe and america would be sunk in china's lethargy, smothered in the past, having no horizon but the actual. hail, spirit of revolt, thou spirit of life, child of eternal love,love rebelling against lovelessness, life rebelling against death! rise at last to the full measure of thy birthright; spurn the puny weapons of hate and oppression; fix rather thy calm, burning, protesting eyes on all the myriad shams of man and they will fade away in thinnest air; gaze upon thy gainsayers until they see and feel the truth and love that begat and bore thee. thus and thus only give form and body to thy noblest aspirations, and we shall see done on earth as it is in heaven god's ever living, growing, ripening will. ernest crosby. 0 egoism. as taught by thomas paine. "a great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government. it had its origin in the principles of society, and the natural constitution of rmin. it existed prior to government, and would exist if the formality of government was abolished. the mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has in man, and all the parts of a civilized community upon each other, create that great chain of connection which holds it together. "government is no further necesary than to 9 supply the few cases to which society and civilization are not conveniently competent; and instances are not wanting to show that everything which government can usefully add thereto, has been performed by the common consent of society, without government. "for upwards of two years from the commencement of the american war, and a longer period in several of the american states, there were no established forms of government. the old governments had been abolished, and the country was too much occupied in defence to employ its attention in establishing a new government; yet, during this interval order and harmony were preserved as inviolate as in any country in europe. there is a natural aptness in man, and more so in society, because it embraces a greater variety of abilities, and resources, to accommodate itself to whatever situation it is in. "the instant formal government is abolished, society begins to act. a general association takes place, and the common interest produces common security. so far is it from being true, as has been pretended, that the abolition of any formal government is -the dissolution of society, it acts by a contrary impulse, and brings the latter closer together. "formal governments make but a small part of civilized *life; and when even the best that numan wisdom can devise is establish, it is a thtng more in name and idea than in fact. it is to the great and fundamental principles of society and civilization-to the common usage universally consented to, and mutually and reciprocally maintained-to the unceasing circulation of interest, which passes through its innumerable channels, invigorates the whole mase of ievilised man, it is to these things, infinitely more than anything which even the best inetituted governments can perform, that the safety and prosperity of the individual and of the whole depends. "the more perfect civilization is, the less occa 10 sion has it for government, because the more does it regulate its own affairs and govern itself; but so contrary is the practice of old governments to the reason of the case, that 'the expenses of them increase in the proportion they ought to diminish. it is but few general laws that civilized life requires, and those of such common usefulness, that whether they are enforced by the forms of government or not, the effect will be nearly the same. if we consider what the principles are -that first condense men into society, and what the motives that regulate their mutual intercourse afterwards, we shall find by the time that we arnve at what is called government, that nearly the whole of the business is performed by the natural operations of the parts upon each other. ",man, with respect to all those matters, is more a creature of consistency than he is aware of, or that governments would, wish him to believe. all the great laws of society are laws of nature. those of trade and commerce, whether with respect to the intercourse of individuals; or of nations, are-laws of naturael and reciprocal interest. they are followed and obeyed, because it is the interest of the parties so to do, and not on account of any formal laws their government may impose or interpose."-rights of man. 0 ------0-----anarchism is, logical choice-making between freedom and force. between reason and rome. between liberty and slavery. between honesty and thievery. between truth and falsehood. between justice and tyranny. 11 self-help. as taught by thoreau. thoreau had watched (human) nature like a detective who is to go upon the stand.-lowell. cease to gnaw the crust. there is ripe fruit over your head.-summer. this life is not for complaint but for satisfaction.-letter. to reject religion is the first step towards moral excellence.-estsay. the whole duty of man may be expressed in one line: make to yourself a perfect body.summer. all the world is forward to prompt him who gets up to live without his creed in his pocket.week. in what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know,that you are a-lone in the world.-letter. there is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his. life getting his living.-life without principle. if there is an experiment which you would like to try. try it. do not entertain doubts if they are not agreeable to you.-letter. do not be too moral. you may cheat yourself out of much life so. aim above morality. be not simply good; be good for something.-letter. the wisest man preaches no doctrines; he has no schemcs; he sees no rafter, not even a cobweb against the heavens, it is clear esy.-week. he is the true artist wnose life is his material. every stroke of the chisel must enter his own flesh and bones and not grate dully on marble.summer. the man who goes alone can start to-day; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready, and it may be a long time before they get off.-walden. there is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which. we may obey. we may study the laws of matter at and for our conve/ 12 nience, but a successful life knows no law.walking. if you would travel farther than all itravellers, be naturalized in all climes, and cause the sphinx to dash her head against a stone, ever obey the precept of the old philosopher and explore thyself.-walden. warm your body by healthful exercise, not by cowering over a stove. warm your spirit by performing independently noble deeds, not by ignobly seeking the sympathy of your fellows who are no better than yourself.--chastity and sensuality. the philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with the remembrance of his own cast-off griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it sympathy. we should impart our courage, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion.-walden. in proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly ana desperately to the post office. you may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud" of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from h:imself this long while.-life without principle. will the government never be so well adminietered, inquired one, that we private men shall hear nothing about it? the criterion. "the king answered. 'at all events, i require a prudent and able man, who is capable of managing the state affairs of my kingdom.' the exminister said, 'the criterion, 0 sire! of a wise and competent man, is, that he will not meddle with such like matters." alas, that the ex-minister should have been so nearly right. in my short experience of human life, the outward obstaclee, if there were any such, have not been living men, but the institutions of the dead. i have not so surely forseen that 'any cossack or ohippeway would come to disturb the honest 13 and simple commonwealth, as that some monster institution would at length embrace and crush its free members in its scaly folds; for it is not to be forgotten, that while the law holds fast the thief and murderer, it lets itself go loose. when i have not paid the tax which the state demanded for that protection which i did not want, itself has robbed me; when i have asserted the liberty it presumed to declare, itself has imprisoned me. i love man-kind, but i hate the institutions of the dead unkind. men execute nothing so faithfully as the wills of the dead, to the last codicil and letter. they rule this world, and the living are but their executors. such foundation, too, have our lectures and our sermons commonly. they are all dudelian; and piety derives its origin still from that exploit of pius aeneas, who bore his father, a tnehises, on his shoulders from the ruins of troy. or rather, like some indian tribes, we bear about with us the mouldering relics of our ancestors on our shoulders. if; for instance, a man asserts the value of individual' liberty over the merely political commonweal, his neighbor still tolerates him, that is he who is. living near him, sometimes even sustains him, but never the state. its officer as a living man, may have human virtues and a thought in his brain, but as the tool of an institution, a jailor or constable it may be, he is not a whit superior to his prison key or his staff. herein is the tragedy; that men doing outrage to their proper natures, even those called wise and good, lend themselves to perform the office of inferior and brutal ones. hence came war and elavery, in; and what else may not come in by this opening? but certainly there are modes by which a man may put-bread into his mouth which will not prejudice him as a companion and neighbor. 14 now turn again, turn again, said the pinder, for a wrong way you have gone. for you have forsaken the king's highway, and made a path over the corn. undoubtedly, countless reforms are called for, because society is not animated, or instinct enough with life, but in the condition of some snakes which i have seen in early spring, with alternate portions of their bodies torpid and flex* ible, so that they could wriggle neither way. all men are partially buried in the grave of custom, and of some we see only the crown of their head albove ground. petter are they physically dead, for they more lively rot. even virtue is no longer such if it be stagnant. a man's life should be constantly as fresh as this river. it should be the same channel, but a few water every instant. -a week on the concord and merrimac rivers. civil disobedience. "i heartily accept the motto, 'that government is best which governs least;' and i should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also i believe: 'that government is best which governs not at all;' and when men are prepared for it that will be the kind of government which they will have.... "it is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous, wrong; he may properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty at least, to wash tis hands of it and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support...... "i do not hesitate to say that those who call themselves abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their support:both in person and property from the government of massachusetts, and not wait till they constitute a majority of 16 one before they suffer the right to prevail through them. i think it is enough if they have god on their side without waiting for that other one. moreover, any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already." "itf a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills -this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay tiem, and enable the state to commit violence and shed innocent blood. this is, in fact,, the definition of a peaceful revolution, if any such is possible. if the tax gatherer or any other public officer asks me, as one has done, 'but what shall i do?' my answer is, 'if you really wish to do anything, resign your office.' when the subject has refused to pay allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished."civil disobedience. should one man, ten men, fifty 'housand laugh because thy thoughts breed folly in their minds, fear not. think on. such langhter is but chaff, mere dross of reason wasted by the winds. should one man, ten men, fifty thousand cry "thy words are false. forbear thou to condemn!" piear not. say on. time's self shall justify: thy words shall live, and give the lie to them. should one man, ten men, fifty thousand curse these acts of thine that counter to their will, fear not. act on. have courage! which is worse, to die for truth-or live-to die for nil? -w. l. bultitaft. 16 self-government. as taught by emerson. so far as a man thinks, he is free. nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a "declaration of independence," or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or act. every man is a consumer and ought to be a producer. i do not wish to live to wear out my old boots. the integrity of our own mind is the only sacred thing. history has been mean; our nations have been mobs; we have never seen a man. he who feeds men serves a few, he serves all who dares be true. goodness dies in wishes; as voltaire said, "'tis the misfortune of worthy people that they are cowards." no picture of life can have any veracity which does not admit the odious facts. if in the hours of clear reason we should speak the severest truth, we should say that we had never made a sacrifice. we must ask why health and beauty and genius should now be the exception rather than the rule of human nature. what quantities of invalids, politicians, thieves, might be advantageously spared; * * * quantitles of poor lives, of distressing invalfds, of cases for a gun. there is no virtue which is final; all are initial. the virtues of society are vices of the saint. the terror of reform lt the discovery that we must east away one virtue, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has coneumed our grosser vices. the one serious and formidable thing in nature is will. society is servile from want of will, and thierefore the world wants saviours and religions. 17 one way is right to go: the hero sees it, and moves on that aim, and has the world under him for root and support. his to others as the world. his approbation is honour; his dissent, infamy. society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. the doctrine of hate must be preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of -love when that spules and whines. as long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusion. our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our wine will burn our mouth. only that good profits which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men. though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not. what forests of laurel we bring, and the tears of mankind, to those who stand firm against the opinions of their contemporaries! the measure of a master is his success in bringing all men 'round to his opinion twenty years later. difference of opinion is 'the one crime which kings never forgive. where there is no 'vision, the people perish. an individual man is a fruit which it cost all the foregoing ages to form and ripen. an awaking world. the world is awaking to the idea of union. * * * it is and will be magic. men will live and communicate and plow, and reap, and govern, as by added ethereal power, when once they are united. * * * but this union must be inward and not one of the covenants, and is to be reached by the reverse of the methods they use. the union is only perfect when all the uniters are isolated. it is the union of friends who live in d(ifferent. streets or towuno l.ach man, it he at 18 tenmpts to join himself to others, is on all sides cramped and diminished of his proportion; and the stricter the union the smaller and more pitiful he is. but leave him alone to recognize in every hour and place the secret soul, he will go up and down doing the works of a true member, and, to the astonishment of all, the work will be done with concert, tho no man spoke. government will be adamantine without any governor. the union must be ideal in actual individualism. i can easily see the bankruptcy of the vulgar musket-worship;-tho great men be musketworshippers;-and 'tis certain as god liveth, the gun that does not need another gun, the law of love and justice alone, can effect a clean revolution. is not the state a question? all society is divided in opinion on the subject of the state. nobody loves it; great numbers dislike it, and suffer conscientious scruples to allegiance; and the only defense set up, is the fear of doing worse is disorganizing. we live in a very low state of the world, and pay unwilling tribute to governments founded on force. there is not, among the most religious and instructed men of the most religious and civil nations, a reliance on the moral sentiment, and a sufficient belief in the unity of things, to persuade them that society can be maintained without artificial restraints, as well as the solar system; or that the private citizen might be reasonable, and a good neighbor, without the hint of a jail or a confiscation. what is strange, too, there never was in any man sufficient faith in the power of rectitude to inspire him with the broad design of renovating the state on the principle of right and love. all those who have pretended this design have been partial reformers, and have admitted in some manner the supremacy of the bad state. i do not call to mind a single human being who has steadily denied the authority of the laws, on the simple ground of his own moral nature. such designs, full of genius 19 and full of fate as they are, are not entertained except avowedly as air-pictures. if the individual who exhibits them dares to think them practicable, he disgusts scholars and churchmen; and men of talent, and women of superior sentiment, cannot hide their contempt. not the less does nature continue to fill the heart of youth with suggestions of this enthusiasm, and there are now men-if indeed i can speak in the plural number -more exactly i will say, i have just been conversing with one man, to 'whom no weight of adverse experience will make it for one moment appear possible that thousands of human beings might exercise toward each other the grandest and simplest sentiments, as well as a knot of friends, or a pair of lovers. the state a trick. every actual state is corrupt. good men must not obey the laws too well. what satire on government can equal the severity of censure conveyed in the word "politic," which now for ages has signified cunning, intimating that the state is a trick. * * * this undertaking for another is the blunder which stands in colossal ugliness in the governments of the world. it is the same thing in numbers as in a pair, only not quite so intelligible. i can see well enough a great difference between my setting myself down to a selfcontrol, and my going to make somebody else act 'after my views; but when a quarter of the human race assume to tell me what i must do, i may be too much disturbed by the circumstances to see so clearly the absurdity of their command. therefore all public ends look vague and quixotic beside private ones. for any laws but those which men can make for themselves are laughable. * * * this is the history of governments -one man does something which is to bind another. a man who cannot be acquainted with me taxes me; looking from afar at me, ordains that a part of my labor shall go to this or that whim 20 sical end, not as i, but as he happens to fancy. behold the consequence. of all debts, men are least willing to pay the taxes. what a satire is this on government! everywhere they think they get their money's worth, except for these. * * we think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morning star. in our barbarous society the influence of character is in its infancy. is a political power, as the rightful lord who is to tumble' all rulers from their chairs, its presence is hardly yet suspected. * * * the tendencies of the times favor the idea of self-government, and leave the individual for all code, to the rewards and penalties of his own constitution, which work with more energy than we believe, while we depend on artificial restraints. * * * we must not imagine that all things are lapsing into confusion, if every tender protestant be not compelled to bear his part in certain social conventions: nor doubt that roads can be built, letters carried and the fruit of labor secured, when the government of force is at an end. are our methods now so excellent that all competition is hopeless? gcould not a nation of friends even devise better ways? on the other hand, let not the most conservative and timid fear anything from a premature surrender of the bayonet, and the system of force. for according to the order of nature, which is quite superior to our will, it stands thus: there will always be a government of force wnere men are selfish; and when they are pure enough to abjure the code of force, they will be wise enough to see how these public ends of the post office, of the highway, of commerce, and the exchange of property, of museums and libraries, of institutions of art and science, can be answered. 21 every good thought ever spoken, every grand deed ever done, is a fresh sword, making surer that our conquest will be wonconquest over superstition that hath ruled and ruined long, conquest of the captive peoples over mailed and mitred wrong in its palaces of splendor and its forts and bulwarks strong! -will h. kernan. ------0----------self sovereignty in quintessence. as taught by tolstoy. [being excerpts from his new book, "the slavery of our times."*] to tolstoy's mind, violence done by man to man is wrong. we cannot escape the wrongness by doing it wholesale, or by sub-dividing the responsibility. we can neither revert to the belief that to use violence is a divine right of kings nor can we maintain the current belief that to do so is a divine right of majorities. to be subjected by force to a rule we disapprove of is slavery, and we are all slaves or slave owners (sometimes both together) as long as our society bases itself on violence. the mind is more free than the body. let us, at least, try to understand' the truth of the matter, and not excuse a vicious system in order to shelter ourselves. when we have understood the matter, let us not fear to speak out; and f this book-the grand old nestor-of-authors' masterpieceis published, with author's portrait, at $1.25, bound in cloth. the publisher of this pamphlet will supply the book for 65 cents, or will lend it freely to anybody in ithaca who will read it, and to anybody anywhere when postage is paid. see advertisement liberty lending library, on page 68 of this booklet. 22 when we have confessed our views, let us try to bring our lives more and more in harmony with them.-the above is taken from the introduction by the translator, aylmer maude. the cause of the miserable condition of the workers is slavery. the cause of slavery is legislation. legislation rests on organized violence. it follows that an improvement in the condition of the people is possible through the abolition of organized violence. * * * it is said, "how can people live without governments-that is, without violence?" but it should, on the contrary, be asked, "how can people who are rational live, acknowledging that the vital bond of their social life is violence, and not reasonable agreement?" sone of two things-either people are rational or irrational beings. if they are irrational beings, then they are irrational, and then everything among them is decided by violence; and there is no reason why certain people should and others should not have a right to use violence. and in that case governni nt violence has no jusa tification. but if men are rational beings, then their relations should be based on reason and not on the violence of those who happen to have seized power; and, therefore, in that case, again, governmental violence has no justification. slavery results from laws, laws are made by governments, and, therefore, people can only be freed from slavery by the abolition of governments. but how can governments be abolished? all attempts to get rid of governments by violence have hitherto, always and everywhere, resulted only in this: -that in place of the deposed governments new ones established themselves, often more eruel than those they replaced. not to mention past attempts to abolish governments by violence, according to the sociajist theory, the coming abolition of the rule of the capitalists--that is, the communalisation of the means of production and the new economic order 23 of society-is also to be carried out by a fresh organization of violence, and will have to be maintained by the same means. so that attempts to abolish violence by violence neither have in the past nor, evidently, can in the future emancipate people from violence nor, consequently, from slavery. it cannot be otherwise. apart from outbursts of revenge or anger, violence is used only in order to compel some people, against their own will, to do the will of others. but the necessity to do what other people wish against your own will is slavery. and, therefore, as long as any violence, designed to compel some people to do the will of others, exists there will be slavery. violence aggravates. all the attempts to abolish slavery by violence are like extinguishing fire with fire, stopping water with water,, or filling up one hole by digging another. the chief thing is that the present arrangement of life is bad; about 'that all are agreed. the cause of the bad conditions and of the, existing slavery lies in the violence used by governments. there is only one way to abolish governmental violence: that people should abstain from participating in violence. and, therefore, whether it be difficult or not, to abstain from participating in governmental violence, and whether the good results of such abstinence will or will not be soon apparent, are superfluous questions; because to liberate people from slavery there is only that one way, and no other! to what extent and when voluntary agreement, confirmed by custom, will replace violence in each society and in the whole world will depend on the strength and eagerness of people's consciousness and on the number of individuals who make this consciousness their own. each of us is a separate person, and each can be a participator in the general movement of humanity by his greater or lesser clearness of recogni 24 tion of the aim before us, or he can be an opponent of progress. eacn will have to make his choice: to oppose the will of god, building upon the sands the unstable house of his brief, illusive life, or to join in the eternal, deathless. movement of true life in accordance with god's will. * * * murder is an evil, that i know more certainly than any reasonings; by demanding that i should enter the army or pay for hiring and equipping soldiers, or for buying cannons and 'building ironclads, you wish to make me an accomplice in murder, and that i cannot and will not be. neither do i wish, nor can i, make use of money you have collected' from hungry people with threats of murder; nor do i wish to make use of lands or capital defended by you, because i know that your defence rests' on murder. "i could do these things when i did, not understand all their criminality, but when i have once seen it, i cannot 'avoid seeing it. and can no ]inger take part in these things. "i know that we are all so bound up by violence that it is difficult 'to avoid it altogether, but i will, nevertheless, do all i can not to take part in it; i will not be an accomplice to it, and will try not 'to make use of what is obtained and defended by murder. "i have but one life, and why should i, in this brief life of mine, act contrary to the voice of conscience and become a partner in your abominable deeds? "i cannot, and i will not. "and what will come of this? i do not know. only i think that no harm can result from acting as my conscience demands." so in our time should each honest and sincere man reply to all the arguments about the necessity of governments and, of violence, and to every demand or invitation to take part in them. so that the supreme and unimpeachable judge -the voice of conrclence-confirms to each man the conclusion to which also general reasoning should bring us. 25 then out spake brave horatius, the captain of the gate; "to every man upon this earth death cometh soon or late. and how can men die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods." -macaulay. 0 -freedom, freedom's cure. ariosto tells a pretty story of a fairy who, by some mysterious law of her nature, was condemned to appear at certain seasons in the form of a foul and poisonous snake. those who injured her during the period of her disguise were forever excluded from participation in the blessings which she bestowed. but to those who, in spite of her hideous aspect, pitied and protected her, she afterwards revealed herself in the beautiful and celestial form which was natural to her, accompanied their steps, granted all their wishes, filled their houses with wealth, made them happy in love and victorious in war. such a spirit is liberty. at times she takes the form of a hateful reptile. she grovels, she hisses, she stings. but woe to those who in disgust shall venture to crush her! and happy are those who, having dared to receive her in her degraded and frightful shape shall at length be rewarded by her in the time of her beauty and glory. there is onl3 one cure for evils which newly acquired freedom produces, and that cure is freedom. when a prisoner first leaves his cell, he cannot bear the light of day, he is unable to discriminate colors, or recognize faces. the remedy is, to accustom him to the rays of the sun. the blaze of truth and liberty may at first daszle and bewilder nations which have become half blind in the house of bondage. but let them gaze on, and they will soon be able to bear it. in a few years men learn to reason. the extreme violence of ovlnions subsides. hostile theories 26 correct each other. the scattered elements of truth cease to contend, and begin to coalesce. and, at length, a system of justice and order is educed out of the chaos. many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. the maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim. if men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait forever. -macaulay. 0 no-the malady, like many others of the body politic, cannot be driven off by any purgative of law. drastic punishments are impotent to restrain; they will serve only to spread the propaganda of anarchism. we must remember that courts and prisons, judges and jailers are not, after all, the great securities of our property and lives. in the maintenance of a just government, our writs, subpoenas, and decisions are dead instruments compared with the force of an active and intelligent public opinion.-evening post. (unconscious? anarchy. italics mine.-pub.) the people is a beast of muddy brain that knows not its own force and therefore stands loaded with wood and stone; the powerless hands of a mere child guide it with bit and rein; one kick would be enough to break the chain; but the beast fears, and what the child demands, it does; nor its own terror understands, confused and stupefied by bugbears vain. most wonderful! with its own hand it ties and gags itself-gives itself death and war for pence doled out by kings from its own store. its own are all things between earth and heaven; but this it knows not; and if one arise to tell this truth, it kills him unforgiven. -campanella. 27 "in vain you tell me that artificial government is good, but that i fall out only with the abuse; the thing-the thing itself is the abuse."-burke. "no person will rule over me with my consent. i will rule over no man."-wm. lloyd garrison. "the lord's prayer says: our father who art in heaven. if god is the father of all men, all men are brothers, and as brothers all men are equal. therefore, all authority arrogated by man over man is wrong. all government of man over man is wrong."-hall caine. "the people are governed too much already, losing their personal freedom, and multiplying tyrants."-judge f. m. finch. majority rule is not founded-any more than emperor's rule-on reason or justice. there is no reason or justice in making two men subject to three men. the opinions of two men are just as sacred for them as the opinions and interests of three men are for them. nobody has the moral right to seek his own advantage by force. that is the one unalterable, inviolable condition of a true society. whether we are many, or whether we are few, we must learn only to use the weapons of reason, discussion, and persuasion. -hon. a. herbert. force is no remedy.-john bright. and the false democracy parts aside for the disclosure of the true democracy which has been formed beneath it-which is not an external government at all, but an inward rule-the rule of the mass-man in each unit-man. for no outward government can be anything but a makeshift-a temporary hard chrysalis-sheath to hold the grub together while the new life is forming inside.-edward carpenter. and this is liberty-that one grow after the law of his own life, hindering not another; and this is opportunity; and the fruit thereof is variation; and from the glad growing and the truit 28 feasting comes sympathy, which is appreciative and helpful good-fellowship.-j. win. lloyd. self-development is an aim for all-an aim which will make all stronger, and saner, and wiser, and better. it will make each in the end more helpful to humanity. to be sound in wind and limb; to be healthy of body and mind; to be educated, to be emancipated, to be free, to be beautiful-these things are ends towards which all should strain, and by attaining which all are happier in themselves, and more useful to others. -grant allen. everywhere the strong have made +he laws and oppressed the weak; and, if they have sometimes consulted the interests of society, they have always forgotten those of humanity.-turgot. society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling; it never forgives the preaching of a new gospel.-fiederick harrison. self-love is a necessary, indestructible, universal law and principle, inseparable from ever. kind of love. religion must and does confirm this on every page of her history. wherever man tries to resist that human egoism, whether in religion, philosophy, or politics, he sinks into pure nonsense and insanity; for the sense which forms the foundation of all human instincts, desires and actions, is the satisfaction of the human being, the satisfaction of human egoism.-feuerbach. an ambassador is a man who goes abroad to lie for the good of his country. a journalist is a man who stays at home to pursue the same vocation.-dr. s. johnson. freedom cannot be granted. it must be taken. the earth is mortgaged to seven speculative scoundrels. the rest of mankind are necessarily the slaves thereof. a race of altruists is necessarily a race of slaves. a race of freemen is necessarily a race of egoists. 29 "the great are great only because we are on our knees. let us rise!" the men of future generations will yet win many a liberty of' which we do not even feel the want.-stirner. one is free in proportion as one is strong; there is no real liberty save that which one takes for one's self.-ib. progress is born of doubt and inquiry. the discoverer of a great truth well knows that it may be useful to other men, and, as a greedy with-holding would bring him no enjoyment, he communicates it.-ib. if it be right to me, it is right.-ib. after all, the poorest bargain that a human being can make, is to give his individuality for what is called respectability.-ingersoll. age after age, the strong have trampled upon the weak; the crafty and heartless have ensnared and enslaved the simple and innocent, and nowhere, in all the annals of mankind, has any god succored the oppressed.-ib. 0 ---------0---------lightning flasihes from nietzsche. forget this superstition (that the day of noble deeds is past), steep your souls in plutarch, and through believing in his heroes, dare to believe in yourselves.-nietzsche. whosoever will be free, must make himself, free: freedom is no fairy's gift to fall into any man's lap.-ib. we still wish to work for our fellow-nmen, but 30 in so far as we find our own highest advantage in this work, not more, not less. everything depends only on what one regard's as his advantage; the immature, undeveloped, coarse individual will also have the coarsest conception of it.ib. the thou hath been proclaimed holy, but the i not yet. what is freedom? to have the will to be responsible for one' self.-ib. we carry faithfully what we are given, on hard shoulders, over rough mountains! and when perspiring, we are told: "yea, life is hard to dear!" but man himself only is hard to bear! the reason is that he carrieth too many strange things on his shoulders. like the camel he kneeleth down and alloweth the heavy load to be put on his back.-ib. noble souls wish not to have anything for nothing.-ib. ---------0---------victory. victory at the end, there's no defeat! let tyranny have its day and then depart: in mankind's teeming brain and throbbing heart slow germinate and bloom the measures meet. there is no shame that shall not be atoned, no suffering or wrong that can endure; humanity is silent but is sure, triumph is not abandoned but postponed. we may not share the glories of the goal, nor even view afar the promised land; enough to leap a-thrilled at love's command, go down in battle with a deathles soul. the banner's borne aloft above the fray, we perish, but the truth and victory stay. -william mountain. 31 no revolution ever rises above the intellectual level of those who make it, and little is gained where one false notion supplants another. but we must some day, at last and forever, cross the line between nonsense and commonsense. and on that day we shall pass from class paternalism, originally derived from the fetich fiction in times of universal ignorance, to human brotherhood in accordance with the nature of things and our growing knowledge of it; from political government to industrial administration; from competition in individualism to individuality in co-operation; from war and despotism in any form to peace and liberty.-thomas carlyle. drop your humility, you know that it is an attitude of hypocrisy based on fear; therefore drop it. come out in your true character as master of all things by your divine right, stand squarely on your own feet, and swear by your own will instead of god's will. * * * you have either to be yourself or god. and as you cannot be god -by which i mean the invisible and omnipresent "law of growth-you will have to be yourself.helen wilmans. intellectual superiority has no more right to get the better of an inferior in its kind of power than physical superiority in its kind; time was when the strong man physically ruled merely because he was strong; that time has passed. now the intellectual man, the cunning man, rules simply because he is most cunning; law and cunning back him up. this mere cunning, however, must be stripped of its power; the keen head should have no more power to tyrannize than the strong arm.-dr. e. b. foote, jr. man will grow, not force, himself free of bars and keys. he will ascend to spaces where laws could not follow him, the state will not be destroyed but will drag more and more behind. the citizenship of a land is not its voting population but its faith. men vote and thin themselves saved. 32 legislators pass laws and imagine that social elriety is conserved.-h. traubel. liberty is the most jealous and exacting!mistress that can beguile the brain and soul of man. from him who will not give her all, she will have nothing. she knows that his pretended love serves but to betray. but when once the fierce heat of her quenchless, lustrous eyes has burned into the victim's heart, he will know no other smile but hers. liberty iwill have none but the great devoted souls, and by her glorious visions, by her lavish promises, her boundless hopes, her infinitely witching charms, she lures these victims over hard and stony ways, by desolate,and dangerous paths, through misery, obloquy and want to a martyr's cruel death. to-day we pay our last sad homage to the most devoted lover, the most abject slave, the fondest, wildest, dreamiest victim that ever gave his life to liberty's immortal, hopeless cause.-c. l. darrow, at altgeld's funeral. i know i am restless and make others so, i know my words are weapons, full of danger, full of fire, for i confront peace, security, and all the settled laws, to unsettle them, i am more resolute because all have denied me than i.could ever have been had all accepted me. i heed not and have never heeded either experience,.caution, majorities, nor ridicule, and the threat of what is called hell is little or nothing to me, and the lure of what is called heaven is little or nothing to me. -walt whitman. -------0--o------liberty which is -the nurse of all great wits. * * * give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.-milton. 33 all of our greatness was born of liberty, even our commercialism was.rocked in the cradle of democracy, and we cannot strangle the mother without destroying her children.-altgeld. "* * * some one is robbing you, brother mine, sister mine; the same who leads you in processions; the same who calls you to prayer, your brother is he, too, but has never learned it; or has forgotten it. some one is robbing you; the same whom you serve; the same to whom you pull the forelock; the same for whom you vote. as if it were important that he and not the other should rob you; poor, patient, stupid brother! is your dinner pail full? they say that is the way to win you. they say that get you on your knees, under stained glass,, and fill your belly, you will keep on voting for some one; some one who robs you. * * * * -rev. h. 0. pentecost. -0-----futility of force. governments cannot be done away with instantaneously, but progress will come, as it has in the past by lessening the number of law&amp; we want less governing, and the ideal government will arrive when there is no government at all. so long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private individuals will occasionally kill theirs. so long as men are clubbed, robbed, imprisoned, disgraced, hanged by the governing class, just so long will the idea of 34 violence and brutality be born in the souls of men. governments imprison men, and then hound them when they are released. hate springs eternal in the human breast. and hate will never die so long as men are taken from useful production on the specious plea of patriotism, and bayonets gleam in god's pure sunshine. and the worst part about making a soldier of a man is, not that the soldier kills brown men or black men or white men, but it is that the soldier loses his own soul. i am an anarkist. i do not believe in bolts or bars or brutality. * "* * i do not believe in governing by force, or threat, or any other form of coercion. i would not arouse in the heart of any of god's creatures a thought of fear, or discord, or hate, or revenge. i will influence men, if i can, but it shall be only by aiding them to think for themselves; and so mayhap, they, of their own accord will choose the better part-the ways that lead to life and light.--fra elbertus.-(elbert hubbard.) 0 ----------0---------affirmations. the strong, from the beginning, have stolen their bread; and, what is worse, they have despised their bakers. they have discredited the natural facts of alimentation, and they have sponged upon the poor. what hope of wise, deliberate science, of joyous, perennial art and permanent civic glory in a world that is ashamed of its stomach, filches its food, and despises the souls of the laborers? * * * europe and america to-day are sick with the night-mare of their dreams. they have dreamed of democracy, and in their dreams have achieved libertybut only in their dreams, not otherwise.* * * we have had the law; we expect now the gospel of democracy. * * * the only available 35 victories are those that one man wins against the mob. * * * over against nature stands the man, and deep in his heart is the passion for liberty. for the passion for liberty is only another name for life itself. liberty is a word of much sophistication, but it means, when it means anything, opportunity to live one's own life in one's own way. * * * the original sin of the world is not contempt for arbitrary laws, but respect for them. * * * -rev. charles ferguson. offices of government are dealt out, children will look for them; money is given, children will look for it; military commands, consulships-let children scramble for them! let them be shut out and smitten, let them kiss the hand of the giver, of his slaves; it is figs and almonds to me. -epictetus. (election day.) whether th' flag of this counthry shall be dhragged in th' mire or left to lay there; whether this counthry shall take its place among the nations iv th' earth, or somewan else's; whether ye shall wurrak at a dollar an' a half a day f'r th' trusts or f'r the men composin' th' trusts.-mr. dooley. s0 * * they were souls that stood alone, while the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious stone.-james r. lowell. we will speak out, we will be heard, though all earths systems crack; we will not bate a single word, nor take a letter back. let liars fear, let cowards shrink, let traitors turn away; whatever we have dared to think sthat dare we also say.-ib. 36 freedom the prerequisite. liberty of action being the first essential to exercise of faculties, and therefore the first essential to happiness; and the liberty of each, limited by the like liberties of all, being the form which this first essential assumes when applied to many instead of one-it follows that this liberty of each, limited by the like liberties of all, is the rule in conformity with which society must be organized. freedom being the prerequi site to normal life in the individual, equal freedom becomes the prerequisite to normal life in society. and if this law of equal freedom is the primary raw of right relationship between man and man, then no desire to get fulfilled a secondary law can warrant us in breaking it. "whatever fosters militarism makes for barbarism; whatever fosters peace makes for civilization. there are two fundamentally opposed principles on which social life may be organizedcompulsory co-operation and voluntary co-operation, the one implying coercive institutions, the other free institutions. just in proportion as militant activity is great does the coercive regime more pervade the whole society. hence, to oppose militancy is to oppose return towara despotism." in proportion as we love truth more and victory less, we shall become more anxious to know what it is which leads our opponents to think as they do. we shall begin to suspect that the pertinacity of belief exhibited by them must result from perception of something we have not perceived.-herbert spencer. "is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? i know not what course others may take, but a9 for me, give me liberty or give me deatur'--patrick renrr. jones versus force. the idea of governing by force another man, who i believe to be my equal in the sight of god, is repugnant to me. i do not want 'to do it. i do not want anyone to govern me by any kind of force. i am a reasoning being, and i unly need to be shown what is best for me, when i will take that course or do that 'thing simply bejg cause it is best, and so will you. i do not believe that a soul was ever forced toward anything except toward ruin. liberty for 'the few is not liberty. liberty for nme and slavery for you means slavery for both. -samuel m. jones. 0 would to god that this hot and bloody struggle was over, and that peace may come at last to the world! and yet i invoke no seeming peace that the -weaker may ever anon be plundered, but a peace with liberty, equality, and honest man's and not robber's order for its condition. * * ** let 'others give aid and acomfort to despots. be it ours to stand for liberty and justice, nor fear to lock arms with those who are called hot-heads and demagogues, when the good cause requires.--charles a. dana. (written prior to his membership in the "plutocratic brotherhood of thieves.") i have been passive; i have submitted to the law, and i have seen the tide of life flow from me to return, bringing but seaweed and the dead i loved. still have i held my peace, until this hour. -paul ettar. 38 bread of the soul. * * * man needs the ideal more than he needs bread. the ideal is the bread of the soul. again there are those who say that the hoeman is content in his squalor and ignorance; and that therefore he should not be disturbed. would they say also that children are happy in their ignorance and should not be led on to the higher knowledge? the hoeman may be content, but his wiser brother should not be. our nobility should oblige as to clear the way for him that he may be quickened to struggle upward to the nobler horizons that await him. and this freedom will be the freedom of all. it will loosen bboth master and slave from the chain. for, by a divine paradox, wherever there is one slave there are two. iso in the wonderful reciprocities of being, we can never reach the higher levels until all our fellows ascend with us. there is no true liberty for the individual except as he finds it in liberty of all. there is no true security for the individual except as he finds it in the security of all.-edwin markham. freiedom is this to me-the remedy.-j. w. lloyd. government is not reason, it is not eloquenceit is force! like fire it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master; never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.-george washington. anarchy.-a social theory which regards the union of order with the absence of all direct government of man by man as the political ideal; absolute individual liberty.-century dictionary. anarohy.-an ideal to which the highest religion and philosophy look forward as the goal of man; not as one, however, which can be forthwith reached through the wholesale destruction of the present frame work of. society, but 39 through a long process of ethical and social improvement. -encyclopedia brittanica. government is an artificial giant and the power that moves it is money.--garfield. english liberty to-day rmsts not so much on the government as on those rights the people have wrested from the governments.-ib. governments, in general, look upon man only as a citizen, a fraction of the state. god looks upon him as an indfvidual man, with capacities, duties, and a destiny of his own; and just in proportion as a government recognizes the individual and shields him in the exercises of his rights, in that proportion is it godlike and glorious.-ib. from time immemorial the pharisaic conventionalists have been preaching self help to "the lower classes." but, at the remotest possibilty that these preached at classes will apply the preachment to the governmental bill of fare, the insincere preachers set up so ludicrous a howl as should convince those of the muddlest brains that self help is the only help that helps. 0 ---------0-------~ assassination a murder on behalf of the people? that is no place for murders-they belong on the other side. poor, brave, cowardly, cruel fool, who thought the people could (be helped by murder, and, thinking to lay oppression, well-nigh laid freedom low! but there are other tools-those who suppose that a foul deed can for long set back the bands of time. can a crime alter facts? can any mad assassin kill the ete jtrpth? -rxne t*,:;ay. 40 force inimical to liberty. the individualistic anarchist holds that the best conditions will be evolved, if people are allowed a free course. he is confident that they will find the right way themselves. he does not believe, of course, that there would,e no more pickpockets day after to-morrow, if the state should be abolished to-morrow. but he knows that people cannot be prepared for liberty by authority and force. he knows this,-that the way is made free for the most independent people by removing all force and authority. but the present states are founded on force and authority. the individualistic anarchist is hostile to them, because they suppress liberty. all he demands is the free untrammeled development of forces. he wishes to remove the force whi-ch hinders free development. he is convinced that whatever smacks of force is inimical to liberty. therefore he combats the state, which rests on force; and therefore he combats just as energetically the "propaganda by 'deed," which rests no less on force. if the state beheads or imprisons a man on account of his convictions, the proceeding, call it whatever one will, is execrable in the eyes of the individualistic anarchist. it is no less execrable, of course, when a lucheni stabs a woman who happens to be the jempress of austria. it is one of the foremost principles of the individualistic an-, archist to combat these things. if he were to approve them, he would have to admit that he does not know w-hy he opposes the state. he combats the force which suppresses liberty; and he combats it as vigorously when the state coerces a libertarian idealist as when an insane, vain fellow assassinates the sympathetic visionary oi the imperial throne of austria. it cannot be urged explicitly enough against our opponents that the "individualistic anarchists" emphatically condemn "propaganda by deed." aside from the coercion practised by 41 states, there is perhaps nothing that is so repugnant to these anarchists as the caserios and luchenis.-dr. rudblph steiner. "the discussion that is now required is one that must go down to the very first principles of existing society." "the restraints of communism would be freedom in comparison with. the present condition of the majority of the human race."-j. s. mill. ----------0---------0__ i know i am august, i do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood, i see that the elementary laws never apologize, (i reckon.1 behave no prouder than the level i plant my house by, after all). i exist as i am, that is enough, if no other in the world be aware i sit content, and if each and all be aware i sit content. one world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself, and whether i come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten million years, i can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness wait. my foothold is tenon'd and mortis'd in granite, i laugh at what you call dissolution, and i know the amplitude of time. walt whitman. ---------0--------overcome evil with good. the heart knoweth his own bitterness, and a stranger doth not intermeddle with his joy. in those days there was no king in israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes. and as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise. if the truth shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed. he that knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it is 4sin.-bible. 4a what greater life, what grander claim, than that which bids you'to be just? what brighter halo, fairer fame, than shines above the sacred dust of him who, formed of finer clay, stood firm, a hero of revolt against the weakness of his day, the traitor's trick, the panderer's fault t -gordak. the most virile literature of all modern nations contains -more or less of this anarchy against law and conventional and narrow laws on the civil plane, and advocates their repeal or defiance in behalf of higher moral and spiritual ideas. -rev. s. c. eby. but have we ever regulated the railroads by law, or the standard oil company by law? let me say that we never, never can regulate -anything by law that has its roots deep down in existing social conditions. those things are too strong to be regulated by law.-c. e. s. wood. what is the state? everything. what should it be? nothing. it is a do-all and a spoil-all. we are only too ready to refrain from wiping our noses without the authorization of the state, to admire only what the state patronizes, to turn imploringly to state boards of charity instead of using our own arms and heads. and yet it would be so easy to lose the hab(it! ah! if papas and mammas were not stupid, how readily little boys would learn to do without the state and no longer rely on it, and how quickly it would become what it ought solely to be-a simple policeman, a good ipoliceman, and not a pretentious botcher of all jobs, even of those which it does not do!-arsene alexandre. he does not really believe his opinions who 43 dares not give free scope to his opponent.-wendell phillips. law has always been wrong. government is the fundamental ism of the soldier, bigot, and priest.-wendell phillips, october 16, 1861. in all ages, hypocrites, called priests, have put crowns upon the heads of thieves, called kings.ingersoll. i knew th' time wud come, hinnissy. 'tis th' on'y way. ye may talk about it as much as ye want, but governmint, me boy, is a case iv me makin' ye do what i want, an' if i can't do it with a song, i'll do it with a shovel. th' ir'n hand in th' velvet glove, th' horseshoe in th' boxin' mit, th' quick right, an' th' heavy boot, that was th' way we r'run pollyticks whin i was captain iv me precinct."-mr. dooley. as l ng as we know we are in hell there is hope.-4 m. powers. a man's own conscience is his sole tribunal; and he should care no more for that phantom "opinion" than he should fear meeting a ghost 11 he crosses the churchyard at dark.-lytton. "this old society has long since been judged and condemned. let justice be done. let this old world be broken to pieces, * * * where innocence has perished, where man is exploited by man. let the white sepulchres full of lying and iniquity be utterly destroyed."-heine. "law grinds the poor, and the rich men rule the law."-oliver goldsmith. "government is the great blackmailer. * * no good ever came from the law. all reforms have been the offspring of revolution."-buckle. "in general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one part of the citizens to give it to another."--voltaire. "the trade of governing has always been mon 44 opolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of.mankind."-thomas paine. "did the mass of men inow the actual selfishness and injustice of their rulers, not a government would stand a year; the world would ferment with revolution."-theodore parker. should humanity weep in order that tyrants may laugh?-d. b. henderson.. "i am convinced that those societies (as the indians) which live without government, enjoy in the general mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live live under governments. * * * that government is best which governs least."-thomas jefferson. "law in its guarantee of the results of pillage, slavery and exploitation, has followed the same phase of development as capital; twin brother and sister, they have advanced hand in hand, sustaining one another with the sufferings ol mankind. * * * judiciary, ipolice, army, public instruction, finance-all serve one god, capital; all have but one object-to facilitate the exploitation of the worker by the capitalist."-peter kropotkin. "by no process can coercion be made equitable. the freest form of government is only the least objectionable form. the rule of the many by the few, we call tyranny. the rule of the few by the many (democracy) is tyranny also, only of a less intense kind."-herbert spencer. "there is no government, however restricted in its powers, that may not, by, abuse, under pretext of exercise of its constitutional authority, drive its unhappy subjects to desperation."-john randolph. "whenever you have niet a dozen earnest men pledged to a new idea-wherever you have met them, you have met the beginning of a revolution. * * * revolution is as natural a growth as an oak-it comes out of the past. * * * every 45 line in our history, every interest of civilization. bids us rejoice when the tyrant grows pale and the slaves rebellious."-wendell philips. government could not continue to exist unless many men were willing to be government's agents for the perpetration of what they personally regard as viles crimes.-steven t. byington. it can never be unpatriotic for a man to take his country's side against his government; it must always be unpatriotic for a man to take his government's side against his country.-ib. in all customary forms of government the rulers are on the average morally worse than the ruled, so that the result is to give 'the bad control over ihe good; the 6uly way yet devised to avoid this is to make supreme authority the prize of a lot. tery or of an athletic colptest.-ib. ----------~0----------order and disorder. who says anarchy, says negation of government. who says negation of government, saysaffirmation of people. who says affirmation of people, says individual liberty. who says individual liberty, says sovereignty of oneself. who says sovereignty of oneself, says equality. who says equality, says solidarity and brotherhood. who says brotherhood and solidarity, says social order. then, who says anarchy, says social order. on the contrary: who says government, says negation of people. who says negation of people, says affirmation of political authority. who says political authority, says individual submission. who says individual submission, says supremacy of caste. who says supremacy of caste, says inequality. who says inequality, says antagonism. who says antagonism, says civil war and disorder. then who says government, says civil war and disorder.-bellegarigue. 46 "obedience,;3ane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, makes slaves oi men, and of the human frame a mechanized automaton." -shelley. -----o--------psychic factors. "today, when mental force is everything and physical force nothing, government is powerless to accomplish the equitable distribution of wealth. * * it is utterly illogical to say that aggrandizement by physical force should be forbidden while aggrandizement by mental force or legal fiction should be permitted. it is absurd to claim that injustice committed by muscle should be restrained while that committed by brain should be unrestrained. "under the system as it now exists the wealth of the world, however created, and irrespective of the claims of the producer, is made to flow toward certain centers of accumulation, to be enjoyed *by those holding the keys to such situations. the world appears to be approaching a stage at which those who labor, no matter how skilled, how industrious, or how frugal, will receive, according to the 'iron law' formulated by ricardo, only so much for their services as will enable them 'to subsist and to perpetuate their race.' the rest finds its way into the hands of a comparatively few, usually non-producing, individuals, whom the usages and laws of all countries permit to claim that they own the very sources of all wealth and the right to allow or forbid its production. "these are great and serious evils, compared with which all the crimes, recognized as such, that would be committed if no government existed, would be as trifles.' the underpaid labor, the prolonged and groveling drudgery, the wasted strength, the misery and the squalor, the diseases resulting, and the premature deaths that would be prevented by a just distribution of products of 47 labor, would in a single year outweigh all the so-called crime of a century, for the prevention of which, it is said, government alone exists. this vast theatre of woe is regarded as wholly outside the jurisdiction of government, while the most strenuous efforts are put forth to detect and punish the perpetrators of the least of" the ordinary recognized crimes. this ignoring of great evils while so violently striking at small ones is the mark of an effete civilization, and warns us of the approaching dotage of the race."-l. f. ward. 0 to mind your own business and do the square thing with your neighbors is an extremely high order of patriotism. if every man were to do this, flags, governments, powers, dominations and thrones might all take an indefinite vacation.puck. the freest government cannot long endure when the tendency of the law is to create a rapid accumulation of property in the hands of a few, and to render the masses poor and dependent.-daniel webster. "freedom is the one purport, wisely aimed at, or unwisely, of all man's strugglings, toilings and sufferings, on this earth."-carlyle. "it is not the disease, but the physician; it i. the pernicious hand of government alone which can reduce a whole people to despair.."-junius. the law of nature,;being co-eval with mankind, and dictated by god himself, is superior in obligation to every other. it is binding all over the globe, in all countries, and at all times; no human laws are of any validity if contrary to this, and such of them as are valid derive their force and all their authority, mediately or immediately, from the original.-blackstone. liberty of thought is a mockery if liberty of speech and of action is denied.-rev. sidney holmes. 48 hither, ye blind, from your futile banding! "know the rights and the rights are won. wrong shall die with the understanding. one truth clear, and the work is done. nature is higher than progress or knowledge whose need is ninety enslaved for ten. my word shall stand against mart and college: the planet belongs to its living men. -j. b. o'reilly. -------0 ---------celtic sense. "the masses are poor, ignorant, disorganized, not knowing the right of mankind upon earth, and never knowing that the world belongs to its population; because a small class in every country has taken possession of property and government and makes laws for its own safety and the security of its plunder; educating the masses, generation after generation, into the belief that this conditiion is the natural order and the "law of god." by long training and submission the people everywhere have come to regard the assumption of their rulers and owners as the law of right and common sense, and their own blind instincts, which tell them that all men ought to have a plenteous living on this rich planet, as the promptings of evil and disorder. the qualitie. we naturally dislike and fear in a man are those which insure success under our present social order, viz: shrewdness, hardness, adroitness, selfishness, the mind to take advantage of necessity, the will to trample on the weak in the canting name of progress and civilization. the qualities we love in a man send him to the poor housegenerosity, truth, truthfulness, friendliness, unselfishness, the desire to help, the heart to pity, the mind to refuse profit from a neighbor's loss or weakness, the defence of the weak. our present civilization is organized injustice and intellectual barbarism. our progress is a march to a preci pice. the sermon on the mount and natural justice can rule the world, or they cannot. if they 49 can, our present ruling is the invention of the devil; if they cannot, the devil has a right to rule if the people let him-but he ought not to call his rule christian civilization."-john boyle o'reilly. 0-----anarchy. ever reviled, accursed-ne'er understood, thou art the grisly terror of our age. "wreck of all order," cry the multitude, "art thou, and war and murder's endless rage." o, let them cry. to them that ne'er have striven, the truth that lies behind a word to find, to them the word's right meaning was not given. they sihall continue blind among the blind. but thou, o word, so clear, so strong, so pure, that sayest all which i for goal have taken. i give thee to the future!-thine secure when each at least unto himself shall waken. comes it in sunshine? in the tempest's thrill? i cannot tell... but it the earth shall see! i am an anarchist! wiherefor i will not rule, and also ruled i will not be! -john henry mackay. definitions. anarchism, as defined by anarchists, is the belief in the greatest amount of liberty compatible with equality of liberty. in other words, the belief in every liberty except the liberty to invade. it is an implication of this definition, that anarchism aims at the abolition of government and the state, for government and the state, as defined by anarchists, are debarred, by their nature, from allowing the greatest amount of liberty compatible with equality of liberty, and are necessarily invasive, government 'being defined 50 as the subjection of the non-invasive individual to an external will, and the state being defined as the embodiment of the principle of invasion in an individual, or a band of individuals, assuming to act as representatives or masters of the entire people within a given area. all the foregoing definitions are taken from the textbooks. the purpose of anarchism, then, is to put an end to every form of invasion and to establish a condition of equal liberty. * * * the idea that anarchy can be inaugurated by force is as fallacious as the idea that it can be sustained by force. force cannot preserve an archy; neither can it bring it. in fact, one of the inevitable influences of the use of force is' to postpone anarchy. the only thing that force can ever do for us is to save us from extinction, to give us a longer lease of life in which to try to secure anarchy by the only methods that can ever bring it. but this advantage is always purchased at immense cost, and its attainment is always attended by frightful risk. the attempt should be made only when the risk of any other course is greater. * * * bloodshed in itself is pure loss. when we must have freedom of agitation, and when nothing but bloodshed will secure it, then bloodshed is wise. but it must be remembered that it can never accomplish the social revolution proper; that that can never be accomplished except by means of agitation, investigation, experiment and passive resistance; and that, after all the bloodshed we shall be exactly where we were before, except in our possession of power to use these means.-benj. r. tucker. 0 ----------0--------i am an anarkist. all good men are anarkists. all,cultured, kindly men; all gentle men; all just men are anarkists. jesus was an anarkist. -elbert hubbard. 51 who is the somebody? "somebody gets the surplus wealth that labor produces and does not consume. who is the somebody?" * * * * what are the ways by which men gain possession of property? not many. let us name them: work, gift, discovery, gaming, the various forms of illegal robbery by force or fraud, usury. can men obtain wealth by any other than one or more of these methods? clearly, no. whoever the somebody may be, then, he must accumulate his riches in one of these ways. we will find him by the process of elimination. is the somebody the laborer? no; at least not as laborer; otherwise the question were absurd. its premises exclude him. he gains a bare subsistence by his work; no more. we are searching for his surplus, product. he has it not. is the somebody the beggar, the invalid, the cripple, the discoverer, the gambler, the highway robber, the burglar, the defaulter, the pickpocket, or the common swindler? none of these to any extent worth mentioning. the aggregate of wealth absorbed by these classes of our population compared with the vast mass produced is a mere drop in the ocean, unworthy of consideration in studying a fundamental problem in political economy. these people get some wealth, it is true; enough, probarbly, for their own purposes; 'but labor can spare them the whole of it, and never know the difference. then we have found him. only the usurer remaining. * * * the usurer is the somebody, and the state is his protector. usury is the serpent gnawing at labor's vitals, and only liberty can detach and kill it. give laborers their liberty, and they will keep their wealth. as for the somebody, he, stripped of his power to steal. must either join their ranks or starve. b, r. tuicrer. "if there were more extremists in evolutionary timer, there would be no revolutionary times."--ib 52 "free life" precepts. {free life, an organ of voluntary taxation and the voluntary state.] don't waste your energies in party fighting; don't believe in the politician, who is climbing to place and power; don't believe in the phrase-makers and vote seekers, whose office it is to please and flatter you and keep you at war with one another; don't believe in state gifts or state privileges, either for poor or rich; don't spend your lives in regulating and restricting each other; get rid of the education-persecutor, the drinkpersecutor, the sanitary-persecutor, the statemorality-persecutor; use no state coercion, except only to defend the person and property of each citizen; vote down all compulsory rates and taxes; train yourselves in voluntary services for the state; safeguard all property; and win it for yourselves through voluntary association and the resist less power of your combined pennies; don't take part in bad, useless wars between rich and poor; don't take part, in bad, useless wars between labor and capital; trust to the widest possible liberty, to self-ownership and self-guidance, to free trade, to peace and friendliness, and to voluntary associations of every kind for satisfying wants and winning wealth; follow nobody; fear nobody; coerce nobody; love freedom; be ready to make sacrifices for her; and believe in her power to overcome all difficulties and heal all sufferings. ------0-----"'for what avail the plough or sail,.or land or life if freedom fail?" 53 savages do one better. i have lived with communities of savages in south america and in the east, who have no laws or law-courts but the public opinion of the village freely expressed. each man scrupulously respects the rights of his fellow, and any infraction of those rights rarely or never takes place. in such a community all are nearly equal. there are none of those wide distinctions of education and ignorance, wealth and poverty, master and servant, which are the production of our civilization. there is none of that wide-spread division of labor, which, while it increases wealth, produces 'also conflicting interests. there is not that severe competition and struggle for existence or for wealth which the dense population of cih ilized countries inevitably creates. all incitements to great crimes are tius wanting, and petty ones are suppressed partly by the influence of public opinion, but chiefly by that natural sense of justice and his neighbor's right which seem to be in some degree inherent in every race of men.-alfred russell wallace. 0 ---------o--------sovereignty of the people. we are all of us, in the realm of religion, anarchists.-dr. lyman abbott. the only real "sovereignty," or right of "sovereignty," in this or any other country, is that right of sovereignty which each and every human being has over his or her person and property, so long as he or she obeys the one law of justice towards the person and property of every other human being. this is the only natural right of sovereignty, that was ever known among men. all other so-called rights of sovereignty are simply the usurpations.of imposters, conspirators, robbers, tyrants and murderers.eysander spooner. it costs the government eight times more to 54 carry the mails than it costs the express companies to have their matter hauled.-w. j. bryan. (the above is one little stone from the babel "tower of governmental extravagance selected by the would-be master mason.) there is one cure, 'and one only, for social upheavals, and that is justice, and if culture is to devote itself to the discovery of substitutes for justice, it will have its labor for its pains.ernest a. crosby. ---------0--------get off his back. "who am i that desire to better men's condition? i desire it; and yet i get up at noon, after having played at cards in a brilliantly lighted saloon during all the previous night, i, an enfeebled and effeminate man, who thus require the help and services of hundreds of people, i come to help them!-these men who have to rise at five, sleep on boards, feed upon cabbage and bread, understand how to plough, to reap, to put a handle to an axe, to write, to harness horses, to sew; men who, by their strength and perseverance and self restraint, are a hundred times stronger than i who come to help them. "it is as if i were sitting on the necl of a man, and, having quite crushed him down, i compel him to carry me, and will not.alight from off his shoulders, while i assure myself and others that i 'am very sorry for him, and wish to ease his condition by every means in my power except by getting off his back."-tolstoy. for the story of mankind is never new-injustice, oppression and wrong are ever fortified and entrenched. here are lawyers with specious arguments and endless briefs, to prove that black is white, that wrong is right. here are judges in 'high places ready to maintain existing things. 55 here is the state which protects the strong and subverts the liberties and natural rights of the disinherited and despised. and here is the press with its million brazen tongues-its tongues of malice, of envy, and of spite, ready to defile the truth, to proclaim falsehood and error to the world, and to "ash to madness the passions and the hates of men. and here is the church, now as of old the home of the money changer and trafficker, the church raising its voice with the cry of the mob, and proclaiming to the world that whatsoever ye bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and that whatsoever ye loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. and now, as of old, truth crushed and bleeding and helpless, has no tongue to speak and no voice to raise.-c. s. darrow. 0-the true kings. in the higher condition of society, toward which mankind is unconsciously advancing, men will shun all responsibility for and arbitrary control over the conduct of others as sedulously as during past ages they have sought them as the chief good. washington declined to be made king, and the whole world has not ceased to make the welkin ring with laudations of the disinterested act. the time will come yet when the declinature, on all hands, of every species of governmental authority over others will not even be deemed a virtue, but simply the plain dictate of enlightened self-interest. the sentiment of the poet will then be recognized as an axiom of philosophy, whoever mounts the throne,-king, priest, or prophet,man alike shall groan. carlyle complains, in the bitterness of his heart, that the true kings and governors of mankind have retired in disgust from the task of 56 governing the world, and betaken themselves to the altogether private business of governing themselves. whenever the world at large shall become as wise as they, when all men shall be content to govern themselves merely, then, and not till then, will "the true constitution of goveminent" begin to be installed. every individual is the rightful sovereign over his own conduct in all things, whenever, and just so far as, the consequences of his conduct can be assumed by himself; or, rather, inasmuch as no one objects to assuming agreeable consequences. for disagreeable consequences, endurance, or burden of all sorts, the term "cost" is elected as a" scientific technicality. hence the exact formula of the doctrine, with its inherent limitation, may be stated thus: "the sovereignty of the individual, to be exercised at his own cost."-stephen pearl andrews. 0 ---------0--------they'se nawthin' so hard as mindin' ye'er own business, an iditor nivir has to do that.-mr. dooley. the desolating hand of power.-hallam. in all ages the individual has, in one form or another, been trodden in the dust. * * * every man, in every condition, is great. it is only our own diseased sight which makes him little. a man is great as a man, be he where or what he may. * * * the truly great are to be found everywhere. * of all the discoveries which men need to make, the most important, a the present moment, is that of the self-forming power treasured up in themselves.-ohanning. ---0 * * but this i know, that every law that men have made for man, *since first man took his brother's life, and the sad world began,but strawe the wheat and saves the chaff with a most evil fan. * * * -0. wilde. 57 the beauties of government. to be governed, is to be watched, inspected, spied, directed, law-ridden, regulated, penned up, indoctrinated, preached at, checked, appraised, seized, censured, commanded, by beings who have neither title nor knowledge nor virtue. 'to be governed is to have every operation, every transaction, every movement noted, registered, counted, rated, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, refused, authorized, indorsed, admonished, prevented, reformed, redressed, corrected. to be governed is, under pretext of public utility and in the name of the general interest, to be laid under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, exhausted, hoaxed and robbed; then, upon the slightest resistence, at the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, villified, annoyed, hunted down, pulled about, beaten, disarmed, bound, imprisoned, shot, mitrailleused, judged, condemned, banished, sacrificed, sold, betrayed, and, to crown all, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored.-proudhon. "whatever form it takes-monarchic, oligarchic or democratic-the government of man by man is illigitimate and absurd. * * * as man seeks justice in equity, so society seeks order in anarchy."-proudhon. liberty not the daughter, but the mother of order.-proudhon. may my communistic friends forgive me! i should be less severe upon their ideas if 1 were not irreversibly convinced, in my reason and in my heart, that communism, republicanism, and all the social, political, and religious utopias which disdain facts and criticism, are the greatest obstcle which progress has now to conquer. why will they never understand that fraternity can be established only by justice; that justice alone, the condition, means, and law of liberty 58 and fraternity, must be the object of our study; and that its determination and formula must be pursued without relaxation, even to the minutest details. * * * turn which way you will, you,must always come back to the cash-book, to the account of receipts and expenditures, the sole guarantee against large consumers as well as against small producers. * * * to suppose that the laborer of great capacity will content himself, in favor of the weak, with half his wages, furnish his services gratuitously, and produce, as the people say, for the king of prussiathat is, for that abstraction called society, the sovereign, or my brothers-is to base society on a sentiment, i do not say beyond the reach of man, but one which, erected systematically into a principle, is only a false virtue, a dangerous hypocrisy.-proudhon. 0 -----------0--------we keep a certain number of clowns digging and ditching, and generally stupefied, in ordei that we, being fed gratis, may have all the thinking and feeling to ourselves.-ruskin. human nature is a noble and beautiful thing; not a foul nor a base thing. all the sin of men i esteem as their disease, not their nature; as a folly which may be prevented, not a necessity which must be accepted. and my wonder, even when things are at their worst, is always at tae height which this human nature can attain. thinking it high, i find it always a higher thing than i thought it; while those who think it low, find it, and will find it, always lower than they thought it: the fact being that it is infinite, and capable of infinite height and infinite fall; jut the nature of it-and there is the faith which i would have you hold with me-the nature of it is in the nobleness, not in the catastrophe.ruskin. 0 politicians art a set of men who have interests aside from the interests of the people and 59 who, to say the most of them, are, taken as a mass, at least one long step removed from honest men. i say this with the greater freedom because, being a politician myself, none can regard it as personal.-abraham lincoln. i have always thought that all men should be free, but if any should be slaves, it should be first those who desire it for themselves, and secondly those who desire it for others.-lincoln to an indiana regiment, march 17, 1865. "when a white man governs himself, that is self government. but, when he governs himself and also governs some other man, that is more than self government-that is despotism. what i do mean to say is that no man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent." -a. lincoln. 0 -----------0----------"perhaps the most remarkable religious leader at the present time is the russian tolstoy, who is an individual anarchist. he does not believe in the law, not because he would have chaos, but he would have men govern themselves, in the broadest sense of the word. "anarchism is in reality the ideal of political and social science, and also the ideal of religion. it is the ideal to which jesus christ looked forward. christ founded no church, established no state, gave practically no laws, organized no government and set up no external authority; but he did seek to write on the hearts of men god's law and make them self-legislafing.-rev. heber newton. "anarchy is madness."-j. g. schurman, et al. "did you ever notice that all the interesting people you meet are anarchists?"-julian rawthorne. ""a man should have the freedom to do whatsoever he wills, provided that in the doing thereof he infringes not the equal freedom of every other man.-herbert,spencer. 60 "much madness is divinest sense to a discerning eye; much sense the starkest madness. 'tis the majority in this, as all, prevails. assent, and you are sane; demur-you're straightway dangerous and handled with a chain." -emily dickenson. 0 ----------0--------truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise from outward things, whate'er you may believe; there is an inmost centre to us all, where truth abides in fullness. * * * -browning. anarchy popularly misconceived. "we should be much helped in discussing anarchy if we used 'terrorist' (communist) for those anarchists who appeal to violence, and the word 'voluntatists' for those like tolstoy who appeal to persuasion. a latin proverb says: 'he teaches well who discriminates well.' from the general confusion and hysteria about this subject, we should have sanity and courage enough to distinguish crime from its opposite. emerson's sentence, 'the more reason the less government,' is the very breath of philosophic anarchy. "these voluntarists would progressively throw off the organized constraints of government, lessen rather than increase the number of laws, while they would increase education and all forms of free voluntary associations. they simply look forward to a society in which men have learned to behave well enough to require no courts or police or armies. if far off ideals have any interest for us, who could present a nobler one than this of the voluntarists? both channing and phil 61 lips brooks gave us a conception of heaven in precisely these terms. ibsen writes a letter' to george brandes in the same spirit. thoreau was out and out an anarchist of this type. "no question in the immediate future will plague us like this question: shall we enlarge or diminish the functions of government? shall we put our faith in compulsion or in liberty and free associations? the socialists beckon us one way, the philosophic anarchist another. as a fact, we know that a practical hand-to-mouth policy, with scant regard to fundamental principles, will guide us; we are just now, however, trying to think clearly about ideals. those who call themselves anarchists and use violence, we shall punish as swiftly as the law allows, but our immediate danger is to confuse an order of ideas with stupid and criminal practice. the anarchist idea, apart flrom violence, we shall not touch by any conceivable law. what a comment on our intelligenoe is the whole list of 'remedies for anarchy--'examinations of opinions by foreign consuls,' 'allow no one to come who cannot read,' 'deportation to some far island,' 'sending them to an insane asylum,' are types even of the serious proposals. "how long will it take to learn that it cannot thus deal with mental processes? our society is, alas! filled with what is worst in the anarchist spirit. a southern community, enflamed by aegro crime, real, or imagined, burns, hangs or shoots the wretch, and thus becomes as a community anarchist in its bad sense of lawless. "in the north the kind of group excitement makes us just as hysterical, just as lawless. atter the assassin had done his work at buffalo, a senator, judges, editors and clergy innumerable, were quick to proclaim themselves lawless and anarchist in opinion. in their heat they were willing, like southern lynchers, to trample upon the only safeguard of civilization--law and order. "our greatest embarrassment in dealing with criminal anarchy (the terrorists) will be hysteria 62 andlawlessness among so many of our citizens, and nowhere are 'remedies' more needed than for this sinister temper among ourselves."-john graham brooks. (t teacher-rara avis-who "discriminates well.") 0 anarchism is truth's crucible. "if we are satisfied with what has been found out, we shall find nothing more. they who have gone before us are not our masters, but our guides. truth is open to all, and has not yet been taken possession of, but many discoveries will be left for future ages."-seneca. 0 ----------0---------whatever freedom for ourselves we claim, we wish all others to enjoy the same, in simple womanhood's and manhood's name! freedom within one law of sacred might: ""trench not on any other's equal right." james thompson. 0 ----------0---------summing up. horace greeley wrote, "he did not mean to say all democrats are horse thieves, 'but he did mean to say all horse thieves are democrats." so, it is here noted-all the writers of the foregoing extracts are not by name anarchists, but they all write capital anarchist doctrine. it needs a little grit in these days of artificiality, to take the jesus stand, "come out from among them and be ye separate." yet, there are compensations to the come-outers which the fatted coward-conformers to things as they are, and their unresisfing purblind dupes wot not of. "better is a dinner of herbs where love is than a stalled ox and hatred therewith." if it was "up to" this one weak wight to foster 63 unkindliness, "hatred' would be too feeble a word to express his detestation of the utter enormity of our interminable wallowing in the mire of the -seemingly-ever widening vicious circle of present conditions. the mighty truth w.iich emerson voiced: "we each have in us the possibility of every crime," happily, by parity of reasoning, carries with it the corollary that in each of us there lieth, though never so dormant, the desire for every virtue. the gradual extinction of slavery will fan this vital spark into living flame. conjure up, if you will, the towering civilizations of the past. corrupt were they and become abominable. lust, not love, wickedness not righteousness, it was that flung them into the everlasting dust. under the forms of libertyless law, crafty byforce-of-intellect, thievery is rampant, corruption, insincerity, profligacy and hypocrisy abound. history repeats itself under our very eyes. but the day of reckoning will as surely come as day follows night. for what we sow that we shall also reap; it cannot b3 otherwise. if there was any doubt or shadow of turning, i would worship at the shrine of the bombastic and "terrible teddy," or even at that of the spent debauchee, edward. for years and years nature, man and animal -down to,and even below the caterwauling denizens of our back yards-have been teaching me this liberty-truth. even though it be out a still small voice. the weak things of the world confound the mighty, for they become mightyif true. like the immortal anarchist garrison, as to this principle,"i will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. i am in earnest. i will not equivocate; i will not excuse; i will not retreat a single inch; and i will be heard." no human lbeing likes to be shunned by his neighbors, but yet, when choice must be made, 64 one's own approbation must have the first consideration. liberty-iawlessness-anarchy can never be trespass as long as the parties thereto assumecarry-bear the burdens or consequences of their acts. as we are of one blood and endowed with reason, the foregoing pages of testimony make it quite manifest that the words "liberty, freedom, self-government, self sovereignty, self-ownership," are absolute only up to the point that ev ery human being has the same proportion of liberty, etc., as any other human being and no more. this is anarchism. anarchism is simplicity itself. it is as self-evident as two and two are four. it is absolute free trade in all human activity or passivity. simply that and nothing more. occupancy and use the only title to land. a title, by the way; that "rough and uncouth" miners, by common consent respect and adopt, till artificial government-reptile-like-sets its fangs in natural conditions to poison them. anarchism places earnership-as nature doesbefore ownership. in other words, the man who catches the coney-or produces the potato-has nature's right to cook and consume it, and no being, be he angel or devil, has rightful warrant to say him nay. anarchism, is minding one's own businessfirst, last and all the time. it is voluntary co-operation in all human affairs. it is work, love's largess, or starve. it is, do no evil that good may come. it is unit-man justice set over against massman-tyranny. it says: "govern thyself and thyself alone. thy neighbor's freedom hold sacred as thy own." it is as practical and natural as sleeping and waking; as sunshine and shadow. any being or principle that contradicts or con 65 travenes these truisms, in the name of anarchy, lies, and don't you forget it. this abounding faith is all inclusive. "not 'till the sun excludes thee will i exclude thee." it is not for us to wait for kings, presidents or majorities to inaugurate anarchism; if we wait for them it will be an ever receding willo-the-wisp. the exact ratio that each human being refrains from stealing from any otherhuman being, and earns what he or she consumes, is the exact measure in which this solvent of human wretchedness will be applied. when education really educateg, each individual will know enough to see to it that his fellow does not filch from him. and thus will the gait of anarchism's coming be accelerated. 0 -the world is saved by its ahockers.-i. mccall 0 -it is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.-voltaire. what we call union seems to me only a name for a phase of individual action. i live only for myself; and in proportion to my growth i benefit others.-george w. ourtis. 66 profounder, profounder man's spirit must dive; his aye-rolling orbit at no goal will arrive; the heavens that now draw him with sweetness untold, once found,-for new heavens.he spurneth the old. -emerson. ----------0---------an afterword. as every open-minded adult, tho' never so near our anthropoid ancestors in intelligence, should allow the need of education in the truth, and, with the press, the church, the bar, and the institutions of learning practically subsidized for the supporting of government force-the pcsstbility for promulgatinxg the truth as it is in jesus, is, as one is to five thousand. nevertheless and notwithstanding, i was so desirous of placing contrasts of force and anti-force side by side, i prepared "copy" to that end; but the allied bulk and expense getting it published, prevented the consummation of the desire. with it all and through it all, it being a labor of love into the bargain, still, these few drops from the ocean of libertarian literature in all probability never would have been gathered together but for the recent unatoned, insulting, sophomoric onslaughts on principles that are as true as the everlasting hills. to be sure, there was the excuse of a beyond-a-peradveqture insane man's act to warrant such onsets. that act also furnished fortuitous opportunity to official satraps to keep the wool still more closely over the people's eyes as to the self-evident truths of self-sovereignty; and, as if that were not enough, there has, in this universityrcrowned valley, been revealed, by anonymous threat, missive, 67 stony stare, and in other ways, such colossal want of knowledge of the subject, that, what with roosevelt's ravings, root's roorbacks, funston's fulminations, madden's mail meddling, and waller's wholesale murders of all over ten, i was somewhat apprehensive of trespass in government monopoly preserves in practicing "the water cure," even though done in a mild form on my own atanomy, yet, crucify me if i didn't feel that some few emanations from the intelilect of earth's elect would not only be in order, but abundantly justified.* this brochure is triple the bulk of original intent-so hard is it to stay one s hand with such an embarrassment of riches to draw from. therefore i desist. besides i wanted it so brief as to invite perusal by every living soul hereabouts who was offered the stone of falsehood in lieu of the bread of truth by the battened consumers of government pabulum. it is a most hopeful sign of the times when staid conservative business men here** hear the truths of anarchism gladly, and the bourbons of the press, applaud in cool blood when the terrible name is not used as a label. present day canutes cannot keep the tide back. change will come! growth or death is nature's decree: let us place our hands in hers, heed her teachings, learn the lessons of sea and sky, bush and bird, and determine that the lord of creation shall be as free as the air in its gladsome surge around this terrestrial ball. *in response to request, and as a further measure of self-vindication and satisfaction, i propose, in abbreviated autobiographic form, to-as it were-hold "nature up by the roots with earth, rain and dew clinging" thereto, thus and thereby showing individ. ual grace-growth from hell-clad bondage to heaven.capped freedom. price of this memoir to be at the discretion of purchasers. orders hereby invited on that basis. *samuel m. jones' business men's address. 68 liberty lending library. location-402 oak avenue, ithaca, n. y. (should circumstances warrant, will be removed to more central location.) motto-read the other side. rules-"ask-by mail if preferred-and ye shall receive; seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you." hours-"from early morn 'till dewey eve," (usually.) the library is little and not select, (a list of the books is in preparation,) but yet contains milk for babes and meat for adults; and ranges, in religion, from "baxter's saints' rest" to grant allen's "evolution of the idea of god," and, in political and social science,, from "garfield's words" to tucker's "instead of a book," thus giving opportunity for the scripture: "prove all things, hold fast that which is good" -to be fulfilled. either or all three books, "the slavery of our times," "instead of a book" and "the science of!society," by tolstoy, tucker and andrews, respectively, are hereby offered presentation to any free "lending library," on condition each book be advertised proportionately with any other book in such library. this offer is, alas! contingent on the journal boycott-taboo, or other untoward event being sufficiently drastic to make it seem inevitable that donor will be forced to dig to beg. n. b.-supplementary to the above work, and, necessarily incidental thereto, orders will be received for books, and special discounts, when possible, will be allowed from prices of boks that the times demand sowing broadcast. 69 pe cksniffian press censorship. typical of its zeal in spreading truth. refused insertion as an advertisement in the ithaca journal and daily news. wanted-adults devoid of prejudice, even though unwilling to get off the m asses' backs, to such will be furnished "without money and without price"-if they will engage to "read, mark, learn and inwardly digest" the same--a course of reading in proof that the gospel of anarchism is a gospel of "peace on earth and good will to man" and in perfect accord with evolutionary progress. apply in any old way to henry bool. instead of a book. a well printed book of 512 pages, being a 1fragmentary' exposition of ophilosophica'l anarchism (the antithesis of absolute monarchism) culled from the writings of benj. r. tucker, editor of "liberty." it discusses money and interest, land and rent; the individual, society and the state; 'and severely criticises istate socialism and communism. price, paper, 50c; cloth, $1. address benj. r. tucker, box 1312, new york city. the religion of democracy. a memorandum of modern principles by charles ferguson, author of (the affirmative intellect.) edwin markham says: "it has style, insight, high seriousness, spiritual ipassion. it is a great book of a great epoch." charles h. parkhurst, d. d., says: an interesting, stimulating, startling, and, all in all, wonderful book. price $1. published by funk &amp; wagnalls company. new york and london. the science of society. by stephen pearl andrews. a well-printed book of 165 large pages, consisting of two essays bearing the following titles respectively: "the true constitution of government in the sovereignty of the individual as the final development of protestantism, democracy, and socialism;" "cost the limit of price: a scientific measure of honesty in trade as on( of the fundamental principles in the solution of the social problem." this work is an elaborate exposition of the teachings of josiah warren by one of his foremost disciples. price in cloth, $1; in paper, 50c. address benj. r. tucker, box 1312, new york city. a stuffed club. a $1.00 a year monthly that knocks the stuffing out of all the antiquated fallacies of diet and drugs. henry bool says 'it's worth its weight in gold." prof. g. c. pitzer, principal of the school of suggestive therapeutics, st. louis, says: "you ape nobody. you show courage and a freedom and independence manifested by few writers." dr. rauscher, murray, utah: "the april club is a splendid specimen of logical thinking." dr. alexander wilder, newark, n. j.: "the club received and ransacked as usual. the editor is as entertainingly lawless and rampant as ever. i enjoy it." address, dr. j. h. tilden, 2831 lafayette st., denver, colo. 71 plain talk in psalm and parable. byiernest crosby. count tolstoy says: i like the book very much. some of the pieces-the choice is difficult because all are very good-i will have translated into russian and published. edwin markham says: plain talk in psalr and parable is one of the significant books of the time-a suggestive and inspiring utterance. these prophet chants are a noble protest againsi the wrongs and failures of civilization. i. zangwill says the book is crammed with vital matter. this most interesting volume.* * there is a strange power in some of these songs-the power which sincere conviction carries with it. there is also a feeling of all-embracing brotherhood. * * it is a strong book.-new york commercial advertiser. the above volume, handsomely printed anc bound, gilt-edged on deckel-edged paper, will be sent pospaid, on receipt of $1.50, by small maynard &amp; co., 10 pierce bldg., boston, mass. captain jenks, hero. by ernest crosby. is a merciless satire on war and militarism in which the parallel between savagery and soldiery is unerringly drawn. it is a biting burlesque on the various forms of cheap heroworship. it holds up to withering scorn every important feature of militarism. the new england magazine, boston: "very amusing indeed-were it not so sadly near the truth-is ernest orosby's satire upon jingoism and american army life." price $1.50 postpaid. published by funk &amp; wagnalls company new york and london. the conservator. published monthly by innes &amp; sons, 200 s. tenth street, philadelphia. per year, $1. single copies, 10 cents. i regard the conservator as one of the best papers published in america; in fact i know of no other paper that stands on so high a plane and is such an inspiration.-john p. altgeld. i think the conservator is full of the soundest reading and of the best criticism to be found in any monthly in the land. it is broad-minded.homer davenport. there is no publication of the size that comes to my hand in which i see so much that i want to read and do read as in the conservator.john burroughs. the conservator is a unique and excellent publication. of all the journals that come to my table i like none better and few as well. its selections have a fine ethical and poetic tone. the editorials by horace traubel have a fine literary flavor and a lofty spirit. i always read them. from cover to cover the conservator is full of the ringing note of personality.-edwin markham. for any of the above works at best possible discounts, and for sample copies of "conservator" andi. "stuffed olub" free to a limited extent.. address, henry bool, ithaca, n. y. library of congress ddddsh7dfl51 ♦^^o' /% ^9^ ••' % / 'ftp *<^ *-^' <^^ •1 * •2 "^^ 'i ^p clifton 2foi)n6an battleground adventures. illustrated. a book of fairy-tale foxes. illustrated. a book of fairy-tale bears. illustrated. houghton mifflin company boston and new york canoeing in the wilderness the indian guide's evening fruyer (page 59) canoeing in the wilderness by henry d. thoreau edited by clifton johnson illustrated by will hammell boston and new york houghton mifflin company 1916 rz7 copyright, 1906, by houghton, mifflin & co. copyright, i916, by houghton mifflin company all rights reserved published april iqib ici.a4289g4 illustrations the indian guide's evening prayer . . frontispiece k the stage on the road to moosehead lake . . 8 ^ making a camp in the streamside woodland . .52 fishing 72 the red squirrel ' 88 '^ coming down the rapids 132 shooting the moose 154 carrying round the falls i8o introduction thoreau was born at concord, massachusetts, july 12, 18 17, and at the time he made this wilderness canoe trip he was forty years old. the record of the journey is the latter half of his the maine woods^ which is perhaps the finest idyl of the forest ever written. it is par ticularly charming in its blending of medi tative and poetic fancies with the minute description of the voyager's experiences. the chief attraction that inspired tho reau to make the trip was the primitive ness of the region. here was a vast tract of almost virgin woodland, peopled only with a few loggers and pioneer farmers, indians, and wild animals. no one could have been better fitted than thoreau to enjoy such a region and to transmit his en joyment of it to others. for though he was a person of culture and refinement. viii introduction with a college education, and had for an intimate friend so rare a man as ralph waldo emerson, he was half wild in many of his tastes and impatient of the restraints and artificiality of the ordinary social life of the towns and cities. he liked especially the companionship of men who were in close contact with nature, and in this book we find him deeply interested in his indian guide and linger ing fondly over the man's characteristics and casual remarks. the indian retained many of his aboriginal instincts and ways, though his tribe was in most respects civilized. his home was in an indian vil lage on an island in the penobscot river at oldtown, a few miles above bangor. thoreau was one of the world's greatest nature writers, and as the years pass, his fame steadily increases. he was a careful and accurate observer, more at home in the fields and woods than in village and town, and with a gift of piquant originality in recording his impressions. the play of introduction ix his imagination is keen and nimble, yet his fancy is so well balanced by his native common sense that it does not run away with him. there is never any doubt about his genuineness, or that what he states is free from bias and romantic exaggeration. it is to be noted that he was no hunter. his inquisitiveness into the ways of the wild creatures carried with it no desire to shoot them, and to his mind the killing of game for mere sport was akin to butchery. the kindly and sympathetic spirit constantly manifest in his pages is very attractive, and the fellowship one gains with him through his written words is both delightful and wholesome. he stimulates not only a love for nature, but a love for simple ways of living, and for all that is sincere and unaffected in human life, wherever found. in the present volume various details and digressions that are not of interest to most readers have been omitted, but except for such elimination thoreau's text has been x introduction retained throughout. it is believed that nothing essential has been sacrificed, and that the narrative in this form will be found lively, informing, and thoroughly enjoy able. clifton johnson. hadley, massachusetts. canoeing in the wilderness canoeing in the wilderness monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday july 20-23, 1857 i started on my third excursion to the maine woods monday, july 20, 1857, with one companion, arriving at bangor the next day at noon. the suc ceeding morning, a relative of mine who is well acquainted with the penobscot in dians took me in his wagon to oldtown to assist me in obtaining an indian for this expedition. we were ferried across to the indian island in a bateau. the ferryman's boy had the key to it, but the father, who was a blacksmith, after a little hesitation, cut the chain with a cold chisel on the rock. he told me that the indians were nearly all gone to the seaboard and to mas sachusetts, partly on account of the small 4 canoeing in the wilderness pox, of which they are very much afraid, having broken out in oldtown. the old chief neptune, however, was there still. the first man we saw on the island was an indian named joseph polls, whom my relative addressed familiarly as "joe." he was dressing a deerskin in his yard. the skin was spread over a slanting log, and he was scraping it with a stick held by both hands. he was stoutly built, perhaps a little above the middle height, with a broad face, and, as others said, perfect indian features and complexion. his house was a two story white one with blinds, the best-look ing that i noticed there, and as good as an average one on a new england village street. it was surrounded by a garden and fruit trees, single cornstalks standing thinly amid the beans. we asked him if he knew any good indian who would like to go into the woods with us, that is, to the allegash lakes by way of moosehead, and return by the east branch of the penobscot. to which he answered out of that allegash and east branch 5 strange remoteness in which the indian ever dwells to the white man, " me like to go myself; me want to get some moose"; and kept on scraping the skin. the ferryman had told us that all the best indians were gone except polis, who was one of the aristocracy. he, to be sure, would be the best man we could have, but if he went at all would want a great price. polis asked at first two dollars a day but agreed to go for a dollar and a half, and fifty cents a week for his canoe. he would come to bangor with his canoe by the seven o'clock train that evening — we might depend on him. we thought our selves lucky to secure the services of this man, who was known to be particularly steady and trustworthy. i spent the afternoon with my com panion, who had remained in bangor, in preparing for our expedition, purchas ing provisions, hard-bread,' pork, coffee, ' hard-bread or ship-bread is a kind of hard biscuit com monly baked in large cakes and much used by sailors and soldiers. 6 canoeing in the wilderness sugar, etc., and some india-rubber cloth ing. at evening the indian arrived in the cars, and i led the way, while he followed me, three quarters of a mile to my friend's house, with the canoe on his head. i did not know the exact route, but steered by the lay of the land, as i do in boston. i tried to enter into conversation with him, but as he was puffing under the weight of his canoe, not having the usual apparatus for carrying it, but, above all, as he was an indian, i-might as well have been thump ing on the bottom of his birch the while. in answer to the various observations that i made he only grunted vaguely from be neath his canoe once or twice, so that i knew he was there. early the next morning the stage called for us. my companion and i had each a large knapsack as full as it would hold, and we had two large rubber bags which held our provisions and utensils. as for the in dian, all the baggage he had, beside his axe allegash and east branch 7 and gun, was a blanket, which he brought loose in his hand. however, he had laid in a store of tobacco and a new pipe for the excursion. the canoe was securely lashed diagonally across the top of the stage, with bits of carpet tucked under the edge to pre vent its chafing. the driver appeared as much accustomed to carrying canoes in this way as bandboxes. at the bangor house we took in four men bound on a hunting excursion, one of the men going as cook. they had a dog, a middling-sized brindled cur, which ran by the side of the stage, his master show ing his head and whistling from time to time. but after we had gone about three miles the dog was suddenly missing, and two of the party went back for him, while the stage, which was full of passengers, waited. at length one man came back, while the other kept on. this whole party of hunters declared their intention to stop till the dog was found, but the very oblig ing driver was ready to wait a spell longer. 8 canoeing in the wilderness he was evidently unwilling to lose so many passengers, who would have taken a private conveyance, or perhaps the other line of stages, the next day. such progress did we make, with a journey of over sixty miles to be accomplished that day, and a rainstorm just setting in. we discussed the subject of dogs and their instincts till it was threadbare, while we waited there, and the scenery of the suburbs of bangor is still distinctly impressed on my memory. after full half an hour the man re turned, leading the dog by a rope. he had overtaken him just as he was entering the bangor house. he was then tied on the top of the stage, but, being wet and cold, several times in the course of the journey he jumped off, and i saw him dangling by his neck. this dog was de pended on to stop bears. he had already stopped one somewhere in new hamp shire, and i can testify that he stopped a stage in maine. this party of four probably paid nothing for the dog's ride. ittj ^ 1 r t'^^h ■ •'^''*:%'l^^| 1 ^^^|l '^' ^^ 1 ^^gmtt b 7%? stage on the road to moosehead luke allegash and east branch 9 nor for his run, while our party of three paid two dollars — and were charged four — for the light canoe which lay still on the top. the stage was crowded all the way. if you had looked inside you would have thought that we were prepared to run the gantlet of a band of robbers, for there were four or five guns on the front seat and one or two on the back one, each man holding his darling in his arms. it appeared that this party of hunters was going our way, but much farther. their leader was a handsome man about thirty years old, of good height, but not appar ently robust, of gentlemanly address and faultless toilet. he had a fair white com plexion as if he had always lived in the shade, and an intellectual face, and with his quiet manners might have passed for a divinity student who had seen something of the world. i was surprised to find that he was probably the chief white hunter of maine and was known all along the lo canoeing in the wilderness road. i afterwards heard him spoken of as one who could endure a great deal of exposure and fatigue without showing the effect of it; and he could not only use guns, but make them, being himself a gunsmith. in the spring he had saved a stage-driver and two passengers from drowning in the backwater of the piscat aquis on this road, having swum ashore in the freezing water and made a raft and got them off — though the horses were drowned — at great risk to himself, while the only other man who could swim withdrew to the nearest house to prevent freezing. he knew our man, and remarked that we had a good indian there, a good hunter; adding that he was said to be worth six thousand dollars. the indian also knew him, and said to me, "the great hunter." the indian sat on the front seat with a stolid expression of face as if barely awake to what was going on. again i was struck by the peculiar vagueness of allegash and east branch ii his replies when addressed in the stage or at the taverns. he really never said any thing on such occasions. he was merely stirred up like a wild beast, and passively muttered some insignificant response. his answer, in such cases, was vague as a puff of smoke, suggesting no responsibility ^ and if you considered it you would find that you had got nothing out of him. this was instead of the conventional palaver and smartness of the white man, and equally profitable. most get no more than this out of the indian, and pronounce him stolid accordingly. i was surprised to see what a foolish and impertinent style a maine man, a passenger, used in addressing him, as if he were a child, which only made his eyes glisten a little. a tipsy canadian asked him at a tavern, in a drawling tone, if he smoked, to which he answered with an indefinite " yes." " won't you lend me your pipe a little while?" asked the other. he replied, looking straight by the 12 canoeing in the wilderness man's head, with a face singularly vacant to all neighboring interests, " me got no pipe"; yet i had seen him put a new one, with a supply of tobacco, into his pocket that morning. our little canoe, so neat and strong, drew a favorable criticism from all the wiseacres among the tavern loungers along the road. by the roadside, close to the wheels, i noticed a splendid great purple fringed orchis which i would fain have stopped the stage to pluck, but as this had never been known to stop a bear, like the cur on the stage, the driver would prob ably have thought it a waste of time. when we reached the lake, about half past eight in the evening, it was still steadily raining, and in that fresh, cool atmosphere the hylas were peeping and the toads ringing about the lake. it was as if the season had revolved backward two or three months, or i had arrived at the abode of perpetual spring. we had expected to go upon the lake allegash and east branch 13 at once, and, after paddling up two or three miles, to camp on one of its islands, but on account of the rain we decided to go to one of the taverns for the night. ii friday, july 24 about four o'clock the next morn . ing, though it was quite cloudy, ac companied by the landlord to the water's edge, in the twilight, we launched our canoe from a rock on moosehead lake. we had a rather small canoe for three persons, eighteen and one fourth feet long by two feet six and one half inches wide in the middle, and one foot deep within. i judged that it would weigh not far from eighty pounds. the indian had recently made it himself, and its smallness was partly compensated for by its newness, as well as stanchness and solidity, it being made of very thick bark and ribs. our baggage weighed about one hundred and sixty-six pounds. the principal part of the baggage was, as usual, placed in the middle of the broadest part, while we allegash and east branch 15 stowed ourselves in the chinks and cran nies that were left before and behind it, where there was no room to extend our legs, the loose articles being tucked into the ends. the canoe was thus as closely packed as a market basket. the indian sat on a crossbar in the stern, but we flat on the bottom with a splint or chip behind our backs to protect them from the cross bar, and one of us commonly paddled with the indian. paddling along the eastern side of the lake in the still of the morning, we soon saw a few sheldrakes, which the indian called shecorways, and some peetweets on the rocky shore. we also saw and heard loons. it was inspiriting to hear the reg ular dip of the paddles, as if they were our fins or flippers, and to realize that we were at length fairly embarked. having passed the small rocky isles within two or three miles of the foot of the lake, we had a short consultation re specting our course, and inclined to the i6 canoeing in the wilderness western shore for the sake of its lee; for otherwise, if the wind should rise, it would be impossible for us to reach mount kineo, which is about midway up the lake on the east side, but at its narrowest part, where probably we could recross if we took the western side. the wind is the chief obsta cle to crossing the lakes, especially in so small a canoe. the indian remarked sev eral times that he did not like to cross the lakes " in littlum canoe," but nevertheless, "just as we say, it made no odds to him." moosehead lake is twelve miles wide at the widest place, and thirty miles long in a direct line, but longer as it lies. pad dling near the shore, we frequently heard the pe-pe of the olive-sided flycatcher, also the wood pewee and the kingfisher. the indian reminding us that he could not work without eating, we stopped to break fast on the main shore southwest of deer island. we took out our bags, and the indian made a fire under a very large bleached log, using white pine bark from allegash and east branch 17 a stump, though he said that hemlock was better, and kindling with canoe birch bark. our table was a large piece of freshly peeled birch bark, laid wrong side up, and our breakfast consisted of hard-bread, fried pork, and strong coffee well sweetened, in which we did not miss the milk. while we were getting breakfast a brood of twelve black dippers,^ half grown, came paddling by within three or four rods, not at all alarmed ; and they loitered about as long as we stayed, now huddled close to gether, now moving off in a long line, very cunningly. looking northward from this place it appeared as if we were entering a large bay, and we did not know whether we should be obliged to diverge from our course and keep outside a point which we saw, or should find a passage between this and the mainland. it was misty dog-day weather, and we had already penetrated ^ the name dipper is applied to several species of water birds that are notable for their skill in diving. i8 canoeing in the wilderness a smaller bay of the same kind, and knocked the bottom out of it, though we had been obliged to pass over a bar be tween an island and the shore, where there was but just breadth and depth enough to float the canoe, and the indian had ob served, " very easy makum bridge here," but now it seemed that if we held on we should be fairly embayed. presently, how ever, the mist lifted somewhat and re vealed a break in the shore northward. the indian immediately remarked, " i guess you and i go there." this was his common expression in stead of saying " we." he never addressed us by our names, though curious to know how they were spelled and what they meant. we called him polis. he had al ready guessed very accurately at our ages, and said that he was forty-eight. after breakfast i emptied the melted pork that was left into the lake, making what the sailors call a "slick," and watch ing to see how much it spread over and allegash and east branch 19 smoothed the agitated surface. the indian looked at it a moment and said, " that make hard paddlum through ; hold 'em canoe. so say old times." we hastily reloaded, putting the dishes loose in the bows, that they might be at hand when wanted, and set out again. the western shore, near which we paddled along, rose gently to a considerable height and was everywhere densely covered with the forest, in which was a large propor tion of hard wood to enliven and relieve the fir and spruce. the indian said that the lichen which we saw hanging from the trees was called chorchorque. we asked him the names of several birds which we heard this morning. the thrush, which was quite common, and whose note he imitated, he said was called adelungquamooktum ; but sometimes he could not tell the name of some small bird which i heard and knew, but he said, "i tell all the birds about here; can't tell littlum noise, but i see 'em, then i can tell." 20 canoeing in the wilderness i observed that i should like to go to school to him to learn his language, living on the indian island the while; could not that be done? "oh, yer," he replied, "good many do so. i asked how long he thought it would take. he said one week. i told him that in this voyage i would tell him all i knew, and he should tell me all he knew, to which he readily agreed. mount kineo, which was generally visi ble, though occasionally concealed by is lands or the mainland in front, had a level bar of cloud concealing its summit, and all the mountain-tops about the lake were cut off at the same height. ducks of vari ous kinds were quite common, and ran over the water before us as fast as a horse trots. the indian asked the meaning o^ reality ^ as near as i could make out the word, which he said one of us had used; also oiinterrent, that is, intelligent. i observed that he could allegash and east branch 21 rarely sound the letter r, but used 1, as also r for 1 sometimes; as load iox road, pickelel for pickerel, soog/e island for sugar island. he generally added the syllable urn to his words, as paddluniy etc. on a point on the mainland where we landed to stretch our legs and look at the vegetation, going inland a few steps, i dis covered a fire still glowing beneath its ashes, where somebody had breakfasted, and a bed of twigs prepared for the follow ing night. so i knew not only that they had just left, but that they designed to re turn, and by the breadth of the bed that there was more than one in the party. you might have gone within six feet of these signs without seeing them. there grew the beaked hazel, rue seven feet high, and red osier, whose bark the indian said was good to smoke, "tobacco before white people came to this country, indian to bacco." the indian was always very careful in approaching the shore, lest he should in 22 canoeing in the wilderness jure his canoe on the rocks, letting it swing round slowly sidewise, and was still more particular that we should not step into it on shore, nor till it floated free, and then should step gently lest we should open its seams, or make a hole in the bottom. after passing deer island we saw the little steamer from greenville, far east in the middle of the lake. sometimes we could hardly tell her from an island which had a few trees on it. here we were ex posed to the wind from over the whole breadth of the lake, and ran a little risk of being swamped. while i had my eye fixed on the spot where a large fish had leaped, we took in a gallon or two of water; but we soon reached the shore and took the canoe over the bar at sand-bar island, a few feet wide only, and so saved a con siderable distance. we crossed a broad bay and found the water quite rough. a very little wind on these broad lakes raises a sea which will swamp a canoe. looking off from the allegash and east branch 23 shore, the surface may appear to be almost smooth a mile distant, or if you see a few white crests they appear nearly level with the rest of the lake, but when you get out so far, you may find quite a sea running, and ere long, before you think of it, a wave will gently creep up the side of the canoe and fill your lap, like a monster deliber ately covering you with its slime before it swallows you, or it will strike the canoe violently and break into it. the same thing may happen when the wind rises suddenly, though it were perfectly calm and smooth there a few minutes before; so that nothing can save you, unless you can swim ashore, for it is impossible to get into a canoe when it is upset. since you sit flat on the bottom, though the danger should not be imminent, a little water is a great inconvenience, not to mention the wetting of your provisions. we rarely crossed even a bay directly, from point to point, when there was wind, but made a slight curve corresponding somewhat to the 24 canoeing in the wilderness shore, that we might the sooner reach it if the wind increased. when the wind is aft, and not too strong, the indian makes a spritsail of his blanket. he thus easily skims over the whole length of this lake in a dav. the indian paddled on one side, and one of us on the other, to keep the canoe steady, and when he wanted to change hands he would say, "t'other side." he asserted, in answer to our questions, that he had never upset a canoe himself, though he may have been upset by others. think of our little eggshell of a canoe tossing across that great lake, a mere black speck to the eagle soaring above it! my companion trailed for trout as we paddled along, but, the indian warning him that a big fish might upset us, for there are some very large ones there, he agreed to pass the line quickly to the stern if he had a bite. while we were crossing this bay, where mount kineo rose dark before us within allegash and east branch 25 two or three miles, the indian repeated the tradition respecting this mountain's having anciently been a cow moose — how a mighty indian hunter succeeded in kill ing this queen of the moose tribe with great difficulty, while her calf was killed somewhere among the islands in penob scot bay, and, to his eyes, this mountain had still the form of the moose in a reclin ing posture. he told this at some length and with apparent good faith, and asked us how we supposed the hunter could have killed such a mighty moose as that. an indian tells such a story as if he thought it deserved to have a good deal said about it, only he has not got it to say, and so he makes up for the deficiency by a drawling tone, long-windedness, and a dumb won der which he hopes will be contagious. we approached the land again through pretty rough water, and then steered di rectly across the lake at its narrowest part to the eastern side, and were soon partly under the lee of the mountain, having 26 canoeing in the wilderness paddled about twenty miles. it was now about noon. we designed to stop there that afternoon and night, and spent half an hour looking along the shore northward for a suitable place to camp. at length, by going half a dozen rods into the dense spruce and fir wood on the side of the mountain almost as dark as a cellar, we found a place suf ficiently clear and level to lie down on, after cutting away a few bushes. the in dian cleared a path to it from the shore with his axe, and we then carried up all our baggage, pitched our tent, and made our bed, in order to be ready for foul weather, which then threatened us, and for the night. he gathered a large armful of fir twigs, breaking them off, which he said were the best for our bed, partly, i thought, because they were the largest and could be most rapidly collected. it had been raining more or less for four or five days, and the wood was even damper than usual, but he got dry bark from the under side of a dead allegash and east branch 27 leaning hemlock, which he said he could always do. this noon his mind was occupied with a law question, and i referred him to my companion, who was a lawyer. it appeared that he had been buying land lately — i think it was a hundred acres — but there was probably an incumbrance to it, somebody else claiming to have bought some grass on it for this year. he wished to know to whom the grass belonged, and was told that if the other man could prove that he bought the grass before he. polls, bought the land, the former could take it whether the latter knew it or not. to which he only answered, " strange ! " he went over this several times, fairly sat down to it, with his back to a tree, as if he meant to confine us to this topic henceforth ; but as he made no headway, only reached the jumping-off place of his wonder at white men's institutions after each explanation, we let the subject die. he said that he had fifty acres of grass. 28 canoeing in the wilderness potatoes, etc., somewhere above oldtown, besides some about his house; that he hired a good deal of his work, hoeing, etc., and preferred white men to indians because " they keep steady and know how." after dinner we returned southward along the shore, in the canoe, on account of the difficulty of climbing over the rocks and fallen trees, and began to ascend the mountain along the edge of the precipice. but, a smart shower coming up just then, the indian crept under his canoe, while we, protected by our rubber coats, pro ceeded to botanize. so we sent him back to the camp for shelter, agreeing that he should come for us with his canoe toward night. it had rained a little in the fore noon, and we trusted that this would be the clearing-up shower, which it proved; but our feet and legs were thoroughly wet by the bushes. the clouds breaking away a little, we had a glorious wild view, as we ascended, of the broad lake with its nu merous forest-clad islands extending be allegash and east branch 29 yond our sight both north and south, and the boundless forest undulating away from its shores on every side, as densely packed as a rye-field and enveloping nameless mountains in succession. it was a perfect lake of the woods. looking southward, the heavens were completely overcast, the mountains capped with clouds, and the lake generally wore a dark and stormy appearance, but from its surface six or eight miles distant there was reflected upward through the misty air a bright blue tinge from the unseen sky of another latitude beyond. they prob ably had a clear sky then at the south end of the lake. again we mistook a little rocky islet seen through the "drisk," with some taller bare trunks or stumps on it, for the steamer with its smoke-pipes, but as it had not changed its position after half an hour we were undeceived. so much do the works of man resemble the works of na ture. a moose might mistake a steamer 30 canoeing in the wilderness for a floating isle, and not be scared till he heard its puffing or its whistle. if i wished to see a mountain or other scenery under the most favorable auspices, i would go to it in foul weather so as to be there when it cleared up. we are then in the most suitable mood, and nature is most fresh and inspiring. there is no seren ity so fair as that which is just established in a tearful eye. jackson, in his " report on the geology of maine," says : " hornstone, which will answer for flints, occurs in various parts of the state. the largest mass of this stone known in the world is mount kineo, upon moosehead lake, which appears to be entirely composed of it, and rises seven hundred feet above the lake level. this variety of hornstone i have seen in every part of new england in the form of in dian arrow-heads, hatchets, chisels, etc., which were probably obtained from this mountain by the aboriginal inhabitants of the country." allegash and east branch 31 i have myself found hundreds of arrow heads made of the same material. it is generally slate-colored, with white specks, becoming a uniform white where exposed to the light and air. i picked up a small thin piece which had so sharp an edge that i used it as a knife, and, to see what i could do, fairly cut off an aspen one inch thick with it, by bending it and making many cuts; though i cut my fingers badly with the back of it in the meanwhile. from the summit of the precipice which forms the southern and eastern sides of this mountain peninsula, five or six hundred feet high, we probably might have jumped down to the water, or to the seemingly dwarfish trees on the narrow neck of land which connects it with the main. it is a dangerous place to try the steadiness of your nerves. the plants which attracted our atten tion on this mountain were the moun tain cinquefoil, abundant and in bloom 32 canoeing in the wilderness still at the very base by the waterside, very beautiful harebells overhanging the precipice, bearberry, the canada blue berry, wild holly, the great round-leafed orchis, bunchberry, reddening as we as cended, green at the base of the moun tain, red at the top, and the small fern woodsia ihensh, growing in tufts, now in fruit. having explored the wonders of the mountain, and the weather being now cleared up, we commenced the descent. we met the indian, puffing and panting, about one third of the way up, but think ing that he must be near the top. on reaching the canoe we found that he had caught a lake trout weighing about three pounds, while we were on the mountain. when we got to the camp, the canoe was taken out and turned over, and a log laid across it to prevent its being blown away. the indian cut some large logs of damp and rotten wood to smoulder and keep fire through the night. the trout was fried for supper. allegash and east branch 33 our tent was of thin cotton cloth and quite small, forming with the ground a triangular prism closed at the rear end, six feet long, seven wide, and four high, so that we could barely sit up in the mid dle. it required two forked stakes, a smooth ridgepole, and a dozen or more pins to pitch it. it kept off dew and wind and an ordinary rain, and answered our purpose well enough. we reclined within it till bedtime, each with his baggage at his head, or else sat about the fire, having hung our wet clothes on a pole before the fire for the night. as we sat there, just before night, look ing out through the dusky wood, the in dian heard a noise which he said was made by a snake. he imitated it at my request, making a low whistling note — pheet — pheet — two or three times re peated, somewhat like the peep of the hyla, but not so loud. he said that he had never seen them while making it, but going to the spot he finds the snake. this, 34 canoeing in the wilderness he said, was a sign of rain. when i had selected this place for our camp he had remarked that there were snakes there. " but they won't do any hurt," i said. "oh, no," he answered, "just as you say; it makes no difference to me." he lay on the right side of the tent, because, as he said, he was partly deaf in one ear, and he wanted to lie with his good ear up. as we lay there he inquired if i ever heard "indian sing." i replied that i had not often, and asked him if he would not favor us with a song. he readily assented, and, lying on his back, with his blanket wrapped around him, he commenced a slow, somewhat nasal, yet musical chant, in his own language, which probably was taught his tribe long ago by the catholic missionaries. he trans lated it to us, sentence by sentence, after ward. it proved to be a very simple religious exercise or hymn, the burden of which was that there was only one god who ruled all the world. allegash and east branch 35 his singing carried me back to the pe riod of the discovery of america, when europeans first encountered the simple faith of the indian. there was, indeed, a beautiful simplicity about it; nothing of the dark and savage, only the mild and infantile. the sentiments of humility and reverence chiefly were expressed. it was a dense and damp spruce and fir wood in which we lay, and, except for our fire, perfectly dark ; and when i awoke in the night, i either heard an owl from deeper in the forest behind us, or a loon from a distance over the lake. getting up some time after midnight to collect the scattered brands together, while my com panions were sound asleep, i observed, partly in the fire, which had ceased to blaze, a perfectly regular elliptical ring of light, about five inches in its shortest diam eter, six or seven in its longer, and from one eighth to one quarter of an inch wide. it was fully as bright as the fire, but not reddish or scarlet like a coal, but a white 36 canoeing in the wilderness and slumbering light, like the glowworm's. i saw at once that it must be phosphor escent wood, which i had often heard of, but never chanced to see. putting my fin ger on it, with a little hesitation, i found that it was a piece of dead moosewood which the indian had cut off in a slanting direction the evening before. using my knife, i discovered that the light proceeded from that portion of the sapwood immediately under the bark, and thus presented a regular ring at the end, and when i pared off the bark and cut into the sap, it was all aglow along the log. i was surprised to find the wood quite hard and apparently sound, though probably decay had commenced in the sap, and i cut out some little triangular chips, and, placing them in the hollow of my hand, car ried them into the camp, waked my com panion, and showed them to him. they lit up the inside of my hand, revealing the lines and wrinkles, and appearing exactly like coals of fire raised to a white heat. allegash and east branch 37 i noticed that part of a decayed stump within four or five feet of the fire, an inch wide and six inches long, soft and shaking wood, shone with equal brightness. i neglected to ascertain whether our fire had anything to do with this, but the pre vious day's rain and long-continued wet weather undoubtedly had. i was exceedingly interested by this phenomenon. it could hardly have thrilled me more if it had taken the form of let ters, or of the human face. i little thought that there was such a light shining in the darkness of the wilderness for me. the next day the indian told me their name for the light — artoosoqu* — and on my inquiring concerning the will-o'-the wisp he said that his " folks " sometimes saw fires passing along at various heights, even as high as the trees, and making a noise. i was prepared after this to hear of the most startling and unimagined phe nemona witnessed by " his folks," they are abroad at all hours and seasons in scenes 38 canoeing in the wilderness so unfrequented by white men. nature must have made a thousand revelations to them which are still secrets to us. i did not regret my not having seen this before, since i now saw it under cir cumstances so favorable. i was in just the frame of mind to see something wonder ful, and this was a phenomenon adequate to my circumstances and expectation, and it put me on the alert to see more like it. i let science slide, and rejoiced in that light as if it had been a fellow creature. a scientific explanation, as it is called, would have been altogether out of place there. that is for pale daylight. science with its retorts would have put me to sleep ; it was the opportunity to be ignorant that i im proved. it made a believer of me more than before. i believed that the woods were not tenantless, but choke-full of hon est spirits as good as myself any day — not an empty chamber in which chemistry was left to work alone, but an inhabited house. it suggested, too, that the same experience allegash and east branch 39 always gives birth to the same sort of be lief or religion. one revelation has been made to the indian, another to the white man. i have much to learn of the indian, nothing of the missionary. i am not sure but all that would tempt me to teach the indian my religion would be his promise to teach me his. long enough i had heard of irrelevant things ; now at length i was glad to make acquaintance with the light that dwells in rotten wood. i kept those little chips and wet them again the next night, but they emitted no light. ill saturday, july 25 at breakfast, the indian, evidently curious to know what would be ex pected of him the next day, asked me how i spent the sunday when at home. i told him that i commonly sat in my chamber reading, etc., in the forenoon, and went to walk in the afternoon. at which he shook his head and said, " er, that is ver' bad." "how do you spend it?" i asked. he said that he did no work, that he went to church at oldtown when he was at home ; in short, he did as he had been taught by the whites. when we were washing the dishes in the lakes, many fishes came close up to us to get the particles of grease. the weather seemed to be more settled this morning, and we set out early in order allegash and east branch 41 to finish our voyage up the lake before the wind arose. soon after starting, the indian directed our attention to the northeast carry, which we could plainly see, about thirteen miles distant. this carry is a rude wooden railroad running north and south about two miles, perfectly straight, from the lake to the penobscot through a low tract, with a clearing three or four rods wide. this opening appeared as a clear bright, or light, point in the horizon, rest ing on the edge of the lake. we should not have suspected it to be visible if the indian had not drawn our attention to it. it was a remarkable kind of light to steer for — daylight seen through a vista in the forest — but visible as far as an ordinary beacon by night. we crossed a deep wide bay north of kineo, leaving an island on our left and keeping up the eastern side of the lake. we then crossed another broad bay, which, as we could no longer observe the shore particularly, afforded ample time for con 42 canoeing in the wilderness versation. the indian said that he had got his money by hunting, mostly high up the west branch of the penobscot, and toward the head of the st, john. he had hunted there from a boy, and knew all about that region. his game had been beaver, otter, black cat (or fisher), sable, moose, etc. canada lynx were plenty yet in burnt grounds. for food in the woods he uses partridges, ducks, dried moose meat, hedge hog, etc. loons, too, were good, only " bile 'em good." pointing into the bay he said that it was the way to various lakes which he knew. only solemn bear-haunted moun tains with their great wooded slopes were visible. the indian said that he had been along there several times. i asked him how he guided himself in the woods. " oh," said he, " i can tell good many ways." when i pressed him further he an swered, *' sometimes i lookum sidehill," and he glanced toward a high hill or allegash and east branch 43 mountain on the eastern shore; "great difference between the north and south; see where the sun has shone most. so trees — the large limbs bend toward south. sometimes i lookum locks" (rocks). i asked what he saw on the rocks, but he did not describe anything in particu lar, answering vaguely, in a mysterious or drawling tone, " bare locks on lake shore — great difference between north, south, east, west side — can tell what the sun has shone on." "suppose," said i, "that i should take you in a dark night right up here into the middle of the woods a hundred miles, set you down, and turn you round quickly twenty times, could you steer straight to oldtown?" " oh, yer," said he, " have done pretty much same thing. i will tell you. some years ago i met an old white hunter at millinocket ; very good hunter. he said he could go anywhere in the woods. he wanted to hunt with me that day, so we 44 canoeing in the wilderness start. we chase a moose all the forenoon, round and round, till middle of afternoon, when we kill him. then i said to him, *now you go straight to camp.' " he said, * i can't do that. i don't know where i am.' " * where you think camp ?' i asked. " he pointed so. then i laugh at him. i take the lead and go right off the other way, cross our tracks many times, straight camp.'' "how do you do that?*' asked i. " oh, i can't tell you^ he replied. ** great difference between me and white man." it appeared as if the sources of infor mation were so various that he did not give a distinct conscious attention to any one, and so could not readily refer to any when questioned about it, but he found his way very much as an animal does. perhaps what is commonly called instinct in the animal in this case is merely a sharp ened and educated sense. often, when an allegash and east branch 45 indian says, " i don't know," in regard to the route he is to take, he does not mean what a white man would by those words, for his indian instinct may tell him still as much as the most confident white man knows. he does not carry things in his head, nor remember the route exactly, like a white man, but relies on himself at the moment. not having experienced the need of the other sort of knowledge — all labeled and arranged — he has not acquired it. the hunter with whom i talked in the stage knew some of the resources of the indian. he said that he steered by the wind, or by the limbs of the hemlocks, which were largest on the south side; also sometimes, when he knew that there was a lake near, by firing his gun and listening to hear the direction and distance of the echo from over it. as the forenoon advanced the wind in creased. the last bay which we crossed before reaching the desolate pier at the 46 canoeing in the wilderness northeast carry, was two or three miles over, and the wind was southwesterly. after going a third of the way, the waves had increased so as occasionally to wash into the canoe, and we saw that it was worse ahead. at first we might have turned about, but were not willing to. it would have been of no use to follow the course of the shore, for the waves ran still higher there on account of the greater sweep the wind had. at any rate it would have been dangerous now to alter our course, because the waves would have struck us at an ad vantage. it will not do to meet them at right angles, for then they will wash in both sides, but you must take them quar tering. so the indian stood up in the canoe and exerted all his skill and strength for a mile or two, while i paddled right along in order to give him more steerage way. for more than a mile he did not allow a single wave to strike the canoe as it would, but turned it quickly from this side to that, so that it would always be on allegash and east branch 47 or near the crest of a wave when it broke, where all its force was spent, and we merely settled down with it. at length i jumped out onto the end of the pier against which the waves were dashing violently, in order to lighten the canoe and catch it at the landing, which was not much sheltered, but just as i jumped we took in two or three gallons of water. i remarked to the indian, "you managed that well," to which he replied: " ver' few men do that. great many waves; when i look out for one, another come quick." while the indian went to get cedar bark, etc., to carry his canoe with, we cooked the dinner on the shore in the midst of a sprinkling rain. he prepared his canoe for carrying in this wise. he took a cedar shingle or splint eighteen inches long and four or five wide, rounded at one end, that the corners might not be in the way, and tied it with cedar bark by two holes made midway, near the edge on each side, to the middle crossbar of the 48 canoeing in the wilderness canoe. when the canoe was hfted upon his head bottom up, this shingle, with its rounded end uppermost, distributed the weight over his shoulders and head, while a band of cedar bark, tied to the crossbar on each side of the shingle, passed round his breast, and another longer one, outside of the last, round his forehead ; also a hand on each side rail served to steer the canoe and keep it from rocking. he thus carried it with his shoulders, head, breast, fore head, and both hands, as if the upper part of his body were all one hand to clasp and hold it. a cedar tree furnished all the gear in this case, as it had the woodwork of the canoe. one of the paddles rested on the crossbars in the bows. i took the canoe upon my head and found that i could carry it with ease, but i let him carry it, not caring to establish a different precedent. this shingle remained tied to the crossbar throughout the voyage, was always ready for the carries, and also served to protect the back of one passenger. allegash and east branch 49 we were obliged to go over this carry twice, our load was so great. but the carries were an agreeable variety, and we improved the opportunity to gather the rare plants which we had seen, when we returned empty-handed. we reached the penobscot about four o'clock, and found there some st. francis indians encamped on the bank. they were making a canoe and drying moose meat. their camp was covered with spruce bark. they had a young moose, taken in the river a fortnight before, confined in a sort of cage of logs piled up cob-fashion, seven or eight feet high. it was quite tame, about four feet high, and covered with moose flies. there was a large quantity of cornel, red maple, and also willow and aspen boughs, stuck through between the logs on all sides, butt ends out, and on their leaves it was browsing. it looked at first as if it were in a bower rather than a pen. our indian said that he used black spruce so canoeing in the wilderness roots to sew canoes with, obtaining it from high lands or mountains. the st. francis indians thought that white spruce roots might be best. but the former said, "no good, break, can't split 'em." i told him i thought that i could make a canoe, but he expressed great doubt of it ; at any rate he thought that my work would not be "neat" the first time. having reloaded, we paddled down the penobscot. we saw a splendid yellow lily by the shore, which i plucked. it was six feet high and had twelve flowers, in two whorls, forming a pyramid. we afterward saw many more thus tall along this stream, and on the east branch. the indian said that the roots were good for soup, that is, to cook with meat, to thicken it, taking the place of flour. they get them in the fall. i dug some, and found a mass of bulbs pretty deep in the earth, two inches in diameter, looking, and even tasting, some what like raw green corn on the ear. when we had gone about three miles allegash and east branch 51 down the penobscot, we saw through the tree-tops a thunder-shower coming up in the west, and we looked out a camping place in good season, about five o'clock. i will describe the routine of camping. we generally told the indian that we would stop at the first suitable place, so that he might be on the lookout for it. having observed a clear, hard, and flat beach to land on, free from mud, and from stones which would injure the canoe, one would run up the bank to see if there were open and level space enough for the camp be tween the trees, or if it could be easily cleared, preferring at the same time a cool place, on account of insects. sometimes we paddled a mile or more before finding one to our minds, for where the shore was suitable the bank would often be too steep, or else too low and grassy, and there fore mosquitoey. we then took out the baggage and drew up the canoe. the in dian cut a path to the spot we had selected, which was usually within two or three 52 canoeing in the wilderness rods of the water, and we carried up our baggage. one, perhaps, takes birch bark, always at hand, and dead dry wood, and kindles a fire five or six feet in front of where we intend to lie. it matters not, commonly, on which side this is, because there is little or no wind in so dense a wood at that season; and then he gets a kettle of water from the river, and takes out the pork, bread, coffee, etc., from their several pack ages. another, meanwhile, having the axe, cuts down the nearest dead rock maple or other dry hard wood, collecting several large logs to last through the night, also a green stake, with a notch or fork to it, which is slanted over the fire, perhaps resting on a rock or forked stake, to hang the kettle on, and two forked stakes and a pole for the tent. the third man pitches the tent, cuts a dozen or more pins with his knife to fasten it down with, and then collects an armful or two of fir twigs, arbor-vits, spruce, or making a camp in the streamside yvoodland allegash and east branch 53 hemlock, whichever is at hand, and makes the bed, beginning at either end, and lay ing the twigs wrong side up, in regular rows, covering the stub ends of the last row ; first, however, filling the hollows, if there are any, with coarser material. commonly, by the time the bed is made, or within fifteen or twenty minutes, the water boils, the pork is fried, and supper is ready. we eat this sitting on the ground, or a stump, around a large piece of birch bark for a table, each holding a dipper in one hand and a piece of ship-bread or fried pork in the other, frequently making a pass with his hand, or thrusting his head into the smoke, to avoid the mosquitoes. next, pipes are lit by those who smoke, and veils are donned by those who have them, and we hastily examine and dry our plants, anoint our faces and hands, and go to bed. though you have nothing to do but see the country, there 's rarely any time to spare, hardly enough to examine a plant. 54 canoeing in the wilderness before the night or drowsiness is upon you. such was the ordinary experience, but this evening we had camped earlier on ac count of the rain, and had more time. we found that our camp was on an old indis tinct supply-road, running along the river. what is called a road there shows no ruts or trace of wheels, for they are not used ; nor, indeed, of runners, since they are used only in the winter when the snow is sev eral feet deep. it is only an indistinct vista through the wood, which it takes an ex perienced eye to detect. we had no sooner pitched our tent than the thunder-shower burst on us, and we hastily crept under it, drawing our bags after us, curious to see how much of a shelter our thin cotton roof was going to be in this excursion. though the violence of the rain forced a fine shower through the cloth before it was fairly wetted and shrunk, with which we were well bedewed, we managed to keep pretty dry, only a allegash and east branch 55 box of matches having been left out and spoiled, and before we were aware of it the shower was over, and only the drip ping trees imprisoned us. wishing to see what fishes were in the river there, we cast our lines over the wet bushes on the shore, but they were repeat edly swept down the swift stream in vain. so, leaving the indian, we took the canoe, just before dark, and dropped down the river a few rods to fish at the mouth of a sluggish brook. we pushed up this a rod or two, but were soon driven off by the mosquitoes. while there we heard the indian fire his gun twice in rapid succes sion. his object was to clean out and dry it after the rain, and he then loaded it with ball, being now on ground where he ex pected to meet with large game. this sudden loud crashing noise in the still aisles of the forest affected me like an insult to nature, or ill manners at any rate, as if you were to fire a gun in a hall or temple. it was not heard far, however, except along 56 canoeing in the wilderness the river, the sound being rapidly hushed up or absorbed by the damp trees and mossy ground. the indian made a little smothered fire of damp leaves close to the back of the camp, that the smoke might drive through and keep out the mosquitoes, but just be fore we fell asleep this suddenly blazed up and came near setting fire to the tent. iv sunday, july 26 the note of the white-throated spar\ row was the first heard in the morn ing, and with this all the woods rang. though commonly unseen, their simple a&y te-te-te, te-te-te^ te-te-te^ so sharp and piercing, was as distinct to the ear as the passage of a spark of fire shot into the darkest of the forest would be to the eye. we were commonly aroused by their lively strain very early. what a glorious time they must have in that wilderness, far from man kind ! i told the indian that we would go to church to chesuncook this morning, some fifteen miles. it was settled weather at last. a few swallows flitted over the water, we heard maryland yellow-throats along the shore, the notes of the chickadee, and. 58 canoeing in the wilderness i believe, redstarts. moose-flies of large size pursued us in midstream. the indian thought that we should lie by on sunday. said he, " we come here lookum things, look all round, but come sunday look up all that, and then monday look again." he spoke of an indian of his acquaint ance who had been with some ministers to katahdin and had told him how they conducted. this he described in a low and solemn voice. "they make a long prayer every morning and night, and at every meal. come sunday, they stop 'em, no go at all that day — keep still — preach all day — first one, then another, just like church. oh, ver' good men. one day go ing along a river, they came to the body of a man in the water, drowned good while. they go right ashore — stop there, go no farther that day — they have meet ing there, preach and pray just like sun day. then they go back and carry the body with them. oh, they ver' good men." allegash and east branch 59 i judged from this account that their every camp was a camp-meeting, and that they wanted an opportunity to preach somewhere more than to see katahdin. however, the indian added, plying the paddle all the while, that if we would go along he must go with us, he our man, and he suppose that if he no takum pay for what he do sunday then ther 's no harm, but if he takum pay then wrong. i told him that he was stricter than white men. nevertheless, i noticed that he did not forget to reckon in the sundays at last. he appeared to be a very religious man, and said his prayers in a loud voice, in in dian, kneeling before the camp, morning and evening — sometimes scrambling up in haste when he had forgotten this, and saying them with great rapidity. in the course of the day he remarked, "poor man rememberum god more than rich." we soon passed the island where i had camped four years before. the deadwater, a mile or two below it, the indian said 6o canoeing in the wilderness was "a great place for moose." we saw the grass bent where a moose came out the night before, and the indian said that he could smell one as far as he could see him, but he added that if he should see five or six to-day close by canoe he no shoot 'em. accordingly, as he was the only one of the party who had a gun, or had come a-hunting, the moose were safe. just below this a cat owl flew heavily over the stream, and he, asking if i knew what it was, imitated very well the com mon hoo, boo, hoo, hoorer, hoo, of our woods. we carried a part of the baggage about pine stream falls, while the indian went down in the canoe. a bangor merchant had told us that two men in his employ were drowned some time ago while pass ing these falls in a bateau, and a third clung to a rock all night and was taken off in the morning. there were magnificent great purple fringed orchises on this carry and the neighboring shores. i measured the largest canoe birch which i saw in this allegash and east branch 6i journey near the end of the carry. it was fourteen and one half feet in circumfer ence at two feet from the ground, but at five feet divided into three parts. the in dian cut a small woody knob as big as a filbert from the trunk of a fir, apparently an old balsam vesicle filled with wood, which he said was good medicine. after we had embarked and gone half a mile, my companion remembered that he had left his knife, and we paddled back to get it, against the strong and swift cur rent. this taught us the difference be tween going up and down the stream, for while we were working our way back a quarter of a mile, we should have gone down a mile and half at least. so we landed, and while he and the indian were gone back for it, i watched the motions of the foam, a kind of white waterfowl near the shore, forty or fifty rods below. it alternately appeared and disappeared behind the rock, being carried round by an eddy. 62 canoeing in the wilderness immediately below these falls was the chesuncook deadwater, caused by the flowing back of the lake. as we paddled slowly over this, the indian told us a story of his hunting thereabouts, and something more interesting about himself. it ap peared that he had represented his tribe at augusta, and once at washington. he had a great idea of education, and would occasionally break out into such expressions as this, " kademy — good thing — i sup pose they usum fifth reader there. you been college?" we steered across the northwest end of the lake. it is an agreeable change to cross a lake after you have been shut up in the woods, not only on account of the greater expanse of water, but also of sky. it is one of the surprises which nature has in store for the traveler in the forest. to look down, in this case, over eighteen miles of water was liberating and civilizing even. the lakes also reveal the mountains, and give ample scope and range to our thought. allegash and east branch 63 already there were half a dozen log huts about this end of the lake, though so far from a road. in these woods the earliest settlements are clustering about the lakes, partly, i think, for the sake of the neigh borhood as the oldest clearings. water is a pioneer which the settler follows, taking advantage of its improvements. about noon we turned northward up a broad kind of estuary, and at its northeast corner found the caucomgomoc river, and after going about a mile from the lake reached the umbazookskus. our course was up the umbazookskus, but as the in dian knew of a good camping-place, that is, a cool place where there were few mos quitoes, about half a mile farther up the caucomgomoc, we went thither. so quickly we changed the civilizing sky of chesuncook for the dark wood of the caucomgomoc. on reaching the indian's camping-ground on the south side, where the bank was about a dozen feet high, i read on the trunk of a fir tree blazed by 64 canoeing in the wilderness an axe an inscription in charcoal which had been left by him. it was surmounted by a drawing of a bear paddling a canoe, which he said was the sign used by his family always. the drawing, though rude, could not be mistaken for anything but a bear, and he doubted my ability to copy it. the inscription ran thus. i interline the english of his indian as he gave it to me. (the figure of a bear in a boat.) july 26 1853 ntasoseb we alone joseph pohs elioi polls start sia olta for oldtown onke ni right away quambi july 15 1855 niasoseb allegash and east branch 65 he added now below: — 1857 july 26 jo. polls this was one of his homes. i saw where he had sometimes stretched his moose-hides on the sunny north side of the river where there was a narrow meadow. after we had selected a place for our camp, and kindled our fire, almost exactly on the site of the indian's last camp here, he, looking up, observed, " that tree danger." it was a dead part, more than a foot in diameter, of a large canoe birch, which branched at the ground. this branch, rising thirty feet or more, slanted directly over the spot which we had chosen for our bed. i told him to try it with his axe, but he could not shake it perceptibly, and, therefore, seemed inclined to disregard it, and my companion expressed his willing ness to run the risk. but it seemed to me that we should be fools to lie under it, for 66 canoeing in the wilderness though the lower part was firm, the top, for aught we knew, might be just ready to fall, and we should at any rate be very uneasy if the wind arose in the night. it is a common accident for men camping in the woods to be killed by a falling tree. so the camp was moved to the other side of the fire. the indian said that the umbazooks kus, being a dead stream with broad mead ows, was a good place for moose, and he frequently came a-hunting here, being out alone three weeks or more from old town. he sometimes, also, went a-hunt ing to the seboois lakes, taking the stage, with his gun and ammunition, axe and blankets, hard-bread and pork, perhaps for a hundred miles of the way, and jumped offat the wildest place on the road, where he was at once at home, and every rod was a tavern-site for him. then, after a short journey through the woods, he would build a spruce-bark canoe in one day, put ting but few ribs into it, that it might be allegash and east branch 67 light, and, after doing his hunting with it on the lakes, would return with his furs the same way he had come. thus you have an indian availing himself of the advantages of civilization, without losing any of his woodcraft, but proving himself the more successful hunter for it. this man was very clever and quick to learn anything in his line. our tent was of a kind new to him, but when he had once seen it pitched it was surprising how quickly he would find and prepare the pole and forked stakes to pitch it with, cutting and placing them right the first time, though i am sure that the majority of white men would have blundered sev eral times. now i thought i would observe how he spent his sunday. while i and my companion were looking about at the trees and river he went to sleep. indeed, he improved every opportunity to get a nap, whatever the day. rambling about the woods at this 68 canoeing in the wilderness camp, i noticed that they consisted chiefly of firs, spruce, red maple, birch, and, along the river, the hoary alder. i could trace the outlines of large birches that had fallen long ago, collapsed and rotted and turned to soil, by faint yellowish-green lines of featherlike moss, eighteen inches wide and twenty or thirty feet long, crossed by other similar lines. wild as it was, it was hard for me to get rid of the associations of the settle ments. any steady and monotonous sound, to which i did not distinctly attend, passed for a sound of human industry. the water falls which i heard were not without their dams and mills to my imagination ; and several times i found that i had been re garding the steady rushing sound of the wind from over the woods beyond the rivers as that of a train of cars. our minds anywhere, when left to themselves, are al ways thus busily drawing conclusions from false premises. i asked the indian to make us a sugar allegash and east branch 69 bowl of birch bark, which he did, using the great knife which dangled in a sheath from his belt; but the bark broke at the corners when he bent it up, and he said it was not good — that there was a great difference in this respect between the bark of one canoe birch and that of another. my companion, wishing to distinguish between the black and white spruce, asked polis to show him a twig of the latter, which he did at once, together with the black; indeed, he could distinguish them about as far as he could see them. as the two twigs appeared very much alike, my companion asked the indian to point out the difference ; whereupon the latter, tak ing the twigs, instantly remarked, as he passed his hand over them successively in a stroking manner, that the white was rough, that is, the needles stood up nearly perpendicular, but the black smooth, that is, as if bent down. this was an obvious difference, both to sight and touch. i asked him to get some black spruce 70 canoeing in the wilderness root and make some thread. whereupon, without looking up at the trees overhead, he began to grub in the ground, instantly distinguishing the black spruce roots, and cutting off a slender one, three or four feet long, and as big as a pipestem, he split the end with his knife, and taking a half between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, rapidly separated its whole length into two equal semi-cylindrical halves. then, giving me another root, he said, " you try." but in my hands it immediately ran off one side, and i got only a very short piece. though it looked easy, i found that there was a great art in splitting these roots. the split is skillfully hu mored by bending short with this hand or that, and so kept in the middle. he then took off the bark from each half, pressing a short piece of cedar bark against the convex side with both hands, while he drew the root upward with his teeth. an indian's teeth are strong, and allegash and east branch 71 i noticed that he used his often where we should have used a hand. they amounted to a third hand. he thus obtained in a moment a very neat, tough, and flexible string, which he could tie into a knot, or make into a fishline even. he said that you would be obliged to give half a dollar for spruce root enough for a canoe, thus prepared. he had discovered the day before that his canoe leaked a little, and said that it was owing to stepping into it violently. i asked him where he would get pitch to mend it with, for they commonly use hard pitch, obtained of the whites at oldtown. he said that he could make something very similar, and equally good, of material which we had with us; and he wished me to guess what. but i could not, and he would not tell me, though he showed me a ball of it when made, as big as a pea and like black pitch, saying, at last, that there were some things which a man did not tell even his wife. 72 canoeing in the wilderness being curious to see what kind of fishes there were in this dark, deep, slug gish river, i cast in my line just before night, and caught several small sucker-like fishes, which the indian at once rejected, saying that they were good for nothing. also, he would not touch a pout, which i caught, and said that neither indians nor whites thereabouts ever ate them. but he said that some small silvery fishes, which i called white chivin, were the best fish in the penobscot waters, and if i would toss them up the bank to him, he would cook them for me. after clean ing them, not very carefully, leaving the heads on, he laid them on the coals and so broiled them. returning from a short walk, he brought a vine in his hand, saying that it made the best tea of anything in the woods. it was the creeping snowberry, which was quite common there, its berries just grown. so we determined to have some tea made of this. it had a slight checker lishing allegash and east branch 73 berry flavor, and we both agreed that it was really better than the black tea which we had brought. we thought it quite a discovery, and that it might well be dried and sold in the shops. i for one, how ever, am not an old tea-drinker and can not speak with authority to others. the indian said that they also used for tea a certain herb which grew in low ground, which he did not find there, and labra dor tea; also hemlock leaves, the last especially in winter when the other plants were covered with snow; and various other things. we could have had a new kind of tea every night. just before night we saw a musquash^ the only one we saw in this voyage, swimming downward on the opposite side of the stream. the indian, wishing to get one to eat, hushed us, saying, " stop, me call 'em"; and, sitting flat on the bank, he began to make a curious squeak ing, wiry sound with his lips, exerting himself considerably. i was greatly sur 74 canoeing in the wilderness prised — thought that i had at last got into the wilderness, and that he was a wild man indeed, to be talking to a musquash ! i did not know which of the two was the strangest to me. he seemed suddenly to have quite forsaken humanity, and gone over to the musquash side. the mus quash, however, as near as i could see, did not turn aside, and the indian said that he saw our fire ; but it was evident that he was in the habit of calling the musquash to him, as he said. an acquaintance of mine who was hunting moose in these woods a month after this, tells me that his indian in this way repeatedly called the musquash within reach of his paddle in the moonlight, and struck at them. the indian said a particularly long prayer this sunday evening, as if to atone for working in the morning. monday, july 27 having rapidly loaded the canoe, which the indian always carefully attended to, that it might be well trimmed, and each having taken a look, as usual, to see that nothing was left, we set out again, descending the caucomgomoc, and turn ing northeasterly up the umbazookskus. this name, the indian said, meant much meadow river. we found it now very wide on account of the rains. the space between the woods, chiefly bare meadow, was from fifty to two hundred rods in breadth. in the water on the meadows grew sedges, wool-grass, the common blue flag abundantly, its flower just showing itself above the high water, as if it were a blue water-lily, and higher in the meadows a great many clumps of a peculiar narrow 76 canoeing in the wilderness leaved willow. here also grew the red osier, its large fruit now whitish. it was unusual for the woods to be so distant from the shore, and there was quite an echo from them, but when i was shouting in order to awake it, the indian reminded me that i should scare the moose, which he was looking out for, and which we all wanted to see. having paddled several miles up the umbazookskus, it suddenly contracted to a mere brook, narrow and swift, the larches and other trees approaching the bank and leaving no open meadow. we landed to get a black spruce pole for pushing against the stream. the one selected was quite slender, cut about ten feet long, merely whittled to a point, and the bark shaved off. while we were thus employed, two in dians in a canoe hove in sight round the bushes, coming down stream. our indian knew one of them, an old man, and fell into conversation with him. he belonged allegash and east branch -jj at the foot of moosehead. the other was of another tribe. they were returning from hunting. i asked the younger if they had seen any moose, to which he said "no"; but i, seeing the moose-hides sticking out from a great bundle made with their blankets in the middle of the canoe, added, " only their hides." as he was a foreigner, he may have wished to deceive me, for it is against the law for white men and foreigners to kill moose in maine at this season. but per haps he need not have been alarmed, for the moose-wardens are not very particular. i heard of one who, being asked by a white man going into the woods what he would say if he killed a moose, answered, " if you bring me a quarter of it i guess you won't be troubled." his duty being, as he said, only to prevent the " indiscriminate " slaughter of them for their hides. i sup pose that he would consider it an indiscrifn inate slaughter when a quarter was not reserved for himself. 78 canoeing in the wilderness we continued along through the most extensive larch wood which i had seen — tall and slender trees with fantastic branches. you do not find straggling trees of this spe cies here and there throughout the wood, but rather a little forest of them. the same is the case with the white and red pines and some other trees, greatly to the convenience of the lumberer. they are of a social habit, growing in " veins," " clumps,'* "groups," or "communities," as the ex plorers call them, distinguishing them far away, from the top of a hill or a tree, the white pines towering above the surround ing forest, or else they form extensive forests by themselves. i should have liked to come across a large community of pines which had never been invaded by the lumbering army. we saw some fresh moose-tracks along the shore. the stream was only from one and one half to three rods wide, quite wind ing, with occasional small islands, meadows, and some very swift and shallow places. allegash and east branch 79 when we came to an island the indian never hesitated which side to take, as if the current told him which was the short est and deepest. it was lucky for us that the water was so high. we had to walk but once on this stream, carrying a part of the load, at a swift and shallow reach, while he got up with the canoe, not being obliged to take out, though he said it was very strong water. once or twice we passed the red wreck of a bateau which had been stove some spring. while making this portage i saw many splendid specimens of the great purple fringed orchis, three feet high. it is re markable that such delicate flowers should here adorn these wilderness paths. the umbazookskus is called ten miles long. having poled up the narrowest part some three or four miles, the next opening in the sky was over umbazookskus lake, which we suddenly entered about eleven o'clock in the forenoon. it stretches north westerly four or five miles. we crossed 8o canoeing in the wilderness the southeast end to the carry into mud pond. hodge, who went through this way to the st. lawrence in the service of the state, calls the portage here a mile and three quarters long. the indian said this was the wettest carry in the state, and as the season was a very wet one we anticipated an unpleasant walk. as usual he made one large bundle of the pork-keg, cook ing-utensils, and other loose traps, by tying them up in his blanket. we should be obliged to go over the carry twice, and our method was to carry one half part way, and then go back for the rest. our path ran close by the door of a log hut in a clearing at this end of the carry, which the indian, who alone entered it, found to be occupied by a canadian and his family, and that the man had been blind for a year. this was the first house above chesuncook, and was built here, no doubt, because it was the route of the lumberers in the winter and spring. allegash and east branch 8i after a slight ascent from the lake through the springy soil of the canadian's clearing, we entered on a level and very wet and rocky path through the dense evergreen forest, a loosely paved gutter merely, where we went leaping from rock to rock and from side to side in the vain attempt to keep out of the water and mud. it was on this carry that the white hunter whom i met in the stage, as he told me, had shot two bears a few months before. they stood directly in the path and did not turn out for him. he said that at this season bears were found on the mountains and hillsides in search of berries and were apt to be saucy. here commences what was called, twenty years ago, the best timber land in the state. this very spot was described as ** covered with the greatest abundance of pine," but now this appeared to me, com paratively, an uncommon tree there — and yet you did not see where any more could have stood, amid the dense growth of cedar, fir, etc. 82 canoeing in the wilderness the indian with his canoe soon disap peared before us, but ere long he came back and told us to take a path which turned off westward, it being better walking, and, at my suggestion, he agreed to leave a bough in the regular carry at that place that we might not pass it by mistake. thereafter, he said, we were to keep the main path, and he added, "you see 'em my tracks/' but i had not much faith that we could distinguish his tracks, since others had passed over the carry within a few days. we turned off at the right place, but were soon confused by numerous logging-paths coming into the one we were on. how ever, we kept what we considered the main path, though it was a winding one, and in this, at long intervals, we distin guished a faint trace of a footstep. this, though comparatively unworn, was at first a better, or, at least, a dryer road than the regular carry which we had left. it led through an arbor-vitae wilderness of the allegash and east branch 83 grimmest character. the great fallen and rotting trees had been cut through and rolled aside, and their huge trunks abutted on the path on each side, while others still lay across it two or three feet high. it was impossible for us to discern the indian's trail in the elastic moss, which, like a thick carpet, covered every rock and fallen tree, as well as the earth. neverthe less, i did occasionally detect the track of a man, and i gave myself some credit for it. i carried my whole load at once, a heavy knapsack, and a large rubber bag containing our bread and a blanket, swung on a paddle, in all about sixty pounds; but my companion preferred to make two jour neys by short stages while i waited for him. we could not be sure that we were not depositing our loads each time farther off from the true path. as i sat waiting for my companion, he would seem to be gone a long time, and i had ample opportunity to make observa tions on the forest. i now first began to 84 canoeing in the wilderness be seriously molested by the black fly, a very small but perfectly formed fly of that color, about one tenth of an inch long, which i felt, and then saw, in swarms about me, as i sat by a wider and more than usually doubtful fork in this dark forest path. remembering that i had a wash in my knapsack, prepared by a thoughtful hand in bangor, i made haste to apply it to my face and hands, and was glad to find it effectual, as long as it was fresh, or for twenty minutes, not only against black flies, but all the insects that molested us. they would not alight on the part thus defended. it was composed of sweet oil and oil of turpentine, with a little oil of spearmint, and camphor. how ever, i finally concluded that the remedy was worse than the disease, it was so dis agreeable and inconvenient to have your face and hands covered with such a mix ture. three large slate-colored birds of the jay genus, the canada jay, came flitting allegash and east branch 85 silently and by degrees toward me, and hopped down the limbs inquisitively to within seven or eight feet. fish hawks from the lake uttered their sharp whist ling notes low over the top of the forest near me, as if they were anxious about a nest there. after i had sat there some time i no ticed at this fork in the path a tree which had been blazed, and the letters " chamb. l." written on it with red chalk. this i knew to mean chamberlain lake. so i concluded that on the whole we were on the right course. my companion having returned with his bag, we set forward again. the walk ing rapidly grew worse and the path more indistinct, and at length we found ourselves in a more open and regular swamp made less passable than ordinary by the unusual wetness of the season. we sank a foot deep in water and mud at every step, and some times up to our knees. the trail was almost obliterated, being no more than a mus 86 canoeing in the wilderness quash leaves in similar places when he parts the floating sedge. in fact, it probably was a musquash trail in some places. we con cluded that if mud pond was as muddy as the approach to it was wet, it certainly de served its name. it would have been amus ing to behold the dogged and deliberate pace at which we entered that swamp, without interchanging a word, as if deter mined to go through it, though it should come up to our necks. having penetrated a considerable distance into this and found a tussock on which we could deposit our loads, though there was no place to sit, my companion went back for the rest of his pack. after a long while my companion came back, and the indian with him. we had taken the wrong road, and the indian had lost us. he had gone back to the cana dian's camp and asked him which way we had probably gone, since he could better understand the ways of white men, and he told him correctly that we had undoubt allegash and east branch 87 edly taken the supply road to chamber lain lake. the indian was greatly sur prised that we should have taken what he called a " tow," that is, tote, toting, or supply, road instead of a carry path, — that we had not followed his tracks, — said it was "strange," and evidently thought little of our woodcraft. having held a consultation and eaten a mouthful of bread, we concluded that it would perhaps be nearer for us two now to keep on to chamberlain lake, omit ting mud pond, than to go back and start anew for the last place, though the in dian had never been through this way and knew nothing about it. in the meanwhile he would go back and finish carrying over his canoe and bundle to mud pond, cross that, and go down its outlet and up cham berlain lake, and trust to meet us there before night. it was now a little after noon. he supposed that the water in which we stood had flowed back from mud pond, which could not be far off 88 canoeing in the wilderness eastward, but was unapproachable through the dense cedar swamp. keeping on, we were ere long agreeably disappointed by reaching firmer ground, and we crossed a ridge where the path was more distinct, but there was never any outlook over the forest. at one place i heard a very clear and piercing note from a small hawk as he dashed through the tree-tops over my head. we also saw and heard several times the red squirrel. this, according to the indian, is the only squir rel found in those woods, except a very few striped ones. it must have a solitary time in that dark evergreen forest, where there is so little life, seventy-five miles from a road as we had come. i wondered how he could call any particular tree there his home, and yet he would run up the stem of one out of the myriads, as if it were an old road to him. i fancied that he must be glad to see us, though he did seem to chide us. one of those somber fir and spruce woods is not complete un f the red squirrel allegash and east branch 89 less you hear from out its cavernous mossy and twiggy recesses his line alarum — his spruce voice, hke the v^'orking of the sap through some crack in a tree. such an im pertinent fellow would occasionally try to alarm the wood about me. "oh," said i, "i am well acquainted with your family. i know your cousins in concord very well." but my overtures were vain, for he would withdraw by his aerial turnpikes into a more distant cedar top, and spring his rattle again. we entered another swamp, at a neces sarily slow pace, where the walking was worse than ever, not only on account of the water, but the fallen timber, which often obliterated the indistinct trail en tirely. the fallen trees were so numerous that for long distances the route was through a succession of small yards, where we climbed over fences as high as our heads, down into water often up to our knees, and then over another fence into a second yard, and so on. in many places 90 canoeing in the wilderness the canoe would have run if it had not been for the fallen timber. again it would be more open, but equally wet, too wet for trees to grow. it was a mossy swamp, which it required the long legs of a moose to traverse, and it is very likely that we scared some of them in our transit, though we saw none. it was ready to echo the growl of a bear, the howl of a wolf, or the scream of a panther ; but when you get fairly into the middle of one of these grim forests you are surprised to find that the larger inhabitants are not at home com monly, but have left only a puny red squir rel to bark at you. generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl ; it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling. i did, however, see one dead porcupine. perhaps he had succumbed to the difficulties of the way. these bristly fellows are a very suitable small fruit of such unkempt wildernesses. making a logging-road in the maine woods is called "swamping" it, and they allegash and east branch 91 who do the work are called "swampers." i now perceived the fitness of the term. this was the most perfectly swamped of all the roads i ever saw. nature must have cooperated with art here. however, i sup pose they would tell you that this name took its origin from the fact that the chief work of roadmakers in those woods is to make the swamps passable. we came to a stream where the bridge, which had been made of logs tied together with cedar bark, had been broken up, and we got over as we could. such as it was, this ruined bridge was the chief evidence that we were on a path of any kind. we then crossed another low rising ground, and i, who wore shoes, had an opportunity to wring out my stockings, but my companion, who used boots, had found that this was not a safe experiment for him, for he might not be able to get his wet boots on again. he went over the whole ground, or water, three times, for which reason our progress was very slow. 92 canoeing in the wilderness beside that, the water softened our feet, and to some extent unfitted them for walk ing. as i sat waiting for him it would natur ally seem an unaccountable time that he was gone. therefore, as i could see through the woods that the sun was getting low, and it was uncertain how far the lake might be, even if we were on the right course, and in what part of the world we should find ourselves at nightfall, i pro posed that i should push through with what speed i could, leaving boughs to mark my path, and find the lake and the in dian, if possible, before night, and send the latter back to carry my companion's bag. having gone about a mile i heard a noise like the note of an owl, which i soon discovered to be made by the indian, and answering him, we soon came together. he had reached the lake after crossing mud pond and running some rapids be low it, and had come up about a mile and allegash and east branch 93 a half on our path. if he had not come back to meet us, we probably should not have found him that night, for the path branched once or twice before reaching this particular part of the lake. so he went back for my companion and his bag. hav ing waded through another stream, where the bridge of logs had been broken up and half floated away, we continued on through alternate mud and water to the shores of apmoojenegamook lake, which we reached in season for a late supper, in stead of dining there, as we had expected, having gone without our dinner. it was at least five miles by the way we had come, and as my companion had gone over most of it three times he had walked full a dozen miles. in the winter, when the water is frozen and the snow is four feet deep, it is no doubt a tolerable path to a footman. if you want an exact recipe for making such a road, take one part mud pond, and dilute it with equal parts of umbazookskus and apmoojenegamook; 94 canoeing in the wilderness then send a family of musquash through to locate it, look after the grades and cul verts, and finish it to their minds, and let a hurricane follow to do the fencing. we had come out on a point extending into apmoojenegamook, or chamberlain lake, where there was a broad, gravelly, and rocky shore, encumbered with bleached logs and trees. we were rejoiced to see such dry things in that part of the world. but at first we did not attend to dryness so much as to mud and wetness. we all three walked into the lake up to our mid dle to wash our clothes. this was another noble lake, twelve miles long; if you add telos lake, which, since the dam was built, has been con nected with it by dead water, it will be twenty; and it is apparently from a mile and a half to two miles wide. we were about midway its length on the south side. we could see the only clearing in these parts, called the " chamberlain farm," with two or three log buildings close to allegash and east branch 95 gether, on the opposite shore, some two and a half miles distant. the smoke of our fire on the shore brought over two men in a canoe from the farm, that being a common signal agreed on when one wishes to cross. it took them about half an hour to come over, and they had their labor for their pains this time. after putting on such dry clothes as we had, and hanging the others to dry on the pole which the indian arranged over the fire, we ate our supper, and lay down on the pebbly shore with our feet to the fire without pitching our tent, making a thin bed of grass to cover the stones. here first i was molested by the little midge called the no-see-em, especially over the sand at the water's edge, for it is a kind of sand-fly. you would not observe them but for their light-colored wings. they are said to get under your clothes and produce a feverish heat, which i sup pose was what i felt that night. our insect foes in this excursion were. 96 canoeing in the wilderness first, mosquitoes, only troublesome at night, or when we sat still on shore by day; sec ond, black flies [simidium molestum)^ which molested us more or less on the carries by day, and sometimes in narrower parts of the stream ; third, moose-flies, stout brown flies much like a horsefly. they can bite smartly, according to polis, but are easily avoided or killed. fourth, the no-see-ems. of all these, the mosquitoes are the only ones that troubled me seriously, but as i was provided with a wash and a veil, they have not made any deep impression. the indian would not use our wash to protect his face and hands, for fear that it would hurt his skin, nor had he any veil. he, therefore, suflfered from insects throughout this journey more than either of us. he regularly tied up his face in his handkerchief, and buried it in his blanket, and he now finally lay down on the sand between us and the fire for the sake of the smoke, which he tried to make enter his blanket about his face, and for the same allegash and east branch 97 purpose he lit his pipe and breathed the smoke into his blanket. in the middle of the night we heard the voice of the loon, loud and distinct, from far over the lake. it is a very wild sound, quite in keeping with the place and the circumstances of the traveler, and very unlike the voice of a bird. i could lie awake for hours listening to it, it is so thrilling. when camping in such a wil derness as this, you are prepared to hear sounds from some of its inhabitants which will give voice to its wildness. some idea of bears, wolves, or panthers runs in your head naturally, and when this note is first heard very far off at midnight, as you lie with your ear to the ground, — the forest being perfectly still about you, you take it for granted that it is the voice of a wolf or some other wild beast, — you con clude that it is a pack of wolves baying the moon, or, perchance, cantering after a moose. it was the unfailing and charac teristic sound of those lakes. 98 canoeing in the wilderness some friends of mine, who two years ago went up the caucomgomoc river, were serenaded by wolves while moose hunting by moonlight. it was a sudden burst, as if a hundred demons had broke loose, — a startling sound enough, which, if any, would make your hair stand on end, — and all was still again. it lasted but a moment, and you 'd have thought there were twenty of them, when probably there were only two or three. they heard it twice only, and they said that it gave expression to the wilderness which it lacked before. i heard of some men, who, while skinning a moose lately in those woods, were driven off from the carcass by a pack of wolves, which ate it up. this of the loon — i do not mean its laugh, but its looning — is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly hu man to my ear — hoo-hoo-ooooo ^ like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. i have heard a sound exactly like it when allegash and east branch 99 breathing heavily through my own nos trils, half awake at ten at night, suggest ing my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all. formerly, when lying awake at midnight in those woods, i had listened to hear some words or syllables of their language, but it chanced that i listened in vain until i heard the cry of the loon. i have heard it occasionally on the ponds of my native town, but there its wild ness is not enhanced by the surrounding scenery. i was awakened at midnight by some heavy, low-flying bird, probably a loon, flapping by close over my head along the shore. so, turning the other side of my half-clad body to the fire, i sought slum ber again. w vi tuesday, july 28 hen we awoke we found a heavy dew on our blankets. i lay awake very early and listened to the clear, shrill ah, te te, te te, te of the white-throated sparrow, repeated at short intervals, with out the least variation, for half an hour, as if it could not enough express its hap piness. we did some more washing in the lake this morning, and, with our clothes hung about on the dead trees and rocks, the shore looked like washing-day at home. the indian, taking the hint, borrowed the soap, and, walking into the lake, washed his only cotton shirt on his per son, then put on his pants and let it dry on him. i observed that he wore a cotton shirt, originally white, a greenish flannel one allegash and east branch loi over it, but no waistcoat, flannel drawers, and strong linen or duck pants, which also had been white, blue woolen stockings, cowhide boots, and a kossuth hat.i he car ried no change of clothing, but, putting on a stout, thick jacket, which he laid aside in the canoe, and seizing a full-sized axe, his gun and ammunition, and a blanket, which would do for a sail or knapsack, if wanted, and strapping on his belt, which contained a large sheath-knife, he walked off at once, ready to be gone all summer. this looked very independent — a few simple and effective tools, and no rubber clothing. he was always the first ready to start in the morning. instead of carry ing a large bundle of his own extra cloth ing, etc., he brought back the greatcoats of moose tied up in his blanket. i found that his outfit was the result of a long ex perience, and in the main hardly to be improved on, unless by washing and an " a soft felt hat of the kind worn by the hungarian patriot, kossuth, on his visit to this country in 1851-52. 102 canoeing in the wilderness extra shirt. wanting a button here, he walked off to a place where some indians had recently encamped, and searched for one, but i believe in vain. having softened our stiffened boots and shoes with the pork fat, the usual disposi tion of what was left at breakfast, we crossed the lake, steering in a diagonal di rection northeastly about four miles to the outlet. the indian name, apmoojenega mook, means lake that is crossed, because the usual course lies across and not along it. we did not intend to go far down the allegash, but merely to get a view of the lakes which are its source, and then re turn this way to the east branch of the penobscot. after reaching the middle of the lake, we found the waves pretty high, and the indian warned my companion, who was nodding, that he must not allow himself to fall asleep in the canoe lest he should upset us ; adding, that when indians want to sleep in a canoe, they lie down straight allegash and east branch 103 on the bottom. but in this crowded one that was impossible. however, he said that he would nudge him if he saw him nodding. a belt of dead trees stood all around the lake, some far out in the water, with others prostrate behind them, and they made the shore, for the most part, almost inaccessi ble. this is the effect of the dam at the outlet. thus the natural sandy or rocky shore, with its green fringe, was concealed and destroyed. we coasted westward along the north side, searching for the outlet, about quarter of a mile distant from this savage-looking shore, on which the waves were breaking violently, knowing that it might easily be concealed amid this rub bish, or by the overlapping of the shore. it is remarkable how little these important gates to a lake are blazoned. there is no triumphal arch over the modest inlet or outlet, but at some undistinguished point it trickles in or out through the uninter rupted forest, almost as through a sponge. i04 canoeing in the wilderness we reached the outlet in about an hour, and carried over the dam there, which is quite a solid structure, and about one quarter of a mile farther there was a sec ond dam. the result of this particular damming about chamberlain lake is that the headwaters of the st. john are made to flow by bangor. they have thus dammed all the larger lakes, raising their broad surfaces many feet, thus turning the forces of nature against herself, that they might float their spoils out of the country. they rapidly run out of these immense forests all the finer and more accessible pine tim ber, and then leave the bears to watch the decaying dams, not clearing nor cultivat ing the land, nor making roads, nor build ing houses, but leaving it a wilderness, as they found it. in many parts only these dams remain, like deserted beaver dams. think how much land they have flowed without asking nature's leave. the wilderness experiences a sudden rise of all her streams and lakes. she feels ten allegash and east branch 105 thousand vermin gnawing at the base of her noblest trees. many combining drag them off, jarring over the roots of the sur vivors, and tumble them into the nearest stream, till, the fairest having fallen, they scamper off to ransack some new wilder ness, and all is still again. it is as when a migrating army of mice girdles a forest of pines. the chopper fells trees from the same motive that the mouse gnaws them — to get his living. you tell me that he has a more interesting family than the mouse. that is as it happens. he speaks of a " berth " of timber, a good place for him to get into, just as a worm might. when the chopper would praise a pine he will commonly tell you that the one he cut was so big that a yoke of oxen stood on its stump; as if that were what the pine had grown for, to become the footstool of oxen. in my mind's eye i can see these unwieldy tame deer, with a yoke binding them together, the brazen-tipped horns betraying their servitude, taking their io6 canoeing in the wilderness stand on the stump of each giant pine in succession throughout this whole forest, and chewing their cud there, until it is nothing but an ox-pasture, and run out at that. as if it were good for the oxen, and some medicinal quality ascended into their nostrils. or is their elevated position intended merely as a symbol of the fact that the pastoral comes next in order to the sylvan or hunter life ? the character of the logger's admira tion is betrayed by his very mode of ex pressing it. if he told all that was in his mind, he would say, " it was so big that i cut it down, and then a yoke of oxen could stand on its stump." he admires the log, the carcass or corpse, more than the tree. why, my dear sir, the tree might have stood on its own stump, and a great deal more comfortably and firmly than a yoke of oxen can, if you had not cut it down. the anglo-american can indeed cut down and grub up all this waving forest, and make a stump speech on its ruins, but allegash and east branch 107 he cannot converse with the spirit of the tree he fells, he cannot read the poetry and mythology which retire as he advances. he ignorantly erases mythological tablets in order to print his handbills and town meeting warrants on them. before he has learned his a b c in the beautiful but mys tic lore of the wilderness he cuts it down, puts up a " deestrict " schoolhouse, and introduces webster's spelling-book. below the last dam, the river being swift and shallow, we two walked about half a mile to lighten the canoe. i made it a rule to carry my knapsack when i walked, and also to keep it tied to a cross bar when in the canoe, that it might be found with the canoe if we should upset. i heard the dog-day locust here, a sound which i had associated only with more open, if not settled countries. we were now fairly on the allegash river. after perhaps two miles of river we entered heron lake, scaring up forty or fifty young sheldrakes, at the entrance. io8 canoeing in the wilderness which ran over the water with great rap idity, as usual in a long line. this lake, judging from the map, is about ten miles long. we had entered it on the southwest side, and saw a dark moun tain northeast over the lake which the in dian said was called peaked mountain, and used by explorers to look for timber from. the shores were in the same ragged and unsightly condition, encumbered with dead timber, both fallen and standing, as in the last lake, owing to the dam on the allegash below. some low points or islands were almost drowned. i saw something white a mile off on the water, which turned out to be a great gull on a rock, which the indian would have been glad to kill and eat. but it flew away long before we were near ; and also a flock of summer ducks that were about the rock with it. i asking him about herons, since this was heron lake, he said that he found the blue heron's nests in the hard-wood trees. allegash and east branch 109 rounding a point, we stood across a bay toward a large island three or four miles down the lake. we met with shadflies midway, about a mile from the shore, and they evidently fly over the whole lake. on moosehead i had seen a large devil's needle half a mile from the shore, coming from the middle of the lake, where it was three or four miles wide at least. it had probably crossed. we landed on the southeast side of the island, which was rather elevated, and densely wooded, with a rocky shore, in season for an early dinner. somebody had camped there not long before and left the frame on which they stretched a moose hide. the indian proceeded at once to cut a canoe birch, slanted it up against another tree on the shore, tying it with a withe, and lay down to sleep in its shade. we made this island the limit of our excursion in this direction. the next dam was about fifteen miles farther north down the allegash. we had no canoeing in the wilderness been told in bangor of a man who lived alone, a sort of hermit, at that dam, to take care of it, who spent his time tossing a bullet from one hand to the other, for want of employment. this sort of tit-for tat intercourse between his two hands, bandying to and fro a leaden subject, seems to have been his symbol for society. there was another island visible toward the north end of the lake, with an elevated clearing on it ; but we learned afterward that it was not inhabited, had only been used as a pasture for cattle which sum mered in these woods. this unnaturally smooth-shaven, squarish spot, in the midst of the otherwise uninterrupted forest, only reminded us how uninhabited the country was. you would sooner expect to meet a bear than an ox in such a clearing. at any rate, it must have been a surprise to the bears when they came across it. such, seen far or near, you know at once to be man's work, for nature never does it. in order to let in the light to the earth he clears off allegash and east branch iii the forest on the hillsides and plains, and sprinkles fine grass seed like an enchanter, and so carpets the earth with a firm sward. polls had evidently more curiosity re specting the few settlers in those woods than we. if nothing was said, he took it for granted that we wanted to go straight to the next log hut. having observed that we came by the log huts at chesuncook, and the blind canadian's at the mud pond carry, without stopping to communicate with the inhabitants, he took occasion now to suggest that the usual way was, when you came near a house, to go to it, and tell the inhabitants what you had seen or heard, and then they told you what they had seen; but we laughed and said that we had had enough of houses for the pres ent, and had come here partly to avoid them. in the meanwhile, the wind, increas ing, blew down the indian's birch and created such a sea that we found ourselves prisoners on the island, the nearest shore 112 canoeing in the wilderness being perhaps a mile distant, and we took the canoe out to prevent its drifting away. we did not know but we should be com pelled to spend the rest of the day and the night there. at any rate, the indian went to sleep again, my companion busied him self drying his plants, and i rambled along the shore westward, which was quite stony, and obstructed with fallen bleached or drifted trees for four or five rods in width. our indian said that he was a doctor, and could tell me some medicinal use for every plant i could show him. i immediately tried him. he said that the inner bark of the aspen was good for sore eyes ; and so with various other plants, proving him self as good as his word. according to his account, he had acquired such knowledge in his youth from a wise old indian with whom he associated, and he lamented that the present generation of indians " had lost a great deal.'* he said that the caribou was a "very great runner," that there were none about allegash and east branch 113 this lake now, though there used to be many, and, pointing to the belt of dead trees caused by the dams, he added: "no likum stump. when he sees that he scared." pointing southeasterly over the lake and distant forest, he observed, " me go old town in three days." i asked how he would get over the swamps and fallen trees. "oh," said he, "in winter all covered, go anywhere on snowshoes, right across lakes." what a wilderness walk for a man to take alone ! none of your half-mile swamps, none of your mile-wide woods merely, as on the skirts of our towns, without hotels, only a dark mountain or a lake for guide board and station, over ground much of it impassable in summer ! here was traveling of the old heroic kind over the unaltered face of nature. from the allegash river, across great apmoojenegamook, he takes his way under the bear-haunted slopes of katahdin to 114 canoeing in the wilderness pamadumcook and millinocket's inland seas, and so to the forks of the nicketow, ever pushing the boughs of the fir and spruce aside, with his load of furs, con tending day and night, night and day, with the shaggy demon vegetation, traveling through the mossy graveyard of trees. or he could go by "that rough tooth of the sea" kineo, great source of arrows and of spears to the ancients, when weapons of stone were used. seeing and hearing moose, caribou, bears, porcupines, lynxes, wolves, and panthers. places where he might live and die and never hear of the united states — never hear of america. there is a lumberer's road called the eagle lake road from the seboois to the east side of this lake. it may seem strange that any road through such a wilderness should be passable, even in winter, but at that season, wherever lumbering operations are actively carried on, teams are contin ually passing on the single track, and it becomes as smooth almost as a railway. i allegash and east branch 115 am told that in the aroostook country the sleds are required by law to be of one width, four feet, and sleighs must be altered to fit the track, so that one runner may go in one rut and the other follow the horse. yet it is very bad turning out. we had for some time seen a thunder shower coming up from the west over the woods of the island, and heard the mut tering of the thunder, though we were in doubt whether it would reach us; but now the darkness rapidly increasing, and a fresh breeze rustling the forest, we hastily put up the plants which we had been drying, and with one consent made a rush for the tent material and set about pitching it. a place was selected and stakes and pins cut in the shortest possible time, and we were pin ning it down lest it should be blown away, when the storm suddenly burst over us. as we lay huddled together under the tent, which leaked considerably about the sides, with our baggage at our feet, we listened to some of the grandest thunder ii6 canoeing in the wilderness which i ever heard — rapid peals, round and plump, bang, bang, bang, in succes sion, like artillery from some fortress in the sky ; and the lightning was propor tionally brilliant. the indian said, " it must be good powder." all for the bene fit of the moose and us, echoing far over the concealed lakes. i thought it must be a place which the thunder loved, where the lightning practiced to keep its hand in, and it would do no harm to shatter a few pines. looking out, i perceived that the violent shower falling on the lake had almost in stantaneously flattened the waves, and, it clearing off, we resolved to start immedi ately, before the wind raised them again. getting outside, i said that i saw clouds still in the southwest, and heard thunder there. we embarked, nevertheless, and paddled rapidly back toward the dams. at the outlet of chamberlain lake we were overtaken by another gusty rain storm, which compelled us to take shelter. allegash and east branch 117 the indian under his canoe on the bank, and we under the edge of the dam. how ever, we were more scared than wet. from my covert i could see the indian peeping out from beneath his canoe to see what had become of the rain. when we had taken our respective places thus once or twice, the rain not coming down in ear nest, we commenced rambling about the neighborhood, for the wind had by this time raised such waves on the lake that we could not stir, and we feared that we should be obliged to camp there. we got an early supper on the dam and tried for fish, while waiting for the tumult to sub side. the fishes were not only few, but small and worthless. at length, just before sunset, we set out again. it was a wild evening when we coasted up the north side of this apmooje negamook lake. one thunder-storm was just over, and the waves which it had raised still running with violence, and an other storm was now seen coming up in ii8 canoeing in the wilderness the southwest, far over the lake ; but it might be worse in the morning, and we wished to get as far as possible on our way while we might. it blew hard against the shore, which was as dreary and harborless as you can conceive. for half a dozen rods in width it was a perfect maze of submerged trees, all dead and bare and bleaching, some standing half their original height, others prostrate, and criss-across, above or be neath the surface, and mingled with them were loose trees and limbs and stumps, beating about. we could not have landed if we would, without the greatest danger of being swamped; so blow as it might, we must depend on coasting. it was twi light, too, and that stormy cloud was ad vancing rapidly in our rear. it was a pleasant excitement, yet we were glad to reach, at length, the cleared shore of the chamberlain farm. we landed on a low and thinly wooded point, and while my companions were allegash and east branch 119 pitching the tent, i ran up to the house to get some sugar, our six pounds being gone. it was no wonder they were, for polis had a sweet tooth. he would first fill his dipper nearly a third full of sugar, and then add the coffee to it. here was a clearing extending back from the lake to a hilltop, with some dark-colored log buildings and a storehouse in it, and half a dozen men standing in front of the prin cipal hut, greedy for news. among them was the man who tended the dam on the allegash and tossed the bullet. he, having charge of the dams, and learning that we were going to webster stream the next day, told me that some of their men, who were haying at telos lake, had shut the dam at the canal there in order to catch trout, and if we wanted more water to take us through the canal we might raise the gate. they were unwilling to spare more than four pounds of brown sugar, — unlocking the storehouse to get it, — since they only 120 canoeing in the wilderness kept a little for such cases as this, and they charged twenty cents a pound for it, which certainly it was worth to get it up there. when i returned to the shore it was quite dark, but we had a rousing fire to warm and dry us by, and a snug apart ment behind it. the indian went up to the house to inquire after a brother who had been absent hunting a year or two, and while another shower was beginning, i groped about cutting spruce and arbor vits twigs for a bed. i preferred the ar bor-vitas on account of its fragrance, and spread it particularly thick about the shoulders. it is remarkable with what pure satisfaction the traveler in those woods will reach his camping-ground on the eve of a tempestuous night like this, as if he had got to his inn, and, rolling himself in his blanket, stretch himself on his six-feet-by-two bed of dripping fir twigs, with a thin sheet of cotton for roof, snug as a meadow mouse in its nest. in allegash and east branch 121 variably our best nights were those when it rained, for then we were not troubled with mosquitoes. you soon come to disregard rain on such excursions, at least in the summer, it is so easy to dry yourself, supposing a dry change of clothing is not to be had. you can much sooner dry you by such a fire as you can make in the woods than in anybody's kitchen, the fireplace is so much larger, and wood so much more abundant. a shed-shaped tent will catch and reflect the heat, and you may be drying while you are sleeping. some who have leaky roofs in the towns may have been kept awake, but we were soon lulled asleep by a steady, soak ing rain, which lasted all night. vii wednesday, july 29 when we awoke it had done rain ing, though it was still cloudy. the fire was put out, and the indian's boots, which stood under the eaves of the tent, were half full of water. he was much more improvident in such respects than either of us, and he had to thank us for keeping his powder dry. we decided to cross the lake at once, before breakfast ; and before starting i took the bearing of the shore which we wished to strike, about three miles distant, lest a sudden misty rain should conceal it when we were midway. though the bay in which we were was perfectly quiet and smooth, we found the lake already wide awake outside, but not dangerously or unpleasantly so. neverthe less, when you get out on one of those lakes in a canoe like this, you do not for allegash and east branch 123 get that you are completely at the mercy of the wind, and a fickle power it is. the playful waves may at any time become too rude for you in their sport, and play right on over you. after much steady paddling and dancing over the dark waves we found ourselves in the neighborhood of the southern land. we breakfasted on a rocky point, the first convenient place that of fered. it was well enough that we crossed thus early, for the waves now ran quite high, but beyond this point we had compara tively smooth water. you can commonly go along one side or the other of a lake, when you cannot cross it. my companion and i, having a discus sion on some point of ancient history, were amused by the attitude which the indian, who could not tell what we were talking about, assumed. he constituted himself umpire, and, judging by our air and ges ture, he very seriously remarked from time to time, "you beat," or " he beat." 124 canoeing in the wilderness leaving a spacious bay on our left, we entered through a short strait into a small lake a couple of miles over, and thence into telos lake. this curved round toward the northeast, and may have been three or four miles long as we paddled. the outlet from the lake into the east branch of the penobscot is an artificial one, and it was not very apparent where it was exactly, but the lake ran curving far up northeasterly into two narrow val leys or ravines, as if it had for a long time been groping its way toward the penob scot waters. by observing where the hori zon was lowest, and following the longest of these, we at length reached the dam, having come about a dozen miles from the last camp. somebody had left a line set for trout, and the jackknife with which the bait had been cut on the dam beside it, and, on a log close by, a loaf of bread. these proved the property of a solitary hunter, whom we soon met, and canoe and gun and traps were not far off. allegash and east branch 125 he told us that it was twenty miles to the foot of grand lake, and that the first house below the foot of the lake, on the east branch, was hunt's, about forty-five miles farther. this hunter, who was a quite small, sunburnt man, having already carried his canoe over, had nothing so interesting and pressing to do as to observe our transit. he had been out a month or more alone. how much more respectable is the life of the solitary pioneer or settler in these, or any woods — having real difficulties, not of his own creation, drawing his sub sistence directly from nature — than that of the helpless multitudes in the towns who depend on gratifying the extremely artificial wants of society and are thrown out of employment by hard times! telos lake, the head of the st. john on this side, and webster pond, the head of the east branch of the penobscot, are only about a mile apart, and they are con nected by a ravine, in which but little 126 canoeing in the wilderness digging was required to make the water of the former, which is the highest, flow into the latter. this canal is something less than a mile long and about four rods wide. the rush of the water has pro duced such changes in the canal that it has now the appearance of a very rapid mountain stream flowing through a ravine, and you would not suspect that any dig ging had been required to persuade the waters of the st. john to flow into the penobscot here. it was so winding that one could see but a little way down. it is wonderful how well watered this country is. as you paddle across a lake, bays will be pointed out to you, by fol lowing up which, and perhaps the tribu tary stream which empties in, you may, after a short portage, or possibly, at some seasons, none at all, get into another river, which empties far away from the one you are on. generally, you may go in any direction in a canoe, by making frequent but not very long portages. it allegash and east branch 127 seems as if the more youthful and impres sionable streams can hardly resist the nu merous invitations and temptations to leave their native beds and run down their neighbors' channels. wherever there is a channel for water there is a road for the canoe. it is said that some western steamers can run on a heavy dew, whence we can imagine what a canoe may do. this canal, so called, was a consider able and extremely rapid and rocky river. the indian decided that there was water enough in it without raising the dam, which would only make it more vio lent, and that he would run down it alone, while we carried the greater part of the baggage. our provisions being about half consumed, there was the less left in the canoe. we had thrown away the pork keg and wrapped its contents in birch bark. following a moist trail through the forest, we reached the head of webster 128 canoeing in the wilderness pond about the same time with the in dian, notwithstanding the velocity with which he moved, our route being the most direct. the pond was two or three miles long. at the outlet was another dam, at which we stopped and picked raspberries, while the indian went down the stream a half-mile through the forest, to see what he had got to contend with. there was a deserted log camp here, apparently used the previous winter, with its " hovel " or barn for cattle. in the hut was a large fir-twig bed, raised two feet from the floor, occupying a large part of the single apartment, a long narrow table against the wall, with a stout log bench before it, and above the table a small window, the only one there was, which admitted a feeble light. it was a simple and strong fort erected against the cold. we got our dinner on the shore, on the upper side of the dam. as we were sitting by our fire, concealed by the earth allegash and east branch 129 bank of the dam, a long line of shel drakes, half grown, came waddling over it from the water below, passing within about a rod of us, so that we could almost have caught them in our hands. they were very abundant on all the streams and lakes which we visited, and every two or three hours they would rush away in a long string over the water be fore us, twenty to fifty of them at once, rarely ever flying, but running with great rapidity up or down the stream, even in the midst of the most violent rapids, and apparently as fast up as down. an indian at oldtown had told us that we should be obliged to carry ten miles between telos lake on the st. john and second lake on the east branch of the penobscot; but the lumberers whom we met assured us that there would not be more than a mile of carry. it turned out that the indian was nearest right, as far as we were concerned. however, if one of us could have assisted the indian in man 130 canoeing in the wilderness aging the canoe in the rapids, we might have run the greater part of the way; but as he was alone in the management of the canoe in such places we were obliged to walk the greater part. my companion and i carried a good part of the baggage on our shoulders, while the indian took that which would be least injured by wet in the canoe. we did not know when we should see him again, for he had not been this way since the canal was cut. he agreed to stop when he got to smooth water, come up and find our path if he could, and halloo for us, and after waiting a reasonable time go on and try again — and we were to look out in like manner for him. he commenced by running through the sluiceway and over the dam, as usual, stand ing up in his tossing canoe, and was soon out of sight behind a point in a wild gorge. this webster stream is well known to lumbermen as a difficult one. it is exceed ingly rapid and rocky, and also shallow. allegash and east branch 131 and can hardly be considered navigable, unless that may mean that what is launched in it is sure to be carried swiftly down it, though it may be dashed to pieces by the way. it is somewhat like navigating a thun der-spout. with commonly an irresistible force urging you on, you have got to choose your own course each moment between the rocks and shallows, and to get into it, moving forward always with the utmost possible moderation, and often holding on, if you can, that you may inspect the rapids before you. by the indian's direction we took an old path on the south side, which appeared to keep down the stream. it was a wild wood-path, with a few tracks of oxen which had been driven over it, probably to some old camp clearing for pasturage, mingled with the tracks of moose which had lately used it. we kept on steadily for about an hour without putting down our packs, occasionally winding around or climbing over a fallen tree, for the most 132 canoeing in the wilderness part far out of sight and hearing of the river; till, after walking about three miles, we were glad to find that the path came to the river again at an old camp-ground, where there was a small opening in the forest, at which we paused. swiftly as the shallow and rocky river ran here, a continuous rapid with dancing waves, i saw, as i sat on the shore, a long string of sheldrakes, which something scared, run up the opposite side of the stream by me, just touching the surface of the waves, and getting an impulse from them as they flowed from under them; but they soon came back, driven by the indian, who had fallen a little behind us on account of the windings. he shot round a point just above, and came to land by us with considerable water in his canoe. he had found it, as he said, " very strong water," and had been obliged to land once before to empty out what he had taken in. he complained that it strained him to paddle so hard in order to keep his canoe coming down the rapids allegash and east branch 133 straight in its course, having no one in the bows to aid him, and, shallow as it was, said that it would be no joke to upset there, for the force of the water was such that he had as lief i would strike him over the head with a paddle as have that water strike him. seeing him come out of that gap was as if you should pour water down an inclined and zigzag trough, then drop a nutshell into it, and, taking a short cut to the bottom, get there in time to see it come out, notwithstanding the rush and tumult, right side up, and only partly full of water. after a moment's breathing-space, while i held his canoe, he was soon out of sight again around another bend, and we, shoul dering our packs, resumed our course. before going a mile we heard the indian calling to us. he had come up through the woods and along the path to find us, hav ing reached sufficiently smooth water to warrant his taking us in. the shore was about one fourth of a mile distant through 134 canoeing in the wilderness a dense, dark forest, and as he led us back to it, winding rapidly about to the right and left, i had the curiosity to look down carefully and found that he was following his steps backward. i could only occasion ally perceive his trail in the moss, and yet he did not appear to look down nor hesi tate an instant, but led us out exactly to his canoe. this surprised me, for without a compass, or the sight or noise of the river to guide us, we could not have kept our course many minutes, and could have retraced our steps but a short distance, with a great deal of pains and very slowly, using a laborious circumspection. but it was evi dent that he could go back through the forest wherever he had been during the day. after this rough walking in the dark woods it was an agreeable change to glide down the rapid river in the canoe once more. this river, though still very swift, was almost perfectly smooth here, and showed a very visible declivity, a regularly allegash and east branch 135 inclined plane, for several miles, like a mirror set a little aslant, on which we coasted down. it was very exhilarating, and the perfection of traveling, the coast ing down this inclined mirror between two evergreen forests edged with lofty dead white pines, sometimes slanted half-way over the stream. i saw some monsters there, nearly destitute of branches, and scarcely diminishing in diameter for eighty or ninety feet. as we were thus swept along, our in dian repeated in a deliberate and drawling tone the words, " daniel webster, great lawyer," apparently reminded of him by the name of the stream, and he described his calling on him once in boston at what he supposed was his boarding-house. he had no business with him but merely went to pay his respects, as we should say. it was on the day after webster delivered his bunker hill oration. the first time he called he waited till he was tired without seeing him, and then went away. the 136 canoeing in the wilderness next time he saw him go by the door of the room in which he was waiting several times, in his shirt-sleeves, without notic ing him. he thought that if he had come to see indians they would not have treated him so. at length, after very long delay, he came in, walked toward him, and asked in a loud voice, gruffly, " what do you want?" and he, thinking at first, by the motion of his hand, that he was going to strike him, said to himself, "you'd bet ter take care; if you try that i shall know what to do." he did not like him, and declared that all he said "was not worth talk about a musquash." coming to falls and rapids, our easy progress was suddenly terminated. the in dian went alongshore to inspect the water, while we climbed over the rocks, picking berries. when the indian came back, he remarked, " you got to walk ; ver' strong water." so, taking out his canoe, he launched allegash and east branch 137 it again below the falls, and was soon out of sight. at such times he would step into the canoe, take up his paddle, and start off, looking far down-stream as if absorbing all the intelligence of forest and stream into himself. we meanwhile scrambled along the shore with our packs, without any path. this was the last of our boating for the day. the indian now got along much faster than we, and waited for us from time to time. i found here the only cool spring that i drank at anywhere on this excur sion, a little water filling a hollow in the sandy bank. it was a quite memorable event, and due to the elevation of the country, for wherever else we had been the water in the rivers and the streams emptying in was dead and warm, com pared with that of a mountainous region. it was very bad walking along the shore over fallen and drifted trees and bushes, and rocks, from time to time swinging ourselves round over the water, or else 138 canoeing in the wilderness taking to a gravel bar or going inland. at one place, the indian being ahead, i was obliged to take off all my clothes in order to ford a small but deep stream emptying in, while my companion, who was inland, found a rude bridge, high up in the woods, and i saw no more of him for some time. i saw there very fresh moose tracks, and i passed one white pine log, lodged in the forest near the edge of the stream, which was quite five feet in diameter at the butt. shortly after this i overtook the indian at the edge of some burnt land, which ex tended three or four miles at least, begin ning about three miles above second lake, which we were expecting to reach that night. this burnt region was still more rocky than before, but, though compara tively open, we could not yet see the lake. not having seen my companion for some time, i climbed with the indian a high rock on the edge of the river forming a narrow ridge only a foot or two wide at top, in order to look for him. after calling allegash and east branch 139 many times i at length heard him answer from a considerable distance inland, he having taken a trail which led off from the river, and being now in search of the river again. seeing a much higher rock of the same character about one third of a mile farther down-stream, i proceeded toward it through the burnt land, in order to look for the lake from its summit, and hallooing all the while that my com panion might join me on the way. before we came together i noticed where a moose, which possibly i had scared by my shouting, had apparently just run along a large rotten trunk of a pine, which made a bridge thirty or forty feet long over a hollow, as convenient for him as for me. the tracks were as large as those of an ox, but an ox could not have crossed there. this burnt land was an exceedingly wild and desolate region. judging by the weeds and sprouts, it ap peared to have been burnt about two years before. it was covered with charred 140 canoeing in the wilderness trunks, either prostrate or standing, which crocked our clothes and hands. great shells of trees, sometimes unburnt with out, or burnt on one side only, but black within, stood twenty or forty feet high. the fire had run up inside, as in a chim ney, leaving the sapwood. there were great fields of fireweed, which presented masses of pink. intermixed with these were blueberry and raspberry bushes. having crossed a second rocky ridge, when i was beginning to ascend the third, the indian, whom i had left on the shore, beckoned to me to come to him, but i made sign that i would first ascend the rock before me. my companion accom panied me to the top. there was a remarkable series of these great rock-waves revealed by the burning ; breakers, as it were. no wonder that the river that found its way through them was rapid and obstructed by falls. we could see the lake over the woods, and that the river made an abrupt turn southward around allegash and east branch 141 the end of the cliff on which we stood, and that there was an important fall in it a short distance below us. i could see the canoe a hundred rods behind, but now on the opposite shore, and supposed that the indian had concluded to take out and carry round some bad rapids on that side, but after waiting a while i could still see nothing of him, and i began to suspect that he had gone inland to look for the lake from some hilltop on that side. this proved to be the case, for after i had started to return to the canoe i heard a faint halloo, and descried him on the top of a distant rocky hill. i began to return along the ridge toward the angle in the river. my com panion inquired where i was going ; to which i answered that i was going far enough back to communicate with the indian. when we reached the shore the indian appeared from out the woods on the oppo site side, but on account of the roar of the water it was difficult to communicate with 142 canoeing in the wilderness him. he kept along the shore westward to his canoe, while we stopped at the an gle where the stream turned southward around the precipice. i said to my com panion that we would keep along the shore and keep the indian in sight. we started to do so, being close together, the indian behind us having launched his canoe again, but i saw the latter beckoning to me, and i called to my companion, who had just disappeared behind large rocks at the point of the precipice on his way down the stream, that i was going to help the in dian. i did so — helped get the canoe over a fall, lying with my breast over a rock, and holding one end while he received it be low — and within ten or fifteen minutes i was back at the point where the river turned southward, while polis glided down the river alone, parallel with me. but to my surprise, when i rounded the preci pice, though the shore was bare of trees, without rocks, for a quarter of a mile at allegash and east branch 143 least, my companion was not to be seen. it was as if he had sunk into the earth. this was the more unaccountable to me, because i knew that his feet were very sore, and that he wished to keep with the party. i hastened along, hallooing and search ing for him, thinking he might be con cealed behind a rock, but the indian had got along faster in his canoe, till he was ar rested by the falls, about a quarter of a mile below. he then landed, and said that we could go no farther that night. the sun was setting, and on account of falls and rapids we should be obliged to leave this river and carry a good way into another farther east. the first thing then was to find my companion, for i was now very much alarmed about him, and i sent the indian along the shore down-stream, which be gan to be covered with unburnt wood again just below the falls, while i searched backward about the precipice which we had passed. 144 canoeing in the wilderness the indian showed some unwilhngness to exert himself, complaining that he was very tired in consequence of his day's work, that it had strained him getting down so many rapids alone; but he went off calling somewhat like an owl. i re membered that my companion was near sighted, and i feared that he had either fallen from the precipice, or fainted and sunk down amid the rocks beneath it. i shouted and searched above and below this precipice in the twilight till i could not see, expecting nothing less than to find his body beneath it. for half an hour i antic ipated and believed only the worst. i thought what i should do the next day if i did not find him, and how his relatives would feel if i should return without him. i felt that if he were really lost away from the river there, it would be a desperate undertaking to find him ; and where were they who could help you ? what would it be to raise the country, where there were only two or three camps, twenty or thirty allegash and east branch 145 miles apart, and no road, and perhaps no body at home? i rushed down from this precipice to the canoe in order to fire the indian's gun, but found that my companion had the caps. when the indian returned he said that he had seen his tracks once or twice along the shore. this encouraged me very much. he objected to firing the gun, say ing that if my companion heard it, which was not likely, on account of the roar of the stream, it would tempt him to come toward us, and he might break his neck in the dark. for the same reason we re frained from lighting a fire on the highest rock. i proposed that we should both keep down the stream to the lake, or that i should go at any rate, but the indian said: "no use, can't do anything in the dark. come morning, then we find 'em. no harm — he make 'em camp. no bad animals here — warm night — he well off as you and i." the darkness in the woods was by this 146 canoeing in the wilderness so thick that it decided the question. we must camp where we were. i knew that he had his knapsack, with blankets and matches, and, if well, would fare no worse than we, except that he would have no supper nor society. this side of the river being so encum bered with rocks, we crossed to the east ern or smoother shore, and proceeded to camp there, within two or three rods of the falls. we pitched no tent, but lay on the sand, putting a few handfuls of grass and twigs under us, there being no ever green at hand. for fuel we had some of the charred stumps. our various bags of provisions had got quite wet in the rapids, and i arranged them about the lire to dry. the fall close by was the principal one on this stream, and it shook the earth un der us. it was a cool, dewy night. i lay awake a good deal from anxiety. from time to time i fancied that i heard his voice calling through the roar of the falls from the opposite side of the river; but allegash and east branch 147 it is doubtful if we could have heard him across the stream there. sometimes i doubted whether the indian had really seen his tracks, since he manifested an unwillingness to make much of a search. it was the most wild and desolate re gion we had camped in, where, if any where, one might expect to meet with befitting inhabitants, but i heard only the squeak of a nighthawk flitting over. the moon in her first quarter, in the fore part of the night, setting over the bare rocky hills garnished with tall, charred, and hollow stumps or shells of trees, served to reveal the desolation. viii thursday, july 30 1 aroused the indian early to go in search of our companion, expecting to find him within a mile or two, farther down the stream. the indian wanted his breakfast first, but i reminded him that my companion had had neither breakfast nor supper. we were obliged first to carry our canoe and baggage over into another stream, the main east branch, about three fourths of a mile distant, for webster stream was no farther navigable. we went twice over this carry, and the dewy bushes wet us through like water up to the middle. i hallooed from time to time, though i had little expectation that i could be heard over the roar of the rapids. in going over this portage the last time, the indian, who was before me with the allegash and east branch 149 canoe on his head, stumbled and fell heavily once, and lay for a moment silent as if in pain. i hastily stepped forward to help him, asking if he was much hurt, but after a moment's pause, without re plying, he sprang up and went forward. we had launched our canoe and gone but little way down the east branch, when i heard an answering shout from my companion, and soon after saw him standing on a point where there was a clearing a quarter of a mile below, and the smoke of his fire was rising near by. before i saw him i naturally shouted again and again, but the indian curtly remarked, "he hears you," as if once was enough. it was just below the mouth of web ster stream. when we arrived he was smoking his pipe, and said that he had passed a pretty comfortable night, though it was rather cold, on account of the dew. it appeared that when we stood together the previous evening, and i was shouting iso canoeing in the wilderness to the indian across the river, he, being nearsighted, had not seen the indian nor his canoe, and when i went back to the indian's assistance, did not see which way i went, and supposed that we were below and not above him, and so, making haste to catch up, he ran away from us. hav ing reached this clearing, a mile or more below our camp, the night overtook him, and he made a fire in a little hollow, and lay down by it in his blanket, still think ing that we were ahead of him. he had stuck up the remnant of a lumberer's shirt, found on the point, on a pole by the waterside for a signal, and attached a note to it to inform us that he had gone on to the lake, and that if he did not find us there he would be back in a couple of hours. if he had not found us soon he had some thoughts of going back in search of the solitary hunter whom we had met at telos lake, ten miles behind, and, if successful, hire him to take him to bangor. but if this hunter allegash and east branch 151 had moved as fast as we, he would have been twenty miles off by this time, and who could guess in what direction ? it would have been like looking for a needle in a haymow to search for him in these woods. he had been considering how long he could live on berries alone. we all had good appetites for the breakfast which we made haste to cook here, and then, having partially dried our clothes, we glided swiftly down the wind ing stream toward second lake. as the shores became flatter with fre quent sandbars, and the stream more wind ing in the lower land near the lake, elms and ash trees made their appearance; also the wild yellow lily, some of whose bulbs i collected for a soup. on some ridges the burnt land extended as far as the lake. this was a very beautiful lake, two or three miles long, with high mountains on the southwest side. the morning was a bright one, and perfectly still, the lake as smooth as glass, we making the only ripple as we 152 canoeing in the wilderness paddled into it. the dark mountains about it were seen through a glaucous mist, and the white stems of canoe birches mingled with the other woods around it. the thrush sang on the distant shore, and the laugh of some loons, sporting in a concealed western bay, as if inspired by the morning, came distinct over the lake to us. the beauty of the scene may have been enhanced to our eyes by the fact that we had just come together after a night of some anxiety. having paddled down three quarters of the lake, we came to a standstill while my companion let down for fish. in the midst of our dreams of giant lake trout, even then supposed to be nibbling, our fish erman drew up a diminutive red perch, and we took up our paddles. it was not apparent where the outlet of the lake was, and while the indian thought it was in one direction, i thought it was in another. he said, " i bet you fourpence it is there," but he still held on allegash and east branch 153 in my direction, which proved to be the right one. as we were approaching the outlet he suddenly exclaimed, "moose! moose!" and told us to be still. he put a cap on his gun, and, standing up in the stern, rapidly pushed the canoe straight toward the shore and the moose. it was a cow moose, about thirty rods off, standing in the water by the side of the outlet, partly behind some fallen timber and bushes, and at that distance she did not look very large. she was flapping her large ears, and from time to time poking off the flies with her nose from some part of her body. she did not appear much alarmed by our neighborhood, only occasionally turned her head and looked straight at us, and then gave her attention to the flies again. as we approached nearer she got out of the water, stood higher, and regarded us more suspiciously. polis pushed the canoe steadily forward in the shallow water, but the canoe soon 154 canoeing in the wilderness grounded in the mud eight or ten rods distant from the moose, and the indian seized his gun. after standing still a mo ment she turned so as to expose her side, and he improved this moment to fire, over our heads. she thereupon moved off eight or ten rods at a moderate pace across a shallow bay to the opposite shore, and she stood still again while the in dian hastily loaded and fired twice at her, without her moving. my companion, who passed him his caps and bullets, said that polis was as excited as a boy of fif teen, that his hand trembled, and he once put his ramrod back upside down. the indian now pushed quickly and quietly back, and a long distance round, in order to get into the outlet, — for he had fired over the neck of a peninsula between it and the lake, — till we ap proached the place where the moose had stood, when he exclaimed, " she is a goner ! " there, to be sure, she lay perfectly y""^ i^ t shooting the moose allegash and east branch 155 dead, just where she had stood to receive the last shots. using a tape, i found that the moose measured six feet from the shoulder to the tip of the hoof, and was eight feet long. polis, preparing to skin the moose, asked me to help him find a stone on which to sharpen his large knife. it being flat alluvial ground, covered with red maples, etc., this was no easy matter. we searched far and wide a long time till at length i found a flat kind of slate stone, on which he soon made his knife very sharp. while he was skinning the moose i proceeded to ascertain what kind of fishes were to be found in the sluggish and muddy outlet. the greatest difficulty was to find a pole. it was almost impossible to find a slender, straight pole ten or twelve feet long in those woods. you might search half an hour in vain. they are commonly spruce, arbor-vits, fir, etc., short, stout, and branchy, and do not 156 canoeing in the wilderness make good iishpoles, even after you have patiently cut off all their tough and scraggy branches. the fishes were red perch and chivin. the indian, having cut off a large piece of sirloin, the upper lip, and the tongue, wrapped them in the hide, and placed them in the bottom of the canoe, observ ing that there was " one man," meaning the weight of one. our load had pre viously been reduced some thirty pounds, but a hundred pounds were now added, which made our quarters still more nar row, and considerably increased the dan ger on the lakes and rapids as well as the labor of the carries. the skin was ours according to custom, since the indian was in our employ, but we did not think of claiming it. he being a skillful dresser of moose-hides would make it worth seven or eight dollars to him, as i was told. he said that he sometimes earned fifty or sixty dollars in a day at them ; he had killed ten moose in one day, though the skin allegash and east branch 157 ning and all took two days. this was the way he had got his property. we continued along the outlet through a swampy region, by a long, winding dead water, very much choked up by wood, where we were obliged to land sometimes in order to get the canoe over a log. it was hard to find any channel, and we did not know but we should be lost in the swamp. it abounded in ducks, as usual. at length we reached grand lake. we stopped to dine on an interesting rocky island, securing our canoe to the cliffy shore. here was a good opportunity to dry our dewy blankets on the open sunny rock. indians had recently camped here, and accidentally burned over the western end of the island. polls picked up a gun-case of blue broadcloth, and said that he knew the indian it belonged to and would carry it to him. his tribe is not so large but he may know all its effects. we proceeded to make a fire and cook our dinner amid some pines. is8 canoeing in the wilderness i saw where the indians had made canoes in a httle secluded hollow in the woods, on the top of the rock, where they were out of the wind, and large piles of whittlings remained. this must have been a favorite resort of their ancestors, and, indeed, we found here the point of an ar row-head, such as they have not used for two centuries and now know not how to make. the indian picked up a yellowish curved bone by the side of our fireplace and asked me to guess what it was. it was one of the upper incisors of a beaver, on which some party had feasted within a year or two. i found also most of the teeth and the skull. we here dined on fried moose meat. our blankets being dry, we set out again, the indian, as usual, having left his gazette on a tree. we paddled southward, keeping near the western shore. the indian did not know exactly where the outlet was, and he went feeling his way by a middle course between two probable points, from allegash and east branch 159 which he could diverge either way at last without losing much distance. in ap proaching the south shore, as the clouds looked gusty and the waves ran pretty high, we so steered as to get partly under the lee of an island, though at a great distance from it. i could not distinguish the outlet till we were almost in it, and heard the water fall ing over the dam there. here was a con siderable fall, and a very substantial dam, but no sign of a cabin or camp. while we loitered here polls took oc casion to cut with his big knife some of the hair from his moose-hide, and so light ened and prepared it for drying. i noticed at several old indian camps in the woods the pile of hair which they had cut from their hides. having carried over the dam, he darted down the rapids, leaving us to walk for a mile or more, where for the most part there was no path, but very thick and diffi cult traveling near the stream. he would i6o canoeing in the wilderness call to let us know where he was waiting for us with his canoe, when, on account of the windings of the stream, we did not know where the shore was, but he did not call often enough, forgetting that we were not indians. he seemed to be very saving of his breath — yet he would be surprised if we went by, or did not strike the right spot. this was not because he was un accommodating, but a proof of superior manners. indians like to get along with the least possible communication and ado. he was really paying us a great compli ment all the while, thinking that we pre ferred a hint to a kick. at length, climbing over the willows and fallen trees, when this was easier than to go round or under them, we overtook the canoe, and glided down the stream in smooth but swift water for several miles. i here observed, as at webster stream, that the river was a smooth and regularly in clined plane down which we coasted. we decided to camp early that we might allegash and east branch i6i have ample time before dark. so we stopped at the first favorable shore, where there was a narrow gravelly beach, some five miles below the outlet of the lake. two steps from the water on either side, and you come to the abrupt, bushy, and rooty, if not turfy, edge of the bank, four or five feet high, where the interminable forest begins, as if the stream had but just cut its way through it. it is surprising on stepping ashore any where into this unbroken wilderness to see so often, at least within a few rods of the river, the marks of the axe, made by lum berers who have either camped here or driven logs past in previous springs. you will see perchance where they have cut large chips from a tall white pine stump for their fire. while we were pitching the camp and getting supper, the indian cut the rest of the hair from his moose-hide, and pro ceeded to extend it vertically on a tem porary frame between two small trees, half i62 canoeing in the wilderness a dozen feet from the opposite side of the fire, lashing and stretching it with arbor vitae bark. asking for a new kind of tea, he made us some pretty good of the check erberry, which covered the ground, drop ping a little bunch of it tied up with cedar bark into the kettle. after supper he put on the moose tongue and lips to boil. he showed me how to write on the under side of birch bark with a black spruce twig, which is hard and tough and can be brought to a point. the indian wandered off into the woods a short distance just before night, and, com ing back, said, " me found great treasure." "what's that? "we asked. " steel traps, under a log, thirty or forty, i did n't count 'em. i guess indian work — worth three dollars apiece." it was a singular coincidence that he should have chanced to walk to and look under that particular log in that trackless forest. allegash and east branch 163 i saw chivin and chub in the stream when washing my hands, but my com panion tried in vain to catch them. i heard the sound of bullfrogs from a swamp on the opposite side. you commonly make your camp just at sundown, and are collecting wood, get ting your supper, or pitching your tent while the shades of night are gathering around and adding to the already dense gloom of the forest. you have no time to explore or look around you before it is dark. you may penetrate half a dozen rods farther into that twilight wilderness after some dry bark to kindle your fire with, and wonder what mysteries lie hidden still deeper in it, or you may run down to the shore for a dipper of water, and get a clearer view for a short distance up or down the stream, and while you stand there, see a fish leap, or duck alight in the river, or hear a thrush or robin sing in the woods. but there is no sauntering off to see the 1 64 canoeing in the wilderness country. ten or fifteen rods seems a great way from your companions, and you come back with the air of a much traveled man, as from a long journey, with adventures to relate, though you may have heard the crackling of the fire all the while — and at a hundred rods you might be lost past re covery and have to camp out. it is all mossy and moosey. in some of those dense fir and spruce woods there is hardly room for the smoke to go up. the trees are a standing night, and every fir and spruce which you fell is a plume plucked from night's raven wing. then at night the general stillness is more impressive than any sound, but occasionally you hear the note of an owl farther or nearer in the woods, and if near a lake, the semihuman cry of the loons at their unearthly revels. to-night the indian lay between the fire and his stretched moose-hide, to avoid mosquitoes. indeed, he also made a small smoky fire of damp leaves at his head and feet, and then as usual rolled up his head allegash and east branch 165 in his blanket. we with our veils and our wash were tolerably comfortable, but it would be difficult to pursue any sedentary occupation in the woods at this season; you cannot see to read much by the light of a fire through a veil in the evening, nor handle pencil and paper well with gloves or anointed fingers. ix friday, july 3 1 we had smooth but swift water for a considerable distance, where we glided rapidly along, scaring up ducks and kingfishers. but, as usual, our smooth prog ress ere long come to an end, and we were obliged to carry canoe and all about half a mile down the right bank around some rapids or falls. it required sharp eyes some times to tell which side was the carry, be fore you went over the falls, but polis never failed to land us rightly. the raspberries were particularly abundant and large here, and all hands went to eating them, the indian remarking on their size. often on bare rocky carries the trail was so indistinct that i repeatedly lost it, but when i walked behind him i observed that he could keep it almost like a hound, and rarely hesitated, or, if he paused a mo allegash and east branch 167 ment on a bare rock, his eye immediately detected some sign which would have es caped me. frequently we found no path at all at these places, and were to him un accountably delayed. he would only say it was "ver' strange." we had heard of a grand fall on this stream, and thought that each fall we came to must be it, but after christening several in succession with this name we gave up the search. there were more grand or petty falls than i can remember. i cannot tell how many times we had to walk on account of falls or rapids. we were expecting all the while that the river would take a final leap and get to smooth water, but there was no improvement this forenoon. however, the carries were an agreeable variety. so surely as we stepped out of the canoe and stretched our legs we found ourselves in a blueberry and rasp berry garden, each side of our rocky trail being lined with one or both. there was not a carry on the main east branch where 1 68 canoeing in the wilderness we did not find an abundance of both these berries, for these were the rockiest places and partially cleared, such as these plants prefer, and there had been none to gather the finest before us. we bathed and dined at the foot of one of these carries. it was the indian who commonly reminded us that it was dinner time, sometimes even by turning the prow to the shore. he once made an indirect, but lengthy apology, by saying that we might think it strange, but that one who worked hard all day was very particular to have his dinner in good season. at the most considerable fall on this stream, when i was walking over the carry close behind the indian, he observed a track on the rock, which was but slightly cov ered with soil, and, stooping, muttered, "caribou." when we returned, he observed a much larger track near the same place, where some animal's foot had sunk into a small hollow in the rock, partly filled with grass allegash and east branch 169 and earth, and he exclaimed with surprise, "what that?" "well, what is it?" i asked. stooping and laying his hand in it, he answered with a mysterious air, and in a half-whisper, " devil [that is, indian devil, or cougar] — ledges about here — very bad animal — pull 'em rocks all to pieces." "how long since it was made?" i asked. "to-day or yesterday," said he. we spent at least half the time in walk ing to-day. the indian, being alone, com monly ran down far below the foot of the carries before he waited for us. the carry paths themselves were more than usually indistinct, often the route being revealed only by the countless small holes in the fallen timber made by the tacks in the drivers' boots. it was a tangled and per plexing thicket, through which we stum bled and threaded our way, and when we had finished a mile of it, our starting-point seemed far away. we were glad that we i70 canoeing in the wilderness had not got to walk to bangor along the banks of this river, which would be a jour ney of more than a hundred miles. think of the denseness of the forest, the fallen trees and rocks, the windings of the river, the streams emptying in, and the frequent swamps to be crossed. it made you shud der. yet the indian from time to time pointed out to us where he had thus crept along day after day when he was a boy of ten, and in a starving condition he had been hunting far north of this with two grown indians. the winter came on unexpectedly early, and the ice compelled them to leave their canoe at grand lake, and walk down the bank. they shouldered their furs and started for oldtown. the snow was not deep enough for snowshoes, or to cover the inequalities of the ground. polls was soon too weak to carry any burden, but he managed to catch one otter. this was the most they all had to eat on this journey, and he remem bered how good the yellow lily roots were. allegash and east branch 171 made into a soup with the otter oil. he shared this food equally with the other two, but being so small he suffered much more than they. he waded through the mattawamkeag at its mouth, when it was freezing cold and came up to his chin, and he, being very weak and emaciated, expected to be swept away. the first house which they reached was at lincoln, and thereabouts they met a white teamster with supplies, who, seeing their condition, gave them as much as they could eat. for six months after getting home he was very low and did not expect to live, and was perhaps always the worse for it. for seven or eight miles below that succession of "grand" falls the aspect of the banks as well as the character of the stream was changed. after passing a trib utary from the northeast we had swift smooth water. low grassy banks and muddy shores began. many elms as well as maples and more ash trees overhung the stream and supplanted the spruce. 172 canoeing in the wilderness mosquitoes, black flies, etc., pursued us in mid-channel, and we were glad some times to get into violent rapids, for then we escaped them. as we glided swiftly down the inclined plane of the river, a great cat owl launched itself away from a stump on the bank, and flew heavily across the stream, and the indian, as usual, imitated its note. soon afterward a white-headed eagle sailed down the stream before us. we drove him several miles, while we were looking for a good place to camp, — for we expected to be overtaken by a shower, — and still we could distinguish him by his white tail, sailing away from time to time from some tree by the shore still farther down the stream. some she corways being surprised by us, a part of them dived, and we passed directly over them, and could trace their course here and there by a bubble on the surface, but we did not see them come up. it was some time before we found a camping-place, for the shore was either allegash and east branch 173 too grassy and muddy, where mosquitoes abounded, or too steep a hillside. we at length found a place to our minds, where, in a very dense spruce wood above a grav elly shore, there seemed to be but few in sects. the trees were so thick that we were obliged to clear a space to build our fire and lie down in, and the young spruce trees that were left were like the wall of an apartment rising around us. we were obliged to pull ourselves up a steep bank to get there. but the place which you have selected for your camp, though never so rough and grim, begins at once to have its attractions, and becomes a very center of civilization to you : " home is home, be it never so homely." the mosquitoes were numerous, and the indian complained a good deal, though he lay, as the night before, between three fires and his stretched hide. as i sat on a stump by the fire with a veil and gloves on, trying to read, he observed, " i make you candle," and in a minute he took a 174 canoeing in the wilderness piece of birch bark about two inches wide and rolled it hard, like an allumette ' fifteen inches long, lit it, fixed it by the other end horizontally in a split stick three feet high, and stuck it in the ground, turning the blazing end to the wind, and telling me to snuff it from time to time. it answered the purpose of a candle pretty well. i noticed, as i had before, that there was a lull among the mosquitoes about midnight, and that they began again in the morning. apparently they need rest as well as we. few, if any, creatures are equally active all night. as soon as it was light i saw, through my veil, that the in side of the tent about our heads was quite blackened with myriads, and their com bined hum was almost as bad to endure as their stings. i had an uncomfortable night on this account, though i am not sure that one succeeded in his attempt to sting me. 'a match. in this case an old-fashioned "spill," or lamplighter, made by twisting a piece of paper, into a long, tight spiral roll. x saturday, sunday, monday august 1-3 i caught two or three large red chivin within twenty feet of the camp, which, added to the moose tongue that had been left in the kettle boiling over night, and to our other stores, made a sumptuous breakfast. the indian made us some hemlock tea instead of coffee. this was tolerable, though he said it was not strong enough. it was interesting to see so simple a dish as a kettle of water with a handful of green hemlock sprigs in it boiling over the huge fire in the open air, the leaves fast losing their lively green color, and know that it was for our breakfast. we were glad to embark once more and leave some of the mosquitoes behind. we found that we had camped about a mile above hunt's, which is the last house 176 canoeing in the wilderness for those who ascend katahdin on this side. we had expected to ascend it from this point, but my companion was obhged to give up this on account of sore feet. the indian, however, suggested that perhaps he might get a pair of moccasins at this place, and that he could walk very easily in them without hurting his feet, wearing several pairs of stockings, and he said beside that they were so porous that when you had taken in water it all drained out in a little while. we stopped to get some sugar, but found that the family had moved away, and the house was unoccupied, except tem porarily by some men who were getting the hay. i noticed a seine here stretched on the bank, which probably had been used to catch salmon. just below this, on the west bank, we saw a moose-hide stretched, and with it a bearskin. the indian said they belonged to joe aitteon,' but how he told i do not " joe aitteon was thoreau's guide on the second of his three excursions into the maine woods. he was an indian whose home was on the same island where polis lived. allegash and east branch 177 know. he was probably hunting near and had left them for the day. finding that we were going directly to oldtown, he regretted that he had not taken more of the moose meat to his family, saying that in a short time, by drying it, he could have made it so light as to have brought away the greater part, leaving the bones. we once or twice inquired after the lip, which is a famous tidbit, but he said, " that go oldtown for my old woman ; don't get it every day." maples grew more and more numerous. it rained a little during the forenoon, and, as we expected a wetting, we stopped early and dined just above whetstone falls, about a dozen miles below hunt's. my companion, having lost his pipe, asked the indian if he could make him one. " oh, yer," said he, and in a minute rolled up one of birch bark, telling him to wet the bowl from time to time. we carried round the falls. the dis tance was about three fourths of a mile. 178 canoeing in the wilderness when we had carried over one load, the indian returned by the shore, and i by the path ; and though i made no particular haste i was nevertheless surprised to find him at the other end as soon as i. it was remarkable how easily he got over the worst ground. he said to me, " i take canoe and you take the rest, suppose you can keep along with me ? " i thought he meant that while he ran down the rapids i should keep along the shore, and be ready to assist him from time to time, as i had done before ; but as the walking would be very bad, i answered, " i suppose you will go too fast for me, but i will try." but i was to go by the path, he said. this i thought would not help the mat ter, i should have so far to go to get to the riverside when he wanted me. but neither was this what he meant. he was proposing a race over the carry, and asked me if i thought i could keep along with him by the same path, adding that i must allegash and east branch 179 be pretty smart to do it. as his load, the canoe, would be much the heaviest and bulkiest, i thought that i ought to be able to do it, and said that i would try. so i proceeded to gather up the gun, axe, paddle, kettle, frying-pan, plates, dippers, carpets, etc., and while i was thus engaged he threw me his cowhide boots. " what, are these in the bargain?" i asked. " oh, yer," said he ; but before i could make a bundle of my load i saw him dis appearing over a hill with the canoe on his head. hastily scraping the various articles to gether, i started on the run, and immedi ately went by him in the bushes, but i had no sooner left him out of sight in a rocky hollow than the greasy plates, dip pers, etc., took to themselves wings, and while i was employed in gathering them up, he went by me; but, hastily pressing the sooty kettle to my side, i started once more, and, soon passing him again, i saw him no more on the carry. i do not men i8o canoeing in the wilderness tion this as anything of a feat, for it was but poor running on my part, and he was obliged to move with great caution for fear of breaking his canoe as well as his neck. when he made his appearance, puf fing and panting like myself, in answer to my inquiries where he had been, he said, " locks cut 'em feet," and, laughing, added, " oh, me love to play sometimes." he said that he and his companions when they came to carries several miles long used to try who would get over first; each perhaps with a canoe on his head. i bore the sign of the kettle on my brown linen sack for the rest of the voyage. as we approached the mouth of the east branch we passed two or three huts, the first sign of civilization after hunt's, though we saw no road as yet. we heard a cowbell, and even saw an infant held up to a small square window to see us pass. on entering the west branch at nicke tow, polls remarked that it was all smooth water hence to oldtown, and he threw carrying round the falls allegash and east branch i8i away his pole which was cut on the um bazookskus. we camped about two miles below nicketow, covering with fresh twigs the withered bed of a former traveler, and feeling that we were now in a settled country, especially when in the evening we heard an ox sneeze in its wild pasture across the river. wherever you land along the frequented part of the river you have not far to go to find these sites of tem porary inns, the withered bed of flattened twigs, the charred sticks, and perhaps the tent-poles. not long since, similar beds were spread along the connecticut, the hudson, and the delaware, and longer still ago, by the thames and seine, and they now help to make the soil where private and public gardens, mansions, and palaces are. we could not get fir twigs for our bed here, and the spruce was harsh in comparison, having more twig in proportion to its leaf, but we improved it somewhat with hemlock. i82 canoeing in the wilderness after the regular supper we attempted to make a lily soup of the bulbs which i had brought along, for i wished to learn all i could before i got out of the woods. fol lowing the indian's directions, i washed the bulbs carefully, minced some moose meat and some pork, salted and boiled all together, but we had not the patience to try the experiment fairly, for he said it must be boiled till the roots were com pletely softened so as to thicken the soup like flour; but though we left it on all night, we found it dried to the kettle in the morning and not yet boiled to a flour. perhaps the roots were not ripe enough, for they commonly gather them in the fall. the indian's name for these bulbs was sheepnoc. he prepared to camp as usual between his moose-hide and the fire, but it begin ning to rain suddenly he took refuge under the tent with us, and gave us a song before falling asleep. it rained hard in the night and spoiled another box of matches for allegash and east branch 183 us, which the indian had left out, for he was very careless; but we had so much the better night for the rain, since it kept the mosquitoes down. sunday, a cloudy and unpromising morn ing. one of us observed to the indian, "you did not stretch your moose-hide last night, did you, mr. polis ?" whereat he replied in a tone of sur prise, though perhaps not of ill humor: "what you ask me that question for? suppose i stretch 'em, you see 'em. may be your way talking, may be all right, no indian way." i had observed that he did not wish to answer the same question more than once, and was often silent when it was put again, as if he were moody. not that he was incommunicative, for he frequently commenced a longwinded narrative of his own accord — repeated at length the tra dition of some old battle, or some passage in the recent history of his tribe in which he had acted a prominent part, from time 1 84 canoeing in the wilderness to time drawing a long breath, and resum ing the thread of his tale, with the true story-teller's leisureliness. especially after the day's work was over, and he had put himself in posture for the night, he would be unexpectedly sociable, and we would fall asleep before he got through. the indian was quite sick this morning with the colic. i thought that he was the worse for the moose meat he had eaten. we reached the mattawamkeag at half past eight in the morning, in the midst of a drizzling rain, and, after buying some sugar, set out again. the indian growing much worse, we stopped in the north part of lincoln to get some brandy for him, but, failing in this, an apothecary recommended brand reth's pills, which he refused to take be cause he was not acquainted with them. he said, "me doctor — first study my case, find out what ail 'em — then i know what to take." ■ we stopped at mid-forenoon on an allegash and east branch 185 island and made him a dipper of tea. here, too, we dined and did some washing and botanizing, while he lay on the bank. in the afternoon we went on a little far ther. as a thunder-shower appeared to be coming up we stopped opposite a barn on the west bank. here we were obliged to spend the rest of the day and night, on account of our patient, whose sickness did not abate. he lay groaning under his canoe on the bank, looking very woebe gone. you would not have thought, if you had seen him lying about thus, that he was worth six thousand dollars and had been to washington. it seemed to me that he made a greater ado about his sickness than a yankee does, and was more alarmed about himself. we talked somewhat of leaving him with his people in lincoln, — for that is one of their homes, — but he objected on account of the expense, saying, " suppose me well in morning, you and i go oldtown by noon.*' 1 86 canoeing in the wilderness as we were taking our tea at twilight, while he lay groaning under his canoe, he asked me to get him a dipper of water. taking the dipper in one hand, he seized his powderhorn with the other, and, pour ing into it a charge or two of powder, stirred it up with his finger, and drank it off. this was all he took to-day after breakfast beside his tea. to save the trouble of pitching our tent, when we had secured our stores from wandering dogs, we camped in the soli tary half-open barn near the bank, with the permission of the owner, lying on new mown hay four feet deep. the fragrance of the hay, in which many ferns, etc., were mingled, was agreeable, though it was quite alive with grasshoppers which you could hear crawling through it. this served to graduate our approach to houses and feather beds. in the night some large bird, probably an owl, flitted through over our heads, and very early in the morning we were awakened by the twit allegash and east branch 187 tering of swallows which had their nests there. we started early before breakfast, the indian being considerably better, and soon glided by lincoln, and stopped to break fast two or three miles below this town. we frequently passed indian islands with their small houses on them. the penobscot indians seem to be more social even than the whites. ever and anon in the deepest wilderness of maine you come to the log hut of a yankee or canada set tler, but a penobscot never takes up his residence in such a solitude. they are not even scattered about on their islands in the penobscot, but gathered together on two or three, evidently for the sake of society. i saw one or two houses not now used by them, because, as our indian said, they were too solitary. from time to time we met indians in their canoes going up river. our man did not commonly approach them, but only exchanged a few words with them at a i88 canoeing in the wilderness distance. we took less notice of the scen ery to-day, because we were in quite a settled country. the river became broad and sluggish, and we saw a blue heron winging its way slowly down the stream before us. the sunkhaze, a short dead stream, comes in from the east two miles above oldtown. asking the meaning of this name, the indian said, " suppose you are going down penobscot, just like we, and you see a canoe come out of bank and go along before you, but you no see 'em stream. that is sunkhaze ^ he had previously complimented me on my paddling, saying that i paddled "just like anybody," giving me an indian name which meant " great paddler." when off this stream he said to me, who sat in the bows, " me teach you paddle." so, turning toward the shore, he got out, came forward, and placed my hands as he wished. he placed one of them quite out side the boat, and the other parallel with allegash and east branch 189 the first, grasping the paddle near the end, not over the fiat extremity, and told me to slide it back and forth on the side of the canoe. this, i found, was a great improve ment which i had not thought of, saving me the labor of lifting the paddle each time, and i wondered that he had not sug gested it before. it is true, before our bag gage was reduced we had been obliged to sit with our legs drawn up, and our knees above the side of the canoe, which would have prevented our paddling thus, or per haps he was afraid of wearing out his canoe by constant friction on the side. i told him that i had been accustomed to sit in the stern, and lift my paddle at each stroke, getting a pry on the side each time, and i still paddled partly as if in the stern. he then wanted to see me paddle in the stern. so, changing paddles, for he had the longer and better one, and turning end for end, he sitting flat on the bottom and i on the crossbar, he began to paddle very hard, trying to turn the canoe, look iqo canoeing in the wilderness ing over his shoulder and laughing, but, finding it in vain, he relaxed his efforts, though we still sped along a mile or two very swiftly. he said that he had no fault to find with my paddling in the stern, but i complained that he did not paddle ac cording to his own directions in the bows. as we drew near to oldtown i asked polls if he was not glad to get home again ; but there was no relenting to his wildness, and he said, " it makes no dif ference to me where i am." such is the indian's pretense always. we approached the indian island through the narrow strait called " cook." he said : " i 'xpect we take in some wa ter there, river so high — never see it so high at this season. very rough water there ; swamp steamboat once. don't you paddle till i tell you. then you paddle right along." it was a very short rapid. when we were in the midst of it he shouted, " pad dle ! " and we shot through without taking allegash and east branch 191 in a drop. soon after the indian houses came in sight. i could not at first tell my companion which of two or three large white ones was our guide's. he said it was the one with blinds. we landed opposite his door at about four in the afternoon, having come some forty miles this day. we stopped for an hour at his house. mrs. p. wore a hat and had a silver brooch on her breast, but she was not introduced to us. the house was roomy and neat. a large new map of old town and the indian island hung on the wall, and a clock opposite to it. this was the last that i saw of joe polls. we took the last train, and reached ban gor that night. the end cambridge . massachusetts u . s . a a selected list of out-of-door and nature books by john burroughs the summit of the years time and change leaf and tendril ways of nature far and near wake-robin winter sunshine pepacton, and other sketches fresh fields signs and seasons birds and poets, with other papers locusts and wild honey riverby each of the above, i6mo, gilt top, $1.15 net. a year in the fields selections appropriate to each season of the year from the writings of johm burroughs. with a biographical sketch, and 24 illustrations from photo graphs by clifton johnson. i2nio, gilt top, $1.50 fiei. squirrels and other fur-bearers illustrated in color after audubon. square izmo, $1.00 xet. in the catskills luvistrated by clikton johnson. $1.50 net. by j. smeaton chase california coast trails 16 full-page illustrations from photographs. large crown 8vo, $2.00 mt. yosemite trails illustrated. large crown 8vo, $2.00 net. by ellery h. clark reminiscences of an athlete illustrated. 12 mo, $1.25 net. by fannie hardy eckstorm the woodpeckers with 5 colored illustrations by louis agassiz fuertks, and many text illustrations. square i2mo, $1.00 «^^. a selected list of out-of-door and nature books by florence merriam bailey handbook of birds of the western united states profusely illustrated by louis agassiz fubrtes. i2mo, $3.50 net. birds of village and field a bird book for beginners. with a general field color key to 154 birds, aud over 300 illustrations. i2mo, $2.00 net. a-birding on a bronco with numerous illustrations. i6mo, $1.25 net. my summer in a mormon village illustrated. i6mo, $1.00 }iet. birds through an opera-glass illustrated. i6mo, 75 cents net. by mary e. bamford up and down the brooks illustrated. j6mo, 75 cents net. by a william beebe two bird-lovers in mexico with more than one hundred illustrations. large crown 8vo, $3.00 net. by frank bolles chocorua's tenants illustrated. i6nio, gilt top, $1.00 net. from blomidon to smoky, and other papers land of the lingering snow. chronicles of a stroller in new eng land from january to june at the north of bearcamp water. chronicles of a stroller in new england from july to december each of the above, i6mo, $1.25 jtei. by edward breck wilderness pets at camp buckshaw illustrated. square crown 8vo, $1.50 }iet. by edwin t. brewster swimming with frontispiece and diagrams. i6nio, $1.00 net. a selected list of out-of-door and nature books by simon b. elliott the important timber trees of the united states with 47 illustrations from photographs. large crown 8vo, $2.50 net. by thomas wentworth higginson outdoor studies, and poems i2mo, gilt top, $2-00 }u:t. the procession of the flowers, and kindred papers with frontispiece, and an index of plants and animals mentioned. i6mo, gilt top, $1.25 net. by ralph hoffmann a guide to the birds of new england and eastern new york with 4 full-page plates by louis agassiz fuerte.s, and about 100 cuts in the text. i2mo, $1.50 net. field edition, bound in flexible leather, pocket size, $2.00 }u;t. by sarah orne jewett coimtry by-ways i8mo, gilt top, $1.00 net. by james russell lowell my garden acquaintance 32mo, 40 cents ?tet ; postpaid. by olive thorne miller the bird our brother i2mo, $1.25 net. with the birds in maine i6mo, $[.io net. the first book of birds with colored illustrations. square i2mo, $1.00. the second book of birds: bird families with colored illustrations by louis agassiz '^'uertbs. square i2mo, $1.00 net. true bird stories from my note-books with illustrations by louis agassiz fuertes. i2mo, $1.00 net. a selected list of out-of-door and nature books by samuel h. scudder frail children of the air : excursions into the world of butterflies with 9 plates. i6mo, 75 cents jiei. every-day butterflies with numerous illustrations, including 8 full-page colored plates. crown 8vo, $2.00 }l£t. by dallas lore sharp where rolls the oregon illustrated. crown svo, $1.25 net. nature series: book i. the fall of the year book ii. winter book iii. the spring of the year book iv. summer illustrated by robert b. horsfall. each, i2mo, 60 cents, net; postpaid. the face of the fields i2mo, $1.25 net. the lay of the land with illustrated chapter headings. i2mo, $1.25 net. by celia thaxter an island garden with portrait. crown svo, $1.25 n^t. among the isles of shoals illustrated. ismo, $1.25 net. poems edited, with a preface, by sarah ornk jewett. i2mo, gilt top, $1.50;^/. by henry d. thoreau a week on the concord and merrimack rivers. with portrait. walden; or, life in the woods the maine woods cape cod early spring in massachusetts autumn summer, with map of concord. winter the above four are from the journal of thorbau. edited by h. g. o. blakb. h 70 891 ,<v <* *^vi» .0^ a3 '0.. .* .^ <► • . . • .0' v'^^'\/ heckman bindery inc. ^^jun 89 w=^ n. manchester ^*^ indiana 46962 i op . 15439 books bp i). d. (lftorrau. walden ; or, life in the woods. i2tno, gilt top, $1.50. riverside aldine edition. i6mo, ji.oo. a week on the concord and merr.mack rivers. 1 2tno, gilt top, $1.50. excursions in field and forest. with a bio graphical sketch by embrson. 12010, gilt top, $1.50. the maine woods. 121110, gilt top, $1.50. cape cod. i2mo, gilt top, $1.50. letters to various persons, to which are added a few poems. i2mo, gilt top, 51.50. a yankee in canada. with antislavery and reform papers. 121110, gilt top, $1.50. early spring in massachusetts. from the journal of henry d. thorkau. i2mo, gilt top, $1.50. summer. from the journal of henry d. thoreau. i2mo, gilt top, $1.50. winter. from the journal of henry d. thoreau. izmo, gilt top, #1.50. the above ten i2ino volumes, $15.00 : half calf, $27. 50. selections from thoreau. with bibliography. i8mo, $1.00. the succession of forest trees and wild apples. with biographical sketch by emkrson. i6mo, paper, 15 cents. houghton, mifflin and company. boston and new york. thoreau s thoughts selections from the writings of henry david thoreau edited by h. g. o. blake we shall one day see that the most private is the most public energy, that quality atones for quantity, and grandeur of character acts in the dark, and succors them who never saw it. emerson boston and new york houghton, mifflin and company 1890 copyright, 1890, by h. g. o. blake. all rights reserved. the riverside press, cambridge, mass., u. s. a. electrotyped and printed by h. o. houghton & company. introductory. in selecting the following passages from thoreau s printed works, for the use of those who are already interested in him, and to win, if possible, new admirers of what has given me so pure and unfailing a satisfaction for now more than forty years, i desired to make a pocket volume, contain ing beautiful and helpful thoughts, which one might not only read in retirement, but use as a traveling companion, or vade me ciim, while waiting at a hotel, railway sta tion, or elsewhere, something even more convenient and ready at hand than the newspaper. i would furnish an antidote to the dissipating, depressing influence of too much newspaper reading, something which instead of filling the mind with gos iv introductory. sip, political strife and misstatement, ath letics, pugilism, accounts of shocking acci dents, and every kind of criminality, may refresh us with a new sense of the beauty of the world, and make us feel how truly life is worth living. " o world as god has made it, all is beauty ; and knowing this is love, and love is duty." the truth expressed in these lines of browning, which seems to me the highest wisdom, and so the essence of religion, was no transient dream with thoreau, but a deep conviction which took possession of him early in life, never to be relinquished, and which he resolved as far as possible to realize, in spite of the false usages and allurements of the world as man has made it. though, faithful to his idea, he felt obliged to stand somewhat apart from the society about him, yet his strong and active interest in the anti-slavery move ment, and his instant appreciation and public defense of captain john brown, show clearly how sensitive he was to the introductory. v tie of humanity. it is the close alliance or unity of thoreau s genius and personal character which gives such power to his words for the purpose i have in view, namely, to awaken or revive our interest in the worthiest things, to lift us above the world of care and sadness into that fairer world which is always waiting to receive us. i would express here my obligations to dr. samuel a. jones, of ann arbor, mi chigan, for the free use of his " biblio graphy," which has been with him indeed a labor of love, and which, i am sure, will add much to the value and attractiveness of this volume. the editor. selections from thoreau. the best kind reading, in a high sense, is not of reading. that wh j ch j^g us as a \ uxur y and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to stand on tiptoe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to. walden, p. .13. society in ^ nave never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few weeks after i came to the woods, when, for an hour, i doubted if the near neighbor hood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. to be alone was some thing unpleasant. but i was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery. in the midst of a gentle rain, while these thoughts prevailed, i was suddenly sensi ble of such sweet and beneficent society in nature, in the very pattering of the 2 selections from thoreau. drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advan tages of human neighborhood insignificant, and i have never thought of them since. every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. i was so distinctly made aware of the pres ence of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that i thought no place could ever be strange to me again. waldkn, p. 143. the best what sort of space is that which neighbor hood. separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary ? i have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another. what do we want most to dwell near to ? not to many men surely, the depot, the post-of fice, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the school-house, the grocery, beacon hill, or the five points, where men most congre gate, but to the perennial source of our selections from thoreau. 3 life, whence in all our experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots in that direction. this will vary with differ ent natures, but this is the place where a wise man will dig his cellar. walden, p 144. our nearest an y prospect of awakening or coming to life to a dead man makes indifferent all times and places. the place where that may occur is always the same, and indescribably pleasant to all our senses. for the most part we al low only outlying and transient circum stances to make our occasions. they are, in fact, the cause of our distraction. near est to all things is that power which fash ions their being. next to us the grandest laws are continually being executed. next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are. walden, p. 145. our double however intense my experi ence, i am conscious of the pres ence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but specta 4 selections from thoreau. tor, sharing no experience, but taking note of it ; and that is no more i than it is you. when the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. it was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagi nation only, so far as he was concerned. this doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends sometimes. walden, p. 146. the most i never found the companion com s panbn y that was so companionable as shlp solitude. we are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. waldk.v, p. 147. too much society is commonly too cheap. shallow intercourse. we meet at very short inter vals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. we live thick and are in each other s way, and stumble over one another, and i think that we thus lose some respect for one another. cer tainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communications. the value of a man is not in his skin, that we should touch him. walden, p. 147. selections from thoreau. 5 the value of t have a g reat deal of company in my house ; especially in the morning, when nobody calls. i am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than walden pond itself. what company has that lonely lake, i pray ? and yet it has not the blue devils, but the blue angels in it, in the azure tint of its waters. god is alone, but the devil, he is far from being alone ; he sees a great deal of company ; he is legion. walden, p. 148. sympathy of the indescribable innocence sm^ and beneficence of nature, of sun and wind and rain, of sum mer and winter, such health, such cheer, they afford forever ! and such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all na ture would be affected, and the sun s brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a just cause grieve. shall i not have intelligence with the earth ? am i not partly leaves and vegetable mould my walden, p. 149. 6 selections froai thoreau. hebeprei am no worshiper of hygeia, hygeia. who was the dauhter of that old herb doctor ^esculapius, but rather of hebe, cupbearer to jupiter, who was the daughter of juno and wild lettuce, and who had the power of restoring gods and men to the vigor of youth. she was probably the only thoroughly sound conditioned, healthy, and robust young lady that ever walked the globe, and wherever she came, it was spring. walden, p. 150. animal food it is hard to provide and cook offends the . . . . , imagination, so simple and clean a diet as will not offend the imagination ; but this, i think, is to be fed when we feed the body ; they should both sit down at the same ta ble. it may be vain to ask why the imagi nation will not be reconciled to flesh and fat. i am satisfied that it is not. what ever my own practice may be, i have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized. waldbn, p . 232. selections from thokeau. 7 the faintest assured objection intimawn ich one healthy man feels will the slight est inti tions of one^-s genius ^ length prevail over the argu regarded. men t s and customs of mankind. no man ever followed his genius till it misled him. though the result were bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the consequences were to be regretted, for these were a life in conformity to higher principles. if the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal, that is your success. all nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. the greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. we easily come to doubt if they exist. we soon forget them. they are the highest reality. per haps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. the true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescrib able as the tints of morning or evening. it is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which i have clutched. walden, p. 233. 8 selections from thoreau. inspiration who has not sometimes derived palate. an inexpressible satisfaction from his food in which appetite had no share ? i have been thrilled to think that i owed a mental perception to the commonly gross sense of taste, that i have been inspired through the palate, that some berries which i had eaten on a hill-side had fed my ge nius. walden, p. 234 the quality he who distinguishes the true of the appe, . . , , , the makes savor oi his food can never be a the sensual, ist. glutton ; he who does not can not be otherwise. a puritan may go to his brown -bread crust with as gross an appetite as ever an alderman to his turtle. not that food which entereth into the mouth defileth a man, but the appetite with which it is eaten ; it is neither the quantity nor the quality, but the devotion to sensual savors. walden, p. 235 the moral our whole life is startlingly rsald moral. there is never an in stant s truce between virtue and vice. goodness is the only investment that never fails. in the music of the harp that trembles round the world it is selections from thoreau. 9 the insisting on this which thrills us. though the youth at last grows indifferent, the laws of the universe are not indiffer ent, but are forever on the side of the most sensitive. listen to every zephyr for some reproof, for it is surely there, and he is unfortunate who does not hear it. we cannot touch a string or move a stop but the charming moral transfixes us. many an irksome noise, go a long way off, is heard as music, a proud sweet satire on the meanness of our lives. waldkn, p. 235. delicacy of " that in which men differ from the distinc1111 tion between brute beasts, says mencius, " is men and . .... beasts. a thing very inconsiderable ; the common herd lose it very soon ; superior men preserve it carefully." walden, p . 23 6. purity inchastity is the flowering of spires the soui. man ; and what are called genius, heroism, holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it. man flows at once to god when the channel of purity is open. by turns our purity inspires and our impurity casts us down. he is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day, and the divine being established. walden, p. 236. io selections from thoreau. purity and a11 sensuality is one, though it eachtsintakes many forms; all purity is gle thing. man eat, or drink, or sleep sensually. they are but one appetite, and we only need to see a person do any one of these things to know how great a sensualist he is. the impure can neither stand nor sit with purity. when the reptile is attacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another. walden, p . 237 work a help ^ y ou w uld avoid uncleanness, agamst sm. an j a jj ^g s [ ns) wor k earnestly, though it be at cleaning a stable. nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be overcome. walden, p. 237. everyone every man is the builder of a a scuw. temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. we are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. any nobleness be gins at once to refine a man s features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them. walden, p. 238. selections from thoreau. ii a v ice said t thepurifica loui gives it mer], why do you stay here a new hfe. an ^ jye ^is mean moiling life, when a glorious existence is possible for you ? those same stars twinkle over other fields than these. but how to come out of this condition and actually migrate thither ? all he could think of was to practice some new austerity, to let his mind descend into his body and redeem it, and treat himself with ever increasing respect. walden, p. 239. strike at the there are a thousand hacking root of social .... , nis by punat the branches ot evil to one who owithfe. is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to re lieve. it is the pious slave-breeder devot ing the proceeds of every tenth slave to buy a sunday s liberty for the rest. some show their kindness to the poor by em ploying them in their kitchens. would they not be kinder if they employed them selves there ? walden, p. 83. 12 selections from thoreau. overflowing i do not value chiefly a man s charity 6 uprightness and benevolence, rmuhitude 3 which are, as it were, his stem and leaves. those plants of whose greenness withered we make herb tea for the sick serve but a humble use, and are most employed by quacks. i want the flower and fruit of a man ; that some fra grance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse. his goodness must not be a partial and transi tory act, but a constant superfluity, which costs him nothing and of which he is un conscious. this is a charity that hides a multitude of sins. waldkn, p . 83. what sadi believe that what so saddens reformer. the reformer is not his sympathy with his fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of god, is his private ail. let this be righted, let the spring come to him, the morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his generous companions without apology. walden.p. s 4 . our own all health and success does me sanity most good, however far off and with helpfulto others. drawn it may appear ; all disease selections from thoreau, 13 and failure helps to make me sad and does me evil, however much sympathy it may have with me or i with it. if, then, we would restore mankind by truly indian, botanic, magnetic, or natural means, let us be as simple and well as nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our own brows, and take up a little life into our pores. do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world. waldbn, p . 8 5 . the true a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone. walden, p . 8 9 . the best with respect to landscapes, crop which ,, t i jn t a farm i am monarch of all 1 survey, affords. my right there is none to dispute." i have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he had got a few wild apples only. why, the owner does not know it for many years when a. poet has put his farm in rhyme, the most admirable kind of invisible fence, has fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk. walden, p . 90. 14 selections from thoreau. slavery ^8 l n as possible, live ffcc to affairs. and unc ommitted. it makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail. walden, p . 9 .. make the ^ ^ not propose to write an goo d f in hat ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morn ing standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up. walden, p. 9 a. the creation the winds which passed over a poem to open ears, my dwelling were such as sweep over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial parts only, of terrestrial music. the morning wind for ever blows, the poem of creation is unin terrupted ; but few are the ears that hear it. olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere. walden, p . 92. the invitaevery morning was a cheerful tionofmorn... ,. r , ing. invitation to make my lite ot equal simplicity, and i may say innocence, with nature herself. waldkn, p . 96. a new life they say that characters were each day. en g raven on the bathing tub of selections from thoreau. 15 king tching-thang to this effect : " re new thyself completely each day ; do it again, and again, and forever again." waldeh, p. 96. we should little is to be expected of that be awakened . , . . each mornday, it it can be called a day, to ing by new . 111 inward life, which we are not awakened by our genius, but by the mechanical nudg ings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newly acquired force and as pirations from within to a higher life than we fell asleep from. walden, p . 9 6. after a partial cessation of his the organs gerdul resensuous life, the soul of man, or btrfeahnfui its organs rather, are reinvigo rated each day, and his genius tries again what noble life it can make. walden, p. 97. morning is to him whose elastic and vig r r e e truly rwe orous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. it matters not what the clocks say, or the attitudes and labors of men. morning is when i am awake and there is a dawn in me. walden, p . 97 . 1 6 selections from thoreau. no one to be awake is to be alive. i thoroughly awake. have never yet met a man who was quite awake. how could i have looked him in the face ? walden, p . 9 s. expectation we must learn to reawaken and of the dawn. keep ourse i ves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expec tation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. walden, p. 9 s. give beauty it is something to be able to to the day . from the paint a. particular picture, or to beauty within. carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful ; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmos phere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. to affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. walden, p. 98. real life. i did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear ; nor did i wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. walden, p. 98. life not to our life is frittered away by cotexit y he detail. simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! let your affairs be selections from thoreau. i/ as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand ; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail. walden, p. 99 "plain living the nation itself is just such an and high . . , . , . , thinking." unwieldy and overgrown establish ment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million house holds in the land ; and the only cure for it as for them is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. walden, p . 99 life wasted why should we live with such in affairs. hurry and waste of life ? we are determined to be starved before we are hungry. men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches to-day to save nine to-morrow. walden, p. 100. the news as what news ! how much more wxt^ai important to know what that is which was never old ! " kieou-he yu (great dignitary of the state of wei) 1 8 selections from thoreau. sent a man to khoung-tseu to know his news. khoung-tseu caused the messenger to be seated near him, and questioned him in these terms : what is your master doing ? the messenger answered with respect, my master desires to diminish the number of his faults, but he cannot come to the end of them. the messenger being gone, the philosopher remarked : what a worthy messenger ! what a wor thy messenger ! walden, p . 103. what alone if we respected only what is in has reality. ev i ta bi e and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. when we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. this is always exhilarating and sublime. walden, p. 103. the great god himself culminates in the eve r l re present moment, and will never be more divine in all the ages. and we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble, only by the selections from thoreau. 19 perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. walden, p . io s . live deiiblet us spend one day as deliber ately as nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mos quito s wing that falls on the rails. let us rise early, and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation ; let company come and let company go ; let the bells ring and the children cry, determined to make a day of it. walden, p. 105. seek to let us settle ourselves, and through work and wedge our feet down reaiity. ward through the mud and slush of opinion and prejudice and tradition and delusion and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through paris and london, through new york and boston and concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and reli gion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality. walden, p. 105. use of the the intellect is a cleaver; it intellect. discerns and rifts its way into the 2o selections from thoreau. secret of things. i do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is neces sary. my head is hands and feet. i feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. walden, p. ic6. the shallow time is but the stream i go stream of . . time. a-nshmg in. i drink at it ; but while i drink, i see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. i would drink deeper, fish in the sky, whose bot tom is pebbly with stars. walden, p . 106. mortality in accumulating property for and im. mortality. ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal ; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident. walden, p. ios. how to read the heroic books, even if books 6 printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times ; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than selections from thoreau. 21 common use permits, out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. walukn, p. 109. what are men sometimes speak as if the sics" ? study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies ; but the adventurous stu dent will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written, and however ancient they may be. for what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of men ? they are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such an swers to the most modern inquiry in them as delphi and dodona never gave. walden, p. no. how true t read we]1 &amp;gt; ~ that is t&amp;lt;d should be true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. it requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. walden, p . no. 22 selections from thoreau. living in we should be blessed if we the present. jj ve( j j n the present a l ways&amp;gt; an d took advantage of every accident that be fell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it ; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty. we loiter in win ter while it is already spring. walden . p336 the inin a pleasant spring morning spring. all men s sins are forgiven. such a day is a truce to vice. while such a sun holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may return. through our own recovered inno cence we discern the innocence of our neighbors. waldbn, p. 336. wiidness. we need the tonic of wild ness, to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow -hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe. at the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and inexplor able, that land and sea be infinitely wild. walden, p. 339. selections from thoreau. 2$ the glory of be b. columbus to whole new the realm . . , . . . within. continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. walden, p. 343 know if you would learn to speak all tongues and conform to the customs of all nations, if you would travel farther than all travellers, be naturalized in all climes, and cause the sphinx to dash her head against a stone, even obey the precept of the old philosopher, and explore thyself. walden, p. 344 the universe l learned this, at least, by my ourhigtelt experiment : that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unimagined in common hours. in proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less com plex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. walden, p. 346. 24 selections from thoreau. realize ^ y ou nave built castles in the your dream. ^ your wor k need not be lost j that is where they should be. now put the foundations under them. w alden, p . 34 6. extravai desire to speak somewhere gance of expression. witjioiit bounds, like a man in a waking moment, to men in waking mo ments ; for i am convinced that i cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the founda tion of a true expression. who that has heard a strain of music feared then lest he should speak extravagantly any more for ever ? walden, p. 347. the words which express our indefinite words may faith and piety are not definite ; be most * j significant. ve t \^ q j are significant and fra grant, like frankincense, to superior na tures. walden, p. 347. step to the if a man does not keep pace music you . hear. with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. it is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple-tree or an oak. shall he turn his spring into summer ? walden, p . 34 s. selections from thoreau. 2$ aim ever at ^ ^e condition of things which the highest. we were ma( j e f or i s not y et) w h a t were any reality which we can substitute ? we will not be shipwrecked on a vain real ity. shall we with pains erect a heaven of blue glass over ourselves, though when it is done we shall be sure to gaze still at the true ethereal heaven far above, as if the former were not ? walden, p . 349 . live for that ^ n an imperfect work time is whkh b an ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not enter. walden, p. 349. why we are no face which we can give to a t7auj y matter will stead us so well at position. last ag the truth _ thig alone wears well. for the most part, we are not where we are, but in a false position. through an infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out. walden, p. 350. the simin sane moments we regard truth. only the facts, the case that is. 26 selections from tiioreau. say what you have to say, not what you ought. any truth is better than make believe. waldbn, p. 350. make the love your lif e, poor as it is, best of your . own life. meet it and live it ; do not shun it and call it hard names. it is not so bad as you are. it looks poorest when you are richest. the fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. walden, p. 35 o. poverty you may perhaps have some need not , ..... . take from us pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, the purest . enjoyments, even in a poor-house. 1 he set ting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brighly as from the rich man s abode ; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. walden, p . 35 o. dishonesty most think they are above being dependence, supported by the town ; but it oftener happens that they are not above supporting themselves by dishonest means, which should be more disreputable. walden, p. 351. selections from thoreau. 2"j humility do not seek so anxiously to be soui c mo s re he developed, to subject yourself to than culture. many j n fl uences to be played on ; it is all dissipation. humility, like dark ness, reveals the heavenly lights. the shadows of poverty and meanness gather around us, " and, lo ! creation widens to our view." walden, p. 351. wealth does we are often reminded that, if not help in our pursuit there were bestowed on us the of the , highest. wealth of croesus, our aims must still be the same, and our means essen tially the same. walden, p. 351. advantage if 7 ou are restricted in your of poverty. ran g e by poverty, if you cannot buy books and newspapers, for instance, you are but confined to the most signifi cant and vital experiences ; you are com pelled to deal with the material which yields the most sugar and the most starch. walden, p. 351. money not superfluous wealth can buy su for the soul, perflultics only. money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul. walden, p. 352. 28 selections from thoreau. a person * ^ ove to we ig n &amp;gt; to settle, to ontif^wn gravitate toward that which most path. strongly and rightfully attracts me ; not hang by the beam of the scale and try to weigh less, not suppose a case, but take the case that is ; to travel the only path i can, and that on which no power can resist me. walden, p. 352. fidelity in drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction, a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the muse. so will help you god, and so only. every nail driven should be as another rivet in the machine of the universe, you carrying on the work. walden, p. 353 hospitaiity i sat at a table where were rich in manners, r ,,..,, , not in the rood and wine in abundance, and "entertain ment." i went away hungry from the in hospitable board. the hospitality was as cold as the ices. . . . the style, the house and grounds and "entertainment," pass for nothing with me. i called on the king, but he made me wait in his hall, and conducted like a man incapacitated for hospitality. selections from thoreau. 29 there was a man in my neighborhood who lived in a hollow tree. his manners were truly regal. i should have done better had i called on him. walden, p. 353. workessenhow long shall we sit in our acter. porticoes practicing idle and mus ty virtues, which any work would make im pertinent ? as if one were to begin the day with long-suffering, and hire a man to hoe his potatoes ; and in the afternoon go forth to practice christian meekness and charity with goodness aforethought ! walden, p. 354. "more day only that day dawns to which we are awake. there is more day to dawn. the sun is but a morning star. walden, p. 357. the vksay not that caesar was victorious, character. with toil and strife who stormed the house of fame ; in other sense this youth was glorious, himself a kingdom wheresoe er he came. wbek, p. 276. the heart is forever inexperienced. week, p. 278. 3o selections from thoreau. friendship there is on the earth no insti a thing out. . . side of hutution which friendship has es man institu tions, tablished ; it is not taught by any religion ; no scripture contains its maxims. week, p. 280. friendship no word is oftener on the lips the dream . of ail. or men than " friendship, and in deed no thought is more familiar to their aspirations. all men are dreaming of it, and its drama, which is always a tragedy, is enacted daily. it is the secret of the uni verse week, p. 281. the actual ^ ls equally impossible to for sug^on a get our friends, and to make of the ideal, them answer to our ideal. when they say farewell, then indeed we begin to keep them company. how often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends, that we may go and meet their ideal cousins ! wkek p28 a fnend even the utmost good will and the soul. harmony and practical kindness are not sufficient for friendship, for friends do not live in harmony, merely, as some say, but in melody. we do not wish for selections from thoreau. 31 friends to feed and clothe our bodies, neighbors are kind enough for that, but to do the like office to our spirits. for this, few are rich enough, however well disposed they may be. week, p . 282. a wend, think of the importance of the true .... , educator. friendship in the education of men. it will make a man honest ; it will make him a hero ; it will make him a saint. it is the state of the just dealing with the just, the magnanimous with the magnani mous, the sincere with the sincere, man with man. week, 11.283. the friend all the abuses which are the the only radir -11 1-1 cai reformer, object or retorm with the philan thropist, the statesman, and the house keeper, are unconsciously amended in the intercourse of friends. week, p . 283. it takes two to speak the truth, one to speak, and another to hear. week, p. 283. men ask too ^ n our daily intercourse with no bitdeait 6 men &amp;gt; our nobler faculties are dor mant and suffered to rust. none will pay us the compliment to expect no 32 selections from thoreau. bleness from us. we ask our neighbor to surfer himself to be dealt with truly, sin cerely, nobly ; but he answers no by his deafness. he does not even hear this prayer. week, p . 284. society conthe state does not demand tent with a j ustice o f its mem bers, but thinks too narrow that it succeeds very well with the least degree of it, hardly more than rogues practice ; and so do the family and the neighborhood. what is commonly called friendship is only a little more honor among rogues. week, p . 284. hearty truth between whom there is hearty is one with . . love. truth there is love ; and m pro portion to our truthfulness and confidence in one another, our lives are divine and miraculous, and answer to our ideal. week, p. 284. the purest there are passages of affection g^mpseof i n our intercourse with mortal men and women, such as no pro phecy had taught us to expect, which trans cend our earthly life and anticipate heaven for us. week, p. 284. selections from thoreau. 33 estrangebetween two by nature alike and fitted to sympathize, there is no veil, and there can be no obstacle. who are the estranged ? two friends ex plaining. winter, p. i. friends are the books for young people not selected. tion of friends ; it is because they really have nothing to say about friends. they mean associates and confidants merely. . . . friendship takes place between those who have an affinity for one another, and is a perfectly natural and inevitable result. no professions nor advances will avail. week, p. 285. friends not impatient and uncertain lovers pleach think that they must say or do something kind whenever they meet ; they must never be cold. but they who are friends do not do what they think they must, but what they must. even their friendship is, in one sense, a sublime phenomenon to them. week, p . 285. friends help the f riend asks no return but fo a f c tiest thers that his friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace 34 selections from thoreau. his apotheosis of him. they cherish each other s hopes. they are kind to each other s dreams. week, p. 286. between no such affront can be offered goodwill is to a friend as a conscious good not"^ will, a friendliness which is not a necessity of the friend s nature. week, p. 286. friendship is no respecter of sex ; and perhaps it is more rare between the sexes than between two of the same sex. week, p. 287. a hero s love is as delicate as a maiden s. week, p. 287. my friend is that one whom i can as sociate with my choicest thought. week, p. 288. the toierabeware lest thy friend learn at tion of faults . . r mi. r an obstacle last to tolerate one frailty of ship" 6 " thine, and so an obstacle be raised to the progress of thy love. webk, p . 288. selections from thoreau. 35 the purest friendship is never established !he e mosj p unas an understood relation. do conscious. y()u ^ emand that j be less your friend that you may know it ? week, p . 2 88. genuine wait not till i invite thee, but invitation, observe that i am glad to see thee when thou comest. .week, p 2 8 9 . where my friend lives, there are all riches and every attraction, and no slight obstacle can keep me from him. week, p . 289. the language of friendship is not words, but meanings. it is an intelligence above language. week, p. 2 8 9 . friendship it is one proof of a man s fit wisdom ness for friendship that he is as well as .... tenderness, able to do without that which is cheap and passionate. a true friendship is as wise as it is tender. week, p . 29 o. friendship when the friend comes out of conscious his heathenism and superstition, and breaks his idols, being con verted by the precepts of a newer testa 36 selections from thoreau. ment ; when he forgets his mythology, and treats his friend like a christian, or as he can afford, then friendship ceases to be friendship, and becomes charity ; that prin ciple which established the almshouse is" now beginning with its charity at home, and establishing an almshouse and pauper relations there. week, p . 292. friendship a oase friendship is of a nar imwmt of rowing and exclusive tendency, humanity. but ^ no\a& one is not exclusive ; its very superfluity and dispersed love is the humanity which sweetens society, and sympathizes with foreign nations ; for, though its foundations are private, it is in effect a public affair and a public advan tage, and the friend, more than the father of a family, deserves well of the state. week, p. 293. are any the only danger in friendship enough for is that it will end. it is a deli friendship? cate plant, though a native. the least unworthiness, even if it be unknown to one s self, vitiates it. let the friend know that those faults which he observes in his friend his own faults attract. . . . selections from thoreau. 37 perhaps there are none charitable, none disinterested, none wise, noble, and heroic enough, for a true and lasting friendship. week, p. 294. friends do i sometimes hear my friends not ask to be r . , appreciated, complain finely that 1 do not ap preciate their fineness. i shall not tell them whether i do or not. as if they ex pected a vote of thanks for every fine thing which they uttered or did ! who knows but it was finely appreciated ? it may be that your silence was the finer thing of the two. week, p. 294. between i n human intercourse the tra riknceis g ec ty begins, not when there is )odmisunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood. then there can never be an explanation. week, p. 294. the reserve often forbear to confess our of affection. f ee lj ns) not f rom j-jde, but for fear that we could not continue to love the one who required us to give such proof of affection. week, p. 295. 38 selections from thoreau. a wend for a companion, i require one one s s hig s hest wno w i^ make an equal demand aspirations. qn me my qwn g enms&amp;gt; a one will always be rightly tolerant. it is suicide and corrupts good manners to welcome any less than this. i value and trust those who love and praise my aspira tion rather than my performance. if you would not stop to look at me, but look whither i am looking and farther, then my education could not dispense with your company. week, p . 296. i cannot leave my sky for thy caprice ; true love would soar as high as heaven is. the eagle would not brook her mate thus won, who trained his eye to look beneath the sun. week, p . 297. friendship confucius said, "to contract what tawghties of friendship with any one, estineach. j g to contract friendship with his virtue. there ought not to be any other motive in friendship." week, p . 298. selections from thokeau. 39 the faults of ^ * s impossible to say all that mus! r be n iost we think, even to our truest friend. we may bid him fare well forever sooner than complain, for our complaint is too well grounded to be ut tered. week, p. 299. friends the constitutional differences suen t 136 which always exist, and are ob sdmdonay stacles to a perfect friendship, are forever a forbidden theme to the lips of friends. they advise by their whole behavior. nothing can reconcile them but love. week, p. 299. the necessity itself for explanation, what explanation will atone for that ? week, p. 299. the real true love does not quarrel for differences , , , between slight reasons, such mistakes as friends cannot be mutual acquaintances can explain explained away. away ; but, alas, however slight the apparent cause, only for adequate and fatal and everlasting reasons, which can never be set aside. its quarrel, if there is any, is ever recurring, notwithstanding the beams of affection which invariably come to &amp;lt;rild its tears. week, p. 3 oo. 4o selections from thoreau. we must accept or refuse one another as we are. i could tame a hyena more easily than my friend. week, p. 3 oo. no real we ignorance and bungling, with without love. love&amp;gt; are better than w i s d om and skill without. there may be courtesy, there may be even temper and wit and talent and sparkling conversation, there may be good-will even, and yet the hu manest and divinest faculties pine for ex ercise. our life without love is like coke and ashes. week, p. 300. the inward dawn. nature doth have her dawn each but mine are far between ; content, i cry, for sooth to say, mine brightest are, i ween. for when my sun doth deign to rise, though it be her noontide, her fairest field in shadow lies, nor can my light abide. week, p . 301. friendship as ! love nature, as i love sing of\ h ure ve ing birds, and gleaming stubble, harmonize. an( j fl ow j n g r i v ers, and morning selections from thoreau. 41 and evening, and summer and winter, i love thee, my friend. week, p . 302. the wend even the death of friends will leaves the . , . . , . sweetest inspire us as much as their lives. consolation . at his death. they will leave consolation to the mourners, as the rich leave money to de fray the expenses of their funerals, and their memories will be incrusted over with sublime and pleasing thoughts, as monu ments of other men are overgrown with moss. week, p. 302. two solitary stars, unmeasured systems far between us roll, but by our conscious light we are determined to one pole. week, p . 304. civility lying on lower levels is but a friends. trivial offense compared with ci vility and compliments on the level of friendship. winter, p. 428. exalting we are all ordinarily in a state mifsic. of desperation. such is our life, it ofttimes drives us to suicide. to how 42 selections from thoreau. many, perhaps to most, life is barely toler able ; and if it were not for the fear of death or of dying, what a multitude would imme diately commit suicide ! but let us hear a strain of music, and we are at once adver tised of a life which no man had told us of, which no preacher preaches. winter, p. 181. no warder at the gate can let the friendly in, but, like the sun, o er all he will the castle win, and shine along the wall. wbbk, p. 305. implacable is love : foes may be bought or teased from their hostile intent, but he goes unappeased who is on kindness bent. week, p. 305. simplify when the mathematician would the problem . of life. solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all encumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. so sim plify the problem of life, distinguish the selections from thokeau. 43 necessary and the real. probe the earth to see where your main roots run. letters, p. 43. our faintest this &amp;gt; our respectable daily life, fo^ss* in which the man of common est reality. ^^ ^ eng l ishman o f t he world, stands so squarely, and on which our institutions are founded, is in fact the veriest illusion, and will vanish like the baseless fabric of a vision ; but that faint glimmer of reality which sometimes illu minates the darkness of daylight for all men, reveals something more solid and en during than adamant, which is in fact the corner-stone of the world. letters, p . 44 thereaiizamen cannot conceive of a state tion of . . . dreams. of things so fair that it cannot be realized. letters, p. 44. we never have a fantasy so subtile and ethereal, but that talent merely, with more resolution and faithful persistency, after a thousand failures, might fix and engrave it in distinct and enduring words, and we should see that our dreams are the solidest facts that we knovv. letters, p. 43. 44 selections from thoreau. what can be expressed in words can be expressed in life. letters, p . 45. we can my actual life is a fact, in view respect our . aspirations, ot which 1 have no occasion to not our actual lives, congratulate myself ; but for my faith and aspiration i have respect. letters, p. 45. i love reform better than its modes. there is no history of how bad became better. letters, p. 45. as for positions, combinations, and de tails, what are they ? in clear weather, when we look into the heavens, what do we see but the sky and the sun ? letters, p. 45. individual if y u would convince a man louset" that he does wrong, do right. but do not care to convince him. men will believe what they see. let them see. letters, p. 46. ,&amp;lt; dowhat pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life, as a dog does his master s chaise. do what you selections from thoreau. 45 love. know your own bone ; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still. letters, p. 46. "if ye be aim above morality. be not led by the . . spirit, ye simply good \ dq good for some denheiaw." thing. all fables, indeed, have their morals; but the innocent enjoy the story. letters, p. 46. direct aplet nothing come between you peal to the highest. and the light. respect men as brothers only. when you travel to the celestial city, carry no letter of introduc tion. when you knock, ask to see god, none of the servants. letters, p . 4 s. in what concerns you much, do not think you have companions ; know that you are alone in the world. letters, p. 4 6. the true ^ have tasted but little bread in my life. it has been mere grub and provender for the most part. of bread that nourished the brain and the heart, scarcely any. there is absolutely none, even on the tables of the rich. letters, p. 47. 46 selections from thoreau. the delight some men go a-hunting, some ear r ning y a a-fishing, some a-gaming, some to war ; but none have so pleas ant a time as they who in earnest seek to earn their bread. it is true actually as it is true really ; it is true materially as it is true spiritually, that they who seek hon estly and sincerely, with all their hearts and lives and strength, to earn their bread, do earn it, and it is sure to be very sweet to them. letters, p. 48. a very little bread, a very few crumbs are enough, if it be of the right quality, for it is infinitely nutritious. let each man, then, earn at least a crumb of bread for his body before he dies, and know the taste of it, that it is identical with the bread of life, and that they both go down at one swallow. letters, p. 48 not only the rainbow and sunset are beautiful, but to be fed and clothed, shel tered and warmed aright, are equally beau tiful and inspiring. there is not necessa rily any gross and ugly fact which may not be eradicated from the life of man. letters, p. 49. selections from thoreau. 47 the earnest how can any man be weak who man irre, ., _, sistibie. dares to be at all ? even the ten derest plants force their way up through the hardest earth, and the crevices of rocks ; but a man no material power can resist. what a wedge, what a beetle, what a cata pult is an earnest man ! what can resist him ? letters, p. 49. that we have but little faith is not sad, but that we have but little faithfulness. by faithfulness faith is earned. letters, p. 50. the misery when once we fall behind our enc d e is to b our~ selves, there is no accounting for the obstacles that rise up in our path, and no one is so wise as to advise, and no one so powerful as to aid us while we abide on that ground. such are cursed with duties, and the neglect of their duties. for such the decalogue was made, and other far more voluminous and terrible codes. letters, p. 50. cibg to be not anxious to avoid pov the thread , . i i r of life. erty. in this way the wealth of the universe may be securely invested. 48 selections from thoreau. what a pity if we do not live this short time according to the laws of the long time, the eternal laws ! ... in the midst of this labyrinth let us live a thread of life. letters, p. 52. the laws of the laws of earth are for the heaveitharf eet &amp;gt; or inferior man ; the laws of heaven are for the head, or superior man ; the latter are the former sublimed and expanded, even as radii from the earth s centre go on diverging space. letters, p. 53. happy the man who observes the heav enly and terrestrial law in just proportion ; whose every faculty, from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head, obeys the law of its level ; who neither stoops nor goes on tiptoe, but lives a balanced life, acceptable to nature and to god. letters, p. 53. newspapers. if words were invented to con ceal thought, i think that newspapers are a great improvement on a bad invention. do not surfer your life to be taken by newspapers. letters, p. 56. selections from thoreau. 49 rest for the when we are weary with trav el, we lay down our load and rest by the wayside. so, when we are weary with the burden of life, why do we not lay down this load of falsehoods which we have volunteered to sustain, and be refreshed as never mortal was ? let the beautiful laws prevail. let us not weary ourselves by resisting them. letters, p . 57 . god most it is not when i am going to truly found ... . t when not meet him, but when i am just consciously . . sought. turning away and leaving him alone, that i discover that god is. i say, god. i am not sure that that is the name. you will know whom i mean. letters, p . s s. self renun^ f r a nioment we make way with our petty selves, wish no ill to anything, apprehend no ill, cease to be but as the crystal which reflects a ray, what shall we not reflect ! what a uni verse will appear crystallized and radiant us ! letters, p. 58. the muse the muse should lead like a should lead, . ... . the understar which is very tar oft ; but that standing . follow. does not imply that we are to tol low foolishly, falling into sloughs and over 5o selections from thoreau. precipices, for it is not foolishness, but un derstanding, which is to follow, which the muse is appointed to lead, as a fit guide of a fit follower. letters, p. 58. too high a men make a great ado about ntbe^ad"" the folly of demanding too much upon life. of hfe ( qr of etemity? ^ and o f endeavoring to live according to that demand. it is much ado about nothing. no harm ever came from that quarter. letters, p. 59. danger of i am not afraid that i shall ex undervalu. ing life. aggerate the value and significance of life, but that i shall not be up to the occasion which it is. i shall be sorry to remember that i was there, but noticed nothing remarkable, not so much as a prince in disguise ; lived in the golden age a hired man ; visited olympus even, but fell asleep after dinner, and did not hear the conversation of the gods. letters, p. 59. the kind of we, demanding news, and put reaiiywant. ting up with suc/i news ! is it a new convenience, or a new accident, or, selections from thoreau. 5 [ rather, a new perception of the truth that we want ? letters, p. 60. divine ex^ s not tne attitude of expecta pemtions. t j on so mewhat divine ? a sort of home-made divineness ? does it not compel a kind of sphere-music to attend on it ? and do not its satisfactions merge at length, by insensible degrees, in the enjoy ment of the thing expected ? letters, p. 6:. exalted emsome absorbing employment on pioyment. vour higher ground, your up land farm, whither no cart-path leads, but where you mount alone with your hoe, where the life everlasting grows ; there you raise a crop which needs not to be brought down into the valley to a market ; which you barter for heavenly products. letters, p. 61. yield not to be not deterred by melancholy heupy on the path which leads to im wardpath. they tasted of the water of the river over which they were to go, they thought it tasted a little bitterish to the palate, but it proved sweeter when it was down. letters, p . 6 3 . 52 selections from thoreau. as a man our thoughts are the epochs in thinketh, so _ . , , , . is he. our lives ; all else is but as a journal of the winds that blew while we were here. letters, p. 63. our ideal it is not easy to make our lives shames our , / best efforts, respectable by any course 01 ac tivity. we must repeatedly withdraw into our shells of thought, like the tortoise, somewhat helplessly ; yet there is more than philosophy in that. letters, p. 64. inward if i should turn myself inside poverty. qu ^ my ra g g an( _j meanne ss would indeed appear. i am something to him that made me, undoubtedly, but not much to any other that he has made. letters, p. 64. he who as for missing friends, what genius canif we do miss one another ? not lose his friends. have we not agreed on a rendez vous ? while each wanders his own way through the wood, without anxiety, ay, with serene joy, though it be on his hands and knees, over rocks and fallen trees, he can not but be in the right way. there is no wrong way to him. letters, p. 65. selections from thoreau. 53 friendship a man who missed his friend m nature. ^ a { urn ^ w ent on buoyantly, di viding the friendly air, and humming a tune to himself, ever and anon kneeling with delight to study each lichen in his path, and scarcely made three miles a day for friend ship. letters, p. 65. unconscious l am g lad to know that t am as much to any mortal as a persis tent and consistent scarecrow is to a far mer, such a bundle of straw in a man s clothing as i am, with a few bits of tin to sparkle in the sun dangling about me, as if i were hard at work there in the field. however, if this kind of life saves any man s corn, why, he is the gainer. letters, p. 68. the best i am no t afraid you will flatter f s p ^s n e as long as you know what i am, as well as what i think or aim to be, and distinguish between these two ; for then it will commonly happen that if you praise the last, you will condemn the first. letters, p. 69. 54 selections from thoreau. the earnest all the world complain now-a not hindered .. . . . . by trifles. days of a press or trivial duties and engagements, which prevents their employing themselves on some higher ground they know of ; but undoubtedly, if they were made of the right stuff to work on that higher ground, provided they were released from all those engagements, they would now at once fulfill the superior en gagement, and neglect all the rest, as nar urally as they breathe. letters, p . 7 o. a glorious as for passing through any cann"t e be e great and glorious experience, ehmd and rising above it, as an eagle might fly athwart the evening sky to rise into still brighter and fairer regions of the heavens, i cannot say that i ever sailed so creditably, but my bark ever seemed thwarted by some side wind, and went off over the edge, and now only occasionally tacks back toward the centre of that sea again. letters, p. 70. hope {or i have outgrown nothing good, ourselves. j ^ q nq behind by whole continents of virtue, which should have been passed as islands in my selections from thoreau. 55 course ; but i trust what else can i trust ? that with a stiff wind, some friday, when i have thrown some of my cargo over board, i may make up for all that distance lost. letters, p. 71. wisdom and man is continually saying to dattolach woman, why will you not be more wise ? woman is contin ually saying to man, why will you not be more loving ? it is not in their wills to be wise or to be loving ; but, unless each is both wise and loving, there can be neither wisdom nor love. letters, p. 72. i am not satisfied with ordinary windows. i must have a true sky-light, and that is outside the village. . . . the man i meet with is not often so instructive as the silence he breaks. this stillness, solitude, wildness of nature is a kind of thoroughwort or boneset to my intellect. this is what i go out to seek. it is as if i always met in those places some grand, serene, immortal, infinitely encouraging, though invisible, companion, and walked with him. there at last my nerves are steadied, my senses and my mind do their office. winter, p. 133. 56 selections from thoreau. the human the lover sees in the glance of his beloved the same beauty that in the sunset paints the western skies. it is the same daimon here lurking under a human eyelid and there under the closing eyelids of the day. here, in small com pass, is the ancient and natural beauty of evening and morning. what loving astron omer has ever fathomed the ethereal depths of the eye ? letters, p. 73 the lover s perhaps an instinct survives through the intensest actual love, which prevents entire abandonment of de votion, and makes the most ardent lover a little reserved. it is the anticipation of change. for the most ardent lover is not the less practically wise, and seeks a love which will last forever. letters, p . 73 . the rarity considering how few poetical marriages, friendships there are, it is remark able that so many are married. it would seem as if men yielded too easy an obedi ence to nature without consulting their genius. one may be drunk with love without being any nearer to finding his mate, letters, p. 74. selections from thoreau. $/ both com^ common sense had been con divine n s tnse suited, how many marriages would consulted in never have taken place ; if uncom mon or divine sense, how few marriages, such as we witness, would ever have taken place ! letters, p. 74 love should our love may be ascending or be ascend. ttt-i i ing. descending. what is its charac ter, if it may be said of it, " \ve must respect the souls above, but only those below we lave." letters, p. 74. shun a t is your friend such a one that descending love. an increase of worth on your part will rarely make her more your friend ? is she retained, is she attracted, by more nobleness in you, by more of that virtue which is peculiarly yours ; or is she indif ferent and blind to that ? is she to be flattered and won by your meeting her on any other than the ascending path ? then duty requires that you separate from her. letters, p. 74. true love a man of fine perceptions is most clear...... , sighted. more truly feminine than a merely 58 selections from thoreau. sentimental woman. the heart is blind ; but love is not blind. none of the gods is so discriminating. letters, p. 75. in love the ^ n ^ ove an ^ friendship the imag jitustnotte ination is as much exercised as offended. raged, the other will be estranged. it is commonly the imagination which is wounded first, rather than the heart, it is so much the more sensitive. letters, p. 75. lovers must i require that thou knowest understand . each another everything without being told without words. anything. i parted from my be loved because there was one thing which i had to tell her. she questioned me. she should have known all by sympathy. that i had to tell it her was the difference be tween us, the misunderstanding. letters, p. 76. the lover a lover never hears anything hears things, . . . not words, that is to/d, for that is commonly either false or stale ; but he hears things taking place, as the sentinels heard trenck selections from thoreau. 59 mining in the ground, and thought it was moles. letters, p. 76. lovede . if to chaffer and higgle are ctm osvdibad in trade, they are much worse in love. it demands directness as of an arrow. letters, p. 77 the true the lover wants no partiality. not e hidehfs he says, be so kind as to be just. ... i need thy hate as much as thy love. thou wilt not repel me entirely when thou repellest what is evil in me. letters, p. 77. truthfulness. it is not enough that we are truthful ; we must cherish and carry out high purposes to be truthful about. letters, p. 78. no lower encommonly, men are as much stlht afraid of lov e as of hat ethey way of love. haye lower en g agements . they have near ends to serve. they have not imagination enough to be thus employed about a human being, but must be cooper ing a barrel, forsooth. letters, p . 7 s. 60 selections from thoreau. no treasure what a difference whether, in paredwi?h a ll your walks, you meet only strangers, or in one house is one who knows you, and whom you know. to have a brother or a sister ! to have a gold mine on your farm ! to find diamonds in the gravel heaps before your door ! how rare these things are ! letters, p . 7 z. "through would not a friend enhance the thee alone . the sky is beauty ot the landscape as much arched. r through as a deer or a hare ? everything thee the rose j is red." would acknowledge and serve such a relation ; the corn in the field, and the cranberries in the meadow. the flow ers would bloom and the birds sing with a new impulse. there would be more fair days in the year. letters, p. ?s. "on the the object of love expands broken a^cs, and grows before us to eternity, heaven a until it includes all that is lovely, sound." and we become all that can love. letters, p. 79. meet others if you seek the warmth even stpiane g of affection from a similar mo commrnd. tive to that from which cats and selections from thoreau. 6 1 dogs and slothful persons hug the fire, be cause your temperature is low through sloth, you are on the downward road, and it is but to plunge yet deeper into slofh. letters, p. 81. genuine the warmth of celestial love love elevates does not relax, but nerves and strengthens. b races j^s enjoyer. warm your body by healthful exercise, not by cower ing over a stove. warm your spirit by performing independently noble deeds, not by ignobly seeking the sympathy of your fellows who are no better than yourself. letters, p. 81. friends deal a man s social and spiritual truthwith discipline must answer to his cor each other. pqrea] re must j ean qn a friend who has a hard breast, as he would lie on a hard bed. he must drink cold water for his only beverage. so he must not hear sweetened and colored words, but pure and refreshing truths. he must daily bathe in truth cold as spring water, not warmed by the sympathy of friends. letters, p. si. we must love our friend so much that 62 selections from thoreau. she shall be associated with our purest and holiest thoughts alone. when there is impurity, we have "descended to meet," though we knew it not. letters, p. 82. love must we may love and not elevate tosta one another. the love that takes us as it finds us degrades us. what watch we must keep over the fairest and purest of our affections, lest there be some taint about them. may we so love as never to have occasion to repent our love. letters, p. 82. a flower the flowers, which, by their infinite pore love. hues and fragrance, celebrate the marriage of the plants, are intended for a symbol of the open and unsuspected beauty of all true marriage, when man s flower ing season arrives. letters, p . 82. the joy of a true marriage will differ in intellectual no wise from illumination. in all perception. percept j on o f t h e truth there is a divine ecstasy, an inexpressible delirium of joy, as when a youth embraces his be trothed virgin. the ultimate delights of a true marriage are one with this. letters, p. 84. selections from thoreau. 63 pure love some have asked if the stock of the radical 11^1^ -r reformer. men could not be improved, it they could not be bred as cattle. let love be purified, and all the rest will follow. a pure love is thus, indeed, the panacea for all the ills of the world. letters, p. 84. the offthe only excuse for reproduc spring of the ... _ _ noble tend tion is improvement. nature ab to a higher nobility. hors repetition. beasts merely propagate their kind ; but the offspring of noble men and women will be superior to themselves, as their aspirations are. by their fruits ye shall know them. letters, p. 84. faithfulness as to how to preserve potatoes knowledge from rotting my opinion may soul. change from year to year ; but as to how to preserve my soul from rotting, i have nothing to learn, but something to practice. letters, p. 87. wealth comtne problem of life becomes, problem ^f 6 one cannot say by how many de grees, more complicated as our material wealth is increased, whether that needle they tell of was a gateway or not, 64 selections from thoreau. since the problem is not merely nor mainly to get life for our bodies, but by this or a similar discipline to get life for our souls ; by cultivating the lowland farm on right principles, that is, with this view, to turn it into an upland farm. letters, p. ss. to truly though we are desirous to earn earn our bread, we our bread, we need not be anxious must satisfy . . god for it. to satisfy men tor it, though we shall take care to pay them, but god, who alone gave it to us. letters, p. 89. men may ut us ln tne possfying debtors jail for that matter, sim ply for paying our whole debt to god, which includes our debt to them, and though we have his receipt for it, for his paper is dishonored. letters, p . 90. how prompt we are to satisfy the hun ger and thirst of our bodies ; how slow to satisfy the hunger and thirst of our souls. letters, p. 90. care for the an ordinary man will work body com pared with every day for a year at shovelling care for the j j j . f soul. dirt to support his body, or a tarn selections from thoreau. 65 ily of bodies ; but he is an extraordinary man who will work a whole day in a year for the support of his soui. letters, p. go. real success. he alone is the truly enterpris ing and practical man who succeeds in maintaining his soul here. have we not our everlasting life to get ? and is not that the only excuse for eating, drinking, sleep ing, or even carrying an umbrella when it rains ? letters, p. go. the helpful i am mucri indebted to you be courag?" our cause you look so steadily at the aspirations. |j etter g^e, or ratri er the true cen tre of me (for our true centre may, and perhaps oftenest does, lie entirely aside from us, and we are in fact eccentric), and, as i have elsewhere said, " give me an op portunity to live." letters, p. 91. the ideal what a little shelf is required, slight su p by which we may impinge upon port in the ./. j & . actual. another, and build there our eyrie in the clouds, and all the heavens we see above us we refer to the crags around and beneath us. some piece of mica, as it were, in the face or eyes of one, as on 66 selections from thoreau. the delectable mountains, slanted at the right angle, reflects the heavens to us. letters, p. 91. how the it was not the hero i admired, %u a res ra a ns ~ but the reflection from his epau let or helmet. it is nothing (for us) permanently inherent in another, but his attitude or relation to what we prize, that we admire. the meanest man may glitter with micaceous particles to his fel low s eye. these are the spangles that adorn a man. letters, p. 91. ideal union. the highest union, ... or central oneness, is the coincidence of visual rays. our club-room was an apartment in a con stellation where our visual rays met (and there was no debate about the restaurant). the way between us is over the mount. letters, p 92. yourself and your words make me think of in y th e l f hg s na man of my acquaintance whom i occasionally meet, whom you, too, appear to have met, one myself, as he is called. yet, why not call him your self ? if you have met with him and selections from thoreau. 6/ know him, it is all i have done ; and surely where there is mutual acquaintance, the my and thy make a distinction without a difference. letters, p. 92. the most hold fast to your most indefi ihought signite, waking dream. the very green dust on the walls is an or ganized vegetable ; the atmosphere has its fauna and flora floating in it ; and shall we think that dreams are but dust and ashes, are always disintegrated and crumbling thoughts, and not dust-like thoughts troop ing to their standard with music, systems beginning to be organized ? letters, p . 92. value of a suppose a man were to sell the clear soul .... compared hue, the least amount of coloring with mate rial gains. matter in the superficies of his thought, for a farm, were to exchange an absolute and infinite value for a relative and finite one, to gain the whole world and lose his own soul ! letters, p. 93. self-respect. it is worth while to live respect ably unto ourselves. we can possibly get along with a neighbor, even with a bedfel low, whom we respect but very little ; but 68 selections from thoreau. as soon as it comes to that, that we do not respect ourselves, then we do not get along at all, no matter how much money we are paid for halting. letters, p. 95. better obit is better to have your head above than in the clouds, and know where ness beiow. you are, if indeed you cannot get it above them, than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise. letters, p . 96. appeal to all that men have said or are the highest . . . within you. is a very taint rumor, and it is not worth while to remember or refer to that. if you are to meet god, will you refer to anybody out of that court ? how shall men know how i succeed, unless they are in at the life ? i did not see the " times " re porter there. letters, p. 96. friends we will stand on solid founda must meet . _ . erectly. tions to one another, la col umn planted on this shore, you on that. . . . we will not mutually fall over that we may meet, but will grandly and eternally guard the straits. letters, p. 119 selections from thoreau. 69 the comfort talk of burning your smoke of industry. a ter ^ q woo( ^ has been con sumed ! there is a far more important and warming heat, commonly lost, which precedes the burning of the wood. it is the smoke of industry, which is incense. i had been so thoroughly warmed in body and spirit, that when at length my fuel was housed, i came near selling it to the ash man, as if i had extracted all its heat. letters, p. 128. providing is it not delightful to provide necessaries, , 1f . . . rot superone s self with the necessaries of pleasure. life, to collect dry wood for the fire when the weather grows cool, or fruits when we grow hungry? not till then. and then we have all the time left for thought ! letters, p. 96. a warm of what use were it, pray, to body and a . . . . . cold spirit, get a little wood to burn to warm your body this cold weather, if there were not a divine fire kindled at the same time to warm your spirit ? letters, p. 97. thetrue life is so short that it is not wise to take roundabout ways, nor 70 selections from thoreau. can we spend much time in waiting. is it absolutely necessary, then, that we should do as we are doing ? . . . though it is late to leave off this wrong way, it will seem early the moment we begin in the right way ; instead of mid-afternoon, it will be early morning with us. we have not got half-way to dawn yet. letters, p . 97 . necessity of we must hea p u p a g reat p ile of doing for a small diameter of being. is it not imperative on us that we do something, if we only work in a tread mill ? and, indeed, some sort of revolving is necessary to produce a centre and nu cleus of being. what exercise is to the body, employment is to the mind and morals. letters, p. 99. unconthere are so many layers of sciousness of . beauty. mere white lime m every shell to that thin inner one so beautifully tinted. let not the shell-fish think to build his house of that alone ; and pray, what are its tints to him ? is it not his smooth, close fitting shirt merely, whose tints are not to him, being in the dark, but only when he is gone or dead, and his shell is heaved up selections from thoreau. jl to light, a wreck upon the beach, do they appear. letters, p. 99. high results how admirably the artist is made to accomplish his self-cul ture by devotion to his art ! the wood sawyer, through his effort to do his work well, becomes not merely a better wood sawyer, but measurably a better man. letters, p. 100. no diiettany u say that you do not suc ceed much. does it concern you enough that you do not ? do you work hard enough at it ? do you get the bene fit of discipline out of it ? if so, persevere. is it a more serious thing than to walk a thousand miles in a thousand successive hours ? do you get any corns by it ? do you ever think of hanging yourself on ac count of failure ? letters, p. 100. it is the art of mankind to polish the world, and every one who works is scrub bing in some part. letters, p. 101. the higher if the work is high and far, you the aim, the . more earnest must not only aim aright, but must be the j work. draw the bow with all your might. 72 selections from thoreau. you must qualify yourself to use a bow which no humbler archer can bend. " work, work, work ! " who shall know it for a bow ? it is not of yew-tree. it is straighter than a ray of light ; flexibility is not known for one of its qualities. letters, p. 101. work in whether a man spends his day spite of . iii/ moods. m an ecstasy or despondency, he must do some work to show for it, even as there are flesh and bones to show for him. we are superior to the joy we experience. letters, p. 103. the loneiiah ! what foreign countries ness of false society. there are, greater in extent than the united states or russia, and with no more souls to a square mile, stretching away on every side from every human being, with whom you have no sympathy. . . . rocks, earth, brute beasts, compara tively, are not so strange to me. letters, p. 105. when i sit in the parlors and kitchens of some with whom my business brings me i was going to say in contact (busi selections fkom thoreau. 73 ness, like misery, makes strange bedfel lows), i feel a sort of awe, and as forlorn as if i were cast away on a desolate shore. i think of riley s narrative and his suf ferings. letters, p. 105. how finite you, who soared like a merlin bo a k tes ess with y ur mate through the realms of ether, in the presence of the unlike drop at once to earth, a mere amor phous squab, divested of your air-inflated pinions. . . . you travel on, however, through this dark and desert world ; you see in the distance an intelligent and sym pathizing lineament ; stars come forth in the dark, and oases appear in the desert. letters, p. 105. the friend i am gl a d to hear that i do not limit our always limit your vision when you look this way ; that you some times see the light through me ; that i am here and there windows, and not all dead wall. might not the community sometimes petition a man to remove himself as a nuisance, a darkener of the day, a too large mote ? letters, p. 107. 74 selections from thoreau. humanity the best news you send me is, nature. not that nature with you is so fair and genial, but that there is one there who likes her so well. that proves all that was asserted. letters, p. in. things cori nave not yet learned to live, outhighest that i can see, and i fear that i shall not very soon. i find, how ever, that in the long run things corre spond to my original idea, that they cor respond to nothing else so much. letters, p. 113. courage. when an indian is burned, his body may be broiled, it may be no more than a beefsteak. what of that ? they may broil his jicart, but they do not therefore broil his courage, his princi ples. be of good courage ! that is the main thing. letters, p. 1 13. tothecour^ a man were to placc himself burde ns a bean attitude to bear manfully come light. the greatest ev ji t hat can be in flicted on him, he would find suddenly that there was no such evil to bear ; his brave back would go a-begging. . . . but as long selections from thoreau. 75 as he crouches, and skulks, and shirks his work, every creature that has weight will be treading on his toes, and crushing him ; he will himself tread with one foot on the other foot. letters, p. 114. thedreadfui the monster is never just there thing not ..... ,.... outside of us. where we think he is. what is truly monstrous is our cowardice and sloth. letters, p. 114. the true why should we ever go abroad, adviser, even across the way, to ask a neighbor s advice ? there is a nearer neighbor within us incessantly telling us how we should behave. but we wait for the neighbor without to tell us of some false, easier way. letters, p . n 4 . fatal post^ n ever y one f these houscs ponement. t h c re is at least one man fighting or squabbling a good part of his time with a dozen pet demons of his own breeding and cherishing, which are relentlessly gnawing at his vitals ; and if perchance he resolve at length that he will courageously combat them, he says, " ay ! ay ! i will attend to you after dinner." and, when that time 76 selections from thoreau. comes, he concludes that he is good for another stage, and reads a column or two about the eastern war ! letters, p . u 5 . we must at last one will say, "let us account for our lives. see, how much wood did you burn, sir ? " and i shall shudder to think that the next question will be, " what did you do while you were warm ? " do we think the ashes will pay for it ? that god is an ash man ? it is a fact that we have got to ren der an account for the deeds done in the body. letters, p. 115. sincerity is a great but rare virtue, and we pardon to it much complaining, and the betrayal of many weaknesses. letters, p. u 7 . simplicity to what end do i lead a simple ?nfet life at all, pray? that i may teach others to simplify their lives ? and so all our lives be simplified merely, like an algebraic formula ? or not, rather, that i may make use of the ground i have cleared, to live more worthily and profitably ? letters, p. 117. i would fain lay the most stress forever selections from thoreau. fj on that which is the most important, im ports the most to me, though it were only (what it is likely to be) a vibration in the air. letters, p. 118. themnuni was glad to hear the other tains within . us. day that higgmson and brown were gone to ktaadn ; it must be so much better to go to than a woman s rights or abolition convention ; better still, to the delectable, primitive mounts within you, which you have dreamed of from your youth up, and seen, perhaps, in the horizon, but never climbed. letters, p. 118. poverty of a wa ^ over the crust to asny fote u roa? nd bumsldt, standing there in its inviting simplicity, is tempting to think of, making a fire on the snow un der some rock ! the very poverty of out ward nature implies an inward wealth in the walker. what a golconda is he conversant with, thawing his fingers over such a blaze ! letters, p. 137 helpful as for the dispute about soli tude and society, any comparison 78 selectiojvs from thoreau. is impertinent. it is an idling down on the plain at the base of a mountain, instead of climbing steadily to its top. of course you will be glad of all the society you can get to go up with. will you go to glory with me ? is the burden of the song. letters, p. 139. & it is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thin ner till there is none at all. it is either the tribune on the plain, a sermon on the mount, or a very private ecstasy still higher up. we are not the less to aim at the summits, though the multitude does not ascend them. use all the society that will abet you. , letters, p. 13$. gratitude i am grateful for what i am for the sense . . of existence, and have. my thanksgiving is perpetual. it is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite, only a sense of existence. letters, p . ms the doablemethinks a certain polygamy aessofour , , , , with its troubles is the tate of almost all men. they are married to two wives, their genius (a celestial muse), and selections from thoreau. fg also to some fair daughter of the earth. unless these two were fast friends before marriage, and so are afterward, there wih be but little peace in the house. ltttek,?, 154 it is a great satisfaction to find that your oldest convictions are permanent with regard to es s e r. ".:=.! s i have never had occasion to change rr.y mind. . . . the aspect of the world y~r: :5 from year to year, as the landscape is d ff-rently clothed, but i find that the truth is still true, and i never regret any emphasis it may have inspired. ktaadn is th :re still, but much more sorely my con viction is there, resting with more than mountain breadth and weight on the world, the source still of fertilizing streams, and affording glorious views from its summit if i can get up to it again. t. .-, . as for style of writing, if one has anything to say, it drops from him simply and directly, as a stone falls to the ground. there are no two ways about it, but down it comes, and he may stick in the points and stops wherever he can get a 80 select/oxs fxo.v thoreau. chance. ... to try to polish the stone in its descent, to give it a peculiar turn, and make it whistle a tune, perchance would be of no use, if it were possible, l*tt*s, p. 158. jnuetitetor as some heads cannot earn, * much wine, so it would seem that i cannot bear so much society as you can. i have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if i don t get enough of it this year, i shall cry all the " c x t la limits, p. 160. if you have been to the top of mdmher mount washington, let me ask, than in the thingdooe. what did you find there ? that is the way they prove witnesses, you know. going up there and being blown on is noth :-_ \vo never io much climbing while we are there, but we eat our luncheon, etc., very much as at home. it is after we get home that we really go over the mountain, if ever. wtiat did the mountain say ? what did the mountain do ? lttms, p . 165. b&amp;lt; wanned now is the time to become con by activity. versan t with your wood-pile (this comes under work for the month), and be selections from thoreau. 8 1 sure you put some warmth into it by your way of getting it. do not consent to be passively warmed. an intense degree of that is the hotness that is threatened. but a positive warmth within can withstand the fiery furnace, as the vital heat of a living man can withstand the heat that cooks meat. lmrmts, p. 167. ?: i have lately got back to that i 11 * &amp;lt; i* glorious society, called solitude, where we meet our friends continually, and can imagine the outside world also to be peopled. yet some of my acquaintances would fain hustle me into the almshouse for the sake of society, as if i were pining for that diet, when i seem to myself a most befriended man, and find constant employment. lxttzss, p. 173. what a fool he must be who thinks that his el dorado is anywhere but where he lives. lcrms, p. 177. ., . what a battle a man must fight j^hfafcf everywhere to maintain his stand ing army of thoughts, and march with them in orderly array through the 82 selections from thoreau. always hostile country ! how many ene mies there are to sane thinking. every soldier has succumbed to them before he enlists for those other battles. letters, p. 179. the cost of it i s eas y enough to maintain a ks family, or a state, but it is hard thoughts. to ma i nta i n these children of your brain (or say, rather, these guests that trust to enjoy your hospitality), they make such great demands ; and yet, he who does only the former, and loses the power to think originally, or as only he ever can, fails mis erably. keep up the fires of thought, and all will go well. letters, p. 180. real success how y ou can overrun a coun fsvn ou7 try, climb any rampart, and carry thoughts. an y f ortress) w j t h an armv o f alert thoughts ! thoughts that send their bullets home to heaven s door, with which you can take the whole world, with out paying for it, or robbing anybody. see, the conquering hero comes ! you fail in your thoughts, or you prevail in your thoughts only. letters, p. 180. selections from thoreau. 83 thought a in your mind must be a liquor solvent for 1-1 ,-, t 1 1 11 the world, which will dissolve the world whenever it is dropt in it. there is no universal solvent but this, and all things together cannot saturate it. it will hold the universe in solution, and yet be as translucent as ever. letters, p . 181. right thinkprovided you think well, the ing irresist, , ibie. heavens falling, or the earth ga ping, will be music for you to march by. no foe can ever see you, or you him ; you cannot so much as think of him ; swords have no edges, bullets no penetration, for such a contest. letters, p. 180. the beauty look at mankind. no great hfe m i s n er o y ur difference between two, appa thoughts. rently . perhaps the same height, and breadth, and weight ; and yet, to the man who sits most east, this life is a wea riness, routine, dust and ashes, and he drowns his imaginary cares (!) (a sort of fric tion among his vital organs) in a bowl. but to the man who sits most west, his contempo rary (!), it is a field for all noble endeavors, an elysium, the dwelling-place of heroes and demigods. the former complains that 84 selections from thoreau. he has a thousand affairs to attend to ; but he does not realize that his affairs (though they may be a thousand) and he are one. letters, p. 182. grade the what is the use of a house if befor e d you y ou nave n&amp;gt;t got a tolerable pla net to put it on ? if you cannot tolerate the planet it is on ? grade the ground first. letters, p. 183. a man s ^ a man believes and expects foptehn r great things of himself, it makes no odds where you put him, or what you show him (of course you cannot put him anywhere, nor show him anything), he will be surrounded by grandeur. he is in the condition of a healthy and hungry man, who says to himself, how sweet this crust is ! if he despairs of himself, then tophet is his dwelling-place, and he is in the condition of a sick man who is disgusted with the fruits of finest flavor. letters, p. 183. whether he sleeps or wakes, whether he runs or walks, whether he uses a microscope or a telescope, or his naked selections from thoreau. 85 eye, a man never discovers anything, never overtakes anything, or leaves any thing behind, but himself. whatever he says or does, he merely reports himself. letters, p. 183. courage. each reaching and aspiration is an instinct with which all nature consists and cooperates, and therefore it is not in vain. but alas ! each relaxation and des peration is an instinct too. to be active, well, happy, implies rare courage. letters, p. 184. success the fact is, you have got to take de^o f nto th e world on your shoulders like atlas, and put along with it. you will do this for an idea s sake, and your success will be in proportion to your devotion to ideas. it may make your back ache occasionally, but you will have the satisfaction of hanging it or twirling it to suit yourself. cowards suffer, heroes en joy. after a long day s walk with it, pitch it into a hollow place, sit down and eat your luncheon. unexpectedly, by some immortal thoughts, you will be compen sated. the bank whereon you sit will be 86 selections from thoreau. a fragrant and flowery one, and your world in the hollow, a sleek and light gazelle. letters, p. 184. explore the what is the use of going right & m^dhii over the old track again ? there your ways. your own feet have worn. you must make tracks into the unknown. that is what you have your board and clothes for. why do you ever mend your clothes, unless that, wearing them, you may mend your ways. letters, p. 185. one s i am very busy, after my fash andspa 1 ? ion, little as there is to show for it, and feel as if i could not spend many days nor dollars in traveling ; for the shortest visit must have a fair margin to it, and the days thus affect the weeks, you know. nevertheless, we cannot forego these luxuries altogether. letters, p . 187. the shallowthis life is not for complaint, ness of .... a complaint, but for satisfaction. . . . any complaint / have to make is too serious to be uttered, for the evil cannot be mended. letters, p. i8s. selections from thoreau. 8/ unconscious how wholesome winter is, seen goodness. f ar or near . fo qw good, abovc all mere sentimental, warm-blooded, short lived, soft-hearted, moral goodness, com monly so-called. give me the goodness which has forgotten its own deeds, which god has seen to be good, and let be. letters, p. 194. what business have you, if you are " an angel of light," to be pondering over the deeds of darkness, reading the " new york herald " and the like ? letters, p . 195. i will not doubt the love untold which not my worth nor want hath bought, which wooed me young, and woos me old, and to this evening hath me brought. letters, p. 219. the ideal of e very walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some peter the her mit in us, to go forth and reconquer this holy land from the hands of the infidels. excursions, p. 162. 88 selections from thoreau. atnie no wealth can buy the requi r o al by er the ade site leisure, freedom, and inde graceofgod. pendence) which are the cap i ta l in this profession. it comes only by the grace of god. it requires a direct dispen sation from heaven to become a walker. excursions, p. 163. true walkthe walking of which i speak ing is not for .... exercise. has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours, as the swing ing of dumb-bells or chairs ; but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day. if you would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life. think of a man s swinging dumb-bells for his health, when those springs are bubbling up in far-off pastures unsought by him. excursions, p. 166. worldly i n m y walks i would fain re gotten f( ina turn to m y senses. what busi ness have i in the woods, if i am thinking of something out of the woods ? i suspect myself, and cannot help a shudder, when i find myself so implicated even in what are called good works, for this may sometimes happen. excursions, p. 169. selections from thoreau. 89 the interest an absolutely new prospect is a of a new . prospect. great happiness, and 1 can get this any afternoon. ... a single farm house which i had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the king of dahomey. excursions, p. 169. nature p refrom many a hill i can see vails over . ... . , , j r man in a civilization and the abodes or scape. man afar. the farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than wood-chucks and their burrows. man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture, even politics, the most alarm ing of them all, i am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape. excursions, p. 170. to enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoy ment of it. excursions, p. 175. the charm there are some intervals which ofwildness. thrush, to which i would migrate, wild lands where no settler has squatted, to to which, methinks, i am already accli mated. excursions, p. 186. 90 selections from thoreau. thejnost life consists with wildness. alive, the . wildest. i he most alive is the wildest. not yet subdued to man, its presence re freshes him. one who pressed forward incessantly and never rested from his labors, who grew fast and made infinite demands on life, would always find himself in a new country or wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life. excursions, p. 187. theattraci derive more of my subsis tiveness of . , , . , swamps. tence from the swamps which sur round my native town than from the culti vated gardens in the village. there are no richer pastures to my eyes than the dense beds of dwarf andromcda which cover these tender places on the earth s surface. excursions, p. 188. my spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness. give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness. excursions, p. 189. wild thinkit is the uncivilized, free, and ing delights . . . . . . ., . , us. wild thinking in hamlet and the " iliad," in all the scriptures and my thologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us. excursions, p. 193. selections from thoreau. 91 wiidness of a truly good book is something books. as natural and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of the west or in the jungles of the east. excursions, p. 193. no poetry i do not know of any poetry to naulre. as quote which adequately expresses this yearning for the wild. approached from this side, the best poetry is tame. i do not know where to find in any literature, ancient or modern, any account which con tents me of that nature with which even i am acquainted. excursions, p. 195. the soul by long years of patient indus saence. try and reading of the newspa pers, for what are the libraries of science but files of newspapers ? a man accumu lates a myriad facts, lays them up in his memory, and then when in some spring of his life he scampers abroad into the great fields of thought, he, as it were, goes to grass like a horse, and leaves all his har ness behind in the stable. excursions, p. 203. knowledge a man s ignorance sometimes wtsffhan is not only useful, but beautiful, ignorance. _ while his knowledge, so called, 92 selections from thoreau. is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly. which is the best man to deal with, he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all ? excursions, p. 204. aim above m y desire for knowledge is in knowledge. my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. the high est that we can attain to is not knowledge, but sympathy with intelligence. excursions, p. 204. free and "that is active duty," says acdvify, the tne vishnu purana, "which is not for our bondage ; that is know ledge which is for our liberation ; all other duty is good only unto weariness ; all other knowledge is only the cleverness of an artist. excursions, p. 205. a border f r mv p art &amp;gt; i ^ ce ^ tnat naturs regard to nature i live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world into which i make occasional and selections from thoreau. 93 transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the state into whose territories i seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper. excursions, p. 2 o 7 . vision the walker in the familiar fields works g of the which stretch around my native ^dn ess of town sometimes finds himself in another land than is described in their owners deeds. . . . these farms . . . have no chemistry to fix them ; they fade from the surface of the glass, and the pic ture which the painter painted stands out dimly from beneath. excursions, p. 207. the realm we are accustomed to say in laid waste new england that few and fewer by worldly ... .~ living. pigeons visit us every year. our forests furnish no mast for them. so, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste, sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill, and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on. excursions, p . 209 . the great so we saunter toward the holy fe val ue land . til] one da y the sun sha11 shine more brightly than ever he 94 selections from thoreau. has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in autumn. excursions, p. 214. thecompiith e greatest compliment that ^g n one f s va u " was ever p a id me was when one asked me what / thought, and at tended to my answer. i am surprised as well as delighted when this happens, it is such a rare use he would make of me, as if he were acquainted with the tool. yankee in canada, etc., p. 248. the glory of this world is a place of busi ness. what an infinite bustle! i am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. it interrupts my dreams. there is no sabbath. it would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. yankee in canada, etc., p. 249. outdoor we must go out and re-ally our selves to nature every day. we must make root, send out some little fibre at least, even every winter day. i am sen sible that i am imbibing health when i selections from thoreau. 95 open my mouth to the wind. staying in the house breeds a sort of insanity always. every house is, in this sense, a sort of hos pital. a night and a forenoon is as much confinement to those wards as i can stand. i am aware that i recover some sanity which i had lost, almost the instant that i come abroad. winter, p. 57. the evil of to have done anything by which money g vou earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. if the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated ; he cheats himself. yankee in canada, etc., p. 251. "work for the aim of the laborer should work s sake." ^ nqt tq get ^ li v j ng) to g et a good job," but to perform well a certain work. . . . do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it. yankee in canada, etc., p. 252. thetmiy the community has no bribe man. that will tempt a wise man. you may raise money enough to tunnel a moun tain, but you cannot raise money enough 96 selections from thoreau. to hire a man who is minding his own business. an efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the community pay him for it or not. yankee in canada, etc., p. 253. artificial perhaps i am more than usually lave us. jealous with respect to my free dom. ... if my wants should be much in creased, the labor required to supply them would become a drudgery. if i should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to so ciety, as most appear to do, i am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for. i trust that i shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage. yankee in canada, etc., p. 253. the constant as for the comparative demand elevation of ... ,.,... which men make on life, it is an our aim. important difference between two, that one is satisfied with a level success, that his marks can all be hit by point-blank shots, but the other, however low and unsuccess ful his life may be, constantly elevates his aim, though at a very slight angle to the horizon. yankee in canada, etc., p. 254. selections from thoreau. 97 living and it is remarkable that there is fivin jfshouid little or nothing to be remembered beautiful. written on the subject of getting a living : how to make getting a living not merely honest and honorable, but altogether inviting and glorious ; for if getting a living is not so, then living is not. yankee in canada, etc., p. 254. cold and hunger seem more friendly to my nature than those methods which men have adopted and advise to ward them off. yankee in canada, etc., p. 255. the ordinary the wa y s in whi ch most men edng of g et their living, that is, live, are hostne s to mere make-shifts, and a shirking of the real business of life, chiefly because they do not know, but partly be cause they do not mean, any better. yankee in canada, etc., p. 255. a grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom. yankee in canada, etc., p. 257. where alone men rusn to california and themzegold to be found in that direction ; but 98 selections from thoreau. that is to go to the very opposite extreme to where it lies. ... is not our native soil auriferous ? does not a stream from the golden mountains flow through our native valley ? and has not this for more than geologic ages been bringing down the shining particles and forming the nuggets for us ? yankee in canada, etc., p. 258. what shall it a man had better starve at once f/he shat" tnan l se h* s innocence in the ^hoie h worid, process of getting his bread. if within the sophisticated man there is not an unsophisticated one, then he is but one of the devil s angels. as we grow old we live more coarsely, we relax a little in our disciplines, and, to some extent, cease to obey our finest instincts. but we should be fastidious to the extreme of sanity, dis regarding the gibes of those who are more unfortunate than ourselves. yankee in canada, etc., p. 260. the limited i hardly know an intellectual men. man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society. most with whom you endeavor to talk soon come to a stand against some selection s from thoreau. 99 institution in which they appear to hold stock, that is, some particular, not uni versal, way of viewing things. they will continually thrust their own low roof, with its narrow skylight, between you and the sky, when it is the unobstructed heavens you would view. yankee in canada, etc., p. 261. religion i n some lyceums they tell me language of that they have voted to exclude the subject of religion. but how do i know what their religion is, and when i am near to it or far from it ? i have walked into such an arena and done my best to make a clean breast of what reli gion i have experienced, and the audience never suspected what i was about. yankee in canada, etc., p. 261. the low i ften accuse my finest ac demandwe quaintanccs of an immense fri rna.ke upon i each other. vo iity ; for, while there are man ners and compliments we do not meet, we do not teach one another the lessons of honesty and sincerity that the brutes do, or of steadiness and solidity that the rocks do. the fault is commonly mutual, 100 selections from thoreau. however ; for we do not habitually demand any more of each other. yankee in canada, etc., p. 262. shallow when our life ceases to be in mtercourse. warc j an( | p r i va te, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. we rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor ; and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is, that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not. yankee in canada, etc., p. 263. lifesacni do not know but it is too newspaper, much to read one newspaper a week. i have tried it recently, and for so long it seems to me that i have not dwelt in my native region. the sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say not so much to me. you cannot serve two masters. it requires more than a day s devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day. yankee in canada, etc., p. 263. a world if y u chance to live and move that ff the ar &amp;gt;d have your being in that thin newspaper. stratum j n ^j^ t h e cvcnts that selections from thoreau. ioi make the news transpire, thinner than the paper on which it is printed, then these things will fill the world for you ; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them. yankee in canada, etc., p. 264. the mind i am astonished to observe how not to be . . desecrated willing men are . . . to permit idle by gossip and affairs, rumors and incidents of the most insignificant kind to intrude on ground which should be sacred to thought. shall the mind be a public arena, where the af fairs of the street and the gossip of the tea-table chiefly are discussed ? or shall it be a quarter of heaven itself, an hy paethral temple, consecrated to the service of the gods ? yankee in canada, etc., p. 265. intellectual it is important to preserve the and moral . . , suicide. mind s chastity. . . . think of ad mitting the details of a single case of the criminal court into our thoughts, to stalk profanely through their very sanctum sanc torum for an hour, ay, for many hours ! to make a very bar-room of the mind s in most apartment, as if for so long the very dust of the street had occupied us, the io2 selections from thoreau. very street itself, with all its travel, its bustle, and filth, had passed through our thoughts shrine ! would it not be an in tellectual and moral suicide ? yankee in canada, etc., p. 265. let your ^ i am to be a thoroughfare, i jtpen ufthe prefer that it be of the mountain brooks, parnassian streams, and not the town sewers. there is inspiration, that gossip which comes to the ear of the attentive mind from the courts of heaven. there is the profane and stale revelation of the bar-room and the police court. the same ear is fitted to receive both commu nications. only the character of the hear er determines to which it shall be opened, and to which closed. yankee in canada, etc., p. 266. science even the facts of science may akoindust the mind by their dryness, spirauon. un i ess th e y are in a sense effaced each morning, or rather rendered fertile by the dews of fresh and living truth. know ledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven. yankee in canada, etc., p. 267. selections from thokeau. 103 political do we call this the land of the freedom but ... . a means. free ? . . . what is the value of any political freedom but as a means to moral freedom ? . . . it is our children s children who may perchance be really free. yankee in canada, etc, p. 268. we quarter our gross bodies on our poor souls, till the former eat up all the latter s substance. yankee in canada, etc., p. 268. manners it is the vice . . . of manners apart from . . .. , . character. that they are continually being deserted by the character ; they are cast off clothes or shells, claiming the respect which belonged to the living creature. . . . the man who thrusts his manners upon me does as if he were to insist on intro ducing me to his cabinet of curiosities when i wished to see himself. it was not in this sense that the poet decker called christ "the first true gentleman that ever breathed. yankee in canada, etc., p. 269. the most the chief want, in every state ducuonsof that i have been into, was a high and earnest purpose in its inhabi tants. , . when we want culture more 104 selections from thokeau. than potatoes, and illumination more than sugar-plums, then the great resources of a world are taxed and drawn out, and the result, or staple production, is, not slaves, nor operatives, but men, those rare fruits called heroes, saints, poets, philosophers, and redeemers. yankee in canada, etc., p. 271. truth and institutions. 3. snow-drift is formed where would say, where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up. but the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at length blows it down. yankee in canada, etc., p. 271. the authorpoetry is so universally true ship of f poetry. and independent 01 experience that it does not need any particular biog raphy to illustrate it, but we refer it sooner or later to some orpheus or linus, and after ages to the genius of humanity, and the gods themselves. week, p . 102. hours above we should be at the helm at least once a day. the whole of the day should not be daytime ; there should be one hour, if not more, when the day did not bring forth. week, p . 103. selections from thoreau. 1 05 read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all. week, p. 103. thehibemathe poet is he that hath fat poet. enough, like bears and marmots, to suck his claws all winter. he hiber nates in this world, and feeds on his own marrow, ... is ... a sort of dormouse gone into winter quarters of deep and se rene thoughts, insensible to surrounding circumstances ; his words are the relation of his oldest and finest memory, a wisdom drawn from the remotest experience. other men lead a starved existence, meanwhile, like hawks that would fain keep on the wing and trust to pick up a sparrow now and then. week, p . 106. the rarity of a perfectly healthy sentence perfect ex. . pression. is ... extremely rare. for the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought ; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of morning or evening with out their colors, or the heavens without their azure. week, p. no. 106 selections from thoreau. are o f ten struck by the ma y hep force and precision of style to which hard-working men, unprac tised in writing, easily attain, when re quired to make the effort ; as if plainness and vigor and sincerity, the ornaments of style, were better learned on the farm and in the workshop than in the schools. week, p. 113. hours of some hours seem not to be resolution. occas j on f or any dccd&amp;gt; but f qr resolves to draw breath in. we do not directly go about the execution of the pur pose that thrills us, but shut our doors be hind us and ramble with prepared mind, as if the half were already done. our reso lution is taking root or hold . . . then, as seeds first send a shoot downward, which is fed by their own albumen, ere they send one upward to the light. week, p . u s . few speak the scholar is not apt to make eugh of his most familiar experience come gracefully to the aid of his ex pression. very few men can speak of nature, for instance, with any truth. they overstep her modesty somehow or other, selections from thoreau. io/ and confer no favor. they do not speak a good word for her. . . . the surliness with which the woodchopper speaks of his woods, handling them indifferently as his axe, is better than the mealy-mouthed enthusiasm of the lover of nature. better that the primrose by the river s brim be a yellow primrose and nothing more, than that it be something less. week, p . n s . always room a good book will never have for a true r . book. been forestalled, but the topic itself will in one sense be new, and its author, by consulting with nature, will con sult not only with those who have gone be fore, but with those who may come after. there is always room and occasion enough for a true book on any subject, as there is room for more light the brightest day, and more rays will not interfere with the first. week, p. 116. good and one sailor was visited in his bad sleep. breams this night by the evil destinies, and all those powers that are hostile to human life, which constrain and oppress the minds of men, and make their path seem difficult and narrow, and beset io8 selections from thoreau. with dangers. . . . but the other hap pily passed a serene and even ambrosial or immortal night, and his sleep was dream less, or only the atmosphere of pleasant dreams remained, a happy, natural sleep until the morning, and his cheerful spirit soothed and reassured his brother, for whenever they meet, the good genius is sure to prevail. week, p . 123. thesigmfiwhen we are in health, all music. sounds fife and drum for us ; we hear the notes of music in the air, or catch its echoes dying away when we awake in the dawn. marching is when the pulse of the hero beats in unison with the pulse of nature, and he steps to the measure of the universe ; then there is true courage and invincible strength. week, p . is s . music is the sound of the universal laws promulgated. it is the only assured tone. there are in it such strains as far surpass any man s faith in the loftiness of his des tiny. week, p. 185. history not we should read history as little critically. critically as we consider the land selections from thoreau. ioq scape, and be more interested by the at mospheric tints and various lights and shades which the intervening spaces cre ate, than by its groundwork and composi tion. it is the morning now turned even ing and seen in the west, the same sun, but a new light and atmosphere. ... in reality, history fluctuates as the face of the landscape from morning to evening. what is of moment is its hue and color . . . ; we want not its then, but its now. we do not complain that the mountains in the horizon are blue and indistinct ; they are the more like the heavens. week, p . :6 4 . divine what are threescore years and ten, hurriedly and coarsely lived, to moments of divine leisure, in which your life is coincident with the life of the uni verse ? we live too fast and coarsely, just as we eat too fast, and do not know the true savor of our food. we consult our will and our understanding and the expec tation of men, not our genius. i can im pose upon myself tasks which will crush me for life and prevent all expansion, and this i am but too inclined to do. winter, p. 45. 1 10 selections from thoreau. the muse the loftiest strains of the muse too plaintive. ay ^ for the most ^^ sublimely plaintive, and not a carol as free as na ture s. the contest which the sun shines to celebrate from morning to evening is unsung. the muse solaces herself, and is not ravished, but consoled. . . . but in homer and chaucer there is more of the serenity and innocence of youth than in the more modern and moral poets. week, p. 389. a spomaneto th e innocent there are nei cenctabove ther cherubims nor angels. at rare intervals we rise above the necessity of virtue into an unchangeable morning light, in which we have only to live right on and breathe the ambrosial air. week, p. 390. there is no wisdom that can take place of humanity. week, p . 39 i. each deed our whole lif e is taxed for the oy thtwhlie least thing well done. it is its net result. how we eat, drink, sleep, and use our desultory hours now in these indifferent days, with no eye to ob selections from thoreau. ill serve and no occasion to excite us, deter mines our authority and capacity for the time to come. early spring, p. 22. a friend s ^ friend advises by his whole behavior, and never condescends to particulars. another chides away a fault, he loves it away. while he sees the other s error, he is silently conscious of it, and only the more loves truth itself, and assists his friend in loving it, till the fault is expelled and gently extinguished. early spring, p. 28. a lesson simplicity is the law of nature from the . urn flowers. for men as well as for flowers. when the tapestry (corolla) of the nuptial bed (calyx) is excessive, luxuriant, it is un productive. . . . such a flower has no true progeny, and can only be reproduced by the humble mode of cuttings from its stem or roots. . . . the fertile flowers are single, not double. early spring, p. 28. the source l have thoughts, as i walk, on above u o g u h rsome subject that is running in my head, but all their pertinence seems gone before i can get home to set 112 selections from thoreau. them down. the most valuable thoughts which i entertain are anything but what 7 thought. nature abhors a vacuum, and if i can only walk with sufficient carelessness i am sure to be filled. early spring, p. 34. there must there can be no good reading hearing to unless there is good hearing also. make a good _ . reader. it takes two, at least, for this game, as for love, and they must coope rate. early spring, p. 52. anadvanthe birds i heard [to-day], tageofigno. ranee. which, fortunately, did not come within the scope of my science, sang as freshly as if it had been the first morning of creation, and had for background to their song an untrodden wilderness stretching through many a carolina and mexico of the soul. early spring, p. 55. the stanwe forget to strive and aspire, dard within us. to do better even than is expected of us. i cannot stay to be congratulated. i would leave the world behind me. . . . to please our friends and relatives we turn out our silver ore in cartloads, while we neglect to work our mines of gold known only to ourselves, far up in the sierras, selections from thoreau. 113 where we pulled up a bush in our mountain walk, and saw the glittering treasure. let us return thither. let it be the price of our freedom to make that known. winter, p. 169. unconscious we reprove each other uncon sciously by our own behavior. our very carriage and demeanor in the streets should be a reprimand that will go to the conscience of every beholder. an infusion of love from a great soul gives a color to our faults which will discover them as lunar caustic detects impurities in water. the best will not seem to go contrary to others ; but as if they could afford to travel the same way, they go a parallel but higher course. jonson says, " that to the vulgar canst thyself apply, treading a better path, not contrary." early spring, p. 56. we must how can our love increase un friend a r s we ^ ess ur loveliness increases also ? we must securely love each other as we love god, with no more danger that our love be unrequited or ill bestowed. there is that in my friend before which i must first decay and prove untrue. early spring, p. 62. 114 selections from thoreau. respectyour impulse is, after all, the best impulses. linguist; its logic, if not confor mable to aristotle, cannot fail to be most convincing. the nearer we can approach to a complete but simple transcript of our thought, the more tolerable will be the piece, for we can endure to consider our selves in a state of passivity or in involun tary action, but rarely can we endure to consider our efforts, and least of all, our rare efforts. early spring, p. 77. essential we must not expect to probe life not to . . e be probed, with our nngcrs the sanctuary of any life, whether animal or vegetable. if we do, we shall discover nothing but sur face still. the ultimate expression or fruit of any created thing is a fine effluence, which only the most ingenuous worshiper perceives at a reverent distance from its surface even. . . . only that intellect makes any progress toward conceiving of the essence which at the same time per ceives the effluence. early spring, p. 83. no ripeness there is no ripeness which is merely the .. . . . means. not, so to speak, something ulti mate in itself, and not merely a perfected selections from thoreau. 115 means to a higher end. in order to be ripe it must serve a transcendent use. the ripeness of a leaf, being perfected, leaves the tree at that point, and never returns to it. early spring, p. 84. music has a history of music would be no history. jj^ the history of the f lltufc, f of so little past is it and capable of record that it is but the hint of a prophecy. ... it has no history more than god. . . . pro perly speaking, there can be no history but natural history, for there is no past in the soul, but in nature. ... i might as well write the history of my aspirations. early spring, p. 85. the warbie the bluebird on the apple-tree, of the blue, , . . , . . bird. warbling so innocently, to inquire if any of its mates are within call, the angel of the spring ! fair and innocent, yet the offspring of the earth. the color of the sky, above, and of the subsoil, be neath, suggesting what sweet and innocent melody, terrestrial melody, may have its birthplace between the sky and the ground. early spring, p. no. il6 selections from thoreau. contentwe can only live healthily the [heiife^ life th e gods assign us. i must us receive my life as passively as the willow leaf that flutters over the brook. i must not be for myself, but god s work, and that is always good. . . . my fate can not but be grand so. we may live the life of a plant or an animal without living an animal life. this constant and universal content of the animal comes of resting quietly in god s palm. early spring, p. in. the delight my friend! my friend! ... to courlfwith address thee delights me, there is such clearness in the delivery. i am delivered of my tale, which, told to strangers, still would linger in my life as if untold, or doubtful how it ran. early spring, p. 112. real wealth. i wish so to live ever as to derive my satisfactions and inspirations from the commonest events, every-day phenomena, so that what my senses hourly perceive in my daily walk, the conversations of my neighbors, may inspire me, and i may dream of no heaven but that which lies about me. ... i do not wish my native soil selections from thoreau. 1 1/ to become exhausted and run out through neglect. only that traveling is good which reveals to me the value of home, and enables me to enjoy it better. that man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest. early spring, p. 114. solitude and mrs a takes on dolefully on account of the solitude in which she lives ; but she gets little consolation. mrs. b. says she envies her that retirement. mrs. a. is aware that she does, and says it is as if a thirsty man should envy another the river in which he is drowning. so goes the world. it is either this extreme or that. of solitude, one gets too much ; another, not enough. early spring,?. 116. turn the scholar finds in his experi tovvards the light. ence some studies to be most fer tile and radiant with light, others, dry, barren, and dark. if he is wise he will not persevere in the last, as a plant in a cel lar will strive towards the light. . . . dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows. a man may associate with such companions, he may pursue such em il8 selections from thoreau. ployments, as will darken the day for him. men choose darkness rather than light. early spring, p. 121. the solitude how alone must our life be of a human ,. , , soul. lived. we dwell on the seashore, and none between us and the sea. men are my merry companions, my fellow-pil grims, who beguile the way, but leave me at the first turn in the road, for none are traveling one road so far as myself. . . . parents and relatives but entertain the youth. they cannot stand between him and his destiny. early spring, p. 128. " the kingi am startled that god can make dom of god . , . , , cometh not me so rich, even with my own with obser, _ , , .. vation." cheap stores. it needs but a few wisps of straw in the sun, some small word dropped, or that has long lain silent in some book. when heaven begins, and the dead arise, no trumpet is blown. perhaps the south wind will blow. early spring, p. 129. let love rest as soon as i see people loving on common aspirations, what they see merely, and not their own high hopes that they form of oth ers, i pity them and do not want their love. selections from thoreau. 1 19 did i ask thee to love me who hate myself ? no ! love that which i love, and i will love thee that loves it. early spring, p. 133 the promise life is grand, and so are its en in the face of r -n i t^ nature. vironments of last and ruture. would the face of nature be so serene and beautiful if man s destiny were not equally so ? early spring, p. 133. singleness what am i good for how, who of purpose. am stm searc hi n g after high things, but to hear and tell the news, to bring wood and water, and count how many eggs the hens lay ? in the mean while i expect my life to begin. i will not aspire longer. i will see what it is i would be after. i will be unanimous. early spring, p. 134. water in no sooner has the ice of wal eariy spring. den me lted than the wind begins to play in dark ripples over the face of the virgin water. it is affecting to see nature so tender, however old, and wearing none of the wrinkles of age. ice dissolved is the next moment as perfect water as if it had been melted a million years. to see 120 selections from thoreau. that which was lately so hard and immov able now so soft and impressible! what if our moods could dissolve thus completely ? it is like a flush of life on a cheek that was dead. it seems as if it must rejoice in its own newly-acquired fluidity, as it affects the beholder with joy. early spring, p. 135. the privacy o ur religion is as unpublic and of rehgion. i nco mmunicable as our poetical vein, and to be approached with as much love and tenderness. early spring, p . i 37 . nobook as i am going to the woods, i can match . 11 i i nature. think to take some small book in my pocket, whose author has been there already, whose pages will be as good as my thoughts, and will eke them out, or show me human life still gleaming in the horizon when the woods have shut out the town. but i can find none. none will sail as far forward into the bay of nature as my thought. they stay at home. i would go home. when i get to the wood, their thin leaves rustle in my fingers. they are bare and obvious, and there is no halo or haze about them. nature lies fair and far be hind them all. early spring, p. 137. selections from thoreau. 121 the divinity when god made man he re of the human . . eye. served some parts and some rights to himself. the eye has many qualities which belong to god more than man. it is his lightning which flashes therein. when i look into my companion s eye, i think it is god s private mine. it is a noble feature ; it cannot be degraded. for god can look on all things undefiled. early spring, p. 138. no truth the only way to speak the truth without love. is to speak i ov i ng i yi only the lover s words are heard. the intellect should never speak. it does not utter a natural sound. early spring, p. 139. disinterthe great and solitary heart estedlove. ^ iqvq ^^ without the knqw _ ledge of its object. it cannot have society in its love. it will expend its love as the cloud drops rain upon the fields over which it lioclts. early spring, p. 139. aspirations i p^y that the life of this spring m the spring. anc j summ er may ever lie fair in my memory. may i dare as i have never done. may i persevere as i have never 122 selections from thoreau. done. may i purify myself anew as with fire and water, soul and body. may my melody not be wanting to the season. may i gird myself to be a hunter of the beauti ful, that naught escape me. may i attain to a youth never attained. early spring, p. 140. human and men make an arbitrary code, divine law. andj b ecause j t j s not r j gnt) they try to make it prevail by might. the moral law does not want any champion. its assertors do not go to war. it was never infringed with impunity. it is in consistent to deny war and maintain law, for if there were no need of war, there would be no need of law. early spring, p. 147. the bluehow much more habitable a few atlheendof birds make the fields! at the winter end of the winter, when the fields are bare, and there is nothing to relieve the monotony of withered vegetation, our life seems reduced to its lowest terms. but let a bluebird come and warble over them, and what a change ! the note of the first bluebird in the air answers to the purling rill of melted snow beneath. it is evi selections from thoreau. 123 dently soft and soothing, and, as surely as the thermometer, indicates a higher tem perature. it is the accent of the south wind, its vernacular. early spring, p. 168. nature on each new year is a surprise to *hasfc?st us. we find that we had virtu ally forgotten the note of each bird, and when we hear it again it is re membered like a dream, reminding us of a previous state of existence. how happens it that the associations it awakens are al ways pleasing, never saddening, reminis cences of our sanest hours. the voice of nature is always encouraging. early spring, p. 170. a contribution toward a bibliography of thoreau "a truth-speaker he, capable of the most deep and strict conver sation ; a physician to the wounds of any soul." emerson. preface. " it is the bibliographer who of all men has most occasion to realize the imperfec tion of human endeavor. completeness in bibliography is an ignis fatuus that eludes even the closest pursuit and the most pains taking endeavor." if such an adept as mr. r. r. bowker makes the above avowal (and it may be found in his preface to the "american catalogue," 1 885), that fact must plead for the "imperfection" of this bit of prentice work, which has been done in such moments as could be stolen from the imperative duties of an arduous profession. to be suddenly summoned from searching a catalogue to soothe a colic may be " busi ness ; " it is hardly bibliographing. this "contribution " is not the result of an "endeavor " at "completeness." it is 128 preface. simply a thank-offering to thoreau s memo ry, from one who has been " lifted up and strengthened" by his example. it was compiled in the hope that it might facili tate the study of, and enlarge an acquain tance with, the author of "the only book yet written in america, to my thinking, that bears an annual perusal." standing at thoreau s graveside some twenty-eight years ago, emerson said, " the country knows not yet, or in least part, how great a son it has lost. ... his soul was made for the noblest society ; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world ; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home." there is too much of truth in the fear that the man so certified "great, intelligent, sensual, avaricious america" knows not yet, or in least part. there is peril for the soul in such ignorance. to those unacquainted with thoreau, this "contribution" will afford an aid for which the compiler would long since have preface. 129 been very grateful. whatever of worth it may have as a contribution is wholly due to courtesies received from h. s. salt, lon don ; geo. willis cooke ; wm. c. lane, harvard college library ; r. c. davis, librarian of the university of michigan ; to whom be thanks. ann arbor, 2$th may, 1890. a contribution toward a bibliography of henry david thoreau. i. papers, poems, and books by thoreau. 1840. sympathy. the dial, i. 71 (july). reprinted in the collection of poems at the close of letters to various persons. aulus persius flaccus. the dial, i. 117 (july). reprinted in a week on the concord and merrimack rivers, p. 326. 1841. stanzas: "nature doth have her dawn each day." the dial, i. 314 (january). reprinted in a week on the concord and merrimack rivers, p. 301. sic vita. the dial, ii. 81 (july). reprinted in a week on the concord and merrimack rivers, p. 405. friendship. the dial, ii. 204 (october). re printed under the title, " romans, country men, and lovers," in the collection of poems at the close of letters to various persons j also in a week on the concord and merri tnack rivers, p. 304. 132 bibliography. 1842. natural history of massachusetts. the dial, iii. 19 (july). reprinted in excursions. prayers. the dial, iii. 77 (july). reprinted in a yankee in canada, with anti-slavery and reform papers. the black knight. the dial, iii. 180 (octo ber). the inward morning. the dial, iii. 198 (oc tober). reprinted in a week on the concord and merrimack rivers, p. 311. free love. the dial, iii. 199 (october). re printed in a week on the concord and mer rimack rivers, p. 296. the poet s delay. the dial, iii. 200 (octo ber). reprinted in a week on the concord and merrimack rivers, p. 364. rumors from an ^eolian harp. the dial. iii. 200 (october). reprinted in a week on the concord and merrimack rivers, p. 185. the moon. the dial, iii. 222 (october). to the maiden in the east. the dial, iii. 222 (october). reprinted in a week on the con cord and merrimack rivers, p. 54. the summer rain. the dial, iii. 224 (octo ber). reprinted in a week on the concord and merrimack rivers, p. 320. 1843. the laws of menu. selected by h. d. t. the dial, iii. 331 (january). the prometheus bound. translated by h. d. t. the dial, iii. 363 (january). anacreon. with translations. the dial, iii. 484 (april). reprinted in a week on the concord and merrimack rivers, p. 238. bibliography. 133 to a stray fowl. the dial, iii. 505 (april). orphics: smoke, haze. the dial, iii. 505 (april). reprinted in the collection of poems at the close of letters to various persons; also, the former in walden, p. 271 ; the latter in a week on the concord and merrimack rivers, p. 229. dark ages. the dial, iii. 527 (april). re printed in a week on the concord and mer rimack rivers, pp. 164-168. a winter walk. the dial, iv. 211 (october). reprinted in excursions. a walk to wachusett. the boston miscel lany. reprinted in excursions. the landlord. the democratic review, xiii. 427 (october). reprinted in excursions. paradise (to be) regained. the democratic review, xiii. 451 (november). reprinted in a yankee in canada, with anti-slavery and reform papers. 1844. homer, ossian, chaucer; extracts from a lecture on poetry, read before the concord lyceum, november 29, 1843. the dial, iv. 290 (january). pindar. translations. the dial, iv. 379 (jan uary) herald of freedom. the dial, iv. 507 (april). reprinted in a yankee in canada, with anti-slavery and reform papers. fragments of pindar. the dial, iv. 513 (april). 1845. wendell phillips before the concord lyceum. the liberator, march 28. reprinted in a 134 bibliography. yankee in canada, with anti-slavery and reform papers. 1847. thomas carlyle and his works. graham s magazine, march, april. reprinted in a yankee in canada, with anti-slavery and reform papers. 1848. ktaadn and the maine woods. the union magazine. reprinted in the maine woods. 1849. a week on the concord and merri mack. rivers. boston and cambridge: james munroe & co. reissued in 1867 by ticknor & fields. resistance to civil government. ^esthetic papers, i. 189-211. reprinted with the title " civil disobedience " in a yankee in canada, with antislavery and reform papers. 1853. excursion to canada. putnam 1 s magazine, i. 54, 179, 321 (january, february, march). chapters i., ii., iii., of a yankee in canada. 1854. walden; or, life in the woods. bos ton: ticknor & fields. reissued in 1889 in two volumes, by houghton, mifflin & co., in the riverside aldine series. slavery in massachusetts ; an address delivered at the anti-slavery celebration at framing ham, mass., july 4. the liberator, july 21. reprinted in a yankee in canada, with anti-slavery and reform papers. 1855. cape cod. putnam s magazine, v. 632, vi. 59, 157 (june, july, august). chapters i. iv. of cape cod. 1858. chesuncook. the atlantic monthly, ii. i, bibliography. 1 3 5 224, 305 (june, july, august). reprinted in the maine woods. 1859. a plea for captain john brown. read to the citizens of concord, mass., sunday even ing, october 30. a yankee in canada, with a nil-slavery and reform papers. 1860. reminiscences of john brown. read at north elba, n. y., july 4. the liberator, july 27. reprinted with the title " the last days of john brown " in a yankee in can ada, with anti-slavery and reform papers. the succession of forest trees ; an address read to the middlesex agricultural society in concord, september. the new york weekly tribune, october 6 ; also in middle sex agricultural transactions. reprinted in excursions. remarks at concord on the day of the execu tion of john brown. echoes from harper s ferry. boston : thayer & eldridge, p. 439, 1862. walking. the atlantic monthly, ix. 657 (june). reprinted in excursions. autumnal tints. the atlantic monthly, x. 385 (october). reprinted in excursions. wild apples. the atlantic monthly, x. 313 (november). reprinted in excursions. 1863. life without principle. the atlantic month ly, xii. 484 (october). reprinted in a yan kee in canada, with anti-slavery and re form papers. night and moonlight. the atlantic monthly, xii. 579 (november). reprinted in excur 1 36 bibliography, excursions. (with biographical sketch by r. w. emerson.) boston : ticknor & fields. 1864. the maine woods. (edited by w. e. channing.) boston : ticknor & fields. n. b. this volume contains the allegash and east branch, not before printed. the wellfleet oysterman. the atlantic monthly, xiv. 470 (october). reprinted in cape cod. the highland light. the atlantic monthly, xiv. 649 (december). reprinted in cape cod. cape cod. (edited by w. e. channing.) bos ton: ticknor & fields. [publisher s date, 1865.] 1865. letters to various persons. (edited by r. w. emerson.) boston : ticknor & fields. 1866. a yankee in canada, with anti-sla very and reform papers. (edited by w. e. channing.) boston : ticknor & fields. 1878. april days. the atlantic monthly, xli. 445 (april). may days. the atlantic monthly, xli. 567 (may). days in june. the atlantic monthly, xli. 71 1 (june). reprinted in summer. 1881. early spring in massachusetts : from the journal of henry d. thoreau. (edited by h. g. o. blake.) boston: houghton, mifflin & co. 1884. summer: from the journal of henry bibliography. 137 d. thoreau. (edited by h. g. o. blake.) boston: houghton, mifflin & co. 1885. winter days. the atlantic monthly, iv. 79 (january). reprinted in winter, pp. 81-107. 1887. winter: from the journal of henry d. thoreau. (edited by h. g. o. blake.) boston: houghton, mifflin & co. [publish er s date, 1888.] ii. books wholly or in part devoted to thoreau. 1855. duyckinck, e. a. and g. l. henry d. thoreart. cyclopaedia of american lit erature, ii. 653-656. new york: charles scribner. 1857. curtis, g.w. thoreau. homes of ameri can authors, pp. 247-248; 250-251. new york : d. appleton and company. 1863. emerson, r. w. biographical sketch. in thoreau s excursions. issued also in complete works, riverside edition, x., pp. 421-452. boston: houghton, mifflin & co. 1866. alger, w. r. thoreau. the solitudes of nature and of man, pp. 329-338. bos ton : roberts brothers. 1868. hawthorne, n. passages from the american note-books, ii., pp. 96-99. boston : ticknor & fields. 1871. lowell, j. r. thoreau. my study win dows, pp. 193-209. boston: james r. os good & co. 138 bibliography. 1873. charming, w. e. thoreau : the poet naturalist. boston: roberts brothers. alcott, a. b. thoreau, walden pond. con cord days, pp. 11-20, 259-264. boston: roberts brothers. 1877. page, h. a. (dr. a. h. japp). thoreau : his life and aims. boston: james r. osgood & co. 1878. sanborn, f. b. memoirs of john brown, pp. 45, 49-51. concord, mass. 1879. higginson, t. w. thoreau. short stud ies of american authors, pp. 23-31. boston: lee & shepard. 1880. james, jr., h. hawthorne. ame-ican men of letters, pp. 93-94. new york: harper and brothers. 1880. scudder, horace e. henry david thoreau. american prose, pp. 296-301. boston: houghton, mifflin and co. 1881. flagg, wilson. thoreau. halcyon days, pp. 164-168. boston: estes & lauriat. cooke, g. w. ralph waldo emerson: his life, writings, and philosophy. (vide index.) boston: james r. osgood & co. 1882. conway, m. d. thoreau. emerson at home and abroad, pp. 279-289. boston : james r. osgood & co. alcott, a. b. sonnets and canzonets. boston : roberts brothers. nichol, prof. john. tjioreau. american literature: an historical sketch, pp. 313-321. edinburgh: adam and charles black. bibliography. 1 39 welsh, a. h. thoreau. development of english literature and language, ii., pp. 409-414. chicago: s. c. griggs & co. burroughs, john. t/wreaiis wildness. es says from the critic, pp. 9-18. boston: james r. osgood & co. sanborn, f. b. thoreau s unpublished po etry. essays from the critic, pp. 71-78. boston : james r. osgood & co. sanborn, f. b. reading from thoreau s manuscripts. concord lectures on phi losophy, pp. 124-126. cambridge: moses king. 1883. sanborn, f. b. henry d. thoreau. american men of letters. boston: hough ton, mifflin & co. 1884. hawthorne, julian. nathaniel haw thorne and his wife: a biography. (vide index.) cambridge: james r. os good & co. 1885. sanborn, f. b. life and letters of john brown. (vide index.) boston: rob erts brothers. holmes, o. w. ralph waldo emerson. (vide index.) american men of letters. boston : houghton, mifflin & co. 1886. stevenson, r. l. henry david thoreau: his character and opinions. familiar studies of men and books, pp. 129-171. london: chatto & windus. dircks, w. h. thoreau. an introductory note in walden. camelot classics. lon don : walter scott. 140 bibliography. garnett, richard. an introductory note in my study windows. camelot classics. london : walter scott. 1887. cabot, james elliot. a memoir of ralph waldo emerson, i., p. 282. boston: hough ton, mifflin & co. haskins, david green. ralph waldo emerson: his maternal ancestors, pp. 119-122. boston: cupples, upham & co. whipple, e. p. american literature and other papers, pp. 111-112. boston : tick nor & co. beers, prof. henry a. henry david thoreau. an outline sketch of american lit erature, pp. 143-148. new york : chautau qua press. carpenter, edward. england s ideal, pp. 13-14. london : swan, sonnenschein, low rey & co. 1888. garnett, richard. life of ralph waldo emerson, pp. 157-159. great writers se ries. london : walter scott. besant, walter. the eulogy of richard jefferies, pp. 221-225. london : long mans, green & co. salt, h. s. literary sketches. london: swan, sonnenschein, lowrey & co. 1889. emerson, e. w. emerson in concord. (vide index.) boston: houghton, mifflin & co. burroughs, john. indoor studies, pp. 1-42. boston: houghton, mifflin & co. bibliography. 1 4 1 dircks, w. h. thoreau. a preparatory note in a week on the concord and merrimac \_sic~\ rivers, pp. v-xviii. game lot classics. london : walter scott. frothingham, o. b. thoreau, henry david. cyclopaedia of american biography, vi., pp. loo-ioi. new york: d. appleton and company. hubert, jr., philip g. henry david thoreau. liberty and a living, pp. 171-190. new york and london: g. p. putnam s sons. 1890. jones, dr. s. a. thoreau: a glimpse. with a bibliography. ann arbor: no publisher. ellis, havelock. the new spirit, pp. 90 99. london: george bell & sons. charles j. woodbury. thoreau. talks with ralph waldo emerson, pp. 69-94. london : kegan paul, trench, triibner & co., ltd. the same. new york : baker & taylor co. salt, h. s. the life of henry david thoreau. london: richard bentley & son. iii. magazine articles. 1849. george ripley. a week on the concord and merrimack rivers. the new york tribune. j. r. lowell. a week on the concord and merrimack rivers. massachusetts quar terly review, iii., ix. (december), 40-51. 142 bibliography. a week on the concord and merrimack riv ers. athenceum (october 27). 1854. a. p. peabody. walden : or life in the woods. north american review, bcxix. 536. c. f. briggs. a yankee diogenes. put hani s magazine, iv. 443. 1855. edwin morton. thoreau and his books. the harvard magazine, i. no. ii. (january), 87-99. \vide sanborn s thoreau. "ameri can men of letters," pp. 195-199.] a rural humbug. knickerbocker magazine, xlv. 235. 1857. an american diogenes. chambers edin burgh journal, xxviii. 330. 1862. g. w. curtis. reminiscences of thoreau. harper s magazine, xxv. 270. r. w. emerson. thoreau. atlantic month ly, x. 239. 1864. t.w. higginson. the maine \voods. at lantic monthly, xiv. 386. the transcendentalists of concord. eraser s magazine, ixx. 245. [same article in eclec tic magazine, ixiii. 231 ; littelfs living age, ixxxiii. 99, 1 78.] an american rousseau. saturday review (december 3). 1865. t. w. higginson. cape cod. atlantic monthly, xv. 381. t. w. higginson. letters to various persons. atlantic monthly, xvi. 504. j. a. weiss. thoreau. christian examiner, ixxix. 96. bibliography. 143 w. r. alger. thoreau. monthly religious magazine, xxxv. 382. m. d. conway. thoreau. eraser s maga zine, ixxiii. 447. [same article in eclectic magazine, ixvii. 180 (1886); every satur day, i. 622 (1886).] j. r.lowell. "letters to various persons." by henry d. thoreau. north american review, ci. 597. 1869. g. w. curtis. further reminiscences of thoreau. harper s magazine, xxxviii. 415. 1870. j. r. lowell. thoreau. every saturday, x. 1 66. 1873. thoreau. british quarterly, lix. 181. [same article in littell s living age, cxx. 643 ; eclectic magazine, ixxxii. 305.] 1874. henry thoreau, the poet-naturalist. brit ish quarterly (january). ellery channing s thoreau. the nation (january 8). 1875. miss h. r. hudson. concord books. harper s magazine, li. 18. 1877. m.collins. thoreau. dublin university magazine, xc. 610. t. hughes. study of thoreau. eclectic mag azine, xc. 1 14. theodore watts. article in athetuzum (no vember 17). 1878. j. v. o connor. henry d. thoreau and new england transcendentalism. catholic world, xxvii. 289. 1879. the pity and humor of thoreau. littews living age, cxlvi. 190. 144 bibliography. r. l. stevenson. henry david thoreau : his character and opinions. cornhill maga zine, xli. 665. [same article in l itteir s liv ing age, cxlvi. 179; eclectic magazine, xcv. 257 (1880).] 1880. w. s. kennedy. a new estimate of henry d. thoreau. penn monthly, xi. 794. philosophy at concord. the nation (septem ber 2). w. s. kennedy. a new estimate of tho reau. penn monthly, ii. 794. 1881. thoreau s portrait. by himself. the liter ary world (boston), xii. 1 16-1 17 (march 26). f. b. sanborn. henry david thoreau. the harvard register, iii. 214-217 (april). por trait. 1882. john burroughs. henry d. thoreau. the century, ii. (new series), 368. john burroughs. thoreau s wildness. critic, i. 74. f. b. sanborn. thoreau s unpublished po etry. critic, i. 75. portraits of thoreau with a beard. critic, i. 95 henry d. thoreau : sanborn s life of. the nation, xxxv. 34. henry d. thoreau: sanborn s life of. lit erary world (boston), xiii. 227. henry d. thoreau : sanborn s life of. athe naum, ii. (of the year), 558. j. a. janvier. henry d. thoreau : sanborn s life of. american, iv. 218. henry d. thoreau : sanborn s life of. aca demy, ii. 271. bibliography. 145 theodore watts. article in athenceum (oc tober 28). 1883. h. n. powers. h. d. thoreau. dial (chi cago), iii. 70. henry d. thoreau. spectator, ivi. 239. 1884. walter lewin. "summer: from the jour nal of henry d. thoreau." the nation, xxvi. 193. " summer : from the journal of henry d. tho reau." literary world (boston), xv. 223. 1885. henry d. thoreau. spectator, iviii. 122. j. benton. thoreau s poetry. lippincott s magazine, xxxvii. 491. g. willis cooke. the dial. journal of speculative philosophy (july). 1886. h. s. salt. henry d. thoreau. temple bar, ixxviii. 369. reprinted, 1888, in liter ary sketches, by h. s. salt. london : swan, sonnenschein, lowrey & co. 1887. h. s. salt. henry d. thoreau. eclectic magazine, cviii. 89. h. s. salt. henry d. thoreau. the critic, ii. 276, 289. from temple bar, a. h. japp. henry david thoreau. the welcome (november). 1888. henry d. thoreau. good words, xxix. 445. grant allen. a sunday at concord. fort nightly review (may). 1 889. john burroughs. henry d. thoreau. chau tauquan, ix. 530. " week on the concord and merrimack rivers." saturday review, ixviii. 195. 1890. s.a.jones. thoreau: a glimpse. the unitarian, v. 2, 3, 4 (february, march, april). 146 bibliography. h. s. salt. thoreau s poetry. the art re view (london), i. 5 (may). c. j. woodbury. emerson s talks with a college boy. the century (february). index. activity, be warmed by, 80. actual, the ideal needs but slight support in the, 65. adventure, an, in the mind rather than in the thing done, 80. advice, a friend s, hi. adviser, the true, 75. affairs, slavery to, 14; life not to be lost in the complexity of, 16 ; life wasted in, 17 ; the mind not to be desecrated by gossip and, 101. affection, the reserve of, 37 ; and sloth, do. aim, the higher the, the more ear nest must be the work, 71 ; the constant elevation of our, 96. animal food offends the imagina tion, 6. appeal, to the highest, direct, 45 ; to the highest within you, 68. appetite, the quality of the, makes the sensualist, 8. appreciation, the best, is discrim inating, s3 aspirations, a friend cherishes one s highest, 38 ; we can re spect our, 44 ; the helpful friend encourages our, 65 ; let love rest on common, 118; in the spring, 121. authorship of poetry, the, 104. awake, morning is whenever we are truly, 15 ; no one is thor oughly, 16. battle in behalf of sane thinking, the, 81. beasts, delicacy of the distinction between men and, 9. beauty, give to the day, from the beauty within, 16 ; unconscious ness of, 70 ; the, or misery, of life in our thoughts, 83. bluebird, the warble of the, 115, 122. body, care for the, compared with care for the soul, 64 ; a warm, and a cold spirit, 69 ; eats up the soul s substance, 103. book, always room for a true, 107 ; cannot match nature, 120. books, how to read the heroic, 20 ; how true ones should be read, 21; wildness of the best, 91 ; read the best first, 105. border life between nature and society, a, 92. bow, a, which no humbler archer can bend, 72. bread, the true, 45 ; the taste of that which we earn, 46 ; to truly earn our, we must satisfy god for it, 64 ; better starve than lose innocence in getting, 98. burdens, all, become light to the courageous, 74. cares, worldly, forgotten in a true walk, 88. character, work essential to, 29; the victory of, 29 ; manners apart from, 103. charity which hides a multitude of sins, overflowing love the, 12. classics, what are the, 21. cold and hunger, 07. companionship, the most satis factory, 4. complaint, the shallowness of, 86. contentment with the life as signed us, 116. 148 index. convictions, our deepest, un changeable, 79. courage, 74, 85. creation a poem to open ears, the, 14. crop, the best, which a farm af fords, 13. culture, humility enriches the soul more than, 27. darkness, pondering over the deeds of, 87. dawn, expectation of the, 16; more day to, 29; the inward, 40; the true, 69. deed, each, determined by the whole life, no. demand we make upon each other, the low, 99. differences, friends must be si lent about constitutional, 39 ; the real, between friends can not be explained away, 39. dilettanteism, 71. dishonesty worse than depen dence, 26. dissipation, one s proper work and, 86. distinction between men and beasts, the delicacy of the, 9. " do what you love," 44. dreadful thing, the, not outside of us, 75. dream, realize your, 24 ; our faintest, points to the solidest reality, 43. dreams, the realization of, 43 ; the solidest facts that we know, 43. dreariness, outward, 90. earnest, the, not hindered by tri fles, 54. earning a living, the delight of really, 46 ; earning money mere ly, the evil of, 95. earth and heaven, the laws of, harmonize, 48. economy, the only cure for the nation, as for the household, &amp;gt;7 el dorado, a man s, is where he lives, 81. elevation of our aim, the con stant, 96. elysium or tophet, a man s, in himself, 84. employment, exalted, 51. enjoyment, the true, 89. enjoyments, poverty need not take from us the purest, 26. estrangement, 33. exercise, true walking is not for, 88. existence, gratitude for the sense of, 78. expectations, divine, 51. experience, a glorious, cannot be left behind, 54. expression, extravagance of, 24; the rarity of perfect, 105. eye, the human, 56. failure, real success or, is in our thoughts, 82. faith is earned by faithfulness, 47 faithfulness rather than know ledge saves the soul, 63. false position, why we are com monly in a, 25. farm, the best crop which one affords, 13. fastidious, one should be ex tremely, 98. faults, the toleration of, an ob stacle to friendship, 34 ; the, of our friends must be lost in love, 39 ; the true lover would not hide his, 59. fidelity in work, 28. flower, a, the symbol of pure love, 62. flowers, a lesson from the, in. freedom, political, but a means, 103. friend, the actual, but a sugges tion of the ideal, 30; nourishes the soul, 30; the true educator, 31 ; the only radical reformer, 31 ; associated with our choi cest thought, 34 ; no slight ob stacle can keep one from a, 35 ; cherishes one s highest aspira tions, 38 ; the faults of, must be lost in love, 39; leaves the sweetest consolation at his death, 41 ; enhances every thing, 60; the helpful, encour ages our aspirations, 65 ; does not limit our vision, 73 ; we must love our, as we love god, 113; the delight of intercourse with a, 116. friends, are not selected, 33 ; not anxious to please each other, index. 149 33 ; help each other s loftiest dreams, 33 ; good will is neces sary, not conscious, between, 34 ; do not ask to be appreci ated, 37; silence is understood between, 37; must be silent about constitutional differ ences, 39 ; the real differences between, cannot be explained away, 39; civility between, 41 ; he who obeys his genius can not lose his, 52 ; deal in pure truth with each other, 61 ; must meet erectly, 68 ; found in solitude, 81. friendship, a thing outside of hu man institutions, 30 ; the dream of all, 30; no respecter of sex, 34 ; the toleration of faults an obstacle to, 34; the purest, the most unconscious, 35 ; the lan guage of, 35 ; requires wisdom as well as tenderness, 35 ; is not conscious kindliness, 35; is in the interest of humanity, 36 ; are any noble enough for a lasting? 36 ; only between what is high est in each, 38 ; and the love of nature harmonize, 40 ; in na ture, 53. genius, the slightest intimations of one s, to be regarded, 7 ; the organs of one s, reinvigorated by healthful sleep, 15 ; the mis ery of disobedience to our, 47 ; he who obeys his, cannot lose his friends, 52. getting a living, living and, should be alike beautiful, 97; the or dinary modes of, hostile to true life, 97. god most truly found when not consciously sought, 49. gold, or wisdom, 97 ; where alone the true, is to be found, 67. good will is necessary, not con scious, between friends, 34. goodness, unconscious, 87. gossip and affairs, the mind not to be desecrated by, 101. grade the ground before you build, 84. gratitude for the sense of exis tence, 78. hearing, there must be good, to make a good reader, 112. heart, the, forever inexperienced, 29. heaven, the purest love a glimpse of, 32 ; the laws of earth and, harmonize, 48. hebe preferred to hygeia, 6. hibernation of the poet, the, 105. highest, aim ever at the, 25 ; wealth does not help us in the pursuit of the, 27 ; within you, appeal to the, 68. history not to be read critically, 108. hope, for ourselves, 54; the great, that gives value to life, 93. hospitality, in manners, not in "entertainment," 28; the cost of, to our best thoughts, 82. hours, above time, 104; of reso lution, 106. human race, sympathy of nature with the, 5. humanity before nature, 74; no wisdom can take the place of, no. humility enriches the soul more than culture, 27. hunger, and thirst of body and soul, 64; and cold, 97. hyena, a, more easily tamed than a friend, 40. ideal, our, shames our best ef forts, 52 ; the, needs but slight support in the actual, 65 ; how the ideal transfigures a person, 66. ideas, success comes from devo tion to, 85. ignorance, knowledge sometimes worse than, 91 ; an advantage of, 1 12. imagination, animal food offends the, 6 ; must not be offended in love, 58. immortality, mortality and, 20. impulses, respect vour, 114. industry, the comfort of, 69. influence, unconscious, 53. innocence, a spontaneous, above virtue, no. inspiration, through the palate, 8 ; science should be allied to, 102. institutions, truth and, 104. intellect, use of the, 19. intercourse, too much shallow, 4 ; shallow, 100. index. invitation, the, of morning, 14; genuine, 35. inward life, we should be awak ened each morning by new, 15. justice, society content with a too narrow, 32. kingdom of god, the, cometh not with observation, 118. know thyself, 23. knowledge, faithfulness saves the soul rather than, 63 ; some times worse than ignorance, 91 ; aim above, 92 ; activity, free and loving, the highest, 92. labor, how physical, may help the writer, 106. landscape, nature prevails over man in a large, $9. language of religion, religion without the, 99. law, if ye be led by the spirit, ye are not under the, 45 ; human and divine, 122. laws, the, of earth and heaven harmonize, 48. leisure, the glory of, 94; divine, 109. life, the moral quality of nature and, 8 ; strike at the root of so cial ills by purifying your own, ii ; make the most of what is good in, 14 ; a new, each day, 14; we should be awakened each morning by new inward, 15; real, 16; not to be lost in the complexity of affair:;, 16 ; wasted in affairs, 17 ; make the best of your own, 26; no real, without love, 40 ; simplify the problem of, 42 ; can express whatever words can, 44 ; cling to the thread of, 47 ; a balanced, 48 ; too high a demand cannot be made upon, 50 ; danger of undervaluing, 50 ; wealth com plicates the problem of, 63 ; simplicity of, not an end, but a means, 76 ; the beauty or mi sery of, in our thoughts, 83 ; consists with wildness, 90; the great hope that gives value to, 93 ; out-door, 94 ; sacrificed to the newspaper, 100 ; each deed determined by the whole, no; essential, not to be probed, 114; contentment with that assigned us, 116. light, turn towards the, 117. live deliberately, 19. lives, we must account for our, 76 ; the doubleness of our, 78. living, plain, 17; the delight of really earning a, 46 ; and get ting a living should be alike beautiful, 97. loneliness, the, of false society, 7 2 love, overflowing, the charity which hides a multitude of sins, 12; hearty truth is one with, 32 ; the purest, a glimpse of heaven, 32 ; a hero s, delicate as a maiden s, 34; no real life without, 40 ; is implacable, 42 ; wisdom and, essential to each other, 55 ; should be ascend ing, 57 ; shun a descending, 57 ; true, most clear-sighted, 57; the imagination must not be of fended in, 58 ; demands the ut most directness, 59 ; no lower engagement can stand in the way of, 59 ; no treasure to be compared with, 60 ; its object expands, 60 ; genuine, elevates and strengthens, 61 ; must be vigilant to retain its purity, 62 ; a flower the symbol of pure, 62 ; the joy of, and of intel lectual perception, 62; pure, the radical reformer, 63 ; not to be doubted, 87 ; let it rest on common aspiration, 118; no truth without, 121 ; disinter ested, 121. lover, the most ardent, a little reserved, 56 ; the, hears things, not words, 58; the true, would not hide his faults, 59. lovers must understand each other without words, 58. man, the earnest, irresistible, 47 , as a, thinketh, so is he, 52; never discovers anything but himself, 85 ; the truly efficient, 95 mankind, the art of, is to polish the world, 71. manners, hospitality in, not in " entertainment," 28 ; apart from character, 103. index. marriage, both common and di vine sense should be consulted in, 57. marriages, the rarity of real, 56. melancholy, yield not to, in the upward path, 51. men, and beasts, delicacy of the distinction between, 9 ; ask too seldom to be nobly dealt with, 31 ; may punish us for satisfy ing god, 64 ; the limited views of, 98. mind, an adventure in the, rather than in the thing done, 80 ; not to be desecrated by gossip and affairs, 101 ; let your, be open to the best, 102. money, not necessary for the soul, 27 ; the evil of earning, merely, 95 moods, work in spite of, 72. moral quality of nature and life, the, 8. morning, the invitation of, 14 ; is whenever we are truly awake, 5 mortality and immortality, 20. mountains, the, within us, 77. muse, the, should lead, the un derstanding follow, 49 ; too plaintive, no. music, you hear, step to the, 24 ; exalting effect of, 41 ; the sig nificance of, 108 ; the sound of the universal laws promulgated, 1 08; has no history, 115. nature, our double, 3 ; sympathy of, with the human race, 5 ; the moral quality of, and life, 8; friendship and the love of, har monize, 40; friendship in, 53; humanity before, 74 ; poverty of outward, 77 ; prevails over man in a large landscape, 89; no poetry so wild as, 91 ; a border life between society and, 92 ; vision through the works of man to the wildness of, 93 ; few speak simply enough of, 106 ; the promise in the face of, 119; no book can match, 120; on the side of what is best in us, 123. necessaries, providing, a -plea sure, 69. neighbor, our nearest, 3. neighborhood, the best, 2. news, as compared with eternal truth, the, 17; the kind of, we really want, 50. newspaper, life sacrificed to the, joo ; a world outside of the, 100. newspapers, 48. noble, the offspring of the, tend to a higher nobility, 63. obscurity above better than false clearness below, 68. offspring of the noble tend to a higher nobility, 63. out-door life, 94. palate, inspiration through the, 8. path, a person irresistible on his own, 28. perception, the joy of love and of intellectual, 62. " plain living and high think ing, 1 17. poet, the hibernation of the, 105. poetry, no, so wild as nature, 91 ; the authorship of, 104. polishing the world, 71. postponement, fatal, 75. poverty, need not take from us the purest enjoyments, 26 ; ad vantage of, 27 ; inward, 52 ; of nature and internal wealth, 77 present, living in the, 22. problem of life, simplify the, 42 ; wealth complicates the, 63. prospect, the interest of a new, 89. purification of a soul gives it a new life, the, u. purity, inspires the soul, 9: and sensuality each a single thing, 10. purpose, singleness of, 1 19. reader, there must be good hear ing to make a good, 112. reading, the best kind of, i. reality, what alone has, 18 ; the great, is ever here and now, 18; seek to penetrate through surfaces to, 19; our faintest dream points to the solidest, 43 realm within, the glory of the, 23. reform, individual life the true source of, 44; is better than its modes, 44. 152 index, reformer, what saddens the, 12 ; the friend the only radical, 31 ; pure love the radical, 63. religion, without the language of religion, 99; the privacy of, 120. reproof, unconscious, 113. reserve, the lover s, 56. resolution, hours of, 106. rest for the soul, 49. ripeness, not merely the means, 114. sanity, our own cheerful, most helpful to others, 12. science, the soul above, 91 ; should be allied to inspiration, 102. sculptor, every one a, 10. self-renunciation, 49. self-respect, 67. sense, both common and divine, should be consulted in mar riage, 57. sensualist, the quality of the ap petite makes the, 8. sensuality, purity and, each a single thing, 10. simplicity of life not an end, but a means, 76. sin, work a help against, 10. sincerity, a rare virtue, 76. singleness of purpose, 119. sky-lights, 55. slavery to affairs, 14. sleep, the organs of one s genius reinvigorated by healthful, 15; good and bad, 107. sloth and affection, 60. social ills, strike at the root of, by purifying your own life, n. society, in solitude, i ; content with a too narrow justice, 32 ; the loneliness of false, 72 ; help ful, 77; use all the, that will abet you, 78; a border life be tween nature and, 92 ; solitude and, 117. solitude, society in, i ; the value of, 5 ; appetite for, 80 ; friends found in, 81 ; and society, 117 ; of a human soul, the, 118. solvent for the world, thought a, s3 soul, purity inspires the, 9; the purification of a, gives it a new life, ii ; humility enriches the, more than culture, 27; money not necessary for the, 27 ; a friend nourishes the, 30 ; rest for the, 49 ; faithfulness rather than knowledge saves the, 63 ; care for the body compared with care for the, 64 ; value of a clear, compared with material gains, 67 ; above science, 91 ; the body eats up the substance of the, 103 ; the solitude of a human, 118. souls, how finite unlikeness iso lates, 73. spirit, a warm body and a cold, 69. spring, the influence of, 22 ; water in early, 119 ; aspirations in the, 121. standard, the, within us, 112. stars, two solitary, determined to one pole, 41. state, the most precious produc tions of a, 103. stress, lay the most, on that which is most important, 76. style in writing, 79. success, real, 65 ; real, or failure is in our thoughts, 82 ; comes from devotion to ideas, 85. suicide, intellectual and moral, 101. swamps, the attractiveness of, 90. sympathy of nature with the hu man race, 5. things correspond to our highest idea, 74. thinking, sane, the battle in be half of, 81 ; right, irresistible, 83 ; wild, delights us, oo. thought, the most indefinite, sig nificant, 67 ; a solvent for the world, 83 ; the realm of, laid waste by worldly living, 93 ; the compliment of valuing one s, 94 ; the source of, above ourselves, in. thread of life, cling to the, 47. time, the shallow stream of, 20 ; not an ingredient of a perfect work, 25 ; hours above, 104. tophet, a man s elysium or, in himself, 84. trifles, the earnest not hindered by, 54 truth, the news as compared with eternal, 17; the simplicity of, index. 153 25; hearty, is one with love, 32; friends deal in pure, with each other, 61 ; and institutions, 104; no, without love, 121. truthfulness, 59. ugly facts may be eradicated from the life of man, 46. union, the highest, 66 ; yourself and myself lost in, 66; ideal, 66. universe, the, conforms to our highest ideas, 23. unknown, explore the, by mend ing your ways, 86. unlikeness, how finite, isolates souls, 73. value of a clear soul compared with material gains, 67. views of men, the limited, 98. virtue, a spontaneous innocence above, no. walk, the ideal of a, 87 ; worldly cares forgotten in a true, 88. walker, a true, made so by the grace of god, 88. walking, true, is not for exercise, wants, artificial, enslave us, 96. water in the early spring, 119. wealth, the true, 13; does not help in our pursuit of the high est, 27 ; complicates the prob lem of life, 63 ; poverty of na ture and internal, 77 ; real, n6. wildness, 22 ; the charm of, 89 ; life consists with, 90. wisdom, and love, essential to each other, 55 ; cannot take the place of humanity, no. words, indefinite, may be most significant, 24. work, a help against sin, 10 ; fidel ity in, 28 ; essential to character, 29 ; necessity of, 70 ; high re sults of, 71 ; the higher the aim, the more earnest must be the, 71 ; in spite of moods, 72 ; one s proper, and dissipation, 86 ; for work s sake, 95. world, the art of mankind is to polish the, 71. writer, how physical labor may help the, 106. writing, style in, 79. yourself and myself lost in the highest union, 66. uc southern regional library facility a 000685015 o university of california southern regional library facility 405 hilgard avenue, los angeles, ca 90024-1388 return this material to the library from which it was borrowed. l 2 t . letters to various persons by henry d. thoreau, author of &quot;a week on the concord and merrimack rivers, &quot;walden,&quot; etc., etc. boston : ticknor and fields 1865. entered according to act of congress, in the year 1865, by ticknor and fields, in the clerk s office of the district court of the district of massachusetts. university press : welch, bigexow, & co. cambridge. r o editor s notice. it may interest the reader of this book to know that nearly all these letters have been printed directly from the original autographs fur nished by the persons to whom they were ad dressed. a few have been carefully copied, but without alteration, from the worn and torn origi nals. in some letters, passages have been omit ted on account of private or personal references. otherwise, the letters have been printed as they stood, with very few verbal corrections. r. w. e. 12 may, 1865. contents. pagh letters 1 poems. sympathy . . . . . . . .211 &quot;romans, countrymen, and lovers&quot; . . 214 inspiration 218 the fisher s boy 220 mountains 221 smoke 225 smoke in winter ...... 226 mist 228 haze . 229 letters. to miss thoreau. concord, june 13, 1840. dearh : that letter to j , for which you had an opportunity doubtless to substitute a more perfect communication, fell, as was natural, into the hands of his &quot; transcendental brother,&quot; who is his proxy in such cases, having been commissioned to acknowl edge and receipt all bills that may be presented. but what s in a name ? perhaps it does not mat ter whether it be john or henry. nor will those same six months have to be altered, i fear, to suit his case as well. but methinks they have not passed entirely without intercourse, provided we have been sincere though humble worshippers of the same virtue in the mean time. certainly it is better that we should make ourselves quite sure of such a communion as this by the only course which is completely free from suspicion, the coincidence of two earnest and aspiring lives, than run the risk of a disappointment by relying wholly or chiefly on so meagre and uncertain a means as i a 2 letters. speech, whether written or spoken, affords. how often, when we have been nearest each other bodily, have we really been farthest oif ! our tongues were the withy foils with which we fenced each other off. not that we have not met heartily and with profit as members of one family, but it was a small one surely, and not that other human family. we have met frankly and without con cealment ever, as befits those who have an instinc tive trust in one another, and the scenery of whose outward lives has been the same, but never as, prompted by an earnest and affectionate desire to probe deeper our mutual natures. such inter course, at least, if it has ever been, has not conde scended to the vulgarities of oral communication, for the ears are provided with no lid as the eye is, and would not have been deaf to it in sleep. and now glad am i, if i am not mistaken in imagining that some such transcendental inquisitiveness has travelled post thither, for, as i observed before, where the bolt hits, thither was it aimed, any arbitrary direction notwithstanding. thus much, at least, our kindred temperament of mind and body and long family-arity have done for us, that we already find ourselves stand ing on a solid and natural footing with respect to one another, and shall not have to waste time in the so often unavailing endeavor to arrive fairly at this simple ground. let us leave trifles, then, to accident ; and poll letters. 3 tics, and finance, and such gossip, to the moments when diet and exercise are cared for, and speak to each other deliberately as out of one infinity into another, you there in time and space, and i here. for beside this relation, all books and doc trines are no better than gossip or the turning of a spit. equally to you and s , from your affectionate brother, h. d. thoreau. to mrs. brown. concord, july 21, 1841. dear friend : don t think i need any prompting to write to you ; but what tough earthenware shall i put in to my packet to travel over so many hills, and thrid so many woods, as lie between concord and plymouth ? thank fortune it is all the way down hill, so they will get safely carried ; and yet it seems as if it were writing against time and the sun, to send a letter east, for no natural force for wards it. you should go dwell in the west, and then i would deluge you with letters, as boys throw feathers into the air to see the wind take them. i should rather fancy you at evening dwelling far away behind the serene curtain of 4 letters. the west, the home of fair weather, than over by the chilly sources of the east wind. what quiet thoughts have you now-a-days which will float on that east wind to west, for so we may make our worst servants our carriers, what progress made from can t to can, in practice and theory ? under this category, you remem ber, we used to place all our philosophy. do you have any still, startling, well moments, in which you think grandly, and speak with emphasis ? don t take this for sarcasm, for not in a year of the gods, i fear, will such a golden approach to plain speaking revolve again. but away with such fears ; by a few miles of travel, w r e have not distanced each other s sincerity. i grow savager and savager every day, as if fed on raw meat, and my tameness is only the repose of untamableness. i dream of looking abroad summer and winter, with free gaze, from some mountain-side, while my eyes revolve in an egyptian slime of health, i to be nature looking into nature, with such easy sympathy as the blue eyed grass in the meadow looks in the face of the sky. from some such recess i would put forth sublime thoughts daily, as the plant puts forth leaves. now-a-nights i go on to the hill to see the sun set, as one would go home at evening, the bustle of the village has run on all day, and left me quite in the rear ; but i see the sunset, and find that it can wait for my slow virtue. letters. 5 but i forget that you think more of this human nature than of this nature i praise. why won t you believe that mine is more human than any single man or woman can be ? that in it, in the sunset there, are all the qualities that can adorn a household, and that sometimes in a flutter ing leaf, one may hear all your christianity preached. you see how unskilful a letterwriter i am, thus to have come to the end of my sheet, when hardly arrived at the beginning of my story. i was going to be soberer, i assure you, but now have only room to add, that if the fates allot you a serene hour, don t fail to communicate some of its serenity to your friend, henry d. thoreau. no, no. improve so rare a gift for yourself, and send me of your leisure. to mrs. l. c. b. coxcord, wednesday evening, september 8 [1841]. dear friexd : your note came wafted to ( my hand, like the first leaf of the fall on the september wind, and i put only another interpretation upon its lines, 6 letters. than upon the veins of those which are soon to be strewed around me. it is nothing but indian summer here at present. i mean that any weather seems reserved expressly for our late purposes, whenever we happen to be fulfilling them. i do not know what right i have to so much happiness, but rather hold it in reserve till the time of my desert. what with the crickets, and the lowing of kine, and the crowing of cocks, our concord life is sono rous enough. sometimes i hear the cock bestir himself on his perch under my feet and crow shrilly long before dawn, and i think i might have been born any year for all the phenomena i know. we count sixteen eggs daily now, when arith metic will only fetch the hens up to thirteen ; but the world is young, and we wait to see this eccen tricity complete its period. my verses on friendship are already printed in the dial, not expanded, but reduced to com pleteness, by leaving out the long lines, which always have, or should have, a longer, or at least another sense than short ones. just now i am in the mid-sea of verses, and they actually rustle round me, as the leaves would round the head of autumnus himself, should he thrust it up through some vales which i know, but, alas ! many of them are but crisped and yellow leaves like his, i fear, and will deserve no better fate than letters. 7 to make mould for new harvests. i see the stanza rise around me, verse upon verse, far and near, like the mountains from agiochook, not all hav ing a terrestrial existence as yet, even as some of them may be clouds ; but i fancy i see the gleam of some sebago lake and silver cascade, at whose well i may drink one day. i am as unfit for any practical purpose i mean for the further ance of the world s ends as gossamer for ship timber ; and i, who am going to be a pencil-maker to-morrow, can sympathize with god apollo, who served king admetus for a while on earth. but i believe he found it for his advantage at last, as i am sure i shall, though i shall hold the no bler part at least out of the service. don t attach any undue seriousness to this threnody, for i love my fate to the very core and rind, and could swallow it without paring it, i think. you ask if i have written any more poems ? excepting those which vulcan is now forging, i have only discharged a few more bolts into the horizon, in all, three hundred verses, and sent them, as i may say, over the mountains to miss fuller, who may have occasion to remember the old rhyme, &quot; three scipen gode comen mid than flode three hundred cnihten.&quot; but these are far more vandalic than they. in this narrow sheet there is not room even for one 8 letters. thought to root itself; but you must consider this an odd leaf of a volume, and that volume your friend, henry d. thoreau. to mrs. brown. cokcokd, october 5, 1841. dear friend : i send you williams s letter as the last remem brancer to one of those &quot; whose acquaintance he had the pleasure to form while in concord.&quot; it came quite unexpectedly to me, but i was very glad to receive it, though i hardly know whether my utmost sincerity and interest can inspire a sufficient answer to it. i should like to have you send it back by some convenient opportunity. pray let me know what you are thinking about any day, what most nearly concerns you. last winter, you know, you did more than your share of the talking, and i did not complain for want of an opportunity. imagine your stove-door out of order, at least, and then while i am fixing it, you will think of enough things to say. what makes the value of your life at present ? what dreams have you ? and what realizations ? you know there is a high table-land which not even the east wind reaches. now can t we walk letters. 9 and chat upon its plane still, as if there were no lower latitudes ? surely our two destinies are topics interesting and grand enough for any occa sion. i hope you have many gleams of serenity and health, or, if your body will grant you no positive respite, that you may, at any rate, enjoy your sickness occasionally, as much as i used to tell of. but here is the bundle going to be done up, so ac cept a &quot; good-night &quot; from henry d. thoreau. to mrs. l. c. b. concord, march 2, 1842. dear friend : i believe i have nothing new to tell you, for what was news you have learned from other sources. i am much the same person that i was, who should be so much better ; yet when i re alize what has transpired, and the greatness of the part i am unconsciously acting, i am thrilled, and it seems as if there were none in history to match it. soon after john s death i listened to a music box, and if, at any time, that event had seemed in consistent with the beauty and harmony of the universe, it was then gently constrained into the 1* 10 letters. placid course of nature by those steady notes, in mild and unoffended tone echoing far and wide under the heavens. but i find these things more strange than sad to me. what right have i to grieve, who have not ceased to wonder ? we feel at first as if some opportunities of kindness and sympathy were lost, but learn afterward that any pure grief is ample recompense for all. that is, if we are faithful ; for a great grief is but sympa thy with the soul that disposes events, and is as natural as the resin on arabian trees. only na ture has a right to grieve perpetually, for she only is innocent. soon the ice will melt, and the blackbirds sing along the river which he fre quented, as pleasantly as ever. the same ever lasting serenity will appear in this face of god, and we will not be sorrowful, if he is not. we are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it. the memory of some past moments is more persuasive than the. experience of present ones. there have been visions of such breadth and brightness that these motes were in visible in their light. i do not wish to see john ever again, i mean him who is dead, but that other, whom only he would have wished to see, or to be, of whom he was the imperfect representative. for we are not what we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for what we are capable of being. letters. 11 as for waldo, he died as the mist rises from the brook, which the sun will soon dart his rays through. do not the flowers die every autumn ? he had not even taken root here. i was not startled to hear that he was dead : it seemed the most natural event that could happen. his fine organization demanded it, and nature gently yielded its request. it would have been strange if he had lived. neither will nature manifest any sorrow at his death, but soon the note of the lark will be heard down in the meadow, and fresh dan delions will spring from the old stocks where he plucked them last summer. i have been living ill of late, but am now doing better. how do you live in that plymouth world, now-a-days? please remember me to m r . you must not blame me if i do talk to the clouds, for i remain your friend, henry d. tiioreau. to mr. fuller. concord, january 16, 1843. dear richard : i need not thank you for your present, for i hear its music, which seems to be playing just for us two pilgrims marching over hill and dale of a 12 letters. summer afternoon, up those long bolton hills and by those bright harvard lakes, such as i see in the placid lucerne on the lid ; and whenever i hear it, it will recall happy hours passed with its donor. when did mankind make that foray into nature and bring off this booty ? for certainly it is but history that some rare virtue in remote times plun dered these strains from above and communicated them to men. whatever we may think of it, it is a part of the harmony of the spheres you have sent me, which has condescended to serve us admetuses, and i hope i may so behave that this may always be the tenor of your thought for me. if you have any strains, the conquest of your own spear or quill, to accompany these, let the winds waft them also to me. i write this with one of the &quot; primaries &quot; of my osprey s wings, which i have preserved over my glass for some state occasion, and now it offers. mrs. e sends her love. your friend, henry d. thoreau. letters. 13 to mks. l. c. b. concord, january 24, 1843. dear friend : the other day i wrote you a letter to go in mrs. e s bundle, but, as it seemed unworthy, i did not send it, and now, to atone for that, i am going to send this, whether it be worthy or not. i will not venture upon news, for, as all the house hold are gone to bed, i cannot learn what has been told you. do you read any noble verses nowadays? or do not verses still seem noble? for my own part, they have been the only things i remembered, or that which occasioned them, when all things else were blurred and defaced. all things have put on mourning but they; for the elegy itself is some victorious melody or joy escaping from the wreck. it is a relief to read some true book, wherein all are equally dead, equally alive. i think the best parts of shakespeare would only be enhanced by the most thrilling and affecting events. i have found it so. and so much the more, as they are not intended for consolation. do you think of coming to concord again ? i shall be glad to see you. i should be glad to know that i could see you when i would. we always seem to be living just on the brink of a pure and lofty intercourse, which would make the ills and trivialness of life ridiculous. after 14 letters. each little interval, though it be but for the night, we are prepared to meet each other as gods and goddesses. i seem to have dodged all my days with one or two persons, and lived upon expectation, as if the bud would surely blossom ; and so i am con tent to live. what means the fact, which is so common, so universal, that some soul that has lost all hope for itself can inspire in another listening soul an infinite confidence in it, even while it is ex pressing its despair ? i am very happy in my present environment, though actually mean enough myself, and so, of course, all around me ; yet, i am sure, we for the most part are transfigured to one another, and are that to the other which we aspire to be ourselves. the longest course of mean and trivial intercourse may not prevent my practising this divine courtesy to my companion. notwithstanding all i hear about brooms, and scouring, and taxes, and house keeping, i am constrained to live a strangely mixed life, as if even valhalla might have its kitchen. we are all of us apollos serving some admetus. i think i must have some muses in my pay that i know not of, for certain musical wishes of mine are answered as soon as entertained. last sum mer i went to hawthorne s suddenly for the ex press purpose of borrowing his music-box, and letters. 15 almost immediately mrs. h proposed to lend it to me. the other day i said i must go to mrs. barrett s to hear hers, and, lo ! straightway rich ard f sent me one for a present from cam bridge. it is a very good one. i should like to have you hear it. i shall not have to employ you to borrow for me now. good night. from your affectionate friend, h. d. t. to mrs. l. c. b. concord, friday evening, january 25, 1843. dear friend : mrs. e asks me to write you a letter, which she will put into her bundle to-morrow along with the tribunes and standards, and miscel lanies, and what not, to make an assortment. but what shall i write. you live a good way off, and i don t know that i have anything which will bear sending so far. but i am mistaken, or rather impatient when i say this, for we all have a gift to send, not only when the year be gins, but as long as interest and memory last. i don t know whether you have got the many i have sent you, or rather whether you were quite sure where they came from. i mean the letters i have sometimes launched off eastward in my 16 letters. thought ; but if you have been happier at one time than another, think that then you received them. but this that i now send you is of another sort. it will go slowly, drawn by horses over muddy roads, and lose much of its little value by the way. you may have to pay for it, and it may not make you happy after all. but what shall be my new-year s gift, then ? why, i will send you my still fresh remembrance of the hours i have passed with you here, for i find in the re membrance of them the best gift you have left to me. we are poor and sick creatures at best ; but we can have well memories, and sound and healthy thoughts of one another still, and an in tercourse may be remembered which was without blur, and above us both. perhaps you may like to know of my estate nowadays. as usual, i find it harder to account for the happiness i enjoy, than for the sadness which instructs me occasionally. if the little of this last which visits me would only be sadder, it would be happier. one while i am vexed by a sense of meanness ; one while i simply wonder at the mystery of life ; and at another, and at an other, seem to rest on my oars, as if propelled by propitious breezes from i know not what quarter. but for the most part, i am an idle, inefficient, lin gering (one term will do as well as another, where all are true and none true enough) member of the great commonwealth, who have most need of my letters. 17 own charity, if i could not be charitable and indulgent to myself, perhaps as good a subject for my own satire as any. you see how, when i come to talk of myself, i soon run dry, for i would fain make that a subject which can be no subject for me, at least not till i have the grace to rule myself. i do not venture to say anything about your griefs, for it would be unnatural for me to speak as if i grieved with you, when i think i do not. if i were to see you, it might be otherwise. but i know you will pardon the trivialness of this let ter ; and i only hope as i know that you have reason to be so that you are still happier than you are sad, and that you remember that the smallest seed of faith is of more worth than the largest fruit of happiness. i have no doubt that out of s s death you sometimes draw sweet consolation, not only for that, but for long-stand ing griefs, and may find some things made smooth by it, which before were rough. i wish you would communicate with me, and not think me unworthy to know any of your thouo-hts. don t think me unkind because i 55 have not written to you. i confess it was for so poor a reason as that you almost made a principle of not answering. i could not speak truly with this ugly fact in the way ; and perhaps i wished to be assured, by such evidence as you could not voluntarily give, that it was a kindness. for 18 letters. every glance at the moon, does she not send me an answering ray ? noah would hardly have done himself the pleasure to release his dove, if she had not been about to come back to him with tidings of green islands amid the waste. but these are far-fetched reasons. i am not speaking directly enough to yourself now, so let me say directly from your friend, henry d. thoreau. to r. f. fuller. concord, april 2, 1843. dear richard : i was glad to receive a letter from you so bright and cheery. you speak of not having made any conquests with your own spear or quill as yet ; but if you are tempering your spear-head during these days, and fitting a straight and tough shaft thereto, will not that suffice ? we are more pleased to consider the hero in the forest cutting cornel or ash for his spear, than marching in tri umph with his trophies, f the present hour is always wealthiest when it is poorer than the fu ture ones, as that is the pleasantest site which affords the pleasantest prospects. what you say about your studies furnishing letters. 19 you with a &quot; mimic idiom &quot; only, reminds me that we shall all do well if we learn so much as to talk, to speak truth. the only fruit which even much living yields seems to be often only some trivial success, the ability to do some slight thing better. we make conquest only of husks and shells for the most part, at least apparently, but sometimes these are cinnamon and spices, you know. even the grown hunter you speak of slays a thousand buffaloes, and brings off only their hides and tongues. what immense sacri fices, what hecatombs and holocausts, the gods exact for very slight favors ! how much sincere life before we can even utter one sincere word. fwhat i was learning in college was chiefly, i think, to express myself, and i see now, that as the old orator prescribed, 1st, action ; 2d, action ; 3d, action ; my teachers should have prescribed to me, 1st, sincerity ; 2d, sincerity ; 3d, sincerity. the old mythology is incomplete without a god or god dess of sincerity, on whose altars we might offer up all the products of our farms, our workshops, and our studies. it should be our lar when we sit on the hearth, and our tutelar genius when we walk abroad. this is the only panacea. i mean sincerity in our dealings with ourselves mainly ; any other is comparatively easy,/ but i must stop % before i get to itthly. i believe i have but one text and one sermon. your rural adventures beyond the west cam .v 20 letters. bridge hills have probably lost nothing by distance of time or space. i used to hear only the sough of the wind in the woods of concord, when i was striving to give my attention to a page of calcu lus. but, depend upon it, you will love your native hills the better for being separated from them. i expect to leave concord, which is my rome, and its people, who are my romans, in may, and go to new york, to be a tutor in mr. william emerson s family. so i will bid you good by till i see you or hear from you again. your friend, h. d. thoreau. to mrs. e. castleton, staten island, may 22, 1843. my dear fkiend : i believe a good many conversations with you were left in an unfinished state, and now indeed i don t know where to take them up. but i will resume some of the unfinished silence. i shall not hesitate to know you. i think of you as some elder sister of mine, whom i could not have avoided, a sort of lunar influence, only of such age as the moon, whose time is measured by her light. you must know that you represent to letters. 21 me woman, for i have not travelled very far or wide, and what if i had ? i like to deal with you, for i believe you do not lie or steal, and these are very rare virtues. i thank you for your influ ence for two years. i was fortunate to be sub jected to it, and am now to remember it. it is the noblest gift we can make ; what signify all others that can be bestowed ? you have helped to keep my life &quot; on loft,&quot; as chaucer says of griselda, and in a better sense. you always seemed to look down at me as from some elevation some of your high humilities and i was the better for having to look up. i felt taxed not to disappoint your expectation ; for could there be any accident so sad as to be respected for something better than we are ? it was a pleasure even to go away from you, as it is not to meet some, as it apprised me of my high relations ; and such a departure is a sort of further introduction and meeting. (&quot;nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance ; they make the latitudes and longitudes.^/ you must not think that fate is so dark there, for even here i can see a faint reflected light over concord, and i think that at this distance i can better weigh the value of a doubt there. your moonlight, as i have told you, though it is a re flection of the sun, allows of bats and owls and other twilight birds to flit therein. but i am very glad that you can elevate your life with a 22 letters. doubt, for i am sure that it is nothing but an insa tiable faith after all, that deepens and darkens its current. and your doubt and my confidence are only a difference of expression. i have hardly begun to live on staten island yet ; but, like the man who, when forbidden to tread on english ground, carried scottish ground in his boots, i carry concord ground in my boots and in my hat, and am i not made of concord dust ? i cannot realize that it is the roar of the sea i hear now, and not the wind in walden woods. i find more of concord, after all, in the prospect of the sea, beyond sandy hook, than in the fields and woods. if you were to have this hugh the gardener for your man, you would think a new dispensation had commenced. he might put a fairer aspect on the natural world for you, or at any rate a screen between you and the almshouse. there is a beautiful red honeysuckle now in blossom in the woods here, which should be transplanted to con cord ; and if what they tell me about the tulip tree be true, you should have that also. i have not seen mrs. black yet, but i intend to call on her soon. have you established those simpler modes of living yet? &quot;in the full tide of suc cessful operation ? &quot; tell mrs. brown that i hope she is anchored in a secure haven and derives much pleasure still from reading the poets, and that her constellation letteks. 23 is not quite set from my sight, though it is sunk so low in that northern horizon. tell e h that her bright present did &quot; carry ink safely to staten island,&quot; and was a conspicuous object in master haven s inventory of my effects. give my respects to madam e , whose concord face i should be glad to see here this summer ; and remember me to the rest of the household who have had vision of me. shake a day-day to edith, and say good night to ellen for me. fare well. henry d. thoreau. to mrs. e. staten island, june 20, 1843. my very dear friend i i have only read a page of your letter, and have come out to the top of the hill at sunset, where i can see the ocean, to prepare to read the rest. it is fitter that it should hear it than the walls of my chamber. the very crickets here seem to chirp around me as they did not before. i feel as if it were a great daring to go on and read the rest, and then to live accordingly. there are more than thirty vessels in sight going to sea. i am almost afraid to look at your letter. i see that it will make my life very steep, but it may lead to fairer prospects than this. 24 letters. you seem to me to speak out of a very clear and high heaven, where any one may be who stands so high. your voice seems not a voice, but comes as much from the blue heavens as from the paper. my dear friend, it was very noble in you to write me so trustful an answer. it will do as well for another world as for this ; such a voice is for no particular time nor person, but it makes him who may hear it stand for all that is lofty and true in humanity. the thought of you will constantly elevate my life ; it will be something always above the horizon to behold, as when i look up at the evening star. i think i know your thoughts with out seeing you, and as well here as in concord. you are not at all strange to me. i could hardly believe, after the lapse of one night, that i had such a noble letter still at hand to read, that it was not some fine dream. i looked at midnight to be sure that it was real. i feel that i am unworthy to know you, and yet they will not permit it wrongfully. i, perhaps, am more willing to deceive by ap pearances than you say you are ; it would not be w r orth the while to tell how willing ; but i have the power perhaps too much to forget my mean ness as soon as seen, and not be incited by per manent sorrow. my actual life is unspeakably mean compared with what i know and see that it might be. yet the ground from which i see and letters. 25 say this is some part of it. it ranges from heaven to earth, and is all things in an hour. the experi ence of every past* moment but belies the faith of each present. we nevej* conceive the greatness of our fates. are not these faint flashes of light which sometimes obscure the sun their certain dawn ? my friend, i have read your letter as if i was not reading it. after each pause i could defer the rest forever. the thought of you will be a new motive for every right action. you are an other human being whom i know, and might not our topic be as broad as the universe ? what have we to do with petty rumbling news ? we have our own great affairs. some times in con cord i found my actions dictated, as it were, by your influence, and though it lead almost to trivial hindoo observances, yet it was good and elevat ing. to hear that you have sad hours is not sad to me. i rather rejoice at the richness of your experience. only think of some sadness away in pekin, unseen and unknown there. what a mine it is ! would it not weigh down the celes tial empire, with all its gay chinese ? our sad ness is not sad, but our cheap joys. let us be sad about all we see and are, for so we demand and pray for better. it is the constant prayer and whole christian religion. i could hope that you would get well soon, and have a healthy body for this world, but i know this cannot be ; and the 26 letters. fates, after all, are the accomplishes of our hopes. yet i do hope that you may find it a worthy struggle, and life seem grand still through the clouds. what wealth is it to have such friends that we cannot think of them without elevation ! and we can think of them any time and anywhere, and it costs nothing but the lofty disposition. i cannot tell you the joy your letter gives me, which will not quite cease till the latest time. let me ac company your finest thought. i send my love to my other friend and brother, whose nobleness i slowly recognize. henry. to mb. e. staten island, august 7, 1843. my dear friend : i fear i have nothing to send you worthy of so good an opportunity. of new york i still know but little, though out of so many thousands there are no doubt many units whom it would be worth my while to know. mr. james talks of going to germany soon with his wife to learn the lan guage. he says he must know it ; can never learn it here ; there he may absorb it ; and is very anxious to learn beforehand where he had best locate himself to enjoy the advantage of the letters. 27 highest culture, learn the language in its purity, and not exceed his limited means. i referred him to longfellow. perhaps you can help him. i have had a pleasant talk with channing ; and greeley, too, it was refreshing to meet. they were both much pleased with your criticism on carlyle, but thought that you had overlooked what chiefly concerned them in the book, its practical aim and merits. i have also spent some pleasant hours with w. and t. at their counting-room, or rather intelli gence office. i must still reckon myself with the innumerable army of invalids, undoubtedly in a fair field they would rout the well, though i am tougher than formerly. methinks i could paint the sleepy god more truly than the poets have done, from more intimate experience. indeed, i have not kept my eyes very steadily open to the things of this world of late, and hence have little to report concerning them. however, i trust the awakening will come before the last trump, and then perhaps i may remember some of my dreams. i study the aspects of commerce at its narrows here, where it passes in review before me, and this seems to be beginning at the right end to under stand this babylon. i have made a very rude translation of the seven against thebes, and pindar too i have looked at, and wish he was better worth translating. f&quot;l believe even the best 28 letters. things are not equal to their fame. perhaps it would be better to translate fame itself, or is not that what the poets themselves do ?j how ever, i have not done with pindar yet. i sent a long article on etzler s book to the democratic review six weeks ago, which at length they have determined not to accept, as they could not subscribe to all the opinions, but asked for other matter, purely literary, i suppose. o sullivan wrote me that articles of this kind have to be re ferred to the circle, who, it seems, are represented by this journal, and said something about &quot; col lective we,&quot; and &quot; homogeneity.&quot; pray don t think of bradbury and soden any more, &quot; for good deed done through praiere is sold and bought too dear, i wis, to herte that of great valor is.&quot; i see that they have given up their shop here. say to mrs. e that i am glad to remember how she too dwells there in concord, and shall send her anon some of the thoughts that belong to her. as for edith, i seem to see a star in the east over where the young child is. remember me to mrs. b . your friend, henry d. thoreau. letters. 29 to mrs. e. statex island, october 16, 1843. my dear friend: i promised you some thoughts long ago, but it would be hard to tell whether these are the ones. i suppose that the great questions of &quot; fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,&quot; which used to be discussed at concord, are still unsettled. and here comes c banning, with his &quot; present,&quot; to vex the world again, a rather galvanic movement, i think. however, i like the man all the better, though his schemes the less. i am sorry for his confessions. faith never makes a confession. have you had the annual berrying party, or sat on the cliffs a whole day this summer? i sup pose the flowers have fared quite as well since i was not there to scoff at them ; and the hens, without doubt, keep up their reputation. i have been reading lately what of quarles s poetry i could get. he was a contemporary of herbert, and a kindred spirit. i think you would like him. it is rare to find one who was so much of a poet and so little of an artist. he wrote long poems, almost epics for length, about jonah, es ther, job, samson, and solomon, interspersed with meditations after a quite original plan, shep herd s oracles, comedies, romances, fancies, and meditations, the quintessence of meditation, and enchiridions of meditation, all divine, 30 letters. and what he calls his morning muse ; besides prose works as curious as the rest. he was an unwearied christian, and a reformer of some old school withal. hopelessly quaint, as if he lived all alone and knew nobody but his wife, who ap pears to have reverenced him. he never doubts his genius ; it is only he and his god in all the world. he uses language sometimes as greatly as shakespeare ; and though there is not much straight grain in him, there is plenty of tough, crooked timber. in an age when herbert is re o vived, quarles surely ought not to be forgotten. i. will copy a few such sentences, as i should read to you if there. mrs. brown, too, may find some nutriment in them. how does the saxon edith do ? can vou tell yet to which school of philosophy she belongs, whether she will be a fair saint of some christian order, or a follower of plato and the heathen ? bid ellen a good night or a good morning from me, and see if she will remember where it comes from ; and remember me to mrs. b , and your mother, and e h . your friend, henky. lelhrs. 31 to mrs. thoreau. staten island, july 7, 1843. dear mother : i was very glad to get your letter and papers. tell father that circumstantial letters make very substantial reading, at any rate. i like to know even how the sun shines and garden grows with you. tell sophia that i have pressed some blos soms of the tulip-tree for her. they look some what like white lilies. pray, have you the seventeen-year locust in concord ? the air here is filled with their din. they come out of the ground at first in an imper fect state, and, crawling up the shrubs and plants, the perfect insect burst out through the back. they are doing great damage to the fruit and for est trees. the latter are covered with dead twigs, which in the distance look like the blossoms of the chestnut. they bore every twig of last year s growth in order to deposit their eggs in it. in a few weeks the eggs will be hatched, and the worms fall to the ground and enter it, and in 1860 make their appearance again. i conversed about their coming this season before they arrived. they do no injury to the leaves, but, beside bor ing the twigs, suck their sap for sustenance. their din is heard by those who sail along the shore from the distant woods. phar-r-r-aoh. phar-r-r-aoh. they are departing now. dogs, 32 liters. cats, and chickens subsist mainly upon them in some places. i have not been to new york for more than three weeks. i have had an interesting letter from mr. lane, describing their new prospects. my pupil and i are getting on apace. he is re markably well advanced in latin, and is well advancing. your letter has just arrived. i was not aware that it was so long since i wrote home ; i only knew that i had sent five or six letters to the town. it is very refreshing to hear from you, though it is not all good news. but i trust that stearns wheeler is not dead. i should be slow to believe it. he was made to work very well in this world. there need be no tragedy in his death. the demon which is said to haunt the jones family, hovering over their eyelids with wings steeped in juice of poppies, has commenced an other campaign against me. i am &quot;clear jones &quot; in this respect at least. but he finds little encour agement in my atmosphere, i assure you, for i do not once fairly lose myself, except in those hours of truce allotted to rest by immemorial custom. however, this skirmishing interferes sadly with my literary projects, and i am apt to think it a good day s work if i maintain a soldier s eye till night fall. very well, it does not matter much in what wars we serve, whether in the highlands or the lowlands. everywhere we get soldiers pay still. letters. 33 give my love to aunt louisa, whose benignant face i sometimes see right in the wall, as naturally and necessarily shining on my path as some star of unaccountably greater age and higher orbit than myself. let it be inquired by her of george minott, as from me, for she sees him, if he has seen any pigeons yet, and tell him there are plenty of jack-snipes here. as for william p., the &quot; worthy young man,&quot; as i live, my eyes have not fallen on him yet. i have not had the influenza, though here are its headquarters, unless my first week s cold was it. tell helen i shall write to her soon. i have heard lucretia mott. this is badly writ ten ; but the worse the writing the sooner you get it this time from your affectionate son, h. d. t. to miss thoreau. staten island, july 21, 1843. dear helen : i have pretty much explored this island, inland and along the shore, finding my health inclined me to the peripatetic philosophy. i have visited telegraph stations, sailors snug harbors, sea man s retreats, old elm-trees, where the hu guenots landed, britton s mills, and all the vil 2* c 34 letters. lages on the island. last sunday i walked over to lake island farm, eight or nine miles from here, where moses prichard lived, and found the pres ent occupant, one mr. davenport, formerly from massachusetts, with three or four men to help him, raising sweet potatoes and tomatoes by the acre. it seemed a cool and pleasant retreat, but a hungry soil. as i was coming away, i took my toll -out of the soil in the shape of arrow-heads, which may after all be the surest crop, certainly not affected by drought. i am well enough situated here to observe one aspect of the modern world at least. i mean the migratory, the western movement. sixteen hundred immigrants arrived at quarantine ground on the 4th of july, and more or less every day since i have been here. i see them occasionally . washing their persons and clothes, or men, wo men, and children gathered on an isolated quay near the shore, stretching their limbs and taking the air ; the children running races and swinging on this artificial piece of the land of liberty, while their vessels are undergoing purification. they are detained but a day or two, and then go up to the city, for the most part without having landed here. / in the city i have seen since i wrote last, w. h. channing, at whose house, in fifteenth street, i spent a few pleasant hours, discussing the all-absorbing question &quot;what to do for the letters. . 35 race. / (he is sadly in earnest about going up tfie river to rusticate for six weeks, and issues a new periodical called &quot; the present &quot; in sep tember.) also horace greelej, editor of the &quot; tribune,&quot; who is cheerfully in earnest, at his office of all work, a hearty new hampshire boy as one would wish to meet, and says, &quot; now be neighborly,&quot; and believes only, or mainly, first, in the sylvania association, somewhere in penn sylvania ; and, secondly, and most of all, in a new association to go into operation soon in new jer-j sey, with which he is connected. edward palmer came down to see me sunday before last. as for w and t , we have strangely dodged one another, and have not met for some weeks. i believe i have not told you anything about lucretia mott. it was a good while ago that i heard her at the quaker church in hester street. she is a preacher, and it was advertised that she would be present on that day. i liked all the pro ceedings very well, their plainly greater harmony and sincerity, than elsewhere. they do nothing in a hurry. every one that walks up the aisle in his square coat and expansive hat has a history, and comes from a house to a house. the women come in one after another in their quaker bon nets and handkerchiefs, looking all like sisters or so many chickadees. at length, after a long silence waiting for the spirit mrs. mott rose, took off her bonnet, and began to utter very 36 letters. deliberately what the spirit suggested. her self possession was something to say, if all else failed ; but it did not. her subject was, &quot; the abuse of the bible,&quot; and thence she straightway digressed to slavery and the degradation of woman. it was a good speech, transcendentalism in its mildest form. she sat down at length, and, after a long and decorous silence, in which some seemed to be really digesting her words, the elders shook hands, and the meeting dispersed. on the whole, i liked their ways and the plainness of their meet ing-house. it looked as if it was indeed made for o service. i think that stearns wheeler has left a gap in the community not easy to be filled. though he did not exhibit the highest qualities of the scholar, he promised, in a remarkable degree, many of the essential and rarer ones ; and his patient industry and energy, his reverent love of letters, and his proverbial accuracy, will cause him to be associ ated in my memory even with many venerable names of former days. it was not w r holly unfit that so pure a lover of books should have ended his pilgrimage at the great book-mart of the world. i think of him as healthy and brave, and am con fident that if he had lived, he would have proved useful in more ways than i can describe. he would have been authority on all matters of fact, and a sort of connecting link between men and scholars of different walks and tastes. the liter letters. 37 ary enterprises he was planning for himself and friends, remind me of an older and more studious time. so much, then, remains for us to do who survive. tell all my friends in concord that i do not send my love, but retain it still. your affectionate brother, h. d. t. to mks. thoreau. staten island, august 6, 1843. dear mother : i am chiefly indebted to. your letters for what i have learned of concord and family news, and am very glad when i get one. i should have liked to be in walden woods with you, but not with the railroad. i think of you all very often, and wonder if you are still separated from me only by so many miles of earth, or so many miles of memory. this life we live is a strange dream, and i don t believe at all any ac count men give of it. methinks i should be con tent to sit at the back-door in concord, under the poplartree, henceforth forever. not that i am homesick at all for places are strangely indif ferent to me but concord is still a cynosure to my eyes, and i find it hard to attach it, even in imagination, to the rest of the globe, and tell where the seam is. 38 letters. i fancy that this sunday evening you are poring over some select book, almost transcendental per chance, or else &quot; burgh s dignity,&quot; or massillon, or the christian examiner. father has just taken one more look at the garden, and is now absorbed in chaptelle, or reading the newspaper quite ab stractedly, only looking up occasionally over his spectacles to see how the rest are engaged, and not to miss any newer news that may not be in the paper. h has slipped in for the fourth time to learn the very latest item. s , i sup pose, is at bangor ; but aunt l , without doubt, is just flitting away to some good meeting, to save the credit of you all. it is still a cardinal virtue with me to keep awake. i find it impossible to write or read ex cept at rare intervals, but am, generally speaking, tougher than formerly. i could make a pedestrian tour round the world, and sometimes think it would perhaps be better to do at once the things i can, rather than be trying to do what at present i cannot do well. however, i shall awake sooner or later. i have been translating some greek, and read ing english poetry, and a month ago sent a paper to the democratic review, which, at length, they were sorry they could not accept ; but they could not adopt the sentiments. however, they were very polite, and earnest that i should send them something else, or reform that. letters. 39 i go moping about the fields and woods here as i did in concord, and, it seems, am thought to be a surveyor, an eastern man inquiring narrowly into the condition -and value of land, &c. here, preparatory to an extensive speculation. one neighbor observed to me, in a mysterious and half inquisitive way, that he supposed i must be pretty well acquainted with the state of things ; that i kept pretty close : he did n t see any surveying instruments, but perhaps i had them in my pocket, j i have received h s note, but have not heard of f h yet. she is a faint hearted writer who could not take the responsi bility of blotting one sheet alone. however, i like very well the. blottings i get. tell her i have not seen mrs. child nor mrs. sedgwick. love to all from your affectionate son, henky d. thoreau. to miss thoreau. staten island, october 18, 1843. dear h : what do you mean by saying that &quot; we have written eight times by private opportunity ? &quot; is n t it the more the better ? and am i not glad of it ? but people have a habit of not let 40 letters. ting me know it when they go to concord from new york. i endeavored to get you &quot; the present &quot; when i was last in the city, but they were all sold ; and now another is out, which i will send, if i get it. i did not send the demo cratic review, because i had no copy, and my piece was not worth fifty cents. you think that channing s words would apply to me too, as liv ing more in the natural than the moral world ; but i think that you mean the world of men and wo men rather, and reformers generally. my ob jection to the editors and all that fraternity is, that they need and deserve sympathy themselves rather than are able to render it to others. they want faith, and mistake their, private ail for an infected atmosphere ; but let any one of them re cover hope for a moment, and right his particular grievance, and he will no longer train in that com pany. to speak or do anything that shall concern mankind, one must speak and act as if well, or from that grain of health which he has left. this &quot; present&quot; book indeed is blue, but the hue of its thoughts is yellow. i say these things with the less hesitation, because i have the jaundice my self; but i also know what it is to be well. but do not think that one can escape from mankind who is one of them, and is so constantly deal ing with them. i could not undertake to form a nucleus of an institution for the development of infant minds, letters. 41 where none already existed. it would be too cruel. and then, as if looking all this while one way with benevolence, to walk off another about one s own affairs suddenly ! something of this kind is an unavoidable objection to that. i am very sorry to hear such bad news about aunt m ; but i think that the worst is al ways the least to be apprehended, for nature is averse to it as well as we. i trust to hear that she is quite well soon. i send love to her and aunt j . for three months i have not known whether to think of sophia as in bangor or concord, and now you say that she is going di rectly. tell her ta^vrite to me, and establish her whereabouts, and also to get well directly. and see that she has something worthy to do when she gets down there, for that s the best remedy for disease. your affectionate brother, ii. d. thoreau. to mr. b. concord, march 27, 1848. i am glad to hear that any words of mine, though spoken so long ago that i can hardly claim identity with their author, have reached you. it gives me pleasure, because i have there 42 letters. fore reason to suppose that i have uttered what concerns men, and that it is not in vain that man speaks to man. this is the value of litera ture. yet those days are so distant, in every sense, that i have had to look at that page again, to learn what was the tenor of my thoughts then. i should value that article, however, if only be cause it was the occasion of your letter. i do believe that the outward and the inward life correspond ; that if any should succeed to live a higher life, others would not know of it ; that difference and distance are one. to set about living a true life is to go a journey to a distant country, gradually to find o^selves surrounded by new scenes and men ; and as long as the old are around me, i know that i am not in any true sense living a new or a better life. the outward is only the outside of that which is within. men are not concealed under habits, but are revealed by them ; they are their true clothes. i care not how curious a reason they may give for their abid ing by them. circumstances are not rigid and unyielding, but our habits are rigid. we are apt to speak vaguely sometimes, as if a divine life were to be grafted on to or built over this present as a suitable foundation. this might do if we could so build over our old life as to exclude from it all the warmth of our affection, and addle it, as the thrush builds over the cuckoo s egg, and lays her own atop, and hatches that only ; but the fact letters. 43 is, we so there is the partition hatch them both, and the cuckoo s always by a day first, and that young bird crowds the young thrushes out of the nest. no. destroy the cuckoo s egg, or build a new nest. change is change. no new life occupies the old bodies ; they decay. it is born, and grows, and flourishes. men very pathetically inform the old, accept and wear it. why put up with the almshouse when you may go to heaven ? it is embalming, no more. let alone your ointments and your linen swathes, and go into an infant s body. you see in the catacombs of egypt the result of that experiment, that is the end of it. i do belie ve in simplicity. it is astonishing a.s~~~j well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest man thinks he must attend to in a day ; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. when the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all encum brances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. so simplify the problem of life, distinguish the neces sary and the real. probe the earth to see where your main roots run. i would stand upon facts. why not see, use our eyes ? do men know nothing? i know many men who, in common things, are not to be deceived ; who trust no moonshine ; who count their money correctly, and know how to invest it ; who are said to be pru dent and knowing, who yet will stand at a desk the 44 letters. greater part of their lives, as cashiers in banks, and glimmer and rust and finally go out there. if they know anything, what under the sun do they do that for ? do they know what bread is ? or what it is for ? do they know what life is ? if they knew something, the places which know them now would know them no more forever^j this, our respectable daily life, in which the man of common sense, the englishman of the world, stands so squarely, and on which our insti tutions are founded, is in fact the veriest illusion, and will vanish like the baseless fabric of a vision ; but that faint glimmer of reality which sometimes illuminates the darkness of daylight for all men, reveals something more solid and enduring than adamant, which is in fact the corner-stone of the world. .men cannot conceive of a state of things so fail that it cannot be realized. can any man honestly consult his experience and say that it is so ? have we any facts to appeal to when we say that our dreams are premature ? did you ever hear of a man who had striven all his life faithfully and singly toward an object and in no measure ob tained it ? if a man constantly aspires, is he not elevated ? did ever a man try heroism, magna nimity, truth, sincerity, and find that there was no advantage in them ? that it was a vain en deavor ? of course we do not expect that our para dise will be a garden. i we know not what we ask. letters. 45 to look at literature ; how many fine thoughts has every man had ! how few fine thoughts are expressed ! yet we never have a fantasy so subtile and ethereal, but that talent merely, with more resolution and faithful persistency, after a thousand failures, might fix and engrave it in dis tinct and enduring words, and we should see that our dreams are the solidest facts that we know. but i speak not of dreams. what can be expressed in words can be ex pressed in life. my actual life is a fact, in view of which i have no occasion to congratulate myself; but for my faith and aspiration i have respect. it is from these that i speak. every man s position is in fact too simple to be described. i have sworn no oath. i have no designs on society, or nature, or god. i am simply what i am, or i begin to be that. i live in the present. i only remember the past, and anticipate the future. i love to live. ( i love reform better than its modes. there is no history of how bad became better. i believe something, and there is nothing else but that. i know that i am. i know that another is who knows more than i, who takes interest in me, whose creature, and yet whose kindred, in one sense, am i. i know that the enterprise is worthy. i know that things work well. i have heard no bad news. as for positions, combinations, and details, what are they ? in clear weather, when we 4b letters. look into the heavens, what do we see but the sky and the sun ? if you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. but do not care to convince him. men will believe what they see. let them see. pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life, as a dog does his master s chaise. do what you love. know your own bone : gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still. do riot be too moral. you may cheat yourself out of much life so. aim above morality. be not simply good ; be good for something. all fables, indeed, have their morals ; but the innocent enjoy the story. let nothing come between you and the light. respect men as brothers only. when you travel to the celestial city, carry no letter of introduction. when you knock, ask to see god, none of the servants. in what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions : know that you are alone in the world./ thus i write at random. i need to see you, and i trust i shall, to correct my mistakes. per haps you have some oracles for me. henry thokeau. (\j letters. 47 k k to me. b. concord, may 2, 1848. &quot; we must have our bread.&quot; but what is our bread ? is it baker s bread ? methinks it should be very home-made bread. what is our meat ? is it butcher s meat ? what is that which we must have ? is that bread which we are now earning sweet ? is it not bread which has been suffered to sour, and then been sweetened with an alkali, which has undergone the vinous, acetous, and sometimes the putrid fermentation, and then, been whitened with vitriol ? is this the bread which we must have ? man must earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, truly, but also by the sweat of his brain within his brow. the body can feed the body only. i have tasted but little bread in my life. it has been mere grub and provender for the most part. of bread that nourished the brain and the heart, scarcely any. there is absolutely none even on the tables of the rich. there is not one kind of food for all men. you must and you will feed those faculties which you exercise. the laborer whose body is weary does not require the same food with the scholar whose brain is weary. men should not labor foolishly like brutes, but the brain and the body should al ways, or as much as possible, work and rest to gether, and then the work will be of such a kind 48 letters. that when the body is hungry the brain will bo hungry also, and the same food will suffice for both ; otherwise the food which repairs the waste energy of the over-wrought body will oppress the sedentary brain, and the degenerate scholar will come to esteem all food vulgar, and all getting a living drudgery. how shall we earn our bread is a grave ques tion ; yet it is a sweet and inviting question. let us not shirk it, as is usually done. it is the most im portant and practical question which is put to man. let us not answer it hastily. let us not be con tent to get our bread in some gross, careless, and hasty manner. some men go a-hunting, some a-fishing, some a-gaming, some to war ; but none have so pleasant a time as they who in earnest seek to earn their bread. it is true actually as it is true really ; it is true materially as it is true spirit ually, that they who seek honestly and sincerely, with all their hearts and lives and strength, to earn their bread, do earn it, and it is sure to be very sweet to them. a very little bread, a very few crumbs are enough, if it be of the right qual ity, for it is infinitely nutritious. let each man, then, earn at least a crumb of bread for his body before he dies, and know the taste of it, that it is identical with the bread of life, and that they both go down at one swallow. our bread need. not ever be sour or hard to digest. what nature is to the mind she is also to letters. 49 the body. as she feeds my imagination, she will feed my body ; for what she says she means, and is ready to do. she is not simply beautiful to the poet s ey&. not only the rainbow and sunset are beautiful, but to be fed and clothed, sheltered and warmed aright, are equally beautiful and inspiring. there is not necessarily any gross and ugly fact which may not be eradicated from the life of man. we should endeavor practically in our lives to correct all the defects which our imagination de tects. the heavens are as deep as our aspira tions are high. so high as a tree aspires to grow, so high it will find an atmosphere suited to it. every man should stand for a force which is per fectly irresistible. how can any man be weak who dares to be at all ? even the tenderest plants force their way up through the hardest earth, and the crevices of rocks ; but a man no material power can resist. what a wedge, what a beetle, what a catapult, is an earnest man ! what can resist him ? it is a momentous fact that a man may be good, or he may be bad; his life may be true, or it may be false ; it may be either a shame or a glory to him. the good man builds himself up; the bad man destroys himself. but whatever we do we must do confidently (if we are timid, let us, then, act timidly), not ex pecting more light, but having light enough. if we confidently expect more, then let us wait for it. 3 d 50 letters. but what is this which we have ? have we not already waited ? is this the beginning of time ? is there a man who does not see clearly beyond, though only a hair s breadth beyond where he at any time stands ? if one hesitates in his path, let him not proceed. let him respect his doubts, for doubts, too, may have some divinity in them. that we have but little faith is not sad, but that we have but little faithfulness. by faithfulness faith is earned. when, in the progress of a life, a man swerves, though only by an angle infinitely small, from his proper and allotted path (and this is never done quite un consciously even at first ; in fact, that was his broad and scarlet sin, ah, he knew of it more than he can tell), then the drama of his life turns to tragedy, and makes haste to its fifth act. when once we thus fall behind ourselves, there is no ac counting for the obstacles which rise up in our path, and no one is so wise as to advise, and no one so powerful as to aid us while we abide on that ground. such are cursed with duties, and the neglect of their duties. for such the deca logue was made, and other far more voluminous and terrible codes. these departures, who have not made them ? for they are as faint as the parallax of a fixed star, and at the commencement we say thev are nothing, that is, they originate in a kind of sleep and forgetfulness of the soul when it is letters. 51 naught. a man cannot be too circumspect in order to keep in the straight road, and be sure that he sees all that he may at any time see, that so he may distinguish his true path. you ask if there is no doctrine of sorrow in my philosophy. of acute sorrow i suppose that i know comparatively little. my saddest and most genuine sorrows are apt to be but transient re grets. the place of sorrow is supplied, perchance, by a certain hard and proportionably barren in difference. i am of kin to the sod, and partake largely of its dull patience, in winter expecting the sun of spring. in my cheapest moments i am apt to think that it is not my business to be &quot; seeking the spirit,&quot; but as much its business to be seeking me. i know very well what goethe meant when he said that he never had a chagrin, but he made a poem out of it. i have altogether too much patience of this kind. i am too easily contented with a slight and almost animal happiness. my happiness is a good deal like that of the wood chucks. methinks i am never quite committed, never wholly the creature of my moods, being always to some extent their critic. my only integral ex perience is in my vision. i see, perchance, with more integrity than i feel. but i need not tell you what manner of man i am, my virtues or my vices. you can guess if 52 letters. it is worth the while ; and i do not discriminate them well. i do not write this time at my hut in the woods. i am at present living with mrs. emerson, whose house is an old home of mine, for company during mr. e. s absence. you will perceive that i am as often talking to myself, perhaps, as speaking to you. henry thoreau. to mr. b. concord, august 10, 1849. mr. b : i write now chiefly to say, before it is too late, that i shall be glad to see you in concord, and will give you a chamber, &c., in my father s house, and as much of my poor company as you can bear. i am in too great haste this time to speak to your, or out of my, condition. i might say, you might say, comparatively speaking, be not anxious to avoid poverty. in this way the wealth of the universe may be securely invested. what a pity if we do not live this short time according to the laws of the long time, the eternal laws ! let us see that we stand erect here, and do not lie along by our whole length in the dirt. let our letters. 53 meanness be our footstool, not our cushion. in the midst of this labyrinth let us live a thread of life. we must act with so rapid and resistless a purpose in one direction, that our vices will necessarily trail behind. the nucleus of a comet is almost a star. was there ever a genuine dilem ma? the laws of earth are for the feet, or in ferior man ; the laws of heaven are for the head, or superior man ; the latter are the former sub limed and expanded, even as radii from the earth s centre go on diverging into space. happy the man who observes the heavenly and the terres trial law in just proportion ; whose every faculty, from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head, obeys the law of its level ; who neither stoops nor goes on tiptoe, but lives a balanced life, acceptable to nature and to god. these things i say ; other things i do. i am sorry to hear that you did not receive my book earlier. i addressed it and left it in munroe s shop to be sent to you immediately, on the twenty sixth of may, before a copy had been sold. will you remember me to mr. when you see him next : he is well remembered by henry thoreau. i still owe you a worthy answer. 54 letters. to mr. b. concord, november 20. 1s49. mr. b : i have not forgotten that i am your debtor. when i read over your letters, as i have just done, i feel that i am unworthy to have received or to answer them, though they are addressed, as i would have them, to the ideal of me. it be hoves me, if i would reply, to speak out of the rarest part of myself. at present i am subsisting on certain wild fla vors which nature wafts to me, which unaccount ably sustain me, and make my apparently poor life rich. within a year my walks have extended themselves, and almost every afternoon (i read, or write, or make pencils in the forenoon, and by the last means get a living for my body) i visit some new hill, or pond, or wood, many miles dis tant. i am astonished at the wonderful retirement through which i move, rarely meeting a man in these excursions, never seeing one similarly en gaged, unless it be my companion, when i have one. i cannot help feeling that of all the human inhabitants of nature hereabouts, only we two have leisure to admire and enjoy our inheritance. &quot; free in this world as the birds in the air, dis- engaged from every kind of chains, those who have practised the yoga gather in brahma the certain fruit of their works.&quot; letters. 55 depend upon it, that, rude and careless as i am, i would fain practise the yoga faithfully. / &quot; the yogi, absorbed in contemplation, con tributes in his degree to creation : he breathes a divine perfume, he hears wonderful things. di vine forms traverse him without tearing him, and, united to the nature which is proper to him, he goes, he acts as animating original matter.&quot; to some extent, and at rare intervals, even i am a yogi. i know little about the affairs of turkey, but i am sure that i know something about barberries and chestnuts, of which i have collected a store this fall. when i go to see my neighbor, he will formally communicate to me the latest news from turkey, which he read in yesterday s mail, &quot; now turkey by this time looks determined, and lord palmerston &quot; why, i would rather talk of the bran, which, unfortunately, was sifted out of my bread this morning, and thrown away. it is a fact which lies nearer to me. the news paper gossip with which our hosts abuse our ears is as far from a true hospitality as the viands which they set before us. we did not need them to feed our bodies, and the news can be bought for a penny. we want the inevitable news, be it sad or cheering, wherefore and by what means they are extant this new day. if they are well, let them whistle and dance ; if they are dyspeptic, it is their duty to complain, that so they may in any 56 letteks. case be entertaining. if words were invented to conceal thought, i think that newspapers are a great improvement or a bad invention. do not [ suffer your life to be taken by newspapers. i thank you for your hearty appreciation of my book. i am glad to have had such a long talk with you, and that you had patience to listen to me to the end. i think that i had the advantage of you, for i chose my own mood, and in one sense your mood too, that is, a quiet and atten tive reading mood. such advantage has the writer over the talker. i am sorry that you did not come to concord in your vacation. is it not time for another vacation ? i am here yet, and con cord is here. you will have found out by this time who it is that writes this, and will be glad to have you write to him, without his subscribing himself henry d. tiioreau. p. s. it is so long since i have seen you, that, as you will perceive, i have to speak, as it were, in vacuo, as if i were sounding hollowly for an echo, and it did not make much odds what kind of a sound i made. but the gods do not hear any rude or discordant sound, as we learn from the echo ; and i know that the nature to ward which i launch these sounds is so rich, that it will modulate anew and wonderfully improve my rudest strain. letters. 57 to mr. b. concord, april 3, 1850. mr. b : i thank you for your letter, and i will endeavor to record some of the thoughts which it suggests^ whether pertinent or not. you speak of poverty and dependence. who are poor and dependent ? who are rich and independent ? when was it that men agreed to respect the appearance and not the reality ? why should the appearance appear? are we well acquainted, then, with the reality ? there is none who does not lie hourly in the respect he pays to false appearance. how sweet it would be to treat men and things, for an hour, for just what they are ! we wonder that the sinner does not confess his sin. when we are weary with travel, we lay down our load and rest by the wayside. so, when we are weary with the burden of life, why do we not lay down this load of falsehoods which we have volunteered to sustain, and be refreshed as never mortal was ? let the beautiful laws prevail. let us not weary ourselves by resisting them. when we would rest #ur bodies we cease to support them ; we re cline on the lap of earth. so, when we would rest our spirits, we must recline on the great spirit. let things alone ; let them weigh what they will ; let them soar or fall. to succeed in letting only one thing alone in a winter morning, 3* 58 letters. if it be only one poor, frozen-thawed apple that hangs on a tree, what a glorious achievement! methinks it lightens through the dusky universe. what an infinite wealth we have discovered ! god reigns, i. e. when we take a liberal view, when a liberal view is presented us. let god alone if need be. methinks, if i loved him more, i should keep him, i should keep myself rather, at a more respectful dis tance. it is not when i am going to meet him, but when i am just turning away and leaving him alone, that i discover that god is. i say, god. i am not sure that that is the name. you will know whom i mean. if for a moment we make way with our petty selves, wish no ill to anything, apprehend no ill, cease to be but as the crystal which reflects a ray, what shall we not reflect! what a universe will appear crystallized and radiant around us ! i should say, let the muse lead the muse, let the understanding lead the understanding, though in any case it is the farthest forward which leads them both. if the muse accompany, she is no muse, but an amusement. the muse should lead like a star which is very far off ; but that doe^s not imply that we are to follow foolishly, falling into sloughs and over precipices, for it is not foolish ness, but understanding, which is to follow, which the muse is appointed to lead, as a fit guide of a fit follower. letters. 59 -^ will you live ? or will you be embalmed ? will you live, though it be astride of a sunbeam ; or will you repose safely in the catacombs for a thou sand years ? in the former case, the worst acci dent that can happen is that you may break your neck. will you break your heart, your soul, to save your neck ? necks and pipe-stems are fated to be broken. men make a great ado about the folly of demanding too much of life (or of eternity?), and of endeavoring to live accord ing to that demand. it is much ado about noth ing. no harm ever came from that quarter. i am not afraid that i shall exaggerate the value and significance of life, but that i shall not be up to the occasion which it is. i shall be sorry to remember that i was there, but noticed noth ing remarkable, not so much as a prince in disguise ; lived in the golden age a hired man ; visited olympus even, but fell asleep after dinner, and did not hear the conversation of the gods. i lived in judaea eighteen hundred years ago, but i never knew that there was such a one as christ among my contemporaries ! if there is anything more glorious than a congress of men a-framing or amending of a constitution going on, which i suspect there is, i desire to see the morning papers. i am greedy of the faintest rumor, though it were got by listening at the key-hole. i will dissipate myself in that direction, j i am glad to know that you find what i have 60 letters. said on friendship worthy of attention. i wish i could have the benefit of your criticism ; it would be a rare help to me. will you not communicate it? henry d. thokeau to me. b. concord, may 28 1850. mr. b : &quot; i never found any contentment in the life which the newspapers record,&quot; anything of more value than the cent which they cost. content ment in being covered with dust an inch deep ! we who walk the streets, and hold time together, are but the refuse of ourselves, and that life is for the shells of us, of our body and our mind, for our scurf, a thoroughly scurvy life. it is coffee made of coffee-grounds the twentieth time, which was only coffee the first time, while the living water leaps and sparkles by our doors. i know some who, in their chanty, give their coffee grounds to the poor ! we, demanding news, and putting up with such news ! is it a new conven ience, or a new accident, or, rather, a new per ception of the truth that we want ! you say that &quot; the serene hours in which friend ship, books, nature, thought, seem alone primary letters. 61 considerations, visit you but faintly.&quot; is not the attitude of expectation somewhat divine ? a sort of home-made divineness ? does it not compel a kind of sphere-music to attend on it? and do not its satisfactions merge at length, by insensible degrees, in the enjoyment of the thing expected ? what if i should forget to write about my not writing ? it is not worth the while to make that a theme. it is as if i had written every day. it is as if i had never written before. i wonder that you think so much about it, for not writing is the most like writing, in my case, of anything i know. why will you not relate to me your dream ? that would be to realize it somewhat. you tell me that you dream, but not what you dream. i can guess what comes to pass. so do the frogs dream. would that i knew what. i have never found out whether they are awake or asleep, whether it is day or night with them. i am preaching, mind you, to bare walls, that is, to myself; and if you have chanced to come in and occupy a pew, do not think that my re marks are directed at you particularly, and so slam the seat in disgust. this discourse was written long before these exciting times. some absorbing employment on your higher ground, your upland farm, whither no cart path leads, but where you mount alone with your hoe, where the life everlasting grows ; there you raise a crop which needs not to be brought 62 letters. down into the valley to a market ; which you barter for heavenly products. do you separate distinctly enough the support of your body, from that of your essence ? by how distinct a course commonly are these two ends attained ! not that they should not be at tained by one and the same means, that, in deed, is the rarest success, but there is no half and half about it. i shall be glad to read my lecture to a small audience in worcester such as you describe, and will only require that my expenses be paid. if only the parlor be large enough for an echo, and the audience will embarrass themselves with hear ing as much as the lecturer would otherwise em barrass himself with reading. but i warn you that this is no better calculated for a promiscuous audience than the last two which i read to you. it requires, in every sense, a concordant audience. i will come on next and spend sunday with you if you wish it. say so if you do. &quot; drink deep, or taste not the pierian spring.&quot; be not deterred by melancholy on the path which leads to immortal health and joy. when they tasted of the water of the river over which they were to go, they thought it tasted a little bitter ish to the palate, but it proved sweeter when it was down. h. d. t. letters. b6 to mr. b. concord, august 9, 1850. mr. b : i received your letter just as i was rushing to fire island beach to recover what remained of margaret fuller, and read it on the way. that event and its train, as much as anything, have pre vented my answering it before. it is wisest to speak when you are spoken to. i will now en deavor to reply, at the risk of having nothing to say. i find that actual events, notwithstanding the singular prominence which we all allow them, are far less real than the creations of my imagination. they are truly visionary and insignificant, all that we commonly call life and death, and affect me less than my dreams. this petty stream which from time to time swells and carries away the mills and bridges of our habitual life, and that mightier stream or ocean on which we securely float, what makes the difference between them ? i have in my pocket a button which i ripped off the coat of the marquis of ossoli, on the sea-shore, the other day. held up, it intercepts the light, an actual button, and yet all the life it is connected with is less substantial to me, and inter ests me less, than my faintest dream. our thoughts are the epochs in our lives: all else is but as a journal of the winds that blew while we were here. 64 letters. i say to myself, do a little more of that work which you have confessed to be good. you are neither satisfied nor dissatisfied with yourself, with out reason. have you not a thinking faculty of inestimable value ? if there is an experiment which you would like to try, try it. do not en tertain doubts if they are not agreeable to you. remember that you need not eat unless you are hungry. do not read the newspapers. improve every opportunity to be melancholy. as for health, consider yourself well. do not engage to find things as you think they are. do what no body else can do for you. omit to do anything else. it is not easy to make our lives respectable by any course of activity. we must repeatedly withdraw into our shells of thought, like the tortoise, somewhat helplessly ; yet there is more than philosophy in that. do not waste any reverence on my attitude. i merely manage to sit up where i have dropped. i am sure that my acquaintances mistake me. they ask my advice on high matters, but they do not know even how poorly on t i am for hats and shoes. i have hardly a shift. just as shabby as i am in my outward apparel, ay, and more lamentably shabby am i in my inward substance. if i should turn myself inside out, my rags and meanness would indeed appear. i am something to him that made me, undoubtedly, but not much to any other that he has made. letters. 65 would it not be worth while to discover nature in milton ? be native to the universe ? i, too, love concord best, but i am glad when i discover, in oceans and wildernesses far away, the material of a million concords : indeed, i am lost, unless i discover them. i see less difference between a city and a swamp than formerly. it is a swamp, however, too dismal and dreary even for me, and i should be glad if there were fewer owls, and frogs, and mosquitoes in it. i prefer ever a more cultivated place, free from miasma and crocodiles. i am so sophisticated, and i will take my choice. as for missing friends, what if we do miss one another ? have we not agreed on a rendez vous ? while each wanders his own way through the wood, without anxiety, ay, with serene joy, though it be on his hands and knees, over rocks and fallen trees, he cannot but be in the right way. there is no wrong way to him. how can he be said to miss his friend, whom the fruits still nourish and the elements sustain? a man who missed his friend at a turn, went on buoyantly, dividing the friendly air, and humming a tune to himself, ever and anon kneeling with delight to study each little lichen in his path, and scarcely made three miles a day for friendship. as for conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, i do not think much of that. let not your right hand know what your left hand does in that line of business. it will prove a failure. 66 letters. just as successfully can you walk against a sharp steel edge which divides you cleanly right and left. do you wish to try your ability to resist distension ? it is a greater strain than any soul can long endure. when you get god to pulling one way, and the devil the other, each having his feet well braced, to say nothing of the con science sawing transversely, almost any timber will give way._j/ i do not dare invite you earnestly to come to concord, because i know too well that the berries are not thick in my fields, and we should have to take it out in viewing the landscape. but come, on every account, and we will see one another. hexry d. thoreau. to sophia thoeeau. concord, july 13, 1852. dear sophia : i am not on the trail of any elephants or mas todons, but have succeeded in trapping only a few ridiculous mice, which cannot feed my imagina tion. i have become sadly scientific. i would rather come upon the vast valley-like &quot; spore &quot; only of some celestial beast which this world s woods can no longer sustain, than spring my net over a bushel of moles. you must do better in letters. 67 those woods where you are. you must have some adventures to relate and repeat for years to come, which will eclipse even mother s voyage to goldsborough and sissiboo. concord is just as idiotic as ever in relation to the spirits and their knockings. most people here believe in a spiritual world which no respectable junk bottle, which had not met with a slip, would condescend to contain even a portion of for a moment, whose atmosphere would extinguish a candle let down into it, like a well that wants airing ; in spirits which the very bull-frogs in our meadows would blackball. their evil genius is seeing how low it can degrade them. the hoot ing of owls, the croaking of frogs is celestial wis dom in comparison. if i could be brought to believe in the things which they believe, i should make haste to get rid of my certificate of stock in this and the next world s enterprises, and buy a share in the first immediate annihilation com pany that offered. i would exchange my im mortality for a glass of small beer this hot weather. where are the heathen ? was there ever any superstition before? and yet i suppose there may be a vessel this very moment setting sail from the coast of north america to that of af rica with a missionary on board! consider the dawn and the sunrise, the rainbow and the evening, the words of christ and the aspira tions of all the saints ! hear music ! see, smell, 68 letters. taste, feel, hear, anything, and then hear these idiots, inspired by the cracking of a rest less board, humbly asking, &quot; please, spirit, if you cannot answer by knocks, answer by tips of the table.&quot; !!!!!! yours, h. d. thoreau. to mr. b. concord, july 21, 1852. mr. b : i am too stupidly well these days to write to you. my life is almost altogether outward, all shell and no tender kernel ; so that i fear the re port of it would be only a nut for you to crack, with no meat in it for you to eat. moreover, you have not cornered me up, and i enjoy such large liberty in writing to you, that i feel as vague as the air. however, i rejoice to hear that you have attended so patiently to anything which i have said heretofore, and have detected any truth in it. it encourages me to say more, not in this letter, i fear, but in some book which i may write one day. i am glad to know that i am as much to any mortal as a persistent and consistent scare crow is to a farmer, such a bundle of straw in a man s clothing as i am, with a few bits of tin to sparkle in the sun dangling about me, as if i were letters. 69 hard at work there in the field. however, if this kind of life saves any man s corn, why, he is the gainer. i am not afraid that you will flatter me as long as you know what i am, as well as what i think, or aim to be, and distinguish between these two, for then it will commonly happen that if you praise the last you will condemn the first. i remember that walk to asneburnskit very well, a fit place to go to on a sunday ; one of the true temples of the earth. a temple, you know, was anciently &quot; an open place without a roof,&quot; whose walls served merely to shut out the world and direct the mind toward heaven ; but a modern meeting-house shuts out the heavens, while it crowds the world into still closer quarters. best of all is it when, as on a mountain-top, you have for all walls your own elevation and deeps of surrounding ether. the partridge-berries, wa tered with mountain dews which are gathered there, are more memorable to me than the words which i last heard from the pulpit at least ; and for my part, i would rather look toward rutland than jerusalem. rutland, modern town, land of ruts, trivial and worn, not too sacred, with no holy sepulchre, but profane green fields and dusty roads, and opportunity to live as holy a life as you can, where the sacredness, if there is any, is all in yourself and not in the place. i fear that your worcester people do not often enough go to the hilltops, though, as i am told, 70 letters. the springs lie nearer to the surface on your hills than in your valleys. they have the reputation of being free-soilers. do they insist on a free atmosphere too, that is, on freedom for the head or brain as well as the feet ? if i were con sciously to join any party, it would be that which is the most free to entertain thought. all the world complain now-a-days of a press of trivial duties and engagements, which prevents their employing themselves on some higher ground they know of; but, undoubtedly, if they were made of the right stuff to work on that higher ground, provided they were released from all those engagements, they would now at once fulfil the superior engagement, and neglect all the rest, as naturally as they breathe. they would never be caught saying that they had no time for this, when the dullest man knows that this is all that he has time for. no man who acts from a sense of duty ever puts the lesser duty above the greater. no man has the desire and the ability to work on high things, but he has also the ability to build himself a high staging. as for passing through any great and glorious experience, and rising above it, as an eagle might fly athwart the evening sky to rise into still brighter and fairer regions of the heavens, i can not say that i ever sailed so creditably, but my bark ever seemed thwarted by some side wind, and went off over the edge, and now only occa letters. 71 sionally tacks back toward the centre of that sea again. i have outgrown nothing good, but, i do not fear to say, fallen behind by whole continents of virtue, which should have been passed as islands in my course ; but i trust what else can i trust that, with a stiff wind, some friday, when i have thrown some of my cargo overboard, i may make up for all that distance lost. perchance the time will come when we shall not be content to go back and forth upon a raft to some huge homeric or shakespearian indiaman that lies upon the reef, but build a bark out of that wreck and others that are buried in the sands of this desolate island, and such new timber as may be required, in which to sail away to whole new worlds of light and life, where our friends are. write again. there is one respect in which you did not finish your letter : you did not write it with ink, and it is not so good, therefore, against or for you in the eye of the law, nor in the eye of h. d. t. to mk. b. september, 1852. mr. b : here come the sentences which i promised you. you may keep them, if you will regard and use 72 letters. them as the disconnected fragments of what i may find to be a completer essay, on looking over my journal, at last, and may claim again. i send you the thoughts on chastity and sensu ality with diffidence and shame, not knowing how far i speak to the condition of men generally, or how far i betray my peculiar defects. pray en lighten me on this point if you can. love. what the essential difference between man and woman is that they should be thus attracted to one another, no one has satisfactorily answered. perhaps we must acknowledge the justness of the distinction which assigns to man the sphere of wisdom, and to woman that of love, though neither belongs exclusively to either. man is continually saying to woman, why will you not be more wise? woman is continually saying to man, why will you not be more loving? it is not in their wills to be wise or to be loving ; but, unless each is both wise and loving, there can be neither wisdom nor love. all transcendent goodness is one, though ap preciated in different ways, or by different senses. in beauty we see it, in music we hear it, in fra grance we scent it, in the palatable the pure palate tastes it, and in rare health the whole body feels it. the variety is in the surface or manifes letters. 73 tatlon ; but the radical identity we fail to express. the lover sees in the glance of his beloved the same beauty that in the sunset paints the western skies. it is the same daimon, here lurking under a human eyelid, and there under the closing eyelids of the day. here, in small compass, is the ancient and natural beauty of evening and morning. what loving astronomer has ever fath omed the ethereal depths of the eye ? the maiden conceals a fairer flower and sweeter fruit than any calyx in the field ; and, if she goes with averted face, confiding in her purity and high resolves, she will make the heavens retrospective, and all nature humbly confess its queen. under the influence of this sentiment, man is a string of an jeolian harp, which vibrates with the zephyrs of the eternal morning. there is at first thought something trivial in the commonness of love. so many indian youths and maidens along these banks have in ages past yielded to the influence of this great civilizer. nevertheless, this generation is not disgusted nor discouraged, for love is no individual s experience ; and though we are imperfect mediums, it does not partake of our imperfection ; though we are finite, it is infinite and eternal ; and the same divine in fluence broods over these banks, whatever race may inhabit them, and perchance still would, even if the human race did not dwell here. perhaps an instinct survives through the intens 4 74 letters. est actual love, which prevents entire abandon ment and devotion, and makes the most ardent lover a little reserved. it is the anticipation of change. for the most ardent lover is not the less practically wise, and seeks a love which will last forever. k considering how few poetical friendships there are, it is remarkable that so many are married. it would seem as if men yielded too easy an obe dience to nature without consulting their genius. one may be drunk with love without being any nearer to finding his mate^ there is more of good nature than of good sense at the bottom of most marriages. but the good nature must have the counsel of the good spirit or intelligence. if com mon sense had been consulted, how many mar riages would never have taken place ; if uncom mon or divine sense, how few marriages such as we witness would ever have taken place ! our love may be ascending or descending. what is its character, if it may be said of it, &quot; we must respect the souls above. but only those below we love.&quot; love is a severe critic. hate can pardon more than love. they who aspire to love worthily, subject themselves to an ordeal more rigid than any other. is your friend such a one that an increase of worth on your part will rarely make her more your friend ? is she retained, is she attracted, letters. 75 by more nobleness in you, by more of that virtue which is peculiarly yours ; or is she indif ferent and blind to that ? is she to be flattered and won by your meeting her on any other than the ascending path ? then duty requires that you separate from her. love must be as much a light as a flame. where there is not discernment, the behavior even of the purest soul may in effect amount to coarseness. a man of fine perceptions is more fruly fem inine than a merely sentimental woman. the heart is blind ; but love is not blind. none of the gods is so discriminating. in love and friendship the imagination is as much exercised as the heart ; and if either is out raged the other will be estranged. it is commonly the imagination which is wounded first, rather than the heart, it is so much the more sensi tive. comparatively, we can excuse any offence against the heart, but not against the imagination. the imagination knows nothing escapes its glance from out its eyry and it controls the breast. my heart may still yearn toward the valley, but my imagination will not permit me to jump off the precipice that debars me from it, for it is wounded, its wings are dipt, and it cannot fly, even descend ingly. our &quot; blundering hearts ! &quot; some poet says. the imagination never forgets ; it is a re-member 76 letters. ing. it is not foundationless, but most reasonable, and it alone uses all the knowledge of the intel lect. love is the profoundest of secrets. divulged, even to the beloved, it is no longer love. as if it were merely i that loved you. when love ceases, then it is divulged. in our intercourse with one we love, we wish to have answered those questions at the end of which we do not raise our voice ; against which we put no interrogation-mark, answered with the same unfailing, universal aim toward every point of the compass. i require that thou knowest everything without being told anything. i parted from my beloved because there was one thing which i had to tell her. she questioned me. she should have known all by sympathy. that i had to tell it her was the difference between us, the misunderstanding. a lover never hears anything that is told, for that is commonly either false or stale ; but he hears things taking place, as the sentinels heard trenck mining in the ground, and thought it was moles. the relation may be profaned in many ways. the parties may not regard it with equal sacred ness. what if the lover should learn that his beloved dealt in incantations and philters ! what if he should hear that she consulted a clairvoy ant ! the spell would be instantly broken. letters. 77 if to chaffer and higgle are bad in trade, they are much worse in love. it demands directness as of an arrow. there is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone. the lover wants no partiality. he says, be so kind as to be just. canst them love with thy mind, and reason with thy heart ? canst thoxi be kind, and from thy darling part ? can st them range earth, sea, and air, and so meet me everywhere &quot;? through all events i will pursue thee, through all persons i will woo thee. i need thy hate as much as thy love. thou wilt not repel me entirely when thou repellest what is evil in me. indeed, indeed, i cannot tell, though i ponder on it well, &quot;which were easier to state, all my love or all my hate. surely, surely, thou wilt trust me when i say thou dost disgust me i hate thee with a hate that would fain annihilate ; yet, sometimes, against my will, my dear friend, i love thee still. it were treason to our love, and a sin to god above, one iota to abate of a pure, impartial hate. 78 letters. it is not enough that we are truthful ; we must cherish and carry out high purposes to be truthful about. it must be rare, indeed, that we meet with one to whom we are prepared to be quite ideally re lated, as she to us. we should have no reserve ; we should give the whole of ourselves to that so ciety ; we should have no duty aside from that. one who could bear to be so wonderfully and beautifully exaggerated every day. i would take my friend out of her low self and set her higher, infinitely higher, and there know her. but, com monly, men are as much afraid of love as of hate. they have lower engagements. they have near ends to serve. they have not imagination enough to be thus employed about a human being, but must be coopering a barrel, forsooth. what a difference, whether, in all your walks, you meet only strangers, or in one house is one who knows you, and whom you know. to have a brother or a sister ! to have a gold mine on your farm ! to find diamonds in the gravel heaps before your door ! how rare these things are ! to share the day with you, to people the earth. whether to have a god or a goddess for com panion in your walks, or to walk alone with hinds and villains and carles. would not a friend en hance the beauty of the landscape asmuch as a deer or hare ? everything would acknowledge and serve such a relation ; the corn in the field, letters. 79 and the cranberries in the meadow. the flowers would bloom, and the birds sing, with a new im pulse. there would be more fair days in the year. the object of love expands and grows before us to eternity, until it includes all that is lovely, and we become all that can love. chastity and sensuality. the subject of sex is a remarkable one, since, though its phenomena concern us so much, both directly and indirectly, and, sooner or later, it occupies the thoughts of all, yet all mankind, as it were, agree to be silent about it, at least the sexes commonly one to another. one of the most in teresting of all human facts is veiled more com pletely than any mystery. it is treated with such secrecy and awe, as surely do not go to any re ligion. i believe that it is unusual even for the most intimate friends to communicate the pleasures and anxieties connected with this fact, much as the external affair of love, its comings and goings, are bruited. the shakers do not exaggerate it so much by their manner of speaking of it, as all mankind by their manner of keeping silence about it. not that men should speak on this or any subject with-, out having anything worthy to say ; but it i plain that the education of man has hardly com menced, there is so little genuine intercom munication. 80 letters. in a pure society, the subject of marriage would not be so often avoided from shame and not from reverence, winked out of sight, and hinted at only, but treated naturally and simply, perhaps simply avoided, like the kindred mys teries. if it cannot be spoken of for shame, how can it be acted of? but, doubtless, there is far more purity, as well as more impurity, than is apparent. men commonly couple with their idea of mar riage a slight degree at least of sensuality ; but every lover, the world over, believes in its incon ceivable purity. if it is the result of a pure love, there can be nothing sensual in marriage. chastity is some thing positive, not negative. it is the virtue of the married especially. all lusts or base pleasures must give place to loftier delights. they who meet as superior beings cannot perform the deeds of inferior ones. the deeds of love are less questionable than any action of an individual can be, for, it being founded on the rarest mutual respect, the parties incessantly stimulate each other to a loftier and purer life, and the act in which they are associated must be pure and noble indeed, for innocence and purity can have no equal. in this relation we deal with one whom we respect more religiously even than we respect our better selves, and we shall necessarily conduct as in the presence of god. what presence can letters. 81 be more awful to the lover than the presence of his beloved ? if you seek the warmth even of affection from a similar motive to that from which cats and dogs and slothful persons hug the fire, because your temperature is low through sloth, you are on the downward road, and it is but to plunge yet deeper into sloth. better the cold affection of the sun, reflected from fields of ice and snow, or his warmth in some still wintry dell. the warmth of celestial love does not relax, but nerves and braces its enjoyer. warm your body by health ful exercise, not by cowering over a stove. warm your spirit by performing independently noble deeds, not by ignobly seeking the sympathy of your fellows who are no better than yourself. a man s social and spiritual discipline must an swer to his corporeal. he must lean on a friend who has a hard breast, as he would lie on a hard bed. he must drink cold water for his only bev erage. so he must not hear sweetened and col o ored words, but pure and refreshing truths. he must daily bathe in truth cold as spring water, not warmed by the sympathy of friends. can love be in aught allied to dissipation ? let us love by refusing, not accepting one another. love and lust are far asunder. the one is good, the other bad. when the affectionate sympathize by their higher natures, there is love ; but there is danger that they will sympathize by their lower 4* f 82 letters. natures, and then there is lust. it is not ne cessary that this he deliberate, hardly even con scious ; hut, in the close contact of affection, there is danger that we may stain and pollute one an other, for we cannot embrace but with an entire embrace. we must love our friend so much that she shall be associated with our purest and holiest thoughts alone. when there is impurity, we have &quot; de scended to meet,&quot; though we knew it not. the luxury of affection, there s the danger. there must be some nerve and heroism in our love, as of a winter morning. in the religion of all nations a purity is hinted at, which, i fear, men never attain to. we may love and not ele vate one another. the love that takes us as it finds us degrades us. what watch we must keep over the fairest and purest of our affections, lest there be some taint about them. may we so love as never to have occasion to repent of our love. there is to be attributed to sensuality the loss to language of how many pregnant symbols ? flowers, which, by their infinite hues and fra grance, celebrate the marriage of the plants, are intended for a symbol of the open and unsuspected beauty of all true marriage, when man s flowering season arrives. virginity, too, is a budding flower, and by an impure marriage the virgin is deflowered. who ever loves flowers, loves virgins and chastity. letters. 83 love and lust are as far asunder as a flower garden is from a brothel. j. biberg, in the amcenitates botanicce, edited by linnaeus, observes (i translate from the latin) : &quot; the organs of generation, which, in the animal kingdom, are for the most part concealed by na ture, as if they were to be ashamed of, in the veg etable kingdom are exposed to the eyes of all ; and, when the nuptials of plants are celebrated, it is wonderful what delight they afford to the be holder, refreshing the senses with the most agree able color and the sweetest odor ; and, at the same time, bees and other insects, not to mention the humming-bird, extract honey from their nec taries, and gather wax from their effete pollen. &quot; linnaeus himself calls the calyx the thdlamus, or bridal chamber ; and the corolla the aulceum, or tapestry of it, and proceeds to explain thus every part of the flower. who knows but evil spirits might corrupt the flowers themselves, rob them of their fragrance and their fair hues, and turn their marriage into a secret shame and defilement ? already they are of various qualities, and there is one whose nup tials fill the lowlands in june with the odor of carrion. the intercourse of the sexes, i have dreamed, is incredibly beautiful, too fair to be remembered. i have had thoughts about it, but they are among the most fleeting and irrecoverable in my experi 84 letters. ence. it is strange that men will talk of miracles, revelation, inspiration, and the like, as things past, while love remains. a true marriage will differ in no wise from illumination. in all perception of the truth there is a divine ecstasy, an inexpressible delirium of joy, as when a youth embraces his betrothed virgin. the ultimate delights of a true marriage are one with this. no wonder that, out of such a union, not as end, but as accompaniment, comes the undying race of man. the womb is a most fertile soil. some have asked if the stock of men could not be improved, if they could not be bred as cattle. let love be purified, and all the rest will follow. a pure love is thus, indeed, the panacea for all the ills of the world. the only excuse for reproduction is improve ment. nature abhors repetition. beasts merely propagate their kind; but the offspring of noble men and women will be superior to themselves, as their aspirations are. by their fruits ye shall know them. letters. 85 to mr. b. concord, february 27, 1853. mr. b : i have not answered your letter before because i have been almost constantly in the fields survey ing of late. it is long since i have spent so many days so profitably in a pecuniary sense ; so un profitably, it seems to me, in a more important sense. i have earned just a dollar a day for seventy-six days past ; for, though i charge at a higher rate for the days which are seen to be spent, yet so many more are spent than appears. this is instead of lecturing, which has not offered, to pay for that book which i printed. i have not only cheap hours, but cheap weeks and months, that is, weeks which are bought at the rate i have named. not that they are quite lost to me, or make me very melancholy, alas ! for i too often take a cheap satisfaction in so spending them, weeks of pasturing and browsing, like beeves and deer, which give me animal health, it may be, but create a tough skin over the soul and intellectual part. yet, if men should offer my body a main tenance for the work of my head alone, i feel that it would be a dangerous temptation. as to whether what you speak of as the &quot; world s way &quot; (which for the most part is my way), or that which is shown me, is the better, the former is imposture, the latter is truth. i 86 letters. have the coldest confidence in the last. there is only such hesitation as the appetites feel in follow ing the aspirations. the clod hesitates because it is inert, wants animation. the one is the way of death, the other of life everlasting. my hours are not &quot; cheap in such a way that i doubt whether the world s way would not have been better,&quot; but cheap in such a way, that i doubt whether the world s way, which i have adopted for the time, could be worse. the whole en terprise of this nation, which is not an upward, but a westward one, toward oregon, california, japan, &c., is totally devoid of interest to me, whether performed on foot, or by a pacific railroad. it is not illustrated by a thought ; it is not warmed by a sentiment ; there is nothing in it which one should lay down his life for, nor even his gloves, hardly which one should take up a newspaper for. it is perfectly heathenish, a filibustering toward heaven by the great western route. no; they may go their way to their manifest destiny, which i trust is not mine. may my seventy-six dollars, whenever i get them, help to carry me in the other direction. i see them on their winding way, but no music is wafted from their host, only the rattling of change in their pockets. i would rather be a captive knight, and let them all pass by, than be free only to go whither they are bound. what end do they propose to themselves beyond japan ? what aims more lofty have they than the prairie dogs ? letters. 87 as it respects these things, i have not changed an opinion one iota from the first. as the stars looked to me when i was a shepherd in assyria, they look to me now a new-englander. the higher the mountain on which you stand, the less change in the prospect from year to year, from age to age. above a certain height there is no change. i am a switzer on the edge of the glacier, with his advantages and disadvantages, goitre, or what not. (you may suspect it to be some kind of swelling at any rate.) i have had but one spiritual birth (excuse the word), and now whether it rains or snows, whether i laugh or cry, fall further below or approach nearer to my standard ; whether pierce or scott is elected, not a new scintillation of light flashes on me, but ever and anon, though with longer intervals, the same surprising and everlastingly new light dawns to me, with only such variations as in the coming of the natural day, with which, indeed, it is often coincident. as to how to preserve potatoes from rotting, your opinion may change from year to year ; but as to how to preserve your soul from rotting, i have nothing to learn, but something to practise. thus i declaim against them ; but i in my folly am the world i condemn. i very rarely, indeed, if ever, &quot; feel any itching to be what is called useful to my fellow-men.&quot; sometimes, it may be when my thoughts for 88 letteks. want of employment fall into a beaten path or humdrum, i have dreamed idly of stopping a man s horse that was running away ; but, per chance, i wished that he might run, in order that i might stop him ; or of putting out a fire ; but then, of course, it must have got well a-going. now, to tell the truth, i do not dream much of acting upon horses before they run, or of prevent ing fires which are not yet kindled. what a foul subject is this of doing good, instead of minding one s life, which should be his business ; doing good as a dead carcass, which is only fit for manure, instead of as a living man, instead of taking care to flourish, and smell, and taste sweet, and refresh all mankind to the extent of our capacity and quality. people will sometimes try to persuade you that you have done something from that motive, as if you did not already know enough about it. if i ever did a man any good, in their sense, of course it was something exceptional and insignificant compared with the good or evil which i am constantly doing by being what i am. as if you were to preach to ice to shape itself into burning-glasses, which are sometimes useful, and so the peculiar properties of ice be lost. ice that merely performs the office of a burning-glass does not do its duty. the problem of life becomes, one cannot say by how many degrees, more complicated as our ma terial wealth is increased, whether that needle letters. 89 they tell of was a gateway or not, since the prob lem is not merely nor mainly to get life for our bodies, but by this or a similar discipline to get life for our souls ; by cultivating the lowland farm on right principles, that is, with this view, to turn it into an upland farm. you have so many more talents to account for. if i accomplish as much more in spiritual work as i am richer in worldly goods, then i am just as worthy, or worth just as much, as i was before, and no more. i see that, in my own case, money might be of great service to me,. but probably it would not be, for the diffi culty now is, that i do not improve my opportuni ties, and therefore i am not prepared to have my opportunities increased. now, i warn you, if it be as you say, you have got to put on the pack of an upland farmer in good earnest the coming spring, the lowland farm being cared for ; ay, you must be selecting your seeds forthwith, and doing what winter work you can ; and, while others are raising potatoes and baldwin apples for you, you must be raising apples of the hesperides for them. (only hear how he preaches !) no man can sus pect that he is the proprietor of an upland farm, upland in the sense that it will produce nobler crops, and better repay cultivation in the long run, but he will be perfectly sure that he ought to cultivate it. though we are desirous to earn our bread, we need not be anxious to satisfy men for it, though we shall take care to pay them, but god, who 90 letters. alone gave it to us. men may in effect put us in the debtors jail for that matter, simply for paying our whole debt to god, which includes our debt to them, and though we have his receipt for it, for his paper is dishonored. the cashier will tell you that he has no stock in his bank. how prompt we are to satisfy the hunger and thirst of our bodies ; how slow to satisfy the hun ger and thirst of our souls. indeed, we would-be practical folks cannot use this world without blush ing because of our infidelity, having starved this substance almost to a shadow. we feel it to be as absurd as if a man were to break forth into a eulogy oh his dog, who has n t any! an ordinary man will work every day for a year at shovelling dirt to support his body, or a family of bodies ; but he is an extraordinary man who will work a whole day in a year for the support of his soul. even the priests, the men of god, so called, for the most part confess that they work for the sup port of the body. but he alone is the truly en terprising and practical man who succeeds in maintaining his soul here. have not we our ever lasting life to get ? and is not that the only excuse at last for eating, drinking, sleeping, or even carry ing an umbrella when it rains ? a man might as well devote himself to raising pork, as to fattening the bodies, or temporal part merely, of the whole human family. if we made the true distinction, we should almost all of us be seen to be in the almshouse for souls. letters. 91 i am much indebted to you because you look so steadily at the better side, or rather the true centre of me (for our true centre may, and perhaps often est does, lie entirely aside from us, and we are in fact eccentric), and, as i have elsewhere said, &quot;give me an opportunity to live.&quot; you speak as if the image or idea which i see were reflected from me to you, and i see it again reflected from you to me, because we stand at the right angle to one another ; and so it goes zigzag to what suc cessive reflecting surfaces, before it is all dissipated or absorbed by the more unreflecting, or differ ently reflecting, who knows ? or, perhaps, what you see directly, you refer to me. what a little shelf is required, by which we may impinge upon another, and build there our eyrie in the clouds, and all the heavens we see above us we refer to the crags around and beneath us. some piece of mica, as it were, in the face or eyes of one, as on the delectable mountains, slanted at the right angle, reflects the heavens to us. but, in the slow geological upheavals and depressions, these mutual angles are disturbed, these suns set, and new ones rise to us. that ideal which i wor shipped was a greater stranger to the mica than to me. it was not the hero i admired, but the reflection from his epaulet or helmet. it is noth ing (for us) permanently inherent in another, but his attitude or relation to what we prize, that we admire. the meanest man may glitter with micacious particles to his fellow s eye. these are 92 letters. the spangles that adorn a man. the highest union, the only un-ion (don t laugh), or cen tral oneness, is the coincidence of visual rays. our club-room was an apartment in a constellation where our visual rays met (and there was no de bate about the restaurant). the way between us is over the mount. your words make me think of a man of my acquaintance whom i occasionally meet, whom you, too, appear to have met, one myself, as he is called. yet, why not call him yourself? if you have met with him and know him, it is all i have done; and surely, where there is a mutual acquaintance, the my and thy make a distinction without a difference. i do not wonder that you do not like my can ada story. it concerns me but little, and prob ably is not worth the time it took to tell it. yet i had absolutely no design whatever in my mind, but simply to report what i saw. i have inserted all of myself that was implicated, or made the ex cursion. it has come to an end, at any rate ; they will print no more, but return me my ms. when it is but little more than half done, as well as an other i had sent them, because the editor requires the liberty to omit the heresies without consulting me, a privilege california is not rich enough to bid for. i thank you again and again for attending to me ; that is to say, i am glad that you hear me, and that you also are glad. hold fast to your letters. 93 most indefinite, waking dream. the very green dust on the walls is an organized vegetable ; the atmosphere has its fauna and flora floating in it ; and shall we think that dreams are but dust and ashes, are always disintegrated and crumbling thoughts, and not dust-like thoughts trooping to their standard with music, systems beginning to be organized ? these expectations, these are roots, these are nuts, which even the poorest man has in his bin, and roasts or cracks them occasionally in winter evenings, which even the poor debtor re tains with his bed and his pig, i. e. his idleness and sensuality. men go to the opera because they hear there a faint expression in sound of this news which is never quite distinctly proclaimed. sup pose a man were to sell the hue, the least amount of coloring matter in the superficies of his thought, for a farm, were to exchange an absolute and infinite value for a relative and finite one, to gain the whole world and lose his own soul ! do not wait as long as i have before you write. if you will look at another star, i will try to sup ply my side of the triangle. tell mr. , that i remember him, and trust that he remembers me. yours, h. d. t. p. s. excuse this rather flippant preaching, which does not cost me enough ; and do not think that i mean you always, though your letter re quested the subjects. 94 letters. to mr. b. concord, april 10, 1853. mfi. b : another singular kind of spiritual foot-ball, really nameless, handleless, homeless, like myself, a mere arena for thoughts and feelings ; defi nite enough outwardly, indefinite more than enough inwardly. but i do not know why we should be styled misters or masters : we come so near to be ing anything or nothing, and seeing that we are mastered, and not wholly sorry to be mastered, by the least phenomenon. it seems to me that we are the mere creatures of thought, one of the lowest forms of intellectual life, we men, as the sunfish is of animal life. as yet our thoughts have acquired no definiteness nor solidity ; they are purely molluscous, not vertebrate ; and the height of our existence is to float upward in an ocean where the sun shines, appearing only like a vast soup or chowder to the eyes of the immortal navigators. it is wonderful that i can be here, and you there, and that we can correspond, and do many other things, when, in fact, there is so little of us, either or both, anywhere. in a few minutes, i expect, this slight film or dash of vapor that i am will be what is called asleep, resting ! forsooth from what ? hard work ! and thought ! ! 5 the hard work of the dandelion down, which floats over the meadow all day ; the hard work of letters. 95 a pismire, that labors to raise a hillock all day, and even by moonlight. suddenly i can come for ward into the utmost apparent distinctness, and speak with a sort of emphasis to you ; and the next moment i am so faint an entity, and make so slight an impression, that nobody can find the traces of me. i try to hunt myself up, and find that the little of me that is discoverable is falling asleep, and then i assist and tuck it up. it is getting late. how can i starve or feed ? can / be said to sleep ? there is not enough of me even for that. if you hear a noise, t aint i, t aint i, as the dog says with a tin-kettle tied to his tail. i read of something happening to another the other day : how happens it that nothing ever hap pens to me ? a dandelion down that never alights, settles, blown off by a boy to see if his moth er wanted him, some divine boy in the upper pastures. well, if there really is another such a meteor sojourning in these spaces, i would like to ask you if you know whose estate this is that we are on ? for my part, i enjoy it well enough, what with the wild apples and the scenery ; but i should n t wonder if the owner set his dog on me next. i could remember something not much to the pur pose, probably ; but if i stick to what i do know, then &quot;it is worth the while to live respectably unto ourselves. we can possibly get along with a 96 letters. neighbor, even with a bedfellow, whom we re spect but very little ; but as soon as it comes to that, that we do not respect ourselves, then we do not get along at all, no matter how much money we are paid for halting. there are old heads in the world who cannot help me by their example or advice to live worthily and satisfactorily to my self ; but i believe that it is in my power to elevate myself this very hour above the common level of my life. it is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are, if indeed you cannot get it above them, than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise. once you were in milton doubting what to do. to live a better life, this surely can be done. dot and carry one. wait not for a clear sight, for that you are to get. what you see clearly you may omit to do. milton and worcester ! it is all b , b . never mind the rats in the wall; the cat will take care of them. ail that men have said or are is a very faint rumor, and it is not worth the while to remember or refer to that. if you are to meet god, will you refer to anybody out of that court? how shall men know how i succeed, unless they are in at the life ? i did not see the &quot; times &quot; reporter there. is it not delightful to provide one s self with the necessaries of life, to collect dry wood for the fire when the weather grows cool, or fruits letters. 97 when we grow hungry ? not till then. and then we have all the time left for thought ! of what use were it, pray, to get a little wood to burn to warm your body this cold weather, if there were not a divine fire kindled at the same time to warm your spirit ? -unless he can &quot; erect himself above himself, how poor a thing is man.&quot; i cuddle up by my stove, and there i get up another fire which warms fire itself. life is so short that it is not wise to take roundabout ways, nor can we spend much time in waiting. is it absolutely necessary, then, that we should do as we are do ing ? are we chiefly under obligations to the devil, like tom walker? though it is late to leave off this wrong way, it will seem early the moment we begin in the right way; instead of mid-afternoon, it will be early morning with us. we have not got half-way to dawn yet. as for the lectures, i feel that i have something to say, especially on travelling, vagueness, and poverty ; but i cannot come now r . i will wait till i am fuller, and have fewer engagements. your suggestions will help me much to write them when i am ready. i am going to haver hill to-morrow surveying, for a week or more. you met me on my last errand thither. i trust that you realize what an exaggerator i am, that i lay myself out to exaggerate when 98 letters. ever i have an opportunity, pile pelion upon ossa, to reach heaven so. expect no trivial truth from me, unless i am on the witness-stand. i will come as near tolying as you can drive a coach and-four. if it is n t thus and so with me, it is with something. i am not particular whether i get the shells or meat, in view of the latter s worth. i see that i have not at all answered your letter, but there is time enough for that. h. d. thoreau. to mr. b. concord. december 19, 1853. mr. b : my debt has accumulated so that i should have answered your last letter at once, if i had not been the subject of what is called a press of en gagements, having a lecture to write for last wednesday, and surveying more than usual be sides. it has been a kind of running fight with me, the enemy not always behind me, i trust. true, a man cannot lift himself by his own waistbands, because he cannot get out of himself ; but he can expand himself (which is better, there being no up nor down in nature), and so split his waistbands, being already within himself. letters. 99 you speak of doing and being, and the vanity, real or apparent, of much doing. the suckers i think it is they make nests in our river in the spring of more than a cart-load of small stones, amid which to deposit their ova. the other day i opened a muskrat s house. it was made of weeds, five feet broad at base, and three feet high, and far and low within it was a little cavity, only a foot in diameter, where the rat dwelt. it may seem trivial, this piling up of weeds, but so the race of muskrats is preserved. we must heap up a great pile of doing, for a small diameter of being. is it not imperative on us that we do something, if we only work in a tread-mill? and, indeed, some sort of revolving is necessary to produce a centre and nucleus of being. what exercise is to the body, employment is to the mind and mor als. consider what an amount of drudgery must be performed, how much humdrum and prosaic labor goes to any work of the least value. there are so many layers of mere white lime in every shell to that thin inner one so beautifully tinted. let not the shell-fish think to build his house of that alone ; and pray, what are its tints to him ? is it not his smooth, close-fitting shirt merely, whose tints are not to him, being in the dark, but only wlien he is gone or dead, and his shell is heaved up to light, a wreck upon the beach, do they appear. with him, too, it is a song of the shirt, &quot; work, work, work ! &quot; and the work 100 letters. is not merely a police in the gross sense, but in the higher sense, a discipline. if it is surely the means to the highest end we know, can any work be humble or disgusting ? will it not rather be elevating as a ladder, the means by which we are translated ? how admirably the artist is made to accomplish his self-culture by devotion to his art ! the wood sawyer, through his effort to do his work well, becomes not merely a better wood-sawyer, but measurably a better man. few are the men that can work on their navels, only some brahmins that i have heard of. to the painter is given some paint and canvas instead ; to the irishman a hog, typical of himself. in a thousand apparently humble ways men busy themselves to make some right take the place of some wrong, if it is only to make a better paste-blacking, and they are themselves so much the better morally for it. you say that you do not succeed much. does it concern you enough that you do not ? do you work hard enough at it ? do you get the benefit of discipline out of it ? if so, persevere. is it a more serious thing than to walk a thousand miles in a thousand successive hours ? do you get any corns by it ? do you ever think of hanging your self on account of failure ? if you are going into that line, going to be siege the city of god, you must not only be strong in engines, but prepared with provisions to letters. 101 starve out the garrison. an irishman came to see me to-day, who is endeavoring to get his family out to this new world. he rises at half past four, milks twenty-eight cows (which has swollen the joints of his fingers), and eats his breakfast, with out any milk in his tea or coffee, before six ; and so on, day after day, for six and a half dollars a, month ; and thus he keeps his virtue in him, if he does not add to it ; and he regards me as a gentle man able to assist him ; but if i ever get to be a gentleman, it will be by working after my fashion harder than he does. if my joints are not swollen, it must be because i deal with the teats of celestial cows before breakfast (and the milker in this case is always allowed some of the milk for his break fast), to say nothing of the flocks and herds of admetus afterward. it is the art of mankind to polish the world, and every one who works is scrubbing in some part. if the work is high and far, you must not only aim aright, but draw the bow with all your might. you must qualify yourself to use a bow which no humbler archer can bend. &quot; work, work, work ! &quot; who shall know it for a bow ? it is not of yew tree. it is straighter than a ray of light; flexi bility is not known for one of its qualities. 102 letters. december 22. so far i had got when i was called off to sur vey. pray read the life of haydon the painter, if you have not. it is a small revelation for these latter days ; a great satisfaction to know that he has lived, though he is now dead. have you met with the letter of a turkish cadi at the end of layard s &quot;ancient babylon &quot; ? that also -is refresh ing, and a capital comment on the whole book which precedes it, the oriental genius speaking through him. those brahmins put it through. they come off, or rather stand still, conquerors, with some withered arms or legs at least to show ; and they are said to have cultivated the faculty of abstrac tion to a degree unknown to europeans. if we cannot sing of faith and triumph, we will sing our despair. we will be that kind of bird. there are day owls, and there are night owls, and each is beautiful and even musical while about its busi ness. might you not find some positive work to do with your back to church and state, letting your back do all the rejection of them ? can you not go upon your pilgrimage, peter, along the wind ing mountain path whither you face ? a step more will make those funereal church bells over your shoulder sound far and sweet as a natural sound. work, work, work ! &quot; letters. 103 why not make a very large mud-pie and bake it in the sun ! only put no church nor state into it, nor upset any other pepper-box that way. dig out a woodchuck, for that has nothing to do with rotting institutions. go ahead. whether a man spends his day in an ecstasy or despondency, he must do some work to show for it, even s there are flesh and bones to show for him. we are superior to the joy we experience. your last two letters, methinks, have more nerve and will in them than usual, as if you had erected yourself more. why are not they good work, if you only had a hundred correspondents to tax you ? make your failure tragical by the earnestness and steadfastness of your endeavor, and then it will not differ from success. prove it to be the inevitable fate of mortals, of one mortal, if you can. you said that you were writing on immortality. i wish you would communicate to me what you know about that. you are sure to live while that is your theme. thus i write on some text which a sentence of your letters may have furnished. i think of coming to see you as soon as i get a new coat, if i have money enough left. i will write to you again about it. henry d. thoreau. 104 letters. to mr. b. concord, january 21, 1854. mr. b : my coat is at last done, and my mother and sister allow that i am so far in a condition to go abroad. i feel as if i had gone abroad the mo ment i put it on. it is, as usual, a production strange to me, the wearer, invented by some count d orsay, and the maker of it was not acquainted with any of my real depressions or elevations. he only measured a peg to hang it on, and might have made the loop big enough to go over my head. it requires a not quite inno cent indifference, not to say insolence, to wear it. ah ! the process by which we get our coats is not what it should be. though the church declares it righteous, and its priest pardons me, my own good genius tells me that it is hasty, and coarse, and false. i expect a time when, or rather an integrity by which a man will get his coat as hon estly and as perfectly fitting as a tree its bark. now our garments are typical of our conformity to the ways of the world, i. e. of the devil, and to some extent react on us and poison us, like that shirt which hercules put on. i think to come and see you next week, on monday, if nothing hinders. i have just returned from court at cambridge, whither i was called as a witness, having surveyed a water-privilege, about which there is a dispute, since you were here. letters. 105 ah ! what foreign countries there are, greater in extent than the united states or russia, and with no more souls to a square mile, stretching away on every side from every human being, with whom you have no sympathy. their humanity affects me as simply monstrous. rocks, earth, brute beasts, comparatively, are not so strange to me. when i sit in the parlors and kitchens of some with whom my business brings me i was going to say in contact (business, like misery, makes strange bedfellows), i feel a sort of awe, and as forlorn as if i were cast away on a desolate shore. i think of riley s narrative and his suffer ings. you, who soared like a merlin with your mate through the realms of ether, in the presence of the unlike, drop at once to earth, a mere amor phous squab, divested of your air-inflated pinions. (by the way, excuse this writing, for i am using the stub of the last feather i chance to possess.) you travel on, however, through this dark and desert world ; you see in the distance an intelli gent and sympathizing lineament ; stars come forth in the dark, and oases appear in the desert. but (to return to the subject of coats), we are well nigh smothered under yet more fatal coats, which do not fit us, our whole lives long. consider the cloak that our employment or station is ; how rarely men treat each other for what in their true and naked characters they are ; how we use and tolerate pretension ; how the judge is clothed with 5* 106 letters. dignity which does not belong to him, and the trembling witness with humility that does not be long to him, and the criminal, perchance, with shame or impudence which no more belong to him. it does not matter so much, then, what is the fashion of the cloak with which we cloak these cloaks. change the coat; put the judge in the criminal-box, and the criminal on the bench, and you might think that you had changed the men. no doubt the thinnest of all cloaks is conscious deception or lies ; it is sleazy and frays out ; it is not close-woven like cloth ; but its meshes are a coarse net-work. a man can afford to lie only at the intersection of the threads ; but truth puts in the filling, and makes a consistent stuff. i mean merely to suggest how much the station affects the demeanor and self-respectability of the parties, and that the difference between the judge s coat of cloth and the criminal s is insignificant, compared with, or only partially significant of, the difference between the coats which their respective stations permit them to wear. what airs the judge may put on over his coat which the crim inal may not! the judge s opinion (sententict) of the criminal sentences him, and is read by the clerk of the court, and published to the world, and executed by the sheriff; but the criminal s opinion of the judge has the weight of a sentence, and is published and executed only in the supreme court of the universe, a court not of common letters. 107 pleas. how much juster is the one than the other ? men are continually sentencing each other ; but, whether we be judges or crimi nals, the sentence is ineffectual unless we con tinue ourselves. i am glad to hear that i do not always limit your vision when you work this way; that you sometimes see the light through me ; that i am here and there windows, and not all dead wall. might not the community sometimes petition a* man to remove himself as a nuisance, a darkener of the day, a too large mote ? h. d. t. to mr. b. concord, august 8, 1854. mr. b : methinks i have spent a rather unprofitable summer thus far. i have been too much with the world, as the poet might say. the complet est performance of the highest duties it imposes would yield me but little satisfaction. better the neglect of all such, because your life passed on a level where it was impossible to recognize them. latterly, i have heard the very flies buzz too dis tinctly, and have accused myself because i did not still this superficial din. we must not be too easily distracted by the crying of children or of dynasties. the irishman erects his sty, and gets 108 letters. drunk, and jabbers more and more under my eaves, and i am responsible for all that filth and folly. i find it, as ever, very unprofitable to have much to do with men. it is sowing the wind, but not reaping even the whirlwind ; only reaping an unprofitable calm and stagnation. our conversa tion is a smooth, and civil, and never-ending spec ulation merely. i take up the thread of it again in the morning, with very much such courage as the invalid takes his prescribed seidlitz powders. shall i help you to some of the mackerel ? it would be more respectable if men, as has been said before, instead of being such pigmy despe rates, were giant despairs. emerson says that his life is so unprofitable and shabby for the most part, that he is driven to all sorts of resources, and, among the rest, to men. i tell him that we differ only in our resources. mine is to get away from men. they very rarely affect me as grand or beautiful ; but i know that there is a sunrise and a sunset every day. in the summer, this world is a mere watering-place, a saratoga, drinking so many tumblers of congress water; and in the winter, is it any better, with its oratorios ? i have seen more men than usual, lately ; and, well as i was acquainted with one, i am surprised to find what vulgar fellows they are. they do a little business commonly each day, in order to pay their board, and then they congregate in sitting-rooms, and feebly fabulate and paddle in the social slush ; letters. 109 and when i think that they have sufficiently re laxed, and am prepared to see them steal away to their shrines, they go unashamed to their beds, and take on a new layer of sloth. they may be single, or have families in their faineancy. i do not meet men who can have nothing to do with me because they have so much to do with themselves. however, i trust that a very few cherish purposes which they never declare. only think, for a moment, of a man about his affairs ! how we should respect him ! how glorious he would appear! not working for any corporation, its agent, or president, but fulfilling the end of his being ! a man about his business would be the cynosure of all eyes. the other evening i was determined that i would silence this shallow din ; that i would walk in various directions and see if there was not to be found any depth of silence around. as bona parte sent out his horsemen in the red sea on all sides to find shallow water, so i sent forth my mounted thoughts to find deep water. i left the village and paddled up the river to fair haven pond. as the sun went down, i saw a solitary boatman disporting on the smooth lake. the falling dews seemed to strain and purify the air, and i was soothed with an infinite stillness. i got the world, as it were, by the nape of the neck, and held it under in the tide of its own events, till it was drowned, and then i let it go down stream 110 letters. like a dead dog. vast hollow chambers of silence stretched away on every side, and my being ex panded in proportion, and filled them. then first could i appreciate sound, and find it musical. but now for your news. tell us of the year. have you fought the good fight? what is the state of your crops? will your harvest answer well to the seed-time, and are you cheered by the prospect of stretching cornfields ? is there any blight on your fields, any murrain in your herds ? have you tried the size and quality of your potatoes ? it does one good to see their balls dangling in the lowlands. have you got your meadow hay before the fall rains shall have set in ? is there enough in your barns to keep your cattle over ? are you killing weeds now-a-days? or have you earned leisure to go a-fishing ? did you plant any giant regrets last spring, such as i saw advertised ? it is not a new species, but the result of cultivation and a fertile soil. they are excellent for sauce. how is it with your marrow squashes for winter use ? is there likely to be a sufficiency of fall feed in your neighborhood ? what is the state of the springs ? i read that in your county there is more water on the hills than in the valleys. do you find it easy to get all the help you require ? work early and late, and let your men and teams rest at noon. be careful not to drink too much sweetened water, while at your hoeing, this hot weather. you can bear the heat much better for it. h. d. t. letters. ill to mb. d. k. concord, october 1, 1854. dear sir: i had duly received your very kind and frank letter, but delayed to answer it thus long, because i have little skill as a correspondent, and wished to send you something more than my thanks. i was gratified by your prompt and hearty accept ance of my book. your s is the only word of greeting i am likely to receive from a dweller in the woods like myself, from where the whip-poor will and cuckoo are heard, and there are better than moral clouds drifting over, and real breezes blowing. your account excites in me a desire to see the middleboro ponds, of which i had already heard somewhat ; as also some very beautiful ponds on the cape, in harwich, i think, near which i once passed. i have sometimes also thought of visiting that remnant of our indians still living near you. but then, you know, there is nothing like one s native fields and lakes. the best news you send me is, not that nature with you is so fair and genial, but that there is one there who likes her so well. that proves all that was asserted. homer, of course, you include in your list of lovers of nature ; and, by the way, let me men tion here, for this is my thunder &quot; lately,&quot; 112 letters. william gilpin s long series of books on the pic turesque, with their illustrations. if it chances that, you have not met with these, i cannot just now frame a better wish than that you may one day derive as much pleasure from the inspection of them as i have. much as you have told me of yourself, you have still, i think, a little the advantage of me in this correspondence, for i have told you still more in my book. you have therefore the broadest mark to fire at. a young englishman, mr. cholmondeley, is just now waiting for me to take a walk with him ; therefore excuse this very barren note from yours, hastily at last, henry d. thokeau. to mr. b. concord, december 19, 1854. mr. b : i suppose you have heard of my truly provi dential meeting with mr. , providential because it saved me from the suspicion that my words had fallen altogether on stony ground, when it turned out that there was some worcester soil there. you will allow me to consider that i cor respond with him through you. letters. 113 i confess that i am a very bad correspondent, so far as promptness of reply is concerned ; but then i am sure to answer sooner or later. the longer i have forgotten you, the more i remember you. for the most part i have not been idle since i saw you. how does the world go with you ? or rather, how do you get along without it ? i have not yet learned to live, that i can see, and i fear that i shall not very soon. i find, how ever, that in the long run things correspond to my original idea, that they correspond to noth ing else so much ; and thus a man may really be a true prophet without any great exertion. the day is never so dark, nor the night even, but that the laws at least of light still prevail, and so may make it light in our minds if they are open to the truth. there is considerable danger that a man will be crazy between dinner and supper ; but it will not directly answer any good purpose that i know of, and it is just as easy to be sane. we have got to know what both life and death are, be fore we can begin to live after our own fashion. let us be learning our a-b-c s as soon as possible. i never yet knew the sun to be knocked down and rolled through a mud-puddle ; he comes out honor bright from behind every storm. let us then take sides with the sun, seeing we have so much leisure. let us not put all we prize into a foot ball to be kicked, when a bladder will do as well. when an indian is burned, his body may be 114 letters. broiled, it may be no more than a beef-steak. what of that ? they may broil his heart, but they do not therefore broil his courage^ his principles. be of good courage ! that is the main thing. ?jlf a man were to place himself in an attitude to bear manfully the greatest evil that can be in flicted on him, he would find suddenly that there was no such evil to bear ; his brave back would go a-begging. when atlas got his back made up, that was all that was required. (in this case a priv., not pleon., and ra^a&quot;.) the world rests on principles. the wise gods will never make underpinning of a man. but as long as he crouches, and skulks, and shirks his work, every creature that has weight will be treading on his toes, and crushing him ; he will himself tread with one foot on the other foot. the monster is never just there where we think he is. what is truly monstrous is our cowardice and sloth. have no idle disciplines like the catholic church and others ; have only positive and fruitful ones. do what you know you ought to do. why should we ever go abroad, even across the way, to ask a neighbor s advice ? there is a nearer neighbor within is incessantly telling us how we should be have. but we wait for the neighbor without to tell us of some false, easier way. they have a census-table in which they put letters. 115 down the number of the insane. do you believe that they put them all down there ? why, in every one of these houses there is at least one man fighting or squabbling a good part of his time with a dozen pet demons of his own breeding and cherishing, which are relentlessly gnawing at his vitals ; and if perchance he resolve at length that he will courageously combat them, he says, &quot; ay ! ay! i will attend to you after dinner!&quot; and, when that time comes, he concludes that he is good for another stage, and reads a column or two about the eastern war ! pray, to be in earnest, where is sevastopol? who is menchikoff? and nicholas behind these? who the allies? did not we fight a little (little enough to be sure, but just enough to make it interesting) at alma, at balaclava, at inkermann ? we love to fight far from home. ah ! the minie musket is the king of weapons. well, let us get one then. i just put another stick into my stove, a pretty large mass of white oak. how many men will do enough this cold winter to pay for the fuel that will be required to warm them ? i suppose i have burned up a pretty good-sized tree to-night, and for what ? i settled with mr. tarbell for it the other day ; but that was n t the final settlement. i got off cheaply from him. at last, one will say, &quot; let us see, how much wood did you burn, sir ? &quot; and i shall shudder to think that the next ques tion will be, &quot; what did you do while you were 116 letters. warm ? &quot; do we think the ashes will pay for it ? that god is an ash-man ? it is a fact that we have got to render an account for the deeds done in the body. who knows but we shall be better the next year than we have been the past ? at any rate, i wish you a really new year, commencing from the in stant you read this, and happy or unhappy, ac cording to your deserts. henry d. thoreau. to mr. b. concord, september 26, 1855. the other day i thought that my health must be better, that i gave at last a sign of vitality, because i experienced a slight chagrin. but i do not see how strength is to be got into my legs again. these months of feebleness have yielded few, if any, thoughts, though they have not passed without serenity, such as our sluggish musketa quid suggests. i hope that the harvest is to come. i trust that you have at least warped up the stream a little daily, holding fast by your anchors at night, since i saw you, and have kept my place for me while i have been absent. mr. r , of new bedford, has just made me letters. 117 a visit of a day and a half, and i have had a quite good time with him. he and c have got on particularly well together. he is a man of very simple tastes, notwithstanding his wealth ; a lover of nature ; but, above all, singularly frank and plain-spoken. i think that you might enjoy meet ing him. / sincerity is a great but rare virtue, and we pardon to it much complaining, and the be trayal of many weaknesses.r says of him self, that he sometimes thinks that he has all the in firmities of genius, without the genius; is wretch ed without a hair-pillow, &c. ; expresses a great and awful uncertainty with regard to &quot; god,&quot; &quot;death,&quot; his &quot;immortality&quot;; says, &quot; if i only knew,&quot; &c. he loves cowper s task better than anything else ; and thereafter, perhaps, thomson, gray, and even howitt. he has evidently suffered for want of sympathizing companions. he says that he sympathizes with much in my books, but much in them is naught to him, &quot; namby-pamby,&quot; &quot;stuff,&quot; &quot;mystical.&quot; why will not i, having common sense, write in plain english always ; teach men in detail how to live a simpler life, &c. ; not go off into ? but i say that i have no scheme about it, no designs on men at all ; and, if i had, my mode would be to tempt them with the fruit, and not with the manure. to what end do i lead a simple life at all, pray ? that i may teach others to simplify their lives ? and so all our lives be simplified merely, like an algebraic for 118 letters. mula ? or not, rather, that i may make use of the ground i have cleared, to live more worthily and profitably ? i would fain lay the most stress forever on that which is the most important, imports the most to me, though it were only (what it is likely to be) a vibration in the air. as a preacher, i should be prompted to tell men, not so much how to get their wheat-bread cheaper, as of the bread of life compared with which that is bran. let a man only taste these loaves, and he becomes a skilful economist at once. he 11 not waste much time in earning those. don t spend your time in drilling soldiers, who may turn out hirelings after all, but give to undrilled peasantry a country to fight for. the schools begin with what they call the elements, and where do they end? i was glad to hear the other day that h and were gone to katahdin ; it must be so much better to go to than a woman s rights or abolition convention ; better still, to the delect able primitive mounts within you, which you have dreamed of from your youth up, and seen, per haps, in the horizon, but never climbed. but how do you do ? is the air sweet to you? do you find anything at which you can work, accomplishing something solid from day to day ? have you put sloth and doubt behind consider ably ? had one redeeming dream this summer ? i dreamed, last night, that i could vault over any letters. 119 height it pleased me. that was something ; and i contemplated myself with a slight satisfaction in the morning for it. methinks i will write to you. methinks you will be glad to hear. we will stand on solid foundations to one another, ~ la column planted on this shore, you on that. we meet the same sun in his rising. we were built slowly, and have come to our bearing. we will not mutually fall over that we may meet, but will grandly and eter nally guard the straits. methinks i see an in scription on you, which the architect made, the stucco being worn off to it. the name of that ambitious worldly king is crumbling away. i see it toward sunset in favorable lights. each must read for the other, as might a sailer by. be sure you are star-y-pointing still. how is it on your side ? i will not require an answer until you think i have paid my debts to you. i have just got a letter from r , urging me to come to new bedford, which possibly i may do. he says i can wear my old clothes there. let me be remembered in your quiet house. henry d. thoreau. 120 letters. to mr. d. r. concord, september 27, 1855. friend r : i am sorry that you were obliged to leave con cord without seeing more of it, its river and woods, and various pleasant walks, and its worthies. i assure you that i am none the worse for my walk with you, but on all accounts the better. methinks i am regaining my health ; but i would like to know first what it was that ailed me. i have not yet conveyed your message to mr. h , but will not fail to do so. that idea of occupying the old house is a good one, quite feasible, and you could bring your hair-pillow with you. it is an inn in concord which i had not thought of, a philosopher s inn. that large chamber might make a man s idea expand propor tionably. it would be well to have an interest in some old chamber in a deserted house in every part of the country which attracted us. there would be no such place to receive one s guests as that. if old furniture is fashionable, why not go the whole house at once? i shall endeavor to make mr. h believe that the old house is the chief attraction of his farm, and that it is his duty to preserve it by all honest appliances. you might take a lease of it in perpetuo, and done with it. i am so wedded to my way of spending a day, letters. 121 require such broad margins of leisure, and such a complete wardrobe of old clothes, that i am ill fitted for going abroad. pleasant is it sometimes to sit at home, on a single egg all day, in your own nest, though it may prove at last to be an egg of chalk. the old coat that i wear is concord ; it is my morning-robe and study-gown, my work ing dress and suit of ceremony, and my night gown after all. cleave to the simplest ever. home, home, home. cars sound like cares to me. i am accustomed to think very long of going anywhere, am slow to move. i hope to hear a response of the oracle first. however, i think that i will try the effect of your talisman on the iron horse next saturday, and dismount at tarkiln hill. perhaps your sea air will be good for me. i conveyed your invitation to c , but he apparently will not come. excuse my not writing earlier ; but i had not decided. yours, henry d. thoreau. 122 letters. to me. d. k. concord, october 12, 1855. mr. e : i fear that you had a lonely and disagreeable ride back to new bedford, through the carver woods and so on, perhaps in the rain too, and i am in part answerable for it. i feel very much in debt to you and your family for the pleasant days i spent at brooklawn. tell a and w that the shells which they gave me are spread out, and make quite a show to inland eyes. methinks i still hear the strains of the piano, the violin, and the flageolet blended together. ex cuse me for the noise which i believe drove you to take refuge in the shanty. that shanty is indeed a favorable place to expand in, which i fear i did not enough improve. on my way through boston, i inquired for gilpin s works at little, brown, & co. s, mon roe s, ticknor s, and burnham s. they have not got them. they told me at little, brown, and co. s that his works (not complete), in twelve vols., 8vo, were imported and sold in this country five or six years ago for about fifteen dollars. their terms for importing are ten per cent on the cost. i copied from the &quot; london catalogue of books, 1816-51,&quot; at their shop, the following list of gilpin s works : letters. 123 gilpin, (wm.) dialogues on various subjects. 8vo. 9s. cadell. essays on picturesque subjects. 8vo. 15s. cadell. exposition of the new testament. 2 vols. 8vo. 16s. longman. forest scenery, by sir t. d. lauder. 2 vols. 8vo. 18s. smith &e. lectures on the catechism. 12mo. 3s. 6c?. longman. lives of the reformers. 2 vols. 12mo. 8s. rivington. sermons illustrative and practical. 8vo. 12 s. hatchavd. sermons to country congregations. 4 vols. 8vo. 1 16s. longman. tour in cambridge, norfolk, &c. 8vo. 18s. cadell. tour of the river wye. 12mo. 4s. with plates. 8vo. 17s. cadell. gilpin, (w. s. (?) ) hints on landscape gardening. royal 8vo. 1. cadell. beside these, i remember to have read one volume on prints ; his southern tour (1775) ; lakes of cumberland, two vols. ; highlands of scotland and west of england, two vols. n. b. there must be plates in every volume. i still see an image of those middleborough ponds in my mind s eye, broad shallow lakes, with an iron mine at the bottom, comparatively unvexed by sails, only by tom smith and his squaw, sepits, &quot; sharper.&quot; i find my map of the state to be the best i have seen of that district. it is a question whether the islands of long pond or great quitticus offer the greatest attractions to a lord of the isles. that plant which i found on the shore of long pond chances to be a rare and beautiful flower, the sabbatia chloroides, re ferred to plymouth. 124 letters. in a description of middleborough in the hist. coll., vol. iii., 1810, signed nehemiah bennet, middleborough, 1793, it is said: &quot;there is on the easterly shore of assawampsitt pond, on the shore of betty s neck, two rocks which have curious marks thereon (supposed to be done by the in dians), which appear like the steppings of a person with naked feet which settled into the rocks ; like wise the prints of a hand on several places, with a number of other marks ; also there is a rock on a high hill a little to the eastward of the old stone fishing wear, where there is the print of a person s hand in said rock.&quot; it would be well to look at those rocks again more carefully ; also at the rock on the hill. i should think that you would like to explore sinpatuct pond in rochester, it is so large and near. it is an interesting fact that the alewives used to ascend to it, if they do not still, both from mattapoisett and through great quitticus. there will be no trouble about the chamber in the old house, though, as i told you, mr. hosmer may expect some compensation for it. he says, &quot; give my respects to mr. r , and tell him that i cannot be at a large expense to preserve an antiquity or curiosity. nature must do its work.&quot; &quot; but,&quot; say i, &quot; he asks you only not to assist nature.&quot; yours, henry d. thoreau. letters. 125 to mk. d. k. concord, october 16, 1855. friend ricketson : i have got both your letters at once. you must not think concord so barren a place when c is away. there are the river and fields left yet ; and i, though ordinarily a man of business, should have some afternoons and evenings to spend with you, i trust, that is, if you could stand so much of me. if you can spend your time profitably here, or without ennui, having an occasional ram ble or tete-a-tete with one of the natives, it will give me pleasure to have you in the neighborhood. you see i am preparing you for our awful un social ways, keeping in our dens a good part of the day, sucking our claws perhaps. but then we make a religion of it, and that you cannot but respect. if you know the taste of your own heart, and like it, come to concord, and i ll warrant you enough here to season the dish with, ay, even though c and e* and i were all away. we might paddle quietly up the river. then there are one or two more ponds to be seen, &c. i should very much enjoy further rambling with you in your vicinity, but must postpone it for the present. to tell the truth, i am planning to get seriously to work after these long months of ineffi ciency and idleness. i do not know whether you 126 letters. are haunted by any such demon which puts you on the alert to pluck the fruit of each day as it passes, and store it safely in your bin. true, it is well to live abandonedly from time to time ; but, to our working hours that must be as the spile to the bung. so for a long season i must enjoy only a low slanting gleam in my mind s eye from the middleborough ponds far away. metliinks i am getting a little more strength into those knees of mine ; and, for my part, i believe that god does delight in the strength of a man s legs. yours, henry d. thoreau. to mr. b. concord, december 9, 1855. mr. b : thank you ! thank you for going a-wooding with me, and enjoying it; for being warmed by my wood fire. i have indeed enjoyed it much alone. i see how i might enjoy it yet more with company, how we might help each other to live. and to be admitted to nature s hearth costs nothing. none is excluded ; but excludes himself. you have only to push aside the curtain. i am glad to hear that you were there too. letters. 127 there are many more such voyages, and longer ones, to be made on that river, for it is the water of life. the ganges is nothing to it. observe its reflections, no idea but is familiar to it. that river, though to dull eyes it seems terrestrial wholly, flows through elysium. what powers bathe in it invisible to villagers ! talk of its shal lowness, that hay-carts can be driven through it at midsummer : its depth passeth my understand ing. if, forgetting the allurements of the world, i could drink deeply enough of it ; if cast adrift from the shore, i could with complete integrity float on it, i should never be seen on the mill-dam again. if there is any depth in me, there is a cor responding depth in it. it is the cold blood of the gods. i paddle and bathe in their artery. i do not want a stick of wood for so trivial a use as to burn even ; but they get it over night, and carve and gild it that it may please my eye. what persevering lovers they are ! what infinite pains to attract and delight us ! they will supply us with fagots wrapped in the daintiest packages, and freight paid ; sweet-scented woods, and bufst ing into flower, and resounding as if orpheus had just left them, these shall be our fuel, and we still prefer to chaffer with the wood-mer chant. the jug we found still stands draining bottom up on the bank, on the sunny side of the house. that river, who shall say exactly whence it 128 letters. came, and whither it goes ? does aught that flows come from a higher source ? many things drift downward on its surface which w r ould enrich a man. if you could only be on the alert all day, and every day. and the nights are as long as the days. do you not think you could contrive thus to get woody fibre enough to bake your wheaten bread with? would you not perchance have tasted the sweet crust of another kind of bread in the mean while, which ever hangs ready baked on the bread-fruit trees of the world ? talk of burning your smoke after the wood has been consumed ! there is a far more important and warming heat, commonly lost, which precedes the burning of the wood. it is the smoke of in dustry, which is incense. i had been so thoroughly warmed in body and spirit, that when at length my fuel was housed, i came near selling it to the ash-man, as if i had extracted all its heat. you should have been here to help me get in my boat. the last time i used it, november 27th, paddling up the assabet, i saw a great round pine log sunk deep in the water, and with labor got it aboard. when i was floating this home so gently, it occurred to me why i had found it. it was to make wheels with to roll my boat into winter .quarters upon. so i sawed off two thick rollers from one end, pierced them for wheels, and then of a joist which i had found drifting on the river letters. 129 in the summer, i made an axle-tree, and on this i rolled my boat out. miss mary emerson is here, the youngest person in concord, though about eighty, and the most apprehensive of a genuine thought ; ear nest to know of your inner life ; most stimulating society ; and exceedingly witty withal. she says they called her old when she was young, and she has never grown any older. i wish you could see her. my books did not arrive till november 30th, the cargo of the asia having been complete when they reached liverpool. i have arranged them in a case which i made in the mean while, partly of river boards. i have not dipped far into the new ones yet. one is splendidly bound and illumi nated. they are in english, french, latin, greek, and sanscrit. i have not made out the signifi cance of this godsend yet. farewell, and bright dreams to you ! henry d. thoreau. 6* 130 letters. to mr. d. e. concord, december 25, 1865. friend r : though you have not shown your face here, i trust that you did not interpret my last note to my disadvantage. i remember that, among other things, i wished to break it to you, that, owing to engagements, i should not be able to show you so much attention as i could wish, or as you had shown to me. how we did scour over the coun try ! i hope your horse will live as long as one which i hear just died in the south of france at the age of forty. yet i had no doubt you would get quite enough of me. do not give it up so easily. the old house is still empty, and hosmer is easy to treat with. c was here about ten days ago. i told him of my visit to you, and that he too must go and see you and your country. this may have suggested his writing to you. that island lodge, especially for some weeks in a summer, and new explorations in your vicinity, are certainly very alluring ; but such are my en gagements to myself, that i dare not promise to wend your way, but will for the present only heartily thank you for your kind and generous offer. when my vacation comes, then look out. my legs have grown considerably stronger, and that is all that ails me. letters. 131 but i wish now above all to inform you, though i suppose you will not be particularly in terested, that cholmondeley has gone to the crimea, &quot; a complete soldier,&quot; with a design, when he returns, if he ever returns, to buy a cottage in the south of england, and tempt me over ; but that, before going, he busied himself in buying, and has caused to be forwarded to me by chapman, a royal gift, in the shape of twenty-one distinct works (one in nine volumes, forty-four volumes in all), almost exclusively relating to an cient hindoo literature, and scarcely one of them to be bought in america. i am familiar with many of them, and know how to prize them. i send you information of this as i might of the birth of a child. please remember me to all your family. yours truly, henry d. thoreau. to mr. d. r. concord, march 5, 1856. dear sir : i have been out of town, else i should have acknowledged your letter before. though not in the best mood for writing, i will say what i can now. you plainly have a rare, though a cheap, 132 letters. resource in your shanty. perhaps the time will come when every country-seat will have one, when every country-seat will be one. i would ad vise you to see that shanty business out, though you go shanty-mad. work your vein till it is ex hausted, or conducts you to a broader one ; so that c shall stand before your shanty, and say, &quot; that is your house.&quot; this has indeed been a grand winter for me, and for all of us. i am not considering how much i have enjoyed it. what matters it how happy or unhappy we have been, if we have minded our business and advanced our affairs. i have made it a part of my business to wade in the snow, and take the measure of the ice. the ice on our pond was just two feet thick on the first, of march ; and i have to-day been surveying a wood-lot, where i sank about two feet at every step. it is high time that you, fanned by the warm breezes of the gulf stream, had begun to &quot; lay&quot; for even the concord hens have, though one won ders where they find the raw material of egg-shell here. beware how you put off your laying to any later spring, else your cackling will not have the inspiring early spring sound. as for visiting you in april, though i am in clined enough to take some more rambles in your neighborhood, especially by the seaside, i dare not engage myself, nor allow you to expect me. the truth is, i have my enterprises now as ever, at letters. 133 which i tug with ridiculous feebleness, but admi rable perseverance, and cannot say when i shall be sufficiently fancy-free for such an excursion. you have done well to write a lecture on covvper. in the expectation of getting you to read it here, i applied to the curators of our ly ceum ; but, alas ! our lyceum has been a failure this winter for want of funds. it ceased some weeks since, with a debt, they tell me, to be car ried over to the next year s account. only one more lecture is to be read by a signor somebody, an italian, paid for by private subscription, as a deed of charity to the lecturer. they are not rich enough to offer you your expenses even, though probably, a month or two ago, they would have been glad of the chance. however, the old house has not failed yet. that offers you lodging for an indefinite time after you get into it ; and in the mean while i offer you bed and board in my father s house, always excepting hair-pillows and new-fangled bedding. remember me to your family. yours, h. d. t. 134 letters. to mr. b. concord, march 13, 1856. mr. b : it is high time i sent you a word. i have not heard from harrisburg, since offering to go there, and have not been invited to lecture any where else the past winter. so you see i am fast growing rich. this is quite right, for such is my relation to the lecture-goers, i should be sur prised and alarmed if there were any great call for me. i confess that i am considerably alarmed even when i hear that an individual wishes to meet me, for my experience teaches me that we shall thus only be made certain of a mutual strangeness, which otherwise we might never have been aware of. i have not yet recovered strength enough for such a walk as you propose, though pretty well again for circumscribed rambles and chamber work. even now, i am probably the greatest walker in concord, to its disgrace be it said. i remember our walks and talks and sailing in the past with great satisfaction, and trust that we shall have more of them erelong, have more wood ings-up, for even in the spring we must still seek &quot; fuel to maintain our fires.&quot; as you suggest, we would fain value one an other for what we are absolutely, rather than letters. 135 relatively. how will this do for a symbol of sympathy ? as for compliments, even the stars praise me, and i praise them. they and i sometimes belong to a mutual admiration society. is it not so with you ? i know you of old. are you not tough and earnest to be talked at, praised or blamed ? must you go out of the room because you are the subject of conversation ? where will you go to, pray ? shall we look into the &quot; letter writer &quot; to see what compliments are admissible ? i am not afraid of praise, for i have practised it on my self. as for my deserts, i never took an account of that stock, and in this connection care not whether i am deserving or not. when i hear praise coming, do i not elevate and arch myself to hear it like the sky, and as impersonally ? think i appropriate any of it to my weak legs ? no. praise away till all is blue. i see by the newspapers that the season for making sugar is at hand. now is the time, whether you be rock, or white-maple, or hick ory. i trust that you have prepared a store of sap-tubs and sumach-spouts, and invested largely in kettles. early the first frosty morning, tap your maples, the sap will not run in summer, 136 letteks. you know. it matters not how little juice you get, if you get all you can, and boil it down. i made just one crystal of sugar once, one-twen tieth of an inch cube, out of a pumpkin, and it sufficed. though the yield be no greater than that, this is not less the season for it, and it will be not the less sweet, nay, it will be infinitely the sweeter. shall, then, the maple yield sugar, and not man ? shall the farmer be thus active, and surely have so much sugar to show for it, before this very march is gone, while i read the news paper ? while he works in his sugar-camp let me work in mine, for sweetness is in me, and to sugar it shall come, it shall not all go to leaves and wood. am i not a sugar-maple man, then? boil down the sweet sap which the spring causes to flow within you. stop not at syrup, go on to sugar, though you present the world with but a single crystal, a crystal not made from trees in your yard, but from the new life that stirs in your pores. cheerfully skim your kettle, and watch it set and crystallize, making a holiday of it if you will. heaven will be propitious to you as to him. say to the farmer, there is your crop ; here is mine. mine is a sugar to sweeten sugar with. if you will listen to me, i will sweeten your whole load, your whole life. letters. 137 then will the callers ask, where is b ? he is in his sugar-camp on the mountain-side. let the world await him. then will the little boys bless you, and the great boys too, for such sugar is the origin of many con diments, b ians in the shops of worcester, of new form, with their mottos wrapped up in them. shall men taste only the sweetness of the maple and the cane, the coming year ? a walk over the crust to asnybumskit, stand ing there in its inviting simplicity, is tempting to think of, making a fire on the snow under some rock ! the very poverty of outward nature im plies an inward wealth in the walker. what a golconda is he conversant with, thawing his fin gers over such a blaze ! but, but have you read the new poem, &quot; the angel in the house &quot; ? perhaps you will find it good for you. h. d. t. to mr. b. concord, may 21, 1856. mr. b : i have not for a long time been putting such thoughts together as i should like to read to the company you speak of. i have enough of that sort to say, or even read, but not time now to 138 letters. arrange it. something i have prepared might prove for their entertainment or refreshment per chance ; but i would not like to have a hat car ried round for it. i have just been reading some papers to see if they would do for your company ; but though i thought pretty well of them as long as i read them to myself, when i got an auditor to try them on, i felt that they would not answer. how could i let you drum up a company to hear them? in fine, what i have is either too scat tered or loosely arranged, or too light, or else is too scientific and matter of fact (i run a good deal into that of late) for so hungry a company. i am still a learner, not a teacher, feeding some what omnivorously, browsing both stalk and leaves ; but i shall perhaps be enabled to speak with the more precision and authority by and by, if philosophy and sentiment are not buried under a multitude of details. i do not refuse, but accept your invitation, only changing the time. i consider myself invited to worcester once for all, and many thanks to the inviter. as for the harvard excursion, will you let me suggest another? do you and b come to concord on saturday, if the weather promises well, and spend the sunday here on the river or hills, or both. so we shall save some of our money (which is of next importance to our souls), and lose i do not know what. you say you talked letters. 139 of coming here before, now do it. i do not pro pose this because i think that i am worth your spending time with, but because i hope that we may prove flint and steel to one another. it is at most only an hour s ride farther, and you can at any rate do what you please when you get here. then we will see if we have any apology to offer for our existence. so come to concord, come to concord, come to concord ! or your suit shall be defaulted. as for the dispute about solitude and society, any comparison is impertinent. it is an idling down on the plain at the base of a mountain, in stead of climbing steadily to its top. of course you will be glad of all the society you can get to go up with. will you go to glory with me ? is the burden of the song. i love society so much that i swallowed it all at a gulp, that is, all that came in my way. it is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thinner till there is none at all. it is either the tribune on the plain, a sermon on the mount, or a very private ecstasy still higher up. we are not the less to aim at the summits, though the multitude does not ascend them. use all the society that will abet you. but perhaps i do not enter into the spirit of your talk. h. d. t. 140 letters. to mr. a. concord, september 1, 1856. mb. a : i remember, that, in the spring, you invited me to visit you. i feel inclined to spend a day or two with you and on your hills at this season, return ing, perhaps, by way of brattleboro. what if i should take the cars for walpole next friday morning? are you at home? and will it be convenient and agreeable to you to see me then ? i will await an answer. i am but poor company, and it will not be worth the while to put yourself out on my ac count ; yet from time to time i have some thoughts which would be the better for an airing. i also wish to get some hints from september on the connecticut to help me understand that season on the concord ; to snuff the musty fragrance of the decaying year in the primitive woods. there is considerable cellar-room in my nature for such stores ; a whole row of bins waiting to be filled, before i can celebrate my thanksgiving. mould in the richest of soils, yet i am not mould. it will alwaysbe found that one flourishing institu tion exists and battens on another mouldering one. the present itself is parasitic to this extent. your fellow-traveller, henry d. thoreau. letters. 141 to mr. b. eagleswood, november 19, 1850. mr. b : i have been here much longer than i expected, but have deferred answering you, because i could not foresee when i should return. i do not know yet within three or four days. this uncertainty makes it impossible for me to. appoint a day to meet you, until it shall be too late to hear from you again. i think, therefore, that i must go straight home. i feel some objection to reading that &quot; what shall it profit &quot; lecture again in worcester ; but if you are quite sure that it will be worth the while (it is a grave consideration), i will even make an independent journey from con cord for that purpose. i have read three of my old lectures (that included) to the eagleswood peo ple, and, unexpectedly, with rare success, i. e. i was aware that what i was saying was silently taken in by their ears. you must excuse me if i write mainly a busi ness letter now, for i am sold for the time, am merely thoreau the surveyor here, and solitude is scarcely obtainable in these parts. alcott has been here three times, and, sunday before hist, i went with him and greeley, by invi tation of the last, to g. s farm, thirty-six miles north of new york. the next day, a. and i heard beecher preach ; and what was more, we 142 letters. visited w the next morning, (a. had already seen him,) and were much interested and pro voked. he is apparently the greatest democrat the world has seen. kings and aristocracy go by the board at once, as they have long deserved to. a remarkably strong though coarse nature, of a sweet disposition, and much prized by his friends. though peculiar and rough in his exterior, his skin (all over ( ? ) ) red, he is essentially a gentle man. i am still somewhat in a quandary about him, feel that he is essentially strange to me, at any rate ; but i am surprised by the sight of him. he is very broad, but, as i have said, not fine. he said that i misapprehended him. i am not quite sure that i do. he told us that he loved to ride up and down broadway all day on an omni bus, sitting beside the driver, listening to the roar of the carts, and sometimes gesticulating and de claiming homer at the top of his voice. he has long been an editor and writer for the newspapers, was editor of the new orleans crescent once ; but now has no employment but to read and write in the forenoon, and walk in the afternoon, like all the rest of the scribbling gentry. i shall probably be in concord next week ; so you can direct to me there. in haste, h. d. thoreau. letters. 143 to mr. b. concord, december 6, 1856. mr. b : i trust that you got a note from me at eagles wood, about a fortnight ago. i passed through worcester on the morning of the 25th of novem ber, and spent several hours (from 3.30 to 6.20) in the travellers room at the depot, as in a dream, it now seems. as the first harlem train unex pectedly connected with the first from fitchburg, i did not spend the forenoon with you as i had anticipated, on account of baggage, &c. if it had been a seasonable hour, i should have seen you, i. e. if you had not gone to a horse-race. but think of making a call at half past three in the morning ! (would it not have implied a three o clock in the morning courage in both you and me ? ) as it were, ignoring the fact that mankind are really not at home, are not out, but so deeply in that they cannot be seen, nearly half their hours at this season of the year. i walked up and down the main street, at half past five, in the dark, and paused long in front of s store, trying to distinguish its features ; considering whether i might safely leave his &quot; putnam &quot; in the door-handle, but concluded not to risk it. meanwhile a watchman (?) seemed to be watching me, and i moved off. took another turn round there, and had the very 144 letters. earliest offer of the transcript from an urchin be hind, whom i actually could not see, it was so dark. so i withdrew, wondering if you and b. would know that i had been there. you little dream who is occupying worcester when you are all asleep. several things occurred there that night which i will venture to say were not put into the transcript. a cat caught a mouse at the depot, and gave it to her kitten to play with. so that world-famous tragedy goes on by night as well as by day, and nature is emphatically wrong. also i saw a young irishman kneel before his mother, as if in prayer, while she wiped a cinder out of his eye with her tongue ; and i found that it was never too late (or early?) to learn some thing. these things transpired while you and b. were, to all practical purposes, nowhere, and good for nothing, not even for society, not for horse-races, nor the taking back of a putnam s magazine. it is true, i might have recalled you to life, but it would have been a cruel act, con sidering the kind of life you would have come back to. however, i would fain write to you now by broad daylight, and report to you some of my life, such as it is, and recall you to your life, which is not always lived by you, even by daylight. b ! b ! are you awake ? are you aware what an ever-glorious morning this is, what long-expected, never-to-be-repeated opportunity is now offered to get life and knowledge ? letters. 145 for my part, i am trying to wake up, to wring slumber out of my pores ; for, generally, i take events as unconcernedly as a fence post, absorb wet and cold like it, and am pleasantly tickled with lichens slowly spreading over me. could i not be content, then, to be a cedar post, which lasts twenty-five years ? would i not rather be that than the farmer that set it ? or he that preaches to that farmer ? and go to the heaven of posts at last ? i think i should like that as well as any would like it. but i should not care if i sprouted into a living tree, put forth leaves and flowers, and bore fruit. i am grateful for what i am and have. my thanksgiving is perpetual. it is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite, only a sense of existence. well, anything for variety. i am ready to try this for the next ten thousand years, and exhaust it. how sweet to think of ! my extremities well charred, and my intellectual part too, so that there is no danger of worm or rot for a long while. my breath is sweet to me. o how i laugh when i think of my vague, indefinite riches. no run on my bank can drain it, for my wealth is not possession but enjoyment. what are all these years made for? and now another winter come, so much like the last ? can t we satisfy the beggars once for all ? have you got in your wood for this winter ? what else have you got in ? of what use a great 7 j 146 letters. fire on the hearth, and a confounded little fire in the heart ? are you prepared to make a decisive campaign, to pay for your costly tuition, to pay for the suns of past summers, for happi ness and unhappiness lavished upon you ? does not time go by swifter than the swiftest equine trotter or racker ? stir up . remind him of his duties, which outrun the date and span of worcester s years past and to come. tell him to be sure that he is on the main street, however narrow it may be, and to have a lit sign, visible by night as well as by day. are they not patient waiters, they who wait for us ? but even they shall not be losers. december 7. that walt whitman, of whom i wrote to you, is the most interesting fact to me at present. i have just read his second edition (which he gave me), and it has done me more good than any read ing for a long time. perhaps i remember best the poem of walt whitman, an american, and the sun-down poem. there are two or three pieces in the book which are disagreeable, to say the least ; simply sensual. he does not celebrate love at all. it is as if the beasts spoke. i think that men have not been ashamed of themselves without reason. no doubt there have always been dens where such deeds were unblushingly recited, and it is no merit to compete with their inhabitants. letters. 147 but even on this side he has spoken more truth than any american or modern that i know. i have found his poem exhilarating, encouraging. as for its sensuality, and it may turn out to be less sensual than it appears, i do not so much wish that those parts were not written, as that men and women were so pure, that they could read them without harm, that is, without understanding them. one woman told me that no woman could read it, as if a man could read what a woman could not. of course walt whitman can com municate to us no experience, and if we are shocked, whose experience is it that we are re minded of ? on the whole, it sounds to me very brave and american, after whatever deductions. i do not believe that all the sermons, so called, that have been preached in this land put together are equal to it for preaching. we ought to rejoice greatly in him. he occa sionally suggests something a little more than human. you can t confound him with the other inhabitants of brooklyn or new york. how they must shudder when they read him ! he is awfully good. to be sure i sometimes feel a little imposed on. by his heartiness and broad generalities he puts me into a liberal frame of mind prepared to see wonders, as it were, sets me upon a hill or in the midst of a plain, stirs me well up, and 148 letters. then throws in a thousand of brick. though rude and sometimes ineffectual, it is a great prim itive poem, an alarum or trumpet-note ringing through the american camp. wonderfully like the orientals, too, considering that when i asked him if he had read them, he answered, &quot; no : tell me about them.&quot; i did not get far in conversation with him, two more being present, and among the few things which i chanced to say, i remember that one was, in answer to him as representing amer ica, that i did not think much of america or of politics, and so on, which may have been some what of a damper to him. since i have seen him, i find that i am not dis turbed by any brag or egoism in his book. he may turn out the least of a braggart of all, having a better right to be confident. he is a great fellow. h. t. d. to mr. w. concord, december 12, 1856. mr. w : it is refreshing to hear of your earnest purpose with respect to your culture, and i can send you no better wish than that you may not be thwarted letters. 149 by the cares and temptations of life. depend on it, now is the accepted time, and probably you will never find yourself better disposed or freer to attend to your culture than at this moment. when they who inspire us with the idea are ready, shall not we be ready also? i do not remember anything which confucius has said directly respecting man s &quot;origin, pur pose, and destiny.&quot; he was more practical than that. pie is full of wisdom applied to human rela tions, to the private life, the family, gov ernment, &c. it is remarkable that, according to his own account, the sum and substance of his teaching is, as you know, to do as you would be done by. he also said (i translate from the french), &quot; conduct yourself suitably toward the persons of your family, then you will be able to instruct and to direct a nation of men.&quot; &quot; to nourish one s self with a little rice, to drink water, to have only his bended arm to support his head, is a state which has also its satisfaction. to be rich and honored by iniquitous means, is for me as the floating cloud which passes.&quot; &quot; as soon as a child is born he must respect its faculties : the knowledge which will come to it by and by does not resemble at all its present state. if it arrive at the age of forty or fifty years, with out having learned anything, it is no more worthy of any respect.&quot; this last, i think, will speak to your condition. 150 letters. but at this rate, i might fill many letters. our acquaintance with the ancient hindoos is not at all personal. the full names that can be relied upon are very shadowy. it is, however, tangible works that we know. the best i think of are the bhagvat geeta (an episode in an ancient heroic poem called the mahabarat), the vedas, the vishnu purana, the institutes of menu, &c. i cannot say that swede nborg has been directly and practically valuable to me, for i have not been a reader of him, except to a slight extent ; but i have the highest regard for him, and trust that i shall read his works in some world or other. he had a wonderful knowledge of our interior and spiritual life, though his illuminations are occasion ally blurred by trivialities. he comes nearer to answering, or attempting to answer, literally, your questions concerning man s origin, purpose, and destiny, than any of the worthies i have re ferred to. but i think that that is not altogether a recommendation ; since such an answer to these questions cannot be discovered any more than per petual motion, for which no reward is now offered. the noblest man it is, methinks, that knows, and by his life suggests, the most about these things. crack away at these nuts, however, as long as you can, the very exercise will ennoble you, and you may get something better than the an swer you expect. yours, h. d. thoreau. letters. 151 to mr. b. concord, december 31, 1856. mr. b : i think it will not be worth the while for me to come to worcester to lecture at all this year. it will be better to wait till i am perhaps unfortunately more in that line. my writing has not taken the shape of lectures, and therefore i should be obliged to read one of three or four old lectures, the best of which i have read to some of your auditors before. i carried that one which i call &quot; walking, or the wild,&quot; to amherst, n. h., the evening of that cold thursday, and i am to read another at fitchburg, february 3. i am simply their hired man. this will probably be the extent of my lecturing hereabouts. i must depend on meeting mr. w some other time. perhaps it always costs me more than it comes to to lecture before a promiscuous audience. it is an irreparable injury done to my modesty even, i become so indurated. o solitude ! obscurity ! meanness ! i never triumph so as when i have the least success in my neighbor s eyes. the lecturer gets fifty dol lars a night; but what becomes of his winter? what consolation will it be hereafter to have fifty thousand dollars for living in the world ? i should like not to exchange any of my life for money. 152 letters. these, you may think, are reasons for not lec turing, when you have no great opportunity. it is even so, perhaps. i could lecture on dry oak leaves, i could ; but who could hear me ? if i were to try it on any large audience, i fear it would be no gain to them, and a positive loss to me. i should have behaved rudely toward my rustling friends. i am surveying, instead of lecturing at present. let me have a skimming from your u pan of un wrinkled cream.&quot; h. d. t. to mr. r. cokcord, april 1, 1857. dear r : i got your note of welcome, night before last. 1 expect, if the weather is favorable, to take the 4.30 train from boston to-morrow, thursday, p. m., for i hear of no noon train, and shall be glad to find your wagon at tarkile hill, for i see it will be rather late for going across lots. i have seen all the spring signs you mention, and a few more, even here. nay, i heard one frog peep nearly a week ago, metbinks the very first one in all this region. i wish that there were a few more signs of spring in myself; however, i take it that there are as many within us as we think we hear without us. i am decent for a letters. 153 steady pace, but not yet for a race. i have a little cold at present, and you speak of rheumatism about the head and shoulders. your frost is not quite out. i suppose that the earth itself has a little cold and rheumatism about these times ; but all these things together produce a very fair general result. in a concert, you know, we must sing our parts feebly sometimes, that we may not injure the general effect. i shouldn t wonder if my ...two year-old invalidity had been a positively charming feature to some amateurs favorably located. why not a blasted man as well as a blasted tree, on your lawn ? if you should happen not to see me by the train named, do not go again, but wait at home for me, or a note from yours, henry d. thoreau, to mr. w. concord, april 26, 1857. mr. w : i see that you are turning a broad furrow among the books, but i trust that some very private jour nal all the while holds its own through their midst. books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service, we lay them aside. i 7* 154 letters. should say,read goethe s autobiography, by all means, also gibbon s, haydon the painter s, and our franklin s of course ; perhaps also alfieri s, benvenuto cellini s, and de quincey s confessions of an opium eater, since you like autobiog raphy. i think you must read coleridge again, and further, skipping all his theology, i. e. if you value precise definitions and a discriminating use of language. by the way, read de quincey s reminiscences of coleridge and wordsworth. how shall we account for our pursuits, if they are original ? we get the language with which to describe our various lives out of a common mint. if others have their losses which they are busy repairing, so have i mine, and their hound and horse may perhaps be the symbols of some of them. but also i have lost, or am in danger of losing, a far finer and more ethereal treasure, which commonly no loss of, which they are con scious, will symbolize. this i answer hastily and with some hesitation, according as i now under stand my words methinks a certain polygamy with its troubles is the fate of almost all men. they are married to two wives : their genius (a celestial muse), and also to some fair daughter of the earth. unless these two were fast friends before marriage, and so are afterward, there will be but little peace in the house. letters. 155 to mr. b. concord, august 18, 1857. mr. b : fifteentlily. it seems to me that you need some absorbing pursuit. it does not matter much what it is, so it be honest. such employment will be favor able to your development in more characteristic and important directions. you know there must be impulse enough for steerage way, though it be not toward your port, to prevent your drifting help lessly on to rocks or shoals. some sails are set for this purpose only. there is the large fleet of scholars and men of science, for instance, always to be seen standing off and on on every coast, and saved thus from running on to reefs, who will at last run into their proper haven, we trust. it is a pity you were not here with and . i think that in this case, for a rarity, the more the merrier. you perceived that i did not entertain the idea of our going together to maine on such an excur sion as i had planned. the more i thought of it, the more imprudent it appeared to me. i did think to have written to you before going, though not to propose your going also ; but i went at last very suddenly, and could only have written a busi ness letter, if i had tried, when there was no busi ness to be accomplished. i have now returned, and think i have had a quite profitable journey, 156 letters. chiefly from associating with an intelligent indian. my companion, e h , also found his ac count in it, though he suffered considerably from being obliged to carry unusual loads over wet and rough &quot; carries,&quot; in one instance five miles through a swamp, where the water was frequently up to our knees, and the fallen timber higher than our heads. he went over the ground three times, not being able to carry all his load at once. this prevented his ascending ktaadn. our best nights were those when it rained the hardest, on account of the mosquitos. i speak of these things, which were not unexpected, merely to account for my not inviting you. having returned, i flatter myself that the world appears in some respects a little larger, and not, as usual, smaller and shallower, for having extended my range. i have made a short excursion into the new world which the indian dwells in, or is. he begins where we leave off. it is worth the while to detect new faculties in man, he is so much the more divine ; . and anything that fairly excites our admiration expands us. the indian, who can find his way so wonderfully in the woods, possesses so much intelligence which the white man does not, and it increases my own capacity, as well as faith, to observe it. i rejoice to find that intelligence flows in other channels than i knew. o it redeems for me portions of what seemed brut ish before. letters. 157 it is a great satisfaction to find that your oldest convictions are permanent. with regard to essen tials, i have never had occasion to change my mind. the aspect of the world varies from year to year, as the landscape is differently clothed, but i find that the truth is still true, and i never regret any emphasis which it may have inspired. ktaadn is there still, but much more surely my old conviction is there, resting with more than moun tain breadth and weight on the world, the source still of fertilizing streams, and affording glorious views from its summit, if i can get up to it again. as the mountains still stand on the plain, and far more unchangeable and permanent, stand still grouped around, farther or nearer to my maturer eye, the ideas which i have entertained, the ever lasting teats from which we draw our nourishment. h. d. t. to mr., d. r. concord, august 18, 1857. dear sir : your wilson flagg seems a serious person, and it is encouraging to hear of a contemporary who recognizes nature so squarely, and selects such a theme as &quot;barns.&quot; (i would rather &quot;mount auburn&quot; were omitted.) but he is not alert enough. he wants stirring up with a pole. he 158 letters. should practise turning a series of somersets rap idly, or jump up and see how many times he can strike his feet together before coming down. let him make the earth turn round now the other way, and whet his wits on it, whichever way it goes, as on a grindstone ; in short, see how many ideas he can entertain at once. his style, as i remember, is singularly vague (i refer to the book), and, before i got to the end of the sentences, i was off the track. if you indulge in long periods, you must be sure to have a snap per at the end. as for style of writing, if one has anything to say, it drops from him simply and directly, as a stone falls to the ground. there are no two ways about it, but down it comes, and he may stick in the points and stops wherever he can get a chance. new ideas come into this world somewhat like falling meteors, with a flash and an explosion, and perhaps somebody s castle-roof per forated. to try to polish the stone in its descent, to give it a peculiar turn, and make it whistle a tune, perchance, would be of no use, if it were possible. your polished stuff turns out not to be meteoric, but of this earth. however, there is plenty of time, and nature is an admirable schoolmistress. speaking of correspondence, you ask me if i &quot; cannot turn over a new leaf in that line.&quot; i certainly could if i were to receive it ; but just then i looked up and saw that your page was dated &quot; may 10,&quot; though mailed in august, and letters. . 159 it occurred to me that i had seen you since that date this year. looking again, it appeared that your note was written in 56 ! ! however, it was a new leaf to me, and i turned it over with as much interest as if it had heen written the day before. perhaps you kept it so long, in order that the manuscript and subject-matter might be more in keeping with the old-fashioned paper on which it was written. i travelled the length of cape cod on foot, soon after you were here, and, within a few days, have returned from the wilds of maine, where i have made a journey of three hundred and twenty-five miles with a canoe and an indian, and a single white companion, e h , esq., of this town, lately from california, traversing the headwaters of the kennebeck, penobscot, and st. john s. can t you extract any advantage out of that de pression of spirits you refer to ? it suggests to me cider-mills, wine-presses, &c., &c. all kinds of pressure or power should be used and made to turn some kind of machinery. c was just leaving concord for plymouth when i arrived, but said he should be here again in two or three days. please remember me to your family, and say that i have at length learned to sing tom bowlin according to the notes. yours truly, henry d. thoreau. 160 letters. to mr. d. k. concord, september 9, 1857. friend r : i thank you for your kind invitation to visit you, but i have taken so many vacations this year, at new bedford, cape cod, and maine, that any more relaxation call it rather dis sipation will cover me with shame and disgrace. i have not earned what i have already enjoyed. as some heads cannot carry much wine, so it would seem that i cannot bear so much society as you can. i have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if i don t get enough of it this year, i shall cry all the next. my mother s house is full at present ; but if it were not, i would have no right to invite you hither, while entertaining such designs as i have hinted at. however, if you care to storm the town, i will engage to take some afternoon walks with you, retiring into profoundest solitude the most sacred part of the day. yours sincerely, h. d. t. letters. 161 to mr. b. concord, november 16, 1857. mr. b : you have got the start again. it was i that owed you a letter or two, if i mistake not. they make a great ado now-a-days about hard times ; but i think that the community generally, ministers and all, take a wrong view of the mat ter, though, some of the ministers preaching ac cording to a formula, may pretend to take a right one. this general failure, both private and pub lic, is rather occasion for rejoicing, as reminding us whom we have at the helm, that justice is al ways done. if our merchants did not most of them fail, and the banks too, my faith in the old laws of the world would be staggered. the state ment that ninety-six in a hundred doing such busi ness surely break down, is perhaps the sweetest fact that statistics have revealed, exhilarating as the fragrance of sallows in spring. does it not say somewhere, &quot; the lord reigneth, let the earth rejoice&quot;? if thousands are thrown out of em ployment, it suggests that they were not well employed. why don t they take the hint ? it is not enough to be industrious ; so are the ants. what are you industrious about ? the merchants and company have long laughed at transcendentalism, higher laws, &c., crying, &quot; none of your moonshine,&quot; as if they were an 162 letters cliored to something not only definite, but sure and permanent. if there was any institution which was presumed to rest on a solid and secure basis, and more than any other represented this boasted common sense, prudence, and practical talent, it was the bank ; and now those very banks are found to be mere reeds shaken by the w r ind. scarcely one in the land has kept its promise. it would seem as if you only need live forty years in any age of this world, to see its most promising government become the government of kansas, and banks nowhere. not merely the brook farm and fourierite communities, but now the community generally has failed. but there is the moonshine still, serene, beneficent, and unchanged. hard times, i say, have this value, among others, that they show us what such promises are worth, where the sure banks are. i heard some mer chant praised the other day, because he had paid some of his debts, though it took nearly all he had (why, i ve done as much as that myself many times, and a litttle more), and then gone to board. what if he has ? i hope he s got a good boarding place, and can pay for it. it s not everybody that can. however, in my opinion, it is cheaper to keep house, i. e. if you don t keep too big a one. men will tell you sometimes that &quot; money s hard.&quot; that shows it was not made to eat, i say. only think of a man in this new world, in his log cabin, in the midst of a corn and potato letters. 163 patch, with a sheepfold on one side, talking about money being hard ! so are flints hard ; there is no alloy in them. what has that to do with his raising his food, cutting his wood (or breaking it), keeping in-doors when it rains, and, if need be, spinning and weaving his clothes ? some of those who sank with the steamer the other day found out that money was heavy too. think of a man s priding himself on this kind of wealth, as if it greatly enriched him. as if one struggling in mid-ocean with a bag of gold on his back should gasp out, &quot; i am worth a hundred thousand dol lars.&quot; i see them struggling just as ineffectually on dry land, nay, even more hopelessly, for, in the former case, rather than sink, they w r ill finally let the bag go ; but in the latter they are pretty sure to hold and go down with it. i see them swim ming about in their great-coats, collecting their rents, really getting their dues, drinking bitter draughts which only increase their thirst, be coming more and more water-logged, till finally they sink plumb down to the bottom. but enough of this. have you ever read ruskin s books ? if not, i would recommend you to try the second and third volumes (not parts) of his modern painters. i am now reading the fourth, and have read most of his other books lately. they are singularly good and encouraging, though not without crudeness and bigotry. the themes in the volumes referred 164 letters. to are infinity, beauty, imagination, love of na ture, &c., all treated in a very living manner. i am rather surprised by them. it is remarkable that these things should be said with reference to painting chiefly, rather than literature. the seven lamps of architecture, too, is made of good stuff; but, as i remember, there is too much about art in it for me and the hottentots. we want to know about matters and things in general. our house is as yet a hut. you must have been enriched by your solitary walk over the mountains. i suppose that i feel the same awe when on their summits that many do on entering a church. to see what kind of earth that is on which you have a house and garden some where, perchance ! it is equal to the lapse of many years. you must ascend a mountain to learn your relation to matter, and so to your own body, for it is at home there, though you are not. it might have been composed there, and will have no further to go to return to dust there, than in your garden ; but your spirit inevitably comes away, and brings your body with it, if it lives. just as awful really, and as glorious, is your gar den. see how i can play with my fingers ! they are the funniest companions i have ever found. where did they come from ? what strange con trol i have over them! who am i? what are they? those little peaks call them madison, jefferson, lafayette. what is the matter f my letters. 165 fingers ten, i say. why, erelong, they may form the topmost crystal of mount washington. i go up there to see my body s cousins. there are some fingers, toes, bowels, &c., that i take an interest in, and therefore i am interested in all their relations. let me suggest a theme for you : to state to yourself precisely and completely what that walk over the mountains amounted to for you, re turning to this essay again and again, until you are satisfied that all that was important in your experience is in it. give this good reason to your self for having gone over the mountains, for man kind is ever going over a mountain. don t suppose that you can tell it precisely the first dozen times you try, but at em again, especially when, after a sufficient pause, you suspect that you are touching the heart or summit of the matter, reiterate your blows there, and account for the mountain to your self. not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short. it did not take very long to get over the mountain, you thought ; but have you got over it indeed ? if you have been to the top of mount washington, let me ask, what did you find there ? that is the way they prove witnesses, you know. going up there and being blown on is nothing. we never do much climbing while we are there, but we eat our luncheon, &c., very much as at home. it is after we get home that we really go over the mountain, 166 letters. if ever. what did the mountain say ? what did the mountain do ? i keep a mountain anchored off eastward a little way, which i ascend in my dreams both awake and asleep. its broad base spreads over a village or two, which do not know it; neither does it know them, nor do i when i ascend it. i can see its general outline as plainly now in my mind as that of wachuset. i do not invent in the least, but state exactly what i see. i find that i go up it when i am light-footed and earnest. it ever smokes like an altar with its sacrifice. i am not aware that a single villager frequents it or knows of it. i keep this mountain to ride instead of a horse. do you not mistake about seeing moosehead lake from mount washington? that must be about one hundred and twenty miles distant, or nearly twice as far as the atlantic, which last some doubt if they can see thence. was it not umbagog ? dr. solger has been lecturing in the ves-try in this town on geography, to sanborn s scholars, for several months past, at five p. m. e and a have been to hear him. i was surprised when the former asked me, the other day, if i was not going to hear dr. solger. what, to be sitting in a meeting-house cellar at that time of day, when you might possibly be out-doors ! i never thought of such a thing. what was the sun made letters. 167 for ? if he does not prize daylight, i do. let him lecture to owls and dormice. he must be a wonderful lecturer indeed who can keep me in doors at such an hour, when the night is coming in which no man can walk. are you in want of amusement now-a-days ? then play a little at the game of getting a living. there never was anything equal to it. do it tem perately, though, and don t sweat. don t let this secret out, for i have a design against the opera. opera ! ! pass along the exclamations, devil. now is the time to become conversant with your wood-pile (this comes under work for the month), and be sure you put some warmth into it by your mode of getting it. do not consent to be passively warmed. an intense degree of that is the hotness that is threatened. but a positive warmth within can withstand the fiery furnace, as the vital heat of a living man can withstand the heat that cooks meat. henky d. thoreau. 168 letters. to mr. d. r. concord, june 30, 1858. friend k : i am on the point of starting for the white mountains in a wagon with my neighbor e ii , and i write to you now rather to apologize for not writing, than to answer worthily your three notes. i thank you heartily for them. you will not care for a little delay in acknowledging them, since your date shows that you can afford to wait. indeed, my head has been so full of com pany, &c., that i could not reply to you fitly be fore, nor can i now. as for preaching to men these days in the wai den strain, is it of any consequence to preach to an audience of men who can fail, or who can be revived ? there are few beside. is it any success to interest these parties ? if a man has speculated and failed, he will probably do these things again, in spite of you or me. i confess that itis rare that i rise to sentiment in my relations to men, ordinarily to a mere patient, or may be wholesome good-will. i can imagine something more, but the truth compels me to regard the ideal and the actual as two things. channing has come, and as suddenly gone, and left a short poem, &quot; near home,&quot; published (?) or printed by monroe, which i have hardly had letters. 169 time to glance at. as you may guess, i learn nothing of you from him. you already foresee my answer to your invita tion to make you a summer visit : i am bound for the mountains. but i trust that you have van quished, ere this, those dusky demons that seem to lurk around the head of the river. you know that this warfare is nothing but a kind of night mare, and it is our thoughts alone which give those tmworthies any body or existence. i made an excursion with b , of worcester, to monadnock, a few weeks since. we took our blankets and food, spent two nights on the moun tain, and did not go into a house. a has been very busy for a long time re pairing an old shell of a house, and i have seen very little of him. i have looked more at the houses which birds build. w made us all very generous presents from his nursery in the spring. especially did he remember a . excuse me for not writing any more at present, and remember me to your family. yours, h. d. thoeeau. 170 letters. to mr. d. r. concord. november 6, 1858. friend r : i was much pleased with your lively and life like account of your voyage. you were more than repaid for your trouble after all. the coast of nova scotia, which you sailed along from windsor westward, is particularly interesting to the historian of this country, having been settled earlier than plymouth. your &quot; isle of haut &quot; is properly &quot; isle haute,&quot; or the high island of champlain s map. there is another off the coast of maine. by the way, the american elk, of american authors, (cervus canadensis,) is a dis tinct animal from the moose (cervus alces), though the latter is also called elk by many. you drew a very vivid portrait of the australian, short and stout, with a pipe in his mouth, and his book inspired by beer, pot first, pot second, &c. i suspect that he must be pot-bellied withal. methinks i see the smoke going up from him as from a cottage on the moor. if he does not quench his genius with his beer, it may burst into a clear flame at last. however, perhaps he inten tionally adopts the low style. what do you mean by that ado about smoking, and my &quot; purer tastes &quot; ? i should like his pipe as well as his beer, at least. neither of them is so bad as to be &quot; highly connected,&quot; which you say letters. 171 he is, unfortunately. no ! i expect nothing but pleasure in &quot; smoke from your pipe.&quot; you and the australian must have put your heads together when you concocted those titles, with pipes in your mouths over a pot of beer. i suppose that your chapters are, whiff the first, whiff the second, &c. but of course it is a more modest expression for &quot; fire from my genius.&quot; you must have been very busy since you came back, or before you sailed, to have brought out your history, of whose publication i had not heard. i suppose that i have read it in the mer cury. yet i am curious to see how it looks in a volume, with your name on the title-page. i am more curious still about the poems. pray put some sketches into the book : your shanty for frontispiece ; a and w s boat (if you can) running for cuttyhunk in a tremendous gale ; not forgetting &quot; be honest boys,&quot; &c., near by ; the middleborough ponds, with a certain island looming in the distance ; the quaker meet ing-house, and the brady house, if you like ; the villagers catching smelts with dip-nets in the twilight, at the head of the river, &c., &c. let it be a local and villageous book as much as pos sible. let some one make a characteristic selec tion of mottoes from your shanty walls, and sprinkle them in an irregular manner, at all angles, over the fly leaves and margins, as a man stamps his name in a hurry ; and also canes, pipes, and 172 letters. jackknives, of all your patterns, about the frontis piece. i can think of plenty of devices for tail pieces. indeed, i should like to see a hair-pillow, accurately drawn, for one ; a cat, with a bell on, for another ; the old horse, with his age printed in the hollow of his back ; half a cocoa-nut shell by a spring ; a sheet of blotted paper ; a settle occupied by a settler at full length, &c., &c., &c. call all the arts to your aid. don t wait for the indian summer, but bring it with you. yours truly, h. d. t. p. s. let me ask a favor. i am trying to write something about the autumnal tints, and i wish to know how much our trees differ from eno-lish and & european ones in this respect. will you observe, or learn for me, what english or european trees, if any, still retain their leaves in mr. arnold s garden (the gardener will supply the true names) ; and also if the foliage of any (and what) euro pean or foreign trees there have been brilliant the past month. if you will do this you will greatly oblige me. i return the newspaper with this. letters. 173 to me. b. coxcord, january 1, 1859. it may interest you to hear that c has been this way again, via montreal and lake huron, go ing to the west indies, or rather to weiss-nicht wo, whither he urges me to accompany him. he is rather more demonstrative than before, and, on the whole, what would be called &quot; a good fellow,&quot; is a man of principle, and quite reliable, but very peculiar. i have been to new bedford with him, to show him a whaling town and r . i was glad to hear that you had called on r . how did you like him ? i suspect that you did not see one another fairly. i have lately got back to that glorious society, called solitude, where we meet our friends con tinually, and can imagine the outside world also to be peopled. yet some of my acquaintance would fain hustle me into the almshouse for the sake of society, as if i were pining for that diet, when i seem to myself a most befriended man, and find constant employment. however, they do not be lieve a word i say. they have got a club, the handle of which is in the parker house at boston, and with this they beat me from time to time, ex pecting to make me tender or minced meat so, fit for a club to dine off. 174 letters. &quot; hercules with his club the dragon did drub ; but more of more hall, with nothing at all, he slew the dragon of wantley.&quot; ah ! that more of more hall knew what fair play was. c , who wrote to me about it once, brandishing the club vigorously, being set on by another, probably, says now, seriously, that he is sorry to find by my letters that i am &quot; absorbed in politics,&quot; and adds, begging my pardon for his plainness, &quot; beware of an extraneous life ! &quot; and so he does his duty, and washes his hands of me. i tell him that it is as if he should say to the sloth, that fellow that creeps so slowly along a tree, and cries ai from time to time, &quot; beware of dancing ! &quot; the doctors are all agreed that i am suffering for want of society. was never a case like it ? first, i did not know that i was suffering at all. secondly, as an irishman might say, i had thought it was indigestion of the society i got. as for the parker house, i went there once, when the club was away, but i found it hard to see through the cigar smoke, and men were deposited about in chairs over the marble floor, as thick as legs of bacon in a smoke-house. it was all smoke, and no salt, attic or other. the only room in boston which i visit with alacrity, is the gentle men s room at the fitchburg dep8t, where i wait for the cars, sometimes for, two hours, in order to get out of town. it is a paradise to the parker letters. 175 house, for no smoking is allowed, and there is far more retirement. a large and respectable club of us hire it (town and country club), and i am pretty sure to find some one there whose face is set the same w r ay as my own. my last essay, on which i am still engaged, is called autumnal tints. i do not know how read able (i. e. by me to others) it will be. i met mr. j the other night at emerson s, at an alcottian conversation, at which, however, a did not talk much, being disturbed by j &quot;s opposition. the latter is a hearty man enough, with whom you can differ very satisfac torily, on account of both his doctrines and his good temper. he utters quasi philanthropic dog mas in a metaphysic dress ; but they are for all practical purposes very crude. he charges society with all the crime committed, and praises the criminal for committing it. but i think that all the remedies he suggests out of his head, for he goes no farther, hearty as he is, would leave us about where we are now. for, of course, it is not by a gift of turkeys on thanksgiving day that he proposes to convert the criminal, but by a true sympathy with each one, with him, among the rest, who lyingly tells the world from the gallows that he has never been treated kindly by a single mortal since he was born. but it is not so easy a thing to sympathize with another, though you may have the best disposition to do it. there is dob 176 letters. son over the hill. have not you and i and all the world been trying, ever since he was born, to sympathize with him ? (as doubtless he with us,) and yet we have got no further than to send him to the house of correction once at least ; and he, on the other hand, as i hear, has sent us to an other place several times. this is the real state of things, as i understand it, as least so far as j s remedies go. we are now, alas! exer cising what chanty we actually have, and new laws would not give us any more. but, per chance, we might make some improvements in the house of correction. you and i are dobson ; what will j do for us ? have you found at last in your wanderings a place where the solitude is sweet ? what mountain are you camping on now-a days ? though i had a good time at the moun tains, i confess that the journey did not bear any fruit that i know of. i did not expect it would. the mode of it was not simple and adventurous enough. you must first have made an infinite de mand, and not unreasonably, but after a corre sponding outlay, have an all-absorbing purpose, and at the same time that your feet bear you hither and thither, travel much more in imagina tion. to let the mountains slide, live at home like a traveller. it should not be in vain that these things are shown us from day to day. is not letters. 177 each withered leaf that i see in my walks some thing which i have travelled to find? travelled, who can tell how far ? what a fool he must be who thinks that his el dorado is anywhere but where he lives ! we are always, methinks, in some kind of ra vine, though our bodies may walk the smooth streets of worcester. our souls (i use this word for want of a better) are ever perched on its rocky sides, overlooking that lowland. (what a more than tuckerman s ravine is the body itself, in which the &quot; soul&quot; is encamped, when you come to look into it ! however, eagles always have chosen such places for their eyries.) thus is it ever with your fair cities of the plain. their streets may be paved with silver and gold, and six carriages roll abreast in them, but the real homes of the citizens are in the tuck erman s ravines which ray out from that centre into the mountains round about, one for each man, woman, and child. the masters of life have so ordered it. that is their beau-ideal of a country seat. there is no danger of being &quot;tuckered&quot; out before you get to it. so we live in worcester and in concord, each man taking his exercise regu]arly in his ravine, like a lion in his cage, and sometimes spraining his ancle there. we have very few clear days, and a great many small plagues which keep us busy. sometimes, i suppose, you hear a neighbor halloo 178 letters. (b , may be) and think it is a bear. never theless, on the whole, we think it very grand and exhilarating, this ravine life. it is a capital ad vantage withal, living so high, the excellent drain age of that city of god. routine is but a shal low and insignificant sort of ravine, such as the ruts are, the conduits of puddles. but these ra vines are the source of mighty streams, precipi tous, icy, savage, as they are, haunted by bears and loup-cerviers, there are born not only sacos and amazons, but prophets who will redeem the world. the at last smooth and fertilizing water at which nations drink and navies supply them selves, begins with melted glaciers, and burst thunder-spouts. let us pray, that, if we are not flowing through some mississippi valley which we fertilize, and it is not likely we are, we may know ourselves shut in between grim and mighty mountain walls amid the clouds, falling a thousand feet in a mile, through dwarfed fir and spruce, over the rocky insteps of slides, being exercised in our minds, and so developed. h. d. t. letters. 179 to mr. b. concord, september 26, 1859. mr. b : i am not sure that i am in a fit mood to write to you, for i feel and think rather too much like a business man, having some very irksome affairs to attend to these months and years on account of my family. this is the way i am serving king admetus, confound him ! if it were not for my relations, i would let the wolves prey on his flocks to their bellies content. such fellows you have to deal with ! herdsmen of some other king, or of the same, who tell no tale, but in the sense of count ing their flocks, and then lie drunk under a hedge. how is your grist ground ? not by some mur muring stream, while you lie dreaming on the bank ; but, it seems, you must take hold with your hands, and shove the wheel round. you can t depend on streams, poor feeble things ! you can t depend on worlds, left to themselves ; but you ve got to oil them and goad them along. in short, you ve got to carry on two farms at once, the farm on the earth and the farm in your mind. those crimean and italian battles were mere boys play, they are the scrapes into which truants get. but what a battle a man must fight everywhere to maintain his standing army of thoughts, and march with them in orderly array through the always hostile country ! how 180 letters. many enemies there are to sane thinking ! every soldier has succumbed to them before he enlists for those other battles. men may sit in chambers, seemingly safe and sound, and yet despair, and turn out at last only hollowness and dust within, like a dead sea apple. a standing army of nu merous, brave, and well-disciplined thoughts, and you at the head of them, marching straight to your goal ! how to bring this about is the prob lem, and scott s tactics will not help you to it. think of a poor fellow begirt only with a sword belt, and no such staff of athletic thought ! his brains rattling as he walks and talks ! these are your pretorian guard. it is easy enough to main tain a family, or a state, but it is hard to maintain these children of your brain (or say, rather, these guests that trust to enjoy your hospitality), they make such great demands ; and yet, he who does only the former, and loses the power to think originally, or as only he ever can, fails misera bly. keep up the fires of thought, and all will go well. zouaves ? pish ! how you can overrun a country, climb any rampart, and carry any for tress, with an army of alert thoughts i. thoughts that send their bullets home to heaven s door, with which you can take the whole world, without paying for it, or robbing anybody. see, the con quering hero comes ! you fail in your thoughts, or you prevail in your thoughts only. provided letters. 181 you think well, the heavens falling, or the earth gaping, will be music for you to march by. no foe can ever see you, or you him ; you cannot so much as think of him. swords have no edges, bullets no penetration, for such a contest. in your mind must be a liquor which will dissolve the w r orld whenever it is dropt in it. there is no universal solvent but this, and all things together cannot saturate it. it will hold the universe in solution, and yet be as translucent as ever. the vast machine may indeed roll over our toes, and we not know it, but it would rebound and be staved to pieces like an empty barrel, if it should strike fair and square on the smallest and least angular of a man s thoughts. you seem not to have taken cape cod the right way. i think that you should have persevered in walking on the beach and on the bank, even to the land s end, however soft, and so, by long knocking at ocean s gate, have gained admittance at last, better, if separately, and in a storm, not knowing where you would sleep by night, or eat by day. then you should have given a day to the sand behind provincetown, and ascended the hills there, and been blown on considerably. i hope that you like to remember the journey better than you did to make it. i have been confined at home all this year, but i am not aware that i have grown any rustier than was to be expected. one while i explored 182 letters. the bottom of the river pretty extensively. i have engaged to read a lecture to parker s society on the 9th of october next. i am off a barberrying. ii. d. t. to mr. b. concord, may 20, 1860. mr. b : i must endeavor to pay some of my debts to you. to begin where we left off, then. the presumption is that we are always the same ; our opportunities, and nature herself, fluc tuating. look at mankind. no great difference between two, apparently ; perhaps the same height, and breadth, and weight ; and yet, to the man who sits most east, this life is a weariness, routine, dust and ashes, and he drowns his imaginary cards ( ! ) (a sort of friction among his vital organs) in a bowl. but to the man who sits most west, his con temporary ( !), it is a field for all noble endeavors, an elysium, the dwelling-place of heroes and demi gods. the former complains that he has a thou sand affairs to attend to ; but he does not realize that his affairs (though they may be a thousand) and he are one. men and boys are learning all kinds of trades letters. 183 but how to make men of themselves. they learn to make houses ; but they are not so well housed, they are not so contented in their houses, as the woodchucks in their holes. what is the use of a house if you have n t got a tolerable planet to put it on ? if you cannot tolerate the planet it is on ? grade the ground first. if a man believes and expects great things of himself, it makes no odds where you put him, or what you show him (of course you cannot put him anywhere, nor show him anything), he will be surrounded by grand eur. he is in the condition of a healthy and hungry man, who says to himself, how sweet this crust is ! if he despairs of himself, then tophet is his dwelling-place, and he is in the con dition of a sick man who is disgusted with the fruits of finest flavor. whether he sleeps or wakes, whether he runs or walks, whether he uses a microscope or a telescope, or his naked eye, a man never dis covers anything, never overtakes anything, or leaves anything behind, but himself. whatever he says or does, he merely reports himself. if he is in love, he loves ; if he is in heaven, he enjoys ; if he is in hell, he suffers. it is his condition that determines his locality. the principal, the only thing a man makes, is his condition or fate. though commonly he does not know it, nor put up a sign to this effect, &quot; my own destiny made and mended here.&quot; [not 184 letters. yours.~\ he is a master-workman in the business. he works twenty-four hours a day at it, and gets it done. whatever else he neglects or botches, no man was ever known to neglect this work. a great many pretend to make shoes chiefly, and would scout the idea that they make the hard times which they experience. each reaching and aspiration is an instinct with which all nature consists and co-operates, and therefore it is not in vain. but alas ! each relax ing and desperation is an instinct too. to be active, well, happy, implies rare courage. to be ready to fight in a duel or a battle, implies des peration, or that you hold your life cheap. if you take this life to be simply what old re ligious folks pretend, (i mean the effete, gone to seed in a drought, mere human galls stung by the devil once,) then all your joy and serenity is re duced to grinning and bearing it. the fact is, you have got to take the world on your shoulders like atlas, and put along with it. you will do this for an idea s sake, and your success will be in proportion to your devotion to ideas. it may make your back ache occasionally, but you will have the satisfaction of hanging it or twirling it to suit yourself. cowards suffer, heroes enjoy. after a long day s walk with it, pitch it into a hollow place, sit down and eat your luncheon. unex pectedly, by some immortal thoughts, you will be compensated. the bank whereon you sit will be letters. 185 a fragrant and flowery one, and your world in the hollow a sleek and light gazelle. where is the &quot; unexplored land &quot; but in our own untried enterprises ? to an adventurous spirit any place london, new york, worces ter, or his own yard is &quot; unexplored land,&quot; to seek which fremont and kane travel so far. to a sluggish and defeated spirit even the great basin and the polaris are trivial places. if they can get there (and, indeed, they are there now), they will want to sleep, and give it up, just as they always do. these are the regions of the known and of the unknown. what is the use of going right over the old track again ? there is an adder in the path which your own feet have worn. you must make tracks into the unknown. that is what you have your board and clothes for. why do you ever mend your clothes, unless that, wearing them, you may mend your ways. let us sing. h. d. t. 186 letters. to mr. d. r. concord, november 4, 1860. friend r : i thank you for the verses. they are quite too good to apply to me. however, i know what a poet s license is, and will not get in the way. but what do you mean by that prose ? why will you waste so many regards on me, and not know what to think of my silence ? infer from it what you might from the silence of a dense pine wood. it is its natural condition, except when the winds blow, and the jays scream, and the chickaree winds up his clock. my silence is just as inhuman as that, and no more. you know that i never promised to correspond with you, and so, when i do, i do more than i promised. such are my pursuits and habits, that i rarely go abroad ; and it is quite a habit with me to de cline invitations to do so. not that i could not enjoy such visits, if i were not otherwise occupied. i have enjoyed very much my visits to you, and my rides in your neighborhood, and am sorry that i cannot enjoy such things oftener ; but life is short, and there are other things also to be done. i admit that you are more social than i am, and far more attentive to &quot; the common courtesies of life ; but this is partly for the reason that you have fewer or less exacting private pursuits. letters. 187 not to have written a note for a year, is with me a very venial offence. i think that i do not correspond with any one so often as once in six months. i have a faint recollection of your invitation re ferred to ; hut i suppose that i had no new nor particular reason for declining, and so made no new statement. i have felt that you would be glad to see me almost whenever i got ready to come ; but i only offer myself as a rare visitor, and a still rarer correspondent. i am very busy, after my fashion, little as there is to show for it, and feel as if i could not spend many days nor dollars in travelling ; for the short est visit must have a fair margin to it, and the days thus affect the w r eeks, you know. neverthe less, we cannot forego these luxuries altogether. you must not regard me as a regular diet, but at most only as acorns, which, too, are not to be despised, which, at least, we love to think are edible in a bracing walk. we have got along pretty well together in several directions, though we are such strangers in others. i hardly know what to say in answer to your letter. some are accustomed to write many letters, others very few. i am one of the last. at any rate, we are pretty sure, if we write at all, to send those thoughts which we cherish, to that one, who, we believe, will most religiously attend to them. 188 letters. this life is not for complaint, but for satisfaction. i do not feel addressed by this letter of yours. it suggests only misunderstanding. intercourse may be good ; but of what use are complaints and apol ogies ? any complaint i have to make is too serious to be uttered, for the evil cannot be mended. turn over a new leaf. my out-door harvest this fall has been one can ada lynx, a fierce-looking fellow, which, it seems, we have hereabouts ; eleven barrels of apples from trees of my own planting ; and a large crop of \vhite-oak acorns, which i did not raise. please remember me to your family. i have a very pleasant recollection of your fireside, and i trust that i shall revisit it ; also of your shanty and the surrounding regions. yours truly, henry d. thoreau. to mr. b. concord, november 4, i860. mr. b : i am glad to hear any particulars of your excur sion. as for myself, i looked out for you some what on that monday, when, it appears, you letters. 189 passed monadnock ; turned my glass upon several parties that were ascending the mountain half a mile on one side of us. in short, i came as near to seeing you as you to seeing me. i have no doubt that we should have had a good time if you had come, for i had, all ready, two good spruce houses, in which you could stand up, complete in all respects, half a mile apart, and you and b. could have lodged by yourselves in one, if not with us. we made an excellent beginning of our moun tain life. you may remember that the saturday previous was a stormy day. well, we went up in the rain, wet through, and found ourselves in a cloud there at mid-afternoon, in no situation to look about for the best place for a camp. so i proceeded at once, through the cloud, to that memorable stone, &quot;chunk yard,&quot; in which we made our humble camp once, and there, after putting our packs under a rock, having a good hatchet, i proceeded to build a substantial house, which c. declared the handsomest he ever saw. (he never camped out before, and was, no doubt, prejudiced in its favor.) this was done about dark, and by that time we were nearly as wet as if we had stood in a hogshead of water. we then built a fire before the door, directly on the site of our little camp of two years ago, and it took a long time to burn through its remains to the earth be neath. standing before this, and turning round 190 letters. slowly, like meat that is roasting, we were as dry, if not drier, than ever, after a few hours, and so, at last, we &quot; turned in.&quot; this was a great deal better than going up there in fair weather, and having no adventure (not knowing how to appreciate either fair weather or foul) but dull, commonplace sleep in a useless house, and before a comparatively useless fire, such as we get every night. of course, we thanked our stars, when we saw them, which was about midnight, that they had seemingly with drawn for a season. we had the mountain all to ourselves that afternoon and night. there was nobody going up that day to engrave his name on the summit, nor to gather blueberries. the genius of the mountains saw us starting from concord, and it said, there come two of our folks. let us get ready for them. get up a serious storm, that will send a-paeking these holi day guests. (they may have their say another time.) let us receive them with true mountain hospitality, kill the fatted cloud. let them know the value of a spruce roof, and of a fire of dead spruce stumps. every bush dripped tears of joy at our advent. fire did its best, and re ceived our thanks. what could fire have done in fair weather ? spruce roof got its share of our blessings. and then, such a view of the wet rocks, with the wet lichens on them, as we had the next morning, but did not get again ! letters. 191 we and the mountain had a sound season, as the saying is. how glad we were to be wet, in order that we might be dried ! how glad we were of the storm which made our house seem like a new home to us ! this day s experience was indeed lucky, for we did not have a thunder shower during all our stay. perhaps our host reserved this attention in order to tempt us to come again. our next house was more substantial still. one side was rock, good for durability ; the floor the same ; and the roof which i made would have upheld a horse. i stood on it to do the shingling. i noticed, when i was at the white mountains last, several nuisances which render travelling thereabouts unpleasant. the chief of these was the mountain houses. i might have supposed that the main attraction of that region, even to citizens, lay in its wildness and unlikeness to the city, and yet they make it as much like the city as they can afford to. i heard that the crawford house was lighted with gas, and had a large saloon, with its band of music, for dancing. but give me a spruce house made in the rain. an old concord farmer tells me that he ascend ed monadnock once, and danced on the top. how did that happen ? why, he being up there, a party of young men and women came up, bring ing boards and a fiddler ; and, having laid down the boards, they made a level floor, on which they 192 letters. danced to the music of the fiddle. i suppose the tune was &quot; excelsior.&quot; this reminds me of the fellow who climbed to the top of a very high spire, stood upright on the ball, and hurrahed for what? why, for harrison and tyler. that s the kind of sound which most ambitious people emit when they culminate. they are wont to be singularly frivolous in the thin atmosphere ; they can t contain themselves, though our comfort and their safety require it; it takes the pressure of many atmospheres to do this; and hence they helplessly evaporate there. it would seem, that, as they ascend, they breathe shorter and shorter, and, at each expiration, some of their wits leave them, till, when they reach the pinnacle, they are so light-headed as to be fit only to show how the wind sits. i suspect that e s criticism called &quot; monadnock &quot; was inspired, not by remembering the inhabitants of new hampshire as they are in the valleys, so much as by meeting some of them on the mountain-top. after several nights experience, c. came to the conclusion that he was &quot; lying out-doors,&quot; and in quired what was the largest beast that might nib ble his legs there. i fear that he did not improve all the night, as he might have done, to sleep. i had asked him to go and spend a week there. we spent five nights, being gone six days, for c. suggested that six working days made a week, and i saw that he was ready to de-camp. however, he found his account in it as well as i. letters. 193 we were seen to go up in the rain, grim and silent, like two genii of the storm, by fassett s men or boys ; but we were never identified after ward, though we were the subject of some con versation which we overheard. five hundred persons at least came on to the mountain while we were there, but not one found our camp. we saw one party of three ladies and two gentlemen spread their blankets and spend the night on the top, and heard them converse ; but they did not know that they had neighbors, who were compara tively old settlers. we spared them the chagrin which that knowledge would have caused them, and let them print their story in a newspaper accordingly. yes, to meet men on an honest and simple foot ing, meet with rebuffs, suffer from sore feet, as you did, ay, and from a sore heart, as perhaps you also did, all that is excellent. what a pity that that young prince could not enjoy a little of the legitimate experience of travelling, be dealt with simply and truly, though rudely. he might have been invited to some hospitable house in the country, had his bowl of bread and milk set be fore him, with a clean pinafore ; been told that there were the punt and the fishing-rod, and he could amuse himself as he chose; might have swung a few birches, dug out a woodchuck, and had a regular good time, and finally been sent to bed with the boys, and so never have been in 194 letters. troduced to mr. everett at all. i have no doubt that this would have been a far more memorable and valuable experience than he got. the snow-clad summit of mount washington must have been a very interesting sight from wa chusett. how wholesome winter is, seen far or near; how good, above all mere sentimental, warm blooded, short lived, soft hearted, moral goodness, commonly so-called. give me the good ness w y hich has forgotten its own deeds, which god has seen to be good, and let be. none of your just made perfect, pickled eels ! all that will save them will be their picturesqueness, as with blasted trees. whatever is, and is not ashamed to be, is good. i value no moral good ness or greatness unless it is good or great, even as that snowy peak is. pray, how could thirty feet of bowels improve it ? nature is goodness crystallized. you looked into the land of promise. whatever beauty we behold, the more it is dis tant, serene, and cold, the purer and more durable it is. it is better to warm ourselves with ice than with fire. tell b that he sent me more than the price of the book, viz., a word from himself, for which i am greatly his debtor. h. d. t. letters. 195 to mr. p. concord, april 10, 1861. friend p : i am sorry to say that i have not a copy of &quot; walden &quot; which i can spare ; and know of none, unless possibly ticknor and fields may have one. i send, nevertheless, a copy of &quot; the week,&quot; the price of which is one dollar and twenty-five cents, which you can pay at your convenience. as for your friend, my prospective reader, i hope he ignores fort sumter, and &quot; old abe,&quot; and all that; for that is just the most fatal, and, indeed, the only fatal weapon you can direct against evil, ever : for, as long as you know of it, you are particeps criminis. what business have you, if you are &quot; an angel of light,&quot; to be ponder ing over the deeds of darkness, reading the new york herald and the like ? i do not so much regret the present condition of things in this country (provided i regret it at all), as i do that i ever heard of it. i know one or two, who have this year, for the first time, read a president s message ; but they do not see that this implies a fall in themselves, rather than a rise in the president. blessed were the days before you read a president s message. blessed are the young, for they do not read the president s message. blessed are they who never read a newspaper, for they shall see nature, and, through her, god. 196 letters. but, alas ! i have heard of sumter and pick ens, and even of buchanan (though i did not read his message). i also read the new york tribune ; but then, i am reading herodotus and strabo, and blodget s climatology, and &quot; six years in the desert of north america,&quot; as hard as i can, to counterbal ance it. by the way, alcott is at present our most pop ular and successful man, and has just published a volume in size, in the shape of the annual school report, which i presume he has sent to you. yours, for remembering all good things, henry d. thoreau. to mr. b. concord, may 3, 1861. mr. b : i am still as much an invalid as when you and b were here, if not more of one, and at this rate there is danger that the cold weather may come again, before i get over my bronchitis. the doctor accordingly tells me that i must &quot; clear out &quot; to the west indies, or elsewhere, he does not seem to care much where. but i decide against the west indies, on account of their muggy letters. 197 heat in the summer, and the south of europe, on account of the expense of time and money, and have at last concluded that it will be most ex pedient for me to try the air of minnesota, say somewhere about st. paul s. i am only wait ing to be well enough to start. hope to get off within a week or ten days. the inland air may help me at once, or it may not. at any rate, i am so much of an invalid, that i shall have to study my comfort in travelling to a remarkable degree, stopping to rest, &c., &c., if need be. i think to get a through ticket to chicago, with liberty to stop frequently on the way, making my first stop of consequence at ni agara falls, several days or a week, at a private boarding-house ; then a night or day at detroit ; and as much at chicago as my health may re quire. at chicago i can decide at what point (fulton, dunleith, or another) to strike the mississippi, and take a boat to st. paul s. i trust to find a private boarding-house in one or various agreeable places in that region, and spend my time there. i expect, and shall be prepared to be gone three months ; and i would like to return by a different route, perhaps mackinaw and mon treal. i have thought of finding a companion, of course, yet not seriously, because i had no right 198 letters. to offer myself as a companion to anybody, having such a peculiarly private and all-absorbing but miserable business as my health, and not altogether his, to attend to, causing me to stop here and go there, &c., &c., unaccountably. nevertheless, i have just now decided to let you know of my intention, thinking it barely pos sible that you might like to make a part or the whole of this journey at the same time, and that perhaps your own health may be such as to be benefited by it. pray let me know if such a statement offers any temptations to you. i write in great haste for the mail, and must omit all the moral. h. d. thoreau. to mr. s. redwing, minnesota, june 26, 1861. mr. s : i was very glad to find awaiting me, on my ar rival here on sunday afternoon, a letter from you. i have performed this journey in a very dead and alive manner, but nothing has come so near wak ing me up as the receipt of letters from concord. i read yours, and one from my sister (and horace m his four), near the top of a remarkable, letters. 199 isolated bluff here, called barn bluff, or the grange, or redwing bluff, some four hundred and fifty feet high, and half a mile long, a bit of the main bluff or bank standing alone. the top, as you know, rises to the general level of the sur rounding country, the river having eaten out so much. yet the valley just above and below this, (we are at the head of lake pepin,) must be three or four miles wide. i am not even so well informed as to the pro gress of the war as you suppose. i have seen but one eastern paper (that, by the way, was the tribune) for five weeks. i have not taken much pains to get them ; but, necessarily, i have not seen any paper at all for more than a week at a time. the people of minnesota have seemed to me more cold, to feel less implicated in this war than the people of massachusetts. it is apparent that massachusetts, for one state at least, is doing much more than her share in carrying it on. however, i have dealt partly with those of south ern birth, and have seen but little way beneath the surface. i was glad to be told yesterday that there was a good deal of weeping here at red wing the other day, when the volunteers stationed at fort snelling followed the regulars to the seat of the war. they do not weep when their children go up the river to occupy the deserted forts, though they may have to fight the indians there. 200 letters. i ao not even know what the attitude of eng land is at present. the grand feature hereabouts is, of course, the mississippi river. too much can hardly be said of its grandeur, and of the beauty of tins portion of it (from dunleith, and probably from rock island to this place). st. paul is a dozen miles below the falls of st. anthony, or near the head of uninterrupted navigation on the main stream, about two thousand miles from its mouth. there is not a &quot; rip &quot; below that, and the river is almost as wide in the upper as the lower part of its course. steamers go up to the sauk rapids, above the falls, near a hundred miles farther, and then you are fairly in the pine-woods and lumbering coun try. thus it flows from the pine to the palm. the lumber, as you know, is sawed chiefly at the falls of st. anthony (what is not rafted in the log to ports far below), having given rise to the towns of st. anthony, minneapolis, &c., &c. in coming up the river from dunleith, you meet with great rafts of sawed lumber and of logs, twenty rods or more in length, by five or six wide, floating down, all from the pine region above the falls. an old maine lumberer, who has followed the same business here, tells me that the sources of the mississippi were comparatively free from rocks and rapids, making easy work for them ; but he thought that the timber was more knotty here than in maine. letters. 201 it has chanced that about half the men whom i have spoken with in minnesota, whether travellers or settlers, were from massachusetts. after spending some three weeks in and about st. paul, st. anthony, and minneapolis, we made an excursion in a steamer some three hundred or more miles up the minnesota (st. peter s) river, to redwood, or the lower sioux agency, in order to see the plains, and the sioux, who were to re ceive their annual payment there. this is emi nently the river of minnesota, (for she shares the mississippi with wisconsin,) and it is of incalcu lable value to her. it flows through a very fertile country, destined to be famous for its wheat ; but it is a remarkably winding stream, so that red wood is only half as far from its mouth by land as by water. there was not a straight reach a mile in length as far as we went, generally you could not see a quarter of a mile of water, and the boat was steadily turning this way or that. at the greater bends, as the traverse des sioux, some of the passengers were landed, and walked across to be taken in on the other side. two or three times you could have thrown a stone across the neck of the isthmus, while it was from one to three miles around it. it was a very novel kind of navigation to me. the boat was perhaps the largest that had been up so high, and the water was rather low (it had been about fifteen feet higher). in making a short turn, we repeatedly 9* 202 letters. and designedly ran square into the steep and soft bank, taking in a cart-load of earth, this being more effectual than the rudder to fetch us about again ; or the deeper water was so narrow and close to the shore, that we were obliged to run into and break down at least fifty trees which overhung the water, when we did not cut them off, repeatedly losing a part of our outworks, though the most exposed had been taken in. i could pluck almost any plant on the bank from the boat. we very frequently got aground, and then drew ourselves along with a windlass and a cable fastened to a tree, or we swung round in the current, and completely blocked up and block aded the river, one end of the boat resting on each shore. and yet we would haul ourselves round again with the windlass and cable in an hour or two, though the boat was about one hundred and sixty feet long, and drew some three feet of water, or, often, water and sand. it was one consolation to know that in such a case we were all the while damming the river, and so raising it. we once ran fairly on to a concealed rock, with a shock that aroused all the passengers, and rested there, and the mate went below with a lamp, expecting to find a hole, but he did not. snags and saw yers were so common that i forgot to mention them. the sound of the boat rumbling over one was the ordinary music. however, as long as the boiler did not burst, we knew that no serious ac letters. 203 cident was likely to happen. yet this was a singularly navigable river, more so than the mis sissippi above the falls, and it is owing to its very crookedness. ditch it straight, and it would not only be very swift, but soon run out. it was from ten to fifteen rods wide near the mouth, and from eight to ten or twelve at redwood. though the current was swift, i did not see a &quot; rip &quot; on it, and only three or four rocks. for three months in the year, i am told that it can be navigated by small steamers about twice as far as we went, or to its source in big stone lake ; and a former indian agent told me that at high water it was thought that such a steamer might pass into the red river. in short, this river proved so very long and navigable, that i was reminded of the last letter or two in the voyage of the baron la hontan (written near the end of the seventeenth century, i thinlc), in which he states, that, after reaching the mississippi (by the illinois or wisconsin), the limit of previous exploration westward, he voyaged up it with his indians, and at length turned up a great river coming in from the west, which he called &quot; la riviere longue &quot; ; and he relates various improbable things about the country and its inhabitants, so that this letter has been regard ed as pure fiction, or, more properly speaking, a lie. but i am somewhat inclined now to recon sider the matter. 204 letters. the governor of minnesota (ramsay), the superintendent of indian affairs in this quarter, and the newly-appointed indian agent were on board ; also a german band from st. paul, a small cannon for salutes, and the money for the indians (ay, and the gamblers, it was said, who were to bring it back in another boat). there were about one hundred passengers, chiefly from st. paul, and more or less recently from the north eastern states ; also half a dozen young educated englishmen. chancing to speak with one who sat next to me, when the voyage was nearly half over, i found that he was the son of the rev. samuel may, and a classmate of yours, and had been looking for us at st. anthony. the last of the little settlements on the river was new ulm, about one hundred miles this side of redwood. it consists wholly of germans. we left them one hundred barrels of salt, which will be worth something more when the water is lowest than at present. redwood is a mere locality, scarcely an in dian village, where there is a store, and some houses have been built for them. we were now fairly on the great plains, and looking south ; and, after walking that way three miles, could see no tree in that horizon. the buffalo was said to be feeding within twenty-five or thirty miles. a regular council was held with the indians, letters. 205 who had come in on their ponies, and speeches were made on both sides through an interpreter, quite in the described mode, the indians, as usual, having the advantage in point of truth and earnestness, and therefore of eloquence. the most prominent chief was named little crow. they were quite dissatisfied with the white man s treatment of them, and probably have rea son to be so. this council was to be continued for two or three days, the payment to be made the second day ; and another payment to other bands a little higher up, on the yellow medicine (a tributary of the minnesota), a few days there after. in the afternoon, the half-naked indians per formed a dance, at the request of the governor, for our amusement and their own benefit ; and then we took leave of them, and of the officials who had come to treat with them. excuse these pencil marks, but my inkstand is unscrewdble, and i can only direct my letter at the bar. i could tell you more, and perhaps more in teresting things, if i had time. i am considerably better than when i left home, but still far from well. our faces are already set toward home. will you please let my sister know that we shall prob ably start for milwaukee and mackinaw in a day or two (or as soon as we hear from home) via prairie du chien, and not la crosse. 206 letters. i am glad to hear that you have written to cholmondoley, as it relieves me of some respon sibility. yours truly, henry d. thoreau. to mr. m. b. b. concord, march 21, 1862. dear sir : i thank you for your very kind letter, which, ever since i received it, i have intended to answer before i died, however briefly. i am encouraged to know, that, so far as you are concerned, i have not written my books in vain. i was particularly gratified, some years ago, when one of my friends and neighbors said, &quot; i wish you would write an other book, write it for me.&quot; he is actually more familiar with what i have written than i am myself. the verses you refer to in conway s dial, were written by f. b. sanborn of this town. i never wrote for that journal. i am pleased when you say that in &quot; the week &quot; you like especially &quot; those little snatches of poetry interspersed through the book,&quot; for these, i sup pose, are the least attractive to most readers. i have not been engaged in any particular work on letters. 207 botany, or the like, though, if i were to live, i should have much to report on natural history generally. you ask particularly after my health. i sup pose that i have not many months to live ; but, of course, i know nothing about .it. i may add that i am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret nothing. yours truly, henry d. thoreau, by sophia e. thoreau. poems. sympathy. lately, alas ! i knew a gentle boy, whose features all were cast in virtue s mould, as one she had designed for beauty s toy, but after manned him for her own stronghold. on every side he open was as day, that you might see no lack of strength within ; for walls and ports do only serve alway for a pretence to feebleness and sin. say not that caesar was victorious, with toil and strife who stormed the house of fame, in other sense this youth was glorious, himself a kingdom, wheresoe er he came. no strength went out to get him victory, when all was income of its own accord ; for where he went none other was to see, but all were parcel of their noble lord. 212 poems. he forayed like the subtle haze of summer, that stilly shows fresh landscapes to our eyes, and revolutions works without a murmur, or rustling of a leaf beneath the skies. so was i taken unawares by this, i quite forgot my homage to confess ; yet now am forced to know, though hard it is, i might have loved him, had i loved him less. each moment as we nearer drew to each, a stern respect withheld us farther yet, so that we seemed beyond each other s reach, and less acquainted than when first we met. we two were one while we did sympathize, so could we not the simplest bargain drive ; and what avails it, now that we are wise, if absence doth this doubleness contrive ? eternity may not the chance repeat ; but i must tread my single way alone, in sad remembrance that we once did meet, and know that bliss irrevocably gone. poems. 213 the spheres henceforth my elegy shall sing, for elegy has other subject none ; each strain of music in my ears shall ring knell of departure from that other one. make haste and celebrate my tragedy ; with fitting strain resound, ye woods and fields ; sorrow is dearer in such case to me than all the joys other occasion yields. is t then too late the damage to repair ? distance, forsooth, from my weak grasp has reft the empty husk, and clutched the useless tare, but in my hands the wheat and kernel left. if i but love that virtue which he is, though it be scented in the morning air, still shall we be truest acquaintances, nor mortals know a sympathy more rare. 214 poems. romans, countrymen, and lovers.&quot; let such pure hate still underprop our love, that we may be each other s conscience, and have our sympathy mainly from thence. we 11 one another treat like gods, and all the faith we have in virtue and in truth, bestow on either, and suspicion leave to gods below. two solitary stars, unmeasured systems far between us roll ; but by our conscious light we are determined to one pole. poems. 215 what need confound the sphere, love can afford to wait ; for it no hour s too late that witnesseth one duty s end, or to another doth beginning lend. it will subserve no use, more than the tints of flowers ; only the independent guest frequents its bowers, inherits its bequest. no speech, though kind, has it ; but kinder silence doles unto its mates : by night consoles, by day congratulates. what saith the tongue to tongue ? what heareth ear of ear ? by the decrees of fate from year to year, does it communicate. pathless the gulf of feeling yawns ; no trivial bridge of words, 216 poems. or arch of boldest span, can leap the moat that girds the sincere man. no show of bolts and bars can keep the foeman out, or scape his secret mine, who entered with the doubt that drew the line. no warder at the gate can let the friendly in : but, like the sun, o er all he will the castle win, and shine alono; the wall. o there s nothing in the world i know that can escape from love, for every depth it goes below, and every height above. it waits, as waits the sky, until the clouds go by, yet shines serenely on with an eternal day, alike when they are gone, and when they stay. poems. 217 implacable is love, foes may be bought or teased from their hostile intent, but he goes unappeased who is on kindness bent. 10 218 poems. inspiration. if with light head erect i sing, though^ all the muses lend their force. from my poor love of anything, the verse is weak and shallow as its source. but if with bended neck i grope listening behind me for my wit, with faith superior to hope, more anxious to keep back than forward it ; making my soul accomplice there unto the flame my heart hath lit, then will the verse forever wear, time cannot bend the line which god has writ. i hearing get, who had but ears, and sight, who had but eyes before ; i moments live, who lived but years, and truth discern, who knew but learning s lore. poems. 219 now chiefly is my natal hour, and only now my prime of life, of manhood s strength it is the flower, t is peace s end, and war s beginning strife. it comes in summer s broadest noon, by a gray wall, or some chance place, unseasoning time, insulting june, and vexing day with its presuming face. i will not doubt the love untold which not my worth nor want hath bought, which wooed me young, and wooes me old, and to this evening hath me brought. 220 poems. the fisher s boy. my life is like a stroll upon the beach, as near the ocean s edge as i can go ; my tardy steps its waves sometimes o erreach, sometimes i stay to let them overflow. my sole employment is, and scrupulous care, to place my gains beyond the reach of tides, each smoother pebble, and each shell more rare, which ocean kindly to my hand confides. i have but few companions on the shore : they scorn the strand who sail upon the sea ; yet oft i think the ocean they ve sailed o er is deeper known upon the strand to me. the middle sea contains no crimson dulse, its deeper waves cast up no pearls to view ; along the shore my hand is on its pulse, and i converse with many a shipwrecked crew. poems. 221 mountains. with frontier strength ye stand your ground, with grand content ye circle round, tumultuous silence for all sound, ye distant nursery of rills, monadnock, and the peterboro hills ; like some vast fleet sailing through rain and sleet, through winter s cold and summer s heat ; still holding to your high emprise, until ye find a shore amid the skies ; not skulking close to land, with cargo contraband ; for they who sent a venture out by ye have set the sun to see their honesty. ships of the line, each one, ye to the westward run, always before the gale, under a press of sail, 222 poems. with weight of metal all untold ; i seem to feel ye in my firm seat here, immeasurable depth of hold, and breadth of beam and length of running gear. methinks ye take luxurious pleasure in your novel western leisure ; so cool your brows, and freshly blue, as time had nought for ye to do ; for ye lie at your length, an unappropriated strength, unhewn primaeval timber for knees so stiff, for masts so limber ; the stock of which new earths are made, one day to be our western trade, fit for the stanchions of a world which through the seas of space is hurled. while we enjoy a lingering ray, ye still o ertop the western day, reposing yonder on god s croft, like solid stacks of hay. edged with silver and with gold, the clouds hang o er in damask fold, and with fresh depth of amber light poems. 223 the west is dight, where still a few rays slant, that even heaven seems extravagant. on the earth s edge, mountains and trees stand as they were on air graven, or as the vessels in a haven await the morning breeze. i fancy even through your defiles windeth the way to heaven ; and yonder still, in spite of history s page, linger the golden and the silver age ; upon the laboring gale the news of future centuries is brought, and of new dynasties of thought, from your remotest vale. but special i remember thee, wachusett ! who, like me, standest alone without society. thy far blue eye, a remnant of the sky, seen through the clearing of the gorge, or from the windows on the forge, doth leaven all it passes by. nothing is true, 224 poems. but stands &quot; tween me and you, thou western pioneer, who know st not shame nor fear, by venturous spirit driven under the eaves of heaven, and can st expand thee there, and breathe enough of air ; upholding heaven, holding down earth, thy pastime from thy birth, not steadied by the one, nor leaning on the other, may i approve myself thy worthy brother ! poems. 225 smoke. light-wixged smoke ! icarian bird, melting thy pinions in thy upward flight ; lark without song, and messenger of dawn, circling above the hamlets as thy nest ; or else, departing dream, and shadowy form of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts ; by night star-veiling, and by day darkening the light and blotting out the sun ; go thou, my incense, upward from this hearth, and ask the gods to pardon this clear flame. 226 poems. smoke in winter. &quot;.;;&quot;&quot;* t. the sluggish smoke curls up from some deep dell, the stiffened air exploring in the dawn, and making slow acquaintance with the day ; delaying now upon its heavenward course, in wreathed loiterings dallying with itself, with as uncertain purpose and slow deed, as its half-wakened master by the hearth, whose mind, still slumbering, and sluggish thoughts have not yet swept into the onward current of the new day ; and now it streams afar, the while the chopper goes with step direct, and mind intent to wield the early axe. first in the dusky dawn he sends abroad his early scout, his emissary, smoke, the earliest, latest pilgrim from his roof, to feel the frosty air, inform the day ; and, while he crouches still beside the hearth, nor musters courage to unbar the door, poems. 227 it has gone down the glen with the light wind, and o er the plain unfurled its venturous wreath, draped the tree-tops, loitered upon the hill, and warmed the pinions of the early bird ; and now, perchance, high in the crispy air, has caught sight of the day o er the earth s edge, and greets its master s eye at his low door, as some refulgent cloud in the upper sky. 7 228 poems. mist. low-anchored cloud, newfoundland air, fountain-head and source of rivers, dew-cloth, dream-drapery, and napkin spread by fays ; drifting meadow of the air, where bloom the daisied banks and violets, and in whose fenny labyrinth the bittern booms and heron wades ; spirit of lakes and seas and rivers, bear only perfumes and the scent of healing herbs to just men s fields. poems. 229 haze. woof of the fen, ethereal gauze, woven of nature s richest stuffs, visible heat, air-water, and dry sea, last conquest of the eye ; toil of the day displayed, sun-dust, aerial surf upon the shores of earth, ethereal estuary, frith of light, breakers of air, billows of heat, fine summer spray on inland seas ; bird of the sun, transparent-winged, owlet of noon, soft-pinioned, from heath or stubble rising without song, establish thy serenity o er the fields. the end. cambridge : stereotyped and printed by welch, bigelow, & co. return recall 63405 the " no name series." what is thought tof the initial volume of the series, "mercy philbrick's choice." " mercy philbrick's choice' reads rather like a record than a story. its personages are few in number; there is no'sensation,' almost no plot, yet it is highly interesting. in saying this, we indicate a remarkable story. the stage properties of a novel -events, situations, surprises -are cheap, and easy to come by. it is the higher art which discards these, and trusts for effect to truth and subtlety of character drawing." -boston transcript "a novel wholly out of the common course, both in plot and style... the moral of thie book is wholesome, that no good can come from deceit, and that the relations of life and innocent love should be frank and without concealment. morbidness works only for misery, and it is the sane and sunny and sound people who get the best out of this life." boston daily a dvertiser. "' mercy philbrick's choice' is a story of great power, great depth of thought and feeling, great tenderness and reverence for the truthfulness of truth, and great insight into life.... we dare place it alongside george eliot's latest in poinit of poetic insight, vigor, and knowledge of life, and to say that it is superior to daniel deronda' in style, and informed by a purer and deeper philosophy." ch arles d. warner, in the hartford conrant. "it is a pleasure, in these days, to get hold of a new american novel which manifests both culture and literary skill. the author of' mercy philbrick's choice' is evidently a woman who looks upon authorship as something more than a pastime, a woman of clear intelligent tastes ard distinct aspirations. the refined quality of her irtellect impresses itself upon the story from first to last." neow york tribune. "there are many things to be admired in this novel. the artistic delineation of character and the subtle rendering of the human atmosphere show a keen appreciation of the delicate shades which make personality and influence the life of ourselves and others." the liberal christian. "it is a striking and touching story, -this new one, and will be greatly read and admired, as it deserves to be. there is even genius in some of its touches, which remind one of a feminintie counterpart to hawthorne." springfield refiublican. "the volume is interspersed with some of the sweetest poems to which these latter days have given birth, shownving that the author is a master of poesy as well as of fas cinating fiction." hartford post. "it is a story of the simplest motives, but as lovely and heart-holding as a sweet folk-song. every page is endearingly true to the innermost part of humanity, and the author transcribes the workings of hearts and minds with no less faithfulness than she (we insist that it is a'she' ) gives exquisite pictures of nature and the handiwork which' fashions in silence.' the story is from the pen of a poet, and the inter-current verses are each and all gems of'ray serene,' not too flashing, but very, very appreciable to eyes which have learned how to weep." boston traveller. "read the book, which is fascinating. the author is certainly a woman. and she is a poet, too, of no mean powers, as is proved by the half dozen short poems in the book. the sonnet engraved on mercy's tombstone is not surpassed by any of wordsworth."troy whikg. "this book is a novel only in the sense that george eliot's books are novels. the story is subordinated to showing the inevitable working out of opposing moral forces. the characters, well drawn as some of them are, are hardly more than dial-pointers on the clock of fate. of dramatic motive there is more than enough. -the unitarian review. in one volume, 16mo. cloth. gilt and red-lettered. *1.00. our publications are to be had of booksellers. when not to be found, send directly to roberts brothers, publishers, boston. i 6 fin 1) o i i no name series. a masque of poets. .no nva me series. anonymous? is he a great unknown?" daniel deronda. a masque of poets. including guy vernon, a novelette in verse. boston: roberts brothers. i878. " is the gentleman . colyr/ight, i878, by roberts brothers. contents. page ii. i3~ i4. is5 17. x9. 22. 23. 24. 32. 33' 34' 36. 38. 4i. a song before singing...................................................... " if only we had time to spare.................................. lalage.................................................................................... awakening.............................................................................. benedicam domino................................................................ provencal lovers............................................................... my lady's voice.................................................................. through a window pane................................................. a mood of cleopatra....................................................... love and fate..................................................................... carpe diem —------------------................................................... youthful love..................................................................... sunset-song........................................................................... to alma................................................................................. the pine-tree..................................................................... contents. page 42. 45 47. 48. husband and wife............................................................. this life of ours............................................................... question and no answer:......................-........... —----quatrains.............-................................................................ i. the money-seeker. ii. the lover. on appledore........................................................................ jasper oakes..................... —-------------------------------—. starlight............................................................................... the bunch of wild flowers.......................................... yaciiting................................ a quandary.......... —----------------------------------------------don't overdo it.........-....... —----------------------love's day.........-............. —------------------------garden-peril....................................................................... a woman's death wound......................-........... —-----a lover's tes s.............-................................-...................... her word of reproach....................-................ —-----forgiven.....-................ —--------------------------we twain --..................... —-------------------a fallen house.....-...................................................... —-the wanderer............ —-----------------------------------at twilight.............................................................. —---the marshes of glynn...................................................... 6 50. 52. 58. 59. 66. 67. 68. 7~~ 72. 74. 75 77 79. 83. 85. 06. 87. 88. contents. 7 page 95' 99. ioo. io4. i i4. i i9. i29. i3i. i35. i36. i38. 140. i4i. 142. i43. 145. 147. ballad of the wicked nephew...................................... the angler........................................................................... the rebel flower................-. —. —----------------------the bride of war.............................................................. from herzegovina............................................................... running the blockade...................................................... the rhone cradle.............................................................. john carman......................................................................... 3 reacher............................................................................ i36. october sunday.................................................................. 138. the unseen preacher......................... —-------------140. children's song........................................................ — i4i. amy margaret...................................................................... 142. "my heart, i cannot still it....................................... i 43. the robin's song................................................................ 145. theocritus............................................................................ 147. medallion heads................................................................. i. saskia. iv. lucrezia. ii. la fornarina. v. vittoria colonna. iii. frau agnes. vi. quentin matsys' bride. i153. red tape.................................................................. —---154. i love to d1ne..................................................................... 155. the beau of the town..................................................... (on.tents. 7 8 contents. page 157. eumenides............................. —---------------------158. eld........................................................................................... 159. horizon................................................................................. i6o. one hundred and one.:........................................ —--i62. the search......................................................................... i63. not lost............................................................................... i64. transfiguration................................................................... i67. immortal clouds.................................................................. i68. pilgrims.................................................................................. 170. avallon.................................................................................. i74. success.................................................................................. 175. guy vernon.......................................................................... hake this to heart, 0 poets of to-day, and let it give you comfort on your way: a single verse may live as long, god please, as all of shakespeare or f.uripides. masque of poets. a song before singing. ing! sing of what? the world is full of song; and all the singing seems but echoed notes of the great masters who, when souls were strong, rolled sturdy paeans from rejoicing throats. or worse than echoes, schemes of tinkling sound, the pilfered phrases of the melodist, a bastard music, a tenth muse discrowned, a light bewildered in a blinding mist. i would not dabble on the brink of power, shape airy nothings, dreaming of a dream, chime word with word, and pipe to catch the hour, but plunge, aim-certain, in the living streanm. i12 a song before singing. give me a theme to sing in man's behoof, as full of purpose as my faith, 0 god! red with our life-blood, firm in warp and woof, a homely product of the common sod. or else, let silence and primeval night reign, as god reigned within his holy dark, eons on eons, till he called the light, and the first poet wakened with the lark. "if oanly we had time to spaaie." 13 "if only we had time to spare." f only we had time to spare to taste the glories of the spring, how good to leave this noise and glare, and breathe the blessed country air, and hear the songs the wild birds sing, if only we had time to spare! then yoli should stretch you at my feet and read aloud, and i should sew, and now and then our eyes might meet, and we might murmur phrases sweet and blissful hours would come and go if only we had time to spare! b13ut as you toil, and as i pray for happier and idler hours, noon follows dawn, night follows day, i look, and lo, your locks are gray and winter withers up our flowers ere ever we have time to spare! '4 lala ge. lalage. .w hen i have kissed the rose upon the path and loved her, touch to touch and eye to eye, the joy i have of her i know she hath for every passer by what right have i? wakes in my heart the morning of thy speech, sings in my soul the music of thy smile, and thou'rt as far as roses out of reach for in a little while will they beguile hearts, not my own, of other sorrowing ah, and thy voice's music, sweet and low and gentle with all magic of the spring shall touch them even so do i not know? i know it well, and yet in peace i part! i know god made the rose, and gave to thee, to help his whole wide world, the rose's heart, nor left thy bounty free to pluck by me. i4 lalage. a wakening. awakening. ell -i said, it is all too true the story told to my childish ears, that tears were many and joys were few, and hopeless the weight of gathering years. i never believed a word of the tale, and turned to the sun and rejoiced in the day, but a blow struck home and the light grew pale till bitter darkness beset the way. oh, what is it all? (i pondered),what this terrible life wherein we are set defenceless, whether we will or not; where the swift years weave us a golden net of joys so sweet and of hopes so bright, only to rob us day by day, slowly to take from the eyes their sight, steal all the body's senses away, and deal to the soul such blows of loss through the hand of death? and there i ceased, i5 a4 w, akening. for a wave too bitter rolled across, and a longing never to be appeased shook me with sorrow beyond all thought. outside i heard the spring wind sigh, as if the pathos of life it caught, and strove to utter it, wandering by. when, in a moment, the door swung wide, sunshine and flowers and songs of birds swept in with you like a golden tide, sweetness and rapture too deep for words. o love, you brought to me youth and spring, took me by storm with a glad surprise; and set my whole soul worshipping, and saved my life with the look in your eyes! and while you are left to me, no more can my heart be dull as a senseless clod, while you hold me fast with those eyes so sure, humbly i reach for the hand of god. i6 benedicam domino. benedicam domino. hank god for life. life is not sweet always, hands may be heavy-laden, heart care-full, unwelcome nights follow unwelcome days; and dreams divine end in awakenings dull, still it is life, and life is cause for praise. this ache, this restlessness, this quickening sting, prove me no torpid and inanimate thing, prove me of him who is of life the spring: i am alive,and that is beautiful. thank god for love; though love may hurt and wound, though set with sharpest thorns its rose may be; roses are not of winter, all attuned must be the earth, filled with soft stir, and free and warm ere dawns the rose upon its tree. fresh currents through my frozen pulses run, my heart has tasted summer, tasted sun; and i can thank thee, lord, although not one of all the many roses blooms for me. 2 17 beniedicam domino. thank god for death. bright thing with dreary name; we wrong with mournful flowers her pure still brow; we heap her with reproaches and with blame her sweetness and her fitness disallow questioning bitterly the why and how. but calmnly'mid our clamor and surmise she touches each in turn, and each grows wise, taught by the light in her mysterious eyes, i shall be glad, and i am thankful now. i8 pro venqal lo vers. proven(al lovers. aucassin and nicolette. ithin the garden of beaucaire he met her by a secret stair;the night was centuries ago. said aucassin, "my love, my pet, these old confessors vex me so! they threaten all the pains of hell unless i give you up, mna belle; "said aucassin to nicolette. "now, who should there in heaven be to fill your place, ma trbs-douce mie? to reach that spot i little care! there all the droning priests are met;all the old cripples, too, are there that unto shrines and altars cling to filch the peter-pence we bring; "said aucassin to nicolette. i9 pro venqal lovers. "there are the barefoot monks and friars with gowns well-tattered by the briers, the saints who lift their eyes and whine: i like them not,a starveling set! who'd care with folk like these to dine? the other road'twere just as well that you and i should take, ma belle!" said aucassin to nicolette. "to purgatory i would go with pleasant comrades whom we know, fair scholars, minstrels, lusty knights whose deeds the land will not forget, the captains of a hundred fights, true men of valor and degree: we'11 join that gallant company," said aucassin to nicolette. "there, too, are jousts and joyance rare, and beauteous ladies debonair, the pretty dames, the merry brides who with their wedded lords coquette and have a friend or two besides, and all in'gold and trappings gay, with furs, and crests in vair and gray;"said aucassin to nicolette. 20 pro ven7al lovers. "sweet players on the cithern strings and they who roam the world like kings are gathered there, so blithe and free! pardie! i'd join them now, my pet, if you went also, ma douce mie! the joys of heaven i'd forego to have you with me there below,"said aucassin to nicolette. 2 1 22 al y lady's voice. my lady's voice. y lady dear hath so divine a voice that, when she speaks, all nature must be mute, for in this low, soul-thrilling, delicate lute, nature's most sweetest harmonies rejoice,the very birds are hushed, in happy choice. and when she sings, the glorious cherubim, and all the host of white-robed seraphim, and all the holy elders, midst heaven's joys rapt with an unknown peace, to list the strain do cease their silvery harps, and kneel attent, wondering now first to know god's smile in sound. e'en the sad doomed forget th' eternal pain, while, thro' the gates of paradise, out-bent, heaven throngs to earth, where bliss doth so abound. thpirough a wlvid 0 w paive. through a window pane. a winter memory. hat bright december morning, playfully, by the pane she lingered; -for ever blossom, sweet morning, in heart and brain! with arch farewell she lingered, her face through the frost-bloom bright, smiling -like frost-bloom vanished that vision into the light! for ever and ever, smiling, through me it steals again: within my soul the picture looks through my heart, the pane! 23 a mood of cleopat.ra. a mood of cleopatra. au temps de cleopatre.... on eat fait venir six ou cinq esclaves, males ou femelles, et l'on aurait essaye le poison sur eux; on aurait fait ce que les midecins appellent une experience in aninza vili. une douzaine de miserables se seraient tordus comme des anguilles coupees en morceaux sur les beaux paves de porphyre et les mosaiques etincelantes, devant la maitresse.... suivant de son regard veloute les dernieres crispations de leur agonie. theo!hile gautier. leopatra, when the chilling fear of ruin touched her soul at ease, when turbid sounds, blown overseas, would speed on rumor's rapid path from the hot lips of roman wrath straight to her own egyptian ear, then, even at some grand feast of hers, would seem to feel the joy struck dumb of citherns, harps, and dulcimers, with rumbling prelude, harsh to hear, of that which must in time become disaster, slavery, actium! 24 a mood of cleopat~ra. then she, that mighty and mystic queen, round whom her vassals crawled in awe, whose lifted finger was a law, whose smile an edict, and whose frown a darkness on the lands between arabian wave and libyan dust, whose name, tyrannic and august, from marble-famed syene's town on wings of wonderment flew down the old sacred nile and serpentine, north to canopus and the sea;cleopatra, couched at feast, even she, would quiver with a sudden sigh, and one imperious hand would raise, that bade the exultant music die, and made, along its mighty maze of columned galleries, grandly high, a silence as of death to come on all the vast triclinium. " if i must die," her thought would say, "what way shall be the swiftest way? what subtle drug shall give release with slightest pain before it slay, 25 26 4 mood of cleopa tra4. and make my conqueror find me here as one who thrids, in cavernous night, some hypogeuumn's halls austere, expecting when his steps shall cease beside the uncrumbled cryptic peace of still sarcophagi, and when he shall behold, with sharp delight, with thrills of greed he shall behold, the royal mummies lying rolled in lordliest wealth against his sight, richly embalmed, these kings renowned, in naphtha and bitumen bound: but now he gains their bourne of sleep, and sees their gilded coffers rise, stript of all wealth to clutch and keep, plundered and spoiled ere this by those who have dared, in violative wise, to assault with strong and impious blows the awful, slumbering pharaohs:thus even shall he that finds me here find ruin of what i was alone, the dumb bulk left, the life outflown beyond all shadow of shame and fear, since death. can do whatso he please a4 mood of cleopa tra. with whoso he shall choose to strive, but roman hands, though quick to seize, can never manacle alive, with wrist-gyve or with ankle-gyve, the daughter of the ptolemies! "wherefore, if i must die one day, how fleetest shall this flesh get peace? what way shall be the swiftest way? what subtle drug shall give release with slightest pain before it slay?" then would she clap her small swart hands, and soon the obeisant slaves would bring rare cups and goblets oddly wrought with sculptured shapes in circling bands, or many a strange hieratic thing whereof these latter times and lands know either vaguely or know naught, with athor, isis, one-armed khem, snake, scarab, ibis, winged ball, quaint coptic anaglyph; and all these vessels, to the brims of them, with deadliest poisons had been fraught. 27 a mood of cleop4a tra. then slowly through the hall's great space, where, statued in weird hybrid gloom, the mighty basalt sphinxes loom, with black claws crossed in cold repose; between the pillars huge of base that might bear heaven, if so they chose, on bulging chapiters that enthrone colossal lotus-leaves of stone, before the queen, with timorous pace, with groundward brow and quivering limb, with horror on each haggard face, they come, the slaves that are to die beneath cleopatra's critic eye, and pleasure thus her sovereign whim. they dare not make one lightest moan while ranging in a dreadful file before their slayer's icy smile. they dare alone to cower and shrink; alone they dare to obey; alone to grasp their goblets and be dumb; for tortures worse than death might come, did they rebel in prayer and groan. 28 a mood of cleopa 7ra. some sweat with anguish as they drink; some totter, and have bristling hair; some choke their bitter sobs, and some roll eyeballs awful with despair! poisons are here of taste and hue most differing, yet all strong and fleet; for here is hellebore, aconite, henbane, and hemlock; nightshade, too, opium, euphorbia; these, and more known only in the years of yore. and all are drunken to the lees by those poor minion lips accurst. a fearful quiet falls at first over the doomed ones where they stand, till now they sink, by sure degrees, form after stricken form, beneath the smile so fathomlessly bland of the calm queen who hears and sees their anguish of the stiff crooked hand, the writhen body and gnashing teeth, the blackening tongues, the crimsoned eyes, the foamy and bloated lips, the cries 29 30 a mood of cleopa tra. that up those monstrous galleries ring, in mad debauch of suffering! superb doth cleopatra sit, the fragrant feast-flowers on her hair, and o'er the shadowy waves of it her crown, imperially fair for spikes of gold about the brows. the delicate schenti that allows glimpses of her voluptuous shape, doth her firm bend of bosom drape, and lightlier lies on her brown limbs than on some moonlit mountain's base the gauziest vapor-wreath that swims. from either side her languorous face the fringy calisiris flows. a gorget girds her olive throat, fantastic, beautiful to note, where clear-green chrysoberyl glows beside azedarac, in rows. one marvellous arm supports her head, with dull gold six times braceleted, as backward on the empurpled ease a mood of cleopa4 7'la. of her greek couch she leans at rest. her deepening smile hath half confest that one thing yet holds power to please her tired soul, pleasure-surfeited; one thing: this riot of death she sees, this pomp of human pangs unblest, thls revel of ghastly agonies! and so while at her feet they writhe, while, levelled of their torture sore, they grovel on the porphyry floor, these slaves whose life is almost less in egypt than to crush a gnat, then (merciless change to wonder at!) cleopatra's smile turns bright and blithe, her eyelids lose their heaviness, her long deep eyes begin to shine, and reaching one dark faultless hand where the gold festal goblets stand, carved by lysippus' rare finesse in sculptures worthy hands divine, for veriest joy her red mouth laughs as now, with back-flung head, she quaffs the odorous white mareotic wine! 3 i l 0 love a4 nd fate. love and fate. 1. ry fate denies me joy, but venus' boy still strings my heart-strings to his bow: they thrill whene'er his arrows go. o fate, how can i view thee? o love. how still pursue thee? ii. though love, indeed, be master, fate follows faster and snares us slyly from behind ere yet love's distant goal we find. o fate, how can i view thee? o love, how still pursue thee? 32 carpe diem. carpe diem. h h! to-day is too delicious, fill'd with little winds and birds and the far-off hum of herds, come, let's put off cruel words this one time that time's propitious. oh! to-day is too delicious. just this one most perfect day,' let's forget while yet we may, let's love sorrow quite away, let to-morrow be malicious. 3 33 youthful love. youthful love. i. eing absent, yet thou art not wholly gone, for thou hast stamped thine image on the world; it shines before me in the blushing dawn, and sunset clouds around its grace are furled. hast thou not burdened every summer breeze with the remembered music of thy voice? sweeter than linnet's song in garden trees, and making wearisome all other joys. sleep vainly strives to bar thee from his hall,thou winn'st light entrance in a dream's disguise, and there, with gentlest sway thou rulest all his gliding visions and quick phantasies. the busy day is thine; the quiet night sleeps in thy radiance, as these skies in light. 34 youthful love. ii. or stooping toward me from the stainless sphere, and reaching dearest hands of comfort down, thou guidest steps that falter on alone, through darkened ways. do i not feel thee near, and lightest whispers of thy spirit hear, clearer than yonder sea's eternal moan? and ah! no breath of any mournful tone, but lessons of high courage, holy cheer, and such sweet notes as charm the snake despair. shall it not be so? doth poor fancy err to hear thee speaking through the rosy air of morn and eve, and when no cloud may stir in the calm noon; or solemn night and fair, plies her grave task, and the stars wait on her? 35 sunvset-song. sunsetsong. i. ee the sun's departing smile, sweetest maid! let us sit and rest a while in the shade. none can hear us, none can see, but the birdling in the tree, sweetest maid! ii. lay your soft white hand in mine, lillie dear! let my arm your waist entwine, do not fear; for the birdling in the tree would not tell of you and me, lillie dear. 36 suaiw'e t-song. iii. while the sun hangs dim and red in the west, come and lean your wondrous head on my breast. it is sweet, my lillie dear, by your side while night draws near thus to rest. iv. hide, oh, hide those lips so fair from my view! oh, the madness but to dare if you knew! but to see and not to dare, sweet my love, that surely were madness too. v. lo, the weary day has fled, dearest heart! through the dark crowns overhead night-birds dart. sleep the birdlings in their nest, those who love each other best, yet, love, must part. 37 'r to alma. to alma. i. n anxious whisper steals unto my ear, that thy young soul, so fresh and pure it be, is alien unto mine; that i in thee no resonance shall find for thoughts austere; no glorious kinship in that loftier sphere where spirits meet and recognize their own. and yet, beloved, from those depths unknown those slumbering depths of silence which i fear with my rude touch to stir some shy sweet thought comes upward trembling, like a coral bright, which no bold eye its loveliness has taught, through pale green waters flashing its warm light! yet, wert thou shallow, love, the heaven's wide sweep the shallow stream reflects, e'en as the deep. 38 to alaja. 39 ii. thy gracious face i greet with glad surprise with each new day; and yet thou saidst a fear oft nestled at thy heart when i was near, because i loved thee only with mine eyes. thou wert not skilled in lore, nor deep, nor wise, but thou wert strong to love and warm and true. what could i answer, love? alas, i knew i love too well, perhaps, the radiant guise through which thy spirit breathes its loveliness. yes, darling, yes, i love thee as thou art, thy coy surrender to my bold caress; when folded in my arms, i feel thy heart beat'gainst my breast; and when my lips meet thine thy very soul is wedded unto mine. iii. yes, my old self is dead; and it is well;i knew, as thou, he had no right to be; and light his death was, for he knew not thee, and thrilling into life by some strange spell to 4 l.ja,. 39 40 to alma. i stood new-born and wondering; nor could tell aught of what had been. through a mist outspread i saw the by-gone years lie cold and dead, and the bright future where with thee i dwell, a happy delos rising from the sea. dim seems my past and strange, and all the earth a pale and melancholy pageantry, until the shining moment of thy birth. thy life from out this age of toil and gloom sprang, like a flower that blossoms on a tomb. 4o to alma. the pine-tree. the pine-tree. the tree. pward and ever upward, while the storms pass me by,up through the lightning flashes longingly look i. the flower. yet when the storm-wind bloweth, gentle pine-tree! downward thine arms in protection stretchest thou o'er me. the tree. upward and ever upward, while the sun rideth high, fearing not his bold glances longingly look i. the flower. yet when the sun's glance is hottest, gentle pine-tree! downward thy poor child to shelter leanest thou to me. 4i husband and wife. husband and wife. "oh kiss me once before i go, "to make amends for sorrow; "oh kiss me once before we part "who shall not meet to-morrow. "and i was wrong to urge your will, "and wrong to mar your life; "but kiss me once before we part, "because you are my wife." she turned her head and tossed her head and puckered up her brow: "i never kissed you yet," said she, "and i'11 not kiss you now. "tho' i'm your wife by might and right "and forsworn marriage vow, "i never loved you yet," said she, "and i don't love you now." 42 h-usband and wife. so he went sailing on the sea, and she sat crossed and dumb while he went sailing on the sea where the storm winds come. he'd been away a month and day counting from morn to morn; and many buds had turned to leaves, and many lambs were born, and many buds had turned to flowers, for spring was in a glow, when she was laid upon her bed as white and cold as snow. "oh let me kiss my baby once, "once before i die; "and bring it sometimes to my grave "to teach it where i lie. "and tell my husband when he comes "safe home from sea, "to love the baby that i leave "if ever he loved me: 43 husband and wife. "and tell him, not for might or right "or forsworn marriage vow, "but for the helpless baby's sake, "i would have kissed him now." 44 this life of o urs. this life of ours. (a song by the way.) life of ours, when from thy grape a poisoned vintage flows, and to the whitened, cheated lips, the wine a sinking comrade sips a deadly gift bestows;o he will raise the murderous cup with trembling hand that's loyal yet: "drink to this glorious life of ours, drink the dark wine fate grimly pours; there is no terror but regret." regret and blame, they'11 turn you tame! o when a friend proves not a friend, "farewell" shall be the only word by the sly listening demons heard; and love's beginning soothe its end. if eyes are harsh that once were kind, 45 this life of ours. and lips are proud that lately kissed, 0, let no faltering utterance show the bitter inner overflow: we are iot mourned unless we're missed. then life of ours, this life of ours breathe her no coward sigh. is she a niggard of her hoard?she gives a title to a lord, and to a knave, the lie. but when along the misty hills you see grief coming, gray and cold (spear-armed like pallas stern of old), and when your heart with horror fills, all-silent step before the breach, nor raise the brittle shield of speech in parley; for thy doom is told. 46 question and no answer. question and no answer. s it ethics or physics? ah, that is the question: is it trouble of conscience or morbid digestion? is the temper that makes all my family quiver ill-disciplined mind or disorder of liver? does the passion, that makes even wise men eccentrical proceed from the heart? and if so from which ventricle? are duty and courage fine functions of nerves just as one horse goes steady, and another horse swerves? is the genius that nature can hardly contain, a film of gray marrow effused on the brain? ... don't believe it, dear lady, or better, don't know it but contentedly stick to your parson and poet. 47 qua tra ins. quatrains. the moneyseeker. hat has he in this glorious world's domain? unreckoned loss, which he counts up as gain; unreckoned shame, of which he feels no stain; unreckoned dead he does not know were slain; what things does he take with him when he dies? nothing of all that he on earth did prize: unto his grovelling feet and sordid eyes how difficult and empty seem the skies! the lover. he knows the utmost secret of the earth: the golden sunrise's and sunset's worth; the pregnancy of every blossom's birth; the hidden name of every creature's mirth. 48 qua tra ins. he knows all measures of the pulse's beat; he knows all pathless paths of human feet; he knows what angels know not of the sweet fulfilments when love's being is complete. he knows all deadly soils where poisons bloom; he knows the fated road where joy makes room for nameless terrors and eternal gloom: god help him in his sad omniscient doom! 4 49 on appledo~e. on appledore. ome thou with me, dear love, and see the day die on the sea, and o'er the distant land this last faint glow of twilight fade away, the while i hold in mine thy gentle hand. the lessening light gleams on yon leaning sail; slowly the sun has sunk beyond the hill, and sombre night in silence draws her veil over us two, and every thing grows still. save when the tide, with constant ebb and flow of wandering waves that greet the steadfast shore, flashes fair forms of foam that falling throw their ardent arms round rocky appledore. faint comes the cry of wild fowl in their flight and chirp of crickets in the clover by, a meteor falls across the face of night sweeping its silver shower through the sky i 50 onv appledore. or like the thread of a delicious dream some far-off sand-bird pipes its evening song, while overhead the stars of heaven beam and bright arcturus leads the sparkling throng. low whispering by us with a silent kiss comes the sweet south wind o'er the slumbering sea: thlou dearest! can such a perfect joy as this be always mine, to drift through life with thee? 5i _%asi'er oa r-e'. jasper oakes. he captain follows the sea no more, but spends the eve of his days on shore; and when about him an eager band beg for a tale of the sea or land, the gentlest among them plead and coax for the sad, strange story of jasper oakes. the ship was ready, the cargo stored, the wind was willing, the crew on board, and we sailed away from the english shore for fair manhattan, our home, once more; but half way over, there came a blow that threatened to sink us fathoms low. the mate i shipped on the trip before was the bravest fellow on wave or shore, a thorough seaman, alert and wise, and wondrous handsome, with fearless eyes, a swift, sure foot and a steady hand, a right good comrade on sea or land. 52 _a sper o0 kes. the jib swung loose in the sudden gale; "up," i shouted, "and furl the sail." before another could make reply, the mate sprung forward and cried, "aye, aye! i am the oldest sailor here ""' stay!" i screamed in his heedless ear, " fasten a rope's end round you, then, even sailors are only men: a dip of the boom will break your hold " "no!" he shouted, unwisely bold, "never a cowardly rope for me. tether a squirrel to climb a tree!" the laboring vessel, with creak and strain, struggled and groaned like a thing in pain, but oakes, the bravest of all my men, never stood on the deck again: torn from his hold by the mad waves' might, the wild sea swallowed him out of sight. my gallant shipmate! i missed him sore, and grieved as i seldom grieved before; yet, in my brooding, was glad to know \what he had told me a time ago,"i've not a tie in the world," said he, "a ship is my sweetheart, my home the sea; 53 4asper o akes. "and if i choke in the bitter brine, nobody's venture goes down but mine!" so i rejoiced that no hearth was dim, no fond heart broken, because of him, that no sad woman would pine and wait or come and ask for the missing mate. past the narrows and up the bay, home we came on a bright march day, glad of our harbor;and, almost ere the vessel touched at the well-known pier, lightly over the side there came a slip of a girl, who called my name. she had a face like an early rose, and the smile of a child, who hardly knows what the burden of living meansscarcely out of her happy teens"and who," i asked, "do you chance to be, and what, my girl, do you want with me?" "only your mate "-with a smile more sweet, "your mate, my husband, i came to meet. i could not wait, sir, a moment more; i could not stay till he came on shore; i hope "she paused, and her face grew dim "i hope no evil has chanced to him?" 54 7a sper oa kes. stunned for a moment, i hardly knew whether my eyes and ears were true, yet there she stood, in her hopeful youth, her whole face earnest with love and truth, eager and anxious, with lips apart, waiting for news that would break her heart. "out on the jib-boom in a gale he went in the darkness to furl a sail, the vessel struggled and plunged and tossedthe ropes were icy -and he was lost." bitter and cruel words, i knew, but what could a clumsy sailor do? out of her face, in an instant white, vanished the glow, like a blown-out light, the smile of joy and the beaming hope and down she dropped on a coil of rope, wringing her hands with moans of woe, like one struck down by a sudden blow. the pitying sailors kindly bore the poor girl-widow back on shore, and the mate's sea-chest, and the little hoard of foreign trinkets he had on board; but her poor pale face, with its grief and fright haunted my dreams for many a night. 55 _7 sper oakes. with april's sunshine and breezes cool we bowled back blithely to liverpool, and when at the close of a cloudy day in front of its dingy wharves we lay, crossing the deck i chanced to see a fair-faced woman, who asked for me. no fresh young girl with a rosy face, but a woman, wearing a matron's grace, in whose soft eyes, as they questioned mine, i saw the look of a mother shine; and closely grasping her garment's fold, was a three-years' baby, with hair like gold. with a chill that smote like a sudden blast i thought of the woman who stood there last, sinking under her great despair; and my glance grew into a startled stare, as the boy came forward, and gazed at me with the eyes of the man i had lost at sea. "where is oakes?" asked a voice of doubt, "w ho sailed with you on the voyage out? i am his wifehave i come too late? has he gone on shore? do you hesitate? speak to me, tell me! ah, i see you are keeping some terrible truth from me! " 56 yasperp oakes. staggered, breathless -in dazed surprise under the spell of those well-known eyes, eyes which silenced my struggling doubt "lost" i gasped -" on the passage out lost from the jib-boomfurling sail overboard in a heavy gale." thus, as the captain quaffs and smokes, he tells the story of jasper oakes. 57 statrlight. starlight. hile the broad night above me broods, in all her shadowy plenitudes, i let my roaming vision fare through many an aisle of starry air. "bright throngs," i muse, "that o'er us bend, how vague the messages you send! "that fiery star, within whose rays a wicked blood-red ardor plays, "may be some world where dwell serene a race with souls divinely clean! "and that large tear of saintly light, o'er the dead sunset throbbing white, "its snowy splendors looking, now, fit for some aureoled spirit's brow, "that star through ages may have been some great wild world that teems with sin!" 58 the bunch of wild flowers. 59 the bunch of wild flowers. o take this perfumed dewy offering, not fairer than thyself, though wondrous bright, fanned by the woodland zephyr's balmy wing, at nature's kindly call, in sweet delight of their own beauty, these fresh wild flowers spring! — on what brown breezy moorla; d or green height, in what cool sylvan glen or bosky dell, thou askest have i plucked them. i will tell! thou knowest the stream that through the meadows sweet and groves and gardens leaves the sunny plain in a great silver coil, then hastes to meet its high-born sister that speeds down amain from the far summits to the mountain feet, and where they bounding join with murmuring strain of watery music, opes from plain and river a gorge whose sides with leafy wildwoods quiver. 6o the bunch of wild flo[er$s. into that gorge, like children to their home, at maytide glad returning, down the hills clothed in light wreaths of pearl and silver foam and glittering in the sunlight, leap the rills through its aerial depths the breezes roam whispering mysterious language, and the bills of many birds make music in its woods answering the voices of the falling floods. of all these little crystal watery threads one most i love that, ere it tumbles down into the gorge, through a flat moorland sheds a linked light. there th' iris lifts its crown of feathery gold and blue, and silver beds of daisies gleam, and heather purple brown and green fern deck its brink, and pearly floss of shining moor-flax and bright golden moss. this morn at rise of sun, upon the bank of that sweet brook, thinking of days gone by, i slowly strayed, for there the heather drank longsyne the blood of battle, there the eye of valor blazed, and there the conquered sank with no small meed of glory, for the sky ne'er looked on starker field as night came on and the white moon on equal carnage shone! y.te bunch of wild flowers. 6i there oft the shepherd's lonely footsteps pass by ancient graves forgotten, there his look not seldom met the cloven helm of brass and shivered sword-blade by the tumbling brook: there riven corselets once gleamed'mid the grass, and whitened skulls o'er which the red plume shook in warlike pride upon that hapless day, but all with time and rust have passed away. and as i wandered on, anigh i drew unto a spot where stood a fair ash tree alone, new garmented in leaves wherethrough the morning zephyrs whispered blithefully as if from some far heavenly place they blew; around it spread a flower-enamelled lea, and'neath its shadow rose a small green mound that heard alway the streamlet's lulling sound. upon that little height i sat me down and paused a while, and thought of those who slept beneath me, for i knew from old renown the story of their fate. wellnigh i wept to think of them. thou knowest the ancient town, upon the bending lowland stream, that kept watch on the passes, when of old the hand of baleful war uprose with reeking brand. 62 the bunch of wild flou'ers. beside the town there dwelt a lordly man of lineage old, who had one daughter fair;over her golden head twelve summers' span had scarcely sped when on the meadows bare beside the stream, as civil strife began her father met his foe, and blindly there they fought and slew each other, and their gore, mingled together, stained the river shore! and the foe had one son, a gallant boy, born with high heart and hand, and friends would tell the tale, well mixed with subtle hate's alloy, how on the fatal sward his father fell and by whose hand, urging him to destroy the rival house, till one day in a dell beside her home they met, this youthful twain, and'stead of hate, love bound them in his chain! and spite of warring friends on either side, of death and ancient bickerings, year by year their love grew stronger, till in hope and pride of youthful manhood he, without a peer in all the land, besought her for his bride, and on light wings the bridal day drew near, and women blessed them whose young hearts did prove that feudal hate could never vanquish love! the bunchi of wild flohters. but ere it came, the joyous bridal day, war's cloud had burst in wrath, the eager fife, the rattling drum, the brazen clarion's bray, were heard on all sides mustering for the strife; and'stead of marriage robe, the iron gray gleamed o'er his breast, and filled with martial life the long plume danced above his helmed head as from his loved one to the fray he sped. upon that moorland of the stream and tree the hostile ranks were marshalled face to face, and each one darkly eyed his enemy and grasped his sword-hilt firmer, as the space grew narrower'twixt the advancing lines, and he, that soldier brave and young, in foremost place of the long ridge of battle, through the smoke upon the opposing ranks in thunder broke. and as his fierce-eyed charger clove the press of the thick spears in front, and he drew nigh the foeman's standard, with quick watchfulness mid the loud roar he marked a kindly eye bent on him with a look of sore distress, and a light nervous hand and sword raised high to ward him'gainst the frequent blows that came on his proud head amid the dust and flame! 63 64 the bunch of wild flowers. he knew that anxious eye, that lovely form now armed and clad in warlike guise, -'twas she! for to all daring deeds will true love warm brave woman's heart! in dire extremity she could not stay behind, and sought the storm of battle by his side, and on that lea, alas! both fell together, as the day beyond the mountain summits died away! next morn the victors found them; on his breast her young head lay in all its wealth and pride of golden locks, and peaceful was their rest, and painless seemed the breath wherewith they died. well the rough soldiers their sad story guessed, and buried them with reverence side by side, on the flat moorland's fairest spot of ground, and raised above their clay that little mound. these flowers were culled around that hallowed spot: here are bright violets wet with morning's tears, and here cerulean blue forget-me-not, and hyacinth, for constancy, that rears its head with harebell by cool ferny grot, and pimpernel that wakes the shepherd's fears of wind and rain, and heartsease: ah! they grew perchance above where closed her eyes of blue! t71e b,un/vch of wild flogte~'ps. here's marygold for grief, and celandine for bliss to come, and primrose golden pale, emblem of youth, and buttercups that shine for childhood's joy, and cowslips of the vale, symbol of maiden grace, and dewy wine of johnswort that of old days tells the tale, and daffodils, the fairest of the fair, sprung from the spot touched by her yellow hair! here's delicate anemone, that vain stern boreas wooed to his wide wastes of snow, here daisies are for innocence, for pain and pleasure mixed these sweet wild roses blow, with moorpink washed by diamond summer rain, all sprung from where her beauteous cheeks lay low, and this great blood-red flower that nature's art formed from the clay where mouldered his true heart! with ivy i have bound them fresh and green, eternal symbol of fidelity, and hawthorn blooms that tell of hope serene, and with some leaves of that lone ashen tree that whispers o'er their graves old songs which mean i know not what! then take these flowers from me, born of the fruitful sun and mountain airs, and think a while on love and what it dares 5 65 ya ch ting. yachting. ow the breezes bend and bow her, this frail yacht, that like a flower overfloats the rolling foam! swift her sides the waters hiss on, while yon calmer spaces glisten with the sunset's monochrome. 'twixt the deeps of sky and ocean holdeth she her eager motion: so, between thy spirit's height and my answering depth of passion, my frail being seems to dash on, buoyant, through the sunset-light! 66 a q uandary. a quandary. tell my lady she is fair? that no news is, truly. tell her she is sweet and rare, pure and lovely past compare? will it strike her newly? no, some other way to woo must be found to win her. what if i be fond and true? all the world adores her, too, such a spell is in her. ah, i have't! i'11 stay away, though i wander sadly; then, to say her gentle nay she must send for me some day, and i'11 go right gladly! 67 don't overdo it. don't overdo it. i wonder whether april-weather has taught you, lady, how to rule my eager heart with frolic art, and keep it playing still love's fool. your sunny breeze is false, and freezes; and when i think a freshening rain has come, the gust brings only dust, and leaves me parched with barren pain. a woman's favor loses savor if it be yielded all too soon; 'tis very true. but were i you i'd heed the changes of the moon. 68 don't 0 verdo it. your game is losing, though amusing. pray, have you seen an early bud in spring unfold, then shrink with cold and hide its blushing flower-blood? in such a season there's small reason; and, though we sport with laughing may, 'tis constant june so fair and boon that wins the flower and makes it stay. once overdo it, and you'11 rue it: too sharp a frost will kill, i fear. the bloom you waste can't be replaced, at least, until another year! 69 love's day. .love's day. o that my heart were the rose of the garden love is the lord of, and summer the warden, where you would come for the cool of the air, with eyes full of pleading, with lips full of pardon, and take me and break me and scatter me there, raining in rose leaves, ruined away, where none can know of and none can say, and my heart, my heart, should have had its day. o that my heart were the breezes that sigh for you over the passionate flowers that die for you, beating against your window at night o like a flame i would quiver and fly for you, fast to your dream, as you lay there white, lost in the moonlight, wafted away, where none can know of and none can say, and my heart, my heart, should have had its day. 70 love's da y. 0 my poor heart, and where can i throw it? love as i love-'twere a sin to show it, for years have changed and the hour gone by my heart must break, you must never know it; the love i love can but dream and die, wneeping by night and wasting by day, where none can-know of, and none can say, and my heart, my heart, shall have had its day. 71 g 4ga rden-peil. garden-peril. ver a garden paling in a soft midsummer day a butterfly went sailing, went he, as who should say, "there's nought in this world ailing, so let the world be gay." went he from pink to posy, but had no mind to sip, the blossoms all were rosy, with dew upon their lip; so snug felt he and cosy, the whole parterre would skip. so often had it flaunted, the scent was growing stale; the same old roses panted, the same old lilies pale their honey-flavor vaunted, the summer's tedious tale. 72 ga rden-perpil. heart-whole, the jaunty sailor cruised, all his canvas set, deigned not a rose to hail, or in one his thirst to wet; no bud shall be his jailer, no coy cup make him fret. ha! up his colors flaring he nailed them to the mast, and down the garden bearing, his reef he found at last: too late, too late for wearing, too late the lead to cast. so sudden, so secluded, so mantled in a mist, her violet-temper brooded, not waiting to be kissed, but not to be eluded: his wreck became a tryst! 73 74 a woma,4n's death wound. a woman's death wound. t left upon her tender flesh no trace. the murderer is safe. as swift as light the weapon fell, and, in the summer night, did scarce the silent dewy air displace. 'twas but a word. a blow had been less base. like dumb beast branded by an iron white with heat, she turned in blind and helpless flight, but then remembered, and with piteous face came back. since then, the world has nothing missed in her in voice or smile. but sheeach day she counts until her dying be complete. one moan she makes, and ever doth repeat, "oh lips which i had loved and kissed and kissed, did i deserve to die this bitterest way?" a4 lover's tests. a lover's tests. i sat to-day beneath the pine and saw the long lake shine. the wind was weary, and the day sank languidly away behind the forest's purple rim: the sun was fair for me, i lived for him! i did not miss you. all was sweet, sky, earth, and soul complete in harmony, which could afford no more, nor spoil the chord. could i be blest, and you afar, were other i, or you, than what we are? the sifted silver of the night rained down a strange delight; the moon's moist beam on meadows made pale bars athwart the shade, and murmurs crept from tree to tree, mysterious whispers not from you to me! 75 a loverp's tests. i stirred the embers, roused the brand and mused: on either hand the pedigree of human thought sang, censured, cheered, or taught. pausing at each titanic line, i caught no echo from your soul to mine! and last, when life recast its form to passive rest and warm, ere the soft, lingering senses cease in sleep's half-conscious peace, the wish i might have fashioned died in dreams that never brought you to my side! farewell! my nature's highest stress mine equal shall possess. 'tis easier to renounce, or wait, haply, the perfect fate. my coldness is the haughty fire that naught consumes except its full desire! 76 her word of reproa4ch. her word of reproach. e must not quarrel, whatever we do; for if i was (but i was not!) wrong, here are the tears for it, here are the tears: what else has a woman to offer you? love might not last for a thousand years, you know, though the stars should rise so long. oh you, you talk in a man's great way! so, love would last though the stars should fall? why, yes. if it last to the grave, indeed, after the grave last on it may. butin the grave? will its dust take heed of any thing sweet or the sweetest of all? ah, death is nothing! it may be so. yet, granting at least that death is death, (pray look at the rose, anrid hear the bird,) whatever it iswe must die to know! sometime we may long to say one word together -and find we have no breath. 77 78 iher word of reproach. ah me, how divine you are growing again! how coldly sure that the heavens are sure, whither too lightly you always fly to hide from the passion of human pain. come, grieve that the earth is not secure, for this one night and forget the sky! forgfvea 79 forgiven. o-day i must forgive you in a song, and put all from me for the old love's sake, leave the vexed question, who was right or wrong, when love broke up, and our hearts did not break; and think of you as one not far away. what is there floating in the air to-day that gets old, sleeping memories awake? a lark began it, singing out of sight; then, from wet woods, a thrush put in your name, and sang it over for my heart's delight; and with the wet blown breath of flowers there came a tender, subtle fragrance of regret: on dead love's grave the grass grows greener yet, and you, to-day, far-off, may think the same. forgiven. 79 forg~v'en. i have a fancy we go out to-day, and tread the woods together, and again go, both of us, the dear, familiar way. soft hazy light succeeds to quiet rain, and thrushes, whose low chant you understand, with songs of blackbirds reach us, on each hand, nature is for us, in our joy and pain. let us remember how, in days gone by when our lives mixed together for love's sake, we stood thus, while the light went out on high and birds stopped singing; while from field and brake, whence bats flew out in stealthy, circling flight, we heard the small, sweet voices of the night begin in faltering music to awake. you thought me so much better than i was i found you perfect ah, to blame, to blame! the sweet hallucination could but pass, and with the passing how much sharpness came! you, nothing perfect -cold, intolerant, with mind on some far, shadowy good intent your love a moonbeam; mine the sun's large flame. 80 fo1?gjven. 8i well, what is left for us to say or do? so many thorns you found in my poor rose i took it from your hand, and laughed at you; the tears came after-then came bland reposealmost forgetfulness -until, to-day, the thrushes singing of you all the way found me the song my wanderings to close. i deemed you should be with me, but, alas! that sweetest thought could not my fancy hold: i only trail my shadow on the grass here's nature to myself, and rest untold yet the time wants you, and the peaceful place would be more peaceful for your peaceful face, your gracious figure, and your hair's red gold. ah! woods and fields all speak to mne of you, as you, in town, would speak of these to me: gray, quiet air faint sunlight falters through, the rest of hills, the eve's tranquillity through which some late, last bird flies home and sings we love you for your semblance to these things, but find behind no fair reality. 6 8i forgiven. forgiven. and is this the forgiveness that i planned? and do i chide you to the end? nay, sweet! so long ago since we loosed hand from hand, my love and sorrow both have been complete, and both have almost faded out of sight, almost i say, you understand, not quite your voice might quicken still my pulse's beat. it seems a strange forgiveness -yet, indeed, you are forgiven, for the thrushes' sakelive on and prosper! we. have no more need of one another -no more thirsts to slake and many days i find, and many miss, but haply nevermore a day like this, to kiss old sleeping memories awake. 82 we twain. we twain. i. h, earth and heaven are far apart! but what if they were one, and neither you nor i, sweetheart, had anyway misdone? when we, like laughing rivers fleet, that cannot choose but flow, among the flowers should meet and greet, should meet and mingle so, sweetheart, that would be sweet, i know. ii. no need to swerve and drift apart, or any bliss resign; then i should all be yours, sweetheart, and you would all be mine. but ah, to rush, defiled and brown, from thaw of smirched snow, to spoil the corn, beat down and drown the rath, red lilies low sweetheart, i do not want you so! 83 84 we twain. iii. for you and i are far apart; and never may we meet, till you are glad and grand, sweetheart, till i am fair and sweet. till morning-light has kissed us white as highest alpine snow, till both are brave and bright of sight, go wander high or low, sweetheart for god will have it so. iv. oh, heaven and earth are far apart! if you are bond or free, and if you climb or crawl, sweetheart, can no way hinder me. but see you come in lordly state, with mountain winds a-glow, when i, by dazzling gate shall wait, to meet and love you so, sweetheart! that will be heaven, i know. 84 we twain. a fallen house. a fallen house. he end has come, which never seems the end, and thou and i, who loved so long and well, find, at the last, our fate implacablestern fate, who wills not that our lives should blend but overthrows fair things we did intend: the house in which long time we thought to dwell was built above a ruin, so it fellgreat was the fall, which no man could defend. behold it lies there overthrown, that housein its fair halls no comer shall carouse its broad rooms with strange silences are filled; no fire upon its crumbling hearth shall glow, seeing its desolation men shall know on ruin of what was they may not build. 85 6the wanderer. the wanderer. ove comes back to his vacant dwelling, the old, old love that we knew of yore! we see him stand by the open door, with his great eyes sad, and his bosom swelling. he makes as though in our arms repelling, he fain would lie as he lay before; love comes back to his vacant dwelling, the old, old love that we knew of yore! ah, who shall help us from over-spelling that sweet forgotten, forbidden lore! e'en as we doubt in our heart once more, with a rush of tears to our eyelids welling, love comes back to his vacant dwelling. 86 a4 t twilight. at twilight. t twilight, when the air is very still, when the last daylight cleaves to the last hill, and streams give answer to the changing sky, when we go home together, grief and i, and gaze again from the old window-sill, then is my life most desolate; until your angel, giving answer to my will, troubles the sullen pools of memory at twilight. all yours, 0 love, are those sweet thoughts that fill my heart as brim high as the sacred rill the sad eye'd throng looked on so longingly. there i am healed. there, as the years go by, my love for you rises more chastened still at twilight. 87 88 the marshes of gl yn. the marshes of glynn. looms of the live-oaks, beautiful-braided and woven with intricate shades of the vines that myriad-cloven clamber the forks of the multiform boughs, emerald twilights, virginal shy lights, wrought of the leaves to allure to the whisper of vows, when lovers pace timidly down through the green colonnades of the dim sweet woods, of the dear dark woods, of the heavenly woods and glades, that run to the radiant marginal sand-beach within the wide sea-marshes of glynn; beautiful glooms, soft dusks in the noon-day fire, wildwood privacies, closets. of lone desire, chamber from chamber parted with wavering arras of leaves, cells for the passionate pleasure of prayer to the soul that grieves, the m4arshes of glynn. pure with a sense of the passing of saints through the wood, cool for the dutiful weighing of ill with good; o braided dusks of the oak and woven shades of the vine, while the riotous noon-day sun of the june-day long did shine, ye held me fast in your heart and i held you fast in mine; but now when the noon is no more, and riot is rest, and the sun doth wait at the ponderous gate of the west, and the slant yellow beam down the wood-aisle doth seem like a lane into heaven that leads from a dream, ay, now, when my soul all day hath drunken the soul of the oak, and my heart is at ease from men, and the wearisome sound of the stroke of the scythe of time and the trowel of trade is low, and belief overmasters doubt, and i know that i know, and my spirit is grown to a lordly great compass within, 89 90 the marshes of glynal. that the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of g]ynn will work me no fear like the fear they have wrought me of yore when length was fatigue, and when breadth was but bitterness sore, and when terror and shrinking and dreary unnamable pain drew over me out of the merciless width of the plain, oh, now, unafraid, i am fain to face the vast sweet visage of space. to the edge of the wood i am drawn, i am drawn, where the gray beach glimmering runs, as a belt of the dawn, for a mete and a mark to the forest-dark: so: affable live-oak, bending low thus with your favor soft, with a reverent hand, (not lightly touching your person, lord of the land!) swinging your beauty aside, with a step i stand on the firm-packed sand, free by a world of marsh that borders a world of sea. 7he ma4rshes of glynn. sinuous southward and sinuous northward the shim mering band of the sand-beach fastens the fringe of the marsh to the folds of the land. inward and outward to northward and southward the beach-lines linger and curl as a silver-wrought garment that clings to and follows the firm sweet limbs of a girl. vanishing, swerving, evermore curving again into sight, softly the sand-beach wavers away to a dim gray loop ing of light. and what if behind me to westward the wall of the woods stands high? the world lies east: how ample, the marsh and the sea and the sky! a league and a league of marsh-grass, waist-hiigh, broad in the blade, green, and all of a height, and unflecked with a light or a shade, stretch leisurely off, in a pleasant plain, to the terminal blue of the main. oh, what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal sea? somehow my soul seems suddenly free 9i 92 the mlarshes of gl yavn. from the weighing of fate and the sad discussion of sin, by the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of glynn. ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-with holding and free ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea! tolerant plains, that suffer the sea and the rains and the sun, ye spread and span like the catholic man who hath mightily won god out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain and sight out of blindness and purity out of a stain. as the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod, behold i will build me a nest on the favor of god: i will fly in the favor of god as the marsh-hen flies in the freedom that fills all the space'twixt the marsh and the skies: by so many roots as the marsh-grass sends in the sod i will heartily lay me a hold on the favor of god. tihe matrshes of glynvn. 9 oh, like to the favor of god, for the largeness within, is the range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of glynn. and the sea lends large, as the marsh: lo, out of his plenty the sea pours fast: full soon the time of the flood of the tide must be: look how the grace of the sea doth go about and about through the intricate channels that flow here and there, everywhere, till his waters have flooded the uttermost creeks and the high-lying lanes, and the marsh is meshed with a million veins, that like as with rosy and silvery essences flow in the rose-and-silver evening glow. farewell, my lord sun! the creeks overflow: a thousand rivulets run 'twixt the roots of the sod; the blades of the marsh grass stir; passeth a hurrying sound of wings that nestward whirr: passeth, and all is still: and the currents cease to run; and the sea and the marsh are one. 93 94 the ma rshes of glynn. how still the plains of the waters be! the tide is in his ecstasy. the tide is at his highest height: and it is night. and now from the vast of the lord will the waters of sleep roll in on the souls of men, but who will reveal to our waking ken the forms that swim and the shapes that creep under the waters of sleep? and i would i could know what swimmeth below when the tide comes in on the length and the breadth of the marvellous marshes of glynn. the u'icked nephe w. ballad of the wicked nephew. t was a wicked nephew bold who uprose in the night, and ground upon a huge grindstone his penknife, sharp and bright. and while the sparks were flying wild the cellar floor upon, quoth he unto himself, "i will despatch my uncle john! "his property is large, and if he dies, and leaves a will, his loving nephew (that's myself) won't get a dollar bill. "i'11 hie unto my uncle's bed, his chamber well i know, and there i'1l find his pocket-book safe under his pil-low. 95 the wicked nephe w. '"with this bright steel i'11 slay him first, because that is the way they do such things, i understand, in boucicault's new play." by this the anxious moon retired, (for all the stars were in), "tis very dark," the nephew cried, "but i can find my kin!" "come forth my trusty weapon now! " (or words to that effect), he shouted to his little bladewhose power he did suspect. then out he starts. his uncle's door is thirteen doors from his:he gains the latch, which upward flies, and straight inside he is! one pause upon the entry stair, and one upon the mat,how still the house at such an hour! how mewless lies the cat i 96 the wicked a;ephe w. " o nephew! nephew! be not rash, turn back, and then'turn in;' your uncle still is sound asleep, and you devoid of sin! "the gallows-tree was never built for handsome lads like you,get thee to bed! (as kind macbeth wished his young man to do)." he will not be advised,he stands beside the sleeping form,the hail begins to beat outside a tattoo for the storm. "tis not too late repent! repent! and all may yet be well!" "repent yourself!" the nephew sneers and at it goes pell-mell! to right and left he carves his way, at least thus did it seem, and, after he had done the deed, woke up from his bad dream. 7 97 the wicked aephe w. and swift to uncle john he ran, when daylight climbed the hill, and told him all and uncle john put nephew in his will. 98 the angler. the angler. n angler by a brook doth lie; upon his hook, a painted fly; a dream's soft shadow in his eye. thus, like a charmed prince he seems, destined a glorious prize to win, which, like a jewelled javelin, poised, as in air, on quivering fin before his vision gleams. with purest blue, the blissful sky pavilions him right royally. sometimes an oriole flames on high; a bee, impetuous, sparkles by; a bobolink, ecstatic, flings bubbles of music down the air; and so he gathers everywhere from realms of ease, all joys most rare, like pearls on silken strings... .. 2:: ~ 99 the rebel flower. the rebel flower. cross the garden paths she led her tory guest, with stately tread; a boston beauty in her prime, with courage equal to the time that tried men's souls, her loyal heart cried out against the craven part it was her irksome fate to play as courteous hostess on that day. a gracious, gallant air he wore, a gracious, gallant rank he bore, this tory guest, yet well she knew beneath the air, the rank, perdue, a crafty treacherous purpose hid, as poisons lurked beneath the lid *:t jewelled caskets long ago, when every friend might prove a foe. io0 the rebel flowep4'r. the garden beds were gay with bloom, fair treasures which have given room long since at fashion's stern decree to splendors from across the sea. for close beside the stately rose, no tyranny can e'er depose, the sturdy camomile did lift its myriad blossoms' snowy drift. " what flower is this?" the tory guest half paused to ask in idle quest. a moment's thought, then sweet and clear, "the rebel flower, we call it here," she answered him, this boston dame of lovely mien and rebel fame. "how's this?" he laughed; and laughing sent a keen look at the fair face bentit in modest musing on the flower she'd newly named within that hour. "how's this, sweet dame, and why, pray tell, so fair a flower a name so fell should win and wear?" a swift smile sped across her face, then slow she said, 101 the rebel flower. "because, my lord, this flower that's won your meed of praise, when trampled on, springs from the dust and thrives anew in fresher vigor than it knew before such blows of fortune came,thus rightly winning name and fame." "ah, ha!" laughed out the tory guest at this bold speech, "a pretty jest i' faith, sweet dame, and bravely said. when next we meet, perhaps a tread of weightier heels may have crushed out these boasted claims, and put to rout your rebel flowers till name and fame are lost beneath the dust of shame." she laughed him back, with laughter born of gay disdain and sparkling scorn. "when next, we meet, my lord," she said, "this rebel flower will lift its head in lustier vigor than before, and name and fame for evermore shall flourish bravely in the land despite th' oppressors' heel or hand!" i02 the rebel flower. when next they met, my lord had laid his sword beneath the rebel blade, and she who prophesied the fate of british valor, stood in state on british soil, an honored guest, wearing upon her lovely breast, in smiling triumph for that hour, ,4 posy called" the rebel flozewer/" i03 the bride of war. the bride of war. (arnold's march to canada, i775.) i. he trumpet with a giant sound its harsh war-summons wildly sings; and, bursting forth like mountain springs, poured from the hillside camping-ground, each swift battalion shouting flings its force into line. then you may see the men, broad-shouldered, heavily sway to the swing of the march, their heads dark like the stones in river-beds. lightly the autumn breezes play with the shining dust-cloud rising to the sunset rays from feet of the moving column. soft, as vou listen, comes the echo of iterant drums, i04 the bride of w,ab. brought by the breezes light from the files that follow the road. a moment their guns have glowed sun-smitten; then out of sight they suddenly sink, like men who touch a new grave's brink! ii. so it was the march began, the march of morgan's riflemen, who like iron held the van in unhappy arnold's plan to win wolfe's daring fame again. with them, by her husband's side, jemima warner, nobly free, moved more fair than when, a bride, one year since she strove to hide the blush it was a joy to see. strangely sounds this name of woman, crude and cold, jemima warner; yet the shrill-blown trumpets summon her to lead this antique story: i05 the bride of wair. not in guise of hero-mourner, nor as one who loved a foeman, but a dauntless peril-scorner whose calm strength was more than glory. iii. o distant, terrible forests of maine, with huge trees numberless as the rain that striketh your lonely lakes! (it strikes and sings through the years, but wakes no answering echo of joy or pain.) your tangled wilderness was tracked by the doers of many a treacherous act, puritan, pagan, and priest: where wolf and panther and serpent ceased, man added the horrors your dark maze lacked. like the fretting of worms on withered wood, the land was scarred with deeds not good. what if its venomous spell breathed into arnold a prompting of hell, with slow empoisoning force indued? io6 the bride of wa r. as through that dreary realm he went, followed a shape of dark portent: pard-like, of furtive eye, with brain to treason narrowing, aaron burr moved loyal-seeming in the train led by the arch-conspirator. and craven enos 1 closed the rear, whose honor's flame died out in fear. not sooner does the dry bough burn and into fruitless ashes turn, than he with whispered, false command flung back the hundreds in his hand, fled like a shade, and all forsook. wherever arnold bent his look danger and doubt around him hung; and pale disaster, shrouded, flung black omens in his track, as though the fingers of a future woe already clutched his life, to wring some expiation for the thing that he was yet to do. a chill struck helpless many a steadfast will within the ranks; the very air rang with a thunder-toned despair; i see note at the end of the poem. 107 the bleide of wa!r. and round them, lost in drifts of snow, the hills like blind guides seemed to go! iv. yet still devout, through loss and doubt, one woman's loyal heartwhose pain filled it with white celestial light shone starry-constant like the north, and sacred like a fane. but he whose ring jemima wore, by want and weariness all unstrung, though strong and honest of heart and young, shrank at the blast that pierced so frore like a huge, invisible bird of prey furious launch'd from labrador and the granite cliffs of saguenay! along the bleak dead river's banks they forced amain their frozen way; but ever from the thinning ranks shapes of ice would reel and fall, human shapes, whose dying prayer floated, a mute white mist, in air; the crowding snow their pall. i08 thve bride of wa r. spectre-like, famine drew near: her doom-word hummed in his ear, and the sounds of life grew fewer as she drew him closer to her. ah, weak were woman's hands to reach and save him from the hellish charms and wizard motion of those arms! yet only noble womanhood the wife her dauntless part could teach: she shared with him the last dry food and thronged with hopefulness her speech, as when hard by her home the flood of rushing conestoga fills its depth afresh from springtide rills! all, all in vain! for far behind the invading rout these two were left alone; and in the waste their wildest shout seemed but a smothered groan. like sheeted wanderers from the grave they moved, and yet seemed not to stir, as icy gorge and sere-leaf'd grove of withered oak and shrouded fir io9 the bride of war. were passed and onward still they strove, while the loud wind's artillery clave the air, and furious sleety rain swung like a sword above the plain! v. they crossed the hills; they came to where through an arid gloom the river chaudiere fled like a maenad with outstreaming hair; and there the soldier sank, and died. death-dumb he fell, yet ere life sped, child-like on her knee he laid his head. she strove to pray; but all words fled save those their love had sanctified. and then her voice rose waveringly to the notes of a mother's lullaby; but her song was only "ah, must thou die!" and to her his eyes death-still replied. vi. dead leaves and stricken boughs she heaped o'er the fallen form: iio 7he bride of war. wolf nor hawk nor lawless storm him from his rest should rouse: but first, with solemn vows, took rifle, pouch, and horn, and the belt that he had worn. for, widowed and unhappy evermore, she gave herself to be the bride of war. then, onward pressing fast through the forest rude and vast hunger-wasted, fever-parch'd many bitter days she marched with bleeding feet that spurned the flinty pain; one thought always throbbing through her brain: "they shall never say, he was afraid, they shall never cry, the coward stayed/" now the wilderness is passed; now the first hut reached, at last. ho, dwellers by the frontier trail, come forth and greet the bride of war! from cabin and from settlement they come to speed her on her way: maidens, whose ruddy cheeks grow pale i i i the bride of wa r. with pity never felt before; children that cluster at the door; mothers, whose toil-worn hands are lent to help, or bid her longer stay. but thirough them all she passes on, strangely martial, fair and wan; nor waits to listen to their cheers that sound so faintly in her ears. for now all scenes around her shift like those before a racer's eyes when, foremost sped and madly swift, forth stretching toward the goal he flies, yet feels his strength wane with his breath and purpose fail'mid fears of death;till, like the flashing of a lamp, starts forth the sight of arnold's camp. then to the leader she is brought the man who wronged his country's trustand speaks her grandly loyal thought that should have bowed him in the dust: "your rifle-bearer on the way perished, but i come to say his faith is kept with you to-day! " ii2 the bride of wa,. r. herald of the brave in story, let the poet proudly summon honor for jemima warner, for the fearless peril-scorner; honor for the high-souled woman whose calm strength was more than glory! note to page 107. —colonel enos, of connecticut, commanded the rear guard, consisting of eight hundred men, in this terrible march, and deserted his chief, with the whole force confided to him, while the expedition was struggling through the wilderness in the dead river region. i i 3 froyii herzegovilna. from herzegovina. here were some forty men of us, strong men and young together, went marching up the mountain-side that glorious august weather; all four by four and step by step, with carabine to shoulder, and girt with glittering yatagans ho! never a band was bolder! our blood-red tassels switched our ears, blood-stained our white apparel; we feasted on the wild goats' flesh, and drank strong wine by barrel; and flushed it forth like fire, and sang and shouted out in chorus, and swore by all god's sacraments, holding his cross before us, ii4 froam heizego vina. each one that he was freedom's son and every one a brother, and each to the sun discharged his gun and manlike kiss'd the other and hand to hand, and breast to breast, that glorious august weather, we swore to hunt the turk and feast and drink and die together. for forty days and forty nights we rattled on like thunder, and shot the damned turk dogs down -no man of us fell under! for forty days and forty nights with long moustaches flying, we hurled the turk from crag to crag -no christian dreamed of dying! for forty days the vines and maize were blazing with our fire, and four by four and step by step we strode on higher and higher. one day we came on a chestnut grove and chose it out for nooning, our heads were wreathed up from the sun as if we came from pruning; i is .wi ozif he rzego vlna. cool strawberry plants grew all about; bright blue, between the branches, you could not say which was blue bay or blue sky where it blanches; for everywhere were simmering air and slumbering slopes of heather; and farther away one reek yet lay and a white sail faint as a feather. we stretched our bare limbs in the moss, our hot things on the thickets, and all was still on shore and hill, except the ceaseless crickets, no bird was heard and no leaf stirr'd and no one dreamed of battle,when quick a white flame quivered past, the jays whirled out, and a rattle of bullets crackled against the twigs, and, snatching our guns in wonder, we found our youngest clawing the ground, his left lung shot asunder. for forty days and forty nights each man was like a mother; we made a litter of tender boughs, each one relieved the other; ii6 froj[ herzego v~v,a. we gave him all we had, and hard we fought our way and bore him both night and day the slippery way, though nothing could restore him. ite lay like lead upon our hearts, like dead upon our shoulder, his joints were rotting in the thews and no corpse could be colder. at last one murmured: -"'tis no use. the turks are pressing faster, we had better slay him from his pain than wait a worse disaster." it must have been his heart that heard. god knows! he muttered: "hear me. "my comrades, i've no fear of death,'tis death who seems to fear me! so take me to the highest ground where grows the golden heather, the wind and light are brighter there than all one's life together. and let me die there as god wills and leave me where you lay me, and may my dead curse doubly strike whoever dares gainsay me! i 17 fromz herzegovina.. and further yet i pray of you, even to the last brother the turks may spare, that you shall bear no tidings to my mother. she stands her distaff in her hands among them at the fountain, and sighs that old sad sigh of hers, and looks up at the mountain. above them shakes the mulberry-tree i have climbed with many a fellow; about the top i've cut my namethe leaves must now be yellow. she nmust not know how matters go; her poor old hands are hoary; it can't be long, so let her die still dreaming of my glory. and bid her work the white stuff done she has spun against i marry; and say i've joined the servian men, and say she must not tarry." i i8 run7iag the blockade. ii 9 running the blockade. a chase in soundings. ;ill 0a-ihoa4! the falcon and swallo7ew, yo-hoicks the fox anid the hound; a4s if you could hear the long, fourfooted, hollowz reverberate beat oil the ground, andfeel yourself swing in the saddle, at thie fore-shoulder's reach in the straddle, as the hunter comes up to the bound. hove in the stays, she lay, in the blockading grounds, of the north carolina sounds, beleaguered half a day, the good ship heir of lynn: the still air shut her in the very focus of light; where the sea grows hot and white, 40 ru fuaj7v/ng the blockade. as if it had turned to salt or solid rock, with a fault that clipped the horizon's edge in a long, irregular ledge. in the summer of'63, as still as they could be the sea and air; and every spar lost in a reverie over its shadow, under the sea, in curious wonder. not a cat's-paw turned the streamer, to spell at it letter by letter; and for fifty leagues and better, you could see the smoke of a steamer drifting down in the offing. you could hear the sullen coughing, over sixty miles away, at wvilinington harbor and bay, the pounding of cannon and mortar, and the groan of torpedoes under the sea, that came over her quarter, like the bellow of smothered thunder. i 20 runn'ing the blockade. uneasily looked the master now at the sea, and then off in a dream again of home, as the boa's'in cast her dipsy * lead in the shallow, to a sort of nasal tune, larded with talk and tallow, in the bight of the afternoon; drawling from sea-worn topics, to sudden squalls in the tropics; and lee shores whose hot lips had opened and swallowed ships,till the slow talk seemed to pool in the old annapolis school; and the master was "joe" again, with his messmate, geordie of maine, who loved, with loves like his own, sweethearts they never had won like the small blue flowers that live but a day, sweet things, in the inlets of chesapeake bay. the skies got bluer and bluer, till the far-off gunboat knew her, * deep-sea. i21 rpunning the blockade. and came up, hand over hand, with a rushing, like falling sand, of the coils of her screw propeller, like the rifles that twist out her shell, or the leverage fold and grapple of the sinewy boa-constrictor, while her stem peeled the scum as an apple, and the plunge of her steam beat the drums of a victor. but, like omens in viscera, old romnans sought for; as the stars fought with sisera,faster and faster, and over and past her, swirled the cone of the cyclone and fought her. it touched the sails of the schooner, t'he turn of a sandglass sooner; and, breaking in sudden bloom, from her foretop studding-sail, aft to her spanker-boom, down to her channel rail, i22 ruvzvia'g the blocicade. 123 fore to her flying jibs; like a lily when it buds she flowers out of her ribs, white as the salt-sea seeds; bobbing about, like a cup. then a shout, and the hunt is up. hilloa-hoa! the falcon and swallow, yo-hoicks! the fox and the hound; as zf you could hear the long, foulrfuoted, hollow reverberate beat of the ground, a4ndfeel yourself swinzg in the saddle, at thie fore-shoulder's reach iiz the straddle, a4s the hunter comes zi to the bound. "a lee shore and a squall! there's but one of them all," as he steamed within hail, said the gunboat commander, "of all that i know, that would dare carry sail to beach her and land her, annapolis joe." pipunnfnig the blocicade. as swivels of hail beat tattoo on the sail, and he looked on the sea, where tempests unchain reefs hid in white rain "you'11 want boots to follow me all night," said the mnaster, "with your wrought-iron roster, old geordie of maine." ship ahoy! heave to! the wind seemed to wrestle with steam in the vessel, elastic and pliant, and wrench the propeller with the strength of a giant, as if to compel her to shrink from the danger, her keel timbers ran on: but grimly defiant, and louder and louder, in the bursting of powder, spoke the lips of her cannon. i24 runnia7g the blo(ckade. hilioa-ioa! tze falcon and sweallow, yo-ioicks! the fox and the hound; a4s if you could hear tile tong, four-fovote, hollow reverberate beat on tie ground, and4feel yourself swing in thle saddle, at the fore-shoulder's reach in the straddle, a4s the hiunter comes up to the bound. "it's joe to be sure," said the naval commander, "and he's got a king's ransom of stores in his keel; i'11 sink her or land her rawbones on a leeshore, to feed the sound fishes on his powder and steel." a reef rose between, \where the keel of the sea seemed to jib and careen, and pitch on its beam ends, about which the water ran smooth with vehemence, like the gates of a lock when its hinges are swung, and the bore of the current shoots out in a tongue. but, taut and close-lasted, from keelson to mast head; 125 riuvnila7g the blockade. spanker vangs to sprit-sail-yards, and flying jib-boom, as true to her halyards as belle of the room when her feet, to the click of the castanets clipping, make rhymes to the music's adagios tripping,as dangerously quick as herodias' daughter, while the wind kissed her lacings and whipped round her quarter, and pitch-piped its bagpipes as shrill as a demon, the sloop felt her tiller; double banked her propeller; and rushed at the sluice with a full head of steam on. hilloa-hoa! tlhe flconiz and swallo7, yo-hoicks! thie fox and tile hozind,' as if you could hear t/ie long, frer-fooled, hollow reverberate beat on tlie ground, andfeel yourself swhing in tlhe saddle, at thefore-shoulder's reach in the straddle, a4s the hunter comes iu to the bound. but the fugitive ship, like a wild thing at bay, 126 running the blockade. that will double and slip from corner to panel, like a fox, stole away. the nips of the channel, in shoulder and knee, seemed to rise and bend over her; the bellowing sea, to open and cover her; and where the surf plunges through coral and sponges in slings of the wind as light as a feather, to rove the blue phosphorus frost in her shrouds, the burst of the clouds, mixed the sea and the sand and the sky altogether, and the welkin cracked open with terrible brightening, till the bed of the sea seemed to bristle with light ning; and over, and under the clamor of waves, pealed the toll of the thunder. hilloa-hoa! the falcon and swallozw, yo-hoicks! tie fox and the hozltnd; as if yoii could hear the long, folr-foolted, hollow reverberate beat on the ground, i27 xual'/vnzvg the blockade. andfeel yourself swing i ll le sad(ile, a4t tlz fore-shozldier's reach ilz the straddle, a4s the hn,':ter conmes up to the bound. so, all through the night, in the darkness they grope. in the wash of the water, and swish of the spray, clung the sloop to the chase, as if towed by a rope, till the morning gun slipped it, at breaking of day. 'ira la, sang the bugles,a fox stole away! .stole away; stole away: stole away; stole away: tira la sang the buglesa fox stole away. in wilmington town, there's a ringing of bells as the people go down, to see her come in, with her flag at the forepeak, as every one tells of the old ballad luck of the ship heir of lynn. if you ever meet josey, or geordie of maine, you will run the chase over in soundings again. i28 the rhone cra,dle. the rhone cradle. (a vignette of travel.) his is the fair bed of the infant rhone, a cradle broad with fruits and sunshine strown, a dreamy valley guarded by tall shapes they call the alps; where mniles of clustering grapes, purple of eye, in leafy garments green load down the hills, that near and nearer lean to watch the rushing river and the small traffic of men close under that scarred wall of some free-booting baron's ancient tower. gone are the baron and his murderous power, and like some uncouth beast of earliest time the gray bones of the ruined castle climb the steep, yet utterly inert remain, a fossil record, which the years disdain to wipe away. here once the cesar bore his roman eagle above the icy roar of mountain-torrents. 9 129 the rhone cradle. many centuries passed; but gaul sent forth her eagle, at the last: napoleon's iron hand cut out a path across the rocky simplon; poured his wrath from out the clouds; and where the deep gorge breaks through caverned gloom, to reach the lombard lakes, his legions swept to italy, to rome, the conqueror's goal, the world-subduer's home. lo, whatsoe'er befall or tribe or town, the growing river still flows broadening down, not otherwise than when it first began; still young, still wild, though many a white-hair'd man hath laid him down beside its foamy bank, nor ever risen again from where he sank. child rhone, thy course is marked by death and woe: wilt thou thus swift and laughing always go? i30 cohn caman.'3' john carman. ohn carman of carmantown worked hard through the longest day; hle drove his awl and he snapped his thread, and he had but little to say. he had but little to say except to a neighbor's child: three summers old she was, and her eyes had a look that was deep and wild. her hair was heavy and brown, like clouds in a starry night. she came and sat by the cobbler's bench, and his soul was filled with delight. no kith nor kin had he, and he never went gadding about; a strange, shy man, the people said, and they could not make him out. 7ohn carman. i3i 7o yohiv car.4f_av. and some of them shook their heads, and wouldn't tell what they'd heard. but he drove his awl and snapped his thread, and he always kept his word. and the little child that knew him better than all the rest, she threw her arms around his neck and went to sleep on his breast. one day in that dreadful summer when children died by the score, john carman glanced from his work and saw 'her mother there at the door. he knew by the look in her face, and his own on a sudden turned white. he rose from his bench and followed her out, and watched by the child that night. he tended her day and night; he watched by her night and day he saw the cruel pain in her eyes; he saw her lips turn gray. ~~~* * * * 132 cohn cai?man.'33 the day that the child was buried, john carman went back to his last; and the neighbors said that for weeks and weeks not a word his clenched lips passed. " he takes it hard," they gossiped. "poor man, he's lacking in wit.""i'11 drop in, to-day," said deacon gray, "and comfort him up a bit." so deacon gray dropped in with a kind and neighborly air; and before he left, he kneeled on the floor, and wrestled with god in prayer. and he said: "0 lord, thou hast stricken this child in its babyhood: in thy own way, we beseech and pray, bring forth from evil good." that night the fire-bells rang, and the flames shot up to the sky, and into the street, as pale as a sheet, the town-folk flock and cry. 70hn ca ra a4. 133 '70hnv ca, rman. the bells ring loud and long; the flames leap high and higher; the rattling engines come too late: the old first church is on fire! and lo and behold, in the lurid glare they see john carman stand, a look of mirth on his iron lips, and a blazing torch in his hand. "you say it was hte who killed her" (his voice had a fearful sound): " i'd have you know, who worship him so, i've burned his house to the ground." * * * * * * john carman died in prison, in the madman's cell, they say; and of his crime, that i've told in rhyme, heaven cleanse his soul, i pray! i34 a prea cier.' a preacher. a" nd oh, my friends," the preacher said, "beware, however smooth and tempting seems the path, with bowers of cooling shade, the end is wrath; here'tis unsafe, that's dangerous footing there: but follow me and have no further care; i'11 be your staff, for i am one that hath lived long and gathered in life's aftermath experience. i bid you not despair; reach me your hands and cast away all doubt; i'11 lead you safe along the glacier's shelf: you say'tis dark?'tis noonday, i insist; besides, i know each pitfall hereabout, i know each chasm "just then the preacher's self stumbled and plunged into eternal mist. i35 octobera suanda y. october sunday. ere are mellow october days; through my open window the organ plays out of the church across the road, leaves and people thickly strowed; those have done with every season, these still live and seek the reason. organ-breath has drawn them in, souls that in an eddy spin, lifted upward from the clay: in the road the leaves at play spin without the sap of passion, faded tints of nature's fashion. and what the organ says they drown, past my window whirling down in sere pretence of keeping tryst; so some bars of chords i've missed; i36 october s.u.nds a' now the wind has caught the strain and drops the leaves, and listens fain: for the souls a sweet wind borrow to intone of earth's tomorrow. when the road is still i hear, like crushed grapes, the notes of cheer; when from these million tongues of leaves the wind dead pentecost receives, i wait, the organ builds the while; 'twixt me and the eternal smile a scurry flits: but, tone-piers sinking, psalmward across i go unshrinking. i37 the uvseen preachetr. the unseen preacher. e spoke of souls that stooped and sinned, of hearts that turned to roam; he spoke of human restlessness, of exile and of home, of earth's eternal vagrancies. "0 slow! " he cried, "to start and throw thy truant childhood back upon thy father's heart. "that life must walk uncomforted, that leans not on his breast: they only know that god is love who learn that god is rest." he spoke, and on his lifted face the prophet's halo crept: like reeds within his outstretched hands, the people bowed, and wept. i38 the unseen pireacher. but in the chancel's solemn shade, she saw a glamour sweet. "beloved!" said she, "was it you fled by with flashing feet; " across the holy desk and book, beside the holy man, swift as a thought, and silent as only the vanished can; "passed and stood listening, poised there, all in a dream of light, paused to attend the sacred word as only a spirit might? " as angels must, then, pity me, so tempted and so blessed! and teach me how, o loved and lost, to go to him for rest! "oh teach me how, when any world, or dark, or bright, or dim, containeth thee, to give my first, my best of love to him!" i39 chiihdren's sonag. children's song. ow the trees are on the air, now the flowers are in the vale, now the earth shows sweet and fair as our mother's tale. bright is every violet's eye, yellow-deep the cowslip hues, where the wide-winged butterfly feeds herself with dews. but the rising wind away turns the flower-bells bending low, and the thunder-clouds do say their sublimest now. leaps the flashing sword of light, rushes breeze and hisses rain; yet the trees are laughing bright at the watery gain. 140 amy margaret. amy margaret. a my margaret's five years old; amy margaret's hair is gold; dearer twenty thousand fold than gold is amy margaret! 'amy' is friendis'margaret' the pearl for crown or carcanet! or peeping daisy, summer's pet? which are you, amy margaret? a friend, a daisy, and a pearl, a kindly, simple, precious girl, such, howsoe'er the world may twirl, be ever, amy margaret! i41 i42 "my hearet, i cannot still it." "my heart, i cannot still it." i. y heart, i cannot still it, is a nest with song-birds in it; and when the last shall go, the dreary days, to fill it, instead of lark or linnet will bring dead leaves and snow. ii. and were they sparrows only, without the passion stronger of joy that soars and sings, woe's me, i shall be lonely when i can feel no longer the impatience of their wings! the robin's song. the robin's song. hen the willows gleam along the brooks, and the grass grows green in sunny nooks, in the sunshine and the rain, i hear the robins in the lane singing, "cheerily cheer upcheer up; cheerily, cheerily cheer up." but the snow is still along the walls and on the hill. the days are cold, the nights forlorn, for one is here and one is gone. "tut, tut. cheerily cheer up, cheer up; cheerily, cheerily cheer up! " i43 the robiv's song. when spring hopes seem to wane, i hear the joyful straina song at night, a song at morn. a lesson deep to me is borne, hearing, "cheerily cheer up, cheer up; cheerily, cheerily *. cheer up." i44 theocriz' 7 us. theocritus. y! unto thee belong . the pipe and song, theocritus,loved by the satyr and the ffun! to thee the olive and the vine, to thee the mediterranean pine, and the soft lapping sea! thine, bacchus, thine, the blood-red revels, thine, the bearded goat! soft valleys unto thee, and aphrodite's shrine, and maidens veiled in falling robes of lawn! but unto us, to us, the stalwart glories of the north; ours is the sounding main, and ours the voices uttering forth by midnight round these cliffs a mighty strain; a tale of viewless islands in the deep washed by the waves' white fire; io i45 theocritus.' of mariners rocked asleep in the great cradle, far from grecian ire of neptune and his train; to us, to us, the dark-leaved shadow and the shining birch, the flight of gold through hollow woodlands driven, soft dying of the year with many a sigh, these, all. to us are given! and eyes that eager evermore shall search the hidden seed, and searching find again unfading blossoms of a fadeless spring; these, these, to us! the sacred youth and maid, coy and half afraid; the sorrowful earthly pall, winter and wintry rain, and autumn's gathered grain, \with whispering music in their fall; these unto us! and unto thee, theocritus, to thee, the immortal childhood of the world, the laughing waters of an inland sea, and beckoning signal of a sail unfurled! 146 medallion hea ds. medallion heads. (iv six sonne 7's.) i. saskia. he lovely friesland maiden whom the pride inherent in her old patrician race, forbade not to renounce her birthright's place, and seek her marriage bliss at rembrandt's side, had recompense to friesland's best denied: for, never wearying of the auroral grace of northern lights that flashed about her face, he, for all time, her beauty glorified. her soul lies mute on each madonna's mouth; her blonde hair floats across bathsheba's breasts; her mingled snow-and-roses kindle up susannah's cheeks; as hagar in her drouth, she droops; and'mid ahasuerus' guests, she sits, queen esther with the jewelled cup. 147 medallion heads. ii. la fornarina. who can believe that he was thralled by this? this creature wrought of flesh not over fine, with brazen brow, and mouth whose sensual line holds no red sting of rapture in its kiss?this splendid animal, for whom life is mere pleased existence, pagan, undivine, without a glimpse of soul, without a sign that she could fathom the soundless depths of his? we see the legend on her armlet traced, " raphael urbinas: " yet deny that one so born for love, so gracious, calm, and sweet, so like a glad greek god with beauty graced, could yield to toils by such calypsos spun, could stoop at such an earthly woman's feet! i48 medallion heads. iii. frau agnes. from page to page they still repeat the wrong,how agnes, with her shrewish marriage-ways, saddened the gentle nuremberger's days, until the silken tie became a thong wherewith she pinioned him in bondage strong; yet who can lay his finger on a phrase that proves it so? or cite a word's dispraise of her, his true' housereckoner,' 1 all life long? one spiteful line has furnished forth the stuff whose hempen coil has strangled the fair name thus filched from albrecht's wife, the centuries through; for if the love she gave was not enough, or if his bosom nursed some fonder flame that perished, surely agnes never knew. i durer's playful designation, in his letters, of his wife. i 49 i medallion heads. iv. lucrezia. the pretty fool's face, with its white and red, its perfect oval, its bewitching pout, the nimbus-shine of shimmering hair about the dian curve of brow, the well-poised head, the rare-ripe, melting form, the princess' tread, all lured his artist nature to devout love for a siren, who that art could scout and barter for the gold it brought, instead. senza errori: florence so did call the master michael loved, and raphael praised: but when lucrezia breathed her blighting breath across his faultless canvas, thenceforth all his genius seemed to shrivel, till, hopeless, crazed, his life's mistake found sole redress in death. i50 medallion heads. v. vittoria colonna. serene and sad and still, she sat apart in widowed saintliness, un unvowed nun, whose duty to the world without was done; and yet concealing with unselfish art, the scars of grief, the pangs of loss, the smart of pain, she suffered not herself to shun the hurt, and bruised, and wronged, who one by one sought sanctuary of her cloistered heart. but to that loneliest soul who found in her his type of womanhood supremest set, and knew not whether he should kneel or no,such sweet, strange comfort did she minister, that, were this deed her all, the world would yet have loved her for the love of angelo! i5 i medallion heads. vi. quentin matsys' bride. an artist's daughter, she,a toiler, he, at the grim forge: all antwerp well might stare upon him as a madman, that he dare aspire to hope, in face of the decree passed by parental pride, that none should be received as suitor who should fail to bear in handhis own true worka picture rare enough to prove his worth of such as she. yet nothing is impossible to love: soon through the city rang the cry abroad, "behold the miracle of malsys' saint!" blind genius felt art's touch, as of a god, had faith, and saw!-and tableted above him still we read:-" -ove taulght the smith to paint." i a connubialis amor de mulcibre fecit apellem." inscriftion on the cathedral wa/l ai a ntwer,. i52 red ta pe. red tape. hat countless years, what wealth of brain were spent to bring us hither from our caves and huts, and trace through pathless wilds the patient ruts of faith and habit, by whose deep indent prudence may guide if genius be not lent, genius not always happy when it shuts its ears against the plodder's ifs and buts, thinking by some brave leap to snatch the event! the coursers of the sun, whose hoofs of flame burn through morn's misty threshold, are exact as bankers' clerks, and all this star-poised frame, self-willed allowed, were with convulsion rackt: the world would end, were dulness not, to tame wit's feathered heels in the stern stocks of fact. 153 i love to dine. i love to dine. [rondeau.] i love to dine when stains the sky one slender long line of wintry sunset; to the fender my back in close proximity; thepite before me: i can watch the dying day, and feel assured that the rbti is tender. i can dine on a dollar and the lender: a haunch of venison, whosoe'er the sender: on general principles, yes, i may say i love to dine. but most, when vis-h-vis the opposite gender is represented, with the repast to blend her dear personality; when in one pzre'e our spirits mingle. ah, that is the waywhen love to savarin stoops in sweet surrender, i love to dine. i54 the beau of the to wn.z the beau of the town. e once was young and gay a beau. (ah, that was long ago!) to-day he is very old and gray. his clothes were once the best; his tile was at the top of style; his vest was flowered upon his breast. he then was tall and slim; his eye made all the maidens sigh for him one of the cherubim! 155 the bea u of the town. he drove a handsome pair of grays, and all men sang his praise: the heir had plenty and to spare. he now is poor and lame and bent. his sunshine friends all went, and shame to take their places came. the flowers upon his vest are rags; his coat is green, and sags. the rest may easily be guessed. his youth was spent in vain; his age is like a blotted page: his bane was roederer's champagne. 156 eumenides. eumenides. e who in noblest strain life's lessons uses, converts the avenging furies into muses; each dawn salutes with sweet surprises, and cheerful thoughts ere he arises. him nothing sullens, nor displeases, nor vexed with life, nor dread diseases. fate is but freedom with averted face, confront the demon and she flees apace: perplexed with life we only move as dragged by strife or drawn by love: souls that to love and truth are blind, ne'er enter forms of human kind. 157 158 eld. eld. ll hail, thou winter solstice of man's life! lord of the faded flower and garnered sheaf, that pluck'st from time its nothings, leaf by leaf, cancell'st its troubles, dost annul its strife thy scythe is sacred; healing is thy knife! small things thou tak'st: yet one thou giv'st the chiefin noble death our petulant raptures brief stilling, as organs still the lute and fife. all hail, divine detachment! when thy rod sweeps from the world its pomp, its praise, its pelf, say, what remains? the pagan answered " self: " the christian lifts his hands, and answers, " god." * all good our youth desired was god! thou dim decline, find all things summed and sealed in him! i "quid superest? medea superest." seneca: tragedy of medea. i58 eld. hq?wzon.'59 horizon. h subtle mystery of the air! or, is it mystery of the earth? which wooes? which pregnant thrills to bear in secrecy the beauteous birth? before the dawn from gray to rose, before the night from rose to gray, with traceless change it comes and goes, and comes and goes, and will not stay. our feet walk tireless in its lure; our eyes insatiate pierce its bound; our hearts wait confident and sure, the wealth of its enchanted ground. for threescore years from gray to rose, from rose to gray, it shines and saves our lives from dearth. who knows, who knows,:... if we shall see it in our graves!.:.: horizon. i59 one h lundred and onve. one hundred and one. concord, april i9th, i876. ow silent, sad, and gray the new-come april day, and the tumult and the show of a year ago already far away! a single banner waves above the ancient graves, and the sleep is deep on the hillside steep, where the chill wind runs and raves. the plain, proud little town, amid her meadows brown, sits lone again, and the great world's din her thought no more doth drown. that thought is not less high . than in the days gone by, '**:. i h~ugh the mantle of honor be worn upon her i*tienceforth right soberly. i 60 one hunidred avd one. for still the quiet street, where budding elms repeat the whisper of the dead, high over head, resounds to loyal feet. where youth died bravely once, immortal youth in bronze, mid the strenuous urging of the spring-tide surging, speaks with unfaltering tones. and windows strait and high, whence have looked on the sky the eyes of sages, praying the ages for light and clear reply, the common light receive, whereby all souls do live, whether the spirit charge inherit to question or believe. i i i6f .... *:i . i*i: the se arch. the search. "give me the girl whose lips disclose, whene'er she speaks, rare pearls in rows, and yet whose words more genuine are than pearls or any shining star. "give me those silvery tones that seem an angel's singing in a dream, a presence beautiful to view, a seraph's, yet a woman's too. "give me that one whose temperate mind is always toward the good inclined, whose deeds spring from her soul unsoughttwin-born of grace and artless thought; " e me that spirit,seek for her e my constant minister!" friend, i heed your earnest prayers, i all your lovely wife down-stairs. i62 not lost. 163 not lost. es, cross in rest the little, snow-white hands. do you not see the lips so faintly red with love's last kiss? their sweetness has not fled, though now you say her sinless spirit stands, within the pale of god's bright summer lands. gather the soft hair round the dainty head, as in past days. who says that she is dead, and never more will heed the old commands? to your cold idols cling, i know she sleeps; that her pure soul is not by vexed winds tost along the pathless altitudes of space. this life but sows the seed, from which one reaps the future's harvest. no, i have not lost the glory and the gladness of her face. i63 not lost. tran isfig ur,a tion. transfiguration. in memoriam. ysterious death! who in a single hour life's gold can so refine; and by thy art divine change mortal weakness to immortal power! bending beneath the weight of eighty years, spent with the noble strife of a victorious life, we watched her fading heavenward, through our tears. but, ere the sense of loss our hearts had wrung, a miracle was wrought, and swift as happy thought she lived again, brave, beautiful, and young. i64 transfigup,a tion. age, pain,. and sorrow dropped the veils they wore, and showed the tender eyes of angels in disguise, whose discipline so patiently she bore. the past years brought their harvests rich and fair, while memory and love together fondly wove a golden garland for the silver hair. how could we mourn like those who are bereft, when every pang of grief found balm for its relief in counting up the treasure she had left? faith that withstood the shocks of toil and time, hope that defied despair, patience that conquered care, and loyalty whose courage was sublime. the great, deep heart that was a home for all; just, eloquent and strong, in protest against wrong; wide charity that knew no sin, no fall. i65 i tir a,sf~igur,a tion. the spartan spirit that made life so grand, mating poor daily needs with high, heroic deeds, that wrested happiness from fate's hard hand. we thought to weep, but sing for joy instead, full of the grateful peace 'fhat followed her release; for nothing but the weary dust lies dead. oh noble woman! never more a queen than in the laying down of sceptre and of crown, to win a greater kingdom yet unseen: teaching us how to seek the highest goal; to earn the true success; to live, to love, to bless, and make death proud to take a royal soul i66 immor a4 l cl 0 uds. immor'ral clouds. clouds, immortal clouds! you rise and float like flowers whose shaken dew might pour through space, in perfumed showers. like flowers you bloom and fade; like stricken hearts you tremble and pass, yet seem to stay so swift you reassemble. o clouds, immortal clouds! with you i fain would wander; so spirit-like you grow, floating to heaven yonder! i67 i63 pflcfm& pilgrims. "have you not seen in ancient times pilgrims pass by toward other climes? with shining faces, youthful and strong, mounting this hill with speech and with song?" "ah, my good sir, i know not those ways: little my knowledge, tho' many my days. when i have slumbered, i have heard sounds as of travellers passing these my grounds. i68 pilgrims. i)ilgais. 169 'twas a sweet music wafted them by, i could not tell if afar off or nigh. unless i dreamed it, this was of yore: i never told it to mortal before, never remembered but in my dreams what to me waking a miracle seems." i 69 pilgrims. 170 avallon avallon. knight of sorrow and discontent, i have been to the land of wonderment in a very far country. the day was gone, the evening late: a messenger came through the silent gate of dreams, and stood by me. so fair a brow, so sweet a mien, had surely much of sorrow seen, and had found peace at last. there was a kindness in his eyes, and in the voice that said "arise." together, out we passed. my conzrade knights shakll happy be that these tlngs hapenzed u;nto me, the knight of discontent. strange was the land we travelled through, unpeopled, and no live thing grew beside the tiresome way. i 70 a va llon. avallon. 171 upon the waste there fell no light of sun by day, or moon by night, but ever a twilight gray. there was no sky, no wind did blow, there fell no rain, there fell no snow, nor dew, nor frost the land did know, no change of cold and heat. there is no winter there no spring, no summer-time, nor harvesting; and dreary was our wandering, and weary were my feet. 0, wail, my coinrade knights, and see why ihese things happened unto nre, the knigh,t of discontent. down to a river side we came, a river without source or name: its ceaseless current runs the same, for ever and a day, around an island of great height, around an island of delight, a peaceful island,' shining bright with wondrous light alway. x ma4llon. i71 a vallon. mine eyes, that had been dim before, were blessed with visions on that shore, brighter than young men's visions, more than old men ever dream. 0 throng of knights, thrice hacppy ye, fthat these thinzgs happened unto me, fthe knight of adiscontent. i saw the mountain-isle divide, i saw the high hills thrust aside, and fair the valley open wide, from centre to the stream. at rest beneath the violet sky, i saw its groves and cities lie, more beauteous than human eye hath seen, or heart conceived. there saw i mystic things, foretold and written in the books of old, hintings of prophets'overbold, by perfect faith believed. a tree whose leaves will heal all harms, the seven lamps with seven arms, and new-named people bearing palms were in that valley there. i72 avallon.'73 and, while i gazed, desire awoke to cross to those palm-bearing folk. i seemed to turn not as i spoke: "why stop we? let us fare "unto that valley." but my guide, that i had thought was close beside, stood far upon the flowing tide, and said: "not yet for thee "comes there a sound of dipping oar, "comes there a boat from yonder shore: "not thee alone we wish, but more," and, "go thou back and see "of all the knights of discontent, "the sorrow-bowed, the trouble-bent, "how many there may be "to rise and put their armor on, "and seek the vale of avallon "in a very far country." 0 listening knights, thrice blessed are ye, that these things ha2ppened,unto me, the knight of discontent. x vpllon. i73 '74 success. success. uccess is counted sweetest by those who ne'er succeed. to comprehend a nectar requires the sorest need. not one of all the purple host who took the flag to-day, can tell the definition, so plain, of.victory, as he defeated, dying, on whose forbidden ear the distant strains of triumph break, agonizing clear. success. i74 guy vernon. a novelette in verse. part i. the wedding journey. part ii. homeward voyage. part iii. the forsaken bride. part iv. the lost bridegroom. part v. husband and lover. part vi. saturn. i guy vernon. part i. the wedding journey. 1. e was as fair a bachelor as ever resolved to take a wife at forty-five. indeed, how one so amiable and clever, good-looking, rich, et cetera, could contrive till the high noon of manhood not to wive, was a vexed theme, and long remained a mystery to those who did not know his early history. and none knew that among his bride's relations. at saratoga, where you meet all grades of well-dressed people spending short vacations, manceuvring mothers, marriageable maids, . and fortune-hunters on their annual raids, he saw her waltz, and spite of every barrier of years or influence, inly vowed, " i'11 marry her!" 12 0 guy vernon. barriers there were: she was but two-and-twenty, he, twice her age, as i have intimated. but that seems no great matter: there are plenty of wives to-day felicitously mated with husbands whose nativities are dated (i speak with some authority) a score of years before their own, and sometimes more. one barrier in himself quite good and strong there was,the mystery no one could discover which kept our beau a bachelor so long: but when a man is very much a lover such things are somehow easily got over:and one in her, on which he had not counted, that could not be so readily surmounted. the lady though guy vernon did not know it had left another lover in the city,rob lorne, a journalist, and sort of poet; a fellow so unthrifty and so witty, that honest people said it was a pity a needle of such point should have a head too fine to take a strong and useful thread. i78 0 guy vernaon. while for a season they were separated, and in his dismal editorial den the lover labored and the lady waited for him to make a fortune with his pen, a thing which does not come to scribbling men so often as, for one, i wish it did,vernon stepped up and made a higher bid. ii. guy vernon's hand! a splendid offer truly! and though florinda (so the muse shall name her) was neither false nor fickle, nor unduly [her, given to the world, -which never quite could claim much as she loved society, -don't blame her, if, when a man like vernon wished to bid her in, she thought the matter worth, at least, considering. good family, good habits, handsome presence, breathing in dress, smile, gesture, look, and tone that indefinable ethereal essence of culture and high breeding, -let alone his private charities, which were well known,a match he seemed in every way superior to him whose chances chanced to be anterior. i79 g uy vern1on. her friends all chorused, "vernon! hear to us! a man of soul and sense is always young!" but conscience whispered, "plighted troth!" while thus long time in even scale the battle hung (as somebody has somewhere said or sung), her heart -or shall we say imagination? was in a fearful state of perturbation. if she had been excessively in love, the business would at once have been decided. the one imperious, mighty power, above all others in such matters though unguided, misguided often, scorned, profaned, derided is love, whose little arrow seldom fails, thrown in, to turn the matrimonial scales. the trouble is, we do not love: who loves with that immortal passion, pure, supreme, strong and unselfish, tender as the dove's, which touches life with a celestial beam, and wraps the world in its own radiant dream;makes heavens of eyes, and then has power to bring all heaven within the horizon of a ring? i80 guy ve~rnoon. si 8 iii. / one loved, at least, our poet. how he first learned of the complication, i've no notion; but sudden lava-flood and flame outburst, a young volcano in love's summer ocean, which sank as suddenly; and, all devotion, humility, despair, self-sacrifice, he wrote: "the world was right! you were not wise, to link your fate with one so poor as i: you're free." and after many tears, and blind, swift gusts of passion, she accepted guy. all which sounds commonplace enough, i find. but somehow it seems better, to my mind, the muse should be a trifle too familiar, than pompous, adipose, and atrabiliar, singing the past in those false tones i loathe. some poets seem oppressed with the conviction, that to be classic, they must still re-clothe the venerable forms of antique fiction in what they deem approved poetic diction; and so they let their unpruned fancies roll round some old theme, like hop-vines round a pole. g t y vea'p von. give me the living theme, and living speech the native stem and its spontaneous shoots, fibres and foliage of the soul that reach deep down in human life their thrilling roots, and mould the sunshine into golden fruits, not ashes to the taste, but fit to feed the highest and the humblest human need! o singers of the sunset! is there naught remaining for the muse, but just to fill old skins of fable with weak wine of thought? the child, imagination, at his will reshakes to wondrous forms of beauty still a few bright shards of common joy and hope, and turns the world in his kaleidoscope. iv. well, they were married, sometime in the autumn, at her aunt's house in town, with great display; for though the bride was penniless, and brought him her beauty for sole dower (that proud array of lace and diamonds was his gift, they say), a multitude of friends conspired to render the wedding feast a perfect blaze of splendor. 182 gcuy vernon. she did not know, before, she had so miany rich and enthusiastic friends: the snob, who never would have sacrificed a penny in bridal gifts for one who married rob, made haste to join the fashionable mob, since vernon was the man, and would have given his last dime to buy her something nice at tiffany's. lorne bravely stood his ground till all was over; then quietly looked round him for some means of burying his dead hope; became a rover, visiting foreign countries and strange scenes; and, writing verses for the magazines, newspaper sketches, stories, correspondence, he struggled with his hotel-bills and despondency. the wedded pair went off to louisiana, where vernon owned a very large plantation, and wintered in new orleans and havana, a season of delightful dissipation, sight-seeing, dining, driving, conversation, and best of all the infinite variety found in each other's ever-fresh society. i83 guy vernon. a paragon of husbands; she admired his noble, courtly manhood more and more; and every day his constancy inspired in her a tenderer deference than before: so she began in earnest to adore this married man and model of a hero, first love's quicksilver sinking fast to zero. such wedlock is, to true hearts truly wed; love's guarded paradise; where sometimes they who enter with indifference or dread find richest blessings; though i'm bound to say, the rule too often works the other way, and disenchantment leads to evil courses, domestic jars, elopements, and divorces. v. and all was lovely with our loving couple; till, one day in havana, there befell, what seems a trifle, their first serious trouble. as they were riding on the isabel paseo, which the traveller knows so well, 'tis truly a magnificent parade, walks, fountains, statues, carriage-way, and shade; i84 guy vernoan. thronged with pedestrians, horsemen, prancing spans; ladies in head-dress singularly scanty, darting dark glances from behind their fans, never on foot, but drawn (behind a jaunty black-faced postilion) in a gay volante, that cuban gig, of easy jogging motion; here, the fine harbor; there the circling ocean: epitome and picture of havana, and that rich land of tropic fruit and tree, fair island of the orange and banana, and endless summer in a sapphire sea! land of the cocoa and mahogany; voluptuous, balmy nights, and wondrous stars; of creole beauties and the best cigars: 'twas on that famous promenade, where daily you meet the wealth and fashion of the isle,as they were riding and conversing gayly, and now and then exchanging nod and smile, with new-made friends, along that marvellous mile, in the soft, rosy twilight of the tropic, florinda touched upon a dangerous topic. i85 guy verzl'on. vi. guy had a bright mulatto for a servant, a jewelled, gorgeous fellow; very handy to pack a trunk, pay bills, discreet, observant; originally nicknamed sam or sandy, but so superb and exquisite a dandy, resplendent in all sorts of gaudy things, florinda called him saturn, for his rings. of all unfeathered bipeds, feejees, negroes, in any clime, of race refined or rude; where crawls the crocodile, or where the tea grows; pale, swarthy, tawny-skinned, or copper-hued; turbaned or pigtailed, naked, furred, tattooed;t'he queerest yet turned out from nature's shop is your complete, unmitigated fop. and of all fops the foppiest yet was saturn. 'twas rumored, he had once been vernon's slave, now freed for his fidelity: a pattern of your smooth, secret, serviceable knave; guy's varlet, barber, purse, and very grave custodian of his cash, mustache, and collars;and worth himself some twenty thousand dollars. is6 guy vernon. of her dear vernon he was such a travesty; the insufferable smile with which he asked at what hour guy would drive or dine or have his tea; the lazy insolence with which he basked in his own conscious gorgeousness,so tasked florinda's patience and provoked her merriment, that now she ventured on a rash experiment. "i'm sick of such magnificence of vest! i hate the princely air with which he bends that carded pate, oiled, scented! i detest crinkled mustaches with waxed, pointed ends! but oh, i see! " she laughed, "the rogue intends to have at least a few straight hairs about him. would the sky fall if we should do without him? do please me, love,-get rid of this phenomenon! dear, will you make me happy?" but although the wish seemed not an idle, nor uncommon one, vernon grew pallid, and with scarce a show of his accustomed graciousness, said, "' no! so bluntly, coldly, that her quick tears started, and for five minutes she was broken-hearted. i87 g guy vernoa,. "darling!" she said, "i was but half in earnest; i only meant to say that i can't bear him!" "unfortunate," he answered, with his sternest and most forbidding scowl, "for i can't spare him!" and, like the tyrant of a turkish harem, thus having curtly uttered his conclusion, he plucked his beard in anger and confusion. but seeing her tears, he soon began to rally his gentler thoughts: "my dear, you do not know that faithful, that incomparable valet, a perfect nonpareil, as valets go.l in other matters i am seldom slow to heed your lightest wishes; but in such a case as this youreallyask too much. "reasons there are -but i can't undertake to give the reasons."" keep him, dear," she sighed; "i'11 even resolve to love him for your sake." and so the matter dropped: florinda tried to make a jest of it, but only cried; for vernon's conduct, and the sallow fellow's strange influence with him, made her sad and jealous. i88 guy vernon. vii. so the ring'd planet kept his proud supremacy over guy vernon's person, mind, and purse, as if there blazed not such another gem as he in the blue setting of the universe! and still florinda liked him worse and worse; but practised wise duplicity,'concealing with innocent art her inmost thought and feeling. and all seemed well; till something far more serious occurred her gentle tactics to derange: first, something in the air, scarce felt, mysterious, the subtile shadow of a coming change; then guy grew restless, melancholy, strange, subject to absent moods and fitful sighs, while saturn watched him with keen, cautious eyes. florinda pleaded fondly: "tell me, dearest, your secret trouble! if you are in pain, you know you have my tenderest, sincerest sympathy, -which, i pray you, don't disdain! " but vernon only groaned: "i can't explain! ask sandy -there is something he will tell you." and then abruptly left her with the fellow. i89 guy vernvon. so the disgust and shame were forced upon her of begging saturn to unfold the matter. he smiled, bowed, hand on waistcoat: "'pon my honor! " quirking his eyebrows, he stood leering at her, like some bedizened, over-civil satyr, extremely sorry news from our attorneyin short,hem!madam, we must make a journey." "where?" cries florinda.-" back to our plantation." "tell me at once! what is the dreadful news?" "the business scarce admits of explanation; for ladies, altogether too abstruse!" "when do we go? "" ah, madam! please excuse the cruel circumstance, the -what you call necessity, -you do not go at all." "and what becomes of me?" pale, stunned, she stared. "madam, you and your maid will be confided to captain jones; so please you, be prepared to sail next week: all things have been provided." he smiled, extremely bland, but quite decided: "believe me, madam,'tis with deepest sorrow that we must sailthe other wayto-morrow." i9o guy vernvon. she clasped her hands before him, speechless, trembling, fearing some terrible distress or treason; while saturn stood there, simpering, dissembling. "don't be alarmed, -you surely have no reason; you join your friends, and later in the season, this trifling business ended, he will meet you. be calm, be patient, madam, i entreat you!" she answered: "tell me all -i will be calm! what is my husband's grief, this fearful trouble? money? a duel?" with a low salaam he bent his brilliant person nearly double (body and soul seemed similarly supple):"beg pardon, madam, neither! to be brief, parting from you is his especial grief." "' why does he leave me, then? 0 sir, be good! is there another woman? tell me truly.!" the fellow was a study as he stood, grimacing, shrugging, lynx-eyed, white-toothed, woolly: "the circumstance has been explained as fully as seems desirable, but this i'll say, no other woman stands in madam's way. i9i guy vernon. "excuse me, madam, if i say no more. we go to-morrow, and you sail next week." the rogue retreated, bowing, to the door, and adding,"you'11 do better not to speak to him of this affair, unless you seek his ruin and your own unhappiness," left her in tears of terror and distress. viii. she flew to vernon's room: abstracted, moody, before his table, leaning on a chair, motionless, breathless, like a statue stood he, with drooping arms, bent head, disordered hair, in utter desolation and despair; then suddenly a shuddering sigh ran through hin. she stayed her steps, not daring to go to him. was this the noble vernon she had wedded, the tender husband and the ardent wooer? unspeakably her poor heart longed, yet dreaded, to question, comfort him; when, turning to her, quick as some conscience-stricken evil-doer in his dark moments taken by surprise, he glared upon her with strange, awful eyes. i92 guy vernon. othello's thus on desdemona burned. she took his hand, and silent, white with fear, yet, with the strength a strong heart gave, returned his lowering look, from large eyes deep and clear, where love and pity trembled to a tear. then, as he smote his brow and turned away, she asked, "have you not one kind word to say?" strongly she held her wildly throbbing heart, determined not to question nor complain; but only said, "to-morrow, then, we part? o guy! dear guy! when shall we meet again?" he wrung her hand until she shrank with pain; then flung her off, and from the chamber fled, leaving the little longed-for word unsaid. ix. she felt her heart give way, and quickly grew ill, sinking upon the couch in abject woe. there as she lay, and thought how strange, how cruel that he should keep his secrets from her so, that she had none which vernon might not know,she started, thinking how she had forborne to tell him of her love-affair with lorne. i3 i93 g uy viernon. now had some recent, terrible discovery changed his regard to sudden deadly hate? oh! had she lost his love beyond recovery, through that one fault, which unforgiving fate had left some loophole to reveal too late? was that malicious, treacherous, artful fellow the dark iago to her white othello? was this his vengeance for that talk with guy about his merits? had some scrap of paper betrayed her secret? was her maid a spy? for thus in mystery's magnifying vapor the fearful soul sees giant shapes that ape her; as in the brocken spectre one discovers one's own vast beckoning shade, that towers and hovers. so fear has oftenest but itself to fear. but though imagined ills are still the worst, to troubled souls this truth is never clear; when evil lowers we deem the rule reversed, and fancy blacker woes about to burst upon our heads than any yet conceived. so now florinda, right or wrong, believed. i94 guy vernon. x. she rose and paced the room like one distracted; and wrote, but tore in haste the blotted sheet; then turnedi know not by what power attracted to the front window-bars her restless feet, and, looking out upon the quaint old street, sawwith lithe head on graceful shoulders borneher late, discarded lover, robert lorne: now habited like any habenero, sauntering as leisurely, quite free from care; his fine face shaded by a light sombrero, bearded, and brown as he had once been fair; smoking his cigarito with an air of such observant fancy and enjoyment, as seems your poet-traveller's fit employment. he had not died of love,that heart-disease which proves but seldom fatal, to my thinking. defeated hope, sick fancy, if you please, often induce a sentimental sinking, drive some to suicide and some to drinking, but stop far short of any such forlorn and dismal end, with high, brave hearts like lorne. i95 g uy vernoan. he had come down at first as far as florida, and seen the alligator and flamingo; then, passing on to regions somewhat torrider, reached the french-negro side of san domingo, and learned a little of the curious lingo the people speak there, but conceived no mighty love for those black republicans of hayti. he had at port-au-prince remained a while, and, with curiously well-furnished note-books, he was now returning by the greater island, which sweeps its curve of beauty thro' the sea; where trade-winds temper the intensity of tropic heats ah, would they might allay the passions that distract the land to-day! and so it chanced that he was now in town, and at this very moment passing by, while poor florinda stood there looking down. all which seemis natural enough; but why he also chanced just then to turn his eye, as if he felt the drawing of her glance, is a much more mysterious circumstance. i96 guy veip'non.' xi. at the long, open window, through the bars (those cuban fronts are formidably grated) tburned her deep eyes, like two bright burning stars; wheteby it seemed that he was really fated to be for ever fooled and fascinated! he started, turned half round, then, flushed and flurried, lifting his broad sombrero, on he hurried. a dream, beyond all dreams of possibility, her image there appeared! but none the less the chance encounter jostled his tranquillity, and shattered, as you readily will guess, the new-filled crystal of his happiness; as if a goblet, which he smiling bore, were dashed in fragments on a marble floor. the tropic suns had not so scorched and wilted him as those two eyes! they left him trembling, weak, fevered and shaken, as when first she jilted him. he strode along with flaming heart and cheek, as if to findwhat strangers need not seek long time in vain there, wandering up and downthe mind's distraction in that novel town. i97 guy veraron. the place is picturesque with blacks and coolies, peasants and panniered beasts: there's nothing odder than the slow-paced, half-hidden, peering mule is, beneath his moving stack of fresh green fodder. it would be better if the streets were broader, the windows glazed, of that, though, i'm not sure, the hotels better, and mosquitoesfewer. lorne ranged the town; dined, spite of sentiment, finished some correspondence for the morrow's new orleans mail; then hastened-with intent to make an article, and drown his sorrows to see the town's renowned plaza de toros, the place of bull-fights; for the first and last time assisting at the favorite spanish pastime. he must have been fastidious, not to fancy the frenzied multitude's vociferating, to wonder, as he did, what people can see, in frightening, torturing, and infuriating a poor dumb beast, so wildly fascinating; what sport there is in all the shrieking, roaring, dart-piercing, spearing, bellowing, rushing, goring. i98 guy vera'onv. departing with unspeakable disgust, in sea-baths sheltered from the prowling shark he cooled his fever and washed off his dust; walked the paseo, spruce as any spark, looking in all the carriages, till dark; then to the theatrei blush to say, hoping to see florinda at the play. nor novel scenes, nor all the blare and clamor of bull-fights, nor the evening's promenade, nor sitting through a spanish melodrama, had power to make him any thing but sad and irritated; for, ala! he had no second vision of the eyes that haunted him, which being absent, nothing else enchanted him. and so next day, in anger and despair because he could not keep his truant thought, and scarce his footsteps, from the window where that momentary glimpse of her was caught, safety against his traitorous heart he sought, and, to its mad attraction risen superior, made a short journey into the interior. i99 part ii. homeward voyage. i. now ye the land?and so forth. cuba seems the later western eden of our planet. what wafted incense from the gate of dreams, what heavenly zephyrs hover o'er and fan it! with groves of orange, mango, and pomegranate, and flowering forests through whose wealth of blooms, like living fires, dart birds of gorgeous plumes. there by still bays the tall flamingo stands; the sunrise flame of whose reflected form crimsons the glassy wave and glistening sands. there, large and luminous, throughout the warm, soft summer eves myriads of fireflies swarm; like the bright spirits of departed flowers nightly revisiting their native bowers. guy verpnon. its own rich, varying world the isle enfolds; where glowing nature seems most prodigal of life and beauty; where the eye beholds orchards that blossom while their ripe fruits fall; mountains, refulgent vales; and, curved round all, from some palm-crested summit seen afar, the gleaming ocean's steel-bright scimitar. ii. all which to lorne was an intoxication, that fed his passion while it soothed his pain. round aromatic jungle and plantation, gardens of shaded coffee, seas of cane sweeping their billowy verdure through the plain, he breathed the flame of indolent desire, and carried in his heart those eyes of fire. she was unhappy! in the look she gave him deep sorrow made impassioned, sad appeal. so love conspired with pity to enslave him, and the sweet hope that still her heart might feel the heavenly hurt which only he could heal! until at last this new infatuation became an irresistible temptation. 20i guy vernon. back to the city, with a wretched sense of his own guilty weakness, in a tremor of passionate haste and torturing suspense, to meet her, flew the miserable dreamer; but saw, just coming into port, a steamer, at whose proud peak the yankee ensign waved; while something seemed to whisper, "you are saved! " fly! fly!" it said: "there is no middle course! your coming cannot help, but only harm her. rally your manhood's enervated force, put on determination's burnished armor! sin is the lovely snake, the deadly charmer; the tempted soul, the bird that round it hovers; flight, the sole safety for sore-tempted lovers!" all which was seconded by sober reason, making his duty in the matter clear: 'twas late in february, and the season so dangerous to the northern blood was near; the best hotels were bad and very dear: so prudence, joined with virtue, bade him leave her, avoid expense, temptation, and the fever. 202 guy vepynon. 203 subtler considerations, too, assisted, no doubt, to make him do as he was bidden; for conduct is a complex cord, that's twisted of many a strand of motive, seen or hidden, and sometimes with the weightiest purpose slid in, and covered perfectly from tip to tip, the belly that gives vengeance to the whip. with lorne, this may have been deep-wounded pride and love's despite: "she shall not say i sought her! " and so, his passport claimed, "farewell," he cried, "queen of the isles, spain's ill-adopted daughter! farewell your plumy palms and blue sea-water! your toiling slaves and idle senforitas, paseos, chain-gangs, bull-fights, and mosquitoes!" iii. 'twas really when the steamer sailed next day, that lorne, on board her, breathed his last farewell; when from the port with countless streamers gay, by frowning bastion and tall citadel they passed, anid took the grand atlantic swell and freshening sea-breeze, which are always found exhilarating to the homeward-bound. guy vehinoz. 203 guy vervno. he paced the deck, and puffed his cigarito, 'mid oranges in many a fragrant pile (barrels of oranges, stacked crates of ditto), and watched the gorgeous sunset's golden smile fade on the lovely, fast-receding isle, then the soft, purple-pinioned twilight sweep the dark-green land and iridescent deep. castles and villas, hills and plumy palms, vanished, to live for ever in his view enring'd in rosy equinoctial calms. the burnished waves wore many a wondrous hue; stars twinkled in the deep eternal blue; and on the horizon of the sea, behold the southern cross, with nails of burning gold! iv. the waves, the heavens, the soothing, bland sea air, the beauty and the life, within him stirred depths of delicious longing, sweet despair; and gazing landward till his vision blurred, he breathed farewell to her. but now was heard, passing along the lower deck and upper, a welcome call; and he went down to supper. 204 guy vernon. with excellent appetite, if one must know it, which at the long, well-lighted cabin table, crowded with hungry passengers, our poet was solacing as well as he was able, when, glancing round the clattering, chattering babel, he paused, aghast, a slice of tongue half swallowed, seeing the fate which, flying, he had followed! florinda! pale but lovely still; enrapt in the delicate discussion of cold chicken, and some engaging topic with the captain. just then, amid loud talk and teacups clicking, over the wing she happened to be picking she looked and there was lorne, quite dazed and pallid, staring at her across a dish of salad. he was a sort of picturesque adonis, with eyebrows of the true adonis curve; eyes all expression; brown hair waved upon his broad, graceful brow; fine nostrils, full of nerve; and something in the pure face that might serve to make you like what still you might condemn in it, and left him beautiful, but not effeminate. 205 guy vep~voz. their eyes met for a moment; and the lady's flashed on him, with a sudden dilatation, such grateful, radiant, sweet surprise as made his whole being tremble with deep agitation, gave his quick spirits a singular elation, and mantled his white forehead with a flush which deepened to a quite decided blush. she did not blush (men often blush, somehow, when women don't): those eyes divinely bright, beneath the beaming crescent of her brow, venus's glow beside diana's light (i trust my classic metaphors are right), shone lustrously upon him, while his gaze sank modestly before their melting rays. v. ere long she rose; and, pausing just to turn on poor lorne a parting look, away she swept. where, all the while (he marvelled), -where was vernon? sea-sick, perhaps, and so his room he kept. lorne's thoughts were flame: he sought the air, and stept up the steep stairs as light of heart and proud as if he had been climbing on a cloud. 206 guy vernoan. now in the night he found a deeper charm; and to and fro he passed with pensive pace, when, lo, florinda on the captain's arm! he knew her by her shape of perfect grace, then by the moonlit beauty of her face, and soft, low accents, as they passed him by, and found a seat beneath the open sky. they passedbut what was that his ears had heard? vernon not with her gone to his plantation! never before had simple, spoken word struck all his heartstrings into such vibration. but four months married, and a separation! and she so pale! could there have been a quarrel? he queried, with an interest quite immoral. now here were they, old lovers! for a minute he questioned his poor flattered conscience, whether the hand of providence might not be in it. that they should thus be voyaging together in the luxurious, lulling, lovely weather, just after he so virtuously had shunned her, appears indeed a matter of some wonder. 207 guy vernon. what was the voice that hurried him aboard, he deemed his better angel's? providence seems after all a sort of two-edged sword, now the direct, miraculous defence of piety and helpless innocence; then, suddenly reversed, it seems no less to shape the ways of sin and wickedness. could we but know when life's true light is given! are there attendant powers of good and evil, one influence, rightly deemed the will of heaven, and one which we -in phrase not quite so civil succinctly term temptation of the devil? and both so like! would some one, who has seen them, might teach us to discriminate between them! here, things are so astonishingly mixed, and morals still so little understood, it takes a saint indeed to choose betwixt the bad that's pleasant and the bitter good, always with perfect faith and certitude! evil, perhaps, being nothing more nor less than good in disproportion, or excess. 2o8 guy vernon.i impartial nature fosters and upholds them by the same equal laws, and it may be the same great brooding power of love enfolds them, with the vast patience of eternity! the beams of life are laid in harmony; in whose triumphal, everlasting glory discord shall be resolved. but to our story. vi. lorne meant to show a dignified reserve by walking at a cool, respectful distance; but towards florinda still his feet would swerve, drawn by a power beyond him, whose persistence found in him little and still less resistance, till, starting with the captain from their place, the lady met him almost face to face. pure accident, of course. she bowed quite slowly, as if her eyes might possibly deceive her. with proudly meek, magnificently lowly obeisance, under his uplifted beaver, he passed aside as if inclined to leave lher. regardless of his coldness or his scorn, she cried, "why, truly! it is robert lorne!" 14 209 guy vernaon. which he acknowledged, with another bend and civil show of passing. she detained him; and introduced the captain to her "friend;" and still with silvery eloquence enchained him, and with a charming petulance arraigned him for visiting the cuban capital without so much as giving her a call! "my husband would have been right glad to meet you! you came to cuba tell me when and how!" "excuse me," said the captain, -" let me seat you," placing a pair of camp-stools: -" i've just now some duties which will take me to the bow." and, seeing robert and florinda seated, that guileless instrument of fate retreated. they took their places mutely, without protest, and sat as if they had been carved in stone. for hearts estranged, as you perhaps have noticed, when brought together and thus left alone, cannot so easily resume the tone of light society, which often covers the aching wounds of parted friends and lovers. 2io guy veraon. he who from his late cuban trip had come back to the town to seek her in such haste, now in her presence sat constrained and dumb; and he who fondly many a time had placed a lover's arm about that lovely waist, was strangely now become, while sitting by her, a man of outward ice and inward fire. the lady was the first to speak, of course. "you hate me, robert! "accents quick and low. he answered in a voice repressed and hoarse: "what reason have i? "-" 0, you shunned me so! but, robert, there are things you do not know! can't we be friends? i need a friend! o rob! " here she was interrupted by a sob. then hardly could he master the impassioned, wild words that forced his lips: "have you forgot florinda!" but he checked himself, and fashioned in the firm moulds of prudent speech his thought, and told how he from first to last had sought her happiness: "and so," he vowed, "you still shall have my whole life's service, if you will." 211 g uy vernon. they talked; and words brought kind alleviation of pain to both, and in new friendship bound them; and the sweet sense of reconciliation diffused an atmosphere of bliss around them; till quite too soon the captain came and found them; and, happy in her late lost friend's recapture, florinda left him to his new-found rapture. vii. a golden shallop on the rim of ocean, the new moon poised, a slowly sinking crescent. with throbbing heart and steady heaving motion, strove the strong ship: the deep was phosphorescent, and on through fiery billows of liquescent, immingled meteors, rolling them asunder, she kept her course through all that night of wonder. o dear, inconstant seraph of repose! wing to the homes of woe thy downy flight; visit the couch of wretchedness, and close the aching sense that wearies of the night! but when immortal freshness and delight sail with the enraptured soul the glorious deep, what have we then to do with thee, 0 sleep? 212 guy vernon. remembering all her words, her looks, her sighs, lorne vowed: "i will not wrong her; heaven! i swear for her sake endless love and sacrifice! just to be near her, and to breathe the air she blesses with the fragrance of her hair, to shiver at the rustle of her dress,is more than other mortals' happiness!" he would not change his lot for any other. she need not love him: he would only ask to be a little dearer than a brother! no richer blessing, no diviner task, than to defend and comfort her, to bask a little in her presence, and so feed at those bright beams his heart's eternal need. love lights all men and women; and all things in youth and loveliness to love invoke us; and beauty is a burning-glass that brings the soft, diffusive sunshine to a focus, whose rays, it may be said, sometimes provoke us to kindle and consume with sweet desire, while yet the glass feels nothing of the fire. 2i3 g uy vernon. if she be cold, so much the worse for her! to be beloved is much; but far above all that the whole world's worship can confer of outward blessing, is the heart's own love, even that poor passion which adores a glove or lady's slipper, though one's apt to find small solace inh it, if she's too unkind. viii. of all the wonders i have heard or read of, in these centennial days and years of wonder,from this which tells us what the stars are made of, to that which over hemispheres and under the seas that hold the continents asunder speeds our swift thought, -of all, from first to latest, the mighty ocean steamship is the greatest. to favoring gales it opens snow-white wings, but takes all gales with laughter; it salutes strange lands and climates in its course, and brings to northern shores full-ripened tropic fruits; a titan, that to power and speed transmutes its daily ration of huge tons of coal, and seems almost to be endowed with soul. 214 guy verfinor. when i behold this little peopled world, large as an asteroid, in the nether blue, its flashing wheels, proud decks, and flags unfurled; then fancy that ancestral savage who first pushed from shore with paddle and canoe, i'm forced to the darwinian conclusion that here's a masterpiece of evolution. from the first skiff of sutured skins or bark to the three-decker with its thundering guns,from jason's classic junk, or noah's ark, to the grand steamship of five thousand tons, the thing developed: just as man was once well, not a monkey; that he never was but something less, evolved through nature's laws. allah il allah! great is evolution, and darwin eminently is its prophet! out of primeval chaos and confusion it massed the nebulous orb, and fashioned of it the sun and planets; one whereof it saw fit to finish off with most attractive features, and make the abode of curious living creatures. 215 guy veraon. all which i do most potently believe, taking large stock in natural selection. but, gentlemen, i cannot quite conceive since centuries of plotting and reflection have brought to pass the steamboat's last perfectionwhat power, without intelligence or plan, evolved the wonders of the world and man. not from without,'tis true, with toil and din, laboriously, the world was built or moulded: by its own law, divinely, from within, no doubt, the incubated egg unfolded to the fledged miracle we now behold it. is thought evolved? then thought, i dare affirm, impregnated the primal cosmic germ. your gospel is a worthy contribution, far as it goes; 1 thank you: yet i find, scanning the puppet-show of evolution, a vast unoutlined presence moves behind the wavering screen that hides the will and mind; and shows, according as you take your stand, more or less certain glimpses of a hand. 2i6 guy veknon. 217 ix. trailing far back upon the blue atlantic its smoky banner; through the warm gulf stream rolling its white wake; with the slow, gigantic one arm of its for-ever-beckoning beam; panting, with heart of fire and breath of steam, the strong ship keptas i set out to say its steady northward course day after day. the passengers, beneath the welcome shade of awnings over all the vessel spread, fanned by the sea-breeze which their own speed made, lounged half asleep, smoked, walked, and talked, and read, or watched the flocking gulls that came and fled,now circled close in quest of food, then fought, far back, about some morsel one had caught. two days of calmn; when all the sea seemed one vast fluctuating field of satin sheen, rolling and undulating in the sun, with evanescent gloss of gold and green no land at last, not even a sail was seen, nor any steadfast thing to rest the eyes on, within the circle of the sea's horizon. guy vernon. 217 guy vernon. the bird of love, in days so truly halcyon, upon the billows well might build her nest! and then the nights! when flashed the moon's bright falchion across old ocean's palpitating breast; when, watching, lingering later than the rest, our lover-friends, forgetting all prudential considerations, grew quite confidential. he, rapt, devoted, with no thought of wronging vernon or her: she, free from ill intent, needing the counsels of a friend, and longing for sympathy,if that be innocent, confessed the dreadful, sudden, sad event, which, falling so mysteriously, bereft her almost of reason when her husband left her. "we were so happy! i was just beginning to learn how dear he was! "lorne's spirits fell. "0, do you think i've any chance of winning his love again? "poor robert could not tell. "i've still one friend, thank heaven! "that pleased him well. "i've never seen a happy moment since, and never shall again! " which made him wince. 2i8 guy vernon. "what do you think what could have been the trouble?" revolving his conjectures, lorne let fall, " the bursting of a speculative bubble." "i shall be happy yet, if that is all, and he is left me! "somehow this was gall. " but oh, we never shall be reunited, i know! "at which the villain was delighted. " he may be i'm afraid.-" she hesitated: "that is, i hope, i trust it isn't true!" "some men get jealous," robert intimated. "jealous, i mean; and how absurd!of you. oh dear, we must not sit here as we do, and talk together! rob, it isn't right!" but still they talked together, day and night. and robert wished (as many on like occasion wish as devoutly) that the voyage might never on earth arrive at any termination, but to the havens of bliss fare on for ever! dreading the end, which all too soon would sever this highly satisfactory arrangement, and bring perhaps, with parting, fresh estrangement. 2i9 guy vernon. x. on the third morning something seemed the matter as lorne went on deck: the winds were piping madly; the ship was toiling somewhere off cape hatteras, breasting the waves and spray, and pitching badly; few faces seen, and those looked blue, and sadly dispirited: with the rising of the seas, the mercury'd sunk, some twenty-five degrees. the call to breakfast that sweet note of warning to hungry passengers was something few heard, and fewer still obeyed, that dismal morning. here with his steaks came staggering up a steward; thereas they gave a sudden lurch to leewarda pale wretch, crawling in with some ability, shot out again with singular agility. the dishes rattled and the coffee spilled, and over all, instead of general mirth, a ghastly gloom the dreary cabin filled: no ladies seen, the saddest thing on earth to lorne; who, losing heart, back to his berth groped wretchedly, at length, and laid himself quietly on that dormitory shelf. 220 guy vernon. of all things unromantic and accursed, to interrupt a pretty love affair, sea-sickness is the meanest and the worst! that is a woe devotion cannot share; nor can one be expected much to care whether the hungry heart shall feed or famish, when at each roll the stomach's growing qualmish. for six-and-thirty hours the gale continued, and some weak souls on board had fears of sinking; but still triumphantly the iron-sinewed, grim titan faced the billows without blinking. lorne kept his berth, and passed the time in thinking, in sending now and then to make inquiry for some one's health, and scribbling in his diary. five days from port, at midday, they made entry into manhattan bay: the wind was bracing, the storm had lulled, the skies were bleak and wintry, and strange appeared the leafless trees, the lacing of snows on roof and shore, so soon replacing, to eyes filled with the south, the glorious calms, the fruits and foliage of the land of palms. 221 guy vebrnon. the passengers, now muffled to the ears, watched the slow steamer gliding to the dock, the tugs, the lighters, and the ship-lined piers, the river ice in many a mottled block, and on a drifting mass the latest flock of gulls, just lighted, heading all one way, towards the cold wind that beat the ruffled bay. lorne lingered near florinda, dull and dreamy: " and so we part! " he said. " but not for long," she answered sweetly. "you will come and see me to-morrow soon i know you will be strong, and not do any thing that might seem wrong! when one has friends, one wishes to be near them; but folks will talk so,-'tis a shame to hear them! "i shall be watched now, quoted, and reported. i'd have my independence if i could! but, really, rob, a woman can't afford it, to have her motives all misunderstood! so now i'm sure you will be very good, and not extend your courtesies too far, but always seemwell, just the friend you are!" 222 guy ver.aon. lorne was not happy: outwardly heroical, he helped her to a coach: she smiled: he bowed; then, with despair at heart, stood stern and stoical amidst the beckoning, hauling, bawling crowd of hackmen (so unreasonably loud!) and watched the rattling vehicle that carried her back to her brooklyn home, where vernon married her. 223 part iii. the forsaken bride. i. oreseeing all her friends' immense astonishment, going to meet it with an equal dread, florinda gave her maid a strict admonishment just what to say, and what to leave unsaid, to questions soon to shower upon her head; for, first suspicions having proved unjust, the girl was granted all the greater trust. deep was the dear old aunt's amazement, meeting at the hall door the unexpected bride. then, having passed the first tumultuous greeting, "your husband, florie! where is he?" she cried, still more bewildered; while the niece replied, "some sudden and important information obliged him to return by his plantation." 1% guy vernon. "without his bride!" "why, aunt,'twas getting late'twas not thought best that i should risk my health. the owner of so splendid an estate of course is burdened with the cares of wealth. in politics he mixes too -by stealth; for he is quite above those sordid natures that fill our congresses and legislatures. "we came directly by the boat so pleasant! i missed my dearest husband, i confess, but-o dear aunt! who do you think was present among the passengers? you cannot guess! surely there's no one f expected less to see on board than mr. robert lorne! he treated me at first with downright scorn, "as if i'd really done him some great evil. . could not speak to him, and why should he seek an interview? but he at length grew civil, and sent his brandy-flask when i was sea-sick, (the lightest gale is certain to make me sick!) an offer which i couldn't well refuse, though brandy's something which i never use. 225 i 10 g uy vernoan. "we had two days of most distressing weather! i could have envied martyrs on the rack. i do not think i cared a pin's weight whether i lived or died! i'm so glad to get back! robert was kind, and helped us to a hack; of course i had to ask the man to call, or show him no civility at all." truth, every word; though it perhaps may strike the reader as too gingerly expressed. women and truth, i find, depend alike, for their effect, upon the way they're dressed. i like for both a simple garment best; but nothing can exceed a woman's tact in fancy-dressing both herself and fact. do not too hastily infer that woman is guilty of downright equivocation. it is not only feminine, but human, to modify by phrase and intonation truth's simple theme, till, through the variation sometimes embroidered on the homely air, you hardly guess what good old tune is there. 226 0 guy vernoan. ii. the bride, whose coming was a nine-days' wonder, received in brooklyn, where her court was held, so many callers that they fairly stunned her; not old friends only; but her train was swelled by more whom love of novelty impelled, and some who thought it worth their while to seek the charming mrs. vernon for their clique. with all the rest, but from a different motive, went lorne,and but a sad appearance made he. so have i seen a worshipper with votive offerings approach some altar of our lady, to find a crowd of tourists there already, airing their guide-books, venturing praise or stricture upon this sacred relic or that picture. the world soon wearies of a stale sensation; and as the swift weeks came and went without bringing guy vernon back from his plantation, people began to shake their heads, and doubt; till something of the secret had leaked out, one scarce knows how: a little, i'm afraid, came through the indiscretion of the maid. 227 g uy verznon. with robert lorne's, florinda's name was coupled in termns uncomplimentary to both. and so discreet society grew troubled: 'twas shocked, distressed: it pitied her;'twas loath to think what had been told it under oath! in short, it never, never could esteem her, after her shameful conduct on the steamer! "he followed her upon her wedding journey, and there in cuba showed her such devotion! vernon was out one day: on his return, he well, all i know is, there was an explosion! just what the man discovered, i've no notion; i only say, he left her in havana, and hurried off next day to louisiana, "cursing, no doubt, the hour when he was wedded!" which was not white and stainless truth, we know, but held some darker substances imbedded: just one of rumor's rolling balls of snow, that pick up sticks and rubbish as they go: the farther they are rolled, the more they gather and suburbs are the place for rubbish, rather. 228 guy vlnon. 229 this to florinda was a fearful trial, added to that which secretly she bore; for now no explanation, no denial, not truth itself, which might have served before, could kill reports, but only raise up more. in fine, her double-burden so unfitted her for life itself that you would quite have pitied her. a common scandal is a borrowed tool passing from hand to hand, yet never losing its edge by any ordinary rule, battered and blunted by severe abusing; but, like a cat's claw, it grows sharp with using; whose softer part wears faster from the friction, leaving the other keen, for your affliction. iii. no word from vernon; though she wrote and pleaded until that rascal, saturn, must have laughed! her love and grief remained alike unheeded: but as each month came round, a princely draft shot at her heart its cruel golden shaft; and in the very thickest of the slander there came a note from "samuel alexander." guy vierayoat 229 guy verinon. for so the varlet signed himself; and truly, a singular performance was this letter! he begged to say that mr. v. was duly regretful that he must remain her debtor for correspondence until he was better: he had been slightly ill of late; beside, he was just then extremely occupied. " the business which has brought us here" (i quote from saturn's postscript) "is not yet quite ended." again, iii postscript number two, he wrote: " be easy, madam; he is well attended, and, every thing considered, doing splendid! please, madam, do not write again, but wait." the missive, i should mention, bore no date. 'twas a distressing riddle: heart and brain were racked and puzzled by it many a day. "he must be ill! "-but that did not explain his parting from her in that cruel way, his long, mysterious silence, and delay on that strange business,too much occupied to write one line to his forsaken bride! 0 230 guy veraion. from her good aunt she got but little solace, a woman of confirmed opinions, blest with little patience for a young girl's follies; who doubted not her niece had lost the best, most generous, most devoted, handsomest of husbands, through her own infatuation;but deemed the monthly draft a consolation. friends do not like to own that ever any advice of theirs in any way was bad. so in florinda's circle there were many who, though the sequel to the match was sad, blamed her for all the ill success it had; while others would not willingly admit that ever they approved or counselled it. the world, it may be said, dropped her acquaintance; but there were those who could not keep away, who came to witness suffering and repentance, to talk the matter over every day, to know just how she felt, what she would say: so she had more than one friend who stuck by her, though something in the fashion of a brier. 23i guy vernon. iv. for lorne the starry skies of love had brightened when her full-mooned renown began to wane; but soon the cloud of ill report had frightened both back to their discreet reserve again. hardly could he that stormy heart restrain, which sometimes drove him now as if a very demon possessed himdown to brooklyn ferry! it was his own imprudence that involved her in this vile coil,he thought with penitence. how tenderly his own great love absolved her of every fault but that sweet confidence which proved tohim her very innocence! he burned to be her champion,but forbore, knowing that he could only harm her more. he plunged in work: his southern notes he winnowed; and, much as he a mean deception spurned, in corresponding with the press, continued to date from countries whence he had returned, if he indeed had seen them; and so learned the artimaginative and dramaticof writing foreign letters from an attic. 232 g uy vernovn. his friends averred that he could never gain a handsome independence by his pen, and marvelled why such genius should remain a beggar in a barren garret, when he might, like many far less able men, become a lawyer, or a politician, and strike for office, fortune, and position. v. his lodging overlooked, in the metropolis, a narrow business street, not over nice, but unromantically over-populous; where, much against the aforesaid friends' advice, he kept on writing at a moderate price, pieces pathetic, picturesque, or funny, which gained for him much credit, and some money. one april afternoon, as he sat writing, buried in books and papers to the chin, where the high luthern window let the light in, a hand scarce heard above the incessant din of the loud street tapped at his door. "come in!" he shouted out, in tones not over-civil, expecting no one but the printer's devil. 233 guy vernon. then, too intently occupied to stop, he still studying an unfinished period over his shoulder reached a roll of copy, giving a little sidelong careless nod; but thought the fellow's movements rather odd,turned slowly,gazed,and just escaped capsizing his loaded table in his hasty rising. he stands and stammers, so confused and vexed is he at his own awkward blunder; but, o heaven! what sudden joy, what thrilling, boundless ecstasy, o, when from a woman's veil one glance is given, and, like a panting fawn to covert driven, pale, with a look of exquisite concern on her fair, sweet face, beholdflorinda vernon! vi. he sprang to meet her, eager hands outreaching to clasp, to bless her; but as he came near, she started from him with a strange, beseeching, wild look, in which there was a mingled fear. " o rob," she cried, "i'm crazy to be here! what would they now say if they only knew it! i can'tmyself conceive what made me do it! 234 guy vernon. "i know you'11 think me dreadfully immodest! o rob! it isn't a mere girlish freak!" but here she paused, being so tightly bodiced, and out of breath from climbing stairs, and weak from agitation, that she could not speak; when seeing her grow faint and gasp for air, he thought at last to offer her a chair. her maid, in his place, would have guessed the matter, have found her corset, and at once unlaced it. but rob could only stand there staring at her, and bring some sherry, begging her to taste it; which she but touched, then on the table placed it; and, having now recovered from her falntness, looked up at him and smiled with charming quaintness. "this is a scene! i'm horribly ashamed! you must not blame me! "quickly growing serious. "i'm stifled! 0 dear! robert," she exclaimed, "i've come on business something quite imperious;" and, lest the lady's interlude should weary us, we'11 simply add that, while he sprang to get her some sort of fan, she pulled out saturn's letter. 235 guy veranon. she'talked to him about it while he read it, fanning herself incessantly, and weeping; told him of all she suffered, all she dreaded: the mystery haunted her awake or sleeping; and, 0, it never could be solved! then, leaping to a most sudden, woman-like conclusion, she begged, entreated him for a solution. vii. "well, looking at it in a business way," said lorne, " as if i now first heard the tale, and did not know the parties,i should say guy vernon was a felon, out on bail; i think he's now convicted, and in jail. summoned to trial under his indictment that's what his strange despair and sudden flight meant, " when he had hoped to quash it, all the time." " o rob, you do not think so! ""well, why not? it may have been sone gentlemanly crime a duel, and his adversary shot ' the southern blood, you know, is quick and hot." "no, no!" she cried, "that's not like him! the duellist is of all men, i've heard him say, the cruelest! 236 guy vepnon. 237 "he hates the code! although at first i feared that he was challenged, and was going to fight. but, grant it all, the mystery is not cleared: why treat me so? and why could he not write one letter, even in jail?" says rob, "you're right." and, on examination, thus they found, that theory was not altogether sound. "there is," said lorne, "one other explanation but that, i know, you will not like to hear. and yet," he said, with painful hesitation, "no other seems to make the matter clear. suppose he had been summoned to appear and meet a different trial in his life? i mean, your husband has another wife." this she opposed with vehement persistency. "o rob, it is a monstrous thought! 0 no! and yet," she said, with feminine consistency, "he must have had another wife, i know, for nothing else could separate us so! i did not think my husband was so bad! say something, robert, or i shall go mad!" 237' guy verpnon. guy vernon. " my dear!" cries lorne, "'twas only a suggestion!" and yet the theory seemed not wholly wrong: it answered, too, the old provoking question, what kept our beau a bachelor so long? "the wretch," she sobbed, "was married all along! he may have had a dozen wives beside, and may be finding now another bride! "and i am not his wife at all! " lorne trembled at all these wildly uttered words implied: her hand was tree, then! but his soul dissembled its secret joy; while he sincerely tried to think but of her grief. "why now," he cried, "you're driving my conjecture quite too far: 'tis only in romnance that such things are. " vernon is not a murderer, nor a forger, nor jealous fool, as far as we can know; nor bluebeard, looking for more wives to torture; nor bankruptas the drafts they send you show; nor varlet's tool and victim: far below our present knowledge and my comprehension the mystery lurks, and baffles my invention!" 238 guy vernon 239 "you do not think," she said, "he is a gambler, that saturn aids him in that horrid vice? or is he.just a wanton, reckless rambler? never did i discover card or dice! o rob," she pleaded, "give me some advice! pity my wretched, my forlorn condition!" and so, at last, he made this proposition: "i have a correspondent, george lazell, a classmate and old crony, studying law there in new orleans: i have known him well: one of the quickest wits you ever saw to prove a question or to pick a flaw. i've not the slightest doubt he can unravel this riddle, with a little time and travel. "with your consent, i'11 put him in possession " florinda shuddered " of the whole affair, and leave its management to his discretion, which can be trusted: give him but a hair, and he will track the mystery to its lair,work up the case, and leave no point neglected, to keep your action in it unsuspected." guy vernon. 239 g uy vera"on. she first approved the plan, then straight repented: it would not do-she dared not!'twas not right!then, after many doubts and sighs, consented, and hurried home, rob promising to write the letter to his friend that very night; but she next morning sent a note to say it must not go when it was on its way. viii. ah, then, for her what days of expectation, of curiosity akin to fear; of baffled hope, and causeless trepidation at sound or sight! -a voice she chanced to hear, perhaps the liveried footman drawing near, who came like fate, and idly went his way, leaving a desolate and empty day. the weeks went by and brought no revelation, and letters came she did not care to read. but now she had one secret consolation, and, 0, what harm, if in her heart's great need she sometimes went to him? what harm indeed, but that imprudence is the door to sin, and one small fault may let large vices in. 240 guy vera7on. to tempted souls there is delight in danger, and then the provocation seems complete, when marriage, like a mastiff in the manger, but guards the morsel which it may not eat, and love and daring find that morsel sweet! don't blame your wife too miuch, sir; but consider, perhaps your coldness or neglect undid her. a little pressure of the hand, returning another's pressure; eyebeams free as air; the lonely heart's unutterable yearning, all this even innocence itself may share: and then a kiss is but a kiss beware! it is a little mouse that gnaws the net around a mighty lion: guard him yet! the world is full of pining hearts mismated, and still they will rmismate, and still will pine. is thy sweet hunger never to be sated, o love? but duty also is divine; and passion finds a poison in the wine, in secret, at a stolen banquet poured, when holy conscience blesses not the board. i6 241 guy veranon. on every side conflicting voices call; and we must reconcile as best we can the rights of each and the great good of all, the claims of nature and the laws of man, the problem since society began! o troubled soul! be tender, wise, and true, and'tis beginning to be solved for you. 242 part iv. the lost bridegroom. i. eanwhile lazell accepted the commission; though it was long before he could report. he moved with all the caution and precision of any practised diplomat at court, or strategist advancing on a fort; and'twas no fault of his if something less was compassed than unqualified success. all lorne could tell him of the strange event, or he himself could learn at guy's plantation, or at the bank from which the drafts were sent, or elsewhere, bearing on the situation, was added carefully to his equation, when, by no common difficulties daunted, he essayed to cipher out the unknown quantity. guy verivon. ii. he wrote to lorne of every thing, confessing " it makes me, rob, exceedingly dejected, to find that here's a riddle there's no guessing from all the facts so carefully collected. the man is known, and everywhere respected; if a great villain, he must be a rare actor, still to preserve so excellent a character. " here in the city, and at his estate, his friends, when questioned, commonly replied, 'we haven't seen nor heard from him, of late; but he was here last winter with his bride.' if he's here now, why, then, we must decide, be what he may, whatever else he lacks, he has the art of covering up his tracks. "i don't believe he's in these parts at all! i'm wrong, no doubt you think: perhaps i am: for his man alexander,whom they call 'big sandy' here, or sometimes'dandy sam,' that gorgeous graft upon the stock of ham, has been at v.'s plantation, and in town; though i could not contrive to hunt him down. 244 guy verzvon. "i followed that embodied will-o'-wisp from place to place,in hopes to overhaul a waistcoat and the waxed ends of a crisp, pointed mustache: the trail was now so small, i vowed that he, too, was not here at all; then i could swear -so great the rumor grew of him, and he was here and there sothere were two of him! "'twas now a flying visit to the bank on vernon's business,if indeed it be not more his own than vernon's: to be frank, i've not the slightest doubt but it is he who sends the monthly draft to mrs. v. in vernon's name there is a large deposit, but'tis this dandy sam who always draws it. "when i rushed in to catch him there, i learned that he was up the river, on the estate; and though i had but recently returned from reconnoitring thereabouts, with great celerity and caution back there straight i sped, to pounce upon him like a cougarpretending always to be buying sugar. 245 i guy vernon. "it seemed as if some magic must have aided to screen a fellow of so great renown, for he had vanished, somehow separated, and gone, part up the river, and part down, half to the northward, and half back to town: so said two sets of persons who had seen him, and it was just my luck to pounce between him. "v.'s is the best plantation in the parish, perhaps the very finest in the state; the mansion, truly elegant, not garish; yet vernon never stays there long of late; and sam -an object of especial hate to every one, from cuff to overseer comes only now and then to domineer. "the people say that vernon's with his wife somewhere up north,the general opinion. i've learned from them a little of his life: he is by birth and breeding a virginian, vvho emigrated from the old dominion twelve years ago -if that be emigration, to take possession of an old plantation. 246 guy vernon. "of the virginia servants two alone, sam and an aged negress, now remain; the latter very deaf: her wits have flown back to the deepening twilight of her brain, so that, i find, there is not much to gain by sounding that dim cave, to bring the bats zizzagging aimlessly around our hats. "yet some things this old creature has let fall to others, which, whatever they may mean, are worth perhaps the trouble to recall: how vernon's mother perished of some keen heart-piercing anguish; and how she has seen the father, ghastly pale, perspiring clammily over some fearful secret in the family. "whether that secret be the same as this which we would fathom, can but be suspected: for secret most assuredly there is, and with it sam is certainly connected; * whose will has so mysteriously subjected his master's, that you hear it said, he runs vernon and his plantation both at once. 247 guy vernoan. "this is by no means mr. vernon's first mysterious disappearance, as i find; though, on his wife's account, it seems the worst and strangest case of absence of the kind. suddenly he or sam makes up his mind, and, presto! like the slipperiest of debtors, he's off, beyond the reach of friends or letters. "so said, at least, my friend the overseer; declaring in half-earnest, grisly fun, 'twas his conviction, that for many a year vernon at stated intervals has done some private business with the evil one, which claims, in spite of friendship or the ladies, his personal attention down in hades!" thus wrote to robert lorne the young attorney, to whom the curious case had been confided; adding, "without another, longer journey, i fear the question cannot be decided. you may no doubt accomplish more than i did, and gain some knowledge, or obtain some trace, of vernon, on the old virginia place." 248 guy vei?non. 249 iii. this letter, which had been so long awaited, caused in the wife an easy transformation: the fever-pulse of hope and fear abated; and with the lapse of high-wrought expectation, there came a sudden, dangerous relaxation of those firm principles which hitherto had kept her, through all perils, pure and true. now all her sinking, unsupported heart reached out for love, -trembling and insecure. and so one day she dressed herself to start upon a fashionable shopping-tour, which one might safely prophesy -was sure to have a rather un-aristocratic, impulsive ending, in a young man's attic. a coach was called; and soon a coach caine dinning its music in her ears; and, pondering more the journey's joyous end than its beginning, she hurried forth; but stopped, aghast, before some legs in the just-opened carriage-door, which to her startled gaze so much resembled a missing pair, that she stood still and trembled. guy vernon. 249 guy vern'on. "florinda!" said a voice; and some one, rising, peered out then even the sky turned black above her! as well it might: what could be more surprising to the young wife, just going to meet her lover, than thus inopportunely to discover a terrible reminder of her marriage, in her own husband stepping from a carriage! iv. fainting is commonplace, even in romances; so let us say that, after some disorder, when she was lying on a lounge, and nancy's care and cologne had partially restored her, she heard a voice which tenderly implored her to calm herself; and, opening her eyes, found that it was indeed her dear, lost guy's! she sat right up and stared him in the face, half-doubtful if she really were beholding her husband or a spectre in his place, and half inclined to give him a good scolding; then pulled-away the hand which he was holding, and dropped some passionate tears; but, for a miracle, was neither sentimental nor hysterical. 250 guy vernon. "our sudden meeting has quite overcome you! you blame me! but you do not know how strong was the necessity which kept me from you. although my absence has been strange and long, i've done no needless or intended wrong, believe me, love!" -a bit of an oration, too evidently studied for the occasion. even honest men, with something to conceal, not. daring quite to trust the impetuous heart to speak directly what they deeply feel, are sometimes tempted to prepare the part which they are called to act, and at the start put on the spirit so to speak a manacle, which makes their words seem formal and mechanical. 'twas thus with vernon, if i err not greatly: his tongue was frigid, while his heart was torrid. and when she saw him, elegant and stately, with calm locks brushed across his bald white fore head, still slightly corpulent and somewhat florid, in health, addressing her with all the awful ease of some well-combed and courtly mephistopheles, 25 i guy vernon. as if the past were no such dreadful load, she looked at him amazed, and almost frightened, (forgetting quite the little episode by which for her the burden had been lightened,) and felt the horror of the mystery heightened, but neither made complaint nor exclamationonly her eyes demanding explanation. v. "you were not looking for me in the coach? you did not get my letter, then!" she darted at him a look of terrible reproach: "never," she cried, and now the deep sobs started, "never a line from you since last we parted! little i dreamed when, yielding my consent, i signed that dreadful paper 1 what it meant!" just then the maid, a letter in her hand (she had been listening at the door until that instant), entered: " this was on the stand; it must have come just now when you were ill." florinda took it, but without a thrill: the flowers of hope, which we too long await, may lose their bloom and come at last too late! i by the cuban passport system quite too strict in some points, but perhaps not in thisthe husband who has lately taken his wife into the. 252 guy ver pon. post-marked new orleans, july twenty-third; the date conspicuously a fortnight older; written in guy's fair hand (but not a word to show where it was penned), the letter told her how fondly he looked forward to behold her, and prove his heart's devotion soon once more,their trials passed, and happier days in store. this missive, which she read through flashing tears, after its meagre contents were made out she tossed to guy, who colored to the ears, comparing date and postmark: he no doubt (she thought) had mailed it in some roundabout, strange way, that his retreat might not be traced, and afterwards outrun it in his haste. then suddenly the sense of her great wrong possessed her; andto make the story briefshe sobbed so strongly, and she sobbed so long, it seemed her soul could never find relief to its wild, inextinguishable grief, which sighs but fanned, and tears in vain might drench, like that greek fire which water will not quench. island cannot obtain his permit to leave without her, unless he first exhibits at the bureau her written consent. probably this is what florinda alludes to. 253 i i guy vernon. vi. "florinda!" said guy vernon, very grave, when she could hear him,studying now no more what he should say, or how he should behave, "there's something which i should have said before and would to heaven that it might now restore our former happiness and dear repose, lost through no weakness of my heart, heaven knows! "when first i sawand loved you i believed a certain crisis in my life was passed. deceiving you, i was myself deceived, trusting the last misfortune was the last: and still i held that fond delusion fast, and would not think what shadow of strange fate lay on my life, until it was too late! "all unprepared, you justly were offended, and filled, i know, with needless pain and dread. now once again i think my troubles ended, and laid forever with the silent dead. still let me say what then i should have said; and guard the future, if in spite of all precautions, evil should again befall." 254 guy vernon. his trembling fingers for a moment flitted across his brow; and mind and frame were shaken; till, half-forgetting her own wrongs, she pitied his greater woe, and felt her love rewaken. " 0, why was i so cruelly forsaken? left, a weak woman, in a land of strangers, exposed "she thought of robert " to such dangers! "but that all that is now beyond recall. you too have sufferedo for what, from whom? all is forgiven, if you will tell me all!" he turned away, and rose, and walked the room, upon his front a thunder-cloud of gloom, and a portentous trouble in his eye; then paused, with downcast looks, and made reply. "the cause," he faltered, "never can be told; we must not talk of that!" florinda felt her heart grow suddenly all stony-cold, which love and pity had begun to melt. "it was a dark necessity which dealt so sternly with us both: should you outlive me, you may know all, and then you will forgive me." 255 i guy veino.v. he sank upon a chair, and once more covered his changing visage, now convulsed and wan, where something of the awful anguish hovered, which art has fixed immovably upon the deathless marble of laoco6n. alarmed she turned, appearing not to heed it; and, after a brief struggle, he proceeded. "ask not the cause; but should there come a time, when i once more may be compelled to leave you, account not my necessity a crime; nor deem that i would willingly deceive you; nor let my going, nor my silence, grieve you; but bear my absencewhich can never be so sad to you as terrible to me! "that such a time may never come again, i do devoutly hope! but it is just that you should know; then if it comeso then " he lifted wide, imploring eyes "you must you will support me with your love and trust! let me, unquestioned, go and come at will: for only so can we be happy still!" 256 guy verinoa2. vii. so earnest was he, and so well she knew it would be vain and cruel to prolong the pain of that unhappy interview, that, though her curiosity was strong, and deep the old resentful sense of wrong, two things with which the unregenerate heart is apt to find it rather hard to part;and though not much a heroine, she rose heroically to the situation, and, prudently forbearing to oppose profitless question or expostulation 'to these hard terms of reconciliation, bowed her proud will, as do the wise,or just as you and i do, when we find we must. she yielded, and immediately repented, foreseeing endless mystery, doubt, and slander. nor can i say that she was quite contented, when vernon told her, with surprising candor, "for your sake, i have banished alexander; though, to relieve my mind of many cares, i still must let him manage my affairs." i7 257 g uy vernon. which somehow did not please her altogether. but now the maid approached once more, to say the coachman at the door demanded whether she wished the carriage ordered, still to stay. "why, no! " she answered; "send the man away." while sundry recollections rushing over her, with quick, confusing blushes seemed to cover her. ah, well her reiiwakened soul might shrink from the great peril that so late impended! she shuddered at herself; and feared to think how differently the morning might have ended, if all had happened as she first intended; what misery and remorse might now await her, had vernon but arrived a minute later. so slight a finger-post of circumstance may turn one's fate! but to the soul, the savor of virtue saved, though saved by seeming chance, and though it have a certain homely flavor, is sweet to taste, and sweeter grows forever! while sin, so pleasant in the hour's swift haste, is biting-bitter to the after-taste. 258 guy vernon. she felt the joy of rescued rectitude; and from the rankling cinders of regret rose heavenward the pure flame of gratitude for her deliverance; making her forget what unseen woe might walk beside her yet: her husband she regarded as her savior from her own wayward heart and weak behavior. the long-lost bridegroom's cloudy brow soon cleared, and even florinda found new hope and peace in their reunion. then the aunt appeared, flushed from the street, asthmatic and obese, and welcomed home the husband of her niece, with rapture: nothing could exceed the dear aunt's surprise and pleasure at his reappearance. viii. public opinion, having had satiety of adverse gossip, now began to waver. vernon had come! and once more good society inclined to take florinda into favor. those who had wronged her graciously forgave her, and, having spread the scandal, or received it, loudly declared that they had not believed it. 259 guy vernon.' vernon's return had virtually acquitted her of every fault, those wary ones reflected. so, having wounded, they came round and pitied her; and it was vernon's turn to be suspected a man who had so shamefully neglected that sadly injured and long-suffering one,as it appeared, for nothing she had done. but women and the world condone in men what they condemn in women without charity. and so when vernon blossomed out again, a fashion-flower of such distinguished rarity, after his recent slight irregularity of conduct, he was marvelled at, admired, gossiped about, and all the more desired. if men have manners, never mind their morals! and do not make too close investigation into the intrigues and domestic quarrels of such as hold high cards of wealth and station: why pass with scorn, or view with indignation, or any thing so impolite as passion, a gentleman of fortune, or of fashion? 260 gu'y vernoa. society is full of politic, smooth people, courteous, shunning all dissension, who, should they find even judas in their clique, well-dressed, would treat him with polite attention, and hardly think it worth the while to mention that most unfortunate misunderstanding he is reported to have had a hand in. behind this stucco of the world's politeness, i find some moral framework not amiss, to give the social fabric strength and lightness. the sculptured forms of strong, fair courtesies uphold while they adorn the edifice; like caryatides, whose true intent is strength and grace, -support and ornament. 26i part v. husband and lover. i. i do not say that guy was to be sorted with wretches guilty of some heinous treason; only that he was quite absurdly courted to his annoyance: partly for which reason he hurried to the mountains for a season, with mrs. vernon,to piece on a truer and happier ending to their bridal tour; happier no doubt it was; and yet not wholly happy for either. vernon was oppressed by a persistent, gentle melancholy: it seemed as if the world within his breast were, like the peaceful world without, possessed by the sad spirit of the early fall, which in a pensive haze enveloped all. guy veraron2. florinda's heart still suffered from the sense of hidden wrong,a constant, slow corroding; seeking for sympathy and confidence, she met the shadow of a vague foreboding; and felt, beside, the ceaseless, secret goading of her own conscience, and the thought of lorne, deep in her heart an ever-present thorn. moreover, she this startling fact discovered, saturn was never very far away! wherever they might be, around them hovered the banished varlet, like a bird of prey. he came on business; but he seemed to stay for pleasure; and she knew that guy conferred in secresy with that forbidden bird. which state of things she could at last endure no longer. "i entreat you, dear," she cried, "take back the man you need him, i am sure for my sake! i shall not be satisfied until you do." but vernon smiled and sighed. "i do not need him very much, i find, save now and then. but you are very kind." 263 guy vern'on. her pent-up passion now began to surge within her, overleaping all discretion; and pain and penitence combined to urge her desperately on to make confession of her first fault and subsequent transgression, in the wild hope that he might make as ample a revelation, following her example. ii. beside a torrent, on a great gray boulder, they rested, in a little paradise of wood and stream: her hand was on his shoulder; and full on him she turned her troubled eyes, deep as the pools, reflecting deep blue skies, that trembled near them, fringed by the long lashes of curved birch boughs and overleaning ashes. "0, will you let me speak? i cannot bear this coldness and reserve! "-a quick flush came into his cheek. " dear, if we cannot share each other's sorrows, even each other's shame, i feel that we are married but in name, and all our hopes of happiness must fail!" the quick flush vanished, and his cheek grew pale. 264 guy vernon. her loosened scarf was trailing in the current, fallen from her arm unheeded. wildly blended with the tumultuous voices of the torrent, thrillingly eloquent her own ascended the gamut of strong passion, till she ended with accusation of herself, and spoke of lorne, when sobs convulsed her, and it broke. iii. thereupon vernon, who sat strangely pallid, finding her theme was not just what he feared, though leading towards that danger, quickly rallied, and (miracle of married men!) appeared quite unaccountably relieved and cheered, as if her fault gave life an added flavor, and she had really rendered him a favor. she recommenced her story; but before she could make full confession, he broke in: "you will but give me pain by telling more! whatever your imprudence may have been, i know you have been guilty of no sin. yol may have erred in wisdom, not in virtue; that is yourself, and never could desert you." 265 guy vernon. she tried to speak, but still he would not hear her. "there's no true marriage without trust! " said he. "my perfect faith in you is as a mirror, in which your white unsullied soul i see. if you but have the same high trust in me,which'tis my life's endeavor to deserve,we shall not feel this coldness and reserve. "obedience to this law alone secures true wedded bliss.this robert i must know, and he shall be my friend, as he is yours. and like this mountain stream our life shall flow, as bright and happy "here she quite let go the scarf her hand unconsciously was trailing, which off upon the whirling stream went sailing. away it floated, light as any feather; and he, before the waves could wholly wet it, reckless alike of health and patent leather, with a resounding splash, jumped in to get it; less like a husband who might well have let it await some prudent action, than a lover, who for a glove would have gone in all over. 266 guy vernon. the conversation, which was interrupted, was not resumed; and vernon did not learn how far florinda's heart had been corrupted; nor did he show thereat the least concern or after-thought; save that, on their return from travel, he reminded her to send some sort. of invitation to her friend. iv. a fine surprise, meanwhile -which we must mention awaited her; and happily expressed the tender husband's delicate attention, not only to her worldly interest, but to her lightest fancies, known or guessed. out driving, they drew up before a brown stone front, one day, on their return to town; and with a princeliness that had no precedence even in his princely conduct, vernon there presented her a charming city residence, finished and furnished with the greatest care, and filled with objects elegant and rare; all in accordance with her utmost wishes, even to the monogram upon the dishes. 267 guy vernvon. "all's yours:" he put a package in her hand: "'these are insurance papers and the deed." " 0, now," she said, " i think i understand!" seeing just then, with eyes too dim to read, from the back stairs a swarthy face recede, with points to its mustaches, and a pattern of necktie that reminded her of saturn. it was a jewel of a house; in short, the very place where one might hope to drown memories and cares of an uncanny sort, and set one's self serenely to live down evil reports about one in the town,an easy matter in a neat, brown-stone, luxurious little mansion of one's own. fair fortune is a magic cloak, which renders invisible the foibles of the wearer; and like a lovely setting, outward splendors to dazzled eyes make what is fair seem fairer; while loads of wealth no more exalt the bearer unskilled in its fine uses, than the pack of costly goods upon an ass's back. 268 guy ver~non. the vernons were not of this vulgar class; but polished ease and elegance of place seemed native to them, as the lakelet's glass to the swan's form and duplicated grace. to their grand house thronged flattery and grimace; and it became the favorite resort of a small circle of the better sort. v. of these was lorne, who nobly had subdued his heart meanwhile to sweet self-sacrifice and aspiration for his lady's good; so that he now appeared to casual eyes no more florinda's friend than he was guy's. blessed, if not happy, in a book of songs he forged his fancies and forgot his wrongs. he always saw the husband with the wife; and him he studied with a most devout desire to solve the mystery of his life; but found not even a thread to ravel out. he went but seldom,wisely i've no doubt; though vernon always met him with a glow of welcome which florinda did not show. 269 guy vernon. and was she happy? well, at least she seemed so, and that was something: often we care less for really being so, than being deemed so, and better bear the loss of happiness than the world's comment on our ill success: rather will pride relinquish every vestige of honest substance, than the phantom, prestige. still something of this pride survived in her, in spite of suffering and humiliation; and served to mould and finish, as it were, that placid mien and perfect modulation of smile and speech, that so became her station, and masked in manners exquisitely charming, none guessed what thoughts distressful or alarming. her fame was fair, her beauty shone full-orbed, 'mid diamond stars and luminous clouds of shawls and laces: time and thought seemed all absorbed in dressing and undressing, making calls, in dinners, drives, receptions, operas, balls; to cope with which, in all their gay confusion, argues, if not great sense, some constitution. 270 guy verpnovn. vernon was ever ready to escort her in all these rounds of fashionable folly, in nothing would her loving husband thwart her, although he had not yet recovered wholly from his late, strange, autumnal melancholy: far from attempting selfishly to stay it, he joined with her in the giddy whirl of gayety. vi. a truer solace in the mind's resources lorne had meanwhile. there is a correlation of spiritual as of material forces: the passions which we waste in dissipation, swayed by the soul are tides of inspiration; and the same power that devastates the bosom with tempests, reappears in bud and blossom. to reach somehow the good all men aspire; but in our ignorance and impatience, we encounter countless ills; and find that fire, which comforts, also will consume. ah me! how beautiful some broken lives might be, did only mild and sane desires attend us, and not the overpowering and tremendous! 27i g uy vernon. while love, debased, is like the prophet's rod, which changed into a serpent on the ground, exalted,'t is the noblest gift of god, by beams of potent influence ring'd around. with something of this glory lorne was crowned, which rayed a subtle light into his look, and played about the pages of his book. all things he saw as symbols, in a splendor of beauty and bright meanings not their own. there walked with him a presence sweet and tender, by an unwonted light and joy made known, so that when loneliest he was least alone; tasting that ecstasy, or something near it, which saints have in the presence of the spirit. it seemed as if the staid old universe, moved by a more than orphean inspiration, did reel and dance into his joyous verse;. and it were all the business of creation to masquerade to his imagination, in fleeting shapes, through whose thin veils he saw the gray old verities of life and law. 272 guy vernoa.2 where is the key to this divine condition? what is the flame that, touching brow and lips, confers the poet's power of speech and vision? or leaves him in mysterious, dull eclipse, when neither toil nor prayer, nor all the whips and scourges of the conscience and the will, can bring again the vision and the thrill! in solitude, or in the busy street, almost without his choice or his endeavor, his songs sung to him, and he found them sweet, so sweet and varied, that it seemed they never might cease again, but so sing on forever! a possibility which looms appalling, in some who have the choice and not the calling. strange seemed sometimes the sound of his own name, an echo of some far-off memory! but from florinda now a summons came, that broke this bubble of bright ecstasy. "for my sake, for my husband's, come to me!" she wrote, or words of like portentous presage; and off went lorne, obedient to the message. i?, 273 guy vernon. vii. as he was hasting down broadway, before the entrance to a showy lodging-house he spied a coach, into whose open door with most dejected mien and haggard brows stepped vernon; while with deprecating bows a gay mulatto gently pressed him through, then quickly followed, and the door clapped to. "saturn, by heaven! "thought rob, as off they sped. it happened in a moment; but this chance to the astonished lorne interpreted florinda's business with him in advance; for it had taken but a passing glance to see in vernon's singular appearance something that called for friendly interference. he hurried to the house. he had not seen her for many days, and was dismayed to find how changed she was in feature and demeanor, frantic in action and half-crazed in mind; for, meeting him, she left her mask behind; and flung herself before him with a cry, grief in her speech and frenzy in her eye. 274 guy vera'on. viii. " o rob!" she cried, "i have no friend but you! and you must help me -for no other can!" "i know," he said: "he's gone! what can i do?" "oh! if you could have seen him when he ran shrieking away -' 0 save me from that man!' but it was sadder still to see him cower and yield,when saturn had him in his power, "and coldly thrust me off, and hear him say he went of his own will! it is not so! that dreadful man has taken him away for his own selfish ends -which i will know! if ever you would serve me, robert, go! follow that fiend, before it is too late, and save my husband from some horrid fate!" lorne tells what he has seen: yet small the hope that ever he can get on saturn's trace: and how can one like him expect to cope with a great villain of such crafty ways? still, eager to assist her, he obeys; receives her blessing in their brief adieux, and money, which he cannot well refuse. 275 guy veranon. no sooner left alone than, recollecting what guy before had told her of his going, which was not to be questioned; and reflecting how much more fatal sometimes is the knowing of hidden things than all the evil growing out of the things themselves while they are hidden; and what a thankless errand she had bidden her friend perform,she wished to call him back; but quieted her conscience with the thought that he could hardly get upon their track, that they who had so many times been sought vainly by others, were not to be caught. then in a strong revulsion of distress, clasping wild hands, she prayed for his success. 276 part vi. saturn. i. orne undertook the business with a zeal and promptness hardly to have been expected. the lodging-house had little to reveal, and yet one clew that saturn had neglected showed where his baggage went, and where he checked it for a swift western train that afternoon, which lorne, this point decided, followed soon. and now commenced the rather curious chase of the escaping husband by the lover. 'mid crossing trains lorne often lost the trace whereby he hoped to hunt the pair to cover, which happy chances helped him to recover,a friendly clerk or baggageman, somewhere, remembering saturn's face and foppish air. guy ver'non. at last he seemed to lose it altogether upon the mississippi; where he stayed his course at memphis, undecided whether he should go back or forward. here he strayed one afternoon along the esplanade and high bluff of the river-fronting town, to watch the boats and see the sun go down. the lyric fit had left him; but the sight of the strong river sweeping vast and slow, gleaming far off, a flood of crimson light; and, darkly hung between it and the glow of a most lovely sunset sky, the low, interminable forests of arkansas, might have inspired some very pretty stanzas. the esplanade looks down upon the landing, a broadly shelving bank, well-trodden and bare, called by a singular misunderstanding the levee, while there is no levee there; the famous landing at new orleans, where there is one, having fixed the name forever for that and other landings on the river. 278 guy verinoni. acres of merchandise, of cotton-bales, and bales of hay, awaiting transportation; ploughs, household goods, and kegs of rum or nails, endless supplies for village and plantation, enclosed a scene of wondrous animation, of outcry and apparent wild confusion contrasting with the sunset's soft illusion; the steamers lying broadside to the stream, with delicately pillared decks, the clang of bells, the uproar of escaping steam; there, tugging at some heavy rope, the gang of slaves that all together swayed and sang, their voices rising in a wild, rich chime, to which lithe forms and lithe black arms kept time; ~ the shouts of negro-drivers, droves of mules, driven in their turn by madly yelling blacks; chairs, tables, kitchen-ware and farming-tools, carts, wagons, barrels, boxes, bales, and sacks, pushed, hauled, rolled, tumbled, tossed, or borne on backs of files of men, across the ways of plank between the loading steamers and the bank! 279 guy vernon. then as the sunlight faded from the stream, and deepening shadows cooled the upper ai-r, the waves were lighted by the lurid gleam of flambeaux that began to smoke and flare, and cast a picturesque and ruddy glare on shore and boats and men of every hue among the rest, a face that robert knew. iii. he had strolled down upon the bank to note the arrival of a steamer and await the travellers disembarking from the boat; when from the gangway, on through rows of freight, in the red glare advanced that face of fate,swart features of the alert and powerful sort, although a dandy's: saturn's face, in short. lorne's heart leaped to his lips, and he was tempted to clutch the rascal without more ado, a rather risky feat to have attempted, for saturn was the stouter of the two; and always'tis a thing that you will rue, so to unmask your purpose, unprepared to close and finish with the game you've scared. 280 guy vernon. he looked for vernon: saturn came alone, bearing a light portmanteau, which he flung at a black coachman; whose white eyeballs shone and ivories grinned, as off he marched among the less distinguished drivers, open swung his carriage door, and dashed it to again, then perched upon his box with whip and rein: saturn inside and lorne on foot without! here was a crisis: what was to be done? no moment to be wasted in weak doubt: follow he must,but should he ride or run? there were the drivers: he selected one, and straightway mounted with him to his seat: money makes coachmen kind and horses fleet. 'mid drays and piles of freight their way they find. "what street, my friend? " follow that coach!" "all right!" the glare of flambeaux quickly fades behind, and through the suburbs, on into the night (keeping the coach they followed well in sight), with rattling speed (the ways were dim and rough), they bowled along the summlit of the bluff. 28t guy vernon. the mighty river glimmered far below, soon lost to view; while on the other hand, just breaking from the horizon, looming slow, the red moon, burning like a red bright brand, far over misty levels of dim land and scattered roofs and gardens shone, and showed the forward coach drawn up beside the road. iv. with columned front and roof of gleaming slate, a dim house stood half hid in trees, surrounded by a high wall. before a high close gate, down from his box the dandy's coachman bounded, and pulled a bell, whose iron clangor sounded hollow within: then straightway open flew the double panels, while the coach drove through; and closed again behind with sullen clank, just as the second coach drove slowly by, shutting their ponderous jaws of bolted plank forbiddingly; appearing to defy alike marauding force and prying eye. then with the brightening moonlight seemed to fall a deep mysterious silence over all. 282 g uy vernon. thought lorne, "i've tracked the devil to his den! what house is that? "-the driver turned to stare, (one of your dry, deliberative men, with a wise drawl), and answered with an air of cautious candor: "friend, you have me there! that house has got a sort of secret history, leastwise a curious nickname -'castle mystery.'" v. "who owns the place?" -" that's more than i can tell. most of the time nobody but an old, queer cove ties up here; while the masterwell, just there comes in the mystery; i've been told he practises the art of making gold. he spends a powerful heap when he's away; that gone, he comes and makes some more, they say." "but that's a foolish fable! "-" yes, of course; some sort of counterfeiting game, perhaps; unnatural stories have some natural source. the old man helps; he keeps the tools and traps; beats all your deep philosophizing chaps! doctor, he's called: he may be: but the fact is, he's all gone up and run to seed in practice. 283 guy verinon. "he has a room and shop plumb full of books, vials and things; and studies day and night, and tries experiments, until he looks dazed, like an owl that's brought too near the light: keeps that black coachman, and one servant, -white; and now and then there comes a strutting fellow that's neither black nor white, but mongrel yellow. "he's in the coach there now -or was. some say he owns the place. that's their imagination; and all because he has a pompous way, as if he had a mortgage on creation in his breast-pocket. that's my observation. i've seen him come and go, and thenit's queer! sometimes he won't be round here for a year. "well, no; i never had the luck to see the master,he keeps mighty close, somehow. he's the last person you would take to be a rogue, by what they tell me. i allow, he's at his business in the house there now;he hates it bad enough, but has to do it, as if some fate or devil drove him to it." 284 guy ve1?non. 285 lorne sought in vain the root of this uncouth, fabulous story. error is a vine, a parasite upon the tree of truth, about whose modest stem its own malign, luxurious branches sometimes twist and twine, until it seems a hopeless task to single the true from false, their boughs so mix and mingle. vi. back by the house they drove. an open field adjoined the "castle" grounds, and bounded all. eager to see what its gray stones concealed, lorne rode into the shadow of the wall, rose to his feet, andbeing somewhat talllooked over, while his heart beat high and fast, into guy vernon's strange retreat at last; nearing the scene of mystery with a thrill. there lay the garden, half in shadow bound, half-silvered by the moonlight soft and still, slanting on tree and shrub and cultured ground, where many a path and peaceful alley wound; all perfumed by the breath of early spring the tender bud and first sweet blossoming. 285 g uy verno.a g uy vernon. before the quiet garden stood the solemn, pale-fronted mansion; its broad, silent mass projecting from quaint gable and pale column a vast and shapeless shadow on the grass: one warm, bright light behind tall doors of glass, which opened from a cheerful banquet-room on the dark lawn and ray-besprinkled gloom. vii. there, like the lord and master of the castle, a petty despot, at his meat and wine, alone, sat saturn; while an abject vassal stood by to serve his dish and see him dine. lorne could even see the rings and trinkets shine, as, blazing there in his own solitary magnificence, he ate, and sipped his sherry. soon, having finished his repast, the varlet wiped his mustache and gave the ends a pull; then set a smoking-cap of flaming scarlet, with gorgeous tassels, on his carded wool; lit a cigar, and out upon the cool veranda stepped, while from the open door his own burlesquing shadow stretched before. 286 guy vernon. a base act robert scorned; and when he saw saturn face towards him, all at once he thought it would be highly proper to withdraw, not just because he dreaded to be caught playing the spy; but to the ill-doer naught conduces more to virtuous reflection, than a good, startling prospect of detection. and yet there was a fearful fascination in spying out the stronghold of the foe. had he not come with stern determination to track, to watch, to circumvent, to know the villain's plots, then strike some sudden blow to rescue vernon, or at least determine the cause of his subjection to such vermin? he would have willingly become a pupil of machiavel himself, but to enhance florinda's happiness; and should he scruple to take advantage now of any chance which served his righteous purpose to advance? it seemed as if the hand of mighty nemesis had led him thus to the mysterious premises. i e i 287 g uy vernon.a he stooped in shadow, but did not retire: hand grasping wall, and trembling knee the coach, he crouched; when from the castle rose a dire, deep outcry of entreaty and reproach; and, springing to his feet, he saw approach while saturn turned with cool, sarcastic grinflorinda's husband, rushing from within! viii. guy vernon, most astonishingly clad; in leather apron, bare arms; on his head a paper cap; in his right hand he had a sort of ladle; features flushed and red, as from a furnace whence he just had fled. a lean, slight figure followed, with lank face,the little owl-eyed doctor of the place. in tones of strong remonstrance and entreaty vernon addressed the varlet; who stood by without a flicker of remorse or pity in the cold, settled purpose of his eye, and waved him back: then with a plaintive cry to the freed slave knelt the subjected freeman, the sad, fallen man to the exalted demon! 288 i guy ver]zon. for so it seemed to lorne: which when he saw, his fury he no longer could restrain. reckless of danger, dignity, or law, or how the outer world he should regain, from coach to high wall-top he leaped amain, ' dropped down within,a sheer ten-foot descent,and through the shaded shrubbery crashing went to lawn, veranda, and wide-open casement; and stood, one fiery pulse from head to foot, before the varlet turning with amazement, guy vernon staggering back irresolute, and the lean doctor blinking pale and mute; while his astonished coachman, at the wall, peered over in blank wonder at it all. lorne eagerly reached forth his hand for guy's: "vernon! my friend! " but saturn, all serene, having recovered from his first surprise, with a polite "excuse me!" stepped between: "i do not know you, sir!" with courteous mien barring the way. "my master is engaged." whereat lorne opened on him, all enraged. i9 289 guy vernon. "i know you, alexander, dandy sam saturn or satan, what's your name? no matter!" the varlet made his wonderful salaam, and quirked his eyebrows with a leer: "you flatter!" preventing still lorne's progress; while the latter called vainly after guy, who shrank away in sad confusion,charging him to stay. "i've come for you i will not go without you! think of florinda! all shall yet be well! what is this net which they have woven about you? where is your manhood? break this hideous spell!" and lorne, regardless of a spring and yell from saturn, made a dash, the table cleared too late! already guy had disappeared. with him, the doctor; and behind them both the obsequious servant had secured the door. lorne turned on saturn; with a thrilling oath, and look more threatening than his speech, he swore not to depart from out that house before he had conferred with vernon. "then i fear you will stay late!" said saturn with a leer. 290 i guy vernaon. "you cannot turn me out i will not stir! i am commissioned by his injured wife; and i will take her husband back to her, or make you a frank present of my life!" and, all unarmed, lorne looked full-armed for strife. there was a moment's awkward silence; then the lordly saturn was himself again. x. he turned magnificently to his henchman, who seemed, in vulgar terms, a sort of cook and general waiting-man; a stocky frenchman, servile, alert, intelligent; who took his orders from a signal or a look, and vanished. saturn blandly smiled. "you're right! you shall be satisfied this very night! "be seated! " with elaborate politeness. "you shall be welcome as the lady's friend. i'm sorry that she questions my uprightness: you share her prejudice, i apprehend! here's some refreshment i can recommend." the nimble frenchman placed upon the table a bottle with an interesting label; 291 guy verinon. and poured a glass, which lorne declined. "no harm, sir!" said saturn with a smile. "i know my place; so there is no occasion for alarm, sir; i am too well aware of the disgrace for gentlemen of your superior race to drink and fellowship with one of mine. but there's no taint of color in the wine!" xi. which sarcasm made lorne wince. he was a man who hated from his heart all tyranny of artificial caste and social ban; in broad, imaginative sympathy a poet; for, however they may be wanting in social manners and urbanity, poets are all for freedom and humanity. "that you have been a servant, or in slavery, or have a colored skin," he cried, "who cares? not i! but i have small respect for knavery, foppish magnificence and insolent airs!" at which plain english saturn grins and glares. "you're frank! but'tis just possible that you may not see all things, from your point of view. 292 guy vernon. "what you have called my knavery, in your haste of that there's something more for you to know. then please set down to differences of taste, and my unhappy race's love of show, much of the foppery that disgusts you so; and it may be the insolence you've noticed is just a proud but ignorant person's protest "against injustice which would keep him under, too violent a rebound of self-respect. that i am what i am, is no great wonder: no fine advantages, please recollect, of birth and education." which direct and simple speech took robert by surprise, and brought a curious twinkle to his eyes. "that mr. vernon's lady deemed that i was his bad genius, i was well aware. but it was not convenient to deny what none the less was somewhat hard to bear. no doubt i've acted strangely in the affair; but i have been no more the evil cause, than whirlwinds are produced by whirling straws. i 293. guy vennon.a " and neither is my master a great villain: our weak point lies in his too st'ict veracity. with something to conceal, he was not willing to use a little innocent mendacity, of which i have perhaps a small capacity; enough to have invented some slight fiction, which would have saved his lady much affliction. "don't think my influence over him lies solely in his great fear to have his trouble known. for thirty years, sir, he has trusted wholly to my fidelity: i am proud to own, that in our boyhood, before he had grown familiar with misfortune and disaster, i was his servant, he my little master. "then when affliction came, our ties were closer. i shared his fortunes; sleeping or awake, i was his chosen attendant. you must know, sir, the ancient family honor was at stake. there was no sacrifice they would not make honest device they would not try -to hide the stain upon the old virginia pride. 294 guy vernon. 295 " with master guy himself the constant dread of an exposure had become a steady motive and habit, when at last it led to the deception practised on his lady. we hoped, and he believedthat he already had passed the crisis, -that his chains were broken." lorne started wonderingly, and would have spoken. saturn proceeded: "since you've found us here, and got some partial facts in your possession, and are the lady's agent, and appear a gentleman of sense and good discretion, i shall go on and make a frank confession of the main circumstance -which you have guessed? then we shall make short business with the rest. "this place was fitted for his occupation, at my suggestion, and with his consent. then, when he felt the first faint intimation, the coming of the terrible event, to keep his secret he was well content to fly with me, and in this shelter wait until the storm was over. but of late, i guy vernon. 295 guy vernon. "love for his lady, fear to do her wrong, and hope that still the shadow might pass by, has caused my master to delay too long. but, though i was not pleasing to her eye, which had to be avoided, i was nigh, and watched him close, and when all hope was past, of his improvement, brought him off at last. " our doctor was the family physician; under his charge my master first was placed. then he was offered here, in this position, advantages he readily embraced; where undisturbed he can indulge his taste for chemistry, until some fresh attack of the disorder brings his patient back. "'tis now twelve years since my old master died, and left him and his fortune to my care. the mother went before. we have three tried and faithful servants, who would neither dare to tell his secret, nor to hurt a hair of that dear head!" here, winking hard, the dandy, with a fierce gulp, tossed off a glass of brandy. 296 guy vernon. 297 "i showed some rudeness, which you'11 please excuse. an ignorant man is liable to err. now shall you care to see him? as you choose. in any case, i do not fancy, sir, that you will wish to take him back to her! the thing has gone so far, though, i suppose it will perhaps be better if she knows. "sometimes for several years he is exempt; then the old indications: first, a strange irritability; then perhaps the attempt to hide even from himself the coming change in a forced gayety; then the symptoms range from moody melancholy and fitful sadness to deep despondency and downright madness! "quite harmless; often fancies he is poor, but that he has the art of making gold. indulgence is the surest way to cure his whims; and'tis a comfort to behold even a poor madman flattered and consoled. but when he knelt to-night and begged for snow to make some silver, i had none to show." guy vernon. 297 g guy, vernon. xii. so saturn told his story; and'tis time mine, too, were ended, -which so far has strayed, winding along the indented shores of rhyme, in many an idle pool and eddy played. lorne did not keep the promise he had made, but all alone, and sorrowful, and late, that night, took his departure by the gate. to know the worst is better than long doubt, the slow, consuming fever of suspense. therefore, when lorne had traced the mystery out, and to florinda bore the news, a sense of soothing respite followed long, intense horror and dread, and speedily allayed the anguish of the wound the sharp truth made. that some remorse for her unjust suspicion of saturn stung her, cannot be denied. then came a message sent by guy's physician; and questions rose of duty, love, and pride, which robert nobly helped her to decide; and soon she made a journey, by her presence to cheer guy vernon in his convalescence. 298 guy vernon. 299 the wise, who would expel a spectral thing that haunts the chambers of the lonely mind, invite sweet sound and sight of birds that sing, and flowers and winds and heavenly beams, to find freely their way through wide-flung door and blind, and pure affections, an angelic host, to fill the rooms and drive away the ghost. the truth was known; and terror of discovery swayed vernon's soul no more as in the past; and for his mind a more complete recovery and perfect cure seemed possible at last. the cloudy future now was clearing fast, and would have brought in brighter days, no doubt, when our unlucky civil war broke out. there, where the treasure is, the heart will be: guy vernon's bride was northern; his estates and many slaves were in the south; and he, having in vain withstood the fiery fates that strove to rend the covenant of states, went with his own, and helped to fight their battles, to save his cotton, cane, and human chattels. guy vernon. 299 guy verfnon. his lands were overrun, his slaves were freed, the cause was lost he struggled to defend, and poor florinda wore a widow's weed! and now no doubt you think the lover friend steps in to give our tale a happy end. but truth is truth; and when the news was carried to lorne at last, he had been three years married. xiii. not his the queen of wit, or star of beauty, dazzling beholders, but a pearl more precious, set in the sacred ring of daily duty; not vast domain, but something far more spacious; nor great renown; yet fortune has been gracious, and to requite his simple faith has sent the all-enclosing freehold of content. smiles of affection keep his fireside bright, around his heart light-footed cherubs dance: love and the muse make labor a delight, the spirit blithe, and sweet the countenance. books he has printed, essay, song, romance; and now the latest venture of them all he publishes a novel in the fall. 300 0 critic of his little book! i hope you will not prove of that pedantic class who view defects as through a telescope; but when they see a modest merit pass, smile, shrug, look doubtful, and reverse the glass, then swear the object is so very small as scarcely to be visible at all. and take this counsel kindly as i mean it: in your reviews, don't hasten to disclose the story's plot, before the world has seen it, pulling to pieces one's poor little rose! but let its readers -ere the volume goes to the oblivion of their upper shelves pluck out its little mystery for themselves. guy vernon. 30i /aijn is the mask! who cannot, at desire, aame every singer in the hidden choir? a4 thin disguise. is that which veils with care the face, but lets the changeless heart lie bare! l' envoi. "our revels now are ended." shakespeare. class book. 133 ()0p>7ightn^. copyright deposit. i| 1 ** 1 ■ 1 ^1 ^h 1 cotuit cape cod by henry d. thoreau with intkoduction and illustrations from photographs by charles s. olcott boston and new york houghton mifflin company 1914 f s '^$5 copyright, 1914, by houghton mifflin company all rights reserved aug -8 1914 ci,a376929 contents page introductory note . . . , , • • vii i. the shipwreck . 1 ii. stage-coach views 20 iii. the plains of nauset . 34 iv. the beach 65 v. the wellpleet oysterman . 92 vi. the beach again .... . 120 vii. across the cape .... .153 viii. the highland light . . 179 ix. the sea and the desert . 211 x. provincetown . ♦ • , « . 255 illustrations page cotuit frontispiece v^' a street in yarmouth 24 \/^ evening, chatham harbor 30 '^ the oldest house on cape cod, built in 1690 32 ^'^ old mill, eastham 381/ the beach, from highland light . . . 66 ^ a sand dune, showing the stone that marks the boundary between wellflbbt and truro . 94 ^ higgins and gull ponds, near wellfleet . 104 '^ fish wagon, yarmouth 140 '^ pond village (north truro) .... 168 "^ mackerel and butterfish 218 ^ beach peas 248 scallop shacks, mill pond, chatham . . . 266 ^ . beach plums 278 ^ a cranberry bog, near harwich .... 294 bass river from west dennis .... 318 k introduction to the visitor's edition by charles s. olcott although the activities of sixty-five years have done much to change the aspect of cape cod since thoreau made his first visit in 1849, yet the visitor of to-day who follows in his foot steps may gather many of the same impressions and experience many of the same conditions. thoreau traveled by rail to sandwich, thence by stage-coach to orleans, and from there walked to provincetown. the visitor to-day may travel the entire distance by train, or he may, preferably, glide over the well-oiled roads at a rapid pace in an automobile ; but if he wishes to see things with the eyes of thoreau he must do neither of these, but get an old-fashioned " horse and buggy " and travel over some of the sandy roads among the scraggly pitch pines and shrub oaks, or walk along the seashore through the sand, as thoreau did, stopping at frequent intervals to empty his shoes. a journey of this kind is really necessary to en able one to get the full flavor of thoreau's " cape cod." the sands of the seashore are constantly viii introduction shifting and forming yearly a different coast-line, and yet their aspect is essentially the same. one can look up, as thoreau did, to the towering beach bluffs, or, climbing these heights, he can survey a country of sand-dunes and desert. if the present-day visitor should proceed as far north as the division line between wellfleet and truro, he might find, if he had a well-informed native to guide him, the stone post, half buried in sand, that marked the boundary line when thoreau walked along the shore and where he diverted his route toward the interior. he could then walk over a sandy road by the margin of some pretty lakes, or ponds, and eventually come to one of those " sober-looking houses within half a mile " which thoreau saw. the first of these is the identical house where thoreau knocked at the door and found the inhabitants gone. the second is the veritable home of the "wellfleet oysterman," where our traveler of two generations ago stopped over night with the old man of eighty-eight years, who remembered hearing the cannon fire at the time of the battle of bunker hill. his name was john young new comb, and he is well remembered as " uncle jack." the two houses are well preserved, though unoccupied. they are the sole survivors of the settlement which originally occupied this immedi ate vicinity. many apple trees and lilac bushes introduction ix scattered between this neighborhood and the present village of wellfleet, mark the spots where farm-houses formerly stood, but the old part of the village of wellfleet is now entirely depopulated. from the home of uncle jack, or better, from the hill near by, may be seen a number of ponds, the largest and most beautiful of which is gull pond, about a mile in circumference. the others are newcomb's, swett's, slough, horse-leech, kound, and herring ponds. thoreau mentions that the old man made him repeat the names to see that he got them right. the scenery from this point is as beautiful as in any part of cape cod. on another hill, not far away, is the place where the old man found a comfortable seat and sat down to see the franklin wrecked, a boy having notified him that the vessel was too near the shore. the vegetation which thoreau describes may be seen in abundance in this section. the visitor may walk over acres of ground covered with the bearberries, which are still used for medicinal purposes. he will see patches here and there of the moss-like " poverty-grass," with bright yellow blossoms, flourishing in the sand where nothing else will grow. he will find bayberries in abundance and plenty of huckleberries. he will see the beach peas growing on the sandy x introduction banks along the shore, and here and there, if he happens to visit the cape in the spring of the year, will see the beautiful white blossoms of the beach 23lums, in clusters of shrubbery not over two or three feet high. at highland light he may stand upon the same high bluff overlooking the ocean and watch the breakers coming in as thoreau did, but he will see a different light house, a larger and finer one equipped with modern apparatus. by its side he will see what thoreau never dreamed of, a high mast, held in position by innumerable wire ropes and used for the receipt and transmission of wireless mes sages. at provincetown he will see the same kind of sand-dunes and drifts that thoreau de scribes, will walk through the same long narrow street, only eighteen feet wide, and will see the same harbor and some of the same old wharves along the water-front. thoreau has much to say about the industries of the cape, particularly the clam and oyster business and the fisheries. the visitor of to-day will hear much talk of these things, although there have been changes. the modern clam-digger and oysterman bring in their shellfish in motor boats, and the boats of the old-time mackerel fleet no longer depend upon their sails, but come to shore under the power of gasoline engines. the old windmills that thoreau mentioned as char introduction , xi acteristic of the cape may still be seen, many of them retainingthe old mill-stones. some of these are kept in excellent repair by their owners, while others have been allowed to fall into de cay and are half covered with the sand. next to the windmills as landmarks, according to tho reau, were the churches, and these may still be seen standing out conspicuously on the high ground, acting as useful guides to the sailors at sea, and offering their assistance in the same capacity to any landsmen who may attend their services. it was never thoreau's practice to frequent the villages in his travels. he preferred the seashore and the woods and the wild open places. the visitor who goes to cape cod to-day in the spirit of thoreau may still avoid, as he did, most of the signs of habitation and enjoy the sweep of the sand and of the ocean, fill his lungs with the fresh air and enjoy the atmosphere of the cape, observing its birds and flowers and trees, its sands and its shellfish, in very much the same way that thoreau did ; and for those who enjoy the things of nature this is really the best way to see cape cod. cape cod the shipwreck wishing to get a better view than i had yet had of the ocean, which, we are told, covers more than two thirds of the globe, but of which a man who lives a few miles inland may never see any trace, more than of another world, i made a visit to cape cod in october, 1849, an other the succeeding june, and another to truro in july, 1855; the first and last time with a single companion, the second time alone. i have spent, in all, about three weeks on the cape; walked from eastham to provincetown twice on the atlantic side, and once on the bay side also, excepting four or five miles, and crossed the cape half a dozen times on my way; but having come so fresh to the sea, i have got but little salted. my readers must expect only so much saltness as the land breeze acquires from blowing over an arm of the sea, or is tasted on the windows and the bark of trees twenty miles inland, after september gales. i have 2 cape cod been accustomed to make excursions to the ponds within ten miles of concord, but latterly i have extended my excursions to the seashore. i did not see why i might not make a book on cape cod, as well as my neighbor on " human culture." it is but another name for the same thing, and hardly a sandier phase of it. as for my title, i suppose that the word cape is from the french cap ; which is from the latin caput, a head ; which is, perhaps, from the verb capere, to take, — that being the part by which we take hold of a thing : — take time by the forelock. it is also the safest part to take a serpent by. and as for cod, that was derived directly from that "great store of cod-fish" which captain bartholomew gosnold caught there in 1602; which fish ai3pears to have been so called from the saxon word codde, "a case in which seeds are lodged," either from the form of the fish, or the quantity of spawn it contains; whence also, perhaps, codling i^'''' pommn coctile^''f^ and coddle, — to cook green like peas. (v. die.) cape cod is the bared and bended arm of massachusetts: the shoulder is at buzzard's bay; the elbow, or crazy -bone, at cape malle barre ; the wrist at truro ; and the sandy fist at provincetown, — behind which the state stands on her guard, with her back to the green moun tains, and her feet planted on the floor of the the shipwreck 3 ocean, like an athlete protecting' her bay, — boxing with northeast storms, and, ever and anon, heaving up her atlantic adversary from the lap of earth, — ready to thrust forward her other fist, which keeps guard the while upon her breast at cape ann. on studying the map, i saw that there must be an uninterrupted beach on the east or outside of the forearm of the cape, more than thirty miles from the general line of the coast,' which would afford a good sea view, but that, on ac count of an opening in the beach, forming the entrance to nauset harbor, in orleans, i must strike it in eastham, if i approached it by land, and probably i could walk thence straight to race point, about twenty-eight miles, and not meet with any obstruction. we left concord, massachusetts, on tuesday, october 9, 1849. on reaching boston, we found that the provincetown steamer, which should have got in the day before, had not yet arrived, on account of a violent storm; and, as we no ticed in the streets a handbill headed, '' death ! one hundred and forty-five lives lost at cohas set,'* we decided to go by way of cohasset. we found many irish in the cars, going to iden tify bodies and to sympathize with the survivors, and also to attend the funeral which was to take place in the afternoon ; — and when we arrived 4 cap^ cod at cohasset, it appeared that nearly all the pas sengers were bound for the beach, which was about a mile distant, and many other persons were flocking in from the neighboring country. there wei^e several hundreds of them streaming off over cohasset common in that direction, some on foot and some in wagons, — and among them were some sportsmen in their hunting jackets, with their guns, and game-bags, and dogs. as we passed tlie graveyard we saw a large hole, like a cellar, freshly dug there, and, just before reaching the shore, by a pleasantly winding and rocky road, we met several hay -rig gings and farm-wagons coming away toward the meeting house, each loaded with three large, rough deal boxes. we did not need to ask what was in them. the owners of the wagons were made the undertakers. many horses in carriages were fastened to the fences near the shore, and, for a mile or more, up and down, the beach was covered with people looking out for bodies, and examinino^ the frao^ments of the wreck. there was a small island called brook island, with a hut on it, lying just off the shore. this is said to be the rockiest shore in massachusetts, from nantasket to scituate, — hard sienitic rocks, which the waves have laid bare, but have not been able to crumble. it has been the scene of many a shipwreck. the shipwreck 6 the brig st. john, from galway, ireland, laden with emigrants, was wrecked on sunday morning ; it was now tuesday morning, and the sea was still breaking violently on the rocks. there were eighteen or twenty of the same large boxes that i have mentioned, lying on a green hillside, a few rods from the water, and sur rounded by a crowd. the bodies which had been recovered, twenty -seven or eight in all, had been collected there. some were rapidly nail ing down the lids, others were carting the boxes away, and others were lifting the lids, which were yet loose, and peeping under the cloths, for each body, with such rags as still adhered to it, was covered loosely with a white sheet. 1 witnessed no signs of grief, but there was a sober dispatch of business which was affecting. one man was seeking to identify a particular body, and one undertaker or c^irpenter was calling to another to know in what box a certain child was put. i saw many marble feet and matted heads as the cloths were raised, and one livid, swollen, and mangled body of a drowned girl, — who pro bably had intended to go out to service in some american family, — to which some rags still ad hered, with a string, half concealed by the flesh, about its swollen neck; the coiled-up wreck of a. human hulk, gashed by the rocks or fishes, so that the bone and muscle were exposed, but quite 6 cape cod bloodless, — merely red and white, — with wide open and staling eyes, yet lustreless, dead lights ; or like the cabin windows of a stranded vessel, filled with sand. sometimes there were two or more children, or a parent and child, in the same box, and on the lid would perhaps be written with red chalk, "bridget such-a-one, and sister's child." the surrounding sward was covered with bits of sails and clothing. i have since heard, from one who lives by this beach, that a woman who had come over before, but had left her infant behind for her sister to bring, came and looked into these boxes, and saw in one — probably the same whose super scription i have quoted — her child in her sis ter's arms, as if the sister had meant to be found thus; and within three days after, the mother died from the effect of that sight. we turned from this and walked along the rocky shore. * in the first cove were strewn what seemed the fragments of a vessel, in small pieces mixed with sand and seaweed, and great quantities of feathers; but it looked so old and rusty, that i at first took it to be some old wreck which had lain there many years. i even thought of captain kidd, and that the feathers were those which sea-fowl had cast there; and perhaps there might be some tradi tion about it in the neighborhood. i asked a the shipwreck 7 sailor if that was the st. john. he said it was. i asked him where she struck. he pointed to a rock in front of us, a mile from the shore, called the grampus rock, and added, — "you can see a part of her now sticking up; it looks like a small boat." i saw it. it was thought to be held by the chain-cables and the anchors. i asked if the bodies which i saw were all that were drowned. "not a quarter of them," said he. "where are the rest?" "most of them right underneath that piece you see." it appeared to us that there was enough rub bish to make the wreck of a large vessel in this cove alone, and that it would take many days to cart it off. it was several feet deep, and here and there was a bonnet or a jacket on it. in the very midst of the crowd about this wreck, there were men with carts busily collecting the seaweed which the storm had cast up, and con veying it beyond the reach of the tide, though they were often obliged to separate fragments of clothing from it, and they might at any moment have found a human body under it. drown who might, they did not forget that this weed was a valuable manure. this shipwreck had not produced a visible vibration in the fabric of society. 8 cape cod about a mile south we could see, rising above the rocks, the masts of the british brig which the st. john had endeavored to follow, which had slipped her cables, and, by good luck, run into the mouth of cohasset harbor. a little further along the shore we saw a man's clothes on a rock; further, a woman's scarf, a gown, a straw bonnet, the brig's caboose, and one of her masts high and dry, broken into several pieces. in another rocky cove, several rods from the water, and behind rocks twenty feet high, lay a part of one side of the vessel, still hanging to gether. it was, perhaps, forty feet long, by fourteen wide. i was even more surprised at the power of the waves, exhibited on this shat tered fragment, than i had been at the sight of the smaller fragments before. the largest tim bers and iron braces were broken superfluously, and i saw that no material could withstand the power of the waves; that iron must go to pieces in such a case, and an iron vessel would be cracked up like an egg-shell on the rocks. some of these timbers, however, were so rotten that i could almost thrust my umbrella through them. they told us that some were saved on this piece, and also showed where the sea had heaved it into this cove which was now dry. when i saw where it had come in, and in what condition, i wondered that any had been saved on it. a lit the shipwreck 9 tie further on a crowd of men was collected around the mate of the st. john, who was tell ing his story. he was a slim-looking youth, who spoke of the captain as the master, and seemed a little excited. he was saying that when they jumped into the boat, she filled, and, the vessel lurching, the weight of the water in the boat caused the painter to break, and so they were separated. whereat one man came away, saying, — "well, i don't see but he tells a straight story enough. you see, the weight of the water in the boat broke the painter. a boat full of water is very heavy," — and so on, in a loud and impertinently earnest tone, as if he had a bet depending on it, but had no humane inter est in the matter. another, a large man, stood near by upon a rock, gazing into the sea, and chewing large quids of tobacco, as if that habit were forever confirmed with him. "come," says another to his companion, "let's be off. we've seen the whole of it. it 's no use to stay to the funeral." further, we saw one standing upon a rock, who, we were told, was one that was saved. he was a sober-looking man, dressed in a jacket and gray pantaloons, with his hands in the pockets, i asked him a few questions, 10 cape cod which he answered ; but he seemed unwilling to talk about it, and soon walked away. by his side stood one of the life-boat men, in an oil cloth jacket, who told us how they went to the relief of the british brig, thinking that the boat of the st. john, which they passed on the way, held all her crew, — for the waves pre vented their seeing those who were on the vessel, though they might have saved some had they known there were any there. a little further was the flag of the st. john spread on a rock to dry, and held down by stones at the corners. this frail, but essential and significant portion of the vessel, which had so long been the sport of the winds, was sure to reach the shore. there were one or two houses visible from these rocks, in which were some of the survivors re coverinof from the shock which their bodies and minds had sustained. one was not expected to live. we kept on down the shore as far as a pro montory called whitehead, that we might see more of the cohasset rocks. in a little cove, within half a mile, there were an old man and his son collecting, with their team, the seaweed which that fatal storm had cast up, as serenely employed as if there had never been a wreck in the world, though they were within sight of the grampus kock, on which the st. john had the shipwreck 11 struck. the old man had heard that there was a wreck and knew most of the particulars, but he said that he had not been up there since it happened. it was the wrecked weed that con cerned him most, rockweed, kelp, and sea weed, as he named them, which he carted to his barnyard; and those bodies were to him but other weeds which the tide cast up, but which were of no use to him. we afterwards came to the life-boat in its harbor, waiting for another emergency, — and in the afternoon we saw the funeral procession at a distance, at the head of which walked the captain with the other sur vivors. on the whole, it was not so impressive a scene as i might have expected. if i had found one body cast upon the beach in some lonely place, it would have affected me more. i sym pathized rather with the winds and waves, as if to toss and mangle these poor human bodies was the order of the day. if this was the law of nature, why waste any time in awe or pity? if the last day were come, we should not think so much about the separation of friends or the 6lighted prospects of individuals. i saw that corpses might be multiplied, as on the field of battle, till they no longer affected us in any de gree, as exceptions to the common lot of human ity. take all the graveyards together, they are 12 cape cod always the majority. it is the individual and private that demands our sympathy. a man can attend but one funeral in the course of his life, can behold but one corpse. yet i saw that the inhabitants of the shore would be not a little affected by this event. they would watch there many days and nights for the sea to give up its dead, and their imaginations and sympa thies would supply the place of mourners far away, who as yet knew not of the wreck. many days after this, something white was seen float ing on the water by one who was sauntering on the beach. it was approached in a boat, and found to be the body of a woman, which had risen in an upright position, whose white cap was blown back with the wind. i saw that the beauty of the shore itself was wrecked for many a lonely walker there, until he could perceive, at last, how its beauty was enhanced by wrecks like this, and it acquired thus a rarer and sublimer beauty still. why care for these dead bodies? they really have no friends but the worms or fishes. their owners were coming to the new world, as columbus and the pilgrims did, — they were within a mile of its shores; but, before they could reach it, they emigrated to a newer world than ever columbus dreamed of, yet one of whose existence we believe that there is far more the shipwreck 13 universal and convincing evidence — though it has not yet been discovered by science — than cohnubus had of this : not merely mariners' tales and some paltry drift-wood and seaweed, but a continual drift and instinct to all our shores. i saw their empty hulks that came to land ; but they themselves, meanwhile, were cast upon some shore yet further west, toward which we are all tending, and which we shall reach at last, it may be through storm and darkness, as they did. no doubt, we have reason to thank god that they have not been " shipwrecked into life again." the mariner who makes the safest port in heaven, perchance, seems to his friends on earth to be shipwrecked, for they deem bos ton harbor the better place ; though perhaps in visible to them, a skillful pilot comes to meet him, and the fairest and balmiest gales blow off that coast, his good ship makes the land in hal cyon days, and he kisses the shore in rapture there, while his old hulk tosses in the surf here. it is hard to part with one's body, but, no doubt, it is easy enough to do without it when once it is gone. all their plans and hopes burst like a bubble i infants by the score dashed on the rocks by the enraged atlantic ocean ! no, no ! if the st. john did not make her port here, she has been telegraphed there. the strongest wind cannot stagger a spirit ; it is a spirit's 14 cape cod breath. a just man's purpose cannot be split on any grampus or material rock, but itself will split rocks till it succeeds. the verses addressed to columbus, dying, may, with slight alterations, be applied to the passengers of the st. john, — " soon with them will all be over, soon the voyage will be begun that shall bear them to discover, far away, a land unknown. " land that each, alone, must visit, but no tidings bring to men ; for no sailor, once departed. ever hath retxirned again. " no carved wood, no broken branches ever drift from that far wild ; he who on that ocean launches meets no corse of angel chud. " undismayed, my noble sailors, spread, then spread your canvas out ; spirits ! on a sea of ether soon shall ye serenely float ! *' where the deep no plummet soundeth, fear no hidden breakers there. and the fanning wing of angels shall youi' bark right onward bear. *' quit, now, full of heart and comfort, these rude shores, they are of earth ; where the rosy clouds are parting. there the blessed isles loom forth." the shipwreck 15 one summer day, since this, i came this way, on foot, along the shore from boston. it was so warm, that some horses had climbed to the very top of the ramparts of the old fort at hull, where there was hardly room to turn round, for the sake of the breeze. the datura stramo nium, or thorn-apple, was in full bloom along the beach; and, at sight of this cosmopolite, — this captain cook among plants, — carried in ballast all over the world, i felt as if i were on the highway of nations. say, rather, this viking, king of the bays, for it is not an inno cent plant; it suggests not merely commerce, but its attendant vices, as if its fibres were the stuff of which pirates spin their yarns. i heard the voices of men shouting aboard a vessel, half a mile from the shore, which sounded as if they were in a barn in the country, they being be tween the sails. it was a purely rural sound. as i looked over the water, i saw the isles rapidly wasting away, the sea nibbling vora ciously at the continent, the springing arch of a hill suddenly interrupted, as at point allerton, — what botanists might call premorse, — show ing, by its curve against the sky, how much space it must have occupied, where now was water only. on the other hand, these wrecks of isles were being fancifully arranged into new shores, as at hog island, inside of hull, where 16 cape cod everything seemed to be gently lapsing into futurity. tliis isle had got the very form of a ripple, — and i thought that the inhabitants should bear a ripple for device on their shields, a wave passing over them, with the datura, which is said to produce mental alienation of long duration without affecting the bodily health,^ springing from its edge. the most in teresting thing which i heard of, in this town ship of hull, was an unfailing spring, whose lo cality was pointed out to me, on the side of a distant hill, as i was panting along the shore, though i did not visit it. perhaps, if i should go tlirough rome, it would be some spring on the capitoline hill i should remember the long ^ the jamestown weed (or thorn-apple). "this, being an early plant, was gathered very young for a boiled salad, by some of the soldiers sent thither [i. e., to virginia] to quell the rebellion of bacon ; and some of them ate plentifully of it, the effect of which was a very pleasant comedy, for they turned natural fools upon* it for several days: one would blow up a feather in the air ; another would dart straws at it with much fury ; and another, stark naked, was sitting up in a corner like a monkey, grinning and making mows at them^ ; a fourth would fondly kiss and paw his companions, and sneer in their faces, with a countenance more antic than any ina dutch droll. in this frantic condition they were confined, lest they should, in their folly, destroy themselves, — though it was observed that all their actions were full of innocence and good nature. in deed, they were not very cleanly. a thousand such simple tricks they played, and after eleven days returned to them selves again, not remembering anything that had passed." — beverly's history of virginia, p. 120. the shipwreck 17 est. it is true, i was somewhat interested in the well at the old french fort, which was said to be ninety feet deep, with a cannon at the bottom of it. on nantasket beach i counted a dozen chaises from the public-house. from time to time the riders turned their horses toward the sea, standing in the water for the coolness, — and i saw the value of beaches to cities for the sea breeze and the bath. at jerusalem village the inhabitants were col lecting in haste, before a thunder-shower now approaching, the irish moss which they had spread to dry. the shower passed on one side, and gave me a few drops only, which did not cool the air. i merely felt a puff upon my cheek, though, within sight, a vessel was cap sized in the bay, and several others dragged their anchors, and were near going .ashore. the sea-bathing at cohasset rocks was perfect. the water was purer and more transparent than any i had ever seen. there was not a particle of mud or slime about it. the bottom being sandy, i could see the sea-perch swimming about. the smooth and fantastically worn rocks, and the perfectly clean and tress-like rock-weeds falling over you, and attached so firmly to the rocks that you could pull yourself up by them, greatly enhanced the luxury of the bath. the stripe of barnacles just above the 18 cape cod weeds reminded me of some vegetable growth, — the buds, and petals, and seed-vessels of flowers. they lay along the seams of the rock like buttons on a waistcoat. it was one of the hottest days in the year, yet i found the water so icy cold that i could swim but a stroke or two, and thought that, in case of shipwreck, there would be more danger of being chilled to death than simply drowned. one immersion was enough to make you forget the dog-days utterly. though you were sweltering before, it will take you half an hour now to remember that it was ever warm. there were the tawny rocks, like lions couchant, defying the ocean, whose waves incessantly dashed against and scoured them with vast quantities of gravel. the water held in their little hollows, on the re ceding of the tide, was so crystalline that i could not believe it salt, but wished to drink it; and higher up were basins of fresh water left by the rain, — all which, being also of different depths and temperature, were convenient for different kinds of baths. also, the larger hollows in the smoothed rocks formed the most convenient of seats and dressing-rooms. in these respects it was the most perfect seashore that i had seen. i saw in cohasset, separated from the sea only by a narrow beach, a handsome but shallow lake of some four hundred acres, which, i was the shipwreck 19 told, the sea had tossed over the beach in a great storm in the spring, and, after the alewives had passed into it, it had stopped up its outlet, and now the alewives were dving by thousands, and the inhabitants were apprehending a pestilence as the water evaporated. it had five rocky islets in it. this rocky shore is called pleasant cove, on some maps ; on the map of cohasset, that name appears to be confined to the particular cove where i saw the wreck of the st. john. the ocean did not look, now, as if any were ever shipwrecked in it ; it was not grand and sublime, but beautiful as a lake. not a vestige of a wreck was visible, nor could i believe that the bones of many a shipwrecked man were buried in that pure sand. but to go on with our first excursion. n stage-coach views after spending the night in bridgewater, and picking up a few arrow-heads there in the morning, we took the cars for sandwich, where we arrived before noon. this was the terminus of the "cape cod railroad," though it is but the beginning of the cape. as it rained hard, with driving mists, and there was no sign of its holding up, we here took that almost obsolete conveyance, the stage, for "as far as it went that day," as we told the driver. we had for gotten how far a stage could go in a day, but we were told that the cape roads were very "heavy," though they added that being of sand, the rain would improve them. this coach was an exceedingly narrow one, but as there was a slight spherical excess over two on a seat, the driver waited till nine passengers had got in, without taking the measure of any of them, and then shut the door after two or three ineffectual slams, as if the fault were all in the hinges or the latch, — while we timed our inspirations and expirations so as to assist him. stage-coach views 21 we were now fairly on the cape, which ex tends from sandwich eastward thirty -five miles, and thence north and northwest thirty more, in all sixty-five, and has an average breadth of about five miles. in the interior it rises to the height of two hundred, and sometimes perhaps three hundred feet above the level of the sea. according to hitchcock, the geologist of the state, it is composed almost entirely of sand, even to the depth of three hundred feet in some places, though there .is probably a concealed core of rock a little beneath the surface, and it is of diluvian origin, excepting a small portion at the extremity and elsewhere along the shores, which is alluvial. for the first half of the cape large blocks of stone are found, here and there, mixed with the sand, but for the last thirty miles boulders, or even gravel, are rarely met with. hitchcock conjectures that the ocean has, in course of time, eaten out boston harbor and other bays in the mainland, and that the minute fragments have been deposited by the currents at a distance from the shore, and formed this sand-bank. above the sand, if the surface is subjected to agricultural tests, there is found to be a thin layer of soil gradually diminishing from barnstable to truro, where it ceases; but there are many holes and rents in this weather-beaten garment not likely to be 22 cape cod stitched in time, which reveal the naked flesh of the cape, and its extremity is completely bare. i at once got out my book, the eighth volume of the collections of the massachusetts histori cal society, printed in 1802, which contains some short notices of the cape towns, and be gan to read up to where i was, for in the cars i could not read as fast as i traveled. to those who came from the side of plymouth, it said, "after riding through a body of woods, twelve miles in extent, interspersed with but few houses, the settlement of sandwich appears, with a more agreeable effect, to the eye of the traveler." another writer speaks of this as a beautiful village. but i think that our villages will bear to be contrasted only with one another, not with nature. i have no great respect for the writer's taste, who talks easily about beau tiful villages, embellished, perchance, with a "fulling-mill," "a handsome academy," or a meeting-house, and "a number of shops for the different mechanic arts;" where the green and white houses of the gentry, drawn up in rows, front on a street of which it would be difficult to tell whether it is most like a desert or a long stable -yard. such spots can be beautiful only to the weary traveler, or the returning native, — or, perchance, the repentant misanthrope; not to him who, with unprejudiced senses, has st a ge-coa ch vie ws * 23 just come out of the woods, and approaches one of them, by a bare road, through a succession of straggling homesteads where he cannot tell which is the almshouse. however, as for sandwich, i cannot speak particularly. ours was but half a sandwich at most, and that must have fallen on the buttered side some time. i only saw that it was a closely -built town for a small one, with glass-works to improve its sand, and narrow streets in which we turned round and round till we could not tell which way we were going, and the rain came in, first on this side and then on that, and i saw that they in the houses were more comfortable than we in the coach. my book also said of this town, "the inhabitants, in general, are substantial livers," — that is, i suppose, they do not live like philosophers ; but, as the stage did not stop long enough for us to dine, we had no opportu nity to test the truth of this statement. it may have referred, however, to the quantity "of oil they would yield." it further said, "the in habitants of sandwich generally manifest a fond and steady adherence to the manners, employ ments and modes of living which characterized their fathers," which made me think that they were, after all, very much like all the rest of the world ; — and it added that this was "a re semblance, which, at this day, will constitute no 24 • cape cod impeachment of either their virtue or taste ; " which remark proves to me that the writer was one with the rest of them. no people ever lived by cursing their fathers, however great a curse their fathers might have been to them. but it must be confessed that ours was old authority, and probably they have changed all that now. our route was along the bay side, through barnstable, yarmouth, dennis, and brewster, to orleans, with a range of low hills on our right, running down the cape. the weather was not favorable for wayside views, but we made the most of such glimpses of land and water as we could get through the rain. the country was, for the most part, bare, or with only a little scrubby wood left on the hills. we noticed in yarmouth — and, if i do not mistake, in dennis — large tracts where pitch pines were planted four or five years before. they were in rows, as they appeared when we were abreast of them, and, excepting that there were extensive vacant spaces, seemed to be doing remarkably well. this, we were told, was the only use to which such tracts could be profitably put. every higher eminence had a pole set up on it, with an old storm-coat or sail tied to it, for a signal, that those on the south side of the cape, for instance, might know when the boston packets had arrived on the north. it stage-coach views 26 appeared as if this use must absorb the greater part of the old clothes of the cape, leaving but few rags for the peddlers. the windmills on the hills, — large weather-stained octagonal structures, — and the salt-works scattered all along the shore, with their long rows of vats resting on piles driven into the marsh, their low, turtle-like roofs, and their slighter wind mills, were novel and interesting objects to an inlander. the sand by the roadside was par tially covered with bunches of a moss-like plant, hudsonia tomentosa^ which a woman in the stage told us was called "poverty grass," be cause it grew where nothing else would. i was struck by the pleasant equality which reigned among the stage company, and their broad and invulnerable good humor. they were what -is called free and easy, and met one another to advantage, as men who had, at length, learned how to live. they appeared to know each other when they were strangers, they were so simple and downright. they were well met, in an unusual sense, that is, they met aa well as they could meet, and did not seem to be troubled with any impediment. they were not afraid nor ashamed of one another, but were contented to make just such a company as the ingredients allowed. it was evident that the same foolish respect was not here claimed, for 26 cape cod mere wealth and station, that is in many parts of new england; yet some of them were the "first people," as they are called, of the various towns through which we passed. retired sea captains, in easy circumstances, who talked of farming as sea-captains are wont; an erect, re spectable, and trustworthy-looking man, in his wrapper, some of the salt of the earth, who had formerly been the salt of the sea; or a more courtly gentleman, who, perchance, had been a representative to the general court in his day; or a broad, red-faced. cape cod man, who had seen too many storms to be easily irritated; or a fisherman's wife, who had been waiting a week for a coaster to leave boston, and had at length come by the cars. a strict regard for truth obliges us to say, that the few women whom we saw that day looked exceedingly pinched up. they had prominent chins and noses, having lost all their teeth, and a sharp w would represent their profile. they were not so well preserved as their husbands; or perchance they were well preserved as dried specimens. (their hus bands, however, were pickled.) but we respect them not the less for all that; our own dental system is far from perfect. still we kept on in the rain, or, if we stopped, it was commonly at a post-office, and we thought stage-coach views 27 that writing letters, and sorting them against our arrival, must be the principal employment of the inhabitants of the cape this rainy clay. the post-office appeared a singularly domestic institution here. ever and anon the stage stopped before some low shop or dwelling, and a wheelwright or shoemaker appeared in his shirt-sleeves and leather apron, with spectacles newly donned, holding up uncle sam's bag, as if it were a slice of home-made cake, for the travelers, while he retailed some piece of gossip to the driver, really as indifferent to the pres ence of the former as if they were so much bag gage. in one instance, we understood that a woman was the post-mistress, and they said that she made the best one on the road ; but we sus pected that the letters must be subjected to a very close scrutiny there. while we were stopping, for this purpose, at dennis, we ven tured to put our heads out of the windows, to see where we were going, and saw rising before us, through the mist, singular barren hills, all stricken with poverty-grass, looming up as if they were in the horizon, though they were close to us, and we seemed to have got to the end of the land on that side, notwithstanding that the horses were still headed that way. indeed, that part of dennis which we saw was an exceed ingly barren and desolate country, of a char 28 cape cod acter which i can find no name for ; such a sur face, perhaps, as the bottom of the sea made dry hind day before yesterday. it was covered with poverty-grass, and there was hardly a tree in sight, but here and there a little weather stained, one-storied house, with a red roof, — for often the roof was painted, though the rest of the house was not, — standing bleak and cheerless, yet with a broad foundation to the land, where the comfort must have been all in side. yet we read in the gazetteer, — for we carried that too with us, — that, in 1837, one hundred and fifty masters of vessels, belonging to this town, sailed from the various ports of the union. there must be many more houses in the south part of the town, else we cannot imagine where they all lodge when they are at home, if ever they are there; but the truth is, their houses are floating ones, and their home is on the ocean. there were almost no trees at all in this part of dennis, nor could i learn that they talked of setting out any. it is true, there was a meeting-house, set round with lombardy poplars, in a hollow square, the rows fully as straight as the studs of a building, and the cor ners as square; but, if i do not mistake, every one of them was dead. i could not help think ing that they needed a revival here. our bool^ said that, in 1795, there was erected in dennis stage-coach views 29 " an elegant meeting-house, with a steeple." perhaps this was the one ; though whether it had a steeple, or had died down so far from sympathy with the poplars, i do not remember. another meeting-house in this town was de scribed as a " neat building ; " but of the meet ing-house in chatham, a neighboring town, for there was then but one, nothing is said, except that it '* is in good repair," — both which re marks, i trust, may be understood as applying to the churches spiritual as well as material. however, " elegant meeting-houses," from that trinity one on broadway, to this at nobscus set, in my estimation, belong to the same cate gory with " beautiful villages." i was never in season to see one. handsome is that handsome does. what they did for shade here, in warm weather, we did not know, though we read that " fogs are more frequent in chatham than in any other part of the country ; and they serve in summer, instead of trees, to shelter the houses against the heat of the sun. to those who de light in extensive vision," — is it to be inferred that the inhabitants of chatham do not ? — " they are unpleasant, but they are not found to be unhealthful." probably, also, the unob structed sea-breeze answers the purpose of a fan. the historian of chatham says further, that " in many families there is no difference between the 30 cape cod breakfast and supper; cheese, cakes, and pies belnfj as common at the one as at the other." but that leaves us still uncertain whether they were really common at either. the road, which was quite hilly, here ran near the bay-shore, having the bay on one side, and "the rough hill of scargo," said to be the highest land on the cape, on the other. of the wide prospect of the bay afforded by the sum mit of this hill, our guide says, "the view has not much of the beautiful in it, but it commu nicates a strong emotion of the sublime." that is the kind of communication which we love to have made to us. we passed through the vil lage of suet, in dennis, on suet and quivet necks, of which it is said, "when compared with nobscusset," — we had a misty recollection of having passed through, or near to, the latter, — " it may be denominated a pleasant village ; but, in comparison with the village of sandwich, there is little or no beauty in it." however, we liked dennis well, better than any town we had seen on the cape, it was so novel, and, in that stormy day, so sublimely dreary. captain john sears, of suet, was the first person in this country who obtained pure marine salt by solar evaporation alone ; though it had long been made in a similar way on the coast of france, and elsewhere. this was in the year stage-coach views 31 1776, at which time, on account of the war, salt was scarce and dear. the historical collec tions contain an interesting account of his ex periments, which we read when we first saw the roofs of the salt-works. barnstable county is the most favorable locality for these works on our northern coast, — there is so little fresh water here emptying into ocean. quite recently there were about two millions of dollars invested in this business here. but now the cape is un able to compete with the importers of salt and the manufacturers of it at the west, and, ac cordingly, her salt-works are fast going to de cay. from making salt, they turn to fishing more than ever. the gazetteer will uniformly tell you, under the head of each town, how many go a-fishing, and the value of the fish and oil taken, how much salt is made and used, how many are engaged in the coasting trade, how many in manufacturing palm -leaf hats, leather, boots, shoes, and tinware, and then it has done, and leaves you to imagine the more truly do mestic manufactures which are nearly the same all the world over. late in the afternoon, we rode through brews ter, so named after elder brewster, for fear he would be forgotten else. who has not heard of elder brewster ? who knows who he was ? this appeared to be the modern -built town of 32 cape cod the cape, the favorite residence of retired sea« captains. it is said that "there are more mas ters and mates of vessels which sail on foreign voyages belonging to this place than to any other town in the country." there were many of the modern american houses here, such as they turn out at cambridgeport, standing on the sand; you could almost swear that they had been floated down charles river, and drifted across the bay. i call them american, because they are paid for by americans, and "put up" by american carpenters; but they are little re moved from lumber; only eastern stuff dis guised with white paint, the least interesting kind of drift-wood to me. perhaps we have reason to be proud of our naval architecture, and need not go to the greeks, or the goths, or the italians, for the models of our vessels. sea captains do not employ a cambridgeport car penter to build their floating houses, and for their houses on shore, if they must copy any, it would be more agreeable to the imagination to see one of their vessels turned bottom upward, in the numidian fashion. we read that, "at certain seasons, the reflection of the sun upon the windows of the houses in wellfleet and truro (across the inner side of the elbow of the cape) is discernible with the naked eye, at a distance of eighteen miles and upward, on the county stage-coach views 83 road." this we were pleased to imagine, as we had not seen the sun for twenty -four hours. the same author (the rev. john simpkins) said of the inhabitants, a good while ago : " no persons appear to have a greater relish for the social circle and domestic pleasures. they are not in the habit of frequenting taverns, unless on public occasions. i know not of a proper idler or tavern -haunter in the place." this is more than can be said of my townsmen. at length, we stopped for the night at hig gins's tavern, in orleans, feeling very much as if we were on a sand-bar in the ocean, and not knowing: whether we should see land or water ahead when the mist cleared away. we here overtook two italian boys, who had waded thus far down the cape through the sand, with their organs on their backs, and were going on to provincetown. what a hard lot, we thought, if the provincetown people should shut their doors against them! whose yard would they go to next? yet we concluded that they had chosen wisely to come here, where other music than that of the surf must be rare. thus the great civilizer sends out his emissaries, sooner or later, to every sandy cape and light-house of the new world which the census-taker visits, and summons the savage there to surrender. ni the plains of nauset the next morning, thursday, october 11, it rained as hard as ever; but we were determined to proceed on foot, nevertheless. we first made some inquiries, with regard to the practi cability of walking up the shore on the atlantic side to provincetown, whether we should meet with any creeks or marshes to trouble us. hig gins said that there was no obstruction, and that it was not much farther than by the road, but he thought that we should find it very "heavy" walking in the sand ; it was bad enough in the road, a horse would sink in up to the fetlocks there. but there was one man at the tavern who had walked it, and he said that we could go very well, though it was sometimes inconven ient and even dangerous walking under the bank, when there was a great tide, with an east erly wind, which caused the sand to cave. for the first four or five miles we followed the road, which here turns to the north on the elbow, — • the narrowest part of the cape, — that we might clear an inlet from the ocean, a part of nauset the plains of nauset 35 harbor, in orleans, on our right. we found the traveling good enough for walkers on the sides of the roads, though it was "heavy" for horses in the middle. we walked with our um brellas behind us since it blowed hard as well as rained, with driving mists, as the day before, and the wind helped us over the sand at a rapid rate. everything indicated that we had reached a strange shore. the road was a mere lane, winding over bare swells of bleak and barren looking land. the houses were few and far be tween, besides being small and rusty, though they appeared to be kept in good repair, and their door-yards, which were the unfenced cape, were tidy ; or, rather, they looked as if the ground around them was blown clean by the wind. perhaps the scarcity of wood here, and the consequent absence of the wood-pile and other wooden traps, had something to do with this appearance. they seemed, like mariners ashore, to have sat right down to enjoy the firm ness of the land, without studying their postures or habiliments. to them it was merely tery^a firma and cogriita, not yet feyiilis sindjucimda. every landscape which is dreary enough has a certain beauty to my eyes, and in this instance its permanent qualities were enhanced by the weather. everything told of the sea, even when we did not see its waste or hear its roar. 36 cape cod for birds there were gulls, and for carts in ike fields, boats turned bottom upward against the houses, and sometimes the rib of a whale was woven into the fence by the roadside. the trees were, if possible, rarer than the houses, excepting apple-trees, of which there were a few small orchards in the hollows. these were either narrow and high, with flat tops, having lost their side branches, like huge plum-bushes growing in exposed situations, or else dwarfed and branching immediately at the ground, like quince-bushes. they suggested that, under like circumstances, all trees would at last ac quire like habits of growth. i afterward saw on the cape many full-grown apple-trees not higher than a man's head; one whole orchard, indeed, where all the fruit could have been gathered by a man standing on the ground ; but you could hardly creep beneath the trees. some, which the owners told me were twenty years old, were only three and a half feet high, spreading at six inches from the ground five feet each way, and being withal surrounded with boxes of tar to catch the canker-worms, they looked like plants in flower-pots, and as if they might be taken into the house in the winter. in another place, i saw some not much larger than currant-bushes ; yet the owner told me that they had borne a barrel and a half of apples the plains of nauset 37 that fall. if they had been placed close to gether, i could have cleared them all at a jump. i measured some near the highland light in truro, which had been taken from the shrubby woods thereabouts when young, and grafted. one, which had been set ten years, was on an average eighteen inches high, and spread nine feet, with a flat top. it had borne one bushel of apples two years before. another, probably twenty years old from the seed, was five feet high, and spread eighteen feet, branching, as usual, at the ground, so that you could not creep under it. this bore a barrel of ajjples two years before. the owner of these trees invari ably used the personal pronoun in speaking of them; as, "i got him out of the woods, but he doesn't bear." the largest that i saw in that neighborhood was nine feet high to the topmost leaf, and spread thirty -three feet, branching at the ground five ways. in one yard i observed a single, very healthy looking tree, while all the rest were dead or dy ing. the occupant said that his father had manured all but that one with blacktish. this habit of growth should, no doubt, be encouraged, and they should not be trimmed up, as some traveling practitioners have ad vised. in 1802 there was not a single fruit-tree in chatham, the next town to orleans, on the 38 cape cod south; and the old account of orleans says: "fruit-trees cannot be made to grow within a mile of the ocean. even those which are placed at a greater distance are injured by the east winds; and, after violent storms in the spring, a saltish taste is perceptible on their bark." we noticed that they were often covered with a yellow lichen like rust, the parmelia i^arietina. the most foreign and picturesque structures on the cape, to an inlander, not excepting the salt-works, are the wind-mills, — gray -looking, octagonal towers, with long timbers slanting to the ground in the rear, and there resting on a cart-wheel, by which their fans are turned round to face the wind. these appeared also to serve in some measure for props against its force. a great circular rut was worn around the building by the wheel. the neighbors who assemble to turn the mill to the wind are likely to know which way it blows, without a weather cock. they looked loose and slightly locomo tive, like huge wounded birds, trailing a wing or a leg, and reminded one of pictures of the netherlands. being on elevated ground, and high in themselves, they serve as landmarks, — for there are no tall trees, or other objects com monly, which can be seen at a distance in the horizon ; though the outline of the land itself is so firm and distinct, that an insignificant cone, f-^\mifiih,iii old mill, eastham the plains of nauset 39 or even precipice of sand, is visible at a great distance from over the sea. sailors making the land commonly steer either by the wind mills, or the meeting-houses. in the country, we are obliged to steer by the meeting-houses alone. yet the meeting-house is a kind of wind mill, which runs one day in seven, turned either by the winds of doctrine or public opinion, or more rarely by the winds of heaven, where another sort of grist is ground, of which, if it be not all bran or musty, if it be not plaster^ we trust to make bread of life. there were, here and there, heaps of shells in the fields, where clams had been opened for bait; for orleans is famous for its shell-fish, especially clams, or, as our author says, "to speak more properly, worms." the shores are more fertile than the dry land. the inhabi tants measure their crops, not only by bushels of corn, but by barrels of clams. a thousand barrels of clam-bait are counted as equal in value to six or eight thousand bushels of indian corn, and once they were procured without more labor or expense, and the supply was thought to be inexhaustible. "for," runs the history, "after a portion of the shore has been dug over, and almost all the clams taken up, at the end of two years, it is said, they are as plenty there as ever. it is even affirmed by 40 cape cod many persons, that it is as necessary to stir the clam ground frequently as it is to hoe a field of potatoes; because, if this labor is omitted, the clams will be crowded too closely together, and will be prevented from increasing in size." but we were told that the small clam, mya arenaria^ was not so plenty here as formerly. probably the clam -ground has been stirred too frequently, after all. nevertheless, one man, who com plained that they fed pigs with them and so made them scarce, told me that he dug and opened one hundred and twenty-six dollars' worth in one winter, in truro. we crossed a brook, not more than fourteen rods long between orleans and eastham called jeremiah's gutter. the atlantic is said some times to meet the bay here, and isolate the northern part of the cape. the streams of the cape are necessarily formed on a minute scale since there is no room for them to run, without tumbling immediately into the sea ; and beside, we found it difficult to run ourselves in that sand, when there was no want of room. hence, the least channel where water runs, or may run, is important, and is dignified with a name. we read that there is no running water in chatham, which is the next town. the barren aspect of the land would hardly be believed if described. it was such soil, or rather land, as^ the plains of nauset 41 to judge from appearances, no farmer in the in terior would think of cultivating, or even fenc ing. generally, the ploughed fields of the cape look white and yellow, like a mixture of salt and indian meal. this is called soil. all an inlander's notions of soil and fertility will be confounded by a visit to these parts, and he will not be able, for some time afterward, to distin guish soil from sand. the historian of chatham says of a part of that town, which has been gained from the sea : " there is a doubtful ap pearance of a soil beginning to be formed. it is styled doubtful^ because it would not be ob served by every eye, and perhaps not acknow ledged by many." we thought that this would not be a bad description of the greater part of the cape. there is a "beach " on the west side of eastham, which we crossed the next summer, half a mile wide, and stretching across the town ship, containing seventeen hundred acres on which there is not now a particle of vegetable mould, though it formerly produced wheat. all sands are here called "beaches," whether they are waves of water or of air that dash against them, since they commonly have their origin on the shore. "the sand in some places," says the historian of eastham, "lodging against the beach-grass, has been raised into hills fifty feet high, where twenty-five years ago no hills ex 42 cape cod isted. in others it has filled up small valleys, and swamps. where a strong rooted bush stood, the appearance is singular; a mass of earth and sand adheres to it, resembling a small tower. in several places, rocks, which were formerly covered with soil, are disclosed, and being lashed by the sand, driven against them by the wind, look as if they were recently dug from a quarry." we were surprised to hear of the great crops of corn which are still raised in eastham, not withstanding the real and apparent barrenness. our landlord in orleans had told us that he raised three or four hundred bushels of corn annually, and also of the great number of pigs which he fattened. in champlain's "voyages," there is a plate representing the indian corn fields hereabouts, with their wigwams in the midst, as they appeared in 1605, and it was here that the pilgrims, to quote their own words, "bought eight or ten hogsheads of corn and beans" of the nauset indians, in 1622, to keep themselves from starving.^ "in 1667 the 1 they touched after this at a place called mattachiest, where they got more corn ; but their shallop being' cast away in a storm, the governor was obliged to return to plymouth on foot, fifty miles through the woods. according to mourt's re lation, "he came safely home, though weary and surbated,^^ that is, foot-sore. (ital. sobattere, lat. sub or solea battere, to bruise the soles of the feet ; v. die. not " from acerbatus, em the plains of nauset 43 town [of eastham] voted that every housekeeper should kill twelve blackbirds, or three crows, which did great damage to the corn, and this vote was repeated for many years." in 1695 an additional order was passed, namely, that "every unmarried man in the township shall kill six blackbirds, or three crows, while he remains single; as a penalty for not doing it, shall not be married until he obey this order." the blackbirds, however, still molest the corn. i saw them at it the next summer, and there were many scarecrows, if not scare-blackbirds, in the fields, which i often mistook for men. from which i concluded, that either many men were not married, or many blackbirds were. yet they put but three or four kernels in a hill, and let fewer plants remain than we do. in the ac count of eastham, in the "historical collec tions," printed in 1802, it is said, that "more corn is produced than the inhabitants consume, and above a thousand bushels are annually sent to market. the soil being free from stones, a plough passes through it speedily ; and after the corn has come up, a small cape horse, somewhat bittered or ag-grieved," as one commentator on this passage supposes.) this word is of very rare occurrence, being applied only to governors and persons of like description, who are in that predicament ; though such generally have considerable mileage allowed them, and might save their soles if they eared. 44 cape cod larger than a goat, will, with the assistance of two boys, easily hoe three or four acres in a day; several farmers are accustomed to produce five hundred bushels of grain annually, and not long since one raised eight hundred bushels on sixty acres." similar accounts are given to> day; indeed, the recent accounts are in some instances suspectable repetitions of the old, and i have no doubt that their statements are as often founded on the exception as the rule, and that by far the greater number of acres are as barren as they appear to be. it is sufficiently remarkable that any crops can be raised here, and it may be owing, as others have suggested, to the amount of moisture in the atmosphere, the warmth of the sand, and the rareness of frosts. a miller, who was sharpening his stones, told me that, forty years ago, he had been to a husking here, where five hundred bushels were husked in one evening, and the corn was piled six feet high or more, in the midst, but now, fifteen or eighteen bushels to an acre were an average yield. i never saw fields of such puny and unpromising-looking corn, as in this town. probably the inhabi tants are contented with small crops from a great surface easily cultivated. it is not always the most fertile land that is the most profitable, aud this sand may repay cultivation, as well as the plains of nauset 45 the fertile bottoms of the west. it is said, moreover, that the vegetables raised in the sand, without manure, are remarkably sweet, the pumpkins especially, though when their seed is planted in the interior they soon degenerate. i can testify that the vegetables here, when they succeed at all, look remarkably green and healthy, though perhaps it is partly by contrast with the sand. yet the inhabitants of the cape towns, generally, do not raise their own meal or pork. their gardens are commonly little patches, that have been redeemed from the edges of the marshes and swamps. all the morning we had heard the sea roar on the eastern shore, which was several miles distant ; for it still felt the effects of the storm in which the st. john was wrecked, — though a school-boy, whom we overtook, hardly knew what we meant, his ears were so used to it. he would have more plainly heard the same sound in a shell. it was a very inspiriting sound to walk by, filling the whole air, that of the sea dashing against the land, heard several miles inland. instead of having a dog to growl be fore your door, to have an atlantic ocean to growl for a whole cape! on the whole, we were glad of the storm, which would show us the ocean in its angriest mood. charles darwin was assured that the roar of the surf on the 46 cape cod coast of chiloe, after a heavy gale, could be heard at night a distance of "21 sea miles across a hilly and wooded country." we con versed with the boy we have mentioned, who might have been eight years old, making him walk the while under the lee of our umbrella; for we thought it as important to know what was life on the cape to a boy as to a man. we learned from him where the best grapes were to be found in that neighborhood. he was carrying his dinner in a pail; and, without any impertinent questions being put by us, it did at length appear of what it consisted. the homeliest facts are always the most acceptable to an inquiring mind. at length, before we got to eastham meeting-house, we left the road and struck across the country for the eastern shore at nauset lights, — three lights close together, two or three miles distant from us. they were so many that they might be distinguished from others; but this seemed a shiftless and costly way of accomplishing that object. we found ourselves at once on an apparently boundless plain, without a tree or a fence, or, with one or two exceptions, a house in sight. instead of fences, the earth was sometimes thrown up into a slight ridge. my companion compared it to the rolling prairies of illinois. in the storm of wind and rain which raged when we traversed the plains of nauset 47 it, it no doubt appeared more vast and desolate than it really is. as there were no hills, but only here and there a dry hollow in the midst of the waste, and the distant horizon was con cealed by mist, we did not know whether it was high or low. a solitary traveler, whom we saw perambulating in the distance, loomed like a giant. he appeared to walk slouchingly, as if held up from above by straps under his shoul ders, as much as supported by the plain below. men and boys would have appeared alike at a little distance, there being no object by which to measure them. indeed, to an inlander, the cape landscape is a constant mirage. this kind of country extended a mile or two each way. these were the "plains of nauset," once covered with wood, where in winter the winds howl and the snow blows right merrily in the face of the traveler. i was glad to have got out of the towns, where i am wont to feel unspeak ably mean and disgraced, — to have left behind me for a season the bar-rooms of massachusetts, where the full-grown are not weaned from sav age and filthy habits, — still sucking a cigar. my spirits rose in proportion to the outward dreariness. the towns need to be ventilated. the gods would be pleased to see some pure flames from their altars. they are not to be appeased with cigar-smoke. 48 cape cod as we thus skirted the back-side of the towns, for we did not enter any village, till we got to provincetown, we read their histories un der our umbrellas, rarely meeting anybody. the old accounts are the richest in topography, which was what we wanted most; and, indeed, in most things else, for i find that the readable parts of the modern accounts of these towns con sist, in a great measure, of quotations, acknow ledged and unacknowledged, from the older ones, without any additional information of equal interest ; — town histories, which at length run into a history of the church of that place, that being the only story they have to tell, and conclude by quoting the latin epitaphs of the old pastors, having been written in the good old days of latin and of greek. they will go back to the ordination of every minister, and tell you faithfully who made the introductory prayer, and who delivered the sermon; who made the ordaining prayer, and who gave the charge ; who extended the right hand of fellow ship, and who pronounced the benediction ; also how many ecclesiastical councils convened from time to time to inquire into the orthodoxy of some minister, and the names of all who com posed them. as it will take us an hour to get over this plain, and there is no variety in the prospect, peculiar as it is, i will read a little in the history of eastham the while. the plains of nauset 49 when the committee from plymouth had pur chased the territory of eastham of the indians, "it was demanded, who laid claim to billings gate?" which was understood to be all that part of the cape north of what they had purchased. " the answer was, there was not any who owned it. 'then,' said the committee, 'that land is ours.' the indians answered, that it was." this was a remarkable assertion and admission. the pilgrims appear to have regarded them selves as not any's representatives. perhaps this was the first instance of that quiet way of "speaking for" a place not yet occupied, or at least not improved as much as it may be, which their descendants have practiced, and are still practicing so extensively. not any seems to have been the sole proprietor of all america be fore the yankees. but history says, that when the pilgrims had held the lands of billingsgate many years, at length, "appeared an indian, who styled himself lieutenant anthony," who laid claim to them, and of him they bought them. who knows but a lieutenant anthony may be knocking at the door of the white house some day? at any rate, i know that if you hold a thing unjustly, there will surely be the devil to pay at last. thomas prince, who was several times the governor of the plymouth colony, was the 50 cape cod leader of the settlement of eastham. there was recently standing, on what was once his farm, in this town, a pear-tree which is said to have been brought from england, and planted there by him, about two hundred years ago. it was blown down a few months before we were there. a late account says that it was recently in a vigorous state ; the fruit small, but excel lent ; and it yielded on an average fifteen bush els. some appropriate lines have been ad dressed to it, by a mr. henian doane, from which i will quote, partly because they are the only specimen of cape cod verse which i re member to have seen, and partly because they are not bad. " two hundred years have, on the wings of time, passed with their joys and woes, since thou, old tree ! put forth thy first leaves in this foreign clime. transplanted from the soil beyond the sea." ******** [these stars represent the more clerical lines, and also those which have deceased.] " that exiled band long since have passed away, and still, old tree ! thou standest in the place where prince's hand did plant thee in his day, — an undesigned memorial of his race and time ; of those our honored fathers, when they came from plymouth o'er and settled here ; doane, higgins, snow, and other worthy men. whose names their sons remember to revere. ******** the plains of nauset 51 " old time has thinned thy boughs, old pilgrim tree i and bowed thee with the weight of many years ; yet, 'mid the frosts of age, thy bloom we see, and yearly still thy mellow fruit appears." there are some other lines which i might quote, if they were not tied to unworthy com panions, by the rhyme. when one ox will lie down, the yoke bears hard on him that stands up. one of the first settlers of eastham was dea con john doane, who died in 1707, aged one hundred and ten. tradition says that he was rocked in a cradle several of his last years. that, certainly, was not an achillean life. his mother must have let him slip when she dipped him into the liquor which was to make him in vulnerable, and he went in, heels and all. some of the stone-bounds to his farm, which he set up, are standing to-day, with his initials cut in them. the ecclesiastical history of this town inter ested us somewhat. it appears that "they very early built a small meeting-house, twenty feet square, with a thatched roof through which they might fire their muskets," — of course, at the devil. "in 1662, the town agreed that a part of every whale cast on shore be appropriated for the support of the ministry." no doubt there seemed to be some propriety in thus leaving the 62 cape cod support of the ministers to providence, whose servants they are, and who alone rules the storms ; for, when few whales were cast up, they might suspect that their worship was not accept able. the ministers must have sat upon the cliffs in every storm, and watched the shore with anxiety. and, for my part, if i were a minister, i would rather trust to the bowels of the billows, on the back-side of cape cod, to cast up a whale for me, than to the generosity of many a country parish that i know. you cannot say of a country minister's salary, com monly, that it is "very like a whale." never theless, the minister who depended on whales cast up must have had a trying time of it. i would rather have gone to the falkland isles with a harpoon, and done with it. think of a whale having the breath of life beaten out of him by a storm, and dragging in over the bars and guzzles, for the support of the ministry ! what a consolation it must have been to him ! i have heard of a minister, who had been a fisherman, being settled in bridge water for as long a time as he could tell a cod from a haddock. gener ous as it seems, this condition would empty most country pulpits forthwith, for it is long since the fishers of men were fishermen. also, a duty was put on mackerel here to support a free school; in other words, the mackerel-school was the plains of nauset 53 taxed in order that the children's school might be free. "in 16g5 the court passed a law to inflict corporal punishment on all persons, who resided in the towns of this government, who denied the scriptures." think of a man being whipped on a spring morning, till he was con strained to confess that the scriptures were true ! "it was also voted by the town, that all persons who should stand out of the meeting-house dur ing the time of divine service should be set in the stocks." it behooved such a town to see that sitting in the meeting-house was nothing akin to sitting in the stocks, lest the penalty of obedience to the law might be greater than that of disobedience. this was the eastham famous of late years for its camp-meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts of the bay. we conjectured that the reason for the perhaps unusual, if not unhealth ful development of the religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large portion of the popula tion are women whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind. the old account says that "hysteric fits are very common in orleans, eastham, and the towns below, particularly on sunday, in the time of divine service. when one woman is alfected, five or six others generally sympathize 54 cape cod with her; and the congregation is thrown into the utmost confusion. several old men suppose, unphilosophically and uncharitably, perhaj)s, that the will is partly concerned, and that ridi cule and threats would have a tendency to pre vent the evil." how this is now we did not learn. we saw one singularly masculine woman, however, in a house on this very plain, who did not look as if she was ever troubled with hyster ics, or sympathized avith those that were; or, perchance, life itself was to her a hysteric fit, — a nauset woman, of a hardness and coarseness such as no man ever possesses or suggests. it was enough to see the vertebrae and sinews of her neck, and her set jaws of iron, which would have bitten a board -nail in two in their ordinary action, — braced against the world, talking like a man-of-war 's-man in petticoats, or as if shout ing to you through a breaker; who looked as if it made her head ache to live ; hard enough for any enormity. i looked upon her as one who had committed infanticide; who never had a brother, unless it were some wee thing that died in infancy, — for what need of him ? — and whose father must have died before she was born. this woman told us that the camp-meet ings were not held the previous summer for fear of introducing the cholera, and that they would have been held earlier this summer, but the rye the plains of nauset 55 was so backward that straw would not have been ready for them ; for they lie in straw. there are sometimes one hundred and fifty ministers, (!) and five thousand hearers, assembled. the ground, which is called millennium grove, is owned by a company in boston, and is the most suitable, or rather unsuitable, for this purpose of any that i saw on the cape. it is fenced, and the frames of the tents are, at all times, to be seen interspersed among the oaks. they have an oven and a pump, and keep all their kitchen utensils and tent coverings and furni ture in a permanent building on the spot. they select a time for their meetings, when the moon is full. a man is appointed to clear out the pump a week beforehand, while the ministers are clearing their throats; but, probably, the latter do not always deliver as pure a stream as the former. i saw the heaps of clam-shells left under the tables, where they had feasted in pre vious summers, and supposed, of course, that that was the work of the unconverted, or the backsliders and scoffers. it looked as if a camp-meeting must be a singular combination of a prayer-meeting and a picnic. the first minister settled here was the rev. samuel treat, in 1672, a gentleman who is said to be " entitled to a distinguished rank among the evangelists of new england." he con 66 cape cod verted many indians, as well as white men, in his day, and translated the confession of faith into the nauset language. these were the in dians concerning whom their first teacher, richard bourne, wrote to gooldn, in 1674, that he had been to see one who was sick, " and there came from him very savory and heavenly expres sions," but, with regard to the mass of them, he says, "the truth is, that many of them are very loose in their course, to my heart-breaking sorrow." mr. treat is described as a calvinist of the strictest kind, not one of those who, by giving up or explaining away, become like a porcupine disarmed of its quills, but a consistent calvinist, who can dart his quills to a distance and courageously defend himself. there exists a volume of his sermons in manuscript "which," says a commentator, "appear to have been de signed for publication." i quote the following sentences at second hand, from a discourse on luke xvi. 23, addressed to sinners : — "thou must erelong go to the bottomless pit. hell hath enlarged herself, and is ready to re ceive thee. there is room enough for thy en tertainment. . . . " consider, thou art going to a place prepared by god on purpose to exalt his justice in, — a place made for no other employment but tor ments. hell is god's house of correction; and, the plains of nauset 57 remember, god doth all things like himself. when god would show his justice and what is the weight of his wrath, he makes a hell where it shall, indeed, appear to purpose. . . . woe to thy soul when thou shalt be set up as a butt for the arrows of the almighty. . . . " consider, god himself shall be the principal igent in thy misery, — his breath is the bellows which blows up the flame cf hell forever; — and if he punish thee, if he meet thee in his fury, he will not meet thee as a man; he will give thee an omnipotent blow." " some think sinning ends with this life ; but it is a mistake. the creature is held under an everlasting law; the damned increase in sin in hell. possibly, the mention of this may please thee. but, remember, there shall be no pleas ant sins there; no eating, drinking, singing, dancing, wanton dalliance, and drinking stolen waters; but damned sins, bitter, hellish sins; sins exasperated by torments, cursing god, spite, rage, and blasphemy. — the guilt of all thy sins shall be laid upon thy soul, and be made so many heaps of fuel. . . . • "sinner, i beseech thee, realize the truth of these things. do not go about to dream that this is derogatory to god's mercy, and nothing but a vain fable to scare children out of their wits withal. god can be merciful, though he 68 cape cod make tliee miserable. he shall have monu ments enough of that precious attribute, shining like stars in the place of glory, and singing eternal hallelujahs to the praise of him that re deemed them, though, to exalt the power of his justice, he damn sinners heaps upon heaps." "but," continues the same writer, "with the advantage of proclaiming the doctrine of terror, which is naturally productive of a sublime and impressive style of eloquence ('triumphat ven toso gloriae curru orator, qui pectus angit, ir ritat, et implet terroribus.' yid. burnet, de stat. mort., p. 309), he could not attain the character of a popular preacher. his voice was so loud, that it could be heard at a great distance from the meeting-house, even amidst the shrieks of hysterical women, and the winds that howled over the plains of nauset; but there was no more music in it than in the dis cordant sounds with which it was mingled." " the effect of his preaching," it is said, " was that his hearers were several times, in the course of his ministry, awakened and alarmed ; " and on one occasion a comparatively innocent young man was frightened nearly out of lys wits, and mr. treat had to exert himself to make hell seem somewhat cooler to him ; yet we are assured that treat's " manners were cheerful, his conversation pleasant, and some the plains of nauset 69 times facetious, but always decent. he was fond of a stroke of humor, and a practical joke, and manifested his relish for them by long and loud fits of laughter." this was the man of whom a well-known anecdote is told, which doubtless many of my readers have heard, but which, nevertheless, i will venture to quote : — "after his marriage with the daughter of mr. willard (pastor of the south church in boston), he was sometimes invited by that gentleman to preach in his pulpit. mr. willard possessed a graceful delivery, a masculine and harmonious voice; and, though he did not gain much repu tation by his 'body of divinity,' which is fre quently sneered at, particularly by those who have not read it, yet in his sermons are strength of thought and energy of language. the natural consequence was that he was generally admired. mr. treat having preached one of his best dis courses to the congregation of his father-in law, in his usual unhappy manner, excited uni versal disgust; and several nice judges waited on mr. willard, and begged that mr. treat, who was a worthy, pious man, it was true, but a wretched preacher, might never be invited into his pulpit again. to this request mr. willard made no reply ; but he desired his son-in-law to lend him the discourse; which, being left with 60 cape cod him, lie delivered it without alteration to his people a few weeks after. . . . they flew to mr. willard and requested a copy for the press. 'see the difference,' they cried, 'between your self and your son-in-law ; you have preached a sermon on the same text as mr. treat's, but whilst his was contemptible, yours is excellent.' " as is observed in a note, '' mr. willard, after producing the sermon in the handwriting of mr. treat, might have addressed these sage critics in the words of phaedrus, — ' en hie declarat, quales sitis judices.' " ^ mr. treat died of a stroke of the palsy, just after the memorable storm known as the great snow, which left the ground around his house entirely bare, but heaped up the snow in the road to an uncommon height. through this an arched way was dug, by which the indians bore his body to the grave. the reader will imagine us, all the while, steadily traversing that extensive plain in a di rection a little north of east toward nauset beach, and reading under our umbrellas as we sailed, while it blowed hard with mingled mist and rain, as if we were approaching a fit anni versary of mr. treat's funeral. we fancied that it was such a moor as that on which some 1 lib. v. fab. 5. the plains of nauset 61 body perished in the snow, as is related in the "lights and shadows of scottish life." the next minister settled here was the "rev. samuel osborn, who was born in ireland, and educated at the university of dublin." he is said to have been "a man of wisdom and vir tue," and taught his people the use of peat, and the art of drying and preparing it, which as they had scarcely any other fuel, was a great blessing to them. he also introduced improve ments in agriculture. but, notwithstanding his many services, as he embraced the religion of arminius, some of his flock became dissatisfied. at length, an ecclesiastical council, consisting of ten ministers, with their churches, sat upon him, and they, naturally enough, spoiled his usefulness. the council convened at the desire of two divine philosophers, joseph doane and nathaniel freeman. in their report they say, "it appears to the council that the rev. mr. osborn hath, in his preaching to this people, said, that what christ did and suffered doth nothing abate or diminish our obligation to obey the law of god, and that christ's suffering and obedience were for him self; both parts of which, we think, contain dangerous error." "also: 'it hath been said, and doth appear to this council, that the rev. mr. osborn, both 62 cape cod in public and in private, asserted that there are no promises in the bible but what are condi tional, which we think, also, to be an error, and do say that there are promises which are abso lute and without any condition, — such as the promise of a new heart, and that he will write his law in our hearts.' " "also, they say, 'it hath been alleged, and doth appear to us, that mr. osborn hath de clared, that obedience is a considerable cause of a person's justification, which, we think, con tains very dangerous error.'" and many the like distinctions they made, such as some of my readers, probably, are more familiar with than i am. so, far in the east, among the yezidis, or worshipers of the devil, so-called, the chaldaeans, and others, accord ing to the testimony of travelers, you may still hear these remarkable disputations on doctri nal points going on. osborn was, accordingly, dismissed, and he removed to boston, where he kept school for many years. but he was fully justified, methinks, by his works in the peat meadow; one proof of which is, that he lived to be between ninety and one hundred years old. the next minister was the rev. benjamin webb, of whom, though a neighboring clergy man pronounced him "the best man and the best minister whom he ever knew," yet the his torian says, that, — the plains of nauset 63 "as he spent his days in the uniform dis charge of his duty (it reminds one of a country nmster) and there were no shades to give relief to his character, not much can be said of him. (pity the devil did not plant a few shade-trees along his avenues.) his heart was as pure as the new-fallen snow which completely covers every dark spot in a field ; his mind was as se rene as the sky in a mild evening in june, when the moon shines without a cloud. name any virtue, and that virtue he practiced; name any vice, and that vice he shunned. but if peculiar qualities marked his character, they were his humility, his gentleness, and his love of god. the people had long been taught by a son of thunder (mr. treat); in him they were in structed by a son of consolation, who sweetly allured them to virtue by soft persuasion, and by exhibiting the mercy of the supreme being ; for his thoughts were so much in heaven, that they seldom descended to the dismal regions be low; and though of the same religious senti ments as mr. treat, yet his attention was turned to those glad tidings of great joy which a sav iour came to publish." we were interested to hear that such a man had trodden the plains of nauset. turning over further in our book, our eyes fell on the name of the rev. jonathan bascom of orleans: "senex emunctae naris, doctus, et 64 cape cod auctor elegantium verborum, facetus, et diilcis festique sermonis." and, again, on that of the eev. nathan stone, of dennis: "vir humilis, mitis, blandus, advenarum hospes; (there was need of him there;) suis commodis in terra non studens, reconditis thesauris in coelo." an easy virtue that, there, for methinks no inhabitant of dennis could be very studious about his earthly commodity, but must regard the bulk of his treasures as in heaven. but probably the most just and pertinent character of all is that which appears to be given to the rev. ephraim briggs, of chatham, in the language of the later romans, ^^ seip, sepoese, sepoemese, wechejcum,^* • — which not being interpreted, we know not what it means, though we have no doubt it oc curs somewhere in the scriptures, probably in the apostle eliot's epistle to the nipmucks. let no one think that i do not love the old ministers. they were, probably, the best men of their generation, and they deserve that their biographies should fill the pages of the town histories. if i could but hear the "glad tid ings " of which they tell, and which, perchance, they heard, i might write in a worthier strain than this. there was no better way to make the reader realize how wide and peculiar that plain was, and how long it took to traverse it, than by inserting these extracts in the midst of my narrative. iv the beach at length we reached the seemingly retreat ing boundary of the plain, and entered what had appeared at a distance an upland marsh, but proved to be dry sand covered with beach-grass, the bearberry, bayberry, shrub-oaks, and beach plum, slightly ascending as we approached the shore; then, crossing over a belt of sand on which nothing grew, though the roar of the sea sounded scarcely louder than before, and we were prepared to go half a mile farther, we sud denly stood on the edge of a bluff overlooking the atlantic. far below us was the beach, from half a dozen to a dozen rods in width, with a long line of breakers rushing to the strand. the sea was exceedingly dark and stormy, the sky completely overcast, the clouds still drop ping rain, and the wind seemed to blow not so much as the exciting cause, as from sympathy with the already agitated ocean. the waves broke on the bars at some distance from the shore, and curving green or yellow as if over so many unseen dams, ten or twelve feet high, like 66 cape cod a thousand waterfalls, rolled in foam to the sand. there was nothing but that savage ocean between us and europe. having got down the bank, and as close to "■jhe water as we could, where the sand was the lardest, leaving the nauset lights behind us, we began to walk leisurely up the beach, in a northwest direction, toward provincetown, which was about twenty-five miles distant, still sailing under our umbrellas with a strong aft wind, admiring in silence, as we walked, the great force of the ocean stream, — tforafiolo /xeya a6ivos ^clkiavoio. the white breakers were rushing to the shore ; the foam ran up the sand, and then ran back, as far as we could see (and we imagined how much farther along the atlantic coast, before and be hind us), as regularly, to compare great things with small, as the master of a choir beats time with his white wand; and ever and anon a higher wave caused us hastily to deviate from our path, and we looked back on our tracks filled with water and foam. the breakers looked like droves of a thousand wild horses of neptune, rushing to the shore, with their white manes streaming far behind; and when, at length, the sun shone for a moment, their manes were rainbow tinted. also, the long kelp the beach 67 weed was tossed up from time to time, like the tails of sea-cows sporting in the brine. there was not a sail in sight, and we saw none that day, — for they had all sought har bors in the late storm, and had not been able to get out again ; and the only human beings whom we saw on the beach for several days were one or two wreckers looking for drift-wood, and fragments of wrecked vessels. after an easterly storm in the spring, this beach is sometimes strewn with eastern wood from one end to the other, which, as it belongs to him who saves it, and the cape is nearly destitute of wood, is a godsend to the inhabitants. we soon met one of these wreckers, — a regular cape cod man, with whom we parleyed, with a bleached and weather-beaten face, within whose wrinkles i distinguished no particular feature. it was like an old sail endowed with life, — a hanging-cliff of weather-beaten flesh, — like one of the clay boulders which occurred in that sand-bank. he had on a hat which had seen salt water, and a coat of many pieces and colors, though it was mainly the color of the beach, as if it had been sanded. his variejrated back — for his coat had many patches, even between the shoulders — was a rich study to us when we had passed him and looked round. it might have been dis honorable for him to have so many scars behind, 68 cape cod it is true, if he had not had many more and more serious ones in front. he looked as if he sometimes saw a doughnut, but never descended to comfort; too grave to laugh, too tough to cry ; as indifferent as a clam, — like a sea-clam with hat on and legs, that was out walking the strand. he may have been one of the pilgrims, — peregrine white, at least, — who has kept on the back side of the cape, and let the cen turies go by. he was looking for wrecks, old logs, water-logged and covered with barnacles, or bits of boards and joists, even chips which he drew out of the reach of the tide, and stacked up to dry. when the log was too large to carry far, he cut it up where the last wave had left it, or rolling it a few feet, appropriated it by stick ing two sticks into the ground crosswise above it. some rotten trunk, which in maine cum bers the ground, and is, perchance, thrown into the water on purpose, is here thus carefully picked up, split and dried, and husbanded. be fore winter the wrecker painfully carries these things up the bank on his shoulders by a long diagonal slanting path made with a hoe in the sand, if there is no hollow at hand. you may see his hooked pike-staff always lying on the bank, ready for use. he is the true monarch of the beach, whose "right there is none to dis pute," and he is as much identified with it as a beach-bird. the beach 69 crantz, in his account of greenland, quotes dalagen's relation of the ways and usages of the greenlanders, and says, "whoever finds drift-wood, or the spoils of a shipwreck on the strand, enjoys it as his own, though he does not live there. but he must haul it ashore and lay a stone upon it, as a token that some one has taken possession of it, and this stone is the deed of security, for no other greenlander will offer to meddle with it afterwards." such is the in stinctive law of nations. we have also this ac count of drift-wood in crantz: "as he (the founder of nature) has denied this frigid rocky region the growth of trees, he has bid the streams of the ocean to convey to its shores a great deal of wood, which accordingly comes floating thither, part without ice, but the most part along with it, and lodges itself between the islands. were it not for this, we europeans should have no wood to burn there, and the poor greenlanders (who, it is true, do not use wood, but train, for burning) would, however, have no wood to roof their houses, to erect their tents, as also to build their boats, and to shaft their arrows, (yet there grew some small but crooked alders, etc.,) by which they must procure their maintenance, clothing and train for warmth, light, and cooking. among this wood are great trees torn up by the roots, which, by driving up 70 cape cod and down for many years and rubbing on the ice, are quite bare of branches and bark, and corroded with great wood-worms. a small part of this drift-wood are willows, alder and birch trees, which come out of the bays in the south (i. e. , of greenland) ; also large trunks of asx>en trees, which must come from a greater distance ; but the greatest part is pine and fir. we find also a good deal of a sort of wood finely veined, with few branches; this i fancy is larch-wood, which likes to decorate the sides of lofty, stony mountains. there is also a solid, reddish wood, of a more agreeable fragrance than the common fir, with visible cross-veins; which i take to be the same species as the beautiful silver-firs, or zirheu that have the smell of cedar, and grow on the high grison hills, and the switzers wain scot their rooms with them." the wrecker di rected us to a slight depression, called snow's hollow, by which we ascended the bank, — for elsewhere, if not difficult, it was inconvenient to climb it on account of the sliding sand which filled our shoes. this sand -bank — the backbone of the cape — rose directly from the beach to the height of a hundred feet or more above the ocean. it was with singular emotions that we first stood upon it and discovered what a place we had chosen to walk on. on our right, beneath us, the beach 71 was the beach of smooth and gentlysloping sand, a dozen rods in width; next, the endless series of white breakers; further still, the light green water over the bar, which runs the whole length of the fore-arm of the cape, and beyond this stretched the unwearied and illimitable ocean. on our left, extending back from the very edge of the bank, was a perfect desert of shining sand, from thirty to eighty rods in width, skirted in the distance by small sand hills fifteen or twenty feet high ; between which, however, in some places, the sand penetrated as much farther. next commenced the region of vegetation, — a succession of small hills and valleys covered with shrubbery, now glowing with the brightest imaginable autumnal tints; and beyond this were seen, here and there, the waters of the bay. here, in wellfleet, this pure sand plateau, known to sailors as the table lands of eastham, on account of its appearance, as seen from the ocean, and because it once made a part of that town, — full fifty rods in width, and in many places much more, and sometimes full one hundred and fifty feet above the ocean, — stretched away northward from the southern boundary of the town, without a particle of vegetation, — as level almost as a table, — for two and a half or three miles, or as far as the eye could reach; slightly rising 72 cape cod towards the ocean, then stooping to the beach, by as steep a slope as sand could lie on, and as regular as a military engineer could desire. it was like the escarped rampart of a stupendous fortress, whose glacis was the beach, and whose champaign the ocean. from its surface we overlooked the greater part of the cape. in short, we were traversing a desert, with the view of an autumnal landscape of extraordinary bril liancy, a sort of promised land, on the one hand, and the ocean on the other. yet, though the prospect was so extensive, and the country for the most part destitute of trees, a house was rarely visible, — we never saw one from the beach, — and the solitude was that of the ocean and the desert combined. a thousand men could not have seriously interrupted it, but would have been lost in the vastness of the scenery as their footsteps in the sand. the whole coast is so free from rocks, that we saw but one or two for more than twenty miles. the sand was soft like the beach, and trying to the eyes, when the sun shone. a few piles of drift-wood, which some wreckers had painfully brought up the bank and stacked uj) there to dry, being the only objects in the desert, looked indefinitely large and distant, even like wigwams, though, when we stood near them, they proved to be insignificant little "jags " of wood. the beach 73 for sixteen miles, commencing at the nauset lights, the bank hehl its height, though farther north it was not so level as here, but interrupted by slight hollows, and the patches of beach grass and bayberry frequently crept into the sand to its edge. there are some pages entitled "a description of the eastern coast of the county of barnstable," printed in 1802, point ing out the spots on which the trustees of the humane society have erected huts called char ity or humane houses, " and other places where shipwrecked seamen may look for shelter." two thousand copies of this were dispersed, that every vessel which frequented this coast might be provided with one. i have read this shipwrecked seaman's manual with a melan choly kind of interest, — for the sound of the surf, or, you might say, the moaning of the sea, is heard all through it, as if its author were the sole survivor of a shipwreck himself. of this part of the coast he says: "this highland ap proaches the ocean with steep and lofty banks, which it is extremely difficult to climb, especially in a storm. in violent tempests, during very high tides, the sea breaks against the foot of them, rendering it then unsafe to walk on the strand which lies between them and the ocean. should the seaman succeed in his attempt to ascend them, he must forbear to penetrate into 74 cape cod the country, as houses are generally so remote that they would escape his research during the night ; he must pass on to the valleys by which the banks are intersected. these valleys, which the inhabitants call hollows, run at right angles with the shore, and in the middle or lowest part of them a road leads from the dwelling-houses to the sea." by the word road must not always be understood a visible cart-track. there were these two roads for us, — an upper and a lower one, — the bank and the beach ; both stretching twenty -eight miles northwest, from nauset harbor to race point, without a single opening into the beach, and with hardly a serious interruption of the desert. if you were to ford the narrow and shallow inlet at nauset harbor, where there is not more than eight feet of water on the bar at full sea, you might walk ten or twelve miles farther, which would make a beach forty miles long, — and the bank and beach, on the east side of nantucket, are but a continuation of these. i was com paratively satisfied. there i had got the cape under me, as much as if i were riding it bare backed. it was not as on the map, or seen from the stage-coach ; but there i found it all out of doors, huge and real. cape cod! as it cannot be represented on a map, color it as you will ; the thing itself, than which there is nothing the beach 75 more like it, no truer picture or account ; which you cannot go farther and see. i cannot remem ber what i thought before that it was. they commonly celebrate those beaches only which have a hotel on them, not those which have a humane house alone. but i wished to see that seashore where man's works are wrecks; to put up at the true atlantic house, where the ocean is land-lord as well as sea-lord, and comes ashore without a wharf for the landing; where the crumbling land is the only invalid, or at best is but dry land, and that is all you can say of it. we walked on quite at our leisure, now on the beach, now on the bank, — sitting from time to time on some damp log, maple or yellow birch, which had long followed the seas, but had now at last settled on land; or under the lee of a sand-hill, on the bank, that we might gaze stead ily on the ocean. the bank was so steep, that, where there was no danger of its caving, we sat on its edge as on a bench. it was difficult for us landsmen to look out over the ocean without imagining land in the horizon; yet the clouds appeared to hang low over it, and rest on the water as they never do on the land, perhaps on account of the great distance to which we saw. the sand was not without advantage, for, though it was "heavy " walking in it, it was soft to the feet; and, notwithstanding that it had 76 cape cod been raining nearly two days, when it held up for half an hour, the sides of the sand-hills, which were porous and sliding, afforded a dry seat. all the aspects of this desert are beau tiful, whether you behold it in fair weather or foul, or when the sun is just breaking out after a storm, and shining on its moist surface in the distance, it is so white, and pure, and level, and each slight inequality and track is so dis tinctly revealed; and when your eyes slide off this, they fall on the ocean. in summer the mackerel gulls — which here have their nests among the neighboring sand-hills — pursue the traveler anxiously, now and then diving close to his head with a squeak, and he may see them, like swallows, chase some crow which has been feeding on the beach, almost across the cape. though for some time i have not spoken of the roaring of the breakers, and the ceaseless flux and reflux of the waves, yet they did not for a moment cease to dash and roar, with such a tumult that, if you had been there, you could scarcely have heard my voice the while; and they are dashing and roaring this very moment, though it may be with less din and violence, for there the sea never rests. we were wholly ab sorbed by this spectacle and tumult, and like chryses, though in a different mood from him, we walked silent along the shore of the resound ing sea. the beach 77 b^ 5' olkiuv iraph diva iro\v(p\oi(rpoio 6a\d(r<t7]s.^ i put ill a little greek now and then, partly because it sounds so much like the ocean, — though i doubt if homer's mediterranean sea ever sounded so loud as this. the attention of those who frequent the camp-meetings at eastham is said to be divided between the preaching of the methodists and the preaching of the billows on the back side of the cape, for they all stream over here in the course of their stay. i trust that in this case the loudest voice carries it. with what effect may we suppose the ocean to say, " my hearers ! '* to the multitude on the bank! on that side some john n. maffit; on this, the keverend poluphloisboios thalassa. there was but little weed cast up here, and that kelp chiefly, there being scarcely a rock for rock-weed to adhere to. who has not had a vision from some vessel's deck, when he had still his land legs on, of this great brown apron, drifting half upright, and quite submerged through the green water, clasping a stone or a deep-sea mussel in its unearthly fingers? i have seen it carrying a stone half as large as my ^ we have no word in english to express the sound of many waves dashing at once, whether gently or violently iroavcpxoia--' fioios to the ear, and, in the ocean's gentle moods, an auapid/xop y€\aafia to the eye. 7^ cape cod head. we sometimes watched a mass of this cal>le-like weed, as it was tossed up on the crest of a breaker, waiting with interest to see it come in, as if there was some treasure buoyed up by it; but we were always surprised and dis appointed at the insignificance of the mass which had attracted us. as we looked out over the water, the smallest objects floating on it ap peared indefinitely large, we were so impressed by the vastness of the ocean, and each one bore so large a proportion to the whole ocean, which we saw. we were so often disappointed in the size of such things as came ashore, the ridiculous bits of wood or weed, with which the ocean la bored, that we began to doubt whether the at lantic itself would bear a still closer inspection, and would not turn out to be but a small pond, if it should come ashore to us. this kelp, oar weed, tangle, devil's apron, sole-leather, or rib bon-weed, — as various species are called, — appeared to us a singularly marine and fabulous product, a fit invention for neptune to adorn his car with, or a freak of proteus. all that is told of the sea has a fabulous sound to an in habitant of the land, and all its products have a certain fabulous quality, as if they belonged to another planet, from seaweed to a sailor's yarn, or a fish story. in this element the animal and vegetable kingdoms meet and are strangely min the beach 79 gled. one species of kelp, according to bory st. vincent, has a stem fifteen hundred feet long, and hence is the longest vegetable known, and a brig's crew spent two days to no purpose collecting the trunks of another kind cast ashore on the falkland islands, mistaking it for drift wood.^ this species looked almost edible; at least, i thought that if i were starving, i would try it. one sailor told me that the cows ate it. it cut like cheese ; for i took the earliest oppor tunity to sit down and deliberately whittle up a fathom or two of it, that i might become more intimately acquainted with it, see how it cut, and if it were hollow all the way through. the blade looked like a broad belt, whose edges had been quilled, or as if stretched by hammering, and it was also twisted spirally. the extremity was generally worn and ragged from the lashing of the waves. a piece of the stem which i car ried home shrunk to one quarter of its size a week afterward, and was completely covered with crystals of salt like frost. the reader will excuse my greenness, — though it is not sea greenness, like his, perchance, — for i live by a river shore, where this weed does not wash up. when we consider in what meadows it grew, and how it was raked, and in what kind of hay weather got in or out, we may well be curious 1 see harvey on algm. 80 cape cod about it. one who is weather-wise has given the following account of the matter ; — " when descends on the atlantic the gigantic storm-wind of the equinox, landward in his wrath he scourges the toiling surges, laden with sea-weed from the rocks. *' from bermuda's reefs, from edges of sunken ledges, in some far-off bright azore ; from bahama and the dashing, silver-flashing surges of san salvador : *' from the tumbling surf that buries the orkneyan skerries, answering the hoarse hebrides ; and from wrecks of ships and drifting spars, uplifting on the desolate rainy seas ; " ever drifting, drifting, drifting on the shifting currents of the restless main." but he was not thinking of this shore, when he added, — " till, in sheltered coves and reaches of sandy beaches. all have found repose again. " these weeds were the symbols of those gro tesque and fabulous thoughts which have not yet got into the sheltered coves of literature. the beach 81 " ever drifting, drifting-, drifting on the shifting currents of the restless heart; " and not yet " in books recorded they, like hoarded household words, no more depart." the beach was also strewn with beautiful sea* jellies, which the wreckers called sun-squall, one of the lowest forms of animal life, some white, some wine-colored, and a foot in diameter. i at first thought that they were a tender part of some marine monster, which the storm or some other foe had mangled. what right has the sea to bear in its bosom such tender things as sea-jellies and mosses, when it has such a boisterous shore, that the stoutest fabrics are wrecked against it? strange that it should un dertake to dandle such delicate children in its arm. i did not at first recognize these for the same which i had formerly seen in myriads in boston harbor, rising, with a waving motion, to the surface, as if to meet the sun, and dis coloring the waters far and wide, so that i seemed to be sailing through a mere sun-fish soup. they say that when you endeavor to take one up, it will spill out the other side of your hand like quicksilver. before the land rose out of the ocean, and became dry land, chaos reigned ; and between high and low water mark, where she is partially disrobed and rising, a sort 82 cape cod of cliaos reigns still, which only anomalous creatures can inhabit. mackerel-gulls were all the while flying over our heads and amid the breakers, sometimes two white ones pursuing a black one; quite at home in the storm, though they are as delicate organizations as sea-jellies and mosses ; and we saw that they were adapted to their circumstances rather by their spirits than their bodies. theirs must be an essen tially wilder, that is less human, nature, than that of larks and robins. their note was like the sound of some vibrating metal, and harmon ized well with the scenery and the roar of the surf, as if one had rudely touched the strings of the lyre, which ever lies on the shore ; a ragged shred of ocean music tossed aloft on the spray. but if i were required to name a sound, the re membrance of which most perfectly revives the impression which the beach has made, it would be the dreary peep of the piping plover ( cha radrlus melodus) which haunts there. their voices, too, are heard as a fugacious part in the dirge which is ever played along the shore for those mariners who have been lost in the deep since first it was created. but through all this dreariness we seemed to have a pure and un qualified strain of eternal melody, for always the same strain which is a dirge to one household is a morning song of rejoicing to another. the beach 83 a remarkable method of catching gulls, de icived from the indians, was practiced in well fleet in 1794. "the gull house," it is said, " is built with crotches, fixed in the ground on the beach," poles being stretched across for the top, and the sides made close with stakes and sea weed. " the poles on the top [are] covered with lean whale. the man, being placed within, is not discovered by the fowls, and, while they are contending for and eating the flesh, he draws them in, one by one, between the poles, until he has collected forty or fifty." hence, perchance, a man is said to be gulled^ when he is tahen in. we read that one "sort of gulls is called by the dutch mallemuche^ i. e. , the foolish fly, because they fall upon a whale as eagerly as a fly, and, indeed, all gulls are foolishly bold and easy to be shot. the norwegians call this bird havjiest, sea-horse (and the english translator says, it is probably what we call boobies). if they have eaten too much, they throw it up, and eat it again till they are tired. it is this habit in the gulls of parting with their property [disgorging the contents of their stomachs to the skuas], which has given rise to the terms gull, guller, and gulling, among men." we also read that they used to kill small birds which roosted on the beach at night, by making a fire with hog's lard in a frying-pan. the indians probably 84 cape cod used pine torches; the birds flocked to the light, and were knocked down with a stick. we noticed holes dug near the edge of the bank, where gunners conceal themselves to shoot the large gulls which coast up and down a-fishing, for these are considered good to eat. we found some large clams, of the species mactra solidissima, which the storm had torn up from the bottom, and cast ashore. i selected one of the largest, about six inches in length, and carried it along, thinking to try an experi' ment on it. we soon after met a wrecker, with a grapple and a rope, who said that he was looking for tow cloth, which had made part of the cargo of the ship franklin, which was wrecked here in the spring, at which time nine or ten lives were lost. the reader may remem ber this wreck, from the circumstance that a letter was found in the captain's valise, which washed ashore, directing him to wreck the vessel before he got to america, and from the trial which took place in consequence. the wrecker said that tow cloth was still cast up in such storms as this. he also told us that the clam which i had was the sea-clam, or hen, and was good to eat. we took our nooning under a sand-hill, covered with beach-grass, in a dreary little hollow, on the top of the bank, while it alternately rained and shined. there, having the beach 85 reduced some damp drift-wood, which i had picked up on the shore, to shavings with my knife, i kindled a fire with a match and some paper, and cooked my clam on the embers for my dinner; for breakfast was commonly the only meal which i took in a house on this excur sion. when the clam was done, one valve held the meat, and the other the liquor. though it was very tough, i found it sweet and savory, and ate the loliole with a relish. indeed, with the addition of a cracker or two, it would have been a bountiful dinner. i noticed that the shells were such as i had seen in the sugar-kit at home. tied to a stick, they formerly made the indian's hoe hereabouts. at length, by mid-afternoon, after we had had two or three rainbows over the sea, the showers ceased, and the heavens gradually cleared up, though the wind still blowed as hard and the breakers ran as high as before. keep ing on, we soon after came to a charity-house, which we looked into to see how the shipwrecked mariner might fare. far away in some desolate hollow by the sea-side, just within the bank, stands a lonely building on piles driven into the sand, with a slight nail put through the staple, which a freezing man can bend, with some straw, perchance, on the floor on which he may lie, or which he may burn in the fire-place to 86 cape cod keep him alive. perhaps this hut has never been required to shelter a shipwrecked man, and the benevolent person who promised to in spect it annually, to see that the straw and matches are here, and that the boards will keep off the wind, has grown remiss and thinks that storms and shipwrecks are over; and this very night a perishing crew may pry open its door with their numbed fingers and leave half their number dead here by morning. when i thought what must be the condition of the fami lies which alone would ever occupy or had oc cupied them, what must have been the tragedy of the winter evenings spent by human beings around their hearths, these houses, though they were meant for human dwellings, did not look cheerful to me. they appeared but a stage to the grave. the gulls flew around and screamed over them ; the roar of the ocean in storms, and the lapse of its waves in calms, alone resounds through them, all dark and empty within, year in, year out, except, perchance, on one memor able night. houses of entertainment for ship wrecked men! what kind of sailor's homes were they? "each hut," says the author of the "descrip tion of the eastern coast of the county of barnstable," "stands on piles, is eight feet long, eight feet wide, and seven feet high; a sliding the beach 87 door is on the south, a sliding shutter on the west, and a pole, rising fifteen feet above the top of the building, on the east. within it is supplied either with straw or hay, and is further accommodated with a bench." they have va ried little from this model now. there are similar huts at the isle of sable and anticosti, on the north, and how far south along the coast i know not. it is pathetic to read the minute and faithful directions which he gives to seamen who may be wrecked on this coast, to guide them to the nearest charity -house, or other shelter, for, as is said of eastham, though there are a few houses within a mile of the shore, yet "in a snow-storm, which rages here with exces sive fury, it would be almost impossible to dis cover them either by night or by day." you hear their imaginary guide thus marshalling, cheering, directing the dripping, shivering, freezing troop along : " at the entrance of this valley the sand has gathered, so that at present a little climbing is necessary. passing over several fences and taking heed not to enter the wood on the right hand, at the distance of three quarters of a mile a house is to be found. this house stands on the south side of the road, and not far from it on the south is pamet river, which runs from east to west through a body of salt marsh." to him cast ashore in eastham, 88 cape cod he says, " the meeting-house is without a steeple, but it may be distinguished from the dwelling houses near it by its situation, which is between two small groves of locusts, one on the south and one on the north, — that on the south being three times as long as the other. about a mile and a quarter from the hut, west by north, ap pear the top and arms of a windmill." and so on for many pages. we did not learn whether these houses had been the means of saving any lives, though this writer says, of one erected at the head of stout's creek, in truro, that "it was built in an im proper manner, having a chimney in it; and was placed on a spot where no beach-grass grew. the strong winds blew the sand from its foun dation, and the weight of the chimney brought it to the ground ; so that in january of the pres ent year [1802] it was entirely demolished. this event took place about six weeks before the brutus was cast away. if it had remained, it is probable that the whole of the unfortunate crew of that ship would have been saved, as they gained the shore a few rods only from the spot where the hut had stood." this "charity-house," as the wrecker called it, this "humane house," as some call it, that is, the one to which we first came, had neither window nor sliding shutter, nor clapboards, nor the beach 89 paint. as we have said, there was a rusty nail put through the staple. however, as we wished to get an idea of a humane house, and we hoped that we should never have a better oppor tunity, we put our eyes, by turns, to a knot hole in the door, and, after long looking, with out seeing, into the dark, — not knowing how many shipwrecked men's bones we might see at last, looking with the eye of faith, knowing that, though to him that knocketh it may not always be opened, yet to him that looketh long enough through a knot-hole the inside shall be visible, — for we had had some practice at look ing inward, — by steadily keeping our other ball covered from the light meanwhile, putting the outward world behind us, ocean and land, and the beach, — till the pupil became enlarged and collected the rays of light that were wandering in that dark (for the pupil shall be enlarged by looking ; there never was so dark a night but a faithful and patient eye, however small, might at last prevail over it), — after all this, i say, things began to take shape to our vision, — if we may use this expression where there was no thing but emptiness, -— and we obtained the long-wished-for insight. though we thought at first that it was a hopeless case, after several minutes' steady exercise of the divine faculty, our prospects began decidedly to brighten, and 90 cape cod we were ready to exclaim with the blind bard of "paradise lost and regained," — " hail, holy light ! ofpspringof heaven first bom, or of the eternal co-eternal beam may i express thee unblamed ? " a little longer, and a chimney rushed red on our sight. in short, when our vision had grown familiar with the darkness, we discovered that there were some stones and some loose wads of wool on the floor, and an empty fire-place at the further end; but it was not supplied with matches, or straw, or hay, that we could see, nor "accommodated with a bench." indeed, it was the wreck of all cosmical beauty there within. turning our backs on the outward world, we thus looked through the knot-hole into the hu mane house, into the very bowels of mercy ; and for bread we found a stone. it was literally a great cry (of sea-mews outside), and a little wool. however, we were glad to sit outside, under the lee of the humane house, to escape the piercing wind; and there we thought how cold is charity ! how inhumane humanity ! this, then, is what charity hides! virtues antique and far away, with ever a rusty nail over the latch; and very difficult to keep in repair, withal, it is so uncertain whether any will ever gain the beach near you. so we shivered round the beach 91 about, not being ableto get into it, ever and anon looking through the knot-hole into that night without a star, until we concluded that it was not a humane house at all, but a seaside box, now shut up, belonging to some of the family of night or chaos, where they spent their summers by the sea, for the sake of the sea breeze, and that it was not proper for us to be prying into their concerns. my companion had declared before this that i had not a particle of sentiment, in rather abso lute terms, to my astonishment; but i suspect he meant that my legs did not ache just then, though i am not wholly a stranger to that senti ment. but i did not intend this for a senti mental journey. the wellfleet oysterman having walked about eight miles since we struck the beach, and passed the boundary be tween wellfleet and truro, a stone post in the sand, — for even this sand comes under the ju risdiction of one town or another, — we turned inland over barren hills and valleys, whither the sea, for some reason, did not follow us, and, tracing up a hollow, discovered two or three sober-looking houses within half a mile, uncom monly near the eastern coast. their garrets were apparently so full of chambers, that their roofs could hardly lie down straight, and we did not doubt that there was room for us there. houses near the sea are generally low and broad. these were a story and a half high ; but if you merely counted the windows in their gable ends, you would think that there were many stories more, or, at any rate, that the hak-story was the only one thought worthy of being illustrated. the great number of windows in the ends of the houses, and their irregularity in size and posi tion, here and elsewhere on the cape, struck us the wellfleet oysterman 93 agreeably, — as if each of the various occupants who had their cunahida behind had punched a hole where his necessities required it, and ac cording to his size and stature, without regard to outside effect. there were windows for the grown folks, and windows for the children, — three or four apiece; as a certain man had a large hole cut in his barn-door for the cat, and another smaller one for the kitten. sometimes they were so low under the eaves that i thought they must have perforated the plate beam for an other apartment, and i noticed some which were triangular, to fit that part more exactly. the ends of the houses had thus as many muzzles as a revolver, and, if the inhabitants have the same habit of staring out the windows that some of our neighbors have, a traveler must stand a small chance with them. generally, the old-fashioned and unpainted houses on the cape looked more comfortable, as well as picturesque, than the modern and more pretending ones, which were less in harmony with the scenery, and less firmly planted. these houses were on the shores of a chain of ponds, seven in number, the source of a small stream called herring river, which empties into the bay. there are many herring rivers on the cape ; they will, perhaps, be more numer ous than herrings soon. we knccked at the 94 cape cod door of the first house, but its inhabitants were all gone away. in the mean while, we saw the occupants of the next one looking out the win dow at us, and before we reached it an old woman came out and fastened the door of her bulkhead, and went in again. nevertheless, we did not hesitate to knock at her door, when a grizzly looking man appeared, whom we took to be sixty or seventy years old. he asked us, at first, suspiciously, where we were from, and what our business was; to which we returned plain answers. "how far is concord from boston?" he in quired. "twenty miles by railroad." "twenty miles by railroad," he repeated. "didn't you ever hear of concord of revo lutionary fame? " "did n't i ever hear of concord? why, i heard guns fire at the battle of bunker hill. [they hear the sound of heavy cannon across the bay.] i am almost ninety; i am eighty-eight year old. i was fourteen year old at the time of concord fight, — and where were you then?" we were obliged to confess that we were not in the fight. "well, walk in, we '11 leave it to the women," said he. rx o the wellfleet oysterman 95 so we walked in, surprised, and sat down, an old woman taking our hats and bundles, and the old man continued, drawing up to the large, old-fashioned fire-place, — "i am a poor, good-for-nothing crittur, as isaiah says ; i am all broken down this year. i am under petticoat government here." the family consisted of the old man, his wife, and his daughter, who appeared nearly as old as her mother, a fool, her son (a brutish-looking, middle-aged man, with a prominent lower face, who was standing by the hearth when we en tered, but immediately went out), and a little boy of ten. while my companion talked with the women, i talked with the old man. they said that he was old and foolish, but he was evidently too knowing for them. "these women," said he to me, "are both of them poor good-for-nothing crittur s. this one is my wife. i married her sixty-four years ago. she is eighty-four years old, and as deaf as an adder, and the other is not much better." he thought well of the bible, or at least he spohe well, and did not think ill, of it, for that would not have been prudent for a man of his age. he said that he had read it attentively for many years, and he had much of it at his tongue's end. he seemed deeply impressed 96 cape cod with a sense of his own nothingness, and would repeatedly exclaim, — "i am a nothing. what i gather from my bible is just this; that man is a poor good-for nothing crittur, and everything is just as god sees fit and disposes." "may i ask your name?" i said. "yes," he answered, "i am not ashamed to tell my name. my name is . my great grandfather came over from england and settled here." he was an old wellfleet oysterman, who had acquired a competency in that business, and had sons still engaged in it. nearly all the oyster shops and stands in massachusetts, i am told, are supplied and kept by natives of wellfleet, and a part of this town is still called billingsgate from the oysters hav ing been formerly planted there ; but the native oysters are said to have died in 1770. various causes are assigned for this, such as a ground frost, the carcasses of black-fish, kept to rot in the harbor, and the like, but the most common account of the matter is, — and i find that a similar superstition with regard to the disap pearance of fishes exists almost everywhere, — that when wellfleet began to quarrel with the neighboring towns about the right to gather them, yellow specks appeared in them, and the wellfleet oysterman 97 providence caused them to disappear. a few years ago sixty thousand bushels were annually brought from the south and planted in the har bor of wellfleet till they attained "the proper relish of billingsgate;" but now they are im ported commonly full-grown, and laid down near their markets, at boston and elsewhere, where the water, being a mixture of salt and fresh, suits them better. the business was said to be still good and improving. the old man said that the oysters were liable to freeze in the winter, if planted too high ; but if it were not "so cold as to strain their eyes" they were not injured. the inhabitants of new brunswick have noticed that " ice will not form over an oyster-bed, unless the cold is very in tense indeed, and when the bays are frozen over the oyster-beds are easily discovered by the water above them remaining unfrozen, or as the french residents say, degele.^^ our host said that they kept them in cellars all winter. "without anything to eat or drink?" i asked. "without anything to eat or drink," he an swered. "can the oysters move? " "just as much as my shoe." but when i caught him saying that they "bedded themselves dpwn in the sand, flat side 98 cape cod up, round side down," i told him that my shoe could not do that, without the aid of my foot in it; at which he said that they merely settled down as they grew; if put down in a square they would be found so; but the clam could move quite fast. i have since been told by oystermen of long island, where the oyster is still indigenous and abundant, that they are found in large masses attached to the parent in their midst, and are so taken up with their tongs; in which case, they say, the age of the young proves that there could have been no mo tion for five or six years at least. and buck land in his curiosities of natural history (page 60) says: "an oyster, who has once taken up his position and fixed himself when quite young, can never make a change. oysters, neverthe less, that have not fixed themselves, but remain loose at the bottom of the sea, have the power of locomotion; they open their shells to their fullest extent, and then suddenly contracting them, the expulsion of the water forwards gives a motion backwards. a fisherman at guernsey told me that he had frequently seen oysters mov ing in this way." some still entertain the question "whether the oyster was indigenous in massachusetts bay," and whether wellfleet harbor was a "natural habitat" of this fish; but, to say no the wellfleet oysterman 99 thing of the testimony of old oystermen, which, i think, is quite conclusive, though the native oyster may now be extinct there, i saw that their shells, opened by the indians, were strewn all over the cape. indeed, the cape was at first thickly settled by indians on account of the abundance of these and other fish. we saw many traces of their occupancy after this, in truro, near great hollow, and at high-head, near east harbor river, — oysters, clams, cockles, and other shells, mingled with ashes and the bones of deer and other quadrupeds. i picked up half a dozen arrow-heads, and in an hour or two could have filled my pockets with them. the indians lived about the edges of the swamps, then probably in some instances ponds, for shelter and water. moreover, champlain, in the edition of his "voyages " printed in 1613, says that in the year 1606 he and poitrincourt exj)lored a harbor (barnstable harbor?) in the southerly part of what is now called massachu setts bay, in latitude 42°, about five leagues south, one point west of cap blanc (cape cod), and there they found many good oysters, and they named it "ze port aux huistres^'^ [sic] (oyster harbor). in one edition of his map (1632), the "i?. aux escailles^'' is drawn emptying into the same part of the bay, and on the map ''^ovi belgii,^^ in ogilby's america 100 cape cod (1670), the words '^ port aux huistres^^ are placed against the same place. also william wood, who left new england in 1633, speaks, in his "new england's prospect," published in 1634, of "a great oyster-bank" in charles river, and of another in the mistick, each of i^hich obstructed the navigation of its river. ^the oysters," says he, "be great ones in form of a shoe-horn; some be a foot long; these breed on certain banks that are bare every spring tide. this fish without the shell is so big, that it must admit of a division before you can well get it into your mouth." oysters are still found there. ^ our host told us that the sea-clam, or hen, was not easily obtained; it was raked up, but never on the atlantic side, only cast ashore there in small quantities in storms. the fisher man sometimes wades in water several feet deep, and thrusts a pointed stick into the sand before him. when this enters between the valves of a clam, he closes them on it, and is drawn out. it has been known to catch and hold coot and teal which were preying on it. i chanced to be on the bank of the acushnet at new bedford one day since this, watching some ducks, when a man informed me that, having let out his young ducks to seek their food amid the samphire 1 also, see thomas morton's new english canaan^ p. 90. the wellfleet oysterman 101 {salicornia) and other weeds along the river side at low tide that morning, at length he no ticed that one remained stationary, amid the weeds, something preventing it from following the others, and going to it he found its foot tightly shut in a quahog's shell. he took up both together, carried them to his home, and his wife opening the shell with a knife released the duck and cooked the quahog. the old man said that the great clams were good to eat, but that they always took out a certain part which was poisonous, before they cooked them. "people said it would kill a cat." i did not tell him that i had eaten a large one entire that afternoon, but began to think that i was tougher than a cat. he stated that pedlers came round there, and sometimes tried to sell the women folks a skimmer, but he told them that their women had got a better skimmer than they could make, in the shell of their clams ; it was shaped just right for this purpose. — they cau them "skim-alls " in some places. he also said that the sun-squall was poisonous to handle, and when the sailors came across it, they did not meddle with it, but heaved it out of their way. i told him that i had handled it that afternoon, and had felt no ill effects as yet. but he said it made the hands itch, especially if they had previously been scratched, or if i put 102 cape cod it into my bosom, i should find out what it was. he informed us that no ice ever formed on the back side of the cape, or not more than once in a century, and but little snow lay there, it being either absorbed or blown or washed away. sometimes in winter, when the tide was down, the beach was frozen, and afforded a hard road up the back side for some thirty miles, as smooth as a floor. one winter when he was a boy, he and his fatlier "took right out into the back side before daylight, and walked to prov incetown and back to dinner." when i asked what they did with all that barren-looking land, where i saw so few culti vated fields, — "nothing," he said. "then why fence your fields? " *' to keep the sand from blowing and cover ing up the whole." "the yellow sand," said he, "has some life in it, but the white little or none." when, in answer to his questions, i told him that i was a surveyor, he said that they who surveyed his farm were accustomed, where the ground was uneven, to loop up each chain as high as their elbows; that was the allowance they made, and he wished to know if i could tell him why they did not come out according to his deed, or twice alike. he seemed to have the wellfleet oysterman 103 more respect for surveyors of the old school, which i did not wonder at. ''king george the third," said he, "laid out a road four rods wide and straight the whole length of the cape," but where it was now he could not tell. this story of the surveyors reminded me of a long-islander, who once, when i had made ready to jump from the bow of his boat to the shore, and he thought that i underrated the dis tance and would fall short, — though i found afterward that he judged of the elasticity of my joints by his own, — told me that when he came to a brook which he wanted to get over, he held up one leg, and then, if his foot appeared to cover any part of the opposite bank, he knew that he could jump it. "why," i told him, "to say nothing of the mississippi, and other small watery streams, i could blot out a star with my foot, but i would not engage to jump that distance," and asked how he knew when he had got his leg at the right elevation. but he regarded his legs as no less accurate than a pair of screw dividers or an ordinary quadrant, and appeared to have a painful recollection of every degree and minute in the arc which they de scribed ; and he would have had me believe that there was a kind of hitch in his hip-joint which answered the purpose. i suggested that he should connect his two ankles by a string of the 104 cape cod proper length, wliicli should be the chord of an arc, measuring his jumping ability on horizontal surfaces, — assuming one leg to be a perpendic ular to the plane of the horizon, which, how ever, may have been too bold an assumption in this case. nevertheless, this was a kind of geometry in the legs which it interested me to hear of. our host took pleasure in telling us the names of the ponds, most of which we could see from his windows, and making us repeat them after him, to see if we had got them right. they were gull pond, the largest and a very hand some one, clear and deep, and more than a mile in circumference, newcomb's, swett's, slough, horse-leech, round, and herring ponds, all connected at high water, if i do not mistake. the coast-surveyors had come to him for their names, and he told them of one which they had not detected. he said that they were not so high as formerly. there was an earthquake about four years before he was born, which cracked the pans of the ponds, which were of iron, and caused them to settle. i did not re member to have read of this. innumerable gulls used to resort to them ; but the large gulls were now very scarce, for, as he said, the eng lish robbed their nests far in the north, where they breed. he remembered well when gulls the wellfleet oysterman 105 were taken in the gull-house, and when small birds were killed by means of a frying-pan and fire at night. his father once lost a valuable horse from this cause. a party from wellfleet having lighted their fire for this purpose, one dark night, on billingsgate island, twenty horses which were pastured there, and this colt among them, being frightened by it, and endeavoring in the dark to cross the passage which separated them from the neighboring beach, and which was then fordable at low tide, were all swept out to sea and drowned. i observed that many horses were still turned out to pasture all sum mer on the islands and beaches in wellfleet, eastham, and orleans, as a kind of common. he also described the killing of what he called "wild hens," here, after they had gone to roost in the woods, when he was a boy. perhaps they were " prairie hens " (pinnated grouse). he liked the beach-pea {lathyrus maritimus), cooked green, as well as the cultivated. he had seen it growing very abundantly in new foundland, where also the inhabitants ate them, but he had never been able to obtain any ripe for seed. we read, under the head of chatham, that "in 1555, during a time of great scarcity, the people about orford, in sussex (england) were preserved from perishing by eating the seeds of this plant, which grew there in great 106 cape cod abundance upon the sea coast. cows, horses, sheep, and goats eat it." but the writer who quoted this could not learn that they had ever been used in barnstable county. he had been a voyager, then? oh, he had been about the world in his day. he once con sidered himself a pilot for all our coast; but now they had changed the names so he might be bothered. he gave us to taste what he called the sum mer sweeting, a pleasant apple which he raised, and frequently grafted from, but had never seen growing elsewhere, except once, — three trees on newfoundland, or at the bay of chaleur, i forget which, as he was sailing by. he was sure that he could tell the tree at a distance. at length the fool, whom my companion called the wizard, came in, muttering between his teeth, " damn book-pedlers, — all the time talking about books. better do something. damn 'em. i '11 shoot 'em. got a doctor down here. damn him, i '11 get a gun and shoot him;" never once holding up his head. whereat the old man stood up and said in a loud voice, as if he was accustomed to command, and this was not the first time he had been obliged to exert his authority there: "john, go sit down, mind your business, — we 've heard you talk before, — precious little you '11 do, — the wellfleet oysterman 107 your bark is worse than ypur bite." but, with out minding, john muttered the same gibberish over again, and then sat down at the table which the okl folks had left. he. ate all there was on it, and then turned to the apples, which his aged mother was paring, that she might give her guests some apple-sauce for breakfast, but she drew them away and sent him off. when i approached this house the next sum mer, over the desolate hills between it and the shore, which are worthy to have been the birth place of ossian, i saw the wizard in the midst of a cornfield on the hillside, but, as usual, he loomed so strangely, that i mistook him for a scarecrow. this was the merriest old man that we had ever seen, and one of the best preserved. his style of conversation was coarse and plain enough to have suited rabelais. he would have made a good panurge. or rather he was a sober silenus, and we were the boys chromis and mnasilus, who listened to his story. " not by haemonian hills the thracian bard, nor awful phoebus was on pindus heard with deeper silence or with more regard." there was a strange mingling of past and present in his conversation, for he had lived under king george, and might have remem bered when napoleon and the moderns generally 108 cape cod were born. he said ^that one day, when the troubles between the colonies and the mother country first broke out, as he, a boy of fifteen, was pitching hay out of a cart, one donne, an old tory, who was talking with his father, a good whig, said to him, "why, uncle bill, you might as well undertake to pitch that pond into the ocean with a pitchfork, as for the col onies to undertake to gain their independence." he remembered well general washington, and how he rode his horse along the streets of bos ton, and he stood up to show us how he looked. "he was a r — a — ther large and portly looking man, a manly and resolute-looking offi cer, with a pretty good leg as he sat on his horse." — "there, i'll tell you, this was the way with washington." then he jumped up again, and bowed gracefully to right and left, making show as if he were waving his hat. said he, " that was washington." he told us many anecdotes of the revolution, and was much pleased when we told him that we had read the same in history, and that his ac count agreed with the written. "oh," he said, "i know, i know! i was a young fellow of sixteen, with my ears wide open; and a fellow of that age, you know, is pretty wide awake, and likes to know everything that 's going on. oh, i know i " the wellfleet oysterman 109 he told us the story of the wreck of the franklin, which took place there the previous spring; how a boy came to his house early in the morning to know whose boat that was by the shore, for there was a vessel in distress, and he, being an old man, first ate his breakfast, and then walked over to the top of the hill by the shore, and sat down there, having found a comfortable seat, to see the ship wrecked. she was on the bar, only a quarter of a mile from him, and still nearer to the men on the beach, who had got a boat ready, but could render no assistance on account of the breakers, for there was a pretty high sea running. there were the passengers all crowded together in the forward part of the ship, and some were getting out of the cabin windows and were drawn on deck by the others. "i saw the captain get out his boat, "said he; "he had one little one; and then they jump^ into it one after another, down as straight as an arrow. i counted them. there were nine. one was a woman, and she jumped as straight as any of them. then they shoved off. the sea took them back, one wave went over them, and when they came up there were six still clinging to the boat; i counted them. the next wave turned the boat bottom upward, and emptied them all out. none of them ever came 110 cape cod ashore alive. there were the rest of them all crowded together on the forecastle, the other parts of the ship being under water. they had seen all that happened to the boat. at length a heavy sea separated the forecastle from the rest of the wreck, and set it inside of the worst breaker, and the boat was able to reach them, and it saved all that were left, but one woman." he also told us of the steamer cambria's get ting aground on this shore a few months before we were there, and of her english passengers who roamed over his grounds, and who, he said, thought the prospect from the high hill by the shore, "the most delightsome they had ever seen," and also of the pranks which the ladies played with his scoop-net in the ponds. he spoke of these travelers with their purses full of guineas, just as our provincial fathers used to speak of british bloods in the time of king gfeorge the third. quid loquar f why repeat what he told us ? " aut seyllam nisi, quam fama secuta est, candida succinctam latrantibus inguina monstris, dulichias vexasse rates, et gnrgite in alto ah ! timidos nautas eanibus lacerasse marinis ? " in the course of the evening i began to feel the potency of the clam which i had eaten, and i was obliged to confess to our host that i was no tougher than the cat he told of; but he the wellfleet oysterman 111 answered, that he was a plain-spoken man, and he could tell me that it was all imagination. at any rate, it proved an emetic in my case, and i was made quite sick by it for a short time, wliile he laughed at my expense. i was pleased to read afterward, in mourt's relation of the landing of the pilgrims in provincetown har bor, these words: "we found great muscles (the old editor says that they were undoubtedly sea-clams) and very fat and full of sea-pearl; but we could not eat them, for they made us all sick that did eat, as well sailors as passengers, . . . but they were soon well again." it brought me nearer to the pilgrims to be thus reminded by a similar experience that i was so like them. moreover, it was a valuable con firmation of their story, and i am prepared now to believe every word of mourt's relation. i was also pleased to find that man and the clam lay still at the same angle to one another. but i did not notice sea-pearl. like cleopatra, i must have swallowed it. i have since dug these clams on a flat in the bay and observed them. they could squirt full ten feet before the wind, as appeared by the marks of the drops on the sand. "now i am going to ask you a question," said the old man, "and i don't know as you can tell me; but you are a learned man, and i never 112 cape cod had any learning, only what i got by natur." — it was in vain that we reminded him that he could quote josephus to our confusion. — "i 've thought, if i ever met a learned man i should like to ask him this question. can you tell me how axy is spelt, and what it means? axy^^"* says he; "there 's a girl over here is named axy. now what is it? what does it mean? is it scripture ? i 've read my bible twenty-five years over and over, and i never came across it." "did you read it twenty -five years for this object? " i asked. "weu, how is it spelt? wife, how is it spelt?" she said, "it is in the bible; i 've seen it." "well, how do you spell it? " "i don't know. a c h, ach, s e h, seh, — achseh." " does that spell axy ? well, do you know what it means? " asked he, turning to me. "no," i replied, "i never heard the sound before." " there was a schoolmaster down here once, and they asked him what it meant, and he said it had no more meaning than a bean-pole." i told him that i held the same opinion with the schoolmaster. i had been a schoolmaster myself, and had had strange names to deal with. the wellfleet oysterman 113 i also heard of such names as zoheth, beriah, amaziah, bethuel, and shearjashub, here abouts. at length the little boy, who had a seat quite in the chimney-corner, took off his stockings and shoes, warmed his feet, and having had his sore leg freshly salved, went off to bed; then the fool made bare his knotty -looking feet and legs, and followed him ; and finally the old man exposed his calves also to our gaze. we had never had the good fortune to see an old man's legs before, and were surprised to find them fair and plump as an infant's, and we thought that he took a pride in exhibiting them. he then proceeded to make preparations for retir ing, discoursing meanwhile with panurgic plain ness of speech on the ills to which old humanity is subject. we were a rare haul for him. he could commonly get none but ministers to talk to, though sometimes ten of them at once, and he was glad to meet some of the laity at leisure. the evening was not long enough for him. as i had been sick, the old lady asked if i would not go to bed, — it was getting late for old people ; but the old man, who had not yet done his stories, said, "you ain't particular, are you? " "oh, no," said i, "i am in no hurry. i be lieve i have weathered the clam cape." 114 cape cod "they are good," said he; "i wish i had some of them now." "they never hurt me," said the old lady. " but then you took out the part that killed a cat," said i. at last we cut him short in the midst of his stories, which he promised to resume in the morning. yet, after all, one of the old ladies who came into our room in the night to fasten the fire -board, which rattled, as she went out took the precaution to fasten us in. old women are by nature more suspicious than old men. however, the winds howled around the house, and made the fire-boards as well as the case ments rattle well that night. it was probably a windy night for • any locality, but we could not distinguish the roar which was 23roper to the ocean from that which was due to the wind alone. the sounds which the ocean makes must be very significant and interesting to those who live near it. when i was leaving the shore at this place the next summer, and had got a quarter of a mile distant, ascending a hill, i was startled by a sudden, loud sound from the sea, as if a large steamer were letting off steam by the shore, so that i caught my breath and felt my blood run cold for an instant, and i turned about, ex pecting to see one of the atlantic steamers thus the wellfleet oysterman 115 far out of her course, but there was nothing un usual to be seen. there was a low bank at the entrance of the hollow, between me and the ocean, and suspecting that i might have risen into another stratum of air in ascending the hill, — which had wafted to me only the ordi nary roar of the sea, — i immediately descended again, to see if i lost hearing of it; but, with out regard to my ascending or descending, it died away in a minute or two, and yet there was scarcely any wind all the while. the old man said that this was what they called the "rut," a peculiar roar of the sea before the wind changes, which, however, he could not account for. he thought that he could tell all about the weather from the sounds which the sea made. old josselyn, who came to new england in 1638, has it among his weather-signs, that "the resounding of the sea from the shore, and mur muring of the winds in the woods, without ap parent wind, sheweth wind to follow." being on another part of the coast one night since this, i heard the roar of the surf a mile distant, and the inhabitants said it was a sign that the wind would work round east, and we should have rainy weather. the ocean was heaped up somewhere at the eastward, and this roar was occasioned by its effort to preserve its equilibrium, the wave reaching the shore before 116 cape cod tlie wind. also the captain of a packet between this country and england told me that he some times met with a wave on the atlantic coming against the wind, perhaps in a calm sea, which indicated that at a distance the wind was blow ing from an opposite quarter, but the undula tion had traveled faster than it. sailors tell of "tide-rips" and "ground-swells," which they suppose to have been occasioned by hurricanes and earthquakes, and to have traveled many hundred, and sometimes even two or three thou sand miles. before sunrise the next morning they let us out again, and i ran over to the beach to see the sun come out of the ocean. the old woman of eighty-four winters was already out in the cold morning wind, bare-headed, tripping about like a young girl, and driving up the cow to milk. she got the breakfast with dispatch, and with out noise or bustle ; and meanwhile the old man resumed his stories, standing before us, who were sitting, with his back to the chimney, and eject ing his tobacco -juice right and left into the fire behind him, without regard to the various dishes which were there preparing. at breakfast we had eels, buttermilk cake, cold bread, green beans, doughnuts, and tea. the old man talked a steady stream; and when his wife told him he had better eat his breakfast, he said*. "don't the wellfleet oysterman 117 hurry me; i have lived too long to be hurried." i ate of the apple-sauce and the doughnuts, which i thought had sustained the least detri ment from the old man's shots, but my compan ion refused the apple-sauce, and ate of the hot cake and green beans, which had appeared to him to occupy the safest part of the hearth. but on comparing notes afterward, i told him that the buttermilk cake was particularly ex posed, and i saw how it suffered repeatedly, and therefore i avoided it ; but he declared that, however that might be, he witnessed that the apple-sauce was seriously injured, and had there fore declined that. after breakfast we looked at his clock, which was out of order, and oiled it with some "hen's grease," for want of sweet oil, for he scarcely could believe that we were not tinkers or pedlers ; meanwhile, he told a story about visions, which had reference to a crack in the clock-case made by frost one night. he was curious to know to what religious sect we be longed. he said that he had been to hear thir teen kinds of preaching in one month, when he was young, but he did not join any of them, — he stuck to his bible. there was nothing like any of them in his bible. while i was shaving in the next room, i heard him ask my compan ion to what sect he belonged, to which he an swered, — 118 cape cod "oh, i belong to the universal brotherhood." "what 's that ? " he asked, "sons o' temper ance?" finally, filling our pockets with doughnuts, which he was pleased to find that we called by the same name that he did, and paying for our entertainment, we took out departure; but he followed us out of doors, and made us tell him the names of the vegetables which he had raised from seeds that came out of the franklin. they were cabbage, broccoli, and parsley. as i had asked him the names of so many things, he tried me in turn with all the plants which grew in his garden, both wild and cultivated. it was about half an acre, which he cultivated wholly himself. besides the common garden vegetables, there were yellow-dock, lemon balm, hyssoj), gill go over the ground, mouse-ear, chick-weed, roman wormwood, elecampane, and other plants. as we stood there, i saw a fish hawk stoop to pick a fish out of his pond. "there," said i, "he has got a fish." "well," said the old man, who was looking all the while, but could see nothing, "he didn't dive, he just wet his claws." and, sure enough, he did not this time, though it is said that they often do, but he merely stooi3ed low enough to pick him out with his talons ; but as he bore his shining prey over the wellfleet oysterman 119 the bushes, it fell to the ground, and we did not see that he recovered it. that is not their prac tice. thus, having had another crack with the old man, he standing bareheaded under the eaves, he directed us "athwart the fields," and we took to the beach again for another day, it being now late in the morning. , it was but a day or two after this that the safe of the provincetown bank was broken open and robbed by two men from the interior, and we learned that our hospitable entertainers did at least transiently harbor the suspicion that we were the men. vi the beach again our way to the high sand-bank, which i have described. as extending all along the coast, led, as usual, through patches of bayberry bushes, which straggled into the sand. this, next to the shrub-oak, was perhaps the most common shrub thereabouts. i was much at tracted by its odoriferous leaves and small gray berries which are clustered about the short twigs, just below the last year's growth. i know of but two bushes in concord, and they, being staminate plants, do not bear fruit. the berries gave it a venerable appearance, and they smelled quite spicy, like small confectionery. robert beverley, in his "history of virginia," published in 1705, states that "at the mouth of their rivers, and all along upon the sea and bay, and near many of their creeks and swamps, grows the myrtle, bearing a berry, of which they make a hard, brittle wax, of a curious green color, which by refining becomes almost trans parent. of this they make candles, which are never greasy to the touch nor melt with lying in the beach again 121 the hottest weather; neither does the snuff of these ever offend the smell, like that of a tallow candle; but, instead of being disagreeable, if an accident puts a candle out, it yields a pleas ant fragrancy to all that are in the room; inso much that nice people often put them out on pur pose to have the incense of the expiring snuff. the melting of these berries is said to have been first found out by a surgeon in new eng land, who performed wonderful things with a salve made of them." from the abundance of berries still hanging on the bushes, we judged that the inhabitants did not generally collect them for tallow, though we had seen a piece in the house we had just left. i have since made some tallow myself. holding a basket beneath the bare twigs in april, i rubbed them together between my hands and thus gathered about a quart in twenty minutes, to which were added enough to make three pints, and i might have gathered them much faster with a suitable rake and a large shallow basket. they have little prominences like those of an orange all creased in tallow, which also fills the interstices down to the stone. the oily part rose to the top, making it look like a savory black broth, which smelled much like balm or other herb tea. you let it cool, then skim off the tallow from the surface, melt this again and strain it. i got 122 cape cod about a quarter of a pound weight from my three pints, and more yet remained within the berries. a small portion cooled in the form of small flat tish hemispheres, like crystallizations, the size of a kernel of corn (nuggets i called them as i picked them out from amid the berries). lou don says, that " cultivated trees are said to yield more wax than those that are found wild." ^ if you get any pitch on your hands in the pine woods you have only to rub some of these ber ries between your hands to start it off. but the ocean was the grand fact there, which made us forget both bayberries and men. to-day the air was beautifully clear, and the sea no longer dark and stormy, though the waves still broke with foam along the beach, but sparkling and full of life. already that morning i had seen the day break over the sea as if it came out of its bosom : — " the saffron-robed dawn rose in haste from the streams of ocean, that she might bring light to immortals and to mortals." the sun rose visibly at such a distance over the sea, that the cloud-bank in the horizon, which at first concealed him, was not perceptible until he had risen high behind it, and plainly broke and dispersed it, like an arrow. but as yet i looked at him as rising over land, and 1 see duplessy, vig^taux b^sineuxf vol. ii., p. 60. the beach again 123 could not, without an effort, realize that he was rising over the sea. already i saw some vessels on the horizon, which had rounded the cape in the night, and were now well on their watery way to other lands. we struck the beach again in the south part of truro. in the early part of the day, while it was flood tide, and the beach was narrow and soft, we walked on the bank, which was very high here, but not so level as the day before, being more interrupted by slight hollows. the author of the description of the eastern coast says of this part, that "the bank is very high and steep. from the edge of it west, there is a strip of sand a hundred yards in breadth. then succeeds low brushwood, a quarter of a mile wide, and almost impassable. after which comes a thick perplexing forest, in which not a house is to be discovered. seamen, therefore, though the distance between these two vallies (newcomb's and brush hollows) is great, must not attempt to enter the wood, as in a snow storm they must undoubtedly perish." this is still a true description of the country, except that there is not much high wood left. there were many vessels, like gulls, skim ming over the surface of the sea, now half con cealed in its troughs, their dolphin-strikers ploughing the water, now tossed on the top of 124 cape cod the billows. one, a barque standing down par allel with the coast, suddenly furled her sails, came to anchor, and swung round in the wind, near us, only half a mile from the shore. at first we thought that her captain wished to com municate with us, and perhaps we did not re gard the signal of distress, which a mariner would have understood, and he cursed us for cold-hearted wreckers who turned our backs on him. for hours we could still see her anchored there behind us, and we wondered how she could afford to loiter so long in her course. or was she a smuggler who had chosen that wild beach to land her cargo on? or did they wish to catch fish, or paint their vessel? erelong other barques, and brigs, and schooners, which had in the meanwhile doubled the cape, sailed by her in the smacking breeze, and our consciences were relieved. some of these vessels lagged behind, while others steadily went ahead. we narrowly watched their rig and the cut of their jibs, and how they walked the water, for there was all the difference between them that there is between living creatures. but we wondered that they should be remembering boston and new york and liverpool, steering for them, out there ; as if the sailor might forget his peddling business on such a grand highway. they had perchance brought oranges from the western the beach again 125 isles; and were they carrying back the peel? we might as well transport our old traps across the ocean of eternity. is that but another "trading flood," with its blessed isles? is heaven such a harbor as the liverpool docks? still held on without a break the inland bar rens and shrubbery, the desert and the high sand-bank with its even slope, the broad white beach, the breakers, the green water on the bar, and the atlantic ocean; and we traversed with delight new reaches of the shore; we took an other lesson in sea-horses' manes and sea-cows' tails, in sea-jellies and sea-clams, with our new gained experience. the sea ran hardly less than the day before. it seemed with every wave to be subsiding, because such was our ex pectation, and yet when hours had elapsed we could see no difference. but there it was, bal ancing itself, the restless ocean by our side, lurching in its gait. each wave left the sand all braided or woven, as it were with a coarse woof and warp, and a distinct raised edge to its rapid work. we made no haste, since we wished to see the ocean at our leisure, and in deed that soft sand was no place in which to be in a hurry, for one mile there was as good as two elsewhere. besides, we were obliged fre quently to empty our shoes of the sand which one took in in climbing or descending the bank. 126 cape cod as we were walking close to the water's edge this morning, we turned round, by chance, and saw a large black object which the waves had just cast up on the beach behind us, yet too far off for us to distinguish what it was ; and when we were about to return to it, two men came running from the bank, where no human beings had appeared before, as if they had come out of the sand, in order to save it before another wave took it. as we approached, it took successively the form of a huge fish, a drowned man, a sail or a net, and finally of a mass of tow-cloth, part of the cargo of the franklin, which the men loaded into a cart. objects on the beach, whether men or inani mate things, look not only exceedingly gro tesque, but much larger and more wonderful than they actually are. lately, when approach ing the sea-shore several degrees south of this, i saw before me, seemingly half a mile distant, what appeared like bold and rugged cliffs on the beach, fifteen feet high, and whitened by the sun and waves; but after a few steps it proved to be low heaps of rags, — part of the cargo of a wrecked vessel, — scarcely more than a foot in height. once also it was my business to go in search of the relics of a human body, mangled by sharks, which had just been cast up, a week after a wreck, having got the direc the beach again 127 tion from a light-house : i should find it a mile or two distant over the sand, a dozen rods from the water, covered with a cloth, by a stick stuck up. i expected that i must look very narrowly to find so small an object, but the sandy beach, half a mile wide, and stretching farther than the eye could reach, was so perfectly smooth and bare, and the mirage toward the sea so magnifying, that when i was half a mile distant the insignificant sliver which marked the spot looked like a bleached spar, and the relics were as conspicuous as if they lay in state on that sandy plain, or a generation had labored to pile up their cairn there. close at hand they were simply some bones with a little flesh adhering to them, in fact, only a slight inequality in the sweep of the shore. there was nothing at all remarkable about them, and they were singu larly inoffensive both to the senses and the im agination. but as i stood there they grew more and more imposing. they were alone with the beach and the sea, whose hollow roar seemed addressed to them, and i was impressed as if there was an understanding between them and the ocean which necessarily left me out, with my snivelling sympathies. that dead body had taken possession of the shore, and reigned over it as no living one could, in the name of a certain majesty which belonged to it. 128 cape cod we afterward saw many small pieces of tow cloth washed up, and i learn that it continued to be found in good condition, even as late as november in that year, half a dozen bolts at a time. we eagerly filled our pockets with the smooth round pebbles which in some places, even here, were thinly sprinkled over the sand, together with flat circular shells (/scutellcef); but, as we had read, when they were dry they had lost their beauty, and at each sitting we emptied our pockets again of the least remarkable, until our collection was well culled. every material was rolled into the pebble form by the waves; not only stones of various kinds, but the hard coal wdiich some vessel had dropped, bits of glass, and in one instance a mass of peat three feet long, where there was nothing like it to be seen for many miles. all the great rivers of the globe are annually, if not constantly, discharg ing great quantities of lumber, which drifts to distant shores. i have also seen very perfect pebbles of brick, and bars of castile soap from a wreck rolled into perfect cylinders, and still spirally streaked with red, like a barber's pole. when a cargo of rags is washed ashore, every old pocket and bag-like recess will be filled to bursting with sand by being rolled on the beach ; *uid on one occasion, the pockets in the clothing the beach again 129 of the wrecked being thus puffed up, even after they had been ripped open by wreckers, deluded me into the hope of identifying them by the contents. a pair of gloves looked exactly as if filled by a hand. the water in such clothing is soon wrung out and evaporated, but the sand, which works itself into every seam, is not so easily got rid of. sponges, which are picked up on the shore, as is well known, retain some of th3 sand of the beach to the latest day, in spite of every effort to extract it. i found one stone on the top of the bank, of a dark gray color, shaped exactly like a giant clam (^mactra solidisshna), and of the same size ; and, what was more remarkable, one half of the outside had shelled off and lay near it, of the same form and depth with one of the valves of this clam, while the other half was loose, leav ing a solid core of a darker color within it. i afterward saw a stone resembling a razor clam, but it was a solid one. it appeared as if the stone, in the process of formation, had filled the mould which a clam-shell furnished; or the same law that shaped the clam had made a clam of stone. dead clams, with shells full of sand, are called sand clams. there were many of the large clam-shells filled with sand; and some times one valve was separately filled exactly even, as if it had beeij heaped and then scraped. 130 cape cod even among the many small stones on the top of the bank, i found one arrow-head. beside the giant clam and barnacles, we found on the shore a small clam {llesodesma arctata), which i dug with my hands in num bers on the bars, and which is sometimes eaten by the inhabitants, in the absence of the my a arenaria^ on this side. most of their empty shells had been perforated by some foe. also, the — astarte castanea. the edible mussel {mytilus eduus) on the few rocks, and washed up in curious bunches of forty or fifty, held together by its rope-like byssus. the scollop shell (^pecten concentricus), used for card-racks and pin-cushions. cockles, or cuckoos {jvatica heros)^ and their remarkable nidus, called "sand-circle," looking like the top of a stone jug without the stopple, and broken on one side, or like a flar ing dickey made of sand-paper. also, — cancellaria couthouyi (j\ and — periwinkles (?) (^fusus decemco status). we afterward saw some other kinds on the bay side, gould states that this cape "has hitherto proved a barrier to the migrations of many species of mollusca." — "of the one hun dred and ninety-seven species [which he de the beach again 131 scribed in 1840 as belonging to massachusetts], eighty-three do not pass to the south shore, and fifty are not found on the north shore of the cape." among crustacea there were the shells of crabs and lobsters, often bleached quite white high up the beach; sea or beach fleas (^am ^ihii^odd)', and the cases of the horse-shoe crab, or saucepan fish (^limulus polyphe mus), of which we saw many alive on the bay side, where they feed pigs on them. their tails were used as arrow-heads by the indians. of kadiata, there were the sea chestnut or egg (^echinus gra?iulatus), commonly divested of its spines; flat circular shells (scutella parma ?) covered with chocolate-colored spines, but becoming smooth and white, with five petal like figures; a few star-fishes or five-fingers {asterias rubens); and sun-fishes or sea-jellies {aurelice). there was also at least one species of sponge. the plants which i noticed here and there on the pure sandy shelf, between the ordinary high-water mark and the foot of the bank, were sea rocket {cahile americana)^ saltwort (salsola hali\ sea sandwort {honhenya pep loides), sea burdock {xanthium echinatuni). sea-side spurge {euphorbia polygonifolia); also, beach grass {arundo, psamma, or 132 cape cod calamagrostis arenaria\ sea-side golden-rod {soudago sempervirens), and tlie beach pea {laihyrus maritimusi). sometimes we helj)ed a wrecker turn over a larger log tlian usual, or we amused ourselves with rolling stones down the bank, but we rarely could make one reach the water, the beach was so soft and wide ; or we bathed in some shallow within a bar, where the sea covered us with sand at every flux, though it was quite cold and windy. the ocean there is commonly but a tantalizing prospect in hot weather, for with all that water before you, there is, as we were af terward told, no bathing on the atlantic side, on account of tlie undertow and the rumor of sharks. at the light-house both in eastham and truro, the only houses quite on the shore, they declared, the next year, that they would tiot bathe there "for any sum," for they some times saw the sharks tossed up and quiver for a moment on the sand. others laughed at these stories, but perhaps they could afford to because they never bathed anywhere. one old wrecker told us that he killed a regular man-eating shark fourteen feet long, and hauled him out with his oxen, where we had bathed; and another, that his father caught a smaller one of the same kind that was stranded there, by standing him up on his snout so that the waves could not take him. the beach again 133 they will tell you tough stories of sharks all over the cape, which i do not presume to doubt utterly, — how they will sometimes upset a boat, or tear it in pieces, to get at the man in it. i can easily believe in the undertow, but i have no doubt that one shark in a dozen years is enough to keep up the reputation of a beach a hundred miles long. i should add, however, that in july we walked on the bank here a quarter of a mile parallel with a fish about six feet in length, possibly a shark, which was prowling slowly along within two rods of the shore. it was of a pale brown color, singularly film-like and indistinct in the water, as if all nature abetted this child of ocean, and showed many darker transverse bars or rings whenever it came to the surface. it is well known that different fishes even of the same species are col ored by the water they inhabit. we saw it go into a little cove or bathing-tub, where we had just been bathing, where the water was only four or five feet deep at that time, and after ex ploring it go slowly out again ; but we continued to bathe there, only observing first from the bank if the cove was preoccupied. we thought that the water was fuller of life, more aerated perhaps than that of the bay, like soda-water, for we were as particular as young salmon, and the expectation of encountering a shark did not 134 cape cod subtract anything from its life-giving quali ties. sometimes we sat on the wet beach and watched the beach birds, sand-pipers, and oth ers, trotting along close to each wave, and wait ing fpr the sea to cast up their breakfast. the former {charadrius melodus) ran with great rapidity, and then stood stock still, remarkably erect, and hardly to be distinguished from the beach. the wet sand was covered with small skipping sea fleas, which apparently made a part of their food. these last are the little scavengers of the beach, and are so numerous that they will devour large fishes, which have been cast up, in a very short time. one little bird not larger than a sparrow — it may have been a phalaroj)e — would alight on the tur bulent surface where the breakers were five or six feet high, and float buoyantly there like a duck, cunningly taking to its wings and lifting itself a few feet through the air over the foam ing crest of each breaker, but sometimes outrid ing safely a considerable billow which hid it some seconds, when its instinct told it that it would not break. it was a little creature thus to sport with the ocean, but it was as perfect a success in its way as the breakers in theirs. there was also an almost uninterrupted line of coots rising and falling with the waves, a few the beach again 135 rods from the shore, the whole length of the cape. they made as constant a part of the ocean's border as the pads or pickerelweed do of tliat of a pond. we read the following as to the storm petrel {thalassidroma wihonii), which is seen in the bay as well as on the out side. "the feathers on the breast of the storm petrel are, like those of all swimming birds, water-proof; but substances not susceptible of being wetted with water are, for that very rea son, the best fitted for collecting oil from its surface. that function is performed by the feathers on the breast of the storm petrels as they touch on the surface; and though that may not be the only way in which they procure their food, it is certainly that in which they ob tain great part of it. they dash along till they have loaded their feathers and then they pause upon the waves and remove the oil with their bills." thus we kept on along the gently curving shore, seeing two or three miles ahead at once, — along this ocean sidewalk, where there was none to turn out for, with the middle of the road, the highway of nations, on our right, and the sand cliffs of the cape on our left. we saw this forenoon a part of the wreck of a ves sel, probably the franklin, a large piece fifteen feet square, and still freshly painted. with » 136 cape cod grapple and a line we could have saved it, for the waves repeatedly washed it within cast, but they as often took it back. it would have been a lucky haul for some poor wrecker, for i have been told that one man who paid three or four dollars for a part of the wreck of that vessel, sold fifty or sixty dollars' worth of iron out of it. another, the same who picked up the cap' tain's valise with the memorable letter in it, showed me, growing in his garden, many pear and plum trees which washed ashore from her, all nicely tied up and labeled, and he said that he might have got five hundred dollars' worth; for a mr. bell was importing the nucleus of a nursery to be established near boston. his turnip-seed came from the same source. also valuable spars from the same vessel and from the cactus lay in his yard. in short the inhab itants visit the beach to see what they have caught as regularly as a fisherman his weir or a lumberer his boom; the caj^e is their boom. i heard of. one who had recently picked up twenty barrels of apples in good condition, probably a part of a deck load thrown over in a storm. though there are wreck-masters appointed to look after valuable property which must be ad vertised, yet undoubtedly a great deal of value is secretly carried off. but are we not all the beach again 137 wreckers contriving that some treasure may be washed up on our beach, that we may secure it, and do we not infer the habits of these nauset and barnegat wreckers, from the common modes of getting a living ? the sea, vast and wild as it is, bears thus the waste and wrecks of human art to its remotest shore. there is no telling what it may not vomit up. it lets nothing lie; not even the giant clams which cling to its bottom. it is still heaving up the tow-cloth of the franklin, and perhaps a piece of some old pirate's ship, wrecked more than a hundred years ago, comes ashore to-day. . some years since, when a vessel was wrecked here which had nutmegs in her cargo, they were strewn all along the beach, and for a considerable time were not spoiled by the salt water. soon afterward, a fisherman caught a cod which was full of them. why, then, might not the spice-islanders shake their nut meg-trees into the ocean, and let all nations who stand in need of them pick them up? how ever, after a year, i found that the nutmegs from the franklin had become soft. you might make a curious list of articles which fishes have swallowed, — sailors' open clasp knives, and bright tin snuff-boxes, not knowing what was in them, — and jugs, and jewels, and jonah. the other day i came across the following scrap in a newspaper. 138 cape cod , " a religious fish. — a short time ag-o, mine host stewart, of the denton hotel, pm'chased a rock-fish, weighing about sixty pounds. on opening it he found in it a certificate of membership of the m. e. church, which we read as follows : — member methodist e. church, founded a. d. 1784. quarterly ticket. 18 minister. * for our light aisiction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.' — 2 cor. iv. 17. * o what are all my sufferings here, if, lord, thou coimt me meet with that enraptured host t' appear. and worship at thy feet.' " the paper was, of course, in a crumpled and wet condition, but on exposing it to the sun, and ironing the kinks out of it, it became quite legible. — denton {md.) journal.'^ from time to time we saved a wreck ourselves, a box or barrel, and set it on its end, and ap propriated it witli crossed sticks ; and it will lie there perhaps, respected by brother wreckers, until some more violent storm shall take it, really lost to man until wrecked again. we also saved, at the cost of wet feet only, a valu able cord and buoy, part of a seine, with which the sea was playing, for it seemed ungracious to refuse the least gift which so great a person age offered you. we brought this home and still use it for a garden line. i picked up a bottle half buried in the wet sand, covered with barnacles, but stoppled tight, and half full of the beach again 139 red ale, which still smacked of juniper, — all that remained i fancied from the wreck of a rowdy world, — that great salt sea on the one hand, and this little sea of ale on the other, pre serving their separate characters. what if it could tell us its adventures over countless ocean waves ! man would not be man through such ordeals as it had passed. but as i poured it slowly out on to the sand, it seemed to me that man himself was like a half -emptied bottle of pale ale, which time had drunk so far, yet stoppled tight for a while, and drifting about in the ocean of circumstances, but destined erelong to mingle with the surrounding waves, or be spilled amid the sands of a distant shore. in the summer i saw two men fishing for bass hereabouts. their bait was a bullfrog, or sev eral small frogs in a bunch, for want of squid. they followed a retiring wave, and whirling their lines round and round their heads with in creasing rapidity, threw them as far as they could into the sea ; then retreating, sat down flat on the sand, and waited for a bite. it was liter ally (or littorally) walking down to the shore, and throwing your line into the atlantic. i should not have known what might take hold of the other end, whether proteus or another. at any rate, if you could not pull him in, why, you might let him go without being pulled in your 140 cape cod self. and they knew by experience that it would be a striped bass, or perhaps a cod, for these fishes play along near the shore. from time to time we sat under the lee of a sand-hill on the bank, thinly covered with coarse beach -grass, and steadily gazed on the sea, or watched the vessels going south, all blessings of the bay of course. we could see a little more than half a circle of ocean, besides the glimpses of the bay which we got behind us; the sea there was not wild and dreary in all respects, for there were frequently a hundred sail in sight at once on the atlantic. you can commonly count about eighty in a favorable summer day, and pilots sometimes land and ascend the bank to look out for those which require their ser vices. these had been waiting for fair weather, and had come out of boston harbor together. the same is the case when they have been as sembled in the vineyard sound, so that you may see but few one day, and a large fleet the next. schooners with many jibs and stay-sails crowded all the sea road ; square-rigged vessels with their great height and breadth of canvas were ever and anon appearing out of the far horizon, or disappearing and sinking into it ; here and there a pilot-boat was towing its little boat astern to ward some distant foreigner who had just fired a gun, the echo of which along the shore the beach again 141 sounded like the caving of the bank. we could see the pilot looking through his glass toward the distant ship which was putting back to speak with him. he sails many a mile to meet her; and now she puts her sails aback, and communi cates with him alongside, — sends some import ant message to the owners, and then bids fare well to these shores for good and all; or, per chance a propeller passed and made fast to some disabled craft, or one that had been becalmed, whose cargo of fruit might spoil. though si lently, and for the most part incommunicatively, going about their business, they were, no doubt, a source of cheerfulness and a kind of society to one another. to-day it was the purple sea, an epithet which i should not before have accepted. there were distinct patches of the color of a purple grape with the bloom rubbed off. but first and last the sea is of all colors. well writes gilpin concerning "the brilliant hues which are contin ually playing on the surface of a quiet ocean," and this was not too turbulent at a distance from the shore. "beautiful," says he, "no doubt in a high degree are those glimmering tints which often invest the tops of mountains ; but they are mere coruscations compared with these marine colors, which are continually varying and shift ing into each other in all the vivid splendor of 142 cape cod the rainbow, through the space often of several leagues." commonly, in calm weather, foi half a mile from the shore, where the bottom tinges it, the sea is green, or greenish, as are some ponds; then blue for many miles, often with purple tinges, bounded in the distance by a light, almost silvery stripe ; beyond which there is gen erally a dark blue rim, like a mountain ridge in the horizon, as if, like that, it owed its color to the intervening atmosphere. on another day, it will be marked with long streaks, alternately smooth and rippled, light-colored and dark, even like our inland meadows in a freshet, and show ing which way the wind sets. thus we sat on the foaming shore, looking on the wine-colored ocean, — 0iv e</)' akhs ttoaitjs, dpswp iirl oxvoira irsvrov. here and there was a darker spot on its surface, the shadow of a cloud, though the sky was so clear that no cloud would have been noticed otherwise, and no shadow would have been seen on the land, where a much smaller surface is visible at once. so, distant clouds and showers may be seen on all sides by a sailor in the course of a day, which do not necessarily portend rain where he is. in july we saw similar dark blue patches where schools of menhaden rippled the surface, scarcely to be distinguished from the the beach again 143 shadows of clouds. sometimes the sea was spotted with them far and wide, such is its in exhaustible fertility. close at hand you see their back fin, which is very long and sharp, projecting two or three inches above water. from time to time also we saw the white bellies of the bass playing along the shore. it was a poetic recreation to watch those dis tant sails steering for half fabulous ports, whose very names are a mysterious music to our ears ; fayal, and babel-mandel, ay, and chagres, and panama, — bound to the famous bay of san francisco, and the golden streams of sacramento and san joaquin, to feather river and the american fork, where sutter's fort presides, and inland stands the city de los angeles. it is remarkable that men do not sail the sea with more expectation. nothing remarkable was ever accomplished in a prosaic mood. the heroes and discoverers have found true more than was previously believed, only when they were expecting and dreaming of something more than their contemporaries dreamed of, or even themselves discovered, that is, when they were in a frame of mind fitted to behold the truth. referred to the world's standard, they are al ways insane. even savages have indirectly sur mised as much. humboldt, speaking of colum bus approaching the new world, says: "the 144 cape cod grateful coolness of the evening air, the ethereal purity of the starry firmament, the balmy fra grance of flowers, wafted to him by the land breeze, all led him to suppose (as we are told by herrera, in the decades) that he was approach ing the garden of eden, the sacred abode of our first parents. the orinoco seemed to him one of the four rivers which, according to the ven erable tradition of the ancient world, flowed from paradise, to water and divide the surface of the earth, newly adorned with plants." so even the expeditions for the discovery of el dorado, and of the fountain of youth, led to real, if not compensatory discoveries. we discerned vessels so far off, when once we began to look, that only the tops of their masts in the horizon were visible, and it took a strong intention of the eye, and its most favor able side, to see them at all, and sometimes we doubted if we were not counting our eyelashes. charles darwin states that he saw, from the base of the andes, " the masts of the vessels at anchor in the bay of valparaiso, although not less than twenty-six geographical miles distant," and that anson had been surprised at the distance at which his vessels were discovered from the coast, without knowing the reason, namely, the great height of the land and the transparency of the air. steamers may be detected much farther the beach again 145 than sailing vessels, for, as one says, when their hulls and masts of wood and iron are down, their smoky masts and streamers still betray them; and the same writer, speaking of the comparative advantages of bituminous and an thracite coal for war-steamers, states that " from the ascent of the columns of smoke above the horizon, the motions of the steamers in calais harbor [on the coast of france] are at all times observable at ramsgate [on the english coast], from the first lighting of the fires to the putting out at sea; and that in america the steamers burning the fat bituminous coal can be tracked at sea at least seventy miles before the hulls be come visible, by the dense columns of black smoke pouring out of their chimneys, and trail ing: alono^ the horizon." though there were numerous vessels at this great distance in the horizon on every side, yet the vast spaces between them, like the spaces between the stars, — far as they were distant from us, so were they from one another — nay, some were twice as far from each other as from us, — impressed us with a sense of the immensity of the ocean, the "unfruitful ocean," as it has been called, and we could see what proportion man and his works bear to the globe. as we looked off, and saw the water growing darker and darker and deeper and deeper the farther 146 cape cod we looked, till it was awful to consider, and it appeared to have no relation to the friendly land, either as shore or bottom, — of what use is a bottom if it is out of sight, if it is two or three miles from the surface, and you are to be drowned so long before you get to it, though it were made of the same stuff with your native soil? — over that ocean where, as the veda says, "there is nothing to give support, nothing to rest upon, nothing to cling to," i felt that i was a land animal. the man in a balloon even may commonly alight on the earth in a few mo ments, but the sailor's only hope is that he may reach the distant shore. i could then appre ciate the heroism of the old navigator. sir humphrey gilbert, of whom it is related, that being overtaken by a storm when on his return from america, in the year 1583, far northeast ward from where we were, sitting abaft with a book in his hand, just before he was swallowed up in the deep, he cried out to his comrades in the hind, as they came within hearing, "we are as near to heaven by sea as by land." i saw that it would not be easy to realize. on cape cod the next most eastern land you hear of is st. george's bank (the fishermen tell of "georges," "cashus," and other sunken lands which they frequent). every cape man has a theory about george's bank having been the beach again 147 an island once, and in their accounts they grad ually reduce the shallowness from six, five, four, two fathoms, to somebody's confident assertion that he has seen a mackerel-gull sitting on a piece of dry land there. it reminded me, when i thought of the shipwrecks which had taken place there, of the isle of demons, laid down off this coast in old charts of the new world. there must be something monstrous, methinks, in a vision of the sea bottom from over some bank a thousand miles from the shore, more awful than its imagined bottomlessness ; a drowned continent, all livid and frothing at the nostrils, like the body of a drowned man, which is better sunk deep than near the surface. i have been surprised to discover from a steamer the shallowness of massachusetts bay itself. off billingsgate point i could have touched the bottom with a pole, and i plainly saw it variously shaded with seaweed, at five or six miles from the shore. this is "the shoal ground of the cape," it is true, but elsewhere the bay is not much deeper than a country pond. we are told that the deepest water in the english channel between shakespeare's cliff and cape gris-nez, in france, is one hun dred and eighty feet ; and guyot says that " the baltic sea has a depth of only one hundred and twenty feet between the coasts of germany and 148 cape cod tliose of sweden," and "the adriatic between venice and trieste has a depth of only one hun dred and thirty feet." a pond in my native town, only half a mile long, is more than one hundred feet deep. the ocean is but a larger lake. at midsum mer you may sometimes see a strip of glassy smoothness on it, a few rods in width and many miles long, as if the surface there were covered with a thin pellicle of oil, just as on a country pond; a sort of stand-still, you would say, at the meeting or parting of two currents of air (if it does not rather mark the unrippled steadiness of a current of water beneath), for sailors tell of the ocean and land breeze meeting between the fore and aft sails of a vessel, while the latter are full, the former being suddenly taken aback. daniel webster, in one of his letters describing blue-fishing off martha's vineyard, referring to those smooth places, which fishermen and sailors call "slicks," says: "we met with them yester day, and our boatman made for them, whenever discovered. he said they were caused by the blue-fish chopping up their prey. that is to say, those voracious fellows get into a school of menhaden, which are too large to swallow whole, and they bite them into pieces to suit their tastes. and the oil from this butchery, rising to the surface, makes the 'slick '." the beach again 149 yet this same placid ocean, as civil now as a city's harbor, a place for ships and commerce, will erelong be lashed into sudden fury, and all its caves and cliffs will resound with tumult. it will ruthlessly heave these vessels to and fro, break them in pieces in its sandy or stony jaws, and deliver their crews to sea-monsters. it will play with them like seaweed, distend them like dead frogs, and carry them about, now high, now low, to show to the fishes, giving them a nibble. this gentle ocean will toss and tear the rag of a man's body like the father of mad bulls, and his relatives may be seen seeking the remnants for weeks along the strand. from some quiet inland hamlet they have rushed weep ing to the unheard-of shore, and now stand un certain where a sailor has recently been buried amid the sand-hills. it is generally supposed that they who have long been conversant with the ocean can fore tell, by certain indications, such as its roar and the notes of sea-fowl, when it will change from calm to storm; but probably no such ancient mariner as we dream of exists; they know no more, at least, than the older sailors do about this voyage of life on which we are all embarked. nevertheless, we love to hear the sayings of old sailors, and their accounts of natural phenomena which totally ignore, and are ignored by, 150 cape cod science; and possibly they have not always looked over the gunwale so long in vain. kalm repeats a story which was told him in philadel phia by a mr. cock, who was one day sailing to the west indies in a small yacht, with an old man on board who was well acquainted with those seas. "the old man sounding the depth, called to the mate to tell mr. cock to launch the boats immediately, and to put a sufficient number of men into them, in order to tow the yacht during the calm, that they might reach the island before them as soon as possible, as within twenty-four hours there would be a strong hurricane. mr. cock asked him what reasons he had to think so ; the old man replied, that on sounding, he saw the lead in the water at a distance of many fathoms more than he had seen it before ; that therefore the water was be come clear all of a sudden, which he looked upon as a certain sign of an impending hurricane in the sea." the sequel of the story is, that by good fortune, and by dint of rowing, they man aged to gain a safe harbor before the hurricane had reached its height ; but it finally raged with so much violence, that not only many ships were lost and houses unroofed, but even their own vessel in harbor was washed so far on shore that several weeks elapsed before it could be got off. the greeks would not have called the ocean the beach again 151 arpvycto^^ or unfruitful, though it does not pro duce wheat, if they had viewed it by the light of modern science, for naturalists now assert that "the sea, and not the land, is the principal seat of life," — though not of vegetable life. dar win affirms that "our most thickly inhabited forests appear almost as deserts when we come to compare them with the corresponding regions of the ocean." agassiz and gould tell us that "the sea teems with animals of all classes, far beyond the extreme point of flowering plants ; " but they add, that "experiments of dredging in very deep water have also taught us that the abyss of the ocean is nearly a desert;" — "so that modern investigations," to quote the words of desor, "merely go to confirm the great idea which was vaguely anticipated by the ancient poets and philosophers, that the ocean is the origin of all things." yet marine animals and plants hold a lower rank in the scale of being than land animals and plants. "there is no instance known," says desor, "of an animal becoming aquatic in its perfect state, after hav ing lived in its lower stage on dry land," but as in the case of the tadpole, "the progress invari ably points towards the dry land." in short, the dry land itself came through and out of the water in its way to the heavens, for, "in going back through the geological ages, we come to 152 cape cod an epoch when, according to all appearances, the dry land did not exist, and when the surface of our globe was entirely covered with water." we looked on the sea, then, once more, not as (xtpuycto?, or unfruitful, but as it has been more truly called, the "laboratory of continents." though we have indulged in some placid re flections of late, the reader must not forget that the dash and roar of the waves were incessant. indeed, it would be well if he were to read with a large conch-shell at his ear. but notwith standing that it was very cold and windy to-day, it was such cold as we thought would not cause one to take cold who was exposed to it, owing to the saltness of the air and the dryness of the soil. yet the author of the old " description of wellfleet" says, "the atmosphere is very much impregnated with saline particles, which, per haps, with the great use of fish, and the neglect of cider and spruce-beer, may be a reason why the people are more subject to sore mouths and throats than in other places." vn across the cape when we have returned from the seaside, we sometimes ask ourselves why we did not spend more time in gazing at the sea; but very soon the traveler does not look at the sea more than at the heavens. as for the interior, if the elevated sand-bar in the midst of the ocean can be said to have any interior, it was an exceed ingly desolate landscape, with rarely a cultivated or cultivable field in sight. we saw no villages, and seldom a house, for these are generally on the bay side. it was a succession of shrubby hills and valleys, now wearing an autumnal tint. you would frequently think, from the character of the surface, the dwarfish trees, and the bear berries around, that you were on the top of a mountain. the only wood in eastham was on the edge of wellfleet. the pitch-pines were not commonly more than fifteen or eighteen feet high. the larger ones were covered with lichens, — often hung with the long gray usnea. there is scarcely a white-pine on the forearm of the cape. yet in the northwest part of east 154 cape cod ham, near tlie camp ground, we saw, the next summer, some quite rural, and even sylvan re treats, for the cape, where small rustling groves of oaks and locusts and whispering pines, on perfectly level ground, made a little paradise. the locusts, both transplanted and growing nat urally about the houses there, appeared to flour ish better than any other tree. there were thin belts of wood in wellfleet and truro, a mile or more from the atlantic, but, for the most part, we could see the horizon through them, or, if extensive, the trees were not large. both oaks and pines had often the same flat look with the apple-trees. commonly, the oak woods twenty -five years old were a mere scraggy shrub bery nine or ten feet high, and we could fre quently reach to their topmost leaf. much that is called "woods " was about half as high as this, — only patches of shrub-oak, bayberry, beach plum, and wild roses, overrun with woodbine. when the roses were in bloom, these patches in the midst of the sand displayed such a profusion of blossoms, mingled with the aroma of the bay berry, that no italian or other artificial rose garden could equal them. they were perfectly elysian, and realized my idea of an oasis in the desert. huckleberry bushes were very abun dant, and the next summer they bore a remark able quantity of that kind of gall called huckle across the cape 155 berry-apple, forming quite handsome though monstrous blossoms. but it must be added, that this shrubbery swarmed with wood -ticks, sometimes very troublesome parasites, and which it takes very horny fingers to crack. the inhabitants of these towns have a great regard for a tree, though their standard for one is necessarily neither large nor high ; and when they tell you of the large trees that once grew here, you must think of them, not as absolutely large, but large compared with the present gen eration. their "brave old oaks," of which they speak with so much respect, and which they will point out to you as relics of the primi tive forest, one hundred or one hundred and fifty, ay, for aught they know, two hundred years old, have a ridiculously dwarfish appear ance, which excites a smile in the beholder. the largest and most venerable which they will show you in such a case are, perhaps, not more than twenty or twenty -five feet high. i was especially amused by the liliputian old oaks in the south part of truro. to the inexperienced eye, which appreciated their proportions only, they might appear vast as the tree which saved his royal majesty, but measured they were dwarfed at once almost into lichens which a deer might eat up in a morning. yet they will tell you that large schooners were once built of tim 156 cape cod ber which grew in wellfleet. the old houses also are built of the timber of the cape ; but instead of the forests in the midst of which they originally stood, barren heaths, with poverty grass for heather, now stretch away on every side. the modern houses are built of what is called "dimension timber," imported from maine, all ready to be set up, so that commonly they do not touch it again with an axe. almost all the wood used for fuel is imported by vessels or currents, and of course all the coal. i was told that probably a quarter of the fuel and a considerable part of the lumber used in north truro was drift-wood. many get all their fuel from the beach. of birds not found in the interior of the state, — at least in my neighborhood, — i heard, in the summer, the black-throated bunting {fringilla americana) amid the shrubbery, and in the open land the upland plover (totanus bartramms\ whose quivering notes were ever and anon prolonged into a clear, somewhat plaintive yet hawk-like scream, which sounded at a very indefinite distance. the bird may have been in the next field, though it sounded a mile off. to-day we were walking through truro, a town of about eighteen hundred inhabitants. we had already come to pamet river, which across the cape 157 empties into the bay. this was the limit of the pilgrims' journey up the cape from province town, when seeking a place for settlement. it rises in a hollow within a few rods of the atlan tic, and one who lives near its source told us that in high tides the sea leaked through, yet the wind and waves preserve intact the barrier between them, and thus the whole river is stead ily driven westward butt-end foremost, — foun tain-head, channel, and light-house, at the mouth, all together. early in the afternoon we reached the high land light, whose white tower we had seen ris ing out of the bank in front of us for the last mile or two. it is fourteen miles from the nauset lights, on what is called the clay pounds, an immense bed of clay abutting on the atlantic, and, as the keeper told us, stretching quite across the cape, which is here only about two miles wide. we perceived at once a differ ence in the soil, for there was an interruption of the desert, and a slight appearance of a sod un der our feet, such as we had not seen for the last two days. after arranging to lodge at the light-house, we rambled across the cape to the bay, over a singularly ble^k and barren-looking country, consisting of rounded hills and hollows, called by geologists diluvial elevations and depressions, 158 cape cod — a kind of scenery which has been compared to a chopped sea, though this suggests too sud den a transition. there is a delineation of this very landscape in hitchcock's report on the geology of massachusetts, a work which, by its size at least, reminds one of a diluvial elevation itself. looking southward from the light house, the cape appeared like an elevated pla teau, sloping very regularly, though slightly, downward from the edge of the bank on the atlantic side, about one hundred and fifty feet above the ocean, to that on the bay side. on traversing this we found it to be interrupted by broad valleys or gullies, which become the hol lows in the bank when the sea has worn up to them. they are commonly at right angles with the shore, and often extend quite across the cape. some of the valleys, however, are circu lar, a hundred feet deep, without any outlet, as if the cape had sunk in those places, or its sands had run out. the few scattered houses which we passed, being placed at the bottom of the hollows, for shelter and fertility, were, for the most part, concealed entirely, as much as if they had been swallowed up in the earth. even a village with its meeting-house, which we had left little more than a stone's throw behind, had sunk into the earth, spire and all, and we saw only the surface of the upland and the sea on across the cape 169 either hand. when approaching it, we had mistaken the belfry for a summer-house on the phiin. we began to think that we might tum ble into a village before we were aware of it, as into an ant-lion's hole, and be drawn into the sand irrecoverably. the most conspicuous ob jects on the land were a distant windmill, or a meeting-house standing alone, for only they could afford to occupy an exposed place. a great part of the township, however, is a bar ren, heath-like plain, and perhaps one third of it lies in common, though the property of indi viduals. the author of the old "description of truro," speaking of the soil, says, "the snow, which would be of essential service to it pro vided it lay level and covered the ground, is blown into drifts and into the sea." this pecu liar open country, with here and there a patch of shrubbery, extends as much as seven miles, or from pamet river on the south to high head on the north, and from ocean to bay. to walk over it makes on a stranger such an im pression as being at sea, and he finds it impos sible to estimate distances in any weather. a windmill or a herd of cows may seem to be far away in the horizon, yet, after going a few rods, he will be close upon them. he is also deluded by other kinds of mirage. when, in the sum mer, i saw a family a-blueberrying a mile off, 160 cape cod walking about amid the dwarfish bushes which did not come up higher than their ankles, they seemed to me to be a race of giants, twenty feet high at least. the highest and sandiest portion next the atlantic was thinly covered with beach grass and indigo-weed. next to this the surface of the upland generally consisted of white sand and gravel, like coarse salt, through which a scanty vegetation found its way up. it will give an ornithologist some idea of its barrenness if i mention that the next june, the month of grass, i found a night-hawk's eggs there, and that almost any square rod thereabouts, taken at random, would be an eligible site for such a deposit. the kildeer-plover, which loves a sim ilar locality, also drops its eggs there, and fills the air above with its din. this upland also produced cladonia lichens, poverty-grass, savory -leaved aster (^diplopappus unariifolius\ mouse-ear, bearberry, etc. on a few hillsides the savory-leaved aster and mouse-ear alone made quite a dense sward, said to be very pretty when the aster is in bloom. in some parts the two species of poverty -grass {hudsonia tomen tosa and ericoides), which deserve a better name, reign for miles in little hemispherical tufts or islets, like moss, scattered over the waste. they linger in bloom there tiu the mid across the cape 161 die of july. occasionally near the beach these rounded beds, as also those of the sea-sandwort (honhenya peploides)^ were filled with sand within an inch of their tops, an^ were hard, like large ant-hills, while the surrounding sand was soft. in summer, if the poverty-grass grows at the head of a hollow looking toward the sea, in a bleak position where the wind rushes up, the northern or exposed half of the tuft is some times all black and dead like an oven-broom, while the opposite half is yellow with blossoms, the whole hillside thus presenting a remarkable contrast when seen from the poverty-stricken and the flourishing side. this plant, which in many places would be esteemed an ornament, is here despised by many on account of its being associated with barrenness. it might well be adopted for the barnstable coat-of-arms, in a field sableux. i should be proud of it. here and there were tracts of beach-grass mingled with the seaside golden rod and beach pea, which reminded us still more forcibly of the ocean. we read that there was not a brook in truro. yet there were deer here once, which must often have panted in vain ; but i am pretty sure that i afterward saw a small fresh-water brook emp tying into the south side of pamet river, though i was so heedless as not to taste it. at any 162 cape cod rate, a little boy near by told me that he drank at it. there was not a tree as far as we could see, and that was many miles each way, the general level of the upland being about the same everywhere. even from the atlantic side we overlooked the bay, and saw to manomet point in plymouth, and better from that side because it was the highest. the ahnost universal bare ness and smoothness of the landscape were as agreeable as novel, making it so much the more like the deck of a vessel. we saw vessels sail ing south into the bay, on the one hand, and north along the atlantic shore, on the other, all with an aft wind. the single road which runs lengthwise the cape, now winding over the plain, now through the shrubbery which scrapes the wheels of the stage, was a mere cart-track, in the sand, com monly without any fences to confine it, and con tinually changing from this side to that, to harder ground, or sometimes to avoid the tide. but the inhabitants travel the waste here and there pilgrim-wise and staff in hand, by narrow footpaths, through which the sand flows out and reveals the nakedness of the land. we shud dered at the thought of living there and taking our afternoon walks over those barren swells, where we could overlook every step of our walk before taking it, and would have to pray for a across the cape 163 fog or a snow-storm to conceal our destiny. the walker there must soon eat his heart. in the north part of the town there is no house from shore to shore for several miles, and it is as wild and solitary as the western prai ries — used to be. indeed, one who has seen every house in truro, will be surprised to hear of the number of the inhabitants, but perhaps five hundred of the men and boys of this small town were then abroad on their fishing-grounds. only a few men stay at home to till the sand or watch for blackfish. the farmers are fisher men-farmers and understand better ploughing the sea than the land. they do not disturb their sands much, though there is a plenty of sea-weed in the creeks, to say nothing of blackfish occa sionally rotting on the shore. between the pond and east harbor village there was an in teresting plantation of pitch pines, twenty or thirty acres in extent, like those which we had already seen from the stage. one who lived near said that the land was purchased by two men for a shilling or twenty -five cents an acre. some is not considered worth writing a deed for. this soil or sand, which was partially covered with poverty and beach grass, sorrel, etc., was furrowed at intervals of about four feet and the seed dropped by a machine. the pines had come up admirably and grown the first year 164 cape cod tliree or four inches, and the second six inches and more. where the seed had been lately planted the white sand was freshly exposed in an endless furrow winding round and round the sides of the deep hollows in a vortical, spiral manner, which produced a very singular effect, as if you were looking into the reverse side of a vast banded shield. this experiment, so im portant to the cape, appeared very successful, and perhaps the time will come when the greater part of this kind of land in barnstable county will be thus covered with an artificial pine-for est, as has been done in some parts of france. in that country 12,500 acres of downs had been thus covered in 1811 near bayonne. they are called pignadas, and according to loudon "con stitute the principal riches of the inhabitants, where there was a drifting desert before." it seemed a nobler kind of grain to raise than corn even. a few years ago truro was remarkable among the cape towns for the number of sheep raised in it; but i was told that at this time only two men kept sheep in the town, and in 1855, a truro boy ten years old told me that he had never seen one. they were formerly pastured on the unfenced lands or general fields, but now the owners were more particular to assert their rights, and it cost too much for fencing. the across the cape 165 rails are cedar from maine, and two rails will answer for ordinary purposes, but four are re quired for sheep. this was the reason assigned by one who had formerly kept them for not keeping them any longer. fencing stuff is so expensive that i saw fences made with only one rail, and very often the rail when split was carefully tied with a string. in one of the vil lages i saw the next summer a cow tethered by a rope six rods long, the rope long in proportion as the feed was short and thin. sixty rods, ay, all the cables of the cape, would have been no more than fair. tethered in the desert for fear that she would get into arabia felix ! i helped a man weigh a bundle of hay which he was sell ing to his neighbor, holding one end of a pole from which it swung by a steel-yard hook, and this was just half his whole crop. in short, the country looked so barren that i several times refrained from asking the inhabitants for a string or a piece of wrapping-paper, for fear i should rob them, for they plainly were obliged to import these things as well as rails, and where there were no news-boys, i did not see what they would do for waste paper. the objects around us, the makeshifts of fish ermen ashore, often made us look down to see if we were standing on terra firma. in the wells everywhere a block and tackle were used to raise 166 cape cod the bucket, instead of a windlass, and by almost every house was laid up a spar or a plank or two full of auger-holes, saved from a wreck. the windmills were partly built of these, and they were worked into the public bridges. the light house keeper, who was having his barn shingled, told me casually that he had made three thou sand good shingles for that purpose out of a mast. you would sometimes see an old oar used for a rail. frequently also some fair-weather finery ripped off a vessel by a storm near the coast was nailed up against an outhouse. i saw fastened to a shed near the light-house a long new sign with the words "anglo saxon" on it in large gilt letters, as if it were a useless part which the ship could afford to lose, or which the sailors had discharged at the same time with the pilot. but it interested somewhat as if it had been a part of the argo, clipped off in passing through the symplegades. to the fisherman, the cape itsek is a sort of store-ship laden with supplies, — a safer and larger craft which carries the women and chil dren, the old men and the sick, and indeed sea phrases are as common on it as on board a vessel. thus is it ever with a sea-going people. the old northmen used to speak of the "keel-ridge " of the country, that is, the ridge of the doffra field mountains, as if the land were a boat turned across the cape 167 bottom up. i was frequently reminded of the northmen here. the inhabitants of the cape are often at once farmers and sea-rovers ; they are more than vikings or kings of the bays, for their sway extends over the open sea also. a farmer in wellfleet, at whose house i afterward spent a night, who had raised fifty bushels of potatoes the previous year, which is a large crop for the cape, and had extensive salt-works, pointed to his schooner, which lay in sight, in which he and his man and boy oocasionally ran down the coast a-trading as far as the capes of virginia. this was his market-cart, and his hired man knew how to steer her. thus he drove two teams a-field, " ere the high seas appeared under the opening eyelids of the morn." though probably he would not hear much of the "gray -fly" on his way to virginia. a great proportion of the inhabitants of the cape are always thus abroad about their team ing on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the argonautic expedition into the shade. i have just heard of a cape cod captain who was expected home in the beginning of the winter from the west indies, but was long since given up for lost, till his relations at length have heard with joy, that, after getting within forty 168 cape cod miles of cape cod light, he was driven back by nine successive gales to key west, between florida and cuba, and was once again shaping his course for home. thus he spent his winter. in ancient times the adventures of these two or three men and boys would have been made the basis of a myth, but now such tales are crowded into a line of shorthand signs, like an algebraic formula in the shipping news. "wherever over the world," said palfrey in his oration at barnstable, "you see the stars and stripes float ing, you may have good hope that beneath them some one will be found who can tell you the soundings of barnstable, or wellfleet, or chatham harbor." i passed by the home of somebody's (or every body's) uncle bill, one day over on the ply mouth shore. it was a schooner half keeled up on the mud; we aroused the master out of a sound sleep at noonday, by thumping on the bottom of his vessel till he presented himself at the hatchway, for we wanted to borrow his clam-digger. meaning to make him a call, i looked out the next morning, and lo! he had run over to "the pines" the evening before, fearing an easterly storm. he outrode the great gale in the spring of 1851, dashing about alone in plymouth bay. he goes after rock weed, lighters vessels, and saves wrecks. i still across the cape , 169 saw him lying in the mud over at "the pines" in i^e horizon, which place he could not leave if he would, till flood tide. but he would not then probably. this waiting for the tide is a singular feature in life by the seashore. a frequent answer is, "well! you can't start for two hours yet." it is something new to a lands man, and at first he is not disposed to wait. history says that "two inhabitants of truro were the first who adventured to the falkland isles in pursuit of whales. this voyage was undertaken in the year 1774, by the advice of admiral montague of the british navy, and was crowned with success." at the pond village we saw a pond three eighths of a mile long densely filled with cat-tail flags, seven feet high, — enough for all the coopers in new england. the western shore was nearly as sandy as the eastern, but the water was much smoother, and the bottom was partially covered with the slender grass-like seaweed {zostera\ which we had not seen on the atlantic side ; there were also a few rude sheds for trying fish on the beach there, which made it appear less wild. in the few marshes on this side we afterward saw sam phire, rosemary, and other plants new to us in landers. in the summer and fall sometimes, hundreds 170 cape cod of blackfish (the social whale, glohicephalus melas of de kay; called also black whale-fish, howling whale, bottle-head, etc.), fifteen feet or more in length, are driven ashore in a single school here. i witnessed such a scene in july, 1855. a carpenter who was working at the light-house arriving early in the morning re marked that he did not know but he had lost fifty dollars by coming to his work; for as he came along the bay side he heard them driving a school of blackfish ashore, and he had debated with himself whether he should not go and join them and take his share, but had concluded to come to his work. after breakfast i came over to this place, about two miles distant, and near the beach met some of the fishermen returning from their chase. looking up and down the shore, i could see about a mile south some large black masses on the sand, which i knew must be blackfish, and a man or two about them. as i walked along towards them i soon came to a large carcass whose head was gone and whose blubber had been stripped off some weeks be fore; the tide was just beginning to move it, and the stench comj^elled me to go a long way round. when i came to great hollow i found a fisherman and some boys on the watch, and counted about thirty blackfish, just killed, with many lance wounds, and the water was more or across the cape 111 less bloody around. they were partly on shore and partly in the water, held by a rope round their tails till the tide should leave them. a boat had been somewhat stove by the tail of one. they were a smooth, shining black, like india-rubber, and had remarkably simple and lumpish forms for animated creatures, with a blunt round snout or head, whale -like, and simple stiif-looking flippers. the largest were about fifteen feet long, but one or two were only five feet long, and still without teeth. the fisher man slashed one with his jackknife, to show me how thick the blubber was, — about three inches ; and as i passed my finger through the cut it was covered thick with oil. the blubber looked like pork, and this man said that when they were trying it the boys would sometimes come round with a piece of bread in one hand, and take a piece of blubber in the other to eat with it, preferring it to pork scraps. he also cut into the flesh beneath, which was firm and red like beef, and he said that for his part he preferred it when fresh to beef. it is stated that in 1812 blackfish were used as food by the poor of bretagne. they were waiting for the tide to leave these fishes high and dry, that they might strip off the blubber and carry it to their try-works in their boats, where they try it on the beach. they get commonly a barrel of oil, 172 cape cod worth fifteen or twenty dollars, to a fish. there were many lances and harpoons in the boats, — much slenderer instruments than i had expected. an old man came along the beach with a horse and wagon distributing the dinners of the fisher men, which their wives had put up in little pails and jugs, and which he had collected in the pond village, and for this service, i suppose, he received a share of the oil. if one could not tell his own pail, he took the first he came to. as i stood there they raised the cry of "an other school," and we could see their black backs and their blowing about a mile north ward, as they went leaping over the sea like horses. some boats were already in pursuit there, driving them toward the beach. other fishermen and boys running up began to jump into the boats and push them off from where i stood, and i might have gone too had i chosen. soon there were twenty-five or thirty boats in pursuit, some large ones under sail, and others rowing with might and main, keeping outside of the school, those nearest to the fishes striking on the sides of their boats and blowing horns to drive them on to the beach. it was an exciting race. if they succeed in driving them ashore each boat takes one share, and then each man, but if they are compelled to strike them off shore each boat's company take what they strike. i across the cape 173 walked rapidly along the shore toward the north, while the fishermen were rowing still more swiftly to join their companions, and a little boy who walked by my side was congratulating him self that his father's boat was beating another one. an old blind fisherman whom we met, inquired, "where are they, i can't see. have they got them?" in the mean while the fishes had turned and were escaping northward toward provincetown, only occasionally the back of one being seen. so the nearest crews were com pelled to strike them, and we saw several boats soon made fast, each to its fish, which, four or five rods ahead, was drawing it like a race-horse straight toward the beach, leaping half out of water blowing blood and water from its hole, and leaving a streak of foam behind. but they went ashore too far north for us, though we could see the fishermen leap out and lance them on the sand. ^it was just like pictures of whal ing which i have seen, and a fisherman told me that it was nearly as dangerous. in his first trial he had been much excited, and in his haste had used a lance with its scabbard on, but nev ertheless had thrust it quite through his fish. i learned that a few days before this one hun dred and eighty blackfish had been driven ashore in one school at eastham, a little farther south, and that the keeper of billingsgate point light 174 cape cod went out one morning about the same time and cut his initials on the backs of a large school which had run ashore in the night, and sold his right to them to provincetown for one thousand dollars, and probably provincetown made as much more. another fisherman told me that nineteen years ago three hundred and eighty were driven ashore in one school at great hol low. in the naturalists' library, it is said that, in the winter of 1809-10, one thousand one hundred and ten "approached the shore of hvalfiord, iceland, and were captured." de kay says it is not known why they are stranded. but one fisherman declared to me that they ran ashore in pursuit of squid, and that they gener ally came on the coast about the last of july. about a week afterward, when i came to this shore, it was strewn, as far as i could see with a glass, with the carcasses of blackfish stripped of their blubber and their head^ cut off; the latter lying higher up. walking on the beach was out of the question on account of the stench. between provincetown and truro they lay in the very path of the stage. yet no steps were taken to abate the nuisance, and men were catching lobsters as usual just off the shore. i was told that they did sometimes tow them out and sink them ; yet i wondered where they got the stones to sink them with. of course they across the cape 175 might be made into guano, and cape cod is not so fertile that her inhabitants can afford to do without this manure, — to say nothing of the diseases they may produce. after my return home, wishing to learn what was known about the blackfish, i had recourse to the reports of the zoological surveys of the state, and i found that storer had rightfully omitted it in his report on the fishes, since it is not a fish; so i turned to emmons's report of the mammalia, but was surprised to find that the seals and whales were omitted by him because he had had no opportunity to observe them. considering how this state has risen and thriven by its fisheries, — that the legislature which au thorized the zoological survey sat under the emblem of a codfish, — that nantucket and new bedford are within our limits, — that an early riser may find a thousand or fifteen hundred dollars' worth of blackfish on the shore in a morning, — that the pilgrims saw the indians cutting up a blackfish on the shore at eastham, and called a part of that shore "grampus bay," from the number of blackfish they found there, before they got to plymouth, — and that from that time to this these fishes have continued to enrich one or two counties almost annually, and that their decaying carcasses were now poison ing the air of one county for more than thirty 176 cape cod miles, — i thouglit it remarkable that neither the j)023ular nor scientific name was to be found in a re23ort on our mammalia, — a catalogue of the productions of our land and water. we had here, as well as all across the cape, a fair view of provincetown, five or six miles distant over the water toward the west, under its shrubby sand-hills, with its harbor now full of vessels whose masts mingled with the spires of its churches, and gave it the appearance of a quite large seaport town. the inhabitants of all the lower cape towns enjoy thus the prospect of two seas. standing on the western or larboard shore, and looking across to where the distant mainland looms, they can say. this is massachusetts bay; and then, after an hour's sauntering walk, they may stand on the starboard side, beyond which no land is seen to loom, and say. this is the atlan tic ocean. on our way back to the light-house, by whose whitewashed tower we steered as securely as the mariner by its light at night, we passed through a graveyard, which apparently was saved from being blown away by its slates, for they had enabled a thick bed of huckleberry bushes to root themselves amid the graves. we thought it would be worth the while to read the epitaphs where so many were lost at sea; how across the cape 111 ever, as not only their lives, but commonly their bodies also, were lost or not identified, there were fewer epitaphs of this sort than we expected, though there were not a few. their graveyard is the ocean. near the eastern side we started up a fox in a hollow, the only kind of wild quadruped, if i except a skunk in a salt marsh, that we saw in all our walk (unless painted and box tortoises may be called quad rupeds). he was a large, plump, shaggy fel low, like a yellow dog, with, as usual, a white tip to his tail, and looked as if he had fared well on the cape. he cantered away into the shrub oaks and bayberry bushes which chanced to grow there, but were hardly high enough to con ceal him. i saw another the next summer leap ing over the top of a beach-plum a little farther north, a small arc of his course (which i trust is not yet run), from which i endeavored in vain to calculate his whole orbit; there were too many unknown attractions to be allowed for. i also saw the exuviae of a third fast sinking into the sand, and added the skull to my collection. hence, i concluded that they must be plenty thereabouts ; but a traveler may meet with more than an inhabitant, since he is more likely to take an unfrequented route across the country. they told me that in some years they died off in great numbers by a kind of madness, under 178 cape cod the effect of which they were seen whirling round and round as if in pursuit of their tails. in crantz's account of greenland, he says, " they (the foxes) live upon birds and their eggs, and, when they can't get them, upon crow-ber ries, mussels, crabs, and what the sea casts up." just before reaching the light-house, we saw the sun set in the bay, — for standing on that narrow cape was, as i have said, like being on the deck of a vessel, or rather at the masthead of a man-of-war, thirty miles at sea, though we knew that at the same moment the sun was set ting behind our native hills, which were just be low the horizon in that direction. this sight drove everything else quite out of our heads, and homer and the ocean came in again with a rush, — the shining torch of the sun fell into the ocean. viii the highland light this light-house, known to mariners as the cape cod or highland light, is one of our "primary sea-coast lights," and is usually the first seen by those approaching the entrance of massachusetts bay from europe. it is forty three miles from cape ann light, and forty one from boston light. it stands about twenty rods from the edge of the bank, which is here formed of clay. i borrowed the plane and square, level and dividers, of a carpenter who was shingling a barn near by, and, using one of those shingles made of a mast, contrived a rude sort of quadrant, with pins for sights and pivots, and got the angle of elevation of the bank op posite the light-house, and with a couple of cod lines the length of its slope, and so measured its height on the shingle. it rises one hundred and ten feet above its immediate base, or about one hundred and twenty-three feet above mean low water. graham, who has carefully surveyed the extremity of the cape, makes it one hundred and thirty feet. the mixed sand and clay lay 180 cape cod at an angle of forty degrees with the horizon, where i measured it, but the clay is generally much steeper. no cow nor hen ever gets down it. half a mile farther south the bank is fif teen or twenty-five feet higher, and that ap peared to be the highest land in north truro. even this vast clay bank is fast wearing away. small streams of water trickling down it at in tervals of two or three rods, have left the inter mediate clay in the form of steep gothic roofs fifty feet high or more, the ridges as sharp and rugged -looking as rocks; and in one place the bank is curiously eaten out in the form of a large semi-circular crater. according to the light-house keeper, the cape is wasting here on both sides, though most on the eastern. in some places it had lost many rods within the last year, and, erelong, the light house must be moved. we calculated, from his data^ how soon the cape would be quite worn away at this point, "for," said he, "i can remember sixty years back." we were even more surprised at this last announcement — that is, at the slow waste of life and energy in our informant, for we had taken him to be not more than forty — than at the rapid wasting of the cape, and we thought that he stood a fair chance to outlive the former. between this october and june of the next the highland light 181 year, i found that the bank had lost about forty feet in one place, opposite the light-house, and it was cracked more than forty feet farther from the edge at the last date, the shore being strewn with the recent rubbish. but i judged that generally it was not wearing away here at the rate of more than six feet annually. any con clusions drawn from the observations of a few years, or one generation only, are likely to prove false, and the cape may balk expectation by its durability. in some places even a wrecker's foot-path down the bank lasts several years. one old inhabitant told us that when the light house was built, in 1798, it was calculated that it would stand forty-five years, allowing the bank to waste one length of fence each year, "but," said he, "there it is" (or rather another near the same site, about twenty rods from the edge of the bank). the sea is not gaining on the cape every where, for one man told me of a vessel wrecked long ago on the north of provincetown whose ''''hones'''' (this was his word) are still visible many rods within the present line of the beach, half buried in sand. perchance they lie along side the timbers of a whale. the general state ment of the inhabitants is, that the cape is wasting on both sides, but extending itself on particular points on the south and west, as at 182 cape cod chatham and monomoy beaches, and at bil lingsgate, long, and race points. james free man stated in his day that above three miles had been added to monomoy beach during the previous fifty years, and it is said to be still ex tending as fast as ever. a writer in the massa chusetts magazine, in the last century, tells us that "when the english first settled upon the cape, there was an island off chatham, at three leagues' distance, called webb's island, con taining twenty acres, covered with red-cedar or savin. the inhabitants of nantucket used to carry wood from it;" but he adds that in his day a large rock alone marked the spot, and the water was six fathoms deep there. the en trance to nauset harbor, which was once in eastham, has now traveled south into orleans. the islands in wellfleet harbor once formed a continuous beach, though now small vessels pass between them. and so of many other parts of this coast. perhaps what the ocean takes from one part of the cape it gives to another, — robs peter to pay paul. on the eastern side the sea appears to be everywhere encroaching on the land. not only the land is undermined, and its ruins car ried off by currents, but the sand in blown from the beach directly up the steep bank, where it is one hundred and fifty feet high, and covers the the highland light 183 original surface there many feet deep. if you sit on the edge you will have ocular demonstra tion of this by soon getting your eyes full. thus the bank preserves its height as fast as it is worn away. this sand is steadily traveling westward at a rapid rate, "more than a hundred yards," says one writer, within the memory of inhabitants now living; so that in some places peat-meadows are buried deep under the sand, and the peat is cut through it; and in one place a large peat-meadow has made its appearance on the shore in the bank covered many feet deep, and peat has been cut there. this accounts for that great pebble of peat which we saw in the surf. the old oysterman had told us that many years ago he lost a "crittur" by her being mired in a swamp near the atlantic side east of his house, and twenty years ago he lost the swamp itself entirely, but has since seen signs of it appearing on the beach. he also said that he had seen cedar stumps "as big as cart wheels "(!) on the bottom of the bay, three miles off billingsgate point, when leaning over the side of his boat in pleasant weather, and that that was dry land not long ago. another tokl us that a log canoe known to have been buried many years before on the bay side at east harbor in truro, where the cape is ex tremely narrow, appeared at length on the at 184 cape cod lantic side, the cape having rolled over it, and an old woman said, — "now, you see, it is true what i told you, that the cape is moving." the bars along the coast shift with every storm, and in many places there is occasionally none at all. we ourselves observed the effect of a single storm with a high tide in the night, in july, 1855. it moved the sand on the beach opposite the light-house to the depth of six feet, and three rods in width as far as we could see north and south, and carried it bodily off no one knows exactly where, laying bare in one place a large rock five feet high which was invisible be fore, and narrowing the beach to that extent. there is usually, as i have said, no bathing on the back side of the cape, on account of the un dertow, but when we were there last, the sea had, three months before, cast up a bar near this light-house, two miles long and ten rods wide, over which the tide did not flow, leaving a nar row cove, then a quarter of a mile long, between it and the shore, which afforded excellent bath ing. this cove had from time to time been closed up as the bar traveled northward, in one instance imprisoning four or five hundred whit ing and cod, which died there, and the water as often turned fresh and finally gave place to sand. this bar, the inhabitants assured us, might be wholly removed, and the water six feet deep there in two or three days. the highland light 185 the light-house keeper said that when the wind blowed strong on to the shore, the waves ate fast into the bank, but when it blowed off they took no sand away; for in the former case the wind heaped up the surface of the water next to the beach, and to preserve its equilibrium a strong undertow immediately set back again into the sea which carried with it the sand and what ever else was in the way, and left the beach hard to walk on ; but in the latter case the un dertow set on, and carried the sand with it, so that it was particularly difficult for shipwrecked men to get to land when the wind blowed on to the shore, but easier when it blowed off. this undertow, meeting the next surface wave on the bar which itself has made, forms part of the dam over which the latter breaks, as over an upright wall. the sea thus plays with the land, holding a sand-bar in its mouth awhile before it swallows it, as a cat plays with a mouse; but the fatal gripe is sure to come at last. the sea sends its rapacious east wind to rob the land, but before the former has got far with its prey, the land sends its honest west wind to recover some of its own. but, according to lieutenant davis, the forms, extent, and distribution of sand-bars and banks are principally determined, not by winds and waves, but by tides. our host said that you would be surprised if 186 cape cod you were on the beach when the wind blew a hurricane directly on to it, to see that none of the drift-wood came ashore, but all was carried directly northward and parallel with the shore as fast as a man can walk, by the inshore cur rent, which sets strongly in that direction at flood tide. the strongest swimmers also are carried along with it, and never gain an inch toward the beach. even a large rock has been moved half a mile northward along the beach. he assured us that the sea was never still on the back side of the cape, but ran commonly as high as your head, so that a great part of the time you could not launch a boat there, and even in the calmest weather the waves run six or eight feet up the beach, though then you could get off on a plank. champlain and pour trincourt could not land here in 1606, on ac count of the swell (la houlle), yet the savages came off to them in a canoe. in the sieur de la borde's "relation des caraibes," my edition of which was published at amsterdam in 1711, at page 530 he says : — " couroumon, a caraibe, also a star [i. e. a god], makes the great lames a la mer, and over turns canoes. lames a la mer are the long vagues which are not broken (^entrecoupees)^ and such as one sees come to land all in one piece, from one end of a beach to another, so that. the highland light 187 however little wind there may be, a shallop or a canoe could hardly land {ahorder terre) with out turning over, or being filled with water." but on the bay side the water even at its edge is often as smooth and still as in a pond. com monly there are no boats used along this beach. there was a boat belonging to the highland light which the next keeper after he had been there a year had not launched, though he said that there was good fishing just off the shore. generally the life boats cannot be used when needed. when the waves run very high it is impossible to get a boat off, however skillfully you steer it, for it will often be completely cov ered by the curving edge of the approaching breaker as by an arch, and so filled with water, or it will be lifted up by its bows, turned di rectly over backwards and all the contents spilled out. a spar thirty feet long is served in the same way. i heard of a party who went off fishing back of wellfleet some years ago, in two boats, in calm weather, who, when they had laden their boats with fish, and approached the land again, found such a swell breaking on it, though there was no wind, that they were afraid to enter it. at first they thought to pull for provincetown, but night was coming on, and that was many miles distant. their case seemed a desperate 188 cape cod one. as often as they approached the shore and saw the terrible breakers that intervened, they were deterred, in short, they were thoroughly frightened. finally, having thrown their fish overboard, those in one boat chose a favorable opportunity, and succeeded, by skill and good luck, in reaching the land, but they were unwill ing to take the responsibility of telling the others when to come in, and as the other helms man was inexperienced, their boat was swamped at once, yet all managed to save themselves. much smaller waves soon make a boat "nail sick," as the phrase is. the keeper said that after a long and strong blow there would be three large waves, each successively larger than the last, and then no large ones for some time, and that, when they wished to land in a boat, they came in on the last and largest wave. sir thomas browne (as quoted in brand's popular antiquities, vol. iii, p. 372), on the subject of the tenth wave being " greater or more danger ous than any other," after quoting ovid, — " qui venit hie fluetus, fluctus supereminet omnes posterior nono est, undecimoque prior," — says, " which, notwithstanding, is evidently false ; nor can it be made out by observation either upon the shore or the ocean, as we have with diligence explored in both. and surely in vain we expect regularity in the waves of the the highland light 189 sea, or in the particular motions thereof, as we may in its general reciprocations, whose causes are constant, and effects therefore correspond ent ; whereas its fluctuations are but motions subservient, which winds, storms, shores, shelves, and every interjacency, irregulates." we read that the clay pounds were so called, ''because vessels have had the misfortune to be pounded against it in gales of wind," which we regard as a doubtful derivation. there are small ponds here, upheld by the clay, which were formerly called the clay pits. perhaps this, or clay ponds, is the origin of the name. water is found in the clay quite near the sur face ; but we heard of one man who had sunk a well in the sand close by, "till he could see stars at noonday," without finding any. over this bare highland the wind has full sweep. even in july it blows the wings over the heads of the young turkeys, which do not know enough to head against it ; and in gales the doors and windows are blown in, and you must hold on to the light-house to prevent being blown into the atlantic. they who merely keep out on the beach in a storm in the winter are sometimes rewarded by the humane society. if you would feel the full force of a tempest, take up your residence on the top of mount washington, or at the highland light, in truro. 190 cape cod it was said in 1794 that more vessels were cast away on the east shore of truro than any where in barnstable county. notwithstanding that this light-house has since been erected, after almost every storm we read of one or more ves sels wrecked here, and sometimes more than a dozen wrecks are visible from this point at one time. the inhabitants hear the crash of vessels going to pieces as they sit round their hearths, and they commonly date from some memorable shipwreck. if the history of this beach could be written from beginning to end, it would be a thrilling page in the history of commerce. truro was settled in the year 1700 as danger field. this was a very appropriate name, for i afterward read on a monument in the grave yard, near pamet river, the following inscrip tion : — sacred to the memory of 57 citizens of truro, "who were lost in seven vessels, which foundered at sea in the memorable gale of oct. 3d, 1841. their names and ages by families were recorded on different sides of the stone. they are said to have been lost on george's bank, and i was told that only one vessel drifted ashore on the the highland light 191 back side of the cape, with the boys locked into the cabin and drowned. it is said that the homes of all were "within a circuit of two miles." twenty eight inhabitants of dennis were lost in the same gale ; and i read that " in one day, immediately after this storm, nearly or quite one hundred bodies were taken up and buried on cape cod." the truro insurance company failed for want of skippers to take charge of its vessels. but the surviving inhab itants went a-fishing again the next year as usual. i found that it would not do to speak of shipwrecks there, for almost every family has lost some of its members at sea. "who lives in that house?" i inquired. "three wid ows," was the reply. the stranger and the in habitant view the shore with very different eyes. the former may have come to see and admire the ocean in a storm ; but the latter looks on it as the scene where his nearest relatives were wrecked. when i remarked to an old wrecker partially blind, who was sitting on the edge of the bank smoking a pipe, which he had just lit with a match of dried beach-grass, that i sup posed he liked to hear the sound of the surf, he answered, "no, i do not like to hear the sound of the surf." he had lost at least one son in "the memorable gale," and could tell many a tale of the shipwrecks which he had witnessed there. 192 cape cod in the year 1717, a noted pirate named bel lamy was led on to the bar off wellfleet by the captain of a s7ioio which he had taken, to whom , he had offered his vessel again if he would pilot him into provincetown harbor. tradition says that the latter threw over a burning tar barrel in the night, which drifted ashore, and the pi rates followed it. a storm coming on, their whole fleet was wrecked, and more than a hun dred dead bodies lay along the shore. six who escaped shipwreck were executed. "at times to this day," (1793), says the historian of well fleet, "there are king william and queen mary's coppers picked up, and pieces of silver called cob-money. the violence of the seas moves the sands on the outer bar, so that at times the iron caboose of the ship [that is, bel lamy's] at low ebbs has been seen." another tells us that, "for many years after this ship wreck, a man of a very singular and frightful aspect used every spring and autumn to be seen traveling on the cape, who was supposed to have been one of bellamy's crew. the pre sumption is that he went to some place where money had been secreted by the pirates, to get such a supply as his exigencies required. when he died, many pieces of gold were found in a girdle which he constantly wore. as i was walking on the beach here in my the highland light 193 last visit looking for shells and pebbles, just after that storm which i have mentioned as moving the sand to a great depth, not knowing but i might find some cob-money, i did actually pick up a french crown piece, worth about one dollar and six cents, near high-water mark, on the still moist sand, just under the abrupt, cav ing base of tlie bank. it was of a dark slate color, and looked like a flat pebble, but still bore a very distinct and handsome head of louis xv., and the usual legend on the reverse. sit nomen domini benedictum (blessed be the name of the lord), a pleasing sentiment to read in the sands of the seashore, whatever it might be stamped on, and i also made out the date, 1741. of course, i thought at first that it was that same old button which i have found so many times, but my knife soon showed the sil ver. afterward, rambling on the bars at low tide, i cheated my companion by holding up round shells (scutellce) between my fingers, whereupon he quickly stripped and came off to me. in the revolution, a british ship of war called the somerset was wrecked near the clay pounds, and all on board, some hundreds in number, were taken prisoners. my informant said that he had never seen any mention of this in the histories, but that at any rate he knew of 194 cape cod a silver watch, which one of those prisoners by accident left there, which was still going to tell the story. but this event is noticed by some writers. the next summer i saw a sloop from chatham dragging for anchors and chains just off this shore. she had her boats out at the work while she shuffled about on various tacks, and, when anything was found, drew up to hoist it on board. it is a singular employment, at which men are regularly hired and paid for their in dustry, to hunt to-day in pleasant weather for anchors which have been lost, — the sunken faith and hope of mariners, to which they trusted in vain; now, perchance, it is the rusty one of some old pirate's ship or norman fisher man, whose cable parted here two hundred years ago, and now the best bower anchor of a canton or a california ship, which has gone about her business. if the roadsteads of the spiritual ocean could be thus dragged, what rusty flukes of hope deceived and parted chain-cables of faith might again be windlassed aboard ! enough to sink the finder's craft, or stock new navies to the end of time. the bottom of the sea is strewn with anchors, some deeper and some shal lower, and alternately covered and uncovered by the sand, perchance with a small length of iron cable still attached, — to which where is the highland light 195 the other end? so many unconcluded tales to be continued another time. so, if we had div ing-bells adapted to the spiritual deeps, we should see anchors with their cables attached, as thick as eels in vinegar, all wriggling vainly toward their holding-ground. but that is not treasure for us which another man has lost; rather it is for us to seek what no other man has found or can find, — not be chatham men, dragging for anchors. the annals of this voracious beach ! who could write them, unless it were a shipwrecked sailor? how many who have seen it have seen it only in the midst of danger and distress, the last strip of earth which their mortal eyes beheld. think of the amount of suffering which a single strand has witnessed ! the ancients would have repre sented it as a sea-monster with open jaws, more terrible than scylla and charybdis. an inhabi tant of truro told me that about a fortnight af ter the st. john was wrecked at cohasset he found two bodies on the shore at the clay pounds. they were those of a man and a cor pulent woman. the man had thick boots on, though his head was off, but "it was alongside." it took the finder some weeks to get over the sight. perhaps they were man and wife, and whom god had joined the ocean currents had not put asunder. yet by what slight accidents 196 cape cod at first may they have been associated in their drifting. some of the bodies of those passen gers were picked up far out at sea, boxed up and sunk; some brought ashore and buried. there are more consequences to a shipwreck than the underwriters notice. the gulf stream may return some to their native shores, or drop them in some out-of-the-way cave of ocean, where time and the elements will write new rid dles with their bones. — but to return to land again. in this bank, above the clay, i counted in the summer, two hundred holes of the bank swallow within a space six rods long, and there were at least one thousand old birds within three times that distance, twittering over the surf. i had never associated them in my thoughts with the beach before. one little boy who had been a birds' -nesting had got eighty swallows' eggs for his share ! tell it not to the humane society ! there were many young birds on the clay be neath, which had tumbled out and died. also there were many crow -blackbirds hopping about in the dry fields, and the upland plover were breeding close by the light-house. the keeper had once cut off one's wing while mowing, as she sat on her eggs there. this is also a favor ite resort for gunners in the fall to shoot the golden plover. as aroimd the shores of a the highland light 197 pond are seen devil' s-needles, butterflies, etc., so here, to my surprise, i saw at the same season great devil' s-needles of a size proportionably larger, or nearly as big as my finger, incessantly coasting up and down the edge of the bank, and butterflies also were hovering over it, and i never saw so many dorr-bugs and beetles of va rious kinds as strewed the beach. they had apparently flown over the bank in the night, and could not get up again, and some had per haps fallen into the sea and were washed ashore. they may have been in part attracted by the light-house lamps. the clay pounds are a more fertile tract than usual. we saw some fine patches of roots and corn here. as generally on the cape, tlie plants had little stalk or leaf, but ran remark ably to seed. the corn was hardly more than half as high as in the interior, yet the ears were large and full, and one farmer told us that he could raise forty bushels on an acre without manure, and sixty with it. the heads of the rye also were remarkably large. the shadbush (anielanchier)^ beach plums, and blueberries (^vaccinium pennsylvaniciini)^ like the apple trees and oaks, were very dwarfish, spreading over the sand, but at the same time very fruit ful. the blueberry was but an inch or two high, and its fruit often rested on the ground, 198 cape cod so that you did not suspect the presence of the bushes, even on those bare hills, until you were treading on them. i thought that this fertility must be owing mainly to the abundance of mois ture in the atmosphere, for i observed that what little grass there was was remarkably laden with dew in the morning, and in summer dense im prisoning fogs frequently last till midday, turn ing one's beard into a wet napkin about his throat, and the oldest inhabitant may lose his way within a stone's throw of his house or be obliged to follow the beach for a guide. the brick house attached to the light-house was ex ceedingly damp at that season, and writing paper lost all its stiffness in it. it was impos sible to dry your towel after bathing, or to press flowers without their mildewing. the air was so moist that we rarely wished to drink, though we could at all times taste the salt on our lips. salt was rarely used at table, and our host told us that his cattle invariably refused it when it was offered them, they. got so much with their grass and at every breath, but he said that a sick horse or one just from the country would sometimes take a hearty draught of salt water, and seemed to like it and be the better for it. it was surprising to see how much water was contained in the terminal bud of the seaside golden-rod, standing in the sand early in july, the highland light 199 and also how turnips, beets, carrots, etc., flour ished even in pure sand. a man traveling by the shore near there not long before us noticed something green growing in the pure sand of the beach, just at high-water mark, and on ap proaching found it to be a bed of beets flourish ing vigorously, probably from seed washed out of the franklin. also beets and turnips came up in the seaweed used for manure in many parts of the cape. this suggests how various plants may have been dispersed over the world to distant islands and continents. vessels, with seeds in their cargoes, destined for particular ports, where perhaps they were not needed, have been cast away on desolate islands, and though their crews perished, some of their seeds have been preserved. out of many kinds a few would find a soil and climate adapted to them, — become naturalized and perhaps drive out the native plants at last, and so fit the land for the habitation of man. it is an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and for the time lamentable shipwrecks may thus contribute a new vegetable to a continent's stock, and prove on the whole a lasting blessing to its inhabitants. or winds and currents might effect the same without the intervention of man. what indeed are the various succulent plants which grow on the beach but such beds of beets and turnips, sprung 200 cape cod originally from seeds which perhaps were cast on the waters for this end, though we do not know the franklin which they came ont of ? in ancient times some mr. bell ( ?) was sailing this way in his ark with seeds of rocket, saltwort, sandwort, beach-grass, samphire, bayberry, pov erty-grass, etc., all nicely labeled with directions, intending to establish a nursery somewhere; and did not a nursery get established, though he thought that he had failed? about the light-house i observed in the sum mer the pretty polygala polygama^ spreading ray -wise flat on the ground, white pasture this tles (^cirsium pumihwi)^ and amid the shrub bery the smilax glauca, which is commonly said not to grow so far north ; near the edge of the banks about half a mile southward, the broom crowberry (^empetrum conradii), for which plymouth is the only locality in massa chusetts usually named, forms pretty green mounds four or five feet in diameter by one foot high, — soft, springy beds for the wayfarer. i saw it afterward in provincetown, but prettiest of all the scarlet pimpernel, or poor-man's weather-glass (^anagallis ar^jensis)^ greets you in fair weather on almost every square yard of sand. from yarmouth, i have received the chrysopsis falcata (golden aster), and vacci nium stamineum (deerberry or squaw huckle the highland light 201 berry), with fruit not edible, sometimes as large as a cranberry (sept. 7). the highland light-house,^ where we were staying, is a substantial-looking building of brick, painted white, and surmounted by an iron cap. attached to it is the dwelling of the keeper, one story high, also of brick, and built by government. as we were going to spend the niorht in a lio^ht-house, we wished to. make the most of so novel an experience, and there fore told our host that we would like to accom pany him when he went to light up. at rather early candle-light he lighted a small japan lamp, allowing it to smoke rather more than we like on ordinary occasions, and told us to follow him. he led the way first through his bed room, which was placed nearest to the light house, and then through a long, narrow, covered passage-way, between whitewashed walls like a prison entry, into the lower part of the light house, where many great butts of oil were ar ranged around ; thence we ascended by a wind ing and open iron stairway, with a steadily increasing scent of oil and lamp-smoke, to a trap-door in an iron floor, and through this into the lantern. it was a neat building, with every thing in apple-pie order, and no danger of any 1 the light -house has since been rebuilt, and shows a fres< nel light. 202 cape cod thing rusting there for want of oil. the light consisted of fifteen argand lamps, placed within smooth concave reflectors twenty-one inches in diameter, and arranged in two horizontal circles one above the other, facing every way excepting directly down the cape. these were sur rounded, at a distance of two or three feet, by large plate-glass windows, which defied the storms, with iron sashes, on which rested the iron cap. all the iron work, except the floor, was painted white. and thus the light-house was completed. we walked slowly round in that narrow space as the keeper lighted each lamp in succession, conversing with him at the same moment that many a sailor on the deep witnessed the lighting of the highland light. his duty was to fill and trim and light his lamps, and keep bright the reflectors. he filled them every morning, and trimmed them com monly once in the course of the night. he com plained of the quality of the oil which was fur nished. this house consumes about eight hun dred gallons in a year, which cost not far from one dollar a gallon; but perhaps a few lives would be saved if better oil were provided. another light-house keeper said that the same proportion of winter-strained oil was sent to the southernmost light-house in the union as to the most northern. formerly, when this light the highland light 203 house had windows with small and thin panes, a severe storm would sometimes break the glass, and then they were obliged to put up a wooden shutter in haste to save their lights and reflec tors, — and sometimes in tempests, when the mariner stood most in need of their guidance, they had thus nearly converted the light-house into a dark lantern, which emitted only a few feeble rays, and those commonly on the land or lee side. he spoke of the anxiety and sense of responsibility which he felt in cold and stormy nights in the winter ; when he knew that many a poor fellow was depending on him, and his lamps burned dimly, the oil being chilled. sometimes he was obliged to warm the oil in a kettle in his house at midnight, and fill his lamps over again, — for he could not have a fire in the light-house, it produced such a sweat on the windows. his successor told me that he could not keep too hot a fire in such a case. all this because the oil was poor. a govern ment lighting the mariners on its wintry coast with summer-strained oil, to save expense! that were surely a summer-strained mercy. this keeper's successor, who kindly enter tained me the next year, stated that one ex tremely cold night, when this and all the neigh boring lights were burning summer oil, but he had been provident enough to reserve a little 204 cape cod winter oil against emergencies, lie was waked up witli anxiety, and found that ms oil was con gealed, and his lights almost extinguished; and when, after many hours' exertion, he had suc ceeded in replenishing his reservoirs with winter oil at the wick end, and with difficulty had made them burn, he looked out and found that the other lights in the neighborhood, which were usually visible to him, had gone out, and he heard afterward that the pamet river and bil lingsgate lights also had been extinguished. our host said that the frost, too, on the win dows caused him much trouble, and in sultry summer nights the moths covered them and dimmed his lights ; sometimes even small birds flew against the thick plate glass, and were found on the ground beneath in the morning with their necks broken. in the spring of 1855 he found nineteen small yellow birds, perhaps goldfinches or myrtle-birds, thus lying dead around the light-house; and sometimes in the fall he had seen where a golden plover had struck the glass in the night, and left the down and the fatty part of its breast on it. thus he struggled, by every method, to keep his light shining before men. surely the light house keeper has a responsible, if an easy, office. when his lamp goes out, he goes out; or, at most, only one such accident is pardoned. the highland light 205 i thought it a pity that some poor student did not live there, to profit by all that light, since he would not rob the mariner. "well," he said, "i do sometimes come up here and read the newspaper when they are noisy down be low." think of fifteen argand lamps to read the newspaper by ! government oil ! — light enough, perchance, to read the constitution by ! i thought that he should read nothing less than his bible by that light. i had a classmate who fitted for college by the lamps of a light-house, which was more light, we think, than the uni versity afforded. when we had come down and walked a dozen rods from the light-house, we found that we could not get the full strength of its light on the narrow strip of land between it and the shore, being too low for the focus, and we saw only so many feeble and rayless stars ; but at forty rods inland we could see to read though we were still indebted to only one lamp. each reflector sent forth a separate "fan " of light, — one shone on the windmill, and one in the hollow, while the intervening spaces were in shadow. this light is said to be visible twenty nautical miles and more, from an observer fifteen feet above the level of the sea. we could see the revolving light at race point, the end of the cape, about nine miles distant, and also the light on long 206 cape cod point, at the entrance of provincetown harbor, and one of the distant plymouth harbor lights, across the bay, nearly in a range with the last, like a star in the horizon. the keeper thought that the other plymouth light was concealed by being exactly in a range with the long point light. he told us that the mariner was sometimes led astray by a mackerel fisher's lan tern, who was afraid of being run down in the night, or even by a cottager's light, mistaking them for some well-known light on the coast, and, when he discovered his mistake, was wont to curse the prudent fisher or the wakeful cot tager without reason. though it was once declared that providence placed this mass of clay here on purpose to erect a light-house on, the keeper said that the light-house should have been erected half a mile farther south, where the coast begins to bend, and where the light could be seen at the same time with the nauset lights, and distinguished from them. they now talk of building one there. it happens that the present one is the more useless now, so near the extremity of the cape, because other light-houses have since been erected there. among the many regulations of the light house board, hanging against the wall here, many of them excellent, perhaps, if there were the highland light 207 a regiment stationed here to attend to tliem, there is one requiring the keeper to keep an ac count of the number of vessels which pass his light during the day. but there are a hundred vessels in sight at once, steering in all direc tions, many on the very verge of the horizon, and he must have more eyes than argus, and be a good deal farther sighted, to tell which are passing his light. it is an employment in some respects best suited to the habits of the gulls which coast up and down here, and circle over the sea. i was told by the next keeper, that on the 8th of june following, a particularly clear and beautiful morning, he rose about half an hour before sunrise, and having a little time to spare, for his custom was to extinguish his lights at sunrise, walked down toward the shore to see what he might find. when he got to the edge of the bank he looked up, and, to his astonish ment, saw the sun rising, and already part way above the horizon. thinking that his clock was wrong, he made haste back, and though it was still too early by the clock, extinguished his lamps, and when he had got through and come down, he looked out the window, and, to his still greater astonishment, saw the sun just where it was before, two thirds above the hori zon. he showed me where its rays fell on the 208 cape cod wall across the room. he proceeded to make a fire, and when he had done, there was the sun still at the same height. whereupon, not trust ing to his own eyes any longer, he called up his wife to look at it, and she saw it also. there were vessels in sight on the ocean, and their crews, too, he said, must have seen it, for its rays fell on them. it remained at that height for about fifteen minutes by the clock, and then rose as usual, and nothing else extraordinary happened during that day. though accustomed to the coast, he had never witnessed nor heard of such a phenomenon before. i suggested that there might have been a cloud in the horizon in visible to him, which rose with the sun, and his clock was only as accurate as the average; or perhaps, as he denied the possibility of this, it was such a looming of the sun as is said to occur at lake superior and elsewhere. sir john franklin, for instance, says in his narrative, that when he was on the shore of the polar sea, the horizontal refraction varied so much one morning that "the upper limb of the sun twice appeared at the horizon before it finally rose." he certainly must be a son of aurora to whom the sun looms, when there are so many millions to whom it glooms rather, or who never see it till an hour after it has risen. but it be hooves us old stagers to keep our lamps trimmed the highland light 209 and burning to the last, and not trust to the sun's looming. this keeper remarked that the centre of the flame should be exactly opposite the centre of the reflectors, and that accordingly, if he was not careful to turn down his wicks in the morn ing, the sun falling on the reflectors on the south side of the building would set fire to them, like a burning-glass, in the coldest day, and he would look up at noon and see them all lighted! when your lamp is ready to give light, it is readiest to receive it, and the sun will light it. his successor said that he had never known them to blaze in such a case, but merely to smoke. i saw that this was a place of wonders. in a sea turn or shallow fog while i was there the next summer, it being clear overhead, the edge of the bank twenty rods distant appeared like a mountain pasture in the horizon. i was com pletely deceived by it, and i could then under stand why mariners sometimes ran ashore in such cases, especially in the night, supposing it to be far away, though they could see the land. once since this, being in a large oyster boat two or three hundred miles from here, in a dark nio-ht, when there was a thin veil of mist on land and water, we came so near to running on to the land before our skipper was aware of it, 210 cape cod that the first warning was my hearing the sound of the surf under my elbow, i could almost have jumped ashore, and we were obliged to go about very suddenly to prevent striking. the distant light for which we were steering, sup posing it a light-house, five or six miles off, came through the cracks of a fisherman's bunk not more than six rods distant. the keeper entertained us handsomely in his solitary little ocean house. he was a man of singular patience and intelligence, who, when our queries struck him, rang as clear as a bell in response. the light-house lamp a few feet dis tant shone full into my chamber, and made it as bright as day, so i knew exactly how the high land light bore all that night, and i was in no danger of being wrecked. unlike the last, this was as still as a summer night. i thought as i lay there, half awake and half asleep, looking upward through the window at the lights above my head, how many sleepless eyes from far out on the ocean stream — mariners of all nations spinning their yarns through the various watches of the night — were directed toward my couch. ix the sea and the desert the liglit-house lamps were still burning, though now with a silvery lustre, when i rose to see the sun come out of the ocean ; for he still rose eastward of us ; but i was convinced that he must have come out of a dry bed beyond that stream, though he seemed to come out of the water. " the sun once more touched the fields, mountuig' to heaven from the fair flowing deep-running ocean." now we saw countless sails of mackerel fishers abroad on the deep, one fleet in the north just pouring round the cape, another standing down toward chatham, and our host's son went off to join some lagging member of the first which had not yet left the bay. before we left the light-house we were obliged to anoint our shoes faithfully with tallow, for walking on the beach, in the salt water and the sand, had turned them red and crisp. to coun terbalance this, i have remarked that the sea shore, even where muddy, as it is not here, is 212 cape cod singularly clean ; for, notwithstanding the spat tering of the water and mud and squirting of the clams, while walking to and from the boat, your best black pants retain no stain nor dirt, such as they would acquire from walking in the country. we have heard that a few days after this, when the provincetown bank was robbed, speedy emissaries from provincetown made particular inquiries concerning us at this light-house. in deed, they traced us all the way down the cape, and concluded that we came by this unusual route down the back side and on foot, in order that we might discover a way to get off with our booty when we had committed the robbery. the cape is so long and narrow, and so bare withal, that it is well-nigh impossible for a stranger to visit it without the knowledge of its inhabitants generally, unless he is wrecked on to it in the night. so, when this robbery oc curred, all their suspicions seem to have at once centred on us two travelers who had just passed down it. if we had not chanced to leave the cape so soon, we should probably have been arrested. the real robbers were two young men from worcester county who traveled with a centre-bit, and are said to have done their work very neatly. but the only bank that we pried into was the great cape cod sand-bank, and we the sea and the desert 213 robbed it only of an old french crown piece, some shells and pebbles, and the materials of this story. again we took to the beach for another day (october 13), walking along the shore of the re sounding sea, determined to get it into us. we wished to associate with the ocean until it lost the pond-like look which it wears to a coun tryman. we still thought that we could see the other side. its surface was still more sparkling than the day before, and we beheld "the count less smilings of the ocean waves;" though some of them were pretty broad grins, for still the wind blew and the billows broke in foam alons: the beach. the nearest beach to us on the other side, whither we looked, due east, was on the coast of galicia, in spain, whose capital is santiago, though by old poets' reckoning it should have been atlantis or the hesperides; but heaven is found to be farther west now. at first we were abreast of that part of portugal entre douro e jlino, and then galicia and the port of pontevedra opened to us as we walked along; but we did not enter, the breakers ran so high. the bold headland of cape finisterre, a little north of east, jutted toward us next, with its vain brag, for we flung back, — "here is cape cod, — cape land's-beginning." a little indentation toward the north, — for the land 214 cape cod loomed to our imaginations by a common mi rage, — we knew was tlie bay of biscay, and we sang : — " there we lay, till next day, in the bay of biscay o ! " a little south of east was palos, where co lumbus weighed anchor, and farther yet the pillars which hercules set up ; concerning which when we inquired at the top of our voices what was written on them, — for we had the morning sun in our faces, and could not see distinctly, — the inhabitants shouted jve plus ultra (no more beyond), but the wind bore to us the truth only, plus ultra (more beyond), and over the bay westward was echoed ultra (beyond). we spoke to them through the surf about the far west, the true hesperia, ew? trepas or end of the tlay, the this side sundown, where the sun was extinguished in the pacific, and we advised them to pull up stakes and plant those pillars of theirs on the shore of california, whither all our folks were gone, — the only ne plus ultra now. whereat they looked crestfallen on their cliffs, for we had taken the wind out of all their sails. we could not perceive that any of their leav ings washed up liere, though we picked up a child's toy, a small dismantled boat, which may have been lost at pontevedra. the cape became narrower and narrower as the sea and the desert 215 we approached its wrist between truro and provincetown and the shore inclined more de cidedly to the west. at the head of east har bor creek, the atlantic is separated but by half a dozen rods of sand from the tide-waters of the bay. from the clay pounds the bank flatted off for the last ten miles to the extremity at race point, though the highest parts, which are called "islands " from their appearance at a dis tance on the sea, were still seventy or eighty feet above the atlantic, and afforded a good view of the latter, as well as a constant view of the bay, there being no trees nor a hill sufficient to in terrupt it. also the sands began to invade the land more and more, until finally they had en tire possession from sea to sea, at the narrowest part. for three or four miles between truro and provincetown there were no inhabitants from shore to shore, and there were but three or four houses for twice that distance. as we plodded along, either by the edge of the ocean, where the sand was rapidly drinking up the last wave that wet it, or over the sand hills of the bank, the mackerel fleet continued to pour round the cape north of us, ten or fif teen miles distant, in countless numbers, schooner after schooner, till they made a city on the water. they were so thick that many appeared to be afoul of one another; now all 216 cape cod standing on this tack, now on that. we saw how well the new-englanders had followed up captain john smith's suggestions with regard to the fisheries, made in 1616, — to what a pitch they had carried "this contemptible trade of fish," as he significantly styles it, and were now equal to the hollanders whose example he holds up for the english to emulate; notwith standing that "in this faculty," as he says, "the former are so naturalized, and of their vents so certainly acquainted, as there is no likelihood they will ever be paralleled, having two or three thousand busses, flat-bottoms, sword-pinks, todes, and such like, that breeds them sailors, mariners, soldiers, and merchants, never to be wrought out of that trade and fit for any other." we thought that it would take all these names and more to describe the numerous craft which we saw. even then, some years before our "re nowned sires" with their "peerless dames" stepped on plymouth rock, he wrote, "new foundland doth yearly fraught near eight hun dred sail of ships with a silly, lean, skinny poor-john, and cor fish," though all their sup plies must be annually transported from europe. why not plant a colony here then, and raise those supplies on the spot? "of all the four parts of the world," saj^s he, "that i have yet seen, not inhabited, could i have but means to the sea and the desert 217 transport a colony, i would rather live here than anywhere. and if it did not maintain itself, were we but once indifferently well fitted, let us starve." then "fishing before your doors," you "may every night sleep quietly ashore, with good cheer and what fires you will, or, when you please, with your wives and family." al ready he anticipates "the new towns in new england in memory of their old," — and who knows what may be discovered in the "heart and entrails " of the land, "seeing even the very edges," etc., etc. all this has been accomplished, and more, and where is holland now? verily the dutch have taken it. there was no long interval be tween the suggestion of smith and the eulogy of burke. still one after another the mackerel schooners hove in sight round the head of the cape, "whitening all the sea road," and we watched each one for a moment with an undivided inter est. it seemed a pretty sport. here in the country it is only a few idle boys or loafers that go a-fishing on a rainy day; but there it ap peared as if every able-bodied man and helpful boy in the bay had gone out on a pleasure ex cursion in their yachts, and all would at last land and have a chowder on the cape. the gazetteer tells you gravely how many of the men 218 cape cod and boys of these towns are engaged in the whale, cod, and mackerel fishery, how many go to the banks of newfoundland, or the coast of labrador, the straits of belle isle or the bay of chaleurs (shalbre, the sailors call it); as if i were to reckon up the number of boys in con cord who are engaged during the summer in the perch, pickerel, bream, horn-pout, and shiner fishery, of which no one keeps the statis tics, — though i think that it is pursued with as much profit to the moral and intellectual man (or boy), and certainly with less danger to the physical one. one of my playmates, who was apprenticed to a printer, and was somewhat of a wag, asked his master one afternoon if he might go a-fish ing, and his master consented. he was gone three months. when he came back, he said that he had been to the grand banks, and went to setting tyj^e again as if only an afternoon had intervened. i confess i was surprised to find that so many men spent their whole day, ay, their whole lives almost, a-fishing. it is remarkable what a se rious business men make of getting their din ners, and how universally shiftlessness and a groveling taste take refuge in a merely ant-like industry. better go without your dinner, i thought, than be thus everlastingly fishing for the sea and the desert 219 jt like a cormorant. of course, vietoed from the shore^ our pursuits in the country appear not a whit less frivolous. i once sailed three miles on a mackerel cruise myself. it was a sunday evening after a very warm day in which there had been frequent thunder-showers, and i had walked along the shore from cohasset to duxbury. i wished to get over from the last place to clark's island, but no boat could stir, they said, at that stage of the tide, they being left high on the mud. at length i learned that the tavern-keeper, winsor, was going out mackereling with seven men that evening, and would take me. when there had been due delay, we one after another straggled down to the shore in a leisurely man ner, as if waiting for the tide still, and in india rubber boots, or carrying our shoes in our hands, waded to the boats, each of the crew bearing an armful of wood, and one a bucket of new potatoes besides. then they resolved that each should bring one more armful of wood, and that would be enough. they had already got a barrel of water, and had some more in the schooner. we shoved the boats a dozen rods over the mud and water till they floated, then rowing half a mile to the vessel climbed aboard, and there we were in a mackerel schooner, a fine stout vessel of forty-three tons, whose name 220 cape cod 1 forget. the baits were not dry on the hooks. there was the mill in which they ground the mackerel, and the trough to hold it, and the long-handled dipper to cast it overboard with; and already in the harbor we saw the surface rippled with schools of small mackerel, the real scomber vernalis. the crew proceeded lei surely to weigh anchor and raise their two sails, there being a fair but very slight wind; — and the sun now setting clear and shining on the vessel after the thunder-showers, i thought that i could not have commenced the voyage under more favorable auspices. they had four dories and commonly fished in them, else they fished on the starboard side aft where their lines hung ready, two to a man. the boom swung round once or twice, and winsor cast overboard the foul juice of mackerel mixed with rain-water which remained in his trough, and then we gathered about the helmsman and told stories. i remember that the compass was affected by iron in its neighborhood and varied a few de grees. there was one among us just returned from california, who was now going as pas senger for his health and amusement. they expected to be gone about a week, to begin fish ing the next morning, and to carry their fish fresh to boston. they landed me at clark's island, where the pilgrims landed, for my com the sea and the desert 221 panlons wished to get some milk for the voyage. but i had seen the whole of it. the rest was only going to sea and catching the mackerel. moreover, it was as well that i did not remain with them, considering the small quantity of supplies they had taken. now i saw the mackerel fleet on its fishing cjrowid^ though i was not at first aware of it. so my experience was complete. it was even more cold and windy to-day than before, and we were frequently glad to take shelter behind a sand-hill. none of the ele ments were resting. on the beach there is a ceaseless activity, always something going on, in storm and in calm, winter and summer, night and day. even the sedentary man here enjoys a breadth of view which is almost equivalent to motion. in clear weather the laziest may look across the bay as far as plymouth at a glance, or over the atlantic as far as human vision reaches, merely raising his eyelids; or if he is too lazy to look after all, he can hardly help hearing the ceaseless dash and roar of the breakers. the restless ocean may at any mo ment cast up a whale or a wrecked vessel at your feet. all the reporters in the world, the most rapid stenographers, could not report the news it brings. no creature could move slowly where there was so much life around. the few 222 cape cod wreckers were either going or coming, and tlie ships and the sand-pipers, and the screaming gulls overhead; nothing stood still but the shore. the little beach -birds trotted past close to the water's edge, or paused but an instant to swallow their food, keeping time with the ele ments. i wondered how they ever got used to the sea, that they ventured so near the waves. such tiny inhabitants the land brought forth! except one fox. and what could a fox do, looking on the atlantic from that high bank? what is the sea to a fox ? sometimes we met a wrecker with his cart and dog, — and his dog's faint bark at us wayfarers, heard through the roaring of the surf, sounded ridiculously faint. to see a little trembling dainty-footed cur stand on the margin of the ocean, and ineffectually bark at a beach-bird, amid the roar of the at lantic ! come with design to bark at a whale, perchance ! that sound will do for farmyards. all the dogs looked out of place there, naked and as if shuddering at the vastness; and i thought that they would not have been there had it not been for the countenance of their masters. still less could you think of a cat bending her steps that way, and shaking her wet foot over the atlantic ; yet even this happens sometimes, they tell me. in summer i saw the tender young of the piping plover, like chickens just the sea and the desert 223 hatclied, mere pinches of down on two legs, running in troops, with a faint peep, along the edge of the waves. i used to see packs of half wild dogs haunting the lonely beach on the south shore of staten island, in new york bay, for the sake of the carrion there cast up ; and i remember that once, when for a long time i had heard a furious barking in the tall grass of the marsh, a pack of half a dozen large dogs burst forth on to the beach, pursuing a little one which ran straight to me for protection, and i afforded it with some stones, though at some risk to myself; but the next day the little one was the first to bark at me. under these cir cumstances i could not but remember the words of the poet : — "blow, blow, thou winter wind. thou art not so unkind as his ingratitude ; thy tooth is not so keen, because thou art not seen, although thy breath be rude. " freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky, thou dost not bite so nigh as benefits forgot ; though thou the waters warp. thy sting is not so sharp as friend remembered not." sometimes, when i was approaching the car cass of a horse or ox which lay on the beach 224 cape cod there, where there was no living creature in sight, a dog would unexpectedly emerge from it and slink away with a mouthful of offal. the seashore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contem plate this world. it is even a trivial place. the waves forever rolling to the land are too far-traveled and untamable to be familiar. creeping along the endless beach amid the sun squall and the foam, it occurs to us that we, too, are the product of sea-slime. it is a wild, rank place, and there is no flat tery in it. strewn with crabs, horse-shoes, and razor-clams, and whatever the sea casts up, — a vast morgue, where famished dogs may range in packs, and crows come daily to glean the pit tance which the tide leaves them. the carcasses of men and beasts together lie stately up upon its shelf, rotting and bleaching in the sun and waves, and each tide turns them in their beds, and tucks fresh sand under them. there is naked nature, — inhumanly sincere, wasting no thought on man, nibbling at the cliffy shore where gulls wheel amid the spray. we saw this forenoon what, at a distance, looked like a bleached log with a branch still left on it. it proved to be one of the principal bones of a whale, whose carcass, having been stripped of blubber at sea and cut adrift, had the sea and the desert 225 been washed up some months before. it chanced that this was the most conclusive evi dence which we met with to prove, what the coj)enhagen antiquaries assert, that these shores were the furdustrandas^ which thorhall, the companion of thorfinn during his expedition to vinland in 1007, sailed past in disgust. it ap pears that after they had left the cape and ex plored the country about straum-fiordr (buz zard's bay!), thorhall, who was disappointed at not getting any wine to drink there, deter mined to sail north again in search of vinland. though the antiquaries have given us the origi nal icelandic, i prefer to quote their translation, since theirs is the only latin which i know to have been aimed at cape cod. " cum parati erant, sublato velo, cecinit thorhallus : e6 redeamus, ubi conterranei sunt nostri ! faciamus alitem, expansi arenosi peritum, lata navis explorare curricula : dum procellam incitantes gladii morje impatientes, qui terram collaudant, furdustrandas inhabitant et coquunt balaenas." in other words, "when they were ready and their sail hoisted, thorhall sang : let us return thither where our fellow-countrymen are. let us make a bird^ skillful to fly through the ^ i. e., a vessel 226 cape cod heaven of sand,^ to explore the broad track of ships; while warriors who impel to the tempest of swords,^ who praise the land, inhabit won der strands, and cook whales,'^ and so he sailed north past cape cod, as the antiquaries say, "and was shipwrecked on to ireland." though once there were more whales cast up here, i think that it was never more wild than now. we do not associate the idea of antiquity with the ocean, nor wonder how it looked a thousand years ago, as we do of the land, for it was equally wild and unfathomable always. the indians have left no traces on its surface, but it is the same to the civilized man and the savage. the aspect of the shore only has changed. the ocean is a wilderness reaching round the globe, wilder than a bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves of our cities and the gardens of our seaside residences. serpents, bears, hyenasc tigers, rapidly vanish as civilization advances, but the most populous and civilized city cannot scare a shark far from its wharves. it is no further advanced than singapore, with its ti gers, in this respect. the boston papers had never told me that there were seals in the har ^ the sea, which is arched over its sandy bottom like a heaven. 2 battle. the sea and the desert 227 bor. i had always associated these with the esquimaux and other outlandish people. yet from the parlor windows all along the coast you may see families of them sporting on the flats. they were as strange to me as the merman would be. ladies who never walk in the woods, sail over the sea. to go to sea ! why, it is to have the experience of noah, — to realize the deluge. every vessel is an ark. we saw no fences as we walked the beach, no birchen riders, highest of rails, projecting into the sea to keep the cows from wading round, nothing to remind us that man was pro prietor of the shore. yet a truro man did tell us that owners of land on the east side of that town were regarded as owning the beach, in or der that they might have the control of it so far as to defend themselves against the encroach ments of the sand and the beach-grass, — for even this friend is sometimes regarded as a foe ; but he said that this was not the case on the bay side. also i have seen in sheltered parts of the bay, temporary fences running to low water mark, the posts being set in sills or sleep ers placed transversely. after we had been walking many hours, the mackerel fleet still hovered in the northern hori zon nearly in the same direction, but farther off, hull down. though their sails were set they 228 cape cod never sailed away, nor yet came to anchor, but stood on various tacks as close together as ves sels in a haven, and we, in our ignorance, thought that they were contending patiently with adverse winds, beatiug eastward; but w( learned afterward that they were even then on their fishing-ground, and that they caught mack erel without taking in their mainsails or coming to anchor, "a smart breeze" (thence called a mackerel breeze) "being," as one says, "con sidered most favorable " for this purpose. we counted about two hundred sail of mackerel fishers within one small arc of the horizon, and a nearly equal number had disapj)eared south ward. thus they hovered about the extremity of the cape, like moths round a candle; the lights at race point and long point being bright candles for them at night, — and at this distance they looked fair and white, as if they had not yet flown into the light, but nearer at hand afterward, we saw how some had formerly singed their wings and bodies. a village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are all ploughing the ocean together, as a common field. in north truro the women and girls may sit at their doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, on the sea, with hundreds of white harvest wagons, just as the sea and the desert 229 in the country the farmers' wives sometimes see their husbands working in a distant hillside field. but the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher's ear. having passed the narrowest part of the waist of the cape, though still in truro, for this township is about twelve miles long on the shore, we crossed over to the bay side, not half a mile distant, in order to spend the noon on the nearest shrubby sand-hill in provincetown, called mount ararat, which rises one hundred feet above the ocean. on our way thither we had occasion to admire the various beautiful forms and colors of the sand, and we noticed an interesting mirage, which i have since found that hitchcock also observed on the sands of the cape. we were crossing a shallow valley in the desert, where the smooth and spotless sand sloped upward by a small angle to the horizon on every side, and at the lowest part was a long chain of clear but shallow pools. as we were approaching these for a drink, in a diagonal di rection across the valley, they appeared inclined at a slight but decided angle to the horizon, though they were plainly and broadly connected with one another, and there was not the least ripple to suggest a current ; so that by the time we had reached a convenient part of one we seemed to have ascended several feet. they 230 cape cod appeared to lie by magic on the side of the vale, like a mirror left in a slanting position. it was a very pretty mirage for a provincetown desert, but not amounting to what, in sanscrit, is called "the thirst of the gazelle," as there was real water here for a base, and we were able to quench our thirst after all. professor rafn, of copenhagen, thinks that the mirage which i noticed, but which an old inhabitant of provincetown, to whom i men tioned it, had never seen nor heard of, had something to do with the name "furdustrandas," i. e.. wonder strands, given, as i have said, in the old icelandic account of thorfinn's expedi tion to vinland in the year 1007, to a part of the coast on which he landed. but these sands are more remarkable for their length than for their mirage, which is common to all deserts, and the reason for the name which the north men themselves give — "because it took a long time to sail by them " — is sufficient and more applicable to these shores. however, if you should sail all the way from greenland to buz zard's bay along the coast, you would get sight of a good many sandy beaches. but whether thor-finn saw the mirage here or not, thor-eau, one of the same family, did; and perchance it was because leif the lucky had, in a previous voyage, taken thor-er and his people off the the sea and the desert 231 rock in the middle of the sea, that thor-eau was born to see it. this was not the only mirage which i saw on the cape. that half of the beach next the bank is commonly level, or nearly so, while the other slopes downward to the water. as i was walk ing upon the edge of the bank in wellfleet at sundown, it seemed to me that the inside half of the beach sloped upward toward the water to meet the other, forming a ridge ten or twelve feet high the whole length of the shore, but higher always opposite to where i stood ; and i was not convinced of the contrary till i de scended the bank, though the shaded outlines left by the waves of a previous tide but halfway down the apparent declivity might have taught me better. a stranger may easily detect what is strange to the oldest inhabitant, for the strange is his province. the old oysterman, speaking of gull-shooting, had said that you must aim under, when firing down the bank. a neighbor tells me that one august, looking through a glass from naushon to some vessels which were sailing along near martha's vine yard, the water about them appeared perfectly smooth, so that they were reflected in it, and yet their full sails proved that it must be rip pled, and they who were with him thought that it was a mirage, i. e., a reflection from a haze. 232 cape cod from the above-mentioned sand-liill we over looked provincetown and its harbor, now emp tied of vessels, and also a wide expanse of ocean. as we did not wish to enter province town before night, though it was cold and windy, we returned across the deserts to the atlantic side, and walked along the beach again nearly to race point, being still greedy of the sea in fluence. all the while it was not so calm as the reader may suppose, but it was blow, blow, blow, — roar, roar, roar, — tramp, tramp, tramp, — without interruption. the shore now trended nearly east and west. before sunset, having already seen the mack erel fleet returning into the bay, we left the sea shore on the north of provincetown, and made our way across the desert to the eastern extrem ity of the town. from the first high sand-hill, covered with beach-grass and bushes to its top, on the edge of the desert, we overlooked the shrubby hill and swamp country which surrounds provincetown on the north, and protects it, in some measure, from the invading sand. not withstanding the universal barrenness, and the contiguity of the desert, i never saw an au tumnal landscape so beautifully painted as this was. it was like the richest rug imaginable spread over an uneven surface ; no damask nor velvet, nor tyrian dye or stuffs, nor the work the sea and the desert 233 of any loom, could ever match it. there was the incredibly bright red of the huckleberry, and the reddish brown of the bayberry, mingled with the briglit and living green of small pitch pines, and also the duller green of the bay berry, boxberry, and plum, the yellowish green of the shrub-oaks, and the various golden and yellow and fawn-colored tints of the birch and maple and aspen, — each making its own fig ure, and, in the midst, the few yellow sand slides on the sides of the hills looked like the white floor seen through rents in the rug. com ing from the country as i did, and many au tumnal woods as i had seen, this was perhaps the most novel and remarkable sight that i saw on the cape. probably the brightness of the tints was enhanced by contrast with the sand which surrounded this tract. this was a part of the furniture of cape cod. we had for days walked up the long and bleak piazza which runs along her atlantic side, then over the sanded floor of her halls, and now we were be ing introduced into her boudoir. the hundred white sails crowding round long point into provincetown harbor, seen over the painted hills in front, looked like toy ships upon a man tel-piece. the peculiarity of this autumnal landscape consisted in the lowness and thickness of the 234 cape cod shrubbery, no less than in the brightness of the tints. it was like a thick stuff of worsted or a fleece, and looked as if a giant could take it up by the hem, or rather the tasseled fringe which trailed out on the sand, and shake it, though it needed not to be shaken. but no doubt the dust would hy in that case, for not a little has accumulated underneath it. "was it not such an autumnal landscape as this which suggested our high-colored rugs and carpets ? hereafter when i look on a richer rug than usual, and study its figures, i shall think, there are the huckleberry hills, and there the denser swamps of boxberry and blueberry ; there the shrub -oak patches and the bayberries, there the maples and the birches and the pines. what other dyes are to be comj^ared to these? they were warmer colors than i had associated with the new england coast. after threading a swamp full of boxberry, and climbing several hills covered with shrub oaks, without a path, where shipwrecked men would be in danger of perishing in the night, we came down upon the eastern extremity of the four planks which run the whole length of pro vincetown street. this, which is the last town on the cape, lies mainly in one street along the curving: beach frontino^ the southeast. the sand-hills, covered with shrubbery and inter the sea and the desert 235 posed with swamps and ponds, rise immediately behind it in the form of a crescent, which is from half a mile to a mile or more wide in the middle, and beyond these is the desert, which is the greater part of its territory, stretching to the sea on the east and west and north. the town is compactly built in the narrow space, from ten to fifty rods deep, between the harbor and the sand-hills, and contained at that time about twenty-six hundred inhabitants. the houses, in which a more modern and pretending style has at length prevailed over the fisher man's hut, stand on the inner or plank side of the street, and the fish and store houses, with the picturesque-looking windmills of the salt works, on the water side. the narrow portion of the beach between, forming the street, about eighteen feet wide, the only one where one car riage could pass another, if there was more than one carriage in the town, looked much "heav ier " than any portion of the beach or the desert which we had walked on, it being above the reach of the highest tide, and the sand being kept loose by the occasional passage of a trav eler. we learned that the four planks on which we were walking had been bought by the town's share of the surplus revenue, the disposition of which was a bone of contention between the inhabitants, till they wisfely resolved thus to put 236 cape cod it under foot. yet some, it was said, were so provoked because they did not receive their particular share in money, that they persisted in walking in the sand a long time after the sidewalk was built. this is the only instance which i happen to know in which the surplus revenue proved a blessing to any town. a sur plus revenue of dollars from the treasury to stem the greater evil of a surplus revenue of sand from the ocean. they expected to make a hard road by the time these planks were worn out. indeed, they have already done so since we were there, and have almost forgotten their sandy baptism. as we passed along we observed the inhabi tants engaged in curing either fish or the coarse salt hay which they had brought home and spread on the beach before their doors, looking as yellow as if they had raked it out of the sea. the front-yard plots appeared like what indeed they were, portions of the beach fenced in, with beach-grass growing in them, as if they were sometimes covered by the tide. you might still pick up shells and pebbles there. there were a few trees among the houses, especially silver abeles, willows, and balm-of-gileads ; and one man showed me a young oak which he had transplanted from behind the town, thinking it an apple-tree. but every man to his trade. the sea and the desert 237 though he had little woodcraft, he was not the less weatherwise, and gave us one piece of in formation, viz., he had observed that when a thundercloud came up with a flood -tide it did not rain. this was the most completely mari time town that we were ever in. it was merely, a good harbor, surrounded by land, dry if not firm, — an inhabited beach, whereon fishermen cured and stored their fish, without any back country. when ashore the inhabitants still walk on planks. a few small patches have been reclaimed from the swamps, containing com monly half a dozen square rods only each. we saw one which was fenced with four lengths of rail; also a fence made wholly of hogshead staves stuck in the ground. these, and such as these, were all the cultivated and cidtivable land in provincetown. we were told that there were thirty or forty acres in all, but we did not discover a quarter part so much, and that was well dusted with sand, and looked as if the des ert was claiming it. they are now turning some of their swamps into cranberry meadows on quite an extensive scale. yet far from being out of the way, province town is directly in the way of the navigator, and he is lucky who does not run afoul of it in the dark. it is situated on one of the highways of commerce, and men from all parts of the globe touch there in the course of a year. 238 cape cod the mackerel fleet had nearly all got in be fore us, it being saturday night, excepting that division which had stood down towards chatham in the morning; and from a hill where we went to see the sun set in the bay, we counted two hundred goodly looking schooners at anchor in the harbor at various distances from the shore, and more were yet coming round the cape. as each came to anchor, it took in sail and swung round in the wind, and lowered its boat. they belonged chiefly to wellfleet, truro, and cape ann. this was that city of canvas which we had seen hull down in the horizon. near at hand, and under bare poles, they were unex pectedly black-looking vessels, fxixalvat vrjes. a fisherman told us that there were fifteen hun dred vessels in the mackerel fleet, and that he had counted three "hundred and fifty in province town harbor at one time. being obliged to anchor at a considerable distance from the shore on account of the shallowness of the water, they made the impression of a larger fleet than the vessels at the wharves of a large city. as they had been manoeuvring out there all day seem ingly for our entertainment, while we were walk ing northwestward along the atlantic, so now we found them flocking into provincetown har bor at night, just as we arrived, as if to meet us, and exhibit themselves close at hand. stand the sea and the desert 239 ing by race point and long point with various speed, they reminded me of fowls coming home to roost. these were genuine new england vessels. it is stated in the journal of moses prince, a brother of the annalist, under date of 1721, at which time he visited gloucester, that the first vessel of the class called schooner was built at gloucester about eight years before, by andrew robinson; and late in the same century one cotton tufts gives us the tradition with some particulars, which he learned on a visit to the same place. according to the latter, robinson having constructed a vessel which he masted and rigged in a peculiar manner, on her going off the stocks a by-stander cried out, " oa, how she scoons/^^ whereat robinson replied, "^ schooner let her 6e.^" "from which time," says tufts, "vessels thus masted and rigged have gone by the name of schooners; before which, vessels of this description were not known in europe." ^ yet i can hardly believe this, for a schooner has always seemed to me the typical vessel. according to c. e. potter of manchester, new hampshire, the very word schooner is of new england origin, being from the indian 1 see mass. hist. coll., vol. ix., 1st series, and vol. i., 4th 240 cape cod schoon or scoot, meaning to rush, as schoodic, from scoot and auke, a place where water rushes. n. b. somebody of gloucester was to read a paper on this matter before a genealogical soci ety in boston, march 3, 1859, according to the boston journal, q. v. nearly all who come out must walk on the four planks which i have mentioned, so that you are pretty sure to meet all the inhabitants of provincetown who come out in the course of a day, provided you keep out yourself. this evening the planks were crowded with mackerel fishers, to whom we gave and from whom we took the wall, as we returned to our hotel. this hotel was kept by a tailor, his shop on the one side of the door, his hotel on the other, and his day seemed to be divided between carving meat and carving broadcloth. the next morning, though it was still more cold and blustering than the day before, we took to the deserts again, for we spent our days wholly out of doors, in the sun when there was any, and in the wind which never failed. after threading the shrubby hill-country at the south west end of the town, west of the shank-painter swamp, whose expressive name — for we under stood it at first as a landsman naturally would — gave it importance in our eyes, we crossed the sands to the shore south of race point and the sea and the desert 241 three miles distant, and thence roamed round eastward through the desert to where we had left the sea the evening before. we traveled five or six miles after we got out there, on a curv ing line, and might have gone nine or ten, over vast platters of pure sand, from the midst of which we could not see a particle of vegetation, excepting the distant thin fields of beach-grass, which crowned and made the ridges toward which the sand sloped upward on each side; — all the while in the face of a cutting wind as cold as january; indeed, we experienced no weather so cold as this for nearly two months afterward. this desert extends from the ex tremity of the cape, through provincetown into truro, and many a time as we were traversing it we were reminded of "riley's narrative " of his captivity in the sands of arabia, notwith standing the cold. our eyes magnified the patches of beach-grass into cornfields, in the horizon, and we probably exaggerated the height of the ridges on account of the mirage. i was pleased to learn afterward, from kalm's travels in north america, that the inhabitants of the lower st. lawrence call this grass (^calama grostis arenaria)^ and also sea-lyme grass {ely mus arenarlus\ seigle de mer; and he adds, "1 have been assured that these plants grow in great plenty in newfoundland, and on other 242 cape cod north american shores ; the j)laces covered with them looking, at a distance, like cornfields; which might explain the passage in our north ern accounts [he wrote in 1749] of the excellent wine land [ vinland det goda, translator], which mentions that they had found whole fields of wheat growing wild." the beach-grass is "two to four feet high, of a sea-green color," and it is said to be widely diffused over the world. in the hebrides it is used for mats, pack-saddles, bags, hats, etc. ; paper has been made of it at dorchester in this state, and cattle eat it when tender. it has heads somewhat like rye, from six inches to a foot in length, and it is propagated both by roots and seeds. to express its love for sand, some botanists have called it psamma arenaria, which is the greek for sand, qualified by the latin for sandy, — or sandy sand. as it is blown about by the wind, while it is held fast by its roots, it describes myriad circles in the sand as accurately as if they were made by com passes. it was the dreariest scenery imaginable. the only animals which we saw on the sand at that time were sj)iders, which are to be found almost everywhere whether on snow or ice, water or sand, — and a venomous-looking, long, narrow worm, one of the myriapods, or thousand -legs. the sea and the desert 243 we were surprised to see spider-holes in that flowing sand with an edge as firm as that of a stoned well. in june this sand was scored with the tracks of turtles both large and small, which had been out in the night, leading to and from the swamps. i was told by a terrm films who has a "farm" on the edge of the desert, and is fami liar with the fame of provincetown, that one man had caught twenty-five snapping-turtles there the previous spring. his own method of catching them was to put a toad on a mackerel hook and cast it into a pond, tying the line to a stump or stake on shore. invariably the turtle when hooked crawled up the line to the stump, and was found waiting there by his captor, how ever long afterward. he also said that minks, .muskrats, foxes, coons, and wild mice were found there, but no squirrels. we heard of sea-turtles as large as a barrel being found on the beach and on east harbor marsh, but whether they were native there, or had been lost out of some vessel, did not appear. perhaps they were the salt-water terrapin, or else the smooth terrapin, found thus far north. many toads were met with where there was nothing but sand and beach-grass. in truro i had been surprised at the number of large light-colored toads everywhere hopping over the dry and 244 cape cod sandy fields, their color corresponding to that of the sand. snakes also are common on these pure sand beaches, and i have never been so much troubled by mosquitoes as in such locali ties. at the same season strawberries grew there abundantly in the little hollows on the edge of the desert, standing amid the beach grass in the sand, and the fruit of the shad-bush or amelanchier, which the inhabitants call josh-pears (some think from juicy?), is very abundant on the hills. i fell in with an oblig ing man who conducted me to the best locality for strawberries. he said that he would not have shown me the place if he had not seen that i was a stranger, and could not anticipate him another year; i therefore feel bound in honor not to reveal it. when we came to a pond, he being the native did the honors and carried me over on his shoulders, like sindbad. one good turn deserves another, and if he ever comes our way, i will do as much for him. in one place we saw numerous dead tops of trees projecting through the otherwise uninter rupted desert, where, as we afterward learned, thirty or forty years before a flourishing forest had stood, and now, as the trees were laid bare from year to year, the inhabitants cut off their tops for fuel. we saw nobody that day outside of the town ; the sea and the desert 245 it was too wintry for such as had seen the back side before, or for the greater number who never desire to see it, to venture out; and we saw hardly a track to show that any had ever crossed this desert. yet i was told that some are al ways out on the back-side night and day in se vere weather, looking for wrecks, in order that they may get the job of discharging the cargo, or the like, — and thus shipwrecked men are succored. but, generally speaking, the inhabi tants rarely visit these sands. one who had lived in provincetown thirty years told me that he had not been through to the north side within that time. sometimes the natives themselves come near perishing by losing their way in snow-storms behind the town. the wind was not a sirocco or simoon, such as we associate with the desert, but a new eng land northeaster, — and we sought shelter in vain under the sand-hills, for it blew all about them, rounding them into cones, and was sure to find us out on whichever side we sat. from time to time we lay down and drank at little pools in the sand, filled with pure, fresh water, all that was left, probably, of a pond or swamp. the air was filled with dust like snow, and cut ting sand which made the face tingle, and we saw what it must be to face it when the weather was drier, and, if possible, windier still, — to 246 cape cod face a migrating sand-bar in the air, which has picked up its duds and is off, — to be whipped with a cat, not o' nine-tails, but of a myriad of tails, and each one a sting to it. a mr. whit man, a former minister of wellfleet, used to write to his inland friends that the blowing sand scratched the windows so that he was obliged to have one new pane set every week, that he might see out. on the edge of the shrubby woods the sand had the appearance of an inundation which was overwhelming them, terminating in an abrupt bank many feet higher than the surface on which they stood, and having partially buried the outside trees. the moving sand-hills of england, called dunes or downs, to which these have been likened, are either formed of sand cast up by the sea, or of sand taken from the land itself in the first place by the wind, and driven still farther inward. it is here a tide of sand impelled by waves and wind, slowly flowing from the sea toward the town. the northeast winds are said to be the strongest, but the northwest to move most sand, because they are the driest. on the shore of the bay of bis cay, many villages were formerly destroyed in this way. some of the ridges of beach-grass which we saw were planted by government many years ago, to preserve the harbor of province the sea and the desert 247 town and the extremity of the cape. i talked with some who had been employed in the plant ing. in the "description of the eastern coast," which i have already referred to, it is said: "beach-grass during the spring and sum mer grows about two feet and a half. if sur rounded by naked beach, the storms of autumn and winter heap up the sand on all sides, and cause it to rise nearly to the top of the plant. in the ensuing spring the grass sprouts anew; is again covered with sand in the winter ; and thus a hill or ridge continues to ascend as long as there is a sufficient base to support it, or till the circumscribing sand, being also covered with beach-grass, will no longer yield to the force of the winds." sand-hills formed in this way are sometimes one hundred feet high and of every variety of form, like snow-drifts, or arab tents, and are continually shifting. the grass roots itself very firmly. when i endeavored to pull it up, it usually broke off ten inches or a foot below the surface, at what had been the surface the year before, as appeared by the numerous offshoots there, it being a straight, hard, round shoot, showing by its length how much the sand had accumulated the last year; and sometimes the dead stubs of a previous season were pulled up with it from still deeper in the sand, with their own more decayed shoot 248 cape cod attached, — so that the age of a sand-hill, and its rate of increase for several years, are pretty accurately recorded in this way. old gerard, the english herbalist, says, p. 1250; "i find mention in stowe's chronicle, in anno 1555, of a certain pulse or pease, as they term it, wherewith the poor people at that time, there being a great dearth, were miraculously helped; he thus mentions it. in the month of augtist (saith he), in suffolke, at a place by the sea side all of hard stone and pibble, called in those parts a shelf, lying between the towns of orford and aldborough, where neither grew grass nor any earth was ever seen ; it chanced in this barren place suddenly to spring up with out any tillage or sowing, great abundance of peason, whereof the poor gathered (as men judged) above one hundred quarters, yet re mained some ripe and some blossoming, as many as ever there were before; to the which place rode the bishop of norwich and the lord willoughby, ^vith others in great number, who found nothing but hard, rocky stone the space of three yards under the roots of these peason, which roots were great and long, and very sweet." he tells us also that gesner learned from dr. cajus that there were enough there to supply thousands of men. he goes on to say that "they without doubt grew there many the sea and the desert 249 years before, but were not observed till hunger made them take notice of them, and quickened their invention, which commonly in our people is very dull, especially in finding out food of this nature. my worshipful friend dr. argent hath told me that many years ago he was in this place, and caused his man to pull among the beach with his hands, and follow the roots so long until he got some equal in length unto his height, yet could come to no ends of them." gerard never saw them, and is not certain what kind they were. in dwight's travels in new england it is stated that the inhabitants of truro were for merly regularly warned under the authority of law in the month of april yearly, to plant beach-grass, as elsewhere they are warned to re pair the highways. they dug up the grass in bunches, which were afterward divided into sev eral smaller ones, and set about three feet apart, in rows, so arranged as to break joints and ob struct the passage of the wind. it spread itself rapidly, the weight of the seeds when ripe bend ing the heads of the grass, and so dropping di rectly by its side and vegetating there. in this way, for instance, they built up again that part of the cape between truro and provincetown where the sea broke over in the last century. they have now a public road near there, made 250 cape cod by laying sods, which were full of roots, bottom upward and close together on the sand, double in the middle of the track, then spreading brush evenly over the sand on each side for half a dozen feet, planting beach-grass on the banks in regular rows, as above described, and sticking a fence of brush against the hollows. the attention of the general government was first attracted to the danger which threatened cape cod harbor from the inroads of the sand, about thirty years ago, and commissioners were at that time appointed by massachusetts to ex amine the premises. they reported in june, 1825, that, owing to "the trees and brush hav ing been cut down, and the beach -grass de stroyed on the seaward side of the cape, oppo site the harbor," the original surface of the ground had been broken up and removed by the wind toward the harbor, — during the pre vious fourteen years, — over an extent of "one half a mile in breadth, and about four and a half miles in length." — "the space where a few years since were some of the highest lands on the cape, covered with trees and bushes," presenting "an extensive waste of undulating sand;" — and that, during the previous twelve months, the sand "had approached the harbor an average distance of fifty rods, for an extent of four and a half miles!" and unless some the sea and the desert 25l measures were adopted to check its progress, it would in a few years destroy both the harbor and the town. they therefore recommended that beach-grass be set out on a curving line over a space ten rods wide and four and a half miles long, and that cattle, horses, and sheep be prohibited from going abroad, and the inhabi tants from cutting the brush. i was told that about thirty thousand dollars in all had been appropriated to this object, though it was complained that a great part of it was spent foolishly, as the public money is wont to be. some say that while the government is planting beach-grass behind the town for the protection of the harbor, the inhabitants are rolling the sand into the harbor in wheelbarrows, in order to make house-lots. the patent-office has recently imj^orted the seed of this grass from holland, and distributed it over the coun try, but probably we have as much as the hol landers. thus cape cod is anchored to the heavens, as it were, by a myriad little cables of beach grass, and, if they should fail, would become a total wreck, and erelong go to the bottom. formerly, the cows were permitted to go at large, and they ate many strands of the cable by which the cape is moored, and well-nigh set it adrift, as the bull did the boat which was 252 cape cod moored with a grass rope ; but now they are not permitted to wander. a portion of truro which has considerable taxable property on it has lately been added to provincetown, and i was told by a truro man that his townsmen talked of petitioning the legis lature to set off the next mile of their territory also to provincetown, in order that she might have her share of the lean as well as the fat, and take care of the road through it; for its whole value is literally to hold the cape to gether, and even this it has not always done. but provincetown strenuously declines the gift. the wind blowed so hard from the northeast, that, cold as it was, we resolved to see the break ers on the atlantic side, whose din we had heard all the morning; so we kept on eastward through the desert, till we struck the shore again northeast of provincetown, and exposed ourselves to the full force of the piercing blast. there are extensive shoals there over which the sea broke with great force. for half a mile from the shore it was one mass of white break ers, which, with the wind, made such a din that we could hardly hear ourselves speak. of this part of the coast it is said : '' a northeast storm, the most violent and fatal to seamen, as it is frequently accompanied with snow, blows di rectly on the land : a strong current sets along the sea and the desert 253 the shore : add to which that ships, during the operation of such a storm, endeavor to work northward, that they may get into the bay. should they be unable to weather race point, the wind drives them on the shore, and a ship wreck is inevitable. accordingly, the strand is everywhere covered with the fragments of ves sels." but since the highland light was erected, this part of the coast is less dangerous, and it is said that more shipwrecks occur south of that light, where they were scarcely known before. this was the stormiest sea that we witnessed, — more tumultuous, my companion affirmed, than the rapids of niagara, and, of course, on a far greater scale. it was the ocean in a gale, a clear, cold day, with only one sail in sight, which labored much, as if it were anxiously seeking a harbor. it was high tide when we reached the shore, and in one i^lace, for a con siderable distance, each wave dashed up so high that it was difficult to pass between it and the bank. further south, where the bank was higher, it would have been dangerous to attempt it. a native of the cape has told me, that many years ago, three boys, his playmates, hav ing gone to this beach in wellfleet to visit a wreck, when the sea receded ran down to the wreck, and when it came in ran before it to the 254 cape cod bank, but the sea following fast at their heels, caused the bank to cave and bury them alive. it was the roaring sea, odxaao-a yxfuf^cra^ — *ht6v€s fioscoctlu, €pevyofj.€i>r]s a\hs e|a). and the summits of the hank around resound, the sea being vomited forth. as we stood looking on this scene we were gradually convinced that fishing here and in a pond were not, in all resj)ects, the same, and that he who waits for fair weather and a calm sea may never see the glancing skin of a mack erel, and get no nearer to a cod than the wooden emblem in the state house. having lingered on the shore till we were well-nigh chilled to death by the wind, and were ready to take shelter in a charity-house, we turned our weather-beaten faces toward pro vincetown and the bay again, having now more than doubled the cape. provincetown early the next morning i walked into a fish house near our hotel, where three or four men were engaged in trundling out the pickled fish on barrows, and spreading them to dry. they told me that a vessel had lately come in from the banks with forty-four thousand cod-fish. timothy dwight says that, just before he ar rived at provincetown, "a schooner came in from the great bank with fifty-six thousand fish, almost one thousand five hundred quintals, taken in a single voyage ; the main deck being, on her return, eight inches under water in calm weather." the cod in this fish -house, just out of the pickle, lay packed several feet deep, and three or four men stood on them in cowhide boots, pitching them on to the barrows with an instrument which had a single iron point. one young man, who chewed tobacco, spat on the fish repeatedly. well, sir, thought i, when that older man sees you he will speak to you. but presently i saw the older man do the same thing. it reminded me of the figs of smyrna. 256 cape cod "how long does it take to cure these fish?" i asked. "two good drying daj^s, sir," was the an swer. i walked across the street again into the hotel to breakfast, and mine host inquired if i would take "hashed fish or beans." i took beans, though they never were a favorite dish of mine. i found next summer that this was still the only alternative proposed here, and the landlord was still ringing the changes on these two words. in the former dish there was a remarkable pro portion of fish. as you travel inland the potato predominates. it chanced that i did not taste fresh fish of any kind on the cape, and i was assured that they were not so much used there as in the country. that is where they are cured, and where, sometimes, travelers are cured of eating them. no fresh meat was slaughtered in provincetown, but the little that was used at the public houses was brought from boston by the steamer. a great many of the houses here were sur rounded by fish -flakes close up to the sills on all sides, with only a narrow passage two or three feet wide, to the front door ; so that instead of looking out into a flower or grass plot, you looked on to so many square rods of cod turned wrong side outwards. these parterres were said provincetown 257 to be least like a flower-garden in a good dry ing day in midsummer. there were flakes of every age and pattern, and some so rusty and overgrown with lichens that they looked as if they might have served the founders of the fish ery here. some had broken down under the weight of successive harvests. the principal employment of the inhabitants at this time seemed to be to trundle out their fish and spread them in the morning, and bring them in at night. i saw how many a loafer who chanced to be out early enough, got a job at wheeling out the fish of his neighbor who was anxious to improve the whole of a fair day. now then i knew where salt fish were caught. they were everywhere lying on their backs, their collar bones standing out like the lapels of a man-o' war-man's jacket, and inviting all things to come and rest in their bosoms ; and all things, with a few exceptions, accepted the invitation. i think, by the way, that if you should wrap a large salt fish round a small boy, he would have a coat of such a fashion as i have seen many a one wear to muster. salt fish were stacked up on the wharves, looking like corded wood, maple and yellow birch with the bark left on. i mis took them for this at first, and such in one sense they were, — fuel to maintain our vital fires, — an eastern wood which grew on the grand 258 cape cod banks. some were stacked in the form of huge flower-pots, being laid in small circles with the tails outwards, each circle successively larger than the preceding until the pile was three or four feet high, when the circles rapidly dimin ished, so as to form a conical roof. on the shores of new brunswick this is covered with birch-bark, and stones are placed upon it, and, being thus rendered impervious to the rain, it is left to season before being packed for exporta tion. it is rumored that in the fall the cows here are sometimes fed on cod's heads! the godlike part of the cod, which, like the human head, is curiously and wonderfully made, forsooth has but little less brain in it, — coming to such an end ! to be craunched by cows ! i felt my own skull crack from sympathy. what if the heads of men were to be cut off to feed the cows of a superior order of beings who inhabit the islands in the ether? away goes your fine brain, the house of thought and instinct, to swell the cud of a ruminant animal! — however, an inhabi tant assured me that they did not make a prac tice of feeding cows on cod's heads; the cows merely would eat them sometimes, but i might live there all my days and never see it done. a <jow wanting salt would also sometimes lick out all the soft part of a cod on the flakes. provincetown 259 this he would have me believe was the founda tion of this fish-story. it has been a constant traveler's tale and per haps slander, now for thousands of years, the latins and greeks have repeated it, that this or that nation feeds its cattle, or horses, or sheep, on fish, as may be seen in ^lian and pliny, but in the journal of nearchus, who was alexan der's admiral, and made a voyage from the indus to the euphrates three hundred and twenty-six years before christ, it is said that the inhabitants of a portion of the intermediate coast, whom he called ichthyophagi or fish eaters, not only ate fishes raw and also dried and pounded in a whale's vertebra for a mortar and made into a paste, but gave them to their cattle, there being no grass on the coast; and several modern travelers, — braybosa, niebuhr, and others make the same report. therefore in balancing the evidence i am still in doubt about the provincetown cows. as for other domestic animals. captain king, in his continuation of captain cook's journal in 1779, says of the dogs of kamtschatka, " their food in the winter consists entirely of the head, entrails, and back bones of salmon, which are put aside and dried for that purpose ; and with this diet they are fed but sparingly."^ 1 cook's journal, vol. vii. p. 315. 260 cape cod as we are treating of fishy matters, let me insert what pliny says, — that " the command ers of the fleets of alexander the great have related that the gedrosi, who dwell on the banks of the river arabis, are in the habit of making the doors of their houses with the jaw bones of fishes, and raftering the roofs with their bones." strabo tells the same of the ichthyophagi. "hardouin remarks, that the basques of his day were in the habit of fencing their gardens with the ribs of the whale, which sometimes exceeded twenty feet in length; and cuvier says, that at the present time the jaw« bone of the whale is used in norway for the purpose of making beams or posts for build ings." ^ herodotus says the inhabitants on lake prasias in thrace (living on piles), "give fish for fodder to their horses and beasts of burden." provincetown was apparently what is called a flourishing town. some of the inhabitants asked me if i did not think that they appeared to be well off generally. i said that i did, and asked how many there were in the almshouse. " oh, only one or two, infirm or idiotic," answered they. the outward aspect of the houses and shops frequently suggested a poverty which their interior comfort and even richness dis proved. you might meet a lady daintily 1 bohn's ed. trans, of pliny, vol. ii. p. 361. provincetown 261 dressed in the sabbath morning, wading in among the sand-hills, from church, where there appeared no house fit to receive her, yet no doubt the interior of the house answered to the exterior of the lady. as for the interior of the inhabitants i am still in the dark about it. i had a little intercourse with some whom i met in the street, and was often agreeably disap pointed by discovering the intelligence of rough, and what would be considered unpromising, specimens. nay, i ventured to call on one citi zen the next summer, by special invitation. i found him sitting in his front doorway, that sabbath evening, prepared for me to come in unto him; but unfortunately for his reputation for keeping open house, there was stretched across his gateway a circular cobweb of the largest kind and quite entire. this looked so ominous that i actually turned aside and went in the back way. this monday morning was beautifully mild and calm, both on land and water, promising us a smooth passage across the bay, and the fisher men feared that it would not be so good a dry ing day as the cold and windy one which pre ceded it. there could hardly have been a greater contrast. this was the first of the in dian summer days, though at a late hour in the morning we found the wells in the sand behind 262 cape cod the town still covered with ice, which had formed in the night. what with wind and sun my most prominent feature fairly cast its slough. but i assure you it will take more than two good drying days to cure me of rambling. af ter making an excursion among the hills in the neighborhood of the shank-painter swamp, and getting a little work done in its line, we took our seat upon the highest sand-hill over looking the town, in mid-air, on a long plank stretched across between two hillocks of sand, where some boys were endeavoring in vain to fly their kite ; and there we remained the rest of that forenoon looking out over the placid harbor, and watching for the first appearance of the steamer from wellfleet, that we might be in readiness to go on board when we heard the whistle off long point. we got what we could out of the boys in the mean while. provincetown boys are of course all sailors and have sailors' eyes. when we were at the highland light the last summer, seven or eight miles from provincetown har bor, and wished to know one sunday morning if the olata, a well-known yacht, had got in from boston, so that we could return in her, a provincetown boy about ten years old, who chanced to be at the table, remarked that she had. i asked him how he knew. "i just saw provincetown 263 her come in," said he. when i expressed sur prise that he could distinguish her from other vessels so far, he said that there were not so many of those two-topsail schooners about but that he could tell her. palfrey said, in his ora tion at barnstable, " the duck does not take to the water with a surer instinct than the barn stable boy. [he might have said the cape cod boy as well.] he leaps from his leading-strings into the shrouds. it is but a bound from the mother's lap to the masthead. he boxes the compass in his infant soliloquies. he can hand, reef, and steer by the time he flies a kite.'* this was the very day one would have chosen to sit upon a hill overlooking sea and land, and muse there. the mackerel fleet was rapidly taking its dej)arture, one schooner after another, and standing round the cape, like fowls leav ing their roosts in the morning to disperse them selves in distant fields. the turtle-like sheds of the salt-works were crowded into every nook in the hills, immediately behind the town, and their now idle wind-mills lined the shore. it was worth the while to see by what coarse and 'simple chemistry this almost necessary of life is obtained, with the sun for journeyman, and a single apprentice to do the chores for a large establishment. it is a sort of tropical labor, pursued too in the sunniest season ; more inter 264 cape cod esting than gold or diamond-washing, which, i fancy, it somewhat resembles at a distance. in the production of the necessaries of life nature is ready enough to assist man. so at the pot ash works which i have seen at hull, where they burn the stems of the kelp and boil the ashes. verily, chemistry is not a splitting of hairs when you have got half a dozen raw irish men in the laboratory. it is said, that owing to the reflection of the sun from the sand-hills, and there being absolutely no fresh water emp tying into the harbor, the same number of su perficial feet yields more salt here than in any other part of the country. a little rain is con sidered necessary to clear the air, and make salt fast and good, for as paint does not dry, so water does not evaporate, in dog-day weather. but they were now, as elsewhere on the cape, breaking up their salt-works and selling them for lumber. from that elevation we could overlook the operations of the inhabitants almost as com pletely as if the roofs had been taken off. they were busily covering the wicker-work flakes about their houses with salted fish, and we now saw that the back yards were improved for this purpose as much as the front; where one man's fish ended another's began. in al most every yard we detected some little build-^ provincetown 265 ing from which these treasures were being trun dled forth and systematically spread, and we saw that there was an art as well as a knack even in spreading fish, and that a division of labor was profitably practiced. one man was withdrawing his fishes a few inches beyond the nose of his neighbor's cow which had stretched her neck over a paling to get at them. it seemed a quite domestic employment, like dry ing clothes, and indeed in some parts of the county the women take part in it. i noticed in several places on the cape a sort of clothes-^ate. they spread brush on the ground, and fence it round, and then lay their clothes on it, to keep them from the sand. this is a cape cod clothes-yard. the sand is the great enemy here. the tops of some of the hills were inclosed and a board put up forbidding all persons entering the in closure, lest their feet should disturb the sand, and set it a-blowing or a-sliding. the inhabi tants are obliged to get leave from the authori ties to cut wood behind the town for fish-flakes, bean-poles, pea-brush, and the like, though, as we were told, they may transplant trees from one part of the township to another without leave. the sand drifts like snow, and some times the lower story of a house is concealed by it, though it is kept off by a wall. the houses 266 cape cod were formerly built on piles, in order that the driving sand might pass under them. we saw a few old ones here still standing on their piles, but they were boarded up now, being protected by their younger neighbors. there was a school house, just under the hill on which we sat, filled with sand up to the tops of the desks, and of course the master and scholars had fled. per haps they had imprudently left the windows open one day, or neglected to mend a broken pane. yet in one place was advertised "fine sand for sale here," — i could hardly believe my eyes, — probably some of the street sifted, — a good instance of the fact that a man confers a value on the most worthless thing by mixing himself with it, according to which rule we must have conferred a value on the whole back side of cape cod; — but i thought that if they could have advertised "fat soil," or perhaps "fine sand got rid of," ay, and "shoes emptied here," it would have been more alluring. as we looked down on the town, i thought that i saw one man, who probably lived beyond the ex tremity of the planking, steering and tacking for it in a sort of snow-shoes, but i may have been mistaken. in some pictures of province town the persons of the inhabitants are not drawn below the ankles, so much being supposed to be buried in the sand. nevertheless, natives provincetown 267 of provincetown assured me that they could walk in the middle of the road without trouble even in slippers, for they had learned how to put their feet down and lift them up without taking in any sand. one man said that he should be surprised if he found half a dozen grains of sand in his pumps at night, and stated, moreover, that the young ladies had a dexterous way of emptying their shoes at each step, which it would take a stranger a long time to learn. the tires of the stagewheels were about five inches wide ; and the wagon-tires gen erally on the cape are an inch or two wider, as the sand is an inch or two deeper than else where. i saw a baby's wagon with tires six inches wide to keep it near the surface. the more tired the wheels, the less tired the horses. yet all the time that we were in provincetown, which was two days and nights, we saw only one horse and cart, and they were conveying a coffin. they did not try such experiments there on common occasions. the next summer i saw only the two-wheeled horse-cart which conveyed me thirty rods into the harbor on my way to the steamer. yet we read that there were two horses and two yoke of oxen here in 1791, and we were told that there were several more when we were there, beside the stage team. in bar ber's historical collections, it is said, "so 268 cape cod rarely are wheel-carriages seen in the place that they are a matter of some curiosity to the younger part of the community. a lad who understood navigating the ocean much better than land travel, on seeing a man driving a wagon in the street, expressed his surprise at his being able to drive so straight without the assistance of a rudder." there was no rattle of carts, and there would have been no rattle if there had been any carts. some saddle horses that passed the hotel in the evening merely made the sand fly with a rustling sound like a writer sanding his paper copiously, but there was no sound of their tread. no doubt there are more horses and carts there at present. a sleigh is never seen, or at least is a great novelty on the cape, the snow being either absorbed by the sand or blown into drifts. nevertheless, the inhabitants of the cape generally do not complain of their "soil," but will tell you that it is good enough for them to dry their fish on. notwithstanding all this sand, we counted three meeting-houses, and four school-houses nearly as large, on this street, though some had a tight board fence about them to preserve the plot within level and hard. similar fences, even within a foot of many of the houses, gave the town a less cheerful and hospitable appear provincetown 269 ance than it would otherwise have had. they told us that, on the whole, the sand had made no progress for the last ten years, the cows be ing no longer permitted to go at large, and every means being taken to stop the sandy tide. in 1727 provincetown was "invested with peculiar privileges," for its encouragement. once or twice it was nearly abandoned; but now lots on the street fetch a high price, though titles to them were first obtained by possession and improvement, and they are still transferred by quit-claim deeds merely, the township being the property of the state. but though lots were so valuable on the street, you might in many places throw a stone over them to where a man could still obtain land or sand by squatting on or improving it. stones are very rare on the cape. i saw a very few small stones used for pavements and for bank walls, in one or two places in my walk, but they are so scarce, that, as i was informed, vessels have been forbidden to take them from the beach for ballast, and therefore their crews used to land at night and steal them. i did not hear of a rod of regular stone wall below or leans. yet i saw one man underpinning a new house in eastham with some "rocks," as he called them, which he said a neighbor had col lected with great pains in the course of years, 270 cape cod and finally made over to him. this i thought was a gift worthy of being recorded, — equal to a transfer of california "rocks," almost. an other man who was assisting him, and who seemed to be a close observer of nature, hinted to me the locality of a rock in that neighbor hood which was "forty -two paces in circumfer ence and fifteen feet high," for he saw that i was a stranger, and, probably, would not carry it off. yet i suspect that the locality of the few large rocks on the forearm of the cape is well known to the inhabitants generally. i even met with one man who had got a smattering of min eralogy, but where he picked it up i could not guess. i thought that he would meet with some interesting geological nuts for him to crack, if he should ever visit the mainland, — cohasset or marblehead, for instance. the well stones at the highland light were brought from hingham, but the wells and cel lars of the cape are generally built of brick, which also are imported. the cellars, as well as the wells, are made in a circular form, to prevent the sand from pressing in the wall. the former are only from nine to twelve feet in diameter, and are said to be very cheap, since a single tier of brick will suffice for a cellar of even larger dimensions. of course, if you live in the sand, you will not require a large cellar provincetown 271 to hold your roots. in provincetown, when formerly they suffered the sand to drive under their houses, obliterating all rudiment of a cellar, they did not raise a vegetable to put into one. one farmer in wellfleet, who raised fifty bushels of potatoes, showed me his cellar under a corner of his house, not more than nine feet in diameter, looking like a cistern ; but he had another of the same size under his barn. you need dig only a few feet almost any where near the shore of the cape to find fresh water. but that which we tasted was invariably poor, though the inhabitants called it good, as if they were comparing it with salt water. in the account of truro, it is said, "wells dug near the shore are dry at low water, or rather at what is called young flood, but are replenished with the flowing of the tide," — the salt water, which is lowest in the sand, apparently forcing the fresh up. when you express your surprise at the greenness of a provincetown garden on the beach, in a dry season, they will sometimes tell you that the tide forces the moisture up to them. it is an interesting fact that low sand bars in the midst of the ocean, perhaps even those which are laid bare only at low tide, are reservoirs of fresh water, at which the thirsty mariner can supply himself. they appear, like huge sponges, to hold the rain and dew which 272 cape cod fall on them, and which, by capillary attraction, are prevented from mingling with the surround ing brine. the harbor of provincetown — which, as well as the greater part of the bay, and a wide expanse of ocean, we overlooked from our perch — is deservedly famous. it opens to the south, is free from rocks, and is never frozen over. it is said that the only ice seen in it drifts in sometimes from barnstable or plymouth. dwight remarks that "the storms which prevail on the american coast generally come from the east ; and there is no other harbor on a windward shore within two hundred miles." j. d. gra ham, who has made a very minute and thorough survey of this harbor and the adjacent waters, states that "its capacity, depth of water, excel lent anchorage, and the complete shelter it affords from all winds, combine to render it one of the most valuable ship harbors on our coast." it is the harbor of the cape and of the fisher men of massachusetts generally. it was known to navigators several years at least before the settlement of plymouth. in captain john smith's map of new england, dated 1614, it bears the name of milford haven, and massa chusetts bay that of stuard's bay. his high ness prince charles changed the name of cape cod to cape james ; but even princes have not provincetown 273 always power to change a name for the worse, and, as cotton mather said, cape cod is "a name which i suppose it will never lose till shoals of codfish be seen swimming on its high est hills." many an early voyager was unexpectedly caught by this hook, and found himself em bayed. on successive maps. cape cod appears sprinkled over with french, dutch, and english names, as it made part of new france, new holland, and new england. on one map provincetown harbor is called "fuic (bownet?) bay," barnstable bay "staten bay,"' and the sea north of it "mare del noort," or the north sea. on another, the extremity of the cape is called "staten hoeck," or the states hook. on another, by young, this has noord zee, staten hoeck, or hit hoeck, but the copy at cambridge has no date ; the whole cape is called "niew houant" (after hudson); and on an other still, the shore between eace point and wood end appears to be called "bevechier." in champlain's admirable map of new france, including the oldest recognizable map of what is now the new england coast with which i am acquainted. cape cod is called c blan (i. e.. cape white), from the color of its sands, and massachusetts bay is baye blanche. it was visited by de monts and champlain in 1605, 274 cape cod and the next year was further explored by poi trincourt and champlain. the latter has given a particular account of these explorations in his "voyages," together with separate charts and soundings of two of its harbors, — malle barre^ the bad bar (nauset harbor?), a name now applied to what the french called cap baturier^ — and port fortune^ apparently chatham harbor. both these names are copied on the map of "novi belgii," in ogilby's america. he also describes minutely the man ners and customs of the savages, and represents by a plate the savages surprising the french and killing five or six of them. the french afterward killed some of the natives, and wished, by way of revenge, to carry off some and make them grind in their hand-mill at port eoyal. it is remarkable that there is not in english any adequate or correct account of the french exploration of what is now the coast of new england, between 1604 and 1608, though it is conceded that they then made the first perma nent european settlement on the continent of north america north of st. augustine. if the lions had been the painters it would have been otherwise. this omission is probably to be ac counted for partly by the fact that the early edition of champlain's "voyages " had not been provincetown 275 consulted for this purpose. this contains by far the most particular, and, i think, the most interesting chapter of what we may call the ante -pilgrim history of new england, extend ing to one hundred and sixty pages quarto ; but appears to be unknown equally to the historian and the orator on plymouth kock. bancroft does not mention champlain at all among the authorities for de monts' expedition, nor does he say that he ever visited the coast of new england. though he bore the title of pilot to de monts, he was, in another sense^ the lead ing spirit, as well as the historian of the expe dition. holmes, hildreth, and barry, and apparently all our historians who mention cham plain, refer to the edition of 1632, in which all the separate charts of our harbors, etc., and about one half the narrative, are omitted; for the author explored so many lands afterward that he could afford to forget a part of what he had done. hildreth, speaking of de monts' expedition, says that "he looked into the penob scot [in 1605], which pring had discovered two years before," saying nothing about cham plain's extensive exploration of it for de monts in 1604 (holmes says 1608, and refers to pur chas); also that he followed in the track of pring along the coast "to cape cod, which he called malabarre." (haliburton had made the 276 cape cod same statement before liira in 1829. he called it c^-p blanc, and malle barre — the bad bar — was the name given to a harbor on the east side of the cape.) pring says nothing about a river there. belknap says that weymouth discov ered it in 1605. sir f. gorges says, in his narration,^ 1658, that pring in 1606 "made a perfect discovery of all the rivers and harbors." this is the most i can find. bancroft makes champlain to have discovered more western riv ers in maine, not naming the penobscot; he, however, must have been the discoverer of dis tances on this river.2 pring was absent from england only about six months, and sailed by this part of cape cod (malebarre) because it yielded no sassafras, while the french, who probably had not heard of pring, were patiently for years exploring the coast in search of a place of settlement, sounding and surveying its har bors. john smith's map, published in 1616, from observations in 1614-15, is by many regarded as the oldest map of new england. it is the first that was made after this country was called new england, for he so called it ; but in cham • plain's "voyages," edition 1613 (and lescarbot, in 1612, quotes a still earlier account of his 1 maine hist. coll., vol. ii. p. 19. 2 see belknap, p. 1-17. provincetown 277 voyage), there is a map of it made when it was known to christendom as new france, called carte geograpuque de la jvouvelle franse faictte par u sleur de champlain saint tongois capintalne ordinaire pour le roy en la marine,— faict ten 1612, from his observa tions between 1604 and 1607 ; a map extending from labrador to cape cod and westward to the great lakes, and crowded with informa tion, geographical, ethnographical, zoological, and botanical. he even gives the variation of the compass as observed by himself at that date on many parts of the coast. this, taken to gether with the many separate charts of harbirs and their soundings on a large scale, which this volume contains, — among the rest, qui ni he quy (kennebec), choitacoit r. (saco r.), le beau j)ort. port st, louis (near cape ann), and others on our coast, — but ivhich are not in the edition o/1632, makes this a completer map of the new england and adjacent northern coast than was made for half a century afterward ; al most, we might be allowed to say, till another frenchman, des barres, made another for us, which only our late coast survey has super seded. most of the maps of this coast made for a long time after betray their indebtedness to champlain. he was a skillful navigator, a man of science, and geographer to the king of 278 cape cod france. he crossed the atlantic about twenty times, and made nothing of it; often in a small vessel in which few would dare to go to sea to day; and on one occasion making the voyage from tadoussac to st. malo in eighteen da^^s. he was in this neighborhood, that is, between annapolis, nova scotia, and cape cod, observ ing the land and its inhabitants, and making a map of the coast, from may, 1604, to septem ber, 1607, or about three and a half years, and he has described minutely his method of survey ing harbors. by his own account, a part of his map was engraved in 1604 (?). when pont grave and others returned to france in 1606, he remained at port royal with poitrincourt, "in order," says he, "by the aid of god, to fin ish the chart of the coasts which i had begun; " and again in his volume, printed before john smith visited this part of america, he says : " it seems to me that i have done my duty as far as i could, if i have not forgotten to put in my said chart whatever i saw, and give a particular knowledge to the public of what had never been described nor discovered so particularly as i have done it, although some other may have heretofore written of it; but it was a very small affair in comparison with what we have discov ered within the last ten years." it is not generally remembered, if known, by provincetown 279 the descendants of the pilgrims, that when their forefathers were spending their first memorable winter in the new world, they had for neigh bors a colony of french no further off than port royal (annapolis, nova scotia), three hundred miles distant (prince seems to make it about five hundred miles); where, in spite of many vicissitudes, they had been for fifteen years. they built a grist-mill there as early as 1606 ; also made bricks and turpentine on a stream, williamson says, in 1606. de monts, who was a protestant, brought his minister with him, who came to blows with the catholic priest on the subject of religion. though these founders of acadie endured no less than the pilgrims, and about the same proportion of them — thirty -five out of seventy-nine (williamson's maine says thirty-six out of seventy) — died the first winter at st. croix, 1604-5, sixteen years earlier, no orator, to my knowledge, has ever celebrated their enterprise (williamson's his tory of maine does considerably), while the trials which their successors and descendants endured at the hands of the english have fur nished a theme for both the historian and poet.^ the remains of their fort at st. croix were dis covered at the end of the last century, and helped decide where the true st. croix, our boundary, was. 1 see bancroft's history and longfellow's evangeline. 280 cape cod the very gravestones of those frenchmen are probably older than the oldest english monu ment in new england north of the elizabeth islands, or perhaps anywhere in new england, for if there are any traces of gosnold's store house left, his strong works are gone. bancroft says, advisedly, in 1834, "it requires a believ ing eye to discern the ruins of the fort;" and that there were no ruins of a fort in 1837. dr. charles t. jackson tells me that, in the course of a geological survey in 1827, he discovered a gravestone, a slab of trap rock, on goat island, opposite annapolis (port eoyal), in nova scotia, bearing a masonic coat-of-arms and the date 1606, which is fourteen years earlier than the landing of the pilgrims. this was left in the possession of judge haliburton, of nova scotia. there were jesuit priests in what has since been called new england, converting the sav ages at mount desert, then st. savior, in 1613, — having come over to port eoyal in 1611, though they were almost immediately interrupted by the english, years before the pilgrims came hither to enjoy their own religion. this ac cording to champlain. charlevoix says the same; and after coming from france in 1611, went west from port eoyal along the coast as far as the kennebec in 1612, and was often carried from port eoyal to mount desert. provincetown 281 lucleed, the englishman's history of new england commences only when it ceases to be new france. though cabot was the first to discover the continent of north america, cham plain, in the edition of his voyages printed in 1632, after the english had for a season got possession of quebec and port royal, complains with no little justice : "the common consent of all europe is to represent new france as ex tending at least to the thirty-fifth and thirty sixth degrees of latitude, as appears by the maps of the world printed in spain, italy, hol land, flanders, germany, and england, until they possessed themselves of the coasts of new france, where are acadie, the etechemains (maine and new brunswick), the almouchicois (massachusetts ?), and the great river st. law rence, where they have imposed, according to their fancy, such names as new england, scot land, and others ; but it is not easy to efface the memory of a thing which is known to all chris tendom." that cabot merely landed on the uninhabita ble shore of labrador gave the english no just title to new england, or to the united states generally, any more than to patagonia. his careful biographer (biddle) is not certain in what voyage he ran down the coast of the united states, as is reported, and no one tells us what 282 cape cod he saw. miller (in tlie new york hist. coll., vol. i. p. 28), says he does not appear to have landed anywhere. contrast with this verraz zani's tarrying fifteen days at one place on the new england coast, and making frequent ex cursions into the interior thence. it chances that the latter's letter to francis i., in 1524, contains "the earliest original account extant of the atlantic coast of the united states ; " and even from that time the northern part of it be gan to be called la terra franceses or french land. a part of it was called new holland be fore it was called new england. the english were very backward to explore and settle the continent which they had stumbled upon. the french preceded them both in their attempts to colonize the continent of north america (caro lina and florida, 1562-64), and in their first permanent settlement (port royal, 1605) ; and the right of possession, naturally enough, was the one which england mainly respected and recognized in the case of spain, of portugal, and also of france, from the time of henry vii. the explorations of the french gave to the world the first valuable maps of these coasts. denys of honfleur made a map of the gulf of st. lawrence in 1506. no sooner had cartier explored the st. lawrence in 1535, than there began to be published by his countrymen re provincetown 283 niarkably accurate charts of that river as far up as montreal. it is almost all of the continent north of florida that you recognize on charts for more than a generation afterward, — though verrazzani's rude plot (made under french aus pices) was regarded by hackluyt, more than fifty years after his voyage (in 1524), as the most accurate representation of our coast. the french trail is distinct. they went measuring and sounding, and when they got home had something to show for their voyages and explo rations. there was no danger of their charts beins: lost, as cabot's have been. the most distinguished navigators of that day were italians, or of italian descent, and portu guese. the french and spaniards, though less advanced in the science of navigation than the former, possessed more imagination and spirit of adventure than the english, and were better fitted to be the explorers of a new continent -even as late as 1751. this spirit it was which so early carried the french to the great lakes and the mississippi on the north, and the spaniard to the same river on the south. it was long before our frontiers reached their settlements in the west, and a voyageur or coureur de hois is still our conductor there. prairie is a french word, as sierra is a spanish one. augustine in florida 284 cape cod and santa fe in new mexico (1582), both built by tlie spaniards, are considered tlie oldest towns in the united states. within the mem ory of the oldest man, the anglo-americans were confined between the appalachian moun tains and the sea, "a space not two hundred miles broad," while the mississippi was by treaty the eastern boundary of new france.^ so far as inland discovery was concerned, the adventurous spirit of the english was that of sailors who land but for a day, and their enter prise the enterprise of traders. cabot spoke like an englishman, as he was, if he said, as one reports, in reference to the discovery of the american continent, when he found it running toward the north, that it was a great disappoint ment to him, being in his way to india; but we would rather add to than detract from the fame of so great a discoverer. samuel penhallow, in his history (boston, 1726), p. 51, speaking of "port eoyal and nova scotia," says of the last, that its "first seizure was by sir sebastian cobbet for the crown of great britain, in the reign of king henry vii. ; but lay dormant till the year 1621," when sir william alexander got a pat ent of it, and possessed it some years; and 1 see the pamphlet on settling the ohio, london, 1763, bound up with the travels of sir john bartrara. provincetown 285 afterward sir david kirk was proprietor of it, but erelong, "to the surprise of all thinking men, it was given up unto the french." even as late as 1633 we find winthrop, the first governor of the massachusetts colony, who was not the most likely to be misinformed, who, moreover, has the fame^ at least, of hav ing discovered wachusett mountain (discerned it forty miles inland), talking about the " great lake" and the "hideous swamps about it," near which the connecticut and • the " poto mack" took their rise; and among the memora ble events of the year 1642 he chronicles darby field, an irishman's expedition to the "white hill," from whose top he saw eastward what he "judged to be the gulf of canada," and west ward what he "judged to be the great lake which canada river comes out of," and where he found much "muscovy glass," and "could rive out pieces of forty feet long and seven or eight broad." while the very inhabitants of new england were thus fabling about the coun try a hundred miles inland, which was a terra incognita to them, — or rather many years be fore the earliest date referred to, — champlain, the^rs^ governor of canada^ not to mention the inland discoveries of cartier,^ roberval, ^ it is remarkable that the first, if not the only, part of new eng-land which cartier saw was vermont (he also saw the mountains of new york), from montreal mountain, in 286 cape cod and others, of the preceding century, and his own earlier voyage, had already gone to war against the iroquois in their forest forts, and penetrated to the great lakes and wintered there, before a pilgrim had heard of new england. in champlain's voyages, printed in 1613, there is a plate representing a fight in which he aided the canada indians against the iroquois, near the south end of lake cham plain, in july, 1609, eleven years before the settlement of plymouth. bancroft says he joined the algonquins in an expedition against the iroquois, or five nations, in the northwest of new york. this is that "great lake," which the english, hearing some rumor of from the french, long after, locate in an "imaginary province called laconia, and spent several years about 1630 in the vain attempt to discover."^ thomas morton has a chapter on this "great lake." in the edition of champlain's map dated 1632, the falls of niagara appear; and in a great lake northwest of mer douce (lake huron) there is an island represented, over which is written, ''''isle ou il y d une mine de 1535, sixty-seven years before gosnold saw cape cod. if see ing is discovering, — and that is all that it is proved that cabot knew of the coast of the united states, — then cartier (to omit verrazzani and gomez) was the discoverer of new eng land rather than gosnold, who is commonly so styled. ^ sir ferdinand gorges, in maine hist. coll., vol. ii. p. 68. provincetown 28t ctiivre,^^ — "island where there is a mine of copper." this will do for an offset to our gov ernor's "muscovy glass." of all these adven tures and discoveries we have a minute and faithful account, giving facts and dates as well as charts and soundings, all scientific and frenchman -like, with scarcely one fable or traveler's story. probably cape cod was visited by europeans long before the seventeenth century. it may be that cabot himself beheld it. yerrazzani, in 1524, according to his own account, spent fifteen days on our coast, in latitude 41° 40', (some suppose in the harbor of newport,) and often went five or six leagues into the interior there, and he says that he sailed thence at once one hundred and fifty leagues northeasterly, always in sight of the coast. there is a chart in hackluyt's "divers voyages," made accord ing to verrazzani's plot, which last is praised for its accuracy by hackluyt, but i cannot dis tinguish cape cod on it, unless it is the "c. arenas," which is in the right latitude, though ten degrees west of "claudia," which is thought to be block island. the "biographic universelle" informs us that "an ancient manuscript chart drawn in 1529 by diego ribeiro, a spanish cosmogra pher, has preserved the memory of the voyage 288 cape cod of gomez [a portuguese sent out by charles the fifth]. one reads in it under (au dessous) the place occupied by the states of new york, connecticut, and rhode island, terre d' jetienne gomez^ quhl decouvrit en 1525 (land of etienne gomez, which he discovered in 1525)." this chart, with a memoir, was published at weimar in the last century. jean alphonse, roberval's pilot in canada in 1542, one of the most skillful navigators of his time, and who has given remarkably minute and accurate direction for sailing up the st. lawrence, showing that he knows what he is talking about, says in his "routier" (it is in hackkiyt), "i have been at a bay as far as the forty-second degree, between norimbegue [the penobscot?] and florida, but i have not ex plored the bottom of it, and i do not know whether it passes from one land to the other," i. e., to asia. (" j'ai ete a une baye jusques ])ar les 42® degres entre la norimbegue et la floride; mais je n'en ai pas cherche le fond, et ne sgais pas si elle passe d'une terre a i'autre.") this may refer to massachusetts bay, if not possibly to the western inclination of the coast a little farther south. when he says, "i have no doubt that the norimbegue enters into the river of canada," he is perhaps so interpreting some account which the indians had given provincetown 289 respecting the route from the st. lawrence to the atlantic, by the st. john, or penobscot, or possibly even the hudson river. we hear rumors of this country of "norum bega " and its great city from many quarters. in a discourse by a great french sea-captain in ramusio's third volume (155g-65), this is said to be the name given to the land by its inhabi tants, and verrazzani is called the discoverer of it ; another in 1607 makes the natives call it, or the river, aguncia. it is represented as an island on an accompanying chart. it is fre quently spoken of by old writers as a country of indefinite extent, between canada and florida, and it appears as a large island with cape bre ton at its eastern extremity, on the map made according to verrazzani 's plot in hackluyt's "divers voyages." these maps and rumors may have been the origin of the notion, common among the early settlers, that new england was an island. the country and city of norum bega appear about where maine now is on a map in ortelius ("theatrum orbis terrarum," antwerp, 1570), and the "r. grande " is drawn where the penobscot or st. john might be. in 1604, champlain being sent by the sieur de monts to explore the coast of norembegue, sailed up the penobscot twenty -two or twenty three leagues from "isle haute," or till he was 290 cape cod stopped by the falls. he says: "i think that this river is that which many pilots and histo rians call norembegue, and which the greater part have described as great and spacious, with numerous islands ; and its entrance in the forty third or forty-third and one half, or, according to others, the forty-fourth degree of latitude, more or less." he is convinced tliat "the greater part " of those who speak of a great city there have never seen it, but repeat a mere rumor, but he thinks that some have seen the mouth of the river, since it answers to their de scription. under date of 1607 champlain writes: "three or four leagues north of the cap de poitrincourt [near the head of the bay of fundy in nova scotia] we found a cross, which was very old, covered with moss and almost all de cayed, which was an evident sign that there had formerly been christians there." also the following passage from lescarbot will show how much the neighboring coasts were frequented by europeans in the sixteenth cen tury. speaking of his return from port royal to france in 1607, he says: "at last, within four leagues of campseau [the gut of canso], we arrived at a harbor [in nova scotia], where a worthy old gentleman from st. john de lus, named captain savale, was fishing, who re* provincetown 291 ceived us with the utmost courtesy. and as this harbor, which is small, but very good, has no name, i have given it on my geographical chart the name of savalet. [it is on cham plain's map also.] this worthy man told us that this voyage was the forty-second which he had made to those parts, and yet the newfound landers [^terre neuviers] make only one a year. he was wonderfully content with his fishery, and informed us that he made daily fifty crowns' worth of cod, and that his voyage would be worth ten thousand francs. he had sixteen men in his employ ; and his vessel was of eighty tons, which could carry a hundred thousand dry cod."^ they dried their fish on the rocks on shore. the ''isola della kena " (sable tsland?) ap pears on the chart of "nuova francia" and norumbega, accompanying the "discourse" above referred to in kamusio's third volume, edition 1556-65. champlain speaks of there being at the isle of sable, in 1604, "grass pas tured by oxen (boeufs) and cows which the por tuguese carried there more than sixty years ago," i, e., sixty years before 1613; in a later edition he says, which came out of a spanish vessel which was lost in endeavoring to settle on the isle of sable; and he states that de la roche's } histoire de la nouvelle france, 1612. 292 cape cod men, who were left on tliis island seven years from 1598, lived on the flesh of these cattle which they found "e?z quantie^^^ and built houses out of the wrecks of vessels which came to the island ("perhaps gilbert's"), there being no wood or stone. lescarbot says that they lived "on fish and the milk of cows left there about eighty years before by baron de leri and saint just." charlevoix says they ate up the cattle and then lived on fish. haliburton speaks of cattle left there as a rumor. de leri and saint just had suggested plans of colonization on the isle of sable as early as 1515 (1508 ?) according to bancroft, referring to charlevoix. these are but a few of the instances which i might ^uote. cape cod is commonly said to have been dis covered in 1602. we will consider at length under what circumstances, and with what obser vation and expectations, the first englishmen whom history clearly discerns approached the coast of new england. according to the ac counts of archer and brereton (both of whom accompanied gosnold), on the 26th of march, 1602, old style. captain bartholomew gosnold set sail from falmouth, england, for the north part of virginia, in a small bark called the concord, they being in all, says one account, "thirty-two persons, whereof eight mariners provincetown 293 and sailors, twelve purposing upon the discovery to return with the ship for england, the rest remain there for population." this is regarded as "the first attempt of the english to make a settlement within the limits of new england." pursuing a new and a shorter course than the usual one by the canaries, "the 14th of april following" they had sight of saint mary's, an island of the azores." as their sailors were few and "none of the best," (i use their own phrases,) and they were "going upon an un known coast," they were not "over-bold to stand in with the shore but in open weather; " so they made their first discovery of land with the lead. the 23d of april the ocean appeared yellow, but on taking up some of the water in a bucket, "it altered not either in color or taste from the sea azure." the 7th of may they saw divers birds whose names they knew, and many others in their "english tongue of no name." the 8th of may "the water changed to a yellowish green, where at seventy fathoms" they "had ground. ' the 9th, they had upon their lead "many glittering stones," — "which might promise some mineral matter in the bottom." the 10th, they were over a bank which they thought to be near the western end of st. john's island, and saw schools of fish. the 12th, they say, " continually passed fleeting by us sea-oare. 294 cape cod which seemed to have their movable course towards the northeast." on the 13th they ob served "great beds of weeds, much wood, and divers things else floating by," and "had smell ing of the shore much as from the southern cape and andalusia in spain." on friday, the 14th, early in the morning they descried land on the north, in the latitude of forty -three degrees, apparently some part of the coast of maine. williamson ^ says it certainly could not have been south of the central isle of shoals. belknap inclines to think it the south side of cape ann. standing fair along by the shore, about twelve o^ clock the same day, they came to anchor and were visited by eight savages, who came off to them "in a biscay shallop, with sail and oars," — "an iron grapple, and a ket tle of copper." these they at first mistook for "christians distressed." one of them was "apparelled with a waistcoat and breeches of black serge, made after our sea-fashion, hoes and shoes on his feet; all the rest (saving one that had a pair of breeches of blue cloth) were naked." they appeared to have had dealings with "some basques of st. john de luz, and to understand much more than we," say the english, "for want of language, could compre hend." but they soon "set sail westward, leav ^ history of maine. "■*t^ ^ '""^^ ^ ^ -^ m^< '^hh #'■■■•1^ 1 ^;3 il * ' .^^ts^k it •l^^ provincetown 295 ing them and their coast." (this was a remark able discovery for discoverers.) "the 15th day," writes gabriel archer, "we had again sight of the land, which made ahead, being as we thought an island, by reason of a large sound that appeared westward be tween it and the main, for coming to the west end thereof, we did perceive a large opening, we called it shoal hope. near this cape we came to anchor in fifteen fathoms, where we took great store of cod-fish, for which we altered the name and called it cape cod. here we saw skulls of herring, mackerel, and other small fish, in great abundance. this is a low, sandy shoal, but without danger ; also we came to an chor again in sixteen fathoms, fair by the land in the latitude of forty -two degrees. this cape is well near a mile broad, and lieth northeast by east. the captain went here ashore, and found the ground to be full of peas, strawberries, whortleberries, etc., as then unripe, the sand also by the shore somewhat deep ; the firewood there by us taken in was of cypress, birch, witch-hazel, and beach. a young indian came here to the captain, armed with his bow and ar rows, and had certain plates of copper hanging at his ears; he showed a willingness to help us in our occasions." "the 16th we trended the coast southerly, 296 cape cod which was all champaign and full of grass, but the islands somewhat woody." or, according to the account of john brere ton, "riding here," that is, where they first communicated with the natives, "in no very good harbor, and withal doubting the weather, about three of the clock the same day in the af ternoon we weighed, and standing southerly off into sea the rest of that day and the night fol lowing, with a fresh gale of wind, in the morn ing we found ourselves embayed with a mighty headland; but coming to an anchor about nine of the clock the same day, within a league of the shore, we hoisted out the one half of our shallop, and captain bartholomew gosnold, myself and three others, went ashore, being a white sandy and very bold shore ; and marching all that af ternoon with our muskets on our necks, on the highest hills which we saw (the weather very hot) at length we perceived this headland to be parcel of the main, and sundry islands lying almost round about it; so returning towards evening to our shallop (for by that time the other part was brought ashore and set together), we espied an indian, a young man of proper stat ure, and of a pleasing countenance, and after some familiarity with him, we left him at the sea side, and returned to our ship, where in five or six hours' absence we had pestered our ship provincetown 297 so with codfish, that we threw numbers of them overboiircl again; and surely i am persuaded that in the months of march, april, and may, there is upon this coast better fishing, and in as great plenty, as in newfoundland ; for the skulls of mackerel, herrings, cod, and other fish, that we daily saw as we went and came from the shore, were wonderful," etc. "from this place we sailed round about this headland, almost all the points of the compass, the shore very bold ; but as no coast is free from dangers, so i am persuaded this is as free as any. the land somewhat low, full of goodly woods, but in some places plain." it is not quite clear on which side of the cape they landed. if it was inside, as would appear from brereton's words, "from this place we sailed round about this headland almost all the points of the compass," it must have been on the western shore either of truro or wellfleet. to one sailing south into barnstable bay along the cape, the only "white, sandy, and very bold shore" that appears is in these towns, though the bank is not so high there as on the eastern side. at a distance of four or five miles the sandy cliffs there look like a long fort of yellow sandstone, they are so level and regular, espe cially in wellfleet, — the fort of the land de fending itself against the encroachments of the 298 cape cod ocean. they are streaked here and there with a reddish sand as if painted. farther south the shore is more flat, and less obviously and ab ruptly sandy, and a little tinge of green here and there in the marshes appears to the sailor like a rare and precious emerald. but in the journal of pring's voyage the next year (and salterne, who was with pring, had accompanied gosnold) it is said, "departing hence [i. e., from savage rock] we bare into that great gulf which captain gosnold overshot the year before."! so they sailed round the cape, calling the southeasterly extremity "point cave," till they came to an island which they named martha's vineyard (now called no man's land), and an other on which they dwelt awhile, which they named elizabeth's island, in honor of the queen, one of the grouj) since so called, now known by its indian name cuttyhunk. there they built a small storehouse, the first house built by the english in new england, whose cellar could recently still be seen, made partly ^ " savage rock," which, some have supposed to be, from the name, the salvages^ a ledge about two miles off rockport, cape ann, was probably the nubble, a large, high rock near the shore, on the east side of york harbor, maine. the first land made by gosnold is presumed by experienced navigators to be cape elizabeth on the same coast. (see babson's his' lory of gloucester, massachusetts.) provincetown 299 of stones taken from the beach. bancroft says (edition of 1837) the ruins of the fort can no longer be discerned. tliey who were to have remained becoming discontented, all together set sail for england, with a load of sassafras and other commodities, on the 18th of june fol lowing. the next year came martin pring, looking for sassafras, and thereafter they began to come thick and fast, until long after sassafras had lost its reputation. these are the oldest accounts which we have of cape cod, unless, perchance. cape cod is, as some suppose, the same with that "kial-ar nes " or keel-cape, on which, according to old icelandic manuscripts, thorwald, son of eric the red, after sailing many days southwest from greenland, broke his keel in the year 1004 ; and where, according to another, in some respects less trustworthy manuscript, thor-finn karlsefue ("that is, one who promises or is destined to be an able or great man; " he is said to have had a son born in new england, from whom thorwaldsen the sculptor was descended), sailing past, in the year 1007, with his wife gudrida, snorre thorbrandson, biarne grinolf son, and thorhall garnlason, distinguished norsemen, in three ships containing "one hun dred and sixty men and all sorts of live stock" 300 cape cod (probably the first norway rats among the rest), having the land "on the right side "of them, "roved ashore," and found " or-cefi (trackless deserts)," and ^' strand-ir lang-ar oh sand-ar (long, narrow beaches and sand-hills)," and "called the shores furdu-strand-ir (wonder strands), because the sailing by them seemed long." according to the icelandic manuscripts, thorwald was the first then, — unless possibly one biarne heriulf son {%. e. , son of heriulf ) who had been seized with a great desire to travel, sailing from iceland to greenland in the year 986 to join his father who had migrated thither, for he had resolved, says the manuscript, "to spend the following winter, like all the preced ing ones, with his father," — being driven far to the southwest by a storm, when it cleared up saw the low land of cape cod looming faintly in the distance ; but this not answering to the description of greenland, he put his vessel about, and, sailing northward along the coast, at length reached greenland and his father. at any rate, he may put forth a strong claim to be regarded as the discoverer of the american continent. these northmen were a hardy race, whose younger sons inherited the ocean, and traversed it without chart or compass, and they are said provincetown 301 to have been "the first who learned the art of sailing on a wind." moreover, they had a habit of casting their door-posts overboard and settling wherever they went ashore. but as biarne, and thorwald, and thorfiini have not mentioned the latitude and longitude distinctly enough, though we have great respect for them as skillful and adventurous navigators, we must for the present remain in doubt as to what capes they did see. we think that they were consid erably further north. if time and space permitted, i could present the claims of several other worthy persons. lescarbot, in 1609, asserts that the french sail ors had been accustomed to frequent the new foundland banks from time immemorial, "for the codfish with which they feed almost all europe and supply all sea-going vessels," and accordingly "the language of the nearest lands is half basque; " and he quotes postel, a learned but extravagant french author, born in 1510, only six years after the basques, bretons, and normans are said to have discovered the grand bank and adjacent islands, as saying, in his charte geogra'phiqiie^ which we have not seen : "terra haec ob lucrosissimam piscationis utili tatem summa litterarum memoria a gallis adiri solita, et ante mille sexcentos annos frequentari solita est; sed eo quod sit urbibus inculta et 302 cape cod vasta, spreta est." "this land, on account of its very lucrative fishery, was accustomed to be visited by the gauls from the very dawn of his tory, and more than sixteen hundred years ago was accustomed to be frequented; but because it was unadorned with cities, and waste, it was despised." it is the old story. bob smith discovered the mine, but i discovered it to the world. and now bob smith is putting in his claim. but let us not laugh at postel and his visions. he was perhaps better posted up than we; and if he does seem to draw the long bow, it may be because he had a long way to shoot, — quite across the atlantic. if america was found and lost again once, as most of us believe, then why not twice? especially as there were likely to be so few records of an earlier discovery. con sider what stuff history is made of, — that for the most part it is merely a story agreed on by posterity. who will tell us even how many russians were engaged in the battle of the chernaya, the other day? yet, no doubt, mr. scriblerus, the historian, will fix on a definite number for the schoolboys to commit to their excellent memories. what, then, of the num ber of persians at salamis? the historian whom i read knew as much about the position of the parties and their tactics in the last-men provincetown 303 tioned affair, as they who describe a recent bat tle in an article for the pres'. nowadays, before the particulars have arrived. i believe that, if i were to live the life of mankind over again myself, (which i would not be hired to do,) with the universal history in my hands, i should not be able to tell what was what. : earlier than the date postel refers to, at any rate. cape cod lay in utter darkness to the civ ilized world, though even then the sun rose from eastward out of the sea every day, and, rolling over the cape, went down westward into the bay. it was even then cape and bay, — ay, the cape of codfish^ and the bay of the massa chusetts^ perchance. quite recently, on the 11th of november^ 1620, old style, as is well known, the pilgrims in the mayflower came to anchor in cape cod harbor. they had loosed from plymouth, england, the 6th of september, and, in the words of "mourt's kelation," "after many difficulties in boisterous storms, at length, by god's providence, upon the 9th of november, we espied land, which we deemed to be cape cod, and so afterward it proved. upon the 11th of november we came to anchor in the bay, which is a good harbor and pleasant bay, circled round except in the entrance, which is about four miles over from land to land, com 804 cape cod passed about to the very sea with oaks, pines, juniper, sassafras, and other sweet wood. it is a harbor wherein a thousand sail of ships may safely ride. there we relieved ourselves with wood and water, and refreshed our people, while our shallop was fitted to coast the bay, to search for an habitation." there we put up at puller's hotel, passing by the pilgrim house as too high for us (we learned afterward that we need not have been so particular), and we re freshed ourselves with hashed fish and beans, beside taking in a supply of liquids (which were not intoxicating), while our legs were refitted to coast the back-side. further say the pilgrims : "we could not come near the shore by three quarters of an english mile, because of shallow water; which was a great prejudice to us; for our people going on shore were forced to wade a bow-shot or two in going aland, which caused many to get colds and coughs; for it was many times freezing cold weather." they afterwards say: "it brought much weakness amongst us;'* and no doubt it led to the death of some at ply mouth. the harbor of provincetown is very shallow near the shore, especially about the head, where the pilgrims landed. when i left this place the next summer, the steamer could not get up to the wharf, but we were carried out to a large provincetown 305 boat in a cart as much as thirty rods in shallow water, while a troop of little boys kept us com pany, wading around, and thence we pulled to the steamer by a rope. the harbor being thus shallow and sandy about the shore, coasters are accustomed to run in here to paint their vessels, which are left high and dry when the tide goes down. it chanced that the sunday morning that we were there, i had joined a j)arty of men who were smoking and lolling over a pile of boards on one of the wharves, (nihil humtmum a me, etc.,) when our landlord, who was a sort of tithing-man, went off to stop some sailors who were engaged in painting their vessel. our party was recruited from time to time by other citizens, who came rubbing their eyes as if they had just got out of bed; and one old man re marked to me that it was the custom there to lie abed very late on sunday, it being a day of rest. i remarked that, as i thought, they might as well let the man paint, for all us. it was not noisy work, and would not disturb our devo tions. but a young man in the company, tak ing his pipe out of his mouth, said that it was a plain contradiction of the law of god, which he quoted, and if they did not have some such regulation, vessels would run in there to tar, and rig, and paint, and they would have no sab 306 cape cod bath at all. this was a good argument enough, if he had not put it in the name of religion. the next summer, as i sat on a hill there one sultry sunday afternoon, the meeting-house windows being open, my meditations were inter rupted by the noise of a preacher who shouted like a boatswain, profaning the quiet atmo sphere, and who, i fancied, must have taken off his coat. few things could have been more disgusting or disheartening. i wished the tith ing-man would stop him. the pilgrims say, "there was the greatest store of fowl that ever we saw." we saw no fowl there, except gulls of various kinds; but the greatest store of them that ever we saw was on a flat but slightly covered with water on the east side of the harbor, and we ob served a man who had landed there from a boat creeping along the shore in order to get a shot at them, but they all rose and flew away in a great scattering flock, too soon for him, having apparently got their dinners, though he did not get his. it is remarkable that the pilgrims (or their reporter) describe this part of the cape, not only as well wooded, but as having a deep and excellent soil, and hardly mention the word sand. now what strikes the voyager is the bar renness and desolation of the land. they found provincetown 307 "the ground or earth sand-hills, much like the downs in holland, but much better ; the crust of the earth, a spit's depth, excellent black earth." we found that the earth had lost its crust, — if, indeed, it ever had any, — and that there was no soil to speak of. we did not see enough black earth in provincetown to fill a flower-pot, unless in the swamps. they found it "all wooded with oaks, pines, sassafras, juniper, birch, holly, vines, some ash, walnut; the wood for the most part open and without underwood, fit either to go or ride in." we saw scarcely anything high enough to be called a tree, except a little low wood at the east end of the town, and the few ornamental trees in its yards, — only a few small specimens of some of the above kinds on the sand-hills in the rear ; but it was all thick shrubbery, without any large wood above it, very unfit either to go or ride in. the greater part of the land was a perfect des ert of yellow sand, rippled like waves by the wind, in which only a little beach-grass grew here and there. they say that, just after pass ing the head of east harbor creek, the boughs and bushes "tore " their "very armor in pieces " (the same thing happened to such armor as we wore, when out of curiosity we took to the bushes); or they came to deep valleys, "full of brush, wood-gaile, and long grass," and "found springs of fresh water." 308 cape cod for the most part we saw neither bough nor bush, not so much as a shrub to tear our clothes against if we would, and a sheep would lose none of its fleece, even if it found herbage enough to make fleece grow there. we saw rather beach and poverty-grass, and merely sor rel enough to color the surface. i suppose, then, by wood-gaile they mean the bayberry. all accounts agree in affirming that this part of the cape was comparatively well wooded a century ago. but notwithstanding the great changes which have taken place in these re spects, i cannot but think that we must make some allowance for the greenness of the pilgrims in these matters, which caused them to see green. we do not believe that the trees were large or the soil was deep here. their account may be true particularly, but it is generally false. they saw literally, as well as figura tively, but one side of the cape. they natu rally exaggerated the fairness and attractiveness of the land, for they were glad to get to any land at all after that anxious voyage. every thing appeared to them of the color of the rose, and had the scent of juniper and sassafras. very different is the general and off-hand ac count given by captain john smith, who was on this coast six years earlier, and speaks like an old traveler, voyager, and soldier, who had provincetown 309 seen too much of the world to exaggerate, or even to dwell long on a part of it. in his "description of new england," printed in 1616, after speaking of accomack, since called plymouth, he says : '^ cape cod is the next pre sents itself, which is only a headland of high hills of sand, overgrown with shrubby pines, hurts \i. e. whorts, or whortleberries], and such trash, but an excellent harbor for all weathers. this cape is made by the main sea on the one side, and a great bay on the other, in form of a sickle." champlain had already written, "which we named cap blanc (cape white), because they were sands and downs (pahles et dunes') which appeared thus." when the pilgi'ims get to plymouth their reporter says again, "the land for the crust of the earth is a spit's depth," — that would seem to be their recipe for an earth's crust, — "ex cellent black mould and fat in some places." however, according to bradford himself, whom some consider the author of part of "mourt's relation," they who came over in the fortune the next year were somewhat daunted when "they came into the harbor of cape cod, and there saw nothing but a naked and barren place." they soon found out their mistake with respect to the goodness of plymouth soil. yet when at length, some years later, when they 310 cape cod were fully satisfied of the poorness of the place which they had chosen, "the greater part," says bradford, "consented to a removal to a place called nausett," they agreed to remove all to gether to nauset, now eastham, which was jumping out of the frying-pan into the fire; and some of the most respectable of the inhabitants of plymouth did actually remove thither accord ingly. it must be confessed that the pilgrims pos sessed but few of the qualities of the modern pioneer. they were not the ancestors of the american backwoodsmen. they did not go at once into the woods with their axes. they were a family and church, and were more anxious to keep together, though it were on the sand, than to explore and colonize a new world. when the above-mentioned company removed to east ham, the church at plymouth was left, to use bradford's expression, "like an ancient mother grown old, and forsaken of her children." though they landed on clark's island in ply mouth harbor, the 9th of december (o. s.), and the 16th all hands came to plymouth, and the 18th they rambled about the mainland, and the 19th decided to settle there, it was the 8th of january before francis billington went with one of the master's mates to look at the magnifi cent pond or lake now called "billington sea,'* provincetown 311 about two miles distant, which he had discov ered from the top of a tree, and mistook for a great sea. and the 7th of march "master carver with five others went to the great ponds which seem to be excellent fishing," both which points are within the compass of an ordinary afternoon's ramble, — however wild the coun try. it is true they were busy at first about their building, and were hindered in that by much foul weather ; but a party of emigrants to california or oregon, with no less work on their hands, — and more hostile indians, — would do as much exploring the first afternoon, and the sieur de champlain would have sought an in terview with the savages, and examined the country as far as the connecticut, and made a map of it, before billing-ton had climbed his tree. or contrast them only with the french searching for copper about the bay of fundy in 1603, tracing up small streams with indian guides. nevertheless, the pilgrims were pio neers, and the ancestors of pioneers, in a far grander enterprise. by this time we saw the little steamer nau shon entering the harbor, and heard the sound of her whistle, and came down from the hills to meet her at the wharf. so we took leave or cape cod and its inhabitants. we liked the manners of the last, what little we saw of them. 312 cape cod very much. they were particularly downright and good-humored. the old people appeared remarkably well preserved, as if by the saltness of the atmosphere, and after having once mis taken, we could never be certain whether we were talking to a coeval of our grandparents, or to one of our own age. they are said to be more purely the descendants of the pilgrims than the inhabitants of any other part of the state. we were told that "sometimes, when the court comes together at barnstable, they have not a single criminal to try, and the jail is shut up." it was "to let" when we were there. until quite recently there was no regular lawyer below orleans. who then will complain of a few regular man-eating sharks along the back side? one of the ministers of truro, when i asked what the fishermen did in the winter, answered that they did nothing but go a-visiting, sit about and tell stories, — though they worked hard in summer. yet it is not a long vacation they get. i am sorry that i have not been there in the winter to hear their yarns. almost every cape man is captain of some craft or other, — every man at least who is at the head of his own affairs, though it is not every one that is, for some heads have the force of alplia p7'ivative, negativing all the efforts which nature provincetown 813 would fain make through them. the greater number of men are merely corporals. it is worth the while to talk with one whom his neighbors address as captain, though his craft may have long been sunk, and he may be hold ing by his teeth to the shattered mast of a pipe alone, and only gets hak-seas-over in a figura tive sense, now. he is pretty sure to vindicate his right to the title at last, — can tell one or two good stories at least. for the most part we saw only the back-side of the towns, but our story is true as far as it goes. we might have made more of the bay side, but we were inclined to open our eyes widest at the atlantic. we did not care to see those features of the cape in which it is inferior or merely equal to the mainland, but only those in which it is peculiar or superior. we cannot say how its towns look in front to one who goes to meet them ; we went to see the ocean behind them. they were merely the raft on which we stood, and we took notice of the barnacles which adhered to it, and some carvings upon it. before we left the wharf we made the acquain tance of a passenger whom we had seen at the hotel. when we asked him which way he came to provincetown, he answered that he was cast ashore at wood end, saturday night, in the same storm in which the st. john was wrecked. 314 cape cod he had been at work as a carpenter in maine, and took passage for boston in a schooner laden with lumber. when the storm came on, they endeavored to get into provincetown harbor. "it was dark and misty," said he, "and as we were steering for long point light we suddenly saw the land near us, — for our compass was out of order, — varied several degrees [a mar iner always casts the blame on his compass], — • but there being a mist on shore, we thought it was farther off than it was, and so held on, and we immediately struck on the bar. says the captain, 'we are all lost.' says i to the cap tain, 'now don't let her strike again this way; head her right on.' the captain thought a moment, and then headed her on. the sea washed completely over us, and well-nigh took the breath out of my body. i held on to the running rigging, but i have learned to hold on to the standing rigging the next time." "well, were there any drowned?" i asked. "no; we all got safe to a house at wood end, at mid night, wet to our skins, and hak frozen to death." he had apparently spent the .time since playing checkers at the hotel, and was congratulating himself on having beaten a tall fellow-boarder at that game. " the vessel is to be sold at auction to-day," he added. (we had heard the sound of the crier's bell which adver provincetown 315 tised it.) "the captain is rather down about it, but i tell him to cheer up and he will soon get another vessel." at that moment the captain called to him from the wharf. he looked like a man just from the country, with a cap made of a wood chuck's skin, and now that i had heard a part of his history, he appeared singularly destitute, — a captain without any vessel, only a great coat! and that perhaps a borrowed one! not even a dog followed him ; only his title stuck to him. i also saw one of the crew. they all had caps of the same pattern, and wore a subdued look, in addition to their naturally aquiline features, as if a breaker — a "comber" — had washed over them. as we passed wood end, we noticed the pile of lumber on the shore which had made the cargo of their vessel. about long point in the summer you com monly see them catching lobsters for the new york market, from small boats just off the shore, or rather, the lobsters catch themselves, for they cling to the netting on which the bait is placed, of their own accord, and thus are drawn up. they sell them fresh for two cents apiece. man needs to know but little more than a lobster in order to catch him in his traps. the mackerel fleet had been getting to sea, one after another, ever since midnight, and as we 316 cape cod were leaving the cape we passed near to many of them under sail, and got a nearer view than we had had ; — half a dozen red-shirted men and boys, leaning over the rail to look at us, the skipper shouting back the number of barrels he had caught, in answer to our inquiry. all sail ors pause to watch a steamer, and shout in wel come or derision. in one a large newfoundland dog put his paws on the rail and stood up as high as any of them, and looked as wise. but the skipper, who did not wish to be seen no better employed than a dog, rapped him on the nose and sent him below. such is human jus tice! i thought i could hear him making an effective appeal down there from human to di vine justice. he must have had much the clean est breast of the two. still, many a mile behind us across the bay, we saw the white sails of the mackerel fishers hovering round cape cod, and when they were all hull down, and the low extremity of the cape was also down, their white sails still ap peared on both sides of it, around where it had sunk, like a city on the ocean, proclaiming the rare qualities of cape cod harbor. but before the extremity of the cape had completely sunk, it appeared like a filmy sliver of land lying flat on the ocean, and later still a mere reflection of a sand-bar on the haze above. its name sug provincetown ^^'^ gests a homely truth, but it would be more poetic if it described the impression which it makes on the beholder. some capes have pe culiarly suggestive names. there is cape wrath, the northwest point of scotland, for m stance; what a good name for a cape lying far away, dark over the water, under a lowering sky ! mild as it was on shore this morning, the wind was cold and piercing on the water. though it be the hottest day in july on land, and the voyage is to last but four hours, take your thickest clothes with you, for you are about to float over melted icebergs. when i left boston in the steamboat on the 25th of june the next year, it was a quite warm day on shore. the passengers were dressed in their thinnest clothes, and at first sat under their um brellas, but when we were fairly out on the bay, such as had only thin coats were suffering with the cold, and sought the shelter of the pilot's house and the warmth of the chimney. but when we approached the harbor of province town, i was surprised to perceive what an influ ence that low and narrow strip of sand, only a mile or two in width, had over the temperature of the air for many miles around. we pene trated into a sultry atmosphere where our thin coats were once more in fashion, and found the inhabitants sweltering. 318 cape cod leaving far on one side manomet point in plymouth and the scituate shore, after being out of sight of land for an hour or two, for it was rather hazy, we neared the cohasset rocks again at minot's ledge, and saw the great tupelo-tree on the edge of scituate, which lifts its dome, like an umbelliferous plant, high over the surrounding forest, and is conspicuous for many miles over land and water. here was the new iron light-house, then unfinished, in the shape of an egg-shell painted red, and placed high on iron pillars, like the ovum of a sea monster floating on the waves, — destined to be phosphorescent. as we passed it at half-tide we saw the spray tossed up nearly to the shell. a man was to live in that egg-shell day and night, a mile from the shore. when i passed it the next summer it was finished and two men lived in it, and a light-house keeper said that they told him that in a recent gale it had rocked so as to shake the plates off the table. think of making your bed thus in the crest of a breaker! to have the waves, like a pack of hungry wolves, eying you always, night and day, and from time to time making a spring at jou, almost sure to have you at last. and not one of all those voyagers can come to your re lief, — but when yon light goes out, it will be a sign that the light of your life has gone out provincetown 819 also. what a place to compose a work on breakers ! this light-house was the cynosure of all eyes. every passenger watched it for half an hour at least ; yet a colored cook belonging to the boat, whom i had seen come out of his quarters several times to empty his dishes over the side with a flourish, chancing to come out just as we were abreast of this light, and not more than forty rods from it, and were all gaz ing at it, as he drew back his arm, caught sight of it, and with surprise exclaimed, " what 's that?" he had been employed on this boat for a year, and passed this light every week-day, but as he had never chanced to empty his dishes just at that point, had never seen it before. to look at lights was the pilot's business; he minded the kitchen fire. it suggested how little some who voyaged round the world could man age to see. you would almost as easil}^ believe that there are men who never yet chanced to come out at the right time to see the sun. what avails it though a light be placed on the top of a hill, if you spend all your life directly under the hill? it might as weu be under a bushel. this light-house, as is well known, was swept away in a storm in april, 1851, and the two men in it, and the next morning not a vestige of it was to be seen from the shore. a hull man told me that he helped set up a 320 cape cod white-oak pole on minot's ledge some years before. it was fifteen inches in diameter, forty one feet high, sunk four feet in the rock, and was secured by four guys, — but it stood only one year. stone piled up cob-fashion near the same place stood eight years. when i crossed the bay in the melrose in july, we hugged the scituate shore as long as possible, in order to take advantage of the wind. far out on the bay (off this shore) we scared up a brood of young ducks, probably black ones, bred hereabouts, which the packet had frequently disturbed in her trips. a townsman, who was making the voyage for the first time, walked slowly round into the rear of the helmsman, when we were in the middle of the bay, and looking out over the sea, before he sat down there, remarked with as much original ity as was possible for one who used a borrowed expression, "this is a great country." he had been a timber merchant, and i afterward saw him taking the diameter of the main mast with his stick, and estimating its height. i returned from the same excursion in the olata, a very handsome and swift-sailing yacht, which left provincetown at the same time with two other packets, the melrose and frolic. at first there was scarcely a breath of air stirring, and we loitered about long point for an hour in com provincetown 821 pany, — with our heads over the rail watching the great sand-circles and the fishes at the bot tom in calm water fifteen feet deep. but after clearing the cape we rigged a flyingjib, and, as the captain had prophesied, soon showed our consorts our heels. there was a steamer six or eight miles northward, near the cape, towing a large ship toward boston. its smoke stretched perfectly horizontal several miles over the sea, and by a sudden change in its direction, warned us of a change in the wind before we felt it. the steamer appeared very far from the ship, and some young men who had frequently used the captain's glass, but did not suspect that the vessels were connected, expressed surprise that they kept about the same distance apart for so many hours. at which the captain dryly re marked, that probably they would never get any nearer together. as long as the wind held we kept pace with the steamer, but at length it died away almost entirely, and the flying-jib did all the work. when we passed the light-boat at minot's ledge, the melrose and frolic were just visible ten miles astern. consider the islands bearing the names of all the saints, bristling with forts like chestnut burs, or echmidce, yet the police will not let a couple of irishmen have a private sparring match on one of them, as it is a government 322 cape cod monopoly ; all the great seaports are in a boxing attitude, and you must sail prudently between two tiers of stony knuckles before you come to feel the warmth of their breasts. the bermudas are said to have been discov ered by a spanish ship of that name which was wrecked on them, " which till then," says capt. ejohn smith, " for six thousand years had been nameless." the english did not stumble upon them in their first voyages to virginia; and the first englishman who was ever there was wrecked on them in 1593. smith says, "no place known hath better walls nor a broader ditch." yet at the very first j^lanting of them with some sixty persons, in 1612, the first gov ernor, the same year, "built and laid the foun dation of eight or nine forts." to be ready, one would say, to entertain the first ship's com pany that should be jiext shipwrecked on to them. it would have been more sensible to have built as many "charity -houses." these are the vexed bermoothes. our great sails caught all the air there was, and our low and narrow hull caused the least possible friction. coming up the harbor against the stream we swept by everything. some j^oung men returning from a fishing excursion came to the side of their smack, while we were thus steadily drawing by them, and, bowing, provincetown 323 observed, with the best possible grace, "we give it up." yet sometimes we were nearly at a stand-still. the sailors watched (two) objects on the shore to ascertain whether we advanced or receded. in the harbor it was like the even ing of a holiday. the eastern steamboat passed us with music and a cheer, as if they were going to a ball, when they might be going to — davy's locker. i heard a boy telling the story of nix's mate to some girls as we passed that spot. that was the name of a sailor hung there, he said. — "if i am guilty, this island will remain; but if i am innocent, it will be washed away," and now it is all washed away ! next (?) came the fort on george's island. these are bungling contrivances : not our fortes^ but onr foibles. wolfe sailed by the strongest fort in north america in the dark, and took it. i admired the skill with which the vessel was at last brought to her place in the dock, near the end of long wharf. it was candle-light, and my eyes could not distinguish the wharves jutting out toward us, but it appeared like an even line of shore densely crowded with ship ping. you could not have guessed within a quarter of a mile of long wharf. neverthe less, we were to be blown to a crevice amid them, — steering right into the maze. down 324 cape cod goes tlie mainsail, and only the jib draws us along. now we are within four rods of the shipping, having already dodged several outsid ers; but it is still only a maze of spars, and rigging, and hulls, — not a crack can be seen. down goes the jib, but still we advance. the captain stands aft with one hand on the tiller, and the other holding his night-glass, — his son stands on the bowsprit straining his eyes, — the passengers feel their hearts half-way to their mouths, expecting a crash. "do you see any room there?" asks the captain quietly. he must make up his mind in five seconds, else he will carry away that vessel's bowsprit, or lose his own. "yes, sir, here is a place for us;" and in three minutes more we are fast to the wharf in a little gap between two bigger vessels. and now we were in boston. whoever has been down to the end of long wharf, and walked through quincy market, has seen bos ton. boston, new york, philadelphia, charleston, new orleans, and the rest, are the names of wharves projecting into the sea (surrounded by the shops and dwellings of the merchants), good places to take in and to discharge a cargo (to land the products of other climes and load the exports of our own). i see a great many bar rels and fig-drums, — piles of wood for um provincetown 325 brella-sticks, — blocks of ^anite and ice, — great heaps of goods, and the means of packing and conveying them, — much wrapping-paper and twine, — many crates and hogsheads and trucks, — and that is boston. the more bar rels, the more boston. the museums and scientific societies and libraries are accidental. they gather around the sands to save carting. the wharf -rats and custom-house officers, and broken-do^vn poets, seeking a fortune amid the barrels. their better or worse lyceums, and preachings, and doctorings, these, too, are acci dental, and the malls of commons are always small potatoes. when i go to boston, i n.:tu rally go straight through the city (taking tlio market in my way), down to the end of long wharf, and look oif, for i have no cousins in the back alleys, — and there i see a great many countrymen in their shirt-sleeves from maine, and pennsylvania, and all along shore and in shore, and some foreigners beside, loading and unloading and steering their teams about, as at a country fair. when we reached boston that october, i had a gill of provincetown sand in my shoes, and at concord there was still enough left to sand my pages for many a day ; and i seemed to hear the sea roar, as if i lived in a shell, for a week afterward. 326 cape cod the places which i have described may seem strange and remote to my townsmen, — indeed, from boston to provincetown is twice as far as from england to france ; yet step into the cars, and in six hours you may stand on those four planks, and see the cape which gosnold is said to have discovered, and which i have so poorly described. if you had started when i first ad vised you, you might have seen our tracks in the sand, still fresh, and reaching all the way from the nauset lights to race point, some thirty miles, — for at every step we made an impression on the cape, though we were not aware of it, and though our account may have made no impression on your minds. but what is our account? in it there is no roar, no beach-birds, no tow-cloth. we often love to think now of the life of men on beaches, — at least in midsummer, when the weather is serene; their sunny lives on the sand, amid the beach-grass and the bayberries, their companion a cow, their wealth a jag of drift-wood or a few beach-plums, and their music the surf and the peep of the beach-bird. we went to see the ocean, and that is prob ably the best place of all our coast to go to. if you go by water, you may experience what it is to leave and to approach these shores; you may see the stormy petrel by the way, oaxaa-a-ospojxa, provincetown 327 running over the sea, and if tlie weather is but a little thick, may lose sight of the land in mid passage. i do not know where there is another beach in the atlantic states, attached to the mainland, so long, and at the same time so straight, and completely uninterrupted by creeks or coves or fresh-water rivers or marshes; for though there may be clear places on the map, they would probably be found by the foot trav eler to be intersected by creeks and marshes; certainly there is none where there is a double way, such as i have described, a beach and a bank, which at the same time shows you the land and the sea, and part of the time two seas. the great south beach of long island, which i have since visited, is longer still without an inlet, but it is literally a mere sand-bar, ex posed, several miles from the island, and not the edge of a continent wasting before the as saults of the ocean. though wild and desolate, as it wants the bold bank, it possesses but half the grandeur of cape cod in my eyes, nor is the imagination contented with its southern aspect. the only other beaches of great length on our atlantic coast, which i have heard sail ors speak of, are those of barnegat on the jer sey shore, and currituck between virginia and north carolina ; but these, like the last, are low and narrow sand-bars, lying off the coast, and 328 cape cod separated from the mainland by lagoons. be sides, as you go farther south the tides are fee bler, and cease to add variety and grandeur to the shore. on the pacific side of our country also no doubt there is good walking to be found ; a recent writer and dweller there tells us that "the coast from cape disappointment (or the columbia river) to cape flattery (at the strait of juan de fuca) is nearly north and south, and can be traveled almost its entire length on a beautiful sand-beach," with the exception of two bays, four or five rivers, and a few points jutting into the sea. the common shell-fish found there seem to be often of corresponding types, if not identical species, with those of cape cod. the beach which i have described, however, is not hard enough for carriages, but must be explored on foot. when one carriage has passed along, a following one sinks deeper still in its rut. it has at present no name any more than fame. that portion south of nauset harbor is commonly called chatham beach. the part in eastham is called nauset beach, and off wellfleet and truro the backside, or sometimes, perhaps. cape cod beach. i think that part which extends without interruption from nauset harbor to race point should be called cape cod beach, and do so speak of it. one of the most attractive points for visitors provincetown 329 is in the northeast part of wellfleet, where ac commodations (i mean for men and women of tolerable health and habits) could probably be had within half a mile of the seashore. it best combines the country and the seaside. though the ocean is out of sight, its faintest murmur is audible, and you have only to climb a hill to find yourself on its brink. it is but a step from the glassy surface of the herring ponds to the big atlantic pond where the waves never cease to break. or perhaps the highland light in truro may compete with this locality, for there there is a more uninterrupted view of the ocean and the bay, and in the summer there is always some air stirring on the edge of the bank there, so that the inhabitants know not what hot weather is. as for the view, the keeper of the light, with one or more of his family, walks out to the edge of the bank after every meal to look off, just as if they had not lived there all their days. in short, it will wear well. and what picture will you substitute for that, upon your walls? but ladies cannot get down the bank there at present without the aid of a block and tackle. most persons visit the seaside in warm weather, when fogs are frequent, and the atmo sphere is wont to be thick, and the charm of the sea is to some extent lost. but i suspect that 330 cape cod the fall is the best season, for then the atmo sphere is more transparent, and it is a greater pleasure to look out over the sea. the clear and bracing air, and the storms of autumn and winter even, are necessary in order that we may get the impression which the sea is calcu lated to make. in october, when the weather is not intolerably cold, and the landscape wears its autumnal tints, such as, methinks, only a cape cod landscape ever wears, especially if you have a storm during your stay, — that i am convinced is the best time to visit this shore. in autumn, even in august, the thoughtful days begin, and we can walk anywhere with prgiit. beside, an outward cold and dreariness, which make it necessary to seek shelter at night, lend a spirit of adventure to a walk. the time must come when this coast will be a place of resort for those new-englanders who really wish to visit the seaside. at present it is wholly unknown to the fashionable world, and probably it will never be agreeable to them. if it is merely a ten-pin alley, or a circular rail way, or an ocean of mint-julep, that the visitor is in search of, — if he thinks more of the wine than the brine, as i suspect some do at new port, — i trust that for a long time he will be disappointed here. but this shore will never be more attractive than it is now. such beaches provincetown 331 as are fashionable are here made and unmade in a day, i may almost say, by the sea shifting its sands. lynn and nantasket! this bare and bended arm it is that makes the bay in which they lie so snugly. what are springs and wa terfalls? here is the spring of springs, the waterfall of waterfalls. a storm in the fall or winter is the time to visit it; a light-house or a fisherman's hut the true hotel. a man may stand there and put all america behind him. index across the cape, 153-178. alphonse, jean, " routier," quoted, 288. anchors, dragging for, 194. apple-trees, cape cod, 36-38. archer, gabriel, quoted, 295. architecture, american, 32. autumn landscape near province town, 232-234. azy, a bible name, 112. bank swallow, the, 196. barber's historical collections, quoted, 267. barnstable (mass.), 24. bascom, the rev. jonathan, 63. bayberry, the, 120-122. beach, the, 65-91. beach again, the, 120-152. beaches, cape cod the best of at lantic, 326-328. beach-grass, 241, 242, 246-251. beach-pea, the, 105, 248, 249. bellamy, the pirate wrecked off wellfleet, 192. beverly, robert, "history of vir ginia," quoted, 16, 120, 121. billingsgate, part of wellfleet called, 96. billingsgate island, 105. birds on cape cod, 134, 135, 156, 196. blackfish driven ashore in storm, 170-176. borde, sieur de la, relatio'i des caraibes, quoted, 186. boston, a big wharf, 325. boys, provincetown, 262. breakers, 66, 252. brereton, john, quoted, 296. brewster (mass.), 24, 31, 32. bridgewater (mass.), 20. brook island in cohasset, 4. browne, sir thomas, quoted, 188. buckland, curiositiea of natural history, 98. cabot, the discoveries of, 281. cambria, the steamer, aground, 110. camp-meetings, eastham, 53-55, versus ocea.li, 77. cape cod, t.'s various visits to, 1 ; derivation of name of, 2 ; forma tion of, 2, 3, 21 ; barrenness of, 40-42; the real, 74; houses, 93; landscape, a, 157-163 ; men, the norse quality of, 166, 167 ; west ern shore of, 169 ; changes in the coast-line of, 180-185 ; clothes yard, a, 265 ; and its harbors, va rious names for, 273, 276 ; gos nold's discovery of, 292-299 ; people, 311, 312. " cape cod railroad," the, 20. champlaiu, " voyages," quoted, 99 ; records and maps of, 274-282. charity, cold, 90. chatham (mass.), described, 29. cigar-smoke, the gods not to be appeased with, 47. cities as wharves, 324. clams, cape cod, 39, 40 ; large, 84 ; or quahogs, catching birds, 100, 101 ; stones shaped like, 129. clay pounds, the, 157 ; why so called, 189 ; the somerset wrecked on, 193. cohasset (mass.), the wreck at, 3 14 ; rocks, sea-bathing at, 17, 18. corn, great crops of, 42-45. cows fed on fishes' heads, 258. crantz, account of greenland, quoted, 69, 178. darwin, charles, quoted, 144, 145. dead body on the shore, a, 126, 127. de monts, champlain and, 275. dennis (mass.), 24 ; described, 27 29. doane, heman, verses by, on thomas prince's pear-tree, 50, 51. doane, john, 51. 334 index dogs on the beashore, 222-224. i driftwood, cape cod and green land, 68-70. dwight, timothy, quoted, 255, 272. east harbor village, in truro, 163. eastham (mass.), the history of, 48 64; ministers of, 51-64; table lands of, 71 ; the pilgrims, 310. fences in truro, 164, 165. " fish, a religious," newspaper clipping, 138; uses of, in prov incetown, 255-259. fish stories, ancient, 259, 260. fishes driven ashore by storm, 170 176. fishing for bass, 139 ; mackerel, 215-221, 227-229. fox, starting up a, 177. franklin, wreck of the ship, 84, 109; wreckage from the, 135, 136. french, coin found on beach at weufleet, 193 ; explorers in and about new england, 274-292. fruit-trees, paucity of, in cape towns, 38. " furdustrandas,'^ 225, 230. galway, ireland, the wrecked brig from, 5. gazetteer, the, 28, 31. gerard, the english herbalist, quoted, 248. gilbert, sir humphrey, 146. gilpin, william, quoted, 141. gosnold, captain bartholomew, 2 ; discovery of cape cod by, 292 299. grampus rock, in cohasset, 7, 9. graveyard, a cape cod, 176. greenland, driftwood in, 69. gulls, methods of catching, 83. herring river, 93. highland light, the, 179-210. highland light, 157, 179 ; descrip tion and stories of, 201-210. hog island, inside of hull, 15. huu (mass.), 15. humane society, huts of the, 73, 85-91. humboldt, alex, von, quoted, 143. huts for shipwrecked sailors, 73, 85-91. indian habitation, signs of previous, 99. italian discoverers, 283. jeremiah's gutter, 40. jerusalem village (mass.), 17. jesuits, early, in new england, 280. josselyn, john, quoted, 115. kalm, travels in north america, quoted, 150, 241. kelp, 77-80. legs, the, as compasses, 103. lescarbot, quoted, 290, 301. long wharf, taking a place at, 323. mackerel, fishing for, 215-221, 227 229 ; fleet, the, 238, 315, 316. maps of cape cod and new england, 274-278, 282, 283. massachusetts bay, shallowness of, 147. massachusetts historical society, collections of the, 22. menhaden, schools of, 142. ministers, salaries of country, 52 ; some old cape cod, 55-64. minot's ledge, the light on, 318, 319. mirages on sand and sea, 229-231. moisture in cape cod air, 198. mount ararat in provincetown, 229. mourt's relation, quoted, 42, 111, 303. nantasket (mass.), 17. nauset harbor, in orleans, 34, 74. nauset lights, 46. nix's mate, story of, 323. northeaster, a, 245, 252-254. norumbega, 289. ocean, calm, rough, and fruitful, 148-152 ; beaches across the, 213, 214. october, the best season for visiting the cape, 330. olata, the swift-sailing yacht, 320. organ-grinders on the cape, 33. orleans (mass.), 24; higgins's tav ern at, 33. osborn, the rev. samuel, 61, 62. pamet river, 156. pear-tree, the, planted by thomas prince, 50. penliallow, samuel, history, quoted, 284. petrel, the storm, 135. pilgrims, arrival of the, 303-311. pitch-pine, tracts of, 24. plains of nacset, the, 34-64. index 335 plants, on cape cod beach, 131 ; about highland light, igo, 200 ; about the clay pounds, 197. pleasant cove, in cohasset, 19. plover, the piping of, 82. point allerton, 15. pohiphloisboios thalassa, the rev., 77. pond village, 1g9. ponds in welltieet, 105. post-office, the domestic, 27. postel, charte geographique, quoted, 301. poverty-grass, 25 ; as the barnsta, ble coat-of-anns, igo, 101. prince, thomas, 49. pring, martin, new england dis coveries of, 275, 27fi, 298, 299. provincetown, 255-331. provincetown (mass.), walking to, 34, 6g ; bank, suspected of rob bing, 212 ; approach to, 232 ; de scribed, 234-237; fish, 256-259; boys, 262 ; harbor, 272. purple sea, the, 141. race point, 74, 232, 240. '• rut," the, a sound before a change of wind, 114, 115. st. george's bank, 146, 147. st. john, the wrecked brig, 5. salt, as manufactured by capt. john sears, 30, 31 ; works, 2g3, 264. sand, blowing, 245 ; inroads of the, 250, 251 ; provincetown, 265-268. sandwich (mass.), 20 ; described, 22-24. schooner, origin of word, 239. sea and the desert, the, 211 254. sea, the roar of the, 45, 76 ; re moteness of the bottom of the, 146. sea-bathing, 17, 18. sea fleas, 134. sears, capt. john, and salt manu facture, 30, 31. shank-painter swamp, 240, 262. sharks, 132-134. shell-fish on cape cod beach, 130, 131. shipwreck, the, 1-19. signals, old clothes as, 24. simpkins, the rev. john, quoted, 33. smith, capt. john, quoted, 216, 309; map of new england by, 276. smoothness of ocean, 148. snow's hollow, 70. somerset, british ship of war, wrecked on clay pounds, 193. spanisli discoverei-s, 283. stage-coach views, 20-33. stone, the rev. nathan, g4. stones, rarity of, on cape cod, 260 271. suet, in dennis (mass.), 30. sunday in provincetown, 305. sun-squall, sea-jellies called, 81. table lands of eastham, 71. thor-finn andthor-eau, 230 ; voyage of, 299. tlioreau, henry david, various vis its to cape cod, 1 ; starts for cape cod, oct. 9, 1849, 3 ; goes on a mackerel cruise, 219 ; takes leave of cape cod, 311. thorhall, the disappointment of, 225. thorn-apple, the, 15, 16. thorwald, voyage of, 299, 300. travelers, good humor of, 25. treat, the rev. samuel, 55-60. trees on cape cod, 153-156 ; disap pearance of, 308. truro (mass.), 123, 163-165; the wreck of, 190. turtles, land and sea, 243. " uncle bill," somebody's (or every body's), 168. vegetables in the oysterman's gar den, 118. vessels seen from cape cod, 123 125, 140, 143-146. "water, cape cod, 271. waves on the shore, 186-189. webb, the rev. benjamin, 62, 63. webb's island, the lost, 182. webster, daniel, quoted, 148. wellfleet oysterman, the, 92 119. wellfleet (mass.), oysters, 96; bel lamy wrecked off, 192 ; a good headquarters for visitors to the cape, 329. " when descends on the atlantic," longfellow, quoted, 80. whitehead, near cohasset, 10. wind-mills, cape cod, 38, 39. windows in cape cod houses, 93. winthrop, gov., quoted, 285. women, pinched-up, 26. wood, william, quoted, 100. wood end, wreck at, 313-315. 336 index wreck of the franklin, 84 ; of bel lamy the pirate, 192 ; of the brit ish ship of war somerset, 193 ; story of a man from a, 313-315. wreckage, 137-139. wrecker, a cape cod, 67, 68. wrecks, truro, 190 ; the quences of, 195, 196. yarmouth (mass.), 24. yankee in canada, with anti-slavery and reform papers. henry d. thoreau, author of &quot;a week on the concord and merrimack rivers, &quot;walden,&quot; &quot;cape cod,&quot; etc., etc. boston : ticknor and fields 1866. entered according to act of congress, in the year 1866, by tick nor and fields, in the clerk s office of the district court of the district of massachusetts. university press: welch, bigelow, & co., cambridge. f contents. page a yankee in canada 1 chap. i. concord to montreal .... 3 ii. quebec and montmorenci . . .18 hi. st. anne 37 iv. the walls or quebec .... 64 v. the scenery of quebec ; and the river st. lawrence 78 anti-slavery and reform papers 95 slavery in massachusetts 97 prayers 117 civil disobedience 123 a plea for captain john brown . . . 152 paradise (to be) regained 182 herald op freedom 206 thomas carlyle and his works . . . .211 life without principle 248 wendell phillips before the concord lyceum . 274 the last days of john brown . 278 a yankee in canada. &quot; new england is by some affirmed to be an island, bounded on the north with the river canada (so called from monsieur cane).&quot; josselyn s rare ties. and still older, in thomas morton s &quot; new english canaan,&quot; published in 1632, it is said, on page 97, &quot;from this lake [erocoise] northwards is derived the famous river of canada, so named, of monsier de cane, a french lord, who first planted a colony of french in america.&quot; chapter i. concord to montreal. i fear that i have not got much to say about canada, not having seen much ; what i got by going to canada was a cold. i left concord, massachusetts, wednesday morning, september 25th, 1850, for quebec. fare, seven dollars there and back ; distance from boston, five hun dred and ten miles ; being obliged to leave montreal on the return as soon as friday, october 4th, or within ten days. i will not stop to tell the reader the names of my fellow-travellers ; there were said to be fifteen hundred of them. i wished only to be set down in canada, and take one honest walk there as i might in concord woods of an afternoon. the country was new to me beyond fitchburg. in ashburnham and afterward, as we were whirled rapidly along, i noticed the woodbine (ampelopsis quinquefblia), its leaves now changed, for the most part on dead trees, draping them like a red scarf. it was a little exciting, suggesting bloodshed, or at least a military life, like an epaulet or sash, as if it were dyed with the blood of the trees whose wounds it was inadequate to stanch. for now the bloody autumn was come, and an indian war fare was waged through the forest. these military trees appeared very numerous, for our rapid progress connect ed those that were even some miles apart. does the woodbine prefer the elm ? the first view of monadnoc was obtained five or six miles this side of fitzwilliam, 4 a yankee in canada. but nearest and best at troy and beyond. then there were the troy cuts and embankments. keene street strikes the traveller favorably, it is so wide, level, straight, and long. i have heard one of my relatives, who was born and bred there, say that you could see a chicken run across it a mile off. i have also been told that when this town was settled they laid out a street four rods wide, but at a subsequent meeting of the proprietors one rose and remarked, &quot;we have plenty of land, why not make the street eight rods wide ? &quot; and so they voted that it should be eight rods wide, and the town is known far and near for its handsome street. it was a cheap way of securing comfort, as well as fame, and i wish that all new towns would take pattern from this. it is best to lay our plans widely in youth, for then land is cheap, and it is but too easy to contract our views afterward. youths so laid out, with broad ave nues and parks, that they may make handsome and lib eral old men! show me a youth whose mind is like some washington city of magnificent distances, prepared for the most remotely successful and glorious life after all, when those spaces shall be built over and the idea of the founder be realized. i trust that every new eng land boy will begin by laying out a keene street through his head, eight rods wide. i know one such washing ton city of a man, whose lots as yet are only surveyed and staked out, and except a cluster of shanties here and there, only the capitol stands there for all structures, and any day you may see from afar his princely idea borne coachwise along the spacious but yet empty avenues. keene is built on a remarkably large and level interval, like the bed of a lake, and the surrounding hills, which are remote from its street, must afford some good walks. i concord to montreal. 5 the scenery of mountain towns is commonly too much crowded. a town which is built on a plain of some extent, with an open horizon, and surrounded by hills at a distance, affords the best walks and views. as we travel northwest up the country, sugar-maples, beeches, birches, hemlocks, spruce, butternuts, and ash trees prevail more and more. to the rapid traveller the number of elms in a town is the measure of its civility. one man in the cars has a bottle full of some liquor. the whole company smile whenever it is ex hibited. . i find no difficulty in containing myself. the westmoreland country looked attractive. i heard a passenger giving the very obvious derivation of this name, west-more-land, as if it were purely american, and he had made a discovery ; but i thought of &quot; my cousin westmoreland &quot; in england. every one will remember the approach to bellows falls, under a high cliff which rises from the connecticut. i was disap pointed in the size of the river here ; it appeared shrunk to a mere mountain stream. the water was evidently very low. the rivers which we had crossed this fore noon possessed more of the character of mountain streams than those in the vicinity of concord, and i was surprised to see everywhere traces of recent fresh ets, which had carried away bridges and injured the rail road, though i had heard nothing of it. in ludlow, mount holly, and beyond, there is interesting moun tain scenery, not rugged and stupendous, but such as you could easily ramble over, long narrow mountain vales through which to see the horizon. you are in the midst of the green mountains. a few more ele vated blue peaks are seen from the neighborhood of mount holly, perhaps killington peak is one. some 6 a yankee in canada. times, as on the western railroad, you are whirled over mountainous embankments, from which the scared horses in the valleys appear diminished to hounds. all the hills blush ; i think that autumn must be the best season to journey over even the green mountains. you fre quently exclaim to yourself, what red maples ! the sugar-maple is not so red. you see some of the latter with rosy spots or cheeks only, blushing on one side like fruit, while all the rest of the tree is green, proving either some partiality in the light or frosts, or some prematurity in particular branches. tall and slender ash-trees, whose foliage is turned to a dark mulberry color, are frequent. the butternut, which is a remark ably spreading tree, is turned completely yellow, thus proving its relation to the hickories. i was also struck by the bright yellow tints of the yellow-birch. the sugar-maple is remarkable for its clean ankle. the groves of these trees looked like vast forest sheds, their branches stopping short at a uniform height, four or five feet from the ground, like eaves, as if they had been trimmed by art, so that you could look under and through the whole grove with its leafy canopy, as under a tent whose curtain is raised. as you approach lake champlain you begin to see the new york mountains. the first view of the lake at vergennes is impressive, but rather from association than from any peculiarity in the scenery. it lies there so small (not appearing in that proportion to the width of the state that it does on the map), but beautifully quiet, like a picture of the lake of lucerne on a music box, where you trace the name of lucerne among the foliage ; far more ideal than ever it looked on the map. it does not say, &quot; here i am, lake champlain,&quot; as the concord to montreal. 7 conductor might for it, but having studied the geography thirty years, you crossed over a hill one afternoon and beheld it. but it is only a glimpse that you get here. at burlington you rush to a wharf and go on board a steamboat, two hundred and thirty-two miles from bos ton. we left concord at twenty minutes before eight in the morning, and were in burlington about six at night, but too late to see the lake. we got our first fair view of the lake at dawn, just before reaching plattsburg, and saw blue ranges of mountains on either hand, in new york and in vermont, the former espe cially grand. a few white schooners, like gulls, were seen in the distance, for it is not waste and solitary like, a lake in tartary ; but it was such a view as leaves not much to be said ; indeed, i have postponed lake cham plain to another day. the oldest reference to these waters that i have yet seen is in the account of cartier s discovery and explo ration of the st. lawrence in 1535. samuel cham plain actually discovered and paddled up the lake in july, 1609, eleven years before the settlement of plym outh, accompanying a war-party of the canadian indians against the iroquois. he describes the islands in it as not inhabited, although they are pleasant, on account of the continual wars of the indians, in consequence of which they withdraw from the rivers and lakes into the depths of the land, that they may not be surprised. &quot; continuing our course,&quot; says he, &quot; in this lake, on the western side, viewing the country, i saw on the eastern side very high mountains, where there was snow on the summit. i inquired of the savages if those places were inhabited. they replied that they were, and that they were iroquois, and that in those 8 a yankee in canada. places there were beautiful valleys and plains fertile in corn, such as i have eaten in this country, with an infinity of other fruits.&quot; this is the earliest account of what is now vermont. the number of french canadian gentlemen and ladies among the passengers, and the sound of the french language, advertised us by this time that we were being whirled towards some foreign vortex. and now we have left rouse s point, and entered the sorel river, and passed the invisible barrier between the states and canada. the shores of the sorel, riche lieu, or st. john s river, are flat and reedy, where i had expected something more rough and mountainous for a natural boundary between two nations. yet i saw a difference at once, in the few huts, in the pirogues on the shore, and as it were, in the shore itself. this was an interesting scenery to me, and the very reeds or rushes in the shallow water, and the tree-tops in the swamps, have left a pleasing impression. we had still a distant view behind us of two or three blue mountains in vermont and new york. about nine o clock in the forenoon we reached st. john s, an old frontier post three hundred and six miles from boston and twenty four from montreal. &quot;vve now discovered that we were in a foreign country, in a station-house of another nation. this building was a barn-like structure, look ing as if it were the work of the villagers combined, like a log-house in a new settlement. my attention was caught by the double advertisements in french and english fastened to its posts, by the formality of the english, and the covert or open reference to their queen and the british lion. no gentlemanly conductor ap peared, none whom you would know to be the conduc concord to montreal. 9 tor by his dress and demeanor ; but erelong we began to see here and there a solid, red-faced, burly-looking englishman, a little pursy perhaps, who made us ashamed of ourselves and our thin and nervous coun trymen, a grandfatherly personage, at home in his great-coat, who looked as if he might be a stage pro prietor, certainly a railroad director, and knew, or had a right to know, when the cars did start. then there were two or three pale-faced, black-eyed, loquacious canadian french gentlemen there, shrugging their shoulders ; pitted as if they had all had the small-pox. in the mean while some soldiers, red-coats, belonging to the barracks near by, were turned out to be drilled. at every important point in our route the soldiers showed themselves ready for us ; though they were evidently rather raw recruits here, they manoauvred far better than our soldiers ; yet, as usual, i heard some yankees talk as if they were no great shakes, and they had seen the acton blues manoeuvre as well. the officers spoke sharply to them, and appeared to be doing their part thoroughly. i heard one suddenly coming to the rear, exclaim, &quot; michael donouy, take his name ! &quot; though i could not see what the latter did or omitted to do. it was whispered that michael donouy would have to suffer for that. i heard some of our party discussing the possibility of their driving these troops off the field with their umbrellas. i thought that the yankee, though undisciplined, had this advan tage at least, that he especially is a man who, everywhere and under all circumstances, is fully resolved to better his condition essentially, and therefore he could afford to be beaten at first ; while the virtue of the irishman, and to a great extent the englishman, consists in merely 10 a yankee in canada. maintaining his ground or condition. the canadians here, a rather poor-looking race, clad in gray homespun, which gave them, the appearance of being covered with dust, were riding about in caleches and small one-horse carts called charettes. the yankees assumed that all the riders were racing, or at least exhibiting the paces of their horses, and saluted them accordingly. we saw but little of the village here, for nobody could tell us when the cars would start; that was kept a profound secret, perhaps for political reasons ; and therefore we were tied to our seats. the inhabitants of st. john s and vicinity are described by an english traveller as &quot; singularly unprepossessing,&quot; and before completing his period he adds, &quot; besides, they are generally very much disaffected to the british crown.&quot; i suspect that that &quot; besides &quot; should have been a because. at length, about noon, the cars began to roll towards la prairie. the whole distance of fifteen miles was over a remarkably level country, resembling a western prairie, with the mountains about chambly visible in the northeast. this novel, but monotonous scenery, was exciting. at la prairie we first took notice of the tinned roofs, but above all of the st. lawrence, which looked like a lake ; in fact it is considerably expanded here ; it was nine miles across diagonally to montreal. mount eoyal in the rear of the city, and the island of st. helen s opposite to it, were now conspicuous. we could also see the sault st. louis about five miles up the river, and the sault norman still farther eastward. the former are described as the most considerable rapids in the st. lawrence ; but we could see merely a gleam of light there as from a cobweb in the sun. soon the city of montreal was discovered with its tin concord to montreal. 11 roofs shining afar. their reflections fell on the eye like a clash of cymbals on the ear. above all the church of notre dame was conspicuous, and anon the bonsecours market-house, occupying a commanding position on the quay, in the rear of the shipping. this city makes the more favorable impression from being approached by water, and also being built of stone, a gray limestone found on the island. here, after travelling directly inland the whole breadth of new england, we had struck upon a city s harbor, it made on me the impression of a seaport, to which ships of six hundred tons can ascend, and where vessels drawing fifteen feet lie close to the wharf, five hundred and forty miles from the gulf; the st. lawrence being here two miles wide. there was a great crowd assembled on the ferry-boat wharf and on the quay to receive the yankees, and flags of all colors were streaming from the vessels to celebrate their arrival. when the gun was fired, the gentry hurrahed again and again, and then the cana dian caleche-drivers, who were most interested in the matter, and who, i perceived, were separated from the former by a fence, hurrahed their welcome ; first the broadcloth, then the homespun. it was early in the afternoon when we stepped ashore. with a single companion, i soon found my way to the church of notre dame. i saw that it was of great size and signified something. it is said to be the largest ecclesiastical structure in north america, and can seat ten thousand. it is two hundred and fifty-five and a half feet long, and the groined ceiling is eighty feet above your head. the catholic are the only churches which i have seen worth remembering, which are not almost wholly profane. i do not speak only of the rich 12 a yankee in canada. and splendid like this, but of the humblest of them as well. coming from the hurrahing mob and the rattling carriages, we pushed aside the listed door of this church, and found ourselves instantly in an atmosphere which might be sacred to thought and religion, if one had any. there sat one or two women who had stolen a moment from the concerns of the day, as they were passing ; but, if there had been fifty people there, it would still have been the most solitary place imaginable. they did not look up at us, nor did one regard another. we walked softly down the broad-aisle with our hats in our hands. presently came in a troop of canadians, in their home spun, who had come to the city in the boat with us, and one and all kneeled down in the aisle before the high altar to their devotions, somewhat awkwardly, as cattle prepare to lie down, and there we left them. as if you were to catch some farmer s sons from marlboro, come to cattle-show, silently kneeling in concord meeting house some wednesday ! would there not soon be a mob peeping in at the windows ? it is true, these ro man catholics, priests and all, impress me as a people who have fallen far behind the significance of their symbols. it is as if an ox had strayed into a church and were trying to bethink himself. nevertheless, they are capable of reverence ; but we yankees are a people in whom this sentiment has nearly died out, and in this respect we cannot bethink ourselves even as oxen. i did not mind the pictures nor the candles, whether tal low or tin. those of the former which i looked at appeared tawdry. it matters little to me whether the pictures are by a neophyte of the algonquin or the italian tribe. but i was impressed by the quiet re ligious atmosphere of the place. it was a great cavo concord to montreal. 13 in the midst of a city ; and what were the altars and the tinsel but the sparkling stalactics, into which you entered in a moment, and where the still atmosphere and the sombre light disposed to serious and profitable thought ? such a cave at hand, which you can enter any day, is worth a thousand of our churches which are open only sundays, hardly long enough for an airing, and then filled with a bustling congregation, a church where the priest is the least part, where you do your own preaching, where the universe preaches to you and can be heard. i am not sure but this cath olic religion would be an admirable one if the priest were quite omitted. i think that i might go to church myself sometimes some monday, if i lived in a city where there was such a one to go to. in concord, to be sure, we do not need such. our forests are such a church, far grander and more sacred. we dare not leave our meeting-houses open for fear they would be profaned. such a cave, such a shrine, in one of our groves, for instance, how long would it be respected ? for what purposes would it be entered, by such baboons as we are ? i think of its value not only to religion, but to philosophy and to poetry ; besides a reading room, to have a thinking-room in every city ! per chance the time will come when every house even will have not only its sleeping-rooms, and dining-room, and talking-room or parlor, but its thinking-room also, and the architects will put it into their plans. let it be furnished and ornamented with whatever conduces to serious and creative thought. i should not object to the holy water, or any other simple symbol, if it were consecrated by the imagination of the worshippers. i heard that some yankees bet that the candles were 14 a yankee in canada. not wax, but tin. a european assured them tliat they were wax ; but, inquiring of the sexton, he was sur prised to learn that they were tin filled with oil. the church was too poor to afford wax. p^ibfttie trot estant churches, here or elsewhere, they did not in terest me, for it is only as caves that churches interest me at all, and in that respect they were inferior. montreal makes the &quot;impression of a larger city than you had expected to find, though you may have heard that it contains nearly sixty thousand inhabitants. in the newer parts it appeared to be growing fast like a small new york, and to be considerably americanized. the names of the squares reminded you of paris, the champ de mars, the place d armes, and others, and you felt as if a french revolution might break out any moment. glimpses of mount royal rising behind the town, and the names of some streets in that direction, make one think of edinburgh. that hill sets off this city wonderfully. i inquired at a principal bookstore for books published in montreal. they said that there were none but school-books and the like ; they got their books from the states. from time to time we met a priest in the streets, for they are distinguished by their dress, like the civil police. like clergymen generally, with or without the gown, they made on us the impres sion of effeminacy. we also met some sisters of char ity, dressed in black, with shaker-shaped black bonnets and crosses, and cadaverous faces, who looked as if they had almost cried their eyes out, their complexions par boiled with scalding tears ; insulting the daylight by their presence, having taken an oath not to smile. by cadaverous i mean that their faces were like the faces of those who have been dead and buried for a year, and concord to montreal. 15 then untombed, with the life s grief upon them, and yet, for some unaccountable reason, the process of decay ar rested. &quot; truth never fails her servant, sir, nor leaves him with the day s shame upon him.&quot; they waited demurejy on the sidewalk while a truck laden with raisins was driven in at the seminary of st. sulpice, never once lifting their eyes from the ground. the soldier here, as everywhere in canada, appeared to be put forward, and by his best foot. they were in the proportion of the soldiers to the laborers in an afri can ant-hill. the inhabitants evidently rely on them in a great measure for music and entertainment. you would meet with them pacing back and forth before some guard-house or passage-way, guarding, regarding, and disregarding all kinds of law by turns, apparently for the sake of the discipline to themselves, and not because it was important to exclude anybody from entering that way. they reminded me of the men who are paid for piling up bricks and then throwing them down again. on every prominent ledge you r could see england s hands holding the canadas, and i judged by the redness of her knuckles that she would soon have to let go. in the rear of such a guard-house, in a large gravelled square or parade-ground, called the champ de mars, we saw a large body of soldiers being drilled, we being as yet the only spectators. but they did not appear to notice us any more than the devotees in the church, but were seemingly as indifferent to few ness of spectators as the phenomena of nature are, what ever they might have been thinking under their helmets of the yankees that were to come. each man wore white kid gloves. it was one of the most interesting 16 a yankee in canada. sights which i saw in canada. the problem appeared to be how to smooth down all individual protuberances or idiosyncrasies, and make a thousand men move as one man, animated by one central will ; and there was some approach to success. they obeyed the signals of a commander who stood at a great distance, wand in hand ; and the precision, and promptness, and harmony of their movements could not easily have been matched. the harmony was far more remarkable than that of any choir or band, and obtained, no doubt, at a greater cost. they made on me the impression, not of many individ uals, but of one vast centipede of a man, good for all sorts of pulling down ; and why not then for some kinds of building up ? if men could combine thus earnestly, and patiently, and harmoniously to some really worthy end, what might they not accomplish ? they now put their hands, and partially perchance their heads, to gether, and the result is that they are the imperfect tools of an imperfect and tyrannical government. but if they could put their hands and heads and hearts and all together, such a co-operation and harmony would be the very end and success for which government now ex ists in vain, a government, as it were, not only with tools, but stock to trade with. i was obliged to frame some sentences that sounded like french in order to deal with the market-women, who, for the most part, cannot speak english. ac cording to the guide-book the relative population of this city stands nearly thus : two fifths are french ca nadian ; nearly one fifth british canadian ; one and a half fifth english, irish, and scotch ; somewhat less than one half fifth germans, united states people, and others. i saw nothing like pie for sale, and no good concord to montreal. 17 cake to put in my bundle, such as you can easily find in our towns, but plenty of fair-looking apples, for which montreal island is celebrated, and also pears, cheaper, and i thought better than ours, and peaches, which, though they were probably brought from the south, were as cheap as they commonly are with us. so im perative is the law of demand and supply that, as i have been told, the market of montreal is sometimes supplied with green apples from the state of new york some weeks even before they are ripe in the latter place. i saw here the spruce wax which the canadians chew, done up in little silvered papers, a penny a roll ; also a small and shrivelled fruit which they called cerises mixed with many little stems somewhat like raisins, but i soon returned what i had bought, finding them rather insipid, only putting a sample in my pocket. since my return, i find on comparison that it is the fruit of the sweet viburnum ( viburnum lentago), which with us rarely holds on till it is ripe. i stood on the deck of the steamer john munn, late in the afternoon, when the second and third ferry-boats arrived from la prairie, bringing the remainder of the yankees. i never saw so many caleches, cabs, charettes, and similar vehicles collected before, and doubt if new york could easily furnish more. the handsome and substantial stone quay, which stretches a mile along the river-side, and protects the street from the ice, was thronged with the citizens who had turned out on foot and in carriages to welcome or to behold the yankees. it was interesting to see the caleche drivers dash up and down the slope of the quay with their active little horses. they drive much faster than in our cities. i have been told that some of them come nine miles into 18 a yankee in canada. the city every morning and return every night, without changing their horses during the day. in the midst of the crowd of carts, i observed one deep one loaded with sheep with their legs tied together, and their bodies piled one upon another, as if the driver had forgotten that they were sheep and not yet mutton. a sight, i trust, peculiar to canada, though i fear that it is not. chapter ii. quebec and m o ntm o r en c i. about six o clock we started for quebec, one hun dred and eighty miles distant by the river ; gliding past longueil and boucherville on the right, and pointe aux trembles, &quot;so called from having been originally covered with aspens,&quot; and bout de vlsle, or the end of the island, on the left. i repeat these names not merely for want of more substantial facts to record, but because they sounded singularly poetic to my ears. there certainly was no lie in them. they suggested that some simple, and, perchance, heroic human life might have transpired there. there is all the poetry in the world in a name. it is a poem which the mass of men hear and read. what is poetry in the common sense, but a string of such jingling names ? i want nothing better than a good word. the name of a thing may easily be more than the thing itself to me. inexpressibly beautiful appears the recognition by man of the least natural fact, and the allying his life to it. all the world reiterating quebec and montmorenci. 19 this slender truth, that aspens once grew there ; and the swift inference is, that men were there to see them. and so it would be with the names of our native and neighboring villages, if we had not profaned them. the daylight now failed us, and we went below ; but i endeavored to console myself for being obliged to make this voyage by night, by thinking that i did not lose a great deal, the shores being low and rather un attractive, and that the river itself was much the more interesting object. i heard something in the night about the boat being at william henry, three rivers, and in the richelieu rapids, but i was still where i had been when i lost sight of pointe aux trembles. to hear a man who has been waked up at midnight in the cabin of a steamboat, inquiring, &quot; waiter, where are we now?&quot; is, as if at any moment of the earth s revolu tion round the sun, or of the system round its centre, one were to raise himself up and inquire of one of the deck hands, &quot;where are we now?&quot; i went on deck at daybreak, when we were thirty or forty miles above quebec. the banks were now higher and more interesting. there was an &quot;uninterrupted succession of white-washed cottages&quot; on each side of the river. this is what every traveller tells. but it is not to be taken as an evidence of the populousness of the country in general, hardly even of the river banks. they have presented a similar appearance for a hundred years. the swedish traveller and naturalist, kalm, who descended this river in 1749, says : &quot; it could really be called a village, beginning at montreal and ending at quebec, which is a distance of more than one hundred and eighty miles ; for the farm-houses are never above five arpens, and sometimes but three asunder, a few 20 a yankee in canada. places excepted.&quot; even in 1684 hontan said that the houses were not more than a gunshot apart at most. erelong we passed cape rouge, eight miles above que bec, the mouth of the chaudiere on the opposite or south side, new liverpool cove with its lumber rafts and some shipping ; then sillery and wolfe s cove and the heights of abraham on the north, with now a view of cape diamond, and the citadel in front. the ap proach to quebec was very imposing. it was about six o clock in the morning when we arrived. there is but a single street under the cliff on the south side of the cape, which was made by blasting the rocks and filling up the river. three-story houses did not rise more than one fifth or one sixth the way up the nearly perpen dicular rock, whose summit is three hundred and forty five feet above the water. we saw, as we glided past, the sign on the side of the precipice, part way up, point ing to the spot where montgomery was killed in 1775. formerly it was the custom for those who went to quebec for the first time to be ducked, or else pay a fine. not even the governor general escaped. but we were too many to be ducked, even if the custom had not been abolished.* here we were, in the harbor of quebec, still three hundred and sixty miles from the mouth of the st. lawrence, in a basin two miles across, where the great est depth is twenty-eight fathoms, and though the water * hierosme lalemant says in 1648, in his relation, he being su perior: &quot; all those who come to new france know well enough the mountain of notre dame, because the pilots and sailors, being ar rived at that part of the great river which is opposite to those high mountains, baptize ordinarily for sport the new passengers, if they do not turn aside by some present the inundation of this baptism which one makes flow plentifully on their heads.&quot; quebec and montmorenci. 21 is fresh, the tide rises seventeen to twenty-four feet, a harbor &quot; large and deep enough,&quot; says a british travel ler, &quot; to hold the english navy.&quot; i may as well state that, in 1844, the county of quebec contained about forty five thousand inhabitants (the city and suburbs having about forty-three thousand) ; about twenty-eight thou sand being canadians of french origin ; eight thousand british ; over seven thousand natives of ireland ; one thousand five hundred natives of england; the rest scotch and others. thirty-six thousand belong to the church of rome. separating ourselves from the crowd, we walked up a narrow street, thence ascended by some wooden steps, called the break-neck stairs, into another steep, narrow, and zigzag street, blasted through the rock, which last led through a low massive stone portal, called prescott gate, the principal thoroughfare into the upper town. this passage was defended by cannon, with a guard house over it, a sentinel at his post, and other soldiers at hand ready to relieve him. i rubbed my eyes to be sure that i was in the nineteenth century, and was not entering one of those portals which sometimes adorn the frontispieces of new editions of old black-letter volumes. i thought it would be a good place to read froissart s chronicles. it was such a reminiscence of the middle ages as scott s novels. men apparently dwelt there for security. peace be unto them ! as if the inhabitants of new york were to go over to castle william to live ! what a place it must be to bring up children ! being safe through the gate we naturally took the street which was steepest, and after a few turns found ourselves on the durham terrace, a wooden platform on the site of the old castle of st. louis, still one hundred and fifteen 22 a yankee in canada. feet below the summit of the citadel, overlooking the lower town, the wharf where we had landed, the har bor, the isle of orleans, and the river and surrounding country to a great distance. it was literally a splendid view. we could see six or seven miles distant, in the northeast, an indentation in the lofty shore of the north ern channel, apparently on one side of the harbor, which marked the mouth of the montmorenci, whose celebrated fall was only a few rods in the rear. at a shoe-shop, whither we were directed for this pur pose, we got some of our american money changed into english. i found that american hard money would have answered as well, excepting cents, which fell very fast before their pennies, it taking two of the former to make one of the latter, and often the penny, which had cost us two cents, did us the service of one cent only. moreover, our robust cents were compelled to meet on even terms a crew of vile half-penny tokens, and bung town coppers, which had more brass in their compo sition, and so perchance made their way in the world. wishing to get into the citadel, we were directed to the jesuits barracks, a good part of the public buildings here are barracks, to get a pass of the town major. we did not heed the sentries at the gate, nor did they us, and what under the sun they were placed there for, unless to hinder a free circulation of the air, was not apparent. there we saw soldiers eating their breakfasts in their mess-room, from bare wooden tables in camp fashion. we were continually meeting with soldiers in the streets, carrying funny little tin pails of all shapes, even semicircular, as if made to pack conveniently. i supposed that they contained their dinners, so many slices of bread and butter to each, perchance. some quebec and montmorenci. 23 times they were carrying some kind of military chest on a sort of bier or hand-barrow, with a springy, un dulating, military step, all passengers giving way to them, even the charette-drivers stopping for them to pass, as if the battle were being lost from an inade quate supply of powder. there was a regiment of highlanders, and, as i understood, of royal irish, in the city ; and by this time there was a regiment of yankees also. i had already observed, looking up even from the water, the head and shoulders of some general poniatowsky, with an enormous cocked hat and gun, peering over the roof of a house, away up where the chimney caps commonly are with us, as it were a cari cature of war and military awfulness ; but i had not gone far up st. louis street before my riddle was solved, by the apparition of a real live highlander under a cocked hat, and with his knees out, standing and marching sentinel on the ramparts, between st. louis and st. john s gate. (it must be a holy war that is waged there.) we stood close by without fear and looked at him. his legs were somewhat tanned, and the hair had begun to grow on them, as some of our wise men predict that it will in such cases, but i did not think they were remarkable in any respect. notwith standing all his warlike gear, when i inquired of him the way to the plains of abraham, he could not answer me without betraying some bashfulness through his broad scotch. soon after, we passed another of these creatures standing sentry at the st. louis gate, who let us go by without shooting us, or even demanding the countersign. we then began to go through the gate, which was so thick and tunnel-like, as to remind me of those lines in claudian s old man of verona, about the 24 a yankee in canada. getting out of the gate being the greater part of a jour ney ; as you might imagine yourself crawling through an architectural vignette at the end of a black-letter volume. we were then reminded that we had been in a fortress, from which we emerged by numerous zig zags in a ditch-like road, going a considerable distance to advance a few rods, where they could have shot us two or three times over, if their minds had been dis posed as their guns were.,/ the greatest, or rather the most prominent, part of this city was constructed with the design to offer the deadest resistance to leaden and iron missiles that might be cast against it. but it is a remarkable meteorological and psychological fact, that it is rarely known to rain lead with much violence, ex cept on places so constructed. keeping on about a mile we came to the plains of abraham, for having got through with the saints, we come next to the patriarchs. here the highland regiment was being reviewed, while the band stood on one side and played, methinks it was la claire fontaine, the national air of the cana dian french. this is the site where a real battle once took place, to commemorate which they have had a sham fight here almost every day since. the highlanders manasuvred very well, and if the precision of their movements was less remarkable, they did not appear so stiffly erect as the english or royal irish, but had a more elastic and graceful gait, like a herd of their own red deer, or as if accustomed to stepping down the sides of mountains. but they made a sad impression on the whole, for it was obvious that all true manhood was in the process of being drilled out of them. i have no doubt that soldiers well drilled are, as a class, peculiarly destitute of originality and independence. the officers quebec and montmobencl 25 appeared like men dressed above their condition. it is impossible to give the soldier a good education, without making him a deserter. his natural foe is the govern ment that drills him. what would any philanthropist, who felt an interest in these men s welfare, naturally do, but first of all teach them so to respect themselves, that they could not be hired for this work, whatever might be the consequences to this government or that ; not drill a few, but educate all. i observed one older man among them, gray as a wharf-rat, and supple as the devil, marching lock-step with the rest who would have to pay for that elastic gait. we returned to the citadel along the heights, pluck ing such flowers as grew there. there was an abun dance of succory still in blossom, broad-leaved golden rod, buttercups, thorn-bushes, canada thistles, and ivy, on the very summit of cape diamond. i also found the bladder-campion in the neighborhood. we there enjoyed an extensive view, which i will describe in another place. our pass, which stated that all the rules were &quot; to be strictly enforced,&quot; as if they were deter mined to keep up the semblance of reality to the last gasp, opened to us the dalhousie gate, and we were conducted over the citadel by a bare-legged highlander in cocked hat and full regimentals. he told us that he had been here about three years, and had formerly been stationed at gibraltar. as if his regiment, having per chance been nestled amid the rocks of edinburgh cas tle, must flit from rock to rock thenceforth over the earth s surface, like a bald eagle, or other bird of prey, from eyrie to eyrie. as we were going out, we met the yankees coming in, in a body, headed by a red-coated officer called the commandant, and escorted by many 2 26 a yankee in canada. citizens, both english and french canadian. i there fore immediately fell into the procession, and went round the citadel again with more intelligent guides, carrying, as before, all my effects with me. seeing that nobody walked with the red-coated commandant, i attached my self to him, and though i was not what is called well dressed, he did not know whether to repel me or not, for i talked like one who was not aware of any de ficiency in that respect. probably there was not one among all the yankees who went to canada this time, who was not more splendidly dressed than i was. it would have been a poor story if i had not enjoyed some distinction. i had on my &quot;badweather clothes,&quot; like olaf trygesson the northman, when he went to the thing in england, where, by the way, he won his bride. as we stood by the thirty-two-pounder on the summit of cape diamond, which is fired three times a day, the commandant told me that it would carry to the isle of orleans, four miles distant, and that no hostile vessel could come round the island. i now saw the subter ranean or, rather, &quot; casemated barracks &quot; of the soldiers, which i had not noticed before, though i might have walked over them. they had very narrow windows, serving as loop-holes for musketry, and small iron chim neys rising above the ground. there we saw the soldiers at home and in an undress, splitting wood, i looked to see whether with swords or axes, and in various ways endeavoring to realize that their nation was now at peace with this part of the world. a part of each regiment, chiefly officers, are allowed to marry. a grandfatherly, would-be witty englishman could give a yankee whom he was patronizing no reason for the bare knees of the highlanders, other than oddity. the rock within the quebec and montmorenci. 27 citadel is a little convex, so that shells falling on it would roll toward the circumference, where the barracks of the soldiers and officers are ; it has been proposed, therefore, to make it slightly concave, so that they may roll into the centre, where they would be comparatively harm less ; and it is estimated that to do this would cost twenty thousand pounds sterling. it may be well to remember this when i build my next house, and have the roof &quot; all correct &quot; for bombshells. at mid-afternoon we made haste down sault-au-mate lot street, towards the falls of montmorenci, about eight miles down the st. lawrence, on the north side, leaving the further examination of quebec till our return. on our way, we saw men in the streets sawing logs pit fashion, and afterward, with a common wood-saw and horse, cutting the planks into squares for paving the streets. this looked very shiftless, especially in a coun try abounding in water-power, and reminded me that i was no longer in yankee land. i found, on inquiry, that the excuse for this was, that labor was so cheap ; and i thought, with some pain, how cheap men are here ! i have since learned that the english traveller, &quot;vvarburton, remarked, soon after landing at quebec, that everything was cheap there but men. that must be the difference between going thither from new and from old england. i had already observed the dogs harnessed to their little milk-carts, which contain a sin gle large can, lying asleep in the gutters regardless of the horses, while they rested from their labors, at dif ferent stages of the ascent in the upper town. i was surprised at the regular and extensive use made of these animals for drawing, not only milk, but groceries, wood, &c. it reminded me that the dog commonly is not put 28 a yankee in canada. to any use. cats catch mice ; but dogs only worry the cats. kalm, a hundred years ago, saw sledges here for ladies to ride in, drawn by a pair of dogs. he says, &quot;a middle-sized dog is sufficient to draw a single per son, when the roads are good &quot; ; and he was told by old people, that horses were very scarce in their youth, and almost all the land-carriage was then effected by dogs. they made me think of the esquimaux, who, in fact, are the next people on the north. charlevoix says, that the first horses were introduced in 1665. we crossed dorchester bridge, over the st. charles, the little river in which cartier, the discoverer of the st. lawrence, put his ships, and spent the winter of 1535, and found ourselves on an excellent macadamized road, called le 0/iemin de .beauport. we had left con cord wednesday morning, and we endeavored to realize that now, friday morning, we were taking a walk in canada, in the seigniory of beauport, a foreign country, which a few days before had seemed almost as far off as england and france. instead of rambling to flint s pond or the sudbury meadows, we found ourselves, after being a little detained in cars and steamboats, after spending half a night at burlington, and half a day at montreal, taking a \valk down the bank of the st. lawrence to the falls of montmorenci and elsewhere. well, i thought to myself, here i am in a foreign coun try ; let me have my eyes about me, and take it all in. it already looked and felt a good deal colder than it had in new england, as we might have expected it would. i realized fully that i was four degrees nearer the pole, and shuddered at the thought ; and i wondered if it were possible that the peaches might not be all gone when i returned. it was an atmosphere that made me quebec and montmorenci. 29 think of the fur-trade, which is so interesting a depart ment in canada, for i had for all head-covering a thin palm-leaf hat without lining, that cost twenty-five cents, and over my coat one of those unspeakably cheap, as well as thin, brown linen sacks of the oak hall pattern, which every summer appear all over new england, thick as the leaves upon the trees. it was a thoroughly yan kee costume, which some of my fellow-travellers wore in the cars to save their coats a dusting. i wore mine, at first, because it looked better than the coat it covered, and last, because two coats were warmer than one, though one was thin and dirty. i never wear my best coat on a journey, though perchance i could show a certificate to prove that i have a more costly one, at least, at home, if that were all that a gentieniail~iu-~ quired. it is not wise for a traveller to go dressed. i should no more think of it than of putting on a clean dicky and blacking my shoes to go a-fishing ; as if you were going out to dine, when, in fact, the genuine travel ler is going out to work hard, and fare harder, to eat a cru&t by the wayside whenever he can get it. honest travelling is about as dirty work as you can do, and a man needs a pair of overalls for it. as for blacking my shoes in such a case, i should as soon think of blacking my face. i carry a piece of tallow to preserve the leather, and keep out the water ; that s all ; and many an officious shoe-black, who carried off my shoes when i was slumbering, mistaking me for a gentleman, has had occasion to repent it before he produced a gloss on them. my pack, in fact, was soon made, for i keep a short list of those articles which, from frequent experience, i have found indispensable to the foot-traveller; and, when 30 a yankee in canada. i am about to start, i have only to consult that, to be sure that nothing is omitted, and, what is more impor tant, nothing superfluous inserted. most of my fellow travellers carried carpet-bags, or valises. sometimes one had two or three ponderous yellow valises in his clutch, at each hitch of the cars, as if we were going to have another rush for seats ; and when there was a rush in earnest, and there were not a few, i would see my man in the crowd, with two or three affectionate lusty fellows along each side of his arm, between his shoulder and his valises, which last held them tight to his back, like the nut on the end of a screw. i could not help v! asking in my mind, &quot;what so great cause for showing 1 la to tho vhen perhaps your very nieces vj stay~at home for want of an escoi-t ? h iuld j have liked to be present when the custom-house ww-.c eaine aboard of him, and asked him to declare u\ ; honor if he had anything but wearing apparel in them. even the elephant carries but a small trunk on his jour neys. the perfection of travelling is to travel without&quot; baggage. after considerable reflection and experience, i have concluded that the best bag for the foot-traveller is made with a handkerchief, or, if he study appearances, a piece of stiff brown paper, well tied up, with a fresh piece within to put outside when the first is torn. that is good for both town and country, and none will knowl but you are carrying home the silk for a new gown for your wife, when it may be a dirty shirt. a bundle which you can carry literally under your arm, and which will shrink and swell with its contents. i never found the carpet-bag of equal capacity, which was not a bundle of itself. we styled ourselves the knights of the umbrella and the bundle ; for wherever we went, whether to notre \ &amp;lt; quebec and montmobmtd. 31 ie or mount royal, or the champ-de-mars, to the n major s or the bishop s palace, to the citadel, i a bare-legged highlander for our escort, or to the us of abraham, to dinner or to bed, the umbrella the bundle went with us ; for we wished to be ready ligress at any moment. we made it our home no ire in particular, but everywhere where our umbrella 1 bundle were. it would have been an amusing cir astance, if the mayor of one of those cities had po ly asked us where we were staying. &quot;we could only uuve answered, that we were staying with his honor for the time being. i was amused when, after our return, some green ones inquired if we found it easy to get ac commodated ; as if we went abroad^ to get accommo dated, when we can get that at home. we met with many charettes, bringing wood and stone the city. the most ordinary looking horses travelled faster than ours, or, perhaps they were ordinary looking, because, as i am told, the canadians do not use the .rry-comb. moreover, it is said, that on the approach winter their horses acquire an increased quantity of lir, to protect them from the cold. if this be true, &amp;gt;me of our horses would make you think winter were pproaching, even in midsummer. we soon began to 3e women and girls at work in the fields, digging pota )es alone, or bundling up the grain which the men cut. they appeared in rude health, with a great deal of color .i i their cheeks, and, if their occupation had made them oarse, it impressed me as better in its effects than mak og shirts at fourpence apiece, or doing nothing at all ; mless it be chewing slate pencils, with still smaller re ults. they were much more agreeable objects, with heir great broad-brimmed hats and flowing dresses, 32 a yankee in canada. than the men and boys. &quot;yye afterwards saw them doing various other kinds of work ; indeed, i thought that we saw more women at work out of doors than men. on our return, we observed in this town a girl with indian boots, nearly two feet high, taking the harness off a dog. the purity and transparency of the atmosphere were wonderful. when we had been walking an hour, we were surprised, on turning round, to see how near the city, with its glittering tin roofs, still looked. a village ten miles off did not appear to be more than three or four. i was convinced that you could see objects dis tinctly there much farther than here. it is true the villages are of a dazzling white, but the dazzle is to be referred, perhaps, to the transparency of the atmosphere as much as to the whitewash. we were now fairly in the village of beauport, though there was still but one road. the houses stood close upon this, without any front-yards, and at any angle with it, as if they had dropped down, being set with more refer ence to the road which the sun travels. it being about sundown, and the falls not far off, we began to look round for a lodging, for we preferred to put up at a pri vate house, that we might see more of the inhabitants. we inquired first at the most promising looking houses, if, indeed, any were promising. when we knocked, they shouted some french word for come in, perhaps entrez, and we asked for a lodging in english ; but we found, unexpectedly, that they spoke french only. then we went along and tried another house, being generally saluted by a rush of two or three little curs, which readily distinguished a foreigner, and which we were prepared now to hear bark in french. our first question would be, parlez-vous anglais? but the invariable an quebec and montmorenci. 33 swer was, non, monsieur ; and we soon found that tliq inhabitants were exclusively french canadians, and no body spoke english at all, any more than in france ; that, in fact, we were in a foreign country, where the inhabitants uttered not one familiar sound to us. then we tried by turns to talk french with them, in which we succeeded sometimes pretty well, but for the most part, pretty ill. pouvez-vous nous donner un lit cette nuit ? we would ask, and then they would answer with french volubility, so that we could catch only a word here and there. we could understand the women and children generally better than the men, and they us ; and thus, after a while, we would learn that they had no more beds than they used. so we were compelled to inquire : ya-t-il une maison puuique id ? (auberge we should have said, perhaps, for they seemed never to have heard of the other), and they answered at length that there was no tavern, unless we could get lodgings at the mill, le moulin, which we had passed ; or they would direct us to a grocery, and almost every house had a small grocery at one end of it. we called on the public notary or village lawyer, but he had no more beds nor english than the rest. at one house there was so good a misunderstanding at once established through the politeness of all parties, that we were en couraged to walk in and sit down, and ask for a glass of water ; and having drank their water, we thought it was as good as to have tasted their salt. when our host and his wife spoke of their poor accommodations, meaning for themselves, we assured them that they were good enough, for we thought that they were only apologizing for the poorness of the accommodations they were about to offer us, and we did not discover our mistake till they 2* c 34 a yankee in canada. took us up a ladder into a loft, and showed to our eyes what they had been laboring in vain to communicate to our brains through our ears, that they had but that one apart ment with its few beds for the whole family. we made our a-dieus forthwith, and with gravity, perceiving the literal signification of that word. we were finally taken in at a sort of public-house, whose master worked for patterson, the proprietor of the extensive saw-mills driven by a portion of the montmorenci stolen from the fall, whose roar we now heard. we here talked, or mur dered french all the evening, with the master of the house and his family, and probably had a more amusing time than if we had completely understood one another. at length they showed us to a bed in their best cham ber, very high to get into, with a low wooden rail to it. it had no cotton sheets, but coarse, home-made, dark colored, linen ones. afterward, we had to do with sheets still coarser than these, and nearly the color of our blan kets. there was a large open buffet loaded with crock ery, in one corner of the room, as if to display their wealth to travellers, and pictures of scripture scenes, french, italian, and spanish, hung around. our hostess came back directly to inquire if we would have brandy for breakfast. the next morning, when i asked their names, she took down the temperance pledges of herself and husband, and children, which were hanging against the wall. they were jean baptiste binet, and his wife, genevieve binet. jean baptiste is the sobriquet of the french canadians. after breakfast we proceeded to the fall, which was within half a mile, and at this distance its rustling sound, like the wind among the leaves, filled all the air. we were disappointed to find that we were in some measure quebec and montmorenci. 35 shut out from the west side of the fall by the private grounds, and fences of patterson, who appropriates not only a part of the water for his mill, but a still larger part of the prospect, so that we were obliged to trespass. this gentleman s mansion-house and grounds were for merly occupied by the duke of kent, father to queen victoria. it appeared to me in bad taste for an indi vidual, though he were the father of queen victoria, to obtrude himself with his land titles, or at least his fences, on so remarkable a natural phenomenon, which should, in every sense, belong to mankind. some falls should even be kept sacred from the intrusion of mills and factories, as water privileges in another than the mill wright s sense. this small river falls perpendicularly nearly two hundred and fifty feet at one pitch. the st. lawrence falls only one hundred and sixty-four feet at niagara. it is a very simple and noble fall, and leaves nothing to be desired ; but the most that i could say of it would only have the force of one other testimony to assure the reader that it is there. we looked directly down on it from the point of a projecting rock, and saw far below us, on a low promontory, the grass kept fresh and green by the perpetual drizzle, looking like moss. the rock is a kind of slate, in the crevices of which grew ferns and golden-rods. the prevailing trees on the shores were spruce and arbor-vitse, the latter very large and now full of fruit, also aspens, alders, and the mountain-ash with its berries. every emigrant who ar rives in this country by way of the st. lawrence, as he opens a point of the isle of orleans, sees the montmo renci tumbling into the great river thus magnificently in a vast white sheet, making its contribution with em phasis, lioberval s pilot, jean alphonse, saw this fall 36 a yankee in canada. thus, and described it, in 1542. it is a splendid intro duction to the scenery of quebec. instead of an arti ficial fountain in its square, quebec has this magnificent natural waterfall to adorn one side of its harbor. within the mouth of the chasm below, which can be entered only at ebb tide, we had a grand view at once of que bec and of the fall. kalm says that the noise of the fall is sometimes heard at quebec, about eight miles distant, and is a sign of a northeast wind. the side of this chasm, of soft and crumbling slate too steep to climb, was among the memorable features of the scene. in the winter of 1829 the frozen spray of the fall, descending on the ice of the st. lawrence, made a hill one hundred and twenty-six feet high. it is an annual phenomenon which some think may help explain the formation of glaciers. in the vicinity of the fall we began to notice what looked like our red-fruited thorn bushes, grown to the size of ordinary apple-trees, very common, and full of large red or yellow fruit, which the inhabitants called pommettes, but i did not learn that they were put to any use. st. anne. 37 chapter iii. st. anne. by the middle of the forenoon, though it was a rainy day, we were once more on our way down the north bank of the st. lawrence, in a northeasterly direction, toward the falls of st. anne, which are about thirty miles from quebec. the settled, more level, and fertile portion of canada east may be described rudely as a triangle, with its apex slanting toward the northeast, about one hundred miles wide at its base, and from two to three, or even four hundred miles long, if you reckon its narrow northeastern extremity ; it being the imme diate valley of the st. lawrence and its tributaries, rising by a single or by successive terraces toward the mountains on either hand. though the words canada east on the map stretch over many rivers and lakes and unexplored wildernesses, the actual canada, which might be the colored portion of the map, is but a little clearing on the banks of the river, which one of those syllables would more than cover. the banks of the st. lawrence are rather low from montreal to the richelieu rapids, about forty miles above quebec. thence they rise gradually to cape diamond, or quebec. where we now were, eight miles northeast of quebec, the mountains which form the northern side of this triangle were only five or six miles distant from the river, grad ually departing farther and farther from it, on the west, till they reach the ottawa, and making haste to meet it on the east, at cape tourmente, now in plain sight about twenty miles distant. so that we were travelling in a 38 a yankee in canada. very narrow and sharp triangle between the mountains and the river, tilted up toward the mountains on the north, never losing sight of our great fellow-traveller on our right. according to bouchette s topographical de scription of the canadas, we were in the seigniory of the cote de beaupre&quot;, in the county of montmorenci, and the district of quebec ; in that part of canada which was the first to be settled, and where the face of the country and the population have undergone the least change from the beginning, where the influence of the states and of europe is least felt, and the inhabitants see little or nothing of the world over the walls of que bec. this seigniory was granted in 1636, and is now the property of the seminary of quebec. it is the most mountainous one in the province. there are some half a dozen parishes in it, each containing a church, parsonage-house, grist-mill, and several saw mills. we were now in the most westerly parish called ange gardien, or the guardian angel, which is bounded on the west by the montmorenci. the north bank of the st. lawrence here is formed on a grand scale. it slopes gently, either directly from the shore, or from the edge of an interval, till, at the distance of about a mile, it attains the height of four or five hundred feet. the single road runs along the side of the slope two or three hundred feet above the river at first, and from a quarter of a mile to a mile distant from it, and affords fine views of the north channel, which is about a mile wide, and of the beautiful isle of orleans, about twenty miles long by five wide, where grow the best apples and plums in the quebec district. though there was but this single road, it was a con tinuous village for as far as we walked this day and the st. anne. 39 next, or about thirty miles down the river, the houses being as near together all the way as in the middle of one of our smallest straggling country villages, and we could never tell by their number when we were on the skirts of a parish, for the road never ran through the fields or woods. we were told that it was just six miles from one parish church to another. i thought that we saw every house in ange gardien. therefore, as it was a muddy day, we never got out of the mud, nor out of the village, unless we got over the fence ; then indeed, if it was on the north side, we were out of the civilized world. there were sometimes a few more houses near the church, it is true, but we had only to go a quarter of a mile from the road to the top of the bank to find ourselves on the verge of the uninhabited, and, for the most part, unexplored wilderness stretching toward hudson s bay. the farms accordingly were extremely long and narrow, each having a frontage on the river. bouchette accounts for this peculiar manner of laying out a village by referring to &quot; the social char acter of the canadian peasant, who is singularly fond of neighborhood,&quot; also to the advantage arising from a concentration of strength in indian times. each farm, called terre, he says, is, in nine cases out of ten, three arpents wide by thirty deep, that is, very nearly thirty five by three hundred and forty-nine of our rods ; some times one half arpent by thirty, or one to sixty ; some times, in fact, a few yards by half a mile. of course it costs more for fences. a remarkable difference between the canadian and the new england character appears from the fact that in 1745, the french government were obliged to pass a law forbidding the farmers or censi taires building on land less than one and a half arpents 40 a yankee in canada. front by thirty or forty deep, under a certain penalty, in order to compel emigration, and bring the seigneur s estates all under cultivation ; and it is thought that they have now less reluctance to leave the paternal roof than formerly, &quot;removing beyond the sight of the parish spire, or the sound of the parish bell.&quot; but i find that in the previous or seventeenth century, the complaint, often renewed, was of a totally opposite character, namely, that the inhabitants dispersed and exposed themselves to the iroquois. accordingly, about 1664, the king was obliged to order that &quot; they should make no more clearings except one next to another, and that they should reduce their parishes to the form of the parishes in france as much as possible.&quot; the canadians of those days, at least, possessed a roving spirit of ad venture which carried them further, in exposure to hardship and danger, than ever the new england colo nist went, and led them, though not to clear and colo nize the wilderness, yet to range over it as coureurs de bois, or runners of the woods, or as hontan prefers to call them coureurs de risques, runners of risks ; to say nothing of their enterprising priesthood ; and charlevoix thinks that if the authorities had taken the right steps to prevent the youth from ranging the woods (de courir les bois) they would have had an excellent militia to fight the indians and english. the road, in this clayey looking soil, was exceedingly muddy in consequence of the night s rain. &quot;we met an old woman directing her dog, which was harnessed to a little cart, to the least muddy part of it. it was a beg garly sight. but harnessed to the cart as he was, we heard him barking after we had passed, though we looked anywhere but to the cart to see where the dog st. anne. 41 was that barked. the houses commonly fronted the south, whatever angle they might make with the road ; and frequently they had no door nor cheerful window on the roadside. half the time they stood fifteen to forty rods from the road, and there was no very obvious pas sage to them, so that you would suppose that there must be another road running by them. they were of stone, rather coarsely mortared, but neatly whitewashed, almost invariably one story high and long in proportion to their height, with a shingled roof, the shingles being pointed, for ornament, at the eaves, like the pickets of a fence, and also one row half-way up the roof. the gables sometimes projected a foot or two at the ridge-pole only. yet they were very humble and unpretending dwellings. they commonly had the date of their erection on them. the windows opened in the middle, like blinds, and were frequently provided with solid shutters. some times, when we walked along the back side of a house which stood near the road, we observed stout stakes leaning against it, by which the shutters, now pushed half open, were fastened at night ; within, the houses were neatly ceiled with wood not painted. the oven was commonly out of doors, built of stone and mortar, frequently on a raised platform of planks. the cellar was often on the opposite side of the road, in front of or behind the houses, looking like an ice-house with us with &quot;a lattice door for summer. the very few mechan ics whom we met had an old-bettyish look, in their aprons and bonnets rouges, like fools caps. the men wore commonly the same bonnet rouge, or red woollen or worsted cap, or sometimes blue or gray, looking to us as if they had got up with their night-caps on, and, in fact, i afterwards found that they had. their clothes 42 a yankee in canada. were of the cloth of the country, etoffe du pays, gr,ay or some other plain color. the women looked stout, with gowns that stood out stiffly, also, for the most part, ap parently of some home-made stuff. we also saw some specimens of the more characteristic winter dress of the canadian, and i have since frequently detected him in new england by his coarse gray homespun capote and picturesque red sash, and his well-furred cap, made to protect his ears against the severity of his climate. /it drizzled all clay, so that the roads did not improve.&quot; we began now to meet with wooden crosses frequently, by the roadside, about a dozen feet high, often old and toppling down, sometimes standing in a square wooden platform, sometimes in a pile of stones, with a little niche containing a picture of the virgin -and child, or of christ alone, sometimes with a string of beads, and covered with a piece of glass to keep out the rain, with the words, pour la vierge, or iniri, on them. frequently, on the cross-bar, there would be quite a collection of symbolical knickknacks, looking like an italian s board ; the representation in wood of a hand, a hammer, spikes, pincers, a flask of vinegar, a ladder, &c., the whole, per chance, surmounted by a weathercock ; but i could not look at an honest weathercock in this walk without mis trusting that there was some covert reference in it to st. peter. from time to time we passed a little one-story chapel-like building, with a tin-roofed spire, a shrine, perhaps it would be called, close to the pathside, with a lattice door, through which we could see an altar, and pictures about the walls ; equally open, through rain and shine, though there was no getting into it. at these places the inhabitants kneeled and perhaps breathed a short prayer. we saw one school-house in our walk, st. anne. 43 . ad listened to the sounds which issued from it ; but it appeared like a place where the process, not of enlight ling, but of obfuscating the mind was going on, and le pupils received only so much light as could pene ate the shadow of the catholic church. the churches ere very picturesque, and their interior much more lowy than the dwelling-houses promised. they were ? stone, for it was ordered, in 1699, that that should be heir material. they had tinned spires, and quaint or laments. that of 1 ange gardien had a dial on it, with lie middle age roman numerals on its face, and some unages in niches on the outside. probably its counter : art has existed in normandy for a thousand years. at i-ie church of chateau richer, which is the next parish to 1 ange gardien, we read, looking over the wall, the inscriptions in the adjacent churchyard, which began with, &quot; id git &quot; or &quot; repose&quot; and one over a boy con tained, &quot; priez pour lui.&quot; this answered as well as p ere la chaise. we knocked at the door of the cure s house here, when a sleek friar-like personage, in his&quot; sacerdotal robe, appeared. to our parlez-vous anglais? even he answered, &quot; non, monsieur &quot; ; but at last we ;aade him understand what we wanted. it was to find the ruins of the old chateau. &quot; ah ! oui ! oui ! &quot; he exclaimed, and, donning his coat, hastened forth, and conducted us to a small heap of rubbish which we had already examined. he said that fifteen vears before, it was plus considerable. seeing at that/ moment three little red birds fly out of a crevice in the ruins, up into ,n arbor-vita3 tree, which grew out of them, i asked lim their names, in such french as i could muster, but le neither understood me nor ornithology ; he only in quired where we had appris a parler frangais / w t e told . 44 a yankee in canada. him, dans les etats-unis; and so we bowed him into his house again. i was surprised to find a man wearing a black coat, and with apparently no work to do, even in that part of the world. the universal salutation from the inhabitants whom we met was bon jour, at the same time touching the hat ; with bon jour, and touching your hat, you may go smoothly through all canada east. a little boy, meet ing us, would remark, &quot; bon jour, monsieur ; le chemin est mauvais&quot; good morning, sir ; it is bad walking. sir francis head says that the immigrant is forward to &quot; appreciate the happiness of living in a land in which the old country s servile custom of touching the hat does not exist,&quot; but he was thinking of canada west, of course. it would, indeed, be a serious bore to be obliged to touch your hat several times a day. a yankee has not leisure for it. we saw peas, and even beans, collected into heaps in the fields. the former are an important crop here, and, i suppose, are not so much infested by the weevil as with us. there were plenty of apples, very fair and sound, by the roadside, but they were so small as to suggest the origin of the apple in the crab. there was also a small red fruit which they called snells, and another, also red and very acid, whose name a little boy wrote for me &quot;pinbena&quot; it is probably the same with, or similar to, the pembina of the voyageurs, a spe cies of viburnum, which, according to richardson, has given its name to many of the rivers of rupert s land. the forest trees were spruce, arborvita3, firs, birches, beeches, two or three kinds of maple, bass-wood, wild cherry, aspens, &c., but no pitch pines (pinus rigidd). i saw very few, if any, trees which had been set out for &quot; st. anne. 45 shade or ornament. the water was commonly running streams or springs in the bank by the roadside, and was excellent. the parishes are commonly separated by a stream, and frequently the farms. i noticed that the fields were furrowed or thrown into beds seven or eight feet wide to dry the soil. at the riviere du sault a la puce, which, i suppose, means the river of the fall of the flea, was advertised in english, as the sportsmen are english, &quot; the best snipe-shooting grounds,&quot; over the door of a small pub lic-house. these words being english affected me as if i had been absent now ten years from my country, and for so long had not heard the sound of my native language, and every one of them was as interesting to me as if i had been a snipe-shooter, and they had been snipes. the prunella or self-heal, in the grass here, was an old acquaintance. we frequently saw the inhabitants washing, or cooking for their pigs, and in one place hackling flax by the roadside. it was pleasant to see these usually domestic operations carried on out of doors, even in that cold country. at twilight we reached a bridge over a little river, the boundary between chateau richer and st. anne, le premier pont de st. anne, and at dark the church of la bonne st. anne. formerly vessels from france, when they came in sight of this church, gave &quot; a general discharge of their artillery,&quot; as a sign of joy that they had escaped all the dangers of the river. though all the while we had grand views of the adjacent country far up and down the river, and, for the most part, when we turned about, of quebec in the horizon behind us, and we never beheld it without new surprise and admi ration ; yet, throughout our walk, the great river of 46 a yankee in canada. canada on our right hand was the main feature in the landscape, and this expands so rapidly below the isle of orleans, and creates such a breadth of level horizon above its waters in that direction, that, looking down the river as we approached the extremity of that island, the st. lawrence seemed to be opening into the ocean, though we were still about three hundred and twenty five miles from what can be called its mouth.* when we inquired here for a maison publique we were directed apparently to that private house where we were most likely to find entertainment. there .were no guideboards where we walked, because there was but one road ; there were no shops nor signs, because there were no artisans to speak of, and the people raised their own provisions; and there were no taverns, because there were no travellers. we here bespoke lodging and breakfast. they had, as usual, a large old-fashioned, two-storied box-stove in the middle of the room, out of which, in due time, there was sure to be forthcoming a supper, breakfast, or dinner. the lower half held the fire, the upper the hot air, and as it was a cool canadian evening, this was a, comforting sight to us. being four or five feet high it warmed the whole person as you stood by it. the stove was plainly a very important article of furniture in canada, and was not set aside during the summer. its size, and the respect which was paid to it, told of the severe winters which it had seen and prevailed over. the master of the house, in his * from mcculloch s geographical dictionary we learn that &quot;im mediately beyond the island of orleans it is a mile broad; where the sagueriay joins it, eighteen miles; at point peter, upwards of thirty; at the bay of seven islands, seventy miles; and at the island of anticosti (about three hundred and fifty miles from quebec) it rolls a flood into the ocean nearly one hundred miles across.&quot; st. anne. 47 long-pointed, red woollen cap, had a thoroughly antique physiognomy of the old norman stamp. he might have come over with jacques cartier. his was the hardest french to understand of any we had heard yet, for there was a great difference between one speaker and another, and this man talked with a pipe in his mouth beside, a kind of tobacco french. i asked him what he called his dog. he shouted brock ! (the name of the breed). we like to hear the cat called min, min ! min ! min ! i inquired if we could cross the river here to the isle of orleans, thinking to return that way when we had been to the falls. he answered, &quot; s ilne fait pas un trop grand vent? if there is not too much wind. they use small boats, or pirogues, and the waves are often too high for them. he wore, as usual, something between a moccasin and a boot, which he called botfes indiennes, in dian boots, and had made himself. the tops were of calf or sheep-skin, and the soles of cowhide turned up like a mocassin. they were yellow or reddish, the leather never having been tanned nor colored. the women wore the same. he told us that he had travelled ten leagues due north into the bush. he had been to the falls of st. anne, and said that they were more beauti ful, but not greater, than montmorenci, plus beau, mais non plus grand que montmorenci. as soon as we had retired, the family commenced their devotions. a little boy officiated, and for a long time we heard him mut tering over his prayers. in the morning, after a breakfast of tea, maple-sugar, bread and butter, arid what i suppose is called potage (potatoes and meat boiled with flour), the universal dish as we found, perhaps the national one, i ran over to the church of la bonne st. anne, whose matin bell we 48 a yankee in canada. had heard, it being sunday morning. our book said that this church had &quot;long been an object of interest, from the miraculous cures said to have been wrought on visitors to the shrine.&quot; there was a profusion of gilding, and i counted more than twenty-five crutches suspended on the walls, some for grown persons, some for children, which it was to be inferred so many sick had been able to dispense with ; but they looked as if they had been made to order by the carpenter who made the church. there were one or two villagers at their devotions at that early hour, who did not look up, but when they had sat a long time with their little book be fore the picture of one saint, went to another. our whole walk was through a thoroughly catholic country, and there was no trace of any other religion. i doubt if there are any more simple and unsophisticated cath olics anywhere. emery de caen, champlain s contem porary, told the huguenot sailors that &quot; monseigneur, the duke de ventadour (viceroy), did not wish that they should sing psalms in the great river.&quot; on our way to the falls, we met the habitans coming to the church of la bonne st. anne, walking or riding in charettes by families. i remarked that they were universally of small stature. the toll-man at the bridge over the st. anne was the first man we had chanced to meet, since we left quebec, who could speak a word of english. how good french the inhabitants of this part of canada speak, i am not competent to say; i only know that it is not made impure by being mixed with english. i do not know why it should not be as good as is spoken in normandy. charlevoix, who was here a hundred years ago, observes, &quot; the french language is nowhere spoken with greater purity, there being no st. anne. 49 accent perceptible &quot; ; and potherie said &quot; they had no dialect, which, indeed, is generally lost in a colony.&quot; the falls, which we were in search of, are three miles up the st. anne. we followed for a short distance a foot-path up the east bank of this river, through hand some sugar-maple and arbor-vitas groves. having lost the path which led to a house where we were to get further directions, we dashed at once into the woods, steering by guess and by compass, climbing directly through woods, a steep hill, or mountain, five or six hundred feet high, which was, in fact, only the bank of the st. lawrence. beyond this we by good luck fell into another path, and following this or a branch of it, at our discretion, through a forest consisting of large white pines, the first we had seen in our walk, we at length heard the roar of falling water, and came out at the head of the falls of st. anne. we had de scended into a ravine or cleft in the mountain, whose walls rose still a hundred feet above us, though we were near its top, and we now stood on a very rocky shore, where the water had lately flowed a dozen feet higher, as appeared by the stones and drift-wood, and large birches twisted and splintered as a farmer twists a withe. here the river, one or two hundred feet wide, came flowing rapidly over a rocky bed out of that in teresting wilderness which stretches toward hudson s bay and davis s straits. ha-ha bay, on the sague nay, was about one hundred miles north of where we stood. looking on the map, i find that the first country on the north which bears a name is that part of ru pert s land called east main. this river, called after the holy anne, flowing from such a direction, here tum bled over a precipice, at present by three channels, how 50 a yankee in canada. far down i do not know, but far enough for all our pur poses, and to as good a distance as if twice as far. it matters little whether you cull it one, or two, or three hundred feet ; at any rate, it was a sufficient water privilege for us. i crossed the principal channel di rectly over the verge of the fall, where it was con tracted to about fifteen feet in width by a dead tree, which had been dropped across and secured in a cleft of the opposite rock, and a smaller one a few feet higher, which served for a hand-rail. this bridge was rotten as well as small and slippery, being stripped of bark, and i was obliged to seize a moment to pass when the falling water did not surge over it, and mid-way, though at the expense of wet feet, i looked down proba bly more than a hundred feet, into the mist and foam below. this gave me the freedom of an island of pre cipitous rock, by which i descended as by giant steps, the rock being composed of large cubical masses, clothed with delicate close-hugging lichens of various colors, kept fresh and bright by the moisture, till i viewed the first fall from the front, and looked down still deeper to where the second and third channels fell into a remark ably large circular basin worn in the stone. the falling water seemed to jar the very rocks, and the noise to be ever increasing. the vista down stream was through a narrow and deep cleft in the mountain, all white suds at the bottom ; but a sudden angle in this gorge prevented my seeing through to the bottom of the fall. returning to the shore, i made my way down stream through the forest to see how far the fall extended, and how the river came out of that adventure. it was to clamber along the side of a precipitous mountain of loose mossy rocks, covered with a damp primitive forest, and termi st. anne. 51 nating at the bottom in an abrupt precipice over the stream. this was the east side of the fall. at length, after a quarter of a mile, i got down to still water, and, on looking up through the winding gorge, i could just see to the foot of the fall which i had before examined ; while from the opposite side of the stream, here much contracted, rose a perpendicular wall, i will not venture to say how many hundred feet, but only that it was the highest perpendicular wall of bare rock that i ever saw. in front of me tumbled in from the summit of the cliff a tributary stream, making a beautiful cascade, which was a remarkable fall in itself, and there was a cleft in this precipice, apparently four or five feet wide, perfectly straight up and down from top to bottom, which, from its cavernous depth and darkness, appeared merely as a hack streak. this precipice is not sloped, nor is the material soft and crumbling slate as at montmorenci, but it rises perfectly perpendicular, like the side of a mountain fortress, and is cracked into vast cubical masses of gray and black rock shining with moisture, as if it were the ruin of an ancient wall built by titans. birches, spruces, mountain-ashes with their bright red berries, arbor-vitaes, white pines, alders, &c., overhung this chasm on the very verge of the cliff and in the crevices, and here and there were buttresses of rock supporting trees part way down, yet so as to enhance, not injure, the effect of the bare rock. take it alto gether, it was a most wild and rugged and stupendous chasm, so deep and narrow where a river had worn it self a passage through a mountain of rock, and all around was the comparatively untrodden wilderness. this was the limit of our walk down the st. law rence. early in the afternoon we began to retrace our 52 a yankee in canada. steps, not being able to cross the north channel and re turn by the isle of orleans, on account of the trop grand vent, or too great wind. though the waves did run pretty high, it was evident that the inhabitants of mont morenci county were no sailors, and made but little use of the river. when we reached the bridge, between st. anne and chateau richer, i ran back a little way to ask a man in the field the name of the river which we were crossing, but for a long time i could not make out what he said, for he was one of the more unintelli gible jacques carder men. at last it flashed upon me that it was la riviere au chien, or the dog river, which my eyes beheld, which brought to my mind the life of the canadian voyageur and coureur de bois, a more western and wilder arcadia, me thinks, than the world has ever seen ; for the greeks, with all their wood and river gods, were not so qualified to name the natural features of a country, as the ancestors of these french canadians ; and if any people had a right to substitute their own for the indian names, it was they. they have preceded the pioneer on our own frontiers, and named the prairie for us. la riviere au chien cannot, by any license of language, be translated into dog river, for that is not such a giving it to the dogs, and recognizing their place in creation as the french implies. one of the tributaries of the st. anne is named la riviere de la rose ; and farther east are, la riviere de la blondelle, and la riviere de la friponne. their very riviere meanders more than our river. yet the impression which this country made on me was commonly different from this. to a traveller from the old world, canada east may appear like a new country, and its inhabitants like colonists, but to me, st. anne. 53 coming from new england, and being a very green traveller withal, notwithstanding what i have said about hudson s bay, it appeared as old as normandy itself, and realized much that i had heard of europe arid the middle ages. even the names of humble canadian villages affected me as if they had been those of the renowned cities of antiquity. to be told by a habitan, when i asked the name of a village in sight, that it is st. fereole or st. anne, the guardian angel or the holy joseph s ; or of a mountain, that it was selange or st. hyacinthe ! as soon as you leave the states, these saintly names begin. st. john is the first town you stop at (fortunately we did not see it), and thenceforward, the names of the mountains, and streams, and villages reel, if i may so speak, with the intoxi cation of poetry ; chamuy, longueil, pointe aux trembles, bartholomy, &c., &c. ; as if it needed only a little foreign accent, a few more liquids and vowels per chance in the language, to make us locate our ideals at once. i began to dream of provence and the trouba dours, and of places and things which have no existence on the earth. they veiled the indian and the primitive forest, and the woods toward hudson s bay, were only as the forests of france and germany. i could not at once bring myself to believe that the inhabitants who pronounced daily those beautiful and, to me, significant names, lead as prosaic lives as we of new england. in short, the canada which i saw was not merely a placo for railroads to terminate in and for criminals to run to. when i asked the man to whom i have referred, if there were any falls on the riviere au chien, for i saw that it came over the same high bank with the montmo renci and st. anne, he answered that there were. 54 a yankee in canada. how far ? i inquired. trois quatres lieue. how high ? je pense, quatre-vingt-dix pieds ; that is, ninety feet. we turned aside to look at the falls of the riviere du sault a la pace, half a mile from the road, which before we had passed in our haste and ignorance, and we pro nounced them as beautiful as any that we saw ; yet they seemed to make no account of them there, and, when first we inquired the way to the falls, directed us to montmorenci, seven miles distant. it was evident that this was the country for waterfalls ; that every stream that empties into the st. lawrence, for some hundreds of miles, must have a great fall or cascade on it, and in its passage through the mountains was, for a short distance, a small saguenay, with its upright walls. this fall of la puce, the least remarkable of the four which we visited in this vicinity, we had never heard of till we came to canada, and yet, so far as i know, there is nothing of the kind in new england to be compared with it. most travellers in canada would not hear of it, though they might go so near as to hear it. since my return i find that in the topographical description of the country mention is made of &quot; two or three romantic falls &quot; on this stream, though we saw and heard of but this one. ask the inhabitants respecting any stream, if there is a fall on it, and they will perchance tell you of something as interesting as bashpishror the catskill, which no traveller has ever seen, or if they have not found it, you may possibly trace up the stream and dis cover it yourself. falls there are a drug ; and we be came quite dissipated in respect to them. we had drank too much of them. beside these which i have referred to, there are a thousand other falls on the st. lawrence and its tributaries which i have not seen nor st. anne. 55 heard of; and above all there is one which i have heard of, called niagara, so that i think that this river must be the most remarkable for its falls of any in the world. at a house near the western boundary of chateau richer, whose master was said to speak a very little english, having recently lived at quebec, we got lodg ing for the night. as usual, we had to go down a lane to get round to the south side of the house where the door was, away from the road. for these canadian houses have no front door, properly speaking. every part is for the use of the occupant exclusively, and no part has reference to the traveller or to travel. every new england house, on the contrary, has a front and principal door opening to the great world, though it may be on the cold side, for it stands on the highway of na tions, and the road which runs by it comes from the old world and goes to the far west ; but the canadian s door opens into his back-yard and farm alone, and the road which runs behind his house leads only from the church of one saint to that of another. we found a large family, hired men, wife and children, just eating their supper. they prepared some for us afterwards. the hired men were a merry crew of short, black-eyed fellows, and the wife a thin-faced, sharp-featured french canadian woman. our host s english staggered us rather more than any french we had heard yet ; indeed, we found that even we spoke better french than he did english, and we concluded that a less crime would be committed on the whole if we spoke french with him, and in no respect aided or abetted his attempts to speak english. we had a long and merry chat with the fam ily this sunday evening in their spacious kitchen. while my companion smoked a pipe and paiiez-vous d with one 56 a yankee in canada. party, i parleyed and gesticulated to another. the whole family was enlisted, and i kept a little girl writ ing what was otherwise unintelligible. the geography getting obscure, we called for chalk, and the greasy oiled table-cloth having been wiped, for it needed no french, but only a sentence from the universal language of looks on my part, to indicate that it needed it, we drew the st. lawrence, with its parishes, thereon, and thenceforward went on swimmingly, by turns handling the chalk and committing to the table-cloth what would otherwise have been left in a limbo of unintelligibility. this was greatly to the entertainment of all parties. i was amused to hear how much use they made of the word oui in conversation with one another. after re peated single insertions of it, one would suddenly throw back his head at the same time with his chair, and ex claim rapidly, &quot;oui! oui! oui! oui!&quot; like a yankee driving pigs. our host told us that the farms there abouts were generally two acres, or three hundred and sixty french feet wide, by one and a half leagues, (?) or a little more than four and a half of our miles deep. this use of the word acre as long measure arises from the fact that the french acre or arpent, the arpent of paris, makes a square of ten perches, of eighteen feet each on a side, a paris foot being equal to 1.06575 english feet. he said that the wood was cut off about one mile from the river. the rest was &quot; bush,&quot; and beyond that the &quot; queen s bush.&quot; old as the country is, each landholder bounds on the primitive forest, and fuel bears no price. as i had forgotten the french for sickle, they went out in the evening to the barn and got one, and so clenched the certainty of our understanding one another. then, wishing to learn if they used the st. anne. 57 cradle, and not knowing any french word for this in strument, i set up the knives and forks on the blade of the sickle to represent one ; at which they all exclaimed that they knew and had used it. when snells were mentioned they went out in the dark and plucked some. they were pretty good. they said they had three kinds of plums growing wild, blue, white, and red, the two former much alike and the best. also they asked me if i would have des pommes, some apples, and got me some. they were exceedingly fair and glossy, and it was evident that there was no worm in them ; but they were as hard almost as a stone, as if the season was too short to mellow them. we had seen no soft and yellow apples by the roadside. i declined eating one, much as i admired it, observing that it would be good dans le pr in temps, in the spring. in the morning when the mistress had set the eggs a-frying she nodded to a thick-set, jolly-looking fellow, who rolled up his sleeves, seized the long-handled griddle, and com menced a series of revolutions and evolutions with it, ever and anon tossing its contents into the air, where they turned completely topsy-turvy and came down t other side up ; and this he repeated till they were done. that appeared to be his duty when eggs were concerned. i did not chance to witness this perform ance, but my companion did, and he pronounced it a master-piece in its way. this man s farm, with the buildings, cost seven hundred pounds ; some smaller ones, two hundred. in 1827, montmorenci county, to which the isle of orleans has since been added, was nearly as large as massachusetts, being the eighth county out of forty (in lower canada) in extent ; but by far the greater part 3* 58 a yankee in canada. still must continue to be waste land, lying, as it were, under the walls of quebec. i quote these old statistics, not merely because of the difficulty of obtaining more recent ones, but also because i saw there so little evidence of any recent growth. there were in this county, at the same date, five roman catholic churches, and no others, five cure s and five presbyteries, two schools, two corn mills, four saw-mills, one carding-mill, no medical man, or notary or lawyer, five shopkeepers, four taverns (we saw no sign of any, though, after a little hesitation, we were sometimes directed to some undis tinguished hut as such), thirty artisans, and five river crafts, whose tonnage amounted to sixty-nine tons ! this, notwithstanding that it has a frontage of more than thirty miles on the river, and the population is almost wholly confined to its banks. this describes nearly enough what we saw. but double some of these figures, which, however, its growth will not warrant, and you have described a poverty which not even its severity of climate and ruggedness of soil will suffice to account for. the . principal productions were wheat, potatoes, oats, hay, peas, flax, maple-sugar, &c., &c. ; linen, cloth, or etoffe du pays, flannel, and homespun, or petite etoffe. in lower canada; according to bouchette, there are two tenures, the feudal and the socage. tenanciers, censitaires, or holders of land en roture, pay a small annual rent to the seigneurs, to which &quot; is added some article of provision, such as a couple of fowls, or a goose, or a bushel of wheat.&quot; &quot; they are also bound to grind their corn at the moulin banal, or the lord s mill, where one fourteenth part of it is taken for his use &quot; as toll. lie says that the toll is one twelfth in the united states, st. anne. 59 where competition exists. it is not permitted to exceed one sixteenth in massachusetts. but worse than this monopolizing of mill rents is what are called lods et ventes, or mutation fines. according to which the seig neur has &quot; a right to a twelfth part of the purchase money of every estate within his seigniory that changes its owner by sale.&quot; this is over and above the sum paid to the seller. in such cases, moreover, &quot; the lord possesses the droit de retrait, which is the privilege of pre-emption at the highest bidden price within forty days after the sale has taken place,&quot; a right which, however, is said to be seldom exercised. &quot; lands held by roman catholics are further subject to the payment to their curates of one twenty-sixth part of all the grain produced upon them, and to occasional assessments for building and repairing churches,&quot; &c., a tax to which they are not subject if the proprietors change their faith; but they are not the less attached to their church in con sequence. there are, however, various modifications of the feudal tenure. under the socage tenure, which is that of the townships or more recent settlements, eng lish, irish, scotch, and others, and generally of canada west, the landholder is wholly unshackled by such con ditions as i. have quoted, and &quot; is bound to no other obli gations than those of allegiance to the king and obedi ence to the laws.&quot; throughout canada &quot; a freehold of forty shillings yearly value, or the payment of ten pounds rent annually, is the qualification for voters.&quot; in 184g more than one sixth of the whole population of canada east were qualified to vote for members of par liament, a greater proportion than enjoy a similar privilege in the united states. the population which we had seen the last two days, 60 a yankee in canada. i mean the habitans of montmorenci county, ap peared very inferior, intellectually and even physically, to that of new england. in some respects they were incredibly filthy. it was evident that they had not ad vanced since the settlement of the country, that they were quite behind the age, and fairly represented their ancestors in normandy a thousand years ago. even in respect to the common arts of life, they are not so far advanced as a frontier town in the west three years old. they have no money invested in railroad stock, and probably never will have. if they have got a french phrase for a railroad, it is as much as you can expect of them. they are very far from a revolution ; have no quarrel with church or state, but their vice and their virtue is content. as for annexation, they have never dreamed of it ; indeed, they have not a clear idea what or where the states are. the english govern ment has been remarkably liberal to its catholic sub jects in canada, permitting them to wear their own fetters, both political and religious, as far as was possible for subjects. their government is even too good for them. parliament passed &quot;an act [in 1825] to provide for the extinction of feudal and seigniorial rights and burdens on lands in lower canada, and for the gradual conversion of those tenures into the tenure of free and common socage,&quot; &c. but as late as 1831, at least, the design of the act was likely to be frustrated, owing to the reluctance of the seigniors and peasants. it has been observed by another that the french canadians do not extend nor perpetuate their influence. the british, irish, and other immigrants, who have settled the town ships, are found to have imitated the american settlers, and not the french. they reminded me in this of the st. anne. 61 indians, whom they were slow to displace and to whose habits of life they themselves more readily conformed than the indians to theirs. the governorgeneral denouville remarked, in 1685, that some had long thought that it was necessary to bring the indians near them in order to frenchify (franciser) them, but that they had every reason to think themselves in an error ; for those who had come near them and were even col lected in villages in the midst of the colony had not become french, but the french, who had haunted them, had become savages. kalrn said: &quot;though many nations imitate the french customs, yet i observed, on the con trary, that the french in canada, in many respects, fol low the customs of the indians, with whom they converse every day. they make use of the tobacco-pipes, shoes, garters, and girdles of the indians. they follow the indian way of making war with exactness ; they mix the same things with tobacco (he might have said that both french and english learned the use itself of this weed of the indian) ; they make use of the indian bark boats, and row them in the indian way ; they wrap square pieces of cloth round their feet instead of stock ings ; and have adopted many other indian fashions.&quot; thus, while the descendants of the pilgrims are teach ing the english to make pegged boots, the descendants of the french in canada are wearing the indian moc casin still. the french, to their credit be it said, to a certain extent respected the indians as a separate and independent people, and spoke of them and contrasted themselves with them as the english have never done. they not only went to war with them as allies, but they lived at home with them as neighbors. in 1627 the french king declared &quot; that the descendants of the 62 a yankee in canada. french, settled in &quot; new france, &quot; and the savages who should be brought to the knowledge of the faith, and should make profession of it, should be counted and reputed french born (naturels frangois) ; and as such could emigrate to france, when it seemed good to them, and there acquire, will, inherit, &c., &c., without obtain ing letters of naturalization.&quot; when the english had possession of quebec, in 1630, the indians, attempting to practise the same familiarity with them that they had with the french, were driven out of their houses with blows ; which accident taught them a difference be tween the two races, and attached them yet more to the french. the impression made on me was, that the french canadians were even sharing the fate of the in dians, or at least gradually disappearing in what is called the saxon current. the english did not come to america from a mere love of adventure, nor to truck with or convert the sav ages, nor to hold offices under the crown, as the french to a great extent did, but to live in earnest and with freedom. the latter overran a great extent of country, selling strong water, and collecting its furs, and convert ing its inhabitants, or at least baptizing its dying infants (enfans moribonds), without improving it. first, went the coureur de bois with the eau de vie; then followed, if he did not precede, the heroic missionary with the eau d immortalite. it was freedom to hunt, and fish, and convert, not to work, that they sought. hontan says that the coureurs de bois lived like sailors ashore. in no part of the seventeenth century could the french be said to have had a foothold in canada ; they held only by the fur of the wild animals which they were exterminating. to enable the poor seigneurs st. anne. 63 to get their living, it was permitted by a decree passed in the reign of louis the fourteenth, in 1685, &quot;to all nobles and gentlemen settled in canada, to engage in commerce, without being called to account or reputed to have done anything derogatory.&quot; the reader can infer to what extent they had engaged in agriculture, and how their farms must have shone by this time. the new england youth, on the other hand, were never coureurs de bois nor voyageurs, but backwoodsmen and sailors rather. of all nations the english undoubtedly have proved hitherto that they had the most business here. yet i am not sure but i have most sympathy with that spirit of adventure which distinguished the french and spaniards of those days, and made them especially the explorers of the american continent, which so early carried the former to the great lakes and the mississippi on the north, and the latter to the same rfver on the south. it was long before our fron tiers reached their settlements in the west. so far as inland discovery was concerned, the adventurous spirit of the english was that of sailors who land but for a day, and their enterprise the enterprise of traders. there was apparently a greater equality of condition among the habitans of montmorenci county than in new england. they are an almost exclusively agri cultural, and so far independent, population, each fam ily producing nearly all the necessaries of life for itself. if the canadian wants energy, perchance he possesses those virtues, social and others, which the yankee lacks, in which case he cannot be regarded as a poor man. 64 a yankee in canada. chapter iv. the walls of quebec. after spending the night at a farm-house in chateau richer, about a dozen miles northeast of quebec, we set out on our return to the city. we stopped at the next house, a picturesque old stone mill, over the ghi pre, for so the name sounded, such as you will nowhere see in the states, and asked the millers the age of the mill. they went up stairs to call the master ; but the crabbed old miser asked why we wanted to know, and would tell us only for some compensation. i wanted french to give him a piece of my mind. i had got enough to talk on a pinch, but not to quarrel ; so i had to come away, looking all i would have said. this was the utmost incivility we met with in canada. in beauport, within a few miles of quebec, we turned aside to look at a church which was just being com pleted, a very large and handsome edifice of stone, with a green bough stuck in its gable, of some significance to catholics. the comparative wealth of the church in this country was apparent ; for in this village we did not see one good house besides. they were all humble cot tages ; and yet this appeared to me a more imposing structure than any church in boston. but i am no judge of these things. re-entering quebec through st. john s gate, we took a caleche in market square for the falls of the chau diere, about nine miles southwest of the city, for which we were to pay so much, beside forty sous for tolls. the driver, as usual, spoke french only. the number of the walls of quebec. 65 these vehicles is very great for so small a town. they are like one of our chaises that has lost its top, only stouter and longer in the body, with a seat for the driver where the dasher is with us, and broad leather ears on each side to protect the riders from the wheel and keep children from falling out. they had an easy jaunting look, which, as our hours were numbered, persuaded us to be riders. we met with them on every road near quebec these days, each with its complement of two in quisitive-looking foreigners and a canadian driver, the former evidently enjoying their novel experience, for commonly it is only the horse whose language you do not understand ; but they were one remove further from him by the intervention of an equally unintelligible driver. we crossed the st. lawrence to point levi in a french-canadian ferry-boat, which was incon venient and dirty, and managed with great noise and bustle. the current was very strong and tumultuous, and the boat tossed enough to make some sick, though it was only a mile across ; yet the wind was not to be com pared with that of the day before, and we saw that the canadians had a good excuse for not taking us over to the isle of orleans in a pirogue, however shiftless they may be for not having provided any other conveyance. the route which we took to the chaudiere did not af ford us those views of quebec which we had expected, and the country and inhabitants appeared less interesting to a traveller than those we had seen. the falls of the chaudiere are three miles from its mouth on the south side of the st. lawrence. though they were the largest which i saw in canada, i was not proportionately inter ested by them, probably from satiety. i did not see any peculiar propriety in the name chaudiere^ or caldron. i 66 a yankee in canada. saw here the most brilliant rainbow that i ever imagined. it was just across the stream below the precipice, formed on the mist which this tremendous fall produced ; and i stood on a level with the key-stone of its arch. it was not a few faint prismatic colors merely, but a full semi circle, only four or five rods in ^diameter, though as wide as usual, so intensely bright as to pain the eye, and ap parently as substantial as an arch of stone. it changed its position and colors as we moved, and was the brighter because the sun shone so clearly and the mist was so thick. evidently a picture painted on mist for the men and animals that came to the falls to look at ; but for what special purpose beyond this, i know not. at the farthest point in this ride, and when most inland, unex pectedly at a turn in the road we descried the frowning citadel of quebec in the horizon, like the beak of a bird of prey. we returned by the river-road under the bank, which is very high, abrupt, and rocky. when we were opposite to quebec, i was surprised to see that in the lower town, under the shadow of the rock, the lamps were lit, twinkling not unlike crystals in a cavern, while the citadel high above, and we, too, on the south shore, were in broad daylight. as we were too late for the ferry-boat that night, we put up at a maison de pension at point levi. the usual two-story stove was here placed against an opening in the partition shaped like a fireplace, and so warmed several rooms. we could not understand their french here very well, but the potage was just like what we had had before. there were many small chambers with doorways but no doors. the walls of our chamber, all around and overhead, were neatly ceiled, and the timbers cased with wood un painted. the pillows were checkered and tasselled, and the walls of quebec. 67 the usual long-pointed red woollen or worsted night-cap was placed on each. i pulled mine out to see how it was made. it was in the form of a double cone, one end tucked into the other ; just such, it appeared, as i saw men wearing all day in the streets. probably i should have put it on if the cold had been then, as it is sometimes there, thirty or forty degrees below zero. when we landed at quebec the next morning, a man lay on his back on the wharf, apparently dying, in the midst of a crowd and directly in the path of the horses, groaning, &quot; ma conscience ! &quot; i thought that he pro nounced his french more distinctly than any i heard, as if the dying had already acquired the accents of a uni versal language. having secured the only unengaged berths in the lord sydenham steamer, which was to leave quebec before sundown, and being resolved, now that i had seen somewhat of the country, to get an idea of the city, i proceeded to walk round the upper town, or fortified portion, which is two miles and three quarters in circuit, alone, as near as i could get to the cliff and the walls, like a rat looking for a hole ; going round by the southwest, where there is but a single street between the cliff and the water, and up the long, wooden stairs, through the suburbs northward to the king s woodyard, which i thought must have been a long way from his fireplace, and under the cliffs of the st. charles, where the drains issue under the walls, and the walls are loop holed for musketry ; so returning by mountain street and prescott gate to the upper town. having found my way by an obscure passage near the st. louis gate to the glacis on the north of the citadel proper, i be lieve that i was the only visitor then in the city who got in there, i enjoyed a prospect nearly as good as from 68 a yankee in canada. within the citadel itself, which i had explored some days before. as i walked on the glacis i heard the sound of a bagpipe from the soldiers dwellings in the rock, and was further soothed and affected by the sight of a sol dier s cat walking up a elected plank into a high loop hole, designed for mus-catry, as serene as wisdom her self, and with a gracefully waving motion of her tail, as if her ways were ways of pleasantness and all her paths were peace. scaling a slat fence, where a small force might have checked me, i got out of the esplanade into the governor s garden, and read the well-known in scription on wolfe and montcalm s monument, which for saying much in little, and that to the purpose, un doubtedly deserved the prize medal which it received : mortem . virtus . communem . famam . historia . monumentum . posteritas . dedit. valor gave them one death, history one fame, posterity one monument. the government garden has for nose gays, amid kitchen vegetables, beside the common gar den flowers, the usual complement of cannon directed toward some future and possible enemy. i then re turned up st. louis street to the esplanade and ram parts there, and went round the upper town once more, though i was very tired, this time on the inside of the wall ; for i knew that the wall was the main thing in quebec, and had cost a great deal of money, and there fore i must make the most of it. in fact, these are the only remarkable walls we have in north america, though we have a good deal of virginia fence, it is true. moreover, i cannot say but i yielded in some measure the walls of quebec. 69 to the soldier instinct, and, having but a short time to spare, thought it best to examine the wall thoroughly, that i might be the better prepared if i should ever be called that way again in the service of my country. i committed all the gates to memory in their order, which did not cost me so much trouble as it would have done at the hundred-gated city, there being only five ; nor were they so hard to remember as those seven of boeo tian thebes ; and, moreover, i thought that, if seven champions were enough against the latter, one would be enough against quebec, though he bore for all armor and device only an umbrella and a bundle. i took the nunneries as i went, for i had learned to distinguish them by the blinds ; and i observed also the foundling hospitals and the convents, and whatever was attached to, or in the vicinity of the walls. all the rest i omitted, as naturally as one would the inside of an inedible shell fish. these were the only pearls, and the wall the only mother-of-pearl for me. quebec is chiefly famous for the thickness of its parietal bones. the technical terms of its conchology may stagger a beginner a little at first, such as banlieue, esplanade, glacis, ravelin, cavalier, &c., &c., but with the aid of a comprehensive dictionary you soon learn the na ture of your ground. i was sur prised at the extent of the artillery barracks, built so long ago, casernes nouvelles, they used to be called, nearly six hundred feet in length by forty in depth, where the sentries, like peripatetic philosophers, were so absorbed in thought, as not to notice me when i passed in and out at the gates. within, are &quot; small arms of every description, sufficient for the equipment of twenty thousand men,&quot; so arranged as to give a startling coup d oeil to strangers. i did not enter, not wishing to 70 a yankee in canada. get a black eye ; for they are said to be &quot; in a state of complete repair and readiness for immediate use.&quot; here, for a short time, i lost sight of the wall, but i recovered it again on emerging from the barrack yard. there i met with a scotchman who appeared to have business with the wall, like myself; and, being thus mutually drawn together by a similarity of tastes, we had a little conversation sub moenibus, that is, by an angle of the wall which sheltered us. he lived about thirty miles northwest of quebec ; had been nineteen years in the country ; said he was disappointed that he was not brought to america after all, but found himself still under british rule and where his own language was not spoken ; that many scotch, irish, and english were dis appointed in like manner, and either went to the states, or pushed up the river to canada west, nearer to the states, and where their language was spoken. he talked of visiting the states some time ; and, as he seemed ignorant of geography, i warned him that it was one thing to visit the state of massachusetts, and another to visit the state of california. he said it was colder there than usual at that season, and he was lucky to have brought his thick togue, or frock-coat, with him ; thought it would snow, and then be pleasant and warm. that is the way we are always thinking. however, his words were music to me in my thin hat and sack. at the ramparts on the cliff near the old parliament house i counted twenty-four thirty-two-pounders in a row, pointed over the harbor, with their balls piled pyramid-wise between them, there are said to be in all about one hundred and eighty guns mounted at que bec, all which were faithfully kept dusted by officials, in accordance with the motto, &quot; in time of peace pre the walls of quebec. 71 pare for war &quot; ; but i saw no preparations for peace : she was plainly an uninvited guest. having thus completed the circuit of this fortress, both within and without, i went no farther by the wall for fear that i should become wall-eyed. however, i think that i deserve to be made a member of the royal sappers and miners. in short, i observed everywhere the most perfect arrangements for keeping a wall in order, not even permitting the lichens to grow on it, which some think an ornament ; but then i saw no cultivation nor pastur ing within it to pay for the outlay, and cattle were strictly forbidden to feed on the glacis under the se verest penalties. where the dogs get their milk i don t know, and i fear it is bloody at best. the citadel of quebec says, &quot;i will live here, and you sha n t prevent me.&quot; to which you return, that you have not the slightest objection ; live and let live. the martello towers looked, for all the world, exactly like abandoned wind-mills which had not had a grist to grind these hundred years. indeed, the whole castle here was a &quot; folly,&quot; england s folly, and, in more senses than one, a castle in the air. the inhabitants and the govern ment are gradually waking up to a sense of this truth ; for i heard something said about their abandoning the wall around the upper town, and confining the fortifi cations to the citadel of forty acres. of course they will finally reduce their intrenchments to the circum ference of their own brave hearts. the most modern fortifications have an air of antiq uity about them ; they have the aspect of ruins in better or worse repair from the day they are built, because they are not really the work of this age. the very 72 a yankee in canada. place where the soldier resides has a peculiar tendency to become old and dilapidated, as the word barrack im plies. i couple all fortifications in my mind with the dismantled spanish forts to be found in so many parts of the world ; and if in any place they are not actually dismantled, it is because that there the intellect of the inhabitants is dismantled. the commanding officer of an old fort near valdivia in south america, when a traveller remarked to him that, with one discharge, his gun-carriages would certainly fall to pieces, gravely re plied, &quot;no, i am sure, sir, they would stand two.&quot; perhaps the guns of quebec would stand three. such structures carry us back to the middle ages, the siege of jerusalem, and st. jean d acre, and the days of the bucaniers. in the armory of the citadel they showed me a clumsy implement, long since useless, which they called a lombard gun. i thought that their whole cita del was such a lombard gun, fit object for the museums of the curious. such works do not consist with the de velopment of the intellect. huge stone structures of all kinds, both in their erection and by their influence when erected, rather oppress than liberate the mind. they are tombs for the souls of men, as frequently for their bodies also. the sentinel with his musket beside a man with his umbrella is spectral. there is not suffi cient reason for his existence. does my friend there, with a bullet resting on half an ounce of powder, think that he needs that argument in conversing with me ? the fort was the first institution that was founded here, and it is amusing to read in charnplain how assiduously they worked at it almost from the first day of the settlement. the founders of the colony thought this an excellent site for a wall, and no doubt it was a better site, in some the walls of quebec. 73 respects, for a wall than for a city, but it chanced that a city got behind it. it chanced, too, that a lower town got before it, and clung like an oyster to the outside of the crags, as you may see at low tide. it is as if you were to come to a country village surrounded by pali sades in the old indian fashion, interesting only as a relic of antiquity and barbarism. a fortified town is like a man cased in the heavy armor of antiquity, with a horse-load of broadswords and small arms slung to him, endeavoring to go about his business. or is this an indispensable machinery for the good government of the country ? the inhabitants of california succeed pretty well, and are doing better and better every day, without any such institution. what use has this for tress served, to look at it even from the soldiers point of view ? at first the french took care of it ; yet wolfe sailed by it with impunity, and took the town of quebec without experiencing any hinderance at last from its fortifications. they were only the bone for which the parties fought. then the english began to take care of it. so of any fort in the world, that in boston harbor, for instance. we shall at length hear that an enemy sailed by it in the night, for it cannot sail itself, and both it and its inhabitants are always benighted. how often we read that the enemy occupied a position which commanded the old, and so the fort was evacuated. have not the school-house and the printing-press occu pied a position which commands such a fort as this ? however, this is a ruin kept in remarkably good re pair. there are some eight hundred or thousand men there to exhibit it. one regiment goes bare-legged to increase the attraction. if you wish to study the mus cles of the leg about the knee, repair to quebec. this s 4 74 a yankee in canada. universal exhibition in canada of the tools and sinews of war reminded me of the keeper of a menagerie show ing his animals claws. it was the english leopard showing his claws. always the royal something or other; as, at the menagerie, the royal bengal tiger. silliman states that &quot; the cold is so intense in the winter nights, particularly on cape diamond, that the sentinels cannot stand it more than one hour, and are relieved at the expiration of that time&quot;; &quot; and -even, as it is said, at much shorter intervals, in case of the most extreme cold.&quot; what a natural or unnatural fool must that sol dier be, to say nothing of his government, who, when quicksilver is freezing and blood is ceasing to be quick, will stand to have his face frozen, watching the walls of quebec, though, so far as they are concerned, both honest and dishonest men all the \vorld over have been in their beds nearly half a century, or at least for that space travellers have visited quebec only as they would read history. i shall never again wake up in a colder night than usual, but i shall think how rapidly the sentinels are relieving one another on the walls of quebec, their quicksilver being all frozen, as if apprehensive that some hostile wolfe may even then be scaling the heights of abraham, or some persever ing arnold about to issue from the wilderness ; some malay or japanese, perchance, coming round by the northwest coast, have chosen that moment to assault the citadel ! why i should as soon expect to find the sentinels still relieving one another on the walls of nin eveh, which have so long been buried to the world ! what a troublesome thing a wall is ! i thought it was to defend me, and not i it. of course, if they had no wall they would not need to have any sentinels. the walls of quebec. 75 you might venture to advertise this farm as well fenced with substantial stone walls (saying nothing about the eight hundred highlanders and royal irish who are required to keep them from toppling down) ; stock and tools to go with the land if desired. but it would not be wise for the seller to exhibit his farm book. why should canada, wild and unsettled as it is, im press us as an older country than the states, unless because her institutions are old ? all things appeared to contend there, as i have implied, with a certain rust of antiquity, such as forms on old armor and iron guns, the rust of conventions and formalities. it is said that the metallic roofs of montreal and quebec keep sound and bright for forty years in some cases. but if the rust was not on the tinned roofs and spires, it was on the inhabitants and their institutions. yet the work of burnishing goes briskly forward. i imagined that the government vessels at the wharves were laden with rot ten-stone and oxalic acid, that is what the first ship from england in the spring comes freighted with, and the hands of the colonial legislature are cased in wash leather. the principal exports must be gunny bags, verdigrease, and iron rust. those who first built this fort, coming from old france with the memory and tradition of feudal days and customs weighing on them, were unquestionably behind their age ; and those who now inhabit and repair it are behind their ancestors or predecessors. those old chevaliers thought that they could transplant the feudal system to america. it has been set out, but it has not thriven. notwithstanding that canada was settled first, and, unlike new england, for a long series of years enjoyed the fostering care of 7g a yankee in canada. the mother country, notwithstanding that, as charle voix tells us, it had more of the ancient noblesse among its early settlers than any other of the french colonies, and perhaps than all the others together, there are in both the canadas but 600,000 of french descent to-day, about half so many as the population of massachusetts. the whole population of both canadas is but about 1,700,000 canadians, english, irish, scotch, indians, and all, put together ! samuel laing, in his essay on the northmen, to whom especially, rather than the sax ons, he refers the energy and indeed the excellence of the english character, observes that, when they occupied scandinavia, &quot; each man possessed his lot of land with out reference to, or acknowledgment of, any other man, without any local chief to whom his military service or other quit-rent for his land was due, without ten ure from, or duty or obligation to, any superior, real or fictitious, except the general sovereign. the individual settler held his land, as his descendants in norway still express it, by the same right as the king held his crown, by udal right, or adel, that is, noble right.&quot; the french have occupied canada, not udally, or by noble right, but feudally, or by ignoble right. they* are a nation of peasants. it was evident that, both on account of the feudal system and the aristocratic government, a private man was not worth so much in canada as in the united i states ; and, if your wealth in any measure consists in manliness, in originality, and independence, you had better stay here. how could a peaceable, freethiriking man live neighbor to the forty -ninth regiment? a new englander would naturally be a bad citizen, probably a rebel, there, certainly if he were already a rebel at the walls of quebec. 77 home. i suspect that a poor man who is not servile is a much rarer phenomenon there and in england than in the northern united states. an englishman, me thinks, not to speak of other european nations, habitually regards himself merely as a constituent part of the english nation ; he is a member of the royal regiment of englishmen, and is proud of his company, as he has reason to be proud of it. but an american, one who has made a tolerable use of his opportuni ties, cares, comparatively, little about such things, and is advantageously nearer to the primitive and the ulti mate condition of man in these respects. it is a govern ment, that english one, like most other european ones, that cannot afford to be forgotten, as you would nat urally forget it ; under which one cannot be wholesomely neglected, and grow up a man and not an englishman merely, cannot be a poet even without danger of being made poet-laureate ! give me a country where it is the jj most natural thing in the world for a government that ( does not understand you to let you alone. one would . say that a true englishman could speculate only within bounds. (it is true the americans have proved that they, in more than one sense, can speculate without bounds.) he has to pay his respects to so many things, that, before he knows it, he may have paid away all he is worth. what makes the united states government, on the whole, more tolerable, i mean for us lucky white men, is the fact that there is so much less of govern ment with us. here it is only once in a month or a year that a man needs remember that institution ; and those who go to congress can play the game of the kilkenny cats there without fatal consequences to those who stay at home, their term is so short : but in canada 78 a yankee in canada. you are reminded of the government every day. it pa rades itself before you. it is not content to be the ser vant, but will be the master ; and every day it goes out to the plains of abraham or to the champ de mars and exhibits itself and its tools. everywhere there appeared an attempt to make and to preserve trivial and other wise transient distinctions. in the streets of montreal and quebec you met not only with soldiers in red, and shuffling priests in unmistakable black and white, with sisters of charity gone into mourning for their deceased relative, not to mention the nuns of various orders depending on the fashion of a tear, of whom you heard, but youths belonging to some seminary or other, wear ing coats edged with white, who looked as if their ex panding hearts were already repressed with a piece of tape. in short, the inhabitants of canada appeared to be suffering between two fires, the soldiery and the priesthood. chapter v. the scenery of quebec ; and the river st. lawrence. about twelve o clock this day, being in the lower town, i looked up at the signal-gun by the flag-staff on cape diamond, and saw a soldier up in the heavens there making preparations to fire it, both he and the gun in bold relief against the sky. soon after, being warned by the boom of the gun to look up again, there was only the cannon in the sky, the smoke just blowing quebec, and the st. laweence. 79 away from it, as if the soldier, having touched it off, had concealed himself for effect, leaving the sound to echo grandly from shore to shore, and far up and down the river. this answered the purpose of a dinner-horn. there are no such restaurateurs in quebec or montreal as there are in boston. i hunted an hour or two in vain in this town to find one, till i lost my appetite. in one house, called a restaurateur, where lunches were adver tised, i found only tables covered with bottles and glasses innumerable, containing apparently a sample of every liquid that has been known since the earth dried up after the flood, but no scent of solid food did i perceive gross enough to excite a hungry mouse. in short, i saw nothing to tempt me there, but a large map of canada against the wall. in another place i once more got as far as the bottles, and then asked for a bill of fare ; was told to walk up stairs ; had no bill of fare, nothing but fare. &quot; have you any pies or puddings ? &quot; i inquired, for i am obliged to keep my savageness in check by a low diet. &quot; no, sir ; we ve nice mutton-chop, roast beef, beef-steak, cutlets,&quot; and so on. a burly englishman, who was in the midst of the siege of a piece of roast beef, and of whom i have never had a front view to this day, turned half round, with his mouth half full, and remarked, &quot; you 11 find no pies nor puddings in quebec, sir ; they don t make any here.&quot; i found that it was even so, and therefore bought some musty cake and some fruit in the open market-place. this market-place by the water side, where the old women sat by their tables in the open air, amid a dense crowd jabbering all languages, was the best place in quebec to observe the people ; and the ferry-boats, continually coming and going with their motley crews and cargoes, added much to the entertain 80 a yankee in canada. ment. i also saw them getting water from the river, for quebec is supplied with water by cart and barrel. this city impressed me as wholly foreign and french, for i scarcely heard the sound of the english language in the streets. more than three fifths of the inhabitants are of french origin ; and if the traveller did not visit the fortifications particularly, he might not be reminded that the english have any&quot; foothold here ; and, in any case, if he looked no farther than quebec, they would appear to have planted themselves in canada only as they have in spain at gibraltar ; and he who plants upon a rock cannot expect much increase. the novel sights and sounds by the water-side made me think of such ports as boulogne, dieppe, rouen, and havre de grace, which i have never seen ; but i have no doubt that they present similar scenes. i was much amused from first to last with the sounds made by the charette and caleche drivers. it was that part of their foreign language that you heard the most of, the french they talked to their horses, and which they talked the loudest. it was a more novel sound to me than the french of conversation. the streets resounded with the cries, &quot; qui done /&quot; &quot;march tot!&quot; i suspect that many of our horses which came from canada would prick up their ears at these sounds. of the shops, i was most attracted by those where furs and indian works were sold, as containing articles of genuine canadian manu facture. i have been told that two townsmen of mine, who were interested in horticulture, travelling once in canada, and being in quebec, thought it would be a good opportunity to obtain seeds of the real canada crook-neck squash. so they went into a shop where such things were advertised, and inquired for the same. quebec, and the st. laweence. 81 the shopkeeper had the very thing they wanted. &quot; but are you sure,&quot; they asked, &quot; that these are the genuine canada crook-neck ? &quot; &quot;0 yes, gentlemen,&quot; answered he, &quot; they are a lot which i have received directly from boston.&quot; i resolved that my canada crook-neck seeds should be such as had grown in canada. too much has not been said about the scenery of quebec. the fortifications of cape diamond are omni present. they preside, they frown over the river and surrounding country. you travel ten, twenty, thirty miles up or down the river s banks, you ramble fifteen miles amid the hills on either side, and then, when you have long since forgotten them, perchance slept on them by the way, at a turn of the road or of your body, there they are still, with their geometry against the sky. the child that is born and brought up thirty miles distant, and has never travelled to the city, reads his country s history, sees the level lines of the citadel amid the cloud built citadels in the western horizon, and is told that that is quebec. no wonder if jacques cartier s pilot ex claimed in norman french, que bee ! &quot; what a beak ! &quot; when he saw this cape, as some suppose. every modern traveller involuntarily uses a similar expression. particularly it is said that its sudden apparition on turn ing point levi makes a memorable impression on him who arrives by water. the view from cape diamond has been compared by european travellers with the most remarkable views of a similar kind in europe, such as from edinburgh castle, gibraltar, cintra, and others, and preferred by many. a main peculiarity in this, compared with other views which i have beheld, is that it is from the ramparts of a fortified city, and not from a solitary and majestic river cape alone that this 4* f 82 a yankee in canada. view is obtained. i associate the beauty of quebec with the steel-like and flashing air, which may be pecu liar to that season of the year, in which the blue flowers of the succory and some late golden-rods and buttercups on the summit of cape diamond were almost my only companions, the former bluer than the heavens they faced. yet even i yielded in some degree to the in fluence of historical associations, and found it hard to attend to the geology of cape diamond or the botany of the plains of abraham. i still remember the harbor far beneath me, sparkling like silver in the sun, the answering highlands of point levi on the southeast, the frowning cap tourmente abruptly bounding the sea ward view far in the northeast, the villages of lorette and charlesbourg on the north, and further west the distant val cartier, sparkling with white cottages, hardly removed by distance through the clear air, not to men tion a few blue mountains along the horizon in that di rection. you look out from the ramparts of the citadel beyond the frontiers of civilization. yonder small group of hills, according to the guide-book, forms &quot; the portal of the wilds which are trodden only by the feet of the indian hunters as far as hudson s bay.&quot; it is but a few years since bouchette declared that the coun try ten leagues north of the british capital of north america was as little known as the middle of africa. thus the citadel under my feet, and all historical asso ciations, were swept away again by an influence from the wilds and from nature, as if the beholder had read her history, an influence which, like the great river itself, flowed from the arctic fastnesses and western forests with irresistible tide over all. the most interesting object in canada to me was the quebec, and the st. lawkence. 83 river st. lawrence, known far and wide, and for centu ries, as the great river. cartier, its discoverer, sailed up it as far as montreal in 1535, nearly a century before the coming of the pilgrims ; and i have seen a pretty accurate map of it so far, containing the city of &quot; hoche laga &quot; and the river &quot; saguenay,&quot; in ortelius s tkea trum orbis terrarum, printed at antwerp in 1575, the first edition having appeared in ] 570, in which the famous cities of &quot; norumbega &quot; and &quot; orsinora &quot; stand on the rough-blocked continent where new eng land is to-day, and the fabulous but unfortunate isle of demons, and frislant, and others, lie off and on in the unfrequented sea, some of them prowling near what is now the course of the cunard steamers. iji this pon derous folio of the &quot; ptolemy of his age,&quot; said to be the first general atlas published after the revival of the sciences in europe, only one page of which is devoted to the topography of the novus orbis, the st. law rence is the only large river, whether drawn from fancy or from observation, on the east side of north america. it was famous in europe before the other rivers of north america were heard of, notwithstanding that the mouth of the mississippi is said to have been discovered first, and its stream was reached by soto not long after ; but the st. lawrence had attracted settlers to its cold shores long before the mississippi, or even the hudson, was known to the world. schoolcraft was misled by gallatin into saying that narvaez discovered the mis sissippi. de vega does not say so. the first explorers declared that the summer in that country was as warm as france, and they named one of the bays in the gulf of st. lawrence the bay of chaleur, or of warmth ; but they said nothing about the winter being as cold as 84 a yankee in canada. greenland. in the manuscript account of carrier s second voyage, attributed by some to that navigator himself, it is called &quot; the greatest river, without com parison, that is known to have ever been seen.&quot; the savages told him that it was the &quot; chemin du canada&quot; the highway to canada, &quot; which goes so far that no man had ever been to the end that they had heard.&quot; the saguenay, one of its tributaries, which the panorama has made known to new england within three years, is described by cartier, in 1535, and still more particularly by jean alphonse, in 1542, who adds, &quot;i think that this river comes from the sea of cathay, for in this place there issues a strong current, and there runs there a terrible tide.&quot; the early explorers saw many whales and other sea-monsters far up the st. lawrence. cham plain, in his map, represents a whale spouting in the harbor of quebec, three hundred and sixty miles from what is called the mouth of the river ; and charlevoix takes his reader to the summit of cape diamond to see the &quot; porpoises, white as snow,&quot; sporting on the surface of the harbor of quebec. and boucher says in 1664, &quot;from there (tadoussac) to montreal is found a great quantity of marsouins blancs&quot; several whales have been taken pretty high up the river since i was there. p. a. gosse, in his &quot; canadian naturalist,&quot; p. 171 (london, 1840), speaks of &quot; the white dolphin of the st. law rence (delphinus canadensis)&quot; as considered different from those of the sea. &quot; the natural history society of montreal offered a prize, a few years ago, for an essay on the cetacea of the st. lawrence, which was, i be lieve, handed in.&quot; in champlain s day it was com monly called &quot; the great river of canada.&quot; more than one nation has claimed it. in ogilby s &quot; america quebec, and the st. lawrence. 85 of 1670,&quot; in the map novi belgii, it is called de groote rivier van niew nederlandt.&quot; it bears differ ent names in different parts of its course, as it flows through what were formerly the territories of different nations. from the gulf to lake ontario it is called at present the st. lawrence ; from montreal to the same place it is frequently called the cateraqui ; and higher up it is known successively as the niagara, detroit, st. clair, st. mary s, and st. louis rivers. humboldt, speaking of the orinoco, says that this name is unknown in the interior of the country ; so likewise the tribes that dwell about the sources of the st. lawrence have never heard the name which it bears in the lower part of its course. it rises near another father of waters, the mississippi, issuing from a remarkable spring far up in the woods, called lake superior, fifteen hundred miles in circumference ; and several other springs there are thereabouts which feed it. it makes such a noise in its tumbling down at one place as is heard all round the world. bouchette, the survey orgeneral of the cana das, calls it &quot; the most splendid river on the globe &quot; ; says that it is two thousand statute miles long (more recent geographers make it four or five hundred miles longer) ; that at the riviere du sud it is eleven miles wide ; at the traverse, thirteen ; at the paps of matane, twenty-five ; at the seven islands, seventy-three ; and at its mouth, from cape rosier to the mingan settle ments in labrador, near one hundred and five (?) miles wide. according to captain bayfield s recent chart it is about ninety-six geographical, miles wide at the latter place, measuring at right angles with the stream. it has much the largest estuary, regarding both length and breadth, of any river on the globe. humboldt says 86 a yankee in canada. that the river plate, which has the broadest estuary of the south american rivers, is ninety-two geographical miles wide at its mouth ; also he found the orinoco to be more than three miles wide at five hundred and sixty miles from its mouth ; but he does not tell us that ships of six hundred tons can sail up it so far, as they can up the st. lawrence to montreal, an equal distance. if he had described a fleet of such ships at anchor in a city s port so far inland, we should have got a very different idea of the orinoco. perhaps charlevoix describes the st. lawrence truly as the most navigable river in the world. between montreal and quebec it averages about two miles wide. the tide is felt as far up as three rivers, four hundred and thirty-two miles, which is as far as from boston to washington. as far up as cap aux oyes, sixty or seventy miles below quebec, kalm found a great part of the plants near the shore to be marine, as glass-wort (salicorma), seaside pease (pisum maritimum), sea-milkwort (glaux), beach-grass (psamma arenarium), seaside plantain (plantago mari tima), the sea-rocket (bunias camle&quot;), &c. the geographer guyot observes that the maranon is three thousand miles long, and gathers its waters from a surface of a million and a half square miles ; that the mississippi is also three thousand miles long, but its basin covers only from eight to nine hundred thousand square miles ; that the st. lawrence is eighteen hun dred miles long, and its basin covers more than a million square miles (darby says five hundred thousand) ; and speaking of the lakes, he adds, &quot; these vast fresh-water seas, together with the st. lawrence, cover a surface of nearly one hundred thousand square miles, and it has been calculated that they contain about one half of all quebec, and the st. lawrence. 87 the fresh water on the surface of our planet.&quot; but all these calculations are necessarily very rude and inaccu rate. its tributaries, the ottawa, st. maurice, and sa guenay, are great rivers themselves. the latter is said to be more than one thousand (?) feet deep at its mouth, while its cliffs rise perpendicularly an equal distance above its surface. pilots say there are no soundings till one hundred and fifty miles up the st. lawrence. the greatest sounding in the river, given on bayfield s chart of the gulf and river, is two hundred and twenty-eight fathoms. mctaggart, an engineer, observes that &quot; the ottawa is larger than all the rivers in great britain, were they running in one.&quot; the traveller grey writes : &quot;a dozen danubes, rhines, taguses, and thameses would be nothing to twenty miles of fresh water in breadth (as where he happened to be), from ten to forty fathoms in depth.&quot; and again : &quot; there is not perhaps in the whole extent of this immense continent so fine an approach to it as by the river st. lawrence. in the southern states you have, in general, a level country for many miles inland ; here you are introduced at once into a majestic scenery, where everything is on a grand scale, mountains, woods, lakes, rivers, preci pices, waterfalls.&quot; we have not yet the data for a minute comparison of the st. lawrence with the south american rivers ; but it is obvious that, taking it in connection with its lakes, its estuary, and its falls, it easily bears off the palm from all the rivers on the globe ; for though, as bou chette observes, it may not carry to the ocean a greater volume of water than the amazon and mississippi, its surface and cubic mass are far greater than theirs. but, unfortunately, this noble river is closed by ice from the 88 a yankee in canada. beginning of december to the middle of april. the arrival of the first vessel from england when the ice breaks up is, therefore, a great event, as when the sal mon, shad, and alewives come up a river in the spring to relieve the famishing inhabitants on its banks. who can say what would have been the history of this conti nent if, as has been suggested, this river had emptied into the sea where new york stands ! after visiting the museum and taking one more look at the wall, i made haste to the lord sydenham steamer, which at five o clock was to leave for montreal. i had already taken a seat on deck, but finding that i had still an hour and a half to spare, and remembering that large map of canada which i had seen in the parlor of the restaurateur in my search after pudding, and realizing that i might never see the like out of the country, i returned thither, asked liberty to look at the map, rolled up the mahogany table, put my handkerchief on it, stood on it, and copied all i wanted before the maid came in and said to me standing on the table, &quot; some gentlemen want the room, sir&quot;; and i retreated without having broken the neck of a single bottle, or my own, very thankful and willing to pay for all the solid food i had got. we were soon abreast of cap rouge, eight miles above quebec, after we got underway. it was in this place, then called &quot;fort du france roy&quot; that the sieur de roberval with his company, having sent home two of his three ships, spent the winter of 1542-43. it appears that they fared in the following manner (i translate from the original) : &quot; each mess had only two loaves, weighing each a pound, and half a pound of beef. they ate pork for dinner, with half a pound of butter, and beef for supper, with about two handfuls of beans, quebec, and the st. lawrence. 89 without butter. wednesdays, fridays, and saturdays they ate salted cod, and sometimes green, for dinner, with butter ; and porpoise and beans for supper. mon sieur roberval administered good justice, and punished each according to his offence. one, named michel gail ion, was hung for theft ; john of nantes was put in irons and imprisoned for his fault ; and others were like wise put in irons ; and many were whipped, both men and women ; by which means they lived in peace and tranquillity.&quot; in an account of a voyage up this river, printed in the jesuit relations in the year 1664, it is said : &quot; it was an interesting navigation for us in ascend ing the river from cap tourment to quebec, to see on this side and on that, for the space of eight leagues, the farms and the houses of the company, built by our french, all along these shores. on the right, the seigniories of beauport, of notre dames des anges ; and on the left, this beautiful isle of orleans.&quot; the same traveller names among the fruits of the country observed at the isles of richelieu, at the head of lake st. peter, &quot; kinds (des especes) of little apples or haws (semelles), and of pears, which only ripen with the frost.&quot; night came on before we had passed the high banks. wo had come from montreal to quebec in one night. the return voyage, against the stream, takes but an hour longer. jacques carder, the first white man who is known to have ascended this river, thus speaks of his voyage from what is now quebec to the foot of lake st. peter, or about half-way to montreal : &quot; from the said day, the 19th, even to the 28th of the said month, [september, 1535] we had been navigating up the said river without losing hour or day, during which time we 90 a yankee in canada. had seen and found as much country and lands as level as we could desire, full of the most beautiful trees in the world,&quot; which he goes on to describe. but we merely slept and woke again to find that we had passed through all that country which he was eight days in sailing through. he must have had a troubled sleep. we were not long enough on the river to realize that it had length ; we got only the impression of its breadth, as if we had passed over a lake a mile or two in breadth and several miles long, though we might thus have slept through a european kingdom. being at the head of lake st. peter, on the above-mentioned 28th of sep tember, dealing with the natives, cartier says : &quot; we inquired of them by signs if this was the route to ho chelaga [montreal] ; and they answered that it was, and that there were yet three days journeys to go there.&quot; he finally arrived at hochelaga on the 2d of october. when i went on deck at dawn we had already passed through lake st. peter, and saw islands ahead of us. our boat advancing with a strong and steady pulse over the calm surface, we felt as if we were permitted to be awake in the scenery of a dream. many vivacious lombardy poplars along the distant shores gave them a novel and lively, though artificial, look, and contrasted strangely with the slender and graceful elms on both shores and islands. the church of varennes, fifteen miles from montreal, was conspicuous at a great distance before us, appearing to belong to, and rise out of, the river ; and now, and before, mount royal indicated where the city was. we arrived about seven o clock, and set forth immediately to ascend the mountain, two miles distant, going across lots in spite of numerous signs threatening the severest penalties to trespassers, past quebec, and the st. lawrence. 91 an old building known as the mac tavish property, simon mac tavish, i suppose, whom silliman refers to as &quot;in a sense the founder of the northwestern com pany.&quot; his tomb was behind in the woods, with a re markably high wall and higher monument. the family returned to europe. he could not have imagined how dead he would be in a few years, and all the more dead and forgotten for being buried under such a mass of gloomy stone, where not even memory could get at him without a crowbar. ah ! poor man, with that last end of his ! however, he may have been the worthiest of mortals for aught that i know. from the mountain-top we got a view of the whole city ; the flat, fertile, exten sive island ; the noble sea of the st. lawrence swelling into lakes ; the mountains about st. hyacinth, and in vermont and new york ; and the mouth of the ottawa in the west, overlooking that st. ann s where the voya geur sings his &quot; parting hymn,&quot; and bids adieu to civili zation, a name, thanks to moore s verses, the most sug gestive of poetic associations of any in canada. we, too, climbed the hill which cartier, first of white men, ascended, and named mont-real, (the 3d of october, o. s., 1535,) and, like him, &quot; we saw the said river as far as we could see, grand, large, et spacieux, going to the southwest,&quot; toward that land whither donnacona had told the discoverer that he had been a month s jour ney from canada, where there grew &quot;force canelle et girofle&quot; much cinnamon and cloves, and where also, as the natives told him, were three great lakes and after ward une mer douce, a sweet sea, de laquelle riest mention avoir vu le bout, of which there is no mention to have seen the end. but instead of an indian town far in the interior of a new world, with guides to 92 a yankee in canada. show us where the river came from, we found a splen did and bustling stone-built city of white men, and only a few squalid indians offered to sell us baskets at the lachine railroad depot, and hochelaga is, perchance, but the fancy name of an engine company or an eating house. we left montreal wednesday, the 2d of october, late in the afternoon. in the la prairie cars the yankees made themselves merry, imitating the cries of the cha rette-drivers to perfection, greatly to the amusement of some french-canadian travellers, and they kept it up all the way to boston. i saw one person on board the boat at st. john s, and one or two more elsewhere in canada, wearing homespun gray great-coats, or capotes, with conical and comical hoods, which fell back between their shoulders like small bags, ready to be turned up over the head when occasion required, though a hat usurped that place now. they looked as if they w r ould be convenient and proper enough as long as the coats were new and tidy, but would soon come to have a beg garly and unsightly look, akin to rags and dust-holes. we reached burlington early in the morning, where the yankees tried to pass off their canada coppers, but the news-boys knew better. returning through the green mountains, i was reminded that i had not seen in can ada such brilliant autumnal tints as i had previously seen in vermont. perhaps there was not yet so great and sudden a contrast with the summer heats in the for mer country as in these mountain valleys. as we were passing through ashburnham, by a new white house which stood at some distance in a field, one passenger exclaimed, so that all in the car could hear him, &quot; there, there & not so good a house as that in all canada ! &quot; the walls of quebec. 93 i did not much wonder at his remark, for there is a neatness, as well as evident prosperity, a certain elastic easiness of circumstances, so to speak, when not rich, about a new england house, as if the proprietor could at least afford to make repairs in the spring, which the canadian houses do not suggest. though of stone, they are no better constructed than a stone barn would bo with us ; the only building, except the chateau, on which money and taste are expended, being the church. in canada an ordinary new england house would be mis taken for the chateau, and while every village here con tains at least several gentlemen or &quot; squires,&quot; there there is but one to a seigniory. i got home this thursday evening, having spent just one week in canada and travelled eleven hundred miles. the whole expense of this journey, including two guide books and a map, which cost one dollar twelve and a half cents, was twelve dollars seventy-five cents. i do not suppose that i have seen all british america ; that could not be done by a cheap excursion, unless it were a cheap excursion to the icy sea, as seen by hearne or mckenzie, and then, no doubt, some interesting features would be omitted. i wished to go a little way behind that word canadense, of which naturalists make such frequent use ; and i should like still right well to make a longer excursion on foot through the wilder parts of canada, which perhaps might be called iter canadense. anti-slavery and reform papers. slavery in massachusetts; i lately attended a meeting of the citizens of con cord, expecting, as one among many, to speak on the subject of slavery in massachusetts ; but i was surprised and disappointed to find that what had called my towns men together was the destiny of nebraska, and not of massachusetts, and that what i had to say would be entirely out of order. i had thought that the house was on fire, and not the prairie ; but though several of the citizens of massachusetts are now in prison for attempt ing to rescue a slave from her own clutches, not one of the speakers at that meeting expressed regret for it, not one even referred to it. it was only the disposition of some wild lands a thousand miles off, which appeared to concern them. the inhabitants of concord are not pre pared to stand by one of their own bridges, but talk only of taking up a position on the highlands beyond the yel lowstone river. our buttricks and davises and hos mers are retreating thither, and i fear that they will leave no lexington common between them and the enemy. there is not one slave in nebraska ; there are perhaps a million slaves in massachusetts. they who have been bred in the school of politics fail now and always to face the facts. their measures are * an address, delivered at the anti-slavery celebration at fram ingham, july 4th, 1854. 5 g 98 slavery in massachusetts. half measures and make-shifts merely. they put off the day of settlement indefinitely, and meanwhile the debt accumulates. though the fugitive slave law had not been the subject of discussion on that occasion, it was at length faintly resolved by my townsmen, at an adjourned meeting, as i learn, that the compromise com pact of 1820 having been repudiated by one of the parties, &quot; therefore, .... the fugitive slave law of 1850 must be repealed.&quot; but this is not the reason why an iniquitous law should be repealed. the fact which the politician faces is merely, that there is less honor among thieves than was supposed, and not the fact that they are thieves. as i had no opportunity to express my thoughts at that meeting, will you allow me to do so here ? again it happens that the boston court-iiouse is full of armed men, holding prisoner and trying a man, to find out if he is not really a slave. does any one think that justice or god awaits mr. loring s decision? for him to sit there deciding still, when this question is already decided from eternity to eternity, and the un lettered slave himself, and the multitude around have long since heard and assented to the decision, is simply to make himself ridiculous. &quot;we may be tempted to ask from whom he received his commission, and who he is that received it ; what novel statutes he obeys, and what precedents are to him of authority. such an arbiter s very existence is an impertinence. we do not ask him to make up his mind, but to make up his pack. i listen to hear the voice of a governor, commander in-chief of the forces of massachusetts. i hear only the creaking of crickets and the hum of insects which slavery in massachusetts. 99 now fill the summer air. the governor s exploit is to review the troops on muster days. i have seen him on horseback, with his hat off, listening to a chaplain s prayer. it chances that that is all i have ever seen of a governor. i think that i could manage to get along without one. if he is not of the least use to prevent my being kidnapped, pray of what important use is he likely to be to me ? when freedom is most endangered, he dwells in the deepest obscurity. a distinguished clergyman told me that he chose the profession of a clergyman, because it afforded the most leisure for lit erary pursuits. i would recommend to him the profes sion of a governor. three years ago, also, when the simms tragedy was acted, i said to myself, there is such an officer, if not such a man, as the governor of massachusetts, what has he been about the last fortnight ? has he had as much as he could do to keep on the fence during this moral earthquake ? it seemed to me that no keener satire could have been aimed at, no more cutting insult have been offered to that man, than just what happened, the absence of all inquiry after him in that crisis. the worst and the most i chance to know of him is, that he did not improve that opportunity to make him self known, and worthily known. he could at least have resigned himself into fame. it appeared to be forgotten that there was such a man or such an office. yet no doubt he was endeavoring to fill the gubernato rial chair all the while. he was no governor of mine. he did not govern me. but at last, in the present case, the governor was heard from. after he and the united states govern ment had perfectly succeeded in robbing a poor inno 100 slavery in massachusetts. cent black man of his liberty for life, and, as far as they could, of his creator s likeness in his breast, he made a speech to his accomplices, at a congratulatory supper ! i have read a recent law of this state, making it pe nal for any officer of the .&quot; commonwealth &quot; to &quot; detain or aid in the .... detention,&quot; anywhere within its limits, &quot; of any person, for the reason that he is claimed as a fugitive slave.&quot; also, it was a matter of notoriety that a writ of replevin to take the fugitive out of the custody of the united states marshal could not be served, for want of sufficient force to aid the officer. i had thought that the governor was, in some sense, the executive officer of the state ; that it was his busi ness, as a governor, to see that the laws of the state were executed ; while, as a man, he took care that he did not, by so doing, break the laws of humanity; but when there is any special important use for him, he is useless, or worse than useless, and permits the laws of the state to go unexecuted. perhaps i do not know what are the duties of a governor ; but if to be a governor requires to subject one s self to so much ignominy without rem edy, if it is to put a restraint upon my manhood, i shall take care never to be governor of massachu setts. i have not read far in the statutes of this com monwealth. it is not profitable reading. they do not always say what is true ; and they do not always mean what they say. what i am concerned to know is, that that man s influence and authority w r ere on the side of the slaveholder, and not of the slave, of the guilty, and not of the innocent, of injustice, and not of jus tice. i never saw him of whom i speak ; indeed, i did not know that he was governor until this event occurred. slavery in massachusetts. 101 i heard of him and anthony burns at the same time, and thus, undoubtedly, most will hear of him. so far am i from being governed by him. i do not mean that it was anything to his discredit that i had not heard of him, only that i heard what i did. the worst i shall say of him is, that he proved no better than the majority of his constituents would be likely to prove. in my opinion, he was not equal to the occasion. the whole military force of the state is at the service of a mr. suttle, a slaveholder from virginia, to enable him to catch a man whom he calls his property ; but not a soldier is offered to save a citizen of massachusetts from being kidnapped ! is this what all these soldiers, all this training, has been for these seventy-nine years past ? have they been trained merely to rob mexico and carry back fugitive slaves to their masters ? these very nights, i heard the sound of a drum in our streets. there were men training still ; and for what ? i could with an effort pardon the cockerels of concord for crowing still, for they, perchance, had not been beaten that morning ; but i could not excuse this rub a-dub of the &quot; trainers.&quot; the slave was carried back by exactly such as these ; i. e. by the soldier, of whom the best you can say in this connection is, that he is a_ tool jnaae conspicuous by a painted coat. three years ago, also, just a week after the authori ties of boston assembled to carry back a perfectly in nocent man, and one whom they knew to be innocent, into slavery, the inhabitants of concord caused the bells to be rung and the cannons to be fired, to celebrate their liberty, and the courage and love of liberty of their ancestors who fought at the bridge. as if those three millions had fought for the right to be free them 102 slavery in massachusetts. selves, but to hold in slavery three millions others. now-a-days, men wear a fool s-cap, and call it a liberty ^cap t .~ i do not know but there are some, wlo, if they were tied to a whipping-post, and could but get one hand free, would use it to ring the bells and fire the cannons to celebrate their liberty. so some of my townsmen took the liberty to ring and fire. that was the extent of their freedom ; and when the sound of the bells died away, their liberty died away also ; when the powder was all expended, their liberty went off with the smoke. the joke could be no broader, if the inmates of the prisons were to subscribe for all the powder to be used in such salutes, and hire the jailers to do the firing and ringing for them, while they enjoyed it through the grating. this is what i thought about my neighbors. every humane and intelligent inhabitant of concord, when he or she heard those bells and those cannons, thought not with pride of the events of the 19th of april, 1775, but with shame of the events of the 12th of april, 1851. but now we have half buried that old shame under a new one. massachusetts sat waiting mr. loring s decision, as if it could in any way affect her own criminality. her crime, the most conspicuous and fatal crime of all, was permitting him to be the umpire in such a case. it was really the trial of massachusetts. every moment that she hesitated to set this man free, every moment that she now hesitates to atone for her crime, she is con victed. the commissioner on her case is god ; not edward g. god, but simple god. i wish my countrymen to consider, that whatever the slavery in massachusetts. 103 human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can ever commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual, without having to pay the penalty for it. a government which deliberately enacts injus tice, and persists in it, will at length even become the laughing-stock of the world. much has been said about american slavery, but i think that we do not even yet realize what slavery is. if i were seriously to propose to congress to make man kind into sausages, i have no doubt that most of the members would smile at my proposition, and if any be lieved me to be in earnest, they would think that i pro posed something much worse than congress had ever done. but if any of them will tell me that to make a man into a sausage would be much worse, would be any worse, than to make him into a slave, than it was to enact the fugitive slave law, i will accuse him of foolishness, of intellectual incapacity, of making a distinction without a difference. the one is just as sensible a proposition as the other. i hear a good deal said about trampling this law un der foot. why, one need not go out of his way to do that. this law rises not to the level of the head or the reason ; its natural habitat is in the dirt. it was born and bred, and has its life, only in the dust and mire, on a level with the feet ; and he who walks with freedom, and does not with hindoo mercy avoid treading on every venomous reptile, will inevitably tread on it, and so trample it under foot, and webster, its maker, with it, like the dirt-bug and its ball. recent events will be valuable as a criticism on the administration of justice in our midst, or, rather, as showing what are the true resources of justice in any 104 slavery in massachusetts. community. it has come to this, that the friends of liberty, the friends of the slave, have shuddered when they have understood that his fate was left to the legal tribunals of the country to be decided. free men have no faith that justice will be awarded in such a case. the judge may decide this way or that ; it is a kind of acci dent, at best. it is evident that he is not a competent authority in so important a case. it is no time, then, to be judging according to his precedents, but to estab lish a precedent for the future. i would much rather trust to the sentiment of the people. in their vote, you would get something of some value, at least, however small ; but in the other case, only the trammelled judg ment of an individual, of no significance, be it which way it might. it is, to some extent, fatal to the courts, when the peo ple are compelled to go behind them. i do not wish to believe that the courts were made for fair weather, and for very civil cases merely ; but think of leaving it to any court in the land to decide whether more than three millions of people, in this case, a sixth part of a nation, have a right to be freemen or not ? but it has been left to the courts of justice, so called, to the supreme court of the land, and, as you all know, recognizing no authority but the constitution, it has de cided that the three millions are, and shall continue to be slaves. such judges as these are merely the inspec tors of a pick-lock and murderer s tools, to tell him whether they are in working order or not, and there they think that their responsibility ends. there was a prior case on the docket, which they, as judges appointed by god, had no right to skip ; which having been justly settled, they would have been saved from this humilia tion. it was the case of the murderer himself. -vol fjl*4 slavery in massachusetts. 105 the law will never make men free ; it is men who have got to make the law free. they are^jhe lovers of . aw and order, who observe the law when the among human beings, the judge whose words seal the fate of a man furthest into eternity is not he who merely pronounces the verdict of the law, but he, who ever he may be, who, from a love of truth, and unpreju diced by any custom or enactment of men, utters a true opinion or sentence concerning him. he it is that sentences him. whoever can discern truth has re ceived his commission from a higher source than the chiefest justice in the world, who can discern only law. he finds himself constituted judge of the judge, strange that it should be necessary to state such simple truths ! i am more and more convinced that, with reference to any public question, it is more important to know what the country thinks of it, than what the city thinks. the city does not think much. on any moral question, i would rather have the opinion of boxboro than of boston and new york put together. when the former speaks, i feel as if somebody had spoken, as if humanity was yet, and a reasonable being had asserted its rights, as if some unprejudiced men among the country s hills had at length turned their attention to the subject, and by a few sensible words redeemed the reputation of the race. when, in some obscure country town, the farmers come together to a special town-meeting, to express their opinion on some subject which is vexing the land, that, i think, is the true congress, and the most respeetable one that is ever assembled in the united states. 106 slavery in massachusetts. it is evident that there are, in this commonwealth at least, two parties, becoming more and more distinct, the party of the city, and the party of the country. %/ i know that the country is mean enough, but i am glad to believe that there is a slight difference in her favor. but as yet, she has few, if any organs, through which to express herself. the editorials which she reads, like the news, come from the seaboard. let us, the inhab itants of the country, cultivate self-respect. let us not send to the city for aught more essential than our broad cloths and groceries ; or, if we read the opinions of the city, let us entertain opinions of our own. among measures to be adopted, i would suggest to make as earnest and vigorous an assault on the press as has already been made, and with effect, on the church. ^ the church has much improved within a few years ; but the press is almost, without exception, corrupt. i believe that, in this country, the press exerts a greater and a more pernicious influence than the church did in its worst period. we are not a religious people, but we are a nation of politicians. we do not care for the bible, but we do care for the newspaper. at any meet ing of politicians, like that at concord the other even ing, for instance, how impertinent it would be to quote from the bible ! how pertinent to quote from a news paper or from the constitution ! the newspaper is a v bible which we read every morning and every after noon, standing and sitting, riding and walking. it is a bible which every man carries in his pocket, which lies on every table and counter, and which the mail, and thousands of missionaries, are continually dispersing. it is, in short, the only book which america has printed, and which america reads. so wide is its influence. slavery in massachusetts. 107 the editor is a preacher whom you voluntarily support. your tax is commonly one cent daily, and it costs noth ing for pew hire. but how many of these preachers preach the truth ? i repeat the testimony of many an intelligent foreigner, as well as my own convictions, when i say, that probably no country was ever ruled by so mean a class of tyrants as, with a few noble excep tions, are the editors of the periodical press in this coun try. and as they live and rule only by their servility, and appealing to the worse, and not the better, nature of man, the people who read them are in the condition of the dog that returns to his vomit. the liberator and the commonwealth were the only papers in boston, as far as i know, which made them selves heard in condemnation of the cowardice and meanness of the authorities of that city, as exhibited in 51. the other journals, almost without exception, by their manner of referring to and speaking of the fugi tive slave law, and the carrying back of the slave simms, insulted the common sense of the country, at least. and, for the most part, they did this, one would say, because they thought so to secure the approbation of their patrons, not being aware that a sounder senti ment prevailed to any extent in the heart of the com monwealth. i am told that some of them have improved of late ; but they are still eminently time-serving. such is the character they have won. but, thank fortune, this preacher can be even more easily reached by the weapons of the reformer than could the recreant priest. the free men of new eng land have only to refrain from purchasing and reading these sheets, have only to withhold their cents, to kill a score of them at once. one whom i respect told me 108 slavery in massachusetts. that he purchased mitchell s citizen in the cars, and then threw it out the window. but would not his con tempt have been more fatally expressed if he had not bought it ? are they americans ? are* they new-englanders? are they inhabitants of lexington and concord and fram ingham, who read and support the boston post, mail, journal, advertiser, courier, and times ? are these the flags of our union ? i am not a newspaper reader, and may omit to name the worst. could slavery suggest a more complete servility than some of these journals exhibit ? is there any dust which their conduct does not lick, and make fouler still with its slime ? i do not know whether the boston herald is still in existence, but i remember to have seen it about the streets when simms was carried off. did it not act its part well, serve its master faithfully? how could it have gone lower on its belly ? how can, a man stoop lower than he is low ? do more than put his extremities in the place of the head he has? than make his head his lower extremity ? when i have taken up this paper with my cuffs turned up, i have heard the gurgling of the sewer through every column, have felt that i was handling a paper picked out of the public gutters, a leaf from the gospel of the gam bling-house, the groggery, and the brothel, harmonizing with the gospel of the merchants exchange. the majority of the men of the north, and of the south and east and west, are not men of principle. if they vote, they do not send men to congress on er rands of humanity ; but while their brothers and sisters are being scourged and hung for loving liberty, while i might here insert all that slavery implies and is, slavery in massachusetts. 109 it is the mismanagement of wood and iron and stone and gold which concerns them. do what you will, o government, with my wife and children, my mother and brother, my father and sister, i will obey your com mands to the letter. it will indeed grieve me if you hurt them, if you deliver them to overseers to be hunted by hounds or to be whipped to death ; but, nevertheless, i will peaceably pursue my chosen calling on this fair earth, until perchance, one day, when i have put on mourning for them dead, i shall have persuaded you to relent. such is the attitude, such are the words of massachusetts. rather than do thus, i need not say what match i would touch, what system endeavor to blow up ; but as i love my life, i would side with the light, and let the dark earth roll from under me, calling my mother and my brother to follow. i would remind my countrymen, that they are to be men first, and americans only at a late and convenient hour. no matter how valuable law may be to protect your property, even to keep soul and body together, if it do not keep you and humanity together. i am sorry to say, that i doubt if there is a judge in massachusetts who is prepared to resign his office, and get his living innocently, whenever it is required of him to pass sentence under a law which is merely contrary to the law of god. i am compelled to see that they put themselves, or rather, are by character, in this respect, exactly on a level with the marine who discharges his musket in any direction he is ordered to. they are just as much tools, and as little men. certainly, they are not the more to be respected, because their master en slaves their understandings and consciences, instead of their bodies. , 110 slavery in massachusetts. the judges and lawyers, simply as such, i mean, and all men of expediency, try this case by a very low and incompetent standard. they consider, not whether the fugitive slave law is right, but whether it is what they call constitutional. is virtue constitutional, or vice ? is equity constitutional, or iniquity ? in im portant moral and vital questions, like this, it is just as impertinent to ask whether a law i s constitutional or not, as to ask whether it is profitable or not. they persist in being the servants of the worst of men, and not the servants of humanity. the question is, not whether you or your grandfather, seventy years ago, did not enter into an agreement to serve the devil, and that service is not accordingly now due ; but whether you will not now, for once and at last, serve god, in spite of your own past recreancy, or that of your an cestor, by obeying that eternal and only just consti tution, which he, and not any jefferson or adams, has written in your being. the amount of it is, if the majority vote the devil to be god, the minority will live and behave accordingly, and obey the successful candidate, trusting that, some time or other, by some speakers casting-vote, perhaps, they may reinstate god. this is the highest principle i can get out or invent for my neighbors. these men act as if they believed that they could safely slide down a hill a little way or a good way and would surely come to a place, by and by, where they could begin to slide up again. this is expediency, or choosing that course which offers the slightest obstacles to the feet, that is, a down-hill one. but there is no such thing as accom plishing a righteous reform by the use of &quot; expediency.&quot; there is no such thing as sliding up hill. in morals, the only sliders are backsliders. slavery in massachusetts. ill thus we steadily worship mammon, both school and state and church, and on the seventh day curse god with a tintamar from one end of the union to the other. 5 will mankind never learn that policy is not morality, that it never secures any moral right, but considers merely what is expedient ? chooses the available candi date, who is invariably the devil, and what right have his constituents to be surprised, because the devil does not behave like an angel of light ? what is wanted is men, not of policy, but of probity, who recognize a higher law than the constitution, or the decision of the majority. the fate of the country does not depend on how you vote at the polls, the worst man is as strong as the best at that game ; it does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning. what should concern massachusetts is not the ne braska bill, nor the fugitive slave bill, but her own slaveholding and servility. let the state dissolve her union with the slaveholder. she may wriggle and hes itate, and ask leave to read the constitution once more ; but she can find no respectable law or precedent which sanctions the continuance of such a union for an instant. let each inhabitant of the state dissolve his union with her, as long as she delays to do her duty. the events of the past month teach me to distrust fame. i see that she does not finely discriminate, but coarsely hurrahs. she considers not the simple heroism of an action, but only as it is connected with its appar ent consequences. she praises till she is hoarse the easy exploit of the boston tea party, but will be com 112 slavery in massachusetts. paratively silent about the braver and more disinterest edly heroic attack on the boston court-house, simply because it was unsuccessful ! covered with disgrace, the state has sat down coolly to try for their lives and liberties the men who attempt ed to do its duty for it. and this is called justice! they who have shown that they can behave particularly well may perchance be put under bonds for their good behavior. they whom truth requires at present to plead guilty are, of all the inhabitants of the state, pre-emi nently innocent. while the governor, and the mayor, and countless officers of the commonwealth are at large, the champions of liberty are imprisoned. only they are guiltless, who commit the crime of con tempt of such a court. it behooves every man to see that his influence is on the side of justice, and let the courts make their own characters. my sympathies in this case are wholly with the accused, and wholly against their accusers and judges. justice is sweet and musical ; but injustice is harsh and discordant. the judge still sits grinding at his organ, but it yields no music, and we hear only the sound of the handle. he believes that all the music resides in the handle, and the crowd toss him their coppers the same as before. do you suppose that that massachusetts which is now doing these things, which hesitates to crown these men, some of whose lawyers, and even judges, perchance, may be driven to take refuge in some poor quibble, that they may not wholly outrage their instinctive sense of justice, do you suppose that she is anything but base and servile ? that she is the champion of liberty ? show me a free state, and a court truly of justice, and i will fight for them, if need be; but show me slavery in massachusetts. 113 massachusetts, and i refuse her my allegiance, and ex press contempt for her courts. the effect of a good government is to make life more , valuable, of a bad one, to make it less valuable. we can afford that railroad, and all merely material stock, should lose some of its value, for that only compels us to live more simply and economically ; but suppose that the value of life itself should be diminished ! how can we make a less demand on man and nature, how live more economically in respect to virtue and all noble qualities, than we do ? i have lived for the last month, and i think that every man in massachusetts capable of the sentiment of patriotism must have had a similar expe rience, with the sense of having suffered a vast and v indefinite loss. i did not know at first what ailed me. at last it occurred to me that what i had lost was a country. i had never respected the government near to which i lived, but i had foolishly thought that i might manage to live here, minding my private affairs, and forget it. for my part, my old and worthiest pursuits v have lost i cannot say how much of their attraction, and i feel that my investment in life here is worth many per cent less since massachusetts last deliberately sent back an innocent man, anthony burns, to slavery. i dwelt before, perhaps, in the illusion that my life passed some where only between heaven and hell, but now i cannot / persuade myself that i do not dwell wholly witjiin hell. the site of that political organization called massachu setts is to me morally covered with volcanic scoriaa and cinders, such as milton describes in the infernal regions. if there is any hell more unprincipled than our rulers, and we, the ruled, i feel curious to see it. life itself being worth less, all things with it, which minister to 114 slavery in massachusetts. it, are worth less. suppose you have a small library, with pictures to adorn the walls, a garden laid out around, and contemplate scientific and literary pur suits, and discover all at once that your villa, with all its contents, is located in hell, and that the justice of the peace has a cloven foot and a forked tail, do not these things suddenly lose their value in your eyes ? i feel that, to some extent, the state has fatally inter fered with my lawful business. it has not only inter rupted me in my passage through court street on errands of trade, but it has interrupted me and every man on his onward and upward path, on which he had trusted soon to leave court street far behind. what right had it to remind me of court street ? i have found that hollow which even i had relied on for solid. i am surprised to see men going about their business as if nothing had happened. i say to myself, &quot; unfor tunates ! they have not heard the news.&quot; i am surprised that the man whom i just met on horseback should be so earnest to overtake his newly bought cows running away, since all property is insecure, and if they do not run away again, they may be taken away from him when he gets them. fool ! does he not know that his seed-corn is worth less this year, that all beneficent harvests fail as you approach the empire of hell ? no prudent man will build a stone house under these cir cumstances, or engage in any peaceful enterprise which it requires a long time to accomplish. art is as long as ever, but life is more interrupted and less available for a man s proper pursuits. it is not an era of repose. we have used up all our inherited freedom. if we would save our lives, we must fight for them. i walk toward one of our ponds ; but what signifies the slavery in massachusetts. 115 beauty of nature when men are base ? we walk to lakes to see our serenity reflected in them ; when we are not serene, we go not to them. who can be serene in a country where both the rulers and the ruled are without principle ? the remembrance of my country spoils my walk. my thoughts are murder to the state, and invol untarily go plotting against her. but it chanced the other day that i scented a white water-lily, and a season i had waited for had arrived. it is the emblem of purity. it bursts up so pure and fair to the eye, and so sweet to the scent, as if to show us what purity and sweetness reside in, and can be ex tracted from, the slime and muck of earth. i think i have plucked the first one that has opened for a mile. what confirmation of our hopes is in the fragrance of this flower ! i shall not so soon despair of the world for it, notwithstanding slavery, and the cowardice and want of principle of northern men. it suggests what kind of laws have prevailed longest and widest, and still pre vail, and that the time may come when man s deeds will smell as sweet. such is the odor which the plant emits. if nature can compound this fragrance still annually, i shall believe her still young and full of vigor, her in tegrity and genius unimpaired, and that there is virtue even in man, too, who is fitted to perceive and love it. it reminds me that nature has been partner to no mis souri compromise. i scent no compromise in the fra grance of the water-lily. it is not a nymphcea doug las six. in it, the sweet, and pure, and innocent are wholly sundered from the obscene and baleful. i do not scent in this the time-serving irresolution of a massa chusetts governor, nor of a boston mayor. so behave that the odor of your actions may enhance the general 116 slavery in massachusetts. sweetness of the atmosphere, that when we behold or scent a flower, we may not be reminded how inconsist ent your deeds are with it ; for all odor is but one form of advertisement of a moral quality, and if fair actions had not been performed, the lily would not smell sweet. the foul slime stands for the sloth and vice of man, the decay of humanity ; the fragrant flower that springs from it, for the purity and courage which are immortal. slavery and servility have produced no sweet-scented flower annually, to charm the senses of men, for they have no real life : they are merely a decaying and a death, offensive to all healthy nostrils. we do not com plain that they live, but that they do not get buried. let the living bury them ; even they are good for manure. prayers . not with fond shekels of the tested gold, nor gems whose rates are either rich or poor, as fancy values them : but with true prayers, that shall be up at heaven, and enter there ere sunrise ; prayers from preserved souls, from fasting maids, whose minds are dedicate ^ to nothing temporal. shakespearb. pythagoras said that the time when men are hon estest, is when they present themselves before the gods. if we can overhear the prayer, we shall know the man. but prayers are not made to be overheard, or to be print ed, so that we seldom have the prayer otherwise than it can be inferred from the man and his fortunes, which are the answer to the prayer, and always accord with it. yet there are scattered about in the earth a few records of these devout hours, which it would edify us to read, could they be collected in a more catholic spirit than the wretched and repulsive volumes which usurp that name. let us not have the prayers of one sect, nor of the christian church, but of men in all ages and religions, who have prayed well. the prayer of jesus is, as it deserves, become a form for the human race. many men have contributed a, single expression, a single word to the language of devotion, which is immediately caught and stereotyped in the prayers of their church and na tion. among the remains of euripides, we have this 118 prayers. prayer : &quot; thou god of all ! infuse light into the souls of men, whereby they may be enabled to know what is the root from whence all their evils spring, and by what means they may avoid them.&quot; in the phaedrus of plato, we find this petition in the mouth of socrates : &quot; gra cious pan! and ye other gods who preside over this place ! grant that i may be beautiful within ; and that those external things which i have may be such as may best agree with a right internal disposition of mind ; and that i may account him to be rich, who is wise and just.&quot; wacic the caliph, who died a. d. 845, ended his life, the arabian historians tell us, with these words : &quot;o thou whose kingdom never passes away, pity one whose dignity is so transient.&quot; but what led us to these remembrances was the happy accident which, in this undevout age, lately brought us acquainted with two or three diaries, which attest, if there be need of attestation, the eternity of the sentiment and its equality to itself through all the variety of expression. the first is the prayer of a deaf and dumb boy. &quot; when my long-attached friend comes to me, i have pleas ure to converse with him, and i rejoice to pass my eyes over his countenance ; but soon i am weary of spending my time causelessly and unimproved, and i desire to leave him (but not in rudeness), because i wish to be engaged in my business. but thou, o my father, knowest i always delight to commune with thee in my lone and silent heart ; i am never full of thee ; i am never weary of thee ; i am always desiring thee. i hunger with strong hope and affection for thee, and i thirst for thy grace and spirit. &quot; when i go to visit my friends, i must put on my best gar ments, and i must think of my manner to please them. i am tired to stay long, because my mind is not free, and they sometimes talk gossip with me. but, o my father, thou prayers. 119 visitest me in my work, and i can lift up my desires to tliee, and my heart is cheered and at rest with thy presence, and i am always alone with thec, and tliou dost not steal my time by foolishness. i always ask in my heart, where can i find thee ? &quot; the next is a voice out of a solitude as strict and sacred as that in which nature had isolated this eloquent mute. &quot; my father, when i cannot be cheerful or happy, i can be true and obedient, and i will not forget that joy has been, and may still be. if there is no hour of solitude granted me, still i will commune with thee. if i may not search out and pierce my thought, so much the more may my living praise thee. at whatever price, i must be alone with thee ; this must be the demand i make. these duties are not the life, but the means which enable us to show forth the life. so must i take up this cross, and bear it willingly. why should i feel reproved when a busy one enters the room ? i am not idle, though i sit with folded hands ; but instantly i must seek some cover. for that shame i reprove myself. are they only the valuable members of society who labor to dress and feed it ? shall we never ask the aim of all this hurry and foam, of this aimless activity ? let the purpose for which i live be always before me ; let every thought and word go to confirm and illuminate that end ; namely, that i must become near and dear to thee ; that now i am beyond the reach of all but thee. &quot; how can we not be reconciled to thy will ? i will know the joy of giving to my friend the dearest treasure i have. i know that sorrow comes not at once only. we cannot meet it, and say, now it is overcome, but again, and yet again its flood pours over us, and as full as at first. &quot; if but this tedious battle could be fought, like sparta s heroes at one rocky pass, one day be spent in dying, men had sought the spot and been cut down like mower s grass.&quot; 120 prayers. the next is all in metrical form. it is the aspiration of a different mind, in quite other regions of power and duty, yet they all accord at last. &quot; great god, i ask thee for no meaner pelf than that i may not disappoint myself, that in my action i may soar as high as i can now discern with this clear eye. &quot; and next in value, which thy kindness lends, that i may greatly disappoint my friends, howe er they think or hope that it may be, they may not dream how thou st distinguished me. &quot; that my weak hand may equal my firm faith, and my life practise more than my tongue saith; that my low conduct may not show, nor my relenting lines, that i thy purpose did not know, or overrated thy designs.&quot; the last of the four orisons is written in a singularly calm and healthful spirit, and contains this petition : &quot; my father ! i now come to thee with a desire to thank thee for the continuance of our love, the one for the other. i feel that without thy love in me, i should be alone here in the flesh. i cannot express my gratitude for what thou hast been and continuest to be to me. but thou knowest what my feelings are. when naught on earth seemeth pleasant to me, thou dost make thyself known to me, and teach me that which is needful for me, and dost cheer my travels on. i know that thou hast not created me and placed me here on earth, amidst its toils and troubles, and the follies of those around me, and told me to be like thyself, when i see so little of thee here to profit by; thou hast not done this, and then left me to myself, a poor, weak man, scarcely able to earn my. bread. no ; thou art my father, and i will love thee, for thou didst first love me, and lovest me still. we will ever be parent and child. wilt thou give me strength to persevere in this great work of redemption. wilt thou prayers. 121 show me the true means of accomplishing it i thank thee for the knowledge that i have attained of thce by thy sons who have been before me, and especially for him who brought me so perfect a type of thy goodness and love to men i know that thou wilt deal with me as i deserve. i place myself, therefore in thy hand, knowing that thou wilt keep me from all harm so long as i consent to live under thy protecting care.&quot; let these few scattered leaves, which a chance, as men say, but which to us shall be holy, brought under our eye nearly at the same moment, stand as an exam ple of innumerable similar expressions which no mortal witness has reported, and be a sign of the tjypaes. might they be suggestion to many a heart of yet higher secret experiences which are ineffable ! but we must not tie up the rosary on which we have strung these few white beads, without adding a pearl of great price from that book of prayer, the &quot; confessions of saint augustine.&quot; &quot; and being admonished to reflect upon myself, i entered into the very inward parts of my soul, by thy conduct ; and i was able to do it, because now thou wert become my helper. i entered and discerned with the eye of my soul (such as it was), even beyond my soul and mind itself the light un changeable. not this vulgar light which all flesh may look upon, nor as it were a greater of the same kind, as though the brightness of this should be manifold greater and with its greatness take up all space. not such was this light, but other, yea, far other from all these. neither was it so above my understanding, as oil swims above water, or as the heaven is above the earth. but it is above me, because it made me ; and i am under it, because i was made by it. he that knows truth or verity, knows what that light is, and he that knows it, knows eternity, and it is known by charity. o eternal verity ! and true charity ! and dear eternity ! thou art my god, to thee do i sigh day and night. thee when i first knew, 6 122 pkayers. thou lifledst me up that i might see there was what i might see, and that i was not yet such as to see. and thou didst beat back my weak sight upon myself, shooting out beams upon me after a vehement manner, and i even trembled be tween love and horror, and i found myself to be far off, and even in the very region of dissimilitude from thee.&quot; civil disobedience.* i heartily accept the motto, &quot; that government is best which governs least &quot; ; and i should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also i believe, &quot; that government is best which governs not at all&quot;; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will havea government is at best but an expedient ; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient^ the objections which have been brought against a stand ing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government. the standing army is only an arm of the standing government. (the government itself, which is only the mode which tile people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through id witness the pres ent mexican war, the work of comparatively a few indi viduals using the standing government as their tool ; for, in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure. ( this american government, what is it but a tra dition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit it self unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some * ^esthetic papers, no. i. boston, 1849. 124 civil disobedience. of its integrity?) it lias not the vitality and force of a single living man ; fdr a single man can bend it to his will. &quot; it is a sort of wooden gun to the people themselves. but it is not the less necessary for this ; for the people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its 4in, to satisfy that idea of government which they have. governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed on, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage. &amp;gt; it is excellent, we must all allow. yet this government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. it does not keep the country free. it does not settle the west. it does not educate. the character inherent in the american people has done all that has been accom plished ; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way. for government is an expedient by which men would fain succeed in letting one another alone ; and, as has been said, when it is most expedient, the governed are most let alone by it. trade and commerce, if they were not made of india-rubber, would never manage to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually put ting in their way ; and, if one were to judge these men wholly by the effects of their actions and not partly by their intentions, they would deserve to be classed and punished with those mischievous persons who put ob structions on the railroads. , but, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men/jljajsk for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. 7 let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it. civil disobedience. 125 after all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are per mitted, and for a long period continue, to rule, is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor be cause this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are ^physically the strongest, jqbut a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience ? in which ma jorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable ? must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator ? why has every man a conscience, then ? i think that we should be men first, and subjects* afterward. it is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. the only obligation which i have a right to assume, is to do at any time what i think right] it is truly enough said, that a cor poration has no conscience ; but a corporation of con scientious men is a corporation with a conscience.^ 1 law never made men a whit more just ; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice^ a common and natural result of an undue respect &quot;for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpi tation of the heart. they have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned ; they are all peaceably inclined. now, what are they ? men i 126 civil disobedience. at all ? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power ? visit the navyyard, and behold a marine, such a man as an american government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts, a mere shadow and reminis cence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments, though it may be, &quot; not a drum was heard, not a funeral note, as his corse to the rampart we hurried ; not a soldier discharged his farewell shot o er the grave where our hero we buried.&quot; the mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. ^they are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, &c. in most cases there is no free exer cise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense ; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones ; and wooden men can perhaps be manu factured that will serve the purpose as well. such com mand no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. they have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. others, as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders, serve the state chiefly with their heads ; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as jikely to serve the devil, without intending it, as god.^ a very few, as heroes, /patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so neces sarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it. a wise man will only be useful as a man, and will not submit to be &quot; clay,&quot; and civil disobedience. 127 &quot;stop a hole to keep the wind away,&quot; but leave that office to his dust at least : &quot; i am too high-born to be propertied, to be a secondary at control, or useful serving-man and instrument ^r to any sovereign state throughout the world.&quot; he who gives himself entirely to his fellow-men appears to them useless and selfish ; but he who gives himself partially to them is pronounced a benefactor and philanthropist. how does it become a man to behave toward this american government to-day ? i answer, that he can not without disgrace be associated with it.^j[ cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave s government alsol? c/ all men recognize the right of revolution ; tnlit is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the govern ment, when, its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable, j but almost all say that such is not the case now. but such was the case, they think, in the revo lution of 75. if one were to tell me that this was a bad government because it taxed certain foreign commodities brought to its ports, it is most probable that i should not make an ado about it, for i can do without them. all machines have their friction ; and possibly this does enough good to counterbalance the evil. at any rate, it is a great evil to make a stir about it. ^j3ut when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, i say, let us not have such a machine any longer?? in other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and 128 civil disobedience. subjected to military law, i think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. what makes this duty the more urgent is the fact, that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army. paley, a common authority with many on moral ques tions, in his chapter on the &quot; duty of submission to civil government,&quot; resolves all civil obligation into ex pediency ; and he proceeds to say, &quot; that so long as the interest of the whole society requires it, that is, so long as the established government cannot be resisted or changed without public inconveniency, it is the will of god that the established government be obeyed, and no longer this principle being admitted, the justice of every particular case of resistance is reduced to a computation of the quantity of the danger and grievance on the one side, and of the probability and expense of redressing it on the other.&quot; of this, he says, every man shall judge for himself. but paley appears never to have contemplated those cases to which the rule of ex pediency does not apply, in which a people, as well as an individual, must do justice, cost what it may. if i have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, i must restore it to him though i drown myself. this, according to paley, would be inconvenient. but he that would save his life, in such a case, shall lose it. this people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on mexico, though it cost them their existence as a peo ple. in their practice, nations agree with paley ; but does any one think that massachusetts does exactly what is right at the present crisis ? &quot; a drab of state, a cloth-o -silver slut, to have her train borne up, and her soul trail in the dirt.&quot; civil disobedience. 129 practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the south, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not pre pared to do justice to the slave and to mexico, cost what it may. \j. quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, co-operate with, and do the bidding of, those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless^ we are accustomed to say, that the mass of men are unprepared ; but improvement is slow, be cause the few are not materially wiser or better than, the many. it is not so important that many should be as good as you, as that there be some absolute good ness somewhere ; for that will leaven the whole lump, e are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them ; who, esteeming themselves children of washington and franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing; who even postpone the question of free dom to the question of free-trade, and quietly read the prices-current along with the latest advices from mexico, after dinner, and, it may be, fall asleep over them both. what is the price-current of an honest man and patriot to-day ? ^they hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition ; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. they will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret-^xat most, they give only a cheap vote, and a feeble countenance and god-speed, to the right, as it goes by them. there are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man.^but it is easier 6* i 130 civil disobedience. to deal with the real possessor of a thing than with the temporary guardian of it. all voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or back gammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions ; and betting nat urally accompanies it. the character of the voters is not staked, (j^cast my vote, perchance, as i think right ; but i am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail.,-* i am willing to leave it to the majority. its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. it is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. (a wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority^ there is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. when the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. they will then be the only slaves. only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote. i hear of a convention to be held at baltimore, or elsewhere, for the selection of a candidate for the presi dency, made up chiefly of editors, and men who are politicians by profession ; but i think, what is it to any independent, intelligent, and respectable man what deci sion they may come to ? shall we not have the advantage of his wisdom and honesty, nevertheless ? can we not count upon some independent votes ? are there not many individuals in the country who do not attend con ventions ? but no : i find that the respectable man, so called, has immediately drifted from his position, and civil disobedience. 131 despairs of his country, when his country has more rea son to despair of him. he forthwith adopts one of the candidates thus selected as the only available one, thus proving that he is himself available for any purposes of the demagogue. his vote is of no more worth than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hireling native, who may have been bought. o for a man who is a man, and, as my neighbor says, has a bone in his back which you cannot pass your hand through ! our statistics are at fault : the population has been returned too large. how many men are there to a square thousand miles in this country ? hardly one. does not america offer any inducement for men to settle here ? the american has dwindled into an odd fellow, one who may be known by the development of his organ of gregarious ness, and a manifest lack of intellect and cheerful self reliance ; whose first and chief concern, on coming into the world, is to see that the almshouses are in good repair ; and, before yet he has lawfully donned the virile garb, to collect a fund for the support of the widows and orphans that may be ; who, in short, ventures to live only by the aid of the mutual insurance company, which has promised to bury him decently. cljjis not a man s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enor mous wrong ; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him ; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer,not to give it practically his supporj? if i devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, i must first see, at least, that i do not pursue them sitting upon another man s shoulders. i must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too. see what gross incon 132 civil disobedience. sistency is tolerated. i have heard some of my towns men say, &quot; i should like to have them order me out to help put down an insurrection of the slaves, or to march to mexico ; see if i would go &quot; ; and yet these very men have each, directly by their allegiance, and so indirectly, at least, by their money, furnished a sub stitute. the soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war ; is applaud ed by those whose own act and authority he disregards and sets at naught ; as if the state were penitent to that degree that it hired one to scourge it while it sinned, but not to that degree that it left off sinning for a moment. (tfhus, under the name of order and ci\ 7 il government, we are all made, at last to pay homage to and support our own meanness^ after the first blush of sin comes its indifference ; and from immoral it becomes, as it were, wwmoral, and not quite unnecessary to that life which we have made. the broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it. the slight re proach to which the virtue of patriotism is commonly liable, the noble are most likely to incur. ^those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support, are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform. some are petitioning the state to dissolve the union, to disregard the requisitions of the president. why do they not dissolve it themselves, the union between themselves and the state, and refuse to pay their quota into its treasury t) do not they stand in the same relation to the state, that the state does to the union ? civil disobedience. 133 and have not the same reasons prevented the state from resisting the union, which have prevented them from resisting the state ? how can a man be satisfied to entertain an opinion merely, and enjoy it ? is there any enjoyment in it, if his opinion is that he is aggrieved ? if you are cheated out of a single dollar by your neighbor, you do not rest satisfied with knowing that you are cheated, or with paying that you are cheated, or even with petitioning him to pay you your due ; but you take effectual steps at once to obtain the full amount, and see that you are never cheated again. action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations ; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. it not only divides states and churches, it divides families ; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine. * unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at oncer^ men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. vthey think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. but it is the fault of the government itself that the rem edy is worse than the evil) it makes it worse. why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform ? why does it not cherish its wise minority ? i why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? whyaoes it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have themv why does it always crucify christ, and excommunicate 134 civil disobedience. copernicus and luther, and pronounce washington and franklin rebels ? one would think, that a deliberate and practical denial of its. authority was the only offence never contemplated by government ; else, why has it not assigned its definite, its suitable and proportionate penalty ? if a man who has no property refuses but once to earn nine shillings for the state, he is put in prison for a period unlimited by any law that i knoav, and determined only by the dis cretion of those who placed him there ; but if he should steal ninety times nine shillings from the state, he is soon permitted to go at large again. if the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go : perchance it will wear smooth, certainly the machine will wear out. if the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil ; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, i say, break the law. let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. what i have to do is to see, at any rate, that / 1 do not lend myself to the wrong which i condemn. sas for adopting the ways which the state has provided for remedying the evil, i know not of such ways. they take too much time, and a man s life will be goiie^ i have other affairs to attend to. i came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad. a man has not everything to do, but something ; and oecause he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong. it is not my business to be petitioning the governor or the | legislature any more than it is theirs to petition me ; and, civil disobedience. 135 if they should not hear my petition, what should i do then ? but in this case the state has provided no way : its very constitution is the evil. this may seem to be harsh and stubborn and unconciliatory ; but it is to treat with the utmost kindness and consideration the only spirit that can appreciate or deserves it. so is all change for the better, like birth and death, which convulse the body. i do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their support, both in person and property, from the govern ment of massachusetts, and not wait till they constitute a majority of one, before they suffer the right to prevail through them. i think that it is enough if they have god on their side, without waiting for that other one. more over, any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already. i meet this american government, or its representa tive, the state government, directly, and face to face, once a year no more in the person of its tax-gatherer ; this is the only mode in which a man situated as i am neces sarily meets it ; and it then says distinctly, recognize me; and the simplest, the most effectual, and, in the present posture of affairs, the indispensablest mode of treating with it on this head, of expressing your little sat isfaction with and love for it, is to deny it then. my civil neighbor, the tax-gatherer, is the very man i have to deal with, for it is, after all, with men and not with parchment that i quarrel, and he has voluntarily chosen to be an agent of the government. how shall he ever know well what he is and does as an officer of the government, or as a man, until he is obliged to consider whether he shall treat me, his neighbor, for whom he 136 civil disobedience. has respect, as a neighbor and well-disposed man, or as a maniac and disturber of the peace, and see if he can get over this obstruction to his neighborliness without a ruder and more impetuous thought or speech correspond ing with his action. i know this well, that if one thou sand, if one hundred, if ten men whom i could name, if ten honest men only, ay, if one honest man, in this state of massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were ac tually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in america. for it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be : what is once well done is done forever. but we love better to talk about it : that we say is our mission. reform keeps many scores of v newspapers in its service, but not one man. if my es teemed neighbor, the state s ambassador, who will devote his days to the settlement of the question of human rights in the council chamber, instead of being threat ened with the prisons of carolina, were to sit down the prisoner of massachusetts, that state which is so anxious to foist the sin of slavery upon her sister, though at present she can discover only an act of inhospitality to be the ground of a quarrel with her, the legislature would not wholly waive the subject the following winter. under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. the proper place to-day, the only place which massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is nr her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the state by her own act, as they have already put them selves out by their principles. it is there that the fugitive slave, and the mexican prisoner on parole, and the indian come to plead the wrongs of his race, civil disobedience. 137 should find them ; on that separate, but more free and honorable ground, where the state places those who are not with her, but against her, the only house in a slave ^ state in which a free man can abide with honor.f if any think that their influence would be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict the ear of the state, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat in justice who has experienced a little in his own perstm. cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. a minority is powerless while it 1 conforms to the majority ; it is not even a minority then ; .) but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. if the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the state will not hesitate which to choose, off a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the state to commit violence and shed innocent blood. this ^ is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible?) if the tax-gatherer, or any other pub lic officer, asks me, as one has done, &quot; but what shall i do ? &quot; my answer is, &quot; if you really wish to do anything, resign your office.&quot; &amp;lt;ien the subject has refused alle^ giance, and the officer has^esigned his office, then the *&quot; revolution is accomplished^) but even suppose blood should flow. is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? through this wound a man s real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death. i see this blood flowing now. ^ i have contemplated the imprisonment of the offender, rather than the seizure of his goods, though both will 138 civil disobedience. serve the same purpose, because they who assert the purest right, and consequently are most dangerous to a corrupt state, commonly have not spent much time in ac cumulating property. to such the state renders compar atively small service, and a slight tax is wont to appear exorbitant, particularly if they are obliged to earn it by special labor with their hands. if there were one who lived wholly without the use of money, the state itself would hesitate to demand it of him. but the rich man, not to make any invidious comparison, is always sold to the institution which makes him rich. absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue ; for money comes between a man and his objects, and obtains them for him ; and it was certainly no great virtue to obtain it. it puts to rest many questions which he would other wise be taxed to answer ; while the only new question which it puts is the hard but superfluous one, how to spend it. thus his moral ground is taken from under his feet. the opportunities of living are diminished in proportion as what are called the &quot; means &quot; are increased. the best thing a man can do for his culture when he is \s rich is to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor. christ answered the herodians according to their condition. &quot; show me the tribute-money,&quot; said he ; and one took a penny out of his pocket ; if you use money which has the image of ca3sar on it, and which he has made current and val uable, that is, if you are men of the state, and gladly enjoy the advantages of cesar s government, then pay him back some of his own when he demands it ; &quot; render therefore to ca3sar that which is caesar s, and to god those things which are god s,&quot; leaving them no wiser than before as to which was which ; for they did not wish to know. civil disobedience. 139 ;, when i converse with the freest of my neighbors, i perceive that, -whatever they may say about the magni tude and seriousness of the question, and their regard for the public tranquillity, the long and the short of the matter is, that they cannot spare the protection of the existing government, and they dread the consequences to their property and families of disobedience to it. for my own part, i should not like to tiring that i ever rely on the protection of the state. but, if i deny the i/ authority of the state when it presents its tax-bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without encfc\ this &quot;is hard. this makes it impossible for a man to live honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in outward respects. it will not be worth the while to accumulate property ; that would be sure to go again. you must hire or squat somewhere, and raise but a small crop, and eat that soon. you must live within yourself, and depend upon yourself always tucked up and ready for a start, and not have many affairs. *^a man may grow rich in turkey even, if he will be in all respects a good subject of the turk ish government. confucius said : &quot; if a state is gov erned by the principles of reason, poverty and misery are subjects of shame ; if a state is not governed by ^. the principles of reason, riches and honors are the sub jects of shame.&quot; no : until i want the protection of massachusetts to be extended to me in some distant southern port, where my liberty is endangered, or until i am bent solely on building up an estate at home by peaceful enterprise, i can afford to refuse allegiance to massachusetts, and her right to my property and life. it costs me less in every sense to incur the penalty of **-* disobedience to the state, than it would to obey. i should feel as if i were worth less in that case. 140 civil disobedience. some years ago, the state met me in behalf of the church, and commanded me to pay a certain sum toward the support of a clergyman whose preaching my father attended, but never i myself. &quot; pay,&quot; it said, &quot; or be locked up in the jail.&quot; i declined to pay. but, unfor tunately, another man saw fit to pay it. i did not see why the schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest, and not the priest the schoolmaster; for i was not the state s schoolmaster, but i supported myself by voluntary subscription. i did not see why the lyceuin should not present its tax-bill, and have the state to back its demand, as well as the church. however, at the re quest of the selectmen, i condescended to make some such statement as this in writing : &quot; know all men by these presents, that i, henry thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which i have not joined.&quot; this i gave to the town clerk; and he has it. the state, having thus learned that i did not wish to be regarded as a member of that church, has never made a like demand on me since ; though it said that it must adhere to its original presumption that time. if i had known how to name them, i should then have signed off in detail from all the societies which i never signed on to ; but i did not know where to find a complete list. i have paid no poll-tax for six years. i was put into a jail once on this account, for one night ; and, as i stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, i could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if i were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. i wondered that it should have concluded civil disobedience. 141 at length that this was the best use it could put me to, and had never thought to avail itself of my services in some way. i saw that, if there was a wall of stone be tween me and my townsmen, there was a still more dif ficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as i was. i did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. i felt as if i alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax. they plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. in every threat and in every compliment there was a blun der ; for they thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall. i could not but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let or hindrance, and they were really all that was danger ous. as they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish my body ; just as boys, if they cannot come at some person against whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog. i saw that the state was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and i lost all .my remaining respect for it, and pitied it. tims the state never intentionally confronts a man s sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. it is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strengtl^ i avas not born to be forced. i will breathe after my own fashion. let us see who ia the strongest. what force has a multitude ? they only can force me who obey a higher law than i. they force me to become like themselve^. i do not hear of men being forced to live this way or that by masses of men. what sort of life were that to live ? when i 142 civil disobedience. meet a government which says to me, &quot;your money or your life,&quot; why should i be in haste to give it my money ? it may be in a great strait, and not know what to do : i cannot help that. it must help itself ; do as i do. it is not worth the while to snivel about it. i am not responsible for the successful working of the ma chinery of society. i am not the son of the engineer. i perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side s by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. if a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies ; and so a man. the night in prison was novel and interesting enough. the prisoners in their shirt-sleeves were enjoying a chat and the evening air in the doorway, when i entered. but the jailer said, &quot; come, boys, it is time to lock up&quot;; and so they dispersed, and i heard the sound of their steps returning into the hollow apartments. my room-mate was introduced to me by the jailer, as &quot; a first-rate fellow and a clever man:&quot; when the door was locked, he showed me where to hang my hat, and how he managed matters there. the rooms were whitewashed once a month ; and this one, at least, was the whitest, most simply furnished, and probably the neatest apartment in the town. he naturally wanted to know where i came from, and what brought me there ; and, when i had told him, i asked him in my turn how lie came there, presum ing him to be an honest man, of course ; and, as the world goes, i believe he was. &quot; why,&quot; said he, &quot; they accuse me of burning a barn ; but i never did it.&quot; as near as i could discover, he had probably gone to bed in a barn avhen drunk, and smoked his pipe there ; and so a barn was burnt. he had the reputation of being a clever man, had been there some three months waiting for his trial to come on, and would have to wait as much longer ; but he was quite domesticated civil disobedience. 143 and contented, since he got his board for nothing, and thought that he was well treated. lie occupied one window, and i the other ; and i saw, that, if one stayed there long, his principal business would be to look out the window. i had soon read all the tracts that were left there, and examined where former prisoners had broken out, and where a grate had been sawed off, and heard the history of the various occupants of that room ; for i found that even here there was a history and a gossip which never circulated beyond the walls of the jail. probably this is the only -house in the town where verses are composed, which are afterward printed in a circular form, but not published. i was shown quite a long list of verses which were composed by some young men who had been detected in an attempt to escape, who avenged themselves by singing them. i pumped my fellow-prisoner as dry as i could, for fear i should never see him again ; but at length he showed me which was my bed, and left me to blow out the lamp. it was like travelling into a far country, such as i had never expected to behold, to lie there for one night. it seemed to me that i never had heard the town-clock strike before, nor the evening sounds of the village ; for we slept with the windows open, which were inside the grating. it was to see my native village in the light of the middle ages, and our concord was turned into a rhine stream, and visions of knights and castles passed before me. they were the voices of old burghers that i heard in the streets. i was an invol untary spectator and auditor of whatever was done and said in the kitchen of the adjacent village-inn, a wholly new and rare experience to me. it was a closer view of my na tive town. i was fairly inside of it. i never had seen its in stitutions before. this is one of its peculiar institutions ; for it is a shire town. i began to comprehend what its inhabi tants were about. in the morning, our breakfasts were put through the hole in the door, in small oblong-square tin pans, made to fit, and holding a pint of chocolate, with brown bread, and an iron 144 civil disobedience. spoon. when they called for the vessels again, i was green enough to return what bread i had left; but my comrade seized it, and said that i should lay that up for lunch or din ner. soon after he was let out to work at haying in a neigh boring field, whither he went every day, and would not be back till noon ; so he bade me good-day, saying that he doubted if he should see me again. when i came out of prison, for some one interfered, and paid that tax, i did not perceive that great changes had taken place on the common, such as he observed who went in a youth, and emerged a tottering and gray-headed man ; and yet a change had to my eyes come over the scene, the town, and state, and country, greater than any that mere time could effect. i saw yet more distinctly the state in which i lived. 1 saw to what extent the people among whom i lived could be trusted as good neighbors and friends ; that their friendship was for summer weather only ; that they did not greatly propose to do right ; that they were a dis tinct race from me by their prejudices and superstitions, as the chinamen and malays are ; that, in their sacrifices to hu manity, they ran no risks, not even to their property ; that, after all, they were not so noble but they treated the thief as he had treated them, and hoped, by a certain outward obser vance and a few prayers, and by walking in a particular straight though useless path from time to time, to save their souls. this may be to judge my neighbors harshly; for i believe that many of them are not aware that they have such an institution as the jail in their village. it was formerly the custom in our village, when a poor debtor came out of jail, for his acquaintances to salute him, looking through their fingers, which were crossed to repre sent the grating of a jail window, &quot; how do ye do ? &quot; my neighbors did not thus salute me, but first looked at me, and then at one another, as if i had returned from a long journey. i was put into jail as i was going to the shoemaker s to get a shoe which was mended. when i was let out the next morn ing, i proceeded to finish my errand, and having put on my civil disobedience. 145 mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impa tient to put themselves under my conduct ; and in half an hour, for the horse was soon tackled, was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the state was nowhere to be seen. this is the whole history of &quot; my prisons.&quot; i have never declined paying the highway tax, because i am as desirous of being a good neighbor as i am of being a bad subject ; and, as for supporting schools, i am doing my part to educate my fellow-countrymen now. it is for no particular item in the tax-bill that i refuse to pay it. i simply wish to refuse allegiance to the state, to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually!^ i do not care to trace the course of my dollar, if i could, till it buys a man or a musket to shoot one with, the dollar is in nocent, but i am concerned to trace the effects of my allegiance. (in fact, i quietly declare war with the state, after my fashion, though i will still make what use and get what advantage of her i can, as is usual in such case^v if others pay the tax which is demanded of me, from a sympathy with the state, they do but what they have al ready done in their own case, or rather they abet injus tice to a greater extent than the state requires. if they pay the tax from a mistaken interest in the individual taxed, to save his property, or prevent his going to jail, it is because they have not considered wisely how far they let their private feelings interfere with the public good. this, then, is my position at present. but one cannot be too much on his guard in such a case, lest his action be biassed by obstinacy, or an undue regard for the opin ions of men. let him see that he does only what be longs to himself and to the hour. 7 j 146 civil disobedience. i think sometimes, why, this people mean well ; they are only ignorant ; they would do better if they knew how : why give your neighbors this pain to treat you as they are not inclined to ? but i think again, this is no reason why i should do as they do, or permit others to suffer much greater pain of a different kindn again, i sometimes say to myself, when many millions of men, without heat, without ill will, without personal feeling of any kind, demand of you a few shillings only, without? the possibility, such is their constitution, of re tracting or altering their present demand, and without the possibility, on your side, of appeal to any other mil lions, why expose yourself to this overwhelming brute force ? you do not resist cold and hunger, the winds and the waves, thus obstinately ; you quietly submit to a thousand similar necessities. you do not put your head into the fire. but just in proportion as i regard this as not wholly a brute force, but partly a human, force, and consider that i have relations to those mil lions as to so many millions of men, and not of mere brute or inanimate things, i see that appeal is possible, first and instantaneously, from them to the maker of them, and, secondly, from them to themselves. but, if i put my head deliberately into the fire, there is no appeal to fire or to the maker of fire, and i have only myself to blame. if i could convince myself that i have any right to be satisfied with men as they are, and to treat them accordingly, and not according, in some respects, to my requisitions and expectations of what they and i ought to be, then, like a good mussulman and fatalist, i should endeavor to be satisfied with things as they are, and say it is the will of god. and, above all? there is this difference between resisting this and a purely brute civil disobedience. 147 or natural force, that i can resist this with some effect ; but i cannot expect, like orpheus, to change the nature of the rocks and trees and beasts. i do not wish to quarrel with any man or nation. i do not wish to split hairs, to make fine distinctions, or set myself up as better than my neighbors. i seek rather, i may say, even an excuse for conforming to the laws of the land. i am but too ready to conform to them. indeed, i have reason to suspect myself on this head ; and each year, as the tax-gatherer comes round, i find myself disposed to review the acts and position of the general and state governments, and the spirit of the people, to discover a pretext for conformity. &quot; we must affect oiir country as our parents ; and if at any time we alienate our love or industry from doing it honor, we must respect effects and teach the soul matter of conscience and religion, and not desire of rule or benefit.&quot; i believe that the state will soon be able to take all my work of this sort out of my hands, and then i shall be no / better a patriot than my fellow-countrymen. seen from a lower point of view, the constitution, with all its faults, is very good ; the law and the courts are very respecta ble ; even this state and this american government are, in many respects, very admirable and rare things, to be thankful for, such as a great many have described them ; but seen from a point of view a little higher, they are what i have described them ; seen from a higher still, and the highest, who shall say what they are, or that they are worth looking at or thinking of at all ? i/ (^however, the government does not concern me much, and i shall bestow the fewest possible thoughts on it. it is not many moments that i live under a government, 148 civil disobedience. even in this world. if a man is thought-free, fancy free, imagination-free, that which is not never for a long time appearing to be to him, unwise rulers or reformers \cannot fatally interrupt him.^ i know that most men think differently from myself; but those whose lives are by profession devoted to the study of these or kindred subjects, content me as little as any. statesmen and legislators, standing so completely within the institution, never distinctly and nakedly be hold it. they speak of moving society, but have no resting-place without it. they may be men of a certain experience and discrimination, and have no doubt in vented ingenious and even useful systems, for which we sincerely thank them ; but all their wit and usefulness lie within certain not very wide limits. they are wont to forget that the world is not governed by policy and expediency. webster never goes behind government, and so cannot speak with authority about it. his words are wisdom to those legislators who contemplate no essential reform in the existing government ; but for thinkers, and those who legislate for all time, he never once glances at the subject. i know of those whose serene and wise speculations on this theme would soon reveal the limits of his mind s range and hospitality. yet, compared with the cheap professions of most re formers, and the still cheaper wisdom and eloquence of politicians in general, his are almost the only sensible and valuable words, and we thank heaven for him. comparatively, he is always strong, original, and, above all, practical. still his quality is not wisdom, but pru dence. the lawyer s truth is not truth, but consistency, or a consistent expediency. truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the civil disobedience. 149 justice that may consist with wrongdoing. he well deserves to be called, as he has been called, the de fender of the constitution. there are really no blows to be given by him but defensive ones. he is not a leader, but a follower. his leaders are the men of 87. &quot; i have never made an effort,&quot; he says, &quot; and never propose to make an effort ; i have never countenanced an effort, and never mean to countenance an effort, to disturb the arrangement as originally made, by which the various states came into the union.&quot; still thinking of the sanction which the constitution gives to slavery, he says, &quot; because it was a part of the original com pact, let it stand.&quot; notwithstanding his special acute ness and ability, he is unable to take a fact out of its merely political relations, and behold it as it lies abso lutely to be disposed of by the intellect, what, for instance, it behooves a man to do here in america to day with regard to slavery, but ventures, or is driven, to make some such desperate answer as the following, while professing to speak absolutely, and as a private man, from which what new and singular code of social duties might be inferred ? &quot; the manner,&quot; says he, &quot; in which the governments of those states where slavery exists are to regulate it, is for their own con sideration, under their responsibility to their constituents, to the general laws of propriety, humanity, and justice, and to god. associations formed elsewhere, springing from a feeling of humanity, or any other cause, have nothing whatever to do with it. they have never re ceived any encouragement from me, and they never will.&quot; * they who know of no purer sources of truth, who * these extracts have been inserted since the lecture was read. 150 civil disobedience. have traced up its stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the bible and the constitution, and drink at it there with reverence and humility ; but they who behold where it comes trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more, and continue their pilgrimage toward its fountain-head. \no man with a genius for legislation has appeared in america^ they are rare in the history of the world. there are orators, politicians, and eloquent men, by the thousand ; but the speaker has not yet opened his mouth to speak, who is capable of settling the much-vexed questions of the day. we love eloquence for its own sake, and not for any truth which it may utter, or any heroism it may inspire. ith^legislators have not yet learned the comparative value of free-trade and of free dom, of union, and of rectitude, to a nation. they have no genius or talent for comparatively humble questions of taxation and finance, commerce and manufactures and agriculture. if we were left solely to the wordy wit of legislators in congress for our guidance, uncorrected by the seasonable experience and the effectual complaints of the people, america would not long retain her rank among the nations.^ for eighteen hundred years, though perchance i havo/no right to say it, the new testament has been written ; yet where is the legislator who has wisdom and practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which it sheds on the science of legislation ? /the authority of government, even such as i am will ing to submit to, for i will cheerfully obey those who know and can do better than i, and in many things even those who neither know nor can do so well, is still an impure one : to be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent of the governed. it can have no pure right civil disobedience. 151 over my person and property but what i concede ton the progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual. even the chinese philosopher was wise enough to regard the indi vidual as the basis of the empire. (^ a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in govern ment ? is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man ? there will never be a really free and enlightened state, until the state comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its ownj^ower and authority are derived, and treats him according!^ i please myself with imagining a state at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor ; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose, if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. a state which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious state, which also i have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen. a plea for captain john brown.* i trust that you will pardon me for being here. i do not wish to force my thoughts upon you, but i feel forced myself. little as i know of captain brown, i would fain do my part to correct the tone and the statements of the newspapers, and of my countrymen gen erally, respecting his character and actions. it costs us nothing to be just. we can at least express our sympa thy with, and admiration of, him and his companions, and that is what i now propose to do. first, as to his history. i will endeavor to omit, as much as possible, what you have already read. i need not describe his person to you, for probably most of you have seen and will not soon forget him. i am told that his grandfather, john brown, was an officer in the rev olution ; that he himself was born in connecticut about the beginning of this century, but early went with his father to ohio. i heard him say that his father was a contractor who furnished beef to the army there, in the war of 1812 ; that he accompanied him to the camp, and assisted him in that employment, seeing a good deal of mil itary life, more, perhaps, than if he had been a soldier ; for he was often present at the councils of the officers. es pecially, he learned by experience how armies are supplied * read to the citizens of concord, mass., sunday evening, octo ber 30, 1859. a plea for captain john brown. 153 and maintained in the field, a work which, he observed, requires at least as much experience and skill as to lead them in battle. he said that few persons had any conception of the cost, even the pecuniary cost, of firing a single bullet in war. he saw enough, at any rate, to disgust him with a military life ; indeed, to excite in him a great abhorrence of it ; so much so, that though he was tempted by the offer of some petty office in the army, when he was about eighteen, he not only declined that, but he also refused to train when warned, and was fined for it. he then resolved that he would never have any thing to do with any war, unless it were a war for liberty. when the troubles in kansas began, he sent several of his sons thither to strengthen the party of the free state men, fitting them out with such weapons as he had ; telling them that if the troubles should increase, and there should be need of him, he would follow, to assist them with his hand and counsel. this, as you all know, he soon after did ; and it was through his agency, far more than any other s, that kansas was made free. for a part of his life he was a surveyor, and at one time he was engaged in wool-growing, and he went to europe as an agent about that business. there, as everywhere, he had his eyes about him, and made many original ob servations. he said, for instance, that he saw why the soil of england was so rich, and that of germany (i think it was) so poor, and he thought of writing to some of the crowned heads about it. it was because in england the peasantry live on the soil which they cultivate, but in germany they are gathered into villages, at night. it is a pity that he did not make a book of his observa tions. i should say that he was an old-fashioned man in his 7* 154 a plea for captain john brown. respect for the constitution, and his faith in the perma nence of this union. slavery he deemed to be wholly opposed to these, and he was its determined foe. he was by descent and birth a new england farmer, a man of great common-sense, deliberate and practical as that class is, and tenfold more so. he was like the best of those who stood at concord bridge once, on lexington common, and on bunker hill, only he was firmer and higher principled than any that i have chanced to hear of as there. it was no abolition lecturer that converted him. ethan allen and stark, with whom he may in some respects be compared, were ran gers in a lower and less important field. they could bravely face their country s foes, but he had the courage to face his country herself, when she was in the wrong. a western writer says, to account for his escape from so many perils, that he was concealed under a &quot; rural exterior &quot; ; as if, in that prairie land, a hero should, by good rights, wear a citizen s dress only. he did not go to the college called harvard, good old alma mater as she is. he was not fed on the pap that is there furnished. as he phrased it, &quot; i know no more of grammar than one of your calves.&quot; but he went to the great university of the west, where he sedulously pursued the study of liberty, for which he had early betrayed a fondness, and having taken many degree?, he finally commenced the public practice of humanity in kansas, as you all know. such were his humanities and not any study of grammar. he would have left a greek accent slanting the wrong way, and righted up a falling man. he was one of that class of whom we hear a great deal, but ; for the most part, see nothing at all, the a plea for captain john brown. 155 puritans. it would be in vain to kill him. he died lately in the time of cromwell, but he reappeared here. why should he not ? some of the puritan stock are said to have come over and settled in new england. they were a class that did something else than celebrate their forefathers day, and eat parched corn in remem brance of that time. they were neither democrats nor republicans, but men of simple habits, straightforward, prayerful ; not thinking much of rulers who did not fear god, not making many compromises, nor seeking after available candidates. &quot; in his camp,&quot; as one has recently written, and as i have myself heard him state, &quot; he permitted no profan ity ; no man of loose morals was suffered to remain there, unless, indeed, as a prisoner of war. i would rather, said he, have the small-pox, yellow-fever, and cholera, all together in my camp, than a man without principle. . . . . it is a mistake, sir, that our people make, when they think that bullies are the best fighters, or that they are the fit men to oppose these southerners. give me men of good principles, god-fearing men, men who respect themselves, and with a dozen of them i will op pose any hundred such men as these buford ruffians. &quot; he said that if one offered himself to be a soldier under him, who was forward to tell what he could or would do, if he could only get sight of the enemy, he had but little confidence in him. he was never able to find more than a score or so of recruits whom he would accept, and only about a dozen, among them his sons, in whom he had perfect faith. when he was here, some years ago, he showed to a few a little manuscript book, his &quot; orderly book &quot; i think he called it, containing the names of his company in kan 156 a plea for captain john brown. sas, and the rules by which they bound themselves ; and he stated that several of them had already sealed the contract with their blood. when some one remarked that, with the addition of a chaplain, it would have been a per fect cromwellian troop, he observed that he would have been glad to add a chaplain to the list, if he could have found one who could fill that office worthily. it is easy enough to find one for the united states army. i believe that he had prayers in his camp morning and evening, nevertheless. he was a man of spartan habits, and at sixty was scrupulous about his diet at your table, excusing himself by saying that he must eat sparingly and fare hard, as became a soldier, or one who was fitting himself for difficult enterprises, a life of exposure. a man of rare common-sense and directness of speech, as of action ; a transcendentalist above all, a man of ideas and principles, that was what distinguished him. not yielding to a whim or transient impulse, but carry ing out the purpose of a life. i noticed that he did not overstate anything, but spoke within bounds. i re member, particularly, how, in his speech here, he re ferred to what his family had suffered in kansas, with out ever giving the least vent to his pent-up fire. it was a volcano with an ordinary chimney-flue. also referring to the deeds of certain border ruffians, he said, rapidly paring away his speech, like an experienced soldier, keeping a reserve of force and meaning, &quot; they had a perfect right to be hung.&quot; he was not in the least a rhetorician, was not talking to buncombe or his constituents anywhere, had no need to invent anything but to tell the simple truth, and communicate his own resolution ; therefore he appeared incomparably strong, a plea for captain john brown. 157 and eloquence in congress and elsewhere seemed to me at a discount. it was like the speeches of cromwell compared with those of an ordinary king. as for his tact and prudence, i will merely say, that at a time when scarcely a man from the free states was able to reach kansas by any direct route, at least without having his arms taken from him, he, carrying what imperfect guns and other weapons he could collect, openly and slowly drove an ox-cart through missouri, apparently in the capacity of a surveyor, with his sur veying compass exposed in it, and so passed unsuspected, and had ample opportunity to learn the designs of the enemy. for some time after his arrival he still followed the same profession. when, for instance, he saw a knot of the ruffians on the prairie, discussing, of course, the sin gle topic which then occupied their minds, he would, per haps, take his compass and one of his sons, and proceed to run an imaginary line right through the very spot on which that conclave had assembled, and when he came up to them, he would naturally pause and have some talk with them, learning their news, and, at last, all their plans perfectly ; and having thus completed his real sur vey he would resume his imaginary one, and run on his line till he was out of sight. when i expressed surprise that he could live in kan sas at all, with a price set upon his head, and so large a number, including the authorities, exasperated against him, he accounted for it by saying, &quot; it is perfectly well understood that i will not be taken.&quot; much of the time for some years he has had to skulk in swamps, suffering from poverty and from sickness, which was the con sequence of exposure, befriended only by indians and a few whites. but though it might be known that he 158 a plea fob captain john brown. was lurking in a particular swamp, his foes commonly did not care to go in after him. he could even come out into a town where there were more border ruffians than free state men, and transact some business, without delaying long, and yet not be molested; for, said he, &quot;no little handful of men were willing to undertake it, and a large body could not be got together in season.&quot; as for his recent failure, we do not know the facts about it. it was evidently far from being a wild and desperate attempt. his enemy, mr. vallandigham, is compelled to say, that &quot; it was among the best planned and executed conspiracies that ever failed.&quot; not to mention his other successes, was it a failure, or did it show a want of good management, to deliver from bondage a dozen human beings, and walk off with them by broad daylight, for weeks if not months, at a leisurely pace, through one state after another, for half the length of the north, conspicuous to all parties, with a price set upon his head, going into a court-room on his way and telling what he had done, thus convincing mis souri that it was not profitable to try to hold slaves in his neighborhood ? and this, not because the govern ment menials were lenient, but because they were afraid of him. yet he did not attribute his success, foolishly, to &quot; his star,&quot; or to any magic. he said, truly, that the reason why such greatly superior numbers quailed before him was, as one of his prisoners confessed, because they lacked a cause, a kind of armor which he and his party never lacked. when the time came, few men were found .willing to lay down their lives in defence of what they knew to be wrong ; they did not like that this should be their last act in this world. a plea for captain john brown. 159 but to make haste to his last act, and its effects. the newspapers seem to ignore, or perhaps are really ingorant of the fact, that there are at least as many as two or three individuals to a town throughout the north who think much as the present speaker does about him and his enterprise. i do not hesitate to say that they are an important and growing party. we aspire to be something more than stupid and timid chattels, pretend ing to read history and our bibles, but desecrating every house and every day we breathe in. perhaps anxious politicians may prove that only seventeen white men and five negroes were concerned in the late enterprise ; but their very anxiety to prove this might suggest to them selves that all is not told. why do they still dodge the truth ? they are so anxious because of a dim conscious ness of the fact, which they do not distinctly face, that at least a million of the free inhabitants of the united states would have rejoiced if it had succeeded. they at most only criticise the tactics. though we wear no crape, the thought of that man s position and probable fate is spoiling many a man s day here at the north for other thinking. if any one who has seen him here can pursue successfully any other train of thought, i do not know what he is made of. if there is any such who gets his usual allowance of sleep, i will warrant him to fatten easily under any circumstances which do not touch his body or purse. i put a piece of paper and a pencil under my pillow, and when i could not sleep, i wrote in the dark. on the whole, my respect for my fellow-men, except as one may outweigh a million, is not being increased these days. i have noticed the cold-blooded way in which newspaper writers and men generally speak of 160 a plea for captain john brown. this event, as if an ordinary malefactor, though one of unusual &quot; pluck,&quot; as the governor of virginia is re ported to have said, using the language of the cock-pit, &quot; the gamest man he ever saw,&quot; had been caught, and were about to be hung. he was not dreaming of his foes when the governor thought he looked so brave. it turns what sweetness i have to gall, to hear, or hear of, the remarks of some of my neighbors. when we heard at first that he was dead, one of my townsmen observed that &quot; he died as the fool dieth &quot; ; which, par don me, for an instant suggested a likeness in him dying to my neighbor living. others, craven-hearted, said disparagingly, that &quot; he threw his life away,&quot; because he resisted the government. which way have they thrown their lives, pray? such as would praise a man for attacking singly an ordinary *band of thieves or mur derers. i hear another ask, yankee-like, &quot; what will he gain by it ? &quot; as if he expected to fill his pockets by this enterprise. such a one has no idea of gain but in this worldly sense. if it does not lead to a &quot; surprise &quot; party, if he does not get a new pair of boots, or a vote of thanks, it must be a failure. &quot; but he won t gain any thing by it.&quot; well, no, i don t suppose he could get four-and-sixpence a day for being hung, take the year round ; but then he stands a chance to save a consid erable part of his soul, and such a soul ! when you do not. no doubt you can get more in your market for a quart of milk than for a quart of blood, but that is not the market that heroes carry their blood to. such do not know that like the seed is the fruit, and that, in the moral world, when good seed is planted, good fruit is inevitable, and does not depend on our watering and cultivating ; that when you plant, or bury, a plea for captain john brown. 161 a hero in his field, a crop of heroes is sure to spring up. this is a seed of such force and vitality, that it does not ask our leave to germinate. the momentary charge at balaclava, in obedience to a blundering command, proving what a perfect machine the soldier is, has, properly enough, been celebrated by a poet laureate ; but the steady, and for the most part successful, charge of this man, for some years, against the legions of slavery, in obedience to an infinitely higher command, is as much more memorable than that, as an intelligent and conscientious man is superior to a machine. do you think that that will go unsung ? &quot; served him right,&quot; &quot;a dangerous man,&quot; u he is undoubtedly insane.&quot; so they proceed to live their sane, and wise, and altogether admirable lives, reading their plutarch a little, but chiefly pausing at that feat of put nam, who was let down into a wolfs den ; and in this wise they nourish themselves for brave and patriotic deeds some time or other. the tract society could afford to print that story of putnam. you might open the district schools with the reading of it, for there is nothing about slavery or the church in it ; unless it occurs to the reader that some pastors are wolves in sheep s clothing. &quot;the american board of commis sioners for foreign missions &quot; even, might dare to pro test against that wolf. i have heard of boards, and of american boards, but it chances that i never heard of this particular lumber till lately. and yet i hear of northern men, and women, and children, by families, buying a &quot; life membership &quot; in such societies as these. a life-membership in the grave ! you can get buried cheaper than that. our foes are in our midst and all about us. there is 162 a plea for captain john brown. hardly a house but is divided against itself, for our foe is the all but universal woodenness of both head and heart, the want of vitality in man, which is the effect of our vice ; and hence are begotten fear, superstition, bigotry, perse cution, and slavery of all kinds. we are mere figure heads upon a hulk, with livers in the place of hearts. the curse is the worship of idols, which at length changes the worshipper into a stone image himself; and the new-englander is just as much an idolater as the hin doo. this man was an exception, for he did not set up even a political graven image between him and his god. a church that can never have done with excommuni cating christ while it exists ! away with your broad and flat churches, and your narrow and tall churches ! take a step forward, and invent a new style of out houses. invent a salt that will save you, and defend our nostrils. the modern christian is a man who has consented to say all the prayers in the liturgy, provided you will let him go straight to bed and sleep quietly afterward. all his prayers begin with &quot; now i lay me down to sleep,&quot; and he is forever looking forward to the time when he shall go to his &quot; long rest.&quot; he has consented to per form certain old-established charities, too, after a fashion, but he does not wish to hear of any new-fangled ones ; he does n t wish to have any supplementary articles added to the contract, to fit it to the present time. he shows the whites of his eyes on the sabbath, and the blacks all the rest of the week. the evil is not merely a stagna tion of blood, but a stagnation of spirit. many, no doubt, are well disposed, but sluggish by constitution and by habit, and they cannot conceive of a man who is act uated by higher motives than they are. accordingly a plea for captain john brown. 163 they pronounce this man insane, for they know that they could never act as he does, as long as they are them selves. we dream of foreign countries, of other times and races of men, placing them at a distance in history or space ; but let some significant event like the present oc cur in our midst, and we discover, often, this distance and this strangeness between us and our nearest neighbors. tjiey are our austria?, and chinas, and south sea islands. our crowded society becomes well spaced all at once, clean and handsome to the eye, a city of magnificent distances. we discover why it was that we never got beyond compliments and surfaces with them before ; we become aware of as many versts between us and them as there are between a wandering tartar and a chinese town. the thoughtful man becomes a hermit in the thoroughfares of the market-place. impassable seas suddenly find their level between us, or dumb steppes stretch themselves out there. it is the difference of con stitution, of intelligence, and faith, and not streams and mountains, that make the true and impassable boundaries between individuals and between states. none but the like-minded can come plenipotentiary to our court. i read all the newspapers i could get within a week after this event, and i do not remember in them a single expression of sympathy for these men. i have since seen one noble statement, in a boston paper, not editorial. some voluminous sheets decided not to print the full re port of brown s words to the exclusion of other matter. it was as if a publisher should reject the manuscript of the new testament, and print wilson s last speech. the same journal which contained this pregnant news, was chiefly filled, in parallel columns, with the reports 164 a plea for captain john brown. of the political conventions that were being held. but the descent to them was too steep. they should have been spared this contrast, been printed in an extra, at least. to turn from the voices and deeds of earnest men to the cackling of political conventions ! office seekers and speech-makers, who do not so much as lay an honest egg, but wear their breasts bare upon an egg of chalk ! their great game is the game of straws, or rather that universal aboriginal game of the platter, at which the indians cried hub, bub ! exclude the reports of re ligious and political conventions, and publish the words of a living man. but i object not so much to what they have omitted, as to what they have inserted. even the liberator called it &quot; a misguided, wild, and apparently insane effort.&quot; as for the herd of newspapers and magazines, i do not chance to know an editor in the country who will deliberately print anything which he knows will ulti mately and permanently reduce the number of his sub scribers. they do not believe that it would be expedient. how then can they print truth? if we do not say pleasant things, they argue, nobody will attend to us. and so they do like some travelling auctioneers, who sing an obscene song, in order to draw a crowd around them. republican editors, obliged to get their sentences ready for the morning edition, and accustomed to look at everything by the twilight of politics, express no admiration, nor true sorrow even, but call these men &quot; deluded fanatics,&quot; &quot; mistaken men,&quot; &quot; insane,&quot; or &quot; crazed.&quot; it suggests what a sane set of editors we are blessed with, not &quot; mistaken men &quot; ; who know very well on which side their bread is buttered, at least. a man does a brave and humane deed, and at once, on a plea for captain john brown. 165 all sides, we hear people and parties declaring, &quot;i did n t do it, nor countenance him to do it, in any conceivable way. it can t be fairly inferred from my past career.&quot; i, for one, am not interested to hear you define your position. i don t know that i ever was, or ever shall be. i think it is mere egotism, or impertinent at this time. ye needn t take so much pains to wash your .skirts of him. no intelligent man will ever be convinced that he was any creature of yours. he went and came, as he him self informs us, &quot; under the auspices of john brown and nobody else.&quot; the republican party does not perceive how many his failure will make to vote more correctly than they would have them. they have counted the votes of pennsylvania & co., but they have not correctly counted captain brown s vote. he has taken the wind out of their sails, the little wind they had, and they may as well lie to and repair. what though he did not belong to your clique! though you may not approve of his method or his prin ciples, recognize his magnanimity. would you not like to claim kindredship with him in that, though in no other thing he is like, or likely, to you ? do you think that you would lose your reputation so ? what you lost at the spile, you would gain at the bung. if they do not mean all this, then they do not speak the truth, and say what they mean. they are simply at their old tricks still. &quot; it was always conceded to him,&quot; says one who calls him crazy, &quot; that he was a conscientious man, very mod est in his demeanor, apparently inoffensive, until the sub ject of slavery was introduced, when he would exhibit a feeling of indignation unparalleled.&quot; the slave-ship is on her way, crowded with its dying 1g6 a plea for captain john brown. victims ; new cargoes are being added in mid-ocean ; a small crew of slaveholders, countenanced by a large body of passengers, is smothering four millions under the hatches, and yet the politician asserts that the only proper way by which deliverance is to be obtained, is by &quot; the quiet diffusion of the sentiments of humanity,&quot; without any &quot; outbreak.&quot; as if the sentiments of hu manity were ever found unaccompanied by its deeds, and you could disperse them, all finished to order, the pure article, as easily as water with a watering-pot, and so lay the dust. what is that that i hear cast overboard ? the bodies of the dead that have found deliverance. that is the way we are &quot; diffusing &quot; humanity, and its sentiments with it. prominent and influential editors, accustomed to deal with politicians, men of an infinitely lower grade, say, in their ignorance, that he acted &quot; on the principle of revenge.&quot; they do not know the man. they must en large themselves to conceive of him. i have no doubt that the time will come when they will begin to see him as he was. they have got to conceive of a man of faith and of religious principle, and not a politician or an in dian ; of a man who did not wait till he was personally interfered with or thwarted in some harmless business before he gave his life to the cause of the oppressed. if walker may be considered the representative of the south, i wish i could say that brown was the represent ative of the north. he was a superior man. he did not value his bodily life in comparison with ideal things. he did not recognize unjust human laws, but resisted them as he was bio*. for once we are lifted out of the trivialness and dust of politics into the region of truth and manhood. no man in america has ever stood up a plea for captain john brown. 167 so persistently and effectively for the dignity of human nature, knowing himself for a man, and the equal of any and all governments. in that sense he was the most american .of us all. he needed no babbling lawyer, making false issues, to defend him. he was more than a match for all the judges that american voters, or office holders of whatever grade, can create. he could not have been tried by a jury of his peers, because his peers did not exist. when a man stands up serenely against the condemnation and vengeance of mankind, rising above them literally by a whole body, even though he were of late the vilest murderer, who has settled that matter with himself, the spectacle is a sublime one, did n t ye know it, ye liberators, ye tribunes, ye he publicans ? and we become criminal in comparison. do yourselves the honor to recognize him. he needs none of your respect. as for the democratic journals, they are not human enough to affect me at all. i do not feel indignation at anything they may say. i am aware that i anticipate a little, that he was still, at the last accounts, alive in the hands of his foes ; but that being the case, i have all along found myself thinking and speaking of him as physically dead. i do not believe in erecting statues to those who still live in our hearts, whose bones have not yet crumbled in the earth around us, but i would rather see the statue of captain brown in the massachusetts state-house yard, than that of any other man whom i know. i re joice that i live in this age, that i am his contemporary. what a contrast, when we turn to that political party which is so anxiously shuffling him and his plot out of its way, and looking around for some available slave 168 a plea for captain john brown. holder, perhaps, to be its candidate, at least for one who will execute the fugitive slave law, and all those other unjust laws which he took up arms to annul ! insane ! a father and six sons, and one son-in-law, and several more men besides, as many at least as twelve disciples, all struck with insanity at once ; while the same tyrant holds with a firmer gripe than ever his four millions of slaves, and a thousand sane editors, his abettors, are saving their country and their bacon ! just as insane were his efforts in kansas. ask the tyrant who is his most dangerous foe, the sane man or the insane ? do the thousands who know him best, who have rejoiced at his deeds in kansas, and have afforded him material aid there, think him insane ? such a use of this word is a mere trope with most who persist in using it, and i have no doubt that many of the rest have already in silence retracted their words. read his admirable answers to mason and others. how they are dwarfed and defeated by the contrast! on the one side, half-brutish, half-timid questioning; on the other, truth, clear as lightning, crashing into their obscene temples. they are made to stand with pilate, and gesler, and the inquisition. how ineffec tual their speech and action ! and what a void their si lence ! they are but helpless tools in this great work. it was no human power that gathered them about this preacher. what have massachusetts and the north sent a few sane representatives to congress for, of late years ? to declare with effect what kind of sentiments ? all their speeches put together and boiled down, and prob ably they themselves will confess it, do not match for manly directness and force, and for simple truth, the few a plea for captain john brown. 169 casual remarks of crazy john brown, on the floor of the harper s ferry engine-house, that man whom you are about to hang, to send to the other world, though not to represent you there. no, he was not our representative in any sense. he was too fair a specimen of a man to represent the like of us. who, then, were his constit uents ? if you read his words understandingly you will find out. in his case there is no idle eloquence, no made, nor maiden speech, no compliments to the oppres sor. truth is his inspirer, and earnestness the polisher of his sentences. he could afford to lose his sharpe s rifles, while he retained his faculty of speech, a sharpe s rifle of infinitely surer and longer range. and the new york herald reports the conversation verbatim / it does not know of what undying words it is made the vehicle. i have no respect for the penetration of any man who can read the report of that conversation, and still call the principal in it insane. it has the ring of a saner sanity than an ordinary discipline and habits of life, than an ordinary organization, secure. take any sentence of it, &quot; any questions that i can honorably answer, i will ; not otherwise. so far as i am myself concerned, i have told everything truthfully. i value my word, sir.&quot; the few who talk about his vindictive spirit, while they really admire his heroism, have no test by which to de tect a noble man, no amalgam to combine with his pure gold. they mix their own dross with it. it is a relief to turn from these slanders to the testi mony of his more truthful, but frightened jailers and hangmen. governor wise speaks far more justly and appreciatingly of him than any northern editor, or poli tician, or public personage, that i chance to have heard 8 170 a plea for captain john brown. from. i know that you can afford to hear him again on this subject. he says : &quot; they are themselves mistaken who take him to be a madman pie is cool, collect ed, and indomitable, and it is but just to him to say, that he was humane to his prisoners and he inspired me with great trust in his integrity as a man of truth. he is a fanatic, vain and garrulous,&quot; (i leave that part to mr. wise,) &quot; but firm, truthful, and intelligent. his men, too, who survive, are like him colonel washington says that he was the coolest and firmest man he ever saw in defying clanger and death. with one son dead by his side, and another shot through, he felt the pulse of his dying son with one hand, and held his rifle with the other, and commanded his men with the utmost composure, encouraging them to be firm, and to sell their lives as dear as they could. of the three white prisoners, brown, stephens, and coppic, it was hard to say which was most firm.&quot; almost the first northern men whom the slaveholder has learned to respect ! the testimony of mr. yallandigham, though less valuable, is of the same purport, that &quot; it is vain to un derrate either the man or his conspiracy he is the farthest possible removed from the ordinary ruffian, fanatic, or madman.&quot; &quot; all is quiet at harper s ferry,&quot; say the journals. what is the character of that calm which follows when the law and the slaveholder prevail ? i regard this event as a touchstone designed to bring out, with glaring distinctness, the character of this government. we needed to be thus assisted to see it by the light of his tory. it needed to see itself. when a government puts forth its strength on the side of injustice, as ours to a plea for captain john brown. 171 maintain slavery and kill the liberators of the slave, it reveals itself a merely brute force, or worse, a demoni acal force. it is the head of the plug-uglies. it is more manifest than ever that tyranny rules. i see this government to be effectually allied with france and austria in oppressing mankind. there sits a tyrant holding fettered four millions of slaves ; here comes their heroic liberator. this most hypocritical and diabolical government looks up from its seat on the gasping four millions, and inquires with an assumption of innocence : &quot; what do you assault me for ? am i not an honest man ? cease agitation on this subject, or i will make a slave of you, too, or else hang you.&quot; we talk about a representative government ; but what a monster of a government is that where the noblest faculties of the mind, and the whole heart, are not rep resented. a semi-human tiger or ox, stalking over the earth, with its heart taken out and the top of its brain shot away. heroes have fought well on their stumps when their legs were shot off, but i never heard of any good done by such a government as that. the only government that i recognize, and it matters not how few are at the head of it, or how small its army, is that power that establishes justice in the land, never that which establishes injustice. what shall we think of a government to which all the truly brave and just men in the land are enemies, standing between it and those whom it oppresses ? a government that pretends to be christian and crucifies a million christs every day ! treason ! where does such treason take its rise ? i cannot help thinking of you as you deserve, ye govern ments. can you dry up the fountains of thought ? high 172 a plea for captain john brown. treason, when it is resistance to tyranny here below, has its origin in, and is first committed by, the power that makes and forever recreates man. when you have caught and hung all these human rebels, you have accomplished nothing but your own guilt, for you have not struck at the fountain-head. you presume to contend with a foe against whom west point cadets and rifled cannon point not. can all the art of the cannon-founder tempt matter to turn against its maker ? is the form in which the founder thinks he casts it more essential than the constitution of it and of himself? the united states have a coffle of four millions of slaves. they are determined to keep them in this condition ; and massachusetts is one of the confederated overseers to prevent their escape. such are not all the inhabitants of massachusetts, but such are they who rule and are obeyed here. it was massachusetts, as well as virginia, that put down this insurrection at harper s ferry. she sent the marines there, and she will have to pay the penalty of her sin. suppose that there is a society in this state that out of its own purse and magnanimity saves all the fugitive slaves that run to us, and protects our colored fellow-citi zens, and leaves the other work to the government, so called. is not that government fast losing its occupation, and becoming contemptible to mankind? if private men are obliged to perform the offices of government, to protect the weak and dispense justice, then the govern ment becomes only a hired man, or clerk, to perform menial or indifferent services. of course, that is but the shadow of a government whose existence necessitates a vigilant committee. what should we think of the oriental cadi even, behind whom worked in secret a a plea for captain john brown. 173 vigilant committee ? but such is the character of our northern states generally ; each has its vigilant com mittee. and, to a certain extent, these crazy govern ments recognize and accept this relation. they say, virtually, &quot; we 11 be glad to work for you on these terms, only don t make a noise about it.&quot; and thus the govern ment, its salary being insured, withdraws into the back shop, taking the constitution with it, and bestows most of its labor on repairing that. when i hear it at work sometimes, as i go by, it reminds me, at best, of those farmers who in winter contrive to turn a penny by follow ing the coopering business. and what kind of spirit is their barrel made to hold ? they speculate in stocks, and bore holes in mountains, but they are not competent to lay out even a decent highway. the only free road, the underground railroad, is owned and managed by the vigilant committee. they have tunnelled under the whole breadth of the land. such a government is losing its power and respectability as surely as water runs out of a leaky vessel, and is held by one that can contain it. i hear many condemn these men because they were so few. when were the good and the brave ever in a majority? would you have had him wait till that time came ? till you and i came over to him ? the very fact that he had no rabble or troop of hirelings about him would alone distinguish him from ordinary heroes. his company was small indeed, because few could be found worthy to pass muster. each one who there laid down his life for the poor and oppressed was a picked man, culled out of many thousands, if not millions ; ap parently a man of principle, of rare courage, and devoted humanity ; ready to sacrifice his life at any moment for 174 a plea for captain john brown. the benefit of his fellow-man. it may be doubted if there were as many more their equals in these respects in all the country ; i speak of his followers only ; for their leader, no doubt, scoured the land far and wide, seeking to swell his troop. these alone were ready to step between the oppressor and the oppressed. surely they were the very best men you could select to be hung. that was the greatest compliment which this country could pay them. they were ripe for her gallows. she has tried a long time, she has hung a good many, but never found the right one before. &quot;when i think of him, and his six sons, and his son-in-law, not to enumerate the others, enlisted for this fight, proceeding coolly, reverently, humanely to work, for months . if not years, sleeping and waking upon it, summering and wintering the thought, without expecting any reward but a good conscience, while almost all amer ica stood ranked on the other side, i say again that it af fects me as a sublime spectacle. if he had had any journal advocating &quot; his cause,&quot; any organ, as the phrase is, mo notonously and wearisomely playing the same old tune, and then passing round the hat, it would have been fatal to his efficiency. if he had acted in any way so as to be let alone by the government, he might have been sus pected. it was the fact that the tyrant must give place to him, or he to the tyrant, that distinguished him from all the reformers of the day that i know. it was his peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. i agree with him. they who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others. such will be more shocked by his life than by a plea for captain john brown. 175 his death. i shall not be forward to think him mistaken in his method who quickest succeeds to liberate the slave. i speak for the slave when i say, that i prefer the phi lanthropy of captain brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots me nor liberates me. at any rate, i do not think it is quite sane for one to spend his whole life in talking or writing about this matter, unless he is continuously inspired, and i have not done so. a man may have other affairs to attend to. i do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but i can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable. we preserve the so-called peace of our community by deeds of petty violence every day. look at the police man s billy and handcuffs ! look at the jail ! look at the gallows ! look at the chaplain of the regiment ! we are hoping only to live safely on the outskirts of this provisional army. so we defend ourselves and our hen-roosts, and maintain slavery. i know that the mass of my countrymen think that the only righteous use that can be made of sharpe s rifles and revolvers is to fight duels with them, when we are insulted by other nations, or to hunt indians, or shoot fugitive slaves with them, or the like. i think that for once the sharpe s rifles and the revolvers were employed in a righteous cause. the tools were in the hands of one who could use them. the same indignation that is said to have cleared the temple once will clear it again. the question is not about the weapon, but the spirit in which you use it. no man has appeared in america, as yet, who loved his fellow-man so well, and treated him so tenderly. he lived for him. he took up his life and he laid it down for him. what sort of violence is that which is en couraged, not by soldiers, but by peaceable citizens, not 176 a plea for captain john brown. so much by laymen as by ministers of the gospel, not so much by the fighting sects as by the quakers, and not so much by quaker men as by quaker women ? this event advertises me that there is such a fact as death, the possibility of a man s dying. it seems as if no man had ever died in america before ; for in order to die you must first have lived. i don t believe in the hearses, and palls, and funerals that they have had. there was no death in the case, because there had been no life ; they merely rotted or sloughed off, pretty much as they had rotted or sloughed along. no temple s veil was rent, only a hole dug somewhere. let the dead bury their dead. the best of them fairly ran down like a clock. franklin, &quot;washington, they were let off without dying; they were merely missing one day. i hear a good many pretend that they are going to die ; or that they have died, for aught that i know. non sense ! i 11 defy them to do it. they have n t got life enough in them. they ll deliquesce like fungi, and keep a hundred eulogists mopping the spot where they left off. only half a dozen or so have died since the world began. do you think that you are going to die, sir ? no ! there s no hope of you. you have n t got your lesson yet. you ve got to stay after school. we make a needless ado about capital punishment, tak ing lives, when there is no life to take. memento mori ! we don t understand that sublime sentence which some worthy got sculptured on his gravestone once. we ve interpreted it in a grovelling and snivelling sense; we ve wholly forgotten how to die. but be sure you do die nevertheless. do your work, and finish it. if you know how to begin, you will know when to end. a plea for captain john brown. 177 these men, in teaching us how to die, have at the same time taught us how to live. if this man s acts and words do not create a revival, it will be the sever est possible satire on the acts and words that do. it is the best news that america has ever heard. it has already quickened the feeble pulse of the north, and infused, more and more generous blood into her veins and heart, than any number of years of what is called commercial and political prosperity could. how many a man who was lately contemplating suicide has now something to live for ! one writer says that brown s peculiar monomania made him to be &quot;dreaded by the missourians as a super natural being.&quot; sure enough, a hero in the midst of us cowards is always so dreaded. he is just that thing. he shows himself superior to nature. he has a spark of divinity in him. &quot; unless above himself he can erect himself, how poor a thing is man ! &quot; newspaper editors argue also that it is a proof of his insanity that he thought he was appointed to do this work which he did, that he did not suspect himself for a moment! they talk as if it were impossible that a man could be &quot; divinely appointed &quot; in these days to do any work whatever ; as if vows and religion were out of date as connected with any man s daily work ; as if the agent to abolish slavery could only be somebody appointed by the president, or by some political party. they talk as if a man s death were a failure, and his continued life, be it of whatever character, were a success. when i reflect to what a cause this man devoted him self, and how religiously, and then reflect to what cause 8* l 178 a plea for captain john brown. his judges and all who condemn him so angrily and fluently devote themselves, i see that they are as far apart as the heavens and earth are asunder. the amount of it is, our &quot; leading men &quot; are a harm less kind of folk, and they know well enough that they were not divinely appointed, but elected by the votes of their party. who is it whose safety requires that captain brown be hung ? is it indispensable to any northern man ? is there no resource but to cast this man also to the minotaur? if you do not wish it, say so distinctly. while these things are being done, beauty stands veiled and music is a screeching lie. think of him, of his rare qualities ! such a man as it takes ages to make, and ages to understand ; no mock hero, nor the repre sentative of any party. a man such as the sun may not rise upon again in this benighted land. to whose making went the costliest material, the finest adamant ; sent to be the redeemer of those in captivity ; and the only use to which you can put him is to hang him at the end of a rope ! you who pretend to care for christ crucified, consider what you are about to do to him who offered himself to be the savior of four millions of men. any man knows when he is justified, and all the wits in the world cannot enlighten him on that point. the murderer always knows that he is justly punished ; but when a government takes the life of a man without the consent of his conscience, it is an audacious government, and is taking a step towards its own dissolution. is it not possible that an individual may be right and a gov ernment wrong? are laws to be enforced simply be cause they were made ? or declared by any number of a plea for captain john brown. 179 men to be good, if they are not good ? is there any necessity for a man s being a tool to perform a deed of which his better nature disapproves ? is it the inten tion of law-makers that good men shall be hung ever ? are judges to interpret the law according to the letter, and not the spirit ? what right have you to enter into a compact with yourself that you will do thus or so, against the light within you ? is it for you to make up your mind, to form any resolution whatever, and not accept the convictions that are forced upon you, and which ever pass your understanding ? i do not believe in lawyers, in that mode of attacking or defending a man, because you descend to meet the judge on his own ground, and, in cases of the highest importance, it is of no consequence whether a man breaks a human law or not. let lawyers decide trivial cases. business men may arrange that among themselves. if they were the interpreters of the everlasting laws which rightfully bind man, that would be another thing. a counterfeiting law-factory, standing half in a slave land and half in a free ! what kind of laws for free men can you expect from that ? i am here to plead his cause with you. i plead not for his life, but for his character, his immortal life ; and so it becomes your cause wholly, and is not his in the least. some eighteen hundred years ago christ was crucified ; this morning, perchance, captain brown was hung. these are the two ends of a chain which is not without its links. he is not old brown any longer ; he is an angel of light. i see now that it was necessary that the bravest and humanest man in all the country should be hung. per haps he saw it himself. i almost fear that i may yet 180 a plea for captain john brown. hear of his deliverance, doubting if a prolonged life, if any life, can do as much good as his death. &quot;misguided&quot;! &quot;garrulous&quot;! &quot;insane&quot;! &quot;vindic tive &quot; ! so ye write in your easy-chairs, and thus he wounded responds from the floor of the armory, clear as a cloudless sky, true as the voice of nature is : &quot; no man sent me here ; it was my own prompting and that of my maker. i acknowledge no master in human form.&quot; and in what a sweet and noble strain he proceeds, addressing his captors, who stand over him : &quot; i think, my friends, you are guilty of a great wrong against god and humanity, and it would be perfectly right for any one to interfere with you so far as to free those you wil fully and wickedly hold in bondage.&quot; and, referring to his movement : &quot; it is, in my opinion, the greatest service a man can render to god.&quot; &quot; i pity the poor in bondage that have none to help them ; that is why i am here ; not to gratify any personal animosity, revenge, or vindictive spirit. it is my sym pathy with the oppressed and the wronged, that are as good as you, and as precious in the sight of god.&quot; you don t know your testament when you see it. &quot; i want you to understand that i respect the rights of the poorest and weakest of colored people, oppressed by the slave power, just as much as i do those of the most wealthy and powerful.&quot; &quot; i wish to say, furthermore, that you had better, all you people at the south, prepare yourselves for a settle ment of that question, that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it. the sooner you are prepared the better. you may dispose of me very easily. i am nearly disposed of now ; but this question a plea for captain john brown. 181 is still to be settled,this negro question, i mean; the end of that is not yet.&quot; i foresee the time when the painter will paint that scene, no longer going to rome for a subject ; the poet will sing it ; the historian record it ; and, with the land ing of the pilgrims and the declaration of independence, it will be the ornament of some future national gallery, when at least the present form of slavery shall be no more here. we shall then be at liberty to weep for captain brown. then, and not till then, we will take our revenge. paradise (to be) regained.* [&quot;democratic eeview,&quot; new york, november, 1843.] we learn that mr. etzler is a native of germany, and originally published his book in pennsylvania, ten or twelve years ago ; and now a second english edition, from the original american one, is demanded by his readers across the water, owing, we suppose, to the re cent spread of fourier s doctrines. it is one of the signs of the times. we confess that we have risen from read ing this book with enlarged ideas, and grander concep tions of our duties in this world. it did expand us a little. it is worth attending to, if only that it entertains large questions. consider what mr. etzler proposes : &quot; fellow-men ! i promise to show the means of cre ating a paradise within ten years, where everything de sirable for human life may be had by every man in superabundance, without labor, and without pay ; where the whole face of nature shall be changed into the most beautiful forms, and man may live in the most magnificent palaces, in all imaginable refinements of luxury, and in the most delightful gardens ; where he may accomplish, without labor, in one year, more than hitherto could be done in thousands of years ; may level mountains, sink * the paradise within the reach of all men, without labor, by powers of nature and machinery. an address to all intelligent men. in two parts. by j. a. etzler. part first. second english edi tion. london. 1842. pp. 55. paradise (to be) regained. 183 valleys, create lakes, drain lakes and swamps, and in tersect the land everywhere with beautiful canals, and roads for transporting heavy loads of many thousand tons, and for travelling one thousand miles in twenty four hours ; may cover the ocean with floating islands movable in any desired direction with immense power and celerity, in perfect security, and with .all comforts and luxuries, bearing gardens and palaces, with thou sands of families, and provided with rivulets of sweet water ; may explore the interior of the globe, and travel from pole to pole in a fortnight ; provide himself with means, unheard of yet, for increasing his knowledge of the world, and so his intelligence ; lead a life of con tinual happiness, of enjoyments yet unknown ; free himself from almost all the evils that afflict mankind, except death, and even put death far beyond the common period of human life, and finally render it less afflicting. mankind may thus live in and enjoy a new world, far superior to the present, and raise themselves far higher in the scale of being.&quot; it would seem from this and various indications be side, that there is a transcendentalism in mechanics as well as in ethics. while the whole field of the one reformer lies beyond the boundaries of space, the other is pushing his schemes for the elevation of the race to its utmost limits. while one scours the heavens, the other sweeps the eartfi. one says he will reform himself, and then nature and circumstances will be right. let us not obstruct ourselves, for that is the greatest friction. it is of little importance though a cloud obstruct the view of the astronomer compared with his own blindness. the other will reform nature and circumstances, and then man will be right. talk no more vaguely, says he, of 184 paradise (to be) regained. reforming the world, i will reform the globe itself. what matters it whether i remove this humor out of my flesh, or this pestilent humor from the fleshy part of the globe ? nay, is not the latter the more generous course ? at present the globe goes with a shattered constitution in its orbit. has it not asthma, and ague, and fever, and dropsy, and flatulence, and pleurisy, and is it not afflicted with vermin ? has it not its healthful laws counteracted, and its vital energy which will yet redeem it ? no doubt the simple powers of nature, properly directed by man, would make it healthy and a paradise ; as the laws of man s own constitution but wait to be obeyed, to restore him to health and happiness. our panaceas cure but few ails, our general hospitals are private and exclusive. we must set up another hygeia than is now worshipped. do not the quacks even direct small doses for children, larger for adults, and larger still for oxen and horses ? let us remember that we are to prescribe for the globe itself. this fair homestead has fallen to us, and how little have we done to improve it, how little have we cleared and hedged and ditched ! we are too inclined to go hence to a &quot; better land,&quot; without lifting a finger, as our farmers are moving to the ohio soil ; but would it not be more heroic and faithful to till and redeem this new eng land soil of the world ? the still youthful energies of the globe have only to be directed in their proper chan nel. every gazette brings accounts of the untutored freaks of the wind, shipwrecks and hurricanes which the mariner and planter accept as special or general providences ; but they touch our consciences, they remind us of our sins. another deluge would disgrace mankind. we confess we never had much respect for that an paradise (to be) regained. 185 tediluvian race. a tliroughbred business man cannot en ter heartily upon the business of life without first look ing into his accounts. how many things are now at loose ends. who knows which way the wind will blow to-morrow ? let us not succumb to nature. we will marshal the clouds and restrain tempests ; we will bottle up pestilent exhalations ; we will probe for earthquakes, grub them up, and give vent to the dangerous gas ; we will disembowel the volcano, and extract its poison, take its seed out. we will wash water, and warm fire, and cool ice, and underprop the earth. we will teach birds to fly, and fishes to swim, and ruminants to chew the cud. it is time we had looked into these things. and it becomes the moralist, too, to inquire what man might do to improve and beautify the system ; what to make the stars shine more brightly, the sun more cheery and joyous, the moon more placid and content. could he not heighten the tints of flowers and the melody of birds ? does he perform his duty to the inferior races ? should he not be a god to them ? what is the part of magnanimity to the whale and the beaver ? should we not fear to exchange places with them for a day, lest by their behavior they should shame us ? might we not treat with magnanimity the shark and the tiger, not descend to meet them on their own level, with spears of sharks teeth and bucklers of tiger s skin? we slander the hyena ; man is the fiercest and cruellest animal. ah ! he is of little faith ; even the erring comets and meteors would thank him, and return his kindness in their kind. how meanly and grossly do we deal with nature ! could we not have a less gross labor ? what else do these fine inventions suggest, magnetism, the da guerreotype, electricity ? can we not do more than cut 186 paradise (to be) regained. and trim the forest, can we not assist in its interior economy, in the circulation of the sap ? now we work superficially and violently. we do not suspect how much might be done to improve our relation to animated nature even ; what kindness and refined courtesy there might be. there are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. the keeping of bees, for instance, is a very slight interference. it is like directing the sunbeams. all nations, from the remotest antiquity, have thus fingered nature. there are hymettus and hybla, and how many bee-renowned spots beside ? there is nothing gross in the idea of these little herds, their hum like the faintest low of kine in the meads. a pleasant reviewer has lately reminded us that in some places they are led out to pasture where the flowers are most abundant. &quot; columella tells us,&quot; says he, &quot; that the inhabitants of arabia sent their hives into attica to benefit by the later-blowing flowers.&quot; annually are the hives, in immense pyramids, carried up the nile in boats, and suffered to float slowly down the stream by night, resting by day, as the flowers put forth along the banks ; and they determine the richness of any locality, and so the profitableness of delay, by the sinking of the boat in the water. we are told, by the same reviewer, of a man in germany, whose bees yielded more honey than those of his neighbors, with no apparent advantage ; but at length he informed them, that he had turned his hives one degree more to the east, and so his bees, having two hours the start in the morning, got the first sip of honey. true, there is treachery and selfishness behind all this ; but these things suggest to the poetic mind what might be done. paradise (to be) regained. 187 many examples there are of a grosser interference, yet not without their apology. we saw last summer, on the side of a mountain, a dog employed to churn for a farmer s family, travelling upon a horizontal wheel, and though he had sore eyes, an alarming cough, and withal a demure aspect, yet their bread did get buttered for all that. undoubtedly, in the most brilliant successes, the first rank is always sacrificed. much useless travel ling of horses, in extenso, has of late years been improv ed for man s behoof, only two forces being taken advan tage of, the gravity of the horse, which is the centrip etal, and his centrifugal inclination to go ahead. only these two elements in the calculation. and is not the creature s whole economy better economized thus ? are not all finite beings better pleased with motions relative than absolute ? and what is the great globe itself but such a wheel, a larger treadmill, so that our horse s freest steps over prairies are oftentimes balked and ren dered of no avail by the earth s motion on its axis ? but here he is the central agent and motive-power ; and, for variety of scenery, being provided with a window in front, do not the ever-varying activity and fluctuating energy of the creature himself work the effect of the most varied scenery on a country road ? it must be confessed that horses at present work too exclusively for men, rarely men for horses ; and the brute degenerates in man s society. it will be seen that we contemplate a time when man s will shall be law to the physical world, and he shall no longer be deterred by such abstractions as time and space, height and depth, weight and hardness, but shall indeed be the lord of creation. &quot; well,&quot; says the faithless reader, &quot; life is short, but art is long ; where 188 paradise (to be) regained. is the power that \vill effect all these changes ? &quot; this it is the very object of mr. etzler s volume to show. at present, he would merely remind us that there are in numerable and immeasurable powers already existing in nature, unimproved on a large scale, or for generous and universal ends, amply sufficient for these purposes. he would only indicate their existence, as a surveyor makes known the existence of a water-power on any stream ; but for their application he refers us to a sequel to this book, called the &quot; mechanical system.&quot; a few of the most obvious and familiar of these powers are, the wind, the tide, the waves, the sunshine. let us consider their value. first, there is the power of the wind, constantly ex erted over the globe. it appears from observation of a sailing-vessel, and from scientific tables, that the average power of the wind is equal to that of one horse for every one hundred square feet. we do not attach much value to this statement of the comparative power of the wind and horse, for no common ground is mentioned on which they can be compared. undoubtedly, each is incomparably excellent in its way, and every general comparison made for such practical purposes as are contemplated, which gives a preference to the one, must be made with some unfairness to the other. the scientific tables are, for the most part, true only in a tabular sense. we suspect that a loaded wagon, with a light sail, ten feet square, would not have been blown so far by the end of the year, under equal circumstances, as a common racer or dray horse would have drawn it. and how many crazy structures on our globe s surface, of the same dimensions, would wait for dry-rot if the traces of one horse were hitched to them, even to their windward side ? plainly, paradise (to be) regained. 189 this is not the principle of comparison. but even the steady and constant force of the horse may be rated as equal to his weight at least. yet \ve should prefer to let the zephyrs and gales bear, with all their weight, upon our fences, than that dobbin, with feet braced, should lean ominously against them for a season. nevertheless, here is an almost incalculable power at our disposal, yet how trifling the use we make of it. it only serves to turn a few mills, blow a few vessels across the ocean, and a few trivial ends besides. what a poor compliment do we pay to our indefatigable and energetic servant ! men having discovered the power of falling water, which, after all, is comparatively slight, how eagerly do they seek out and improve these privileges ? let a difference of but a few feet in level be discovered on some stream near a populous town, some slight occasion for gravity to act, and the whole economy of the neighbor hood is changed at once. men do indeed speculate about and with this power as if it were the only privilege. but meanwhile this aerial stream is falling from far greater heights with more constant flow, never shrunk by drought, offering mill-sites wherever the wind blows ; a niagara in the air, with no canada side ; only the application is hard. there are the powers, too, of the tide and waves, constantly ebbing and flowing, lapsing and relapsing, but they serve man in but few ways. they turn a few tide mills, and perform a few other insignificant and accidental services only. we all perceive the effect of the tide ; how imperceptibly it creeps up into our harbors and rivers, and raises the heaviest navies as easily as the lightest chip. everything that floats must yield to it. 190 paradise (to be) regained. but man, slow to take nature s constant hint of assistance, makes slight and irregular use of this power, in careen ing ships and getting them afloat when aground. this power may be applied in various ways. a large body, of the heaviest materials that will float, may first be raised by it, and being attached to the end of a bal ance reaching from the land, or from a stationary sup port, fastened to the bottom, when the tide falls, the whole weight will be brought to bear upon the end of the balance. also, when the tide rises, it may be made to exert a nearly equal force in the opposite direc tion. it can be employed wherever a point d appui can be obtained. verily, the land would wear a busy aspect at the spring and neap tide, and these island ships, these terrce infirmce, which realize the fables of antiquity, affect our imagination. we have often thought that the fittest locality for a human dwelling was on the edge of the land, that there the constant lesson and impression of the sea might sink deep into the life and character of the landsman, and perhaps impart a marine tint to his imagination. it is a noble word, that mariner, one who is conversant with the sea. there should be more of what it signifies in each of us. it is a worthy country to belong to, we look to see him not disgrace it. perhaps we should be equally mariners and ter reners, and even our green mountains need some of that sea-green to be mixed with them. the computation of the power of the waves is less satisfactory. while only the average power of the wind, and the average height of the tide, were taken be fore, now the extreme height of the waves is used, for they are made to rise ten feet above the level of the sea, paradise (to be) regained. 191 to which, adding ten more for depression, we have twenty feet, or the extreme height of a wave. indeed, the power of the waves, which is produced by the wind blowing obliquely and at disadvantage upon the water, is made to be, not only three thousand times greater than that of the tide, but one hundred times greater than that of the wind itself, meeting its object at right an gles. moreover, this power is measured by the area of the vessel, and not by its length mainly, and it seems to be forgotten that the motion of the waves is chiefly undulatory, and exerts a power only within the limits of a vibration, else the very continents, with their ex tensive coasts, would soon be set adrift. finally, there is the power to be derived from sun shine, by the principle on which archimedes contrived his burning-mirrors, a multiplication of mirrors reflect ing the rays of the sun upon the same spot, till the requisite degree of heat is obtained. the principal ap plication of this power will be to the boiling of water and production of steam. so much for these few and more obvious powers, already used to a trifling extent. but there are innumerable others in nature, not described nor discovered. these, however, will do for the pres ent. this would be to make the sun and the moon equally our satellites. for, as the moon is the cause of the tides, and the sun the cause of the wind, which, in turn, is the cause of the waves, all the work of this planet would be performed by these far influences. &quot; we may store up water in some eminent pond, and take out of this store, at any time, as much water through the outlet as we want to employ, by which means the original power may react for many days after it has ceased. . . such reservoirs of moderate elevation or 192 paradise (to be) regained. size need not be made artificially, but will be found made by nature very frequently, requiring but little aid for their completion. they require no regularity of form. any valley, with lower grounds in its vicinity, would answer the purpose. small crevices may be filled up. such places may be eligible for the begin ning of enterprises of this kind.&quot; the greater the height, of course, the less water re quired. but suppose a level and dry country ; then hill and valley, and &quot; eminent pond,&quot; are to be construct ed by main force ; or, if the springs are unusually low, then dirt and stones may be used, and the disadvan tage arising from friction will be counterbalanced by their greater gravity. nor shall a single rood of dry laud be sunk in such artificial ponds as may be wanted, but their surfaces &quot; may be covered with rafts decked with fertile earth, and all kinds of vegetables which may grow there as well as anywhere else.&quot; and, finally, by the use of thick envelopes retaining the heat, and other contrivances, &quot; the power of steam caused by sunshine may react at will, and thus be ren dered perpetual, no matter how often or how long the sunshine may be interrupted.&quot; here is power enough, one would think, to accom plish somewhat. these are the powers below. o ye millwrights, ye engineers, ye operatives and speculators of every class, never again complain of a want of power : it is the grossest form of infidelity. the question is, not how we shall execute, but what. let us not use in a niggardly manner what is thus generously offered. consider what revolutions are to be effected in agri culture. first, in the new country a machine is to move along, taking out trees and stones to any required depth, paradise (to be) regained. 193 and piling them up in convenient heaps ; then the same machine, &quot; with a little alteration,&quot; is to plane the ground perfectly, till there shall be no hills nor valleys, making the requisite canals, ditches, and roads as it goes along. the same machine, &quot; with some other little alterations,&quot; is then to sift the ground thoroughly, supply fertile soil from other places if wanted, and plant it; and finally the same machine, &quot; with a little addition,&quot; is to reap and gather in the crop, thresh and grind it, or press it to oil, or prepare it any way for final use. for the de scription of these machines we are referred to &quot;etzler s mechanical system,&quot; pages 11 to 27. we should be pleased to see that &quot;mechanical system.&quot; we have great faith in it. but we cannot stop for applications now. who knows but by accumulating the power until the end of the present century, using meanwhile only the smallest allowance, reserving all that blows, all that shines, all that ebbs and flows, all that dashes, we may have got such a reserved accumulated power as to run the earth off its track into a new orbit, some summer, and so change the tedious vicissitude of the seasons? or, perchance, coming generations will not abide the dissolution of the globe, but, availing themselves of future inventions in aerial locomotion, and the naviga tion of space, the entire race may migrate from the earth, to settle some vacant and more western planet, it may be still healthy, perchance unearthy, not composed of dirt and stones, whose primary strata only are strewn, and where no weeds are sown. it took but little art, a simple application of natural laws, a canoe, a paddle, and a sail of matting, to people the isles of the pacific, and a little more will people the shining isles of space. do we not see in the firmament the lights carried along 9 m 194 paradise (to be) regained. the shore by night, as columbus did ? let us not de spair nor mutiny. &quot; the dwellings also ought to be very different from, what is known, if the full benefit of our means is to be en joyed. they are to be of a structure for which we have no name yet. they are to be neither palaces, nor tem ples, nor cities, but a combination of all, superior to whatever is known. &quot; earth may be baked into bricks, or even vitrified stone by heat, we may bake large masses of any size and form, into stone and vitrified substance of the great est durability, lasting even thousand of years, out of clayey earth, or of stones ground to dust, by the application of burning-mirrors. this is to be done in the open air, without other preparation than gathering the substance, grinding and mixing it with water and cement, moulding or casting it, and bringing the focus of the burning mirrors of proper size upon the same.&quot; the character of the architecture is to be quite dif ferent from what it ever has been hitherto ; large solid masses are to be baked or cast in one piece, ready shaped in any form that may be desired. the building may, therefore, consist of columns two hundred feet high and upwards, of proportionate thickness, and of one entire piece of vitrified substance ; huge pieces are to be mould ed so as to join and hook on to each other firmly, by proper joints and folds, and not to yield in any way with out breaking. &quot;foundries, of any description, are to be heated by burning-mirrors, and will require no labor, except the making of the first moulds and the superintendence for gathering the metal and taking the finished articles away. &quot; 1 alas ! in the present state of science, we must take the paradise (to be) regained. 195 finished articles away ; but think not that man will al ways be the victim of circumstances. the countryman who visited the city, and found the streets cluttered with bricks and lumber, reported that it was not yet finished ; and one who considers the end less repairs and reforming of our houses might well wonder when they will be done. but why may not the dwellings of men on this earth be built, once for all, of some durable material, some roman or etruscan ma sonry, which will stand, so that time shall only adorn and beautify them ? why may we not finish the out ward world for posterity, and leave them leisure to at tend to the inner ? surely, all the gross necessities and economies might be cared for in a few years. all might be built and baked and stored up, during this, the term-time of the world, against the vacant eternity, and the globe go provisioned and furnished, like our public vessels, for its voyage through space, as through some pacific ocean, while we would &quot; tie up the rudder and sleep before the wind,&quot; as those who sail from lima to manilla. but, to go back a few years in imagination, think not that life in these crystal palaces is to bear any anal ogy to life in our present humble cottages. far from it. clothed, once for all, in some &quot; flexible stuff,&quot; more durable than george fox s suit of leather, composed of &quot; fibres of vegetables,&quot; &quot; glutinated &quot; together by some &quot;cohesive substances,&quot; and made into sheets, like pa per, of any size or form, man will put far from him corroding care and the whole host of ills. &quot;the twenty-five halls in the inside of the square are to be each two hundred feet square and high ; the forty corridors, each one hundred feet long and twenty 196 paradise (to be) eegained. i. wide; the eighty galleries, each from 1,000 to 1,250 feet long ; about 7,000 private rooms, the whole sur rounded and intersected by the grandest and most splen did colonnades imaginable ; floors, ceilings, columns, with their various beautiful and fanciful intervals, all shining, and reflecting to infinity all objects and persons, with splendid lustre of all beautiful colors, and fanciful shapes and pictures. &quot; all galleries, outside and within the halls, are to be provided with many thousand commodious and most ele gant vehicles, in which persons may move up and down like birds, in perfect security, and without exertion. .... any member may procure himself all the common articles of his daily wants, by a short turn of some crank, without leaving his apartment. &quot; one or two persons are sufficient to direct the kitch en business. they have nothing else to do but to super intend the cookery, and to watch the time of the victuals being done, and then to remove them, with the table and vessels, into the dining-hall, or to the respec tive private apartments, by a slight motion of the hand at some crank any very extraordinary desire of any person may be satisfied by going to the place where the thing is to be had ; and anything that requires a partic ular preparation in cooking or baking may be done by the person who desires it&quot; this is one of those instances in which the individual genius is found to consent, as indeed it always does, at last, with the universal. this last sentence has a cer tain sad and sober truth, which reminds us of the scrip ture of all nations. all expression of truth does at length take this deep ethical form. here is hint of a place the most eligible of any in space, and of a servi paradise (to be) regained. 197 tor, in comparison with whom all other helps dwindle into insignificance. we hope to hear more of him anon, for even a crystal palace would be deficient without his invaluable services. and as for the environs of the establishment : &quot; there will be afforded the most enrapturing views to be fancied, out of the private apartments, from the galleries, from the roof, from its turrets and cupolas, gardens, as far as the eye can see, full of fruits and flowers, arranged in the most beautiful order, with walks, colonnades, aqueducts, canals, ponds, plains, amphithea tres, terraces, fountains, sculptural works, pavilions, gon dolas, places for public amusement, etc., to delight the eye and fancy, the taste and smell the walks and roads are to be paved with hard vitrified large plates, so as to be always clean from all dirt in any weather or season &quot; the walks may be covered with porticos adorned with magnificent columns, statues, and sculptural works ; all of vitrified substance, and lasting forever. at night the roof, and the inside and outside of the whole square, are illuminated by gas-light, which, in the mazes of many-colored crystal -like colonnades and vaultings, is reflected with a brilliancy that gives to the whole a lustre of precious stones, as far as the eye can see. such are the future abodes of men such is the life reserved to true intelligence, but withheld from ig norance, prejudice, and stupid adherence to custom.&quot; thus is paradise to be regained, and that old and stern decree at length reversed. man shall no more earn his living by the sweat of his brow. all labor shall be reduced to &quot; a short turn of some crank,&quot; and &quot;taking the finished articles away.&quot; but there is a 198 paradise (to be) eegained. crank, o, how hard to be turned ! could there not be a crank upon a crank, an infinitely small crank ? we would fain inquire. no, alas ! not. but there is a certain divine energy in every man, but sparingly employed as yet, which may be called the crank within, the crank after all, the prime mover in all ma chinery, quite indispensable to all work. &quot;would that we might get our hands on its handle ! in fact, no work can be shirked. it may be postponed indefinitely, but not infinitely. nor can any really important work be made easier by co-operation or machinery. not one particle of labor now threatening any man can be routed without being performed. it cannot be hunted out of the vicinity like jackals and hyenas. it will not run. you may begin by sawing the little sticks, or you may saw the great sticks first, but sooner or later you must saw them both. we will not be imposed upon by this vast application of forces. we believe that most things will have to be accomplished still by the application called industry. we are rather pleased after all to consider the small private, but both constant and accumulated force, which stands behind every spade in the field. this it is that makes the valleys shine, and the deserts really bloom. sometimes, we confess, we are so degenerate as to re flect with pleasure on the days when men were yoked liked cattle, and drew a crooked stick for a plough. af ter all, the great interests and methods were the same. it is a rather serious objection to mr. etzler s schemes, that they require time, men, and money, three very su perfluous and inconvenient things for an honest and well-disposed man to deal with. &quot; the whole world,&quot; he tells us, &quot; might therefore be really changed into a paradise (to be) regained. 199 paradise, within less than ten years, commencing from the first year of an association for the purpose of con structing and applying the machinery.&quot; we are sensi ble of a startling incongruity when time and money are mentioned in this connection. the ten years which are proposed would be a tedious while to wait, if every man were at his post and did his duty, but quite too short a period, if we are to take time for it. but this fault is by no means peculiar to mr. etzler s schemes. there is far too much hurry and bustle, and too little patience and privacy, in all our methods, as if something were to be accomplished in centuries. the true reformer does not want time, nor money, nor co-operation, nor advice. &quot;what is time but the stuff delay is made of? and de pend upon it, our virtue will not live on the interest of our money. he expects no income, but outgoes; so soon as we begin to count the cost, the cost begins. and as for advice, the information floating in the atmos phere of society is as evanescent and unserviceable to him as gossamer for clubs of hercules. there is absolutely no common sense ; it is common nonsense. if we are to risk a cent or a drop of our blood, who then shall advise us ? for ourselves, we are too young for experience. who is old enough? we are older by faith than by experience. in the unbending of the arm to do the deed there is experience worth all the maxims in the world. &quot; it will now be plainly seen that the execution of the proposals is not proper for individuals. whether it be proper for government at this time, before the sub ject has become popular, is a question to be decided ; all that is to be done is to step forth, after mature reflection, to confess loudly one s conviction, and to constitute so 200 paradise (to be) regained. cieties. man is powerful but in union with many. nothing great, for the improvement of his own condi tion, or that of his fellow-men, can ever be effected by individual enterprise.&quot; alas ! this is the crying sin of the age, this want of faith in the prevalence of a man. nothing can be effect ed but by one man. he who wants help wants every thing. true, this is the condition of our weakness, but it can never be the means of our recovery. we must first succeed alone, that we may enjoy our success to gether. we trust that the social movements which we witness indicate an aspiration not to be thus cheaply satisfied. in this matter of reforming the world, we have little faith in corporations ; not thus was it first formed. but our author is wise enough to say, that the raw materials for the accomplishment of his purposes are &quot; iron, copper, wood, earth chiefly, and a union of men whose eyes and understanding are not shut up by pre conceptions.&quot; ay, this last may be what we want mainly, a company of &quot; odd fellows &quot; indeed. &quot; small shares of twenty dollars will be sufficient,&quot; in all, from &quot; 200,000 to 300,000,&quot; &quot; to create the first establishment for a whole community of from 3,000 to 4,000 individuals,&quot; at the end of five years we shall have a principal of 200 millions of dollars, and so para dise will be wholly regained at the end of the tenth year. but, alas, the ten years have already elapsed, and there are no signs of eden yet, for want of the requisite funds to begin the enterprise in a hopeful manner. yet it seems a safe investment. perchance they could be hired at a low rate, the property being mortgaged for security, and, if necessary, it could be given up in any stage of the enterprise, without loss, with the fixtures. paradise (to be) regained. 201 but we see two main difficulties in the way. first, the successful application of the powers by machinery, (we have not yet seen the &quot; mechanical system,&quot;) and, secondly, which is infinitely harder, the application of man to the work by faith. this it is, we fear, which will prolong the ten years to ten thousand at least. it will take a power more than &quot; 80,000 times greater than all the men on earth could effect with their nerves,&quot; to per suade men to use that which is already offered them. even a greater than this physical power must be brought to bear upon that moral power. faith, indeed, is all the reform that is needed ; it is itself a reform. doubtless, we are as slow to conceive of paradise as of heaven, of a perfect natural as of a perfect spiritual world. we see how past ages have loitered and erred ; &quot; is perhaps our, generation free from irrationality and error ? have we perhaps reached now the summit of human wisdom, and need no more to look out for mental or physical im provement ? &quot; undoubtedly, we are never so visionary as to be prepared for what the next hour may bring forth. mexxei to delov & ecrrt toiovtov cfrvcrei. the divine is about to be, and such is its nature. in our wisest moments we are secreting a matter, which, like the lime of the shell-fish, incrusts us quite over, and well for us if, like it, we cast our shells from time to time, though they be pearl and of fairest tint. let us consider under what disadvantages science has hitherto labored before we pronounce thus confidently on her progress. mr. etzler is not one of the enlightened practical men, the pioneers of the actual, who move with the slow, deliberate tread of science, conserving the world ; who o* 202 pakadise (to be) regained. execute the dreams of the last century, though they have no dreams of their own ; yet he deals in the very raw but still solid material of all inventions. he has more of the practical than usually belongs to so bold a schemer, so resolute a dreamer. yet his success is in theory, and not in practice, and he feeds our faith rather than contents our understanding. his book wants order, serenity, dignity, everything, but it does not fail to impart what only man can impart to man of much im portance, his own faith. it is true his dreams are not thrilling nor bright enough, and he leaves off to dream where he who dreams just before the dawn begins. his castles in the air fall to the ground, because they are not built lofty enough ; they should be secured to heaven s roof. after all, the theories and speculations of men concern us more than their puny accomplishment. it is with a certain coldness and languor that we loiter about the actual and so-called practical. how little do the most wonderful inventions of modern times detain us. they insult nature. every machine, or particular ap plication, seems a slight outrage against universal laws. how many fine inventions are there which do not clutter the ground ? we think that those only succeed which minister to our sensible and animal wants, which bake or brew, wash or warm, or the like. but are those of no account which are patented by fancy and imagination, and succeed so admirably in our dreams that they give the tone still to our waking thoughts? already nature is serving all those uses which science slowly derives on a much higher and grander scale to him that will be served by her. when the sunshine falls on the path of the poet, he enjoys all those pure benefits and pleasures which the arts slowly and partially realize from age to paradise (to be) regained. 203 age. the winds which fan his cheek waft him the sum of that profit and happiness which their lagging inven tions supply. the chief fault of this book is, that it aims to secure the greatest degree of gross comfort and pleasure merely. it paints a mahometan s heaven, and stops short with singular abruptness when we think it is drawing near to the precincts of the christian s, and we trust we have not made here a distinction without a difference. un doubtedly if we were to reform this outward life truly and thoroughly, we should find no duty of the inner omitted. it would be employment for our whole nature ; and what we should do thereafter would be as vain a question as to ask the bird what it will do when its nest is built and its brood reared. but a moral reform must take place first, and then the necessity of the other will be superseded, and we shall sail and plough by its force alone. there is a speedier way than the &quot; mechanical system &quot; can show to fill up marshes, to drown the roar of the waves, to tame hyenas, secure agreeable environs, diversify the land, and refresh it with &quot; rivulets of sweet water,&quot; and that is by the power of rectitude and true behavior. it is only for a little while, only occasionally, methinks, that we want a garden. surely a good man need not be at the labor to level a hill for the sake of a prospect, or raise fruits and flowers, and construct float ing islands, for the sake of a paradise. he enjoys better prospects than lie behind any hill. where an angel travels it will be paradise all the way, but where satan travels it will be burning marl and cinders. what says veeshnoo sarma ? &quot; he whose mind is at ease is pos sessed of all riches. is it not the same to one whose foot is enclosed in a shoe, as if the whole surface of the earth were covered with leather ? &quot; 204 paradise (to be) regained. he who is conversant with the supernal powers will not worship these inferior deities of the wind, waves, tide, and sunshine. but we would not disparage the importance of such calculations as we have described. they are truths in physics, because they are true in ethics. the moral powers no one would presume to cal culate. suppose we could compare the moral with the physical, and say how many horse-power the force of love, for instance, blowing on every square foot of a man s soul, would equal. no doubt we are well aware of this force ; figures would not increase our respect for it ; the sunshine is equal to but one ray of its heat. the light of the sun is but the shadow of love. &quot; the souls of men loving and fearing god,&quot; says raleigh, &quot; receive influence from that divine light itself, whereof the sun s clarity, and that of the stars, is by plato called but a shadow. lumen est umbra dei, deus est lumen lu minis. light is the shadow of god s brightness, who is the light of light,&quot; and, we may add, the heat of heat. love is the wind, the tide, the waves, the sunshine. its power is incalculable ; it is many horse-power. it never ceases, it never slacks ; it can move the globe without a resting-place ; it can warm without fire ; it can feed with out meat ; it can clothe without garments ; it can shelter without roof; it can make a paradise within which will dispense with a paradise without. but though the wisest men in all ages have labored to publish this force, and every human heart is, sooner or later, more or less, made to feel it, yet how little is actually applied to social ends. true, it is the motive-power of all successful social ma chinery ; but, as in physics, we have made the elements do only a little drudgery for us, steam to take the place of a few horses, wind of a few oars, water of a few cranks paradise (to be) regained. 205 and hand-mills ; as the mechanical forces have not yet been generously and largely applied to make the phys ical world answer to the ideal, so the power of love has been but meanly and sparingly applied, as yet. it has patented only such machines as the almshouse, the hos pital, and the bible society, while its infinite wind is still blowing, and blowing down these very structures too, from time to time. still less are we accumulating its power, and preparing to act with greater energy at a future time. shall we not contribute our shares to this enterprise, then ? herald of freedom.* [from &quot;the dial, 1 boston, april, 1844.] we had occasionally, for several years, met with a number of this spirited journal, edited, as abolitionists need not to be informed, by nathaniel p. rogers, once a counsellor at law in plymouth, still farther up the mer rimac, but now, in his riper years, come down the hills thus far, to be the herald of freedom to these parts. &quot;we had been refreshed not a little by the cheap cordial of his editorials, flowing like his own mountain-torrents, now clear and sparkling, now foaming and gritty, and always spiced with the essence of the fir and the nor way pine ; but never dark nor muddy, nor threatening with smothered murmurs, like the rivers of the plain. the effect of one of his effusions reminds us of what the hydropathists say about the electricity in fresh spring-water, compared with that which has stood over night, to suit weak nerves. we do not know of another notable and public instance of such pure, youthful, and hearty indignation at all wrong. the church itself must love it, if it have any heart, though he is said to have dealt rudely with its sanctity. his clean attach ment to the right, however, sanctions the severest rebuke we have read. * herald of freedom. published weekly by the new hampshire anti-slavery society, concord, n. h., vol. x. no. 4. herald of freedom. 207 mr. rogers seems to us to have occupied an honor able and manly position in these days, and in this coun try, making the press a living and breathing organ to reach the hearts of men, and not merely &quot;fine paper and good type,&quot; with its civil pilot sitting aft, and mag nanimously waiting for the news to arrive, the vehi cle of the earliest news, but the latest intelligence, re cording the indubitable and last results, the marriages and deaths, alone. this editor was wide awake, and standing on the beak of his ship ; not as a scientific ex plorer under government, but a yankee sealer rather, who makes those unexplored continents his harbors in which to refit for more adventurous cruises. he was a fund of news and freshness in himself, had the gift of speech, and the knack of writing ; and if anything impor tant took place in the granite state, we might be sure that we should hear of it in good season. no other pa per that we know kept pace so well with one forward wave of the restless public thought and sentiment of new england, and asserted so faithfully and ingenuous ly the largest liberty in all things. there was beside more unpledged poetry in his prose than in the verses of many an accepted rhymer ; and we were occasionally advertised by a mellow hunter s note from his trumpet, that, unlike most reformers, his feet were still where they should be, on the turf, and that he looked out from a serener natural life into the turbid arena of politics. nor was slavery always a sombre theme with him, but invested with the colors of his wit and fancy, and an evil to be abolished by other means than sorrow and bitterness of complaint. he will fight this fight with what cheer may be. but to speak of his composition. it is a genuine yan 208 herald of freedom. kee style, without fiction, real guessing and calculat ing to some purpose, and reminds us occasionally, as does all free, brave, and original writing, of its great master in these days, thomas carlyle. it has a life above grammar, and a meaning which need not be parsed to be understood. but like those same moun tain-torrents, there is rather too much slope to his chan nel, and the rainbow sprays and evaporations go double quick-time to heaven, while the body of his water falls headlong to the plain. we would have more pause and deliberation, occasionally, if only to bring his tide to a head, more frequent expansions of the stream, still, bottomless, mountain tarns, perchance inland seas, and at length the deep ocean itself. some extracts will show in what sense he was a poet as well as a reformer. he thus raises the anti-slavery &quot;war-whoop&quot; in new hampshire, when an important convention is to be held, sending the summons, &quot; to none but the whole-hearted, fully-committed, cross the-rubicon spirits from rich old cheshire, from buckingham, with her horizon setting down away to the salt sea from where the sun sets behind kearsarge, even to where he rises gloriously over moses norris s own town of pittsfield, and from amoskeag to ragged mountains, . coos upper coos, home of the everlasting hills, send out your bold advocates of human rights, wherever they lay, scat tered by lonely lake, or indian stream, or grant or loca tion, from the trout-haunted brooks of the amoriscoggin, and where the adventurous streamlet takes up its mountain march for the st. lawrence. &quot; scattered and insulated men, wherever the light of philanthropy and liberty has beamed in upon your solitary spirits, come down to us like your streams and clouds ; and our own grafton, all about among your dear hills, and herald of freedom. 200 your mountain-flanked valley?, whether you home along the swift ammonoosuck, the cold pemigewassett, or the ox bowed connecticut &quot; we are slow, brethren, dishonorably slow, in a cause like ours. our feet should be as hinds feet. liberty lies bleeding. the leaden-colored wing of slavery obscures the land with its baleful shadow. let us come together, and inquire at the hand of the lord, what is to be done.&quot; and again ; on occasion of a new england conven tion, in the secondad vent tabernacle, in boston, he desires to try one more blast, as it were, &quot; on fabyan s white mountain horn.&quot; &quot; ho, then, people of the bay state, men, women, and children; children, women, and men, scattered friends of the friendless, wheresoever ye inhabit, if habitations ye have, as such friends have not always, along the sea-beat border of old essex and the puritan landing, and up be yond sight of the sea-cloud, among the inland hills, where the sun rises and sets upon the dry land, in that vale of the connect icut, too fair for human content and too fertile for virtuous industry, where deepens the haughtiest of earth s streams, on its seaward way, proud with the pride of old massachu setts. are there any friends of the friendless negro haunt ing such a valley as this ? in god s name, i fear there are none, or few ; for the very scene looks apathy and oblivion to the genius of humanity. i blow you the summons, though. come, if any of you are there. &quot; and gallant little rhode island ; transcendent abolition ists of the tiny commonwealth. i need not call you. you are called the year round, and, instead of sleeping in your tents, stand harnessed, and with trumpets in your hands, every one ! &quot; connecticut ! yonder, the home of the burleighs, the monroes, and the hudsons, and the native land of old george benson ! are you ready ? all ready ! &quot; maine here, off east, looking from my mountain post like n 210 herald of freedom. an everglade. where is your sam. fessenden, who stood storrn-proof gainst new organization in 38 ? has he too much name as a jurist and orator, to be found at a new england convention in 43 ? god forbid. come one and all of you from down east to boston, on the 30th, and let the sails of your coasters whiten all the sea-road. alas ! there are scarce enough of you to man a fishing boat. come up mighty in your fewness.&quot; such timely, pure, and unpremeditated expressions of a public sentiment, such publicity of genuine indigna tion and humanity, as abound everywhere in this jour nal, are the most generous gifts which a man can make. thomas carlyle and his works.* thomas caklyle is a scotchman, born about fifty years ago, &quot; at ecclefechan, annandale,&quot; according to one authority. &quot; his parents good farmer people/ his father an elder in the secession church there, and a man of strong native sense, whose words were said to nail a subject to the wall. &quot; we also hear of his &quot; excellent mother,&quot; still alive, and of &quot;her fine old covenanting accents, concerting with his transcendental tones.&quot; he seems to have gone to school at annan, on the shore of the solway frith, and there, as he himself writes, &quot;heard of famed professors, of high matters classical, mathematical, a whole &quot;wonderland of knowledge,&quot; from edward irving, then a young man &quot; fresh from edinburgh, with college prizes, .... come to see our schoolmaster, who had also been his.&quot; from this place, they say, you can look over into wordsworth s country. here first he may have become acquainted with nature, with woods, such as are there, and rivers and brooks, some of whose names we have heard, and the last lapses of atlantic billows. he got some of his education, too, more or less liberal, out of the university of edinburgh, where, according to the same authority, he had to &quot; sup port himself,&quot; partly by &quot;private tuition, translations for the booksellers, &c.,&quot; and afterward, as we are glad to hear, &quot;taught an academy in dysart, at the same * graham s magazine, philadelphia, march, 1847. 212 thomas carlyle and his works. time that irving was teaching in kirkaldy,&quot; the usual middle passage of a literary life. he was destined for the church, but not by the powers that rule man s life ; made his literary debut in fraser s magazine, long ago ; read here and there in english and french, with more or less profit, we may suppose, such of us at least as are not particularly informed, and at length found some words which spoke to his condition in the german lan guage, and set himself earnestly to unravel that mys tery, with what success many readers know. after his marriage he &quot; resided partly at comely bank, edinburgh ; and for a year or two at craigen puttock, a wild and solitary farm-house in the upper part of dumfriesshire,&quot; at which last place, amid barren heather hills, he was visited by our countryman, emer son. with emerson he still corresponds. he was early intimate with edward irving, and continued to be his friend until the latter s death. concerning this &quot; freest, brotherliest, bravest human soul,&quot; and carlyle s relation to him, those whom it concerns will do well to consult a notice of his death in fraser s magazine for 1835, reprinted in the miscellanies. he also correspond ed with goethe. latterly, we hear, the poet sterling was his only intimate acquaintance in england. he has spent the last quarter of his life in london, writing books ; has the fame, as all readers know, of having made england acquainted with germany, in late years, and done much else that is novel and remarkable in literature. he especially is the literary man of those parts. you may imagine him living in altogether a retired and simple way, with small family, in a quiet part of london, called chelsea, a little out of the din of commerce, in &quot; cheyne row,&quot; there, not far from the thomas carlyle and his works. 213 &quot; chelsea hospital.&quot; &quot; a little past this, and an old ivy clad church, with its buried generations lying around it, * writes one traveller, &quot; you come to an antique street run ning at right angles with the thames, and, a few steps from the river, you find carlyle s name on the door.&quot; &quot; a scotch lass ushers you into the second story front chamber, which is the spacious workshop of the world maker.&quot; here he sits a long time together, with many books and papers about him ; many new books, we have been told, on the upper shelves, uncut, with the &quot; author s respects &quot; in them ; in late months, with many manu scripts in an old english hand, and innumerable pamph lets, from the public libraries, relating to the cromwellian period ; now, perhaps, looking out into the street on brick and pavement, for a change, and now upon some rod of grass ground in the rear ; or, perchance, he steps over to the british museum, and makes that his studio for the time. this is the fore part of the day ; that is the way with literary men commonly ; and then in the afternoon, we presume, he takes a short run of a mile or so through the suburbs out into the country ; we think he would run that way, though so short a trip might not take him to very sylvan or rustic places. in the mean while, people are calling to see him, from various quarters, few very worthy of being seen by him ; &quot; distinguished travellers from america,&quot; not a few ; to all and sundry of whom he gives freely of his yet unwritten rich and flashing solilo quy, in exchange for whatever they may have to offer ; speaking his english, as they say, with a &quot; broad scotch accent,&quot; talking, to their astonishment and to ours, very much as he writes, a sort of carlylese, his discourse &quot; coming to its climaxes, ever and anon, in long, deep, chest-shaking bursts of laughter.&quot; 214 thomas carlyle and his works. he goes to scotland sometimes, to visit his native heath-clad hills, having some interest still in the earth there ; such names as craigenputtock and ecclefechan, which we have already quoted, stand for habitable places there to him ; or he rides to the seacoast of england in his vacations, upon his horse yankee, bought by the sale of his books here, as we have been told. how, after all, he gets his living ; what proportion of his daily bread he earns by day-labor or job-work with his pen, what he inherits, what steals, questions whose answers are so significant, and not to be omitted in his biography, we, alas ! are unable to answer here. it may be worth the while to state that he is not a reform er in our sense of the term, eats, drinks, and sleeps, thinks and believes, professes and practises, not accord ing to the new england standard, nor to the old english wholly. nevertheless, we are told that he is a sort of lion in certain quarters there, &quot; an amicable centre for men of the most opposite opinions,&quot; and &quot; listened to as an oracle,&quot; &quot; smoking his perpetual pipe.&quot; a rather tall, gaunt figure, with intent face, dark hair and complexion, and the air of a student ; not altogether well in body, from sitting too long in his workhouse, he, born in the border country and descended from moss troopers, it may be. we have seen several pictures of him here ; one, a full-length portrait, with hat and overall, if it did not tell us much, told the fewest lies ; another, we remember, was well said to have &quot; too combed a look &quot; ; one other also we have seen in which we discern some features of the man we are thinking of; but the only ones worth remembering, after all, are those which he has unconsciously drawn of himself. thomas carlyle and his works. 215 when we remember how these volumes came over to us, with their encouragement and provocation from month to month, and what commotion they created in many private breasts, we wonder that the country did not ring, from shore to shore, from the atlantic to the pacific, with its greeting ; and the boones and crockets of the west make haste to hail him, whose wide humanity em braces them too. of all that the packets have brought over to us, has there been any richer cargo than this ? what else has been english news for so long a season ? what else, of late years, has been england to us, to us who read books, we mean ? unless we remembered it as the scene where the age of wordsworth was spend ing itself, and a few younger muses were trying their wings, and from time to time, as the residence of landor, carlyle alone, since the death of coleridge, has kept the promise of england. it is the best apology for all the bustle and the sin of commerce, that it has made us ac quainted with the thoughts of this man. commerce would not concern us much if it were not for such results as this. new england owes him a debt which she will be slow to recognize. his earlier essays reached us at a time when coleridge s were the only recent words which had made any notable impression so far, and they found a field unoccupied by him, before yet any words of mo ment had been uttered in our midst. he had this ad vantage, too, in a teacher, that he stood near to his pupils ; and he has no doubt afforded reasonable encouragement and sympathy to many an independent but solitary thinker. it is remarkable, but on the whole, perhaps, not to be lamented, that the world is so unkind to a new book. any distinguished traveller who comes to our shores is 216 thomas carlyle and his works. likely to get more dinners and speeches of welcome than he can well dispose of, but the best books, if noticed at all, meet with coldness and suspicion, or, what is worse, gratuitous, off-hand criticism. it is plain that the re viewers, both here and abroad, do not know how to dispose of this man. they approach him too easily, as if he were one of the men of letters about town, who grace mr. somebody s administration, merely ; but he already belongs to literature, and depends neither on the favor of reviewers, nor the honesty of booksellers, nor the pleasure of readers for his success. he has more to impart than to receive from his generation. he is an other such a strong and finished workman in his craft as samuel johnson was, and, like him, makes the literary class respectable. since few are yet out of their appren ticeship, or, even if they learn to be able writers, are at the same time able and valuable thinkers. the aged and critical eye, especially, is incapacitated to appreciate the works of this author. to such their meaning is im palpable and evanescent, and they seem to abound only in obstinate mannerisms, germanisms, and whimsical ravings of all kinds, with now and then an unaccountably true and sensible remark. on the strength of this last, carlyle is admitted to have what is called genius. we hardly know an old man to whom these volumes are not hopelessly sealed. the language, they say, is foolish ness and a stumbling-block to them ; but to many a clear headed boy, they are plainest english, and despatched with such hasty relish as his bread and milk. the fa thers wonder how it is that the children take to this diet so readily, and digest it with so little difficulty. they shake their heads with mistrust at their free and easy delight, and remark that &quot; mr. carlyle is a very learned thomas carlyle and his works. 217 man &quot; ; for they, too, not to be out of fashion, have got grammar and dictionary, if the truth were known, and with the best faith cudgelled their brains to get a little way into the jungle, and they could not but confess, as often as they found the clew, that it was as intricate as blackstone to follow, if you read it honestly. but merely reading, even with, the best intentions, is not enough : you must almost have written these books your self. only he who has had the good fortune to read them in the nick of time, in the most perceptive and recipient season of life, can give any adequate account of them. many have tasted of this well with an odd suspicion, as if it were some fountain arethuse which had flowed under the sea from germany, as if the materials of his books had lain in some garret there, in danger of be ing appropriated for waste-paper. over what german ocean, from what hercynian forest, he has been import ed, piecemeal, into england, or whether he has now all arrived, we are not informed. this article is not in voiced in hamburg nor in london. perhaps it was contraband. however, we suspect that this sort of goods cannot be imported in this way. no matter how skilful the stevedore, all things being got into sailing trim, wait for a sunday, and aft wind, and then weigh anchor, and run up the main-sheet, straightway what of transcend ent and permanent value is there resists the aft wind, and will doggedly stay behind that sunday, it does not travel sundays ; while biscuit and pork make headway, and sailors cry heave-yo ! it must part company, if it open a seam. it is not quite safe to send out a venture in this kind, unless yourself go supercargo. where a man goes, there he is ; but the slightest virtue is immov 10 218 thomas carlyle and his works. able, it is real estate, not personal ; who would keep it, must consent to be bought and sold with it. however, we need not dwell on this charge of a ger man extraction, it being generally admitted, by this time, that carlyle is english, and an inhabitant of london. he has the english for his mother-tongue, though with a scotch accent, or never so many accents, and thoughts also, which are the legitimate growth of native soil, to utter therewith. his style is eminently colloquial, and no wonder it is strange to meet with in a book. it is not literary or classical ; it has not the music of poetry, nor the pomp of philosophy, but the rhythms and cadences of conversation endlessly repeated. it resounds with emphatic, natural, lively, stirring tones, muttering, rat tling, exploding, like shells and shot, and with like exe cution. so far as it is a merit in composition, that the written answer to the spoken word, and the spoken word to a fresh and pertinent thought in the mind, as well as to the half thoughts, the tumultuary misgivings and ex pectancies, this author is, perhaps, not to be matched in literature. he is no mystic, either, more than newton or ark wright or davy, and tolerates none. not one obscure line, or half line, did he ever write. his meaning lies plain as the daylight, and he who runs may read ; in deed, only he who runs can read, and keep up with the meaning. it has the distinctness of picture to his mind, and he tells us only what he sees printed in largest eng lish type upon the face of things. he utters substantial english thoughts in plainest english dialects ; for it must be confessed, he speaks more than one of these. all the shires of england, and all the shires of europe, are laid under contribution to his genius ; for to be eng thomas caelyle and his works. 219 lish does not mean to be exclusive and narrow, and adapt one s self to the apprehension of his nearest neigh bor only. and yet no writer is more thoroughly saxon. in the translation of those fragments of saxon poetry, we have met with the same rhythm that occurs so often in his poem on the french revolution. and if you would know where many of those obnoxious carlyleisms and germanisms came from, read the best of milton s prose, read those speeches of cromwell which he has brought to light, or go and listen once more to your mother s tongue. so much for his german extraction. indeed, for fluency and skill in the use of the eng lish tongue, lie is a master unrivalled. his felicity and power of expression surpass even his special mer its as historian and critic. therein his experience has not failed him, but furnished him with such a store of winged, ay and legged words, as only a london life, perchance, could give account of. we had not under stood the wealth of the language before. nature is ran sacked, and all the resorts and purlieus of humanity are taxed, to furnish the fittest symbol for his thought. he does not go to the dictionary, the word-book, but to the word-manufactory itself, and has made endless work for the lexicographers. yes, he has that same english for his mother-tongue that you have, but with him it is no dumb, muttering, mumbling faculty, concealing the thoughts, but a keen, unwearied, resistless weapon. he has such command of it as neither you nor i have ; and it would be well for any who have a lost horse to adver tise, or a town-meeting warrant, or a sermon, or a letter to write, to study this universal letter-writer, for he knows more than the grammar or the dictionary. the style is worth attending to, as one of the most im 220 thomas carlyle and his works. portant features of the man which we at this distance can discern. it is for once quite equal to the matter. it can carry all its load, and never breaks down nor stag gers. his books are solid and workmanlike, as all that england does ; and they are graceful and readable also. they tell of huge labor done, well done, and all the rub bish swept away, like the bright cutlery which glitters in shop windows, while the coke and ashes, the turnings, filings, dust, and borings lie far away at birmingham, unheard of. he is a masterly clerk, scribe, reporter, writer. he can reduce to writing most things, ges tures, winks, nods, significant looks, patois, brogue, ac cent, pantomime, and how much that had passed for si lence before, does he represent by written words. the countryman who puzzled the city lawyer, requiring him to write, among other things, his call to his horses, would hardly have puzzled him ; he would have found a word for it, all right and classical, that would have started his team for him. consider the ceaseless tide of speech for ever flowing in countless cellars, garrets, parlors ; that of the french, says carlyle, &quot; only ebbs toward the short hours of night,&quot; and what a drop in the bucket is the printed word. feeling, thought, speech, writing, and, we might add, poetry, inspiration, for so the circle is completed ; how they gradually dwindle at length, pass ing through successive* colanders, into your history and classics, from the roar of the ocean, the murmur of the forest, to the squeak of a mouse ; so much only parsed and spelt out, and punctuated, at last. the few who can talk like a book, they only get reported commonly. but this writer reports a new &quot; lieferung.&quot; one wonders how so mucli, after all, was expressed in the old way, so much here depends upon the emphasis, thomas caelyle and his works. 221 tone, pronunciation, style, and spirit of the reading. no writer uses so profusely all the aids to intelligibility w.hich the printer s art affords. you wonder how others had contrived to write so many pages without emphatic or italicized words, they are so expressive, so natural, so indispensable here, as if none had ever used the demon strative pronouns demonstratively before. in another s sentences the thought, though it may be immortal, is as it were embalmed, and does not strike you, but here it is so freshly living, even the body of it not having passed through the ordeal of death, that it stirs in the very ex tremities, and the smallest particles and pronouns are all alive with it. it is not simple dictionary it, yours or mine, but it. the words did not come at the command of grammar, but of a tyrannous, inexorable meaning; not like standing soldiers, by vote of parliament, but any able bodied countryman pressed into the service, for &quot; sire, it is not a revolt, it is a revolution.&quot; we have never heard him speak, but we should say that carlyle was a rare talker. he has broken the ice, and streams freely forth like a spring torrent. he does fiot trace back the stream of his thought, silently adven turous, up to its fountain-head, but is borne away with it, as it rushes through his brain like a torrent to over whelm and fertilize. he holds a talk with you. his audience is such a tumultuous mob of thirty thousand, as assembled at the university of paris, before printing was invented. philosophy, on the other hand, does not talk, but write, or, when it comes personally before an audience, lecture or read ; and therefore it must be read to-morrow, or a thousand years hence. but the talker must naturally be attended to at once ; he does not talk on without an audience ; the winds do not long bear the 222 thomas caelyle axd his works. sound of his voice. think of carlyle reading his french revolution to any audience. one might say it was never written, but spoken ; and thereafter reported and printed, that those not within sound of his voice might know something about it. some men read to you some thing which they have written in a dead language, of course, but it may be in a living letter, in a syriac, or roman, or runic character. men must speak english who can write sanscrit ; they must speak a modern language who write, perchance, an ancient and universal one. we do not live in those days when the learned used a learned language. there is no writing of latin with carlyle ; but as chaucer, with all reverence to homer, and virgil, and messieurs the normans, sung his poetry in the homely saxon tongue, and locke has at least the merit of having done philosophy into eng lish, so carlyle has done a different philosophy still fur ther into english, and thrown open the doors of litera ture and criticism to the populace. such a style, so diversified and variegated ! it is like the face of a country ; it is like a new england landscape, with farm-houses and villages, and cultivated spots, and belts of forests and blueberry-swamps round about, with the fragrance of shad-blossoms and violets on certain winds. and as for the reading of it, it is nov el enough to the reader who has used only the diligence, and old line m-ail-coach. it is like travelling, sometimes on foot, sometimes in a gig tandem ; sometimes in a full coach, over highways, mended and unmended, for which you will prosecute the town ; on level roads, through french departments, by simplon roads over the alps, and now and then he hauls up for a relay, and yokes in an unbroken colt of a pegasus for a leader, driving off thomas carlyle and his works. 223 by cart-paths, and across lots, by corduroy roads and gridiron bridges ; and where the bridges are gone, not even a string-piece left, and the reader has to set his breast and swim. you have got an expert driver this time, who has driven ten thousand miles, and was never known to upset ; can drive six in hand on the edge of a precipice, and touch the leaders anywhere with his snapper. &quot;with wonderful art he grinds into paint for his pic ture all his moods and experiences, so that all his forces may be brought to the encounter. apparently writing without a particular design or responsibility, setting down his soliloquies from time to time, taking advantage of all his humors, when at length the hour comes to declare himself, he puts down in plain english, without quota tion marks, what he, thomas carlyle, is ready to defend in the face of the world, and fathers the rest, often quite as defensible, only more modest, or plain spoken, or in sinuating, upon &quot; sauerteig,&quot; or some other gentleman long employed on the subject. rolling his subject how many ways in his mind, he meets it now face to face, wrestling with it at arm s length, and striving to get it down, or throw it over his head ; and if that will not do, or whether it will do or not, tries the back-stitch and side-hug with it, and downs it again, scalps it, draws and quarters it, hangs it in chains, and leaves it to the winds and dogs. with his brows knit, his mind made up, his will resolved and resistless, he advances, crashing his way through the host of weak, half-formed, dilettante opinions, honest and dishonest ways of thinking, with their standards raised, sentimentalities and conjectures, and tramples them all into dust. see how he prevails ; you don t even hear the groans of the wounded and dy 224 thomas carlyle and his works. ing. certainly it is not so well worth the while to look through any man s eyes at history, for the time, as through his ; and his way of looking at things is fastest getting adopted by his generation. it is not in man to determine what his style shall be. he might as well determine what his thoughts shall be. we would not have had him write always as in the chapter on burns, and the life of schiller, and else where. no ; his thoughts were ever irregular and im petuous. perhaps as he grows older and writes more he acquires a truer expression ; it is in some respects man lier, freer, struggling up to a level with its fountain-head. we think it is the richest prose style we know of. who cares what a man s style is, so it is intelligible, as intelligible as his thought. literally and really, the style is no more than the stylus, the pen he writes with ; and it is not worth scraping and polishing, and gilding, unless it will write his thoughts the better for it. it is something for use, and not to look at. the question for us is, not whether pope had a fine style, wrote with a peacock s feather, but whether he uttered useful thoughts. translate a book a dozen times fro.m one language to another, and what becomes of its style ? most books would be worn out and disappear in this ordeal. the pen which wrote it is soon destroyed, but the poem survives. we believe that carlyle has, after all, more readers, and is better known to-day for this very originality of style, and that posterity will have reason to thank him for emancipating the language, in some measure, from the fetters which a merely conservative, aimless, and pedantic literary class had imposed upon it, and setting an example of greater freedom and natural ness. no man s thoughts are new, but the style of their thomas carlyle and his works. 225 expression is tiie never-failing novelty which cheers and refreshes men. if we were to answer the question, whether the mass of men, as we know them, talk as the standard authors and reviewers write, or rather as this man writes, we should say that he alone begins to write their language at all, and that the former is, for the most part, the mere effigies of a language, not the best method of concealing one s thoughts even, but frequently a meth od of doing without thoughts at all. in his graphic description of richter s style, carlyle describes his own pretty nearly ; and no doubt he first got his own tongue loosened at that fountain, and was inspired by it to equal freedom and originality. &quot; the language,&quot; as he says of richter, &quot; groans with inde scribable metaphors and allusions to all things, human and divine, flowing onward, not like a river, but like an inundation ; circling in complex eddies, chafing and gur gling, now this way, now that&quot;; but in carlyle, &quot;the proper current &quot; never &quot; sinks out of sight amid the boundless uproar.&quot; again : &quot; his very language is titanian, deep, strong, tumultuous, shining with a thousand hues, fused from a thousand elements, and winding in labyrinthic mazes.&quot; in short, if it is desirable that a man be eloquent, that he talk much, and address himself to his own age mainly, then this is not a bad style of doing it. but if it is desired rather that he pioneer into unexplored regions of thought, and speak to silent centuries to come, then, indeed, we could wish that he had cultivated the style of goethe more, that of richter less ; not that goethe s is the kind of utterance most to be prized by mankind, but it will serve for a model of the best that can be success fully cultivated. 10* o 226 thomas carlyle and his works. but for style, and fine writing, and augustan ages, that is but a poor style, and vulgar writing, and a degen erate age, which allows us to remember these things. this man has something to communicate. carlyle s are not, in the common sense, works of art in their origin and aim ; and yet, perhaps, no living english writer evinces an equal literary talent. they are such works of art only as the plough and corn-mill and steam-en gine, not as pictures and statues. others speak with greater emphasis to scholars, as such, but none so ear nestly and effectually to all who can read. others give their advice, he gives his sympathy also. it is no small praise that he does not take upon himself the airs, has none of the whims, none of the pride, the nice vulgarities, the starched, impoverished isolation, and cold glitter of the spoiled children of genius. he does not need to husband his pearl, but excels by a greater humanity and sincerity. he is singularly serious and untrivial. we are every where impressed by the rugged, unwearied, and rich sincerity of the man. we are sure that he never sacri ficed one jot of his honest thought to art or whim, but to utter himself in the most direct and effectual way, that is the endeavor. these are merits which will wear well. when time has worn deeper into the substance of these books, this grain will appear. no such sermons have come to us here out of england, in late years, as those of this preacher, sermons to kings, and sermons to peasants, and sermons to all intermediate classes. it is in vain that john bull, or any of his cousins, turns a deaf ear, and pretends not to hear them : nature will not soon be weary of repeating them. there are words less obviously true, more for the ages to hear, perhaps, but thomas carlyle and his works. 227 none so impossible for this age not to hear. what a cutting cimeter was that &quot; past and present,&quot; going through heaps of silken stuffs, and glibly through the necks of men, too, without their knowing it, leaving no trace. he has the earnestness of a prophet. in an age of pedantry and dilettantism, he has no grain of these in his composition. there is nowhere else, surely, in re cent readable english, or other books, such direct and effectual teaching, reproving, encouraging, stimulating, earnestly, vehemently, almost like mahomet, like luther ; not looking behind him to see how his opera omnia will look, but forward to other work to be done. his writings are a gospel to the young of this generation ; they will hear his manly, brotherly speech with respon sive joy, and press forward to older or newer gospels. we should omit a main attraction in these books, if we said nothing of their humor. of this indispensable pledge of sanity, without some leaven, of which the abstruse thinker may justly be suspected of mysticism, fanaticism, or insanity, there is a superabundance in carlyle. especially thetranscendental philosophy needs the leaven of humor to render it light and digestible. in his later and longer works it is an unfailing accompani ment, reverberating through pages and chapters, long sustained without effort. the very punctuation, the ital ics, the quotation-marks, the blank spaces and dashes, and the capitals, each and all are pressed into its ser vice. carlyle s humor is vigorous and titanic, and has more sense hi it than the sober philosophy of many an other. it is not to be disposed of by laughter and smiles merely ; it gets to be too serious for that : only 228 thomas carlyle and his works. they may laugh who are not hit by it. for those who love a merry jest, this is a strange kind of fun, rather too practical joking, if they understand it. the pleasant humor which the public loves is but the innocent pranks of the ball-room, harmless flow of animal spirits, the light plushy pressure of dandy pumps, in comparison. but when an elephant takes to treading on your corns, why then you are lucky if you sit high, or wear cowhide. his humor is always subordinate to a serious purpose, though often the real charm for the reader is not so much in the essential progress and final upshot of the chapter, as in this indirect side-light illustration of every hue. he sketches first, with strong, practical english pencil, the essential features in outline, black on white, more faith fully than dryasdust would have done, telling us wisely whom and what to mark, to save time, and then with brush of camel s hair, or sometimes with more expe ditious swab, he lays on the bright and fast colors of his humor everywhere. one piece of solid work, be it known, we have determined to do, about which let there be no jesting, but all things else under the heavens, to the right and left of that, are for the time fair game. to us this humor is not wearisome, as almost every other is. rabelais, for instance, is intolerable ; one chapter is bet ter than a volume, it may be sport to him, but it is death to us. a mere humorist, indeed, is a most un happy man ; and his readers are most unhappy also. humor is not so distinct a quality as, for the purposes of criticism, it is commonly regarded, but allied to every, even the divinest faculty. the familiar and cheerful conversation about every hearthside, if it be analyzed, will be found to be sweetened by this principle. there is not only a never-failing, pleasant, and earnest humor thomas caklyle and his works. 229 kept up there, embracing the domestic affairs, the dinner, and the scolding, but there is also a constant run upon the neighbors, and upon church and state, and to cherish and maintain this, in a great measure, the fire is kept burning, and the dinner provided. there will be neigh bors, parties to a very genuine, even romantic friendship, whose whole audible salutation and intercourse, abstain ing from the usual cordial expressions, grasping of hands, or affectionate farewells, consists in the mutual play and interchange of a genial and healthy humor, which excepts nothing, not even themselves, in its lawless range. the child plays continually, if you will let it, and all its life is a sort of practical humor of a very pure kind, often of so fine and ethereal a nature, that its parents, its uncles and cousins, can in no wise participate in it, but must stand aloof in silent admiration, and reverence even. the more quiet the more profound it is. even nature is ob served to have her playful moods or aspects, of which man seems sometimes to be the sport. but, after all, we could sometimes dispense with the humor, though unquestionably incorporated in the blood, if it were replaced by this author s gravity. we should not apply to himself, without qualification, his remarks on the humor of richter. with more repose in his in most being, his humor would become more thoroughly genial and placid. humor is apt to imply but a half satisfaction at best. in his pleasantest and most genial hour, man smiles but as the globe smiles, and the works of nature. the fruits dry ripe, and much as we relish some of them in their green and pulpy state, we lay up for our winter store, not out of these, but the rustling autumnal harvests. though we never weary of this vivacious wit, while we are perusing its work, yet when 230 thomas caelyle and his works. we remember it from afar, we sometimes feel balked and disappointed, missing the security, the simplicity, and frankness, even the occasional magnanimity of acknowl edged dulness and bungling. this never-failing success and brilliant talent become a reproach. besides, humor does not wear well. it is commonly enough said, that a joke will not bear repeating. the deepest humor will not keep. humors do not circulate but stagnate, or circulate partially. in the oldest litera ture, in the hebrew, the hindoo, the persian, the chi nese, it is rarely humor, even the most divine, which still survives, but the most sober and private, painful or joyous thoughts, maxims of duty, to which the life of all men may be referred. after time has sifted the literature of a people, there is left only their scripture, for that is writing, par excellence. this is as true of the poets, as of the philosophers and moralists by profession ; for what subsides in any of these is the moral only, to re appear as dry land at some remote epoch. we confess that carlyle s humor is rich, deep, and variegated, in direct communication with the backbone and risible muscles of the globe, and there is nothing like it; but much as we relish this jovial, this rapid and delugeous way of conveying one s views and impressions, when we would not converse but meditate, we pray for a man s diamond edition of his thought, without the col ored illuminations in the margin, the fishes and drag ons, and unicorns, the red or the blue ink, but its initial letter in distinct skeleton type, and the whole so clipped and condensed down to the very essence of it, that time will have little to do. we know not but we shall im migrate soon, and would fain take with us all the treas ures of the east ; and all kinds of dry, portable soups, in. thomas cajjlyle and his works. 231 small tin canisters, which contain whole herds of eng lish beeves boiled down, will be acceptable. the difference between this flashing, fitful writing and pure philosophy is the difference between flame and light. the flame, indeed, yields light ; but when we are so near as to observe the flame, we are apt to be incom moded by the heat and smoke. but the sun, that old platonist, is set so far off in the heavens, that only a genial summer-heat and ineffable daylight can reach us. but many a time, we confess, in wintry weather, we have been glad to forsake the sunlight, and warm us by these promethean flames. carlyle must undoubtedly plead guilty to the charge of mannerism. he not only has his vein, but his peculiar manner of working it. he has a style which can be imitated, and sometimes is an imitator of himself. certainly, no critic has anywhere said what is more to the purpose, than this which carlyle s own writings fur nish, which we quote, as well for its intrinsic merit as for its pertinence here. &quot; it is true,&quot; says he, thinking of richter, &quot; the beaten paths of literature lead the safeliest to the goal ; and the talent pleases us most which submits to shine with new gracefulness through old forms. nor is the noblest and most peculiar mind too noble or pecu liar for working by prescribed laws ; sophocles, shake speare, cervantes, and in richter s own age, goethe, how little did they innovate on the given forms of com position, how much in the spirit they breathed into them ! all this is true ; and richter must lose of our esteem in proportion.&quot; and again, in the chapter on goethe, &quot; we read goethe for years before we come to see where in the distinguishing peculiarity of his understanding, of his disposition, even of his way of writing, consists ! it 232 thomas carlyle and his works. seems quite a simple style, [that of his ?] remarkable chiefly for its calmness, its perspicuity, in short, its commonness ; and yet it is the most uncommon of all styles.&quot; and this, too, translated for us by the same pen from schiller, which we will apply not merely to the out ward form of his works, but to their inner form and substance. he is speaking of the artist. &quot; let some beneficent divinity snatch him, when a suckling, from the breast of his mother, and nurse him with the milk of a better time, that he may ripen to his full stature beneath a distant grecian sky. and having grown to manhood, let him return, a foreign shape, into his century ; not, however, to delight it by his presence, but, dreadful, like the son of agamemnon, to purify it. the matter of his works he will take from the present, but their form lie will derive from a nobler time ; nay, from beyond all time, from the absolute unchanging unity of his own na ture.&quot; but enough of this. our complaint is already out of all proportion to our discontent. carlyle s works, it is true, have not the stereotyped success which we call classic. they are a rich but inex pensive entertainment, at which we are not concerned lest the host has strained or impoverished himself to feed his guests. it is not the most lasting word, nor the loftiest wisdom, but rather the word which comes last. for his genius it was reserved to give expression to the thoughts which were throbbing in a million breasts. he has plucked the ripest fruit in the public garden ; but this fruit already least concerned the tree that bore it, which was rather perfecting the bud at the foot of the leaf-stalk. his works are not to be studied, but read with a swift satisfaction. their flavor and gust is like thomas carlyle and his works. 233 what poets tell of the froth of wine, which can only be tasted once and hastily. on a review we can never find the pages we had read. yet they are in some degree true natural products in this respect. all things are but once, and never repeated. these works were de signed for such complete success that they serve but for a single occasion. but he is wilfully and pertinaciously unjust, even scurrilous, impolite, ungentlemanly ; calls us &quot;imbeciles,&quot; &quot; dilettants,&quot; &quot; philistines,&quot; implying sometimes what would not sound well expressed. if he would adopt the newspaper style, and take back these hard names but where is the reader who does not derive some ben efit from these epithets, applying them to himself? he is, in fact, the best tempered, and not the least im partial of reviewers. he goes out of his way to do jus tice to profligates and quacks. there is somewhat even christian, in the rarest and most peculiar sense, in his universal brotherliness, his simple, child-like endurance, and earnest, honest endeavor, with sympathy for the like. carlyle, to adopt his own classification, is himself the hero as literary man. there is no more notable workingman in england, in manchester or birmingham, or the mines round about. we know not how many hours a day he toils, nor for what wages, exactly : we only know the results for us. notwithstanding the very genuine, admirable, and loyal tributes to burns, schiller, goethe, and others, carlyle is not a critic of poetry. in the book of heroes, shakespeare, the hero as poet, conies off rather slimly. his sympathy, as we said, is with the men of endeavor ; not using the life got, but still bravely getting their life. &quot;in fact,&quot; as he says of cromwell, &quot;everywhere we 234 thomas caelyle and his works. have to notice the decisive practical eye of this man; how he drives toward the practical and practicable ; has a genuine insight into what is fact.&quot; you must have very stout legs to get noticed at all by him. he is thor oughly english in his love of practical men, and dislike for cant, and ardent enthusiastic heads that are not sup ported by any legs. he would kindly knock them down that they may regain some vigor by touching their moth er earth. we have often wondered how he ever found out burns, and must still refer a good share of his de light in him to neighborhood and early association. the lycidas and comus, appearing in blackwood s magazine, would probably go unread by him, nor lead him to expect a paradise lost. the condhion-of-england question is a practical one. the condition of england demands a hero, not a poet. other things demand a poet ; the poet answers other demands. carlyle in london, with this question pressing on him so urgently, sees no occasion for minstrels and rhapsodists there. kings may have their bards when there are any kings. homer would certainly go a-begging there. he lives in chelsea, not on the plains of hindostan, nor on the prairies of the &quot;west, where settlers are scarce, and a man must at least go whistling to himself. what he says of poetry is rapidly uttered, and sug gestive of a thought, rather than the deliberate develop ment of any. he answers your question, what is po etry ? by writing a special poem, as that norse one, for instance, in the book of heroes, altogether wild and original; answers your question, what is light? by kindling a blaze which dazzles you, and pales sun and moon, and not as a peasant might, by opening a shutter. carlyle is not a seer, but a brave looker-on and review thomas caelyle and his works. 235 er ; not the most free and catholic observer of men and events, for they are likely to find him preoccupied, but unexpectedly free and catholic when they fall within the focus of his lens. he does not live in the present hour, and read men and books as they occur for his theme, but having chosen this, he directs his studies to this end. if we look again at his page, we are apt to retract somewhat that we have said. often a genuine poetic feeling dawns through it, like the texture of the earth seen through the dead grass and leaves in the spring. the history of the french revolution is a poem, at length translated into prose, an iliad, indeed, as he him self has it, &quot; the destructive wrath of sansculotism : this is what we speak, having unhappily no voice for singing.&quot; one improvement we could suggest in this last, as in deed in most epics, that he should let in the sun oftener upon his picture. it does not often enough appear, but it is all revolution, the old way of human life turned simply bottom upward, so that when at length we are inadvertently reminded of the &quot; brest shipping,&quot; a st. domingo colony, and that anybody thinks of owning plantations, and simply turning up the soil there, and that now at length, after some years of this revolution, there is a falling off in the importation of sugar, we feel a queer surprise. had they not sweetened their water with revolution then ? it would be well if there were several chapters headed &quot; work for the month,&quot; revolution-work inclusive, of course, &quot; altitude of the sun,&quot; &quot; state of the crops and markets,&quot; &quot;meteorological observations,&quot; &quot; attractive industry,&quot; &quot; day labor,&quot; &c., just to remind the reader that the french peasantry did something beside go without breeches, burn chateaus, 236 thomas carlyle and his works. get ready knotted cords, and embrace and throttle one another by turns. these things are sometimes hinted at, but they deserve a notice more in proportion to their importance. we want not only a background to the picture, but a ground under the feet also. we remark, too, occasionally, an unphilosophical habit, common enough elsewhere, in alison s history of modern europe, for instance, of saying, undoubtedly with effect, that if a straw had not fallen this way or that, why then but, of course, it is as easy in philosophy to make kingdoms rise and fall as straws. the poet is blithe and cheery ever, and as well as nature. carlyle has not the simple homeric health of wordsworth, nor the deliberate philosophic turn of cole ridge, nor the scholastic taste of landor, but, though sick and under restraint, the constitutional vigor of one of his old norse heroes, struggling in a lurid light, with jotuns still, striving to throw the old woman, and &quot; she was time,&quot; striving to lift the big cat, and that was &quot; the great world-serpent, which, tail in mouth, girds and keeps up the whole created world.&quot; the smith, though so brawny and tough, i should not call the health iest man. there is too much shop-work, too great ex tremes of heat and cold, and incessant ten-pound-ten and thrashing of the anvil, in his life. but the haymaker s is a true sunny perspiration, produced by the extreme of summer heat only, and conversant with the blast of the zephyr, not of the forge-bellows. we know very well the nature of this man s sadness, but we do not know the nature of his gladness. the poet will maintain serenity in spite of all disap pointments. he is expected to preserve an unconcerned and healthy outlook over the world, while he lives. philo thomas carlyle and his works. 237 sophia practica est eruditionis meta, philosophy prac tised is the goal of learning ; and for that other, oratoris est celare artem, we might read, herois est celarepugnam, the hero will conceal his struggles. poetry is the only life got, the only work done, the only pure product and free labor of man, performed only when he has put all the world under his feet, and conquered the last of his foes. carlyle speaks of nature with a certain unconscious pathos for the most part. she is to him a receded but ever memorable splendor, casting still a reflected light over all his scenery. as we read his books here in new england, where there are potatoes enough, and every man can get his living peacefully and sportively as the birds and bees, and need think no more of that, it seems to us as if by the world he often meant london, at the head of the tide upon the thames, the sorest place on the face of the earth, the very citadel of conservatism. in his writings, we should say that he, as conspicuously as any, though with little enough expressed or even con scious sympathy, represents the reformer class, and all the better for not being the acknowledged leader of any. in him the universal plaint is most settled, unappeasable, and serious. until a thousand named and nameless grievances are righted, there will be no repose for him in the lap of nature, or the seclusion of science and litera ture. by foreseeing it, he hastens the crisis in the affairs of england, and is as good as many years added to her history. to do himself justice, and set some of his readers right, he should give us some transcendent hero at length, to rule his demigods and titans ; develop, perhaps, his re served and dumb reverence for christ, not speaking to a 238 thomas carlyle and his works. london or church of england audience merely. let not &quot; sacred silence meditate that sacred matter &quot; forever, but let us have sacred speech and sacred scripture there on. every man will include in his list of worthies those whom he himself best represents. carlyle, and our countryman emerson, whose place and influence must erelong obtain a more distinct recognition, are, to a cer tain extent, the complement of each other. the age could not do with one of them, it cannot do with both. to make a broad and rude distinction, to suit our present purpose, the former, as critic, deals with the men of action, mahomet, luther, cromwell ; the latter with the thinkers, plato, shakespeare, goethe ; for, though both have written upon goethe, they do not meet in him. the one has more sympathy with the heroes, or prac tical reformers, the other with the observers, or philoso phers. put their worthies together, and you will have a pretty fair representation of mankind ; yet with one or more memorable exceptions. to say nothing of christ, who yet awaits a just appreciation from literature, the peacefully practical hero, whom columbus may repre sent, is obviously slighted ; but above and after all, the man of the age, come to be called workingman, it is obvious that none yet speaks to his condition, for the speaker is not yet in his condition. like speaks to like only ; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the east, how little to the west, in the east fames are won, in the west deeds are done. thomas carlyle and his works. 239 one merit in carlyle, let the subject be what it may, is the freedom of prospect he allows, the entire absence of cant and dogma. he removes many cart-loads of rubbish, and leaves open a broad highway. his writings are all unfenccd on the side of the future and the possi ble. though he does but inadvertently direct our eyes to the open heavens, nevertheless he lets us wander broad ly underneath, and shows them to us reflected in innumer able pools and lakes. these volumes contain not the highest, but a very practicable wisdom, which startles and provokes, rather than informs us. carlyle does not oblige us to think ; we have thought enough for him already, but he compels us to act. &quot;we accompany him rapidly through an end less gallery of pictures, and glorious reminiscences of experiences unimproved. &quot; have you not had moses and the prophets ? neither will ye be persuaded if one should rise from the dead.&quot; there is no calm philosophy of life here, such as you might put at the end of the almanac, to hang over the farmer s hearth, how men shall live in these winter, in these summer days. no philosophy, properly speaking, of love, or friendship, or religion, or politics, or education, or nature, or spirit ; perhaps a nearer approach to a philosophy of kingship, and of the place of the literary man, than of anything else. a rare preacher, with prayer, and psalm, and ser mon, and benediction, but no contemplation of man s life from the serene oriental ground, nor yet from the stirring occidental. no thanksgiving sermon for the holydays, or the easter vacations, when all men submit to float on the full currents of life. when we see with what spirits, though with little heroism enough, wood-choppers, dro 240 thomas carlyle and his works. vers, and apprentices take and spend life, playing all day long, sunning themselves, shading themselves, eating, drinking, sleeping, we think that the philosophy of their life written would be such a level natural history as the gardener s calendar and the works of the early botan ists, inconceivably slow to come to practical conclusions. there is no philosophy here for philosophers, only as every man is said to have his philosophy. no system but such as is the man himself; and, indeed, he stands compactly enough ; no progress beyond the first assertion and challenge, as it were, with trumpet blast. one thing is certain, that we had best be doing something in good earnest henceforth forever ; that s an indispensable philosophy. the before impossible precept, &quot; know thy self&quot; he translates into the partially possible one, &quot; know what tliou canst work at.&quot; sartor eesartus is, perhaps, the sunniest and most philosophical, as it is the most autobiographical of his works, in which he drew most largely on the experience of his youth. but we miss everywhere a calm depth, like a lake, even stagnant, and must submit to rapidity and whirl, as on skates, with all kinds of skilful and antic motions, sculling, sliding, cut ting punch-bowls and rings, forward and backward. the talent is very nearly equal to the genius. sometimes it would be preferable to wade slowly through a serbonian bog, and feel the juices of the meadow. beside some philosophers of larger vision, carlyle stands like an honest, half-despairing boy, grasping at some details only of their world systems. philosophy, certainly, is some account of truths, the fragments and very insignificant parts of which man will practise in this workshop ; truths infinite and in harmony with infinity ; in respect to which the very objects and ends of the so thomas carlyle and his works. 241 called practical philosopher will be mere propositions, like the rest. it would be no reproach to a philosopher, that he knew the future better than the past, or even than the present. it is better worth knowing. he will prophesy, tell what is to be, or in other words, what alone is, under appearances, laying little stress on the boiling of the pot, or the condition-of-england question. he has no more to do with the condition of england than with her national debt, which a vigorous generation would not inherit. the philosopher s conception of things will, above all, be truer than other men s, and his phi &quot;losophy will subordinate all the circumstances of life. to live like a philosopher is to live, not foolishly, like other men, but wisely and according to universal laws. if carlyle does not take two steps in philosophy, are there any who take three ? philosophy having crept clinging to the rocks, so far, puts out its feelers many ways in vain. it would be hard to surprise him by the relation of any important human experience, but in some nook or corner of his works you will find that this, too, was sometimes dreamed of in his philosophy. to sum up our most serious objections in a few words, we should say that carlyle indicates a depth, and we mean not impliedly, but distinctly, which he neglects to fathom. we want to know more about that which he wants to know as well. if any luminous star or undissolvable nebula is visible from his station which is not visible from ours, the interests of science require that the fact be communicated to us. the universe expects every man to do his duty in his parallel of lati tude. we want to hear more of his inmost life; his hymn and prayer more ; his elegy and eulogy less ; that he should speak more from his character, and less from 11 p 242 thomas carlyle and his works. his talent ; communicate centrally with his readers, and not by a side ; that he should say what he believes, with out suspecting that men disbelieve it, out of his never misunderstood nature. his genius can cover all the land with gorgeous palaces, but the reader does not abide in them, but pitches his tent rather in the desert and on the mountain-peak. when we look about for something to quote, as the fairest specimen of the man, we confess that we labor under an unusual difficulty ; for his philosophy is so little of the proverbial or sentential kind, and opens so gradually, rising insensibly from the reviewer s level, and developing its thought completely and in detail, that we look in vain for the brilliant passages, for point and antithesis, and must end by quoting his works entire. what in a writer of less breadth would have been the proposition which would have bounded his discourse, his column of victory, his pillar of hercules, and ne plus ul tra, is in carlyle frequently the same thought unfolded ; no pillar of hercules, but a considerable prospect, north and south, along the atlantic coast. there are other pil lars of hercules, like beacons and light-houses, still further in the horizon, toward atlantis, set up by a few ancient and modern travellers ; but, so far as this traveller goes, he clears and colonizes, and all the surplus population of london is bound thither at once. what we would quote is, in fact, his vivacity, and not any particular wisdom or sense, which last is ever synonymous with sentence \_sen tentia] , as in his contemporaries coleridge, landor, and wordsworth. we have not attempted to discriminate between his works, but have rather regarded them all as one work, as is the man himself. we have not examined so much as remembered them. to do otherwise would thomas carlyle and his woeks. 243 have required a more indifferent, and perhaps even less just review, than the present. all his works might well enough be embraced under the title of one of them, a good specimen brick, &quot; on heroes, heroworship, and the heroic in history.&quot; of this department he is the chief professor in the &quot;world s university, and even leaves plutarch behind. such intimate and living, such loyal and generous sym pathy with the heroes of history, not one in one age only, but forty in forty ages, such an unparalleled re viewing and greeting of all past worth, with exceptions, to be sure, but exceptions were the rule before, it was, indeed, to make this the age of review writing, as if now one period of the human story were completing itself, and getting its accounts settled. this soldier has told the stories with new emphasis, and will be a memo rable hander-down of fame to posterity. and with what wise discrimination he has selected his men, with reference both to his own genius and to theirs, ma homet, dante, cromwell, voltaire, johnson, burns, goethe, bichter, schiller, mirabeau, could any of these have been spared? these we wanted to hear about. we have not as commonly the cold and refined judgment of the scholar and critic merely, but something more human and affecting. these eulogies have the glow and warmth of friendship. there is sympathy, not with mere fames, and formless, incredible things, but with kindred men, not transiently, but life-long he has walked with them. no doubt, some of carlyle s worthies, should they ever return to earth, would find themselves unpleasantly put upon their good behavior, to sustain their charac ters; but if he can return a man s life more perfect to 244 thomas caelyle and his works. our hands than it was left at his death, following out the design of its author, we shall have no great cause to complain. we do not want a daguerreotype likeness. all biography is the life of adam, a much-experienced man, and time withdraws something partial from the story of every individual, that the historian may supply something general. if these virtues were not in this man, perhaps they are in his biographer, no fatal mis take. really, in any other sense, we never do, nor desire to, come at the historical man, unless we rob his grave, that is the nearest approach. why did he die, then ? he is with his bones, surely. no doubt carlyle has a propensity to exaggerate the heroic in history, that is, he creates you an ideal hero rather than another thing: he has most of that material. this we allow in all its senses, and in one narrower sense it is not so convenient. yet what were history if he did not exaggerate it ? how comes it that history never has to wait for facts, but for a man to write it ? the ages may go on forgetting the facts never so long, he can remember two for every one forgotten. the musty records of history, like the catacombs, contain the perishable remains, but only in the breast of genius are embalmed the souls of heroes. there is very little of what is called criticism here ; it is love and reverence, rather, which deal with qualities not relatively, but abso lutely great; for whatever is admirable in a man is something infinite, to which we cannot set bounds. these sentiments allow the mortal to die, the immortal and divine to survive. there is something antique, even, in his style of treating his subject, reminding us that heroes and demi-gods, fates and furies, still exist ; the common man is nothing to him, but after death the hero thomas carlyle and his works. 245 is apotheosized and has a place in heaven, as in the religion of the greeks. exaggeration ! was ever any virtue attributed .^.to a man without exaggeration ? was ever any vice, without infinite exaggeration ? do we not exaggerate ourselves to ourselves, or do we recognize ourselves for the actual men we are ? are we not all great men ? yet what are we actually to speak of? we live by exaggeration. what else is it to anticipate more than we enjoy ? the lightning is an exaggeration of the light. exaggerated history is poetry, and truth referred to a new standard. to a small man every greater is an exaggeration. he who cannot exaggerate is not qualified to utter truth. no truth, we think, was ever expressed but with this sort of emphasis, so that for the time there seemed to be no other. moreover, you must speak loud to those who are hard of hearing, and so you acquire a habit of shout ing to those who are not. by an immense exaggeration we appreciate our greek poetry and philosophy, and egyptian ruins ; our shakespeares and miltons, our liberty and christianity. we give importance to this hour over all other hours. we do not live by justice, but by grace. as the sort of justice which concerns us in our daily intercourse is not that administered by the judge, so the historical justice which we prize is not arrived at by nicely balancing the evidence. in order to appreciate any, even the humblest man, you must first, by some good fortune, have acquired a sentiment of admiration, even of reverence, for him, and there never were such exaggerators as these. to try him by the german rule of referring an author to his own standard, we will quote the following from carlyle s remarks on history, and leave the reader to 246 thomas caelyle and his works. consider how far his practice has been consistent with his theory. &quot; truly, if history is philosophy teaching by experience, the writer fitted to compose history is hitherto an unknown man. the experience itself would require all-knowledge to record it, were the all-wisdom, needful for such philosophy as would interpret it, to be had for asking. better were it that mere earthly histo rians should lower such pretensions, more suitable for omniscience than for human science ; and aiming only at some picture of the things acted, which picture itself will at best be a poor approximation, leave the inscru table purport of them an acknowledged secret ; or, at most, in reverent faith, far different from that teaching of philosophy, pause over the mysterious vestiges of him whose path is in the great deep of time, whom history indeed reveals, but only all history, and in eternity, will clearly reveal.&quot; carlyle is a critic who lives in london to tell this generation who have been the great men of our race. we have read that on some exposed place in the city of geneva, they have fixed a brazen indicator for the use of travellers, with the names of the mountain summits in the horizon marked upon it, &quot; so that by taking sight across the index you can distinguish them at once. you will not mistake mont blanc, if you, see him, but until you get accustomed to the panorama, you may easily mistake one of his court for the king.&quot; it stands there a piece of mute brass, that seems nevertheless to know in what vicinity it is : and there perchance it will stand, when the nation that placed it there has passed away, still in sympathy with the mountains, forever discriminating in the desert. thomas caelyle and his works. 247 so, we may say, stands this man, pointing as long as he lives, in obedience to some spiritual magnetism, to the summits in the historical horizon, for the guidance of his fellows. truly, our greatest blessings are very cheap. to have our sunlight without paying for it, without any duty levied, to have our poet there in england, to fur nish us entertainment, and, what is better, provocation, from year to year, all our lives long, to make the world seem richer for us, the age more respectable, and life better worth the living, all without expense of ac knowledgment even, but silently accepted out of the east, like morning light as a matter of course. life without principle * at a lyceum, not long since, i felt that the lecturer had chosen a theme too foreign to himself, and so failed to interest me as much as he might have done. he de scribed things not in or near to his heart, but toward his extremities and superficies. there was, in this sense, no truly central or centralizing thought in the lecture. i would have had him deal with his privates! experience, as the poet does. the greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what / thought, and attended to my answer. i am surprised, as well as delighted, when this happens, it is such a rare use he would make of me, as if he were acquainted with the tool. commonly, if men want anything of me, it is only to know how many acres i make of their land, since i am a surveyor, or, at most, what trivial news i have burdened myself with. they never will go to law for my meat ; they prefer the shell. a man once came a considerable distance to ask me to lecture on slavery ; but on conversing with him, i found that he and his clique expected seven eighths of the lecture to be theirs, and only one eighth mine ; so i declined. i take it for granted, when i am invited to lecture anywhere, for i have had a little experience in that business, that there is a desire to hear what / think on some subject, * atlantic monthly, boston, october, 1363. life without principle. 249 though i may be the greatest fool in the country, and not that i should say pleasant things merely, or such as the audience will assent to ; and i resolve, accordingly, that i will give them a strong dose of myself. they have sent for me, and engaged to pay for me, and i am determined that they shall have me, though i bore them beyond all precedent. so now i would say something similar to you, my readers. since you are my readers, and i have not been much of a traveller, i will not talk about people a thousand miles off, but come as near home as i can. as the time is short, i will leave out all the flattery, and retain all the criticism. let us consider the way in which we spend our lives. this world is a place of business. what an infinite bustle ! i am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. it interrupts my dreams. there is no sabbath. it would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. it is nothing but work, work, work. i cannot easily buy a blank-book to write thoughts in ; they are commonly ruled for dollars and cents. an irishman, seeing me making a minute in the fields, took it for granted that i was calculating my wages. if a man was tossed out of a window when an infant, and so made a cripple for life, or scared out of his wits by the indians, it is regretted chiefly because he was thus incapacitated for business ! i think that there is noth ing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philoso phy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business. there is a coarse and boisterous money-making fellow in the outskirts of our town, who is going to build a bank-wall under the hill along the edge of his meadow. the powers have put this into his head to keep him out 11* 250 life without principle. of mischief, and he wishes me to spend three weeks digging there with him. the result will be that he will perhaps get some more money to hoard, and leave for his heirs to spend foolishly. if i do this, most will commend me as an industrious and hard-working man ; but if i choose to devote myself to certain labors which yield more real profit, though but little money, they may be inclined to look on me as an idler. neverthe less, as i do not need the police of meaningless labor to regulate me, and do not see anything absolutely praise worthy in this fellow s undertaking, any more than in many an enterprise of our own or foreign governments, however amusing it may be to him or them, i prefer to finish my education at a different school. if a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer ; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. as if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down ! most men would feel insulted, if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. but many are no more worthily employed now. for instance : just after sunrise, one summer morning, i noticed one of my neighbors walking beside his team, which was slowly drawing a heavy hewn stone swung under the axle, surrounded by an atmosphere of indus try, his day s work begun, his brow commenced to sweat, a reproach to all sluggards and idlers, paus ing abreast the shoulders of his oxen, and half turning round with a flourish of his merciful whip, while they life without principle. 251 gained their length on him. and i thought, such is the labor which the american congress exists to protect, honest, manly toil, honest as the day is long, that makes his bread taste sweet, and keeps society sweet, which all men respect and have consecrated : one of the sacred band, doing the needful but irksome drudgery. indeed, i felt a slight reproach, because i observed this from a window, and was not abroad and stirring about a similar business. the day went by, and at evening i passed the yard of another neighbor, who keeps many servants, and spends much money fool ishly, while he adds nothing to the common stock, and there i saw the stone of the morning lying beside a whimsical structure intended to adorn this lord timo thy dexter s premises, and the dignity forthwith departed from the teamster s labor, in my eyes. in my opinion, the sun was made to light worthier toil than this. i may add, that his employer has since run off, in debt to a good part of the town, and, after passing through chancery, has settled somewhere else, there to become once more a patron of the arts. the ways by which you may get money almost with out exception lead downward. to have done anything by which youearned money merely is to have been truly jdig^or worset i^ v j^_jabpj[e_ge^s_no more than the wngps_whjrh hifl omp1 n yor pnyn-him, ho in cheated, he cheats himself. if you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down per pendicularly. those services which the community will most readily pay for, it is most disagreeable to ren der. you are paid for being something less than a man. the state does not commonly reward a genius any more wisely. even the poet-laureate would rather not 252 life without principle. have to celebrate the accidents of royalty. he must be bribed with a pipe of wine ; and perhaps another poet is called away from his muse to gauge that very pipe, i as for my own business, even that kind of surveying which i could do with most satisfaction, my employers do not want. they would prefer that i should do my work coarsely and not too well, ay, not well enough. when i observe that there are different ways of surveying, my employer commonly asks which will give him the most land, not which is most correct. i once invented a rule for measuring cord-wood, and tried to introduce it in boston ; but the measurer there told me that the sellers did not wish to have their wood measured correctly, that he was already too accurate for them, and therefore they commonly got their wood measured in charlestown before crossing the bridge. \ the aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get &quot; a good job,&quot; but to perform well a certain work ; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a liveli hood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. do \/ not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it. it is remarkable that there are few men so well em ployed, so much to their minds, but that a little money or fame would commonly buy them off from their pres ent pursuit. i see advertisements for active young men, as if activity were the whole of a young man s capital. yet i have been surprised when one has with confidence proposed to me, a grown man, to embark in some enterprise of his, as if i had absolutely nothing to do, my life having been a complete failure hitherto. life without principle. 253 what a doubtful compliment this is to pay me ! as if he had met me half-way across the ocean beating up against the wind, but bound nowhere, and proposed to me to go along with him ! if i did, what do you think the un derwriters would say ? no, no ! i am not without employment at this stage of the voyage. to tell the truth, i saw an advertisement for able-bodied seamen, when i was a boy, sauntering in my native port, and as soon as i came of age i embarked. the community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man. you may raise money enough to tunnel a moun tain, but you cannot raise money enough to hire a man who is minding his own business. an efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the community pay him for it or not. the inefficient offer their in efficiency to the highest bidder, and are forever expecting to be put into office. one would suppose that they were rarely disappointed. perhaps i am more than usually jealous with respect to my freedom. i feel that my connection with and obligation to society are still very slight and transient. those slight labors which afford me a livelihood, and by which it is allowed that i am to some extent serviceable to my contemporaries, are as yet commonly a pleasure to me, and i am not often reminded that they are a ne cessity. so far i am successful. but i foresee, that, if my wants should be much increased, the labor re quired to supply them would become a drudgery. if i should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, i am sure, that for me there would be nothing left worth living for. i trust that i shall never thus sellmy birthright for a mess of pottage. ^ i wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, 254 life without peinciple. and yet not spend his time well. there is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part k of his life getting his living. all great enterprises are self-supporting. the poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it makes. you must get your . living by loving. but as it is said of the merchants that ninety-seven in a hundred fail, so the life of men generally, tried by this standard, is a failure, and bank ruptcy may be surely prophesied. merely to come into the world the heir of a fortune is not to be born, but to be still-born, rather. to be sup ported by the charity of friends, or a government-pen sion, provided you continue to breathe, by whatever fine synonymes you describe these relations, is to go into the almshouse. on sundays the poor debtor goes to church to take an account of stock, and finds, of course, that his outgoes have been greater than his income. in the catholic church, especially, they go into chancery, make a clean confession, give up all, and think to start again. thus men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up. as for the comparative demand which men make on life, it is an important difference between two, that the one is satisfied with a level success, that his marks can all be hit by point-blank shots, but the other, however low and unsuccessful his life may be, constantly elevates his aim, though at a very slight angle to the horizon. i should , much rather be the last man, though, as the orientals say, &quot; greatness doth not approach him who is forever looking down ; and all those who are looking high are growing poor.&quot; it is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be life without principle. 255 remembered written on the subject of getting a living : now to make getting a living not merely honest and honorable, but altogether inviting and glorious; for if \ getting a living is not so, then living is not. one would think, from looking at literature, that this question had never disturbed a solitary individual s musings. is it that men are too much disgusted with their experience to speak of it ? the lesson of value which money teaches, which the author of the universe has taken so much pains to teach us, we are inclined to skip altogether. as for the means of living, it is wonderful how indifferent men of all classes are about it, even reformers, so called, whether they inherit, or earn, or steal it. i think that society has done nothing for us in this respect, or at least has undone what she has done. cold and hunger seem more friendly to my nature than those methods which men have adopted and advise to ward them off. the title wise is, for the most part, falsely applied. how can one be a wise man, if he does not know any better how to live than other men ? if he is only more cunning and intellectually subtle ? does wisdom work in a tread-mill ? or does she teach how to succeed by her example ? is there any such thing as wisdom not applied to life ? is she merely the miller who grinds the finest logic ? it is pertinent to ask if plato got his living in a better way or more successfully than his contempora ries, or did he succumb to the difficulties of life like other men ? did he seem to prevail over some of them merely by indifference, or by assuming grand airs ? or find it easier to live, because his aunt remembered him in her will ? the ways in which most men get their living, that is, live, are mere make-shifts, and a shirking 256 life without peinciple. of the real business of life, chiefly because they do not know, but partly because they do not mean, any better. the rush to california, for instance, and the atti tude, not merely of merchants, but of philosophers and prophets, so called, in relation to it, reflect the greatest disgrace on mankind. that so many are ready to live by luck, and so get the means of commanding the labor of others less lucky, without contributing any value to soci ety ! and that is called enterprise ! i know of no more startling development of the immorality of trade, and all the common modes of getting a living. the philosophy and poetry and religion of such a mankind are not worth the dust of a puff-ball. the hog that gets his living by rooting, stirring up the soil so, would be ashamed of such company. if i could command the wealth of all the worlds by lifting my finger, i would not pay such a price for it. even mahomet knew that god did not make this world in jest. it makes god to be a moneyed gen tleman who scatters a handful of pennies in order to see mankind scramble for them.the world s raffle ! a subsistence in the domains of nature a thing to be raffled for ! what a comment, what a satire, on our institutions ! the conclusion will be, that mankind will hang itself upon a tree. and have all the precepts in all the bibles taught men only this ? and is the last and most admirable invention of the human race only an improved muck rake ? is this the ground on which orientals and oc cidentals meet ? did god direct us so to get our living, digging where we never planted, and he would, per chance, reward us with lumps of gold ? god gave the righteous man a certificate entitling him to food and raiment, but the unrighteous man found a fac-simile of the same in god s coffers, and appropriated life without principle. 257 it, and obtained food and raiment like the former. it is one of the most extensive systems of counterfeiting that the world has seen. i did not know that mankind were suffering for want of gold. i have seen a little of it. i know that it is very malleable, but not so malleable as wit. a grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom. (the gold-digger in the ravines of the mountains is as much a gambler as his fellow in the saloons of san fran cisco. what difference does it make, whether you shake dirt or shake dice ? if you win, society is the loser. the gold-digger is the enemy of the honest laborer, whatever checks and compensations there may be. it is not enough to tell me that you worked hard to get your gold. so does the devil work hard. \ the way of trans gressors may be hard in many respects. the humblest observer who goes to the mines sees and says that gold digging is of the character of a lottery ; the gold thus ob tained is not the same thing with the wages of honest toil. but, practically, he forgets what he has seen, for he has seen only the fact, not the principle, and goes into trade there, that is, buys a ticket in what commonly proves another lottery, where the fact is not so obvious. after reading hewitt s account of the australian gold diggings one evening, i had in my mind s eye, all night, the numerous valleys, with their streams, all cut up with foul pits, from ten to one hundred feet deep, and half a dozen feet across, as close as they can be dug, and partly filled with water, the locality to which men furiously rush to probe for their fortunes, uncertain where they shall break ground, not knowing but the gold is under their camp itself, sometimes digging one hundred and sixty feet before they strike the vein, or then missing it q 258 life without principle. by a foot,t turned into demons, and regardless of each other s rights, in their thirst for riches, whole valleys, for thirty miles, suddenly honeycombed by the pits of the miners, so that even hundreds are drowned in them, standing in water, and covered with mud and clay, they work night and day, dying of exposure and disease. having read this, and partly forgotten it, i was thinking, accidentally, of my own unsatisfactory life, doing as others do ; and with that vision of the diggings still before me, i asked myself, why /might not be washing some gold daily, though it were only the finest particles, why / might not sink a shaft down to the gold within me, and work that mine. there is a ballarat, a bendigo for you, what though it were a sulky-gully ? at any rate, i might pursue some path, however solitary and nar row and crooked, in which i could walk with love and reverence. wherever a man separates from the multi tude, and goes his own way in this mood, there indeed is a fork in the road, though ordinary travellers may see only a gap in the paling. his solitary path across-lots will turn out the higher way of the two. men rush to california and australia as if the true gold were to be found in that direction ; but that is to go to the very opposite extreme to where it lies. they go prospecting farther and farther away from the true lead, and are most unfortunate when they think them selves most successful. is not our native soil auriferous ? does not a stream from the golden mountains flow through our native valley ? and has not this for more than geologic ages been bringing down the shining particles and forming the nuggets for us ? yet, strange to tell, if a digger steal away, prospecting for this true gold, into the unexplored solitudes around us, there is no danger life without peinciple. 259 that any will dog his steps, and endeavor to supplant him. he may claim and undermine the whole valley even, both the cultivated and the uncultivated portions, his whole life long in peace, for no one will ever dispute his claim. they will not mind his cradles or his toms. he is not confined to a claim twelve feet square, as at balla rat, but may mine anywhere, and wash the whole wide world in his torn. howitt says of the man who found the great nugget which weighed twenty-eight pounds, at the bendigo dig gings in australia : &quot; he soon began to drink ; got a horse, and rode all about, generally at full gallop, and, when he met people, called out to inquire if they knew who he was, and then kindly informed them that he was * the bloody wretch that had found the nugget. at last he rode full speed against a tree, and nearly knocked his brains out.&quot; i think, however, there was no danger of that, for he had already knocked his brains out against the nugget. howitt adds, &quot; he is a hopelessly ruined man.&quot; but he is a type of the class. they are all fast men. hear some of the names of the places where they dig: &quot;jackass flat,&quot; sheep s-head gully,&quot; &quot;murderer s bar,&quot; etc. is there no satire in these names ? let them carry their ill-gotten wealth where they will, i am thinking it will still be &quot; jackass flat,&quot; if not &quot; murderer s bar,&quot; where they live. the last resource of our energy has been the robbing of graveyards on the isthmus of darien, an enterprise which appears to be but in its infancy ; for, according to late accounts, an act has passed its second reading in the legislature of new granada, regulating this kind of min ing ; and a correspondent of the &quot; tribune &quot; writes : &quot; in the dry season, when the weather will permit of the 260 life without principle. country being properly prospected, no doubt other rich guacas [that is, graveyards] will be found.&quot; to emi grants he says : &quot; do not come before december ; take the isthmus route in preference to the boca del toro one ; bring no useless baggage, and do not cumber your self with a tent ; but a good pair of blankets will be necessary ; a pick, shovel, and axe of good material will be almost all that is required &quot; : advice which might have been taken from the &quot; barker s guide.&quot; and he con cludes with this line in italics and small capitals : &quot; if you are doing well at home, stay there,&quot; which may fairly be interpreted to mean, &quot; if you are getting a good living by robbing graveyards at home, stay there.&quot; but why go to california for a text ? she is the child of new england, bred at her own school and church. it is remarkable that among all the preachers there are so few moral teachers. the prophets are employed in excusing the ways of men. most reverend seniors, the illuminati of the age, tell me, with a gracious, remi niscent smile, betwixt an aspiration and a shudder, not to be too tender about these things, to lump all that, that is, make a lump of gold of it. the highest advice i have heard on these subjects was grovelling. the burden of it was, it is not worth your while to under take to reform the world in this particular. do not ask how your bread is buttered ; it will make you sick, if you do, and the like. a man had better starve at once than lose his innocence in the process of getting his bread. if within the sophisticated man there is not an unsophisticated one, then he is but one of the devil s angels. as we grow old, we live more coarsely, we re lax a little in our disciplines, and, to some extent, cease to obey our finest instincts. but we should be fastidious life without principle. 261 to the extreme of sanity, disregarding the gibes of those who are more unfortunate than ourselves. in our science and philosophy, even, there is commonly no true and absolute account of things. the spirit of sect and bigotry has planted its hoof amid the stars. you have only to discuss the problem, whether the stars are inhabited or not, in order to discover it. why must we daub the heavens as well as the earth ? it was an un fortunate discovery that dr. kane was a mason, and that sir john franklin was another. but it was a more cruel suggestion that possibly that was the reason why the former went in search of the latter. there is not a popular magazine in this country that would dare to print a child s thought on important subjects without comment. it must be submitted to the d. d.s. i would it were the chickadee-dees. you come from attending the funeral of mankind to attend to a natural phenomenon. a little thought is sexton to all the world. i hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society. most with whom you endeavor to talk soon come to a stand against some institution in which they appear to hold stock, that is, some particular, not uni versal, way of viewing things. they will continually thrust their own low roof, with its narrow skylight, be tween you and the sky, when it is the unobstructed heavens you would view. get out of the way with your cobwebs, wash your windows, i say ! in some lyceums they tell me that they have voted to exclude the subject of religion. but how do i know what their religion is, and when i am near to or far from it ? i have walked into such an arena and done my best to make a clean 262 life without principle. breast of what religion i have experienced, and the au dience never suspected what i was about. the lecture was as harmless as moonshine to them. whereas, if i had read to them the biography of the greatest scamps in history, they might have thought that i had written the lives of the deacons of their church. ordinarily, the inquiry is, where did you come from ? or, where are you going ? that was a more pertinent question which i overheard one of my auditors put to another once, &quot; what does he lecture for ? &quot; it made me quake in my shoes. to speak impartially, the best men that i know are not serene, a world in themselves. for the most part, they dwell in forms, and flatter and study effect only more finely than the rest. we select granite for the underpinning of our houses and barns ; we build fences of stone ; but we do not ourselves rest on an underpinning of granitic truth, the lowest primitive rock. our sills are rotten. what stuff is the man made of who is not coexistent in our thought with the purest and subtilest truth ? i often accuse my finest acquaintances of an im mense frivolity ; for, while there are manners and com pliments we do not meet, we do not teach one another the lessons of honesty and sincerity that the brutes do, or of steadiness and solidity that the rocks do. the fault is commonly mutual, however ; for we do not habitually demand any more of each other. that excitement about kossuth, consider how character istic, but superficial, it was ! only another kind of poli tics or dancing. men were making speeches to him all over the country, but each expressed only the thought, or the want of thought, of the multitude. no man stood on truth. they were merely banded together, as usual, nv / life without peinciple. 263 one leaning on another, and all together on nothing ; as the hindoos made the world rest on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent, and had nothing to put under the serpent. for all fruit of that stir we have the kossuth hat. just so hollow arid ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary conversation. surface meets surface. when our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation de generates into mere gossip. we rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a news paper, or been told by his neighbor ; and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is, that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and l we have not. in proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office, -u you may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while. i do not know but it is too much to read one news paper a week. i have tried it recently, and for so long it seems to me that i have not dwelt in my native region. the sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say not so much to me. you cannot serve two masters. it requires more than a day s devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day. we may well be ashamed to tell what things we have read or heard in our day. i do not know why my news should be so trivial, considering what one s dreams and expectations are, why the developments should be so paltry. the news we hear, for the most part, is not news to our genius. it is the stalest repeti tion. you are often tempted to ask, why such stress is 264 life without principle. laid on a particular experience which you have had, that, after twenty-five years, you should meet hobbins, registrar of deeds, again on the sidewalk. have you not budged an inch, then ? such is the daily news. its facts appear to float in the atmosphere, insignificant as the sporules of fungi, and impinge on some neglected thallus, or surface of our rninds, which affords a basis for them, and hence a parasitic growth. &quot;we should wash ourselves clean of such news. of what conse quence, though our planet explode, if there is no character involved in the explosion? in health we have not the least curiosity about such events. we do not live for idle amusement. i would not run round a corner to see the world blow up. all summer, and far into the autumn, perchance, you unconsciously went by the newspapers and the news, and now you find it was because the morning and the evening were full of news to you. your walks were full of incidents. you attended, not to the affairs of europe, but to your own affairs in massachusetts fields. if you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events that make the news transpire, thinner than the paper on which it is printed, then these things will fill the world for you ; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you can not remember nor be reminded of them. really to see the sun rise or go down every day, so to relate ourselves to a universal fact, would preserve us sane forever. nations ! what are nations ? tartars, and huns, and chinamen ! like insects, they swarm. the histo rian strives in vain to make them memorable. it is for want of a man that there are so many men. it is indi viduals that populate the world. any man thinking may say with the spirit of lodin, life without principle. 265 &quot; i look down from my height on nations, and they become ashes before me; calm is my dwelling in the clouds ; pleasant are the great fields of my rest.&quot; pray, let us live without being drawn by dogs, esquimaux-fashion, tearing over hill and dale, and bit ing each other s ears. not without a slight shudder at the danger, i often perceive how near i had come to admitting into my mind the details of some trivial affair, the news of the street ; and i am astonished to observe how willing men are to lumber their minds with such rubbish, to permit idle rumors and incidents of the most insig nificant kind to intrude on ground which should be sacred to thought. shall the mind be a public arena, where the affairs of the street and the gossip of the tea table chiefly are discussed ? or shall it be a quarter of heaven itself, an hypsethral temple, consecrated to the service of the gods ? i find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant that i hesitate to burden my attention with those which are insignifi cant, which only a divine mind could illustrate. such is, for the most part, the news in newspapers and con versation. it is important to preserve the mind s chastity in this respect. think of admitting the details of a single case of the criminal court into our thoughts, to stalk profanely through their very sanctum sanctorum for an hour, ay, for many hours ! to make a very bar room of the mind s inmost apartment, as if for so long the dust of the street had occupied us, the very street itself, with all its travel, its bustle, and filth, had passed through our thoughts shrine! would it not be an intellectual and moral suicide ? when i have been 12 266 life without principle. compelled to sit spectator and auditor in a court-room for some hours, and have seen my neighbors, who were not compelled, stealing in from time to time, and tiptoeing about with washed hands and faces, it has appeared to my mind s eye, that, when they took off their hats, their ears suddenly expanded into vast hoppers for sound, between which even their narrow heads were crowded. like the vanes of windmills, they caught the broad, but shallow stream of sound, which, after a few titillating gyrations in their coggy brains, passed out the other side. i wondered if, when they got home, they were as careful to wash their ears as before their hands and faces. it has seemed to me, at such a time, that the auditors and the witnesses, the jury and the counsel, the judge and the criminal at the bar, if i may presume him guilty before he is convicted, were all equally criminal, and a thunderbolt might be expected to de scend and consume them all together. by all kinds of traps and signboards, threatening the extreme penalty of the divine law, exclude such trespass ers from the only ground which can be sacred to you. it is so hard to forget what it is worse than useless to remember ! if i am to be a thoroughfare, i prefer that it be of the mountain-brooks, the parnassian streams, and not the town-sewers. there is inspiration, that gossip which comes to the ear of the attentive mind from the courts of heaven. there is the profane and stale revelation of the bar-room and the police court. the same ear is fitted to receive both communications. only the character of the hearer determines to which it shall be open, and to which closed. i believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall life without principle. 2g7 be tinged with triviality. our very intellect shall be macadamized, as it were, its foundation broken into fragments for the wheels of travel to roll over ; and if you would know what will make the most durable pavement, surpassing rolled stones, spruce blocks, and asphaltum, you have only to look into some of our minds which have been subjected to this treatment so long. if we have thus desecrated ourselves, as who has not ? the remedy will be by wariness and devotion to reconsecrate ourselves, and make once more a fane of the mind. we should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention. read not the times. read the eternities. conventionalities are at length as bad as impurities. even the facts of science may dust the mind by their dryness, unless they are in a sense effaced each morning, or rather rendered fertile by the dews of fresh and living truth. knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven. yes, every thought that passes through the mind helps to wear and tear it, and to deepen the ruts, which, as in the streets of pompeii, evince how much it has been used. how many things there are concern ing which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them, had better let their peddling-carts be driven, even at the slowest trot or walk, over that bridge of glorious span by which we trust to pass at last from the farthest brink of time to the nearest shore of eternity ! have we no culture, no refinement, but skill only to live coarsely and serve the devil ? to acquire a little worldly wealth, or fame, or liberty, and + y/e 268 life without principle. make a false show with it, as if we were all husk and shell, with no tender and living kernel to us ? shall our institutions be like those chestnut-burrs which contain abortive nuts, perfect only to prick the fingers ? america is said to be the arena on which the battle of freedom is to be fought ; but surely it cannot be freedom in a merely political sense that is meant. even if we grant that the american has freed himself from a politi cal tyrant, he is still the slave of an economical and moral tyrant. now that the republic, the res-publica, has been settled, it is time to look after the res-privata, the private state, to see, as the roman senate charged its consuls, &quot;ne quid res-pkivata detrimenti caperet&quot; that the private state receive no detriment. do we call this the land of the free ? what is it to be free from king george and continue the slaves of prejudice? what is it to be born free and not to live free ? what is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom ? is it a freedom to be slaves, or a freedom to be free, of which we boast ? we are a nation of politicians, concerned about the out most defences only of freedom. it is our children s chil dren who may perchance be really free. we tax our selves unjustly. there is a part of us which is not represented. it is taxation without representation. we quarter troops, we quarter fools and cattle of all sorts upon ourselves. we quarter our gross bodies on our poor souls, till the former eat up all the latter s sub stance. with respect to a true culture and manhood, we are essentially provincial still, not metropolitan, mere jonathans. we are provincial, because we do not find at home our standards, because we do not worship life without principle. 269 truth, but the reflection of truth, because we are warped and narrowed by an exclusive devotion to trade and commerce and manufactures and agriculture and the like, which are but means, and not the end. so is the english parliament provincial. mere coun try-bumpkins, they betray themselves, when any more important question arises for them to settle, the irish question, for instance, the english question why did i not say ? their natures are subdued to what they work in. their &quot; good breeding &quot; respects only secondary ob jects. the finest manners in the world are awkwardness and fatuity, when contrasted with a finer intelligence. they appear but as the fashions of past days, mere courtliness, knee-buckles and small-clothes, out of date. it is the vice, but not the excellence of manners, that they are continually being deserted by the character ; they are -cast-off clothes or shells, claiming the respect which belonged to the living creature. you are present ed with the shells instead of the meat, and it is no ex cuse generally, that, in the case of some fishes, the shells are of more worth than the meat. the man who thrusts his manners upon me does as if he were to insist on in, troducing me to his cabinet of curiosities, when i wished r to see himself. it was not in this sense that the poet decker called christ &quot; the first true gentleman that ever breathed.&quot; i repeat, that in this sense the most splendid court in christendom is provincial, having authority to consult about transalpine interests only, and not the affairs of rome. a praetor or proconsul would suffice to settle the questions which absorb the attention of the english parliament and the american congress. government and legislation ! these i thought were respectable professions. we have heard of heaven-born 270 life without principle. numas, lycurguses, and solons, in the history of the world, whose names at least may stand for ideal legisla tors ; but think of legislating to regulate the breeding of slaves, or the exportation of tobacco ! what have divine legislators to do with the exportation or the importation of tobacco ? what humane ones with the breeding of slaves ? suppose you were to submit the question to any son of god, and has he no children in the nineteenth cen tury ? is it a family which is extinct ? in what condi tion would you get it again ? what shall a state like virginia say for itself at the last day, in which these have been the principal, the staple productions ? what ground is there for patriotism in such a state ? i derive my facts from statistical tables which the states them selves have published. ca commerce that whitens every sea in quest of nuts and raisins, and makes slaves of its sailors for this pur pose ! i saw, the other day, a vessel which had been wrecked, and many lives lost, and her cargo of rags, ju niper-berries, and bitter almonds were strewn along the shore. it seemed hardly worth the while to tempt the dangers of the sea between leghorn and new york for the sake of a cargo of juniper-berries and bitter almonds. / america sending to the old world for her bitters ! is not the sea-brine, is not shipwreck, bitter enough to make the cup of life go down here ? yet such, to a great ex tent, is our boasted commerce ; and there are those who style themselves statesmen and philosophers who are so blind as to think that progress and civilization depend on precisely this kind of interchange and activity, the activity of flies about a molasses-hogshead. very well, observes one, if men were oysters. and very well, an swer i, if men were mosquitoes. \ life without principle. 271 lieutenant herndon, whom our government sent to explore the amazon, and, it is said, to extend the area of slavery, observed that there was wanting there &quot; an industrious and active population, who know what the comforts of life are, and who have artificial wants to draw out the great resources of the country.&quot; but what are the &quot; artificial wants &quot; to be encouraged ? not the love of luxuries, like the tobacco and slaves of, i believe, his native virginia, nor the ice and granite and other mate rial wealth of our native new england ; nor are &quot; the great resources of a country &quot; that fertility or barrenness of soil which produces these. the chief want, in every state that i have been into, was a high and earnest pur pose in its inhabitants. this alone draws out &quot;the great resources &quot; of nature, and at last taxes her beyond her resources ; for man naturally dies out of her. when we want culture more than potatoes, and illumination more than sugar-plums, then the great resources of a world are taxed and drawn out, and the result, or staple production, is, not slaves, nor operatives, but men, those rare fruits called heroes, saints, poets, philosophers, and redeemers. in short, as a snow-drift is formed where there is a lull in the wind, so, one would say, where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up. but the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at length blows it down. what is called politics is comparatively something so superficial and inhuman, that, practically, i have never fairly recognized that it concerns me at all. the news papers, i perceive, devote some of their columns specially to politics or government without charge ; and this, one would say, is all that saves it ; but, as i love literature, 272 life without principle. and, to some extent, the truth also, i never read those columns at any rate. i do not wish to blunt my sense of right so much. i have not got to answer for having read a single president s message. a strange age of the world this, when empires, kingdoms, and republics come a-begging to a private man s door, and utter their complaints at his elbow ! i cannot take up a newspaper but i find that some wretched government or other, hard pushed, and on its last legs, is interceding with me, the reader, to vote for it, more importunate than an ital ian beggar ; and if i have a mind to look at its certificate, made, perchance, by some benevolent merchant s clerk, or the skipper that brought it over, for it cannot speak a word of english itself, i shall probably read of the erup tion of some vesuvius, or the overflowing of some po, true or forged, which brought it into this condition. i do not hesitate, in such a case, to suggest work, or the almshouse ; or why not keep its castle in silence, as i do commonly ? the poor president, what with preserving his popularity and doing his duty, is completely bewil dered. the newspapers are the ruling power. any other government is reduced to a few marines at fort independence. if a man neglects to read the daily ; times, government will go down on its knees to him, for! this is the only treason in these days. those things which now most engage the attention of men, as politics and the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions of human society, but should be uncon sciously performed, like the corresponding functions of the physical body. they are ivi/ra-hurnan, a kind of vegetation. i sometimes awake to a half-consciousness of them going on about me, as a man may become con scious of some of the processes of digestion in a mor life without principle. 273 bid state, and so have the dyspepsia, as it is called. it is as if a thinker submitted himself to be rasped by the great gizzard of creation. politics is, as it were, the jl gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its two opposite halves, some times split into quarters, it may be, which grind on each other. not only individuals, but states, have thus a confirmed dyspepsia, which expresses itself, you can im agine by what sort of eloquence. thus our life is not altogether a forgetting, but also, alas ! to a great extent, a remembering, of that which we should never have been conscious of, certainly not in our waking hours. why should we not meet, not always as dyspeptics, to tell our bad dreams, but sometimes as ewpeptics, to congratulate each other on the ever-glorious morning? i do not make an exorbitant demand, surely. 10* wendell phillips before the concord lyceum.* concord, mass., march 12, 1845. mr. editor : we have now, for the third winter, had our spirits re freshed, and our faith in the destiny of the common wealth strengthened, by the presence and the eloquence of wendell phillips ; and we wish to tender to him our thanks and our sympathy. the admission of this gentle man into the lyceum has been strenuously opposed by a respectable portion of our fellow-citizens, who themselves, we trust, whose descendants, at least, we know, will be as faithful conservers of the true order, whenever that shall be the order of the day, and in each instance the people have voted that they would hear him, by com ing themselves and bringing their friends to the lecture room, and being very silent that they might hear. we saw some men and women, who had long ago come out, going in once more through the free and hospitable por tals of the lyceum; and many of our neighbors con fessed, that they had had a &quot; sound season &quot; this once. it was the speaker s aim to show what the state, and above all the church, had to do, and now, alas ! have done, with texas and slavery, and how much, on the other hand, the individual should have to do with church and state. these were fair themes, and not mistimed; * from &quot; the liberator,&quot; march 28, 1845. wendell phillips befoke concokd lyceum. 275 and his words were addressed to &quot; fit audience, and not few.&quot; we must give mr. phillips the credit of being a clean, erect, and what was once called a consistent man. he at least is not responsible for slavery, nor for american independence ; for the hypocrisy and superstition of the church, nor the timidity and selfishness of the state ; nor for the indifference and willing ignorance of any. he stands so distinctly, so firmly, and so effectively alone, and one honest man is so much more than a host, that we cannot but feel that he does himself injustice when he reminds us of &quot; the american society, which he rep resents.&quot; it is rare that we have the pleasure of listen ing to so clear and orthodox a speaker, who obviously has so few cracks or flaws in his moral nature, who, having words at his command in a remarkable degree, has much more than words, if these should fail, in his unquestionable earnestness and integrity, and, aside from their admiration at his rhetoric, secures the genuine respect of his audience. he unconsciously tells his biog raphy as he proceeds, and we see him early and earnest ly deliberating on these subjects, and wisely and bravely, without counsel or consent of any, occupying a ground at first from which the varying tides of public opinion cannot drive him. no one could mistake the genuine modesty and truth with which he affirmed, when speaking of the framers of the constitution, &quot; i am wiser than they,&quot; who with him has improved these sixty years experience of its working ; or the uncompromising consistency and frank ness of the prayer which concluded, not like the thanks giving proclamations, with &quot; god save the common wealth of massachusetts,&quot; but god dash it into a thou 276 wendell phillips before sand pieces, till there shall not remain a fragment on which a man can stand, and dare not tell his name, referring to the case of frederick ; to our dis grace we know not what to call him, unless scotland will lend us the spoils of one of her douglasses, out of history or fiction, for a season, till we be hospitable and brave enough to hear his proper name, a fugitive slave in one more sense than we ; who lias proved himself the possessor of a, fair intellect, and has won a colorless rep utation in these parts ; and who, we trust, will be as superior to degradation from the sympathies of freedom, as from the antipathies of slavery. when, said mr. phillips, he communicated to a new bedford audience, the other day, his purpose of writing his life, and telling his name, and the name of his master, and the place he ran from, the murmur ran round the room, and was anx iously whispered by the sons of the pilgrims, &quot; he had better not ! &quot; and it was echoed under the shadow of con cord monument, &quot; he had better not ! &quot; we would fain express our appreciation of the free dom and steady wisdom, so rare in the reformer, with which he declared that he was not born to abolish slav ery, but to do right. we have heard a few, a very few, good political speakers, who afforded us the pleasure of great intellectual power and acuteness, of soldier-like steadiness, and of a graceful and natural oratory ; but in this man the audience might detect a sort of moral prin ciple and integrity, which was more stable than their firmness, more discriminating than his own intellect, and more graceful than his rhetoric, which was not working for temporary or trivial ends. it is so rare and encour aging to listen to an orator who is content with another alliance than with the popular party, or even with the the concord lyceum. 277 sympathizing school of the martyrs, who can afford some times to be his own auditor if the mob stay away, and hears himself without reproof, that we feel ourselves in danger of slandering all mankind by affirming, that here is one, who is at the same time an eloquent speaker and a righteous man. perhaps, on the whole, the most interesting fact elicit ed by these addresses, is the readiness of the people at large, of whatever sect or party, to entertain, with good will and hospitality, the most revolutionary and heretical opinions, when frankly and adequately, and in some sort cheerfully, expressed. such clear and candid declara tion of opinion served like an electuary to whet and clar ify the intellect of all parties, and furnished each one with an additional argument for that right he asserted. we consider mr. phillips one of the most conspicuous and efficient champions of a true church and state now in the field, and would say to him, and such as are like him, &quot; god speed you.&quot; if you know of any champion in the ranks of his opponents, who has the valor and courtesy even of paynim chivalry, if not the christian graces and refinement of this knight, you will do us a service by directing him to these fields forthwith, where the lists are now open, and he shall be hospitably enter tained. for as yet the red-cross knight has shown us only the gallant device upon his shield, and his admira ble command of his steed, prancing and curvetting in the empty lists ; but we wait to see who, in the actual break ing of lances, will come tumbling upon the plain. the last days of john brown.* john brown s career for the last six weeks of his life was meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live. i know of nothing so miraculous in our his tory. if any person, in a lecture or conversation at that time, cited any ancient example of heroism, such as cato or tdl or winkelried, passing over the recent deeds and words of brown, it was felt by any intelligent au dience of northern men to be tame and inexcusably far fetched. for my own part, i commonly attend more to nature than to man, but any affecting human event may blind our eyes to natural objects. i was so absorbed in him as to be surprised whenever i detected the routine of the natural world surviving still, or met persons going about their affairs indifferent. it appeared strange to me that the &quot; little dipper &quot; should be still diving quietly in the river, as of yore ; and it suggested that this bird might continue to dive here when concord shouldbe no more. i felt that he, a prisoner in the midst of his enemies, and under sentence of death, if consulted as to his next step or resource, could answer more wisely than all his countrymen beside. he best understood his position ; he contemplated it most calmly. comparatively, all other * read at north elba, july 4, 1860. the last days of john brown. 279 men, north and south, were beside themselves. our thoughts could not revert to any greater or wiser or bet ter man with whom to contrast him, for he, then and there, was above them all. the man this country was about to hang appeared the greatest and best in it. years were not required for a revolution of public opinion; days, nay hours, produced marked changes in this case. fifty who were ready to say on going into our meeting in honor of him in concord, that he ought to be hung, would not say it when they came out. they heard his words read ; they saw the earnest faces of the con gregation ; and perhaps they joined at last in singing the hymn in his praise. the order of instructors was reversed. i heard that one preacher, who at first was shocked and stood aloof, felt obliged at last, after he was hung, to make him the subject of a sermon, in which, to some extent, he eulo gized the man, but said that his act was a failure. an influential class-teacher thought it necessary, after the services, to tell his grown-up pupils, that at first he thought as the preacher did then, but now he thought that john brown was right. but it was understood that his pupils were as much ahead of the teacher as he was ahead of the priest ; and i know for a certainty, that very little boys at home had already asked their parents, in a tone of surprise, why god did not interfere to save him. in each case, the constituted teachers were only half conscious that they were not leading, but being dragged, with some loss of time and power. the more conscientious preachers, the bible men, they who talk about principle, and doing to others as you would that they should do unto you, how could they fail to recognize him, by far the greatest preacher of 280 the last days of john brown. them all, with the bible in his life and in his acts, the embodiment of principle, who actually carried out the golden rule ? all whose moral sense had been aroused, who had a calling from on high to preach, sided with him. what confessions he extracted from the cold and con servative ! it is remarkable, but on the whole it is well, that it did not prove the occasion for a new sect of brownites being formed in our midst. they, whether within the church or out of it, who adhere to the spirit and let go the letter, and are accord ingly called infidel, were as usual foremost to recognize him. men have been hung in the south before for attempting to rescue slaves, and the north was not much stirred by it. whence, then, this wonderful dif ference? we were not so sure of their devotion to principle. we made a subtle distinction, forgot human laws, and did homage to an idea. the north, i mean the living north, was suddenly all transcendental. it went behind the human law, it went behind the apparent failure, and recognized eternal justice and glory. com monly, men live according to a formula, and are satisfied if the order of law is observed, but in this instance they, to some extent, returned to original perceptions, and there was a slight revival of old religion. they saw that what was called order was confusion, what was called justice, injustice, and that the best was deemed the worst. this attitude suggested a more intelligent and generous spirit than that which actuated our forefathers, and the possibility, in the course of ages, of a revolution in behalf of another and an oppressed people. most northern men, and a few southern ones, were wonderfully stirred by brown s behavior and words. they saw and felt that they were heroic and noble, and the last days of john brown. 281 that there had been nothing quite equal to them in their kind in this country, or in the recent history of the world. but the minority were unmoved by them. they were only surprised and provoked by the attitude of their neighbors. they saw that brown was brave, and that he believed that he had done right, but they did not detect any further peculiarity in him. not being accustomed to make fine distinctions, or to appre ciate magnanimity, they read his letters and speeches as if they read them not. they were not aware when they approached a heroic statement, they did not know when they burned. they did not feel that he spoke with authority, and hence they only remembered that the law must be executed. they remembered the old formula, but did not hear the new revelation. the man who does not recognize in brown s words a wisdom and nobleness, and therefore an authority, superior to our laws, is a modern democrat. this is the test by which to discover him. he is not wilfully but constitutionally blind on this side, and he is consistent with himself. such has been his past life ; no doubt of it. in like manner he has read history and his bible, and he ac cepts, or seems to accept, the last only as an established formula, and not because he has been convicted by it. you will not find kindred sentiments in his common place book, if he has one. when a noble deed is done, who is likely to appre ciate it ? they who are noble themselves. i was not surprised that certain of my neighbors spoke of john brown as an ordinary felon, for who are they ? they have either much flesh, or much office, or much coarse ness of some kind. they are not ethereal natures in any sense. the dark qualities predominate in them. 282 the last days of john brown. several of them are decidedly pachydermatous. i say it in sorrow, not in anger. how can a man behold the light, who has no answering inward light ? they are true to their right, but when they look this way they see nothing, they are blind. for the children of the light to contend with them is as if there should be a contest between eagles and owls. show me a man who feels bitterly toward john brown, and let me hear what noble verse he can repeat. he 11 be as dumb as if his lips were stone. it is not every man who can be a christian, even in a very moderate sense, whatever education you give him. it is a matter of constitution and temperament, after all. he may have to be born again many times. i have known many a man who pretended to be a christian, in whom it was ridiculous, for he had no genius for it. it is not every man who can be a free man, even. editors persevered for a good while in saying that brown was crazy ; but at last they said only that it was &quot; a crazy scheme,&quot; and the only evidence brought to prove it was that it cost him his life. i have no doubt that if he had gone with five thousand men, liberated a thou sand slaves, killed a hundred or two slaveholders, and had as many more killed on his own side, but not lost his own life, these same editors would have called it by a more respectable name. yet he has been far more successful than that. he has liberated many thousands of slaves, both north and south. they seem to have known nothing about living or dying for a principle. they all called him crazy then ; who calls him crazy now? all through the excitement occasioned by his remark the last days of john brown. 283 able attempt and subsequent behavior, the massachusetts legislature, not taking any steps for the defence of her citizens who were likely to be carried to virginia as wit nesses and exposed to the violence of a slaveholding mob, was wholly absorbed in a liquor-agency question, and in dulging in poor jokes on the word &quot; extension.&quot; bad spirits occupied their thoughts. i am sure that no states man up to the occasion could have attended to that ques tion at all at that time, a very vulgar question to at tend to at any time ! when i looked into a liturgy of the church of eng land, printed near the end of the last century, in order to find a service applicable to the case of brown, i found that the only martyr recognized and provided for by it was king charles the first, an eminent scamp. of all the inhabitants of england and of the world, he was the only one, according to this authority, whom that church had made a martyr and saint of; and for more than a century it had celebrated his martyrdom, so called, by an annual service. what a satire on the church is that ! look not to legislatures and churches for your guid ance, nor to any soulless incorporated bodies, but to in spirited or inspired ones. what avail all your scholarly accomplishments and learning, compared with wisdom and manhood ? to omit his other behavior, see what a work this comparative ly unread and unlettered man wrote within six weeks. where is our professor of belles-lettres or of logic and rhetoric, who can write so well ? he wrote in prison, not a history of the world, like raleigh, but an ameri can book which i think will live longer than that. i do not know of such words, uttered under such circum-? 284 the last days of john brown. stances, and so copiously withal, in roman or english or any history. what a variety of themes he touched on in that short space! there are words in that letter to his wife, respecting the education of his daughters, which deserve to be framed and hung over every mantel-piece in the land. compare this earnest wisdom with that of poor richard. the death of irving, which at any other time would have attracted universal attention, having occurred while these things were transpiring, went almost unobserved. i shall have to read of it in the biography of authors. literary gentlemen, editors, and critics, think that they know how to write, because they have studied grammar and rhetoric ; but they are egregiously mistaken. the art of composition is as simple as the discharge of a bul let from a rifle, and its masterpieces imply an infinitely greater force behind them. this unlettered man s speak ing and writing are standard english. some words and phrases deemed vulgarisms and americanisms before, he has made standard american ; such as &quot; it will pay &quot; it suggests that the one great rule of composition, and if i were a professor of rhetoric i should insist on this, is, to speak the truth. this first, this second, this third ; pebbles in your mouth or not. this demands earnest ness and manhood chiefly. we seem to have forgotten that the expression, a lib eral education, originally meant among the romans one worthy of free men ; while the learning of trades and professions by which to get your livelihood merely was considered worthy of slaves only. but taking a hint from the word, i would go a step further, and say, that it is not the man of wealth and leisure simply, though devoted to art, or science, or literature, who, in a true the last days of john brown. 285 sense, is liberally educated, but only the earnest and free man. in a slaveholding country like this, there can be no such thing as a liberal education tolerated by the state ; and those scholars of austria and france who, however learned they may be, are contented under their tyrannies, have received only a servile education. nothing could his enemies do, but it redounded to his infinite advantage, that is, to the advantage of his cause. they did not hang him at once, but reserved him to preach to them. and then there was another great blunder. they did not hang his four followers with him ; that scene was still postponed ; and so his victory was prolonged and completed. no theatrical manager could have arranged things so wisely to give effect to his behavior and words. and who, think you, was the manager ? who placed the slave-woman and her child, whom he stooped to kiss for a symbol, between his prison and the gallows ? we soon saw, as he saw, that he was not to be par doned or rescued by men. that would have been to dis arm him, to restore to him a material weapon, a sharpe s rifle, when he had taken up the sword of the spirit, the sword with which he has really won his greatest and most memorable victories. now he has not laid aside the sword of the spirit, for he is pure spirit himself, and his sword is pure spirit also. &quot; he nothing common did or mean upon that memorable scene, nor called the gods with vulgar spite, to vindicate his helpless right ; but bowed his comely head down as upon a bed.&quot; what a transit was that of his horizontal body alone, but just cut down from the gallows-tree ! we read, that 286 the last days of john brown. at such a time it passed through philadelphia, and by saturday night had reached new york. thus, like a meteor it shot through the union from the southern re gions toward the north ! no such freight had the cars borne since they carried him southward alive. on the day of his translation, i heard, to be sure, that he was hung, but i did not know what that meant ; i felt no sorrow on that account ; but not for a day or two did i even hear that he was dead, and not after any num ber of days shall i believe it. of all the men who were said to be my contemporaries, it seemed to me that john brown was the only one who had not died. i never hear of a man named brown now, and i hear of them pretty often, i never hear of any particularly brave and earnest man, but my first thought is of john brown, and what relation he may be to him. i meet him at every turn. he is more alive than ever he was. he has earned immortality. he is not confined to north elba nor to kansas. he is no longer working in secret. he works in public, and in the clearest light that shines on this land. the end cambridge : stereotyped and printed by welch, bigelow, & co. 14 day use return to desk from which borrowed loan dept. this book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. renewals only: tel. no. 642-3405 renewals may be made 4 days prior to date due. renewed books are subject to immediate recall. .flec-pld novzv72 -3 mar 24 1980 2 b -80 k!iu.cilt. mar 1 g i9 dec x 1 1994 rec.circ. dec 11 1994 jul oe1998 ld2la-40m-3, 72 (qll73blo)476-a-32 general library university of california berkeley u.c. berkeley libraries case b university of california library ^3 2s &>3 cornell university library ps 3042.b63 early u spring in massachusetts.from the j 3 1924 022 192 383 cornell university library the original of this book is in the cornell university library. there are no known copyright restrictions in the united states on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022192383 early spring in massachusetts. from the journal of henry dfthoreau, author op " x week on the cohoord amd jubbikaoe rtvexs," "wal»ek," wo " the morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation la uninter rupted ; but few are the ears that hear it. olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere " — walden, p. 92 boston: houghton, mifflin and company. qlie riuercitie bttee, camfrftffe. ^ 6 ■mivr.-i'ofty. a p : jii »o, t » i i fi^r copyright, 1881, by houghton, mipfun a 00. alt rights reserved. the riverside press, cambridge: stereotyped and printed by h. o. houghton a oik introductory. henry david thobeatt was born in con cord, massachusetts, july 12, 1817, and died there may 6, 1862. most of his life was spent in that town, and most of the localities referred to in this volume are to be found there. his journal, from which the following selections were made, was bequeathed to* me by his sister sophia, who died october 7, 1876, at bangor, maine. before it came into my possession i had been in the habit of borrowing volumes of it from time to time, and thus continuing an intercourse with its author which i had en joyed, through occasional visits and correspond ence, for many years before his death, and which i regard as perhaps the highest privilege of my life. in reading the journal for my own satisfac tion, i had sometimes been wont to attend each day to what had been written on the same day of the month in some other year ; desiring thus to be led to notice, in my walks, the phenomena which thoreau noticed, so to be iv intbodtjctoby. brought nearer to the -writer by observing the bame sights, sounds, etc., and if possible have my love of nature quickened by him. this habit suggested the arrangement of dates in the following pages, viz., the bringing together of passages under the same day of. the month in different years. in this way i hoped to make an interesting picture of the progress of the seasons, of thoreau's year. it was evi dently painted with a most genuine love, and often apparently in the open air, in the very presence of the phenomena described, so that the written page brings the mind of the reader, as writing seldom does, into closest contact with nature, making him see its sights, hear its sounds, and feel its very breath upon his cheek. thoreau seems deliberately to have chosen nature rather than man for his companion, though he knew well the higher value of man, as appears from such passages as the following : " the blue sky is a distant reflection of the azure serenity that looks out from under a human brow." " to attain to a true relation to one human creature is enough to make a year memorable." and somewhere he says in substance, " what is the singing of birds or any natural sound compared with the voice of one we lova ? " friendship was one of his favorite introductory. t themes, and no one has written with a finer ap preciation of it. still, in ordinary society, he found it so difficult to reach essential humanity through the civilized and conventional, that he turned to nature, who was ever ready to meet his highest mood. from the haunts of business and the common intercourse of men he went into the woods and fields as from a solitary desert into society. he might have said with another, — he did virtually say, — " if we go sol itary to streams and mountains, it is to meet man there where he is more than ever man." but while i have sought in these selections to represent the progressive life of nature, i have also been careful to give thoreau's thoughts, because though his personality is in a striking degree single, he being ever the same man in his conversation, letters, books, and the details of his life, though his observation is imbedded in his philosophy ("how to observe is how to behave," etc.), yet if any distinction may be made, his thoughts or philosophy seem to me incomparably the more interesting and impor tant. he declined from the first to live for the common prizes of society, for wealth or even what is called a competence, for professional, social, political, or even literary success ; and this not from a want of ambition or a purpose, but from an ambition far higher than the ordi n introductory. nary, which fully possessed him, — an ambition to obey his purest instincts, to follow implicitly the finest intimations of his genius, to secure thus the fullest and freest life of which he was capable. he chose to lay emphasis on his rela tions to nature and the universe rather than on those he bore to the ant-hill of society, not to be merely another wheel in the social ma chine. he felt that the present is only one among the possible forms of civilization, and so preferred not to commit himself to it. herein lies the secret of that love of the wild which was so prominent a trait in his character. it is evident that the main object of society now is to provide for our material wants, and still more and more luxuriously for them, while the higher wants of our nature are made secon dary, put off for some sunday service and future 'eisure. a great lesson of thoreau's life is that all this must be reversed, that whatever relates to the supply of inferior wants must be simpli fied, in order that the higher life may be en riched, though he desired no servile imitation of his own methods, for perhaps the highest les son of all to be learnt from him is that the only way of salvation lies in the strictest fidelity to one's own genius. a late english reviewer, who shows in many (espects a very just appreciation of thoreau, introductory. til charges him with doing little beyond writing a few books, as if that might not be a great thing; but a life so steadily directed from the first to ward the highest ends, gaining as the fruits of its fidelity such a harvest of sanity, strength, and tranquillity, and that wealth of thought which has been well called " the only conceiva ble prosperity," accompanied, too, as it naturally was, with the earnest and effective desire to communicate itself to others, — such a life is the worthiest deed a man can perform, the purest benefit he can confer upon his fellows, compared with which all special acts of service or philan thropy are trivial . tr ^\ j w'qtfo'. blake. early spring in massachusetts. february 24, 1852. p. m. railroad causeway. i am reminded of spring by the quality of the air. the cock-crowing, and even the telegraph harp prophesy it, though the ground is, for the most part, covered with snow. it is a natural resurrection, an experience of immortality the telegraph harp reminds me of anacredn. that is the glory of greece, that we are re minded of her only when in our best estates — our elysian days, — when our senses are young and healthy again. i could find a name for every strain or intonation of the harp from one or other of the grecian bards. i often hear mimnermus ; often, menander. i am too late by a day or two for the sand foliage on the east side of the deep cut. it is glorious to see the soil again here where a shovel perchance will enter it and find no frost. the frost is partly come out of this bank, and it has become dry again in the sun. the very sound of mens' work reminds, advertises, me of the coming of l 2 early spring in massachusetts. spring, as i now hear the laborer's sledge on the rails as we grow older, is it not om inous that we have more to write about evening, less about morning. we must associate more with the early hours. february 24, 1854. p. m. to walden and fair haven. nuthatches are faintly answering each other, tit for tat, on different keys — a faint creak. now and then one utters a loud, distinct quah. this bird, more than any other i know, loves to stand with its head downward ; meanwhile, chickadees, with their silver tink ling are flitting high above through the tops of the pines observed in one of the little pond holes between walden and fair haven, where a partridge had traveled around in the snow, amid the bordering bushes, twenty-five rods ; had pecked the green leaves of the lamb kill, and left fragments on the snow, and had paused at each high blueberry bush, and shaken down fragments of its. bark on the snow. the buds appeared to be its main object. i finally scared the bird. february 24, 1855. the brightening of the willow or of osiers, that is a season in the spring, showing that the dormant sap is awak ened. i now remember a few osiers which i have seen early in past springs, thus brilliantly green or red, and it is as if all the landscape early spring in massachusetts. 3 shone. though the twigs were few that i saw, i remember it as a prominent phenomenon af fecting the face of nature, a gladdening of her face. you will often fancy that they look brighter before the spring has come, and when there has been no change in them. thermome ter at 10° at 10 p. m. february 24, 1857. a fine spring morning. the ground is almost completely bare again. there has been a frost in the night. now at half past eight it is melted and wets my feet like a dew. the water on the meadow this still bright morning is smooth as in april. i am surprised to hear the strain of a song-spar row from the river side, and as i cross from the causeway to the hill, thinking of the bluebird, i that instant hear one's note from deep in the softened air. it is already 40°. by noon it is between 50° and 60°. as the day advances i hear more bluebirds, and see their azure flakes settling on the fence posts. their short rich warble curls through the air. its grain now lies parallel to the bluebird's warble, like boards of the same lot. it seems to be one of those early springs of which we have heard, but which we have never experienced. i have seen the probings of skunks for a week or more. i now see where one has pawed out the worn dust or chankings from 4 eakly spring in massachusetts. a hole in the base of a walnut, and torn opei the fungi, etc., exploring for grubs or insects they are very busy these nights. if i should make the least concession mj friend would spurn me. i am obeying his law as well as my own. where is the actual friend you love ? ask from what hill the rainbow's arch springs ! it adorns and crowns the earth. our friends are our kindred, of our species. there are but few of our species on the globe. between me and my friend what unfathomable distance ! all mankind, like water and insects, are between us. if my friend says in his mind, i will never see you again, i translate it, of necessity, into ever. that is its definition in love's lexicon. those we can love we can hate. to others we are indifferent. p. m. to walden. the railroad in the deep cut is dry as in spring, almost dusty. the best of the sand foliage is already gone. i walk without a great coat. a chickadee, with its winter lisp, flits over. i think it is time to hear its phebe note, and that instant it pipes it forth. walden is still covered with thick '.ce, though melted a foot from the shore. the french (in the jesuit relation) say "fil de i'eau " for that part of the current of a river in which any floating thing would be carried, gen early spring in massachusetts. 5 erally about equidistant from the two banks. it is a convenient expression for which i think we have no equivalent. february 24, 1858. i see rhodora in bloom in a pitcher with water andromeda. went through that long swamp northeast of boaz's meadow. interesting and peculiar are the clumps and masses of panicled andromeda, with light brown stems, topped uniformly with very distinct, yellow-brown recent shoots, ten or twelve inches long, with minute red buds sleep ing close along them. this uniformity in such masses gives a pleasing tinge to the swamp's surface. wholesome colors which wear well. i see quite a number of emperor moths' cocoons attached to this shrub, some hung round with a loose mass of leaves as big as my two fists. what art in the red-eye to make these two adjacent maple twigs serve for the rim of its pensile basket, inweaving them ! surely it finds a place for itself in nature, between the two twigs of a maple. on the side of the meadow moraine, just north of the bowlder field, i see barberry bushes three inches in di ameter and ten feet high. what a surprising color this wood has. it splits and splinters very much when i bend it. i cut a cane, and, shaving off the outer bark, find it of imperial yellow, as if painted, — fit for a chinese man* iarin. 6 eably spring in massachusetts. february 25, 1859. measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. if there is no response in you to the awakening of nature, if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you, know that the morning and spring of your life are past. thus may you feel your pulse. i heard this morning a nuthatch in the elms on the street. i think they are heard oftener at the approach of spring, just as the phebe note of the chicka dee is, and so their quah quah is a herald of the spring. a good book is not made in the cheap and off-hand manner of many of our scientific re ports, ushered in by the message of the pres ident communicating it to congress, and the order of congress that many thousand copies be printed with the letters of instruction from the secretary of the interior (or rather ex terior) ; the bulk of the book being a jour nal of a picnic or sporting expedition by a brevet lieutenant-colonel, illustrated by photo graphs of the traveler's footsteps across _ the plains, and an admirable engraving of his na tive village as it appeared on his leaving it, and followed by an appendix on the paleontology of the route by a distinguished savant who was not there ; the last illustrated by very finely early spring in massachusetts. 7 executed engravings of some old broken shells picked up on the road. there are several men of whose comings and goings the town knows little, — i mean the trappers. they may be seen coming from the woods and river, perhaps with nothing in their hands, and you do not suspect what they have been about. they go about their business in a stealthy manner for fear that any should see where they set their traps, for the fur-trade still flourishes here. every year they visit the out-of-the-way swamps and meadows and brooks to set and examine their traps for mus quash and mink, and the owners of the land commonly know nothing of it. but few as the trappers are here, it seems by g 's accounts that they steal one another's traps. all the criticism i got on my lecture on " autumnal tints, " at worcester, on the 22d, was that i presumed my audience had not seen so much of them as they had. but after read ing it i am more than ever convinced that they have not seen much of them, that there are very few persons who do see much of nature. february 25, 1860. the fields of open water amid the thin ice of the meadows are the spec tacle to-day. they are especially dark blue when i look southwest. has it anything to do with the direction of the wind ? it is pleas* 8 eably spring in massachusetts. ant to see high, dark blue waves half a mile off, running incessantly along the edge of white ice. there the motion of the blue liquid is the most distinct. as the waves rise and fall they seem to run swiftly along the edge of the ice. for a day or two past i have seen in various places the small tracks of skunks. they ap pear to come out commonly in the warmer weather in the latter part of february. i noticed yesterday the first conspicuous silvery sheen from the needles of the white pine waving in the wind. a small one was conspicuous by the side of the road, more than a quarter of a mile ahead. i suspect that those plumes which have been oppressed -or contracted by snow and ice, are not only dried, but opened and spread by the wind. those peculiar tracks which i saw some time ago, and still see, made in slosh, and since frozen at the andromeda ponds, i think must be mole tracks, and those " nicks " on the sides are where they shoved back the snow with their vertical flippers. this is a very peculiar track, a broad channel in slosh and at length in ice. february 26, 1840. the most important events make no stir on their first taking place, nor indeed in their effects directly. they seem bedged about by secrecy. it is concussion or early spbing in massachusetts. 9 the rushing together of air to fill a vacuum which makes a noise. the great events to which all things consent, and for which they have prepared the way, produce no explosion, for they are gradual, and create no vacuum which requires to be filled. as a birth takes place in silence, and is whispered about the neighborhood, but an assassination, which, is at war with the constitution of things, creates a tumult immediately. february 26, 1841. my prickles or smooth ness are as much a quality of your hand as of myself. i cannot tell you what i am more than a ray of the summer's sun. what i am, i am, and say not. being is the great explainer. in the attempt to explain, shall i plane away all the spines till it is no thistle, but a cornstalk. if my world is not sufficient without thee, my friend, i will wait till it is, and then call thee. you shall come to a palace, not to an alms house. to be great we do as if we would be tall merely, longer than we are broad, stretch" ourselves and stand on tiptoe. but greatness is well-proportioned, unstrained, and stands on the soles of the feet. in composition i miss the hue of the mind, as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning and evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure. this good 10 eaelt spbing in massachusetts. book helps the sun shine in my chamber. the rays fall on its page as if to explain and illus trate it. i, who have been sick, hear cattle low in the street with such a healthy ear as prophesies my cure. these sounds lay a finger on my pulse to some purpose. a fragrance comes in at all my senses which proclaims that i am still of nature, the child. the threshing m yonder barn, and the tinkling of the anvil come from the same side of styx with me. if i were a physician i would try my patients thus : i would wheel them to a window and let nature feel their pulses. it will soon appear if their sensuous existence is sound. these sounds are but the throbbing of some pulse in me. nature seems to have given me these hours to pry into her private drawers. i watch the insensible perspiration rising from my coat or hand on the wall. i go and feel my pulse in all the recesses of the house, and see if i am of force to carry a homely life and comfort into them. february 26, 1852. we are told to-day that civilization is making rapid progress ; the ten dency is ever upward, substantial justice is done even by human courts. you may trust the good intentions of mankind. we read to-morrow in the newspapers that prance is on the eve of go ing to war with england to give employment early spring in massachusetts. 11 to her army. this russian war is popular. what is the influence of men of principle ? or how numerous are they? how many moral teachers has society ? of course so many as she has will resist her. how many resist her ? how many have i heard speak with warning voice? the preacher's standard of morality is no higher than that of his audience. he btudies to conciliate his hearers, and never to offend them. does the threatened war between france and england evince any more enlight enment than a war between two savage tribes, the iroquois and hurons? is it founded in better reason ? february 26, 1855. directly off clam-shell hill, within four rods of it, where the water is three or four feet deep, i see where the mus quash dived and brought up clams before the last freezing. their open shells are strewn along close to the edge of the ice, and close to gether for about three rods in one place, and the bottom under the edge of the older ice, as seen through the new black ice, is perfectly white with those which sank. they may have been blown in or the ice may have melted. the nacre of these freshly-opened shells is very fair, azure, or else a delicate salmon pink (?), or ro saceous, or violet. i find one not opened, but frozen, and several have one valve quite broken 12 early spring in massachusetts. in two in the rat's effort to wrench them open, leaving the frozen fish half-exposed. all the rest show the marks of their teeth at one end or the other. you can see distinctly also the marks of their teeth where with a scraping cut they have scraped off the tough muscle which fastens the fish to its shell, also sometimes all along the nacre next the edge these shells lie thickly around the edge of each small circle of thinner black ice in the midst of the white, showing where was open water a day or two ago. at the beginning and end of winter, when the river is partly open, the ice thus serves the muskrat instead of other stool hence it appears that this is still a good place for clams as it was in indian days. february 26, 1857. what an accursed land, methinks unfit for the habitation of man, where the wild animals are monkeys ! february 27, 1841. life looks as fair at this moment as a summer's sea .... like a persian city or hanging gardens in the distance, so washed in light, so untried, only to be thridded by clean thoughts. all its flags are flowing and tassels streaming, and drapery flapping like some pavilion. the heavens hang over it like tome low screen, and seem to undulate in the breeze. through this pure, unwiped hour, as through a crystal glass, i look out upon the early spring in massachusetts. 13 future as a smooth lawn for my virtue to disport in. it shows from afar as unrepulsive as the sunshine upon walls and cities, over which the passing life moves as gently as a shadow. i see the course of my life, like some retired road, wind on without obstruction into a country maze. i am attired for the future so, as the sun setting presumes all men at leisure and in con templative mood, and am thankful that it is thus presented blank and indistinct. it still o'ertops my life. my future deeds bestir them selves within me and move grandly towards a consummation, as ships go down the thames. a steady onward motion i feel in me as still as that, or like some vast snowy cloud whose shadow first is seen across the fields. it is the material of all things, loose and set afloat, that makes my sea. these various words are not without various meanings. the combined voice of the race makes nicer distinctions than any individual. there are the words diversion and amusement. it takes more to amuse than to divert. we must be surrendered to our amusements, but only turned aside to our diversions. we have vo will in the former, but oversee the latter. we are oftenest diverted in the street, but amused in our chambers. we are diverted from our engagements, but amused when we 14 eakly spbing in massachusetts. are listless. we may be diverted iron.* amusement, and amused by a diversion. it often happens that a diversion becomes our amusement, and an amusement our employ ment. february 27, 1851. of two men, one of whom knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows noth ing, and the other really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all, what great ad vantage has the latter over the former ? which is the better to deal with ? i do not know that knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all we had called knowledge before, an indefinite sense of the grandeur and glory of the universe. it is a lighting up of the mist by the sun. but man cannot be said to know, in the highest sense, any better than he can look serenely and with im punity in the face of the sun. how when a man purchases a thing, he is determined to get and get hold of it, using how many expletives and how long a string of iynonymous or similar terms signifying posses sion in the legal process. what 's mine 's my own. an old deed of a small piece of swamp land which i have lately surveyed at the risk of being mired past recovery, says that " the said early spring in massachusetts. ll i spaulding, his heirs and assigns, shall and may from this (?) time, and at all times forever hereafter, by force and virtue )f these presents, lawfully, peaceably, and quietly have, hold, use, occupy, possess, and enjoy the said swamp," etc. the following bears on the floating ice which has risen from the bottom of the meadows. robert hunt says, " water conducts heat down ward but very slowly j a mass of ice will re main undissolved but a few inches under water on the surface of which ether or any other inflammable body is burning. if ice swam beneath the surface the summer sun would scarcely have power to thaw it, and thus our lakes and seas would be gradually converted into solid masses." nature and man ; some prefer one, others the other. but that is all " de gustibus." it makes no odds at what well you drink, provided it be a well-head. walking in the woods, it may be some after noon, the shadow of the wings of a thought flits across the landscape of my mind, and i am re minded how little eventful are our lives. what have been all these wars and rumors of wars, and modern discoveries and improvements, so called ? a mere irritation in the skin. but this shadow which is so soon past, and whose bubstance is not detected, suggests that there 16 early spring in massachusetts. are events of importance whose interval is to us a true historic period. the lecturer is wont to describe the nine teenth century, the american of the last gen eration, in an off-hand and triumphant strain, wafting him to paradise, spreading his fame by steam and telegraph, recounting the number of wooden stopples he has whittled. but he does not perceive that this is not a sincere or perti nent account of any man's or nation's life. it is the hip-hip-hurrah and mutual admiration society style. cars go by and we know their substance as well as their shadow i they stop and we get into them. but those sublime thoughts, passing on high, do not stop, and we never get into them. their conductor is not like one of us. i feel that the man who, in his conversation with me about the life of man in new england, lays much stress on railroads, telegraphs, and such enterprises does not go below the surface of things in one of the mind's ava tars, in the interval between sleeping and wak ing, aye, in one of the interstices of a hin doo dynasty, perchance, such things as the nineteenth century, with all its improvements, may come and go again. nothing makes a deep und lasting impression but what is weighty. . . . he who lives according to the highest early spring in massachusetts. 17 law is in one sense lawless. that is an unfor tunate discovery, certainly, that of a law which binds us where we did not know that we were bound. liye_free, child of the mist. he for whom the law is made, who does not obey the law, but whom the law obeys, reclines on pil lows of down, and is wafted at will whither he pleases ; for man is superior to all laws, both of heaven and earth, when he takes his liberty. february 27, 1852. the main river is not yet open except in very few places, but the north branch, which is so much more rapid, is open near tarbell's and harrington's, where i walked to-day, and flowing with full tide, bor dered with ice on either side, sparkles in the clear, cool air, — a silvery sparkle as from a stream that would not soil the sky we have almost completely forgotten the summer. this restless and now swollen stream has burst its icy fetters, and as i stand looking up it west ward for half a mile, where it winds slightly under a high bank, its surface is lit up here and there with a fine-grained silvery sparkle which makes the river appear something celestial, more than a terrestrial river, which might have suggested that one surrounding the shield in homer. if rivers come out of their prison thus bright and immortal, shall not i, too, re sume my spring life with joy and hope. have 18 early spring in massachusetts. i no hopes to sparkle on the surface of life's current? it is worthwhile to have our faith revived by seeing where a river swells and eddies about a half-buried rock. february 27, 1853. a week or two ago i brought home a handsome pitch pine cone, which had freshly fallen, and was closed per fectly tight. it was put into a table-drawer. to-day i am agreeably surprised that it has there dried and opened with perfect regularity, filling the drawer ; and from a solid, narrow and sharp cone has become a broad, rounded, open one, — has, in fact, expanded into a coni cal flower with rigid scales, and has shed a remarkable quantity of delicate winged seeds. each scale, which is very elaborately and per fectly constructed, is armed with a short spine pointing downward, as if to protect its seeds from squirrels and birds. that hard, closed cone, which defied all violent attempts to open it, and could only be cut open, has thus yielded to the gentle persuasion of warmth and dryness. the expanding of the pine cones, that, too, is a season. february 27, 1854 i remarked yes terday the rapidity with which water flowing over the icy ground sought its level. all that rain would hardly have produced a puddle in midsummer, but now it produces a freshet, and will perhaps break up the river. early spring in massachusetts. j . february 27, 1856.. the papers are talking about the prospect of war between england and america. neither side sees how its coun try can avoid a long and fratricidal war without sacrificing its honor. both nations are ready to take a desperate step, to forget the interests of civilization and christianity and their com mercial prosperity, and fly at each other's throats. when i see an individual thus be side himself, thus desperate, ready to shoot or be shot like a blackleg, who has little to lose, no serene aims to accomplish, i think he is a candidate for bedlam. what asylum is there for nations to go to ? nations are thus ready to talk of wars and challenge one another because they are made up, to such an extent, of poor, low-spirited, de spairing men, in whose eyes the chance of shooting somebody else without being shot themselves, exceeds their actual good fortune. . who, in fact, will be the first to enlist but the most desperate class, they who have lost all . hope ? and they may at last infect the rest. will not war, at length, be thought disreputable like duelling between individuals ? february 27, 1857. before i opened the win dow this cold morning i heard the peep of a robin, that sound which is often heard in cheer less or else rainy weather, so often heard first 20 early spring in massachusetts. borne on the cutting march wind, or through bleet or rain, as if its coming were premature. february 27, 1858 the -hedges on the hill are all cut off. the journals think they cannot say too much on improvements in husbandry. but as for one of these farms brushed up, — a model farm, — i had as lief see a patent churn and a man turning it. it is simply a place where somebody is making money. i see a snow bunting, though it is pleasant and warm. february 27, 1859. p. m. to cliffs ; though it was a dry, powdery snow-storm yesterday, the sun is now so high that the snow is soft and sticky this p. m. the sky, too, is soft to look at, and the air to feel on my cheek. health makes the poet, or sympathy with nat ure, a good appetite for his food, which is con stantly renewing him, — whetting his senses. pay for your victuals then with poetry, give back life for life. february 27, 1860. 2 p. m. to abner but trick's hill i walk down by the river below flint's, on the north side. the sudden apparition of the dark blue water on the sur face of the earth is exciting. i must now walk where i can see the most water, as to the most 'iving part of nature. this is the blood of the early spring in massachusetts. 21 earth, and we see its blue arteries pulsing with new life now. i see from far over the mead ows white cakes of ice gliding swiftly down the stream, — a novel sight. they are whiter than ever in this spring sun. the abundance of light, as reflected from clouds and the snow, etc., etc., is more spring like than anything else of late i had noticed for some time, far in the middle of the great meadows, something dazzling white, which i took, of course, to be a small cake of ice on its end ; but now that i have climbed the pitch pine hill, and can overlook the whole meadow, i see it to be the white breast of a small shel drake accompanied, perhaps, by its mate, a darker one. they have settled warily in the very midst of the meadow, where the wind has blown a space of clear water for an acre or two. the aspect of the meadow is sky blue and dark blue, the former a thin ice, the lat ter the spaces of open water which the wind has made ; but it is chiefly ice still. thus as soon as the river breaks up, or begins to break up fairly, and the strong wind, widening the cracks, makes at length open spaces in the ice of the meadow, this hardy bird appears, and is seen tailing in the first widened crack in the ice where it can come at the water. instead of a piece of ice i find it to be the breast of the 22 .early spring in massachusetts. bheldrake which so reflects the light as to look larger than it is, the bird steadily sailing this way and that with its companion who is diving from time to time. they have chosen the opening farthest removed from all shores. as i look i see the ice drifting in upon them and contracting the water, till finally they have but a few square rods left, while there are forty or fifty acres near by. this is the first bird of the spring that i have seen or heard of. february 28, 1841. nothing goes by luck in composition ; it allows of no trick. the best you can write will be the best you are. every sentence is the result of a long probation. the author's character is read from title page to end. of this he never corrects the proofs. we read it as the essential character of a hand writing without regard to the flourishes. and so of the rest of our actions. it runs as straight as a ruled line through them all, no matter how many curvets about it. our whole life is taxed for the least thing well done. it is its net result. how we eat, drink, sleep, and use our desultory hours now in these indifferent days, with no eye to observe and no occasion to excite us, determines our authority and capaci ty for the time to come. february 28, 1852. to-day it snows again, covering the ground. to get the value of the early spring in massachusetts. 23 storm, we must be out a long time and travel far in it, so that it may fairly penetrate our skin, and we be, as it were, turned inside out to it, and there be no part in us but is wet or weather-beaten, so that we become storm-men, instead of fair-weather men. some men speak of having been wet to the skin once as a mem orable event in their lives which, notwithstand ing the croakers, they survived. february 28, 1855. i observed how a new ra vine was formed in that last thaw at clam shell hill. much melted snow and rain being collected on the top of the hill, some apparently found its way through the ground frozen a foot thick, a few feet from the edge of the bank, and began with a small rill washing down the slope the unfrozen sand beneath. as the water con tinued to flow, the sand on each side continued to slide into it and be carried off, leaving the frozen crust above quite firm, making a bridge five or six feet wide over this cavern. now since the thaw, this bridge, i see, has melted and fallen in, leaving a ravine some ten feet wide* and much longer, which now may go on increasing from year to year without limit. i was there just after it began. february 28, 1856. how simple the machin ery of a saw-mill. m has dammed a stream, raised a pond or head of water, and placed an 24 eably spring in massachusetts. old horizontal mill-wheel in position to receive a jet on its buckets, transferred the motion to a horizontal shaft and saw, by a few cog-wheels and simple gearing ; then throwing a roof of slabs over all, at the outlet of the pond, you have a mill a weight of water stored upon a meadow, applied to move a saw, which scratches its way through the trees placed be fore it, so simple is a saw-mill. february 28, 1857. it is a singular infatua tion that leads men to become clergymen in regular or even irregular standing. i pray to be introduced to new men at whom i may stop short and taste their peculiar sweetness. but in the clergyman of the most liberal sort i see no perfectly independent human nucleus, but i seem to see some indistinct scheme hoveridg about, to which he has lent himself, to which he belongs. it is a very fine cobweb in the lower stratum of the air, which stronger wings do nr>t even discover. whatever he may say, ne does not know that one day is as good as another. whatever he may say, he does not know that a man's creed can never be written, that there are no particular expressions of wor ship that deserve to be prominent. he dreams of a certain sphere to be filled by him some thing less in diameter than a great circle, may be not greater than a hogshead. all the staves early spring in massachusetts. 25 are got out, and his sphere is already hooped. what 's the use of talking to him ? when you spoke of sphere music, he thought only of a thumping on his cask. if he does not know something that nobody else does, that nobody told him, then he 's a tell-tale. february 28, 1860. passed a very little boy in the street to-day who had on a home-made cap of a woodchuck's skin, which his father or older brother had killed and cured, and his mother or older sister had fashioned into a nice warm cap. i was interested by the sight of it, it suggested so much of family history, adven ture with the animal, story told about it, not without exaggeration, the human parents, care of their young these hard times. johnny had been promised a cap many times, and now the work was completed. a perfect little idyl, as they say. the cap was large and round, big enough, you would say, for the boy's father, and had some kind of cloth visor stitched to it. the top of the cap was evidently the back of the woodchuck, as it were, expanded in breadth, contracted in length, and it was as fresh and handsome as if the woodchuck wore it himself. the great gray-tipped hairs were all preserved and stood out above the brown ones, only a lit tle more loosely than in life. as if he had put his head into the belly of a woodchuck, having 26 early spring in massachusetts. cut off his tail and legs, and substituted a visor for the head. the little fellow wore it inno cently enough, not knowing what he had on forsooth, going about his small business pit-a pat, and his black eyes sparkled beneath it when i remarked on its warmth, even as the wood chuck's might have done. such should be the history of every piece of clothing that we wear. as i stood by eagle field wall, i heard a fine rattling sound from some dry seeds at my el bow. it was occasioned by the wind rattling the fine seeds in those pods of the indigo weed which were still closed, a distinct rattling din which drew my attention, like a small indian cal abash. not a mere rattling of dry seeds, but the shaking of a rattle or a hundred rattles as it is important to consider nature from the point of view of science, remembering the nomenclature and systems of men, and so, if possible, go a step further in that direction, so it is equally important often to ignore or forget all that men presume that they know, and take an original and unprejudiced view of nature, letting her make what impression she will on you, as the first men, and all children, and nat ural men do. for our science, so called, is al ways more barren and mixed with error than our sympathies are. as i go down the boston road i see an irish early spring in massachusetts. 27 man wheeling home from far a large, damp, and rotten pine log for fuel. he evidently sweats at it and pauses to rest many times. he found, perhaps, that his woodpile was gone before the winter was, and he trusts thus to contend with the remaining cold. i see him unload it in his yard before me, and then rest himself. the piles of solid oak wood which i see in other yards do not interest me at all, but this looked like fuel. it warmed me to think of it. he will now proceed to split it finely, and then i fear it will require about as much heat to dry it a3 it will give out at last. how rarely we are encouraged by the sight of simple actions in the street. we deal with banks and other institutions where the life and humanity are concealed, what there is of it. i like, at least, to see the great beams half-ex posed in the ceiling or the corner. february 28, 1861. p. m. down boston road under the hill. air full of bluebirds, as yesterday. the sidewalk is bare and almost dry the whole distance under the hill. turn in at the gate this side of moore's, and sit on one of the yellowish stones rolled down in the bay of a digging, and examine the radical leaves, etc., etc. where the edges of grassy banks have caved i see the fine fibrous roots of the grass which have been washed bare during 28 early spring in massachusetts. the winter, extending straight downward two feet (and how much further within the earth i know not), a pretty dense, grayish mass. february 29, 1840. a friend advises by his whole behavior, and never condescends to par ticulars. another chides away a fault, he loves it away. while he sees the other's error, he is silently conscious of it, and only the more loves truth itself, and assists his friend in loving it till the fault is expelled and gently extin guished. february 29, 1852. simplicity is the law of nature for men as well as for flowers. when the tapestry (corolla) of the nuptial bed (ca lyx) is excessive, luxuriant, it is unproductive. linnaeus says, "luxuriant flowers are none natural, but all monsters," and so, for the most part, abortive, and when proliferous " they but increase the monstrous deformity." " luxurians flos tegmenta fructiflcationis ita multiplicat ut essentiales equidem partes destruantur." " ori tur luxurians flos plerumque ab alimento luxu riante." such a flower has no true progeny, and can only be reproduced by the humble mode of cuttings from its stem or roots. " anthophilorum et hortulanorum delicisa sunt flores pleni," not of nature. the fertile flowers are single, not double. p. m. to pine hill across walden. the eahly spring in massachusetts. 29 high wind takes off the oak leaves. i oee them scrambling up the slopes of the deep cut, hurry scurry like a flock of squirrels for the past month there has been more sea room in the day, without so great danger of running aground on one of those two promon tories that make it so arduous to navigate the winter day, the morning or the evening. it is a narrow pass, and you must go through with the tide. might not some of my pages be called the short days of winter. from pine hill looking westward i see the snow-crust shine in the sun as far as the eye can reach, — snow which fell yesterday morn ing. then before night came the rain, then in the night the freezing northwest wind, and where day before yesterday half the ground was bare, is this sheeny snow-crust to-day. march 1, 1838. spring. march fans it, april christens it, and may puts on its jacket and trousers. it never grows up, but, alex andrine-like, " drags its slow length along," — ever springing, bud following close upon leaf, — and when winter comes it is not annihilated, but creeps on mole-like under the snow, show ing its face, nevertheless, occasionally by fuming springs and watercourses. so let our manhood be a more advanced and still advancing youth, bud following hard upon leaf. by the side of 30 early speihg in massachusetts. the ripening corn let 's have a second or third crop of peas and turnips, decking the fields in a new green. so amid clumps of sere herd's grass sometimes flower the violet and butter cups, spring-born. march 1, 1842. whatever i learn from any circumstance, that especially i needed to know. events come out of god, and our characters determine them and constrain fate as much as they determine the words and tone of a friend to us. hence are they always acceptable in ex perience, and we do not see how we could have done without them. march 1, 1854. here is our first spring morning according to the almanac. it is re markable that the spring of the almanac and of nature should correspond so closely. the morning of the 26th ult. was good winter; but then came a plentiful rain in the afternoon, and yesterday and to-day are quite spring-like. this morning the air is still, and though clear enough, a yellowish light is widely diffused through the east now just after sunrise. the .sunlight looks and feels warm, and a fine va por fills the lower atmosphere. i hear the " phebe " or spring note of the chickadee, and the scream of the jay is perfectly repeated by the echo from a neighboring wood. for some days past the surface of the earth, covered with eakly spring in massachusetts. 3] water or with ice where the snow is washed off, has shone in the sun as it does only at the approach of spring, methinks, and are not the frosts in the morning more like the early frosts in the fall, — common white frosts ? as for the birds of the past winter, i have seen but three hawks, one early in the winter, two lately ; have heard the hooting owl pretty often late in the afternoon. crows have not been numerous, but their cawing was heard chiefly in the pleasanter mornings. blue jays have blown the trumpet of winter as usual, but they, as all birds, are most lively in spring-like days. the chickadees have been the prevailing bird. the partridge common enough. one ditcher tells me that he saw two robins in moore's swamp a month ago. i have not seen a quail, though a few have been killed in the thaws, — four or five downy wood peckers. the white-breasted nuthatch four or five times. tree sparrows, one or more at a time, oftener than any bird that comes to us from the north. two pigeon-woodpeckers, i think, lately. one dead shrike and perhaps one or two live ones. have heard of two white owls, one about thanksgiving time and one in midwinter; one short-eared owl in de cember, several flocks of snow buntings in the severest storm in the last part of december ; one grebe in walden, just before it froze com 32 early spring in massachusetts. pletely, and two brown creepers once in the middle of february. c says he saw a little olivaceous green bird lately. i have not seen a fringilla linaria, nor a pine grossbeak, nor a fringilla hiemalis this winter, though the first was the prevailing bird last winter. in correcting my mss., which i do with suf ficient phlegm, i find that i invariably turn out much that is good along with the bad, which it is then impossible for me to distinguish, — so much for keeping bad company ; but after a lapse of time, having purified the main body and thus created a distinct standard for com parison, i can review the rejected sentences, and easily detect those which deserve to be re admitted. p. m. to walden by r. "w. e.'s. i am surprised to see how bare minot's hillside is already. it is spring there, and m. is putter ing outside in the sun. how wise in his grand father to select such a site for a house ; the summers he has lived there have been so much longer. how pleasant the calm season and the warmth (the sun is even like a burning glass on my back), and the sight and sound of melt ing snow running down the hill. i look in among the withering grass blades for some btartihg greenness. i listen to hear the first bluebird in the soft air. i hear the dry cluck mrly spring in massachusetts. 33 ing of hens which have come abroad. the ice at walden is softened. with a stick you can loosen it to the depth of an inch, or the first freezing, and turn it up in cakes. yesterday you could skate here, now only close to the south shore. i notice the redness of the an dromeda leaves, but not so much as once. the sand foliage is now in its prime. march 1, 1855. it is a very pleasant and warm day, the finest yet, with considerable coolness in the air, however. winter still. the air is beautifully clear, and through it i love to trace at a distance the roofs and outlines of sober-colored farm-houses amid the woods. we go listening for bluebirds, but only hear crows and chickadees. a fine seething air over the fair russet fields. the dusty banks of snow by the railroad reflect a wonderfully dazzling white from their pure crannies, being melted into an uneven, sharp-wavy surface. this more dazzling white must be due to the higher sun. march 1, 1856. 9 a. m. to flint's pond via walden, by railroad and the crust. i hear the hens cackle as not before for many months. are they not beginning to lay ? the catkins of the willow by the causeway and of the as pens appear to have pushed out a little farther than a month ago. i see the down of half a dozen on that willow by the causeway, on the s 34 eaely spring in massachusetts. aspens pretty generally. as i go through the out it is still warm, and more or less sunny, spring-like (about 40°) ; and the sand and red dish subsoil is bare for about a rod in width on the railroad. i hear several times the fine drawn phe-be note of the chickadee, which i heard only once during the winter it is remarkable that though i have not been able to find any open place in the river almost all winter, except under the further stone bridge and at loring's pond, this winter so remarka ble for ice and snow, yet c s should (as he says) have killed two sheldrakes at the falls of the factory, a place which i had forgotten, — some four or six weeks ago ; singular that this hardy bird should have found that small open ing which i had forgotten, while the ice every where else was from one to two feet thick, and the snow sixteen inches on a level. if there is a crack amid the rocks of some waterfall, this bright diver is sure to know it. ask the shel drake whether the rivers are completely sealed up. march 1, 1860. i have thoughts, as i walk, on some subject that is running in my head, but all their pertinence seems gone before i can get home to set them down. the most valu able thoughts which i entertain are anything but what /thought. nature abhors a vacuum early spring in massachusetts. 35 and if i can only walk with sufficient careless ness, i am sure to be filled. march 2, 1840. love is the burden of all nature's odes, the song of the birds is an epi thalamium, a hymeneal. the marriage of the flowers spots the meadows and fringes the hedges with pearls and diamonds. in the deep water, in the high air, in woods and pastures, and the bowels of the earth, this is the employ ment and condition of all things. march 2, 1852. if the sciences are protected from being carried by assault by a palisade or chevaux-de-frise of technical terms, so also the learned man may ensconce himself, and conceal his little true knowledge behind hard names. perhaps the value of any statement may be increased by its susceptibility of being expressed in popular language. the greatest . discoveries can be reported in the newspapers. i thought it was a great advantage both to speakers and hearers, when, at the meetings of scientific gentlemen at the marlborough chapel, the representatives of one department of science were required to speak intelligibly to those of other departments ; therefore dispensing with the most peculiarly technical terms. a man may be permitted to state a very meagre truth to a fellow-student using technical terms, but when he stands up before the mass of men he 86 early spring in massachusetts. must have some distinct and important truth to communicate, and the most important it will always be the most easy to communicate to the vulgar. if anybody thinks a thought how sure we are to hear of it. though it be only a half thought or half a delusion, it getsinto the newspapers, and all the country rings with it. but how much clearing of land, and plowing and planting, and building of stone wall is done every summer without being reported in the newspapers or in literature. agricultural lit erature is not as extensive as the fields, and the farmer's almanac is never a big book. yet i think that the history (or poetry) of one farm from a state of nature to the highest state of cultivation comes nearer to being the true sub ject of a modern epic than the siege of jerusa lem or any such paltry and ridiculous romance to which some have thought men reduced. was it coleridge who said that the "works and days" of hesiod, the eclogues and georgics of virgil are but leaves out of that epic? the turning of a swamp into a garden, though the poet may not think it an improvement, is at any rate an enterprise interesting to all men. a wealthy farmer, who has money to let, was here yesterday who said that fourteen years ago a man came to him to hire two hundred dollars eablt spring in massachusetts. 37 for thirty days. he told him that he should have it if he would give proper security. but the other, thinking it exorbitant to require security for so short a term, went away. he soon returned, however, and gave the security ; " and," said the farmer, " he has punctually paid me twelve dollars a year ever since. i have never said a word to him about the prin cipal." march 2, 1854. what produces the peculiar softness of the air yesterday and to-day, as if it were the air of the south suddenly pillowed amid our wintry hills ? we have suddenly a different sky, a different atmosphere. it is as if the subtlest possible soft vapor were diffused through the atmosphere. warm air has come to us from the south, but charged with moist ure which will yet distill into rain or congeal into snow and hail. march 2, 1855. another still, warm, beauti ful day, like yesterday. 9. a. m. to great meadows to see the ice. these meadows, like all the rest, are one great field of ice a foot thick, to their utmost verge far up the hillsides and into the swamps, sloping upward there, without water under it, resting almost every where on the ground, a great undulating field of ice, rolling, prairie-like, the earth wearing this dry icy shield or armor, which shines in 38 eaelt spring in massachusetts. the sun. over brooks and ditches, perhaps, and in many other places, the ice, sometimes a foot thick, is shoved (?) or puffed up in the form of a pent roof, in some places three feet high and stretching twenty or thirty rods. there ia certainly more ice than could lie flat there, as if the adjacent masses had been moved toward each other. yet this general motion is not likely, and it is more probably the result of the expansion of the ice under the sun, and of the warmth of the water (?) there. in many places the ice is dark and transparent, and you see plainly the bottom on which it lies. the various figures in the partially rotted ice are very interesting, white bubbles, which look like coins of various sizes overlapping each other, parallel waving lines, with sometimes very slight intervals on the underside of slop ing white ice, marking the successive levels at which the water has stood ; also countless white cleavages, perpendicular or inclined, straight and zigzag, meeting and crossing each other at all possible angles, and making all kinds of geo metrical figures, checkering the whole surface like white frills or ruffles in the ice. at length it melts on the edge of these cleavages into little gutters which catch the snow. there is the greatest noise from the cracking of the ice about 10 a. m., as i noticed yesterday and to day. early spring in massachusetts. 39 where the last year's shoots or tops of the young white maples are brought together, as i walk toward a mass of them, one quarter of a mile off, with the sun on them, they present a fine dull scarlet streak. young twigs are thus more fluid than the old wood, as if from their nearness to the flower, or like the complexion of children. you see thus a fine dash of red or scarlet against the distant hills which near at hand, or in the midst, is wholly unobservable. i go listening, but in vain, for the warble of the bluebird from the old orchard across the river. i love to look now at the fine-grained russet hillsides in the sun, ready to relieve and contrast with, the azure of the bluebirds. i made a burning glass of ice which produced a slight sensation of warmth on 4he back of my hand, but was so irregular that it did not con centrate the . rays to a sufficiently small focus. returning over great fields found half a dozen arrow-heads, one with three scollops in the base heard two hawks scream. there was something truly march-like in it, like a prolonged blast or whistling of the wind through a crevice in the sky, which, like a cracked blue saucer, overlaps the woods. such are the first rude notes which prelude the summer's choir, learned of the whistling march wind. march 2, 1856. walking up the river by 40 early spring in massachusetts. •'s was surprised to see on the snow over the river a great many seeds and scales of birches, though the snow had so recently fal len. there had been but little wind, and it was already spring. there was one seed or bcale to a square foot, yet the nearest birches were, about fifteen of them, along the wall thirty rods east. as i advanced towards them the seeds became thicker and thicker till they quite discolored the snow half a dozen rods distant, while east of the birches there was not one. the birches appear not to have lost a quarter of their seeds yet. so i went home up the river. t saw some i of the seeds forty rods off, and perhaps in a more favorable direction i might have found them much farther. it suggested how unwearied nature is in spread ing her seeds. even the spring does not find her unprovided with birch, aye, and alder and pine, seed. a great proportion of the seed that was carried to a distance lodged in the hollow over the river, and when the river breaks up will be carried far away to distant shores and meadows _, i can hardly believe that hen-hawks may be beginning to build their nests now, yet their young were a fortnight old the last of april last year. march 2, 1858. i walk through the colburn early spring in massachusetts. 41 j farm pine woods, and thence to rear of john hosmer's. see a large flock of snow buntings, the white birds of the winter, rejoicing in the snow. i stand near a flock in an open field. they are trotting about briskly over the snow, amid the weeds, apparently pig-weed and ro man wormwood, as if to keep their toes warm hopping up to the weeds. then they suddenly take to wing again, and as they wheel about one, it is a very rich sight to see them dressed in black and white uniforms, alternate black and white, very distinct and singular. perhaps no colors would be more effective above the snow, black tips (considerably more) to wings, then clear white between this and the back, which is black or very dark again they alight again equally near. their track is much like a small crow's track. the last new journal thinks that it is very liberal, nay, bold ; but it does not publish a child's thought on important subjects, such as life and death and good books. it requires the sanction of the divines just as surely as the tamest journal does. if it had been pub lished at the time of the famous dispute be tween christ and the doctors, it would have published only the opinions of the doctors and buppressed christ's. there is no need of a iaw to check the license of the press. it is law 42 early spring in massachusetts. enough and more than enough to itself. vir tually the community must have come together and agreed what things shall be uttered, have agreed on a platform and to excommunicate him who departs from it, and not one in a thousand dares utter anything else. there are plenty of journals brave enough to say what they think about the government, this being a free one ; but i know of none widely circulated or well conducted that does say what it thinks about the sunday or the bible. they have been bribed to keep dark. they are in the service of hypocrisy. march 2, 1859. we talk about spring as at hand before the end of february, and yet it will be two good months, one sixth part of the whole year, before we can go a-maying. there may be a whole month of solid and uninter rupted winter yet, plenty of ice and good sleigh ing. we may not even see the bare ground, and hardly the water ; and yet we sit down and warm our spirits annually with the distant prosp.ect of spring. as if a man were to warm his hands by stretching them towards the ris ing sun and rubbing them. we listen to the february cock-crowing and turkey gobbling as to a first course or prelude. the bluebird, which some wood-chopper or inspired walker is said to have seen in that sunny interval be early spring in massachusetts. 43 fcween the snow storms, is like a speck of clear blue sky seen near the end of a storm, remind ing us of an ethereal region, and a heaven which we had forgotten. princes and magistrates are often styled serene, but what is their turbid se renity to that ethereal serenity which the blue bird embodies. his most serene birdship ! his soft warble melts in the ear as the snow is melt ing in the valleys around. the bluebird comes, and with his warble drills the ice, and sets free the rivers and ponds and frozen ground. as the sand flows down the slopes a little way, assum ing the forms of foliage when the frost comes out of the ground, so this little rill of melody flows a short way down the concave of the sky. the sharp whistle of the blackbird, too, is heard like single sparks, or a shower of them, shot up from the swamp and seen against the dark winter in the rear. march 2, 1860. there is a strong westerly wind to-day, though warm, and we sit under dennis's lupine promontory to observe the water. a richer blue than the sky ever is. the flooded meadows are ripple lakes on a large scale. the bare landscape, though no growth is visible in it, is bright and spring-like. there is the tawny earth (almost completely bare) of different shades, lighter or darker, the light very light in this air, more so than the surface 44 early spring in massachusetts. of the earth ever is (i. e., without snow), bleached, as it were, and in the hollows of it, set round by the tawny hills and banks, is this copious, living, and sparkling blue water of vari ous shades. it is more dashing, rippling, spark ling, living this windy but clear day, never smooth, but ever varying in its degree of mo tion and depth of blue, as the wind is more or less strong, rising and falling. all along the shore next us is a strip a few feet wide of very light and smooth sky-blue, for so much is shel tered ever by the lowest shore, but the rest is all more or less agitated and dark blue. in it are floating or stationary, here and there, cakes of white ice, the least looking like ducks, and large patches of water have a dirty-white or even tawny look where the ice still lies on the bottom of the meadow. thus even the meadow flood is parded, of various patches of color. ever and anon the wind seems to drop down from over the hills in strong puffs, and then spread and diffuse itself in dark, fan-shaped figures over the surface of the water. it is glorious to see how it sports on the watery surface. you see a hundred such nimble-footed puffs drop and spread on all sides at once, and dash on, sweeping the surface of the water for forty rods in a few seconds, as if so many invisible spirits were playing tag there. it even suggests some , early spring in massachusetts. 45 fine dust swept along just above the surface and reminds me of snow blowing over ice — and vapor curving along a roof, meandering like that, often. the before dark blue is now diver sified with much darker or blackish patches, with a suggestion of red, purplish even i am surprised to see that the billows which the wind makes are concentric curves, apparently reaching round from shore to shore of this broad bay forty rods wide or more. for this, two things may account, the greater force of the wind in the middle and the friction of the shores. when it blows hardest each successive billow (four or five feet apart or more) is crowned with a yellowish or dirty-white foam. the wind blows around each side of the hill, the opposite currents meeting, perchance, or it falls over the hill so that you have a field of ever varying color, dark blue, blackish, yellowish, light blue, smooth sky-blue, purplish, and yel lowish foam, all at once. sometimes the wind visibly catches up the surface and blows it along and about in spray four or five feet high. the requisites are high water, mostly clear of ice, ground bare and sufficiently dry, weather warm enough, and wind strong and gusty. then you may sit or stand on a hill and watch the play of the wind with the water. i know of no checker-board more interesting to watch. 46 early spring in massachusetts. the wind, the gusts, comb the hair of the water nymphs. you never tire of seeing it drop, spread, and sweep over the yielding and -sensi tive surface. the water is full of life, now ris ing into higher billows which would make your mast crack if you had any, now subsiding into lesser, dashing against and wearing away the still anchored ice, setting many small cakes adrift. how they entertain us with ever-chang ing scenes in the sky above or on the earth be low. if the plowman lean on his plow handle and look up or down, there is danger that he will forget his labor on that day. march 3, 1838. homer. three thousand years and the world so little changed. the iliad seems like a natural sound which has re verberated to our days. whatever in it is still freshest in the memories of men was most childlike in the poet. it is the problem of old age, a second childhood exhibited in the life of the world. phoebus apollo went like night, s 8' 7/ie vwkti counos. this either refers to the gross atmosphere of the plague, darkening the sun, or to the crescent of night, rising solemn and stately in the east, while the sun is setting in the west. then agamemnon darkly lowers on calchas, prophet of evil, oarae 8e ol wvfii xa/xwerornvti eiicn/v, such a fire-eyed agamemnon as you may see ai eably speing in massachusetts. 47 town meetings and elections, as well here as in troy neighborhood. march 3, 1839. the poet must be some thing more than natural, even supernatural. nature will not speak through him, but along with him. his voice will not proceed from her midst, but, breathing on her, will make her the expression of his thought. he then poetizes when he takes a fact out of nature into spirit. he speaks without reference to time or place. his thought is one world, hers, another. he is another nature, nature's brother. march 3, 1841. i hear a man blowing a horn this still evening, and it sounds like the plaint of nature in these times. in this which i refer to some man there is something greater than any man. it is as if the earth spoke. it adds a great remoteness to the horizon, and its very distance is grand, as when one draws back the head to speak. that which i now hear in the west seems like an invitation to the east. it runs round the earth as round a whisper ing gallery. all things great seem transpiring where this sound comes from. it is friendly as & distant hermit's taper. when it trills or un dulates, the heavens are crumpled into time, and successive waves flow across them. it is a strangely healthy sound for these disjointed times. it is a rare soundness when cow-bells 48 early spring in massachusetts. and horns are heard from over the fields. and now i see the full meaning and beauty of that word, sound. nature always possesses a cer tain sonorousness, as in the hum of insects, the booming of ice, the crowing of cocks in the morning, and the barking of dogs in the night, which indicates her sound state. god's voice" is but a clear bell sound. i drink in a wonder ful health, a cordial, in sound. the effect of the slightest tinkling in the horizon measures my own soundness, i thank god for sound. it always mounts and makes me mount. i think i will not trouble myself for any wealth when i can be so cheaply enriched. here i contem plate to drudge that i may own a farm, and may have such a limitless estate for the listen ing. all good things are cheap, all bad are very dear. as for these communities, i think i had rather keep bachelor's hall in hell than go to board in heaven. do not think your virtue will be boarded with you. it will never live on the interest of your money, depend upon it. the boarder has no home. in heaven i hope to bake my own bread and clean my own linen. the tomb is the only boarding-house in which a hundred are served at once. in the cata combs we may dwell together and prop one another up without loss. early spring in massachusetts. 49 march 3, 1857. to fair haven hill. 3 p. m. 24°+ in shade. the red maple sap, which 1 first noticed the 21st of february, is now frozen up in the auger holes, and thence down the trunk to the ground, except in one place where the hole was made on the south side of the tree, where it is melted and is flowing a lit tle. generally, -then, when the thermometer is thus low, say below freezing point, it does not thaw in the auger holes. there is no expand ing of buds of any kind, nor are early birds to be seen. nature was, thus, premature, antici pated her own revolutions with respect to the sap of trees, the buds (spiraea, at least), and birds. the warm spell ended with february 26th. the crust of yesterday's snow has been con verted by the sun and wind into flakes of thin ice from two or_three inches to a foot in diame ter, scattered like a mackerel sky over the past ures, as if all the snow bad been blown out from beneath. much of this thin ice is partly opaque and has a glutinous look even, remind ing me of frozen glue. probably it has much dust mixed with it the slight robin snow of yesterday is already mostly dissipated, but where a heap still lingers the sun on the ibarra face of this cliff leads down a puny, trick ling rill, moistening the gutters on the steep 50 early speing in massachusetts. face of the rocks where patches of umbiliearia lichens grow, of rank growth, but now thirsty and dry as bones and hornets' nests, dry as shells which crackle under your feet. the more fortunate of these, which stand by the moistened seam or gutter of the rock, luxuriate in the grateful moisture as in the spring, their rigid nerves relax, they unbend and droop like lim ber infancy, and from dry ash and leather color turn a lively olive green. you can trace the course of this trickling stream over the rock through such a patch of lichens by the olive green of the lichens alone. here and there the same moisture refreshes and brightens up the scarlet crown of some little cockscomb lichen; and when the rill reaches the perpendicular face of the cliff its constant drip at night builds great organ pipes, of a ringed structure, which run together buttressing the rock. skating yesterday and to-day. march 3, 1859. going by the solidago oak at clam-shell hill bank, i heard a faint rip pling note, and looking up saw about fifteen snow buntings sitting in the top of the oak, all with their breasts toward me. sitting so still, and quite white seen against the white cloudy bky, they did not look like birds, and their bold ness, allowing me to come quite near, enhanced this impression. they were almost as white as early spuing in massachusetts. 51 mow-balls, and from time to time i heard a low, soft, rippling note from them. i could see no features, but only the general outline of plump birds in white. it was a very spectral bight, and after i had watched them for several minutes i can hardly say that i was prepared to see them fly away like ordinary buntings when i advanced further. at first they were almost concealed by being the same color with the cloudy sky how imperceptibly the first springing takes place ! in some still, muddy "springs whose temperature is more equable than that of the brooks, while brooks and ditches generally are thickly frozen and concealed, and the earth is covered with snow, and it is even cold, hard, and nipping winter weather, some fine grass which fills the water begins to lift its tiny spears or blades above the surface which di rectly fall flat for half an inch or an inch along the surface, and on these (though many are frost-bitten) you may measure the length to which the spring had advanced (has sprung) ; very few indeed, even of botanists, are aware of this growth. some of it appears to go on even under ice and snow. or, in such a place as i have described, if it is sheltered by alders or the like you may see (as march 2d) a little green crescent of caltha leaves raised an inch 52 early spring in massachusetts. or so above the water, the leaves but partially unrolled and looking as if they would with draw beneath the surface again at night. this i think must be the most conspicuous and for ward greenness of the spring. the small red dish, radical leaves of the dock, too, are ob served flat on the moist ground as soon as the snow has melted there, *as if they had grown beneath it. talk about reading ! a good reader ! it de pends on how he is heard. there may be elocution and pronunciation (recitation say) to satiety, but there can be no good reading un less there is good hearing also. it takes two, at least, for this game, as for love, and they must cooperate. the lecturer will read but those parts of his lecture which are best heard. sometimes, it is true, the faith and spirits of the reader run a little ahead and draw after the good hearing, and at other times the good hearing runs ahead and draws on the good reading. the reader and the hearer are a team not to be harnessed tandem, the poor wheel horse supporting the burden of the shafts, while the leader runs pretty much at will, the lecture lying passive in the painted curricle be hind. i saw some men unloading molasses hogsheads from a truck at a depot the other day, by rolling them up an inclined plane. the early spring in massachusetts. 53 truckmen stood behind and shoved, after put ting a couple of ropes, one round each end of the hogshead, while two men standing in the depot steadily pulled at the ropes. the first man was the lecturer, the others were the audi ence. it is the duty of the lecturer to team his hogshead of sweets to the depot or lyceum, place the horse, arrange the ropes, and shove, and it is the duty of the audience to take hold of the ropes and pull with all their might. the lecturer who has to read his essay without be ing abetted by a good hearing is in the predica ment of a teamster who is engaged in the sisy phean labor of rolling a molasses hogshead up an inclined plane alone, while the freight-mas ter and his men stand indifferent with their hands in their pockets. i have seen many such a hogshead which had rolled off the horse and gone to smash with all the sweets wasted on the ground between the truckmen and the freight house, and the freight-masters thought the loss was not theirs. read well ! did you ever know a full well that did not yield of its refreshing waters to those who put their hands to the windlass or the well-sweep ? did you ever suck cider through a straw ? did you ever know the cider to push out of the straw when you were not. sucking, unless it chanced to be in a complete ferment ? an audience will draw out 54 early speing in massachusetts. of a lecture, or enable a lecturer to read, only such parts of his lecture as they like. it is like a barrel half fuh. of some palatable liquor. you may tap it at various levels, in the sweet liquor, or in the froth, or in the fixed air above. if it is pronounced good, it is partly to the credit of the hearers, if bad, it is partly their fault. sometimes a lazy audience refuses to cooperate and pull at the ropes because the hogshead is full and therefore heavy, when if it were empty, or had only a little sugar adhering to it, they would whisk it up the slope in a jiffy. the lecturer therefore desires of his audience a long pull, a strong pull, and a pull altogether. i have seen a sturdy (truckman) lecturer who had nearly broken his back with shoving his lecture up such an inclined plane, while the audience were laughing at him, at length, as with a last effort, set it a-rolling in amid the audience and upon their toes, scattering them like sheep and making them cry out with pain, while he drove proudly away. rarely it is a very heavy freight of such hogsheads stored in a vessel's hold that is to be lifted out and de posited on the public wharf, and this is accom plished only after many a hearty pull and a good deal of heave-yo-ing. march 3, 1860. 2 p. m. 50°+. overcast mid somewhat rain-threatening. wind south early spring in massachusetts. 55 west. to abner buttrick and tarbell hills. see a flock of large ducks in a line (may be black ?) over great meadows' also a few shel drakes. it was pleasant to hear the tinkling of very coarse brash, broken, honey-combed, dark ice, rattling one piece against another along the northeast shores to which it had drifted. scarcely any ice now about river except what rests on the bottom of the meadow, dirty with sediment. the first song-sparrows are very in conspicuous and shy on the brown earth. you hear some weeds rustle, or think you see a mouse run amid the stubble, and then the spar row flies low away. march 4, 1840. i learned to-day that my ornithology had done me no service. the birds i heard, which fortunately did not come within the scope of my science, sang as freshly as if it had been the first morning of creation and had for background to their song an untrodden wil derness stretching through many a carolina and mexico of the soul. march 4, 1841. ben jonson says in his epigrams, " he makes himself a thoroughfare of vice." this is true, for by vice the substance of a man is not changed, but all his pores and cavities and avenues are profaned by being made the thoroughfares of vice. the searching devil courses through and through him. his 56 eaely spring in massachusetts. flesh and blood and bones are cheapened. he is all trivial, a place where three highways of sin meet. so is another the thoroughfare of virtue, and virtue circulates through all his aisles like a wind, and he is hallowed. we reprove each other unconsciously by our own behavior. our very carriage and de meanor in the streets should be a reprimand that will go to the conscience of every beholder. an infusion of love from a great soul gives a color to our faults which will discover them as lunar caustic detects impurities in water. the best will not seem to go contrary to others ; but as if they could afford to travel the same way, they go a parallel but higher course. jonson says, — " that to the vulgar canst thyself apply, treading a better path, not contrary." march 4, 1852. it is discouraging to talk with men who will recognise no principles. how little use is made of reason in this world ! you argue with a man for an hour, he agrees with you step by step, you are approaching a triumphant conclusion, you think that you have converted him, but, ah, no, he has a habit, he takes a pinch of snuff, he remembers that he entertained a different opinion at the com mencement of the controversy, and his rever ence for the past compels him to reiterate it eaelt spring in massachusetts. 57 now. you began at the butt of tbe pole to curve it, you gradually bent it round according to rule, and planted the other end in the ground, and already in imagination saw the vine curling round this segment of an arbor, under which a new generation was to recreate itself, but when you had done, it sprang back to its former stub born and unhandsome position like a bit of whalebone. 10 a. m. up river on ice to fairhaven pond. .... we have this morning the clear, cold, continent sky of january. the river is frozen solidly and i do not have to look out for open ings. now i can take that walk along the river highway and the meadow which leads me under the boughs of the maples and the swamp white oaks, etc., which in summer overhang the water. i can now stand at my ease and study their phenomena amid the sweet gale and but ton bushes projecting above the snow and ice. i see the shore from the water side ; a liberal walk, so level, wide, and smooth, without un derbrush. in some places where the ice is ex posed i see a kind of crystallized' chaffy snow like little bundles of asbestos on its surface. i seek some sunny nook on the -south side of a wood which keeps off the cold wind, among the maples and the swamp white oaks, and there ut and anticipate the spring and hear the chick 58 early spring in massachusetts. adees and the belching of the ice. the sun has got a new power in his rays after all, cold as the weather is. he could not have warmed me so much a month ago, nor should i have heard such rumblings of the ice in december. i see where a maple has been wounded, the sap is flowing out. now, then, is the time to make sugar. if i were to paint the short days of winter i should represent two towering icebergs ap proaching each other like promontories, for morning and evening, with cavernous recesses, and a solitary traveler wrapping his cloak about him and bent forward against a driving storm, just entering the narrow pass. i would paint the light of a taper at midday, seen through a cottage window, half buried in snow and frost. .... in the foreground should appear the harvest, and far in the background, through the pass, should be seen the sowers in the fields and other evidences of spring. on the right and left of the approaching icebergs the heav ens should be shaded off from the light of mid day to midnight with its stars, the sunbeing low in the sky. i look between my legs up the river across fair haven. subverting the head, we refer things to the heavens, the sky becomes the ground of the picture, and where the river breaks through low hills which slope to meet eably spring in massachusetts. 59 each other one quarter of a mile off, appears a mountain pass, so much nearer is it to heaven. we are compelled to call it something which relates it tothe heavens rather than the earth. now at eleven and a half, perhaps, the sky begins to be slightly overcast. the northwest is the god of the winter, as the southwest of the summer. the forms of clouds are inter esting, often, as now, like flames, or more like the surf curling before it breaks, reminding me of the prows of ancient vessels which have their pattern or prototype again in the surf, as if the wind made a surf of the mist. thus as the fishes look up at the waves, we look up at the clouds. it is pleasant to see the reddish green leaves of the lambkill still hanging with -fruit above the snow, for i am now crossing the shrub oak plain to the cliffs. i find a place on the south side of this rocky hill where the snow is melted and the bare gray rock appears covered with mosses and lichens and beds of oak leaves in the hollows, where i can sit, and an invisible flame and smoke seem to ascend from the leaves,, and the sun shines with a gen ial warmth, and you can imagine the hum of bees amid flowers. the heat reflected from the dry leaves reminds you of the sweet fern and those summer afternoons which are longer than ft winter day, though you sit on a mere oasis in 60 early speing in massachusetts. the snow. the snow is melting on the rocks, the water trickles down in shining streams, the mosses look bright ; the first awakening of veg etation is at the root of the saxifrage. as i go by the farmer's yard the hens cackle more sol idly, as if eggs were the burden of the strain. a horse's fore legs are handier than his hind ones, the latter but fall into the place which the former have found. they have the advantage of being nearer the head, the source of intelli gence.. he strikes and paws with them. it is true he kicks with the hind legs. but that is a very simple and unscientific action, as if his whole body were a whip lash and his heels the snapper. the constant reference in our lives, even in the most trivial matters, to the superhuman is wonderful. if a portrait is painted, neither the wife's opinion of the husband, nor the husband's opinion of the wife, nor either's opinion of the artist, not man's opinion of man, is final and satisfactory. man is not the final judge of the humblest work, though it be piling wood. the queen and the chambermaid, the king and the hired man, the indian and the slave, alike ap peal to god. each man's mode of speaking of the sexual relation proves how sacred his own relations of that kind are. we do not respect the mind that can jest on this subject. eaelt spring in massachusetts. 61 march 4, 1854. p. m. to walden. in the meadow i see some still fresh and perfect pitcher plant leaves, and everywhere the green and reddish radical leaves of the golden sene cio, whose fragrance when bruised carries me back or forward to an incredible season. who would believe that under the snow and ice lie still, or in mid-winter, some green leaves which bruised yield the same odor that they do when their yellow blossoms spot the meadows in june. nothing so realizes the summer to me now. in the dry pastures under the cliff hill, the radical leaves of the johnswort are now re vealed everywhere in pretty radiating wreaths flat on the ground. these leaves are recurved, reddish above, green beneath, and covered with dewy drops. i see now-a-days, the ground being laid bare, great cracks in the earth revealed, a third of an inch wide, running with a crink ling line for twenty rods or more through the pastures and under the walls, frost cracks of the past winter. sometimes they are revealed through ice four or five inches thick over them. i observed to-day where a crack had divided a piece of bark lying over it with the same ir regular and finely meandering lines, sometimes forking. march 4, 1855. p. m. though there is a cold and strong wind, it is very warm in the 62 early spring in massachusetts. bun, and we can sit in it when sheltered by these rocks with impunity. it is a genial warmth. the rustle of the dry leaves on the earth and in the crannies of the rocks, and gathered in deep windrows just under their edge, midleg deep, reminds me of fires in the woods. they are almost ready to burn. march 4, 1859. we stood still a few mo ments on the turnpike below wright's (the turnpike which has no wheel track beyond tut tle's and no track at all beyond wright's), and listened to hear a spring bird. we only heard the jay screaming in the distance and the caw ing of a crow. what a perfectly new england sound is this voice of the crow ! if you stand perfectly still anywhere in the outskirts of the town, and listen, stilling the almost incessant hum of your personal factory, this is perhaps the sound which you will be most sure to hear, rising above all sounds of human industry, and leading your thoughts to some far bay in the woods, where the crow is venting his disgust. this bird sees the white man come and the in dian withdraw, but it withdraws not. its un tamed voice is still heard above the tinkling of the forge. it sees a race pass away, but it passes not away. it remains to remind us of aboriginal nature. march, 5, 1841. how can our love increase early spring in massachusetts. 63 unless our loveliness increases also. we must securely love each other as we love god, with no more danger that our love be unrequited or ill-bestowed. there is that in my friend before which i must first decay and prove untrue. love is. the least moral and the most. are the best good in their love ? or the worst, bad ? march 5, 1853. it is encouraging to know that though every kernel of truth has been care fully swept out of our churches, there yet re mains the dust of truth on their walls, so that if you should carry a light into them, they would still, like some powder-mills, blow up at once. 3 p. m. to the beeches. a misty after noon, but warm, threatening rain. standing on walden, whose eastern shore is laid waste, men walking on the hillside a quarter of a mile off are singularly interesting objects seen through the mist which has the effect of a mirage. the persons of the walkers are black on the snowy ground, and the limited horizon makes them the more important in the scene. this kind of weather is very favorable to our landscape. i must not forget the lichen-painted boles of the beeches. round to the white bridge where the red-ma ple buds are already much expanded, foretell ing summer, though our eyes s'>e only winter 64 early spring in massachusetts. as yet. as i sit under their boughs looking into the sky, i suddenly see the myriad black dots of the expanded buds against the sky. their sap is flowing. the elm buds, too, i find are expanded, though on earth are no signs of spring. i find myself inspecting lit tle granules, as it were, on the bark of trees, little shields or apothecia springing from a thallus, and i call it studying lichens. that is merely the prospect which is afforded me. it is short commons and innutritious. surely i might take wider views. the habit of look ing at things microscopically, as the lichens on the trees and rocks, really prevents my see ing aught else in a walk. would it not be noble to study the shield of the sun on the thallus of the sky, cerulean, which scatters its infinite sporules of light through the universe. to the lichenist is not the shield (or rather the apotliecium) of a lichen disproportionately large compared with the universe ? march 5, 1853. f. browne showed me some lesser red -polls which he shot yesterday. they turn out to be very falsely called the chest nut frontleted bird of the winter. " linaria minor. ray. lesser red-poll. linnet. from pennsylvania and new jersey to maine, in winter ; inland to kentucky. breeds in maine, nova scotia, newfoundland, labrador, and early spring in massachusetts. 65 the fur countries." aud. synopsis. they have a sharp bill; black legs and claws, and a bright crimson crown or frontlet, in the male reaching to the base of the bill, with, in his case, a delicate rose or carmine on the breast and rump. though this is described in nuttall as an occasional visitor in the winter, it has been the prevailing bird here this winter. yesterday i got my grape cuttings. the day before went to the corner spring to look at the tufts of green grass was pleased with the sight of the yellow osiers of the golden wil low and the red of the cornel, now colors are so rare. saw the green fine-threaded conferva in a ditch, commonly called frog spittle. brought it home in my pocket and it expanded again in a tumbler. it appeared quite a fresh growth, with what looked like filmy air-bubbles as big as large shot in its midst. the secretary of the association for the ad vancement of science requested me, as he prob ably has thousands of others, by a printed cir cular letter from washington, the other day, to fill the blanks against certain questions, among which the most important one was what branch of science i was specially interested in, using the term science in the most comprehensive sense possible. now, though i could state to a select few that department of human inquiry 66 early spring in massachusetts. which engages me, and should rejoice at an op portunity so to do, i felt that it would be to make myself the laughing stock of the scien tific community to describe to them that branch of science which specially interests me, inas much as they do not believe in a science which deals with the higher law. so i was obliged to speak to their condition and describe to them that poor part of me which alone they can un derstand. the fact is i am a mystic, a tran bcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot. now i think of it, i should have told them at once that i was a transcendentalist; that would have been the shortest way of telling them that they would not understand my explana tions. how absurd that though i probably stand as near to nature as any of them, and am by constitution as good*| an observer as most, yet a true account of my relation to na ture should excite their ridicule only. if it had been the secretary of an association of which plato or aristotle was the president, i should not have hesitated to describe my studies at once and particularly. march 5, 1856. to carlisle, surveying. i had two friends. the one offered me friend ship on such terms that i could not accept it without a sense of degradation. he would not meet me on equal terms, but only be to some eablt spring in massachusetts. 67 extent my patron. he would not come to see me, but was hurt if i did not visit him. he would not readily accept a favor, but wuiild gladly confer one. he treated me with cere mony occasionally, though he could be simple and downright sometimes. from time to time he acted a part, treating me as if i were a dis tinguished stranger, was on stilts, using made words. our relation was one long tragedy, yet i did not directly speak of it. i do not believe in complaint, nor in explanations. the whole is but too plain, alas, already. we grieve that we do not love each other. i could not bring myself to speak and so recognize an obstacle to our affection. i had another friend who through a slight obtuseness, perchance, did not recognize a fact which the dignity of friendship would by no means allow me to descend so far as to speak of, and yet the inevitable effect of that igno rance was to hold us apart forever. march 5, 1858. we read the english poets, we study botany and zoology and geology, lean and dry as they are, and it is rare that we get a new suggestion. it is ebb tide with the scientific reports, professor in the chair. we would fain know something more about these animals and stones and trees around us. we are ready to skin the animals alive to came 68 eaely spring in massachusetts. at them. our scientific names convey a very par tial information, they suggest certain thoughts only. it does not occur to me that there are other names for most of these objects given by a people who stood between me and them, who had better senses than our race. how little i know of that arbor vitce when i have heard only what science can tell me. it is but a word, it is not a tree of life. but there are twenty words for the tree and its different parts which the indian gave, which are not in our botanies, which imply a more practical and vital science. he used it every day. he was well acquainted with its wood, its bark, and its leaves. no sci ence does more than arrange what knowledge we have of any class of objects. but generally speaking how much more conversant was the indian with any wild animal or plant than we, and in his language is implied all that intimacy, as much as ours is expressed in our language, how many words in his language about a moose, or birch bark, and the like. the indian stood nearer to wild nature than we. the wildest and noblest quadrupeds, even the largest fresh water fish, some of the wildest and noblest birds, and the fairest flowers have actually receded as we advanced, and we have but the most distant knowledge of them. a rumor has come down to us that the skin of a lion was seen and his early speing in massachusetts. 69 roar heard here by an early settler. but there was a race here that slept on his skin. it was a new light when my guide gave me indian names for things for which i had only scientific ones before. in proportion as i understood the language, i saw them from a new point of view. a dictionary of the indian language reveals another and wholly new life to us. look at the wood canoe, and see what a story it tells of out-door life, with the names of all its parts and of the modes of driving it, as our words describe the different parts of a coach ; or at the word wigwam, and see how close it brings you to the ground ; or at indian corn, and see which race has been most familiar with it. it reveals to me a life within a life, or rather a life with out a life, as it were threading the woods be tween our towns, and yet we can never tread on its trail. the indian's earthly life was as far off from us as heaven is. i saw yesterday a musquash sitting on thin ice on the assabet by a hole which it had kept open, gnawing a white root. now and then it would dive and bring up more. i waited for it to dive again that i might run nearer to it meanwhile, but it sat ten minutes all wet in the freezing wind while my feet and ears grew numb, so tough it is. at last i got quite near. when i frightened it, it dove with a sudden 70 eakly spring in massachusetts. blap of its tail. i feel pretty sure that this is an involuntary movement, the tail, by the sudden turn of the body, being brought down on the water or ice like a whip-lash. march 5, 1859. going down town this a. m. i heard a white-bellied nuthatch on an elm within twenty feet, uttering peculiar notes and more like a song than i remember to have heard from it. there was a chickadee close by to which it may have been addressed. it was something like " to-what what what what what " rapidly repeated, and not the usual " quah quah." and this instant it occurs to me that this may be that earliest spring note which i hear and have referred to a wood-pecker ! this is be fore i have chanced to see a bluebird, black bird, or robin in concord this year. it is the spring note of the nuthatch. it paused in its progress about the trunk or branch, and uttered this lively but peculiarly inarticulate song, an awkward attempt to warble almost in the face of the chickadee, as if it were one of its kind. it was thus giving vent to the spring within it. if i am not mistaken, this is what i have heard in former springs or winters long ago, fabulously aarly in the season, when we men had but just begun to anticipate the spring, for it would seem that we in our anticipations and sympa thies include in succession the moods and ex eaely spring in massachusetts. 71 pressions of all creatures. when only the snow had begun to melt and no rill of song had broken loose, a note so dry and fettered still, so inarticulate and half thawed out that you might and would commonly mistake for the tapping of a woodpecker. as if the young nuthatch in its hole had listened only to the tapping of woodpeckers and learned that music, and now when it would sing and give vent to its spring ecstasy, it can modulate only some notes like that. that is its theme still. that is its rul ing idea of song and music. only a little clan gor and liquidity added to the tapping of the woodpecker. it was the handle by which my thoughts took firmly hold on spring. this herald of spring is commonly unseen, it sits so close to the bark. march 5, 1860. the old naturalists were so sensitive and sympathetic toward nature that they could be surprised by the ordinary events of life. it was an incessant miracle to them, and therefore gorgons and flying dragons were not incredible. the greatest and saddest de fect is not credulity, but an habitual forgetful ness that our science is ignorance. as we sat under lupine promontory the other day, watching the ripples that swept over the flooded meadows, and thinking what an eli gible site that would be for a cottage, c de 72 eaely spring in massachusetts. clared that we did not live in the country as long as we lived in that village street and only took walks into the fields, any more than if we lived in boston or new york. we enjoyed none of the immortal qniet of the country as we might here, for instance, but, perchance, the first sound that we hear in the morning, in stead of the note of a bird, is some neighbor's hawking and spitting. march 6, 1840. there is no delay in an swering great questions ; for them all things have an answer ready. the pythian priestess gave her answers instantly, and ofttimes before the questions were fairly propounded. great topics do not wait for past or future to be de termined ; but the state of the crops or brighton market, no bird concerns itself about. march 6, 1841. an honest misunderstand ing is often the ground of future intercourse. march 6, 1853. p. m. to lee's hill. i am pleased to cut the small woods with my knife to see their color. the high blueberry, hazel, and swamp pink are green. i love to see the clear green sprouts of the sassafras, and its large and fragrant buds and bark. the twigs and branches of young trees twenty feet high look as if scorched and blackened. the water is pretty high on the meadows (though the ground is covered with snow) so eaely spring in massachusetts. 73 that we get a little of the peculiar still lake view at evening when the wind goes down. two red squirrels made an ado about or above me near the north river, hastily running from tree to tree, leaping from the extremity of one bough to that of another on the next tree, until they gained and ascended a large white pine. i approached and stood under this, while they made a great fuss about me. one at length came part way down to reconnoitre me. it seemed that one did the barking, a faint, short, chippy bai'k, like that of a toy dog, its tail vi brating each time, while its neck was stretched over a bough as it peered at me. the other, higher up, kept up a sort of gurgling whistle, more like a bird than a beast. when i made a noise, they would stop a moment. scared up a partridge which had crawled iato a pile of wood. saw a gray hare, a dirty yellowish gray, not trig and neat, but, as usual, apparently in dishabille. as it frequently does, it ran a little way and stopped just at the en trance to its retreat, then, when i moved again, suddenly disappeared. by a slight obscure hole in the snow it had access to a large and appar ently deep woodchucks' hole. march 6, 1854. the water here and there on the meadow begins to appear smooth and i look to see it rippled by a musk-rat. the earth 74 early spring in massachusetts. has, to some extent, frozen dry, for the drying of the earth goes on in the cold night as well as the warm day. the alders and hedge-rows are still silent, emit no notes. according to g. b. emerson, maple sap sometimes begins to flow in the middle of february, but usually in the second week in march, especially in a clear bright day with a westerly wind, after a frosty night i saw trout glance in the mill brook this afternoon, though near its sources in hubbard's close it is still covered with dark icy snow, and the river into which it empties has not broken up. can they have come up from the sea ? like a film or shadow they glance before the eye, and "you see where the mud is roiled by them. .... i see the skunk cabbage started about the spring at head of hubbard's close, amid the green grass, and what looks like the first probing of the skunk. .... the ponds are hard enough for skating again. heard and saw the first blackbird fly ing east over the deep cut, with a tchuck tchuek, and finally a split whistle. march 6, 1855. to second division brook. .... observed a mouse's nest in second di vision meadow, where it had been made under the snow, a nice, warm, globular nest, some five inches in diameter amid the sphagnum, cran berry vines, etc., made of dried grass and lined early spring in massachusetts. 75 with a still finer grass. the hole was on one side, and the bottom was near two inches thick. there were many small paths or galleries in the meadow leading to this from the brook some rod or more distant. the small gyrinus is circling in the brook. i see where much fur of a rabbit, which prob ably a fox was carrying, has caught on a moss rose twig as he leaped a ditch there is a peculiar redness in the western sky just after sunset. there are many great dark slate-col ored clouds floating there, seen against more distant and thin wispy, bright, vermillion, (?) almost blood-red, ones, which in many places appear as the lining of the former i see in many places where, after the late freshet, the musquash made their paths under the ice, leading from the water a rod or two to a bed of grass above the water level. march 6, 1858. p. m. up river on ice to fair haven pond. the river is frozen more solidly than during the past winter, and for the first time for a year i could cross it in most places. i did not once cross it the past winter, though by choosing a safe place i might have done so without doubt once or twice. but i have had no river walks before. i see the first hen-hawk or hawk of any kind, methinks, since the beginning of winter. its scream, even, is 76 early spring in massachusetts. inspiring, as the voice of a spring bird. that light spongy bark about the base of the nesaea appears to be good tinder. i have only to touch one end to a coal and it all burns out slowly, without blazing, in whatever position held, and even after being dipped in water. sunday, march 6, 1859. p. m. to yellow birch swamp. we go through the swamp near bee tree or oak ridge listening for blackbirds or robins, and in the old orchard, for bluebirds. found between two of the little birches in the path, where they grow densely, in indigo-bird sproutland, a small nest suspended between one and two feet from the ground. this is where i have seen the indigo-bird in summer, and the nest apparently answers to wilson's account of that bird, being fastened with saliva to the birch on each side. wilson says " it is built in a low bush, .... suspended between two twigs, one passing up each side." it is about the diame ter of a hair-bird's nest within, composed chiefly of fine bark shreds looking like grass, and one or two strips of grapevine bark, and very se curely fastened to the birch on each side by a whitish silk or cobweb and saliva. it is thin, the lining being probably gone. march 6, 1860. p. m. fair and spring-like, t. e., rather still for march, with some raw wind. pleasant in sun. going by messer's i early spring in massachusetts. 77 hear the well-known note and see a flock of fringilla hiemalis, flitting in a lively manner about trees, weeds, walls, and ground by the roadside, showing their two white tail feathers. they are more fearless than the song-sparrow. they attract notice by their numbers and in cessant twittering in a social manner. the lin arias have been the most numerous birds here the past winter. i can scarcely see a heel of a snow drift from my window. jonas melvin says he saw hundreds, of " speckled " turtles out on the banks to-day in a voyage to bil lerica for musquash. also saw gulls. shel drakes and black ducks are the only ones he has seen this year. a still and mild moonlight night, and people walking about the streets. march 7, 1838. we should not endeavor coolly to analyze our thoughts, but, keeping the pen even and parallel with the current, make an accurate transcript of them. impulse is, after all, the best linguist ; its logic, if not conforma ble to aristotle, cannot fail to be most con vincing. the nearer we can approach to a complete but simple transcript of our thought, the more tolerable will be the piece, for we can endure to consider ourselves in a state of pass ivity or in involuntary action, but rarely can we endure to consider our efforts, and least of »t, our rare efforts. 78 early spring in massachusetts. i march 7, 1852. at 9 o'clock p. m. to the woods by the full moon going through the high field beyond the lone grave-yard, i see the track of a boy's sled before me, and his foot steps shining like silver between me and the moon; and now i come to where they have coasted in a hollow in the upland beanfield, and there are countless tracks of sleds. i forget that the sun shone on them in their sport as if i had reached the region of perpetual twilight, and their sports appear more significant and symbolical now, more earnest. for what a man does abroad by night requires and implies more deliberate energy than what he is encouraged to do in the sunshine. he is more spiritual, less animal, and vegetable, in the former case this stillness is more impressive than any sound. the moon, the stars, the trees, the snow, the band when bare, a monumental stillness whose void must be supplied by thought. it extracts thought from the beholder like, the void under a cupping glass, raises a swelling. how much a silent mankind might suggest! .... the moon appears to have waned a little, yet with this snow on the ground i can plainly see the words i write i do not know why such emphasis should be laid on certain events that transpire, why my news should be so trivial* considering what one's dreams and expectations early spbing in massachusetts. 79 are, why the developments should be so paltry. these facts appear to float in the atmosphere insignificant as the sporules of fungi and im pinge on my thallus. some neglected surface of my mind affords a basis for them, and hence a parasitic growth. we should wash ourselves clean of such news. methinks i should hear with indifference if a trustworthy messenger were to inform me that the sun drowned him self last night. march 7, 1853. what is the earliest sign of spring ? the motion of worms and insects ? the flow of sap in trees and the swelling of buds ? do not the insects awake with the flow of the sap ? bluebirds, etc., probably do not come till the insects come out. or are there earlier signs in the water, the tortoises, frogs, etc. ? the little cup and cocciferse lichens mixed with other cladonias of the reindeer moss kind are full of fresh fruit to-day. the scarlet apo thecia of the cocciferae on the stumps and earth partly covered with snow with which they con trast, i never saw more fresh and brilliant. but they shrivel up and lose their brightness by the time you get them home. the only birds i see to-day are the lesser red-polls. i have not seen a fox-colored sparrow or a fringilla hiemalis. march 7, 1854. p. m. to anursnack heard the first bluebird, something like pe-a 80 early* spring in massachusetts. wor, and then other slight warblings as if farther off. was surprised to see the bird within seven or eight rods on the top of an oak on the or chard's edge under the hill. but he appeared silent while i heard others faintly warbling and twittering far in the orchard. when he flew i heard no more, and then i suspected that he had been ventriloquizing, as if he hardly dared open his mouth yet while there was so much winter left. it is an overcast and moist, but rather warm, afternoon. he revisks the apple trees and appears to find some worms. probably not till now was his food to be found abundantly. saw some fuzzy gnats in the air the river channel is nearly open everywhere. saw on the alders by the river side front of hil dreth's a song-sparrow quirking its tail. it flew across the river to the willows and soon i heard its well-known dry tchip-tchip. march 7, 1858. walking by the river this p. m., it being half open, and the waves running pretty high, the black waves, yellowish where they break over ice, i inhale a fresh meadowy spring odor from them which is a little exciting. it is like the fragrance of tea to an old tea drinker. march 7, 1859. 6j a. m. to hill. i came out to hear a spring bird, the ground generally covered with snow yet, and the channel of the early spring in massachusetts. 81 river only partly open. on the hill i hear first the tapping of a small woodpecker. i then see a bird alight on the dead top of the highest ■white oak on the hill-top, on the topmost point. it is a shrike. while i am watching him eight or ten rods off, i hear robins down below west of the hill. then to my surprise the shrike be gins to sing. it is at first a wholly ineffectual and inarticulate sound, without any solid tone, a mere hoarse breathing, as if he were clearing his throat, unlike any bird that i know, a shrill hissing. then he uttered a kind of mew, a very decided mewing, clear and wiry, between that of a catbird and the note of the nuthatch, as if to lure a nuthatch within his reach. then rose with the sharpest, shrillest vibratory or tremu lous whistling, or chirruping on the very high est key. this high gurgling jingle was like some of the notes of a robin singing in summer. but they were very short spurts in all these directions, though there was all this variety. unless you saw the shrike, it would be hard to tell what bird it was. these various notes cov ered considerable time, but were sparingly ut tered with intervals. it was a decided chink ing sound, the clearest strain, suggesting much ice in the stream. i heard this bird sing once defore, but that was also in early spring, or about this time. it is said that they imitate 6 82 early spring in massachusetts. the notes of other birds in order to attract them within their reach. why then have i never heard them sing in the winter ? i have seen seven or eight of them the past winter quite near. the birds which it imitated, if it imi tated any this morning, were the catbird and the nuthatch, neither of which, probably, would it catch. the first is not here to catch. hear ing a peep i looked up and saw three or four birds passing which suddenly descended and settled on this oak top. they were robins, but the shrike instantly hid himself behind a bough, and in half a minute flew off to a wal nut and alighted, as usual, on its very topmost twig, apparently afraid of its visitors. the robins kept their ground, one alighting on the very point which the shrike vacated. is not this, then, probably the spring note or pairing song of the shrike ? the first note which i heard from the robins far under the hill was " sveet sveet," suggesting a certain haste and alarm, and then a rich, hollow, somewhat plain tive peep or peep-eep-eep, as when in distress with young just flown. when you first see them alighted, they have a haggard, an anxious and hurried, look the mystery of the life of plants is kindred with that of our own lives, and the physiologist must not presume to explain their growth ao eably spring in massachusetts. 83 cording to mechanical laws, or as lie would ex plain a machine of his own making. we must not expect to probe with our fingers the sanc tuary of any life, whether animal or vegetable. if we do, we shall discover nothing but surface still. the ultimate expression or fruit of any created thing is a fine effluence which only the most ingenuous worshipper perceives at a rever ent distance from its surface even. the cause ind the effect are equally evanescent and in tangible, and the former must be investigated in the same spirit and with the same reverence with which the latter is perceived. science is often like the grub which, though it may have nestled in the germ of a plant, has merely blighted or consumed it, never truly tasted it. only that intellect makes any progress toward conceiving of the essence which at the same time perceives the effluence. the rude and ig norant finger is probing in the rind still, for in this case, too, the angles of incidence and exci dence are equal, and the essence is as far on the other side of the surface or matter, as reverence detains the worshipper on this, and only rever ence can find out this angle instinctively. shall we presume to alter the angle at which god chooses to be worshipped " accordingly i re ject carpenter's explanation of the fact that n potato-vine in a cellar grows toward the 84 early spking in massachusetts. light, when he says, " the reason obviously is that in consequence of loss of fluid from the tissue of the stem on the side on which the light falls, it is contracted, whilst that of the other side remains turgid with fluid ; the stem makes a bend, therefore, until its growing point becomes opposite to the light, and then in creases in that direction. 1 there is no ripe ness which is not, so to speak, something ulti mate in itself, and not merely a perfected means to a higher end. in order to be ripe it must serve a transcendent use. the ripeness of a leaf, being perfected, leaves the tree at that point and never returns to it. it has nothing to do with any other fruit which the tree may bear, and only genius can pluck it. the fruit of a tree is neither in the seed nor in the full grown tree, but it is simply the highest use to which it can be put. march 8, 1840. the wind shifts from north east and east to northwest and south, and every icicle which has tinkled in the meadow grass so long, trickles down its stem and seeks its water level, unerringly with a million comrades. in the ponds the ice cracks with a busy and in spiriting din, and down the larger streams is whirled, grating hoarsely and crashing its way along, which was so lately a firm field for the 1 carpenter's vegetable physiology, page 174. eaely spring in massachusetts. 85 woodman's team and the fox, sometimes with the tracks of the skaters still fresh upon it, and the holes cut for pickerel. town committees inspect the bridges and causeways as if by mere eye-force to intercede with the ice and save the treasury. in the brooks the floating of small cakes of ice with various speed, is full of con tent and promise, and when the water gurgles under a natural bridge you may hear these hasty rafts hold conversation in an undertone. every rill is a channel for the juices of the meadow. last year's grasses and flower stalks have been steeped in rain and snow, and now the brooks flow with meadow tea, thoroughwort, mint, flag root, and pennyroyal, all at one draught; in the ponds the sun makes encroachments around the edges first, as ice melts in a kettle on the fire, darting his rays "through this crevice, and preparing the deep water to act simultaneously on the under side. march 8, 1842. most lecturers preface their discourses on music with a history of music, but as well introduce an essay on virtue with a his tory of virtue. as if the possible combinations of sound, the last wind that sighed or melody that waked the wood, had any history other than a perceptive ear might hear in the least and latest sound of nature. a history of music would be like the history of the future, for so 86 early spring in massachusetts. little past is it and capable of record that it is but the hint of a prophecy. it is the history of gravitation. it has no history more than god. it circulates and resounds forever, and only flows like the sea or air why, if i should sit down to write its story, the west wind would rise to refute me. properly speaking there can be no history but natural history, for there is no past in the soul, but in nature. .... i might as well write the history of my aspira tions. does not the last and highest contain them all ? do the lives of the great composers contain the facts which interested them ? what is this music? why, thinner and more evanes cent than ether ? subtler than sound, for it is only a disposition of sound. it is to sound what color is to matter. it is the color of a flame, or of the rainbow, or of water. only one sense has known it. the least profitable, the least tangible fact, which cannot be bought or cul tivated but by virtuous methods, and yet our ears ring with it like shells left on the shore. march 8, 1853. 10 a. m. rode to saxon ville with f. b. to look at a small place for sale, via wayland. return by sudbury. on wheels in snow. a spring sheen on the snow. the melting snow running and sparkling down hill in the ruts was quite spring-like saw a mink run across the road in sudbury, a early spring in massachusetts. 87 large, black weasel, to appearance, worming its bupple way over the snow. where it ran, its tracks were thus, == = = = the intervals between the fore and hind feet sixteen or eighteen inches, and between the two fore and the two hind feet two inches and a half. the distant view of the open-flooded sud bury meadows all dark blue, surrounded by a landscape of white snow, gave an impulse to the dormant sap in my veins. dark blue and angry waves contrasting with the white but melting winter landscape. ponds, of course, do not yet afford this water prospect, only the flooded meadows. there is no ice over or near the stream, and the flood has covered or broken up much of the ice on the meadow. the as pect of these waters at sunset, when the air is still, begins to be unspeakably soothing and promising. waters are at length and begin to reflect, and instead of looking into the sky, i look into the placid reflecting water for the signs and promise of the morrow. these mead ows are the most of ocean that i have fairly learned. now, when the sap of the trees is probably beginning to flow, the sap of the earth, the river, overflows and bursts its icy fet ters. this is the sap of which i make my sugar after the frosty nights, boiling it down and 88 eaely spring in massachusetts. crystallizing it. i must be on the lookout now for gulls and the ducks. that dark-blue mead owy revelation. it is as when the sap of the maple bursts forth early and runs down the trunk to the snow. saw two or three hawks sailing saw some very large willow buds expanded (their silk) to thrice the length of their scales, indistinctly barred or waved witn darker lines around them. they look more like, are more of spring than anything else i have seen. heard the spring note of the chick adee now before any spring bird has arrived. march 8, 1854. what pretty wreaths the mountain cranberry makes, curving upward at the extremity. the leaves are now a dark red, and wreath and all are of such a shape as might fitly be copied in wood or stone, or architectural foliage. march 8, 1855. as the ice melts in the swamps i see the horn-shaped buds of the skunk cabbage, green with a bluish bloom, standing uninjured, ready to feel the influence of the sun, more prepared for spring, to look at, than any other plant. march 8, 1857. when i cut a white pine twig, the crystalline sap at once exudes. how long has it been thus ? got a glimpse of a hawk, the first of the season. the tree spar rows sing a little on the still, sheltered, and early spring in massachusetts. 89 sunny side of the hill, but not elsewhere. a partridge goes from amid the pitch pines. it lifts each wing so high above its back and flaps so low and withal so rapidly that it presents the appearance of a broad wheel, almost a re volving sphere, as it whirrs off, like a cannon ball shot from a gun. march 8, 1859. p. m. to hill in rain, there is a fine freezing rain with strong wind from the north, so i keep along under the shel ter of hills and woods, along the south side, in my india-rubber coat and boots. under the southern edge of woodis park, in the low ground i see many radical leaves of the soli dago altissima and another, i am pretty sure it is the solidago strieta, and occasionally, also, of the aster undulatus, and all are more or less lake beneath. the first, at least, have when bruised a strong scent. some of them have recently grown decidedly. so at least several kinds of golden rods and asters have radical leaves lake-colored at this season. the common strawberry leaves, too, are quite fresh, and a handsome lake color beneath in many cases. there are also many little rosettes of the radical leaves of the epilobium eoloratum, half brown and withered, with bright green centres, at ipast there is but a narrow strip of bare ground reaching a few rods into the wood along 90 early spring in massachusetts. the edge, but the less ground there is bare, the more we make of it. such a day as this i re bort where the partridges, etc., do, to the bare ground and the sheltered sides of woods and hills, and there explore the moist ground for the radical leaves of plants while the storm lowers overhead, and i forget how the. time is passing. if the weather is thick and stormy enough, if there is a good chance to be cold and wet and uncomfortable, in other words to feel weather-beaten, you may consume the after noon to advantage, thus browsing along the edge of some near wood which would scarcely detain you at all in fair weather, and you will get as far away there as at the end of your longest fair-weather walk, and come home as if from an adventure. there is no better fence to put between you and the village than a storm into which the villagers do not venture out. i go looking for green radical leaves. what a dim and shadowy existence have now to our memories the fair flowers whose localities they markl how hard to find any trace of their stem now after it has been flattened under the snows of the winter. i go feeling with wet and freezing fingers amid the withered grass and the snow for their prostrate stems that i may reconstruct the plant. but greenness so ab •orbs my attention that sometimes i do not see eably spring in massachusetts. 91 .the former rising from the midst of those radi cal leaves when it almost puts my eyes out. the radical leaves of the shepherd's purse are particularly bright men of science, when they pause to contemplate the power, wisdom/ and goodness of god, or as they sometimes call him " the almighty designer," speak of him as a total stranger whom it is necessary to treat with the highest consideration. they seem suddenly to have lost their wits. march 8, 1860. to cliffs and walden. see a small flock of grackles on the willow row above railroad bridge. how they sit and make a business of chattering, for it cannot be called singing, and there is no improvement from age to age, perhaps. yet as nature is a becoming, these notes may become melodious at last. at length, on my very near approach, they flit sus piciously away, uttering a few subdued notes as they hurry off. this is the first flock of black birds i have chanced to see, though c. saw one the 6th. to say nothing of fungi, lichens, mosses, and other oryptogamous plants, you cannot say that vegetation absolutely ceases at any season in this latitude. for there is grass in some warm exposures and in springy places always growing more or less, and willow catkins ex panding and peeping out a little farther every 32 early spring in massachusetts. warm day from the very beginning of winter, and the skunk cabbage buds being developed and actually flowering sometimes in the winter, and the sap flowing in the maples on some days 'in midwinter, and perhaps some cress growing a little (?), certainly some pads, and various naturalized garden weeds steadily growing, if not blooming, and apple buds sometimes ex panding. thus much of vegetable life, or mo tion, or growth, is to be detected every winter. there is something of spring in all seasons. there is a large class which is evergreen in its radical leaves, which make such a show as soon as the snow goes off that many take them to be a new growth of the spring. in a pool i no tice that the crowfoot (buttercup) leaves which are at the bottom of the water stand up and are much more advanced than those two feet off in the air, for there they receive warmth from the sun, while they are sheltered from cold winds. nowadays we separate the warmth of the sun from the cold of the wind, and ob serve that the cold does not pervade all places, vt being due to strong northwest winds, if we get into some sunny and sheltered nook where jhey do not penetrate, we quite forget how cold it is elsewhere i meet some indians just camped on brister's hill. as usual, they are zhiefly concerned to and where black ash grows early spring in massachusetts. 93 for their baskets. this is what they set about to ascertain as soon as they arrive in any strange neighborhood. march 9, 1852. a warm spring rain in the night. 3 p. m. down the railroad. cloudy, but spring-like. when the frost conies out of the ground there is a corresponding thawing of the man. the earth is now half bare. these march winds, which make the woods roar and fill the world with life and bustle, appear to wake up the trees out of their winter sleep and excite the sap to flow. i have no doubt they serve some such use, as well as to hasten the evap oration of the snow and water. the railroad men have now their hands full. i hear and see bluebirds come with the war n\ wind. the sand is flowing in the deep cut. i am affected by the sight of the moist red sand or subsoil under the edge of the sandy bank under the pitch pines. the railroad is perhaps our pleasantest and wildest road. it only makes deep cuts into and through the hills. on it are no houses nor foottravelers. the travel on it does not dis turb me. the woods are left to hang over it. though straight, it is wild in its accompani ments, keeping all its raw edges. even the laborers on it are not like other laborers. its houses, if any, are shanties, and its ruins the ruins of shanties, shells where the race that 94 early spbing in massachusetts. built the railroad dwelt; and the bones they gnawed lie about. i am cheered by the sound of running water now down the wooden troughs each side the cut. this road breaks the sur face of the earth. here is the dryest walking in wet weather, and the easiest in snowy. even the sight of smoke from the shanty excites me to-day. already these puddles on the railroad, reflecting the pine woods, remind me of sum mer lakes. when i hear the telegraph harp i think i must read the greek poets. this sound is like a brighter color, red, or blue, or green, where all was dull white or black. it prophesies finer senses, a finer life, a golden age. it is the poetry of the railroad./ the heroic and poetic thoughts which the irish laborers had at their toil has now got expression, that which has made the world mad so long. or is it the gods expressing their delight at this invention ? the flowing sand bursts out through the snow and overflows it where no sand was to be seen. .... again it rains, and i turn about. the sound of water falling on rocks and of air fall ing on trees are very much alike. though cloudy, the air excites me. yesterday all was tight as a stricture on my breast. to-day all is loosened. it is a different element from wha* it was. the sides of the bushy hill where the eablt spring in massachusetts. 95 snow is melted look through this air as if i were under the influence of some intoxicating liquor. the earth is not quite steady nor palp able to my sense, — a little idealized. march 9, 1853. minott thinks, and quotes some old worthy as authority for saying, that the bark of the striped squirrel is one of the first sure signs of decided spring weather. march, 9, 1854. saw this morning a musk rat sitting " in a round form on the ice," or rather motionless, like the top of a stake or a mass of muck on the edge of the ice. he then dove for a clam, whose shells he left on the ice< beside him. boiled a handful of rock tripe ( umbilicaria muhlenbergii) (which tuckerman says " was the favorite rock tripe in franklin's journey ") for more than an hour. it produced a black puff, looking somewhat like boiled tea leaves, and was insipid, like rice or starch. the dark water in which it was boiled had a bitter taste, and was slightly gelatinous. the puff was not positively disagreeable to the palate. p. m. to great meadows. saw several flocks of large grayish and whitish or speckled ducks, i suppose the same that p. calls shel drakes. they, like ducks, commonly incline to fly in a line about an equal distance apart. i hear the common sort of quacking from them. it is pleasant to see them at a distance alight 96 early spring in massachusetts. on the water with a slanting flight, launch themselves, and sail along so stately. the pieces of ice, large and small, drifting along, help to conceal them. in the spaces of still, open water i see the reflection of the hills and woods, which for so long i have not seen, and it gives expression to the face of nature. the face of nature is lit up by these reflections in still water in the spring. sometimes you see only the top of a distant hill reflected far with in the meadow, where a dull, gray field of ice intervenes between the water and the shore. march 9, 1855. p. m. to andromeda ponds. scare up a rabbit on the hillside by these ponds which was gnawing a smooth su mach. see also where they have gnawed the red maple, sweet fern, popidus grandldentata, white and other oaks (taking off considera ble twigs at four or five cuts), amelanchier, and sallow. but they seem to prefer the smooth sumach to any of them. with this variety of cheap diet they are not likely to starve. the rabbit, indeed, lives, but the su mach may be killed. i get a few drops of the sweet red-maple juice which has run down the main stem where a rabbit has nibbled a twig off close. the heart-wood of the poison dog-wood, when i break it down with my hand, has a eaely spring in massachusetts. 97 singular, decayed-yellow look, and a spirituous or apothecary odor. as the other day i clam bered over those great white pine masts which lay in all directions, one upon another, on the hillside south of fair haven, where the woods have been laid waste, i was struck, in favorable lights, with the jewel-like brilliancy of the sawed ends thickly bedewed with crystal drops of turpentine, thickly as a shield, as if the dry ads, oreads, pine-wood nymphs had seasonably wept there the fall of the tree. the perfect sincerity of these terebinthine drops, each one reflecting the world, colorless as light, or like drops of dew heaven-distilled and trembling to their fall, is incredible when you remember how firm their consistency. and is this that pitch, which you cannot touch without being denied ? looking from the cliffs, the sun being, as before, invisible, i saw far more light in the reflected sky in the neighborhood of the sun than i could see in the heavens from my po sition, and it occurred to me that the reason ' sun 'a place. rirex. was that there was reflected to me from the river, the view i should have got if i had stood there on the water in a more favorable position. i see that the sand in the road has crystallized 7 98 early spbing in massachusetts. as if dried (for it is nearly cold enough to freeze), like the first crystals that shoot and set on water when freezing c. says he saw yesterday the slate-colored hawk, with a white bar across tail, meadow hawk, i. e., frog hawk. probably it finds moles and mice. march 9, 1859 at corner spring brook the water reaches up to the crossing, and stands over the ice there, the brook being open and some space each side of it. when i look from forty to fifty rods off at the yellowish water covering the ice about a foot here, it is decidedly purple (though, when i am close by and looking down on it, it is yellowish merely), while the water of the brook and channel, and a rod on each side of it, where there is no ice beneath, is a beautiful very dark blue. these colors are very distinct, the fine of separation being the edge of the ice on the bottom ; and this apparent j uxtaposition of different kinds of water is a ve?y~ singular and pleasing sight. you see a light purple flood about the color of a red grape, and a broad channel of dark pur ple water, as dark as a common blue-purple grape, sharply distinct across its middle. march 10, 1852. i was reminded this morn ing before i rose, of those undescribed ambrosial mornings of summer which i can remember, when a thousand birds were heard gently twit early spring in massachusetts. 99 tering and ushering in the light, like the argu ment to a new canto of an epic, a heroic poem. the serenity, the infinite promise of such a i morning ! the song or twitter of birds drips l from the leaves like dew. then there was something divine and immortal in our life; when i have waked up on my couch in the woods and seen the day dawning and heard the twittering of the birds i see flocks of a dozen bluebirds together. the warble of thisi bird is innocent and celestial like its color. saw a sparrow, perhaps a song-sparrow, flitting amid the young oaks where the ground was covered with snow. i think that this is an indication that the ground is quite bare a little further south. probably the spring birds never fly far over a snow-clad country i see the re ticulated leaves of the rattlesnake plantain in the woods quite fresh and green. what is the little chickweed-like plant already springing up on the top of the cliffs ? there are some other plants with bright green leaves which have either started somewhat or have never suffered from the cold under the snow. i am pretty sure that i heard the chuckle of a ground squirrel among the warm and bare rocks of the cliffs. .... the mosses are now very handsome like young grass pushing up. heard the phebe note of the chickadee to-day for the first time; i 100 eaely spring in massachusetts. had at first heard their day, day, day, ungrate fully. " ah ! you but carry my thoughts back to winter !" but anon i found that they, too, had become spring birds. they had changed their note. even they feel the influence of spring. i see cup lichens (cladonias) with their cups beset inside and out with little leaflets like shell work. march 10, 1853. this is the first really spring day. the sun is brightly reflected from all surfaces, and the north side of the street be gins to be a little more passable to foot travel ers. you do not think it necessary to button up your coat. p. m. to second division brook. as i stand looking over the river, looking from the bridge into the flowing, eddying tide, the al most strange chocolate-colored water, the sound of distant crows and cocks, is full of spring. as anacreon says " the works of men shine," so the sounds of men and birds are musical. something analogous to the thawing of the ice seems to have taken place in the air. at the end of winter there is a season in which we are daily expecting spring, and finally, a day when it arrives the radical leaves of innumerable plants (as here a dock in and near the water) are evidently affected by the spring influences. many plants are to some extent early spring in massachusetts. 101 evergreen, like the buttercup novr beginning to start. methinks the first obvious evidence of spring is the pushing out of the swamp willow catkins, the pushing up of skunk cabbage spatb.es, and pads at the bottom of water. this is the order i am inclined to, though, per haps any of these may take precedence of all the rest in any particular case. what is that dark pickle-green alga (?) at the bottom of this ditch, looking somewhat like a decaying cress, with fruit like a lichen ? at nut meadow brook crossing we rest awhile on the rail gazing into the eddying stream. the ripple marks on the sandy bot tom where silver spangles shine in the sun with black wrecks of caddis casts lodged under each, the shadows of the invisible dimples re flecting prismatic colors on the bottom, the minnows already stemming the current with restless, wiggling tails, ever and anon darting aside, probably to secure some invisible mote in the water, whose shadows we do not at first detect on the sandy bottom, though, when de tected, they are so much more obvious as well »s larger and more interesting than the sub stance, in which each fin is distinctly seen, though scarcely to be detected in the substance, these are all very beautiful and exhilarating bights, a sort of diet drink to heal our winter 102 early spring in massachusetts. discontent. have the minnows played thus all winter ? the equisetum at the bottom has freshly grown several inches. then should i not have given the precedence on the other page to this and some other water plants ? i suspect that i should, and the flags appear to be start ing. i am surprised to find on the rail a young tortoise l^r inches long in the shell, which has crawled out to sun or perchance is on its way to the water. i think it must be the emys gut tata, for there is a large and distinct yellow spot on each dorsal and lateral plate, and the third dorsal plate is hexagonal and not quadrangular as that of the emys picta is described as being, though in my specimen i can't make it out to be so. yet the edges of the plates are prom inent as described in the emys sculpta, which, but for the spots, two yellow spots on each side of the hind head, and one fainter on the top of the head, i should take it to be. it is about seven eighths of an inch wide, very inactive. when was it hatched and where ? what is the theory of these sudden pitches of deep shelving places in the sandy bottom of the brook. it is very interesting to walk along such ,i brook as this in the midst of the meadow, which you can better do now before the frost is quite out of the sod, and gaze into the deep holes in its irregular bottom and the dark gulfs eaelt spking in massachusetts. 103 tinder the banks. where it rushes over the edge of a steep slope in the bottom, the shadow of the disturbed surface is like sand hurried for ward in the water. the bottom being of shift ing sand is exceedingly irregular and interest ing. what was that sound that came on the soft ened air ? it was the warble of the first bluebird from that scraggy apple orchard yonder. when this is heard then has spring arrived. it must be that the willow twigs, both the yellow and green, are brighter colored than be fore ; i cannot be deceived. they shine as if the sap were already flowing under the bark, a certain lively and glossy hue they have. the early poplars are pushing forward their catkins though they make not so much display as the willows. still, in some parts of the woods it is good sledding; at second division brook, the fragrance of the senecio, decidedly evergreen, which i have bruised, is very permanent. it is a memorable, sweet, meadow fragrance. i find a yellow-spotted tortoise, emys guttata, in the bank. a very few leaves of cowslips, and those wholly under water, show themselves yet. the leaves of the water saxifrage, for the most part frost-bitten, are common enough minott says that old sam nutting, the hun tor, fox nutting, old pox he was called, whc 104 early spbing in massachusetts. died more than forty years ago (he lived in ja> cob baker's home in lincoln, came from wes ton, and was some seventy years old when he died), told him that he had killed not only bears about fair haven among the walnuts, but moose. march 10, 1854. misty rain, rain. the third day of more or less rain. p. m. c. miles road via clam shell hill. .... it occurs to me that heavy rains and sudden meltings of the snow, such as we had a fortnight ago (february 26)., before the ground is thawed, so that all the water, in stead of being soaked up by the ground, flows rapidly into the streams and ponds, is neces sary to swell and break them up. if we waited for the direct influence of the sun on the ice, and the influence of such water as would reach the river under other circumstances, the spring would be very much delayed. in the violent freshet there is a mechanic force added to the chemic saw a skunk in the corner road, which i followed sixty rods or more. out now, about 4 p. m., partly because it is a dark, foul day. it is a slender, black (and white) animal, with its back remarkably arched, standing high behind, and carrying its head low, it runs, even when undisturbed, with a singular teter or undula early spring in massachusetts. 105 tion, like the walking of a chinese lady. very slow ; i hardly have to run to keep up with it. it has a long tail which it regularly erects when i come too near, and prepares to discharge its liquid. it is white at the end of the tail, on the hind head, and in a line on the front of the face. the rest black, except the flesh-colored nose (and i think, feet) it tried repeat edly to get into the wall, and did not show much cunning. finally it steered for an old skunk or woodchuck hole under a wall four rods off and got into it, or under the wall, at least, for the hole was stopped up. there i could view it closely and at leisure. it has a remarka bly long, narrow, pointed head and snout which enable it to make those deep narrow holes in the earth by which it probes for insects. its eyes are bluish-black, and have an innocent, child-like expression. it made a singular loud patting sound repeatedly on the frozen ground under the wall, undoubtedly with its fore feet. (i saw only the upper part of the animal.). . . . probably it has to do with getting its food, patting the earth to get the insects or worms, chough why it did so then, i know not. its track was small and round, showing the nails, a little less than an inch in diameter. its steps alternate, five or six inches by two or two and a half, sometimes two feet together. there is 106 early spring in massachusetts. something pathetic in such a sight, next to see ing one of the human aborigines of the country. i respect the skunk as a human being in a very humble sphere. i have no doubt they have be gun to probe already where the ground permits or as far as it does. but what have they eat all winter ? the weather is almost april-like. we al ways have much of this rainy drizzling weather in early spring, after which we expect to hear march 10, 1855. i am not aware of growth in any plant yet, unless it be the further peep ing out of the willow catkins. they have crept out further from under the scales, and looking closely i detect a little redness along the twigs even now. you are always surprised by the sight of the first spring bird or insect. they seem prema ture, and there is no such evidence of spring as themselves, so that they literally fetch the year about. it is thus when i hear the first robin or bluebird, or looking along the brooks see the first water-bugs out, circling. but you think they have come and nature cannot recede. thus, when, on the 6th, i saw the gyrinus at second division brook. i saw no peculiarity in the water or the air to remind me of them, but to-day they are here and yesterday they early spbing in massachusetts. 107 were not. i go looking deeper for tortoises, when suddenly my eye rests on these black cir cling apple-seeds in some smoother bay. the red squirrel should be drawn with a pine cone j f gave me to-day a part of the foot, probably of a pine marten, which he found two or three days ago in a trap he had set in his brook under water for a mink, baited with a pickerel. it is colored above with glossy dark brown hair, and contains but two toes armed with fine and very sharp talons, much curved. there may be a third without the talon. it had left thus much in the trap and departed. march 10, 1859. there are some who never do nor say anything, whose life merely excites expectation. their excellence reaches no fur ther than a gesture or mode of carrying them selves. they are a sash dangling from the waist, or a sculptured war-club over the shoul der. they are like fine-edged tools gradually becoming rusty in a shop window. i like as well, if not better, to see a piece of iron or steel, out of which many such tools will be made, or the bushwhack in a man's hand. when i meet gentlemen and ladies i am re minded of the extent of the habitable and un inj ^bitable globe. i exclaim to myself : sur 108 early spring in massachusetts. faces ! surfaces ! if the outside of a man is so variegated and extensive what must the inside be ? you are high up the platte river, travers ing deserts, plains covered with soda, with no deeper hollow than a prairie-dog hole, tenanted also by owls and venomous snakes. as i look toward the woods from wood's bridge, i perceive the spring in the softened air. this is to me the most interesting and affecting phenomenon of the season as yet. apparently, in consequence of the very warm bun, this still and clear day, falling on the earth four fifths covered with snow and ice, there is an almost invisible vapor held in suspension, which is like a thin coat or enamel applied to every object, and especially it gives to the woods of pine and oak intermingled, a softened and more living appearance.. they evidently stand in a more genial atmosphere than before. looking more low i see that shimmering in the air over the earth which betrays the evapora tion going on. looking through this trans parent vapor, all surfaces, not osiers and open water alone, look more vivid. the hardness of winter is relaxed. there is a fine effluence sur rounding the wood, as if the sap had begun to stir, and you could detect it a mile off. such is the difference in an object seen through a warm, moist, and soft air, and a cold, dry, hard early spring in massachusetts. 109 one. such is the genialness of nature that the trees appear to have put out feelers, by which the senses apprehend them more ten derly. i do not know that the woods are ever more beautiful or affect me more. i feel it to be a greater success as a lecturer to affect uncultivated natures than to affect the most refined, for all cultivation is necessarily superficial, and its root may not even be di rected toward the centre of the being look up or down the open river channel now so smooth. like a hibernating animal, it has ventured to come out to the mouth of its bur row. one way, perhaps, it is like melted sil ver alloyed with copper. it goes nibbling off the edge of the thick ice on each side. sere and there i see a musquash sitting in the sun on the edge of the ice eating a clam, and the shells it has left, are strewn along the edge. ever and anon he drops into the liquid mirror and soon reappears with another clam. this clear, placid, silvery water is evidently a phenomenon of spring. winter could not show us this as we sit in this wonder ful air, many sounds — that of wood-chopping for one — come to our ears, agreeably blunted, or muffled even, like the drumming of a part ridge, not sharp and rending as in winter and recently. if a partridge should drum in win 110 early spring in massachusetts. ter, probably it would not reyerberate so softly through the wood, and sound indefinitely far. our voices even sound differently, and betray the spring. we speak as in a house, in a warm apartment still, with relaxed muscles and soft ened voices. the voice, like a woodchuck in his burrow, is met and lapped in and encouraged by all genial and sunny influences. there may be heard now, perhaps, under south hillsides and the south sides of houses, a slight murmur of conversation, as of insects, out of doors. these earliest spring days are peculiarly pleasant; we shall have no more of them for a year. i am apt to forget that we may have raw and blustering days a month hence. the combination of this delicious air, which you do not want to be warmer or softer, with the pres ence of ice and snow, you sitting on the bare russet portions, the south hillsides of the earth, — this is the charm of these days. it is the summer beginning to show itself, like an old friend, in the midst of winter. you ramble from one drier russet patch to another. these are your stages. you have the air and sun of summer over snow and ice, and in some places p^en the rustling of dry leaves under your feet, as in indian-summer days. the bluebird on the apple-tree, warbling so innocently, to inquire if any of its mates are early spring in massachusetts. ill within call, — the angel of the spring! fair and innocent, yet the offspring of the earth. the color of the sky, above, and of the subsoil, beneath, suggesting what sweet and innocent melody, terrestrial melody, may have its birth place between the sky and the ground. march 11, 1842. we can only live healthily the life the gods assign us. i must receive my life as passively as the willow leaf that flutters over the brook. i must not be for myself, but god's work, and that is always good. i will wait the breezes patiently, and grow as they shall determine. my fate cannot but be grand so. we may live the life of a plant or an ani mal without living an animal life. this con stant and universal content of the animal comes of resting quietly in god's palm. i feel as if i could at any time resign my life and the re sponsibility into god's hands, and become as innocent and free from care as a plant or stone. my life! my life! why will you linger? are the years short and the months of no account ? .... can god afford that i should forget him ? is he so indifferent to my career ? can heaven be postponed with no more ado? why were my ears. given to hear those everlasting strains which haunt my life, and yet to be profaned by these perpetual dull sounds? .... why, god, did you include me in your great scheme ? 112 early spring in massachusetts. will you not make me a partner at last ? did it need there should be a conscious material ? my friend ! my friend ! i 'd speak so frank to thee that thou,wouldst pray me to keep back some part of it, for fear i robbed myself. to address thee, delights me, there is such clear ness in the delivery. i am delivered of my tale, which, told to strangers, still would linger in my life as if untold, or doubtful how it ran. march 11, 1854. fair weather after three rainy days. air full of birds, — bluebirds, song sparrows, chickadees (phebe-notes), and black birds. song-sparrows toward the water with at least two kinds or variations of their strain quick hard to imitate, — ozit, ozit, ozit, psa te te te tete ter twe ter, is one. the other began chip, chip che we, etc., etc. bluebirds' warbling curls in elms. shall the earth be regarded as a graveyard, a necropolis merely, and not also as a granary filled with the seeds of life, fertile compost, not exhausted sand ? is not its fertility increased by decay ? on tuesday, the 7th, i heard the first song isparrow chirp, and saw it flit silently from alder to alder. this pleasant morning, after three days' rain and mist, they generally burst forth into sprayey song from the low trees along the river. the development of their song is early spring in massachusetts. 118 gradual, but sure, like the expanding of a flower. this is the first song i have heard. p. m. to cliffs. river higher than at any time in the winter, i think musk-rats are driven out of their holes. heard one's loud plash behind hubbard's. it comes up brown, striped with wet. i could detect its progress beneath, in shallow water, by the bub bles which came up from the hill, the river and meadow is about equally water and ice, — rich, blue water, and islands or conti nents of white ice, no longer ice in place. the distant mountains are all white with snow, while our landscape is nearly bare. another year i must observe the alder and willow sap as early as the middle of february at least nowadays, where snow-banks have partly melted against the banks by the roadside in low ground, i see in the grass nu merous galleries where the mice or moles have worked in the winter. march 11, 1855. at this season, before grass springs to conceal them, i notice those pretty little roundish shells on the tops of hills ; one to-day on anursnack. i see pitch pine needles looking as if white washed, thickly covered on each of the two slopes of the needle with narrow white oyster shell-like latebrae or chrysalids of insects. 8 114 early spring in massachusetts. "''march 11, 1856. when it is proposed to me to go abroad, rub off some rust, and better my condition in a worldly sense, i fear lest my life would lose some of its homeliness. if these fields, and streams, and woods, the phenomena of nature here, and the simple occupations of the inhabitants should cease to interest and in spire me, no culture or wealth would atone for the loss. i fear the dissipation that traveling, going into society, even the best, the enjoy ment of intellectual luxuries, imply. if paris is much in your mind, if it is more and more to you, concord is less and less, and yet it would be a wretched bargain to accept the proudest paris in exchange for my native village. at best, paris could only be a school in which to learn to live here, a stepping-stone to concord, a school in which to fit for this university. i wish so to live ever as to derive my satisfactions and inspirations from the commonest events, every-day phenomena, so that what my senses hourly perceive in my daily walk, the conver sations of my neighbors, may inspire me, and i may dream of no heaven but that which lies about me. a man may acquire a taste for wine or jbrandy, and so lose his love for water, but should we not pity him ? the sight of a marsh hawk in concord meadows is worth more to me than the entry of the allies into paris. in early spring in massachusetts. 115 this sense i am not ambitious. i do not wish, my native soil to become exhausted and run out through neglect. only that traveling is good which reveals to me the value of home and enables me to enjoy it better. that man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest. it is strange that men are in such haste to geb fame as teachers rather than knowledge as learners. march 11, 1857. i see and talk with rice sawing off the ends of clapboards, which he has planed to make them square, for an addition to his house. he has a fire in his shop and plays at house-building there. his life is poetic. he does the work himself. he combines several qualities and talents rarely combined. though he owns houses in the city whose repairs he at tends to, finds tenants for them, and collects the rent, he also has his sudbury farm and bean field. though he lived in a city, he would still be natural, and related to primitive nature around him. though he owned all beacon street, you might find that his mittens were made of the skin of a woodchuck that had rav aged his beanfield. i noticed a woodchuck's bkin tacked up to the inside of his shop. he said it had fatted on his beans and william had killed it, and expected to get another to make i, pair of mittens of, one not being quite large 116 early spring in massachusetts. enough. it was excellent for mittens ; you could hardly wear it out. spoke of the cuckoo, which was afraid of other birds, was easily beaten, would dive into the middle of a poplar, then come out on to some bare twig and look round for a nest to rob of young or eggs. march 11, 1859. mrs. a. takes on dolefully on account of the solitude in which she lives ; but she gets little consolation. mrs. b. says she envies her that retirement. mrs. a. is aware that she does, and says it is as if a thirsty man should envy another the river in which he is drowning. so goes the world, it is either this extreme or that. of solitude, one gets too much ; another, not enough. march 11, 1860. i see a woodchuck out on the calm side of lee's hill (nawshawtuck). he has pushed away the withered leaves which filled his hole and come forth, and left his tracks on those slight patches of the recent snow which are left about his hole. i was amused with the behavior of two red squirrels, as i approached the hemlocks. they were as gray as red, and white, beneath. i at first heard a faint, sharp chirp, like a bird, with in the hemlock, on my account, and then one rushed forward on a descending limb toward me, barking or chirruping at me after his fash ion, within a rod. they seemed to vie with early spring in massachusetts. 117 »ne another who should be most bold. for four or five minutes at least they kept up an incessant chirruping or squeaking bark, vibrat ing their tails and their whole bodies, and fre quently changing their position or point of view, making a show of rushing forward, or perhaps darting off a few feet like lightning, and bark ing still more loudly, i. e., with a yet sharper exclamation, as if frightened by their own mo tions, their whole bodies quivering, their heads and great eyes on the qui vive. you are uncer tain whether it is not partly in sport, after all. march 11, 1861. the seed of the willow is exceedingly minute, as i measure, from one twentieth to one twelfth of an inch in length and ohe fourth as much in width. it is sur rounded at base by a tuft of cotton-like hairs, about one quarter of an inch long rising around and above it, forming a kind of parachute. these render it more buoyant than the seeds of any other of our trees, and it is borne the fur thest horizontally with the least wind. it falls very slowly even in the still air of a chamber, aud rapidly ascends over a stove. it floats more like a mote than the seed of any other of dur trees, in a meandering manner, and being enveloped in this tuft of cotton, the seed is hard to detect. each of the numerous little pods, more or less ovate and beaked, which form the 118 eaely spring in massachusetts. fertile catkin, is closely packed with down and seeds. at maturity these pods open their beaks, which curve back, and gradually discharge their burden, like the milk-weed. it would take a delicate gin indeed to separate these seeds from their cotton. if you lay bare any spot in our woods, how ever sandy, as by a railroad cut, no shrub or tree is surer to plant itself there, sooner or later, than a willow (salix humilis, commonly) or a poplar. we have many kinds, but each is confined to its own habitat. i am not aware that the salix nigra has ever strayed from the river's bank. though many of the salix alba have been set along our causeways, very few have sprung up and maintained their ground elsewhere. the principal habitat of most of our species, such as love the water, is the river's bank, and the adjacent river meadows, and where certain kinds spring up in an inland meadow where they were not known before i feel pretty cer tain that they come from the river meadows. i have but little doubt that the seed of four of them that grow along the railroad causeway was blown from the river meadows, namely, salix pedioellaris, lucida, torreyana, and petio laris. the barren and fertile flowers are usually on early spring in massachusetts. 119 beparate plants. the greater part of the white willows set out on our causeways are sterile only. you can easily distinguish the fertile ones at a distance when the pods are bursting. it is said that no sterile weeping willows have been introduced into this country, so that it cannot be raised from the seed. of two of the indigenous willows common along the bank of our river i have detected but one sex. the seeds of the willow thus annually fill the air with their lint, being wafted to all parts of the country, and though apparently not more than one in many millions gets to be a shrub, yet so lavish and persevering is nature that her purpose is completely answered. march 12, 1842. consider what a difference there is between living and dying. to die is not to begin to die and continue, it is not a state of continuance, but of transientness ; whereas to live is a condition of continuance, and does not mean to be born merely. there is no con tinuance of death. it is a transient phenome non. nature presents nothing in a state of ieath. march 12, 1852. according to linnaeus very many plants become perennial and arborescent in warm regions which with us are annual, for duration often depends more on the locality than on the plant. so is it with men. under 120 early spring in massachusetts. more favorable conditions, the human plant that is short-lived and dwarfed becomes perennial and arborescent i have learned in a shorter time and more accurately the meaning of the scientific terms used in botany from a few plates of figures at the end of the " philosophia botanica," with the names annexed, than a vol ume of explanations or glossaries could teach. and, that the alternate pages may not be left blank, linnseus has given on them very concise and important instruction to students of botany. this lawgiver of science, this systematizer, this methodizer, carries his system into his studies in the field. on one of the little pages he gives some instruction concerning " herbatio " or botanizing. into this he introduces law, or der, and system, and describes with the great est economy of words what some would have required a small volume to tell, all on a small page ; tells what dress you shall wear, what in struments you shall carry, what season and hours you shall observe, namely, " from the leaf ing of the trees,-sirius excepted, to the fall of the leaf, twice a week in summer, once, in spring; from seven in the morning till seven at night." when you shall dine and take your rest, etc., whether you shall botanize in a crowd or dis persed, etc., how far you shall go, two miles and a half, at most; what you shall collect what kind of observations make, etc., etc. early spring in massachusetts. 121 railroad to walden, 3 p.m. i see the popw lus (apparently tremuloides, not grandidentata') at the end of the railroad causeway; showing the down of its ament. bigelow makes the tremuloides flower in april, the grandidentata in may the little grain of wheat, triti cum, is the noblest food of man, the lesser grains of other grasses are the food of passerine birds at present. their diet is like man's. the gods can never afford to leave a man in the world who is privy to any of their secrets. they cannot have a spy here. they will at once send him packing. how can you walk on ground where you see through it ? the telegraph harp has spoken to me more distinctly and effectually than any man ever did. march 12, 1853. it is essential that a man confine himself to pursuits, a scholar, for in stance, to studies which lie next to and con duce to his life, which do not go against the grain either of his will or his imagination. the scholar finds in his experience some studies to be most fertile and radiant with light, others, dry, barren, and dark. if he is wise, he will not persevere in the last, as a plant in a cellar will strive towards the light. he will confine the observations of his mind as closely as possi ble to the experience or life of his senses. his 122 early spring in massachusetts. thought must live with and be inspired with the life of the body. the death-bed scenes even of the best and wisest afford but a sorry picture of our humanity. some men endeavor to live a constrained life, to subject their whole lives to their will, as he who said he would give a sign, if he were conscious, after his head was cut off, but he gave no sign. dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows. a man may associate with such companions, he may pursue such employments, as will darken the day for him. men choose darkness rather than light. p. m. saw the first lark rise from the rail road causeway and sail on quivering wing over the meadow to alight on a heap of dirt. was that a mink we saw at the boiling spring? the senecio was very forward there in the water, and it still scents my fingers. a very lasting odor it leaves it is a rare lichen day. the usnea with its large fruit is very rich on the maples in the swamp, lux uriating in this moist, overcast, melting day, but it is impossible to get it home in good con dition. looking behind the bark of a dead white pine i find plenty of gnats quite lively and ready to issue forth as soon as the sun comes out. the grubs there are sluggish, buried in early spring in massachusetts. 123 the chunkings. i took off some pieces of bark more than three feet long and one foot wide. between this and the wood, in the dust left by borers, the gnats were concealed, ready to bwarm. this is their hibernaculum. the rich red-brown leaves of the gnaphalium, downy white beneath, begin to attract me where the snow is off. march 12, 1854. a. m. up railroad to woods. we have white frosts these mornings. this is the blackbird morning. their sprayey notes and conqueree ring with the song-sparrow's jingle all along the river. thus gradually they ac quire confidence to sing. it is a beautiful spring morning. i hear my first robin peep distinctly at a distance on some higher trees, oaks or other, on a high key, no singing yet. i hear from an apple tree a faint cricket-like chirp, and a spar row darts away, flying far, dashing from side to side. i think it must be the white-in-tail or grass finch. i hear a jay loudly screaming, phe phay, phe-phay, a loud, shrill chickadee's phe bee. i see and hear the lark sitting with head erect, neck outstretched, in the middle of a pas ture, and-i hear another far off, singing. they sing when they first come. all these birds do their warbling espeoially in the still sunny hour after sunrise. now is the time to be abroad to hear them, as you detect the slightest ripple in 124 early spring in massachusetts. smooth water. as -with tinkling sounds the sources of streams burst their icy fetters, so the rills of music begin to flow and swell the general choir of spring. memorable is the warm light of the spring sun on russet fields in the morn ing. p. m. to ball's hill along river. my com panion tempts me to certain licenses of speech, *'. e., to reckless and sweeping expressions which i am wont to regret that i have used. i find that i have used more harsh, extravagant, and cynical expressions concerning mankind and in dividuals than i intended. i find it difficult to make to him a sufficiently moderate state ment. i think it is because i have not his sym pathy in my sober and constant view. he asks for a paradox, an eccentric statement, and too often i give it to him. saw some small ducks, teal or widgeons. this great expanse of deep blue water, deeper than the sky, why does it not blue my soul, as of yore ? it is hard to soften me now the time was when this great blue scene would have tinged my spirit more. now is the time to look for indian relics, the sandy fields being just bared. i stand on the high lichen-covered and col ored (greenish) hill beyond abner buttrick's, i go further east and look across the meadows eably spring in massachusetts. 125 to bedford, and see that peculiar scenery of march in which i have taken so many ram bles; the earth just bare and beginning to be dry, the snow lying on the north sides of hills, the gray, deciduous trees, and the green pines soughing in the march wind. they look now as if deserted by a companion, the snow. when you walk over bare, lichen-clad hills, just be ginning to be dry, and look afar over the blue water on the meadows, you are beginning to break up your winter quarters and plan adven tures for the new year. the scenery is like, yet unlike, november. you have the same barren russet, but now instead of a dry, hard, cold wind, a peculiarly soft, moist air, or else a raw wind. now is the reign of water. i see many crows on the water's edge these days. it is astonishing how soon the ice has gone out of the river. but it still lies on the bottom of the meadow. is it peculiar to the song-sparrow to dodge behind and hide in walls and the like ? toward night the water becomes smooth and beautiful. men are eager to launch their boats and paddle over the meadows. march 12, 1856. i never saw such solid mountains of snow in the roads. you travel along for many rods over excellent, dry, solid sleighing where the road is perfectly level, not 126 early spring in massachusetts. thinking but you are within a foot of the ground, then suddenly descend four or five feet, and find, to your surprise, that you had been traversing the broad back of a drift. march 12, 1857. p. m. to hill. observe the waxwork twining about the smooth sumach. it winds against the sun. it is at first loose about the stem, but this ere long expands and overgrows it. observed the track of a squirrel in the snow under one of the apple trees on the southeast side of the hill, and looking up saw a red squir rel with a nut or piece of frozen apple (?) in his mouth within six feet, sitting in a con strained position, partly crosswise, on a limb over my head, perfectly still, and looking not at me, but off into the air, evidently expecting to escape my attention by this trick. i stood, and watched and chirruped to him about five minutes, so near, and yet he did not once turn his head to look at me, or move a foot, or wink. the only motion was that of his tail curled over his back in the wind. at length he did change his attitude a little and look at me a moment. evidently this is a trick they often practice. if i had been farther off, he might have scolded at me. march 12, 1859. p. m. in rain to minis terial swamp as i passed the j—— early spring in massachusetts. 127 hosmer (rough-cast) house, i thought i never saw any bank so handsome as the russet hill side behind it. it is a very barren, exhausted soil where the cladonia lichens abound, and the lower side is a flowing sand, but this russet grass, with its weeds, being saturated with moisture, was, in this light, the richest brown, methought, that i ever saw. there was the pale brown of the grass, red-brown of some weeds (sarothra and pinweed, probably), dark brown of huckleberry and sweet fern stems, and the very visible green of the cladonias, thirty rods off, and the rich brown fringes where the broken sod hung over the sand-bank on some knolls these vivid and rampant lichens, as it were, dwarf the oaks. a peculiar and unaccountable light seemed to fall on that bank or hillside, though it was thick storm all around. a sort of newfoundland sun seemed to be shining on it. it was such a light that you looked round for the sun from which it might come it was a prospect to excite a reindeer. these tints of brown were as softly and richly fair and sufficing as the most bril liant autumnal tints. in fair and dry weather these spots may be commonplace. but now they are worthy to tempt the painter's brush. the picture should be the side of a barren, lichen-clad hill with a flowing sand-bank be 128 early spring in massachusetts. death, a few blackish huckleberry bushes scat tered about, and bright, white patches of , snow here and there in the ravines, the hill running east and west, and seen through the storm from a point twenty or thirty rods south. march 13, 1841. how alone must our life be lived. we dwell on the sea-shore, and none between us and the sea. men are my merry companions, my fellow-pilgrims, who beguile the way, but leave me at the first turn in the road, for none are traveling one road so far as myself. each one marches in the van. the weakest child is exposed to the fates henceforth as barely as its parents. parents and relatives but entertain the youth. they cannot stand between him and his destiny. this is the one bare side of every man. there is no fence. it is clear before him to the bounds of space. what is fame to a living man ? if he live aright the sound of no man's voice will resound through 'the aisles of his secluded life. his life is a hallowed silence, a pool. the loudest sounds have to thank my little ear that they are heard. march 13, 1842. the sad memory of de parted friends is soon incrusted over with sub lime and pleasing thoughts, as their monuments are overgrown with moss. nature doth thus kindly heal every wound. by the mediation of a thousand little mosses and fungi the most early spring in massachusetts. 129 unsightly objects become radiant with beauty. there seem to be two sides of this world pre sented to us at different times, as we see things in growth or dissolution, in life or death. for seen with the eye of a poet, as god sees them, all things are alive and beautiful, but seen with the historical eye, or the eye of memory, they are dead and offensive. if we see nature as pausing, immediately all mortifies and decays ; but seen as progressing she is beautiful. i am startled that god can make me so rich even with my own cheap stores. it needs but a few wisps of straw in the sun, some small word dropped, or that has long lain silent in some book. when heaven begins and the dead arise no trumpet is blown. perhaps the south wind will blow. march 13, 1853. 6 a. m., to cliffs. there begins to be a greater depth of saffron in the morning sky. the morning and evening hori zon fires are warmer to the eye. march 13, 1855. p.m. to hubbard's close .... coming through the stubble of stow's rye-field in front of the breed house, i meet with four mice nests in going half a dozen rods. they lie flat on the ground amid the stubble, flattened spheres, the horizontal diameter about five inches, the perpendicular considerably less, composed of grass or finer stubble. on taking 130 early spring in massachusetts. them up you do not at once detect the entrance with your eye, but rather feel it with your fin ger on the side. they are lined with the finest of the grass. these were probably made when the snow was on the ground for their winter residence, while they gleaned the rye-field, and when the snow went off, they scampered to the woods. i think they were made by the mus leucopus, i. e., arvida emmonsii. i look at many woodchuck's holes, but as yet they are choked with leaves. there is no sign that their occupants have come abroad. march 13, 1859. i see a small flock of black birds flying over, some rising, others falling, yet all advancing together, one flock, but many birds, some silent, others tchucking, — inces sant alternation. this harmonious movement, as in a dance, this agreeing to differ, makes the charm of the spectacle to me. one bird looks fractional, naked, like a single thread or ravel ing from the web to which it belongs. alter nation ! alternation ! heaven and hell ! here again, in the flight of a bird, its ricochet mo tion is that undulation observed in so many materials, as in the mackerel sky. if men were to be destroyed, and the books they have written, to be transmitted to a new race of creatures, a new world, what kind of record would be found in them of so remark able a phenomenon as the rainbow? eakly spring in massachusetts. 131 i cannot easily forget the beauty of those terrestrial browns in the rain yesterday. the withered grass was not of that very pale, hoary brown that it is to-day, now that it is dry and lifeless ; but being perfectly saturated and drip ping with the rain, the whole hillside seemed to reflect a certain yellowish light so that you looked round for the sun in the midst of the storm the cladonias crowning the knoll had richly expanded and erected themselves, though seen twenty rods off, and the knoll ap peared swelling and bursting as with yeast. the various hues of brown were most beauti fully blended, so that the earth appeared cov ered with the softest and most harmoniously spotted and tinted fur coat in short, in these early spring rains, the withered herbage thus saturated, and reflecting its brightest with ered tint, seems in a certain degree to have re vived, and sympathizes with the fresh greenish, or yellowish, or brownish lichens in its midst, which also seemed to have withered. it seemed to "^e, and i think it may be the truth, that the abundant moisture, bringing out the highest color on the brown surface of the earth, gen erated a certain degree of light, which, when the rain held up a little, reminded you of the sun shining through a thick mist the barrenest surfaces are perhaps the most inter 132 early spring in massachusetts. eating in such weather as yesterday, where the most terrene colors are seen. the wet earth and sand, and especially subsoil, are very invig orating sights. it is remarkable that the spots where i find most arrow-heads, etc., being light, dry soil (as the great fields, clamshell hill, etc.), are among the first to be bare of snow and free from frost. it is very curiously and particu larly true, for the only parts of the northeast section of the great fields which are so dry that i do not slump there, are those, small in area, where perfectly bare patches of sand oc cur, and there, singularly enough, the arrow heads are particularly common. indeed, in some cases, i find them only on such bare spots, a rod or two in extent, where a single wigwam might have stood, and not half a dozen rods off in any direction. yet the difference of level may not be more than a foot, if there is any. it is as if the indians had selected pre cisely the driest spots on the whole plain with a view to their advantage at this season. if vou were going to pitch a tent to-night on the great fields, you would inevitably pitch on one of those spots, or else lie down in water or mud, or on ice. it is as if they had chosen the site of <heir wigwams at this very season of the year. march 14, 1842. it is not easy to find one early spring in massachusetts. 133 brave enough to play the game of love quite alone with you, but they must get some third person or world to countenance them. they thrust others between. love is so delicate and fastidious that i see not how it can ever begin. do you expect me to love with you unless you make my love secondary to nothing else ? your words come tainted if the thought of the world darts between thee and the thought of me. you are not venturous enough for love. it goes alone unscared through wildernesses. as soon as i see people loving what they see merely, and not their own high hopes that they form of others, j pity them, and do not want their love. did i ask thee to love me who hate myself ? no ! love that which i love, and i will love thee that loves it. the love is faint-hearted and short-lived that is contented with the past history of its object. it does not prepare the soil to bear new crops lustier than the old. i would i had leisure for these thidgs, sighs the world. when i have done my quilting and baking, then i will not be backward. love never stands still, nor does its object. it is the revolving sun and the swelling bud. if i know what i love, it is because i remem ber it. life is grand, and so are its environments of 134 eaelt spring in massachusetts. past and future. would the face of nature be bo serene and beautiful if man's destiny were not equally so ? what am i good for now, who am still search ing after high things, but to hear and tell the news, to bring wood and water, and count how many eggs the hens lay? in the meanwhile i expect my life to begin. i will not aspire longer. i will see what it is i would be after. i will be unanimous. march 14, 1854. great concert of song-spar rows in willows and alders along swamp brook by river. hardly hear a distinct strain. < couples chasing each other, and some tree sparrows with them p. m. to great meadows. counted over forty robins with my glass in the meadow north of sleepy hollow on the grass and on the snow. a large company of fox-colored sparrows in heywood's maple swamp close by. i heard their loud, sweet, canary-like whistle thirty or forty rods off, sounding richer than anything else yet ; some on the bushes, singing twee twee twa twa twa ter tweer tweer twa. this is the scheme of it only, there being no dental grit. they were shy, flitting before me, and i heard a slight susurrus where many were busily scratch ing amid the leaves in the swamp, without seeing them, and also saw many indistinctly. eaelt spring in massachusetts. 135 wilson never heard but one sing, their common note, where he heard them, being a cheep. from within the house at 5£ p. m. i hear the loud honking of geese, throw up the window, and see a large flock in disordered harrow fly ing more directly north, or even northwest than usual. raw, thick, misty weather. march 14, 1855. i observe the tracks of sparrows leading to every little sprig of blue curls amid the other weeds, which, with its seemingly empty pitchers, rises above the snow. there seems, however, to be a little seed left in them. this, then, is reason enough why these withered stems still stand, that they may raise these granaries above the snow for the use of the snowbirds. march 14, 1858. p. m. i see a fringilla hiemalis, the first bird, perchance, unless one hawk, which is an evidence of spring, though they lingered with us the past unusual winter till the 19th of january. they are now getting back earlier than our permanent summer resi dents. it flits past with a rattling or grating chip, showing its two white tail feathers. march 14, 1860. no sooner has the ice of walden melted than the wind begins to play in dark ripples over the face of the virgin water. it is affecting to see nature so tender, however old, and wearing none of the wrinkles of age. 136 early spring ih massachusetts. ice dissolved is the next moment as perfect water as if it had been melted a million years. to see that which was lately so hard and im movable now so soft and impressible. what if our moods could dissolve thus completely? it is like a flush of life on a cheek that was dead. it seems as if it must rejoice in its own newly acquired fluidity, as it affects the be holder with joy. often the march winds have no chance to ripple its face at all. march 15, 1841. when i have access to a man's barrel of sermons, which were written from week to week as his life lapsed, though i now know bim to live cheerfully and bravely enough, still i cannot conceive what interval there was for laughter and smiles in the midst of so much sadness. almost in proportion to the sincerity and earnestness of the life will be the sadness of the record. when i reflect that twice a week for so many years he pondered and preached such a sermon, i think he must have been a splenetic and melancholy man, and wonder if his food digested well. it seems as if the fruit of virtue was never a careless happiness. a great cheerfulness have all great wits possessed, almost a profane levity to such as understood them not, but their religion had the broader basis in proportion as it was less prominent. the religion i love is very laic. early speing in massachusetts. 137 the clergy are as diseased and as much pos sessed with a devil as the reformers. they make their topic as offensive as the politician ; for our religion is as unpublic and incommuni cable as our poetical vein, and to be approached tvith as much love and tenderness. march 15, 1842 the poor have come out to employ themselves in the sunshine, the old and feeble to scent the air once more. " i hear the bluebird, the song-sparrow, and the robin, and the note of the lark leaks up through the meadows, as if its bill had been thawed by the'warm sun. as i am going to the woods i think to take some small book in my pocket, whose author has been there already, whose pages will be as good as my thoughts, and will eke them out or show me human life still gleam ing in the horizon when the woods have shut out the town. but i can find none. none will sail as far forward into the bay of nature as my thought. they stay at home. i would go home. when i get to the wood their thin leaves rustle in my fingers. they are bare and obvious, and there is no halo or haze about them. nature lies fair and far behind them all. cold spring. i hear nothing but a phebe, and the wind, and the rattling of a chaise in the wood. for a few years i stay here, not knowing, taking my own life by degrees, and 138 eaelt spring in massachusetts. then i go. i hear a spring hubbling near where i drank out of a can in my earliest youth. the birds, the squirrels, the alders, the pines, they seem serene and in their places. i wonder if my life looks as serene to them too. does no creature, then, see, not only with the eyes of its own narrow destiny, but with god's ? when god made man, he reserved some parts and some rights to himself. the eye has many qualities which belong to god more than man. it is his lightning which flashes therein. when i look into my companion's eye, i think it is god's private mine. it is a noble feature '; it cannot be degraded. for god can look on all things undented. pond. nature is constantly original and in denting new patterns, like a mechanic in his shop. when the overhanging pine drops into the water, by the action of the sun and of the wind rubbing it on the shore, its boughs become white and smooth, and assume fantastic forms, as if turned by a lathe. all things, indeed, are subjected to a rotary motion, either gradual and partial, or rapid and complete, from the planet and system to the simplest shell-fish and pebbles on the beach. as if all beauty resulted from an object's turning on its own axis, or from the turning of others about it. it estab lishes a new centre in the universe. as al' eaely spring in massachusetts. 139 curves have reference to their centres or foci, so all beauty of character has reference to the soul, and is a graceful gesture of recognition or ■waving of the body toward it. the great and solitary heart will love alone, without the knowledge of its object. it cannot have society in its love. it will expend its love as the cloud drops rain upon the fields over which it floats. the only way to speak the truth is to speak lovingly. only the lover's words are heard. the intellect should never speak. it does not utter a natural sound. how trivial the best actions are. i am led about from sunrise to sunset by an ignoble rou tine, and yet can find no better road. i must make a part of the planet. i must obey the law of nature. march 15, 1852. this afternoon i throw off my outside coat. a mild spring day. i must hie to the great meadows. the air is full of bluebirds ; the ground almost entirely bare. the villagers are out in the sun, and every man is happy whose work takes him out doors. i go by sleepy hollow toward the great fields. i lean over a rail to hear what is in the air ,'iquid with the bluebirds' warble. my life par takes of infinity. the air is as deep as our na ture. is the drawing in of this vital air at* 140 early spring in massachusetts. tended with no more glorious results than i witness ? the air is a velvet cushion against which i press my ear. i go forth to make new demands on life. i wish to begin this summer well, to do something in it worthy of it and of me, to transcend my daily routine and that of my townsmen, to have my immortality now, in the quality of my daily life, to pay the greatest price, the greatest tax, of any man in concord, and enjoy the most ! ! i will give all i am for my nobility. i will pay all my days for my suc cess. i pray that the life of this spring and summer may ever lie fair in my memory. may i dare as i have never done. may i persevere as i have never done. may i purify myself anew as with fire and water, soul and body. may my melody not be wanting to the season. may i gird myself to be a hunter of the beau tiful, that naught escape me. may i attain to a youth never attained. i am eager to report the glory of the universe. may i be worthy to do it, to have got through with regarding hu man values so as not to be distracted from re garding divine values. it is reasonable that a man should be something worthier at the end of the year than he was at the beginning. yesterday's rain, in which i was glad to be drenched, has advanced the spring, settled the ways, and the old foot-path and the brook and early spring in massachfsetts. 141 the plank bridge behind the hill which have been buried so long,; are suddenly uncovered, as if we had returned to our earth after an ab sence and took pleasure in finding things so nearly in the state in which we left them. we go out without overcoats, saunter along the street, look at the aments of the willow begin ning to appear, and the swelling buds of the maple and the elm. the great meadows are water instead of ice. i see the ice on the bot tom in white sheets. most men find farming unprofitable. but there are some who can get their living any where. if you set them down on a bare rock, they will thrive there. the true farmer is to those that come after him and take the benefit of his improvements like the lichen which plants itself on the bare rock and grows and thrives and cracks it, making vegetable mould for the garden vegetables which are to grow in it. march 15, 1854. i am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. severe truth is ex pressed with some bitterness. march 15, 1855. mr. rice tells me. that when he was getting mud out of the little bwamp at the foot of brister's hill he heard a squeaking and found that he was digging into 142 eaely spring in massachusetts. the nest of what he called a " field mouse," from his description probably the meadow mouse. it was made of grass, etc., and while he stood over it, the mother, not regarding him, came and carried off the young, one by one, in her mouth, being gone some time in each case before she returned, and finally she took the nest itself. march 15, 1857. p. m. to hubbard's close and walden. i see in the ditches in hubbard's close the fine green tips of the spires of grass just rising above the surface of the water in one place, as if unwilling to trust itself to the frosty air. favored by the warmth of the water and sheltered by the banks of the ditch it has ad vanced thus far. but generally i see only the placid and frost-bitten tips of grass which ap parently started during that warm spell in feb ruary. the surface of the ditches is spotted with these pale and withered frost-bitten blade lets. it was the first green blush (nay, it is purple or lake often, and a true blush) of spring, of that indian spring we had in february. to be present at the instant when the springing grass at the bottoms of ditches lifts its spear above the surface and bathes in the spring air. many a first faint crop mantling the pools thus early is mown down by the frost before the vil lager suspects that vegetation has reawakened. the trout darts away in the hazy brook there eably spring in massachusetts. 143 30 swiftly in zigzag course that commonly i only see the ripple he makes, in proportion, in thi3 brook only a foot wide, like that made by a steamer in a canal. if i catch a glimpse of him before he buries himself in the mud, it is only a dark film without distinct outline. by his zigzag course he bewilders the eye and avoids capture perhaps. march 15, 1860. 2 p.m. to lee's cliff. . . . a henhawk sails away from the wood south ward. i get a very fair sight of it sailing over head. what a perfectly regular and neat out line it presents ! an easily recognized figure any where. yet i never see it represented in books. the exact correspondence of the marks on one side to those on the other, as of the black or dark tip on one wing to that of the other, and the dark line midway the wing. i do not be lieve that one can get as correct an idea of the form and color of the under sides of a hen hawk's wings by spreading those of a dried specimen in his study as by looking up at a free and living hawk soaring above him in the fields. the penalty for obtaining a petty knowledge thus dishonestly is that it is less interesting to men generally as it is less significant. some seeing and admiring the neat figure of the hawk bailing two or three hundred feet above their heads, wish to get nearer and hold it in their 144 early spring in massachusetts. hands, perchance, not realizing that they can bee it beet at a distance, better now, perhaps, than ever they will again. what is an eagle in captivity ! screaming in a court-yard ! i am not the wiser respecting eagles for having seen one there. i do not wish to know the length of its entrails. how neat and all compact the hawk 1 its wings and body are all one piece, the wings apparently the greater part, while its body is a mere fullness, a protuberance between its wings, an inconspicuous pouch hung there. it suggests no insatiable maw, no corpulence, but looks like a large moth, with little body in pro portion to its wings, its body naturally more etherealized as it soars higher. these hawks, as usual, began to be common about the first of march, showing that they were returning from their winter quarters. am surprised to hear from the pool behind lee's cliff the croaking of the wood frog. it is all alive with them and i see them spread out on the surface. their note is somewhat in harmony with the rustling of the now drier leaves. it is more like the note of the classical frog as described by aristophanes, etc. how suddenly they awake. yesterday, as it were, asleep and dormant; to-day, as lively as ever they are. the awakening of the leafy wood« early spring in massachusetts. 145 land pools. they must awake in good condi tion. as walden opens eight days earlier than i have known it, so this frog croaks about as much earlier it is remarkable how lit tle certain knowledge even old weather-wise men have of the comparative earliness of the year. they will speak of the passing spring as earlier or later than they ever knew, when per chance the third spring before, it was equally early or late, as i have known. march 16, 1840. the cabins of the settlers are the points whence radiate these rays of green and yellow and russet over the landscape. out of these go the axes and spades with which the landscape is painted. how much is the indian summer and the budding of spring re lated to the cottage. have not the flight of the crow and the gyrations of the hawk a refer ence to that roof? the ducks alight at this season on the wind ward side of the river in the smooth water, and swim about by twos and threes, pluming them selves and diving to peck at the root of the lily and the cranberries which the frost has not loosened. it is impossible to approach them within gunshot when they are accompanied by the gull which rises sooner and makes them sestless. they fly to windward first in order to get under weigh, and are more easily reached 10 146 early spring in massachusetts. by tne shot if approached on that side. when preparing to fly they swim about with their heads erect and then gliding along a few feet with their bodies just touching the surface, rise heavily with much splashing, and fly low at first, if not suddenly aroused, but otherwise rise directly to survey the danger. the cunning sportsman is not in haste to desert his position, but waits to ascertain if, having got themselves into flying trim, they will not return over the ground in their course to a new resting-place. march 16, 1842. raleigh's maxims are not true and impartial, but yet are expressed with a certain magnanimity which was natural to the man, as if this selfish policy could easily af ford to give place in him to a more human and generous one. he gives such advice that we have more faith in his conduct than his princi ples. he seems to have carried the courtier's life to the highest pitch of magnanimity and grace it was capable of. he is liberal and gra cious as a prince, that is, within bounds ; brave, chivalrous, heroic, as the knight in armor, and not as a defenseless man. his was not the heroism of luther, but of bayard. there was more of grace than of truth in it. he had more taste than character. there may be something petty in a refined taste ; it easily degenerates into effeminacy. it does not con« eaely spring in massachusetts. 147 sider the broadest use. it is not content with simple good and bad, and so is fastidious and curious, or nice only that is very true which raleigh says about the equal necessity*of war and law, that " the necessity of war which among human actions is most lawless hath some kind of affinity and near resemblance with the necessity of law," for both equally rest on force as their basis, and war is only the resource of law, either on a smaller or larger scale, its authority asserted. in war, in some sense, lie3 the very genius of law. it is law creative and active, it is the first principle of law. what is human warfare but just this, an effort to make the laws of god and nature take sides with one party. men make an arbitrary code, and, be cause it is not right, they try to make it prevail by might. the moral law does not want any champion. its assertors do not go to war. it was never infringed with impunity. it is in consistent to deny war and maintain law, for if there were no need of war there would be no need of law. march 16, 1852. before sunrise. with what infinite and unwearied expectation and procla mation the cocks usher in every dawn, as if there had never been one before, and the dogs bark still, and the thallus of lichens springs, so tenacious of life is nature. 148 early spring in massachusetts. spent the day in cambridge library. .... what a wilderness of books it is. looking over books on canada written within the last three hundred years, i could see how one had been built on another, each author consulting and re ferring to his predecessors. you could read most of them without changing your position on the steps. it is necessary to find out ex actly what books to read on a. given subject. though there may be a thousand books written upon it, it is only necessary to read three or four. they will contain all that is essential, and a few pages will show which they are. books which are books are all that you want, and there are but half a dozen in any thousand. i saw that while we are clearing the forest in our westward progress, we are accumulating a forest of books in our rear, as wild and unex plored as any of nature's primitive wildernesses. the volumes of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and sev enteenth centuries which lie so near on the shelf, are rarely opened, are effectually forgot ten, and not implied by our literature and newspapers. when i looked into one of them, it affected me like looking into an inaccessible swamp, ten feet deep with sphagnum, where the inonarchs of the forest covered with mosses and stretched along the ground were making haste to become peat. those old books sug early spring in massachusetts. 149 gested a certain fertility, an ohio soil, as if they were making a humus for new literatures to spring in. i heard the bellowing of bull frogs and the hum of mosquitoes reverberating through the thick embossed covers when i had closed the book. decayed literature makes the richest of all soils. march 16, 1854. a. m. another fine morn ing. willows and alders along water courses all alive these mornings, and ringing with the trills and jingles and warbles of birds, even as the waters have lately broken loose and tinkle below, song-sparrows, blackbirds, not to men tion robins, etc., etc. the song-sparrows are very abundant, peopling each bush, willow, or alder for a quarter of a mile and pursuing each other as if now selecting their mates. it is their song which especially fills the air, made an incessant and indistinguishable trill and jin gle by their numbers. i see ducks afar sailing on the meadow leaving a long furrow in the water behind them. watch them at leisure without scaring them, with my glass, observe their free and undisturbed motions. some dark orown, partly on water, alternately dipping with their tails up, partly on land. others with bright white breasts, etc., and black heads, of about the same size or larger. (later date. probably both are sheldrakes.) they dive and 150 early spring in massachusetts. are gone some time, and come up a rod off. at first i saw but one, then, a minute after, three. the first phebe, near the water, is heard. march 16, 1855. p. m. to conantum end. at the woodchuck's hole, just beyond the cock spur thorn, i see several diverging and con verging tracks of, undoubtedly, a woodchuck or several, which must have come out at least as early as the 13th. the track is about one and three quarters inches wide by two long, the five toes very distinct and much spread, and, in cluding the scrape of the snow before the foot came to its bearing, is somewhat handlike. it is simple and alternate, thus, ****** commonly, but sometimes much like a rabbit's, and again, like a mink's, somewhat thus * * e they had come out and run about directly from hole to hole, six in all, within a dozen rods or more. this appeared to have been all their traveling, as if they had run round a visiting and waked each other up the first thing. at first they soiled the snow with their sandy feet. at one place they had been clearing out to day the throat of two holes within a rod of each other, scattering the mud-like sand, made wet by the melting snow, over the pure snow around. i saw where, between these holes, they had sat on a horizontal limb of a shrub-oak (which they had tried their teeth on) about 9 early spring in massachusetts. 151 foot from the ground, plainly to warm and dry themselves in the sun, having muddied it all over. i also saw where one had sunned him self on a stone at the foot «f a small pitch pine, and tried his teeth on a dead limb of the pine. they could not go in or out of these sandy burrows without being completely covered with bandy mud. the path over the snow between these holes was quite covered with it. they have but four toes on the fore feet with the rudiment of a thumb. the woodchuck's first journey then appears to be to some neighboring hole which he remembers a dozen or fifteen rods off, and, perchance, he goes as straight or uner ringly to it as if he had not been asleep all win ter. apparently, after a little gossiping there, his first work is to clear out the entrance to his burrow, ejecting the leaves and sand which have there collected. none have traveled beyond these holes, except that one track leads into the swamp. but here are the tracks of foxes bound on longer journeys. they are generally ten or twelve inches apart lengthwise, by three to five wide, ' . ' . " but are irreg ular, now two at the usual distance, then two close together orthree or four inches apart only. the foot is very shapely, much like a dog's. march 16, 1858 a still, foggy, and rather warm day. i heard this morning . . . 152 early spring in massachusetts. that peculiar drawling note of a hen who has this hennish way of expressing her content at the sight of bare ground and mild weather. the crowing of cocks and cawing of crows tell the same story how conversant the indian, who lived out of doors, must have been with mouse ear leaves, pine needles, mosses, and lichens which form the crust of the earth. no doubt he had names accordingly for many things for which we have no popular names. i walk in muddy fields hearing the tinkle of the new-born rills. where the melted snow has made a swift rill in the rut of a cart-path, flowing over an icy bottom, and between icy banks, i see, just below a little fall an inch high, a circular mass of foam or white bubbles nearly two inches in diameter, slowly revolving, but never moving off. the swift stream at the fall appears to strike one side, as it might the side of a water wheel, and so cause it to revolve ; but in the angle between this and the fall half an inch distant, is another circle of bubbles, re volving very rapidly in the opposite direction. the laws, perchance, by which the world was made, and according to which the systems re volve, are seen in full operation in a rill of melted snow. march 16, 1859. p. m. launch my boat eably spring in massachusetts. 153 and sail to ball's hill. it is fine, clear weather, and a strong northwest wind. what, a change since yesterday ! last night i qame home through as incessant heavy rain as i have been out in for many years, through the muddiest and wettest of streets, still partly covered with ice, and the rain-water stood over shoes in many places on the sidewalks. i heard of several who went astray in this water, and had adven tures in the dark. you require india-rubber boots then. but to-day i see the children play ing at hop-scotch on those very sidewalks, with a bed marked in the dry sand. so rapid are the changes of weather with us and so porous our soil a new phase of the spring is presented, a new season has come. we no longer see drip ping, saturated russet and brown banks through rain, hearing at intervals the alarm notes of early robins, banks which reflect a yellowish light, but we see the bare and now pale-brown and dfy russet hills. the earth has cast off her white coat and come forth in her clean washed, sober, russet, early spring dress. as ive look over the lively tossing blue waves for a mile or more eastward and westward, our eyes fall on these shining russet hills. ball's hill appears in the strong light, at the verge of this undulating blue plain, like some glo 154 early spring in massachusetts. nous newly-created island of the spring, just sprung up from the bottom in the midst of the blue waters. the fawn-colored oak leaves, with a few pines intermixed, thickly covering the hill, look not like a withered vegetation, but an ethereal kind just expanded and peculiarly adapted to the season and the sky. look toward the sun, the water is yellow, as water in which the earth had just washed itself clean of its winter impurities ; look from the sun and it is a beautiful dark-blue, but in each direction the crests of the waves are white, and you cannot sail or row over this watery wilder ness without sharing the excitement of this ele ment. our sail draws so strongly that we cut through the great waves without feeling them. .... we meet one great gull beating up the course of the river against the wind at flint's bridge. it is a very leisurely sort of limping flight, the bird tacking its way along like a sail ing vessel. yet the slow security with which it advances suggests a leisurely contemplative ness, as if it were working out some problem quite at its leisure. as often as its very nar row, long, and curved wings are lifted up against the light, i see a very narrow, distinct light edging to the wing where it is thin. its black tipt wings. afterwards from ball's hill i see two more circling about looking for food over the ice and water. eably spring in massachusetts. 155 march 16, 1860. saw a flock of sheldrakes a hundred rods off on the great meadows, mostly males, with a few females, all intent on fishing. they were coasting along a spit of bare ground that showed itself in the middle of the meadow, sometimes the whole twelve^ ap parently in a straight line, at nearly equal dis tances apart, each with its head under water, rapidly coasting along back and forth, and ever and anon one having caught something would be pursued by the others. it is remarkable that they find their finny prey in the middle of the meadow now, and even on the very inmost side, as i afterward saw, though the water is quite low. of course, as soon as they are seen on the meadows there are fishes there to be caught. i never see them fish thus in the chan nel. perhaps the fishes lie up there for warmth already. i also see two gulls nearly a mile off. one stands still and erect for three quarters of an hour, or till disturbed, on a little bit of floated meadow crust which rises above the water, just room for it to stand on, with its great white breast toward the wind. then another comes flying past it, and alights on a similar perch, but which does not rise quite to the surface, so that it stands in the water. thus they will stand fo> an hour, at least. they are not of 156 early spking in massachusetts. handsome form, but look like great wooden im ages of birds, bluish slate, and white. but when they fly they are quite another creature. march, 17, 1842. i have been making pen cils all day, and then at evening walked to see an old schoolmate who is going to help make the welland canal navigable for ships round niagara. he cannot see any such motives and modes of living as i, professes not to look be yond the securing of certain " creature com forts." and so we go silently different ways with all serenity, i, in the still moonlight through the village this fair evening to write these thoughts in my journal, and he, forsooth, to mature his schemes to ends as good, may be, but different. so are we two made, while the same stars shine quietly over us. if i or he be wrong, nature yet consents placidly. she bites her lip and smiles to see how her children will agree. so does the welland canal get built and other conveniences, while i live. well and good, i must confess. fast-sailing ships are hence not detained. what means this changing sky, that now i freeze and contract and go within myself to warm me, and now i say it is a south wind and go all soft and warm along the way ? i some times wonder if i do not breathe the south wind. eaelt spring in massachusetts. 157 march 17, 1852. i catch myself philosophiz ing most abstractly when first returning to con sciousness in the night or morning. i make the truest observations and distinctions then, when the will is yet wholly asleep, and the mind works like a machine without friction. i am conscious of having in my sleep transcended the limits of the individual, and made observa tions and carried on conversations which in my waking hours i can neither recall nor appre ciate. as if in sleep our individual fell into the infinite mind, and at the moment of awakening we found ourselves on the confines of the latter. on awakening we resume our enterprises, take up our bodies, and become limited mind again. we meet and converse with those bodies which we have previously animated. there is a mo ment in the dawn when the darkness of the night is dissipated and before the exhalations of the day begin to rise, when we see things more truly than at any other time. the light is more trustworthy, since our senses are purer and the atmosphere is less gross. by afternoon all objects are seen in mirage to-day the fox-colored sparrow is on its way to hudson's bay. march 17, 1854. . . . the grass is slightly greened on south bank-sides, on the south side of the house. the first tinge of green appears 158 eaklt spring in massachusetts. to be due to moisture more than direct heat. it is not on bare, dry banks, but in hollows •where the snow melts last, that it is most con spicuous. march 17, 1855. see now along the edge of the river, the ice being gone, many fresh heaps of clam-shells which were opened by the mus quash when the water was higher, about some tree where the ground rises. and in very many places you see where they formed new burrows into the bank, the sand being pushed out into the stream about the entrance, which is still be low water, and you feel the ground undermined as you walk. march 17, 1857. these days, beginning with the 14th, more spring-like. i hear the note of the woodpecker from the elms, that early note. launch my boat. no mortal is alert enough to be present at the first dawn of the spring, but he will presently discover some evidence that vegetation had awaked some days at least before. early as i have looked this year, per haps the first unquestionable growth of an in digenous plant detected was the fine tips of grass blades which the frost had killed, floating pale and placid, though still attached to their stems, spotting the pools like a slight fall or flurry of dull-colored snow-flakes. after a few mild and sunny days, even in february, the grass in still early spring in massachusetts. 159 muddy pools and ditches, sheltered by the sur rounding banks which reflect the heat upon it, ventures to lift the points of its green phalanx into the mild and flattering atmosphere, and advances rapidly from the saffron even to the rosy tints of morning. but the following night comes the frost which with rude and ruthless hand sweeps the surface of the pooh and the advancing morning pales into the dim light of earliest dawn. i thus detect the first approach of spring by finding here and there its scouts and vanguard which have been slain by the rearguard of retreating winter. march 17, 1858. hear the first bluebird. p. m. to the hill. a remarkably warm and pleasant day with a south or southwest wind. the air is full of bluebirds, i hear them far and near on all sides of the hill, warbling in the tree-tops, though i do not distinctly see them. i stand by the wall at the east base of the hill, looking into the alder meadow lately cut off. i am peculiarly attracted by its red brown maze, seen in this bright sun and mild southwest wind. it has expression in it as a familiar freckled face. methinks it is about waking up, though it still slumbers. i see the still, smooth pools of water in its midst almost free from ice, and seem to hear the sound of the water soaking into it, as it were, its voice 160 early spring in massachusetts. even the shade is agreeable to-day. you hear the buzzing of a fly from time to time, and see the black speck zig-zag by. x ah, there is the note of the first flicker, a prolonged monotonous wick-wiek-wick-wick-wick wick, etc., or, if you please, quick-quick-quick, heard far over and through the dry leaves. but how that single sound peoples and enriches all the woods and fields ! they are no longer the same woods and fields that they were. this note really quickens what was dead. it seems to put life into the withered grass and leaves and bare twigs, and henceforth the days shall not be as they have been. it is as when a family, your neighbors, return to an empty house after a long absence, and you hear the cheerful hum of voices and the laughter of chil dren, and see the smoke from the kitchen fire. the doors are thrown open, and children go screaming through the hall. so the flicker dashes through the aisles of the grove, throws up a window here, and cackles out of it, and then there, airing the house. he makes his voice ring up-stairs and down-stairs, and so, as it were, fits it for his habitation and ours, and takes possession. it as good as a house-warm ing to all nature. now i hear and see him louder and nearer on the top of the long-armed white oak, sitting very upright, as is their wont, eaely spring in massachusetts. 161 as it were calling to some of his kind that may also have arrived. sitting under the handsome scarlet oak be yond the hill, i hear a faint note far in the wood which reminds me of the robin ; again i hear it ; it is he, an occasional peep. these notes of the earliest birds seem to invite forth vegetation now i .hear, when passing the south side of the hill, or first when threading the maple swamp far west of it, the tohuck tchuek of a blackbird, and after, a distinct conqueree. so it is a red-wing. thus these four species of birds all come in one day, no doubt, to almost all parts of the town. march 17, 1859. 6£ a. m. river rises still higher a great many musquash have been killed within a week. one says a cart load have been killed in assabet. perhaps a dozen gunners have been out in this town every day. they get a shilling apiece for their skins. one man getting musquash and one mink earned five or six dollars the other day. i hear their guns early and late, long before sunrise and after sunset, for these are the best times. p. m. to flint's bridge by water. the water is very high and as smooth as it ever is. it is very warm. i wear but one coat. on the u 162 early spring in massachusetts. water, the town and the land it is built on, rise but little above the flood. this bright, smooth, and level surface seems here the pre vailing element, as if the distant town were an island. i realize how water predominates on the surface of the globe how different to-day from yesterday. yesterday was a cool, bright day, the earth just washed bare by the rain, and a strong northwest wind raised re spectable billows on our vernal seas, and im parted remarkable life and spirit to the scene. to-day it is perfectly still and warm, not a rip ple disturbs the surface of these lakes, but every insect, every small black beetle struggling on it, is betrayed. seen through this air, though many might not notice the difference, the rus set surface of the earth does not shine, is not bright. i see no shining russet islands with dry but flushing oak leaves. the air is com paratively dead when i attend to it, and it is as if there were the veil of a fine mist over all ob jects, dulling their edges. yet this would be called a clear day. these aerial differences in the days are not commonly appreciated, though they affect our spirits. when i am opposite the end of the willow row, seeing the osiers of perhaps two years old, all in a mass, they are seen to be very distinctly yellowish beneath and scarlet above. they are early spring in massachusetts. 163 fifty rods off. here is the same chemistry that colors the leaf or fruit, coloring the bark. it is generally, probably always, the upper part of the twig, the more recent growth, that is the higher colored, and more flower or fruit-like. so leaves are more ethereal, the higher up and farther from the root. in the bark of the twigs, indeed, is the more permanent flower or fruit. the flower falls in spring or summer, the fruit and leaves fall or wither in autumn, but the blushing twigs retain their color throughout the winter, and appear more brilliant than ever the suc ceeding spring. they are winter fruit. it adds greatly to the pleasure of late november, of winter, or of early spring walks to look into these mazes of twigs of different colors. as i float by the rock, i hear a rustling amid ihe oak leaves above that new water line, and there being no wind i know it to be a striped squirrel, and soon see its long unseen striped sides flirting about the instep of an oak. its lateral stripes, alternate black and yellowish, are si type which i have not seen for a long time, = a punctuation mark to indicate that a new paragraph commences in the revolution of the seasons. march 17, 1860. p. m. to walden and goose pond. i see a large flock of sheldrakes, which have probably risen from the pond, go 164 early spring in massachusetts. over my head in the woods, a dozen large and compact birds flying with great force and rapid ity, spying out the land, eyeing every traveler. now you hear the whistling of their wings, and in a moment they are lost in the horizon. what health and vigor they suggest i the life of man seems slow and puny in comparison, reptilian. how handsome a flock of red-wings, ever changing its oval form as it advances, from the rear birds pursuing the others. march 18, 1842. whatever book or sentence will bear to be read twice, we may be sure was thought twice. i say this thinking of carlyle, who writes pictures or first impressions merely, which consequently will only bear a first read ing. as if any transient, any new, mood of the best man deserved to detain the world long. i should call his writing essentially dramatic, ex cellent acting, entertaining especially to those who see rather than those who hear, not to be repeated, more than a joke. if he did not think who made the joke, how shall he think who hears it. he never consults the oracle, but thinks to utter oracles himself. there is noth ing in his book for which he is not and does not feel responsible. he does not retire behind the truth he utters, but stands in the fore-ground. i wish he would just think, and tell me what he early spring in massachusetts. 165 thinks, appear to me in the attitude of a man with his ear inclined, who comes as silently and meekly as the morning star which is uncon scious of the dawn it heralds ; leading the way up the steep as though alone and unobserved in its observing, without looking behind. march 18, 1852. that is a pretty good story told of a london citizen just retired to country life on a fortune, who wishing, among other novel rustic experiments, to establish a number of bee communities, would not listen to the ad vice of his under-steward, but asking fiercely "how he could be so thoughtless as to recom mend a purchase of what might so easily be pro cured on the downs?" ordered him to hire ten women to go in quest of bees the next morning, and to prepare hives for the reception of the captives. early the next day the detachment started for the downs, each furnished with a tin canister to contain the spoil ; and after run ning about for hours, stunning the bees with blows from their straw bonnets, and encounter ing stings without number, secured about thirty prisoners who were safely lodged in a hive. but as has been the fate of many arduous cam paigns, little advantage accrued from all this fatigue and danger. next morning the squire sallied forth to visit his new colony. as he ap proached, a loud humming assured him that 166 early spring in massachusetts. they were hard at work, when, to his infinite disappointment, it was found that the bees had made their escape through a small hole in the hive, 'leaving behind them only an unfortunate humble-bee, whose bulk prevented his squeez ing himself through the aperture, and whose loud complaints had been mistaken for the busy hum of industry." you must patiently study the method of nature, and take advice of the under-steward in the establishment of all communities, both insect and human. prob ably the bees could not make industry attract ive under the circumstances described above. a wise man will not go out of his way for information. he might as well go out of na ture, or commit suicide. march 18, 1853 the bluebird and song-sparrow sing immediately on their ar rival, and hence deserve to enjoy some preemi nence. they give expression to the joy which the season inspires, but the robin and black bird only peep and tchuck at first, commonly, and the lark is silent and flitting. the blue bird at once fills the air with his sweet warb ling, and the song-sparrow from the top of a rail pours forth his most joyous strain. both oxpress their delight at the weather, which per mits them to return to their favorite haunts they are the more welcome to man for it. eaelt speing in massachusetts. 167 the sun is now declining with a warm and bright light on all things, a light which answers to the late afterglow of the year, when, in the fall, wrapping his cloak about him, the traveler goes home at night to prepare for winter. this is the foreglow of the year, when the walker goes home at eve to dream of summer. march 18, 1855. round by hollowell place via clam-shell. i see with my glass as i go over the railroad bridge, sweeping the river, a great gull standing far away on the top of a musk-rat cabin, which rises just above the water. when i get round within sixty rods of him, ten min utes later, he still stands on the same spot, con stantly turning his head to every side looking out for food. like a wooden image of a bird he stands there, heavy to look at, head, breast, beneath, and rump, pure white, slate-colored wings tipped with black, and extending beyond the tail, the herring gull. i can see down to his webbed feet. but now i advance and he rises easily, and goes off northeastward over the river with a leisurely flight. at clam-shell hill i sweep the river again, and see standing midleg deep on the meadow where the water is very shallow, with deeper around, another of these wooden images, which is harder to scare. i do not fairly distinguish black tips to its wings. it is ten or fifteen 168 eakly spring in massachusetts. minutes before i get him to rise, and then he goes off in the same leisurely manner, stroking the air with his wings, and now making a great circle back in his course, so that you cannot tell which way he is bound. by standing so long motionless in these places they may, per chance, accomplish two objects, i. e., catch pass ing fish (suckers ?) like a heron, and escape the attention of man. his utmost motions were to plume himself once, and turn his head about. if he did not move his head he would look like a decoy. march 18, 1858. 7 a. m. by river. al most every bush has its song-sparrow this morn ing, and their tinkling strains are heard on all sides. you see them just hopping under a bush or into some other covert as you go by, turning with a jerk this way and that ; or they flit away just above the ground, which they resem ble. theirs is the prettiest strain i have heard yet. m is already out in his boat for all day with his white hound in the prow, bound up the river for musquash, etc., but the river is hardly high enough to drive them out. p. m. to fair haven hill via hubbard's bathing place. how much more habitable a few birds make the fields i at the end of the winter, when the fields are bare, and there is nothing to relieve the monotony of withered eaely spring in massachusetts. 169 vegetation, our life seems reduced to its lowest terms. but let a bluebird come and warble over them, and what a change ! the note of the first bluebird in the air answers to the purl ing rill of melted snow beneath. it is evidently soft and soothing, and, as surely as the ther mometer, indicates a higher temperature. it is the accent of the south wind, its vernacular. it is modulated by the south wind. the song-sparrow is more sprightly, mingling its notes with the rustling of the brush along the water sides, but it is at the same time more terrene than the bluebird. the first wood pecker comes screaming into the empty house, and throws open doors and windows wide, call ing out each of them to let the neighbors know of its return. but heard farther off it is very suggestive of ineffable associations, which can not be distinctly recalled, of long-drawn summer hours, and thus it also has the effect of music. i was not aware that the capacity to hear the woodpecker had slumbered within me so long. when the blackbird gets to a conqueree he seems to be dreaming of the sprays that are to be and on which he will perch. the robin does not come singing, but utters a somewhat anxious or inquisitive peep at first. the song-sparrow is immediately most at home of those i have named. 170 early spring in massachusetts. each new year is a surprise to us. we find that we had virtually forgotten the note of each bird, and when we hear it again it is remem bered like a dream, reminding us of a previous state of existence. how happens it that the associations it awakens are always pleasing, never saddening, reminiscences of our sanest hours. the voice of nature is always encour aging. when i get two thirds up the hill, i look round, and am for the hundredth time sur prised by the landscape of the river valley and the horizon with its distant blue-scolloped rim. it is a spring landscape, and as impos sible a fortnight ago as the song of birds. it is a deeper and warmer blue than in winter, methinks. the snow is off the mountains, which seem even to have come again like the birds. the undulating river is a bright blue channel between sharp-edged, shores of ice re tained by the willows. the wind blows strong but warm from west by north (so that i have to hold my paper tight while i write this), mak ing the copses creak and roar, but the sharp tinkle of a song-sparrow is heard through it all. but, ah ! the needles of the pine, how they shine, as i look down over the holden wood and westward ! every third tree is lit with •toe most subdued, but clear, ethereal light, ay early spring in massachusetts. 171 if it were the most delicate frost-work in a win ter morning, reflecting no heat, but only light. and as they rock and wave in the strong wind, even a mile off, the light courses up and down them as over a field of grain, i. e., they are al ternately light and dark, like looms above the forest, when the shuttle is thrown between the light woof and the dark web. at sight of this my spirit is like a lit tree. it runs or flashes over their parallel boughs as when you play with the teeth of a comb. not only osiers, but pine needles, shine brighter, i think, in the spring, and arrow-heads and railroad rails, etc., etc. anacreon noticed this spring shining. is it not from the higher sun and cleansed air and greater animation of nature ? there is a warmer red on the leaves of the shrub oak and on the tail of the hawk circling over them. i sit on the cliff and look toward sudbury. i see its meeting-houses and its common, and its fields lie but little beyond my ordinary walk. how distant in all important senses may be the town which yet is within sight. with a glass i might, perchance, read the time on its clock. how circumscribed are our walks after all ! with the utmost industry we cannot expect to know well an area more than six miles square ; and yet we pretend to be travelers, to be ac quainted with siberia and africa. 172 early spring in massachusetts. march 18, 1860. i examine the skunk cab bage now generally and abundantly in bloom all along under clam-shell. it is a flower, as it were, without a leaf. all that you see is a stout beaked hood just rising above the dead brown grass in the springy ground where it has felt the heat under some south bank. the single enveloping leaf or "spathe" is all the flower that you see commonly, and these are as variously colored as tulips, and of singular color, from a very dark, almost black mahogany to a bright yellow, streaked or freckled with mahogany. it is a leaf simply folded around the flower, with its top like a bird's beak bent over it for its further protection, evidently to keep off wind and frost, and having a sharp angle down its back. these various colors are seen close together, and the beaks are bent in various directions. all along under that bank i heard the hum of honey bees in the air, at tracted by this flower. especially the hum of one within a spathe sounds deep and loud. they circle about the bud, at first hesitatingly, then alight and enter at the open door and crawl over the spadix, and reappear laden with the yellow pollen. what a remarkable instinct it is that leads them to this flower. this bee is said to have been introduced by the white man, bat how much it has learned. this is almost early spring in massachusetts. 173 the only indigenous flower in bloom in this town at present, and probably i and my com panion are the only men who have detected it this year. yet this foreign fly has left its home, probably a mile off, and winged its way to this warm bank to find it. six weeks hence children will set forth a-maying, and have in different luck. but the first sunny and warmer day in march the honey-bee comes forth, stretches its wings, and goes forth in search of the earliest flower. march 18, 1861. when i pass by a twig of willow, though of the slenderest kind, rising above the sedge in some dry hollow, early in december or midwinter, above the snow, my spirits rise, as if it were an oasis in the desert. the very name, sallow (salix, from the celtic sal-lis, near water), suggests that there is some natural sap or blood flowing there. it is a di vining rod that has not failed, but stands with its root in the fountain. the fertile willow catkins are those green caterpillar-like ones, eommonly an inch or more in length, which develop themselves rapidly after the sterile yel low ones, which we had so admired, are fallen or effete. arranged around the bare twigs, they often form green wands trom eight to eighteen inches long. a single catkin consists of from twenty-five to one hundred pods, more 174 eaely spring in massachusetts. or less ovate and beaked, each of which is close •ly packed with cotton, in which are numerous seeds, so small that they are scarcely discern able by ordinary eyes. " the willow worn by forlorn paramour." aa if it were the emblem of despairing love i it is rather the emblem of triumphant love and sympathy with all nature. it may droop, — it is so lithe and supple, — but it never weeps. the willow of babylon blooms not the less hopefully with us though its other half is not in the new england world at all, and never has been. it droops not to represent david's tears, but rather to snatch the crown from alex ander's head. (nor were poplars ever the weep ing sisters of phaeton, for nothing rejoices them more than the sight of the sun's chariot, and little reck they who drives it.) no wonder its wood was anciently in demand for bucklers, for, like the whole tree, it is not only soft and pli ant, but tough and resilient, not splitting at the first blow, but closing its wounds at once, and refusing to transmit its hurts. i know of one foreign species which introduced itself into con cord as a withe used to tie up a bundle of trees. a gardener stuck it in the ground, and it lived, and has its descendants. herodotus says that the scythians divined by the help of willow early spuing in massachusetts. 175 rods. i do not know any better twigs for this purpose. you can't read any genuine history, as that of herodotus or the venerable bede, without perceiving that our interest depends not on the subject, but on the man, or the manner *in which he treats the subject, and the impor tance he gives it. a feeble writer, and with out genius, must have what he thinks a great theme, which we are already interested in through the accounts of others; but a genius, — a shakespeare, for instance, — would make the history of his parish more interesting than another's history of the world. wherever men have lived there is a story to be told, and it de pends chiefly on the story-teller, the historian, whether that is interesting or not. march 19, 1841. no true and brave person will be content to live on such a footing with his fellows and himself as the laws of every house hold now require. the house is the very haunt and lair of our vice. i am impatient to with draw myself from under its roof as an unclean spot. there is no circulation there. it is full of stagnant and mephitic vapors. march 19, 1842. when i walk in the fields of concord and meditate on the destiny of this prosperous slip of the saxon family, the unex hausted energies of this new country, i forget 176 early spring in massachusetts. that this which is now concord was once mus ketaquid, and that the american race has had its destiny also. everywhere in the fields, in the corn and grain land, the earth is strewn with the relics of a race which has vanished as completely as if trodden in with the earth. is it not good to remember the eternity behind me as well as the eternity before? wherever i go i tread in the tracks of the indian. i pick up the bolt which he has but just dropped at my feet. and if i consider destiny i am on his trail. i scatter his hearth-stones with my feet, and pick out of the embers of his fire the simple but enduring implements of the wigwam and the chase. in planting my corn in the same furrow which yielded its increase to his support so long, i displace some memorial of him. i have been walking this afternoon over a pleasant field planted with winter rye in a region where this strange people once had their dwelling-place. another species of mortal men but little less wild to me than the musquash they hunted. strange spirits, demons, whose eye could never meet mine. with another na ture, and another fate than mine. the crows flew over the edge of the woods, and wheeling over my head, seemed to rebuke, as dark winged spirits more akin to the indian than i. perhaps only the present disguise of the indian. if the new has a meaning, so has the old. . . . early spring in massachusetts. 177 a blithe west wind is blowing over all. in the fine flowing haze, men at a distance seem shadowy and gigantic, as ill-defined and great as men should always be. i do not know if yonder be a man or a ghost. what a consolation are the stars to man, so high and out of his reach, as is his own destiny. .... my fate is in some sense linked with theirs, and if they are to persevere to a great end, shall i die who could conjecture it. it surely is some encouragement to know that the stars are my fellow-creatures, for i do not sus pect but they are reserved for a high destiny. man's moral nature is a riddle which only eter nity can solve. i see laws which never fail, of whose failure i never conceived. indeed, i cannot detect failure anywhere but in my fear. i do not fear that right is not right, that good is not good, but only the annihilation of the present exist ence. but only that can make me incapable of fear. my fears are as good prophets as my hopes. march 19, 1852. observed, as i stood with c on the brink of the rill on conantum, where falling a few inches it produced bubbles, our images three quarters of an inch long, and black as imps, appearing to lean towards each other on account of the convexity of the bub 13 178 early spring in massachusetts. bles. there was nothing but these two dis tinct black manikins and the branch of the elm over our heads to be seen. the bubbles rap idly burst and succeeded one another. march 19, 1854. cold and windy. the meadow ice bears where the water is shallow. .... saw in mill brook three or four shiners* (the first), poised over the sand, with a dis tinct longitudinal, light-colored line midway along their sides and a darker line below it. this is a noteworthy and characteristic linea ment, a cypher, a hieroglyphic, or type of spring. you look into some clear, sandy-bot tomed brook, where it spreads into a deeper bay, yet flowing cold from ice and snow not far off, and see indistinctly poised over the sand, on invisible fins, the outlines of a shiner, scarcely to be distinguished from the sand be hind it, as if it were transparent, or as if the material of which it was builded had all been picked up from there, chiefly distinguished by the lines i have mentioned. march 19, 1856 the snow was con stantly sixteen inches deep at least on a level in open land from january 13 to march 13. march 19, 1858. p. m. to hill and grackle swamp. another pleasant and warm day. painted my boat this p. m. these spring im pressions (as of the apparent waking up of tha early spring in massachusetts. 179 meadow described day before yesterday) are not repeated the same year, at least not with the same force, for the next day the same phe nomenon does not surprise us, our appetite has lost its edge. the other day the face of the meadow wore a peculiar appearance as if it were beginning to wake up under the influence of the southwest wind and the warm sun, but it cannot again this year present precisely that appearance to me. i have taken a step for ward to a new position and must see something else. we perceive and are affected by changes too subtle to be described. i see little swarms of those fine fuzzy gnats in the air. it is their wings which are most conspicuous when they are in the sun. their bodies are comparatively small and black, and they have two mourning plumes on their fronts. are not these the winter gnat ? they keep up a circulation in the air like water bugs on the water. sometimes there is a globular swarm two feet or more in diameter suggesting how genial and habitable the air has become. they people a portion of the otherwise vacant air, being apparently for and of the sunshine, in which they are most conspicuous by the river i see distinctly red-wings and hear their conqueree. they are not associated with grackles. they are an age before theit 180 early spring in massachusetts. cousins, have attained to clearness and liquid ity, they are officers, epauletted. the others are rank and file. i distinguish one even by its flight, hovering slowly from tree-top to tree-top, as if ready to utter its liquid notes. their whistle is very clear and sharp, while that of the grackle is ragged and split. it is a fine evening, as i stand on the bridge. the waters are quite smooth, very little ice to be seen. the red-wing and song-sparrow are singing, and a flock of tree-sparrows is pleas antly wajrbling. a new era has come. the red-wing's gurgle-ee is heard where smooth waters begin. one or two boys are out trying their skiffs, even like the fuzzy gnats in the sun, and as often as one turns his boat round on the smooth surface, the setting sun is re flected from its side. i feel reproach when i have spoken with lev ity, when i have made a jest, of my own exist ence. the makers have thus secured serious ness and respect for their work in our very organization. the most serious events have their ludicrous aspects, such as death, but we yannot excuse ourselves when we have taken this view of them only. it is pardonable when we spurn the proprieties, even the sanctities, making them the stepping-stones to something higher. earl? spbing in massachusetts. 181 march 19, 1859. the wind makes such a din about your ears that conversation is diffi cult, your words are blown away and do not strike the ear they were aimed at. if you walk by the water the tumult of the waves confuses you. if you go by a tree or enter the woods the din is yet greater. nevertheless this uni versal commotion is very interesting and excit ing. the white pines in the horizon, either single trees or whole woods, a mile off in the southwest or west, are particularly interesting. you not only see the regular bilateral form of the tree, all the branches distinct like the frond of a fern or a feather (for the pine even at this distance has not merely beauty of outline and color, it is not merely an amorphous and homogeneous or continuous mass of green, but shows a regular succession of flattish leafy boughs or stages in flakes, one above another, like the veins of a leaf, or the leaflets of a frond. it is this richness and symmetry of de tail which more than its outline charms us), but that fine silvery light reflected from its needles (perhaps their under sides) incessantly in motion. as a tree bends and waves like a feather in the gale, i see it alternately dark and light, as the sides of tne needles which re flect the cool sheen are alternately withdrawn from and restored to the proper angle. the 182 early spring in massachusetts. light appears to flash upward from the base of the tree incessantly. in the intervals of the flash it is often as if the tree were withdrawn altogether from sight. i see one large pine wood over whose whole top these cold electric flashes are incessantly passing off harmlessly into the air above. i thought at first of some fine spray dashed upward, but it is rather like broad flashes of pale cold light. surely you can never, under other circumstances, see a pine wood so expressive, so speaking. this re flection of light from the waving crests of the earth is like the play and flashing of electricity. no deciduous tree exhibits these fine effects of light. literally, incessant sheets not of heat, but of cold lightning, you would say, were flash ing there. seeing some just over the roof of a house which was far on this side, i thought at first that it was something like smoke even, though a rare kind of smoke, that went up froni the house. in short, you see a play of light over the whole pine, similar in its cause to that seen on a waving field of grain, but far grander in its effects. seen at mid-day even, it is still the light of dewy morning alone that is reflected from the needles of the pine. this is the brightening and awakening of the pines, a phenomenon, perchance, connected with the flow of sap in them. i feel somewhat like the eakly spring in massachusetts. 183 young astyanax at sight of his father's flashing crest. as if in this wind storm of march a certain electricity were passing from earth to heaven through the pines and calling them to life. we are interested in the phenomena of na ture mainly as children are, or as we are in games of chance. they are more or less ex citing. our appetite for novelty is insatiable. we do not attend to ordinary things, though they are most important, but to extraordinary ones. while it is only moderately hot, or cold, or wet or dry, nobody attends to it, but when nature goes to an extreme in any of these di rections we are all on the alert with excitement. not that we care about the philosophy or the effects of the phenomenon. j8. g., when i went to boston in the early train the coldest morn ing of last winter, two topics seemingly occu pied the attention of the passengers, morphy's chess victories, and nature's victorious cold that morning. the inhabitants of various towns were comparing notes, and that one whose door opened upon a greater degree of cold than any of his neighbors' doors, chuckled not a little. nearly every one i met asked me almost be fore the salutations were over " how the glass stood " at my house or in my town, the libra eian ofsfche college, the register of deeds at 184 eaely spuing in massachusetts. cambridgeport, a total stranger to me, .... and each rubbed his hands with pretended horror but real delight, if i named a higher figure than he had yet heard. it was plain that one object which the cold was given us for was our amusement, a passing excitement. it would be perfectly consistent and american to bet on the cold of our respective towns for the morning that is to come. thus a greater degree of cold may be said to warm us more than a less one. this is a perfectly legitimate amusement, only we should know that each day is peculiar and has its kindred excitements. in those wet days like the 12th and 15th, when the browns culminated, the sun being concealed, i was drawn towards and worshipped the brownish light in the sod, the withered grass, etc., on barren hills. i felt as if i could eat the very crust of the earth, i never felt so terrene, never sympathized so with the surface of the earth. from whatever source the light and heat come, thither we look with love. march 19, 1860. going along the turnpike i look over to the pitch pines on moore's hill side, and it strikes me that this pine, take the year round, is the most cheerful tree and most living to look at and have about your house, it is so sunny and full of light, in harmony with the yellow sand there and the spring sun. th« early spring in massachusetts. 185 deciduous trees are apparently dead and the white pine is much darker, but the pitch pine has an ingrained sunniness and is especially valuable for imparting warmth to the landscape at this season. yet men will take pains to cut down these trees, and set imported larches in their places! the pitch pine shines in the spring somewhat as the osiers do. march 20, 1840. in society all the inspira tion of my lonely hours seems to flow back on me, and then first to have expression. love never degrades its votaries, but lifts them up to higher walks of being ; they over look one another. all other charities are swal lowed up in this. it is gift and reward both. we will have no vulgar cupid for a go-between, to make us the playthings of each other, but rather cultivate an irreconcilable hatred instead of this. march 20, 1841. even the wisest and best are apt to use their lives as the occasion to do something else in than to live greatly. but we should hang as fondly over this work as the finishing and embellishment of a poem. it is a great relief when for a few moments in the day we can retire to our chamber and be completely true to ourselves it leavens the rest of our hours. in that moment i will be nakedly as vicious as i am; this false life of aiine shall have a being at length. 186 early spring in massachusetts. march 20, 1842. my friend is cold and re served because his love for me is waxing and not waning. these are the early processes j the particles are just beginning to shoot in crystals. if the mountains came to me i should no longer go to the mountains. so soon as that consummation takes place which i wish, it will be past. shall i not have a friend in reserve ? heaven is to come. i hope this is not it. words should pass between friends as the lightning passes from cloud to cloud. i don't know how much i assist in the econ omy of nature when i declare a fact. is it not an important fact in the history of a plant that i tell my friend where i found it ? we do not wish friends to feed and clothe our bodies (neighbors are kind enough for that), but to do the like offices for our spirits. we wish to spread and publish ourselves as the sun spreads its rays, and we toss the new thought to the friend, and thus it is dispersed. friends are those twain who feel their interests to be one. each knows that the other might as well have said what he said. all beauty, all music, all delight springs from apparent dualism, but real unity. my friend is my real brother. i see his nature groping yonder so like my own. does there go one whom i know, then i go there. comparatively speaking i care not for eably spring in massachusetts. 187 the man or his designs who would make the very highest use of me short of an all-adventur ing friendship. the field where friends have met is consecrated forever. man seeks friend ship out of the desire to realize a home here. as the indian thinks he receives into himself the courage and strength of his conquered en emy, so we add to ourselves all the character and heart of our friend. he is my creation. i can do what i will with him. there is no pos sibility of being thwarted. the friend is like wax in the rays that fall from our own hearts. my friend does not take my word for anything, but he takes me. he trusts me as i trust my self. we only need to be as true to others as we are to ourselves that there may be ground enough for friendship. in the beginnings of friendship, for it does not grow, we realize such love and justice as are attributed to god. very few are they from whom we derive any information. the most only announce and tell tales, but the friend in-forms. how simple is the natural connection of events. we complain greatly of the want of flow and sequence in books, but if the journalist only move himself from boston to new york, and speak as before, there is link enough. and so there would be f he were as careless of connection and order when he stayed at home, and let the incessant 188 early spring in massachusetts. progress which his life makes be the apology for abruptness. is not my life riveted to gether? has not it sequence? do not my breathings follow each other naturally? march 20, 1853. i notice the downy, swad dled plants now and in the fall, the fragrant life-everlasting and the ribwort, innocents bom in a cloud. those algae i saw the other day in john hosmer's ditch were more like sea weed than anything else i have seen in the country. they made me look at the whole earth as a seashore, reminded me of nereids, sea-nymphs, tritons, proteus, etc., etc., made the ditches tabulate in an older than the arrow headed character. better learn this strange character which nature uses to-day than the sanskrit, "books in the brooks." .... it is evident that the english do not enjoy that contrast between winter and summer that we do, that there is too much greenness and spring in the winter, there is no such wonder ful resurrection of the year. birds kindred with our first spring ones remain with them all winter, and flowers answering to our earliest spring ones put forth there in january. they have no winter in our sense, only a winter like our spring. the peculiarity of to-day is that now first you perceive that dry, warm, summer presaging scent from dry oaks and other leaves early spring in massachusetts. 189 on the sides of hills and ledges. you smell the summer from afar. the warmth makes a man young again. there is also some dryness, al most dustiness, in the roads. the mountains are white with snow. when the wind is north west, it is now wintry, hut at present it is more westerly. the edges of the mountains melt into the sky. it is affecting to be put into com munication with such distant objects by the power of vision, actually to look into such lands of promise. in this spring breeze, how full of life the silvery pines, probably the under sides of their leaves. the canoe-birch sprouts are red or salmon-colored like those of the common, but soon they cast off their salmon-colored jack ets, and come forth with a white, but naked look, all dangling with ragged reddish curls. what is that little bird that makes so much use of these curls in its nest lined with coarse grass ? in a stubble field started up a bevy (about twenty) of quail which went off to some young pitch pines with a whirr like a shot, the plump round birds. the red polls are still numerous. (have not seen them again, march 28th.) march 20, 1855. it is remarkable by what & gradation of days which we call pleasant and warm, beginning in the last of february, we come at last to real summer warmth. • at first 190 early spbing in massachusetts. a sunny, calm, serene winter day is pronounced spring, or reminds us of it. and even the first pleasant spring day, perhaps, we walk with our greatcoat buttoned up, and gloves on. trying the other day to imitate the honking of geese, i found myself flapping my sides with my elbows, and uttering something like mow ach with a nasal twang and twist of my head, and i produced the note so perfectly in the opinion of the hearers, that i thought i might possibly draw a flock down. we notice the color of the water especially at this season, when it is recently revealed (and in the fall), because there is little color else where. it shows best in a clear air, contrast ing with the russet shores. march 20, 1858. a. m. by river. the tree sparrow is perhaps the sweetest and most me lodious warbler at present and for some days. it is peculiar, too, for singing in concert along the hedge-rows, much like a canary, especially in the mornings, very clear, sweet, melodious notes, between a twitter and a warble, of which t is hard to catch the strain, for you commonly hear many at once. the note of the fringilla hiemalis, or chill-till, is a jingle, with also a shorter and dryer crackling chip as it flits by. at hubbard's wall how handsome the wil low catkins ! those wonderfully bright silvery eakly spring in massachusetts. 191 duttons so regularly disposed in oval schools in the air, or, if you please, along the seams which the twigs make, in all degrees of forwardness, from the faintest, tiniest speck of silver just peeping from beneath the black scales to lusty pussies which have thrown off their scaly coats., and show some redness at base or on close in spection. these fixed swarms of arctic buds spot the air very prettily along the hedges. they remind me somewhat by their brilliancy of the snow-flakes, which are so bright by con trast at this season when the sun is high. they are grayish, not nearly so silvery a week or ten days later, when more expanded, show ing the dark scales. the fishes are going up the brooks as they open; they are dispersing themselves through the fields and woods, imparting new life into them. they are taking their places under the shelving banks and in the dark swamps. the water running down meets the fishes running up. they hear the latest news. spring-aroused fishes are running up our veins too. little fishes are seeking the sources of the brooks, seeking to disseminate their principles. talk about a re vival of religion ! business men's prayer meet ings, with which all the country goes mad now i what if it were as true and wholesome a revival as the little fishes feel which come out of the 192 early spring in massachusetts sluggish waters, and run up the brooks toward their sources. all nature revives at this season. with her it is really a new life. it cheers me to behold the swarms of gnats which have re vived in the spring sun. the fish lurks by the mouth of its native brook watching its oppor tunity to dart up the stream by the cakes of ice. do the fishes stay to hold prayer-meet ings in fair haven bay, while some monstrous pike gulps them down? or is not each one privately, or with kindred spirits, as soon as possible, stemming the course of its native brook, making its way to more ethereal waters, burnishing its scaly armor by its speed ? . . . . no wonder we feel the spring influences. there is a motion in the very ground under our feet. each rill is peopled with new life rushing up it. in order that a house and grounds may be picturesque and interesting in the highest degree, they must suggest the idea of necessity, proving the devotion of the builder, not of lux ury. we need to see the honest and naked hie here and there protruding. what is a fort without any foe before it ? that is not now sus taining and never has sustained a siege ? the gentleman whose purse is always full, and who can meet all demands, though he employs the most famous artists, can never make a very in teresting seat. he does not carve from neat early spring in massachusetts. 193 enough to the bone. no man is rich enough to keep a poet in his pay. march 20, 1859. p. m. i see under the east side of the house, amid the evergreens, where they are sheltered from the cold northwest wind, a company of sparrows, chiefly fringilla hiemalis, two or three tree-sparrows, and one song-sparrow, quietly feeding together. i watch them through a window within six or eight feet. they evidently love to be sheltered from the wind, and at least are not averse to each other's society. one perches on a bush to sing, while others are feeding on the ground ; but he is very restless on his perch, hopping about and stooping, as if dodging those that fly over. he must perch on some bit of stubble or some twig to sing. the tree-sparrows sing a little. they are evidently picking up the seeds of weeds which lie on the surface of the ground, invisible to our eyes. they suffer their wings to hang rather loose. the fringilla hiemalis is the largest of the three. it has a remarkably dis tinct light-colored bill, and when it stretches shows very distinct clear white lateral tail feathers. this stretching seems to be conta gious among them, like yawning with us. the tree-sparrows are much brighter brown and white than the song-sparrow. the latter alone scratches once or twice, and is more inclined 13 194 early spring in massachusetts. to hop or creep close to the ground under the fallen weeds. perhaps it deserves most to be called the ground-biid. march 21, 1840. our limbs, indeed, have room enough : it is our souls that rust in a cor ner. let us migrate interiorly without inter mission, and pitch our tent each day nearer the western horizon. the really fertile soils and luxuriant prairies lie on this side the alle ghanies. there has been no hanno of the affections. their domain is untraveled ground to the mogul's dominions. march 21, 1841. to be associated with others by my friend's generosity when he be stows a gift is an additional favor to be grate ful for. march 21, 1853. p. m. to kibbe place. the stellaria media is fairly in bloom in mr. c 's garden. this, then, is our earliest flower, though it is said to have been intro duced. it may blossom under favorable cir cumstances in warmer weather than usual any time in the winter. it has been so much opened that you could easily count its petals any month the past winter, and plainly blossoms with the first pleasant weather that brings the robins, etc., in numbers. the bees this morning had access to no flower, so they came to the graft ing wax on my boat, though it was mixed with early spring in massachusetts. 195 tallow and covered with fresh paint. often they essayed to light on it and retreated in disgust. yet one got caught. as they de tected the wax concealed and disguised in this composition, so they will receive the earliest in telligence of the blossoming of the first flower which contains any sweetness for them. it is a genial and reassuring day ; the mere warmth of the west wind amounts almost to balminess. the softness of the air mollifies our own dry and congealed substance. i sit down by a wall to see if i can muse again. we become, as it were, pliant and ductile again to strange but memorable influences ; we are led a little way by our genius. we are affected like the earth, and yield to the elemental tenderness. winter breaks up within us. the frost is coming out of me, and i am heaved like the road. accu mulated masses of ice and snow dissolve, and thoughts, like a freshet, pour down unwonted channels. a strain of music comes to solace the traveler over earth's downs and dignify his chagrins. the petty men whom he meets are shadows of grander to come. roads lead else whither than to carlisle and sudbury. the earth is uninhabited, but fair to inhabit, like the old carlisle road. is, then, the road so rough that it should be neglected ? not only narrow, but rough, is the way that leadeth to 196 eakly spring in massachusetts. life everlasting. our experience does not wear upon us. it is seen to be fabulous or symboli cal, and tbe future is worth expecting. en couraged, i set out once more to climb the mountain of the earth, for my steps are sym bolical steps, and i have not reached the top of tbe earth yet. in two or three places i hear the ground-squirrel's first chirrup or qui-vive in the wall, like a bird or a cricket. though i do not see him, the sun has reached him too. ah, then ! as i was rising this crowning road, just beyond the old lime-kiln, there leaked into my open ear the faint peep of a hyla from some far pool. one little hyla, somewhere in the fens, aroused by the genial season, crawls up the bank or a bush, squats on a dry leaf, and essays a note or two which scarcely rends the air, does no violence to the zephyr, but yet leaks through all obstacles and far over the downs to the ear of the listening naturalist, as it were the first faint cry of the new-born year, notwith standing the notes of birds. where so long i have heard only the prattling and moaning of the wind, what means this tenser, far-piercing sound. all nature rejoices with one joy. if the hyla has revived again, why may not i ? whatever your sex or position, life is a bat tle in which you are to show your pluck, and woe be to the coward. whether passed on a early spring in massachusetts. 197 bed of sickness or a tented field, it is ever the same fair play, and admits no foolish distinc tion. despair and postponement are cowardice and defeat. men were born to succeed, not to fail. march 21, 1854. at sunrise to clam-shell hill. river skimmed over at willow bay last night. thought i should find ducks cornered up by the ice. they get behind this hill for shelter. saw what looked like clods of plowed meadow rising above the ice. looked with glass and found it to be more than thirty black ducks asleep with their heads in their backs, motionless, thin ice being formed about them. soon one or two were moving about slowly. there was an open space, eight or ten rods by one or two. at first all were within a space of apparently less than a rod in diameter. it was 6ja. m. and the sun shining on them, but bitter cold. how tough they are. i crawled far on my stomach and got a near view of them, thirty rods off. at length they detected me and quacked. some got out upon the ice, and when i rose up, all took to flight in a great straggling flock, looking at a distance like crows, in no order. yet when you see two or three, the parallelism produced by their necks and bodies steering the same way gives the idea of order. 198 early spring in massachusetts. march 21, 1855. the tree-sparrow, flitting song-sparrow-like through the alders, utters a sharp metallic tcheep. march 21, 1856. 10 a. m. to my red maple sugar camp. found that after a pint and a half had run from a single tube after 3 p. m. yester day afternoon, it had frozen about half an inch thick, and this morning a quarter of a pint more had run. between 10£ and ll£ a. m. this forenoon i caught two and three quarters pints more from six tubes at the same tree, though it is completely overcast, and threatening rain, — four and one half pints in all. the sap is an agreeable drink like iced water, by chance, with a pleasant but slightly sweetish taste. i boiled it down in the afternoon, and it made one and one half ounces of sugar, without any molasses. this appears to be the average amount yielded by the sugar maple in similar circumstances, viz., on the south edge of a wood, and on a tree partly decayed, two feet in diameter. it is worth while to know that there is all this sugar in our woods, much of which might be obtained by using the refuse wood lying about, without damage to the proprietors, who use neither the sugar nor the wood. i put in saleratus and a little milk while boiling, the former to neutral ize the acid, and the latter to collect the impu rities in a scum. after boiling it, till i burned early spbing in massachusetts. 199 it a little, and my small quantity would not flow when cool, but was as hard as half-done candy, i put it on again, and in a minute it was softened and turned to sugar. had a dis pute with father about the use of my making this sugar when i knew it could be done, and might have bought sugar cheaper at holden's. he said it took me from my studies. i said i made it my study and felt as if i had been to a university. the sap dropped from each tube about as fast as my pulse beat, and as there were three tubes directed to each vessel it flowed at the rate of about one hundred and eighty drops a minute into it. one maple, standing immediately north of a thick white pine, scarcely flowed at all, while a smaller one, farther in the wood, ran pretty well. the south side of a tree bleeds first in the spring. had a three quarter inch auger. made a dozen spouts five or six inches long, hole as large as a pencil, and smoothed with one. march 21, 1858. p. m. to ministerial swamp, via little river. i hear the pleasant phebe note of the chickadee. it is, methinks, more like a wilderness note than any other i have heard yet. it is peculiarly interesting that this, which is one of our winter birds also, bhould have a note with which to welcome the spring. 200 early spring in massachusetts. march 22, 1840. while i bask in the sun on the shores of walden pond, by this heat and this rustle i am absolved from all obligation to the past. the council of nations may recon sider their votes. the grating of a pebble an nuls them. march 22, 1842. nothing can be more use ful to a man than a determination not to be hurried. i have not succeeded if i have an antagonist who fails. it must be humanity's success. i cannot think nor utter my thoughts unless i have infinite room. the cope of heaven is not too high, the sea is not too deep, for him •who would unfold a great thought. it must feed me, and warm and clothe me. it must be an entertainment to which my whole nature is invited. i must know that the gods are to be my fellow guests. march 22, 1853. as soon as those spring mornings arrive in which the birds sing, i am sure to be an early riser, i am waked by my genius, i wake to inaudible melodies, and am surprised to find myself awaiting the dawn in bo serene and joyful and expectant a mood. i have an appointment with spring. she comes to the window to wake me, and i go forth an nour or two earlier than usual. it is by es pecial favor that i am waked, not rudely, but early spring in massachusetts. 201 gently, as infants should be waked when we wake indeed with a double awakening, not only from our ordinary nocturnal slumbers, but from our diurnal, we burst through the thal lus of our ordinary life, we wake with empha sis 6 a. m. to cliffs. it affects one's philoso phy after so long living in winter quarters to see the day dawn from some hill. our effete, lowland town is fresh as new hampshire. it is as if we had migrated and were ready to be gin life again in a new country with new hopes and resolutions. see your town with the dew on it, in as wild a morning mist (though thin) as ever draped it. to stay in the house all day such reviving spring days as the past have been, bending over a stove and gnawing one's heart, seems to me as absurd as for a woodchuck to linger in his burrow. we have not heard the news then! sucking the claws of our philoso phy when there is game to be had. the tap ping of the woodpecker, rat-tat-tat, knocking at the door of some sluggish grub to tell him that the spring has arrived, and his fate, this is one of the season sounds, calling the roll of birds and insects, the reveillie. the cliff woods are comparatively silent. not yet the woodland birds (except, perhaps, the woodpecker, so far as it migrates), only the orchard and river birds 202 early spring in massachusetts. have arrived. probably the improvements of men thus advance the seasons. this is the ba hamas and the tropics or turning point to the red poll. is not the woodpecker (downy ?) our first woodland bird, come to see what effects the frost and snow and rain have produced on the decaying trees, what trunks will drum ? . . . . the oak plain is still red. there are no ex panding leaves to greet and reflect the sun as it first falls over the hill. i go along the river side to see the now novel reflections. the invading waters have left a thousand little isles where willows and sweet gale and the meadow itself appears. i hear the phebe note of the chickadee, one taking it up behind another, as in a catch, phe-bee phe-bee. that is an interesting morning when one first uses the warmth of the sun instead of fire, bathes in the sun as anon in the river, eschew ing fire, draws up to the garret window and warms his thoughts at nature's great central fire, as does the buzzing fly by his side. like it, too, our muse, wiping the dust off her long unused wings, goes blundering through the cob webs of criticism, more dusty still, and carries away the half of them. what miserable cob web is that which has hitherto escaped the broom, whose spider is invisible, but the " north american review.'" early spring in massachusetts. 203 hylodes pickeringii, a name that is longer than the frog itself ! a description of animals, too, from a dead specimen only, as if in a work on man you were to describe a dead man only, omitting his manners and cnstoms, his institu tions and divine faculties, from want of oppor tunity to observe them, suggesting, perhaps, that the colors of the eye are said to be much more brilliant in the living specimen, and that some cannibal, your neighbor, who has tried him on his table, has found him to be sweet and nutritious, good on the gridiron, having had no opportunity to observe his habits, be cause you do not live in the country. nothing is known of his habits. food — seeds of wheat, beef, pork, and potatoes. i told s the other day that there was an other volume of de quincey's "essays," want ing to see it in his library. " i know it," says he, " but i shan't buy any more of them, for nobody reads them." i asked what book in his library was most read. he said, " the wide, wide world." in a little dried and bleached tortoise shell about one and three fourths inches long i can easily study his anatomy and the house he lives in. his ribs are now distinctly revealed under hie lateral scales, slanted like rafters to the ridge ot his roof, for his sternum is so large 204 eaely spring in massachusetts. that his ribs are driven round upon his back. it is wonderful to see what a perfect piece of dovetailing his house is, the different plates of his shell fitting into each other by a thousand sharp teeth or serrations, and the scales always breaking joints over them so as to bind the whole firmly together, all parts of his abode variously interspliced and dovetailed. an ar chitect might learn much from a faithful study of it. there are three large diamond-shaped openings down the middle of the sternum cov ered only by the scales, through which perhaps he feels, he breasts the earth. his roof rests on four stout posts. this young one is very deep in proportion to its breadth. march 22, 1855. p. m. fair haven pond via conantum on the steep hill-side south of the pond i observed a rotten and hol low hemlock stump about two feet high, and six inches in diameter, and instinctively approached with my right hand ready to cover it. i found a flying squirrel in it, which, as my left hand covered a small hole at the bottom, ran directly into my right hand. it struggled and bit not a little, but my cotton gloves protected me, and i felt its teeth only once or twice. it also uttered three or four dry shrieks at first, something like cr-r-r-ack cr-r-r-ach cr-r-r-ack. i rolled it up in my handkerchief, and holding the ends tight early spring in massachusetts. 205 carried it home in my hand, some three miles. it struggled more or less all the way, especially when my feet made any unusual or louder noise going through leaves, etc. i could count its claws as they appeared through the handker chief, and once it put its head through a hole. it even bit through the handkerchief. color, as i remember, a chestnut ash inclining to fawn or cream color, slightly browned. be neath, white. the under edge of its wings (?) tinged yellow, the upper, dark, perhaps black, making a dark stripe. it was a very cunning little animal, reminding me of a mouse in the room. its very large and prominent black eyes gave it an interesting, innocent look. its very neat, fiat, fawn-colored, distichous tail was a great ornament. its " sails " were not very ob vious when it was at rest, merely giving it a flat appearance beneath. it would leap off and upward into the air two or three feet from a table, spreading its " sails," and fall to the floor in vain, perhaps strike the side of the room in its upward spring and endeavor to cling to it. it would run up the window by the sash, but evidently found the furniture and walls and floor too hard and smooth for it, and after some falls}' v eeame quiet. in a few moments it al lowed me to stroke it, though far from confi dent. i put it in a barrel and covered it up %*. 206 eaely spring in massachusetts. the night. it was quite busy all the evening gnawing out, clinging for this purpose and gnaw ing at the upper edge of a sound oak barrel, and then dropping to rest from time to time. it had defaced the barrel considerably by morn ing, and would probably have escaped, if i had not placed a piece of iron against the gnawed part. i had left in the barrel some bread, ap ple, shagbarks, and cheese. it eat some of the apple and one shagbark, cutting it quite in two transversely. in the morning it was quiet, and squatted, somewhat curled up, amid the straw, with its tail passing under it and the end curved over its head, very prettily, as if to shield it from the light and keep it warm. i always found it in this position by day when i raised the lid. march 23, 1855. carried my flying squirrel back to the woods in my handkerchief. i placed it on the very stump i had taken it from. it immediately ran about a rod over the leaves and up a slender maple sapling about ten feet, then after a moment's pause sprang off and skimmed downward toward a large maple nine feet distant, whose trunk it struck three or four feet from the ground. this it rapidly ascended on the opposite side from me, nearly thirty feet, and then clung to the main stem with its head downward, eyeing me. after two or three minutes' pause, i saw that it was preparing early spring in massachusetts. 207 for another spring by raising its head and looking off, and away it went in admirable style, more like a bird than any quadruped i had dreamed of, and far surpassing the impres sion i had received from naturalists' accounts. i marked the spot it started from and the place where it struck, and measured the height and distance carefully. it sprang off from the ma ple at the height of twenty-eight feet and a half, and struck the ground at the foot of a tree fifty and one half feet distant measured horizon tally. its flight was not a regular descent. it varied from a direct line both horizontally and vertically. indeed, it skimmed much like a hawk, and part of its flight was nearly horizon tal. it diverged from a right line eight or ten feet to the right, making a curve in that direc tion. there were six trees from six inches to a foot in diameter, one a hemlock, in a direct line between the termini, and these it skimmed partly round, passing through their thinner limbs. it did not, so far as i could perceive, touch a twig. it skimmed its way like a hawk between and around the trees. though it was a windy day, this was on a steep hillside covered with wood and away from the wind, so it was not aided by that. as the ground rose about two feet, the distance was to the absolute height as fifty and one half feet to twenty-six and one half 208 early spring in massachusetts. feet, or it advanced about two feet for every foot of descent. after the various attempts in the house i was not prepared for this exhibi tion. it did not fall heavily as in the house, but struck the ground quietly enough, and i cannot believe that the mere extension of the skin en abled it to skim so far. it must be still further aided by its organization. perhaps it fills it self with air first kicking over the hem lock stump, which was a mere shell with holes below, and a poor refuge, i was surprised to find a little nest at the bottom, open above just like a bird's nest, a mere bed. it was composed of leaves, shreds of bark, and dead pine needles. as i remember, this squirrel was not more than an inch and a half broad when at rest, but when skimming through the air i should say it was four inches broad. this is the impression i now have. captain j. smith says it is reported to fly thirty or forty yards. one gideon b. smith, m. d., of baltimore, who has had much to do with these squirrels, speaks of their curv ing upward at the end of their flight to alight on a tree trunk, and of their "flying" into his windows. in order to perform all these flights, to strike a tree at such a distance, etc., etc., it is evident it must be able to steer. i should say that mine steered like a hawk, that moves without flapping its wings, never being able, eakly spring in massachusetts. 209 however, to get a new impetus after the firat spring. march 22, 1860. some of the phenomena of an average march are increasing warmth, melt ing the snow and ice, and gradually the frost in the ground ; cold and blustering weather, with high, commonly northwest, winds for many days together ; misty and other rains taking out frosts, whitenings of snow, and winter often back again, both its cold and snow ; bare ground and open waters, and more or less of a freshet ; some calm and pleasant days reminding us of summer, with a blue haze or a thicker mist over the woods at last, in which, perchance, we take off our coats a while, and sit without a fire ; the ways getting settled, and some greenness ap pearing on south banks ; april-like rains after the frost is chiefly out ; plowing and planting of peas, etc., just beginning, and the old leaves getting dry in the woods. march 22, 1861. a driving northeast snow storm yesterday and last night, and to-day the drifts are high over the fences, and the trains stopped. the boston train due at 8£ a. m. did not reach here till 5 this p. m. one side of all the houses this morning was one color, i. e., white, with the moist snow plastered over them bo that you could not tell whether they had blinds or not. 14 210 early spring in massachusetts. when we consider how soon some plants which spread rapidly by seeds or roots would cover an area equal to the surface of the globe, how soon some species of trees, as the white willow, for instance, would equal in mass the earth itself, if all their seeds became full-grown trees, how soon some fishes would fill the ocean if all their ova became full-grown fishes, we are tempted to say that every organism, whether animal or vegetable, is contending for the pos session of the planet, and if any one were suffi ciently favored, supposing it still possible to grow as at first, it would at length convert the entire mass of the globe into its own substance. nature opposes to this many obstacles, as cli mate, myriads of brute and also human foes, and of competitors which may preoccupy the ground. each species suggests an immense and wonderful greediness and tenacity of life, as if bent on taking entire possession of the globe wherever the climate and soil will permit, and each prevails as much as it does, because of the ample preparations it has made for the con test. it has received a myriad chances, because it never depends on spontaneous generation to save it. march 23, 1853. 5 a. m. i hear the robin sing before i rise. 6 a. m. up the north river. a fresh, cool, spring morning. the early spring in massachusetts. 211 white maple may, perhaps, be said to begin to blossom to-day, the male, for the stamens, both anthers and filaments, are conspicuous on some buds. it has opened unexpectedly, and a rich sight it is, looking up through the expanded buds to the sky. this and the aspen are the first trees that ever grow large, i believe, which show the influence of the season thus conspicu ously. from nawshawtuck i see the snow is off the mountains. a large aspen by the island is unexpectedly forward. i already see the red anthers appearing. it will bloom in a day or two. one studies books of science merely to learn the language of naturalists, to be able to com municate with them. the frost in swamps and meadows makes it good walking there still. away, away to the swamps where the silver catkins of the swamp willow shine a quarter of a mile off, those south ward penetrating vales of rupert's land. the birds, which are merely migratory or tarrying here for a season, are especially gregarious now, the redpoll, fringilla hiemalis, fox-col ored sparrow, etc. i judge by the dead bodies of frogs partially devoured in brooks and ditches that many are killed in their hibernacula. evelyn and others wrote when the language iras in a tender, nascent state, and could be 212 early spring in massachusetts. molded to express the shades of meaning, when sesquipedalian words, long since cut and appar ently dried and drawn to mill, not yet to the dictionary lumber-yard, put forth a fringe of green sprouts here and there along in the angles of their sugared bark, their very bulk insuring some sap remaining ; some florid suckers they sustain at least. these words, split into shin gles and laths, will supply poets for ages to come. a man can't ask properly for a piece of bread and butter without some animal spir its. a child can't cry without them. p. m. to heywood's meadow. the tele graph harp sounds more commonly now that westerly winds prevail. the winds of winter are too boisterous, too violent or rude, and do not strike it at the right angle when i walk, so that it becomes one of the spring sounds. the ice went out of walden this forenoon ; of flint's pond day before yesterday, i have no doubt. the buds of the shad-blossom look green. the crimson-starred flowers of the hazel begin to peep out, though the catkins have not opened. the alders are almost generally in full bloom, and a very handsome and interesting show they make with their graceful tawny pendants in clining to yellow. they shake like ear-drops in the wind, almost the first completed orna ments with whieh the new year decks herself, eaelt spring in massachusetts. 213 their yellow pollen is shaken down and colors my coat like sulphur as i pass through them. i go to look for mud-turtles in heywood's meadow. the alder catkins just burst open are prettily marked spirally by streaks of yellow, contrasting with alternate rows of rich reddish brown scales, which make one revolution in the length of the catkin. i hear in heywood's north meadow the most unmusical low croak from one or two frogs, though it is half ice there yet. a remarkable note with which to greet the new year, as if one's teeth slid off with a grating sound in cracking a nut, but not a frog nor a dimple to be seen. man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at nature directly, but only with the side of his eye. he must look through and beyond her. to look at her is as fatal as to look at the head of medusa. it turns the man of science to stone. i feel that i am dissipated by so many observations. i should be the magnet in the midst of all this dust and filings. i knock the back of my hand against a rock, and as i smooth back the skin i find myself prepared to study lichens there. i look upon man but as a fungus. i have almost a slight, dry head ache as the result of all this observation. how to observe is how to behave. oh, for a little lethe. to crown all, lichens which are so thin 214 early spring in massachusetts. are described in the dry state, as they are most commonly, not most truly, seen. they are, in« deed, dryly described. without being the owner of any land, i find that i have a civil right in the river, that if i am not a landowner i am a water owner. it is fitting, therefore, that i should have a boat, a cart, for this my farm. since it is almost wholly given up to a few of us, while the other highways are much traveled, no wonder that i improve it. such a one as i will choose to dwell in a township where there are most ponds and rivers, and our range is widest. in rela tion to the river, i find my natural rights least infringed on. it is an extensive " common " still left. certain savage liberties still prevail in the oldest and most civilized countries. i am pleased to find that in gilbert white's day, at least, the laborers in that part of england where he lived, enjoyed certain rights of com mon in the royal forests, so called, where they cut their turf and other fuel, etc., though no large wood, and obtained materials for broom making, etc., when other labor failed. it is no longer so, according to the editor. the cat-tail down puffs and swells in your hand like a mist, or the conjuror's trick of fill ing a hat with feathers, for when you have rubbed off but a thimble full, and can close and eaelt spring in massachusetts. 215 conceal the wound completely, the expanded down fills your hand to overflowing. appar ently there is a spring to the fine elastic threads which compose the down, which, after having been so long closely packed, on being the least relieved, spring open apace into the form of parachutes to convey the seed afar. where birds, or the winds, or ice have assaulted them, this has spread like an eruption. march 23, 1856. i spend a considerable por tion of my time observing the habits of the wild animals, my brute neighbors. by their various movements and migrations they fetch the year about to me. very significant are the flight of geese and the migration of suckers, etc. but when i consider that the nobler animals have been exterminated here, the cougar, panther, lynx, wolverene, wolf, bear, moose, deer, beaver, turkey, etc., etc., i cannot but feel as if i lived in a tamed and, as it were, emasculated coun try. would not the motions of those larger and wilder animals have been more significant still? is it not a maimed and imperfect na ture that i am conversant with ? as if i were to study a tribe of indians that had lost all its warriors. do not the forest and the meadow now lack expression ? now that i never see nor think of the moose with a lesser forest on his head in the one, nor of the beaver in the 216 early spring in massachusetts. other? when i think what were the various sounds and notes, the migrations and works, and changes of fur and plumage which ushered in the spring, and marked the other seasons of the year, i am reminded that this my life in nature, this particular round of natural phenomena which i call a year, is lamentably incomplete. i listen to a concert in which so many parts are wanting. the whole civilized country is, to some extent, turned into a city, and i am that citizen whom i pity. many of those animal migrations and other phenomena by which the indians marked the season are no longer to he observed. i seek acquaintance with nature to know her moods and manners. primitive na ture is the most interesting to me. i take in finite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking that i have here the entire poem, and then, to my chagrin, i learn that it is but an imperfect copy that i possess and have read, that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places. i should not like to think that some demigod had jome before me and picked out some of the best of the stars. i wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth. all the great trees and beasts, fishes and fowl are gone; the streams derchance are somewhat shrunk. early spring in massachusetts. 217 p. m. to walden. i think i may say that jhe snow has not been less than a foot deep on a level in open land until to-day, since january 6th, about eleven weeks. i am reassured and reminded that i am the heir of eternal inheri tances which are inalienable when i feel the warmth reflected from this sunny bank, and see the yellow sand and the reddish subsoil, and hear some dried leaves rustle and the trickling of melting snow in some sluiceway. the eter nity which i detect in nature i predicate of my self also. how many springs i have had this same experience ! i am encouraged, for i rec ognize this steady persistency and recovery of nature as a quality of myself. now the steep south hill-sides begin to be bare, and the early sedge and the sere, but still fragrant, pennyroyal and rustling leaves are exposed, and you see where the mice have sheared off the sedge, and also made nests of its top during the winter. there, too, the partridges resort, and perhaps you hear the bark of a striped squirrel, and see him scratch toward his hole, rustling the leaves ; "or all the inhabitants of nature are attracted by this bare and dry spot as well as you. the musk-rat houses were certainly very few and small last summer, and the river has been remarkably low up to this time, while the pre vious fall they were very numerous and large, 218 eably spring in massachusetts. and in the succeeding winter the river rose re markably high. so much for the muskrat sign. march 23, 1859. p. m. walk to cardinal shore, and sail to well meadow and lee's cliff. as we entered well meadow we saw a hen hawk perch on the topmost plume of the tall pines at the head of the meadow ; soon another appeared, probably its mate, but we looked in vain for a nest there. it was a fine sight, their soaring above our heads, presenting a perfect outline and, as they came round, showing their rust-colored tails with a whitish rump, or, as they sailed away from us, that slight tetering or quivering motion of their dark-tipt wings, seen edgewise, now on this side, now on that, by which they balanced and directed themselves. these are the most eagle-like of our com mon hawks. they very commonly perch upon the very topmost plume of a pine, and, if mo tionless, are rather hard to distinguish there. while reconnoitering we hear the peep of one hylodes somewhere in the sheltered recess in the woods, and afterward, on the lee-side shore, a single croak from a wood frog. we cross to lee's shore and sit upon the bare rocky ridge overlooking the flood southwest and northeast. it is quite sunny and sufficiently warm. the prospect thence is a fine one, es« pecially at this season when the water is high. early spbing in massachusetts. 219 the landscape is very agreeably diversified with hill and dale, meadow and cliff. as we look southwest how attractive the shores of russet capes and peninsulas laved by the flood. in deed that large tract east of the bridge is now an island. how firm that low, undulating, rus set-land ! at this season and under these cir cumstances the sun just come out and the flood high around it, russet, so reflecting the light of the sun, appears to me the most agreeable of colors, and i begin to dream of a russet fairy land and elysium. how dark and terrene must be green, but this smooth russet reflects almost all the light. that broad and low, but firm, island, with but few trees to conceal the con tour of the ground and its outline, with its fine russet sward, firm and soft as velvet, reflecting so much light ; all the undulations of the earth, its nerves and muscles revealed by the light and shade, and the sharper ridgy edge of steep banks where the plow has heaped up the earth from year to year, this is a sort of fairy land and elysium to my eye. the tawny, couchant island i dry land for the indian's wigwam in the spring, and still strewn with his arrow points. the sight of such land reminds me of the pleasant spring days in which i have walked over such tracts looking for these relics. how well, too, the smooth, firm, light-reflecting, 220 early spring in massachusetts. tawny earth contrasts with the darker watei which surrounds it, or perchance lighter some times. at this season when the russet colors prevail, the contrast of water and land is more agreeable to behold. what an inexpressibly soft curving line is the shore ! and if the watei is perfectly smooth and yet rising, you seem to see it raised one eighth of an inch with swelling lip above the immediate shore it kisses, as in a cup. indian isles and promontories. thus we sit on that rock, hear the first wood-frog's croak, and dream of a russet elysium. enough for the season is the beauty thereof. the qualities of the land that are most attrac tive to our eyes now are dryness and firmness. it is not the rich, black soil, but warm and sandy hills and plains which tempt our steps. we love to sit on and walk over sandy tracts in the spring, like cicindelas. these tongues of russet land capeing and sloping into the flood do almost speak to one. they are alternately in sun and shade. when the cloud is passed and they reflect their pale brown light to me, i am tempted to go to them in the shadow of a cloud, and it chances to be a hollow ring with sunlight in its midst, passing over the hilly sproutland toward the baker house, a sproutland of oaks and birches, owing to the color of the birch twigs, perhaps, the russet eakly spring in massachusetts. 221 changes to a dark purplish tint as the cloud moves along. and then as i look further along eastward in the horizon, i am surprised to see strong purple and violet tinges in the sun from a hillside a mile off, densely covered with full grown birches. i would not have believed that under the spring sun so many colors wore brought out. it is not the willows only that shine, but, under favorable circumstances, many other twigs, even a mile or two off. the dense birches, so far that their white stems are not distinct, reflect deep, strong purple and violet colors from the distant hillsides opposite to the sun. can this have to do with the sap flowing in them ? as we sit there, we see coming swift and straight northeast along the river valley, not seeing us and therefore not changing his course, a male goosander, so near that the green reflec tions of his head and neck are plainly visible. he looks like a paddle-wheel steamer, so oddly painted, black and white and green, and moves along swift and straight, like one. ere long the same returns with his mate, the red-throated, the male taking the lead. the loud peop (?) of a pigeon woodpecker is heard, and anon the prolonged loud and shrill cackle calling the thin-wooded hillsides and pastures to life. it is like the note of an alarm clock set last fall so 222 early spring in massachusetts. as to wake nature up at exactly this date, up up up up up up up up up ! what a rustling it seems to make among the dry leaves then i see come slowly flying from the south west a great gull, of voracious form, which at length, by a sudden and steep descent, alights in fair haven pond, scaring up a crow which was seeking its food on the edge of the ice. march 24, 1842. those authors are success ful who do not write down to others, but make their own taste and judgment their audience. by some strange infatuation we forget that we do not approve what yet we recommend to others. it is enough if i please myself with writing, i am there sure of all audience. it is always singular to meet common sense in the very old books, as in the " veeshnoo sarma," as if they could have dispensed with the experience of later times. we had not given space enough to their antiquity for the accumulation of wisdom. we meet even a triv ial wisdom in them as if truth were already hacknied. the present is always younger than antiquity. a playful wisdom, which has eyes behind as well as before, and oversees itself. the wise can afford to doubt in his wisest moment. the easiness of doubt is the ground of his assurance. faith keeps many doubts in her pay. if i could not doubt i should not believe. eaelt spring in massachusetts. 223 it is seen in the old scripture how wisdom is older than the talent of composition. the story is as slender as the thread on which pearls are strung, it is a spiral line growing more and more perplexed till it winds itself up and dies like the silk-worm in its cocoon. it seems as if the old philosopher could not talk without mov ing, and each motion were made the apology or occasion for a sentence, but this being found in convenient, the fictitious progress of the tale was invented. the great thoughts of a wise man seem to the vulgar who do not generalize to stand far apart like isolated mounts, but science knows that the mountains which rise so solitary in our midst are parts of a great mountain chain, dividing the earth, and the eye that looks into the hori zon toward the blue sierra melting away in the distance may detect their flow of thought. these sentences which take up your common life so easily are not seen to run into ridges because they are the table land on which the spectator stands that they stand frown ing upon one another or mutually reflecting the bun's rays, is proof enough of their common basis. the book should be found where the sentence is, and its connection be as inartificial. it is the inspiration of a day and not of a moment. 224 eaely spring in massachusetts. the links should be gold also. better that the good be not united than that a bad man be ad mitted into their society. when men can select, they will. if there be any stone in the quarry better than the rest they will forsake the rest because of it. only the good will be quarried. march 24, 1853. in many cases i find that the willow cones are a mere dense cluster of loose leaves, suggesting that the scales of cones of all kinds are only modified leaves, a crowd ing and stinting of the leaves, as the stem be comes a thorn, and in this view those conical bunches of leaves of so many of the pine family have relation to the cones of the tree in origin as well as in form. the leaf, perchance, be comes calyx, cone, husk, and nut-shell. march 24, 1855. passing up the assabet by the hemlocks where there has been a slide and some rocks have slid down into the river, i think i see how rocks came to be found in the midst of rivers. rivers are continually chan ging their channels, eating into one bank and adding their sediment to the other, so that fre quently where there is a great bend, you see a high and steep bank or hill on one side which the river washes, and a broad meadow on the other. as the river eats into the hill, especially in freshets, it undermines the rocks, large and small, and they slide down alone or with the eaely spring in massachusetts. 225 band and soil to the water's edge. the river continues to eat into the hill, carrying away all the lighter parts, the sand and soil, to add to its meadows v or islands somewhere, but leaves the rocks where they rested, and thus, in course of time, they occupy the middle of the stream, and later still, the mud of the meadow, perchance, though they may be buried under the mud. but this does not explain how so many rocks lying in streams have been split in the direction of the current. again rivers appear to have traveled back and worn into the meadows of their own creating, and then they become more meandering than ever. thus, in the course of ages, the river wriggles in its bed till it feels comfortable. time is cheap and rather insig nificant. it matters not whether it is a river which changes from side to side in a geological period, or an eel that wriggles past in an in stant it is too cold to think of those signs of spring which i find recorded under this date last year. the earliest of such signs in vegetation, noticed thus far, are the maple sap, the willow catkins and those of the poplar (not examined early), the celandine (?), grass on south banks, and perhaps cowslip in sheltered places, alder catkins loosened, *nd also white maple buds loosened. i am not sure that the osiers are decidedly dngnter yet. 15 . 226 early speing in massachusetts. march 24, 1857. if you are describing an occurrence or a man, make two or more distinc reports at different times. though you ma think you have said all, you will to-morrow r< member a whole new class of facts which pei haps interested most of all at the time, but di not present themselves to be reported. if w have recently met and talked with a man an would report our experience, we commonl make a very partial report at first, failing t seize the most significant, picturesque, and dr; matic points. we describe only what we hat had time to digest and dispose of in our mine without being conscious that there were othe things really more novel and interesting to i which will not fail to occur to us and impref us suitably at last. how little that occurs t us, are we prepared at once to appreciate. w discriminate at first only a few features, and w need to reconsider our experience from man points of view and in various moods, to preset the whole force of it. march 24, 1858. p. m. to fairhaven pom east side. the pond not yet open. a cold nortl by-west wind which must have come over muc snow and ice. the chip of the song sparrc resembles that of the robin, i. e., its expression i the same, only fainter, and reminds me that th robin's peep, which sounds like a note of di tress, is also a chip or call note to its kind. eaely spring in massachusetts. 227 returning about 5 p. m. across the depot field, i scare up from the ground a flock of about twenty birds which fly low making a short circuit to another part of the field. at first they remind me of bay-wings, except that they are in a flock, show no white in tail, are, i see, a little larger, and utter a faint sveet sveet merely, a sort of sibilant chip. starting them again, i see that they have black tails, very conspicuous when they pass here. they fly in the flock somewhat like snow-buntings, occasionally one surging upward a few feet in pursuit of another, and they alight about where they first were. it is almost impossible to distinguish them upon the ground, they squat so flat, and so much re semble it, running amid the stubble. but at length i stand within two rods of one and get a good view of its markings with my glass. they are the alauda alpestris or shore lark, a quite sizeable and handsome bird. a delicate, pale, lemon-yellow line above, with a dark line through the eye. the yellow again on the sides of the neck and on the throat, with a buff ash breast and reddish-brown tinges. beneath, white. above, rusty brown behind, and darker, ash or slate with purplish -brown reflections, forward. legs black. bill blue and black. common to the old and new world. march 24, 1859. now when the leaves get to 228 early spring in massachusetts. be dry and rustle under your feet, the peculiar dry note wurrh wurrk wur rrh wurjc, of the wood-frog is heard faintly by ears on the alert, borne up from some unseen pool in a woodland hollow which is open to the influences of the sun. it is a singular sound for awakening na ture to make, associated with the first warmer days when you sit in some sheltered place in the woods amid the dried leaves. how moder ate on her first awakening, how little demon strative ! you may sit half an hour before you will hear another. you doubt if the season will be long enough for such oriental and luxu rious slowness. but they get on nevertheless, and by to-morrow or in a day or two they croak louder and more frequently. can you be sure that you have heard the very first wood-frog in the township croak? ah, how weather-wise must he be ! there is no guessing at the weather with him. he makes the weather in his degree, he ericourages it to be mild. the weather, what is it but the temperament of the earth ? and he is wholly of the earth, sensitive as its skin in which he lives, and of which he is a part. his life relaxes with the thawing ground. he pitches and tunes his voice to ihord with the rustling leaves which the march wind has dried. long before the frost is quite out he feels the influence of the spring rains early spuing in massachusetts. 229 and the warmer days. his is the very voice of the weather. he rises and falls like quicksil ver in the thermometer. you do not perceive the spring so surely in the actions of men, their lives are so artificial. they may make more or less fife in their parlors, and their feelings accord ingly are not good thermometers. the frog far away in the wood, that bums no coal nor wood, perceives more surely the general and universal changes. there sits on the bank of the ditch a rana fontinalis. he is mainly a bronze brown, with a very dark greenish snout, etc. ; with the raised line down the side of the back. this, methinks, is about the only frog which the marsh hawk could have found hitherto. march 25, 1842. great persons are not soon learned, not even their outlines, but they change like the mountains in the horizon as we ride along. comparatively speaking, i care not for the man or his designs who would make the highest use of me short of an all adventuring friendship. i wish by the behavior of my friend toward me to be led to have such regard for myself as for a box of precious ointment. i shall not be as cheap to myself if i see that another values me. we talk much about education, and yet none will assume the office of an educator. i nevei 230 early spring in massachusetts. gave any one the whole advantage of myself. i never afforded him the culture of my love. how can i talk of charity who at last withhold the kindness which alone makes charity desira ble. the poor want nothing less than me my self, and i shirk charity by giving rags and meat. what can i give or what deny to another but myself? that person who alone can understand you you cannot get out of your mind. the artist must work with indifferency. too great interest vitiates his work. march 25, 1858. p. m. i see many fox colored sparrows flitting past in a straggling manner into the birch and pine woods on the left, and hear a sweet warble there from time to time. they are busily scratching like hens amid the dry leaves of that wood (not swampy), from time to time the rearmost moving forward one or two at a time, while a few are perched here and there on the lower branches of a birch or other tree, and i hear a very low and sweet whistling strain, commonly half-finished, from one every two or three minutes. you might frequently say of a poet away from home that he was as mute as a bird of passage, uttering a mere chip from time to time, but follow him to his true habitat, and you shal' dot know him, he will sing so melodiously. eaely spring in massachusetts. 231 march 25, 1859. a score of my townsmen have been shooting and trapping musquash and mink of late. they are gone all day; early and late they scan the rising tide ; stealthily they set their traps in remote swamps, avoid ing one another. am not i a trapper, too ? early and late scanning the rising flood, rang ing by distant woodsides, setting my traps in solitude, and baiting them as well as i know how, that i may catch life and light, that my intellectual part may taste some venison and be invigorated, that my nakedness may be clad in some wild june warmth ? as to the color of spring, i should say that hitherto in dry weather it was fawn-colored ; in wet, more yellowish or tawny. when wet, the green of the fawn is supplied by the lichens and the mosses. march 26, 1842. i thank god that the cheapness which appears in time and the world, the trivialness of the whole scheme of things, is in my own cheap and trivial moment. i am _time and the world. in me are summer and winter, village life, and commercial routine, pes tilence and famine, and refreshing breezes, joy and sadness, life and death. i must confess i have felt mean enough when asked how i was to act on society, what errand i had to mankind. undoubtedly i did not feel 232 early spring in massachusetts. mean without a reason, and yet my loitering is not without a defense. i would fain communi cate the wealth of my life to men, would really give them what is most precious in my gift. i would secrete pearls with the shellfish and lay up honey with the hees for them. i will sift the sunbeams for the public good. i know no riches i would keep back. i have no private good unless it be my peculiar ability to serve the public. this is the only individual prop erty. each one may thus be innocently rich. i enclose and foster the pearl till it is grown. i wish to communicate those parts of my life which i would gladly live again. it is hard to be a good citizen of the world in any great sense, but if we do render no interest or increase to mankind out of that talent god gave us, we can at least preserve the principal unimpaired. in such a letter as i like there will be the most naked and direct speech, the least circum locution. march 26, 1853. up the assabet, scared from his perch a stout hawk, the red-tailed, un doubtedly, for i saw very plainly the cow-red when he spread his wings from off his tail (and rump?) i rowed the boat three times within gunshot before he flew, twice within four rods, while he sat on an oak over the water ; i think early spring in massachusetts. 233 because i had two ladies with me, which was as good as bushing the boat. he was an inter esting, eagle-like object as he sat upright on his perch with his back to us, now and then look ing over his shoulder, the broad-backed, flat headed, curve-beaked bird. march 26, 1855. 6 a. m. still cold and blustering. i see a musk-rat house just erected, two feet or more above the water, and sharp. at the hubbard path a mink comes tetering along the ice by the side of the river. i am between bim and the sun, and he does not no tice me. he seems daintily lifting his feet with a jerk as if his toes were sore. they seem to go a-hunting at night along the edge of the river. perhaps i notice them more at this season when the shallow water freezes at nighfcf and there is no vegetation along the shore to conceal them. the lark sings perched on the top of an ap ple tree, seel-yah seel-yah, and then perhaps seel-yah— see— e, and several other strains quite sweet and plaintive, contrasting with the cheer less season and the bleak meadow. farther off i hear one with notes like ah— tick— seel— yah. p. m. sail down to the great meadows. a strong wind with snow driving from the west <wa thickening the air. the farmers pause to bee me scud before it. at last i land and walk further down on the meadow bank i no 834 early spring in massachusetts. tice the paths made by the musk-rats when the water was high in the winter leading from the river up the bank to a bed of grass above or below the surface. when it runs under the sur face i frequently slump into it, and can trace it to the bed by the hollow sound when i stamp on the frozen ground. they have disfigured the banks very much in some places the past winter. clams have been carried into these galleries a rod or more under the earth. when the ice still remained thick over the galleries, after the water had gone down, they kept on the surface and terminated, perhaps, at some stump where the earth was a little raised. march 26, 1856. the romans introduced husbandry into england where but little was practiced before, and the english have intro duced it into america. so we may well read the roman authors for a history of this art as practiced by us. i am sometimes affected by the consideration that a man may spend the whole of his life after boyhood in accomplishing a particular design, as if he were put to a special and petty use, without taking time to look around him and appreciate the phenomenon of his existence. if so many purposes are thus necessarily left un accomplished, perhaps unthought of, we are re minded of the transient interest we have in this early spring in massachusetts. 235 life. our interest in our country, the spread of liberty, etc., strong, and as it were, innate as it is, cannot be as transient as our present existence here. it cannot be that all those pa triots who die in the midst of their career have no further connection with the career of their country. march 26, 1857. as i lay on the fine dry sedge in the sun in a deep and sheltered hol low, i heard one fine, faint peep from over the windy ridge between the hollow in which i lay and the swamp, which at first i referred to a bird, and looked round at the bushes which crowned the brim of this hollow to find it, but erelong a regularly but faintly repeated phe, phe, phe, phe, revealed the hylodes pickeringii it was like the light reflected from the moun tain ridges within the shaded portion of the moon, forerunner and herald of the spring. you take your walk some pretty cold and windy, but sunny, march day through rustling woods, perhaps, glad to take shelter in the hol .faws or on the south side of hills or woods. when ensconced in some sunny and sheltered hollow with some just melted pool at its bot tom, as you recline on the fine withered sedge in which the mice have had their galleries, leav ing it pierced with countless holes, and are, per chance, dreaming of spring there, a single dry £36 early spring in massachusetts. hard croak, like a grating twig, comes up from the pool. where there is a small, smooth sur face of melted ice bathing the bare button bushes, or water andromeda, or tufts of sedge, such is the earliest voice of the liquid pools, hard and dry and grating. unless you watch long and closely, not a ripple nor a bubble will be seen, and a marsh hawk will have to look long to find one. the notes of the croaking frog and the hylodes are not only contemporary with, but analogous to, the blossom of the skunk cabbage and white maple. march 26, 1860. this dry, whitish, tawny or drab color of the fields, withered grass lit by the sun, is the color of a teamster's coat. it is one of the most interesting effects of light now, when the sun coming out of clouds shines brightly on it. it is the /ore-glow of the year. there is certainly a singular propriety in that color for the coat of a farmer or teamster, a hunter or shepherd, who is required to be much abroad in our landscape at this season. it is in harmony with nature, and you are less conspic uous in the fields and can get nearer wild ani mals for it. for this reason i am the better satisfied with the color of my hat, a drab, than with that of my companion, which is black, though his coat is of the exact tint, and better than mine. but again my dusty boots harmon early speing in massachusetts. 237 ize better with, the landscape than his black and glossy india-rubbers. 1 had a suit once in which, methinks, i could glide across the fields unperceived half a mile in front of a farmer's windows. it was such a skillful mix ture of browns, dark and light, properly propor tioned, with even some threads of green in it, by chance. it was of loose texture and about the color of a pasture with patches of withered sweet fern and lechea. i trusted a good deal to my invisibility in it when going across lots, and many a time i was aware that to it i owed the near approach of wild animals. no doubt my dusty and tawny cowhides sur prise the street walkers who wear patent leather congress shoes, but they do not consider how absurd such shoes would be in my vocation to thread the woods and swamps in. c was saying properly enough the other day, as we were making our way through a dense patch of shrub oak, " i suppose that those villagers think we wear these old, worn hats with holes all along the corners for oddity ; but coombs, the musquash hunter and partridge and rabbit snarer, knows better. he understands us. he knows that a new and square-cornered hat would be spoiled in one excursion through the shrub oaks." when a citizen comes to take a walk with me, i commonly find that he is lame 238 early spring in massachusetts. and disabled by his shoeing. he is sure to wet his feet, tear his coat, and jam his hat, and the superior qualities of my boots, coat, and hat appear. i once went into the woods with a party for a fortnight. i wore my old and com mon clothes, which were of vermont gray. they wore, no doubt, the best they had for such an occasion, of a fashionable color and quality. i thought that they were a little ashamed of me while we were in the towns. they all tore their clothes badly but myself, and i, who, it chanced, was the only one pro vided with needles and thread, enabled them to mend them. when we came out of the woods i was the best dressed of the party. one of the most interesting sights this p. m. is the color of the yellow sand in the sun at the bottom of nut-meadow and second division brooks. the yellow sands of a lonely brook, seen through the rippling water, with the shadows of the ripples like films passing over it. tried by various tests this season fluctuates. thus the skunk-cabbage may flower march 2, as in 1860, or not till april 6 or 8, as in 1854 and 1855, a variation of about thirty-six days. the bluebird may be seen february 24, as in 1850, 1857, and 1860, or not till march 24, as in 1856, a variation of about twenty-eight days. early spring in massachusetts. 239 the yellow-spotted tortoise may be seen feb ruary 23, as in 1857, or not till march 28, as in 1855, a variation of thirty-three days. the wood-frog may be heard march 15, as this year, or not till april 13, as in 1856, a va riation of twenty-nine days. thus tried by these four tests, march fluctu ates about a month, receding into february or advancing into april. march 27, 1840. think how finite, after all, the known world is. money coined at phila delphia is a legal tender over how much of it. you may carry ship-biscuit, beef, and pork quite round to the place you set out from. england sends her felons to the other side for safe-keep ing and convenience. march 27, 1841. magnanimity, though it look expensive for a short course, is always economy in the long run. to make up a great action there are no subordinate mean ones. we can never afford to postpone a true life to day to any future and anticipated nobleness. we think if by tight economy we can manage to arrive at independence, then indeed we will begin to be generous without stay. we sacri 6ce all nobleness to a little present meanness. if a man charge you $800 pay him $850, and it will leave a clean edge to the sum. it will be like nature, overflowing and rounded like the 240 early spring in massachusetts. bank of a river, not close and precise like a bank or ditch. it is always a short step to peace of mind. i must not lose any of my freedom by being a farmer and landholder. most who enter on any profession are doomed men. the world might as well sing a dirge over them forthwith. the farmer's muscles are rigid ; he can do one thing long, not many well. his pace seems determined henceforth. he never quickens it. a very rigid nemesis is his fate. when the right wind blows, or a star calls, i can leave this arable and grass ground without making a will or settling my estate. i would buy a farm as freely as a silken streamer. let me not think my front windows must face east hence forth because a particular hill slopes that way. my life must undulate still. i will not feel that my wings are dipt when once i have settled on ground which the law calls my own, but find new pinions grown to the old, and talaria to my feet beside. sunday, march 27, 1842. the eye must be firmly anchored to this earth which beholds birches and pines waving in the breeze in a cer tain light, a serene, rippling light. cliffs. the little hawks have just come out to play, like butterflies rising one above tha other in endless alternation, far below me. early spring in massachusetts. 241 they swoop from side to side in the broad basin of the tree-tops, with wider and wider surges, as if swung by an invisible pendulum. they stoop down on this side and scale up on that. suddenly i look up and see a new bird, prob ably an eagle, quite above me, laboring with the wind not more than forty rods off. it was the largest bird of the falcon kind i ever saw. i was never so impressed by any flight. she sailed the air, and fell back from time to time like a ship on her beam-ends, holding her talons up as if ready for the arrows. i never allowed before for the grotesque attitude of our national bird. the eagle must have an educated eye. see what a life the gods have given us, set round with pain and pleasure. it is too strange for sorrow, it is too strange for joy. one while it looks as shallow, though as intricate as a cre tan labyrinth, and again it is a pathless depth. i ask for bread incessantly, that my life sustain me as much as meat my body. no man know eth in what hour his life may come. say not that nature is trivial, for to-morrow she will be radiant with beauty. march, 27, 1853 p. m. to martial miles's the hazel is fully out. the 23d was perhaps full early to date them. it is in some respects the most interesting flower yet, though so minute that only an observer of 16 242 early spuing in massachusetts. nature, or one who looked carefully, would no tice it. it is the most highly and richly col ored yet, ten or a dozen little rays at the end of the buds, which are at the ends and along the sides of the bare stems. some of the 1 flowers are a light, some a dark, crimson. the high color of this minute, unobserved flower at this cold, leafless, and almost flowerless season ! it is a beautiful greeting of the spring, when the catkins are scarcely relaxed and there are no signs of life in the bush. moreover, they are so tender that i never get one home in good condition. they wilt and turn black. tried to see the faint-croaking frogs at j. p. brown's pond in the woods. they are remarkably timid and shy ; had their noses and eyes out, croaking, but all ceased, dived, and concealed themselves, before i got within a rod of the shore. stood perfectly still amid the bushes on the shore before one showed himself ; finally five or six. all eyed me and gradually ap proached me within three feet to reconnoitre. though i waited about half an hour, they would not utter a sound nor take their eyes off me, plainly affected by curiosity. dark brown, and some, perhaps, dark green, about two inches long. had their noses and eyes out when they croaked. if described at all, they must be either young of ran a pipiens or rana palustris. early spring in massachusetts. 243 march, 27, 1857 i would fain make two reports in my journal, first, the incidents and observations of to-day, and by to-morrow i review the same and record what was omitted before, which will often be the most significant and poetic part. i do not know at first what it is that charms me. the men and things of to-day are wont to be fairer and truer in to morrow's memory. men talk to me about society, as if i had none, and they had some, as if it were only to be got by going to the sociable or to boston. compliments and flattery oftenest excite my contempt by the pretension they imply, for who is he that assumes to flatter me ? to com pliment often implies an assumption of superi ority in the complimenter. it is in fact a subtle detraction. march 27, 1858. p. m. sail to bittern cliff. scare up a flock of sheldrakes just off fair ha ven hill, the conspicuous white ducks, sailing straight hither and thither soon after we scare up a flock of black ducks. we land and steal over the hill through the woods, ex pecting to find them under lee's cliff, as indeed we do, having crawled over the hill through the woods on our stomachs. there we watched various waterfowl for an hour. there are a dozen sheldrakes (or goosanders) and among 244 early spring in massachusetts. them four or five females. they are now pair ing. i should say one or two pairs are made. at first we see only a male and female quite on the alert, some way out on the pond, tacking back and forth, and looking every way. they keep close together, headed one way, and when one turns the other also turns quickly. the male appears to take the lead. soon the rest appear, sailing out from the shore into sight. we hear a squeaking note as if made by a pump, and presently see four or five great her ring gulls wheeling about. sometimes they make a sound like the scream of a hen hawk. they are shaped somewhat like a very thick white rolling-pin sharpened at both ends. at length they alight near the ducks. the shel drakes at length acquire confidence, come close in shore and go to preening themselves they are all busy about it at once among them, or near by, i at length detect three or four whistlers by their wanting the red dill, being considerably smaller and less white, having a white spot on the head, a black back, and altogether less white. they also keep more or less apart and do not dive when the rest do at length i detect two little uppers, as i have called them, though i am not sure that i have ever seen the male before. they are male and female. .... they are in* early spring in massachusetts. 245 cessantly diving close to the button bushes. the female is apparently uniformly black, another, dark brown, but the male has a conspicuous crest. apparently white on the hind head, with a white breast and white line on the lower sides of the neck ; that is, the head and breast are black and white conspicuously. the sheldrake has a peculiar long clipper look, often moving rapidly straight forward over the water. it sinks to very various depths, sometimes, as when apparently alarmed, show ing only its head and neck and the upper part of its back, and at others, when at ease, float ing buoyantly on the surface, as if it had taken in more air, showing all its white breast and the white along its sides. sometimes it lifts itself up on the surface and flaps its wings, re vealing its whole rosaceous breast and its lower parts, looking in form like a penguin it was a pretty sight to see a pair of them tack ing about, always within a foot or two of each other, heading the same way, now on this short tack, now on that, the male taking the lead, sinking deep and looking every way. when the whole twelve had come together they would soon break up again, and were continu ally changing their ground, though not diving, now sailing slowly this way a dozen rods, and now that, and now coming in near the shore. 246 early spring in massachusetts. then they would all go to preening themselves, thrusting their bills into their backs, and keep ing up such a brisk motion that you could not get a fair sight of one's head. from time to time you heard a slight note of alarm, or per haps a breeding note, for they were evidently selecting their mates. then it was surprising to see how briskly sailing off one side they went to diving, as if they had suddenly come across a school of minnows. a whole company would disappear at once now for nearly a min ute there is not a feather to be seen, and then next minute you see a party of half a dozen there chasing one another and making the water fly far and wide. march 27, 1859 it is remarkable how modest and unobtrusive these early flowers are. the musquash and duck hunter or the farmer might and do commonly pass by them without perceiving them. they steal into the air and light of spring without being noticed for the most part. the sportsman seems to see a mass of weather-stained dead twigs, whose wood is exposed here and there, but nearer the spots are recognized for the pretty bright buttons of the willow ; and the flowers of the alder (now partly in bloom) look like masses of bare, bar ren twigs, last year's twigs, and would be taken (or such. early spring in massachusetts. 247 march 28, 1842. how often must one feel, as he looks back on his past life, that he has gained a talent, but lost a character. my life has got down into my fingers. my inspiration at length is only so much breath as i can breathe. society affects to estimate men by their talents, but really feels and knows them by their character. what a man does, compared with what he is, is but a small part. to re quire that our friend possess a certain skill is not to be satisfied till he is something less than our friend. friendship should be a great prom ise, a perennial spring-time. i can conceive how the life of the gods may be dull and tame, if it is not disappointed and insatiate. one may well feel chagrined when he finds he can do nearly all he can conceive. how poor is the life of the best and wisest ; the petty side will appear at last. understand once how the best in society live, with what routine, with what tedium and insipidity, with what grimness and defiance, with what chuckling over an exaggera tion of the sunshine ! i am astonished, i must confess, that man looks so respectable in nature, that, considering the littlenesses socrates must descend to in the twenty-four hours, he yet wears a serene countenance and even adorns nature. march 28, 1852. 10i p. m. the geese havo 248 early spring in massachusetts. just gone over making a great cackling and awaking people in their beds. they will prob ably settle in the river. march 28, 1853. asked me to read the life of dr. chalmers, which, however, i did not promise to do. yesterday, sunday, she was heard, through the partition, shouting to , who is deaf, " think of it, he stood half an hour to-day to hear the frogs croak, and he wouldn't read the life of chalmers." 6 a. m. to cliffs the woods ring with the cheerful jingle of the fringilla hiemalis. this is a very trig and compact little bird, and appears to be in good condition. the straight edge of slate on their breasts contrasts remark ably with the white from beneath. the short, light-colored bill is also very conspicuous amid the dark slate, and when they fly from you, the two white feathers in their tails are very dis tinct at a good distance. they are very lively, pursuing each other from bush to bush. p. m. to assabet. saw eleven black ducks near the bathing-place in the assabet flying up stream. came within three or four rods of me, then wheeled and went down. their faint quack sounded much like the croak of the frogs occasionally heard now in the pools. as they wheeled and went off they made a very fine whistling sound which yet, i think, was not made by their wings. early spring in massachusetts. 249 i saw flying to the alders by the river what i have no doubt was the tree-sparrow, with a ferruginous crown or head, and wings also partly ferruginous ; light beneath. it was in company with a few of the fringilla hiemalis. sang sweetly, much like some notes of the ca nary. one pursued another. it was not large enough for the fox-colored sparrow. perhaps i have seen it before within the month. as near as i can make out, the hawks or fal cons i am likely to see here are the american sparrow hawk, the fish hawk, the goshawk, the short-winged buzzard (if this is the same with browne's stuffed sharp-shinned or slate-col ored hawk, not slate in his specimen). is not this the common small hawk that soars ? the red-tailed hawk. (have we the red-shouldered hawk, about the same size and aspect with the last ?) the hen harrier. i suppose it is the adult of this, with the slate color, over meadows. march 28, 1855. p. m. to cliffs, along river. .... i run about these cold, blustering days, on the whole, perhaps, the worst to bear in the year (partly because they disappoint expecta tion), looking almost in vain for some animal or vegetable life stirring. the warmest springs hardly allow me the glimpse of a frog's heel as he settles himself in the mud, and i think i am •ucky if i see one winter-defying hawk or a 250 early spring in massachusetts. hardy duck or two at a distance on the water. as for the singing of birds, the few that have come to us, it is too cold for them to sing and for me to hear. the bluebird's warble comes feeble and frozen to my ear over a great many acres the meadows have been cut up into neat squares and other figures by the ice of february, as if ready to be re moved ; sometimes separated by narrow and deep channels like musk-rat paths, but oftener the edges have been raised and apparently stretched, and settling have not fallen into their places exactly, but lodged on their neigh bors. even yet you see cakes of ice surmounted by a shell of meadow-crust which has preserved them, while all around is bare meadow. march 28, 1856. i think to say to my friend, there is but one interval between us. you are on one side of it, i on the other. you know as much about it as i, how wide, how impassable it is. i will endeavor not to blame you. do not blame me. there is nothing to be said about it. recognize the truth, and pass over the intervals that are bridged. farewell, my friends, my path inclines to this side the mountains, yours to that. for a long time you have appeared further and further off to me. i see that you will at length iissappear altogether. for a season my path early spring in massachusetts. 251 seems lonely without you. the meadows are like barren ground. the memory of me is steadily passing away from you. my path grows narrower and steeper, and the night is approaching. yet i have faith that in the in finite future new suns will rise and new plains expand before me, and i trust i shall therein encounter pilgrims who bear that same virtue that i recognized in you, who will be that very virtue that was you. i accept the everlasting and salutary law which was promulgated as much that spring when i first knew you, as this when i seem to leave you. my former friends, i visit you as one walks amid the columns of a ruined temple, you be long to an era, a civilization and glory long past. i recognize still your fair proportions, notwithstanding the convulsions we have felt, and the weeds and jackals that have sprung up around. i come here to be reminded of the past, to read your inscriptions, the hieroglyph ics, the sacred writings. we are no longer the representatives of our former selves. love is a thirst that is never slaked. under the coarsest rind the sweetest meat. if you would read a friend aright you must be able to read through something thicker and opaquer than horn. if you can read a friend, all lan guages will be easy to you. enemies publish 252 eably spring in massachusetts. themselves. they declare war. the friend never declares his love. march 28, 1857. at lee's cliff and this side, i see half a dozen buff-edged butterflies, van essa antiopa, and pick up three dead or dying — two together, the edges of their wings gone. several are fluttering over the dry rock dsbria under the cliff, in whose crevices probably they have wintered. two of the three i pick up are not dead, though they will not fly. verily their day is a short one. what has checked their frail lif e ? within the buff-edge is black with bright sky-blue spots. those little oblong spots on the black ground are light as you look directly down on them, but from one side they change through violet to a crystalline rose pur ple the broad buff edge of the vanessa antiopa's wings harmonizes with the russet ground it flutters over, and as it stands con cealed in the winter with its wings folded above its back, in a cleft in the rocks, the gray-brown underside of its wings prevents its being distin guished from the rocks themselves when i witness the first plowing and planting i ac quire a long lost confidence in the earth that it will nourish the seed that is committed to its bosom. i am surprised to be reminded that there is warmth is it. we have not only warmer skies then but a warmer earth. the early spring in massachusetts. 253 frost is out of it and we may safely commit these seeds to it in some places. yesterday i walked with a farmer beside his team and saw one furrow turned quite round his field. what noble work is plowing, with the broad and solid earth for material, the ox for fellow-laborer, and the simple, but efficient plow for tool. work that is not done in any shop, in a cramped position, work that tells, that concerns all men, which the sun shines and the rain falls on, and the birds sing over. you turn over the whole vegetable mould, expose how many grubs, and put a new aspect on the face of the earth. it comes pretty near to mak ing a world. redeeming a swamp does, at any rate. a good plowman is a terrse-filius. a plowman, we all know, whistles as he drives his team afield.^ often i can give the truest and most inter esting account of any adventure i have had, after years have elapsed, for then i am not con fused, only the most significant facts surviving in my memory. indeed, all that continues to interest me after such a lapse of time is sure to be pertinent, and i may safely record all that 1 remember. march 28, 1858. i notice the hazel stigmaa in a warm hollow just beginning to peep forth. this is an unobserved, but very pretty and in 254 eakly spring in massachusetts. teresting evidence of the progress of the season. i should not have noticed it, if i had not care fully examined the fertile buds. it is like a crimson star first dimly detected in the twilight. the warmth of the day in this sunny hollow above the withered sedge has caused the stig mas to show their lips through the scaly shield. they do not project more than the thirtieth of an inch. some not the sixtieth. the staminate catkins are also considerably loosened. just as the turtles put forth their heads, so these put forth their stigmas in the spring. how many accurate thermometers there are on every hill and in every valley! measure the length of the hazel stigmas and you can tell how much warmth there has been this spring. how fitly and exactly any season of the year may be de scribed by indicating the condition of some flower it is surprising that men can be divided into those who lead an in-door and those who lead an out-door life, as if birds and quad rupeds were to be divided into those that lived a within-nest or burrow life, and those that lived without their nests and holes chiefly. how many of our troubles are house-bred ! he lives an out-door life, i. e., he is not squatted behind a door. it is such a questionable phrase as an " honest man," or the " naked eye," as if the eye which is not covered with a spy-glass should properly be called naked. eablt spring in massachusetts. 255 march 28, 1859. p. m. paddle to the bed ford line. it is now high time to look for ar rowheads, etc. i spend many hours every spring gathering the crop which the melting snow and rain have washed bare. when at length some island in the meadow or some sandy field else where has been plowed, perhaps for rye, in the fall, i take note of it, and do not fail to repair thither as soon as the earth begins to be dry in the spring. if the spot chances never to have been cultivated before, i am the first to gather a crop from it. the farmer little thinks that another reaps a harvest which is the fruit of his toil. as much ground is' turned up in a day by the plow as indian implements could not have turned over in a month, and my eyes rest on the evidences of an aboriginal life which passed here a thousand years ago, perchance. espec ially if the knolls in the meadows are washed by a freshet where they have been plowed the previous fall, the soil will be taken away lower down and the stones left, the arrow-heads, etc., and soapstone pottery amid them, somewhat as gold is washed in a dish or torn. i landed on two spots this p. m. and picked up a dozen ar rowheads. it is one of the regular pursuits of the spring. as sportsmen go in pursuit of ducks and musquash, and scholars of rare books, and travelers of adventures, and poets of ideas, 256 early spring in massachusetts.. and all men of money, i go in search of arrow heads when the season comes round again. so i help myself to live worthily, loving my life as i should. it is a good collyrium to look on the bare earth, to pore over it so much, getting strength to all your senses, like antaeus. you can hardly name a more innocent or wholesome entertainment. as i am thus engaged i hear the rumble of the bowling-alley's thunder, which has begun again in thevillage. it comes before the earliest natural thunder. but what its lightning is, and what atmospheres it purifies, i do not know i have not decided whether i had better publish my experience in searching for arrowheads in three volumes with plates, or try to compress it into one. these durable im plements seem to have been suggested to the in dian mechanic with a view to my entertainment in a succeeding period. after all the labor ex pended on it, the bolt may have been shot but once, perchance, and the shaft, once attached to it, decayed, and there lay the arrowhead, sink ing into the ground, awaiting me. they lie all over the hills with like expectation, and in due time the husbandman is sent, and, tempted by the promise of corn or rye, he plows the land and turns them up to my view. many as i have found, methinks the last one gave me about the same delight that the first did. some time eablt spring in massachusetts. 257 or other, you would say, it had rained arrow heads, for they lie all over the surface of amer ica. you may have your peculiar tastes, cer tain localities in your town may seem from association unattractive and uninhabitable to you, you may wonder that the land bears any money value there, and pity some poor fellow who is said to survive in that neighborhood, but plow up a new field there, and you will find the omnipresent arrow point strewn over it, and it will appear that the red man with other tastes and associations lived there too. no matter how far from the modern road or meet ing-bouse, no matter how near. they lie in the meeting-house cellar, and they lie in the distant cow-pasture. some collections which were made a cenfiiry ago by the curious like myself have been dispersed again, and they are still as good as new. you cannot tell the third hand ones (for they are all second-hand) from the others, such is their persistent out-of-doors durability. they were chiefly made to be lost. they are sown like a grain that is slow to germinate, broadcast over the earth. as the dragon's teeth bore a crop of soldiers, so these bear crops of philosophers and poets, and the same seed is just as good to plant again. it is a stone fruit. each one yields me a thought. i come nearer to the maker of it than if i found 17 258 early spring in massachusetts. his bones. they would not prove any art that wielded them, such as this work of his bones does. it is humanity inscribed on the face of the earth, patent to my eyes as soon as the snow is off, not hidden away in some crypt or grave, or under a pyramid. no disgusting mummy, but a clean stone, the best symbol or letter that could have been transmitted to me. the red man, his mark ! __f ^^^ at every step i see it it l_ — is no single in scription on a particular rock, but a footprint or rather a mindprint left everywhere and alto gether illegible. no vandals, however van dalic in their disposition, can be so industrious as to destroy them they are not fossil bones, but, as it were, fossil thoughts, forever reminding me of the mind that shaped them. i would fain know that i am treading in the tracks of human game, that i am on the trail of mind when i see these signs i know that the subtle spirits that made them are not far off, into whatever form transmuted. what if you do plow and hoe amid them, and swear that not one stone shall be left upon another, they are only the less likely to break in that case. when you turn up one layer you bury another so much the more securely. they are at peace with rust. this arrow-headed charac ter promises to outlast all others. the larger eably spring in massachusetts. 259 pestles and axes may perchance be broken and grow scarce, but the arrow-head shall perhaps never cease to wing its way through the ages to eternity when some vandal chieftain has razed to earth the british museum, and per chance, the winged bulls of nineveh shall have lost most, if not all, of their features, the arrow heads which the museum contains, may find themselves at home again in familiar dust, and resume their shining in new springs upon the bared surface of the earth, to be picked up for the thousandth time by the shepherd or savage that may be wandering there, and once more suggest their story to him they cannot be said to be lost or found. surely their use was not so much to bear its fate to some bird or quadruped, or man, as it was to lie here near the surface of the earth for a perpetual reminder to the generations that come after as for museums, i think it is better to let nature take care of our antiquities. these are our an tiquities, and they are cleaner to think of than the rubbish of the tower of london, and they are a more ancient armor than is there. it is a recommendation that they are so inobvious that they occur only to the eye and thought that chances to be directed toward them. when you pick up an arrow-head and put it in your pocket, it may say, " eh, you think yon 260 early spring in massachusetts. have got me, do you ? but i shall wear a hole in your pocket at last, or if you put me in your cabinet, your heir or great-grandson will forget me, or throw me out of the window directly, or when the house falls, i shall drop into the cel lar, and then i shall he quite at home again, ready to be found again. perhaps some new red man, that is to come, will fit me to a shaft and make me do his bidding for a bow shot ; what reck i ? " the meadows, which are still covered far and wide, are quite alive with black ducks. when walking about on the low eastern shore at the bedford bound, i heard a faint honk, and looked around near the water with my glass, thinking it came from that side or perhaps from a farm-yard in that direction. i soon heard it again, and at last we detected a great flock of geese passing over quite on the other side of us and pretty high up. from time to time one of the company uttered a short note, — that pecu liarly metallic, clangorous sound. they were in a single undulating line, and, as usual, one or two were from time to time crowded out of the line, apparently by the crowding of those in the rear, and were flying on one side and trying to recover their places. but at last a second short line was formed, meeting the long one at the usual angle, and making a figure early spring in massachusetts. 261 gomewhat like a hay-hook. i suspect it will be found there is really some advantage in large birds of passage flying in the wedge form and cleaving their way through the air, — that they really do overcome its resistance best in this way, and perchance the direction and strength of the wind determine the comparative length of the two sides. the great gulls fly generally up and down the river valley, cutting off the bends of the river, and so do these geese. they fly sympathizing with the river, a stream in the air, soon lost in the distant sky. if you scan the horizon at this season you are very likely to detect a flock of dark ducks moving with rapid wing athwart the sky, or see the undulat ing line of migrating geese. ball's hill, with its withered oak leaves and its pines, looks very fair to-day, a mile and a half off across the water, through a very thin varnish or haze. it reminds me of the isle which was called up from the bottom of the sea and given to apollo. how charming the con trast of land and water, especially where there is a temporary island in the flood with its new and tender shores of waving outline, so with drawn, yet habitable ; above all, if it rises into a hill high above the water, so contrasting with it the more, and, if that hill is wooded, suggest ing wildness. our vernal lakes have a beauty 262 early spring in massachusetts. to my mind which they would not possess if they were more permanent. everything is in rapid flux here, suggesting that nature is alive to her extremities and superficies. to-day we sail swiftly on dark rolling waves or paddle over a sea as smooth as a mirror, unable to touch the bottom, where mowers work and hide their jugs in august, coasting the edge of maple swamps where alder tassels and white-maple flowers are kissing the tide that has risen to meet them. but this particular phase of beauty is fleeting. nature has so many shows for us, she cannot afford to give much time to this. in a few days, perchance, these lakes will all have run away to the sea. such are the pictures which she paints. when we look at our mas terpieces we see only dead paint and its vehicle, which suggests no liquid life rapidly flowing off from beneat^t but in nature it is constant sur prise and novelty as we sweep past the north end of poplar hill, its now dryish, pale brown, withered sward, clothing its rounded wlope which was lately saturated with moisture, presents very agreeable hues. in this light, in fair weather, the patches of now dull greenish masses contrast just regularly enough with the pale brown grass. it is like some rich but mod est-colored kidderminster carpet, or rather the ekin of a monster python tacked to the hillside eably spring in massachusetts. 263 »nd stuffed with earth the earth lies out now like 'a leopard drying her lichen and moss spotted skin in the sun, her sleek and varie gated hide. i know that the few raw spots will heal over. brown is the color for me, the color of our coats and our daily lives, the color of the poor man's loaf. the bright tints are pies and cakes, good only for october feasts, which would make us sick if eaten every day. .... undoubtedly the geese fly more numerously over rivers which, like ours, flow north-easterly, are more at home with the-water under them. each flock runs the gauntlet of a thousand gun ners ; and when you see them steer off from you and your boat, you may remember how great their experience in such matters may be, how many such boats and gunners they have seen and avoided between here and mexico. even now (though you, low plodding, little dream it) they may perhaps see one or two more lying in wait ahead. they have an ex perienced ranger of the air for their guide. the echo of one gun hardly dies away, before they see another pointed at them. how many bul lets or smaller shot have sped in vain toward their ranks ! ducks fly more irregularly, and shorter dis tances at a time. th3 geese rest in fair weather by 4ay only in the midst of our broadest mead* 264 early spring in massachusetts, ows and ponds. so they go anxious and ear nest to hide their nests under the pole. the gulls, more used to boats and sails, will often fly quite near without manifesting alarm. march 29 and 30, 1842. though nature s laws are more immutable than any despot's, they rarely seem rigid, but relax with license in summer weather. we are not often nor harshly reminded of the things we may not do. i am often astonished to see how long and with what manifest infringement of the natural laws some men i meet in the highway maintain life. na ture does not deny them quarter. they do not die without priest. all the while she re joices, for if they are not one part of her, they are another. i am convinced that consistency is the secret of health. how many a poor man, striving to live a pure life, pines and dies after a life of sickness, and his successors doubt if nature is not pitiless, while the confirmed and consistent sot who is content with his rank life like mush rooms, a mass of corruption, still dozes comfort ably under a hedge. he has made his peace with himself; there is no strife. nature is really very kind and liberal to all persons of vicious habits. they take great licenses with her. she does not exhaust them with many excesses. early spring in massachusetts. 265 how hard it is to be greatly related to man kind. they are only our uncles and aunts and cousins. i hear of some persons greatly re lated, but only he is so who has all mankind for his friend. our intercourse with the best grows soon shallow and trivial. they no longer in spire us. after enthusiasm comes insipidity. the sap of all noble schemes drieth up, and the schemers return again and again in despair to " common sense and labor." if i could help infuse some life and heart into society, should i not do a service ? why will not the gods mix a little of the wine of nobleness with the air we drink ? let virtue have some firm foothold in the earth ? where does she dwell ? who are the salt of the earth ? may not love have some resting-place on the earth as sure as the sunshine on the rock ? the crystals imbedded in the cliffs sparkle and gleam from afar, as if they did certainly enrich our planet, but where does any virtue permanently sparkle and (fleam ? she was sent forth over the earth too soon, before the earth was prepared for her. rightfully we are to each other the gate of heaven and redeemers from sin, but how we overlook these lowly and narrow ways. we will go over the bold mountain tops without going through the valleys. men do not, after all, meet on the ground of their real acquaint* 266 eaely spring in massachusetts. ance and actual understanding of one another, but degrade themselves immediately into the puppets of convention. they do as if, in given circumstances, they had agreed to know each other only so well. they rarely get so far as to inform one another gratuitously, and use each other like the sea and the woods for what is new and inspiring there. the best inter course and communion they have is a silence above and behind their speech. we should be very simple to rely on words. what we knew before, always interprets a man's words. i can not easily remember what any man has said to me, but how can i forget what he is to me ? we know each other better than we are aware. we are admitted to startling privacies with every person we meet. march 29, 1853 p. m. to the early willow behind martial miles's on the railroad i hear the telegraph. this is the lyre that is as old as the world. i put my ear to the post and the sound seems to be in its core directly against my ear. this is all of music. the utmost refinements of art, i think, can go no further walking along near the edge of the meadow under lupine hill, i slumped through the sod into a musk-rat's nest, for there was only a thick ness of two inches over it, which was enough early spring in massachusetts. 267 when it was frozen. i laid it open with my bands. there were three or four channels or hollowed paths a rod or more in length, not merely worn but made in the meadow centering at the mouth of this burrow. they were three or four inches deep, and finally became indis tinct, and were lost amid the cranberry vines and grass toward the river. the entrance to the burrow was just at the edge of the upland, here a gentle sloping bank, and was probably just beneath the surface of the water six weeks, ago. it was about twenty-five rods distant from the true bank of the river. from this a straight gallery about six inches in diameter every way sloped upward about eight feet into the bank just beneath the turf, so that the end was about a foot higher than the entrance. here was a somewhat circular enlargement about one foot in horizontal diameter and of the same depth as the gallery. in it was nearly a peck of coarse meadow stubble, showing the marks of the scythe with which was mixed accident ally a very little of the moss that grew with it. three short galleries, only two feet long, were continued from this centre, somewhat like rays, toward the high land, as if they had been pre pared in order to be ready for a sudden rise of the water, or had been actually made so far under such an emergency. the nest was of 268 early spring in massachusetts. course thoroughly wet, and, humanly speak ing, uncomfortable, though the creature could breathe in it. but it is plain that the musk rat cannot be subject to the toothache. i have no doubt this was made and used last winter, for the grass was as fresh as that in the meadow (except that it was pulled up), and the sand which had been taken out lay partly in a flat tened heap in the meadow, and no grass had sprung up through it. in the course of the above examination i made a very interesting discovery. when i turned up the thin sod from over the damp cavity of the nest, i was sur prised to see at this hour of a pleasant day what i took to be beautiful frost crystals of a rare form, frost bodkins i was in haste to name them, for around the fine white roots of the grass, apparently herds grass, which were from one to two or more inches long, reaching down ward into the dark, damp cavern (though the grass blades had scarcely made so much growth above ; indeed the growth was scarcely visible there), appeared to be lingering still into the middle of this warm afternoon, rare and beau tiful frost crystals exactly in the form of a bodkin, about one sixth of an inch wide at base, and tapering evenly to the lower end. some times the upper part of the core was naked for half an inch, which gave them a slight resem early spring in massachusetts. 269 blance to feathers, though they were not flat, but round. at the abrupt end of the rootlet, as if cut off, was a larger dewdrop. on exam ining them more closely, feeling and tasting them, i found that it was not frost, but a clear crystalline dew in almost invisible drops, con centrated from the dampness of the cavern, perhaps melted frost preserving by its fine ness its original color, thus regularly arranged around the delicate white fibre. looking again, incredulous, i discerned extremely minute white threads or gossamer standing out on all sides from the main rootlet and affording the core for these drops. yet on those fibres which had lost their dew, none of these minute threads appeared it impressed me as a wonder ful piece of chemistry, that the very grass we trample on and esteem so cheap should be thus wonderfully nourished, that this spring green ness was not produced by coarse and cheap means, but that in the sod out of sight the most delicate and magical processes are going on. the half is not shown i brought home some tufts of the grass in my pocket, but when i took it out, i could not at first find those pearly white fibres and thought they were lost, for they were shrunk to dry brown threads, <ind as for the still finer gossamer which sup ported the roscid droplets, with few exceptions 270 early spbing in massachusetts. they were absolutely undiscoverable. they no longer stood out around the core, so delicate was their organization. it made me doubt almost if there were not actual, substantial, though in visible cores to the leaflets and veins of the hoar frost. can these almost invisible and ten der fibres penetrate the earth where there is no cavern? or is what we call the solid earth porous and cavernous enough for them ? march 29, 1855. as i stand on heywood's peak looking over walden, more than half its surface already sparkling blue water, i inhale with pleasure the cold but wholesome air, like a draught of cold water, contrasting it in my memory with the wind of summer which i do not thus eagerly swallow. this, which is a chilling wind to my fellow, is decidedly refresh ing to me. i swallow it with eagerness as a panacea. i feel an impulse also already to jump into the half-melted pond. this cold wind is refreshing to my palate as the warm air of; sun shine is not, methinks. march 29, 1858 p. m. to ball's hill as i sit two thirds up the sunny side of pine hill looking over the meadows, now almost completely bare, the crows, by their bwift flight and scolding, reveal to me some large bird of prey hovering over the river. i per teive by its marking and size that it cannot be eably spring in massachusetts. 271 a hen-hawk, and now it settles on the topmost branch of a white maple, bending it down. its great armed and feathered legs dangle help lessly in the air for a moment, as if feeling for the perch, while its body is tipping this way and that. it sits there facing me some forty or fifty rods off, pluming itself, but keeping a good look-out. at this distance and in this light it appears to have a rusty-brown head and breast, and is white beneath, with rusty leg feathers and a tail black beneath. when it flies again, it is principally black varied with white, regu lar light spots on its tail and wings beneath, but chiefly a conspicuous white space on the forward part of the neck. also some of the upper side of the tail or tail-coverts is white. it has broad, ragged, buzzard-like wings. i think it must be an eagle (?) it lets itself down, with its legs somewhat helplessly dang ling, as if feeling for something on the bare meadow, and then gradually flies away soaring and circling higher and higher until lost in the downy clouds. this lofty soaring is at least a grand recreation, as if it were nourishing sub lime ideas. i should like to know why it soars higher and higher so, whether its thoughts are really turned to earth, for it seems to be more nobly as well as highly employed than the la borers ditching in the meadows beneath, or any others of my fellow townsmen. 272 early spring in massachusetts. with many men their fine manners are a lie all over, a skin coat or finish of falsehood. they are not brave enough to do without this sort of armor which they wear night and day. march 30, 1840. pray what things interest me at present ? a long soaking rain, the drops trickling down the stubble, while i lay drenched on a last year's bed of wild oats by the side of some bare hill, ruminating. these things are of moment. to watch tnis crystal globe just sent from heaven to associate with me. while these clouds and this sombre drizzling weather shut all in, we two draw nearer and know one another. the gathering in of the clouds with the last rush and dying breath of the wind, and then the regular dripping of twigs and leaves the country over, give the impression of inward comfort and sociableness. the drenched stub ble and trees that drop beads on you as you pass, their dim outline seen through the rain on all sides drooping in sympathy with yourself, these are my undisputed territory, this is na ture's english comfort. the birds draw closer and are more familiar under the thick foliage, composing new strains on their roosts against the sunshine. march, 30, 1841. i find my life growing slov enly when it does not exercise a constant super vision over itself. its deeds accumulate. next early spring in massachusetts. 273 to having lived a day well, is a clear and calm overlooking of all our days. friendship. now we are partners in such legal trade, we '11 look to the beginnings, not the ends, nor to pay-day, knowing true wealth is made for current stock, and not for dividends. march 30, 1853. ah, those youthful days, are they never to return? when the walker does not too enviously observe particulars, but sees, hears, scents, tastes, and feels only him self, the phenomena that showed themselves in him, his expanding body, his intellect and heart. no worm or insect, quadruped or bird confined his view, but the unbounded universe was his. a bird has now become a mote in his eye. dug into what i take to be a woodchuck's burrow in the low knoll below the cliffs. it was in the side of the hill, and sloped gently downward at first diagonally into the hill about five feet, perhaps westerly, then turned and ran north about three feet, then northwest further into the hill four feet, then north again four feet, then northeast i know not how far, the last five feet, perhaps, ascending. it was the full length of the shovel from the surface of the ground to the bottom of the hole when i left offi owing, perhaps, to the rise of the hill. the 18 274 early spring in massachusetts. hole was arched above and flat on the bottom like an oven, o about five inches in diameter at the base. it seemed to have a pretty hard crust as i probed into it. there was a little enlargement, perhaps ten inches in diameter, in the angle at the end of twelve feet. it was thus, r ,«** it was a wonder where the sand was •». conveyed to, for there was not a wheel * ' entrance. barrow load at the entrance. march 30, 1854 eead an interest ing article on etienne geoffroy st. hilaire, the friend and contemporary of cuvier, though op posed to him in his philosophy. he believed species to be variable. in looking for anatomi cal resemblances he found that he could not safely be guided by function, form, structure, bize, color, etc., but only by the relative position and mutual dependence of organs. hence his " le principe des connexions " and his maxim, "an organ is sooner destroyed than trans posed," " un organ est plutfit alterd, atropine", ane"anti, que transpose ." a principal formula of his was, " unity of plan, unity of composi tion." " westminster review," january, 1854. march 30, 1855. .... he must have a great deal of life in him to draw upon, who can pick up a subsistence in november and march. man comes out of his winter quarters this month as lean as a woodchuck. not till late could the early spring in massachusetts. 275 bkunk find a place where the ground was thawed on the surface. except for science do not travel in such a climate as this, in november and march. i tried if a fish would take the bait to day, but in vain, i did not get a nibble. where are they ? march 30, 1856. p.m. to walden and fair haven. still cold and blustering. i came out to see the sand and subsoil in the deep cut as i would to see a spring flower, some redness on the cheek of earth i go to fair haven via the andromeda swamp. the river is a foot and more in depth there still. there is a little bare ground in and next to the swampy woods at the head of well meadow, where the springs and little black rills are flow ing. i see already one blade, three or four inches long, of that purple or lake grass, lying . flat on some water between snow-clad banks, the first leaf with a rich bloom on it. how si lent are the footsteps of spring ! there, too, where there is a fraction of the meadow, two rods over, quite bare under the bank, in this warm recess at the head of the meadow, though the rest is covered with snow a foot or more in depth, i was surprised to see the skunk-cabbage, with its great spear-heads, open and ready to blossom, and the oaltha palustris bud, which »hows yellowish, and the golden saxifrage green 276 eaelt spring in massachusetts. and abundant, all surrounded and hemmed in by snow which has covered the ground since christmas, and stretches as far as you can see on every side. the spring advances in spite of snow and ice and cold even. the ground un der the snow has lodg since felt the influence of the spring sun whose rays fell at a more favor able angle. the tufts or tussocks next the edge of the snow were crowned with dense phalanxes of spears of the stiff, triangularish sedge grass five inches high, but quite yellow, with a very slight greenness at the tip, showing that they pushed up through the snow, and, though it had melted, had not yet acquired color. in warm recesses in meadows and clefts, in rocks in the midst of ice and snow, nay, even under the snow, vegetation commences and steadily advances. march 30, 1858. p. m. to my boat at car dinal shore and thence to lee's cliff landing at bittern cliff i went round through the woods to get sight of ducks on the pond. creeping down through the woods i reached the rocks and saw fifteen or twenty sheldrakes scattered about. the full-plumaged males, con spicuously black and white, and often swim ming in pairs, appeared to be the most wary, keeping farthest out. others, with much less white, and duller black, were very busily fishing early spring in massachusetts. 277 just north of the inlet of the pond, where there is about three feet of water, and others still playing and preening themselves. these ducks, whose tame representatives are so sluggish and deliberate in their motions, were full of activ ity. a party of them fishing and playing is a 7ery lively scene. on one side, for instance, you will see eight or ten busily diving and most of the time under water, not rising high when they come up, and soon plunging again. the whole surface will be in commotion, though no ducks are to be seen. i saw one come up with a large fish, whereupon all the rest, as they successively came to the surface, gave chase to it, while it held its prey over the water in its bill. they pursued it with a great rush and clat ter a dozen or more rods over the surface, mak ing a great furrow in the water, but there be ing some trees in the way i could not see the issue. i saw seven or eight all dive together, as with one consent, remaining under, half a minute or more. on another side you see a party which seem to be playing and pluming themselves. they will swim rapidly and dive, and come up and dive again every three or four feet, occasionally one pursuing another, will flut ter in the water, making it fly, or erect them selves at full length on the surface like a pen guin, and flap their wings. this party make an 278 early spring in massachusetts. incessant noise. again, you will see some stead ily tacking this way or that in the middle of the pond, and often they rest there asleep with their heads in their backs. they readily cross the pond, swimming from this side to that. -" march 30, 1859. 6 a. m. to hill (across water). hear a red squirrel chirrup at me by the hemlocks. it is all for my benefit, not that he is excited by fear, i think, but so full is he of animal spirits that he makes a great ado about the least event. at first he scratches on the bark very rapidly with his hind feet, without moving the fore feet. he makes so many queer sounds, and so different from one another, that you would think they came from half a dozen creatures. i hear now two sounds from him of a very distinct character, a low or base internal, worming, screwing kind of sound (very like that, by the way, which an anxious partridge mother makes), and at the same time a very sharp and shrill bark, clear, and on a very high key, totally distinct from the last, while his tail is flourishing incessantly. you might say that he successfully accomplished the difficult feat of singing and whistling at the same time. p. m. to walden via hubbard's close. .... see on walden two sheldrakes, male fend female (as is common), so they have for early spring in massachusetts. 279 gome time paired. they are a hundred rods off, the male, the larger, with his black head and white breast ; the female with a red head. with my glass i see the long red bills of both. they swim, at first one way near together, then tack and swim the other, looking around incessantly, never quite at their ease, wary and watchful for foes. a man cannot walk down to the shore, or stand out on a hill overlook ing the pond, without disturbing them. they will have an eye upon him. the locomotive whistle makes every wild duck start that is floating within the limits of the town. i see that these ducks are not here for protection alone, for at last they both dive and remain beneath about forty pulse-beats, and again and again. i think they are looking for fishes. perhaps, therefore, these divers are more likely to alight in walden than the black ducks are. hear the hovering note of a snipe. march 31, 1842. i cannot forget the majesty of that bird at the cliff. it was no sloop or smaller craft hove in sight, but a ship of the line, worthy to struggle with the elements. it was a great presence, as of the master of river and forest. his eye would not have quailed before the owner of the soil, none could chal lenge his rights. and then his retreat, sailing bo steadily away, was a kind of advance. how 280 eaelt spring ts massachusetts. is it that man always feels like an interloper in nature, as if he had intruded on the domains of bird and beast. the really efficient laborer -will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure. there will be a wide margin for re laxation to his day. he is only earnest to se cure the kernels of time, and does not exagger ate the value of the husk. why should the hen sit all day ? she can lay but one egg, and besides she will not have picked up materials for a new one. those who work much do not work hard. nothing is so sure as sense. very uncommon sense is poetry, and has a heroic or sweet music. but in verse, for the most part, the music now runs before and now behind the sense, is not coincident with it. given the metre, and one will make music while another makes sense. but good verse, like a good soldier, will make its own music, and it will march to the same with one consent. in most verse there is no in herent music. the man should not march, but walk like a citizen lydgate's " story of thebes," intended for a canterbury tale, is a specimen of most unprogressive, unmusical verse. each line rings the knell of its brother, as if it were introduced but to dispose of him. early spring in massachusetts. 281 no mortal man could have breathed to that cadence without long intervals of relaxation. the repetition would have been fatal to the lungs. no doubt there was much healthy ex ercise taken in the meanwhile. he should forget his rhyme and tell his story, or forget his story and breathe himself. in shakespeare and else where the climax may be somewhere along the line which runs as varied and meandering as a country road ; but in lydgate it is nowhere but in the rhyme. the couplets slope headlong to their confluence. march 31, 1852. intended to get up early this morning and commence a series of spring walks, but clouds and drowsiness prevented. early, however, i saw the clouds in the west, for my window looks that way, suffused with rosy light, but that flattery is all forgotten now. how can one help being an early riser and walker in that season when the birds begin to twitter and sing in the morning. the expedition in search of sir john frank lin, in 1850, landed at cape riley, on the north side of lancaster sound, and one vessel brought off relics of franklin, viz., " five pieces of beef, mutton, and pork bones, together with a bit of rope, a small rag of canvas, and a chip of wood cut by an axe." richardson says, "from a careful examination of the beef bones, i came 882 eaely spring in massachusetts. to the conclusion that they had belonged to pieces of salt beef ordinarily supplied to the navy, and that probably they and the other bones had been exposed to the atmosphere and friction in rivulets of melted snow for four or five summers. the rope was proved by the ropemaker who examined it to have been made at chatham, of hungarian hemp, subsequent to 1841. the fragment of canvas which seemed to have been part of a boat's swab, had the queen's broad arrow painted on it, and the chip of wood was of ash, a tree which does not grow on the banks of any river that falls into the arctic sea. it had, however, been long exposed to the weather, and was likely to have been cut from a piece of drift timber found lying on the spot, as the mark of an axe was recent compared to the surface of the wood, which might have been exposed to the weather for a century." " the grounds of these conclusions were fully stated in a report made to the admiralty by sir ed ward parry, myself, and other officers." is not here an instance of the civilized man's detect ing the traces of a friend or foe with a skill at least equal to that of the savage ? indeed it is in both cases but a common sense applied to the objects, and in a manner most familiar to both parties. the skill of the savage is just buch a science, though referred sometimes to in stinct. eaely spring in massachusetts. 283 perchance, as we grow old, we cease to spring with the spring, we are indifferent to the suc cession of years, and they go by without epoch as months. woe be to us when we cease to form new resolutions on the opening of a new year. it would be worth while to tell why a swamp pleases us, why a certain kind of weather pleases us, etc., analyze our impressions. why does the moaning of the storm give me pleasure ? me thinks because it puts to rout the trivialness of our fair-weather life, and gives it, at least, a tragic interest. the sound has the effect of a pleasing challenge to call forth our energy to resist the invaders of our life's territory. it is musical and thrilling as the sound of an ene my's bugle. our spirits revive like lichens in al storm. there is something worth living for when we are resisted, threatened. as at the last day we might be thrilled with the prospect of the grandeur of our destiny, so in these first days, our destiny appears grander. what would the days, what would our life, be worth, if some nights were not dark as pitch, of darkness tangi ble, that you can cut with a knife ! how else . could the light in the mind shine ! how should-* we be conscious of the light of reason ? if it were not for physical cold how should we have discovered the warmth of the affections. i some 284 early spring in massachusetts. times feel that i need to sit in a far-away cave through a three weeks' storm, cold and wet, to give a tone to my system. the spring has its windy march to usher it in, with many soaking rains reaching into april. methinks i would share every creature's suf fering for the sake of its experience and joy. the song-sparrow and the transient fox-colored sparrow, have they brought me no message this year? is not the coming of the fox-colored sparrow something more earnest and significant than i have dreamed of? have i heard what this tiny passenger has to say while it flits thus from tree to tree ? can i forgive myself if i let it go to rupert's land before i have appreciated it ? god did not make this world in jest, no, nor in indifference. these migratory sparrows all bear messages that concern my life. i do not pluck the fruits in their season. i love the birds and beasts because they are mythologi cally in earnest. i see that the sparrow cheeps, and flits, and sings adequately to the great de sign of the universe, that man does not com • municate with it, understand its language, be cause he is not at one with nature. i reproach myself because i have regarded with indiffer ence the passage of the birds, i have thought them no better than i. what philosopher can estimate the different values of a waking thought and a dream ? early spring w massachusetts. 285 i hear late to-night the unspeakable rain min gled with rattling snow against the windows, preparing the ground for spring. march 31, 1853. the robins sing at the tery earliest dawn. i wake with their note ringing in my ear. 6 a. m. to island by boat 9 a. m. to lincoln surveying for mr. austin. the catkins of the hazel are now trembling in the wind and much lengthened, showing yel lowish and beginning to shed pollen. saw and heard sing in a peach orchard my warbling vireo of the morning. it must be the fox-colored sparrow. it is plumper than a bluebird, tail fox-colored, a distinct spot on the breast, no bars visible on wings, beginning with a clear, rich, deliberate note, jingling more rapidly, much like the warbling vireo, at the end. i afterwards heard a fine concert of little song sters along the edge of the meadow, approached and watched and listened for more than half an hour. there were many little sparrows, diffi cult to detect, flitting and hopping along, and scratching the ground like hens under the al ders, willows, and cornels, in a wet leafy place, occasionally alighting and preening themselves. they had bright bay crowns, two rather dis tinct white bars on wings, an ashy breast and dark tail. these twittered sweetly, in some parts very much like a canary and many to 286 eably spring in massachusetts. gether, making the fullest and sweetest concert i have heard yet. like a shopfull of canaries. about the size of a song-sparrow. i think these are the tree-sparrow. also mixed with them, and puzzling me to distinguish for a long time, were many of the fox-colored (?) sparrows mentioned above, with a creamy, cinnamon tinged, ashy breast, cinnamon shoulder-let, and ashy about side-head and throat, with a fox-col ored tail. a size larger than the others, the spot on breast very marked. here were evi dently two birds intimately mixed. did not peabody confound them when he mentioned the mark on the breast of the tree-sparrow? the rich strain of the fox-colored sparrow, as i think it, added much to the choir. .the latter, solos, the former, in concert. i kept off a hawk by my presence. they were a long time invis ible to me except when they flitted past mount tabor it is affecting to see a distant mountain top like the summits of un cannunuc, well seen from this hill, whereon you camped for a night in your youth, which you have never revisited, still as blue and ethereal to your eyes as is your memory of it. it lies like an isle in the far heavens, a part of earth unprofaned, which does not bear a price in the market, is not advertised by the real estate broker. eakly speing in massachusetts. 287 march 31, 1854. in criticising your writing, trust your finest instinct. there are many things which we come very near questioning, but do not question.. when i have sent off my manuscripts to the printer, certain objectionable sentences or expressions are sure to obtrude themselves on my attention with force, though i had not consciously suspected them before. my critical instinct then at once breaks the ice and comes to the surface. march 31, 1855. i see through the window that it is a very fine day, the first really warm one. i did not know the whole till i came out at 3 p. m. and walked to the cliffs. the slight haze of yesterday has become very thick, with a southwest wind, concealing the mountains. i can see it in the air within two or three rods as i look against the bushes. the fuzzy gnats are in the air, and bluebirds whose warble is thawed out ; i am uncomfortably warm, gradually un button both my coats, and wish that i had left the outside one at home. i go listening for the croak of the first frog or peep of a hylodes. it is suddenly warm and this amelioration of the weather is incomparably the most important fact in this vicinity. it is incredible what a revolution in our feelings and in the aspect of nature this warmer air alone has produced. yesterday the earth was simple to barrenness, 288 early spring in massachusetts. and dead, bound out. out of doors there was nothing but the wind and the withered grass, and the cold though sparkling blue water, and you were driven in upon yourself. now, you would think there was a sudden awakening in the very crust of the earth, as if flowers were expanding and leaves putting forth ; but not so. i listen in vain to hear a frog or a new bird as yet. only the frozen ground is melting a little deeper, and the water is trickling from the hills in some places. no, the change is mainly in us. we feel as if we had obtained a new lease of life. march 31, 1856. i see the scarlet tops of white maples nearly a mile off down the river, the lusty shoots of last year. those of the red maple do not show thus. i see many little holes in the old and solid snow where leaves have sunk down gradually and perpendicularly eleven or twelve inches, the hole no larger at the top than at the bottom, nay, often partly closed at top by the drifting, and exactly the form and size of the leaf. it is as if the sun had driven this thin shield like a bullet thus deep into the solid snow. march 31, 1857. a very pleasant day. spent a part of it in the garden preparing to set out fruit trees. it is agreeable once more to put a spade into the warm mould. the victory "ii eably spring in massachusetts. 289 ours at last, for we remain and take possession of the field. in this climate in which we do not commonly bury our dead in the winter on account of the frozen ground, and find ourselves exposed on a hard, bleak crust, the coming out of the frost and the first turning up of the soil with a spade or plow, is an event of importance. p. m. to hill. as i ascend the east side of the hill i hear the distant faint peep of the hy lodes and the tut tut of the croaking frogs from the west. how gradually and imperceptibly the peep of the hylodes mingles with and swells the volume of sound which makes the voice of awak ening nature ! if you do not listen carefully for its first note you probably will not hear it ; and not having heard that, your ears become used to the sound, so that you will hardly notice it at last, however loud and universal. i hear it now faintly from through and over the bare gray twigs and the sheeny needles of an oak and pine wood, and from over the russet fields beyond. it is so intimately mingled with the murmur or roar of the wind as to be wellnigh inseparable from it. it leaves such a lasting trace on the ear's memory that often i think i hear the peeping when i do not. it is a singu larly emphatic and ear-piercing proclamation of animal life, when, with a very few and slight exceptions, vegetation is yet dormant. the dry 19 290 early spring in massachusetts. croaking and tut tut of the frogs (a sound which ducks seem to imitate, a kind of quacking, and they are both of the water), is plainly enough down there in some pool in the woods. but the shrill peeping of the hylodes locates itself nowhere in particular. it seems to take its rise at an indefinite distance over wood and hill and pasture, from clefts or hollows, in the march wind. it is not so much of the earth, earthy, as of the air, airy. it rises at once on the wind and is at home there and we are incapable of tracing it farther back. what an important part to us the little peeping hylodes acts, filling all our ears with sound in the spring afternoons and evenings, while the existence of the otter, our largest wild animal, is not betrayed to any of our senses, or at least not to more than one in a thousand. an irishman is digging a ditch for a founda tion wall of a new shop where james harris's shop stood. he tells me that he dug up three cannon balls just in the rear of the shop within a foot of each other and about eighteen inches beneath the surface. i saw one of them which was about three and one half inches in diame ter and somewhat eaten with rust on one side. these were probably thrown into the pond by the british on the 19th of april, 1775. shat *uck says that five hundred pounds of balls wen early spring in massachusetts. 291 thrown into the pond and wells. these may have been dropped out of the back window. march 31, 1858 i see about a dozen black ducks on flint's pond asleep with their beads on their backs and drifting across the pond before the wind. i suspect that they are nocturnal in their habits and therefore require much rest by day. so do the seasons revolve and every chink is filled. while the waves toss, this bright day, the ducks asleep are drifting before the wind across the ponds. every now and then one or two lift their heads and look about, as if they watched by turns just after sundown i see a large flock of wild geese in a perfect harrow cleaving their way toward the northeast, with napoleonic tactics splitting the forces of winter. march 31, 1860 the small red butterfly in the woodpaths and sproutlands, and i hear at mid p. m. a very faint but positive ringing sound rising above the susurrus of the pines, of the breeze, which i think is the note of a distant and perhaps solitary toad, not loud and ringing as it will be. toward night i hear it more dis tinctly and am more confident about it. i hear ihis faint first reptilian sound added to the sound of the winds thus, each year a little in ad vance of the unquestionable note of the toad. of constant sounds in the warmer parts of warm 292 early spbing in massachusetts. days there now begins to be added to the rust ling or washing water-fall like sound of the wind, this faintest imaginable prelude of the toad. i often draw my companion's attention to it, and he fails to hear it at all, it is so slight a departure from the previous monotony of march. this morning you walked in the warm sproutland, the strong but warm southwest wind blowing, and you heard no sound but the dry and mechanical susurrus of the wood ; now there is mingled with or added to it, to be de tected only by the sharpest ears, this first and faintest imaginable voice. i heard this under mount misery. probably the toads come forth earlier under the warm slopes of that hill. . . . at evening i hear the first real robin's song. april 5, 1841. this long series of desultory mornings does not tarnish the brightness of the prospective days. surely faith is not dead. wood, water, earth, air are essentially what they are. only society has degenerated. this lament for a golden age is only a lament for golden men. april 5, 1854. this morning heard a famil iar twittering over the house, looked up and saw white-bellied swallows. another saw tbem yesterday. surveying all day. in carlisle. i have taken off my outside coat, perhaps for the first time, and hung it on a tree. the early spring in massachusetts. 293 eephyr is positively agreeable on my cheek. i am thinking what an elysian day it is, and how i seem always to be keeping the flocks of admetus such days, that is my luck, when i hear a single short stertorous croak from some pool half-filled with dry leaves. you may see anything now, the buff-edged butterfly and many hawks along the meadow, and hark i while i was writing down that field note, the shrill peep of the hylodes was borne to me from afar through the woods. i rode with my employer a dozen miles to day, keeping a profound silence almost all the way, as the most simple and natural course. i treated him simply as if he had bronchitis and could not speak, just as i would a sick man, a crazy man, or an idiot. the disease was only an unconquerable stiffness in a well-meaning and sensible man. begin to look off the hills and see the land scape again through a slight haze, with warm wind on the cheek. april 5, 1855. 9 a. m. to sudbury line by boat it is a smooth april morning water, and many sportsmen are out in their boats. i see a pleasure boat on the smooth surface away by the rock, resting lightly as a feather in the air. scare up a snipe close to the water's edge, and soon after a hen-hawk from the clam-shell 294 early spring in massachusetts. oaks. the last looks larger on his perch than flying. the snipe, too, then, like crows, robins, black-birds, and hens, is found near the water side where is the first spring (alders, white ma ples, etc., etc.), and there, too, especially, are heard the songand tree-sparrows and pewees, and even the hen-hawk, at this season, haunts these for his prey. inland, the groves are al most completely silent as yet. the concert of songand tree-sparrows at willow row is now very full, and their different notes are com pletely mingled. see a single white-bellied swallow dashing over the river. he, too, is at tracted by the early insects that begin to be seen over the water. it being fast day, we on the water hear the loud and musical sound of bells ringing for -church in the surrounding towns. april 6, 1853. 6 a. m. to cliffs. the robin is the singer at present, such is its power and universality, being heard both in garden and wood. morning and evening he does not fail, perched on some elm or the like, and in rainy days it is one long morning or evening. the song-sparrow is still more universal, but not so powerful. the lark, too, is equally constant morning and evening, but confined to certain localities, as is the blackbird to some extent. the bluebird with feebler, but not less sweet, eaely spring in massachusetts. 295 warbling, helps fill the air, and the phebe does her part. the tree-sparrow, fringilla hiemalis, and fox-colored sparrows make the meadow sides or gardens where they are flitting, vocal, the first with its canary-like twittering, the sec ond, with its lively ringing trills or jingle. ■ the third is a very sweet and more powerful singer, which would be memorable if we heard him long enough. the woodpecker's tapping, though not musical, suggests pleasant associa tions in the cool morning, is inspiriting, enliv ening. i hear no hylas nor croakers in the morning. is it too cool for them ? the gray branches of the oaks, which have lost still more of their leaves, seen against the pines when the sun is rising and falling on them, how rich and interesting! hear the faint, swelling, far-off beat of a partridge. p. m. to second division brook all along on the south side of this hill, on the edge of the meadow, the air resounds with the hum of honey bees, attracted by the flower of the skunk-cabbage. i first heard the fine, peculiarly sharp hum of the honey bee before i thought of them. some hummed hollowly within the spathe, perchance to give notice to their fellows that the plant was occupied, for they repeatedly looked in and backed out on finding another. it was surprising to see them directed by their 296 eably spring in massachusetts. instincts to these localities, while the earth has still but a wintry aspect, so far as vegetation is concerned, buzz around some obscure spathe close to the ground, well knowing what they are about, then alight and enter. as the plants were very numerous for thirty or forty rods, there must have been some hundreds, at least, of bees there at once. i watched many when they entered and came out, and they all had little yellow pellets of pollen at their thighs. as the skunk-cabbage comes out before the willow, it is probable that the former is the first flower they visit. it is the more surprising, as the flower is, for the most part, invisible within the spathe. some of these spathes are now quite large and twisted up like cows' horns, not curved over, as usual. commonly they make a pretty little crypt or shrine for the flower. lucky that this flower does not flavor their honey. one cowslip, though it shows the yellow, is not fairly out, but will be by to-morrow. how they improve their time. not a moment of sunshine is lost. one thing i may depend on, there has been no idling with the flowers. na ture loses not a moment, takes no vacation. they advance as steadily as a clock. these plants, now protected by the water, are just peeping forth. i should not be surprised to find that they drew in their heads in a frosty night. early spring in massachusetts. 297 returning. saw a pigeon woodpecker flash away, showing the rich golden underside of its glancing wings and the large whitish spot on its back, and presently i heard its familiar, long-repeated, loud note, almost as familiar as that of a barn-door fowl, which it somewhat re sembles. the robins, too, now toward sunset, perched on the old apple trees in tarbel's or chard, twirl forth their evening lays unwea riedly to-night, for the first time, i hear the hylas in full blast. april 6, 1854. a still warmer day than yes terday, a warm, moist, rain-smelling, west wind. iam surprised to find so much of the white maples already out. the light-colored stamens show some rods. probably they began as early as day before yesterday. they resound with the hum of honey bees heard a dozen rods off, and you see thousands of them about the flow ers against the sky. they know where to look for the white maple and when. their susurrus carries me forward some months toward sum mer. i was reminded before of those still, warm, summer noons when the breams' nests are left dry, and the fishes retreat from the shal lows into the cooler depths, and the cows stand up to their bellies in the rivers the al ders, both kinds, just above the hemlocks, have just begun to shed their pollen. they are 298 early spring in massachusetts. hardly as forward as the white maples, but they are not in so warm a position as some. .... in clearing out the assabet spring, dis turbed two small speckled (palustris) frogs, just beginning to move heard the snipe over the meadows this evening. probably was to be heard for a night or two. sounds on different keys, as if approaching or receding over the meadows recently become bare. april 6, 1855 i go up the assabet in my boat. the blackbirds have now begun to frequent the water's edge in the meadow, the ice being sufficiently out. the aspect of april waters, smooth and commonly high, before many flowers (none yet), or any leafing, while the landscape is still russet, and frogs are just awak ening, is peculiar. it began yesterday. a very few white-maple stamens stand out already loosely enough to blow in the wind, and some alder catkins look almost ready to shed pollen. on the hillsides i smell the dried leaves, and hear a few flies buzzing over them. the banks of the river are alive with song-sparrows and tree-sparrows. they now sing in advance of vegetation, as the flowers will blossom. those slight tinkling, twittering sounds, called the singing of birds, they have come to enliven the bare twigs before the buds show any signs of starting, i . . . you can hear all day, from time early spring in massachusetts. 299 to time, in any part of the village, the sound of a gun fired at ducks. yesterday i was wishing that i could find a dead duck floating in the water, as i had found musk-rats and a hare, and now i see something bright and reflecting the light from the edge of the alders five or six rods off. can it be a duck ? i can hardly believe my eyes. i am near enough to see its green head and neck. i am delighted to find a per fect specimen of the mergus, merganser, or goosander, undoubtedly shot yesterday by the fast day sportsmen. i take a small flattened shot from its wing, flattened against the wing bone, apparently. the wing is broken, and it is shot through the head. it is a perfectly fresh and very beautiful bird. as i raise it, i get sight of its long, slender vermilion bill (color of red sealing-wax), and its clean, bright orange legs and feet, and then of its perfectly smooth and spotlessly pure white breast and belly, tinged with a faint salmon, or a delicate buff inclining to salmon i afterwards took three small shot from it which were flattened against the bill's base and perhaps the quills' shafts. this, according to wilson, is one of the mergansers or fisher-ducks, of which there are nine or ten species, and we have four in america. it is the largest of these four, .... called water pheasant, sheldrake, fisherman 800 early spring in massachusetts. diver, etc., as well as goosander. .... my bird is twenty-five and seven eighths inches long and thirty-five in alar extent. from point of wing to end of primaries, eleven inches. it is a great diver, and does not mind the cold. it appears admirably adapted for diving and swimming. its body is flat, and its tail short, flat, compact and wedge-shaped. its eyes peer out from a slight slit or semicircle in the skin of the head, and its legs are flat and thin in one direction, and the toes shut up compactly so as to create the least friction when drawing them forward, but their broad webs spread three inches and a half when they take a stroke. the web is extended three eighths of an inch beyond the inner toe of each foot. there are very conspicuous black teeth, like serrations, along the edges of its bill, and this also is roughened so that it may hold its prey securely. the breast appeared quite dry when i raised it from the water. the head and neck are, as wilson says, black, glossed with green, but the lower part of the neck pure white, and these colors bound on each other so abruptly that one appears to be sewed on to the other. it is a perfect wedge from the middle of its body to the end of its tail, is only three and one fourth inches deep from back to breast at the thickest part, while the greatest breadth horizontally early spring in massachusetts. 301 (at the base of the legs) is five inches and a half. i suspect that i have seen near one hun dred of these birds this spring, but i never got so near one before yarrell says it is the largest of the british mergansers, is a winter visitor, though a few breed in the north of brit ain ; are rare in the southern counties. april 7, 1839. the tediousness and detail of execution never occur to the genius project ing ; it always antedates the completion of its work. it condescends to give time a few hours to do its bidding in. most have sufficient contempt for what is mean to resolve that they will abstain from it, and a few, virtue enough to abide by their res olution, but not often does one attain to such lofty contempt as to require no resolution to be made. april 7, 1841. my life will wait for nobody, but is being matured still irresistibly while i go about the streets, and chaffer with this man and that to secure it a living. it will cut its own channel, like the mountain stream, which, by the longest ridges and by level prairies, is not kept from the sea finally. so flows a man's life, and will reach the sea water, if not by an earthly channel, yet in dew and rain, overleap ing all barriers, with rainbows to announce its victory. it can wind as cunningly and uner 302 eably spbing in massachusetts. ringly as water that seeks its level, and shall i complain if the gods make it meander? this staying to buy me a farm is as if the missis sippi should stop to chaffer with a clam-shell. if from your price ye will not swerve, why then i '11 think the gods reserve a greater bargain there above, ont of their superabundant love have meantime better for me cared, and so will get my stock prepared, and sow my seed broadcast in air, certain to reap my harvest there. april 7, 1853. 10 a. m. down the river in boat to bedford how handsome the river from those hills, southwest over the great meadows, a sheet of sparkling, molten silver, with broad lagoons parted from it by curving lines of low bushes, to the right or northward now at 2 or 3 p. m., a dark blue, with small, smooth, light edgings, firm plating, under the lee of the shore as we stand on naw bhawtuck at 5 p. m., looking over the meadows, i doubt if there is a town more adorned by its river than ours. now, while the sun is low in the west, the northeasterly water is of a pecul iarly ethereal, light blue, more beautiful than the sky, and this broad water, with innumerable bays and inlets running up into the land on either side, and often divided by bridges and causeways, as if it were the very essence and eablt spring in massachusetts. 303 richness of the heavens distilled and poured upon the earth, contrasting with the clear rus set land and the paler sky from which it has been subtracted, nothing can be more elysian. is not the blue more ethereal when the sun is at this angle ? the river is but a long chain of flooded meadows. i think our most distant, ex tensive low horizon must be that northeast from this hill over ball's hill. it is down the river valley partly, at least, toward the merrimack, as it should be. april 7, 1854. 6 a. m. down railroad to cliffs. the populus tremuloides in a day or two. the hazel stigmas are well out and the catkins loose, but no pollen shed yet. on the cliff i find after long and careful search one sedge above the rocks low amid the withered blades of last year, out, its little yellow beard amid the' dry blades and a few green ones, the first herbaceous flowering i have detected. fair haven is completely open. april 7, 1855. at six this morning to clam shell see thirty or forty goldfinches in a dashing flock, in all respects, notes and all, like lesser red-polls on the trees and on the railroad bank there is a general twittering and an occasional mew. then they alight on the ground to feed, along with the fringilla hiemalis and fox-colcred sparrows. they are 304 eably spbing in massachusetts. merely olivaceous above, dark about the base of the bill, but bright lemon-yellow in a semicir cle on the breast, black wings and tail, with white bar on wings and white vanes to tail. i never saw them here so early before, or probably one or two olivaceous birds i have seen and heard of in other years were this. april 7, 1860. the purple finch (if not be fore). this is therana halecina day, awakening of the meadows, though not very warm. the thermometer in boston is said to be 49°-f-. prob ably, then, when it is about 50°+ at this sea son, the river being low, they are to be heard in calm places. fishes now lie up abundantly in shallow water in the sun ; pickerel, and i see several bream. what was lately motionless and lifeless ice is a transparent liquid in which the stately pickerel moves along. a novel sight is that of the first bream that has come forth from i know hot what hibernaculum, moving gently over the still, brown river bottom where scarcely a weed has started. water is as yet only melted ice, or like that of november, which is ready to become ice. april 8, 1840. how shall i help myself ? by withdrawing into the garret and associating with spiders and mice, determining to meet my self face to face sooner or later ? completely silent and attentive i will be this hour and the early spbing in massachusetts. 305 next and forever. the most positive life that history notices has heen a constant retiring out of life, a wiping one's hands of it, seeing how mean it is, and having nothing to do with it. april 8, 1841. friends are the ancient and honorable of the earth. the oldest men did not begin friendship. it is older than hindo stan and the chinese empire. how long has it been cultivated, and still it is the staple article. it is a divine league struck forever. warm days only bring it out to the surface. there is a friendliness between the sun and the earth in pleasant weather. the gray content of the land is its color. you can tell what another's suspicions are by what you feel forced to become. you will wear a new character, like a strange habit, in his presence. april 8, 1852 i notice the alder in blossom, its reddish-brown catkins now length ened and loose. what mean the apparently younger small red (catkins ?) ? they are the female aments. april 8, 1853 saw and heard my small pine warbler shaking out his trills or jin gle, even like money coming to its bearing. they appear so much the smaller from perch ing high in the tops of white pines, and flitting from tree to tree at that height. is not my so 806 early spring in massachusetts. night warbler the white-eyed vireo? not yet here. april 8, 1854 at nut meadow brook, saw or rather heard a musk-rat plunge into the brook before me, and saw him endeavoring in vain to bury himself in the sandy bottom, look ing like an amphibious animal. i stooped and taking him by the tail, which projected, tossed him ashore. he did not lose the points of the compass, but turned directly to the brook again, though it was toward me, and plunging in buried himself in the mud, and that was the last i saw of him. saw a large bird sail along over the edge of wheeler's cranberry meadow just below fair haven, which i at first thought a gull. but with my glass i found it appeared like a hawk and had a perfectly white head and tail, and broad black or blackish wings. it sailed and circled along over the low cliff and the crows dived at it in the field of my glass. i saw it well both above and beneath as it turned, and then it passed off to hover over the cliffs at a greater height. it was undoubtedly a white-headed eagle, though to the eye it was but a large hawk. i find that i can criticise my composition best v hen i stand at a little distance from it, when i do not see it, for instance. i make a little chapter of contents which enables me to recall early spring in massachusetts. 307 it page by page to my mind and judge it more impartially when my manuscript is out of the way. the distraction of surveying enables me rapidly to take new points of view. a day or two of surveying is equal to a journey. some poets mature early and die young. their fruits have a delicious flavor like straw berries, but do not keep till fall or winter. others are slower in coming to their growth. their fruits may be less delicious, but are a more lasting food, and are so hardened by the sun of summer and the coolness of autumn that they keep sound over winter. april 8, 1859. as i stood by the foot of a middling-sized white pine the other day, on fair haven hill, one of the very windy days, i felt the ground rise and fall under my feet, be ing lifted by the roots of the pine, which was waving in the wind, so loosely are they planted. .... what a pitiful business is the fur trade, which has been pursued now for so many ages, for so many years, by famous companies, which enjoy a profitable monopoly, and control a large part of the earth's surface. unweariedly they pursue and ferret out small animals by the aid of all the loafing class, tempted by rum and money, that they may rob some little fellow creature of its coat to adorn or thicken their own, that they may get a fashionable covering 808 early spking in massachusetts. in which to hide their heads, or a suitable robe in which to dispense justice to their fellow-men ! regarded from the philosopher's point of view it is precisely on a level with rag and bone picking in the streets of cities. the indian led a more respectable life before he was tempted to debase himself so much by the white man. think how many musquash and weasel skins the hudson's bay company pile up annually in their warehouses, leaving the bare red car casses on the banks of the streams throughout all british america, and this it is chiefly which makes it british america. it is the place where great britain goes a-mousing. when we see men and boys spend their time shooting and trapping musquash and mink, we cannot but have a poorer opinion of them, unless we thought meanly of them before. yet the world is imposed on by the fame of the hudson bay and northwest fur companies, who are only so many partners, more or less, in the same sort of business, with thousands of just such loafing men and boys in their service to abet them. on the one side is the hudson bay company, on the other the company of scavengers who clear the sewers of paris of their vermin. there is a good excuse for smoking out or poisoning rats which infest the house, but when they are as far off as hudson's bay, i think that we had bet eaely spring in massachusetts. 809 ter let them alone. to such an extent do time and distance, and our imaginations, consecrate at last not only the most ordinary, but even the vilest pursuits. the efforts of legislation from time to time to stem the torrent are sig nificant, as showing that there is some sense and conscience left, but they are insignificant in their effects it will not do to be thoughtless with regard to any of our valuables or property. when you get to europe you will meet the most ten der-hearted and delicately-bred lady, perhaps the president of the anti-slavery society, or of that for the encouragement of humanity to ani mals, marching or presiding with the scales from a tortoise's back, obtained by laying live coals on it to make them curl up, stuck in her hair, rat-skins fitting as close to her fingers as erst to the rats ; and her cloak, perchance, adorned with the spoils of a hundred skunks. could she not wear other armor in the war of humanity ? cold as it is, and has been for several weeks, in all exposed places, i find it unexpectedly warm in perfectly sheltered places where the bun shines, and so it always is in april. the cold wind from the northwest seems distinct and separable from the air here warmed by the sun, and when i sit in some warm and sheltered 810 early spring in massachusetts. hollow in the woods, i feel the cold currents drop into it occasionally, just as they are seen to ripple a small lake in such a situation from time to time. the epigcea is not quite out. the earliest peculiarly woodland herbaceous flowers are epi gcea, anemone, thalictrum, and (by the first of may) viola pedata. these grow quite in the woods amid dry leaves, nor do they depend so much on water as the very earliest flowers. i am perhaps more surprised by the growth of the viola pedata leaves by the side of paths amid the shrub oaks, and half covered with oak leaves, than by any other growth, the situation is so dry and the surrounding bushes so appar ently lifeless. april 9, 1841. the brave man does not mind the call of the trumpet, nor hear the idle clash ing of swords without, for the infinite din within. war is but a training compared with the active service of his peace. is he not at war ? does he not resist the ocean swell within him, and walk as gently as the summer's sea ? would you have him parade in uniform and manoeuver men, whose equanimity is his uni form, and who is himself manoeuvered? april 9, 1853. p. m. to second division. the chipping sparrow, with its ashy white breast, white streak over eye, and undivided eably spring in massachusetts. 311 chestnut crown, holds up its head and pours forth its che che che che che che saw a pine warbler, by ventriloquism sounding further off than it was, which was seven or eight feet, hopping and flitting from twig to twig, appar ently picking the small flies at and about the base of the needles at the extremities of the twigs a warm and hazy, but breezy, day. the sound of the laborers striking the iron nails of the railroad with their sledges is as in the sultry days of summer, — resounds, as it were, from the hazy sky as from a roof, a more confined, and in that sense more domestic, sound echoing along between the earth and the low heavens. the same strokes would produce a very different sound in the winter be yond the desert, hear the hooting owl whieh, as formerly, i at first mistook for the hounding of dog, a squealing sound followed by hoo hoo hoo deliberately, and particularly sonorous and ringing. this at 2 p. if. ... . the cowslips are well out, the first conspicu ous herbaceous flower, for that of the skunk's cabbage is concealed in its spathe. april 9, 1855. 5i a. m. to red bridge just before sunrise hear the coarse, rasping cluck or chatter of crow blackbirds, and distin guished their long, broad tails. "wilson says that the only note of the rusty grackle is a 312 eaelt spring in massachusetts. cluck, though he is told that at hudson's bay at the breeding time they sing with a fine note. here they utter not only a cluck, but a fine shrill whistle. they coyer the top of a tree now, and their concert is of this character. they all seem laboring together to get out a clear strain, as it were wetting their whistles against their arrival at hudson's bay. they begin, as it were, by disgorging or spitting it out like so much tow, from a full throat, and conclude with a clear, fine, shrill, ear-piercing whistle. then away they go all chattering to gether. april 9, 1858 i doubt if men do ever simply and naturally glorify god in the ordi nary sense, but it is remarkable how sincerely in all ages they glorify nature. the praising of aurora, for instance, under some form in all ages is obedience to as irresistible an instinct as that which impels the frogs to peep. april 9, 1859. p. m we go seeking the south sides of hills and woods, or deep hol lows to walk in, this cold and blustering day. we sit by the side of little goose pond to watch the ripples on it. now it is merely smooth, and then there drops down upon it, deep as it lies amid the hills, a sharp and nar tow blast of the icy north wind careering above, striking it perhaps by a point or an edge, and early spbing in massachusetts. 313 swiftly spreading along it, making a dark blue tipple. "now four or five windy bolts, sharp or blunt, strike it at once and spread different ways. the boisterous but playful north wind evidently stoops from a considerable height to dally with this fair pool which it discerns be neath. you could ait there and watch these blue shadows playing over the surface like light and shade on changeable silk, for hours. it reminds me, too, of swift camilla on a field of grain. the wind often touches the water only by the finest points or edges. it is thus when you look in some measure from the sun, but if you move round so as to come more nearly opposite to him, then these dark blue ripples are all sparkles too bright to look at, for now you see the sides of the wavelets which re flect the sun to you watching the rip ples fall and dart across the surface of low lying and small woodland lakes is one of the amuse ments of these windy march and april days. it is only on small lakes deep sunk in hollows in the woods that you can see or study them these days, for the winds sweep over the whole breadth of larger lakes incessantly, but they only touch these sheltered lakelets by fine points and edges from time to time. and then there is such a fiddling in the woods, such a viol creaking of bough on bough 314 eakly spring in massachusetts. that you would think music was being born again as in the days of orpheus. orpheus and apollo are certainly there taking lessons ; aye, and the jay and the blackbird, too, learn now where they stole their " thunder." they are, perforce, silent, meditating new strains. when the playful breeze drops on the pool, it springs to right and left quick as a kitten playing with dead leaves, clapping her paw on them these ripple lakes lie now in the midst of mostly bare brown or tawny dry woodlands, themselves the most living objects. they may say to the first woodland flowers, we played with the north winds here before you were born. april 10, 1841. how much virtue there is in bimply seeing. we may almost say that the hero has striven in vain for his preeminency, if the student oversees him. the woman who sits in the house and sees is a match for a stir ring captain. those still piercing eyes, as faith fully exercised as their talent, will keep her even with alexander or shakespeare. they may go to asia with parade, or to fairyland, but not beyond her ray. we are as much as we see. faith is sight and knowledge. the hands only serve the eyes. the farthest blue utreak in the horizon i can see, i may reach be fore many sunsets. what i saw alters not. in eaelt spbing in massachusetts. 315 my night when i wander, it is still steadfast as the star which the sailor steers by. whoever has had one thought quite lonely, and could con tentedly digest that, knowing that none could accept it, may rise to the heights of humanity and overlook all living men as from a pinnacle. speech never made man master of men, but the eloquently refraining from it. april 10, 1853 the saxifrage is be ginning to be abundant, elevating its flowers somewhat, pure trustful white amid its pretty notched and reddish cup of leaves. the white saxifrage is a response from earth to the in creased light of' the year, the yellow crowfoot, to the increased heat of the sun when the farmer cleans out his ditches, i mourn the loss of many a flower which he calls a weed. the main charm about the lower road, just beyond the bridge, to me has been in the little grove of locusts, sallows, birches, etc., which has sprung up on the bank as you rise the hill. yesterday i saw a man who is building a house near by cutting them down. finding he was going to cut them all, i said if i were in his place 1 would not have them cut for a hun dred dollars. " why," said he, " they are noth ing but a parcel of prickly bushes and are not worth anything. i 'm going to build a new (rail here." and so to ornament the approach 316 early spring in massachusetts. to his house he substituted a bare ugly wall for an interesting grove. april 10, 1854. april rain. how sure a rain is to bring the tree-sparrows into the yard, to sing sweetly, canary-like. i bought me a spy-glass some weeks since. i buy but few things, and those not till long after i begin to want them, so that when i do get them i am prepared to make a perfect use of them and extract their whole sweetness. april 11, 1841. a greater baldness my life seeks, as the crest of some bare hill, which towns and cities do not afford. i want a di recter relation with the sun. april 11, 1852 the sight of nut meadow brook in brown's land reminds me that the attractiveness of a brook depends much on the character of its bottom. i love just now to see one flowing through soft sand like this where it wears a deep but irregular channel, now wider and shallower with distinct ripple marks, now shelving off suddenly to indistinct depths, meandering as well up and down as from side to side, deepest where narrowest, and ever gullying under this bank or that, its bot tom lifted up to one side or the other, the cur rent inclining to one side. i stop to look at the circular shadows of the dimples, over the yellow band, and the dark brown clams on their edge* eaely spring in massachusetts. 317 in the sand at the bottom. [i hear the sound of the piano below as i ■write this and feel as if the winter in me were at length beginning to thaw, for my spring has been even more back ward than nature's. for. a month past life has been a thing incredible to me. none but the kind gods can make me sane. if only they will let their south winds blow on me. i ask to be melted. you can only ask of the metals that they be tender to the fire that melts them. to nought else can they be tender.] the sweet flags are now starting up under water two inches high, and minnows dart. a pure brook is a very beautiful object to study minutely. it will bear the closest inspec tion, even to the fine air-bubbles, like minute globules of quicksilver, that lie on its bottom. the minute particles or spangles of golden mica in these sands, when the sun shines on them, re mind one of the golden sands we read of. ev erything is washed clean and bright, and the water is the best glass through which to see it if i am too cold for human friendship, i trust i shall not soon be too cold for natural influ ences. it appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nat ure. those qualities which bring you near to the one estrange you from the other 318 eaelt spring in massachusetts. every man will be a poet if he can, otherwise a philosopher or man of science. this proves the superiority of the poet. it is hard for a man to take money from his friends for any service. this suggests how all men should be related. ah ! when a man has traveled, and robbed the horizon of his native fields of its mystery and poetry, its indefinite promise, tarnished the blue of distant mountains with his feet, when he has done this, he may begin to think of an other world. what is this longer to him ? . . . . at what an expense any valuable work is performed ! at the expense of a life i if you do one thing well, what else are you good for meanwhile ? index. aimer butfcriek'e mil, 20, 66, 124. actions, 189. agamemnon, 46. age, advancing, 2, 283. agriculture, 36. air, 37, 270. alauda ulpestris (shore lark), 227. alders, 213, 297, 305. algte, 188. alternation, 130. amusement, 13. anacreon, 1, 171. andromeda, panicled, 6. andromeda ponds, 96. anemone, 310. animals, the larger and wilder, 215 ; unworthily described from dead specimens, 203. anursnack, 79. april, rain, 316 ; waters, 298 ; 309. arborescence, of plants, 119. argument, 56. arrow-heads, 39, 132, 255. artist, the, 230. arvida emmonsii (mas leucopus), 130. aspen, 21. assabet river, 232, 248, 298. assabet spring, 298. aster undulatus, 89. awakening, a true, 200. ball's mil, 124, 153, 154. barberry, 5. bear, 104. beeches, the, 63. bees, 165, 194. being, the explainer, 9. ben jongon, 55. birches, their seed, 40. birds, of the winter, 31 ; 112. bittern cliff, 243. 276. blackbird, 43, 74, 91, 123, 130, 161, 169 294 bluebird, 3, 27, 33, 39, 42, 43. 112, 139, 159, 166, 169, 294. blue curls, 135. boarding, 48. books, 6, 10, 137, 176, 187, 203, 211. botanizing, 120. bream, 304. brook, 101, 307 bubbles, reflections from, 177. buds, 63. butterfly, small red, 291; buff edged, 293. buzzard, short-winged, 249. c. miles road, 104. caltha palnstris (marsh marigold), 275. cambridge, its library, 148. cannon balls, 290. cap, of woodchuck's skin, 25. cardinal shore, 218, 276. carpenter, william benjamin, 83. catkins, 33, 103, 106, 190, 211. cat-tail, its down, 214. chalmers, br. thomas, 248. character, 22, 247. charity, 230. cheapness, in ourselves, 231. chicadees, 4, 6, 30, 34, 88, 99, 123. 199,202. chrysalids, 113. cicindelas (glow worms), 220. civilization, 10. cladonias, 79, 100. clams, 11. clamshell hill, 11, 23, 50, 104, 132, 197, 303. clergymen, 24. cliffs, 20, 91, 113, 129, 201, 240, 248, 249, 279, 287, 294, 303. clothing, 236. clouds, 59, 75. cocciferae (lichens), 79. cocks, ushering in the dawn, 147. compliments, 243. communities, 48. concord, its indian inhabitants. 176. 320 index. cones, willow and other, their origin, 224. consistency, the secret of health, 264. convention, 266. correction of mss., 32. country, living in the, 72. cowslips, 103, 296, 811. cranberry, mountain, 88. creepers, brown, 32. criticism, 7 ; the most effective, 141 ; cobwebs of, 202 ; 287, 306. crow blackbirds, their note de scribed, 311. crowfoot (buttercup), 315. crows, 31, 62. crystals, frost, 268. cup-lichens (cladonias), 100. cuvier, 274. day, an elysian, 293. days, their aerial differences, 162. death, without continuance, 119. deep cut, 1, 4, 275. dippers, 244. discontent, 116. diversion, 13. dog-wood, 96. doubt, can be afforded by the wise, 3991 bucks, 65, 77, 95, 145, 149, 197, 243, 260, 263, 291, 299. eagle, 241, 271 (?) ; white-headed, 306. eagle field, 26. earth, 30, 61, 112, 252, 263. education, 229. emys 102, 103. see tortoise. epigsea, 310. epilobium coloratum, 89. etruisetmn, 102. evelyn, john, 211. events, 8, 30. expensiveness of valuable work, 318. eye, the human, its nobleness, 138 ; failure, 177. fair haven, 2, 276. fair haven hill, 243. fair haven pond, 57, 75, 204, 222. fame, 128. farm, 20. farmer, 141. fields, their color, 236. ••fildel'eau," 4. finch, purple, 804. fishes, their revival, 191. fishhawk, 249. flattery. 243. flicker (pigeon woodpecker), 160. flint's bridge, 154, 161. flint's pond, 33, 291. foxes, 75, 151. franklin, sir john, 281. freedom, 240. freshet, 18. friendship, 4, 9, 28, 66, 112, 186, 229, 247,251,278,305. fringula hiemalis (snow-bird), 77, 135, 190, 198, 248, 295, 303. frog, wood, 144, 218. frogs, 213, 289. frog spittle, 65. geese, wild, 135, 247, 260, 263, 291. genius, 301. gentlemen, 107. gnaphalium, 123. gnats, 122, 179. god, false view of, 91. golden age, 292. goldfinches, 303. goosanders, 221, 243. goose pond, little, 312. goshawk, 249. grackles (blackbirds), 91, 179, 311. grape cuttings, 65. grass, 142. grass finch (white-in-tail), 123. gratitude, 194. great fields, 39, 132, 139. great meadows, 37, 55, 95, 141, 155, 233. great questions, 72. greatness, unstrained, 9. grebe, 31. greece, 1. greenness, beginning, 157. grubs, 122. gulls, 77, 146, 222, 264. gyrinus, 75. hare, 73. hawks. 81, 39, 40, 75, 88, 98, 143, 218, 232, 240, 249. haze, 177. hazel, 212, 241, 253, 285. hearing, good, 52. hen harrier, 249. hens. 83, 60. " herbatio," 120. heywood's peak, 270. hill, the, 159, 289. hillside, russet, its beauty, 127, 131 homer, 46. honey bees, 295, 297. horizon, 129. index. 321 horse, 60. house, 176, 192. hubbard path, 233. hubbard's close, 129, 142, 2t8. hue, of the mind, 9. hurry, 200. hy la, its piercing note, 190 ; 297. see hylodes. hylodes, 203, 218, 289. see hyla. ice, 15 ; a study of, 38 ; 19, 56, 75, 84, iia, 141, 212: iliad, 46. indians. 92, 152. indigo bird, 76. indigo weed, 26. information, 166, 187. intercourse, 265: island, 285. jay, 30, 31, 123. kibbe place, 194. knowledge, its nature, 14 ; of each other, 266. laborer, the efficient, 280. lakes, vernal, 262. lambkiu, 59. landscape, 43, 58, 69, 63, 219. lark, 123, 233, 294. latebra?, 113. law, 16, 147. leaves, radical, 100. leoturer, his success, 109. lee's cliff, 143, 218, 243, 252, 276. lee's hill (nawshawtuck). 72. lichens, 50, 64. 79, 122, 127. life, 12, 82, 107, 111, 119, 128, 129, 133,186. light, 21, 184. linanas, 77. see bed-polls. linnsbus (linn6, earl von), 120. little river, 199. love, 35, 62, 133, 139, 185, 266. lupine hill, 266. lupine promontory, 43, 71. luxuries, intellectual, 114. lydgate, john, 280. magnanimity, 239. majesty, in a bird, 279. manners, 272. maple, 74, 198, 211, 288, 297. maple sap, 49, 74, 198. maple sugar, 58. march, 125, 209, 274, 288, 297. marten, pine (?), 107. martial miles's. 241. 266. meadows, 159, 179, 250. 21 meanness, 301. menander, 1. mice, 74, 130, 142. migration, interior, 194. mimnermus, 1. mink, 86, 122, 233. minott, 32, 95, 103. misunderstanding, honest, 72. mole, 8. money, lending, 36. moonlight, walk by, 78. moose, 104. morning, 98, 157, 200-202. moth, emperor, 5. mount misery, 292. mount tabor, 286. mus leucopus (arvida emmonsii), 130. music, 85, 124. muskrat, 95, 113, 217, 233, 234, 266, 306. see musquash. musquash, 11, 69, 76, 109, 161. see muskrat. nacre, 11. nature, 16, 26, 128, 138, 166, 170, 183, 216, 264, 312. nawshawtuck (lee's hill), 116 ; view of river from, 302. nessea (swamp loosestrife), 76. news, trivial, 78. night warbler. 306. november, 274:. nuthatch, 2, 6, 31, 70. nut meadow brook, 101, 238, 306. nutting, sam or fox, 103. observation, excessive, 213, 273. originality, 25. ornithology, 55. osiers, 2, 65, 162. owls, 31, 311. paradox, 124. parry, sir edward. 282. partridge, 2, 81, 73, 89, 109, 296. peabody.w. b. o.. 286. peace of mind, 240. persons, 229, 230. phebe, 187, 160, 295. " philosophia botanica," 120. piano, 817. pickerel, 304. pine, 170, 181, 182. pine, pitch, 18, 113. 184. pine, white, 8, 88, 97. pine hill, 29, 270. pine warbler, 306, 311. pinweed, 127. pitcher plant, 61. 322 index. plantain, rattlesnake, 99. pleasures, cheap, 116. plowing, 253. poet, the, 47, 230, 807, 318. poetry, 20. potato-vine, 83. press, not free, 41. property, sense of, 14. pursuits, what are essential, 121. quail, 31, 189. babbit, 75, 96. railroad, attractive for walking, 93 bain, enjoyment of, 126, 272 ; 286. baiubow, 130. baleigh, sir walter, 146. rana fontinalis, 229 bana halecina, 304. bana palustris, 242. bana pipiens, 242. ravine, how formed, 23. reading, good, 52. red bridge, 311. red-eye, 5. red-polls, 64, 79, 189. see lina rias. red-wings, 164, 179. relics, indian, 124. religion, incommunicable, 137. reports of experience, how best made, 226, 243, 263. retirement, 185. rhodora, 5. rice, bis life poetic, 115. richardson, sir john, 281. see frogs. river, 17, 97, 109, 214. robins. 19, 31, 82, 123,137, 161, 166, 226, 286, 294, 297. rock, the, 293. rook tripe (umbilicaria muhlenber gii), 95. russet (coloring), 220. st. hilaire, litienne oeoffroy, 274. st. johnswort, 61. salix, 173. salix alba, salix humilis, salix lucida, salix nigra, salix pedicellaris, salix petiolaris, salix torreyana, sap, alder and willow, 113. sarothra (pine weed), 126. satisfactions, simple, 114. saw-mill, its simplicity, 23. 118. see wil lows. saxifrage, water, 103 ; golden, 275 ; 316. scent, summer-presaging, 188. scholar, 121. science, 67. scripture, old, 223. second division brook, 74, 103, 238, 295. seeing, the virtue of, 314. senecio, 61, 103. sense, 280. sermons, 136. settlers, paint the landscape, 146. sex, 60. shad-blossom, 212. shattuck, lemuel, 290. sheldrake, 21. 34.55, 77, 149,243, 244, 245, 276, 278. shells, 113. shiners, 178. shrike, 31 ; its notes, 81. silence, the virtue of, 316. simplicity in living, 27 ; the law of nature, 28. skating, 74. skunk, 104, 275. skunk cabbage, 74, 88. sleepy hollow, 139. snipe, 279, 293, 294. snow, 22, 49, 87, 125, 178, 209, 288. snow-buntings, 20,41, 60. society, 185, 243. solidago (golden-rod), 89. sound, 47, 110, 311. sparrow, chipping described, 810. sparrows, fox-colored, 134, 157, 239, 284, 285, 294, 303. sparrows, migratory, 284. sparrows, song, 3, 65, 80, 99, 112, 125, 134, 149, 166, 169, 193, 226, 294. sparrows, tree, 31, 249. species, struggle of, 210. spirits, animal, 212. spring. 1, 29. 30, 42, 61, 79,225, 231, 276, 281, 284. squirrels, 99, 196. squirrels, red, 73, 116, 126, 278. squirrels, striped, 95, 163. stars, 177. stellaria media (chickweed), 194. " story of thebes," 280. style, literary, the result of char after, 22. success, 200. sudbury meadows, 87. superhuman , the, 60. surveying, 292. suspicion, 306. swallows, white-bellied, 292, 291. index. 323 swamp, 233; ministerial, 126, 199 ; grackle, 178. sweet flags, 317. talent, 247. tarbell hill, 55. technical terms, 35. telegraph harp, 1, 91, 121, 212, 266. temperature, effect of changes in, 166. thoreau, his relation to nature, 65, 284 ; resolves to be unanimous, 134; aspirations, 140 ; views of life, 166 ; imitation of wild geese, 190 ; philanthropy, 231; what he likes in a letter, 232 ; his purchases, 816. thoughts, 16, 34, 200, 223, 315. tinder, 76. toad, its ringing note, 291. tortoise, 103, 203. sec emys. trapping, 7, 23. traveling, 114, 318. trout, 74, 142. truth, 63, 139. umbilicaria muhlenbergii (rock tripe), 96. tjncannunuc, 286* vanessa antiopa (mourning cloak butterfly), 252. " yeeshnoo sarma," 222. vegetation, unceasing in our cli mate, 91 j 2/6. verse, 280. viola pedata, 310. vireo, white-eyed, 306. virtue, 265. walden, 28, 32, 33, 61, 91, 275, 278. walking, in stormy weather, 90. walks, circumscribed, 171. war, 19. warmth, spring, 61. water, 20, 43-45, 87, 96, 98, 109. 118, 124, 125, 135, 164, 220, 261. waxwork, 126. weather, its gradations, 189 j its effect upon us, 283. weatherwise, the, 145. well meadow, 276. whistlers, 244. white-in-tail (grass finch), 123. willow bay, 197. willow row, 294. willows, 2, 117, 118, 119. set salix. wilson, alexander, 299, 300. wind, 181 ; playing on water, 812. winter, short days of, 29, 58 ; eng lish, 188 ; its breaking up within us, 195. wood, its colors, 72. woodchuck, 115, 116, 130, 160, 273. woodis park, 89. woodpeckers. 81, 81, 168, 160,201, 202,221,297. words, poetic, 212. world, how finite, 239. writer, the, 164, 222. yellow birch swamp, 76. &tan&ard anil popular hibrarp 2&oofe£ selected from the catalogue of houghton, mifflin and company. a club of one. an anonymous volume, i6mo, $1.25. brooks adams. the emancipation of massachusetts, crown 8vo, $1.50. john adams and abigail adams. familiar letters of, during the revolution, l2mo, $2.00. oscar pay adams. handbook of english authors, i6mo, 75 cents; handbook of american authors, i6mo, 75 cents. louis agassiz. methods of study in natural history, illus trated, i2mo, $1.50; geological sketches, series i. and ii., i2mo, each, $1.50; a journey in brazil, illustrated, l2mo, $2.50; life and letters, edited by his wife, 2 vols. i2mo, $4.00 ; life and works, 6 vols. $10.00. alexander agassiz. three cruises of the blake. 2 vols, 8vo, $s.oo. anne a. agge and mary m. brooks. marblehead sketches. 4to, $3.00. elizabeth akers. the silver bridge and other poems, i6mo, $1.25. thomas bailey aldrich. story of a bad boy, illustrated, i2mo, js1.50; marjorie daw and other people, i2mo, $1.50; prudence palfrey, i2mo, $1.50; the queen of sheba, i2mo, $1.50; the stillwater tragedy, l2mo, $1.50; poems, house hold edition, illustrated, i2mo, $1.75 ; full gilt, $2.25; the above six vols. i2mo, uniform, $9.00 j from ponkapog to pesth, l6mo, $1.25 ; poems, complete, illustrated, 8vo, $3.50 ; mercedes, and later lyrics, cr. 8vo, $1.25. rev. a. v. g. allen. continuity of christian thought, 121110, $2.00. american commonwealths. per volume, i6mo, $1.25. virginia. by john esten cooke. oregon. by william barrows. maryland. by wm. hand browne. kentucky. by n. s. shaler. michigan. by hon. t. m. cooley. 2 houghton, mifflin and company's kansas. by leverett w. spring. california. by josiah royce. new york. by ellis h. roberts. 2 vols. connecticut. by alexander johnston. missouri. by lucien carr. 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the world to come, i&no, $1.25. illilll llllll .iiiiiii null i.. -„1' i lllil;lli,li;i;!; p5 bought with thb income from the sage endowment fund the gift of heni^g ih. sage 1s91 a.ws'^5".^ 7luq.i:..i. cornell university library ps 2699.r54z8 daniel ricketson and his friendsed. by h 3 1924 022 155 281 cornell university library the original of tiiis book is in tine cornell university library. there are no known copyright restrictions in the united states on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022155281 daniel kicketson and his jpeiends ^^.i^^^^^,^^^ ^^&i<^^l^?^^o^_^ -.i'v daniel ricketson and his friends lettees poems sketches etc. mdited by his daughtee and son anna and walton ricketson witb illustrations boston and new york houghton, mifflin and company 1902 copyright, 1902, by anna and walton ricketson all rights reserved published novemter, igos. a 2lf emorial to daniel ricketson and his friends the thoreaus what greetings smile, what farewells wave, what loved ones enter and depart ; the good, the beaiui/ul, the brave, the heaven lent treasures of the heart; how consdous seems the frozen sod. and ieechen slope whereon they trod; the oak leaves rustle, and the dry gra^s bends. beneath the shadowy feet of lost or absent friends. whittibr. to the last hour of his long honored life, me never fcdtered in his love of nature. recluse with men, her dear society, welcome at all times, savored of content, brightened his happy moments, and consoled his hours of gloom. a student of the woods and of ths fields, he was their cazendar, knew when the first pale wind-jlower would appear, and when the last wild-fowl would take its flight. b.ichabd heitbt stoddabd. contents page i. sketch of daniel biceetsok. by f. b. sanborn . 1 ii. sketch op henry d. thoreau. by daniel eicketson 9 m. letters op daniel kicketson and henry d. tho reau 23 iv. letters of sophia e. thoreau and daniel bick et80n 133 v. letters op mb. and mrs. a. b. alcott, daniel eicketson, and frank b. sanborn 183 vi. letters op william ellery channing and frank b. sanborn 203 vii. letters op "theo." brown. ........ 211 viii. letters of daniel eicketson and alexander h. japp, ll. d 219 ix. letters of daniel eicketson and henry s. salt 245 x. letters op daniel eicketson and sastoel a. jones, m. d 263 xi. extracts from daniel eicketson's journal . . 275 xii. extracts from henry d. thoreau's journal . . 333 xin. poems by daniel eicketson 357 list of illustrations page daioel ricketson. ^t. 75 frontispiece. henry d. thoreau. ^t. 44. from ambrotype by dunshee . 10 henry d. thoreau. ^t. 37. from pencil sketch by daniel ricjcetson 12 letter of h. d. thoreau, oct. 14, 1861. from original ms. 116 letter op s. e. thoreau, may 20, 1862. from original ms. 142 letter of d. ricketsois^, 22 may, 1862. from original ms. 144 brooklawn house and shanty. from photograph by t. e. m. white 184 daniel ricketson. mt. 37. from crayon portrait by charles martin 276 louisa ricketson. mt. 37. from crayon portrait by charles martin 276 long pond (indian name aponoquet). from photograph by j. g. tirrell ' 280 henry d. thoreau. from bust by walton uicketson . . . 336 tobey's pond (indian name sassaquin). from photograph by j. g. tirrell 340 the shanty at broobxawn. from photograph by t. e. m. white : 352 daniel ricketson. mt. 25. from ou portrait by hathaway 360 louisa sampson (mrs. daniel ricketson). mt. 20. from oilportraitbyw. a.wall 360 i sketch of daniel ricketson by frank b. sanborn daniel ricketson, of new bedford an event, long foreshadowed by his failing strength and narrowing circle of friendly visits and country rambles, has at last occurred, — the death of that man of leisure and literary acquaintance who to so many of us represented new bedford, friend daniel ricketson. this quaker title was his by inheritance, and stiu more by nature ; for he was formed in the mould of friendship, and depended, more than most men, on the friendly countenance of those to whom he attached himself. along with this affection there went a singular withdrawal from too close associa tion with those whom he most valued; and this led him, long before he knew henry thoreau, or the poet euery channing, to retire by himself into his " shanty," — a retreat he built near his country house, for sohtary musing, or the companionship ©f his books and his pen. his house was always a refuge for the oppressed, and his friends found a hearty welcome at his fireside. to his intimates he opened the door of his shanty, and there he talked and ustened when alcott or thoreau, curtis or channing, visited at " brooklawn," — the fairly designed and well-named retreat near his native town, which has now become a public park for the people of new bedford. backed by a thick wood 4 daniel kicketson and his friends land, the lawny slopes about the house were crossed by a brook suggesting the name of the place — brooklawn. born to a modest competence, and infected with that taste for free thinking and social reform which was the prevalent contagion in new england from 1830 to 1860, mr. ricketson, though studious in the classics and in english literature, and versed in the elements of law, could not subject himself to the requirements of a college, or the indignities of an ordinary law practice ; and so devoted himself to rural pursuits, philanthropy, and hterature, emulous of cowper and the rural poets, and fond of the correspondence of uterary men in america and europe. his quaker antecedents made him an abohtionist ; his aversion to tame conformity drew him towards the society of men like thoreau, while his love of music and hospitauty attracted to his pleasant home men of society, like his lifelong friend, george william curtis. if the association of daniel ricketson's rehgious society had for a time a narrowing influence, from which he sought to escape, by the avenue opening towards concord and its transcendentausts, yet its early impressions and its calm and illuminating tra ditions called him back into the fold of fox and wpolman, and he died, as he was educated, a con sistent friend. though early acquainted with emerson, who was well known to new bedford as a preacher, mr. ricketson, as was said, does not seem to have known sketch of daniel ricketson 5 much of thoreau until the publication of " walden " in 1854, when he was in middle ufe. the reading of that book caused him to seek the acquaintance and correspondence of its author, and they became fast friends, exchanging visits ; and this drew him often into intimacy for a time with the poet ellery channing, and for many years with mr. alcott. they were much at brooklawn, and the shanty echoed to their wit and wisdom ; and he became famihar with their homes and haunts in concord. among the best pages in mr. ricketson's " autumn sheaf " of verses are those which tell of talks with emerson, alcott, and thoreau, to whose memory he kept the fidehty of undiminished admiration : — beneath another roof all browned with age, and overhung with one great sheltering elm, where dwelt a seer decreed to solemn thought, i see ye now in memory's faithful glass as last i saw ye, brave and worthy pair ! the white-haired sage, with deep and serious words sonorously expressed ; thy quick reply, thine eyes all glowing with supreme good sense : a genial pair, though of unequal age. these were alcott and thoreau, in the ubrary of the orchard house, — over whose fireplace channing had written, — the hills are reared, the valleys scooped in vain, if learning's altars vanish from the plain. at a later day mr. kicketson wrote and sent me these lines, which i think have not been printed : — 6 daniel eicketson and his friends emerson on his seventy-seventh bikthdat (may 25, 1880) gently thy lamp, scholar rich and rare ! grows paler as thy years their burden bear ; softly the evening shades are shutting down, for nature ne'er to thee betrayed a frown, — a worshipper at her eternal shrine, thy soul illumined with the spark divine. as spans at eve the richly-tinted bow, as sunset leaves behind its after-glow, so shall thy fame with golden memories grow. with the shght diversity which their unlike tem peraments required, this picture might answer for the advancing age of daniel ricketson. there was an unsatisfied element in him which made the serenity of emerson possible only at intervals ; but these grew more frequent, as the shadows fell longer from the summit of fourscore years. they marked the presence, if they darkened the radiance, of that in ward light by which the friends are guided on their pilgrimage through the world; and those lessons which kindly nature had been teaching for so many decades were not lost on this humble woi^ shipper. he died where he had lived so long, faithful to the tradition of the fathers, yet never blind to the rising beams of new truth. literature needs its lifelong students no less than its fluent professors ; they create the atmosphere in which alone men of letters can freely respire, and fully perform their tasks. of such was our new sketch of daniel kicketson 7 bedford friend ; not destined for the fame of a writer, yet essential to the continuance of good writers in a community too much given over to material cares. daniel ricketson might have rephed to questioners of his well-spent life, as festus avie nus did when his roman friends impatiently asked what he was doing in the country : — (luee deos oro, famulos post, arvaque viso, etc.) i pace my fields, when dawn has heard my prayers. direct my household in their daily cares. then to my books, — the muses' aid invoke, — cheerful in heart, and free from usury's yoke : sweet sleep succeeds to feast and song and sport ; my fauing lamp stiu finds the evenings short. when i to verse and authorship resort. concord, july 18, 1898. thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart : thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea : pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free. wordsworth. ii sketch of henry d. thoreau by daniel eicketson /i^is^^^^ ^, it^c^^r^^c^ thoreau it was my good fortune to know henry d, thoreau as a friend and correspondent during the last eight years of his life. i had been attracted by his fresh and manly thoughts as recorded in walden, and sought his acquaintance by writing him an appreciative letter, and inviting him to visit me. my first interview with him was so peculiar that i will venture to state it. the season was winter, a snow had lately fallen, and i was engaged in shoveuing the accumulated mass from the en trance to my house, when i perceived a man walk ing towards me bearing an umbrella in one hand and a leather travelhng-bag in the other. so unlike my ideal thoreau, whom i had fancied, from the ro bust nature of his mind and habits of life, to be a man of unusual vigor and size, that i did not sus pect, although i had expected him in the morning, that the sught, quaint-looking person before me was the walden philosopher. there are few persons who had previously read his works that were not dis appointed by his personal appearance. as he came near to me i gave him the usual salutation, and supposing him to be either a pedler or some way traveller, he at once remarked, " you don't know me." the truth flashed on my mind, and conceal 12 daniel ricketson and his friends ing my own surprise i at once took him by the hand and led him to the room abeady prepared for him, feeling a kind of disappointment — a disap pointment, however, which soon passed off, and never again obtruded itself to the philosopher's dis advantage. in fact, i soon began to see that nature had dealt kindly by him, and that this apparently slender personage was physically capable of endur ing far more than the ordinary class of men, al though he had then begun to show signs of failure of strength in his knees. d. e. henry d. thoreau the names of thoreau and emerson are not properly placed together on account of any great similarity in the character of the two men ; yet from some cause, probably from their being feuow-towns men more than any other, they are in many minds associated as of the same class. although thoreau was many years younger than emerson, his mind was equally as mature, and i place his name first out of respect to the dead. while emerson is the product of new england institutions, the ripest fruit and the best specimen, perhaps, thoreau is one of those remarkable instances of wisdom and philosophy that grow out, as it were, of the order of nature, and may be born in any age or nation. they who drink at the fountain-head of knowledge and truth need not the artificial training of the schools. stiu '^^ ^-'--^^is^^^ n ' '■ ' ./^j ' |3: , /j''i i ,;! / : ^'•■■: -'/i ''-'■. ■•■ ' ,_ ' ~ <■; •'' '■ "■" / h. d. thoreau from pencil sketch by d. ricketson sketch of henry d. thoreau 13 henry thoreau had the best advantages of new england in his education. he was a graduate of harvard college, a good classical scholar, well versed in the mathematics, had been a teacher of youth, and a land surveyor in his own town, which brought him into an intimate acquaintance with the topo graphy of the surroimding country. he was an excellent naturalist, particularly in his knowledge of plants and birds. in fact, nothing escaped his notice or interest. he was, indeed, a most consummate observer and recorder of the works of nature and the ways of men. it was my privilege to know him during the last eight years of his life, when in the full maturity of his powers. the relationship between thoreau and his most intimate friends was not that of great warmth of affection, but rather of respect for manly virtues. if affection were wanting, a strong and abiding attachment took its place, and his friend ship was one not liable to the usual ruptions of more ardent and emotional minds. he was in its strictest sense a good man, sternly virtuous and temperate in all his habits; in fact, one who did not know how little he valued the ordi nary manifestations of religion would have said that he was a real christian, indeed a bishop of the church could not have comported himself with more dignity or propriety of conduct than he. his tastes and pursuits were all of a manly character. the morn ing hours were usually devoted to study or writing, and the afternoon to walking, or boating on his 14 daniel ricketson and his friends favorite river, the musketaquid or concord, with an occasional pedestrian tour to the mountains or cape cod, many of his experiences in which are recorded in his published works. many a long ramble have i taken with him, and although i am a pretty good walker, he usually quite fatigued me before he had accomphshed his object, perhaps the pursuit of some rare plant. in a boat of his own construction i have sailed with him up and down the slow gliding concord river, and found him a good boatman, both in sailing and sculling. once, during a win ter visit to him, we took a tramp through the snow to white pond, some two or three miles beyond walden, then surrounded by heavy wood, and frequented by huntsmen. he was fond of hardy enterprises, and few of his companions could compete with him. in fact i have heard that he quite tired out an indian guide, on one of his excursions in maine. i do not remember of ever seeing him laugh outright, but he was ever ready to smile at anything that pleased him ; and i never knew him to betray any tender emotion except on one occa sion, when he was narrating to me the death of his only brother, john thoreau, from lockjaw, strong symptoms of which, from his sympathy with the sufferer, he himself experienced. at this time his voice was choked, and he shed tears, and went to the door for air. the subject was of course dropped, and never recurred to again. in person he was rather below the medium stat ure, though not decidedly short, — of rather slender sketch of henry d. thoreau 15 than robust habit of body, and marked for his droop ing shoulders. still he was vigorous and active, and when in good health could perform a good deal of physical labor. his head was of medium size, but well formed according to the rules of phreno logy, — his brow was f uu, and his forehead rather broad than prominent; his eyes grayish blue, his nose long and aquiline, and his hair inclined to sandy. when interested in conversation, and stand ing, he had a decidedly dignified bearing. at first thoreau was far from being understood by the public ; a few there were, and but a few, who accepted him ; he uved, however, long enough to create a public for himself, and if not among the most scholarly, at least it comprised the more thoughtful portion of the reading class of our people. i never heard him lecture or speak in public, but i believe he was not generally successful except, perhaps, in his more private readings. his thoughts were often too subtle to be readily inter preted, requiring a deliberate reading to fully under stand them. he won for himself a name and fame, which had before his death reached the other side of the water, where his works are by a chosen few stiu known and cherished. among those from abroad who sought him out was the late thomas chohnondeley, esq., an oxford graduate, and a gentleman of rare culture and polished manners. in order to see more of thoreau he became an inmate of his family for several weeks, and on his return to england sent ^ over as a present to thoreau a valuable collection of 16 daniel ricketson and his fkiends oriental works. i had the pleasure of having this worthy gentleman and my friend thoreau on a visit of a few days, during which time i formed a high respect for his truly noble and christian qualities of heart. he married a lady of rank, and died on his marriage tour in italy. he was, i beheve, a nephew of the good and highly respected bishop heber. about three years before his death, thoreau be gan to complain of weakness in his knees, which in a good degree he recovered from ; but soon after, the disease of which he died, that of the lungs, manifested itself by general increased weakness and a cough. he still kept about his pursuits as usual, and during the summer of 1861, the last one he saw, he made me a visit at new bedford, and though sufeering by night and by day with his troublesome cough, was able to ride about the coun try and by the seashore, as well as to take short rambles for his favorite plants, or in search of those not found in his own vicinity of concord. the following is a hst of the plants he found at this time, august, 1861, which before he had not seen : — malva sylvestris, spartina juncea, teucrium canadense, chenopodina maritima, obione arenaria, proserpinaca pectinacea, linum virginianum, aster spectabilis, and an undescribed species of lactuca. as well as thoreau wrote, only those whose privi lege it was to listen to one of his long discursive conversations by the evening fireside know how f uu of interest and instruction he made the subject of sketch of henry d. thoreau 17 his disquisition, apparently enjoying himself as much as interesting his hearers. judging from my own relationship with him, i would say that he won rather the respect and admiration of his friends than their love. he was so superior to almost all other men that he inspired a certain amount of awe. " why," said his eccentric friend, c , in his own peculiar manner, which of course imphed no irreverence, " thoreau is a god ! " whether a god or saint it matters not, he was, in almost every walk of life that makes a man honored and respected by his friends, a rare example. as a son and brother he was much beloved, in temperance and frugality an example worthy of following ; and though no politician he was by no means an uninterested looker-on of the state of affairs in ours as welk as other countries. few men in any age of the world have more fuuy rounded their lives than he. if he had any fault, it was that he was too true to nature and himself to become a decided christian ; but in most that is excellent in christianity he pos sessed a large share, and i am too much a behever in the doctrine of the light within not to recognize the divine unction in the soul even if the form of sound words be wanting. but it was in the closing scenes of his life, and when confined to his room and bed, that this truly good and brave man showed the depth and power of divine wisdom in his soul, giving him strength in his weakness, and making the sick-room and the chamber of death resplendent in beauty and " hopefulness. 18 daniel ricketson and his friends his inquisitive mind still found an interest in the change he was experiencing, and regarding death to be as natural as life, he accepted it "with gracefulness, and investigated its approach with more than philo sophic composure. as a writer thoreau was sententious rather than graceful or elegant ; his style was his own, and well adapted to his subject-matter. originahty perhaps more than other quahty marked his thought ; yet at times he uttered old truths in a new dress so weu adapted to his object of conveying practical ideas, that they have the charm of novelty, and are calcu lated to edify the attentive reader. more than any writer perhaps of his time does he require a careful reading to fully arrive at the pith of his matter, which is often marked by a subtlety that he appears to have chosen to conceal a too glaring expression of his meaning. he could, however, at wul execute his thought in the most graceful and poetic manner, and a judicious selection of these passages from his works would form a volume of remarkable beauty. he was a voluminous writer; and although since his death several volumes have been added to his former works, it is probable that a large amount of manu script yet remains. during his lifetime, he was known to the public by his " week on the concord and merrimack riv ers " and " walden, or life in the woods ; " the former published in 1849 and the latter in 1854. the titles of these books give but a faint idea of their contents, for both are full of thought and sketch of heney d. thokeau 19 observation upon man and nature, and are rather works of philosophy than simple narratives, as their names might suggest. although the life of thoreau was mostly within himself, or rather with the company he entertained there, as he would probably have expressed it, stiu few men have found a keener reksh for innocent out of door amusements than he. his boat, his spy-glass, and staff, though he rarely used the latter about home, comprised his eqiiipage. so thoroughly had he learned the characteristics of his own neigh borhood for miles around, that he probably knew more about its history than the proprietors them selves, even as to boundaries and titles tracing back to the days of the native indians. few men have accomplished more than our late friend, or lived to better purpose. peace to his memory. d. r. in memokiam to h. d. t. o henkt ! in thy new-born sphere of life, thy present home, though hidden from our view, does not thy spirit linger still around thy much loved concord ? visit'st not thou still thy favorite haunts, by river, hill, and dale. through lonely woods, or over barren plains. where once the ploughshare passed long years ago. and where with thee i once so gladly roamed. through winter's snow, or summer's fervent heat, 20 daniel ricketson and his friends to " baker farm," or to the beetling cliff that overlooks the gentle river's course, or to thy walden, " blue-eyed walden " called by that much gifted man, thy chosen friend, companion of thy walks and rural life. with thee i 've sat beside the glowing hearth of one so grand in thought, so pure of aim i new england's keenest, wisest scrutineer, a poet, too, endowed with rarest gifts. and listened to the converse thou and he, so like, and yet so unlike, often held. intelligent and wise, and deeply learned, 1 found ye both ; both scholars, rich and rare ; but in the book of nature no peer hast thou. whether in words expressed of glowing thought, from deep philosophy revealed of old. or in the fields or woods, or by the shore of the great ocean thou didst love so weu, and where with pilgrim steps thou often went'st. no plant escaped thy ever-searching eye ; no bird or beast, however rarely found. but thou didst find. unknown indian wares, by thy divining wand, though centuries hid. came forth to view, and thou their history told'st. and 'neath another roof all browned with age. and overhung by one great sheltering elm, where dwells a seer decreed to solemn thought, amid old books and treasures rare to see. and learned of wisdom and devout of heart, a bishop worthy of the apostolic age. we sometimes met to pass a thoughtful hour in sweet discourse on themes of lofty tone. i see ye, too, in memory's faithful glass. as last i saw ye, brave and worthy pair ! the white haired sage, with deep and solemn words sketch of henry d. thoreau 21 sonorously expressed ; thy quick reply thy eyes all glowing with supreme good sense ; a genial pair, though of unequal age. thou worthy man ! so noble and so brave ! how much i miss thee, friend and teacher too i thou gentle man ! thou purest of the pure, and wisest of the wise, best of the good i how saint-like and sublime thy walk on earth ! truly, i never shall behold thy like again. but whensoe'er old concord's pleasant realms rise to my mind, thou as her chiefest son will haunt her as the spirit of her groves. her moorland fields, and river famed in song, and marked in history's page by scenes of blood ; for here, as often told, their yeoman sires met the proud briton, and defied his steps, — some falling bravely for their country's right. and now in coming time linked with this tale. so often told e'en yet to household groups of listening youngsters with wide staring eyes. thy honored name shall be remembered too, remembered by the good and wise long lustrums hence. as one who in an age of much dismay lived a serene, a pure and holy life. d. r. 1863. ill letteks of daniel ricketson and henry d. thoreau letters of daniel ricketson and henry d. thoreau bkooklawn, near new bedford, mass., august 12th, 1854. dear sib, — i have just finished reading " wal den," and hasten to thank you for the great degree of satisfaction it has afforded me. having always been a lover of nature, in man, as well as in the material universe, i hail with pleasure every original produc tion in literature which hears the stamp of a genuine and earnest love for the true philosophy of human life. — such i assure you i esteem your book to he. to many, and to most, it will appear to be the wild musings of an eccentric and strange mind, though all must recognize your affectionate regard for the gentle denizens of the woods and ponds, as well as the great love you have shown for what are famil iarly called the beauties of nature. but to me the book appears to evince a mind most thoroughly self-possessed, highly cultivated, with a strong vein of common sense. the whole book is a prose poem (pardon the solecism) and at the same time as simple as a running brook. i have always loved ponds of pure translucent water, and some of my happiest and most memor able days have been passed on and around the beau 26 daniel ricketson and his friends tiful middleboro' ponds, particularly the largest, assawampset ; here king phihp frequently came, and a beautiful round hill near by is still known as " king philip's look-out." i have often felt an in clination when tired of the noise and striee of society, to retire to the shores of this noble old pond, or rather lake, for it is some five or six miles in length and two broad. but i have a wife and four chil dren, and besides have got a little too far along, being in my forty-second year, to undertake a new mode of kfe. i strive, however, and have striven during the whole of my life, to live as free from the restraint of mere forms and ceremonies as i possibly can. i love a quiet, peaceful, rural retirement, but it was not my fate to realize this until a little past thirty years of age ; since then i have been a sort of rustic. genteel, perhaps, rustic. not so very gen teel, you might reply, if you saw the place where i am writing. it is a rough board shanty 12 x 14, three miles from new bedford, in a quiet and se cluded spot — here for the present i eat and sleep, read, write, receive visitors, etc. my house is now undergoing repairs, and my family are in town. a short time since a whippoorwiu serenaded me, and late at night i hear the cuckoos near my win dows. it has long been my delight to observe the feathered tribes, and earlier in life i was quite an ornithologist. the coming of the first bluebird in early spring is to me still a delightful circumstance. but more particularly soothing to me is the insect hum so multitudinous at this season. now as i letters of ricketson and thoreau 27 write the crickets and other little companions are sweetly and soothingly singing around my dwelling, and occasionally in my room. i am quite at home with partridges, quails, rabbits, skunks, and wood chucks. but winter is my best time ; then i am a great tramper through the woods. how i love the woods. i have walked thousands of miles in th(b woods hereabouts. i recognize many of my own experiences in your " walden." stiu i am not altogether given up to these matters — they are my pastimes. i have a farm to attend to, fruit trees and a garden, and a little business occasionally in town to look after, but much leisure nevertheless. in fact i am the only man of leisure i know of; everybody here, as well as elsewhere, is upon the stir. i love quiet ; this you know, friend thoreau, don't necessarily imply that the body should be still all the time. i am often quietest, are n't you, when walking among the stiu haunts of nature, or hoeing, perhaps, beans as i have oftentimes done, as well as corn and potatoes, etc., etc. poetry has been to me a great consolation amid the jarring elements of this life. the english poets, some of them at least, and one latin, our good old virgil, have been like household gods to me. cowper's task, my greatest favorite, now lies before me, in which i had been reading, and alternately looking at the western sky just after sunset, before i commenced this letter. cowper was a true lover of the country. how often have i felt the force of these lines upon the country in my own experience : 28 daniel eicketson and his friends " i never framed a wish, or formed a plan, that flattered me with hopes of earthly hliss, but there i laid the scene." all through my boyhood, the country haunted my thoughts. though blessed with a good home, books, and teachers (the latter, however, with one exception, were not blessings), i would have ex changed all for the life of a rustic. i envied, as i then thought, the freedom of the farmer boy. but i have long thought that the life of the farmer, that is most farmers, promised but little of the poetry of labor. how we accumulate cares around us. the very repairs i am now making upon my house will, to some considerable extent, increase my cares. a rough board shanty, rye and indian bread, water from the spring, or, as in your case, from the pond, and other things in keeping, do not burden the body and mind. it is fine houses, fine furniture, sump tuous fare, fine clothes, and many in number, horses and carriages, servants, etc., etc., etc., these are the harpies that so disturb our real happiness. my next move in life i hope will be into a much more simple mode of living. i should like to live in a small house, with my family, uncarpeted, white washed walls, simple old-fashioned furniture, and plain, wholesome, old-fashioned fare; — though i have always been inclined to be a vegetarian in diet, and once hved in capital health two years on the graham system. well, this will do for myself. now for you, friend thoreau. why return to " the world " again ? letters of ricketson and thoreau 29 a life such as you spent at walden was too true and beautiful to be abandoned for any slight reason. the ponds i allude to are much more secluded than walden, and really delightful places. should you ever incline again to try your " philosophy of living" i would introduce you into haunts that your very soul would leap to behold. well, i thought i would just write you a few lines to thank you for the pleasure i have received from the reading of your " walden," but i have found myself running on till now. i feel that you are a kindred spirit, and so fear not. i was pleased to find a kind word or two in your book for the poor down-trodden slave. wilber force, clarkson, john woolman, and anthony bene zet were household words in my' father's family. i early became acquainted with the subject of slav ery, for my parents were quakers, and quakers were then all abolitionists. my love of nature, absolute, undefiled nature, makes me an abolitionist. how could i listen to the woodland songs, or gaze upon the outstretched landscape, or look at the great clouds and the starry heavens, and be aught but a friend of the poor and oppressed colored race of our land. but why do i write ? it is in vain to portray these things ; they can only be felt and lived, and to you, of all others, i would refrain from being prohx. i have outlived, or nearly so, all ambition for notoriety. i wish only to be a simple, good man, and so hve that when i come to surrender up my spirit to the great father, i may depart in peace. 30 daniel ricketson and his friends i wrote the above last evening. it is now sun day afternoon, and alone in my shanty i sit down at my desk to add a little more. a great white cloud which i have been watching for the past half hour is now majestically moving off to the north east, before the fine southwest breeze which sets in here nearly every summer afternoon from the ocean. we have here the best climate in new england, — sheltered on the north and east by dense pine woods from the cold winds which so cut up the healths of eastern folk, or rather are supposed to ; but i think if the habits of our people were right, the northeasters would do but kttle harm. i never heard that the indians were troubled by them — but they were nature's philosophers and hved in the woods. i love to go by my instincts, inspiration rather. oh, how much we lose by civilization ! in the eyes of the world you and i are demi-savages. but i rather think we could stand our hand at the dinner table or in the drawing-room with most of folks. i would risk you anywhere, and as for my self i have about done with the follies of " society." i never was trump' d yet. i have lived out all the experiences of idle youth, — some gentle and some savage experiences, — but my heart was not made of the stuff for a sportsman or angler. early in life i ranged the woods, fields, and shores, with my gun or rod, but i found that all i sought could be obtained much better without the death dealing implements. so now my rustic staff is all the companion i usually take, unless my letteks of ricketson and thoreau 31 old dog joins me, taking no track, as he often does, and bounding upon me in some distant thicket. my favorite books are — cowper's task, thomson's seasons, milton, shakespeare, &c., &c. ; goldsmith, gray's elegy, beattie's minstrel (parts), howitt, gu. white (selborne), bewick (wood-engraver). moderns: wordsworth, ch. lamb, de quincey, macaulay, kit north, &c., &c. these and others are more my companions than men. i kke talented women, and swear lustily by mary wollstonecraft, mde. roland, joan of arc, and somewhat by dear margaret fuller. again permit me to thank you for the pleasure and strength i have found in reading " walden." dear mr. walden, good-by for the present. yours most respectfully, daniel ricketson. henry d. tnorear, esq. concord, october 1, 1854. dear sib : — i had duly received your very hind and frank letter, but delayed to answer it thus long, because i have httle skill as a correspondent, and wished to send you something more than my thanks. i was gratified by your prompt and hearty acceptance of my book. yours is the only word of greeting i am likely to receive from a dweller in the woods like myself, from where the whippoorwill and cuckoo are heard, and there are better than moral clouds drifting over, and real breezes blow. your account excites in me a desire to see the 32 daniel kicketson and his friends middleboro' ponds, of which i had already heard somewhat ; as also of some very beautiful ponds on the cape, in harwich, i think, near which i once passed. i have sometimes also thought of visiting that remnant of our indians still living near you. but then, you know, there is nothing like one's native fields and lakes. the best news you send me is, not that nature with you is so fair and genial, but that there is one there who hkes her so well. that proves all that was asserted. homer, of course, you include in your list of lovers of nature ; and, by the way, let me mention here, — for this is my thunder " lately," — william gilpin's long series of books on the picturesque, with their illustrations. if it chances that you have not met with these, i cannot just now frame a bet ter wish than that you may one day derive as much pleasure from the inspection of them as i have. much as you have told me of yourself, you have still, i think, a little advantage of me in this corre spondence, for i have told you still more in my book. you have therefore the broadest mark to fire at. a young english author, thomas cholmondeley, is just now waiting for me to take a walk with him, therefore excuse this very barren note from. yours, hastily at last, henry d. thoreau. bkoobxawn, near new bedford, oct. 12th, 1854. dear mr. walden, — your long delayed, but very acceptable acknowledgment of the 1st inst. came letters of eicketson and thoreau 33 duly to hand. it requires no answer, and i trust you will not esteem this as such. i simply wish to say, that it will afeord me pleasure to show you the middleborough ponds, as well as the other indian water spoken of by you, which i conclude to be what is called " wakeebe pond," at mashpee near sandwich. since i first wrote you my rough board shanty, which i then inhabited and from which i now write, has been partially forsaken, thro' the house of which i spoke to you as being built, having been completed and my family moved into it ; so the shanty is some what shorn of its beams to the public or vulgar eye at least, but none the less prized by me. here i spend a considerable part of my time in study and meditation, and here i also entertain my best and most welcome friends. now, friend walden, if it should be agreeable to you to leave home at this pleasant season, i shall be happy to receive you as my guest. making my farm, which hes about three miles north of new bedford, headquarters, we can sally forth into the adjoining country — to the fine ponds in question and visit other objects of interest hitherward. i am just now quite busily engaged in the improvement of the grounds near my house, but expect to conclude them by the end of next week, when, should it meet your pleasure, i shall be very happy to see you here. i am quite a tramper as well as yourself, but have horse-flesh and carriages at hand if preferable, which certainly for long distances, with au my antediluvian taste, i deem it to be. 34 daniel ricketson and his friends perhaps your young english friend and author, mr. chohnondeley, would like to accompany you, should you conclude to come. if so, please extend the invitation to him should you deem it proper. i do not wish to push matters at all, but am of the opinion, i£ you are not too learned, we shall affiliate nicely in our rustic feelings — at any rate it will do no harm to try. your short and hastily written note embarrasses me, and i hardly know whether it best or no to send what i have now written, and so conclude, whether this shall reach you or not. your friend and fellow-worshipper at nature's great shrine, daniel eicketson. concokd, mass., dec. 19, 1854. dbae sib, — i wish to thank you for your sym pathy. i had counted on seeing you when i came to new bedford, though i did not know exactly how near to it you permanently dwelt ; therefore i gladly accept your invitation to stop at your house. i am going to lecture at nantucket the 28th, and as i suppose i must improve the earliest opportunity to get there from new bedford, i will endeavor to come on monday that i may see yourself and new bedford before my lecture. • i should uke right well to see your ponds, but that is hardly to be thought of at present. i fear that it is impossible for me to combine such things with the business of lecturing. you cannot serve letters of ricketson and thoreau 35 god and mammon. however, perhaps i shall have time to see something of your country. i am aware that you have not so much snow as we; there has been excellent sleighing here ever since the 5th ult. mr. cholmondeley has left us, so that i shall come alone. will you be so kind as to warn mr. mitchell that i accept at once his invitation to lecture on the 26th of this month, for i do not know that he has got my letter. excuse this short note, from yours truly, henry d. thoreau. h. d. thoeeatj. dear sir, — yours of the 19th came to hand this evening. i shall therefore look for you on monday next. my farm is three miles north of new bedford. say to the conductor to leave you at the tarkun hill station, where i or some of my folks will be in readiness for you on the arrival of the evening train. should you intend coming earlier in the day, please inform me in time. i will get word to the committee of the n. b. lyceum, as you desire. if i do not hear from you again, i shall prepare for your arrival as before. in the meantime, i remain. yours very truly, daii'l ricketson. brooklawn, near new bedford, wednesday eve'g, deo. 20, '54. 36 daniel kicketson and his friends shanty, bkooklawn, thursday p. m., jan. 4, 1855. dear waxden, — we should be glad to hear of your safe arrival home from your " perils by land and by flood," and as we are not likely to know of this unless you receive a strong hint, i just drop a line for that end. your visit, short as it was, gave us all at brook lawn much satisfaction. i should be glad to have you come again next summer and cruise around with me. i regret i was unusually unwell when you were here, as you undoubtedly perceived by my com plaints. i am just starting for a walk, and as i expect to pass our village post-office, thought it a good time to write you. i trust you and your comrade channing wiu have many good times this winter. i may possibly drop in on you for a few hours at the end of this month, when i expect to be in boston. excuse haste. yours very truly, daniel ricketson. p. s. mrs. r. and children sent kind regards. concord, mass., jan. 6, 1855. mb. ricketson, — i am pleased to hear from the shanty whose inside and occupant i have seen. i had a very pleasant time at brooklawn, as you letters of ricketson and thoreau 37 know, — and thereafter at nantucket. i was obkged to pay the usual tribute to the sea, but it was more than made up to me by the hospitahty of the nan tucketers. tell arthur that i can now compare notes with him, for though i went neither before nor behind the mast, since we had n't any — i went with my head hanging over the side all the way. in spite of all my experience, i persisted in read ing to the nantucket people the lecture which i read at new bedford, and i found them to be the very audience for me. i got home friday night, after being lost in the fog off hyannis. i have not yet foirad a new jack-knife, but i had a glorious skating with channing the other day, on the skates found long ago. mr. cholmondeley sailed for england direct, in the america, on the third, after spending a night with me. he thinks even to go to the east and enust. last night i returned from lecturing in worcester. i shall be glad to see you when you come to boston, as will also my mother and sister, who know something about you as an aboutionist. come di rectly to our house. please remember me to mrs. ricketson, and also to the young folks. yours, henby d. thoreau. shantt, brooexawn, 9 jan., '55. dear waldbn, — i have just received your very welcome reply. i am also happy to learn of your 38 daniel kicketson and his friends safe arrival home, and was much amused by your account of your voyage to nantucket — also that you found an appreciative audience there. you address me as mr. ricketson. what did i do "whue you were here to warrant so much defer ence — i pass for a rather aristocratic man among hig folk, but did n't suppose you knew it ! you should have addressed " dear brooklawn." john son in his tour to the hebrides says they have a custom, in those isles, of giving their names to their chieftains or owners — as col rasay, much, etc., of which they are the lairds. you are the true and only laird of walden, and as such i address you. you certainly can show a better title to walden manor than any other. it is just as we lawyers say, and you hold the fee. you did n't think of finding such knowing folks this way, altho you had travelled a good deal in concord. by the way, i have heard several sensible people speak well of your lecture before the new bedford lyceiun, but conclude it was not generally under^ stood. my son arthur and i have begun a series of pil grimages to old farmhouses — we don't notice any short of a hundred years old. i am much obliged to you and your mother for your mnd invitation. my intention is to attend the anti-slavery meetings in boston, wednesday and thursday, 24th and 25th this month, and shall endeavor to get up to concord for part of a day. letteks of ricketson and thokeau 39 i wish you would come to boston at that time. you will find me at the tremont house, where i shall hope to see you. mrs. ricketson and the "young folks" wish to be kindly remembered to you. i have had a present of a jack-knife /owncz upon a stick of timber in an old house, " built in " and supposed to have been left there by the carpenter. the house is over one hundred years old, and the knife is very curious. so i conclude this rambling epistle, yours exceedingly, " me. ricketson." present my compliments to mr. channing. bkooklawn, n. bedford, 26 jan., 1855. dear sir, — i fully intended to have gone to boston yesterday ; but not being very well, deferred it until to-day, and now we are visited by a severe snowstorm, so that i fear the railway track may be obstructed. i shall not, therefore, be able to reach concord this time. my only fear is that you may have gone to boston in expectation of meeting me there ; but as i have not heard from you to this efeect i have no very strong reason to think so, and hope that you have not. i should like very much to see concord and its environs with the laird of walden, and hope at no very distant time to do so, should it meet his plea 40 daniel ricketson and his friends sure. i hope also to see your lordship again here, and to visit with you some of our rural retreats. yours, d. rickbtson. h. d. thoreau, esq., concord, mass. concord, february 1st, 1855. deah sir, — i supposed, as i did not see you on the 24th or 25th, that some track or other was obstructed, but the sohd earth still holds together between new bedford and concord, and i trust that as this time you stayed away, you may live to come another day. i did not go to boston, for with regard to that place, i sympathize with one of my neighbors, an old man, who has not been there since the last war, when he was compelled to go — no, i have a real genius for staying at home. i have been looking of late at bewick's tailpieces in the " birds " — all they have of him at harvard. why will he be a little vulgar at times ? yesterday i made an excursion up our river — skated some thirty miles in a few hours, if you will believe it. so with reading and writing and skating the night comes round again. yours, henry d. thoreau. brooklawn, sunday p. m., sept. 23d, 1855. dear thoreau, — here am i at home again seated in my shanty. my mind is constantly reverting to letters of ricketson and thoreau 41 the pleasant little visit i made you, and so i thought i would sit down and write you. i regret exceedingly that i was so interrupted in my enjoyment while at concord by my " aches and pains." my head troubled me until i had got within about 20 miles of home, when the pain passed off and my spirits began to revive. i hope that your walks, &c., with me wiu not harm you and that you will soon regain your usual health and strength, which i trust the cooler weather will favor ; would advise you not to doctor, but just use your own good sense. i should have insisted more on your coming on with me had i not felt so lu and in such actual pain the day i left — but i want you to come before the weather gets uncomfortably cool. i feel much your debtor, for through you and your walden i have found my hopes and strength in those matters which i had before found none to sympathize with. you have more than any other to me discovered the true secret of hving comfortably in this world, and i hope more and more to be able to put it into prac tice, in the mean time you will be able to extend your pity and charity. you are the only " millionaire " among my acquaintance. i have heard of people being " independently rich," but you are the only one i have ever had the honor of knowing. how charmingly you, channing, and i dovetailed together ! few men smoke such pipes as we did — the real calumet — the tobacco that we smoked was free labor produce. i have n't lost sight of solon hosmer, the wisest looking man in concord, and a 42 daniel ricketson and his friends real " feelosopher " / i want you to see him and tell him not to take down the old house, where the feelosofers met. i think i should like to have the large chamber, for an occasional sojourn to concord. it might be easily tinkered up so as to be a com fortable roost for afeelosofer — a few old chairs, a table, bed, &c., would be all-sufficient, then you and c. could come over in your punt and rusticate. what think of it ? in the mean time come down to brooklawn, and look about with me. as you are a uttle under the weather, we wiu make our peregrina tions with horse and wagon. with much regard to channing and my kind remembrances to your parents and sister, i remain. yours very truly, d'l ricketson. p. s. please come by saturday next, as the weather is getting cool. i would hke to have channing to come with you. please invite him from me. you can wear your old clothes here. concord, september 27, 1855. friend ricketson, — i am sorry that you were obliged to leave concord without seeing more of it, — its river and woods, and various pleasant walks, and its worthies. i assure you that i am none the worse for my walk with you, but on au accounts the better. methinks i am regaining my health ; but i would hke to know first what it was that ailed me. i have not yet conveyed your message to mr. lettees of ricketson and thoreau 43 hosmer, but will not fail to do so. that idea of occupying the old house is a good one, — quite feasible, — and you could bring your hair pillow with you. it is an inn in concord which i had not thought of, — a philosopher's inn. that large chamber might make a man's idea expand propor tionably. it would be well to have an interest in some old chamber in a deserted house in every part of the country which attracted us. there would be no such place to receive one's guests as that. if old furniture is fashionable, why not go the whole house at once ? i shall endeavor to make mr. hosmer believe that the old house is the chief attraction of his farm, and that it is his duty to preserve it by all honest apphances. you might take a lease of it in perpetuo, and done with it. i am so wedded to my way of spending a day, — require such broad margins of leisure, and such a complete wardrobe of old clothes, that i am ill-fitted for going abroad. pleasant is it sometimes to sit at home, on a single egg all day, in your own nest, though it may prove at last to be an egg of chalk. the old coat that i wear is concord j it is my morn ing-robe and my study-gown, my working dress and suit of ceremony, and my night-gown after all. cleave to the simplest ever. home, — home, — home. cars sound like cares to me. i am accustomed to think very long of going anywhere, — am slow to move. i hope to hear a response of the oracle first. however, i think that i will try the effect of your 44 daniel ricketson and his friends talisman on the iron horse next saturday, and dis mount at tarkun hill. perhaps your sea air will be good for me. i conveyed your invitation to channing, but he apparently will not come. excuse my not writing earlier ; but i had not decided. yours, hbney d. thobeau. concord, oct. 12, 1855. mr. rickbtson, — i fear that you had a lonely and disagreeable ride back to new bedford, through the carver woods, and so on, — perhaps in the rain, too, and i am in part answerable for it. i feel very much in debt to you and your family for the plea sant days i spent at brooklawn. tell arthur and walton that the shells which they gave me are spread out, and make quite a show to inland eyes. methinks i still hear the strains of the piano, the violin, and the flageolet blended together. excuse me for the noise which i believe drove you to take refuge in the shanty. that shanty is indeed a fa vorable place to expand in, which i fear i did not enough improve. on my way through boston, i inquired for gil pin's works at little, brown & co.'s, monroe's, ticknor's, and burnham's. they have not got them. they told me at little, brown & co.'s that his works (not complete), in twelve volumes, 8vo, were imported, and sold in this country five or six letters of ricketson and thoreau 45 years ago for about fifteen dollars. their terms for importing are ten per cent, on the cost. i copied from the " london catalogue of books, 1816-51," at their shop, the following list of gilpin's works : — gilpin (wm.) dialogues on various subjects, 8vo, 9s. cadell. essays on picturesque subjects, 8vo, 15s. car dell. exposition of the new testament, 2 vols. 8vo, 16s. longman. forest scenery, by sir t. d. lauder, 2 vols. 8vo, 18s. smith & e. lectures on the catechism, 12mo, 3s. 6d. long man. lives of the reformers, 2 vols. 12mo, 8s. riv ington. sermons illustrative and practical, 8vo, 12s. hatchard. sermons to country congregations, 4 vols. 8vo, £1. 16s. longman. tour in cambridge, norfolk, etc., 8vo, 18s. cadell. tour of the river wye, 12mo, 4s. with plates, 8vo, 17s. cadell. gilpin (w. s.) (?) hints on landscape gardening, royal 8vo, £1. cadell. beside these, i remember to have read one volume on prints, his southern tour (1775) ; lakes of cumberland, two volumes; highlands of scotland and west of england, two vols. — n. b. there must be plates in every volume. i still see an image of those middleborough ponds in my mind's eye, — broad shallow lakes, with an iron mine at the bottom, — comparatively unvexed by sails, — only by tom smith and his 46 daniel kicketson and his ekiends squaw, sepits, "sharper." i find my map of the state to be the best i have seen of that district. it is a question whether the islands of long pond or great quitticus offer the most attractions to a lord of the isles. that plant which i found on the shore of long pond chances to be a rare and beauti ful flower — the sabbatia chloroides — referred to plymouth. in a description of middleborough in the hist. coll., vol. m, 1810, signed nehemiah bennet, middleborough, 1793, it is said : " there is on the easterly shore of assawampsitt pond, on the shore of betty's neck, two rocks which • have curious marks thereon (supposed to be done by the indians), which appear like the steppings of a person with naked feet which settled into the rocks ; likewise the prints of a hand on several places, with a number of other marks ; also there is a rock on a high hiu a little to the eastward of the old stone fishing weir, where there is the print of a person's hand in said rock." it would be well to look at those rocks again more carefully, also at the rock on the hiq. i should think that you would like to explore snip atuit pond in eochester, — it is so large and near. it is an interesting fact that the alewives used to as cend to it, if theydo not still, — both from mat tapoisett and through great quitticus. there wiu be no trouble about the chamber in the old house, though, as i told you, mr. hosmer may expect some compensation for it. he says. letters of ricketson and thoreau 47 " give my respects to mr. ricketson, and tell him that i cannot be at a large expense to preserve an antiquity or curiosity. nature must do its work." " but," say i, " he asks you only not to assist nature." yours, henry d. thoreau. brooklawn, 13 oct., '55. dear thoreau, — your long lost letter came to hand last monday, and i concluded that you had safely arrived in concord and had forwarded it yourself. one week ago this morning we parted in plymouth. i looked out of my window and got the last glimpse of you going off with your umbrella and carpet-bag or valise. your visit here was very agreeable to us all, and particularly to me. in fact your visit was highly successful except in duration — being much too short. but the principal object in my now writing is, to assure you that i expect to spend a few days in concord next week, and i shall leave here by the middle or towards the end of the week. ,1 shall bring my hair pillow and some old clothes. i shall not consider it obligatory on you to devote much time to me, particularly as you are an invalid, but such time as you can spare i shall be gladto avail myself of, but i hope that channing, you, and i will be able to feelosophize a little occa sionally. 48 daniel kicketson and his friends i shall go directly to the tavern, and shall insist upon putting you to no trouble or attention. i conclude in haste, breakfast waiting. yours truly, dan'l rickbtson. tell channing i hope to smoke my pipe with him soon. brooklawn, saturday noon, 13 oct., 1855. dbak thoreau, — i wrote a few lines to you this morning before breakfast, which i took to the post-of&ce, but since, i have received yours of yes terday, which rather changes my mind as to going to concord. i thank you for your kindness in pro curing for me information concerning gilpin's work, which i shall endeavor to procure. my ride home, as you anticipate, was somewhat dull and dreary through carver woods, but i escaped the rain which did not come on until after my arri val home, about tea-time. i think that you hurried away from brooklawn. we had just got our affairs in good train. i hope, however, that you will soon be able to come again and spend several weeks, when we will visit the pond in rochester which you mentioned, and review our rides and rambles. the middleborough ponds and their surroundings never tire me. i could go every day for a long time to them. i give my preference to the isles in long pond — we must get the indian name of this fa vorite lake of ours. the principal reason for my changing my mind letters of ricketson and thoreau 49 in regard to going to concord is that you say chan ning has gone, and perhaps for the winter. al though i intended to board and lodge at the tavern, i expected to philosophize with you and c. by his wood-fire. but this is only a good reason for you to come to brooklawn again. we have some weeks of good rambling weather yet before winter sets in. you wiq be very welcome to us all, and don't feel the least hesitation about coming i£ you have the desire so to do. i am in the shanty — uncle james is here with me. he came up as soon as he heard you had gone. i have endeavored to convince him that you are per fectly harmless, but i think he still retains a portion of his fears. i think you would affiliate well i£ you should ever come together. yours truly, d. kicketson. h. d. thoreau, esq., concord, mass. concord, october 16, 1855. fkibnd rickbtsoiir, — i have got both your let ters at once. you must not think concord so bar ren a place when channing is away. there are the river and fields left yet ; and i, though ordinarily a man of business, should have some afternoons and evenings to spend with you, i trust, — that is, if you could stand so much of me. if you can spend your time profitably here, or without ennui, having an occasional ramble or tete-a-tete with one of the natives, it will give me pleasure to have you in the 60 daniel eicketson and his fkiends neighborhood. you see i am preparing you for our awful unsocial ways, — keeping in our dens a good part of the day, — sucking our claws perhaps. but then we make a religion of it, and that you cannot but respect. if you know the taste of your own heart, and like it, come to concord, and i '11 warrant you enough here to season the dish with, — aye, even though channing and emerson and i were all away. we might paddle quietly up the river. then there are one or two more ponds to be seen, &c. i should very much enjoy further rambling with you in your vicinity, but must postpone it for the present. to tell the truth, i am planning to get seriously to work after these long months of iueffi ciency and idleness. i do not know whether you are haunted by any such demon which puts you on the alert to pluck the fruit of each day as it passes, and store it safely in your bin. true, it is well to live abandonedly from time to time ; but, to our working hours that must be as the spile to the bung. so for a long season i must enjoy only a low slant ing gleam in my miud's eye from the middleborough ponds far away. methinks i am getting a uttle more strength into those knees of mine ; and, for my part, i beheve that god does deught in the strength of a man's legs. yours, henet d. thokbau. letters of kicketson and thoreau 51 brooklawn, oct. 18th, 1855. dbab thoeeau, — i received yours of the 16th inst. yesterday. i am very sorry^;hat you did not con clude at once to come to brooklawn and finish the visit which you so unceremoniously curtailed. but i cannot release you on so light grounds. i thought that you were a man of leisure. at any rate by your philosophy which i consider the best, you are so. you appear to be hugging your chains or endeavor ing so to do. i approve of your courage, but can not see the desperate need of your penance. but i must appeal to you as a brother man, a philanthropist too. i am in need of help. i want a physician, and i send for you as the one i have the most confidence in. you can bring your writing with you, but i can furnish you with stationery in abundance, and you can have as much time for " sucking your claws " as you wish. don't fail to come by saturday noon the 20th. yours truly, d. ricketson. i am in need of a physician, — so dr. thoreau, come to my relief. i need dosing with country rides and rambles, lake scenery, cold viands and jack-knife dinners. i find the following in sterne's koran, which is the best thing i have seen for a long time : — " spare diet and clear skies are apollo and the muses." 62 daniel eicketson and his friends concord, december 25, 1855. friend ricketson, — though you have not shown your face here, i trust that you did not in terpret my last note to my disadvantage. i remem ber that, among other things, i wished to break it to you, that, owing to engagements, i should not be able to show you so much attention as i could wish, or as you had shown to me. how we did scour over the country ! i hope your horse wiu live as long as one which i hear just died in the south of france at the age of forty. yet i had no doubt you would get quite enough of me. do not give it up so easily. the old house is still empty, and hosmer is easy to treat with. channing was here about ten days ago. i told him of my visit to you, and that he too must go and see you and your country. this may have suggested his writing to you. that island lodge, especially for some weeks in a summer, and new explorations in your vicinity, are certainly very alluring ; but such are my engage ments to m^yself, that i dare not promise to wend your way, but will for the present only heartily thank you for your kind and generous offer. when my vacation comes, then look out. my legs have grown considerably stronger, and that is all that ails me. but i wish now above all to inform you, — though i suppose you will not be particularly interested, — that cholmondeley has gone to the crimea, " a com plete soldier," with a design, when he returns, if he letters of ricketson and thoreau s3 ever returns, to buy a cottage in the south of eng land, and tempt me over ; but that, before going, he busied himself in buying and has caused to be for warded to me by chapman, a royal gift, in the shape of twenty-one distinct works (one in nine volumes, — forty-four volumes in all) almost exclusively relating to ancient hindoo literature, and scarcely one of them to be bought in america. i am familiar with many of them, and know how to prize them. i send you information of this as i might of the birth of a child. please remember me to all your family. yours truly, henky d. thoeeau. the shanty, brooklawn, 26tb feb., 1856. dear thokeau, — i often think of you and nearly as often feel the prompting to write you, and being alone in the shanty this afternoon i have concluded to obey the prompting. i say alone, but i can fancy you seated opposite on the settee looking very orphic or something more mystical. this winter must have been a grand one for your ruminations and i conclude that you will thaw out in the spring with the snakes an,d frogs, more of a philosopher than ever, which perhaps is needless; it has required all my little share oi feelosofy to keep up my fortitude during the past hyperborean interregnum. we have usually flattered ourselves that our winters were much milder than of most places in new england or even in the same latitude farther inland, on account 54 daniel ricketson and his friends of out vicinity to the sea and the gulf stream in particular. but ! the cold, cold days and weeks we have had in common with the rest of our country north, south, east and west ! but we are beginning to relax a little, and like barn-yard fowls begin to plume ourselves again and pick about, but we hardly begin to lay and cackle yet — that will au come in due season, and such a crowing some of us old cocks will make that if you are awake you wiu perhaps hear at concord. the snow has nearly gone, but our river is still firmly bound, and great sport have gentle and simple, young and old, thereon — skating, ice-boats, boys holding sails in their hands are shooting like " mer curial trout " in every direction up and down, even horses and sleighs and loaded wagons have passed where large ships float. but i glory in none of this, on the contrary sigh for the more genial past, and hope for no more such desperate seasons. ah ! but march is close here, and she wears at least the gentle name of spring as bryant says — and soon may we expect to hear the bluebird and song sparrow again. then let " hope rule triumphant in the breast," and buckhng our girth a kttle tighter journey on. dear thoreau, i am under the greatest obligations to you. before your walden i felt quite alone in my best attainments and experiences, but now i find myself sustained and strengthened in my hopes of hf e. can we not meet occasionally ere the evil days, should there be any in store for us, come ? the letters of ricketson and thoreau 55 accumulated years " notched upon my stick " warn me not to be too prodigal of time. by april then i hope you will be ready to wend this way, and take spring a little in advance of concord ; then with the bluebirds and sparrows, the robins and thrushes, will i welcome you and associate you. i should have told you before that channing is here in new bedford. i had but just written his name, when old ranger announced him, and he is now quietly smoking his pipe by the shanty fire. he arrived on christmas day, and his first salutation on meeting me at the front door of my house was, " that 's your shanty," pointing towards it. he is engaged with the editor of the n. b. mercury, and boards in town, but whereabout i have not yet dis covered. he usually spends saturday and a part of sunday with me, and seems to enjoy himself pretty well. mr. emerson is expected to lecture before our lyceum to-morrow evening, but from a note i re ceived from him in answer to an invitation to brook lawn i should think it quite uncertain whether he be here. i too have written and delivered a lecture this winter before the lyceum of our village, acushnet, on popular education, into which i contrived to get a good deal of radicalism, and had a successful time. should your lyceum be in want of a lecture you might let me know, although i should hardly dare to promise to come, — that is, gratuitously except 56 daniel ricketson and his fkiends incidental expenditures. i have commenced a new lecture of a little higher literary tone upon " the poet cowper and his friends," and am medita ting a grand affair wherein i expect to introduce some of the philosophy 1 have found in solitude, or rather to publish some of the communications and revelations received from a certain old neighbor and visitor, who occasionally favors by his presence, the world's outcasts, holding them up by the chin, and occasionally whispering weighty matters into their ears, which at these times are particularly free from wax. channing is not here now, that is in the shanty, but it being after tea, is chatting by the fireside with my wife and daughters, and i am writing by the humming of my fire and the music of my eolian harp. these are fine things to have in your win dows, and lest you are not acquainted with them i will describe the way to make them. make two wedges of soft wood — make a slight incision in the top or thick part of the wedges and another in the thin part, which should be shaved down quite thin — then take a string of saddler's suk, or several strands of fime suk twisted to the size of the other, waxed or not, as you may see fit, make a knot in each end, the length of the string to be governed by the width of the window-sash where it is to be placed. put one end of the string into the incision upon the top of the wedge and then down the side through the other split in the thin end and the other end likevsdse on the other wedge. letters of ricketson and thoreau 57 then place the two wedges drawing the string tight between the upper and lower sashes of your window and if the wind be favorable, it wiu give you a pleasing serenade. write soon and believe me, yours very truly, d. r. thursday a. m., 29th. another pleasant day — the song sparrows sing ing from the old rail fences, and whortleberry bushes — the last day of winter. how rich we are ! my dear old northman, sitting by the sea, whose azure tint is seen, reflected in thy e'e. leave your sharks and your dolphins, and eke the sporting whale. and for a little while on milder scenes regale : my heart is beating strongly to see your face once more, so leave the land of thor, and row along our shore ! d. r. pax vobiscum. concord, mar. 5, '66. friend rickbtson, — i have been out of town, else i should have acknowledged your letter before. though not in the best mood for writing i will say what i can now. you plainly have a rare, though a cheap resource in your shanty. perhaps the time will come when every country-seat will have one — when every country-seat wiu he one. i would advise you to see that shanty business out, though you go shanty mad. work your vein till it is exhausted or conducts you to a broader one, so that c. shall 58 daniel ricketson and his friends stand before your shanty and say, " that is your house." this has indeed been a grand -winter for me, and for all of us. i am not considering how much i have enjoyed it. what matters it how happy or unhappy we have been, if we have minded our business and advanced our affairs ? i have made it a part of my business to wade in the snow and take the measure of the ice. the ice on one of our ponds was just two feet thick on the first of march ; and i have to-day been surveying a wood-lot, where i sank about two feet at every step. it is high time that you, fanned by the warm breezes of the gulf stream, had begun to " lay," for even the concord hens have, though one wonders where they find the raw material of egg-shells here. beware how you put off your laying to any later spring, else your cackling will not have the inspiring early spring sound. i was surprised to hear the other day that chan ning was in new bedford. when he was here last (in december, i think), he said, like himself, in answer to my inquiry where he hved, " that he did not know the name of the place ; " so it remained in a degree of obscurity to me. as you have made it certain to me that he is in new bedford, perhaps i can return the favor by putting you on the track to his boarding-house there. mrs. arnold told mrs. emerson where it was — and the latter thinks, though she may be mistaken, that it was at a mrs. lindsey's. letters op. ricketson and thoreau 59 i am rejoiced to hear that you are getting on so bravely with him and his verses. he and i, as you know, have been old cronies, — " fed the same flock, by fountain, shade, and rill, together both, ere the high lawns appeared under the opening eyelids of the morn. we drove afield, and both together heard," etc. " but 0, the heavy change," now he is gone ! the c. you have seen and described is the real simon pure. you have seen him. many a good ramble may you have together! you will see in him stiu more of the same kind to attract and to puzzle you. how to serve him most effectually has long been a problem with his friends. perhaps it is left for you to solve it. i suspect that the most you or any one can do for him is to appreciate his genius, — to buy and read, and cause others to buy and read his poems. that is the hand which he has put forth to the world, — take hold of that. review them if you can, — perhaps take the risk of publishing something more which he may write. your knowledge of cowper will help you to know c. he will accept sympathy and aid, but he will not bear questioning, unless the aspects of the sky are particularly auspicious. he will ever be "re served and enigmatic," and you must deal with him at arm's length. i have no secrets to tell you concerning him, and do not wish to call obvious excellences and defects by far-fetched names. i think i have already spoken to you more, and more to the purpose, on this theme, 60 daniel ricketson and his friends than i am likely to write now — nor need i suggest how witty and poetic he is — and what an inex haustible fund of good fellowship you will find in him. as for visiting you in april, though i am inclined enough to take some more rambles in your neighbor hood, especially by the seaside, i dare not engage myself, nor allow you to expect me. the truth is, i have my enterprises now as ever, at which i tug with ridiculous feebleness, but admirable persever ance, and cannot say when i shall be sufficiently fancy-free for such an excursion. you have done well to write a lecture on cowper. in the expectation of getting you to read it here, i apphed to the curators of our lyceum ; but, alas ! our lyceum has been a failure this winter for want of funds. it ceased some weeks since, with a debt, they tell me, to be carried over to the next year's account. only one more lecture is to be read, by a signer somebody, an italian, paid for by private subscription, as a deed of charity to the lecturer. they are not rich enough to offer you your expenses even, though probably a month or two ago, they would have been glad of the chance. however, the old house has not failed yet, and that offers you lodging for an indefinite time after you get into it ; and in the mean while i offer you bed and board in my father's house, — always ex cepting hair-pillows and new-fangled bedding. remember me to your family. yours, h. d. t. letters of ricketson and thoreau 61 balloon. the shanty, 7th march, 1856. to my deak gabriel, — who like one of old that appeared to daniel, zachariah, &c., hath in these latter days appeared unto the least of all the daniels, greeting : — i have just received and read your genuine epistle of the 5th inst. you satisfy me fully in regard to c, and i trust we shall draw with an even yoke in future. i had thought of attempting something by way of revising his poems. a new public has grown up since their appearance, and their assassinator poe, lies in the potter's field at baltimore, without a stone to mark his grave, as somebody in the home journal of this week, says, — and thus hath nemesis overtaken him. i conclude you received my newspaper notice of mr. emerson's explosion before the new bedford lyceum, although you make no mention of it. you may be surprised at my sudden regard for his genius, but not more so than myself. it came by revelation. i had never, i believe, read a page of his writings when i heard his lecture. how i came to go to hear him i hardly know, and must conclude that my good gabriel led me there. don't despair of me yet, i am getting along bravely in my shanty and hope to crow (note : a true shanty clear — chanticleer) in due time. some how, too, i am getting wonderfully interested in ancient lore, and am delighted to find that there were odd fellows like you and i and c. some hundreds of years before our data. 62 daniel ricketson and his friends how wonderfully daylight shines upon us at times ! i no longer wonder that you had homer, vahniki, vyasa, &c., in your walden shanty. they have already peeped into my windows, and i shall not be surprised to have them seated within as my guests ere long. you need not be astonished if you hear of my swearing in sanscrit or at least in pan crit ! i have just got a taste of these old fellows, and what a glorious feast awaits me ! what a lucky mortal are you to be the possessor of those priceless treasures, sent you from england ! i am about starting upon a pilgrimage into the country of these ancient hindus, and alteady in fancy at least see the " gigantic peaks of the himalayas " and sit be neath the " tremendous heights of the dhawalagiri range " — so far as the railway of books can carry me there. give me your hand, gabriel, and lead the way. now for the present time. we are beginning to have spring here — and i have already heard the warbhng of the bluebird near the shanty — but did not get a sight of one. the bluebird once appeared here as early as the middle of february, but disappeared as the weather proved colder and did not return until about the middle of march. i am sorry you talk so discouragingly about coming this way this spring. don't be afraid of me, dear gabriel — i will do you no harm. i have my fears also. i conclude that i am too social for you, al though this is a sin i have never been accused of. letters of ricketson and thoreau 63 think of it again, about coming here ; but don't come unless you get a clear " response from your oracle " ! i quote from gabriel himsele. i am quite humbled at your halting — the cords of love do not draw you, and i have none stronger to bring into requisition, but i shall not release you without a struggle. — may i not then expect you in may — things may be done in that month which none other in the calendar admit of. it is the month of may bees — so some fine morning may you ahght here a thoro' may-bee, fresh from musketaquid. then you and channing and i can sit in this little hermitage hke the gymnosophists of old, and you may do the stamping on the ground to any alexander that may offer himself an intruder. i copy from my journal of this day the following for your edification ! " ' orphics ' by a modern hindu, the ancient hindus of course wrote no ' orphics,' — the gentle man is a modern." in proportion as we see the merits of others we add to our own. mind is ever in the spring — one eternal may morning, the same in its original freshness whether in the sanscrit, the greek and other languages or the english, as a medium of expression. mind has an eternal youth. " haunted forever by the eternal mind " is a fine thought of wordsworth, himself a philosopher and priest of nature. man must ever find this to be true — the thoughtful man. 64 daniel kicketson and his friends pabach0te. solar lamp, 10 p. m. deak t. — your letter, as usual, was full of wisdom, and has done me much good. your visit here, last fall, did much to carry me well through the winter. i consider a visit from you a perfect benison, and hope that you will get a good response for may. i must try to get a look at the old house during the spring. i thank you for your kind invitation, but i am already too much in debt to you. should i visit concord it must be in a way not to incommode your household. i think i win set up a bed at once in the old house, to be kept as a kind of retreat for a few days at a time occasionally. i should have stated before that channing and i have passed a word in relation to going to concord, together, so look out ! i wish to know if you think my sketch of the concord sage was right, i£ you received the paper. with kind remembrances to your family, good night. i go to bed. d. r. a diuenal rhyme. time, evening. in my humble shanty, rude, where i pass the graceful hours, sweetened by sweet solitude — the true springtime with its flowers, letters of ricketson and thoreau 65 many solemn truths i learn that are found not in the books, ne'er denied to those who yearn for them in their chosen nooks : — for primeval wisdom here finds me ready at her call, and upon my listening ear^ oft her kindly whisperings fall, — telling me in accents clear, — known but to the ear within. that the source of all i hear did with man at first begin. and in silence as i sit. calmly waiting for the power, knowledge to my soul doth flit, that no learning e'er could shower : — sempiternal wisdom deep. from the endless source divine. not as creeds and dogmas creep, but as doth the day-god shine — with broad beams of amber light, eeaching into every cell. driving out the ancient night. that my soul in peace may dwell, — thus i 'm taught to look and learn. rather calmly to receive, and from stupid schoolmen turn, to that which will ne'er deceive. i copy the above as the shortest way of informing you how i am getting along, and so abruptly close. my dear gabriel, jungfung, yours warmly, d. the least. 66 daniel ricketson and his friends concord, september 2, '56. friend ricketson, — my father and mother regret that your indisposition is likely to prevent your coming to concord at present. it is as well that you do not, if you depend on seeing me, for i expect to go to new hampshire the latter part of the week. i shall be glad to see you afterward, if you are prepared for and can endure my unsocial habits. i would suggest that you have one or two of the teeth, which you can best spare, extracted at once, for the sake of your general, no less than particular health. this is the advice of one who has had quite his share of toothache in this world. i am a trifle stouter than when i saw you last, yet far, far short of my best estate. i thank you for two newspapers which you have sent me — am glad to see that you have studied out the history of the ponds, got the indian names straightened — which means made more crooked — &c., &c. i remember them with great satisfaction. they are all the more interesting to me for the lean and sandy soil that surrounds them. heaven is not one of your fertile ohio bottoms, you may depend on it. ah, the middleboro ponds ! — great platte lakes. remember me to the perch in them. i trust that i may have some better craft than that oarless pumpkin-seed the next time i navigate them. from the size of your family i infer that mrs. ricketson and your daughters have returned from franconia. please remember me to them, and also letters of ricketson and thoreau 67 to arthur and walton, and tell the latter that if in the course of his fishing he should chance to come across the shell of a terrapin and will save it for me, i shall be exceedingly obliged to him. channing dropped in on us the other day, but soon dropped out again. yours, henry d. thoreau. concord, sept. 23, '56. friend ricketson, — i have returned from new hampshire and find myself in statu quo. my journey proved one of business purely. as you suspected, i saw alcott, and i spoke to him of you, and your good will toward him ; so now you may consider yourself introduced. he vould be glad to hear from you about a conversation in new bedford. he was about setting out on a conversing tour to fitchburg, worcester, and three or four weeks hence waterbury, ct., new york, newport (?). now, then, is the season to catch him, or else when he comes to newport (?) or providence (?). you may be sure that you will not have occasion to repent of any exertions which you may make to secure an audience for him. i send you one of his programmes lest he should not have done so himself. you propose to me teaching the following winter. i find that i cannot entertain the idea. it would require such a revolution of all my habits, i think, and would sap the very foundations of me. i am engaged to concord and my own private pursuits by 10,000 ties, and it would be suicide to rend them. 68 daniel ricketson and his friends if i were weaker, and not somewhat stronger physically, i should be more tempted. i am so busy that i cannot even thmk of visiting you. the days are not long enough, or i am not strong enough to do the work of the day before bedtime. excuse my paper. it chances to be the best i have. yours, hbnky d. thobbaxj. brooklawn, 24 sept. 1866. dear fkibsd, — yours of the 23rd is received, and i notice what you say in regard to mr. alcott's class ; but i fear that i shall hardly prove able to undertake the business of obtaining one for him. it is entirely out of my line and very much averse to my taste, to solicit from any one. people are so ready to ride a " high horse," as soon as you present anything to them that is left for their consideration or decision, that i shrink at once from any such collision. " still should anything turn up whereby i may effect the object through a third party, i shall be very glad so to do. in the mean time i am ready to hsten to any suggestions mr. alcott may make to me in the premises. i am sorry that i shall not have the pleasure of a visit from you this fall, but as you need compan ionship so much less than i do i suppose the plea sure would not be reciprocal were we to meet. i am becoming quite a historical shetcher, and have already commenced publishing a history of new bedford, or rather of the old township of dart mouth, which included new bedford, also the letters of ricketson and thoreau 69 townships of westport, fairhaven, and the present dartmouth. have you ever observed how many of the |ndian names of rivers, lakes, &c., end in et ? assawampset, acushnet, pascamanset, &c., &c. i am informed by a person who appeared to have some knowledge of indian words that et signifies water — the taunton river was called nemasket for several miles from its outlet from the middleborough ponds — then teti quet or tetiquid. now i come to my object — did not your own musketaquid have the final syllable quet ? if the fact can be established that et meant water, i should have no hesitation in making the alteration. please remember me most truly to your family, and to mr. emerson and his, when you next meet him. trusting that when the right time comes around we shall meet once more, i remain, yours faithfully, d. ricketson. concord, oct. 31, 1856. friend ricketson, — i have not seen anything of your english author yet. edward hoar, my companion in maine and at the white mountains, his sister, elizabeth, and a miss prichard, another neighbor of ours, went to europe in the niagara on the 6th. i told them to look out for you under the yardley oak, but it seems that they will not find you there. i had a pleasant time in tuckerman's ravine at 70 daniel ricketson and his friends the white mountains, in july, entertaining four beside myself under my httle tent through some soaking rains ; and more recently i have taken an interesting walk with channing about cape ann. we were obhged to " dipper it " a good way, on account of the scarcity of fresh water, for we got most of our meals by the shore. c. is understood to be here for the winter, but i rarely see him. i should be pleased to see your face here in the course of the indian summer, which may still be expected — if any authority can tell us when that phenomenon does occiu". we would like to hear the story of your travels, for if you have not been fairly intoxicated with europe, you have bee;i hale seas-over, and so probably can tell more about it. yours truly, hbnky d. thorbau. concord, march 28, 1857. fbiend ricketson, — if it chances to be perfectly agreeable and convenient to you, i will make you a visit next week, say wednesday or thursday, and we will have some more rides to assawampset and the seashore. have you got a boat on the former yet? who knows but we may camp out on the island ? i propose this now, because it will be more novel to me at this season, and i should like to see your early birds, &c. your historical papers have all come safely to hand, and i thank you for them. i see that they letters of kicketson and thoreau 71 will be indispensable, memoir es pour servier. by the way, have you read church's history of philip's war, and looked up the localities ? it should make part of a chapter. i had a long letter from chohnondeley lately, which i should like to show you. i will expect an answer to this straightaway — but be sure you let your own convenience and incuna tions rule it. yours truly, heney d. thorbau. p. s. — please remember me to your family. new bedford, sunday a. m., 29 march, '57. deas thoreau, — i have just received your note of the 28th at my brother's, and hasten a reply for the post office before i leave for brooklawn. nothing would give me more pleasure than a visit from you at any time. it will be perfectly agree able to myself and family at this present time, and i shall duly expect you on wednesday or thursday. should this reach you in time for an answer, i will be at tarkiln hiu station to meet you ; if not, make your appearance as early as you wish. you can leave your baggage at the depot, and i will send for it if you do not find me or our carriage in waiting. as channing did mot make his usual appearance, yesterday p. m., i conclude that he is with you to day, and if he leaves before wednesday or thursday, you may like to have his company hereward. we are getting on very nicely together. 72 d.4niel ricketson and his friends the early birds are daily coining. song spar rows, bluebirds, robins, meadow larks, blackbirds (" gen. abercrombies ") are already here, frogs croaking, but not piping yet, and the spring quite genial. my historical sketches have kept me quite busy, but agreeably so during the past winter. they are quite to my surprise, very popular. i should have hardly supposed that my homely habits and homeher style of composition would have suited many. should channing be in concord and in the hu mor, he can report my home affairs more fully, i£ you wish. remember me to your parents and sister and other friends, particularly the emersons. i write at my brother's, and in the midst of con versation, in which i am participating. you wiu perceive this is not a shanty letter, but i am none the less cordially yours, d. ricketson. concord, april 1, 1857. dear ricketson, — i got your note of welcome night before last. channing is not here, at least i have not seen nor heard of him, but depend on meeting him in new bedford. i expect if the weather is favorable to take the 4.30 train from boston to-morrow, thursday p. m., for i hear of no noon train, and shall be glad to find your wagon at tarkiln hill, for i see it will be rather late for going across lots. letters of ricketson and thoreau 73 alcott was here last week, and will probably visit new bedford within a week or two. i have seen all the spring signs you mention, and a few more, even here. nay, i heard one frog peep nearly a week ago, methinks the very first one in all this region. i wish that there were a few more signs of spring in myself — however, i take it that there are, as many within us as we think we hear without us. i am decent for a steady pace, but not yet for a race. i have a little cold at present, and you speak of rheumatism about the head and shoulders. your frost is not quite out. i suppose that the earth itsele has a little cold and rheuma, tism about these times, but all these things together produce a very fair general result. in a concert, you know, we must sing our parts feebly sometimes, that we may not injure the general effect. i should n't wonder i£ my two-year old invalidity had been a positively charming feature to some amateurs favorably located. why not a blasted man as well as a blasted tree, on your lawn ? if you should happen not to see me by the train named, do not go again, but wait at home for me, or a note from yours, henry d. thokbatj. concord, august 18, 1857. dear. sir, — your wilson flagg seems a serious person, and it is encouraging to hear of a contem porary who recognizes nature so squarely, and 74 daniel kicketson and his friends selects such a theme as " barns." (i wotild rather "mount auburn" were omitted.) but he is not alert enough. he wants stirring up with a pole. he should practice turning a series of somersets rapidly, or jump up and see how many times he can strike his feet together before coming down. let him make the earth turn round now the other way, and whet his wits on it, whichever way it goes, as on a grindstone ; in short, see how many ideas he can entertain at once. his style, as i remember, is singularly vague (i refer to the book), and before i got to the end of the sentences, i was off the track. if you indulge in long periods, you must be sure to have a snapper at the end. as for style of writing, if one has any thing to say, it drops from him simply and directly, as a stone falls to the ground. there are no two ways about it, but down it comes, and he may stick in the points and stops wherever he can get a chance. new ideas come into this world somewhat hke falling meteors, with a flash and an explosion, and perhaps somebody's castle roof perforated. to try to polish the stone in its descent, to give it a peculiar turn, and make it whistle a tune, perchance, would be of no use, r£ it were possible. your polished stuff turns out not to be meteoric, but of this earth. however, there is plenty of time, and nature is an admirable schoolmistress. speaking of correspondence, you ask me if i " cannot turn over a new leaf in that line." i certainly could i£ i were to receive it ; but just then letters of eicketson and thoreau 75 i looked up and saw that your page was dated " may 10," though mailed in august, and it occurred to me that i had seen you since that date this year. looking again it appeared that your note was writ ten in '56 ! however, it was a new leaf to me, and i turned it over with as much interest as if it had been written the day before. perhaps you kept it so long, in order that the manuscript and subject matter might be more in keeping with the old fashioned paper on which it was written. i travelled the length of cape cod on foot, soon after you were here, and within a few days have returned from the wilds of maine, where i have made a journey of three hundred and twenty-five miles with a canoe and an indian and a single white companion, edward hoar, esq., of this town, lately from cahfornia, traversing the head-waters of the kennebec, penobscot, and st. john's. can't you extract any advantage out of that de pression of spirits you refer to? it suggests to me cider-mius, wine-presses, &c., &c. all kinds of pressure or power should be used and made to turn some kind of machinery. channing was just leaving concord for plymouth when i arrived, but said he should be here again in two or three days. please remember me to your family, and say that i have at length learned to sing tom bowlin accord ing to the notes. yours truly, henry d. thobeau. 76 daniel ricketson and his friends the shanty, sept. 7th, 1857. dear thobeaxj, — i wrote you some two weeks ago that i intended visiting concord, but have not yet found the way there. the object of my now writ ing is to invite you to make me a visit. walton's small sail boat is now in assawampset pond. we took it up in our farm wagon to the south shore of long pond (apponoquet), visited the islands in course and passed through the river that connects the said ponds. this is the finest season as to weather to visit the ponds, and i feel much stronger than when you were here last spring. the boys and myself have made several excursions to our favorite region this simimer, but we have left the best of it, so far as the voyage is concerned, for you to accompany us. we hear nothing of channing, but conclude that he is with you — trust he has not left us entirely,^ and hope to see him again before long. now should my invitation prove acceptable to you, i should be glad to see you just as soon after the receipt of this as you like to come, immediately if you please. if you cannot come and should like to see me in concord, please inform me, but we all hope to see you here. mrs. e. and the rest join in regards and invita tion. yours truly, d. e. eemember me to channing. letters of ricketson and thoreau 77 concord, september 9, 1857. friend ricketson, — i thank you for your kind invitation to visit you, but i have taken so many vacations this year, — at new bedford, cape cod, and maine, — that any more relaxation — call it rather dissipation — will cover me with shame and disgrace. i have not earned what i have already enjoyed. as some heads cannot carry much wine, so it would seem that i cannot bear so much society as you can. i have an immense appetite for soli tude, like an infant for sleep, and if i don't get enough of it this year, i shall cry all the next. my mother's house is fuu at present ; but if it were not, i should have no right to invite you hither, while entertaining such designs as i have hinted at. however, if you care to storm the town, i will engage to take some afternoon walks with you, — retiring into profoundest solitude the most sacred part of the day. yours sincerely, h. d. t. (written before my late visit, as the date shows.) the shantt, friday evening, deo. 11, 1857. dear thorbau, — i expect to go to boston next week, thursday 17th, with my daughters anna and emma to attend the anti-slavery bazaar. they will probably return home the next day, and i pro ceed to maiden for a day or two. after which i may proceed to concord, if i have your permission, 78 daniel ricketson and his friends and if you will be at home, for without you concord would be quite poor and deserted, hke to the place some poet, perhaps walter scott, describes, — " "where thro' the desert walks the lapwing flies and tires their echoes with unceasing cries." channing says i can take his room in the garret of his house, but i think i should take to the tavern. were you at walden i should probably storm your castle and make good an entrance, and perhaps as an act of generous heroism allow you quarters while i remained. but in sober truth i should like to see you and sit or he down in your room and hear you growl once more, thou brave old norseman — thou thor, thunder-god-man. i long to see your long beard, which for a short man is rather a stretch of imagination or understanding. c says it is terrible to behold, but improves you mightily. how grandly your philosophy sits now in these trying times. i lent my walden to a broken mer chant latelj as the best panacea i could afford him for his troubles. you should now come out and call together the lost sheep of israel, thou cool-headed pastor, no corydon forsooth, but genuine judean — fulminate from the banks of concord upon the banks of dis cord and once more set ajog a pure curren(t)cy whose peaceful tide may wash us clean once more again. j^o pcean ! is " father alcott " in your city ? i should count much on seeing him too — a man who is all-cot letters of kicketson and thoreau 79 should not be -without a home at least in his chosen land. don't be provoked at my nonsense, for anything better would be like " carrying coals to newcastle." i would sit at the feet of gamahel, so farewell for the present. with kind remembrances to your family, i remain, faithfully your friend, d. ricketson. p. s. if i can't come please inform me. concord, june 30, 1858. friend eicketson, — i am on the point of start ing for the white mountains in a wagon with my neighbor, edward hoar, and i write to you now rather to apologize for not writing than to answer worthily your three notes. i thank you heartily for them. you will not care for a uttle delay in acknowledging them, since your dates show that you can afford to wait. indeed my head has been so taken up with company, &c., that i could not reply to you fitly before, nor can i now. as for preaching to men these days in the walden strain — is it of any consequence to preach to an audience of men who can fail ? or who can be re mved ? there are few beside. is it any success to interest these parties ? if a man has speculated and failed, he will probably do these things agaio, in spite of you or me. i confess that it is rare that i rise to sentiment in my relations to men — ordinarily to a mere patient 80 daniel ricketson and his friends and maybe wholesome good •svill. i can imagine something more, but the truth compels me to regard the ideal and the actual as two things. channing has come, and as suddenly gone, and left a short poem " near home," published (?) or printed by munroe, which i have hardly had time to glance at. as you may guess, i learn nothing of you from him. you already foresee my answer to your invitation to make you a summer visit — i am bound for the mountains. but i trust that you have vanquished ere this, those dusky demons that seem to lurk around the head of the river. you know that this warfare is nothing but a kind of nightmare — it is our thoughts alone which give those m?iworthies any body or existence. i made an excursion with blake of worcester to monadnoc, a few weeks since. we took our blankets and food, spent two nights on the mountain, and did not go into a house. alcott has been very busy for a long time repair ing an old shell of a house, and i have seen very little of him. i have looked more at the houses which birds build. watson made us all very generous presents from his nursery in the spring, especially did he remember alcott. excuse me for not writing any more at present, and remember me to your family. yours, h. d. thorbau. letters of ricketson and thoreau 81 the shanty, 9 p. m., nov. 3d, 1858. dbab thorbau, — your truly welcome note of the 31st idt. reached me only this evening. i am sorry our engush australian has not been in con cord. he is quite an original, and appeared to be as familiar with the concord worthies, as though he had been a fellow townsman of theirs. he is a young man, but has seen a good deal of the world, inside and outside — has uved some years in and about london, and feuowshipped with all sorts of folks, authors, gypsies, vagrants, &c., his accounts of which are entertaining — talks easy and well, has no vain pretensions, although i found incidentally that he is highly connected — i believe, with the family of the celebrated lord lyttleton, of monody memory — wears common cheap clothes, and carries his own baggage, a small leathern bag, is short and rather stout, full beard and of sandy complexion, smokes a pipe a good deal, likes malt liquor and an occasional glass of whiskey or gin, but is by no means intemperate, only english and cosmopohtan also in his habits. he has a httle book in project to be called " pots of beer," the chapters headed pot first, pot second, &c., so on — conversations and reflections over these inspiring vessels. (p. s. of wrath ?) i told channing about him (who, by the way — c. — i found at his old post at the mercury office, last week), and he said that you would not like his pipe. this puts me to thinking, as jack downing 82 daniel ricketson and his friends would say, and i want to take this opportunity to apologize for having so often offended you by my unti.m.e\j puffs. i assure you, in future, that i will strive to refrain in your presence, for i am ready to " acknowledge the corn," and plead guilty, craving pardon for my manifold sins against your purer tastes. i feel deeply disappointed and somewhat cha grined at my failure in going to europe, and hope to master sufficient courage to embark again next spring, when i shall probably go from new york, whence like the decensus averni there is no return. you would like to know more about my voyage. i was really " half seas over," as you intimate, in more senses than one, for my sea-sickness operated on my brain like a potent stimulus, accompanied with the most painful vertigo. i felt somewhat as i conclude a dancing dervish might, after having spun round for some time, that is if they ever do so, or is it only the shakers that perform these gyrations ? but the newspaper i send you wiu give you an account of my experiences on board ship. the paragraph about the moose is quite thoreauj^ — take your choice — and the phrase, tribute to the sea, is, i think, borrowed from your account of your winter voyage to nantucket, some years ago. i have published my history of new bedford in a neat duodecimo of 400 pages, and am prospecting for a volume of poems — also writing some sketches called "smoke from my pipe" — in the second chapter of which i introduce a certain philosopher, letters of ricketson and thoreau 83 a friend of mine, who built his own house, earned his own livehhood, and uved alone some years, a genial man, a scholar, &c. can you guess him out ? i think i may also introduce, all of course, in a respectful and quiet way, some other of the con cordian band — but more of this anon, as we authors say, when we run out our line. i am quite tempted by your kind invitation to visit concord during the " indian summer," should such a boon come this month. i may go to boston soon, and may also possibly get as far as concord for a few days — but whether i do or not, i want you to come down and visit me. i value your acquaintance highly, and i want to see mr. emerson and father alcott once more. life is too short, and noble men and women too scarce, for me to lose any opportunity of enjoying the society of such, when i can do so without obtrusion. with my warm regards to your family and my other concord friends, and hoping to hear from you again very soon, i remain, yours faithfully, daniel ricketson. please return the newspaper. i am amused by your account of your party in the rain under your little tent. i trust your friends were quite contented with your hospitality. concord, november 6, 1858. fkiend ricketson, — i was much pleased with your lively and life-like account of your voyage. you were more than repaid for your trouble after 84 daniel ricketson and his friends all. the coast of nova scotia, which you sailed along from windsor westward, is particularly inter esting to the historian of this country, having been settled earlier than plymouth. your " isle of haut," is properly " isle haut," or the high island of champlain's map. there is another off the coast of maine. by the way, the american elk, of american authors (oervus canadensis) is a dis tinct animal from the moose (cervus alces), though the latter is also called elk by many. you drew a very vivid portrait of the australian, — short and stout, with a pipe in his mouth, and his book inspired by beer. pot first, pot second, &c. i suspect that he must be pot-beuied withal. methinks i see the smoke going up from him as from a cottage on the moor. if he does not quench his genius with his beer, it may burst into a clear flame at last. however, perhaps he intentionally adopts the low style. what do you mean by that ado about smoking, and my " purer tastes " ? i shoidd like his pipe as well as his beer, at least. neither of them is so bad as to be " highly connected," which you say he is, unfortunately. no ! i expect nothing but pleasure in " smoke from your pipe." you and the australian must have put your heads together when you concocted those titles, — with pipes in your mouths over a pot of beer. i suppose that your chapters are whiff the first, whife the second, &e. but, of course, it is a more modest expression for " fire from my genius." letters of ricketson and thoreau 85 you must have been very busy since you came back, or before you sailed, to have brought out your history, of whose publication i had not heard. i suppose that i have read it in the. mercury. yet i am curious to see how it looks in a volume, with your name on the title-page. i am more curious still about the poems. pray put some sketches into the book ; your shanty for frontispiece ; arthur and walton's boat (if you can) running for cuttyhunk in a tremendous gale ; not forgetting " be honest, boys " &c., near by ; the middleborough ponds, with a certain island looming in the distance ; the quaker meeting-house and the brady house, if you like ; the villagers catching smelts with dip-nets in the twilight, at the head of the river, &c., &c. let it be a local and villageous book as much as possible. let some one make a characteristic selec tion of mottoes from your shanty walls, and sprinkle them in an irregular manner, at all angles, over the fly-leaves and margins, as a man stamps his name in a hurry ; and also canes, pipes, and jackknives, of all your patterns, about the frontispiece. i can think of plenty of devices for tail-pieces. indeed, i should like to see a hair-pillow, accurately drawn, for one ; a cat, with a bell on, for another ; the old horse, with his age printed in the hollow of his back ; half a cocoanut shell by a spring ; a sheet of blotted paper ; a settle occupied by a settler at full length, &c., &c., &c. cau all the arts to your aid. don't wait for the indian summer, but bring it with you. yours truly, h. d. t. 86 daniel ricketson and his friends p. s. let me ask a favor. i am trying to write something about the autumnal tints, and i wish to know how much our trees differ from english and european ones in this respect. will you observe or learn for me, what english or european trees, if any, still retain their leaves in mr. arnold's garden (the gardener will supply the true names) ; and also if the fouage of any (and what) european or foreign trees there have been briluant the past month. if you will do this you will greatly oblige me. i return the newspaper with this. the shanty, nov. 10th, 1858. friend thorbau, — your very pleasant and en couraging letter reached me on monday (the 8th). pleasant from the cheerful spirit in which it was written, and encouraging from the appreciation you express for the, little portraits of my late travelling experiences i sent you. this forenoon i made a visit to arnold's grounds, walking to and from through the woods and fields most of the way on the route by the upper road by which the wind-mill stands. in company with the gardener, rejoicing in the appropriate and symphoni ous name of wellwood young, whose broad gaelic accent rendered an attentive ear necessary to catch the names, i made the following list. the scotch larch, for instance, he said came from norroway (norway), the yellow fringes of which were still hanging on the branches. the following is the list i made in accordance letteks of kicketson and thoreau 87 with your request. i give the names without any order, just as we happened to meet the trees. horse chestnut, quite full of yellow and green fohage. enghsh walnut, do. beech, linden, hawthorn (nearly perfect in green foliage, only a little decayed at the top, but in a sheltered place). silver linden, copper beech, elm, weeping ash, weeping willow, scotch larch, euanimus europeus (gardener's name), i suppose correct. these are all european or eng ush, i believe. i give a few others not european, viz : osage orange (or madura), cornus florida (handsome) tulip, three-thorned acacia, mexican cypress. there were numerous shrubs in fuu leaf, among them the guelder rose. vines, bignonia radicans and bignonia cuminata. i send a few leaves. the largest green leaf is the american linden — the smaller, the european copper leaved beech. one enghsh elm (green), and two smaller and narrower leaves, the euanimus jeuropeus. i am sorry the list is no fuller, but i think it includes all in these grounds. the location is quite sheltered. i could not ascertain from the gardener what trees exhibited particular brilliancy of foliage last month. i conclude, however, that these i have named were quite fresh up to the last of october. it is barely possible i may reach concord on sat urday next and remain over sunday, but hardly probable as they say. channing i understand has been to concord since 88 daniel ricketson and his friends i wrote you last, and is now here again. is he not quite as much a " creature of moods " as old sudbury inn ? but i am in poor mood for writing, and besides it is nearly dark (5 p. m.). may i not hear from you again soon, and may i not expect a visit also ere long? as this is only a business letter i trust you will excuse its dulness. hoping i have supplied you (channing has just come in) with what you wanted, i conclude. yours faithfully, • d. r. p. s. if i should not go to concord i wiu en deavor to get one of my books to you soon. concord, nov. 22d, 1858. friend rickbtson, — i thank you for your " his tory." though i have not yet read it again, i have looked far enough to see that i like the homeliness of it ; that is, the good old-fashioned way of writing as if you actually lived where you wrote. the man's interest in a single bluebird is more than a complete, but dry, list of the fauna and flora of a town. it is also a considerable advantage to be able to say at any time, if d. r. is not here, here is his book. alcott being here, and inquiring after you (whom he has been expecting), i lent the book to him al most immediately. he talks of going west the latter part of this week. channing is here again, as i am told, but i have not seen him. letters of ricketson and thoreau 89 i thank you also for the account of the trees. it was to my purpose, and i hope that you got some thing out of it too. i suppose that the cold weather prevented your coming here. suppose you try a winter walk on skates. please remember me to your family. yours, h. d. t. concord, deo. 6, 1858. friend kicketsoiir, — thomas cholmondeley, my english acquaintance, is here on his way to the west indies. he wants to see new bedford, a whaling town. i tell him that i would like to in troduce him to you there, thinking more of his see ing you than new bedford, so we propose to come your way to-morrow. excuse this short notice, for the time is short. if, on any account, it is incon venient to see us, you will treat us accordingly. yours truly, henry d. thoreau. the shanty, 9 feb. 1859. my dear friend, — i received last evening a bos ton newspaper with your superscription, containing the record of the decease of your father. it had pre viously been published in the new bedford mercury, perhaps by channing. you must all feel his loss very much, particularly your mother. i have rarely, if ever, met a man 90 daniel ricketson and his fkiends ■who inspired me with more respect. he appeared to me to be a real embodiment of honest virtue, as well as a true gentleman of the old school. i also recognized in him a fund of good fellowship, or what would perhaps better and more respectfully express it, kindly friendship. i remember with pleasure, a ramble i took with him about concord some two or three years ago, at a time when you were away from home, on which occasion i was much impressed with his good sense, his fine social nature, and genuine hospitality. he reminded me much of my own father, in fact, i never saw a man more like him even in his personal appearance and manners — both bore upon their countenances the impress of care and sorrow, a revelation of the experience of life, written in the most legible characters, and one which always awakens my deepest sympathy and reverence. i doubt not but that he was a good man, and however we may be unable to peer beyond this sphere of experience, may we not trust that some good angel, perhaps that of his mother (was her name jeanie burns ?), has already welcomed him to the spirit land ? at any rate, if there be any award for virtue and well doing i think it is for such as he. veiled as the future is in mystery profound, i think we may fully rely upon divine wisdom who has seen it proper not only to conceal from us know ledge beyond this life, but has also wrapped us in so much obscurity even here. but let us go on trust fully in him — the sun yet shines, the birds sing, letters of ricketson and thoreau 91 the flowers bloom, and nature is still as exhaustless as ever in her charms and riches for those who love her. i trust that your mother and sister will find that consolation which they so much need. they as well as you have my warmest sympathy, and it is a plea surable sorrow for me to bear my poor tribute to the memory and worth of him from whom you have so lately parted. it seems to me that nature — and by this i always mean the out-o'-door life in woods and fields, by streams and lakes, etc. — afeords the best balm for our wounded spirits. one of the best things written by francis jeffrey, and which i have tacked upon my shanty wall, is, "if it were not for my love of beautiful nature and poetry, my heart would have died within me long ago." would not a httle run from home soon, if you can be spared, be well for you ? can you not catch the early spring a little in advance ? we are prob ably a week or two before you in her maiden steps. soon shall we see the catkins upon the willows, and hear the bluebird and song-sparrow again — how full of hope and cheer ! even this morning (a soft, drizzling one) i have heard the sweet, mellow, long' drawn pipe of the meadow lark. i have also seen robins occasionally during the winter, and a flock of quails several times, besides numerous partridges and rabbits. i see nothing of channing of late. 92 daniel ricketson and his friends with my best regards to your mother and sister, believe me very truly your friend, d. elcketson. please write me. p. s. your letter indicates health of mind and good pluck. in fact, dr. pluck is a capital physi cian. glory in whortle and blackberries ; eat them like an indian, abundantly and from the bushes and vines. when you can, smeu of sweet fern, bayberry, sassafras, yeuow birch, and rejoice in the songs of crickets and harvest flies. lo piean. concord, 12th february, 1859. friend ricketson, — i thank you for your kind letter. i sent you the notice of my father's death as much because you knew him as because you knew me. i can hardly realize that he is dead. he had been sick about two years, and at last declined rather rapidly, though steadily. till within a week or ten days before he died he was hoping to see another spring, but he then discovered that this was a vain expectation, and, thinking that he was dying, he took leave of us several times within a week before his departure. once or twice he expressed a slight impatience at the delay. he was quite con scious to the last, and his death was so easy that, though we had all been sitting around the bed for an hour or more expecting that event (as we had sat before), he was gone at last almost before we were aware of it. letteks of ricketson and thoreau 93 i am glad to read -what you say about his social nature. i thiuk i may say that he was wholly unpre tending ; and there was this peculiarity in his aim, that, though he had pecuniary difficulties to contend with the greater part of his life, he studied merely how to make a good article, pencil or other (for he practised various arts), and was never satisfied with what he had produced. nor was he ever in the least disposed to put off a poor one for the sake of pecuniary gain, — as if he labored for a higher end. though he was not very old, and was not a native of concord, i think that he was, on the whole, more identified with concord street than any man now alive, having come here when he was about twelve years old, and set up for himself as a merchant here at the age of twenty-one,' fifty years ago. as i sat in a circle the other evening with my mother and sister, my mother's two sisters and my father's two sisters, it occurred to me that my father, though seventy-one, belonged to the youngest foiu* of the eight who recently composed our family. how swiftly at last, but unnoticed, a generation passes away ! three years ago i was called with my father to be a witness to the signing of our neigh bor mr. frost's will. mr. samuel hoar, who was there writing it, also signed it. i was lately required to go to cambridge to testify to the genuineness of the will, being the only one of the four who could be there, and now i am the only one alive. my mother and sister thank you heartily for your sympathy. the latter, in particular, agrees with 94 daniel kicketson and his friends you in thinking that it is communion with still living and healthy nature alone which can restore to sane and cheerful views. i thank you for your invita tion to new bedford, but i feel somewhat confined here for the present. i did not know but we should see you the day after alger \^as here. it is not too late for a winter walk in concord. it does me good to hear of spring birds, and singing ones too, for spring seems far away from concord yet. i am going to worcester to read a parlor lecture on the 22d, and shall see blake and brown. what if you were to meet me there, or go with me from here? you would see them to good advantage. cholmondeley has been here again, after going as far south as virginia, and left for canada about three weeks ago. he is a good soul, and i am afraid that i did not sufficiently recognize him. please remember me to mrs. ricketson and to the rest of your family. yours, hbnky d. thoreau. the shanty, sunday a. m., 6 march, 1859. respected friend, — this fine spring morning with its cheering influences brings you to my mind ; for i always associate you with the most genial aspects of our beloved nature, with the woods, the fields, lakes and rivers, with the birds and flowers. as i write, the meadow lark is piping sweetly in the meadows near by, and lo ! at this instant, the very first i have heard this season, a bluebird has war letters op eicketson and thoreau 95 bled on a tree near the shanty. what salutation could be more welcome or more in unison with my subject ? yesterday, my son walton saw and heard the red-winged blackbird, and this morning robins are flying about. the song-sparrow (f. melodia) now singing, has also been in tune since the 23d of february. truly may we say, " spring is come ! " at my present writing, the thermometer at my north window indicates 44 degrees and is rising; yesterday p. m. 50 degrees, wind ws. w. it seems to me quite time to stop the abuse of our climate. in my boyhood and even until after my marriage (1834), i do not remember it ever occurred to me but that our climate was a very good one. and had i never heard it complained of by others, should hardly have ever suspected it otherwise. a climate that has sustained such men as r. w. e., a. b. a., h. d. t., and other kindred natures, can't be a very bad one, and may be the very best. march is to me the month of hope. i always look forward to its coming with pleasure, and wel come its arrival. others may speak of it in terms of reproach, but to me it has much to recommend itself. the backbone of winter, according to the homely adage, is now broken. every day brings us nearer to the vernal influences, to the return of the birds and the appearance of wild flowers. min gled with storms are many warm sunny days. i am no longer in haste for finer weather, so near at hand. each day has something to interest me, and even in a severe snow or rain-storm, accompanied 96 daniel ricketson and his feiends with cold weather, i know that the glorious sun, when once he shines again, will dispel all gloom and soften the temperature. although it is my custom to walk in the woods, fields, and by-places at all seasons of the year and in all weathers, the spring (and in this i include march as fairly belonging) is my most favorite time. nature, ever attractive to me, is at this season particularly inviting, the kind solace and hope of my days. although i am but an indifferent versifier, yet i fancy but few poets have experienced richer or happier emotions than myself from her benign spirit. i am most happy to record, at this time, that i have, i trust, recovered my good spirits, such as blessed me in my earlier years of manhood. i shall endeavor by a life of purity and retirement to keep them as the choicest of blessings. my desires, i believe, are moderate, and not beyond my reach. so far as the false luxuries of life are concerned, i have but little taste for them, and i would wilhngly dispense with almost every unnecessary article in the economy of living, for the sake of being the master of my own time, and the leisure to pursue the simple occupations and enjoyments of rural life. i do not covet wealth, i certainly do not wish it. with the intelhgent and worthy poor, i feel far greater sym pathy and affinity, than with a large portion of the rich and falsely great. i would give more for one day with the poet-peasant, robert burns, or shake speare, than for unnumbered years of entertainment at the tables of proud and rich men. letters of eicketson and thokeau 97 " beliind the plough burns sang his -wood-notes wild, and richest shakespeare was a poor man's child:" so sung ebenezer elliot, the corn-law rhymer, himself a true poet and friend of the " virtuous and struggling poor." i copy the foregoing, suggested by the season, from my daily journal, on the entrance of march. you may, therefore, read it as a soluoquy, by which it may savor less of egotism and bombast, to which objections it might otherwise be open. during my walk, yesterday p. m., in a sunny spot, i found the " pussy willows " (s. eriocephala) and enclose one of the " catkins " or " woolly aments " in testimony thereof. i also enclose a pansy from the south side of the shanty. how should i rejoice to have you as the companion of my walks ! i suppose you have some time since returned from your literary exploit into worcester, and trust that you had a good time with your disciples, blake, and brown. they must be thoreauly brown by this time. " arcades ambo " under your pupuage — though, i think, the classic term applies better to you and r. "w. e. or w. e. c. may i not also claim as a birthright to rank in your fraternity, as a disciple, at least ? please not reject me. failing in you i shall be bankrupt, indeed. shall echo respond, to my complaint, "is there none for me in the wide world, — no kindred spirit ? " " none " ? don't be alarmed, " amicus mihi," you shall be as free as air for aught me. during the past winter i have been reviewing 98 daniel ricketson and his friends somewhat my law studies, and what will not a little surprise you, have received and accepted a commis sion as justice of the peace. i have collected the relic of my law library, and ranged them in formid able array upon a shelf in the shanty. i find my self much better able to grasp and cope with these legal worthies than when a young man. i don't suppose i shall do much in the way of my profession, but may assist occasionally the injured in the recovery of their rights. i have not done this hastily, as you may suppose. i intend to be free from all trammels, and believing, as i do, that law, or rather government, was made for the weal of all concerned, and particularly for the protection of the weak against the strong, and that, according to blackstone, " what is not reason is not law," i shall act accordingly if i act at all. i may make use of the elective franchise, but of this am as yet undetermined. it seems to me as though a crisis was approaching in the affairs of our government, when the use of every means that " god and nature affords " will be required to oppose • tyranny. i trust that i shall have your sympathy in this matter. i shall seek no opportunity for the exercise of my opposition, but " bide my time." a visit from you would be very welcome. with kind regards to your household and my concord friends, one and all, i remain, yours truly, d. r. yours of 12th feb. came duly to hand. letters of ricketson and thoreau 99 . the shamty, oct. 14, 1859. friend thorbau, — shall i break our long silence, silence so much more instructive than any words i may utter ? yet should my rashness pro cure a response from you, i, at least, may be the ■wiser. solemn though the undertaking be, i would fain venture. well, imprimis, you have been talking, as i learn from various sources, in boston. i hope you were understood, in some small measure, at least, though i fear not ; but this is not your business — to find understanding for your audience. i respect your benevolence in thus doing, for i esteem it one of the most gracious and philanthropic deeds, for a wise, thoughtful man, a philosopher, to attempt, at least, to awaken his fellow men from their drunken som nolence, perhaps to elevate them. " but unimproved, heaven's noblest brows are vain, no sun with plenty crowns the uncultured vale ; "where green lakes languish on the silent plain. death rides the billows of the western gale." what are we to think of a world that has had a socrates, a plato, a christ for its teachers, and yet remaining in such outer darkness ? it appears to me it is only, age after age, the working over of the old original compound — man. we appear to gain nothing. a few noble, wise ones, mark the lustrums of the past — a few also will mark what we call the present. the things men rate so highly in modern times do not appear to me to be of very great value after all. what is 100 daniel kicketson and his friends it for a ship to cross the ocean by steam if its pas sengers have no godlike errand to perform ? we have enough to wonder at in nature ah'eady, why seek new wonders ? i have passed some peaceful hours of late, sawing wood by moonhght, in the field near the lane to our cow-pastures — the work does not interfere with, but rather favors meditation, and i have foiuid some solace in the companionship of the woods near by, and the concert of their wind harps. during my evening walks i hear the flight of passenger birds overhead, probably those of noctur nal habits, as i suppose others rest at this season (night). a small flock, only ten wild geese, passed over a few days ago. the sylviacola coronata have arrived from the north, and wiu remain until driven away by the severe cold. i have often seen them in the company of snow buntings about the house and during snowstorms, but they suffer and often die at such times if the storm be severe. quails are gradually increasing, though stiu scarce. last winter i saw a covey of some twelve or more near here, and occasionally have heard their whistle during the early part of the past summer. i made the acquaintance of your friends, blake and brown, very favorably at the middleborough ponds, last june, on their way to cape cod. i had, however, seen mr. blake once before. i should be happy to have a visit from you. can you not come soon ? letters of kicketson and thoreau 101 i have passed through some deep experiences since i last saw you. we are getting nearer. is there not such a fact as human companionship ? i need not add how much i owe you, and that i remain, faith fully your friend, d. r. bluebirds are still here, and meadow-larks are tuneful. the shanty, 15 jan., 1860. friend thoebau, — we 've been having a good deal of wintry weather for our section of late, and skating by both sexes is a great fashion. on the 26th of last month, arthur, walton, and i skated about fifteen miles. we rode out to the south end of long pond (aponoquet), and leaving our horse at a farmer's barn, put on our skates, and went nearly in a straight line to the north end of said pond, up to the old herring weir of king philip, where we were obliged to take ofe our skates, as the passage to assawamset was not frozen. we stopped about an hour at the old tavern and had a good sohd anti-slavery, and john brown talk with some travellers. one, a square-set, red-bearded farmer, said among other rough things, that he would like to eat southerners^ hearts ! and drink their blood ! for a fortnight, and would he willing to die if he could not live on this fare ! this was said in reply to a spruce young fellow who had been in new orleans, and knew all about slavery — damned the abolitionists most lustily, and john brown and his associates in particular. oaths flew like shot from one side to the other, but the renegade northerner 102 daniel ricketson and his friends was no match for the honest farmer, who met him at every point with facts, statistics, oaths, and argu ments, and finally swore his antagonist down flat. he " burst the bully " in good earnest. occasionally i had interspersed a few words, and others present, but our farmer was the champion of the field, and a more complete annihilation of a dough-face i never witnessed. my boys seemed to enjoy it well. after this scene we again assumed our skates from the assa wamset shore, near by, and skated down to the end of the bast quitticus pond, the extreme southern end of the ponds ; thence crossing to west quitticus, we skated around it, which with the return from the south end of the former pond to our crossing place, we estimated at something over 15 miles. taking off our skates we took a path through the woods, and walking about a mile came out in some old fields near our starting point. we put on our skates at 10.30 o'clock a. m., and at 3 p. m. were eating dinner at the old farm-house of wiuiam a. morton, near the south shore of long pond. i, as well as my boys, enjoyed the excursion very much. we saw our favorite pond under entirely new aspects, and visited many nooks that we had never before seen — sometimes under the boughs of the old cedars, draped in long clusters of moss, like bearded veterans, and anon farther out on the bosom of the lake, with broad and refreshing views of wild nature, taking the imagination back to the times of the indians and early settlers of these parts — shoot letters of kicketson and thokeau 103 ing by kttle islands and rocky islets, among them the one called " lewis island," which you thought would do for a residence. i got a fresh hold of ufe that day, and hope to repeat the pleasure before winter closes his reign. i found myself not only not exhausted, as i had expected, but unusually fresh and cheerful on my arrival home about 5 p. m. the boys stood it equally well. so my friend we shall not allow you all the glory of the skating field, but must place our aponoquet, assawamset and quitticas-et, in the skating account with your own beloved miisketaquid exploits. well, since i saw you, dear old john brown has met, and ! how nobly, his death, at the hands of southern tyrants. i honor him and his brave asso ciates in my " heart of hearts ; " but my voice is for peaceable measures henceforth, doubtful, alas ! as their success appears. i expect to be in boston at the annual meeting of the mass. a. s. society, near at hand, and hope to see you there, and if agreeable should like to have you return home with me, when, d. v., we may try our skates on the middleborough ponds. we all spoke of you and wished you were with us on our late excursion there. with kind regards to your family and my other concord friends, i remain. yours faithfully, d. rioketson. h. d. thokeau, concord. 104 daillel kicketson and his friends the shanty, oct. 14, 1860. fbiend thoreau, — am i to infer from your silence that you decline any farther correspondence and intercourse with me? or is it that having nothing in particular to communicate you deem suence the wiser course ? yet, between friends, to observe a certain degree of consideration is well, and as i wrote you last, and that some nine or ten months ago, inviting you to visit me, i have often felt disappointed and hurt by your almost sepulchral silence towards me. i am aware that i have no claims upon you, that i voluntarily introduced myself to your notice, and that from the first you have always behaved toward me with a composure which leads me not to judge too severely your present neutrality. i know also that i have but little to give you in return for the edification and pleasure i have derived from your society, and of which to be deprived not only my self but my family would deem a great and irrepar able loss. i readily admit that this gives me no claim upon your friendship, but having passed so much of my ufe in the want of rural companionship i cannot easuy surrender the opportunity of occa sionally conversing and rambling among the scenes of our beloved neighborhood, here and at concord, with you. i trust you will now pardon me for again obtruding myself upon you. i am not accustomed to be humble, nor do i intend to be at this time, for i am not conscious of having committed any offence of sufficient magnitude to forfeit your regard for me. letters of kicketson and thoreau 105 i would, however, state, that you have probably never seen me under the most favorable circum stances, that is, in my calmest hours. i am by nature very easily disturbed, mentally and physically, and this tendency, or infirmity, has been increased by smoking. i have, at last, abandoned the use of the weed. it is now about four months since i have made any use whatever of tobacco, and nearly a year since i began to battle seriously with this en emy of my soul's and body's peace. when i was last at concord, owing to bad sleep, and the conse quent nervous irritability aggravated by smoking, i was particularly out of order, and like an intoxicated or crazed man, hardly responsible for my conduct. wherefore, i£ i betrayed any want of kind or gen tlemanly feeling, which, i fear, may have been the case, i trust you will pardon the same and attribute it to a source not normal with me. in conclusion, i would add that it would give me much pleasure to continue our friendship and occa sional intimacy. still i would not press it, for in so doing i should be selfish, as i have so little to re turn you for your favors. but ah ! me, what is this life worth, if those of congenial tastes and pursuits cannot exchange common courtesies with each other? channing is occasionally in new bedford, but he never comes to see me, nor writes me. i endeavored to be to him a good friend, and his cold, strange ways hurt and grieve me. would to god that he were able to be true to his higher nature, so beautiful and intelligent. 106 daniel kicketson and his friends it is possible you may not have got the last letter i wrote you, which was in december last, if so, the cause of your silence will prove less painful to me. i write under embarrassment, and must trust to your generosity for the want of felicity of expression in my attempt to convey to you my estimation of the value of your friendship, and my unwillingness to lose it. i remain, truly and faithfully your friend, • d. ricketson. concord, november 4, 1860. fkiend ricketson, — i thank you for the verses. they are quite too good to apply to me. however, i know what a poet's license is, and will not get in the way. but what do you mean by that prose ? why will you waste so many regards on me, and not know what to think of my silence ? infer from it what you might from the silence of a dense pine wood. it is its natural condition, except when the winds blow, and the jays scream, and the chickaree winds up his clock. my silence is just as inhuman as that, and no more. you know that i never promised to correspond with you, and so, when i do, i do more than i promised. such are my pursuits and habits, that i rarely go abroad ; and it is quite a habit with me to decline invitations to do so. not that i could not enjoy such visits, if i were not otherwise occupied. i have letters of eicketson and thoreau 107 enjoyed very much my visits to you, and my rides in your neighborhood, and am sorry that i cannot enjoy such things oftener; but life is short, and there are other things also to be done. i admit that you are more social than i am, and far more atten tive to " the common courtesies of hfe ; " but this is partly for the reason that you have fewer or less exacting private pursuits. not to have written a note for a year, is with me a very venial offence. i think that i do not corre spond with any one so often as once in six months. i have a faint recollection of your invitation referred to; but t suppose that i. had no new nor particular reason for declining, and so made no new statement. i have felt that you would be glad to see me almost whenever i got ready to come ; but i only offer myself as a rare visitor, and a still rarer correspondent. i am very busy, after my fashion, httle as there is to show for it, and feel as if i could not spend many days nor dollars in travelkng ; for the shortest visit must have a fair margin to it, and the days thus affect the weeks, you know. nevertheless, we cannot forego these luxuries altogether. you must not regard me as a regular diet, but at most only as acorns, which, too, are not to be despised, — which, at least, we love to think are edible in a bracing walk. we have got along pretty well together in several directions, though we are such strangers in others. i hardly know what to say in answer to your letter. 108daniel ricketson and his friends some are accustomed to write many letters, others very few. i am one of the last. at any rate, we are pretty sure, if we write at all, to send those thoughts which we cherish to that one, who, we beheve, will most religiously attend to them. this life is not for complaint, but for satisfaction. i do not feel addressed by this letter of yours. it suggests only misunderstanding. intercourse may be good ; but of what use are complaints and apolo gies ? any complaint / have to make is too serious to be uttered, for the evil cannot be mended. turn over a new leaf. my out-door harvest this fall has been one canada lynx, a fierce looking fellow, which, it seems, we have hereabouts ; eleven barrels of apples from trees of my own planting ; and a large crop of white-oak acorns, which i did not raise. please remember me to your family. i have a very pleasant recollection of your fireside, and i trust that i shall revisit it ; also of your shanty and the surrounding regions. yours truly, henry d. thoeeau. wednesday, 9 a. m., 27th feb., 1861. dear thorbau, — " the bluebird has come, now let us rejoice ! this morning i heard his melodious voice." but a more certain herald of spring, the pigeon woodpecker, a few of which remaia with us dur ing the winter, has commenced his refreshing call. letters of ricketson and thoreau 109 while i sit writing with my shanty door open i hear, too, the sweet notes of the meadow-lark, which also winters here, and regales us with his song nearly every fine morning. i have seen and heard the blackbird flying over, not his song, but crackle ; the redwing, i doubt not he is quite garrulous in the warmer nooks of low and open woodlands and bushy pastures. there goes the woodpecker, rat tling away on his "penny trumpet ! " it is one of those exquisitely still mornings when all nature, without and within, seems at peace. sing away, dear bluebird ! my soul swells with gratitude to the great giver of au good and beautiful things. as i go to my shanty door to dry my ink in the sun, i see swarms of httle flies in the air near by. the crows are cawing from the more distant pine-woods, where you and i and my other dear poetic friends have walked together. now i hear the lonely whistle of the black-cap, followed by his strange counterpart in song, the " chickadee " chorus. 2 p. m. wind s. w. thermometer 52 deg. in shade. i suppose that you are also enjoying somewhat of this spring influence, if not as fuuy as we. the winter has passed away thus far quite comfortably with us, and though not severe, with a few occasional exceptions, yet we have had a good deal of good skating, which has been weu unproved by both sexes, old and young. my sons and i again made a circuit of the middleborough ponds on the 17th december, at which we should have uked 110 daniel ricketson and his friends very much your company. our river has also been frozen strong enough, and we have had several af terr noons' skating there, visiting our friends below on the fairhaven side. it was really a cheerful sight to see the large number — sometimes a thousand or more — enjoying the pastime and recreation. many of our young women skate well, and among them our emma. walton makes his own skates, and really elegant affairs are they, and he is also very ague upon them. we have a large ship building a little below us, but far enough off not to interfere with the inland quiet of my rambles along shore, which i sometimes take in foggy weather, when i suppose i am httle more of a hollander than usual. as my object was principally to announce the bluebird, which may have reached you by the time this letter shall, i will soon close. march is close at hand again, and may be here by the time you read this. it is " a welcome month to me." i call it the month of hope, and can patiently wait for the spring flowers and the songs of birds so near by. soon the willow wiu put forth its catkins, and your friends the piping or peeping frogs set up their vernal choir, so gentle and soothing to the wounded spirit, where there is also a poetic ear to listen to it. 4 p. m. i fear, after all, that this wiu prove rather a disjointed letter, for i have been interrupted several times in its progress. during the intervals i have been to town — helped load a hay-wagon with hay, and am just returned from a short drive with my wife and daughters. the only objects of letters of kicketson and thoreau 111 particular attraction were the pussies or catkins on the willows along the lower part oje the nash road, and the aments of the alder, the latter not much advanced. now that spring is so near at hand may i not expect to see you here once more ? truly pleasant would it be to ramble about with you, or sit and chat in the shanty or with the family around our common hearthstone. i send you this day's mercury with a letter and editorial (i suppose) of channing's. hoping to hear from you soon, or, what is better, to see you here, i remain. yours truly, dan'l rickbtson. h. d. thoeeau. your welcome letter of nov. 4th last was duly received. i regret that mine which prompted it should have proved mystical to you. we must " bear and forbear " with each other. concord, march 22, 1861. friend rickbtson, — the bluebird was here the 26th of february at least, which is one day earlier than your date; but i have not heard of larks nor pigeon-woodpeckers. to tell the truth, i am not on the alert for the signs of spring, not hav ing had any winter yet. i took a severe cold about the 3d of december, which at length resulted in a kind of bronchitis, so that i have been confined to the house ever since, excepting a very few experimental 112 daniel ricketson and his friends trips as far as the post-office in some particularly nuld noons. my health otherwise has not been affected in the least, nor my spirits. i have simply been imprisoned for so long, and it has not pre vented my doing a good deal of reading and the like. channing has looked after me very faithfully; says he has made a study of my case, and knows me better than i know myself, etc., etc. of course, if i knew how it began, i should know better how it would end. i trust that when warm weather comes i shall begin to pick up my crumbs. i thank you for your invitation to come to new bedford and will bear it in mind ; but at present my health will not permit my leaving home. the day i received your letter, blake and brown arrived here, having walked from worcester in two days, though alcott, who happened in soon after, could not understand what pleasure they found in walking across the country at this season, when the ways were so unsettled. i had a sohd talk with them for a day and a half, — though my pipes were not in good order, — and they went their way again. you may be interested to hear that alcott is at present, perhaps, the most successful man in town. he had his second annual exhibition of all the schools in the town at the town hau last saturday, at which all the masters and misses did themselves great credit, as i hear, and of course reflected some on their teachers and parents. they were making letters of ricketson and thoreau 113 their little speeches from one till six o'clock p. m. to a large audience, which patiently listened to the end. in the meanwhile, the children made mr. alcott an unexpected present of a fine edition of " pilgrim's progress " and " herbert's poems," which, of course, overcame all parties. i inclose our order of exer cises. we had last night an old-fashioned northeast snowstorm, far worse than anything in the winter, and the drifts are now very high above the fences. the inhabitants are pretty much confined to their houses, as i was already. all houses are one color, — white, with the snow plastered over them, and you cannot tell whether they have blinds or not. our pump has another pump, its ghost, as thick as itself, sticking to one side of it. the town has sent out teams of eight oxen each, to break out the roads ; and the train due from boston at 8j a. m. has not arrived yet (4 p. m.). all the passing has been a train from above at 12 m., which also was due at 8^ a. m. where are the bluebirds now, think you ? i suppose that you have not so much snow at new bedford, if any. yours, henby d. thoreau. concord, august 15, 1861. friend rickbtson, — when your last letter was written i was away in the far northwest, in search of health. my cold turned to bronchitis, which made me a close prisoner almost up to the moment of my 114 daniel eicketson and his friends starting on that journey, early in may. as i had an incessant cough, my doctor told me that i must " clear out " — to the west indies, or elsewhere — so i selected minnesota. i returned a few weeks ago, after a good deal of steady travelhng, considerably, yet not essentially, better ; my cough still continuing. if i don't mend very quickly, i shall be obliged to go to another climate again very soon. my ordinary pursuits, both indoor and out, have been for the most part omitted, or seriously inter rupted, — walking, boating, scribbling, etc. indeed, i have been sick so long that i have almost forgotten * what it is to be well ; and yet i feel that it is in all respects only my envelope. channing and emerson are as well as usual ; but alcott, i am sorry to say, has for some time been more or less confined by a lameness, perhaps of a neuralgic character, occa sioned by carrying too great a weight on his back while gardening. on returning home, i found various letters await ing me ; among others, one from chohnondeley, and one from yourself. of course i am sufficiently surprised to hear of your conversion ; yet i scarcely know what to say about it, unless that, judging by your account, it appears to me a change which concerns yourself peculiarly, and wiu not make you more valuable to mankind. however, perhaps, i must see you before i can judge. remembering your numerous invitations, i write this short note now, chiefly to say that, if you are letters of ricketson and thoreau 115 to be at home, and it will be quite agreeable to you, i will pay you a visit next week, and take such rides or sauntering walks with you as an invalid may. yours, hbnby d. thorbau. the shanty, tuesday 6-h. 20-m. a. m., 17 sept., '61. dear friend, — i am desirous to hear how you are getting along, although i have an impression that you are improving. i would not put you to the trouble to write me, could i fairly call upon any one else. i look back with pleasure upon my late visit to concord. the particularly bright spots are my walks with you to farmer hosmer's and to walden pond, as well as our visit to friend alcott, i should like to have you make us a good long visit before cold weather sets in, and should this meet your approval please inform me when you answer this. i expect to be absent from home for a few days the last of this month, but after that time i shall be at home for some time. our indian summer weather is very charming, and probably the air softer than more inland if a season so delightful has any difference in this section of new england. i suppose you have hardly needed a fresh doctor since the bountiful supply i brought you. i was much pleased at the unceremonious way in which you described him. i hope the dread of another 116 daniel kicketson and his friends holocaust of the same kind will keep you in good heart for some time, for, assuredly, as soon as you begin to complain, which is hardly possible, after so great a feast as you have had of late, a bigger victim wiu be forthcoming upon whom the eagle-eye of some friend of yours is already fixed. you win pardon my seeming levity, and attribute it to the fresh morning air and increasing health and spirits. i have tasted no sugar-plums of any kind since i left you. i thank you for the friendly caution. i need more. come then, and be my kind mentor still further. with kind regards to all your family and to mr. alcott, channing, hosmer, &c. yours truly, d. kicketson. p. s. mrs. ricketson and our daughters join in regards and invitation to visit us soon. you will be welcome at any time. this is a good time to ride out to the ponds, &c. we are having beautiful weather here, calm and mild. please ask channing if he received a book i sent him in care of dr. w. channing, boston. concord, oct. 14, 1861. friend eicketson, — i think that, on the whole, my health is better than when you were here ; and my faith in the doctors has not increased. i thank you all for your invitation to come to new bedford, but i suspect that it must still be warmer here than there ; that, indeed, new bedford is warmer than c^,;^5*^^ /^'^^ ^^^-^c::^ ^/ '^^^"^b'^.ty^ y .^iy^^-b-t. — ^^ ' ^.^..^^ ^^^^--^ ^**-**3 ^ij^ ^^^.'-^ letters of ricketson and thoreau 117 concord only in the winter, and so i abide by con cord. september was pleasanter and much better for me than august, and october has thus far been quite tolerable. instead of riding on horseback, i take a ride in a wagon about every other day. my neigh bor, mr. hoar, has two horses, and he, being away for the most part this fall, has generously offered me the use of one of them ; and, as i notice, the dog throws himself in, and does scouting duty. i am glad to hear that you no longer chew, but eschew, sugar-plums. one of the worst effects of sickness is, that it may get one into the habit of taking a little something — his bitters or sweets, as if for his bodily good — from time to time, when he does not need it. however, there is no danger of this if you do not dose even when you are sick. i went with a mr. eodman, a young man of your town, here the other day, or week, looking at farms for sale, and rumor says that he is inclined to buy a particular one. channing says that he received his book, but has not got any of yours. it is easy to talk, but hard to write. from the worst of au correspondents, henry d. thokeau. (last letter written by mr. thoreau.) brooklawn, 7th jan., 1862. my dear friend, — i thought you would like to have a few unes from me, providing they required no answer. 118 daniel ricketson and his friends i have quite recovered from my illness, and am able to walk and skate as usual. my son, walton, and i do both nearly every day of late. the weather here — as i suppose has been the case virith you at concord — has been very cold, the ther mometer as low one morn (saturday last) as five degrees above zero. we propose soon to take our annual tour on skates over the middleboro' ponds. i received your sister's letter in reply to mine inquiring after your health. i was sorry to hear of your having pleurisy, but it may prove favorable after all to your case, as a counter-irritant often does to sick people. it appears to me you will in time recover — nature can't spare you, and we all, your friends, can't spare you. so you must look out for us and hold on these many years yet. i wish i could see you oftener. i don't believe in your silence and absence from congenial spirits. companionship is one of the greatest blessings to me. eemember me kindly to my valued friends mr. and mrs. alcott. yours truly, in haste, d. r. p. s. thank your sister for her letter. at any time when you wish to visit us, just send a line. you are always welcome. letters of ricketson and thoreau 119 spring notes. new bedford, 23d march, '62. my dear friend, — as it is some time since i wrote you, i have thought that as a faithful chroni cler of the season in this section, i would announce to you the present stage of our progress. i will not begin with the origin of creation as many worthy historians are wont, but would say that we have had a pretty steady cold winter through the months of january and february, but since the coming in of march the weather has been mild, though for the past week cloudy and some rain. today the wind is southerly and the thermometer — 3 p. m. — 46°, north side of our house. a flock of wild geese flew over about an hour ago, which i viewed with my spy-glass — their course about due east. few things give me a stronger sense of the sublime than the periodical flight of these noble birds. bluebirds arrived here about a fortnight ago, but a farmer who kves about 1^ miles from here north, says he heard them on the 7th feb'y. i hear the call of the golden winged woodpecker, and the sweet notes of the meadow lark in the morning, and yesterday morning for the first time this spring, we were sa luted with the song of a robin in a tree near our house. the song sparrow has been calling the maids to hang on their teakettles for several weeks, and this morning i heard the crackle of the cow bunting. i must not forget, too, that last evening 120 daniel kicketson and his friends i heard the ground notes speed, speed of the wood cock and his warbling while descending from his spiral flight. the catkins begin to expand upon the willows, and the grass in warm and rich spots to look green. truly spring is here, and each day adds to the in terest of the season. i hope you wiu catch a share of its healthful influences ; at least feast upon the stock you have in store, for as friend alcott says, in his quaint way, you have all weathers within you. am i right in my intimations that you are mend ing a little, and that you wiu be able once more to resume your favorite pursuits so valuable to us all as well as to yourself ? may i not hope to see you the coming season at brooklawn where you are al ways a welcome guest ? i see that you are heralded in the atlantic for april, and find a genial appre ciative notice of you under the head of "forester," which i suppose ^qmes from either alcptt or emer son, and channing's lines at the close, which i was also glad to see. i am reading a very interesting book called " footnotes from the page of nature, or first forms of vegetation." by rev. hugh macmillan, cam bridge and london, 1861. it treats of mosses, lichens, fresh water algse and fungi. the au thor appears to be ricl^ in lore and writes in an easy manner with no pretension to science. don't fail to read it if you can obtain it. it is lent me by a friendly naturalist. hoping to hear of your improved state of health, letters of eicketson and thoreau 121 and with the affectionate regards of my whole family, as well as my own, i remain, dear friend, yours faithfully, dan'l ricketson. p. s. i notice that walden is to appear in a second edition, and hope that your puhhshers will consider your interests as well as their own. would they not ]ike to buy your unbound copies of " the week"? the shanty, brookiawn, 30 march, 1862. dear thoeeau, — alone, and idle here tllis pleasant sunday p. m., i thought i might write you a few lines, not that i expect you to answer, but only to bring myself a httle nearer to you. i have to chronicle this time, the arrival of the purple finch, and a number of warblers and songsters of the sparrow tribe. the spring is coming on nicely here, and to-day it is mild, calm, and sunny. i hope you are able to get out a little and breathe the pure air of your fields and woods. while sawing some pine wood the other day, the fragrance suggested to my mind that you might be benefited by living among, or at least frequenting pine woods. i have heard of peo ple much improved in health who were afflicted in breathing, from this source, and i once seriously thought of taking my wife to the pine woods between here and plymouth, or rather between middleborough 122 daniel ricketson and his friends and plymouth, where the pine grows luxuriantly in the dry yellow ground of that section. i have thought you might, if still confined, trans port yourself in imagination or spirit to your favorite haunts, which might be facuitated by taking a piece of paper and mapping out your usual rambles around concord, making the village the centre of the chart and giving the name of each part, marking out the roads and footpaths as well as the more prominent natural features of the country. i have had two unusually dreamy nights — last and the one before. last night i was climbing mountains with some accidental companion, and among the dizzy heights when near the top i saw and pointed out to my fellow-traveller two enormous birds flying over our heads. these birds soon in creased, and, from being as i at first supposed eagles of great size, became griffins ! as large as horses, their huge bodies moved along by broad spread wings. the dream continued, but the re mainder is as the conclusion of most dreams in strange contrast. i found myself passing through a very narrow and filthy village street, the disagree able odor of which so quickened my speed as to either awake me or cut off my dream. at any rate, when i awoke my head was aching and i was gener ally exhausted. but enough of this. two young men in a buggy-wagon have just driven up the road singing in very sonorous strains the " john brown " chorus. i wish its pathetic and heart-stirring appeals could reach the inward ears of letters of ricketson and thoreau 123 congress and the president. i hope you can see some light on our present benighted way, for i cannot except by the exercise of my faith in an overruung providence. i may write you again soon, and hope i do not tire you. with kind regards to your family and my other concord friends, i remain, yours affectionately, dan'l ricketson. p. s. i have just seen a cricket in the path near the house. flies are very lively in my shanty win dows. two flocks wild geese just passed, 4 p. m., n. e. by n. honk-honk ! honk-honk ! the shanty, april 6th, 1862. my dear philomath, — another sunday has come round, and as usual i am to be found in the shanty, where i should also be glad to have you bodily present. we have had a little interruption to our fine weather during the past week in the shape of a hail-storm yesterday p. m. and evening, but it is clear again to-day, though cooler. i have to kronikle the arrival of the white-belhed swallow and the commencement of the frog choir, which saluted my ear for the first time on the even ing of the 3d inst. the fields are becoming a little greener, and the trailing moss is already waving along the sides of the rivulets. i have n't walked much, however, as i have been busy about farm 124 daotel ricketson and his friends work, the months of april and may being my busiest time, but as my real business is with nature, i do not let any of these " side issues " lead me astray. how serenely and grandly amid the din of arms nature preserves her integrity, nothing moved ; with the return of spring come the birds and the flowers, the swollen streams go dancing on, and all the laws of the great solar system are perfectly pre served. how wise, how great, must be the creator and mover of it all ! but i descend to the affairs of mortals, which particularly concern us at this time. i do not think that the people of the north appear to be awakened, enlightened, rather, to their duty in this great struggle. i fear that there is a great deal of treachery which time will alone dis cover and remove, for the eight must eventually prevail. can we expect when we consult the page of history that this revolution wiu be more speedily terminated than others of a like nature? the civil war of england lasted, i think, some ten years, and the american revolution some seven or eight years, besides the years of antecedent agitation. we have no cromweu, unless wendell phillips shall by and by prove one ; but at present he rather represents hampden, whose mournful end was perhaps a better one than to be killed by a rotten-egg mob. the voice of hogopolis (the mob portion of cincinnati), if such grunts can be thus dignified, must prove a lasting disgrace. the government party, if we have a government, seems to continue with a saintly per severance their faith in general mcclellan. how letters of kicketson and thqreau 125 much longer this state of delay will continue to be borne it is difficult to foresee, but i trust the force of circumstances {sub deo) will soon require a move for the cause of liberty. i read but little of the newspaper reports of the war, rather preferring to be governed by the gen eral characteristics of the case, as they involuntarily affect my mind. 4 p. m. since writing the foregoing, somewhat more than an hour ago, i have taken a stroll with my son walton and our dog through the woods and fields west of our house, where you and i have walked several times ; the afternoon is sunny and of mild temperature, but the wind from the n. w. rather cool, rendering overcoat agreeable. our prin cipal object was to look at lichens and mosses, to which w. is paying some attention. we started up a woodcock at the south edge of the woods, and a large number of robins in a field adjoining, also pigeon-woodpeckers, and heard the warble of blue birds. i remain, with faith in the sustaining forces of nature and nature's god, yours truly and affectionately, daniel rioketson. henry d. thoreau, concord, mass. the shanty, brooklawn, 13th april, 1862. my dear fkibnd, — i received a letter from your dear sister a few days ago, informing me of your continued illness and prostration of physical strength. 126 daniel eicketson and his friends which i was not altogether unprepared to learn, as our valued friend mr. alcott wrote me by your sis ter's request in february last, that you were con fined at home and very feeble. i am glad, however, to learn from sophia that you still find comfort and are happy, the reward i have no doubt of a virtuous life, and an abiding faith in the wisdom and good ness of our heavenly father. it is undoubtedly wisely ordained that our present fives should be mortal. sooner or later we must au close our eyes for the last time upon the scenes of this world, and oh ! how happy are they who feel the assurance that the spirit shau survive the earthly tabernacle of clay, and pass on to higher and happier spheres of ex perience. " it must be so — plato, thou reasonest well : — else, whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire. this longing after immortality." (addison, cato.) " the soul's dark cottage, battered, and decayed. lets in new light through chinks that time has made : stronger by weakness, wiser men become, as they draw near to their eternal home. leaving the old both worlds at once they view who stand upon the threshold of the new." (wauer.) it has been the lot of but few, dear henry, to extract so much from fife as you have done. al though you number fewer years than many who have fived wisely before you, yet i know of no one, either in the past or present times, who has drank so deeply from the sempiternal spring of truth and letters of ricketson and thoreau 127 knowledge, or who in the poetry and beauty of every-day life has enjoyed more or contributed more to the happiness of others. truly you have not lived in vain — your works, and above all, your brave and truthful life, will become a precious trea sure to those whose happiness it has been to have known you, and who will continue to uphold though with feebler hands the fresh and instructive philo sophy you have taught them. but i cannot yet resign my hold upon you here. i will still hope, and if my poor prayer to god may be heard, would ask, that you may be spared to us a while longer, at least. this is a lovely spring day here — warm and mild — the thermometer in the shade at 62 above zero (3 p. m.). i write with my shanty door open and my west curtain down to keep out the sun, a red-winged blackbird is regaling me with a querulous, half broken song from a neighbor ing tree just in front of the house, and the gentle southwest wind is soughing through my young pines. here where you have so often sat with me, i am alone. my dear uncle james whom you may remember to have seen here, the companion of my woodland walks for more than quarter of a cen tury, died a year ago this month : my boys and girls have grown into men and women, and my dear wife is an invalid still, so, though a pater familias, i often feel quite alone. years are accumulating upon me, the buoyancy of youth has ere while de parted, and with some bodily and many mental infirmities i sometimes feel that the cords of life are 128 daniel kicketson and his friends fast separating. i wish at least to devote the re mainder of my life, whether longer or shorter, to the cause of truth and humanity — a life of simpli city and humility. pardon me for thus dwelling on myself. hoping to hear of your more favorable symptoms, but committing you (all unworthy as i am) unto the tender care of the great shepherd, who " tempers the wind to the shorn lamb," i remain, my dear friend and counsellor. ever faithfully yours, dan'l ricketson. p. s. it is hardy possible i may come to see you on sat'y next. the shanty, sunday, 7.30 a. m., 4th may, 1862. my dear feiend, — i have just returned from driving our cow to pasture and assisting in our usual in and outdoor work, the first making a fire in our sitting-room, a little artificial warmth being still necessary for my invalid wife, although i sit most of the time as i do now, with my shanty door open, and without fire in my stove. well, my dear friend and fellow-pilgrim, spring has again come, and here appears in f uu glow. the farmers are busy and have been for some weeks, ploughing and planting, — the necessity of paying more attention to agriculture being strongly felt in these hard times, — old fields and neglected places are now being brought into requisition, and with a letters op ricketson and thoreau 129 good season our former neglected farms will teem with abundance. i, too, am busy in my way, but on rather a small scale, principally in my garden and among my fruit trees. walton, however, is head man, and i am obliged generally to submit to his superior judg ment. about all the birds have returned — the large thrush (t. rufus) arrived here on the 25th last month. i am now daily expecting the catbird and ground robin, and soon the bob-o-link and golden robin. with the arrival of the two last our vernal choir becomes nearly complete. i have known them both to arrive the same day. of the great variety of little woodland and wayside warblers, i am famil iar with but few, yet some of them are great favor ites of mine, particularly the oven bird, warbling vireo, veery (t. wilsonii), etc., etc. the wind flower and blue violet have been in bloom some time, and i suppose the columbine and wild gera nium are also, although i have not been to visit them as yet. how beautiful and how wonderful indeed is the return of life — how suggestive and how instructive to mankind ! truly god is great and good and wise and glorious. i hope this will find you mending, and as i hear nothing to the contrary, i trust that it may be so that you are. i did expect to be able to go to con cord soon ; i still may, but at present i do not see my way clear, as we " friends " say. i often think of you, however, and join hands with you in the 130 daniel ricketson and his friends spirit, i£ not in the flesh, which i hope always to do. i see by the papers that concord has found a new voice in the way of a literary journal y'clept " the monitor," which has my good wishes for its success. i conclude that mr. sanborn is the pioneer in this enterprise, who appears to be a healthy nursing child of the old mother of heroes. i do not mean to be classic, and only intend to speak of old mother concord. i hope channing will wake up and give us some of his lucubrations, and father alcott strike his orphic lyre once more, and emerson discourse wisdom and verse from the woods around. there sings a whortleberry sparrow (f. juncorimi) from our bush pasture beyond the garden. i hear daily your sparrow (f. graminus) with his " here ! here ! there ! there ! come quick or i 'm gone ! " by the way, is not emerson wrong in his interpretation of the whistle of the chickadee as "phoebe"? the low, sweet whistle of the " black cap " is very dis tinct from the clearly expressed phoebe of the wood pewee. but i must not be hypercritical with so true a poet and lover of nature as e. how grandly is the lord overruhng all for the cause of the slave — defeating the evil machinations of men by the operation of his great universal and regulating laws, by which the universe of mind and matter is governed ! i do not look for a speedy ter mination of the war, although matters look more hopeful, but i cannot doubt but that slavery will soon find its exodus. what a glorious country this will letters op ricketson and thoreau 131 be for the next generation should this curse be removed ! amid the song of purple finches, robins, meadow larks, and sparrows — a kind of t. solitarius myself — and with a heart full of kind wishes and affection for you, i conclude this hasty epistle. as ever, yours faithfully, d. r. p. s. i believe i answered your sister's kind and thoughtful letter to me. (last letter to h. d. t.). iv letters of sophia e. thoreau and daniel eicketson her memory makes our common landscape seem fairer than any of which painters dream, lights the brown hills and sings in every stream. whittiee. letters of sophia e. thoreau and daniel ricketson concord, deo. 19, 1861. mr. ricketson : dear sir, — thank you for your friendly interest in my dear brother. i wish that i could report more favorably in regard to his health. soon after your visit to concord henry com menced riding, and almost every day he introduced me to* some of his familiar haunts, far away in the thick woods or by the ponds, all very new and delightful to me. the air and exercise which he enjoyed during the fine autumn days, was a benefit to him — he seemed stronger — had a good appetite, and was able to attend somewhat to his writing ; but since the cold weather' has come his cough has in creased and he is able to go out but seldom. just now he is suffering from an attack of pleurisy which confines him whouy to the house. his spirits do not fail him, he continues in his usual serene mood, which is very pleasant for his friends as well as himself. i am hoping for a short winter and early spring that the invalid may again be out of doors. i am sorry to hear of your in disposition, and trust that you wiu be well again soon. it woidd give me pleasure to see some of •136 daniel kicketson and his friends your newspaper articles, since you possess a hopeful spirit. my patience is very nearly exhausted, the times look very dark. i think that the next soldier who is shot for sleeping at his post should be general mcclellan. why does he not do something in the way of fighting ? i despair of ever living under the reign of sumner or philhps. . . . mother joins with me in kind remembrances to yourself and family. yours with much esteem, s. e. thokeau. concobd, april 7, 1862. mb. ricketson : dear sir, — i feel moved to acknowledge the pleasant letters which henry has lately received from you. it is really refreshing to hear of the flight of the wild geese and the singing of birds. there is a good deal of snow stiq whitening our fields. i am almost impatient to see the ground bare again. my dear brother has survived the winter, and we should be most thankful i£ he might knger to wel come the green grass and the flowers once more. beueving as i do in the sincerity of your friendship for henry, i feel anxious that you should know how ill he is. since the autumn he has been gradually fafling, and is now the embodiment of weakness ; stfll, he enjoys seeing his friends, and every bright hour he devotes to his manuscripts which he is pre paring for publication. for many weeks he has letters op s. e. thoreau and ricketson 137 spoken only in a faint whisper. henry accepts this dispensation with such childlike trust and is so happy that i feel as if he were being translated, rather than dying in the ordinary way of most mortals. i hope you will come and see him soon, and be cheered. he has often expressed pleasure at the prospect of seeing you. i asked mr. alcott to write to you some weeks since ; but i do not think that he impressed you with henry's true condition. few of his friends reahze how sick he is, his spirits are always so good. in much haste, beheve me, yours truly, s. e. thokbau. p. s. henry sends kind regards to you and your family, and desires me to tell you that he cannot rise to greet a guest, and has not been out for three months. sunday may 11th '62. mottoes placed in henry's cof&n by his friend w. e. c. : — " hail to thee, o man, who art come from the transitory place to the imperishable." " gazed on the heavens for what he missed on earth." " i think for to touche also the world whiche neweth everie dale, so as i can, so as i maie." dear friend, you wiu not forget the bereaved mother and sister. yours truly, s. e. thorbau. 138 daniel ricketson and his friends stanzas written to be sung at the ftrnebal of henbt d. thobeau, op concobd, massachusetts (friday, may 9th, : hearest thou the sobbing breeze complain how faint the sunbeams light the shore, — his heart more fixed than earth or main, henry ! that faithful heart is o'er. oh, weep not thou thus vast a soul, oh, do not mourn this lordly man, as long as walden's waters rou, and concord river fills a span. for thoughtful minds in henry's page large welcome find and bless his verse, drawn from the poet's heritage, from wells of right and nature's source. fountains of hope and faith ! inspire most stricken hearts to lift this cross ! his perfect trust shau keep the fixe. his glorious peace disarm all loss ! wm. e. changing. bkooklawn, 13th may, 1862. my dear friend, — please accept my thanks for your kindness in sending me the lines sung at your dear brother's funeral. i did not know of his death until i read it in one of our new bedford papers thursday evening, the 8th inst. although i was not unprepared for the sad event, still i was very seriously moved by the same. i had fondly, you know, cherished the hope that he might stiu be letters of s. e. thoreau and ricketson 139 spared to us who so much" valued him, but he has passed on to a higher and happier sphere of exist ence. while at work in our garden the other day with my son walton, i remarked that henry would never hear the birds sing here again, adding how much we should miss him, and wondering whether he still felt an interest in things of earth. walton vpry appropriately and beautifully, as i think, replied that he supposed henry was interested in looking about upon the new scenes of his present experience. what a glorious field he has for his exquisitely curious mind to work in ! i hope your dear mother finds consolation. you have, i am aware, been often stricken, but i trust are not left hopeless nor comfortless. you spoke of henry's serenity and resignation. will you be so kind as to give me a few of the particulars of his lat ter days, — his expressions and the state of his mind generally, i£ it be agreeable to you. i should have been glad to have seen henry again, and had hoped to come up to concord from boston at the time of the anti-slavery convention this month. by refer ring to your letter i see that i should not have deferred it ; but it is now too late to perform the last offices of a friendship which i trust was sincere and hope will again be renewed. i have sent some fines entitled " walden," written some two years ago, to the " liberator " for publication. i inclose the letter which i refer to in my last to henry as unsent. i retained it by the advice of my daughters, who thought its tone too mournful, g,nd so in consider 140 daniel kicketson and his friends ation of henry's feelings i coincided with them. had i known he was so near the close of his life i should have sent it. most certainly i will not forget "the bereaved mother and sister." may i be permitted to mourn with you the loss of one whose peer in virtue and intelligence i never knew ! daily i think of him, and my dear son, walton, with whom i am now busily engaged in our garden work, often speaks of him; this very afternoon he remarked of henry's companionship with some congenial ^spirit, and i suggested plato. the public have met with a great loss in henry's death, — his friends and pupils were increasing, — concord is sadly bereaved, and his friends, emer son, alcott, channing, hosmer, and others, must feel it very keenly. i should be glad for you and my daughters to know each other, and i should be happy, as they would, to see you at our house. i am under many obhgations to your kind mother and yourself for kindnesses which i should be happy to reciprocate. i should be glad to* hear more about henry's last experiences, as i have before written. with my kindest regards and sympathy to your mother and aunts, i remain, my dear friend, for your own as well as for henry's sake. yours faithfully, dan'l eickbtson. p. s. did my last letter to henry, dated the 4th inst., reach him in time for him to read it or have it read ? i did not think it would be my last to him. letters of s. e. thoeeau and ricketson 141 i write amid many interruptions from various callers and visitors. concord, may 20th, 1862. mk. eiokbtson: dear friend, — profound joy mingles with my grief. i feel as if something very beautiful had happened, not death ; although henry is with us no longer, yet the memory of his sweet and virtuous soul must ever cheer and comfort me. my heart is filled with praise to god for the gift of such a brother, and may i never distrust the love and wis dom of him who made him, and who has now called him to labor in more glorious fields than earth af fords. you ask for some particulars relating to henry's illness. i feel like saying that henry was never afeected, never reached by it. i never before saw such a manifestation of the power of spirit over matter. very often i have heard him tell his visit ors that he enjoyed existence as well as ever. he remarked to me that there was as much comfort in perfect disease as in perfect health, the mind always conforming to the condition of the body. the thought of death, he said, could not begin to trouble him. his thoughts had entertained him all his life, and did still. when he had wakeful nights, he would ask me to arrange the furniture so as to make fantastic shadows on the wall, and he wished his bed was in the form of a shell, that he might curl up in it. he considered occupation as necessary for the sick as 142 daniel ricketson and his friends for those in health, and has accomplished a vast amount of labor during the past few months in pre paring some papers for the press. he did not cease to call for his manuscripts till the last day of his life. during his long illness i never heard a murmur escape him, or the slightest wish expressed to remain with us ; his perfect contentment was truly wonder ful. none of his friends seemed to realize how very ill he was, so full of life and good cheer did he seem. one friend, as if by way of consolation, said to him, "well, mr. thoreau, we must all go." henry rephed, " when i was a very little boy i learned that i must die, and i set that down, so of coiirse i am not disappointed now. death is as near to you as it is to me." there is very much that i should like to write you about my precious brother, had i time and strength. i wish you to know how very gentle, lovely, and submissive he was in all his ways. his little study bed was brought down into our front parlor, when he could no longer walk with our assistance, and every arrangement pleased him. the devotion of his friends was most rare and touching ; his room was made fragrant by the gift of flowers from young and old ; fruit of every kind which the season afforded, and game of all sorts was sent him. it was really pathetic, the way in which the town was moved to minister to his comfort. total stran gers sent grateful messages, remembering the good he had done them. all this attention was fully / "z^i ^^<:> ^^^^^ .^^^2?^ '^=^/^i^'«^ ig^g^^^^?^.;??^*:::^^ ^a^^ ^ (//^^^^j/c t^-t^-^t-.^^^!^-^,^ ^^^:.^^^ ^4:^^^^^/' '^^^^.^e^ dtj;^^^^ /^f^^^^^^. 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(^ j^l^t'^-^^^ •^a^czl^ir^ «£^^t.«^^^^ j:^ ,u^^!z^ a^y &^-7!^_ ^^^sfii^ . t:!^^ c^d^ /^<.ui.^t^^^>c<^ ^.4^^ ctte^^a^li^^^a^i^jr-^^ ' aj^ ^cv f^^.^^.^^^^^ c^r^k^^-7^^^^ ^feit^^ ^^p-^^ ^^^^^ /^c^e^^^ .<!ii>^t.«^, ca^cjii/ o-^c/nu^f^c^'-^ ^ ^ys^^^a..^ 'v^ce— .-^ v a=^-^-^^^^%^^ >''*^^*^'^' "^^^ ^ib^ ife^p ur-=^i^^^ ■.-e^t.^'^a. letters of s. e. thoreau and ricketson 143 appreciated and very gratifying to henry ; he would sometimes say, " i should be ashamed to stay in this world after so much had been done for me, i could never repay my friends." and they so remembered him to the last. , only about two hours before he left us. judge hoar called with a bouquet of hya cinths fresh from his garden, which henry smelled and said he liked, and a few minutes after he was gone, another friend came with a dish of his favorite jelly. i can never be grateful enough for the gentle, easy exit which was granted him. at seven o'clock tuesday morning he became restless and desired to be moved; dear mother. aunt louisa, and myself were with him ; his self-possession did not forsake him. a uttle after eight he asked to be raised quite up, his breathing grew fainter and fainter, and with out the slightest struggle, he left us at nine o'clock. but not alone. our heavenly father was with us. your last letter reached us by the evening mail on monday. h. asked me to read it to him, which i did. he enjoyed your letters, and felt disap pointed not to see you again. mr. blake and brown came twice to visit him since january. they were present at his funeral, which took place in the church. mr. emerson read such an address as no other man could have done. it is a source of great satisfaction that one so gifted knew and loved my brother and is prepared to speak such brave words about him at this time. the " atlantic monthly " for july will contain mr. e.'s memorial of henry. 144 daniel ricketson and his fkiends i hope that you saw a notice of the services on friday written by mr. fields in the " transcript." let me thank you for your very friendly letters. i trust we shall see you in concord anniversary week. it would give me pleasure to make the acquaintance of your family, of whom my brother has so often told me. if convenient, will you please bring the ambro type of henry which was taken last autumn in new bedford ? i am interested to see it. mr. channing will take the crayon likeness to boston this week to secure some photographs. my intention was to apologize for not writing you at this time : but i must now trust to your generos ity to pardon this hasty letter, written under a great pressure of cares and amid frequent interrup tions. my mother unites with me in very kind regards to your family. yours truly, s. e. thoreau. brooklawn, 22d may, 1862. dear miss thoreau, — your deeply affecting letter of the 20th inst. relative to henry's death arrived yesterday. my family as well as myself have read and reread the contents with truly rev erential feelings for the beautiful and noble spirit of your brother. you hardly need our sympathy, sustained as you are by a higher and better support than any earthly friend can lend. y(j€a^ eyu^.^^!^ ^^^^z^ ^-^:-^»^ ^£ s^^k^, ^>^^ ^fe-^^-o -^^^^^g;::*^.-^^ 7^ 1^ ^<^^. a_^ ^ ^, ^^^-^ua^ ^k.^^' 'fu^.^^c^ y^^ xe^^^i-^^^t/ /c/' >c ^^^;^.^^ ,1^ ^^ letters of s. e. thoreau and ricketson 145 i am very glad that henry was so upheld to the last, and that you appear to possess the same admir able element of faith and trust. still we shall all miss him, we shall be sensible of a void which will for us never be filled ; and the fair fields, the woods, and the river he so much loved wul lose to many of us their highest interest now he is gone, except such as memory may hold in store for us, of the master spirit that once so graced and depicted them. henry was the roundest man i ever knew — he seemed as near perfect as it is possible for humanity to be. other men have been great in their particular vocations, but he became master in whatever he grasped, — at once poet, and painter, naturahst, scholar, artisan, philanthropist, and withal, and more than all else, so christlike in the childlike simplicity and strength of his character. truly, we shall never behold his peer, and i am so poor and weak that i must mourn his loss. with the loss of friend after friend and the lessening hold of life in advan cing years, i feel the deep necessity of diligently seeking the true ground of faith and hope. possess ing not the grand and well-balanced mind of your brother, i am still anxiously inquiring the way to life and immortality, and often feel hke a poor weary pilgrim on the dusty road i travel. i am becoming more and more drawn to the faith of my fathers, who were friends from the days of george fox, and so much of the old leaven remains in me that i find myself involuntarily, as it were, drawn into their simple and rational ways of life. 146 daniel ricketson and his friends as it is quite uncertain about my going to the anti-slavery convention next week, and thence to concord, i have concluded to send the ^mbrotype of henry by mail. when i heard of your brother's death, i went to the artist who took the picture and got the duplicate of the one i had for you. i send you the strongest impression, the first taken. the one i keep is a httle lighter in color, which led me to choose it, but i now see the stronger expression in yours. if you were here i should like for you to take your choice. we au consider it very hfelike and one of the most successful likenesses we ever saw. what is rather remarkable is that it shews scarcely at all henry's loss of health, suffering deeply as he was at the time it was taken, from his disease. farewell, dear friend ! i shall never forget thy noble worth and the many instructive days i have passed in thy companionship. as milton mourned his beloved lycidas, so i must mourn the loss of thee, dear henry ! excuse my sad conclusion, and beueve me, ever truly yours, dan'l rickbtson. p. s. i should like to hear of the receipt of the ambrotype and how you like it. concord, may 26th, 1862. mr. ricketson : dear friend, — most heartily do i thank you for the picture of my dear brother which . was re ceived on saturday. it was very kind of you to letters of s. e. thoreau and ricketson 147 secure the duplicate for me. until a few weeks since, i did not know that henry had his picture taken when in new bedford last ; he accidentally spoke of it, and said that you considered it a good likeness. none of his daguerreotypes have pleased us, and i did not imagine that the ambrotype would afford us much satisfaction, still i felt curious to see it,' thinking i might get a copy of yours in case we liked it. i need not tell you, for i cannot, how agreeably surprised i was on opening the little box, to find my own lost brother again. i could not restrain my tears. the picture is invaluable to us. i discover a slight shade about the eyes expressive of weariness, but a stranger might not observe it. i am very glad to possess a picture of so late a date. the crayon drawn eight years ago this summer we con sidered good, it betrays the poet. i always liked it. mr. channing, emerson, alcott, and many other friends who have looked at the ambrotype, express much satisfaction. we are disappointed that we may not see you at present. i know that our home has lost all its attraction. you are aware what a host henry was, how full of profit and entertainment was all his con versation. still the town contains many valued friends of my dear brother whom i know that you would enjoy meeting, and i trust that it will not be long ere we see you in concord. let me thank you for your late letters, so full of heartfelt sympathy, as well as appreciation and 148 daniel ricketson and his friends admiration for my dear brother's rare traits. i shall ever prize them most highly. henry left a vast amount of manuscript. he made disposition of some of his effects, and he often spoke of yourself, mr. blake and brown, but i regret that he did not decide what should be given to these friends. when you come to concord i hope that you may find something to keep which belonged to henry, if you desire it. i regret that you did not see henry during his late illness. it was not possible to be sad in his presence. i feel as if he had done much to strengthen the faith of all his friends. no shadow of gloom attaches to anything in my mind, connected with my precious brother. henry's whole life impresses me as a grand miracle. i always thought him the most upright man i ever knew, and now it is a pleasure to praise him. with very kind regards to your family, believe me. yours truly, s. e. thobeau. concord, aug. 31, 1862. mr. ricketson : very dear friend, — nothing but illness, which has prostrated me all the summer, has pre vented my acknowledging your kind letter of may 27th. no opportunity has occurred to send to new bedford, else i should have forwarded " wilson's ornithology." henry mentioned the volume to me, letters of s. e. thoreau and ricketson 149 as one of value, and as being out of print. believe me, i shall be most happy to transfer it to the shelves of your library. henry always admired your relation to nature, and he much enjoyed your letters last spring containing a record of the coming of the birds. you refer to henry's "dance" at your house some years since. i have so often witnessed the like that i can easily imagine how it was, and i remember that henry gave me some account of the same. i recollect he said that he did not scruple to tread on mr. alcott's toes. i hope you will some day let me see the verses written on the occasion. your lines entitled " walden " afeorded mother and myself much satisfaction, they seem very just, and i am glad to know that in his lifetime, you appreciated so well my precious brother. i have thought that you might like to see some verses which henry wrote soon after my brother john's decease, and i will transcribe them. henry scarcely spoke of dear john, it pained him too much. he sent the following verses from castleton, staten island, in a letter to helen in may, 1843. you will see that they apply to himself. " brother, where dost thou dwell ? what sun shines for thee now ? dost thou indeed fare well ? as we wished here below ? " what season didst thou find ? 't was winter here. 150 daniel kicketson and his friends axe not the fates more kind than they appear ? " is thy brow clear again, as in thy youthful years ? and was that ugly pain the summit of thy fears ? " yet thou wast cheery stiu ; they could not quench thy fire ; thou didst abide their will, ajid then retire. " where chiefly shall i look to feel thy presence near ? along the neighboring brook may i thy voice still hear ? " dost thou still haunt the brink of yonder river's tide ? and may i ever think that thou art by my side ? " "what bird wilt thou employ to bring me word of thee ? for it would give them joy, 't would give them liberty, to serve their former lord with wing and minstrelsy. " a sadder strain has mixed with their song, they 've slowlier built their nests ; since thou art gone their lively labor rests. " where is the finch — the thrush, i used to hear ? letters of s. e. thoreau and ricketson 151 ah. ! they could well abide the dying year. " now they no more return, i hear them not ; ' they have remained to mourn, or else forgot." i suppose you have read mr. emerson's article. i should like to know what you think of it. i hope the autumn will not pass without a visit from you. i long to see you and talk with you of dear henry. mother joins with me in kind regards to yourself and family. yours truly, s. e. t. the shanty, 2d sept., 1862. dear miss thoreau, — in my younger days i had a seal with a harp upon it, and this motto, " i answer to the touch ; " and though i grow more sedate with increasing years, i am not sorry to find that your kind and friendly letter has touched a responsive chord. i am pained to hear that you have been so ill, the announcement of which by yourself is the first intimation i have had of it, for certainly had i known it, i should have hastened to write you or some one of your family about you. i trust that you are fast recovering, and that the cooler weather of autumn will prove favorable to you. i shall be very glad to have henry's copy of wilson's ornithology, although i felt after i had written to 152 daniel kicketson and his friends you for the same, that i had been too forward, and should have waited for you to have asked what book i would prefer. i am happy to learn that my last letters to henry afforded him some gratification. i do not regret that i did not see henry towards his close, as my remembrances of him are now as he usually appeared when on our rural rambles here and at concord. i am glad that my hues entitled " walden " pleased you and your mother. i am not much of a versifier, though by nature of the poetic temperament, but my lines can claim one recom mendation, they are genuine. i have never before seen the verses of your brother you sent me. how tender and beautiful they are, and to you and your mother they must be a precious memento of her dear, noble sons, who i trust have met and joined the dear sister and father in a higher and better sphere of existence. it will be one year ago the 5th of this month when i parted with henry at the concord depot. he had made me a visit in the latter part of the previous august as you may remember, but was too feeble at that time to ramble much ; but we took a number of pleasant rural drives about the country and to the seashore. the following are the verses you refer to. thoreau's dajsrce. like the indian dance of old, far within the forest shade, showing forth the spirit bold, that no foeman e'er dismayed ; — letters of s. e. thoreau and ricketson 153 like the dancing of the hours, tripping on with merry feet, triumphing o'er earthly powers. yet with footsteps all must greet ; — like the fauns, and satyrs, too, nimbly leaping in the grove. now unseen, and then in view. as amid the trees they move ; — like the leaves by whirlwind tossed in some forest's valley wide. scattered by the autumn frost, whirling madly, side by side ; — thus, and still mysterious more. our philosopher did prance. skipping on our parlor floor. in his wild improvised dance. ap-il, 1857. you ask my opinion of mr. emerson's article on your brother. when i read it for the first time i felt somewhat disappointed in its want of fullness, but on subsequent reading i feel better satisfied, and bating a few errors in fact, i do not think it could be much improved. i think mr. emerson intended the strictest justice to henry*s memory, but i think also that to strangers the article would fail in some important particulars to convey an idea of his noblest and. highest quahties. i do not myself think that henry was fuuy revealed, and i had looked forward to the more genial years of advanced life, when the spiritual experiences of his soul should bring us nearer together. but a truer or 154 daniel kicketson and his friends better man i never knew, and his like i cannot hope to meet again, i keep his memory sacred in my heart. i thank you for your kind wishes to see and talk with me about your brother. i should be glad to do so, and hope before autumn closes to come to concord. with kind regards from my wife, son, and daughters to yourself and mother, and my own, i remain very truly yours, dan'l ricketson. concord, feb. 7th, 1863. mk. ricketson : dear friend, — i hasten to acknowledge your tribute to my dear brother. any word in memory of him awakens my gratitude. mother and myself kve almost whouy in the past. henry is ever in our thoughts. i feel continually sustained and cheered by the influence of his child like faith. you are evidently not aware that i have been recently called to pass through a most fiery trial. seven weeks ago yesterday, my poor mother fell down our back stairway, a long, steep flight (per haps you may remember them), shattering her right arm frightfuuy, and otherwise seriously injuring herself. for an hour or two she was deprived of her senses, and during her insanity it was heart rending to me to hear her call almost incessantly for henry, so sadly did i miss his strong arm and kind, brave heart in that dark hour. ether was admin istered, her arm was set, and since then my dear letters op s. e. thoreau and ricketson 155 mother has lain in her bed, a most patient sufferer. i have been her constant and only nurse. it is won derful how much discipline we need, although this late affliction is wholly mysterious ; somehow i feel a little wiser, and trust that it has been good for me. you speak of a biography of henry. i think the world is so much better for his having lived in it, that i ardently wish that a faithful record of his life might be written for the profit of all men. i do not think, however, of one competent to write it. mr. w., whom you suggest, had a very slight acquaint ance with my brother. mr. blake and brown would be truer to him than any who knew him. mr. alcott perhaps best understood his rehgious charac ter, while mr. emerson possesses the rare wisdom, discrimination, and taste requisite for the purpose. mr. channing and yourself might aid in the work. henry's character was so comprehensive that i think it would take many minds to portray it. mr. emerson's article in the " atlantic " i value very highly, but you know that he always eschewed pathos, and reading it for consolation as a stricken mourner, i felt somewhat disappointed. henry never impressed me as the stoic which mr. e. repre sents him. i think henry was a person of much more faith than mr. emerson. i remember with pleasure henry's criticism upon some chapters in " the conduct of life " which i read to him last winter. i shall always regret that you did not see henry during his last illness. he often seemed radiant. 156 daniel ricketson and his friends one day observing his wasted limbs he said, " sophia, my knees look like balls on a string, — i go on as if i were to stay a thousand years. i do enjoy my self." mr. blake and brown spent a day with me not long since, and paid a visit to walden. i hope we shall see you soon. henry's friends are most welcome. mother joins with me in very kind regards to yourself and household. we are glad to know that you sometimes speak of dear henry. yours very truly, s. e. thorbaxj. concokd, may 18th, 1863. my dear mr. eiokbtson, — i cannot tell you how very welcome was your last kind note. the sympathy of friends is truly prized by us. i always reproach myself for any sadness in view of dear henry's departure, knowing that the posses sion of such a priceless treasure as he was to us, for so long a time, should ever fill our hearts with grati tude. but i have passed the round of one year with no earthly friend to lean upon — the spring finds us in feeble health — my dear mother's frame sadly shattered, with no prospect of ever recovering the use of her right hand, and often when over whelmed with care, i so miss the counsel of my precious brother, who was never cast down and who in every emergency could make the hght shine, that i confess, my heart at times is heavy. letters of s. e. thoreau and ricketson 157 it is pleasant, and indeed impossible for me not to associate all nature with henry ; he did so love au god's works. — when you come to concord, i shall show you some of his journals, and you will see how much he enjoyed, what lessons he learned from day to day. " no flower or herb his vernal head shall rear but when thou comest nigh will know thy tread, and lift a little more -his happy head ; the birds will watch thee walking, and thy breast confide in as a wider, warmer nest ; beneath thy step shall thriu the buried root ; the riu wiu run to lave thy lov^d foot ; the earliest flowers of spring from other eye wiu hide, and wishful wait thy passing by ; and when thy footstep to the forest roams the pines among their tops will say, ' he comes,' and give new balsam to their healing breath." i often think how much henry is spared when i realize the terrible state of our country, — it would have darkened his sky ; he was most sensitive. did you receive my note with the photograph ? . — the prayer i copied is one henry selected for the dial years ago. i do not know the author. i enjoyed your lines, " the fallow fields " — they made for me a charming picture. ticknor & fields are about to issue a volume of henry's papers. i think that i have not told you of calvin h. green, of michigan, a most enthusiastic admirer of my brother, — a total stranger to us. mr. g. has written me several times since henry left us, and 158 daniel ricketson and his friends once said that he had desired to bestow some token of friendship upon henry during his hfe, but now that it was too late, he wished to give it to the com panion who walked most frequently with him, ask ing his name. since then he has sent a cane to mr. channiqg. the wood is highly polished, a silver band with a motto from the " week " and the names thoreau and channing encircle the cane, and on the " top is a silver plate with " friendship " engraved upon it. i should have said that the wood is of a bright red color, and came from california. the stick was cut from the " manzanita," a little shrub which grows on the tops of mountains and bears apples, with evergreen leaves. was not this a rare instance of friendship ? how dear henry would have enjoyed receiving the gift ! perhaps he knows au about it now. you do not write as i£ you planned coming to concord this season, but really, i think if you knew how much pleasure it would give me to see you here, that you would come. may we not expect you ? mother unites with me in very kind regards to yourself and family. yours very sincerely, sophia e. thoreau. concord, dec. 15th, '63. mb. rickbtson : dear friend, — i cannot let another day pass without assuring you of my most grateful remem brance of all the members of your family, who so letters of s. e. thoeeau and ricketson 159 kindly contributed to the pleasure of my. stay at brooklawn. i was much benefited by my absence from concord, and since my return have been able to walk five or six miles with ease, which is a great gain. i spend much time out of doors, visit walden very often, and the other day i enticed my good aunt jennie, who will be 79 years old christmas day, to accom pany me to the pond. it gave her much satisfac tion to visit the spot where dear henry enjoyed so much. i walked up to the north part of the town lately, where his little house now stands, and ate my dinner under its roof, with the mice for com pany. i hope you uke the new volume " excursions." i am quite reconciled to the title. i found mr. blake in concord when i got home. he shrinks from undertaking such a book as mr. fields desires to make of the letters — thinks he lacks hterary skill. i trust, however, that he will simply edit the letters if nothing more. mr. curtis lectured before the lyceum a few weeks since, and we are to have mr. emerson to morrow evening. mr. channing is quite neighborly, although he did not condescend to make any inquiries as to his new bedford friends when he first met me after my return, yet i am quite sure that he was interested to hear all that i had to tell him about them. mrs. brooks is sadly afflicted by the death of her husband — indeed all concord sympathize in the 160 daniel kicketson and his feiends loss, for mr. brooks had won the respect and affec tion of all who knew him. for many weeks i have had a lame wrist, which has compelled me to neglect all my correspondents ; nothing taxes it so severely as writing. this must be my apology for any seeming neglect. i trust that you have had a visit from your son arthur. please remember me affectionately to your gentle wife, and daughters. thinking of miss anna one day at our cliffs, i plucked a frost-bitten leaf, which i wiu inclose. hoping to hear a pleasant report from your house hold, i remain. very truly yours, s. e. thoeeau. my kind regards to walton. i would like to see him in concord. concord, nov. 29, 1864. mr. ricketson: dear feibnd, — a few weeks since i felt moved to respond to your kindly notice of mr. phillips. it betrayed so much wisdom, and dignity, — i fancied it coming fresh and pure from your httle shanty, — a spot unspotted from this world, and i assure you it was most satisfactory, — it was refreshing to feel that another man as good as mr. phillips was ready to stand by his side. i am still grateful for your last pleasant note, which i have so long neglected to acknowledge. i letters of s. e. thoreau and ricketson 161 did hope that the summer would not pass without seeing you, with your daughters, in concord. the invalid state of my family forbids my inviting guests, but i do like to have them take the responsi bility of coming and sharing what hospitality it is in our power to bestow. i thought ere this to send you a volume of my brother's letters. mr. blake shrank from the task of editing them, feeling that he lacked the requisite literary skill, so mr. emerson assumed the labor and i suppose that they will not appear at present. the " cape cod " papers have been printed, j believe that the publisher wishes to issue the letters first, so the volume is delayed. mr. blake and brown visited us this autumn, and mr. channing treated them very courteously — on henry's account, i have no doubt. since i last wrote you i have parted with one more out of my narrow circle of relatives. my dear aunt jane died in bangor in august last, while visiting her nieces — she had paralysis of the lungs. aunt maria, the only surviving member of the family, makes her home with us for the present. i trust you are enjoying these indian summer days. mother joins with me in very kind regards to all your family. with sincere respect, believe me, yours truly, s. e. thorbatj. 162 daniel kicketson and his friends concord, march, 1865. dbab mr. ricketson, — i felt that i got much more than my deserts when your welcome letters reached me in response to my note. you can scarcely realize how much pleasure your communications afford me, since i am so tardy in acknowledging them. but the kind words you so sincerely write of my dear brother are very comfort ing to me. i cannot tell you how startled and grieved we all felt to hear of mr. cholmondeley's death. his brother's letter impressed me as a painful chapter from some romance. it is hard to realize that he has left us. we have always felt the truest regard for mr. c. as a person of rare integrity, great bene volence, and the sinjcerest friendliness, and i am sure that his loss must be very great to those who knew, and loved him best. i have lately read his letters to henry, with peculiar interest. he reauy cared much for america, and i think seriously entertained the idea at one time, of making it his home. i am surprised by referring to your letters to find that they were written december 2d — so quickly has the spring come. it was henry's favorite season. did you see some hues, by channing, entitled " a voice of spring " ? i fancy that dear henry's absence inspired the lament. some of mr. c.'s verses are very charming to me, he makes such lovely pictures of birds and flowers. i will copy a part of the poem. letters of s. e. thokeau and ricketson 163 " the swallow is flying over but he will not come to me ; he who heard his cry of spring hears that no more, heeds not his wing. " how bright the skies that dally along day's cheerful arch, and paint the sunset valley ! how redly buds the larch ! " blackbirds are singing, clear hylas ringing, over the meadow the frogs proclaim the coming of spring to boy and dame, but not to me, nor thee. " a wail in the wind is all i hear ; a voice of woe for a lover's loss, a motto for a traveling cross — and yet it is mean to mourn for thee. in the form of bird or blossom or bee. " some time i will copy all the lines if you care for them. mr. hosmer was here not long since, and enjoyed hearing your letter. he said, " tell mr. ricketson that i hope he will come to concord, i should be glad to see him. how would he feel if he were sixty-seven years old, as i am ? " a few years since mr. emerson repeated " the touchstone," ia one of his lectures, and the news papers printed it. i was dehghted with it and saved it, and will enclose it for you. 164 daniel ricketson and his friends how do you feel about mr. garrison's position to-day? i am sorry that he cannot see danger in the future, but i must adhere to the cause if i forsake the man. i will not inflict upon you any account of my many cares, which must serve as an apology for this meagre note, but pray that you will not think me selfish if i hope to hear from you again soon. mother joins with me in very kind regards to yourself and family. yours truly, s. e. thoebau. brooklawn, 16 march, 1865. my dear fbiend, — your kind and thoughtful present of henry's cape cod book, came duly to hand, for which please accept my best thanks. but may i not soon expect to have a few lines, at least, from you to blend with the kindly spring influences ? already has spring set in with us. i had hardly sent my last letter to you before the bluebird arrived and saluted the shanty and its inmate with his rich warble, and now we are rejoicing in song with the red-winged blackbird, song-sparrow and the coarser notes of pigeon woodpecker, crow, and blue jay. all winter we have the sweet meadow lark, and he, too, joins the vernal choir, as a kind of master of ceremonies. several flocks of wild geese have also flown over, and the woodcock has already commenced his twilight gyrations and jubilant utterances, a kind of chuckling warble. so, my letters op s. e. thoread and ricketson 165 dear friend, we are still blessed, and as happy as thoughtful patient creatures may be. calm and grateful, are we all, i trust, for heavenly favors. i write in haste and intend this only as an acknowledgment of thanks for your valued present. hoping to hear from you soon, or what would be better still to have a visit from you, with love to your mother and other friends, i remain. faithfully yours, dan'l eicketson. memo. j. f. c. in his article on mr. emerson was very unjust to henry, and went quite out of his way to wound him. but it can do him no harm. in charity to mr. c. who would not, i think, do any one wrong, it must have been very carelessly done. in common respect for the departed and remaining friends, i do not see how he could have done it. henry has a good and lasting fame. as virgil says, " sic itur ad astra." concord, july 17th, 1865. mb. ricketson : dear fribio), — i trust that you have received a few lines from miss hosmer, who was kind enough to befriend me by replying to your last note. i was sorry to delay acknowledging it so long. mr. emerson was very kind in assuming the task of editing the letters, and i do not like to express any dissatisfaction in relation thereto, but i despair of justice being done to henry's character by any one. i do not mean that i despair in the future, for i am wholly content in the faith that god will 166 daniel ricketson and his friends use the work of his own hands in blessing the exam ple of my precious brother to those who knew him and to many who may come after him. oh ! that there were more lives as transparent, as unclouded by sin, as dear henry's ! during mr. e.'s absence last winter some of the proofs of the letters were sent to me. i was disap pointed to find that some passages betraying natural afeection had been omitted. i consulted mrs. emer son, who said that her husband was a greek, and that he treated his own writings in the same manner. i expressed my desire that the passages should not be left out — it did not seem quite honest to henry not to print them. i presume that the sentences to which i refer seemed to mr. emerson trivial. mr. fields thought it best to use them, and they were retained. mr. alcott thought it a happy accident which brought the matter to my notice. at the close of a beautiful letter to mrs. emerson, henry wrote, " shake a day-day to edith, and say ' good-night ' to ellen for me." this ending was omitted, so the world might never have known that he loved the babies. i did not see any of the proofs after mr. emer son's return. he told me that he had bragged that the coming volume would be a most perfect piece of stoicism, and he feared that i had marred his classic statue. mr. fields called to see me lately ; he is very anxious to obtain the letters which henry wrote to mr. cholmondeley, and wiu you do me the favor to letters of s. e. thoreau and ricketson 167 send to europe for them, if it will not give you too much trouble. i do not know the address of mr. c.'s widow or his brother ? please assure them of the sympathy which mother and myself feel in view of their great loss? mr. c. gained our highest esteem and affection during his stay in our family. i shall be happy to defray expense attending the receipt of the letters. we were much touched the other day to learn that a party of forty ladies and gentlemen, all stran gers, came to walden to celebrate henry's birthday. a party of young ladies who went to the pond to bathe accidentally discovered the company. they had spread a table on the spot where his little hut formerly stood. i should kke to know how you feel about the perilous times in which we hve. miss louisa alcott sails for germany this week. please remember me very kindly to your family. yours truly, s. e. thoreau. the shanty, brooklawn, 4 june, 1866. dear miss thoreau, — your late, though very welcome letter of the 26th ult., with the book also, came in due time. the latter proves to be " sewell's history," instead of the journal of george fox as i supposed, but it contains a large portion of the life and experiences of this, as i believe, godly as well as remarkable man, and is altogether a very valuable 168 daniel kicketson and his friends and interesting work. i am quite inclined to agree with charles lamb that it is "worth all ecclesias tical history put together." the interesting letters, too, o£ mr. cholmondeley, and the photographic likeness of his brother, and that of his house, con dover hall, which i received with the book, i will retain, with your permission, for the present, and return them by my son walton, who expects to go to concord to visit mr. bull's vineyard in september, unless you desire them before that time. besides, i expect to write mr. c. soon, and should hke to have them in the way of inspiration. i shall value the book very highly, not only for its intrinsic merits, but for its associations with your family, and particularly that it was henry's. ... i suppose you already know that i hold to the religious principles of my ancestors, who were friends, although i am not sectarian, and by no means exclusive, and i hope to " become more sage, milder, and mellower with declining age." i am sorry that ill health should have been the cause of your long silence, which i hope will soon be overcome by the more genial season we are now enjoying. i should hke to come to concord once more, but since the death of henry i have hardly felt equal to the undertaking. i should so much miss him, i could hardly have supposed any place possessed so much human interest as that of concord in my mind from its alliance with your brother. he was indeed letters of s. e. thoreau and ricketson 169 her presiding genius and interpreter ; and now that he is gone, the river, the woods, the landscape, and even walden pond, with all its beauty, have lost for me their greatest charm. i could not have joined the party of forty strangers who lately had a picnic on the spot of henry's hermitage. i may at some not far distant time retrace our walks, or sail upon the river, alone or with some congenial friend, pos sibly, but hardly. may we not hope ere long to see you here again ? your visit is remembered by us all with much pleasure. with the united love of my wife, son, and daughters to yourself and mother, i remain, truly and affect'ly yours, dan'l rickbtson. the shanty, brooklawn, 4th aug. 1866. my dear friend, — i have been thinking for a long time of writing you, for few days pass but i think of henry, and of course, as you are next to him, i naturally look to you. if he were now alive, i think i could enjoy and appreciate his company better than ever before. i have passed through with an experience since his death which, however severe at first and uncompromising in its exactions, has, i thank god, left me with larger faith in and charity towards my fellow men. it is not often that a man at fifty changes for the better, but i hope that such is my case, at least in that world-wide sympathy for the conditions of mankind. i have been so disap 170 daniel kicketson and his friends pointed in the religion of the churches that i am convinced more than, ever that that which saves the soul is the spirit which purifies and prepares it for the good of humanity. this is, however, only a revival of a former experience which i had in early life, and which was at that time intensified by the pro-slavery of the so-called church. while i am led, therefore, to believe in the marvellous records of the christian religion, and feel the importance of giving heed to my ways herein, i see more of the heavenly spirit it inculcates in pagan humanity than in the hardness and selfishness of most of those it has been my lot to know prominently connected with church and sect. it now appears to me that what i saw in henry, so good and pure, was the efeect of the true baptism, and i can understand how one so heavenly minded could meet death with christian composure. how his noble soul must have expanded when it launched into the broader atmosphere of light and knowledge ! but something checks me — have i sufficient faith in life and immortality thus to write ? i hope tremblingly, prayerfully, and may god pardon all my faint-heartedness. i write to you as to a sister in the lord, for in you i think i see the spirit of the same good angel as in henry. with these confessions you can see how much nearer i am drawn again to our friends emerson, alcott, et id omne genus. i have not written mr. cholmondeley, or rather i have not sent him a letter, for i wrote one to him some time ago, which still remains unsent. i hope letters of s. e. thoreau and ricketson 171 ere long to find myself led that way, as i do not wish to write without having something to say to him. as it is possible i may reach' concord by and by, i win keep the photographs a little longer. should i not come i will send them. but may we not hope to see you the coming autumn? i will promise to try to be good, and not combat with you on religion, at least. my son, the doctor, speaks of having had a pleasant interview with you and your mother on his late visit to concord. my boys, as well as myself and the rest of the family, all hold henry in dear remembrance. alas ! how much we miss his visits here ! it was henry, i find, more than all else, that made concord attractive to me. i still can see much to admire in her slowly flowing river, its banks, the old fields and woods, out-of-the-way places, and walden pond, sacred to h.'s memory. but the master who held the talismanic wand has gone, or only stands fading in the past, half real, half spiritual, still haunting these endeared abodes of poetry and peace. it is a great blessing to have a house to love — to have eyes to see and ears to hear what nature and nature's god has to reveal to you from your own doorway. pardon this egotistic scrawl, and with the united love of my household to yourself and mother, believe me as ever. your faithful friend, daniel ricketsou". 172 daniel kicketson and his friends concokd, aug. 25, 1867. dear mr. ricketson, — there are seasons in my experience so filled with memories of the past that one drop of true sympathy quite melts me. at such a moment your letter reached me, and i thank you for your most friendly allusion to my dear brother. i did receive a response to my invitation to your son and daughters, and to make amends for my disappointment, i sent for other friends, who came at once, and thus engrossed me, which must be my apology for not writing to new bedford. i hope that nothing will occur in either family to prevent our seeing walton and his sisters at the proposed time, when, too, i trust the weather wiu be more propitious for out-door enjoyment than of late. i passed a day at walden with my friends. we were disappointed to meet several hundreds collected from the neighboring towns. since arrangements for picnic parties have been made, the pond seldom enjoys a quiet day during the summer months. associations have rendered the spot' so entirely sacred to me, that the music and dancing, swinging and tilting,, seemed uke profanity almost. an over whelming sense of my great loss saddened me, and i felt that only the waters sympathized in my bereavement, for there seemed in all that throng no heart nor eye to appreciate the purity and beauty of nature. the lover of walden has, indeed, de parted : i recalled my last day spent there with henry : — letters of s. e. thoreau and ricketson 173 " sweet september day, so calm, so cool, so bright, the bridal of the earth and sky." while i sat sketching, henry gathered grapes from a vine, dropping its fruit into the green waters which gently laved its roots. with the lapse of time my sense of loneliness increases, and i often fail to realize that each day shortens my separation from those who have gone before. i will return your letters by walton, when he comes again. mr. sanborn has received a letter from mr. cholmondeley since i have ; it is a long time ago, however. hope he is still alive, and that we may have good news of him ere long. i was caught in a heavy shower the other day, and chanced to meet farmer hosmer in a store. he has worked hard on the land this summer, and consequently is in good health and spirits. mr. and mrs. alcott are better than i feared they would ever be, after their serious illness last winter. mother and myself send kind regards to yourself and family. we anticipate with much pleasure the visit from the young people. yours very truly, s. e. thorbau. concord, nov. 12tli, 1867. dbab mb. ricketson, — your letter of last week was cordially received, and i was much interested in the pleasant picture, which grew out of your finding 174 daniel ricketson and his friends the old jack-knife. i wish you might find dear henry's old knife, we never saw it after his departure, although, i think, he used it during his illness. mr. channing wished that it might be bestowed upon him, and we should gladly have consented, had it not mysteriously disappeared. thank you for your notice of mr. alger's new book. i have not seen the volume ; but i did see a paper in a religious magazine, written by mr. a. some time last winter, which proved his entire mis apprehension of my brother's character ; the writer seemed inspired by personal enmity. mr. channing was greatly disturbed by it. mr. emerson and fields both censured the author so severely, that i really felt inclined to pity, more than blame, the poor man. i confess myself greatly surprised by prof. lowell's article, published in the " north american keview " a year since. i have too much respect for mr. lowell's powers of discrimination to account at all for his blundering and most unfriendly attack upon henry's book. it is fuu of contradic tions. i presume you have read it. as you remark, " henry has already received the homage of the best of our land," and surely i can not allow myself to grieve over the unkindness, or ignorance, which may prompt any one to malign him. i would rather listen to the bay-wing. let me tell you what henry says about him : — " while dropping beans in the garden, just after sundown. may 13th, i hear across the fields the note of the bay-wing (which i have no doubt sits on letters of s. e. thoreau and ricketson 175 some fence-post or rail there) and it instantly trans lates me from the sphere of my work. it reminds me of so many country afternoons and evenings when this bird's strain was heard far over the fields. the spirit of its earth-song, of its serene and true philosophy, was breathed into me, and i saw the world as through a glass — as it lies eternally. some of its aboriginal contentment — even of its domestic felicity — possessed me. what he sug gests is permanently true. as the bay-wing sang many a thousand years ago, so sings he to-night. in the beginning god heard his song and pro nounced it good, and hence it has endured. it reminds me of many a summer sunset, of the farm house far in the fields, — its milk-pans and well sweep and the cows coming home from pasture. he is a brother poet, this small gray bird (a bard), whose muse inspires mine. his lay is an idyl or pastoral older and sweeter than any that is classic. " if you would have the song of the sparrow in spire you a thousand years hence, let your hfe be in harmony with its strain to-day.". . . we were much disappointed that anna could not visit us this autumn. we do not despair of seeing walton ere the winter sets in, and hope that you will favor us with your presence when next you visit your son, the doctor. with very kind regards from mother and myself to you and your family, i remain, yours truly, s. e. thokeau. 176 daniel ricketson and his friends concord, mar. 30th, 1869. deab mr. ricketson, — as you once wrote me, "i answer to the touch." i had seated myself this rainy morning to invite you to mingle your note with that of the spring bird, when a neighbor, returning from the office, brought me your letter, — a cheering strain from new bedford, — breaking the long silence, for which i thank you. i am happy to hear that you have been so plea santly occupied the past winter, & shall most cor dially welcome the promised volume. the spring has come. it was the season dear henry loved best. he detected its first symptom, — the softened air, even when snow and ice covered the ground, & he would go out in cold rain storms, feehng with wet and freezing fingers amid the withered grass & snow, for the radical leaves & prostrate stems of the fair flowers, so sure to bloom again. the bluebird he called " the angel of the spring ! fair & innocent, yet the offspring of the earth. the color of the sky above & of the subsoil beneath, suggesting what sweet & innocent melody (terrestrial melody) may have its birthplace between the sky and the ground." " the flowers that earliest usher in the spring long for the eye that kindred love did bring to view their daily growth, and wait in vain to hear thy childlike welcome ring again. " to lure thee to thy long frequented haunts, at early dawn the cheery robin chants ; her notes, unheeded, rise on wings of love, as if to greet thee in the blue above." letters of s. e. thoreau and ricketson 177 the preceding lines are part of a poem entitled thoreau, which was sent to mr. emerson signed i. a, e, he does not recognize the author. you enquire for y'r old friends. farmer hosmer has blessed us with frequent calls & visits during the winter. he dropped in last sat. just as we were going to tea. he drew up to the table, beginning at once to discourse upon a future life, letting fall many wise sayings — nibbling away, meanwhile, upon brown bread & cheese, which composed his meal. he talks about the weight of 71 winters. but i think he seems less burdened than formerly — appears to care less for this world's goods & so can afford to be cheerful. one evening i read snow bound to him & he enjoyed it so well that he took the book home for mrs. hosmer to see. your poem. the old barn, afforded him satisfaction. he thought it the best you had ever written. i have not seen the alcotts since their return, if indeed they have got home again. mrs. emerson has beerf an invalid most of the winter. she is better now. mr. e. has been absent as usual from concord during the lecturing sea son. edward, perhaps you know, is studying medi cine. mr. w. e. c. last & least, i can tell you nothing about, not having met him since anna and walton were with us last autumn. i have not the pleasure of knowing mr. hotham. i had a friendly letter from mr. conway recently. he writes me that he has determined to sever the 178 daniel ricketson and his friends last strand that bound him to ecclesiasticism and thus enjoy a kttle personal freedom before he dies. i shall not forget your cordial invitations to new bedford. i hope anna and walton will visit us this sum mer, when we can give them a warm reception. they are kindly remembered by mr. wheildon's family, who hope to see them again. with kind regards from mother and myself, beheve me, yours truly, s. e. t. bkooklawn, march 14th, 1872. my dear friend, — i have just received a few lines from the doct'r announcing the decease of your dear mother. i regret that i am not near you to render such little services and express such poor words of sympathy as your great affliction would call forth. as it is, i can only send in this way my friendly feelings for the occasion. your mother was a woman of unusual vivacity, as well as of rare intellectual powers ; and in her youth, i doubt not, was not only handsome, but the life of her compan ions. i did not know her until she had passed her prime and had met with severe afflictions. i could recognize in her dramatic talent the origin of your brother henry's fine gift for conversation, and in the quiet manner of your dear father his repose of mind j combined, the strong contrasts of your par? letters of s. e. thoreau and ricketson 179 ents produced henry's character, one of the truest and noblest of our time. i was thinkmg of him yesterday, and thought that nearly ten years had already elapsed since he left us. from a letter of arthur's to his mother, received yesterday, i was prepared to hear of your mother's demise, although he spoke of her strong vitality, and thus admitting a possibility of her rallying. she lived to a good old age, and has gone in good time to join as we trust the departed ones of your family. as the funeral will be to-morrow, i shall not be able to attend it. still you may regard me as with you in spirit, and sympathizing with you as a friend upon the sad occasion. i trust that the doct. will be able to render you such fraternal as well as pro fessional assistance as may be in his power. my family join with me in the expression of sym pathy, and i remain, my dear friend, yours faithfully, dan'l kicketson. p. s. i am thinking of visiting concord when the spring is a httle further advanced. bangok, may 18th, 1876. dear mr. ricketson, — it seems almost uke distrusting your friendship to keep silent any longer, so now i write to tell you that i am ill. very often i have thought how pleasant it would be to receive your kind and sympathetic letters as of old, but i have not asked you to write, for i felt that i should be a most unworthy correspondent, and then i have 180 daniel kicketson and his friends refrained from arousing the anxiety of my friends. i cannot bear that they should be burdened on my account. my health has been steadily faihng ever since i left concord. i am suffering with ascites, — have been subjected to paracentesis seventeen times, so you can judge of the progress of the disease — it is a lingering one. my vitality surprises all my physi cians. how long i may continue of course i cannot know. tor the past five weeks i have been confined mostly to my bed, subjected to very great suffering. it is truly wonderful how evanescent are these bodily pains. you will be glad to know that notwithstanding my invahd condition i have been able to get much satisfaction out of life. memories of the past af ford me true consolation. i feel as i£ i had been singled out for peculiar blessings. no sad hours as yet have befallen me — they may come. thus far through divine blessing my soul is permitted to dwell in an atmosphere of cheerfulness, and i am now conscious of the infinite tenderness which over shadows au god's children. i feel very much interested to hear of the welfare of your family, and i hope you wiu write me. is the doctor still in new bedford ? some very sacred memories i associate with him, and shall be ever grateful for his most kind attentions. unless some favorable symptoms occur, i feel that my day for letter-writing is past. i write out of great weakness this morning, be letters of s. e. thoread and ricketson 181 lieving that you will pardon all discrepancies, and accept these lines from one who has ever valued your friendship and has still faith in its endurance. with very hind love to all, let me say farewell. s. e. thobbau. concord, monday, oct. 9, 1876. dear sir, — our dear friend sophia e. thoreau, passed away at bangor saturday morning. (7th.) becoming necessary to have the remains interred with the least possible delay, i left bangor saturday evening, and they were deposited in her grave at " sleepy hollow," at half past three yesterday in the presence of such friends as could be notified. rev. mr. reynolds performed the service at the grave and everything passed off most appropriately. she suffered greatly during the last weeks of her illness, but she had great fortitude and patience and died in full faith of a blessed immortality. her mortal remains rest by the side of her dear brother henry. the soul has gone to him who gave it, and who endowed it with such superior capacities. i should have written you from bangor, but my time was occupied to the last moment in making the necessary arrangements for the removal of her re mains. we have lost a dear friend, but she has found a sweet rest in heaven, i doubt not. we cannot regret her escape from mortal agony, and bless god for what we have known and enjoyed of her on earth. 182 daniel ricketson and his friends * mr. and mrs. le brun have been exceedingly kind and attentive in this time of trouble. with kind regards, i am very truly yours, etc., geo. h. thatcher. letters of a. bronson alcott, abby m. alcott, daniel ricketson, and frank b. sanborn .?^ '""s^iih,^ letters of a. bronson alcott, abby m. alcott, daniel ricketson, and frank b. sanborn concord, mass., nov. 15, 1898. dbae friends, walton and anna ricketson, — i ought long since to have acknowledged your kindness in sending me not only the photograph of the bust of thoreau, which is so pleasing, but also the excellent photograph of your father. but i wished to copy out for you a passage in mr. alcott's diary of 1857, which you may not have seen, and which shows his appreciation of mr. ricketson and of brooklawn, — here it is. brooelawn, wednesday, 1st april, 1857. at mr. ricketson's, two and one-half miles from new bedford, — a neat country residence, sur rounded by wild pastures and low woods, the little stream acushnet flowing east of the house and into fairhaven bay at the city. the hamlet of acushnet at the " head of the river " (so called popularly) lies within half a mile of ricketson's house. his tastes are pastoral, simple even to wildness ; and he passes a good part of his day in the fields and woods, — or in his rude " shanty " near his house, where he writes and reads his favorite authors, cowper 186 daniel eicketson and his friends having the first place in his affections. he is in easy circumstances, and has the manners of an english gentleman, — frank, hospitable, and with positive persuasions of his own. a man to feel on good terms with, and reliable as to the things good and true ; mercurial, perhaps, and wayward a little sometimes, but full of kindness and sensibility to suffering : something of a poet, too, — singing the common things around him with a genuine love and tenderness, reminding one of cowper, and, in the best lines, of wordsworth. he has just written some papers, and printed them in the new bedford " mercury " (a newspaper) on the antiquities of that place, of which he intends to make a book soon, illustrated with maps and portraits, the genealogies of the primitive famihes, and the local history of the district. his ancestors were among the original settlers, and were gentlemen of good estates. they were quakers, and the traits of that sect survive in him, as, indeed, in the best families here. he tells me most of them, by intermarriage, if not direct descent, spring from this formidable persuasion (the quakers). k. has an agreeable family, consisting of his wife and two daughters, also two sons, the oldest a sea man, the youngest a promising student, the whole family most friendly and hospitable. we talk on men, times, and things : on emerson particularly, as a representative of the american ideas, and thoreau as scarcely less so, and walk to the " head of the kiver," returning to dinner. in the afternoon we lettees of alcott, ricketson, and sanborn 187 ride into town (new bedford) and see weiss about talking some evening while i stay. he approves the design, and will move at once in the matter. thursday, april m. henry thoreau comes to tea ; also euery channing, who is engaged on the new bedford mercury, and we talk tiu into the evening, late. friday, sd, a. m. in house and shanty. thoreau and eicketson treating of nature and the wild. thoreau has visited r. before, and won him as a disciple, though not in the absolute way he has blake of worcester, whose love for t.'s genius par takes of the exceeding tenderness of woman, and is a pure platonism, to the fineness and delicacy of the devotee's sensibilities. but r. is himself, and plays the manly part in the matter, defending himself against the master's twistiness and tough " thorough craft," with spirit and ability. p. m. walk into the city and see weiss, who has seen his friends, and commends me to the arnolds, where he hopes to hold our conversations. chan ning returns with me to brooklawn, to smoke his pipe and joke with r. in the shanty. is not this a good brief account of that distant time when channing was living in new bedford, after the death of his wife, i in his house at con cord, with my sister sarah, and thoreau stiu making his tours and lectures and visits ? i had the pas sage copied out from mr. alcott's diary during his lifetime, while i was writing the "hfe of thoreau in 1881. 188 daniel ricketson and his fkiends walton's bust of thoreau is in place at the library, and makes a good effect. mr. channing, who was very ill a month ago, is now well again, and very homer-like ia his long white beard. yours ever, f. b. sanborn. concord, january 10, 1862. dbak friend, — you have not been informed of henry's condition this winter, and will be sorry to hear that he grows feebler day by day, and is evidently failing and fading from our sight. he gets some sleep, has a pretty good appetite, reads at intervals, takes notes of his readings, and likes to see his friends, conversing, however, with difficulty, as his voice partakes of his general debility. we had thought this oldest inhabitant of our planet would have chosen to stay and see it fairly dismissed into the chaos (out of which he has brought such precious jewels, — gifts to friends, to mankind gen erally, diadems for fame to coming followers, for getful of his own claims to the honors) before he chose simply to withdraw from the spaces and times he has adorned with the truth of his genius. but the masterly work is nearly done for us here. and our woods and fields are sorrowing, though not in sombre, but in robes of white, so becoming to the piety and probity they have known so long, and soon are to miss. there has been none such since plinyy and it will be long before there comes his like ; the most sagacious and wonderful worthy of his time, and a marvel to coming ones. letters of alcott, ricketson, and sanborn 189 . i write at the suggestion of his sister, who thought his friends would like to be informed of his condition to the latest date. ever yours and respectfully, a. bkonson alcott. bkooklawn, feb. 14th, 1862. dear friend alcott, — many thanks for your kind letter informing me of the lamentable state of our dear thoreau. i wrote his sister some two months since for information relative to his health, and her reply, perhaps, prepared me the more calmly to receive your more particular account of his pre sent state. i had still hopes of his eventual recovery, and cannot yet feel that we must lose him. how poorly can we spare him ! indeed, he has no peer. he has done more than any other to make old con cord classic ground. how nobly, how truly, how priestly has he hved — the most godlike of men. i feel much indebted to him ; how much, indeed, have we all enjoyed his companionship in wood and field and on his favorite stream ! concord will be in time to come a resort for the young and ardent pilgrim, whether poet, philosopher, or naturalist. poor channing will be more than ever stripped by his loss. mr. emerson, as well as yourself, haw thorne, and farmer hosmer, — in fact, all concord will meet with an irreparable loss in the event of his death. but cannot we hope yet ? i have felt that he might recover. i will not yet relinquish my heart's desire. 190 daniel kicketson and his friends i often think of you and mrs. alcott and your brave, good girls, daughters worthy of so noble a parentage. how i wish i could see you oftener, or in some way serve you ! i know of no pleasanter room than your own hbrary with its arched fireplace, the owner there of course. i stiu hold to my open wood fire, and have already laid in my next winter's wood, fourteen and a half cords, a little more than usual, but about two and a half cords are hard and soft pine. i think you would enjoy the hghter labor with me of packing upon a sled drawn by an honest yoke of oxen. oxen are truly classic beasts, and well become the woods as weu as the rural land scape. but can't you come and see me, and sit by our fireside once more? i am growing, i trust, calmer and milder, and i hope to " become more sage, milder and mellower with declining age." although i have never been able to possess a spirit in peace, i have always been an admirer of those who do ; and among those the most successful in this sphere of grace i know of none more truly so than you and our dear sufeering friend t. how beautiful is serenity ! i love it in nature as well as in human character. mountains and cataracts, heav ing waves, thunder and lightning, and generally what men call sublime, even the most impassioned eloquence, attract me not. how serene and lovely was jesus of nazareth — how much he excels au in the beautiful and simple grandeur of his life and death ! i trust dear thoreau will find a consolation^ letters of alcott, ricketson, and sanborn 191 if needed, in his gracious words and still more gra cious suffering and fortitude. truly we cannot make too much of him. one with the father, was he not? i am happy to inform you of the improved state of my wife's health ; my daughters, too, are well, and my youngest son, walton, who is our main stay. our eldest, arthur, the doctor, is surgeon in the navy, and is on board the u. s. ship nightingale, cruising in the gulf of mexico on his second voyage. a letter from him we received to-day in company with yours. he appears to be well satisfied with his sit uation, but i should much prefer for him to be at home, or at least on terra firma in a more peaceful walk of life. your letter bears date january 10th, but as it is postmarked february 11th, i consider you wrote on the 10th inst. i should be glad once more to see our dear henry thoreau, and should he hold on till milder weather i hope to take him again by the hand. do remem ber me most kindly and affectionately to him. i wrote channing of late, but hardly expect an an swer. please mention me in friendship to him. i must close, as i am just going to show a piece of forest pines to a young artist, a poor (rich) young genius, our frequent guest — robert swain giffiord by name, a native of naushon, one of the elizabeth islands that form the south side of our (buzzard's) bay, destined to be known hereafter, i ween. my wife, daughters, and son, individually, desire 192 daniel ricketson and his friends warm remembrances to you and yours. mrs. r. and our girls would like to be kindly remembered to mr. thoreau. remember me afeectionately to dear mrs. alcott, and believe me, as ever, your faitbful and affectionate friend, d. rickbtson. the shanty, beooklawn, 4th feb., 1865. dear and respected friend, — seeing your name in the last number of the " liberator " as one of the voices at the late anti-slavery meeting in boston, and agreeing with you in regard to him who may be regarded as the present leader of the anti slavery reform, to wit, — wendell phiuips, i have felt prompted once more to address you a few lines in the spirit of kindness and brotherly love. it is a long time since we have seen each other or passed a une. i feel that i have so much in common with you and my other concord friends that i often regret our separation. every year i become less and less of a traveller ; and that which once appeared a pleasure or a trifle in the undertaking is now quite an arduous affair. still, i hope to see old concord and my friends there, perhaps before the year closes, d. v. i wrote your good wife a letter some months since which i presume she received. i did not expect an answer, but hope my remembrance of her in this humble way was not altogether unwelcome. my letters of alcott, ricketson, and sanborn 193 daughters have been reading " moods," and to my queries relative to it, for i never read any works of fiction in these days, speak favorably, if not enthu siastically of its merits. this may sound to the fair' author as " faint praise," but it is not so intended. my youngest narrated the plot, and the eldest said she thought the book would do good in giving a more elevated idea of marriage among young people than usually obtains. i am glad thus to learn that your daughter is herein a public educator for good. vegetable diet does not appear to have quenched the tender passion in her heart, and i trust she is not proof against the shafts of the shrewd little god. my hf e goes on much after the old sort — my family cares, reading, writing, and meditation occupy my time, with occasional rambles in the woods and about the country. i am now in my fifty-second year, and nearly eight years older than when you visited us in the spring of 1857. i have passed through many experiences and some changes, and i trust have made some progress, so that i now might more truly affiliate with one of your calm and philo sophic character. what a chasm has the death of thoreau made in concord ! he did not seem to me to be a man to die, but to live on and on, and outlive his generation until he became so much affiliated to his own be loved rural haunts as to merge into some old mossy rock, wild flower, or favorite song-bird. but how handsomely he departed, leaving a lesson of sweet 194 daniel ricketson and his friends serenity and peace to the most christian philosopher. i trust he still hves in the land of the blest and is now enjoying his ardent pursuit in whatever is curious, beautiful, or good. i cannot conceive of him as an angel or an evangelist (he is probably both), but as some good old hermit or monk, who still drinks from some sweet fount of nature, and goes at night into his mossy cave or leaf-grown bower. am i irreverent ? if so, may heaven par don me, for the pearly gates must have indeed stood wide open for one so good, so wise, and so pure to enter. will you do me the favor the next time in your way to ask my good friend. miss sophia thoreau, if she received two letters from me in november last part, in reply to one i had just before received from her. i fear she, or her mother, may be iu, and should be glad to hear from her if not so. say to louisa that her literary fame has reached to this far out of the way corner, and that she is very popular with her readers. miss thoreau, who made us a short visit in the fall of '63, gave us a humorous account of her wig, and other interesting matters of her personality, showing her not to be an exception to the usual eccentricities of genius. with the kindest regards to your beloved wife and daughters, and all my good concord friends, particularly mr. emerson and family, beheve me, in the bonds of christian love. yours very truly, dan'l rickbtson. letters of alcott, ricketson, and sanborn 195 concord, february 12, 1865. deak feiend, — many thanks for your kind thoughts of me and mine. and especially of my daughter's story. your own and daughters' hearty words about its spirit and influence gave us plea sure. the book has provoked much criticism, has been widely read, and is winning an acceptance with discerning persons as surprising to its author as it is encouraging. immediately after your letter came to hand, i hastened to read it to the thoreaus. what you say of henry was most grateful to them. miss sophia desired me to say that but for the press of cares, your letters would not have been left so long unac knowledged and unanswered. she has been busily engaged in overlooking her brother's papers, copy ing some, reading the proof-sheets of the books of \cape cod and the letters, finding no moment for correspondence. besides, her mother's infirmity has been an additional and constant call upon her hands and heart. henry's letters are to appear soon, and will in crease his fame. you will be pleased to learn that there remains matter for a book or two of politics, one or more of morals, and several volumes of field and tdble-talk, the choicest reading all, and to be printed sometime. you speak of the spring of '57, and of having passed through many experiences since. happy man to have known changes at your age ! i trust the keys of life are in your keeping now. 196 daniel kicketson and his friends lately it has seemed as if the call had come for me to speak not in parlors alone, and privately, but from public platforms and pulpits, as if our right thinkers and best men's utterances needed to be followed out into clearness, to be complemented in assertions of a personal god, a vital theology, answering to the claims of this revolutionary time. neither james bushnell, phillips, emerson, quite content me. and yet these if any have good words to speak and the gifts for speaking them eloquently. you may have noticed in the boston papers our advertisement of some sunday evening lectures, to be given by these and others. i have my chance, too, and gave my own last sunday evening on american religion, by way of an opening. have been also at lynn and haverhill speaking lately. certainly men need teaching badly enough when any words of mine can help them. yet i would fain believe that not i, but the spirit, the person, sometimes speaks, to revive and spare. come and see me and let us talk over the land matters again. with pleasant memories of your family, i remain. your friend, a. bbonson alcott. mr. ricketson : my dear sir, — mr. alcott allows me to add a few words to his letter for my own sake. i received a kind long letter from you, to which had i been a theologian or given to arguing, should letters of alcott, ricketson, and sanborn 197 have replied without delay, but being neither a re ligious or spiritual minded person, i left it to the higher powers to acknowledge and accept. my gifts are few, what i have are for use and duty — i uve, love, and learn — and find myself more content every day of my life, with humble conditions. great principles and small duties define my position just now. the well accepted labors of my daughters, are the true pabuliun of a mother's happiness. the world has its charms, but home is heaven when it is the treasure-house of your offspring. the approaching spring or summer may tempt you to concord — it has lost much of its attraction, but there are still left those who would be pleased to see you. i am very respectfully your obliged, abby alcott. concord, feb. 12, 1865. waipole, april 22. to dan'l ricketson: dr sib, — i thank you from my heart for the very appreciative testimony you have so beautifully rendered to mr. alcott's gifts and graces. his, certainly, are powers and glories which the world neither gave nor can take away. our faith will increase with time and soul-culture, our hope will strengthen with love and spirit-force, our charity become all-abiding and diffusive, as the unseen and eternal are made more manifest. 198 daniel kicketson and his friends believe me most grateful for your home hospital ities to this gentle and beloved of yours most respectfully, abby m. alcott. to dan'l ricketson, esq. new bedford, mass., april 19, 1878. my dear pkiend, — i have just been reading the interesting sketch of good mr. pratt written by mr. sanborn, and the excellent memorial poem by your daughter louisa, to which i would add my humble testimony of respect for the good man's memory. he is indeed a great loss to your village, as well as to his family and friends. i would thank you, should opportunity ofeer, to present my sympathy to mrs. pratt and her son and his wife, with whom i have the pleasure of a slight acquaintance. i would also at this time, as i have often before felt moved to do, express to you and your daughters my sym pathy for your great loss and affliction in the death of dear mrs. alcott for whom i have ever entertained the highest respect. in thinking of her i am re minded of wordsworth's beautiful lines to his wife, wherein among other graces he speaks of her as a " noble woman, nobly planned." turn to the poem for her full portrait. i too have parted with a beloved wife, after a companionship of more than forty years. she died as she had lived, in peace and tranquility of mind. you knew her well, and you also knew how unworthy i was of her. she patient, kind, self-sacrificing, while i was almost the opposite letters of alcott, ricketson, and sanborn 199 to her in all those aceompushments that so beautify our humble nature. i often think of you and the pleasant walks and talks we have had together, and should be glad to resume them should occasion offer so to do. hoping this hasty note will find you and your family well i remain, yours very truly, dan'l ricketson. p. s. should you see channing please remember me kindly to him. i should not close without some mention of our lamented thoreau and his worthy family, whose old home i believe you now possess. he has left a void in concord that can never be filled. his fame is constantly on the increase, and if, as in his last ill ness, he said he should be ashamed to stay in this world after so much had been done for him, as he. never could repay his friends, how would the plain, dear old dogmatist now feel to see his name so hon ored at home and abroad. i should like also for you to remember me in terms of friendship and respect to mr. emerson. neither do i forget our old friend, farmer hosmer. he might have been born one hundred and fifty years ago just as well so far as modern fashion has afpected him. i am sorry that the old house of " ebby hubbard " is gone. concord should keep her old landmarks. the old parsonage (manse of hawthorne) will doubtless remain. but i must close this afterlogue. semper idem. 200 daniel ricketson and his friends concord, april 24, 1878. dbab fbibnd, — on returning from greenwood, where i passed last sunday, i find your most ac ceptable epistle, and wish i may return a fitting ac knowledgment for your kind sympathy, and appre ciation of departed ones of our mutual acquaintance. life can never be the same after a companion for hale of one's existence here has disappeared from this scene of mortahty. wordsworth's tribute might have been fitly addressed to the memory of my as cended partner — as to yours, i doubt not, from what i knew of her virtues. the more the incen tives now, my friend, to wprks worthy of both of them. and fortunately i am blessed with perfect health, i may add youthfulness of spirits, and wiu not disdain to round off my century, — god and good angels wilhng it. it is a fortunate time to live in and work nobly. since last november i have been living with my daughters in the thoreau house on main street. all of us but louisa are in good health, and she is rest ing a little and recruiting for future work. may has found a friend abroad. she writes last from havre, and appears to be happy with her switzer. yes, thoreau's fame is in the ascendant. a braver person has hardly trodden this globe in our day. channing i never meet now, nor hosmer often. emerson is less abroad than formerly. he pleads his old age when i meet him. he lectures, i read, this evening for old south. letters of alcott, ricketson, and sanborn 201 you speak of " the pleasant walks and talks we have had together, and how you would be glad to resume them." come on then, and pass a day or two with us, if it were but to recall those old times ! kemembrances to the doctor and lady, and a query about that bust of thoreau moulded by your son walton. very truly yours, a. bbonson alcott. vi lettees of william ellery chan ning and frank b. sanborn letters of william ellery chan ning and frank b. sanborn my dear mr. ric^etson, — there is a little matter of business to which i would ask your assist ance. possibly i may leave concord, and my aim would be to get a small place in the vicinity of a large town, with some land, and if possible near to some one person with whom i might in some mea sure fraternize. knowest thou, man of monies and affairs, of such a place in thy vicinity, or in the town of new bedford, in thy locality ? if so, i wiu come there and look at it. i am a poet, or of a poetical temper or mood, with a very limited income, both of brains and of monies. this world is rather a sour world. but as i am with you equally an admirer of cowper, why should i not prove a sort of unnecessary addition to the neighborhood, possibly? and how is new bedford, and hast thou, lover of cowper, any means of renting houses adapted to poets, seeking roofs to cover them ? something moder ate, with one large room on the first floor, if possible 24x 24. do not object to an old house, must be near schools and church (old fashion unitarian if 20g daniel ricketson and his friends possible), no objection to groves, lakes, seas, or rivers, in the neighborhood. come, my neighbor, thou hast now a new occu pation, the setting up of a poet and literary man, one who loves old books, old garrets, old wine, old pipes, and (last, not least) cowper. we might pass the winter in comparing variorum editions of our favorite authors, and the summers in walking and horticulture. this is a grand scheme of life. all it requires is the house of which i spake. i think one in middle life feels averse to change, and especially of local change. the lares et penates love to establish themselves, and desire no moving. but the fatal hour may come, when bidding one long, one last adieu, to those weather-beaten penates, we sally forth with don quixote once more to strike our lances into some new truth, or life, or man. yours in cowper w. e. channing. my address : harrison square massachusetts. nov., 1856. harrison sq., dec. 20, 1858. dear sir, — i trust you will not think i have neglected your favor, which i received too late to make any practical use of, and was also away when the last note arrived. i trust now that i will be able to come to tarkiln hill station the first week of january. should i be able to do so, i will send you word a day or two previous. letters of channing and sanborn 207 i am greatly indebted for your prompt and cor dial answer, and am also much pleased that h. d. t. has been down and enjoyed himself so much as he says among the middleboro ponds. he is so noble and admirable a man, that i wonder he was not long since canonized, or raised up among men as an elder or a guide. but he is too good for a supereminent position, which he dwarfs by the majesty of his genius. let you and i in our dying moments lack not one thought and one feeling i£ not many more for this admirable man, who has not only instructed us by his excellent writings, but has also led us for ward, to do and to dare, by the example of a brave and generous life. i am afraid that our admirable friend will not readily disconnect himself from the old associations, the old shoes of his native village, and that both he and i must be buried in the same fields which we have so long trod. but as often as he can be had in bristol county i am certain she will be no loser, and who knows but that some day the same pro lific pen which hath done so much to illustrate mid dlesex may give forth by its native excellence the features of our new bedford landscape. alas ! if the world was not so rich by the pos session of h. d. t., we might inquire why there were not more of the same kidney. and yet let us be thankful for even the faintest splendor of genius. she has her sunsets and sunrises, her seas and woods, but one soul of genius, one heart of oak and hand of fire, throws all her greatest splen 208 daniel ricketson and his friends dors, her liveliest superiorities, ineffably into the shade. if h. d. t. were not our best writer, if he were only our best man, that were enough. singular that so excellent a soul should also have had so superior a scribbkng faculty. you who have lately come into the good graces of our worthy friend may not perceive the whole value of my fleeting eulogium, and may suspect me of touching too high topics. but i so long enjoyed the companionship of our excellent friend, i have sat so long at his feet, and experienced so greatly the worth of his genius, that surely i am qualified to write at some length of his merits, foremost of which is that unfailing truth and reahty of his heart and life, which, as it cannot be too highly valued in fact, so neither can it be too highly praised in words. god grant that you may find in him, in the midst of this stricken and suffering world, a solace for your soul and a comfort to your apprehensions. ricketson, h. d. t. is a man on whom you may whouy rely, and who will not be found faulty in the judgment day, dies ilia, &c. yours for the best, w. e. c. d. eicketson, esq. concord, mass., july 21st, 1898. dear fkiesus, anna and walton eickbtson ! it occurs to me that you may like to see what mr. letters of channing and sanborn 209 channing has been saying o£ your father ; you will know how to make allowance for his modes of ex pression. what he says of the journal perhaps relates only to the few years when he was much at brooklawn ; but it suggests to me that there may be a great deal in the volumes concerning our transcendentalist circle which it might be well to publish at some time. have you ever had a thought of that ? yours truly, f. b. sanborn. "he has haunted my mind," said c. to-night; " he was a man so peculiar ; there are none left like him, — never was there another. he was the quick est of all men in his movements, — quick as a dog : he would see the teamsters coming down his hill from freetown with loads of wood, or something else, and he would rush out without his hat, hail them, and scold them for ill-treating their cattle or horses. he had the evils of the world on his mind all the time ; being a reformer, could not get them out of his mind. he was always in a hurry, flying from one thing to another. he seldom sat in the house with the family, unless there were strangers there ; but as soon as the meal was over would go out to the shanty, and while i sat by the open wood fire and smoked, he sat down at the table by the window and wrote in his journal, paying no attention to me. what has become of all those journals ? there were thousands of pages. they 210 daniel ricketson and his friends would be very valuable if preserved. where do you suppose they are now ? " i used to walk up to brooklawn every sunday while i lived in new bedford (1856-1858), not by the road in front of the house, but through the woods on a road behind. sometimes we would drive off to a lake in the suburbs of freetown, ten miles off, taking a stock of provisions, and spend the day there ; then get back in time for tea, when ' uncle james ' (thornton) would be there from the town, where he had a room. after tea, mr. ricketson and i would walk back part way with him ; he was the mildest, most amiable man conceivable, — al ways called mr. r. 'daniel.' everybody admired ' uncle james,' — and mrs. r. was another sweet and amiable person." vii lettees of «theo." beown letters of "theo." brown worcester, mass., jan. 19, 1868. mr. ricketson : dear sir, — i have several times of late thought of a walk i had with you (my friend blake was there too) one summer afternoon many summers ago, at middleborough pond, through a ^ony pasture, in which you told me you had been wont to string your thoughts into rhyme, and, following my incli nation, i have taken my pen to recall the time to you. if any of your time is as cheap to you as much of mine is to me, you can afford to read it and possibly to answer it. there is a bird which every summer keeps me in constant remembrance of that afternoon, — it is the bird whose song, according to your translation, is " please don't grieve." we reclined upon a bank near some water, i think, awhile, and talked of thoreau, whom we all had quite an admiration for. it may interest you to hear of the last visit which i with blake made at his (thoreau' s) house a short time before he died. we took our skates, and then the cars as far as framingham. from some two miles north of framingham we took to the river and 214 daniel ricketson and his friends skated nearly to thoreau's house. we found him pretty low, but well enough to be up in his chair. he seemed glad to see us. said we had not come much too soon. we spent some hours with him in his mother's parlor, which overlooks the river that runs all through his life. there was a beautiful snowstorm going on the while which i fancy in spired him, and his talk was up to the best i ever heard from him, — the same depth of earnestness and the same infinite depth of fun going on at the same time. i wish i could recall some of the things he said. i do remember some few answers he made to ques tions from blake. blake asked him how the future seemed to him. " just as uninteresting as ever," was his characteristic answer. a little while after he said, " you have been skating on this river ; per haps i am going to skate on some other." and again, "perhaps i am going up country." he stuck to nature to the last. he seemed to be in an exalted state of mind for a long time before his death. he said it was just as good to be sick as to be well, — just as good to have a poor time as a good time, — the which, if we could always reahze, the little bird referred to above might have to find other audience for his singing. have you been to concord since his death ? the river still runs and the birds still sing and the flowers blossom, but to my eye nature somehow looked bereft of her lover. the loss seemed so great that one could easily fancy that the river would hence letters of "theo." brown 215 forth run only tears, and that the bobolinks even, if they sung at all, would sing in the minor key. i think it no small achievement to so live as to raise the value of one's surroundings. that thoreau has done. i suppose i may feel a httle more acquainted with you than you do with me from the fact of having heard thoreau talk so much about you. yours truly, thbo. brown. worcesteb, february 21, 1869. friend rickbtson, — my friend blake has just been in to smoke with me before going to bed, and he read me a letter he had from you recently. your mention in it of our landing on the south shore of middleboro pond incites me to hegiii at least a note to you, for i have a very pleasant recollection of our crossing that pond and also of our walk the day before through the rocky pasture — a favorite place of yours, and where i think you told us the little sparrow — whose name i don't know but whose song i do — sang to you " please don't grieve." he always sings the same to me since. but i grieve, nevertheless, sometimes. that walk is getting a good way into the past, and we are getting somewhat older. i am a great deal older. how goes the world with you ? if such a question were put to me i should have to confess that i had passed the summit some time ago. i see the sun rise less often than i used to, and i 216 daniel ricketson and his friends fear prize the day less that it makes after it has risen, — look forward with less anticipation to the spring, — am not always on hand to see the first bobolink that arrives from the south — coming in with a flourish like the hero in a play after the play gets well started — and breaks open and floods the meadow with song before alighting on the spear of grass that bends over and lets him down out of sight. but i remember a few sunrises, and a spring or two with bobolinks and buttercups to them, — springs in which the great lif etide that floods every thing found its way and crept up into the little pri vate rill that fed my hf e, and entranced me with the old and forever new wonder and delight. but i am perhaps 'giving you a larger dose of my self than our short acquaintance warrants. your hking for thoreau and your translation of the sparrow's song make me feel pretty well acquainted with you, and that must be my apology if one is needed for thus addressing you. i should like to hear from you all you feel inclined to teu. blake and i think of calling on you some day, or we have thought of doing so. he with his wife ex pects to go abroad next april and they may be gone a year and a half if they like it, so you wfll not probably see us very soon, but his going will not prevent my going to see you. it will make it all the more necessary for me. i wish we might see you here. don't you ever have dccasion to come through worcester ? yours truly, thbo. brown. letters of "theo." brown 217 wokckster, may 10, '69. friend eicketson, — your note containing the proem was duly received, and, if i had followed my feelings would have been responded to then, but, fearing such promptness might alarm you and so prove detrimental to this exchange of notes of ours, i put it in my pocket, and there it has been until now. i find the date so far back as to occasion what there is of apology in the above. if your poems read as smoothly and pleasantly as the proem i think they must be read by many more than you wrote them for. when will the volume come out ? i want to see it. methinks the birds will be heard in some of the stanzas. judging from the proem i hardly think we shall hear the bob-o-link in them much, or if we hear him his singing will be softened from its distance in the past. have you heard of a mr. hotham who has built him a house on the bank of walden pond near where thoreau lived and has spent the winter there? i went to his house some months ago, and found him an interesting man. he said he came there out of health, and one object in coming was to regain it. another to do some literary work he had in hand, which, by the way, he said was of a theological character. he said he chose that location in spite of it looking like following thoreau, thinking the fact of thoreau's having lived there in a similar way would serve as a sort of breakwater and save him answering a great many questions, which it did. his talk about nature was very interesting to me, 218 daniel kicketson and his friends and seemed much like thoreau's. but it occurs to me that he has been written about in the papers, and probably you may have seen the accounts. my friend blake has gone. i think i told you o£ his intention of going to europe and remaining there some year and a half, if he likes. now if we (blake and i) walk together it must be on the margin of the sea, across which we can shout occasionally in the loud notes we exchange with each other. truly yours, theophilus brown. viii letters of daniel ricketson and alexander h. japp, ll. d. letters of daniel ricketson and alexander h. japp, ll.d. 20 west cedab st., boston, u. s. a., deo. 6th, 1887. my dear sir, — i hold the pen for my son, walton ricketson, with whom i am on a visit, to acknowledge the receipt of a copy of the november number of " the welcome " magazine, with your excellent arti cle on our friend, henry david thoreau. please ac cept our thanks for the complimentary notice you have so gracefully given. my son is now well estab lished in his profession, and his last work. dawn and twilight, — medallions, — are meeting with fine success. he and an only sister, both single, are keeping hous^ together. my home is still in new bedford, about sixty miles from here, in the s. e. corner of massachusetts, boston being our capital or metropolis. for thirty years, during the child hood and youth of my children, we resided in the country a few miles from our city, so that a good part, perhaps the best of their education, came from their familiarity with natural objects and the healthy influence of a rural life. here it was that our beloved thoreau, with other honored. guests, visited us. he was cheerful and highly entertaining as well as instructive. as a naturaust in its most 222 daniel kicketson and his friends inclusive sense, i have never met his equal. he had made a thorough study of all the plants, the feath ered tribes, our native quadrupeds, and was highly endowed with historical and aboriginal lore. be sides, he was a good classical scholar, a graduate of harvard college, and well read in european as well as oriental literature. it was interesting to hear him and emerson dis cuss some point of ethics, perhaps, wherein there was a difference of opinion, and where i have thought thoreau had the best of it. to compare him with emerson, he had not the courtly urbanity, but equal dignity and self-poise of manner, — arcades amho nevertheless. no one who knew them as well as their intimate friends did, could fail to see the great originality of each. as for myself, if you will excuse an episode of egoism, i have achieved but little, nor ha^e i desired fame. i have rather been the friend of good and noted men and women. still, from ^y loophole of retreat, i have caught an occasional glance at the world of men and manners, while i have never been able to mix much with it, always returning from my contact to my woods and fields as with a native instinct for fresh air and freedom. i have not been idle, however; besides making two homes in the country, with au their attendant cares of rural archi tecture and landscape gardening, i was for a quarter of a century deeply interested in the great cause of aboution, which resulted in the cruel and demoral izing civil war and the freedom of the slave. of letters of ricketson and japp 223 quaker stock, whose ancestry dates back to the days of fox and penn, i abhor war and violence. in fact, i am a quaker, or friend, rather, still, and should have preferred in addressing you, to have adopted the simple manner of expression. i have some acquaintance with the press, though my name has probably never reached your ears. for many years i corresponded with the late wil liam howitt, an interesting file of whose letters i still keep. i think england has hardly done him justice. he had much of the fire and patriotism of john bright, with a broader humanity, and would have honored any post in the realm. one englishman, at least, early recognized and sought out thoreau, — the late thomas cholmonde ley, esq., an oxford man, of condover hall, shrews bury, shrops., who spent several weeks with tho reau at his home in concord, about which time they paid me a visit. he was afterwards married, and died on his wedding tour in italy from malarial fever. a fine, highly cultivated enghsh gentleman. for some years i corresponded with his brother reginald, but we have heard nothing from him of late. another correspondent i had for many years, the late rev. william barnes, the dorset poet, a clergy man of the old school of gilbert white and william gilpin. he died about a year ago at the age of eighty-six years. i have sent copies of my letters from him to his son, who is also a rector of the church, as a biography of him is contemplated. i 224 daniel ricketson and his friends have at present no correspondent in england. i have outlived most of mine here, my age nearing seventy-five years. i have published privately somewhat — among them a volume of poems entitled "the autumn sheaf," 1869. but, as i have intimated, i am un known in the world of letters. my son and daughter wish to be cordially remem bered to you. he proposes to send herewith photo graphs of his dawn and twilight. i am very truly yours, dan'l kicketson. 48 fitzkoy st., fitzeoy sq., london, w., dec. 27th, 1887. my dear sir, — it gave me the liveliest pleasm-e to receive and read your friendly letter of december 6th. the details you give me respecting your life were most interesting to me ; the more so since in so many respects they suggest something in my own, as to strivings and ideals in certain directions, though, as yet, i have not very much passed dante's " mid way line of kfe." i, too, have striven for freedom and fresh air ; for escape, as far as circumstances would allow, from the dominations of social tyran nies and exactions. as soon as my position allowed it, i established myself in a little house in essex, in the most varied and romantic part of itj near colchester, and spent half the week there, amongst flowers and trees and birds, rejoicing in the beauty and blessing of it all. . . . letters of ricketson and japp 225 i am always busy on some theme or another, and have more to do than i can well manage. i am delighted in what you tell me of your family arrangements. it must be a pleasant change for you to go from new bedford to boston now and then, and get stimulus and suggestion — this quick ens the sense of quiet enjoyment in rural sights and sounds. i am with you in what you say of dear william howitt. mrs. howitt gave, if i remember right, in good words, some admirable reminiscences of their life in some periods — genial, unafeected, faithful. no doubtjyou saw these and enjoyed them. barnes's faithful dorsetshire, in which he embodied some beautiful fancies and ideals, has long been a delight some study of mine. i will look out with the more interest and curiosity for the life, knowing that some of his letters to you may be there. if i am not too intrusive and exacting, it would please me much to have a copy of your volume, " the autumn sheaf," if you can spare one. i might find some chance of referring to it or of quoting from it. did you ever put on paper any record of your work in the abolition cause, and impressions of the men who were active in it with you and whom you knew? did you know the tappans, garrison, gerrit smith ? i would be glad if you would tell me of this. the abolitionist work has my warmest sympathy, and many of the workers my deepest reverence and admiration. i have written here and there on the subject, and also on the progress of the 226 daniel kicketson and his friends f reedmen since their emancipation in the " sunday magazine," &c., &c. i am much pleased to know that walton's dawn and twilight have had a good success. you men tion that he meant to send me photos. as yet i have not received them ; but i was to blame in not sending him a note with " the welcome " with my town address of more recent years. i do hope, through this cause, they have not gone astray, for i would prize them — much. at the time i sent "the welcome" i was suffering from rheumatism complicated with a writer's cramp in the arms, and shyed every line of writing i could avoid, dictating for pen, which i found a most trying and painful operation. thank god ! have got rid of that now. it is one of the dreams of my life to see amer ica. mr. james t. fields gave me pressing invita tions to spend a summer with him at his house, gambrell cottage, at manchester-by-the-sea ; but, alas ! he will not be there when i come. i should like to wander about concord, thinking of emer son, thoreau, hawthorne ; to walk leisurely about boston, and to look at new york in passing. it is a dream ; i do not know if it will ever be any thing else ; but some cherished memory-shaded spots seem so familiar that i might find the reality quite different. but i remember wordsworth's " three yarrows." when you write to me again, which i hope you will do, do adopt the style of address, pray, which you find most easy and spontaneous. give my most letters of kicketson and japp 227 grateful remembrances to walton and his sister in boston, and believe me, dear friend, always yours most sincerely, alex. h. japp. 48 fitzrot st., fitzrot sq., london, w., feb. 15, 1888. my dear friend, — i am sure you must be think ing me very remiss in not having written sooner to acknowledge the receipt of your kind letter and also the two volumes of your poems you were so good as to forward me by the same post. but i have had no end of unexpected things to occupy me. the condition of my poor wife is only worse, and what with her sufferings and her sleeplessness, i find that the strain is so great that i cannot keep up my reg ular routine work, and fall into arrears, and then the happy moments of comparative escape come so seldom now that even trifles sometimes seem heavy tasks. so my correspondence has suffered in a way it does not usually ; and i am sure you will accept for once my excuses. well, i did not lose much time in reading your poems, finding in them the honest utterance of a loving and earnest mind, keenly affected by the sufferings of others, and always intent on kindliness, — a nature too, with the finest impulses to nature ward, and an eye for all sweet and tender and lovely forms. particularly do i like " autumn twilight " and the " winter sketch." 228 daniel eicketson and his friends " such reward kind nature gives to him who in her quiet lives." i am exceedingly pleased to have these volumes to add to my library, and thank you most sincerely for sending them, and for the pleasure which the reading of them has given me. i wonder you do not put on paper some of your reminiscences, particularly of the anti-slavery men with whom you were for so many years in close association. i am sure your sketches would contain much of value, interest, and influence. i hope you will do so some day soon. your poem to whittier i have cut out and put into my album for such things. yes, it would delight me to show you the " col chester " country. there we have traces of four civilizations : first romans, then frizians, then danes, then saxons. the northeast coast just at the point is particularly rich — not in old buildings and walls alone, as in colchester, but remains of roman dwell ings or camps in out-of-the-way corners. at a farm on the side of the colne, near alresf ord — alsf ord (as it is locally called) — below wivenhoe, whole streets of roman villas have been unveiled to view below the earth, only a foot and a half or so ; the farmer being surprised at turning up, when ploughing, scores on scores of httle cubelets, of different colors, all of one size, with the angles as sharp as when first made. these had formed portions of mosaic floor ings, and when the ground was open one could trace out the whole lie of the settlement. i went there letters of kicketson and japp 229 frequently and was much interested. and beyond this, the scenery on some parts of the colne is fine, though the river in its upper portions is disappoint ing. we have here what you have not — reucs of antiquity that we can connect with a great long-past civihzation, whereas your red indian relics, great as they are, tell only of a semi-wild race ; hut they have their own attractions too. i wish i could send you some return in kind for your volumes. but at present i have no quite recent product from the press beyond magazine and review literature ; but by and by, i hope to be able to gratify myself in this regard. since i went to stay in the country i have done a little in the way of more systematic observation of nature, and have published one or two essays in the " gentleman's magazine ; " others i trust will come towards the end of the year in " good words," etc., etc. now i do hope you will not allow the shortness of my letter to hinder you from giving me another soon ; the peculiarly painful position in which i am placed just now must be my excuse for so worthless an epistle, and next time i hope that i may do better. believe me, my dear friend. always yours sincerely, alex. h. japp. p. s. whilst i was in the midst of writing this letter, i received the photographs of dawn and twilight, which have had three journeys now across 230 daniel eicketson and his friends the atlantic. they are worth it, if measured by the pleasure their fine ideality and beauty of outline and expression have given me. i wish i could see the marble. i may some day. please to tell walton this, as i won't be able to give him a letter for a day or two, and remember me most kindly to both at boston when writing. a. h. j. autumn twilight. chill the autumn wind is blowing ; evening throws her veil around ; soon on hill-top and in valley naught but darkness will be found. reft of all the summer glory stand the stately forest trees ; where so late sweet notes reechoed, swells alone the sighing breeze. but there is a charm in autumn for the contemplative mind ; nature aye will teach the keason truth in all her walks to find. leave the school of worldly wisdom, thou of thought and careworn brow ; and for him who rules the seasons. learn in solemn awe to bow. look abroad upon the landscape. meadows, hills, and woods around ; letters of ricketson and japp 231 are not these more grateful teachers than in human lore are found ? search the broad, blue, arching heavens to their vast empyrean height ; think of him above who made them by his awful word of might. one clear beam from nature's teaching, once received into thy heart, shall awaken more true wisdom than a score from halls of art. a winter sketch. when winter's horn blows loud and clear, and snow drifts down the silent glen, when slowly goes the waning year, and few of nature's smiles are seen. then to the woods i often go. heedless alike of wind or snow. 't is not when naught but smiles are seen, and fields are gay with new-blown flowers. when the old woods are robed in green, that nature shows her greatest powers ; but when her hidden forces rise, and clouds and storms deform the skies. for then more boldly rush the streams. the waterfall more loudly roars. and to the gale the raven screams. as o'er the lofty pines he soars. 232 daniel kicketson and his friends and the riven branches loudly crack, while echo sends the tumult back. 't is then the mighty sea is tossed, and the frail bark to the tempest stoops, when billows lash the rock-girt coast, where the gray sea-gull slowly swoops ; and on the wind is often heard the voice of some storm-driven bird. then far within the woods' retreat with eager steps i gladly hie. where each familiar haunt i greet, as old friends in adversity. for here a countless store i find. that on me shed their influence kind. the robin flits across my way. as though he would my coming hail. the black-cap hops from spray to spray, and near by whirrs the startled quail ; while frisking on some neighboring bough. the squirrel eyes me as i go. the green moss peeps forth from the snow, and sweetly smiles at winter's frown. while with their load the maples bow. and humbly wear their winter crown. such rich reward kind nature gives to him who in her quiet lives. 1838. letters of ricketson and japp 233 new bedford, mass., u. s. a., jan. 3, 1890. my dbak friend, — i have been reading over again your letters to me, and am so much impressed with their friendly spirit, as well as sentiments and tastes similar to my own, that i feel an apology is almost required of me for allowing so long a time to have passed since i received your last at the time of your great affliction and bereavement in the loss of your beloved wife. as time mellows all our woes, i trust you have found its benign influence upon your own great sorrow, while it will remain hallowed in memory, and the same sweet spirit ever be present to comfort you on your earthly pilgrimage. you must remember that i am an old man, for i am far advanced in my seventy-seventh year, while i con clude that you are hardly of middle age. in your letter of july 5, 1888, you intimate possibilities of visiting friends in buenos ayres, of a trip to nor way the next year, " at the time when the midnight sun is at its best." also a future prospect of america (u. s.). whether you have or have not performed all this or a portion of it i am of course unaware ; so, should you have the goodness to reply, i shall be pleased to hear. as for myself, having never been capable of much endurance in body or mind in these accumulated years, i have been obliged to follow the good advice of emerson in his poem, " terminus," and have long ago taken in the sail that so smoothly and sweetly wafted me along in youth's gay prime. 234 daniel kicketson and his friends i am just now recovering from an attack in octo ber last of acute bronchitis, so that i am weaker and more sensitive to atmospheric changes than for merly. our new england climate is less agreeable than that of old england ; and we have much more reason, if we have any good right to grumble, than the native-born briton. as much as i am attached to my native land, and deeply so to this spot where i have spent nearly all my long hfe, settled by my forefathers over two hundred years ago, i have often felt when reading the works of the great geniuses of our fatherland, particularly the grand old poets and lovers of nature, that i should have been as happy, if not more so, had my lot been cast there. now i can only hope, d. v., to find in the realms beyond those to whom i owe so much of this life's happi ness. am i not repeating you, dear friend, in these aspirations ? since we corresponded, i have passed several let ters with mr. h. s. salt, who is writing the life of thoreau, and speaks of having received kind assist ance from dr. japp. i will now close, hoping that you are comfortably settled once more in your house, and enjoying the gentler pursuits which a lover of nature and whole some art values as his best earthly possessions. i need hardly add that i remain, with much esteem. your attached friend, dan'l ricketson. letters of ricketson and japp 235 the limes, elmstead, colchester, jan. 31, 1890'. my dbae friend, — it was with the hveliest pleasure that i received your letter of the 3rd janu ary, which i did not do till after a little delay owing to my having come down here and left 48 fitzroy street. i have managed to pull through this winter, running up and down to london, but it has taken so much out of me, and owing to the exposure i have suffered so much from rheumatism, eczema, and bad chest, that i am afraid i cannot face another winter in the country, much as i like it : so that this at the end of the coming autumn will be re duced merely to a summer resort, and new arrange ments made. but, in spite of all, i have managed to get through a fair amount of work — in work nowadays i find almost my only anodyne for the grief that wears, though i am only about fifty, and feel t have a good bit of energy and work in me yet. they tell me — those who have known me from youth — that i do not look changed, but looks are misleading. i feel ever so much changed. i have written or edited three books within the past year, and have been steadily writing in three or four magazines and as many weekly newspapers, and another volume under the assumed name of conder pray, under which nom de plume i have done a lot before. i have sent several things to mrs. farman pratt, — do you know her ? — for " wide awake," which i suppose will come soon, both prose and verse, and she asks me for more in the same lines. in the 23g daniel kicketson and his friends " sun," a new scotch magazine, i have been writing a series " in the youth of the world," of which i send you by book post the two first numbers as spe cimens. (there is a misprint of " altar " for " atlas" in the very first few lines, which please correct, as i forgot to do so before putting up the packet.) i also enclose some notices in the parcel of some of my recent work. by the way, there is an attempt at blank verse, ""sir guy of devon," etc., by me in the " sun," which was reviewed in the funniest way, being anonymous, and great wonder expressed at the identity of " this promising disciple of the ten nysonian school." when you write again let me know what you think of it. i tried a volume of poems — did i send you a prospectus before ? — but i did not get quite the number of subscribers that would have saved me from risk, and, at the present time, i cannot afeord to run much risk. i wonder if one or two subscribers could be found in boston, had james t. fields been hving, he would have helped me, i know. but i am not acquainted with any one such as him there now. i am sorry to hear of your suffering so much, but trust that the spring weather, which, i hope, may come to you with this letter, may be in your favor. you have now reached a long age, and i remember that some one — i think hervey, pope's sporus — remarked that as " we get on in life the ways get rougher," which i am afraid is true, with but few exceptions. i begin to feel it so myself already. i did not, for the reason i have given above, letteks of ricketson and japp 237 manage my tour, though i still live in the hope of yet seeing america ; and of seeing you when i come. what delightful days we could spend — would you not accompany me to concord and walk along that now classic stream musketiquid, wander around walden and think of thoreau, and find out emer son's woodlot where he walked and meditated, where we could walk and meditate and think of this new plato in his new grove of academe, and go to and look at the old manse, and muse on hawthorne, and his strange, dreamy, eerie genius, so compounded of sun and of shadowy cobwebby twilight, like the wine that is mellowed to the height in the dark cellars, and owes something to the darkness and the cobwebs? ah me, so we could do our journey; but, if we do not manage that, shall we not dream our dream, and make it as real as the fact? yes, we can, and we will : such power is in the spirit framed to friendly and pious resolutions. the papers i enclose in the packet will tell you all my titles, which preserve for title-pages, where they ought to be ; though for one of the very youngest ll. d.'s ever made at glasgow, having been honored to stand by principal tallock, professor wood, and such men in receiving it in 1874. i am glad you were able to give my friend mr. salt some help ; he will do thoreau with the finest sympathy, for he is a lover of thoreau himself : a man of fine scholarship and sensibihty. he was at one time an eton master : but found it too restrictive, gave it up, and betook himself to literature and the most simple life. 238 daniel ricketson and his friends i enclose or annex a little notice of reissue of a book of mine which made a fair success in amer ica some years ago, and was widely noticed. this cheap edition will have much of new. mr. fields in his lectures on de quincey used to praise it highly. i have just come back from the funeral of one of the sweetest and most original of our young poets, mrs. pf eiffer — emily pf eifleer — who has survived her husband only one year. when i saw her late in december she was so hopeful of betterness and so fuu of schemes of work, both literary and philan thropic, that her death is a personal loss to me. her sonnets are very fine, a few almost equal to mrs. barrett browning. i had written a sketch of her from personal knowledge and personal study of her works, for a magazine, which was stereotyped for the march number before she died, and i had to go and mend it up and add an addendum to it : and she never had the pleasure to see what she had her self so largely contributed to. but i must pull up, else i fear that you will feel, what with my garrulity and my bad writing, i am likely to become a bore : but somehow i feel a kind of famiuarity such as would only be possible to minds somewhat kindred, and when i once begin, feel in clined to go on. with the kindest remembrances to miss ricket son, and mr. walton, beheve me to remain, always yours most sincerely, alex. h. japp. letters of ricketson and japp 239 mr. john hogg, 13 paternoster row, announces as in the press a new edition in one volume, of h. a. page's " thomas de quincey, his life and writings, with unpubhshed correspondence." this new edition will furnish new matter, and will be thoroughly revised — in great part rewritten ; mr. page having once more, with mr. de quincey's family, gone over papers and letters hitherto un examined. the volume will include portraits of de quincey, professor wilson, and sir william ham ilton, from originals in possession of mr. john hogg. new bedford, mass., u. s. a., feb. 18, 1890. my dear fbibnd, — your welcome letter of the 31st ultimo came duly to hand, together with the " sun" magazine for october and november, also the prospectus of your forthcoming volume of poems. i have re-read " the echo of a song," so marked for delicacy and beauty, and make use of a quotation by my dear old friend and correspondent, the rev. william barnes, when some twenty years ago i sent him the introductory lines to my " autumn sheaf" followed by the volume itself. " ex unque conem," which i hope and doubt not, wiu be better verified by yours than mine. the amount of literary labor you have performed and are still engaged in, quite surprises me, but i doubt not has greatly alleviated the bitterness of your bereavements and sorrows. it is southey, i think, who says : — 240 daniel ricketson and his friends " heaven hath assigned two sovereign remedies for human woes, religion, surest, firmest, first and best, and strenuous labor next." your scholarship must be very large to comprise such a variety of topics as you write upon so instruc tively and so well. i have rather been a friend of good scholars than one myself. my classical know ledge is quite limited, both in ancient and modern lore. my poems, if i may so speak of them, were written, as i trust they evince, as the simple record of my own daily experiences and observations. i suppose that i am culpably deficient in the laws of versification — a slight knowledge of which only i learned from my old adam's latin grammar, and never rightly attempted to apply them. to one accustomed to the modern enghsh poets, i should think they might appear very puerile — to me, how ever, they are a comfort in my old age, as pleasant pictures of past and happier days. perhaps a critic like alfred austin, who so severely descants upon the artificial productions of modern english poets, might see in my humble lines somewhat that har monized with the natural love of song in the heart of man as coming from the groves and fields and other rural objects which my dear master, the good cowper, so beautifully describes : he, for me, is the truest and best of all old england's grand array of poetic genius. from the time when i, a boy of some fifteen years, found a mutilated copy of " the task" in a chest with other old books, among them letters of ricketson and japp 241 " rasselas " and " the pleasures of hope," to the present, i love him and his work hefore all others. am i too egotistic ? if so, i hope you will par don me as excusable in an old fellow of nearly seventy-seven years, if consciousness of that base metal does not preclude excuse. i should be very happy to aid in the introduction of your literary works in this country, but i have little or no ability or power so to do ; so far as my immediate interest is concerned, i may not be want ing. i sent your letter to my son and daughter, which they read with friendly interest and returned. they are again settled in concord, mass., the home of thoreau, emerson, alcott, &c. except for the gradual failure of old age, 1 am well and remain. yours very truly, dan'l ricketson. new bedford, mass., u. s. a., jan. 30, 1893. my dear friend, — i have often thought of you • since we last corresponded, and now i am prompted to write to you, and thank you for the poems which came duly to hand. i have read a goodly number of them and my wife has read to me from time to time many more. i am not fully qualified to judge of their merits, but should think they were the pro duct of a scholarly mind. although i had a moder ately classical education, i was a dull scholar, and failed so in my examination at harvard college that i gave up any further trial. i read law in a desul 242 daniel kicketson and his friends tory kind of way for several years, but found myself unfit for the legal practice, and after my marriage retired from our busy town to the rural neighbor hood where i spent about thirty years, engaged in a variety of rural and literary employments. my love of retirement and unambitious nature, with an early moderate estimate of my abihties, have confined me to a very umited public about my native place. i have again been looking over your " thoreau " with renewed interest, and read over your letters to me, all of which i have preserved. i find also in " men of our time " or some such title of a work in our city library : alexander hay japp, ll. d., &c., born 1840 at dunn, forfarshire, scotland ; educated at montrose academy and at the university of edinburgh." i am pleased to find you are a fellow countryman of burns. i was for several years an honorary member of a " burns club " now extinct, in our city. we also celebrated scott's centenary (aug. 15, 1871) in our city hall. some of tanna hill's songs are nearly equal to those of burns. the older ones of allan eamsay i also admire. i had no idea you were so voluminous an author and writer until i read a hst of your works in the beforementioned record. i well see that you have the " ars poetce " far beyond my humble attempts, which are at the best but the " disjecta membra." among the poems i particularly note the one " in memoriam, e. f. j." that which comes from the heart goes to the heart. as i am not quite certain of your present address letters of ricketson and japp 243 and feel a little uncertain of your receiving this, i will close, as ever, yours truly and cordially, dan'l eicketsok. p. s. my eightieth birthday is drawing near, so excuse this rambling note. new bedford, mass., u. s. a., jan. 22, 1894. my dear friend, — i have been reading your admirable book, " hours in my garden," and do not hesitate to say that i should place you in the honor able company of gilpin, white of selborne, et hoc genus omne. the mechanical work of the book evinces your great oversight, particularly in the illustrations. it will i trust become a classic with ingenuous youth of the rising generation as well as with the older ones of ours. i fear, however, i am placing you with myself one generation in advance, as i am already an octogenarian, and you yet in the heyday of middle life. i was four years older than my friend thoreau, who died in 1862, at the age of forty-five. since then his contemporaries, long fellow, emerson, alcott, lowell, and whittier have passed on, while i, the least of all, still remain, which i attribute largely to my quiet and unambi tious hfe, and an early conviction of my lack of qualification for any great sphere. i have had the usual experiences of men in the way of joy and sorrow, among these the loss of a beloved mother when i was about fourteen, the 244 daniel ricketson and his friends beloved wife of my youth and mother of my chil dren and cherished companion of more than forty years, also my dear and beautiful youngest daugh ter, and a grandson at the age of twelve years. but i did not intend to write my biography, so will leave off. i think i acknowledged the receipt of your book of sonnets, which i have read more of since, and find many very attractive, particularly those wherein your own personal bereavements are seen in the tender words which only a deep experience can utter. i hope that time has softened your sorrow, and that yoiu" heart has not been left desolate. my life has largely been a pleasant one, and i feel grateful to the great and good giver, and to my earthly kind father, who left me a sufficient patri mony for my quiet, economic way of hfe. hoping to hear from you once more, and with best wishes for your happiness, i remain. very truly your sincere and obliged friend, dan'l ricebtson. ix letters of daniel eicketson and henry s. salt letters of daniel eicketson and henry s. salt new bedford, mass., u. s. a., nov. 5, 1889. dbak sir, — yours of the 18th ult. was received on the 28th, finding me quite ill with acute bron chitis, from which i am slowly recovering, and take this my first opportunity to answer your letter. among the foreign essays on thoreau, that of "h. a. page," a. h. japp, ll. d., 13 albion square, dalston, london, which appeared several years ago, from his high appreciation and genial style, has met with much approval here. with mr. j. i have passed several letters, the last informing me of his great bereavement in the loss of his wife. i do not know that he intends writing anything further about thoreau, and i am willing to afford you any help in my power for your proposed work. i have to-day found the letter written by thoreau on his father's death, which is at your service, while in looking over a large number of letters from him i find many more interesting and characteristic of the writer than those few already published by mr. sanborn and others. it would be through his pri vate correspondence to his intimate friends that he would be best known. i think that* a letter or 248 daniel kicketson and his friends more from thoreau to an admiring english friend, who spent some time with him in concord, thomas chohnondeley, afterwards owen, who died in april, 1864, would be of interest. he and thoreau made me a visit at brooklawn, my country home, in the early part of december, 1858. after mr. c. returned to england, some time after, i wrote to him, not knowing of his death, which was very melancholy, on his marriage tour in italy, dying of malarial fever at naples. my letter was answered very cordially by his brother, reginald cholmondeley, esq., con dover hall, near shrewsbury, shrops., and we cor responded for a year or two. as i have not heard from him for some thirty years, i fear he has long since passed on. should he or any of his family be living, i doubt not they would meet your wishes in supplying any correspondence thoreau may have had with his friend, as well as my letters. i could also supply the letters of e. c. to me. letters showing the strong personal admiration of a well-educated and travelled english gentleman like mr. thomas cholmondeley would add much to your book. i think thoreau also corresponded with william auingham, poet, etc., ballyshannon, ireland. i should like to know a little more of your modus operandi. i suppose you address me in your own and not a nom de plume. if so, i am pleasantly reminded of charles lamb's " old bencher," mr. s. i have just been reading the autobiography of mary howitt, giving occasional sketches of wilha^ letters of ricketson and salt 249 howitt. it has occurred to me, if you are in the way of writing biographies, william howitt would afford you an admirable opportunity for presenting to the american as well as the english public one of the truest and most loyal writers of our time. as a friend and correspondent of himself and family i have a number of letters from them all, also an admirable daguerreotype of william howitt, taken in london in 1846, and an excellent engraving of mrs. howitt, done about the same time, with accom panying letters from both. this is not, however, thoreau. but i cannot promise to do much for you requiring writing, as it exhausts me much, and my correspondence is too large already for an old man of seventy-six years. so please excuse this hasty scrawl as a sort of ram bling, desultory answer ; being far from well and strong is my excuse. yours cordially, daniel rickbtson. h. s. salt, esq. 38 gloucester road, regent's pake, london, 18/11/89. dear sm, — i am exceedingly obliged to you for your kind letter and the copy of thoreau' s most interesting account of the death of his father. let me first answer your question about my modus ope randi in this volume on thoreau which i am now preparing. my object is to give (1) a clear and succinct account of thoreau's life, gathering up and arranging in their due order all the scattered records 250 daniel kigketson and his friends of him to be found in periodicals, as ■well as the information given by messrs. channing, sanborn, and page. (2) a fuller and more serious estimate of thoreau's doctrines than any hitherto published, and a critique of his literary qualities. the book will consist of about ten or twelve chapters, the first two thirds of it being biographical and the remain ing third critical. i shall aim throughout at inter preting rather than criticising in the ordinary sense, it being my belief that in the case of such a real man of genius as thoreau it is the duty of the critic to accept him thankfully, and not to carp unduly at his limitations, though of course not shutting his eyes to them. my name is not, hke h. a. page, a nom de plume, though i do not know that i can claim kinship with the mr. salt whom charles lamb has immortalized. there are a great many salts in staffordshire and shropshire, and shrewsbury is my native place. oddly enough, i find that my relatives at shrews^ bury knew mr. cholmondeley ; he spoke to some of them about thoreau, and gave them copies of his books. some weeks ago mr. reginald cholmonde ley (who is still living) kindly promised to look up his brother's papers, in the hope of finding tho reau's letters, and to allow me the use of them if they are stiu in existence. he has, however, been away from home lately, so there is necessarily a delay. i agree with you that mr. cholmondeley's high, opinion of thoreau is an important and valuable point, especially as he was letters of ricketson and salt 261 (if i mistake not) the only englishman who saw much of thoreau. dr. japp (" h. a. page ") is a correspondent of mine, but we have never met. he has very kindly given me some assistance in my preparation of ma terials for this volume. he told me of the medalr lion portrait which your son sent him, and which he had engraved for a magazine article on thoreau. speaking of myself, i may add that i was an assistant master at eton couege until a few years ago, when i gave up teaching and took to literary work. an article of mine on thoreau, which ap peared in temple bar in 1886, was reprinted in the new york critic, and may possibly have met your eye. i have published books on shelley, james thom son, &c., and it has always been one of my desires to write a good life of thoreau. it will be my own fault if i do not do this now, for i have received a great deal of hind help from america. i need not say that if you will let me print any other characteristic letters of thoreau which you have in your possession it will be a great assistance to my book, and will put me under a great obli gation to you. i would, of course, gladly pay the cost of having them copied, if copyists are to be found, for i could not think of asking you to do such laborious work ; indeed, i feel ashamed to see how much you have already written on my account. heartily thanking you for your kindness, i remain yours sincerely, h. s. salt. daniel eickbtson, esq. 252 daniel ricketson and his friends p. s. i am interested in what you say of wil liam howitt. new bedford, mass., deo. 9, 1889. dear sib, — since i wrote you i have remem bered that a volume of thoreau's letters not now in my possession, containing several to me, was pub lished some years ago by mr. sanborn, which, with others he used in his biography of thoreau, must include about all of interest of mine. these vol umes i think you informed me of having. unless you can obtain somewhat from mr. cholmondeley or the poet auingham i hardly know where you will look for new matter, and that you will be obliged to depend upon your essay on his character. on this point i can bear my own testimony, that without any formality he was remarkable in his uprightness and honesty, industrious and frugal, simple and not fastidious in his tastes, whether in food, dress, or address ; an admirable conversationalist, and a good story-teller, not wanting in humor. his full blue eye, aquiline nose, and peculiar pursed lips, which even his mustache did not entirely conceal, added much to the effect of his descriptive powers. he was a man of rare courage, physically and intellec tually. in the way of the former, he arrested two young fellows with horse and wagon on the lonely road leading to his hermitage at walden pond, who were endeavoring to entrap a young woman on her way home, and took them to the village ; whether they were brought to court i do not remember, and letters of eicket^son and salt 253 may not have given an exact account of the affair, but it is circumstantially correct. intellectually, his strong and manly mind was en riched by a classical education and extensive know ledge of history, ancient and modern, and english literature — himself a good versifier, if not true poet — whose poetic character is often seen in his prose works. there are few finer passages in any author than the following, which doubtless you will remember : — " the morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted, but few are the ears that hear it. olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere." (walden, page 92.) i will conclude by making a copy of hues written by me soon after his death, from a volume of pieces privately pubkshed twenty years ago, entitled " the autumn sheaf," three copies of which i sent to england, — one each to my honored old friends and correspondents, the late william howitt, rev. wil liam barnes, the dorset poet, late rector of winter borne-came, near dorchester, and reginald chol mondeley, esq., shrewsbury, shrops. i mention these in case you may wish to see the humble pro duction of my rustic muse, now out of print and no spare copies. i remain, yours very truly, dan'l rickbtson. h. s. salt, esq. p. s. there were ten letters to me published by mr. s. i find in my package several more which i 254 daniel kicketson and his friends ■would willingly put into your hands with other matter were you here. still, your essay would hardly te improved therefrom. 38 glouckster ed., regent's pask, london, 22/12/89. deab sir, — i am very much obliged to you for your kindness in sending me the extracts from the "autumn sheaf," from which i shall be glad to quote in my book on thoreau. i will ask mr. cholmondeley to send me his copy of the volume, which i am sure will be full of interest to me. i thank you also for your testimony to thoreau's genius, which has especial value as coming from one who knew him so intimately. the published letters to which you allude are, i presume, those printed at boston, and edited by emerson, in 1865. i have quoted passages from more than one of those addressed to you : for of course i recognized who thoreau's correspondent was by the initials and context. if an opportunity should offer of having copies made of the few un published letters now in your possession, i need not say that i should be very grateful for them, though i think i now have sufficient material to rely upon if no more comes to hand. colonel wentworth higginson has very hndly sent me copies of some letters he received from thoreau, and there is the chance of finding those addressed to thomas cholmondeley. i had intended to write to the poet allingham, letters of ricketson and salt 255 when i was shocked to hear o£ his death, news of which has i suppose by this time reached you. perhaps his widow may by and by be able to find the papers which you mentioned. with many thanks for all the aid you have given me, and with best wishes of the season, i remain. yours very truly, h. s. salt. no. 38 qloucbsteb road, regent's park, london, dec. 30, 1890. dear mr. rickbtson, — i was very glad to learn from your letter of october 9 that you thought well of my book on thoreau. it has been very widely noticed in the english press, and i trust it will be the means of exciting a greater interest in thoreau's character and writings. what you told me of your correspondence with william howitt, and of the letters in your posses sion, interested me very much. i much wish i were competent to undertake the work which you sug gest ; but i am ashamed to say that i am almost unacquainted with william howitt's writings, though i have read the biography recently published, or rather edited, by his daughter. if i should ever hear of any worthy person meditating a volume on howitt, i will bear in mind the existence of these valuable letters. i was touched by what you said respecting the loss of so many of your early friends — one of those 256 daniel kicketson and his friends most pathetic experiences of life which affect us in thought even before they come to us in reality. but it must cheer you to remember that you num bered among your friends so noble and notable a personality as thoreau, for to have known a man of genius is indeed a rare and inestimable privilege. with myself, change of opinion, rather than death, has hitherto been the cause of» friends falling away ; but as i am now in my fortieth year i have come to a time when i am not likely to make many new friends, and can ill afford to lose old ones. i forget whether i told you in former letters that i was an assistant master at our great classical school, eton couege, for ten years, but gave up my posi tion owing to the adoption of views (such as those of thoreau) which brought me into antagonism with the conservative tone of an old-fashioned insti tution. if, as i hope may be the case, you should some day feel disposed to write to me again, there is one point in thoreau' s history on which i should be very glad to receive enlightenment. i have been told by an american correspondent that in follow ing mr. sanborn's account of thoreau's parents, i have done an injustice to john thoreau, the elder, and cynthia dunbar. mr. sanborn (and i think also moncure conway) represents john thoreau as a somewhat dull, plodding person, and his wife as a lively gossip ; but i am now assured that they were both persons of more than average sensibihty and attainments, and possessed of a true love of nature letters of kicketson and salt 257 and natural life. it would be interesting and valu able to have your reminiscences as to this point. with all good wishes for the new year, i remain, yours very truly, h. s. salt. new bedfobd, mass., u. s. a., jan. 19, 1891. my dear feiend, — for i feel you are such — your welcome letter of the 30th ult. came duly to hand on the 10th inst. we are only eleven days apart, although over three thousand miles, and then, more wonderful still, within only a few hours by cable telegraph. we hve truly in an age of wonderful scientific discovery. i had been lately reading a very pleasant and well-written essay on thomas gray and his friends, by d. c. tovey of trinity college, cambridge, and as i sometimes do under hke circumstances, wrote a letter of thanks to the author, in which i mentioned your life of thoreau. i quote the following from his letter in reply to mine : — " your correspondent, h. s. salt, is one of my greatest friends. i have not yet seen his thoreau, though i have heard much of it. salt is a very able writer, i think. he was a master at eton with me for some years. though i don't suppose our opinions very much harmonize, i find salt and mrs. salt very lovable people, and very much in earnest." i trust i have made no breach of confidence, as 258 daniel ricketson and his friends the sentiments expressed are so friendly and appre ciative, and such as should pass among christian gentlemen and ladies. i had addressed mr. tovey at trinity college, from whence my letter was forwarded to him at his home, " worpledon rectory," guilford, surrey, in which he says, — "you will gather from my ad dress, that i am a country parson." the more i read of your thoreau the more i am impressed with his rare excellence of character and the admirable manner you have set him forth to the british public. it seems remarkable to me, who knew him so intimately, that you should have been able to make so lifelike a portraiture of him. i do not know who your american correspondent may be that criticised mr. sanborn's representation of the good old couple, mr. and mrs. thoreau. mr. san born was an inmate of their family for some length of time when a teacher in the academy at concord, and of course knew the parties well. you are aware that portraits of the same person by different artists are often very dissimilar, and yet good likenesses. although the portraits of mr. and mrs. thoreau which you have copied from mr. sanborn are readily recognized, i should never have spoken of them in any manner that could have been construed into any disrespect for their genuine worth. our philosopher was iudebted undoubtedly to both his parents for much of his rare qualities — to the father for a calm, patient, industrious spirit, with great honesty of purpose and performance. he was a man rather to letters of ricketson and salt 259 be drawn out than to obtrude himself. he moved my respect for his genuine worth. on the other hand, mrs. thoreau was an unusually active, voluble person, rather tall, while her husband was short, a great talker, and strong delineator of character, but not unlike many other good housewives gifted in relating historical and domestic events. they lived harmoniously as husband and wife, and their children excelled in whatever is good and noble and therefore praiseworthy. had i your youth and high literary qualifications, i should feel strongly inclined to write the life of william howitt, one of england's truest sons, whose works stand high in america as well as at home. he had much of the character of the statesman, hampden, and sidney, etc., and would have graced the government of his country had he been called to parhament. your affectionate friend, dan'l rickbtson. p. s. it will always give me pleasure to receive a letter from you. new bedford, mass., april 21st, 1892. dear mr. salt, — i have by no means forgotten you and the generous as well as admirable work you have done for my dear friend thoreau, as well as for the large and increasing circle of his admirers. i hope it has proved a pecuniary success — for most certainly the handsome manner in which the publish 260 daniel kicketson and his friends ers as well as yourself have given it to the great re public of letters deserves the most cordial reception. however much i love my own native land, i think we have reason to be proud of our mother country, who in thoroughness of scholarship is still ahead of us, as most of our best educated people are aware. our more variable climate, even than yours, and still more unsettled state of public matters, keep the great mass of our people so constantly in a state of excitement that a retired, studious, and reflective mind, whether man or woman, is an exception. it is the great advantage of an old country, whose in stitutions are settled, that genius and merit find a readier sphere of action. i know the greed for wealth is the bane of the best lands, but a new country in some ways suffers the most therefrom. we have a few pohtical-economists among our pub lic men, and our high, so-called protective tarifb has already created monopolies of wealth and a spurious aristocracy. time, however, will rectify all this, and our hopes are still in the ascendant for a better future. accept this hasty note as a token of friendship and affection from your obliged friend, dan'l ricketson. p. s. please remember me, should it come in your way to do so, to dr. japp, with whom i had a pleasant correspondence a few years ago. he was then under affliction at the loss of his wife. letters of ricketson and salt 261 old elm place, new bedford, mass., u. s. a., june 3rd, 1895. dear me. salt, — i have been much interested in reading your late work, " animals' rights," a copy of which i received soon after its publication last autumn. it is a grand contribution to the cause of humanity, as well as the higher culture of a pure and practical rehgion, such as the diviner portions of the old and new testaments inculcate, but which too often, and perhaps generally, have been supplanted by creeds and dogmas quite at variance with the great doctrine of " peace on earth and good will towards men." at the advanced age of nearly eighty-two years, i still find myself constantly required to increase my faith in the great power that overrules all things, as creeds and dogmas lose their significance. this is an age of deep inquiry, and much that was deemed sacred has been relegated with the exploded doctrines of our forefathers. among the good friends (quakers) from whom in an unbroken line i trace my descent back to the time of fox and penn, i can say in the words of my friend ralph waldo emerson, " if i am anything, i am a quaker." i still cung to their simple ways of worship, their honesty and truthfulness. i heard nothing of doc trines in my own father's family, but by precept and example was taught the higher principles of chris tianity. the religion seen so often in the works of our 262 daniel kicketson and his friends truest new england poet, john greenleaf whittier, ■whom i also had as a friend and occasional corre spondent, is that which i can most fully endorse, as the result of a long life of research and striving for the truth. i have lately also written a hasty letter to rev. duncan c. tovey, who speaks of you in a letter i received from him dec. 19, 1890, as " one of his greatest friends," also as a " master at eton with him some years." he styles himself a "country parson," and in my reply i mention, ''holy mr. herbert," as old isaac walton called reverend george herbert, the sweet old poet-divine, wiuiam gupin, prebendary of salisbury, white of sel bourne (rev. gilbert), &c., &c., as confreres. well, i will draw this rambhng note to a close, with my best wishes for your welfare and happi ness. yours cordially and truly, dan'l ricketson. h. s. salt, esq. lettees of daniel ricketson and samuel a. jones, m. d. letteks of daniel ricketson and samuel a. jones, m. d. ann akbor, 10 march, 1890. my dear sie, — i am deeply touched by your kind letter of the 8th inst. "^et. 76 yrs. 7 mos."— that went to my heart. to write so long a letter at your age to an utter stranger shows your loving loyalty to thoreau's memory. i had received an equally genial letter from mr. blake, and now, dear sir, my thoreau collection is rich indeed. you and mr. b. were his favorite correspondents, and your joint letters make me feel as if i had almost touched thoreau's hand. i have never had the pleasure of meeting you in the flesh, nor is it probable that i ever shall have. my life has not been given to making money. i have nine children and an aged father and mother dependent on me, and i just live and honestly pay my way. god gave me a love of books that has been to me more than wealth, and from the day that i began to study thoreau i have been rich enough. that dear man's life and example has done for me far more than my dear old mother's bible could do. i do not comprehend thoreau, but i revere his memory and have learned from him the way of life. this is why i sent you a copy of my poor paper. 266 daniel ricketson and his friends i had already sent one to mr. salt, and i will this day mail one to dr. japp — for whose address i am grateful indeed. my pamphlet (not the original paper) was " printed but not published," and as i have some copies (100) i will gladly mail one to any friend of thoreau's whom you think would care for one; tho' i well know its only value is in the " bibhography." both lowell and thoreau are judged by me from their written utterances. lowell's genius and cul ture receive my unstinted admiration ; but when it comes to absolute sincerity lowell is to thoreau as a " tallow dip " to an electric light. lowell's nature is wholly inadequate to take in thoreau. lowell thought thoreau was posing for effect. i am satis fied that thoreau could not possibly play a part. i rank christ jesus, socrates, and thoreau as the sincerest souls that ever walked the earth. alas ! i have forgotten one — john woolman, on whom god's peace sat as a garment. just here please let me ask a question, namely: thoreau is generally regarded as a sour, crabbed cynic. now i never saw any photograph of thoreau, and no steel engraving can give the eyes as a photograph does, yet i feel in my heart that, i£ one were absolutely an earnest and sincere man, he would find in thoreau an infinite depth of tenderness. not the demonstrative kind, but that which you see in the eyes and feel warming your own heart. am i right? i do not want to burden your age with writing a letter, but a reply from you, if only a word. letters of kicketson and jones 267 ■will do my heart good, and i ask it from pure love for thoreau. i thank you for the " standard." lamb taught me to love john woolman, and woolman to love the quakers. and now, dear sir, may the source of all good fill your eveningtide with peace ineffa ble. sincerely yours, sam'l a. jones. dan'l a. ricketson, esq. new bedford, mass., march 12, 1890. my deae fbibnd, — your warm-hearted letter of the 10th inst. has just come to hand, and been read with much interest and reciprocal feelings. the characteristics you name, i have heard applied to our dear philosopher, many years ago, but they have so long been buried in the high estimation and praise he has received at home and abroad, that i was almost surprised at the appearance of their ghost, which i thought had been effectually laid long ago. while thoreau had no one of the char acters mentioned, he was wisely careful not to have his friends expect too much intimacy, and it was my good fortune to receive more from him than he had given me reason to expect. there was a dignity in his composition that commanded respect, and a gen uine benevolence and hospitality in his companion ship that ever inspired confidence in his sincerity. the best likeness of him was an ambrotype i had taken on his last visit to me in 1861, the year 268 daniel kicketson and his fkiends before his death. there were two copies, one of which i sent to his sister sophia soon after his decease, and the other is in the possession of my son walton, who with his sister anna, both unmar ried, have resided together since their mother's death in 1877, mostly in concord, mass. the fulness and tenderness of his (thoreau's) eyes are largely wanting in the engraving made from it in sanborn's memoir. a number of his best and most characteristic letters of friendship to me have never been published — they were omitted by emerson and sanborn. these did far more jus tice to the true man than one or more of those they selected. 1 conclude such to be the case in those to mr. blake, of whom thoreau always spoke in terms of much esteem. but the state of my health just now (as i am somewhat, as sailors say, " under the weather ") reminds me that i must not enlarge fur ther, although i have a great deal i could say were you at my side. i remain. very truly yours, dan'1 eicketson. dr. s. a. jones, m. d. p. s. i think mr. salt will have some new and interesting matter in his " study of thoreau." ann akbob, 11th july, 1891. my deap, sib, — i sent you a copy of the " in lander " solely for the purpose of giving so old a friend of thoreau's the history of the 1862 edition letters of ricketson and jones 269 of his week, and, behold, you have been kind enough to dehght me with a friendly note. i beg leave to say that, as a bibliographical frag ment, the paper in the " inlander " is based on abso lute fact. when preparing a bibliography of tho reau i was not aware of the existence of the " 1862 edition," and having found a copy thereof, the pro blem was to account for it. i therefore visited con cord last august, and to solve this puzzle was a part of my purpose. as i am the first to record this bit of history i am as pleased with my perform ance as is the young mother with her first baby — " for pride attends us still." the manner in which the fact is presented may make the paper appear as a clumsy figment ; but i have only allowed fancy to dress up the fact. i did wish to contrast carlyle's famous sartor with tho reau's first book, and to declare my conviction that the stormy scotchman must sit at thoreau's feet — as a philosopher. i also wished to have that par ticular book in our university library tenderly pre served, and i am glad to inform you that, from a little regard for me as an effete ex-professor, that book can now be seen, but no rude hand can harm it. a common copy is provided for use. when i was in concord i ached to go to new bedford and see you; but when i learned what strange creatures the school of philosophy had erst while attracted thither, i feared i might be taken by you for one of the same, and i had not the courage to knock at your door. of course, mr. kicketson, 270 daniel ricketson and his friends such self-distrust is based on self-knowledge, and a consciousness of my own defects tends to make me shy in the presence of strangers. nevertheless, i have many times repented that i did not call upon you ; for your deepest scrutiny, while detecting my fallings-short, would have also found a sincere ven eration for him whom it was your happiness to know. i am not worthy to even grease thoreau's shoes — you know he would n't let me " black " them — but i am a truer man than i would have been had thoreau never lived. you refer to mr. salt's life of thoreau and to me as a contributor. i did put my bibkography at his service, and have ever since been in correspondence with him — a love for thoreau being " the tie that binds." let me add that when houghton, mifflin & co. pubushed an enlarged bibuography in mr. blake's " thoreau's thoughts," i reserved the right to publish another bibliography whenever i saw fit. i did this because i desire to see a bibliography that wiu give as complete a history of each of thoreau's books as is possible at this late day. to this end i shall need the aid, here and there, of those who knew thoreau. therefore i beg leave to apply to you when need arises. i am also collecting first editions of thoreau's works, and everything that i can find which in any way applies to him. it is already a large collection, and it will ultimately be deposited en bloc in some suitable place where they may, haply, fructify those who shall come to them after i am insensate dust. letters of ricketson and jones 271 from mr. salt's life i learned for the first time of your autumn sheaf, and i am surprised that he did not include it in his bibliography. as i am collecting items of this nature for the larger edition of this bibliography, will you kindly copy the title page of that volume, and state the pages therein in which thoreau is mentioned ? i know this is bold in me, but i ask it in his name. in " lippincott's magazine " for the coming au gust i shall have a paper entitled thoreau in the hands of his biographers, and if you would give me your plainest and most unsparing criticism you wul help one who is most earnestly desirous of securing for thoreau that audience which his life and work should have, but as yet does not. i most sincerely trust that the spirit which urges me to write will also lead you to pardon so long a letter. i am, dear sir, sincerely yours, sam'l a. jokes. daniel ricketson, esq. new bedfokd, mass., july 15, 1891. resp'd feibnd, — i received your kind letter of the 11th inst. in the same kind spirit, but i fear i shall hardly be able to answer your expectations in my response. i presume i am considerably older than you, as i was four years older than thoreau, so that i shall reach my seventy-eighth year on the 30th of this month. just now i am rather poorly, 272 daniel eicketson and his friends having had an " ill turn " a few days ago, and added thereto i am afflicted with poison in my face and eyes, to which i have been subject for the past five or six years at this season whenever i go to visit my son and daughter at their summer resort, " non quit beach," some six miles hence on the north shore of our beautiful buzzard's bay, so full of his toric interest from the days of the northmen in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, giving it the name of " straumfiord " (stream currents), and the adjoining coast vineland. afterward, rediscovered by bartholomew gosnold in 1602, who gave the name of his queen to the elizabeth islands, that form its southern boundary. i crossed this bay with thoreau in the summer of 1856, and landed on naushon, the largest of the islands, and strolled with him along its shores and iuto the primitive woods, where the native deer are still found. here we also heard the wood-thrush and other of our song birds, much to our delight. days sacred in memory, so great the changes to me in common with other mortals. but to return to your letter, — in my remem brance of thoreau i must repeat what i have so often written before to his biographers, that i must also caution you in its use. i never felt that i was as near to him as some of his older friends whom he often mentioned to me in much respect, particularly messrs. blake and brown, who were, i think, more loyal than i, who being quite free, often too much so, in my expressions. letters of ricketson and jones 273 difeered occasionally from our more learned and exacting seer, still, i enjoyed and profited much in his companionship during the seven or eight years of his latter life. his strict honesty, veracity, justness, &c., &c., somewhat, perhaps, lessened the warmth of his friendship, which those of more ardent natures like myself desire, but are usually doomed to disappointment. of course, thoreau was by far the wiser and better man. i should conclude that you and i were more ahke than t. and ourselves, but that in an early friend ship we should not have done so well together as with him. my " autumn sheaf," to which you refer, was privately printed, and a very limited nimiber, all of which were exhausted many years ago. i should be glad, had i a spare one, to send it to you. as you wish for references therein to t., i send the following, — " the improvised dance," page 198. " in memoriam," 209. these, i think, are noticed in brief by sanborn and salt. i fear i have hardly responded to your warm hearted letter, but must plead as excuse my present collapsed condition, as thoreau's eccentric and poetic friend, euery channing, might say. wishing you good success in your benevolent labors, i remain. yours very truly, dan'l eicketsou^. 274 daniel kicketson and his friends new bedford, mass., aug. 12, 1891. dear friend, — your type letter of the 10th inst. has just come to hand, and i hasten to make more clear my statement relative to thoreau and lowell. it was in reference to an article which thoreau had sent to the " atlantic monthly " mag azine some two or three years before his death, and which lowell, if my memory serves me rightly, as editor, took the liberty of criticising. my use of the word critique led you to suppose, and very justly, a subsequent production. our dear thoreau stands now far beyond any reproach, and the unfair words said before or since his heroic life and death, are harmless ripples on the smooth surface of his fair name and fame. my daughter, who now in winter resides in con cord, and knew thoreau and his sister sophia well, was much pleased with your article in " lippincott," and took it with her to her seashore summer home, to read to her brother and other friends. we all meet with our rebuffs, but " time makes all things even," and the great problem of our exist ence remains to be solved. with abiding faith in divine wisdom and good ness, i remain, yours very truly, dan'l eioketson. p. s. in a letter i have lately received from my friend whittier, he says, "i am calmly waiting my call." he is in his eighty-fourth year. xi extracts from daniel ricketson's journal daniel rickets on, jet. 37 louisa ricketson, mt. 37 extracts from daniel ricketson's journal cowper. whenever i stand before my little library or take from the shelf a volume, i feel that i am highly honored by the best of company, and i feel grateful to the great and good men who have thus kindly introduced themselves to me. how often when warmly interested upon some inspired page have i been brought into communion with the noble nature that gave it ! but among all my dearly treasured friends i find there none awaken in my mind such sweet, soothing, or instruc tive thoughts as my own dear cowper. from my boyhood to the present time my love and admiration for his character and genius has not only continued unabated, but has gradually and surely increased, and should it ever prove my beatific privilege to reach the hoped-for haven of bliss and rest among the saintly choir that are already there, after my own dear kindred i hope to behold and hold converse high — high indeed — with him i so much reverence and to whom i owe so much of my best and happiest hours. 278 daniel ricketson and his friends july 30th, 1853. it has been my impression that i should live to good old age, and now at forty i find myself in as good health so far as i can judge as at twenty, and as my desire is to lead a quiet and unostentatious life i hope to enjoy the remainder of my days in a wise and philosophical as well as truly religious manner. i hope to uve to see slavery, that sum of all wick edness, abolished from our land, the quarrels of nations settled by arbitration, and war to become obsolete, the factory system to become so ameliorated that the poor and sufeering operatives of the present day shall be released from their thraldom, and the suffering poor of the old world, the little children here and there shut out from the beautiful influ ences of life and nature, set at hberty to enjoy fresh air and wholesome food; when the gallows shall be no longer seen, and the prisons and dungeons of the old world and our own become comparatively tenantless; when the domestic animals, particu larly the horse, shall be far better treated, and the application of steam and other motive powers now so destructive of human life shall become by the increase of scientific knowledge and an increase of moral responsibiuty on the part of directors, officers, etc., far more safe and useful to mankind. i desire to uve to see this or a reasonable part of it. happy day, when no sensitive mind shall say as i have often done in the language of the feeling bard, — extracts from ricketson's journal 279 " oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness, some boundless contiguity of shade, where rumor of oppression and deceit, of unsuccessful or successful war shall never reach me more." (cowper.) 1864. august loth. bought a book this morning named walden, or life in the woods, by henry d. thoreau, who spent several years upon the shore of walden pond near concord, mass., living in a rough board house of his own building. much of his experience in his out-of-door and secluded life i fully understand and appreciate. 12th. finished this morning reading walden, or life in the woods, by h. d. thoreau. i have been highly interested in this book, the most truly original one i ever read, unless the life of john b uncle, an old book written by an eccentric eng lish gentleman. the experience of thoreau and his reflections are like those of every true lover of nature. his views of the artificial customs of civ ilized life are very correct. mankind labor and suffer to supply themselves with the unnecessaries of life, — leisure for enjoyment is rarely obtained. i long for mankind to be emancipated from this thraldom which has spread its nets and snares over so large a portion of the human family. a love for a more simple ufe increases with me, and i hope that the time will ere long come when i may reauze the peace to be derived therefrom. simpkcity in 280 daniel ricketson and his friends all things, house, living, dress, address, &c., &c. my fortune, though not large, is ample, and were my style of living less expensive i might have considerable for charitable purpioses. one of my greatest luxuries has been in books, — good boots i value beyond most all else in the world of earthly treasure, after my family, — handsome editions of my favorite authors. such i want in the best of paper, type, and binding and english, for my read ing is confined .pretty much to my native language. england, scotland, or rather great britain and america, have furnished nearly all the authors i am acquainted with. genuine enghsh literature is my line of reading. august 13th, 1854. mailed a letter to henry d. thoreau expressive of my satisfaction in reading his book, " walden, or life in the woods." his volume has been a source of great comfort to me in reading and will i think continue to be so, giving me cheerful views of life and feeling of confidence that misfortune cannot so far as property is con cerned deprive me or mine of the necessaries of life, and even that we may be better in every respect for the changes. oct. 4th, 1854. received a letter from henry d. thoreau to-day in reply to mine to him. letter hastily written and hardly satisfactory, evidently well meant though overcautious?" dec. 14th, 1854. wrote an invitation to h. d. thoreau of concord, author of walden, and sent a letter which i had had on hand some time. a z o o 2; o extracts from ricketson's journal 281 dec. 25th, 1854. h. d. thoreau arrived this p. m., spent evening conversing upon various mat ters, the climate, &c., of england and america, &c. dec. 26th. a fine mild spring-like day. walked through the woods to tarkiln hiu and through acushnet to friends' meeting house with henry d. thoreau, author of walden. rode this p. m. with h. d. t. round white's factory. louisa and the children, except walton, attended lyceum this evening. lecture by mr. thoreau. subject, " get ting a living." i remained at home, not feeling well enough to attend. september, 1855. 29th sept., saturday. clear fine day, growing gradually cooler. henry d. thoreau of concord arrived about 1 1/2 o'clock. 30th, sunday. rather unsettled, but quite a fine day. visited with thoreau sassaquin and long ponds, also " joe's rocks." left about ten a. m. and returned at six p. m. in buggy wagon with old charley, who performed his work with great spirit. oct. 2d, tuesday, 1855. cloudy and windy. left home at 8 a, m. with h. d. thoreau and visited several of the middleboro ponds, spending the most part of the day among them. home at 6^, dark cloudy evening* spent an hour on the shore by betty's neck, so called; found the rock with the footmark upon it, though not as distinct as when i visited it in 1847, — 1749 (footmark) israel felix. 282 daniel ricketson and his friends israel felix was an old indian preacher; the foot print thoreau supposed to be much older than the date or the name. the rocks around bore marks of other records, but so nearly obliterated as to be hardly distinguished. saw five loons near the shore, also a half-blood indian woman with her husband, a negro, starting in their boat to fish. saw also the wife of my old friend john hosier, who was drowned in the pond several years ago. john was a half-blood indian, being part negro. he lived in a little cabin half in a hill, with a roof over it. there are but two of the old stock remaining, one by the name of lydia squinn, who now lives in new bedford, and another, a female by the name of simonds, who lives now on sconticut neck. we also stopped at the old indian burying-place near the road by quittacus pond. ■ oct. 4th, thursday. clear and fine most of the day ; shower latter part afternoon. rode to west port with thoreau and examined the old proprietor's records of the old township of dartmouth for the names of my ancestors. returning stopped upon the shore of westport pond in a grove of young oaks, where ourselves and old charley ate our dinner, arriving home about 4j p. m. showery evening. 5th, friday. clear and fine, warm for the season. left home this morning at 8 o'clock with henry d. thoreau, who has been on a visit with us at brook lawn during the past week, for plymouth ; went by the way of middleborough, crossing by long pond extracts from ricketson's journal 283 into carver ; took our dinner on the way, under some pines by the wayside, where we also baited our horse, " billy," upon oats. took tea at the house of b. m. watson, a friend of thoreau, who has a nursery near plymouth, a very pleasant place, and nice people, — mr. and mrs. w. and the mother of mr. w. and three young children. eode into ply mouth after tea, and stopped for the night at olyn's on leyden street. 6th, sat. unsettled, rain in evening. left ply mouth at 11 j a. m., and arrived home much fatigued about 5 p. m. my friend, h. d. thoreau, left for boston and home. 7th, sunday, oct., 1855. last sunday my friend thoreau and i spent most of the day visiting sas saquin and long pond, " joe's rocks." i enjoyed the visit of thoreau very much ; he improves, unuke most people, upon an intimate acquaintance — mod est and gentle in his manner, the best read and most intelligent man i ever knew. he is also a very good naturalist, and very much interested while here in wild plants, shells, &c. he took away with him quite a little collection of curiosities he had collected during our rambles. in indian history i found him well informed, and as a classical scholar but few, i should judge, could compete with him. my respect for his character and talents is greater than for any man i know. march, 1856. 6th, thursday. at home in the shanty this forenoon, reading and making extracts from an arti 284 daniel ricketson and his friends cle on indian epic poetry in the "westminster review." wrote the following this forenoon : — oephics by a modbbn. in proportion as we see the merits of others we add to our own. mind is ever in the spring, — one eternal may morning, the same in its original freshness, whether in the sanscrit as a medium, the greek and other languages, or the enghsh. mind has an eternal youth. "haunted forever by the eternal mind " is a fine thought of words worth, himself a philosopher and priest of nature. man must ever find this to be true — the thoughtful man. books. chaining. " god be thanked for books. they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. books are the true levellers'. they give to all who will faithfully use , them the society, the spiritual presence of the best and greatest of our race. no matter how poor i am. no matter though the prosperous of my own time will not enter my obscure dwelling. if the sacred writers will enter and take up their abode under my roof, if milton will cross my threshold to sing to me of paradise, and shakespeare to open to me the worlds of imagination and the workings of the human heart, and franklin to enrich me with his practical wisdom, i shall not pine for the want of extracts from ricketson's journal 285 intellectual companionship, and i may become a cultivated man though excluded from what is called the best society in the place "where i live," d. r.'s joubnai, june 10th, 1866. 1856. june 17th, 1856. left newport this morning at five o'clock for concord, mass., via providence and boston, and arrived at c. about 12 m. the sail up the providence or blackstone river was very fine, the morning being clear and the air very refreshing. my object in coming to concord was to see h. d. thoreau, but unfortunately i found him on a visit at worcester, but i was received with great kind ness and cordiality by his father and mother, and took tea with them. mrs. thoreau, like a true mother, idolizes her son, and gave me a long and interesting account of his character. mr. thoreau, a very short old gentleman, is a pleasant person. we took a short walk together after tea, returned to the middlesex hotel at ten. mrs. t. gave me a long and particular account of w. e. channing, who spent so many years here. june 19th, 1856. walked after breakfast with mr. thoreau, senr., by appointment to the ceme tery and over the ridge to see mr. hosmer, an intel ligent farmer. purchased the life of mary ware, and a framed portrait of charles sumner, the former for mrs. thoreau, and the latter for her daughter sophia. h. d. thoreau and his sister s. arrived home this noon from a visit to worcester. passed a part of 286 daniel ricketson and his friends the afternoon on the river with h. d. t. in his little boat, — discussed channing part of the time. took tea and spent the evening at mr. t.'s. (item) h. d. t. says buy " margaret." concord, june 20th, 1856, 6 p. m. just returned from a sail on the river with thoreau, having been all day. bathed twice, visited the baker farm and the conantum farmhouse. just going out to tea with the thoreaus to mrs. brooks's, an abolitionist. took tea at mrs. brooks's. i was pleased with her downright principles on the subject of slavery. her husband appeared pleasant and agreeable, but not particularly engaged in the anti-slavery enterprise. home at ten ; retire about eleven. mr. thoreau, senr., although ordinarily a quiet man, is very intel ligent, and a fine specimen of the gentleman of the old school. i am strongly impressed with his sterling merits — a character of honesty illumines his countenance. few men have impressed me so favorably. 21 june, 1856. saturday. exceedingly warm at concord. thermometer at 93 in the shade north side mr. thoreau's house, 12 m., rose to 97 ; spent the forenoon with mr. thoreau, senr., walked down by the river and sat under the shade of the willows by the bank. i had a pleasant conversation with miss thoreau this p. m. ; walked to walden pond with h. d. t. this p. m. ; bathed, and crossed the pond with him in a boat we found upon the shore. saw the scarlet tanager by the aid of thoreau's glass, a bird i had never seen before. he was extracts from ricketson's journal 287 perched upon the topmost bough of a pine, and chanted forth his simple song with considerable ear nestness for some time. r. w. emerson called upon me this evening ; talked of channing and the kansas affairs. walked home with him and with thoreau. this has been extremely warm, thermometer at 99 at 5 p. m. north side shade of mr. t.'s house. concord, mass., sunday, june 22d, 1856. my ideas of mr. emerson, with whom i had my second interview last night, are that he is a kind, gentle natured man, even loving, but not what is usually termed warm-hearted. his mind does not strike me as being so great and strong as good in quality ; it appears to me also limited as to its power. i should think he could rarely surprise one with any outburst of inspiration — his genius, for that he undoubtedly has, is sui generis. he is thoughtful, original, and only emerson, and the founder of his race. it does not appear to me that he is even indebted to car lyle, although the latter has recognized him as a kindred spirit. emerson's strength appears to me to lie in his honesty with himself ; by his honesty he has produced a genuine article in the way of thought. he is an intelligent philosopher, a recip ient of the divine cordial in doses rather homoeo pathic, but effectual specifics for those seeking a purer and better draught than what the schools afford. he is a blessing to the age. i am much interested in concord, and should prefer it for a residence to almost any other place. the scenery is very picturesque in and about the village, and all 288 daniel kicketson and his fkiends appears quiet and peaceful, none of the stir and bustle of new bedford. the concord, or musketa quid or grass-grown river, as my friend h. d. t. has learned its meaning from the indians, runs along the edge of the village, which is chiefly on one street, although there are several others. it is a fine stream, and remarkable for its gentle current. with thoreau i rowed up the river several miles, and had many pleasant views from different points. walden pond, by the shore where thoreau built him a httle house and there lived two years, is a small but dehghtful little lake, surrounded by woods. it is very deep and clear, a kind of well of nature. concord has been for a long time the home or place of temporary abode for many of our most intellec tual men and women, — commencing, so far as i am informed, with dr. ripley, then emerson, mar garet fuller for a short time as a visitor, hawthorne, g. w. curtis, h. d. thoreau, the true concord aborigine, wiuiam e. channing, 2d, poet, hon. sam uel hoar, and his son, ex-judge ebenezer rockwood hoar. it is also the home of mrs. brooks, a true and stirring abolitionist. concord has a large num ber of fine old houses, and the old parsonage, once the home of dr. eipley and near the battle-ground, is one of the finest old homes in this county. june 22d, 1856. a very warm day. thermo meter at 95, 3 p. m. spent the forenoon in h. d. t.'s room, copying titles of books, &c. — called by invi tation at r. w. emerson's at 4 p. m. with thoreau — on the way called on mrs. brooks, the abohtionist. extracts from ricketson's journal 289 walked to walden pond with emerson and his children, and thoreau ; took tea at e.'s. thoreau returned with ellen and edith e. while mr. e., his son eddy, 12 years of age, and myself, stopped and bathed in walden pond. our conversation was principally upon birds and flowers that we met upon the way. met mrs. ripley, mrs. goodwin, miss ripley and dr. c. francis at mr. e.'s on our return. returned at 9 with t. to his father's and to bed at ten. my visit to e.'s was very satisfactory. june 23d, 1856. — monday. left concord this a. m. with henry d. thoreau at 8^ o'clock, and arrived home at 1| p. m., stopping one hour in boston, visiting the natural history rooms with h. d. t. who is a member of the society. thermo meter at 73 — p. m. r. w. emerson's version of the wood-thrush as repeated to me sunday p. m. june 22d, on our walk to walden pond : he willy willy, ha willy, willy 0, willy 0. my visit to concord from which i have just re turned will long be remembered with pleasure. there i met several cultured and congenial people and particularly enjoyed my walks, rambles and boat excursions with my friend thoreau. june 24th, 1856. clear and fine, wind w. — thermometer at 48 at 5 a. m. rose early and found thoreau walking in the garden — assisted him in fitting a press for his plants. left home about 10 with h. d. t. for long pond — on the way spent an hour at sassaquin or tobey's pond, dined under an apple-tree near a spring on the brady 290 daniel ricketson and his friends farm, after which bathed upon the south shore of long pond, and visited nelson's island, one of the most beautiful and retired spots in this part of the county, made a sketch of the back side of the brady house, and the barn, in thoreau's note-book. home at 7 ; went with billy and the old buggy wagon. 25th wednesday. cooler, unsettled, and signs of rain, wind s. w. at home and about this fore noon, thoreau busy collecting marine plants from the river side. went to town this p. m. with thoreau. called at thomas a. greene's with t. who wished to confer with him about rare plants and those peculiar to this section — afterwards went to the city hbrary and examined audubon's ornithology for a species of the sparrow which we have on our place and which as yet i have been unable to iden tify with any described in wilson or nuttall. 26th, thursday. cloudy morning and hght rain. cleared off by noon very fine and warm. made an excursion to the end of sconticut neck with my friend thoreau, in search of marine plants, &c. on our return called to see an old indian woman by the name of martha simonds living alone in a little dwell ing of but one room. it was very interesting to see her, as she is not only a pure blooded indian, but the last of her tribe, probably the nemaskets. her complexion was tawny, and her straight black hair was mixed with gray ; we undoubtedly saw a genu ine indian woman. arrived home from our excur sion to sconticut about 5. 27th, friday. clear and warm, some rain and extracts from ricketson's journal 291 sharp lightning last night. spent forenoon in the shanty with thoreau, engaged in ornithology prin cipally and the philosophy of life generally. went to naushon island in the afternoon in the steamer " eagle's wing " and returned at 6^ in company with our friend h. d. thoreau, arthur, and wal ton. [we quote the following from the history of new bedford descriptive of this visit. — editors.] " on the afternoon of the 27th of june, 1856, in company with a congenial friend, i visited this island. leaving new bedford, in less than two hours our gallant steamer, the eagle's wing, landed us at hadley's harbor, upon the east end of the island. our object being to see the natural beauties and productions of this comparatively unmolested realm of nature, we at once proceeded into the ancient woods, where we were soon amply rewarded by a sight of some of the noblest trees and forest ranges we had ever seen. the beeches, oaks, and other trees here grow to a large size, many of them un doubtedly of great age. soon after our entrance we were greeted by the sight of a beautiful fawn, that stood gazing at us from a thicket at a short distance, but quickly bounded away from our view. the island being private property, the native deer are still preserved ; but at certain seasons, we regret to say, these beautiful and noble creatures are hunted and shot. naushon is the largest of the ekzabeth islands, and is about seven miles in length and a 292 daniel eicketson and his friends mile and a quarter in breadth. it was formerly the property of the hon. james bowdoin, a governor of massachusetts, by whom it was bequeathed to his nephew, james bowdoin, and by him bequeathed to his nephew, james temple bowdoin, who resided in london. it is now the property, by purchase, of william w. swain, of new bedford, and john m. forbes, of milton. the old mansion-house upon this island, which has been for many years the sum mer residence of the elder proprietor, mr. swain, was built by said james bowdoin, an old bachelor, who died there while seated in his chair. the house was closed for many years, and had the reputation of being haunted, and was occasionally visited from this cause by the curious. " to the natives, this island, as well as the rest of the group, was a favorite resort, both on account of the refreshing ocean breezes of summer and the tempered air of winter, besides affording them the necessaries of life in abundance. to the natural ist, this island affords much attraction. the trees, plants, &c., grow in unusual luxuriance ; and we saw a grapevine, which my companion thought might have dated back to the time of gosnold, that measured twenty-three inches in circumference six feet from the ground, firmly interlaced with a sturdy beech, each apparently striving for the mastery. " the fine old woods were vocal with the songs of birds, and it was singularly pleasing to hear, on this ocean isle, the familiar notes of the wood-thrush, the veery (wilson's thrush), the yellow-throat, wood extracts from ricketson's journal 293 pewee, &c. so with the plants and flowers which greeted our way. a more genial and heart-moving welcome we could not have desired than was thus afforded us hy the bountiful hand of nature. " a melancholy interest is attached to this island in the minds of the readers of the beautiful and instructive narrative of the heroic life, sufferings, and death of robert swain, a talented and ac complished young man, the only son of mr. swain, who lies buried in a pleasant and retired spot chosen by himself. here his exhausted body found its last rest ; but the beautiful and noble spirit that invested it dwells in the genial atmosphere of kin dred natures. " sacred the spot where virtue lies ! though we may see his form no more, in vain we say the good man dies ; he lives more truly than before. " passing out of the woods, we stopped upon a ris ing ground to view the hospitable mansion of mr. swain, which stands upon an elevated spot at the northeast part of the island, commanding a fine view of the broad landscape around, the bay, and the adjoining main. this house, the same before spoken of, is a large old-fashioned mansion, fronting the north, hip-roofed, with several tall chimneys, which with its ample piazzas presents an imposing and agreeable appearance. during the past year (1857) this house has been enlarged by the addition of a wing upon each side, and in other respects materially improved by the proprietors. mr. swain is familiarly 294 daniel ricketson and his friends known as ' the governor,' but truly he belongs to a more gallant and noble class, the ancient lords o£ the isles ; and thus regarding him, we were reminded of the hospitable chieftains visited by doctor john son and his friend bosweu during their tour among the hebrides. " buzzard's bay lies between north latitude 41° 25' and 41° 42', and between 70° 38' and 71° 10' west longitude from greenwich ; from its entrance between saughkonnet point and the ledge of rocks that makes off from the west end of cutty hunk, known as the 'sow and pigs,' it stretches away northeast-by-north for thirty miles, with an average breadth of seven miles, laving the southern shore of old dartmouth, beautifully indented by those fine rivers, the acoaxet, the paseamanset, and the acushnet ; with dumpling rock and the round hills on the north, while on the south lies the beautiful and noble group of the elizabeth islands. pleasant must it be to our seafaring brethren, after a long voyage into distant oceans, once more to be hold the familiar objects herein described. with a fine ocean breeze, the canvas all spread, the signal flying at mast-head, and richly freighted, each moment bringing them nearer to those so near and dear, until the anchor drops in our harbor, every object that meets the eye must extend a welcome." june 28th, saturday. clear and fine. thoreau and arthur went up the river botanizing. 29th, sunday. very warm, wind s. w. fresh. extracts from ricketson's journal 295 thermometer at 87 during tlie middle of the day. walked this p. m. -with thoreau down as far as the indian hurial hill on coggeshall farm, and after tea rode with him round tarkiln hill and home by nash road ; talked widely, and retired at 10. 30th, monday. warm and clear. rode to the middleboro' ponds with thoreau. visited haskell's island, so-called, in great quitticus pond, from where we bathed and ate our dinner upon the west shore of the island, then rode to assawampsett and visited the old meeting-house now fast falling to decay and abuse, and king philip's look-out, so called. july 1st, friday. a fine day, cooler than for some days. thermometer at 75, 12 hours, noon : wind n.w. this i attribute to the heat lightning in the east last evening. rode to town this morn ing with thoreau, visited arnold's garden with him. channing came up to tea to see thoreau and spend the evening and night. thoreau and channing spent the evening in the shanty. retired at 10. 2d, saturday. clear and fine, cool this morn ing. thermometer at about 50, 5 a. m. my friend h. d. thoreau left in the early train this morning for his home at concord, mass. took him to the tarkiln hiu station. channing, who spent the night with us, left about 9 to walk to town. dur ing the visit of my friend thoreau we have visited the middleborough ponds twice, the island nau shon, sconticut neck, etc. his visit has been a very pleasant one to myself and famuy. he is the best educated man i know, and i value his friend 296 daniel ricketson and his fkiends ship very much. his health is quite poor at present, and i fear he will hardly reach old age, which from his unconcern in regard to it the more strengthens my fears for his loss. "while seated this forenoon in the shanty, uncom fortable with my swouen face, i ran off the follow ing lines : — i have no appetite, says tom, i 've naught to eat, says jack, — the moths devour tom's surplus coats, john has none to his back. here, eat my dinner, honest soul, and clothe thy naked back ; down goes the beef and puddings quick, and warmly clad is jack. by fasting tom is soon improved, by feeding so is jack ; room in his wardrobe now has tom, and john a good warm back. sept. 3d, 1856. sept. 20th, thursday. left home this p. m. in 3.40 train for boston and concord, mass., where i arrived about 7^ p. m. on my arrival at concord sent a lad for h. d. thoreau who i went to visit ; he soon came ; went to his father's house ; called on wm. e. channing and then to the hotel. 21st, friday. poor sleep at hotel. thoreau called at 8. walked with him to walden pond and saw the location of the shanty where he hved extracts from ricketson's journal 297 alone some two years, bathed and visited the chff and several other hills to obtain views of the pond and surrounding country, which is very picturesque, the concord river constantly seen in its meandering course through the neighboring fields, &c. dined with thoreau at bis father's house ; after dinner went on the river with thoreau and channing; called at an old farmhouse and saw a mr. hosmer, a friend of my companions ; visited old battle ground; saw the old mansion where hawthorne formerly lived. took tea with r. w. emerson, in whose family thoreau is quite at home, having been an inmate there. suffered from embarrassment or rather a sense of incongruity in my being at em erson's. i spent the night with channing, who kindly made a good bed for me, the one at the hotel being so poor. 22d, saturday. rose with headache, breakfast with channing who lives alone, having separated from his wife and children for what reason i do not know, but he appears to me to be a kind and quiet man with extreme eccentricity. thoreau came in, we spent the forenoon in conversation ; among other matters channing suggested the plan of an inde pendent periodical, &c. left at 1 p. m. and arrived at tarkiln hill about 7 p. m. the visit, except excessive fatigue and headache, was very pleasant and will be long remembered by me. my respect for thoreau was much increased, he is not only a man of great natural powers, but of extreme acquire ments and very much of a gentleman. 298 daniel ricketson and his friends dec. 22d, 1856. rode to the tarkiln hill sta tion at noon in expectation somewhat of seeing mr. r. w. emerson, but he did not come. at the depot in town while awaiting the arrival of the p. m. train from boston, had an adventure with a coachman who abused his horse. rather success ful on my part. mr. emerson arrived, took him to brother joseph's to tea, heard his lecture before the lyceum. he came out with me and spent the night. his lecture without a name very good. 23d, tuesday. spent an hour in the shanty with mr. emerson and accompanied him to boston in the mid-day train; he introduced me to the athenaeum ; called at the anti-slavery fair in win ter st. met mr. e. by agreement and went to concord with him and passed the night. found an agree able and hospitable companion, mr. sanborn, the teacher, and a mr. abbott, sophomore of cam bridge. called at mr. emerson's in the evening. 24th, wednesday. breakfasted with mr. emerson and his daughters ellen and edith, and his son ed ward, fine young people. left mr. e.'s and walked with thoreau in the p. m. to walden pond, and through the woods to " baker farm," immortalized by thoreau and channing in prose and verse. the walking hard on account of snow about eight inches deep ; got back at ten. spent evening in house. t. read channing's poem on baker farm and some other of c.'s pieces which he thinks better than almost any other poet. thoreau saw a fox cross extracts from ricketson's journal 299 before us and there were numerous traces across the road in the woods. enjoyed the walk though quite tired out. 1857. january. another year added to my experience of life, marked by a few changes in my intellectual life. i find myself becoming more philosophical (a very indefinite term i am aware), and less actual (another vague term), but nearer to what i mean than any other terms i can find. during the past year my intercourse with chan ning, thoreau, and emerson has had a considerable effect in modifying my views of life, but in a great measure has harmonized with my former experi ences, which in a good degree have prepared me for them. i find myself rather calmer in my views of duty, and trust less to active measures than for merly. during the past year i have written more than usual, — a few pieces of verse, two articles on the middleborough ponds, and fourteen articles on the history of new bedford, all requiring consid erable research and intellectual labor. i hope the practice in composition will prepare me for writing something that may be useful to my feuow-men, par ticularly those rising in life, the young and ardent, who need the cheering voice of one who has passed the threshold of manhood and has already felt the intimations of old age, one who has suffered from the impositions of society, wrong-headed as it usually is. many a youthful genius is undoubtedly crushed by the rolling weight of popular opinion — to these 300 daniel ricketson and his friends i would speak a word of encouragement, having learned from experience how much of a bugbear this world and its inhabitants are. i mean, of course, the conventionahties of society, so called. april 1st, 1857. spent the day at home with mr. alcott ; i find him a genial, highly gifted man. h. d. thoreau arrived to-night from concord ; met him at tarkiln hill. april 3d. spent the day at home, in the shanty during the forenoon with mr. alcott and thoreau ; talked on high themes, rather religious. alcott walked to town this p. m. thoreau and i walked as far as woodlee with him, parted, and we crossed to the railroad and so up to tarkiln hill, and through the woods thence home. charming and alcott walked up from town together to tea. 8th, wednesday. clear and fine, spent at home. mr. alcott dined at b. rodman's. thoreau made some bayberry tallow in the shanty ; walked with him to the rocky chfe beyond acushnet. channing came up this p. m. fair, clear, moonlight evening. 9th, thursday. unsettled. in town with tho reau. walton and thoreau walked round the beach and the west side of clark's cove. mr. alcott's first conversation at mrs. arnold's this evening; attended with the children, mr. a. riding with us. subject, " descent." a successful opening. 13th, monday. rode to quittacus pond with thoreau, also visited long pond, and took our dinner at the old brady house. channing came up extracts from ricketson's journal 301 to tea. attended the third conversation of mr. alcott at c. w. morgan's this evening, the subject, " diet and health." owing to some supposed dis respect to christianity and the customs of quakers, some of the members of the society left, although i think from what i know of mr. alcott if they had remained through his course they would have been better satisfied. 14th, tuesday. raining, wind n. e. at home. in the shanty and house conversing on high themes with mr. alcott and thoreau. walked as far as the blacksmith's shop (terry's) just at night. talk after tea on races, &c. dull for want of sleep. april 15th, wednesday. h. d. thoreau and myself left home at 6 a. m. for tarkiln hill, but the cars not stopping long enough for him to get on board, he was left and returned home with me. rode to the depot with him at loj a. m. april 17th. attended mr. alcott's fifth and last conversation at c. w. m.'s ; subject, " victories," an animated discussion, in which i participated to my regret. i must retire more and more into my old habits of solitude ; much society i cannot bear. retired at 12|^ exhausted and nervous. 18th, saturday. my friend a. bronson alcott, who came the 31st of march, left this morning after breakfast for boston. mr. a. is the best represent ative, probably, of modern days of one of the old philosophers, and is sometimes called "plato," or the modern plato. from the acquaintance i have had with him i am ready to award to him the noblest 302 daniel ricketson and his friends character of any man i have ever met. such men are indeed rare in any age. i am now left to my old habits, and feel more than ever the necessity of living in retirement. april 22, 1857. i miss my friend channing, who usually came up on wednesday afternoons. read in his poems to-day the lines entitled " to my companions ; " very touching, and reauy a deep wrought experience of life rendered into verse. i should like to write a review of channing's poems which might bring them more familiarly before the public. he has written some of the best poetry of any american, and will, sooner or later, be recog nized as one of our best as well as most original poets. his lines possess much tenderness and beauty. he is reauy the poet of the heart. the world is too hard for such men, and he suffers greatly therefrom. from an intimate acquaintance of nearly a year and a half, which is now, alas ! terminated, i look back with much interest and feel quite indebted to him for many interesting experiences. 23d. i begin to feel the loss of channing's company, who, though a very capricious acquaint ance, still possessed many tastes in common with my own. i have rarely if ever found a more com panionable friend. may 23d, saturday. left home at 10 a. m. for concord, arriving there at 5i p. m. walked with thoreau this evening, and called at mr. emerson's. slept at channing's house upon an iron bedstead. fine warm starlight eve. extracts from ricketson's journal 303 24th. sunday fine and warm — wind light. ther mometer at 86 above zero north side mr. thoreau's house at 2 p. m. rowed upon the river with thoreau this forenoon. walked up lee's hill and visited the old lee farm, the house having been lately burned. the barn and hen-houses are very com plete affairs. dined at mr. thoreau's ; spent part of the p. m. in my room at channing's house talking with thoreau upon various topics. took a long walk this p. m., leaving at four and returning at seven to the cliff with mr. and mrs. emerson, their two daughters, ellen and edith, son edward, and my friend thoreau ; had tea and spent the remain der of the evening with the emersons. much pleased with mrs. e.'s fine sense and sensibility as well as humanity, topics relative to which were the princi pal part of my conversation with her on the walk this p. m. concord, 25th, monday. fine and warm summer weather. walked through the village, over the river, north to the hills, and returned by the battle ground and the old parsonage house. on the river with thoreau in his boat this p. m. the excursion upon the concord river this p. m. with thoreau in his boat was very pleasant, although when we started i hardly felt able to walk to the boat, which was upon the shore, some distance up the river, near fairhaven bay. but after a bath and swim with t, i felt much refreshed and my dull headache passed gradually off. walked alone after tea as far as the old red-painted house beyond the railroad 304 daniel ricketson and his friends crossing west. halted on my return at the railroad depot, and was much interested in an ingenious young fellow who was earning his livelihood sell ing humming-tops, of whom i purchased one for joseph's little boy frank. thoreau accompanied me to my room, and after a long talk upon charac ter, &c., i retired at 10. 26th, tuesday. left concord at 7^ a. m. had a long conversation with miss ellen emerson, eldest daughter of e. w. emerson, who attends the school of professor agassiz at cambridge. she is a very sensible, open-hearted, intelligent young lady, but quite peculiar and original in, her ideas upon many subjects ; modest of her own quahties, but evi dently a strongly marked person, one that will grow in strength and finally make a noble woman. i was on the whole quite interested and pleased with her. in boston called about noon at dr. walter chan ning's, in bowdoin st.; there saw beside the doc tor the two eldest children of my friend wm. ellery channing, margaret fuuer c. and carohne sturgis c, daughters worthy of a poet and of whom any father might be proud : sweet sensitive girls, mar garet not 13 and carokne about 10. how ten derly i regarded them, deprived of their lovely mother and so neglected by their talented and way ward father ! dined with arthur b. fuller, the brother, and mrs. fuller, the mother of the revered and lamented margaret and ellen — madam ossoli and mrs. william e. channing. after a long extracts from ricketson's journal 305 and instructive as well as interesting conversation, the latter part with mrs. fuller, i left, deeply impressed with their genuine goodness and beauty of character, about 5 p. m. in the dining-room were three engravings (saved from the wreck) of madam ossoli's, to wit: "tasso's oak," "pine in the colonna gardens, rome," michael angelo's " cypresses, rome ; " also a scene in rome, with her residence there. in mr. fuller's own room up stairs were several line engravings from paintings by zampieri. in the front parlor was a raised plas ter head of margaret, and the engraving underneath the same, placed in the memoirs of her by her brother, very much hke the original daguerreotype of miss ellen channing with a child in her arms — a sweet motherly face, truly lovely ; also a fine por trait of the deceased wife of mr. fuller, a sweet open face. in the dining-room was a portrait of the hon. timothy fuller, the father of margaret — reddish hair, blue eyes, and rather mild countenance — the portrait resembling in style that of fisher ames. mr. f. presented me with several manu script pieces of margaret's, and mrs. fuller with a volume of poems, by j. w. randall, a friend of hers. december 18th. took tea with thoreau and spent the evening with him and his father's family. parker pillsbury, the anti-slavery lecturer, there. took channing's room for lodging, hard bed, poor sleep. cleared this p. m. 19th, saturday. clear and colder ; accompanied 306 daniel ricketson and his friends thoreau on a survey of woodland near walden pond this forenoon, dined with him at his father's, afternoon at my lodgings with thoreau and parker pulsbury. r. w. emerson also joined us at the close of the p. m. took tea with mr. emerson, called on mrs. alcott and her daughters, whom i found very agreeable and intelligent people ; one daughter i did not see, being quite ill, probably not to recover. mr. sanborn called there, with whom i returned to my room, he occupying with a sister channing's house. 20th, sunday. clear and cool, walked this fore noon with thoreau to the high land northeast of the village about three miles ; ate our dinner of brown bread and cheese on the lee side of a stone wall. took tea with mr. emerson and spent the evening alone with him by his parlor wood fire. left at 9j. called on thoreau at his room on my return, to bed at llj. my conversation with mr. emerson upon oriental literature. remarks. this short absence has been crowded with inter esting events and experiences to me. the short stay at my friend arthur b. fuller's, where i only dined, was very agreeable from the cordiality of mrs. fuller, the mother of the celebrated m. f. ossoli. i was introduced to eichard h. fuller, esq., of the legal profession, but also a farmer, or rather the owner of a farm at wayland, some twenty miles north of boston. he as well as the extracts from ricketson's journal 307 rest of the family are very devout and intelligent people. the interviews and conversations i had with my friends emerson and thoreau were marked by agreeable and intellectual experiences, and will long be remembered in my rather dull and unintellectual life. 1857. dec. 22d. in the shanty most of the day. walked down to the railroad crossing this p. m. with ranger, — thinking of the lapse of time and how imperceptibly, almost, my youth had slipped away. my thoughts ran somewhat in this strain : solemn indeed is the march of time, quietly stealing along his sure and resistless way. in childhood and youth we heed him not, the wealth of years seems before us, and we gladly count the lustrums as they pass. like the full bucket rising so buoyantly until it leaves the water's edge, so rise our early years upon us. soon, alas ! like the bucket, we ourselves, filled with years, are ready as it were to sink back into the abyss of time, never more to rise again. august 20th, 1868. as i am just publishing my history of new bed ford, i make the subjoined description of myself, now in the 46th year of my age, taking the hint for so doing from the " spectator." " a reader seldom peruses a book with pleasure till he knows whether the writer of it be a black or a fair man, of a mild or choleric disposition, married 308 daniel ricketson and his friends or a bachelor, with other particulars o£ a like nature, that conduce very much to the right understanding of an author " (addison). having stated my age, i would add that i am, or rather was in my youth, fair — in other words of a sandy complexion, my hair somewhat of a darker shade now and a little on the brown, a good crop of it still upon my head ; my beard, which i wear at present full, rather light and coarse, and of a red dish brown color — my skin where not exposed to the sun of a clear white but not delicate, but little hair upon my body and none upon my breast — my limbs stout and well proportioned — hands and feet small, but in good proportion to the rest of my body, my height a little rising five feet three inches. my forehead of good height and rather broad, the size of my head by hatter's measure 6|, a good pro portion.. my eyes hazel, the left, from an injury re ceived in my youth, defective in vision and slightly smaller than my right one, which is very strong. in past years when much subject to the headache, my poor eye was generally affected considerably thereby with pain. my nose rather long and large, mouth wide, lips thin, upper lip short, full round chin — on the whole i conclude that i could never have passed for aught but an ordinary looking person, towards which my small stature has con tributed. i am of an excitable temperament, but of late years not subject to anger. i believe that i am free from any constitutional or acquired disease. i have extracts from ricketson's journal 309 a mark of a light broavn color upon the right side of my neck, and each little finger is crooked shghtly inward at the upper joint. old montaigne himsele could not complain of my want of particulars in this description of my person. i might add, however, that although my feelings are quickly moved in sympathy for human or brute suffering, i do not consider myself a particularly liberal or open-handed man. i may not be deficient in this respect, but great generosity and self-sacrifice i conclude not to be among my more redeeming traits of character. december 1st, 1858. another december! well, welcome old month of cold and storm, yet not without smiles and sunshine withal — as well as these milder days of thaw and mist equally acceptable to me, season for woodland walks when the shelter of the old woods is so wel come. old friend, i welcome thee. 1858. december 7th, tuesday. dull and cloudy. in town this a. m. saw channing at the mercury office, who informed of thoreau's intended visit to me with his english friend, thomas chohnondeley, of hodnet, shropshire. eeceived a letter from thoreau on the arrival of the morning mail to this end. at home this p. m., went to the depot at head of the river (tarkiln hill) on arrival of even ing train from boston, where i met thoreau and his friend chohnondeley. spent evening in the 310 daniel ricketson and his friends shanty with them, talking of the engksh poets — gray, tennyson, wordsworth, etc. retired at ten o'clock. 8th, wednesday. dull, cloudy, and drizzly. spent the forenoon in the shanty with thoreau and cholmondeley talking of mankind and his relation ships here and hereafter. walked with c. to the rocky bluff beyond the village to get a view of new bedford. smoked after dinner with c. while thoreau and walton examined anna's collection of plants. thoreau and cholmondeley walked. mr. c. is a tall spare man thirty-five years of age, fair and fresh complexion, blue eyes, light brown and fine hair, nose small roman, beard light and worn full with mustache. a man of fine culture and refinement of manner, educated at oriel col lege, oxford, of an old cheshire family by his father, and shropshire by his mother ; his father a clergyman of the church of england, hjs mother sister of bishop heber. spent evening in the sit ting-room talking of the old writers, chaucer, &c. 9th. thoreau and cholmondeley walked to town this forenoon and back at dinner. 10th, friday. clear and cold. my friends thoreau and cholmondeley left at 7| a. m. to take the train at tarkiln hiu. july, 1859. 17th, sunday. "a red letter day" as charles lamb would say. clear and fine. wind w. by n. left home at 9 a. m., rode out to sampson's. extracts from ricketson's journal 3h soon after my arrival at sampson's, while seated under the piazza, two gentlemen pedestrians came up from the northward who proved to be h. g. 0. blake and his friend theophilus brown, both near friends of h. d. thoreau, having walked from their home, worcester, and bound to the end of cape cod, the meeting was very agreeable to me, and i think also to them. after dinner we walked to the top of " king philip's lookout " and the west shore of long pond, where we bathed. a severe thunder-gust came up from the northeast about 7, which wrought in a few minutes the pond, a short time before calm and smooth, into a furious state, waves of considetable size dashing against the shore, and the sailboats dashing at their moorings as though they might swamp at any moment. it passed over to the s. e. in the course of an hour, and clear star light succeeded, but warm and close air. retired at 10, after a walk with messrs. blake and brown by the shore of the pond. slept in the s. w. room where i lodged last year. 18th, monday. clear, fine, and warm. rose at q^, found my friends blake and brown already at their breakfast. after breakfast the landlord, sam'l briggs, kindly took his sailboat and went to the crossing place at long point for the purpose of landing blake and brown on their way to wareham and thence to provincetown, whom i accompanied ; after a pleasant conversation on various matters during the sail, we parted with mutual good-will and farewells, they standing on the shore under the 312 daniel ricketson and his friends shade of the old oaks and waving their hats as we set sail, and so we parted after a pleasant interview of some hours. 1859. nov. 19th, saty. left home for concord at loj a. m., arrived at concord at 5j p. m., leaving the cars at concord depot, walked down to the village bookstore (mr. stacey's) where i found mr. alcott, by whose invitation i was going to visit him ; also saw thoreau at the post-office. received with much kindness by mrs. alcott and her two daughters, louisa and abby. spent the evening with mr. a. in his library, where he has a wood fire on the hearth. their place is very retired, the house an old farmhouse which mr. a. has fitted up at little expense in a very tasteful manner, and made it a suitable home for a philosopher and poet. 20th, sunday. clear and cold. spent the fore noon in the library with mr. alcott, looking after and examining his old books. i walked this p. m. with thoreau to walden pond and the woods around. took tea with t. and called upon chan ning and smoked a pipe with him; returned to thoreau' s, met edmund hosmer, an intelligent farmer, there. talked on religious faith, &c., re turned to mr. alcott's late in the evening. 21st, monday. clear and milder. walked this forenoon with mr. alcott beyond the old parsonage of dr. ripley, looking at farms, mr. alcott bting desirous for me to come to concord with my family extracts from kicketson's journal 313 to live. left mr. a.'s hospitable roof after dinner to visit my friend thoreau. mr. a. and his family are vegetarians, and live very simply on homely but ■wholesome fare, and enjoy good health. my visit was a very pleasant one, giving me the feeling of much ease and comfort. called on mr. emerson vfith mr. a. this a. m. 22d, tuesday. unsettled. called after break fast on channing, who left me below in his kitchen and went to his room in the attic. proceeded to mr. alcott's, dined with thoreau, spent part of the afternoon with him at mr. alcott's in the hbrary, walked after with t. in the dark as far as the hosmer farm, sat with thoreau in his room talking till 11. 23d, wednesday. walked after breakfast to ed mund hosmer's farm, spent an hour with him and his youngest daughter, an intelhgent and well edu cated young woman. called at mr. alcott's and dined with him in his library on boiled rice, grated cheese, cider, and apples. walked this p. m. with thoreau to the hallowell farm; returned to tho reau's room ; plain talk, perhaps too much so. called at mr. alcott's this evening ; he was at mr. emerson's. sat till nearly 9 with the two young ladies; introduced to mr. pratt, engaged to miss anna alcott, who was also in the room a short time. spent the night at the middlesex house, kept by a mr. newton, formerly a stage-driver between taun ton and boston. retired at 10. talk in the bar room with several persons. 314 daniel kicketson and his friends 24th, thursday. clear and fine for the season. left concord at 8j a. m. after having kept the temperature of the weather for many years the constant observation of the thermometer has become irksome to me, and of late i generally omit to make a record from it ; and, besides, so far as my own purposes are concerned, can tell so nearly the temperature that i do not need the use of the thermometer, and i like to be exempt from too much use of these sort of aids. i could do very well without a watch — a sun-dial would answer all general purposes. we lose so much by these artificial aids that our instincts and memory are enervated by them. the true philoso phy is to ascertain how much we can do without. but most people labor to encumber themselves with the innumerable miscalled conveniences with which old-fashioned comfort is quite smothered. i must shake still more these non-essentials, and learn, if possible, what a wise man in this day only needs. december, 1859. friday, 2d. to-day at 12 m. john brown was probably executed at charlestown, va., for a noble but apparently ineffectual attempt to emancipate slaves. my sympathy for the brave and self-sacri ficing old man has been deeply aroused. his suf ferings are now probably all over, and his body rests in peace, the bloody requisitions of the law having been satisfied. extracts from ricketson's journal 315 the riven oak. firm the oak upon the hill-top, though its branches may be torn, standeth in its solemn glory, standeth solemn and forlorn. though the lightning rend asunder and prostrate the noble bole, acorns that have fallen under shall increase a thousand-fold. so old brown of ossawatomie, with his sons in blood and death. like the dragon's teeth when planted serried armies shall bequeath. feeling sad at the mournful close of poor john brown's life, now i trust with his father and his god beyond the reach of the tyrant slaveholder. cloudy this afternoon, and all nature affected with a general gloom, as it were at the loss of the brave old philanthropic hero now lying dead and cold in the hands of his enemies and the enemies of hu manity. john brown cannot die; his body may perish, but that which was the most himself, his noble, self sacrificing spirit, will survive, and that object to which he so heartily devoted himself and for which he has died, will be hastened to its accomphshment by his cruel and untimely death, untimely so far as 316 daniel kicketson and his friends the means used to effect it on the part of his tyran nical captors. 3d, saty. learned that john brown was hanged in charlestown, virginia, yesterday, between 11 and 12 a. m., — a martyr to the cause of the oppressed slave, — meeting death with the dignity and com posure of a christian martyr, as he undoubtedly was, although i do not think he took the wisest or best way to effect his noble object, — that of hber ating the slaves of this professed republic. peace to his memory. good men will bless his name, and his memory will be venerated by the wise and good. his death must prove the destruction of the blood cemented union of this nation. mark this record, whosoever may at some future day read this page. i would make this record with due humihty, and with a tender solicitude for the best interests of my countrymen. i wish not the blood of the tyrant, but that he may become abashed and conscience-stricken before god. my soul truly yearneth for peace and prosperity to all mankind, but cruelty and slavery must cease. january, 1860. the following are the resolutions i offered yes terday the 26th at the anti-slavery meeting, bos ton. resolved, that dreadful as slavery is, its aboli tion, in order to secure the highest good of hu manity, must be accomphshed without bloodshed. resolved, that to be a true abolitionist we must extracts from ricketson's journal 317 be true to humanity, and therefore any measures which violate the great cause of human rights, though intended for the good of the slave, must result in evil. resolved, that if the anti-slavery movement be conducted on the true principles of peace and good will we can reasonably absolve ourselves from any violent measures adopted by others for the liberation of the oppressed. oct. 11th, 1860. almost every real enjoyment we experience comes to us simply and naturally. the state of mind which constantly seeks some new form of pleasure rarely accomplishes its object. a philo sophical composure is therefore much to be coveted and encouraged. seeking the companionship of those distinguished for their talents and acquire ments, if they are beyond our own sphere and com pass, is rarely rewarded with success and usually ends in disappointment. it is better to lead an austere life of virtue, than one of amiable weaknesses that partake of the spirit of sensuality, though not really criminal in char acter. if nature has not made you a true man strive to become one. 8th month, 1861 (henry thoreau's last visit, 19th to 24th). rode up to the depot for my friend thoreau, who came by the p. m. train from boston. spent evening conversing, thoreau giving an in teresting and graphic account of his late visit to 318 daniel ricketson and his friends the mississippi, st. anthony falls, &c,, — gone two months. 20th, thursday. clear and fine, wind e. at home this a. m. talking a good deal with thoreau in the shanty. rode with thoreau this p. m., visited the old house at thomas wood's farm. in rela tion to my friend thoreau's health my impression is that his case is a very critical one as to recovery ; he has a bad cough and expectorates a good deal, is emaciated considerably, his spirits, however, appear as good as usual, his appetite good. unless some favorable symptom shows itself soon i fear that he will gradually dechne. he is thinking of going to a warm chmate for the winter, but i think a judi cious hydropathic treatment at home would be much better for him. 21st, wednesday. clear and fine, perfect wea ther. rode to town with thoreau this a. m. got an ambrotype of him at dunshee's which we all think an excellent likeness. thence we drove to clark's cove and so by resolved howland's corner and new road to town. got september number atlantic magazine. called at post-office and home by 1 p. m. 22d. long talk with my friend thoreau on va rious matters this a. m. rode this p. m. round by white's factory with t. walked over the ridge road called the " back-bone of acushnet " with t. 23d, friday. rode this p. m. to sassaquin pond with thoreau, walked round from the north end, where we left our horse and wagon (billy and old extracts from: ricketson's journal 319 buggy wagon). t. found one or more plants new to him, at least rare. i bathed in a little cove on the west shore, a mild, pleasant afternoon. home 24th, saturday. clear and fine. our friend h. d. thoreau who came on monday p. m. left us by 7.10 a. m. train. rode with him to head river depot. the visit i trust has been agreeable to him as well as myself. his health is very poor, being afflicted with bronchitis, and the recovery of his health is i fear quite uncertain ; still he has a good deal of toughness and great will, which are in his favor. it is my earnest desire that he may recover. new bedford, sept. 1, 1861. dear thorbatj, — dr. denniston, to whom i re commended you to go, has kindly consented on his way from new bedford to northampton, to go to concord to see you. he has had much experience and success in the treatment of bronchitis, and i hope his visit to you will result in your placing your self under his care, which i much desire. should the doctor have the time, and you feel able, please show him a little of the concord worthies and much obuge, yours truly, d. ricketson. sept. 1st. feeling rather dull and anxious whether or not to go to concord with dr. d. to morrow. 320 daniel eicketson and his friends sept. 2d, monday. left home by a. m. train for boston with dr. denniston to see my friend h. d. thoreau, the doctor professionally. after talk and examination by the doctor walked with him and t. to the battle-ground ; on return met mr. alcott, who joined us. dr. d. left for boston at 6j p. m. i walked home with mr. alcott. returned to mr. thoreau's by 9. 3d, tuesday. weather warm and cloudy. spent forenoon with mr. alcott in his study, thoreau there part of the time. on our way visited an antiqua rian collection of a mr. davis in company with miss sophia thoreau and mr. thoreau. dined with mr. alcott, his wife, and daughters louisa and abby. returned to thoreau's to tea, walked this evening in the dark, got lost for a time, but by retraciug my steps found my way again. dark cloudy evening, warm. talked with t. till ten. 4th, wednesday. clear and fine, walked to walden pond with mr. thoreau, bathed ; on our way called on mr. emerson ; walked this p. m. with t. to mr. edmund hosmer's farm, mr. h. with us from the post-office. saw channing in the street, but no word between us, i not knowing how he would meet me if i addressed him. took tea at mrs. brooke's, returned to mr. t.'s at 7^, walked alone on the hill beyond the bridge by the wheeler farm, talked with t. till 9i. clear, fine evening. 5th, thursday. clear and fine. left concord at 8| a. m., my friend t. accompanying me to the extracts from ricketson's journal 321 depot ; introduced to young horace mann, mr. t.'s late companion to minnesota ; arrived home to din ner. i think t. seemed improving when i left him at concord. dr. d., though he faithfully examined his case, was unable to awaken in t. an interest in his mode of treating disease by the water practice. the doctor kindly invited t. to come to northampton and stop a fortnight as a guest with him ; discour aged his going to the west indies. i hope t. may be improving and need no doctor or absence from home. 1862. may 4th. wrote and mailed a letter to henry d. thoreau this forenoon. 7th. heard of the death of my valued and re spected friend, henry d. thoreau, who died at his home in concord yesterday, aged 44 years. an irre parable loss ; one of the best and truest of men. non omnis moriar — may 7, 1897. 9th. rode to town with louisa ; got ambrotype of henry d. thoreau at dunshee's. arranged h. d. thoreau's letters to me, 27 in all, commencing oct., 1854, and ending oct. 14, 1861. his first visit to me was in dec, 1854, and his last in august, 1861 ; during the interval he visited me at least once a year. 22d. received a letter from sophia thoreau re lating to the death of her brother. 23d. wrote sophia thoreau and sent an ambro type of her late brother henry, which i had taken 322 daniel kicketson and his friends on his last visit here, in august, 1861 ; mailed both at the village office. my lines entitled " walden " appeared in the " liberator " of this week. 26th. received a letter from sophia thoreau acknowledging receipt of the ambrotype of henry thoreau which i sent last saturday. walden. dedicated to henry d. thoreau. here once a poet most serenely lived, a poet and philosopher, forsooth — for in him both have joined and greatly thrived. and found content before the god of truth. a plain-set man, a man of culture rare, who left an honor on old harvard's walls ; an honest man, content with nature's fare, the spot more rich where'er his shadow falls. near by the shore his cabin reared its head. with his own hands he built the simple dome, and here alone to thought and study wed. he found a genial though an humble home. from the scant produce of a neighboring field. tilled by his hands, he got his honest bread ; but nature for him greater crops did yield. in rich abundance daily for him spread. the woods, the fields, the lake, and all around, both man and beast ; and bird and insect small, in his keen mind a shrewd expression found ; for truth and beauty he discerned in all. extracts from ricketson's journal 323 a jurist learned in nature's court supreme, a wise physician, priest, and teacher, too, for whom each sphere reveals a ready theme. and wisdom is exhaled, both old and new. while others unto foreign lands have gone. and in old footsteps travelled far and wide, this man at home a richer prize hath won. from fresher fields unknown to wealth and pride. his own good limbs have borne him well about. whose constant use hath made him staunch and strong, as many a luckless wight hath proven out. and concord soil in him hath found a tongue. henceforth her hills, her gently flowing stream, her woods and fields shall classic ground become. and e'en the village street with interest beam. where one so nobly true hath found a home. to walden pond the ingenuous youth shall hie. and mark the spot where stood the hermitage, but ye who seek 'mid glittering scenes to vie, let other haunts your vanity engage. go on, brave man ! in thy own chosen way ; how many ills of life thou dost escape ! thy brave example others shall essay. and from thy lessons happier lives may shape ; shall learn from thee to find a ready store of choicest treasures spread before their eyes. for nature ever keeps an open door. and bids a welcome to the good and wise. 17 jan'y, 1860. 324 daniel ricketson and his friends reflection. my mind sometimes appears to me comparable to a harp that plays whatever tune the controlling power passes over its strings. 5 month, 11th, 1863. 1866. march, 1866. 28th, wednesday. spring again. clear and fine. wind changes from n. w. to s. by 8 a. m. the birds are sweetly singing once more, not having lost their faith in a kind providence, and neither would i. the song sparrow, blue-bird, robin, linnet, making melody among our trees — these, with the cry of the bluejay and golden-winged woodpecker, and the sweet blending of the meadow lark give a cheer and freshness to nature, and the shrunken spirit of the sensitive among mankind. how often have i felt the force of the sentiment and word of francis jeffrey : " if it were not for my love of beautiful nature and poetry, my heart would have died within me long ago." how beau tiful are thy works, god, as seen in the opening of the year ! a casket fuu of beauty reminding us of duty, — of hearts fuu of gratitude, for thy sweet beatitude, in sending forth thy cheer, to grace the vernal year. extracts from ricketson's journal 325 october, 1866. reflections. cowper had published his task before he was my age, and had several years before pubhshed his first volume of poems, — " table talk," "truth, hope, and charity." most men accomphsh their best efforts long before fifty years of age. how unrea sonable would it be for me to expect to perform anything at my period of life of a high order or lasting nature in the walks of hterature, particularly in poetry ! it was my ambition when a young man to do something in the way of verse that might be of value to others and survive me. i held my lit tle gift (as it has proved) in sacredness, and thanks be to god, however humble, i never profaned it to low purposes. i have never, i believe, written a line, so far as its moral bearing is concerned, that i should be ashamed of. i have composed many poems that now appear to me of far less merit than at the time they were written, but i still regard with re verence the sweet and sacred periods of poetic plea sure when they were written. oh, halcyon days, how have ye fled and gone, yet dear in memory ! at forty years of age i find upon survey of my life and its results, that neither my education nor talents would warrant me in the hope or expectation of doing anything remarkable in the field of letters ; and that i must content myself with a humbler walk in life than i had aspired to. i have in a good measure conformed to this conclusion, and for the 326 daniel ricketson and his friends past thirteen years have felt more and more that my sphere is not a large or luminous one. i have for the past five years been striving to benefit others in the cause of truth and christian liberality, particu larly among friends or quakers, but i fear with but little success ; so that i now begin to feel that i may be excused from much further effort in this line, and simply attend to the duties of life, hoping to live a pure and acceptable one to my heavenly father, so that my end may be in peace. gracious father and beloved saviour, grant my humble prayer. 1872. sounds i paeticttlaklt enjoy as associated in memory. 1. the distant lowing of cattle (cows). 2. the distant tinkling of the cow-bells, particularly at eventide. 3. the distant barking of a large dog from some remote farmhouse late in autumn, of a moonlight evening. 4. the neighing of a horse in a pasture, and the whin neying in the stable in recognition of his master or asking for food. 5. the early crowing of cocks, and the attempts of cockerels to crow. the cackling of hens in warm spells of winter. 6. the song of the sparrow in early spring, — also that of the bluebird and robin. 7. the low call of the robin about raspberry-time, and the low sweet summer song i now hear, aug. 9th, 1872, 4 o'clock p. m., from our thicket. 8. the chirping of crickets, particularly the fall-cricket and harvest-fly, so full of soothing melody. 9. the soft sweet voice of woman. extracts from ricketson's journal 327 10. the wind through pines. 11. the bell-like sound i have heard through our elms, at our old home, new bedford (elm st.). 12. the sound of distant flails in autumn. 13. distant sleighbells of the old-fashioned sort. 14. bells at a distance such as cowper heard in his " "winter morning walk." 15. songs associated in memory of early days, like " fairy-like music," » brignal banks " " kelvin grove," " rose tree," &c., &c. 16. the lapsing of wavelets on the shore of my favorite middleboro ponds, and against the boat's sides. 17. the piping of frogs in spring, and the guttural warbling of the woodcock at this season. 18. the rippling of brooks adown their pebbly courses. 19. the softer melody of the flute and piano, accom panied by a gentle, sweet, unaffected voice. 20. the whistling of the wind about the angles of the house, or deserted places, when accompanied with no danger, and in the society of congenial friends. 21. the cry of the bluejay, and the cawing of the crow in my autumn rambles near the woods. 22. the " drumming " of the partridges, and the call of the quail in spring. 23. the chirp and song of the cheweet or ground robin, the former in early, the latter in later summer. 24. the sublime chant of wild geese while passing on their vernal and autumnal migrations. 25. the sweet soothing song of the meadow lark, than which nothing in natural sounds touches my heart more deeply. 26. the noonday song of the sparrow, known to me as " the sampson sparrow " from my having heard his plea sant song in former years at our old favorite retreat near " assowamset pond." 328 daniel kicketson and his friends we all need some great and noble purpose of life, for without this our years will drag on or slip away and we shall be found at last hopelessly shipwrecked. arouse then, youth, and look around for some grand object of pursuit — it may be an humble duty of every-day life that demands thy soul ; but is nevertheless thy proper work and therefore noble, — spurn it not, but accept it. record feb. 7, 1873. i do not know that i have an enemy in the world, in fact i think i may safely say that i have none. of this i am sure, that i am not an enemy to any human being ; and i most humbly desire to be a friend to all, inclusive of feehng and sentient creatures, and tenderly appre ciative of the beauty of the productions of nature, both animate and inanimate, seeking thus to fall into the divine harmony and to find by his all-guiding hand the path of serenity and peace i have so long sought for. i have never been able to attain to that degree of intellectual expansion and clearness which would make me master of resources lying as it were stored away somewhere in my brain. i have compared it to an iron band about my head which would seem to repress its greater energies and particularly con trol my imagination, confining it to a narrow sphere. in my poetical experiences i have never been able except in a very moderate degree to record my highest and best impressions. i can see the land scape in all its beauty outstretched before me, — the fields, the woods, and distant hills, the dancing extracts from ricketson's journal 329 stream, the mossy rock, the light and shade that give such charming effect to scenes of nature ; the sky with its pavilion of cloud upon cloud, the music of the breeze through the pines in svmimer, and the roar of the tempest in winter often give me emo tions and thoughts that i should in vain attempt to put into language. may, 1885. my keligiotjs belief. i have just been reading the rehgious behef of victor hugo in his preexistence and in his complex being, with his future hopes of meeting his friends. it has occurred to me to write down my own present rehgious faith or rather views : i believe in the gen tle doctrines of the early friends — particularly that of " the indwelling light," as the first great teacher and guide, it being " the divine immanence " or " holy spirit ; " also the christ within the soul, according to st. john, the true light from the beginning and according to st. paul " the grace of god which bringeth salvation." this also as the true interpreter of the sacred volume whose pages bear record of this divine manifestation to mankind from the earhest ages. i am convinced of the wis dom of god's plan for man's redemption from sin, as a free gift, and not from his own merits lest he boast, thus productive of that humiliation which is man's true exaltation. i believe, therefore, that jesus christ was the promised messiah and saviour, in whose crucifixion and example, mysterious as it 330 daniel ricketson and his ekiends may be, i hope for mercy and happiness beyond the grave. at the hour of death i hope for grace from on high, to resign myself with childlike confidence into the hands of our heavenly father, the great and good creator, whose protecting care over me in my past youth, manhood, and old age, i have so often witnessed. with a sense of my own unworthiness through redeeming power and goodness i would trust in him alone, the fountain and source of life, the god and saviour of mankind. as a birthright member of the society of friends, i would express my continued faith in its christian doctrines, so simple and true, so humane and char itable when rightly observed, feehng that in the future they will be seen to be the truest interpreta tion of the christian truth. so, asking god's bless ing upon those who may be called upon to suffer for its priqciples i would close. how would i die ? with heartfelt trust in him who gave me life and light, our god and saviour — good supreme, who governs all in love and might. how would i die ? in peace with au, in resignation, and in hope ; released from every earthly thrau, as visions of the future ope. jan., 1889. 25th. this is the 130th anniversary of the birth of robert burns, whose poems still hold a warm place in my heart, particularly " the cotter's satur day night," "highland mary," and many of his extracts from ricketson's journal 331 sweet songs. i would to-night respond to the fol lowing closing stanza of one of our dear longfel low's last poems — a graceful tribute to the memory of scotia's favorite poet, — " his presence haunts this room to-night, a form of mingled mist and light, from that far coast. welcome beneath this roof of mine ! ^ welcome ! this vacant chair is thine, dear guest and ghost." august, 1892. reflections. i have been in the habit of writing occasionally for many years my thoughts when particularly led to a subject, and now it occurs to me to record for future reference and i hope encouragement, thoughts that have just crossed my mind while looking, as i am frequently led to do, in my advanced years, to the closing scene. while the future is largely concealed from man, yet hope grows stronger as more required. al though my life has not been without its sorrows and <|lisappointments, the bright spots are predominant, ^nd those which happily most present themselves to my mind. i have ever loved nature in her calm and peaceful sphere, and simple pleasures have ever been my choice. i have been much blessed in my family relations, and life to me has on the whole been an unusually serene and happy one. for all of which i would thank the great and good author of our being, and the kind parents, the industry of 332 daniel kicketson and his friends my dear father having afforded me the means of a moderate independence. domestic affection, friend ship, and nature have made my life peacefid and pleasant. i fear that i am too much attached still to my earthly existence to leave without a struggle, but i will hope that the great sovereign of the universe will sustain me in my closing experience with resignation and hope. no man is truly great until he has risen above the incentive of human praise for doing good. no one is capable of producing a great work in the science of letters or art until he has passed be yond the motive of human reward. in fact it seems to be necessary that the man should be so much superior even to his best efforts that when fame reaches him, he has already risen superior to its charms. aspiration belongs more particularly to the season of youth, and undoubtedly has its val uable influence, but by the time any great or noble work is accomplished that reward which was so ardently desired is no longer coveted; and fame once truly obtained becomes nearly worthless to its possessor. humility must ever be the accompani ment of human greatness. xii extracts from henry d. thoreau's journal extracts prom henry d. thoreau's journal first visit to dakiel eickbtson. dec. 25th, 1854. to new bedford via cambridge. i think that i never saw a denser growth than the young white cedars in swamps on the taunton and new bedford railroad. in most places it looked as if there was not room for a man to pass between the young trees. that part of the country is remark ably level and wooded. the evergreen prinos very common in the low ground. at new bedford saw the casks of oil covered with seaweed to prevent fire ; the weed holds moisture. town not lively. whalers abroad at this season. ricketson has "bewick's british birds," two vols.; " --esop's fables," one vol. ; " select fables," one vol. (partly the same) ; " quadrupeds," one vol. has taken pains to obtain them. the tail-pieces were the attraction to him. he suggested to howitt to write his abodes of the poets. ["homes and haunts of the british poets," 2 vols., 8vo, richard bentley, london, 1847. — editors.] dee. 25th, 1854. at ricketson's (new bedford). i do not remember to have ever seen such a day 336 daniel ricketson and his friends as this in concord. there is no snow here (though there has been excellent sleighing at concord since the 5th ult.), but it is very muddy, the frost coming out of the ground as in spring with us. i went to walk in the woods with r. ; it was wonderfully warm and pleasant, and the cockerels crowed just as in a spring day at home. i felt the winter break ing up in me, and if i had been at home i should have tried to write poetry. they told me that this was not a rare day there. that they had little or no winter such as we have, and it was owing to the influence of the gulf stream, which was only sixty nules from nantucket at the nearest or 120 miles from them. in mid-winter when the wind was s. e. or even s. w. they frequently had days as warm and debilitating as in summer. there is a difference of a degree in latitude, between concord and new bed ford, but far more in climate. the american holly is quite common there, with its red berries still hold ing on, and is now their christmas evergreen. i heard the lark sing, strong and sweet, and saw robins. r. lives in that part of new bedford, three miles out of the town, called the head of the river, i. e. the acushnet river. there is a quaker meet ing-house there. such an ugly shed without a tree or bush about it, which they call their meeting house (without steeple of course), is altogether repul sive to me, like a powder-house or grave. and even the quietness and perhaps unworldliness of an aged quaker has something ghostly and saddening about it — as it were a mere preparation for the grave. extracts from thoreau's journal 337 e. said that pheasants from england (where they are not indigenous) had been imported to naushon, and were killed there. sept. 29th, 1855. * go to daniel ricketson's, new bedford. got out at tarkiln hill or head of the river station, three miles this side of new bedford. recognized an old dutch barn. r.'s sons, arthur and walton, were just returning from tautog fishing in buzzard's bay, and i tasted one at supper, — singularly curved from snout to tail. sept. 30th, 1855. sunday. rode with r. to sassacowens pond, in the north part of new bedford on the taunton road. called also tobey's pond, from jonathan tobey, who lives close by, who has a famous law suit, all about a road he built to taunton years ago, which he has not got paid for. in which suit he told us he had spent $30,000 ; employed webster. tobey said the pond was called from the last of the indians who lived here 100 or 150 years ago, and that you can still see his cellar-hole, etc., on the west side of the pond. we saw floating in the pond the bottom of an old log canoe, the sides rolled up, and some great bleached trunks of trees washed up. ^ found two quartz arrow-heads on the neighboring fields. noticed the ailanthus or tree of heaven about tobey's house, giving it a tropical look. thence we proceeded to long pond, stopping at the s. end, which is in freetown about 9 miles from 338 daniel kicketson and his friends r.'s. the main part is in middleborough. it is about 4 miles long by ^ wide, measuring on the maps of middleborough and of the state (a man said 5 to 15 feet deep or 20 in some places), with at least three islands in it. this and the neighbor ing ponds were remarkably low. we first came out on to a fine soft white sandy beach 2 rods wide near the s. e. end, and walked westerly; it was very wild, and not a boat to be seen. the sandy bottom in the shallow water from the shore to three or four rods out, or as far as we could see, was thickly fur rowed by clams, chiefly the common unio, and a great many were left dead or dying high and dry within a few feet of the water. these furrows, with each its clam at the end, though headed different ways — all ways — described various figures on the bottom, some pretty perfect circles, figure 6's and 3's, whiplashes curling to snap, bow-knots, serpen tine knes, and often crossing each other's tracks like the paths of rockets or bombshells. i never saw these forms so numerous. soon we came to a stony and rocky shore abutting on a meadow fringed with wood, with quite a primitive aspect. with the stones the clams ceased. saw two places where invisible inhabitants make fires and do their wash ,ing on the shore, some barrels or firkins, etc., still left. some of the rocks at high-water mark were very large and wild, which the water had under mined on the edge of the woods. here, too, were some great bleached trunks of trees high and dry. saw a box-tortoise which had been recently killed on extkacts from thoreau's journal 339 the rocky shore. after walking in all ahout | or ^ a mile, came again to a sandy shore, where the sand-bars lately cast up and saturated with water sank under us. there we saw, washed up dead, §, great pickerel 23 inches long (we measured it on a cane), and there was projecting from its mouth the tail of another pickerel. as i wished to ascertain the size of the last, but could not pull it out, for i found it would part first at the tail, it was so firmly fixed, i cut into the large one (though it was very ofeensive) and found that the head and much more was digested, and that the smaller fish had been at least fifteen inches long. the big one had evi dently been choked by trying to swallow too large a mouthful. such was the penalty it had paid for its voracity. there were several suckers and some minnows also washed up near by. they get no iron from these ponds now. went to a place easterly from the south end of this pond called " joe's rocks," just over the eo chester line, where a cousin of thomas morton told us that one joe ashley secreted himself in the rev olution around the fissures of the rocks, and being supplied with food by his friends, could not be found, though he had enlisted in the army. returning, we crossed the acushnet river where it takes its rise, coming out of a swamp. looked for arrow-heads in a field where were many quahog, oyster, scallop, clam, and winkles (pyrola) shells, probably brought by the whites four or five miles from the salt water. also saw these in places where 340 daniel eicketson and his friends indians had frequented. went into an old deserted house — the brady house — where two girls who had lived in the family of k. and his brother had been born and bred. e. said that they were partic ularly bright girls and lovers of nature ; had read my "walden;" now keep school, and have stiq an afeection for their old house. we visited the spring they had used, saw the great wiuow-tree at the corner of the house, in which one of the girls, an infant in the cradle, thought that the wind began, as she looked out of the window and heard the wind sough through it; saw how the chimney in the garret was eked out with flat stones, bricks being dear. arthur ricketson showed me in his collection what was apparently an indian mortar, which had come from sampson's in middleborough. it was a dark granite-like stone some ten inches long by eight wide and four thick, with a regular round cavity worn in it four inches in diameter and one and one half deep, also a smaller one opposite on the other side. he also showed me the perfect shell of emys guttata with some of the internal bones, which had been found between the plastering and boarding of a meeting-house at the head of the eiver (in new bedford) which was 75 or 80 years old, and was torn down 15 or 20 years ago, supposed to have crawled in when the meeting-house was built, though it was not very near water. it had lost no scales, but was bleached to a dirty white, sprinkled with spots still yellow. p z o ph in o extracts from thoreau's journal 341 oct. 1st, 1855. among e.'s books is bewick's "^esop's fables." on a leaf succeeding the title-page is engraved a facsimile of his handwriting to the following effect : newcastle, january, 1824. to thomas bewick & son, dr. l. s. d. to a demy copy of jesop's fables 18 keceived the above with thanks. thomas bewick. robert elliot bewick. then there was some fire-red sea moss adhering to the page just over the view of a distant church and windmill (probably newcastle by moonlight) and at the bottom of the page : — no. 809. thomas bewick. his mark. it being the impression of his thumb. a cloudy, somewhat rainy day. mr. r. brought me a snail, a helix alboldbris, or possibly thyroides, which he picked from under a rock where he was having a wall built. it had put out its stag, or, rather, giraffe-hke head and neck, out to about two inches, the whole length of the point behind being about three inches, mainly a neck of a somewhat huffish white or a grayish buff color, or buff brown, shining with moisture, with a short head, deer-like and giraffe-like horns or tentacular on its top, black at tip f of an inch long, and also 2 short horns on mouth. its neck, etc., flat beneath, by which sur face it draws or slides itself along in a chair. it is 342 daniel kicketson and his friends surprisingly long and large to be contained in that shell which moves atop of it. it moves at the rate of an inch or half an inch a minute over a level sur face, whether horizontal or perpendicular, and holds quite tight to it. the shell like a whorled dome to a portion of a building. its foot (?) extends to a point behind. it commonly touches by an inch of its flat under side, flattening out by as much of its length as it touches. shell rather darker, mottled (?) than body. the tentacula become all dark as they are drawn in, and it can draw them or contract them straight back to nought. no obvious eyes (?) or mouth. p. m. rode to new bedford and cafled on mr. green, a botanist, but had no interview with him. walked through mrs. arnold's arboretum. rode to the beach at clark's cove where gen. gray landed his 4000 troops in the revolution. found there in abundance anomia ephippium, the irregular golden colored sheus, modiolaplicatula (rayed mussel), cre pidula fornicata worn, pecten concentricus alive, and one or two more. returned by the new point road, four miles long and r. said 80 feet wide (i should think by recouection more) and cost |50,000. a magnificent road by which new bedford has ap propriated the sea. passed salt-works stiu in active operation, wind mius going. a series of frames with layers of bushes one above another to a great height up for filtering. went into a spermaceti candle and oil factory. arthur r. has a soapstone pot (indian) about 9 inches long, more than an inch extracts from thoreau's journal 343 thick, with a kind of handles at the end or protu berances. oct. 2d, 1855. rode to sampson's in middleborough ; a cloudy day ; 13 miles. many quails in road. passed over a narrow neck between the two quittacus ponds, after first visiting great quittacus on right of road and gathering clam-shells there as i had done at long pond and intend to do at assawampset. these shells, labelled, will be good mementos of the ponds. it was a great wild pond with large islands in it. saw a loon on little or west quittacus from road, an old bird with a black biu. the bayonet or rainbow rush was common along the shore. in backus's act. of mid. hist. coll. vol. 30, 1st series, philip once saw an army to waylay there, capt. church in assawampset neck, which is in the s. part of mid. perhaps this was it. just beyond this neck by the roadside, between the road and west quittacus pond, is an old indian burying ground. r. thought it was used before the whites came, though of late by the wampanoag indians. this was the old stage-road from new bedford to boston. it occupies a narrow strip between the road and the pond about a dozen rods wide at the north end and narrower at the south, and is covered with a middling growth of oak, birch, hickory, etc. chestnut, oaks (perhaps q. melana) grow near there. i gathered some leaves and one large acorn from the buggy. there were two stones with in scriptions. r. copied one as follows, v. scrap. 344 daniel kicketson and his friends " in memory of jean squeen, who died april 13th, 1794, in her 23rd year. also of benj'n, who died at sea april 22d, 1799, in his 26th year. children of lydia squeen, a native." on east shore of little quittacus by roadside old stage-road from new bedford to boston, 30 to 40 feet from shore of pond, another stone, lydia squeen died 1812, aged 75. kocks which have curious marks thereon (sup posed to have been done by the indians) which appear like the steppings of a person, &c. we soon left the main road and turned into a path in the right leading to assawampset pond a mile distant. there too was a fine sandy beach, the south shore of the pond three or four rods wide. we walked along the part called betty's neck. this pond is by the map of middleborough a little more than three miles long in a straight line n— w and s-e across pocksha and nearly two wide. we saw the village of middleborough four corners far across it, yet no village on the shore. as we walked easterly the shore became stony. on one large slate rock with a smooth surface sloping toward the pond, at high-water mark were some inscriptions or sculptures which r. had copied about ten years since, thus : 1749. b. hiu, israel felix. the b. hill is comparatively modern. e. said that israel felix was an old indian preacher ; ac. to backus in hist. coll. vol. 3d, 1st series, thomas extracts from thoreau's journal 345 felix was an indian teacher in middleborough once. the foot appeared very ancient, though pecked in only half an inch. it was squarish form and broad at the toes — like the representations of some sculp tured in rocks at the west. for a long time we could only discern 1749 and b. hiu ; at length we detected the foot, and after my companion had given up, concluding that the water and the ice had oblit erated the rest within ten years, i at last rather felt with my fingers than saw with my eyes the faintly graven and lichen-covered letters of israel felix's name. we had looked on that surface full fifteen minutes in vain. yet i felt out the letters after all with certainty. in a description of middleborough in the hist. coll. vol. 3d, 1810, signed nehemiah bennett, mid dleborough, 1793, it is said, " there is on the easterly shore of assawampset pond on the shore of betty's neck two rocks which have curious marks thereon (supposed to have been done by the indians) which appear like the stoppings of a person with naked feet which settled into the rocks. likewise the prints of a hand on several places, with a number of other marks ; also there is a rock on a high hiu a little to the eastward of the old stone fishing weir, where there is the print of a person's hand in said rock." perhaps we might have detected more on these same rocks had we read this before, for we saw that there was something on the next rock — we did not know of the weir. the same writer speaks of a settlement of indians at " betty's neck 346 daniel ricketson and his friends (which place took its name from an ancient in dian woman of the name of betty sasemore who named that neck), where there are now eight indian houses and eight families," — between 30 and 40 souls. i was interested by some masses of pudding-stone further along the shore. there were also a few large flat sloping slate (?) rocks. i saw a small emys picta and a young snapping turtle apparently hatched this summer, the whole length when measur ing, about three inches. it was larger than mine last april, and had ten very distinct points to its shell behind. i first saw it in the water near the shore. the same bennett quoted above adds in a post script, " in the year 1763 mr. shubael thompson found a land turtle in the north-east part of middle borough which by some misfortune had lost one of its feet, and found the following marks on its shell, viz: 'i — w — 1747.'" he marked it s. t.— 1763, and let it go. it was found again in the year 1773 by elijah clapp, who marked it e. c. 1773, and let it go. it was found again in 1775 by capt. william shaw in the month of may, who marked it ws. 1775. ^ it was found again by said shaw the same year in september, about 100 yards distance from the place where he let it go. it was found again in the year 1784 by jonathan soule, who marked it j. s. 1784 and let it go. it was found again in the year 1791 by zeno smith, who marked it z. s. and let it go, it being the last time it was extracts from thoreau's journal 347 found, 44 years from the time the first marks were put on. " note : joseph soule found it in 1790 by hay ward's, v. hist. coll. again." we saw five loons diving off the shore of betty's neck, which, instead of swimming off, approached within ten rods of us as if to reconnoitre us ; only one had a black bill and that not entirely so, another was turning. their throats were all very white. i was surprised to see the usnea hanging thick on many apple-trees and some pears in the neighbor hood of this and the other ponds, as on spruce. sheep are pastured hereabouts. eeturning along the shore we saw a man and woman putting off in a small boat, the first we had seen. the man was black ; he rowed and the wo man steered. r. called td them — they approached within a couple of rods in the shallow water. " come nearer," said e. " don't be afraid ; i ain't a-going to hurt you." the woman answered, " i never saw the man yet that i was afraid of." the man's name was thomas smith, and in answer to r.'s very direct questions as to how much he was of the native stock, said that he was one-fourth indian. he then asked the woman, who sat un moved in the stern with a brown dirt-colored dress on, a regular country woman, an acre of face (squaw like), having first inquired of tom if she was his woman, how much indian blood she had in her. she did not answer directly so home a question, yet at length as good as acknowledged to be half indian, 348 daniel kicketson and his friends and said she carae from carver, where she had one sister, the only half-breed about here. said her name was sepit, but could not spell it. r. said, " your nose looks rather indiany." where will you find a yankee and his wife going a-fishing thus ? they lived on the shore. tom said he had seen turtles in the pond that weighed between 50 and 60. had caught a pickerel that morning that weighed four or five pounds ; had also seen them washed up with another in their mouths. their boat was of peculiar construction and t. said it was called a sharpie, with very high sides and a remarkable run on the bottom aft, and the bottom boards were laid across coming out flush and the sides set on them ; an ugly model. concord, dec. 24th, '56. p. m. more snow in the night and to-day, mak ing nine or ten inches. to walden and baker farm with eicketson, it still snowing a httle. turned off from the railroad and went through wheeler or owl wood. the snow is very light, so that sleighs cut through it and there is but little sleighing. it is very handsome now "on the trees by the main path in wheeler wood, where on the weeds and twigs that rise above the snow, it rests just like down, light towers of down with the bare extremity of the twig peeping out above. we push through the light dust, throwing it before our legs as a husbandman grain which he is sowing. it is only in still paths in the woods that it rests on the trees much. extracts from thoreau's journal 349 am surprised to find walden still open in the middle. when i push aside the snow with my feet the ice appears quite black by contrast. there is considerable snow on the edge of the pine woods where i used to uve. it rests on the successive tiers of boughs, perhaps weighing them down so that the trees are opened into great flakes from top to bot tom. the snow collects and is piled up in little columns like down about every twig and stem, and this is only seen in perfection, complete to the last flake, while it is snowirfg, as now. returned across the pond and went to baker farm. noticed at e. end of westernmost andromeda pond the slender spikes of lycopus with half a dozen distinct little spherical dark brown whorls of pungently fragrant or spicy seeds, somewhat nut meg-like or even hke flagroot when bruised. i am not sure that the seeds of any other mint are thus fragrant now. it scents your handkerchief or pocketbook finely when the crumbled whorls are sprinkled over them. it was very pleasant walking there before the storm was over, in the soft subdued light. we are also more domesticated in nature when our vision is confined to near and familiar objects. did not see a track of any animal till returning near the wells meadow field, where many foxes (?) two of whom i had a glimpse of, had been coursiag back and forth in the path and near it for | of a mile ; they had made quite a path. 350 daniel ricketson and his friends i do not take snuff. in my winter walks i stop and bruise between my thumb and fingers the dry whorls of the lycopus or water-horehound, just ris ing above the snow, stripping them off, and smell that. that is as near as i come to the spice islands. that is my smelling-bottle, my ointment. april 2(i to 15th, 1857. hear ricketson describing to alcott his bachelor uncle, james thornton. when he awakes in the morning he lights the fire in his stove (already pre pared) with a match on the end of a stick without getting up. when he gets up he first attends to his ablutions, being personally very clean ; cuts off a head of tobacco to clean his teeth with, and eats a hearty breakfast, sometimes, it was said, even but tering sausages. then he goes to a relative's store and reads the tribune till dinner, sitting in a corner with his back to those who enter. goes to his boarding-house and dines, eats an apple or two and then in the p. m. frequently goes about the solution of some mathematical problem (having once been a schoolmaster) which often employs him a week. friday, april 10, 1857; eain. d. e.'s shanty is about half a dozen rods s. w. of his house (which may be one hundred rods from the road), nearly between his house and barn, is 12 x 14 feet, with 7 feet posts, with common pent roof. in building it he directed the carpenter to use western boards and timbers, though some eastern extracts from thoreau's journal 351 studs (spruce ?) were inserted. he had already occu pied a smaller shanty at " woodlee," about a mile s. the roof is shingled, and the sides made of matched boards, and painted a light clay color, with ch,oco lafce (?) colored blinds. within, it is not plastered, and is open to the roof, showing the timbers and rafters, and rough boards and cross-timbers over head, as if ready for plastering. the door is at the east end, with a small window on each side of it, a similar window on each side of the buuding, and one at the west end, the latter looking down the garden walk. in front of the last window is a small box stove with a funnel rising to a level with the plate, and there inserted in a small brick chimney which rests on planks. on the south side the room, against the stove, is a rude settle with a coarse cush ion and pillow; on the opposite side a large low desk with some bookshelves above it ; on the same side by the window, a small table covered with books ; and in the n. e. corner, behiad the door, an old fashioned secretary, its pigeonholes stufeed with papers. on the opposite side as you enter is a place for fuel, which the boy leaves each morning, a place to hang greatcoats. there were two small pieces of carpet on the floor, and r. or one of his guests swept out the shanty each morning. there was a small kitchen clock hanging in the s. w. corner, and a map of bristol county behind the settle. the west and n. w. side is well-nigh covered with slips of paper on which are written some sentences or paragraphs from r.'s favorite books. i noticed 352 daniel eicketson and his friends among the most characteristic dibdin's " tom tackle," a translation of anacreon's cicada, lines celebrating tobacco, milton's " how charming is divine philosophy," &c., "inveni requiem; spes et fortuna valete : nil mihi vobiscum est : laudite nunc alios." (is it petrarch ?) this is also over the door, " mors pallida aequo pulsat pede paupe rum tabernas regumque turres." some lines of his own in memory of a. j. downing, " not to be in a hurry," over the desk, and many other quota tions, celebrating retirement, country life, simpli city, humanity, sincerity, &c., &c., from cowper and other english poets, and similar extracts from newspapers. there were also two or three adver tisements of cattle-show exhibitions, and the warn ing not to kill birds contrary to laws, he being one of the subscribers notified to enforce the act, an advertisement of a steamboat on lake winnepi seogee, &c., cards of his business friends. the size of different brains, from " hall's journal of health," and " take the world easy." a sheet of blotting paper tacked up, and of chinese characters from a tea-chest. also a few small pictures and pencil sketches, the latter commonly caricatures of his vis itors or friends, as " the trojan " (channing) and van beest ; i take the most notice of these par ticulars because his peculiarities are so commonly unafeected. he has long been accustomed to put these scraps on his walls, and has a basket full somewhere saved from the old shanty, though there were some quotations which had no right there. i o o < h a en w a h extracts from thoreau's journal 353 found all his peculiarities faithfully expressed, his humanity, his fear of death, love of retirement, sim plicity, &c. the more characteristic books were bradley's husbandry, drake's indians, barber's hist. coll., zimmermann on solitude, bigelow's plants of boston, &c., farmer's eegister of the first settlers of new england, marshall's gardening, vick's gardener, john woohnan, the modern horse doctor, downing's fruits, &c.. the farmer's library, walden, dymond's essays, jobb scott's journal, morton's memorial, bailey's dictionary, downing's landscape gardening, etc., the task, nuttall's or nithology, morse's gazetteer, the domestic practice of hydropathy, john buncle, dwight's travels, virgil, young's night thoughts, history of ply mouth, and other shanty books. there was an old gun, hardly safe to fire, said to be loaded with an inextractable charge, and also an old sword over the door ; also a tin sign, " d. rick etson's of&ce " (he having set up for a lawyer once), and a small crumpled horn ; there i counted more than 20 rustic canes scattered about, a dozen or 15 pipes of various patterns (mostly the common), two spy-glasses, an open paper of tobacco, an indian's jaw (dug up), a stuffed bluejay, and pine grosbeak, and a rude indian stone hatchet, &c., &c. there was a box with fifteen or twenty knives, mostly very large old-fashioned jack-knives, kept for curiosity, occasionally giving one to a boy or friend. a large book full of pencil sketches, " to be inspected by whomsomever," containing mostly sketches of his 334 daniel kicketson and his friends friends, &c., acquaintances, and himself, of wayfar ing men whom he had met, quakers, &c., &c., and now and then a verse under fence rail, or an old fashioned house sketched on a peculiar pea-green paper. a pail of water stands behind the door, with a pecuhar tin cup for drinking, made in france. mon., apr. 13th, 1857. to middleboro ponds. there was no boat on little quittacus, so we could not explore it. set out to walk around it, but the water being high (higher than anciently, even, on account of dams), we had to go round a swamp at the south end about joe's rocks, and e. gave it up. i went to long pond and waited for him. saw a strange turtle, much like a small snapping turtle or very large sternotherus odoratus (?), crawung slowly along the bottom next the shore ; poked it ashore with a stick ; it had a peculiarly square snout, and hinges to the sternum, and both parts movable ; was very sluggish, would not snap or bite, looked old, being mossy close on the edges, and the scales greenish and eaten beneath, the flesh slate colored. i saw it was new, and wished to bring it away, but had no paper to wrap it in ; so i peeled a white birch, getting a piece of bark about ten inches long. noticed that the birch sap was flowing. this bark at once curled back so as to present its yellow side outward. i rolled it about the turtle and folded the ends back, and tied it round with a strip of birch bark, making a very nice and airy box for the occasion, which would extracts from thoreau's journal 355 not be injured by moisture, far better than any paper, and so brought it home to concord at last. as my coat hung in r.'s shanty, over a barrel of papers, the morning that i came away the turtle made a little noise, scratching the birch bark in my pocket. r. observed, " there is a mouse in that barrel; what would you do about it?" "oh, let him alone," said i, " he '11 get out directly." "they often get among my papers," he added. " i guess i 'd better set the barrel outdoors." i did not ex plain, and perhaps he experimented in the barrel after my departure. [note. this might appear like a practical joke, but we are inclined to think it was out of consider ation for father's sensitiveness regarding all dumb animals that mr. thoreau kept him " in the dark " as to his specimen, fearing he might be disturbed. — editoes.] may 24th, 1857. ricketsok at thoreaxj's. at 3 p. m. thermometer at 88 deg. it soon gets to be quite hazy. apples out. heard one speak to-day of his sense of awe at the thought of god, and suggested to him that awe was the cause of the potato rot. the same speaker dwelt on the sufferings of life, but my advice was to go about one's business, suggesting that no ecstasy was ever attempted as its fruit blasted. as for completeness and roundness, to be sure, we are each like one of the lacinice of a lichen, a torn fragment, but not the 356 daniel ricketson and his friends less cheerfully we expand in a radiant day and assume unexpected colors. we want not complete ness but intensity of life. hear the first cricket as i go through a warm bottom, bringing round the simuner with his everlasting strain. xiii poems by daniel kicketson poems by daniel ricketson in regard to my own poems, i confess almost a culpable neglect in not having made the architec ture of verse more of a study ; and the more so, as i have a high regard for the great masters of rhythm ; but a certain sort of impatience of rules has ever been in the way of my obtaining an accom plishment in that all important knowledge to a good and successful writer of verse, the ars poetce. i am aware that my sphere is by no means a broad one, that i am deficient in imagery and felicity of expres sion ; and were it not from a consciousness that i have taken my inspiration from nature, with whom more than with aught else i have been conversant from my early youth, and have passed more hours in her society than in any other, i should without hesita tion decide that i had no claim to be classed as a poet, even of the humblest class ; but knowing this fact, and that my sweetest and happiest hours have ever been when among my favorite haunts in field or wood, by lake, river, or dancing rivulet, or where old ocean rolls his crested waves upon our coast, alone or in congenial company, i am led at times to think i may have caught and made record of things which are really true, noble, and beautiful ; and that therefore i have not failed altogether in producing 360 daniel kicketson and his friends that which to the not over-critical, and yet such as are truly lovers of nature and poetry, pictures rural life and scenery, which may give pleasure to others by recalling similar experiences sacred in memory. and in another sphere, i£ i may have, as i sin cerely hope, reached in sympathy the lowly in life or the wounded in spirit, i shall have attained the full measure of my own critical estimate of my produc tions. the shanty, 5 p. m., sept. 28th, 1872. the poet's sanctuaey. oh, 't is an humble, rustic place enough, o'ergrown with rambling vines e'en to the vane upon its lowly front : o'ertopping all, a single shoot waves to the passing breeze. the little chimney at the farther end is also mantled with its robe of green ; and e'en the roof and sides receive their share, so that the whole appears more like a nest or rustic hut, or more, perhaps, a nook where some old monk might find a studious ease, afar from haunts of men ; where, undisturbed, his daily prayers at morning and at eve might rise to heaven ; and meditation take the place of worldly care. so that a sweet tranquillity might keep his soul. and thus run out the sands of mortal life. while, unknown to the bustling world around, his soul would find a sure and easy way into those realms of peace beyond the grave. louisa sampson (mrs. daniel ricketson), jet. 20, from oil portrait by w. a. wall daniel ricketson, jet. 25 poems by daniel eicketson 361 a far unworthier occupant is there, — a poor and restless spirit, often sad and buffeted by fierce besetting sins, causing him sharp remorse and bitter hours of deep contrition. ah, how little knows the world around how deep a tragedy is oft enacted where all seems at peace ! still waters run the deepest. often, too. within the breast of him appearing calm a tempest rages, tearing at the roots of his own heart-strings, causing death and gloom. envy him not, thou son of daily toil, for hours of leisure, rarely, too rarely. productive of happiness. let this pass but for a picture of sweet rural cast, the little domicile is scarce surpassed. mantled in vines, and sheltered at the east and north by thickly planted pines and shrubs that shed their fragrance on the air around. here, too, in years long passed, my worthy friend, known for thy wisdom, thou didst love to come from thy dear home beside old concord's stream. and hold long converse on our favorite theme, nature's rich products of the field and wood ; the rarest plants, and birds of sweetest song ; the ways of rural life, and that simplicity that marked the more arcadian days our fathers knew, — the days of homely fare and homespun cloth, of sanded floors. and great wood fires, and simple cookery. but oft on higher themes each spoke or mused ; of man, who in his serious hours observes the laws controlling life, that when obeyed. bring harmony where else is only ill. a man of great adventure was my friend, 362 daniel ricketson and his friends though calm as well befits a wise, good man ; long journeys had he made on foot, through scenes far from the route of fashionable life, and found rare interest, bringing oft to light old scenes and histories long forgotten, making what was before of no account, almost as vivid as a rare romance ; such is the power that flows from gifted minds. 1874. the old homestead. a plain, old-fashioned country house was that where i was born, built by my grandsire in his prime, a hundred years agone. as story goes, the trees were felled upon the very spot, from which its sturdy frame was hewed, e'en now unharmed by rot, but fresh and strong as on the day the huge oak beams were raised, and hence another hundred years by poet may be praised. the massive chimney, built of brick, with heavy stone foundation, suggested heaping piles of wood, and heaping stock of ration : the deep, broad kitchen fireplace, with oven in its back, poems by daniel kicketson 363 and o'er its high-raised mantelpiece, the queer old roasting-jack : while in the garret, far above, a wheel and rope were found, by which the meat upon the spit was slowly turned around. the floor of pine, so nice and clean. and freshly sanded o'er, the great high settle ranged along. between the fire and door. bespoke of comfort and good cheer, in those rare days of old. while far around, the blazing hearth kept off the winter's cold. how cracked the wood upon the fire. in ample armfuls thrown ! and roaring up the chimney flue. made music of its own. a broadened circle thus was made. as all sat round the fire, — the serving-maid, and serving-man, granddame, and child, and sire. the grandsire smoked his long-stemmed pipe within his corner snug, while on the hearth the apples hummed. and eke the cider mug. the granddame on the other side. with knitting-work in hand ; 364 daniel kicketson and his friends the tallow candles, nicely dipped, upon the ancient stand. where oft the open bible lay, or book of early friend, whose honest pages lure me still, and sweet instruction lend : for of that simple, christlike faith our ancient household were ; and " thee " and " thou " and " thus he saith " evinced our quaker sphere. and standing near, the rustic child, with open eyes and ears. enjoyed the comfort of the scene, nor dreamed of boding fears. the mottled cat, so fat and sleek, sat purring near the stand ; the old dog stretched himself and yawned. and licked the proffered hand. and so the evening passed away. the apples passed around. the cider in the earthen mug, and thus the day was crowned. o peaceful days, my childhood's boon, in memory ever dear ! and dear the plain and honest ways that keep our lives from fear. 't was pleasant, of a " first-day " morn, to see the good old pair, poems by daniel eicketson 365 together in the square-topped chaise, with dobbin plump and fair, set off for meeting far away, some six or seven miles ; for where the conscience guides the heart, no trifling space beguiles. a worthier or happier sect than were our ancient sires. are found not in the lists of fame a grateful world admires. and fondly still in memory's page , i keep my childhood's home. though many changes, sad and sore, upon its walls have come. but in the ever mellowed past all things are as before. and forms and faces meet my gaze as they were seen of yore. far back into the storied past i peer with curious eyes, to earlier days than those i knew. and live 'neath earlier skies. i still can see the broad domain. the spacious fields and woods ; and 'mid our crowded city streets form sylvan solitudes ; can see the old house, stark and lone. its overshading trees ; 366 daniel ricketson and his fkiends can hear the robin's evening song, and feel the summer breeze ; can hear the mowers whet their scythes, the dewy herd's grass fall, and from the old rail fence beyond, the quail his covey call. my grandsire with his broad-brimmed hat, in shirtsleeves with his men. stands leaning on his rake or fork, beside the loaded wain. methinks 't was fairer then than now. that life was freer then. and more of faith and honest cheer among the sons of men. our lineage boasts no wealth nor rank — a simple, honest race. who from old england's sea-girt shores their saxon offspring trace ; who some two hundred years ago sought out this peaceful nook. and o'er the broad atlantic wave their native land forsook. and here they made a pleasant home, and here their roofs were reared, and here, the offshoot of their toil, our city has appeared. the axe rang through the grand old woods. and laid its monarchs low : poems by daniel kicketson 367 no qualms of conscience then held back the settler's sturdy blow : for where was all one savage waste, and wild men still around, the clearings then were pleasant spots. and dear the naked ground. the fields of grain soon rose to view ; and soon the orchards fair, and signs of industry and thrift were scattered here and there. along the river's pleasant banks. how fair the landscape glowed. when lighted by the morning sun. its varied beauties showed ! here by the shore were built the ships which brought our early wealth ; while from the dotted farms around were found the stores of health. but simple truth is still the same. and they who love its ways will find its blessings still abound. as in those early days. 1868. prospective. oh, should my life be spared to age, though age bring with it pain. may scenes that now my youth engage stiu with me then remain ! 368 daniel eicketson and his friends may still the landscape smile for me, that smiles on all around, and seated 'neath some favorite tree as now be often found ; whose spreading branches overhead a canopy shall lend ; and may i feel, though youth hath sped, joy with my sorrow blend. and though my limbs should need the aid of kindly arm, or staff, stiu may i seek the woodland shade, the crystal streamlet quaff, — there in the glass of memory dwell upon the varied past ; and if a sigh my heart should swell, still may the vision last ! a diurnal rhyme. time, evening. in my humble shanty rude. where i pass the graceful hours. sweetened by sweet solitude — the true springtime with its flowers. many solemn truths i learn. that are found not in the books. ne'er denied to those who yearn for them in their chosen nooks ; for primeval wisdom here finds me ready at her call, and upon my listening ear poems by daniel ricketson 369 oft her kindly whisperings fall, telling me in accents clear, known but to the ear within. that the source of all i hear did with man at first begin. and in silence as i sit, calmly waiting for the power, knowledge to my soul doth flit that no learning e'er could shower, — sempiternal wisdom deep, from the endless source divine, not as creeds and dogmas creep, but as doth the day-god shine, with broad beams of amber light. reaching into every cell. driving out the ancient night. that my soul in peace may dwell. thus i 'm taught to look and learn, rather calmly to receive, and from stupid schoolmen turn, to that which will ne'er deceive. march, 1856. the "winter evening. oh, play again that grand old tune. resounding far through memory's halls. refreshing as the breeze of june 'mid songs of birds and waterfalls ! it takes me back to other days, when, void of every earthly care, i sped amid the giddy maze. in time to that old favorite air. 370 daniel kicketson and his ekiends how jocund passed the light-winged hours, where youth and beauty led the dance ! our pathway then was strewn with flowers, the happy season of romance. o fairy form ! o gentle heart ! where have your light and beauty gone ? do others now like grace impart ? or with the past have all these flown ? ah, no ! kind nature keeps her own. and youth and beauty take the place of those from whom these gifts have gone. and are renewed in every race ; and glowing eyes and waving hair. the kindly voice and lovely smile. do stiu the same attractions wear, and still the heart from pain beguile. eejoice, then, ye of hopeful years ! oh, sing and dance while yet you may! nor let your hearts, disturbed by fears, look forward to a sadder day. strike up the old familiar air, and let our hearts to-night rejoice ; a farewell let us give to care. and in the song blend every voice. tune up, dear hearts, each tuneful throat ! it is your mother's natal day ; her voice still with your own shall float, as sweet as ere her hair was gray. poems by daniel ricketson 371 and though our years are gathering fast, we will to-night he young again, again live o'er the sacred past, and bid good-by to care and pain. blow, winter wind ! we dread you not, and spread your snow upon the ground, while safe within our rural cot, among our treasures we are found. our cattle all are housed and fed ; the barnyard fowl have gone to rest ; old " billy " has his clean straw bed. and blanket strapped across his breast. the sheds well filled with oak and pine. cut from the woods a year ago : our household comforts all combine to keep aloof the frost and snow. thanks to a kindly father's hand, thanks unto him who rules above. our lot is cast in this fair land, 'mid scenes that we so dearly love. while we forget not in our prayer those who to-night are on the sea, and from our stores afford a share to meet the claims of poverty, — remember still those who so late in bonds groaned on our southern soil. and by the treachery of state are now oppressed by want and toil. 372 daniel ricketson and his friends blow, boreas, from your ice-bound sphere, and ring your chords among our trees ; sound forth the wailings of the year, where sang so late the summer breeze. come, ranger ! leave the glowing hearth. where you so long have dreamed and slept ; the cat and kittens join in mirth ; 't is time your watch and ward were kept. old ranger 'neath the dresser sneaks. with wagging tail and upturned eye ; in vain his master sharply speaks, for all exclaim, " oh, let him lie ! " yes, lie thou shalt, now stiff and old ; naught shall subject thee to the storm ; thou once wast like a lion bold. of stately port and graceful form. so let the storm blow wildly out, and howl and whistle at our ears ; our social bliss will put to rout and drive afar au idle fears. then heap the wood upon the fire. and send a glow on all around ! let au within to mirth conspire ! let merriment to-night abound ! ye tranquil hours, supremely blessed. dear to my heart, — a present heaven, — when no rude passions stir the breast, and au is calm as summer even ! poems by daniel kicketson 373 what, then, are riches, what is fame ? the one takes wings and flies away ; the other glitters in a name, and only lives its poor, brief day. how sweet the boon of rural peace, that soothes and heals the wounded heart ! may thy sweet influence never cease ; may thou and i ne'er have to part. dear quiet haunts, where nature smiles, and o'er her votary kindly flings her genial blessings, and beguiles the heart that listens as she sings, — her song of truth and beauty tell, and speak the great, good giver's praise ! from mountain top to shady dell all things the glorious anthem raise. o mellowed days ! o hallowed shrines ! where hearts in peace together dwell ; around which memory entwines, and bids the soul with pleasure swell ! ah, what were life without the power to call to mind our happier days, while waiting for that holier hour when we shall join the song of praise ? then pleasant pictures let us strive upon life's canvas oft to paint, where we again the past may live, though age may make them worn and faint. 374 daniel kicketson and his friends with hope triumphant in the heart, a trust that all is ordered right, they who to others joy impart shall find their waning years more bright. in chorus shout the brave old air that hath awaked this happy vein ! give vent to joy, farewell to care. and yield to love's supernal reign. 1868. my old plaid cloae:. mt old plaid cloak ! my old plaid cloak ! how many storms we've borne together ! and now though old, and faded too, thou still canst shield me from the weather. and here thou art, old tartan friend ! again brought out to face the blast, and ward me from rude boreas' cold. faithful in duty to the last. yes ! i have wrapped thee round my breast, and borne the brunt of many a storm ; and well hast thou withstood the test. but now art worn, and quaint in form ; yet i '11 not cast thee off, old friend, dimmed as thou art, and beauty gone ; but every rent in thee will mend, though thou shouldst cause the proud to scorn. with thee my woodland walks i trace, when mantling snow is falling fast, poems by daniel ricketson 375 and safe within thy warm embrace, fear naught fronj stern old winter's blast. old scottish plaid ! thou bring'st to mind the thought of days long past and gone, of happy hours, and friendship kind, in memory blest, though erewhile flown. yet thou art here, my well-tried friend, who half a score of years hast seen. and wilt thy share of comfort lend. though thou art not what thou hast been, — a bonnie plaid, of fairest hue, that well might win the fair one's smile. of lincoln green, and highland blue. with purest white inmixed the while. as on thy time-worn form i muse. my mind is turned to scotia's land. when wallace brave and gallant bruce in times of fear maintained command ; and fireside joys are brought to mind. with bonnie doon, and-auld lang syne, and highland lads, in bran-new plaids. appear around thy hoary shrine. let who will call it weak in me. and smile at this my humble song, which thus records the worth of thee, who hast been true to me so long, — i cannot scorn thee, honest plaid ! if thou art old, and faded too ; 376 daniel ricketson and his friends for well thou hast my friendship paid, nor shall my muse refuse thy due. 1836. kitchen musings. i love by the warm kitchen wood fire to ponder, while thick-coming fancies envelop my mind, and the old chimney rumbles like far distant thunder, a trumpet alarm of the god of the wind. the casements au rattle, and threaten to tumble ; they 've told the same tale these odd fifty years : i heed it no more than old boreas' grumble ; to the chicken-heart only it brings any fears. let all those who wish sit ensconced in the parlor ; in vain they attempt their gloom to deceive ; i rather would hum some old song of kit marlow by the warm kitchen wood fire on a cold winter's eve. oh, the old kitchen hearth, the charm of my childhood ! with fondness i hold to its generous heat ; it tells me of tales in the night-shrouded wildwood. and youthful emotions my fancy still greet, — when entranced i sat by the warm glowing embers, and listened with tears to some heart-touching tale, which with fond cherished love my heart still remembers, for innocence then did o'er it prevail. the simplest of pleasures are surely the sweetest, and those which will bring best good to the mind. and though we deplore they so often prove fleetest, we look with fond hope to those left behind. 1838. 1840. poems by daniel ricketson 377 a wish. take me where nature spreads around her ample store of woods and fields, when in the vale of years i 'm found, ere the last hope of pleasure yields. for so i 've loved the quiet haunts where poesy makes her holy shrine. that death himself could scarcely daunt, when 'mid her scenes, this soul of mine. the fallen wood. ye brave old woods, farewell ! who have so long spread your huge branches to the wintry wind, or waved your leafy tops 'neath summer's breeze ; within whose still retreats the gentle band of nature's choristers has nestled oft. and hatched their young, and sung their mellow chants. farewell ! the woodman's axe hath laid ye low. and soon upon some sturdy yeoman's hearth, or that of well-fed citizen, ye '11 blaze. no more by eager fancy borne along, far from the cares that crowd the haunts of man, shall i commune within your quiet walks, which seemed so hidden from the glare of day, that ages might have passed you undisturbed. but the all-grasping hand of gain hath found you, and ye have fallen. that aged raven. sweeping his lonely way o'er your sad ruins, in vain seeks out his once sequestered nest. and boding omens sad, sends forth his tale of sorrow. where is the heart that cannot feel 378 daniel ricketson and his friends a pain to see fair nature thus disrobed ? so it was not meant — god lends the leafy grove, and the grand influence of the forest wild, to calm our worldly nature, and to tranquillize the troubled waters of the harassed soul. but man, not heeding nature's kindly boon. blots her fair face, and treats her oft with scorn. the pleasant spring has come, and o'er your haunts casts its broad smile. an effort yet for life you make, and from your sad and mutilated stumps shoots forth the juicy twig. but years must pass. the yet unwrinkled brow must droop with age. those limbs now strong and in the flush of youth must shrink and weaken 'neath the hand of time. or moulder in the cold damp vault of earth, ere ye shall rear your lordly heads again. methinks yon warbler by his saddened note laments your fate, and in his soft complaint would call unfeeling man to his hard lot. man is a destroyer ! before whose might the lofty forests fall — earth, sky, and water. all must yield to him — for so the word is written. " deep calleth unto deep," and oft within the far recesses of the solemn wood, a voice like that which at creation's birth spread o'er the forming world, may then be heard ; and to the soul so clear, so deep it comes, that man might deem the great jehovah spake, prompting his wayward thoughts to look above. and lost in wonder, worship and adore. then let the groves remain ! sacred to thought. to purity, to health, and sweet devotion ; where rural worshipper may steal away. far from the jarring world where mammon reigns, that world which oft has caused his heart to mourn. poems by daniel ricketson 379 and droop with sadness ; here let him come, and pour out the full tide of his feelings in free communion with the god of all. here in her beauty let the maiden come, blushing to hear the low repeated vows of him for whom she lives. what fitter place for pure congenial hearts to sympathize ? the man of sorrow, too, may linger here. and in the solemn stillness of these scenes find a sure balm to heal his wounded heart,' and bid him think that life may yet be blessed. spare, then, the grand old woods, the pleasant groves, and delve the earth, — there borrow from the mine the sulphurous lump to cheer the winter hearth. 1839. lines. the bard who does not rise above the low and commonplace of life. whose highest efforts only prove a level with his daily strife, but slender title to the name of poet or of seer can claim. his lines may flow in mellow verse, his periods rounded off and terse ; but wanting nature's magic grace, — a few short years shall all efface. december, 1854. wintee evening. the snow falls on my shanty roof. and fiercely drives against the door ; but my warm fire keeps harm aloof, and flickers on the hard-pine floor. 380 daniel ricketson and his friends flickers upon the boards and beams that form my humble rustic dome, where flies enjoy their winter dreams, and wasps and spiders find a home. companions of my solitude, ye 're welcome to your chosen nooks in this my habitation rude ; ye never on my peace intrude. but leave me to my thoughts and books. so let the storm beat loud without, if only peace may rule within ; all harping ills i '11 put to rout, and deem my solitude no sin. 1858. the chickadee. thou little black-cap, chirping at my door, and then saluting with thy gentle song or lonely whistle my attentive ear, a hearty welcome would i give to thee. thou teacher blest of quietness and peace. sweet minister of love for hearts awake to the rare minstrelsy of field and wood. thou constant friend ! i hail thee with delight. who at this season of rude winter's reign, when all the cheerful summer birds are fled. dost still remain to cheer the heart of man ! and though in numbers few thy song is given, two tranquil notes alone thy fullest song, yet scarcely when the joyous year brings back the swelling choir of various notes once more. have i found deeper or more welcome strains ; poems by daniel ricketson 381 for when all nature glows with life again, when hills and dales put on their vernal gear, when gentle wildflowers burst upon our gaze, with all the exultation of the year. our souls, unequal to the heavenly boon, are often overwhelmed ; and in the attempt to enjoy it all, drop listless and confused. but at the close of these sweet sights and sounds. this grand display of god's enriching power. the trees all bare, and nature's russet stole thrown o'er the landscape, chill must be the heart, ingrate to him who rules the perfect year, that is not gladdened by thy gentle song. 1859. the thunderstoem. oh, there is something in the thunder's peal. when bursting from their shroud the lightnings dart, that to my mind more than aught else reveals the great jehovah — the almighty god. naught of the earth in her sublimest scenes. such clear, such open evidence displays, of a great ruler — one omnipotent. the broad expanse of ocean, from whose realms, mysterious, dark and fathomless abodes, grace, grandeur, and infinity are felt. the mighty cataract, with thundering voice deafening the ear, the towering mountain's peak unfold to view, and in a language strong speak of the almighty hand that formed them all ; but faint indeed to the tremendous voice which the trembling earth is called to hear. when, from his great pavilion in the skies, he causes such terrific fires to glow. 382 daniel eicketson and his friends oh, it dott seem, with each repeated shock, as though hi's sovereign presence was revealed within the open veil — there riding safe upon his radiant car, careering through the skies. 1860. the saxon heart. the saxon heart bears not control ; like a strong river on its course, the tide swells on within the soul, o'erpowering every adverse force. the brave, good heart, that takes its stand, kesisting wrong, defying shame. born like a prince to take command. regardless still of praise or blame, — the matchless heart of bold emprise. the conquering heart, the heart so strong, the heart of heroes, brave and wise. the heart that always rights the wrong. the race that erst, in forest drear. the deadly arrow swiftly sped. hath dropt the winged shaft and spear. and wields the winged thought instead. the race that once went bravely forth to beard the wild boar in his den, now meets the tyrant in his wrath. and boldly claims the right of men. as in those saxon days of old the bow-string echoed far and wide, poems by daniel ricketson 383 the words of truth ring out like gold, the same old spirit sanctified. the race whence valiant luther sprung — the modern herald of the cross, whose words throughout the world have rung. and cleared religion of its dross — spake out in honest fox and penn, inspired a wesley's fervent heart, moved sidney for the rights of men. and vane to take the freeman's part, — the race that on the battlefield opposed the tyranny of kings. like hampden, ready life to yield. believing more in men than things, and in our day still battles wrong. believing still in knightly deed. and finds in phillips' classic tongue a voice the bondman's claim to plead. 1860. old england. home of my fathers long, long years ago, i feel for thee a strong and filial love. and next to my own beloved native land, prize thee above the nations of the earth. i know that thou hast many blots upon thy shield, and cruel art at times, whene'er thy rule is forced upon its victims ; through blood i know that thou hast risen high in glory, by the scale of nations ; still. 384 daniel eicketson and his friends for the great and good spirits thou hast borne, i love thee. land of howard, wilberforce, and " nature's darling," the true christian bard, the gentle cowper, dear to every heart attuned to truth and virtue's lovely haunts ; and in these later days, and our own time. the much-loved home of wordsworth, coleridge, and southey, unto whom i owe so much ; — for these, and many more of ancient time, as well as modern, do i entertain for thee, o sea-girt isle, an affection ; and in earlier years, through thy inspired bards, a strong desire, as yet unrealized. to visit thy fair realms, and wander o'er thy scenes historic, see the homes and haunts of those whose works have ever been to me friends and companions in the walk of life. how dear indeed the spot that rendered birth to ye, dear sons of poetry divine, scattered all o'er thy soil, britannia, and through the cambrian and the scotian hills. and o'er green erin. oft in thought i go through gray old abbeys and crumbling castle walls. mantled with ivy, beauteous in decay. and dwell on themes found in historic page ; — a thousand years ago, when mailed knights rode forth on errands to the farthest east. or met in tournament with shield and lance. but scenes of modern time delight me more. and oft i trace with reverential steps the haunts of cowper, portrayed in his task ; visit his garden and his summer-house. his walks at olney by the banks of ouse, the woods of weston, sir john throckmorton's grounds, poems by daniel ricketson 385 the " wilderness," the " lime walk," and the " chase," where stands the yardley oak, renowned in verse ; seen in the distance, olney's tapering spire. and emberton's square tower with chime of bells, that so much charmed the poet's listening ear ; the " hall," where cowper met his " lady frog " and " catharina," patrons of his muse. and constant friends until the poet's death, — these, and the like, would tempt my wandering steps from scenes of fashion and from prouder sights. the bard of avon, too, would claim my love. and with delighted steps i stray along the village street to charlecote's fair woods. where story says the poet purloined deer when in the heyday of his roystering youth. and was arraigned before the angry squire ; thence to the church where rest his honored bones, yet undisturbed, as was the poet's wish, and curse pronounced on the offender's head ; — forgetting not upon my pilgrimage the " leasowes," shenstone's rural seat, drummond of hawthornden, and banks of ayr, eenowned as the ploughman-poet's home, the land of burns, endeared to every muse. thus would i wander through our fatherland, 'mid scenes endeared to virtue and to truth, the homes of godlike genius, that have kept their land from sinking 'neath a barbarous sway. far greater than her warriors, men of blood, her marlborough or wellington, i deem her sons of song, such as glorious milton, the bard of olney, and of eydal mount, and tennyson of our own time, whose verse, though often shaded by a sombre muse, still rises with the great harmonic chant, 386 daniel ricketson and his friends from chaucer's keynote of old english verse down to the present day of choral song. 1866. nature and humanity. i could not listen to the robin's song, nor bluebird's warble in the vernal year could see no charm that to the flowers belong, if to humanity i closed my ear. my darling nature would revert her face, the fields, the wqods, no more would lend their charm if silently i should my soul disgrace, nor strive to save the suffering poor from harm. only in sympathy with human woe, nor wanting sympathy for brute distress, can in our hearts the tender passions flow. prepare our souls the god of love to bless. so far away from pomp and pride i roam, where humble virtue finds its best retreat. to some poor laborer's peaceful, low-roofed home. with words of cheer or sympathy to greet. the old barn. no hay upon its wide-spread mows. no horses in the stalls. no broad-horned oxen, sheep, or cows. withinits time-worn walls ; the wind howls through its shattered doors. now swinging to and fro ; poems by daniel ricketson 387 and o'er its once frequented floors no footsteps come or go. oh, once, alas ! each vacant bay, and every space around, was teeming with sweet-scented hay, the harvest of the ground ; and well-fed cattle in a row. at mangers ranged along, each fastened by an oaken bow, stood at the stanchions strong. but where so long old dobbin stood. his master's pride and care, and from whose hand received his food. all now is vacant there. then these broad fields, from hill to plain. waved in the summer air with choicest crops of grass or grain, now left so bleak and bare ; the swallows chattered all day long, as they flew out and in. while from their nests on high, the young kept up a constant din ; the blackbird hailed the dewy mom from out his rushy perch ; the sparrow sang upon the thorn. the catbird on the birch ; the robin from the highest tree sent forth his whistle clear, 388 daniel ricketson and his friends his soul partaking of the glee that wakes the vernal year ; and childhood's merry shout was heard. the farmyard choir among, which, mingled with the note of bird. enriched the tide of song ; the lilies bloomed upon the pond, , amid the meadows gay, and scented all the air around, throughout the summer day. a pleasant sight it was to see the great hay-loaded wain, with youthful rustics in their glee. come down the rural lane, — the oxen's backs half covered o'er with locks of fragrant clover. the farmer's precious winter store. when sterner toils are over. and when the autumn days had come. and loudly piped the jay, — the cheery days of harvest-home, the crops all stored away, — a happy scene then, the old barn ; a joy to young and old to strip the yellow shining corn. the farmer's ready gold. the merry jokes around would crack. and merry peals of laughter 1867. poems by daniel kicketson 389 the old walls gratefully sent back, and every beam and rafter. how sweet the music of the flail, eesounding far and clear, as borne upon the passing gale it reached the distant ear ! the master on his daily round with conscious pride would go, his faithful dog close by him found. attending to and fro. old honest trip long since has gone. and moulders 'neath the wall ; no more he takes the welcome bone. or hears his master's call. the kindly master, too, has died. the matron in her grace ; and dead, or scattered far and wide, the remnant of their race. but peace and blessings on the past. the poet now would say ; our joy cannot forever last. nor sorrow ever stay. the death of jacob. 't was noon in egypt, and the scorching sun poured down his sultry heat on jacob's tent ; no noise disturbed the holy calm around, save when at times the buzzing harvest-fly 390 daniel ricketson and his fkiends spun his long note^ or far-off bleat of flocks came slowly stealing through, the burning air. the feeble breeze was scarcely heard to stir the ancient palm that stood beside the door ; and the sweet flowers, that to the morning smiled, hung down their heads and closed their drooping leaves. the flocks and shepherds sought a refuge safe. in cool retreats among the mountain groves. the fallen sheaves lay withering in the sun, while the exhausted reapers slept beneath the spreading branches of the shady trees. within the tent where aged jacob dwelt. stood joseph, and near by two youthful forms, his sons, ephraim and manasseh, who with weeping eyes looked at the dying sage. upon a lowly couch the old man lay. his long white beard hanging o'er his bosom. and his feeble eye turned toward heaven. eaising himself upon his pilgrim-staff, he lifted up his voice to god, and asked of heaven a blessing for the youthful swains. his prayer was heard, and like their godly sire. they lived, and died, in service of the lord. the sun went down behind the distant hills. and his bright beams had scarcely left the skies, when good old jacob sank upon his couch. he died, as all of us might wish to die, with a firm hope and confidential trust. 1837. sonnet — charles lamb. how gloriously around thy cherished name the gentle graces of thy soul are wreathed ! each passing thought, or word but by thee breathed, is now recorded with thy lustrous fame. poems by daniel ricketson 391 oh, happy they who had thee for a friend, with whom thou fondly didst thy humor share, and who as with one voice thy worth declare. and aye with sorrow o'er thy ashes bend ; for thou possessed a spirit rich and rare. which lasted to the evening of thy days. as sunlight round some sparkling fountain plays ; and what of all most genial can combine, this, gentle " elia," was truly thine. 1838. new york. o complication of all evil. and complication of all good ; where thousands worship but the devil, and thousands also worship god ! o wretchedness beyond compare ! o filth and rags, and stagnant air ! o glittering wealth and poverty. and rosy health and misery ! the palace and the hovel vie to take the palm of victory. centre of all that 's good and bad, of all that 's cheerful, all that 's sad ! may god in mercy spare the best. and in his wisdom purge the rest ! 1867. the new york dustman's bells. of all comical sounds in heaven or earth, a combination of sadness and mirth, there 's nothing to my imagining tells more wonderful tales than the dustman's bells. as wrangling, jangling, to and fro, their notes are heard wherever you go. 392 daniel kicketson and his friends witches and goblins fill the air; oaths and curses mingle with prayer ; from gutter to eaves, and very house-top, such queer looking people i fancy may pop, — as wrangling, jangling, to and fro. their notes are heard wherever you go. the ghosts of old dutchmen long hidden appear, with their " donder und blitzen," " mein gott," and " mynheer ; " and 'mid the strange bluster, and jostle, and jam, our " gotham " is lost in " new amsterdam," — as wrangling, jangling, to and fro. their notes are heard wherever you go. for among these old rags and fragments so packed, from many a garret and cellar ransacked. are bits of old garments a century old, that marvellous bits of old history unfold, — as wrangling, jangling, to and fro. their notes are heard wherever you go. and not unmusical, too, are these bells, reminding the ear of pastoral dells, — of scenes far away in the country so dear, where there 's nothing from want and wrong tl fear, as wrangling, jangling, to and fro, their notes are heard wherever you go. ring on ! ring on ! ye quaint old bells. and rouse each house with your constant knells ; but rarely, i fancy, shall rhymer like me find in your rude notes such weird minstrelsy, as wrangling, jangling, to and fro. their notes are heard wherever you go. 1867. poems by daniel ricketson 393 the world as we make it. the world is just as we make it, — if i 'm crabbed, and cold, and hard, all things will wear the same aspect, and from whate'er is good i 'm debarred. but if i am calm, good, and sunny. and meet every one with a smile. like plato's, my lips shall yield houey, like woolman's, my heart void of guile. 1871. hope. o hope ! delightful hope ! how much i owe to thee, thou true inspirer of our highest joy. when nature in her wintry garb is clad, and all around seems in deep sympathy with whatsoe'er would add its special gloom, then thou, kind helper, bring' st thy ready aid. and cheerful thoughts of springtime fill the heart. again we see the landscape clothed in green, the woods again resume their leafy crown, the flowers we love so much again spring up. and the sweet songsters chant at morn and eve. 't is pleasant in winter's milder days to seek the sunny side of some old wood. or 'neath the shelter of a moss-clad wall, where naught disturbs, to sit and muse awhile. how much of what we call the ills of life may we escape who seek these simple joys ! as i look back on my much lengthened life, a sense of gratitude arises in my heart. for the calm pleasures of my rural haunts. 394 daniel kicketson and his friends and now in these my winter days of life i calmly contemplate the closing scene, which through the goodness of the king of all, i humbly pray may be in some sweet place. 1887. my boon. no invitation to the classic seat have i, no publisher my humble wares would buy, no reader for my latest effort waits, nor cottage opes to me its golden gates ; yet nature to my rustic muse is free. at large i roam beneath her canopy. the sky is mine, the stars forever true. the ocean with its boundless realm of blue. the woods, the fields, the rocks, the joyous rius, my simple taste with pleasure ever fills : — with grateful heart to god i render praise. and thus in peace wiu hope to end my days. dec. 18, 1885. the divine presence. in the lone visions of the night, in quiet hours by day, i 've felt the presence of his might to shine upon my 'way. in silent walks through field and wood. or by the babbling stream, i too have felt the wise and good along my pathway gleam. in quiet, meditative hours. his presence has appeared. poems by daniel ricketson 395 with song of birds and new-born flowers, in memory so endeared. and often on my evening strolls, beneath the starry skies, i 've felt the power that all controls with welcome and surprise. thus may my soul be ever found attentive to his call ; and sacred ever be the ground where'er his light may fall. nov. 24th, 1884. reception. when i walk forth and view the grand display of moon and stars in the great realm above. or when i walk beneath the god of day, and listen to the melody of field and grove. or see the wild-flower on its slender stalk. and other objects fair that greet my walk. must i in all my admiration pause. and seek to comprehend great nature's laws ? still in my knowledge i would be a child. and feel the beauty of the forest wild ; the gentle influence of the field and wood. the sweetness of fair nature's solitude. rather than waste o'er theories and rules. the products of our scientific schools. 1871. aspirations. oh, in the life that is to come, may i, dear father, all redeemed by thee from sin, not only meet those dear by nature's ties, 396 daniel eicketson and his friends the cherished household band, but also see those unto whom my heart so fondly clings, whose glorious works have wrought upon my soul such happiness from early youth to age ! and first, my much loved cowper, teacher dear in wisdom's ways and nature's fair domains, thou gentle spirit unto whom i owe a debt of gratitude deep and sincere, for hours of pleasure and instruction wise. how oft with thee upon my rural walks have i in sweet communion strolled along through fields and woods, or by some murmuring stream. and felt thy genial sway, o poesy, pervade my mind, enriching all around ! the solemn muse of young, leading the soul to look beyond the things of earth to him who ruleth all things by his sovereign will ; and tuneful gray, so mellow and so rich. shedding o'er nature a transcendent calm ; thomson, whom early too i learned to love, and from his seasons drew a fresh delight ; then dear beattie, with his minstrel harp, and moral lessons told in graceful verse ; and coming down to still more modern days, our own rich wordsworth, simple, and yet deep in that philosophy which bears aloft the humblest objects, and enjoins on man the recognition of her royal truths ; and over all great milton, master of the lyre, whether its chords resound of life or death, or chant of sweet arcadian scenes, — perfect in all, and gracefully sublime. for such companionship my soul aspires in that blessed land, where peace and virtue reign. ask i too much ? oh, let me then prepare. 1868. poems by daniel eicketson 397 by close observance of the heavenly law, and drinking oft at siloam's holy fount the cleansing waters, and by grace divine washed of all stain, to meet the heavenly host the great and good who once dwelt on the earth. and may i not, dear father, hope that thou wilt hear my prayer for this thy benison. that while on earth my best companionship hath been among the good, so that in heaven i may renew and add to my erewhile friends, such as i have ever found to be, whether among the living or the dead, congenial to my soul ? and thus shall heaven prove the great fulfilment of my best hopes ; and there, perhaps, my humble rural muse, by thy permission graciously vouchsafed. may join in singing praises unto thee, who out of chaos wrought thy wondrous works. a wish. when to its final rest my form is borne, in all simplicity let it be done. the few that may remain, the cherished few, whom i have loved, and found their love returned, these only would i have at the last scene. with no adornment for my humble mound, no published eulogy with falsehood rife. no ministerial form, nor solemn woe, but gently let me pass beyond this life, to that broad realm, unknown to man while here. 1877. electrotyted and printed by h. o. hmghim &f co. cambridge, mass., u.s.a. m?, iiiiiiii ,m\ 1 cornell university library bought with the income ''bf the sage endo'^ment fund given in 1891 by henry williams sage born^i universny liorary ps 3042.s17 selections from thoreau / 3 1924 022 198 521 cornell university library the original of tinis bool< is in the cornell university library. there are no known copyright restrictions in the united states on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022198521 selections feom thokeau •f'i^, iz 'i>t-^'^ selections feom thoeeau edited, with an introduction heney s. salt author of ' thk life op henry david thobeau ' honlion macmillan aistd co. 1895 inteoduction we are most of us familiar with one or another of the many legendary apparitions of the alter ego, or second self, a manifestation which must have entailed considerable inconvenience on the parties whom it principally concerned. it could hardly be agreeable to a person of strong distinctive personality to feel that his astral counterpart was travelling at large about the country, and compromising him by grant ing unauthorised interviews to all sorts of busy bodies; still less, perhaps, would he relish such a startling experience as that of the magus zoroaster, who, if the poet is to be credited, "met his own image walking in the garden." but it should be noted that the annals of literature present equally interesting, and better authenticated examples of a somewhat similar phenomenon. authors, and especi ally those of new and unappreciated genius, are not unfrequently subject to the same annoyance as zoroaster ; nay, worse, for whereas the second self in the legend was at least an exact image of its original, vi selections fuom thoeeau the literary phantom can seldom boast more than a very superficial resemblance. in a word, there are often two personalities who stand junder the same name before the eyes of the public^the author him self, as represented in his actual character and writ ings, and the current idea of the auihor, as misrepre sented in the critical analysis and exposition of him. and it often goes hard for a time with the reputation of a writer who is thus dogged and superseded by his ghostly rival, for these spectral illusions, flimsy and hollow though they may be, are by no means easy to exorcise, and many years, or even generations, must sometimes elapse before they are finally consigned to their appointed resting-place with the hippogriff, the chimsera, and other kindred superstitions. if ever there was a man of genius who was fore ordained by the peculiarity of his doctrines and the eccentricity of his actions to be misjudged by critics, it was thoreau. it is not in the least surprising that i his true character should to this day remain unknown i to the majority of readers, while his place is usurped by a mysterious personage of whose origin i will presently speak. but first let us turn our attention to the real thoreau, and in particular to that much maligned gospel of naturalness and simplicity which it is so easy to comprehend if it be studied with sym pathetic interest, and so easy to distort and miscon i strue if regarded from a hostile standpoint. having introduction vu seen how thoreau himself lived and wrote and acted, we shall be better able to appreciate what his carica turists have erroneously attributed to him; having made ourselves acquainted with the characteristic features of the man, we shall know what to think of the more shadowy lineaments of the phantom. henry david thoreau was born at the village of concord, massachusetts, on 12th july 1817, his father, john thoreau, being a pencil -maker, of french extraction, and his mother, whose maiden name was cynthia dunbar, the daughter of a new hampshire minister. his debt to his parents, and especially to his mother, has perhaps been somewhat underrated, for it is probable that his sturdy uncom promising temperament, and shrewd mordant humour, were a direct inheritance. " the best parts of mrs. thoreau's character," so i learn from one who was born and bred in concord, "have not been given. she was a woman of commanding presence, never to be ignored in any company. she had a keen sense of humour, and would give an account of a journey to boston in a stage-coach, or even a walk to the post-office, which, although perhaps tinged a little with romance, would convulse her hearers with laughter, her manner was so dramatic. of her generosity it was said that no matter how much she i might complain of poverty, she always had something: of value to give to her poorer neighbours.'' still vlll selections fkom thoeeau more important, in its bearing on henry thoreau's .character, was the fact that both his parents were /great lovers of nature, and earnest workers for the abolition of negro slavery. " they were twenty years ahead of their time," is the verdict of one who knew them. from 1833 to 1837 "thoreau was a student at harvard university, but though he became in this ■^way a good classical scholar, his intellect, so free and ' self-reliant in its scope, was not one which could ! greatly profit by an academical education. it was ' in the school of wild nature that he was destined to graduate. " though bodily," he wrote, " i have been a member of harvard university, heart and soul i have been far away among the scenes of my boyhood. those hours that should have been devoted to study have been spent in scouring the woods and exploring the lakes and streams of my native village. im■ mured within the dark but classic walls, my spirit ' yearned for the sympathy of my old and almost for gotten friend. nature/' during the last twentyfive years of his life he indulged this instinctive sympathy to the utmost, in his devoted attachment to the fields and forests of his native concord. after leaving harvard he became a prominent member of that transcendentalist circle of which emerson was the chief, and a personal friend and associate of bronson alcott, ellery chan intkoduction ix ning, margaret fuller, and nathaniel hawthorne. by emerson in particular he was powerfully and beneficially influenced in his youth and early man hood, when his hitherto unsuspected genius was somewhat suddenly awakened ; though, in view of the originality and greater practicalness of mind which in later life carried him apart from and beyond the emersonian theories, it is a complete mistake to regard him as an "imitator" of his friend. i have been assured on good authority that emerson was in his turn considerably influenced by thoreau, in the direction of a simpler and austerer mode of thought and living, at a time when the elder man was leaning in a somewhat contrary direction. an amusing story is told that when thoreau was a mere youth, and some one remarked to his mother on the similarity of his thought to that of the great concord philosopher, mrs. thoreau replied, "well, you see, mr. emerson has been a good deal with david henry, and may have got ideas from him." what was said as a jest in 1837 might have been said in all truth and seriousness some ten years later. thoreau's personal appearance is thus described by euery channing, the most intimate of his con cord friends. " his face once seen could not be for gotten. the features were quite marked ; the nose aquiline or very roman, like one of the portraits of x selections fkom thoreau ceesar (more like a beak, as was said) ; huge over hanging brows above the deepest-set blue eyes that could be seen, in certain lights, and in others gray eyes expressive of all shades of feeling, but never weak or near-sighted; the forehead not unusually broad or high, full of concentrated energy or pur pose; the mouth with prominent lips, pursed up with meaning and thought when silent, and giving out when open a stream of the most varied and unusual and instructive sayings. his whole figure ' had an active earnestness, as if he had no moment to waste." a good idea of thoreau's wayward independent mode of living, and of the paradoxical humour which covered, and in some cases concealed, his profound ' sincerity of purpose,j may be gathered from the highly characteristic answer which he returned in 1847 to a harvard university circular, issued in order to collect statistics concerning the uves of former students. this remarkable letter runs as follows : — "am not married. i don't know whether mine is a profession, or a trade, or what not. it is not yet learned, and in every instance has been practised before being studied. the mercantile part of it was begun by myself alone. it is not one but legion. i will give you some of the monster's heads. i am a schoolmaster, a private tutor, a surveyor, a gardener, a farmer, a painter (i mean a house-painter), a carpenter, a mason, a day-labourer a introduction xi pencil-maker, a glass-paper-maker, a writer, and some times a poetaster. if you will act the part of lolus, and apply a hot iron to any of these heads, i shall be greatly obliged to yon. my present employment is to answer such orders as may be expected from so general an advertisement as the above. that is, if i see fit, which is not always the case, for i have found out a way to live without what is commonly called employment or industry, attractive or otherwise. indeed my steadiest employment, if such it can be called, is to keep myself^t^the top of my . condition, and ready for whatever may turn up in heaven or on_earth. the last two or three years i lived in concord woods alone, something more than a mile from any neighbour, in a house built entirely by myself. p.s. — i beg that the class will not consider me an object of charity, and if any of them are in want of any pecuniary assistance, and will make known their case to me,(i will engage to give them some advice of more worth than money^ the residence in walden woods, referred to in the above letter, and narrated in the most popular of his books, was the one episode in thoreau's career which attracted popular attention, but it should be re membered that it was an episode only , occupying but two and a half years out of his whole active life. to label him "misanthrope" or_^ermit" on account of the walden experiment is to misunderstand him completely. (jhe was a hermit when it suited his purposes to be one — a misanthrope never.j a man 1 from " memorials of the class of 1837 of harvard uni versity," by henry williams, boston, mass. xii selections from thoreau \pf deep sp iritual instincts, he needed large j),eiiqds_of solitude and retirement ; butteetdeat'tliat he had no regard for human interests and human aspirations is the very reverse of the truth. at that critical and supreme moment in the abolitionist movement when john brown was arrested and condemned for the insurrection at harper's ferry the first voice publicly raised on the convict's behalf was the voice of thoreau, in the magnificent "plea for captain john brown." " for my own part," he wrote in a second oration on the same subject, '{l commonly attend more to nature than to man, but any affecting human event may blind our eyes to natural objects.^ this is scarcely the sentiment of a misanthrope. a great injustice has been done to thoreau's memory by the common notion^ hat h e was devoid of huin an symp athies. for this notion the responsibility must partly rm~5n emerson, who, when editing the posthumous volume oi tetters in 1865, made the unfortunate mistake of omitting the domestic cgr respondence which showed thoreau in his most neigh bourly and affectionate mood, in order to exhibit in the more formal epistles " a perfect piece of stoicism." the recent publication of thoreau's f amiliar lette rs has now correctedtliis„im.ppess}pn, but it will doubtless be many years before it is finally removed. the truth is that thoreau, despite his sternness of temperament and bluntness of speech, was at heart a man of introduction xiii profound sensibility and_feeling, as was proved, for example, in the extreme tenderness of his relations mimiiiiiii i iii! ill miir'iwiiiwifi' -iii with hi s broth er john, the brother who was his companion in the famous "week on the concord eiver," and whose early death was a cause of lifelong grief to the survivor. a discerning reader will not fail to note the true^humanityj)f__thoreau, although there" is, be it admitted, a complete absence of t he " am iability " that needs to be expressed in words. such are the readers for whom he lived and wrote. ('i think of those amongst men," he say s, "wh o will know that i love th^m, though i tell them not.'' it is unnecessary here to relate the details of his life at concord, so uneventful in external incidents, so full of spiritual adventure and inner experience. his walden and jveek on the concord cund merrimack rivers have already been referred to ; the other most notable "excursions'' are those described in the maine woods and cape cod. with the exception of such brief absences, his years were wholly spent at concord, where he lived in his father's house, and supported himself by( land-surveying, pencil-making, or one of the many crafts of which he had made him self master. he died from consumption on 6th may 1862, and the family, which was never a robust stock, is now extinct. it is probable that nothing but simple living and open-air habits could have prolonged his life to the term of forty-five years. xiv selections from thoreau let us now turn to tlia ^philosophy of thoreau's writings. it has been recorded that when dr. samuel johnson was invited to take a country walk he replied, "sir, one green field is like another green field; i like to look at men." thoreau's attitude towards nature and natural scenery was the exact opposite of this. he found in nature not the dull, uniform, inanimate thing which most town-dwellers, and it is to be feared some country-dwellers, too often conceive it to be, but a living entity, possessing its own distinctive moods and affections, and animated j with as conscious and active a spirit as himself. ' he rejoiced in the belief that mankind is not the sole' object of concern to the spirit of the universe. like st. francis, he could never look on the animals as divided from man by some arbitrary line of demarca tion, but sympathised with them as his " townsmen and fellow-creatures," who, as he said, possessed the " character and importance of another order of men." accordingly his whole relation to nature and natural history differed widely from that of the collector and scientist, whose dominant impulse on seeing a beautiful bird or beast is to kill and stuff it — to knock it down first, and then, as the taxider mists say, to " set it up " afterwards. thoreau was distinctly not a professor of this anatomical method of classification. "i think," he said, ("the mos_t important requisite in describing an animal is to be introduction xv sure that you give its character and spirit, for in that you have, without error, the sum and effect of all its parts, known and unknown. j you must tell what it is to man ; surely the most important part of an animal is its anima, its vital spirit, on which is based its character and all the particulars by which it most concerns us. yet most scientific books which treat of animals leave this out altogether, and what they describe are, as it were, phenomena of dead matter." that aspect of natural scenery which especially attracted thoreau's temperament was the wild. he turned back from the vanities and disappointments of social intercourse to draw (renewed jiealth and vitality from the far recesses of nature) alike in ethics, in science, and in literature, he looked to wildness as(supplying the most essential element of genius); a creed which may be summed up in one of those incomparably terse and suggestive images which lie scattered through his pages. " as the wild duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild — the mallard — thought, which 'mid falling dews, wings it way above the fens." the simplicity which thoreau preached and (/practised was intimately connected with this love of the wild. an instinctive persona l preference afforded the primary reason for his simplification of life — it was as natural to him to be frugal in his habits as to prefer the wildness of the concord woods to the 6 xvi selections from thoeeau academic coteries of boston. this should be sufficient answer to the charge of "asceticism" which is some times brought against him by critics who cannot believe that an abstinence from their comforts and their luxuries can be due to any other cause.) it would be difficult, perhaps, to instance a man who was less of an ascetic than thoreau -yht knew his own mind, he determined from the first to live his own life, and when he renounced certain things which custom proclaims to be necessary, we may be quite sure that he did so from a wish to vivify, not mortify, the keenness of his enjoyment. and here arises an important objection which has been urged, from time to time, against every apostle of simplicity — against rousseau in france, and thoreau in america, and edward carpenter in eng land. does not the " return to nature," it is asked, imply a corresponding relapse from civilisation toj savagery 1 is it not retrogressive, reactionary, unj scientific — in a word, impossible ? to which it may at once be answered that the naturalness which thoreau advocates cannot, if one takes the trouble to note his own clear definition of it, be mistaken for a state akin to barbarism or incompatible with the highest and truest culture. he explicitly avows his belief that civilisation is " a real advance in the condition ofjman," but adds that he wishes " to show at what a i ( sacrifice this advantage is at present obtained, and to introduction xvii suggest that we may possibly so live as to secure all the advantage without suffering any of the disadvan tage^ the destructive side of thoreau's teaching consists in a prolonged, deliberate, and merciless ex position of these disadvantages of civilisation, and of the numerous sophisms that underlie so large a portion of modern society. but he is no advocate of a mere return to barbarism, the question proposed by him being whether it is possible r to combine the hardi ness of the savage with the intellectualness of the civilised man." i have spoken of the destructive side of thoreau's! teaching, but his teaching was not destructive only. ! in an age ot^ increasing artificiality and restless self indulgence he preached a gospel of healthfulness, simplicity, and contentment — the gospel of natural living, 'of the open air.y(^he taught men to trust their real native instincts, and to distrust the in numerable artificial wants with which custom and tradition have everywhere surrounded us j to distin guish betweer^^genuine taste and acquired habitj as the greek philosopher exclaimed, " how many things there are that i do not desire ! " so thoreau insisted that_!i£liaaii-is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone." it may be said that a savage also is content to let alone those things ; but it must be remembered that a savage spends the leisure thus obtained in sleeping on a mat, xviii selections from thoreau whereas thoreau had other means for the disposal of his spare hours. " to what end," he says in his letters, "do i lead a simple life at all? that i may teach others to simplify their lives, and so all our lives be 'simplified' merely, like an algebraic/ formula? or not, rather, that i may make use of the ground i have cleared, to live more worthily \ and profitably ? " this gospel of naturalness, strange enough in itself to the ordinary member of society, was made still stranger by the manner in which thoreau intro duced it. his peculiarities of character and speech, the keen thrifty incisiveness of his paradoxical utter ances — barbed like his favourite indian arrow-heads — all militated against the early acceptance of his novel principles, and thoreau was not the man to explain himself to his puzzled audience. for the time, therefore, his pointed epigrams had the efiect, and still have the effect, of making society look and feel like the fretful porcupine in its attitude towards him. local prejudice was strong against this pre sumptuous village moralist, this "yankee diogenes" or " eural humbug," as contemporary critics styled him, who dared call in/ question the utility of nine tenths of the most cherished institutions of mankind' ; and, as it is always cheering to believe that uncom fortable prophets whose admonitions trouble us are themselves the victims of depravity or madness, a introduction xix phantom thoreau was soon forthcoming (under the usual working of the law of demand and supply), who was so contrived as to fit in precisely with the preconceived ideas of the boston public. insincerity and self-conceit, cynicism and misanthropy, were the qualities with which this unhappy lay figure was most liberally endowed. if this were thoreau, we might well join with mr. lowell and the other critics who have mistaken the phantom for the man in their contempt for a personality so contemptible — a mix ture of indolence, misanthropy, and self-conceit. cbut fortunately the writings of thoreau^hemselves pro vide the most specific refutation of the error. it is hoped that the following selections, which, though moderate in compass, are typical of thoreau in almost all his moods and aspects, and contain much that is new to english readers, may be instru mental in quickening a more just and liberal appre ciation. i have endeavoured so to choose and arrange the passages as to make them representative not only of their author's strongly-marked opinions on morals, society, politics, literature, and natural history, but also of the various influences and incidents that chiefly aff"ected his life — the scenery of concord, his study of indian lore,(his_sojourn at 'swaldem his daily walks, his longer excursions by river, forest, or sea-coast, his solitary moods, and his genial moods (as in his friendly " crack " with the xx selections fiiom thokea.u wellfleet oysterman), his revolt against the state of massachusetts for its sanction of slavery, his unhesi tating championship of john brown at a moment which tried as in a fiery furnace the mettle of human character. as a writer, thoreau's great qualities stand consjiicuous on every page, admitted even by those critics who, like mr. lowell, are least in sym pathy with his aims. not less remarkable, though as yet but half recognised by the public, are his noble qualities as a man. h. s. salt. contents page introduction . . . . . v prom the week on the concord and merrimack rivers— conooed river . . . . 1 sunday thoushts . .... 13 friendship 29 from walden, or life in the woods — where i lived and what i lived for . 42 higher laws . . . .64 house warming . . ... 80 prom the maine woods — primeval nature . . 89 the murder of the moose . . 103 forest phenomena . . 118 prom gape god — the shipwreck . . . 124 the beach .... .136 the wellfleet oysterman . 151 xxii selections feom thobeau from excursions — page natural history of massachusetts . 168 walking .198 from anti-slavery and reform papers — civil disobedience 238 a plea fok captain john brown . . 267 life without principle .... 301 portrait of thoreau, from a daguerreotype made about 1857, and photograplied by mr. a. w. hosmer of con cord, mass. . . frontispiece concoed eivp:e the musketaquid, or grass-ground eiver, though probably as old as the nile or euphrates, did not begin to have a place in civilised history until the fame of its grassy meadows and its iish attracted settlers out of england in 1635, when it received the other but kindred name of concord from the first planta tion on its banks, which appears to have been commenced in a spirit of peace and harmony. it will be grass-ground eiver as long as grass grows and water runs here ; it will be concord eiver only while men lead peaceable lives on its banks. to an extinct race it was grass-ground, where they hunted and fished, and it is still perennial grass-ground to con cord farmers, who own the great meadows, and get the hay from year to year. " one branch of it," according to the historian of concord, for i love to quote so good authority, " rises in the south part of hopkinton, and another from a pond and a large cedar-swamp in westborough," and flowing between hopkinton and southborough, through framingham, and between sudbury and wayland, where it is s> b 2 selections fkom thoeeau sometimes called sudbury eiver, it enters concord at the south part of the town, and after receiving the north or assabeth eiver, which has its source a little farther to the north and west, goes out at the north east angle, and flowing between bedford and carlisle, and through billerica, empties into the merrimack ' at lowell. in concord it is, in summer, from four to fifteen feet deep, and from one hundred to three hundred feet wide, but in the spring freshets, when it overflows its banks, it is in some places nearly a mile wide. between sudbury and wayland the meadows acquire their greatest breadth, and when covered with water, they form a handsome chain of shallow vernal lakes, resorted to by numerous gulls and ducks. just above sherman's bridge, between these towns, is the largest expanse, and when the wind blows freshly in a raw march day, heaving up the surface into dark and sober billows or regular swells, skirted as it is in the distance with alder swamps and smoke-like maples, it looks like a smaller lake huron, and is very pleasant and exciting for a landsman to row or sail over. the farm-houses along the sudbury shore, which rises gently to a considerable height, command fine water prospects at this season. the shore is more flat on the wayland side, and this town is the greatest loser by the flood. its farmers tell me that thousands of acres are flooded now, since the dams have been erected, where they remember to have seen the white honeysuckle or clover growing once, and they could go dry with shoes only in summer. now there is nothing but concord eitee 3 blue-joint and sedge and cut-grass there, standing in water all the year round. for a long time, they made the most of the driest season to get their hay, working sometimes till nine o'clock at night, sedu lously paring with their scythes in the twilight round the hummocks left by the ice; but now it is not worth the getting when they can come at it, and they look sadly round to their wood-lots and upland as a last resource. it is worth the while to make a voyage up this stream, if you go no farther than sudbury, only to see how much country there is in the rear of us; great hills, and a hundred brooks, and farm-houses, and barns, and haystacks, you never saw before, and men everywhere — sudbury, that is southhorough men, and wayland, and mne-acre-corner men, and bound eock, where four towns bound on a rock in the river, lincoln, wayland, sudbury, concord. many waves are there agitated by the wind, keeping nature fresh, the spray blowing in your face, reeds and rushes waving ; ducks by the hundred, all uneasy in the surf, in the raw wind, just ready to rise, and now going off with a clatter and a whistling like riggers straight for labrador, flying against the stiff gale with reefed wings, or else circling round first, with all their paddles briskly moving, just over the surf, to recon noitre you before they leave these parts ; gulls wheeling overhead, musk-rats swimming for dear life, wet and cold, vidth no fire to warm them by that you know of ; their laboured homes rising here and there like haystacks ; and countless mice and moles 4 selections fkom thoebau and winged titmice along the sunny windy shore; cranberries tossed on the waves and heaving up on the beach, their little red skiffs beating about among the alders; — such healthy natural tumult as proves the last day is not yet at hand. and there stand all around the alders, and birches, and oaks, and maples full of glee and sap, holding in their buds until the waters subside. you shall perh'apstun aground on cranberry island, only some spires of last year's pipe grass above water, to show where the danger is, and get as good a freezing there as anywhere on the north-west coast. i never voyaged so far in all my life. you shall see men you never heard of before, whose names you don't know, going away down through the meadows with long ducking-guns, with water-tight boots wading through the fowl-meadow grass, on bleak, wintry, distant shores, with guns at half-cock ; and they shall see teal, blue-winged, green winged sheldrakes, whistlers, black ducks, ospreys, and many other wild and noble sights, before night, such as they who sit in parlours never dream of. you shall see rude and sturdy, experienced and wise men, keeping their castles, or teaming up their sum mer's wood, or chopping alone in the woods, — men fuller of talk and rare adventure in the sun and wind and rain, than a chestnut is of meat ; who were out not only in '75 and 1812, but have been out every day of their lives ; greater men than homer, or chaucer, or shakespeare, only they never got time to say so ; they never took to the way of writing. look at their fields, and imagine what they might write, if concord eivbr 5 ever they should put pen to paper. or what have they not written on the face of the earth already, clearing, and burning, and scratching, and harrowing, and ploughing, and subsoiling, in and in, and out and out, and over and over, again and again, erasing what they had already written for want of parchment. as yesterday and the historical ages are past, as the work of to-day is present, so some flitting per spectives and demi-experiences of the life that is in nature are in time veritably future, or rather outside to time, perennial, young, divine, in the wind and rain which never die. the respectable folks, — where dwell they 1 they whisper in the oaks, and they sigh in the hay ; summer and winter, night and day, out on the meadow, there dwell they. they never die. nor snivel, nor cry, nor ask our pity with a wet eye. a sound estate they ever mend, to every asker readily lend ; to the ocean wealth, to the meadow health, to time his length, to the rooks strength, to the stars light. to the weary night. to the busy day, to the idle play ; and so their good cheer never ends, for all are their debtors, and all their friends.^ ' it should be stated, with reference to the poems with which 6 selections fkom thobbau concord eiver is remarkable for the gentleness of its current, which is scarcely perceptible, and some have referred to its influence the proverbial modera tion of the inhabitants of concord, as exhibited in the revolution, and on later occasions. it has been pro posed that the town should adopt for its coat of arms a field verdant, with the concord circling nine times round. i have read that a descent of an eighth of an inch in a mile is suflacient to produce a flow. our river has, probably, very near the smallest allowance. the story is current, at any rate, though i believe that strict history will not bear it out, that the only bridge ever carried away on the main branch, within the limits of the town, was driven up stream by the wind. but wherever it makes a sudden bend it is shallower and swifter, and asserts its title to be called a river. compared with the other tributaries of the merrimack, it appears to have been properly named musketaquid, or meadow river, by the indians. for the most part, it creeps through broad meadows, adorned with scattered oaks, where the cranberry is found in abundance, covering the ground like a moss-bed. a row of sunken dwarf willows borders the stream on one or both sides, while at a greater distance the meadow is skirted with maples, alders, and other fluviatile trees, overrun with the grape vine, which bears fruit in its season, purple, red, white, and other grapes. still farther from the stream, on the edge of the firm land, are seen the thoreau frequently interspersed his essays, that those which are distinguished by inverted commas are quotations from other writers, the rest by thoreau himself. concord eiver 7 gray and white dwellings of the inhabitants. ac cording to the valuation of 1831, there were in concord two thousand one hundred and eleven acres, or about one seventh of the whole territory in meadow ; this standing next in the list after pastur age and unimproved lands, and, judging from the returns of previous years, the meadow is not re claimed so fast as the woods are cleared. let us here read what old johnson says of these meadows in his wonder-workinfj providence, which gives the account of new england from 1628 to 1652, and see how matters looked to him. he says of the twelfth church of christ gathered at concord : " this town is seated upon a fair fresh river, whose rivulets are filled with fresh marsh, and her streams with fish, it being a branch of that large river of merrimack. allwifes and shad in their season come up to this town, but salmon and dace cannot come up, by reason of the rocky falls, which causeth their meadows to lie much covered with water, the which these people, together with their neighbour town, have several times essayed to cut through but cannot, yet it may be turned another way with an hundred pound charge as it appeared.'' as to their farming he says : " hav ing laid out their estate upon cattle at 5 to 20 pound a cow, when they came to winter them with inland hay, and feed upon such wild fother as was never cut before, they could not hold out the winter, but, ordinarily the first or second year after their coming up to a new plantation, many of their cattle died." and this from the same author of the planting 8 selections fkom thoeead of the i9th church in the mattachusets' government, called sudbury: "this year [does he mean 1654] the town and church of christ at sudbury began to have the first foundation stones laid, taking up her station in the inland country, as her elder sister concord had formerly done, lying further up the same river, being furnished with great plenty of fresh marsh, but, it lying very low is much indamaged with land floods, insomuch that when the summer proves wet they lose part of their hay ; yet are they so suffi ciently provided that they take in cattle of other towns to winter." the sluggish artery of the concord meadows steals thus unobserved through the town, without a murmur or a pulse-beat, its general course from south-west to north-east, and its length about fifty miles ; a huge volume of matter, ceaselessly rolling through the plains and valleys of the substantial earth with the moccasined tread of an indian warrior, making haste from the high places of the earth to its ancient reservoir. the murmurs of many a famous river on the other side of the globe reach even to us here, as to more distant dwellers on its banks ; many a poet's stream floating the helms and shields of heroes on its bosom. the xanthus or scamander is not a mere dry channel and bed of a mountain torrent, but fed by the everflowing springs of fame — " and thou simois, that as an arrowe, clere through troy rennest, aie downward to the sea " ; and i trust that i may be allowed to associate our concoed kivee 9 muddy but much abused concord river with the most famous in history. " sure there are poets which did never dream upon parnassus, nor did taste the stream of helicon ; we therefore may suppose those made not poets, but the poets those. " the mississippi, the ganges, and the nile, those journeying atoms from the rocky mountains, the himmaleh, and mountains of the moon, have a kind of personal importance in the annals of the vrorld. the heavens are not yet drained over their sources, but the mountains of the moon still send their annual tribute to the pasha without fail, as they did to the pharaohs, though he must collect the rest of his revenue at the point of the sword. rivers must have been the guides which conducted the footsteps of the first travellers. they are the constant lure, when they flow by our doors, to distant enterprise and adventure, and, by a natural impulse, the dwellers on their banks will at length accompany their currents to the lowlands of the globe, or explore at their invitation the interior of continents. they are the natural highways of all nations, not only levelling the ground and removing obstacles from the path of the traveller, quenching his thirst and bearing him on their bosoms, but conducting him through the most interesting scenery, the most populous portions of the globe, and where the animal and vegetable kingdoms attain their greatest per fection. i had often stood on the banks of the concord, 10 selections from thoeeau watching the lapse of the current, an emblem of all progress, following the same law with the system, with time, and all that is made; the weeds at the bottom gently bending down the stream, shaken by the watery wind, still planted where their seeds had sunk, but ere long to die and go down likewise ; the shining pebbles, not yet anxious to better their condition, the chips and weeds, and occasional logs and stems of trees that floated past, fulfilling their fate, were objects of singular interest to me, and at last i resolved to launch myself on its bosom and float whither it would bear me. at length, on saturday, the last day of august, 1839, we two, brothers, and natives of concord, weighed anchor in this river port ; for concord, too, lies under the sun, a port of entry and departure for the bodies as well as the souls of men ; one shore at least exempted from all duties but such as an honest man will gladly discharge. a warm drizzling rain had obscured the morning, and threatened to delay our voyage, but at length the leaves and grass were dried, and it came out a mild afternoon, as serene and fresh as if nature were maturing some greater scheme of her own. after this long dripping and oozing from every pore, she began to respire again more healthily than ever. so with a vigorous shove we launched our boat from the bank, while the flags and bulrushes courtesied a god-speed, and dropped silently down the stream. our boat, which had cost us a week's labour in concoed eivee 11 the spring, was in form like a fisherman's dory, fifteen feet long by three and a half in breadth at the widest part, painted green below, with a border of blue, with reference to the two elements in which it was to spend its existence. it had been loaded the evening before at our door, half a mile from the ri-ver, with potatoes and melons from a patch which we had cultivated, and a few utensils, and was provided with wheels in order to be rolled around falls, as well as with two sets of oars, and several slender poles for shoving in shallow places, and also two masts, one of which served for a tent-pole at night; for a bufialo-skin was to be our bed, and a tent of cotton cloth our roof. it was strongly built, but heavy, and hardly of better model than usual. if rightly made, a boat would be a sort of amphibious animal, a creature of two elements, related by one half its structure to some swift and shapely fish, and by the other to some strong-winged and graceful bird. the fish shows where there should be the greatest breadth of beam and depth in the hold ; its fins direct where to set the oars, and the tail gives some hint for the form and position of the rudder. the bird shows how to rig and trim the sails, and what form to give to the prow that it may balance the boat, and divide the air and water best. these hints we had but partially obeyed. but the eyes, though they are no sailors, will never be satisfied with any model, how ever fashionable, which does not answer all the requisitions of art. however, as art is all of a ship but the wood, and yet the wood alone will rudely 12 selections feom thoeeau serve the purpose of a ship, so our boat, being of wood, gladly availed itself of the old law that the heavier shall float the lighter, and though a dull water-fowl, proved a sufficient buoy for our purpose. " were it the will of heaven, an osier bough were vessel safe enough the seas to plough. " some village friends stood upon a promontory lower down the stream to wave us a last farewell ; but we, having already performed these shore rites, with excusable reserve, as befits those who are embarked on unusual enterprises, who behold but speak not, silently glided past the firm lands of concord, both peopled cape and lonely summer meadow, with steady sweeps. and yet we did unbend so far as to let our guns speak for us, when at length we had swept out of sight, and thus left the woods to ring again with their echoes ; and it may be many russet-clad children, lurking in those broad meadows, with the bittern and the woodcock and the rail, though wholly concealed by brakes and hard-hack and meadow-sweet, heard our salute that afternoon. sunday thoughts as we passed under the last bridge over the canal, just before reaching the merrimack, the people coming out of church paused to look at us from above, and apparently, so strong is custom, indulged in some heathenish comparisons ; but we were the truest observers of this sunny day. according to hesiod, "the seventh is a holy day, for then latona hrought forth golden-rayed apollo, " and by our reckoning this was the seventh day of the week, and not the first. i find among the papers of an old justice of the peace and deacon of the town of concord, this singular memorandum, which is worth preserving as a relic of an ancient custom. after reforming the spelling and grammar, it runs as follows : " men that travelled with teams on the sabbath, dec. 18th, 1803, were jeremiah eichardson and jonas parker, both of shirley. they had teams with rigging such as is used to carry barrels, and they were travelling westward. eichardson was questioned by the hon. ephraim wood, esq., and he 14 sbleotions feom thoeeau said that jonas parker was his fellow-traveller, and he further said that a mr. longley was his employer, who promised to bear him out." we were the men that were gliding northward, this 1st september 1839, with still team, and rigging not the most convenient to carry barrels, unquestioned by any squire or church deacon and ready to bear ourselves out if need were. in the latter part of the seventeenth century, according to the historian of dunstable, "towns were directed to erect 'a cage' near the meeting-house, and in this all offenders against the sanctity of the sabbath were confined." society has relaxed a little from its strictness, one would say, but i presume that there is not less religion than formerly. if the ligature is found to be loosened in one part, it is only drawn the tighter in another. you can hardly convince a man of an error in a lifetime, but must content yourself with the reflection that the progress of science is slow. if he is not convinced, his grandchildren may be. the geologists tell us that it took one hundred years to pi'ove that fossils are organic, and one hundred and fifty more, to prove that they are not to be referred to the noachian deluge. i am not sure but i should betake myself in extremities to the liberal divinities of greece, rather than to my country's god. jehovah, though with us he has acquired new attributes, is more absolute and unapproachable, but hardly more divine, than jove. he is not so much of a gentle man, not so gracious and catholic, he does not exert so intimate and genial an influence on nature, as sunday thoughts 15 many a god of the greeks. i should fear the infinite power and inflexible justice of the almighty mortal hardly as yet apotheosised, so wholly masculine, with no sister juno, no apollo, no venus, nor minerva, to intercede for me, dvfim (j)vx,^ovaa re, kr^zofiivrj re. the grecian are youthful and erring and fallen gods, with the vices of men, but in many important respects essentially of the divine race. in my pantheon, pan still reigns in his pristine glory, with his ruddy face, his flowing beard, and his shaggy body, his pipe and his crook, his nymph echo, and his chosen daughter lambe ; for the great god pan is not dead, as was rumoured. no god ever dies. perhaps of all the gods of new england and of ancient greece, i am most constant at his shrine. it seems to me that the god that is commonly worshipped in civilised countries is not at all divine, though he bears a divine name, but is the overwhelm ing authority and respectability of mankind com bined. men reverence one another, not yet god. if i thought that i could speak with discrimination and impartiality of the nations of christendom, i should praise them, but it tasks me too much. they seem to be the most civil and humane, but i may be mistaken. every people have gods to suit their cir cumstances ; the society islanders had a god called toahitu, " in shape like a dog ; he saved such as were in danger of falling from rocks and trees." i think that we can do without him, as we have not much climbing to do. among them a man could make himself a god out of a piece of wood in a 16 selections from thoeeau few minutes, whicli would frighten him out of his wits. i fancy that some indefatigable spinster of the old school, who had the supreme felicity to be bom in " days that tried men's souls," hearing this, may say with nestor, another of the old school, "but you are younger than i. for time was when i conversed with greater men than you. for not at any time have i seen such men, nor shall see them, as perithous, and dryas, and troi/meva xawv," that is probably washington, sole " shepherd of the people." and when apollo has now six times rolled westward, or seemed to roll, and now for the seventh time shows his face in the east, eyes well-nigh glazed, long glassed, which have fluctuated only between lamb's wool and worsted, explore ceaselessly some good sermon book. for six days shalt thou labour and do all thy knitting, but on the seventh, forsooth, thy reading. happy we who can bask in this warm september sun, which illumines all creatures, as well when they rest as when they toil, not without a feeling of gratitude ; whose life is as blameless, how blameworthy soever it may be, on the lord's mona day as on his suna-day. there are various, nay, incredible faiths; why should we be alarmed at any of them ? what man believes, g-od believes. long as i have lived, and many blasphemers as i have heard and seen, i have never yet heard or witnessed any direct and conscious blasphemy or irreverence ; but of indirect and habit ual, enough. where is the man who is guilty of sunday thoughts 17 direct and personal insolence to him that made him? one memorable addition to the old mythology is due to this era, — the christian fable. with what pains, and tears, and blood these centuries have woven this and added it to the mythology of man kind. the new prometheus. with what miraculous consent, and patience, and persistency has this mythus been stamped on the memory of the race ! it would seem as if it were in the progress of our mythology to dethrone jehovah, and crown christ in his stead. if it is not a tragical life we live, then i know not what to call it. such a story as that of jesus christ, — the history of jerusalem, say, being a part of the universal history. the naked, the embalmed, un buried death of jerusalem amid its desolate hills,^ think of it. in tasso's poem i trust some things are sweetly buried. consider the snappish tenacity with which they preach christianity still. what are time and space to christianity, eighteen hundred years, and a new world ? — that the humble life of a jewish peasant should have force to make a new york bishop so bigoted. forty-four lamps, the gift of kings, now burning in a place called the holy sepulchre ; — a church-bell ringing; — some unaffected tears shed by a pilgrim on mount calvary within the week. — "jerusalem, jerusalem, when i forget thee, may my right hand forget her cunning." " by the waters of babylon there we sat down, and we wept when we remembered zion." i trust that some may be as near and dear to 18 selections from thoeeau buddha, or christ, or swedenborg, who are without the pale of their churches. it is not necessary to be christian to appreciate the beauty and significance of the life of christ. i know that some will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their christ named beside my buddha, yet i am sure that i am willing they should love their christ more than my buddha, for the love is the main thing, and i like him too. "god is the letter ku, as well as khu." why need christians be still intolerant and superstitious ? the simple-minded sailors were unwilling to cast over board jonah at his own request. — " where is this love become in later age ? alas ! 'tis gone in endless pilgrimage from hence, and never to return, i doubt, till revolution wheel those times about. " one man says, — " the world's a popular disease, that reigns within the froward heart and frantic brains of poor distempered mortals." another, that " all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players." the world is a strange place for a playhouse to stand within it. old drayton thought that a man that lived here, and would be a poet, for instance, should have in him certain " brave, translunary things," and a "fine madness " should possess his brain. certainly it were as well, that he might be up to the occasion. that is a superfluous wonder, which dr. johnson expresses at the assertion of sir thomas browne that "his life has been a miracle of thirty years, which to sunday thoughts 19 relate, were not history but a piece of poetry, and would sound like a fable." the wonder is, rather, that all men do not assert as much. that would be a rare praise, if it were true, which was addressed to francis beaumont, — "spectators sate part in your tragedies.'' think what a mean and wretched place this world is ; that half the time we have to light a lamp that we may see to live in it. this is half our life. who would undertake the enterprise if it were all ? and, pray, what more has day to offer 1 a lamp that burns more clear, a purer oil, say winter-strained, that so we may pursue our idleness with less obstruction. bribed with a little sunlight and a few prismatic tints, we bless our maker, and stave off his wrath with hymns. i make ye an offer, ye gods, hear the scoffer, the scheme will not hurt you, if ye will find goodness, i will find virtue. though i am your creature, and child of your nature, i have pride still unbended, and blood undescended. some free independence, and my own descendants. i cannot toil blindly, though ye behave kindly. and i swear by the rood, i'll be slave to no god. if ye will deal plainly, i will strive mainly, if ye w.ill discover, great plans to your lover. and give him a sphere' somewhat larger than here. 20 selections feom thokbau " verily, my angels ! i was abashed on account of my servant, who had no providence but me ; there fore did i pardon him." — the gulistan of sadi. most people with whom i talk, men and women even of some originality and genius, have their scheme of the universe all cut and dried, — very dry, i assure you, to hear, dry enough to burn, dry-rotted and powder-post, methinks, — which they set up be tween you and them in the shortest intercourse ; an ancient and tottering frame with all its boards blown off. they do not walk without their bed. some, to me, seemingly very unimportant and unsubstantial things and relations, are for them everlastingly settled, — as father, son, and holy ghost, and the like. these are like the everlasting hills to them. but in all my wanderings i never came across the least vestige of authority for these things. they have not left so distinct a trace as the delicate flower of a remote geological period on the coal in my grate. the wisest man preaches no doctrines; he has no scheme ; he sees no rafter, not even a cobweb, against the heavens. it is clear sky. if i ever see more clearly at one time than at another, the medimi] through which i see is clearer. to see from earth tc heaven, and see there standing, still a fixture, that old jewish scheme ! what right have you to hold up this obstacle to my understanding you, to youi understanding me ! you did not invent it ; it was imposed on you. examine your authority. ever christ, we fear, had his scheme, his conformity t( sunday thoughts 21 tradition, which slightly vitiates his teaching. he had not swallowed all formulas. he preached some mere doctrines. as for me, abraham, isaac, and jacob are now only the subtilest imaginable essences, which would not stain the morning sky. your scheme must be the framework of the universe; all other schemes will soon be ruins. the perfect grod in his revelations of himself has never got to the length of one such proposition as you, his prophets, state. have you learned the alphabet of heaven and can count three 1 do you know the number of god's family? can you put mysteries into words? do you presume to fable of the ineffable? pray, what geographer are you, that speak of heaven's topo graphy 1 whose friend are you that speak of god's personality? do you. miles howard, think that he has made you his confidant ? tell me of the height of the mountains of the moon, or of the diameter of space, and i may believe you, but of the secret history of the almighty, and i shall pronounce thee mad. yet we have a sort of family history of our god, — so have the tahitians of theirs, — and some old poet's grand imagination is imposed on us as adamantine everlasting truth, and god's own words. pythagoras says, truly enough, "a true assertion respecting god, is an assertion of god " ; but we may well doubt if there is any example of this in literature. the new testament is an invaluable book, though i confess to having been slightly prejudiced against it in my very early days by the church and the sabbath school, so that it seemed, before i read it, to be the 22 selections eeom thoeeau yellowest book in the catalogue. yet i early escaped from their meshes. it was hard to get the comment aries out of one's head and taste its true flavour.— i think that pilgrim's progress is the best sermon which has been preached from this text ; almost all other sermons that i have heard, or heard of, have been but poor imitations of this. — it would be a poor story to be prejudiced against the life of christ because the book has been edited by christians. in fact, i love this book rarely, though it is a sort of castle in the air to me, which i am permitted to dream. having come to it so recently and freshly, it has the greater charm, so that i cannot find any to talk with about it. i never read a novel, they have so little real life and thought in them. the reading which i love, best is the scriptures of the several nations, though it happens that i am better ac quainted with those of the hindoos, the chinese, and the persians, than of the hebrews, which i have come to last. give me one of these bibles and you have silenced me for a while. when i recover the use of my tongue, i am wont to worry my neighbours with the new sentences ; but commonly they cannot see that there is any wit in them. such has been my experience with the new testament. i have not yet got to the crucifixion, i have read it over so many times. i should love dearly to read it aloud to my friends, some of whom are seriously inclined ; it is so good, and i am sure that they have never heard it, it fits their case exactly, and we should enjoy it so much together, — but i instinctively despair of getting sunday thoughts 23 their ears. they soon show, by signs not to be mis taken, that it is inexpressibly wearisome to them. i do not mean to imply that i am any better than my neighbours ; for, alas ! i know that i am only as good, though i love better books than they. it is remarkable that, notwithstanding the univer sal favour with which the new testament is out wardly received, and even the bigotry with which it is defended, there is no hospitality shown to, there is no appreciation of, the order of truth with which it deals. i know of no book that has so few readers. there is none so truly strange, and heretical, and un popular. to christians, no less than greeks and jews, it is foolishness and a stumbling-block. there are, indeed, severe things in it which no man should read aloud more than once. — " seek first the kingdom of heaven." — "lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth." — "if thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven." — "for what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul ? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" — think of this, yankees! — "verily, i say unto you, if ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, eemove hence to yonder place ; and it shall remove ; and nothing shall be impossible unto you." — think of repeating these things to a new england audience ! thirdly, fourthly, fifteenthly, till there are three barrels of sermons ! who, without cant, can read them aloud? who, without cant, can hear them, and not go out of the 24 selections from thoeeatj meeting-house? they never were read, they never were heard. let but one of these sentences be rightly read from any pulpit in the land, and there would not be left one stone of that meeting-house upon another. yet the new testament treats of man and man's so-called spiritual affairs too exclusively, and is too constantly moral and personal, to alone content me, who am not interested solely in man's religious or moral nature, or in man even. i have not the most definite designs on the future. absolutely speaking, do unto others as you would that they should do unto you, is by no means a golden rule, but the best of current silver. an honest man would have but little occasion for it. it is golden not to have any rule at all in such a case. the book has never been written which is to be accepted without any allow ance. christ was a sublime actor on the stage of the world. he knew what he was thinking of when he said, "heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away." i draw near to him at such a time. yet he taught mankind but imperfectly how to live ; his thoughts were all directed toward another world. there is another kind of success than his. even here we have a sort of living to get, and must buffet it somewhat longer. there are various tough problems yet to solve, and we must make shift to live, betwixt spirit and matter, such a human life as we can. a healthy man, with steady employment, as wood chopping at fifty cents a cord, and a camp in the sunday thoughts 25 woods, will not be a good subject for christianity. the new testament may be a choice book to him on some, but not on all or most of his days. he will rather go a-fishing in his leisure hours. the apostles, though they were fishers too, were of the solemn race of sea-fishers, and never trolled for pickerel on inland streams. men have a singular desire to be good without being good for anything, because, perchance, they think vaguely that so it will be good for them in the end. the sort of morality which the priests inculcate is a very subtle policy, far finer than the politicians, and the world is very successfully ruled by them as the policemen. it is not worth the while to let our im perfections disturb us always. the conscience really does not, and ought not^to monopolise the whole of our lives, any more than the heart or the head. it is as liable to disease as any other part. i have seen some whose consciences, owing undoubtedly to former indulgence, had grown to be as irritable as spoilt children, and at length gave them no peace. they did not know when to swallow their cud, and their lives of course yielded no milk. i was once reproved by a minister who was driving a poor beast to some meeting-house horse-sheds among the hills of new hampshire, because i was bending my steps to a mountain-top on the sabbath, instead of a church, when i would have gone farther than he to hear a true word spoken on that or any day. he declared that i was "breaking the lord's fourth commandment," and proceeded to enumerate, in a 26 selections from thoeeau sepulchral tone, the disasters which had befallen him whenever he had done any ordinary work on the sabbath. he really thought that a god was on the watch to trip up those men who followed any secular work on this day, and did not see that it was the evil conscience of the workers that did it. the country is full of this superstition, so that when one enters a village, the church, not only really but from associa tion, is the ugliest looking building in it, because it is the one in which human nature stoops the lowest and is most disgraced. certainly, such temples as these shall ere long cease to deform the landscape. there are few things more disheartening and dis gusting than when you are walking the streets of a strange village on the sabbath, to hear a preacher shouting like a boatswain in a gale of wind, and thus harshly profaning the quiet atmosphere of the day. you fancy him to have taken oflf his coat, as when men are about to do hot and dirty work. if i should ask the minister of middlesex to let me speak in his pulpit on a sunday, he would object, because i do not pray as he does, or because i am not ordained. what under the sun are these things ? really, there is no infidelity, nowadays, so great as that which prays, and keeps the sabbath, and rebuilds the churches. the sealer of the south pacific preaches a truer doctrine. the church is a sort of hospital for men's souls, and as full of quack ery as the hospital for their bodies. those who are taken into it live like pensioners in their retreat or sailor's snug harbour, where you may see a row of sunday thoughts 27 religious cripples sitting outside in sunny weather. let not the apprehension that he may one day have to occupy a ward therein, discourage the cheerful labours of the able-souled man. while he remembers the sick in their extremities, let him not look thither as to his goal. one is sick at heart of this pagoda worship. it is like the beating of gongs in a hindoo subterranean temple. in dark places and dungeons the preacher's words might perhaps strike root and grow, but not in broad daylight in any part of the world that i know. the sound of the sabbath bell far away, now breaking on these shores, does not awaken pleasing associations, but melancholy and sombre ones rather. one involuntarily rests on his oar, to humour his unusually meditative mood. it is as the sound of many catechisms and religious books twanging a canting peal round the earth, seeming to issue from some egyptian temple and echo along the shore of the nile, right opposite to pharaoh's palace and moses in the bulrushes, startling a multitude of storks and alligators basking in the sun. everywhere "good men" sound a retreat, and the word has gone forth to fall back on innocence. fall forward rather on to whatever there is there. chris tianity only hopes. it has hung its harp on the willows, and cannot sing a song in a strange land. it has dreamed a sad dream, and does not yet welcome the morning with joy. the mother tells her falsehoods to her child, but, thank heaven, the child does not grow up in its parent's shadow. our mother's faith has not grown with her experience. 28 selections from thokeau her experience has been too much for her. the lesson of life was too hard for her to learn. it is remarkable that almost all speakers and writers feel it to be incumbent on them, sooner or later, to prove or to acknowledge the personality of god. some earl of bridgewater, thinking it better late than never, has provided for it in his will. it is a sad mistake. in reading a work on agriculture, we have to skip the author's moral reflections, and the words "providence" and "he" scattered along tha page, to come at the profitable level of what he has to say. what he calls his religion is for the most part offensive to the nostrils. he should know better than expose himself, and keep his foul sores covered till they are quite healed. there is more religion in men's science than there is science in their religion. let us make haste to the report of the committee on swine. a man's real faith is never contained in his creed, nor is his creed an article of his faith. the last is never adopted. this it is that permits him to smile ever, and to live even as bravely as he does. and yet he clings anxiously to his creed, as to a straw, thinking that that does him good service because his sheet anchor does not drag. peiendship no word is oftener on the lips of men than friend ship, and indeed no thought is more famihar to their aspirations. ml men are dreaming of it, and its drama, which is always a tragedy, is enacted daily. it is the secret of the universe. you may thread the town, you may wander the country, and none shall ever speak of it, yet thought is everywhere busy about it, and the idea of what is possible in this respect affects our behaviour toward all new men and women, and a great many old ones. neverthe less, i can remember only two or three essays on this subject in all literature. no wonder that the myth ology, and arabian nights, and shakespeare, and scott's novels, entertain us, — we are poets and fablers and dramatists and novelists ourselves. we are continually acting a part in a more interesting drama than any written. we are dreaming that our friends are our friends, and that we are our friends' friends. our actual friends are but distant relations of those to whom we are pledged. we never exchange more than three words with a friend in our lives on that level to which our thoughts and feelings almost 30 selections from thokeau habitually rise. one goes forth prepared to say, "sweet friends!" and the salutation is, "damn your eyes ! " but never mind ; faint heart never won true friend. my friend, may it come to pass once, that when you are my friend i may be yours. of what use the friendliest dispositions even, if there are no hours given to friendship, if it is for ever postponed to unimportant duties and relations 1 friendship is first. friendship last. but it is equally impossible to forget our friends, and to make them answer to our ideal. when they say farewell, then indeed we begin to keep them company. how often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends, that we may go and meet their ideal cousins. i would that i were worthy to be any man's friend. what is commonly honoured with the name of friendship is no very profound or powerful instinct. men do not, after all, love their friends greatly. i do not often see the farmers made seers and wise to the verge of insanity by their friendship for one another. they are not often transfigured and trans lated by love in each other's presence. i do not observe them purified, refined, and elevated by the love of a man. if one abates a little the price of his wood, or gives a neighbour his vote at town meeting, or a barrel of apples, or lends him his waggon frequently, it is esteemed a rare instance of friendship. nor do the farmers' wives lead lives consecrated to friendship. i do not see the pair of farmer friends of either sex prepared to stand against the world. there are only two or three couples in friendship 31 history. to say that a man is your friend, means j commonly no more than this, that he is not your "f enemy. most contemplate only what would be the i accidental and trifling advantages of friendship, as that the friend can assist in time of need, by his substance, or his influence, or his counsel ; but he who foresees such advantages in this relation proves himself blind to its real advantage, or indeed wholly inexperienced in the relation itself. such services are particular and menial, compared with the per petual and all-embracing service which it is. even the utmost good-will and harmony and practical kindness are not suflbcient for friendship, for friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody. we do not wish for friends to feed and clothe our bodies, — neighbours are kind enough for , that, — but to do the like office to our spirits. for 1 this few are rich enough, however well disposed they may be. for the most part we stupidly confound one man with another. the dull distinguish only races or nations, or at most classes, but the wise man, individuals. to his friend a man's peculiar character appears in every feature and in every action, and it is thus drawn out and improved by him. think of the importance of friendship in the education of men. "he that hath love and judgment too, sees more than any other doe. " it will make a man honest; it will make him a hero; it will make him a saint. it is the state of the just dealing with the just, the magnanimous 32 selections fkom thoeeau with the magnanimous, the sincere with the sincere, man with man. y and it is well said by another poet, "why love among the virtues is not known, is that love is them all contract in one.''~\ all the abuses which are the object of reform with the philanthropist, the statesman, and the house keeper are unconsciously amended in the intercourse of friends. a friend is one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting from us all the virtues, and who can appreciate them in us. it takes two to speak the truth, — one to speak, and another to hear. how can one treat with magnanimity mere wood and stone 1 if we dealt only with the false and dishonest, we should at last forget how to speak truth. only lovers know the value and magnanimity of truth, while traders prize a cheap honesty, and neighbours and acquaintance a cheap civility. in our daily intercourse with men, our nobler faculties are dor mant and suffered to rust. none will pay us the compliment to expect nobleness from us. though we have gold to give, they demand only copper. we ask our neighbour to sufifer himself to be dealt with truly, sincerely, nobly; but he answers no by his deafness. he does not even hear this prayer. he says practically, i will be content if you treat me as "no better than i should be," as deceitful, mean, dishonest, and selfish. for the most part, we are con tented so to deal and to be dealt with, and we do not think that for the mass of men there is any truer and nobler relation possible. a man may have good friendship 33 neighbours, so called, and acquaintances, and even companions, wife, parents, brothers, sisters, children, who meet himself and one another on this ground only. the state does not demand justice of its members, but thinks that it succeeds very well with the least degree of it, hardly more than rogues practise ; and so do the neighbourhood and the family. what is commonly called friendship even is only a little more honour among rogues. but sometimes we are said to love another, that is, to stand in a true relation to him, so that we give the best to, and receive the best from, him. between whom there is hearty truth, there is love; and in proportion to our truthfulness and confidence in one another, our lives are divine and miraculous, and answer to our ideal. there are passages of affection in our intercourse with mortal men and women, such as no prophecy had taught us to expect, which transcend our earthly life, and anticipate heaven for us. what is this love that may come right into the middle of a prosaic goffstown day, equal to any of the gods ? that discovers a new world, fair and fresh and eternal, occupying the place of the old one, when to the common eye a dust has settled on the universe ? which world cannot else be reached, and does not exist. what other words, we may almost ask, are memorable and worthy to be repeated than those which love has inspired ? it is wonderful that they were ever uttered. they are few and rare, indeed, but, like a strain of music, they are incessantly repeated and modulated by the memory. all other d 34 selections from thobeau words crumble off with the stucco which overhes the heart. we should not dare to repeat these now aloud. we are not competent to hear them at all ^ , tihies.3 ' i the books for young people say a great deal about the selection of friends ; it is because they really have nothing to say about friends. they mean associates and confidants merely. " know that the contrariety of foe and friend proceeds from god." friendship takes place between those who have an affinity for one another, and is a perfectly natural and inevitable result. no professions nor advances will avail. even speech, at first, necessarily has nothing to do with it ; but it follows after silence, as the buds in the graft do not put forth into leaves till long after the graft has taken. it is a drama in which the parties have no part to act. we are au mussulmen and fatalists in this respect. impatient and uncertain lovers think that they must say or do something kind whenever they meet ; they must never be cold. but they who are friends do not do what they think they must, but what they nvust. even their friendship is to some extent but a sublime phenomenon to them. the true and not despairing friend will address his friend in some such terms as these. " i never asked thy leave to let me love thee,— i have a right. i love thee not as something private and personal, which is your own, but as something universal and worthy of love, loliich i liave fmird. 0, how i think of you ! you are purely good, — you are infinitely good. i can trust you forever. i did not feiendship 35 think that humanity was so rich. give me an oppor tunity to live." " you are the fact in a fiction, — you are the truth more strange and admirable than fiction. consent only to be what you are. i alone will never standin your way." "this is what i would like, — to be as intimate with you as our spirits are intimate, — respecting you as i respect my ideal. never to profane one another by word or action, even by a thought. between us, if necessary, let there be no acquaintance." " i have discovered you ; how can you be concealed from me ? " the friend asks no return but that his friend will religipusly accept and wear and not disgrace his '■^apoclfeosiis of him. they cherish each other's hopes. they are kind to each other's dreams. though the poet says, '"tis the pre-eminence of friendship to impute excellence,'' yet we can never praise our friend, nor esteem him praiseworthy, nor let him think that he can please us by any behamour, or ever treat us well enough. that kindness which has so good a reputation elsewhere can least of all consist with this relation, and no such affront can be offered to a friend, as a conscious good-will, a friend liness which is not a necessity of the friend's nature. \~the sexes are naturally most strongly attracted to one another, by constant constitutional diflferences, and are most commonly and surely the complements of each other how natural and easy it is for man 36 selections feom thoeeau to secure the attention of woman to what interests himself. men and women of equal culture, thrown together, are sure to be of a certain value to one another, more than men to men. there exists already a natural disinterestedness and liberality in such society, and i think that any man will more confidently carry his favourite books to read to some circle of intelligent women, than to one of his own sex. the visit of man to man is wont to be an inter ruption, but the sexes naturally expect one another. yet friendship is no respecter of sex ; and perhaps it is more rare between the sexes than between two of the same sex. '^ f" friendship "ts, at any rate, a relation of perfect equality. it cannot well spare any outward sign of equal obligation and advantage. the nobleman can never have a friend among his retainers, nor the king among his subjects. not that the parties to it are in all respects equal, but they are equal in all that respects or affects their friendship. the one's love is exactly balanced and represented by the other's. persons are only the vessels which contain the nectar, and the hydrostatic paradox is the symbol of love's law. it finds its level and rises to its fountain-head in all breasts, and its slenderest column balances the ocean. "and love as well the shepherd can as can the mighty nobleman." the one sex is not, in this respect, more tender than the other. a hero's love is as delicate as a maiden's. j fkiendship 37 confucius said, "never contract friendship with a man who is not better than thyself." it is the merit and preservation of friendship, that it takes place on a level higher than the actual characters of the parties would seem to warrant. the rays of light come to us in such a curve that every man whom we meet appears to be taller than he actually is. such foundation has civility. my friend is that one whom i can associate with my choicest thought. p i always assign to him a nobler employment in my absence than i ever find him engaged in; /and i imagine that the hours which he devotes to me were snatched from a higher society. the sorest insult which i ever received from a friend was, when he behaved with the license which only long and cheap acquaintance allows to one's faults, in my presence, without shame, and still addressed me in friendly accents. beware, lest thy friend learn at last to tolerate one frailty of thine, and so an obstacle be raised to the progress of thy love. there are times when we have had enough even of our friends, when we begin inevitably to profane one another, and must withdraw religiously into solitude and silence, the better to prepare ourselves for a loftier intimacy. silence is the ambrosial night in the intercourse of friends, in which their sincerity is recruited and takes deeper root. friendship is never established as an understood relation. do you demand that i be less your friend that you may know it 'i yet what right have i to think that another cherishes so rare a sentiment for 38 selections from thoeeau me t it is a miracle which requires constant proofs. it is an exercise of the purest imagination and the rarest faith. it says by a silent but eloquent behaviour, — "i will be so related to thee as thou canst imagine ; even so thou mayest believe. i will spend truth, — all my wealth on thee," — and the friend responds silently through his nature and life, and treats his friend with the same divine courtesy. he knows us literally through thick and thin. he never asks for a sign of love, but can distinguish it by the features which it naturally wears. we never need to stand upon ceremony with him with regard to his visits. wait not till i invite thee, but observe that i am glad to see thee when thou comest. it would be paying too dear for thy visit to ask for it. where my friend lives there are all riches and every attraction, and no slight obstacle can keep me from him. let me never have to teu thee what i have not to teu. let our intercourse be wholly above ourselves, and draw us up to it. the language of friendship is not words, but meanings. it is an intelligence above language. one imagines endless conversations with his friend, in which the tongue shall be loosed, and thoughts be spoken without hesitancy or end ; but the experience is commonly far otherwise. acquaintances may come and go, and have a word ready for every occasion ; but what puny word shall he utter whose very breath is thought and meaning 1 suppose you go to bid farewell to your friend who is setting out on a journey ; what other outward sign do you know friendship 39 than to shake his hand? have you any palaver ready for him then ? any box of salve to commit to his pocket 1 any particular message to send by him 1 any statement which you had forgotten to make 1 — as if you could forget anything. — no, it is much that you take his hand and say farewell ; that you could easily omit ; so far custom has prevailed. it is even painful, if he is to go, that he should linger so long. if he must go, let him go quickly. have you any last words 1 alas, it is only the word of words, which you have so long sought and found not; you have not a first word yet. there are few even whom i should venture to call earnestly by their most proper names. a name pronounced is the recognition of the individual to whom it belongs. he who can pronounce my name aright, he can call me, and is entitled to my love and service. yet reserve is the freedom and abandonment of lovers. it is the reserve of what is hostile or indifferent in their natures, to give place to what is kindred and harmonious. the violence of love is as much to be dreaded as that of hate. when it is durable it is serene and equable. even its famous pains begin only with the ebb of love, for few are indeed lovers, though all would fain be. it is one proof of a man's fitness for friendship that he is able to do without that which is cheap and passionate. a true friendship is as wise as it is tender. the parties to it yield implicitly to the guidance of their love, and know no other law nor kindness. it is not extravagant and insane, but what it says is something established henceforth, and 40 selections from thoeeau will bear to be stereotyped. it is a truer truth, it is better and fairer news, and no time will ever shame it, or prove it false. this is a plant which thrives best in a temperate zone, where summer and winter alternate with one another. the friend is a neces sa/riws, and meets his friend on homely ground ; not on carpets and cushions, but on the ground and on rocks they will sit, obeying the natural and primitive laws. they will meet without any outcry, and part without loud sorrow. their relation implies such qualities as the warrior prizes ; for it takes a valour to open the hearts of men as well as the gates of castles. it is not an idle sympathy and mutual consolation merely, but a heroic ' sympathy of aspirar tion and endeavour. as surely as the sunset in my latest november shall translate me to the ethereal world, and remind me of the ruddy morning of youth ; as surely as the last strain of music which falls on my decaying ear shall make age to be forgotten, or, in short, the mani fold influences of nature survive during the term of our natural life, so surely my friend shall for ever he my friend, and reflect a ray of god to me, and time shall foster and adorn and consecrate our friendship, no less than the ruins of temples. as i love nature, as i love singing birds, and gleaming stubble, and flowing rivers, and morning and evening, and summer and winter, i love thee, my friend. but all that can be said of friendship is like feiendship 41 botany to flowers. how can the understanding take account of its friendliness ■? even the death of friends will inspire us as much as their lives. they will leave consolation to the mourners, as the rich leave money to defray the expenses of their funerals, and their memories will be incrusted over with sublime and pleasing thoughts, as monuments of other men are overgrown with moss ; for our friends have no place in the graveyard. | this to our cis-alpine and cis-atlantic friends. wheee i lived and what i lived foe at a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house. i have thus surveyed the country on every side within a dozen miles of where i live. in imagination i have bought all the farms in succession, for all were to be bought, and i knew their price. i walked over each farmer's premises, tasted his wild apples, discoursed on husbandry with him, took his farm at his price, at any price, mortgaging it to him in my mind ; even put a higher price on it, — took everything but a deed of it, — took his word for his deed, for i dearly love to talk, — cultivated it, and him too to some extent, i trust, and withdrew when i had enjoyed it long enough, leaving him to carry it on. this experience entitled me to be regarded as a sort of real-estate broker by my friends. wherever i sat, there i might live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly. what is a house but a sedes, a seat ?— better if a country-seat. i discovered many a site for a house not likely to be soon improved, which some might have thought too far from the village, where i lived 43 but to my eyes the village was too far from it. well, there i might live, i said ; and there i did live, for an hour, a summer and a winter life ; saw how i could let the years run off, buffet the winter through, and see the spring come in. the future inhabitants of this region, wherever they may place their houses, may be sure that they have been anticipated. an afternoon sufficed to lay out the land into orchard, woodlot, and pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or pines should be left to stand before the door, and whence each blasted tree could be seen to the best advantage ; and then i let it lie, fallow perchance, for a man is rich in pro portion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone. my imagination carried me so far that i even had the refusal of several farms, — the refusal was all i wanted, — ^but i never got my fingers burned by actual possession. the nearest that i came to actual posses sion was when i bought the houowell place, and had begun to sort my seeds, and collected materials with which to make a wheelbarrow to carry it on or off with ; but before the owner gave me a deed of it, his wife — every man has such a wife — changed her mind and wished to keep it, and he offered me ten dollars to release him. now, to speak the truth, i had but ten cents in the world, and it surpassed my arithmetic to tell, if i was that man who had ten cents, or who had a farm, or ten dollars, or all together. however, i let him keep the ten dollars and the farm too, for i had carried it far enough ; or rather, to be generous, i sold him the farm for just what i gave for it, and, 44 selections feom thoeea.xt as he was not a rich man, made him a present of ten dollars, and still had my ten cents, and seeds, and materials for a wheelbarrow left. i found thus that i had been a rich man without any damage to my poverty. but i retained the landscape, and i have since annually carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow. with respect to landscapes, — " i am monarch of all i survey, my right there is none to dispute. " i have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he had got a few wild apples only. why, the owner does not know it for many years when a poet has put his farm in rhyme, the most admirable kind of invisible fence, has fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk. the real attractions of the hollowell farm, to me, were — its complete retirement, being about two miles from the village, half a mile from the nearest neigh bour, and separated from the highway by a broad field ; its bounding on the river, which the owner said protected it by its fogs from frosts in the spring, though that was nothing to me; the gray colour and ruinous state of the house and barn, and the dilapidated fences, which put such an interval between me and the last occupant; the hollow and lichen-covered apple trees, gnawed by rabbits, showing what kind of neighbours i should have; wheke i lived 45 but above all, the recollection i had of it from my earliest voyages up the river, when the house was concealed behind a dense grove of red maples, through which i heard the house-dog bark. i was in haste to buy it, before the proprietor finished getting out some rocks, cutting down the hollow apple trees, and grubbing up some young birches which had sprung up in the pasture or, in short, had made any more of his improvements. to enjoy these advantages i was ready to carry it on; like atlas, to take the world on my shoulders, — i never heard what compensation he received for that, — and do all those things which had no other motive or excuse but that i might pay for it and be un molested in my possession of it ; for i knew all the while that it would yield the most abundant crop of the kind i wanted if i could only afford to let it alone. but it turned out as i have said. all that i could say, then, with respect to farming on a large scale (i have always cultivated a garden) was, that i had had my seeds ready. many think that seeds improve with age. i have no doubt that time discriminates between the good and the bad; and when at last i shall plant, i shall be less likely to be disappointed. but i would say to my fellows, once for all, as long as possible live free and uncommitted. it makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail. old cato, whose de be busticd is my "cultiva tor," says, and the only translation i have seen makes 46 selections feom thokeau sheer nonsense of the passage, " when you think of getting a farm, turn it thus in your mind, not to buy greedily ; nor spare your pains to look at it, and do not think it enough to go round it once. the oftener you go there the more it will please you, if it is good." i think i shall not buy greedily, but go round and round it as long as i live, and be buried in it first, that it may please me the more at last. the present was my next experiment of this kind, which i purpose to describe more at length, for con venience, putting the experience of two years into one. as i have said, i do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbours up. when first i took up my abode in the woods, that is, began to spend my nights as well as days there, which, by accident, was on independence day, or the fourth of july 1845, my house was not finished for winter, but was merely a defence against the rain, without plastering or chimney, the waus being of rough weather-stained boards, with wide chinks, which made it cool at night. the upright white hewn studs and freshly-planed door and window casings gave it a clean and airy look, especially in the morning, when its timbers were saturated with dew, so that i fancied that by noon some sweet gum would exude from them. to my imagination it retained throughout the day more or less of this auroral character, reminding me wheee i lived 47 of a certain house on a mountain which i had visited the year before. this was an airy and unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a travelling god, and where a goddess might trail her garments. the winds which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial parts only, of terrestrial music. the morn ing wind for ever blows, the poem of creation is un interrupted; but few are the ears that hear it. olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere. the only house i had been the owner of before, if i except a boat, was a tent, which i used occasionally when making excursions in the summer, and this is still rolled up in my garret ; but the boat, after passing from hand to hand, has gone down the stream of time. with this more substantial shelter about me, i had made some progress toward settling in the world. this frame, so slightly clad, was a sort of crystallisation around me, and reacted on the builder. it was suggestive somewhat as a picture in outlines. i did not need to go out doors to take the air, for the atmosphere within had lost none of its freshness. it was not so much within doors as behind a door where i sat, even in the rainiest weather. the earivansa says, "an abode without birds is like a meat without seasoning." such was not my abode, for i found myself suddenly neighbour to the birds; not by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near them. i was not only nearer to some of those which commonly frequent the garden and the orchard, but to those wilder and 48 selections from thoeeau more thrilling songsters of the forest which never, or rarely, serenade a villager, — the wood-thrush, the veery, the scarlet tanager, the field-sparrow, the whip-poor-will, and many others. i was seated by the shore of a small pond, about a mile and a half south of the village of concord and somewhat higher than it, in the midst of an extensive wood between that town and lincoln, and about two miles south of that our only field known to fame, concord battle ground ; but i was so low in the woods that the opposite shore, half a mile off, like the rest, covered with wood, was my most distant horizon. for the first week, whenever i looked out on the pond it impressed me like a tarn high up on the side of a mountain, its bottom far above the surface of other lakes, and, as the sun arose, i saw it throwing off its nightly clothing of mist, and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface was revealed, while the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the breaking up of some nocturnal conventicle. the very dew seemed to hang upon the trees later into the day than usual, as on the sides of mountains. this small lake was of most value as a neighbour in the intervals of a gentle rainstorm in august, when, both air and water being perfectly still, but the sky overcast, mid-afternoon had all the serenity of evening, and the wood-thrush sang around, and was heard from shore to shore. a lake like this is never smoother than at such a time ; and the clear wheee i lived 49 portion of the air above it being shallow and darkened by clouds, the water, full of light and reflections, becomes a lower heaven itself so much the more important. from a hill -top near by, where the wood had been recently cut off, there was a pleasing vista southward across the pond, through a wide indentation in the hills which form the shore there, where their opposite sides sloping toward each other suggested a stream flowing out in that direction through a wooded valley, but stream there was none. that way i looked between and over the near green hills to some distant and higher ones in the horizon, tinged with blue. indeed, by standing on tiptoe i could catch a glimpse of some of the peaks of the still bluer and more distant mountain ranges in the north-west, those true-blue coins from heaven's own mint, and also of some portion of the village. but in other directions, even from this point, i could not see over or beyond the woods which surrounded me. it is well to have some water in your neighbourhood, to give buoyancy to and float the earth. one value even of the smallest well is, that when you look into it you see that earth is not continent but insular. this is as important as that it keeps butter cool. when i looked across the pond from this peak toward the sudbury meadows, which in time of flood i distin guished elevated perhaps by a mirage in their seething valley, like a coin in a basin, all the earth beyond the pond appeared like a thin crust insulated and floated even by this small sheet of intervening e 50 selections feom thoeeau water, and i was reminded that this on which i dwelt was but dry land. though the view from my door was still more contracted, i did not feel crowded or confined in the least. there was pasture enough for my imagination. the low shrub-oak plateau to which the opposite shore arose, stretched away toward the prairies of the west and the steppes of tartary, afibrd ing ample room for all the roving families of men. "there are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon," — said damodara, when his herds required new and larger pastures. /both place and time were changed, and i dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me. where i lived was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers. we are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind the constellation of cassiopeia's chair, far from noise and disturbance. i discovered that my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but for ever new and unprofaned, part of the universe. if it were worth the while to settle in those parts near to the pleiades or the hyades, to aldebaran or altair, then i was really there, or at an equal remoteness from the life which i had left behind, dwindled and twinkling vsdth as fine a ray to my nearest neighbour, and to be seen only in moonless nights by him. such was that part of creation where i had squatted ; — what i lived for 51 "there was a shepherd that did live, and held his thoughts as high as were the mounts whereon his flocks did hourly feed him by." what should we think of the shepherd's life if his flocks always wandered to higher pastures than his thoughts 1 every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and i may say innocence, with nature herself. i have been as sincere a worshipper of aurora as the greeks. i got up early and bathed in the pond ; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which i did. they say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of king tching-thang to this effect : " renew thyself completely each day ; do it again, and again, and forever again.'' i can understand that. morning brings back the heroic ages. i was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when i was sitting with door and windows open, as i could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. it was homer's requiem; itself an iliad and odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. there was something cosmical about it; a standing advertise ment, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigour and fertility of the world. the morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. then there is least somnolence in us ; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which 52 selections feom thoreau slumbers all the rest of the day and night. little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by oui' own newly -acquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied by the undula tions of celestial music, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance filling the air — to a higher life than we fell asleep from ; and thus the darkness bear its fruit, and prove itself to be good, no less than the hght. that man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of ufe, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way. after a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his genius tries again what noble life it can make. all memorable events, i should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. the vedas say, " all intelligences awake with the morning." poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour. all poets and heroes, like memnon, are the children of aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. to him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. it matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labours of men. morning is when i am awake and there is a dawn in me. moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have what i lived foe 53 not been slumbering ^ tbey are not such poor calculators. if they had not been overcome with drowsiness they would have performed something. the millions are awake enough for physical labour ; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. to be awake is to be alive. i have never yet met a man who was quite awake. how could i have looked him in the face ? we must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. i know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious' endeavour. it is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful ; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. to affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. if we refused, or rather used up, such paltry information as we get, the oracles would distinctly inform us how this might be done. / 1 went to the woods because i wished to live de liberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if i could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when i came to die, discover that i had not lived. i did not wish to live what was not life, living is so 54 selections from thoreau dear ; nor did i wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. i wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world ; or if it were sublime, to know it by ex perience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. for most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of god, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify god and enjoy him forever." \ still we live meanly, like ants ; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men ; like pygmies we fight with cranes ; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretched ness. our life is frittered away by detail. an honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. simplicity, simplicity, simplicity ! i say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand ; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail. in the midst of this chopping sea of civilised life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to ■what i lived for 55 the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. simplify, simplify. instead of thrde meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one ; instead of a hundred dishes, five ; and reduce other things in proportion. our life is like a german confederacy, made up of petty states, with its boundary for ever fluctuating, so that even a german cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment. the nation itself, with all its so-called internal improvements, which, by the way, are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land ; and the only cure for it as for them is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. it lives too fast. men think that it is essential that the nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether fhey do or not ; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. if we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads ? and if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season ? but if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads 1 we do not ride on the railroad ; it rides upon us. did you ever think what those sleepers are that 56 selections from thoeeau underlie the railroad ? each one is a man, an irish man, or a yankee man. the rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. they are sound sleepers, i assure you. and every few years a new lot is laid down and run over ; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. and when they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception. i am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may sometime get up again. why should we live with such hurry and waste of life t we are determined to be starved before we are hungry. men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches to-day to save nine to-morrow. as for work, we haven't any of any consequence. we have the saint vitus's dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still. if i should only give a few pulls at the parish bell-rope, as for a fire, that is, without setting the bell, there is hardly a man on his farm in the outskirts of concord, notwith standing that press of engagements which was his excuse so many times this morning, nor a boy, nor a woman, i might almost say, but would forsake all and follow that sound, not mainly to save property from the flames, but, if we will confess the truth, much more to see it burn, since burn it must, and we. what i lived for 57 be it known, did not set it on fire, — or to see it put out, and have a hand in it, if that is done as hand somely ; yes, even if it were the parish church itself. hardly a man takes a half-hour's nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, " what's the news ? " as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels. some give directions to be waked every half-hour, doubtless for no other purpose ; and then, to pay for it, they tell what they have dreamed. after a night's sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast. " pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere on this globe," — and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the wachito river ; never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself. for my part, i could easily do without the post office. i think that there are very few important communications made through it. to speak critically, i never received more than one or two letters in my life — i wrote this some years ago — that were worth the postage. the penny-post is, commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest. and i am sure that i never read any memorable news in a newspaper. if we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the western eailroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot 58 selections ffiom thokbau of grasshoppers in the winter, — we never need read of another. one is enough. if you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? to a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. there was such a rush, as i hear, the other day at one of the ofi&ces to learn the foreign news by the last arrival, that several large squares of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure, — news which i seriously think a ready wit might write a twelvemonth or twelve years beforehand with sufficient accuracy. as for spain, for instance, if you know how to throw in don carlos and the infanta, and don pedro and seville and granada, from time to time in the right proportions, — they may have changed the names a little since i saw the papers, — and serve up a bull fight when other entertainments fail, it will be true to the letter, and give us as good an idea of the exact state or ruin of things in spain as the most succinct and lucid reports under this head in the newspapers ; and as for england, almost the last significant scrap of news from that quarter was the revolution of 1649 ; and if you have learned the history of her crops for an average year, you never need attend to that thing again, unless your speculations are of a merely pecuniary character. if one may judge who rarely looks into the newspapers, nothing new does ever happen in foreign parts, a french revolution not excepted. what i lived fok 59 what news ! how much more important to know what that is which was never old ! " kieou-he-yu (great dignitary of the state of wei) sent a man to khoung-tseu to know his news. khoung-tseu caused the messenger to be seated near him, and questioned him in these terms : ' what is your master doing ? ' the messenger answered with respect : ' my master desires to diminish the number of his faults, but he cannot come to the end of them.' the messenger being gone, the philosopher remarked : ' what a worthy messenger ! what a worthy messenger ! ' " the preacher, instead of vexing the ears of drowsy farmers on their day of rest at the end of the week, — for sunday is the fit conclusion of an ill spent week, and not the fresh and brave beginning of a new one, — with this one other draggle-tail of a sermon, should shout with thundering voice, — " pause ! avast ! why so seeming fast, but deadly slow?" /..§hams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. if men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow them selves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the arabian nights' entertainments. \if we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. when we are unhurried and wise we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, — that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the realityj this 60 selections feom thoebau is always exhilarating and sublimej by closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily hfe of routine and habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations. children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience — that is, by failure^ i have read in a hindoo book, that "there was a mng's son, who, being erpelled in infancy from his native city, was brought up by a forester, and, growing up to maturity in that state, imagined himself to belong to the barbarous race with which he lived. one of his father's ministers having discovered him, revealed to him what he was, and the misconception of his character was removed, and he knew himself to be a prince. so soul," continues the hindoo philosopher, "from the cir cumstances in which it is placed, mistakes its own character, until the truth is revealed to it by some holy teacher, and then it knows itself to be brahme." i perceive that we inhabitants of new england live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface of things. we think that that is which appears to be. if a man should walk through this town and see only the reality, where, think you, would the " mill-dam " go to 1 if he should give us an account of the realities he beheld there, we should not recognise the place in his description. look at a meeting-house, or a court-house, or a jail, or a shop, or a dwelling-house, and say what that thing really "what i lived foe 61 is before a true gaze, and they would all go to pieces in your account of them. /men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the sy^em, behind the farthest star, before adam and after the last man. in eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. but all these times and places and occasions are now and here. god himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. and we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. the universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions ; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. let us spend our lives in conceiving then. the poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it.\ let us spend one day as delibemely as nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails. let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation ; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry, — determined to make a day of it. why should we knock under and go with the stream? let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. with un relaxed nerves, with morning vigour, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like ulysses. 62 selections feom thoreau if the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. if the bell rings, why should we run 1 we will consider what kind of music they are like. let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through paris and london, through new york and boston and concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, tiu we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say. this is, and no mistake ; and then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a nilometer, but a realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. if you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. be it life or death, we crave only reality. if we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities ; if we are alive, let us go about our business. time is but the stream i go a-fishing in. i drink at it ; but while i drink i see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. i would drink deeper ; what i lived for 63 fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. i cannot count one. i know not the first letter of the alphabet. i have always been regretting that i was not as wise as the day i was born. the intellect is a cleaver ; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. i do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. my head is hands and feet. i feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. my instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws, and with it i would mine and burrow my way through these hills. i think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts ; so by the divining rod and thin rising vapours i judge ; and here i will begin to mine. highee laws as i came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, i caught a glimpse of a wood-chuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw ; not that i was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented. once or twice, however, while i lived at the pond, i found myself ranging the woods, like -a half-starved hound, with a strange abandonment, seeking some kind of venison which i might devour, and no morsel could have been too savage for me. the wildest scenes had become unaccountably familiar. i found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and i reverence them both. i love the wild not less than the good. the wildness and adventure that are in fishing still recommended it to me. i like sometimes to take rank hold on life and spend my day more as the animals do. perhaps i have owed to this employment and to hunting, when quite higher laws 65 young, my closest acquaintance with nature. they early introduce us to and detain us in scenery with which otherwisej__at that age, we should have little acquaintance. \ fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of nature themselves, . are often in a more favourable mood for observing her, '^ in the intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, who approach her with expectationtd she is not afraid to exhibit herself to them. the traveller on the prairie is naturally a hunter, on the head-waters of the missouri and columbia a trapper, and at the falls of st. mary a fisherman. he who is only a traveller learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. we are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that,/ alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience. they mistake who assert that the yankee has few amusements, because he has not so many public holidays, and men and boys do not play so many games as they do in england, for here the more primitive but solitary amusements of hunting, fishing, i/ and the like, have not yet given place to the former. almost every new england boy among my con temporaries shouldered a fowling-piece between the ages of ten and fourteen ; and his hunting and fishing grounds were not limited like the preserves of an english nobleman, but were more boundless even than those of a savage. no wonder, then, f 66 selections from thoeeau that he did not oftener stay to play on the common. but already a change is taking place, owing, not to an increased humanity, but to an increased scarcity of game, for perhaps the hunter is the greatest friend of the animals hunted, not excepting the humane society. moreover, when at the pond, i wished sometimes to add fish to my fare for variety. i have actually fished from the same kind of necessity that the first fishers did. whatever humanity i might conjure up against it was all factitious, and concerned my philosophy more than my feelings. i speak of fishing only now, for i had long felt differently about fowling, and sold my gun before i went to the woods. not that i am less humane than others, but i did not perceive that my feehngs were much affected. i did not pity the fishes nor the worms. this was habit. as for fowling, during the last years that i carried a gun my excuse was that i was studying ornithology, and sought only new or rare birds. but i confess that i am now inclined to think that there is a finer way of studying ornithology than this. it requires so much closer attention to the habits of the birds, that, if for that reason only, i have been willing to omit the gun. yet not withstanding the objection on the score of humanity, i am compelled to doubt if equally valuable sports are ever substituted for these ; and when some of my friends have asked me anxiously about their boys, whether they should let them hunt, i have answered, yes, — remembering that it was one of the best parts highee laws 67 of my education, — make them tunters, though sports men only at first, if possible, mighty hunters at last, so that they shall not find game large enough for them in this or any vegetable wilderness, — hunters as well as fishers of men. thus far i am of the opinion of chaucer's nun, who " yave not of the text a pulled hen that saith that hunters ben not holy men." there is a period in the history of the individual, as of the race, when the hunters are the " best men," as the algonquins called them. we cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun ; he is no more , humane, while his education has been sadly neglected.'' this was my answer with respect to those youths who were bent on this pursuit, trusting that they would soon outgrow it. no humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature, which holds its life by the same tenure that he does. the hare in its extremity cries like a child. i warn you, mothers, that my sympathies do not always make the usual phu-anihropic distinc tions. such is oftenest the young man's introduction to the forest, and the most original part of himself. he goes thither at first as a hunter and fisher, until at last, if he has the seeds of a better life in him, he distinguishes his proper objects, as a poet or naturalist"^ it may be, and leaves the gun and fish-pole behind. the mass of men are still and always young in this respect. in some countries a hunting parson is no 68 selections from thoreau uncommon sight. such a one might make a good shepherd's dog, but is far from being the good shepherd. i have been surprised to consider that the only obvious employment, except wood-chopping, ice-cutting, or the like business, which ever to my knowledge detained at walden pond for a whole half day any of my fellow-citizens, whether fathers or children of the town, with just one exception, was fishing. commonly they did not think that they were lucky, or well paid for their time, unless they got a long string of fish, though they had the opportunity of seeing the pond all the while. they might go there a thousand times before the sediment of fishing would sink to the bottom and leave their purpose pure; but no doubt such a clarifying process would be going on au the while. the governor and his councu faintly remember the pond, for they went a-fishing there when they were boys ; but now they are too old and dignified to go a-fishing, and so they know it no more for ever. yet even they expect to go to heaven at last. if the legislature regards it, it is chiefly to regulate the number of hooks to be used there ; but they know nothing about the hook of hooks with which to angle for the pond itself, impaling the legislature for a bait. thus, even in civilised communities, the embryo man passes through the hunter stage of development. i have found repeatedly, of late years, that i cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect. i have tried it again and again. i have skill at it, and, like higher laws 69 many of my fellows, a certain instinct for it, which revives from time to time, but always when i have done i feel that it would have been better if i had not fished. i think that i do not mistake. it is a faint intimation, yet so are the first streaks of morning. there is unquestionably this instinct in me which belongs to the lower orders of creation; yet with every year i am less a fisherman, though without more humanity or even wisdom ; at present i am no fisherman at all. but i see that if i were to live in a wilderness i should again be tempted to become a fisher and hunter in earnest. beside, there is some thing essentially unclean about this diet and all flesh, and i began to see where housework commences, and whence the endeavour, which costs so much, to wear a tidy and respectable appearance each day, to keep the house sweet and free from all ill odours and sights. having been my own butcher and scullion and cook, as well as the gentleman for whom the dishes were served up, i can speak from an unusually complete experience. the practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness ; and, besides, when i had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. it was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. a little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth. like many of my contemporaries, i had rarely for many years used animal food, or tea, or coffee, etc. ; not so much because of any ill effects < which i had traced to them, as because they were not 70 selections from thorea.u t' agreeable to my imagination. the repugnance to animal food is not the effect of experience, but is an instinct. it appealed more beautiful to live low and fare hard in many respects ; and though i never did so, i went far enough to please my imagination. i believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind. it is a significant fact, stated by entomologists, — i find it in kirby and spence, — that " some insects in their perfect state, though furnished with organs of feeding, make no use of them ; " and they lay it down as " a general rule, that almost all insects in this state eat much less than in that of larvse. the voracious caterpillar when transformed into a butterfly,'' . . . "and the gluttonous maggot when become a fly,'' content themselves with a drop or two of honey or some other sweet liquid. the abdomen under the wings of the butterfly still represents the larva. this is the tid-bit which tempts his insectivorous fate. the gross feeder is a man in the larva state; and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without fancy or imagination, whose vast abdomens betray them. it is hard to provide and cook so simple and clean ^ a diet as will not offend the imagination ; but this, i think, is to be fed when we feed the bodyj they should both sit down at the same table. yet perhaps this may be done. the fruits eaten temperately need not make us ashamed of our appetites, nor interrupt higher laws 71 the worthiest pursuits. but put an extra condiment into your dish, and it will poison you. it is not worth the while to live by rich cookery. most men would feel shame if caught preparing with their own hands precisely such a dinner, whether of animal or vegetable food, as is every day prepared for them by others. yet till this is otherwise we are not civilised, and, if gentlemen and ladies, are not true men and women. this certainly suggests what change is to be made. it may be vain to ask why the imagination will not be reconciled to flesh and fat. i am satisfied that it is not. is it not a reproach that man is a carnivorous animal ? true, he can and does live, in a great measure, by preying on other animals ; but this is a miserable way, — as any one who will go to snaring rabbits, or slaughtering lambs, may learn, — and he will be regarded as a benefactor of his race who shall teach man to confine himself to a more innocent and wholesome diet. whatever my own practice may be, i have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improve ment, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilised. if one listens to the faintest but constant sugges tions of his genius, which are certainly true, he sees not to what extremes, or even insanity, it may lead him ; and yet that way, as he grows more resolute and faithful, his road lies. the faintest assured objection which one healthy man feels will at length prevail over the arguments and customs of mankind. 72 selections from thoeeau no man ever followed his genius till it misled hm. though the result were bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the consequences were to be regretted, for these were a life in conformity to higher principles. if the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fra grance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal, — ^that is your success. ^all nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. the greatest gains and values are furthest from being appreciated. we easily come to doubt if they exist. we soon forget them. they are the highest reality. perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. the true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. it is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rain bow which i have clutched. ) yet, for my part, i was never unusually squeamish ; i could sometimes eat a fried rat with a good relish, if it were necessary. i am glad to have drunk water so long, for the same reason that i prefer the natural ^sky to an opium-eater's heaven. i would fain keep jsober always ; and there are infinite degrees of /drunkenness. i believe that water is the only drink for a wise man ; wine is not so noble a liquor ; and think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea ! ah, how low i fall when i am tempted by them ! even music may be intoxicating. such apparently higher laws 73 slight causes destroyed greece and rome, and will destroy england and america. of all ebriosity, who does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes? i have found it to be the most serious objection to coarse labours long continued, that they compelled me to eat and drink coarsely also. but to tell the truth, i find myself at present somewhat less particular in these respects. i carry less religion to the table, ask no blessing; not because i am wiser than i was, but, i am obliged to confess, because, however much it is to be regretted, with years i have grown more coarse and indifferent. perhaps these questions are entertained only in youth, as most believe of poetry. my practice is "nowhere,'' my opinion is here. nevertheless i am far from regarding myself as one of those privileged ones to whom the c5£d>ref ers when it says, that " he who has true faith in the omnipresent supreme being may eat all that exists," — that is, is not bound to inquire what is his food, or who prepares it ; and even in their case it is to be observed, as a hindoo commentator has remarked, that the vedant limits this privilege to "the time of distress." who has not sometimes derived an inexpressible satisfaction from his food in which appetite had no share 1 i have been thrilled to think that i owed a mental perception to the commonly gross sense of taste, that i have been inspired through the palate, that some berries which i had eaten on a hillside had fed my genius. " the soul not being mistress of her self," says thseng-tseu, " one looks, and one does not 74 selections from thorbau see ; one listens, and one does not hear ; one eats, and one does not know the savour of food." he who distinguishes the true savour of his food can never be a glutton ; he who does not cannot be otherwise. a puritan may go to his brown-bread crust with as gross an appetite as ever an alderman to his turtle. not that food which entereth into the mouth defileth a man, but the appetite with which it is eaten. it is neither the quality nor the quantity, but the devotion to sensual savours ; when that which is eaten is not a viand to sustain our animal, or inspire our spiritual life, but food for the worms that possess us. if the hunter has a taste for mud-turtles, musk-rats, and other such savage tid-bits, the fine lady indulges a taste for jelly made of a calf's foot, or for sardines from over the sea, and they are even. he goes to the mill-pond, she to her preserve-pot. the wonder is how they, how you and i, can live this slimy beastly life, eating and drinking. our whole life is startlingly moral. thejp is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice^ goodness is the only investment that never fails. in the music of the harp which trembles round the world it is the insisting on this which thrills usi^the harp is the travelling patterer for the universe's insurance com pany, recommending its laws, and our little goodness is all the assessment that we pay. though the youth at last grows indifferent, the laws of the universe are not indifferent, but are for ever on the side of the most sensitive. listen to every zephyr for some reproof, for it is surely there, and he is unfortunate higher laws 75 who does not hear it. we cannot touch a string or move a stop but the charming moral transfixes us. many an irksome noise, go a long way off, is heard as music, a proud sweet satire on the meanness of our lives. we are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. it is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled; like the worms which, even in life and health, occupy our bodies. possibly we may with draw from it, but never change its nature. i fear that it may enjoy a certain health of its own ; that we may be well, yet not pure. the other day i picked up the lower jaw of a hog, with white and sound teeth and tusks, which suggested that there was an animal health and vigour distinct from the spiritual. this creature succeeded by other means than temperance and purity. " that in which men differ from brute beasts,'' says mencius, " is a thing very inconsiderable; the common herd lose it very soon; superior men preserve it carefully.'' who knows what sort of life would result if we had attained to purity 1 if i knew so wise a man as could teach me purity i would go to seek him forthwith. "ai command over our passions, and over the external senses of the body, and good acts, are declared by the ved to be indispensable in the mind's approximation to god." yet the spirit can for the time pervade and control every member and function of the body, and transmute what in form is the grossest sensuality into purity and devotion. the generative energy. 76 selections from thoreau which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us. chastity is the flowering of man ; and what are called genius, heroism, holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it. man flows at once to god when the channel of purity is open. by turns our purity inspires and our impurity casts us down. he is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day, and the divine being established. perhaps there is none but has cause for shame on account of the inferior and brutish nature to which he is allied. i fear that we are such gods or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, ' and that, to some extent, our very life is our dis ' ' how happy's he who hath due place assigned to his beasts and disaforested his mind ! can use his horse, goat, wolf, and ev'ry beast, and is not ass himself to all the rest ! else man not only is the herd of swine, but he's those devils too which did incline them to a headlong rage, and made them worse." all sensuality is one, though it takes many forms ; all purity is one. it is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or sleep sensually. they are but one appetite, and we only need to see a person do any one of these things to know how great a sensualist he is. the impure can neither stand nor sit with pui'ity. when the reptile is attacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another. highee laws 77 if you would be chaste, you must be temperate, l/ what is chastity ? how shall a man know if he is chaste 1 he shall not know it. we have heard of this virtue, but we know not what it is. we speak conformably to the rumour which we have heard. from exertion come wisdom and purity ; from sloth ignorance and sensuality. in the student sensuality is a sluggish habit of mind. an unclean person is universally a slothful one, — one who sits by a stove, whom the sun shines on prostrate, who reposes with out being fatigued. if you would avoid uncleanness, and all the sins, work earnestly, though it be at cleaning a stable. nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be overcome. what avails it that you are christian, if you are not purer than the heathen, if you deny yourself no more, if you are not more ]/' religious? i know of many systems of religion esteemed heathenish whose precepts fill the reader with shame, and provoke him to new endeavours, though it be to the performance of rites merely. '' i hesitate to say these things, but it is not because of the subject, — i care not how obscene my words are, — but because i cannot speak of them without betraying my impurity. we discourse freely without shame of one form of sensuality, and are silent about another. we are so degraded that we cannot speak ,, simply of the necessary functions of human nature. ' in earlier ages, in some countries, every function was reverently spoken of and regulated by law. nothing was too trivial for the hindoo lawgiver, however offensive it may be to modern taste. he teaches 78 selections ekom thoeeau how to eat, drink, cohabit, void excrement and urine, and the like, elevating what is mean, and does not falsely excuse himself by calling these things trifles. / every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. we are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. any noble ness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them. john farmer sat at his door one september evening, after a hard day's work, his mind stul running on his labour more or less. having bathed he sat down to recreate his intellectual man. it was a rather cool evening, and some of his neighbours were apprehend ing a frost. he had not attended to the train of his thought;. 1 3ng when he heard some one playing on a flute, and that sound harmonised with his mood. still he thought of his work ; but the burden of his thought was, that though this kept running in his head, and he found himself planning and contriving it against his will, yet it concerned him very little. it was no more than the scurf of his skin, which was constantly shuffled ofi'. but the notes of the flute came home to his ears out of a different sphere from that he worked in, and suggested work for certain faculties which slumbered in him. they gently did away with the street, and the village, and the state in which he lived. a voice said to him, — why do you stay here and live this mean moiling life, when a glorious existence is possible for you ? those same higher laws 79 stars twinkle over other fields than these.— but how to come out of this condition and actually migrate thither "i all that he could think of was to practise some new austerity, to let his mind descend into his body and redeem it, and, treat himself with ever-in creasing respect. house-waeming in october i went a-graping to the river meadows, and loaded myself with clusters more precious for their beauty and fragrance than for food. there too i admired, though i did not gather, the cranberries, small waxen gems, pendants of the meadow grass, pearly and red, which the farmer plucks with an ugly rake, leaving the smooth meadow in a snarl, heedlessly measuring them by the bushel and the dollar only, and sells the spoils of the meads to boston and new york, destined to be jammed, to satisfy the tastes of lovers of nature there. so butchers rake the tongues of bison out of the prairie grass, regardless of the torn and drooping plant. the barberry's brilliant fruit was likewise food for my eyes merely; but i collected a small store of wild apples for coddling, which the proprietor and tra vellers had overlooked. when chestnuts were ripe i laid up half a bushel for winter. it was very exciting at that season to roam the then boundless chestnut woods of lincoln, — they now sleep their long sleep under the railroad, — with a bag on my shoulder, and a stick to open burrs with in my hand, for i did house-warming 81 not always wait for the frost, amid the rustling of leaves and the loud reproofs of the red squirrels and the jays, whose half-consumed nuts i sometimes stole, for the burrs which they had selected were sure to contain sound ones. occasionally i climbed and shook the trees. they grew also behind my house, and one large tree which almost overshadowed it, was, when in flower, a bouquet which scented the whole neighbourhood, but the squirrels and the jays got most of its fruit ; the last coming in flocks early in the morning and picking the nuts out of the burrs before they fell. i relinquished these trees to them and visited the more distant woods composed wholly of chestnut. these nuts, as far as they went, were a good substitute for bread. many other substitutes might, perhaps, be found. digging one day for ilsh worms i discovered the ground-nut {apios tuherosa) on its string, the potato of the aborigines, a sort of fabulous fruit, which i had begun to doubt if i had ever dug and eaten in childhood, as i had told, and had not dreamed it. i had often since seen its crimpled red velvety blossom supported by the stems of other plants without knowing it to be the same. cultivation has well-nigh exterminated it. it has a sweetish taste, much like that of a frost-bitten potato, and i found it better boiled than roasted. this tuber seemed like a faint promise of nature to rear her own children and feed them simply here at some future period. in these days of fatted cattle and waving grain -fields, this humble root, which was once the totem of an indian tribe, is quite forgotten, or known g 82 selections eeom thoreau only'by its flowering vine ; but let wild nature reign here once more, and the tender and luxurious english grains will probably disappear before a myriad of foes, and without the care of man the crow may carry back even the last seed of corn to the great corn-field of the indian's god in the south-west, whence he is said to have brought it ; but the now almost exterminated ground-nut will perhaps revive and flourish in spite of frosts and wildness, prove itself indigenous, and resume its ancient importance and dignity as the diet of the hunter tribe. some indian ceres or minerva must have been the in ventor and bestower of it; and when the reign of poetry commences here, its leaves and string of nuts may be represented on our works of art. already, by the first of september, i had seen two or three small maples turned scarlet across the pond, beneath where the white stems of three aspens diverged, at the point of a promontory, next the water. ah, many a tale their colour told ! and gradually from week to week the character of each tree came out, and it admired itself reflected in the smooth mirror of the lake. each morning the manager of this gallery substituted some new picture, distin guished by more brilliant or harmonious colouring, for the old upon the walls. the wasps came by thousands to my lodge in october, as to winter quarters, and settled on my windows within and on the walls overhead, sometimes deterring visitors from entering. each morning, when they were numbed with cold, i swept some of house-waeming 83 them out, but i did not trouble myself much to get rid of them ; i even felt complimented by their regarding my house as a desirable shelter. they never molested me seriously, though they bedded with me ; and they gradually disappeared, into what crevices i do not know, avoiding winter and unspeak able cold. like the wasps, before i finally went into winter quarters in november, i used to resort to the north east side of walden, which the sun, reflected from the pitch-pine woods and the stony shore, made the fire side of the pond; it is so much pleasanter and wholesomer to be warmed by the sun while you can be, than by an artificial fire. i thus warmed myself by the still glowing embers which the summer, like a departed hunter, had left. when i came to build my chimney i studied masonry. my bricks being second-hand ones required to be cleaned with a trowel, so that i learned more than usual of the qualities of bricks and trowels. the mortar on them was fifty years old, and was said to be still growing harder; but this is one of those sayings which men love to repeat whether they are true or not. such sayings themselves grow harder and adhere more firmly with age, and it would take many blows with a trowel to clean an old wiseacre of them. many of the villages of mesopotamia are built of second-hand bricks of a very good quality, obtained from the ruins of babylon, and the cement on them is older and probably harder 84 selections from thorea0 still. however that may be, i was struck by the peculiar toughness of the steel which bore so many violent blows without being worn out. as my bricks had been in a chimney before, though i did not read the name of nebuchadnezzar on them, i picked out as many fireplace bricks as i could find, to save work and waste, and i filled the spaces between the bricks about the fireplace with stones from the pond shore, and also made my mortar with the white sand from the same place. i lingered most about the fireplace, as the most vital part of the house. indeed, i worked so deliberately, that though i commenced at the ground in the morning, a course of bricks raised a few inches above the floor served for my pillow at night ; yet i did not get a stiff neck for it that i remember ; my stiff neck is of older date. i took a poet to board for a fortnight about those times, which caused me to be put to it for room. he brought his own knife, though i had two, and we used to scour them by thrusting them into the earth. he shared with me the labours of cooking. i was pleased to see my work rising so square and solid by degrees, and reflected, that, if it proceeded slowly, it was calculated to endure a long time. the chimney is to some extent an independent structure, standing on the ground and rising through the house to the heavens ; even after the house is burned it still stands sometimes, and its importance and independence are apparent. this was toward the end of summer. it was now november. the north wind had already begun to cool the house-waeming 85 pond, though it took many weeks of steady blowing to accomplish it, it is so deep. when i began to have a fire at evening, before i plastered my house, the chimney carried smoke particularly well, because of the numerous chinks between the boards. yet i passed some cheerful evenings in that cool and airy apartment, surrounded by the rough brown boards fuu of knots, and rafters with the bark on high over head. my house never pleased my eye so much after it was plastered, though i was obliged to confess that it was more comfortable. should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters? these forms are more agreeable to the fancy and imagination than fresco paintings or other the most expensive furniture. i now first began to inhabit my house, i may say, when i began to use it for warmth as well as shelter. i had got a couple of old fire-dogs to keep the wood from the hearth, and it did me good to see the soot form on the back of the chimney which i had built, and i poked the fire with more right and more satisfaction than usual. my dwelling was small, and i could hardly entertain an echo in it ; but it seemed larger for being a single apartment and remote from neighbours. all the attractions of a house were concentrated in one room ; it was kitchen, chamber, parlour, and keeping room; and whatever satisfaction parent or child, master or servant, derive from living in a house, i enjoyed it all. cato says, the master of a family 86 selections fkom thoeeau (patremfamilias) must have in his rustic villa " cellam oleariam, vinaraim, dolia multa, uti lubeat caritatem expectare, et rei, et virtuti, et glorias erit,"— that is, " an oil and wine cellar, many casks, so that it may be pleasant to expect hard times ; it will be for his advantage, and virtue, and glory." i had in my cellar a firkin of potatoes, about two quarts of peas with the weevil in them, and on my shelf a little rice, a jug of molasses, and of rye and indian meal a peek each. i sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house, standing in a golden age, of enduring materials, and without ginger-bread work, which shall still consist of only one room, a vast, rude, substantial, primitive hall, without ceiling or plastering, with bare rafters and purlins supporting a sort of lower heaven over one's head, — useful to keep off rain and snow ; where the king and queen posts stand out to receive your homage, when you have done reverence to the prostrate saturn of an older dynasty on stepping over the sill ; a cavernous house, wherein you must reach up a torch upon a pole to see the roof ; where some may live in the fireplace, some in the recess of a window, and some on settles, some at one end of the hall, some at another, and some aloft on rafters with the spiders, if they choose ; a house which you have got into when you have opened the outside door, and the ceremony is over ; where the weary traveller may wash, and eat, and converse, and sleep, without further journey ; such a shelter as you would be glad to reach in a tempestuous house-warming 87 night, containing all the essentials of a house, and nothing for house-keeping; where you can see all the treasures of the house at one view, and every thing hangs upon its peg that a man should use ; at once kitchen, pantry, parlour, chamber, store house, and garret ; where you can see so necessary a thing as a barrel or a ladder, so convenient a thing as a cupboard, and hear the pot boil, and pay your respects to the fire that cooks your dinner and the oven that bakes your bread, and the necessary furniture and utensils are the chief ornaments; where the washing is not put out, nor the fire, nor the mistress, and perhaps you are sometimes re quested to move from off the trap-door, when the cook would descend into the cellar, and so learn whether the ground is solid or hollow beneath you without stamping. a house whose inside is as open and manifest as a bird's nest, and you cannot go in at the front door and out at the back without seeing some of its inhabitants ; where to be a guest is to be presented with the freedom of the house, and not to be carefully excluded from seven-eighths of it, shut up in a particular cell, and told to make yourself at home there, — in solitary confinement. nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance. there is as much secrecy about the cooking as if he had a design to poison you. i am aware that i have been on many a man's premises, and might have been legally ordered off". 88 selections fkom thoeeau but i am not aware that i have been in many men's houses. i might visit in my old clothes a king and queen who lived simply in such a house as i have described, if i were going their way; but backing out of a modern palace will be all that i shall desire to learn, if ever i am caught in one. peimeval natueei pekhaps i most fully realised that this was primeval, untamed, and for ever untamable natwe, or whatever else men call it, while coming down this part of the mountain. we were passing over "burnt lands," burnt by lightning, perchance, though they showed no recent marks of fire, hardly so much as a charred stump, but looked rather like a natural pasture for the moose and deer, exceedingly wild and desolate, with occasional strips of timber crossing them, and low poplars springing up, and patches of blueberries here and there. i found myself traversing them familiarly, like some pasture run to waste, or partially reclaimed by man ; but when i reflected what man, what brother or sister or kinsman of our race made it and claimed it, i expected the proprietor to rise up and dispute my passage. it is difficult to conceive of a region uninhabited by man. we habitually pre sume his presence and influence everywhere. and yet we have not seen pure nature, unless we have seen her thus vast and drear and inhuman, though in * thoreau visited the maine woods in 1846, 1853, and 1857, chiefly to gratify his interest in wild nature and the indians. 90 selections fkom thoebau the midst of cities. nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. i looked with awe at the ground i trod on, to see what the powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. this was that earth of which we have heard, made out of chaos and old night. here was no man's garden, but the unhandselled globe. it was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste-land. it was the fresh and natural surface of the planet earth, as it was made for ever and ever, — to be the dwelling of man, we say, — so nature made it, and man may use it if he can. man was not to be associated with it. it was matter, vast, terrific, — not his mother earth that we have heard of, not for him to tread on, or be buried in, — no, it were being too familiar even to let his bones lie there, — the home, this, of necessity and fate. there was there felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. it was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites,— to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we. we walked over it with a certain awe, stopping, from time to time, to pick the blue berries which grew there, and had a smart and spicy taste. perchance where our wild pines stand, and leaves lie on their forest floor, in concord, there were once reapers, and husbandmen planted grain; but here not even the surface had been scarred by man, but it was a specimen of what god saw fit to make this world. what is it to be admitted to a museum, to see a myriad of particular things, compared with primeval nature 91 being shown some star's surface, some hard matter in its home ! i stand in awe of my body, this matter to which i am bound has become so strange to me. i fear not spirits, ghosts, of which i am one, — that my body might, — but i fear bodies, i tremble to meet them. what is this titan that has possession of me ? talk of mysteries ! — think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks ! the solid earth ! the actual world ! the common sense ! contact ! con tact i wtio are we 1 where are we ? about four o'clock, the same afternoon, we com menced our return voyage, which would require but little if any poling. in shooting rapids the boatmen use large and broad paddles, instead of poles, to guide the boat with. though we glided so swiftly, and often smoothly, down, where it had cost us no slight effort to get up, our present voyage was attended with far more danger : for if we once fairly struck one of the thousand rocks by which we were sur rounded the boat would be swamped in an instant. when a boat is swamped under these circumstances, the boatmen commonly find no difficulty in keeping afloat at first, for the current keeps both them and their cargo up for a long way down the stream ; and if they can swim, they have only to work their way gradually to the shore. the greatest danger is of being caught in an eddy behind some larger rock, where the water rushes up stream faster than else where it does down, and being carried round and round under the surface till they are drowned. 92 selections fkom thoreau m'causlin pointed out some rocks which had been the scene of a fatal accident of this kind. sometimes the body is not thrown out for several hours. he himself had performed such a circuit once, only his legs being visible to his companions; but he was fortunately thrown out in season to recover his breath. in shooting the rapids, the boatman has this problem to solve : to choose a circuitous and safe course amid a thousand sunken rocks, scattered over a quarter or half a mile, at the same time that he is moving steadily on at the rate of fifteen miles an hour. stop he cannot ; the only question is, where will he go? the bow-man chooses the course with all his eyes about him, striking broad off with his paddle, and drawing the boat by main force into her course. the stern-man faithfully follows the bow. we were soon at the aboljacarmegus falls. anxious to avoid the delay, as well as the labour, of the portage here, our boatmen went forward first to reconnoitre, and concluded to let the batteau down the falls, carrying the baggage only over the portage. jumping from rock to rock until nearly in the middle of the stream, we were ready to receive the boat and let her down over the first fall, some six or seven feet perpendicular. the boatmen stand upon the edge of a shelf of rock, where the fall is perhaps nine or ten feet perpendicular, in from one to two feet of rapid water, one on each side of the boat, and let it shde gently over, till the bow is run out ten or twelve feet in the air; then, letting it drop squarely, while one holds the painter, the other leaps in, and his compan primeval nature 93 ion following, they are whirled down the rapids to a new fall, or to smooth water. in a very few minutes they had accomplished a passage in safety, which would be as foolhardy for the unskilful to attempt as the descent of niagara itself. it seemed as if it needed only a little familiarity, and a little more skill, to navigate down such falls as niagara itself with safety. at any rate, i should not despair of such men in the rapids above table-rock, until i saw them actually go over the falls, so cool, so collected, so fertile in resources are they. one might have thought that these were falls, and that falls were not to be waded through with impunity, like a mud puddle. there was really danger of their losing their sublimity in losing their power to harm us. familiarity breeds contempt. the boatman pauses, perchance, on some shelf beneath a table-rock under the fall, standing in some cove of back-water two feet deep, and you hear his rough voice come up through the spray, coolly giving directions how to launch the boat this time. having carried round pockwockomus falls, our oars soon brought us to the katepskonegan, or oak hall carry, where we decided to camp half way over, leaving our batteau to be carried over in the morning on fresh shoulders. one shoulder of each of the boatmen showed a red spot as large as one's hand, worn by the batteau on this expedition; and this shoulder, as it did all the work, was perceptibly lower than its fellow, from long service. such toil soon wears out the strongest constitution. the 94 selections from thoreau drivers are accustomed to work in the cold water in the spring, rarely ever dry; and if one falls in all over he rarely changes his clothes till night, if then, even. one who takes this precaution is called by a particular nickname, or is turned off. none can lead this life who are not almost amphibious. m'causlin said soberly, what is at any rate a good story to tell, that he had seen where six men were wholly under water at once, at a jam, with their shoulders to hand spikes. if the log did not start, then they had to put out their heads to breathe. the driver works as long as he can see, from dark to dark, and at night has not time to eat his supper and dry his clothes fairly, before he is asleep on his cedar bed. we lay that night on the very bed made by such a party, stretching our tent over the poles which were still standing, but reshingling the damp and faded bed with fresh leaves. in the morning we carried our boat over and launched it, making haste lest the wind should rise. the boatmen ran down passamagamet, and, soon after, ambejijis falls, while we walked round with the baggage. we made a hasty breakfast at the head of ambejijis lake, on the remainder of our pork, and were soon rowing across its smooth surface again, under a pleasant sky, the mountain being now clear of clouds, in the north-east. taking turns at the oars, we shot rapidly across deep cove, the foot of pamadumcook, and the north twin, at the rate of six miles an hour, the wind not being high enough to disturb us, and reached the dam at noon. the boat primeval nature 95 men went through one of the log sluices in the batteau, where the fall was ten feet at the bottom, and took us in below. here was the longest rapid in our voyage, and perhaps the running this was as dangerous and arduous a task as any. shooting down sometimes at the rate, as we judged, of fifteen miles an hour, if we struck a rock we were split from end to end in an instant. now, like a bait bobbing for some river monster, amid the eddies, now darting to this side of the stream, now to that, gliding swift and smooth near to our destruction, or striking broad off with the paddle and drawing the boat to right or left with all our might, in order to avoid a rock. i suppose that it was like running the rapids of the saute de st. marie, at the outlet of lake superior, and our boatmen probably displayed no less dexterity than the indians there do. we soon ran through this mile, and floated in quakish lake. after such a voyage, the troubled and angry waters, which once had seemed terrible and not to be trifled with, appeared tamed and subdued ; they had been bearded and worried in their channels, pricked and whipped into submission with the spike-pole and paddle, gone through and through with impunity, and all their spirit and their danger taken out of them, and the most swollen and impetuous rivers seemed but playthings henceforth. i began, at length, to understand the boatman's familiarity with, and contempt for, the rapids. " those fowler boys," said mrs. m'causlin, " are perfect ducks for the water." they had run down to lincoln, according to her, 96 selections from thorea.u thirty or forty miles, in a batteau, in the night, for a doctor, when it was so dark that they could not see a rod before them, and the river was swollen so as to be almost a continuous rapid, so that the doctor cried, when they brought him up by daylight, " why, tom, how did you see to steer?" "we didn't steer much, — only kept her straight." and yet they met with no accident. it is true, the more difficult rapids are higher up than this. when we reached the millinocket, opposite to tom's house, and were waiting for his folks to set us over, for we had left our batteau above the grand falls, we discovered two canoes, with two men in each, turning up this stream from shad pond, one keeping the opposite side of a small island before us, while the other approached the side where we were standing, examining the banks carefully for musk-rats as they came along. the last proved to be louis neptune and his companion, now, at last, on their way up to chesuncook after moose ; but they were so disguised that we hardly knew them. at a little distance they might have been taken for quakers, with their broad-brimmed hats, and overcoats with broad capes, the spoils of bangor, seeking a settlement in this sylvania, — or, nearer at hand, for fashionable gentlemen the morning aiter a spree. met face to face, these indians in their native woods looked like the sinister and slouching fellows whom you meet picking up strings and paper in the streets of a city. there is, in fact, a remarkable and unexpected resem blance between the degraded savage and the lowest primeval nature 97 classes in a great city. the one is no more a child of nature than the other. in the progress of degradation the distinction of races is soon lost. neptune at first was only anxious to know what we "kill," seeing some partridges in the hands of one of the party, but we had assumed too much anger to permit of a reply. we thought indians had some honour before. but — "me been sick. 0, me unwell now. you make bargain, then me go." they had in fact been de layed so long by a drunken frolic at the five islands, and they had not yet recovered from its effects. they had some young musquash in their canoes, which they dug out of the banks with a hoe, for food, not for their skins, for musquash are their principal food on these expeditions. so they went on up the millinocket, and we kept down the bank of the penobscot, after recruiting ourselves with a draught of tom's beer, leaving tom at his home. thus a man shall lead his life away here on the edge of the wilderness, on indian millinocket stream, in a new world, far in the dark of a continent, and have a flute to play at evening here, while his strains echo to the stars, amid the howling of wolves; shall live, as it were, in the primitive age of the world, a primitive man. yet he shall spend a sunny day, and in this century be my contemporary ; perchance shall read some scattered leaves of literature, and sometimes talk with me. why read history, then, if the ages and the generations are now 1 he lives three thousand years deep into time, an age not yet described by poets. can you well go further back in h 98 selections from thoreau history than this 1 ay ! ay ! — for there turns up but now into the mouth of millinooket stream a still more ancient and primitive man, whose history is not brought down even to the former. in a bark vessel sewn with the roots of the spruce, with hornbeam paddles, he dips his way along. he is but dim and misty to me, obscured by the aeons that lie between the bark-canoe and the batteau. he builds no house of logs, but a wigwam of skins. he eats no hot bread and sweet cake, but musqflash and moose-meat and the fat of bears. he glides up the millinocket and is lost to my sight, as a more distant and misty cloud is seen flitting by behind a nearer, and is lost in space. so he goes about his destiny, the red face of man. after having passed the night, and buttered our boots for the last time, at uncle george's, whose dogs almost devoured him for joy at his return, we kept on down the river the next day, about eight miles on foot, and then took a batteau, with a man to pole it, to mattawamkeag, ten more. at the middle of that very night, to make a swift conclusion to a long story, we dropped our buggy over the half finished bridge at oldtown, where we heard the confused din and clink of a hundred saws, which never rest, and at six o'clock the next morning one of the party was steaming his way to massachusetts. what is most striking in the maine wilderness is the continuousness of the forest, with fewer open intervals or glades than you had imagined except primeval nature 99 the few burnt-lands, the narrow intervals on, the rivers, the bare tops of the high mountainsj^ and the lakes and streams, the forest is uninterrupted. it is even more grim and wild than you had anticipated, a damp and intricate wilderness; in the spring every where wet and miry. the" aspect of the country, indeed, is universally stern and savage, excepting the distant views of the forest from hills, and the lake prosfcsct?, which are mild and civilising in a degree. the lakes are something which you are unprepared for ; they lie up so high, exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine fringe on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, like amethyst jewels set around some jewel of the first water, — so anterior, so superior, to all the changes that are to take place on their shores, even now civil and refined, and fair as they can ever be. these are not the artificial forests of an english king, — a royal preserve merely. here prevail no forest laws but those of nature. the aborigines have never been dispossessed, nor nature disforested. it is a country full of evergreen trees, of mossy silver birches and watery maples, the ground dotted with insipid, small, red berries, and strewn with damp and moss-grown rocks, — a country diversified with innumerable lakes and rapid streams, peopled with trout and various species of leucisci, with salmon, shad, and pickerel, and other fishes ; the forest resounding at rare intervals with the note of the chicadee, the blue-jay, and the woodpecker, the scream of the fish-hawk and the eagle, the laugh of '**^yloo selections fkom thoreau the loon, and the whistle of ducks along the solitary streard^jcat night, with the hooting of owls and howling otv wolves; in summer, swarming with myriads of blaxsk flies and mosquitoes, more formid able than wolves is^^the white man. such is the home of the moose, the'lbsm', the caribou, the wolf, the beaver, and the indian. t^ho shall describe the inexpressible tenderness and immqrtal life of the grim forest, where nature, though it be'^i(i-wkiter, is ever in her spring, where the moss-grown and decaying trees are not old, but seem to enjoy a per petual youth ; and blissful, innocent nature, like a serene infant, is too happy to make a noise, except by a few tinkling, lisping birds and trickling rills ? what a place to live, what a place to die and be buried in ! there certainly men would live for ever, and laugh at death and the grave. there they could have no such thoughts as are associated with the village graveyard, — that make a grave out of one of those moist evergreen hummocks ! die and be buried who will, i mean to live here stul ; my nature grows ever more young the primitive pines among. i am reminded by my journey how exceedingly new this country still is. you have only to travel for a few days into the interior and back parts even of many of the old states, to come to that very america which the northmen, and cabot, and gosnold, and smith, and ealeigh visited. if columbus was the first to discover the islands, pkimeval natueb 101 americus vespucius and cabot, and the puritans, and we their descendants, have discovered only the shores of america. while the republic has already acquired a history world-wide, america is still unsettled and unexplored. like the english in new holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy. the very timber and boards and shingles of which our houses are made, grew but yesterday in a wilderness where the indian still hunts and the moose runs wild. new york has her wilderness within her own borders ; and though the sailors of europe are familiar with the soundings of her hudson, and fulton long since invented the steam boat on its waters, an indian is still necessary to guide her scientific men to its head-waters in the adirondac country. have we even so much as discovered and settled the shores? let a man travel on foot along the coast, from the passamaquoddy to the sabine, or to the eio bravo, or to wherever the end is now, if he is swift enough to overtake it, faithfully following the windings of every inlet and of every cape, and stepping to the music of the surf, — ^with a desolate fishing-town once a week, and a city's port once a month to cheer him, and putting up at the light houses, when there are any, — and tell me if it looks like a discovered and settled country, and not rather, for the most part, like a desolate island, and no man's land. we have advanced by leaps to the pacific, and 102 selections feom thoebau left many a lesser oregon and california unexplored behind us. though the railroad and the telegraph have been established on the shores of maine, the indian still looks out from her interior mountains over all these to the sea. there stands the city of bangor, fifty miles up the penobscot, at the head of navigation for vessels of the largest class, the principal lumber depot on this continent, with a population of twelve thousand, like a star on the edge of night, still hewing at the forests of which it is buut, already overflowing with the luxuries and refinement of europe, and sending its vessels to spain, to england, and to the west indies, for its groceries, — and yet only a few axe-men have gone " up river," into the howling wilderness which feeds it. the bear and deer are still found within its limits ; and the moose, as he swims the penobscot, is entangled amid its shipping, and taken by foreign sailors in its harbour. twelve miles in the rear, twelve miles of railroad, are orono and the indian island, the home of the penob scot tribe, and then commence the batteau and the canoe, and the military road ; and sixty miles above, the country is virtually unmapped and unexplored, and there still waves the virgin forest of the new world. the muedee of the moose here, about two o'clock, we turned up a small branch three or four rods wide, which comes in on the right from the south, called pine-stream, to look for moose signs. we had gone but a few rods before we saw very recent signs along the water's edge, the mud lifted up by their feet being quite fresh, and joe declared that they had gone along there but a short time before. we soon reached a small meadow on the east side, at an angle in the stream, which was, for the most part, densely covered with alders. as we were advancing along the edge of this, rather more quietly than usual, perhaps, on account of the freshness of the signs, — the design being to camp up this stream, if it promised well, — i heard a slight crackling of twigs deep in the alders, and turned joe's attention to it ; whereupon he began to push the canoe back rapidly ; and we had receded thus half a dozen rods, when we suddenly spied two moose standing just on the edge of the open part of the meadow which we had passed, not more than six or seven rods distant, looking round the alders at us. they made me think of great frightened rabbits, with 104 selections fkom thoeeau their long ears and half-inquisitive, half-frightened looks ; the true denizens of the forest (i saw at once), tilling a vacuum which now first i discovered had not been filled for me, — moose-men, wood-eaters, the word is said to mean, — clad in a sort of vermont gray, or homespun. our nimrod, owing to the retrograde movement, was now the farthest from the game ; but being warned of its neighbourhood, he hastily stood up, and, while we ducked, fired over our heads one barrel at the foremost, which alone he saw, though he did not know what kind of creature it was; whereupon this one dashed across the meadow and up a high bank on the north-east, so rapidly as to leave but an indistinct impression of its outlines on my mind. at the same instant, the other, a young one, but as tall as a horse, leaped out into the stream, in full sight, and there stood cowering for a moment, or rather its disproportionate lowness behind gave it that appearance, and uttering two or three trumpeting squeaks. i have an indistinct recollection of seeing the old one pause an instant on the top of the bank in the woods, look toward its shivering young, and then dash away again. the second barrel was levelled at the calf, and when we expected to see it drop in the water, after a little hesitation, it, too, got out of the water, and dashed up the hill, though in a some what different direction. all this was the work of a few seconds, and our hunter, having never seen a moose before, did not know but they were deer, for they stood partly in the water, nor whether he had fired at the same one twice or not. from the style the mubdee of the moose 105 in which they went off, and the fact that he was not used to standing up and firing from a canoe, i judged that we should not see anything more of them. the indian said that they were a cow and her calf, — a yearling, or perhaps two years old, for they accom pany their dams so long ; but, for my part, i had not noticed much difference in their size. it was but two or three rods across the meadow to the foot of the bank, which, like all the world thereabouts, was densely wooded ; but i was surprised to notice that, as soon as the moose had passed behind the veil of the woods, there was no sound of footsteps to be heard from the soft, damp moss which carpets that forest, and long before we landed, perfect silence reigned. joe said, "if you wound 'em moose, me sure get 'em." we all landed at once. my companion reloaded ; the indian fastened his birch, threw off his hat, adjusted his waistband, seized the hatchet, and set out. he told me afterward, casually, that before we landed he had seen a drop of blood on the bank, when it was two or three rods off. he proceeded rapidly up the bank and through the woods, with a peculiar, elastic, noiseless, and stealthy tread, looking to right and left on the ground, and stepping in the faint tracks of the wounded moose, now and then pointing in silence to a single drop of blood on the handsome, shining leaves of the clintonia borealis, which, on every side, covered the ground, or to a dry fern-stem freshly broken, all the while chewing some leaf or else the spruce gum. i followed, watching his 106 selections from thoreau motions more than the trail of the moose. after following the trail about forty rods in a pretty direct course, stepping over fallen trees and winding between standing ones, he at length lost it, for there were many other moose-tracks there, and, returning once more to the last blood-stain, traced it a little way and lost it again, and, too soon, i thought, for a good hunter, gave it up entirely. he traced a few steps, also, the tracks of the calf ; but, seeing no blood, soon relinquished the search. i observed, while he was tracking the moose, a certain reticence or moderation in him. he did not communicate several observations of interest which he made, as a white man would have done, though they may have leaked out afterward. at another time, when we heard a slight crackling of twigs and he landed to reconnoitre, he stepped lightly and gracefully, stealing through the bushes with the least possible noise, in a way in which no white man does, — as it were, finding a place for his foot each time. about half an hour after seeing the moose, we pursued our voyage up pine-stream, and soon, coming to a part which was very shoal and also rapid, we took out the baggage, and proceeded to carry it round, while joe got up with the canoe alone. we were just completing our portage and i was absorbed in the plants, admiring the leaves of the aster macro phyllus, ten inches wide, and plucking the seeds of the great round-leaved orchis, when joe exclaimed from the stream that he had killed a moose. he had the murder of the moose 107 found the cow-moose lying dead, but quite warm, in the middle of the stream, which was so shallow that it rested on the bottom, with hardly a third of its body above water. it was about an hour after it was shot, and it was swollen with water. it had run abovit a hundred rods and sought the stream again, cutting off a slight bend. no doubt, a better hunter would have tracked it to this spot at once. i was surprised at its great size, horse-like, but joe said it was not a large cow-moose. my companion went in search of the calf again. i took hold of the ears of the moose, while joe pushed his canoe down stream toward a favourable shore, and so we made out, though with some difficulty, its long nose frequently sticking in the bottom, to drag it into still shallower water. it was a brownish black, or perhaps a dark iron-gray, on the back and sides, but lighter beneath and in front. i took the cord which served for the canoe's painter, and with joe's assistance measured it carefully, the greatest distances first, making a knot each time. the painter being wanted, i reduced these measures that night with equal care to lengths and fractions of my umbrella, beginning with the smallest measures, and untying the knots as i pro ceeded ; and when we arrived at chesuncook the next day, finding a two-foot rule there, i reduced the last to feet and inches ; and, moreover, i made myself a two-foot rule of a thin and narrow strip of black ash, which would fold up conveniently to six inches. all this pains i took because i did not wish to be obliged to say merely that the moose was very large. 108 selections from thoeeau of the various dimensions which i obtained i will mention only two. the distance from the tips of the hoofs of the fore-feet, stretched out, to the top of the back between the shoulders, was seven feet and five inches. i can hardly believe my own measure, for this is about two feet greater than the height of a tall horse. (indeed, i am now satisfied that this measurement was incorrect, but the other measures given here i can warrant to be correct, having proved them in a more recent visit to those woods.) the extreme length was eight feet and two inches. another cow-moose, which i have since measured in those woods with a tape, was just six feet from the tip of the hoof to the shoulders, and eight feet long as she lay. when afterward i asked an indian at the carry how much taller the male was, he answered, " eighteen inches," and made me observe the height of a cross stake over the fire, more than four feet from the ground, to give me some idea of the depth of his chest another indian, at oldtown, told me that they were nine feet high to the top of the back, and that one which he tried weighed eight hundred pounds. the length of the spinal projections between the shoulders is very great. a white hunter, who was the best authority among hunters that i could have, told me that the male was not eighteen inches taller than the female ; yet he agreed that he was sometimes nine feet high to the top of the back, and weighed a thousand pounds. only the male has horns, and they rise two feet or more above the mukdek of the moose 109 shoulders, — spreading three or four, and sometimes six feet, — which would make him in all, sometimes, eleven feet high ! according to this calculation, the moose is as tall, though it may not be as large, as the great irish elk, megaceros hibernicus, of a former period, of which mantell says that it "very far exceeded in magnitude any living species, the skele ton " being " upward of ten feet high from the ground to the highest point of the antlers." joe said, that, though the moose shed the whole horn annually, each new horn has an additional prong ; but i have noticed that they sometimes have more prongs on one side than on the other. i was struck with the delicacy and tenderness of the hoofs, which divide very far up, and the one half could be pressed very much behind the other, thus probably making the animal surer-footed on the uneven ground and slippery moss covered logs of the primitive forest. they were very unlike the stiff and battered feet of our horses and oxen. the bare, horny part of the fore-foot was just six inches long, and the two portions could be separated four inches at the extremities. the moose is singularly grotesque and awkward to look at. why should it stand so high at the shoulders ? why have so long a head ? why have no tail to speak of? for in my examination i over looked it entirely. naturalists say it is an inch and a half long. it reminded me at once of the camelo pard, high before and low behind, — and no wonder, for, like it, it is fitted to browse on trees. the upper lip projected two inches beyond the lower for this 110 selections fkom thoeeau purpose. this was the kind of man that was at home there; for, as near as i can learn, that has never been the residence, but rather the hunting ground of the indian. the moose will perhaps one day become extinct ; but how naturally then, when it exists only as a fossil relic, and unseen as that, may the poet or sculptor invent a fabulous animal with similar branching and leafy horns, — a sort of fucus or lichen in bone, — to be the inhabitant of such a forest as this ! here, just at the head of the murmuring rapids, joe now proceeded to skin the moose with a pocket knife, while i looked on ; and a tragical business it was, — to see that still warm and palpitating body pierced with a knife, to see the warm milk stream from the rent udder, and the ghastly naked red carcass appearing from within its seemly robe, which was made to hide it. the ball had passed through the shoulder-blade diagonally and lodged under the skin on the opposite side, and was partially flattened. my companion keeps it to show to his grandchildrea he has the shanks of another moose which he has since shot, skinned and stuffed, ready to be made into boots by putting in a thick leather sole. joe said, if a moose stood fronting you, you must not fire, but advance toward him, for he will turn slowly and give you a fair shot. in the bed of this narrow, wild, and rocky stream, between two lofty walls of spruce and firs, a mere cleft in the forest which the stream had made, this work went on. at length joe had stripped off the hide and dragged it trailing to the shore, muedee of the moose 111 declaring that it weighed a hundred pounds, though probably fifty would have been nearer the truth. he cut off a large mass of the meat to carry along, and another, together with the tongue and nose, he put with the hide on the shore to lie there all night, or till we returned. i was surprised that he thought of leaving this meat thus exposed by the side of the carcass, as the simplest course, not fearing that any creature would touch it; but nothing did. this could hardly have happened on the bank of one of our rivers in the eastern part of massachusetts ; but i suspect that fewer small wild animals are prowling there than with us. twice, however, in this excursion i had a glimpse of a species of large mouse. this stream was so withdrawn, and the moose tracks were so fresh, that my companions, still bent on hunting, concluded to go farther up it and camp, and then hunt up or down at night. half a mile above this, at a place where i saw the aster puniceus and the beaked hazel, as we paddled along, joe, hearing a slight rustling amid the alders, and seeing something black about two rods off, jumped up and whispered, " bear ! " but before the hunter had dis charged his piece, he corrected himself to " beaver ! " — " hedgehog ! " the bullet killed a large hedgehog more than two feet and eight inches long. the quills were rayed out and flattened on the hinder part of its back, even as if it had lain on that part, but were erect and long between this and the tail. their points, closely examined, were seen to be finely 112 selections from thoreau bearded or barbed, and shaped like an awl, that is, a little concave, to give the barbs effect. after about a mile of still water, we prepared our camp on the right side, just at the foot of a considerable fall. little chopping was done that night, for fear of scaring the moose. we had moose-meat fried for supper. it tasted like tender beef, with perhaps more flavour, — sometimes like veal. after supper, the moon having risen, we proceeded to hunt a mile up this stream, first " carrying " about the falls. we made a picturesque sight, wending single-file along the shore, climbing over rocks and logs, — joe, who brought up the rear, twirling his canoe in his hands as if it were a feather, in places where it was difi&cult to get along without a burden. we launched the canoe again from the ledge over which the stream fell, but after half a mile of still water, suitable for hunting, it became rapid again, and we were compelled to make our way along the shore, while joe endeavoured to get up in the birch alone, though it was still very difficult for him to pick his way amid the rocks in the night. we on the shore found the worst of walking, a perfect chaos of fallen and drifted trees, and of bushes projecting far over the water, and now and then we made our way across the mouth of a small tributary on a kind of network of alders. so we went tumbling on in the dark, being on the shady side, effectually scaring all the moose and bears that might be thereabouts. at length we came to a standstill, and joe went forward to reconnoitre ; but he reported that it was murder of the moose 113 still a continuous rapid as far as he went, or half a mile, with no prospect of improvement, as if it were coming down from a mountain. so we turned about, hunting back to the camp through the still water. it was a splendid moonlight night, and i, getting sleepy as it grew late, — for i had nothing to do, — found it difficult to realise where i was. this stream was much more unfrequented than the main one, lumbering operations being no longer carried on in this quarter. it was only three or four rods wide, but the firs and spruce through which it trickled seemed yet taller by contrast. being in this dreamy state, which the moonlight enhanced, i did not clearly discern the shore, but seemed, most of the time, to be floating through ornamental grounds, — for i asso ciated the fir-tops with such scenes ; — very high up some broadway, and beneath or between their tops, i thought i saw an endless succession of porticoes and columns, cornices and fa9ades, verandas and churches. i did not merely fancy this, but in my drowsy state such was the illusion. i fairly lost myself in sleep several times, still dreaming of that architecture and the nobility that dwelt behind and might issue from it ; but all at once i would be aroused and brought back to a sense of my actual position by the sound of joe's birch horn in the midst of all this silence calling the moose, ugh, ugh, oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo, and i prepared to hear a furious moose come rushing and crashing through the forest, and see him burst out on to the little strip of meadow by our side. but, on more accounts than one, i had had enough 114 selections from thokeau of moose-hunting. i had not come to the woods for this purpose, nor had i foreseen it, though i had been willing to learn how the indian manoeuvred ; but one moose killed was as good, if not as bad, as a dozen. the afternoon's tragedy, and my share in it, as it affected the innocence, destroyed the pleasure of my adventure. it is true, i came as near as is possible to come to being a hunter and miss it, myself ; and as it is, i think that i could spend a year in the woods, fishing and hunting, just enough to sustain myself, with satisfaction. this would be next to living like a philosopher on the fruits of the earth which you had raised, which also attracts me. but this hunting of the moose merely for the satisfaction of killing him, — not even for the sake of his hide, — without making any extraordinary exertion or run ning any risk yourself, is too much like going out by night to some wood-side pasture and shooting your neighbour's horses. these are god's own horses, poor, timid creatures, that will run fast enough as soon as they smell you, though they are nine feet high. joe told us of some hunters who a year or two before had shot down several oxen by night, somewhere in the maine woods, mistaking them for moose. and so might any of the hunters; and what is the difference in the sport, but the name? in the former case, having killed one of god's and your own oxen, you strip off its hide, — because that is the common trophy, and, moreover, you have heard that it may be sold for moccasins, — cut a steak from its haunches, and leave the huge carcass to smell to murder of the moose 115 heaven for you. it is no better, at least, than to assist at a slaughter-house. this afternoon's experience suggested to me how base or coarse are the motives which commonly carry men into the wilderness. the explorers and lum berers generally are all hirelings, paid so much a day for their labour, and as such they have no more love for wild nature than wood-sawers have for forests. other white men and indians who come here are for the most part hunters, whose object is to slay as many moose and other wild animals as possible. but, pray, could not one spend some weeks or years in the solitude of this vast wilderness with other employments than these, — employments perfectly sweet and innocent and ennobling? for one that comes with a pencil to sketch or sing, a thousand come with an axe or rifle. what a coarse and imperfect use indians and hunters make of nature ! no wonder that their race is so soon exterminated. i already, and for weeks afterward, felt my nature the coarser for this part of my woodland experience, and was reminded that our life should be lived as tenderly and daintily as one would pluck a flower. with these thoughts, when we reached our camp ing-ground, i decided to leave my companions to continue moose-hunting down the stream, while i prepared the camp, though they requested me not to chop much nor make a large fire, for fear i should scare their game. in the midst of the damp fir-wood, high on the mossy bank, about nine o'clock of this bright moonlight night, i kindled a fire, when they 116 selections from thoeeau were gone, and, sitting on the fir-twigs, within sound of the falls, examined by its light the botanical specimens which i had collected that afternoon, and wrote down some of the reflections which i have here expanded ; or i walked along the shore and gazed up the stream, where the whole space above the falls was filled with mellow light. as i sat before the fire on my fir-twig seat, without walls above or around me, i remembered how far on every hand that wilderness stretched, before you came to cleared or cultivated fields, and wondered if any bear or moose was watching the light of my fire ; for nature looked sternly upon me on account of the murder of the moose. strange that so few ever come to the woods to see how the pine lives and grows and spires, lifting its evergreen arms to the light, — to see its perfect success; but most are content to behold it in the shape of many broad boards brought to market, and deem that its true success ! but the pine is no more lumber than man is, and to be made into boards and houses is no more its true and highest use than the truest use of a man is to be cut down and made into manure. there is a higher law afi'ecting our relation to pines as well as to men. a pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man. can he who has discovered only some of the values of whalebone and whale oil be said to have discovered the true use of the whale ? can he who slays the elephant for his ivory be said to have " seen the elephant " ? these are petty and accidental uses ; just as if a stronger race were to kill us in order to muedee of the moose 117 make buttons and flageolets of our bones ; for every thing may serve a lower as well as a higher use. every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine-trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it. is it the lumberman, then, who is the friend and lover of the pine, stands nearest to it, and understands its nature best ? is it the tanner who has barked it, or he who has boxed it for turpentine, whom posterity will fable to have been changed into a pine at last ? no ! no ! it is the poet ; he it is who makes the truest use of the pine, — who does not fondle it with an axe, nor tickle it with a saw, nor stroke it with a plane, — who knows whether its heart is false without cutting into it, — ^who has not bought the stumpage of the township on which it stands. all the pines shudder and heave a sigh when that man steps on the forest floor. no, it is the poet, who loves them as his own shadow in the air, and lets them stand. i have been into the lumber-yard, and the carpenter's shop, and the tannery, and the lampblack-factory, and the turpentine clearing ; but when at length i saw the tops of the pines waving and reflecting the light at a distance high over all the rest of the forest, i realised that the former were not the highest use of the pine. it is not their bones or hide or tallow that i love most. it is the living spirit of the tree, not its spirit of turpentine, with which i sympathise, and which heals my cuts. it is as immortal as i am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still. fokest phenomena when we got to the camp, the canoe was taken out and turned over, and a log laid across it to prevent its being blown away. the indian cut some large logs of damp and rotten hard-wood to smoulder and keep fire through the night. the trout was fried for supper. our tent was of thin cotton cloth and quite small, forming with the ground a triangular prism closed at the rear end, six feet long, seven wide, and four high, so that we could barely sit up in the middle. it required two forked stakes, a smooth ridge-pole, and a dozen or more pins to pitch it. it kept off dew and wind, and an ordinary rain, and answered our purpose well enough. we reclined within, it till bedtime, each with his baggage at his head, or else sat about the fire, having hung our wet clothes on a pole before the fire for the night. as we sat there, just before night, looking out through the dusky wood, the indian heard a noise which he said was made by a snake. he imitated it at my request, making a low whistling note, — pheet — forest phenomena 119 pheet, — two or three times repeated, somewhat like the peep of the hylodes, but not so loud. in answer to my inquiries, he said that he had never seen them while making it, but going to the spot he iinds the snake. this, he said on another occasion, was a sign of rain. when i had selected this place for our camp, he had remarked that there were snakes there,— he saw them. "but they won't do any hurt," i said. " no," he answered, " just as you say, it makes no difference to me." he lay on the right side of the tent, because, as he said, he was partly deaf in one ear, and he wanted to lie with his good ear up. as we lay there, he inquired if i ever heard "indian sing.'' i replied that i had not often, and asked him if he would not favour us with a song. he readily assented, and lying on his back, with his blanket wrapped around him, he commenced a slow, somewhat nasal, yet musical chant, in his own language, which probably was taught his tribe long ago by the catholic mis sionaries. he translated it to us, sentence by sentence, afterward, wishing to see if we could remember it. it proved to be a very simple religious exercise or hymn, the burden of which was, that there was only one god who ruled all the world. this was hammered (or sung) out very thin, so that some stanzas well-nigh meant nothing at all, merely keeping up the idea. he then said that he would sing us a latin song; but we did not detect any latin, only one or two greek words in it, — the rest may have been latin with the indian pronunciation. 120 selections from thoeeau his singing carried me back to the period of the discovery of america, to san salvador and the incas, when europeans first encountered the simple faith of the indian. there was, indeed, a beautiful simplicity about it ; nothing of the dark and savage, only the mild and infantile. the sentiments of humility and reverence chiefly were expressed. it was a dense and damp spruce and fir wood in which we lay, and, except for our fire, perfectly dark ; and when i awoke in the night, i either heard an owl from deeper in the forest behind us, or a loon from a distance over the lake. getting up some time after midnight to collect the scattered brands together, while my companions were sound asleep, i observed, partly in the fire, which had ceased to blaze, a per fectly regular elliptical ring of light, about five inches in its shortest diameter, six or seven in its longer, and from one eighth to one quarter of an inch wide. it was fully as bright as the fire, but not reddish or scarlet like a coal, but a white and slumbering light, like the glowworm's. i could tell it from the fire only by its whiteness. i saw at once that it must be phosphorescent wood, which i had so often heard of, but never chanced to see. putting my finger on it, with a little hesitation, i found that it was a piece of dead moose-wood {acer striatum) which the indian had cut off' in a slanting direction the evening before. using my knife, i discovered that the light proceeded from that portion of the sap-wood immediately under the bark, and thus presented a regular ring at the end, which, indeed, appeared raised above the level forest phenomena 121 of the wood, and when i pared off the bark and cut into the sap, it was all aglow along the log. i was surprised to find the wood quite hard and apparently sound, though probably decay had commenced in the sap, and i cut out some little triangular chips, and placing them in the hollow of my hand, carried them into the camp, waked my companion, and showed them to him. they lit up the inside of my hand, revealing the lines and wrinkles, and appearing exactly like coals of fire raised to a white heat, and i saw at once how, probably, the indian jugglers had imposed on their people and on travellers, pretending to hold coals of fire in their mouths. i also noticed that part of a decayed stump within four or five feet of the fire, an inch wide and six inches long, soft and shaking wood, shone with equal brightness. i neglected to ascertain whether our fire had any thing to do with this, but the previous day's rain and long-continued wet weather undoubtedly had. i was exceedingly interested by this phenomenon, and already felt paid for my journey. it could hardly have thrilled me more if it had taken the form of letters, or of the human face. if i had met with this ring of light while groping in this forest alone, away from any fire, i should have been still more surprised. i little thought that there was such a light shining in the darkness of the wilderness for me. the next day the indian told me their name for this light, — artoosogu', — and on my inquiring concern 122 selections from thokeau ing the will-o'-the-wisp, and the like phenomena, he said that his "folks" sometimes saw fires passing along at various heights, even as high as the trees, and making a noise. i was prepared after this to hear of the most startling and unimagined phenomena witnessed by " his folks," they are abroad at all hours and seasons in scenes so unfrequented by white men. nature must have made a thousand revelations to them which are still secrets to us. i did not regret my not having seen this before, since i now saw it under circumstances so favourable. i was in just the frame of mind to see something wonderful, and this was a phenomenon adequate to my circumstances and expectation, and it put me on the alert to see more like it. i exulted like " a pagan suckled in a creed " that had never been worn at all, but was bran new, and adequate to the occasion. i let science slide, and rejoiced in that light as if it had been a fellow-creature. i saw that it was excellent, and was very glad to know that it was so cheap. a scientific explanation, as it is called, would have been altogether out of place there. that is for pale day light. science with its retorts would have put me to sleep ; it was the opportunity to be ignorant that i improved. it suggested to me that there was some thing to be seen if one had eyes. it made a believer of me more than before. i belie\'ed that the woods were not tenantless, but choke-full of honest spirits as good as myself any day, — not an empty chamber, in which chemistry was left to work alone, but an inhabited house, — and for a few moments i enjoyed forest phenomena 123 fellowship with them. your so-called wise man goes trying to persuade himself that there is no entity there but himself and his traps, but it is a great deal easier to believe the truth. it suggested, too, that the same experience always gives birth to the same sort of belief or religion. one revelation has been made to the indian, another to the white man. i have much to learn of the indian, nothing of the missionary. i am not sure but all that would tempt me to teach the indian my religion would be his promise to teach me his. long enough i had heard of irrelevant things ; now at length i was glad to make acquaintance with the light that dwells in rotten wood. where is all your knowledge gone to ? it evaporates completely, for it has no depth. i kept those little chips and wet them again the next night, but they emitted no light. the shipweeck wishing to get a better view than i had yet had of the ocean, which, we are told, covers more than two thirds of the globe, but of which a man who lives a few miles inland may never see any trace, more than of another world, i made a visit to cape cod in october 1849, another the succeeding june, and another to truro in july 1855; the first and last time with a single companion, the second time alone. i have spent, in all, about three weeks on the cape ; walked from eastham to provincetown twice on the atlantic side, and once on the bay side also,, except ing four or five miles, and crossed the cape half a dozen times on my way ; but having come so fresh to the sea, i have got but little salted. my readers must expect only so much saltness as the land breeze acquires from blowing over an arm of the sea, or is tasted on the windows and the bark of trees twenty miles inland, after septembei' gales. i have been accustomed to make excursions to the ponds within ten miles of concord, but latterly i have extended my excursions to the seashore. the shipweeck 125 i did not see why i might not make a book on cape cod, as well as my neighbour on human culture. it is but another name for the same thing, and hardly a sandier phase of it. as for my title, i suppose that the word cape is from the french cap ; which is from the latin caput, a head ; which is, perhaps, from the verb capere, to take, — that being the part by which we take hold of a thing : — take time by the forelock. it is also the safest part to take a serpent by. and as for cod, that was derived directly from that "great store of cod-fish" which captain bartholomew gosnold caught there in 1602; which fish appears to have been so called from the saxon word codde, " a case in which seeds are lodged," either from the form of the fish, or the quantity of spawn it contains ; whence also, perhaps, codling ("pomum coctile " ?) and coddle, — to cook green like peas. (v. die.) cape cod is the bared and bended arm of massa chusetts : the shoulder is at buzzard's bay ; the elbow, or crazy-bone, at cape mallebarre; the wrist at truro ; and the sandy fist at provincetown, — behind which the state stands on her guard, with her back to the green mountains, and her feet planted on the floor of the ocean, like an athlete protecting her bay, — boxing with north-east storms, and, ever and anon, heaving up her atlantic adver sary from the lap of earth, — ready to thrust forward her other fist, which keeps guard the while upon her breast at cape ann. on studying the map, i saw that there must be 126 selections from thoreau an uninterrupted beach on the east or outside of the forearm of the cape, more than thirty miles from the general line of the coast, which would afford a good sea view, but that, on account of an opening in the beach, forming the entrance to nauset harbour, in orleans, i must strike it in eastham, if i approached it by land, and probably i could walk thence straight to eace point, about twenty -eight miles, and not meet with any obstruction. we left concord, massachusetts, on tuesday, 9th october 1849. on reaching boston, we found that the provincetown steamer, which should have got in the day before, had not yet arrived, on account of a violent storm ; and, as we noticed in the streets a handbill headed, " death ! one hundred and forty five lives lost at cohasset," we decided to go by way of cohasset. we found many irish in the cars, going to identify bodies and to sympathise with the sur vivors, and also to attend the funeral which was to take place in the afternoon ; — and when we arrived at cohasset, it appeared that nearly all the passengers were bound for the beach, which was about a mile distant, and many other persons were flocking in from the neighbouring country. there were several hundreds of them streaming oflf over cohasset common in that direction, some on foot and some in waggons, — and among them were some sportsmen in their hunting-jackets, with their guns, and game-bags, and dogs. as we passed the graveyard we saw a large hole, like a cellar, freshly dug there, and, just before reaching the shore, by a pleasantly winding and the shipwreck 127 rocky road, we met several hay-riggings and farm waggons coming away toward the meeting-house, each loaded with three large, rough deal boxes. we did not need to ask what was in them. the owners of the waggons were made the undertakers. many horses in carriages were fastened to the fences near the shore, and, for a mile or more, up and down, the beach was covered with people looking out for bodies, and examining the fragments of the wreck. there was a small island called brook island, with a hut on it, lying just off the shore. this is said to be the rockiest shore in massachusetts, from nantasket to scituate, — hard sienitic rocks, which the waves have laid bare, but have not been able to crumble. it has been the scene of many a shipwreck. the brig st. john, from galway, ireland, laden with emigrants, was wrecked on sunday morning; it was now tuesday morning, and the sea was still breaking violently on the rocks. there were eighteen or twenty of the same large boxes that i have men tioned, lying on a green hillside, a few rods from the water, and surrounded by a crowd. the bodies which had been recovered, twenty-seven or eight in all, had been collected there. some were rapidly nailing down the lids, others were carting the boxes away, and others were lifting the lids, which were yet loose, and peeping under the cloths, for each body, with such rags as still adhered to it, was covered loosely with a white sheet. i witnessed no signs of grief, but there was a sober dispatch of business which was affecting. one man was seeking 128 selections from thoreau to identify a particular body, and one undertaker or carpenter was calling to another to know in what box a certain child was put. i saw many marble feet and matted heads as the cloths were raised, and one livid, swollen, and mangled body of a drowned girl, — who probably had intended to go out to service in some american family, — to which some rags still adhered, with a string, half concealed by the flesh, about its swollen neck ; the coiled-up wreck of a human hulk, gashed by the rocks or fishes, so that the bone and muscle were exposed, but quite bloodless, — merely red and white, — with wide-open and staring eyes, yet lustreless, deadlights ; or like the cabin windows of a stranded vessel, filled with sand. sometimes there were two or more children, or a parent and child, in the same box, and on the lid would perhaps be written with red chalk, " bridget such-a-one, and sister's child." the surrounding sward was covered with bits of sails and clothing. i have since heard, from one who lives by this beach, that a woman who had come over before, but had left her infant behind for her sister to bring, came and looked into these boxes, and saw in one — prob ably the same whose superscription i hare quoted — her child in her sister's arms, as if the sister had meant to be found thus ; and within three days after, the mother died from the effect of that sight. we turned from this and walked along the rocky shore. in the first cove were strewn what seemed the fragments of a vessel, in small pieces mixed with sand and seaweed, and great quantities of feathers ; the shipwreck 129 but it looked so old and rusty, that i at first took it to be some old wreck which had lain there many years. i even thought of captain kidd, and that the feathers were those which sea-fowl had cast there ; and perhaps there might be some tradition about it in the neighbourhood. i asked a sailor if that was the st. john. he said it was. i asked him where she struck. he pointed to a rock in front of us, a mile from the shore, called the grampus rock, and added, — " you can see a part of her now sticking up ; it looks like a small boat." i saw it. it was thought to be held by the chain cables and the anchors. i asked if the bodies which i saw were all that were drowned. " not a quarter of them," said he. " where are the rest 1 " "most of them right underneath that piece you see." it appeared to us that there was enough rubbish to make the wreck of a large vessel in this cove alone, and that it would take many days to cart it off. it was several feet deep, and here and there was a bonnet or a jacket on it. in the very midst of the crowd about this wreck, there were men with carts busily collecting the seaweed which the storm had cast up, and conveying it beyond the reach of the tide, though they were often obhged to separate fragments of clothing from it, and they might at any moment have found a human body under it. drown who might, they did not forget that this k 130 selections feom thoeeau weed was a valuable manure. this shipwreck had not produced a visible vibration in the fabric of society. about a mile south we could see, rising above the rocks, the masts of the british brig which the st. john had endeavoured to follow, which had slipped her cables, and, by good luck, run into the mouth of cohasset harbour. a little farther along the shore we saw a man's clothes on a rock; farther, a woman's scarf, a gown, a straw bonnet, the brig's caboose, and one of her masts high and dry, broken into several pieces. in another rocky cove, several rods from the water, and behind rocks twenty feet high, lay a part of one side of the vessel, still hanging together. it was, perhaps, forty feet long, by four teen wide. i was even more surprised at the power of the waves, exhibited on this shattered fragment, than i had been at the sight of the smaller fragments before. the largest timbers and iron braces were broken superfluously, and i saw that no material could withstand the power of the waves ; that iron must go to pieces in such a case, and an iron vessel would be cracked up like an egg-shell on the rocks. some of these timbers, however, were so rotten that i could almost thrust my umbrella through them. they told us that some were saved on this piece, and also showed where the sea had heaved it into this cove which was now dry. when i saw where it had come in, and in what condition, i wondered that any had been saved on it. a little farther on a crowd of men was collected around the mate of the st. john, the shipwreck 131 who was telling his story. he was a slim-looking youth, who spoke of the captain as the master, and seeined a little excited. he was saying that when they jumped into the boat, she filled, and, the vessel lurching, the weight of the water in the boat caused the painter to break, and so they were separated. whereat one man came away, saying, — "well, i don't see but he tells a straight story enough. you see, the weight of the water in the boat broke the painter. a boat full of water is very heavy," — and so on, in a loud and impertinently earnest tone, as if he had a bet depending on it, but had no humane interest in the matter. another, a large man, stood near by upon a rock, gazing into the sea, and chewing large quids of tobacco, as if that habit were for ever confirmed with him. "come," says another to his companion, "let's be off. we've seen the whole of it. it's no use to stay to the funeral." further, we saw one standing upon a rock, who, we were told, was one that was saved. he was a sober looking man, dressed in a jacket and gray pantaloons, with his hands in the pockets. i asked him a few questions, which he answered j but he seemed un willing to talk about it, and soon walked away. by his side stood one of the lifeboat men, in an oil-cloth jacket, who told us how they went to the relief of the british brig, thinking that the boat of the st. john, which they passed on the way, held all her crew, — for the waves prevented their seeing those 132 selections feom thoebatt who were on the vessel, though they might have saved some had they known there were any there. a little farther was the flag of the st. john spread on a rock to dry, and held down by stones at the corners. this frail, but essential and significant portion of the vessel, which had so long been the sport of the winds, was sure to reach the shore. there were one or two houses visible from these rocks, in which were some of the survivors recover ing from the shock which their bodies and minds had sustained. one was not expected to live. "we kept on down the shore as far as a promontory called whitehead, that we might see more of the cohasset rocks. in a little cove, within half a mile, there were an old man and his son collecting, with their team, the seaweed which that fatal storm had cast up, as serenely employed as if there had never been a wreck in the world, though they were within sight of the grrampus rock, on which the st. john had struck. the old man had heard that there was a wreck and knew most of the particulars, but he said that he had not been up there since it happened. it was the wrecked weed that concerned him most, rockweed, kelp, and seaweed, as he named them, which he carted to his barnyard; and those bodies were to him but other weeds which the tide cast up, but which were of no use to him. we afterwards came to the lifeboat in its harbour, waiting for another emergency, — and in the afternoon we saw the funeral procession at a distance, at the head of which walked the captain with the other survivors. the shipwreck 133 on the whole, it was not so impressive a scene as i might have expected. if i had found one body cast upon the beach in some lonely place, it would have affected me more. i sympathised rather with the winds and waves, as if to toss and mangle these poor human bodies was the order of the day. if this was the law of nature, why waste any time in awe or pity "! if the last day were come, we should not think so much about the separation of friends or the blighted prospects of individuals. i saw that corpses might be multiplied, as on the field of battle, till they no longer affected us in any degree, as exceptions to the common lot of humanity. take all the graveyards together, they are always the majority. it is the individual and private that demands our sympathy. a man can attend but one funeral in the course of his life, can behold but one corpse. yet i saw that the inhabitants of the shore would be not a little affected by this event. they would watch there many days and nights for the sea to give up its dead, and their imaginations and sympathies would supply the place of mourners far away, who as yet knew not of the wreck. many days after this, something white was seen floating on the water by one who was sauntering on the beach. it was approached in a boat, and found to be the body of a woman, which had risen in an upright position, whose white cap was blown back with the wind. i saw that the beauty of the shore itself was wrecked for many a lonely walker there, until he could perceive, at last, how its beauty was enhanced 134 selections from thoebau by wrecks like this, and it acquired thus a rarer and sublimer beauty still. why care for these dead bodies? they really have no friends but the worms or fishes. their owners were coming to the new world, as columbus and the pilgrims did, — they were within a mile of its shores ; but, before they could reach it, they emigrated to a newer world than ever columbus dreamed of, yet one of whose existence we believe that there is far more universal and convincing evidence — though it has not yet been discovered by science — than columbus had of this: not merely mariners' tales and some paltry driftwood and sea weed, but a continual drift and instinct to all our shores. i saw their empty hulks that came to land ; but they themselves, meanwhile, were cast upon some shore yet farther west, toward which we are all tending, and which we shall reach at last, it may be through storm and darkness, as they did. no doubt, we have reason to thank god that they have not been "shipwrecked into life again." the mariner who makes the safest port in heaven, perchance, seems to his friends on earth to be shipwrecked, for they deem boston harbour the better place ; though perhaps invisible to them, a skilful pilot comes to meet him, and the fairest and balmiest gales blow off that coast, his good ship makes the land in hal cyon days, and he kisses the shore in rapture there, while his old hulk tosses in the surf here. it is hard to part with one's body, but, no doubt, it is easy enough to do without it when once it is gone. all the shipwreck 135 their plans and hopes burst like a bubble ! infants by the score dashed on the rocks by the enraged atlantic ocean ! no, no ! if the st. john did not make her port here, she has been telegraphed there. the strongest wind cannot stagger a spirit ; it is a spirit's breath. a just man's purpose cannot be split on any grampus or material rock, but itself will split rocks till it succeeds. the beach at length we reached the seemingly retreating bound ary of the plain, and entered what had appeared at a distance an upland marsh, but proved to be dry sand covered with beach -grass, the bearberry, bayberry, shrub -oaks, and beach -plum, slightly ascending as we approached the shore ; then, crossing over a belt of sand on which nothing grew, though the roar of the sea sounded scarcely louder than before, and we were prepared to go half a mile farther, we suddenly stood on the edge of a bluff overlooking the atlantic. far below us was the beach, from half a dozen to a dozen rods in width, with a long line of breakers rushing to the strand. the sea was exceedingly dark and stormy, the sky completely overcast, the clouds still dropping rain, and the wind seemed to blow not so much as the exciting cause, as from sympathy with the already agitated ocean. the waves broke on the bars at some distance from the shore, and curving green or yellow as if over so many unseen dams, ten or twelve feet high, like a thousand waterfalls, rolled in foam to the sand. the beach 137 there was nothing but that savage ocean between us and europe. having got down the bank, and as close to the water as we could, where the sand was the hardest, leaving the nauset lights behind us, we began to walk leisurely up the beach, in a north-west direction, toward provincetown, which was about twenty-five miles distant, still sailing under our umbrellas with a strong aft wind, admiring in silence, as we walked, the great force of the ocean stream, — the white breakers were rushing to the shore; the foam ran up the sand, and then ran back as far as we could see (and we imagined how much farther along the atlantic coast, before and behind us), as regularly, to compare great things with, small, as the master of a choir beats time with his white wand ; and ever and anon a higher wave caused us hastily to deviate from our path, and we looked back on our tracks filled with water and foam. the breakers looked kke droves of a thousand wild horses of neptune, rushing to the shore, with their white manes stream ing far behind ; and when, at length, the sun shone for a moment, their manes were rainbow-tinted. also, the long kelp-weed was tossed up from time to time, like the tails of sea-cows sporting in the brine. there was not a sail in sight, and we saw none that day, — ^for they had all sought harbours in the late storm, and had not been able to get out again ; and the only human beings whom we saw on the 138 selections from thoeeau beach for several days were one or two wreckers looking for drift-wood, and fragments of wrecked vessels. after an easterly storm in the spring, this beach is sometimes strewn with eastern wood from one end to the other, which, as it belongs to him who saves it, and the cape is nearly destitute of wood, is a godsend to the inhabitants. we soon met one of these wreckers, — a regular cape cod man, with whom we parleyed, with a bleached and weather-beaten face, within whose wrinkles i distinguished no particular feature. it was like an old sail endowed with life, — a hanging-cliff of weather-beaten flesh, — like one of the clay boulders which occurred in that sand-bank. he had on a hat which had seen salt water, and a coat of many pieces and colours, though it was mainly the colour of the beach^ as if it had been sanded. his variegated back — for his coat had many patches, even between the shoulders — was a rich study to us when we had passed him and looked round. it might have been dishonourable for him to have so many scars behind, it is true, if he had not had many more and more serious ones in front. he looked as if he sometimes saw a dough-nut, but never descended to comfort ; too grave to laugh, too tough to cry ; as indiff'erent as a clam, — like a sea-clam with hat on and legs, that was out walking the strand. he may have been one of the pilgrims, — peregrine white, at least, — who has kept on the back side of the cape, and let the centuries go by. he was looking for wrecks, old logs, water-logged and covered with barnacles, or bits of boards and joists, even the beach 139 chips which he drew out of the reach of the tide, and stacked up to dry. when the log was too large to carry far, he cut it up where the last wave had left it, or rolling it a few feet, appropriated it by sticking two sticks into the ground crosswise above it. some rotten trunk, which in maine cumbers the ground, and is, perchance, thrown into the water on purpose, is here thus carefully picked up, split and dried, and husbanded. before vnnter the wrecker painfully carries these things up the bank on his shoulders by a long diagonal slanting path made with a hoe in the sand, if there is no hollow at hand. you may see his hooked pike-staff always lying on the bank, ready for use. he is the true monarch of the beach, whose " right there is none to dispute," and he is as much identified with it as a beach-bird. crantz, in his account of greenland, quotes dalagen's relation of the ways and usages of the grreenlanders, and says, " whoever finds drift-wood, or the spoils of a shipwreck on the strand, enjoys it as his own, though he does not live thera but he must haul it ashore and lay a stone upon it, as a token that some one has taken possession of it, and this stone is the deed of security, for no other green lander will offer to meddle with it afterwards," such is the instinctive law of nations. we have also this account of drift-wood in orantz : "as he (the founder of nature) has denied this frigid rocky region the growth of trees, he has bid the streams of the ocean to convey to its shores a great deal of wood, which accordingly comes floating thither, part 140 selections from thoreau without ice, but the most part along with it, and lodges itself between the islands. were it not for this, we europeans should have no wood to burn there, and the poor greenlanders (who, it is true, do not use wood, but train, for burning) would, however, have no wood to roof their houses, to erect their tents, as also to build their boats, and to shaft their arrows (yet there grew some small but crooked alders, etc.), by which they must procure their maintenance, clothing and train for warmth, light, and cooking. among this wood are great trees torn up by the roots, which, by driving up and down for many years and rubbing on the ice, are quite bare of branches and bark, and corroded with great wood-worms. a small part of this drift-wood are willows, alder and birch trees, which come out of the bays in the south (i.e. of greenland) ; also large trunks of aspen trees, which must come from a greater distance ; but the greatest part is pine and fir. we find also a good deal of a sort of wood finely veined, with few branches ; this i fancy is larch-wood, which likes to decorate the sides of lofty, stony mountains. there is also a solid, reddish wood, of a more agreeable fragrance than the common fir, with visible cross-veins ; which i take to be the same species as the beautiful silver-firs, or zirbel, that have the smell of cedar, and grow on the high grison hills, and the switzers wainscot their rooms with them." the wrecker directed us to a slight depression, called snow's hollow, by which we ascended the bank,^ — for elsewhere, if not difiicult, it was inconvenient to climb it on account of the sliding sand which filled our shoes. the beach 141 this sand-bank — the backbone of the cape — rose directly from the beach to the height of a hundred feet or more above the ocean. it was with singular emotions that we first stood upon it and discovered what a place we had chosen to walk on. on our right, beneath us, was the beach of smooth and gently sloping sand, a dozen rods in width ; next, the endless series of white breakers ; farther still, the light green water over the bar, which runs the whole length of the fore-arm of the cape, and beyond this stretched the unwearied and illimitable ocean. on our left, extending back from the very edge of the bank, was a perfect desert of shining sand, from thirty to eighty rods in width, skirted in the distance by small sand hills fifteen or twenty feet high; between which, however, in some places, the sand penetrated as much farther. next commenced the region of vegetation, — a succession of small hills and valleys covered with shrubbery, now glowing with the brightest imaginable autumnal tints ; and beyond this were seen, here and there, the waters of the bay. here, in wellfleet, this pure sand plateau, known to sailors as the table lands of eastham, on account of its appearance, as seen from the ocean, and because it once made a part of that town, — full fifty rods in width, and in many places much more, and sometimes full one hundred and fifty feet above the ocean, — stretched away northward from the southern boundary of the town, without a particle of vegetation, — as level almost as a table, — for two and a half or three miles, or as far as the eye could reach ; slightly rising to 142 selections from thoeeau wards the ocean, then stooping to the beach, by as steep a slope as sand could lie on, and as regular as a military engineer could desire. it was like the escarped rampart of a stupendous fortress, whose glacis was the beach, and whose champaign the ocean. from its surface we overlooked the greater part of the cape. in short, we were traversing a desert, with the view of an autumnal landscape of extra ordinary brilliancy, a sort of promised land, on the one hand, and the ocean on the other. yet, though the prospect was so extensive, and the country for the most part destitute of trees, a house was rarely visible, — we never saw one from the beach, — and the solitude was that of the ocean and the desert com bined. a thousand men could not have seriously interrupted it, but would have been lost in the vast ness of the scenery as their footsteps in the sand. the whole coast is so free from rocks, that we saw but one or two for more than twenty miles. the sand was soft like the beach, and trying to the eyes, when the sun shone. a few piles of drift-wood, which some wreckers had painfully brought up the bank and stacked up there to dry, being the only objects in the desert, looked indefinitely large and distant, even like wigwams, though, when we stood near them, they proved to be insignificant little " jags " of wood. for sixteen miles, commencing at the nauset lights, the bank held its height, though farther north it was not so level as here, but interrupted by slight hollows, and the patches of beach-grass and bayberry frequently crept into the sand to its edge. the beach 143 there are some pages entitled a description of the eastern coast of the county of barnstable, printed in 1802, pointing out the spots on which the trustees of the humane society have erected huts called charity or humane houses, "and other places where shipwrecked seamen may look for shelter." two thousand copies of this were dispersed, that every vessel which frequented this coast might be provided with one. i have read this shipwrecked seaman's manual with a melancholy kind of interest, — for the sound of the surf, or, you might say, the moaning of the sea, is heard all through it, as if its author were the sole survivor of a shipwreck himself. of this part of the coast he says : " this highland approaches the ocean with steep and lofty banks, which it is extremely difficult to climb, especially in a storm. in violent tempests, during very high tides, the sea breaks against the foot of them, rendering it then unsafe to walk on the strand which lies between them and the ocean. should the seaman succeed in his attempt to ascend them, he must forbear to penetrate into the country, as houses are generally so remote that they would escape his research during the night ; he must pass pn to the valleys by which the banks are intersected. these valleys, which the inhab itants call hollows, run at right angles with the shore, and in the middle or lowest part of them a road leads from the dwelling-houses to the sea." by the word road must not always be understood a visible cart-track. there were these two roads for us, — an upper and a lower one, — the bank and the beach ; both 144 selections from thobeau stretching twenty-eight miles north-west, from nauset harbour to race point, without a single opening into the beach, and with hardly a serious interruption of the desert. if you were to ford the narrow and shallow inlet at nauset harbour, where there is not more than eight feet of water on the bar at full sea, you might walk ten or twelve miles farther, which would make a beach forty miles long, — and the bank and beach, on the east side of nantucket, are but a continuation of these. i was comparatively satisfied. there i had got the cape under me, as much as if i were riding it barebacked. it was not as on the map, or seen from the stage-coach ; but there i found it all out of doors, huge and real. cape cod ! as it cannot be represented on a map, colour it as you will; the thing itself, than which there is nothing more like it, no truer picture or account ; which you cannot go farther and see. i cannot remember what i thought before that it was. they commonly celebrate those beaches only which have a hotel on them, not those which have a humane house alone. but i wished to see that seashore where man's works are wrecks; to put up at the true atlantic house, where the ocean is land-lord as well as sea-lord, and comes ashore without a wharf for the landing ; where the crumbling land is the only invalid, or at best is but dry land, and that is all you can say of it. we walked on quite at our leisure, now on the beach, now on the bank, — sitting from time to time on some damp log, maple, or yellow birch, which had long followed the seas, but had now at last settled on the beach 145 land; or under the lee of a sand-hill, on the bank, that we might gaze steadily on the ocean. the bank was so steep, that, where there was no danger of its caving, we sat on its edge as on a bench. it was difficult for us landsmen to look out over the ocean without imagining land in the horizon; yet the clouds appeared to hang low over it, and rest on the water as they never do on the land, perhaps on account of the great distance to which we saw. the sand was not without advantage, for, though it was " heavy " walking in it, it was soft to the feet ; and, notwithstanding that it had been raining nearly two days, when it held up for half an hour, the sides of the sand-hills, which were porous and sliding, afforded a dry seat. all the aspects of this desert are beauti ful, whether you behold it in fair weather or foul, or when the sun is just breaking out after a storm, and shining on its moist surface in the distance, it is so white, and pure, and level, and each slight in equality and track is so distinctly revealed ; and when your eyes slide off this, they fall on .the ocean. in summer the mackerel-gulls — which here have their nests among the neighbouring sand-hills — pursue the traveller anxiously, now and then diving close to his head with a squeak, and he may see them, like swallows, chase some crow which has been feeding on the beach, almost across the cape. though for some time i have not spoken of the roaring of the breakers, and the ceaseless flux and reflux of the waves, yet they did not for a moment cease to dash and roar, with such a tumult that, if l 146 selections feom thorea.xj you had been there, you could scarcely have heard my voice the while; aud they are dashing and roaring this very moment, though it may be with less din and violence, for there the sea never rests. we were wholly absorbed by this spectacle and tumult, and like chryses, though in a different mood from him, we walked silent along the shore of the resounding sea. bij s* akcoiv trapa diva, 7roai;^a,ot(r/8oio 6axacr(r»)s.l i put in a little greek now and then, partly because it sounds so much like the ocean, — though i doubt if homer's mediterranean sea ever sounded so loud as this. the attention of those who frequent the camp meetings at eastham is said to be divided between the preaching of the methodists and the preaching of the billows on the back side of the cape, for they all stream over here in the course of their stay. i trust that in this case the loudest voice carries it. with what effect may we suppose the ocean to say, "my hearers !" to the multitude on the bank ! on that side some john n. maffit ; on this, the eeverend poluphloisboios thalassa. there was but little weed cast up here, and that kelp chiefly, there being scarcely a rock for rock-weed to adhere to. who has not had a vision from some vessel's deck, when he had still his land legs on, of ■' we have no word iu english to express the sound of many waves dashing at once, whetlier gently or violently toxvipxoiit^ows to the car, and, iu the ocean's gentle moods, an dvdpiff/iov ^aacr/ui to the eye. the beach 147 this great brown apron, drifting half upright, and quite submerged through the green water, clasping a stone or a deep-sea mussel in its unearthly fingers? i have seen it carrying a stone half as large as my head. we sometimes watched a mass of this cable like weed, as it was tossed up on the crest of a breaker, waiting with interest to see it come in, as if there was some treasure buoyed up by it; but we were always surprised and disappointed at the insig nificance of the mass which had attracted us. as we looked out over the water, the smallest objects floating on it appeared indefinitely large, we were so impressed by the vastness of the ocean, and each one bore so large a proportion to the whole ocean, which we saw. we were so often disappointed in the size of such things as came ashore, the ridiculous bits of wood or weed, with which the ocean laboured, that we began to doubt whether the atlantic itself would bear a still closer inspection, and would not turn out to be but a small pond, if it should come ashore to us. this kelp, oar-weed, tangle, devil's apron, sole-leather, or ribbon -weed, — as various species are called, — ■ appeared to us a singularly marine and fabulous product, a fit invention for neptune to adorn his car with, or a freak of proteus. all that is told of the sea has a fabulous sound to an inhabitant of the land, and all its products have a certain fabulous quality, as if they belonged to another planet, from seaweed to a sailor's yarn, or a fish story. in this element the animal and vegetable kingdoms meet and are strangely mingled. one species of kelp, according to 148 selections feom thoeeau bory st. vincent, has a stem fifteen hundred feet long, and hence is the longest vegetable known, and a brig's crew spent two days to no purpose collecting the trunks of another kind cast ashore on the falk land islands, mistaking it for driftwood. ^ this species looked almost edible ; at least, i thought that if i were starving, i would try it. one sailor told me that the cows ate it. it cut like cheese ; for i took the earliest opportunity to sit down and deliberately whittle up a fathom or two of it, that i might become more intimately acquainted with it, see how it cut, and if it were hollow all the way through. the blade looked like a broad belt, whose edges had been quilled, or as if stretched by hammering, and it was also twisted spirally. the extremity was generally worn and ragged from the lashing of the waves. a piece of the stem which i carried home shrunk to one quarter of its size a week afterward, and was com pletely covered with crystals of salt like frost. the reader will excuse my greenness, — though it is not sea-greenness, like his, perchance, — for i live by a river shore, where this weed does not wash up. when we consider in what meadows it grew, and how it was raked, and in what kind of hay weather got in or out, we may well be curious about it. the beach was also strewn with beautiful sea jellies, which the wreckers called sun-squall, one of the lowest forms of animal life, some white, some wine-coloured, and a foot in diameter. i at first ' see harvey on aiqw. the beach 149 thought that they were a tender part of some marine monster, which the storm or some other foe had mangled. what right has the sea to bear in its bosom such tender things as sea-jellies and mosses, when it has such a boisterous shore, that the stoutest fabrics are wrecked against it? strange that it should undertake to dandle such delicate children in its arm. i did not at iirst recognise these for the same which i had formerly seen in myriads in boston harbour, rising, with a waving motion, to the surface, as if to meet the sun, and discolouring the waters far and wide, so that i seemed to be sailing through a mere sun-fish soup. they say that when you en deavour to take one up, it will spill out the other side of your hand like quicksilver. before the land rose out of the ocean, and became dry land, chaos reigned; and between high and low water mark, where she is partially disrobed and rising, a sort of chaos reigns still, which only anomalous creatures can inhabit. mackerel-gulls were all the while flying over our heads and amid the breakers, sometimes two white ones pursuing a black one ; quite at home in the storm, though they are as delicate organisations as sea-jellies and mosses ; and we saw that they were adapted to their circumstances rather by their spirits than their bodies. theirs must be an essentially wilder, that is less human, nature, than that of larks and robins. their note was like the sound of some vibrating metal, and harmonised well with the scenery and the roar of the surf, as if one had rudely touched the strings of the lyre, which ever lies on the shore ; 150 selections from thoreau a ragged shred of ocean music tossed aloft on the spray. but if i were required to name a sound, the remembrance of which most perfectly revives the impression which the beach has made, it would be the dreary peep of the piping plover (oharadrius melodus) which haunts there. their voices, too, are heard as a fugacious part in the dirge which is ever played along the shore for those mariners who have been lost in the deep since first it was created. but through all this dreariness we seem to have a pure and unqualified strain of eternal melody, for always the same strain which is a dirge to one household is a morning song of rejoicing to another. the wellfleet oysteeman having walked about eight miles since we struck the beach, and passed the boundary between wellfleet and truro, a stone post in the sand, — for even this sand comes under the jurisdiction of one town or another, — we turned inland over barren hills and valleys, whither the sea, for some reason, did not follow us, and, tracing up a hollow, discovered two or three sober-looking houses within half a mile, uncommonly near the eastern coast. their garrets were apparently so full of chambers, that their roofs could hardly lie down straight, and we did not doubt that there was room for us there. houses near the sea are generally low and broad. these were a story and a half high; but if you merely counted the windows in their gable ends, you would think that there were many stories more, or, at any rate, that the half-story was the only one thought worthy of being illustrated. the great number of windows in the ends of the houses, and their irregularity in size and position, here and elsewhere on the cape, struck us agreeably, — as if each of the various occupants 152 selections from thoeeau who had their cunabula behind had punched a hole where his necessities required it, and according to his size and stature, without regard to outside effect. there were windows for the grown folks, and windows for the children, — three or four apiece ; as a certain man had a large hole cut in his barn-door for the cat, and another smaller one for the kitten. some times they were so low under the eaves that i thought they must have perforated the plate beam for another apartment, and i noticed some which were triangular, to fit that part more exactly. the ends of the houses had thus as many muzzles as a revolver, and, if the inhabitants have the same habit of staring out the windows that some of our neighbours have, a traveller must stand a small chance with them. generally, the old-fashioned and unpainted houses on the cape looked more comfortable, as well as picturesque, than the modern and more pretending ones, which were less in hai'mony with the scenery, and less firmly planted. these houses were on the shores of a chain of ponds, seven in number, the source of a small stream called herring river, which empties into the ba}^ there are many herring rivers on the cape ; they will, perhaps, be more numerous than herrings soon. we knocked at the door of the first house, but its inhabitants were all gone away. in the meanwhile, we saw the occupants of the next one looking out the window at us, and before we reached it an old woman came out and fastened the door of her bulkhead, and went in again. nevertheless, we did not hesitate to the wellfleet oysteeman 153 knock at her door, wken a grizzly-looking man appeared, whom we took to be sixty or seventy years old. he asked us, at first, suspiciously, where we were from, and what our business was ; to which we returned plain answers. " how far is concord from boston ? " he inquired. "twenty miles by railroad." " twenty miles by railroad," he repeated. "didn't you ever hear of concord of revolu tionary fame ? " " didn't i ever hear of concord ? why, i heard guns fire at the battle of bunker hill. [they hear the sound of heavy cannon across the bay.] i am almost ninety ; i am eighty-eight year old. i was fourteen year old at the time of concord fight, — and where were you then 1 " we were obliged to confess that we were not in the fight. " well, walk in, we'll leave it to the women," said he. so we walked in, surprised, and sat down, an old woman taking our hats and bundles, and the old man continued, drawing up to the large, old-fashioned fire-place, — "i am a poor, good-for-nothing ciittur, as isaiah says ; i am all broken down this year. i am under petticoat government here." the family consisted of the old man, his wife, and his daughter, who appeared nearly as old as her mother, a fool, her son (a brutish-looking, middle aged man, with a prominent lower face, who was 154 selections fkom thoeea.u standing by the hearth when we entered, but immedi ately went out), and a little boy of ten. while my companion talked with the women, i talked with the old man. they said that he was old and foolish, but he was evidently too knowing for them. "these women," said he to me, "are both of them poor good-for-nothing critturs. this one is my wife. i married her sixty-four years ago. she is eighty four years old, and as deaf as an adder, and the other is not much better." he thought well of the bible, or at least he spoke well, and did not think ill, of it, for that would not have been prudent for a man of his age. he said that he had read it attentively for many years, and he had much of it at his tongue's end. he seemed deeply impressed with a sense of his own nothingness, and would repeatedly exclaim, — • " i am a nothing. what i gather from my bible is just this ; that man is a poor good-for-nothing crittur, and everything is just as god sees fit and disposes." " may i ask your name % " i said. "yes," he answered, "i am not ashamed to tell my name. my name is • . my great-grandfather came over from england and settled here." he was an old wellfleet oysterman, who had acquired a competency in that business, and had sons still engaged in it. our host told us that the sea-clam, or hen, was not easily obtained ; it was raked up, but never on the wellfleet oysteeman 155 the atlantic side, only cast ashore there in small quantities in storms. the fisherman sometimes wades in water several feet deep, and thrusts a pointed stick into the sand before him. when this enters between the valves of a clam, he closes them on it, and is drawn out. it has been known to catch and hold coot and teal which were preying on it. i chanced to be on the bank of the acushnet at new bedford one day since this, watching some ducks, when a man informed me that, having let out his young ducks to seek their food amid the samphire (salicornia) and other weeds along the riverside at low tide that morning, at length he noticed that one remained stationary, amid the weeds, something preventing it from following the others, and going to it he found its foot tightly shut in a quahog's shell. he took up both together, carried them to his home, and his wife opening the shell with a knife released the duck and cooked the quahog. the old man said that the great clams were good to eat, but that they always took out a certain part which was poisonous, before they cooked them. "people said it would kill a cat." i did not tell him that i had eaten a large one entire that afternoon, but began to think that i was tougher than a cat. he stated that pedlers came round there, and sometimes tried to sell the women folks a skimmer, but he told them that their women had got a better skimmer than they could make, in the shell of their clams ; it was shaped jusf right for this purpose.-^they call them " skim-alls " in some places. he also said that the sun-squall 156 selections fkom thoeeau was poisonous to handle, and when the sailors came across it, they did not meddle with it, but heaved it out of their way. i told him that i had handled it that afternoon, and had felt no ill effects as yet. but he said it made the hands itch, especially if they had previously been scratched, or if i put it into my bosom, i should find out what it was. at length the fool, whom my companion called the wizard, came in, muttering between his teeth, " damn book-pedlers, — all the time talking about books. better do something. damn 'em. i'll shoot 'em. got a doctor down here. damn him, i'll get a gun and shoot him ; " never once holding up his head. whereat the old man stood up and said in a loud voice, as if he was accustomed to command, and this was not the first time he had been obliged to exert his authority there : "john, go sit down, mind your business, — we've heard you talk before, ^precious little you'll do, — your bark is worse than your bite." but, without minding, john muttered the same gibberish over again, and then sat down at the table which the old folks had left. he ate au there was on it, and then turned to the apples, which his aged mother was paring, that she might give her guests some apple-sauce for breakfast, but she drew them away and sent him off. when i approached this house the next summer, (jver the desolate hills between it and the shore, which arc worthy to have been the birthplace of ossian, i saw the wizard in the midst of a cornfield on the hillside, the wellflbet oystbeman 157 but, as usual, he loomed so strangely, that i mistook him for a scarecrow. this was the merriest old man that we had ever seen, and one of the best preserved. his style of con versation was coarse and plain enough to have suited kabelais. he would have made a good panurge. or rather he was a sober silenus, and we were the boys ohromis and mnasilus, who listened to his story. " not by hsemonian hills the thraoiaii bard, nor awful phcebiis was on pindus heard with deeper silence or with more regard. " there was a strange mingling of past and present in his conversation, for he had lived under king george, and might have remembered when napoleon and the moderns generally were born. he said that one day, when the troubles between the colonies and the mother country first broke out, as he, a boy of fifteen, was pitching hay out of a cart, one donne, an old tory, who was talking with his father, a good whig, said to him, "why, uncle bill, you might as well undertake to pitch that pond into the ocean with a pitchfork, as for the colonies to undertake to gain their independence." he remembered well general washington, and how he rode his horse along the streets of boston, and he stood up to show us how he looked. "he was a r — a — ther large and portly-looking man, a manly and resolute-looking officer, with a pretty good leg as he sat on his horse." — "there, i'll tell you, this was the way with washington.'' then he jumped up again, and bowed gracefully to right 158 selections from thoeeau and left, making show as if he were waving his hat. said he, " that was washington." he told us many anecdotes of the revolution, and was much pleased when we told him that we had read the same in history, and that his account agreed with the written. " oh," he said, " i know, i know ! i was a young fellow of sixteen, with my ears wide open; and a fellow of that age, you know, is pretty wide awake, and likes to know everything that's going on. oh, i know ! " he told us the story of the wreck of the franklin which took place there the previous spring; how a boy came to his house early in the morning to know whose boat that was by the shore, for there was a vessel in distress, and he, being an old man, first ate his breakfast, and then walked over to the top of the hill by the shore, and sat down there, having found a comfortable seat, to see the ship wrecked. she was on the bar, only a quarter of a mile from him, and still nearer to the men on the beach, who had got a boat ready, but could render no assistance on account of the breakers, for there was a pretty high sea running. there were the passengers all crowded together in the forward part of the ship, and some were getting out of the cabin windows and were drawn on deck by the others. "i saw the captain get out his boat," said he; " he had one little one ; and then they jumped into it one after another, down as straight as an arrow. i counted them. there were nine. one was a the wellflebt oysteeman 159 woman, and she jumped as straight as any of them. then they shoved off. the sea took them back, one wave went over them, and when they came up there were six still clinging to the boat ; i counted them. the next wave turned the boat bottom upward, and emptied them all out. none of them ever came ashore alive. there were the rest of them all crowded together on the forecastle, the other parts of the ship being under water. they had seen all that happened to the boat. at length a heavy sea separated the forecastle from the rest of the wreck, and set it inside of the worst breaker, and the boat was able to reach them, and it saved all that were left, but one woman." he also told us of the steamer cambria's getting aground on this shore a few months before we were there, and of her english passengers who roamed over his grounds, and who, he said, thought the pro spect from the high hill by the shore, "the most delightsome they had ever seen," and also of the pranks which the ladies played with his scoop-net in the ponds. he spoke of these travellers with their purses full of guineas, just as our provincial fathers used to speak of british bloods in the time of king george the third. quid loguar ? why repeat what he told us ? " aut scyllam nisi, quam fama secuta est, candida sucoinotam latrantibus inguina monstris, diiliohas vexasse rates, et gurgite in alto ah ! timidos uautas canibus lacerasse marinis ? " in the course of the evening i began to feel the potency of the clam which i had eaten, and i was 160 skleotions from thoeeau obliged to confess to our host that i was no tougher than the cat he told of; but he answered, that he was a plain-spoken man, and he could tell me that it was all imagination. at any rate, it proved an emetic in my case, and i was made quite sick by it for a short time, while he laughed at my expense. i was pleased to read afterward, in mourt's belation of the landing of the pilgrims in provincetown harbour, these words : " we found great muscles (the old editor says that they were undoubtedly sea-clams) and very fat and full of sea-pearl ; but we could not eat them, for they made us all sick that did eat, as well sailors as passengers, . . . but they were soon well again." it brought me nearer to the pilgrims to be thus reminded by a similar experience that i was so like them. moreover, it was a valuable confirmation of their story, and i am prepared now to believe every word of mourt's relation. i was also pleased to find that man and the clam lay still at the same angle to one another. but i did not notice sea-pearl. like cleopatra, i must have swallowed it. i have since dug these clams on a flat in the bay and observed them. they could squirt full ten feet before the wind, as appeared by the marks of the drops on the sand. "now i am going to ask you a question," said the old man, " and i don't know as you can tell me ; but you are a learned man, and i never had any learning, only what i got by natur." — it was in vain that we reminded him that he could quote josephus to our confusion. — "i've thought, if i ever met the wellfleet oysteeman 161 a learned man i should like to ask him this question. can you tell me how axy is spelt, and what it means? axy," says he; "there's a girl over here is named axy. now what is it ? what does it mean ? is it scripture? i've read my bible twenty-five years over and over, and i never came across it." " did you read it twenty-five years for this object?" i asked. " well, how is it spelt ? wife, how is it spelt ? " she said, " it is in the bible ; i've seen it." " well, how do you spell it ? " " i don't know. a c h, ach, s e h, seh, — achseh." " does that spell axy ? well, do you know what it means ? " asked he, turning to me. " no," i replied, " i never heard the sound before." "there was a schoolmaster down here once, and they asked him what it meant, and he said it had no more meaning than a bean-pole." i told him that i held the same opinion with the schoolmaster. i had been a schoolmaster myself, and had had strange names to deal with. i also heard of such names as zoheth, beriah, amaziah, bethuel, and shearjashub, hereabouts. at length the little boy, who had a seat quite in the chimney-corner, took off his stockings and shoes, warmed his feet, and having had his sore leg freshly salved, went off to bed ; then the fool made bare his knotty-looking feet and legs, and followed him ; and finally the old man exposed his calves also to our gaze. we had never had the good fortune to see an m 162 selections feom thoreau old man's legs before, and were surprised to find them fair and plump as an infant's, and we thought that he took a pride in exhibiting them. he then proceeded to make preparations for retiring, dis coursing meanwhile with panurgic plainness of speech on the ills to which old humanity is subject. we were a rare haul for him. he could commonly get none but ministers to talk to, though sometimes ten of them at once, and he was glad to meet some of the laity at leisure. the evening was not long enough for him. as i had been sick, the old lady asked if i would not go to bed, — ^it was getting late for old people ; but the old man, who had not yet done his stories, said, " you ain't particular, are you "i " " oh no," said i, " i am in no hurry. i believe i have weathered the clam cape.'' " they are good," said he ; "i wish i had some of them now.'' " they never hurt me,'' said the old lady. "but then you took out the part that killed a cat," said i. at last we cut him short in the midst of his stories, which he promised to resume in the morning. yet, after all, one of the old ladies who came into our room in the night to fasten the fire-board, which rattled, as she went out took the precaution to fasten us in. old women are by nature more suspicious than old men. however, the winds howled around the house, and made the fire-boards as well as the casements rattle well that night. it was probably a windy night for any locality, but we could not dis the wbllflbbt oysteeman 163 tinguish the roar which was proper to the ocean from that which was due to the wind alone. the sounds which the ocean makes must be very significant and interesting to those who live near it. when i was leaving the shore at this place the next summer, and had got a quarter of a mile distant, ascending a hill, i was startled by a sudden, loud sound from the sea, as if a large steamer were letting off steam by the shore, so that i caught my breath and felt my blood run cold for an instant, and i turned about, expecting to see one of the atlantic steamers thus far out of her course, but there was nothing unusual to be seen. there was a low bank at the entrance of the hollow, between me and the ocean, and suspecting that i might have risen into another stratum of air in ascending the hill, — which had wafted to me only the ordinary roar of the sea, — i immediately descended again, to see if i lost hearing of it ; but, without regard to my ascending or descending, it died away in a minute or two, and yet there was scarcely any wind all the while. the old man said that this was what they called the " rut," a peculiar roar of the sea before the wind changes, which, however, he could not account for. he thought that he could tell all about the weather from the sounds which the sea made. old josselyn, who came to new england in 1638, has it among his weather-signs, that " the resounding of the sea from the shore, and murmuring of the winds in the woods, without apparent wind, showeth wind to follow." 164 selections feom thokeau being on another part of the coast one night since this, i heard the roar of the surf a mile distant, and the inhabitants said it was a sign that the wind would work round east, and we should have rainy weather. the ocean was heaped up somewhere at the eastward, and this roar was occasioned by its effort to preserve its equilibrium, the wave reaching the shore before the wind. also the captain of a packet between this country and england told me that he sometimes met with a wave on the atlantic coming against the wind, perhaps in a calm sea, which indicated that at a distance the wind was blowing from an opposite quarter, but the undulation had travelled faster than it. sailors teu of "tide rips" and "ground-swells," which they suppose to have been occasioned by hurricanes and earthquakes, and to have travelled many hundred, and sometimes even two or three thousand miles. before sunrise the next morning they let us out again, and i ran over to the beach to see the sun come out of the ocean. the old woman of eighty four winters was already out in the cold morning wind, bare-headed, tripping about like a young girl, and driving up the cow to milk. she got the break fast with dispatch, and without noise or bustle ; and meanwhile the old man resumed his stories, standing before us, who were sitting, with his back to the chimney, and ejecting his tobacco-juice right and left into the fire behind him, without regard to the various dishes which were there preparing. at breakfast we had eels, buttermilk cake, cold bread. the wellfleet oysteeman 165 green beans, doughnuts, and tea. the old man talked a steady stream ; and when his wife told him he had better eat his breakfast, he said : "don't hurry me; i have lived too long to be hurried." i ate of the apple-sauce and the doughnuts, which i thought had sustained the least detriment from the old man's shots, but my companion refused the apple-sauce, and ate of the hot cake and green beans, which had appeared to him to occupy the safest part of the hearth. but on comparing notes afterward, i told him that the buttermilk cake was particularly exposed, and i saw how it suffered repeatedly, and therefore i avoided it ; but he declared that, however that might be, he witnessed that the apple-sauce was seriously injured, and had therefore declined that. after breakfast we looked at his clock, which was out of order, and oued it with some "hen's grease," for want of sweet oil, for he scarcely could believe that we were not tinkers or pedlers ; meanwhile, he told a story about visions, which had reference to a crack in the clock case made by frost one night. he was curious to know to what religious sect we belonged. he said that he had been to hear thirteen kinds of preaching in one month, when he was young, but he did not join any of them, — he stuck to his bible. there was nothing like any of them in his bible. while i was shaving in the next room, i heard him ask my com panion to what sect he belonged, to which he answered, — "oh, i belong to the universal brotherhood." "what's that?" he asked, "sons o' temperance?" 166 selections from thoeeau finally, filling our pockets with doughnuts, which he was pleased to find that we called by the same name that he did, and paying for our entertainment, we took our departure; but he followed us out of doors, and made us tell him the names of the vege tables which he had raised from seeds that came out of the franklin. they were cabbage, broccoli, and parsley. as i had asked him the names of so many things, he tried me in turn with au the plants which grew in his garden, both wild and cultivated. it was about half an acre, which he cultivated whouy him self. besides the common garden vegetables, there were yellow-dock, lemon balm, hyssop, gill-go-over the-ground, mouse-ear, chick-weed, eoman wormwood, elecampane, and other plants. as we stood there, i saw a fish-hawk stoop to pick a fish out of his pond. "there," said i, "he has got a fish." " well," said the old man, who was looking all the while, but could see nothing, "he didn't dive, he just wet his claws." and, sure enough, he did not this time, though it is said that they often do, but he merely stooped low enough to pick him out with his talons ; but as he bore his shining prey over the bushes, it fell to the ground, and we did not see that he recovered it. that is not their practice. thus, having had another crack with the old man, he standing bareheaded under the eaves, he directed us " athwart the fields," and we took to the beach again for another day, it being now late in the morning. the wellfleet oysteeman 167 it was but a day or two after this that the safe of the provincetown bank was broken open and robbed by two men from the interior, and we learned that our hospitable entertainers did at least transiently harbour the suspicion that we were the n"atueal histoey of massachusetts^ [1842] books of natural history make the most cheerful winter reading. i read in audubon with a thrill of delight, when the snow covers the ground, of the magnolia, and the florida keys, and their warm sea breezes; of the fence-rail, and the cotton tree, and the migrations of the rice-bird ; of the breaking up of winter in labrador, and the melting of the snow on the forks of the missouri ; and owe an accession of health to these reminiscences of luxuriant nature. witmn tlie circuit of this plodding life, there enter moments of an azure hue, untarnished fair as is the violet or anemone, when the spring strews them by some meandering rivulet, which make the hest philosophy untrue that aims ' reports — on the fishes, reptiles, and birds ; the herhaeeous plants and quad,rupeds ; the insects injurious to vegetation ; and the invertebrate animals of massachusetts. published agreeably to an order of the legislature, by the commissioners on the zoological and botanical survey of the state. natukal history of massachusetts 169 but to console man for his grievances. i have remembered when the winter came, high in my chamber in the frosty nights, when in the still light of the cheerful moon, on every twig and rail and jutting spout, the icy spears were adding to their length against the arrows of the coming sun. how in the shimmering noon of summer past some unrecorded beam slanted across the upland pastures where the johnswort gi-ew ; or heard, amid the verdure of my mind, the bee's long smothered hum, on the blue flag loitering amidst the mead ; or busy rill, which now through all its course stands still and dumb its own memorial, — purling at its play along the slopes, and through the meadows next, until its youthful sound was hushed at last in the staid current of the lowland stream ; or seen the furrows shine hut late upturned. and where the fieldfare followed in the rear. when all the fields around lay bound and hoar beneath a thick integument of snow. so by god's cheap economy made rich to go upon my winter's task again. i am singularly refreshed in winter when i hear of service-berries, poke-weed, juniper. is not heaven made up of these cheap summer glories ? there is a singular health in those words, labrador and east main, which no desponding creed recognises. how much more than federal are these states. if there were no other vicissitudes than the seasons, our in terest would never tire. much more is adoing than congress wots of. what journal do the persimmon and the buckeye keep, and the sharp-shinned hawk 1 what is transpiring from summer to winter in the carolinas, and the great pine forest, and the valley 170 selections from thoreau of the moliawk 1 the merely political aspect of the land is never very cheering ; men are degraded when considered as the members of a political organisation. on this side all lands present only the symptoms of decay. i see but bunker hill and sing-sing, the district of columbia and sullivan's island, with a few avenues connecting them. but paltry are they all beside one blast of the east or the south wind which blows over them. in society you will not find health, but in nature. unless our feet at least stood in the midst of nature, all our faces would be pale and livid. society is always diseased, and the best is the most so. there is no scent in it so wholesome as that of the pines, nor any fragrance so penetrating and restorative as the life-everlasting in high pastures. i would keep some book of natural history always by me as a sort of elixir, the reading of which should restore the tone of the system. to the sick, indeed, nature is sick, but to the well, a fountain of health. to him who contemplates a trait of natural beauty no harm nor disappointment can come. the doctrines of despair, of spiritual or political tyranny or servitude, were never taught by such as shared the serenity of nature. surely good courage will not flag here on the atlantic border, as long as we are flanked by the fur countries. there is enough in that sound to cheer one under any circumstances. the spruce, the hemlock, and the pine will not countenance despair. methinks some creeds in vestries and churches do forget the hunter wrapped in furs by the great slave natukal history of massachusetts 171 lake, and that the esquimaux sledges are drawn by dogs, and in the twilight of the northern night the hunter does not give over to follow the seal and walrus on the ice. they are of sick and diseased imagina tions who would toll the world's knell so soon. can not these sedentary sects do better than prepare the shrouds and write the epitaphs of those other busy living men's the practical faith of all men belies the preacher's consolation. what is any man's dis course to me, if i am not sensible of something in it as steady and cheery as the creak of crickets ? in it the woods must be relieved against the sky. men tire me when i am not constantly greeted and refreshed as by the flux of sparkling streams. surely joy is the condition of life. think of the young fry that leap in ponds, the myriads of insects ushered into being on a summer evening, the incessant note of the hyla with which the woods ring in the spring, the nonchalance of the butterfly carrying accident and change painted in a thousand hues upon its wings, or the brook minnow stoutly stemming the current, the lustre of whose scales worn bright by the attrition is reflected upon the bank. we fancy that this din of religion, literature, and philosophy, which is heard in pulpits, lyceums, and parlours, vibrates through the universe, and is as catholic a sound as the creaking of the earth's axle ; but if a man sleep soundly, he will forget it all between sun set and dawn. it is the three-inch swing of a pen dulum in a cupboard, which the great pulse of nature vibrates by and through each instant. when we lift 172 selections from thoreau our eyelids and open our ears, it disappears with smoke and rattle like the cars on a railroad. when i detect a beauty in any of the recesses of nature, i am reminded, by the serene and retired spirit in which it requires to be contemplated, of the inex pressible privacy of a life, — how silent and unam bitious it is. the beauty there is in mosses must be considered from the holiest, quietest nook. what an admirable training is science for the more active war fare of life. indeed, the unchallenged bravery, which these studies imply, is far more impressive than the trumpeted valour of the warrior. i am pleased to learn that thales was up and stirring by night not unfrequently, as his astronomical discoveries prove. linnaeus, setting out for lapland, surveys his " comb " and "spare shirt," "leathern breeches "and "gauze cap to keep oif gnats,'' with as much complacency as bonaparte a park of artillery for the russian campaign. the quiet bravery of the man is admirable. his eye is to take in fish, flower, and bird, quadruped and biped. science is always brave, for to know, is to know good ; doubt and danger quail before her eye. what the coward overlooks in his hurry, she calmly scrutinises, breaking ground like a pioneer for the array of arts that follow in her train. but cowardice is unscientific ; for there cannot be a science of ignor ance. there may be a science of bravery, for that advances ; but a retreat is rarely well conducted ; if it is, then is it an orderly advance in the face of circumstances. but to draw a little nearer to our promised topics. natukal histoey of massachusetts 173 entomology extends the limits of being in a new direction, so that i walk in nature with a sense of greater space and freedom. it suggests besides, that the universe is not rough-hewn, but perfect in its details. nature will bear the closest inspection ; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. she has no interstices ; every part is full of life. i explore, too, with pleasure, the sources of the myriad sounds which crowd the summer noon, and which seem the very grain and stuff of which eternity is made. who does not remember the shrill roll-call of the harvest fly? there were ears for these sounds in greece long ago, as anacreon's ode will show. " we pronounce thee happy, cicada, for on the tops of the trees, drinking a little dew, like any king thou singest, for thine are they all, whatever thou seest in the fields, and whatever the woods bear. thou art the friend of the husbandmen, in no respect injuring any one ; and thou art honoured among men, sweet prophet of summer. the muses love thee, and phcebus himself loves thee, and has given thee a shrill song ; age does not wrack thee, thou skilful, earthborn, song-loving, unsuffering, bloodless one ; almost thou art like the gods. " in the autumn days, the creaking of crickets is heard at noon over au the land, and as in summer 174 selections ekom thoreau they are heard chiefly at nightfall, so then by their incessant chirp they usher in the evening of the year. nor can all the vanities that vex the world alter one whit the measure that night has chosen. every pulse beat is in exact time with the cricket's chant and the tickings of the deathwatch in the wall. alternate with these if you can. about two hundred and eighty birds either reside permanently in the state, or spend the summer only, or make us a passing visit. those which spend the winter with us have obtained our warmest sympathy. the nut-hatch and chicadee flitting in company through the dells of the wood, the one harshly scolding at the intruder, the other with a faint lisping note enticing him on ; the jay screaming in the orchard ; the crow cawing in unison with the storm ; the partridge, like a russet link extended over from autumn to spring, preserving unbroken the chain of summers ; the hawk with warrior-like firmness abiding the blasts of winter ; the robin ^ and lark lurking by warm springs in the woods ; the familiar snow-bird culling a few seeds in the garden, or a few crumbs in the yard; and occasionally the shrike, with heedless and unfrozen melody bringing back summer again ; — his steady sails he never furls at any time o' year, and perching now on winter's curls, he whistles in his ear. ^ a white robin and a white quail have occasionally been seen. it is mentioned in audubon as remarkable that the nest of a robin should be found on the ground ; but this bird seems to be less particular than most in the choice of a building spot. i have seen natural hlstofiy of massachusetts 175 as the spring advances, and the ice is melting in the river, our earliest and straggling visitors make their appearance. again does the old teian poet sing, as well for new england as for greece, in the return of spring " behold how, spring appearing, the graces send forth roses ; behold, how the wave of the sea is made smooth hy the calm ; behold, how the dnck dives ; behold, how the crane travels ; and titan shines constantly bright. the shadows of the clouds are moving ; the works of man shine ; the earth puts forth fruits ; the fruit of the olive puts forth. the cup of bacchus is crowned, along the leaves, along the branches. the fruit, bending them down, flourishes." the ducks alight at this season in the still water, in company with the gulls, which do not fail to im prove an east wind to visit our meadows, and swim about by twos and threes, pluming themselves, and diving to peck at the root of the lily, and the cran berries which the frost has not loosened. the first flock of geese is seen beating to north, in long harrows and waving lines; the gingle of the song-sparrow salutes us from the shrubs and fences ; the plaintive its nest placed under the thatched roof of a deserted barn, and in one instance, where the adjacent country was nearly destitute of trees, together with two of the phcebe, upon the end of a board in the loft of a saw-mill, but a few feet from the saw, which vibrated several inches with the motion of the machinery [thoreau's note]. 176 selections from thorbau note of the lark comes clear and sweet from the meadow ; and the bluebird, like an azure ray, glances past us in our walk. the fish-hawk, too, is occasion ally seen at this season sailing majestically over the water, and he who has once observed it will not soon forget the majesty of its flight. it sails the air like a ship of the line, worthy to struggle with the elements, falling back from time to time like a ship on its beam ends, and holding its talons up as if ready for the arrows, in the attitude of the national bird. it is a great presence, as of the master of river and forest. its eye would not quail before the owner of the soil, but make him feel like an intruder on its domains. and then its retreat, sailing so steadily away, is a kind of advance. i have by me one of a pair of ospreys, which have for some years fished in this vicinity, shot by a neighbouring pond, measuring more than two feet in length, and six in the stretch of its wings. nuttall mentions that "the ancients, par ticularly aristotle, pretended that the ospreys taught their young to gaze at the sun, and those who were unable to do so were destroyed. linnseus even believed, on ancient authority, that one of the feet of this bird had all the toes divided, while the other was partly webbed, so that it could swim with one foot, and grasp a fish with the other." but that educated eye is now dim, and those talons are nerve less. its shrill scream seems yet to linger in its throat, and the roar of the sea in its wings. there is the tyranny of jove in its claws, and his wrath in the erectile feathers of the head and neck. it re natural histoey of massachusetts 177 minds me of the argonautic expedition, and would inspire the diillest to take flight over parnassus. the booming of the bittern, described by gold smith and nuttall, is frequently heard in our fens, in the morning and evening, sounding like a pump, or the chopping of wood in a frosty morning in some distant farm-yard. the manner in which this sound is produced i have not seen anywhere described. on one occasion, the bird has been seen by one of my neighbours to thrust its bill into the water, and suck up as much as it could hold, then raising its head, it pumped it out again with four or five heaves of the neck, throwing it two or three feet, and making the sound each time. at length the summer's eternity is ushered in by the cackle of the flicker among the oaks on the hill side, and a new dynasty begins with calm security. in may and june the woodland quire is in full tune, and given the immense spaces of hollow air, and this curious human ear, one does not see how the void could be better filled. each summer sound is a summer round. as the season advances, and those birds which make us but a passing visit depart, the woods become silent again, and but few feathers ruffle the drowsy air. but the solitary rambler may still find a response and expression for every mood in the depths of the wood. n 178 selections feom thoreau sometimes i hear the veery's ' clarion, or brazen trump of the impatient jay, and in secluded woods the chicadee doles out her scanty notes, which sing the praise of heroes, and set forth the loveliness of virtue evermore. the phcbbe still sings in harmony with the sultry weather by the brink of the pond, nor are the de sultory hours of noon in the midst of the village without their minstrel. upon the lofty elm-tree sprays the vireo rings the changes sweet, during the trivial summer days, striving to lift our thoughts above the street. with the autumn begins in some measure a new spring. the plover is heard whistling high in the air over the dry pastures, the finches flit from tree to tree, the bobolinks and flickers fly in flocks, and the goldfinch rides on the earliest blast, like a winged hyla peeping amid the rustle of the leaves. the crows, too, begin now to congregate ; you may stand and count them as they fly low and straggling over the landscape, singly or by twos and threes, at in tervals of half a mile, until a hundred have passed. i have seen it suggested somewhere that the crow ^ this bird, which is so well described by nuttall, but is apparently unknown by the author of the report, is one of the most common in the woods in this vicinity, and in cambridge i have heard the college yard ring with its trill. the boys call it yorrick, from the sound of its querulous and chiding note, as it flits near the traveller through the underwood. the cowbird's egg is occasionally found in its nest, as mentioned by audubon [thoreau's note]. natural history of massachusetts 179 was brought to this country by the white man ; but i shall as soon believe that the white man planted these pines and hemlocks. he is no spaniel to follow our steps ; but rather flits about the clearings like the dusky spirit of the indian, reminding me oftener of philip and powhatan, than of winthrop and smith. he is a relic of the dark ages. by just so slight, by just so lasting a tenure does superstition hold the world ever; there is the rook in england, and the crow in new england. thou dusky spirit of the wood, bird of an ancient brood, flitting thy lonely way, a meteor in the summer's day. from wood to wood, from hill to hill, low over forest, field, and rill, what wouldst thou say ? why shouldst thou haunt the day ? what makes thy melancholy float ? what bravery inspires thy throat. and bears thee up above the clouds, over desponding human crowds, which far below lay thy haunts low ? the late walker or sailor, in the october evenings, may hear the murmurings of the snipe, circling over the meadows, the most spirit-like sound in nature; and still later in the autumn, when the frosts have tinged the leaves, a solitary loon pays a visit to our retired ponds, where he may lurk undisturbed till the season of moulting is passed, making the woods ring with his wild laughter. this bird, the great northern diver, well deserves its name; for when 180 selections from thoeeau pursued with a boat, it will dive, and swim like a fish under water, for sixty rods or more, as fast as a boat can be paddled, and its pursuer, if he would discover his game again, must put his ear to the surface to hear where it comes up. when it comes to the surface, it throws the water off with one shake of its wings, and calmly swims about until again disturbed. these are the sights and sounds which reach our senses oftenest during the year. but sometimes one hears a quite new note, which has for background other carolinas and mexicos than the books describe, and learns that his ornithology has done him no service. it appears from the beport that there are about forty quadrupeds belonging to the state, and among these one is glad to hear of a few bears, wolves, lynxes, and wildcats. when our river overflows its banks in the spring, the wind from the meadows is laden with a strong scent of musk, and by its freshness advertises me of an unexplored wildness. those backwoods are not far off then. i am affected by the sight of the cabins of the musk-rat, made of mud and grass, and raised three or four feet along the river, as when i read of the barrows of asia. the musk-rat is the beaver of the settled states. their number has even increased within a few years in this vicinity. among the rivers which empty into the merrimack, the concord is known to the boatmen as a dead stream. the indians are said to have called it musketaquid, or natural history of massachusetts 181 prairie river. its current being much more sluggish, and its water more muddy than the rest, it abounds more in fish and game of every kind. according to the history of the town, " the fur-trade was here once very important. as early as 1641, a company was formed in the colony, of which major willard of concord was superintendent, and had the exclusive right to trade with the indians in furs and other articles ; and for this right they were obliged to pay into the public treasury one twentieth of all the furs they obtained." there are trappers in our midst still, as well as on the streams of the far west, who night and morning go the round of their traps, with out fear of the indian. one of these takes from one hundred and fifty to two hundred musk-rats in a year, and even thirty-six have been shot by one man in a day. their fur, which is not nearly as valuable as formerly, is in good condition in the winter and spring only ; and upon the breaking up of the ice, when they are driven out of their holes by the water, the greatest number is shot from boats, either swim ming or resting on their stools, or slight supports of grass and reeds, by the side of the stream. though they exhibit considerable cunning at other times, they are easily taken in a trap, which has only to be placed in their holes, or wherever they frequent, without any bait being used, though it is sometimes rubbed with their musk. in the winter the hunter cuts holes in the ice, and shoots them when they come to the surface. their burrows are usually in the high banks of the river, with the entrance under 182 selections from thoeeau water, and rising within to above the level of high water. sometimes their nests, composed of dried meadow grass and flags, may be discovered where the bank is low and spongy, by the yielding of the ground under the feet. they have from three to seven or eight young in the spring. frequently, in the morning or evening, a long ripple is seen in the still water, where a musk-rat is crossing the stream, with only its nose above the surface, and sometimes a green bough in its mouth to build its house with. when it finds itself observed, it will dive and swim five or six rods under water, and at length conceal itself in its hole, or the weeds. it will remain under water for ten minutes at a time, and on one occasion has been seen, when undisturbed, to form an air-bubble under the ice, which contracted and expanded as it breathed at leisure. when it suspects danger on shore, it will stand erect like a squirrel, and survey its neighbourhood for several minutes, without moving. in the fall, if a meadow intervene between their burrows and the stream, they erect cabins of mud and grass, three or four feet high, near its edge. these are not their breeding-places, though young are sometimes found in them in late freshets, but rather their hunting-lodges, to which they resort in the winter with their food, and for shelter. their food consists chiefly of flags and fresh-water muscles, the shells of the latter being left in large quantities around their lodges in the spring. the penobscot indian wears the entire skin of a natueal history of massachusetts 183 musk-rat, with the legs and tail dangling and the head caught under his girdle, for a pouch, into which he puts his iishing-tackle, and essences to scent his traps with. the bear, wolf, lynx, wildcat, deer, beaver, and marten, have disappeared ; the otter is rarely if ever seen here at present ; and the mink is less common than formerly. perhaps of all our untamed quadrupeds, the fox tas obtained the widest and most familiar reputation, from the time of pilpay and ^sop to the present day. his recent tracks still give variety to a winter's walk. i tread in the steps of the fox that has gone before me by some hours, or which perhaps i have started, with such a tiptoe of expectation, as if i were on the trail of the spirit itself which resides in the wood, and expected soon to catch it in its lair. i am curious to know what has determined its graceful curvatures, and how surely they were coincident with the fluctuations of some mind. i know which way a mind wended, what horizon it faced, by the setting of these tracks, and whether it moved slowly or rapidly, by their greater or less intervals and distinctness; for the swiftest step leaves yet a lasting trace. sometimes you will see the trails of many together, and where they have gambolled and gone through a hundred evolutions, which testify to a singular listlessness and leisure in nature. when i see a fox run across the pond on the snow, with the carelessness of freedom, or at intervals trace his course in the sunshine along the ridge of a hill, i 184 selections from thoebau give up to him sun and earth as to their true pro prietor. he does not go in the sun, but it seems to follow him, and there is a visible sympathy between him and it. sometimes, when the snow lies light, and but five or six inches deep, you may give chase and come up with one on foot. in such a case he will show a remarkable presence of mind, choosing only the safest direction, though he may lose ground by it. notwithstanding his fright, he will take no step which is not beautiful. his pace is a sort of leopard canter, as if he were in nowise impeded by the snow, but were husbanding his strength all the while. when the ground is uneven, the course is a series of graceful curves, conforming to the shape of the surface. he runs as though there were not a bone in his back. occasionally dropping his muzzle to the ground for a rod or two, and then tossing his head aloft, when satisfied of his course. when he comes to a declivity, he will put his forefeet together, and slide swiftly down it, shoving the snow before him. he treads so softly that you would hardly hear it from any nearness, and yet with such expres sion that it would not be quite inaudible at any distance. of fishes, seventy-five genera and one hundred and seven species are described in the repmt. the fisherman will be startled to learn that there are but about a dozen kinds in the ponds and streams of any inland town ; and almost nothing is known of their habits. only their names and residence make one nataeal histoky of massachusetts 185 love fishes. i would know even the number of their fin-rays, and how many scales compose the lateral line. i am the wiser in respect to all knowledges, and the better qualified for all fortunes, for knowing that there is a minnow in the brook. methinks i have need even of his sympathy, and to be his fellow in a degree. i have experienced such simple delight in the trivial matters of fishing and sporting, formerly, as might have inspired the muse of homer or shakespeare ; and now, when i turn the pages and ponder the plates of the angler's souvenir, i am fain to exclaim, — ' ' can these things be, and overcome us like a summer's cloud ? " next to nature, it seems as if man's actions were the most natural, they so gently accord with her. the small seines of flax stretched across the shallow and transparent parts of our river, are no more in trusion than the cobweb in the sun. i stay my boat in midcurrent, and look down in the sunny water to see the civil meshes of his nets, and wonder how the blustering people of the town could have done this elvish work. the twine looks like a new river weed, and is to the river as a beautiful memento of man's presence in nature, discovered as silently and delicately as a footprint in the sand. when the ice is covered with snow, i do not suspect the wealth under my feet ; that there is as good as a mine under me wherever i go. how many pickerel are poised on easy fin fathoms below the loaded wain. 186 selections feom thoeeau the revolution of the seasons must be a curious phenomenon to them. at length the sun and wind brush aside their curtain, and they see the heavens again. early in the spring, after the ice has melted, is the time for spearing fish. suddenly the wind shifts from north-east and east to west and south, and every icicle, which has tinkled on the meadow grass so long, trickles down its stem, and seeks its level un erringly with a million comrades. the steam curls up from every roof and fence. i see tlie civil sun drying eartt's tears, her tears of joy, whicli only faster flow. in the brooks is heard the slight grating sound of small cakes of ice, floating with various speed, full of content and promise, and where the water gurgles under a natural bridge, you may hear these hasty rafts hold conversation in an undertone. every riu is a channel for the juices of the meadow. in the ponds the ice cracks with a merry and inspiriting din, and down the larger streams is whirled grating hoarsely, and crashing its way along, which was so lately a highway for the woodman's team and the fox, sometimes with the tracks of the skaters still fresh upon it, and the holes cut for pickerel. town committees anxiously inspect the bridges and cause ways, as if by mere eye-force to intercede with the ice, and save the treasury. the river swolleth more and more, like some sweet influence stealing o'er the passive town ; and for a while natukal mstoky of massachusetts 187 each tussuok makes a tiny isle, where, on some friendly ararat, resteth the weary water-rat. no ripple shows musketaquid, her very current e'en is hid, as deepest souls do calmest rest. when thoughts are swelling in the breast, and she that in the summer's drought doth make a rippung and a rout, sleeps from nahshawtuok to the cliff, unrufsed by a single skiff. but by a thousand distant hills the louder roar a thousand rills, and many a spring which now is dumb, and many a stream with smothered hum. doth swifter well and faster glide. though buried deep beneath the tide. our village shows a rural venice, its brood lagoons where yonder fen is ; as lovely as the bay of naples yon placid cove amid the maples ; and in my neighbour's field of corn i recognise the golden horn. here nature taught from year to year. when only red men came to hear, methinks 'twas in this school of art venice and naples learned their part ; but still their mistress, to my mind, her young disciples leaves behind. the fisherman now repairs and launches his boat. the best time for spearing is at this season, before the weeds have begun to grow, and while the fishes lie in the shallow water, for in summer they prefer the cool depths, and in the autumn they are still more or less concealed by the grass. the first requisite is 188 selections feom thoeeau fuel for your crate ; and for this purpose the roots of the pitch-pine are commonly used, found under decayed stumps, where the trees have been felled eight or ten years. with a crate, or jack, made of iron hoops, to contain your fire, and attached to the bow of your boat about three feet from the water, a fish-spear with seven tines, and fourteen feet long, a large basket, or barrow, to carry your fuel and bring back your fish, and a thick outer garment, you are equipped for a cruise. it should be a warm and still evening ; and then with a fire crackling merrily at the prow, you may launch forth like a cucullo into the night. the dullest soul cannot go upon such an expedition without some of the spirit of adventure ; as if he had stolen the boat of charon and gone down the styx on a midnight expedition into the realms of pluto. and much speculation does this wandering star afibrd to the musing nightwalker, leading him on and on, jack-o'lantern-like, over the meadows ; or, if he is wiser, he amuses himself with imagining what of human life, far in the silent night, is flitting mothlike round its candle. the silent navigator shoves his craft gently over the water, with a smothered pride and sense of benefaction, as if he were the phosphor, or light-bringer, to these dusky realms, or some sister moon, blessing the spaces with her light. the waters, for a rod or two on either hand and several feet in depth, are lit up with more than noonday distinctness, and he enjoys the opportunity which so many have desired, for the roofs of a city are indeed raised, and natdeal history of massachusetts 189 he surveys the midnight economy of the fishes. there they lie in every variety of posture ; some on their back, with their white bellies uppermost, some sus pended in midwater, some sculling gently along with a dreamy motion of the fins, and others quite active and wide-awake, — a scene not unlike what the human city would present. occasionally he will encounter a turtle selecting the choicest morsels, or a musk-rat resting on a tussuck. he may exercise his dexterity, if he sees fit, on the more distant and active fish, or fork the nearer into his boat, as potatoes out of a pot, or even take the sound sleepers with his hands. but these last accomplishments he will soon learn to dispense with, distinguishing the real object of his pursuit, and find compensation in the beauty and never-ending novelty of his position. the pines growing down to the water's edge will show newly as in the glare of a conflagration ; and as he floats under the willows with his light, the song-sparrow will often wake on her perch, and sing that strain at midnight, which she had meditated for the morning. and when he has done, he may have to steer his way home through the dark by the north star, and he will feel himself some degrees nearer to it for having lost his way on the earth. the fishes commonly taken in this way are pickerel, suckers, perch, eels, pouts, breams, and shiners, — from thirty to sixty weight in a night. some are hard to be recognised in the unnatural light, especially the perch, which, his dark bands being exaggerated, acquires a ferocious aspect. the number of these 190 selections from thokeau transverse bands, which the report states to be seven, is, however, very variable, for in some of our ponds they have nine and ten even. it appears that we have eight kinds of tortoises, twelve snakes, — but one of which is venomous, — nine frogs and toads, nine salamanders, and one lizard, for our neighbours. i am particularly attracted by the motions of the serpent tribe. they make our hands and feet, the wings of the bird, and the fins of the fish seem very superfluous, as if nature had only indulged her fancy in making them. the black snake will dart into a bush when pursued, and circle round and round with an easy and graceful motion, amid the thin and bare twigs, five or six feet from the ground, as a bird fiits from bough to bough, or hang in festoons between the forks. elasticity and flesdbleness in the simpler forms of animal life are equivalent to a complex system of limbs in the higher ; and we have only to be as wise and wuy as the serpent, to perform as difficult feats without the vulgar assistance of hands and feet. in may, the snapping tm:\l&,emysau'msserpentina,\s, frequently taken on the meadows and in the river. the fisherman, taking sight over the calm surface, discovers its snout projecting above the water, at the distance of many rods, and easily secures his prey through its unwillingness to disturb the water by swimming hastily away, for, gradually drawing its head under, it remains resting on some limb or clump natural history of massachusetts 191 of grass. its eggs, which are buried at a distance from the water, in some soft place, as a pigeon-bed, are frequently devoured by the skunk. it will catch fish by daylight, as a toad catches flies, and is said to emit a transparent fluid from its mouth to attract them. nature has taken more care than the fondest parent for the education and refinement of her children. consider the silent influence which flowers exert, no less upon the ditcher in the meadow than the lady in the bower. when i walk in the woods, i am reminded that a wise purveyor has been there before me ; my most delicate experience is typified there. i am struck with the pleasing friendships and unanimities of nature, as when the lichen on the trees takes the form of their leaves. in the most stupendous scenes you will see delicate and fragile features, as slight wreaths of vapour, dewlines, feathery sprays, which suggest a high refinement, a noble blood and breeding, as it were. it is not hard to account for elves and fairies ; they represent this light grace, this ethereal gentility. bring a spray from the wood, or a crystal from the brook, and place it on your mantel, and your household orna ments will seem plebeian beside its nobler fashion and bearing. it will wave superior there, as if used to a more refined and polished circle. it has a salute and a response to all your enthusiasm and heroism. in the winter, i stop short in the path to admire how the trees grow up without forethought, regardless of the time and circumstances. they do not wait as man does, but now is the golden age of the sapling. 192 selections from thoeeau earth, air, sun, and rain, are occasion enough ; they were no better in primeval centuries. the " winter of their discontent " never comes. witness the buds of the native poplar standing gayly out to the frost on the sides of its bare switches. they express a naked confidence. with cheerful heart one could be a sojourner in the wilderness, if he were sure to find there the catkins of the willow or the alder. when i read of them in the accounts of northern adven turers, by baffin's bay or mackenzie's river, i see how even there too i could dwell. they are our little vegetable redeemers. methinks our virtue will hold out till they come again. they are worthy to have had a greater than minerva or ceres for their inventor. who was the benignant goddess that bestowed them on mankind 1 nature is mythical and mystical always, and works with the licence and extravagance of genius. she has her luxurious and florid style as well as art. having a pilgrim's cup to make, she gives to the whole, stem, bowl, handle, and nose, some fantastic shape, as if it were to be the car of some fabulous marine deity, a nereus or triton. in the winter, the botanist needs not confine him self to his books and herbarium, and give over his out-door pursuits, but may study a new department of vegetable physiology, what may be called crystal line botany, then. the winter of 1837 was unusu ally favourable for this. in december of that year, the genius of vegetation seemed to hover by night over its summer haunts with unusual persistency. natueal history of massachusetts 193 such a hoar-frost, as is very uncommon here or any where, and whose full effects can never be witnessed after sunrise, occurred several times. as i went forth early on a still and frosty morning, the trees looked like airy creatures of darkness caught napping ; on this side huddled together with their gray hairs streaming in a secluded valley, which the sun had not penetrated ; on that hurrying off in indian file along some watercourse, while the shrubs and grasses, like elves and fairies of the night, sought to hide their diminished heads in the snow. the river, viewed from the high bank, appeared of a yellowish green colour, though all the landscape was white. every tree, shrub, and spire of grass, that could raise its head above the snow, was covered with a dense ice foliage, answering, as it were, leaf for leaf to its summer dress. even the fences had put forth leaves in the night. the centre, diverging, and more minute fibres were perfectly distinct, and the edges regularly indented. these leaves were on the side of the twig or stubble opposite to the sun, meeting it for the most part at right angles, and there were others standing out at all possible angles upon these and upon one another, with no twig or stubble supporting them. when the first rays of the sun slanted over the scene, the grasses seemed hung with innumerable jewels, which jingle^ merrily as they were brushed by the foot of the traveller, and reflected all the hues of the rainbow as he moved from side to side. it struck me that these ghost leaves, and the green ones whose forms they assume, were the creatures of but 194 selections from thoeeau one law; that in obedience to the same law the vegetable juices swell gradually into the perfect leaf, on the one hand, and the crystalline particles troop to their standard in the same order, on the other. as if the material were indifferent, but the law one and invariable, and every plant in the spring but pushed up into and filled a permanent and eternal mould, which, summer and winter for ever, is waiting to be filled. this foliate structure is common to the coral and the plumage of birds, and to how large a part of animate and inanimate nature. the same independ ence of law on matter is observable in many other instances, as in the natural rhymes, when some animal form, colour, or odour, has its counterpart in some vegetable. as, indeed, all rhymes imply an eternal melody, independent of any particular sense. as confirmation of the fact, that vegetation is but a kind of crystallisation, every one may observe how, upon the edge of the melting frost on the window, the needle-shaped particles are bundled together so as to resemble fields waving \vith grain, or shocks rising here and there from the stubble; on one side the vegetation of the torrid zone, high-towering palms and wide-spread banyans, such as are seen in pictures of oriental scenery ; on the other, arctic pines stiff frozen, with downcast branches. vegetation has been made the type of all growth ; but as in crystals the law is more obvious, their material being more simple, and for the most part natural history of massachusetts 195 more transient and fleeting, would it not be as philo sophical as convenient to consider all growth, all filling up within the limits of nature, but a crystallisa tion more or less rapid 1 on this occasion, in the side of the high bank of the river, wherever the water or other cause had formed a cavity, its throat and outer edge, like the entrance to a citadel, bristled with a glistening ice armour. in one place you might see minute ostrich feathers, which seemed the waving plumes of the warriors filing into the fortress ; in another, the glancing, fan-shaped banners of the lilliputian host ; and in another, the needle-shaped particles collected into bundles, resembling the plumes of the pine, might pass for a phalanx of spears. from the under side of the ice in the brooks, where there was a thicker ice below, depended a mass of crystallisation, four or five inches deep, in the form of prisms, with their lower ends open, which, when the ice was laid on its smooth side, resembled the roofs and steeples of a gothic city, or the vessels of a crowded haven under a press of canvas. the very mud in the road, where the ice had melted, was crystallised with deep recti linear fissures, and the crystalline masses in the sides of the ruts resembled exactly asbestos in the disposi tion of their needles. around the roots of the stubble and flower-stalks, the frost was gathered into the form of irregular conical shells, or fairy rings. in some places the ice-crystals were lying upon granite rocks, directly over crystals of quartz, the frost-work of a longer night, crystals of a longer period, but to 196 selections feom thoeeau some eye unprejudiced by the short term of human life, melting as fast as the former. in the report on the invertebrate animals, this singular fact is recorded, which teaches us to put a new value on time and space. "the distribution of the marine shells is well worthy of notice as a geologi cal fact. cape cod, the right arm of the common wealth, reaches out into the ocean, some fifty or sixty miles. it is nowhere many miles wide; but this narrow point of land has hitherto proved a barrier to the migrations of many species of mouusca. several genera and numerous species, which are separated by the intervention of only a few miles of land, are effectually prevented from mingling by the cape, and do not pass from one side to the other. , ... of the one hundred and ninety-seven marine species, eighty-three do not pass to the south shore, and fifty are not found on the north shore of the cape." that common muscle, the unio complanatus, or more properly fluviatilis, left in the spring by the musk-rat upon rocks and stumps, appears to have been an important article of food with the indians. in one place, where they are said to have feasted, they are found in large quantities, at an elevation of thirty feet above the river, iilling the soil to the depth of a foot, and mingled with ashes and indian remains. the works we have placed at the head of our chapter, with as much license as the preacher selects his text, are such as imply more labour than enthusiasm. natukal history of massachusetts 197 the state wanted complete catalogues of its natural riches, with such additional facts merely as would be directly useful. the reports on fishes, keptiles, insects, and in vertebrate animals, however, indicate labour and re search, and have a value independent of the object of the legislature. those on herbaceous plants and birds cannot be of much value, as long as bigelow and nuttall are accessible. they serve but to indicate, with more or less exactness, what species are found in the state. we detect several errors ourselves, and a more prac tised eye would no doubt expand the list. the quadrupeds deserved a more final and in structive report than they have obtained. these volumes deal much in measurements and minute descriptions, not interesting to the general reader, with only here and there a coloured sentence to allure him, like those plants growing in dark forests, which bear only leaves without blossoms. but the ground was comparatively unbroken, and we will not complain of the pioneer, if he raises no flowers with his first crop. let us not underrate the value of a fact ; it will one day flower in a truth. it is astonish ing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. the natural history of man himself is still being gradually written. men are knowing enough after their fashion. every countryman and dairymaid knows that the coats of the fourth stomach of the calf will curdle milk, and what particular mushroom is a safe and 198 selections feom thoreau nutritious diet. you cannot go into any field or wood, but it will seem as if every stone had been turned, and the bark on every tree ripped up. but, after all, it is much easier to discover than to see when the cover is off. it has been well said that " the attitude of inspection is prone." wisdom does not inspect, but behold. we must look a long time before we can see. slow are the beginnings of philo sophy. he has something demoniacal in him, who can discern a law or couple two facts. we can imagine a time when, — " water runs dovm hill," — may have been taught in the schools. the true man of science will know nature better by his finer organisa tion ; he will smell, taste, see, hear, feel, better than other men. his will be a deeper and finer experience. we do not learn by inference and deduction, and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy. it is with science as with ethics, — we cannot know truth by contrivance and method ; the baconian is as false as any other, and with all the helps of machinery and the arts, the most scientific will still be the healthiest and friend liest man, and possess a more perfect indian wisdom. walking [1862] i wish to speak a word for nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil, — to regard man as an in habitant, or a part and parcel of nature, rather than a member of society. i wish to make an extreme statement, if so i may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilisation : the minister and the school-committee, and every one of you will take care of that. i have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of walking, that is, of taldng walks, — who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going a la sainte terre," to the holy land, till the children exclaimed, "there goes a sainteterr er," a saunterer, — a holy-lander. they who never go to the holy land in their walks, as 'w"^ 200 selections feom thoebau they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds ; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as i mean. some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. for this is the secret of successful sauntering. he who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all ; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. but i prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. for every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some peter the hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this holy land from the hands of the infidels. it is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we set out. half the walk is but retracing our steps. we should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return, — prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. if you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again, — if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk. walking 201 to come down to my own experience, my companion and i, for i sometimes have a companion, take pleasure in fancying ourselves knights of a new, or rather an old, order, — not equestrians or chevaliers, not eitters or riders, but walkers, a still more ancient and honourable class, i trust. the chivalric and heroic spirit which once belonged to the eider seems now to reside in, or perchance to have subsided into, the walker, — not the knight, but walker errant. he is a sort of fourth estate, outside of church and state and people. we have felt that we almost alone hereabouts practised this noble art ; though, to tell the truth, at least, if their own assertions are to be received, most of my townsmen would fain walk sometimes, as i do, but they cannot. no wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and independence, which are the capital in this profession. it comes only by the grace of god. it requires a direct dispensation from heaven to become a walker. you must be born into the family of the walkers. ambulator nascitur, non fit. some of my townsmen, it is true, can remember and have described to me some walks which they took ten years ago, in which they were so blessed as to lose themselves for half an hour in the woods ; but i know very well that they have confined themselves to the highway ever since, whatever pretensions they may make to belong to this select class. no doubt they were elevated for a moment as by the remin iscence of a previous state of existence, when even they were foresters and outlaws. 202 selections from thoeeaxj ' ' when he came to grene wode, in a mery mornynge, there he herde the notes small of byrdes mery syngynge. " it is feite gone, sayd robyn, that i was last here ; me lyste a lytell for to shote at the donne dere." i think that i cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless i spend four hours a day at least, — and it is commonly more than that, — sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements. you may safely say, a penny for your thoughts or a thousand pounds. when sometimes i am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs so many of them, — as if the legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon, — i think that they deserve some credit for not having all com mitted suicide long ago. i, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust, and when sometimes i have stolen forth for a walk at the eleventh hour of four o'clock in the afternoon, too late to redeem the day, when the shades of night were already be ginning to be mingled with the daylight, have felt as if i had committed some sin to be atoned for, — i confess that i am astonished at the power of endurance, to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my neighbours who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, ay, and years walking 203 almost together. i know not what manner of stuff they are of, — sitting there now at three o'clock in the afternoon, as if it were three o'clock in the morning. bonaparte may talk of the three-o'clock-in-the-morning courage, but it is nothing to the courage which can sit down cheerfully at this hour in the afternoon over against one's self whom you have known all the morning, to starve out a garrison to whom you are bound by such strong ties of sympathy. i wonder that about this time, or say between four and five o'clock in the afternoon, too late for the morning papers and too early for the evening ones, there is not a general explosion heard up and down the street, scattering a legion of antiquated and house -bred notions and whims to the four winds for an airing, — and so the evil cure itself. how womankind, who are confined to the house still more than men, stand it i do not know ; but i have ground to suspect that most of them do not staiid it at all. when, early in a summer afternoon, we have been shaking the dust of the village from the skirts of our garments, making haste past those houses with purely doric or gothic fronts, which have such an air of repose about them, my companion whispers that probably about these times their occu pants are all gone to bed. then it is that i appreciate the beauty and the glory of architecture, which itself never tiu'ns in, but for ever stands out and erect, keeping watch over the slumberers. no doubt temperament, and, above all, age, have a good deal to do with it. as a man grows older. 204 selections fkom thoeeau his ability to sit still and follow indoor occupations increases. he grows vespertinal in his habits as the evening of life approaches, till at last he comes forth only just before sundown, and gets all the walk that he requires in half an hour. but the walking of which i speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours, — as the swinging of dumb-bells or chairs ; but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day. if you would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life. think of a man's swinging dumb-bells for his health, when those springs are bubbling up in far-off pastures unsought by him ! moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking. when a traveller asked wordsworth's servant to show him her master's study, she answered, " here is his library, but his study is out of doors." living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce a certain roughness of character, — will cause a thicker cuticle to grow over some of the finer qualities of our nature, as on the face and hands, or as severe manual labour robs the hands of some of their delicacy of touch. so staying in the house, on the other hand, may produce a softness and smoothness, not to say thinness of skin, accompanied by an increased sensibility to certain impressions. perhaps we should be more susceptible to some influences important to our intellectual and moral growth, if the sun had shone and the wind blown on us a little less ; and no doubt it is a nice matter to walking 205 proportion rightly the thick and thin skin. but methinks that is a scurf that will fall off fast enough, — that the natural remedy is to be found in the proportion which the night bears to the day, the winter to the summer, thought to experience. there will be so much the more air and sunshine in our thoughts. the callous palms of the labourer are con versant with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness. that is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus of experience. when we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods : what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall 1 even some sects of philo sophers have felt the necessity of importing the woods to themselves, since they did not go to the woods. "they planted groves and walks of platanes," where they took subdiales ambulationes in porticoes open to the air. of course it is of no use to direct our steps to the woods, if they do not carry us thither. i am alarmed when it happens that i have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. in my afternoon walk i would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society. but it sometimes happens that i cannot easily shake off the village. the thought of some work will run in my head and i am not where my body is, —i am out of my senses. in my walks i would fain return to my senses. what business have i in the woods, if 1 am thinking of something out of the 206 selections feom thoreau woods 1 i suspect myself, and cannot help a shudder, when i find myself so implicated even in what are called good works, — for this may sometimes happen. my vicinity affords many good walks ; and though for so many years i have walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, i have not yet exhausted them. an absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and i can still get this any after noon. two or three hours' walking will carry me to as strange a country as i expect ever to see. a single farmhouse which i had not seen before is some times as good as the dominions of the king of dahomey. there is in fact a sort of harmony dis coverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles' radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. it will never become quite familiar to you. nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called, as the building of houses, and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap. a people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest stand ! i saw the fences half consumed, their ends lost in the middle of the prairie, and some worldly miser with a surveyor look ing after his bounds, while heaven had taken place around him, and he did not see the angels going to and fro, but was looking for an old post-hole in the midst of paradise. i looked again, and saw him standing in the middle of a boggy, stygian fen, walking 207 surrounded by devils, and he had found his bounds without a doubt, three httle stones, where a stake had been driven, and looking nearer, i saw that the prince of darkness was his surveyor. i can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do : first along by the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the wood-side. there are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. from many a hill i can see civilisation and the abodes of man afar. the farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and their burrows. man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and com merce, and manufactures and agriculture, even politics, the most alarming of them all, — i am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape. politics is but a narrow field, and that still narrower highway yonder leads to it. i sometimes direct the traveller thither. if you would go to the political world, follow the great road, — follow that market-man, keep his dust in your eyes, and it will lead you straight to it ; for it, too, has its place merely, and does not occupy all space. i pass from it as from a bean-field into the forest, and it is forgotten. in one half-hour i can walk off to some portion of the earth's surface where a man does not stand from one year's end to another, and there, consequently, politics are not, for they are but as the cigar-smoke of a man. 208 selections from thoeeau at present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. but possibly the day will come when it will be parti tioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only, — when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of god's earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentle man's grounds. to enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoy ment of it. let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come. what is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we will walk 1 i believe that there is a subtile magnetism in nature, which, if we un consciously yield to it, will direct us aright. it is not indifferent to us which way we walk. there is a right way ; but we are very liable from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one. we would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through this actual world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the interior and ideal world ; and sometimes, no doubt, we find it difiicult to choose our direction, because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea. when i go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither i will bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct to decide for me, i find, strange walking 209 and whimsical as it may seem, that i finally and inevitably settle south-west, toward some particular wood or meadow or deserted pasture or hill in that direction. my needle is slow to settle, — varies a few degrees, and does not always point due south-west, it is true, and it has good authority for this variation, hut it always settles between west and south-south west. the future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side. the outline which would bound my walks would be, not a circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits which have been thought to be non returning curves, in this case opening westward, in which my house occupies the place of the sun. i turn round and round irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an hour, until i decide, for a thousandth time, that i will walk into the south-west or west. eastward i go only by force ; but westward i go free. thither no business leads me. it is hard for me to believe that i shall find fair landscapes or sufls.cient wildness and freedom behind the eastern horizon. i am not excited by the prospect of a walk thither ; but i believe that the forest which i see in the western horizon stretches uninterruptedly toward the setting sun, and there are no towns nor cities in it of enough consequence to disturb me. let me live where i will, on this side is the city, on that the wilderness, and ever i am leaving the city more and more, and withdrawing into the wilderness. i should not lay so much stress on this fact, if i did not believe that something like this is the prevailing tendency of my 210 selections from thoebatj countrymen. i must walk toward oregon, and not toward europe. and that way the nation is moving, and i may say that mankind progress from east to west. within a few years we have witnessed the phenomenon of a south-eastward migration, in the settlement of australia ; but this affects us as a retro grade movement, and, judging from the moral and physical character of the first generation of australians, has not yet proved a successful experiment. the eastern tartars think that there is nothing west beyond thibet. " the world ends there," say they, "beyond there is nothing but a shoreless sea." it is unmitigated east where they live. we go eastward to realise history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race ; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. the atlantic is a lethean stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity to forget the old world and its institutions. if we do not succeed this time, there is perhaps one more chance for the race left before it arrives on the banks of the styx ; and that is in the lethe of the pacific, which is three times as wide. i know not how significant it is, or how far it is an evidence of singularity, that an individual should thus consent in his pettiest walk with the general movement of the race ; but i know that something akin to the migratory instinct in birds and quadrupeds, — which, in some instances, is known to have affected the squirrel tribe, impelling them to a general and mysterious movement, in which they were seen, say walking 211 sombj crossing the broadest rivers, each on its par ticular chip, with its tail raised for a sail, and bridging narrower streams with their dead,— that something like the fwror which aflfects the domestic cattle in the spring, and which is referred to a worm in their tails, — affects both nations and individuals, either perennially or from time to time. not a flock of wild geese cackles over our town, but it to some extent unsettles the value of real estate here, and, if i were a broker, i should probably take that disturb ance into account. " than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages, and palmeres for to seken sti-ange strondes." every sunset which i witness inspires me with the desire to go to a west as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down. he appears to migrate westward daily, and tempt us to follow him. he is the great western pioneer whom the nations follow. we dream all night of those mountain-ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapour only, which were last gilded by his rays. the island of atlantis, and the islands and gardens of the hesperides, a sort of terrestrial paradise, appear to have been the great west of the ancients, enveloped in mystery and poetry. who has not seen in imagination, when looking into the sunset sky, the gardens of the hesperides, and the foundation of all those fables? columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before. he obeyed it, and found a new 212 selections from thoebau world for castile and leon. the herd of men in those days scented fresh pastures from afar. " and now the sun had stretched out all the hlus, and now was dropped into the western bay ; at last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue ; to-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new." where on the globe can there be found an area of equal extent with that occupied by the bulk of our states, so fertile and so rich and varied in its produc tions, and at the same time so habitable by the european, as this is ? michaux, who knew but part of them, says that "the species of large trees are much more numerous in north america than in europe ; in the united states there are more than one hundred and forty species that exceed thirty feet in height; in france there are but thirty that attain this size." later botanists more than confirm his observations. humboldt came to america to realise his youthful dreams of a tropical vegetation, and he beheld it in its greatest perfection in the primitive forests of the amazon, the most gigantic wilderness on the earth, which he has so eloquently described. the geographer guyot, himself a european, goes further, — further than i am ready to fouow him ; yet not when he says, — "as the plant is made for the animal, as the vegetable world is made for the animal world, america is made for the man of the old world. . . . the man of the old world sets out upon his way. leaving the highlands of asia, he descends from station to station towards europe. each of his steps is marked by a new civilisation superior to walking 213 the preceding, by a greater power of development. arrived at the atlantic, he pauses on the shore of this unknown ocean, the bounds of which he knows not, and turns upon his footprints for an instant." "when he has exhausted the rich soil of europe, and reinvigorated himself, " then recommences his adven turous career westward as in the earliest ages.'' so far guyot. from this western impulse coming in contact with the barrier of the atlantic sprang the commerce and enterprise of modern times. the younger michaux, in his travels west of the aueghanies in 1802, says that the common inquiry in the newly settled west was, " ' from what part of the world have you come"!' as if these vast and fertile regions would naturally be the place of meeting and common country of all the inhabitants of the globe." to use an obsolete latin word, i might say, ex oriente iwx, ; ex occidente frux. from the east light ; from the west fruit. the west of which i speak is but another name for the wild; and what i have been preparing to say is, that in wildness is the preservation of the world. every tree sends its fibres forth in search of the wild. the cities import it at any price. men plough and sail for it. from the forest and wilder ness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. our ancestors were savages. the story of eomulus and remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaning less fable. the founders of every state which has 214 selections feom thoreau risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigour from a similar wild source. it was because the children of the empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the northern forests who were. i believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows. we require an infusion of hemlock-spruce or arbor-vitse in our tea. there is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and from mere gluttony. the hottentots eagerly devour the marrow of the koodoo and other ante lopes raw, as a matter of course. some of our northern indians eat raw the marrow of the arctic reindeer, as well as various other parts, including the summits of the antlers, as long as they are soft. and herein, perchance, they have stolen a march on the cooks of paris. they get what usually goes to feed the fire. this is probably better than stall-fed beef and slaughter-house pork to make a man of. give me a wildness whose glance no civilisation can endure, — as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos devoured raw. there are some intervals which border the strain of the wood-thrush, to which i would migrate, — wild lands where no settler has squatted; to which, methinks, i am already acclimated. the african hunter cummings tells us that the skin of the eland, as well as that of most other ante lopes just killed, emits the most delicious perfume of trees and grass. i would have every man so much like a wild antelope, so much a part and parcel of walking 215 nature, that his very person should thus sweetly advertise our senses of his presence, and remind us of those parts of nature which he most haunts. i feel no disposition to be satirical, when the trapper's coat emits the odour of musquash even ; it is a sweeter scent to me than that which commonly exhales from the merchant's or the scholar's garments. when i go into their wardrobes and handle their vestments, i am reminded of no grassy plains and flowery meads which they have frequented, but of dusty merchants' exchanges and libraries rather. a tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a fitter colour than white for a man, — a denizen of the woods. "the pale white man ! " i do not wonder that the african pitied him. darwin the naturalist says, "a white man bathing by the side of a tahitian was like a plant bleached by the gardener's art, compared with a fine, dark green one, growing vigorously in the open fields." ben jonson exclaims, — • " how near to good is what is fair!" so i would say, — how near to good is what is wild ! life consists with wildness. the most alive is the wildest. not yet subdued to man, its presence re freshes him. one who pressed forward incessantly and never rested from his labours, who grew fast and made infinite demands on life, would always find himself in a new country or wilderness, and surrounded 216 selections feom thoeeatj by the raw material of life. he would be climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest-trees. hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps. when, formerly, i have analysed my partiality for some farm which i had contemplated purchasing, i have frequently found that i was attracted solely by a few square rods of impermeable and unfathomable bog, — a natural sink in one corner of it. that was the jewel which dazzled me. i derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village. there are no richer parterres to my eyes than the dense beds of dwarf andromeda (cassandra calyculata) which cover these tender places on the earth's surface. botany cannot go further than tell me the names of the shrubs which grow there, — the high -blueberry, panicled andromeda, lamb-kiu, azalea, and rhodora, — all standing in the quaking sphagnum. i often think that i should like to have my house front on this mass of dull red bushes, omitting other flower plots and borders, transplanted spruce and trim box, even gravelled walks, — to have this fertile spot under my windows, not a few imported barrow-fuus of soil only to cover the sand which was thrown out in digging the cellar. why not put my house, my parlour, behind this plot, instead of behind that meagre assemblage of curiosities, that poor apology for a nature and art, which i call my front-yard ? it is an effort to clear up and make a decent appearance walking 217 when the carpenter and mason have departed, though done as much for the passer-by as the dweller within. the most tasteful front -yard fence was never an agreeable object of study to me ; the most elaborate ornaments, acorn -tops, or what not, soon wearied and disgusted me. bring your sills up to the very edge of the swamp, then (though it may not be the best place for a dry cellar), so that there be no access on that side to citizens. front-yards are not made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you could go in the back way. yes, though, you may think me perverse, if it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighbourhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived, or else of a dismal swamp, i should cer tainly decide for the swamp. how vain, then, have been all your labours, citizens, for me ! my spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness. give me the ocean, the desert or the wilderness ! in the desert, pure air and solitude compensate for want of moisture and fertility. the traveller burton says of it, — " your morale improves ; you become frank and cordial, hospitable and single minded. ... in the desert, spirituous liquors excite only disgust. there is a keen enjoyment in a mere animal existence." they who have been travelling long on the steppes of tartary say, — " on reentering cultivated lands, the agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of civilisation oppressed and suffocated us ; the air seemed to fail us, and we felt every moment as if about to die of asphyxia." when i would recreate 218 selections feom thoeeatj myself, i seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable, and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp. i enter a swamp as a sacred place, — a sandwn sa/nctorum. there is the strength, the marrow of nature. the wild -wood covers the virgin mould, — and the same soil is good for men and for trees. a man's health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck. there are the strong meats on which he feeds. a town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it. a township where one primitive forest waves above while another primitive forest rots below, — such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. in such a soil grew homer and confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the reformer eating locusts and wild honey. to preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest for them to dwell in or resort to. so it is with man. a hundred years ago they sold bark in our streets peeled from our own woods. in the very aspect of those primitive and rugged trees, there was, methinks, a tanning principle which hardened and consolidated the fibres of men's thoughts. ah ! already i shudder for these comparatively de generate days of my native village, when you cannot collect a load of bark of good thickness, — and we no longer produce tar and turpentine. the civilised nations — greece, rome, england — have been sustained by the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. they survive ■walking 219 as long as the soil is not exhausted. alas for human culture ! little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers. there the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous fat, and the philosopher comes down on his marrow bones. it is said to be the task of the american " to work the virgin soil," and that " agriculture here already assumes proportions unknown everywhere else.'' i think that the farmer displaces the indian even be cause he redeems the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in some respects more natural. i was surveying for a man the other day a single straight line one hundred and thirty-two rods long, through a swamp, at whose entrance might have been written the words which dante read over the entrance to the infernal regions, — "leave all hope, ye that enter," — that is, of ever getting out again ; where at one time i saw my employer actually up to his neck and swimming for his life in his property, though it was still winter. he had another similar swamp which i could not survey at all, because it was completely under water, and nevertheless, with regard to a third swamp, which i did survey from a distance, he re marked to me, true to his instincts, that he would not part with it for any consideration, on account of the mud which it contained. and that man intends to put a girdling ditch round the whole in the course of forty months, and so redeem it by the magic of his spade. i refer to him only as the type of a class. 220 selections feom thoeeau the weapons with which we have gained our most important victories, which should be handed down as heirlooms from father to son are not the sword and the lance, but the bush-whack, the turf cutter, the spade, and the bog-hoe, rusted with the blood of many a meadow, and begrimed with the dust of many a hard-fought field. the very winds blew the indian's corn-field into the meadow, and pointed out the way which he had not the skill to follow. he had no better implement with which to intrench himself in the land than a clam-sheu. but the farmer is armed with plough and spade. in literature it is only the wild that attracts us. dulness is but another name for tameness. it is the uncivilised free and wild thinking in hamlet and the iliad, in all the scriptures and mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us. as the wild duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild — the mallard — thought, which 'mid falling dews wings its way above the fens. a truly good book is something as natural, and as un expectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of the west or in the jungles of the east. genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning's flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself, — and not a taper lighted at the hearth-stone of the race, which pales before the light of common day. english literature, from the days of the minstrels to the lake poets, — chaucer and spenser and milton, and even shakespeare, included — breathes no quite walking 221 fresh and in this sense wild strain. it is an essentially tame and civilised literature, reflecting greece and eome. her wilderness is a green wood, — her wild man a eobin hood. there is plenty of genial love of nature, but not so much of nature herself. her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not when the wild man in her, became extinct. the science of humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing. the poet to-day, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over homer. where is the literature which gives expression to nature 1 he would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him ; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved ; who derived his words as often as he used them, — transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their roots; whose words were so true and fresh and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half-smothered between two musty leaves in a library, — ay, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sym pathy with surrounding nature. i do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning for the wild. approached from this side, the best poetry is tame. i do not know where to find in any literature, ancient or modern, any account which contents me of that nature with which even i am acquainted. you will 222 selections fkom thoeeau perceive that i demand sometliing whicli no augustan nor elizabethan age, which no culture, in short, can give. mythology comes nearer to it than anything. how much more fertile a nature, at least, has grecian mythology its root in than english literature ! mythology is the crop which the old world bore before its soil was exhausted, before the fancy and imagination were affected with blight ; and which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigour is unabated. all other literatures endure only as the elms which overshadow our houses ; but this is like the great dragon-tree of the western isles, as old as mankind, and, whether that does or not, will endure as long ; for the decay of other literatures makes the soil in which it thrives. the west is preparing to add its fables to those of the east. the valleys of the ganges, the nue, and the rhine, having yielded their crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the amazon, the plate, the orinoco, the st. lawrence, and the mississippi will produce. perchance, when, in the course of ages, american liberty has become a fiction of the past, — as it is to some extent a fiction of the present, — the poets of the world will be inspired by american mythology. the wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true, though they may not recommend them selves to the sense which is most common among englishmen and americans to-day. it is not every truth that recommends itself to the common sense. nature has a place for the wild clematis as well as walking 223 for the cabbage. some expressions of truth are reminiscent, — others raerely sensible, as the phrase is, — others prophetic. some forms of disease, even, may prophesy forms of health. the geologist has discovered that the figures of serpents, griffins, flying dragons, and other fanciful embellishments of heraldry, have their prototypes in the forms of fossil species which were extinct before man was created, and hence "indicate a faint and shadowy knowledge of a previous state of organic existence.'' the hindoos dreamed that the earth rested on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent; and though it may be an unimportant coincidence, it will not be out of place here to state, that a fossil tortoise has lately been discovered in asia large enough to support an elephant. i confess that i am partial to these wild fancies, which transcend the order of time and development. they are the sublimest recreation of the intellect. the partridge loves peas, but not those that go with her into the pot. in short, all good things are wild and free. there is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human voice, — take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance,— which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. it is so much of their wildness as i can understand. give me for my friends and neighbours wild men, not tame ones. the wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet. 224 selections feom thoeeau i love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights, — any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigour ; as when my neighbour's cow breaks out of her pasture early in the spring and boldly swims the river, a cold, gray tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. it is the buffalo crossing the mississippi. this exploit confers some dignity on the herd in my eyes, — already dignified. the seeds of instinct are preserved under the thick hides of cattle and horses, like seeds in the bowels of the earth, an indefinite period. any sportiveness in cattle is unexpected. i saw one day a herd of a dozen bullocks and cows running about and frisking in unwieldy sport, like huge rats, even like kittens. they shook their heads, raised their tails, and rushed up and down a hill, and i perceived by their horns, as well as by their activity, their relation to the deer tribe. but, alas ! a sudden loud tfjioa ! would have damped their ardour at once, reduced them from venison to beef, and stiffened their sides and sinews like the locomotive. who but the evil one has cried, " whoa ! " to mankind ? indeed, the life of cattle, like that of many men, is but a sort of locomotiveness ; they move a side at a time, and man, by his machinery, is meeting the horse and the ox half-way. whatever part the whip has touched is thenceforth palsied. who would ever think of a sids of any of the supple cat tribe, as we speak of a side of beef % i rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken walking 225 before they can be made tbe slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still left to sow before they become submissive members of society. undoubtedly, all men are not equally fit subjects for civilisation ; and because the majority, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inherited disposition, this is no reason why the others should have their natures broken that they may be reduced to the same level. men are in the main alike, but they were made several in order that they might be various. if a low use is to be served, one man will do nearly or quite as well as another ; if a high one, individual excellence is to be regarded. any man can stop a hole to keep the wind away, but no other man could serve so rare a use as the author of this illustration did. confucius says, — " the skins of the tiger and the leopard, when they are tanned, are as the skins of the dog and the sheep tanned." but it is not the part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious ; and tanning their skins for shoes is not the best use to which they can be put. when looking over a list of men's names in a foreign language, as of military officers, or of authors who have written on a particular subject, i am re minded once more that there is nothing in a name. the name menschikoff, for instance, has nothing in it to my ears more human than a whisker, and it may belong to a rat. as the names of the poles and russians are to us, so are ours to them. it is as if they had been named by the child's rigmarole, — lery q 226 selections from thoeeau wiery ichery van, tittle-tol-tan. i see in my mind a herd of wild creatures swarming over the earth and to each the herdsman has affixed some barbarous sound in his own dialect. the names of men are of course as cheap and meaningless as bose and tray, the names of dogs. methinksit would be some advantage to philosophy, if men were named merely in the gross, as they are known. it would be necessary only to know the genus and perhaps the race or variety, to know the individual. we are not prepared to believe that every private soldier in a eoman army had a name of his own, — because we have not supposed that he had a character of his own. at present our only true names are nicknames. i knew a boy who, from his peculiar energy, was called "buster" by his playmates, and this rightly supplanted his chris tian name. some travellers tell us that an indian had no name given him at first, but earned it, and his name was his fame ; and among some tribes he acquired a new name with every new exploit. it is pitiful when a man bears a name for convenience merely, who has earned neither name nor fame. i will not allow mere names to make distinctions for me, but still see men in herds for all them. a familiar name cannot make a man less strange to me. it may be given to a savage who retains in secret his own wild title earned in the woods. we have a wild savage in us and a savage name is perchance some where recorded as* ours. i see that my neighbour, who bears the familiar epithet william, or edwin, walking 227 takes it off with his jacket. it does not adhere to him when asleep or in anger, or arouse(j by any passion or inspiration. i seem to hear pronounced by some of his kin at such a time his original wild name in some jaw-breaking or else melodious tongue. here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours. nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard ; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man, — a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely english nobility, a civilisa tion destined to have a speedy limit. in society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. when we should still be growing children, we are already little men. give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil, — not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements and modes of culture only ! many a poor sore-eyed student that i have heard of would grow faster, both intellectually and physic ally, if, instead of sitting up so very late, he honestly slumbered a fool's allowance. there may be an excess even of informing light. niepce, a frenchman, discovered "actinism," that power in the sun's rays which produces a chemical effect, — that granite rocks, and stone structures, and statues of metal, "are all alike destructively acted upon during the hours of sunshine, and, but for pro 228 selections fkom thokeau visions of nature no less wonderful, would soon perish under the delicate touch of the most subtile of the agencies of the universe." but he observed that "those bodies which underwent this change during the daylight possessed the power of restoring them selves to their original conditions during the hours of night, when this excitement was no longer influencing them." hence it has been inferred that " the hours of darkness are as necessary to the inorganic creation as we know night and sleep are to the organic king dom." not even does the moon shine every night, but gives place to darkness. i would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than i would have every acre of earth cultivated : part will be tiuage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serv ing an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay of the vegeta tion which it supports. there are other letters for the child to learn than those which cadmus invented. the spaniards have a good term to express this wild and dusky know ledge, — gramdtica parda, tawny grammar, — a kind of mother-wit derived from that same leopard to which i have referred. we have heard of a society for the diffusion of useful knowledge. it is said that knowledge is power ; and the like. methinks there is equal need of a society for the diffusion of useful ignorance, what we will call beautiful knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense : for what is most of our walking 229 boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit ttat we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance ? what we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance ; ignorance our negative knowledge. by long years of patient industry and reading of the newspapers, — for what are the libraries of science but files of newspapers 'i — a man accumu lates a myriad facts, lays them up in his memory, and then when in some spring of his life he saunters abroad into the great fields of thought, he, as it were, goes to grass like a horse and leaves all his harness behind in the stable. i would say to the society for the diffusion of useful knowledge, sometimes, — go to grass. you have eaten hay long enough. the spring has come with its green crop. the very cows are driven to their country pastures before the end of may ; though i have heard of one unnatural farmer who kept his cow in the barn and fed her on hay all the year round. so, frequently, the society for the diffasion of useful knowledge treats its cattle. a man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful, — while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly. which is the best man to deal with, — he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all. my desire for knowledge is intermittent ; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. the highest that we can attain to is not knowledge, but sympathy 230 selections feom thoeeau with intelligence. i do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we caued knowledge before, — a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philo sophy. it is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. man cannot know in any higher sense than this, any more than he can look serenely and with impunity in the face of sun : 'o9 t\ vosiv ov kezvov vorjaei'i, — " you will not perceive that, as perceiving a particular thing," say the chaldean oracles. there is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which we may obey. we may study the laws of matter at and for our convenience, but a suc cessful life knows no law. it is an unfortunate dis covery certainly, that of a law which binds us where we did not know before that we were bound. live free, child of the mist, — and with respect to know ledge we are all children of the mist. the man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the law -maker. " that is active duty," says the vishnu purana, "which is not for our bondage ; that is knowledge which is for our liberation : all other duty is good only unto weariness ; all other knowledge is only the cleverness of an artist." it is remarkable how few events or crises there are in our histories; how little exercised we have been in our minds; how few experiences we have had. i would fain be assured that i am growing walking 231 apace and rankly, though my very growth disturb this dull equanimity, — though it be with struggle through long, dark muggy nights or seasons of gloom. it would be well, if all our lives were a divine tragedy even, instead of this trivial comedy or farce. dante, bunyan, and others, appear to have been exercised in their minds more than we : they were subjected to a kind of culture such as our district schools and colleges do not contemplate. even mahomet, though many may scream at his name, had a good deal more to live for, ay, and to die for, than they have commonly. when, at rare intervals, some thought visits one, as perchance he is walking on a railroad, then indeed the cars go by without his hearing them. but soon, by some inexorable law, our life goes by and the cars return. " gentle breeze, that wanderest unseen, and bendest the thistles round loira of storms, traveller of the windy glens, why hast thou left my ear so soon ? " while almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society, few are attracted strongly to nature. in their relation to nature men appear to me for the most part, notwithstanding their arts, lower than the animals. it is not often a beautiful relation, as in the case of the animals. how little appreciation of the beauty of the landscape there is among us ! we have to be told that the greeks called the world kotr/(,o9, beauty, or order, but we do not see clearly why they did so, and we esteem it at best only a curious philological fact. 232 selections from thoeeau for my part, i feel that with regard to nature i live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world into which i make occasional and transitional and tran sient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the state into whose territories i seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper. unto a life which i call natural i would gladly follow even a will-o'-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor fire-fly has shown me the causeway to it. nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features. the walker in the familiar fields which stretch around my native town sometimes finds himself in another land than is de scribed in their owners' deeds, as it were in some far away field on the confines of the actual concord, where her jurisdiction ceases, and the idea which the word concord suggests ceases to be suggested. these farms which i have myself surveyed, these bounds which i have set up, appear dimly still as through a mist ; but they have no chemistry to fix them ; they fade from the surface of the glass ; and the picture which the painter painted stands out dimly from beneath. the world with which we are commonly acquainted leaves no trace, and it will have no anniversary. i took a walk on spaulding's farm the other after noon. i saw the setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. its golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble hall. i was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable and shining family had settled there in walking 233 that part of the land called concord, unknown to me, — to whom the sun was servant, — who had not gone into society in the village, — who had not been called on. i saw their park, their pleasure-ground, beyond through the wood, in spaulding's cranberry-meadow. the pines furnished them with gables as they grew. their house was not obvious to vision ; the trees grew through it. i do not know whether i heard the sounds of a suppressed hilarity or not. they seemed to recline on the sunbeams. they have sons and daughters. they are quite well. the farmer's cart path, which leads directly through their hall, does not in the least put them out, — as the muddy bottom of a pool is sometimes seen through the reflected skies. they never heard of spaulding, and do not know that he is their neighbour, — notwithstanding i heard him whistle as he drove his team through the house. nothing can equal the serenity of their lives. their coat of arms is simply a lichen. i saw it painted on the pines and oaks. their attics were in the tops of the trees. they are of no politics. there was no noise of labour. i did hot perceive that they were weaving or spinning. yet i did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum, — as of a distant hive in may, which perchance was the sound of their thinking. they had no idle thoughts, and no one without could see their work, for their industry was not as in knots and excrescences embayed. but i find it difficult to remember them. they fade irrevocably out of my mind even now while i 234 selections from thoeeau speak and endeavour to recall them, and recollect myself. it is only after a long and serious effort to recollect my best thoughts that i become again aware of their cohabitancy. if it were not for such families as this, i think i should move out of concord. we are accustomed to say in new england that few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. our forests furnish no mast for them. so, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste, — sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill, and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on. they no longer build nor breed with us. in some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the mind, cast by the tilings of some thought in its vernal or autumnal migra tion, but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of the thought itself. our winged thoughts are turned to poultry. they no longer soar, and they attain only to a shanghai and cochin-china grandeur. those gra-a-ate thoughts, those gra-a-ate men you hear of ! we hug the earth, — how rarely we mount ! me thinks we might elevate ourselves a little more. we might climb a tree, at least. i found my account in climbing a tree once. it was a tall white pine, on the top of a hill ; and though i got well pitched, i was well paid for it, for i discovered new mountains in the horizon which i had never seen before, — so much more of the earth and the heavens. i might have walking 235 walked about the foot of the tree for threescore years and ten, and yet i certainly should never have seen them. but, above all, i discovered around me, — it was near the end of june, — on the ends of the topmost branches only, a few minute and delicate red cone-like blossoms, the fertile flower of the white pine looking heavenward. i carried straightway to the village the topmost spire, and showed it to stranger jurymen who walked the streets, — for it was court-week, — and to farmers and lumber-dealers and wood-choppers and hunters, and not one had ever seen the like before, but they wondered as at a star dropped down. tell of ancient architects finishing their works on the tops of columns as perfectly as on the lower and more visible parts ! nature has from the first expanded the minute blossoms of the forest only toward the heavens, above men's heads and unobserved by them. we see only the flowers that are under our feet in the meadows. the pines have developed their delicate blossoms on the highest twigs of the wood every summer for ages, as well over the heads of nature's red children as of her white ones ; yet scarcely a farmer or hunter in the land has ever seen them. above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. he is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past. unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barnyard within our horizon, it is belated. that sound commonly reminds us that we are growing rusty and antique in our employments and habits of 236 selections from thoreau thought. his philosophy comes down to a more recent time than ours. there is something suggested by it that is a newer testament, — the gospel according to this moment. he has not fallen astern ; he has got up early and kept up early and to be where he is to be in season, in the foremost rank of time. it is an expression of the health and soundness of nature, a brag for all the world, — healthiness as of a spring burst forth, a new fountain of the muses, to celebrate this last instant of time. where he lives no fugitive slave laws are passed. who has not betrayed his master many times since last he heard that note 1 the merit of this bird's strain is in its freedom from all plaintiveness. the singer can easily move us to tears or to laughter, but where is he who can excite in us a pure morning joy ? when, in doleful dumps, breaking the awful stillness of our wooden sidewalk on a sunday, or, perchance, a watcher in the house of mourning, i hear a cockerel crow far or near, i think to myself, " there is one of us well, at any rate," — and with a sudden gush return to my senses. we had a remarkable sunset one day last november. i was walking in a meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before setting, after a cold gray day, reached a clear stratum in the horizon, and the softest, brightest morning sunlight fell on the dry grass and on the stems of the trees in the opposite horizon and on the leaves of the shrub-oaks on the hill-side, while our shadows stretched long over the meadow eastward, as if we are the only motes in its walking 237 beams. it was such a light as we could not have imagined a moment before, and the air also was so warm and serene that nothing was wanting to make a paradise of that meadow. when we reflected that this was not a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it would happen for ever and ever an infinite number of evenings, and cheer and reassure the latest child that walked there, it was more glorious still. the sun sets on some retired meadow, where no house is visible, with all the glory and splendour that it lavishes on cities, and perchance, as it has never set before, — where there is but a solitary marsh hawk to have his wings gilded by it, or only a mus quash looks out from his cabin, and there is some little black-veined brook in the midst of the marsh, just beginning to meander, winding slowly round a decay ing stump. we walked in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright, i thought i had never bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. the west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman driving us home at evening. so we saunter toward the holy land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bank side in autumn. civil disobedience i heartily accept the motto, — "that government is best which governs least " ; and i should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also i believe, — "that government is best which governs not at all " ; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. government is at best but an expedient ; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. the objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government. the standing army is only an arm of the standing government. "^ the government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it." witness the present mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool ; for, in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure. civil disobedience 239 this american government, — what is it but a tra dition, though a recent one, endeavouring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity 1 it has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his 'will. it is a sort of wooden gun to the people themselves. but it is not the less necessary for this ; for the people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have. governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed on, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage. it is excellent, we must all allow. yet this govern ment never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. it does not keep the country free. it does not settle the west. it does not educate. the character in herent in the american people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not some times got in its way. for government is an ex pedient by which men would fain succeed in letting one another alone ; and, as has been said, when it is most expedient, the governed are most let alone by it. trade and commerce, if they were not made of india-rubber, would never manage to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way ; and, if one were to judge these men wholly by the effects of their actions and not partly by their intentions, they would de serve to be classed and punished with those mis 240 selections feom thoeeait chievous persons who put obstructions on the railroads. but, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, i ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it. after all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule, is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. but a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience? — in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable ? must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator ? why has every man a conscience, then 1 i think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. it is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. the only obligation which i have a right to assume, is to do at any time what i think right, d it is truly enough said, that a corporation has no conscience; but a cor poration of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. law never made men a whit more just ; civil disobedience 241 and, by means of their respect for it, even the well disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. a common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. they have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned ; they are all peaceably inclined. now, what are they 1 men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power f visit the navyyard, and behold a marine, such a man as an american government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts, — a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments, though it may be— " not a drum was heard, not a funeral note, as his corse to the rampart we hurried ; not a soldier discharged his farewell shot o'er the grave where our hero we buried. " the mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. they are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse cmnitatus, etc. in most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense ; but they put themselves on a level k 242 selections from thoeeau with -wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. they have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. others, — as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders, — serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as hkely to serve the devil, without intending it, as god. a very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part ; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it. a wise man wiu only be useful as a man, and will not submit to be "clay," and "stop a hole to keep the wind away," but leave that office to his dust at least : — " i am too mgh-born to be propertied, to be a secondary at control, or useful serving-man and instrument to any sovereign state throughout the world." he who gives himself entirely to his fellow-men appears to them useless and selfish ; but he who gives himself partially to them is pronounced a benefactor and philanthropist. how does it become a man to behave toward this american government to-day 1 i answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. i cannot for an instant recognise that political organ civil disobedience 243 isation as my government which is the slave's govern ment also. all men recognise the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. but almost all say that such is not the case now. but such was the case, they think, in the revolution of '75. if one were to tell me that this was a bad government because it taxed certain foreign commodities brought to its ports, it is most probable that i should not make an ado about it, for i can do without them. all machines have their friction ; and possibly this does enough good to counterbalance the evil. at any rate, it is a great evil to make a stir about it. but when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organised, i say, let us not have such a machine any longer. in other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and con quered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, i think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionise. what makes this duty the more urgent is the fact, that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army. paley, a common authority with many on moral questions, in his chapter on the "duty of submission to civil government," resolves all civil obligation into expediency ; and he proceeds to say, " that so 244 selections feom thoreau long as the interest of the whole society requires it, that is, so long as the established government cannot be resisted or changed without public inconveniency, it is the will of god that the established government be obeyed, and no longer. . . this principle being admitted, the justice of every particular case of resist ance is reduced to a computation of the quantity of the danger and grievance on the one side, and of the probability and expense of redressing it on the other." of this, he says, every man shall judge for himself. but paley appears never to have contemplated those cases to which the rule of expediency does not apply, in which a people, as well as an individual, must do justice, cost what it may. if i have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, i must restore it to him though i drown mysek. this, according to paley, would be inconvenient. but he that would save his life, in such a case, shall lose it. this people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people. in their practice, nations agree with paley; but does any one think that massachusetts does exactly what is right at the present crisis 1 " a drab of state, a cloth-o' -silver slut, to have her train borne up, and her soul trail in the dirt" practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the south, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are civil disobedience 245 not prepared to do justice to the slave and to mexico, cost what it may. i quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, co-operate with, and do the bidding of, those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless. we are accustomed to say, that the mass of men are unprepared ; but improvement is slow, because the few are not materially wiser or better than the many. it is not so important that many should be as good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere ; for that will leaven the whole lump. there are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect -do nothing to put an end to them ; who, esteeming themselves children of washington and franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing ; who even postpone the question of freedom to the question of free-trade, and quietly read the prices-current along with the latest advices from mexico, after dinner, and, it may be, fall asleep over them both. what is the price current of an honest man and patriot to-day? they hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. they will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret. at most, they give only a cheap vote, and a feeble countenance and god-speed, to the right, as it goes by them. there are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man. but it is easier to deal with the 24:6 selections feom thokeau real possessor of a thing than with the temporary guardian of it. all voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions ; and betting naturally accompanies it. the character of the voters is not staked. i cast my vote, per chance, as i think right; but i am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. i am willing to leave it to the majority. its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. it is only expressing to meil feebly your desire that it should prevail. a wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. there is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. when the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. they wiu then be the only slaves. only his vote can hasten the abohtion of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote. i hear of a convention to be held at baltimore, or elsewhere, for the selection of a candidate for the presidency, made up chiefly of editors, and men who are politicians by profession; but i think, what is it to any independent, intelligent, and respectable man what decision they may come to 1 shall we not have the advantage of his wisdom and honesty, nevertheless'? can we not count upon civil disobedience 247 some independent votes? are there not many individuals in the country who do not attend con ventions 1 but no : i find that the respectable man, so called, has immediately drifted from his position, and despairs of his country, when his country has more reason to despair of him. he forthwith adopts one of the candidates thus selected as the only available one, thus proving that he is himself available for any purposes of the demagogue. his vote is of no more worth than that of any un principled foreigner or hireling native, who may have been bought. o for a man who is a man, and, as my neighbour says, has a bone in his back which you cannot pass your hand through ! our statistics are at fault : the population has been returned too large. how many men are there to a square thousand miles in this country ? hardly one. does not america offer any inducement for men to settle here? the american has dwindled into an odd fellow, — one who may be knovm by the development of his organ of gregariousness, and a manifest lack of intellect and cheerful self-reliance ; whose first and chief concern, on coming into the world, is to see that the almshouses are in good repair ; and, before yet he has lawfully donned the virile garb, to collect a fund for the support of the widows and orphans that may be ; who, in short, ventures to live only by the aid of the mutual insur ance company, which has promised to bury him decently. it is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to 248 selections fkom thoreau devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous vs^rong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him ; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. if i devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, i must first see, at least, that i do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders. i must get off him first, that he may pursue his con templations too. see what gross inconsistency is tolerated. i have heard some of my townsmen say, " i should like to have them order me out to help put down an insurrection of the slaves, or to march to mexico ; — see if i would go " ; and yet these very men have each, directly by their allegiance, and so indirectly, at least, by their money, furnished a substitute. the soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war; is applauded by those whose own act and authority he disregards and sets at naught ; as if the state were penitent to that degree that it hired one to scourge it while it sinned, but not to that degree that it left off sinning for a moment. thus, under the name of order and civil government, we are all made at last to pay homage to and support our own meanness. after the first blush of sin comes its indifference ; and from immoral it becomes, as it were, mjimoral, and not quite unnecessary to that life which we have made. the broadest and most prevalent error requires civil disobedience 249 the most disinterested virtue to sustain it. the slight reproach to which the virtue of patriotism is commonly liable, the noble are most likely to incur. those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support, are undoubtedly its most ■ conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform. some are petitioning the state to dissolve the union, to disregard the requisitions of the president. why do they not dissolve it themselves, — the union between them selves, and the state, — and refuse to pay their quota into its treasury ? do not they stand in the same relation to the state, that the state does to the union ? and have not the same reasons prevented the state from resisting the union, which have pre vented them from resisting the state ? how can a man be satisfied to entertain an opinion merely, and enjoy it ? is there any enjoyment in it, if his opinion is that he is aggrieved? if you are cheated out of a single dollar by your neighbour, you do not rest satisfied with knowing that you are cheated, or with saying that you are cheated, or even with petitioning him to pay you your due ; but you take effectual steps at once to obtain the full amount, and see that you are never cheated again. action -from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations ; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with any thing which was. it not only divides states and churches, it divides families ; ay, it divides the 250 selections from thoreau individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine. unjust laws exist : shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavour to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. they think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. but it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. it makes it worse. why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform ? why does it not cherish its wise minority? why does it cry and resist before it is hurt 1 why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have them ? why does it always crucify christ, and ex communicate copernicus and luther, and pronounce washington and franklin rebels ? one would think, that a deliberate and practical denial of its authority was the only offence never contemplated by government; else, why has it not assigned its definite, its suitable and proportionate penalty ? if a man who has no property refuses but once to earn nine shillings for the state, he is put in prison for a period unlimited by any law that i know, and determined only by the discretion of those who placed him there ; but if he should steal ninety times nine shillings from the state, he is soon per mitted to go at large again. civil disobedience 251 if the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go : per chance it will wear smooth, — certainly the machine will wear out. if the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil ; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, i say, break the law. let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. what i have to do is to see, at any rate, that i do not lend myself to the wrong which i condemn. as for adopting the ways which the state has provided for remedying the evil, i know not of such ways. they take too much time, and a man's life will be gone. i have other affairs to attend to. i came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad. a man has not everything to do, but something ; and because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong. it is not my business to be petitioning the governor or the legis lature any more than it is theirs to petition me ; and, if they should not hear my petition, what should i do then ? but in this case the state has provided no way: its very constitution is the evil. this may seem to be harsh and stubborn and unconciliatory ; but it is to treat with the utmost kindness and con sideration the only spirit that can appreciate or deserves it. so is all change for the better, like birth and death, which convulse the body. 252 selections from thoeeau i do not hesitate to say, that those who call them selves abolitionists should at once effectually with draw their support, both in person and property, from the government of massachusetts, and not wait till they constitute a majority of one, before they suffer the right to prevail through them. i think that it is enough if they have god on their side, without waiting for that other one. moreover, any man more right than his neighbours constitutes a majority of one already. i meet this american government, or its repre sentative, the state government, directly, and face to face, once a year — no more — in the person of its tax gatherer ; this is the only mode in which a man situated as i am necessarily meets it ; and it then says distinctly, eecognise me ; and the simplest, the most effectual, and, in the present posture of affairs, the indispensablest mode of treating with it on this head, of expressing your little satisfaction with and love for it, is to deny it then. my civil neighbour, the tax-gatherer, is the very man i have to deal with, — for it is, after all, with men and not with parch ment that i quarrel, — and he has voluntarily chosen to be an agent of the government. how shall he ever know well what he is and does as an officer of the government, or as a man, until he is obliged to consider whether he shall treat me, his neighbour, for whom he has respect, as a neighbour and well-disposed man, or as a maniac and disturber of the peace, and see if he can get over this obstruction to his neigh bourliness without a ruder and more impetuous civil disobedience 253 thought or speech corresponding with his action. i know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom i could name, — if ten honest men only, — ay, if one honest man, in this state of massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in america. for it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be : what is once well done is done foij ever. but we love better to talk about it : that we say is our mission. reform keeps many scores of newspapers in its service, but not one man. if my esteemed neighbour, the state's am bassador, who will devote his days to the settlement of the question of human rights in the council chamber, instead of being threatened with the prisons of carolina, were to sit down the prisoner of massachusetts, that state which is so anxious to foist the sin of slavery upon her sister, — though at present she can discover only an act of inhospitality to be the ground of a quarrel with her, — the legislature would not wholly waive the subject the following winter. under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. the proper place to-day, the only place which massachu setts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the state by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. it is there that the fugitive slave, and the mexican prisoner on 254 selections from thoeeau parole, and the indian come to plead the wrongs of his race, should find them ; on that separate, but more free and honourable ground, where the state places those who are not tdth her, but against her, — the only house in a slave state in which a free man can abide with honour. if any think that their influence would be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict the ear of the state, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat in justice who has experienced a little in his own person. cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. a minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority ; it is not even a minority then ; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. if the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the state will not hesitate which to choose. if a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the state to commit violence and shed innocent blood. this is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible. if the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, "but what shall i do ?" my answer is, " if you really wish to do anything, resign your office." when the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished. but even suppose blood should flow. is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience civil disobedience 255 is wounded ? through this wound a man's real man hood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death. i see this blood flowing now. i have contemplated the imprisonment of the offender, rather than the seizure of his goods, — though both will serve the same purpose, — because they who assert the purest right, and consequently are most dangerous to a corrupt state, commonly have not spent much time in accumulating property. to such the state renders comparatively small service, and a slight tax is wont to appear exorbitant, particularly if they are obliged to earn it by special labour with their hands. if there were one who lived wholly without the use of money, the state itself would hesitate to demand it of him. but the rich man, — not to make any invidious comparison, — is always sold to the institution which makes him rich. absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue ; for money comes between a man and his objects, and obtains them for him ; and it was certainly no great virtue to obtain it. it puts to rest many questions which he would otherwise be taxed to answer ; while the only new question which it puts is the hard but superfluous one, how to spend it. thus his moral ground is taken from under his feet. the oppor tunities of living are diminished in proportion as what are called the "means" are increased. the best thing a man can do for his culture when he is rich is to endeavour to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor. christ answered the herodians according to their condition. " show 256 selections from thoeeau me the tribute-money," said he; — and one took a penny out of his pocket ; — if you use money which has the image of caesar on it, and which he has made current and valuable, that is, if you are men of the state, and gladly enjoy the advantages of csesar's govern ment, then pay him back some of his own when he demands it; "eender therefore to caesar that which is caesar's, and to g-od those things which are god's, " — leaving them no wiser than before as to which was which ; for they did not wish to know. when i converse with the freest of my neighbours, i perceive that, whatever they may say about the magnitude and seriousness of the question, and their regard for the public tranquillity, the long and the short of the matter is, that they cannot spare the protection of the existing government, and they dread the consequences to their property and families of disobedience to it. for my own part, i should not like to think that i ever rely on the protection of the state. but, if i deny the authority of the state when it presents its tax-bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. this is hard. this makes it impossible for a man to live honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in outward respects. it will not be worth the while to accumulate pro perty ; that would be sure to go again. you must hire or squat somewhere, and raise but a small crop, and eat that soon. you must live within yourself, and depend upon yourself, always tucked up and ready for a start, and not have many affairs. a civil disobedience 257 man may grow rich in turkey even, if he will be in all respects a good subject of the turkish govern ment. confucius said : " if a state is governed by the principles of reason, poverty and misery are subjects of shame ; if a state is not governed by the principles of reason, riches and honours are the subjects of shame." no : until i want the pro tection of massachusetts to be extended to me in some distant southern port, where my liberty is endangered, or until i am bent solely on building up an estate at home by peaceful enterprise, i can afford to refuse allegiance to massachusetts, and her right to my property and life. it costs me less in every sense to incur the penalty of disobedience to the state, than it would to obey. i should feel as if i were worth less in that case. some years ago, the state met me in behalf of the church, and commanded me to pay a certain sum toward the support of a clergyman whose preaching my father attended, but never i myself. "pay,'' it said, "or be locked up in the jail." i declined to pay. but, unfortunately, another man saw fit to pay it. i did not see why the school master should be taxed to support the priest, and not the priest the schoolmaster; for i was not the state's schoolmaster, but i supported myself by voluntary subscription. i did not see why the lyceum should not present its tax-bill, and have the state to back its demand, as well as the church. however, at the request of the selectmen, i con descended to make some such statement as this in s 258 selections feom thoeeau writing : — " know all men by these presents, that i, henry thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which i have not joined." this i gave to the town clerk; and he has it. the state, having thus learned that i did not wish to be regarded as a member of that church, has never made a like demand on me since ; though it said that it must adhere to its original presumption that time. if i had known how to name them, i should then have signed off in detail from all the societies which i never signed on to ; but i did not know where to find a complete list. i have paid no poll-tax for six years. i was put into a jail once on this account, for one night ; and, as i stood considering the walls of sohd stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, i could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if i were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. i wondered that it should have concluded at length that this was the best use it could put me to, and had never thought to avail itself of my services in some way. i saw that, if there was a wall of stone be tween me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as i was. i did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. i felt as if i alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax. they plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons civil disobedience 259 who are underbred. in every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for they thought that my chief desire was to stand on the other side of that stone wall. i could not but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my medi tations, which followed them out again without let or hindrance, and tjiey were really all that was danger ous. as they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish my body ; just as boys, if they cannot come at some person against whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog. i saw that the state was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and i lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it. thus the state never intentionally confronts a man's sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. it is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. i was not born to be forced. i will breathe after my own fashion. let us see who is the strongest. what force has a multitude 1 they only can force me who obey a higher law than i. they force me to become like themselves. i do not hear of rmn being forced to live this way or that by masses of men. what sort of life were that to live? when i meet a government which says to me, " your money or your ufe," why should i be in haste to give it my money ? it may be in a great strait, and not know what to do : i cannot help that. it must help itself ; do as i do. it is not worth the while to snivel about it 260 selections from thoeeau i am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society. i am not the son of the engineer. i perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. if a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies ; and so a man. the night in prison was novel and interesting enough. ^ the prisoners in their shirt-sleeves were enjoying a chat and the evening air in the doorway, when i entered. but the jailer said, "come, boys, it is time to lock up" ; and so they dispersed, and i heard the sound of their steps returning into the hollow apartments. my room-mate was introduced to me by the jailer, as " a first-rate fellow and a clever man." when the door was locked, he showed me where to hang my hat, and how he managed matters there. the rooms were whitewashed once a month ; and this one, at least, was the whitest, most simply furnished, and probably the neatest apartment in .the town. he naturally wanted to know where i came from, and what brought me there ; and, when i had told him, i asked him in my turn how he came there, presuming him to' be an honest man, of course ; and, as the world goes, i believe he was. "why," said he, "they accuse me of burning a barn ; but i never did it. " as near as i could discover, he had prob ably gone to bed in a barn when drunk, and smoked his pipe there ; and so a barn was burnt. he had the reputation of being a clever man, had been there some three months waiting for his trial to come on, and would have to wait as much longer ; but he was quite domesticated and contented, since he got his board for nothing, and thought that he was well treated. he occupied one window, and i the other ; and i saw, that, if one stayed there long, his principal business would be to look out the window. i had soon read all the tracts that were left there, and examined where former prisoners had broken out, and where a grate had been sawed on, and heard the history of the various occupants of that room ; for i found that even here there was a history and a gossip which never circulated beyond the walls of the jail. probably this is the only house in the ' this refers to thoreau's imprisonment in 1845 for his refusal to pay the poll-tax. civil disobedience 261 town where verses are composed, whioli are afterward printed in a circular form, but not published. i was shown quite a long list of verses which were composed by some young men who had been detected in an attempt to escape, who avenged themselves by singing them. i pumped my fellow-prisoner as dry as i could, for fear i should never see him again ; but at length he showed me which was my bed, and left me to blow out the lamp. it was like travelling into a far country, such as i had never expected to behold, to lie there for one night. it seemed to me that i never had heard the town-clock strike before, nor the evening sounds of the village ; for we slept with the windows open, which were inside the grating. it was to see my native village in the light of the middle ages, and our concord was turned into a rhine stream, and visions of knights and castles passed before me. they were the voices of old burghers that i heard in the streets. i was an involuntary spectator and audi tor of whatever was done and said in the kitchen of the adjacent village-inn, — a wholly new and rare experience to me. it was a closer view of my native town. i was fairly inside of it. i never had seen its institutions before. this is one of its peculiar institutions ; for it is a shire town. i began to com prehend what its inhabitants were about. in the morning, our breakfasts were put through the hole in the door, in small oblong-square tin pans, made to fit, and holding a pint of chocolate, with brown bread, and an iron spoon. when they called for the vessels again, i was green enough to return what bread i had left ; but my comrade seized it, and said that i should lay that up for lunch or dinner. soon after he was let out to work at haying in a neighbouring field, whither he went every day, and would not be back till noon ; so he bade me good-day, saying that he doubted if he should see me again. when i came out of prison, — for some one interfered, and paid that tax,' — i did not perceive that great changes had taken place on the common, such as he observed who went in a youth, and emerged a tottering and gray-headed man ; and yet a change had to my eyes come over the scene, — the town, and state, and country, — greater than any that mere time could effect. i saw yet more distinctly the state in which i lived. i saw to what extent the people among whom i lived could be trusted as good neighbours and friends ; that their friendship was for summer weather only ; that they did not greatly propose to do right ; that they were a distinct race ■^ this was not emerson, as has been supposed, but thoreau's mother and aunts. the jailer, who is still living, says the pay ment of the tax made thoreau "mad as the devil." 262 selections fkom thoeeau from me by their prejudices and superstitions, as the chinamen and malays are ; that, in their sacrifices to humanity, they ran no risks, not even to their property ; that, after all, they were not so noble but they treated the thief as he had treated them, and hoped, by a certain outward observance and a few prayers, and by walking in a particular straight though useless path from time to time, to save their souls. this may be to judge my neighbours harshly ; for i believe that many of them are not aware that they have such an institution as the jail in their village. it was formerly the custom in our village, when a poor debtor came out of jail, for his acquaintances to salute him, looking through their fingers, which were crossed to represent the grating of a jail window, ' ' how do ye do ? " my neighbours did not thus salute me, but first looked at me, and then at one another, as if i had returned from a long journey. i was put into jail as i was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. when i was let out the next morning, i pro ceeded to finish my errand, and having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put them selves under my conduct ; and in half an hour, — for the horse was soon tackled, — was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the state was nowhere to be seen. this is the whole history of " my prisons." i have never declined paying the highway tax, because i am as desirous of being a good neighbour as i am of being a bad subject ; and, as for supporting schools, i am doing my part to educate my fellow countrymen now. it is for no particular item in the tax-bill that i refuse to pay it. i simply wish to refuse allegiance to the state, to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually. i do not care to trace the course of my dollar, if i could, till it buys a man or a musket to shoot one with, — the dollar is innocent, — but i am concerned to trace the effects of my allegiance. in fact, i quietly declare war with the state, after my fashion, though i will still make what use and get what advantage of her i can, as is usual in such cases. civil disobedience 263 if others pay the tax which is demanded of me, from a sympathy with the state, they do but what they have already done in their own case, or rather they abet injustice to a greater extent than the state requires. if they pay the tax from a mistaken in ■ terest in the individual taxed, to save his property, or prevent his going to jail, it is because they have not considered wisely how far they let their private feelings interfere with the public good. this, then, is my position at present. but one cannot be too much on his guard in such a case, lest his action be biassed by obstinacy, or an undue regard for the opinions of men. let him see that he does only what belongs to himself and to the hour, i think sometimes. why, this people mean well ; they are only ignorant ; they would do better if they knew how : why give your neighbours this pain to treat you as they are not inclined to ? but i think again, this is no reason why i should do as they do, or permit others to suffer much greater pain of a different kind. again, i sometimes say to myself, when many millions of men, without heat, without ill will, without personal feeling of any kind, demand of you a few shillings only, without the possibility, such is their constitution, of retracting or altering their present demand, and without the possibility, on your side, of appeal to any other millions, why expose yourself to this overwhelming brute force? you do not resist cold and hunger, the winds and the waves, thus obstinately; you quietly submit to a thousand similar necessities. you do not put your 264 selections from thoeeau head into the fire. but just in proportion as i regard this as not wholly a brute force, but partly a human force, and consider that i have relations to those millions as to so many millions of men, and not of mere brute or inanimate things, i see that appeal is possible, first and instantaneously, from them to the maker of them, and, secondly, from them to themselves. but, if i put my head deliberately into the fire, there is no appeal to fire or to the maker of fire, and i have only myself to blame. if i could convince myself that i have any right to be satisfied with men as they are, and to treat them accordingly, and not according, in some respects, to my requisi tions and expectations of what they and i ought to be, then, like a good mussulman and fatalist, i should endeavour to be satisfied with things as they are, and say it is the will of god. and, above all, there is this difference between resisting this and a purely brute or natural force, that i can resist this with some effect ; but i cannot expect like orpheus, to change the nature of the rocks and trees and beasts. i do not wish to quarrel with any man or nation. i do not wish to split hairs, to make fine distinctions, or set myself up as better than my neighbours. i seek rather, i may say, even an excuse for conform ing to the laws of the land. i am but too ready to conform to them. indeed, i have reason to suspect myself on this head ; and each year, as the tax gatherer comes round, i find myself disposed to re view the acts and position of the general and state ? civil disobedience 265 governments, and the spirit of the people, to discover a pretext for conformity. " "we must affect our country as our parents, and if at any time we alienate our love or industry from doing it honour, we must respect effects and teach the soul matter of conscience and religion, and not desire of rule or benefit." i believe that the state will soon be able to take all my work of this sort out of my hands, and then i shall be no better a patriot than my fellow-countrymen. seen from a lower point of view, the constitution, with all its faults, is very good; the law and the courts are very respectable ; even this state and this american government are, in many respects, very admirable and rare things, to be thankful for, such as a great many have described them ; but seen from a point of view a little higher, they are what i have described them ; seen from a higher still, and the highest, who shall say what they are, or that they are worth looking at or thinking of at all 1 r however, the government does not concern me much, and i shall bestow the fewest possible thoughts on it. it is not many moments that i live under a government, even in this world. if a man is thought free, fancy-free, imagination-free, that which is not never for a long time appearing to be to him, unwise rulers or reformers cannot fatally interrupt him. the authority of government, even such as i am willing to submit to, — for i will cheerfully obey those who know and can do better than i, and in many 266 selections from thoeeau things even those who neither know nor can do so well, — is still an impure one : to be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent of the governed. it can have no pure right over my person and pro perty but what i concede to it. the progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual. even the chinese philo sopher was wise enough to regard the individual as the basis of the empire. is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in govern ment 1 is it not possible to take a step further towards recognising and organising the rights of man?^there will never be a really free and enlightened state, until the state comes to recognise the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. i please myself with imagining a state at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbour ; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose, if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbours and fellow-men. a state which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious state, which also i have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen. ck a plea for captain john beown^ i trust that you will pardon me for being here. i do not wish to force my thoughts upon you, but i feel forced myself. little as i know of captain brown, i would fain do my part to correct the tone and the statements of the newspapers, and of my countrymen generally, respecting his character and actions. it costs us nothing to be just. we can at least express our sympathy with, and admiration of, him and his companions, and that is what i now propose to do. first, as to his history. i will endeavour to omit, as much as possible, what you have already read. i need not describe his person to you, for probably most of you have seen and will not soon forget him. i am told that his grandfather, john brown, was an officer in the eevolution ; that he himself was born in connecticut about the beginning of this century, but early went with tais father to ohio. i heard him say that his father was a contractor who furnished beef to the army there, in the war of 1812 ; that he 1 eead to the citizens of concord, mass., sunday evening, october 30, 1859. 268 selections from thoeeau accompanied him to the camp, and assisted him in that employment, seeing a good deal of military life, — more, perhaps, than if he had been a soldier ; for he was often present at the councils of the officers. especially, he learned by experience how armies are supplied and maintained in the field, — a work which, he observed, requires at least as much experience and skill as to lead them in battle. he said that few persons had any conception of the cost, even the pecuniary cost, of firing a single bullet in war. he saw enough, at any rate, to disgust him with a military life ; indeed, to excite in him a great abhor rence of it ; so much so, that though he was tempted by the offer of some petty office in the army, when he was about eighteen, he not only declined that, but he also refused to train when warned, and was fined for it. he then resolved that he would never have anything to do withfany war, unless it were a war for liberty, f when the troubles in kansas began, he sent several of his sons thither to strengthen the party of the free state men, fitting them out with such weapons as he had ; telling them that if the troubles should increase, and there should be need of him, he would follow, to assist them with his hand and counsel. this, as you all know, he soon after did ; and it was through his agency, far more than any other's, that kansas was made free. for a«jart of his life he was a surveyor, and at one time he was engaged in wool-growing, and he went to europe as an agent about that business. a plea for captain john brown 269 there, as everywhere, he had his eyes about him, and made many original observations. he said, for in stance, that he saw why the soil of england was so rich, and that of germany (i think it was) so poor, and he thought of writing to some of the crowned heads about it. it was because in england the peasantry live on the soil which they cultivate, but in g-ermany they are gathered into villages, at night. it is a pity that he did not make a book of his obser vations. i should say that he was an old-fashioned man in his respect for the constitution, and his faith in the permanence of this union. slavery he deemed to be wholly opposed to these, and he was its determined foe. he was by descent and birth a new england farmer, a man of great common-sense, deliberate and practical as that class is, and tenfold more so. he was like the best of those who stood at concord bridge once, on lexington common, and on bunker hill, only he was firmer and higher principled than any that i have chanced to hear of as there. it was no abolition lecturer that converted him. ethan allen and stark, with whom he may in some respects be compared, were rangers in a lower and less im portant field. they could bravely face their country's j foes, but he had the courage to face his country her/ self, when she was in the wrong. a "western writer says, to account for his escape from so many perils, that he was concealed under a " rural exterior '' ; as if, in that prairie land, a hero should, by good rights, wear a citizen's dress only. 270 selections feom thoeeau he did not go to the college called harvard, good old alma mater as she is. he was not fed on the pap that is there furnished. as he phrased it, "i know no more of grammar than one of your calves.'' but he went to the great university of the west, where he sedulously pursued the study of liberty, for which he had early betrayed a fondness, and having taken many degrees, he finally commenced the public practice of humanity in kansas, as you all know. such were his humanities and not any study of grammar. he would have left a greek accent slanting the wrong way, and righted up a falling man. he was one of that class of whom we hear a great deal, but, for the most part, see nothing at all, — the puritans. it would be in vain to kill him. he died lately in the time of cromwell, but he reappeared here. why should he not ? some of the puritan stock are said to have come over and settled in new england. they were a class that did something else than celebrate their forefathers' day, and eat parched corn in remembrance of that time. they were neither democrats nor eepublicans, but men of simple habits, straightforward, prayerful ; not think ing much of rulers who did not fear god, not making many compromises, nor seeking after available can didates. "in his camp," as one has recently written, and as i have myself heard him state, " he permitted no profanity; no man of loose morals was suffered to remain there, unless, indeed, as a prisoner of war. a plea foe captain john bkown 271 '1 would rather,' said he, 'have the small-pox, yellow fever, and cholera, all together in my camp, than a man without principle. ... it is a mistake, sir, that our people make, when they think that bullies are the best fighters, or that they are the fit men to oppose these southerners. give me men of good principles, — god-fearing men, — men who respect themselves, and with a dozen of them i will oppose any hundred such men as these buford rufiians.' " he said that if one offered himself to be a soldier under him, who was forward to tell what he could or would do, if he could only get sight of the enemy, he had but little confidence in him. he was never able to find more than a score or so of recruits whom he would accept, and only about a dozen, among them his sons, in whom he had perfect faith. when he was here, some years ago, he showed to a few a little manuscript book, — his "orderly book " i think he called it, — containing the names of his company in kansas, and the rules by which they bound themselves ; and he stated that several of them had already sealed the contract with their blood. when some one remarked that, with the addition of a chaplain, it would have been a perfect cromwellian troop, he observed that he would have been glad to add a chaplain to the list, if he could have found one who could fill that office worthily. it is easy enough to find one for the united states army. i believe that he had prayers in his camp morning and evening, nevertheless. he was a man of spartan habits, and at sixty was 272 selections feom thoeeau scrupulous about his diet at your table, excusing himself by saying that he must eat sparingly and fare hard, as became a soldier, or one who was fitting himself for diflficult enterprises, a life of exposure. a man of rare common -sense and directness of speech, as of action ; a transcendentalist above all, a man of ideas and principles, — that was what dis tinguished him. not yielding to a whim or transient impulse, but carrying out the purpose of a life. i noticed that he did not overstate anything, but spoke within bounds. i remember, particularly, how, in his speech here, he referred to what his family had suffered in kansas, without ever giving the least vent to his pent-up fire. it was a volcano with an ordinary chimney-flue. also referring to the deeds of certain border rufisans, he said, rapidly paring away his speech, like an experienced soldier, keeping a reserve of force and meaning, " they had a perfect right to be hung." he was not in the least a rhetorician, was not talking to buncombe or his con stituents anywhere, had no need to invent anything j but to tell the simple truth, and communicate his own resolution ; therefore he appeared incomparably strong, and eloquence in congress and elsewhere seemed to me at a discount. it was like the speeches of cromwell compared with those of an ordinary king. as for his tact and prudence, i will merely say, that at a time when scarcely a man from the free states was able to reach kansas by any direct route, at least without having his arms taken from him, he, a plea for captain john beown 273 carrying what imperfect guns and other weapons he could collect, openly and slowly drove an oxcart through missouri, apparently in the capacity of a surveyor, with his surveying compass exposed in it, and so passed unsuspected, and had ample opportunity to learn the designs of the enemy. for some time after his arrival he still followed the same profession. when, for instance, he saw a knot of the ruflbans on the prairie, discussing, of course, the single topic which then occupied their minds, he would, perhaps, take his compass and one of his sons, and proceed to run an imaginary line right through the very spot on which that conclave had assembled, and when he came up to them, he would naturally pause and have some talk with them, learning their news, and, at last, all their plans perfectly ; and having thus com pleted his real survey he would resume his imaginary one, and run on his line till he was out of sight. when i expressed surprise that he could live in kansas at all, with a price set upon his head, and so large a number, including the authorities, exasperated against him, he accounted for it by saying, " it is perfectly well understood that i will not be taken." much of the time for some years he has had to skulk in swamps, suffering from poverty and from sickness, which was the consequence of exposure, befriended only by indians and a few whites. but though it might be known that he was lurking in a particular swamp, his foes commonly did not care to go in after him. he could even come out into a town where there were more border euffians than free state t 274 selections fkom thoeeau men, and transact some business, without delaying long, and yet not be molested ; for, said he, " no little handful of men were willing to undertake it, and a large body could not be got together in season." as for his recent failure, we do not know the facts about it. it was evidently far from being a wild and desperate attempt. his enemy, mr. vallandigham, is compelled to say, that "it was among the best planned and executed conspiracies that ever failed." not to mention his other successes, was it a failure, or did it show a want of good management, to dehver from bondage a dozen human beings, and walk off with them by broad daylight, for weeks if not months, at a leisurely pace, through one state after another, for half the length of the north, conspicuous to au parties, with a price set upon his head, going into a court-room on his way and telling what he had done, thus convincing missouri that it was not profitable to try to hold slaves in his neighbourhood ? — and this, not because the government menials were lenient, but because they were afraid of him. yet he did not attribute his success, foolishly, to " his star,'' or to any magic. he said, truly, that the reason why such greatly superior numbers quailed before him was, as one of his prisoners confessed, because they lacked a cause, — a kind of armour which he and his party never lacked. when the time came, few men were found willing to lay down their lives in defence of what they knew to be wrong ; they did not like that this should be their last act in this world. a plea foe captain john brown 275 but to make haste to his last act, and its effects. the newspapers seem to ignore, or perhaps are really ignorant of the fact, that there are at least as many as two or three individuals to a town through out the north who think much as the present speaker does about him and his enterprise. i do not hesitate to say that they are an important and growing party. we aspire to be something more than stupid and timid chattels, pretending to read history and our bibles, but desecrating every house and every day we breathe in. perhaps anxious politicians may prove that only seventeen white men and five negroes were concerned in the late enterprise ; but their very anxiety to prove this might suggest to themselves that all is not told. why do they still dodge the truth ? they are so anxious because of a dim consciousness of the fact, which they do not distinctly face, that at least a million of the free inhabitants of the united states would have rejoiced if it had succeeded. they at most only criticise the tactics. though we wear no crape, the thought of that man's position and probable fate is spoiling many a man's day here at the north for other thinking. if any one who has seen him here can pursue successfully any other train of thought, i do not know what he is made of. if there is any such who gets his usual allowance of sleep, i will warrant him to fatten easily under any circumstances which do not touch his body or purse. i put a piece of paper and a pencil under my pillow, and when i could not sleep, i wrote in the dark. 276 selections fkom thoeeau on the whole, my respect for my fellow-men, except as one may outweigh a million, is not being increased these days. i have noticed the cold-blooded way in which newspaper writers and men generally speak of this event, as if an ordinary malefactor, though one of unusual " pluck," — as the governor of virginia is reported to have said, using the language of the cock-pit, " the gamest man he ever saw," — had been caught, and were about to be hung. he was not dreaming of his foes when the governor thought he looked so brave. it turns what sweetness i have to gall, to hear, or hear of, the remarks of some of my neighbours. when we heard at first that he was dead, one of my townsmen observed that " he died as the fool dieth"; which, pardon me, for an instant suggested a likeness in him dying to my neighbour living. others, craven -hearted, said disparagingly, that "he threw his life away," becaiise he resisted the government. which way have they thrown their lives, pray "i — such as would praise a man for attack ing singly an ordinary band of thieves or murderers. i hear another ask, yankee-like, " what will he gain by it 1 " as if he expected to fill his pockets by this enterprise. such a one has no idea of gain but in this wordly sense. if it does not lead to a " surprise " party, if he does not get a new pair of boots, or a vote of thanks, it must be a failure. " but he won't gain anything by it." well, no, i don't suppose he could get four-andsixpence a day for being hung, take the year round ; but then he stands a chance to save a considerable part of his soul, — and such a soul ! — a plea foe captain john brown 277 when you do not. no doubt you can get more in your market for a quart of milk than for a quart of blood, but that is not the market that heroes carry their blood to. such do not know that like the seed is the fruit, and that, in the moral world, when good seed is planted, good fruit is inevitable, and does not depend on our watering and cultivating; that when you plant, or bury a hero in his field, a crop of heroes is sure to spring up. this is a seed of such force and vitality, that it does not ask our leave to germinate. the momentary charge at balaclava, in obedience to a blundering command, proving what a perfect machine the soldier is, has, properly enough, been celebrated by a poet laureate ; but the steady, and for the most part successful, charge of this man, for some years, against the legions of slavery, in obed ience to an infinitely higher command, is as much more memorable than that, as an intelligent and con scientious man is superior to a machine. do you think that that will go unsung ? "served him right," — "a dangerous man," — "he is undoubtedly insane.'' so they proceed to live their sane, and wise, and altogether admirable lives, reading their plutarch a little, but chiefly pausing at that feat of putnam, who was let down into a wolf's den; and in this wise they nourish themselves for brave and patriotic deeds some time or other. the tract society could aiford to print that story of put nam. you might open the district schools with the reading of it, for there is nothing about slavery or the church in it : unless it occurs to the reader that 278 selections feom thoeeau some pastors are wolves in sheep's clothing. "the american board of commissioners for foreign mis sions " even, might dare to protest against that wolf. i have heard of boards, and of american boards, but it chances that i never heard of this particular lumber till lately. and yet i hear of northern men, and women, and children, by families, buying a "life membership " in such societies as these. a life membership in the grave ! you can get buried cheaper than that. our foes are in our midst and all about us. there is hardly a house but is divided against itself, for our foe is the all but universal woodenness of both head and heart, the want of vitality in man, which is the effect of our vice ; and hence are begotten fear, superstition, bigotry, persecution, and slavery of au kinds. we are mere figure-heads upon a hulk, with livers in the place of hearts. the curse is the worship of idols, which at length changes the worshipper into a stone image himself; and the new-englander is just as much an idolater as the hindoo. this man was an exception, for he did not set up even a political graven image between him and his god. a church that can never have done with excom municating christ while it exists ! away with your broad and flat churches, and your narrow and tall churches ! take a step forward, and invent a new style of out-houses. invent a salt that will save you, and defend our nostrils. the modern christian is a man who has consented to say all the prayers in the liturgy, provided you a plea for captain john brown 279 will let him go straight to bed and sleep quietly after ward. all his prayers begin with " now i lay me down to sleep," and he is for ever looking forward to the time when he shall go to his "long rest." he has consented to perform certain old-established charities, too, after a fashion, but he does not wish to hear of any new-fangled ones ; he doesn't wish to have any supplementary articles added to the contract, to fit it to the present time. he shows the whites of his eyes on the sabbath, and the blacks all the rest of the week. the evil is not merely a stagnation of blood, but a stagnation of spirit. many, no doubt, are weu disposed, but sluggish by constitution and by habit, and they cannot conceive of a man who is actuated by higher motives than they are. accordingly they pro nounce this man insane, for they know that they could never act as he does, as long as they are themselves. we dream of foreign -countries, of other times and races of men, placing them at a distance in history or space ; but let some significant event like the present occur in our midst, and we discover, often, this distance and this strangeness between us and our nearest neighbours. they are our austrias, and chinas, and south sea islands. our crowded society becomes well spaced all at once, clean and handsome to the eye, — a city of magnificent distances. we discover why it was that we never got beyond com pliments and surfaces with them before ; we become aware of as many versts between us and them as there are between a wandering tartar and a chinese town. the thoughtful man becomes a hermit in the 280 selections from thoeeau thoroughfares of the market-place. impassable seas suddenly find their level between us, or dumb steppes stretch themselves out there. it is the difference of constitution, of intelligence, and faith, and not streams and mountains, that make the true and impassable boundaries between individuals and between states. none but the like-minded can come plenipotentiary to our court. i read all the newspapers i could get within a week after this event, and i do not remember in them a single expression of sympathy for these men. i have since seen one noble statement, in a boston paper, not editorial. some voluminous sheets decided not to print the full report of brown's words to the exclusion of other matter. it was as if a publisher should reject the manuscript of the new testament, and print wilson's last speech. the same journal which contained this pregnant news, was chiefly filled, in parallel columns, with the reports of the political conventions that were being held. but the descent to them was too steep. they should have been spared this contrast, — been printed in an extra, at least. to turn from the voices and deeds of earnest men to the cackling of political conventions ! office seekers and speech-makers, who do not so much as lay an honest egg, but wear their breasts bare upon an egg of chalk ! their great game is the game of straws, or rather that universal aboriginal game of the platter, at which the indians cried hub, hub! exclude the reports of religious and political con ventions, and publish the words of a living man. a plea foe captain john beown 281 but i object not so much to what they have omitted, as to what they have inserted. even the liberator called it " a misguided, wild, and apparently insane effort." as for the herd of newspapers and magazines, i do not chance to know an editor in the country who will deliberately print anything which he knows will ultimately and permanently reduce the number of his subscribers. they do not believe that it would be expedient. how then can they print truth 1 if we do not say pleasant things, they argue, nobody will attend to us. and so they do like some travelling auctioneers, who sing an obscene song, in order to draw a crowd around them. eepublican editors, obliged to get their sentences ready for the morning edition, and accustomed to look at every thing by the twilight of politics, express no admira tion, nor true sorrow even, but call these men " deluded fanatics," — '' mistaken men," — " insane," or " crazed." it suggests what a sane set of editors we are blessed with, not " mistaken men " ; who know very well on which side their bread is buttered, at least. a man does a brave and humane deed, and at once, on all sides, we hear people and parties declar ing, " i didn't do it, nor countenance him to do it, in any conceivable way. it can't be fairly inferred from my past career." i, for one, am not interested to hear you define your position. i don't know that i ever was, or ever shall be. i think it is mere egotism, or impertinent at this time. ye needn't take so much pains to wash your skirts of him. no intelli 282 selections feom thoeeau gent man will ever be convinced that lie was any creature of yours. he went and came, as he himself informs us, " under the auspices of john brown and nobody else." the republican party does not per ceive how many his failure will make to vote more correctly than they would have them. they have counted the votes of pennsylvania & co., but they have not correctly counted captain brown's vote. he has taken the wind out of their sails, — the little wind they had, — and they may as well lie to and repair. what though he did not belong to your clique ! though you may not approve of his method or his principles, recognise his magnanimity. would you not like to claim kindredship with him in that, though in no other thing he is like, or likely, to you? do you think that you would lose your reputation so ? what you lost at the spue, you would gain at the bung. if they do not mean all this, then they do not speak the truth, and say what they mean. they are simply at their old tricks still. "it was always conceded to him," says one who calls him crazy, " that he was a conscientious man, very modest in his demeanour, apparently inoffensive, untd the subject of slavery was introduced, when he would exhibit a feeling of indignation unparalleled." the slave-ship is on her way, crowded with its dying victims ; new cargoes are being added in mid ocean ; a small crew of slaveholders, countenanced by a large body of passengers, is smothering four miuions a plea foe captain john beown 283 under the hatches, and yet the politician asserts that the only proper way by which deliverance is to be obtained, is by " the quiet diffusion of the senti ments of humanity," without any " outbreak." as if the sentiments of humanity were ever found unac companied by its deeds, and you could disperse them, all finished to order, the pure article, as easily as water with a watering-pot, and so lay the dust. what is that that i hear cast overboard ? the bodies of the dead that have found deliverance. that is the way we are " diffusing " humanity, and its senti ments with it. prominent and influential editors, accustomed to deal with politicians, men of an infinitely lower grade, say, in their ignorance, that he acted " on the principle of revenge." they do not know the man. they must enlarge themselves to conceive of him. i have no doubt that the time will come when they will begin to see him as he was. they have got to conceive of a man of faith and of religious principle, and not a politician or an indian ; of a man who did not wait till he was personally interfered with or thwarted in some harmless business before he gave his life to the cause of the oppressed. if walker may be considered the representative of the south, i wish i could say that brown was the representative of the north. he was a superior man. he did not value his bodily life in comparison with ideal things. he did not recognise unjust human laws, but resisted them as he was bid. for once we are lifted out of the trivialness and dust of politics 284 selections from thoebau into the region of truth and manhood. no man in america has ever stood up so persistently and effec tively for the dignity of human nature, knowing himself for a man, and the equal of any and all governments. in that sense he was the most ameri can of us all. he needed no babbling lawyer, making false issues, to defend him. he was more than a match for all the judges that american voters, or office-holders of whatever grade, can create. he could not have been tried by a jury of his peers, because his peers did not exist. when a man stands up serenely against the condemnation and vengeance of mankind, rising above them literally ly a whole body, — even though he were of late the vilest murderer who has settled that matter with himself, — the spectacle is a sublime one, — didn't ye know it, ye liberators, ye tribunes, ye republicans? — and we become criminal in comparison. do yourselves the honour to recognise him. he needs none of your respect. as for the democratic journals, they are not human enough to affect me at au. i do not feel indignation at anything they may say. i am aware that i anticipate a little, — that he was still, at the last accounts, alive in the hands of his foes ; but that being the case, i have all along found myself thinking and speaking of him as physically dead. i do not believe in erecting statues to those who still live in our hearts, whose bones have not yet crumbled in the earth around us, but i would rather a plea for captain john beown 285 see the statue of captain brown in the massachusetts state-house yard, than that of any other man whom i know. i rejoice that i live in this age, that i am his contemporary. what a contrast, when we turn to that political party which is so anxiously shuffling him and his plot out of its way, and looking around for some available slaveholder, perhaps, to be its candidate, at least for one who will execute the fugitive slave law, and all those other unjust laws which he took up arms to annul ! insane ! a father and six sons, and one son-in law, and several more men besides, — as many at least as twelve disciples, — all struck with insanity at once; while the same tyrant holds with a firmer gripe than ever his four millions of slaves, and a thousand sane editors, his abettors, are saving their country and their bacon ! just as insane were his efforts in kansas. ask the tyrant who is his most dangerous foe, the sane man or the insane ! do the thousands who know him best, who have rejoiced at his deeds in kansas, and have afforded him material aid there, think him insane 1 such a use of this word is a mere trope with most who persist in using it, and i have no doubt that many of the rest have already in silence retracted their words. eead his admirable answers to mason and others. how they are dwarfed and defeated by the contrast ! on the one side, half-brutish, half-timid questioning ; on the other, truth, clear as lightning, crashing into their obscene temples. they are made to stand with 286 selections fkom thoebau pilate, and gesler, and the inquisition. how ineffec tual their speech and action ! and what a void their silence ! they are but helpless tools in this great work. it was no human power that gathered them about this preacher. what have massachusetts and the north sent a few sane representatives to congress for, of late years ? — to declare with effect what kind of. senti ments ? all their speeches put together and boiled down, — and probably they themselves will confess it, — do not match for manly directness and force, and for simple truth, the few casual remarks of crazy john brown, on the floor of the harper's ferry engine house, — that man whom you are about to hang, to send to the other world, though not to represent you there. no, he was not our representative in any sense. he was too fair a specimen of a man to represent the like of us. who, then, were his constitu ents? if you read his words understandingly you will find out. in his case there is no idle eloquence, no made, nor maiden speech, no compliments to the oppressor. truth is his inspirer, and earnestness the polisher of his sentences. he could afford to lose his sharpe's rifles, while he retained his faculty of speech, — a sharpe's rifle of infinitely surer and longer range. and the new york herald reports the conversa tion verbatim ! it does not know of what undying words it is made the vehicle. i have no respect for the penetration of any man who can read the report of that conversation, and a plea fok captain john bllown 287 still call the principal in it insane. it has the ring of a saner sanity than an ordinary discipline and habits of life, than an ordinary organisation, secure. take any sentence of it, — "any questions that i can honourably answer, i will ; not otherwise. so far as i am myself concerned, i have told everything truth fully. i value my word, sir." the few who talk about his vindictive spirit, while they really admire his heroism, have no test by which to detect a noble man, no amalgam to combine with his pure gold. they mix their own dross with it. it is a relief to turn from these slanders to the testimony of his more truthful, but frightened jailers and hangmen. governor wise speaks far more justly and appreciatingly of him than any northern editor, or politician, or public personage, that i chance to have heard from. i know that you can afford to hear him again on this subject. he says : " they are themselves mistaken who take him to be a mad man. ... he is cool, collected, and indomitable, and it is but just to him to say, that he was humane to his prisoners. . . . and he inspired me with great trust in his integrity as a man of truth. he is a fanatic, vain and garrulous " (i leave that part to mr. wise), "but firm, truthful, and intelligent. his men, too, who survive, are like him. . . colonel washington says that he was the coolest and firmest man he ever saw in defying danger and death. with one son dead by his side, and another shot through, he felt the pulse of his dying son with one hand, and held his rifle with the other, and commanded his men 288 selections from thoeea0 with the utmost composure, encouraging them to be firm, and to sell their lives as dear as they could. of the three white prisoners, brown, stephens, and coppic, it was hard to say which was most firm." almost the first northern men whom the slave holder has learned to respect ! the testimony of mr. vallandigham, though less valuable, is of the same purport, that " it is vain to underrate either the man or his conspiracy. . . . he is the furthest possible removed from the ordin ary ruflsan, fanatic, or madman." "all is quiet at harper's ferry," say the journals. what is the character of that calm which follows when the law and the slaveholder prevail ? i regard this event as a touchstone designed to bring out, with glaring distinctness, the character of this government. we needed to be thus assisted to see it by the light of history. it needed to see itself. when a govern ment puts forth its strength on the side of injustice, as ours to maintain slavery and kill the liberators of the slave, it reveals itself a merely brute force, or worse, a demoniacal force. it is the head of the plug uglies. it is more manifest than ever that tyranny rules. i see this government to be efiectually allied with france and austria in oppressing mankind. there sits a tyrant holding fettered four millions of slaves ; here comes their heroic liberator. this most hypocritical and diabolical government looks up from its seat on the gasping foiumillions, and inquires with an assumption of innocence : " what do you assault me for "! am i not an honest man 1 cease a plea for captain john bkown 289 agitation on this subject, or i will make a slave of you, too, or else hang you." we talk about a representative government; but what a monster of a government is that where the noblest faculties of the mind, and the whole heart, are not represented. a semi -human tiger or ox, stalk ing over the earth, with its heart taken out and the top of its brain shot away. heroes have fought well on their stumps when their legs were shot oif, but i never heard of any good done by such a government as that. the only government that i recognise, — and it matters not how few are at the head of it, or how small its army, — is that power that establishes justice in the land, never that which establishes injustice. what shall we think of a government to which all the truly brave and just men in the land are enemies, standing between it and those whom it oppresses? a government that pretends to be christian and crucifies a million christs every day ! treason ! where does such treason take its rise ? i cannot help thinking of you as you deserve, ye governments. can you dry up the fountains of thought? high treason, when it is resistance to tyranny here below, has its origin in, and is first committed by, the power that makes and for ever recreates man. when you have caught and hung all these human rebels, you have accomplished nothing but your own guilt, for you have not struck at the fountain-head. you presume to contend with a foe against whom west point cadets and rifled cannon u 290 selections from thoeeau point not. can all the art of the cannon-founder tempt matter to turn against its maker ? is the form in which the founder thinks he casts it more essential than the constitution of it and of himself 1 the united states have a coffle of four millions of slaves. they are determined to keep them in this condition ; and massachusetts is one of the confeder ated overseers to prevent their escape. such are not all the inhabitants of massachusetts, but such are they who rule and are obeyed here. it was massa chusetts, as well as virginia, that put down this insur rection at harper's ferry. she sent the marines there, and she will have to pay the penalty of her sin. suppose that there is a society in this state that out of its own purse and magnanimity saves au the fugitive slaves that run to us, and protects our coloured fellow -citizens, and leaves the other work to the government, so-called. is not that government fast losing its occupation, and becoming contemptible to mankind ? if private men are obliged to perform the offices of government, to protect the weak and dispense justice, then the government be comes only a hired man, or clerk, to perform menial or indifferent services. of course, that is but the shadow of a government whose existence necessitates a vigilant committee. what should we think of the oriental cadi even, behind whom worked in secret a vigilant committee 1 but such is the character of our northern states generally ; each has its vigilant committee. and, to a certain extent, these crazy governments recognise and accept this relation. a plea fok captain john beown 291 they say, virtually, " we'll be glad to work for you on these terms, only don't make a noise about it." and thus the government, its salary being insured, withdraws into the back shop, taking the constitution with it, and bestows most of its labour on repairing that. when i hear it at work sometimes, as i go by, it reminds me, at best, of those farmers who in winter contrive to turn a penny by following the coopering business. and what kind of spirit is their barrel made to hold 1 they speculate in stocks, and bore holes in mountains, but they are not competent to lay out even a decent highway. the only free road, the underground eailroad, is owned and managed by the vigilant committee. they have tunnelled under the whole breadth of the land. such a government is losing its power and respectability as surely as water runs out of a leaky vessel, and is held by one that can contain it. i hear many condemn these men because they were so few. when were the good and the brave ever in a majority 1 would you have had him wait till that time came'! — till you and i came over to him 1 the very fact that he had no rabble or troop of hirelings about him would alone distinguish him from ordinary heroes. his company was small in deed, because few could be found worthy to pass muster. each one who there laid down his life for the poor and oppressed was a picked man, culled out of many thousands, if not millions ; apparently a man of principle, of rare courage, and devoted humanity ; ready to sacrifice his life at any moment for the 292 selections fkom thokeau benefit of his fellow-man. it may be doubted if there were as many more their equals in these respects in all the country ; — i speak of his followers only; — for their leader, no doubt, scoured the land far and wide, seeking to swell his troop. these alone were ready to step between the oppressor and the oppressed. surely they were the very best men you could select to be hung. that was the greatest com pliment which this country could pay them. they were ripe for her gallows. she has tried a long time, she has hung a good many, but never found the right one before. when i think of him, and his six sons, and his son-in-law, not to enumerate the others, enlisted for this fight, proceeding coolly, reverently, humanely to work, for months if not years, sleeping and waking upon it, summering and wintering the thought, with out expecting any reward but a good conscience, while almost all america stood ranked on the other side, — i say again that it affects me as a sublime spectacle. if he had had any journal advocating " his cause,'' any organ, as the phrase is, monotonously and wearisomely playing the same old tune, and then passing round the hat, it would have been fatal to his efficiency. if he had acted in any way so as to be let alone by the government, he might have been suspected. it was the fact that the tyrant must give place to him, or he to the tyrant, that distinguished him from all the reformers of the day that i know. it was his peculiar doctrine that a man has a per fect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, a plea fob captain john beown 293 in order to rescue the slave. i agree with him. they who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others. such will be more shocked by his life than by his death. i shall not be forward to think him mistaken in his method who quickest succeeds to liberate the slave. i speak for the slave when i say, that i prefer the philanthropy of captain brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots me nor liberates me. at any rate, i do not think it is quite sane for one to spend his whole life in talking or writing about this matter, unless he is continuously inspired, and i have not done so. a man may have other affairs to attend to. i do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but i can foresee circum stances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable. we preserve the so-called peace of our community by deeds of petty violence every day. look at the policeman's billy and handcuffs ! look at the jail ! look at the gallows ! look at the chaplain of the regiment ! we are hoping only to live safely on the outskirts of this provisional army. so we defend ourselves and our hen-roosts, and main tain slavery. i know that the mass of my country men think that the only righteous use that can be made of sharpe's rifles and revolvers is to fight duels with them, when we are insulted by other nations, or to hunt indians, or shoot fugitive slaves with them, or the like. i think that for once the sharpe's rifles and the revolvers were employed in a righteous cause. the tools were in the hands of one who could use them. 294 selections from thoeeau the same indignation that is said to have cleared the temple once will clear it again. the question is not about the weapon, but the spirit in which you use it. no man has appeared in america, as yet, who loved his fellow-man so well, and treated him so tenderly. he lived for him. he took up his life and he laid it down for him. what sort of violence is that which is encouraged, not by soldiers, but by peaceable citizens, not so much by laymen as by ministers of the gospel, no't so much by the fighting sects as by the quakers, and not so much by quaker men as by quaker women 1 this event advertises me that there is such a fact as death, — the possibility of a man's dying. it seems as if no man had ever died in america before ; for in order to die you must first have lived. i don't believe in the hearses, and palls, and funerals that they have had. there was no death in the case, because there had been no life ; they merely rotted or sloughed oif, pretty much as they had rotted or sloughed along. no temple's veil was rent, only a hole dug somewhere. let the dead bury their dead. the best of them fairly ran down like a clock. franklin, ^ — washington, — they were let off without dying ; they were merely missing one day. i hear a good many pretend that they are going to die; or that they have died, for aught that i know. nonsense ! i'll defy them to do it. they haven't got life enough in them. they'll deliquesce like fungi, and keep a hundred eulogists mopping the spot where they left off. only half a dozen or so have a plea foe captain john brown 295 died since the world began. do you think that you are going to die, sir ? no ! there's no hope of you. you haven't got your lesson yet. you've got to stay after school. we make a needless ado about capital punishment, — taking lives, when there is no life to take. memento mori! we don't understand that sublime sentence which some worthy got sculptured on his gravestone once. we've interpreted it in a grovelling and snivelling sense; we've wholly forgotten how to die. but be sure you do die nevertheless. do your work, and finish it. if you know how to begin, you will know when to end. these men, in teaching us how to die, have at the same time taught us how to live. if this man's acts and words do not create a revival, it will be the severest possible satire on the acts and words that do. it is the best news that america has ever heard. it has already quickened the feeble pulse of the north, and infused more and more generous blood into her veins and heart, than any number of years of what is called commercial and political prosperity could. how many a man who was lately contemplating suicide has now something to live for ! one writer says that brown's peculiar monomania made him to be " dreaded by the missourians as a supernatural being.'' sure enough, a hero in the midst of us cowards is always so dreaded. he is just that thing. he shows himself superior to nature. he has a spark of divinity in him. " unless above himself he can erect himself, how poor a thing is man ! " 296 selections from thoeeau newspaper editors argue also that it is a proof of his insanity that he thought he was appointed to do this work which he did, — that he did not suspect himself for a moment ! they talk as if it were im possible that a man could be "divinely appointed" in these days to do any work whatever ; as if vows and religion were out of date as connected with any man's daily work ; as if the agent to abolish slavery could only be somebody appointed by the president, or by some political party. they talk as if a man's death were a failure, and his continued life, be it of whatever character, were a success. when i reflect to what a cause this man devoted himself, and how religiously, and then reflect to what cause his judges and all who condemn him so angrily and fluently devote themselves, i see that they are as far apart as the heavens and earth are asunder. the amount of it is, our "leading men" are a harmless kind of folk, and they know well enough that they were not divinely appointed, but elected by the votes of their party. who is it whose safety requires that captain brown be hung '! is it indispensable to any northern man ? is there no resource but to cast this man also to the minotaur? if you do not wish it, say so distinctly. while these things are being done, beauty stands veiled and music is a screeching lie. think of him, — of his rare qualities ! — such a man as it takes ages to make, and ages to understand; no mock hero, nor the representative of any party. a man such as the sun may not rise upon again in this a plea foe captain john brown 297 benighted land. to whose making went the costhest material, the finest adamant ; sent to be the redeemer' of those in captivity ; and the only use to which you can put him is to hang him at the end of a rope ! you who pretend to care for christ crucified, consider what you are about to do to him who offered him self to be the saviour of four millions of men. any man knows when he is justified, and all the wits in the world cannot enlighten him on that point. the murderer always knows that he is justly punished ; but when a government takes the life of a man without the consent of his conscience, it is an audacious government, and is taking a step towards its own dissolution. is it not possible that an indi vidual may be right and a government wrong 1 are laws to be enforced simply because they were made 1 or declared by any number of men to be good, if they are not good? is there any necessity for a man's being a tool to perform a deed of which his better nature disapproves 1 is it the intention of law-makers that good men shall be hung ever 1 are judges to in terpret the law according to the letter, and not the spirit ? what right have you to enter into a compact with yourself that you will do thus or so, against the light within you 1 is it for you to majce up your mind, • — to form any resolution whatever, — and not accept the convictions that are forced upon you, and which ever pass your understanding ? i do not believe in lawyers, in that mode of attacking or defending a man, because you descend to meet the judge on his own ground, and, in cases of the highest importance. 298 selections feom thoeeatj it is of no consequence whether a man breaks a human law or not. let lawyers decide trivial cases. business men may arrange that among themselves. if they were the interpreters of the everlasting laws which rightfully bind man, that would be another thing. a counterfeiting law-factory, standing half in a slave land and half in a free ! what kind of laws for free men can you expect from that 1 i am here to plead his cause with you. i plead not for his life, but for his character, — his immortal life ; and so it becomes your cause wholly, and is not his in the least. some eighteen hundred years ago christ was crucified ; this morning, perchance. captain brown was hung. these are the two ends of a chain which is not without its links. he is not old brown any longer ; he is an angel of light. i see now that it was necessary that the bravest and humanest man in all the country should be hung. perhaps he saw it himself. i almost fear that i may yet hear of his deliverance, doubting if a prolonged life, if any life, can do as much good as his death. "misguided"! "garrulous"! "insane"! "vin dictive " ! so ye write in your easy-chairs, and thus he, wounded, responds from the floor of the armoury, clear as a cloudless sky, true as the voice of nature is : " no man sent me here ; it was my own prompt ing and that of my maker. i acknowledge no master in human form." and in what a sweet and noble strain he proceeds, addressing his captors, who stand over him : " i think, my friends, you are guilty of a great wrong a plea for captain john beown 299 against god and humanity, and it would be perfectly right for any one to interfere with you so far as to free those you wilfully and wickedly hold in bond age." and, referring to his movement: "it is, in my opinion, the greatest service a man can render to god." "i pity the poor in bondage that have none to help them ; that is why i am here ; not to gratify any personal animosity, revenge, or vindictive spirit. it is my sympathy with the oppressed and the wronged, that are as good as you, and as precious in the sight of god." you don't know your testament when you see it. "i want you to understand that i respect the rights of the poorest and weakest of coloured people, oppressed by the slave power, just as much as i do those of the most wealthy and powerful. " i wish to say, furthermore, that you had better, all you people at the south, prepare yourselves for a settlement of that question, that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it. the sooner you are prepared the better. you may dispose of me very easily. i am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled, — this negro question, i mean; the end of that is not yet." i foresee the time when the painter will paint that scene, no longer going to rome for a subject ; the poet will sing it ; the historian record it ; and, with the landing of the pilgrims and the declaration of 300 selections feom thoebau independence, it will be the ornament of some future national gallery, wten at least the present form of slavery shall be no more here. we shall then be at liberty to weep for captain brown. then, and not till then, we will take our revenge. life without peinoiple at a lyceum, not long since, i felt that the lecturer had chosen a theme too foreign to himself, and so failed to interest me as much as he might have done. he described things not in or near to his heart, but toward his extremities and superficies. there was, in this sense, no truly central or centralising thought in the lecture. i would have had him deal with his privatest experience, as the poet does. the greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what i thought, and attended to my answer. i am surprised, as well as delighted, when this happens, it is such a rare use he would make of me, as if he were acquainted with the tool. commonly, if men want anything of me, it is only to know how many acres i make of their land, — since i am a surveyor, — or, at most, what trivial news i have burdened myself with. they never will go to law for my meat ; they prefer the shell. a man once came a considerable distance to ask me to lecture on slavery ; but on conversing with him, i found that he and his clique expected seven-eighths of the lecture to be 302 selections feom thokeau theirs, and only one-eighth mine; so i declined. i take it for granted, when i am invited to lecture any where, — for i have had a little experience in that business, — that there is a desire to hear what i think on some subject, though i may be the greatest fool in the country, — and not that i should say pleasant things merely, or such as the audience wiu assent to ; and i resolve, accordingly, that i will give them a strong dose of myself. they have sent for me, and engaged to pay for me, and i am determined that they shall have me, though i bore them beyond au precedent. so now i would say something similar to you, my readers. since you are my readers, and i have not been much of a traveller, i will not talk about people a thousand miles off, but come as near home as i can. as the time is short, i will leave out all the flattery, and retain all the criticism. let us consider the way in which we spend our lives. this world is a place of business. what an in finite bustle ! i am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. it interrupts my dreams. there is no sabbath. it would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. it is nothing but work, work, work. i cannot easily buy a blank book to write thoughts in; they are commonly ruled for dollars and cents. an irishman, seeing me making a minute in the fields, took it for granted that i was calculating my wages. if a man was tossed out of a window when an infant, and so made a life without peinciple 303 cripple for life, or scared out of his wits by the indians, it is regretted chiefly because he was thus incapacitated for — business ! i think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business. there is a coarse and boisterous money-making fellow in the outskirts of our town, who is going to build a bank-wall under the hill along the edge of his meadow. the powers have put this into his head to keep him out of mischief, and he wishes me to spend three weeks digging there with him. the result will be that he will perhaps get some more money to hoard, and leave for his heirs to spend foolishly. if i do this, most will commend me as' an industrious and hard-working man ; but if i choose to devote myself to certain labours which yield more real profit, though but little money, they may be inclined to look on me as an idler. nevertheless, as i do not need the police of meaningless labour to regulate me, and do not see anything absolutely praiseworthy in this fellow's undertaking, any more than in many an enterprise of our own or foreign govern ments, however amusing it may be to him or them, i prefer to finish my education at a dififerent school. if a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a specu lator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and 304 selections from thokbau enterprising citizen. as if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down ! most men would feel insulted, if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. but many are no more worthily employed now. for instance : just after sunrise, one summer morning, i noticed one of my neighbours walking beside his team, which was slowly drawing a heavy hewn stone swung under the axle, surrounded by an atmosphere of industry, — his day's work begun, — his brow commenced to sweat, — a reproach to all sluggards and idlers, — pausing abreast the shoulders of his oxen, and half turning round with a flourish of his merciful whip, while they gained their length on him. and i thought. such is the labour which the american congress exists to protect, — honest, manly toil, — honest as the day is long, — that makes his bread taste sweet, and keeps society sweet, — which all men respect and have consecrated ; one of the sacred band, doing the needful but irksome drudgery. indeed, i felt a slight reproach, because i observed this from a window, and was not abroad and stirring about a similar business. the day went by, and at evening i passed the yard of another neighbour, who keeps many servants, and spends much money fool ishly, while he adds nothing to the common stock, and there i saw the stone of the morning lying beside a whimsical structure intended to adorn this lord timothy dexter's premises, and the dignity forth with departed from the teamster's labour, in my eyes. life without pkinciple 305 in my opinion, the sun was made to light worthier toil than this. i may add, that his employer has since run off, in debt to a good part of the town, and, after passing through chancery, has settled some where else, there to become once more a patron of the arts. the ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. to have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. if the labourer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself. if you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly. those services which the community will most readily pay for, it is most disagreeable to render. you are paid for being something less than a man. the state does not commonly reward a genius any more wisely. even the poet-laureate would rather not have to cele brate the accidents of royalty. he must be bribed with a pipe of wine; and perhaps another poet is called away from his muse to gauge that very pipe. as for my own business, even that kind of survey ing which i could do with most satisfaction, my em ployers do not want. they would prefer that i should do my work coarsely and not too well, ay, not well enough. when i observe that there are different ways of surveying, my employer commonly asks which will give him the most land, not which is most correct. i once invented a rule for measuring cord wood, and tried to introduce it in boston ; but the x 306 selections feom thoeeau measurer there told me that the sellers did not wish to have their wood measured correctly, — that he was already too accurate for them, and therefore they commonly got their wood measured in charlestown before crossing the bridge. the aim of the labourer should be, not to get his living, to get "a good job," but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its labourers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it. it is remarkable that there are few men so well employed, so much to their minds, but that a little money or fame would commonly buy them off from their present pursuit. i see advertisements for adive young men, as if activity were the whole of a young man's capital. yet i have been surprised when one has with confidence proposed to me, a grown man, to embark in some enterprise of his, as if i had abso lutely nothing to do, my life having been a complete failure hitherto. what a doubtful compliment this is to pay me ! as if he had met me half-way across the ocean beating up against the wind, but bound nowhere, and proposed to me to go along with him ! if i did, what do you think the underwriters would say 1 no, no 1 i am not without employment at this stage of the voyage. to tell the truth, i saw an advertisement for able-bodied seamen, when i was a life without principle 307 boy, sauntering in my native port, and as soon as i came of age i embarked. the community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man. you may raise money enough to timnel a mountain, but you cannot raise money enough to hire a man who is minding his own business. an efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the community pay him for it or not. the inefficient offer their inefficiency to the highest bidder, and are for ever expecting to be put into office. one would suppose that they were rarely disappointed. perhaps i am more than usually jealous with re spect to my freedom. i feel that my connection with and obligation to society are still very slight and transient. those slight labours which afford me a livelihood, and by which it is allowed that i am to some extent serviceable to my contemporaries, are as yet commonly a pleasure to me, and i am not often reminded that they are a necessity. so far i am successful. but i foresee, that, if my wants should be much increased, the labour required to supply them would become a drudgery. if i should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, i am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for. i trust that i shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage. i wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. there is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living. all great enterprises are self -supporting. the poet, for instance, must 308 selections from thoeeatj sustain his body by his poetry, as a steam planing mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it makes. you must get your living by loving. but as it is said of the merchants that ninety-seven in a hundred fail, so the life of men generally, tried by this standard, is a failure, and bankruptcy may be surely prophesied. merely to come into the world the heir of a for tune is not to be born, but to be stiu-born, rather. to be supported by the charity of friends, or a government -pension, — provided you continue to breathe, — by whatever fine synonymes you describe these relations, is to go into the almshouse. on sundays the poor debtor goes to church to take an account of stock, and finds, of course, that his out goes have been greater than his income. in the catholic church, especially, they go into chancery, make a clean confession, give up all, and think to start again. thus men wiu lie on their backs, talk ing about the fall of man, and never make an eflfort to get up. as for the comparative demand which men make on life, it is an important difference between two, that the one is satisfied with a level success, that his marks can all be hit by point-blank shots, but the other, however low and unsuccessful his life may be, constantly elevates his aim, though at a very slight angle to the horizon. i should much rather be the last man, — though, as the orientals say, " greatness doth not approach him who is for ever looking down ; and all those who are looking high are growing poor." life without principle 309 it is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting a living : how to make getting a living not merely honest and honourable, but altogether inviting and glorious ; for if getting a living is not so, then living is not. one would think, from looking at literature, that this question had never disturbed a solitary individual's musings. is it that men are too much disgusted with their experience to speak of it "i the lesson of value which money teaches, which the author of the universe has taken so much pains to teach us, we are inclined to skip altogether. as for the means of living, it is wonderful how indifferent men of all classes are about it, even reformers, so called, — whether they inherit, or earn, or steal it. i think that society has done nothing for us in this respect, or at least has undone what she has done. cold and hunger seem more friendly to my nature than those methods which men have adopted and advise to ward them off. the title wise is, for the most part, falsely applied. how can one be a wise man, if he does not know any better how to live than other men? — if he is only more cunning and intellectually subtle ? does wisdom work in a tread-milh or does she teach how to succeed hy her example 1 is there any such thing as wisdom not applied to life % is she merely the miller who grinds the finest logic % it is pertinent to ask if plato got his living in a better way or more success fully than his contemporaries, — or did he succumb to the difficulties of life like other men % did he seem 310 selections from thokeau to prevail over some of them merely by indifference, or by assuming grand airs 1 or find it easier to live, because his aunt remembered him in her will 1 the ways in which most men get their living, that is, live, are mere make -shifts, and a shirking of the real business of life, — chiefly because they do not know, but partly because they do not mean, any better. the rush to california, for instance, and the atti tude, not merely of merchants, but of philosophers and prophets, so called, in relation to it, reflect the greatest disgrace on mankind. that so many are ready to live by luck, and so get the means of com manding the labour of others less lucky, without contributing any value to society ! and that is called enterprise ! i know of no more startling development of the immorality of trade, and all the common modes of getting a hving. the philosophy and poetry and religion of such a mankind are not worth the dust of a puff-ball. the hog that gets his living by rooting, stirring up the soil so, would be ashamed of such company. if i could command the wealth of all the worlds by lifting my finger, i would not pay such a price for it. even mahomet knew that god did not make this world in jest. it makes god to be a moneyed gentleman who scatters a hand ful of pennies in order to see mankind scramble for them. the world's raffle ! a subsistence in the domains of nature a thing to be raflled for ! what a comment, what a satire, on our institutions ! the conclusion will be, that mankind will hang itself upon a tree. and have all the precepts in all the life without pkinciple 311 bibles taught men only this? and is the last and most admirable invention of the human race only an improved muck-rake 1 is this the ground on which orientals and occidentals meet ? did god direct us so to get our living, digging where we never planted, — and he would, perchance, reward us with lumps of gold "i god gave the righteous man a certiiicate entitling him to food and raiment, but the unrighteous man found a, facsimile of the same in god's coffers, and appropriated it, and obtained food and raiment like the former. it is one of the most extensive systems of counterfeiting that the world has seen. i did not know that mankind were suffering for want of gold. i have seen a little of it. i know that it is very malleable, but not so malleable as wit. a grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom. the gold-digger in the ravines of the mountains is as much a gambler as his fellow in the saloons of san francisco. what difference does it make, whether you shake dirt or shake dice 1 if you win, society is the loser. the gold-digger is the enemy of the honest labourer, whatever checks and compensations there may be. it is not enough to tell me that you worked hard to get your gold. so does the devil work hard. the way of transgressors may be hard in many respects. the humblest observer who goes to the mines sees and says that gold-digging is of the character of a lottery ; the gold thus obtained is not the same thing with the wages of honest toil. but, 312 selections feom thoeeau practically, he forgets what he has seen, for he has seen only the fact, not the principle, and goes into trade there, that is, buys a ticket in what commonly proves another lottery, where the fact is not so obvious. after reading howitt's account of the australian gold-diggings one evening, i had in my mind's eye, all night, the numerous valleys, with their streams, all cut up with foul pits, from ten to one hundred feet deep, and half a dozen feet across, as close as they can be dug, and partly filled with water, — the locality to which men furiously rush to probe for their fortunes, — uncertain where they shall break ground, — not knowing but the gold is under then camp itself, — sometimes digging one hundred and sixty feet before they strike the vein, or then missing it by a foot, — turned into demons, and regardless of each other's rights, in their thirst for riches, — whole valleys, for thirty miles, suddenly honeycombed by the pits of the miners, so that even hundreds are drowned in them, — standing in water, and covered with mud and clay, they work night and day, dying of exposure and disease. having read this, and partly forgotten it, i was thinking, accidentally, of my own unsatisfactory life, doing as others do ; and with that vision of the diggings stiu before me, i asked myself, why /might not be washing some gold daily, though it were only the finest particles, — why / might not sink a shaft down to the gold within me, and work that mine. there is a ballarat, a ben digo for }'ou, — what though it were a sulky-gully? life without pkinciple 313 at any rate, i might pursue some path, however solitary and narrow and crooked, in which i could walk with love and reverence. wherever a man separates from the multitude, and goes his own way in this mood, there indeed is a fork in the road, though ordinary travellers may see only a gap in the paling. his solitary path across-lots will turn out the higher way of the two. men rush to california and australia as if the true gold were to be found in that direction; but that is to go to the very opposite extreme to where it lies. they go prospecting farther and farther away from the true lead, and are most unfortunate when they think themselves most successful. is not our tuitive soil auriferous 1 does not a stream from the golden mountains flow through our native valley 1 and has not this for more than geologic ages been bringing down the shining particles and forming the nuggets for us ? yet, strange to tell, if a digger steal away, prospecting for this true gold, into the un explored solitudes around us, there is no danger that any will dog his steps, and endeavour to supplant him. he may claim and undermine the whole valley even, both the cultivated and the uncultivated portions, his whole life long in peace, for no one will ever dispute his claim. they will not mind his cradles or his toms. he is not confined to a claim twelve feet square, as at ballarat, but may mine any where, and wash the whole wide world in his tom. howitt says of the man who foimd the great nugget which weighed twenty-eight pounds, at the 314 selections ffiom thoebau beiidigo diggings in australia : "he soon began to drink ; got a horse, and rode all about, generally at full gallop, and, when he met people, called out to inquire if they knew who he was, and then kindly informed them that he was ' the bloody wretch that had found the nugget.' at last he rode full speed against a tree, and nearly knocked his brains out." i think, however, there was no danger of that, for he had already knocked his brains out against the nugget. howitt adds, " he is a hopelessly ruined man." but he is a type of the class. they are all fast men. hear some of the names of the places where they dig: "jackass flat," — " sheep's-head gully," — "murderer's bar," etc. is there no satire in these names ? let them carry their ill-gotten wealth where they will, i am thinking it wiu still be "jackass fiat,'' if not "murderer's bar," where they live. the last resource of our energy has been the rob bing of graveyards on the isthmus of darien, an enterprise which appears to be but in its infancy ; for, according to late accounts, an act has passed its second reading in the legislature of new granada, regulating this kind of mining ; and a correspondent of the trilune writes : " in the dry season, when the weather will permit of the country being properly prospected, no doubt other rich guacas [that is, grave yards] will bo found." to emigrants he says: "do not come before december ; take the isthmus route in preference to the boca del toro one ; bring no useless baggage, and do not cumber yourself with a life without peinoiple 315 tent ; but a good pair of blankets will be necessary ; a pick, shovel, and axe of good material will be almost all that is required " : advice which might have been taken from the burker's guide. and he concludes with this line in italics and small capitals : "if you are doing well at home, stay there," which may fairly be interpreted to mean, " if you are getting a good living by robbing graveyards at home, stay there." but why go to california for a text ? she is the child of new england, bred at her own school and church. it is remarkable that among all the preachers there are so few moral teachers. the prophets are employed in excusing the ways of men. most rever end seniors, the illuminati of the age, tell me, with a gracious, reminiscent smile, betwixt an aspiration and a shudder, not to be too tender about these things, — to lump all that, that is, make a lump of gold of it. the highest advice i have heard on these subjects was grovelling. the burden of it was, — it is not worth your while to undertake to reform the world in this particular. do not ask how your bread is buttered ; it will make you sick, if you do, — and the like. a man had better starve at once than lose his innocence in the process of getting his bread. if within the sophisticated man there is not an un sophisticated one, then he is but one of the devil's angels. as we grow old, we live more coarsely, we relax a little in our disciplines, and, to some extent, cease to obey our finest instincts. but we should be 316 selections from thoreatj fastidious to the extreme of sanity, disregarding the gibes of those who are more unfortunate than our selves. in our science and philosophy, even, there is commonly no true and absolute account of things. the spirit of sect and bigotry has planted its hoof amid the stars. you have only to discuss the prob lem, whether the stars are inhabited or not, in order to discover it. why must we daub the heavens as well as the earth 1 it was an unfortunate discovery that dr. kane was a mason, and that sir john franklin was another. but it was a more cruel suggestion that possibly that was the reason why the former went in search of the latter. there is not a popular magazine in this country that would dare to print a child's thought on important subjects without comment. it must be submitted to the d.d.s. i would it were the chickadee-dees. you come from attending the funeral of mankind to attend to a natural phenomenon. a little thought is sexton to all the world. i hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society. most with whom you endeavour to talk soon come to a stand against some institution in which they appear to hold stock, — that is, some particular, not universal, way of viewing things. they will continually thrust their own low roof, with its narrow skylight, between you and the sky, when it is the unobstructed heavens you would view. get out of the way mth your cobwebs, wash your life without principle 317 windows, i say ! in some lyceums they tell me that they have voted to exclude the subject of religion. but how do i know what their religion is, and when i am near to or far from it ? i have walked into such an arena and done my best to make a clean breast of what religion i have experienced, and the audience never suspected what i was about. the lecture was as harmless as moonshine to them. whereas, if i had read to them the biography of the greatest scamps in history, they might have thought that i had written the lives of the deacons of their church. ordinarily, the inquiry is. where did you come from ? or. where are you going ? that was a more pertinent question which i overheard one of my auditors put to another once, — "what does he lecture for 1 " it made me quake in my shoes. to speak impartially, the best men that i know are not serene, a world in themselves. for the most part, they dwell in forms, and flatter and study effect only more finely than the rest. we select granite for the underpinning of our houses and barns ; we build fences of stone ; but we do not ourselves rest on an underpinning of granitic truth, the lowest primitive rock. our sills are rotten. what stuff is the man made of who is not coexistent in our thought with the purest and subtilest truth? i often accuse my finest acquaintances of an immense frivolity ; for, while there are manners and compliments, we do not meet, we do not teach one another the lessons of honesty and sincerity that the brutes do, or of steadi ness and solidity that the rocks do. the fault is 318 selections from thoeeau commonly mutual, however ; for we do not habitually demand any more of each other. that excitement about kossuth, consider how characteristic, but superficial, it was ! — only another kind of politics or dancing. men were making speeches to him all over the country, but each ex pressed only the thought, or the want of thought, of the multitude. no man stood on truth. they were merely banded together, as usual, one leaning on another, and all together on nothing ; as the hindoos made the world rest on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent, and had nothing to put under the serpent. for all fruit of that stir we have the kossuth hat. just so hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary conversation. surface meets surface. when our life ceases to be inward and private, con versation degenerates into mere gossip. we rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neigh bour ; and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is, that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not. in proportion as our inward life fails, we go more con stantly and desperately to the post-office. you may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while. i do not know but it is too much to read one news paper a week. i have tried it recently, and for so life without principle 319 long it seems to me that i have not dwelt in my native region. the sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say not so much to me. you cannot serve two masters. it requires more than a day's devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day. we may well be ashamed to tell what things we have read or heard in our day. i do not know why my news should be so trivial, — considering what one's dreams and expectations are, why the developments should be so paltry. the news we hear, for the most part, is not news to our genius. it is the stalest repetition. you are often tempted to ask, why such stress is laid on a particular experience which you have had, — that, after twenty-five years, you should meet hobbins, eegistrar of deeds, again on the side walk. have you not budged an inch, then ? such is the daily news. its facts appear to float in the atmo sphere, insignificant as the sporules of fungi, and impinge on some neglected thallus, or surface of our minds, which affords a basis for them, and hence a parasitic growth. we should wash ourselves clean of such news. of what consequence, though our planet explode, if there is no character involved in the explosion ? in health we have not the least curiosity about such events. we do not live for idle amuse ment. i would not run round a corner to see the world blow up. all summer, and far into the autumn, perchance, you unconsciously went by the newspapers and the news, and now you find it was because the morning and the evening were full of news to you. your 320 selections from thoeeau walks were full of incidents. you attended, not to the affairs of europe, but to your own affairs in massachusetts fields. if you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events that make the news transpire, — thinner than the paper on which it is printed, — then these things will fiu the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them. really to see the sun rise or go down every day, so to relate ourselves to a universal fact, would preserve us sane for ever. nations ! what are nations 1 tartars, and huns, and chinamen ! like insects, they swarm. the historian strives in vain to make them memorable. it is for want of a man that there are so many men. it is individuals that populate the world. any man thinking may say with the spirit of lodin — " i look down from my height on nations, and they become ashes before me ; — calm is my dwelling in the clouds ; pleasant are the great fields of my rest." pray, let us hve without being drawn by dogs, esquimaux-fashion, tearing over hill and dale, and biting each other's ears. not without a slight shudder at the danger, i often perceive how near i had come to admitting into my mind the details of some trivial affair, — the news of the street ; and i am astonished to observe how willing men are to lumber their minds with such rubbish, — to permit idle rumours and incidents of the most insignificant kind to intrude on ground life without pkinciple 321 which should be sacred to thought. shall the mind be a public arena, where the affairs of the street and the gossip of the tea-table chiefly are discussed 1 or shall it be a quarter of heaven itself, — an hypsethral temple, consecrated to the service of the gods? i find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant that i hesitate to burden my attention with those which are insignificant, which only a divine mind could illustrate. such is, for the most part, the news in newspapers and conversation. it is important to preserve the mind's chastity in this respect. think of admitting the details of a single ease of the criminal court into our thoughts, to stalk profanely through their very sanctum sanctorum for an hour, ay, for many hours ! to make a very bar-room of the mind's inmost apartment, as if for so long the dust of the street had occupied us, — the very street itself, with all its travel, its bustle, and filth, had passed through our thoughts' shrine ! would it not be an intellectual and moral suicide 1 when i have been compelled to sit spectator and auditor in a court room for some hours, and have seen my neighbours, who were not compelled, stealing in from time to time, and tiptoeing about with washed hands and faces, it has appeared to my mind's eye, that, when they took ofif their hats, their ears suddenly expanded into vast hoppers for sound, between which even their narrow heads were crowded. like the vanes of wind mills, they caught the broad, but shallow stream of sound, which, after a few titillating gyrations in their coggy brains, passed out the other side. i wondered t 322 selections fkom thoeeau if, when they got home, they were as careful to wash their ears as before their hands and faces. it had seemed to me, at such a time, that the auditors and the witnesses, the jury and the counsel, the judge and the criminal at the bar, — ^if i may presume him guilty before he is convicted, — were au equally criminal, and a thunderbolt might be expected to descend and consume them all together. by all kinds of traps and signboards, threatening the extreme penalty of the divine law, exclude such trespassers from the only ground which can be sacred to you. it is so hard to forget what it is worse than useless to remember ! if i am to be a thoroughfare, i prefer that it be of the mountain-brooks, the parnassian streams, and not the town-sewers. there is inspiration, that gossip which comes to the ear of the attentive mind from the courts of heaven. there is the profane and stale revelation of the bar-room and the police court. the same ear is fitted to receive both communications. only the character of the hearer determines to which it shall be open, and to which closed. i believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality. our very intellect shall be mac adamised, as it were, — its foundation broken into fragments for the wheels of travel to roll over ; and if you would know what will make the most durable pavement, surpassing rolled stones, spruce blocks, and asphaltum, you have only tolook into some of our minds which have been subjected to this treatment so long. life without principle 323 if we have thus desecrated ourselves, — as who has not?— the remedy will be by wariness and devotion to reconsecrate ourselves, and make once more a fane of the mind. we should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention. read not the times. read the eternities. convention alities are at length as bad as impurities. even the facts of science may dust the mind by their dryness, unless they are in a sense effaced each morning, or rather rendered fertile by the dews of fresh and living truth. knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven. yes, every thought that passes through the mind helps to wear and tear it, and to deepen the ruts, which, as in the streets of pompeii, evince how much it has been used. how many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them, — had better let their peddling-carts be driven, even at the slowest trot or walk, over that bridge of glorious span by which we trust to pass at last from the farthest brink of time to the nearest shore of eternity ! have we no culture, no refinement, — but skill only to live coarsely and serve the devil 1 — to acquire a little worldly wealth, or fame, or liberty, and make a false show with it, as if we were all husk and shell, with no tender and living kernel to us? shall our institutions be like those chestnut-burrs which contain abortive nuts, perfect only to prick the fingers 1 y 2 324 selections from thoreau america is said to be the arena on which the battle of freedom is to be fought ; but surely it can not be freedom in a merely political sense that is meant. even if we grant that the american has freed himself from a political tyrant, he is still the slave of an economical and moral tyrant. now that the republic, — the res-puuica, — has been settled, it is time to look after the res-privata, — the private state, — to see, as the roman senate charged its consuls, "ne quid res-pbivata detrimenti caper et," that the private state receive no detriment. do we call this the land of the free 1 what is it to be free from king george and continue the slaves of king prejudice 1 what is it to be born free and not to live free ? what is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom 1 is it a freedom to be slaves, or a freedom to be free, of which we boast ? we are a nation of politicians, con cerned about the outmost defences only of freedom. it is our children's children who may perchance be really free. we tax ourselves unjustly. there is a part of us which is not represented. it is taxation without representation. we quarter troops, we quarter fools and cattle of all sorts upon ourselves. we quarter our gross bodies on our poor souls, till the former eat up all the latter's substance. with respect to a true culture and manhood, we are essentially pro^ancial still, not metropolitan, — mere jonathans. we are provincial, because we do not find at home our standards, — because we do not worship truth, but the reflection of truth, — because life without principle 325 we are warped and narrowed by an exclusive devo tion to trade and commerce and manufactures and agriculture and the like, which are but means, and not the end. so is the english parliament provincial. mere country-bumpkins, they betray themselves, when any more important question arises for them to settle, the irish question, for instance, — the english question why did i not say ? their natures are subdued to what they work in. their "good breeding " respects only secondary objects. the finest manners in the world are awkwardness and fatuity, when contrasted with a finer intelligence. they appear but as the fashions of past days, — mere courtliness, knee-buckles and small-clothes, out of date. it is the vice, but not the excellence of manners, that they are continu ally being deserted by the character ; they are cast off clothes or shells, claiming the respect which belonged to the living creature. you are presented with the shells instead of the meat, and it is no excuse generally, that, in the case of some fishes, the shells are of more worth than the meat. the man who thrusts his manners upon me does as if he were to insist on introducing me to his cabinet of curiosities, when i wished to see himself. it was not in this sense that the poet decker called christ "the first true gentleman that ever breathed." i repeat, that in this sense the most splendid court in christendom is provincial, having authority to consult about transalpine interests only, and not the affairs of eome. a praetor or proconsul would 326 selections from thoeeau suffice to settle the questions which absorb the atten tion of the english parliament and the american congress. government and legislation ! these i thought were respectable professions. we have heard of heaven born numas, lycurguses, and solons, in the history of the world, whose names at least may stand for ideal legislators ; but think of legislating to regulate the breeding of slaves, or the exportation of tobacco ! what have divine legislators to do with the exporta tion or the importation of tobacco? what humane ones vnth the breeding of slaves ? suppose you were to submit the question to any son of god, — and has he no children in the nineteenth century? is it a family which is extinct? — in what condition would you get it again ? what shall a state like virginia say for itself at the last day, in which these have been the principal, the staple productions? what ground is there for patriotism in such a state? i derive my facts from statistical tables which the states themselves have published. a commerce that whitens every sea in quest of nuts and raisins, and makes slaves of its sailors for this purpose ! i saw, the other day, a vessel which had been wrecked, and many lives lost, and her cargo of rags, juniper-berries, and bitter almonds were strewn along the shore. it seemed hardly worth the while to tempt the dangers of the sea between leghorn and new york for the sake of a cargo of juniper-berries and bitter almonds. america sending to the old world for her bitters ! is not the life without principle 327 sea-brine, is not shipwreck, bitter enough to make the cup of life go down here ? yet such, to a great extent, is our boasted commerce ; and there are those who style themselves statesmen and philosophers who are so blind as to think that progress and civilisation depend on precisely this kind of interchange and activity, — the activity of ilies about a molasses hogshead. very well, observes one, if men were oysters. and very well, answer i, if men were mos quitoes. lieutenant herndon, whom our government sent to explore the amazon, and, it is said, to extend the area of slavery, observed that there was wanting there "an industrious and active population, who know what the comforts of life are, and who have artificial wants to draw out the great resources of the country." but what are the "artificial wants" to be encouraged? not the love of luxuries, like the tobacco and slaves of, i believe, his native virginia, nor the ice and granite and other material wealth of our native new england; nor are "the great resources of a country " that fertility or barren ness of soil which produces these. the chief want, in every state that i have been into, was a high and earnest purpose in its inhabitants. this alone draws out " the great resources " of nature, and at last taxes her beyond her resources; for man naturally dies out of her. when we want culture more than potatoes, and illumination more than sugar -plums, then the great resources of a world are taxed and drawn out, and the result, or staple production, is, 328 selections peom thoeeau not slaves, nor operatives, but men, — those rare fruits called heroes, saints, poets, philosophers, and redeemers. in short, as a snow-drift is formed where there is a lull in the wind, so, one would say, where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up. but the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at length blows it down. what is called politics is comparatively something so superficial and inhuman, that, practically, i have never fairly recognised that it concerns me at all. the newspapers, i perceive, devote some of their columns specially to politics or government without charge ; and this, one would say, is all that saves it ; but, as i love literature, and, to some extent, the truth also, i never read those columns at any rate. i do not wish to blunt my sense of right so much. 1 have not got to answer for having read a single president's message. a strange age of the world this, when empires, kingdoms, and republics come a-begging to a private man's door, and utter their complaints at his elbow ! i cannot take up a news paper but i find that some wretched government or other, hard pushed, and on its last legs, is interced ing with me, the reader, to vote for it, — more im portunate than an italian beggar; and if i have a mind to look at its certificate, made, perchance, by some benevolent merchant's clerk, or the skipper that brought it over, for it cannot speak a word of english itself, i shall probably read of the eruption of some vesuvius, or the overflowing of some po, true life without principle 329 or forged, which brought it into this condition. i do not hesitate, in such a case, to suggest work, or the almshouse ; or why not keep its castle in silence, as i do commonly ? the poor president, what with preserving his popularity and doing his duty, is com pletely bewildered. the newspapers are the ruling power. any other government is reduced to a few marines at fort independence. if a man neglects to read the daily times, government will go down on its knees to him, for this is the only treason in these days. those things which now most engage the atten tion of men, as politics and the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions of human society, but should be unconsciously performed, like the corresponding functions of the physical body. they are ivfra human, a kind of vegetation. i sometimes awake to a half-consciousness of them going on about me, as a man may become conscious of some of the pro cesses of digestion in a morbid state, and so have the dyspepsia, as it is called. it is as if a thinker submitted himself to be rasped by the great gizzard of creation. politics is, as it were, the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its two opposite halves, — sometimes split into quarters, it may be, which grind on each other. not only individuals, but states, have thus a con firmed dyspepsia, which expresses itself, you can imagine by what sort of eloquence. thus our life is not altogether a forgetting, but also, alas ! to a great extent, a remembering, of that which we should never 330 selections from thoreau have been conscious of, certainly not in our waking hours. why should we not meet, not always as dyspeptics, to tell our bad dreams, but sometimes as «mpeptics, to congratulate each other on the ever glorious morning? i do not make an exorbitant demand, surely. the end printed by r. & r. clark, edinburgh. the eversley series. globe si/o. cloth. 4^-. net per volume. the works of matthew arnold. 8 vols. essays in criticism. first series. essays in criticism. second series. eaely and narrative poems. lyric and elegiac poems. dramatic and later poems. american discourses. letters. edited by g. w. e. russell. 2 vols. the holy bible. arranged in para graphs, with an introduction by j. w. mackail, m.a. in 8 volumes. vol. i, genesis — numbers. vol. 2. deutero' , nomv — 2 samuel. vol. 3. i kings — esther. vol. 4. job — song of solo' mon. vol, 5. isaiah — lamentations, vol. 6. ezekiel— malachi. vol. 7 matthew— john. vol. 8. acts revelation. essays by george brimley. third edition, chaucer's canterbury tales, edited by a. w. pollard. 2 vols. miscellaneous writings of dean church. collected edition. 9 vols. 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mdccccvi copyright 1864 by ticknor and fields copyright 1892, 1893, and 1906 by houghton, mifflin & co. all rights reserved contents introductory note ktaadn chesuncook the allegash and east branch appendix i. trees ii. flowers and shrubs iii. list of plants iv. list of birds v. quadrupeds vi. outfit for an excursion vii. a list of indian words index illustrations snowberry, _carbon photograph_ moosehead lake, from mount kineo, maine wilderness pine tree, boar mountain squaw mountain, moosehead lake moosehead lake, from mount kineo mount kineo cliff introductory note the maine woods was the second volume collected from his writings after thoreauâ��s death. of the material which composed it, the first two divisions were already in print. â��ktaadn and the maine woodsâ�� was the title of a paper printed in 1848 in _the union magazine_, and â��chesuncookâ�� was published in _the atlantic monthly_ in 1858. the book was edited by his friend william ellery channing. it was during his second summer at walden that thoreau made his first visit to the maine woods. it was probably in response to a request from horace greeley that he wrote out the narrative from his journal, for mr. greeley had shown himself eager to help thoreau in putting his wares on the market. in a letter to emerson, january 12, 1848, thoreau writes: â��i read a part of the story of my excursion to ktaadn to quite a large audience of men and boys, the other night, whom it interested. it contains many facts and some poetry.â�� he offered the paper to greeley at the end of march, and on the 17th of april greeley responded: â��i inclose you $25 for your article on maine scenery, as promised. i know it is worth more, though i have not yet found time to read it; but i have tried once to sell it without success. it is rather long for my columns, and too fine for the million; but i consider it a cheap bargain, and shall print it myself if i do not dispose of it to better advantage. you will not, of course, consider yourself under any sort of obligation to me, for my offer was in the way of business, and i have got more than the worth of my money.â�� but this generous, high-minded friend was thinking of thoreauâ��s business, not his own, for in october of the same year he writes, â��i break a silence of some duration to inform you that i hope on monday to receive payment for your glorious account of â��ktaadn and the maine woods,â�� which i bought of you at a jewâ��s bargain and sold to _the union magazine_. i am to get $75 for it, and as i donâ��t choose to _exploiter_ you at such a rate, i shall insist on inclosing you $25 more in this letter, which will still leave me $25 to pay various charges and labors i have incurred in selling your articles and getting paid for them,--the latter by far the most difficult portion of the business.â�� the third of thoreauâ��s excursions in the maine woods was made very largely for the purpose of studying indian life and character in the person of his guide. he had all his life been interested in the indians, and mr. sanborn tells us--what is also evident from his journal--that it was his purpose to expand his studies into a separate work on the subject, for which he had collected a considerable amount of material from books as well as from his own observations. after his return from the allegash and east branch he wrote as follows to mr. blake under date of august 18, 1857: â��i have now returned, and think i have had a quite profitable journey, chiefly from associating with an intelligent indian.... having returned, i flatter myself that the world appears in some respects a little larger, and not as usual smaller and shallower for having extended my range. i have made a short excursion into the new world which the indian dwells in, or is. he begins where we leave off. it is worth the while to detect new faculties in man, he is so much the more divine; and anything that fairly excites our admiration expands us. the indian who can find his way so wonderfully in the woods possesses so much intelligence which the white man does not, and it increases my own capacity as well as faith to observe it. i rejoice to find that intelligence flows in other channels than i knew. it redeems for me portions of what seemed brutish before. it is a great satisfaction to find that your oldest convictions are permanent. with regard to essentials i have never had occasion to change my mind. the aspect of the world varies from year to year as the landscape is differently clothed, but i find that the _truth_ is still _true_, and i never regret any emphasis which it may have inspired. ktaadn is there still, but much more surely my old conviction is there, resting with more than mountain breadth and weight on the world, the source still of fertilizing streams, and affording glorious views from its summit if i can get up to it again.â�� the maine woods ktaadn on the 31st of august, 1846, i left concord in massachusetts for bangor and the backwoods of maine, by way of the railroad and steamboat, intending to accompany a relative of mine, engaged in the lumber trade in bangor, as far as a dam on the west branch of the penobscot, in which property he was interested. from this place, which is about one hundred miles by the river above bangor, thirty miles from the houlton military road, and five miles beyond the last log hut, i proposed to make excursions to mount ktaadn, the second highest mountain in new england, about thirty miles distant, and to some of the lakes of the penobscot, either alone or with such company as i might pick up there. it is unusual to find a camp so far in the woods at that season, when lumbering operations have ceased, and i was glad to avail myself of the circumstance of a gang of men being employed there at that time in repairing the injuries caused by the great freshet in the spring. the mountain may be approached more easily and directly on horseback and on foot from the northeast side, by the aroostook road, and the wassataquoik river; but in that case you see much less of the wilderness, none of the glorious river and lake scenery, and have no experience of the batteau and the boatmanâ��s life. i was fortunate also in the season of the year, for in the summer myriads of black flies, mosquitoes, and midges, or, as the indians call them, â��no-see-ems,â�� make traveling in the woods almost impossible; but now their reign was nearly over. ktaadn, whose name is an indian word signifying highest land, was first ascended by white men in 1804. it was visited by professor j. w. bailey of west point in 1836; by dr. charles t. jackson, the state geologist, in 1837; and by two young men from boston in 1845. all these have given accounts of their expeditions. since i was there, two or three other parties have made the excursion, and told their stories. besides these, very few, even among backwoodsmen and hunters, have ever climbed it, and it will be a long time before the tide of fashionable travel sets that way. the mountainous region of the state of maine stretches from near the white mountains, northeasterly one hundred and sixty miles, to the head of the aroostook river, and is about sixty miles wide. the wild or unsettled portion is far more extensive. so that some hours only of travel in this direction will carry the curious to the verge of a primitive forest, more interesting, perhaps, on all accounts, than they would reach by going a thousand miles westward. the next forenoon, tuesday, september 1, i started with my companion in a buggy from bangor for â��up river,â�� expecting to be overtaken the next day night at mattawamkeag point, some sixty miles off, by two more bangoreans, who had decided to join us in a trip to the mountain. we had each a knapsack or bag filled with such clothing and articles as were indispensable, and my companion carried his gun. within a dozen miles of bangor we passed through the villages of stillwater and oldtown, built at the falls of the penobscot, which furnish the principal power by which the maine woods are converted into lumber. the mills are built directly over and across the river. here is a close jam, a hard rub, at all seasons; and then the once green tree, long since white, i need not say as the driven snow, but as a driven log, becomes lumber merely. here your inch, your two and your three inch stuff begin to be, and mr. sawyer marks off those spaces which decide the destiny of so many prostrate forests. through this steel riddle, more or less coarse, is the arrowy maine forest, from ktaadn and chesuncook, and the head-waters of the st. john, relentlessly sifted, till it comes out boards, clapboards, laths, and shingles such as the wind can take, still, perchance, to be slit and slit again, till men get a size that will suit. think how stood the white pine tree on the shore of chesuncook, its branches soughing with the four winds, and every individual needle trembling in the sunlight,--think how it stands with it now,--sold, perchance, to the new england friction-match company! there were in 1837, as i read, two hundred and fifty sawmills on the penobscot and its tributaries above bangor, the greater part of them in this immediate neighborhood, and they sawed two hundred millions of feet of boards annually. to this is to be added the lumber of the kennebec, androscoggin, saco, passamaquoddy, and other streams. no wonder that we hear so often of vessels which are becalmed off our coast being surrounded a week at a time by floating lumber from the maine woods. the mission of men there seems to be, like so many busy demons, to drive the forest all out of the country, from every solitary beaver swamp and mountain-side, as soon as possible. at oldtown, we walked into a batteau-manufactory. the making of batteaux is quite a business here for the supply of the penobscot river. we examined some on the stocks. they are light and shapely vessels, calculated for rapid and rocky streams, and to be carried over long portages on menâ��s shoulders, from twenty to thirty feet long, and only four or four and a half wide, sharp at both ends like a canoe, though broadest forward on the bottom, and reaching seven or eight feet over the water, in order that they may slip over rocks as gently as possible. they are made very slight, only two boards to a side, commonly secured to a few light maple or other hard-wood knees, but inward are of the clearest and widest white pine stuff, of which there is a great waste on account of their form, for the bottom is left perfectly flat, not only from side to side, but from end to end. sometimes they become â��hoggingâ�� even, after long use, and the boatmen then turn them over and straighten them by a weight at each end. they told us that one wore out in two years, or often in a single trip, on the rocks, and sold for from fourteen to sixteen dollars. there was something refreshing and wildly musical to my ears in the very name of the white manâ��s canoe, reminding me of charlevoix and canadian voyageurs. the batteau is a sort of mongrel between the canoe and the boat, a fur-traderâ��s boat. the ferry here took us past the indian island. as we left the shore, i observed a short, shabby, washerwoman-looking indian,--they commonly have the woebegone look of the girl that cried for spilt milk,--just from â��up river,â�� land on the oldtown side near a grocery, and, drawing up his canoe, take out a bundle of skins in one hand, and an empty keg or half-barrel in the other, and scramble up the bank with them. this picture will do to put before the indianâ��s history, that is, the history of his extinction. in 1837 there were three hundred and sixty-two souls left of this tribe. the island seemed deserted to-day, yet i observed some new houses among the weather-stained ones, as if the tribe had still a design upon life; but generally they have a very shabby, forlorn, and cheerless look, being all back side and woodshed, not homesteads, even indian homesteads, but instead of home or abroad-steads, for their life is _domi aut militiã¦_, at home or at war, or now rather _venatus_, that is, a hunting, and most of the latter. the church is the only trim-looking building, but that is not abenaki, that was romeâ��s doings. good canadian it may be, but it is poor indian. these were once a powerful tribe. politics are all the rage with them now. i even thought that a row of wigwams, with a dance of powwows, and a prisoner tortured at the stake, would be more respectable than this. we landed in milford, and rode along on the east side of the penobscot, having a more or less constant view of the river, and the indian islands in it, for they retain all the islands as far up as nicketow, at the mouth of the east branch. they are generally well-timbered, and are said to be better soil than the neighboring shores. the river seemed shallow and rocky, and interrupted by rapids, rippling and gleaming in the sun. we paused a moment to see a fish hawk dive for a fish down straight as an arrow, from a great height, but he missed his prey this time. it was the houlton road on which we were now traveling, over which some troops were marched once towards marsâ�� hill, though not to marsâ�� _field_, as it proved. it is the main, almost the only, road in these parts, as straight and well made, and kept in as good repair as almost any you will find anywhere. everywhere we saw signs of the great freshet,--this house standing awry, and that where it was not founded, but where it was found, at any rate, the next day; and that other with a waterlogged look, as if it were still airing and drying its basement, and logs with everybodyâ��s marks upon them, and sometimes the marks of their having served as bridges, strewn along the road. we crossed the sunkhaze, a summery indian name, the olemmon, passadumkeag, and other streams, which make a greater show on the map than they now did on the road. at passadumkeag we found anything but what the name implies,--earnest politicians, to wit,--white ones, i mean,--on the alert to know how the election was likely to go; men who talked rapidly, with subdued voice, and a sort of factitious earnestness you could not help believing, hardly waiting for an introduction, one on each side of your buggy, endeavoring to say much in little, for they see you hold the whip impatiently, but always saying little in much. caucuses they have had, it seems, and caucuses they are to have again,--victory and defeat. somebody may be elected, somebody may not. one man, a total stranger, who stood by our carriage in the dusk, actually frightened the horse with his asseverations, growing more solemnly positive as there was less in him to be positive about. so passadumkeag did not look on the map. at sundown, leaving the river road awhile for shortness, we went by way of enfield, where we stopped for the night. this, like most of the localities bearing names on this road, was a place to name which, in the midst of the unnamed and unincorporated wilderness, was to make a distinction without a difference, it seemed to me. here, however, i noticed quite an orchard of healthy and well-grown apple trees, in a bearing state, it being the oldest settlerâ��s house in this region, but all natural fruit and comparatively worthless for want of a grafter. and so it is generally, lower down the river. it would be a good speculation, as well as a favor conferred on the settlers, for a massachusetts boy to go down there with a trunk full of choice scions, and his grafting apparatus, in the spring. the next morning we drove along through a high and hilly country, in view of cold-stream pond, a beautiful lake four or five miles long, and came into the houlton road again, here called the military road, at lincoln, forty-five miles from bangor, where there is quite a village for this country,--the principal one above oldtown. learning that there were several wigwams here, on one of the indian islands, we left our horse and wagon and walked through the forest half a mile to the river, to procure a guide to the mountain. it was not till after considerable search that we discovered their habitations,--small huts, in a retired place, where the scenery was unusually soft and beautiful, and the shore skirted with pleasant meadows and graceful elms. we paddled ourselves across to the island side in a canoe, which we found on the shore. near where we landed sat an indian girl, ten or twelve years old, on a rock in the water, in the sun, washing, and humming or moaning a song meanwhile. it was an aboriginal strain. a salmon-spear, made wholly of wood, lay on the shore, such as they might have used before white men came. it had an elastic piece of wood fastened to one side of its point, which slipped over and closed upon the fish, somewhat like the contrivance for holding a bucket at the end of a well-pole. as we walked up to the nearest house, we were met by a sally of a dozen wolfish-looking dogs, which may have been lineal descendants from the ancient indian dogs, which the first voyageurs describe as â��their wolves.â�� i suppose they were. the occupant soon appeared, with a long pole in his hand, with which he beat off the dogs, while he parleyed with us,--a stalwart, but dull and greasy-looking fellow, who told us, in his sluggish way, in answer to our questions, as if it were the first serious business he had to do that day, that there _were_ indians going â��up riverâ��--he and one other--to-day, before noon. and who was the other? louis neptune, who lives in the next house. well, let us go over and see louis together. the same doggish reception, and louis neptune makes his appearance,--a small, wiry man, with puckered and wrinkled face, yet he seemed the chief man of the two; the same, as i remembered, who had accompanied jackson to the mountain in â��37. the same questions were put to louis, and the same information obtained, while the other indian stood by. it appeared that they were going to start by noon, with two canoes, to go up to chesuncook to hunt moose,--to be gone a month. â��well, louis, suppose you get to the point (to the five islands, just below mattawamkeag) to camp, we walk on up the west branch tomorrow,--four of us,--and wait for you at the dam, or this side. you overtake us to-morrow or next day, and take us into your canoes. we stop for you, you stop for us. we pay you for your trouble.â�� â��yeâ��,â�� replied louis, â��may be you carry some provision for all,--some pork,--some bread,--and so pay.â�� he said, â��me sure get some moose;â�� and when i asked if he thought pomola would let us go up, he answered that we must plant one bottle of rum on the top; he had planted good many; and when he looked again, the rum was all gone. he had been up two or three times; he had planted letter,--english, german, french, etc. these men were slightly clad in shirt and pantaloons, like laborers with us in warm weather. they did not invite us into their houses, but met us outside. so we left the indians, thinking ourselves lucky to have secured such guides and companions. there were very few houses along the road, yet they did not altogether fail, as if the law by which men are dispersed over the globe were a very stringent one, and not to be resisted with impunity or for slight reasons. there were even the germs of one or two villages just beginning to expand. the beauty of the road itself was remarkable. the various evergreens, many of which are rare with us,--delicate and beautiful specimens of the larch, arbor-vitã¦, ball-spruce, and fir-balsam, from a few inches to many feet in height,--lined its sides, in some places like a long front yard, springing up from the smooth grass-plots which uninterruptedly border it, and are made fertile by its wash; while it was but a step on either hand to the grim, untrodden wilderness, whose tangled labyrinth of living, fallen, and decaying trees only the deer and moose, the bear and wolf can easily penetrate. more perfect specimens than any front-yard plot can show grew there to grace the passage of the houlton teams. about noon we reached the mattawamkeag, fifty-six miles from bangor by the way we had come, and put up at a frequented house still on the houlton road, where the houlton stage stops. here was a substantial covered bridge over the mattawamkeag, built, i think they said, some seventeen years before. we had dinner,--where, by the way, and even at breakfast, as well as supper, at the public-houses on this road, the front rank is composed of various kinds of â��sweet cakes,â�� in a continuous line from one end of the table to the other. i think i may safely say that there was a row of ten or a dozen plates of this kind set before us two here. to account for which, they say that, when the lumberers come out of the woods, they have a craving for cakes and pies, and such sweet things, which there are almost unknown, and this is the _supply_ to satisfy that _demand_. the supply is always equal to the demand, and these hungry men think a good deal of getting their moneyâ��s worth. no doubt the balance of victuals is restored by the time they reach bangor,--mattawamkeag takes off the raw edge. well, over this front rank, i say, you, coming from the â��sweet cakeâ�� side, with a cheap philosophic indifference though it may be, have to assault what there is behind, which i do not by any means mean to insinuate is insufficient in quantity or quality to supply that other demand, of men, not from the woods but from the towns, for venison and strong country fare. after dinner we strolled down to the â��point,â�� formed by the junction of the two rivers, which is said to be the scene of an ancient battle between the eastern indians and the mohawks, and searched there carefully for relics, though the men at the bar-room had never heard of such things; but we found only some flakes of arrowhead stone, some points of arrowheads, one small leaden bullet, and some colored beads, the last to be referred, perhaps, to early fur-trader days. the mattawamkeag, though wide, was a mere riverâ��s bed, full of rocks and shallows at this time, so that you could cross it almost dry-shod in boots; and i could hardly believe my companion, when he told me that he had been fifty or sixty miles up it in a batteau, through distant and still uncut forests. a batteau could hardly find a harbor now at its mouth. deer and caribou, or reindeer, are taken here in the winter, in sight of the house. before our companions arrived, we rode on up the houlton road seven miles to molunkus, where the aroostook road comes into it, and where there is a spacious public house in the woods, called the â��molunkus house,â�� kept by one libbey, which looked as if it had its hall for dancing and for military drills. there was no other evidence of man but this huge shingle palace in this part of the world; but sometimes even this is filled with travelers. i looked off the piazza round the corner of the house up the aroostook road, on which there was no clearing in sight. there was a man just adventuring upon it this evening in a rude, original, what you may call aroostook wagon,--a mere seat, with a wagon swung under it, a few bags on it, and a dog asleep to watch them. he offered to carry a message for us to anybody in that country, cheerfully. i suspect that, if you should go to the end of the world, you would find somebody there going farther, as if just starting for home at sundown, and having a last word before he drove off. here, too, _was_ a small trader, whom i did not see at first, who kept a store,--but no great store, certainly,--in a small box over the way, behind the molunkus sign-post. it looked like the balance-box of a patent hay-scales. as for his house, we could only conjecture where that was; he may have been a boarder in the molunkus house. i saw him standing in his shop door,--his shop was so small, that, if a traveler should make demonstrations of entering in, _he_ would have to go out by the back way, and confer with his customer through a window, about his goods in the cellar, or, more probably, bespoken, and yet on the way. i should have gone in, for i felt a real impulse to trade, if i had not stopped to consider what would become of him. the day before, we had walked into a shop, over against an inn where we stopped, the puny beginning of trade, which would grow at last into a firm copartnership in the future town or city,--indeed, it was already â��somebody & co.,â�� i forget who. the woman came forward from the penetralia of the attached house, for â��somebody & co.â�� was in the burning, and she sold us percussion-caps, canalã©s and smooth, and knew their prices and qualities, and which the hunters preferred. here was a little of everything in a small compass to satisfy the wants and the ambition of the woods,--a stock selected with what pains and care, and brought home in the wagon-box, or a corner of the houlton team; but there seemed to me, as usual, a preponderance of childrenâ��s toys,--dogs to bark, and cats to mew, and trumpets to blow, where natives there hardly are yet. as if a child born into the maine woods, among the pine cones and cedar berries, could not do without such a sugar-man or skipping-jack as the young rothschild has. i think that there was not more than one house on the road to molunkus, or for seven miles. at that place we got over the fence into a new field, planted with potatoes, where the logs were still burning between the hills; and, pulling up the vines, found good-sized potatoes, nearly ripe, growing like weeds, and turnips mixed with them. the mode of clearing and planting is to fell the trees, and burn once what will burn, then cut them up into suitable lengths, roll into heaps, and burn again; then, with a hoe, plant potatoes where you can come at the ground between the stumps and charred logs; for a first crop the ashes sufficing for manure, and no hoeing being necessary the first year. in the fall, cut, roll, and burn again, and so on, till the land is cleared; and soon it is ready for grain, and to be laid down. let those talk of poverty and hard times who will in the towns and cities; cannot the emigrant who can pay his fare to new york or boston pay five dollars more to get here,--i paid three, all told, for my passage from boston to bangor, two hundred and fifty miles,--and be as rich as he pleases, where land virtually costs nothing, and houses only the labor of building, and he may begin life as adam did? if he will still remember the distinction of poor and rich, let him bespeak him a narrower house forthwith. when we returned to the mattawamkeag, the houlton stage had already put up there; and a province man was betraying his greenness to the yankees by his questions. why province money wonâ��t pass here at par, when statesâ�� money is good at fredericton,--though this, perhaps, was sensible enough. from what i saw then, it appears that the province man was now the only real jonathan, or raw country bumpkin, left so far behind by his enterprising neighbors that he didnâ��t know enough to put a question to them. no people can long continue provincial in character who have the propensity for politics and whittling, and rapid traveling, which the yankees have, and who are leaving the mother country behind in the variety of their notions and inventions. the possession and exercise of practical talent merely are a sure and rapid means of intellectual culture and independence. the last edition of greenleafâ��s map of maine hung on the wall here, and, as we had no pocket-map, we resolved to trace a map of the lake country. so, dipping a wad of tow into the lamp, we oiled a sheet of paper on the oiled table-cloth, and, in good faith, traced what we afterwards ascertained to be a labyrinth of errors, carefully following the outlines of the imaginary lakes which the map contains. the map of the public lands of maine and massachusetts is the only one i have seen that at all deserves the name. it was while we were engaged in this operation that our companions arrived. they had seen the indiansâ�� fire on the five islands, and so we concluded that all was right. early the next morning we had mounted our packs, and prepared for a tramp up the west branch, my companion having turned his horse out to pasture for a week or ten days, thinking that a bite of fresh grass and a taste of running water would do him as much good as backwoods fare and new country influences his master. leaping over a fence, we began to follow an obscure trail up the northern bank of the penobscot. there was now no road further, the river being the only highway, and but half a dozen log huts, confined to its banks, to be met with for thirty miles. on either hand, and beyond, was a wholly uninhabited wilderness, stretching to canada. neither horse nor cow, nor vehicle of any kind, had ever passed over this ground; the cattle, and the few bulky articles which the loggers use, being got up in the winter on the ice, and down again before it breaks up. the evergreen woods had a decidedly sweet and bracing fragrance; the air was a sort of diet-drink, and we walked on buoyantly in indian file, stretching our legs. occasionally there was a small opening on the bank, made for the purpose of log-rolling, where we got a sight of the river,--always a rocky and rippling stream. the roar of the rapids, the note of a whistler duck on the river, of the jay and chickadee around us, and of the pigeon woodpecker in the openings, were the sounds that we heard. this was what you might call a bran-new country; the only roads were of natureâ��s making, and the few houses were camps. here, then, one could no longer accuse institutions and society, but must front the true source of evil. there are three classes of inhabitants who either frequent or inhabit the country which we had now entered: first, the loggers, who, for a part of the year, the winter and spring, are far the most numerous, but in the summer, except a few explorers for timber, completely desert it; second, the few settlers i have named, the only permanent inhabitants, who live on the verge of it, and help raise supplies for the former; third, the hunters, mostly indians, who range over it in their season. at the end of three miles we came to the mattaseunk stream and mill, where there was even a rude wooden railroad running down to the penobscot, the last railroad we were to see. we crossed one tract, on the bank of the river, of more than a hundred acres of heavy timber, which had just been felled and burnt over, and was still smoking. our trail lay through the midst of it, and was well-nigh blotted out. the trees lay at full length, four or five feet deep, and crossing each other in all directions, all black as charcoal, but perfectly sound within, still good for fuel or for timber; soon they would be cut into lengths and burnt again. here were thousands of cords, enough to keep the poor of boston and new york amply warm for a winter, which only cumbered the ground and were in the settlerâ��s way. and the whole of that solid and interminable forest is doomed to be gradually devoured thus by fire, like shavings, and no man be warmed by it. at crockerâ��s log-hut, at the mouth of salmon river, seven miles from the point, one of the party commenced distributing a store of small, cent picture-books among the children, to teach them to read, and also newspapers, more or less recent, among the parents, than which nothing can be more acceptable to a backwoods people. it was really an important item in our outfit, and, at times, the only currency that would circulate. i walked through salmon river with my shoes on, it being low water, but not without wetting my feet. a few miles farther we came to â��marm howardâ��s,â�� at the end of an extensive clearing, where there were two or three log huts in sight at once, one on the opposite side of the river, and a few graves even, surrounded by a wooden paling, where already the rude forefathers of a hamlet lie, and a thousand years hence, perchance, some poet will write his â��elegy in a country churchyard.â�� the â��village hampdens,â�� the â��mute, inglorious miltons,â�� and cromwells, â��guiltless ofâ�� their â��countryâ��s blood,â�� were yet unborn. â��perchance in this _wild_ spot _there will be_ laid some heart once pregnant with celestial fire; hands that the rod of empire might have swayed, or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.â�� the next house was fiskâ��s, ten miles from the point at the mouth of the east branch, opposite to the island nicketow, or the forks, the last of the indian islands. i am particular to give the names of the settlers and the distances, since every log hut in these woods is a public house, and such information is of no little consequence to those who may have occasion to travel this way. our course here crossed the penobscot, and followed the southern bank. one of the party, who entered the house in search of some one to set us over, reported a very neat dwelling, with plenty of books, and a new wife, just imported from boston, wholly new to the woods. we found the east branch a large and rapid stream at its mouth and much deeper than it appeared. having with some difficulty discovered the trail again, we kept up the south side of the west branch, or main river, passing by some rapids called rock-ebeeme, the roar of which we heard through the woods, and, shortly after, in the thickest of the wood, some empty loggersâ�� camps, still new, which were occupied the previous winter. though we saw a few more afterwards, i will make one account serve for all. these were such houses as the lumberers of maine spend the winter in, in the wilderness. there were the camps and the hovels for the cattle, hardly distinguishable, except that the latter had no chimney. these camps were about twenty feet long by fifteen wide, built of logs,--hemlock, cedar, spruce or yellow birch,--one kind alone, or all together, with the bark on; two or three large ones first, one directly above another, and notched together at the ends, to the height of three or four feet, then of smaller logs resting upon transverse ones at the ends, each of the last successively shorter than the other, to form the roof. the chimney was an oblong square hole in the middle, three or four feet in diameter, with a fence of logs as high as the ridge. the interstices were filled with moss, and the roof was shingled with long and handsome splints of cedar, or spruce, or pine, rifted with a sledge and cleaver. the fireplace, the most important place of all, was in shape and size like the chimney, and directly under it, defined by a log fence or fender on the ground, and a heap of ashes, a foot or two deep within, with solid benches of split logs running round it. here the fire usually melts the snow, and dries the rain before it can descend to quench it. the faded beds of arbor-vit㦠leaves extended under the eaves on either hand. there was the place for the water-pail, pork-barrel, and wash-basin, and generally a dingy pack of cards left on a log. usually a good deal of whittling was expended on the latch, which was made of wood, in the form of an iron one. these houses are made comfortable by the huge fires, which can be afforded night and day. usually the scenery about them is drear and savage enough; and the loggersâ�� camp is as completely in the woods as a fungus at the foot of a pine in a swamp; no outlook but to the sky overhead; no more clearing than is made by cutting down the trees of which it is built, and those which are necessary for fuel. if only it be well sheltered and convenient to his work, and near a spring, he wastes no thought on the prospect. they are very proper forest houses, the stems of the trees collected together and piled up around a man to keep out wind and rain,--made of living green logs, hanging with moss and lichen, and with the curls and fringes of the yellow birch bark, and dripping with resin, fresh and moist, and redolent of swampy odors, with that sort of vigor and perennialness even aboutr and perennialness even about them that toadstools suggest.[1] the loggerâ��s fare consists of tea, molasses, flour, pork (sometimes beef), and beans. a great proportion of the beans raised in massachusetts find their market here. on expeditions it is only hard bread and pork, often raw, slice upon slice, with tea or water, as the case may be. the primitive wood is always and everywhere damp and mossy, so that i traveled constantly with the impression that i was in a swamp; and only when it was remarked that this or that tract, judging from the quality of the timber on it, would make a profitable clearing, was i reminded, that if the sun were let in it would make a dry field, like the few i had seen, at once. the best shod for the most part travel with wet feet. if the ground was so wet and spongy at this, the dryest part of a dry season, what must it be in the spring? the woods hereabouts abounded in beech and yellow birch, of which last there were some very large specimens; also spruce, cedar, fir, and hemlock; but we saw only the stumps of the white pine here, some of them of great size, these having been already culled out, being the only tree much sought after, even as low down as this. only a little spruce and hemlock beside had been logged here. the eastern wood which is sold for fuel in massachusetts all comes from below bangor. it was the pine alone, chiefly the white pine, that had tempted any but the hunter to precede us on this route. waiteâ��s farm, thirteen miles from the point, is an extensive and elevated clearing, from which we got a fine view of the river, rippling and gleaming far beneath us. my companions had formerly had a good view of ktaadn and the other mountains here, but to-day it was so smoky that we could see nothing of them. we could overlook an immense country of uninterrupted forest, stretching away up the east branch toward canada on the north and northwest, and toward the aroostook valley on the northeast; and imagine what wild life was stirring in its midst. here was quite a field of corn for this region, whose peculiar dry scent we perceived a third of a mile off, before we saw it. eighteen miles from the point brought us in sight of mccauslinâ��s, or â��uncle georgeâ��s,â�� as he was familiarly called by my companions, to whom he was well known, where we intended to break our long fast. his house was in the midst of an extensive clearing or intervale, at the mouth of the little schoodic river, on the opposite or north bank of the penobscot. so we collected on a point of the shore, that we might be seen, and fired our gun as a signal, which brought out his dogs forthwith, and thereafter their master, who in due time took us across in his batteau. this clearing was bounded abruptly, on all sides but the river, by the naked stems of the forest, as if you were to cut only a few feet square in the midst of a thousand acres of mowing, and set down a thimble therein. he had a whole heaven and horizon to himself, and the sun seemed to be journeying over his clearing only the livelong day. here we concluded to spend the night, and wait for the indians, as there was no stopping-place so convenient above. he had seen no indians pass, and this did not often happen without his knowledge. he thought that his dogs sometimes gave notice of the approach of indians half an hour before they arrived. mccauslin was a kennebec man, of scotch descent, who had been a waterman twenty-two years, and had driven on the lakes and headwaters of the penobscot five or six springs in succession, but was now settled here to raise supplies for the lumberers and for himself. he entertained us a day or two with true scotch hospitality, and would accept no recompense for it. a man of a dry wit and shrewdness, and a general intelligence which i had not looked for in the back woods. in fact, the deeper you penetrate into the woods, the more intelligent, and, in one sense, less countrified do you find the inhabitants; for always the pioneer has been a traveler, and, to some extent, a man of the world; and, as the distances with which he is familiar are greater, so is his informatio than the villagerâ��s. if i were to look for a narrow, uninformed, and countrified mind, as opposed to the intelligence and refinement which are thought to emanate from cities, it would be among the rusty inhabitants of an old-settled country, on farms all run out and gone to seed with life-everlasting, in the towns about boston, even on the high-road in concord, and not in the back woods of maine. supper was got before our eyes in the ample kitchen, by a fire which would have roasted an ox; many whole logs, four feet long, were consumed to boil our tea-kettle,--birch, or beech, or maple, the same summer and winter; and the dishes were soon smoking on the table, late the arm-chair, against the wall, from which one of the party was expelled. the arms of the chair formed the frame on which the table rested; and, when the round top was turned up against the wall, it formed the back of the chair, and was no more in the way than the wall itself. this, we noticed, was the prevailing fashion in these log houses, in order to economize in room. there were piping-hot wheaten cakes, the flour having been brought up the river in batteaux,--no indian bread, for the upper part of maine, it will be remembered, is a wheat country,--and ham, eggs, and potatoes, and milk and cheese, the produce of the farm; and also shad and salmon, tea sweetened with molasses, and sweet cakes, in contradistinction to the hot cakes not sweetened, the one white, the other yellow, to wind up with. such we found was the prevailing fare, ordinary and extraordinary, along this river. mountain cranberries (_vaccinium vitis-idã¦a_), stewed and sweetened, were the common dessert. everything here was in profusion, and the best of its kind. butter was in such plenty that it was commonly used, before it was salted, to grease boots with. in the night we were entertained by the sound of rain-drops on the cedar splints which covered the roof, and awaked the next morning with a drop or two in our eyes. it had set in for a storm, and we made up our minds not to forsake such comfortable quarters with this prospect, but wait for indians and fair weather. it rained and drizzled and gleamed by turns, the livelong day. what we did there, how we killed the time would perhaps be idle to tell; how many times we buttered our boots, and how often a drowsy one was seen to sidle off to the bedroom. when it held up, i strolled up and down the bank, and gathered the harebell and cedar berries, which grew there; or else we tried by turns the long-handled axe on the logs before the door. the axe-helves here were made to chop standing on the log,--a primitive log of course,--and were, therefore, nearly a foot longer than with us. one while we walked over the farm and visited his well-filled barns with mccauslin. there were one other man and two women only here. he kept horses, cows, oxen, and sheep. i think he said that he was the first to bring a plow and a cow so far; and he might have added the last, with only two exceptions. the potato-rot had found him out here, too, the previous year, and got half or two thirds of his crop, though the seed was of his own raising. oats, grass, and potatoes were his staples; but he raised, also, a few carrots and turnips, and â��a little corn for the hens,â�� for this was all that he dared risk, for fear that it would not ripen. melons, squashes, sweet corn, beans, tomatoes, and many other vegetables, could not be ripened there. the very few settlers along this stream were obviously tempted by the cheapness of the land mainly. when i asked mccauslin why more settlers did not come in, he answered, that one reason was, they could not buy the land, it belonged to individuals or companies who were afraid that their wild lands would be settled, and so incorporated into towns, and they be taxed for them; but to settling on the stateâ��s land there was no such hindrance. for his own part, he wanted no neighbors,--he didnâ��t wish to see any road by his house. neighbors, even the best, were a trouble and expense, especially on the score of cattle and fences. they might live across the river, perhaps, but not on the same side. the chickens here were protected by the dogs. as mccauslin said, â��the old one took it up first, and she taught the pup, and now they had got it into their heads that it wouldnâ��t do to have anything of the bird kind on the premises.â�� a hawk hovering over was not allowed to alight, but barked off by the dogs circling underneath; and a pigeon, or a â��yellow-hammer,â�� as they called the pigeon woodpecker, on a dead limb or stump, was instantly expelled. it was the main business of their day, and kept them constantly coming and going. one would rush out of the house on the least alarm given by the other. when it rained hardest, we returned to the house, and took down a tract from the shelf. there was the â��wandering jew,â�� cheap edition, and fine print, the â��criminal calendar,â�� and â��parishâ��s geography,â�� and flash novels two or three. under the pressure of circumstances, we read a little in these. with such aid, the press is not so feeble an engine, after all. this house, which was a fair specimen of those on this river, was built of huge logs, which peeped out everywhere, and were chinked with clay and moss. it contained four or five rooms. there were no sawed boards, or shingles, or clapboards, about it; and scarcely any tool but the axe had been used in its construction. the partitions were made of long clapboard-like splints, of spruce or cedar, turned to a delicate salmon-color by the smoke. the roof and sides were covered with the same, instead of shingles and clapboards, and some of a much thicker and larger size were used for the floor. these were all so straight and smooth, that they answered the purpose admirably, and a careless observer would not have suspected that they were not sawed and planed. the chimney and hearth were of vast size, and made of stone. the broom was a few twigs of arbor-vit㦠tied to a stick; and a pole was suspended over the hearth, close to the ceiling, to dry stockings and clothes on. i noticed that the floor was full of small, dingy holes, as if made with a gimlet, but which were, in fact, made by the spikes, nearly an inch long, which the lumberers wear in their boots to prevent their slipping on wet logs. just above mccauslinâ��s, there is a rocky rapid, where logs jam in the spring; and many â��driversâ�� are there collected, who frequent his house for supplies; these were their tracks which i saw. at sundown mccauslin pointed away over the forest, across the river, to signs of fair weather amid the clouds,--some evening redness there. for even there the points of compass held; and there was a quarter of the heavens appropriated to sunrise and another to sunset. the next morning, the weather proving fair enough for our purpose, we prepared to start, and, the indians having failed us, persuaded mccauslin, who was not unwilling to revisit the scenes of his driving, to accompany us in their stead, intending to engage one other boatman on the way. a strip of cotton cloth for a tent, a couple of blankets, which would suffice for the whole party, fifteen pounds of hard bread, ten pounds of â��clearâ�� pork, and a little tea, made up â��uncle georgeâ��sâ�� pack. the last three articles were calculated to be provision enough for six men for a week, with what we might pick up. a tea-kettle, a frying-pan, and an axe, to be obtained at the last house, would complete our outfit. we were soon out of mccauslinâ��s clearing, and in the evergreen woods again. the obscure trail made by the two settlers above, which even the woodman is sometimes puzzled to discern, ere long crossed a narrow, open strip in the woods overrun with weeds, called the burnt land, where a fire had raged formerly, stretching northward nine or ten miles, to millinocket lake. at the end of three miles, we reached shad pond, or noliseemack, an expansion of the river. hodge, the assistant state geologist, who passed through this on the 25th of june, 1837, says, â��we pushed our boat through an acre or more of buck-beans, which had taken root at the bottom, and bloomed above the surface in the greatest profusion and beauty.â�� thomas fowlerâ��s house is four miles from mccauslinâ��s, on the shore of the pond, at the mouth of the millinocket river, and eight miles from the lake of the same name, on the latter stream. this lake affords a more direct course to ktaadn, but we preferred to follow the penobscot and the pamadumcook lakes. fowler was just completing a new log hut, and was sawing out a window through the logs, nearly two feet thick, when we arrived. he had begun to paper his house with spruce bark, turned inside out, which had a good effect, and was in keeping with the circumstances. instead of water we got here a draught of beer, which, it was allowed, would be better; clear and thin, but strong and stringent as the cedar sap. it was as if we sucked at the very teats of natureâ��s pine-clad bosom in these parts,--the sap of all millinocket botany commingled,--the topmost, most fantastic, and spiciest sprays of the primitive wood, and whatever invigorating and stringent gum or essence it afforded steeped and dissolved in it,--a lumbererâ��s drink, which would acclimate and naturalize a man at once,--which would make him see green, and, if he slept, dream that he heard the wind sough among the pines. here was a fife, praying to be played on, through which we breathed a few tuneful strains,--brought hither to tame wild beasts. as we stood upon the pile of chips by the door, fish hawks were sailing overhead; and here, over shad pond, might daily be witnessed the tyranny of the bald eagle over that bird. tom pointed away over the lake to a bald eagleâ��s nest, which was plainly visible more than a mile off, on a pine, high above the surrounding forest, and was frequented from year to year by the same pair, and held sacred by him. there were these two houses only there, his low hut and the eaglesâ�� airy cart-load of fagots. thomas fowler, too, was persuaded to join us, for two men were necessary to manage the batteau, which was soon to be our carriage, and these men needed to be cool and skillful for the navigation of the penobscot. tomâ��s pack was soon made, for he had not far to look for his watermanâ��s boots, and a red flannel shirt. this is the favorite color with lumbermen; and red flannel is reputed to possess some mysterious virtues, to be most healthful and convenient in respect to perspiration. in every gang there will be a large proportion of red birds. we took here a poor and leaky batteau, and began to pole up the millinocket two miles, to the elder fowlerâ��s, in order to avoid the grand falls of the penobscot, intending to exchange our batteau there for a better. the millinocket is a small, shallow, and sandy stream, full of what i took to be lamprey-eelsâ�� or suckersâ�� nests, and lined with musquash-cabins, but free from rapids, according to fowler, excepting at its outlet from the lake. he was at this time engaged in cutting the native grass--rush-grass and meadow-clover, as he called it--on the meadows and small, low islands of this stream. we noticed flattened places in the grass on either side, where, he said, a moose had laid down the night before, adding, that there were thousands in these meadows. old fowlerâ��s, on the millinocket, six miles from mccauslinâ��s, and twenty-four from the point, is the last house. gibsonâ��s, on the sowadnehunk, is the only clearing above, but that had proved a failure, and was long since deserted. fowler is the oldest inhabitant of these woods. he formerly lived a few miles from here, on the south side of the west branch, where he built his house sixteen years ago, the first house built above the five islands. here our new batteau was to be carried over the first portage of two miles, round the grand falls of the penobscot, on a horse-sled made of saplings, to jump the numerous rocks in the way; but we had to wait a couple of hours for them to catch the horses, which were pastured at a distance, amid the stumps, and had wandered still farther off. the last of the salmon for this season had just been caught, and were still fresh in pickle, from which enough was extracted to fill our empty kettle, and so graduate our introduction to simpler forest fare. the week before they had lost nine sheep here out of their first flock, by the wolves. the surviving sheep came round the house, and seemed frightened, which induced them to go and look for the rest, when they found seven dead and lacerated, and two still alive. these last they carried to the house, and, as mrs. fowler said, they were merely scratched in the throat, and had no more visible wound than would be produced by the prick of a pin. she sheared off the wool from their throats, and washed them, and put on some salve, and turned them out, but in a few moments they were missing, and had not been found since. in fact, they were all poisoned, and those that were found swelled up at once, so that they saved neither skin nor wool. this realized the old fables of the wolves and the sheep, and convinced me that that ancient hostility still existed. verily, the shepherd-boy did not need to sound a false alarm this time. there were steel traps by the door, of various sizes, for wolves, otter, and bears, with large claws instead of teeth, to catch in their sinews. wolves are frequently killed with poisoned bait. at length, after we had dined here on the usual backwoods fare, the horses arrived, and we hauled our batteau out of the water, and lashed it to its wicker carriage, and, throwing in our packs, walked on before, leaving the boatmen and driver, who was tomâ��s brother, to manage the concern. the route, which led through the wild pasture where the sheep were killed, was in some places the roughest ever traveled by horses, over rocky hills, where the sled bounced and slid along, like a vessel pitching in a storm; and one man was as necessary to stand at the stern, to prevent the boat from being wrecked, as a helmsman in the roughest sea. the philosophy of our progress was something like this: when the runners struck a rock three or four feet high, the sled bounced back and upwards at the same time; but, as the horses never ceased pulling, it came down on the top of the rock, and so we got over. this portage probably followed the trail of an ancient indian carry round these falls. by two oâ��clock we, who had walked on before, reached the river above the falls, not far from the outlet of quakish lake, and waited for the batteau to come up. we had been here but a short time, when a thunder-shower was seen coming up from the west, over the still invisible lakes, and that pleasant wilderness which we were so eager to become acquainted with; and soon the heavy drops began to patter on the leaves around us. i had just selected the prostrate trunk of a huge pine, five or six feet in diameter, and was crawling under it, when, luckily, the boat arrived. it would have amused a sheltered man to witness the manner in which it was unlashed, and whirled over, while the first waterspout burst upon us. it was no sooner in the hands of the eager company than it was abandoned to the first revolutionary impulse, and to gravity, to adjust it; and they might have been seen all stooping to its shelter, and wriggling under like so many eels, before it was fairly deposited on the ground. when all were under, we propped up the lee side, and busied ourselves there whittling thole-pins for rowing, when we should reach the lakes; and made the woods ring, between the claps of thunder, with such boat-songs as we could remember. the horses stood sleek and shining with the rain, all drooping and crestfallen, while deluge after deluge washed over us; but the bottom of a boat may be relied on for a tight roof. at length, after two hoursâ�� delay at this place, a streak of fair weather appeared in the northwest, whither our course now lay, promising a serene evening for our voyage; and the driver returned with his horses, while we made haste to launch our boat, and commence our voyage in good earnest. there were six of us, including the two boatmen. with our packs heaped up near the bows, and ourselves disposed as baggage to trim the boat, with instructions not to move in case we should strike a rock, more than so many barrels of pork, we pushed out into the first rapid, a slight specimen of the stream we had to navigate. with uncle george in the stern, and tom in the bows, each using a spruce pole about twelve feet long, pointed with iron,[2] and poling on the same side, we shot up the rapids like a salmon, the water rushing and roaring around, so that only a practiced eye could distinguish a safe course, or tell what was deep water and what rocks, frequently grazing the latter on one or both sides, with a hundred as narrow escapes as ever the argo had in passing through the symplegades. i, who had had some experience in boating, had never experienced any half so exhilarating before. we were lucky to have exchanged our indians, whom we did not know, for these men, who, together with tomâ��s brother, were reputed the best boatmen on the river, and were at once indispensable pilots and pleasant companions. the canoe is smaller, more easily upset, and sooner worn out; and the indian is said not to be so skillful in the management of the batteau. he is, for the most part, less to be relied on, and more disposed to sulks and whims. the utmost familiarity with dead streams, or with the ocean, would not prepare a man for this peculiar navigation; and the most skillful boatman anywhere else would here be obliged to take out his boat and carry round a hundred times, still with great risk, as well as delay, where the practiced batteau-man poles up with comparative ease and safety. the hardy â��voyageurâ�� pushes with incredible perseverance and success quite up to the foot of the falls, and then only carries round some perpendicular ledge, and launches again in â��the torrentâ��s smoothness, ere it dash below,â�� to struggle with the boiling rapids above. the indians say that the river once ran both ways, one half up and the other down, but that, since the white man came, it all runs down, and now they must laboriously pole their canoes against the stream, and carry them over numerous portages. in the summer, all stores--the grindstone and the plow of the pioneer, flour, pork, and utensils for the explorer--must be conveyed up the river in batteaux; and many a cargo and many a boatman is lost in these waters. in the winter, however, which is very equable and long, the ice is the great highway, and the loggersâ�� team penetrates to chesuncook lake, and still higher up, even two hundred miles above bangor. imagine the solitary sled-track running far up into the snowy and evergreen wilderness, hemmed in closely for a hundred miles by the forest, and again stretching straight across the broad surfaces of concealed lakes! we were soon in the smooth water of the quakish lake, and took our turns at rowing and paddling across it. it is a small, irregular, but handsome lake, shut in on all sides by the forest, and showing no traces of man but some low boom in a distant cove, reserved for spring use. the spruce and cedar on its shores, hung with gray lichens, looked at a distance like the ghosts of trees. ducks were sailing here and there on its surface, and a solitary loon, like a more living wave,--a vital spot on the lakeâ��s surface,--laughed and frolicked, and showed its straight leg, for our amusement. joe merry mountain appeared in the northwest, as if it were looking down on this lake especially; and we had our first, but a partial view of ktaadn, its summit veiled in clouds, like a dark isthmus in that quarter, connecting the heavens with the earth. after two miles of smooth rowing across this lake, we found ourselves in the river again, which was a continuous rapid for one mile, to the dam, requiring all the strength and skill of our boatmen to pole up it. this dam is a quite important and expensive work for this country, whither cattle and horses cannot penetrate in the summer, raising the whole river ten feet, and flooding, as they said, some sixty square miles by means of the innumerable lakes with which the river connects. it is a lofty and solid structure, with sloping piers, some distance above, made of frames of logs filled with stones, to break the ice.[3] here every log pays toll as it passes through the sluices. we filed into the rude loggersâ�� camp at this place, such as i have described, without ceremony, and the cook, at that moment the sole occupant, at once set about preparing tea for his visitors. his fireplace, which the rain had converted into a mud-puddle, was soon blazing again, and we sat down on the log benches around it to dry us. on the well-flattened and somewhat faded beds of arbor-vit㦠leaves, which stretched on either hand under the eaves behind us, lay an odd leaf of the bible, some genealogical chapter out of the old testament; and, half buried by the leaves, we found emersonâ��s address on west india emancipation, which had been left here formerly by one of our company, and _had made two converts to the liberty party_ here, as i was told; also, an odd number of the _westminster review_, for 1834, and a pamphlet entitled â��history of the erection of the monument on the grave of myron holly.â�� this was the readable or reading matter in a lumbererâ��s camp in the maine woods, thirty miles from a road, which would be given up to the bears in a fortnight. these things were well thumbed and soiled. this gang was headed by one john morrison, a good specimen of a yankee; and was necessarily composed of men not bred to the business of dam-building, but who were jacks-at-all-trades, handy with the axe, and other simple implements, and well skilled in wood and water craft. we had hot cakes for our supper even here, white as snowballs, but without butter, and the never-failing sweet cakes, with which we filled our pockets, foreseeing that we should not soon meet with the like again. such delicate puffballs seemed a singular diet for backwoodsmen. there was also tea without milk, sweetened with molasses. and so, exchanging a word with john morrison and his gang when we had returned to the shore, and also exchanging our batteau for a better still, we made haste to improve the little daylight that remained. this camp, exactly twenty-nine miles from mattawamkeag point by the way we had come, and about one hundred from bangor by the river, was the last human habitation of any kind in this direction. beyond, there was no trail, and the river and lakes, by batteaux and canoes, was considered the only practicable route. we were about thirty miles by the river from the summit of ktaadn, which was in sight, though not more than twenty, perhaps, in a straight line. it being about the full of the moon, and a warm and pleasant evening, we decided to row five miles by moonlight to the head of the north twin lake, lest the wind should rise on the morrow. after one mile of river, or what the boatmen call â��thoroughfare,â��--for the river becomes at length only the connecting link between the lakes,--and some slight rapid which had been mostly made smooth water by the dam, we entered the north twin lake just after sundown, and steered across for the river â��thoroughfare,â�� four miles distant. this is a noble sheet of water, where one may get the impression which a new country and a â��lake of the woodsâ�� are fitted to create. there was the smoke of no log hut nor camp of any kind to greet us, still less was any lover of nature or musing traveler watching our batteau from the distant hills; not even the indian hunter was there, for he rarely climbs them, but hugs the river like ourselves. no face welcomed us but the fine fantastic sprays of free and happy evergreen trees, waving one above another in their ancient home. at first the red clouds hung over the western shore as gorgeously as if over a city, and the lake lay open to the light with even a civilized aspect, as if expecting trade and commerce, and towns and villas. we could distinguish the inlet to the south twin, which is said to be the larger, where the shore was misty and blue, and it was worth the while to look thus through a narrow opening across the entire expanse of a concealed lake to its own yet more dim and distant shore. the shores rose gently to ranges of low hills covered with forests; and though, in fact, the most valuable white-pine timber, even about this lake, had been culled out, this would never have been suspected by the voyager. the impression, which indeed corresponded with the fact, was, as if we were upon a high table-land between the states and canada, the northern side of which is drained by the st. john and chaudiã¨re, the southern by the penobscot and kennebec. there was no bold, mountainous shore, as we might have expected, but only isolated hills and mountains rising here and there from the plateau. the country is an archipelago of lakes,--the lake-country of new england. their levels vary but a few feet, and the boatmen, by short portages, or by none at all, pass easily from one to another. they say that at very high water the penobscot and the kennebec flow into each other, or at any rate, that you may lie with your face in the one and your toes in the other. even the penobscot and st. john have been connected by a canal, so that the lumber of the allegash, instead of going down the st. john, comes down the penobscot; and the indianâ��s tradition, that the penobscot once ran both ways for his convenience, is, in one sense, partially realized to-day. none of our party but mccauslin had been above this lake, so we trusted to him to pilot us, and we could not but confess the importance of a pilot on these waters. while it is river, you will not easily forget which way is up-stream; but when you enter a lake, the river is completely lost, and you scan the distant shores in vain to find where it comes in. a stranger is, for the time at least, lost, and must set about a voyage of discovery first of all to find the river. to follow the windings of the shore when the lake is ten miles, or even more, in length, and of an irregularity which will not soon be mapped, is a wearisome voyage, and will spend his time and his provisions. they tell a story of a gang of experienced woodmen sent to a location on this stream, who were thus lost in the wilderness of lakes. they cut their way through thickets, and carried their baggage and their boats over from lake to lake, sometimes several miles. they carried into millinocket lake, which is on another stream, and is ten miles square, and contains a hundred islands. they explored its shores thoroughly, and then carried into another, and another, and it was a week of toil and anxiety before they found the penobscot river again, and then their provisions were exhausted, and they were obliged to return. while uncle george steered for a small island near the head of the lake, now just visible, like a speck on the water, we rowed by turns swiftly over its surface, singing such boat songs as we could remember. the shores seemed at an indefinite distance in the moonlight. occasionally we paused in our singing and rested on our oars, while we listened to hear if the wolves howled, for this is a common serenade, and my companions affirmed that it was the most dismal and unearthly of sounds; but we heard none this time. if we did not _hear_, however, we did _listen_, not without a reasonable expectation; that at least i have to tell,--only some utterly uncivilized, big-throated owl hooted loud and dismally in the drear and boughy wilderness, plainly not nervous about his solitary life, nor afraid to hear the echoes of his voice there. we remembered also that possibly moose were silently watching us from the distant coves, or some surly bear or timid caribou had been startled by our singing. it was with new emphasis that we sang there the canadian boat song,- â��row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast, the rapids are near and the daylightâ��s past!â�� which describes precisely our own adventure, and was inspired by the experience of a similar kind of life,--for the rapids were ever near, and the daylight long past; the woods on shore looked dim, and many an utawasâ�� tide here emptied into the lake. â��why should we yet our sail unfurl? there is not a breath the blue wave to curl! but, when the wind blows off the shore, oh, sweetly weâ��ll rest our weary oar.â�� â��utawasâ�� tide! this trembling moon shall see us float oâ��er thy surges soon.â�� at last we glided past the â��green isle,â�� which had been our landmark, all joining in the chorus; as if by the watery links of rivers and of lakes we were about to float over unmeasured zones of earth, bound on unimaginable adventures,- â��saint of this green isle! hear our prayers, oh, grant us cool heavens and favoring airs!â�� about nine oâ��clock we reached the river, and ran our boat into a natural haven between some rocks, and drew her out on the sand. this camping-ground mccauslin had been familiar with in his lumbering days, and he now struck it unerringly in the moonlight, and we heard the sound of the rill which would supply us with cool water emptying into the lake. the first business was to make a fire, an operation which was a little delayed by the wetness of the fuel and the ground, owing to the heavy showers of the afternoon. the fire is the main comfort of the camp, whether in summer or winter, and is about as ample at one season as at another. it is as well for cheerfulness as for warmth and dryness. it forms one side of the camp; one bright side at any rate. some were dispersed to fetch in dead trees and boughs, while uncle george felled the birches and beeches which stood convenient, and soon we had a fire some ten feet long by three or four high, which rapidly dried the sand before it. this was calculated to burn all night. we next proceeded to pitch our tent; which operation was performed by sticking our two spike-poles into the ground in a slanting direction, about ten feet apart, for rafters, and then drawing our cotton cloth over them, and tying it down at the ends, leaving it open in front, shed-fashion. but this evening the wind carried the sparks on to the tent and burned it. so we hastily drew up the batteau just within the edge of the woods before the fire, and propping up one side three or four feet high, spread the tent on the ground to lie on; and with the corner of a blanket, or what more or less we could get to put over us, lay down with our heads and bodies under the boat, and our feet and legs on the sand toward the fire. at first we lay awake, talking of our course, and finding ourselves in so convenient a posture for studying the heavens, with the moon and stars shining in our faces, our conversation naturally turned upon astronomy, and we recounted by turns the most interesting discoveries in that science. but at length we composed ourselves seriously to sleep. it was interesting, when awakened at midnight, to watch the grotesque and fiend-like forms and motions of some one of the party, who, not being able to sleep, had got up silently to arouse the fire, and add fresh fuel, for a change; now stealthily lugging a dead tree from out the dark, and heaving it on, now stirring up the embers with his fork, or tiptoeing about to observe the stars, watched, perchance, by half the prostrate party in breathless silence; so much the more intense because they were awake, while each supposed his neighbor sound asleep. thus aroused, i, too, brought fresh fuel to the fire, and then rambled along the sandy shore in the moonlight, hoping to meet a moose come down to drink, or else a wolf. the little rill tinkled the louder, and peopled all the wilderness for me; and the glassy smoothness of the sleeping lake, laving the shores of a new world, with the dark, fantastic rocks rising here and there from its surface, made a scene not easily described. it has left such an impression of stern, yet gentle, wildness on my memory as will not soon be effaced. not far from midnight we were one after another awakened by rain falling on our extremities; and as each was made aware of the fact by cold or wet, he drew a long sigh and then drew up his legs, until gradually we had all sidled round from lying at right angles with the boat, till our bodies formed an acute angle with it, and were wholly protected. when next we awoke, the moon and stars were shining again, and there were signs of dawn in the east. i have been thus particular in order to convey some idea of a night in the woods. we had soon launched and loaded our boat, and, leaving our fire blazing, were off again before breakfast. the lumberers rarely trouble themselves to put out their fires, such is the dampness of the primitive forest; and this is one cause, no doubt, of the frequent fires in maine, of which we hear so much on smoky days in massachusetts. the forests are held cheap after the white pine has been culled out; and the explorers and hunters pray for rain only to clear the atmosphere of smoke. the woods were so wet to-day, however, that there was no danger of our fire spreading. after poling up half a mile of river, or thoroughfare, we rowed a mile across the foot of pamadumcook lake, which is the name given on the map to this whole chain of lakes, as if there was but one, though they are, in each instance, distinctly separated by a reach of the river, with its narrow and rocky channel and its rapids. this lake, which is one of the largest, stretched northwest ten miles, to hills and mountains in the distance. mccauslin pointed to some distant, and as yet inaccessible, forests of white pine, on the sides of a mountain in that direction. the joe merry lakes, which lay between us and moosehead, on the west, were recently, if they are not still, â��surrounded by some of the best timbered land in the state.â�� by another thoroughfare we passed into deep cove, a part of the same lake, which makes up two miles, toward the northeast, and rowing two miles across this, by another short thoroughfare, entered ambejijis lake. at the entrance to a lake we sometimes observed what is technically called â��fencing-stuff,â�� or the unhewn timbers of which booms are formed, either secured together in the water, or laid up on the rocks and lashed to trees, for spring use. but it was always startling to discover so plain a trail of civilized man there. i remember that i was strangely affected, when we were returning, by the sight of a ring-bolt well drilled into a rock, and fastened with lead, at the head of this solitary ambejijis lake. it was easy to see that driving logs must be an exciting as well as arduous and dangerous business. all winter long the logger goes on piling up the trees which he has trimmed and hauled in some dry ravine at the head of a stream, and then in the spring he stands on the bank and whistles for rain and thaw, ready to wring the perspiration out of his shirt to swell the tide, till suddenly, with a whoop and halloo from him, shutting his eyes, as if to bid farewell to the existing state of things, a fair proportion of his winterâ��s work goes scrambling down the country, followed by his faithful dogs, thaw and rain and freshet and wind, the whole pack in full cry, toward the orono mills. every log is marked with the ownerâ��s name, cut in the sapwood with an axe or bored with an auger, so deep as not to be worn off in the driving, and yet not so as to injure the timber; and it requires considerable ingenuity to invent new and simple marks where there are so many owners. they have quite an alphabet of their own, which only the practiced can read. one of my companions read off from his memorandum book some marks of his own logs, among which there were crosses, belts, crowâ��s feet, girdles, etc., as, â��y--girdle--crowfoot,â�� and various other devices. when the logs have run the gauntlet of innumerable rapids and falls, each on its own account, with more or less jamming and bruising, those bearing various ownersâ�� marks being mixed up together,--since all must take advantage of the same freshet,--they are collected together at the heads of the lakes, and surrounded by a boom fence of floating logs, to prevent their being dispersed by the wind, and are thus towed all together, like a flock of sheep, across the lake, where there is no current, by a windlass, or boom-head, such as we sometimes saw standing on an island or headland, and, if circumstances permit, with the aid of sails and oars. sometimes, notwithstanding, the logs are dispersed over many miles of lake surface in a few hours by winds and freshets, and thrown up on distant shores, where the driver can pick up only one or two at a time, and return with them to the thoroughfare; and before he gets his flock well through ambejijis or pamadumcook, he makes many a wet and uncomfortable camp on the shore. he must be able to navigate a log as if it were a canoe, and be as indifferent to cold and wet as a muskrat. he uses a few efficient tools,--a lever commonly of rock maple, six or seven feet long, with a stout spike in it, strongly ferruled on, and a long spike-pole, with a screw at the end of the spike to make it hold. the boys along shore learn to walk on floating logs as city boys on sidewalks. sometimes the logs are thrown up on rocks in such positions as to be irrecoverable but by another freshet as high, or they jam together at rapids and falls, and accumulate in vast piles, which the driver must start at the risk of his life. such is the lumber business, which depends on many accidents, as the early freezing of the rivers, that the teams may get up in season, a sufficient freshet in the spring, to fetch the logs down, and many others.[4] i quote michaux on lumbering on the kennebec, then the source of the best white pine lumber carried to england. â��the persons engaged in this branch of industry are generally emigrants from new hampshire.... in the summer they unite in small companies, and traverse these vast solitudes in every direction, to ascertain the places in which the pines abound. after cutting the grass and converting it into hay for the nourishment of the cattle to be employed in their labor, they return home. in the beginning of the winter they enter the forests again, establish themselves in huts covered with the bark of the canoe-birch, or the arbor-vitã¦; and, though the cold is so intense that the mercury sometimes remains for several weeks from 40â° to 50â° [fahr.] below the point of congelation, they persevere, with unabated courage, in their work.â�� according to springer, the company consists of choppers, swampers,--who make roads,--barker and loader, teamster, and cook. â��when the trees are felled, they cut them into logs from fourteen to eighteen feet long, and, by means of their cattle, which they employ with great dexterity, drag them to the river, and, after stamping on them a mark of property, roll them on its frozen bosom. at the breaking of the ice, in the spring, they float down with the current.... the logs that are not drawn the first year,â�� adds michaux, â��are attacked by large worms, which form holes about two lines in diameter, in every direction; but, if stripped of their bark, they will remain uninjured for thirty years.â�� ambejijis, this quiet sunday morning, struck me as the most beautiful lake we had seen. it is said to be one of the deepest. we had the fairest view of joe merry, double top, and ktaadn, from its surface. the summit of the latter had a singularly flat, table-land appearance, like a short highway, where a demigod might be let down to take a turn or two in an afternoon, to settle his dinner. we rowed a mile and a half to near the head of the lake, and, pushing through a field of lily-pads, landed, to cook our breakfast, by the side of a large rock, known to mccauslin. our breakfast consisted of tea, with hard-bread and pork, and fried salmon, which we ate with forks neatly whittled from alder twigs, which grew there, off strips of birch-bark for plates. the tea was black tea, without milk to color or sugar to sweeten it, and two tin dippers were our tea cups. this beverage is as indispensable to the loggers as to any gossiping old women in the land, and they, no doubt, derive great comfort from it. here was the site of an old loggerâ��s camp, remembered by mccauslin, now overgrown with weeds and bushes. in the midst of a dense underwood we noticed a whole brick, on a rock, in a small run, clean and red and square as in a brick-yard, which had been brought thus far formerly for tamping. some of us afterward regretted that we had not carried this on with us to the top of the mountain, to be left there for our mark. it would certainly have been a simple evidence of civilized man. mccauslin said that large wooden crosses, made of oak, still sound, were sometimes found standing in this wilderness, which were set up by the first catholic missionaries who came through to the kennebec. in the next nine miles, which were the extent of our voyage, and which it took us the rest of the day to get over, we rowed across several small lakes, poled up numerous rapids and thoroughfares, and carried over four portages. i will give the names and distances, for the benefit of future tourists. first, after leaving ambejijis lake, we had a quarter of a mile of rapids to the portage, or carry of ninety rods around ambejijis falls; then a mile and a half through passamagamet lake, which is narrow and river-like, to the falls of the same name,--ambejijis stream coming in on the right; then two miles through katepskonegan lake to the portage of ninety rods around katepskonegan falls, which name signifies â��carrying-place,â��--passamagamet stream coming in on the left; then three miles through pockwockomus lake, a slight expansion of the river, to the portage of forty rods around the falls of the same name,--katepskonegan stream coming in on the left; then three quarters of a mile through aboljacarmegus lake, similar to the last, to the portage of forty rods around the falls of the same name; then half a mile of rapid water to the sowadnehunk deadwater, and the aboljacknagesic stream. this is generally the order of names as you ascend the river: first, the lake, or, if there is no expansion, the deadwater; then the falls; then the stream emptying into the lake, or river above, all of the same name. first we came to passamagamet lake, then to passamagamet falls, then to passamagamet stream, emptying in. this order and identity of names, it will be perceived, is quite philosophical, since the deadwater or lake is always at least partially produced by the stream emptying in above; and the first fall below, which is the outlet of that lake, and where that tributary water makes its first plunge, also naturally bears the same name. at the portage around ambejijis falls i observed a pork-barrel on the shore, with a hole eight or nine inches square cut in one side, which was set against an upright rock; but the bears, without turning or upsetting the barrel, had gnawed a hole in the opposite side, which looked exactly like an enormous rat-hole, big enough to put their heads in; and at the bottom of the barrel were still left a few mangled and slabbered slices of pork. it is usual for the lumberers to leave such supplies as they cannot conveniently carry along with them at carries or camps, to which the next comers do not scruple to help themselves, they being the property, commonly, not of an individual, but a company, who can afford to deal liberally. i will describe particularly how we got over some of these portages and rapids, in order that the reader may get an idea of the boatmanâ��s life. at ambejijis falls, for instance, there was the roughest path imaginable cut through the woods; at first up hill, at an angle of nearly forty-five degrees, over rocks and logs without end. this was the manner of the portage. we first carried over our baggage, and deposited it on the shore at the other end; then, returning to the batteau, we dragged it up the hill by the painter, and onward, with frequent pauses, over half the portage. but this was a bungling way, and would soon have worn out the boat. commonly, three men walk over with a batteau weighing from three to five or six hundred pounds on their heads and shoulders, the tallest standing under the middle of the boat, which is turned over, and one at each end, or else there are two at the bows. more cannot well take hold at once. but this requires some practice, as well as strength, and is in any case extremely laborious, and wearing to the constitution, to follow. we were, on the whole, rather an invalid party, and could render our boatmen but little assistance. our two men at length took the batteau upon their shoulders, and, while two of us steadied it, to prevent it from rocking and wearing into their shoulders, on which they placed their hats folded, walked bravely over the remaining distance, with two or three pauses. in the same manner they accomplished the other portages. with this crushing weight they must climb and stumble along over fallen trees and slippery rocks of all sizes, where those who walked by the sides were continually brushed off, such was the narrowness of the path. but we were fortunate not to have to cut our path in the first place. before we launched our boat, we scraped the bottom smooth again, with our knives, where it had rubbed on the rocks, to save friction. to avoid the difficulties of the portage, our men determined to â��warp upâ�� the passamagamet falls; so while the rest walked over the portage with the baggage, i remained in the batteau, to assist in warping up. we were soon in the midst of the rapids, which were more swift and tumultuous than any we had poled up, and had turned to the side of the stream for the purpose of warping, when the boatmen, who felt some pride in their skill, and were ambitious to do something more than usual, for my benefit, as i surmised, took one more view of the rapids, or rather the falls; and, in answer to our question, whether we couldnâ��t get up there, the other answered that he guessed heâ��d try it. so we pushed again into the midst of the stream, and began to struggle with the current. i sat in the middle of the boat to trim it, moving slightly to the right or left as it grazed a rock. with an uncertain and wavering motion we wound and bolted our way up, until the bow was actually raised two feet above the stern at the steepest pitch; and then, when everything depended upon his exertions, the bowmanâ��s pole snapped in two; but before he had time to take the spare one, which i reached him, he had saved himself with the fragment upon a rock; and so we got up by a hairâ��s breadth; and uncle george exclaimed that that was never done before, and he had not tried it if he had not known whom he had got in the bow, nor he in the bow, if he had not known him in the stern. at this place there was a regular portage cut through the woods, and our boatmen had never known a batteau to ascend the falls. as near as i can remember, there was a perpendicular fall here, at the worst place of the whole penobscot river, two or three feet at least. i could not sufficiently admire the skill and coolness with which they performed this feat, never speaking to each other. the bowman, not looking behind, but knowing exactly what the other is about, works as if he worked alone. now sounding in vain for a bottom in fifteen feet of water, while the boat falls back several rods, held straight only with the greatest skill and exertion; or, while the sternman obstinately holds his ground, like a turtle, the bowman springs from side to side with wonderful suppleness and dexterity, scanning the rapids and the rocks with a thousand eyes; and now, having got a bite at last, with a lusty shove, which makes his pole bend and quiver, and the whole boat tremble, he gains a few feet upon the river. to add to the danger, the poles are liable at any time to be caught between the rocks, and wrenched out of their hands, leaving them at the mercy of the rapids,--the rocks, as it were, lying in wait, like so many alligators, to catch them in their teeth, and jerk them from your hands, before you have stolen an effectual shove against their palates. the pole is set close to the boat, and the prow is made to overshoot, and just turn the corners of the rocks, in the very teeth of the rapids. nothing but the length and lightness, and the slight draught of the batteau, enables them to make any headway. the bowman must quickly choose his course; there is no time to deliberate. frequently the boat is shoved between rocks where both sides touch, and the waters on either hand are a perfect maelstrom. half a mile above this two of us tried our hands at poling up a slight rapid; and we were just surmounting the last difficulty, when an unlucky rock confounded our calculations; and while the batteau was sweeping round irrecoverably amid the whirlpool, we were obliged to resign the poles to more skillful hands. katepskonegan is one of the shallowest and weediest of the lakes, and looked as if it might abound in pickerel. the falls of the same name, where we stopped to dine, are considerable and quite picturesque. here uncle george had seen trout caught by the barrelful; but they would not rise to our bait at this hour. halfway over this carry, thus far in the maine wilderness on its way to the provinces, we noticed a large, flaming, oak hall handbill, about two feet long, wrapped round the trunk of a pine, from which the bark had been stripped, and to which it was fast glued by the pitch. this should be recorded among the advantages of this mode of advertising, that so, possibly, even the bears and wolves, moose, deer, otter, and beaver, not to mention the indian, may learn where they can fit themselves according to the latest fashion, or, at least, recover some of their own lost garments. we christened this the oak hall carry. the forenoon was as serene and placid on this wild stream in the woods, as we are apt to imagine that sunday in summer usually is in massachusetts. we were occasionally startled by the scream of a bald eagle, sailing over the stream in front of our batteau; or of the fish hawks on whom he levies his contributions. there were, at intervals, small meadows of a few acres on the sides of the stream, waving with uncut grass, which attracted the attention of our boatmen, who regretted that they were not nearer to their clearings, and calculated how many stacks they might cut. two or three men sometimes spend the summer by themselves, cutting the grass in these meadows, to sell to the loggers in the winter, since it will fetch a higher price on the spot than in any market in the state. on a small isle, covered with this kind of rush, or cut-grass, on which we landed to consult about our further course, we noticed the recent track of a moose, a large, roundish hole in the soft, wet ground, evincing the great size and weight of the animal that made it. they are fond of the water, and visit all these island meadows, swimming as easily from island to island as they make their way through the thickets on land. now and then we passed what mccauslin called a pokelogan, an indian term for what the drivers might have reason to call a poke-logs-in, an inlet that leads nowhere. if you get in, you have got to get out again the same way. these, and the frequent â��runroundsâ�� which come into the river again, would embarrass an inexperienced voyager not a little. the carry around pockwockomus falls was exceedingly rough and rocky, the batteau having to be lifted directly from the water up four or five feet on to a rock, and launched again down a similar bank. the rocks on this portage were covered with the _dents_ made by the spikes in the lumberersâ�� boots while staggering over under the weight of their batteaux; and you could see where the surface of some large rocks on which they had rested their batteaux was worn quite smooth with use. as it was, we had carried over but half the usual portage at this place for this stage of the water, and launched our boat in the smooth wave just curving to the fall, prepared to struggle with the most violent rapid we had to encounter. the rest of the party walked over the remainder of the portage, while i remained with the boatmen to assist in warping up. one had to hold the boat while the others got in to prevent it from going over the falls. when we had pushed up the rapids as far as possible, keeping close to the shore, tom seized the painter and leaped out upon a rock just visible in the water, but he lost his footing, notwithstanding his spiked boots, and was instantly amid the rapids; but recovering himself by good luck, and reaching another rock, he passed the painter to me, who had followed him, and took his place again in the bows. leaping from rock to rock in the shoal water, close to the shore, and now and then getting a bite with the rope round an upright one, i held the boat while one reset his pole, and then all three forced it upward against any rapid. this was â��warping up.â�� when a part of us walked round at such a place, we generally took the precaution to take out the most valuable part of the baggage for fear of being swamped. as we poled up a swift rapid for half a mile above aboljacarmegus falls, some of the party read their own marks on the huge logs which lay piled up high and dry on the rocks on either hand, the relics probably of a jam which had taken place here in the great freshet in the spring. many of these would have to wait for another great freshet, perchance, if they lasted so long, before they could be got off. it was singular enough to meet with property of theirs which they had never seen, and where they had never been before, thus detained by freshets and rocks when on its way to them. methinks that must be where all my property lies, cast up on the rocks on some distant and unexplored stream, and waiting for an unheard-of freshet to fetch it down. o make haste, ye gods, with your winds and rains, and start the jam before it rots! the last half mile carried us to the sowadnehunk deadwater, so called from the stream of the same name, signifying â��running between mountains,â�� an important tributary which comes in a mile above. here we decided to camp, about twenty miles from the dam, at the mouth of murch brook and the aboljacknagesic, mountain streams, broad off from ktaadn, and about a dozen miles from its summit, having made fifteen miles this day. we had been told by mccauslin that we should here find trout enough; so, while some prepared the camp, the rest fell to fishing. seizing the birch poles which some party of indians, or white hunters, had left on the shore, and baiting our hooks with pork, and with trout, as soon as they were caught, we cast our lines into the mouth of the aboljacknagesic, a clear, swift, shallow stream, which came in from ktaadn. instantly a shoal of white chivin (_leuciscus pulchellus_), silvery roaches, cousin-trout, or what not, large and small, prowling thereabouts, fell upon our bait, and one after another were landed amidst the bushes. anon their cousins, the true trout, took their turn, and alternately the speckled trout, and the silvery roaches, swallowed the bait as fast as we could throw in; and the finest specimens of both that i have ever seen, the largest one weighing three pounds, were heaved upon the shore, though at first in vain, to wriggle down into the water again, for we stood in the boat; but soon we learned to remedy this evil; for one, who had lost his hook, stood on shore to catch them as they fell in a perfect shower around him,--sometimes, wet and slippery, full in his face and bosom, as his arms were outstretched to receive them. while yet alive, before their tints had faded, they glistened like the fairest flowers, the product of primitive rivers; and he could hardly trust his senses, as he stood over them, that these jewels should have swam away in that aboljacknagesic water for so long, so many dark ages;--these bright fluviatile flowers, seen of indians only, made beautiful, the lord only knows why, to swim there! i could understand better for this, the truth of mythology, the fables of proteus, and all those beautiful sea-monsters,--how all history, indeed, put to a terrestrial use, is mere history; but put to a celestial, is mythology always. but there is the rough voice of uncle george, who commands at the frying-pan, to send over what youâ��ve got, and then you may stay till morning. the pork sizzles and cries for fish. luckily for the foolish race, and this particularly foolish generation of trout, the night shut down at last, not a little deepened by the dark side of ktaadn, which, like a permanent shadow, reared itself from the eastern bank. lescarbot, writing in 1609, tells us that the sieur champdorã©, who, with one of the people of the sieur de monts, ascended some fifty leagues up the st. john in 1608, found the fish so plenty, â��quâ��en mettant la chaudiã¨re sur le feu ils en avoient pris suffisamment pour eux disner avant que lâ��eau fust chaude.â�� their descendants here are no less numerous. so we accompanied tom into the woods to cut cedar twigs for our bed. while he went ahead with the axe and lopped off the smallest twigs of the flat-leaved cedar, the arbor-vit㦠of the gardens, we gathered them up, and returned with them to the boat, until it was loaded. our bed was made with as much care and skill as a roof is shingled; beginning at the foot, and laying the twig end of the cedar upward, we advanced to the head, a course at a time, thus successively covering the stub-ends, and producing a soft and level bed. for us six it was about ten feet long by six in breadth. this time we lay under our tent, having pitched it more prudently with reference to the wind and the flame, and the usual huge fire blazed in front. supper was eaten off a large log, which some freshet had thrown up. this night we had a dish of arbor-vit㦠or cedar tea, which the lumberer sometimes uses when other herbs fail,- â��a quart of arbor-vitã¦, to make him strong and mighty,â��-but i had no wish to repeat the experiment. it had too medicinal a taste for my palate. there was the skeleton of a moose here, whose bones some indian hunters had picked on this very spot. in the night i dreamed of trout-fishing; and, when at length i awoke, it seemed a fable that this painted fish swam there so near my couch, and rose to our hooks the last evening, and i doubted if i had not dreamed it all. so i arose before dawn to test its truth, while my companions were still sleeping. there stood ktaadn with distinct and cloudless outline in the moonlight; and the rippling of the rapids was the only sound to break the stillness. standing on the shore, i once more cast my line into the stream, and found the dream to be real and the fable true. the speckled trout and silvery roach, like flying-fish, sped swiftly through the moonlight air, describing bright arcs on the dark side of ktaadn, until moonlight, now fading into daylight, brought satiety to my mind, and the minds of my companions, who had joined me. by six oâ��clock, having mounted our packs and a good blanketful of trout, ready dressed, and swung up such baggage and provision as we wished to leave behind upon the tops of saplings, to be out of the reach of bears, we started for the summit of the mountain, distant, as uncle george said the boatmen called it, about four miles, but as i judged, and as it proved, nearer fourteen. he had never been any nearer the mountain than this, and there was not the slightest trace of man to guide us farther in this direction. at first, pushing a few rods up the aboljacknagesic, or â��open-land stream,â�� we fastened our batteau to a tree, and traveled up the north side, through burnt lands, now partially overgrown with young aspens and other shrubbery; but soon, recrossing this stream, where it was about fifty or sixty feet wide, upon a jam of logs and rocks,--and you could cross it by this means almost anywhere,--we struck at once for the highest peak, over a mile or more of comparatively open land, still very gradually ascending the while. here it fell to my lot, as the oldest mountain-climber, to take the lead. so, scanning the woody side of the mountain, which lay still at an indefinite distance, stretched out some seven or eight miles in length before us, we determined to steer directly for the base of the highest peak, leaving a large slide, by which, as i have since learned, some of our predecessors ascended, on our left. this course would lead us parallel to a dark seam in the forest, which marked the bed of a torrent, and over a slight spur, which extended southward from the main mountain, from whose bare summit we could get an outlook over the country, and climb directly up the peak, which would then be close at hand. seen from this point, a bare ridge at the extremity of the open land, ktaadn presented a different aspect from any mountain i have seen, there being a greater proportion of naked rock rising abruptly from the forest; and we looked up at this blue barrier as if it were some fragment of a wall which anciently bounded the earth in that direction. setting the compass for a northeast course, which was the bearing of the southern base of the highest peak, we were soon buried in the woods. we soon began to meet with traces of bears and moose, and those of rabbits were everywhere visible. the tracks of moose, more or less recent, to speak literally, covered every square rod on the sides of the mountain; and these animals are probably more numerous there now than ever before, being driven into this wilderness, from all sides, by the settlements. the track of a full-grown moose is like that of a cow, or larger, and of the young, like that of a calf. sometimes we found ourselves traveling in faint paths, which they had made, like cow-paths in the woods, only far more indistinct, being rather openings, affording imperfect vistas through the dense underwood, than trodden paths; and everywhere the twigs had been browsed by them, clipped as smoothly as if by a knife. the bark of trees was stripped up by them to the height of eight or nine feet, in long, narrow strips, an inch wide, still showing the distinct marks of their teeth. we expected nothing less than to meet a herd of them every moment, and our nimrod held his shooting-iron in readiness; but we did not go out of our way to look for them, and, though numerous, they are so wary that the unskillful hunter might range the forest a long time before he could get sight of one. they are sometimes dangerous to encounter, and will not turn out for the hunter, but furiously rush upon him and trample him to death, unless he is lucky enough to avoid them by dodging round a tree. the largest are nearly as large as a horse, and weigh sometimes one thousand pounds; and it is said that they can step over a five-foot gate in their ordinary walk. they are described as exceedingly awkward-looking animals, with their long legs and short bodies, making a ludicrous figure when in full run, but making great headway, nevertheless. it seemed a mystery to us how they could thread these woods, which it required all our suppleness to accomplish,--climbing, stooping, and winding, alternately. they are said to drop their long and branching horns, which usually spread five or six feet, on their backs, and make their way easily by the weight of their bodies. our boatmen said, but i know not with how much truth, that their horns are apt to be gnawed away by vermin while they sleep. their flesh, which is more like beef than venison, is common in bangor market. we had proceeded on thus seven or eight miles, till about noon, with frequent pauses to refresh the weary ones, crossing a considerable mountain stream, which we conjectured to be murch brook, at whose mouth we had camped, all the time in woods, without having once seen the summit, and rising very gradually, when the boatmen beginning to despair a little, and fearing that we were leaving the mountain on one side of us, for they had not entire faith in the compass, mccauslin climbed a tree, from the top of which he could see the peak, when it appeared that we had not swerved from a right line, the compass down below still ranging with his arm, which pointed to the summit. by the side of a cool mountain rill, amid the woods, where the water began to partake of the purity and transparency of the air, we stopped to cook some of our fishes, which we had brought thus far in order to save our hard-bread and pork, in the use of which we had put ourselves on short allowance. we soon had a fire blazing, and stood around it, under the damp and sombre forest of firs and birches, each with a sharpened stick, three or four feet in length, upon which he had spitted his trout, or roach, previously well gashed and salted, our sticks radiating like the spokes of a wheel from one centre, and each crowding his particular fish into the most desirable exposure, not with the truest regard always to his neighborâ��s rights. thus we regaled ourselves, drinking meanwhile at the spring, till one manâ��s pack, at least, was considerably lightened, when we again took up our line of march. at length we reached an elevation sufficiently bare to afford a view of the summit, still distant and blue, almost as if retreating from us. a torrent, which proved to be the same we had crossed, was seen tumbling down in front, literally from out of the clouds. but this glimpse at our whereabouts was soon lost, and we were buried in the woods again. the wood was chiefly yellow birch, spruce, fir, mountain-ash, or round-wood, as the maine people call it, and moose-wood. it was the worst kind of traveling; sometimes like the densest scrub oak patches with us. the cornel, or bunch-berries, were very abundant, as well as solomonâ��s-seal and moose-berries. blueberries were distributed along our whole route; and in one place the bushes were drooping with the weight of the fruit, still as fresh as ever. it was the 7th of september. such patches afforded a grateful repast, and served to bait the tired party forward. when any lagged behind, the cry of â��blueberriesâ�� was most effectual to bring them up. even at this elevation we passed through a moose-yard, formed by a large flat rock, four or five rods square, where they tread down the snow in winter. at length, fearing that if we held the direct course to the summit, we should not find any water near our camping-ground, we gradually swerved to the west, till, at four oâ��clock, we struck again the torrent which i have mentioned, and here, in view of the summit, the weary party decided to camp that night. while my companions were seeking a suitable spot for this purpose, i improved the little daylight that was left in climbing the mountain alone. we were in a deep and narrow ravine, sloping up to the clouds, at an angle of nearly forty-five degrees, and hemmed in by walls of rock, which were at first covered with low trees, then with impenetrable thickets of scraggy birches and spruce trees, and with moss, but at last bare of all vegetation but lichens, and almost continually draped in clouds. following up the course of the torrent which occupied this,--and i mean to lay some emphasis on this word _up_,--pulling myself up by the side of perpendicular falls of twenty or thirty feet, by the roots of firs and birches, and then, perhaps, walking a level rod or two in the thin stream, for it took up the whole road, ascending by huge steps, as it were, a giantâ��s stairway, down which a river flowed, i had soon cleared the trees, and paused on the successive shelves, to look back over the country. the torrent was from fifteen to thirty feet wide, without a tributary, and seemingly not diminishing in breadth as i advanced; but still it came rushing and roaring down, with a copious tide, over and amidst masses of bare rock, from the very clouds, as though a waterspout had just burst over the mountain. leaving this at last, i began to work my way, scarcely less arduous than satanâ��s anciently through chaos, up the nearest though not the highest peak. at first scrambling on all fours over the tops of ancient black spruce trees (_abies nigra_), old as the flood, from two to ten or twelve feet in height, their tops flat and spreading, and their foliage blue, and nipped with cold, as if for centuries they had ceased growing upward against the bleak sky, the solid cold. i walked some good rods erect upon the tops of these trees, which were overgrown with moss and mountain cranberries. it seemed that in the course of time they had filled up the intervals between the huge rocks, and the cold wind had uniformly leveled all over. here the principle of vegetation was hard put to it. there was apparently a belt of this kind running quite round the mountain, though, perhaps, nowhere so remarkable as here. once, slumping through, i looked down ten feet, into a dark and cavernous region, and saw the stem of a spruce, on whose top i stood, as on a mass of coarse basket-work, fully nine inches in diameter at the ground. these holes were bearsâ�� dens, and the bears were even then at home. this was the sort of garden i made my way _over_, for an eighth of a mile, at the risk, it is true, of treading on some of the plants, not seeing any path _through_ it,--certainly the most treacherous and porous country i ever traveled. â��nigh foundered on he fares, treading the crude consistence, half on foot, half flying,â�� but nothing could exceed the toughness of the twigs,--not one snapped under my weight, for they had slowly grown. having slumped, scrambled, rolled, bounced, and walked, by turns, over this scraggy country, i arrived upon a side-hill, or rather side-mountain, where rocks, gray, silent rocks, were the flocks and herds that pastured, chewing a rocky cud at sunset. they looked at me with hard gray eyes, without a bleat or a low. this brought me to the skirt of a cloud, and bounded my walk that night. but i had already seen that maine country when i turned about, waving, flowing, rippling, down below. when i returned to my companions, they had selected a camping-ground on the torrentâ��s edge, and were resting on the ground; one was on the sick list, rolled in a blanket, on a damp shelf of rock. it was a savage and dreary scenery enough, so wildly rough, that they looked long to find a level and open space for the tent. we could not well camp higher, for want of fuel; and the trees here seemed so evergreen and sappy, that we almost doubted if they would acknowledge the influence of fire; but fire prevailed at last, and blazed here, too, like a good citizen of the world. even at this height we met with frequent traces of moose, as well as of bears. as here was no cedar, we made our bed of coarser feathered spruce; but at any rate the feathers were plucked from the live tree. it was, perhaps, even a more grand and desolate place for a nightâ��s lodging than the summit would have been, being in the neighborhood of those wild trees, and of the torrent. some more aã«rial and finer-spirited winds rushed and roared through the ravine all night, from time to time arousing our fire, and dispersing the embers about. it was as if we lay in the very nest of a young whirlwind. at midnight, one of my bed-fellows, being startled in his dreams by the sudden blazing up to its top of a fir tree, whose green boughs were dried by the heat, sprang up, with a cry, from his bed, thinking the world on fire, and drew the whole camp after him. in the morning, after whetting our appetite on some raw pork, a wafer of hard-bread, and a dipper of condensed cloud or waterspout, we all together began to make our way up the falls, which i have described; this time choosing the right hand, or highest peak, which was not the one i had approached before. but soon my companions were lost to my sight behind the mountain ridge in my rear, which still seemed ever retreating before me, and i climbed alone over huge rocks, loosely poised, a mile or more, still edging toward the clouds; for though the day was clear elsewhere, the summit was concealed by mist. the mountain seemed a vast aggregation of loose rocks, as if some time it had rained rocks, and they lay as they fell on the mountain sides, nowhere fairly at rest, but leaning on each other, all rocking stones, with cavities between, but scarcely any soil or smoother shelf. they were the raw materials of a planet dropped from an unseen quarry, which the vast chemistry of nature would anon work up, or work down, into the smiling and verdant plains and valleys of earth. this was an undone extremity of the globe; as in lignite we see coal in the process of formation. at length i entered within the skirts of the cloud which seemed forever drifting over the summit, and yet would never be gone, but was generated out of that pure air as fast as it flowed away; and when, a quarter of a mile farther, i reached the summit of the ridge, which those who have seen in clearer weather say is about five miles long, and contains a thousand acres of table-land, i was deep within the hostile ranks of clouds, and all objects were obscured by them. now the wind would blow me out a yard of clear sunlight, wherein i stood; then a gray, dawning light was all it could accomplish, the cloud-line ever rising and falling with the windâ��s intensity. sometimes it seemed as if the summit would be cleared in a few moments, and smile in sunshine; but what was gained on one side was lost on another. it was like sitting in a chimney and waiting for the smoke to blow away. it was, in fact, a cloud-factory,--these were the cloud-works, and the wind turned them off done from the cool, bare rocks. occasionally, when the windy columns broke in to me, i caught sight of a dark, damp crag to the right or left; the mist driving ceaselessly between it and me. it reminded me of the creations of the old epic and dramatic poets, of atlas, vulcan, the cyclops, and prometheus. such was caucasus and the rock where prometheus was bound. ã�schylus had no doubt visited such scenery as this. it was vast, titanic, and such as man never inhabits. some part of the beholder, even some vital part, seems to escape through the loose grating of his ribs as he ascends. he is more lone than you can imagine. there is less of substantial thought and fair understanding in him than in the plains where men inhabit. his reason is dispersed and shadowy, more thin and subtile, like the air. vast, titanic, inhuman nature has got him at disadvantage, caught him alone, and pilfers him of some of his divine faculty. she does not smile on him as in the plains. she seems to say sternly, why came ye here before your time. this ground is not prepared for you. is it not enough that i smile in the valleys? i have never made this soil for thy feet, this air for thy breathing, these rocks for thy neighbors. i cannot pity nor fondle thee here, but forever relentlessly drive thee hence to where i _am_ kind. why seek me where i have not called thee, and then complain because you find me but a stepmother? shouldst thou freeze or starve, or shudder thy life away, here is no shrine, nor altar, nor any access to my ear. â��chaos and ancient night, i come no spy with purpose to explore or to disturb the secrets of your realm, but ... . . . . . . as my way lies through your spacious empire up to light.â�� the tops of mountains are among the unfinished parts of the globe, whither it is a slight insult to the gods to climb and pry into their secrets, and try their effect on our humanity. only daring and insolent men, perchance, go there. simple races, as savages, do not climb mountains,--their tops are sacred and mysterious tracts never visited by them. pomola is always angry with those who climb to the summit of ktaadn. according to jackson, who, in his capacity of geological surveyor of the state, has accurately measured it, the altitude of ktaadn is 5300 feet, or a little more than one mile above the level of the sea, and he adds, â��it is then evidently the highest point in the state of maine, and is the most abrupt granite mountain in new england.â�� the peculiarities of that spacious table-land on which i was standing, as well as the remarkable semicircular precipice or basin on the eastern side, were all concealed by the mist. i had brought my whole pack to the top, not knowing but i should have to make my descent to the river, and possibly to the settled portion of the state alone, and by some other route, and wishing to have a complete outfit with me. but at length fearing that my companions would be anxious to reach the river before night, and knowing that the clouds might rest on the mountain for days, i was compelled to descend. occasionally, as i came down, the wind would blow me a vista open, through which i could see the country eastward, boundless forests, and lakes, and streams, gleaming in the sun, some of them emptying into the east branch. there were also new mountains in sight in that direction. now and then some small bird of the sparrow family would flit away before me, unable to command its course, like a fragment of the gray rock blown off by the wind. i found my companions where i had left them, on the side of the peak, gathering the mountain cranberries, which filled every crevice between the rocks, together with blueberries, which had a spicier flavor the higher up they grew, but were not the less agreeable to our palates. when the country is settled, and roads are made, these cranberries will perhaps become an article of commerce. from this elevation, just on the skirts of the clouds, we could overlook the country, west and south, for a hundred miles. there it was, the state of maine, which we had seen on the map, but not much like that,--immeasurable forest for the sun to shine on, that eastern _stuff_ we hear of in massachusetts. no clearing, no house. it did not look as if a solitary traveler had cut so much as a walking-stick there. countless lakes,--moosehead in the southwest, forty miles long by ten wide, like a gleaming silver platter at the end of the table; chesuncook, eighteen long by three wide, without an island; millinocket, on the south, with its hundred islands; and a hundred others without a name; and mountains, also, whose names, for the most part, are known only to the indians. the forest looked like a firm grass sward, and the effect of these lakes in its midst has been well compared, by one who has since visited this same spot, to that of a â��mirror broken into a thousand fragments, and wildly scattered over the grass, reflecting the full blaze of the sun.â�� it was a large farm for somebody, when cleared. according to the gazetteer, which was printed before the boundary question was settled, this single penobscot county, in which we were, was larger than the whole state of vermont, with its fourteen counties; and this was only a part of the wild lands of maine. we are concerned now, however, about natural, not political limits. we were about eighty miles, as the bird flies, from bangor, or one hundred and fifteen, as we had ridden, and walked, and paddled. we had to console ourselves with the reflection that this view was probably as good as that from the peak, as far as it went; and what were a mountain without its attendant clouds and mists? like ourselves, neither bailey nor jackson had obtained a clear view from the summit. setting out on our return to the river, still at an early hour in the day, we decided to follow the course of the torrent, which we supposed to be murch brook, as long as it would not lead us too far out of our way. we thus traveled about four miles in the very torrent itself, continually crossing and recrossing it, leaping from rock to rock, and jumping with the stream down falls of seven or eight feet, or sometimes sliding down on our backs in a thin sheet of water. this ravine had been the scene of an extraordinary freshet in the spring, apparently accompanied by a slide from the mountain. it must have been filled with a stream of stones and water, at least twenty feet above the present level of the torrent. for a rod or two, on either side of its channel, the trees were barked and splintered up to their tops, the birches bent over, twisted, and sometimes finely split, like a stable-broom; some, a foot in diameter, snapped off, and whole clumps of trees bent over with the weight of rocks piled on them. in one place we noticed a rock, two or three feet in diameter, lodged nearly twenty feet high in the crotch of a tree. for the whole four miles we saw but one rill emptying in, and the volume of water did not seem to be increased from the first. we traveled thus very rapidly with a downward impetus, and grew remarkably expert at leaping from rock to rock, for leap we must, and leap we did, whether there was any rock at the right distance or not. it was a pleasant picture when the foremost turned about and looked up the winding ravine, walled in with rocks and the green forest, to see, at intervals of a rod or two, a red-shirted or green-jacketed mountaineer against the white torrent, leaping down the channel with his pack on his back, or pausing upon a convenient rock in the midst of the torrent to mend a rent in his clothes, or unstrap the dipper at his belt to take a draught of the water. at one place we were startled by seeing, on a little sandy shelf by the side of the stream, the fresh print of a manâ��s foot, and for a moment realized how robinson crusoe felt in a similar case; but at last we remembered that we had struck this stream on our way up, though we could not have told where, and one had descended into the ravine for a drink. the cool air above and the continual bathing of our bodies in mountain water, alternate foot, sitz, douche, and plunge baths, made this walk exceedingly refreshing, and we had traveled only a mile or two, after leaving the torrent, before every thread of our clothes was as dry as usual, owing perhaps to a peculiar quality in the atmosphere. after leaving the torrent, being in doubt about our course, tom threw down his pack at the foot of the loftiest spruce tree at hand, and shinned up the bare trunk some twenty feet, and then climbed through the green tower, lost to our sight, until he held the topmost spray in his hand.[5] mccauslin, in his younger days, had marched through the wilderness with a body of troops, under general somebody, and with one other man did all the scouting and spying service. the generalâ��s word was, â��throw down the top of that tree,â�� and there was no tree in the maine woods so high that it did not lose its top in such a case. i have heard a story of two men being lost once in these woods, nearer to the settlements than this, who climbed the loftiest pine they could find, some six feet in diameter at the ground, from whose top they discovered a solitary clearing and its smoke. when at this height, some two hundred feet from the ground, one of them became dizzy, and fainted in his companionâ��s arms, and the latter had to accomplish the descent with him, alternately fainting and reviving, as best he could. to tom we cried, â��where away does the summit bear? where the burnt lands?â�� the last he could only conjecture; he descried, however, a little meadow and pond, lying probably in our course, which we concluded to steer for. on reaching this secluded meadow, we found fresh tracks of moose on the shore of the pond, and the water was still unsettled as if they had fled before us. a little farther, in a dense thicket, we seemed to be still on their trail. it was a small meadow, of a few acres, on the mountain-side, concealed by the forest, and perhaps never seen by a white man before, where one would think that the moose might browse and bathe, and rest in peace. pursuing this course, we soon reached the open land, which went sloping down some miles toward the penobscot. perhaps i most fully realized that this was primeval, untamed, and forever untamable _nature_, or whatever else men call it, while coming down this part of the mountain. we were passing over â��burnt lands,â�� burnt by lightning, perchance, though they showed no recent marks of fire, hardly so much as a charred stump, but looked rather like a natural pasture for the moose and deer, exceedingly wild and desolate, with occasional strips of timber crossing them, and low poplars springing up, and patches of blueberries here and there. i found myself traversing them familiarly, like some pasture run to waste, or partially reclaimed by man; but when i reflected what man, what brother or sister or kinsman of our race made it and claimed it, i expected the proprietor to rise up and dispute my passage. it is difficult to conceive of a region uninhabited by man. we habitually presume his presence and influence everywhere. and yet we have not seen pure nature, unless we have seen her thus vast and drear and inhuman, though in the midst of cities. nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. i looked with awe at the ground i trod on, to see what the powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. this was that earth of which we have heard, made out of chaos and old night. here was no manâ��s garden, but the unhandseled globe. it was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste land. it was the fresh and natural surface of the planet earth, as it was made forever and ever,--to be the dwelling of man, we say,--so nature made it, and man may use it if he can. man was not to be associated with it. it was matter, vast, terrific,--not his mother earth that we have heard of, not for him to tread on, or be buried in,--no, it were being too familiar even to let his bones lie there,--the home, this, of necessity and fate. there was clearly felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. it was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites,--to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we. we walked over it with a certain awe, stopping, from time to time, to pick the blueberries which grew there, and had a smart and spicy taste. perchance where _our_ wild pines stand, and leaves lie on their forest floor, in concord, there were once reapers, and husbandmen planted grain; but here not even the surface had been scarred by man, but it was a specimen of what god saw fit to make this world. what is it to be admitted to a museum, to see a myriad of particular things, compared with being shown some starâ��s surface, some hard matter in its home! i stand in awe of my body, this matter to which i am bound has become so strange to me. i fear not spirits, ghosts, of which i am one,--_that_ my body might,--but i fear bodies, i tremble to meet them. what is this titan that has possession of me? talk of mysteries! think of our life in nature,--daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,--rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the _solid_ earth! the _actual_ world! the _common sense!_ _contact!_ _contact!_ _who_ are we? _where_ are we? erelong we recognized some rocks and other features in the landscape which we had purposely impressed on our memories, and, quickening our pace, by two oâ��clock we reached the batteau.[6] here we had expected to dine on trout, but in this glaring sunlight they were slow to take the bait, so we were compelled to make the most of the crumbs of our hard-bread and our pork, which were both nearly exhausted. meanwhile we deliberated whether we should go up the river a mile farther, to gibsonâ��s clearing, on the sowadnehunk, where there was a deserted log hut, in order to get a half-inch auger, to mend one of our spike-poles with. there were young spruce trees enough around us, and we had a spare spike, but nothing to make a hole with. but as it was uncertain whether we should find any tools left there, we patched up the broken pole, as well as we could, for the downward voyage, in which there would be but little use for it. moreover, we were unwilling to lose any time in this expedition, lest the wind should rise before we reached the larger lakes, and detain us; for a moderate wind produces quite a sea on these waters, in which a batteau will not live for a moment; and on one occasion mccauslin had been delayed a week at the head of the north twin, which is only four miles across. we were nearly out of provisions, and ill prepared in this respect for what might possibly prove a weekâ��s journey round by the shore, fording innumerable streams, and threading a trackless forest, should any accident happen to our boat. it was with regret that we turned our backs on chesuncook, which mccauslin had formerly logged on, and the allegash lakes. there were still longer rapids and portages above; among the last the ripogenus portage, which he described as the most difficult on the river, and three miles long. the whole length of the penobscot is two hundred and seventy-five miles, and we are still nearly one hundred miles from its source. hodge, the assistant state geologist, passed up this river in 1837, and by a portage of only one mile and three quarters crossed over into the allegash, and so went down that into the st. john, and up the madawaska to the grand portage across to the st. lawrence. his is the only account that i know of an expedition through to canada in this direction. he thus describes his first sight of the latter river, which, to compare small things with great, is like balboaâ��s first sight of the pacific from the mountains of the isthmus of darien. â��when we first came in sight of the st. lawrence,â�� he says, â��from the top of a high hill, the view was most striking, and much more interesting to me from having been shut up in the woods for the two previous months. directly before us lay the broad river, extending across nine or ten miles, its surface broken by a few islands and reefs, and two ships riding at anchor near the shore. beyond, extended ranges of uncultivated hills, parallel with the river. the sun was just going down behind them, and gilding the whole scene with its parting rays.â�� about four oâ��clock, the same afternoon, we commenced our return voyage, which would require but little if any poling. in shooting rapids the boatmen use large and broad paddles, instead of poles, to guide the boat with. though we glided so swiftly, and often smoothly, down, where it had cost us no slight effort to get up, our present voyage was attended with far more danger; for if we once fairly struck one of the thousand rocks by which we were surrounded, the boat would be swamped in an instant. when a boat is swamped under these circumstances, the boatmen commonly find no difficulty in keeping afloat at first, for the current keeps both them and their cargo up for a long way down the stream; and if they can swim, they have only to work their way gradually to the shore. the greatest danger is of being caught in an eddy behind some larger rock, where the water rushes up stream faster than elsewhere it does down, and being carried round and round under the surface till they are drowned. mccauslin pointed out some rocks which had been the scene of a fatal accident of this kind. sometimes the body is not thrown out for several hours. he himself had performed such a circuit once, only his legs being visible to his companions; but he was fortunately thrown out in season to recover his breath.[7] in shooting the rapids, the boatman has this problem to solve: to choose a circuitous and safe course amid a thousand sunken rocks, scattered over a quarter or half a mile, at the same time that he is moving steadily on at the rate of fifteen miles an hour. stop he cannot; the only question is, where will he go? the bowman chooses the course with all his eyes about him, striking broad off with his paddle, and drawing the boat by main force into her course. the sternman faithfully follows the bow. we were soon at the aboljacarmegus falls. anxious to avoid the delay, as well as the labor, of the portage here, our boatmen went forward first to reconnoitre, and concluded to let the batteau down the falls, carrying the baggage only over the portage. jumping from rock to rock until nearly in the middle of the stream, we were ready to receive the boat and let her down over the first fall, some six or seven feet perpendicular. the boatmen stand upon the edge of a shelf of rock, where the fall is perhaps nine or ten feet perpendicular, in from one to two feet of rapid water, one on each side of the boat, and let it slide gently over, till the bow is run out ten or twelve feet in the air; then, letting it drop squarely, while one holds the painter, the other leaps in, and his companion following, they are whirled down the rapids to a new fall or to smooth water. in a very few minutes they had accomplished a passage in safety, which would be as foolhardy for the unskillful to attempt as the descent of niagara itself. it seemed as if it needed only a little familiarity, and a little more skill, to navigate down such falls as niagara itself with safety. at any rate, i should not despair of such men in the rapids above table rock, until i saw them actually go over the falls, so cool, so collected, so fertile in resources are they. one might have thought that these were falls, and that falls were not to be waded through with impunity, like a mud-puddle. there was really danger of their losing their sublimity in losing their power to harm us. familiarity breeds contempt. the boatman pauses, perchance, on some shelf beneath a table-rock under the fall, standing in some cove of backwater two feet deep, and you hear his rough voice come up through the spray, coolly giving directions how to launch the boat this time. having carried round pockwockomus falls, our oars soon brought us to the katepskonegan, or oak hall carry, where we decided to camp half-way over, leaving our batteau to be carried over in the morning on fresh shoulders. one shoulder of each of the boatmen showed a red spot as large as oneâ��s hand, worn by the batteau on this expedition; and this shoulder, as it did all the work, was perceptibly lower than its fellow, from long service. such toil soon wears out the strongest constitution. the drivers are accustomed to work in the cold water in the spring, rarely ever dry; and if one falls in all over he rarely changes his clothes till night, if then, even. one who takes this precaution is called by a particular nickname, or is turned off. none can lead this life who are not almost amphibious. mccauslin said soberly, what is at any rate a good story to tell, that he had seen where six men were wholly under water at once, at a jam, with their shoulders to handspikes. if the log did not start, then they had to put out their heads to breathe. the driver works as long as he can see, from dark to dark, and at night has not time to eat his supper and dry his clothes fairly, before he is asleep on his cedar bed. we lay that night on the very bed made by such a party, stretching our tent over the poles which were still standing, but re-shingling the damp and faded bed with fresh leaves. in the morning we carried our boat over and launched it, making haste lest the wind should rise. the boatmen ran down passamagamet, and soon after ambejijis falls, while we walked round with the baggage. we made a hasty breakfast at the head of ambejijis lake on the remainder of our pork, and were soon rowing across its smooth surface again, under a pleasant sky, the mountain being now clear of clouds in the northeast. taking turns at the oars, we shot rapidly across deep cove, the foot of pamadumcook, and the north twin, at the rate of six miles an hour, the wind not being high enough to disturb us, and reached the dam at noon. the boatmen went through one of the log sluices in the batteau, where the fall was ten feet at the bottom, and took us in below. here was the longest rapid in our voyage, and perhaps the running this was as dangerous and arduous a task as any. shooting down sometimes at the rate, as we judged, of fifteen miles an hour, if we struck a rock we were split from end to end in an instant. now like a bait bobbing for some river monster, amid the eddies, now darting to this side of the stream, now to that, gliding swift and smooth near to our destruction, or striking broad off with the paddle and drawing the boat to right or left with all our might, in order to avoid a rock. i suppose that it was like running the rapids of the sault sainte marie, at the outlet of lake superior, and our boatmen probably displayed no less dexterity than the indians there do. we soon ran through this mile, and floated in quakish lake. after such a voyage, the troubled and angry waters, which once had seemed terrible and not to be trifled with, appeared tamed and subdued; they had been bearded and worried in their channels, pricked and whipped into submission with the spike-pole and paddle, gone through and through with impunity, and all their spirit and their danger taken out of them, and the most swollen and impetuous rivers seemed but playthings henceforth. i began, at length, to understand the boatmanâ��s familiarity with, and contempt for, the rapids. â��those fowler boys,â�� said mrs. mccauslin, â��are perfect ducks for the water.â�� they had run down to lincoln, according to her, thirty or forty miles, in a batteau, in the night, for a doctor, when it was so dark that they could not see a rod before them, and the river was swollen so as to be almost a continuous rapid, so that the doctor _cried_, when they brought him up by daylight, â��why, tom, how did you see to steer?â�� â��we didnâ��t steer much,--only kept her straight.â�� and yet they met with no accident. it is true, the more difficult rapids are higher up than this. when we reached the millinocket opposite to tomâ��s house, and were waiting for his folks to set us over,--for we had left our batteau above the grand falls,--we discovered two canoes, with two men in each, turning up this stream from shad pond, one keeping the opposite side of a small island before us, while the other approached the side where we were standing, examining the banks carefully for muskrats as they came along. the last proved to be louis neptune and his companion, now, at last, on their way up to chesuncook after moose, but they were so disguised that we hardly knew them. at a little distance they might have been taken for quakers, with their broad-brimmed hats and overcoats with broad capes, the spoils of bangor, seeking a settlement in this sylvania,--or, nearer at hand, for fashionable gentlemen the morning after a spree. met face to face, these indians in their native woods looked like the sinister and slouching fellows whom you meet picking up strings and paper in the streets of a city. there is, in fact, a remarkable and unexpected resemblance between the degraded savage and the lowest classes in a great city. the one is no more a child of nature than the other. in the progress of degradation the distinction of races is soon lost. neptune at first was only anxious to know what we â��kill,â�� seeing some partridges in the hands of one of the party, but we had assumed too much anger to permit of a reply. we thought indians had some honor before. but--â��me been sick. oh, me unwell now. you make bargain, then me go.â�� they had in fact been delayed so long by a drunken frolic at the five islands, and they had not yet recovered from its effects. they had some young musquash in their canoes, which they dug out of the banks with a hoe, for food, not for their skins, for musquash are their principal food on these expeditions. so they went on up the millinocket, and we kept down the bank of the penobscot, after recruiting ourselves with a draught of tomâ��s beer, leaving tom at his home. thus a man shall lead his life away here on the edge of the wilderness, on indian millinocket stream, in a new world, far in the dark of a continent, and have a flute to play at evening here, while his strains echo to the stars, amid the howling of wolves; shall live, as it were, in the primitive age of the world, a primitive man. yet he shall spend a sunny day, and in this century be my contemporary; perchance shall read some scattered leaves of literature, and sometimes talk with me. why read history, then, if the ages and the generations are now? he lives three thousand years deep into time, an age not yet described by poets. can you well go further back in history than this? ay! ay!--for there turns up but now into the mouth of millinocket stream a still more ancient and primitive man, whose history is not brought down even to the former. in a bark vessel sewn with the roots of the spruce, with horn-beam paddles, he dips his way along. he is but dim and misty to me, obscured by the ã¦ons that lie between the bark canoe and the batteau. he builds no house of logs, but a wigwam of skins. he eats no hot bread and sweet cake, but musquash and moose meat and the fat of bears. he glides up the millinocket and is lost to my sight, as a more distant and misty cloud is seen flitting by behind a nearer, and is lost in space. so he goes about his destiny, the red face of man. after having passed the night, and buttered our boots for the last time, at uncle georgeâ��s, whose dogs almost devoured him for joy at his return, we kept on down the river the next day, about eight miles on foot, and then took a batteau, with a man to pole it, to mattawamkeag, ten more. at the middle of that very night, to make a swift conclusion to a long story, we dropped our buggy over the half-finished bridge at oldtown, where we heard the confused din and clink of a hundred saws, which never rest, and at six oâ��clock the next morning one of the party was steaming his way to massachusetts. * * * * * [illustration: _maine wilderness_] what is most striking in the maine wilderness is the continuousness of the forest, with fewer open intervals or glades than you had imagined. except the few burnt lands, the narrow intervals on the rivers, the bare tops of the high mountains, and the lakes and streams, the forest is uninterrupted. it is even more grim and wild than you had anticipated, a damp and intricate wilderness, in the spring everywhere wet and miry. the aspect of the country, indeed, is universally stern and savage, excepting the distant views of the forest from hills, and the lake prospects, which are mild and civilizing in a degree. the lakes are something which you are unprepared for; they lie up so high, exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine fringe on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, like amethyst jewels set around some jewel of the first water,--so anterior, so superior, to all the changes that are to take place on their shores, even now civil and refined, and fair as they can ever be. these are not the artificial forests of an english king,--a royal preserve merely. here prevail no forest laws but those of nature. the aborigines have never been dispossessed, nor nature disforested. it is a country full of evergreen trees, of mossy silver birches and watery maples, the ground dotted with insipid small, red berries, and strewn with damp and moss-grown rocks,--a country diversified with innumerable lakes and rapid streams, peopled with trout and various species of _leucisci_, with salmon, shad, and pickerel, and other fishes; the forest resounding at rare intervals with the note of the chickadee, the blue jay, and the woodpecker, the scream of the fish hawk and the eagle, the laugh of the loon, and the whistle of ducks along the solitary streams; at night, with the hooting of owls and howling of wolves; in summer, swarming with myriads of black flies and mosquitoes, more formidable than wolves to the white man. such is the home of the moose, the bear, the caribou, the wolf, the beaver, and the indian. who shall describe the inexpressible tenderness and immortal life of the grim forest, where nature, though it be midwinter, is ever in her spring, where the moss-grown and decaying trees are not old, but seem to enjoy a perpetual youth; and blissful, innocent nature, like a serene infant, is too happy to make a noise, except by a few tinkling, lisping birds and trickling rills? what a place to live, what a place to die and be buried in! there certainly men would live forever, and laugh at death and the grave. there they could have no such thoughts as are associated with the village graveyard,--that make a grave out of one of those moist evergreen hummocks! die and be buried who will, i mean to live here still; my nature grows ever more young the primitive pines among. i am reminded by my journey how exceedingly new this country still is. you have only to travel for a few days into the interior and back parts even of many of the old states, to come to that very america which the northmen, and cabot, and gosnold, and smith, and raleigh visited. if columbus was the first to discover the islands, americus vespucius and cabot, and the puritans, and we their descendants, have discovered only the shores of america. while the republic has already acquired a history world-wide, america is still unsettled and unexplored. like the english in new holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy. the very timber and boards and shingles of which our houses are made grew but yesterday in a wilderness where the indian still hunts and the moose runs wild. new york has her wilderness within her own borders; and though the sailors of europe are familiar with the soundings of her hudson, and fulton long since invented the steamboat on its waters, an indian is still necessary to guide her scientific men to its headwaters in the adirondack country. have we even so much as discovered and settled the shores? let a man travel on foot along the coast, from the passamaquoddy to the sabine, or to the rio bravo, or to wherever the end is now, if he is swift enough to overtake it, faithfully following the windings of every inlet and of every cape, and stepping to the music of the surf,--with a desolate fishing town once a week, and a cityâ��s port once a month to cheer him, and putting up at the lighthouses, when there are any,--and tell me if it looks like a discovered and settled country, and not rather, for the most part, like a desolate island, and no-manâ��s land. we have advanced by leaps to the pacific, and left many a lesser oregon and california unexplored behind us. though the railroad and the telegraph have been established on the shores of maine, the indian still looks out from her interior mountains over all these to the sea. there stands the city of bangor, fifty miles up the penobscot, at the head of navigation for vessels of the largest class, the principal lumber depot on this continent, with a population of twelve thousand, like a star on the edge of night, still hewing at the forests of which it is built, already overflowing with the luxuries and refinement of europe, and sending its vessels to spain, to england, and to the west indies for its groceries,--and yet only a few axemen have gone â��up river,â�� into the howling wilderness which feeds it. the bear and deer are still found within its limits; and the moose, as he swims the penobscot, is entangled amid its shipping, and taken by foreign sailors in its harbor. twelve miles in the rear, twelve miles of railroad, are orono and the indian island, the home of the penobscot tribe, and then commence the batteau and the canoe, and the military road; and sixty miles above, the country is virtually unmapped and unexplored, and there still waves the virgin forest of the new world. footnotes: [1] springer, in his _forest life_ (1851), says that they first remove the leaves and turf from the spot where they intend to build a camp, for fear of fire; also, that â��the spruce-tree is generally selected for camp-building, it being light, straight, and quite free from sap;â�� that â��the roof is finally covered with the boughs of the fir, spruce, and hemlock, so that when the snow falls upon the whole, the warmth of the camp is preserved in the coldest weather;â�� and that they make the log seat before the fire, called the â��deaconâ��s seat,â�� of a spruce or fir split in halves, with three or four stout limbs left on one side for legs, which are not likely to get loose. [2] the canadians call it _picquer de fond_. [3] even the jesuit missionaries, accustomed to the st. lawrence and other rivers of canada, in their first expeditions to the abenaquinois, speak of rivers _ferrã©es de rochers_, shod with rocks. see also no. 10 _relations_, for 1647, p. 185. [4] â��a steady current or pitch of water is preferable to one either rising or diminishing; as, when rising rapidly, the water at the middle of the river is considerably higher than at the shores,--so much so as to be distinctly perceived by the eye of a spectator on the banks, presenting an appearance like a turnpike road. the lumber, therefore, is always sure to incline from the centre of the channel toward either shore.â��--springer. [5] â��the spruce tree,â�� says springer in â��51, â��is generally selected, principally for the superior facilities which its numerous limbs afford the climber. to gain the first limbs of this tree, which are from twenty to forty feet from the ground, a smaller tree is undercut and lodged against it, clambering up which the top of the spruce is reached. in some cases, when a very elevated position is desired, the spruce tree is lodged against the trunk of some lofty pine, up which we ascend to a height twice that of the surrounding forest.â�� to indicate the direction of pines, one throws down a branch, and a man on the ground takes the bearing. [6] the bears had not touched things on our possessions. they sometimes tear a batteau to pieces for the sake of the tar with which it is besmeared. [7] i cut this from a newspaper: â��on the 11th (instant?) [may, â��49], on rappogenes falls, mr. john delantee, of orono, me., was drowned while running logs. he was a citizen of orono, and was twenty-six years of age. his companions found his body, enclosed it in bark, and buried it in the solemn woods.â�� chesuncook at five p. m., september 13, 1853, i left boston, in the steamer, for bangor, by the outside course. it was a warm and still night,--warmer, probably, on the water than on the land,--and the sea was as smooth as a small lake in summer, merely rippled. the passengers went singing on the deck, as in a parlor, till ten oâ��clock. we passed a vessel on her beam-ends on a rock just outside the islands, and some of us thought that she was the â��rapt shipâ�� which ran â��on her side so low that she drank water, and her keel ploughed air,â�� not considering that there was no wind, and that she was under bare poles. now we have left the islands behind and are off nahant. we behold those features which the discoverers saw, apparently unchanged. now we see the cape ann lights, and now pass near a small village-like fleet of mackerel fishers at anchor, probably off gloucester. they salute us with a shout from their low decks; but i understand their â��good-eveningâ�� to mean, â��donâ��t run against me, sir.â�� from the wonders of the deep we go below to yet deeper sleep. and then the absurdity of being waked up in the night by a man who wants the job of blacking your boots! it is more inevitable than seasickness, and may have something to do with it. it is like the ducking you get on crossing the line the first time. i trusted that these old customs were abolished. they might with the same propriety insist on blacking your face. i heard of one man who complained that somebody had stolen his boots in the night; and when he found them, he wanted to know what they had done to them,--they had spoiled them,--he never put that stuff on them; and the bootblack narrowly escaped paying damages. anxious to get out of the whaleâ��s belly, i rose early, and joined some old salts, who were smoking by a dim light on a sheltered part of the deck. we were just getting into the river. they knew all about it, of course. i was proud to find that i had stood the voyage so well, and was not in the least digested. we brushed up and watched the first signs of dawn through an open port; but the day seemed to hang fire. we inquired the time; none of my companions had a chronometer. at length an african prince rushed by, observing, â��twelve oâ��clock, gentlemen!â�� and blew out the light. it was moonrise. so i slunk down into the monsterâ��s bowels again. the first land we make is monhegan island, before dawn, and next st. georgeâ��s islands, seeing two or three lights. whitehead, with its bare rocks and funereal bell, is interesting. next i remember that the camden hills attracted my eyes, and afterward the hills about frankfort. we reached bangor about noon. when i arrived, my companion that was to be had gone up river, and engaged an indian, joe aitteon, a son of the governor, to go with us to chesuncook lake. joe had conducted two white men a-moose-hunting in the same direction the year before. he arrived by cars at bangor that evening, with his canoe and a companion, sabattis solomon, who was going to leave bangor the following monday with joeâ��s father, by way of the penobscot, and join joe in moose-hunting at chesuncook when we had done with him. they took supper at my friendâ��s house and lodged in his barn, saying that they should fare worse than that in the woods. they only made watch bark a little, when they came to the door in the night for water, for he does not like indians. the next morning joe and his canoe were put on board the stage for moosehead lake, sixty and odd miles distant, an hour before we started in an open wagon. we carried hard-bread, pork, smoked beef, tea, sugar, etc., seemingly enough for a regiment; the sight of which brought together reminded me by what ignoble means we had maintained our ground hitherto. we went by the avenue road, which is quite straight and very good, northwestward toward moosehead lake, through more than a dozen flourishing towns, with almost every one its academy,--not one of which, however, is on my general atlas, published, alas! in 1824; so much are they before the age, or i behind it! the earth must have been considerably lighter to the shoulders of general atlas then. it rained all this day and till the middle of the next forenoon, concealing the landscape almost entirely; but we had hardly got out of the streets of bangor before i began to be exhilarated by the sight of the wild fir and spruce tops, and those of other primitive evergreens, peering through the mist in the horizon. it was like the sight and odor of cake to a schoolboy. he who rides and keeps the beaten track studies the fences chiefly. near bangor, the fence-posts, on account of the frostâ��s heaving them in the clayey soil, were not planted in the ground, but were mortised into a transverse horizontal beam lying on the surface. afterwards, the prevailing fences were log ones, with sometimes a virginia fence, or else rails slanted over crossed stakes; and these zigzagged or played leap-frog all the way to the lake, keeping just ahead of us. after getting out of the penobscot valley, the country was unexpectedly level, or consisted of very even and equal swells, for twenty or thirty miles, never rising above the general level, but affording, it is said, a very good prospect in clear weather, with frequent views of ktaadn,--straight roads and long hills. the houses were far apart, commonly small and of one story, but framed. there was very little land under cultivation, yet the forest did not often border the road. the stumps were frequently as high as oneâ��s head, showing the depth of the snows. the white hay-caps, drawn over small stacks of beans or corn in the fields on account of the rain, were a novel sight to me. we saw large flocks of pigeons, and several times came within a rod or two of partridges in the road. my companion said that in one journey out of bangor he and his son had shot sixty partridges from his buggy. the mountain-ash was now very handsome, as also the wayfarerâ��s-tree or hobble-bush, with its ripe purple berries mixed with red. the canada thistle, an introduced plant, was the prevailing weed all the way to the lake, the roadside in many places, and fields not long cleared, being densely filled with it as with a crop, to the exclusion of everything else. there were also whole fields full of ferns, now rusty and withering, which in older countries are commonly confined to wet ground. there were very few flowers, even allowing for the lateness of the season. it chanced that i saw no asters in bloom along the road for fifty miles, though they were so abundant then in massachusetts,--except in one place one or two of the _aster acuminatus_,--and no golden-rods till within twenty miles of monson, where i saw a three-ribbed one. there were many late buttercups, however, and the two fire-weeds, erechthites and epilobium, commonly where there had been a burning, and at last the pearly everlasting. i noticed occasionally very long troughs which supplied the road with water, and my companion said that three dollars annually were granted by the state to one man in each school-district, who provided and maintained a suitable water-trough by the roadside, for the use of travelers,--a piece of intelligence as refreshing to me as the water itself. that legislature did not sit in vain. it was an oriental act, which made me wish that i was still farther down east,--another maine law, which i hope we may get in massachusetts. that state is banishing bar-rooms from its highways, and conducting the mountain springs thither. the country was first decidedly mountainous in garland, sangerville, and onwards, twenty-five or thirty miles from bangor. at sangerville, where we stopped at mid-afternoon to warm and dry ourselves, the landlord told us that he had found a wilderness where we found him. at a fork in the road between abbot and monson, about twenty miles from moosehead lake, i saw a guide-post surmounted by a pair of moose horns, spreading four or five feet, with the word â��monsonâ�� painted on one blade, and the name of some other town on the other. they are sometimes used for ornamental hat-trees, together with deerâ��s horns, in front entries; but, after the experience which i shall relate, i trust that i shall have a better excuse for killing a moose than that i may hang my hat on his horns. we reached monson, fifty miles from bangor, and thirteen from the lake, after dark. at four oâ��clock the next morning, in the dark, and still in the rain, we pursued our journey. close to the academy in this town they have erected a sort of gallows for the pupils to practice on. i thought that they might as well hang at once all who need to go through such exercises in so new a country, where there is nothing to hinder their living an outdoor life. better omit blair, and take the air. the country about the south end of the lake is quite mountainous, and the road began to feel the effects of it. there is one hill which, it is calculated, it takes twenty-five minutes to ascend. in many places the road was in that condition called _repaired_, having just been whittled into the required semicylindrical form with the shovel and scraper, with all the softest inequalities in the middle, like a hogâ��s back with the bristles up, and jehu was expected to keep astride of the spine. as you looked off each side of the bare sphere into the horizon, the ditches were awful to behold,--a vast hollowness, like that between saturn and his ring. at a tavern hereabouts the hostler greeted our horse as an old acquaintance, though he did not remember the driver. he said that he had taken care of that little mare for a short time, a year or two before, at the mount kineo house, and thought she was not in as good condition as then. every man to his trade. i am not acquainted with a single horse in the world, not even the one that kicked me. already we had thought that we saw moosehead lake from a hilltop, where an extensive fog filled the distant lowlands, but we were mistaken. it was not till we were within a mile or two of its south end that we got our first view of it,--a suitably wild-looking sheet of water, sprinkled with small, low islands, which were covered with shaggy spruce and other wild wood,--seen over the infant port of greenville with mountains on each side and far in the north, and a steamerâ��s smoke-pipe rising above a roof. a pair of moose-horns ornamented a corner of the public house where we left our horse, and a few rods distant lay the small steamer moosehead, captain king. there was no village, and no summer road any farther in this direction, but a winter road, that is, one passable only when deep snow covers its inequalities, from greenville up the east side of the lake to lily bay, about twelve miles. i was here first introduced to joe. he had ridden all the way on the outside of the stage, the day before, in the rain, giving way to ladies, and was well wetted. as it still rained, he asked if we were going to â��put it through.â�� he was a good-looking indian, twenty-four years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description of his race. besides his underclothing, he wore a red flannel shirt, woolen pants, and a black kossuth hat, the ordinary dress of the lumberman, and, to a considerable extent, of the penobscot indian. when, afterward, he had occasion to take off his shoes and stockings, i was struck with the smallness of his feet. he had worked a good deal as a lumberman, and appeared to identify himself with that class. he was the only one of the party who possessed an india-rubber jacket. the top strip or edge of his canoe was worn nearly through by friction on the stage. at eight oâ��clock the steamer, with her bell and whistle, scaring the moose, summoned us on board. she was a well-appointed little boat, commanded by a gentlemanly captain, with patent life-seats and metallic life-boat, and dinner on board, if you wish. she is chiefly used by lumberers for the transportation of themselves, their boats, and supplies, but also by hunters and tourists. there was another steamer, named amphitrite, laid up close by; but, apparently, her name was not more trite than her hull. there were also two or three large sailboats in port. these beginnings of commerce on a lake in the wilderness are very interesting,--these larger white birds that come to keep company with the gulls. there were but few passengers, and not one female among them: a st. francis indian, with his canoe and moose-hides; two explorers for lumber; three men who landed at sandbar island, and a gentleman who lives on deer island, eleven miles up the lake, and owns also sugar island, between which and the former the steamer runs; these, i think, were all beside ourselves. in the saloon was some kind of musical instrument--cherubim or seraphim--to soothe the angry waves; and there, very properly, was tacked up the map of the public lands of maine and massachusetts, a copy of which i had in my pocket. the heavy rain confining us to the saloon awhile, i discoursed with the proprietor of sugar island on the condition of the world in old testament times. but at length, leaving this subject as fresh as we found it, he told me that he had lived about this lake twenty or thirty years, and yet had not been to the head of it for twenty-one years. he faces the other way. the explorers had a fine new birch on board, larger than ours, in which they had come up the piscataquis from howland, and they had had several messes of trout already. they were going to the neighborhood of eagle and chamberlain lakes, or the head-waters of the st. john, and offered to keep us company as far as we went. the lake to-day was rougher than i found the ocean, either going or returning, and joe remarked that it would swamp his birch. off lily bay it is a dozen miles wide, but it is much broken by islands. the scenery is not merely wild, but varied and interesting; mountains were seen, farther or nearer, on all sides but the northwest, their summits now lost in the clouds; but mount kineo is the principal feature of the lake, and more exclusively belongs to it. after leaving greenville, at the foot, which is the nucleus of a town some eight or ten years old, you see but three or four houses for the whole length of the lake, or about forty miles, three of them the public houses at which the steamer is advertised to stop, and the shore is an unbroken wilderness. the prevailing wood seemed to be spruce, fir, birch, and rock maple. you could easily distinguish the hard wood from the soft, or â��black growth,â�� as it is called, at a great distance, the former being smooth, round-topped, and light green, with a bowery and cultivated look. mount kineo, at which the boat touched, is a peninsula with a narrow neck, about midway the lake on the east side. the celebrated precipice is on the east or land side of this, and is so high and perpendicular that you can jump from the top, many hundred feet, into the water, which makes up behind the point. a man on board told us that an anchor had been sunk ninety fathoms at its base before reaching bottom! probably it will be discovered ere long that some indian maiden jumped off it for love once, for true love never could have found a path more to its mind. we passed quite close to the rock here, since it is a very bold shore, and i observed marks of a rise of four or five feet on it. the st. francis indian expected to take in his boy here, but he was not at the landing. the fatherâ��s sharp eyes, however, detected a canoe with his boy in it far away under the mountain, though no one else could see it. â��where is the canoe?â�� asked the captain, â��i donâ��t see it;â�� but he held on, nevertheless, and by and by it hove in sight. we reached the head of the lake about noon. the weather had, in the meanwhile, cleared up, though the mountains were still capped with clouds. seen from this point, mount kineo, and two other allied mountains ranging with it northeasterly, presented a very strong family likeness, as if all cast in one mould. the steamer here approached a long pier projecting from the northern wilderness, and built of some of its logs, and whistled, where not a cabin nor a mortal was to be seen. the shore was quite low, with flat rocks on it, overhung with black ash, arbor-vitã¦, etc., which at first looked as if they did not care a whistle for us. there was not a single cabman to cry â��coach!â�� or inveigle us to the united states hotel. at length a mr. hinckley, who has a camp at the other end of the â��carry,â�� appeared with a truck drawn by an ox and a horse over a rude log-railway through the woods. the next thing was to get our canoe and effects over the carry from this lake, one of the heads of the kennebec, into the penobscot river. this railway from the lake to the river occupied the middle of a clearing two or three rods wide and perfectly straight through the forest. we walked across while our baggage was drawn behind. my companion went ahead to be ready for partridges, while i followed, looking at the plants. this was an interesting botanical locality for one coming from the south to commence with; for many plants which are rather rare, and one or two which are not found at all, in the eastern part of massachusetts, grew abundantly between the rails,--as labrador-tea, _kalmia glauca_, canada blueberry (which was still in fruit, and a second time in bloom), _clintonia_ and _linnã¦a borealis_, which last a lumberer called _moxon_, creeping snowberry, painted trillium, large-flowered bellwort, etc. i fancied that the _aster radula_, _diplopappus umbellatus_, _solidago lanceolata_, red trumpet-weed, and many others which were conspicuously in bloom on the shore of the lake and on the carry, had a peculiarly wild and primitive look there. the spruce and fir trees crowded to the track on each side to welcome us, the arbor-vitã¦, with its changing leaves, prompted us to make haste, and the sight of the canoe birch gave us spirits to do so. sometimes an evergreen just fallen lay across the track with its rich burden of cones, looking, still, fuller of life than our trees in the most favorable positions. you did not expect to find such _spruce_ trees in the wild woods, but they evidently attend to their toilets each morning even there. through such a front yard did we enter that wilderness. there was a very slight rise above the lake,--the country appearing like, and perhaps being partly a swamp,--and at length a gradual descent to the penobscot, which i was surprised to find here a large stream, from twelve to fifteen rods wide, flowing from west to east, or at right angles with the lake, and not more than two and a half miles from it. the distance is nearly twice too great on the map of the public lands, and on coltonâ��s map of maine, and russell stream is placed too far down. jackson makes moosehead lake to be nine hundred and sixty feet above high water in portland harbor. it is higher than chesuncook, for the lumberers consider the penobscot, where we struck it, twenty-five feet lower than moosehead, though eight miles above it is said to be the highest, so that the water can be made to flow either way, and the river falls a good deal between here and chesuncook. the carry-man called this about one hundred and forty miles above bangor by the river, or two hundred from the ocean, and fifty-five miles below hiltonâ��s, on the canada road, the first clearing above, which is four and a half miles from the source of the penobscot. at the north end of the carry, in the midst of a clearing of sixty acres or more, there was a log camp of the usual construction, with something more like a house adjoining, for the accommodation of the carry-manâ��s family and passing lumberers. the bed of withered fir twigs smelled very sweet, though really very dirty. there was also a store-house on the bank of the river, containing pork, flour, iron, batteaux, and birches, locked up. we now proceeded to get our dinner, which always turned out to be tea, and to pitch canoes, for which purpose a large iron pot lay permanently on the bank. this we did in company with the explorers. both indians and whites use a mixture of rosin and grease for this purpose, that is, for the pitching, not the dinner. joe took a small brand from the fire and blew the heat and flame against the pitch on his birch, and so melted and spread it. sometimes he put his mouth over the suspected spot and sucked, to see if it admitted air; and at one place, where we stopped, he set his canoe high on crossed stakes, and poured water into it. i narrowly watched his motions, and listened attentively to his observations, for we had employed an indian mainly that i might have an opportunity to study his ways. i heard him swear once, mildly, during this operation, about his knife being as dull as a hoe,--an accomplishment which he owed to his intercourse with the whites; and he remarked, â��we ought to have some tea before we start; we shall be hungry before we kill that moose.â�� at mid-afternoon we embarked on the penobscot. our birch was nineteen and a half feet long by two and a half at the widest part, and fourteen inches deep within, both ends alike, and painted green, which joe thought affected the pitch and made it leak. this, i think, was a middling-sized one. that of the explorers was much larger, though probably not much longer. this carried us three with our baggage, weighing in all between five hundred and fifty and six hundred pounds. we had two heavy, though slender, rock-maple paddles, one of them of birdâ��s-eye maple. joe placed birch-bark on the bottom for us to sit on, and slanted cedar splints against the cross-bars to protect our backs, while he himself sat upon a cross-bar in the stern. the baggage occupied the middle or widest part of the canoe. we also paddled by turns in the bows, now sitting with our legs extended, now sitting upon our legs, and now rising upon our knees; but i found none of these positions endurable, and was reminded of the complaints of the old jesuit missionaries of the torture they endured from long confinement in constrained positions in canoes, in their long voyages from quebec to the huron country; but afterwards i sat on the cross-bars, or stood up, and experienced no inconvenience. it was deadwater for a couple of miles. the river had been raised about two feet by the rain, and lumberers were hoping for a flood sufficient to bring down the logs that were left in the spring. its banks were seven or eight feet high, and densely covered with white and black spruce,--which, i think, must be the commonest trees thereabouts,--fir, arbor-vitã¦, canoe, yellow and black birch, rock, mountain, and a few red maples, beech, black and mountain ash, the large-toothed aspen, many civil-looking elms, now imbrowned, along the stream, and at first a few hemlocks also. we had not gone far before i was startled by seeing what i thought was an indian encampment, covered with a red flag, on the bank, and exclaimed, â��camp!â�� to my comrades. i was slow to discover that it was a red maple changed by the frost. the immediate shores were also densely covered with the speckled alder, red osier, shrubby willows or sallows, and the like. there were a few yellow lily pads still left, half-drowned, along the sides, and sometimes a white one. many fresh tracks of moose were visible where the water was shallow, and on the shore, the lily stems were freshly bitten off by them. after paddling about two miles, we parted company with the explorers, and turned up lobster stream, which comes in on the right, from the southeast. this was six or eight rods wide, and appeared to run nearly parallel with the penobscot. joe said that it was so called from small fresh-water lobsters found in it. it is the matahumkeag of the maps. my companion wished to look for moose signs, and intended, if it proved worth the while, to camp up that way, since the indian advised it. on account of the rise of the penobscot, the water ran up this stream to the pond of the same name, one or two miles. the spencer mountains, east of the north end of moosehead lake, were now in plain sight in front of us. the kingfisher flew before us, the pigeon woodpecker was seen and heard, and nuthatches and chickadees close at hand. joe said that they called the chickadee _kecunnilessu_ in his language. i will not vouch for the spelling of what possibly was never spelt before, but i pronounced after him till he said it would do. we passed close to a woodcock, which stood perfectly still on the shore, with feathers puffed up, as if sick. this joe said they called _nipsquecohossus_. the kingfisher was _skuscumonsuck_; bear was _wassus_; indian devil, _lunxus_; the mountain-ash, _upahsis_. this was very abundant and beautiful. moose tracks were not so fresh along this stream, except in a small creek about a mile up it, where a large log had lodged in the spring, marked â��w-cross-girdle-crow-foot.â�� we saw a pair of moose-horns on the shore, and i asked joe if a moose had shed them; but he said there was a head attached to them, and i knew that they did not shed their heads more than once in their lives. after ascending about a mile and a half, to within a short distance of lobster lake, we returned to the penobscot. just below the mouth of the lobster we found quick water, and the river expanded to twenty or thirty rods in width. the moose-tracks were quite numerous and fresh here. we noticed in a great many places narrow and well-trodden paths by which they had come down to the river, and where they had slid on the steep and clayey bank. their tracks were either close to the edge of the stream, those of the calves distinguishable from the others, or in shallow water; the holes made by their feet in the soft bottom being visible for a long time. they were particularly numerous where there was a small bay, or pokelogan, as it is called, bordered by a strip of meadow, or separated from the river by a low peninsula covered with coarse grass, wool-grass, etc., wherein they had waded back and forth and eaten the pads. we detected the remains of one in such a spot. at one place, where we landed to pick up a summer duck, which my companion had shot, joe peeled a canoe birch for bark for his hunting-horn. he then asked if we were not going to get the other duck, for his sharp eyes had seen another fall in the bushes a little farther along, and my companion obtained it. i now began to notice the bright red berries of the tree-cranberry, which grows eight or ten feet high, mingled with the alders and cornel along the shore. there was less hard wood than at first. after proceeding a mile and three quarters below the mouth of the lobster, we reached, about sundown, a small island at the head of what joe called the moosehorn deadwater (the moosehorn, in which he was going to hunt that night, coming in about three miles below), and on the upper end of this we decided to camp. on a point at the lower end lay the carcass of a moose killed a month or more before. we concluded merely to prepare our camp, and leave our baggage here, that all might be ready when we returned from moose-hunting. though i had not come a-hunting, and felt some compunctions about accompanying the hunters, i wished to see a moose near at hand, and was not sorry to learn how the indian managed to kill one. i went as reporter or chaplain to the hunters,--and the chaplain has been known to carry a gun himself. after clearing a small space amid the dense spruce and fir trees, we covered the damp ground with a shingling of fir twigs, and, while joe was preparing his birch horn and pitching his canoe,--for this had to be done whenever we stopped long enough to build a fire, and was the principal labor which he took upon himself at such times,--we collected fuel for the night, large, wet, and rotting logs, which had lodged at the head of the island, for our hatchet was too small for effective chopping; but we did not kindle a fire, lest the moose should smell it. joe set up a couple of forked stakes, and prepared half a dozen poles, ready to cast one of our blankets over in case it rained in the night, which precaution, however, was omitted the next night. we also plucked the ducks which had been killed for breakfast. while we were thus engaged in the twilight, we heard faintly, from far down the stream, what sounded like two strokes of a woodchopperâ��s axe, echoing dully through the grim solitude. we are wont to liken many sounds, heard at a distance in the forest, to the stroke of an axe, because they resemble each other under those circumstances, and that is the one we commonly hear there. when we told joe of this, he exclaimed, â��by george, iâ��ll bet that was a moose! they make a noise like that.â�� these sounds affected us strangely, and by their very resemblance to a familiar one, where they probably had so different an origin, enhanced the impression of solitude and wildness. at starlight we dropped down the stream, which was a deadwater for three miles, or as far as the moosehorn; joe telling us that we must be very silent, and he himself making no noise with his paddle, while he urged the canoe along with effective impulses. it was a still night, and suitable for this purpose,--for if there is wind, the moose will smell you,--and joe was very confident that he should get some. the harvest moon had just risen, and its level rays began to light up the forest on our right, while we glided downward in the shade on the same side, against the little breeze that was stirring. the lofty, spiring tops of the spruce and fir were very black against the sky, and more distinct than by day, close bordering this broad avenue on each side; and the beauty of the scene, as the moon rose above the forest, it would not be easy to describe. a bat flew over our heads, and we heard a few faint notes of birds from time to time, perhaps the myrtle-bird for one, or the sudden plunge of a musquash, or saw one crossing the stream before us, or heard the sound of a rill emptying in, swollen by the recent rain. about a mile below the island, when the solitude seemed to be growing more complete every moment, we suddenly saw the light and heard the crackling of a fire on the bank, and discovered the camp of the two explorers; they standing before it in their red shirts, and talking aloud of the adventures and profits of the day. they were just then speaking of a bargain, in which, as i understood, somebody had cleared twenty-five dollars. we glided by without speaking, close under the bank, within a couple of rods of them; and joe, taking his horn, imitated the call of the moose, till we suggested that they might fire on us. this was the last we saw of them, and we never knew whether they detected or suspected us. i have often wished since that i was with them. they search for timber over a given section, climbing hills and often high trees to look off; explore the streams by which it is to be driven, and the like; spend five or six weeks in the woods, they two alone, a hundred miles or more from any town, roaming about, and sleeping on the ground where night overtakes them, depending chiefly on the provisions they carry with them, though they do not decline what game they come across; and then in the fall they return and make report to their employers, determining the number of teams that will be required the following winter. experienced men get three or four dollars a day for this work. it is a solitary and adventurous life, and comes nearest to that of the trapper of the west, perhaps. they work ever with a gun as well as an axe, let their beards grow, and live without neighbors, not on an open plain, but far within a wilderness. this discovery accounted for the sounds which we had heard, and destroyed the prospect of seeing moose yet awhile. at length, when we had left the explorers far behind, joe laid down his paddle, drew forth his birch horn,--a straight one, about fifteen inches long and three or four wide at the mouth, tied round with strips of the same bark,--and, standing up, imitated the call of the moose,--_ugh-ugh-ugh_, or _oo-oo-oo-oo_, and then a prolonged _oo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o_, and listened attentively for several minutes. we asked him what kind of noise he expected to hear. he said that if a moose heard it, he guessed we should find out; we should hear him coming half a mile off; he would come close to, perhaps into, the water, and my companion must wait till he got fair sight, and then aim just behind the shoulder. the moose venture out to the riverside to feed and drink at night. earlier in the season the hunters do not use a horn to call them out, but steal upon them as they are feeding along the sides of the stream, and often the first notice they have of one is the sound of the water dropping from its muzzle. an indian whom i heard imitate the voice of the moose, and also that of the caribou and the deer, using a much longer horn than joeâ��s, told me that the first could be heard eight or ten miles, sometimes; it was a loud sort of bellowing sound, clearer and more sonorous than the lowing of cattle, the caribouâ��s a sort of snort, and the small deerâ��s like that of a lamb. at length we turned up the moosehorn, where the indians at the carry had told us that they killed a moose the night before. this is a very meandering stream, only a rod or two in width, but comparatively deep, coming in on the right, fitly enough named moosehorn, whether from its windings or its inhabitants. it was bordered here and there by narrow meadows between the stream and the endless forest, affording favorable places for the moose to feed, and to call them out on. we proceeded half a mile up this as through a narrow, winding canal, where the tall, dark spruce and firs and arbor-vit㦠towered on both sides in the moonlight, forming a perpendicular forest-edge of great height, like the spires of a venice in the forest. in two places stood a small stack of hay on the bank, ready for the lumbererâ��s use in the winter, looking strange enough there. we thought of the day when this might be a brook winding through smooth-shaven meadows on some gentlemanâ��s grounds; and seen by moonlight then, excepting the forest that now hems it in, how little changed it would appear! again and again joe called the moose, placing the canoe close by some favorable point of meadow for them to come out on, but listened in vain to hear one come rushing through the woods, and concluded that they had been hunted too much thereabouts. we saw, many times, what to our imaginations looked like a gigantic moose, with his horns peering from out the forest edge; but we saw the forest only, and not its inhabitants, that night. so at last we turned about. there was now a little fog on the water, though it was a fine, clear night above. there were very few sounds to break the stillness of the forest. several times we heard the hooting of a great horned owl, as at home, and told joe that he would call out the moose for him, for he made a sound considerably like the horn; but joe answered, that the moose had heard that sound a thousand times, and knew better; and oftener still we were startled by the plunge of a musquash. once, when joe had called again, and we were listening for moose, we heard, come faintly echoing, or creeping from far through the moss-clad aisles, a dull, dry, rushing sound with a solid core to it, yet as if half smothered under the grasp of the luxuriant and fungus-like forest, like the shutting of a door in some distant entry of the damp and shaggy wilderness. if we had not been there, no mortal had heard it. when we asked joe in a whisper what it was, he answered, â��tree fall.â�� there is something singularly grand and impressive in the sound of a tree falling in a perfectly calm night like this, as if the agencies which overthrow it did not need to be excited, but worked with a subtle, deliberate, and conscious force, like a boa-constrictor, and more effectively then than even in a windy day. if there is any such difference, perhaps it is because trees with the dews of the night on them are heavier than by day. having reached the camp, about ten oâ��clock, we kindled our fire and went to bed. each of us had a blanket, in which he lay on the fir twigs, with his extremities toward the fire, but nothing over his head. it was worth the while to lie down in a country where you could afford such great fires; that was one whole side, and the bright side, of our world. we had first rolled up a large log some eighteen inches through and ten feet long, for a backlog, to last all night, and then piled on the trees to the height of three or four feet, no matter how green or damp. in fact, we burned as much wood that night as would, with economy and an air-tight stove, last a poor family in one of our cities all winter. it was very agreeable, as well as independent, thus lying in the open air, and the fire kept our uncovered extremities warm enough. the jesuit missionaries used to say, that, in their journeys with the indians in canada, they lay on a bed which had never been shaken up since the creation, unless by earthquakes. it is surprising with what impunity and comfort one who has always lain in a warm bed in a close apartment, and studiously avoided drafts of air, can lie down on the ground without a shelter, roll himself in a blanket, and sleep before a fire, in a frosty autumn night, just after a long rain-storm, and even come soon to enjoy and value the fresh air. i lay awake awhile, watching the ascent of the sparks through the firs, and sometimes their descent in half-extinguished cinders on my blanket. they were as interesting as fireworks, going up in endless, successive crowds, each after an explosion, in an eager, serpentine course, some to five or six rods above the tree-tops before they went out. we do not suspect how much our chimneys have concealed; and now air-tight stoves have come to conceal all the rest. in the course of the night, i got up once or twice and put fresh logs on the fire, making my companions curl up their legs. when we awoke in the morning (saturday, september 17), there was considerable frost whitening the leaves. we heard the sound of the chickadee, and a few faintly lisping birds, and also of ducks in the water about the island. i took a botanical account of stock of our domains before the dew was off, and found that the ground-hemlock, or american yew, was the prevailing undershrub. we breakfasted on tea, hard-bread, and ducks. before the fog had fairly cleared away we paddled down the stream again, and were soon past the mouth of the moosehorn. these twenty miles of the penobscot, between moosehead and chesuncook lakes, are comparatively smooth, and a great part deadwater; but from time to time it is shallow and rapid, with rocks or gravel beds, where you can wade across. there is no expanse of water, and no break in the forest, and the meadow is a mere edging here and there. there are no hills near the river nor within sight, except one or two distant mountains seen in a few places. the banks are from six to ten feet high, but once or twice rise gently to higher ground. in many places the forest on the bank was but a thin strip, letting the light through from some alder swamp or meadow behind. the conspicuous berry-bearing bushes and trees along the shore were the red osier, with its whitish fruit, hobble-bush, mountain-ash, tree-cranberry, choke-cherry, now ripe, alternate cornel, and naked viburnum. following joeâ��s example, i ate the fruit of the last, and also of the hobble-bush, but found them rather insipid and seedy. i looked very narrowly at the vegetation, as we glided along close to the shore, and frequently made joe turn aside for me to pluck a plant, that i might see by comparison what was primitive about my native river. horehound, horse-mint, and the sensitive fern grew close to the edge, under the willows and alders, and wool-grass on the islands, as along the assabet river in concord. it was too late for flowers, except a few asters, goldenrods, etc. in several places we noticed the slight frame of a camp, such as we had prepared to set up, amid the forest by the riverside, where some lumberers or hunters had passed a night, and sometimes steps cut in the muddy or clayey bank in front of it. we stopped to fish for trout at the mouth of a small stream called ragmuff, which came in from the west, about two miles below the moosehorn. here were the ruins of an old lumbering-camp, and a small space, which had formerly been cleared and burned over, was now densely overgrown with the red cherry and raspberries. while we were trying for trout, joe, indian-like, wandered off up the ragmuff on his own errands, and when we were ready to start was far beyond call. so we were compelled to make a fire and get our dinner here, not to lose time. some dark reddish birds, with grayer females (perhaps purple finches), and myrtle-birds in their summer dress, hopped within six or eight feet of us and our smoke. perhaps they smelled the frying pork. the latter bird, or both, made the lisping notes which i had heard in the forest. they suggested that the few small birds found in the wilderness are on more familiar terms with the lumberman and hunter than those of the orchard and clearing with the farmer. i have since found the canada jay, and partridges, both the black and the common, equally tame there, as if they had not yet learned to mistrust man entirely. the chickadee, which is at home alike in the primitive woods and in our wood-lots, still retains its confidence in the towns to a remarkable degree. joe at length returned, after an hour and a half, and said that he had been two miles up the stream exploring, and had seen a moose, but, not having the gun, he did not get him. we made no complaint, but concluded to look out for joe the next time. however, this may have been a mere mistake, for we had no reason to complain of him afterwards. as we continued down the stream, i was surprised to hear him whistling â��o susannaâ�� and several other such airs, while his paddle urged us along. once he said, â��yes, sir-ee.â�� his common word was â��sartain.â�� he paddled, as usual, on one side only, giving the birch an impulse by using the side as a fulcrum. i asked him how the ribs were fastened to the side rails. he answered, â��i donâ��t know, i never noticed.â�� talking with him about subsisting wholly on what the woods yielded,--game, fish, berries, etc.,--i suggested that his ancestors did so; but he answered that he had been brought up in such a way that he could not do it. â��yes,â�� said he, â��thatâ��s the way they got a living, like wild fellows, wild as bears. by george! i shanâ��t go into the woods without provision,--hard-bread, pork, etc.â�� he had brought on a barrel of hard-bread and stored it at the carry for his hunting. however, though he was a governorâ��s son, he had not learned to read. at one place below this, on the east side, where the bank was higher and drier than usual, rising gently from the shore to a slight elevation, some one had felled the trees over twenty or thirty acres, and left them drying in order to burn. this was the only preparation for a house between the moosehead carry and chesuncook, but there was no hut nor inhabitants there yet. the pioneer thus selects a site for his house, which will, perhaps, prove the germ of a town. my eyes were all the while on the trees, distinguishing between the black and white spruce and the fir. you paddle along in a narrow canal through an endless forest, and the vision i have in my mindâ��s eye, still, is of the small, dark, and sharp tops of tall fir and spruce trees, and pagoda-like arbor-vitã¦s, crowded together on each side, with various hard woods intermixed. some of the arbor-vitã¦s were at least sixty feet high. the hard woods, occasionally occurring exclusively, were less wild to my eye. i fancied them ornamental grounds, with farmhouses in the rear. the canoe and yellow birch, beech, maple, and elm are saxon and norman, but the spruce and fir, and pines generally, are indian. the soft engravings which adorn the annuals give no idea of a stream in such a wilderness as this. the rough sketches in jacksonâ��s reports on the geology of maine answer much better. at one place we saw a small grove of slender sapling white pines, the only collection of pines that i saw on this voyage. here and there, however, was a full-grown, tall, and slender, but defective one, what lumbermen call a _konchus_ tree, which they ascertain with their axes, or by the knots. i did not learn whether this word was indian or english. it reminded me of the greek îºá½¹î³ï�î·, a conch or shell, and i amused myself with fancying that it might signify the dead sound which the trees yield when struck. all the rest of the pines had been driven off. how far men go for the material of their houses! the inhabitants of the most civilized cities, in all ages, send into far, primitive forests, beyond the bounds of their civilization, where the moose and bear and savage dwell, for their pine boards for ordinary use. and, on the other hand, the savage soon receives from cities irge soon receives from cities iron arrow-points, hatchets, and guns, to point his savageness with. the solid and well-defined fir-tops, like sharp and regular spearheads, black against the sky, gave a peculiar, dark, and sombre look to the forest. the spruce-tops have a similar but more ragged outline, their shafts also merely feathered below. the firs were somewhat oftener regular and dense pyramids. i was struck by this universal spiring upward of the forest evergreens. the tendency is to slender, spiring tops, while they are narrower below. not only the spruce and fir, but even the arbor-vit㦠and white pine, unlike the soft, spreading second-growth, of which i saw none, all spire upwards, lifting a dense spearhead of cones to the light and air, at any rate, while their branches straggle after as they may; as indians lift the ball over the heads of the crowd in their desperate game. in this they resemble grasses, as also palms somewhat. the hemlock is commonly a tent-like pyramid from the ground to its summit. after passing through some long rips, and by a large island, we reached an interesting part of the river called the pine stream deadwater, about six miles below ragmuff, where the river expanded to thirty rods in width and had many islands in it, with elms and canoe-birches, now yellowing, along the shore, and we got our first sight of ktaadn. here, about two oâ��clock, we turned up a small branch three or four rods wide, which comes in on the right from the south, called pine stream, to look for moose signs. we had gone but a few rods before we saw very recent signs along the waterâ��s edge, the mud lifted up by their feet being quite fresh, and joe declared that they had gone along there but a short time before. we soon reached a small meadow on the east side, at an angle in the stream, which was, for the most part, densely covered with alders. as we were advancing along the edge of this, rather more quietly than usual, perhaps, on account of the freshness of the signs,--the design being to camp up this stream, if it promised well,--i heard a slight crackling of twigs deep in the alders, and turned joeâ��s attention to it; whereupon he began to push the canoe back rapidly; and we had receded thus half a dozen rods, when we suddenly spied two moose standing just on the edge of the open part of the meadow which we had passed, not more than six or seven rods distant, looking round the alders at us. they made me think of great frightened rabbits, with their long ears and half-inquisitive, half-frightened looks; the true denizens of the forest (i saw at once), filling a vacuum which now first i discovered had not been filled for me,--_moose_-men, _wood-eaters_, the word is said to mean,--clad in a sort of vermont gray, or homespun. our nimrod, owing to the retrograde movement, was now the farthest from the game; but being warned of its neighborhood, he hastily stood up, and, while we ducked, fired over our heads one barrel at the foremost, which alone he saw, though he did not know what kind of creature it was; whereupon this one dashed across the meadow and up a high bank on the northeast, so rapidly as to leave but an indistinct impression of its outlines on my mind. at the same instant, the other, a young one, but as tall as a horse, leaped out into the stream, in full sight, and there stood cowering for a moment, or rather its disproportionate lowness behind gave it that appearance, and uttering two or three trumpeting squeaks. i have an indistinct recollection of seeing the old one pause an instant on the top of the bank in the woods, look toward its shivering young, and then dash away again. the second barrel was leveled at the calf, and when we expected to see it drop in the water, after a little hesitation, it, too, got out of the water, and dashed up the hill, though in a somewhat different direction. all this was the work of a few seconds, and our hunter, having never seen a moose before, did not know but they were deer, for they stood partly in the water, nor whether he had fired at the same one twice or not. from the style in which they went off, and the fact thatp and firing from a canoe, i judged that we should not see anything more of them. the indian said that they were a cow and her calf,--a yearling, or perhaps two years old, for they accompany their dams so long; but, for my part, i had not noticed much difference in their size. it was but two or three rods across the meadow to the foot of the bank, which, like all the world thereabouts, was densely wooded; but i was surprised to notice, that, as soon as the moose had passed behind the veil of the woods, there was no sound of footsteps to be heard from the soft, damp moss which carpets that forest, and long before we landed, perfect silence reigned. joe said, â��if you wound â��em moose, me sure get â��em.â�� we all landed at once. my companion reloaded; the indian fastened his birch, threw off his hat, adjusted his waistband, seized the hatchet, and set out. he told me afterward, casually, that before we landed he had seen a drop of blood on the bank, when it was two or three rods off. he proceeded rapidly up the bank and through the woods, with a peculiar, elastic, noiseless, and stealthy tread, looking to right and left on the ground, and stepping in the faint tracks of the wounded moose, now and then pointing in silence to a single drop of blood on the handsome, shining leaves of the _clintonia borealis_, which, on every side, covered the ground, or to a dry fern stem freshly broken, all the while chewing some leaf or else the spruce gum. i followed, watching his motions more than the trail of the moose. after following the trail about forty rods in a pretty direct course, stepping over fallen trees and winding between standing ones, he at length lost it, for there were many other moose-tracks there, and, returning once more to the last blood-stain, traced it a little way and lost it again, and, too soon, i thought, for a good hunter, gave it up entirely. he traced a few steps, also, the tracks of the calf; but, seeing no blood, soon relinquished the search. i observed, while he was tracking the moose, a certain reticence or moderation in him. he did not communicate several observations of interest which he made, as a white man would have done, though they may have leaked out afterward. at another time, when we heard a slight crackling of twigs and he landed to reconnoitre, he stepped lightly and gracefully, stealing through the bushes with the least possible noise, in a way in which no white man does,--as it were, finding a place for his foot each time. about half an hour after seeing the moose, we pursued our voyage up pine stream, and soon, coming to a part which was very shoal and also rapid, we took out the baggage, and proceeded to carry it round, while joe got up with the canoe alone. we were just completing our portage and i was absorbed in the plants, admiring the leaves of the _aster macrophyllus_, ten inches wide, and plucking the seeds of the great round-leaved orchis, when joe exclaimed from the stream that he had killed a moose. he had found the cow moose lying dead, but quite warm, in the middle of the stream, which was so shallow that it rested on the bottom, with hardly a third of its body above water. it was about an hour after it was shot, and it was swollen with water. it had run about a hundred rods and sought the stream again, cutting off a slight bend. no doubt a better hunter would have tracked it to this spot at once. i was surprised at its great size, horse-like, but joe said it was not a large cow moose. my companion went in search of the calf again. i took hold of the ears of the moose, while joe pushed his canoe down-stream toward a favorable shore, and so we made out, though with some difficulty, its long nose frequently sticking in the bottom, to drag it into still shallower water. it was a brownish-black, or perhaps a dark iron-gray, on the back and sides, but lighter beneath and in front. i took the cord which served for the canoeâ��s painter, and with joeâ��s assistance measured it carefully, the greatest distances first, making a knot each time. the painter being wanted, i reduced these measures that night with equal care to lengths and fractions of my umbrella, beginning with the smallest measures, and untying the knots as i proceeded; and when we arrived at chesuncook the next day, finding a two-foot rule there, i reduced the last to feet and inches; and, moreover, i made myself a two-foot rule of a thin and narrow strip of black ash, which would fold up conveniently to six inches. all this pains i took because i did not wish to be obliged to say merely that the moose was very large. of the various dimensions which i obtained i will mention only two. the distance from the tips of the hoofs of the fore feet, stretched out, to the top of the back between the shoulders, was seven feet and five inches. i can hardly believe my own measure, for this is about two feet greater than the height of a tall horse. (indeed, i am now satisfied that this measurement was incorrect, but the other measures given here i can warrant to be correct, having proved them in a more recent visit to those woods.) the extreme length was eight feet and two inches. another cow moose, which i have since measured in those woods with a tape, was just six feet from the tip of the hoof to the shoulders, and eight feet long as she lay. when afterward i asked an indian at the carry how much taller the male was, he answered, â��eighteen inches,â�� and made me observe the height of a cross-stake over the fire, more than four feet from the ground, to give me some idea of the depth of his chest. another indian, at oldtown, told me that they were nine feet high to the top of the back, and that one which he tried weighed eight hundred pounds. the length of the spinal projections between the shoulders is very great. a white hunter, who was the best authority among hunters that i could have, told me that the male was not eighteen inches taller than the female; yet he agreed that he was sometimes nine feet high to the top of the back, and weighed a thousand pounds. only the male has horns, and they rise two feet or more above the shoulders,--spreading three or four, and sometimes six feet,--which would make him in all, sometimes, eleven feet high! according to this calculation, the moose is as tall, though it may not be as large, as the great irish elk, _megaceros hibernicus_, of a former period, of which mantell says that it â��very far exceeded in magnitude any living species, the skeletonâ�� being â��upward of ten feet high from the ground to the highest point of the antlers.â�� joe said, that, though the moose shed the whole horn annually, each new horn has an additional prong; but i have noticed that they sometimes have more prongs on one side than on the other. i was struck with the delicacy and tenderness of the hoofs, which divide very far up, and the one half could be pressed very much behind the other, thus probably making the animal surer-footed on the uneven ground and slippery moss-covered logs of the primitive forest. they were very unlike the stiff and battered feet of our horses and oxen. the bare, horny part of the fore foot was just six inches long, and the two portions could be separated four inches at the extremities. the moose is singularly grotesque and awkward to look at. why should it stand so high at the shoulders? why have so long a head? why have no tail to speak of? for in my examination i overlooked it entirely. naturalists say it is an inch and a half long. it reminded me at once of the camelopard, high before and low behind,--and no wonder, for, like it, it is fitted to browse on trees. the upper lip projected two inches beyond the lower for this purpose. this was the kind of man that was at home there; for, as near as i can learn, that has never been the residence, but rather the hunting-ground of the indian. the moose will, perhaps, one day become extinct; but how naturally then, when it exists only as a fossil relic, and unseen as that, may the poet or sculptor invent a fabulous animal with similar branching and leafy horns,--a sort of fucus or lichen in bone,--to be the inhabitant of such a forest as this! here, just at the head of the murmuring rapids, joe now proceeded to skin the moose with a pocket-knife, while i looked on; and a tragical business it was,--to see that still warm and palpitating body pierced with a knife, to see the warm milk stream from the rent udder, and the ghastly naked red carcass appearing from within its seemly robe, which was made to hide it. the ball had passed through the shoulder-blade diagonally and lodged under the skin on the opposite side, and was partially flattened. my companion keeps it to show to his grandchildren. he has the shanks of another moose which he has since shot, skinned and stuffed, ready to be made into boots by putting in a thick leather sole. joe said, if a moose stood fronting you, you must not fire, but advance toward him, for he will turn slowly and give you a fair shot. in the bed of this narrow, wild, and rocky stream, between two lofty walls of spruce and firs, a mere cleft in the forest which the stream had made, this work went on. at length joe had stripped off the hide and dragged it trailing to the shore, declaring that it weighed a hundred pounds, though probably fifty would have been nearer the truth. he cut off a large mass of the meat to carry along, and another, together with the tongue and nose, he put with the hide on the shore to lie there all night, or till we returned. i was surprised that he thought of leaving this meat thus exposed by the side of the carcass, as the simplest course, not fearing that any creature would touch it; but nothing did. this could hardly have happened on the bank of one of our rivers in the eastern part of massachusetts; but i suspect that fewer small wild animals are prowling there than with us. twice, however, in this excursion, i had a glimpse of a species of large mouse. this stream was so withdrawn, and the moose-tracks were so fresh, that my companions, still bent on hunting, concluded to go farther up it and camp, and then hunt up or down at night. half a mile above this, at a place where i saw the _aster puniceus_ and the beaked hazel, as we paddled along, joe, hearing a slight rustling amid the alders, and seeing something black about two rods off, jumped up and whispered, â��bear!â�� but before the hunter had discharged his piece, he corrected himself to â��beaver!â��--â��hedgehog!â�� the bullet killed a large hedgehog more than two feet and eight inches long. the quills were rayed out and flattened on the hinder part of its back, even as if it had lain on that part, but were erect and long between this and the tail. their points, closely examined, were seen to be finely bearded or barbed, and shaped like an awl, that is, a little concave, to give the barbs effect. after about a mile of still water, we prepared our camp on the right side, just at the foot of a considerable fall. little chopping was done that night, for fear of scaring the moose. we had moose meat fried for supper. it tasted like tender beef, with perhaps more flavor,--sometimes like veal. after supper, the moon having risen, we proceeded to hunt a mile up this stream, first â��carryingâ�� about the falls. we made a picturesque sight, wending single file along the shore, climbing over rocks and logs, joe, who brought up the rear, twirling his canoe in his hands as if it were a feather, in places where it was difficult to get along without a burden. we launched the canoe again from the ledge over which the stream fell, but after half a mile of still water, suitable for hunting, it became rapid again, and we were compelled to make our way along the shore, while joe endeavored to get up in the birch alone, though it was still very difficult for him to pick his way amid the rocks in the night. we on the shore found the worst of walking, a perfect chaos of fallen and drifted trees, and of bushes projecting far over the water, and now and then we made our way across the mouth of a small tributary on a kind of network of alders. so we went tumbling on in the dark, being on the shady side, effectually scaring all the moose and bears that might be thereabouts. at length we came to a standstill, and joe went forward to reconnoitre; but he reported that it was still a continuous rapid as far as he went, or half a mile, with no prospect of improvement, as if it were coming down from a mountain. so we turned about, hunting back to the camp through the still water. it was a splendid moonlight night, and i, getting sleepy as it grew late,--for i had nothing to do,--found it difficult to realize where i was. this stream was much more unfrequented than the main one, lumbering operations being no longer carried on in this quarter. it was only three or four rods wide, but the firs and spruce through which it trickled seemed yet taller by contrast. being in this dreamy state, which the moonlight enhanced, i did not clearly discern the shore, but seemed, most of the time, to be floating through ornamental grounds,--for i associated the fir-tops with such scenes;--very high up some broadway, and beneath or between their tops, i thought i saw an endless succession of porticoes and columns, cornices and faã§ades, verandas and churches. i did not merely fancy this, but in my drowsy state such was the illusion. i fairly lost myself in sleep several times, still dreaming of that architecture and the nobility that dwelt behind and might issue from it: but all at once i would be aroused and brought back to a sense of my actual position by the sound of joeâ��s birch horn in the midst of all this silence calling the moose, _ugh_, _ugh_, _oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo_, and i prepared to hear a furious moose come rushing and crashing through the forest, and see him burst out on to the little strip of meadow by our side. but, on more accounts than one, i had had enough of moose-hunting. i had not come to the woods for this purpose, nor had i foreseen it, though i had been willing to learn how the indian manå�uvred; but one moose killed was as good, if not as bad, as a dozen. the afternoonâ��s tragedy, and my share in it, as it affected the innocence, destroyed the pleasure of my adventure. it is true, i came as near as is possible to come to being a hunter and miss it, myself; and as it is, i think that i could spend a year in the woods, fishing and hunting just enough to sustain myself, with satisfaction. this would be next to living like a philosopher on the fruits of the earth which you had raised, which also attracts me. but this hunting of the moose merely for the satisfaction of killing him,--not even for the sake of his hide,--without making any extraordinary exertion or running any risk yourself, is too much like going out by night to some wood-side pasture and shooting your neighborâ��s horses. these are godâ��s own horses, poor, timid creatures, that will run fast enough as soon as they smell you, though they are nine feet high. joe told us of some hunters who a year or two before had shot down several oxen by night, somewhere in the maine woods, mistaking them for moose. and so might any of the hunters; and what is the difference in the sport, but the name? in the former case, having killed one of godâ��s and _your own_ oxen, you strip off its hide,--because that is the common trophy, and, moreover, you have heard that it may be sold for moccasins,--cut a steak from its haunches, and leave the huge carcass to smell to heaven for you. it is no better, at least, than to assist at a slaughter-house. this afternoonâ��s experience suggested to me how base or coarse are the motives which commonly carry men into the wilderness. the explorers and lumberers generally are all hirelings, paid so much a day for their labor, and as such they have no more love for wild nature than wood-sawyers have for forests. other white men and indians who come here are for the most part hunters, whose object is to slay as many moose and other wild animals as possible. but, pray, could not one spend some weeks or years in the solitude of this vast wilderness with other employments than these,--employments perfectly sweet and innocent and ennobling? for one that comes with a pencil to sketch or sing, a thousand come with an axe or rifle. what a coarse and imperfect use indians and hunters make of nature! no wonder that their race is so soon exterminated. i already, and for weeks afterward, felt my nature the coarser for this part of my woodland experience, and was reminded that our life should be lived as tenderly and daintily as one would pluck a flower. with these thoughts, when we reached our camping-ground, i decided to leave my companions to continue moose-hunting down the stream, while i prepared the camp, though they requested me not to chop much nor make a large fire, for fear i should scare their game. in the midst of the damp fir wood, high on the mossy bank, about nine oâ��clock of this bright moonlight night, i kindled a fire, when they were gone, and, sitting on the fir twigs, within sound of the falls, examined by its light the botanical specimens which i had collected that afternoon, and wrote down some of the reflections which i have here expanded; or i walked along the shore and gazed up the stream, where the whole space above the falls was filled with mellow light. as i sat before the fire on my fir-twig seat, without walls above or around me, i remembered how far on every hand that wilderness stretched, before you came to cleared or cultivated fields, and wondered if any bear or moose was watching the light of my fire; for nature looked sternly upon me on account of the murder of the moose. strange that so few ever come to the woods to see how the pine lives and grows and spires, lifting its evergreen arms to the light,--to see its perfect success; but most are content to behold it in the shape of many broad boards brought to market, and deem _that_ its true success! but the pine is no more lumber than man is, and to be made into boards and houses is no more its true and highest use than the truest use of a man is to be cut down and made into manure. there is a higher law affecting our relation to pines as well as to men. a pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man. can he who has discovered only some of the values of whalebone and whale oil be said to have discovered the true use of the whale? can he who slays the elephant for his ivory be said to have â��seen the elephantâ��? these are petty and accidental uses; just as if a stronger race were to kill us in order to make buttons and flageolets of our bones; for everything may serve a lower as well as a higher use. every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it. [illustration: _pine tree, boar mountain_] is it the lumberman, then, who is the friend and lover of the pine, stands nearest to it, and understands its nature best? is it the tanner who has barked it, or he who has boxed it for turpentine, whom posterity will fable to have been changed into a pine at last? no! no! it is the poet; he it is who makes the truest use of the pine, who does not fondle it with an axe, nor tickle it with a saw, nor stroke it with a plane, who knows whether its heart is false without cutting into it, who has not bought the stumpage of the township on which it stands. all the pines shudder and heave a sigh when that man steps on the forest floor. no, it is the poet, who loves them as his own shadow in the air, and lets them stand. i have been into the lumber-yard, and the carpenterâ��s shop, and the tannery, and the lampblack factory, and the turpentine clearing; but when at length i saw the tops of the pines waving and reflecting the light at a distance high over all the rest of the forest, i realized that the former were not the highest use of the pine. it is not their bones or hide or tallow that i love most. it is the living spirit of the tree, not its spirit of turpentine, with which i sympathize, and which heals my cuts. it is as immortal as i am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still. ere long, the hunters returned, not having seen a moose, but, in consequence of my suggestions, bringing a quarter of the dead one, which, with ourselves, made quite a load for the canoe. after breakfasting on moose meat, we returned down pine stream on our way to chesuncook lake, which was about five miles distant. we could see the red carcass of the moose lying in pine stream when nearly half a mile off. just below the mouth of this stream were the most considerable rapids between the two lakes, called pine stream falls, where were large flat rocks washed smooth, and at this time you could easily wade across above them. joe ran down alone while we walked over the portage, my companion collecting spruce gum for his friends at home, and i looking for flowers. near the lake, which we were approaching with as much expectation as if it had been a university,--for it is not often that the stream of our life opens into such expansions,--were islands, and a low and meadowy shore with scattered trees, birches, white and yellow, slanted over the water, and maples,--many of the white birches killed, apparently by inundations. there was considerable native grass; and even a few cattle--whose movements we heard, though we did not see them, mistaking them at first for moose--were pastured there. on entering the lake, where the stream runs southeasterly, and for some time before, we had a view of the mountains about ktaadn (_katahdinauquoh_ one says they are called), like a cluster of blue fungi of rank growth, apparently twenty-five or thirty miles distant, in a southeast direction, their summits concealed by clouds. joe called some of them the sowadnehunk mountains. this is the name of a stream there, which another indian told us meant â��running between mountains.â�� though some lower summits were afterward uncovered, we got no more complete view of ktaadn while we were in the woods. the clearing to which we were bound was on the right of the mouth of the river, and was reached by going round a low point, where the water was shallow to a great distance from the shore. chesuncook lake extends northwest and southeast, and is called eighteen miles long and three wide, without an island. we had entered the northwest corner of it, and when near the shore could see only part way down it. the principal mountains visible from the land here were those already mentioned, between southeast and east, and a few summits a little west of north, but generally the north and northwest horizon about the st. john and the british boundary was comparatively level. ansell smithâ��s, the oldest and principal clearing about this lake, appeared to be quite a harbor for batteaux and canoes; seven or eight of the former were lying about, and there was a small scow for hay, and a capstan on a platform, now high and dry, ready to be floated and anchored to tow rafts with. it was a very primitive kind of harbor, where boats were drawn up amid the stumps,--such a one, methought, as the argo might have been launched in. there were five other huts with small clearings on the opposite side of the lake, all at this end and visible from this point. one of the smiths told me that it was so far cleared that they came here to live and built the present house four years before, though the family had been here but a few months. i was interested to see how a pioneer lived on this side of the country. his life is in some respects more adventurous than that of his brother in the west; for he contends with winter as well as the wilderness, and there is a greater interval of time at least between him and the army which is to follow. here immigration is a tide which may ebb when it has swept away the pines; there it is not a tide, but an inundation, and roads and other improvements come steadily rushing after. as we approached the log house, a dozen rods from the lake, and considerably elevated above it, the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. it was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments. the walls were well clayed between the logs, which were large and round, except on the upper and under sides, and as visible inside as out, successive bulging cheeks gradually lessening upwards and tuned to each other with the axe, like pandean pipes. probably the musical forest gods had not yet cast them aside; they never do till they are split or the bark is gone. it was a style of architecture not described by vitruvius, i suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of orpheus; none of your frilled or fluted columns, which have cut such a false swell, and support nothing but a gable end and their builderâ��s pretensions,--that is, with the multitude; and as for â��ornamentation,â�� one of those words with a dead tail which architects very properly use to describe their flourishes, there were the lichens and mosses and fringes of bark, which nobody troubled himself about. we certainly leave the handsomest paint and clapboards behind in the woods, when we strip off the bark and poison ourselves with white-lead in the towns. we get but half the spoils of the forest. for beauty, give me trees with the fur on. this house was designed and constructed with the freedom of stroke of a foresterâ��s axe, without other compass and square than nature uses. wherever the logs were cut off by a window or door, that is, were not kept in place by alternate overlapping, they were held one upon another by very large pins, driven in diagonally on each side, where branches might have been, and then cut off so close up and down as not to project beyond the bulge of the log, as if the logs clasped each other in their arms. these logs were posts, studs, boards, clapboards, laths, plaster, and nails, all in one. where the citizen uses a mere sliver or board, the pioneer uses the whole trunk of a tree. the house had large stone chimneys, and was roofed with spruce-bark. the windows were imported, all but the casings. one end was a regular loggerâ��s camp, for the boarders, with the usual fir floor and log benches. thus this house was but a slight departure from the hollow tree, which the bear still inhabits,--being a hollow made with trees piled up, with a coating of bark like its original. the cellar was a separate building, like an ice-house, and it answered for a refrigerator at this season, our moose meat being kept there. it was a potato hole with a permanent roof. each structure and institution here was so primitive that you could at once refer it to its source; but our buildings commonly suggest neither their origin nor their purpose. there was a large, and what farmers would call handsome, barn, part of whose boards had been sawed by a whip-saw; and the saw-pit, with its great pile of dust, remained before the house. the long split shingles on a portion of the barn were laid a foot to the weather, suggesting what kind of weather they have there. grantâ��s barn at caribou lake was said to be still larger, the biggest ox-nest in the woods, fifty feet by a hundred. think of a monster barn in that primitive forest lifting its gray back above the tree-tops! man makes very much such a nest for his domestic animals, of withered grass and fodder, as the squirrels and many other wild creatures do for themselves. there was also a blacksmithâ��s shop, where plainly a good deal of work was done. the oxen and horses used in lumbering operations were shod, and all the iron-work of sleds, etc., was repaired or made here. i saw them load a batteau at the moosehead carry, the next tuesday, with about thirteen hundredweight of bar iron for this shop. this reminded me how primitive and honorable a trade was vulcanâ��s. i do not hear that there was any carpenter or tailor among the gods. the smith seems to have preceded these and every other mechanic at chesuncook as well as on olympus, and his family is the most widely dispersed, whether he be christened john or ansell. smith owned two miles down the lake by half a mile in width. there were about one hundred acres cleared here. he cut seventy tons of english hay this year on this ground, and twenty more on another clearing, and he uses it all himself in lumbering operations. the barn was crowded with pressed hay, and a machine to press it. there was a large garden full of roots,--turnips, beets, carrots, potatoes, etc., all of great size. they said that they were worth as much here as in new york. i suggested some currants for sauce, especially as they had no apple trees set out, and showed how easily they could be obtained. there was the usual long-handled axe of the primitive woods by the door, three and a half feet long,--for my new black-ash rule was in constant use,--and a large, shaggy dog, whose nose, report said, was full of porcupine quills. i can testify that he looked very sober. this is the usual fortune of pioneer dogs, for they have to face the brunt of the battle for their race, and act the part of arnold winkelried without intending it. if he should invite one of his town friends up this way, suggesting moose meat and unlimited freedom, the latter might pertinently inquire, â��what is that sticking in your nose?â�� when a generation or two have used up all the enemiesâ�� darts, their successors lead a comparatively easy life. we owe to our fathers analogous blessings. many old people receive pensions for no other reason, it seems to me, but as a compensation for having lived a long time ago. no doubt our town dogs still talk, in a snuffling way, about the days that tried dogsâ�� noses. how they got a cat up there i do not know, for they are as shy as my aunt about entering a canoe. i wondered that she did not run up a tree on the way; but perhaps she was bewildered by the very crowd of opportunities. twenty or thirty lumberers, yankee and canadian, were coming and going,--aleck among the rest,--and from time to time an indian touched here. in the winter there are sometimes a hundred men lodged here at once. the most interesting piece of news that circulated among them appeared to be, that four horses belonging to smith, worth seven hundred dollars, had passed by farther into the woods a week before. the white pine tree was at the bottom or farther end of all this. it is a war against the pines, the only real aroostook or penobscot war. i have no doubt that they lived pretty much the same sort of life in the homeric age, for men have always thought more of eating than of fighting; then, as now, their minds ran chiefly on the â��hot bread and sweet cakes;â�� and the fur and lumber trade is an old story to asia and europe. i doubt if men ever made a trade of heroism. in the days of achilles, even, they delighted in big barns, and perchance in pressed hay, and he who possessed the most valuable team was the best fellow. we had designed to go on at evening up the caucomgomoc, whose mouth was a mile or two distant, to the lake of the same name, about ten miles off; but some indians of joeâ��s acquaintance, who were making canoes on the caucomgomoc, came over from that side, and gave so poor an account of the moose-hunting, so many had been killed there lately, that my companions concluded not to go there. joe spent this sunday and the night with his acquaintances. the lumberers told me that there were many moose hereabouts, but no caribou or deer. a man from oldtown had killed ten or twelve moose, within a year, so near the house that they heard all his guns. his name may have been hercules, for aught i know, though i should rather have expected to hear the rattling of his club; but, no doubt, he keeps pace with the improvements of the age, and uses a sharpâ��s rifle now; probably he gets all his armor made and repaired at smithâ��s shop. one moose had been killed and another shot at within sight of the house within two years. i do not know whether smith has yet got a poet to look after the cattle, which, on account of the early breaking up of the ice, are compelled to summer in the woods, but i would suggest this office to such of my acquaintances as love to write verses and go a-gunning. after a dinner at which apple-sauce was the greatest luxury to me, but our moose meat was oftenest called for by the lumberers, i walked across the clearing into the forest, southward, returning along the shore. for my dessert, i helped myself to a large slice of the chesuncook woods, and took a hearty draught of its waters with all my senses. the woods were as fresh and full of vegetable life as a lichen in wet weather, and contained many interesting plants; but unless they are of white pine, they are treated with as little respect here as a mildew, and in the other case they are only the more quickly cut down. the shore was of coarse, flat, slate rocks, often in slabs, with the surf beating on it. the rocks and bleached drift-logs, extending some way into the shaggy woods, showed a rise and fall of six or eight feet, caused partly by the dam at the outlet. they said that in winter the snow was three feet deep on a level here, and sometimes four or five,--that the ice on the lake was two feet thick, clear, and four feet including the snow-ice. ice had already formed in vessels. we lodged here this sunday night in a comfortable bedroom, apparently the best one; and all that i noticed unusual in the night--for i still kept taking notes, like a spy in the camp--was the creaking of the thin split boards, when any of our neighbors stirred. such were the first rude beginnings of a town. they spoke of the practicability of a winter road to the moosehead carry, which would not cost much, and would connect them with steam and staging and all the busy world. i almost doubted if the lake would be there,--the self-same lake,--preserve its form and identity, when the shores should be cleared and settled; as if these lakes and streams which explorers report never awaited the advent of the citizen. the sight of one of these frontier houses, built of these great logs, whose inhabitants have unflinchingly maintained their ground many summers and winters in the wilderness, reminds me of famous forts, like ticonderoga or crown point, which have sustained memorable sieges. they are especially winter-quarters, and at this season this one had a partially deserted look, as if the siege were raised a little, the snowbanks being melted from before it, and its garrison accordingly reduced. i think of their daily food as rations,--it is called â��supplies;â�� a bible and a greatcoat are munitions of war, and a single man seen about the premises is a sentinel on duty. you expect that he will require the countersign, and will perchance take you for ethan allen, come to demand the surrender of his fort in the name of the continental congress. it is a sort of ranger service. arnoldâ��s expedition is a daily experience with these settlers. they can prove that they were out at almost any time; and i think that all the first generation of them deserve a pension more than any that went to the mexican war. early the next morning we started on our return up the penobscot, my companion wishing to go about twenty-five miles above the moosehead carry to a camp near the junction of the two forks, and look for moose there. our host allowed us something for the quarter of the moose which we had brought, and which he was glad to get. two explorers from chamberlain lake started at the same time that we did. red flannel shirts should be worn in the woods, if only for the fine contrast which this color makes with the evergreens and the water. thus i thought when i saw the forms of the explorers in their birch, poling up the rapids before us, far off against the forest. it is the surveyorâ��s color also, most distinctly seen under all circumstances. we stopped to dine at ragmuff, as before. my companion it was who wandered up the stream to look for moose this time, while joe went to sleep on the bank, so that we felt sure of him; and i improved the opportunity to botanize and bathe. soon after starting again, while joe was gone back in the canoe for the frying-pan, which had been left, we picked a couple of quarts of tree-cranberries for a sauce. i was surprised by joeâ��s asking me how far it was to the moosehorn. he was pretty well acquainted with this stream, but he had noticed that i was curious about distances, and had several maps. he and indians generally, with whom i have talked, are not able to describe dimensions or distances in our measures with any accuracy. he could tell, perhaps, at what time we should arrive, but not how far it was. we saw a few wood ducks, sheldrakes, and black ducks, but they were not so numerous there at that season as on our river at home. we scared the same family of wood ducks before us, going and returning. we also heard the note of one fish hawk, somewhat like that of a pigeon woodpecker, and soon after saw him perched near the top of a dead white pine against the island where we had first camped, while a company of peetweets were twittering and teetering about over the carcass of a moose on a low sandy spit just beneath. we drove the fish hawk from perch to perch, each time eliciting a scream or whistle, for many miles before us. our course being up-stream, we were obliged to work much harder than before, and had frequent use for a pole. sometimes all three of us paddled together, standing up, small and heavily laden as the canoe was. about six miles from moosehead, we began to see the mountains east of the north end of the lake, and at four oâ��clock we reached the carry. the indians were still encamped here. there were three, including the st. francis indian who had come in the steamer with us. one of the others was called sabattis. joe and the st. francis indian were plainly clear indian, the other two apparently mixed indian and white; but the difference was confined to their features and complexion, for all that i could see. we here cooked the tongue of the moose for supper,--having left the nose, which is esteemed the choicest part, at chesuncook, boiling, it being a good deal of trouble to prepare it. we also stewed our tree-cranberries (_viburnum opulus_), sweetening them with sugar. the lumberers sometimes cook them with molasses. they were used in arnoldâ��s expedition. this sauce was very grateful to us who had been confined to hard-bread, pork, and moose meat, and, notwithstanding their seeds, we all three pronounced them equal to the common cranberry; but perhaps some allowance is to be made for our forest appetites. it would be worth the while to cultivate them, both for beauty and for food. i afterward saw them in a garden in bangor. joe said that they were called _ebeemenar_. while we were getting supper, joe commenced curing the moose-hide, on which i had sat a good part of the voyage, he having already cut most of the hair off with his knife at the caucomgomoc. he set up two stout forked poles on the bank, seven or eight feet high, and as much asunder east and west, and having cut slits eight or ten inches long, and the same distance apart, close to the edge, on the sides of the hide, he threaded poles through them, and then, placing one of the poles on the forked stakes, tied the other down tightly at the bottom. the two ends also were tied with cedar bark, their usual string, to the upright poles, through small holes at short intervals. the hide, thus stretched, and slanted a little to the north, to expose its flesh side to the sun, measured, in the extreme, eight feet long by six high. where any flesh still adhered, joe boldly scored it with his knife to lay it open to the sun. it now appeared somewhat spotted and injured by the duck shot. you may see the old frames on which hides have been stretched at many camping-places in these woods. for some reason or other, the going to the forks of the penobscot was given up, and we decided to stop here, my companion intending to hunt down the stream at night. the indians invited us to lodge with them, but my companion inclined to go to the log camp on the carry. this camp was close and dirty, and had an ill smell, and i preferred to accept the indiansâ�� offer, if we did not make a camp for ourselves; for, though they were dirty, too, they were more in the open air, and were much more agreeable, and even refined company, than the lumberers. the most interesting question entertained at the lumberersâ�� camp was, which man could â��handleâ�� any other on the carry; and, for the most part, they possessed no qualities which you could not lay hands on. so we went to the indiansâ�� camp or wigwam. it was rather windy, and therefore joe concluded to hunt after midnight, if the wind went down, which the other indians thought it would not do, because it was from the south. the two mixed-bloods, however, went off up the river for moose at dark, before we arrived at their camp. this indian camp was a slight, patched-up affair, which had stood there several weeks, built shed-fashion, open to the fire on the west. if the wind changed, they could turn it round. it was formed by two forked stakes and a cross-bar, with rafters slanted from this to the ground. the covering was partly an old sail, partly birch-bark, quite imperfect, but securely tied on, and coming down to the ground on the sides. a large log was rolled up at the back side for a headboard, and two or three moose-hides were spread on the ground with the hair up. various articles of their wardrobe were tucked around the sides and corners, or under the roof. they were smoking moose meat on just such a crate as is represented by with, in de bryâ��s â��collectio peregrinationum,â�� published in 1588, and which the natives of brazil called _boucan_ (whence buccaneer), on which were frequently shown pieces of human flesh drying along with the rest. it was erected in front of the camp over the usual large fire, in the form of an oblong square. two stout forked stakes, four or five feet apart and five feet high, were driven into the ground at each end, and then two poles ten feet long were stretched across over the fire, and smaller ones laid transversely on these a foot apart. on the last hung large, thin slices of moose meat smoking and drying, a space being left open over the centre of the fire. there was the whole heart, black as a thirty-two pound ball, hanging at one corner. they said that it took three or four days to cure this meat, and it would keep a year or more. refuse pieces lay about on the ground in different stages of decay, and some pieces also in the fire, half buried and sizzling in the ashes, as black and dirty as an old shoe. these last i at first thought were thrown away, but afterwards found that they were being cooked. also a tremendous rib-piece was roasting before the fire, being impaled on an upright stake forced in and out between the ribs. there was a moose-hide stretched and curing on poles like ours, and quite a pile of cured skins close by. they had killed twenty-two moose within two months, but, as they could use but very little of the meat, they left the carcases on the ground. altogether it was about as savage a sight as was ever witnessed, and i was carried back at once three hundred years. there were many torches of birch-bark, shaped like straight tin horns, lying ready for use on a stump outside. for fear of dirt, we spread our blankets over their hides, so as not to touch them anywhere. the st. francis indian and joe alone were there at first, and we lay on our backs talking with them till midnight. they were very sociable, and, when they did not talk with us, kept up a steady chatting in their own language. we heard a small bird just after dark, which, joe said, sang at a certain hour in the night,--at ten oâ��clock, he believed. we also heard the hylodes and tree-toads, and the lumberers singing in their camp a quarter of a mile off. i told them that i had seen pictured in old books pieces of human flesh drying on these crates; whereupon they repeated some tradition about the mohawks eating human flesh, what parts they preferred, etc., and also of a battle with the mohawks near moosehead, in which many of the latter were killed; but i found that they knew but little of the history of their race, and could be entertained by stories about their ancestors as readily as any way. at first i was nearly roasted out, for i lay against one side of the camp, and felt the heat reflected not only from the birch-bark above, but from the side; and again i remembered the sufferings of the jesuit missionaries, and what extremes of heat and cold the indians were said to endure. i struggled long between my desire to remain and talk with them and my impulse to rush out and stretch myself on the cool grass; and when i was about to take the last step, joe, hearing my murmurs, or else being uncomfortable himself, got up and partially dispersed the fire. i suppose that that is indian manners,--to defend yourself. while lying there listening to the indians, i amused myself with trying to guess at their subject by their gestures, or some proper name introduced. there can be no more startling evidence of their being a distinct and comparatively aboriginal race than to hear this unaltered indian language, which the white man cannot speak nor understand. we may suspect change and deterioration in almost every other particular but the language which is so wholly unintelligible to us. it took me by surprise, though i had found so many arrowheads, and convinced me that the indian was not the invention of historians and poets. it was a purely wild and primitive american sound, as much as the barking of a chickaree, and i could not understand a syllable of it; but paugus, had he been there, would have understood it. these abenakis gossiped, laughed, and jested, in the language in which eliotâ��s indian bible is written, the language which has been spoken in new england who shall say how long? these were the sounds that issued from the wigwams of this country before columbus was born; they have not yet died away; and, with remarkably few exceptions, the language of their forefathers is still copious enough for them. i felt that i stood, or rather lay, as near to the primitive man of america, that night, as any of its discoverers ever did. in the midst of their conversation, joe suddenly appealed to me to know how long moosehead lake was. meanwhile, as we lay there, joe was making and trying his horn, to be ready for hunting after midnight. the st. francis indian also amused himself with sounding it, or rather calling through it; for the sound is made with the voice, and not by blowing through the horn. the latter appeared to be a speculator in moose-hides. he bought my companionâ��s for two dollars and a quarter, green. joe said that it was worth two and a half at oldtown. its chief use is for moccasins. one or two of these indians wore them. i was told that, by a recent law of maine, foreigners are not allowed to kill moose there at any season; white americans can kill them only at a particular season, but the indians of maine at all seasons. the st. francis indian accordingly asked my companion for a _wighiggin_, or bill, to show, since he was a foreigner. he lived near sorel. i found that he could write his name very well, tahmunt swasen. one ellis, an old white man of guilford, a town through which we passed, not far from the south end of moosehead, was the most celebrated moose-hunter of those parts. indians and whites spoke with equal respect of him. tahmunt said that there were more moose here than in the adirondack country in new york, where he had hunted; that three years before there were a great many about, and there were a great many now in the woods, but they did not come out to the water. it was of no use to hunt them at midnight,--they would not come out then. i asked sabattis, after he came home, if the moose never attacked him. he answered that you must not fire many times, so as to mad him. â��i fire once and hit him in the right place, and in the morning i find him. he wonâ��t go far. but if you keep firing, you mad him. i fired once five bullets, every one through the heart, and he did not mind â��em at all; it only made him more mad.â�� i asked him if they did not hunt them with dogs. he said that they did so in winter, but never in the summer, for then it was of no use; they would run right off straight and swiftly a hundred miles. another indian said that the moose, once scared, would run all day. a dog will hang to their lips, and be carried along till he is swung against a tree and drops off. they cannot run on a â��glaze,â�� though they can run in snow four feet deep; but the caribou can run on ice. they commonly find two or three moose together. they cover themselves with water, all but their noses, to escape flies. he had the horns of what he called â��the black moose that goes in low lands.â�� these spread three or four feet. the â��red mooseâ�� was another kind, â��running on mountains,â�� and had horns which spread six feet. such were his distinctions. both can move their horns. the broad flat blades are covered with hair, and are so soft, when the animal is alive, that you can run a knife through them. they regard it as a good or bad sign, if the horns turn this way or that. his caribou horns had been gnawed by mice in his wigwam, but he thought that the horns neither of the moose nor of the caribou were ever gnawed while the creature was alive, as some have asserted. an indian, whom i met after this at oldtown, who had carried about a bear and other animals of maine to exhibit, told me that thirty years ago there were not so many moose in maine as now; also, that the moose were very easily tamed, and would come back when once fed, and so would deer, but not caribou. the indians of this neighborhood are about as familiar with the moose as we are with the ox, having associated with them for so many generations. father rasles, in his dictionary of the abenaki language, gives not only a word for the male moose (_aianbã©_), and another for the female (_hã¨rar_), but for the bone which is in the middle of the heart of the moose (!), and for his left hind leg. there were none of the small deer up there; they are more common about the settlements. one ran into the city of bangor two years before, and jumped through a window of costly plate glass, and then into a mirror, where it thought it recognized one of its kind, and out again, and so on, leaping over the heads of the crowd, until it was captured. this the inhabitants speak of as the deer that went a-shopping. the last-mentioned indian spoke of the _lunxus_ or indian devil (which i take to be the cougar, and not the _gulo luscus_), as the only animal in maine which man need fear; it would follow a man, and did not mind a fire. he also said that beavers were getting to be pretty numerous again, where we went, but their skins brought so little now that it was not profitable to hunt them. i had put the ears of our moose, which were ten inches long, to dry along with the moose meat over the fire, wishing to preserve them; but sabattis told me that i must skin and cure them, else the hair would all come off. he observed that they made tobacco pouches of the skins of their ears, putting the two together inside to inside. i asked him how he got fire; and he produced a little cylindrical box of friction matches. he also had flints and steel, and some punk, which was not dry; i think it was from the yellow birch. â��but suppose you upset, and all these and your powder get wet.â�� â��then,â�� said he, â��we wait till we get to where there is some fire.â�� i produced from my pocket a little vial, containing matches, stoppled water-tight, and told him, that, though we were upset, we should still have some dry matches; at which he stared without saying a word. we lay awake thus a long while talking, and they gave us the meaning of many indian names of lakes and streams in the vicinity,--especially tahmunt. i asked the indian name of moosehead lake. joe answered _sebamook_; tahmunt pronounced it _sebemook_. when i asked what it meant, they answered, moosehead lake. at length, getting my meaning, they alternately repeated the word over to themselves, as a philologist might,--_sebamook_,--_sebamook_,--now and then comparing notes in indian; for there was a slight difference in their dialects; and finally tahmunt said, â��ugh! i know,â��--and he rose up partly on the moose-hide,--â��like as here is a place, and there is a place,â�� pointing to different parts of the hide, â��and you take water from there and fill this, and it stays here; that is _sebamook_.â�� i understood him to mean that it was a reservoir of water which did not run away, the river coming in on one side and passing out again near the same place, leaving a permanent bay. another indian said, that it meant large bay lake, and that _sebago_ and _sebec_, the names of other lakes, were kindred words, meaning large open water. joe said that _seboois_ meant little river. i observed their inability, often described, to convey an abstract idea. having got the idea, though indistinctly, they groped about in vain for words with which to express it. tahmunt thought that the whites called it moosehead lake, because mount kineo, which commands it, is shaped like a mooseâ��s head, and that moose river was so called â��because the mountain points right across the lake to its mouth.â�� john josselyn, writing about 1673, says, â��twelve miles from casco bay, and passable for men and horses, is a lake, called by the indians sebug. on the brink thereof, at one end, is the famous rock, shaped like a moose deer or helk, diaphanous, and called the moose rock.â�� he appears to have confounded sebamook with sebago, which is nearer, but has no â��diaphanousâ�� rock on its shore. i give more of their definitions, for what they are worth,--partly _because_ they differ sometimes from the commonly received ones. they never analyzed these words before. after long deliberation and repeating of the word,--for it gave much trouble,--tahmunt said that _chesuncook_ meant a place where many streams emptied in (?), and he enumerated them,--penobscot, umbazookskus, cusabesex, red brook, etc. â��_caucomgomoc_,--what does that mean?â�� â��what are those large white birds?â�� he asked. â��gulls,â�� said i. â��ugh! gull lake.â�� _pammadumcook_, joe thought, meant the lake with gravelly bottom or bed. _kenduskeag_, tahmunt concluded at last, after asking if birches went up it,--for he said that he was not much acquainted with it,--meant something like this: â��you go up penobscot till you come to _kenduskeag_, and you go by, you donâ��t turn up there. that is _kenduskeag_.â�� (?) another indian, however, who knew the river better, told us afterward that it meant little eel river. _mattawamkeag_ was a place where two rivers meet. (?) _penobscot_ was rocky river. one writer says that this was â��originally the name of only a section of the main channel, from the head of the tide-water to a short distance above oldtown.â�� a very intelligent indian, whom we afterward met, son-in-law of neptune, gave us also these other definitions: _umbazookskus_, meadow stream; _millinoket_, place of islands; _aboljacarmegus_, smooth-ledge falls (and deadwater); _aboljacarmeguscook_, the stream emptying in (the last was the word he gave when i asked about _aboljacknagesic_, which he did not recognize); _mattahumkeag_, sand-creek pond; _piscataquis_, branch of a river. i asked our hosts what _musketaquid_, the indian name of concord, massachusetts, meant; but they changed it to _musketicook_, and repeated that, and tahmunt said that it meant dead stream, which is probably true. _cook_ appears to mean stream, and perhaps _quid_ signifies the place or ground. when i asked the meaning of the names of two of our hills, they answered that they were another language. as tahmunt said that he traded at quebec, my companion inquired the meaning of the word _quebec_, about which there has been so much question. he did not know, but began to conjecture. he asked what those great ships were called that carried soldiers. â��men-of-war,â�� we answered. â��well,â�� he said, â��when the english ships came up the river, they could not go any farther, it was so narrow there; they must go back,--go-back,--thatâ��s que-bec.â�� i mention this to show the value of his authority in the other cases. late at night the other two indians came home from moose-hunting, not having been successful, aroused the fire again, lighted their pipes, smoked awhile, took something strong to drink, and ate some moose meat, and, finding what room they could, lay down on the moose-hides; and thus we passed the night, two white men and four indians, side by side. when i awoke in the morning the weather was drizzling. one of the indians was lying outside, rolled in his blanket, on the opposite side of the fire, for want of room. joe had neglected to awake my companion, and he had done no hunting that night. tahmunt was making a cross-bar for his canoe with a singularly shaped knife, such as i have since seen other indians using. the blade was thin, about three quarters of an inch wide, and eight or nine inches long, but curved out of its plane into a hook, which he said made it more convenient to shave with. as the indians very far north and northwest use the same kind of knife, i suspect that it was made according to an aboriginal pattern, though some white artisans may use a similar one. the indians baked a loaf of flour bread in a spider on its edge before the fire for their breakfast; and while my companion was making tea, i caught a dozen sizable fishes in the penobscot, two kinds of sucker and one trout. after we had breakfasted by ourselves, one of our bed-fellows, who had also breakfasted, came along, and, being invited, took a cup of tea, and finally, taking up the common platter, licked it clean. but he was nothing to a white fellow, a lumberer, who was continually stuffing himself with the indiansâ�� moose meat, and was the butt of his companions accordingly. he seems to have thought that it was a feast â��to eat all.â�� it is commonly said that the white man finally surpasses the indian on his own ground, and it was proved true in this case. i cannot swear to his employment during the hours of darkness, but i saw him at it again as soon as it was light, though he came a quarter of a mile to his work. the rain prevented our continuing any longer in the woods; so, giving some of our provisions and utensils to the indians, we took leave of them. this being the steamerâ��s day, i set out for the lake at once. i walked over the carry alone and waited at the head of the lake. an eagle, or some other large bird, flew screaming away from its perch by the shore at my approach. for an hour after i reached the shore there was not a human being to be seen, and i had all that wide prospect to myself. i thought that i heard the sound of the steamer before she came in sight on the open lake. i noticed at the landing, when the steamer came in, one of our bed-fellows, who had been a-moose-hunting the night before, now very sprucely dressed in a clean white shirt and fine black pants, a true indian dandy, who had evidently come over the carry to show himself to any arrivers on the north shore of moosehead lake, just as new york dandies take a turn up broadway and stand on the steps of a hotel. midway the lake we took on board two manly-looking middle-aged men, with their batteau, who had been exploring for six weeks as far as the canada line, and had let their beards grow. they had the skin of a beaver, which they had recently caught, stretched on an oval hoop, though the fur was not good at that season. i talked with one of them, telling him that i had come all this distance partly to see where the white pine, the eastern stuff of which our houses are built, grew, but that on this and a previous excursion into another part of maine i had found it a scarce tree; and i asked him where i must look for it. with a smile, he answered that he could hardly tell me. however, he said that he had found enough to employ two teams the next winter in a place where there was thought to be none left. what was considered a â��tip-topâ�� tree now was not looked at twenty years ago, when he first went into the business; but they succeeded very well now with what was considered quite inferior timber then. the explorer used to cut into a tree higher and higher up, to see if it was false-hearted, and if there was a rotten heart as big as his arm, he let it alone; but now they cut such a tree and sawed it all around the rot, and it made the very best of boards, for in such a case they were never shaky. one connected with lumbering operations at bangor told me that the largest pine belonging to his firm, cut the previous winter, â��scaledâ�� in the woods four thousand five hundred feet, and was worth ninety dollars in the log at the bangor boom in oldtown. they cut a road three and a half miles long for this tree alone. he thought that the principal locality for the white pine that came down the penobscot now was at the head of the east branch and the allegash, about webster stream and eagle and chamberlain lakes. much timber has been stolen from the public lands. (pray, what kind of forest-warden is the public itself?) i heard of one man who, having discovered some particularly fine trees just within the boundaries of the public lands, and not daring to employ an accomplice, cut them down, and by means of block and tackle, without cattle, tumbled them into a stream, and so succeeded in getting off with them without the least assistance. surely, stealing pine trees in this way is not so mean as robbing hen-roosts. we reached monson that night, and the next day rode to bangor, all the way in the rain again, varying our route a little. some of the taverns on this road, which were particularly dirty, were plainly in a transition state from the camp to the house. * * * * * the next forenoon we went to oldtown. one slender old indian on the oldtown shore, who recognized my companion, was full of mirth and gestures, like a frenchman. a catholic priest crossed to the island in the same batteau with us. the indian houses are framed, mostly of one story, and in rows one behind another, at the south end of the island, with a few scattered ones. i counted about forty, not including the church and what my companion called the council-house. the last, which i suppose is their town-house, was regularly framed and shingled like the rest. there were several of two stories, quite neat, with front yards inclosed, and one at least had green blinds. here and there were moose-hides stretched and drying about them. there were no cart-paths, nor tracks of horses, but footpaths; very little land cultivated, but an abundance of weeds, indigenous and naturalized; more introduced weeds than useful vegetables, as the indian is said to cultivate the vices rather than the virtues of the white man. yet this village was cleaner than i expected, far cleaner than such irish villages as i have seen. the children were not particularly ragged nor dirty. the little boys met us with bow in hand and arrow on string, and cried, â��put up a cent.â�� verily, the indian has but a feeble hold on his bow now; but the curiosity of the white man is insatiable, and from the first he has been eager to witness this forest accomplishment. that elastic piece of wood with its feathered dart, so sure to be unstrung by contact with civilization, will serve for the type, the coat-of-arms of the savage. alas for the hunter race! the white man has driven off their game, and substituted a cent in its place. i saw an indian woman washing at the waterâ��s edge. she stood on a rock, and, after dipping the clothes in the stream, laid them on the rock, and beat them with a short club. in the graveyard, which was crowded with graves, and overrun with weeds, i noticed an inscription in indian, painted on a wooden grave-board. there was a large wooden cross on the island. since my companion knew him, we called on governor neptune, who lived in a little â��ten-footer,â�� one of the humblest of them all. personalities are allowable in speaking of public men, therefore i will give the particulars of our visit. he was abed. when we entered the room, which was one half of the house, he was sitting on the side of the bed. there was a clock hanging in one corner. he had on a black frock coat, and black pants, much worn, white cotton shirt, socks, a red silk handkerchief about his neck, and a straw hat. his black hair was only slightly grayed. he had very broad cheeks, and his features were decidedly and refreshingly different from those of any of the upstart native american party whom i have seen. he was no darker than many old white men. he told me that he was eighty-nine; but he was going a-moose-hunting that fall, as he had been the previous one. probably his companions did the hunting. we saw various squaws dodging about. one sat on the bed by his side and helped him out with his stories. they were remarkably corpulent, with smooth, round faces, apparently full of good-humor. certainly our much-abused climate had not dried up their adipose substance. while we were there,--for we stayed a good while,--one went over to oldtown, returned and cut out a dress, which she had bought, on another bed in the room. the governor said that â��he could remember when the moose were much larger; that they did not use to be in the woods, but came out of the water, as all deer did. moose was whale once. away down merrimack way, a whale came ashore in a shallow bay. sea went out and left him, and he came up on land a moose. what made them know he was a whale was, that at first, before he began to run in bushes, he had no bowels inside, butâ��--and then the squaw who sat on the bed by his side, as the governorâ��s aid, and had been putting in a word now and then and confirming the story, asked me what we called that soft thing we find along the seashore. â��jelly-fish,â�� i suggested. â��yes,â�� said he, â��no bowels, but jelly-fish.â�� there may be some truth in what he said about the moose growing larger formerly; for the quaint john josselyn, a physician who spent many years in this very district of maine in the seventeenth century, says that the tips of their horns â��are sometimes found to be two fathoms asunder,â��--and he is particular to tell us that a fathom is six feet,--â��and [they are] in height, from the toe of the fore foot to the pitch of the shoulder, twelve foot, both which hath been taken by some of my sceptique readers to be monstrous lies;â�� and he adds, â��there are certain transcendentia in every creature, which are the indelible character of god, and which discover god.â�� this is a greater dilemma to be caught in than is presented by the cranium of the young bechuana ox, apparently another of the _transcendentia_, in the collection of thomas steel, upper brook street, london, whose â��entire length of horn, from tip to tip, along the curve, is 13 ft. 5 in.; distance (straight) between the tips of the horns, 8 ft. 8â½ in.â�� however, the size both of the moose and the cougar, as i have found, is generally rather underrated than overrated, and i should be inclined to add to the popular estimate a part of what i subtracted from josselynâ��s. but we talked mostly with the governorâ��s son-in-law, a very sensible indian; and the governor, being so old and deaf, permitted himself to be ignored, while we asked questions about him. the former said that there were two political parties among them,--one in favor of schools, and the other opposed to them, or rather they did not wish to resist the priest, who was opposed to them. the first had just prevailed at the election and sent their man to the legislature. neptune and aitteon and he himself were in favor of schools. he said, â��if indians got learning, they would keep their money.â�� when we asked where joeâ��s father, aitteon, was, he knew that he must be at lincoln, though he was about going a-moose-hunting, for a messenger had just gone to him there to get his signature to some papers. i asked neptune if they had any of the old breed of dogs yet. he answered, â��yes.â�� â��but that,â�� said i, pointing to one that had just come in, â��is a yankee dog.â�� he assented. i said that he did not look like a good one. â��oh, yes!â�� he said, and he told, with much gusto, how, the year before, he had caught and held by the throat a wolf. a very small black puppy rushed into the room and made at the governorâ��s feet, as he sat in his stockings with his legs dangling from the bedside. the governor rubbed his hands and dared him to come on, entering into the sport with spirit. nothing more that was significant transpired, to my knowledge, during this interview. this was the first time that i ever called on a governor, but, as i did not ask for an office, i can speak of it with the more freedom. an indian who was making canoes behind a house, looking up pleasantly from his work,--for he knew my companion,--said that his name was old john pennyweight. i had heard of him long before, and i inquired after one of his contemporaries, joe four-pence-haâ��penny; but alas! he no longer circulates. i made a faithful study of canoe-building, and i thought that i should like to serve an apprenticeship at that trade for one season, going into the woods for bark with my â��boss,â�� making the canoe there, and returning in it at last. while the batteau was coming over to take us off, i picked up some fragments of arrowheads on the shore, and one broken stone chisel, which were greater novelties to the indians than to me. after this, on old fort hill, at the bend of the penobscot, three miles above bangor, looking for the site of an indian town which some think stood thereabouts, i found more arrowheads, and two little dark and crumbling fragments of indian earthenware, in the ashes of their fires. the indians on the island appeared to live quite happily and to be well treated by the inhabitants of oldtown. we visited veazieâ��s mills, just below the island, where were sixteen sets of saws,--some gang saws, sixteen in a gang, not to mention circular saws. on one side, they were hauling the logs up an inclined plane by water-power; on the other, passing out the boards, planks, and sawed timber, and forming them into rafts. the trees were literally drawn and quartered there. in forming the rafts, they use the lower three feet of hard-wood saplings, which have a crooked and knobbed butt-end, for bolts, passing them up through holes bored in the corners and sides of the rafts, and keying them. in another apartment they were making fence-slats, such as stand all over new england, out of odds and ends; and it may be that i saw where the picket-fence behind which i dwell at home came from. i was surprised to find a boy collecting the long edgings of boards as fast as cut off, and thrusting them down a hopper, where they were ground up beneath the mill, that they might be out of the way; otherwise they accumulate in vast piles by the side of the building, increasing the danger from fire, or, floating off, they obstruct the river. this was not only a sawmill, but a gristmill, then. the inhabitants of oldtown, stillwater, and bangor cannot suffer for want of kindling stuff, surely. some get their living exclusively by picking up the driftwood and selling it by the cord in the winter. in one place i saw where an irishman, who keeps a team and a man for the purpose, had covered the shore for a long distance with regular piles, and i was told that he had sold twelve hundred dollarsâ�� worth in a year. another, who lived by the shore, told me that he got all the material of his outbuildings and fences from the river; and in that neighborhood i perceived that this refuse wood was frequently used instead of sand to fill hollows with, being apparently cheaper than dirt. i got my first clear view of ktaadn, on this excursion, from a hill about two miles northwest of bangor, whither i went for this purpose. after this i was ready to return to massachusetts. * * * * * humboldt has written an interesting chapter on the primitive forest, but no one has yet described for me the difference between that wild forest which once occupied our oldest townships, and the tame one which i find there to-day. it is a difference which would be worth attending to. the civilized man not only clears the land permanently to a great extent, and cultivates open fields, but he tames and cultivates to a certain extent the forest itself. by his mere presence, almost, he changes the nature of the trees as no other creature does. the sun and air, and perhaps fire, have been introduced, and grain raised where it stands. it has lost its wild, damp, and shaggy look; the countless fallen and decaying trees are gone, and consequently that thick coat of moss which lived on them is gone too. the earth is comparatively bare and smooth and dry. the most primitive places left with us are the swamps, where the spruce still grows shaggy with usnea. the surface of the ground in the maine woods is everywhere spongy and saturated with moisture. i noticed that the plants which cover the forest floor there are such as are commonly confined to swamps with us,--the _clintonia borealis_, orchises, creeping snowberry, and others; and the prevailing aster there is the _aster acuminatus_, which with us grows in damp and shady woods. the asters _cordifolius_ and _macrophyllus_ also are common, asters of little or no color, and sometimes without petals. i saw no soft, spreading, second-growth white pines, with smooth bark, acknowledging the presence of the woodchopper, but even the young white pines were all tall and slender rough-barked trees. those maine woods differ essentially from ours. there you are never reminded that the wilderness which you are threading is, after all, some villagerâ��s familiar wood-lot, some widowâ��s thirds, from which her ancestors have sledded fuel for generations, minutely described in some old deed which is recorded, of which the owner has got a plan, too, and old bound-marks may be found every forty rods, if you will search. â��tis true, the map may inform you that you stand on land granted by the state to some academy, or on binghamâ��s purchase; but these names do not impose on you, for you see nothing to remind you of the academy or of bingham. what were the â��forestsâ�� of england to these? one writer relates of the isle of wight, that in charles the secondâ��s time â��there were woods in the island so complete and extensive, that it is said a squirrel might have traveled in several parts many leagues together on the top of the trees.â�� if it were not for the rivers (and he might go round their heads), a squirrel could here travel thus the whole breadth of the country. we have as yet had no adequate account of a primitive pine forest. i have noticed that in a physical atlas lately published in massachusetts, and used in our schools, the â��wood landâ�� of north america is limited almost solely to the valleys of the ohio and some of the great lakes, and the great pine forests of the globe are not represented. in our vicinity, for instance, new brunswick and maine are exhibited as bare as greenland. it may be that the children of greenville, at the foot of moosehead lake, who surely are not likely to be scared by an owl, are referred to the valley of the ohio to get an idea of a forest; but they would not know what to do with their moose, bear, caribou, beaver, etc., there. shall we leave it to an englishman to inform us, that â��in north america, both in the united states and canada, are the most extensive pine forests in the worldâ��? the greater part of new brunswick, the northern half of maine, and adjacent parts of canada, not to mention the northeastern part of new york and other tracts farther off, are still covered with an almost unbroken pine forest. but maine, perhaps, will soon be where massachusetts is. a good part of her territory is already as bare and commonplace as much of our neighborhood, and her villages generally are not so well shaded as ours. we seem to think that the earth must go through the ordeal of sheep-pasturage before it is habitable by man. consider nahant, the resort of all the fashion of boston,--which peninsula i saw but indistinctly in the twilight, when i steamed by it, and thought that it was unchanged since the discovery. john smith described it in 1614 as â��the mattahunts, two pleasant isles of groves, gardens, and cornfields;â�� and others tell us that it was once well wooded, and even furnished timber to build the wharves of boston. now it is difficult to make a tree grow there, and the visitor comes away with a vision of mr. tudorâ��s ugly fences, a rod high, designed to protect a few pear shrubs. and what are we coming to in our middlesex towns? a bald, staring town-house, or meeting-house, and a bare liberty-pole, as leafless as it is fruitless, for all i can see. we shall be obliged to import the timber for the last, hereafter, or splice such sticks as we have. and our ideas of liberty are equally mean with these. the very willow-rows lopped every three years for fuel or powder, and every sizable pine and oak, or other forest tree, cut down within the memory of man! as if individual speculators were to be allowed to export the clouds out of the sky, or the stars out of the firmament, one by one. we shall be reduced to gnaw the very crust of the earth for nutriment. they have even descended to smaller game. they have lately, as i hear, invented a machine for chopping up huckleberry bushes fine, and so converting them into fuel!--bushes which, for fruit alone, are worth all the pear trees in the country many times over. (i can give you a list of the three best kinds, if you want it.) at this rate, we shall all be obliged to let our beards grow at least, if only to hide the nakedness of the land and make a sylvan appearance. the farmer sometimes talks of â��brushing up,â�� simply as if bare ground looked better than clothed ground, than that which wears its natural vesture,--as if the wild hedges, which, perhaps, are more to his children than his whole farm beside, were dirt. i know of one who deserves to be called the tree-hater, and, perhaps, to leave this for a new patronymic to his children. you would think that he had been warned by an oracle that he would be killed by the fall of a tree, and so was resolved to anticipate them. the journalists think that they cannot say too much in favor of such â��improvementsâ�� in husbandry; it is a safe theme, like piety; but as for the beauty of one of these â��model farms,â�� i would as lief see a patent churn and a man turning it. they are, commonly, places merely where somebody is making money, it may be counterfeiting. the virtue of making two blades of grass grow where only one grew before does not begin to be superhuman. nevertheless, it was a relief to get back to our smooth but still varied landscape. for a permanent residence, it seemed to me that there could be no comparison between this and the wilderness, necessary as the latter is for a resource and a background, the raw material of all our civilization. the wilderness is simple, almost to barrenness. the partially cultivated country it is which chiefly has inspired, and will continue to inspire, the strains of poets, such as compose the mass of any literature. our woods are sylvan, and their inhabitants woodmen and rustics; that is _selvaggia_, and the inhabitants are _salvages_. a civilized man, using the word in the ordinary sense, with his ideas and associations, must at length pine there, like a cultivated plant, which clasps its fibres about a crude and undissolved mass of peat. at the extreme north, the voyagers are obliged to dance and act plays for employment. perhaps our own woods and fields,--in the best wooded towns, where we need not quarrel about the huckleberries,--with the primitive swamps scattered here and there in their midst, but not prevailing over them, are the perfection of parks and groves, gardens, arbors, paths, vistas, and landscapes. they are the natural consequence of what art and refinement we as a people have,--the common which each village possesses, its true paradise, in comparison with which all elaborately and willfully wealth-constructed parks and gardens are paltry imitations. or, i would rather say, such _were_ our groves twenty years ago. the poetâ��s, commonly, is not a loggerâ��s path, but a woodmanâ��s. the logger and pioneer have preceded him, like john the baptist; eaten the wild honey, it may be, but the locusts also; banished decaying wood and the spongy mosses which feed on it, and built hearths and humanized nature for him. but there are spirits of a yet more liberal culture, to whom no simplicity is barren. there are not only stately pines, but fragile flowers, like the orchises, commonly described as too delicate for cultivation, which derive their nutriment from the crudest mass of peat. these remind us, that, not only for strength, but for beauty, the poet must, from time to time, travel the loggerâ��s path and the indianâ��s trail, to drink at some new and more bracing fountain of the muses, far in the recesses of the wilderness. the kings of england formerly had their forests â��to hold the kingâ��s game,â�� for sport or food, sometimes destroying villages to create or extend them; and i think that they were impelled by a true instinct. why should not we, who have renounced the kingâ��s authority, have our national preserves, where no villages need be destroyed, in which the bear and panther, and some even of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be â��civilized off the face of the earth,â��--our forests, not to hold the kingâ��s game merely, but to hold and preserve the king himself also, the lord of creation,--not for idle sport or food, but for inspiration and our own true recreation? or shall we, like the villains, grub them all up, poaching on our own national domains? the allegash and east branch i started on my third excursion to the maine woods monday, july 20, 1857, with one companion, arriving at bangor the next day at noon. we had hardly left the steamer, when we passed molly molasses in the street. as long as she lives, the penobscots may be considered extant as a tribe. the succeeding morning, a relative of mine, who is well acquainted with the penobscot indians, and who had been my companion in my two previous excursions into the maine woods, took me in his wagon to oldtown, to assist me in obtaining an indian for this expedition. we were ferried across to the indian island in a batteau. the ferrymanâ��s boy had got the key to it, but the father, who was a blacksmith, after a little hesitation cut the chain with a cold-chisel on the rock. he told me that the indians were nearly all gone to the seaboard and to massachusetts, partly on account of the smallpox--of which they are very much afraid--having broken out in oldtown, and it was doubtful whether we should find a suitable one at home. the old chief neptune, however, was there still. the first man we saw on the island was an indian named joseph polis, whom my relative had known from a boy, and now addressed familiarly as â��joe.â�� he was dressing a deer-skin in his yard. the skin was spread over a slanting log, and he was scraping it with a stick held by both hands. he was stoutly built, perhaps a little above the middle height, with a broad face, and, as others said, perfect indian features and complexion. his house was a two-story white one, with blinds, the best-looking that i noticed there, and as good as an average one on a new england village street. it was surrounded by a garden and fruit-trees, single cornstalks standing thinly amid the beans. we asked him if he knew any good indian who would like to go into the woods with us, that is, to the allegash lakes, by way of moosehead, and return by the east branch of the penobscot, or vary from this as we pleased. to which he answered, out of that strange remoteness in which the indian ever dwells to the white man, â��me like to go myself; me wants to get some moose;â�� and kept on scraping the skin. his brother had been into the woods with my relative only a year or two before, and the indian now inquired what the latter had done to him, that he did not come back, for he had not seen nor heard from him since. at length we got round to the more interesting topic again. the ferryman had told us that all the best indians were gone except polis, who was one of the aristocracy. he to be sure would be the best man we could have, but if he went at all would want a great price; so we did not expect to get him. polis asked at first two dollars a day, but agreed to go for a dollar and a half, and fifty cents a week for his canoe. he would come to bangor with his canoe by the seven oâ��clock train that evening,--we might depend on him. we thought ourselves lucky to secure the services of this man, who was known to be particularly steady and trustworthy. i spent the afternoon with my companion, who had remained in bangor, in preparing for our expedition, purchasing provisions, hard-bread, pork, coffee, sugar, etc., and some india-rubber clothing. we had at first thought of exploring the st. john from its source to its mouth, or else to go up the penobscot by its east branch to the lakes of the st. john, and return by way of chesuncook and moosehead. we had finally inclined to the last route, only reversing the order of it, going by way of moosehead, and returning by the penobscot, otherwise it would have been all the way upstream and taken twice as long. at evening the indian arrived in the cars, and i led the way while he followed me three quarters of a mile to my friendâ��s house, with the canoe on his head. i did not know the exact route myself, but steered by the lay of the land, as i do in boston, and i tried to enter into conversation with him, but as he was puffing under the weight of his canoe, not having the usual apparatus for carrying it, but, above all, was an indian, i might as well have been thumping on the bottom of his birch the while. in answer to the various observations which i made by way of breaking the ice, he only grunted vaguely from beneath his canoe once or twice, so that i knew he was there. early the next morning (july 23) the stage called for us, the indian having breakfasted with us, and already placed the baggage in the canoe to see how it would go. my companion and i had each a large knapsack as full as it would hold, and we had two large india-rubber bags which held our provision and utensils. as for the indian, all the baggage he had, beside his axe and gun, was a blanket, which he brought loose in his hand. however, he had laid in a store of tobacco and a new pipe for the excursion. the canoe was securely lashed diagonally across the top of the stage, with bits of carpet tucked under the edge to prevent its chafing. the very accommodating driver appeared as much accustomed to carrying canoes in this way as bandboxes. at the bangor house we took in four men bound on a hunting excursion, one of the men going as cook. they had a dog, a middling-sized brindled cur, which ran by the side of the stage, his master showing his head and whistling from time to time; but after we had gone about three miles the dog was suddenly missing, and two of the party went back for him, while the stage, which was full of passengers, waited. i suggested that he had taken the back track for the bangor house. at length one man came back, while the other kept on. this whole party of hunters declared their intention to stop till the dog was found; but the very obliging driver was ready to wait a spell longer. he was evidently unwilling to lose so many passengers, who would have taken a private conveyance, or perhaps the other line of stages, the next day. such progress did we make, with a journey of over sixty miles to be accomplished that day, and a rain-storm just setting in. we discussed the subject of dogs and their instincts till it was threadbare, while we waited there, and the scenery of the suburbs of bangor is still distinctly impressed on my memory. after full half an hour the man returned, leading the dog by a rope. he had overtaken him just as he was entering the bangor house. he was then tied on the top of the stage, but being wet and cold, several times in the course of the journey he jumped off, and i saw him dangling by his neck. this dog was depended on to stop bears with. he had already stopped one somewhere in new hampshire, and i can testify that he stopped a stage in maine. this party of four probably paid nothing for the dogâ��s ride, nor for his run, while our party of three paid two dollars--and were charged four--for the light canoe which lay still on the top. it soon began to rain, and grew more and more stormy as the day advanced. this was the third time that i had passed over this route, and it rained steadily each time all day. we accordingly saw but little of the country. the stage was crowded all the way, and i attended the more to my fellow-travelers. if you had looked inside this coach you would have thought that we were prepared to run the gauntlet of a band of robbers, for there were four or five guns on the front seat, the indianâ��s included, and one or two on the back one, each man holding his darling in his arms. one had a gun which carried twelve to a pound. it appeared that this party of hunters was going our way, but much farther,--down the allegash and st. john, and thence up some other stream, and across to the restigouche and the bay of chaleur, to be gone six weeks. they had canoes, axes, and supplies deposited some distance along the route. they carried flour, and were to have new bread made every day. their leader was a handsome man about thirty years old, of good height, but not apparently robust, of gentlemanly address and faultless toilet; such a one as you might expect to meet on broadway. in fact, in the popular sense of the word, he was the most â��gentlemanlyâ�� appearing man in the stage, or that we saw on the road. he had a fair white complexion, as if he had always lived in the shade, and an intellectual face, and with his quiet manners might have passed for a divinity student who had seen something of the world. i was surprised to find, on talking with him in the course of the dayâ��s journey, that he was a hunter at all,--for his gun was not much exposed,--and yet more to find that he was probably the chief white hunter of maine, and was known all along the road. he had also hunted in some of the states farther south and west. i afterwards heard him spoken of as one who could endure a great deal of exposure and fatigue without showing the effect of it; and he could not only use guns, but make them, being himself a gunsmith. in the spring, he had saved a stage-driver and two passengers from drowning in the backwater of the piscataquis in foxcroft on this road, having swum ashore in the freezing water and made a raft and got them off,--though the horses were drowned,--at great risk to himself, while the only other man who could swim withdrew to the nearest house to prevent freezing. he could now ride over this road for nothing. he knew our man, and remarked that we had a good indian there, a good hunter; adding that he was said to be worth $6000. the indian also knew him, and said to me, â��the great hunter.â�� the former told me that he practiced a kind of still-hunting, new or uncommon in those parts; that the caribou, for instance, fed round and round the same meadow, returning on the same path, and he lay in wait for them. the indian sat on the front seat, saying nothing to anybody, with a stolid expression of face, as if barely awake to what was going on. again i was struck by the peculiar vagueness of his replies when addressed in the stage, or at the taverns. he really never said anything on such occasions. he was merely stirred up, like a wild beast, and passively muttered some insignificant response. his answer, in such cases, was never the consequence of a positive mental energy, but vague as a puff of smoke, suggesting no _responsibility_, and if you considered it, you would find that you had got nothing out of him. this was instead of the conventional palaver and smartness of the white man, and equally profitable. most get no more than this out of the indian, and pronounce him stolid accordingly. i was surprised to see what a foolish and impertinent style a maine man, a passenger, used in addressing him, as if he were a child, which only made his eyes glisten a little. a tipsy canadian asked him at a tavern, in a drawling tone, if he smoked, to which he answered with an indefinite â��yes.â�� â��wonâ��t you lend me your pipe a little while?â�� asked the other. he replied, looking straight by the manâ��s head, with a face singularly vacant to all neighboring interests, â��me got no pipe;â�� yet i had seen him put a new one, with a supply of tobacco, into his pocket that morning. our little canoe, so neat and strong, drew a favorable criticism from all the wiseacres among the tavern loungers along the road. by the roadside, close to the wheels, i noticed a splendid great purple fringed orchis with a spike as big as an epilobium, which i would fain have stopped the stage to pluck, but as this had never been known to stop a bear, like the cur on the stage, the driver would probably have thought it a waste of time. when we reached the lake, about half past eight in the evening, it was still steadily raining, and harder than before; and, in that fresh, cool atmosphere, the hylodes were peeping and the toads ringing about the lake universally, as in the spring with us. it was as if the season had revolved backward two or three months, or i had arrived at the abode of perpetual spring. we had expected to go upon the lake at once, and, after paddling up two or three miles, to camp on one of its islands; but on account of the steady and increasing rain, we decided to go to one of the taverns for the night, though, for my own part, i should have preferred to camp out. about four oâ��clock the next morning (july 24), though it was quite cloudy, accompanied by the landlord to the waterâ��s edge, in the twilight, we launched our canoe from a rock on the moosehead lake. when i was there four years before, we had a rather small canoe for three persons, and i had thought that this time i would get a larger one, but the present one was even smaller than that. it was 18â¼ feet long by 2 feet 6â½ inches wide in the middle, and one foot deep within, so i found by measurement, and i judged that it would weigh not far from eighty pounds. the indian had recently made it himself, and its smallness was partly compensated for by its newness, as well as stanchness and solidity, it being made of very thick bark and ribs. our baggage weighed about 166 pounds, so that the canoe carried about 600 pounds in all, or the weight of four men. the principal part of the baggage was, as usual, placed in the middle of the broadest part, while we stowed ourselves in the chinks and crannies that were left before and behind it, where there was no room to extend our legs, the loose articles being tucked into the ends. the canoe was thus as closely packed as a market-basket, and might possibly have been upset without spilling any of its contents. the indian sat on a cross-bar in the stern, but we flat on the bottom, with a splint or chip behind our backs, to protect them from the cross-bar, and one of us commonly paddled with the indian. he foresaw that we should not want a pole till we reached the umbazookskus river, it being either deadwater or down-stream so far, and he was prepared to make a sail of his blanket in the bows if the wind should be fair; but we never used it. it had rained more or less the four previous days, so that we thought we might count on some fair weather. the wind was at first southwesterly. paddling along the eastern side of the lake in the still of the morning, we soon saw a few sheldrakes, which the indian called _shecorways_, and some peetweets, _naramekechus_, on the rocky shore; we also saw and heard loons, _medawisla_, which he said was a sign of wind. it was inspiriting to hear the regular dip of the paddles, as if they were our fins or flippers, and to realize that we were at length fairly embarked. we who had felt strangely as stage-passengers and tavern-lodgers were suddenly naturalized there and presented with the freedom of the lakes and the woods. having passed the small rocky isles within two or three miles of the foot of the lake, we had a short consultation respecting our course, and inclined to the western shore for the sake of its lee; for otherwise, if the wind should rise, it would be impossible for us to reach mount kineo, which is about midway up the lake on the east side, but at its narrowest part, where probably we could recross if we took the western side. the wind is the chief obstacle to crossing the lakes, especially in so small a canoe. the indian remarked several times that he did not like to cross the lakes â��in littlum canoe,â�� but nevertheless, â��just as we say, it made no odds to him.â�� he sometimes took a straight course up the middle of the lake between sugar and deer islands, when there was no wind. measured on the map, moosehead lake is twelve miles wide at the widest place, and thirty miles long in a direct line, but longer as it lies. the captain of the steamer called it thirty-eight miles as he steered. we should probably go about forty. the indian said that it was called â��_mspame_, because large water.â�� squaw mountain rose darkly on our left, near the outlet of the kennebec, and what the indian called spencer bay mountain, on the east, and already we saw mount kineo before us in the north. paddling near the shore, we frequently heard the _pe-pe_ of the olive-sided flycatcher, also the wood pewee, and the kingfisher, thus early in the morning. the indian reminding us that he could not work without eating, we stopped to breakfast on the main shore, southwest of deer island, at a spot where the _mimulus ringens_ grew abundantly. we took out our bags, and the indian made a fire under a very large bleached log, using white pine bark from a stump, though he said that hemlock was better, and kindling with canoe birch bark. our table was a large piece of freshly peeled birch bark, laid wrong side up, and our breakfast consisted of hard-bread, fried pork, and strong coffee, well sweetened, in which we did not miss the milk. while we were getting breakfast, a brood of twelve black dippers, half grown, came paddling by within three or four rods, not at all alarmed; and they loitered about as long as we stayed, now huddled close together, within a circle of eighteen inches in diameter, now moving off in a long line, very cunningly. yet they bore a certain proportion to the great moosehead lake on whose bosom they floated, and i felt as if they were under its protection. looking northward from this place it appeared as if we were entering a large bay, and we did not know whether we should be obliged to diverge from our course and keep outside a point which we saw, or should find a passage between this and the mainland. i consulted my map and used my glass, and the indian did the same, but we could not find our place exactly on the map, nor could we detect any break in the shore. when i asked the indian the way, he answered, â��i donâ��t know,â�� which i thought remarkable, since he had said that he was familiar with the lake; but it appeared that he had never been up this side. it was misty dog-day weather, and we had already penetrated a smaller bay of the same kind, and knocked the bottom out of it, though we had been obliged to pass over a small bar, between an island and the shore, where there was but just breadth and depth enough to float the canoe, and the indian had observed, â��very easy makum bridge here,â�� but now it seemed that, if we held on, we should be fairly embayed. presently, however, though we had not stirred, the mist lifted somewhat, and revealed a break in the shore northward, showing that the point was a portion of deer island, and that our course lay westward of it. where it had seemed a continuous shore even through a glass, one portion was now seen by the naked eye to be much more distant than the other which overlapped it, merely by the greater thickness of the mist which still rested on it, while the nearer or island portion was comparatively bare and green. the line of separation was very distinct, and the indian immediately remarked, â��i guess you and i go there,--i guess thereâ��s room for my canoe there.â�� this was his common expression instead of saying â��we.â�� he never addressed us by our names, though curious to know how they were spelled and what they meant, while we called him polis. he had already guessed very accurately at our ages, and said that he was forty-eight. [illustration: _squaw mountain, moosehead lake_] after breakfast i emptied the melted pork that was left into the lake, making what sailors call a â��slick,â�� and watching to see how much it spread over and smoothed the agitated surface. the indian looked at it a moment and said, â��that make hard paddlum throâ��; hold â��em canoe. so say old times.â�� we hastily reloaded, putting the dishes loose in the bows, that they might be at hand when wanted, and set out again. the western shore, near which we paddled along, rose gently to a considerable height, and was everywhere densely covered with the forest, in which was a large proportion of hard wood to enliven and relieve the fir and spruce. the indian said that the usnea lichen which we saw hanging from the trees was called _chorchorque_. we asked him the names of several small birds which we heard this morning. the wood thrush, which was quite common, and whose note he imitated, he said was called _adelungquamooktum_; but sometimes he could not tell the name of some small bird which i heard and knew, but he said, â��i tell all the birds about here,--this country; canâ��t tell littlum noise, but i see â��em, then i can tell.â�� i observed that i should like to go to school to him to learn his language, living on the indian island the while; could not that be done? â��oh, yer,â�� he replied, â��good many do so.â�� i asked how long he thought it would take. he said one week. i told him that in this voyage i would tell him all i knew, and he should tell me all he knew, to which he readily agreed. the birds sang quite as in our woods,--the red-eye, redstart, veery, wood pewee, etc., but we saw no bluebirds in all our journey, and several told me in bangor that they had not the bluebird there. mount kineo, which was generally visible, though occasionally concealed by islands or the mainland in front, had a level bar of cloud concealing its summit, and all the mountain-tops about the lake were cut off at the same height. ducks of various kinds--sheldrake, summer ducks, etc.--were quite common, and ran over the water before us as fast as a horse trots. thus they were soon out of sight. the indian asked the meaning of _reality_, as near as i could make out the word, which he said one of us had used; also of â��_interrent_,â�� that is, intelligent. i observed that he could rarely sound the letter r, but used l, as also r for l sometimes; as _load_ for road, _pickelel_ for pickerel, _soogle_ island for sugar island, _lock_ for rock, etc. yet he trilled the _r_ pretty well after me. he generally added the syllable _um_ to his words when he could,--as paddl_um_, etc. i have once heard a chippeway lecture, who made his audience laugh unintentionally by putting _m_ after the word _too_, which word he brought in continually and unnecessarily, accenting and prolonging this sound into _m-ah_ sonorously, as if it were necessary to bring in so much of his vernacular as a relief to his organs, a compensation for twisting his jaws about, and putting his tongue into every corner of his mouth, as he complained that he was obliged to do when he spoke english. there was so much of the indian accent resounding through his english, so much of the â��bow-arrow tangâ�� as my neighbor calls it, and i have no doubt that word seemed to him the best pronounced. it was a wild and refreshing sound, like that of the wind among the pines, or the booming of the surf on the shore. i asked him the meaning of the word _musketicook_, the indian name of concord river. he pronounced it _muskã©eticook_, emphasizing the second syllable with a peculiar guttural sound, and said that it meant â��deadwater,â�� which it is, and in this definition he agreed exactly with the st. francis indian with whom i talked in 1853. on a point on the mainland some miles southwest of sand-bar island, where we landed to stretch our legs and look at the vegetation, going inland a few steps, i discovered a fire still glowing beneath its ashes, where somebody had breakfasted, and a bed of twigs prepared for the following night. so i knew not only that they had just left, but that they designed to return, and by the breadth of the bed that there was more than one in the party. you might have gone within six feet of these signs without seeing them. there grew the beaked hazel, the only hazel which i saw on this journey, the diervilla, rue seven feet high, which was very abundant on all the lake and river shores, and _cornus stolonifera_, or red osier, whose bark, the indian said, was good to smoke, and was called _maquoxigill_, â��tobacco before white people came to this country, indian tobacco.â�� the indian was always very careful in approaching the shore, lest he should injure his canoe on the rocks, letting it swing round slowly sidewise, and was still more particular that we should not step into it on shore, nor till it floated free, and then should step gently lest we should open its seams, or make a hole in the bottom. he said that he would tell us when to jump. soon after leaving this point we passed the kennebec, or outlet of the lake, and heard the falls at the dam there, for even moosehead lake is dammed. after passing deer island, we saw the little steamer from greenville, far east in the middle of the lake, and she appeared nearly stationary. sometimes we could hardly tell her from an island which had a few trees on it. here we were exposed to the wind from over the whole breadth of the lake, and ran a little risk of being swamped. while i had my eye fixed on the spot where a large fish had leaped, we took in a gallon or two of water, which filled my lap; but we soon reached the shore and took the canoe over the bar, at sand-bar island, a few feet wide only, and so saved a considerable distance. one landed first at a more sheltered place, and walking round caught the canoe by the prow, to prevent it being injured against the shore. again we crossed a broad bay opposite the mouth of moose river, before reaching the narrow strait at mount kineo, made what the voyageurs call a _traverse_, and found the water quite rough. a very little wind on these broad lakes raises a sea which will swamp a canoe. looking off from the shore, the surface may appear to be very little agitated, almost smooth, a mile distant, or if you see a few white crests they appear nearly level with the rest of the lake; but when you get out so far, you may find quite a sea running, and ere long, before you think of it, a wave will gently creep up the side of the canoe and fill your lap, like a monster deliberately covering you with its slime before it swallows you, or it will strike the canoe violently, and break into it. the same thing may happen when the wind rises suddenly, though it were perfectly calm and smooth there a few minutes before; so that nothing can save you, unless you can swim ashore, for it is impossible to get into a canoe again when it is upset. since you sit flat on the bottom, though the danger should not be imminent, a little water is a great inconvenience, not to mention the wetting of your provisions. we rarely crossed even a bay directly, from point to point, when there was wind, but made a slight curve corresponding somewhat to the shore, that we might the sooner reach it if the wind increased. when the wind is aft, and not too strong, the indian makes a spritsail of his blanket. he thus easily skims over the whole length of this lake in a day. the indian paddled on one side, and one of us on the other, to keep the canoe steady, and when he wanted to change hands he would say, â��tâ�� other side.â�� he asserted, in answer to our questions, that he had never upset a canoe himself, though he may have been upset by others. think of our little eggshell of a canoe tossing across that great lake, a mere black speck to the eagle soaring above it! my companion trailed for trout as we paddled along, but the indian warning him that a big fish might upset us, for there are some very large ones there, he agreed to pass the line quickly to him in the stern if he had a bite. besides trout, i heard of cusk, whitefish, etc., as found in this lake. while we were crossing this bay, where mount kineo rose dark before us, within two or three miles, the indian repeated the tradition respecting this mountainâ��s having anciently been a cow moose,--how a mighty indian hunter, whose name i forget, succeeded in killing this queen of the moose tribe with great difficulty, while her calf was killed somewhere among the islands in penobscot bay, and, to his eyes, this mountain had still the form of the moose in a reclining posture, its precipitous side presenting the outline of her head. he told this at some length, though it did not amount to much, and with apparent good faith, and asked us how we supposed the hunter could have killed such a mighty moose as that,--how we could do it. whereupon a man-of-war to fire broadsides into her was suggested, etc. an indian tells such a story as if he thought it deserved to have a good deal said about it, only he has not got it to say, and so he makes up for the deficiency by a drawling tone, long-windedness, and a dumb wonder which he hopes will be contagious. we approached the land again through pretty rough water, and then steered directly across the lake, at its narrowest part, to the eastern side, and were soon partly under the lee of the mountain, about a mile north of the kineo house, having paddled about twenty miles. it was now about noon. we designed to stop there that afternoon and night, and spent half an hour looking along the shore northward for a suitable place to camp. we took out all our baggage at one place in vain, it being too rocky and uneven, and while engaged in this search we made our first acquaintance with the moose-fly. at length, half a mile farther north, by going half a dozen rods into the dense spruce and fir wood on the side of the mountain, almost as dark as a cellar, we found a place sufficiently clear and level to lie down on, after cutting away a few bushes. we required a space only seven feet by six for our bed, the fire being four or five feet in front, though it made no odds how rough the hearth was; but it was not always easy to find this in those woods. the indian first cleared a path to it from the shore with his axe, and we then carried up all our baggage, pitched our tent, and made our bed, in order to be ready for foul weather, which then threatened us, and for the night. he gathered a large armful of fir twigs, breaking them off, which he said were the best for our bed, partly, i thought, because they were the largest and could be most rapidly collected. it had been raining more or less for four or five days, and the wood was even damper than usual, but he got dry bark for the fire from the under side of a dead leaning hemlock, which, he said, he could always do. this noon his mind was occupied with a law question, and i referred him to my companion, who was a lawyer. it appeared that he had been buying land lately (i think it was a hundred acres), but there was probably an incumbrance to it, somebody else claiming to have bought some grass on it for this year. he wished to know to whom the grass belonged, and was told that if the other man could prove that he bought the grass before he, polis, bought the land, the former could take it, whether the latter knew it or not. to which he only answered, â��strange!â�� he went over this several times, fairly sat down to it, with his back to a tree, as if he meant to confine us to this topic henceforth; but as he made no headway, only reached the jumping-off place of his wonder at white menâ��s institutions after each explanation, we let the subject die. he said that he had fifty acres of grass, potatoes, etc., somewhere above oldtown, besides some about his house; that he hired a good deal of his work, hoeing, etc., and preferred white men to indians, because â��they keep steady, and know how.â�� after dinner we returned southward along the shore, in the canoe, on account of the difficulty of climbing over the rocks and fallen trees, and began to ascend the mountain along the edge of the precipice. but a smart shower coming up just then, the indian crept under his canoe, while we, being protected by our rubber coats, proceeded to botanize. so we sent him back to the camp for shelter, agreeing that he should come there for us with his canoe toward night. it had rained a little in the forenoon, and we trusted that this would be the clearing-up shower, which it proved; but our feet and legs were thoroughly wet by the bushes. the clouds breaking away a little, we had a glorious wild view, as we ascended, of the broad lake with its fluctuating surface and numerous forest-clad islands, extending beyond our sight both north and south, and the boundless forest undulating away from its shores on every side, as densely packed as a rye-field, and enveloping nameless mountains in succession; but above all, looking westward over a large island, was visible a very distant part of the lake, though we did not then suspect it to be moosehead,--at first a mere broken white line seen through the tops of the island trees, like hay-caps, but spreading to a lake when we got higher. beyond this we saw what appears to be called bald mountain on the map, some twenty-five miles distant, near the sources of the penobscot. it was a perfect lake of the woods. but this was only a transient gleam, for the rain was not quite over. looking southward, the heavens were completely overcast, the mountains capped with clouds, and the lake generally wore a dark and stormy appearance, but from its surface just north of sugar island, six or eight miles distant, there was reflected upward to us through the misty air a bright blue tinge from the distant unseen sky of another latitude beyond. they probably had a clear sky then at greenville, the south end of the lake. standing on a mountain in the midst of a lake, where would you look for the first sign of approaching fair weather? not into the heavens, it seems, but into the lake. again we mistook a little rocky islet seen through the â��drisk,â�� with some taller bare trunks or stumps on it, for the steamer with its smoke-pipes, but as it had not changed its position after half an hour, we were undeceived. so much do the works of man resemble the works of nature. a moose might mistake a steamer for a floating isle, and not be scared till he heard its puffing or its whistle. if i wished to see a mountain or other scenery under the most favorable auspices, i would go to it in foul weather, so as to be there when it cleared up; we are then in the most suitable mood, and nature is most fresh and inspiring. there is no serenity so fair as that which is just established in a tearful eye. jackson, in his report on the geology of maine, in 1838, says of this mountain: â��hornstone, which will answer for flints, occurs in various parts of the state, where trap-rocks have acted upon silicious slate. the largest mass of this stone known in the world is mount kineo, upon moosehead lake, which appears to be entirely composed of it, and rises seven hundred feet above the lake level. this variety of hornstone i have seen in every part of new england in the form of indian arrowheads, hatchets, chisels, etc., which were probably obtained from this mountain by the aboriginal inhabitants of the country.â�� i have myself found hundreds of arrowheads made of the same material. it is generally slate-colored, with white specks, becoming a uniform white where exposed to the light and air, and it breaks with a conchoidal fracture, producing a ragged cutting edge. i noticed some conchoidal hollows more than a foot in diameter. i picked up a small thin piece which had so sharp an edge that i used it as a dull knife, and to see what i could do, fairly cut off an aspen one inch thick with it, by bending it and making many cuts; though i cut my fingers badly with the back of it in the meanwhile. [illustration: _moosehead lake, from mount kineo_] from the summit of the precipice which forms the southern and eastern sides of this mountain peninsula, and is its most remarkable feature, being described as five or six hundred feet high, we looked, and probably might have jumped, down to the water, or to the seemingly dwarfish trees on the narrow neck of land which connects it with the main. it is a dangerous place to try the steadiness of your nerves. hodge says that these cliffs descend â��perpendicularly ninety feetâ�� below the surface of the water. the plants which chiefly attracted our attention on this mountain were the mountain cinquefoil (_potentilla tridentata_), abundant and in bloom still at the very base, by the waterside, though it is usually confined to the summits of mountains in our latitude; very beautiful harebells overhanging the precipice; bear-berry; the canada blueberry (_vaccinium canadense_), similar to the _v. pennsylvanicum_, our earliest one, but entire-leaved and with a downy stem and leaf (i have not seen it in massachusetts); _diervilla trifida_; _microstylis ophioglossoides_, an orchidaceous plant new to us; wild holly (_nemopanthes canadensis_); the great round-leaved orchis (_platanthera orbiculata_), not long in bloom; _spiranthes cernua_, at the top; bunchberry, reddening as we ascended, green at the base of the mountain, red at the top; and the small fern _woodsia ilvensis_, growing in tufts, now in fruit. i have also received _liparis liliifolia_, or tway-blade, from this spot. having explored the wonders of the mountain, and the weather being now entirely cleared up, we commenced the descent. we met the indian, puffing and panting, about one third of the way up, but thinking that he must be near the top, and saying that it took his breath away. i thought that superstition had something to do with his fatigue. perhaps he believed that he was climbing over the back of a tremendous moose. he said that he had never ascended kineo. on reaching the canoe we found that he had caught a lake trout weighing about three pounds, at the depth of twenty-five or thirty feet, while we were on the mountain. when we got to the camp, the canoe was taken out and turned over, and a log laid across it to prevent its being blown away. the indian cut some large logs of damp and rotten hard wood to smoulder and keep fire through the night. the trout was fried for supper. our tent was of thin cotton cloth and quite small, forming with the ground a triangular prism closed at the rear end, six feet long, seven wide, and four high, so that we could barely sit up in the middle. it required two forked stakes, a smooth ridge-pole, and a dozen or more pins to pitch it. it kept off dew and wind, and an ordinary rain, and answered our purpose well enough. we reclined within it till bedtime, each with his baggage at his head, or else sat about the fire, having hung our wet clothes on a pole before the fire for the night. as we sat there, just before night, looking out through the dusky wood, the indian heard a noise which he said was made by a snake. he imitated it at my request, making a low whistling note,--_pheet_--_pheet_,--two or three times repeated, somewhat like the peep of the hylodes, but not so loud. in answer to my inquiries, he said that he had never seen them while making it, but going to the spot he finds the snake. this, he said on another occasion, was a sign of rain. when i had selected this place for our camp, he had remarked that there were snakes there,--he saw them. â��but they wonâ��t do any hurt,â�� i said. â��oh, no,â�� he answered, â��just as you say; it makes no difference to me.â�� he lay on the right side of the tent, because, as he said, he was partly deaf in one ear, and he wanted to lie with his good ear up. as we lay there, he inquired if i ever heard â��indian sing.â�� i replied that i had not often, and asked him if he would not favor us with a song. he readily assented, and, lying on his back, with his blanket wrapped around him, he commenced a slow, somewhat nasal, yet musical chant, in his own language, which probably was taught his tribe long ago by the catholic missionaries. he translated it to us, sentence by sentence, afterward, wishing to see if we could remember it. it proved to be a very simple religious exercise or hymn, the burden of which was, that there was only one god who ruled all the world. this was hammered (or sung) out very thin, so that some stanzas well-nigh meant nothing at all, merely keeping up the idea. he then said that he would sing us a latin song; but we did not detect any latin, only one or two greek words in it,--the rest may have been latin with the indian pronunciation. his singing carried me back to the period of the discovery of america, to san salvador and the incas, when europeans first encountered the simple faith of the indian. there was, indeed, a beautiful simplicity about it; nothing of the dark and savage, only the mild and infantile. the sentiments of humility and reverence chiefly were expressed. it was a dense and damp spruce and fir wood in which we lay, and, except for our fire, perfectly dark; and when i awoke in the night, i either heard an owl from deeper in the forest behind us, or a loon from a distance over the lake. getting up some time after midnight to collect the scattered brands together, while my companions were sound asleep, i observed, partly in the fire, which had ceased to blaze, a perfectly regular elliptical ring of light, about five inches in its shortest diameter, six or seven in its longer, and from one eighth to one quarter of an inch wide. it was fully as bright as the fire, but not reddish or scarlet, like a coal, but a white and slumbering light, like the glow-wormâ��s. i could tell it from the fire only by its whiteness. i saw at once that it must be phosphorescent wood, which i had so often heard of, but never chanced to see. putting my finger on it, with a little hesitation, i found that it was a piece of dead moose-wood (_acer striatum_) which the indian had cut off in a slanting direction the evening before. using my knife, i discovered that the light proceeded from that portion of the sap-wood immediately under the bark, and thus presented a regular ring at the end, which, indeed, appeared raised above the level of the wood, and when i pared off the bark and cut into the sap, it was all aglow along the log. i was surprised to find the wood quite hard and apparently sound, though probably decay had commenced in the sap, and i cut out some little triangular chips, and, placing them in the hollow of my hand, carried them into the camp, waked my companion, and showed them to him. they lit up the inside of my hand, revealing the lines and wrinkles, and appearing exactly like coals of fire raised to a white heat, and i saw at once how, probably, the indian jugglers had imposed on their people and on travelers, pretending to hold coals of fire in their mouths. i also noticed that part of a decayed stump within four or five feet of the fire, an inch wide and six inches long, soft and shaking wood, shone with equal brightness. i neglected to ascertain whether our fire had anything to do with this, but the previous dayâ��s rain and long-continued wet weather undoubtedly had. i was exceedingly interested by this phenomenon, and already felt paid for my journey. it could hardly have thrilled me more if it had taken the form of letters, or of the human face. if i had met with this ring of light while groping in this forest alone, away from any fire, i should have been still more surprised. i little thought that there was such a light shining in the darkness of the wilderness for me. the next day the indian told me their name for this light,--_artoosoquâ��_--and on my inquiring concerning the will-oâ��-the-wisp, and the like phenomena, he said that his â��folksâ�� sometimes saw fires passing along at various heights, even as high as the trees, and making a noise. i was prepared after this to hear of the most startling and unimagined phenomena, witnessed by â��his folks;â�� they are abroad at all hours and seasons in scenes so unfrequented by white men. nature must have made a thousand revelations to them which are still secrets to us. i did not regret my not having seen this before, since i now saw it under circumstances so favorable. i was in just the frame of mind to see something wonderful, and this was a phenomenon adequate to my circumstances and expectation, and it put me on the alert to see more like it. i exulted like â��a pagan suckled in a creedâ�� that had never been worn at all, but was bran-new, and adequate to the occasion. i let science slide, and rejoiced in that light as if it had been a fellow creature. i saw that it was excellent, and was very glad to know that it was so cheap. a scientific _explanation_, as it is called, would have been altogether out of place there. that is for pale daylight. science with its retorts would have put me to sleep; it was the opportunity to be ignorant that i improved. it suggested to me that there was something to be seen if one had eyes. it made a believer of me more than before. i believed that the woods were not tenantless, but choke-full of honest spirits as good as myself any day,--not an empty chamber, in which chemistry was left to work alone, but an inhabited house,--and for a few moments i enjoyed fellowship with them. your so-called wise man goes trying to persuade himself that there is no entity there but himself and his traps, but it is a great deal easier to believe the truth. it suggested, too, that the same experience always gives birth to the same sort of belief or religion. one revelation has been made to the indian, another to the white man. i have much to learn of the indian, nothing of the missionary. i am not sure but all that would tempt me to teach the indian my religion would be his promise to teach me _his_. long enough i had heard of irrelevant things; now at length i was glad to make acquaintance with the light that dwells in rotten wood. where is all your knowledge gone to? it evaporates completely, for it has no depth. i kept those little chips and wet them again the next night, but they emitted no light. * * * * * saturday, july 25. at breakfast this saturday morning, the indian, evidently curious to know what would be expected of him the next day, whether we should go along or not, asked me how i spent the sunday when at home. i told him that i commonly sat in my chamber reading, etc., in the forenoon, and went to walk in the afternoon. at which he shook his head and said, â��er, that is ver bad.â�� â��how do you spend it?â�� i asked. he said that he did no work, that he went to church at oldtown when he was at home; in short, he did as he had been taught by the whites. this led to a discussion in which i found myself in the minority. he stated that he was a protestant, and asked me if i was. i did not at first know what to say, but i thought that i could answer with truth that i was. when we were washing the dishes in the lake, many fishes, apparently chivin, came close up to us to get the particles of grease. the weather seemed to be more settled this morning, and we set out early in order to finish our voyage up the lake before the wind arose. soon after starting, the indian directed our attention to the northeast carry, which we could plainly see, about thirteen miles distant in that direction as measured on the map, though it is called much farther. this carry is a rude wooden railroad, running north and south about two miles, perfectly straight, from the lake to the penobscot, through a low tract, with a clearing three or four rods wide; but low as it is, it passes over the height of land there. this opening appeared as a clear bright, or light, point in the horizon, resting on the edge of the lake, whose breadth a hair could have covered at a considerable distance from the eye, and of no appreciable height. we should not have suspected it to be visible if the indian had not drawn our attention to it. it was a remarkable kind of light to steer for,--daylight seen through a vista in the forest,--but visible as far as an ordinary beacon at night. we crossed a deep and wide bay which makes eastward north of kineo, leaving an island on our left, and keeping up the eastern side of the lake. this way or that led to some tomhegan or _socatarian_ stream, up which the indian had hunted, and whither i longed to go. the last name, however, had a bogus sound, too much like sectarian for me, as if a missionary had tampered with it; but i knew that the indians were very liberal. i think i should have inclined to the tomhegan first. we then crossed another broad bay, which, as we could no longer observe the shore particularly, afforded ample time for conversation. the indian said that he had got his money by hunting, mostly high up the west branch of the penobscot, and toward the head of the st. john; he had hunted there from a boy, and knew all about that region. his game had been beaver, otter, black cat (or fisher), sable, moose, etc. loup-cervier (or canada lynx) were plenty yet in burnt grounds. for food in the woods, he uses partridges, ducks, dried moose-meat, hedgehog, etc. loons, too, were good, only â��bile â��em good.â�� he told us at some length how he had suffered from starvation when a mere lad, being overtaken by winter when hunting with two grown indians in the northern part of maine, and obliged to leave their canoe on account of ice. pointing into the bay, he said that it was the way to various lakes which he knew. only solemn bear-haunted mountains, with their great wooded slopes, were visible; where, as man is not, we suppose some other power to be. my imagination personified the slopes themselves, as if by their very length they would waylay you, and compel you to camp again on them before night. some invisible glutton would seem to drop from the trees and gnaw at the heart of the solitary hunter who threaded those woods; and yet i was tempted to walk there. the indian said that he had been along there several times. i asked him how he guided himself in the woods. â��oh,â�� said he, â��i can tell good many ways.â�� when i pressed him further, he answered, â��sometimes i lookum side-hill,â�� and he glanced toward a high hill or mountain on the eastern shore, â��great difference between the north and south, see where the sun has shone most. so trees,--the large limbs bend toward south. sometimes i lookum locksâ�� (rocks). i asked what he saw on the rocks, but he did not describe anything in particular, answering vaguely, in a mysterious or drawling tone, â��bare locks on lake shore,--great difference between north, south, east, west, side,--can tell what the sun has shone on.â�� â��suppose,â�� said i, â��that i should take you in a dark night, right up here into the middle of the woods a hundred miles, set you down, and turn you round quickly twenty times, could you steer straight to oldtown?â�� â��oh, yer,â�� said he, â��have done pretty much same thing. i will tell you. some years ago i met an old white hunter at millinocket; very good hunter. he said he could go anywhere in the woods. he wanted to hunt with me that day, so we start. we chase a moose all the forenoon, round and round, till middle of afternoon, when we kill him. then i said to him, â��now you go straight to camp. donâ��t go round and round where weâ��ve been, but go straight.â�� he said, â��i canâ��t do that, i donâ��t know where i am.â�� â��where you think camp?â�� i asked. he pointed so. then i laugh at him. i take the lead and go right off the other way, cross our tracks many times, straight camp.â�� â��how do you do that?â�� asked i. â��oh, i canâ��t tell you,â�� he replied. â��great difference between me and white man.â�� it appeared as if the sources of information were so various that he did not give a distinct, conscious attention to any one, and so could not readily refer to any when questioned about it, but he found his way very much as an animal does. perhaps what is commonly called instinct in the animal, in this case is merely a sharpened and educated sense. often, when an indian says, â��i donâ��t know,â�� in regard to the route he is to take, he does not mean what a white man would by those words, for his indian instinct may tell him still as much as the most confident white man knows. he does not carry things in his head, nor remember the route exactly, like a white man, but relies on himself at the moment. not having experienced the need of the other sort of knowledge, all labeled and arranged, he has not acquired it. the white hunter with whom i talked in the stage knew some of the resources of the indian. he said that he steered by the wind, or by the limbs of the hemlocks, which were largest on the south side; also sometimes, when he knew that there was a lake near, by firing his gun and listening to hear the direction and distance of the echo from over it. the course we took over this lake, and others afterward, was rarely direct, but a succession of curves from point to point, digressing considerably into each of the bays; and this was not merely on account of the wind, for the indian, looking toward the middle of the lake, said it was hard to go there, easier to keep near the shore, because he thus got over it by successive reaches and saw by the shore how he got along. the following will suffice for a common experience in crossing lakes in a canoe. as the forenoon advanced, the wind increased. the last bay which we crossed before reaching the desolate pier at the northeast carry was two or three miles over, and the wind was southwesterly. after going a third of the way, the waves had increased so as occasionally to wash into the canoe, and we saw that it was worse and worse ahead. at first we might have turned about, but were not willing to. it would have been of no use to follow the course of the shore, for not only the distance would have been much greater, but the waves ran still higher there on account of the greater sweep the wind had. at any rate it would have been dangerous now to alter our course, because the waves would have struck us at an advantage. it will not do to meet them at right angles, for then they will wash in both sides, but you must take them quartering. so the indian stood up in the canoe, and exerted all his skill and strength for a mile or two, while i paddled right along in order to give him more steerage-way. for more than a mile he did not allow a single wave to strike the canoe as it would, but turned it quickly from this side to that, so that it would always be on or near the crest of a wave when it broke, where all its force was spent, and we merely settled down with it. at length i jumped out on to the end of the pier, against which the waves were dashing violently, in order to lighten the canoe, and catch it at the landing, which was not much sheltered; but just as i jumped we took in two or three gallons of water. i remarked to the indian, â��you managed that well,â�� to which he replied, â��ver few men do that. great many waves; when i look out for one, another come quick.â�� while the indian went to get cedar bark, etc., to carry his canoe with, we cooked the dinner on the shore, at this end of the carry, in the midst of a sprinkling rain. he prepared his canoe for carrying in this wise. he took a cedar shingle or splint eighteen inches long and four or five wide, rounded at one end, that the corners might not be in the way, and tied it with cedar bark by two holes made midway, near the edge on each side, to the middle cross-bar of the canoe. when the canoe was lifted upon his head bottom up, this shingle, with its rounded end uppermost, distributed the weight over his shoulders and head, while a band of cedar bark, tied to the cross-bar on each side of the shingle, passed round his breast, and another longer one, outside of the last, round his forehead; also a hand on each side-rail served to steer the canoe and keep it from rocking. he thus carried it with his shoulders, head, breast, forehead, and both hands, as if the upper part of his body were all one hand to clasp and hold it. if you know of a better way, i should like to hear of it. a cedar tree furnished all the gear in this case, as it had the woodwork of the canoe. one of the paddles rested on the cross-bars in the bows. i took the canoe upon my head and found that i could carry it with ease, though the straps were not fitted to my shoulders; but i let him carry it, not caring to establish a different precedent, though he said that if i would carry the canoe, he would take all the rest of the baggage, except my companionâ��s. this shingle remained tied to the cross-bar throughout the voyage, was always ready for the carries, and also served to protect the back of one passenger. we were obliged to go over this carry twice, our load was so great. but the carries were an agreeable variety, and we improved the opportunity to gather the rare plants which we had seen, when we returned empty handed. we reached the penobscot about four oâ��clock, and found there some st. francis indians encamped on the bank, in the same place where i camped with four indians four years before. they were making a canoe, and, as then, drying moose-meat. the meat looked very suitable to make a _black_ broth at least. our indian said it was not good. their camp was covered with spruce bark. they had got a young moose, taken in the river a fortnight before, confined in a sort of cage of logs piled up cob-fashion, seven or eight feet high. it was quite tame, about four feet high, and covered with moose-flies. there was a large quantity of cornel (_c. stolonifera_), red maple, and also willow and aspen boughs, stuck through between the logs on all sides, butt ends out, and on their leaves it was browsing. it looked at first as if it were in a bower rather than a pen. our indian said that _he_ used _black_ spruce roots to sew canoes with, obtaining it from high lands or mountains. the st. francis indian thought that _white_ spruce roots might be best. but the former said, â��no good, break, canâ��t split â��em;â�� also that they were hard to get, deep in ground, but the black were near the surface, on higher land, as well as tougher. he said that the white spruce was _subekoondark_, black, _skusk_. i told him i thought that i could make a canoe, but he expressed great doubt of it; at any rate, he thought that my work would not be â��neatâ�� the first time. an indian at greenville had told me that the winter bark, that is, bark taken off before the sap flows in may, was harder and much better than summer bark. having reloaded, we paddled down the penobscot, which, as the indian remarked, and even i detected, remembering how it looked before, was uncommonly full. we soon after saw a splendid yellow lily (_lilium canadense_) by the shore, which i plucked. it was six feet high, and had twelve flowers, in two whorls, forming a pyramid, such as i have seen in concord. we afterward saw many more thus tall along this stream, and also still more numerous on the east branch, and, on the latter, one which i thought approached yet nearer to the _lilium superbum_. the indian asked what we called it, and said that the â��lootsâ�� (roots) were good for soup, that is, to cook with meat, to thicken it, taking the place of flour. they get them in the fall. i dug some, and found a mass of bulbs pretty deep in the earth, two inches in diameter, looking, and even tasting, somewhat like raw green corn on the ear. when we had gone about three miles down the penobscot, we saw through the tree-tops a thunder-shower coming up in the west, and we looked out a camping-place in good season, about five oâ��clock, on the west side, not far below the mouth of what joe aitteon, in â��53, called lobster stream, coming from lobster pond. our present indian, however, did not admit this name, nor even that of _matahumkeag_, which is on the map, but called the lake _beskabekuk_. i will describe, once for all, the routine of camping at this season. we generally told the indian that we would stop at the first suitable place, so that he might be on the lookout for it. having observed a clear, hard, and flat beach to land on, free from mud, and from stones which would injure the canoe, one would run up the bank to see if there were open and level space enough for the camp between the trees, or if it could be easily cleared, preferring at the same time a cool place, on account of insects. sometimes we paddled a mile or more before finding one to our minds, for where the shore was suitable, the bank would often be too steep, or else too low and grassy, and therefore mosquitoey. we then took out the baggage and drew up the canoe, sometimes turning it over on shore for safety. the indian cut a path to the spot we had selected, which was usually within two or three rods of the water, and we carried up our baggage. one, perhaps, takes canoe birch bark, always at hand, and dead dry wood or bark, and kindles a fire five or six feet in front of where we intend to lie. it matters not, commonly, on which side this is, because there is little or no wind in so dense a wood at that season; and then he gets a kettle of water from the river, and takes out the pork, bread, coffee, etc., from their several packages. another, meanwhile, having the axe, cuts down the nearest dead rock maple or other dry hard wood, collecting several large logs to last through the night, also a green stake, with a notch or fork to it, which is slanted over the fire, perhaps resting on a rock or forked stake, to hang the kettle on, and two forked stakes and a pole for the tent. the third man pitches the tent, cuts a dozen or more pins with his knife, usually of moose-wood, the common underwood, to fasten it down with, and then collects an armful or two of fir twigs,[8] arbor-vitã¦, spruce, or hemlock, whichever is at hand, and makes the bed, beginning at either end, and laying the twigs wrong side up, in regular rows, covering the stub ends of the last row; first, however, filling the hollows, if there are any, with coarser material. wrangel says that his guides in siberia first strewed a quantity of dry brushwood on the ground, and then cedar twigs on that. commonly, by the time the bed is made, or within fifteen or twenty minutes, the water boils, the pork is fried, and supper is ready. we eat this sitting on the ground, or a stump, if there is any, around a large piece of birch bark for a table, each holding a dipper in one hand and a piece of ship-bread or fried pork in the other, frequently making a pass with his hand, or thrusting his head into the smoke, to avoid the mosquitoes. next, pipes are lit by those who smoke, and veils are donned by those who have them, and we hastily examine and dry our plants, anoint our faces and hands, and go to bed--and--the mosquitoes. though you have nothing to do but see the country, thereâ��s rarely any time to spare, hardly enough to examine a plant, before the night or drowsiness is upon you. such was the ordinary experience, but this evening we had camped earlier on account of the rain, and had more time. we found that our camp to-night was on an old, and now more than usually indistinct, supply road, running along the river. what is called a road there shows no ruts or trace of wheels, for they are not used; nor, indeed, of runners, since they are used only in the winter when the snow is several feet deep. it is only an indistinct vista through the wood, which it takes an experienced eye to detect. we had no sooner pitched our tent than the thunder-shower burst on us, and we hastily crept under it, drawing our bags after us, curious to see how much of a shelter our thin cotton roof was going to be in this excursion. though the violence of the rain forced a fine shower through the cloth before it was fairly wetted and shrunk, with which we were well bedewed, we managed to keep pretty dry, only a box of matches having been left out and spoiled, and before we were aware of it the shower was over, and only the dripping trees imprisoned us. wishing to see what fishes there were in the river there, we cast our lines over the wet bushes on the shore, but they were repeatedly swept down the swift stream in vain. so, leaving the indian, we took the canoe just before dark, and dropped down the river a few rods to fish at the mouth of a sluggish brook on the opposite side. we pushed up this a rod or two, where, perhaps, only a canoe had been before. but though there were a few small fishes, mostly chivin, there, we were soon driven off by the mosquitoes. while there we heard the indian fire his gun twice in such rapid succession that we thought it must be double-barreled, though we observed afterward that it was single. his object was to clean out and dry it after the rain, and he then loaded it with ball, being now on ground where he expected to meet with large game. this sudden, loud, crashing noise in the still aisles of the forest, affected me like an insult to nature, or ill manners at any rate, as if you were to fire a gun in a hall or temple. it was not heard far, however, except along the river, the sound being rapidly hushed up or absorbed by the damp trees and mossy ground. the indian made a little smothered fire of damp leaves close to the back of the camp, that the smoke might drive through and keep out the mosquitoes; but just before we fell asleep this suddenly blazed up, and came near setting fire to the tent. we were considerably molested by mosquitoes at this camp. * * * * * sunday, july 26. the note of the white-throated sparrow, a very inspiriting but almost wiry sound, was the first heard in the morning, and with this all the woods rang. this was the prevailing bird in the northern part of maine. the forest generally was all alive with them at this season, and they were proportionally numerous and musical about bangor. they evidently breed in that state. though commonly unseen, their simple _ah, te-te-te, te-te-te, te-te-te_, so sharp and piercing, was as distinct to the ear as the passage of a spark of fire shot into the darkest of the forest would be to the eye. i thought that they commonly uttered it as they flew. i hear this note for a few days only in the spring, as they go through concord, and in the fall see them again going southward, but then they are mute. we were commonly aroused by their lively strain very early. what a glorious time they must have in that wilderness, far from mankind and election day! i told the indian that we would go to church to chesuncook this (sunday) morning, some fifteen miles. it was settled weather at last. a few swallows flitted over the water, we heard maryland yellow-throats along the shore, the phebe notes of the chickadee, and, i believe, redstarts, and moose-flies of large size pursued us in midstream. the indian thought that we should lie by on sunday. said he, â��we come here lookum things, look all round; but come sunday, lock up all that, and then monday look again.â�� he spoke of an indian of his acquaintance who had been with some ministers to ktaadn, and had told him how they conducted. this he described in a low and solemn voice. â��they make a long prayer every morning and night, and at every meal. come sunday,â�� said he, â��they stop â��em, no go at all that day,--keep still,--preach all day,--first one, then another, just like church. oh, ver good men.â�� â��one day,â�� said he, â��going along a river, they came to the body of a man in the water, drowned good while, all ready fall to pieces. they go right ashore,--stop there, go no farther that day,--they have meeting there, preach and pray just like sunday. then they get poles and lift up the body, and they go back and carry the body with them. oh, they ver good men.â�� i judged from this account that their every camp was a camp-meeting, and they had mistaken their route,--they should have gone to eastham; that they wanted an opportunity to preach somewhere more than to see ktaadn. i read of another similar party that seem to have spent their time there singing the songs of zion. i was glad that i did not go to that mountain with such slow coaches. however, the indian added, plying the paddle all the while, that if we would go along, he must go with us, he our man, and he suppose that if he no takum pay for what he do sunday, then therâ��s no harm, but if he takum pay, then wrong. i told him that he was stricter than white men. nevertheless, i noticed that he did not forget to reckon in the sundays at last. he appeared to be a very religious man, and said his prayers in a loud voice, in indian, kneeling before the camp, morning and evening,--sometimes scrambling up again in haste when he had forgotten this, and saying them with great rapidity. in the course of the day, he remarked, not very originally, â��poor man rememberum god more than rich.â�� we soon passed the island where i had camped four years before, and i recognized the very spot. the deadwater, a mile or two below it, the indian called _beskabekukskishtuk_, from the lake _beskabekuk_, which empties in above. this deadwater, he said, was â��a great place for moose always.â�� we saw the grass bent where a moose came out the night before, and the indian said that he could smell one as far as he could see him; but, he added, that if he should see five or six to-day close by canoe, he no shoot â��em. accordingly, as he was the only one of the party who had a gun, or had come a-hunting, the moose were safe. just below this, a cat owl flew heavily over the stream, and he, asking if i knew what it was, imitated very well the common _hoo, hoo, hoo, hoorer, hoo_, of our woods; making a hard, guttural sound, â��ugh, ugh, ugh,--ugh, ugh.â�� when we passed the moose-horn, he said that it had no name. what joe aitteon had called ragmuff, he called _paytaytequick_, and said that it meant burnt ground stream. we stopped there, where i had stopped before, and i bathed in this tributary. it was shallow but cold, apparently too cold for the indian, who stood looking on. as we were pushing away again, a white-headed eagle sailed over our heads. a reach some miles above pine stream, where there were several islands, the indian said was _nonglangyis_ deadwater. pine stream he called black river, and said that its indian name was _karsaootuk_. he could go to caribou lake that way. we carried a part of the baggage about pine stream falls, while the indian went down in the canoe. a bangor merchant had told us that two men in his employ were drowned some time ago while passing these falls in a batteau, and a third clung to a rock all night, and was taken off in the morning. there were magnificent great purple fringed orchises on this carry and the neighboring shores. i measured the largest canoe birch which i saw in this journey near the end of the carry. it was 14â½ feet in circumference at two feet from the ground, but at five feet divided into three parts. the canoe birches thereabouts were commonly marked by conspicuous dark spiral ridges, with a groove between, so that i thought at first that they had been struck by lightning, but, as the indian said, it was evidently caused by the grain of the tree. he cut a small, woody knob, as big as a filbert, from the trunk of a fir, apparently an old balsam vesicle filled with wood, which he said was good medicine. after we had embarked and gone half a mile, my companion remembered that he had left his knife, and we paddled back to get it, against the strong and swift current. this taught us the difference between going up and down the stream, for while we were working our way back a quarter of a mile, we should have gone down a mile and a half at least. so we landed, and while he and the indian were gone back for it, i watched the motions of the foam, a kind of white water-fowl near the shore, forty or fifty rods below. it alternately appeared and disappeared behind the rock, being carried round by an eddy. even this semblance of life was interesting on that lonely river. immediately below these falls was the chesuncook deadwater, caused by the flowing back of the lake. as we paddled slowly over this, the indian told us a story of his hunting thereabouts, and something more interesting about himself. it appeared that he had represented his tribe at augusta, and also once at washington, where he had met some western chiefs. he had been consulted at augusta, and gave advice, which he said was followed, respecting the eastern boundary of maine, as determined by highlands and streams, at the time of the difficulties on that side. he was employed with the surveyors on the line. also he had called on daniel webster in boston, at the time of his bunker hill oration. i was surprised to hear him say that he liked to go to boston, new york, philadelphia, etc., etc.; that he would like to live there. but then, as if relenting a little, when he thought what a poor figure he would make there, he added, â��i suppose, i live in new york, i be poorest hunter, i expect.â�� he understood very well both his superiority and his inferiority to the whites. he criticised the people of the united states as compared with other nations, but the only distinct idea with which he labored was, that they were â��very strong,â�� but, like some individuals, â��too fast.â�� he must have the credit of saying this just before the general breaking down of railroads and banks. he had a great idea of education, and would occasionally break out into such expressions as this, â��kademy--a-cad-e-my--good thing--i suppose they usum fifth reader there.... you been college?â�� from this deadwater the outlines of the mountains about ktaadn were visible. the top of ktaadn was concealed by a cloud, but the souneunk mountains were nearer, and quite visible. we steered across the northwest end of the lake, from which we looked down south-southeast, the whole length to joe merry mountain, seen over its extremity. it is an agreeable change to cross a lake, after you have been shut up in the woods, not only on account of the greater expanse of water, but also of sky. it is one of the surprises which nature has in store for the traveler in the forest. to look down, in this case, over eighteen miles of water, was liberating and civilizing even. no doubt, the short distance to which you can see in the woods, and the general twilight, would at length react on the inhabitants, and make them salvages. the lakes also reveal the mountains, and give ample scope and range to our thought. the very gulls which we saw sitting on the rocks, like white specks, or circling about, reminded me of custom-house officers. already there were half a dozen log huts about this end of the lake, though so far from a road. i perceive that in these woods the earliest settlements are, for various reasons, clustering about the lakes, but partly, i think, for the sake of the neighborhood as the oldest clearings. they are forest schools already established,--great centres of light. water is a pioneer which the settler follows, taking advantage of its improvements. thus far only i had been before. about noon we turned northward, up a broad kind of estuary, and at its northeast corner found the caucomgomoc river, and after going about a mile from the lake, reached the umbazookskus, which comes in on the right at a point where the former river, coming from the west, turns short to the south. our course was up the umbazookskus, but as the indian knew of a good camping-place, that is, a cool place where there were few mosquitoes about half a mile farther up the caucomgomoc, we went thither. the latter river, judging from the map, is the longer and principal stream, and, therefore, its name must prevail below the junction. so quickly we changed the civilizing sky of chesuncook for the dark wood of the caucomgomoc. on reaching the indianâ��s camping-ground, on the south side, where the bank was about a dozen feet high, i read on the trunk of a fir tree, blazed by an axe, an inscription in charcoal which had been left by him. it was surmounted by a drawing of a bear paddling a canoe, which he said was the sign which had been used by his family always. the drawing, though rude, could not be mistaken for anything but a bear, and he doubted my ability to copy it. the inscription ran thus, _verbatim et literatim_. i interline the english of his indian as he gave it to me. [the figure of a bear in a boat.] july 26 1853 ---------- _niasoseb_ we alone joseph _polis elioi_ polis start _sia olta_ for oldtown _onke ni_ right away _quambi_ ----------- july 15 1855 _niasoseb_ he added now below:- 1857 july 26 jo. polis this was one of his homes. i saw where he had sometimes stretched his moose-hides on the opposite or sunny north side of the river, where there was a narrow meadow. after we had selected a place for our camp, and kindled our fire, almost exactly on the site of the indianâ��s last camp here, he, looking up, observed, â��that tree danger.â�� it was a dead part, more than a foot in diameter, of a large canoe birch, which branched at the ground. this branch, rising thirty feet or more, slanted directly over the spot which we had chosen for our bed. i told him to try it with his axe; but he could not shake it perceptibly, and therefore seemed inclined to disregard it, and my companion expressed his willingness to run the risk. but it seemed to me that we should be fools to lie under it, for though the lower part was firm, the top, for aught we knew, might be just ready to fall, and we should at any rate be very uneasy if the wind arose in the night. it is a common accident for men camping in the woods to be killed by a falling tree. so the camp was moved to the other side of the fire. it was, as usual, a damp and shaggy forest, that caucomgomoc one, and the most you knew about it was, that on this side it stretched toward the settlements, and on that to still more unfrequented regions. you carried so much topography in your mind always,--and sometimes it seemed to make a considerable difference whether you sat or lay nearer the settlements, or farther off, than your companions,--were the rear or frontier man of the camp. but there is really the same difference between our positions wherever we may be camped, and some are nearer the frontiers on feather-beds in the towns than others on fir twigs in the backwoods. the indian said that the umbazookskus, being a dead stream with broad meadows, was a good place for moose, and he frequently came a-hunting here, being out alone three weeks or more from oldtown. he sometimes, also, went a-hunting to the seboois lakes, taking the stage, with his gun and ammunition, axe and blankets, hard-bread and pork, perhaps for a hundred miles of the way, and jumped off at the wildest place on the road, where he was at once at home, and every rod was a tavern-site for him. then, after a short journey through the woods, he would build a spruce-bark canoe in one day, putting but few ribs into it, that it might be light, and, after doing his hunting with it on the lakes, would return with his furs the same way he had come. thus you have an indian availing himself cunningly of the advantages of civilization, without losing any of his woodcraft, but proving himself the more successful hunter for it. this man was very clever and quick to learn anything in his line. our tent was of a kind new to him; but when he had once seen it pitched, it was surprising how quickly he would find and prepare the pole and forked stakes to pitch it with, cutting and placing them right the first time, though i am sure that the majority of white men would have blundered several times. this river came from caucomgomoc lake, about ten miles farther up. though it was sluggish here, there were falls not far above us, and we saw the foam from them go by from time to time. the indian said that _caucomgomoc_ meant big-gull lake (_i. e._, herring gull, i suppose), gomoc meaning lake. hence this was _caucomgomoctook_, or the river from that lake. this was the penobscot _caucomgomoctook_; there was another st. john one not far north. he finds the eggs of this gull, sometimes twenty together, as big as henâ��s eggs, on rocky ledges on the west side of millinocket river, for instance, and eats them. now i thought i would observe how he spent his sunday. while i and my companion were looking about at the trees and river, he went to sleep. indeed, he improved every opportunity to get a nap, whatever the day. rambling about the woods at this camp, i noticed that they consisted chiefly of firs, black spruce, and some white, red maple, canoe birch, and, along the river, the hoary alder (_alnus incana_). i name them in the order of their abundance. the _viburnum nudum_ was a common shrub, and of smaller plants, there were the dwarf cornel, great round-leaved orchis, abundant and in bloom (a greenish-white flower growing in little communities), _uvularia grandiflora_, whose stem tasted like a cucumber, _pyrola secunda_, apparently the commonest pyrola in those woods, now out of bloom, _pyrola elliptica_, and _chiogenes hispidula_. the _clintonia borealis_, with ripe berries, was very abundant, and perfectly at home there. its leaves, disposed commonly in triangles about its stem, were just as handsomely formed and green, and its berries as blue and glossy, as if it grew by some botanistâ��s favorite path. i could trace the outlines of large birches that had fallen long ago, collapsed and rotted and turned to soil, by faint yellowish-green lines of feather-like moss, eighteen inches wide and twenty or thirty feet long, crossed by other similar lines. i heard a night-warbler, wood thrush, kingfisher, tweezer-bird or parti-colored warbler, and a nighthawk. i also heard and saw red squirrels, and heard a bullfrog. the indian said that he heard a snake. wild as it was, it was hard for me to get rid of the associations of the settlements. any steady and monotonous sound, to which i did not distinctly attend, passed for a sound of human industry. the waterfalls which i heard were not without their dams and mills to my imagination; and several times i found that i had been regarding the steady rushing sound of the wind from over the woods beyond the rivers as that of a train of cars,--the cars at quebec. our minds anywhere, when left to themselves, are always thus busily drawing conclusions from false premises. i asked the indian to make us a sugar-bowl of birch bark, which he did, using the great knife which dangled in a sheath from his belt; but the bark broke at the corners when he bent it up, and he said it was not good; that there was a great difference in this respect between the bark of one canoe birch and that of another, _i. e._, one cracked more easily than another. i used some thin and delicate sheets of this bark which he split and cut, in my flower-book; thinking it would be good to separate the dried specimens from the green. my companion, wishing to distinguish between the black and white spruce, asked polis to show him a twig of the latter, which he did at once, together with the black; indeed, he could distinguish them about as far as he could see them; but as the two twigs appeared very much alike, my companion asked the indian to point out the difference; whereupon the latter, taking the twigs, instantly remarked, as he passed his hand over them successively in a stroking manner, that the white was rough (_i. e._, the needles stood up nearly perpendicular), but the black smooth (_i. e._, as if bent or combed down). this was an obvious difference, both to sight and touch. however, if i remember rightly, this would not serve to distinguish the white spruce from the light-colored variety of the black. i asked him to let me see him get some black spruce root, and make some thread. whereupon, without looking up at the trees overhead, he began to grub in the ground, instantly distinguishing the black spruce roots, and cutting off a slender one, three or four feet long, and as big as a pipe-stem, he split the end with his knife, and, taking a half between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, rapidly separated its whole length into two equal semicylindrical halves; then giving me another root, he said, â��you try.â�� but in my hands it immediately ran off one side, and i got only a very short piece. in short, though it looked very easy, i found that there was a great art in splitting these roots. the split is skillfully humored by bending short with this hand or that, and so kept in the middle. he then took off the bark from each half, pressing a short piece of cedar bark against the convex side with both hands, while he drew the root upward with his teeth. an indianâ��s teeth are strong, and i noticed that he used his often where we should have used a hand. they amounted to a third hand. he thus obtained, in a moment, a very neat, tough, and flexible string, which he could tie into a knot, or make into a fish-line even. it is said that in norway and sweden the roots of the norway spruce (_abies excelsa_) are used in the same way for the same purpose. he said that you would be obliged to give half a dollar for spruce root enough for a canoe, thus prepared. he had hired the sewing of his own canoe, though he made all the rest. the root in his canoe was of a pale slate-color, probably acquired by exposure to the weather, or perhaps from being boiled in water first. he had discovered the day before that his canoe leaked a little, and said that it was owing to stepping into it violently, which forced the water under the edge of the horizontal seams on the side. i asked him where he would get pitch to mend it with, for they commonly use hard pitch, obtained of the whites at oldtown. he said that he could make something very similar, and equally good, not of spruce gum, or the like, but of material which we had with us; and he wished me to guess what. but i could not, and he would not tell me, though he showed me a ball of it when made, as big as a pea, and like black pitch, saying, at last, that there were some things which a man did not tell even his wife. it may have been his own discovery. in arnoldâ��s expedition the pioneers used for their canoe â��the turpentine of the pine, and the scrapings of the pork-bag.â�� being curious to see what kind of fishes there were in this dark, deep, sluggish river, i cast in my line just before night, and caught several small somewhat yellowish sucker-like fishes, which the indian at once rejected, saying that they were _michigan_ fish (_i. e._, _soft_ and _stinking_ fish) and good for nothing. also, he would not touch a pout, which i caught, and said that neither indians nor whites thereabouts ever ate them, which i thought was singular, since they are esteemed in massachusetts, and he had told me that he ate hedgehogs, loons, etc. but he said that some small silvery fishes, which i called white chivin, which were similar in size and form to the first, were the best fish in the penobscot waters, and if i would toss them up the bank to him, he would cook them for me. after cleaning them, not very carefully, leaving the heads on, he laid them on the coals and so broiled them. returning from a short walk, he brought a vine in his hand, and asked me if i knew what it was, saying that it made the best tea of anything in the woods. it was the creeping snowberry (_chiogenes hispidula_), which was quite common there, its berries just grown. he called it _cowosnebagosar_, which name implies that it grows where old prostrate trunks have collapsed and rotted. so we determined to have some tea made of this to-night. it had a slight checkerberry flavor, and we both agreed that it was really better than the black tea which we had brought. we thought it quite a discovery, and that it might well be dried, and sold in the shops. i, for one, however, am not an old tea-drinker, and cannot speak with authority to others. it would have been particularly good to carry along for a cold drink during the day, the water thereabouts being invariably warm. the indian said that they also used for tea a certain herb which grew in low ground, which he did not find there, and ledum, or labrador tea, which i have since found and tried in concord; also hemlock leaves, the last especially in the winter, when the other plants were covered with snow; and various other things; but he did not approve of arbor-vitã¦, which i said i had drunk in those woods. we could have had a new kind of tea every night. just before night we saw a _musquash_ (he did not say muskrat), the only one we saw in this voyage, swimming downward on the opposite side of the stream. the indian, wishing to get one to eat, hushed us, saying, â��stop, me call â��em;â�� and, sitting flat on the bank, he began to make a curious squeaking, wiry sound with his lips, exerting himself considerably. i was greatly surprised,--thought that i had at last got into the wilderness, and that he was a wild man indeed, to be talking to a musquash! i did not know which of the two was the strangest to me. he seemed suddenly to have quite forsaken humanity, and gone over to the musquash side. the musquash, however, as near as i could see, did not turn aside, though he may have hesitated a little, and the indian said that he saw our fire; but it was evident that he was in the habit of calling the musquash to him, as he said. an acquaintance of mine who was hunting moose in those woods a month after this, tells me that his indian in this way repeatedly called the musquash within reach of his paddle in the moonlight, and struck at them. the indian said a particularly long prayer this sunday evening, as if to atone for working in the morning. * * * * * monday, july 27. having rapidly loaded the canoe, which the indian always carefully attended to, that it might be well trimmed, and each having taken a look, as usual, to see that nothing was left, we set out again descending the caucomgomoc, and turning northeasterly up the _umbazookskus_. this name, the indian said, meant much meadow river. we found it a very meadowy stream, and deadwater, and now very wide on account of the rains, though, he said, it was sometimes quite narrow. the space between the woods, chiefly bare meadow, was from fifty to two hundred rods in breadth, and is a rare place for moose. it reminded me of the concord; and what increased the resemblance was one old musquash-house almost afloat. in the water on the meadows grew sedges, wool-grass, the common blue flag abundantly, its flower just showing itself above the high water, as if it were a blue water-lily, and higher in the meadows a great many clumps of a peculiar narrow-leaved willow (_salix petiolaris_), which is common in our river meadows. it was the prevailing one here, and the indian said that the musquash ate much of it; and here also grew the red osier (_cornus stolonifera_), its large fruit now whitish. though it was still early in the morning, we saw nighthawks circling over the meadow, and as usual heard the pepe (_muscicapa cooperi_), which is one of the prevailing birds in these woods, and the robin. it was unusual for the woods to be so distant from the shore, and there was quite an echo from them, but when i was shouting in order to awake it, the indian reminded me that i should scare the moose, which he was looking out for, and which we all wanted to see. the word for echo was _pockadunkquaywayle_. a broad belt of dead larch trees along the distant edge of the meadow, against the forest on each side, increased the usual wildness of the scenery. the indian called these juniper, and said that they had been killed by the backwater caused by the dam at the outlet of chesuncook lake, some twenty miles distant. i plucked at the waterâ��s edge the _asclepias incarnata_, with quite handsome flowers, a brighter red than our variety (the _pulchra_). it was the only form of it which i saw there. having paddled several miles up the umbazookskus, it suddenly contracted to a mere brook, narrow and swift, the larches and other trees approaching the bank and leaving no open meadow, and we landed to get a black spruce pole for pushing against the stream. this was the first occasion for one. the one selected was quite slender, cut about ten feet long, merely whittled to a point, and the bark shaved off. the stream, though narrow and swift, was still deep, with a muddy bottom, as i proved by diving to it. beside the plants which i have mentioned, i observed on the bank here the _salix cordata_ and _rostrata_, _ranunculus recurvatus_, and _rubus triflorus_ with ripe fruit. while we were thus employed, two indians in a canoe hove in sight round the bushes, coming down stream. our indian knew one of them, an old man, and fell into conversation with him in indian. he belonged at the foot of moosehead. the other was of another tribe. they were returning from hunting. i asked the younger if they had seen any moose, to which he said no; but i, seeing the moose-hides sticking out from a great bundle made with their blankets in the middle of the canoe, added, â��only their hides.â�� as he was a foreigner, he may have wished to deceive me, for it is against the law for white men and foreigners to kill moose in maine at this season. but perhaps he need not have been alarmed, for the moose-wardens are not very particular. i heard quite directly of one who being asked by a white man going into the woods what he would say if he killed a moose, answered, â��if you bring me a quarter of it, i guess you wonâ��t be troubled.â�� his duty being, as he said, only to prevent the â��indiscriminateâ�� slaughter of them for their hides. i suppose that he would consider it an _indiscriminate_ slaughter when a quarter was not reserved for himself. such are the perquisites of this office. we continued along through the most extensive larch wood which i had seen,--tall and slender trees with fantastic branches. but though this was the prevailing tree here, i do not remember that we saw any afterward. you do not find straggling trees of this species here and there throughout the wood, but rather a little forest of them. the same is the case with the white and red pines, and some other trees, greatly to the convenience of the lumberer. they are of a social habit, growing in â��veins,â�� â��clumps,â�� â��groups,â�� or â��communities,â�� as the explorers call them, distinguishing them far away, from the top of a hill or a tree, the white pines towering above the surrounding forest, or else they form extensive forests by themselves. i should have liked to come across a large community of pines, which had never been invaded by the lumbering army. we saw some fresh moose-tracks along the shore, but the indian said that the moose were not driven out of the woods by the flies, as usual at this season, on account of the abundance of water everywhere. the stream was only from one and one half to three rods wide, quite winding, with occasional small islands, meadows, and some very swift and shallow places. when we came to an island, the indian never hesitated which side to take, as if the current told him which was the shortest and deepest. it was lucky for us that the water was so high. we had to walk but once on this stream, carrying a part of the load, at a swift and shallow reach, while he got up with the canoe, not being obliged to take out, though he said it was very strong water. once or twice we passed the red wreck of a batteau which had been stove some spring. while making this portage i saw many splendid specimens of the great purple fringed orchis, three feet high. it is remarkable that such delicate flowers should here adorn these wilderness paths. having resumed our seats in the canoe, i felt the indian wiping my back, which he had accidentally spat upon. he said it was a sign that i was going to be married. the umbazookskus river is called ten miles long. having poled up the narrowest part some three or four miles, the next opening in the sky was over umbazookskus lake, which we suddenly entered about eleven oâ��clock in the forenoon. it stretches northwesterly four or five miles, with what the indian called the caucomgomoc mountain seen far beyond it. it was an agreeable change. this lake was very shallow a long distance from the shore, and i saw stone-heaps on the bottom, like those in the assabet at home. the canoe ran into one. the indian thought that they were made by an eel. joe aitteon in 1853 thought that they were made by chub. we crossed the southeast end of the lake to the carry into mud pond. umbazookskus lake is the head of the penobscot in this direction, and mud pond is the nearest head of the allegash, one of the chief sources of the st. john. hodge, who went through this way to the st. lawrence in the service of the state, calls the portage here a mile and three quarters long, and states that mud pond has been found to be fourteen feet higher than umbazookskus lake. as the west branch of the penobscot at the moosehead carry is considered about twenty-five feet lower than moosehead lake, it appears that the penobscot in the upper part of its course runs in a broad and shallow valley, between the kennebec and st. john, and lower than either of them, though, judging from the map, you might expect it to be the highest. mud pond is about halfway from umbazookskus to chamberlain lake, into which it empties, and to which we were bound. the indian said that this was the wettest carry in the state, and as the season was a very wet one, we anticipated an unpleasant walk. as usual he made one large bundle of the pork-keg, cooking-utensils, and other loose traps, by tying them up in his blanket. we should be obliged to go over the carry twice, and our method was to carry one half part way, and then go back for the rest. our path ran close by the door of a log hut in a clearing at this end of the carry, which the indian, who alone entered it, found to be occupied by a canadian and his family, and that the man had been blind for a year. he seemed peculiarly unfortunate to be taken blind there, where there were so few eyes to see for him. he could not even be led out of that country by a dog, but must be taken down the rapids as passively as a barrel of flour. this was the first house above chesuncook, and the last on the penobscot waters, and was built here, no doubt, because it was the route of the lumberers in the winter and spring. after a slight ascent from the lake through the springy soil of the canadianâ��s clearing, we entered on a level and very wet and rocky path through the universal dense evergreen forest, a loosely paved gutter merely, where we went leaping from rock to rock and from side to side, in the vain attempt to keep out of the water and mud. we concluded that it was yet penobscot water, though there was no flow to it. it was on this carry that the white hunter whom i met in the stage, as he told me, had shot two bears a few months before. they stood directly in the path, and did not turn out for him. they might be excused for not turning out there, or only taking the right as the law directs. he said that at this season bears were found on the mountains and hillsides in search of berries, and were apt to be saucy,--that we might come across them up trout stream; and he added, what i hardly credited, that many indians slept in their canoes, not daring to sleep on land, on account of them. here commences what was called, twenty years ago, the best timber land in the state. this very spot was described as â��covered with the greatest abundance of pine,â�� but now this appeared to me, comparatively, an uncommon tree there,--and yet you did not see where any more could have stood, amid the dense growth of cedar, fir, etc. it was then proposed to cut a canal from lake to lake here, but the outlet was finally made farther east, at telos lake, as we shall see. the indian with his canoe soon disappeared before us; but ere long he came back and told us to take a path which turned off westward, it being better walking, and, at my suggestion, he agreed to leave a bough in the regular carry at that place, that we might not pass it by mistake. thereafter, he said, we were to keep the main path, and he added, â��you see â��em my tracks.â�� but i had not much faith that we could distinguish his tracks, since others had passed over the carry within a few days. we turned off at the right place, but were soon confused by numerous logging-paths, coming into the one we were on, by which lumberers had been to pick out those pines which i have mentioned. however, we kept what we considered the main path, though it was a winding one, and in this, at long intervals, we distinguished a faint trace of a footstep. this, though comparatively unworn, was at first a better, or, at least, a drier road than the regular carry which we had left. it led through an arbor-vit㦠wilderness of the grimmest character. the great fallen and rotting trees had been cut through and rolled aside, and their huge trunks abutted on the path on each side, while others still lay across it two or three feet high. it was impossible for us to discern the indianâ��s trail in the elastic moss, which, like a thick carpet, covered every rock and fallen tree, as well as the earth. nevertheless, i did occasionally detect the track of a man, and i gave myself some credit for it. i carried my whole load at once, a heavy knapsack, and a large india-rubber bag, containing our bread and a blanket, swung on a paddle; in all, about sixty pounds; but my companion preferred to make two journeys, by short stages, while i waited for him. we could not be sure that we were not depositing our loads each time farther off from the true path. as i sat waiting for my companion, he would seem to be gone a long time, and i had ample opportunity to make observations on the forest. i now first began to be seriously molested by the black fly, a very small but perfectly formed fly of that color, about one tenth of an inch long, which i first felt, and then saw, in swarms about me, as i sat by a wider and more than usually doubtful fork in this dark forest path. the hunters tell bloody stories about them,--how they settle in a ring about your neck, before you know it, and are wiped off in great numbers with your blood. but remembering that i had a wash in my knapsack, prepared by a thoughtful hand in bangor, i made haste to apply it to my face and hands, and was glad to find it effectual, as long as it was fresh, or for twenty minutes, not only against black flies, but all the insects that molested us. they would not alight on the part thus defended. it was composed of sweet oil and oil of turpentine, with a little oil of spearmint, and camphor. however, i finally concluded that the remedy was worse than the disease. it was so disagreeable and inconvenient to have your face and hands covered with such a mixture. three large slate-colored birds of the jay genus (_garrulus canadensis_), the canada jay, moose-bird, meat-bird, or what not, came flitting silently and by degrees toward me, and hopped down the limbs inquisitively to within seven or eight feet. they were more clumsy and not nearly so handsome as the bluejay. fish hawks, from the lake, uttered their sharp whistling notes low over the top of the forest near me, as if they were anxious about a nest there. after i had sat there some time, i noticed at this fork in the path a tree which had been blazed, and the letters â��chamb. l.â�� written on it with red chalk. this i knew to mean chamberlain lake. so i concluded that on the whole we were on the right course, though as we had come nearly two miles, and saw no signs of mud pond, i did harbor the suspicion that we might be on a direct course to chamberlain lake, leaving out mud pond. this i found by my map would be about five miles northeasterly, and i then took the bearing by my compass. my companion having returned with his bag, and also defended his face and hands with the insect-wash, we set forward again. the walking rapidly grew worse, and the path more indistinct, and at length, after passing through a patch of _calla palustris_, still abundantly in bloom, we found ourselves in a more open and regular swamp, made less passable than ordinary by the unusual wetness of the season. we sank a foot deep in water and mud at every step, and sometimes up to our knees, and the trail was almost obliterated, being no more than that a musquash leaves in similar places, when he parts the floating sedge. in fact, it probably was a musquash trail in some places. we concluded that if mud pond was as muddy as the approach to it was wet, it certainly deserved its name. it would have been amusing to behold the dogged and deliberate pace at which we entered that swamp, without interchanging a word, as if determined to go through it, though it should come up to our necks. having penetrated a considerable distance into this, and found a tussock on which we could deposit our loads, though there was no place to sit, my companion went back for the rest of his pack. i had thought to observe on this carry when we crossed the dividing line between the penobscot and st. john, but as my feet had hardly been out of water the whole distance, and it was all level and stagnant, i began to despair of finding it. i remembered hearing a good deal about the â��highlandsâ�� dividing the waters of the penobscot from those of the st. john, as well as the st. lawrence, at the time of the northeast boundary dispute, and i observed by my map, that the line claimed by great britain as the boundary prior to 1842 passed between umbazookskus lake and mud pond, so that we had either crossed or were then on it. these, then, according to _her_ interpretation of the treaty of â��83, were the â��highlands which divide those rivers that empty themselves into the st. lawrence from those which fall into the atlantic ocean.â�� truly an interesting spot to stand on,--if that were it,--though you could not sit down there. i thought that if the commissioners themselves, and the king of holland with them, had spent a few days here, with their packs upon their backs, looking for that â��highland,â�� they would have had an interesting time, and perhaps it would have modified their views of the question somewhat. the king of holland would have been in his element. such were my meditations while my companion was gone back for his bag. it was a cedar swamp, through which the peculiar note of the white-throated sparrow rang loud and clear. there grew the side-saddle flower, labrador tea, _kalmia glauca_, and, what was new to me, the low birch (_betula pumila_), a little round-leafed shrub, two or three feet high only. we thought to name this swamp after the latter. after a long while my companion came back, and the indian with him. we had taken the wrong road, and the indian had lost us. he had very wisely gone back to the canadianâ��s camp, and asked him which way we had probably gone, since he could better understand the ways of white men, and he told him correctly that we had undoubtedly taken the supply road to chamberlain lake (slender supplies they would get over such a road at this season). the indian was greatly surprised that we should have taken what he called a â��towâ�� (_i. e._, tote or toting or supply) road, instead of a carry path,--that we had not followed his tracks,--said it was â��strange,â�� and evidently thought little of our woodcraft. having held a consultation, and eaten a mouthful of bread, we concluded that it would perhaps be nearer for us two now to keep on to chamberlain lake, omitting mud pond, than to go back and start anew for the last place, though the indian had never been through this way, and knew nothing about it. in the meanwhile he would go back and finish carrying over his canoe and bundle to mud pond, cross that, and go down its outlet and up chamberlain lake, and trust to meet us there before night. it was now a little after noon. he supposed that the water in which we stood had flowed back from mud pond, which could not be far off eastward, but was unapproachable through the dense cedar swamp. keeping on, we were ere long agreeably disappointed by reaching firmer ground, and we crossed a ridge where the path was more distinct, but there was never any outlook over the forest. while descending the last, i saw many specimens of the great round-leaved orchis, of large size; one which i measured had leaves, as usual, flat on the ground, nine and a half inches long, and nine wide, and was two feet high. the dark, damp wilderness is favorable to some of these orchidaceous plants, though they are too delicate for cultivation. i also saw the swamp gooseberry (_rides lacustre_), with green fruit, and in all the low ground, where it was not too wet, the _rubus triflorus_ in fruit. at one place i heard a very clear and piercing note from a small hawk, like a single note from a white-throated sparrow, only very much louder, as he dashed through the tree-tops over my head. i wondered that he allowed himself to be disturbed by our presence, since it seemed as if he could not easily find his nest again himself in that wilderness. we also saw and heard several times the red squirrel, and often, as before observed, the bluish scales of the fir cones which it had left on a rock or fallen tree. this, according to the indian, is the only squirrel found in those woods, except a very few striped ones. it must have a solitary time in that dark evergreen forest, where there is so little life, seventy-five miles from a road as we had come. i wondered how he could call any particular tree there his home; and yet he would run up the stem of one out of the myriads, as if it were an old road to him. how can a hawk ever find him there? i fancied that he must be glad to see us, though he did seem to chide us. one of those sombre fir and spruce woods is not complete unless you hear from out its cavernous mossy and twiggy recesses his fine alarum,--his spruce voice, like the working of the sap through some crack in a tree,--the working of the spruce beer. such an impertinent fellow would occasionally try to alarm the wood about me. â��oh,â�� said i, â��i am well acquainted with your family, i know your cousins in concord very well. guess the mailâ��s irregular in these parts, and youâ��d like to hear from â��em.â�� but my overtures were vain, for he would withdraw by his aerial turnpikes into a more distant cedar-top, and spring his rattle again. we then entered another swamp, at a necessarily slow pace, where the walking was worse than ever, not only on account of the water, but the fallen timber, which often obliterated the indistinct trail entirely. the fallen trees were so numerous, that for long distances the route was through a succession of small yards, where we climbed over fences as high as our heads, down into water often up to our knees, and then over another fence into a second yard, and so on; and, going back for his bag, my companion once lost his way and came back without it. in many places the canoe would have run if it had not been for the fallen timber. again it would be more open, but equally wet, too wet for trees to grow, and no place to sit down. it was a mossy swamp, which it required the long legs of a moose to traverse, and it is very likely that we scared some of them in our transit, though we saw none. it was ready to echo the growl of a bear, the howl of a wolf, or the scream of a panther; but when you get fairly into the middle of one of these grim forests, you are surprised to find that the larger inhabitants are not at home commonly, but have left only a puny red squirrel to bark at you. generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling. i did, however, see one dead porcupine; perhaps he had succumbed to the difficulties of the way. these bristly fellows are a very suitable small fruit of such unkempt wildernesses. making a logging-road in the maine woods is called â��swampingâ�� it, and they who do the work are called â��swampers.â�� i now perceived the fitness of the term. this was the most perfectly swamped of all the roads i ever saw. nature must have cooperated with art here. however, i suppose they would tell you that this name took its origin from the fact that the chief work of roadmakers in those woods is to make the swamps passable. we came to a stream where the bridge, which had been made of logs tied together with cedar bark, had been broken up, and we got over as we could. this probably emptied into mud pond, and perhaps the indian might have come up it and taken us in there if he had known it. such as it was, this ruined bridge was the chief evidence that we were on a path of any kind. we then crossed another low rising ground, and i, who wore shoes, had an opportunity to wring out my stockings, but my companion, who used boots, had found that this was not a safe experiment for him, for he might not be able to get his wet boots on again. he went over the whole ground, or water, three times, for which reason our progress was very slow; beside that the water softened our feet, and to some extent unfitted them for walking. as i sat waiting for him, it would naturally seem an unaccountable time that he was gone. therefore, as i could see through the woods that the sun was getting low, and it was uncertain how far the lake might be, even if we were on the right course, and in what part of the world we should find ourselves at nightfall, i proposed that i should push through with what speed i could, leaving boughs to mark my path, and find the lake and the indian, if possible, before night, and send the latter back to carry my companionâ��s bag. having gone about a mile, and got into low ground again, i heard a noise like the note of an owl, which i soon discovered to be made by the indian, and, answering him, we soon came together. he had reached the lake, after crossing mud pond, and running some rapids below it, and had come up about a mile and a half on our path. if he had not come back to meet us, we probably should not have found him that night, for the path branched once or twice before reaching this particular part of the lake. so he went back for my companion and his bag, while i kept on. having waded through another stream, where the bridge of logs had been broken up and half floated away,--and this was not altogether worse than our ordinary walking, since it was less muddy,--we continued on, through alternate mud and water, to the shore of apmoojenegamook lake, which we reached in season for a late supper, instead of dining there, as we had expected, having gone without our dinner. it was at least five miles by the way we had come, and as my companion had gone over most of it three times, he had walked full a dozen miles, bad as it was. in the winter, when the water is frozen, and the snow is four feet deep, it is no doubt a tolerable path to a footman. as it was, i would not have missed that walk for a good deal. if you want an exact recipe for making such a road, take one part mud pond, and dilute it with equal parts of umbazookskus and apmoojenegamook; then send a family of musquash through to locate it, look after the grades and culverts, and finish it to their minds, and let a hurricane follow to do the fencing. we had come out on a point extending into apmoojenegamook, or chamberlain lake, west of the outlet of mud pond, where there was a broad, gravelly, and rocky shore, encumbered with bleached logs and trees. we were rejoiced to see such dry things in that part of the world. but at first we did not attend to dryness so much as to mud and wetness. we all three walked into the lake up to our middle to wash our clothes. this was another noble lake, called twelve miles long, east and west; if you add telos lake, which, since the dam was built, has been connected with it by dead water, it will be twenty; and it is apparently from a mile and a half to two miles wide. we were about midway its length, on the south side. we could see the only clearing in these parts, called the â��chamberlain farm,â�� with two or three log buildings close together, on the opposite shore, some two and a half miles distant. the smoke of our fire on the shore brought over two men in a canoe from the farm, that being a common signal agreed on when one wishes to cross. it took them about half an hour to come over, and they had their labor for their pains this time. even the english name of the lake had a wild, woodland sound, reminding me of that chamberlain who killed paugus at lovewellâ��s fight. after putting on such dry clothes as we had, and hanging the others to dry on the pole which the indian arranged over the fire, we ate our supper, and lay down on the pebbly shore with our feet to the fire, without pitching our tent, making a thin bed of grass to cover the stones. here first i was molested by the little midge called the no-see-em (_simulium nocivum_,--the latter word is not the latin for no-see-em), especially over the sand at the waterâ��s edge, for it is a kind of sand-fly. you would not observe them but for their light-colored wings. they are said to get under your clothes, and produce a feverish heat, which i suppose was what i felt that night. our insect foes in this excursion, to sum them up, were, first, mosquitoes, the chief ones, but only troublesome at night, or when we sat still on shore by day; second, black flies (_simulium molestum_), which molested us more or less on the carries by day, as i have before described, and sometimes in narrower parts of the stream. harris mistakes when he says that they are not seen after june. third, moose-flies. the big ones, polis said, were called _bososquasis_. it is a stout, brown fly, much like a horse-fly, about eleven sixteenths of an inch long, commonly rusty-colored beneath, with unspotted wings. they can bite smartly, according to polis, but are easily avoided or killed. fourth, the no-see-ems above mentioned. of all these, the mosquitoes are the only ones that troubled me seriously; but, as i was provided with a wash and a veil, they have not made any deep impression. the indian would not use our wash to protect his face and hands, for fear that it would hurt his skin, nor had he any veil; he, therefore, suffered from insects now, and throughout this journey, more than either of us. i think that he suffered more than i did, when neither of us was protected. he regularly tied up his face in his handkerchief, and buried it in his blanket, and he now finally lay down on the sand between us and the fire for the sake of the smoke, which he tried to make enter his blanket about his face, and for the same purpose he lit his pipe and breathed the smoke into his blanket. as we lay thus on the shore, with nothing between us and the stars, i inquired what stars he was acquainted with, or had names for. they were the great bear, which he called by this name, the seven stars, which he had no english name for, â��the morning star,â�� and â��the north star.â�� in the middle of the night, as indeed each time that we lay on the shore of a lake, we heard the voice of the loon, loud and distinct, from far over the lake. it is a very wild sound, quite in keeping with the place and the circumstances of the traveler, and very unlike the voice of a bird. i could lie awake for hours listening to it, it is so thrilling. when camping in such a wilderness as this, you are prepared to hear sounds from some of its inhabitants which will give voice to its wildness. some idea of bears, wolves, or panthers runs in your head naturally, and when this note is first heard very far off at midnight, as you lie with your ear to the ground,--the forest being perfectly still about you, you take it for granted that it is the voice of a wolf or some other wild beast, for only the last part is heard when at a distance,--you conclude that it is a pack of wolves, baying the moon, or, perchance, cantering after a moose. strange as it may seem, the â��mooingâ�� of a cow on a mountain-side comes nearest to my idea of the voice of a bear; and this birdâ��s note resembled that. it was the unfailing and characteristic sound of those lakes. we were not so lucky as to hear wolves howl, though that is an occasional serenade. some friends of mine, who two years ago went up the caucomgomoc river, were serenaded by wolves while moose-hunting by moonlight. it was a sudden burst, as if a hundred demons had broke loose,--a startling sound enough, which, if any, would make your hair stand on end, and all was still again. it lasted but a moment, and youâ��d have thought there were twenty of them, when probably there were only two or three. they heard it twice only, and they said that it gave expression to the wilderness which it lacked before. i heard of some men who, while skinning a moose lately in those woods, were driven off from the carcass by a pack of wolves, which ate it up. this of the loon--i do not mean its laugh, but its looning,--is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my ear,--_hoo-hoo-ooooo_, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. i have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all. formerly, when lying awake at midnight in those woods, i had listened to hear some words or syllables of their language, but it chanced that i listened in vain until i heard the cry of the loon. i have heard it occasionally on the ponds of my native town, but there its wildness is not enhanced by the surrounding scenery. i was awakened at midnight by some heavy, low-flying bird, probably a loon, flapping by close over my head, along the shore. so, turning the other side of my half-clad body to the fire, i sought slumber again. * * * * * tuesday, july 28. when we awoke, we found a heavy dew on our blankets. i lay awake very early, and listened to the clear, shrill _ah, te te, te te, te_ of the white-throated sparrow, repeated at short intervals, without the least variation, for half an hour, as if it could not enough express its happiness. whether my companions heard it or not, i know not, but it was a kind of matins to me, and the event of that forenoon. it was a pleasant sunrise, and we had a view of the mountains in the southeast. ktaadn appeared about southeast by south. a double-topped mountain, about southeast by east, and another portion of the same, east-southeast. the last the indian called nerlumskeechticook, and said that it was at the head of the east branch, and we should pass near it on our return that way. we did some more washing in the lake this morning, and with our clothes hung about on the dead trees and rocks, the shore looked like washing-day at home. the indian, taking the hint, borrowed the soap, and, walking into the lake, washed his only cotton shirt on his person, then put on his pants and let it dry on him. i observed that he wore a cotton shirt, originally white, a greenish flannel one over it, but no waistcoat, flannel drawers, and strong linen or duck pants, which also had been white, blue woolen stockings, cowhide boots, and a kossuth hat. he carried no change of clothing, but putting on a stout, thick jacket, which he laid aside in the canoe, and seizing a full-sized axe, his gun and ammunition, and a blanket, which would do for a sail or knapsack, if wanted, and strapping on his belt, which contained a large sheath-knife, he walked off at once, ready to be gone all summer. this looked very independent; a few simple and effective tools, and no india-rubber clothing. he was always the first ready to start in the morning, and if it had not held some of our property, would not have been obliged to roll up his blanket. instead of carrying a large bundle of his own extra clothing, etc., he brought back the greatcoats of moose tied up in his blanket. i found that his outfit was the result of a long experience, and in the main hardly to be improved on, unless by washing and an extra shirt. wanting a button here, he walked off to a place where some indians had recently encamped, and searched for one, but i believe in vain. having softened our stiffened boots and shoes with the pork fat, the usual disposition of what was left at breakfast, we crossed the lake early, steering in a diagonal direction, northeasterly about four miles, to the outlet, which was not to be discovered till we were close to it. the indian name, _apmoojenegamook_, means lake that is crossed, because the usual course lies across, and not along it. this is the largest of the allegash lakes, and was the first st. john water that we floated on. it is shaped in the main like chesuncook. there are no mountains or high hills very near it. at bangor we had been told of a township many miles farther northwest; it was indicated to us as containing the highest land thereabouts, where, by climbing a particular tree in the forest, we could get a general idea of the country. i have no doubt that the last was good advice, but we did not go there. we did not intend to go far down the allegash, but merely to get a view of the great lakes which are its source, and then return this way to the east branch of the penobscot. the water now, by good rights, flowed northward, if it could be said to flow at all. after reaching the middle of the lake, we found the waves as usual pretty high, and the indian warned my companion, who was nodding, that he must not allow himself to fall asleep in the canoe lest he should upset us; adding, that when indians want to sleep in a canoe, they lie down straight on the bottom. but in this crowded one that was impossible. however, he said that he would nudge him if he saw him nodding. a belt of dead trees stood all around the lake, some far out in the water, with others prostrate behind them, and they made the shore, for the most part, almost inaccessible. this is the effect of the dam at the outlet. thus the natural sandy or rocky shore, with its green fringe, was concealed and destroyed. we coasted westward along the north side, searching for the outlet, about one quarter of a mile distant from this savage-looking shore, on which the waves were breaking violently, knowing that it might easily be concealed amid this rubbish, or by the overlapping of the shore. it is remarkable how little these important gates to a lake are blazoned. there is no triumphal arch over the modest inlet or outlet, but at some undistinguished point it trickles in or out through the uninterrupted forest, almost as through a sponge. we reached the outlet in about an hour, and carried over the dam there, which is quite a solid structure, and about one quarter of a mile farther there was a second dam. the reader will perceive that the result of this particular damming about chamberlain lake is, that the head-waters of the st. john are made to flow by bangor. they have thus dammed all the larger lakes, raising their broad surfaces many feet; moosehead, for instance, some forty miles long, with its steamer on it; thus turning the forces of nature against herself, that they might float their spoils out of the country. they rapidly run out of these immense forests all the finer, and more accessible pine timber, and then leave the bears to watch the decaying dams, not clearing nor cultivating the land, nor making roads, nor building houses, but leaving it a wilderness as they found it. in many parts, only these dams remain, like deserted beaver-dams. think how much land they have flowed, without asking natureâ��s leave! when the state wishes to endow an academy or university, it grants it a tract of forest land: one saw represents an academy; a gang, a university. the wilderness experiences a sudden rise of all her streams and lakes. she feels ten thousand vermin gnawing at the base of her noblest trees. many combining drag them off, jarring over the roots of the survivors, and tumble them into the nearest stream, till, the fairest having fallen, they scamper off to ransack some new wilderness, and all is still again. it is as when a migrating army of mice girdles a forest of pines. the chopper fells trees from the same motive that the mouse gnaws them,--to get his living. you tell me that he has a more interesting family than the mouse. that is as it happens. he speaks of a â��berthâ�� of timber, a good place for him to get into, just as a worm might. when the chopper would praise a pine, he will commonly tell you that the one he cut was so big that a yoke of oxen stood on its stump; as if that were what the pine had grown for, to become the footstool of oxen. in my mindâ��s eye, i can see these unwieldy tame deer, with a yoke binding them together, and brazen-tipped horns betraying their servitude, taking their stand on the stump of each giant pine in succession throughout this whole forest, and chewing their cud there, until it is nothing but an ox-pasture, and run out at that. as if it were good for the oxen, and some terebinthine or other medicinal quality ascended into their nostrils. or is their elevated position intended merely as a symbol of the fact that the pastoral comes next in order to the sylvan or hunter life? the character of the loggerâ��s admiration is betrayed by his very mode of expressing it. if he told all that was in his mind, he would say, it was so big that i cut it down and then a yoke of oxen could stand on its stump. he admires the log, the carcass or corpse, more than the tree. why, my dear sir, the tree might have stood on its own stump, and a great deal more comfortably and firmly than a yoke of oxen can, if you had not cut it down. what right have you to celebrate the virtues of the man you murdered? the anglo-american can indeed cut down, and grub up all this waving forest, and make a stump speech, and vote for buchanan on its ruins, but he cannot converse with the spirit of the tree he fells, he cannot read the poetry and mythology which retire as he advances. he ignorantly erases mythological tablets in order to print his handbills and town-meeting warrants on them. before he has learned his _a b c_ in the beautiful but mystic lore of the wilderness which spenser and dante had just begun to read, he cuts it down, coins a _pine-tree_ shilling (as if to signify the pineâ��s value to him), puts up a _dee_strict schoolhouse, and introduces websterâ��s spelling-book. below the last dam, the river being swift and shallow, though broad enough, we two walked about half a mile to lighten the canoe. i made it a rule to carry my knapsack when i walked, and also to keep it tied to a crossbar when in the canoe, that it might be found with the canoe if we should upset. i heard the dog-day locust here, and afterward on the carries, a sound which i had associated only with more open, if not settled countries. the area for locusts must be small in the maine woods. we were now fairly on the allegash river, which name our indian said meant hemlock bark. these waters flow northward about one hundred miles, at first very feebly, then southeasterly two hundred and fifty more to the bay of fundy. after perhaps two miles of river, we entered heron lake, called on the map _pongokwahem_, scaring up forty or fifty young _shecorways_, sheldrakes, at the entrance, which ran over the water with great rapidity, as usual in a long line. this was the fourth great lake, lying northwest and southeast, like chesuncook and most of the long lakes in that neighborhood, and, judging from the map, it is about ten miles long. we had entered it on the southwest side, and saw a dark mountain northeast over the lake, not very far off nor high, which the indian said was called peaked mountain, and used by explorers to look for timber from. there was also some other high land more easterly. the shores were in the same ragged and unsightly condition, encumbered with dead timber, both fallen and standing, as in the last lake, owing to the dam on the allegash below. some low points or islands were almost drowned. i saw something white a mile off on the water, which turned out to be a great gull on a rock in the middle, which the indian would have been glad to kill and eat, but it flew away long before we were near; and also a flock of summer ducks that were about the rock with it. i asking him about herons, since this was heron lake, he said that he found the blue heronâ��s nests in the hardwood trees. i thought that i saw a light-colored object move along the opposite or northern shore, four or five miles distant. he did not know what it could be, unless it were a moose, though he had never seen a white one; but he said that he could distinguish a moose â��anywhere on shore, clear across the lake.â�� rounding a point, we stood across a bay for a mile and a half or two miles, toward a large island, three or four miles down the lake. we met with ephemer㦠(shadfly) midway, about a mile from the shore, and they evidently fly over the whole lake. on moosehead i had seen a large devilâ��s-needle half a mile from the shore, coming from the middle of the lake, where it was three or four miles wide at least. it had probably crossed. but at last, of course, you come to lakes so large that an insect cannot fly across them; and this, perhaps, will serve to distinguish a large lake from a small one. we landed on the southeast side of the island, which was rather elevated and densely wooded, with a rocky shore, in season for an early dinner. somebody had camped there not long before, and left the frame on which they stretched a moose-hide, which our indian criticised severely, thinking it showed but little woodcraft. here were plenty of the shells of crayfish, or fresh-water lobsters, which had been washed ashore, such as have given a name to some ponds and streams. they are commonly four or five inches long. the indian proceeded at once to cut a canoe birch, slanted it up against another tree on the shore, tying it with a withe, and lay down to sleep in its shade. when we were on the caucomgomoc, he recommended to us a new way home, the very one which we had first thought of, by the st. john. he even said that it was easier, and would take but little more time than the other, by the east branch of the penobscot, though very much farther round; and taking the map, he showed where we should be each night, for he was familiar with the route. according to his calculation, we should reach the french settlements the next night after this, by keeping northward down the allegash, and when we got into the main st. john the banks would be more or less settled all the way; as if that were a recommendation. there would be but one or two falls, with short carrying-places, and we should go down the stream very fast, even a hundred miles a day, if the wind allowed; and he indicated where we should carry over into eel river to save a bend below woodstock in new brunswick, and so into the schoodic lake, and thence to the mattawamkeag. it would be about three hundred and sixty miles to bangor this way, though only about one hundred and sixty by the other; but in the former case we should explore the st. john from its source through two thirds of its course, as well as the schoodic lake and mattawamkeag,--and we were again tempted to go that way. i feared, however, that the banks of the st. john were too much settled. when i asked him which course would take us through the wildest country, he said the route by the east branch. partly from this consideration, as also from its shortness, we resolved to adhere to the latter route, and perhaps ascend ktaadn on the way. we made this island the limit of our excursion in this direction. we had now seen the largest of the allegash lakes. the next dam â��was about fifteen milesâ�� farther north, down the allegash, and it was dead water so far. we had been told in bangor of a man who lived alone, a sort of hermit, at that dam, to take care of it, who spent his time tossing a bullet from one hand to the other, for want of employment,--as if we might want to call on him. this sort of tit-for-tat intercourse between his two hands, bandying to and fro a leaden subject, seems to have been his symbol for society. this island, according to the map, was about a hundred and ten miles in a straight line north-northwest from bangor, and about ninety-nine miles east-southeast from quebec. there was another island visible toward the north end of the lake, with an elevated clearing on it; but we learned afterward that it was not inhabited, had only been used as a pasture for cattle which summered in these woods, though our informant said that there was a hut on the mainland near the outlet of the lake. this unnaturally smooth-shaven, squarish spot, in the midst of the otherwise uninterrupted forest, only reminded us how uninhabited the country was. you would sooner expect to meet with a bear than an ox in such a clearing. at any rate, it must have been a surprise to the bears when they came across it. such, seen far or near, you know at once to be manâ��s work, for nature never does it. in order to let in the light to the earth as on a lake, he clears off the forest on the hillsides and plains, and sprinkles fine grass seed, like an enchanter, and so carpets the earth with a firm sward. polis had evidently more curiosity respecting the few settlers in those woods than we. if nothing was said, he took it for granted that we wanted to go straight to the next log-hut. having observed that we came by the log huts at chesuncook, and the blind canadianâ��s at the mud pond carry, without stopping to communicate with the inhabitants, he took occasion now to suggest that the usual way was, when you came near a house, to go to it, and tell the inhabitants what you had seen or heard, and then they tell you what they had seen; but we laughed, and said that we had had enough of houses for the present, and of houses for the present, and had come here partly to avoid them. in the meanwhile, the wind, increasing, blew down the indianâ��s birch, and created such a sea that we found ourselves prisoners on the island, the nearest shore, which was the western, being perhaps a mile distant, and we took the canoe out to prevent its drifting away. we did not know but we should be compelled to spend the rest of the day and the night there. at any rate, the indian went to sleep again in the shade of his birch, my companion busied himself drying his plants, and i rambled along the shore westward, which was quite stony, and obstructed with fallen, bleached, or drifted trees for four or five rods in width. i found growing on this broad, rocky, and gravelly shore the _salix rostrata_, _discolor_, and _lucida_, _ranunculus recurvatus_, _potentilla norvegica_, _scutellaria lateriflora_, _eupatorium purpureum_, _aster tradescanti_, _mentha canadensis_, _epilobium angustifolium_ (abundant), _lycopus sinuatus_, _solidago lanceolata_, _spirã¦a salicifolia_, _antennaria margaraticea_, _prunella_, _rumex acetosella_, raspberries, wool-grass, _onoclea_, etc. the nearest trees were _betula papyracea_ and _excelsa_, and _populus tremuloides_. i give these names because it was my farthest northern point. our indian said that he was a doctor, and could tell me some medicinal use for every plant i could show him. i immediately tried him. he said that the inner bark of the aspen (_populus tremuloides_) was good for sore eyes; and so with various other plants, proving himself as good as his word. according to his account, he had acquired such knowledge in his youth from a wise old indian with whom he associated, and he lamented that the present generation of indians â��had lost a great deal.â�� he said that the caribou was a â��very great runner,â�� that there was none about this lake now, though there used to be many, and pointing to the belt of dead trees caused by the dams, he added, â��no likum stump,--when he sees that he scared.â�� pointing southeasterly over the lake and distant forest, he observed, â��me go oldtown in three days.â�� i asked how he would get over the swamps and fallen trees. â��oh,â�� said he, â��in winter all covered, go anywhere on snowshoes, right across lakes.â�� when i asked how he went, he said, â��first i go ktaadn, west side, then i go millinocket, then pamadumcook, then nicketow, then lincoln, then oldtown,â�� or else he went a shorter way by the piscataquis. what a wilderness walk for a man to take alone! none of your half-mile swamps, none of your mile-wide woods merely, as on the skirts of our towns, without hotels, only a dark mountain or a lake for guide-board and station, over ground much of it impassable in summer! it reminded me of prometheus bound. here was traveling of the old heroic kind over the unaltered face of nature. from the allegash, or hemlock river, and pongoquahem lake, across great apmoojenegamook, and leaving the nerlumskeechticook mountain on his left, he takes his way under the bear-haunted slopes of souneunk and ktaadn mountains to pamadumcook, and millinocketâ��s inland seas (where often gullsâ��-eggs may increase his store), and so on to the forks of the nicketow (_niasoseb_, â��we alone joseph,â�� seeing what our folks see), ever pushing the boughs of the fir and spruce aside, with his load of furs, contending day and night, night and day, with the shaggy demon vegetation, traveling through the mossy graveyard of trees. or he could go by â��that rough tooth of the sea,â�� kineo, great source of arrows and of spears to the ancients, when weapons of stone were used. seeing and hearing moose, caribou, bears, porcupines, lynxes, wolves, and panthers. places where he might live and die and never hear of the united states, which make such a noise in the world,--never hear of america, so called from the name of a european gentleman. there is a lumbererâ��s road called the eagle lake road, from the seboois to the east side of this lake. it may seem strange that any road through such a wilderness should be passable, even in winter, when the snow is thrat season, wherever lumbering operations are actively carried on, teams are continually passing on the single track, and it becomes as smooth almost as a railway. i am told that in the aroostook country the sleds are required by law to be of one width (four feet), and sleighs must be altered to fit the track, so that one runner may go in one rut and the other follow the horse. yet it is very bad turning out. we had for some time seen a thunder-shower coming up from the west over the woods of the island, and heard the muttering of the thunder, though we were in doubt whether it would reach us; but now the darkness rapidly increasing, and a fresh breeze rustling the forest, we hastily put up the plants which we had been drying, and with one consent made a rush for the tent material and set about pitching it. a place was selected and stakes and pins cut in the shortest possible time, and we were pinning it down lest it should be blown away, when the storm suddenly burst over us. as we lay huddled together under the tent, which leaked considerably about the sides, with our baggage at our feet, we listened to some of the grandest thunder which i ever heard,--rapid peals, round and plump, bang, bang, bang, in succession, like artillery from some fortress in the sky; and the lightning was proportionally brilliant. the indian said, â��it must be good powder.â�� all for the benefit of the moose and us, echoing far over the concealed lakes. i thought it must be a place which the thunder loved, where the lightning practiced to keep its hand in, and it would do no harm to shatter a few pines. what had become of the ephemer㦠and devilâ��s-needles then? were they prudent enough to seek harbor before the storm? perhaps their motions might guide the voyageur. looking out i perceived that the violent shower falling on the lake had almost instantaneously flattened the waves,--the commander of that fortress had smoothed it for us so,--and, it clearing off, we resolved to start immediately, before the wind raised them again. going outside, i said that i saw clouds still in the southwest, and heard thunder there. the indian asked if the thunder went â��loundâ�� (round), saying that if it did we should have more rain. i thought that it did. we embarked, nevertheless, and paddled rapidly back toward the dams. the white-throated sparrows on the shore were about, singing, _ah, te-e-e, te-e-e, te_, or else _ah, te-e-e, te-e-e, te-e-e, te-e-e_. at the outlet of chamberlain lake we were overtaken by another gusty rain-storm, which compelled us to take shelter, the indian under his canoe on the bank, and we ran under the edge of the dam. however, we were more scared than wet. from my covert i could see the indian peeping out from beneath his canoe to see what had become of the rain. when we had taken our respective places thus once or twice, the rain not coming down in earnest, we commenced rambling about the neighborhood, for the wind had by this time raised such waves on the lake that we could not stir, and we feared that we should be obliged to camp there. we got an early supper on the dam and tried for fish there, while waiting for the tumult to subside. the fishes were not only few, but small and worthless, and the indian declared that there were no good fishes in the st. johnâ��s waters; that we must wait till we got to the penobscot waters. at length, just before sunset, we set out again. it was a wild evening when we coasted up the north side of this apmoojenegamook lake. one thunder-storm was just over, and the waves which it had raised still running with violence, and another storm was now seen coming up in the southwest, far over the lake; but it might be worse in the morning, and we wished to get as far as possible on our way up the lake while we might. it blowed hard against the northern shore about an eighth of a mile distant on our left, and there was just as much sea as our shallow canoe would bear, without our taking unusual care. that which we kept off, and toward which the waves were driving, was as dreary and harborless a shore as you can conceive. for half a dozen rods in width it was a perfect maze of submerged trees, all dead and bare and bleaching, some standing half their original height, others prostrate, and criss-across, above or beneath the surface, and mingled with them were loose trees and limbs and stumps, beating about. imagine the wharves of the largest city in the world, decayed, and the earth and planking washed away, leaving the spiles standing in loose order, but often of twice the ordinary height, and mingled with and beating against them the wreck of ten thousand navies, all their spars and timbers, while there rises from the waterâ��s edge the densest and grimmest wilderness, ready to supply more material when the former fails, and you may get a faint idea of that coast. we could not have landed if we would, without the greatest danger of being swamped; so blow as it might, we must depend on coasting by it. it was twilight, too, and that stormy cloud was advancing rapidly in our rear. it was a pleasant excitement, yet we were glad to reach, at length, in the dusk, the cleared shore of the chamberlain farm. we landed on a low and thinly wooded point there, and while my companions were pitching the tent, i ran up to the house to get some sugar, our six pounds being gone;--it was no wonder they were, for polis had a sweet tooth. he would first fill his dipper nearly a third full of sugar, and then add the coffee to it. here was a clearing extending back from the lake to a hilltop, with some dark-colored log buildings and a storehouse in it, and half a dozen men standing in front of the principal hut, greedy for news. among them was the man who tended the dam on the allegash and tossed the bullet. he having charge of the dams, and learning that we were going to webster stream the next day, told me that some of their men, who were haying at telos lake, had shut the dam at the canal there in order to catch trout, and if we wanted more water to take us through the canal, we might raise the gate, for he would like to have it raised. the chamberlain farm is no doubt a cheerful opening in the woods, but such was the lateness of the hour that it has left but a dusky impression on my mind. as i have said, the influx of light merely is civilizing, yet i fancied that they walked about on sundays in their clearing somewhat as in a prison-yard. they were unwilling to spare more than four pounds of brown sugar,--unlocking the storehouse to get it,--since they only kept a little for such cases as this, and they charged twenty cents a pound for it, which certainly it was worth to get it up there. when i returned to the shore it was quite dark, but we had a rousing fire to warm and dry us by, and a snug apartment behind it. the indian went up to the house to inquire after a brother who had been absent hunting a year or two, and while another shower was beginning, i groped about cutting spruce and arbor-vit㦠twigs for a bed. i preferred the arbor-vit㦠on account of its fragrance, and spread it particularly thick about the shoulders. it is remarkable with what pure satisfaction the traveler in these woods will reach his camping-ground on the eve of a tempestuous night like this, as if he had got to his inn, and, rolling himself in his blanket, stretch himself on his six-feet-by-two bed of dripping fir twigs, with a thin sheet of cotton for roof, snug as a meadow-mouse in its nest. invariably our best nights were those when it rained, for then we were not troubled with mosquitoes. you soon come to disregard rain on such excursions, at least in the summer, it is so easy to dry yourself, supposing a dry change of clothing is not to be had. you can much sooner dry you by such a fire as you can make in the woods than in anybodyâ��s kitchen, the fireplace is so much larger, and wood so much more abundant. a shed-shaped tent will catch and reflect the heat like a yankee baker, and you may be drying while you are sleeping. some who have leaky roofs in the towns may have been kept awake, but we were soon lulled asleep by a steady, soaking rain, which lasted all night. to-night, the rain not coming at once with violence, the twigs were soon dried by the reflected heat. * * * * * wednesday, july 29. when we awoke it had done raining, though it was still cloudy. the fire was put out, and the indianâ��s boots, which stood under the eaves of the tent, were half full of water. he was much more improvident in such respects than either of us, and he had to thank us for keeping his powder dry. we decided to cross the lake at once, before breakfast, or while we could; and before starting i took the bearing of the shore which we wished to strike, s. s. e. about three miles distant, lest a sudden misty rain should conceal it when we were midway. though the bay in which we were was perfectly quiet and smooth, we found the lake already wide awake outside, but not dangerously or unpleasantly so; nevertheless, when you get out on one of those lakes in a canoe like this, you do not forget that you are completely at the mercy of the wind, and a fickle power it is. the playful waves may at any time become too rude for you in their sport, and play right on over you. we saw a few _shecorways_ and a fish hawk thus early, and after much steady paddling and dancing over the dark waves of apmoojenegamook, we found ourselves in the neighborhood of the southern land, heard the waves breaking on it, and turned our thoughts wholly to that side. after coasting eastward along this shore a mile or two, we breakfasted on a rocky point, the first convenient place that offered. it was well enough that we crossed thus early, for the waves now ran quite high, and we should have been obliged to go round somewhat, but beyond this point we had comparatively smooth water. you can commonly go along one side or the other of a lake, when you cannot cross it. the indian was looking at the hard-wood ridges from time to time, and said that he would like to buy a few hundred acres somewhere about this lake, asking our advice. it was to buy as near the crossing-place as possible. my companion and i, having a minuteâ��s discussion on some point of ancient history, were amused by the attitude which the indian, who could not tell what we were talking about, assumed. he constituted himself umpire, and, judging by our air and gesture, he very seriously remarked from time to time, â��you beat,â�� or â��he beat.â�� leaving a spacious bay, a northeasterly prolongation of chamberlain lake, on our left, we entered through a short strait into a small lake a couple of miles over, called on the map _telasinis_, but the indian had no distinct name for it, and thence into _telos_ lake, which he called _paytaywecomgomoc_, or burnt-ground lake. this curved round toward the northeast, and may have been three or four miles long as we paddled. he had not been here since 1825. he did not know what telos meant; thought it was not indian. he used the word â��_spokelogan_â�� (for an inlet in the shore which led nowhere), and when i asked its meaning said that there was â��no indian in â��em.â�� there was a clearing, with a house and barn, on the southwest shore, temporarily occupied by some men who were getting the hay, as we had been told; also a clearing for a pasture on a hill on the west side of the lake. we landed on a rocky point on the northeast side, to look at some red pines (_pinus resinosa_), the first we had noticed, and get some cones, for our few which grow in concord do not bear any. the outlet from the lake into the east branch of the penobscot is an artificial one, and it was not very apparent where it was exactly, but the lake ran curving far up northeasterly into two narrow valleys or ravines, as if it had for a long time been groping its way toward the penobscot waters, or remembered when it anciently flowed there; by observing where the horizon was lowest, and following the longest of these, we at length reached the dam, having come about a dozen miles from the last camp. somebody had left a line set for trout, and the jack knife with which the bait had been cut on the dam beside it, an evidence that man was near, and on a deserted log close by a loaf of bread baked in a yankee baker. these proved the property of a solitary hunter, whom we soon met, and canoe and gun and traps were not far off. he told us that it was twenty miles farther on our route to the foot of grand lake, where you could catch as many trout as you wanted, and that the first house below the foot of the lake, on the east branch, was huntâ��s, about forty-five miles farther; though there was one about a mile and a half up trout stream, some fifteen miles ahead, but it was rather a blind route to it. it turned out that, though the stream was in our favor, we did not reach the next house till the morning of the third day after this. the nearest permanently inhabited house behind us was now a dozen miles distant, so that the interval between the two nearest houses on our route was about sixty miles. this hunter, who was a quite small, sunburnt man, having already carried his canoe over, and baked his loaf, had nothing so interesting and pressing to do as to observe our transit. he had been out a month or more alone. how much more wild and adventurous his life than that of the hunter in concord woods, who gets back to his house and the mill-dam every night! yet they in the towns who have wild oats to sow commonly sow them on cultivated and comparatively exhausted ground. and as for the rowdy world in the large cities, so little enterprise has it that it never adventures in this direction, but like vermin clubs together in alleys and drinking-saloons, its highest accomplishment, perchance, to run beside a fire-engine and throw brickbats. but the former is comparatively an independent and successful man, getting his living in a way that he likes, without disturbing his human neighbors. how much more respectable also is the life of the solitary pioneer or settler in these, or any woods,--having real difficulties, not of his own creation, drawing his subsistence directly from nature,--than that of the helpless multitudes in the towns who depend on gratifying the extremely artificial wants of society and are thrown out of employment by hard times! here for the first time we found the raspberries really plenty,--that is, on passing the height of land between the allegash and the east branch of the penobscot; the same was true of the blueberries. telos lake, the head of the st. john on this side, and webster pond, the head of the east branch of the penobscot, are only about a mile apart, and they are connected by a ravine, in which but little digging was required to make the water of the former, which is the highest, flow into the latter. this canal, which is something less than a mile long and about four rods wide, was made a few years before my first visit to maine. since then the lumber of the upper allegash and its lakes has been run down the penobscot, that is, up the allegash, which here consists principally of a chain of large and stagnant lakes, whose thoroughfares, or river-links, have been made nearly equally stagnant by damming, and then down the penobscot. the rush of the water has produced such changes in the canal that it has now the appearance of a very rapid mountain stream flowing through a ravine, and you would not suspect that any digging had been required to persuade the waters of the st. john to flow into the penobscot here. it was so winding that one could see but little way down. it is stated by springer, in his â��forest life,â�� that the cause of this canal being dug was this: according to the treaty of 1842 with great britain, it was agreed that all the timber run down the st. john, which rises in maine, â��when within the province of new brunswick ... shall be dealt with as if it were the produce of the said province,â�� which was thought by our side to mean that it should be free from taxation. immediately, the province, wishing to get something out of the yankees, levied a duty on all the timber that passed down the st. john; but to satisfy its own subjects â��made a corresponding discount on the stumpage charged those hauling timber from the crown lands.â�� the result was that the yankees made the st. john run the other way, or down the penobscot, so that the province lost both its duty and its water, while the yankees, being greatly enriched, had reason to thank it for the suggestion. it is wonderful how well watered this country is. as you paddle across a lake, bays will be pointed out to you, by following up which, and perhaps the tributary stream which empties in, you may, after a short portage, or possibly, at some seasons, none at all, get into another river, which empties far away from the one you are on. generally, you may go in any direction in a canoe, by making frequent but not very long portages. you are only realizing once more what all nature distinctly remembers here, for no doubt the waters flowed thus in a former geological period, and, instead of being a lake country, it was an archipelago. it seems as if the more youthful and impressible streams can hardly resist the numerous invitations and temptations to leave their native beds and run down their neighborsâ�� channels. your carries are often over half-submerged ground, on the dry channels of a former period. in carrying from one river to another, i did not go over such high and rocky ground as in going about the falls of the same river. for in the former case i was once lost in a swamp, as i have related, and, again, found an artificial canal which appeared to be natural. i remember once dreaming of pushing a canoe up the rivers of maine, and that, when i had got so high that the channels were dry, i kept on through the ravines and gorges, nearly as well as before, by pushing a little harder, and now it seemed to me that my dream was partially realized. wherever there is a channel for water, there is a road for the canoe. the pilot of the steamer which ran from oldtown up the penobscot in 1854 told me that she drew only fourteen inches, and would run easily in two feet of water, though they did not like to. it is said that some western steamers can run on a heavy dew, whence we can imagine what a canoe may do. montresor, who was sent from quebec by the english about 1760 to explore the route to the kennebec, over which arnold afterward passed, supplied the penobscot near its source with water by opening the beaver-dams, and he says, â��this is often done.â�� he afterward states that the governor of canada had forbidden to molest the beaver about the outlet of the kennebec from moosehead lake, on account of the service which their dams did by raising the water for navigation. this canal, so called, was a considerable and extremely rapid and rocky river. the indian decided that there was water enough in it without raising the dam, which would only make it more violent, and that he would run down it alone, while we carried the greater part of the baggage. our provision being about half consumed, there was the less left in the canoe. we had thrown away the pork-keg, and wrapt its contents in birch bark, which is the unequaled wrapping-paper of the woods. following a moist trail through the forest, we reached the head of webster pond about the same time with the indian, notwithstanding the velocity with which he moved, our route being the most direct. the indian name of webster stream, of which this pond is the source, is, according to him, _madunkchunk_, _i. e._, height of land, and of the pond, _madunkchunk-gamooc_, or height of land pond. the latter was two or three miles long. we passed near a pine on its shore which had been splintered by lightning, perhaps the day before. this was the first proper east branch penobscot water that we came to. at the outlet of webster lake was another dam, at which we stopped and picked raspberries, while the indian went down the stream a half-mile through the forest, to see what he had got to contend with. there was a deserted log camp here, apparently used the previous winter, with its â��hovelâ�� or barn for cattle. in the hut was a large fir twig bed, raised two feet from the floor, occupying a large part of the single apartment, a long narrow table against the wall, with a stout log bench before it, and above the table a small window, the only one there was, which admitted a feeble light. it was a simple and strong fort erected against the cold, and suggested what valiant trencher work had been done there. i discovered one or two curious wooden traps, which had not been used for a long time, in the woods near by. the principal part consisted of a long and slender pole. we got our dinner on the shore, on the upper side of the dam. as we were sitting by our fire, concealed by the earth bank of the dam, a long line of sheldrake, half-grown, came waddling over it from the water below, passing within about a rod of us, so that we could almost have caught them in our hands. they were very abundant on all the streams and lakes which we visited, and every two or three hours they would rush away in a long string over the water before us, twenty to fifty of them at once, rarely ever flying, but running with great rapidity up or down the stream, even in the midst of the most violent rapids, and apparently as fast up as down, or else crossing diagonally, the old, as it appeared, behind, and driving them, and flying to the front from time to time, as if to direct them. we also saw many small black dippers, which behaved in a similar manner, and, once or twice, a few black ducks. an indian at oldtown had told us that we should be obliged to carry ten miles between telos lake on the st. john and second lake on the east branch of the penobscot; but the lumberers whom we met assured us that there would not be more than a mile of carry. it turned out that the indian, who had lately been over this route, was nearest right, as far as we were concerned. however, if one of us could have assisted the indian in managing the canoe in the rapids, we might have run the greater part of the way; but as he was alone in the management of the canoe in such places, we were obliged to walk the greater part. i did not feel quite ready to try such an experiment on webster stream, which has so bad a reputation. according to my observation, a batteau, properly manned, shoots rapids as a matter of course, which a single indian with a canoe carries round. my companion and i carried a good part of the baggage on our shoulders, while the indian took that which would be least injured by wet in the canoe. we did not know when we should see him again, for he had not been this way since the canal was cut, nor for more than thirty years. he agreed to stop when he got to smooth water, come up and find our path if he could, and halloo for us, and after waiting a reasonable time go on and try again,--and we were to look out in like manner for him. he commenced by running through the sluiceway and over the dam, as usual, standing up in his tossing canoe, and was soon out of sight behind a point in a wild gorge. this webster stream is well known to lumbermen as a difficult one. it is exceedingly rapid and rocky, and also shallow, and can hardly be considered navigable, unless that may mean that what is launched in it is sure to be carried swiftly down it, though it may be dashed to pieces by the way. it is somewhat like navigating a thunder-spout. with commonly an irresistible force urging you on, you have got to choose your own course each moment, between the rocks and shallows, and to get into it, moving forward always with the utmost possible moderation, and often holding on, if you can, that you may inspect the rapids before you. by the indianâ��s direction we took an old path on the south side, which appeared to keep down the stream, though at a considerable distance from it, cutting off bends, perhaps to second lake, having first taken the course from the map with a compass, which was northeasterly, for safety. it was a wild wood-path, with a few tracks of oxen which had been driven over it, probably to some old camp clearing, for pasturage, mingled with the tracks of moose which had lately used it. we kept on steadily for about an hour without putting down our packs, occasionally winding around or climbing over a fallen tree, for the most part far out of sight and hearing of the river; till, after walking about three miles, we were glad to find that the path came to the river again at an old camp ground, where there was a small opening in the forest, at which we paused. swiftly as the shallow and rocky river ran here, a continuous rapid with dancing waves, i saw, as i sat on the shore, a long string of sheldrakes, which something scared, run up the opposite side of the stream by me, with the same ease that they commonly did down it, just touching the surface of the waves, and getting an impulse from them as they flowed from under them; but they soon came back, driven by the indian, who had fallen a little behind us on account of the windings. he shot round a point just above, and came to land by us with considerable water in his canoe. he had found it, as he said, â��very strong water,â�� and had been obliged to land once before to empty out what he had taken in. he complained that it strained him to paddle so hard in order to keep his canoe straight in its course, having no one in the bows to aid him, and, shallow as it was, said that it would be no joke to upset there, for the force of the water was such that he had as lief i would strike him over the head with a paddle as have that water strike him. seeing him come out of that gap was as if you should pour water down an inclined and zigzag trough, then drop a nutshell into it, and, taking a short cut to the bottom, get there in time to see it come out, notwithstanding the rush and tumult, right side up, and only partly full of water. after a momentâ��s breathing-space, while i held his canoe, he was soon out of sight again around another bend, and we, shouldering our packs, resumed our course. we did not at once fall into our path again, but made our way with difficulty along the edge of the river, till at length, striking inland through the forest, we recovered it. before going a mile we heard the indian calling to us. he had come up through the woods and along the path to find us, having reached sufficiently smooth water to warrant his taking us in. the shore was about one fourth of a mile distant, through a dense, dark forest, and as he led us back to it, winding rapidly about to the right and left, i had the curiosity to look down carefully, and found that he was following his steps backward. i could only occasionally perceive his trail in the moss, and yet he did not appear to look down nor hesitate an instant, but led us out exactly to his canoe. this surprised me; for without a compass, or the sight or noise of the river to guide us, we could not have kept our course many minutes, and could have retraced our steps but a short distance, with a great deal of pains and very slowly, using a laborious circumspection. but it was evident that he could go back through the forest wherever he had been during the day. after this rough walking in the dark woods it was an agreeable change to glide down the rapid river in the canoe once more. this river, which was about the size of our assabet (in concord), though still very swift, was almost perfectly smooth here, and showed a very visible declivity, a regularly inclined plane, for several miles, like a mirror set a little aslant, on which we coasted down. this very obvious regular descent, particularly plain when i regarded the water-line against the shores, made a singular impression on me, which the swiftness of our motion probably enhanced, so that we seemed to be gliding down a much steeper declivity than we were, and that we could not save ourselves from rapids and falls if we should suddenly come to them. my companion did not perceive this slope, but i have a surveyorâ��s eyes, and i satisfied myself that it was no ocular illusion. you could tell at a glance on approaching such a river which way the water flowed, though you might perceive no motion. i observed the angle at which a level line would strike the surface, and calculated the amount of fall in a rod, which did not need to be remarkably great to produce this effect. it was very exhilarating, and the perfection of traveling, quite unlike floating on our dead concord river, the coasting down this inclined mirror, which was now and then gently winding, down a mountain, indeed, between two evergreen forests, edged with lofty dead white pines, sometimes slanted half-way over the stream, and destined soon to bridge it. i saw some monsters there, nearly destitute of branches, and scarcely diminishing in diameter for eighty or ninety feet. as we thus swept along, our indian repeated in a deliberate and drawling tone the words â��daniel webster, great lawyer,â�� apparently reminded of him by the name of the stream, and he described his calling on him once in boston, at what he supposed was his boarding-house. he had no business with him, but merely went to pay his respects, as we should say. in answer to our questions, he described his person well enough. it was on the day after webster delivered his bunker hill oration, which i believe polis heard. the first time he called he waited till he was tired without seeing him, and then went away. the next time, he saw him go by the door of the room in which he was waiting several times, in his shirt-sleeves, without noticing him. he thought that if he had come to see indians, they would not have treated him so. at length, after very long delay, he came in, walked toward him, and asked in a loud voice, gruffly, â��what do you want?â�� and he, thinking at first, by the motion of his hand, that he was going to strike him, said to himself, â��youâ��d better take care; if you try that i shall know what to do.â�� he did not like him, and declared that all he said â��was not worth talk about a musquash.â�� we suggested that probably mr. webster was very busy, and had a great many visitors just then. coming to falls and rapids, our easy progress was suddenly terminated. the indian went alongshore to inspect the water, while we climbed over the rocks, picking berries. the peculiar growth of blueberries on the tops of large rocks here made the impression of high land, and indeed this was the height-of-land stream. when the indian came back, he remarked, â��you got to walk; ver strong water.â�� so, taking out his canoe, he launched it again below the falls, and was soon out of sight. at such times he would step into the canoe, take up his paddle, and, with an air of mystery, start off, looking far down-stream, and keeping his own counsel, as if absorbing all the intelligence of forest and stream into himself; but i sometimes detected a little fun in his face, which could yield to my sympathetic smile, for he was thoroughly good-humored. we meanwhile scrambled along the shore with our packs, without any path. this was the last of _our_ boating for the day. the prevailing rock here was a kind of slate, standing on its edges, and my companion, who was recently from california, thought it exactly like that in which the gold is found, and said that if he had had a pan he would have liked to wash a little of the sand here. the indian now got along much faster than we, and waited for us from time to time. i found here the only cool spring that i drank at anywhere on this excursion, a little water filling a hollow in the sandy bank. it was a quite memorable event, and due to the elevation of the country, for wherever else we had been the water in the rivers and the streams emptying in was dead and warm, compared with that of a mountainous region. it was very bad walking along the shore over fallen and drifted trees and bushes, and rocks, from time to time swinging ourselves round over the water, or else taking to a gravel bar or going inland. at one place, the indian being ahead, i was obliged to take off all my clothes in order to ford a small but deep stream emptying in, while my companion, who was inland, found a rude bridge, high up in the woods, and i saw no more of him for some time. i saw there very fresh moose tracks, found a new goldenrod to me (perhaps _solidago thyrsoidea_), and i passed one white pine log, which had lodged, in the forest near the edge of the stream, which was quite five feet in diameter at the butt. probably its size detained it. shortly after this i overtook the indian at the edge of some burnt land, which extended three or four miles at least, beginning about three miles above second lake, which we were expecting to reach that night, and which is about ten miles from telos lake. this burnt region was still more rocky than before, but, though comparatively open, we could not yet see the lake. not having seen my companion for some time, i climbed, with the indian, a singular high rock on the edge of the river, forming a narrow ridge only a foot or two wide at top, in order to look for him; and, after calling many times, i at length heard him answer from a considerable distance inland, he having taken a trail which led off from the river, perhaps directly to the lake, and was now in search of the river again. seeing a much higher rock, of the same character, about one third of a mile farther east, or down-stream, i proceeded toward it, through the burnt land, in order to look for the lake from its summit, supposing that the indian would keep down the stream in his canoe, and hallooing all the while that my companion might join me on the way. before we came together i noticed where a moose, which possibly i had scared by my shouting, had apparently just run along a large rotten trunk of a pine, which made a bridge, thirty or forty feet long, over a hollow, as convenient for him as for me. the tracks were as large as those of an ox, but an ox could not have crossed there. this burnt land was an exceedingly wild and desolate region. judging by the weeds and sprouts, it appeared to have been burnt about two years before. it was covered with charred trunks, either prostrate or standing, which crocked our clothes and hands, and we could not easily have distinguished a bear there by his color. great shells of trees, sometimes unburnt without, or burnt on one side only, but black within, stood twenty or forty feet high. the fire had run up inside, as in a chimney, leaving the sap-wood. sometimes we crossed a rocky ravine fifty feet wide, on a fallen trunk; and there were great fields of fire-weed (_epilobium angustifolium_) on all sides, the most extensive that i ever saw, which presented great masses of pink. intermixed with these were blueberry and raspberry bushes. having crossed a second rocky ridge like the first, when i was beginning to ascend the third, the indian, whom i had left on the shore some fifty rods behind, beckoned to me to come to him, but i made sign that i would first ascend the highest rock before me, whence i expected to see the lake. my companion accompanied me to the top. this was formed just like the others. being struck with the perfect parallelism of these singular rock hills, however much one might be in advance of another, i took out my compass and found that they lay northwest and southeast, the rock being on its edge, and sharp edges they were. this one, to speak from memory, was perhaps a third of a mile in length, but quite narrow, rising gradually from the northwest to the height of about eighty feet, but steep on the southeast end. the southwest side was as steep as an ordinary roof, or as we could safely climb; the northeast was an abrupt precipice from which you could jump clean to the bottom, near which the river flowed; while the level top of the ridge, on which you walked along, was only from one to three or four feet in width. for a rude illustration, take the half of a pear cut in two lengthwise, lay it on its flat side, the stem to the northwest, and then halve it vertically in the direction of its length, keeping the southwest half. such was the general form. there was a remarkable series of these great rock-waves revealed by the burning; breakers, as it were. no wonder that the river that found its way through them was rapid and obstructed by falls. no doubt the absence of soil on these rocks, or its dryness where there was any, caused this to be a very thorough burning. we could see the lake over the woods, two or three miles ahead, and that the river made an abrupt turn southward around the northwest end of the cliff on which we stood, or a little above us, so that we had cut off a bend, and that there was an important fall in it a short distance below us. i could see the canoe a hundred rods behind, but now on the opposite shore, and supposed that the indian had concluded to take out and carry round some bad rapids on that side, and that that might be what he had beckoned to me for; but after waiting a while i could still see nothing of him, and i observed to my companion that i wondered where he was, though i began to suspect that he had gone inland to look for the lake from some hilltop on that side, as we had done. this proved to be the case; for after i had started to return to the canoe, i heard a faint halloo, and descried him on the top of a distant rocky hill on that side. but as, after a long time had elapsed, i still saw his canoe in the same place, and he had not returned to it, and appeared in no hurry to do so, and, moreover, as i remembered that he had previously beckoned to me, i thought that there might be something more to delay him than i knew, and began to return northwest, along the ridge, toward the angle in the river. my companion, who had just been separated from us, and had even contemplated the necessity of camping alone, wishing to husband his steps, and yet to keep with us, inquired where i was going; to which i answered that i was going far enough back to communicate with the indian, and that then i thought we had better go along the shore together, and keep him in sight. when we reached the shore, the indian appeared from out the woods on the opposite side, but on account of the roar of the water it was difficult to communicate with him. he kept along the shore westward to his canoe, while we stopped at the angle where the stream turned southward around the precipice. i again said to my companion that we would keep along the shore and keep the indian in sight. we started to do so, being close together, the indian behind us having launched his canoe again, but just then i saw the latter, who had crossed to our side, forty or fifty rods behind, beckoning to me, and i called to my companion, who had just disappeared behind large rocks at the point of the precipice, three or four rods before me, on his way down the stream, that i was going to help the indian a moment. i did so,--helped get the canoe over a fall, lying with my breast over a rock, and holding one end while he received it below,--and within ten or fifteen minutes at most i was back again at the point where the river turned southward, in order to catch up with my companion, while polis glided down the river alone, parallel with me. but to my surprise, when i rounded the precipice, though the shore was bare of trees, without rocks, for a quarter of a mile at least, my companion was not to be seen. it was as if he had sunk into the earth. this was the more unaccountable to me, because i knew that his feet were, since our swamp walk, very sore, and that he wished to keep with the party; and besides this was very bad walking, climbing over or about the rocks. i hastened along, hallooing and searching for him, thinking he might be concealed behind a rock, yet doubting if he had not taken the other side of the precipice, but the indian had got along still faster in his canoe, till he was arrested by the falls, about a quarter of a mile below. he then landed, and said that we could go no farther that night. the sun was setting, and on account of falls and rapids we should be obliged to leave this river and carry a good way into another farther east. the first thing then was to find my companion, for i was now very much alarmed about him, and i sent the indian along the shore down-stream, which began to be covered with unburnt wood again just below the falls, while i searched backward about the precipice which we had passed. the indian showed some unwillingness to exert himself, complaining that he was very tired, in consequence of his dayâ��s work, that it had strained him very much getting down so many rapids alone; but he went off calling somewhat like an owl. i remembered that my companion was near-sighted, and i feared that he had either fallen from the precipice, or fainted and sunk down amid the rocks beneath it. i shouted and searched above and below this precipice in the twilight till i could not see, expecting nothing less than to find his body beneath it. for half an hour i anticipated and believed only the worst. i thought what i should do the next day if i did not find him, what i _could_ do in such a wilderness, and how his relatives would feel, if i should return without him. i felt that if he were really lost away from the river there, it would be a desperate undertaking to find him; and where were they who could help you? what would it be to raise the country, where there were only two or three camps, twenty or thirty miles apart, and no road, and perhaps nobody at home? yet we must try the harder, the less the prospect of success. i rushed down from this precipice to the canoe in order to fire the indianâ��s gun, but found that my companion had the caps. i was still thinking of getting it off when the indian returned. he had not found him, but he said that he had seen his tracks once or twice along the shore. this encouraged me very much. he objected to firing the gun, saying that if my companion heard it, which was not likely, on account of the roar of the stream, it would tempt him to come toward us, and he might break his neck in the dark. for the same reason we refrained from lighting a fire on the highest rock. i proposed that we should both keep down the stream to the lake, or that i should go at any rate, but the indian said: â��no use, canâ��t do anything in the dark; come morning, then we find â��em. no harm,--he make â��em camp. no bad animals here, no gristly bears, such as in california, where heâ��s been,--warm night,--he well off as you and i.â�� i considered that if he was well he could do without us. he had just lived eight years in california, and had plenty of experience with wild beasts and wilder men, was peculiarly accustomed to make journeys of great length; but if he were sick or dead, he was near where we were. the darkness in the woods was by this so thick that it alone decided the question. we must camp where we were. i knew that he had his knapsack, with blankets and matches, and, if well, would fare no worse than we, except that he would have no supper nor society. this side of the river being so encumbered with rocks, we crossed to the eastern or smoother shore, and proceeded to camp there, within two or three rods of the falls. we pitched no tent, but lay on the sand, putting a few handfuls of grass and twigs under us, there being no evergreen at hand. for fuel we had some of the charred stumps. our various bags of provisions had got quite wet in the rapids, and i arranged them about the fire to dry. the fall close by was the principal one on this stream, and it shook the earth under us. it was a cool, because dewy, night; the more so, probably, owing to the nearness of the falls. the indian complained a good deal, and thought afterward that he got a cold there which occasioned a more serious illness. we were not much troubled by mosquitoes at any rate. i lay awake a good deal from anxiety, but, unaccountably to myself, was at length comparatively at ease respecting him. at first i had apprehended the worst, but now i had little doubt but that i should find him in the morning. from time to time i fancied that i heard his voice calling through the roar of the falls from the opposite side of the river; but it is doubtful if we could have heard him across the stream there. sometimes i doubted whether the indian had really seen his tracks, since he manifested an unwillingness to make much of a search, and then my anxiety returned. it was the most wild and desolate region we had camped in, where, if anywhere, one might expect to meet with befitting inhabitants, but i heard only the squeak of a nighthawk flitting over. the moon in her first quarter, in the fore part of the night, setting over the bare rocky hills garnished with tall, charred, and hollow stumps or shells of trees, served to reveal the desolation. * * * * * thursday, july 30. i aroused the indian early this morning to go in search of our companion, expecting to find him within a mile or two, farther down the stream. the indian wanted his breakfast first, but i reminded him that my companion had had neither breakfast nor supper. we were obliged first to carry our canoe and baggage over into another stream, the main east branch, about three fourths of a mile distant, for webster stream was no farther navigable. we went twice over this carry, and the dewy bushes wet us through like water up to the middle; i hallooed in a high key from time to time, though i had little expectation that i could be heard over the roar of the rapids, and, moreover, we were necessarily on the opposite side of the stream to him. in going over this portage the last time, the indian, who was before me with the canoe on his head, stumbled and fell heavily once, and lay for a moment silent, as if in pain. i hastily stepped forward to help him, asking if he was much hurt, but after a momentâ��s pause, without replying, he sprang up and went forward. he was all the way subject to taciturn fits, but they were harmless ones. we had launched our canoe and gone but little way down the east branch, when i heard an answering shout from my companion, and soon after saw him standing on a point where there was a clearing a quarter of a mile below, and the smoke of his fire was rising near by. before i saw him i naturally shouted again and again, but the indian curtly remarked, â��he hears you,â�� as if once was enough. it was just below the mouth of webster stream. when we arrived, he was smoking his pipe, and said that he had passed a pretty comfortable night, though it was rather cold, on account of the dew. it appeared that when we stood together the previous evening, and i was shouting to the indian across the river, he, being near-sighted, had not seen the indian nor his canoe, and when i went back to the indianâ��s assistance, did not see which way i went, and supposed that we were below and not above him, and so, making haste to catch up, he ran away from us. having reached this clearing, a mile or more below our camp, the night overtook him, and he made a fire in a little hollow, and lay down by it in his blanket, still thinking that we were ahead of him. he thought it likely that he had heard the indian call once the evening before, but mistook it for an owl. he had seen one botanical rarity before it was dark,--pure white _epilobium angustifolium_ amidst the fields of pink ones, in the burnt lands. he had already stuck up the remnant of a lumbererâ��s shirt, found on the point, on a pole by the waterside, for a signal, and attached a note to it, to inform us that he had gone on to the lake, and that if he did not find us there, he would be back in a couple of hours. if he had not found us soon, he had some thoughts of going back in search of the solitary hunter whom we had met at telos lake, ten miles behind, and, if successful, hire him to take him to bangor. but if this hunter had moved as fast as we, he would have been twenty miles off by this time, and who could guess in what direction? it would have been like looking for a needle in a haymow, to search for him in these woods. he had been considering how long he could live on berries alone. we substituted for his note a card containing our names and destination, and the date of our visit, which polis neatly inclosed in a piece of birch bark to keep it dry. this has probably been read by some hunter or explorer ere this. we all had good appetites for the breakfast which we made haste to cook here, and then, having partially dried our clothes, we glided swiftly down the winding stream toward second lake. as the shores became flatter with frequent gravel and sand-bars, and the stream more winding in the lower land near the lake, elms and ash trees made their appearance; also the wild yellow lily (_lilium canadense_), some of whose bulbs i collected for a soup. on some ridges the burnt land extended as far as the lake. this was a very beautiful lake, two or three miles long, with high mountains on the southwest side, the (as our indian said) _nerlumskeechticook_, _i. e._, deadwater mountain. it appears to be the same called carbuncle mountain on the map. according to polis, it extends in separate elevations all along this and the next lake, which is much larger. the lake, too, i think, is called by the same name, or perhaps with the addition of _gamoc_ or _mooc_. the morning was a bright one, and perfectly still and serene, the lake as smooth as glass, we making the only ripple as we paddled into it. the dark mountains about it were seen through a glaucous mist, and the brilliant white stems of canoe birches mingled with the other woods around it. the wood thrush sang on the distant shore, and the laugh of some loons, sporting in a concealed western bay, as if inspired by the morning, came distinct over the lake to us, and, what was more remarkable, the echo which ran round the lake was much louder than the original note; probably because, the loon being in a regularly curving bay under the mountain, we were exactly in the focus of many echoes, the sound being reflected like light from a concave mirror. the beauty of the scene may have been enhanced to our eyes by the fact that we had just come together again after a night of some anxiety. this reminded me of the ambejijis lake on the west branch, which i crossed in my first coming to maine. having paddled down three quarters of the lake, we came to a standstill, while my companion let down for fish. a white (or whitish) gull sat on a rock which rose above the surface in mid-lake not far off, quite in harmony with the scene; and as we rested there in the warm sun, we heard one loud crushing or crackling sound from the forest, forty or fifty rods distant, as of a stick broken by the foot of some large animal. even this was an interesting incident there. in the midst of our dreams of giant lake trout, even then supposed to be nibbling, our fishermen drew up a diminutive red perch, and we took up our paddles again in haste. it was not apparent where the outlet of this lake was, and while the indian thought it was in one direction, i thought it was in another. he said, â��i bet you four-pence it is there,â�� but he still held on in my direction, which proved to be the right one. as we were approaching the outlet, it being still early in the forenoon, he suddenly exclaimed, â��moose! moose!â�� and told us to be still. he put a cap on his gun, and, standing up in the stern, rapidly pushed the canoe straight toward the shore and the moose. it was a cow moose, about thirty rods off, standing in the water by the side of the outlet, partly behind some fallen timber and bushes, and at that distance she did not look very large. she was flapping her large ears, and from time to time poking off the flies with her nose from some part of her body. she did not appear much alarmed by our neighborhood, only occasionally turned her head and looked straight at us, and then gave her attention to the flies again. as we approached nearer she got out of the water, stood higher, and regarded us more suspiciously. polis pushed the canoe steadily forward in the shallow water, and i for a moment forgot the moose in attending to some pretty rose-colored polygonums just rising above the surface, but the canoe soon grounded in the mud eight or ten rods distant from the moose, and the indian seized his gun and prepared to fire. after standing still a moment, she turned slowly, as usual, so as to expose her side, and he improved this moment to fire, over our heads. she thereupon moved off eight or ten rods at a moderate pace, across a shallow bay, to an old standing-place of hers, behind some fallen red maples, on the opposite shore, and there she stood still again a dozen or fourteen rods from us, while the indian hastily loaded and fired twice at her, without her moving. my companion, who passed him his caps and bullets, said that polis was as excited as a boy of fifteen, that his hand trembled, and he once put his ramrod back upside down. this was remarkable for so experienced a hunter. perhaps he was anxious to make a good shot before us. the white hunter had told me that the indians were not good shots, because they were excited, though he said that we had got a good hunter with us. the indian now pushed quickly and quietly back, and a long distance round, in order to get into the outlet,--for he had fired over the neck of a peninsula between it and the lake,--till we approached the place where the moose had stood, when he exclaimed, â��she is a goner!â�� and was surprised that we did not see her as soon as he did. there, to be sure, she lay perfectly dead, with her tongue hanging out, just where she had stood to receive the last shots, looking unexpectedly large and horse-like, and we saw where the bullets had scarred the trees. using a tape, i found that the moose measured just six feet from the shoulder to the tip of the hoof, and was eight feet long as she lay. some portions of the body, for a foot in diameter, were almost covered with flies, apparently the common fly of our woods, with a dark spot on the wing, and not the very large ones which occasionally pursued us in midstream, though both are called moose-flies. polis, preparing to skin the moose, asked me to help him find a stone on which to sharpen his large knife. it being all a flat alluvial ground where the moose had fallen, covered with red maples, etc., this was no easy matter; we searched far and wide, a long time, till at length i found a flat kind of slate-stone, and soon after he returned with a similar one, on which he soon made his knife very sharp. while he was skinning the moose, i proceeded to ascertain what kind of fishes were to be found in the sluggish and muddy outlet. the greatest difficulty was to find a pole. it was almost impossible to find a slender, straight pole ten or twelve feet long in those woods. you might search half an hour in vain. they are commonly spruce, arbor-vitã¦, fir, etc., short, stout, and branchy, and do not make good fish-poles, even after you have patiently cut off all their tough and scraggy branches. the fishes were red perch and chivin. the indian, having cut off a large piece of sirloin, the upper lip, and the tongue, wrapped them in the hide, and placed them in the bottom of the canoe, observing that there was â��one man,â�� meaning the weight of one. our load had previously been reduced some thirty pounds, but a hundred pounds were now added,--a serious addition, which made our quarters still more narrow, and considerably increased the danger on the lakes and rapids, as well as the labor of the carries. the skin was ours according to custom, since the indian was in our employ, but we did not think of claiming it. he being a skillful dresser of moose-hides would make it worth seven or eight dollars to him, as i was told. he said that he sometimes earned fifty or sixty dollars in a day at them; he had killed ten moose in one day, though the skinning and all took two days. this was the way he had got his property. there were the tracks of a calf thereabouts, which he said would come â��by, by,â�� and he could get it if we cared to wait, but i cast cold water on the project. we continued along the outlet toward grand lake, through a swampy region, by a long, winding, and narrow dead water, very much choked up by wood, where we were obliged to land sometimes in order to get the canoe over a log. it was hard to find any channel, and we did not know but we should be lost in the swamp. it abounded in ducks, as usual. at length we reached grand lake, which the indian called _matungamook_. at the head of this we saw, coming in from the southwest, with a sweep apparently from a gorge in the mountains, trout stream, or _uncardnerheese_, which name, the indian said, had something to do with mountains. we stopped to dine on an interesting high rocky island, soon after entering matungamook lake, securing our canoe to the cliffy shore. it is always pleasant to step from a boat on to a large rock or cliff. here was a good opportunity to dry our dewy blankets on the open sunny rock. indians had recently camped here, and accidentally burned over the western end of the island, and polis picked up a gun-case of blue broadcloth, and said that he knew the indian it belonged to, and would carry it to him. his tribe is not so large but he may know all its effects. we proceeded to make a fire and cook our dinner amid some pines, where our predecessors had done the same, while the indian busied himself about his moose-hide on the shore, for he said that he thought it a good plan for one to do all the cooking, _i. e._, i suppose, if that one were not himself. a peculiar evergreen overhung our fire, which at first glance looked like a pitch pine (_p. rigida_), with leaves little more than an inch long, spruce-like, but we found it to be the _pinus banksiana_,--â��banksâ��s, or the labrador pine,â�� also called scrub pine, gray pine, etc., a new tree to us. these must have been good specimens, for several were thirty or thirty-five feet high. richardson found it forty feet high and upward, and states that the porcupine feeds on its bark. here also grew the red pine (_pinus resinosa_). i saw where the indians had made canoes in a little secluded hollow in the woods, on the top of the rock, where they were out of the wind, and large piles of whittlings remained. this must have been a favorite resort for their ancestors, and, indeed, we found here the point of an arrowhead, such as they have not used for two centuries and now know not how to make. the indian, picking up a stone, remarked to me, â��that very strange lock (rock).â�� it was a piece of hornstone, which i told him his tribe had probably brought here centuries before to make arrowheads of. he also picked up a yellowish curved bone by the side of our fireplace and asked me to guess what it was. it was one of the upper incisors of a beaver, on which some party had feasted within a year or two. i found also most of the teeth, and the skull, etc. we here dined on fried moose-meat. one who was my companion in my two previous excursions to these woods, tells me that when hunting up the caucomgomoc, about two years ago, he found himself dining one day on moose-meat, mud turtle, trout, and beaver, and he thought that there were few places in the world where these dishes could easily be brought together on one table. after the almost incessant rapids and falls of the madunkchunk (height-of-land, or webster stream), we had just passed through the dead water of second lake, and were now in the much larger dead water of grand lake, and i thought the indian was entitled to take an extra nap here. ktaadn, near which we were to pass the next day, is said to mean â��highest land.â�� so much geography is there in their names. the indian navigator naturally distinguishes by a name those parts of a stream where he has encountered quick water and forks, and again, the lakes and smooth water where he can rest his weary arms, since those are the most interesting and more arable parts to him. the very sight of the _nerlumskeechticook_, or deadwater mountains, a dayâ��s journey off over the forest, as we first saw them, must awaken in him pleasing memories. and not less interesting is it to the white traveler, when he is crossing a placid lake in these out-of-the-way woods, perhaps thinking that he is in some sense one of the earlier discoverers of it, to be reminded that it was thus well known and suitably named by indian hunters perhaps a thousand years ago. ascending the precipitous rock which formed this long narrow island, i was surprised to find that its summit was a narrow ridge, with a precipice on one side, and that its axis of elevation extended from northwest to southeast exactly like that of the great rocky ridge at the commencement of the burnt ground, ten miles northwesterly. the same arrangement prevailed here, and we could plainly see that the mountain ridges on the west of the lake trended the same way. splendid large harebells nodded over the edge and in the clefts of the cliff, and the blueberries (_vaccinium canadense_) were for the first time really abundant in the thin soil on its top. there was no lack of them henceforward on the east branch. there was a fine view hence over the sparkling lake, which looked pure and deep, and had two or three, in all, rocky islands in it. our blankets being dry, we set out again, the indian as usual having left his gazette on a tree. this time it was we three in a canoe, my companion smoking. we paddled southward down this handsome lake, which appeared to extend nearly as far east as south, keeping near the western shore, just outside a small island, under the dark nerlumskeechticook mountain. for i had observed on my map that this was the course. it was three or four miles across it. it struck me that the outline of this mountain on the southwest of the lake, and of another beyond it, was not only like that of the huge rock waves of webster stream, but in the main like kineo, on moosehead lake, having a similar but less abrupt precipice at the southeast end; in short, that all the prominent hills and ridges hereabouts were larger or smaller kineos, and that possibly there was such a relation between kineo and the rocks of webster stream. [illustration: _mount kineo cliff_] the indian did not know exactly where the outlet was, whether at the extreme southwest angle or more easterly, and had asked to see my plan at the last stopping-place, but i had forgotten to show it to him. as usual, he went feeling his way by a middle course between two probable points, from which he could diverge either way at last without losing much distance. in approaching the south shore, as the clouds looked gusty and the waves ran pretty high, we so steered as to get partly under the lee of an island, though at a great distance from it. i could not distinguish the outlet till we were almost in it, and heard the water falling over the dam there. here was a considerable fall, and a very substantial dam, but no sign of a cabin or camp. the hunter whom we met at telos lake had told us that there were plenty of trout here, but at this hour they did not rise to the bait, only cousin trout, from the very midst of the rushing waters. there are not so many fishes in these rivers as in the concord. while we loitered here, polis took occasion to cut with his big knife some of the hair from his moose-hide, and so lightened and prepared it for drying. i noticed at several old indian camps in the woods the pile of hair which they had cut from their hides. having carried over the dam, he darted down the rapids, leaving us to walk for a mile or more, where for the most part there was no path, but very thick and difficult traveling near the stream. at length he would call to let us know where he was waiting for us with his canoe, when, on account of the windings of the stream, we did not know where the shore was, but he did not call often enough, forgetting that we were not indians. he seemed to be very saving of his breath,--yet he would be surprised if we went by, or did not strike the right spot. this was not because he was unaccommodating, but a proof of superior manners. indians like to get along with the least possible communication and ado. he was really paying us a great compliment all the while, thinking that we preferred a hint to a kick. at length, climbing over the willows and fallen trees, when this was easier than to go round or under them, we overtook the canoe, and glided down the stream in smooth but swift water for several miles. i here observed again, as at webster stream, and on a still larger scale the next day, that the river was a smooth and regularly inclined plane down which we coasted. as we thus glided along we started the first black ducks which we had distinguished. we decided to camp early to-night, that we might have ample time before dark; so we stopped at the first favorable shore, where there was a narrow gravelly beach on the western side, some five miles below the outlet of the lake. it was an interesting spot, where the river began to make a great bend to the east, and the last of the peculiar moose-faced nerlumskeechticook mountains not far southwest of grand lake rose dark in the northwest a short distance behind, displaying its gray precipitous southeast side, but we could not see this without coming out upon the shore. two steps from the water on either side, and you come to the abrupt bushy and rooty if not turfy edge of the bank, four or five feet high, where the interminable forest begins, as if the stream had but just cut its way through it. it is surprising on stepping ashore anywhere into this unbroken wilderness to see so often, at least within a few rods of the river, the marks of the axe, made by lumberers who have either camped here or driven logs past in previous springs. you will see perchance where, going on the same errand that you do, they have cut large chips from a tall white pine stump for their fire. while we were pitching the camp and getting supper, the indian cut the rest of the hair from his moose-hide, and proceeded to extend it vertically on a temporary frame between two small trees, half a dozen feet from the opposite side of the fire, lashing and stretching it with arbor-vit㦠bark which was always at hand, and in this case was stripped from one of the trees it was tied to. asking for a new kind of tea, he made us some, pretty good, of the checkerberry (_gaultheria procumbens_), which covered the ground, dropping a little bunch of it tied up with cedar bark into the kettle; but it was not quite equal to the _chiogenes_. we called this therefore checkerberry-tea camp. i was struck with the abundance of the _linnã¦a borealis_, checkerberry, and _chiogenes hispidula_, almost everywhere in the maine woods. the wintergreen (_chimaphila umbellata_) was still in bloom here, and clintonia berries were abundant and ripe. this handsome plant is one of the most common in that forest. we here first noticed the moose-wood in fruit on the banks. the prevailing trees were spruce (commonly black), arbor-vitã¦, canoe birch (black ash and elms beginning to appear), yellow birch, red maple, and a little hemlock skulking in the forest. the indian said that the white maple punk was the best for tinder, that yellow birch punk was pretty good, but hard. after supper he put on the moose tongue and lips to boil, cutting out the _septum_. he showed me how to write on the under side of birch bark, with a black spruce twig, which is hard and tough, and can be brought to a point. the indian wandered off into the woods a short distance just before night, and, coming back, said, â��me found great treasure,--fifty, sixty dollarsâ�� worth.â�� â��whatâ��s that?â�� we asked. â��steel traps, under a log, thirty or forty, i didnâ��t count â��em. i guess indian work,--worth three dollars apiece.â�� it was a singular coincidence that he should have chanced to walk to and look under that particular log, in that trackless forest. i saw chivin and chub in the stream when washing my hands, but my companion tried in vain to catch them. i also heard the sound of bullfrogs from a swamp on the opposite side, thinking at first that they were moose; a duck paddled swiftly by; and sitting in that dusky wilderness, under that dark mountain, by the bright river which was full of reflected light, still i heard the wood thrush sing, as if no higher civilization could be attained. by this time the night was upon us. you commonly make your camp just at sundown, and are collecting wood, getting your supper, or pitching your tent while the shades of night are gathering around and adding to the already dense gloom of the forest. you have no time to explore or look around you before it is dark. you may penetrate half a dozen rods farther into that twilight wilderness, after some dry bark to kindle your fire with, and wonder what mysteries lie hidden still deeper in it, say at the end of a long dayâ��s walk; or you may run down to the shore for a dipper of water, and get a clearer view for a short distance up or down the stream, and while you stand there, see a fish leap, or duck alight in the river, or hear a wood thrush or robin sing in the woods. that is as if you had been to town or civilized parts. but there is no sauntering off to see the country, and ten or fifteen rods seems a great way from your companions, and you come back with the air of a much-traveled man, as from a long journey, with adventures to relate, though you may have heard the crackling of the fire all the while,--and at a hundred rods you might be lost past recovery, and have to camp out. it is all mossy and _moosey_. in some of those dense fir and spruce woods there is hardly room for the smoke to go up. the trees are a _standing_ night, and every fir and spruce which you fell is a plume plucked from nightâ��s raven wing. then at night the general stillness is more impressive than any sound, but occasionally you hear the note of an owl farther or nearer in the woods, and if near a lake, the semihuman cry of the loons at their unearthly revels. to-night the indian lay between the fire and his stretched moose-hide, to avoid the mosquitoes. indeed, he also made a small smoky fire of damp leaves at his head and his feet, and then as usual rolled up his head in his blanket. we with our veils and our wash were tolerably comfortable, but it would be difficult to pursue any sedentary occupation in the woods at this season; you cannot see to read much by the light of a fire through a veil in the evening, nor handle pencil and paper well with gloves or anointed fingers. * * * * * friday, july 31. the indian said, â��you and i kill moose last night, therefore use â��em best wood. always use hard wood to cook moose-meat.â�� his â��best woodâ�� was rock maple. he cast the mooseâ��s lip into the fire, to burn the hair off, and then rolled it up with the meat to carry along. observing that we were sitting down to breakfast without any pork, he said, with a very grave look, â��me want some fat,â�� so he was told that he might have as much as he would fry. we had smooth but swift water for a considerable distance, where we glided rapidly along, scaring up ducks and kingfishers. but, as usual, our smooth progress ere long came to an end, and we were obliged to carry canoe and all about half a mile down the right bank, around some rapids or falls. it required sharp eyes sometimes to tell which side was the carry, before you went over the falls, but polis never failed to land us rightly. the raspberries were particularly abundant and large here, and all hands went to eating them, the indian remarking on their size. often on bare rocky carries the trail was so indistinct that i repeatedly lost it, but when i walked behind him i observed that he could keep it almost like a hound, and rarely hesitated, or, if he paused a moment on a bare rock, his eye immediately detected some sign which would have escaped me. frequently _we_ found no path at all at these places, and were to him unaccountably delayed. he would only say it was â��ver strange.â�� we had heard of a grand fall on this stream, and thought that each fall we came to must be it, but after christening several in succession with this name, we gave up the search. there were more grand or petty falls than i can remember. i cannot tell how many times we had to walk on account of falls or rapids. we were expecting all the while that the river would take a final leap and get to smooth water, but there was no improvement this forenoon. however, the carries were an agreeable variety. so surely as we stepped out of the canoe and stretched our legs we found ourselves in a blueberry and raspberry garden, each side of our rocky trail around the falls being lined with one or both. there was not a carry on the main east branch where we did not find an abundance of both these berries, for these were the rockiest places, and partially cleared, such as these plants prefer, and there had been none to gather the finest before us. in our three journeys over the carries,--for we were obliged to go over the ground three times whenever the canoe was taken out,--we did full justice to the berries, and they were just what we wanted to correct the effect of our hard bread and pork diet. another name for making a portage would have been going a-berrying. we also found a few amelanchier, or service, berries, though most were abortive, but they held on rather more generally than they do in concord. the indian called them _pemoymenuk_, and said that they bore much fruit in some places. he sometimes also ate the northern wild red cherries, saying that they were good medicine, but they were scarcely edible. we bathed and dined at the foot of one of these carries. it was the indian who commonly reminded us that it was dinner-time, sometimes even by turning the prow to the shore. he once made an indirect, but lengthy apology, by saying that we might think it strange, but that one who worked hard all day was very particular to have his dinner in good season. at the most considerable fall on this stream, when i was walking over the carry, close behind the indian, he observed a track on the rock, which was but slightly covered with soil, and, stooping, muttered â��caribou.â�� when we returned, he observed a much larger track near the same place, where some animalâ��s foot had sunk into a small hollow in the rock, partly filled with grass and earth, and he exclaimed with surprise, â��what that?â�� â��well, what is it?â�� i asked. stooping and laying his hand in it, he answered with a mysterious air, and in a half whisper, â��devil [that is, indian devil, or cougar]--ledges about here--very bad animal--pull â��em rocks all to pieces.â�� â��how long since it was made?â�� i asked. â��to-day or yesterday,â�� said he. but when i asked him afterward if he was sure it was the devilâ��s track, he said he did not know. i had been told that the scream of a cougar was heard about ktaadn recently, and we were not far from that mountain. we spent at least half the time in walking to-day, and the walking was as bad as usual, for the indian, being alone, commonly ran down far below the foot of the carries before he waited for us. the carry-paths themselves were more than usually indistinct, often the route being revealed only by the countless small holes in the fallen timber made by the tacks in the driversâ�� boots, or where there _was_ a slight trail we did not find it. it was a tangled and perplexing thicket, through which we stumbled and threaded our way, and when we had finished a mile of it, our starting-point seemed far away. we were glad that we had not got to walk to bangor along the banks of this river, which would be a journey of more than a hundred miles. think of the denseness of the forest, the fallen trees and rocks, the windings of the river, the streams emptying in, and the frequent swamps to be crossed. it made you shudder. yet the indian from time to time pointed out to us where he had thus crept along day after day when he was a boy of ten, and in a starving condition. he had been hunting far north of this with two grown indians. the winter came on unexpectedly early, and the ice compelled them to leave their canoe at grand lake, and walk down the bank. they shouldered their furs and started for oldtown. the snow was not deep enough for snowshoes, or to cover the inequalities of the ground. polis was soon too weak to carry any burden; but he managed to catch one otter. this was the most they all had to eat on this journey, and he remembered how good the yellow lily roots were, made into a soup with the otter oil. he shared this food equally with the other two, but being so small he suffered much more than they. he waded through the mattawamkeag at its mouth, when it was freezing cold and came up to his chin, and he, being very weak and emaciated, expected to be swept away. the first house which they reached was at lincoln, and thereabouts they met a white teamster with supplies, who, seeing their condition, gave them as much of his load as they could eat. for six months after getting home, he was very low, and did not expect to live, and was perhaps always the worse for it. we could not find much more than half of this dayâ��s journey on our maps (the â��map of the public lands of maine and massachusetts,â�� and â��coltonâ��s railroad and township map of maine,â�� which copies the former). by the maps there was not more than fifteen miles between camps at the outside, and yet we had been busily progressing all day, and much of the time very rapidly. for seven or eight miles below that succession of â��grandâ�� falls, the aspect of the banks as well as the character of the stream was changed. after passing a tributary from the northeast, perhaps bowlin stream, we had good swift smooth water, with a regular slope, such as i have described. low, grassy banks and muddy shores began. many elms, as well as maples, and more ash trees, overhung the stream, and supplanted the spruce. my lily roots having been lost when the canoe was taken out at a carry, i landed late in the afternoon, at a low and grassy place amid maples, to gather more. it was slow work, grubbing them up amid the sand, and the mosquitoes were all the while feasting on me. mosquitoes, black flies, etc., pursued us in mid-channel, and we were glad sometimes to get into violent rapids, for then we escaped them. a red-headed woodpecker flew across the river, and the indian remarked that it was good to eat. as we glided swiftly down the inclined plane of the river, a great cat owl launched itself away from a stump on the bank, and flew heavily across the stream, and the indian, as usual, imitated its note. soon the same bird flew back in front of us, and we afterwards passed it perched on a tree. soon afterward a white-headed eagle sailed down the stream before us. we drove him several miles, while we were looking for a good place to camp, for we expected to be overtaken by a shower,--and still we could distinguish him by his white tail, sailing away from time to time from some tree by the shore still farther down the stream. some shecorways being surprised by us, a part of them dived, and we passed directly over them, and could trace their course here and there by a bubble on the surface, but we did not see them come up. polis detected once or twice what he called a â��towâ�� road, an indistinct path leading into the forest. in the meanwhile we passed the mouth of the seboois on our left. this did not look so large as our stream, which was indeed the main one. it was some time before we found a camping-place, for the shore was either too grassy and muddy, where mosquitoes abounded, or too steep a hillside. the indian said that there were but few mosquitoes on a steep hillside. we examined a good place, where somebody had camped a long time; but it seemed pitiful to occupy an old site, where there was so much room to choose, so we continued on. we at length found a place to our minds, on the west bank, about a mile below the mouth of the seboois, where, in a very dense spruce wood above a gravelly shore, there seemed to be but few insects. the trees were so thick that we were obliged to clear a space to build our fire and lie down in, and the young spruce trees that were left were like the wall of an apartment rising around us. we were obliged to pull ourselves up a steep bank to get there. but the place which you have selected for your camp, though never so rough and grim, begins at once to have its attractions, and becomes a very centre of civilization to you: â��home is home, be it never so homely.â�� it turned out that the mosquitoes were more numerous here than we had found them before, and the indian complained a good deal, though he lay, as the night before, between three fires and his stretched hide. as i sat on a stump by the fire, with a veil and gloves on, trying to read, he observed, â��i make you candle,â�� and in a minute he took a piece of birch bark about two inches wide and rolled it hard, like an allumette fifteen inches long, lit it, and fixed it by the other end horizontally in a split stick three feet high, stuck it in the ground, turning the blazing end to the wind, and telling me to snuff it from time to time. it answered the purpose of a candle pretty well. i noticed, as i had done before, that there was a lull among the mosquitoes about midnight, and that they began again in the morning. nature is thus merciful. but apparently they need rest as well as we. few, if any, creatures are equally active all night. as soon as it was light i saw, through my veil, that the inside of the tent about our heads was quite blackened with myriads, each one of their wings when flying, as has been calculated, vibrating some three thousand times in a minute, and their combined hum was almost as bad to endure as their stings. i had an uncomfortable night on this account though i am not sure that one succeeded in his attempt to sting me. we did not suffer so much from insects on this excursion as the statements of some who have explored these woods in midsummer led us to anticipate. yet i have no doubt that at some seasons and in some places they are a much more serious pest. the jesuit hierome lalemant, of quebec, reporting the death of father reni menard, who was abandoned, lost his way, and died in the woods, among the ontarios near lake superior, in 1661, dwells chiefly on his probable sufferings from the attacks of mosquitoes when too weak to defend himself, adding that there was a frightful number of them in those parts, â��and so insupportable,â�� says he, â��that the three frenchmen who have made that voyage affirm that there was no other means of defending oneâ��s self but to run always without stopping, and it was even necessary for two of them to be employed in driving off these creatures while the third wanted to drink, otherwise he could not have done it.â�� i have no doubt that this was said in good faith. * * * * * august 1. i caught two or three large red chivin (_leuciscus pulchellus_) early this morning, within twenty feet of the camp, which, added to the moose-tongue, that had been left in the kettle boiling overnight, and to our other stores, made a sumptuous breakfast. the indian made us some hemlock tea instead of coffee, and we were not obliged to go as far as china for it; indeed, not quite so far as for the fish. this was tolerable, though he said it was not strong enough. it was interesting to see so simple a dish as a kettle of water with a handful of green hemlock sprigs in it, boiling over the huge fire in the open air, the leaves fast losing their lively green color, and know that it was for our breakfast. we were glad to embark once more, and leave some of the mosquitoes behind. we had passed the _wassataquoik_ without perceiving it. this, according to the indian, is the name of the main east branch itself, and not properly applied to this small tributary alone, as on the maps. we found that we had camped about a mile above huntâ��s, which is on the east bank, and is the last house for those who ascend ktaadn on this side. we had expected to ascend it from this point, but my companion was obliged to give up this on account of sore feet. the indian, however, suggested that perhaps he might get a pair of moccasins at this place, and that he could walk very easily in them without hurting his feet, wearing several pairs of stockings, and he said beside that they were so porous that when you had taken in water it all drained out again in a little while. we stopped to get some sugar, but found that the family had moved away, and the house was unoccupied, except temporarily by some men who were getting the hay. they told me that the road to ktaadn left the river eight miles above; also that perhaps we could get some sugar at fiskâ��s, fourteen miles below. i do not remember that we saw the mountain at all from the river. i noticed a seine here stretched on the bank, which probably had been used to catch salmon. just below this, on the west bank, we saw a moose-hide stretched, and with it a bearskin, which was comparatively very small. i was the more interested in this sight, because it was near here that a townsman of ours, then quite a lad, and alone, killed a large bear some years ago. the indian said that they belonged to joe aitteon, my last guide, but how he told i do not know. he was probably hunting near, and had left them for the day. finding that we were going directly to oldtown, he regretted that he had not taken more of the moose-meat to his family, saying that in a short time, by drying it, he could have made it so light as to have brought away the greater part, leaving the bones. we once or twice inquired after the lip, which is a famous tidbit, but he said, â��that go oldtown for my old woman; donâ��t get it every day.â�� maples grew more and more numerous. it was lowering, and rained a little during the forenoon, and, as we expected a wetting, we stopped early and dined on the east side of a small expansion of the river, just above what are probably called whetstone falls, about a dozen miles below huntâ��s. there were pretty fresh moose-tracks by the waterside. there were singular long ridges hereabouts, called â��horsebacks,â�� covered with ferns. my companion, having lost his pipe, asked the indian if he could not make him one. â��oh, yer,â�� said he, and in a minute rolled up one of birch bark, telling him to wet the bowl from time to time. here also he left his gazette on a tree. we carried round the falls just below, on the west side. the rocks were on their edges, and very sharp. the distance was about three fourths of a mile. when we had carried over one load, the indian returned by the shore, and i by the path, and though i made no particular haste, i was nevertheless surprised to find him at the other end as soon as i. it was remarkable how easily he got along over the worst ground. he said to me, â��i take canoe and you take the rest, suppose you can keep along with me?â�� i thought that he meant that while he ran down the rapids i should keep along the shore, and be ready to assist him from time to time, as i had done before; but as the walking would be very bad, i answered, â��i suppose you will go too fast for me, but i will try.â�� but i was to go by the path, he said. this i thought would not help the matter, i should have so far to go to get to the riverside when he wanted me. but neither was this what he meant. he was proposing a race over the carry, and asked me if i thought i could keep along with him by the same path, adding that i must be pretty smart to do it. as his load, the canoe, would be much the heaviest and bulkiest, though the simplest, i thought that i ought to be able to do it, and said that i would try. so i proceeded to gather up the gun, axe, paddle, kettle, frying-pan, plates, dippers, carpets, etc., etc., and while i was thus engaged he threw me his cowhide boots. â��what, are these in the bargain?â�� i asked. â��oh, yer,â�� said he; but before i could make a bundle of my load i saw him disappearing over a hill with the canoe on his head; so, hastily scraping the various articles together, i started on the run, and immediately went by him in the bushes, but i had no sooner left him out of sight in a rocky hollow than the greasy plates, dippers, etc., took to themselves wings, and while i was employed in gathering them up again, he went by me; but hastily pressing the sooty kettle to my side, i started once more, and soon passing him again, i saw him no more on the carry. i do not mention this as anything of a feat, for it was but poor running on my part, and he was obliged to move with great caution for fear of breaking his canoe as well as his neck. when he made his appearance, puffing and panting like myself, in answer to my inquiries where he had been, he said, â��rocks (locks) cut â��em feet,â�� and, laughing, added, â��oh, me love to play sometimes.â�� he said that he and his companions, when they came to carries several miles long, used to try who would get over first; each, perhaps, with a canoe on his head. i bore the sign of the kettle on my brown linen sack for the rest of the voyage. we made a second carry on the west side, around some falls about a mile below this. on the mainland were norway pines, indicating a new geological formation, and it was such a dry and sandy soil as we had not noticed before. as we approached the mouth of the east branch, we passed two or three huts, the first sign of civilization after huntâ��s, though we saw no road as yet; we heard a cow-bell, and even saw an infant held up to a small square window to see us pass, but apparently the infant and the mother that held it were the only inhabitants then at home for several miles. this took the wind out of our sails, reminding us that we were travelers surely, while it was a native of the soil, and had the advantage of us. conversation flagged. i would only hear the indian, perhaps, ask my companion, â��you load my pipe?â�� he said that he smoked alder bark, for medicine. on entering the west branch at nicketow it appeared much larger than the east. polis remarked that the former was all gone and lost now, that it was all smooth water hence to oldtown, and he threw away his pole which was cut on the umbazookskus. thinking of the rapids, he said once or twice that you wouldnâ��t catch him to go east branch again; but he did not by any means mean all that he said. things are quite changed since i was here eleven years ago. where there were but one or two houses, i now found quite a village, with sawmills and a store (the latter was locked, but its contents were so much the more safely stored), and there was a stage-road to mattawamkeag, and the rumor of a stage. indeed, a steamer had ascended thus far once, when the water was very high. but we were not able to get any sugar, only a better shingle to lean our backs against. we camped about two miles below nicketow, on the south side of the west branch, covering with fresh twigs the withered bed of a former traveler, and feeling that we were now in a settled country, especially when in the evening we heard an ox sneeze in its wild pasture across the river. wherever you land along the frequented part of the river, you have not far to go to find these sites of temporary inns, the withered bed of flattened twigs, the charred sticks, and perhaps the tent-poles. and not long since, similar beds were spread along the connecticut, the hudson, and the delaware, and longer still ago, by the thames and seine, and they now help to make the soil where private and public gardens, mansions and palaces are. we could not get fir twigs for our bed here, and the spruce was harsh in comparison, having more twig in proportion to its leaf, but we improved it somewhat with hemlock. the indian remarked as before, â��must have hard wood to cook moose-meat,â�� as if that were a maxim, and proceeded to get it. my companion cooked some in california fashion, winding a long string of the meat round a stick and slowly turning it in his hand before the fire. it was very good. but the indian, not approving of the mode, or because he was not allowed to cook it his own way, would not taste it. after the regular supper we attempted to make a lily soup of the bulbs which i had brought along, for i wished to learn all i could before i got out of the woods. following the indianâ��s directions, for he began to be sick, i washed the bulbs carefully, minced some moose-meat and some pork, salted and boiled all together, but we had not patience to try the experiment fairly, for he said it must be boiled till the roots were completely softened so as to thicken the soup like flour; but though we left it on all night, we found it dried to the kettle in the morning, and not yet boiled to a flour. perhaps the roots were not ripe enough, for they commonly gather them in the fall. as it was, it was palatable enough, but it reminded me of the irishmanâ��s limestone broth. the other ingredients were enough alone. the indianâ��s name for these bulbs was _sheepnoc_. i stirred the soup by accident with a striped maple or moose-wood stick, which i had peeled, and he remarked that its bark was an emetic. he prepared to camp as usual between his moose-hide and the fire; but it beginning to rain suddenly, he took refuge under the tent with us, and gave us a song before falling asleep. it rained hard in the night, and spoiled another box of matches for us, which the indian had left out, for he was very careless; but, as usual, we had so much the better night for the rain, since it kept the mosquitoes down. * * * * * sunday, august 2. was a cloudy and unpromising morning. one of us observed to the indian, â��you did not stretch your moose-hide last night, did you, mr. polis?â�� whereat he replied, in a tone of surprise, though perhaps not of ill humor: â��what you ask me that question for? suppose i stretch â��em, you see â��em. may be your way talking, may be all right, no indian way.â�� i had observed that he did not wish to answer the same question more than once, and was often silent when it was put again for the sake of certainty, as if he were moody. not that he was incommunicative, for he frequently commenced a long-winded narrative of his own accord,--repeated at length the tradition of some old battle, or some passage in the recent history of his tribe in which he had acted a prominent part, from time to time drawing a long breath, and resuming the thread of his tale, with the true story-tellerâ��s leisureliness, perhaps after shooting a rapid,--prefacing with â��we-e-ll, by-by,â�� etc., as he paddled along. especially after the dayâ��s work was over, and he had put himself in posture for the night, he would be unexpectedly sociable, exhibit even the _bonhommie_ of a frenchman, and we would fall asleep before he got through his periods. nicketow is called eleven miles from mattawamkeag by the river. our camp was, therefore, about nine miles from the latter place. the indian was quite sick this morning with the colic. i thought that he was the worse for the moose-meat he had eaten. we reached the mattawamkeag at half past eight in the morning, in the midst of a drizzling rain, and, after buying some sugar, set out again. the indian growing much worse, we stopped in the north part of lincoln to get some brandy for him; but failing in this, an apothecary recommended brandrethâ��s pills, which he refused to take, because he was not acquainted with them. he said to me, â��me doctor,--first study my case, find out what ail â��em,--then i know what to take.â�� we dropped down a little farther, and stopped at mid-forenoon on an island and made him a dipper of tea. here, too, we dined and did some washing and botanizing, while he lay on the bank. in the afternoon we went on a little farther, though the indian was no better. â��burntibus,â�� as he called it, was a long, smooth, lake-like reach below the five islands. he said that he owned a hundred acres somewhere up this way. as a thunder-shower appeared to be coming up, we stopped opposite a barn on the west bank, in chester, about a mile above lincoln. here at last we were obliged to spend the rest of the day and night, on account of our patient, whose sickness did not abate. he lay groaning under his canoe on the bank, looking very woebegone, yet it was only a common case of colic. you would not have thought, if you had seen him lying about thus, that he was the proprietor of so many acres in that neighborhood, was worth six thousand dollars, and had been to washington. it seemed to me that, like the irish, he made a greater ado about his sickness than a yankee does, and was more alarmed about himself. we talked somewhat of leaving him with his people in lincoln,--for that is one of their homes,--and taking the stage the next day, but he objected on account of the expense saying, â��suppose me well in morning, you and i go oldtown by noon.â�� as we were taking our tea at twilight, while he lay groaning still under his canoe, having at length found out â��what ail him,â�� he asked me to get him a dipper of water. taking the dipper in one hand he seized his powder-horn with the other, and, pouring into it a charge or two of powder, stirred it up with his finger, and drank it off. this was all he took to-day after breakfast beside his tea. to save the trouble of pitching our tent, when we had secured our stores from wandering dogs, we camped in the solitary half-open barn near the bank, with the permission of the owner, lying on new-mown hay four feet deep. the fragrance of the hay, in which many ferns, etc., were mingled, was agreeable, though it was quite alive with grasshoppers which you could hear crawling through it. this served to graduate our approach to houses and feather beds. in the night some large bird, probably an owl, flitted through over our heads, and very early in the morning we were awakened by the twittering of swallows which had their nests there. * * * * * monday, august 3. we started early before breakfast, the indian being considerably better, and soon glided by lincoln, and after another long and handsome lake-like reach, we stopped to breakfast on the west shore, two or three miles below this town. we frequently passed indian islands with their small houses on them. the governor, aitteon, lives in one of them, in lincoln. the penobscot indians seem to be more social, even, than the whites. ever and anon in the deepest wilderness of maine, you come to the log hut of a yankee or canada settler, but a penobscot never takes up his residence in such a solitude. they are not even scattered about on their islands in the penobscot, which are all within the settlements, but gathered together on two or three,--though not always on the best soil,--evidently for the sake of society. i saw one or two houses not now used by them, because, as our indian polis said, they were too solitary. the small river emptying in at lincoln is the matanancook, which also, we noticed, was the name of a steamer moored there. so we paddled and floated along, looking into the mouths of rivers. when passing the mohawk rips, or, as the indian called them, â��mohog lips,â�� four or five miles below lincoln, he told us at length the story of a fight between his tribe and the mohawks there, anciently,--how the latter were overcome by stratagem, the penobscots using concealed knives,--but they could not for a long time kill the mohawk chief, who was a very large and strong man, though he was attacked by several canoes at once, when swimming alone in the river. from time to time we met indians in their canoes, going up river. our man did not commonly approach them, but exchanged a few words with them at a distance in his tongue. these were the first indians we had met since leaving the umbazookskus. at piscataquis falls, just above the river of that name, we walked over the wooden railroad on the eastern shore, about one and a half miles long, while the indian glided down the rapids. the steamer from oldtown stops here, and passengers take a new boat above. piscataquis, whose mouth we here passed, means â��branch.â�� it is obstructed by falls at its mouth, but can be navigated with batteaux or canoes above through a settled country, even to the neighborhood of moosehead lake, and we had thought at first of going that way. we were not obliged to get out of the canoe after this on account of falls or rapids, nor, indeed, was it quite necessary here. we took less notice of the scenery to-day, because we were in quite a settled country. the river became broad and sluggish, and we saw a blue heron winging its way slowly down the stream before us. we passed the passadumkeag river on our left and saw the blue olamon mountains at a distance in the southeast. hereabouts our indian told us at length the story of their contention with the priest respecting schools. he thought a great deal of education and had recommended it to his tribe. his argument in its favor was, that if you had been to college and learnt to calculate, you could â��keep â��em property,--no other way.â�� he said that his boy was the best scholar in the school at oldtown, to which he went with whites. he himself is a protestant, and goes to church regularly at oldtown. according to his account, a good many of his tribe are protestants, and many of the catholics also are in favor of schools. some years ago they had a schoolmaster, a protestant, whom they liked very well. the priest came and said that they must send him away, and finally he had such influence, telling them that they would go to the bad place at last if they retained him, that they sent him away. the school party, though numerous, were about giving up. bishop fenwick came from boston and used his influence against them. but our indian told his side that they must not give up, must hold on, they were the strongest. if they gave up, then they would have no party. but they answered that it was â��no use, priest too strong, weâ��d better give up.â�� at length he persuaded them to make a stand. the priest was going for a sign to cut down the liberty-pole. so polis and his party had a secret meeting about it; he got ready fifteen or twenty stout young men, â��stript â��em naked, and painted â��em like old times,â�� and told them that when the priest and his party went to cut down the liberty-pole, they were to rush up, take hold of it, and prevent them, and he assured them that there would be no war, only a noise,--â��no war where priest is.â�� he kept his men concealed in a house near by, and when the priestâ��s party were about to cut down the liberty-pole, the fall of which would have been a death-blow to the school party, he gave a signal, and his young men rushed out and seized the pole. there was a great uproar, and they were about coming to blows, but the priest interfered, saying, â��no war, no war,â�� and so the pole stands, and the school goes on still. we thought that it showed a good deal of tact in him, to seize this occasion and take his stand on it; proving how well he understood those with whom he had to deal. the olamon river comes in from the east in greenbush a few miles below the passadumkeag. when we asked the meaning of this name, the indian said there was an island opposite its mouth which was called _olarmon_; that in old times, when visitors were coming to oldtown, they used to stop there to dress and fix up or paint themselves. â��what is that which ladies used?â�� he asked. rouge? red vermilion? â��yer,â�� he said, â��that is _larmon_, a kind of clay or red paint, which they used to get here.â�� we decided that we, too, would stop at this island, and fix up our inner man, at least, by dining. it was a large island, with an abundance of hemp nettle, but i did not notice any kind of red paint there. the olamon river, at its mouth at least, is a dead stream. there was another large island in that neighborhood, which the indian called â��_soogle_â�� (_i. e._, sugar) island. about a dozen miles before reaching oldtown he inquired, â��how you like â��em your pilot?â�� but we postponed an answer till we had got quite back again. the sunkhaze, another short dead stream, comes in from the east two miles above oldtown. there is said to be some of the best deer ground in maine on this stream. asking the meaning of this name, the indian said, â��suppose you are going down penobscot, just like we, and you see a canoe come out of bank and go along before you, but you no see â��em stream. that is _sunkhaze_.â�� he had previously complimented me on my paddling, saying that i paddled â��just like anybody,â�� giving me an indian name which meant â��great paddler.â�� when off this stream he said to me, who sat in the bows, â��me teach you paddle.â�� so, turning toward the shore, he got out, came forward, and placed my hands as he wished. he placed one of them quite outside the boat, and the other parallel with the first, grasping the paddle near the end, not over the flat extremity, and told me to slide it back and forth on the side of the canoe. this, i found, was a great improvement which i had not thought of, saving me the labor of lifting the paddle each time, and i wondered that he had not suggested it before. it is true, before our baggage was reduced we had been obliged to sit with our legs drawn up, and our knees above the side of the canoe, which would have prevented our paddling thus, or perhaps he was afraid of wearing out his canoe, by constant friction on the side. i told him that i had been accustomed to sit in the stern, and, lifting my paddle at each stroke, give it a twist in order to steer the boat, only getting a pry on the side each time, and i still paddled partly as if in the stern. he then wanted to see me paddle in the stern. so, changing paddles, for he had the longer and better one, and turning end for end, he sitting flat on the bottom and i on the crossbar, he began to paddle very hard, trying to turn the canoe, looking over his shoulder and laughing; but finding it in vain, he relaxed his efforts, though we still sped along a mile or two very swiftly. he said that he had no fault to find with my paddling in the stern, but i complained that he did not paddle according to his own directions in the bows. opposite the sunkhaze is the main boom of the penobscot, where the logs from far up the river are collected and assorted. as we drew near to oldtown i asked polis if he was not glad to get home again; but there was no relenting to his wildness, and he said, â��it makes no difference to me where i am.â�� such is the indianâ��s pretense always. we approached the indian island through the narrow strait called â��cook.â�� he said, â��i â��xpect we take in some water there, river so high,--never see it so high at this season. very rough water there, but short; swamp steamboat once. donâ��t you paddle till i tell you, then you paddle right along.â�� it was a very short rapid. when we were in the midst of it he shouted â��paddle,â�� and we shot through without taking in a drop. soon after the indian houses came in sight, but i could not at first tell my companion which of two or three large white ones was our guideâ��s. he said it was the one with blinds. we landed opposite his door at about four in the afternoon, having come some forty miles this day. from the piscataquis we had come remarkably and unaccountably quick, probably as fast as the stage or the boat, though the last dozen miles was dead water. polis wanted to sell us his canoe, said it would last seven or eight years, or with care, perhaps ten; but we were not ready to buy it. we stopped for an hour at his house, where my companion shaved with his razor, which he pronounced in very good condition. mrs. p. wore a hat and had a silver brooch on her breast, but she was not introduced to us. the house was roomy and neat. a large new map of oldtown and the indian island hung on the wall, and a clock opposite to it. wishing to know when the cars left oldtown, polisâ��s son brought one of the last bangor papers, which i saw was directed to â��joseph polis,â�� from the office. this was the last that i saw of joe polis. we took the last train, and reached bangor that night. footnote: [8] these twigs are called in rasleâ��s dictionary _sediak_. appendix i. trees the prevailing trees (i speak only of what i saw) on the east and west branches of the penobscot and on the upper part of the allegash were the fir, spruce (both black and white), and arbor-vitã¦, or â��cedar.â�� the fir has the darkest foliage, and, together with the spruce, makes a very dense â��black growth,â�� especially on the upper parts of the rivers. a dealer in lumber with whom i talked called the former a weed, and it is commonly regarded as fit neither for timber nor fuel. but it is more sought after as an ornamental tree than any other evergreen of these woods except the arbor-vitã¦. the black spruce is much more common than the white. both are tall and slender trees. the arbor-vitã¦, which is of a more cheerful hue, with its light-green fans, is also tall and slender, though sometimes two feet in diameter. it often fills the swamps. mingled with the former, and also here and there forming extensive and more open woods by themselves, indicating, it is said, a better soil, were canoe and yellow birches (the former was always at hand for kindling a fire,--we saw no small white birches in that wilderness), and sugar and red maples. the aspen (_populus tremuloides_) was very common on burnt grounds. we saw many straggling white pines, commonly unsound trees, which had therefore been skipped by the choppers; these were the largest trees we saw; and we occasionally passed a small wood in which this was the prevailing tree; but i did not notice nearly so many of these trees as i can see in a single walk in concord. the speckled or hoary alder (_alnus incana_) abounds everywhere along the muddy banks of rivers and lakes, and in swamps. hemlock could commonly be found for tea, but was nowhere abundant. yet f. a. michaux states that in maine, vermont, and the upper part of new hampshire, etc., the hemlock forms three fourths of the evergreen woods, the rest being black spruce. it belongs to cold hillsides. the elm and black ash were very common along the lower and stiller parts of the streams, where the shores were flat and grassy or there were low gravelly islands. they made a pleasing variety in the scenery, and we felt as if nearer home while gliding past them. the above fourteen trees made the bulk of the woods which we saw. the larch (juniper), beech, and norway pine (_pinus resinosa_, red pine) were only occasionally seen in particular places. the _pinus banksiana_ (gray or northern scrub pine), and a single small red oak (_quercus rubra_) only, are on islands in grand lake, on the east branch. the above are almost all peculiarly northern trees, and found chiefly, if not solely, on mountains southward. ii. flowers and shrubs it appears that in a forest like this the great majority of flowers, shrubs, and grasses are confined to the banks of the rivers and lakes, and to the meadows, more open swamps, burnt lands, and mountain-tops; comparatively very few indeed penetrate the woods. there is no such dispersion even of wild-flowers as is commonly supposed, or as exists in a cleared and settled country. most of our wild-flowers, so called, may be considered as naturalized in the localities where they grow. rivers and lakes are the great protectors of such plants against the aggressions of the forest, by their annual rise and fall keeping open a narrow strip where these more delicate plants have light and space in which to grow. they are the _protã©gã©s_ of the rivers. these narrow and straggling bands and isolated groups are, in a sense, the pioneers of civilization. birds, quadrupeds, insects, and man also, in the main, follow the flowers, and the latter in his turn makes more room for them and for berry-bearing shrubs, birds, and small quadrupeds. one settler told me that not only blackberries and raspberries but mountain maples came in, in the clearing and burning. though plants are often referred to primitive woods as their locality, it cannot be true of very many, unless the woods are supposed to include such localities as i have mentioned. only those which require but little light, and can bear the drip of the trees, penetrate the woods, and these have commonly more beauty in their leaves than in their pale and almost colorless blossoms. the prevailing flowers and conspicuous small plants of the _woods_, which i noticed, were: _clintonia borealis_, linnã¦a, checkerberry (_gaultheria procumbens_), _aralia nudicaulis_ (wild sarsaparilla), great round-leaved orchis, _dalibarda repens_, _chiogenes hispidula_ (creeping snowberry), _oxalis acetosella_ (common wood-sorrel), _aster acuminatus_, _pyrola secunda_ (one-sided pyrola), _medeola virginica_ (indian cucumber-root), small _circã¦a_ (enchanterâ��s nightshade), and perhaps _cornus canadensis_ (dwarf cornel). of these, the last of july, 1858, only the _aster acuminatus_ and great round-leaved orchis were conspicuously in bloom. the most common flowers of the _river_ and _lake shores_ were: _thalictrum cornuti_ (meadow-rue); _hypericum ellipticum_, _mutilum_, and _canadense_ (st. johnâ��s-wort); horsemint; horehound, _lycopus virginicus_ and _europã¦us_, var. _sinuatus_ (bugle-weed); _scutellaria galericulata_ (skullcap); _solidago lanceolata_ and _squarrosa_, east branch, (goldenrod); _diplopappus umbellatus_ (double-bristled aster); _aster radula_; _cicuta maculata_ and _bulbifera_ (water hemlock); meadow-sweet; _lysimachia stricta_ and _ciliata_ (loosestrife); _galium trifidum_ (small bed-straw); _lilium canadense_ (wild yellow lily); _platanthera peramå�na_ and _psycodes_ (great purple orchis and small purple fringed orchis); _mimulus ringens_ (monkey-flower); dock (water); blue flag; _hydrocotyle americana_ (marsh pennywort); _sanicula canadensis_ (_?_) (black snake-root); _clematis virginiana_ (_?_) (common virginâ��s-bower); _nasturtium palustre_ (marsh cress); _ranunculus recurvatus_ (hooked crow-foot); _asclepias incarnata_ (swamp milkweed); _aster tradescanti_ (tradescantâ��s aster); _aster miser_, also _longifolius_; _eupatorium purpureum_, apparently, lake shores, (joe-pye-weed); _apocynum cannabinum_, east branch, (indian hemp); _polygonum cilinode_ (bindweed); and others. not to mention, among inferior orders, wool-grass and the sensitive fern. in the water, _nuphar advena_ (yellow pond-lily), some _potamogetons_ (pond-weed), _sagittaria variabilis_ (arrowhead), _sium lineare_ (_?_) (water-parsnip). of these, those conspicuously in flower the last of july, 1857, were: rue, _solidago lanceolata_ and _squarrosa_, _diplopappus umbellatus_, _aster radula_, _lilium canadense_, great and small purple orchis, _mimulus ringens_, blue flag, virginâ��s-bower, etc. the characteristic flowers in _swamps_ were: _rubus triflorus_ (dwarf raspberry); _calla palustris_ (water-arum); and _sarracenia purpurea_ (pitcher-plant). on _burnt grounds_: _epilobium angustifolium_, in full bloom, (great willow-herb); and _erechthites hieracifolia_ (fire-weed). on _cliffs_: _campanula rotundifolia_ (harebell); _cornus canadensis_ (dwarf cornel); _arctostaphylos uva-ursi_ (bear-berry); _potentilla tridentata_ (mountain cinquefoil); _pteris aquilina_ (common brake). at _old camps, carries, and logging-paths_: _cirsium arvense_ (canada thistle); _prunella vulgaris_ (common self-heal); clover; herdâ��s-grass; _achillea millefolium_ (common yarrow); _leucanthemum vulgare_ (whiteweed); _aster macrophyllus_; _halenia deflexa_, east branch, (spurred gentian); _antennaria margaritacea_ (pearly everlasting); _actã¦a rubra_ and _alba_, wet carries, (red and white cohosh); _desmodium canadense_ (tick-trefoil); sorrel. the handsomest and most interesting flowers were the great purple orchises, rising ever and anon, with their great purple spikes perfectly erect, amid the shrubs and grasses of the shore. it seemed strange that they should be made to grow there in such profusion, seen of moose and moose-hunters only, while they are so rare in concord. i have never seen this species flowering nearly so late with us, or with the small one. the prevailing underwoods were: _dirca palustris_ (moose-wood), _acer spicatum_ (mountain maple), _virburnum lantanoides_ (hobble-bush), and frequently _taxus baccata_, var. _canadensis_ (american yew). the prevailing shrubs and small trees along the shore were: _osier rouge_ and alders (before mentioned); sallows, or small willows, of two or three kinds, as _salis humilis_, _rostrata_, and _discolor_ (_?_); _sambucus canadensis_ (black elder); rose; _viburnum opulus_ and _nudum_ (cranberry-tree and withe-rod); _pyrus americana_ (american mountain-ash); _corylus rostrata_ (beaked hazelnut); _diervilla trifida_ (bush honeysuckle); _prunus virginiana_ (choke-cherry); _myrica gale_ (sweet-gale); _nemopanthes canadensis_ (mountain holly); _cephalanthus occidentalis_ (button-bush); _ribes prostratum_, in some places, (fetid currant). more particularly of shrubs and small trees in _swamps_: some willows, _kalmia glauca_ (pale laurel), _ledum latifolium_ and _palustre_ (labrador tea), _ribes lacustre_ (swamp gooseberry), and in one place _betula pumila_ (low birch). at _camps and carries_: raspberry, _vaccinium canadense_ (canada blueberry), _prunus pennsylvanica_ (also alongshore) (wild red cherry), _amelanchier canadensis_ (shad-bush), _sambucus pubens_ (red-berried elder). among those peculiar to the _mountains_ would be the _vaccinium vitis-idã¦a_ (cow-berry). of plants commonly regarded as _introduced_ from europe, i observed at ansel smithâ��s clearing, chesuncook, abundant in 1857: _ranunculus acris_ (buttercups); _plantago major_ (common plantain); _chenopodium album_ (lambâ��s-quarters); _capsella bursa-pastoris_, 1853, (shepherdâ��s-purse); _spergula arvensis_, also north shore of moosehead in 1853, and elsewhere, 1857, (corn-spurry); _taraxacum dens-leonis_--regarded as indigenous by gray, but evidently introduced there--(common dandelion); _polygonum persicaria_ and _hydropiper_, by a logging-path in woods at smithâ��s, (ladyâ��s-thumb and smart-weed); _rumex acetosella_, common at carries, (sheep sorrel); _trifolium pratense_, 1853, on carries, frequent, (red clover); _leucanthemum vulgare_, carries, (whiteweed); _phleum pratense_, carries, 1853 and 1857, (herdâ��s-grass); _verbena hastata_ (blue vervain); _cirsium arvense_, abundant at camps, 1857, (canada thistle); _rumex crispus_ (_?_), west branch, 1853 (?), (curled dock); _verbascum thapsus_, between bangor and lake, 1853, (common mullein). it appears that i saw about a dozen plants which had accompanied man as far into the woods as chesuncook, and had naturalized themselves there, in 1853. plants begin thus early to spring by the side of a logging-path,--a mere vista through the woods, which can only be used in the winter, on account of the stumps and fallen trees,--which at length are the roadside plants in old settlements. the pioneers of such are planted in part by the first cattle, which cannot be summered in the woods. iii. list of plants the following is a list of the plants which i noticed in the maine woods, in the years 1853 and 1857. (those marked * not in woods.) 1. those which attained the height of trees _alnus incana_ (speckled or hoary alder), abundant along streams, etc. _thuja occidentalis_ (american arbor-vitã¦), one of the prevailing. _fraxinus sambucifolia_ (black ash), very common, especially near dead water. the indian spoke of â��yellow ashâ�� as also found there. _populus tremuloides_ (american aspen), very common, especially on burnt lands, almost as white as birches. _populus grandidentata_ (large-toothed aspen), perhaps two or three. _fagus ferruginea_ (american beech), not uncommon, at least on the west branch. (saw more in 1846.) _betula papyracea_ (canoe birch), prevailing everywhere and about bangor. _betula excelsa_ (yellow birch), very common. _betula lenta_ (black birch), on the west branch in 1853. _betula alba_ (american white birch), about bangor only. _ulmus americana_ (american or white elm), west branch and low down the east branch, _i. e._ on the lower and alluvial part of the river, very common. _larix americana_ (american or black larch), very common on the umbazookskus; some elsewhere. _abies canadensis_ (hemlock spruce); not abundant; some on the west branch, and a little everywhere. _acer saccharinum_ (sugar maple), very common. _acer rubrum_ (red or swamp maple), very common. _acer dasycarpum_ (white or silver maple), a little low on east branch and in chesuncook woods. _quercus rubra_ (red oak), one on an island in grand lake, east branch, and, according to a settler, a few on the east side of chesuncook lake; a few also about bangor in 1853. _pinus strobus_ (white pine), scattered along, most abundant at heron lake. _pinus resinosa_ (red pine), telos and grand lake, a little afterwards here and there. _abies balsamea_ (balsam fir), perhaps the most common tree, especially in the upper parts of rivers. _abies nigra_ (black or double spruce), next to the last the most common, if not equally common, and on mountains. _abies alba_ (white or single spruce), common with the last along the rivers. _pinus banksiana_ (gray or northern scrub pine), a few on an island in grand lake. twenty-three in all (23). 2. small trees and shrubs _prunus depressa_ (dwarf cherry), on gravel-bars, east branch, near huntâ��s, with green fruit; obviously distinct from the _pumila_ of river and meadows. _vaccinium corymbosum_ (common swamp blueberry), bucksport. _vaccinium canadense_ (canada blueberry), carries and rocky hills everywhere as far south as bucksport. _vaccinium pennsylvanicum_ (dwarf-blueberry?), whetstone falls. _betula pumila_ (low birch), mud pond swamp. _prinos verticillatus_ (black alder), 1857, now placed with _ilex_ by gray, 2d ed. _cephalanthus occidentalis_ (button-bush). _prunus pennsylvanica_ (wild red cherry), very common at camps, carries, etc., along rivers; fruit ripe august 1, 1857. _prunus virginiana_ (choke-cherry), riverside, common. _cornus alternifolia_ (alternate-leaved cornel), west branch, 1853. _ribes prostratum_ (fetid currant), common along streams; on webster stream. _sambucus canadensis_ (common elder), common along riversides. _sambucus pubens_ (red-berried elder), not quite so common; roadsides toward moosehead, and on carries afterward; fruit beautiful. _ribes lacustre_ (swamp-gooseberry), swamps, common; mud pond swamp and webster stream; not ripe july 29, 1857. _corylus rostrata_ (beaked hazelnut), common. _taxus baccata_, var. _canadensis_ (american yew), a common undershrub at an island in west branch and chesuncook woods. _viburnum lantanoides_ (hobble-bush), common, especially in chesuncook woods; fruit ripe in september, 1853, not in july, 1857. _viburnum opulus_ (cranberry-tree), on west branch; one in flower still, july 25, 1857. _viburnum nudum_ (withe-rod), common along rivers. _kalmia glauca_ (pale laurel), swamps, common, as at moosehead carry and chamberlain swamp. _kalmia angustifolia_ (lambkill), with _kalmia glauca_. _acer spicatum_ (mountain maple), a prevailing underwood. _acer striatum_ (striped maple), in fruit july 30, 1857; green the first year; green, striped with white, the second; darker, the third, with dark blotches. _cornus stolonifera_ (red-osier dogwood), prevailing shrub on shore of west branch; fruit still white in august, 1857. _pyrus americana_ (american mountain-ash), common along shores. _amelanchier canadensis_ (shad-bush), rocky carries, etc., considerable fruit in 1857. _rubus strigosus_ (wild red raspberry), very abundant, burnt grounds, camps, and carries, but not ripe till we got to chamberlain dam and on east branch. _rosa carolina_ (swamp rose), common on the shores of lakes, etc. _rhus typhina_* (staghorn sumach). _myrica gale_ (sweet-gale), common. _nemopanthes canadensis_ (mountain holly), common in low ground, moosehead carry, and on mount kineo. _cratã¦gus_ (_coccinea_? scarlet-fruited thorn), not uncommon; with hard fruit in september, 1853. _salix_ (near to _petiolaris_, petioled willow), very common in umbazookskus meadows. _salix rostrata_ (long-beaked willow), common. _salix humilis_ (low bush willow), common. _salix discolor_ (glaucous willow) (?). _salix lucida_ (shining willow), at island in heron lake. _dirca palustris_ (moose-wood), common. in all, 38. 3. small shrubs and herbaceous plants _agrimonia eupatoria_ (common agrimony), not uncommon. _circã¦a alpina_ (enchanterâ��s nightshade), very common in woods. _nasturtium palustre_ (marsh cress), var. _hispidum_, common, as at a. smithâ��s. _aralia hispida_ (bristly sarsaparilla), on west branch, both years. _aralia nudicaulis_ (wild sarsaparilla), chesuncook woods. _sagittaria variabilis_ (arrowhead), common at moosehead and afterward. _arum triphyllum_ (indian turnip), now _arisã¦ma_, moosehead carry in 1853. _asclepias incarnata_ (swamp milkweed), umbazookskus river and after; redder than ours, and a different variety from our var. _pulchra_. _aster acuminatus_ (pointed-leaved aster), the prevailing aster in woods, not long open on south branch, july 31; two or more feet high. _aster macrophyllus_ (large-leaved aster), common, and the whole plant surprisingly fragrant, like a medicinal herb; just out at telos dam, july 29, 1857, and after to bangor and bucksport; bluish flower (in woods on pine stream and at chesuncook in 1853). _aster radula_ (rough-leaved aster), common, moosehead carry and after. _aster miser_ (petty aster), in 1853 on west branch, and common on chesuncook shore. _aster longifolius_ (willow-leaved blue aster), 1853, moosehead and chesuncook shores. _aster cordifolius_ (heart-leaved aster), 1853, west branch. _aster tradescanti_ (tradescantâ��s aster), 1857. a narrow-leaved one, chesuncook shore, 1853. _aster_, _longifolius_-like, with small flowers, west branch, 1853. _aster puniceus_ (rough-stemmed aster), pine stream. _diplopappus umbellatus_ (large diplopappus aster), common along river. _arctostaphylos uva-ursi_ (bear-berry), kineo, etc., 1857. _polygonum cilinode_ (fringe-jointed false-buckwheat), common. _bidens cernua_ (bur-marigold), 1853, west branch. _ranunculus acris_ (buttercups), abundant at smithâ��s dam, chesuncook, 1853. _rubus triflorus_ (dwarf raspberry), low grounds and swamps, common. _utricularia vulgaris_* (greater bladderwort), pushaw. _iris versicolor_ (larger blue flag), common, moosehead, west branch, umbazookskus, etc. _sparganium_ (bur-reed). _calla palustris_ (water-arum), in bloom july 27, 1857, mud pond swamp. _lobelia cardinalis_ (cardinal-flower), apparently common, but out of bloom august, 1857. _cerastium nutans_ (clammy wild chickweed) (?). _gaultheria procumbens_ (checkerberry), prevailing everywhere in woods along banks of rivers. _stellaria media_* (common chickweed), bangor. _chiogenes hispidula_ (creeping snowberry), very common in woods. _cicuta maculata_ (water hemlock). _cicuta bulbifera_ (bulb-bearing water hemlock), penobscot and chesuncook shore, 1853. _galium trifidum_ (small bed-straw), common. _galium aparine_ (cleavers) (?), chesuncook, 1853. _galium_, one kind on pine stream, 1853. _trifolium pratense_ (red clover), on carries, etc. _actã¦a spicata_, var. _alba_ (white cohosh), chesuncook woods, 1853, and east branch, 1857. _actã¦a_, var. _rubra_ (red cohosh), east branch, 1857. _vaccinium vitis-idã¦a_ (cow-berry), ktaadn, very abundant. _cornus canadensis_ (dwarf cornel), in woods chesuncook, 1853; just ripe at kineo, july 24, 1857, common; still in bloom, moosehead carry, september 16, 1853. _medeola virginica_ (indian cucumber-root), west branch and chesuncook woods. _dalibarda repens_ (dalibarda), moosehead carry and after, common. in flower still, august 1, 1857. _taraxacum dens-leonis_ (common dandelion), smithâ��s, 1853; only there. is it not foreign? _diervilla trifida_ (bush honeysuckle), very common. _rumex hydrolapathum_ (_?_) (great water dock), in 1857; noticed it was large-seeded in 1853; common. _rumex crispus_ (_?_) (curled dock), west branch, 1853. _apocynum cannabinum_ (indian hemp), kineo (bradford) and east branch, 1857, at whetstone falls. _apocynum androsã¦mifolium_ (spreading dogbane), kineo (bradford). _clintonia borealis_ (clintonia), all over woods; fruit just ripening, july 25, 1857. a _lemna_ (duckweed), pushaw, 1857. _elodea virginica_ (marsh st. johnâ��s-wort), moosehead, 1853. _epilobium angustifolium_ (great willow-herb), great fields on burnt lands; some white at webster stream. _epilobium coloratum_ (purple-veined willow-herb), once in 1857. _eupatorium purpureum_ (joe-pye-weed), heron, moosehead, and chesuncook lake shores, common. _allium_ (onion), a new kind to me in bloom, without bulbs above, on rocks near whetstone falls (?), east branch. _halenia deflexa_ (spurred gentian), carries on east branch, common. _geranium robertianum_ (herb-robert). _solidago lanceolata_ (bushy goldenrod), very common. _solidago_, one of the three-ribbed, in both years. _solidago thyrsoidea_ (large mountain goldenrod), one on webster stream. _solidago squarrosa_ (large-spiked goldenrod), the most common on east branch. _solidago altissima_ (rough hairy goldenrod), not uncommon both years. _coptis trifolia_ (three-leaved gold-thread). _smilax herbacea_ (carrion-flower), not uncommon both years. _spirã¦a tomentosa_* (hardhack), bangor. _campanula rotundifolia_ (harebell), cliffs, kineo, grand lake, etc. _hieracium_ (hawkweed), not uncommon. _veratrum viride_ (american white hellebore). _lycopus virginicus_ (bugle-weed), 1857. _lycopus europã¦us_ (water horehound), var. _sinuatus_, heron lake shore. _chenopodium album_ (lambâ��s-quarters), smithâ��s. _mentha canadensis_ (wild mint), very common. _galeopsis tetrahit_ (common hemp-nettle), olamon isle, abundant, and below, in prime, august 3, 1857. _houstonia cã¦rulea_ (bluets), now _oldenlandia_ (gray, 2d ed.), 1857. _hydrocotyle americana_ (marsh pennywort), common. _hypericum ellipticum_ (elliptical-leaved st. johnâ��s-wort), common. _hypericum mutilum_ (small st. johnâ��s-wort), both years, common. _hypericum canadense_ (canadian st. johnâ��s-wort), moosehead lake and chesuncook shores, 1853. _trientalis americana_ (star-flower), pine stream, 1853. _lobelia inflata_ (indian tobacco). _spiranthes cernua_ (ladiesâ��-tresses), kineo and after. _nabalus_ (rattlesnake-root), 1857; _altissimus_ (tall white lettuce), chesuncook woods, 1853. _antennaria margaritacea_ (pearly everlasting), common, moosehead, smithâ��s, etc. _lilium canadense_ (wild yellow lily), very common and large, west and east branch; one on east branch, 1857, with strongly revolute petals, and leaves perfectly smooth beneath, but not larger than the last, and apparently only a variety. _linnã¦a borealis_ (linnã¦a), almost everywhere in woods. _lobelia dortmanna_ (water lobelia), pond in bucksport. _lysimachia ciliata_ (hairy-stalked loosestrife), very common, chesuncook shore and east branch. _lysimachia stricta_ (upright loosestrife), very common. _microstylis ophioglossoides_ (adderâ��s-mouth), kineo. _spirã¦a salicifolia_ (common meadow-sweet), common. _mimulus ringens_ (monkey-flower), common, lake-shores, etc. _scutellaria galericulata_ (skullcap), very common. _scutellaria lateriflora_ (mad-dog skullcap), heron lake, 1857; chesuncook, 1853. _platanthera psycodes_ (small purple fringed orchis), very common, east branch and chesuncook, 1853. _platanthera fimbriata_ (large purple fringed orchis), very common, west branch and umbazookskus, 1857. _platanthera orbiculata_ (large round-leaved orchis), very common in woods, moosehead and chamberlain carries, caucomgomoc, etc. _amphicarpã¦a monoica_ (hog peanut). _aralia racemosa_ (spikenard), common, moosehead carry, telos lake, etc., and after; out about august 1, 1857. _plantago major_ (common plantain), common in open land at smithâ��s in 1853. _pontederia cordata_* (pickerel-weed), only near oldtown, 1857. _potamogeton_ (pondweed), not common. _potentilla tridentata_ (mountain cinquefoil), kineo. _potentilla norvegica_ (cinquefoil), heron lake shore and smithâ��s. _polygonum amphibium_ (water persicaria), var. _aquaticum_ second lake. _polygonum persicaria_ (ladyâ��s-thumb), log-path, chesuncook, 1853. _nuphar advena_ (yellow pond-lily), not abundant. _nymphã¦a odorata_ (sweet water-lily), a few in west branch, 1853. _polygonum hydropiper_ (smart-weed), log-path, chesuncook. _pyrola secunda_ (one-sided pyrola), very common, caucomgomoc. _pyrola elliptica_ (shin-leaf), caucomgomoc river. _ranunculus flammula_ (spearwort, var. _reptans_). _ranunculus recurvatus_ (hooked crowfoot), umbazookskus landing, &c. _typha latifolia_* (common cat-tail or reed-mace), extremely abundant between bangor and portland. _sanicula marylandica_ (black snake-root), moosehead carry and after. _aralia nudicaulis_ (wild sarsaparilla). _capsella bursa-pastoris_ (shepherdâ��s-purse), smithâ��s, 1853. _prunella vulgaris_ (self-heal), very common everywhere. _erechthites hieracifolia_ (fire-weed), 1857, and smithâ��s open land, 1853. _sarracenia purpurea_ (pitcher-plant), mud pond swamp. _smilacina bifolia_ (false solomonâ��s-seal), 1857, and chesuncook woods, 1853. _smilacina racemosa_ (false spikenard) (?), umbazookskus carry, july 27, 1853. _veronica scutellata_ (marsh speedwell). _spergula arvensis_ (corn-spurry), 1857, not uncommon, 1853, moosehead and smithâ��s. _fragaria_ (strawberry), 1853, smithâ��s; 1857, bucksport. _thalictrum cornuti_ (meadow-rue), very common, especially along rivers, tall, and conspicuously in bloom in july, 1857. _cirsium arvense_ (canada thistle), abundant at camps and highway-sides in the north of maine. _cirsium muticum_ (swamp thistle), well in bloom, webster stream, august 31. _rumex acetosella_ (sheep sorrel), common by river and log-paths, as chesuncook log-path. _impatiens fulva_ (spotted touch-me-not). _trillium erythrocarpum_ (painted trillium), common west branch and moosehead carry. _verbena hastata_ (blue vervain). _clematis virginiana_ (common virginâ��s-bower), common on river-banks; feathered in september, 1853; in bloom july, 1857. _leucanthemum vulgare_ (whiteweed). _sium lineare_ (water-parsnip), 1857, and chesuncook shore 1853. _achillea millefolium_ (common yarrow), by river and log-paths, and smithâ��s. _desmodium canadense_ (canadian tick-trefoil), not uncommon. _oxalis acetosella_ (common wood-sorrel), still out july 25 1853, at moosehead carry and after. _oxalis stricta_ (yellow wood-sorrel), 1853, at smithâ��s and his wood-path. _liparis liliifolia_ (tway-blade), kineo (bradford). _uvularia grandiflora_ (large-flowered bellwort), woods, common. _uvularia sessilifolia_ (sessile-leaved bellwort), chesuncook woods, 1853. in all, 145. 4. of lower order _scirpus eriophorum_ (wool-grass), very common, especially on low islands. a coarse grass, four or five feet high, along the river. _phleum pratense_ (herdâ��s-grass), on carries, at camps and clearings. _equisetum sylvaticum_ (sylvatic horse-tail). _pteris aquilina_ (brake), kineo and after. _onoclea sensibilis_ (sensitive fern), very common along the riversides; some on the gravelly shore of heron lake island. _polypodium dryopteris_ (brittle polypody). _woodsia ilvensis_ (rusty woodsia), kineo. _lycopodium lucidulum_ (toothed club-moss). _usnea_ (a parmeliaceous lichen), common on various trees. iv. list of birds which i saw in maine between july 24 and august 3, 1857 a very small hawk at great falls, on webster stream. _haliã¦etus leucocephalus_ (white-headed or bald eagle), at ragmuff, and above and below huntâ��s, and on pond below mattawamkeag. _pandion haliaã«tus_ (fish hawk or osprey), heard, also seen on east branch. _bubo virginianus_ (cat owl), near camp island, also above mouth of schoonis, from a stump back and forth, also near huntâ��s on a tree. _icterus phå�niceus_ (red-winged blackbird), umbazookskus river. _corvus americanus_ (american crow), a few, as at outlet of grand lake; a peculiar cawing. _fringilla canadensis_ (tree sparrow), think i saw one on mount kineo, july 24, which behaved as if it had a nest there. _garrulus cristatus_ (blue jay). _parus atricapillus_ (chickadee), a few. _muscicapa tyrannus_ (kingbird). _muscicapa cooperii_ (olive-sided flycatcher), everywhere a prevailing bird. _muscicapa virens_ (wood pewee), moosehead, and i think beyond. _muscicapa acadica_ (small pewee), common. _muscicapa ruticilla_ (american redstart), moosehead. _vireo olivaceus_ (red-eyed vireo), everywhere common. _turdus migratorius_ (red-breasted robin), some everywhere. _turdus melodus_ (wood thrush), common in all the woods. _turdus wilsonii_ (wilsonâ��s thrush), moosehead and beyond. _turdus aurocapillus_ (golden-crowned thrush or oven-bird), moosehead. _fringilla albicollis_ (white-throated sparrow), kineo and after, apparently nesting; the prevailing bird early and late. _fringilla melodia_ (song sparrow), at moosehead or beyond. _sylvia pinus_ (pine warbler), one part of voyage. _trichas marylandica_ (maryland yellow-throat), everywhere. _coccyzus americanus_ (_?_) (yellow-billed cuckoo), common. _picus erythrocephalus_ (red-headed woodpecker), heard and saw, and good to eat. _sitta carolinensis_ (_?_) (white-breasted american nuthatch), heard. _alcedo alcyon_ (belted kingfisher), very common. _caprimulgus americanus_ (nighthawk). _tetrao umbellus_ (partridge), moosehead carry, etc. _tetrao cupido_ (_?_) (pinnated grouse), webster stream. _ardea cã¦rulea_ (blue heron), lower part of penobscot. _totanus macularius_ (spotted sandpiper or peetweet), everywhere. _larus argentatus_ (_?_) (herring gull), heron lake on rocks, and chamberlain. smaller gull on second lake. _anas obscura_ (dusky or black duck), once in east branch. _anas sponsa_ (summer or wood duck), everywhere. _fuligula albeola_ (spirit duck or dipper), common. _colymbus glacialis_ (great northern diver or loon), in all the lakes. _mergus merganser_ (buff-breasted merganser or sheldrake), common on lakes and rivers. a swallow; the night-warbler (?) once or twice. v. quadrupeds a bat on west branch; beaver skull at grand lake; mr. thatcher ate beaver with moose on the caucomgomoc. a muskrat on the last stream; the red squirrel is common in the depths of the woods; a dead porcupine on chamberlain road; a cow moose and tracks of calf; skin of a bear, just killed. vi. outfit for an excursion the following will be a good outfit for one who wishes to make an excursion of _twelve_ days into the maine woods in july, with a companion and one indian, for the same purposes that i did. _wear_,--a check shirt, stout old shoes, thick socks, a neck-ribbon, thick waistcoat, thick pants, old kossuth hat, a linen sack. _carry_,--in an india-rubber knapsack, with a large flap, two shirts (check), one pair thick socks, one pair drawers, one flannel shirt, two pocket-handkerchiefs, a light india-rubber coat or a thick woolen one, two bosoms and collars to go and come with, one napkin, pins, needles, thread, one blanket, best gray, seven feet long. _tent_,--six by seven feet, and four feet high in middle, will do; veil and gloves and insect-wash, or, better, mosquito-bars to cover all at night; best pocket map, and perhaps description of the route; compass; plant-book and red blotting-paper; paper and stamps, botany, small pocket spy-glass for birds, pocket microscope, tape-measure, insect-boxes. axe, full size if possible, jackknife, fish-lines, two only apiece, with a few hooks and corks ready, and with pork for bait in a packet, rigged; matches (some also in a small vial in the waistcoat pocket); soap, two pieces; large knife and iron spoon (for all); three or four old newspapers, much twine, and several rags for dish-cloths; twenty feet of strong cord, four-quart tin pail for kettle, two tin dippers, three tin plates, a fry-pan. _provisions._--soft hard-bread, twenty-eight pounds; pork, sixteen pounds; sugar, twelve pounds; one pound black tea or three pounds coffee; one box or a pint of salt; one quart indian meal, to fry fish in; six lemons, good to correct the pork and warm water; perhaps two or three pounds of rice, for variety. you will probably get some berries, fish, etc., beside. a gun is not worth the carriage, unless you go as hunters. the pork should be in an open keg, sawed to fit; the sugar, tea or coffee, meal, salt, etc., should be put in separate water-tight india-rubber bags, tied with a leather string; and all the provisions, and part of the rest of the baggage, put into two large india-rubber bags, which have been proved to be water-tight and durable. expense of preceding outfit is twenty-four dollars. an indian may be hired for about one dollar and fifty cents per day, and perhaps fifty cents a week for his canoe (this depends on the demand). the canoe should be a strong and tight one. this expense will be nineteen dollars. such an excursion need not cost more than twenty-five dollars apiece, starting at the foot of moosehead, if you already possess or can borrow a reasonable part of the outfit. if you take an indian and canoe at oldtown, it will cost seven or eight dollars more to transport them to the lake. vii. a list of indian words 1. _ktaadn_, said to mean _highest land_, rasles puts for _mt. pemadene_; for _grai, pierre ã  aiguiser_, _kitadaã¼gan_. (_vide_ potter.) _mattawamkeag_, place where two rivers meet. (indian of carry.) (_vide_ williamsonâ��s history of maine, and willis.) _molunkus._ _ebeeme_, rock. _noliseemack_; other name, shad pond. _kecunnilessu_, chickadee. } } _nipsquecohossus_, woodcock. } } _skuscumonsuk_, kingfisher. has it not the pl. termination } _uk_ here, or _suk_? } joe. } _wassus_, bear, _aouessous_ (rasles). } } _lunxus_, indian-devil. } } _upahsis_, mountain-ash. } _moose_ (is it called, or does it mean, wood-eater?), _mous_ (rasles). _katahdinauguoh_, said to mean mountains about ktaadn. _ebemena_, tree-cranberry. _ibibimin_, _nar_, red, bad }joe fruit. (rasles.) } _wighiggin_, a bill or writing, _aouixigan_, } indâ��n of â��_livre_, _lettre_, _peinture_, _ceinture_â�� (rasles). } carry. _sebamook_, large-bay lake, _peqouasebem_; add _ar_ } for plural, _lac_ or _ã©tang_, (rasles). _ouaã¼rinaã¼gamek_, } nicholai. _anse dans un lac_, (rasles). _mspame_, large water. } polis. } _sebago_ and _sebec_, large open water. _chesuncook_, place where many streams empty in. } (_vide_ willis and potter.) } } tahmunt, _caucomgomoc_, gull lake. (_caucomgomoc_, the lake; } etc. _caucomgomoc-took_, the river, polis.) } _pammadumcook._ _kenduskieg_, little eel river. (_vide_ willis.) nicholai. _penobscot_, rocky river. _puapeskou_, stone. (rasles } indâ��n of v. springer.) } carry. _umbazookskus_, meadow stream. (much-meadow } river, polis.) } } _millinocket_, place of islands. } nicholai. } _souneunk_, that runs between mountains. } } _aboljacarmegus_, smooth-ledge falls and deadwater. } _aboljacarmeguscook_, the river there. _muskiticook_, dead stream. (indian of carry.) _meskikou_, or _meskikouikou_, a place where there is grass, (rasles). _muskã©eticook_, deadwater, (polis). _mattahumkeag_, sand-creek pond. } } nicholai. _piscataquis_, branch of river. } _shecorways_, sheldrakes. } } _naramekechus_, peetweet. } polis. } _medawisla_, loon. } _orignal_, moosehead lake. (montresor.) _chor-chor-que_, usnea. } } _adelungquamooktum_, wood thrush. } } _bematruichtik_, high land generally. } polis. (_mt. pemadenã©._ rasles). } } _maquoxigil_, bark of red osier, indian tobacco. } _kineo_, flint (williamson; old indian hunter). (hodge.) _artoosoquâ��_, phosphorescence. } } _subekoondark_, white spruce. } } _skusk_, black spruce. } } _beskabekuk_, the â��lobster lakeâ�� of maps. } polis. } _beskabekukskishtuk_, the deadwater below the island. } } _paytaytequick_, burnt-ground stream, what joe } called _ragmuff_. } } _nonlangyis_, the name of a deadwater between the } last and pine stream. } _karsaootuk_, black river (or pine stream). _mkazã©ouighen_, } black, (rasles). } } _michigan, fimus._ polis applied it to a sucker, or } a poor, good-for-nothing fish. _fiante (?) mitsegan_ } (rasles). (pickering puts the ? after the first word.) } } _cowosnebagosar_, _chiogenes hispidula_, means, grows } where trees have rotted. } } polis. _pockadunkquaywayle_, echo. _pagadaã¼koueouã©rrã©_ } (rasles). } } _bororquasis_, moose-fly. } } _nerlumskeechtcook_ (or _quoik_?), (or _skeetcook_), } deadwater, and applied to the mountains near. } } _apmoojenegamook_, lake that is crossed. } } _allegash_, hemlock bark. (_vide_ willis.) } _paytaywecongomec_, burnt-ground lake, _telos_. _madunkehunk_, height-of-land stream (webster } stream). } } _madunkehunk-gamooc_, height-of-land lake. } } _matungamooc_, grand lake. } } _uncardnerheese_, trout stream. } } _wassataquoik_ (or _-cook_), salmon river, east branch. } (_vide_ willis.) } } polis. _pemoymenuk_, amelanchier berries, â��_pemouaimin, } nak_, a black fruit. rasles.â�� has it not here the plural } ending? } } _sheepnoc_, _lilium canadense_ bulbs. â��_sipen, nak_, } white, larger than _penak_â�� (rasles). } } _paytgumkiss_, petticoat (where a small river comes } into the penobscot below nicketow). } } _burntibus_, a lake-like reach in the penobscot. } _passadumkeag_, â��where the water falls into the penobscot above the fallsâ�� (williamson). _paã¼sidaã¼kioui_ is, _au dessus de la montagne_ (rasles). _olarmon_, or _larmon_ (polis), red paint. â��vermilion, paint, _ouramaã¼_â�� (rasles). _sunkhaze_, â��see canoe come out; no see â��em streamâ�� (polis). the mouth of a river, according to rasles, is _saã¼ghedã©tegoue_. the place where one stream empties into another, thus [symbol] is _saã¼ktaã¼oui_. (_vide_ willis.) _tomhegan_ br. (at moosehead). â��_hatchet_, _temahigan_â�� (rasles). _nicketow_, â��_nicketaouteguã©_, or _niketoutegoue_, _riviã¨re qui fourche_â�� (rasles). 2. from william willis, on the language of the abnaquies, maine hist. coll., vol. iv. _abalajako-megus_ (river near ktaadn). _aitteon_ (name of a pond and sachem). _apmogenegamook_ (name of a lake). _allagash_ (a bark camp). sockbasin, a penobscot, told him, â��the indians gave this name to the lake from the fact of their keeping a hunting-camp there.â�� _bamonewengamock_, head of allegash, cross lake. (sockbasin.) _chesuncook_, big lake. (sockbasin.) _caucongamock_ (a lake). _ebeeme_, mountains that have plums on them. (sockbasin). _ktaadn_. sockbasin pronounces this ka-tah-din, and said it meant â��large mountain or large thing.â�� _kenduskeag_ (the place of eels). _kineo_ (flint), mountain on the border, etc. _metawamkeag_, a river with a smooth, gravelly bottom. (sockbasin.) _metanawcook._ _millinoket_, a lake with many islands in it. (sockbasin.) _matakeunk_ (river). _molunkus_ (river). _nicketow_, neccotoh, where two streams meet (â��forks of the penobscotâ��). _negas_ (indian village on the kenduskeag). _orignal_ (montresorâ��s name for moosehead lake). _ponguongamook_, allagash, name of a mohawk indian killed there. (sockbasin.) _penobscot_, _penobskeag_, french _pentagoet_, etc. _pougohwaken_ (heron lake). _pemadumcook_ (lake). _passadumkeag_, where water goes into the river above falls. (williamson.) _ripogenus_ (river). _sunkhaze_ (river), deadwater. _souneunk._ _seboomook._ sockbasin says this word means â��the shape of a mooseâ��s head, and was given to the lake,â�� etc. howard says differently. _seboois_, a brook, a small river. (sockbasin.) _sebec_ (river). _sebago_ (great water). _telos_ (lake). _telasius_ (lake). _umbagog_ (lake), doubled up; so called from its form. (sockbasin.) _umbazookskus_ (lake). _wassatiquoik_, a mountain river. (sockbasin.) judge c. e. potter of manchester, new hampshire, adds in november, 1855:- â��_chesuncook._ this is formed from _chesunk_, or _schunk_ (a goose), and _auke_ (a place), and means â��the goose place.â�� chesunk, or schunk, is the sound made by the wild geese when flying.â�� _ktaadn._ this is doubtless a corruption of _kees_ (high), and _auke_ (a place). _penobscot_, _penapse_ (stone, rock place), and _auke_ (place). _suncook_, goose place, _schunk-auke_. the judge says that _schoot_ means to rush, and hence _schoodic_ from this and _auke_ (a place where water rushes), and that _schoon_ means the same; and that the marblehead people and others have derived the words â��scoonâ�� and â��scootâ�� from the indians, and hence â��schoonerâ��; refers to a mr. chute. index abbot (me.), 97. aboljacarmegus falls, 58, 82; meaning of the name, 157. aboljacarmegus, lake, 51. aboljacknagesic stream, 51, 58, 59, 62. aitteon, joe, 94, 99, 100, 210, 233, 313. allegash and east branch, the, 174-327. allegash lakes, the, 78, 175, 250, 257. allegash river, the, 40, 80, 161, 178, 233, 250, 254-257, 260, 270. ambejijis falls, 50; portage round, 52; 84. ambejijis lake, 45-47, 49, 50, 84, 291. ambejijis stream, 50. america, the newness of, 90. apmoojenegamook lake, 244; meaning of, 250; 260; a storm on, 263, 264; hard paddling on, 267. aroostook (me.) road, 3, 13, 14; river, 4; wagon, an, 14; valley, 23; sleds of the, 261. asters, 97. atlas, the general, 95. bailey, prof. j. w., 4. bangor (me.), 3, 4, 9, 12; passage to, 16; 23, 36, 38, 74, 86, 91, 94-98; the deer that went a-shopping in, 154; 160, 161, 166, 167, 174, 175; house, the, 177; 250, 251, 256, 257, 290, 307. batteaux, 6, 35. bears, abundance of, 235. bed, a cedar-twig, 60; of arbor-vit㦠twigs, 265; the primitive, by all rivers, 317. birds, in the wilderness, 118; about moosehead lake, 186; about mud pond carry, 237; near chamberlain lake, 240, 241; on heron lake, 255; on east branch, 309. black flies, protection against, 236; 246. blueberries, 66, 298. boston (mass.), countrified minds in towns about, 24. bowlin stream, 308. burnt land, the, 29, 77. â��burntibus,â�� 319. camp, loggersâ��, 20; reading matter in a, 37, 38; on side of ktaadn, a, 68; the routine for making, 210-212; darkness about a, 303, 304. canadian boat-song, 42; a blind, 234. canoe, a birch, 106; used in third excursion to maine woods, 181; shipping water in a, 189; crossing lakes in a, 206; carrying a, 207, 208; running rapids in a, 275-277, 279, 280. carbuncle mountain, 291. caribou lake, 216. carry, indianâ��s method with canoe at a, 207, 208; a wet, 235-244; berries at each, 305, 306; race at a, 314, 315. caucomgomoc lake, meaning of the name, 156; 222, 223. caucomgomoc mountain, 233. caucomgomoc stream, 142, 147, 219, 229, 247, 297. cedar tea, arbor-vitã¦, or, 60. chaleur, bay of, 178. chamberlain farm, the, 245, 264, 265. chamberlain lake, 101, 145, 161, 233, 237, 239, 240; apmoojenegamook or, 244; dams about, 251; 262, 267. checkerberry-tea camp, 301. chesuncook, 93-173. chesuncook deadwater, 217. chesuncook lake, 5, 11, 36, 73, 80, 86, 94, 104, 105, 117, 119, 136, 137; meaning of the word, 156; 176; going to church on, 214; 234, 250, 254. chivin, silvery roaches, cousin-trout, or, 59; 312. civilization and landscape, 171-173. cloud, entering a, 70; factory, a, 70. cold stream pond, 9. coltonâ��s map of maine, 104, 308. concord (mass.), 1, 24, 76, 117; meaning of indian name for, 157, 187; 214, 268; the assabet in, 278. concord river, 229, 278, 299. cranberries, mountain, 27; tree-, 147. crosses in the wilderness, 50. curing moose meat and hide, 149, 150, 208. de bryâ��s _collectio peregrinationum_, 149. deep cove, 45, 84. deer, 154. deer island, 100, 183, 185, 188. â��die and be buried who will,â�� verse, 90. dippers, a brood of, 184. dog, a troublesome, 177. double top mountain, 49. dream of fishing, a, 61. eagle lake, 101, 161; road, 261. east branch, the allegash and, 174-327. east branch, mouth of the, 19; 23, 161, 175, 176, 249, 256, 257, 268; huntâ��s house on the, 269, 270, 273, 274, 288, 289, 298, 312, 315, 316. eel river, 256. elegy in a country churchyard, quoted, 19. enfield (me.), 9. everlasting, the pearly, 97. fenwick, bishop, 323. fire, a camp, 43, 115, 116. fire-weed, 95, 282. fishing, 58; the caucomgomoc, 147. five islands, the, 11, 31, 87, 320. fowler, thomas, sheltered and joined by, 29-34. fredericton (n. b.), 16. freshet, the great, 58. frontier houses, 144. fundy, bay of, 254. goldenrod, 97. grand falls of the penobscot, 31; portage to avoid the, 32. grand lake, 268; indian name for, 295; 297, 307. grand portage, the, 80. greenbush (me.), 324. greenleafâ��s map of maine, 16. greenville (me.), 99, 101, 188, 194, 209. hedgehog, shooting a, 130. heron lake, 254, 255. hide, stretching a, 147, 148; sale of a moose-, 152. â��highlandsâ�� between the penobscot and st. john, 238. hiltonâ��s clearing, 105. history, reading, 87. hobble-bush, wayfarerâ��s tree or, 96. hodge, assistant geologist, quoted, 29, 80. holland, the king of, in his element, 239. horns, uses for deerâ��s, 97, 98. hornstone, 194. houlton (me.), road, the, 3, 8, 9, 12, 13. hunter, a â��gentlemanly,â�� 178, 179; indian, with hides, 231; enviable life of a, 269, 270. hunting, the degradation of, 132-134. indian, extinction, 7; guides secured, 11; belief that river ran two ways, 35; words for some birds and animals, 108; camp, an, 146-159; language, 151; words for maine waters, 155-157; houses at oldtown, 161; relics, 166; speech, 187; singing, 198; methods of guiding, 204-206; manner of carrying canoes, 207, 208; inscription, an, 220; wardrobe, 249, 250; failure to understand avoidance of settlers, 258; medicines, 259; travel, 260, 261; as umpire, 267; skill in retracing steps, 277; relics and geographical names, 297; good manners, 300; devil (or cougar), the, 306; reticence and talkativeness, 318, 319; sickness, 319, 320; indifference, 326. indian island, 92, 174, 326, 327. insect foes, 246. jackson, dr. charles t., 4, 10; quoted regarding altitude of ktaadn, 72; on moosehead lake, 104; sketches in reports of, 120; quoted, regarding hornstone on mount kineo, 194, 195. joe merry lakes, the, 45. joe merry mountain, 38, 51, 218. josselyn, john, quoted, 156, 164. katepskonegan falls, 52; carry, 81. katepskonegan lake, 50, 57. katepskonegan stream, 50. kenduskeag, meaning of, 156. kennebec river, the, 5, 40, 103, 183, 188, 233, 272. kineo, mount, 9-103, 156, 183, 186, 189; indian tradition of origin of, 190; hornstone on, 194; 196, 203, 260, 299. knife, an indian, 156. ktaadn, 3-90. ktaadn, mt., 1; ascents of, 3-5; view of, 23; first view of, 36; 38; the flat summit of, 49; 58, 61; the ascent of, 63-76; altitude of, 72; 96, 121, 136, 167, 215, 218, 249, 257, 260, 297, 312, 313. lake country of new england, the, 40. larch, extensive wood of, 231. lescarbot quoted regarding abundance of fishes, 60. lily, the yellow, 209, 291; roots, gathering, 309; roots, soup of, 317. lily bay, 97, 99. lincoln (me.), 9, 85, 260, 319, 321, 322. little schoodic river, the, 23. lobster lake, 106. lobster pond, 210. lobster stream, 105, 210. locusts, 254. loggers, camps of, 20; a gang of, 38. log house, a, 138. logs, from woods to market, sending, 46-49. loon, indian word for, 182; cry of the, 247, 248. lost, in the lakes, experienced woodmen, 41; in the woods, t.â��s companion, 285-290. lovewellâ��s fight, 245. madawaska, the, 80. maine, mountainous region of, 4; intelligence of backwoodsmen in, 24; view of, 73; the forest of, 88. map of the public lands of maine and massachusetts, 17, 101, 104, 308. marriage, a sign of, 232. marsâ�� hill, 8. matahumkeag, 107; meaning of the word, 157; 210. matanancook river, the, 321. mattaseunk, 18. mattawamkeag, the, 12, 13, 16; meaning of the name, 157; 256. mattawamkeag point, 4, 11, 38, 88, 316, 319. matungamook lake, 295. mccauslin, or â��uncle george,â�� weather-bound at farm of, 23-29; good services as guide by, 40-42. michaux on lumbering, quoted, 48. milford (me.), 7. millinocket lake, 29, 41, 73, 260. millinocket river, 29, 31, 86-88, 223. ministers, with, on ktaadn, 214. mohawk rips, the, 322. mohawk traditions, 154. molasses, molly, 174. molunkus (me.), 13, 15. monhegan island, 94. monson (me.), 97, 98, 161. moose, sign of, 58, 65, 108; carcass of a, 109; night expedition in vain hunt for, 110-115; shooting at and wounding a, 122-124; found, measured, and skinned, 125-130; indian ideas about, 153; indian tradition of evolution of, from the whale, 163; shooting and skinning a, on second lake, 292-295. moose-flies, 246. moosehead lake, 45, 46, 73, 95, 97, 99; steamers and sail-boats on, 100; 104, 108, 117, 145, 150, 152; indian name for, 155; 159, 175, 176, 181; extent of, 183; 184, 188, 193, 231, 252; dragon-fly on, 255; 272, 299, 322. moosehorn deadwater, 109. moosehorn stream, the, 111, 113, 117, 118, 145, 216. moose river, 189. moose wardens, laxness of, 231. moose-wood, 65; phosphorescent light in, 199. morrison, john, head of a lumber-gang, 38. mosquitoes, 246, 310, 311. mountain-ash, 94. mountain-tops, 71. mud pond, 233, 237, 238, 240, 243, 244. murch brook, 58, 64, 74. musquash, calling a, 228. nahant (mass.), 170. nature, the earth as made by, 77, 78; always young, 89, 90; the coarse use of, 133. neptune, louis, 10, 86; a call on governor, 162, 163; the old chief, 174. nerlumskeechticook mountain, 249, 260, 291, 297, 298, 301. nicketow (me.), 7, 19, 260, 316, 319. night, in the woods, a, 43-45; thoughts by a stream at, 131; sounds in the woods at, 247, 248. noliseemack, shad pond or, 29. north twin lake, 39, 80, 84. no-see-em, midge called, 245, 246. oak hall hand-bill and carry, 55, 83. olamon mountains, 323. olamon river, the, and meaning of word, 324. old fort hill, 166. oldtown (me.), 4, 6, 7, 9, 88, 142, 152, 153, 160, 161, 166, 167, 174, 192, 202, 204, 222, 226, 259, 272, 274, 313, 320, 322, 323, 325-327. orchis, the great round-leaved, 240. orono (me.), 92. osier, red, indian word for, 188. paddling, a lesson in, 325, 326. pamadumcook lakes, the, 30, 45, 47, 84; meaning of the word, 156; 260. passadumkeag river, the, 8, 9, 323, 324. passamagamet falls, 51; â��warping up,â�� 53; 84. passamagamet lake, 50, 51. passamagamet stream, 50, 51. passamaquoddy river, the, 5, 91. peaked mountain, 254. peetweets, indian word for, 182. penobscot county, 73. penobscot indians, sociability of, 321. penobscot river, the, 3, 5, 6; indian islands in the, 7; 17, 18, 24, 29, 31, 32, 40, 41, 54, 77, 80, 87, 91, 95, 96, 103-105, 107, 108; between moosehead and chesuncook lake, described, 117; 145, 148; meaning of the word, 157, 158, 161; 166, 176, 193, 202; west branch of, 203; 208, 209, 233, 234, 238, 270-272; main boom of the, 329. phosphorescent wood, 199-201. pine, the white, 160; forests, 169; red, 268; labrador and red, 296. pine stream, 122, 136, 216. pine stream deadwater, 121. pine stream falls, 136, 216. piscataquis falls, 322. piscataquis river, the, 101; meaning of the word, 157; 179, 260, 327. pitching a canoe, 105. plants, abundance of strange, by moosehead lake, 103, 104, 188; observed on mount kineo, 195; about camp on the caucomgomoc, 223; along the umbazookskus, 229, 230; in cedar swamp by chamberlain lake, 239-241; on east branch, 302. pockwockomus falls, 56, 57, 83. pockwockomus lake, 50. pokelogan, a, 56. poling a batteau, 34, 35, 53, 54. polis, joe, 174; secured as guide, 175; puzzled about white menâ��s law, 192; travels and opinions of, 217, 218; calls upon daniel webster, 279; as a boy, hard experience in traveling of, 308; good-by to, 327. politicians, country, 8, 9. pongoquahem lake, 260. portage, a rough, 33; round ambejijis falls, 51. province man, a green, 16. quakish lake, 33, 36, 85. quebec, meaning of the word, 157; 257. ragmuff stream, 118, 121, 145, 216. rain, 33, 265, 266. rapids, shooting, 81. rasles, father, dictionary of the abenaki language, 154. red shirts, 31, 145. _repaired_ road, a, 98. restigouche river, the, 178. ripogenus portage, 80. roaches, silvery, 59. road, a supply, 212; recipe for making a, 244. rock-ebeeme, 20. rock hills, singular, 282. roots of spruce, as thread, 225, 226. russell stream, 104. st. francis indian, 146, 208. st. john river, the, 5, 40, 80, 101, 137, 176, 178, 203, 233, 238, 251, 256, 257, 270, 271, 274. st. lawrence river, the, 80, 233, 238. salmon river, 19. sandbar island, 100, 188, 189. schoodic lake, 256. school question, the, among indians, 323, 324. seboois lakes, 222, 261, 310. second lake, 274, 276, 281; beauty of, 290-292, 297. shad pond, or noliseemack, 29, 30, 86. shad-flies, ephemer㦠or, 255. sheldrakes, indian word for, 182; 254, 274, 276. singing, 41, 42. smith, ansell, clearing and settlement of, 137-145. snowberry, creeping, used as tea, 227. â��somebody & co.,â�� 14. souneunk mountains, the, 218, 260. south twin lake, 39. sowadnehunk deadwater, 58. sowadnehunk river, the, 31, 79. sparrow, the white-throated, 213, 249, 262. spencer bay mountain, 183. spencer mountains, 108. â��spokelogan,â�� 268. spring, a cool, 280. springer, j. s., forest life, quoted, 21, note; on lumbering, quoted, 48, note; on the spruce tree, quoted, 75; about the digging of a canal, quoted, 270, 271. spruce, the, 104; indian words for black and white, 209; difference between black and white, 225. spruce beer, a draught of, 30. squaw mountain, 183. squirrel, the red, 241. stars known to indian, 247. stillwater (me.), 4, 167. sugar island, 101, 183, 194; near olamon river, 324. sunday, an indianâ��s, 201, 202, 214, 215, 223, 229. sunkhaze, the, 8, 325, 326. â��swampers,â�� 242. â��sweet cakes,â�� 12. tea, varieties of forest, 227; hemlock, 312. telasinis lake, 267. telos lake, 235, 245, 264; indian name for, 267; 270, 274, 281, 290, 299. tent, description of, 196, 197. thistle, the canada, 96. thoreau, henry david, leaves concord for maine, 31 aug. 1846, 3; starts â��up riverâ�� from bangor, 4; strikes into the wilderness, 15; starts for summit of ktaadn, 61, 62; begins descent, 72; leaves boston by steamer for bangor, 13 sept. 1853, 93; takes moosehead lake steamer for return home, 159; starts on third excursion to maine woods, 20 july, 1857, 174; reaches farthest northern point, 259; lands at oldtown, the journey finished, 326. thrush, wood, indian word for, 186. thunder-storm, violent, 261, 262. timber, 18; land, best in maine, 235. tomhegan stream, 203. traps, a find of steel, 302. tree, fall of a, at night, 115; a dangerous, 221. trees, varieties of, 22, 116; along the penobscot, 107, 120; about camp on the caucomgomoc, 223; along the umbazookskus, 231; on island in heron lake, farthest northern point, 259; on east branch, 302. tree-tops, a walk over, 67; appearance of various, 121. trout, true and cousin-, 59. trout stream, 235, 269; indian name for, 295. umbazookskus, the, 219, 222; much meadow river, 229; 230, 232. umbazookskus lake, 233, 238. usnea lichen, indian word for, 186. veazieâ��s mills, 166. voyageurs, canadian, 6. waiteâ��s farm, 23. â��warping up,â�� 57. washing in a lake, 249. wassataquoik river, the, 3, 312. water-troughs, 97. wayfarerâ��s-tree or hobble-bush, 96. webster, daniel, joe polisâ��s call upon, 279. webster pond, 270, 273; indian name for, 273. webster stream, 161, 264; indian name for, 273; 275, 289, 297, 299, 300. west branch, tramp up the, 17; 20, 31, 32, 291, 316. whetstone falls, 313. white mountains, the, 4. whitehead island, 94. woods, wetness of the, 22; characteristics of maine, and uses of all, 167-173; destruction of the, 252-254. woodstock (n. b.), 256. the riverside press h.â o. houghton and company cambridge massachusetts the riverside press h.â o. houghton and company cambridge massachusetts * * * * * transcriberâ��s note: inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have been preserved. in particular, numerous spelling differences between the text and the appendices were noted and retained. on page 240, â��rides lacustreâ�� possibly should be â��ribes lacustre.â�� on page 259, â��margaraticeaâ�� possibly should be â��margaritacea.â�� on page 319, â��bonhommieâ�� possibly should be â��bonhomie.â�� on page 330, â��new hamphsireâ�� was corrected to â��new hampshire.â�� on page 333, â��virbirnumâ�� possibly should be â��viburnum.â�� on page 351, â��mt. pemadeneâ�� possibly should be â��mt. pemadenã©e.â�� on page 354, â��allegashâ�� possibly should be â��allagash.â�� on page 355, a symbol, circle with up arrow, is denoted by [symbol]. w, is denoted by [symbol]. 1817 հաաաաաա) scientia artes veritas library of the university of michigan tuehor si queris peninsulam amenam circumspice 00 파리 ​i 1 walden walden ву henry david thoreau 1817-1862 with an essay on thoreau by r. w. emerson london george routledge & sons limited new york : e. p. dutton & co. 1904 . c f --g в. i в. i te a 396 bet / contents. 1 page thoreau-by r. w. emerson 9 economy 27 . where i lived, and what i lived for 81 reading 94 sounds 102 solitude 115 visitors 123 . the bean-field 134 . the village 143 . the ponds 148 baker farm 167 higher laws 173 . brute neighbours 182 house-warming 192 former inhabitants ; and winter visitors 204 . winter animals 214 . the pond in winter 222 244 spring 233 conclusion 247 135553 1 thoreau by r: w: emerson a > henry david thoreau was the last male descendant of a french ancestor who came to this country from the isle of guernsey. his character exhibited occasional traits drawn from this blood, in singular combination with a very strong saxon genius. he was born in concord, massachusetts, on july 12, 1817. he was graduated at harvard college in 1837, but without any literary distinction. an iconoclast in literature, he seldom thanked colleges for their services to him, holding them in small esteem, whilst yet his debt to them was important. after leaving the university, he joined his brother in teaching a private school, which he soon renounced. his father was a manufacturer of lead-pencils, and henry applied himself for a time to this craft, believing he could make a better pencil than was then in use. after completing his experiments, he exhibited his work to chemists and artists in boston, and having obtained their certificates to its excellence and to its equality with the best london manufacture, he returned home contented. his friends congratulated him that he had now opened his way to fortune. but he replied, that he should never make another pencil. why should i? i would not do again what i have done once.” he resumed his endless walks and miscellaneous studies, making every day some new acquaintance with nature, though as yet never speaking of zoology or botany, since, though very studious of natural facts, he was incurious of technical and textual science. at this time, a strong, healthy youth, fresh from college, whilst all his companions were choosing their profession, or eager to begin some lucrative employment, it was inevitable that his thoughts should be exercised on the same question, and it required rare decision to refuse all the accustomed paths and keep his solitary freedom at the cost of disappointing the natural expectations of his family and friends : all the more difficult that he had a perfect probity, was exact in securing his own independence, and in holding every man to the like duty. but thoreau never io thoreau 1 s d 8 ti 0 w a faltered. he was a born protestant. he declined to give up his large ambition of knowledge and action for any narrow craft or profession, aiming at a much more comprehensive calling, the art of living well. if he slighted and defied the opinions of others, it was only that he was more intent to reconcile his practice with his own belief. never idle or self-indulgent, he preferred, when he wanted money, earning it by some piece of manual labour agreeable to him, as building a boat or a fence, planting, grafting, surveying, or other short work, to any long engagements. with his hardy habits and few wants, his skill in wood-craft, and his powerful arithmetic, he was very competent to live in any part of the world. it would cost him less time to supply his wants than another. he was therefore secure of his leisure. a natural skill for mensuration, growing out of his mathematical knowledge and his habit of ascertaining the measures and distances of objects which interested him, the size of trees, the depth and extent of ponds and rivers, the height of mountains, and the air-line distance of his favourite summits,—this, and his intimate knowledge of the territory about concord, made him drift into the profession of land-surveyor. it had the advantage for him that it led him continually into new and secluded grounds, and helped his studies of nature. his accuracy and skill in this work were readily appreciated, and he found all the employment he wanted. he could easily solve the problems of the surveyor, but he was daily beset with graver questions, which he manfully confronted. he interrogated every custom, and wished to settle all his practice on an ideal foundation. he was a protestant à outrance, and few lives contain so many renunciations. he was bred to no profession; he never married ; he lived alone ; he never went to ; church ; he never voted ; he refused to pay a tax to the state ; he ate no flesh, he drank no wine, he never knew the use of tobacco; and, though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun. he chose, wisely no doubt for himself, to be the bachelor of thought and nature. he had no talent for wealth, and knew how to be poor without the least hint of squalor or inelegance. perhaps he fell into his way of living without forecasting it much, but approved it with later wisdom. “i am often reminded,” he wrote in his journal, “ that if i had bestowed on me the wealth of croesus, my aims must be still the same, and my means essentially the same. he had no temptations to fight against, -no appetites, no passions, no taste for elegant trifles. a fine house, dress, the manners and talk of highly cultivated people were all thrown away on him. al hi b а hi y w ou so ; ac н. or fr sh an ya as ex a on sud lik thoreau ii he much preferred a good indian, and considered these refinements as impediments to conversation, wishing to meet his companion on the simplest terms. he declined invitations to dinnerparties, because there each was in every one's way, and he could not meet the individuals to any purpose. they make their pride," he said, “in making their dinner cost much ; i make my pride in making my dinner cost little.” when asked at table ” what dish he preferred, he answered, “the nearest." he did not like the taste of wine, and never had a vice in his life. he said,—“i have a faint recollection of pleasure derived from smoking dried lily-stems, before i was a man. i had commonly a supply of these. i have never smoked anything more noxious.” he chose to be rich by making his wants few, and supplying them himself. in his travels, he used the railroad only to get over so much country as was unimportant to the present purpose, walking hundreds of miles, avoiding taverns, buying a lodging in farmers' and fishermen's houses, aş cheaper, and more agreeable to him, and because there he could find better the men and the information he wanted. there was something military in his nature, not to be subdued, always manly and able, but rarely tender, as if he did not feel himself except in opposition. he wanted a fallacy to expose, a blunder to pillory, i may say required a little sense of victory, a roll of the drum, to call his powers into full exercise. it cost him nothing to say no; indeed he found it much easier than to say yes. it seemed as if his first instinct on hearing a proposition was to controvert it, so impatient was he of the limitations of our daily thought. this habit, of course, is a little chilling to the social affections; and though the companion in the end would acquit him of any malice or untruth, yet it mars conversation. hence, no equal companion stood in affectionate relations with one so pure and guileless. “i love henry,” said one of his friends, t but i cannot like him; and as for taking his arm, i should as soon think of taking the arm of an elm-tree.' yet, hermit and stoic as he was, he was really fond of sympathy, and threw himself heartily and childlike into the company of young people whom he loved, and whom he delighted to entertain, as he only could, with the varied and endless anecdotes of his experiences by field and river: and he was always ready to lead a huckleberry-party or a search for chestnuts or grapes. talking, one day, of a public discourse, henry remarked, that whatever succeeded with the audience was bad. i said, “ who would not like to write something which all can read, like robinson crusoe ? a 12 thoreau t e e à in any t a 1 and who does not see with regret that his page is not solid wit) a right materialistic treatment, which delights everybody ? henry objected, of course, and vaunted the better lectures which reached only a few persons. but, at supper, a young girl, under standing that he was to lecture at the lyceum, sharply asked him, “ whether his lecture would be a nice, interesting story, such as she wished to hear, or whether it was one of those old philosophical things that she did not care about.” henry turned to her, and bethought himself, and, i saw, was trying to believe that he had matter that might fit her and her brother, who were to sit up and go to the lecture, if it was a good one for them. he was a speaker and actor of the truth, born such, and was ever running into dramatic situations from this cause. circumstance it interested all bystanders to know what part henry would take, and what he would say ; and he did not disappoint expectation, but used an original judgment on each emergency. in 1845 he built himself a small framed house on the shores of walden pond, and lived there two years alone, life of labour and study. this action was quite native and fit for him. no one who knew him would tax him with affectation. he was more unlike his neighbours in his thought than in his action. as soon as he had exhausted the advantages of that solitude, he abandoned it. in 1847, not approving some uses to which the public expenditure was applied, he refused to pay his town tax, and was put in jail. a friend paid the tax for him, and he was released. the like annoyance was threatened. the next year. but, as his friends paid the tax, notwithstanding his protest, i believe he ceased to resist. no opposition or ridicule had any weight with him. he coldly and fully stated his opinion of the company. it was of no consequence if every one present held the opposite opinion. on one occasion he went to the university library to procure some books. the librarian refused to lend them. mr. thoreau repaired to the president, who stated to him the rules and usages, which permitted the loan of books to resident graduates, to clergymen who were alumni, and to some others resident within a circle of ten miles' radius from the college. mr. thoreau explained to the president that the railroad had destroyed the old scale of distances,-that the library was useless, yes, and president and college useless, on the terms of his rules,-that the one benefit he owed to the college was its library, --that, at this moment, not only his want of books was imperative but he wanted a large number of books, and assured him that he, thoreau, and not the librarian, was the proper custodian of these. > 1 { thoreau 13 lec > eve ere vas art ol ? od it in short, the president found the petitioner so formidable, and ? the rules getting to look so ridiculous, that he ended by giving icl him a privilege which in his hands proved unlimited thereafter. er no truer american existed than thoreau. his preference of tec his country and condition was genuine, and his aversation from ry english and european manners and tastes almost reached conoli tempt. he listened impatiently to news or bonmots gleaned from london circles ; and though he tried to be civil, these anecdotes fatigued him. the men were all imitating each other, and on a small mould. why can they not live as far apart as possible, and each be a man by himself? what he sought was the most energetic nature ; and he wished to go to oregon, not to london. ins “ in every part of great britian,” he wrote in his diary,“ are discovered traces of the romans, their funereal urns, their camps, lis their roads, their dwellings. but new england, at least, is not ich based on any roman ruins. we have not to lay the foundations of our houses on the ashes of a former civilization.” but, idealist as he was, standing for abolition of slavery, for abolition of tariffs, almost for abolition of government, it is need less to say he found himself not only unrepresented in actual politics, but almost equally opposed to every class of reformers. he yet he paid the tribute of his uniform respect to the anti-slavery the party. one man, whose personal acquaintance he had formed, he honoured with exceptional regard. before the first friendly word had been spoken for captain john brown, he sent notices to most houses in concord that he would speak in a public hall on the condition and character of john brown, on sunday evening, ny and invited all people to come. the republican committee, the che abolitionist committee, sent him word that it was premature and eld not advisable. he replied, “i did not send to you for advice, er but to announce that i am to speak.” the hall was filled at an tc early hour by people of all parties, and his earnest eulogy of the to hero was heard by all respectfully, by many with a sympathy tc that surprised themselves. it was said of plotinus that he was ashamed of his body, and he 'tis very likely he had good reason for it,—that his body was a ad bad servant, and he had not skill in dealing with the material world, as happens often to men of abstract intellect. but mr. thoreau was equipped with a most adapted and serviceable body. he was of short stature, firmly built, of light complexion, with strong, serious blue eyes, and a grave aspect—his face covered in the late years with a becoming beard. his senses were acute, his frame well-knit and hardy, his hands strong and skilful in om a: ar ne a e. 14 thoreau a a the use of tools. and there was a wonderful fitness of body and mind. he could pace sixteen rods more accurately than another man could measure them with rod and chain. he could find his path in the woods at night, he said, better by his feet than his eyes. he could estimate the measure of a tree very well by his eye; he could estimate the weight of a calf or a pig, like a dealer. from a box containing a bushel or more of loose pencils, he could take up with his hands fast enough just a dozen pencils at every grasp. he was a good swimmer, runner, skater, boatman, and would probably outwalk most countrymen in a day's journey. and the relation of body to mind was still finer than we have indicated. he said he wanted every stride his legs made. the length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing. if shut up in the house he did not write at all. he had a strong common-sense, like that which rose flammock the weaver's daughter in scott's romance, commends in her father, as resembling a yardstick, which, whilst it measures dowlas and diaper, can equally well measure tapestry and cloth of gold. he had always a new resource. when i was planting forest trees, and had procured half a peck of acorns, he said that only a small portion of them would be sound, and proceeded to examine them and select the sound ones. but finding this took time, he said, “i think if you put them all into water the good ones will sink ;” which experiment we tried with success. he could plan a garden or a house or a barn ; would have been competent to lead a “ pacific exploring expedition ;" could give judicious counsel in the gravest private or public affairs. he lived for the day, not cumbered and mortified by his memory. if he brought you yesterday a new proposition, he would bring you to-day another not less revolutionary. a very industrious man, and setting, like all highly organized men, a high value on his time, he seemed the only man of leisure in town, always ready for any excursion that promised well, or for conversation prolonged into late hours. his trenchant sense was never stopped by his rules of daily prudence, but was always up to the new occasion. he liked and used the simplest food, yet, when some one urged a vegetable diet, thoreau thought all diets a very small matter, saying that “the man who shoots the buffalo lives better than the man who boards at the graham house.” he said, “ you can sleep near the railroad, and never be disturbed : nature knows very well what sounds are worth attending to, and has made up her mind 'not to hear the railroad whistle. but things respect the devout mind, and a mental a 6 thoreau 15 dy an nothe ind hi nan hi by hi dealer e could every 7, ane urney e have the ag. 1 nmoc! father as and 1. he forest t only camin ecstacy was never interrupted.” he noted what repeatedly befell him, that, after receiving from a distance a rare plant, he would presently find the same in his own haunts. and those pieces of luck which happen only to good players happened to him one day, walking with a stranger, who inquired where indian arrow-heads could be found, he replied, “everywhere," and, stooping forward, picked one on the instant from the ground. at mount washington, in tuckerman's ravine, thoreau had a bad fall, and sprained his foot. as he was in the act of getting up from his fall, he saw for the first time the leaves of the arnica mollis. his robust common sense, armed with stout hands, keen perceptions and strong will, cannot yet account for the superiority which shone in his simple and hidden life. i must add the cardinal fact, that there was an excellent wisdom in him, proper to a rare class of men, which showed him the material world as a means and symbol. this discovery, which sometimes yields to poets a certain casual and interrupted light, serving for the ornament of their writing was in him an unsleeping insight; and whatever faults or obstructions of temperament might cloud it, he was not disobedient to the heavenly vision. in his youth, he said, one day, “ the other world is all my art; my pencils will draw no other; my jack-knife will cut nothing else; i do not use it as a this was the muse and genius that ruled his opinions, conversations, studies, work and course of life. this made him a searching judge of men. at first glance he measured his companion, and, though insensible to some fine traits of culture, could very well report his weight and calibre. and this made the impression of genius which his conversation sometimes gave. he understood the matter in hand at a glance, and saw the limitations and poverty of those he talked with, so that nothing seemed concealed from such terrible eyes. i have repeatedly known young men of sensibility converted in a moment to the belief that this was the man they were in search of, the man of men, who could tell them all they should do. his dealing with them was never affectionate, but superior, didactic, scorning their petty ways, —very slowly conceding, or not conceding at all, the promise of his society at their houses, or even at his own. “would he not walk with them?" he did not know. there was nothing so important to him as his walk; he had no walks to throw away on company.” visits were offered him from respectful parties, but he declined them."** admiring friends offered to carry him at their own cost to the yellowstone me, he es will means. d plan co lead punse op his on, he ı very men, ure in or for own sense lways 3, yet, diets 8 the aham ver be worth troad rental 16 thoreau river, to the west indies,-to south america. but though nothing could be more grave or considered than his refusals, they remind one, in quite new relations, of that fop brummel's reply to the gentleman who offered him his carriage in a shower, “but where will you ride, then ?”—and what accusing silences, and what searching and irresistible speeches, battering down all defences, his companions can remember! mr. thoreau dedicated his genius with such entire love to the fields, hills and waters of his native town, that he made them known and interesting to all reading americans, and to people over the sea. the river on whose banks he was born and died he knew from its springs to its confluence with the merrimack. he had made summer and winter observations on it for many years, and at every hour of the day and night. the result of the recent survey of the water commissioners appointed by the state of massachusetts he had reached by his private experiments, several years earlier. every fact which occurs in the bed, on the banks, or in the air over it; the fishes, and their spawning and nests, their manners, their food; the shad-flies which fill the air on a certain evening once a year, and which are snapped at by the fishes so ravenously that many of these die of repletion ; the conical heaps of small stones on the river-shallows, the huge nests of small fishes, one which will sometimes overfill a cart; the birds which frequent the stream, heron, duck, sheldrake, loom, osprey ; the snake, muskrat, otter, woodchuck and fox, on the banks; the turtle, frog, hyla and cricket, which make the bank vocal,—were all known to him, and, as it were, townsmen and fellow-creatures ; so that he felt an absurdity or violence in any narrative of one of these by itself apart, and still more of its dimensions on an inchrule, or in the exhibition of its skeleton, or the specimen of a squirrel or a bird in brandy. he liked to speak of the manners of the river, as itself a lawful creature, yet with exactness, and always to an observed fact. as he knew the river, so the ponds in this region. one of the weapons he used, more important to him than microscope or alcohol-receiver to other investigators was a whim which grew on him by indulgence, yet appeared in gravest statement, namely, of extolling his own town and neighbourhood as the most favoured centre for natural observation. he remarked that the flora of massachusetts embraced almost all the important plants of america,-most of the oaks, most of the willows, the best pines, the ash, the maple, the beech, the nuts. he returned kane's arctic voyage to a friend of whom he had borrowed > thoreau 17 > a > , it, with the remark, that “ most of the phenomena noted might be observed in concord.' he seemed a little envious of the pole, for the coincident sunrise and sunset, or five minutes' day after six months : a splendid fact, which annursnuc had never afforded him. he found red snow in one of his walks, and told me that he expected to find yet the victoria regia in concord. he was the attorney of the indigenous plants, and owned to a preference of the weeds to the imported plants as of the indian to the civilized man, and noticed, with pleasure,' that the willow beanpoles of his neighbour had grown more than his beans. “see these weeds,” he said, “ which have been hoed at by a million farmers all spring and summer, and yet have prevailed, and just now come out triumphant over all lanes, pastures, fields and gardens, such is their vigour. we have insulted them with low names, too, as pigweed, wormwood, chickweed, shad-blossom.” he says, they have brave names, too, ambrosia, stellaria, amelanchier, amaranth, etc." i think his fancy for referring everything to the meridian of concord did not grow out of any ignorance or depreciation of other longitudes or latitudes, but was rather a playful expression of his conviction of the indifferency of all places, and that the best place for each is where he stands. he expressed it once in this wise :-“i think nothing is to be hoped from you, if this bit of mould under your feet is not sweeter to you to eat than other in this world, or in any world.” the other weapon with which he conquered all obstacles in science was patience. he knew how to sit immovable, a part of ♡ the rock he rested on, until the bird, the reptile, the fish, which had retired from him, should come back and resume its habits, nay, moved by curiosity, should come to him and watch him. it was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him. he knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own. he knew every track in the snow or on the ground, and what creature had taken this path before him. one must submit abjectly to such a guide, and the reward was great.. under his arm he carried an old music-book to press plants ; in his pocket, his diary and pencil, a spy-glass for birds, microscope, jack-knife, and twine. he wore a straw hat, stout-shoes, strong grey trousers, to brave scrub-oaks and smilax, and to climb a tree for a hawk's or a squirrel's nest. he waded into the pool for the water-plants, and his strong legs were no insignificant part of his on the day i speak of he looked for the menyanthes, detected it across the wide pool, and, on examination of the b any > > a armour. 18 thoreau florets, decided that it had been in flower five days. he drew out of his breast-pocket his diary, and read the names of all the plants that should bloom on this day, whereof he kept account as a banker when his notes fall due. the cypripedium not due till to-morrow. he thought that, if waked up from a trance, in this swamp, he could tell by the plants what time of the year it was within two days. the redstart was flying about, and presently the fine grosbeaks, whose brilliant scarlet“ makes the rash gazer wipe his eye,” and whose fine clear note thoreau compared to that of a tanager which has got rid of its hoarseness. presently he heard a note which he called that of the night-warbler, a bird he had never identified, had been in search of twelve years, which always, when he saw it, was in the act of diving down into a tree or bush, and which it was vain to seek ; the only bird which sings indifferently by night and by day. i told him he must beware of finding and booking it, lest life should have nothing more to show him. he said, “what you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come full upon, all the family at dinner. you seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it you become its a 1 prey." his interest in the flower or the bird lay very deep in his mind, was connected with nature--and the meaning of nature was never attempted to be defined by him. he would not offer a memoir of his observations to the natural history society. “why should i? to detach the description from its connexions in my mind would make it no longer true or valuable to me: and they do not wish what belongs to it.” his power of observation seemed to indicate additional senses. he saw as with microscope, heard as with ear-trumpet, and his memory was a photographic register of all he saw and heard. and yet none knew better than he that it is not the fact that imports, but the impression or effect of the fact on your mind. every fact lay in glory in his mind, a type of the order and beauty of the whole. his determination on natural history was organic. he confessed that he sometimes felt like a hound or a panther, and, if born among indians, would have been a fell hunter. but, restrained by his massachusetts culture, he played out the game in this mild form of botany and ichthyology. his intimacy with animals suggested what thomas fuller records of butler the apiologist, that “either he had told the bees things or the bees had told him." snakes coiled round his leg ; the fishes swam into his hand, and he took them out of the water; he pulled the woodchuck out of its hole by the tail and took the foxes under his thoreau 19 a protection from the hunters. our naturalist had perfect magnanimity; he had no secrets ; he would carry you to the heron's haunt, or even to his most prized botanical swamp-possibly knowing that you could never find it again, yet willing to take his risks. no college ever offered him a diploma, or a professor's chair ; no academy made him its corresponding secretary, its discoverer, or even its member. perhaps these learned bodies feared the satire of his presence. yet so much knowledge of nature's secret and genius few others possessed, none in a more large and religious synthesis. for not a particle of respect had he to the opinions of any man or body of men, but homage solely to the truth itself; and as he discovered everywhere among doctors some leaning of courtesy, it discredited them. he grew to be revered and admired by his townsmen, who had at first known him only as an oddity. the farmers who employed him as a surveyor soon discovered his rare accuracy and skill, his knowledge of their lands, of trees, of birds, of indian remains and the like, which enabled him to tell every farmer more than he knew before of his own farm ; so that he began to feel a little as if mr. thoreau had better rights in his land than he. they felt, too, the superiority of character which addressed all men with a native authority. indian relics abound in concord-arrow-heads, stone chisels, pestles, and fragments of pottery; and, on the river-bank, large heaps of clam-shells and ashes mark spots which the savages frequented. these, and every circumstance touching the indian, were important in his eyes. his visits to maine were chiefly for love of the indian. he had the satisfaction of seeing the manufacture of the bark-canoe, as well as of trying his hand in its management on the rapids. he was inquisitive about the making of the stone arrow-head, and in his last days charged a youth setting out for the rocky mountains to find an indian who could tell him that: “ it was well worth a visit to california to learn it.”. occasionally, a small party of penobscot indians would visit concord, and pitch their tents for a few weeks in summer on the river-bank. he failed not to make acquaintance with the best of them; though he well knew that asking questions of indians is like catechizing beavers and rabbits. in his last visit to maine he had great satisfaction from joseph polis, an intelligent indian of oldtown, who was his guide for some weeks. he was equally interested in every natural fact. the depth a 20 thoreau > a of his perception found likeness of law throughout nature, and i know not any genius who so swiftly inferred universal law from the single fact. he was no pedant of a department. his eye was open to beauty, and his ear to music. he found these, not in rare conditions, but wheresoever he went. he thought the best of music was in single strains ; and he found poetic suggestion in the humming of the telegraph-wire. his poetry might be bad or good; he no doubt wanted a lyric facility and technical skill, but he had the source of poetry in his spiritual perception. he was a good reader and critic, and his judgment on poetry was to the ground of it. he could not be deceived as to the presence or absence of the poetic element in any composition, and his thirst for this made him negligent and perhaps scornful of superficial graces. he would pass by many delicate rhythms, but he would have detected every live stanza or line in a volume, and knew very well where to find an equal poetic charm in prose. he was so enamoured of the spiritual beauty that he held all actual written poems in very light esteem in the comparison.' he admired æschylus and pindar; but, when some one was commending them, he said that æschylus and the greeks, in describing apollo and orpheus, had given no song, or no good one. they ought not to have moved trees, but to have chanted to the gods such a hymn as would have sung all their old ideas out of their heads, and new ones in." his own verses are often rude and defective. the gold does not yet run pure, is drossy and crude. the thyme and marjoram are not yet honey. but if he want lyric fineness and technical merits, if he have not the poetic temperament, he never lacks the casual thought, showing that his genius was better than his talent. he knew the worth of the imagination for the uplifting and consolation of human life, and liked to throw every thought into a symbol. the fact you tell is of no value, but only the impression. for this reason his presence was poetic, always piqued the curiosity to know more deeply the secrets of his mind. he had many reserves, an unwillingness to exhibit to profane eyes what was still sacred in his own, and knew well how to throw a poetic veil over his experience. all readers of walden will remember his mythical record of his disappointments “i long ago lost a hound, a bay horse and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. many are the travellers i have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks, and what calls they answered to. i have met one or two who have heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear thoreau 21 behind a cloud; and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.” 1 his riddles were worth the reading, and i confide that if at any time i do not understand the expression, it is yet just. such was the wealth of his truth that it was not worth his while to use words in vain. his poem entitled “sympathy reveals the tenderness under that triple steel of stoicism, and the intellectual subtility it could animate. his classic poem on “smoke” suggests simonides, but is better than any poem of simonides. his biography is in his verses. his habitual thought makes all . his poetry a hymn to the cause of causes, the spirit which vivifies and controls his own : “i hearing get, who had but ears, and sight, who had but eyes before ; i moments live, who lived but years, and truth discern, who knew but learning's lore.” and still more in these religious lines : "now chiefly is my natal hour, and only now my prime of life ; i will not doubt the love untold, which not my worth nor want have bought, which wooed me young, and wooes me old, and to this evening hath me brought." whilst he used in his writings a certain petulence of remark in reference to churches or churchmen, he was a person of a rare, tender and absolute religion, a person incapable of any profanation, by act or by thought. of course, the same isolation which belonged to his original thinking and living detached him from the social religious forms. this is neither to be censured nor regretted. aristotle long ago explained it, when he said, “one who surpasses his fellow-citizens in virtue is no longer a part of the city. their law is not for him, since he is a law to himself.” thoreau was sincerity itself, and might fortify the convictions of prophets in the ethical laws by his holy living. it was an affirmative experience which refused to be set aside. a truthspeaker he, capable of the most deep and strict conversation ; a physician to the wounds of any soul; a friend, knowing not only the secret of friendship, but almost worshipped by those few persons who resorted to him as their confessor and prophet, and knew the deep value of his mind and great heart. he thought 1 see p. 37. 22 thoreau . 13 that without religion or devotion of some kind nothing great was ever accomplished : and he thought that the bigoted sectarian had better bear this in mind. his virtues, of course, sometimes ran into extremes. it was easy to trace to the inexorable demand on all for exact truth that austerity which made this willing hermit more solitary even than he wished. himself of a perfect probity, he required not less of others. he had a disgust at crime, and no worldly success would cover it. he detected paltering as readily in dignified and prosperous persons as in beggars, and with equal scorn. such dangerous frankness was in his dealing that his admirers called him " that terrible thoreau,” as if he spoke when silent, and was still present when he had departed. i think the severity of his ideal interfered to deprive him of a healthy sufficiency of human society. the habit of a realist to find things the reverse of their appearance inclined him to put every statement in a paradox. a certain habit of antagonism defaced his earlier writings-a trick of rhetoric not quite outgrown in his later, of substituting for the obvious word and thought its diametrical opposite. he praised wild mountains and winter forests for their domestic air, in snow and ice he would find sultriness, and commended the wilderness for resembling rome and paris. “it was so dry, that you might call it wet.” the tendency to magnify the moment, to read all the laws of nature in the one object or one combination under your eye, is, of course, comic to those who do not share the philosopher's perception of identity. to him there was no such thing as size. the pond was a small ocean; the atlantic, a large walden pond. he referred every minute fact to cosmical laws. though he meant to be just, he seemed haunted by a certain chronic assumtion that the science of the day pretended completeness, and he had just found out that the savans had neglected to discriminate a particular botanical variety, had failed to describe the seeds or count the sepals. “ that is to say,” we replied, “ the blockheads were not born in concord ; but who said they were ? it was their unspeakable misfortune to be born in london, or paris, or rome; but, poor fellows, they did what they could, considering that they never saw bateman’s pond, or nine-acre corner, or becky stow's swamp; besides, what were you sent into the world for, but to add this observation ? ” had his genius been only contemplative, he had been fitted to his life, but with his energy and practical ability he seemed thoreau 23 bom for great enterprise and for command ; and i so much regret the loss of his rare powers of action, that i cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. wanting this, instead of engineering for all america, he was the captain of a huckleberry-party. pounding beans is good to the end of pounding empires one of these days; but if, at the end of years, it is still only beans ! but these foibles, real or apparent, were fast vanishing in the incessant growth of a spirit so robust and wise, and which effaced its defeats with new triumphs. his study of nature was a perpetual ornament to him, and inspired his friends with curiosity to see the world through his eyes, and to hear his adventures. they possessed every kind of interest. he had many elegancies of his own, whilst he scoffed at conventional elegance. thus, he could not bear to hear the sound of his own steps, the grit of gravel ; and therefore never willingly walked in the road, but in the grass, on mountains and in woods. his senses were acute, and he remarked that by night every dwelling-house gives out bad air, like a slaughter-house. he liked the pure fragrance of melilot. he honoured certain plants with special regard, and, over all, the pond-lily-then, the gentian, and the mikania scandens, and “ life-everlasting," and a bass-tree which he visited every year when it bloomed, in the middle of july. he thought the scent a more oracular inquisition than the sight-more oracular and trustworthy. the scents of course, reveals what is concealed from the other senses. by it he detected earthiness. he delighted in echoes, and said they were almost the only kind of kindred voices that he heard. he loved nature so well , was so happy in her solitude, that he became very jealous of cities and the sad work which their refinements and artifices made with man and his dwelling. the axe was always destroying his forest. “thank god.” he said, "they . cannot cut down the clouds !” “all kinds of figures are drawn on the blue ground with this fibrous white paint." i subjoin a few sentences taken from his unpublished manuscripts, not only as records of his thought and feeling, but for their power of description and literary excellence “some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.” “the chub is a soft fish, and tastes like boiled brown paper salted.” the youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at a 24 thoreau length the middle-aged man concludes to build a wood-shed with them." “the locusts z-ing." devil's-needles zigzagging along the nut-meadow brook.” sugar is not so sweet to the palate as sound to the healthy 66 ear." 66 a 66 > “i put on some hemlock-boughs, and the rich salt crackling of their leaves was like mustard to the ear, the crackling of uncountable regiments. dead trees love the fire." “the bluebird carries the sky on his back.” the tanager flies through the green foliage as if it would ignite the leaves.” if i wish for a horse-hair for my compass-sight i must go to the stable ; but the hair-bird, with her sharp eyes, goes to the road.” “ immortal water, alive even to the superficies. “fire is the most tolerable third party nature made ferns for pure leaves, to show what she could do in that line." “no tree has so fair a bole and so handsome an instep as the beech.” “how did these beautiful rainbow-tints get into the shell of the fresh-water clam, buried in the mud at the bottom of our dark river ? ” hard are the times when the infant's shoes are second-foot." we are strictly confined to our men to whom we give liberty." nothing is so much to be feared as fear. atheism may comparatively be popular with god himself.” of what significance the things you can forget? a little thought is sexton to all the world.” how can we expect a harvest of thought who have not had a seed-time of character ? " only he can be trusted with gifts who can present a face of bronze to expectations." ' i ask to be melted. you can only ask of the metals that they be tender to the fire that melts them. to nought else can they be tender.” there is a flower known to botanists, one of the same genus with our summer plant called “life-everlasting," a gnaphalium, like that which grows on the most inaccessible cliffs of the tyrolese mountains, where the chamois dare hardly venture, and which the hunter, tempted by its beauty, and by his love (for it is immensely valued by the swiss maidens), climbs the 66 66 thoreau 25 cliffs to gather, and is sometimes found dead at the foot, with the flower in his hand. it is called by botanists the gnaphalium leontopodium, but by the swiss edelweisse, which signfies noble purity. thoreau seemed to me living in the hope to gather this plant, which belonged to him of right, the scale on which his studies proceeded was so large as to require longevity, and we were the less prepared for his sudden disappearance. the country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost. it seems an injury that he should leave in the midst his broken task which none else can finish, a kind of indignity to so noble a soul that he should depart out of nature before yet he has been really shown to his peers for what he is. but he, at least, is content. his soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world ; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home. + 4 7 walden economy when i wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, i lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbour, in a house which i had built myself, on the shore of walden pond, in concord, massachusetts, and earned my living by the labour of my hands only. i lived there two years and two months. at present i am a sojourner in civilized life again. i should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life, which some would call impertinent, though they do not appear to me at all impertinent, but, considering the circumstances, very natural and pertinent. some have asked what i got to eat; if i did not feel lonesome ; if i was not afraid ; and the like. others have been curious to learn what portion of my income i devoted to charitable purposes ; and some, who have large families, how many poor children i maintained. i will therefore ask those of my readers who feel no particular interest in me to pardon me if i undertake to answer some of these questions in this book. in most books, the i, or first person, is omitted ; 'in this it will be retained ; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. we commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. i should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom i knew as well. unfortunately, i am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. moreover, i, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land ; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me. perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. as for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. i trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits. > a > a 27 28 walden i would fain say something, not so much concerning the chines and sandwich islanders, as you who read these pages, who ar said to live in new england; something about your condition especially your outward condition or circumstances in this world, in this town, what it is, whether it is necessary that it be as bad as it is, whether it cannot be improved as well as not. i have travelled a good deal in concord : and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. what i have heard of brahmins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders, “ until it becomes impossible for them to resume their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach "sor dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the top of pillars-even these forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which i daily witness. the twelve labours of hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbours have undertaken ; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but i could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labour. they have no friend iolas to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra’s head, but as soon as one head is crushed, two spring up i see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools ; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. better if they had been born in the open pastures and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labour in. who made them serfs of the soil ? why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt ? why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? they have got to live a man's life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they can. how many a poor immortal soul have i met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot! the portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labour enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh. а a economy 29 2 2 but men labour under a mistake. the better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. by a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. it is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before. it is said that deucalion and pyrrha created men by throwing stones over their heads behind them : “inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum, et documenta damus quâ simus origine nati.” or, as raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way “from thence our kind hard-hearted is, enduring pain and care, approving that our bodies of a stony nature are. so much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the stones over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they fell. most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious, cares and superfluously coarse labours of life that its finer fruits camot be plucked by them. their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. actually, the labouring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labour would be depreciated in the market. he has no time to be anything but , machine. how can he remember well his ignorance a -which his growth requires—who has so often to use his knowledge ? we should feed and clothe him gratuitously sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we judge him. the finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly. some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. i have no doubt that some of you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an thour. it is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by experience; always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the latins æs alienum, a . 2 30 walden > a another's brass, for some of their coins were made of brass; still living, and dying, and buried, by this other's brass ; always promising to pay, promising to pay, to-morrow, and dying to-day, insolvent; seeking to curry favour, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offences ; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility, or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbour to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him ; making yourself sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in the brick bank; no matter where, no matter how much or how little. i sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, i may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called negro slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both north and south. it is hard to have southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver yourself. talk of a divinity in man! look at the teamster on the highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir within him? his highest duty to fodder and water his horses ! what is his destiny to him compared with the shipping interests? does not he drive for squire make-a-stir ? how godlike, how immortal, is he? see how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. what a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate. self-emancipation even in the west indian provinces of the fancy and imagination-what wilberforce is there to bring that about ? think, also, of the ladies of the land weaving toilet cushions against the last day, not to betray too green an interest in their fates ! as if you could kill time without injuring eternity. the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. what is called resignation is confirmed desperation. from the desperate cities you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. a stereotyped but. unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called th games and amusements of mankind. there is no play in them for this comes after work. but it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things. 1 0 economy 31 1 when we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. yet they honestly think there is no choice left. but alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. it is never too late to give up our prejudices. no way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. what everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. what old people say you cannot do you try and find that you can. old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new. old people did not know enough once, perchance, to fetch fuel to keep the fire a-going ; new people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the phrase is. age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. one may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must believe; and it may be that they have some faith left which belies that experience, and they are only less young than they were. i have lived some thirty years on this planet, and i have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. they have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything, to the purpose. here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it. if i have any experience which i think valuable, i am sure to reflect that this my mentors said nothing about. one farmer says to me, you cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with " ; and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones ; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plough along in spite of every obstacle. some things are really necessaries of life in some circles, the most helpless and diseased, which in others are luxuries merely, and in others still are entirely unknown. the whole ground of human life seems to some to have been gone over by their predecessors, both the heights and the valleys, 66 32 walden 99 and all things to have been cared for. according to evelyn, the wise solomon prescribed ordinances for the very distances of trees; and the roman prætors have decided how often you may go into your neighbour's land to gather the acorns which fall on it without trespass, and what share belongs to that neighbour.” hippocrates has even left directions how we should cut our nails ; that is, even with the ends of the fingers, neither shorter nor longer. undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as adam. but man's capacities have never been measured ; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried. whatever have been thy failures hitherto, "be not afflicted, my child, for who shall assign to thee what thou hast left undone ? we might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for instance, that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of earths like ours. if i had remembered this it would have prevented some mistakes. this was not the light in which i hoed them. the stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles ! what distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment! nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. who shall say what prospect life offers to another ? could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant ? we should live in all the ages of the world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages. history, poetry, mythology !--i know of no reading of another's experience so startling and informing as this would be. the greater part of what my neighbours call good i believe in my soul to be bad, and if i repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behaviour. what demon possessed me that i behaved so well ? you may say the wisest thing you can, old man-you who have lived seventy years, not without honour of a kindi hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that. one generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels. i think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. we may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere. nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength. the incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well-nigh incurable form of disease. we are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do; and yet how much is not done by us ! or, what if we had been taken sick? how viligant we are ! determined not to live by faith if we can avoid it; all economy 33 the day long on the alert, at night we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to uncertainties. so thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. this is the only way, we say ; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. all change is a miracle to contemplate ; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant. confucius said, “ to know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.” when one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, i foresee that all men will at length establish their lives on that basis. a let us consider for a moment what most of the trouble and anxiety which i'have referred to is about, and how much it is necessary that we be troubled, or at least, careful. it would be some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life and what methods have been taken to obtain them; or even to look over the old day-books of the merchants, to see what it was that the men most commonly bought at the stores, what they stored, that is, what are the grossest groceries. for the improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man's existence : as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors. by the words, necessary of life, i mean whatever, of all that man obtains by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long use has become, so important to human life that few, if any, whether from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it. to many creatures there is in this sense but one necessary of life-food. to the bison of the prairie it is a few inches of palatable grass, with water to drink; unless he seeks the shelter of the forest or the mountain's shadow. none of the brute creation requires more than food and shelter: the necessaries of life for man in this climate may, accurately enough, be distributed under the several heads of food, shelter, clothing, and fuel; for not till we have secured these are we prepared to entertain the true problems of life with freedom and a prospect of success. man has invented, not only houses, but clothes and cooked food; and possibly from the accidental discovery of the warmth of fire, and the consequent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the present necessity to sit by it. we observe с 34 walden cats and dogs acquiring the same second nature. by proper shelter and clothing we legitimately retain our own internal heat; but with an excess of these, or of fuel, that is, with an external heat greater than our own internal, may not cookery properly be said to begin ? darwin, the naturalist, says of the inhabitants of tierra del fuego, that while his own party, who were well clothed and sitting close to a fire, were far from too warm, these naked savages, who were farther off, were observed, to his great surprise, “to be streaming with perspiration at undergoing such a roasting.” so, we are told, the new hollander goes naked with impunity, while the european shivers in his clothes. is it impossible to combine the hardiness of these savages with the intellectualness of the civilized man ? according to liebeg, man's body is a stove, and food the fuel which keeps up the internal combustion in the lungs. in cold weather we eat more, in warm less. the animal heat is the result of a slow combustion, and disease and death take place when this is too rapid ; or for want of fuel, or from some defect in the draught, the fire goes out. of course the vital heat is not to be confounded with fire; but so much for analogy. it appears, therefore, from the above list, that the expression, animal life, is nearly synonymous with the expression, animal heat ; for while food may be regarded as the fuel which keeps up the fire within usand fuel serves only to prepare that food or to increase the warmth of our bodies by addition from without shelter and clothing also serve only to retain the heat thus generated and absorbed. the grand necessity, then, for our bodies, is to keep warm, to keep the vital heat in us. what pains we accordingly take, not only with our food, and clothing, and shelter, but with our beds, which are our night-clothes, robbing the nests and breasts of birds to prepare this shelter within a shelter, as the mole has its bed of grass and leaves at the end of its burrow! the poor man is wont to complain that this is a cold world ; and to cold, no less physical than social, we refer directly a great part of our ails. the summer, in some climates, makes possible to man a sort of elysian life. fuel, except to cook his food, is then unnecessary ; the sun is his fire, and many of the fruits are sufficiently cooked by its rays; while food generally is more various, and more easily obtained, and clothing and shelter are wholly or half unnecessary. at the present day, and in this country, as i find by my own experience, a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a wheelbarrow, etc., and for the studious, lamplight, stationery, and access to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and can all be a economy 35 l obtained at a trifling cost. yet some, not wise, go to the other side of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and devote themselves to trade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may live—that is, keep comfortably warm—and die in new england at last. the luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot; as i implied before, they are cooked of course à la mode. most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. with respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor. the ancient philosophers, chinese, hindoo, persian, and greek, were a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward. we know not much about them. it is remarkable that we know so much of them as we do. the same is true of the more modern reformers and benefactors of their race. none can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty. of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art. there are nowa-days professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. to be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. it is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. the success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. they make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men. but why do men degenerate ever ? what makes families run out ? what is the nature of the luxury which enervates and destroys nations ? are we sure that there is none of it in our own lives? the philosopher is in advance of his age even in the outward form of his life. he is not fed, sheltered, clothed, warmed, like his contemporaries. how can a man be a philosopher and not maintain his vital heat by better methods than other men ? when a man is warmed by the several modes which i have described, what does he want next ? surely not more warmth of the same kind, as more and richer food, larger and more splendid houses, finer and more abundant clothing, more numerous, incessant, and hotter fires, and the like. when he has obtained a 36 walden on life those things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced. the soil, it appears, is suited to the seed, for it has sent its radicle downward, and it may now send its shoot upward also with confidence. why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the same proportion into the heavens above ?—for the nobler plants are valued for the fruit they bear at last in the air and light, far from the ground, and are not treated like the humbler esculents, which, though they may be biennials, are cultivated only till they have perfected their root, and often cut down at top for this purpose, so that most would not know them in their flowering season. i do not mean to prescribe rules to strong and valiant natures, who will mind their own affairs whether in heaven or hell, and perchance build more magnificently and spend more lavishly than the richest, without ever impoverishing themselves, not knowing how they live,-if, indeed, there are any such, as has been dreamed ; nor to those who find their encouragement and inspiration in precisely the present conditions of things, and cherish it with the fondness and enthusiasm of lovers—and, to some extent, i reckon myself in this number; i do not speak to those who are well employed, in whatever circumstances, and they know whether they are well employed or not-but mainly to the mass of men who are discontented, and idly complaining of the hardness of their lot or of the times, when they might improve them. there are some who complain most energetically and inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their duty. i also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters. i will only if i should attempt to tell how i have desired to spend my life in years past, it would probably surprise those of my readers who are somewhat acquainted with its actual history; it would certainly astonish those who know nothing about it. hint at some of the enterprises which i have cherished. in any weather, at any hour of the day or night, i have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. you will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in ? economy 37 a a my trade than in most men’s, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. i would gladly tell all that i know about it, and never paint “no admittance on my gate. i long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. many are the travellers i have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. i have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves. to anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, nature herself! how many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbour was stirring about his business, have i been about mine! no doubt, many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise, farmers starting for boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers going to their work. it is true i never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it. so many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town, trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express ! i well-nigh sunk all my capital in it, and lost my own breath into the bargain, running in the face of it. if it had concerned either of the political parties, depend upon it, it would have appeared in the gazette with the earliest intelligence. at other times watching from the observatory of some cliff or tree, to telegraph any new arrival; or waiting at evening on the hill-tops for the sky to fall, that i might catch something, though i never caught much, and that, manna-wise, would dissolve again in the sun. for a long time i was reporter to a journal, of no very wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, i got only my labour for my pains. however, in this case my pains were their own reward. for many years i was self-appointed inspector of snow storins ι and rain storms, and did my duty faithfully ; surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility. i have looked after the wild stock of the town, which give a faithful herdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping fences; and i have had an eye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of the farm, though i did not always know whether jonas or solomon worked in a particular field to-day-that was none of my business. > 1 38 walden i have watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle tree, the red pine and the black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might have withered else in dry seasons. in short, i went on thus for a long time, i may say it without boasting, faithfully minding my own business, till it became more and more evident that my townsmen would not after all admit me into the list of town officers, nor make my place a sinecure with a moderate allowance. my accounts, which i can swear to have kept faithfully, i have, indeed, never got audited, still less accepted, still less paid and settled. however, i have not set my heart on that. not long since, a strolling indian went to sell baskets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neighbourhood. “do you wish to buy any baskets ?” he asked. no, we do not want any," was the reply. “what !” exclaimed the indian, as he went out the gate,“ do you mean to starve us ? ” having seen his industrious white neighbours so well off-that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and by some magic wealth and standing followed-he had said to himself: i will go into business; i will weave baskets ; it is a thing which i can do. thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have done his part, and it would be the white man's to buy them. he had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other's while to buy them, or at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while to buy. i too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but i had not made it worth any one's while to buy them. yet not the less, in my case, did i think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, i studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them. the life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others ? finding that my fellow-citizens were not likely to offer me any room in the court-house, or any curacy or living anywhere else, but i must shift for myself, i turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods, where i was better known. i determined to go into business at once, and not wait to acquire the usual capital, using such slender means as i had already got. my purpose in going to walden pond was not to live cheaply nor to five dearly there, but to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles; to be hindered from accomplishing which, for a economy 39 a want of a little common-sense, a little enterprise, and business talent, appeared not so bad as foolish. i have always endeavoured to acquire strict business habits; they are indispensable to every man. if your trade is with the celestial empire, then some small counting-house on the coast, in some salem harbour, will be fixture enough. you will export such articles as the country affords, purely native products, much ice and pine timber and a little granite, always in native bottoms. these will be good ventures. to oversee all the details yourself in person; to be at once pilot and captain, and owner and underwriter; to buy and sell and keep the accounts; to read every letter received, and write and read every letter sent; to superintend the discharge of imports night and day; to be upon many parts of the coast almost at the same time—often the richest freight will be discharged upon a jersey shore; to be your own telegraph, unweariedly sweeping the horizon, speaking all passing vessels bound coast-wise ; to keep up a steady dispatch of com modities, for the supply of such a distant and exorbitant market ; to keep yourself informed of the state of the markets, prospects of war and peace everywhere, and anticipate the tendencies of trade and civilization-taking advantage of the results of all exploring expeditions, using new passages and all improvements in navigation; charts to be studied, the position of reefs and new lights and buoys to be ascertained, and ever, and ever, the logarithmic tables to be corrected, for by the error of some calculator the vessel often splits upon a rock that should have reached a friendly pier—there is the untold fate of la perouse ; -universal science to be kept pace with, studying the lives of all the great discoverers and navigators, great adventurers and merchants, from hanno and the phænicians down to our day; in fine, account of stock to be taken from time to time, to know how you stand. it is a labour to task the faculties of a mansuch problems of profit and loss, of interest, of tare and tret, and gauging of all kinds in it, as demand a universal knowledge. i have thought that walden pond would be a good place for business, not solely on account of the railroad and the ice trade ; it offers advantages which it may not be good policy to divulge ; it is a good post and a good foundation. no neva marshes to be filled; though you must everywhere build on piles of your own driving. it is said that a flood-tide, with a westerly wind, and ice in the neva, would sweep st. petersburg from the face of the earth. as this business was to be entered into without the usual capital, it may not be easy to conjecture where those means; > 40 walden on. that will still be indispensable to every such undertaking, were to be obtained. as for clothing, to come at once to the practical part of the question, perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty, and a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than by true utility. let him who has work to do recollect that the object of clothing is, first, to retain the vital heat, and secondly, in this state of society, to cover nakedness, and he may judge how much of any necessary or important work may be accomplished without adding to his wardrobe. kings and queens who wear a suit but once, though made by some tailor or dressmaker to their majesties, cannot know the comfort of wearing a suit that fits. they are no better than wooden horses to hang the clean clothes every day our garments become more assimilated to ourselves, receiving the impress of the wearer's character, until we hesitate to lay them aside, without such delay and medical appliances and some such solemnity even as our bodies. no man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes : et i am sure there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience. but even if the rent is not mended, perhaps the worst vice betrayed is improvidence. i sometimes try my acquaintances by such tests as this--who could wear a patch, or two extra seams only, over the knee? most behaved as if they believed that their prospects for life would be ruined if they should do it. it would be easier for them to hobble to town with a broken leg than with a broken pantaloon. often if an accident happens to a gentleman's legs, they can be mended ; but if a similar accident happens to the legs of his pantaloons, there is no help for it; for he considers, not what is truly respectable, but what is respected. we know but few men, a great many coats and breeches. dress a scarecrow in your last shift, you standing shiftless by, who would not soonest salute the scarecrow? passing a cornfield the other day, close by a hat and a coat on a stake, i recognized the owner of the farm. he was only a little more weather-beaten than when i last saw him. i have heard of a dog that barked at every stranger who approached his master's premises with clothes on, but was easily quieted by a naked thief. it is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes. could you, in such a case, tell surely of any company of civilized men, which belonged to the most respected class ? when madame pfeiffer, in her adventurous travels round the world, from east to west, had got so near home economy 41 a a as asiatic russia, she says that she felt the necessity of wearing other than a travelling dress, when she went to meet the authorities, for she was now in a civilized country, where — people “ are judged of by their clothes.” even in our democratic new england towns the accidental possession of wealth, and its manifestation in dress and equipage alone, obtain for the possessor almost universal respect. but they who yield such respect, numerous as they are, are so far heathen, and need to have a missionary sent to them. beside, clothes introduced sewing, a kind of work which you may call endless ; a woman's dress, at least, is never done. a man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in ; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period. old shoes will serve a hero longer than they have served his valet,-if a hero ever has a valet,-bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make them do. only they who go to soirées and legislative halls must have new coats, coats to change as often as the man changes in them. but if my jacket and trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship god in, they will do ; will they not? who ever saw his old clothes—his old coat, actually worn out, resolved into its primitive elements, so that it was not a deed of charity to bestow it on some poor boy, by him perchance to be bestowed on some poorer still, or shall we say richer, who could do with less ? i say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. if there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? if you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. all men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged and dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. the loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. thus also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion ; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colours, and be inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind. we don garment after garment, as if we grew like exogenous plants by addition without. our outside and often thin and fanciful clothes are our epidermis or false skin, which partakes > 42 walden a a not of our life, and may be stripped off here and there without fatal injury ; our thicker garments, constantly worn, are our cellular integument, or cortex; but our shirts are our liber or true bark, which cannot be removed without girdling and so destroying the man. i believe that all races at some seasons wear something equivalent to the shirt. it is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly, that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety. while one thick garment is, for most purposes, as good as three thin ones, and cheap clothing can be obtained at prices really to suit customers ; while a thick coat can be bought for five dollars, which will last as many years, thick pantaloons for two dollars, cowhide boots for a dollar and a half a pair, a summer hat for a quarter of a dollar, and a winter cap for sixty-two and ahalf cents, or a better be made at home for a nominal cost, where is he so poor that, clad in such a suit, of his own earning, there will not be found wise men to do him reverence ? when i ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me gravely, “ they do not make them so now,” not emphasising the “ they” at all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the fates, and i find it difficult to get made what i want, simply because she cannot believe that i mean what i say, that i am so rash. when i hear this oracular sentence, i am for a moment absorbed in thought, emphasising to myself each word separately that i may come at the meaning of it, that i may find out by what degrees of consanguinity they are related to me, and what authority they may have in an affair which affects me so nearly ; and, finally, i am inclined to answer her with equal mystery, and without any more emphasis of the “ they -“ it is true, they did not make them so recently, but they do now." of what use this measuring of me if she does not measure my character, but only the breadth of my shoulders, as it were a peg to hang the coat on? we worship not the graces, nor the parcæ, but fashion. she spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. the head monkey at paris puts on a traveller's cap, and all the monkeys in america do the same. i sometimes despair of getting anything quite simple and honest done in this world by the help of men. they would have to be passed through a powerful press first, to squeeze their old notions out of them, so that they would not soon get upon their legs again, and then there would be some one in the company with a maggot in economy 43 4 his head, hatched from an egg deposited there nobody knows when, for not even fire kills these things, and you would have lost your labour. nevertheless, we will not forget that some egyptian wheat was handed down to us by a mummy. on the whole, i think that it cannot be maintained that dressing has in this or any other country risen to the dignity of an art. at present men make shift to wear what they can get. like shipwrecked sailors, they put on what they can find on the beach, and at a little distance, whether of space or time, laughs at each other's masquerade. every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. we are amused at beholding the costume of henry viii., or queen elizabeth, as much as if it was that of the king and queen of the cannibal islands. all costume off a man is pitiful or grotesque. it is only the serious eye peering from and the sincere life passed within it, which restrain laughter and consecrate the costume of any people. let harlequin be taken with a fit of the colic, and his trappings will have to serve that mood too. when the soldier is hit by a cannon-ball, rags are as becoming as the childish and savage taste of men and women for new patterns keep how many shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes that they may discover the particular figure which this generation requires to-day. the manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a particular colour, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf, though it frequently happens that, after the lapse of a season, the latter becomes the most fashionable. comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. it is not barbarous, merely because the printing is skin-deep and unalterable. i cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode byen which men may get clothing. the condition of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the english; and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as i have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that the corporations may be enriched. in the long run men hit only what they aim at. therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high. as for a shelter, i do not deny that this is now a necessary of life, though there are instances of men having done without it for long periods in colder countries than this. samuel laing 44 walden > a says that “the laplander in his skin dress, and in a skin bag which he puts over his head and shoulders, will sleep night after night on the snow-in a degree of cold which would extinguish the life of one exposed to it in any woollen clothing.” he had seen them asleep thus. yet he adds, “they are not hardier than other people.” but, probably, man did not live long on earth without discovering the convenience which there is in a house, the domestic comforts, which phrase may have originally signified the satisfactions of the house more than of the family; though these must be extremely partial and occasional in those climates where the house is associated in our thoughts with winter or the rainy season chiefly, and two-thirds of the year, except for a parasol, is unnecessary. in our climate, in the summer, it was formerly almost solely a covering at night. in the indian gazettes a wigwam was the symbol of a day's march, and a row of them cut or painted on the bark of a tree signified that so many times they had camped. man was not made so large-limbed and robust but that he must seek to narrow his world, and wall in a space such as fitted him. he was at first bare and out of doors; but though this was pleasant enough in serene and warm weather, by daylight, the rainy season and the winter, to say nothing of the torrid sun, would perhaps have nipped his race in the bud if he had not made haste to clothe himself with the shelter of a house. adam and eve, according to the fable, wore the bower before other clothes. man wanted a home, a place of warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections. we may imagine a time when, in the infancy of the human race, some enterprising mortal crept into a hollow in a rock for shelter. every child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay out-doors, even in wet and cold. it plays house as well as horse, having an instinct for it. who does not remember the interest with which when young he looked at shelving rocks, or any approach to a cave? it was the natural yearning of that portion of our most primitive ancestor which still survived in us. from the cave we have advanced to roofs of palm leaves, of bark and boughs, of linen woven and stretched, of grass and straw, of boards and shingles, of stones and tiles. at last, we know not what it is to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more senses than we think. from the hearth to the field is a great distance. it would be well perhaps if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from a economy 45 a ? for un a under a roof, or the saint dwell there so long. birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots. however, if one designs to construct a dwelling-house, it behoves him to exercise a little yankee shrewdness, lest after all he find himself in a workhouse, a labyrinth without a clew, a museum, an almshouse ... prison, or a splendid mausoleum instead. consider first how slight a shelter is absolutely necessary. i have seen penobscot indians, in this town, living in tents of thin cotton cloth, while the snow was nearly a foot deep around them, and i thought that they would be glad to have it deeper to keep out the wind. formerly, when how to get my living honestly, with freedom left for my proper pursuits, was a question which vexed me even more than it does now, fortunately i am become somewhat callous, i used to see a large box by the railroad, six feet long by three wide, in which the labourers locked up their tools at night, and it suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed might get such a one for a dollar, and, having bored a few auger holes in it, to admit the air at least, get into it when it rained and at night, and hook down the lid, and so have freedom in his love, and in his soul be free. this did not appear the worst, nor by any means a despicable alternative. you could sit up as late as you pleased, and, whenever you got up, go abroad without any landlord or house-lord dogging you for rent. many a man is harassed to death to pay the rent of a larger and more luxurious box who would not have frozen to death in such a box as this. i am far from jesting. economy is a subject which admits of being treated with levity, but it cannot so be disposed of. a comfortable house, for a rude and hardy race, that lived mostly out of doors, was once made here almost entirely of such materials as nature furnished ready to their hands. gcokin, who was superintendent of the indians subject to the massachusetts colony, writing in 1674, says, “ the best of their houses are covered very neatly, tight and warm, with barks of trees, slipped from their bodies at those seasons when the sap is up, and made into great flakes, with pressure of weighty timber, when they are green. the meaner sort are covered with mats which they make of a kind of bulrush, and are also indifferently tight and warm, but not so good as the former. .. some i have seen, sixty or a hundred feet long and thirty feet broad. ... i have often lodged in their wigwams, and found them as warm as the best english houses.” he adds, that they were commonly carpeted and lined within with well-wrought embroidered mats, and were furnished with various utensils. the 46 walden a indians had advanced so far as to regulate the effect of the wind by a mat suspended over the hole in the roof and moved by a string. such a lodge was in the first instance constructed in a day or two at most, and taken down and put up in a few hours ; and every family owned one, or its apartment in one. in the savage state every family owns a shelter as good as the best, and sufficient for its coarser and simpler wants ; but i think that i speak within bounds when i say that, though the birds of the air have their nests, and the foxes their holes, and the savages their wigwams, in modern civilized society not more than one-half the families own a shelter. in the large towns and cities, where civilization especially prevails, the number of those who own a shelter is a very small fraction of the whole. the rest pay an annual tax for this outside garment of all, become indispensable summer and winter, which would buy a village of indian wigwams, but now helps to keep them poor as long as they live. i do not mean to insist here on the disadvantage of hiring compared with owning, but it is evident that the savage owns his shelter because it costs so little, while the civilized man hires his commonly because he cannot afford to own it; nor can he, in the long run, any better afford to hire. but, answers one, by merely paying this tax the poor civilized man secures an abode which is a palace compared with the savage’s. an annual rent of from twentyfive to a hundred dollars—these are the country rates-entitles him to the benefit of the improvements of centuries, spacious apartments, clean paint and paper, rumford fire-place, back plastering, venetian blinds, copper pump, spring lock, a commodious cellar, and many other things. but how happens it that he who is said to enjoy these things is so commonly a poor civilized man, while the savage, who has them not, is rich as a savage ? if it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man,-and i think that it is, though only the wise improve their advantages,-it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is the amount of what i will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. an average house in this neighbourhood costs perhaps eight hundred dollars, and to lay up this sum will take from ten to fifteen years of the labourer's life, even if he is not encumbered with a family—estimating the pecuniary value of every man's labour at one dollar a-day, for if some receive more, others receive less—so that he must have spent more than half his life commonly before his wigwam will be earned. if we suppose him to pay a economy 47 66 rent instead, this is but a doubtful choice of evils. would the savage have been wise to exchange his wigwam for a palace on these terms ? it may be guessed that i reduce almost the whole advantage of holding this superfluous property as a fund in store against the future, so far as the individual is concerned, mainly to the defraying of funeral expenses. but perhaps a man is not required to bury himself. nevertheless this points to an important distinction between the civilized man and the savage ; and, no doubt, they have designs on us for our benefit, in making the life of a civilized people an institution, in which the life of the individual is to a great extent absorbed, in order to preserve and perfect that of the race. but i wish to show at what a sacrifice this advantage is at present obtained, and to suggest that we may possibly so live as to secure all the advantage without suffering any of the disadvantage. what mean ye by saying that the poor ye have always with you, or that the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge ? as i live, saith the lord god, ye shall not have occasion any more to use this proverb in israel.” behold, all souls are mine ; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine : the soul that sinneth it shall die." when i consider my neighbours, the farmers of concord, who are at least as well off as the other classes, i find that for the most part they have been toiling twenty, thirty, or forty years, that they may become the real owners of their farms, which commonly they have inherited with encumbrances, or else bought with hired money,—and we may regard one-third of that toil as the cost of their houses,—but commonly they have not paid for them yet. it is true, the encumbrances sometimes outweigh the value of the farm, so that the farm itself becomes one great encumbrance, and still a man is found to inherit it, being well acquainted with it, as he says. on applying to the assessors, i am surprised to learn that they cannot at once name a dozen in the town who own their farms free and clear. if you would know the history of these homesteads, inquire at the bank where they are mortgaged. the man who has actually paid for his farm with labour on it is so rare that every neighbour can point to him. i doubt if there are three such men in concord. what has been said of the merchants, that a very large majority, even ninety-seven in a hundred, are sure to fail, is equally true of the farmers. with regard to the merchants, however, one of them says pertinently that a great part of their failures are not genuine pecuniary failures, but mere 48 walden a ) failures to fulfil their engagements, because it is inconvenientthat is, it is the moral character that breaks down. but this puts an infinitely worse face on the matter, and suggests, beside, that probably not even the other three succeed in saving their souls, but are perchance bankrupt in a worse sense than they who fail honestly. bankruptcy and repudiation are the spring-boards from which much of our civilization vaults and turns its somersets, but the savage stands on the unelastic plank of famine. yet the middlesex cattle show goes off here with éclat annually, as if all the joints of the agricultural machine were suent. the farmer is endeavouring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a formula more complicated than the problem itself. to get his shoe-strings he speculates in herds of cattle. with consummate skill he has set his trap with a hair-spring to catch comfort and independence, and then, as he turned away, got his own leg into it. this is the reason he is poor; and for a similar reason we are all poor in respect to a thousand savage comforts, though surrounded by luxuries. as chapman sings,“ the false society of men--for earthly greatness all heavenly comforts rarefies to air.” and when the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him. as i understand it, that was a valid objection urged by momus against the house which minerva made, that she had not made it movable, by which means a bad neighbourhood might be avoided ”; and it may still be urged, for our houses are such unwieldy property, that we are often imprisoned rather han housed in them; and the bad neighbourhood to be avoided is our own scurvy selves. i know one or two families, at least, in this town, who, for nearly a generation, have been wishing to sell their houses in the outskirts and move into the village, but have not been able to accomplish it, and only death will set them free. granted that the majority are able at last either to own or hire the modern house with all its improvements. while civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. it has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings. and if the civilized man's pursuits are no worthier than the savage's, if he is employed the greater part of his life in obtaining gross necessaries and comforts merely, why should he have a better dwelling than the former. but how do the poor minority fare? perhaps it will be found, that just in proportion as some have been placed in outward 66 economy 49 circumstances above the savage, others have been degraded below him. the luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of another. on the side is the palace, on the other are the almshouse and "silent poor.” the myriads who built the pyramids to be the tombs of the pharaohs were fed on garlic, and it may be were not decently buried themselves. the mason who finishes the cornice of the palace returns at night perchance to a hut not so good as a wigwam. it is a mistake to suppose that, in a country where the usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition of a very large body of the inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages. i refer to the degraded poor, not now to the degraded rich. to know this i should not need to i look farther than to the shanties which everywhere border our railroads, that last improvement in civilization ; where i see in my daily walks human beings living in sties, and all winter with an open door, for the sake of light, without any visible, often i maginable, wood pile, and the forms of both old and young are permanently contracted by the long habit of shrinking from cold and misery, and the development of all their limbs and faculties is checked. it certainly is fair to look at that class by whose labour the works which distinguish this generation are accomplished. such too, to a greater or less extent, is the condition of the operatives of every denomination in england, which is the great workhouse of the world. or i could refer you to ireland, which is marked as one of the white or enlightened spots on the map. contrast the physical condition of the irish with that of the north american indian, or the south sea islander, or any other savage race before it was degraded by contact with the civilized man. yet i have no doubt that that people's rulers are as wise as the average of civilized rulers. their condition only proves what squalidness may consist with civilization. i hardly need refer now to the labourers in our southern states who produce the staple exports of this country, and are themselves a staple production of the south. but to confine myself to those who are said to be in moderate circumstances. most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbours have. as if one were to wear any sort of coat which the tailor might cut out for him, or, gradually leaving off palm-leaf hat or cap of woodchuck skin, complain of hard times because he could not afford to buy him a crown! it is possible to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious than we have, which yet all d a 50 walden would admit that man could not afford to pay for: shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less ? shall the respectable citizen thus gravely teach, by precept and example, the necessity of the young man's providing a certain number of superfluous glowshoes, and umbrellas, and empty guest chambers for empty guests, before he dies? why should not our furniture be as simple as the arab's or the indian's ? when i think of the benefactors of the race, whom we have apotheosized as messengers from heaven, bearers of divine gifts to man, i do not see in my mind any retinue at their heels, any car-load of fashionable furniture. or what if i were to allow-would it not be a singular allowance ?—that our furniture should be more complex than the arab’s, in proportion as we are morally and intellectually his superiors ! at the present our houses are cluttered with it, and a good housewife would soon sweep out the greater part into the dust-hole, and not leave her morning's work undone. morning work! by the blushes of aurora and the music of memnon, what should be man's morning work in this world ? i had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but i was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and i threw them out the window in disgust. how, then, could i have a furnished house? i would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where màn has broken ground. it is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which the herd so diligently follow. the traveller who stops at the best houses, so called, soon discovers this, for the publicans presume him to be a sardanapalus, and if he resigned himself to their tender mercies he would soon be completely emasculated. i think that in the railroad car we are inclined to spend more on luxury than on safety and convenience, and it threatens without attaining these to become no better than a modern drawing-room, with its divans, and ottomans, and sunshades, and a hundred other oriental things, which we are taking west with us, invented for the ladies of the harem, and the effeminate natives of the celestial empire, which jonathan should be ashamed to know the names of. i would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than to be crowded on à velvet cushion. i would rather ride on earth in an ox-cart with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way. the very simplicity and nakedness of man's life in the primitive ages imply this advantage at least, that they left him still but a una > a economy 51 sojourner in nature. when he was refreshed with food and sleep he contemplated his journey again. he dwelt, as it were, in a tent in this world, and was either threading the valleys; or crossing the plains, or climbing the mountain tops. but lo! men have become the tools of their tools. the man who independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry is become a farmer; and he who stood under a tree for shelter, a housekeeper. we now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven. we have adopted christianity merely as an improved method of agri-culture. we have built for this . world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb. the best works of art are the expression of man's struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten. there is actually no place in this village for a work of fine art, if any had come down to us, to stand, for our lives, our houses and streets, furnish no proper pedestal for it. there is not a nail to hang a picture on, nor a shelf to receive the bust of a hero or a saint. when i consider how our houses are built and paid for, or not paid for, and their internal economy managed and sustained, i wonder that the floor does not give way under the visitor while he is admiring the gewgaws upon the mantel-piece, and let him through into the cellar, to some solid and honest, though earthy foundation. i cannot but perceive that this socalled rich and refined life is a thing jumped at, and i do not get on in the enjoyment of the fine arts which adorn it, my attention being wholly occupied with the jump; for i remember that the greatest genuine leap, due to human muscles alone, on record, is that of certain wandering arabs, who are said to have cleared twenty-five feet on level ground. without factitious support, man is sure to come to earth again beyond that distance. the first question which i am tempted to put to the proprietor of such great impropriety is, who bolsters you? are you one of the ninety-seven who fail, or the three who succeed? answer me these questions, and then perhaps i may look at your baubles and find them ornamental. the cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful. before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must be stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful living be laid for a foundation : now, a taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors, where there is no house and no housekeeper. old johnston, in his wonder-working providence, speaking of 52 walden the first settlers of this town, with whom he was contemporary, tells us that “ they burrow themselves in the earth for their first shelter under some hillside, and, casting the soil aloft upon timber, they make a smoky fire against the earth, at the highest side." they did not “provide them houses,” says he, “ till the earth, by the lord's blessing, brought forth bread to feed them,” and the first year's crop was so light that “they were forced to cut their bread very thin for a long season.” the secretary of the province of new netherland, writing in dutch, in 1650, for the information of those who wished to take up land there, states more particularly, that“ those in new netherland, and especially in new england, who have no means to build farmhouses at first according to their wishes, dig a square pit in the ground, cellar fashion, six or seven feet deep, as long and as broad as they think proper, case the earth inside with wood all round the wall, and line the wood with the bark of trees or something else to prevent the caving-in of the earth ; floor this cellar with plank, and wainscot it overhead for a ceiling, raise a roof of spars clear up, and cover the spars with bark or green sods, so that they can live dry and warm in these houses with their entire families for two, three, and four years, it being understood that partitions are run through those cellars which are adapted to the size of the family. the wealthy and principal men in new england, in the beginning of the colonies, commenced their first dwelling-houses in this fashion, for two reasons : firstly, in order not to waste time in building, and not to want food the next season ; secondly, in order not to discourage poor labouring people whom they brought over in numbers from fatherland. in the course of three or four years, when the country became adapted to agriculture, they built themselves handsome houses, spending on them several thousands." in this course which our ancestors took there was a show of prudence at least, as if their principle were to satisfy the more pressing wants first. but are the more pressing wants satisfied now? when i think of acquiring for myself one of our luxurious dwellings, i am deterred, for, so to speak, the country is not yet adapted to human culture, and we are still forced to cut our spiritual bread far thinner than our forefathers did their wheaten. not that all architectural ornament is to be neglected even in the rudest periods ; but let our houses first be lined with beauty, where they come in contact with our lives, like the tenement of the shell-fish, and not "overlaid with it. but, alas ! i have been inside one or two of them, and know what they are lined with. economy 53 though we are not so degenerate but that we might possibly live in a cave or a wigwam, or wear skins to-day, it certainly is better to accept the advantages, though so dearly bought, which the invention and industry of mankind offer. in such a neighbourhood as this, boards and shingles, lime and bricks, are cheaper and more easily obtained than suitable caves, or whole bark in sufficient quantities, or even well-tempered clay or flat stones. i speak understandingly on this subject, for i have made myself acquainted with it both theoretically and practically. with a little more wit, we might use these materials so as to become richer than the richest now are, and make our civilization a blessing. the civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage. but to make haste to my own experiment. a near the end of march, 1845, i borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by walden pond, nearest to where i intended to build my house, and began to cut down some tall arrowy white pines, still in their youth, for timber. it is difficult to begin without borrowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your fellow-men to have an interest in your enterprise. the owner of the axe, as he released his hold on it, said that it was the apple of his eye ; but i returned it sharper than i received it. it was a pleasant hillside where i worked, covered with pine woods, through which i looked out on the pond, and a small open field in the woods where pines and hickories were springing up. the ice in the pond was not yet dissolved, though there were some open spaces, and it was all dark-coloured and saturated with water. there were some slight flurries of snow during the day that i worked there ; but for the most part when i came out on to the railroad, on my way home, its yellow sand heap stretched away gleaming in the hazy atmosphere, and the rails shone in the spring sun, and i heard the lark and pewee and other birds already come to commence another year with us. they were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man's discontent was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid began to stretch itself. one day, when my axe had come off and i had cut a green hickory for a wedge, driving it with a stone, and had placed the whole to soak in a pond hole in order to swell the wood, i saw a striped snake run into the water, and he lay on the bottom, apparently without inconvenience, as long as i stayed there, or more than a quarter of an hour; perhaps because he had not yet fairly come out of the torpid state. it appeared to me that for a like reason men remain in their present a 54 walden low and primitive condition ; but if they should feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they would of necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life. i had previously seen the snakes in frosty mornings in my path with portions of their bodies still numb and inflexible, waiting for the sun to thaw them. on april 1 it rained and melted the ice, and in the early part of the day, which was very foggy, i heard a stray goose groping about over the pond and cackling as if lost, or like the spirit of the fog. so i went on for some days cutting and hewing timber, and also studs and rafters, all with my narrow axe, not having many communicable or scholar-like thoughts, singing to myself, “men say they know many things ; but lo! they have taken wingsthe arts and sciences, and a thousand appliances ; the wind that blows is all that anybody knows.” i hewed the main timbers six inches square, most of the studs on two sides only, and the rafters and floor timbers on one side, leaving the rest of the bark on, so that they were just as straight and much stronger than sawed ones. each stick was carefully mortised or tenoned by its stump, for i had borrowed other tools by this time. my days in the woods were not very long ones; yet i usually carried my dinner of bread and butter, and read the newspaper in which it was wrapped, at noon, sitting amid the green pine boughs which i had cut off, and, to my bread was imparted some of their fragrance, for my hands were covered with a thick coat of pitch. before i had done i was more the friend than the foe of the pine tree, though i had cut down some of them, having become better acquainted with it. sometimes a rambler in the wood was attracted by the sound of my axe, and we chatted pleasantly over the chips which i made. by the middle of april, for i made no haste in my work, but rather made the most of it, my house was framed and ready for the raising. i had already bought the shanty of james collins, an irishman, who worked on the fitchburg railroad, for boards. james collins' shanty was considered an uncommonly fine one. when i called to see it he was not at home. i walked about the outside, at first unobserved from within, the window was so deep and high. it was of small dimensions, with a peaked cottage roof, and not much else to be seen, the dirt being raised five feet all round as if it were a compost heap. the roof was the soundest economy 55 part, though a good deal warped and made brittle by the sun. door-sill there was none, but a perennial passage for the hens under the door board. mrs. c. came to the door and asked me to view it from the inside. the hens were driven in by my approach. it was dark, and had a dirt floor for the most part, dank, clammy, and aguish, only here and there a board which would not bear removal. she lighted a lamp to show me the inside of the roof and the walls, and also that the board floor extended under the bed, warning me not to step into the cellar, a sort of dust-hole two feet deep. in her own words, they were good boards overhead, good boards all around, and a good window,"—of two whole squares originally, only the cat had passed out that way lately. there was a stove, a bed, and a place to sit, an infant in the house where it was born, a silk parasol, gilt-framed looking-glass, and a patent new coffee-mill nailed to an oak sapling, all told. the bargain was soon concluded, for james had in the meanwhile returned. i to pay four dollars and twenty-five cents to-night, he to vacate at five tomorrow morning, selling to nobody else meanwhile : i to take possession at six. it were well, he said, to be there early, and , anticipate certain indistinct but wholly unjust claims on the score of ground-rent and fuel. this he assured me was the only encumbrance. at six i passed him and his family on the road. . one large bundle held their all,-bed, coffee-mill, looking-glass, hens,—all but the cat; she took to the woods and became a wild cat, and, as i learned afterward, trod in a trap set for woodchucks, and so became a dead cat at last. i took down this dwelling the same morning, drawing the nails, and removed it to the pond-side by small cartloads, spreading the boards on the grass there to bleach and warp back again in the sun. one early thrush gave me a note or two as i drove along the woodland path. i was informed treacherously by a young patrick that neighbour seeley, an irishman, in the intervals of the carting, transferred the still tolerable, straight, and drivable nails, staples, and spikes to his pocket, and then stood when i came back to pass the time of day, and look freshly up, unconcerned, with spring thoughts, at the devastation; there being a dearth of work, as he said. he was there to represent spectatordom, and help make this seemingly insignificant event one with the removal of the gods of troy. i dug my cellar in the side of a hill sloping to the south, where a woodchuck had formerly dug his burrow, down through sumach and blackberry roots, and the lowest stain of vegetation, six feet a a 56 walden square by seven deep, to a fine sand where potatoes would not freeze in any winter. the sides were left shelving, and not stoned ; but the sun having never shone on them, the sand still keeps its place. it was but two hours' work. i took particular pleasure in this breaking of ground, for in almost all latitudes men dig into the earth for an equable temperature. under the most splendid house in the city is still to be found the cellar where they store their roots as of old, and long after the superstructure has disappeared posterity remark its dent in the earth. the house is still but a sort of porch at the entrance of a burrow. at length, in the beginning of may, with the help of some of my acquaintances, rather to improve so good an occasion for neighbourliness than from any necessity, i set up the frame of my house. no man was ever more honoured in the character of his raisers than i. they are destined, i trust, to assist at the raising of loftier structures one day. i began to occupy my house on july 4, as soon as it wa boarded and roofed, for the boards were carefully feather-edged and lapped, so that it was perfectly impervious to rain, but before boarding i laid the foundation of a chimney at one end, bringing two cartloads of stones up the hill from the pond in my arms. i built the chimney after my hoeing in the falī, before a fire became necessary for warmth, doing my cooking in the meanwhile out of doors on the ground, early in the morning ; which mode i still think is in some respects more convenient and agreeable than the usual one. when it stormed before my bread was baked, i fixed a few boards over the fire; and sat under them to watch my loaf, and passed some pleasant hours in that way. in those days, when my hands were much employed, i read but little, but the least scraps of paper which lay on the ground, my holder, or tablecloth, afforded me as much entertainment; in fact, answered the same purpose as the iliad. it would be worth the while to build still more deliberately than i did, considering, for instance, what foundation a door, a window, a cellar, a garret, have in the nature of man, and pers chance never raising any superstructure until we found a better reason for it than our temporal necessities even. there is some of the same fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's building its own nest. who knows but if men con structed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds univera economy 57 sally sing when they are so engaged? but alas ! we do like cowsbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes. shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter? what does architecture amount to in the experience of the mass of men ? i never in all my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and natural an occupation as building his house. we belong to the community. it is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man: it is as much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer. where is this division of labour to end ? and what object does it finally serve ? no doubt another may also think for me ; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself. true, there are architects so-called in this country, and i have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. all very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism. a sentimental reformer in architecture, he began at the cornice, not at the foundation. it was only how to put a core of truth within the ornaments, that every sugar plum in fact might have an almond or caraway seed in it,—though i hold that almonds are most wholesome without the sugar, and not how the inhabitant, the indweller, might build truly within and without, and let the ornaments take care of themselves. what reasonable man ever supposed that ornaments were something outward and in the skin merely,—that the tortoise got his spotted shell, or the shell-fish its mother-of-pearl tints, by such a contract as the inhabitants of broadway their trinity church? but a man has no more to do with the style of architecture of his house than a tortoise with that of its shell : nor need the soldier be so idle as to try to paint the precise colour of his virtue on his standard. the enemy will find it out. he may turn pale when the trial comes. this man seemed to me to lean over the cornice, and timidly whisper his half truth to the rude occupants who really knew it better than he. what of architectural beauty i now see, i know has gradually grown from within outward, out of the necessities and character of the indweller, who is the only builder-out of some unconscious truthfulness, and nobleness, without ever a thought for the appearance ; and whatever additional beauty of this kind is destined to be produced will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of life. the most inter58 walden > 66 esting dwellings in this country, as the painter knows, are the most unpretending, humble log huts and cottages of the poor commonly; it is the life of the inhabitants whose shells they are, and not any peculiarity in these surfaces merely, which makes them picturesque ; and equally interesting will be the citizen's suburban box, when his life shall be as simple and as agreeable to the imagination, and there is as little straining after effect in the style of his dwelling. a great proportion of architectural ornaments are literally hollow, and a september gale would strip them off, like borrowed plumes, without injury to the substantials. they can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar. what if an equal ado were made about the ornaments of style in literature, and the architects of our bibles spent as much time about their cornices as the architects of our churches do ? so are made the belles-lettres and the beaux-arts and their professors. much it concerns a man, forsooth, how a few sticks are slanted over him or under him, and what colours are daubed upon his box. it would signify somewhat, if, in any earnest nse, he slanted them and daubed it; but the spirit having departed out of the tenant, it is of a piece with constructing his own coffin,—the architecture of the grave and “ carpenter” is but another name for coffin-maker." one man says, in his despair or indifference to life, take up a handful of the earth at your feet, and paint your house that colour. is he thinking of his last and narrow house ? toss up a copper for it as well . what an abundance of leisure he must have ! you take up a handful of dirt ? better paint your house your own complexion ; let it turn pale or blush for you. an enterprise to improve the style of cottage architecture! when you have got my ornaments ready i will wear them. before winter i built a chimney, and shingled the sides of my house, which were already impervious to rain, with imperfect and sappy shingles made of the first slice of the log, whose edges i was obliged to straighten with a plane. i have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by fifteen long, eight-feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a large window on each side, two trap-doors, one door at the end, and a brick fire-place opposite. the exact cost of my house, paying the usual price for such materials as i used, but not counting the work, all of which was done by myself, was as follows : and i give the details because very few are able to tell exactly what their houses cost, and fewer still, if any, the separate cost of the various materials which compose them :why do a economy 59 . . . boards $8 03 mostly shanty boards. refuse shingles for roof and sides 4 00 laths 1 25 two second-hand windows with glass 2 43 one thousand old bricks. 4 00 two casks of lime . 2 40 that was high. hair 0 31 more than i needed. mantle-tree iron 0 15 nails 3 90 hinges and screws 0 14 latch 0 10 chalk o 01 transportation 1 40 i carried a good part on my back. . . . . a in all . $28 12} these are all the materials excepting the timber, stones, and sand, which i claimed by squatter's right. i have also a small wood-shed adjoining, made chiefly of the stuff which was left after building the house. i intend to build me a house which will surpass any on the main street in concord in grandeur and luxury, as soon as it pleases me as much and will cost me no more than my present one. i thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter can obtain one for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent which he now pays annually. if i seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that i brag for humanity rather than for myself, and my shortcomings and inconsistencies do not affect the truth of my statement. notwithstanding much cant and hypocrisy,chaff which i find it difficult to separate from my wheat, but for which i am as sorry as any man,-i will breathe freely and stretch myself in this respect, it is such a relief to both the moral and physical system; and i am resolved that i will not through humility become the devil's attorney. i will endeavour to speak a good word for the truth. at cambridge college the mere rent of a student's room, which is only a little larger than my own, is thirty dollars each year, though the corporation had the advantage of building thirty-two side by side and under one roof, and the occupant suffers the inconvenience of many and noisy neighbours, and perhaps a residence in the fourth story. i cannot but think that if we had more true wisdom in these respects, not only less education would be needed, because, forsooth, more would already have been acquired, but the pecuniary expense of getting an education would in a great measure vanish. those conveniences which the student requires at cambridge or elsewhere cost him or somebody else ten times a 60 walden a 66 > as great a sacrifice of life as they would with proper management on both sides. those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made. the mode of founding a college is, commonly, to get up a subscription of dollars and cents, and then following blindly the principles of a division of labour to its extreme, –a principle which should never be followed but with circumspection,--to call in å contractor, who makes this a subject of speculation, and he employs irishmen or other operatives actually to lay the foundations, while the students that are to be are said to be fitting themselves for it; and for these oversights successive generations have to pay. i think that it would be better than this, for the students, or those who desire to be benefited by it, even to lay the foundation themselves. the student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labour necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful. but," says one, you do not mean that the students should go to work with their hands instead of their heads ? ” i do not mean that exactly, but i mean something which he might think a good deal like that; i mean that they should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. how could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics. if i wished a boy to know something about the arts and sciences, for instance, i would not pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the neighbourhood of some professor, where anything is professed and practised but the art of life-to survey the world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his natural eye; to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is made, or mechanics, and not learn how it is earned ; to discover new satellites to neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to what vagabond he is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the monsters that swarm all around him, while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar. which would have advanced the most at the end of a month-the boy who had made his own jack-knife from the ore which he had dug, and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this,-or the economy 61 2 boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the institute in the meanwhile, and had received a rogers' penknife from his father? which would be most likely to cut his fingers ? to my astonishment i was informed on leaving college that i had studied navigation !—why, if i had taken one turn down the harbour i should have known more about it. even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. the consequence is, that while he is reading adam smith, ricardo, and say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably. as with our colleges, so with a hundred "modern improvements”: there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. the devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. they are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at—as railroads lead to boston or new york. we are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from maine to texas; but maine and texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. as if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. we are eager to tunnel under the atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new ; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping american ear will be that the princess adelaide has the whooping cough. after all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages : he is not an evangelist, nor does he come round eating locusts and wild honey. i doubt if flying childers ever carried a peck of corn to the mill. one says to me, i wonder that you do not lay up money ; you love to travel ; you might take the cars and go to fitchburg to-day and see the country.' but i am wiser than that. i have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes_a-foot. i say to my friend, suppose we try who will get there first. the distance is thirty miles; the fare ninety cents. that is almost a day's wages. i remember when wages were sixty cents a day for labourers on this very road. well, i start now on foot, and get there before night; i have travelled at that rate by the week 62 walden > together. you will in the meanwhile have earned your fare, and arrive there some time to-morrow, or possibly this evening, if you are lucky enough to get a job in season. instead of going to fitchburg, you will be working here the greater part of the day. and so, if the railroad reached round the world, i think that i should keep ahead of you; and as for seeing the country and getting experience of that kind, i should have to cut your acquaintance altogether. such is the universal law, which no man can ever outwit, and with regard to the railroad even we may say it is as broad as it is long. to make a railroad round the world available to all mankind is equivalent to grading the whole surface of the planet. men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depôt, and the conductor shouts all aboard !” when the smoke is blown away and the vapour condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over,—and it will be called, and will be, “a melancholy accident." no doubt they can ride at last who shall have earned their fare, that is, if they survive so long, but they will probably have lost their elasticity and desire to travel by that time. this spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the englishman who went to india to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to england and live the life of a poet. he should have gone up garret at once. what !” exclaim a million irishmen, starting up from all the shanties in the land, “is not this railroad which we have built a good thing ?” yes, i answer, comparatively good—that is, you might have done worse ; but i wish, as you are brothers of mine, that you could have spent your time better than digging in this dirt. a > before i finished my house, wishing to earn ten or twelve dollars by some honest and agreeable method, in order to meet my usual expenses, i planted about two acres and a half of light and sandy soil near it chiefly with beans, but also a small part with potatoes, corn, peas, and turnips. the whole lot contains eleven acres, mostly growing up to pines and hickories, and was sold the preceding season for eight dollars and eight cents an one farmer said that it was good for nothing but to raise cheeping squirrels on.” i put no manure whatever on this acre. 1 economy 63 land, not being the owner, but merely a squatter, and not expecting to cultivate so much again, and i did not quite hoe it all once. i got out several cords of stumps in ploughing, which supplied me with fuel for a long time, and left small circles of virgin mould, easily distinguishable through the summer by the greater luxuriance of the beans there. the dead and for the most part unmerchantable wood behind my house, and the driftwood from the pond, have supplied the remainder of my fuel. i was obliged to hire a team and a man for the ploughing, though i held the plough myself. my farm outgoes for the first season were, for implements, seed, work, etc., $14 741. the seed corn was given me. this never costs anything to speak of unless you plant more than enough. i got twelve bushels of beans, and eighteen bushels of potatoes, beside some peas and sweet corn. the yellow corn and turnips were too late to come to anything. my whole income from the farm was $23 44. deducting the outgoes 14 721 there are left $8 71), . a that year. besides produce consumed and on hand at the time this estimate was made of the value of $4 50—the amount on hand much more than balancing a little grass which i did not raise. all things considered, that is, considering the importance of a man's soul and of to-day, notwithstanding the short time occupied by my experiment, nay, partly even because of its transient character, i believe that that was doing better than any farmer in concord did the next year i did better still, for i spaded up all the land which i required, about a third of an acre, and i learned from the experience of both years, not being in the least awed by many celebrated works on husbandry, arthur young among the rest, that if one would live simply and eat only the crop which he raised, and raise no more than he ate, and not exchange it for an insufficient quantity of more luxurious and expensive things, he would need to cultivate only a few rods of ground, and that it would be cheaper to spade up that than to use oxen to plough it, and to select a fresh spot from time to time than to manure the old, and he could do all his necessary farm work, as it were, with his left hand at odd hours in the summer; and thus he would not be tied to an ox, or horse, or cow, or pig, as at present. i desire to speak impartially on this point, and as one not interested in 64 walden a a the success or failure of the present economical and social arrangements. lwas more independent than any farmer in concord, for i was not anchored to a house or farm, but could follow the bent of my genius, which is ich is a very crooked one, every moment. besides being better off than they already, if my house had been burned or my crops had failed, i should have been nearly as well off as before. i am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men, the former are so much the freer. men and oxen exchange work; but if we consider necessary work only, the oxen will be seen to have greatly the advantage, their farm is so much larger. man does some of his part of the exchange work in his six weeks of haying, and it is no boy's play. certainly no nation that lived simply in all respects that is, no nation of philosophers—would commit so great a blunder as to use the labour of animals. true, there never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am i certain it is desirable that there should be. however, i should never have broken a horse or bull, and taken him to board for any work he might do for me, for. fear i should become a horseman or a herdsman merely; and if society seems to be the gainer by so doing, are we certain that what is one man’s gain is not another's loss, and that the stable-boy has equal cause with his master to be satisfied ? granted that some public works would not have been constructed without this aid, and let man share the glory of such with the ox and horse ; does it follow that he could not have accomplished works yet more worthy of himself in that case? when men begin to do, not merely unnecessary or artistic, but luxurious and idle work, with their assistanee, it is inevitable that a few do all the exchange work with the oxen, or, in other words, become the slaves of the strongest. man thus not only works for the anmial within him, but, for a symbol of this, he works for the animal without him. though we have many substantial houses of brick or stone, the prosperity of the farmer is still measured by the degree to which the barn overshadows the house. this town is said to have the largest houses for oxen, cows, and horses hereabouts, and it is not behindhand in its public buildings; but there are very few halls for free worship or free speech in this country. it should not be by their architecture, but why not even by their power of abstract thought, that nations should seek to commemorate themselves? how much more admirable the bhagvat-geeta than all the ruins of the east! towers and temples are the luxury of princes, > economy 65 1 a simple and independent mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince. genius is not a retainer to any emperor, nor is its material silver, or gold, or marble, except to a trifling extent. to what end, pray, is so much stone hammered ? in arcadia, when i was there, i did not see any hammering stone. nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. what if equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners ? one piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon. i love better to see stones in place. the grandeur of thebes was a vulgar grandeur. more sensible is a rod of stone-wall that bounds an honest man's field than a hundred-gated thebes that has wandered farther from the true end of life. the religion and civilization which are barbaric and heathenish build splendid temples, but what you might call christianity does not. most of the stones a nation hammers goes toward its tomb only. it buries itself alive. as for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the nile, and then given his body to the dogs. i might possibly invent some excuse for them and him, but i have no time for it. as for the religion and love of art of the builders, it is much the same all the world over, whether the building be an egyptian temple or the united states bank. it costs more than it comes to. the mainspring is vanity, assisted by the love of garlic and bread and butter. mr. balcom, a promising young architect, designs it on the back of his vitruvius, with hard pencil and ruler, and the job is let out to dobson & sons, stonecutters. when the thirty centuries begin to look down on it, mankind begins to look as for your high towers and monuments there was a crazy fellow once in this town who undertook to dig through to china, and he got so far that, as he said, he heard the chinese pots and kettles rattle ; but i think that i shall not go out of my way to admire the hole which he made. many are concerned about the monuments of the west and the east, to know who built them. for my part, i should like to know who in those days did not build them, -who were above_such trifling. but to proceed with my statistics. by surveying, carpentry, and day-labour of various other kinds in the village in the meanwhile—for i have as many trades as fingers—i had earned $13 34. the expense of food for eight up at it. e 66 walden months-namely, from july 4 to march 1, the time when these estimates were made, though i lived there more than two years --not counting potatoes, a little green corn, and some peas, which i had raised, nor considering the value of what was on hand at the last date, wasrice molasses rye meal indian meal pork flour sugar lard apples dried apple sweet potatoes one pumpkin one water-melon salt $1 73} 1 73 cheapest form of the saccharine. 1 041 0 991 cheaper than rye. 0 22 0 88 costs more than indian meal, both money and trouble. 0 80 0 65 0 25 0 22 0 10 0 6 0 2 0 3 all experiments, which failed. were yes, i did eat $8 74, all told; but i should not thus unblushingly publish my guilt, if i did not know that most of my readers equally guilty with myself, and that their deeds would look no better in print. the next year i sometimes caught a mess of fish for my dinner, and once i went so far as to slaughter a woodchuck which ravaged my bean-field, -effect his transmigration, as a tartar would say,--and devour him, partly for experiment's sake; but though it afforded me a momentary enjoyment notwithstanding a musky flavour, i saw that the longest use would not make that a good practice, however it might seem to have your woodchucks ready dressed by the village butcher. clothing and some incidental expenses within the same dates, though little can be inferred from this item, amounted to > $8 401 2 00 oil and some household utensils so that all the pecuniary outgoes, excepting for washing and mending, which for the most part were done out of the house, and their bills have not yet been received,—and these are all and more than all the ways by which money necessarily goes out in this part of the world,---were economy 67 house farm, one year food, eight months clothing, etc., eight months oil, etc., eight months $28 124 14 72 8 74 8 401 2 00 in all $61 99 i address myself now to those of my readers who have a living to get. and to meet this i have for farm produce sold $23 44 13 34 earned by day-labour in all . $36 78 and salt, which, subtracted from the sum of the outgoes, leaves a balance of $25 214 on the one side,—this being very nearly the means with which i started, and the measure of expenses to be incurred, -and, on the other, beside the leisure and independence and health thus secured, a comfortable house for me as long as i choose to occupy it. these statistics, however accidental and therefore uninstructive they may appear, as they have a certain completeness, have a certain value also. nothing was given me of which i have not rendered some account. it appears from the above estimate, that my food alone cost me in money about twenty-seven cents a-week. it was, for nearly two years after this, rye and indian meal without yeast, potatoes, rice, a very little salt pork, molasses, and my drink water. it was fit that i should live on rice, mainly, who loved so well the philosophy of india. to meet the objections of some inveterate cavillers, i may as well state, that if i dined out occasionally, as i always had done, and i trust shall have opportunities to do again, it was frequently to the detriment of my domestic arrangements. but the dining out, being, as i have stated, a constant element, does not in the least affect a comparative statement like this. i learned from my two years' experience that it would cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one's necessary food even in this latitude ; that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength. i have made a satisfactory dinner, satisfactory on several accounts, simply off a dish of purslane (portulaca oleracea) which i gathered in my corn-field, boiled and salted. i give the latin on account of the savouriness of the trivial name. and pray what more can a reasonable man 68 walden > a desire, in peaceful times, in ordinary noons, than a sufficient number of ears of green sweet-corn boiled, with the addition of salt ? even the little variety which i used was a yielding to the demands of appetite, and not of health. yet men have come to such a pass that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want of luxuries ; and i know a good woman who thinks that her son lost his life because he took to drinking water only. the reader will perceive that i am treating the subject rather from an economic than a dietetic point of view, and he will not venture to put my abstemiousness to the test unless he has a well-stocked larder. bread i at first made of pure indian meal and salt, genuine hoe-cakes, which i baked before my fire out of doors on a shingle or the end of a stick of timber sawed off in building my house ; but it was wont to get smoked and to have a piny flavour. i tried flour also ; but have at last found a mixture of rye and indian meal most convenient and agreeable. in cold weather it was no little amusement to bake several small loaves of this in succession, tending and turning them as carefully as an egyptian his hatching eggs. they were a real cereal fruit which i ripened, and they had to my senses a fragrance like that of other noble fruits, which i kept in as long as possible by wrapping them in cloths. i made a study of the ancient and indispensable art of bread-making, consulting such authorities as offered, going back to the primitive days and first invention of the unleavened kind, when from the wildness of nuts and meats men first reached the mildness and refinement of this diet, and travelling gradually down in my studies through that accidental souring of the dough which, it is supposed, taught the leavening process, and through the various fermentations thereafter, till i came to good, sweet, wholesome bread," the staff of life. leaven, which some deem the soul of bread, the spiritus which fills its cellular tissue, which is religiously preserved like the vestal fire,-some precious bottleful, i suppose, first brought over in the mayflower, did the i business for america, and its influence is still rising, swelling, spreading, in cerealian billows over the land,—this seed i regularly and faithfully procured from the village, till at length one morning i forgot the rules and scalded my yeast; by which accident i discovered that even this was not indispensable,—for my discoveries were not by the synthetic but analytic process, – and i have gladly omitted it since, though most housewives earnestly assured me that safe and wholesome bread without yeast might not be, and elderly people prophesied a speedy decay cg economy 69 v a a of the vital forces. yet i find it not to be an essential ingredient, and after going without it for a year am still in the land of the living; and i am glad to escape the trivialness of carrying a bottleful in my pocket, which would sometimes pop and discharge its contents to my discomfiture. it is simpler and more respectable to omit it. man is an animal who more than any other can adapt himself to all climates and circumstances. neither did i put any salt, soda, or other acid or alkali, into my bread. it would seem that i made it according to the recipe which marcus porcius cato gave about two centuries before christ. “ panem depsticium sic facito. manus mortariumque bene lavato. farinam in mortarium indito, aquæ paulatim addito, subigitoque pulchre. ubi bene subegeris, defingito, coquitoque sub te tu.” which i take to mean—“make kneaded bread thus : wash your hands and trough well. put the meal into the trough, and water gradually, and knead it thoroughly. when you have kneaded it well, mould it, and bake it under a cover,” that is, in a bakingkettle. not a word about leaven. but i did not always use this staff of life. at one time, owing to the emptiness of my purse, i saw none of it for more than a month. every new englander might easily raise all his own breadstuffs in this land of rye and indian corn, and not depend on distant and fluctuating markets for them. yet so far-aro-we from simplicity and independence that, in concord, fresh and sweet meal is rarely sold in the shops, and hominy and corn in a still coarser form are hardly used by any. for the most part the farmer gives to his cattle and hogs the grain of his own producing, and buys flour, which is at least no more wholesome, at a greater cost, at the store. i saw that i could easily raise my bushel or two of rye and indian corn, for the former will grow on the poorest land, and the latter does not require the best, and grind them in a hand-mill, and so do without rice and pork; and if i must have some concentrated sweet, i found by experiment that i could make a very good molasses either of pumpkins or beets, and i knew that i needed only to set out a few maples to obtain it more easily still, and while these were growing i could use various substitutes beside those which i have named. “for," as the forefathers sang, 'we can make liquor to sweeten our lips of pumpkins and parsnips and walnut-tree chips.” finally, as for salt, that grossest of groceries, to obtain this might be a fit occasion for a visit to the sea-shore, or, if i did 70 walden without it altogether, i should probably drink the less water. i do not learn that the indians ever troubled themselves to go after it. thus i could avoid all trade and barter, so far as my food was concerned, and having a shelter already, it would only remain to get clothing and fuel. the pantaloons which i now wear were woven in a farmer's family,—thank heaven there is so much virtue still in man; for i think the fall from the farmer to the operative as great and memorable as that from the man to the farmer;—and in a new country fuel is an encumbrançe. as for a habitat, if i were not permitted still to squat, i might purchase one acre at the same price for which the land i cultivated was sold-namely, eight dollars and eight cents. but as it was, i considered that i enhanced the value of the land by squatting on it. there is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes ask me such questions as, if i think that i can live on vegetable food alone; and to strike at the root of the matter at once,-for the toot.is faith,-i am accustomed to answer such, that i can live on board nails. if they cannot understand that, they cannot understand much that i have to say. for my part, i am glad to hear of experiments of this kind being tried ; as that a young man tried for a fortnight to live on hard, raw corn in the ear, using his teeth for all mortar. the squirrel tribe tried the same and succeeded. the human race is interested in these experiments, though a few old women, who are incapacitated for them, or who own their thirds in mills, may be alarmed. my furniture, part of which i made myself, and the rest cost me nothing of which i have not rendered an account, consisted of a bed, a table, a desk, three chairs, a looking-glass three inches in diameter, a pair of tongs and irons, a kettle, a skillet, and a frying-pan, a dipper, a wash-bowl, two knives and forks, three plates, one cup, one spoon, a jug for oil, a jug for molasses, and a japanned lamp. none is so poor that he need sit on a pumpkin. that is shiftlessness. there are plenty of such chairs as i like best in the village garrets to be had for taking them away. furniture ! thank god, i can sit and i can stand without the aid of a furniture warehouse. what man but a philosopher would not be ashamed to see his furniture packed in a cart and going up country exposed to the light of heaven and the eyes of men, a beggarly account of empty boxes? that is spaulding's furniture, i could never tell from inspecting such a load whether it belonged to a so-called rich man or a poor one; the owner always seemed a economy 71 times as poor. a poverty-stricken. indeed, the more you have of such things the poorer you are. wach load looks as if it contained the contents of a dozen shanties ; and if one shanty is poor, this is a dozen pray, for what do we move ever but to get rid of our furniture, our exuvim ; at last to go from this world to another newly furnished, and leave this to be burned ? it is the same as if all these traps were buckled to a man's belt, and he could not move over the rough ço try where our lines are cast without dragging them,-dragging his trap. he was a lucky fox that left his tail in the trap. the muskrat will gpaw his third leg off to be free. no wonder man has lost his elasticity. how often he is at a dead set! 'sir, if i may be so bold, what do you mean by a dead set ?? if you are a seer, whenever you meet a man you will see all that he owns, ay, and much that he pretends to disown behind him, even to his kitchen furniture and all the trumpery which he saves and will not burn, and he will appear to be harnessed to it and making what headway he can. i think that the man is at a dead set who has got through a knot hole or gateway where his sledge load of furniture cannot follow him. i cannot but feel compassion when i hear some trig, compact-looking man, seemingly free, all girded and ready, speak of his “furniture," as whether it is insured or not. but what shall i do with my furniture ?” my gay butterfly is entangled in a spider's web ? then. even those who seem for a long while not to have any, if you inquire more narrowly you will find have some stored in somebody's barn. i look upon england to-day as an old gentleman who is travelling with a great deal of baggage, trumpery which has accumulated from long housekeeping, which he has not the courage to burn; great trunk, little trunk, bandbox and bundle. throw away the first three at least. it would surpass the powers of a well man now-a-days to take up his bed and walk, and i should certainly advise a sick one to lay down his bed and run. when i have met an immigrant tottering under a bundle which contained his all—looking like an enormous wen which had grown out of the nape of his neck-i have pitied him, not because that was his all, but because he had all that to carry. if i have got to drag my trap, i will take care that it be a light one and do not nip me in a vital part. but perchance it would be wisest never to put one's paw into it. i would observe, by the way, that it cost me nothing for curtains, for i have no gazers to shut out but the and moon, and i am willing that they should look in. the moon will not sour milk nor taint meat of mine, nor will the sun injure my furniture a a . a sun 72 walden or fade my carpet, and if he is sometimes too warm a friend, i find it still better economy to retreat behind some curtain which nature has provided, than to add a single item to the details of housekeeping. a lady once offered me a mat, but as i had no room to spare within the house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, i declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. it is best to avoid the beginnings of evil. not long since i was present at the auction of a deacon's effects, for his life had not been ineffectual :“ the evil that men do lives after them." worm. 66 66 as usual, a great proportion was trumpery which had begun to accumulate in his father's day. among the rest was a dried tape and now, after lying half-a-century in his garret and other dust holes, these things were not burned ; instead of a bone fire, or purifying destruction of them, there was an auction, or increasing of them. the neighbours eagerly collected to view them, bought them all and carefully transported them to their garrets and dust holes, to lie there till their estates are settled, when they will start again. when a man dies he kicks the dust. the customs of some savage nations might, perchance, be profitably imitated by us, for they at least go through the semblance of casting their slough annually; they have the idea of the thing, whether they have the reality or not. would it not be well if we were to celebrate such a busk," or feast of first fruits” as bartram describes to have been the custom of the mucclasse indians ? when a town celebrates the busk,” says he,“ having previously provided themselves with new clothes, new pots, pans, and other household utensils and furniture, they collect all their worn-out clothes and other despicable things, sweep and cleanse their houses, squares, and the whole town, of their filth, which, with all the remaining grain and other old provisions, they cast together into one common heap, and consume it with fire. after having taken medicine, and fasted for three days, all the fire in the town is extinguished. during the fast they abstain from the gratification of every appetite and passion whata general amnesty is proclaimed ; all malefactors may return to their town. on the fourth morning the high priest, by rubbing dry wood together, produces new fire in the public square, from whence every habitation in the town is supplied with the new and pure flame." ever. m economy 73 they then feast on the new corn and fruits, and dance and sing for three days, “and the four following days they receive visits and rejoice with their friends from neighbouring towns, who have in like manner purified and prepared themselves." the mexicans also practised a similar purification at the end of every fifty-two years, in the belief that it was time for the world to come to an end. i have scarcely heard of a truer sacrament, that is, as the dictionary defines it, “outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace," than this, and i have no doubt that they were originally inspired directly from heaven to do thus, though they have no biblical record of the revelation. c for more than five years i maintained myself thus solely by the labour of my hands, and i found, that by working about six weeks in a year, i could meet all the expenses of living. the ι whole of my winters, as well as most of my summers, i had free and clear for study. i have thoroughly tried school-keeping, and found that my expenses were in proportion, or rather out of proportion, to my income, for i was obliged to dress and train, not to say think and believe, accordingly, and i lost my time into the bargain. as i did not teach for the good of my fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure. i have tried trade; but i found that it would take ten years to get under way in that, and that then i should probably be on my way to the devil. i was actually afraid that i might by that time be doing what is called a good business. when formerly i was looking about to see what i could do for a living, some sad experience in conforming to the wishes of friends being fresh in my mind to tax my ingenuity, i thought often and seriously of picking huckleberries; that surely i could do, and its small profits might suffice,-for my greatest skill has been to want but little, --so little capital it required, so little distraction from my wonted moods, i foolishly thought. while my acquaintances went unhesitatingly into trade or the professions, i contemplated this occupation as most like theirs ; ranging the hills all summer to pick the berries which came in my way, and thereafter carelessly dispose of them ; so, to keep the flocks of admetus. i also dreamed that i might gather the wild herbs, or carry evergreens to such villagers as loved to be reminded of the woods, even to the city, by hay-cart loads. but i have since learned that trade curses everything it handles ; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole eurse of trade attaches to the business. 74 walden as i preferred some things to others, and especially valued my freedom, as i could fare hard and yet succeed welf, i did not wish to spend my time in earning rich carpets or other fine furniture, or delicate cookery, or a house in the grecian or the gothic style just yet. if there are any to whom it is no interruption to acquire these things, and who know how to use them when acquired, i relinquish to them the pursuit. some are “industrious," and appear to love labour for its own sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out of worse mischief; to such i have at present nothing to say. those who would not know what to do with more leisure than they now enjoy, i might advise to work twice as hard as they do,—work till they pay for themselves, and get their free papers. for myself i found that the occupation of a day-labourer was the most independent of any, especially as it required only thirty or forty days in a year to support one. the labourer's day ends with the going down of the sun, and he is then free to devote himself to his chosen pursuit, independent of his labour ; but his employer, who speculates from month to month, has no respite from one end of the year to the other, in short, i am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial. it is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than i do. one young man of my acquaintance, who has inherited some acres, told me that he thought he should live as i did, if he had the means. i would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account; for, beside that before he has fairly learned it i may have found out another for myself, i desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible ; but i would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father's or his mother's or his neighbour's instead. the youth may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do. it is by a mathematical point only that we are wise, as the sailor or the fugitive slave keeps the pole-star in his eye; but that is sufficient guidance for all our life. we may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we would preserve the true course. undoubtedly, in this case, what is true for one is truer still for a thousand, as a large house is not proportionally more expensive than a small one, since one roof may cover, one cellar underlie, and one wall separate several apartments. but for my part, i economy 75 preferred the solitary dwelling. moreover, it will commonly be cheaper to build the whole yourself than to convince another of the advantage of the common wall; and when you have done this, the common partition, to be much cheaper, must be a thin one, and that other may prove a bad neighbour, and also not keep his side in repair. the only co-operation which is commonly possible is exceedingly, partial and superficial; and what little true co-operation there is, is as if it were not, being a harmony inaudible to men. if a man has faith he will co-operate with equal faith everywhere; if he has not faith, he will continue to live like the rest of the world, whatever company he is joined to. to co-operate in the highest as well as the lowest sense, means to get our tiving together. i heard it proposed lately that two young men should travel together over the world, the one without money, earning his means as he went, before the mast and behind the plough, the other carrying a bill of exchange in his pocket. it was easy to see that they could not long be companions or co-operate, since one would not operate at all. they would part at the first interesting crisis in their adventures. above all, as i have implied, the man who goes alone can start to-day ; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready, and it may be a long time before they get off. > but all this is very selfish, i have heard some of my townsmen say. i confess that i have hitherto indulged very little in philanthropic enterprises. i have made some sacrifices to a sense of duty, and among others have sacrificed this pleasure also. there are those who have used all their arts to persuadë me to undertake the support of some poor family in the town; and if i had nothing to do,-for the devil finds employment for the idle,-i might try my hand at some such pastime as that. however, when i have thought to indulge myself in this respect, and lay their heaven under an obligation by maintaining certain poor persons in all respects as comfortably as i maintain myself, and have even ventured so far as to make them the offer, they have one and all unhesitatingly preferred to remain poor. while my townsmen and women are devoted in so many ways to the good of their fellows, i trust that one at least may be spared to other and less humane pursuits. you must have a genius for charity as well as for anything else. as for doing good, that is one of the professions which are full. moreover, i have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution. probably i should not consciously and deliber76 walden w ately forsake my particular calling to do the good which society demands of me, to save the universe from annihilation; and i believe that a like but infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it. but i would not stand between any man and his genius; and to him who does this work, which i decline, with his whole heart and soul and life, i would say, persevere, even if the world call it doing evil, as it is most likely they will. i am far from supposing that my case is a peculiar one ; no doubt many of my readers would make a similar defence. at doing something, --i will not engage that my neighbours shall pronounce it good,i do not hesitate to say that i should be a capital fellow to hire ; but what that is, it is for my employer to find out: what good i do, in the common sense of that word, must be aside from my main path, and for the most part wholly unintended. men say, practically, begin where you are and such as you are, without aiming mainly to become of more worth, and with kindness aforethought go about doing good. if i were to preach at all in this strain, i should say rather, set about being good. as if the sun should stop when he had kindled his fires up to the splendour of a moon or a star of the sixth magnitude, and go about like a robin goodfellow, peeping in at every cottage window, inspiring lunatics, and tainting meats, and making darkness visible, instead of steadily increasing his genial heat and beneficence till he is of such brightness that no mortal can look him in the face, and then, in the meanwhile too, going about the world in his own orbit, doing it good, or rather, as a truer philosophy has discovered, the world going about him getting good. when phaeton, wishing to prove his heavenly birth by his beneficence, had the sun's chariot but one day, and drove out of the beaten track, he burned several blocks of houses in the lower streets of heaven, and scorched the surface of the earth, and dried up every spring, and made the great desert of sahara, till at length jupiter hurled him headlong to the earth with a thunderbolt, and the sun, through grief at his death, did not shine for a year. there is no odour so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted. it is human, it is divine, carrion. if i knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, i should run for my life as from that dry and parching wind of the african deserts called the simoom, which fills the mouth the nose and ears and eyes with dust till you are suffocated, for fear i should get some of his good done to me, --some of its virus mingled with my blood: no,-in this case economy 77 i would rather suffer evil the natural way. a man is not a good man to me, because he will feed me if i should be starving, or warm me if i should be freezing, or pull me out of a ditch if i should ever fall into one. i can find you a newfoundland dog that will do as much. philanthropy is not love for one's fellowman in the broadest sense. howard was no doubt an exceedingly kind and worthy man in his way, and has his reward; but, comparatively speaking, what are a hundred howards to us, if their philanthropy do not help us in our best estate, when we are most worthy to be helped ? i never heard of a philanthropic meeting in which it was sincerely proposed to do any good to me, or the like of me. the jesuits were quite baulked by those indians who, being burned at the stake, suggested new modes of torture to their tormentors. being superior to physical suffering, it sometimes chanced that they were superior to any consolation which the missionaries could offer; and the law to do as you would be done by fell with less persuasiveness on the ears of those, who, for their part, did not care how they were done by, who loved their enemies after a new fashion, and came very near freely forgiving them all they did. be sure you give the poor the aid they most need, though it be your example which leaves them far behind. if you give money, spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them. we make curious mistakes sometimes. often the poor man is not so cold and hungry as he is dirty and ragged and gross. it is partly his taste, and not merely his misfortune. if you give him money, he will perhaps buy more rags with it. i was wont to pity the clumsy irish labourers who cut ice on the pond, in such mean and ragged clothes, while i shivered in my more tidy and somewhat more fashionable garments, till, one bitter cold day one who had slipped in to the water came to my house to warm him, and i saw him strip off three pairs of pants and two pairs of stockings ere he got down to the skin, though they were dirty and ragged enough, it is true, and that he could afford to refuse the extra garments which i offered him, he had so many intra ones. this ducking was the very thing he needed. then i began to pity myself, and i saw that it would be a greater charity to bestow on me a flannel shirt than a whole slop-shop on him. there are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who 18 striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain 78 walden to relieve. it is the pious slave-breeder devoting the proceeds of every tenth slave to buy a sunday's liberty for the rest. some show their kindness to the poor by employing them in their kitchens. would they not be kinder if they employed themselves . there ? you boast of spending a tenth part of your income in charity; maybe you should spend the nine-tenths so, and done with it. society recovers only a tenth part of the property then. is this owing to the generosity of him in whose possession it is found, or to the remissness of the officers of justice ? philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated by mankind. nay, it is greatly overrated ; and it is our selfishness which overrates it. a robust poor man, one sunny day here in concord, praised a fellow-townsman to me, because, as he said, he was kind to the poor, meaning himself. the kind uncles and aunts of the race are more esteemed than its true spiritual fathers and mothers. i once heard a reverend lecturer on england, a man of learning and intelligence, after enumerating her scientific, literary, and political worthies, shakespeare, bacon, cromwell, milton, newton, and others, speak next of her christian heroes, whom, as if his profession required it of him, he elevated to a place far above all the rest, as the greatest of the great. they were penn, howard, and mrs. fry. every one must feel the falsehood and cant of this. the last were not england's best men and women; only, perhaps, her best philanthropistor i would not subtract anything from the praise that is due to philanthropy, hut merely demand justice for all who by their lives and works are a blessing to mankind. i do not value chiefly a man's uprightness and benevolence, which are, as it were, his stem and leaves. those plants of whose greenness withered we make herb tea for the sick, serve but a humble use, and are most employed by quacks. i want the flower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavour our intercourse. his goodness must not be a partial and transitory act, but a constant superfluity, which cost him nothing and of whch he is unconscious. this is a charity that hides a multitude of sins. the philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with the remembrance of his own cast-off griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it sympathy. we should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion. from what southern plains comes up the voice of wailing ? under what latitudes reside the heathen to whom we would send light? who is that intemperate and brutal man whom we would redeem ? a economy 79 if anything ail a man, so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even,—for that is the seat of sympathy,-he forthwith sets about reforming-the world. being a microcosm himself, he discovers, and it is a true discovery, and he is the man to make it,—that the world has been eating green apples ; to his eyes, in fact, the globe itself is a great green apple, which there is danger awful to think of that the children of men will nibble before it is ripe ; and straightway his drastic philanthropy seeks out the esquimaux and the patagonian, and embraces the populous indian and chinese villages; and, thus, by a few years of philanthropic activity, the powers in the meanwhile using him for their own ends, no doubt, he cures himself of his dyspepsia, the globe acquires a faint blush on one or both of its cheeks, as if it were beginning to be ripe, and life loses it crudity and is once more sweet and wholesome to live. i never dreamed of any enormity greater than i have committed. i never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself. i believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy with his fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of god, is his private ail. let this be righted, let the spring come to him, the morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his generous companions without apology. my excuse for not lecturing against the use of tobacco is, that i never chewed it; that is a penalty which reformed tobacco-chewers have to pay ; though there are things enough i have chewed which i could lecture against. if you should ever be betrayed into any of these philanthropies, do not let your left hand know what your right hand does, for it is not worth knowing. rescue the drowning and tie your shoe-strings. take your time, and set about some free labour. our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints. our hymn-books resound with a melodious cursing of god and enduring him forever. one would say that even the prophets and redeemers had rather consoled the fears than confirmed the hopes of man. there is nowhere recorded a simple and irrepressible satisfaction with the gift of life, any memorable praise of god. all health and success does me good, however far off and withdrawn it may appear; all disease and failure helps to make me sad and does me evil, however much sympathy it may have with me or i with it. if, then, we would indeed restore mankind by truly indian, botanic, magnetic, or natural means, let us first be as simple and well as nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our own brows, and take up a little life 80 walden into our pores. do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavour to become one of the worthies of the world. i read in the gulistan, or flower garden, of sheik sadi of shiraz, that “ they asked a wise man, saying, of the many celebrated trees which the most high god has created lofty and umbrageous, they call none azad, or free, excepting the cypress, which bears no fruit; what mystery is there in this? he replied, each has its appropriate produce, and appointed season, during the continuance of which it is fresh and blooming, and during their absence dry and withered; to neither of which states is the cypress exposed, being always flourishing; and of this nature are the azads, or religious independents.-fix not thy heart on that which is transitory ; for the dijlah, or tigris, will continue to flow through bagdad after the race of caliphs is extinct : if thy hand has plenty, be liberal as the date tree; but if it affords nothing to give away, be an azad, or free man, like the cypress." complemental verses the pretensions of poverty “thou dost presume too much, poor needy wretch, to claim a station in the firmament, because thy humble cottage, or thy tub, nurses some lazy or pedantic virtue in the cheap sunshine or by shady springs, with roots and pot-herbs ; where thy right hand, tearing those humane passions from the mind, upon whose stocks fair blooming virtues flourish, degradeth nature, and benumbeth sense, and, gorgon-like, turns active men to stone. we not require the dull society of your necessitated temperance, or of that unnatural stupidity that knows no joy nor sorrow; nor your forc'd falsely exalted passive fortitude above the active. this low abject brood, that fix their seats in mediocrity, becomes your servile minds ; but we advance such virtues only as admit excess, brave, bounteous acts, regal magnificence, all-seeing prudence, magnanimity that knows no bound, and that heroic virtue for which antiquity hath left no name, but patterns only, such as hercules, achilles, theseus. back to thy loath'd cell ; and when thou seest the new enlightened sphere, study to know but what those worthies were. -t. carew. 2 where i lived, and what i lived for at a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house. i have thus surveyed the country on every side within a dozen miles of where i live: in imagination i have bought all the farms in succession, for all were to be bought, and i knew their price. i walked over each farmer's premises, tasted his wild apples, discoursed on husbandry with him, took his farm at his price, at any price, mortgaging it to him in my mind; even put a higher price on it,-took everything but a deed of it, -took his word for his deed, for i dearly love to talk,-cultivated it, and him too to some extent, i trust, and withdrew when i had enjoyed it long enough, leaving him to carry it on. this experience entitled me to be regarded as a sort of real-estate broker by my friends. wherever i sat, there i might live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly. what is a house but a sedes, a seat ?—better if a country seat. i discovered many a site for a house not likely to be soon improved, which some might have thought too far from the village, but to my eyes the village was too far from it. well, there i might live, i said ; and there i did live, for an hour, a summer and a winter life ; saw how i could let the years run off, buffet the winter through, and see the spring come in. the future inhabitants of this region, wherever they may place their houses may be sure that they have been anticipated. an afternoon sufficed to lay out the land into orchard, woodlot, and pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or pines should be left to stand before the door, and whence each blasted tree could be seen to the best advantage ; and then i let it lie, fallow perchance, for a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he ean afford to let alone. my imagination carried me so far that i even had the refusal of several farms,—the refusal was all i wanted,—but i never got my fingers burned by actual possession. the nearest that i came to actual possession was when i bought the hollowell place, and had begun to sort my seeds, and collected materials with which to make a wheelbarrow to carry it on or off with ; but before the owner gave me a deed of it, his wife-every man has such a wife-changed her mind and wished to keep it, and he offered me ten dollars to release him: now, to speak the truth, a 81 f 82 walden ? i had but ten cents in the world, and it surpassed my arithmetic to tell, if i was that man who had ten cents, or who had a farm, or ten dollars, or all together. however, i let him keep the ten dollars and the farm too, for i had carried it far enough ; or rather, to be generous, i sold him the farm for just what i gave for it, and, as he was not a rich man, made him a present of ten dollars, and still had my ten cents, and seeds, and materials for a wheelbarrow left. i found th that had been a rich man without any damage to my property. but i retained the landscape, and have since annually carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow. with respect to landscapes, — “ i am monarch of all i survey, my right there is none to dispute." i have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he had got a few wild apples only. why, the owner does not know it for many years when a poet has put his farm in rhyme, the most admirable kind of invisible fence, has fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk. the real attractions of the hollowell farm, to me, were : its complete retirement, being about two miles from the village, half-a-mile from the nearest neighbour, and separated from the highway by a broad field; its bounding on the river, which the owner said protected it by its fogs from frosts in the spring, though that was nothing to me; the grey colour and ruinous state of the house and barn, and the dilapidated fences, which put such an interval between me and the last occupant; the hollow and lichen-covered apple trees, gnawed by rabbits, showing what kind of neighbours i should have; but above all, the recollection i had of it from my earliest voyages up the river, when the house was concealed behind a dense grove of red maples, through which i heard the house-dog bark. i was in haste to buy it, before the proprietor finished getting out some rocks, cutting down the hollow apple trees, and grubbing up some young birches which had sprung up in the pasture, or, in short, had made any more of his improvements. to enjoy these advantages i was ready to carry it on; like atlas, to take the world on my shoulders,-1 have never heard what compensation he received for that,—and do all those things which had no other motive or excuse but that i might pay for it and be unmolested in my possession of it; for i knew all the while that it would yield the most abundant crop a where i lived 83 l of the kind i wanted if i could only afford to let it alone. but it turned out as i have said. all that i could say, then, with respect to farming on a large scale (i have always cultivated a garden), was that i had had my seeds ready. many think that seeds improve with age. i have no doubt that time discriminates between the good and the bad ; and when at last i shall plant, i shall be less likely to be disappointed. but i would say to my fellows, once for all , as long as possible live free and uncommitted. it makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail. old cato, whose de re rustica is my “cultivator," says, and the only translation i have seen makes sheer nonsense of the passage, “when you think of getting a farm, turn it thus in your mind, not to buy greedily, nor spare your pains to look at it, and do not think it enough to go round it once. the oftener you go there the more it will please you, if it is good.” i think i shall not buy greedily, but go round and round it as long as i live, and be buried in it first, that it may please me the more at last. 6 the present was my next experiment of this kind, which i purpose to describe more at length ; for convenience, putting the , experience of two years into one. as i have said, i do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbours up. when first i took up my abode in the woods, that is, began to spend my nights as well as days there, which, by accident, was on independence day, on july 4, 1845, my house was not finished for winter, but was merely a defence against the rain, without plastering or chimney, the walls being of rough weather-stained boards, with wide chinks, which made it cool at night. the upright white hewn studs and freshly planed door and window casings gave it a clean and airy look, especially in the morning, when its timbers were saturated with dew, so that i fancied that by noon some sweet gum would exude from them. to my imagination it retained throughout the day more or less of this auroral character reminding me of a certain house on a mountain which i had visited the year before. this was an airy, an unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a travelling god, and where a goddess might trail her garments. the winds which passed over x my dwelling were such as sweep over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial parts only, of terrestrial a 84 walden a a music. the morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted ; but few are the ears that hear it. olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere. the only house i had been the owner of before, if i except a boat, was a tent, which i used occasionally when making excursions in the summer, and this is still rolled up in my garret; but the boat, after passing from hand to hand, has gone down the stream of time. with this more substantial shelter about me, i had made some progress toward settling in the world. this frame, so slightly clad, was a sort of crystallization around me, and reacted on the builder. it was suggestive somewhat as a picture in outlines. i did not need to go out doors to take the air, for the atmosphere within had lost none of its freshness. it was not so much within doors as behind a door where i sat, even in the rainiest weather. the harivansa says, “ an abode without birds is like a meat without seasoning.” such was not my abode, for i found myself suddenly neighbour to the birds ; not by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near them. i was not only nearer to some of those which commonly frequent the garden and the orchard, but to those wilder and more thrilling songsters of the forest which never, or rarely, serenade a villager, -the wood-thrush, the veery, the scarlet tanager, the fieldsparrow, the whip-poor-will, and many others. i was seated by the shore of a small pond, about a mile and a half south of the village of concord and somewhat higher than it, in the midst of an extensive wood between that town and lincoln, and about two miles south of that our only field known to fame, concord battle-ground; but i was so low in the woods that the opposite shore, half a mile off, like the rest, covered with wood, was my most distant horizon. for the first week, whenever i looked out on the pond, it impressed me like a tarn high up on the one side of a mountain, its bottom far above the surface of other lakes, and, as the sun arose, i saw it throwing off its nightly clothing of mist, and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface was revealed, while the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the breaking up of some nocturnal conventicle. the very dew seemed to hang upon the trees later into the day than usual, as on the sides of mountains. this small lake was of most value as a neighbour in the intervals of a gentle rain-storm in august, when, both air and water being perfectly still, but the sky overcast, mid-afternoon had all the serenity of evening, and the wood-thrush sang around, and was а where i lived 85 a that way heard from shore to shore. a lake like this is never smoother than at such a time; and the clear portion of the air above it being shallow and darkened by clouds, the water, full of light and reflections, becomes a lower heaven itself so much the more important. from a hill-top near by, where the wood had been recently cut off, there was a pleasing vista southward across the pond, through a wide indentation in the hills which form the shore there, where their opposite sides sloping toward each other suggested a stream flowing out in that direction through a wooded valley, but stream there was none. i looked between and over the near green hills to some distant and higher ones in the horizon, tinged with blue. indeed, by standing on tiptoe i could catch a glimpse of some of the peaks of the still bluer and more distant mountain ranges in the north-west, those true-blue coins from heaven's own mint, and also of some portion of the village. but in other directions, even from this point, i could not see over or beyond the woods which surrounded me. it is well to have some water in your neighbourhood, to give buoyancy to and float the earth. one value even of the smallest well is, that when you look into it you see that earth is not continent but insular. this is as important as that it keeps butter cool. when i looked across the pond from this peak toward the sudbury meadows, which in time of flood i distinguished elevated perhaps by a mirage in their seething valley, like a coin in a basin, all the earth beyond the pond appeared like a thin crust insulated and floated even by this small sheet of intervening water, and i was reminded that this on which i dwelt was but dry land. though the view from my door was still more contracted, i did not feel crowded or confined in the least. there was pasture enough for my imagination. the low shrub-oak plateau to which the opposite shore arose, stretched away toward the prairies of the west and the steppes of tartary, afforded ample room for all the roving families of men. “there are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon,” said damodara, when his herds required new and larger pastures. both place and time were changed, and i dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me. where i lived was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers. we are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind the constellation of cassiopeia's chair, far from noise and disturbance. i discovered that my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but for ever new and unproa 86 walden faned, part of the universe. if it were worth the while to settle in those parts near to the pleiades or the hyades, to aldebaran or altair, then i was really there, or at an equal remoteness from the life which i had left behind, dwindled and twinkling with as fine a ray to my nearest neighbour, and to be seen only in moonless nights by him. such was that part of creation where i had squatted“ there was a shepherd that did live, and held his thoughts as high as were the mounts whereon his flocks did hourly feed him by.” what should we think of the shepherd's life if his flocks always wandered to higher pastures than his thoughts ? every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and i may say innocence, with nature herself. i have been as sincere a worshipper of aurora as the greeks. i got up early and bathed in the pond : that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which i did. they say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of king tchingthang to this effect : “renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.” i can understand that. morning brings back the heroic ages. i was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when i was sitting with door and windows open, as i could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. it was homer's requiem; itself an iliad and odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. there was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigour and fertility of the world. the morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. then there is . least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night: little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newlyacquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied by the undulations of celestial music, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance filling the air--to a higher life than we fell asleep from ; and thus the darkness bears its fruit, and proves itself to be good, no less than the light. that man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descendwhere i lived 87 ing and darkening way. after a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his genius tries again what noble life it can make. all memorable events, i should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. the vedas say, “ all intelligences awake with the morning.” poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour. all poets and heroes, like memnon, are the children of aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. to him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. it matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labours of men. morning is when i am awake and there is a dawn in me. moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep: why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? they are not such poor calculators: : if they had not been overcome with drowsiness they would have performed something. the millions are awake enough for physical labour ; but only one in a million is awake enough for. effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions a poetic or divine life. to be awake is to be alive. i have never yet met a man who was quite awake. how could i have looked him in the face ? we must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. i know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavour. it is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful ; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. to affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. every man is tasked to make , his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. if we refused, or rather used up, such paltry information as we get, the oracles would distinctly inform us how this might be done. i went to the woods because i wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if i could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when i came to die, discover that i had not lived. i did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did i wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. i wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and spartan-like as to put to 88 walden > a rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world ; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. for most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of god, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to “ glorify god and enjoy him for ever.” still we live meanly, like ants ; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes ; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. our life is frittered away by detail. an honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! i say, let your affairs be as two or three and not a hundred or a thousand ; instead of a million count half-a-dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. in the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that à man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. simplify, simplify. instead of three meals a-day, if it be necessary eat but one ; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion. our life is like a german confederacy, made up of petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a german cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment. the nation itself, with all its so-called internal improvements, which, by the way, are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land ; and the only cure for it as for them is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. it lives too fast. men think that it is essential that the nation have commerce, and export rice, and talk through a telephone, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. if we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads ? a a what i lived for 89 upon us. man. a that a any and if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season? but if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? we do not ride on the railroad; it rides did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad ? each one is a man, an irishman, or a yankee the rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. they are sound sleepers, i assure you. and every few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. and when they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception. i am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may sometimes get up again. why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? we are determined to be starved before we are hungry. men say stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine to-morrow. as for work, we haven't of any consequence. we have the saint vitus' dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still. vf i should only give a few pulls at the parish bell-rope, as for a 'fire, that is, without setting the bell, there is hardly a man on his farm in the outskirts of concord, notwithstanding that press of engagements which was his excuse so many times this morning, nor a boy, nor a woman, i might almost say, but would forsake all and follow that sound, not mainly to save property from the flames, but, if we will confess the truth, much more to see it burn, since burn it must, and we, be it known, did not set it on fire, or to see it put out, and have a hand in it, if that is done as handsomely; yes, even if it were the parish church itself. hardly a man takes a half-hour's nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks,“ what's the if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels. some give directions to be waked every half-hour, doubtless for no other purpose ; and then to pay for it, they tell what they have dreamed. after a night's sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast. pray, tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere on this globe," —and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the wachito river; never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself. news ? as 90 walden a for my part, i could easily do without the post office. i think that there are very few important communications made through uit. 'it. to speak critically, i never received more than one or two letters in my life i wrote this some years ago—that were worth the postage. the penny-post is, commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest. and i am sure that i never read any memorable news in a newspaper. if we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown-up, or one cow run over on the western railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter,—we never need read of another. one is enough. if you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? to a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. there was such a rush, as i hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn the foreign news by the last arrival, that several large squares of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure, -news which i seriously think a ready wit might write a twelvemonth or twelve years beforehand with sufficient accuracy. as for spain, for instance, if you know how to throw in don carlos and the infanta, and don pedro and seville and granada, from time to time in the right proportions,—they may have changed the names a little since i saw the papers, -and serve up a bull-fight when other entertainments fail, it will be true to the letter, and give us as good an idea of the exact state or ruin of things in spain as the most succinct and lucid reports under this head in the newspapers : and as for england, almost the last significant scrap of news from that quarter was the revolution of 1649; and if you have learned the history of her crops for an average year, you never need attend to that thing again, unless your speculations are of a merely pecuniary character. if one may judge who rarely looks into the newspapers, nothing new does ever happen in foreign parts, a french revolution not excepted. what news ! how much more important to know what that is which was never old ! “ kieou-he-yu (great dignitary of the state of wei) sent a man to khoung-tseu to know his news. khoungtseu caused the messenger to be seated near him, and questioned him in these terms : what is your master doing ? the messenger answered with respect : my master desires to diminish the number of his faults, but he cannot come to the end of them. the meswhat i lived for 91 senger being gone, the philosopher remarked : what a worthy messenger!” the preacher, instead of vexing the ears of drowsy farmers on their day of rest at the end of the week,-for sunday is the fit conclusion of an ill-spent week, and not the fresh and brave beginning of a new one, with this one other draggletail of a sermon, should shout with thundering voice,—“pause ! avast! why so seeming fast, but deadly slow ?" shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. if men would steadily observé realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the arabian nights entertainments. if we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. when we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence,-that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. this is always exhilarating and sublime. ву closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations. children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more closely than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure. i have read in a hindoo book, that “there was a king's son, who, being expelled in infancy from his native city, was brought up by a forester, and, growing up to maturity in that state, imagined himself to belong to the barbarous race with which he lived. one of his father's ministers having discovered him, revealed to him what he was, and the misconception of his character was removed, and he knew himself to be a prince. so soul,” continues the hindoo philosopher, “from the circumstances in which it is placed, mistakes its own character, until the truth is revealed to it by some holy teacher, and then it knows itself to be brahme." i perceive that we inhabitants of new england live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface of things. we think that that is which appears to be. if a man should walk through this town and see only the reality, where, think you, would the “mill-dam” go to ? if he should give us an account of the realities he beheld there, we should not recognize the place in his description. look at a meeting-house, or a court-house, or a jail, or a shop, or a dwelling-house, and say what that thing really is before a true gaze, and they would all go to pieces in your account of them. men esteem truth remote, 92 walden in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before adam and after the last man. in eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. but all these times and places and occasions are now and here. god himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. and we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. the universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. let us spend our lives in conceiving then. the poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it. let us spend one day as deliberately as nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails. let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation ; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry,--determined to make a day of it. why should we knock under and go with the stream ? let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. with unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigour, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like ulysses. if the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. if the bell rings, why should we run ? we will consider what kind of music they are like. let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through paris and london, through new york and boston and concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, this is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a well or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps à gauge, not a nilometer, but a realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. if you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. be it life or death, we crave only reality. it we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our a what i lived for 93 > throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are a alive, let us go about our business. time is but the stream. i go a-fishing in. i drink at it; but while i drink i see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. i would drink deeper ; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. i cannot count one. i know not the first letter of the alphabet. i have always been regretting that i was not as wise as the day i was born. the intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and drifts its way into the secret of things. i do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. my head is hands and feet. i feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. my instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws, and with it i would mine and burrow my way through these hills. i think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts ; so by the divining rod and thin rising vapours i judge ; and here i will begin to mine. reading . a with a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike. in accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident. the oldest egyptian or hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and i gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was i in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. no dust has settled on that robe : no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed. that time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is neither past, present, nor future. my residence was more favourable, not only to thought but to serious reading, than a university; and though i was beyond the range of the ordinary circulating library, i had more than ever come within the influence of those books which circulate round the world, whose sentences were first written on bark, and are now merely copied from time to time on to linen paper. says the poet, mir camar uddin mast, "being seated to run through the region of the spiritual world; i have had this advantage in books. to be intoxicated by a single glass of wine; i have experienced, this pleasure when i have drunk the liquor of the esoteric doctrines." i kept homer's iliad on my table through the summer, though i looked at his page only now and then. incessant labour with my hands, at first, for i had my house to finish and my beans to hoe at the same time, made more study impossible. yet i sustained myself by the prospect of such reading in future. i read one or two shallow books of travel in the intervals of my work, till that employment made me ashamed of myself, and i asked where it was then that i lived. the student may read homer or æschylus in the greek without danger of dissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies that some measure emulates their heroes, and consecrates morning hours to their pages. the heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning 94 reading 95 1 of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom, and valour, and generosity we have. the modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity. they seem as solitary, and the letter in which they are printed as rare and curious as ever. it is worth the expense of youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some words of an ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be perpetual suggestions and provocations. it is not in vain that the farmer remembers and repeats the few latin words which he has heard. men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written, and however ancient they may be. for what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? they are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as delphi and dodona never gave. we might as well omit to study nature because she is old. to read wellthat is, to read true books in a true spirit—is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. it requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. it is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read. the one is commonly transitory-a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. the other is the maturity and experience of that: if that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak. the crowds of men who merely . spoke the greek and latin tongues in the middle ages were not entitled by the accident of birth to read the works of genius written in those languages ; for these were not written in that greek or latin which they knew, but in the select language of literature. they had not learned the nobler dialects of greece and rome, but the very materials on which they were written were waste paper to them, and they prized instead a cheap contemporary literature. but when the several nations of europe þad acquired distinct though rude written languages of their own, 96 walden a a sufficient for the purposes of their rising literatures, then first learning revived, and scholars were enabled to discern from that remoteness the treasures of antiquity: what the roman and grecian multitude could not hear, after the lapse of ages a few scholars read, and a few scholars only are still reading it. however much we may admire the orator's occasional bursts of eloquence, the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or above the fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind the clouds. there are the stars, and they who can may read them. the astronomers forever comment on and observe them. they are not exhalations like our daily colloquies and vaporous breath. what is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. the orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him ; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him. no wonder that alexander carried the iliad with him on his expeditions in a precious casket. a written word is the choicest of relics. it is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. it is the work of art nearest to life itself. it may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips;—not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. the symbol of an ancient man's thought becomes a modern man's speech. two thousand summers have imparted to the monuments of grecian literature, as to her marbles, only a maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have carried their own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to protect them against the corrosion of time. books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. they have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader, his common sense will not refuse them. their authors are natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind. when the illiterate and perhaps scornful trader has earned by enterprise and industry his coveted leisure and independence, and is admitted to the circles of wealth and fashion; he turns inevitably at last to those still higher but yet inaccessible circles of intellect reading 97 > and genius, and is sensible only of the imperfection of his culture and the vanity and insufficiency of all his riches, and further proves his good sense by the pains which he takes to secure for his children that intellectual culture whose want he so keenly feels ; and thus it is that he becomes the founder of a family. those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language in which they were written must have a very imperfect knowledge of the history of the human race ; for it is remarkable that no transcript of them has ever been made into any modern tongue, unless our civilization itself may be regarded as such a transcript. homer has never yet been printed in english, nor æschylus, nor virgil even,-works as refined, as soidlly done, and as beautiful almost as the morning itself; for later writers, say what we will of their genius, have rarely, if ever, equalled the elaborate beauty and finish and the lifelong and heroic literary labours of the ancients. they only talk of forgetting them who never knew them. it will be soon enough to forget them when we have the learning and the genius which will enable us to attend to and appreciate them. that age will be rich indeed when those relics which we call classics, and the still older and more than classic but even less known scriptures of the nations, shall have still further accumulated, when the vaticans shall be filled with vedas and zenda vestas and bibles, with homers and dantes and shakespeares, and all the centuries to come shall have successively deposited their trophies in the forum of the world. by such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at last. (the works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. they have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically. most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and siffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to stand on tip-toe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to. i think that having learned our letters we should read the best that is in literature, and not be forever repeating our a, b, abs, and words of one syllable, in the fourth or fifth classes, sitting on the lowest and foremost form all our lives. most men are satisfied if they read or hear read, and perchance have been convicted by the wisdom of one good book, the bible, and for the rest of their g 98 walden lives vegetate and dissipate their faculties in what is called easy reading. there is a work in several volumes in our circulating library entitled little reading, which i thought referred to a town of that name which i had not been to. there are those who, like cormorants and ostriches, can digest all sorts of this, even after the fullest dinner of meats and vegetables, for they suffer nothing to be wasted. if others are the machines to provide this provender, they are the machines to read it. they read the nine thousandth tale about zebulon and sephronia, and how they loved as none had ever loved before, and neither did the course of their true love run smooth,—at any rate, how it did run and stumble, and get up again and go on ! how some poor unfortunate got up on to a steeple, who had better never have gone up as far as the belfry; and then, having needlessly got him up there, the happy novelist rings the bell for all the world to come together and hear, 0 dear! how did he get down again ! for my part, i think that they had better metamorphose all such aspiring heroes of universal noveldom into man weathercocks, as they used to put heroes among the constellations, and let them swing round there till they are rusty, and not come down at all to bother honest men with their pranks. the next time the novelist rings the bell i will not stir though the meeting-house burn down. “the skip of the tiptoe-hop, a romance of the middle ages, by the celebrated author of tittle-tol-tan, to appear in monthly parts ; a great rush ; don't all come together. all this they read with saucer eyes, and erect and primitive curiosity, and with unwearied gizzard, whose corrugations even yet need no sharpening, just as some little four-year-old bencher his two-cent gilt-covered edition of cinderella, --without any improvement, that i can see, in the pronunciation, or accent, or emphasis, or any more skill in abstracting or inserting the moral. the result is dulness of sight, stagnation of the vital circulations, and a general deliquium and sloughing off of all the intellectual faculties. this sort of gingerbread is baked daily and more sedulously than pure wheat or rye-and-indian in almost every oven, and finds a surer market. the best books are not read even by those who are called good readers. what does our concord culture amount to? there is in this town, with a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even in english literature, whose words all can read and spell. even the college-bred and so-called liberally educated men here and elsewhere have really little or no acquaintance with english classics; and as for the recorded wisdom of mankind, the ancient classics and bibles, which are reading 99 accessible to all who will know of them, there are the feeblest efforts anywhere made to become acquainted with them. i know a wood-chopper, of middle age, who takes a french paper, not for news as he says, for he is above that, but to “ keep himself in practice,” he being a canadian by birth ; and when i ask him what he considers the best thing he can do in this world, he says, besides this, to keep up and add to his english. this is about as much as the college-bred generally do or aspire to do, and they take an english paper for the purpose. one who has just come from reading perhaps one of the best english books will find how many with whom he can converse about it? or suppose he comes from reading a greek or latin classic in the original, whose praises are familiar even to the so-called illiterate ; he will find nobody at all to speak to, but must keep silence about it. indeed, there is hardly the professor in our colleges, who, if he has mastered the difficulties of the language, has proportionately mastered the difficulties of the wit and poetry of a greek poet, and has any sympathy to impart to the alert and heroic reader; and as for the sacred scriptures, or bibles of mankind, who in this town can tell me even their titles ? most men do not know that any nation but the hebrews have had a scripture. a man, any man, will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver , dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of;—and yet we learn to read only as far as easy reading, the primers and class-books, and when we leave school, the little reading, and story books, which are for boys and beginners; and our reading, our conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins. i aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our concord soil has produced, whose names are hardly known here. or shall i hear the name of plato and never read his book ? as if plato were my townsman and i never saw him,-my next neighbour, and i never heard him speak or attended to the wisdom of his words. but how actually is it? his dialogues, which contain what was immortal in him, lie on the next shelf , and yet i never ι read them. we are under-bred and low-lived and illiterate ; and in this respect i confess i do not make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my townsmen who cannot read at all, and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects. we should be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they 100 walden were. new ones. we are a race of tit-men, and soar but little higher in our intellectual flights than the columns of the daily paper. it is not all books that are as dull as their readers. there are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. how many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. the book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal the at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. these same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men ; not one has been omitted ; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life. moreover, with wisdom we shall learn liberality. the solitary hired man on a farm in the outskirts of concord, who has had his second birth and peculiar religious experience, and is driven, as he believes, into silent gravity and exclusiveness by his faith, may think it is not true; but zoroaster, thousands of years ago, travelled the same road and had the same experience; but he, being wise, knew it to be universal and treated his neighbours accordingly, and is even said to have invented and established worship among men. let him humbly commune with zoroaster then, and, through the liberalizing influence of all the worthies, with jesus christ himself, and let our church” go by the board. we boast that we belong to the nineteenth century, and are making the most rapid strides of any nation. but consider how little this village does for its own culture. i do not wish to flatter my townsmen, nor to be flattered by them, for that will not advance either of us. we need to be provoked,-goaded like oxen, as we are, into a trot. we have a comparatively decent system of common schools, schools for infants only; but excepting the half-starved lyceum in the winter, and latterly the puny beginning of a library suggested by the state, no school for ourselves. we spend more on almost any article of bodily aliment or ailment than on our mental aliment. it is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. it is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure—if they are indeed so well off-to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives. shall the world be confined to one paris or one oxford for ever? cannot students be boarded here and get a liberal education under the skies of concord ? reading ιοι can we not hire some abelard to lecture to us? alas! what with foddering the cattle and tending the store, we are kept from school too long, and our education is sadly neglected. in this country, the village should in some respects take the place of the nobleman of europe. it should be the patron of the fine arts. it is rich enough. it wants only the magnanimity and refine; it can spend money enough on such things as farmers and traders value, but it is thought utopian to propose spending money for things which more intelligent men know to be of far more worth. this town has spent seventeen thousand dollars on a town-house, thank fortune or politics, but probably it will not spend so much on living wit, the true meat to put into that shell, in a hundred years. the one hundred and twenty-five dollars annually subscribed for a lyceum in the winter is better spent than any other equal sum raised in the town. if we live in the nineteenth century, why should we not enjoy the advantages which the nineteenth century offers? why should our life be in any respect provincial ? if we will read newspapers, why not skip the gossip of boston and take the best newspaper in the world at once ?—not be sucking the pap of “neutral family papers, or browsing “ olive-branches ” here in new england. let the reports of all the learned societies come to us, and we will see if they know anything. why should we leave it to harper & brothers and redding & co. to select our reading ? as the nobleman of cultivated taste surrounds himself with whatever conduces to his culture-genius-learning-witbooks-paintings-statuary-music-philosophical instruments, and the like; so let the village do,-not stop short at a pedagogue, a parson, a sexton, a parish library, and three select men because our pilgrim forefathers got through a cold winter once on a bleak rock with these. to act collectively is according to the spirit of our institutions ; and i am confident that, as circumstances are more flourishing, our means are greater than the nobleman’s. new england can hire all the wise men in the world to come and teach her, and board them round the while, and not be provincial at all. that is the uncommon school we want. instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men. if it is necessary, omit one bridge over the river, go round a little there, and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us. a sounds > but while we are confined to books, though the most select and classic, and read only particular written languages, which are themselves but dialects and provincial, we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard. much is published, but little printed. the rays which stream through the shutter will no longer be remembered when the shutter is wholly removed. no method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being for ever on the alert. what is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen ? will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity. i did not read books the first summer; i hoed beans. nay, i often did better than this. there were times when i could afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. i love a broad margin to my life. sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, i sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller's waggon on the distant highway, i was reminded of the lapse of time. i grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. they were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance, i realized what the orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. for the most part, i minded not how the hours went. the day advanced as if to light some work of mine ; it was morning, and lo! now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished. instead of singing like the birds, i silently smiled at my incessant good fortune. as the sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hickory before my door, so had i my chuckle or suppressed warble which he might hear out of my nest. my days were not days of the week, bearing the > > 102 sounds 103 a stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for lived i like the puri indians, of whom it is said that“ for yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow they have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning by pointing backward for yesterday, forward for to-morrow, and overhead for the passing day.” this was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, i should not have been found wanting. a man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. the natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence. í had this advantage, at least, in my mood of life, over those who were obliged to look abroad for amusement, to society and the theatre, that my life itself was become my amusement and never ceased to be novel. it was a drama of many scenes and without an end. if we were always indeed getting our living, and regulating our lives according to the last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with ennui. follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour. housework was a pleasant pastime. when my floor was dirty, i rose early, and, setting all my furniture out of doors on the grass , bed and bedstead making but one budget, dashed water on the floor, and sprinkled white sand from the pond on it, and then with a broom scrubbed it clean and white; and by the time the villagers had broken their fast the morning sun had dried my house sufficiently to allow me to move in again, and my meditations were almost uninterrupted. it was pleasant to see my whole household effects on the grass, making a little pile like a gipsy's pack, and my three-legged table, from which i did not remove the books and pen and ink, standing amid the pines and hickories. they seemed glad to get out themselves, and as if unwilling to be brought in. i was sometimes tempted to stretch an awning over them and take my seat there. it was worth the while to see the sun shine on these things, and hear the free wind blow on them; so much more interesting most familiar objects look out of doors than in the house. a bird sits on the next bough, life-everlasting grows under the table, and blackberry vines run round its legs ; pine cones, chestnut burs, and strawberry leaves are strewn about. it looked as if this was the way these forms came to be transferred to our furniture, to tables, chairs, and bedsteads,-because they once stood in their midst. my house was on the side of a hill, immediately on the edge of the larger wood, in the midst of a young forest of pitch pines a 104 walden and hickories, and half-a-dozen rods from the pond, to which a narrow footpath led down the hill. in my front yard grew the strawberry, blackberry, and life-everlasting, johnswort and goldenrod, shrub-oaks and sand-cherry, blueberry and groundnut. near the end of may, the sand-cherry (cerasus pumila), adorned the sides of the path with its delicate flowers arranged in umbels cylindrically about its short stems, which last, in the fall, weighed down with good-sized and handsome cherries, fell over in wreaths like rays on every side. i tasted them out of compliment to nature, though they were scarcely palatable. the sumach (rhus glabra), grew luxuriantly about the house, pushing up through the embankment which i had made, and growing five or six feet the first season. its broad pinnate tropical leaf was pleasant though strange to look on. the large buds, suddenly pushing out late in the spring from dry sticks which had seemed to be dead, developed themselves as by magic into graceful green and tender boughs, an inch in diameter; and sometimes, as i sat at my window, so heedlessly did they grow and tax their weak joints, i heard a fresh and tender bough suddenly fall like a fan to the ground, when there was not a breath of air stirring, broken off by its own weight. in august, the large masses of berries, which, when in flower, had attracted many wild bees, gradually assumed their bright velvety crimson hue, and by their weight again bent down and broke the tender limbs. > > as i sit at my window this summer afternoon, hawks are circling about my clearing; the tantivy of wild pigeons, flying by twos and threes athwart my view, or perching restless on the white-pine boughs behind my house, gives a voice to the air ; a fish-hawk dimples the glassy surface of the pond and brings up a fish ; a mink steals out of the marsh before my door and seizes a frog by the shore; the sedge is bending under the weight of the reed-birds flitting hither and thither; and for the last halfhour i have heard the rattle of railroad-cars, now dying away and then reviving like the beat of a partridge, conveying travellers from boston to the country. for i did not live so out of the world as that boy, who, as i hear, was put out to a farmer in the east part of the town, but ere long ran away and came home again, quite down at the heel and home-sick. he had never seen such a dull and out-of-the-way place; the folks were all gone off somewhere ; why, you couldn't even hear the whistle ! i doubt if there is such a place in massachusetts now :a sounds 105 “in truth, our village has become a butt for one of those fleet railroad shafts, and o'er our peaceful plain its soothing sound is-concord.” the fitchburg railroad touches the pond about a hundred rods south of where i dwell. i usually go to the village along its causeway, and am, as it were, related to society by this link. the men on the freight trains, who go over the whole length of the road, bow to me as to an old acquaintance, they pass me so often, and apparently they take me for an employee : and so i am. i too would fain be a track-repairer somewhere in the orbit of the earth. the whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter, sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer's yard, informing me that many restless city merchants are arriving within the circle of the town, or adventurous country traders from the other side. as they come under one horizon, they shout their warning to get off the track to the other, heard sometimes through the circles of two towns. here come your groceries, country; your rations, countrymen ! nor is there any man so independent on his farm that he can say them nay. and here's your pay for them ! screams the countryman's whistle ; timber like long battering-rams going twenty miles an hour against the city walls, and chairs enough to seat all the weary and heavy-laden that dwell within them. with such huge and lumbering civility the country hands a chair to the city. all the indian huckleberry hills are stripped, all the cranberry meadows are raked into the city. up comes the cotton ; down goes the woven cloth ; up comes the silk, down goes the woollen ; up come the books, but down goes the wit that writes them. when i meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with planetary motion,-or, rather, like a comet, for the beholder knows not if with that velocity and with that direction it will ever revisit this system, since its orbit does not look like a returning curve,--with its steam-cloud like a banner streaming ! behind in golden and silver wreaths, like many a downy cloud . which i have seen, high in the heavens, unfolding its masses to the light, -as if this travelling demigod, this cloud-compeller, would ere long take the sunset sky for the livery of his train ; when i hear the iron horse make the bills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils (what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put into the new mythology i don't know), it 106 walden seems as if the earth had got a race now worthy to inhabit it. if all were as it seems, and men made the elements their servants for noble ends! if the cloud that hangs over the engine were the perspiration of heroic deeds, or as beneficent as that which floats over the farmer's fields, then the elements and nature herself would cheerfully accompany men on their errands, and be their escort. i watch the passage of the morning cars with the same feeling that i do the rising of the sun, which is hardly more regular. their train of clouds stretching far behind and rising higher and higher, going to heaven while the cars are going to boston, conceals the sun for a minute and casts my distant field into the shade, a celestial train beside which the petty train of cars which hugs the earth is but the barb of the spear. the stabler of the iron horse was up early this winter morning by the light of the stars amid the mountains, to fodder and harness his steed. fire, too, was awakened thus early to put the vital heat in him and get him off. if the enterprise were as innocent as it is early ! if the snow lies deep, they strap on his snow-shoes, and with the giant plough, plough a furrow from the mountains to the seaboard, in which the cars, like a following drill-barrow, sprinkle all the restless men and floating merchandise in the country for seed. all day the fire-steed flies over the country, stopping only that his master may rest, and i am awakened by his tramp and defiant snort at midnight, when in some remote glen in the woods he fronts the elements incased in ice and snow; and he will reach his stall only with the morning star, to start once more on his travels without rest or slumber. or perchance, at evening, i hear him in his stable blowing off the superfluous energy of the day, that he may calm his nerves and cool his liver and brain for a few hours of iron slumber. if the enterprise were as heroic and commanding as it is protracted and unwearied ! far through unfrequented woods on the confines of towns, where once only the hunter penetrated by day, in the darkest night dart these bright saloons without the knowledge of their inhabitants ; this moment stopping at some brilliant stationhouse in town or city, where a social crowd is gathered, the next in the dismal swamp, scaring the owl and fox. the startings and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs in the village day. they go and come with such regularity and precision, and their whistle can be heard so far, that the farmers set their clocks by them, and thus one well-conducted institution regulates a whole country. have not men improved somewhat in punctuality sounds 107 > since the railroad was invented ? do they not talk and think faster in the depôt than they did in the stage-office? there is something electrifying in the atmosphere of the former place. i have been astonished at the miracles it has wrought; and some of my neighbours, who, i should have prophesied, once for all would never get to boston by so prompt a conveyance, are on hand when the bell rings. to do things “ railroad fashion” is now the by-word; and it is worth the while to be warned so often and so sincerely by any power to get off its track. there is no stopping to read the riot act, no firing over the heads of the mob in this case. we have constructed a fate, an atropos, that never turns aside. (let that be the name of your engine.) men are advertised that at a certain hour and minute these bolts will be shot toward particular points of the compass; yet it interferes with no man's business, and the children go to school on the other track. we live the steadier for it. we are all educated thus to be sons of tell. the air is full of invisible bolts. every path but your own is the path of fate. keep on your own track, then. what recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery. it does not clasp its hands and pray to jupiter. i see these men every day go about their business with more or less courage and content, doing more even than they suspect, and perchance better employed than they could have consciously devised. i am less affected by their heroism who stood up for half an hour in the front line at buena vista, than by the steady and cheerful valour of the men who inhabit the snow-plough for their winter quarters ; who have not merely the three o'clock in the morning courage, which bonaparte thought was the rarest, but whose courage does not go to rest so early, who go to sleep only when the storm sleeps or the sinews of their iron steed are frozen. on this morning of the great snow, perchance, which is still raging and chilling men's blood, i hear the muffled tone of their engine bell from out the fog-bank of their chilled breath, which announces that the cars are coming, without long delay, notwithstanding the veto of a new england north-east snowstorm, and i behold the ploughmen covered with snow and rime, their heads peering above the mould-board which is turning down other than daisies and the nests of field-mice, like boulders of the sierra nevada, that occupy an outside place in the universe. commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert, adventurous, and unwearied. it is very natural in its methods, withal, far more so than many fantastic enterprises and sentimental 108 walden а experiments, and hence its singular success. i am refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me, and i smell the stores which go dispensing their odours all the way from long wharf to lake champlain, reminding me of foreign parts, of coral reefs, and indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the extent of the globe. i feel more like a citizen of the world at the sight of the palm-leaf which will cover so many flaxen new england heads the next summer, the manilla hemp and cocoa-nut husks, the old junk, gunny bags, scrap iron, and rusty nails. this car-load of torn sails is more legible and interesting now than if they should be wrought into paper and printed books. who can write so graphically the history of the storms they have weathered as these rents have done? they are proof-sheets which need no correction. here goes lumber from the maine woods, which did not go out to sea in the last freshet, risen four dollars on the thousand because of what did go out or was split up; pine, spruce, cedar,-first, second, third, and fourth qualities, so lately all of one quality, to wave over the bear, and moose, nd caribou. next rolls thomaston lime, a prime lot, which will get far among the hills before it gets slacked. these rags in bales, of all hues and qualities, the lowest condition to which cotton and linen descend, the final result of dress, -of patterns which are now no longer cried up, unless it be in milwaukie, as those splendid articles, english, french, or american prints, ginghams, muslins, etc.-gathered from all quarters both of fashion and poverty, going to become paper of one colour or a few shades only, on which, forsooth, will be written tales of real life, high and low, and founded on fact! this closed car smells of salt fish, the strong new england and commercial scent, reminding me of the grand banks and the fisheries. who has not seen a salt fish, thoroughly cured for this world, so that nothing can spoil it, and putting the perseverance of the saints to the blush? with which you may sweep or pave the streets, and split your kindlings, and the teamster shelter himself and his lading against sun, wind, and rain behind it,--and the trader, as a concord trader once did, hang # up by his door for a sign when he commences business, until at last his oldest customer cannot tell surely whether it be animal, vegetable, or mineral, and yet it shall be as pure as a snowflake, and if it be put into a pot and boiled, will come out an excellent dun fish for a saturday's dinner. next, spanish hides, with the tails still preserving their twist and the angle of elevation they had when the oxen that wore them were careering over the pampas of the spanish main,-a type of all obstinacy, sounds 109 and evincing how almost hopeless and incurable are all constitutional vices. i confess, that practically speaking, when i have learned a man's real disposition, i have no hopes of changing it for the better or worse in this state of existence. as the orientals say, “a cur's tail may be warmed, and pressed, and bound round with ligatures, and after a twelve years' labour bestowed upon it, still it will retain its natural form.” the only effectual cure for such inveteracies as these tails exhibit to make glue of them, which i believe is what is usually done with them, and then they will stay put and stick. here is a hogshead of molasses or of brandy directed to john smith, cuttingsville, vermont, some trader among the green mountains, who imports for the farmers near his clearing, and now perchance stands over his bulk-head and thinks of the last arrivals on the coast, how they may affect the price for him, telling his customers at this moment, as he has told them twenty times before this morning, that he expects some by the next train of prime quality. it is advertized in the cuttingsville times. while these things go up other things come down. warned by the whizzing sound, i look up from my book and see some tall pine, hewn on far northern hills, which has winged its way over the green mountains and the connecticut, shot like an arrow through the township within ten minutes, and scarce another eye beholds it; going to be the mast of some great ammiral.” and hark ! here comes the cattle-train bearing the cattle of a thousand hills, sheepcots, stables, and cow-yards in the air, drovers with their sticks, and shepherd boys in the midst of their flocks, all but the mountain pastures, whirled along like leaves blown from the mountains by the september gales. the air is filled with the bleating of calves and sheep, and the hustling of oxen, as if a pastoral valley were going by. when the old bellwether at the head rattles his bell, the mountains do indeed skip like rams and the little hills like lambs. a car-load of drovers, too, in the midst, on a level with their droves now, their vocation gone, but still clinging to their useless sticks as their badge of office. but their dogs, where are they? it is a stampede to them; they are quite thrown out; they have lost the scent. methinks i hear them barking behind the peterboro' hills, or panting up the western slope of the green mountains. they will not be in at the death. their vocation, too, is gone. their fidelity and sagacity are below par now. they will slink back iio walden to their kennels in disgrace, or perchance run wild and strike a league with the wolf and the fox. so is your pastoral life whirled past and away. but the bell rings, and i must get off the track and let the cars go by'what's the railroad to me ? i never go to see where it ends. it fills a few hollows, and makes banks for the swallows, it sets the sand a-blowing, and the blackberries a-growing." but i cross it like a cart-path in the woods. i will not have my eyes put out and my ears spoiled by its smoke, and steam, and hissing. now that the cars are gone by and all the restless world with them, and the fishes in the pond no longer feel their rumbling, i am more alone than ever. for the rest of the long afternoon, perhaps, my meditations are interrupted only by the faint rattle of a carriage or team along the distant highway. sometimes, on sundays, i heard the bells, the lincoln, acton, bedford, or concord bell, when the wind was favourable, a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness. at a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. all sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it. there came to me in this case a melody which the air had strained, and which had conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the sound which the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale to vale. the echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. it is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood ; the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph. at evening, the distant lowing of some cow on the horizon beyond the woods sounded sweet and melodious, and at first i would mistake it for the voices of certain minstrels by whom i was sometimes serenaded, who might be straying over hill and dale"; but soon i was not unpleasantly disappointed when it was sounds iii a prolonged into the cheap and natural music of the cow. i do i not mean to be satirical, but to express my appreciation of those youths' singing, when i state that i perceived clearly that it was akin to the music of the cow, and they were at length one articulation of nature. regularly at half-past seven, in one part of the summer, after the evening train had gone by, the whip-poor-wills chanted their vespers for half an hour, sitting on a stump by my door, or upon the ridge pole of the house. they would begin to sing almost with as much precision as a clock, within five minutes of a particular time, referred to the setting of the sun, every evening. i had a rare opportunity to become acquainted with their habits. sometimes i heard four or five at once in different parts of the wood, by accident one a bar behind another, and so near me that i distinguished not only the cluck after each note, but often that singular buzzing sound like a fly in a spider's web, only proportionally louder. sometimes one would circle round and round me in the woods a few feet distant as if tethered by a string, when probably i was near its eggs. they sang at intervals throughout i the night, and were again as musical as ever just before and about dawn. when other birds are still the screech owls take up the strain, like mourning women their ancient u-lu-lu. their dismal scream is truly ben jonsonian. wise midnight hags! it is no honest and blunt tu-whit tu-who of the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn graveyard ditty, the mutual consolations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs and the delights of supernal love in the infernal groves. yet i love to hear their wailing, their doleful responses, trilled along the woodside ; reminding me sometimes of music and singing birds ; as if it were the dark and tearful side of music, the regrets and sighs that would fain be sung. they are the spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen souls that once in human shape nightly walked the earth and did the deeds of darkness, now expiating their sins with their wailing hymns or threnodies in the scenery of their transgressions. they give me a new sense of the variety and capacity of that nature which is our common dwelling. oh-0-0-0-0 that i never had been bor-y-r-y-n ! sighs one on this side of the pond, and circles with the restlessness of despair to some new perch on the grey oaks. then-that i never had been bor-y-r-y-n! echoes another on the farther side with tremulous sincerity, and bor-r-y-r-n! comes faintly from far in the lincoln woods. i was also serenaded by a hooting owl. near at hand you ii2 walden could fancy it the most melancholy sound in nature, as if she meant by this to stereotype and make permanent in her choir the dying moans of a human being,—some poor weak relic of mortality who has left hope behind, and howls like an animal, yet with human sobs, on entering the dark valley, made more awful by a certain gurgling melodiousness,-i find myself beginning with the letters gl when i try to imitate it,--expressive of a mind which has reached the gelatinous mildewy stage in the mortification of all healthy and courageous thought. it reminded me of ghouls and idiots and insane howlings. but now one answers from far woods in a strain made really melodious by distance,hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo ; and indeed for the most part it suggested only pleasing associations, whether heard by day or night, summer or winter. i rejoice that there are owls. let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. it is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized. they represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts whielt all have. all day the sun has shone on the surface of some savage swamp, where the single spruce stands hung with usnea lichens, and small hawks circulate above, and the chicadee lisps amid the evergreens, and the partridge and rabbit skulk beneath ; but now a more dismal and fitting day dawns, and a different race of creatures awakes to express the meaning of nature there. late in the evening i heard the distant rumbling of waggons over bridges,—a sound heard farther than almost any other at night,—the baying of dogs, and sometimes again the lowing of some disconsolate cow in a distant barnyard. in the meanwhile all the shore rang with the trump of bull-frogs, the sturdy spirits of ancient wine-bibbers and wassailers, still unrepentant, trying to sing a catch in their stygian lake,-if the walden nymphs will pardon the comparison, for though there are almost no weeds, there are frogs there,—who would fain keep up the hilarious rules of their old festal tables, though their voices have waxed hoarse and solemnly grave, mocking at mirth, and the wine has lost its flavour, and become only liquor to distend their paunches, and sweet intoxication never comes to drown the memory of the past, but mere saturation and waterloggedness and distention. the most aldermanic, with his chin upon a heart-leaf, which serves for a napkin to his drooling chaps, under this northern shore quaffs a deep draught of the once scorned water, and passes round a cup with the ejaculation tr-r-r-oonk, tr-y-r-oonk, tr-r-r-oonk ! sounds 113 > and straightway comes over the water from some distant cove the same pass-word repeated, where the next in seniority and girth has gulped down to his mark; and when this observance has made the circuit of the shores, then ejaculates the master of ceremonies, with satisfaction, tr-r-r-oonk! and each in his turn repeats the same down to the least distended, leakiest, and flabbiest paunched, that there be no mistake ; and then the bowl goes round again and again, until the sun disperses the morning mist, and only the patriarch is not under the pond, but vainly bellowing troonk from time to time, and pausing for a reply. i am not sure that ever i heard the sound of cock-crowing from my clearing, and i thought that it might be worth the while to keep a cockerel for his music merely, as a singing bird. the note of this once wild indian pheasant is certainly the most remarkable of any bird's, and if they could be naturalized without being domesticated, it would soon become the most famous sound in our woods, surpassing the clangour of the goose and the hooting of the owl; and then imagine the cackling of the hens to fill the pauses when their lords' clarions rested ! no wonder that man added this bird to his tame stock,—to say nothing of the eggs and drumsticks. to walk in a winter morning in a wood where these birds abounded, their native woods, and hear the wild cockerels crow on the trees, clear and shrill for miles over the resounding earth, drowning the feebler notes of other birds,-think of it! it would put nations on the alert. who would not be early to rise, and rise earlier and earlier every successive day of his life, till he became unspeakably healthy, wealthy, and wise? this foreign bird's note is celebrated by the poets of all countries along with the notes of their native songsters. all climates agree with brave chanticleer. he is more indigenous even than the natives. his health is ever good, his lungs are sound, his spirits never flag. even the sailor on the atlantic and pacific is awakened by his voice ; but its shrill sound never roused me from my slumbers. i kept neither dog, cat, cow, pig, nor hens, so that you would have said there was a deficiency of domestic sounds; neither the churn, nor the spinning-wheel, nor even the singing of the kettle, nor the hissing of the urn, nor children crying, to comfort one. an old-fashioned man would have lost his senses or died of ennui before this. not even rats in the wall, for they were starved out, or rather were never baited in,-only squirrels on the roof and under the floor, a whip-poor-will on the ridge-pole, a blue-jay screaming beneath the window, a hare or woodchuck under the house, a screech-owl or a cat-owl behind it, a flock of ң 114 walden wild geese or a laughing loon on the pond, and a fox to bark in the night. not even a lark or an oriole, those mild plantation birds, ever visited my clearing. no cockerels to crow now nor hens to cackle in the yard. noyard ! but unfenced nature reaching up to your very sills. a young forest growing up under your windows, and wild sumachs and blackberry vines breaking through your cellar; sturdy pitch-pines rubbing and creaking against the shingles for want of room, their roots reaching quite under the house. instead of a scuttle or a blind blown off in the gale, pine tree snapped off or torn up by the roots behind your house for fuel. instead of no path to the front yard gate in the great snow,-no gate,-no front yard,-and no path to the civilized world! a -a solitude this is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. i go and come with a strange liberty in nature, a part of herself. as i walk along the stony shore of the pond in my shirt sleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, and i see nothing special to attract me, all the elements are unusually congenial to me. the bullfrogs trump to usher in the night, and the note of the whip-poorwill is borne on the rippling wind from over the water. sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath ; yet, like the lake, my serenity is rippled, but not ruffled. these small waves raised by the evening wind are as remote from storm as the smooth reflecting surface. though it is now dark, the wind still blows and roars in the wood, the waves still dash, and some creatures lull the rest with their notes. the repose is never complete. the wildest animals do not repose, but seek their prey now; the fox, and skunk, and rabbit, now roam the fields and woods without fear. they are nature's watchmen—links which connect the days of animated life. when i return to my house i find that visitors have been there and left their cards—either a bunch of flowers, or a wreath of evergreen, or a name in pencil on a yellow walnut leaf or a chip. they who come rarely to the woods take some little piece of the forest into their hands to play with by the way, which they leave, either intentionally or accidentally. one has peeled a willow wand, woven it into a ring, and dropped it on my table. i could always tell if visitors had called in my absence, either by the bended twigs or grass, or the print of their shoes, and generally of what sex, or age, or quality they were by some slight trace left, as a flower dropped, or a bunch of grass plucked and thrown away, even as far off as the railroad, half a mile distant, or by the lingering odour of a cigar or pipe. nay, i was frequently notified of the passage of a traveller along the highway sixty rods off by the scent of his pipe. :. there is commonly sufficient space about us. our horizon is never quite at our elbows. the thick wood is not just at our door, nor the pond, but somewhat is always clearing, familiar and worn by us, appropriated and fenced in some way, and reclaimed from nature. for what reason have i this vast range a 115 116 walden a and circuit, some square miles of unfrequented forest, for my privacy, abandoned to me by men ? my nearest neighbour is a mile distant, and no house is visible from any place but the hilltops within half-a-mile of my own. i have my horizon bounded by woods all to myself; a distant view of the railroad where it touches the pond on the one hand, and of the fence which skirts the woodland road on the other. but for the most part it is as solitary where i live as on the prairies. it is as much asia or africa as new england. i have, as it were, my own sun, and moon, and stars, and a little world all to myself. at night there was never a traveller passed my house, or knocked at my door, more than if i were the first or last man, unless it were in the spring, when at long intervals some came from the village to fish for pouts,-they plainly fished much more in the walden pond of their own natures, and baited their hooks with darkness, but they soon retreated, usually with light baskets, and left “the world to darkness and to me," and the black kernel of the night was never profaned by any human neighbourhood. i believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, and christianity and candles have been introduced. yet i experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object, even for the poor misanthrope and most melancholy man. there can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature, and has his senses still. there was never yet such a storm, but it was æolian music to a healthy and innocent ear. nothing can rightly compel a simple and brave man to a vulgar sadness. while i enjoy the friendship of the seasons i trust that nothing can make life a burden to me)) the gentle rain which waters my beans and keeps me in the house today is not drear and melancholy, but good for me too. though it prevents my hoeing them, it is of far more worth than my hoeing. if it should continue so long as to cause the seeds to rot in the ground and destroy the potatoes in the low lands, it would still be good for the grass on the uplands, and, being good for the grass, it would be good for me. sometimes, when i compare myself with other men, it seems as if i were more favoured by the gods than they, beyond any deserts that i am conscious of--as if i had a warrant and surety at their hands which my fellows have not, and were especially guided and guarded. i do not flatter myself, but if it be possible they flatter me. i have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude, but > solitude 117 once, and that was a few weeks after i came to the woods, when, for an hour, i doubted if the near neighbourhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. to be alone was something unpleasant. but i was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery. . in the midst of a gentle rain, while these thoughts prevailed, i was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighbourhood insignificant, and i have never thought of them since. every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy, and befriended me. i was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that i thought no place could ever be strange to me again. mourning untimely consumes the sad ; few are their days in the land of the living, beautiful daughter of toscar.' some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rainstorms in the spring or fall, which confined me to the house for the afternoon as well as the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless roar and pelting ; when an early twilight ushered in a long evening in which many thoughts had time to take root and unfold themselves. in those driving north-east rains which tried the village houses so, when the maids stood ready with mop and pail in front entries to keep the deluge out, i sat behind my door in my little house, which was all entry, and thoroughly enjoyed its protection. in one heavy thunder-shower the lightning struck a large pitch-pine across the pond, making a very conspicuous and perfectly regular spiral groove from top to bottom, an inch or more deep, and four or five inches wide, as you would groove a walking-stick. i passed it again the other day, and was struck with awe on looking up and beholding that mark, now more distinct than ever, where a terrific and resistless bolt came down out of the harmless sky eight years ago. men frequently say to me, “i should think you would feel lonesome down there, and want to be nearer to folks, rainy and snowy days and nights especially." i am tempted to reply to such-this whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. how far apart, think > 118 walden i one you, dwell the two most distinct inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disc cannot be appreciated by our instruments ? why should i feel lonely? is not our planet in the milky way ? this which you put seems to me not to be the most important question. what sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary ? i have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another. what do we want most to dwell near to ? not to many men surely, the depôt, the post office, the bar-room, the meetinghouse, the school-house, the grocery, beacon hill, or the five points, where men most congregate, but to the perennial source of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots in that direction. this will vary with different natures, but this is the place where a wise man will dig his cellar. evening overtook one of my townsmen, who had accumulated what is called "a handsome property "—though i never got a ” fair view of it,--on the walden road, driving a pair of cattle to market, who inquired of me how i could bring my mind to give up so many of the comforts of life. i answered that i was very sure i liked it passably well ; i was not joking. and so i went home to my bed, and left him to pick his way through the darkness and the mud to brighton,-or bright-town, which place he would reach some time in the morning. any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a dead man makes indifferent all times and places. the place where that may occur is always the same, and indescribably pleasant to all for the most part we allow only outlying and transient circumstances to make our occasions. they are, in fact, the cause of our distraction. nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being. next to us the grandest laws are continually being executed. next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, we whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are. | how vast and profound is the influence of the subtile powers of heaven and of earth!'" “we seek to perceive them, and we not see them ; we seek to hear them, and we do not hear them ; identified with the substance of things, they cannot be separated from them.” they cause that in all the universe men purify and sanctify their hearts, and clothe themselves in their holiday garments to offer sacrifice and oblations to their ancestors. it is an ocean of subtile intelligences. they are everywhere, above us, on our left, on our right; they environ us on all sides." our senses. 66 solitude 119 we are the subjects of an experiment which is not a little interesting to me. can we not do without the society of our gossips a little while under these circumstances,-have our own thoughts to cheer us?) confucius says truly, “virtue does not remain as an abandoned orphan; it must of necessity have neighbours.” with thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. by a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent. we are not wholly involved in nature. i may be either the driftwood in the stream, or indra in the sky looking down on it. i may be affected by a theatrical exhibition ; on the other hand, i may not be affected by an actual event which appears to concern me much more. i only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections ; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which i can stand as remote from myself as from another. however intense my experience, i am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it; and that is no more i than it is you. when the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, . the spectator goes his way. it was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned. this doubleness may easily make us poor neighbours and friends sometimes. i find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. to be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. i love to be alone. /i never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. we are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. a man thinking, or working is always alone, let him be where he will. solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. the really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of cambridge college is as solitary as a dervish in the desert. the farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing and chopping, and not feel lonesome, because he is employed; but when he comes home at night he cannot sit down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but must be where he can see the folks,” and recreate, and, as he thinks, remunerate himself for his day's solitude ; and hence he wonders how the student can sit alone in the house all night and most of the day without ennui and “the blues”; but he does not realize that the student, though in the house, is still at work in his field, and chopping in his woods, as 66 120 walden > the farmer in his, and in turn seeks the same recreation and society that the latter does, though it may be a more condensed form of it. society is commonly too cheap. we meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. we meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. we have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war. we meet at the post office, and at the sociable, and about the fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another, and i think that we thus lose some respect for one another. certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communications. consider the girls in a factory-never alone, hardly in their dreams. it would be better if there were but one inhabitant to a square mile, as where i live. the value of a man is not in his skin, that we should touch him. i have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine and exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved by the grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness, his diseased imagination surrounded him, and which he believed to be real. so also, owing to bodily and mental health and strength, we may be continually cheered by a like but more normal and natural society, and come to know that we are never alone. i have a great deal of company in my house ; especially in the morning, when nobody calls. let me suggest a few comparisons, that some one may convey an idea of my situation. i am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than walden pond itself. what company has that lonely lake, i pray ? (and yet it has not the blue devils, but the blue angels in it, in the azure tint of its waters.) the sun is alone, except in thick weather, when there sometimes appear to be two, but one is a mock sun. god is alone,-but the devil, he is far from being alone ; he sees a great deal of company; he is legion. i am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a humble bee. i am no more lonely than the mill brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an april shower, or a january thaw, or the first spider in a new house. i have occasional visits in the long winter evenings, when the snow falls fast and the wind howls in the woods, from an old 2 solitude 121 settler and original proprietor, who is reported to have dug walden pond, and stoned it, and fringed it with pine woods : who tells me stories of old time and of new eternity; and between us we manage to pass a cheerful evening with social mirth and pleasant views of things, even without apples or cider,-a most wise and humorous friend, whom i love much, who keeps himself more secret than ever did goffe or whalley; and though he is thought to be dead, none can show where he is buried. an elderly dame, too, dwells in my neighbourhood, invisible to most persons, in whose odorous herb garden i love to stroll sometimes, gathering simples and listening to her fables; for she has a genius of unequalled fertility, and her memory runs back farther than mythology, and she can tell me the original of every fable, and on what fact every one is founded, for the incidents occurred when she was young. a ruddy and lusty old dame, who delights in all weathers and seasons, and is likely to outlive all her children yet. the indescribable innocence and beneficence of nature,-of sun, and wind, and rain, of summer and winter,—such health, such cheer, they afford for ever! and such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all nature would be affected, and the sun's brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a just cause grieve. shall i not have intelligence with the earth ? am i not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself ? what is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented ? not my or thy great-grandfather's, but our great-grandmother nature's universal, vegetable, botanic medicines, by which she has kept herself young always, outlived so many old parrs in her day, and fed her health with their decaying fatness. for my panacea, instead of one of those quack vials of a mixture dipped from acheron and the dead sea, which come out of those long shallow black-schooner-looking waggons which we sometimes see made to carry bottles, let me have a draught of undiluted morning air. morning air ! if men will not drink of this at the fountain-head of the day, why, then, we must even bottle up some and sell it in the shops, for the benefit of those who have lost their subscription ticket to morning time in this world. but remember, it will not keep quite till noonday even in the coolest cellar, but drive out the stopples long ere that and follow westward the steps of aurora. i am no worshipper of hygeia, who was the daughter of that old herb-doctor æsculapius, and who is 122 walden represented on monuments holding a serpent in one hand, and in the other a cup out of which the serpent sometimes drinks ; but rather of hebe, cup-bearer to jupiter, who was the daughter of juno and wild lettuce, and who had the power of restoring gods . and men to the vigour of youth. she was probably the only thoroughly sound-conditioned, healthy, and robust young lady that ever walked the globe, and whenever she came it was spring. visitors i think that i love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a blood-sucker for the time to any fullblooded man that comes in my way. i am naturally no hermit, but might possibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the barroom, if my business called me thither. i had three chairs in my house ; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. when visitors came in larger and unexpected numbers there was but the third chair for them all, but they generally economized the room by standing up. it is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain. i have had twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often parted without being aware that we had come very near to one another. many of our houses, both public and private, with their almost innumerable apartments, their huge halls and their cellars for the storage of wines and other munitions of peace, appear to me extravagantly large for their inhabitants. they are so vast and magnificent that the latter seem to be only vermin which infest them. i am surprised when the herald blows his summons. before some tremont, or astor, or middlesex house, to see come creeping out over the piazza for all inhabitants & ridiculous mouse, which soon again slinks into some hole in the pavement. one inconvenience i sometimes experienced in so small a house; the difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when we began to utter the big thoughts in big words. you want room for your thoughts to get into sailing trim, and run a course or two before they make their port. the bullet of your thought must have overcome its lateral and ricochet motion, and fallen into its last and steady course, before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may plough out again through the side of his head. also, our sentences wanted room to unfold and form their columns in the interval. individuals, like nations, must have suitable broad and natural boundaries, even a considerable neutral ground, between them. i have found it a singular luxury to talk across the pond to a companion on the opposite side. in my house we were so near that we could not begin to hear,—we could not speak low enough to be heard, as when you throw two stones into calm water so near that they break 123 124 walden each other's undulations. if we are merely loquacious and loud talkers, then we can afford to stand very near together, cheekby-jowl, and feel each other's breath ; but if we speak reservedly and thoughtfully, we want to be farther apart, that all animal heat and moisture may have a chance to evaporate. if we would enjoy the most intimate society with that in each of us which is without, or above, being spoken to, we must not only be silent, but commonly so far apart bodily that we cannot possibly hear each other's voice in any case. referred to this standard, speech is for the convenience of those who are hard of hearing; but there are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout. as the conversation began to assume a loftier and grander tone, we gradually shoved our chairs farther apart till they touched the wall in opposite corners, and then commonly there was not room enough. my “best room, however--my withdrawing-room--always ready for company, on whose carpet the sun rarely fell, was the pine wood behind my house. thither in summer days, when distinguished guests came, i took them, and a priceless domestic swept the floor, and dusted the furniture, and kept the things in order. if one guest came he sometimes partook of my frugal meal, and it was no interruption to conversation to be stirring a hastypudding, or watching the rising and maturing of a loaf of bread in the ashes, in the meanwhile. but if twenty came and sat in my house there was nothing said about dinner, though there might be bread enough for two, more than if eating were a forsaken habit; but we naturally practised abstinence; and this was never felt to be an offence against hospitality, but the most proper and considerate course. the waste and decay of physical life, which so often needs repair, seemed miraculously retarded in such a case, and the vital vigour stood its ground. i could entertain thus a thousand as well as twenty; and if any ever went away disappointed or hungry from my house when they found me at home, they may depend upon it that i sympathized with them at least. so easy is it, though many housekeepers doubt it, to establish new and better customs in the place of the old. you need not rest your reputation on the dinners you give. for my own part, i was never so effectually deterred from frequenting a man's house, by any kind of cerberus whatever, as by the parade one made about dining me, which i took to be a very polite and roundabout hint never to trouble him so again. i think i shall never revisit those scenes. i should be proud a visitors 125 to have for the motto of my cabin those lines of spenser which one of my visitors inscribed on a yellow walnut leaf for a card"arrivéd there, the little house they fill, no look for entertainment where none was ; rest is their feast, and all things at their will : the noblest mind the best contentment has.' so > a when winslow, afterward governor of the plymouth colony went with a companion on a visit of ceremony to massassoit on foot through the woods, and arrived tired and hungry at his lodge, they were well received by the king, but nothing was said about eating that day. when the night arrived, to quote their own words—“ he laid us on the bed with himself and his wife, they at the one end and we at the other, it being only plank, laid a foot from the ground, and a thin mat upon them. two more of his chief men, for want of room, pressed by and upon us ; that we were worse weary of our lodging than of our journey.” at one o'clock the next day massassoit“ brought two fishes that he had shot,” about thrice as big as a bream; “these being boiled, there were at least forty looked for a share in them. the most ate of them. this meal only we had in two nights and a day; and had not one of us bought a partridge, we had taken our journey fasting.” fearing that they would be light-headed for want of food and also sleep, owing to “the savages' barbarous singing (for they used to sing themselves asleep)," and that they might get home while they had strength to travel, they departed. as for lodging, it is true they were but poorly entertained, though what they found an inconvenience was no doubt intended for an honour; but as far as eating was concerned, i do not see how the indians could have done better. they had nothing to eat themselves, and they were wiser than to think that apologies could supply the place of food to their guests; so they drew their belts tighter and said nothing about it. another time when winslow visited them, it being a season of plenty with them, there was no deficiency in this respect. as for men, they will hardly fail one anywhere. i had more visitors while i lived in the woods than at any other period of my life; i mean that i had some. i met several there under more favourable circumstances than i could anywhere else. but fewer came to see me upon trivial business. in this respect, my company was winnowed by my mere distance from town. i had withdrawn so far within the great ocean of solitude, into which the rivers of society empty, that for the most part, so far 126 walden a as my needs were concerned, only the finest sediment was deposited around me. beside, there were wafted to me evidences of unexplored and uncultivated continents on the other side. who should come to my lodge this morning but a true homeric or paphlagonian man,-he had so suitable and poetic a name that i am sorry i cannot print it here, a canadian, a woodchopper, and post-maker, who can hole fifty posts in a day, who made his last supper on a woodchuck which his dog caught. he, too, has heard of homer, and, “if it were not for books," would not know what to do rainy days,” though perhaps he has not read one wholly through for many rainy seasons. some priest who could pronounce the greek itself taught him to read his verse in the testament in his native parish far away ; and now i must translate to him, while he holds the book, achilles' reproof to patroclus for his sad countenance. “why are you in tears, patroclus, like a young girl ? "5) “ or ave you alone heard some news from phthia ? they say that menotius lives yet, son of actor, and peleus lives, son of æacus, among the myrmidons, either of whom having died, we should greatly grieve." he says, “ that's good.” he has a great bundle of white-oak bark under his arm for a sick man, gathered this sunday morning. “i suppose there's no harm in going after such a thing to-day, says he. (to him homer was a great writer, though what his writing was about he did not know. a more simple and natural man it would be hard to find. vice and disease, which cast such a sombre moral hue over the world, seemed to have hardly any existence for him.) he was about twenty-eight years old, and had left canada and his father's house a dozen years before to work in the states, and earn money to buy a farm with at last, perhaps in his native country. he was cast in the coarsest mould ;) a stout but sluggish body, yet gracefully carried, with a thick sunburnt neck, dark bushy hair, and dull, sleepy blue eyes, which were occasionally lit up with expression. he wore a flat grey cloth cap, a dingy wool-coloured greatcoat, and cowhide boots. he was a great consumer of meat, usually carrying his dinner to his work a couple of miles past my house—for he chopped all summer-in a tinpail; cold meats, often cold woodchucks, and coffee in a stone bottle which dangled by a string from his belt; and sometimes he offered me a drink. (he came along early, crossing my bean-field, though without anxiety or haste to get to his work, such as yankees exhibit. he wasn't visitors 127 a-going to hurt himself. he didn't care if he only earned his board. frequently he would leave his dinner in the bushes, when his dog had caught a woodchuck by the way, and go back a mile and a half to dress it and leave it in the cellar of the house where he boarded, after deliberating first for half an hour whether he could not sink it in the pond safely till nightfall—loving to dwell long upon these themes. he would say, as he went by in the morning, “ how thick the pigeons are! if working every day were not my trade, i could get all the meat i should want by hunting,-pigeons, woodchucks, rabbits, partridges,—by gosh! i could get all i should want for a week in one day.” he was a skilful chopper, and indulged in some flourishes and ornaments in his art. he cut his trees level and close to the ground, that the sprouts which came up afterwards might be more vigorous and a sled might slide over the stumps; and instead of leaving a whole tree to support his corded wood, he would pare it away to a slender stake or splinter which you could break off with your hand at last. (he interested me because he was so quiet and solitary, and so happy withal; a well of good humour and contentment which overflowed at his eyes. his mirth was without alloy. sometimes i saw him at his work in the woods, felling trees, and he would greet me with a laugh of inexpressible satisfaction, and a salutation in canadian french, though he spoke english as well. when i approached him he would suspend his work, and with halfsuppressed mirth lie along the trunk of a pine which he had felled, and, peeling off the inner bark, roll it up into a ball and chew it while he laughed and talked. such an exuberance of animal spirits had he that he sometimes tumbled down and rolled on the ground with laughter at anything which made him think and tickled him. looking round upon the trees he would exclaim—“ by george ! i can enjoy myself well enough here chopping; i want no better sport. sometimes, when at leisure, he amused himself all day in the woods with a pocket pistol, firing salutes to himself at regular intervals as he walked. in the winter he had a fire by which at noon he warmed his coffee in a kettle ; and as he sat on a log to eat his dinner, the chicadees would sometimes come round and alight on his arm and peck at the potato in his fingers ; and he said that he “liked to have the little fellers about him.” in him the animal man chiefly was developed. in physical endurance and contentment he was cousin to the pine and the rock. i asked him once if he was not sometimes tired at night, 128 walden if you after working all day; and he answered, with a sincere and serious look, gorrappit, i never was tired in my life." but the intellectual and what is called spiritual man in him were slumbering as in an infant. he had been instructed only in that innocent and ineffectual way in which the catholic priests teach the aborigines, by which the pupil is never educated to the degree of consciousness, but only to the degree of trust and reverence, and a child is not made a man, but kept a child. when nature made him, she gave him a strong body and contentment for his portion, and propped him on every side with reverence and reliance, that he might live out his threescore years and ten a child. he was so genuine and unsophisticated that no introduction would serve to introduce him, more than if you introduced a woodchuck to your neighbour. he had got to find him out as you did. he would not play any part. men paid him wages for work, and so helped to feed and clothe him ; but he never exchanged opinions with them. he was so simply and naturally humble—if he can be called humble who never aspires-that humility was no distinct quality in him, nor could he conceive of it. wiser men were demigods to him. told him that such a one was coming, he did as if he thought that anything so grand would expect nothing of himself, but take all the responsibility on itself, and let him be forgotten still. he never heard the sound of praise. he particularly reverenced the writer and the preacher. their performances were miracles. when i told him that i wrote considerably, he thought for a long time that it was merely the handwriting which i meant, for he could write a remarkably good hand himself. i sometimes found the name of his native parish handsomely written in the snow by the highway, with the proper french accent, and knew that he had passed. i asked him if he ever wished to write his thoughts. he said that he had read and written letters for those who could not, but he never tried to write thoughts-no, he could not, he could not tell what to put first, it would kill him, and then there was spelling to be attended to at the same time! i heard that a distinguished wise man and reformer asked him if he did not want the world to be changed ; but he answered with a chuckle of surprise, in his canadian accent, not knowing that the question had ever been entertained before, "no, i like it well enough.” it would have suggested many things to a philosopher to have dealings with him. to a stranger he appeared to know nothing of things in general; yet i sometimes a visitors 129 saw in him a man whom i had not seen before, and i did not know whether he was as wise as shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child—whether to suspect him of a fine poetic consciousness or of stupidity. a townsman told me that when he met him sauntering through the village in his small close-fitting cap, and whistling to himself, he reminded him of a prince in disguise. his only books were an almanac and an arithmetic, in which last he was considerably expert. the former was a sort of cyclopædia to him, which he supposed to contain an abstract of human knowledge, as indeed it does to a considerable extent. i loved to sound him on the various reforms of the day, and he never failed to look at them in the most simple and practical light. he had never heard of such things before. could he do without factories? i asked. he had worn the home-made vermont grey, he said, and that was good. could he dispense with tea and coffee? did this country afford any beverage beside water? he had soaked hemlock leaves in water and drank it, and thought that was better than water in warm weather. when i asked him if he could do without money, he showed the convenience of money in such a way as to suggest and coincide with the most philosophical accounts of the origin of this institution, and the very derivation of the word pecunia. if an ox were his property, and he wished to get needles and thread at the store, he thought it would be inconvenient and impossible soon to go on mortgaging some portion of the creature each time to that amount. he could defend many institutions better than any philosopher, because, in describing them as they concerned him, he gave the true reason for their prevalence, and speculation had not suggested to him any other. at another time, hearing plato's ) definition of a man,-a biped without feathers, -and that one exhibited a cock plucked and called it plato's man, he thought it an important difference that the knees bent the wrong way. he would sometimes exclaim, “how i love to talk! by george, i could talk all day!" i asked him once, when i had not seen him for many months, if he had got a new idea this summer: “ good lord !” said he, a man that has to work as i do, if he does not forget the ideas he has had, he will do well. maybe, the man you hoe with is inclined to race; then, by gorry, your mind must be there ; you think of weeds.” he would sometimes ask me first on such occasions, if i had made any improvement. one winter day i asked him if he was always satisfied with himself, wishing to suggest a substitute within him for the priest without, and some higher motive for living. “satisfied ! " i 66 130 walden 2 said he, some men are satisfied with one thing, and some with another. one man, perhaps, if he has got enough, will be satisfied to sit all day with his back to the fire and his belly to the table, by george !” yet i never, by any maneuvring, could get him to take the spiritual view of things; the highest that he appeared to conceive of was a simple expediency, such as you might expect an animal to appreciate ; and this, practically, is true of most men. if i suggested any improvement in his mode of life, he merely answered, without expressing any regret, that it was too late. yet he thoroughly believed in honesty and the like virtues. there was a certain positive originality, however slight, to be detected in him, and i occasionally observed that he was thinking for himself and expressing his own opinion a phenomenon so rare that i would any day walk ten miles to observe it; and it amounted to the reorigination of many of the institutions of society. though he hesitated, and perhaps failed to express himself distinctly, he always had a presentable thought behind. yet his thinking was so primitive and immersed in his animal life, that, though more promising than a merely learned man's, it rarely ripened to anything which can be reported. he suggested that there might be men of genius in the lowest grades of life, however permanently humble and illiterate, who take their own view always, or do not pretend to see at all—who are as bottomless even as walden pond was thought to be, though they may be dark and muddy, many a traveller came out of his way to see me and the inside of my house, and, as an excuse for calling, asked for a glass of water. i told them that i drank at the pond, and pointed thither, offering to lend them a dipper. far off as i lived, i was not exempted from that annual visitation which occurs, methinks, about the first of april, when everybody is on the move ; and i had my share of good luck, though there were some curious specimens among my visitors. half-witted men from the almshouse and elsewhere came to see me; but i endeavoured to make them exercise all the wit they had, and make their confessions to me; in such cases making wit the theme of our conversation ; and so was compensated. indeed, i found some of them to be wiser than the so-called overseers of the poor and select men of the town, and thought it was time that the tables were turned: with respect to wit, i learned that there was not much difference between the half and the whole. one day, in particular, an inoffensive, simple-minded pauper, whom with others i had often visitors 131 course seen used as fencing stuff, standing or sitting on a bushel in the fields to keep cattle and himself from straying, visited me, and expressed a wish to live as i did. he told me, with the utmost simplicity and truth, quite superior, or rather inferior, to anything that is called humility, that he was “ deficient in intellect." these were his words. the lord had made him so, yet he supposed the lord cared as much for him as for another. “ i have always been so," said he, “ from my childhood ; i never had much mind; i was not like other children ; i am weak in the head. it was the lord's will, i suppose. and there he was to prove the truth of his words. he was a metaphysical puzzle to me. i have rarely met a fellow-man on such promising ground-it was so simple and sincere, and so true, all that he said. and, true enough, in proportion as he appeared to humble himself was he exalted. i did not know at first but it was the result of a wise policy. it seemed that from such a basis of truth and frankness as the poor weak-headed pauper had laid, our intercourse might go forward to something better than the interof sages. i had some guests from those not reckoned commonly among the town's poor, but who should be—who are among the world's poor, at any rate-guests who appeal, not to your hospitality, but to your hospitalality; who earnestly wish to be helped, and preface their appeal with the information that they are resolved, for one thing, never to help themselves. i require of a visitor that he be not actually starving, though he may have the very best appetite in the world, however he got it. (objects of charity are not guests. men who did not know when their visit had terminated, though i went about my business again, answer. ing them from greater and greater remoteness.) men of almost every degree of wit called on me in the migrating season. some who had more wits than they knew what to do with—runaway slaves, with plantation manners, who listened from time to time, like the fox in the fable, as if they heard the hounds a-baying on their track, and looked at me beseechingly, as much as to say“ o christian, will you send me back ? one real runaway slave, among the rest, whom i had helped to forward toward the north star. men of one idea, like a hen with one chicken, and that a duckling; men of a thousand ideas, and unkempt heads, like those hens which are made to take charge of a hundred chickens, all in pursuit of one bug, a score of them lost in every morning's dew,--and become frizzled and > 132 walden a mangy in consequence ; men of ideas instead of legs, a sort of intellectual centipede that made you crawl all over. one man proposed a book in which visitors should write their names, as at the white mountains ; but, alas ! i have too good a memory to make that necessary. i could not but notice some of the peculiarities of my visitors. girls and boys and young women generally seemed glad to be in the woods. they looked in the pond and at the flowers, and improved their time. men of business, even farmers, thought only of solitude and employment, and of the great distance at which i dwelt from something or other; and though they said that they loved a ramble in the woods occasionally, it was obvious that they did not. restless, committed men, whose time was all taken up in getting a living or keeping it ; ministers who spoke of god as if they enjoyed a monopoly of the subject, who could not bear all kinds of opinions ; doctors, lawyers, uneasy housekeepers who pried into my cupboard and bed when i was out,-how came mrs. to know that my sheets were not as clean as hers ? -young men who had ceased to be young, and had concluded that it was safest to follow the beaten track of the professions, -all those generally said that it was not possible to do so much good in my position. ay! there was the rub. the old and infirm and the timid, of whatever age or sex, thought most of sickness, and sudden accident and death; to them life seemed full of danger--what danger is there if you don't think of any ?and they thought that a prudent man would carefully select the safest position, where dr. b-might be on hand at a moment's warning. to them the village was literally a com-munity, a league for mutual defence, and you would suppose that they would not go a-huckleberrying without a medicine chest. the amount of it is, if a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. a man sits as many risks as he runs. finally, there were the self-styled reformers, the greatest bores of all, who thought that i was for ever singing“this is the house that i built ; this is the man that lives in the house that i built ;" but they did not know that the third line was “ these are the folks that worry the man that lives in the house that i built.”. i did not fear the hen-harriers, for i kept no chickens, but i feared the men-harriers rather. 1 visitors 133 i had more cheering visitors than the last. children came a-berrying, railroad men taking a sunday morning walk in clean shirts, fishermen and hunters, poets and philosophers, in short, all honest pilgrims, who came out to the woods for freedom's sake, and really left the village behind, i was ready to greet with“welcome, englishmen! welcome, englishmen!” for i had had communication with that race. the bean-field a meanwhile my beans, the length of whose rows, added together, was seven miles already planted, were impatient to be hoed, for the earliest had grown considerably before the latest were in the ground ; indeed, they were not easily to be put off. what was the meaning of this so steady and self-respecting, this small herculean labour, i knew not. i came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than i wanted. they attached me to the earth, and so i got strength like antæus. but why should i raise them? only heaven knows. this was my curious labour all summer,-to make this portion of the earth's surface, which had yielded only cinquefoil, blackberries, johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wild fruits and pleasant flowers, produce instead this pulse. what shall i learn of beans, or beans of me? i cherish them, i hoe them, early and late i have an eye to them; and this is my day's work. it is a fine broad leaf to look on. my auxiliaries are the dews and rains which water this dry soil, and what fertility is in the soil itself, which for the most part is lean and effete. my enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks. the last have nibbled for me a quarter of an acre clean. but what right had i to oust johnswort and the rest, and break up their ancient herb garden? soon, however, the remaining beans will be too tough for them, and go forward to meet new foes. when i was four years old, as i well remember, i was brought from boston to this my native town, through these very woods and this field, to the pond. it is one of the oldest scenes stamped on my memory. and now to-night my flute has waked the echoes over that very water. the pines still stand here, older than i; or, if some have fallen, i have cooked my supper with their stumps, and a new growth is rising all around, preparing another aspect for new infant eyes. almost the same johnswort springs from the same perennial root in this pasture, and even i have at length helped to clothe that fabulous landscape of my infant dreams, and one of the results of my presence and influence is seen in these bean leaves, corn blades, and potato vines. i planted about two acres and a-half of upland ; and as it was only fifteen years since the land was cleared, and i myself had got out two or three cords of stumps, i did not give it any manure ; 134 the bean-field 135 2 a but in the course of the summer it appeared by the arrow-heads which i turned up in hoeing, that an extinct nation had anciently dwelt here and planted corn and beans ere white men came to clear the land, and so, to some extent, had exhausted the soil for this very crop. before yet any woodchuck or squirrel had run across the road, or the sun had got above the shrub oaks, while all the dew was ong though the farmers warned me against it,i would advise you to do all your work if possible while the dew is on, i began to level the ranks of haughty weeds in my bean-field and throw dust upon their heads. early in the morning i worked barefooted, dabbling like a plastic artist in the dewy and crumbling sand, but later in the day the sun blistered my feet. there the sun lighted me to hoe beans, pacing slowly backward and forward over that yellow gravelly upland, between the long green rows, fifteen rods, the one end terminating in a shrub oak copse where i could rest in the shade, the other in a blackberry field where the green berries deepened their tints by the time i had made another bout. removing the weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean stems, and encouraging this weed which i had sown, making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and millet grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass,—this was my daily work. as ijhad little aid from horses or cattle, or hired men or boys, or improved implements of husbandry, i was much slower, and became much more intimate with my beans than usual. but labour of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness. it has a constant and imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a classic result. agricola laboriosus was i to travellers bound westward through lincoln and wayland to nobody knows where ; they sitting at their ease in gigs, with elbows on knees, and reins loosely hanging in festoons ; i the home-staying, laborious native of the soil. but soon my homestead was out of their sight and thought. it was the only open and cultivated field for a great distance on either side of the road, so they made the most of it; and sometimes the man in the field heard more of travellers' gossip and comment than was meant for his ear : “ beans so late! peas so late ! for i continued to plant when others had began to hoe,—the minis. terial husbandman had not suspected it. “corn, my boy, for , fodder; corn for fodder." does he live there? asks the black bonnet of the grey coat; and the hard-featured farmer reins up his grateful dobbin to inqiure what you are doing where he sees 7 a very 136 walden a no manure in the ſurrow, and recommends a little chip dirt, or any little waste stuff, or it may be ashes or plaster. but here were two acres and a-half of furrows, and only a hoe for cart and two hands to draw it,—there being an aversion to other carts and horses, -and chip dirt far away. fellow-travellers as they rattled by compared it aloud with the fields which they had passed, so that i came to know how i stood in the agricultural world. this was one field not in mr. coleman's report. and, by the way, who estimates the value of the crop which nature yields in the still wider fields unimproved by man? the crop of english hay is carefully weighed, the moisture calculated, the silicates and the potash ; but in all dells and pond holes in the woods and pastures and swamps grows a rich and various crop only unreaped by man. mine was, as it were, the connecting link between wild and cultivated fields; as some states are civilized, and others half-civilized, and others savage or barbarous, as my field was, though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated field. they were beans cheerfully returning to their wild and primitive state that i cultivated, and my hoe played the rans des vaches for them. near at hand, upon the topmost spray of a birch, sings the brown-thrasher-or red mavis, as some love to call him-all the morning, glad of your society, that would find out another farmer's field if yours were not here. while you are planting the seed, he cries,—“ drop it, drop it-cover it up, cover it up, pull it up, pull it up, pull it up. but this was not corn, and so it was safe from such enemies as he. you may wonder what his rigmarole, his amateur paganini performances on one string or on twenty, have to do with your planting, and yet prefer it to leached ashes or plaster. it was a cheap sort of top-dressing in which i had entire faith. as i drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe, i disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years lived under these heavens, and their small implements of war and hunting were brought to the light of this modern day. they lay mingled with other natural stones, some of which bore the marks of having been burned by indian fires, and some by the sun, and also bits of pottery and glass brought hither by the recent cultivators of the soil. when my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labour which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. it was no longer beans that i hoed nor i that hoed beans ; and i remembered with as much pity as pride, if i remembered at 7 the bean-field 137 and a all, my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios. the night-hawk circled overhead in the sunny afternoons for i sometimes made a day of it-like a mote in the eye, or in heaven's eye, falling from time to time with a swoop sound as if the heavens were rent, torn at last to very rags and tatters, and yet a seamless cope remained ; small imps that fill the air and lay their eggs on the ground on bare sand or rocks on the tops of hills, where few have found them ; graceful and slender like ripples caught up from the pond, as leaves are raised by the wind to float in the heavens ; such kindredship is in nature. the hawk is aerial brother of the wave which he sails over and surveys, those his perfect air-inflated wings answering to the elemental unfledged pinions of the sea. or sometimes i watched a pair of hen-hawks circling high in the sky, alternately soaring and descending, approaching and leaving one another, as if they were the embodiment of my own thoughts. or i was attracted by the passage of wild pigeons from this wood to that, with a slight quivering winnowing sound and carrier haste ; or from under a rotten stump my hoe turned up a sluggish, portentous, and outlandish spotted salamander, a trace of egypt and the nile, yet our contemporary, when i paused to lean on my hoe, these sounds and sights i heard and saw anywhere in the row, a part of the inexhaustible entertainment which the country offers. on gala days the town fires its great guns, which echo like popguns to these woods, and some waifs of martial music occasionally penetrate thus far. to me, away there in my bean-field at the other end of the town, the big guns sounded as if a puff-ball had burst; and when there was a military turn-out of which i was ignorant, i have sometimes had a vague sense all the day of some sort of itching and disease in the horizon, as if some eruption would break out there soon-either scarlatina or canker-rash-until at length some more favourable puff of wind, making haste over the fields and up the wayland road, brought me information of the trainers.” it seemed by the distant hum as if somebody's bees had swarmed, and that the neighbours, according to virgil's advice, by a faint tintinnabulum upon the most sonorous of their domestic utensils, were endeavouring to call them down into the hive again. and when the sound died quite away, and the hum had ceased, and the most favourable breezes told no tale, i knew that they had got the last drone of them all safely into the middlesex hive, and that now their minds were bent on the honey with which it was smeared. i felt proud to know that the liberties of massachusetts and of 138 walden our fatherland were in such safe keeping ; and as i turned to my hoeing again i was filled with an inexpressible confidence, and pursued my labour cheerfully, with a calm trust in the future. when there were several bands of musicians, it sounded as if all the village was a vast bellows, and all the buildings expanded and collapsed alternately with a din. but sometimes it was a really noble and inspiring strain that reached these woods, and the trumpet that sings of fame, and i felt as if i could spit a mexican with a good relish,—for why should we always stand for trifles?and looked round for a woodchuck or a skunk to exercise my chivalry upon. these martial strains seemed as far away as palestine, and reminded me of a march of crusaders in the horizon, with a slight tantivy and tremulous motion of the elmtree tops which overhang the village. this was one of the great days; though the sky had from my clearing only the same everlasting great look that it wears daily. it was a singular experience that long acquaintance which i cultivated with beans, what with planting and hoeing, and harvesting, and threshing, and picking over, and selling them,--the last was the hardest of all,i might add eating, for i did taste. i was determined to know beans. when they were growing, i used to hoe from five o'clock in the morning till noon, and commonly spent the rest of the day about other affairs. consider the intimate and curious acquaintance one makes with various kinds of weeds,it will bear some iteration in the account, for there is no little iteration in the labour,--disturbing their delicate organizations so ruthlessly, and making such invidious distinctions with his hoe, levelling whole ranks of one species and sedulously cultivating another. that's roman wormwood,-that's pigweed, — that's sorrel,--that's piper-grass,-have at him, chop him up, turn his roots upward to the sun, don't let him have a fibre in the shade; if you do, he'll turn himself t'other side up and be as green as a leek in two days. a long war, not with cranes, but with weeds, those trojans who had sun, and rain, and dews on their side. daily the beans saw me come to their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of their enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy dead. many a lusty crest-waving hector, that towered a whole foot above his crowding comrades, fell before my weapon. those summer days which some of my contemporaries devoted to the fine arts in boston or rome, and others to contemplation in india, and others to trade in london or new york, i thus, with the other farmers of new england, devoted to husbandry. not that i wanted beans to eat, for i am by nature a pythagorean, so far 9 the bean-field 139 60 as beans are concerned, whether they mean porridge or voting, and exchanged them for rice; but, perchance, as some must work in fields if only for the sake of tropes and expression, to serve a parable-maker one day. it was on the whole a rare amusement, which, continued too long, might have become a dissipation. though i gave them no manure, and did not hoe them all once, i hoed them unusually well as far as i went, and was paid for it in the end, " there being in truth," as evelyn says, no compost or lætation whatsoever comparable to this continual motion, repastination, and turning of the mould with the spade.” “the earth,” he adds elsewhere, “especially if fresh, has, a certain magnetism in it, by which it attracts the salt, power, or virtue (call it either) which gives it life, and is the logic of all the labour and stir we keep about it, to sustain us ; all dungings and other sordid temperings being but the vicars succedaneous to this improvement. moreover, this being one of those "worn-out and exhausted lay fields which enjoy their sabbath,” had perchance, as sir kenelm digby thinks likely, attracted “ vital spirits" from the air. i harvested twelve bushels of beans. but to be more particular, for it is complained that mr. coleman has reported chiefly the expensive experiments of gentlemen farmers, my outgoes werefor a hoe ploughing, harrowing, and furrowing beans for seed potatoes , peas turnip seed white line for crow fence horse cultivator and boy three hours horse and cart to get crop po 54 7 50, too much. 3 121 1 33 0 40 0 06 0 02 1 00 075 99 in all $14 721 . my income was (patrem familias vendacem, non emacem esse oportet), from nine bushels and twelve quarts of beans sold five large potatoes nine small grass stalks $16 94 2 50 2 25 100 0 75 in all $23 44 leaving a pecuniary profit, as i have elsewhere said, of $8 71} 140 walden this is the result of my experience in raising beans. plant the common small white bush bean about the first of june, in rows three feet by eighteen inches apart, being careful to select fresh, round, and unmixed seed. first look out for worms, and supply vacancies by planting anew. then look out for woodchucks, if it is an exposed place, for they will nibble off the earliest tender leaves almost clean as they go ; and again, when the young tendrils make their appearance, they have notice of it, and will sbear them off with both buds and young pods, sitting erect like a squirrel. but above all harvest as early as possible, if you would escape frosts and have a fair and saleable crop; you may save much loss by this means. this further experience also i gained. i said to myself, i will i not plant beans and corn with so much industry another summer, but such seeds, if the seed is not lost, as sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith, innocence, and the like, and see if they will not grow in this soil, even with less toil and manurance, and sustain me, for surely it has not been exhausted for these crops. alas ! i said this to myself ; but now another summer is gone, and another and another, and i am obliged to say to you, reader, that the seeds which i planted, if indeed they were the seeds of those virtues, were worm-eaten or had lost their vitality, and so did not come up. commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave or timid. this generation is very sure to plant corn and beans each new year precisely as the indians did centuries ago and taught the first settlers to do, as if there were a fate in it. i saw an old man the other day, to my astonishment, making the holes with a hoe for the seventieth time at least, and not for himself to lie down in ! but why should not the new englander try new adventures, and not lay so much stress on his grain, his potato and grass crop, and his orchards,-raise other crops than these ? why concern ourselves so much about our beans for seed, and not be concerned at all about a new generation of men ? we should really be fed and cheered if when we met a man we were sure to see that some of the qualities which i have named, which we all prize more than those other productions, but which are for the most part broadcast and floating in the air, had taken root and grown in him. here comes such a subtile and ineffable quality, for instance, as truth or justice, though the slightest amount or new variety of it, along the road. our ambassadors should be instructed to send home such seeds as these, and congress help to distribute them over all the land. we should never stand upon ceremony with sincerity. we should never cheat and insult and banish one > the bean-field 141 another by our meanness, if there were present the kernel of worth and friendliness. we should not meet thus in haste. most men i do not meet at all, for they seem not to have time ; they are busy about their beans. we would not deal with a man thus plodding ever, leaning on a hoe or a spade as a staff between his work, not as a mushroom, but partially risen out of the earth, something more than erect, like swallows alighted and walking on the ground“and as he spake, his wings would now and then spread, as he meant to fly, then close again," so that we should suspect that we might be conversing with an angel. bread may not always nourish us, but it always does us good ; it even takes stiffness out of our joints, and makes us supple and buoyant, when we knew not what ailed us, to recognise any generosity in man or nature, to share any unmixed and heroic joy ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry was once a sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us, our object being to have large farms and large crops merely. we have no festival, nor procession, nor ceremonyi not excepting our cattle shows and so-called thanksgivings, by which the farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is reminded of its sacred origin. it is the premium and the feast which tempt him. he sacrifices not to ceres and the terrestrial jove, but to the infernal plutus rather. by avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the former leads the meanest of lives. he knows nature but as a robber. cato says that the profits of agriculture are particularly pious or just (maximeque pius quæstus), and according to varo the old romans called the same earth mother and ceres, and thought that they who cultivated it led a pious and useful life, and that they alone were left of the race of king saturn." we are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cultivated fields, and on the prairies and forests without distinction. they all reflect and absorb his rays alike, and the former make but a small part of the glorious picture which he beholds in his daily course. in his view the earth is all equally cultivated like a garden. therefore we should receive the benefit of his light and heat with a corresponding trust and magnanimity. what 66 3 142 walden though i value the seed of these beans, and harvest that in the fall of the year ? this broad field which i have looked at so long looks not to me as a principal cultivator, but away from me to influences more genial to it, which water and make it green. these beans have results which are not harvested by me. do they not grow for woodchucks partly? the ear of wheat (in latin spica, obsoletely speca, from spe, hope) should not be the only hope of the husbandman ; its kernel or grain (granum, from gerendo, bearing) is not all that it bears. how, then, can our harvest fail ? shall i not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds? it matters little comparatively whether the fields fill the farmer's barns. the true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labour with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first but his last fruits also. the village after hoeing, or perhaps reading and writing, in the forenoon, i usually bathed again in the pond, swimming across one of its coves for a stint, and washed the dust of labour from my person, or smoothed out the last wrinkle which study had made, and for the afternoon was absolutely free. every day or two i strolled to the village to bear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there, circulating either from mouth to mouth, or from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken in homoeopathic doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs. as i walked in the woods to see the birds and squirrels, so i walked in the village to see the men and boys ; instead of the wind among the pines i heard the carts rattle. in one direction from my house there was a colony of muskrats in the river meadows; under the grove of elms and buttonwoods in the other horizon was a village of busy men, as curious to me as if they had been prairie dogs, each sitting at the mouth of its burrow, or running over to a neighour's to gossip. i went there frequently to observe their habits. the village appeared to me a great news-room ; and on one side, to support it, as once at redding & company's on state street, they kept nuts and raisins, or salt and meal, and other groceries. some have such a vast appetite for the former commodity—that is, the news-and such sound digestive organs, that they can sit for ever in public avenues without stirring, and let it simmer and whisper through them like the etesian winds, or as if inhaling ether, it only producing numbness and insensibility to pain, otherwise it would often be painful to hear,-without affecting the consciousness. i hardly ever failed, when i rambled through the village, to see a row of such worthies, either sitting on a ladder sunning themselves, with their bodies inclined forward and their eyes glancing along the line this way and that, from time to time, with a voluptuous expression, or else leaning against & barn with their hands in their pockets, like caryatides, as if to prop it up. they, being commonly out of doors, heard whatever was in the wind. these are the coarsest mills, in which all gossip is first rudely digested or cracked up before it is emptied into finer and more delicate hoppers within doors. i 143 144 walden observed that the vitals of the village were the grocery, the barroom, the post office, and the bank ; and, as a necessary part of the machinery, they kept a bell, a big gun, and a fire-engine, at convenient places ; and the houses were so arranged as to make the most of mankind, in lanes and fronting one another, so that every traveller had to run the gauntlet, and every man, woman, and child might get a lick at him. of course, those who were stationed nearest to the head of the line, where they could most see and be seen, and have the first blow at him, paid the highest prices for their place; and the few straggling inhabitants in the outskirts, where long gaps in the line began to occur, and the traveller could get over walls or turn aside into cowpaths, and so escape, paid a very slight ground or window tax. signs were hung out on all sides to allure him ; some to catch him by the appetite, as the tavern and victualling cellar; some by the fancy, as the dry goods store and the jeweller's; and others by the hair, or the feet, or the skirts, as the barber, the shoemaker, or the tailor. besides, there was a still more terrible standing invitation to call at every one of these houses, and company expected about these times. for the most part i escaped wonderfully from these dangers, either by proceeding at once boldly and without deliberation to the goal, as is recommended to those who run the gauntlet, or by keeping my thoughts on high things, like orpheus, who, “loudly singing the praises of the gods to his lyre, drowned the voices of the sirens, and kept out of danger." sometimes i bolted suddenly, and nobody could tell my whereabouts, for i did not stand much about gracefulness, and never hesitated at a gap in a fence. i was even accustomed to make an irruption into some houses, where i was well entertained, and after learning the kernels and very last sieveful of news, what had subsided, the prospects of war and peace, and whether the world was likely to hold together much longer, i was let out through the rear avenues, and so escaped to the woods again. it was very pleasant, when i staid late in town, to launch myself into the night, especially if it was dark and tempestuous, and set sail from some bright village parlour or lecture room, with a bag of rye or indian meal upon my shoulder, for my snug harbour in the woods, having made all tight without and with drawn under hatches with a merry crew of thoughts, leaving only my outer man at the helm, or even tying up the helm when it was plain sailing. i had many a genial thought by the cabin as i sailed.” i was never cast away nor distressed in any weather, though i encountered some severe storms. it is darker fire « the village 145 in the woods, even in common nights, than most suppose. 1 frequently had to look up at the opening between the trees above the path in order to learn my route, and, where there was no cart-path, to feel with my feet the faint track which i had worn, or steer by the known relation of particular trees which i felt with my hands, passing between two pines for instance, not more than eighteen inches apart, in the midst of the woods, invariably in the darkest night. sometimes, after coming home thus late in a dark and muggy night, when my feet felt the path which my eyes could not see, dreaming and absent-minded all the way, until i was aroused by having to raise my hand to lift the latch, i have not been able to recall a single step of my walk, and i have thought that perhaps my body would find its way home if its master should forsake it, as the hand finds its way to the mouth without assistance. several times, when a visitor chanced to stay into evening, and it proved a dark night, i was obliged to conduct him to the cart-path in the rear of the house, and then point out to him the direction he was to pursue, and in keeping which he was to be guided rather by his feet than his eyes. one very dark night i directed thus on their way two young men who had been fishing in the pond. they lived about a mile off through the woods, and were quite used to the route. a day or two after one of them told me that they wandered about the greater part of the night, close by their own premises, and did not get home till toward morning, by which time, as there had been several heavy showers in the meanwhile, and the leaves were very wet, they were drenched to their skins. i have heard of many going astray even in the village streets, when the darkness was so thick that you could cut it with a knife, as the saying is. some who live in the outskirts, having come to town a-shopping in their wagons, have been obliged to put up for the night; and ladies and gentlemen making a call, have gone half-a-mile out of their way, feeling the side-walk only with their feet, and not knowing when they turned. it is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods at any time. often in a snow-storm, even by day, one will come out upon a well-known road and yet find it impossible to tell which way leads to the village. though he knows that he has travelled it a thousand times, he cannot recognize a feature in it, but it is as a strange to him as if it were a road in siberia. by night, of course, the perplexity is infinitely greater. in our most trivial walks we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond k 146 walden our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighbouring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round,-for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost,-do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. not till we are lost—in other words, not till we have lost the world do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are, and the infinite extent of our relations. one afternoon, near th the end of the first summer, when i went to the village to get a shoe from the cobbler's, i was seized and put into jail, because, as i have elsewhere related, i did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of the state which buys and sells men, women, and children, like cattle at the door of its senate-house. i had gone down the woods for other purposes. but, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. it is true, i might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run amok against society ; but i preferred that society should run "amok” against me, it being the desperate party. however, i was released the next day, obtained my mended shoe, and returned to the woods in season to get my dinner of huckleberries on fairhaven hill. i was never molested by any person but those who represented the state. i had no lock nor bolt but for the desk which held my papers, not even a nail to put over my latch or windows. i never fastened my door night or day, though i was to be absent several days; not even when the next fall i spent a fortnight in the woods of maine. and yet my house was more respected than if it had been surrounded by a file of soldiers. the tired rambler could rest and warm himself by my fire, the literary amuse himself with the few books on my table, or the curious, by opening my closet door, see what was left of my dinner, and what prospect i had of a supper. yet, though many people of every class came this way to the pond, i suffered no serious inconvenience from these sources, and i never missed anything but one small book, a volume of homer, which perhaps was improperly gilded, and this i trust a soldier of our camp has found by this time. i am convinced, that if all men were to live as simply as i then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. these take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient, while others have not enough. the pope's homers would soon get properly distributed> the village 147 ) “nec bella fuerunt, faginus astabat dum scyphus ante dapes.” “nor wars did men molest, when only beechen bowls were in request.” “you who govern public affairs, what need have you to employ punishments ? love virtue, and the people will be virtuous. the virtues of a superior man are like the wind ; the virtues of a common man are like the grass ; the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends." the ponds > sometimes, having had a surfeit of human society and gossip, and worn out all my village friends, i rambled still farther westward than i habitually dwell, into yet more unfrequented parts of the town, “ to fresh woods and pastures new,” or, while the sun was setting, made my supper of huckleberries and blueberries on fair-haven hill, and laid up a store for several days. the fruits do not yield their true flavour to the purchaser of them, nor to him who raises them for the market. there is but one way to obtain it, yet few take that way. if you would know the flavour of huckleberries, ask the cow-boy or the partridge. it is a vulgar error to suppose that you have tasted huckleberries who never plucked them. a huckleberry never reaches boston ; they have not been known there since they grew on her three hills. the ambrosial and essential part of the fruit is lost with the bloom which is rubbed off in the market-cart, and they become mere provender. as long as eternal justice reigns, not one innocent huckleberry can be transported thither from the country's hills. occasionally, after my hoeing was done for the day, i joined some impatient companion who had been fishing on the pond since morning, as silent and motionless as a duck or a floating leaf, and, after practising various kinds of philosophy, had concluded commonly, by the time i arrived, that he belonged to the ancient sect of cænobites. there was one older man, an excellent fisher and skilled in all kinds of woodcraft, who was pleased to look upon my house as a building erected for the convenience of fishermen : and i was equally pleased when he sat in my doorway to arrange his lines. once in a while we sat together on the pond, he at one end of the boat and i at the other; but not many words passed between us, for he had grown deaf in his later years, but he occasionally hummed a psalm, which harmonized well enough with my philosophy. our intercourse was thus altogether one of unbroken harmony, far more pleasing to remember than if it had been carried on by speech. when, as was commonly the case, i had none to commune with, i used to raise the echoes by striking with a paddle on the side of my boat, filling the surrounding woods with circling and dilating sound, a 148 the ponds 149 > a stirring them up as the keeper of a menagerie his wild beasts, until i elicited a growl from every wooded vale and hill-side. . in warm evenings i frequently sat in the boat playing the flute, and saw the perch, which i seemed to have charmed, hovering around me, and the moon travelling over the ribbed bottom, which was strewed with the wrecks of the forest. formerly i had come to this pond adventurously, from time to time, in dark summer nights, with a companion, and making a fire close to the water's edge, which we thought attracted the fishes, we caught pouts with a bunch of worms strung on a thread, and when we had done, far in the night, threw the burning brands high into the air like sky-rockets, which, coming down into the pond, were quenched with a loud hissing, and we were suddenly groping in total darkness. through this, whistling a tune, we took our way to the haunts of men again. but now i had made my home by the shore. sometimes, after staying in a village parlour till the family had all retired, i have returned to the woods, and, partly with a view to the next day's dinner, spent the hour of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. these experiences were very memorable and valuable to me,-anchored in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as i drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind. at length you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand, some horned pout squeaking and squirming to the upper air. it was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to nature again. it seemed as if i might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element which was scarcely more dense. thus i caught two fishes, as it were, with one hook. the scenery of walden is on a humble scale, and, though very beautiful, does not approach to grandeur, nor can it much con150 walden acern one who has not long frequented it or lived by its shore ; yet this pond is so remarkable for its depth and purity as to merit a particular description. it is a clear and deep green well, half-a-mile long and a mile and threequarters in circumference, and contains about sixty-one and a half acres; a perennial spring in the midst of pine and oak woods, without any visible inlet or outlet except by the clouds and evaporation. the surrounding hills rise abruptly from the water to the height of forty to eighty feet, though on the south-east and east they attain to about one hundred and one hundred and fifty feet respectively, within a quarter and a third of a mile. they are exclusively woodland. all our concord waters have two colours at least, one when viewed at a distance, and another, more proper, close at hand. the first depends more on the light, and follows the sky. in clear weather, in summer, they appear blue at a little distance, especially if agitated, and at a great distance all appear alike. in stormy weather they are sometimes of a dark slate colour: the sea, however, is said to be blue one day and green another without any perceptible change in the atmosphere. i have seen our river, when, the landscape being covered with snow, both water and ice were almost as green as grass. some consider blue “ to be the colour of pure water, whether liquid or solid.” but, looking directly down into our waters from a boat, they are seen to be of very different colours. walden is blue at one time and green at another, even from the same point of view. lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the colour of both. viewed from a hill-top it reflects the colour of the sky, but near at hand it is of a yellowish tint next the shore where you can see the sand, then a light green, which gradually deepens to a uniform dark green in the body of the pond. in some lights, viewed even from a hill-top, it is of a vivid green next the shore. some have referred this to the reflection of the verdure; but it is equally green there against the railroad sand-bank, and in the spring, before the leaves are expanded, and it may be simply the result of the prevailing blue mixed with the yellow of the sand. such is the colour of its iris. this is that portion, also, where in the spring, the ice being warmed by the heat of the sun reflected from the bottom, and also transmitted through the earth, melts first and forms a narrow canal about the still frozen middle. like the rest of our waters, when much agitated, in clear weather, so that the surface of the waves may reflect the sky at the right angle, or because there is more light mixed with it, it appears at a little distance of a darker blue than the sky itself; and at such a 1 ? a the ponds 151 time, being on its surface, and looking with divided vision, so as to see the reflection, i have discerned a matchless and indescribable light blue, such as watered or changeable silks and sword blades suggest, more cerulean than the sky itself, alternating with the original dark green on the opposite sides of the waves, which last appeared but muddy in comparison. it is a vitreous greenish blue, as i remember it, like those patches of the winter sky seen through cloud vistas in the west before sundown. yet a single glass of its' water held up to the light is as colourless as an equal quantity of air. it is well known that a large plate of glass will have a green tint, owing, as the makers say, to its “ body, but a small piece of the same will be colourless. how large a body of walden water would be required to reflect a green tint i have never proved. the water of our river is black or a very dark brown to one looking directly down on it, and, like that of most ponds, imparts to the body of one bathing in it a yellowish tinge; but this water is of such crystalline purity that the body of the bather appears of an alabaster whiteness, still more unnatural, which, as the limbs are magnified and distorted withal, produces a monstrous effect, making fit studies for a michael angelo. the water is so transparent that the bottom can easily be discerned at the depth of twenty-five or thirty feet. paddling over it, you may see many feet beneath the surface the schools of perch and shiners, perhaps only an inch long, yet the former easily distinguished by their transverse bars, and you think that they must be ascetic fish that find a subsistence there. once, in the winter, many years ago, when i had been cutting holes through the ice in order to catch pickerel, as i stepped ashore i tossed my axe back on to the ice, but, as if some evil genius had directed it, it slid four or five rods directly into one of the holes; where the water was twenty-five feet deep. out of curiosity, i lay down on the ice and looked through the hole, until i saw the axe a little on one side, standing on its head, with its helve erect and gently swaying to and fro with the pulse of the pond ; and there it might have stood erect and swaying till in the course of time the handle rotted off, if i had not disturbed it. making another hole directly over it with an ice chisel which i had, and cutting down the longest birch which i could find in the neighbourhood with my knife, i made a slip noose, which i attached to its end, and, letting it down carefully, passed it over the knob of the handle, and drew it by a line along the birch, and so pulled the axe out again. the shore is composed of a belt of smooth rounded white stones a a > a 152 walden a like paving stones, excepting one or two short sand beaches, and is so steep that in many places a single leap will carry you into the water over your head ; and were it not for its remarkable transparency, that would be the last to be seen of its bottom till it rose on the opposite side. some think it is bottomless. it is nowhere muddy, and a casual observer would say that there were no weeds at all in it; and of noticeable plants, except in the little meadows recently overflowed, which do not properly belong to it, a closer scrutiny does not detect a flag nor a bulrush, nor even a lily, yellow or white, but only a few small heart-leaves and potamogetons, and perhaps a water-target or two; all which, however, a bather might not perceive; and these plants are clean and bright like the element they grow in. the stones extend a rod or two into the water, and then the bottom is pure sand, except in the deepest parts, where there is usually a little sediment, probably from the decay of the leaves which have been wafted on to it so many successive falls; and a bright green weed is brought up on anchors even in midwinter. we have one other pond just like this—white pond in nine acre corner, about two and a half miles westerly ; but, though i am acquainted with most of the ponds within a dozen miles of this centre, i do not know a third of this pure and well-like character. successive nations perchance have drank at, admired, and fathomed it, and passed away, and still its water is green and pellucid as ever. not an intermitting spring! perhaps on that spring morning when adam and eve were driven out of eden, walden pond was already in existence, and even then breaking up in a gentle spring rain accompanied with mist and a southerly wind, and covered with myriads of ducks and geese, which had not heard of the fall, when still such pure lakes sufficed them. even then it had commenced to rise and fall, and had clarified its waters and coloured them of the hue they now wear, and obtained a patent of heaven to be the only walden pond in the world and distiller of celestial dews. who knows in how many unremembered nations' literatures this has been the castalian fountain ? or what nymphs presided over it in the golden age? it is a gem of the first water, which concord wears in her coronet. yet perchance the first who came to this well have left some trace of their footsteps. i have been surprised to detect encircling the pond, even where a thick wood has just been cut down on the shore, a narrow shelf-like path in the steep hill-side, alternately rising and falling, approaching and receding from the water's edge, as old probably as the race of man here, worn by the ponds 153 а a 1 the feet of aboriginal hunters, and still from time to time unwittingly trodden by the present occupants of the land. this is particularly distinct to one standing on the middle of the pond in winter, just after a light snow has fallen, appearing as a clear undulating white line, unobscured by weeds and twigs, and very obvious a quarter of a mile off in many places where in summer it is hardly distinguishable close at hand. the snow reprints it, as it were, in clear white type alto-relievo. the ornamented grounds of villas which will one day be built here may still preserve some trace of this. the pond rises and falls, but whether regularly or not, and within what period, nobody knows, though, as usual, many pretend to know. it is commonly higher in the winter and lower in the summer, though not corresponding to the general wet and dryness. i can remember when it was a foot or two lower, and also when it was at least five feet higher, than when i lived by it. there is a narrow sand-bar running into it, with very deep water on one side, on which i helped to boil a kettle of chowder, some six rods from the main shore, about the year 1824, which it has not been possible to do for twenty-five years; and on the other hand, my friends used to listen with incredulity when i told them that, a few years later, i was accustomed to fish from a boat in a secluded a cove in the woods, fifteen rods from the only shore they knew, which place was long since converted into a meadow. but the pond has risen steadily for two years, and now, in the summer of °52, is just five feet higher than when i lived there, or as high as it was thirty years ago, and fishing goes on again in the meadow. this makes a difference of level, at the outside, of six or seven feet; and yet the water shed by the surrounding hills is insignificant in amount, and this overflow must be referred to causes which affect the deep springs. this same summer the pond has begun to fall again. it is remarkable that this fluctuation, whether periodical or not, appears thus to require many years for its accomplishment. i have observed one rise and a part of two falls, and i expect that a dozen or fifteen years hence the water will again be as low as i have ever known it. flints' pond, a mile eastward, allowing for the disturbance occasioned by its inlets and outlets, and the smaller intermediate ponds also, sympathise with walden, and recently attained their greatest height at the same time with the latter. the same is true, as far as my observation goes, of white pond. this rise and fall of walden at long intervals serves this use at least : the water standing at this great height for a year or more, a 154 walden w though it makes it difficult to walk round it, kills the shrubs and trees which have sprung up about its edge since the last risepitch-pines, birches, alders, aspens, and others-and, falling again, leaves an unobstructed shore ; for, unlike many ponds and all waters which are subject to a daily tide, its shore is cleanest when the water is lowest. on the side of the pond next my house a row of pitch-pines fifteen feet high has been killed and tipped over as if by a lever, and thus a stop put to their encroachments ; and their size indicates how many years have elapsed since the last rise to this height. by this fluctuation the pond asserts its title to a shore, and thus the shore is shorn, and the trees cannot hold it by right of possession. these are the lips of the lake on which no beard grows. it licks its chaps from time to time. when the water is at its height, the alders, willows, and maples send forth a mass of fibrous red roots several feet long from all sides of their stems in the water, and to the height of three or four feet from the ground, in the effort to maintain themselves ; and i have known the high-blueberry bushes about the shore, which commonly produce no fruit, bear an abundant crop under these circumstances. some have been puzzled to tell how the shore became so regularly paved. my townsmen have all heard the tradition—the oldest people tell me that they heard it in their youth—that anciently the indians were holding a pow-wow upon a hill there, which rose as high into the heavens as the pond now sinks deep into the earth, and they used much profanity, as the story goes, though this vice is one of which the indians were never guilty, and while they were thus engaged the hill shook and suddenly sank, and only one old squaw, named walden, escaped, and from her the pond was named. it has been conjectured that when the hill shook, these stones rolled down its side and became the present shore. it is very certain, at any rate, that once there was no pond here, and now there is one; and this indian fable does not in any respect conflict with the account of that ancient settler whom i have mentioned, who remembers so well when he first came here with his divining-rod, saw a thin vapour rising from the sward, and the hazel pointed steadily downward, he concluded to dig a well here. as for the stones, many still think that they are hardly to be accounted for by the action of the waves on these hills ; but i observe that the surrounding hills are remarkably full of the same kind of stones, so that they have been obliged to pile them up in walls on both sides of the railroad cut nearest the pond ; and, moreover, there are most stones where the ponds 155 the shore is most abrupt; so that; unfortunately, it is no longer a mystery to me. i detect the paver. if the name was not derived from that of some english locality,saffron walden, for instance, -one might suppose that it was called, originally, walled-in pond. the pond was my well ready dug. for four months in the years its water is as cold as it is pure at all times; and i think that it is then as good as any, if not the best in the town. in the winter, all water which is exposed to the air is colder than springs and wells which are protected from it. the temperature of the pond water which had stood in the room where i sat from five o'clock in the afternoon till noon the next day, the 6th of march, 1846, the thermometer having been up to 65° or 70° some of the time, owing partly to the sun on the roof, was 42°, or one degree colder than the water of one of the coldest wells in the village just drawn. the temperature of the boiling spring the same day was 45°, or the warmest of any water tried, though it is the coldest that i know of in summer, when, beside, shallow and stagnant surface water is not mingled with it. moreover, in summer, walden never becomes so warm as most water which is exposed to the sun, on account of its depth. in the warmest weather i usually placed a pailful in my cellar, where it became cool in the night, and remained so during the day; though i also resorted to a spring in the neighbourhood. it was as good when a week old as the day it was dipped, and had no taste of the camps for a week in summer by the shore of a pond, needs only bury a pail of water a few feet deep in the shade of his camp to be independent of the luxury of ice. there have been caught in walden, pickerel, one weighing seven pounds, to say nothing of another which carried off a reel with great velocity, which the fisherman safely set down at eight pounds because he did not see him, perch and pouts, some of each weighing over two pounds, shiners, chivins or roach (leuciscus pulchellus), a very few breams, and a couple of eels, one weighing four pounds, i am thus particular because the weight of a fish is commonly its only title to fame, and these are the only eels i have heard of here ; also, i have a faint recollection of a little fish some five inches long, with silvery sides and a greenish back, somewhat dace-like in its character, which i mention here chiefly to link my facts to fable. nevertheless, this pond is not very fertile in fish. its pickerel, though not abundant, are its chief boast. i have seen at one time lying on the ice pickerel of at least three different kinds; a long and shallow one, steel> pump. whoever a а 156 walden a coloured, most like those caught in the river; a bright golden kind, with greenish reflections and remarkably deep, which is the most common here; and another golden-coloured, and shaped like the last, but peppered on the sides with small dark brown or black spots, intermixed with a few faint blood-red ones, very much like a trout. the specific name reticulatus would not apply to this ; it would be guttatus rather. these are all very firm fish, and weigh more than their size promises. the shiners, pouts, and perch also, and indeed all the fishes which inhabit this pond, are much cleaner, handsomer, and firmer fleshed than those in the river and most other ponds, as the water is purer, and they can easily be distinguished from them. probably many ichthyologists would make new varieties of some of them. there are also a clean race of frogs and tortoises, and a few mussels in it; musk-rats and minks leave their traces about it, and occasionally a travelling mud-turtle visits it. sometimes, when i pushed off my boat in the morning, i disturbed a great mud-turtle which had secreted himself under the boat in the night. ducks and geese frequent it in the spring and fall, the white-bellied swallows (hirundo bicolor) skim over it, and the peetweets (totanus macularius)“ teter ” along its stony shores all summer. have sometimes disturbed a fish-hawk sitting on a white-pine over the water ; but i doubt if it is ever profaned by the wing of a gull, like fair-haven. at most it tolerates one annual loon. these are all the animals of consequence which frequent it now. you may see from a boat, in calm weather, near the sandy eastern shore, where the water is eight or ten feet deep, and also in some other parts of the pond, some circular heaps half-a-dozen feet in diameter by a foot in height, consisting of small stones less than a hen's egg in size, where all around is bare sand. at first you wonder if the indians could have formed them on the ice for any purpose, and so, when the ice melted, they sank to the bottom; but they are too regular, and some of them plainly too fresh, for that. they are similar to those found in rivers ; but as there are no suckers nor lampreys here, i know not by what fish they could be made. perhaps they are the nests of the chivin. these lend a pleasing mystery to the bottom. the shore is irregular enough not to be monotonous. i have in my mind's eye the western indented with deep bays, the bolder northern, and the beautifully-scolloped southern shore, where successive capes overlap each other, and suggest unexplored coves between. the forest has never so good a setting, nor is so distinctly beautiful, as when seen from the middle of a small lake amid . a the ponds 157 hills which rise from the water's edge ; for the water in which it is reflected not only makes the best foreground in such a case, but, with its winding shore, the most natural and agreeable boundary to it. there is no rawness nor imperfection in its edge there, as where the axe has cleared a part, or a cultivated field abuts on it. the trees have ample room to expand on the water-side, and each sends forth its most vigorous branch in that direction. there nature has woven a natural selvage, and the eye rises by just gradations from the low shrubs of the shore to the highest trees. there are few traces of man's hand to be seen. the water laves the shore as it did a thousand years ago. a lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. it is earth's eye, looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. the fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooden hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows. standing on the smooth sandy beach at the east end of the pond, in a calm september afternoon, when a slight haze makes the opposite shore-line indistinct, i have seen whence came the expression, “ the glassy surface of a lake.” when you invert your head, it looks like a thread of finest gossamer stretched across the valley, and gleaming against the distant pine woods, separating one stratum of the atmosphere from another. would think that you could walk dry under it to the opposite hills, and that the swallows which skim over might perch on its indeed, they sometimes dive below the line, as it were by mistake, and are undeceived. as you look over the pond westward you are obliged to employ both your hands to defend your eyes against the reflected as well as the true sun, for they are equally bright; and if, between the two, you survey its surface critically, it is literally as smooth as glass, except where the skater insects, at equal intervals scattered over its whole extent, by their motions in the sun produce the finest imaginable sparkle on it, or, perchance, a duck plumes itself, or, as i have said, a swallow skims so low as to touch it. it may be that in the distance a fish describes an arc of three or four feet in the air, and there is one bright flash where it emerges, and another where it strikes the water; sometimes the whole silvery arc is revealed ; or here and there, perhaps, is a thistle-down floating on its surface, which the fishes dart at and so dimple it again. it is like molten glass cooled but not congealed, and the few motes in it are pure and beautiful, like the imperfections in glass. you may often detect a yet smoother and darker water, separated from the rest as if > a 158 walden by an invisible cobweb, boom of the water nymphs, resting on it. from a hill-top you can see a fish leap in almost any part; for not a pickerel or shiner picks an insect from this smooth surface but it manifestly disturbs the equilibrium of the whole lake. it is wonderful with what elaborateness this simple fact is advertised,--this piscine murder will out, and from my distant perch i distinguish the circling undulations when they are half a dozen rods in diameter. you can even detect a water-bug (gyrinus) ceaselessly progressing over the smooth surface a quarter of a mile off ; for they furrow the water slightly, making a conspicuous ripple bounded by two diverging lines, but the skaters glide over it without rippling it perceptibly. when the surface is considerably agitated there are no skaters nor water-bugs on it, but apparently, in calm days, they leave their havens and adventurously glide forth from the shore by short impulses till they completely cover it. it is a soothing employment, on one of those fine days in the fall, when all the warmth of the sun is fully appreciated, to sit on a stump on such a height as this, overlooking the pond, and study the dimpling circles which are incessantly inscribed on its otherwise invisible surface amid the reflected skies and trees. over this great expanse there is no disturbance but it is thus at once gently smoothed away and assuaged, as, when a vase of water is jarred, the trembling circles seek the shore, and all is smooth again. not a fish can leap or an insect fall on the pond but it is thus reported in circling dimples, in lines of beauty, as it were the constant welling-up of its fountain, the gentle pulsing of its life, the heaving of its breast. the thrills of joy and thrills of pain are undistinguishable. how peaceful the phenomena of the lake! again the works of man shine as in the spring -aye, every leaf, and twig, and stone, and cobweb sparkles now at mid-afternoon, as when covered with dew in a spring morning. every motion of an oar or an insect produces a flash of light; and if an oar falls, how sweet the echo ! in such a day, in september or october, walden is a perfect forest mirror, set round with stones as precious to my eye as if fewer or rarer. nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. sky water. it needs no fence. without defiling it. it is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding nature continually repairs ; no storms, no dust, can dim its surface ever fresh ;-a mirror in which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the sun's hazy brush—this the light dust-cloth-which retains no breath nations come and go the ponds 159 a that is breathed on it, but sends its own to float as clouds high above its surface, and be reflected on its bosom still. a field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. it is continually receiving new life and motion from above. it is intermediate in its nature between land and sky. on land only the grass and trees wave, but the water itself is rippled by the wind. now see where the breeze dashes across it by the streaks or flakes of light. it is remarkable that we can look down on its surface. we shall, perhaps, look down thus on the surface of air at length, and mark where a still subtler spirit sweeps over it. the skaters and water-bugs finally disappear in the latter part of october, when the severe frosts have come ; and then and in november, usually, in a calm day, there is absolutely nothing to ripple the surface. one november afternoon, in the calm at the end of a rain-storm of several days' duration, when the sky was still completely overcast and the air was full of mist, i observed that the pond was remarkably smooth, so that it was difficult to distinguish its surface; though it no longer reflected the bright tints of october, but the sombre november colours of the surrounding hills. though i passed over it as gently as possible, the slight undulations produced by my boat extended almost as far as i could see, and gave a ribbled appearance to the reflections, but, as i was looking over the surface, i saw here and there at a distance a faint glimmer, as if some skater insects which had escaped the frosts might be collected there, or, perchance, the surface, being so smooth, betrayed where a spring welled up from the bottom. paddling gently to one of these places, i was surprised to find myself surrounded by myriads of small perch, about five inches long, of a rich bronze colour in the green water, sporting there and constantly rising to the surface and dimpling it, sometimes leaving bubbles on it. in such transparent and seemingly bottomless water, reflecting the clouds, i seemed to be floating through the air as in a balloon, and their swimming impressed me as a kind of flight or hovering, as if they were a compact flock of birds passing just beneath my level on the right or left, their fins, like sails, set all around them. there were many such schools in the pond, apparently improving the short season before winter would draw an icy shutter over their broad skylight, sometimes giving to the surface an appearance as if a slight breeze struck it, or a few rain-drops fell there. when i approached carelessly and alarmed them, they made a sudden plash and rippling with their tails, as if one had struck the water with a brushy bough, and instantly took refuge in the depths. at length the 160 walden wind rose, the mist increased, and the waves began to run, and the perch leaped much higher than before, half out of water, a hundred black points, three inches long, at once above the surface. even as late as the 5th of december, one year, i saw some dimples on the surface, and thinking it was going to rain hard immediately, the air being full of mist, i made haste to take my place at the oars and row homewards ; already the rain seemed rapidly increasing, though i felt none on my cheek, and i anticipated a thorough soaking. but suddenly the dimples ceased, for they were produced by the perch, which the noise of my oars had scared into the depths, and i saw their schools dimly disappearing ; so i spent a dry afternoon after all. an old man who used to frequent this pond nearly sixty years ago, when it was dark with surrounding forests, tells me that in those days he sometimes saw it all alive with ducks and other water-fowl, and that there were many eagles about it. he came here a-fishing, and used an old log canoe which he found on the shore. it was made of two white pine logs dug out and pinned together, and was cut off square at the ends. it was very clumsy, but lasted a great many years before it became water-logged and perhaps sank to the bottom. he did not know whose it was ; it belonged to the pond. he used to make a cable for his anchor of strips of hickory bark tied together. an old man, a potter, who lived by the pond before the revolution, told him once that there was an iron chest at the bottom, and that he had seen it. sometimes it would come floating up to the shore ; but when you went towards it, it would go back into deep water and disappear. i was pleased to hear of the old log canoe, which took the place of an indian one of the same material but more graceful construction, which perchance had first been a tree on the bank, and then as it were, fell into the water, to float there for a generation, the most proper vessel for the lake. i remember that when i first looked into these depths there were many large trunks to be seen indistinctly lying on the bottom, which had either been blown over formerly, or left on the ice at the last cutting, when wood was cheaper; but now they have mostly disappeared. when i first paddled a boat on walden, it was completely surrounded by thick and lofty pine and oak woods, and in some of its coves grape vines had run over the trees next the water and formed bowers under which a boat could pass. the hills which form its shores are so steep, and the woods on them were then so high, that, as you looked down from the west end, it had the appearance of an amphitheatre for some kind of sylvan spectacle. a a the ponds 161 in sunny i have spent many an hour, when i was younger, floating over its surface as the zephyr willed, having paddled my boat to the middle, and lying on my back across the seats, in a summer forenoon, dreaming awake, until i was aroused by the boat touching the sand, and i arose to see what shore my fates had impelled me to-days when idleness was the most attractive and productive industry. many a forenoon have i stolen away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day; for i was rich, if not in money, hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly ; nor do i regret that i did not waste more of them in the workshop or the teacher's desk. but since i left those shores the woodchoppers have still further laid them waste, and now for many a year there will be no more rambling through the aisles of the wood, with occasional vistas through which you see the water. my muse may be excused if she is silent henceforth. how can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down ? now the trunks of trees on the bottom, and the old log canoe, and the dark surrounding woods, are gone, and the villagers, who scarcely know where it lies, instead of going to the pond to bathe or drink, are thinking to bring its water, which should be as sacred as the ganges at least, to the village in a pipe, to wash their dishes with !—to earn their walden by the turning of a cock or drawing of a plug! that devilish iron horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout the town, has muddied the boiling spring with his foot, and he it is that has browsed off all the woods on walden shore; that trojan horse, with a thousand men in his belly, introduced by mercenary greeks! where is the country's champion, the moore of moore hall, to meet him at the deep cut and thrust an avenging lance between the ribs of the bloated pest? nevertheless, of all the characters i have known, perhaps walden wears best, and best preserves its purity. many men have been likened to it, but few deserve that honour. though the woodchoppers have laid bare first this shore and then that, and the irish have built their styes by it, and the railroad has infringed on its border, and the ice-men have skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on; all the change is in me. it has not acquired one permanent wrinkle after all its ripples. it is perennially young, and i may stand and see a swallow dip apparently to pick an insect from its surface as of yore. it struck me again to-night, as if i had not seen it almost daily for more than twenty years,—why, here is walden, l a > 162 walden the same woodland lake that i discovered so many years ago ; where a forest was cut down last winter another is springing up by its shore as lustily as ever ; the same thought is welling up to its surface that was then ; it is the same liquid joy and happiness to itself and its maker, ay, and it may be to me. it is the work of a brave man surely, in whom there was no guile! he rounded this water with his hand, deepened and clarified it in his thought, and in his will bequeathed it to concord. i see by its face that it is visited by the same reflection; and i can almost say, walden, is it you ? “it is no dream of mine, to ornament a line ; i cannot come nearer to god and heaven than i live to walden even. i am its stony shore, and the breeze that passes o'er ; in the hollow of my hand, are its water and its sand, and its deepest resort lies high in my thought.” the cars never pause to look at it; yet i fancy that the engiι neers and firemen and brakesmen, and those passengers who have a season ticket and see it often, are better men for the sight. the engineer does not forget at night, or his nature does not, that he has beheld this vision of serenity and purity once at least during the day. though seen but once, it helps to wash out state street and the engine's soot. one proposes that it be called “god's drop.” i have said that walden has no visible inlet nor outlet, but it is on the one hand distantly and indirectly related to flint's pond, which is more elevated, by a chain of small ponds coming from that quarter, and on the other directly and manifestly to concord river, which is lower, by a similar chain of ponds through which in some other geological period it may have flowed, and by a little digging, which god forbid, it can be made to flow thither again. if by living thus reserved and austere, like a hermit in the woods, so long, it has acquired such wonderful purity, who would not regret that the comparatively impure waters of flint's pond should be mingled with it, or itself should ever go to waste its sweetness in the ocean wave ? flint's, or sandy pond, in lincoln, our greatest lake and inland sea, lies about a mile east of walden. it is much larger, being said to contain one hundred and ninety-seven acres, and is more fertile in fish ; but it is comparatively shallow, and not the ponds 163 remarkably pure. a walk through the woods thither was often my recreation. it was worth the while, if only to feel the wind blow on your cheek freely and see the waves run, and remember the life of mariners. i went a-chestnutting there in the fall, on windy days, when the nuts were dropping into the water and were washed to my feet; and one day, as i crept along its sedgy shore, the fresh spray blowing in my face, i came upon the mouldering wreck of a boat, the sides gone, and hardly more than the impression of its flat bottom left amid the rushes; yet its model was sharply defined, as if it were a large decayed pad, with its veins. it was as impressive a wreck as one could imagine on the sea-shore, and had as good a moral. it is by this time mere vegetable mould and undistinguishable pond-shore, through which rushes and flags have pushed up. i used to admire the ripple marks on the sandy bottom, at the north end of this pond, made firm and hard to the feet of the wader by the pressure of the water, and the rushes which grew in indian file, in waving lines, corresponding to these marks, rank behind rank, as if the waves had planted them. there also i have found, in considerable quantities, curious balls, composed apparently of fine grass or roots, of pipewort perhaps, from half an inch to four inches in diameter, and perfectly spherical. these wash back and forth in shallow water on a sandy bottom, and are sometimes cast on the shore. they are either solid grass, or have a little sand in the middle. at first you would say that they were formed by the action of the waves, like a pebble ; yet the smallest are made of equally coarse materials, half an inch long, and they are produced only at one season of the year. moreover, the waves, i suspect, do not so much construct as wear down a material which has already acquired consistency. they preserve their form when dry for an indefinite period. flint's pond ! such is the poverty of our nomenclature. what right had the unclean and stupid farmer, whose farm abutted on this sky water, whose shores he has ruthlessly laid bare, to give his name to it ? some skin-flint, who loved better the reflecting surface of a dollar, or a bright cent., in which he could see his own brazen face; who regarded even the wild ducks which settled in it as trespassers ; his fingers grown into crooked and horny talons from the long habit of grasping harpy-like ;-so it is not named i go not there to see him nor to hear of him ; who never saw it, who never bathed in it, who never loved it, who never protected it, who never spoke a good word of it, nor thanked god that he had made it. rather let it be named from the fishes that a > a for me. 164 walden a swim in it, the wild fowl or quadrupeds which frequent it, the wild flowers which grow by its shores, or some wild man or child the thread of whose history is interwoven with its own; not from him who could show no title to it but the deed which a like-minded neighbour or legislature gave him,-him who thought only of its money value ; whose presence perchance cursed all the shore ; who exhausted the land around it, and would fain have exhausted the waters within it; who regretted only that it was not english hay or cranberry meadow,-there was nothing to redeem it, forsooth, in his eyes,—and would have drained and sold it for the mud at its bottom. it did not turn his mill, and it was no privilege to him to behold it. i respect not his labours, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his god, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is ; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits but dollars; who loves not the beauty of his fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him till they are turned to dollars. give me the poverty that enjoys true we true wealth. farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor-poor farmers. a model farm ! where the house stands like a fungus in a muck-heap, chambers for men, horses, oxen, and swine, cleansed and uncleansed, all contiguous to one another! stocked with men! a great grease-spot, redolent of manures and buttermilk! under a high state of cultivation, being manured with the hearts and brains of men ! as if you were to raise your potatoes in the churchyard ! such is a model farm. no, no; if the fairest features of the landscape are to be named after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone. let our lakes receive as true names at least as the icarian sea, where “ still the shore a “brave attempt resounds." this is my goose pond, of small extent, is on my way to flint's ; fairhaven, an expansion of concord river, said to contain some seventy acres, is a mile south-west; and white pond, of about forty acres, is a mile and a half beyond fair-haven. lake country. these, with concord river, are my water privileges; and night and day, year in year out, they grind such grist i carry to them. since the woodcutters, and the railroad, and i myself have profaned walden, perhaps the most attractive, if not the most beautiful, of all our lakes, the gem of the woods, is white pond,—a poor name from its commonness, whether derived from the re. as 2 > the ponds 165 a markable purity of its waters or the colour of its sands. in these as in other respects, however, it is a lesser twin of walden. they are so much alike that you would say they must be connected underground. it has the same stony shore, and its waters are of the same hue. as at walden, in sultry dog-day weather, looking down through the woods on some of its bays which are not so deep but that the reflection from the bottom tinges them, its waters are of a misty bluish-green or glaucous colour many years since i used to go there to collect the sand by cart-loads, to make sand-paper with, and i have continued to visit it ever since. one who frequents it proposes to call it virid lake. perhaps it might be called yellow-pine lake, from the following circumstance: about fifteen years ago you could see the top of a pitchpine, of the kind called yellow-pine hereabouts, though it is not a distinct species, projecting above the surface in deep water, many rods from the shore. it was even supposed by some that the pond had sunk, and this was one of the primitive forest that formerly stood there. i find that even so long ago as 1792, in a topographical description of the town of concord, by one of its citizens, in the collections of the massachusetts historical society, the author, after speaking of walden and white ponds, adds : “ in the middle of the latter may seen, when the water is very low, a tree which appears as if it grew in the place where it now stands, although the roots are fifty feet below the surface of the water; the top of this tree is broken off, and at that place measures fourteen inches in diameter." in the spring of ²49 i talked with a man who lived nearest the pond in sudbury, who told me that it was he who got out this tree ten or fifteen years before. as near as he could remember, it stood twelve or fifteen rods from the shore, where the water was thirty or forty feet deep. it was in the winter, and he had been getting out ice in the forenoon, and had resolved that in the afternoon, with the aid of his neighbours, he would take out the old yellow-pine. he sawed a channel in the ice toward the shore, and hauled it over and along and out on to the ice with oxen; but, before he had gone far in his work, he was surprised to find that it was wrong end upward, with the stumps of the branches pointing down, and the small end firmly fastened in the sandy bottom. it was about a foot in diameter at the big end, and he had expected to get a good sawlog, but it was so rotten as to be fit only for fuel, if for that. he had some of it in his shed then. there were marks of an axe and of woodpeckers on the butt. he thought that it might have been a dead tree on the shore, but was finally blown over into the be a 166 walden pond, and after the top had become water-logged, while the buttend was still dry and light, had drifted out and sunk wrong end up. his father, eighty years old, could not remember when it was not there. several pretty large logs may still be seen lying on the bottom, where, owing to the undulation of the surface, they look like huge water snakes in motion. this pond has rarely been profaned by a boat, for there is little in it to tempt a fisherman. instead of the white lily, which requires mud, or the common sweet flag, the blue flag (iris versicolor) grows thinly in the pure water, rising from the stony bottom all around the shore, where it is visited by humming-birds in june, and the colour both of its bluish blades and its flowers, and especially their reflections, are in singular harmony with the glaucous water. white pond and walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, lakes of light. if they were permanently congealed, and small enough to be clutched, they would, perchance, be carried off by slaves, like precious stones, to adorn the heads of emperors; but being liquid, and ample, and secured to us and our successors for ever, we disregard them, and run after the diamond of koh-i-noor. they are too pure to have a market value; they contain no muck. how much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters, are they! we never learned meanness of them. how much fairer than the pool before the farmer's door, in which his ducks swim! hither the clean wild ducks come. nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates her. the birds with their plumage and their notes are in harmony with the flowers, but what youth or maiden conspires with the wild luxuriant beauty of nature ? she flourishes most alone, far from the towns where they reside. talk of heaven! ye disgrace earth. > baker farm sometimes i rambled to pine groves, standing like temples, or like fleets at sea, full-rigged, with wavy boughs, and rippling with light, so soft, and green, and shady, that the druids would have forsaken their oaks to worship in them; or to the cedar wood beyond flint’s pond, where the trees, covered with hoary blueberries, spiring higher and higher, are fit to stand before valhalla, and the creeping juniper covers the ground with wreaths full of fruit; or to swamps where the usnea lichen hangs in festoons from the white-spruce trees, and toad-stools, round tables of the swamp gods, cover the ground, and more beautiful fungi adorn the stumps, like butterflies or shells, vegetable winkles; where the swamp-pink and dogwood grow, the red alderberry glows like eyes of imps, the waxwork grooves and crushes the hardest woods in its folds, and the wild-holly berries make the beholder forg his home with their beauty, and he is dazzled and tempted by nameless other wild forbidden fruits, too fair for mortal taste. instead of calling on some scholar, i paid many a visit to particular trees, of kinds which are rare in this neighbourhood, standing far away in the middle of some pasture, or in the depths of a wood or swamp, or on a hill-top ; such as the black-birch, of which we have some handsome specimens two feet in diameter ; its cousin, the yellow-birch, with its loose golden vest, perfumed like the first; the beech, which has so neat a bole and beautifully lichen-painted, perfect in all its details, of which, excepting scattered specimens, i know but one small grove of sizeable trees left in the township, supposed by some to have been planted by the pigeons that were once baited with beech nuts near by ; it is worth the while to see the silver grain sparkle when you spilt this wood; the bass ; the hornbeam; the celtis occidentalis, or false elm, of which we have but one well-grown ; some taller mast of a pine, a shingle tree, or a more perfect hemlock than usual, standing like a pagoda in the midst of the woods ; and many others i could mention. these were the shrines i visited both summer and winter. once it chanced that i stood in the very abutment of a rainbow's arch, which filled the lower stratum of the atmosphere, tinging the grass and leaves around, and dazzling me as if i looked through coloured crystal. it was a lake of rainbow light, a 187 168 walden in which, for a short while, i lived like a dolphin. if it had lasted longer it might have tinged my employments and life. as i walked on the railroad causeway, i used to wonder at the halo of light around my shadow, and would fain fancy myself one of the elect. one who visited me declared that the shadows of some irishmen before him had no halo about them, that it was only natives that were so distinguished. benvenuto cellini tells us in his memoirs, that, after a certain terrible dream or vision which he had during his confinement in the castle of st. angelo, a resplendent light appeared over the shadow of his head at morning and evening, whether he was in italy or france, and it was particularly conspicuous when the grass was moist with dew. this was probably the same phenomenon to which i have referred, which is especially observed in the morning, but also at other times, and even by moonlight. though a constant one, it is not commonly noticed, and, in the case of an excitable imagination like cellini's, it would be basis enough for superstition. besides, he tells us that he showed it to very few. but are they not indeed distinguished who are conscious that they are regarded at all ? i set out one afternoon to go a-fishing to fair-haven, through the woods, to eke out my scanty fare of vegetables. my way led through pleasant meadow, an adjunct of the baker farm, that retreat of which a poet has since sung, beginning66 “thy entry is a pleasant field, which some mossy fruit tre yielu partly to a ruddy brook, by gliding musquash undertook, and mercurial trout, darting about.” i thought of living there before i went to walden. i“ hooked" the apples, leaped the brook, and scared the musquash and the trout. it was one of those afternoons which seem indefinitely long before one, in which many events may happen, a large portion of our natural life, though it was already half spent when i started. by the way there came up a shower, which compelled me to standthalf an hour under a pine, piling boughs over my head, and wearing my handkerchief for a shed; and when at length i had made one cast over the pickerel-weed, standing up to my middle in water, i found myself suddenly in the shadow of a cloud, and the thunder began to rumble with such emphasis . baker farm 169 that i could do no more than listen to it. the gods must be proud, thought i, with such forked flashes to rout a poor unarmed fisherman. so i made haste for shelter to the nearest hut, which stood half a mile from any road, but so much the nearer to the pond, and had long been uninhabiteda and here a poet builded, in the completed years, for behold a trival cabin that to destruction steers. а so the muse fables. but therein, as i found, dwelt now john field, an irishman, and his wife, and several children, from the broad-faced boy who assisted his father at his work, and now came running by his side from the bog to escape the rain, to the wrinkled, sibyl-like, cone-headed infant that sat upon its father's knee as in the palaces of nobles, and looked out from its home in the midst of wet and hunger inquisitively upon the stranger, with the privilege of infancy, not knowing but it was the last of a noble line, and the hope and cynosure of the world, instead of john field's poor starveling brat. there we sat together under that part of the roof which leaked the least, while it showered and thundered without. i had sat there many times of old before the ship was built that floated this family to america. an honest, hard-working, but shiftless man plainly was john field; and his wife—she too was brave to cook so many successive dinners in the recesses of that lofty stove; with round greasy face and bare breast, still thinking to improve her condition one day; with the never-absent mop in one hand, and yet no effects of it visible anywhere. the chickens, which had also taken shelter here from the rain, stalked about the room like members of the family, too humanised methought to roast well. they stood and looked in my eye or pecked at my shoe significantly. meanwhile my host told me his story, how hard he worked “bogging " for a neighbouring farmer, turning up a meadow with a spade or bog hoe at the rate of ten dollars "an acre, and the use of the land with manure for one year, and his little broad-faced "son worked cheerfully at his father's side the while, not knowing how poor a bargain the latter had made. i tried to help him with my experience, telling him that he was one of my nearest neighbours, and that i, too, who came a-fishing here, and looked like a loafer, was getting my living like himself ; that i lived in a tight, light, and clean house, which hardly cost more than the annual'rent of such a ruin as his commonly amounts to; and how, if he chose, he a 170 walden a a might in a month or two build himself a palace of his own; that i did not use tea, nor coffee, nor butter, nor milk, nor fresh meat, and so did not have to work to get them ; again, as i did not work hard, i did not have to eat hard, and it cost me but a trifle for my food; but as he began with tea, and coffee, and butter, and milk; and beef, he had to work hard to pay for them, and when he had worked hard he had to eat hard again to repair the waste of his system ; and so it was as broad as it was long-indeed it was broader than it was long—for he was discontented, and wasted his life into the bargain ; and yet he had rated it as a gain in coming to america, that here you could get tea, and coffee, and meat every day. but the only true america is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without these, and where the state does not endeavour to compel you to sustain the slavery, and war, and other superfluous expenses which directly or indirectly result from the use of such things. for i purposely talked to him as if he were a philosopher, or desired to be one. i should be glad if all the meadows on the earth were left in a wild state, if that were the consequence of men's beginning to redeem themselves. a man will not need to study history to find out what is best for his own culture. but alas ! the culture of an irishman is an enterprise to be undertaken with a sort of moral bog hoe. 'i told him, that as he worked so hard at bogging, he required thick boots and stout clothing, which yet were soon soiled and worn out; but i wore light shoes and thin clothing, which cost not half so much, though he might think that i was dressed like a gentleman (which however, was not the case), and in an hour or two, without labour, but as a recreation, i could, if i wished, catch as many fish as i should want for two days, or earn enough money to support me a week. if he and his family would live simply, they might all go a-huckleberrying in the summer for their amusement. john heaved a sigh at this, and his wife stared with arms akimbo, and both appeared to be wondering if they had capital enough to begin such a course with, or arithmetic enough to carry it through. it was sailing by dead reckoning to them, and they saw not clearly how to make their port so ; therefore, i suppose, they still take life bravely, after their fashion, face to face, giving it tooth and nail, not having skill to split its massive columns with any fine entering wedge, and rout it in detail-thinking to deal with it roughly, as one should handle a thistle. but they fight at an overwhelming disadvantageliving, john field, alas ! without arithmetic, and failing so, baker farm 171 "oh ? “do you ever fish?” i asked. yes, i catch a mess now and then when i am lying by; good perch i catch.” “ what's your bait ?.” “i catch shiners with fish-worms, and bait the perch with them.” “you'd better go now, john,” said his wife with glistening and hopeful face; but john demurred. the shower was now over, and a rainbow above the eastern woods promised a fair evening ; so i took my departure. when i had got without i asked for a dish, hoping to get a sight of the well bottom to complete my survey of the premises ; but there, alas ! are shallows and quicksands, and rope broken withal, and bucket irrecoverable. meanwhile the right culinary vessel was selected, water was seemingly distilled, and after consultation and long delay passed out to the thirsty one,-not yet suffered to cool, nor yet to settle. such gruel sustains life here, i thought; so, shutting my eyes, and excluding the motes by a skilfully directed under-current, i drank to genuine hospitality the heartiest draught i could. i am not squeamish in such cases when manners are concerned. as i was leaving the irishman's roof after the rain, bending my steps again to the pond, my haste to catch pickerel, wading in retired meadows, in sloughs and bog-holes, in forlorn and savage places, appeared for an instant trivial to me who had been sent to school and college ; but as i ran down the hill toward the reddening west, with the rainbow over my shoulder, and some faint tinkling sounds borne to my ear through the cleansed air, from i know not what quarter, my good genius seemed to say,-go fish and hunt far and wide day by day,-farther and wider,-and rest thee by many brooks and hearth-sides without misgiving. remember thy creator in the days of thy youth. rise free from . care beyond the dawn, and seek adventures. let the noon find thee by other lakes, and the night overtake thee everywhere at home. there are no larger fields than these, no worthier games than may here be played. grow wild according to thy nature, like these sledges and brakes, which will never become english hay. let the thunder rumble; what if it threaten ruin to farmers' crops ? that is not its errand to thee. take shelter under the cloud, while they flee to carts and sheds. let not to get a living be thy trade, but thy sport. enjoy the land, but own it not. through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like serfs. o baker farm ! “ landscape where the richest element is a little sunshine innocent. 172 walden "no one runs to revel on thy rail-fenced lea. 9 . “debate with no man hast thou, with questions art never perplexed, as tame at the first sight as now, in thy plain russet gabardine dressed. “come ye who love, and ye who hate, children of the holy dove, and guy faux of the state, and hang conspiracies from the tough rafters of the trees !' men come tamely home at night only from the next field or street, where their household echoes haunt, and their life pines because it breathes its own breath over again ; their shadows morning and evening reach farther than their daily steps. should come home from far, from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day, with new experience and character. before i reached the pond some fresh impulse had brought out john field, with altered mind, letting go “ bogging ” ere this sunset. but he, poor man, disturbed only a couple of fins while i was catching a fair string, and he said it was his luck ; but when we changed seats in the boat luck changed seats too. poor john field !—i trust he does not read this, unless he will improve by it, -thinking to live by some derivative old country mode in this primitive new country,—to catch perch with shiners. it is good bait sometimes, i allow. with his horizon all his own, yet he a poor man, born to be poor, with his inherited irish poverty or poor life, his adam's grandmother and boggy ways, not to rise in this world, he nor his posterity, till their wading, webbed, bog-trotting feet get talaria to their heels. a me. higher laws as i came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being quite dark, i caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that i was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented. once or twice, however, while i lived at the pond, i found myself ranging the woods, like a half-starved hound, with a strange abandonment, seeking some kind of venison which i might devour, and no morsel could have been too savage for the wildest scenes had become unaccountably familiar. i found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and i reverence them both. i love the wild not less than the good. the wildness and adventure that are in fishing still recommend it to me. i like sometimes to take rank hold on life and spend my day more as the animals do. perhaps i have.owed to this employment and to hunting, when quite young, my closest acquaintance with nature. they early introduce us to and detain us in scenery with which otherwise, at that age, we should have little acquaintance. fishermen, hunters, wood-choppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of nature themselves, are often in a more favourable mood for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, who approach her with expectation. she is not afraid to exhibit herself to them. the traveller on the prairie is naturally a hunter, on the head waters of the missouri and columbia a trapper, and at the falls of st. mary a fisherman. he who is only a traveller learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. we are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, on account of human experience. they mistake who assert that the yankee has few amusements, because he has not so many public holidays, and men and boys do not play so many games as they do in england, for here the more primitive but solitary amusements of hunting, fishing, and the like have not yet given place to the former. almost every new england boy among my contemporaries shouldered a fowlinga 173 174 walden piece between the ages of ten and fourteon; and his hunting and fishing grounds were not limited like the preserves of an english nobleman, but were more boundless even than those of a savage. no wonder, then, that he did not oftener stay to play on the common. but already a change is taking place, owing, not to an increased humanity, but to an increased scarcity of game, for perhaps the hunter is the greatest friend of the animals hunted, not excepting the humane society. moreover, when at the pond, i wished sometimes to add fish to my fare for variety. i have actually fished from the same kind of necessity that the first fishers did. whatever humanity i might conjure up against it was all factitious, and concerned my philosophy more than my feelings. i speak of fishing only now, for i had long felt differently about fowling, and sold my gun before i went to the woods. not that i am less humane than others, but i did not perceive that my feelings were much affected. i did not pity the fishes nor the worms. this was habit. as for fowling, during the last years that i carried a gun my excuse was that i was studying ornithology, and sought only new or rare birds. but i confess that i am now inclined to think that there is a finer way of studying ornithology than this. it requires so much closer attention to the habits of the birds, that, if for that reason only, i have been willing to omit the gun. yet notwithstanding the objection on the score of humanity, i am compelled to doubt if equally valuable sports are ever substituted for these ; and when some of my friends have asked me anxiously about their boys, whether they should let them hunt, i have answered, yes,-remembering that it was one of the best parts of my education,-make them hunters, though sportsmen only at first, if possible, mighty hunters at last, so that they shall not find game large enough for them in this or any vegetable wilderness,-hunters as well as fishers of men. thus far i am of the opinion of chaucer's who yave not of the text a pulled hen that saith that hunters ben not holy men. there is a period in the history of the individual, as of the race, when hunters are the “ best men,” as the algonquins called them. we cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun ; he is no more humane, while his education has been sadly neglected. this was my answer with respect to those youths who were bent on this pursuit, trusting that they would soon outgrow it. no humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly 's nun, higher laws 175 murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does. the hare in its extremity cries like a child. i warn you, mothers, that my sympathies do not always make the usual philanthropic distinctions. such is oftenest the young man's introduction to the forest, and the most original part of himself. he goes thither at first as a hunter and fisher, until at last, if he has the seeds of a better life in him, he distinguishes his proper objects, as a poet or naturalist it may be, and leaves the gun and fish-pole behind. the mass of men are still and always young in this respect. in some countries a hunting parson is no uncommon sight. such a one might make a good shepherd's dog, but is far from being the good shepherd. i have been surprised to consider that the only obvious employment, except wood-cutting, ice-chopping, or the like business, which ever to my knowledge detained at walden pond for a whole half day any of my fellow-citizens, whether fathers or children of the town, with just one exception, was fishing. commonly they did not think that they were lucky, or well paid for their time, unless they got a long string of fish, though they had the opportunity of seeing the pond all the while. they might go there a thousand times before the sediment of fishing would sink to the bottom and leave their purpose pure; but no doubt such a clarifying process would be going on all the while. the governor and his council faintly remember the pond, for they went a-fishing there when they were boys; but now they are too old and dignified to go a-fishing and so they know it no more for ever. yet even they expect to go to heaven at last. if the legislature regards it, it is chiefly to regulate the number of hooks to be used there ; but they know nothing about the hook of hooks with which to angle for the pond itself, impaling the legislature for a bait. thus, even in civilized communities, the embryo man passes through the hunter stage of development. i have found repeatedly, of late years, that i cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect. i have tried it again and again. i have skill at it, and, like many of my fellows, a certain instinct for it, which revives from time to time, but always when i have done i feel that it would have been better if i had not fished. i think that i do not mistake. it is a faint intimation, yet so are the first streaks of morning. there is unquestionably this instinct in me which belongs to the lower orders of creation ; yet with every year i am less a fisherman, though without more humanity or even wisdom; at present i am no fisherman at all. but i see that if i were to live in a wilderness i should again be tempted a . 176 walden to become a fisher and hunter in earnest. beside, there is something essentially unclean about this diet and all flesh; and i began to see where housework commences, and whence the endeavour, which costs so much, to wear a tidy and respectable appearance each day, to keep the house sweet and free from all ill odours and sights. having been my own butcher, and scullion, and cook, as well as the gentleman for whom the dishes were served up, i can speak from an unusually complete experience. the practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness; and, besides, when i had caught, and cleaned, and cooked, and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially: it was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. a little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth. like many of my contemporaries, i had rarely for many years used animal food, or tea, or coffee, etc. ; not so much because of any ill effects which i had traced to them, as because they were not agreeable to my imagination. the repugnance to animal food is not the effect of experience, but is an instinct. it appeared more beautiful to live low and fare hard in many respects; and though i never did so, i went far enough to please my imagination. ì believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind. it is a significant fact, stated by entomologists,-i find it in kirby and spence;—that "some insects in their perfect state, though furnished with organs of feeding, make no use of them ; and they lay it down as general rule, that almost all insects in this state eat much less than in that of larvæ. the voracious caterpillar when transformed into a butterfly," ... "and the gluttonous maggot when become a fly," content themselves with a drop or two of honey or some other sweet liquid. the abdomen under the wings of the butterfly still represents the larva. this is the tid-bit which tempts his insectivorous fate. the gross feeder is a man in the larva state ; and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without fancy or imagination, whose vast abdomens betray them. it is hard to provide and cook so simple and clean a diet as will not offend the imagination ; but this, i think, is to be fed when we feed the body; they should both sit down at the same table. yet perhaps this may be done. the fruits eaten temperately need not make us ashamed of our appetites, nor interrupt the worthiest pursuits. but put an extra condiment into your dish, and it will poison you. it is not worth the while to live by rich cookery: a > a higher laws in 177 most men would feel shame if caught preparing with their own hands precisely such a dinner, whether of animal or vegetable food, as is every day prepared for them by others. yet till this is otherwise we are not civilized, and, if gentlemen and ladies, are not true men and women. this certainly suggests what change is to be made. it may be vain to ask why the imagination will not be reconciled to flesh and fat. i am satisfied that it is not. is it not a reproach that man is a carnivorous animal ? true, he can and does live, in a great measure, by preying on other animals ; but this is a miserable way—as any one who will go to snaring rabbits, or slaughtering lambs, may learn and he will be regarded as a benefactor of his race who shall teach man to confine himself to a more innocent and wholesome diet. whatever my own practice may be, i have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized. if one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of his genius, which are certainly true, he sees not to what extremes, or even insanity, it may lead him; and yet that way, as he grows more resolute and faithful, his road lies. the faintest assured objection which one healthy man feels will at length prevail over the arguments and customs of mankind. no man ever followed his genius till it misled him. though the result were bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the consequences were to be regretted, for these were a life of conformity to higher principles. if the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal,—that is your all nature is your congratulation and you have cause monentarily to bless yourself. the greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. we easily come to doubt if they exist. we soon forget them. they are the highest reality. perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. the true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. it is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which i have clutched. yet, for my part, i was never unusually squeamish ; i could sometimes eat a fried rat with a good relish, if it were necessary. i am glad to have drunk water so long, for the same reason that i prefer the natural sky to an opium-eater's heaven. i would fain m success. 178 walden a > keep sober always; and there are infinite degrees of drunkenness. i believe that water is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor; and think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea! ah, how low i fall when i am tempted by them! even music may be intoxicating. such apparently slight causes destroyed greece and rome, and will destroy england and america. of all ebriosity, who does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes? i have found it to be the most serious objection to coarse labours long continued, that they compelled me to eat and drink coarsely also. but to tell the truth, i find myself at present somewhat less particular in these respects. i carry less religion to the table, ask no blessing ; not because i am wiser than i was, but, i am obliged to confess, because, however much it is to be regretted, with years i have grown more coarse and indifferent. perhaps these questions are entertained only in youth, as most believe of poetry. my practice is "nowhere," my opinion is here. nevertheless i am far from regarding myself as one of those privileged ones to whom the ved refers when it says, that “he who has faith in the omnipresent supreme being may eat all that exists," that is, is not bound to inquire what is his food, or who prepares it; and even in their case it is to be observed, as a hindoo commentator has remarked, that the vedant limits this privilege to the time of distress.” who has not sometimes derived an inexpressible satisfaction from his food in which appetite had no share ? i have been thrilled to think that i owed a mental preception to the commonly gross sense of taste, that i have been inspired through the palate, that some berries which i had eaten on a hill-side had fed my genius. the soul not being mistress of herself,” says thseng-tseu, looks, and one does not see; one listens, and one does not hear; one eats, and one does not know the savour of food.” he who distinguishes the true savour of his food can never be a glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise. a puritan may go to his brown-bread crust with as gross an appetite as ever an alderman to his turtle. not that food which entereth into the mouth defileth a man, but the appetite with which it is eaten. it is neither the quality nor the quantity, but the devotion to sensual savours ; when that which is eaten is not a viand to sustain our animal, or inspire our spiritual life, but food for the worms that possess us. if the hunter has a taste 'for mud-turtles, musk-rats, and other such savage tid-bits, the fine lady indulges a taste for jelly made of a calf's foot, or for sardines from over the sea, and they are even. 66 66 one > a higher laws 179 > he goes to the mill-pond, she to her preserve-pot. the wonder is how they, how you and i, can live this slimy beastly life, eating and drinking. our whole life is startlingly moral. there is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice. goodness is the only investment that never fails. in the music of the harp which trembles round the world it is the insisting on this which thrills us. the harp is the travelling patterer for the universe's insurance company, recommending its laws, and our little goodness is all the assessment that we pay. though the youth at last grows indifferent, the laws of the universe are not indifferent, but are for ever on the side of the most sensitive. listen to every zephyr for some reproof, for it is surely there, and he is unfortunate who does not hear it. we cannot touch a string or move a stop but the charming moral transfixes us. many an irksome noise, go a long way off, is heard as music, a proud sweet satire on the meanness of our lives. we are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. it is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled ; like the worms which, even in life and health, occupy our bodies. possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change its nature. i fear that it may enjoy a certain health of its own; that we may be well, yet not pure. the other day i picked up the lower jaw of a hog, with white and sound teeth and tusks, which suggested that there was an animal health and vigour distinct from the spiritual. this creature succeeded by other means than temperance and purity. “ that in which men differ from brute beasts says mencius is a thing very inconsiderable; the common herd lose it very soon; superior men preserve it carefully.” who knows what sort of life would result if we had attained to purity ? if i knew so wise a man as could teach me purity i would go to seek him forthwith. "a command over our passions and over the external senses of the body, and good acts, are declared by the ved to be indispensable in the mind's approximation to god." yet the spirit can for the time pervade and control every member and function of the body, and transmute what in form is the grossest sensuality into purity and devotion. the generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us. chastity is the flowering of man; and what ; are called genius, heroism, holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it. man flows at once to god when the channel of purity is open. by turns our purity inspires and our impurity casts us down. he is blessed who is assured that the 180 walden animal is dying out in him day by day, and the divine being established. perhaps there is none but has cause for shame on account of the inferior and brutish nature to which he is allied. i fear that we are such gods or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures of appetitc, and that, to some extent, our very life is our disgrace 66 how happy’s he who hath due place assigned to his beasts and disaforested his mind ! 本 ​* * * * can use his horse, goat, wolf, and ev'ry beast, and is not ass himself to all the rest ! else man not only is the herd of swine, but he's those devils too which did incline them to a headlong rage, and made them worse.” > one. 4 all sensuality is one, though it takes many forms; all purity is it is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or sleep sensually. they are but one appetite, and we only need to see a person do any one of these things to know how great a sensualist he is. the impure can neither stand nor sit with purity. when the reptile is attacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another. if you would be chaste, you must be temperate. what is chastity ? how shall a man know if he is chaste ? he shall not know it. we have heard of this virtue, but we know not what it is. we speak conformably to the rumour which we have heard. from exertion come wisdom and purity ; from sloth ignorance and sensuality. in the student sensuality is a sluggish habit of mind. an unclean person is universally a slothful one, one who sits by a stove, whom the sun shines on prostrate, who reposes without being fatigued. if you would avoid uncleanness and all the sins, work earnestly, though it be at cleaning a stable. nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be overcome, what avails it that you are a christian, if you are not purer than the heathen, if you deny yourself no more, if you are not more religious ? i know of many systems of religion esteemed heathenish whose precepts fill the reader with shame, and provoke him to new endeavours, though it be to the performance of rites merely. i hesitate to say these things, but it is not because of the subject, i care not how obscene my words are,—but because i cannot speak of them without betraying my impurity. we discourse freely without shame of one form of sensuality, and are silent about another. we are so degraded that we cannot speak simply of the necessary functions of human nature. in earlier ages in higher laws 181 some countries, every function was reverently spoken of and regulated by law. nothing was too trivial for the hindoo lawgiver, however offensive it may be to modern taste. he teaches how to eat, drink, cohabit, void excrement and urine, and the like, elevating what is mean, and does not falsely excuse himself by calling these things trifles. every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. we are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them. john farmer sat at his door one september evening, after a hard day's work, his mind still running on his labour more or less. having bathed, he sat down to recreate his intellectual man. it was a rather cool evening, and some of his neighbours were apprehending a frost. he had not attended to the train of his thoughts long when he heard some one playing on a flute, and that sound harmonized with his mood. still he thought of his work; but the burden of his thought was, that though this kept running in his head, and he found himself planning and contriving it against his will, yet it concerned him very little. it was no more than the scurf of his skin, which was constantly shuffled off. but the notes of the flute came home to his ears out of a different sphere from that he worked in, and suggested work for certain faculties which slumbered in him. they gently did away with the street, and the village, and the state in which he lived. a voice said to him—why do you stay here and live this mean moiling life, when a glorious existence is possible for you? those same stars twinkle over other fields than these. but how to come out of this condition and actually migrate thither ? all that he could think of was to practise some new austerity, to let his mind descend into his body and redeem it, and treat himself with ever-increasing respect. brute neighbours sometimes i had a companion in my fishing, who came through the village to my house from the other side of the town, and the catching of the dinner was as much a social exercise as the eating of it. hermit. i wonder what the world is doing now. i have not heard so much as a locust over the sweet-fern these three hours. the pigeons are all asleep upon their roosts, --no flutter from them. was that a farmer's noon-horn which sounded from beyond the woods just now? the hands are coming in to boiled salt beef, and cider, and indian bread. why will men worry themselves so ? he that does not eat need not work. i wonder how much they have reaped. who would live there where a body can never think for the barking of bose ? and 0, the housekeeping ! to keep bright the devil's door-knobs, and scour his tubs this bright day! better not keep a house. say, some hollow tree; and then for morning-calls and dinner-parties ! only a woodpecker tapping. o, they swarm; the sun is too warm there ; they are born too far into life for me. i have water from the spring, and a loaf of brown bread on the shelf. hark! i hear a rustling of the leaves. is it some ill-fed village hound yielding to the instinct of the chase ? or the lost pig which is said to be in these woods, whose tracks i saw after the rain ? it comes on apace; my sumachs and sweet-briers tremble. eh, mr. poet, is it you? how do you like the world to-day? poet.-see those clouds ; how they hang! that's the greatest thing i have seen to-day. there's nothing like it in old paintings, nothing like it in foreign lands,—unless when we were off the coast of spain. that's a true mediterranean sky. i thought, as i have my living to get, and have eaten not to-day, that i might go a-fishing. that's the true industry for poets. it is the only trade i have learned. come let's along. hermit. i cannot resist. my brown bread will soon be gone. i will go with you gladly soon, but i am just concluding a serious meditation. i think that i am near the end of it. leave me alone, then, for a while. but that we may not be delayed, you shall be digging the bait meanwhile. angle-worms are rarely to be met with in these parts, where the soil was never fattened with manure; the race is nearly extinct. the sport of digging the 182 brute neighbours 183 bait is nearly equal to that of catching the fish, when one's appetite is not too keen; and this you may have all to yourself to-day. i would advise you to set in the spade down yonder among the ground-nuts, where you see the johnswort waving. i think that i may warrant you one worm to every three sods you turn up, if you look well in among the roots of the grass, as if you were weeding. or, if you choose to go farther, it will not be unwise, for i have found the increase of fair bait to be very nearly as the squares of the distances. hermit alone.—let me see ; where was i ? methinks i was nearly in this frame of mind; the world lay about at this angle. shall i go to heaven or a-fishing ? if i should bring this meditation to an end, would another so sweet occasion be likely to offer ? i was as near being resolved into the essence of things as ever i was in my life. i fear my thoughts will not come back to me. if it would do any good, i would whistle for them. when they make us an offer, is it wise to say, we will think of it ? my thoughts have left no track, and i cannot find the path again. what was it that i was thinking of? it was a very hazy day. i will just try these three sentences of con-fut-see ; they may fetch that state about again. i know not whether it was the dumps or a budding ecstasy. mem. there never is but one opportunity of a kind. poet.—how now, hermit, is it too soon ? i have got just thirteen whole ones, beside several which are imperfect or undersized ; but they will do for the smaller fry; they do not cover up the hook so much. those village worms are quite too large ; a shiner may make a meal off one without finding the skewer. hermit.-well then, let's be off. shall we to the concord ? there's good sport there if the water be not too high. why do precisely these objects which we behold make a world ? why has man just these species of animals for his neighbours ; as if nothing but a mouse could have filled this crevice? i suspect that pilpay co. have put animals to their best use, for they are all beasts of burden, in a sense, made to carry some portion of our thoughts. the mice which haunted my house were not the common ones, which are said to have been introduced into the country, but a wild native kind not found in the village. i sent one to a distinguished naturalist, and it interested him much. when i was building, one of these had its nest underneath the house, and before i had laid the second floor, and swept out the shavings, would come out regularly at lunch time and pick up the crumbs at 184 walden a my feet. it probably had never seen a man before ; and it soon became quite familiar, and would run over my shoes and up my clothes. it could readily ascend the sides of the room by short impulses, like a squirrel, which it resembled in its motions. at length, as i leaned with my elbow on the bench one day, it ran up my clothes, and along my sleeve, and round and round the paper which held my dinner, while i kept the latter close, and dodged and played at bo-peep with it; and when at last i held still a piece of cheese between my thumb and finger, it came and nibbled it, sitting in my hand, and afterward cleaned its face and paws, like a fly, and walked away. a phobe soon built in my shed, and a robin for protection in a pine which grew against the house. in june the partridge (tetrao umbellus), which is so shy a bird, led her brood past my windows, from the woods in the rear to the front of my house, clucking and calling to them like a hen, and in all her behaviour proving herself the hen of the woods. the young suddenly disperse on your approach, at a signal from the mother, as if a whirlwind had swept them away, and they so exactly resemble the dried leaves and twigs that many a traveller has placed his foot in the midst of a brood, and heard the whirr of the old bird as she flew off, and her anxious calls and mewing, or seen her trail her wings to attract his attention, without suspecting their neighbourhood. the parent will sometimes roll and spin round before you in such a dishabille, that you cannot, for a few moments, detect what kind of a creature it is. the young squat still and flat, often running their heads under a leaf, and mind only their mother's directions given from a distance, nor will your approach make them run again and betray themselves. you may even tread on them, or have your eyes on them for a minute, without discovering them. i have held them in my open hand at such a time, and still their only care, obedient to their mother and their instinct, was to squat there without fear or trembling. so perfect is this instinct, that once, when i had laid them on the leaves again, and one accidentally fell or its side, it was found with the rest in exactly the same position ten minutes afterward. they are not callow like the young of most birds, but more perfectly developed and precocious even than chickens. the remarkably adult yet innocent expression of their open and serene eyes is ver memorable. all intelligence seems reflected in them. they suggest not merely the purity of infancy, but a wisdom clarified by experience. such an eye was not born when the bird was, but is coeval with the sky it reflects: the woods do not yield another brute neighbours 185 such a gem. the traveller does not often look into such a limpid well. the ignorant or reckless sportsman often shoots the parent at such a time, and leaves these innocents to fall a prey to some prowling beast or bird, or gradually mingle with the decaying leaves which they so much resemble. it is said that when hatched by a hen they will directly disperse on some alarm, and so are lost, for they never hear the mother's call which gathers them again. these were my hens and chickens. it is remarkable how many creatures live wild and free though secret in the woods, and still sustain themselves in the neighbourhood of towns, suspected by hunters only. how retired the otto manages to live here! he grows to be four feet long, as big as a small boy, perhaps without any human being getting a glimpse of him. i formerly saw the raccoon in the woods behind where my house is built, and probably still heard their whinnering at night. commonly i rested an hour or two in the shade at noon, after planting, and ate my lunch, and read a little by a spring which was the source of a swamp and of a brook, oozing from under brister's hill, half a mile from my field. the approach to this was through a succession of descending grassy hollows, full of young pitch-pine into a larger wood about the swamp. there, in a very secluded and shaded spot, under a spreading white-pine, there was yet a clean firm sward to sit on. i had dug out the spring, and made a well of clear grey water, where i could dip up a pailful without roiling it, and thither i went for this purpose almost every day in midsummer, when the pond was warmest. thither too the woodcock led her brood, to probe the mud for worms, flying but a foot above them down the bank, while they ran in a troop beneath ; but at last, spying me, she would leave her young and circle round and round me, nearer and nearer till within four or five feet, pretending broken wings and legs, to attract my attention, and get off her young, who would already have taken up their march, with faint wiry peep, single file through the swamp, as she directed. or i heard the peep of the young when i could not see the parent bird. there too the turtle doves sat over the spring, or fluttered from bough to bough of the soft white-pines over my head ; or the red squirrel, coursing down the nearest bough, was particularly familiar and iniquisitive.) you only need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns. i was witness to events of a less peaceful character. one day when i went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, i observed two large ants, the one red, the other much larger, a 186 walden a a nearly half-an-inch long, and black, fiercely contending with one another. having once got hold they never let go, but struggled and wrestled and rolled on the chips incessantly. looking farther, i was surprised to find that the chips were covered with such combatants, that it was not a duellum, but a bellum, a war between two races of ants, the red always pitted against the black, and frequently two red ones to one black. the legions of these myrmidons covered all the hills and vales in my wood-yard, and the ground was already strewn with the dead and dying, both red and black. it was the only battle which i had ever witnessed, the only battle-field i ever trod while the battle was raging; internecine war; the red republicans on the one hand, and the black imperialists on the other. on every side they were engaged in deadly combat, yet without any noise that i could hear, and human soliders never fought so resolutely. (i watched a couple that were fast locked in each other's embraces, in a little sunny valley amid the chips, now at noon-day prepared to fight till the sun went down, or life went out.) the smaller red champion had fastened himself like a vice to his adversary's front, and through all the tumblings on that field never for an instant ceased to gnaw at one of his feelers near the root, having already caused the other to go by the board ; while the stronger black one dashed him from side to side, and as i saw on looking nearer, had already divested him of several of his members. they fought with more pertinacity than bull-dogs. neither manifested the least disposition to retreat. it was evident that their battle-cry was conquer or die. in the meanwhile there came along a single red ant on the hill-side of this valley, evidently full of excitement, who either had despatched his foe, or had not yet taken part in the battle ; probably the latter, for he had lost none of his limbs ; whose mother had charged him to return with his shield or upon it. or perchance he was some achilles, who had nourished his wrath apart, and had now come to avenge or rescue his patroclus. he saw this unequal combat from afar—for the blacks were nearly twice the size of the red-he drew near with rapid pace till he stood on his guard within half-an-inch of the combatants ; then, watching his opportunity, he sprang upon the black warrior, and commenced his operations near the root of his right fore-leg, leaving the foe to select among his own members ; and so there were three united for life, as if a new kind of attraction had been invented which put other locks and cements to shame. i should not have wondered by this time to find that they had their respective musical bands stationed on some eminent chip, and playing their national airs brute neighbours 187 the while, to excite the slow and cheer the dying combatants. was myself excited somewhat even as if they had been men. the more you think of it, the less the difference. and certainly there is not a fight recorded in concord history, at least, if in the history of america, that will bear a moment's comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed. for numbers and for carnage it was an austerlitz or dresden. concord fight! two killed on the patriots' side, and luther blanchard wounded! why here every ant was a buttrick,—“fire ! for god's sake, fire !”—and thousands shared the fate of davis and hosmer. there was not one hireling there. i have no doubt that it was a principle they fought for, as much as our ancestors, and not to avoid a threepenny tax on their tea ; and the results of this battle will be as important and memorable to those whom it concerns as those of the battle of bunker hill, at least. i took up the chip on which the three i have particularly described were struggling, carried it into my house, and placed it under a tumbler on my window-sill, in order to see the issue. holding a microscope to the first mentioned red ant, i saw that, though he was assiduously gnawing at the near fore-leg of his enemy, having severed his remaining feeler, his own breast was all torn away, exposing what vitals he had there to the jaws of the black warrior, whose breast-plate was apparently too thick for him to pierce; and the dark carbuncles of the sufferer's eyes shone with ferocity such as war only could excite. they struggled half-an-hour longer under the tumbler, and when i looked again the black soldier had severed the heads of his foes from their bodies, and the still living heads were hanging on either side of him like ghastly trophies at his saddle-bow, still apparently as firmly fastened as ever, and he was endeavouring with feeble struggles, being without feelers and with only the remnant of a leg, and i know not how many other wounds, to divest himself of them ; which at length, after half-an-hour more, he accomplished. i raised the glass, and he went off over the window-sill in that crippled state. whether he finally survived that combat, and spent the remainder of his days in some hotel des invalides, i do not know; but i thought that his industry would not be worth much thereafter. (i never learned which party was victorious, nor the cause of the war; but i felt for the rest of that day as if i had had my feelings excited and harrowed by witnessing the struggle, the ferocity and carnage, of a human battle before iny door.) a kirby and spence tell us that the battles of ants have long been 188 walden > celebrated and the date of them recorded, though they say that huber is the only modern author who appears to have witnessed them. “æneas sylvius,” say they, “after giving a very circumstantial account of one contested with great obstinacy by a great and small species on the trunk of a pear tree,” adds that, this action was fought in the pontificate of eugenius the fourth, in the presence of nicholas pistoriensis, an eminent lawyer, who related the whole history of the battle with the greatest fidelity.' a similar engagement between great and small ants is recorded by olaus magnus, in which the small ones, being victorious are said to have buried the bodies of their own soliders, but left those of their giant enemies a prey to the birds. this event happened previous to the expulsion of the tyrant christiern the second from sweden.' the battle which i witnessed took place in the residency of polk, five years before the passage of websters' fugitive-slave bill. many a village bose, fit only to course a mud-turtle in a victualling cellar, sported his heavy quarters in the woods, without the knowledge of his master, and ineffectually smelled at old fox burrows and woodchucks' holes ; led perchance by some slight cur which nimbly threaded the wood, and might still inspire a natural terror in its denizens ; now far behind his guide, barking like a canine bull towards some small squirrel which had treed itself for scrutiny, then, cantering off, bending the bushes with his weight, imagining that he is on the track of some stray member of the jerbilla family. once i was surprised to see a cat walking along the stony shore of the pond, for they rarely wander so far from home. the surprise was mutual. nevertheless the most domestic cat, which has lain on a rug all her days, appears quite at home in the woods, and, by her sly and stealthy behaviour, proves herself more native there than the regular inhabitants. once, when berrying, i met with a cat with young kittens in the woods, quite wild, and they all, like their mother, had their backs up and were fiercely spitting at me. a few years before i lived in the woods there was what was called a “winged cat” in one of the farmhouses in lincoln nearest the pond, mr. gilian baker's. when i called to see her in june 1842 she was gone a-hunting in the woods, as was her wont (i am not sure whether it was a male or a female, and so use the more common pronoun), but her mistress told me that she came into the neighbourhood a little more than a year before, in april, and was finally taken into their house ; that she was of a dark brownish-grey colour, with a white spot on her throat, and white feet, and had a large bushy tail like a fox ; that in i brute neighbours 189 the winter the fur grew thick and flatted out along her sides, forming stripes ten or twelve inches long by two and a half wide, and under her chin like a muff, the upper side loose, the under matted like felt, and in the spring these appendages dropped off. they gave me a pair of her“ wings,” which i keep still. there is no appearance of a membrane about them. some thought it was part flyingsquirrel or some other wild animal, which is not impossible, for, according to naturalists, prolific hybrids have been produced by the union of the marten and domestic cat. this would have been the right kind of cat for me to keep, if i had kept any; for why should not a poet's cat be winged as well as his horse ? in the fall the loon (colymbus glacialis) came, as usual, to moult and bathe in the pond, making the woods ring with his wild laughter before i had risen. at rumour of his arrival all the mill-dam sportsmen are on the alert, in gigs and on foot, two by two and three by three, with patent rifles and conical balls and spy-glasses. they come rustling through the woods like autumn leaves, at least ten men to one loon. some station themselves on this side of the pond, some on that, for the poor bird cannot be omnipresent; if he dive here he must come up there. but now the kind october wind rises, rustling the leaves and rippling the surface of the water, so that no loon can be heard or seen, though his foes sweep the pond with spy-glasses, and make the woods resound with their discharges. the waves generously rise and dash angrily, taking sides with all water-fowl, and our sportsmen must beat a retreat to town, and shop, and unfinished jobs. but they were too often successful. when i went to get a pail of water early in the morning i frequently saw this stately bird sailing out of my cove within a few rods. if i endeavoured to overtake him in a boat, in order to see how he would manoeuvre, he would dive and be completely lost, so that i did not discover him again, sometimes till the latter part of the day. but i was more than a match for him on the surface. he commonly went off in a rain. as i was paddling along the north shore one very calm october afternoon, for such days especially they settle on to the lakes, like the milk-weed down, having looked in vain over the pond for a loon, suddenly one, sailing out from the shore towards the middle a few rods in front of me, set up his wild laugh and betrayed himself. i pursued with a paddle and he dived, but when he came up i was nearer than before. he dived again, but i miscalculated the direction he would take, and we were fifty rods apart when he came to the surface this time, for i had helped to widen the interval; and again he laughed long and loud, and with more reason than 190 walden water, and before. he manoeuvred so cunningly that i could not get within half a dozen rods of him. each time, when he came to the surface, turning his head this way and that, he coolly surveyed the water and the land, and apparently chose his course so that he might come up where there was the widest expanse of at the greatest distance from the boat. it was surprising how quickly he made up his mind and put his resolve into execution. he led at once to the widest part of the pond, and could not be driven from it. while he was thinking one thing in his brain, i was endeavouring to divine his thought in mine. it was a pretty game, played on the smooth surface of the pond, a man against a loon. suddenly your adversary's checker dissappears beneath the board, and the problem is to place yours nearest to where his will appear again. sometimes he would come up unexpectedly on the opposite side of me, having apparently passed directly under the boat. so long-winded was he and so unweariable, that when he had swum farthest he would immediately plunge again, nevertheless; and then no wit could divine where in the deep pond, beneath the smooth surface, he might be speeding his way like a fish, for he had time and ability to visit the bottom of the pond in its deepest part. it is said that loons have been caught in the new york lakes eighty feet beneath the surface, with hooks set for trout,--though walden is deeper than that. how surprised must the fishes be to see this ungainly visitor from another sphere speeding his way amid their schools! yet he appeared to know his course as surely under water as on the surface, and swam much faster there. once or twice i saw a ripple where he approached the surface, just put his head out to reconnoitre, and instantly dived again. i found that it was as well to me to rest on my oars and wait his reappearing as to endeavour to calculate where he would rise ; for again and again, when i was straining my eyes over the surface one way, i would suddenly be startled by his unearthly laugh behind me. but why, after displaying so much cunning, did he invariably betray himself the moment he came up by that loud laugh? did not his white breast enough betray him? he was indeed a silly loon, i thought. i could commonly hear the plash of the water when he came up, and so also detected him. but after an hour he seemed as fresh as ever, dived as willingly, and swam yet farther than at first. it was surprising to see how serenely he sailed off with unruffled breast when he came to the surface, doing all the work with his webbed feet beneath. his usual note was this demoniac laughter, yet somewhat like that of a water-fowl ; brute neighbours 191 a و but occasionally, when he had balked me most successfully and come up a long way off, he muttered a long-drawn unearthly howl, probably more like that of a wolf than any bird ; as when a beast puts his muzzle to the ground and deliberately howls. this was his looning,-perhaps the wildest sound that is ever heard here, making the woods ring far and wide. i concluded that he laughed in derision of my efforts, confident of his own resources. though the sky was by this time overcast, the pond was so smooth that i could see where he broke the surface when i did not hear him. his white breast, the stillness of the air, and the smoothness of the water were all against him. (at length, having come up fifty rods off, he uttered one of those prolonged howls, as if calling on the god of loons to aid him, and immediately there came a wind from the east and rippled the surface, and filled the whole air with misty rain, and i was impressed as if it were the prayer of the loon answered, and his god was angry with me, and so i left him disappearing far away on the tumultuous surface) (for hours, in fall days, i watched the ducks cunningly tack and veer and hold the middle of the pond, far from the sportsmantricks which they will have less need to practise in louisiana bayous. when compelled to rise they would sometimes circle round and round and over the pond at a considerable height, from which they could easily see to other ponds and the river, like black motes in the sky; and when i thought they had gone off thither long since, they would settle down by a slanting flight of a quarter of a mile on to a distant part which was left free ; but what beside safety they got by sailing in the middle of the walden i do not know, unless they love its water for the same reason that i do. a a 1 house-warming a in october i went a-graping to the river meadows, and loaded myself with clusters more precious for their beauty and fragrance than for good. there too i admired, though i did not . gather, the cranberries, small waxen gems, pendants of the meadow grass, pearly and red, which the farmer plucks with an ugly rake, leaving the smooth meadow in a snarl, heedlessly measuring them by the bushel and the dollar only, and sells the spoils of the meads to boston and new york; destined to be jammed, to satisfy the tastes of lovers of nature there. so butchers rake the tongues of bison out of the prairie grass, regardless of the torn and drooping plant. the barberry's brilliant fruit was likewise food for my eyes merely ; but i collected a small store of wild apples for coddling, which the proprietor and travellers had overlooked. when chestnuts were ripe i laid up half-abushel for winter. it was very exciting at that season to roam the then boundless chestnut woods of lincoln,—they now sleep their long sleep under the railroad,—with a bag on my shoulder, and a stick to open burrs with in my hand, for i did not always wait for the frost, amid the rustling of leaves and the loud reproofs of the red-squirrels and the jays, whose half-consumed nuts i sometimes stole, for the burrs which they had selected were sure to contain sound ones. occasionally i climbed and shook the trees. they grew also behind my house, and one large tree which almost overshadowed it, was, when in flower, a bouquet which scented the whole neighbourhood, but the squirrels and the jays got most of its fruit; the last coming in flocks "early in the morning and picking the nuts out of the burrs before they fell. i relinquished these trees to them and visited the more distant woods composed wholly of chestuut. these nuts, as far as they went, were a good substitute for bread. many other substitutes might, perhaps, be found. digging one day for fish-worms i discovered the ground-nut (apios tuberosa) on its string, the potato of the aborigines, a sort of fabulous fruit, which i had begun to doubt if i had ever dug and eaten in childhood, as i had told, and had not dreamed it. i had often since seen its crimpled red velvety blossom supported by the stems of other plants without knowing it to be the same. cultivation has well nigh exterminated it. it has a sweetish taste, much 192 house-warming 193 like that of a frost-bitten potato, and i found it better boiled than roasted. this tuber seemed like a faint promise of nature to rear her own children and feed them simply here at some future period. in these days of fatted cattle and waving grainfields, this humble root, which was once the totem of an indian tribe, is quite forgotten, or known only by its flowering vine ; but let wild nature reign here once more, and the tender and luxurious english grains will probably disappear before a myriad of foes, and without the care of man the crow may carry back even the last seed of corn to the great corn-field of the indian's god in the south-west, whence he is said to have brought it; but the now almost exterminated ground-nut will perhaps revive and flourish in spite of the frosts and wildness, prove itself indigenous and resume its importance and dignity as the diet of the hunter tribe. some indian ceres or minerva must have been the inventor and bestower of it; and when the reign of poetry commences here, its leaves and string of nuts may be represented on our works of art. already, by the 1st of september, i had seen two or three small maples turned scarlet across the pond, beneath where the white stems of three aspens diverged, at the point of a promontory, next the water. ah, many a tale their colour told ! and gradually from week to week the character of each tree came out, and it admired itself reflected in the smooth mirror of the lake. each morning the manager of this gallery substituted some new picture, distinguished by more brilliant or harmonious colouring, for the old upon the walls. the wasps came by thousands to my lodge in october, as to winter-quarters, and settled on my windows within and on the walls overhead, sometimes deterring visitors from entering. each morning, when they were numbed with cold, i swept some of them out, but i did not trouble myself much to get rid of them ; i even felt complimented by their regarding my house as a desirable shelter. they never molested me seriously, though they bedded with me; and they gradually disappeared, into what crevices i do not know, avoiding winter and unspeakable cold. like the wasps, before i finally went into winter-quarters in november, i used to resort to the north-east side of walden, which the sun, reflected from the pitch-pine woods and the stony shore, made the fireside of the pond ; it is so much pleasanter and wholesomer to be warmed by the sun while you can be, than by an artificial fire. i thus warmed myself by the still glowing embers which the summer, like a departed hunter, had left. n a 194 walden when i came to build my chimney i studied masonry. my bricks being second-hand ones required to be cleaned with a trowel, so that i learned more than usual of the qualities of bricks and trowels. the mortar on them was fifty years old, and was said to be still growing harder ; but this is one of those sayings which men love to repeat whether they are true or not. such sayings themselves grow harder and adhere more firmly with age, and it would take many blows with a trowel to clean an old wiseacre of them. many of the villages of mesopotamia are built of second-hand bricks of a very good quality, obtained from the ruins of babylon, and the cement on them is older and probably harder still. however that may be, i was struck by the peculiar toughness of the steel which bore so many violent blows without being worn out. as my bricks had been in a chimney before, though i did not read the name of nebuchadnezzar on them, i picked out as many fire-place bricks as i could i find, to save work and waste, and i filled the spaces between the bricks about the fire-place with stones from the pond shore, and also made my mortar with the white sand from the same place. i lingered most about the fire-place, as the most vital part of the house. indeed, i worked so deliberately, that though i commenced at the ground in the morning, a course of bricks raised a few inches above the floor served for my pillow at night; yet i did not get a stiff neck for it that i remember; my stiff neck is of older date. i took a poet to board for a fortnight about those times, which caused me to be put to it for room. he brought his own knife, though i had two, and we used to scour them by thrusting them into the earth. he shared with me the labours of cooking. i was pleased to see my work rising so square and solid by degrees, and reflected, that, if it proceeded slowly, it was calculated to endure a long time. the chimney is to some extent an independent structure, standing on the ground and rising through the house to the heavens ; even after the house is burned it still stands sometimes, and its importance and independence are apparent. this was toward the end of summer. it was now november. a the north wind had already begun to cool the pond, though it took many weeks of steady blowing to accomplish it, it is so deep. when i began to have a fire at evening, before i plastered my house, the chimney carried smoke particularly well, because of the numerous chinks between the boards. yet i passed some cheerful evenings in that cool and airy apartment, surrounded by house-warming 195 the rough brown boards full of knots, and rafters with the bark on high overhead. my house never pleased my eye so much after it was plastered, though i was obliged to confess that it was more comfortable. should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters ? these forms are more agreeable to the fancy and imagination than fresco paintings or other the most expensive furniture. i now first began to inhabit my house, i may say, when i began to use it for warmth as well as shelter. i had got a couple of old firedogs to keep the wood from the hearth, and it did me good to see the soot form on the back of the chimney which i had built, and i poked the fire with more right and more satisfaction than usual. my dwelling was small, and i could hardly entertain an echo in it; but it seemed larger for being a single apartment and remote from neighbours. all the attractions of a house were concentrated in one room ; it was kitchen, chamber, parlour, and keeping-room ; and whatever satisfaction parent or child, master or servant, derive from living in a house, i enjoyed it all. cato says, the master of a family (patremfamilias) must have in his rustic villa cellam oleariam, vinariam, dolia multa, uti lubeat caritatem expectare, et rei, et virtuti, et gloriæ erit,”—that is, “an oil and wine cellar, many casks, so that it may be pleasant to expect hard times ; it will be for his advantage, and virtue, and glory." i had in my cellar a firkin of potatoes, about two quarts of peas with the weevil in them, and on my shelf a little rice, a jug of molasses, and of rye and indian meal a peck each. i sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house, standing in a golden age, of enduring materials, and without gingerbread work, which shall still consist of only one room, a vast, rude, substantial primitive hall, without ceiling or paste ring, with bare rafters and purlins supporting a sort of lower heaven over one's head,-useful to keep off rain and snow ; where the king and queen posts stand out to receive your homage, when you have done reverence to the prostrate saturn of an older dynasty on stepping over the sill; a cavernous house, wherein you must reach up a torch upon a pole to see the roof; where some may live in the fire-place, some in the recess of a window, and some on settles, some at one end of the hall, some at another, and some aloft on rafters with the spiders, if they choose ; a house which you have got into when you have opened the outside door, and the ceremony is over; where the weary traveller may wash, and eat, and converse, and sleep, without further journey' ; > > 196 walden such a shelter as you would be glad to reach in a tempestuous night, containing all the essentials of a house, and nothing for house-keeping ; where you can see all the treasures of the house at one view, and everything hangs upon its peg that a man should use ; at once kitchen, pantry, parlour, chamber, store-house, and garret; where you can see so necessary a thing as a barrel or a ladder, so convenient a thing as a cupboard, and hear the pot boil, and pay your respects to the fire that cooks your dinner and the oven that bakes your bread, and the necessary furniture and utensils are the chief ornaments ; where the washing is not put out, nor the fire, nor the mistress, and perhaps you are sometimes requested to move from off the trap-door, when the cook would descend into the cellar, and so learn whether the ground is solid or hollow beneath you without stamping. a house whose inside is as open and manifest as a bird's nest, and you cannot go in at the front door and out at the back without seeing some of its inhabitants ; where to be a guest is to be presented with the freedom of the house, and not to be carefully excluded from seven-eighths of it, shut up in a particular cell, and told to make yourself at home there,-in solitary confinement. now-a-days the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance. there is as much secrecy about the cooking as if he had a design to poison you. i am aware that i have been on many a man's premises, and might have been legally ordered off, but i am not aware that i have been in many men's houses. i might visit in my old clothes a king and queen who lived simply in such a house as i have described, if i were going their way; but backing out of a modern palace will be all that i shall desire to learn, if ever i am caught in one. it would seem as if the very language of our parlours would lose all its nerve and degenerate into parlaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far-fetched, through slides and dumbwaiters, as it were ; in other words, the parlour is so far from the kitchen and workshop. the dinner even is only the parable of a dinner, commonly. as if only the savage dwelt near enough to nature and truth to borrow a trope from them. how can the scholar, who dwells away in the north-west territory or the isle of man, tell what is parliamentary in the kitchen ? however, only one or two of my guests were ever bold enough to stay and eat a hasty-pudding with me; but when they saw house-warming 197 that crisis approaching they beat a hasty retreat rather, as if it would shake the house to its foundations. nevertheless, it stood through a great many hasty-puddings. i did not plaster till it was freezing weather. i brought over some whiter and cleaner sand for this purpose from the opposite shore of the pond in a boat, a sort of conveyance which would have tempted me to go much further if necessary. my house had in the meanwhile been shingled down to the ground on every side. in lathing i was pleased to be able to send home each nail with a single blow of the hammer, and it was my ambition to transfer the plaster from the board to the wall neatly and rapidly. i remembered the story of a conceited fellow, who, in fine clothes, was wont to lounge about the village once, giving advice to workmen. venturing one day to substitute deeds for words, he turned up his cuffs, seized the plasterer's board, and having loaded his trowel without mishap, with a complacent look toward the lathing overhead, made a bold gesture thitherward ; and straightway, to his complete discomfiture, received the whole contents in his ruffled bosom. i admired anew the economy and convenience of plastering, which so effectually shuts out the cold and takes a handsome finish, and i learned the various casualties to which the plasterer is liable. i was surprised to see how thirsty the bricks were which drank up all the moisture in my plaster before i had smoothed it, and how many pailfuls of water it takes to christen a new hearth. vious winter made a small quantity of lime by burning the shells of the unio fluviatilis, which our river affords, for the sake of the experiment; so that i knew where my materials came from. i might have got good limestone within a mile or two and burned it myself, if i had cared to do so. i had the prea the pond had in the meanwhile skimmed over in the shadiest and shallowest coves, some days or even weeks before the general freezing. the first ice is especially interesting and perfect, being hard, dark, and transparent, and affords the best opportunity that ever offers for examination of the bottom where it is shallow ; for you can lie at your length on ice only an inch thick, like a skater insect on the surface of the water, and study the bottom at your leisure, only two or three inches distant, like a picture behind a glass, and the water is necessarily always smooth then. there are many furrows in the sand where some creature has travelled about and doubled on its tracks; and, for wrecks, it is strewn with the cases of cadis worms made of minute grains 198 walden of white quartz. perhaps these have creased it, for you find some of their cases in the furrows, though they are deep and broad for them to make. but the ice itself is the object of most interest, though you must improve the earliest opportunity to study it. if you examine it closely the morning after it freezes, you find that the greater part of the bubbles, which at first appeared to be within it, are against its under surface, and that more are continually rising from the bottom; while the ice is as yet comparatively solid and dark, that is, you see the water through it. these bubbles are from an eightieth to an eighth of an inch in diameter, very clear and beautiful, and you see your face reflected in them through the ice. there may be thirty or forty of them to a square inch. there are also already within the ice narrow, oblong, perpendicular bubbles about halfan-inch long, sharp cones with the apex upward; or oftener, if the ice is quite fresh, minute spherical bubbles, one directly above another, like a string of beads. but these within the ice are not so numerous nor obvious as those beneath. i sometimes used to cast on stones to try the strength of the ice, and those which broke through carried in air with them, which formed very large and conspicuous white bubbles beneath. one day when i came to the same place forty-eight hours afterward, i found that those large bubbles were still perfect, though an inch more of ice had formed, as i could see distinctly by the seam in the edge of a cake. but as the last two days had been very warm, like an indian summer, the ice was not now transparent, showing the dark green colour of the water, and the bottom, but opaque and whitish or grey, and though twice as thick was hardly stronger than before, for the air bubbles had greatly expanded under this heat and run together, and lost their regularity ; they were no longer one directly over another, but often like silvery coins poured from a bag, one overlapping another, or in thin flakes, as if occupying slight cleavages. the beauty of the ice was gone, and it was too late to study the bottom. being curious to know what position my great bubbles occupied with regard to the new ice, i broke out a cake containing a middling-sized one, and turned it bottom upward. the new ice had formed around and under the bubble, so that it was included between the two ices. it was wholly in the lower ice, but close against the upper, and was flattish, or perhaps slightly lenticular, with a rounded edge, a quarter-of-an-inch deep by four inches in diameter; and i was surprised to find that directly under the bubble the ice was melted with great regularity in the house-warming 199 form of a saucer reversed, to the height of five-eighths of an inch in the middle, leaving a thin partition there between the water and the bubble, hardly an eighth-of-an-inch thick ; and in many places the small bubbles in this partition had burst out downward, and probably there was no ice at all under the largest bubbles, which were a foot in diameter. i inferred that the infinite number of minute bubbles which i had first seen against the under surface of the ice were now frozen in likewise, and that each, in its degree, had operated like a burning glass on the ice beneath to melt and rot it. these are the little air-guns which contribute to make the ice crack and whoop. a at length the winter set in in good earnest, just as i had finished plastering, and the wind began to howl around the house as if it had not had permission to do so till then. night after night geese came lumbering in in the dark with a clangour and a whistling of wings, even after the ground was covered with snow, some to alight in walden, and some flying low over the woods toward fair-haven, bound for mexico. several times, when returning from the village at ten or eleven o'clock at night, i heard the tread of a flock of geese, or else ducks, on the dry leaves in the woods by a pond-hole behind my dwelling, where they had come up to feed, and the faint honk or quack of their leader as they hurried off. in 1845 walden froze entirely over for the first time on the night of the 22nd of december, flints' and other shallower ponds and the river having been frozen ten days or more; in ’46, the 16th ; in '49, about the 31st; and in '50, about the 27th of december; in '52, the 5th of january ; in '53, the ; 31st of december. the snow had already covered the ground since the 25th of november, and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery of winter. i withdrew yet farther into my shell, and endeavoured to keep a bright fire both within my house and within my breast. my employment out of doors now was to collect the dead wood in the forest, bringing it in my hands or on my shoulders, or sometimes trailing a dead pine tree under each arm to my shed. an old forest fence which had seen its best days was a great haul for me. i sacrificed it to vulcan, for it was past serving the god terminus. how much more interesting an event is that man's supper who has just been forth in the snow to hunt, nay, you might say, steal, the fuel to cook it with ! his bread and meat are sweet. there are enough faggots and waste wood of all kinds in the forests of most of our towns to support many fires, but which at present warm none, and, some think, 200 walden a > hinder the growth of the young wood. there was also the driftwood of the pond. in the course of the summer i had discovered a raft of pitch-pine logs with the bark on, pinned together by the irish when the railroad was built. this i hauled up partly on the shore. after soaking two years and then lying high six months it was perfectly sound, though waterlogged past drying. i amused myself one winter day with sliding this piecemeal across the pond, nearly half a mile, skating behind with one end of a log fifteen feet long on my shoulder, and the other on the ice; or i tied several logs together with a birch withe, and then, with a longer birch or alder which had a hook at the end, dragged a them across. though completely waterlogged and almost as heavy as lead, they not only burned long, but made a very hot fire; nay, i thought that they burned better for the soaking, as if the pitch, being confined by the water, burned longer, as in a lamp. gilpin, in his account of the forest borderers of england, says that the encroachments of trespassers, and the houses and fences thus raised on the borders of the forest,” were considered as great nuisances by the old forest law, and were severely punished under the name of purprestures, as tending ad terrorem ferarum-ad nocumentum forestce," etc., to the frightening of the game and the detriment of the forest. but i was interested in the preservation of the venison and the vert more than the hunters or wood-choppers, and as much as though i had been the lord warden himself; and if any part was burned, though i burned it myself by accident, i grieved with a grief that lasted longer and was more inconsolable than that of the proprietors ; nay, i grieved when it was cut down by the proprietors themselves. i would that our farmers when they cut down a forest felt some of that awe which the old romans did when they came to thin, or let in the light to, a consecrated grove (lucum conlucare), that is, would believe that it is sacred to some god. the roman made an expiatory offering, and prayed, whatever god or goddess thou art to whom this grove is sacred, be propitious to me, my family, and children, etc. it is remarkable what a value is still put upon wood even in this age and in this new country—a value more permanent and universal than that of gold. after all our discoverie and inventions no man will go by a pile of wood. it is as precious to us as it was to our saxon and norman ancestors. if they made their bows of it, we made our gun-stocks of it. michaux, more than thirty years ago, says that the price of wood for fuel in new york and philadelphia " nearly equals, and sometimes exceeds, that house-warming 201 of the best wood in paris, though this immense capital annually requires more than three hundred thousand cords, and is surrounded to the distance of three hundred miles by cultivated plains.” in this town the price of wood rises almost steadily, and the only question is, how much higher it is to be this year than it was the last. mechanics and tradesmen who come in person to the forest on no other errand, are sure to attend the wood auction, and even pay a high price for the privilege of gleaning after the wood-chopper. it is now many years that men have resorted to the forest for fuel and the materials of the arts ; the new englander and the new hollander, the parisian and the celt, the farmer and robin hood, goody blake and harry gill, in most parts of the world the prince and the peasant, the scholar and the savage, equally require still a few sticks from the forest to warm them and cook their food. neither could i do without them. every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection. i loved to have mine before my window, and the more chips the better to remind me of my pleasing work. i had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which by spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, i played about the stumps which i had got out of my beanfield. as my driver prophesied when i was ploughing, they warmed me twice, once while i was splitting them, and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel could give out more heat. as for the axe, i was advised to get the village blacksmith to "jump" it; but i jumped him, and, putting a hickory helve from the woods into it, made it do. if it was dull, it was at least hung true. a few pieces of fat pine were a great treasure. it is interesting to remember how much of this food for fire is still concealed in the bowels of the earth. in previous years i had often gone“ prospecting” over some bare hillside, where a pitch-pine wood had formerly stood, and got out the fat pine roots. they are almost indestructible. stumps thirty or forty years old, at least, will still be sound at the core, though the sapwood has all become vegetable mould, as appears by the scales of the thick bark forming a ring level with the earth four or five inches distant from the heart. with axe and shovel you explore this mine, and follow the marrowy store, yellow as beef tallow, or as if you had struck on a vein of gold, deep into the earth. but commonly i kindled my fire with the dry leaves of the forest, which i had stored up in my shed before the snow came. green hickory finely split makes the wood-chopper's kindlings, when he has a camp in the > 202 walden woods. once in a while i got a little of this. when the villagers were lighting their fires beyond the horizon, i too gave notice to the various wild inhabitants of walden vale, by a smoky streamer from my chimney, that i was awake"light-winged smoke, icarian bird, melting thy pinions in thy upward flight, lark without song, and messenger of dawn, circling above the hamlets as they nest; or else, departing dream, and shadowy form of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts ; by night star-veiling, and by day darkening the light and blotting out the sun; go thou my incense upward from this hearth, and ask the gods to pardon this clear flame.” hard green wood just cut, though i used but little of that, answered my purpose better than any other. i sometimes left a good fire when i went to take a walk in a winter afternoon; and when i returned, three or four hours afterward, it would be still alive and glowing. my house was not empty though i was gone. it was as if i had left a cheerful housekeeper bebind. it was i and fire that lived there ; and commonly my housekeeper proved trustworthy. one day, however, as i was splitting wood, i thought that i would just look in at the window and see if the house was not on fire ; it was the only time i remembered to have been particularly anxious on this score ; so i looked and saw that a spark had caught my bed, and i went in and extinguished it when it had burned a place as big as my hand. but my house occupied so sunny and sheltered a position, and its roof was so low, that i could afford to let the fire go out in the middle of almost any winter day. the moles nested in my cellar, nibbling every third potato, and making a snug bed even there of some hair left after plastering and of brown paper; for even the wildest animals love comfort and warmth as well as man, and they survive the winter only because they are so careful to secure them. some of my friends spoke as if i was coming to the woods on purpose to freeze my. self. the animal merely makes a bed, which he warms with his body in a sheltered place ; but man, having discovered fire, boxes up some air in a spacious apartment, and warms that, instead of robbing himself, makes that his bed, in which he can move about divested of more cumbrous clothing, maintain a kind of summer in the midst of winter, and by means of windows even admit the light, and with a lamp lengthen out the day. thus he goes a step or two beyond instinct, and saves a little time for > house-warming 203 the fine arts. though, when i have been exposed to the rudest blasts a long time, my whole body began to grow torpid, when i reached the genial atmosphere of my house i soon recovered my faculties and prolonged my life, but the most luxuriously housed has little to boast of in this respect, nor need we trouble ourselves to speculate how the human race may be at last destroyed. it would be easy to cut their threads any time with a little sharper blast from the north. we go on dating from cold fridays and great snows; but a little colder friday, or greater snow, would put a period to man's existence on the globe. the next winter i used a small cooking-stove for economy, since i did not own the forest; but it did not keep fire so well as the open fire-place. cooking was then, for the most part, no longer a poetic, but merely a chemic process. it will soon be forgotten, in these days of stoves, that we used to roast potatoes in the ashes, after the indian fashion. the stove not only took up room and scented the house, but it concealed the fire, and i felt as if i had lost a companion. you can always see a face in the fire. the labourer, looking into it at evening, purifies his thoughts of the dross and earthiness which they have accumulated during the day. but i could no longer sit and look into the fire and the pertinent words of a poet recurred to me with new force :never, bright flame, may be denied to me thy dear, life imagining, close sympathy. what but my hopes shot upward e'er so bright ? what but my fortunes sunk so low in night? why art thou banished from our hearth and hall, thou who art welcomed and beloved by all ? was thy existence then too fanciful for our life's common light, who art so dull ? did thy bright gleam mysterious converse hold with our congenial souls ? secrets too bold ? well, we are safe and strong, for now we sit beside a hearth where no dim shadows flit, where nothing cheers nor* saddens, but a fire warms feet and hands—nor does to more aspire ; by whose compact utilitarian heap the present may sit down and to sleep, nor fear the ghosts who from the dim past walked, and with us by the unequal light of the old wood fire talked.” > for many former inhabitants; and winter visitors i weathered some merry snow-storms, and spent some cheerful winter evenings by my fire-side, while the snow whirled wildly without, and even the hooting of the owl was hushed. weeks i met no one in my walks but those who came occasionally to cut wood and sled it to the village. the elements, however, abetted me in making a path through the deepest snow in the woods, for when i had once gone through, the wind blew the oak leaves into my tracks, where they lodged, and by absorbing the rays of the sun melted the snow, and so not only made a dry bed for my feet, but in the night their dark line was my guide. for human society i was obliged to conjure up the former occupants of these woods. within the memory of many of my towns. men the road near which my house stands resounded with the laughter and gossip of inhabitants, and the woods which border it were notched and dotted with their little gardens and dwellings, though it was then much more shut in by the forest than now. in some places, within my own remembrance, the pines would scrape both sides of a chaise at once, and women and children who were compelled to go this way to lincoln alone and on foot did it with fear, and often ran a good part of the distance. though mainly but a humble route to neighbouring villages, or for the woodman's team, it once amused the traveller more than now by its variety, and lingered longer in his memory. where now firm open fields stretch from the village to the woods, it then ran through a maple swamp on a foundation of logs, the remnants of which, doubtless, still underlie the present dusty highway, from the stratten, now the alms house, farm, to brister's hill. east of my bean-field, across the road, lived cato ingraham, slave of duncan ingraham, esquire, gentleman of concord village ; who built his slave a house, and gave him permission to live in walden woods ;-cato, not uticensis, but concordiensis. some say that he was a guinea negro. there are a few who remember his little patch among the walnuts, which he let grow up till he should be old and need them; but a younger and whiter speculator got them at last. he too, however, occupies an equally narrow house at present. cato's half-obliterated cellar hole still remains, though known to few, being concealed from the traveller by a fringe of pines. it is now filled with the smooth 204 former inhabitants 205 sumach (rhus glabra,) and one of the earliest species of goldenrod (solidago stricta) grows there luxuriantly. here, by the very corner of my field, still nearer to town, zilpha, a coloured woman, had her little house, where she spun linen for the townsfolk, making the walden woods ring with her shrill singing, for she had a loud and notable voice.) at length, in the war of 1812, her dwelling was set on fire by english soldiers, prisoners on parole, when she was away, and her cat, and dog, and hens were all burned up together. she led a hard life, and somewhat inhumane. one old frequenter of these woods remembers, that as he passed her house one noon he heard her muttering to herself over her gurgling pot—“ye are all bones, bones ! ” i have seen bricks amid the oak copse there. down the road, on the right hand, on brister's hill, lived brister freeman, a handy negro," slave of squire cummings once,—there where grow still the apple-trees which brister planted and tended ; large old trees now, but their fruit still wild and ciderish to my taste. not long since i read his epitaph in the old lincoln burying-ground, a little on one side, near the unmarked graves of some british grenadiers who fell in the retreat from concord, where he is styled “ sippio brister," —scipio africanus ”— he had some title to be called, a man of colour," as if he were discoloured. it also told me, with staring emphasis, when he died; which was but an indirect way of informing me that he ever lived. with him dwelt fenda, his hospitable wife, who told fortunes, yet pleasantly,-large, round, and black, blacker than any of the children of night, such a dusky orb as never rose on concord before or since. farther down the hill, on the left, on the old road in the woods, are marks of some homestead of the stratten family ; whose orchard once covered all the slope of brister's hill, but was long since killed out by pitch-pines, excepting a few stumps, whose old roots furnish still the wild stocks of many a thrifty village tree. nearer yet to town, you come to breed's location, on the other side of the way, just on the edge of the wood ; ground famous for the pranks of a demon not distinctly named in old mythology, who has acted a prominent and astounding part in our new england life, and deserves, as much as any mythological character, to have his biography written one day; who first comes in the guise of a friend or hired man, and then robs and murders the whole family–new england rum. but history must not yet tell the tragedies enacted here ; let time intervene in some mea> 206 walden sure to assuage and lend an azure tint to them. here the most indistinct and dubious tradition says that once a tavern stood ; the well the same which tempered the traveller's beverage and refreshed his steed. here then men saluted one another, and heard and told the news, and went their ways again. breed's hut was standing only a dozen years ago, though it had long been unoccupied. it was about the size of mine. it was set on fire by mischievous boys, one election night, if i do not mistake. i lived on the edge of the village then, and had just lost myself over davenant's gondibert, that winter that i laboured with a lethargy-which, by the way, i never knew whether to regard as a family complaint, having an uncle who goes to sleep shaving himself, and is obliged to sprout potatoes in a cellar sundays, in order to keep awake and keep the sabbath, or as the consequence of my attempt to read chalmers' collection of english poetry without skipping. it fairly overcame my nervii. i had just sunk my head on this when the bells rung fire, and in hot haste the engines rolled that way, led by a straggling troop of men and boys, and i among the foremost, for i had leaped the brook. we thought it was far south over the woodswe who had run to fires before—barn, shop, or dwelling-house, or all together. “it's baker's barn,” cried one. it is the codman place,” affirmed another. and then fresh sparks went up above the wood, as if the roof fell in, and we all shouted “concord to the rescue ! waggons shot past with furious speed and crushing loads, bearing, perchance, among the rest, the agent of the insurance company, who was bound to go however far; and ever and anon the engine bell tinkled behind, more slow and sure, and rearmost of all, as it was afterward whispered, came they who set the fire and gave the alarm. thus we kept on like true idealists, rejecting the evidence of our senses, until at a turn in the road we heard the crackling and actually felt the heat of the fire from over the wall, and realized, alas ! that we were there. the very nearness of the fire but cooled our ardour. at first we thought to throw a frog-pond on to it; but concluded to let it burn, it was so far gone and so worthless. so we stood round our engine, jostled one another, expressed our sentiments through speaking trumpets, or in lower tone referred to the great confiagrations which the world has witnessed, including bascom's shop, and, between ourselves, we thought that, were we there in season tub,” and a full frog-pond by, we could turn that threatened last and universal one into another flood. we finally retreated without doing any mischief,-returned to sleep and 66 לל with our > former inhabitants 207 gondibert. but as for gondibert, i would except that passage in the preface about wit being the soul's powder-“but most of mankind are strangers to wit, as indians are to powder.” it chanced that i walked that way across the fields the following night, about the same hour, and hearing a low moaning at this spot, i drew near in the dark, and discovered the only survivor of the family that i know, the heir of both its virtues and its vices, who alone was interested in this burning, lying on his stomach and looking over the cellar wall at the still smouldering cinders beneath, muttering to himself, as is his wont. he had been working far off in the river meadows all day, and had improved the first moments that he could call his own to visit the home of his fathers and his youth. he gazed into the cellar from all sides and points of view by turns, always lying down to it, as if there was some treasure, which he remembered, concealed between the stones, where there was absolutely nothing but a heap of bricks and ashes. the house being gone, he looked at what there was left. he was soothed by the sympathy which my mere presence implied, and showed me, as well as the darkness permitted, where the well was covered up; which, thank heaven, could never be burned ; and he groped long about the wall to find the well-sweep which his father had cut and mounted, feeling for the iron hook or staple by which a burden had been fastened to the heavy endall that he could now cling to—to convince me that it was no comrider.” i felt it, and still remark it almost daily in my walks, for by it hangs the history of a family. once more, on the left, where are seen the well and lilac bushes by the wall, in the now open field, lived nutting and le grosse. but to return toward lincoln. farther in the woods than any of these, where the road approaches nearest to the pond, wyman the potter squatted, and furnished his townsmen with earthenware, and left descendants to succeed him. neither were they rich in worldly goods, holding the land by sufferance while they lived ; and there often the sheriff came in vain to collect the taxes, and “ attached a chip," for form's sake, as i have read in his accounts, there being nothing else that he could lay his hands on. one day in midsummer, when i was hoeing, a man who was carrying a load of pottery to market stopped his horse against my field and inquired concern. ing wyman the younger. he had long ago bought a potter's wheel of him, and wished to know what had become of him. i had read of the potter's clay and wheel in scripture, but it had never occurred to me that the pots we use were not such as had 66 mon ? 208 walden a an > come down unbroken from those days, or grown on trees like gourds, and i was pleased to hear that so fictile an art was ever practised in my neighbourhood. the last inhabitant of these woods before me was an irishman, hugh quoil (if i have spelt his name with coil enough), who occupied wyman's tenement/col. quoil, he was called. rumour said that he had been a soldier at waterloo. if he had lived i should have made him fight his battles over again. his trade here was that of a ditcher. napoleon went to st. helena ; quoil came to walden woods. all i know of him is tragic. he was a man of manners, like one who had seen the world, and was capable of more civil speech than you could well attend to. he wore a great-coat in midsummer, being affected with the trembling delirium, and his face was the colour of carmine. he died in the road at the foot of brister's hill shortly after i came to the woods, so that i have not remembered him as a neighbour. before his house was pulled down, when his comrades avoided it as unlucky castle,” i visited it. there lay his old clothes curled up by use, as if they were himself, upon his raised plank bed. his pipe lay broken on the hearth, instead of a bowl broken at the fountain. the last could never have been the symbol of his death, for he confessed to me that, though he had heard of brister's spring, he had never seen it; and soiled cards, kings of diamonds, spades, and hearts, were scattered over the floor. one black chicken which the administrator could not catch, black as night and as silent, not even croaking, awaiting reynard, still went to roost in the next apartment. in the rear there was the dim outline of a garden, which had been planted but had never received its first hoeing, owing to those terrible shaking fits, though it was now harvest time. it was overrun with roman wormwood and beggar-ticks, which last stuck to my clothes for all fruit. the skin of a woodchuck was freshly stretched upon the back of the house, a trophy of his last waterloo; but no warm cap or mittens would he want more. now only a dent in the earth marks the site of these dwellings, with buried cellar stones, and strawberries, raspberries, thimbleberries, hazel-bushes, and sumachs growing in the sunny sward there ; some pitch-pine or gnarled oak occupies what was the chimney-nook, and a sweet-scented black-pitch, perhaps, waves where the door-stone was. sometimes the well dent is visible, where once a spring oozed; now dry and tearless grass ; or it was covered deep-not to be discovered till some late day—with a flat stone under the sod, when the last of the race departed. former inhabitants 209 a what a sorrowful act must that be,-the covering up of wells ! coincident with the opening of wells of tears. these cellar dents, like deserted fox-burrows, old holes, are all that is left where once were the stir and bustle of human life, and “fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,” in some form and dialect or other were by turns discussed. but all i can learn of their conclusions amounts to just this, that“ cato and brister pulled wool ” ; which is about as edifying as the history of more amous schools of philosophy. still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door and lintel and the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet-scented flowers each spring, to be plucked by the musing traveller; planted and tended once by children's hands, in front-yard plots, -now standing by wall-sides in retired pastures, and giving place to newrising forests ;—the last of that stirp, sole survivor of that family. little did the dusky children think that the puny slip with its two eyes only, which they stuck in the ground in the shadow of the house and daily watered, would root itself so, and outlive them, and house itself, in the rear that shaded it, and grown man's garden and orchard, and tell their story faintly to the lone wanderer a half century after they had grown up and died, -blossoming as fair, and smelling as sweet, as in that first spring. i mark its still tender, civil, cheerful, lilac colours. but this small village, germ of something more, why did it fail while concord keeps its ground? were there no natural advantages, -no water privileges, forsooth ? ay, the deep walden pond and cool brister's spring,-privilege to drink long and healthy draughts at these, all unimproved by these men but to dilute their glass. they were universally a thirsty race. might not the basket, stable-broom, mat-making, corn-parching, linenspinning, and pottery business have thrived here, making the wilderness to blossom like the rose, and a numerous posterity have inherited the land of their fathers ? the sterile soil would at least have been proof against a lowland degeneracy. alas ! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape ! again, perhaps, nature will try, with me for a first settler, and my house raised last spring to be the oldest in the hamlet. i am not aware that any man has ever built on the spot which i occupy. deliver me from a city built on the site of a more ancient city, whose materials are ruins, whose gardens cemeteries. the soil is blanched and accursed there, and before that becomes necessary the earth itself will be destroyed. with such reminiscences i repeopled the woods and lulled myself asleep. o 210 walden 1 at this season i seldom had a visitor. when the snow lay deepest no wanderer ventured near my house for a week or fortnight at a time, but there i lived as snug as a meadow mouse, or as cattle and poultry which are said to have survived for a long time buried in drifts, even without food; or like that early settler's family in the town of sutton, in this state, whose cottage was completely covered by the great snow of 1717 when he was absent, and an indian found it only by the hole which the chimney's breath made in the drift, and so relieved the family. but no friendly indian concerned himself about me; nor needed he, for the master of the house was at home. the great snow ! how cheerful it is to hear of! when the farmers could not get to the woods and swamps with their teams, and were obliged to cut down the shade trees before their houses, and when the crust was harder cut off the trees in the swamps ten feet from the ground, as it appeared the next spring. in the deepest snows, the path which i send from the highway to my house, about half a mile long, might have been represented by a meandering dotted line, with wide intervals between the dots. for a week of even weather i took exactly the same number of steps, and of the same length, coming and going, stepping deliberately and with the precision of a pair of dividers in my own deep tracks,—to such routine the winter reduces us—yet often they were filled with heaven's own blue. but no weather interfered fatally with my walks, or rather my going abroad, for i frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow-birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines ; when the ice and snow causing their limbs to droop, and so sharpening their tops, had changed the pines into fir-trees; wading to the tops of the highest hills when the snow was nearly two feet deep on a level, and shaking down another snow-storm on my head at every step; or sometimes creeping and floundering thither on my hands and knees, when the hunters had gone into winter quarters. one afternoon i amused myself by watching a barred owl (strix nebulosa) sitting on one of the lower dead limbs of a white pine, close to the trunk, in broad daylight, i standing within a rod of him. he could hear me when i moved and cronched the snow with my feet, but could not plainly see me. when i made most noise he would stretch out his neck, and erect his neck feathers, and open his eyes wide ; but their lids soon fell again, and he began to nod. i too felt a slumberous influence after watching him half an hour, as he sat thus with his eyes half open, like a cat, winged brother a a winter visitors 2ii of the cat. there was only a narrow slit left between their lids, by which he preserved a peninsular relation to me; thus, with half-shut eyes, looking out from the land of dreams, and endeavouring to realize me, vague object or mote that interrupted his visions. at length, on some louder noise or my nearer approach, he would grow uneasy and sluggishly turn about on his perch, as if impatient at having his dreams disturbed ; and when he launched himself off, and flapped through the pines, spreading his wings to unexpected breadth, i could not hear the slightest sound from them. thus, guided amid the pine boughs rather by a delicate sense of their neighbourhood than by sight, feeling his twilight way as it were with his sensitive pinions, he found a new perch, where he might in peace await the dawning of his day. as i walked over the long causeway made for the railroad through the meadows, i encountered many a blustering and nipping wind, for nowhere has it freer play; and when the frost had smitten me on one cheek, heathen as i was, i turned to it the other also. nor was it much better by the carriage road from brister's hill. for i came to town still, like a friendly indian, when the contents of the broad open fields were all piled up between the walls of the walden road, and half an hour sufficed to obliterate the tracks of the last traveller. and when i returned new drifts would have formed, through which i floundered, where the busy north-west wind had been depositing the powdery snow round a sharp angle in the road, and not a rabbit's track, nor even the fine print, the small type, of a meadow mouse was to be seen. yet i rarely failed to find, even in mid-winter, some warm and springy swamp where the grass and the skunk cabbage still put forth with perennial verdure, and some hardier bird occasionally awaited the return of spring. sometimes, notwithstanding the snow, when i returned from my walk at evening i crossed the deep tracks of a wood-chopper leading from my door, and found his pile of whittlings on the hearth, and my house filled with the odour of his pipe. or on a sunday afternoon, if i chanced to be at home, i heard the cronching of the snow made by the step of a long-headed farmer, who, from far through the woods, sought my house, to have a social crack -one of the few of his vocation who are men on their farms," who donned a frock instead of a professor's gown, and is as ready to extract the moral out of church or state as to haul a load of manure from his barn-yard. we talked of rude and simple times, when men sat about large fires in cold, bracing weather, with clear heads; and when other dessert failed, we > a 66 >> 212 walden tried our teeth on many a nut which wise squirrels had long since abandoned, for those which have the thickest shells are commonly empty. the one who came from farthest to my lodge, through deepest snows and most dismal tempests, was a poet. a farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter, even a philosopher, may be daunted ; but nothing can deter a poet, for he is actuated by pure love. who can predict his comings and goings ? his business calls him out at all hours, even when doctors sleep. we made that small house ring with boisterous mirth and resound with the murmur of much sober talk, making amends then to walden vale for the long silences. broadway was still and deserted in comparison. at suitable intervals there were regular salutes of laughter, which might have been referred indifferently to the last uttered or the forthcoming jest. we made many a "bran new" theory of life over a dish of gruel, which combined the advantages of convi. viality with the clear-headedness which philosophy requires. i should not forget that during my last winter at the pond there was another welcome visitor, who at one time came through the village, through snow, and rain, and darkness, till he saw my lamp through the trees, and shared with me some long winter evenings. one of the last of the philosophers, connecticut gave him to the world,-he peddled first her wares ; afterwards, as he declares, his brains. these he peddles still, prompting god and disgracing man, bearing for fruit his brain only, like the nut its kernel. i think that he must be the man of the most faith of any alive. his words and attitude always suppose a better state of things than other men are acquainted with, and he will be the last man to be disappointed as the ages revolve. he has no venture in the present. but though comparatively disregarded now, when his day comes, laws unsuspected by most will take effect, and masters of families and rulers will come to him for advice. “how blind that cannot see serenity !” a true friend of man-almost the only friend of human progress. an old mortality-say, rather, an immortality-with unwearied patience and faith making plain the image engraven in men's bodies, the god of whom they are but defaced and leaning monuments. with his hospitable intellect, he embraces children, beggars, insane, and scholars, and entertains the thought of all, adding to it commonly some breadth and elegance. i think that he should keep a caravansary on the world's highway, where philo1 213 winter visitors 2 sophers of all nations might put up, and on his sign should be printed, “ entertainment for man, but not for his beast. enter ye that have leisure and a quiet mind, who earnestly seek the right road." he is, perhaps, the sanest man, and has the fewest crotchets of any i chance to know—the same yesterday and tomorrow. of yore we had sauntered and talked, and effectually put the world behind us ; for he was pledged to no institution in it, free-born, ingenuus. whichever way we turned, it seemed that the heavens and the earth had met together, since he enhanced the beauty of the landscape. a blue-robed man, whose fittest roof is the overarching sky which reflects his serenity. i do not see how he can ever die nature cannot spare him. having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled them, trying our knives, and admiring the clear yellowish grain of the pumpkin pine. we waded so gently and reverently, or we pulled together so smoothly, that the fishes of thought were not scared from the stream, nor feared any angler on the bank, but came and went grandly, like the clouds which float through the western sky, and the mother-o’-pearl flocks which sometimes form and dissolve there. there we worked, revising mythology, rounding a fable here and there, and building castles in the air for which earth offered no worthy foundation. great looker ! great expecter ! to converse with whom was a new england night's entertainment. ah! such discourse we had, hermit and philosopher, and the old settler i have spoken of,-we three,-it expanded and racked my little house ; i should not dare to say how many pounds' weight there was above the atmospheric pressure on every circular inch; it opened its seams so that they had to be caulked with much dulness thereafter to stop the consequent leak;—but i had enough of that kind of oakum already picked. there was one other with whom i had solid seasons,” long to be remembered, at his house in the village, and who looked in upon me from time to time; but i had no more society there. there too, as everywhere, i sometimes expected the visitor who never comes. the vishnu purana says, the householder is to remain at eventide in his court-yard as long as it takes to milk a cow, or longer if he pleases, to await the arrival of a guest.” i often performed this duty of hospitality, waited long enough to milk a whole herd of cows, but did not see the man approaching from the town. 66 a winter animals when the ponds were firmly frozen, they afforded not only new and shorter routes to many points, but new views from their surfaces of the familiar landscape around them. when i crossed flint's pond, after it was covered with snow, though i had often paddled about and skated over it, it was so unexpectedly wide and so strange that i could think of nothing but baffin's bay. the lincoln hills rose up around me at the extremity of a snowy plain, in which i did not remember to have stood before ; and the fishermen, at an indeterminable distance over the ice, moving slowly about with their wolfish dogs, passed for sealers or esquimaux, or in misty weather loomed like fabulous creatures, and i did not know whether they were giants or pygmies. i took this course when i went to lecture in lincoln in the evening, travelling in no road and passing no house between my own hut and the lecture-room. in goose pond, which lay in my way, a colony of musk-rats dwelt, and raised their cabins high above the ice, though none could be seen abroad when i crossed it. walden, being like the rest usually bare of snow, or with only shallow and interrupted drifts on it, was my yard where i could walk freely when the snow was nearly two feet deep on a level elsewhere and the villagers were confined to their streets. there, far from the village street, and, except at very long intervals, from the jingle of sleigh-bells, i slid and skated, as in a vast moose-yard well trodden, overhung by oak woods and solemn pines bent down with snow or bristling with icicles. for sounds in winter nights, and often in winter days, i heard the forlorn but melodious notes of a hooting owl indefinitely far; such a sound as the frozen earth would yield if struck with a a suitable plectrum, the very lingua vernacula of walden wood, and quite familiar to me at last, though i never saw the bird while it was making it. i seldom opened my door in a winter evening without hearing it; hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo, sounded sonorously, and the first three syllables accented somewhat like how der do ; or sometimes hoo hoo only. one night in the beginning of winter, before the pond froze over, about nine o'clock, i was startled by the loud honking of a goose, and, stepping to the door, heard the sound of their wings like a tempest in the woods as they flew low over my house. they passed over the pond toward fair-haven, a 214 winter animals 215 a seemingly deterred from settling by my light, their commodore honking all the while with a regular beat. suddenly an unmistakable cat-owl from very near me, with the most harsh and tremendous voice i ever heard from any inhabitant of the woods, responded at regular intervals to the goose, as if determined to expose and disgrace this intruder from hudson's bay by exhibiting a greater compass and volume of voice in a native, and boo-boo him out of concord horizon. what do you mean by alarming the citadel at this time of night consecrated to me? do you think i am ever caught napping at such an hour, and that i have not got lungs and a larynx as well as yourself? boo-hoo, boo-hoo, boo-hoo! it was one of the most thrilling discords i ever heard. and yet, if you had a discriminating ear, there were in it the elements of a concord such as these plains never saw nor heard. i also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great bedfellow in that part of concord, as if it were restless in its bed and would fain turn over—were troubled with flatulency and bad dreams; or i was waked by the cracking of the ground by the frost, as if some one had driven a team against my door, and in the morning would find a crack in the earth a quarter of a mile long and a third of an inch wide. sometimes i heard the foxes as they ranged over the snow crust, in moonlight nights, in search of a partridge or other game, barking raggedly and demoniacally like forest dogs, as if labouring with some anxiety, or seeking expression, struggling for light and to be dogs outright and run freely in the streets ; for if we take the ages into our account, may there not be a civilization going on among brutes as well as men? they seemed to me to be rudimental, burrowing men, still standing on their defence, awaiting their transformation. sometimes one came near to my window, attracted by my light, barked a vulpine curse at me, and then retreated. usually the red squirrel (sciurus hudsonius) waked me in the dawn, coursing over the roof and up and down the sides of the house, as if sent out of the woods for this purpose. in the course of the winter i threw out half-a-bushel of ears of sweet-corn, which had not got ripe, on to the snow crust by my door, and was amused by watching the motions of the various animals which were baited by it. in the twilight and the night the rabbits came regularly and made a hearty meal. all day long the red squirrels came and went, and afforded me much entertainment by their manone would approach at first warily through the shrub> qeuvres. 216 walden a a 2 2 oaks, running over the snow crust by fits and starts like a leaf blown by the wind, now a few paces this way, with wonderful speed and waste of energy, making inconceivable haste with his trotters," as if it were for a wager, and now as many paces that way, but never getting on more than half a rod at a time; and then suddenly pausing with a ludicrous expression and a gratuitous somersault; as if all the eyes in the universe were fixed on him,for all the motions of a squirrel, even in the most solitary recesses of the forest, imply spectators as much as those of a dancing girl, —wasting more time in delay and circumspection than would have sufficed to walk the whole distance,-i never saw one walk,and then suddenly, before you could say jack robinson, he would be in the top of a young pitch-pine, winding up his clock and chiding all imaginary spectators, soliloquizing and talking to all the universe at the same time,-for no reason that i could ever detect, or he himself was aware of, i suspect. at length he would reach the corn, and selecting a suitable ear, brisk about in the same uncertain trigonometrical way to the topmost stick of my wood-pile, before my window, where he looked me in the face, and there sit for hours, supplying himself with a new ear from time to time, nibbling at first voraciously and throwing the half-naked cobs about ; till at length he grew more dainty still and played with his food, tasting only the inside of the kernel, and the ear, which was held balanced over the stick by one paw, slipped from his careless grasp and fell to the ground, when he would look over at it with a ludicrous expression of uncertainty, as if suspecting that it had life, with a mind not made up whether to get it again, or a new one, or be off ; now thinking of corn, then listening to hear what was in the wind. so the little impudent fellow would waste many an ear in a forenoon ; till at last, seizing some longer and plumper one, considerably bigger than himself, and skilfully balancing it, he would set out with it to the woods, like a tiger with a buffalo, by the same zig-zag course and frequent pauses, scratching along with it as if it were too heavy for him and falling all the while, making its fall a diagonal between a perpendicular and horizontal, being determined to put it through at any rate ;—a singularly frivolous and whimsical fellow ;—and so he would get off with it to where he lived, perhaps carry it to the top of a pine tree forty or fifty rods distant, and i would afterwards find the cobs strewn about the woods in various directions. at length the jays arrive, whose discordant screams were heard long before, as they were warily making their approach an eighth of a mile off, and in a stealthy and sneaking manner > a winter animals 217 they flit from tree to tree, nearer and nearer, and pick up the kernels which the squirrels have dropped. then, sitting on a pitch-pine bough, they attempt to swallow in their haste a kernel which is too big for their throats and chokes them; and after great labour they disgorge it, and spend an hour in the endeavour to crack it by repeated blows with their bills. they were manifestly thieves, and i had not much respect for them; but the squirrels, though at first shy, went to work as if they were taking what was their own. meanwhile also came the chicadees in flocks, which, picking up the crumbs the squirrels had dropped, flew to the nearest twig, and, placing them under their claws, hammered away at them with their little bills, as if it were an insect in the bark, till they were sufficiently reduced for their slender throats. a little flock of these tit-mice came daily to pick a dinner out of my wood-pile, or the crumbs at my door, with faint, flitting, lisping notes, like the tinkling of icicles in the grass, or else with sprightly day, day, day, or more rarely, in spring-like days, a wiry summery phe-be from the wood-side. they were so familiar that at length one alighted on an armful of wood which i was carrying in and pecked at the sticks without fear. i once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment while i was hoeing in a village garden, and i felt that i was more distinguished by that circumstance than i should have been by any epaulet i could have worn. the squirrels also grew at last to be quite familiar, and occasionally stepped upon my shoe, when that was the nearest way. when the ground was not yet quite covered, and again near the end of winter, when the snow was melted on my south hill-side and about my wood-pile, the partridges came out of the woods morning and evening to feed there. whichever side you walk in the woods the partridge bursts away on whirring wings, jarring the snow from the dry leaves and twigs on high, which comes sifting down in the sunbeams like golden dust, for this brave bird is not to be scared by winter. it is frequently covered up by drifts, and, it is said, “ sometimes plunges from on wing into the soft snow, where it remains concealed for a day or two.' i sed to start in the land also, where they had come out of the woods at sunset to “bud' the wild apple trees. they will come regularly every evening to particular trees, where the cunning sportsman lies in wait for them, and the distant orchards next the woods suffer thus not a little. i am glad that the partridge gets fed, at any rate. it is nature's own bird, which lives on buds and diet-drink. open 2 . 218 walden in dark winter mornings, or in short winter afternoons, i sometimes heard a pack of hounds threading all the woods with hounding cry and yelp, unable to resist the instinct of the chase, and the note of the hunting-horn at intervals, proving that man was in the rear. the woods ring again, and yet no fox bursts forth on to the open level of the pond, nor following pack pursuing their actæon. and perhaps at evening i see the hunters returning with a single brush trailing from their sleigh for a trophy, seeking their inn. they tell me that if the fox would remain in the bosom of the frozen earth he would be safe, or if he would run in a straight line away no fox-hound could overtake him ; but, having left his pursuers far behind, he stops to rest and listen till they come up, and when he runs he circles round to his old haunts, where the hunters await him. sometimes, however, he will run upon a wall many rods, and then leap off far to one side, and he appears to know that water will not retain his scent. a hunter told me that he once saw a fox pursued by hounds burst out on to walden when the ice was covered with shallow puddles, run part way. across, and then return to the same shore. ere long the hounds arrived, but here they lost the scent. sometimes a pack hunting by themselves would pass my door, and circle round my house, and yelp and hound without regarding me, as if afflicted by a species of madness, so that nothing could divert them from the pursuit. thus they circle until they fall upon the recent trail of a fox, for a wise hound will forsake everything else for this. one day a man came to my hut from lexington to inquire after his hound that made a large track, and had been hunting for a week by himself. but i fear that he was not the wiser for all i told him, for every time i attempted to answer his questions he interrupted me by asking, “what do you do here?” he had lost a dog, but found a man. one old hunter who has a dry tongue, who used to come to bathe in walden once every year when the water was warmest, and at such times looked in upon me, told me, that many years ago he took his gun one afternoon and went out for a cruise in walden wood; and as he walked the wayland road he heard the cry of hounds approaching, and ere long a fox leaped the wall into the road, and as quick as thought leaped the other wall out of the road, and his swift bullet had not touched him. some way behind came an old hound and her three pups in full pursuit, hunting on their own account, and dissappeared again in the woods. late in the afternoon, as he was resting in the thick woods south of walden, he heard the voice of the hounds far over towards fair-haven still pursuing winter animals 219 the fox; and on they came, their hounding cry, which made all the woods ring, sounding nearer and nearer, now from wellmeadow, now from the baker farm. for a long time he stood still and listened to their music, so sweet to a hunter's ear, when suddenly the fox appeared, threading the solemn aisles with an easy coursing pace, whose sound was concealed by a sympathetic rustle of the leaves, swift and still, keeping the ground, leaving his pursuers far behind ; and leaping upon a rock amid the woods, l he sat erect and listening, with his back to the hunter. for a moment compassion restrained the latter's arm; but that was a short-lived mood, and as quick as thought can follow thought, his piece was levelled, and whang ! – the fox rolling over the rock lay dead on the ground. the hunter still kept his place and listened to the hounds. still on they came, and now the near woods resounded through all their aisles with their demoniac cry. at length the old hound burst into view with muzzle to the ground, and snapping the air as if possessed, and ran directly to the rock ; but spying the dead fox she suddenly ceased her hounding, as if struck dumb with amazement, and walked round and round him in silence; and one by one her pups arrived, and, like their mother, were sobered into silence by the mystery. then the hunter came forward and stood in their midst, and the mystery was solved. they waited in silence while he skinned the fox, then followed the brush a while, and at length turned off into the woods again. that evening a weston squire came to the concord hunter's cottage to inquire for his hounds, and told how for a week they had been hunting on their own account from weston woods. the concord hunter told him what he knew and offered him the skin ; but the other declined it and departed. he did not find his hounds that night, but the next day learned that they had crossed the river and put up at a farm-house for the night, whence, having been well fed, they took their departure early in the morning. the hunter who told me this could remember one sam nutting, who used to hunt bears on fair-haven ledges and exchange their skins for rum in concord village—who told him, even, that he had seen a moose there. nutting had a famous fox-hound named burgoyne-he pronounced is bugine-which my informant used to borrow. in the “ waste book” of an old trader of this town, who was also a captain, town-clerk, and representative, i find the following entry jan. 18th, 1742-3, “john melven cr. by 1 grey fox 0–2–3;” they are not now found here ; and in his ledger, feb. 7th, 1743, hezekiah stratton has credit" by a catt 3 220 walden skin o_1–41; ” of course, a wild-cat, for stratton was a sergeant in the old french war, and would not have got credit for hunting less noble game. credit is given for deer-skins also, and they were daily sold. one man still preserves the horns of the last deer that was killed in this vicinity, and another party has told me the particulars of the hunt in which his uncle was engaged. the hunters were formerly a numerous and merry crew here. i remember well one gaunt nimrod who would catch up a leaf by the road-side, and play a strain on it wilder and more melodious, if my memory serves me, than any hunting-horn. at midnight, when there was a moon, i sometimes met with hounds in my path prowling about the woods, which would skulk out of my way, as if afraid, and stand silent amid the bushes till i had passed. squirrels and wild mice disputed for my store of nuts. there were scores of pitch-pines around my house, from one to four inches in diameter, which had been gnawed by mice the previous winter,-a norwegian winter for them, for the snow lay long and deep, and they were obliged to mix a large proportion of pine bark with their other diet. these trees were alive and apparently flourishing at midsummer, and many of them had grown a foot, though completely girdled; but after another winter such were without exception dead. it is remarkable that a single mouse should thus be allowed a whole pine tree for its dinner, gnawing round instead of up and down it; but perhaps it is necessary in order to thin these trees, which are wont to grow up densely. the hares (lepus americanus) were very familiar. one hid her form under my house all winter, separated from me only by the flooring, and she startled me each morning by her hasty departure when i began to stir,-thump, thump, thump, striking her head against the floor timbers in her hurry. they used to come round my door at dusk to nibble the potato parings which i had thrown out, and were so nearly the colour of the ground that they could hardly be distinguished when still. sometimes in the twilight i alternately lost and recovered sight of one sitting motionless under my window. when i opened my door in the evening, off they would go with a squeak and a bounce. near at hand they only excited my pity. one evening one sat by my door two paces from me, at first trembling with fear, yet unwilling to move; a poor wee thing, lean and bony, with ragged ears and sharp nose, scant tail and slender paws. it looked as if nature no longer contained the breed of nobler bloods, but stood on her last toes. its large eyes appeared young and unhealthy, almost dropsical. winter animals 221 i took a step, and lo, away it scud with an elastic spring over the snow crust, straightening its body and its limits into graceful length, and soon put the forest between me and itself,—the wild free venison, asserting its vigour and the dignity of nature. not without reason was its slenderness. such then was its nature. (lepus, livipes, light-foot, some think.) what is a country without rabbits and partridges ? they are among the most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times ; of the very hue and substance of nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground, and to one another; it is either winged or it is legged. it is hardly as if you had seen a wild creature when a rabbit or a partridge bursts away, only a natural one, as much to be expected as rustling leaves. the partridge and the rabbit are stiſl sure to thrive, like true natives of the soil, whatever revolutions occur. if the forest is cut off, the sprouts and bushes which spring up afford them concealment, and they become more numerous han ever. that must that must be a poor country indeed that does not support a hare. our woods teem with them both, and around every swamp may be seen the partridge or rabbit walk, beset with twiggy fences and horse-hair snares, which some cowboy tends. the pond in winter after a still winter night i awoke with the impression that some question had been put to me, which i had been endeavouring in vain to answer in my sleep, as what-how-when—where ? but there was dawning nature, in whom all creatures live, looking in at my broad windows with serene and satisfied face, and no question on her lips. i awoke to an answered question, to nature and daylight. the snow lying deep on the earth dotted with young pines, and the very slope of the hill on which my house is placed seemed to say, forward ! nature puts no question, and answers none which we mortals ask. she has long ago taken her resolution. “o prince, our eyes contemplate with admiration and transmit to the soul the wonderful and varied spectacle of this universe. the night veils without doubt a part of this glorious creation ; but day comes to reveal to us this great work, which extends from earth into the plains of the ether.” then to my morning work. first i take an axe and pail and go in search of water, if that be not a dream. after a cold and snowy night is needed a divining rod to find it. every winter the liquid and trembling surface of the pond, which was so sensitive to every breath, and reflected every light and shadow, becomes solid to the depth of a foot or a foot and a half, so that it will support the heaviest teams, and perchance the snow covers it to an equal depth, and it is not to be distinguished from any level field. like the marmots in the surrounding hills, it closes its eyelids and becomes dormant for three months or more. standing on the snow-covered plain, as if in a pasture amid the hills, i cut my way first through a foot of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a window under my feet, where, kneeling to drink, i look down into the quiet parlour of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as in summer; there a perennial waveless serenity reigns as in the amber twilight sky, corresponding to the cool and even temperament of the inhabitants. heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads. early in the morning, while all things are crisp with frost, men come with fishing reels and slender lunch, and let down their fine lines through the snowy field to take pickerel and perch; wild men, who instinctively follow other fashions and trust other 222 the pond in winter 223 authorities than their townsmen, and by their goings and comings stitch towns together in parts where else they would be ripped. they sit and eat their luncheon in stout fear-naughts on the dry oak leaves on the shore, as wise in natural lore as the citizen is in artificial. they never consulted with books, and know and can tell much less than they have done. the things which they practise are said not yet to be known. here is one fishing for pickerel with grown perch for bait. you look into his pail with wonder as into a summer pond, as if he kept summer locked up at home, or knew where she had retreated. how, pray, did he get these in mid-winter? oh, he got worms out of rotten logs since the ground froze, and so he caught them. his life itself passes deeper in nature than the studies of the naturalist penetrate, himself a subject for the naturalist. the latter raises the moss and bark gently with his knife in search of insects; the former lays open logs to their core with his axe, and moss and bark fly far and wide. he gets his living by barking trees. such a man has some right to fish, and i love to see nature carried out in him. the perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel ; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled. when i strolled around the pond in misty weather i was sometimes amused by the primitive mode which some ruder fisherman had adopted. he would perhaps have placed alder branches over the narrow holes in the ice, which were four or five rods apart and an equal distance from the shore, and having fastened the end of the line to a stick to prevent it being pulled through, have passed the slack line over a twig of the alder, a foot or more above the ice, and tied a dry oak leaf to it, which, being pulled down, would show when he had a bite. these alders loomed through the mist at regular intervals as you walked half-way round the pond. ah, the pickerel of walden ! when i see them lying on the ice, or in the well which the fisherman cuts in the ice, making a little hole to admit the water, i am always surprised by their rare beauty, as if they were fabulous fishes, they are so foreign to the streets, even to the woods, foreign as arabia to our concord life. they possess a quite dazzling and transcendant beauty, which separates them by a wide interval from the cadaverous cod and haddock whose fame is trumpeted in our streets. they are not green like the pines, nor grey like the stones, nor blue like the sky; but they have, to my eyes, if possible, yet rarer colours, like flowers and precious stones, as if they were the pearls, the animalized nuclei or crystals of the walden water. they, of 224 walden course, are walden all over and all through ; are themselves small waldens in the animal kingdom, waldenses. it is surprising that they are caught here,—that in this deep and capacious spring, far beneath the rattling teams and chaises and tinking sleighs that travel the walden road, this great gold and emerald fish swims. i never chanced to see its kind in any market; it would be the cynosure of all eyes there. easily, with a few convulsive quirks, they give up their watery ghosts, like a mortal translated before his time to the thin air of heaven. a as i was desirous to recover the long lost bottom of walden pond, i surveyed it carefully, before the ice broke up, early in '46, with compass and chain and sounding line. there have been many stories told about the bottom, or rather no bottom, of this pond, which certainly had no foundation for themselves. it is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it. i have visited two such bottomless ponds in one walk in this neighbourhood. many have believed that walden reached quite through to the other side of the globe. some who had lain flat on the ice for a long time, looking down through the illusive medium, perchance with watery eyes into the bargain, and driven to hasty conclusions by the fear of catching cold in their breasts, have seen vast holes “into which a load of hay might be driven," if there were any body to drive it, the undoubted source of the styx and entrance to the infernal regions from these parts. others have gone down from the village with a " fifty-six" and a waggon load of inch rope, , but yet have failed to find any bottom ; for while the “ fifty-six” was resting by the way, they were paying out the rope in the vain attempt to fathom their truly immeasurable capacity for marvellousness. but i can assure my readers that walden has a reasonably tight bottom at a not unreasonable, though at an unusual depth. i fathomed it easily with a cod-line and a stone weighing about a pound and a half, and could tell accurately when the stone left the bottom, by having to pull so much harder before the water got underneath to help me. the greatest depth was exactly one hundred and two feet; to which may be added the five feet which it has risen since, making one hundred and seven. this is a remarkable depth for so small an area ; yet not an inch of it can be spared by the imagination. what if all ponds were shallow ? would it not react on the minds of men ? i am thankful that this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol. while men believe in the infinite, some ponds will be thought to be bottomless. the pond in winter 225 a a factory owner, hearing what depth i had found, thought that it could not be true, for, judging from his acquaintance with dams, sand would not lie at so steep an angle. but the deepest ponds are not so deep in proportion to their area as most suppose, and, if drained, would not leave very remarkable valleys. they are not like cups between the hills ; for this one, which is so unusually deep for its area, appears in a vertical section through its centre not deeper than a shallow plate. most ponds, emptied, would leave a meadow no more hollow than we frequently see. william gilpin, who is so admirable in all that relates to landscapes, and usually so correct, standing at the head of loch fyne, in scotland, which he describes as a bay of salt water, sixty or seventy fathoms deep, four miles in breadth,” and about fifty miles long, surrounded by mountains, observes, “if we could have seen it immediately after the diluvian crash, or whatever convulsion of nature occasioned it, the waters gushed in, what a horrid chasm it must have appeared ! “so high as heaved the tumid hills, so low down sunk a hollow bottom, broad, and deep, capacious bed of waters--" but if, using the shortest diameter of loch fyne, we apply these proportions to walden, which, as we have seen, appears already in a vertical section only like a shallow plate, it will appear four times as shallow. so much for the increased horrors of the chasm of loch fyne when emptied. no doubt many a smiling valley with its stretching corn-fields occupies exactly such a “horrid chasm, from which the waters have receded, though it requires the insight and the far sight of the geologist to convince the unsuspecting inhabitants of this fact. often an inquisitive eye may detect the shores of a primitive lake in the low horizon hills, and no subsequent elevation of the plain has been necessary to conceal their history. but it is easiest, as they who work on the highways know, to find the hollows by the puddles after a shower. the amount of it is, the imagination, give it the least license, dives deeper and soars higher than nature goes. so, probably, the depth of the ocean will be found to be very inconsiderable compared with its breadth. as i sounded through the ice i could determine the shape of the bottom with greater accuracy than is possible in surveying harbours which do not freeze over, and i was surprised at its general regularity. in the deepest part there are several acres more level than almost any field which is exposed to the p 226 시 ​walden sun, wind, and plough. in one instance, on a line arbitrarily chosen, the depth did not vary more than one foot in thirty rods ; and generally, near the middle, i could calculate the variation of each one hundred feet in any direction beforehand within three or four inches. some are accustomed to speak of deep and dangerous holes even in quiet sandy ponds like this, but the effect of water under these circumstances is to level all inequalities. the regularity of the bottom and its conformity to the shores and the range of the neighbouring hills were so perfect that a distant promontory betrayed itself in the soundings quite across the pond, and its direction could be determined by observing the opposite shore. cape becomes bar, and plain shoal, and valley and gorge deep water and channel. when i had mapped the pond by the scale of ten rods to an inch, and put down the soundings, more than a hundred in all, i observed this remarkable coincidence. having noticed that the number indicating the greatest depth was apparently in the centre of the map, i laid a rule on the map lengthwise, and then breadthwise, and found, to my surprise, that the line of greatest length intersected the line of greatest breadth exactly at the point of the greatest depth, notwithstanding that the middle is so nearly level, the outline of the pond far from regular, and the extreme length and breadth were got by measuring into the coves ; and i said to myself, who knows but this hint would conduct to the deepest part of the ocean as well as of a pond or puddle ? is not this the rule also for the height of mountains, regarded as the opposite of valleys ? we know that a hill is not highest at its narrowest part. of five coves, three, or all which had been sounded, were observed to have a bar quite across their mouths and deeper water within, so that the bay tended to an expansion of water within the land not only horizontally but vertically, and to form a basin or independent pond, the direction of the two capes showing the course of the bar. every harbour on the sea-coast, also, has its bar at its entrance. in proportion as the mouth of the cove was wider compared with its length, the water over the bar was deeper compared with that in the basin. given, then, the length and breadth of the cove, and the character of the surrounding shore, and you have almost elements enough to make out a formula for all cases. in order to see how nearly i could guess, with this experience, at the deepest point in a pond, by observing the outlines of its surface and the character of its shores alone, i made a plan of white pond, which contains about forty-one acres, and, like this, a a the pond in winter 227 has no island in it, nor any visible inlet or outlet; and as the line of greatest breadth fell very near the line of least breadth, where two opposite capes approached each other and two opposite bays receded, i ventured to mark a point a short distance from the latter line, but still on the line of greatest length, as the deepesti the deepest part was found to be within one hundred feet of this, still farther in the direction to which i had inclined, and was only cne foot deeper, namely, sixty feet. of course a stream running through, or an island in the pond, would make the problem much more complicated. if we knew all the laws of nature, we should need only one fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point. now we know only a few laws, and our result is vitiated, not, of course, by any confusion or irregularity in nature, but by our ignorance of essential elements in the calculation. our notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to those instances which we detect; but the harmony which results from a far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but really concurring, laws, which we have not detected, is still more wonderful. the particular laws are as our points of view, as, to the traveller, a mountain outline varies with every step, and it has an infinite number of profiles, though absolutely but one form. even when cleft or bored through it is not compre. hended in its entireness: what i have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics. it is the law of average. such a rule of the two diameters not only guides us toward the sun in the system and the heart in man, but draw lines through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man's particular daily behaviours and waves of life, into his coves and inlets, and where they intersect will be the height or depth of his character. perhaps we need only to know how his shores trend and his adjacent country or circumstances, to infer his depth and concealed bottom. if he is surrounded by mountainous circumstances, an achillean shore, whose peaks overshadow and are reflected in his bosom, they suggest a corresponding depth in him. but a low and smooth shore proves him shallow on that side. in our bodies, a bold projecting brow falls off to and indicates a corresponding depth of thought. also there is a bar across the entrance of our every cove, or particular inclination ; each is our harbour for a season, in which we are detained and partially landlocked. these inclinations are not whimsical usually, but their form, size, and direction are determined by the promontories of the shore, the ancient axis of elevation. when this bar is gradu2 228 walden a a ally increased by storms, tides, or currents, or there is a subsidence of the waters, so that it reaches to the surface, that which was at first but an inclination in the shore in which a thought was harboured becomes an individual lake, cut off from the ocean, wherein the thought secures its own conditions, changes, perhaps, from salt to fresh, becomes a sweet sea, dead sea, or a marsh. at the advent of each individual into this life, may we not suppose that such a bar has risen to the surface somewhere? it is true, we are such poor navigators that our thoughts, for the most part, stand off and on upon a harbourless coast, are conversant only with the bights of the bays of poesy, or steer for the public ports of entry, and go into the dry docks of science, where they merely refit for this world, and no natural currents concur to individualize them. as for the inlet or outlet of walden, i have not discovered any but rain and snow and evaporation, though perhaps, with a thermometer and a line, such places may be found, for where the water flows into the pond it will probably be coldest in summer and warmest in winter. when the icemen were at work here in ’46–7, the cakes sent to the shore were one day rejected by those who were stacking them up there, not being thick enough to lie side by side with the rest; and the cutters thus discovered that the ice over a small space was two or three inches thinner than elsewhere, which made them think that there was an inlet there. they also showed me in another place what they thought was a hole,” through which the pond leaked out under a hill into a neighbouring meadow, pushing me out on a cake of ice to see it. it was a small cavity under ten feet of water; but i think that i can warrant the pond not to need soldering till they find a worse leak than that. one has suggested that if such a " leach hole” “ should be found, its connection with the meadow might be proved by conveying some coloured powder or sawdust to the mouth of the hole, and then putting a strainer over the spring in the meadow, which would catch some of the particles carried through by the current. while i was surveying, the ice, which was sixteen inches thick, undulated under a slight wind like water. it is well known that a level cannot be used on ice. at one rod from the shore its greatest fluctuation, when observed by means of a level on land directed toward a graduated staff on the ice, was three-quarters of an inch, though the ice appeared firmly attached to the shore. it was probably greater in the middle. who knows but if our instruments were delicate enough we might detect an undulation in the crust of the earth ? when two legs of my level were on the " leach > a the pond in winter 229 2 shore and the third on the ice, and the sights were directed over the latter, a rise or fall of the ice of an almost infinitesimal amount made a difference of several feet on a tree across the pond. when i began to cut holes for sounding, there were three or four inches of water on the ice under a deep snow which had sunk it thus far; but the water began immediately to run into these holes, and continued to run for two days in deep streams, which wore away the ice on every side, and contributed essentially, if not mainly, to dry the surface of the pond; for, as the water ran in, it raised and floated the ice. this was somewhat like cutting a hole in the bottom of a ship to let the water out. when such holes freeze, and a rain succeeds, and finally a new freezing forms a fresh smooth ice over all, it is beautifully mottled internally by dark figures, shaped somewhat like a spider's web, what you may call ice rosettes, produced by the channels worn by the water flowing from all sides to a centre. sometimes, also, when the ice was covered with shallow puddles, i saw a double shadow of myself, one standing on the head of the other-one on the ice, the other on the trees or hill-side. > while yet it is cold january, and snow and ice are thick and solid, the prudent landlord comes from the village to get ice to cool his summer drink; impressively, even pathetically wise, to foresee the heat and thirst of july now in january,--wearing a thick coat and mittens! when so many things are not provided for. it may be that he lays up no treasures in this world which will cool his summer drink in the next. he cuts and saws the solid pond, unroofs the house of fishes, and carts off their very element and air, held fast by chains and stakes like corded wood through the favouring winter air, to wintry cellars, to underlie the summer there. it looks like solidified azure, as, far off, it is drawn through the streets. these ice-cutters are a merry race, full of jest and sport, and when i went among them they were wont to invite me to saw pit-fashion with them, i standing underneath. in the winter of '46–7 there came a hundred men of hyperborean extraction swoop down on to our pond one morning, with many car-loads of ungainly-looking farming tools, sleds, ploughs, drill-barrows, turf-knives, spades, saws, rakes, and each man was armed with a double-pointed pike-staff, such as is not described in the new-england farmer or the cultivator. i did not know whether they had come to sow a crop of winter rye, or some other kind of grain recently introduced from iceland. as i saw no 230 walden 2 a > a a manure, i judged that they meant to skim the land, as i had done; thinking the soil was deep and had lain fallow long enough. they said that a gentleman farmer, who was behind the scenes, wanted to double his money, which, as i understood, amounted to half a million already ; but in order to cover each one of his dollars with another, he took off the only coat, ay, the skin itself, of walden pond in the midst of a hard winter. they went to work at once, ploughing, harrowing, rolling, furrowing, in admirable order, as if they were bent on making this a model farm ; but when i was looking sharp to see what kind of seed they dropped into the furrow, a gang of fellows by my side suddenly began to hook up the virgin mould itself, with a peculiar jerk, clean down to the sand, or rather the water,--for it was a very springy soil, -indeed all the terra firma there was,-and haul it away on sleds, and then i guessed that they must be cutting peat in a bog. so they came and went every day, with a peculiar shriek from the locomotive, from and to some point of the polar regions, as it seemed to me, like a flock of arctic snow-birds. but sometimes squaw walden had her revenge, and a hired man, walking behind his team, slipped through a crack in the ground down toward tartarus, and he who was so brave before suddenly became but the ninth part of a man, almost gave up his animal heat, and was glad to take refuge in my house, and acknowledged that there was some virtue in a stove ; or sometimes the frozen soil took a piece of steel out of a ploughshare, or a plough got set in the furrow and had to be cut out. to speak literally, a hundred irishmen, with yankee overseers, came from cambridge every day to get out the ice. they divided it into cakes by methods too well known to require description, and these, being sledded to the shore, were rapidly hauled off on to an ice platform, and raised by grappling irons and block and tackle, worked by horses, on to a stack, as surely as so many barrels of flour, and there placed evenly side by side, and row upon row, as if they formed the solid base of an obelisk designed to pierce the clouds. they told me that in a good day they could get out a thousand tons, which was the yield of about one acre. deep ruts and cradle holes were worn in the ice, as on terra firma, by the passage of the sleds over the same track, and the horses invariably ate their oats out of cakes of ice hollowed out like buckets. they stacked up the cakes thus in the open air in a pile thirty-five feet high on one side and six or seven rods square, putting hay between the outside layers to exclude the air ; for when the wind, though never so cold, finds a passage through, it לל the pond in winter 231 > ? a > will wear large cavities, leaving slight supports or studs only here and there, and finally topple it down. at first it looked like a vast blue fort or valhalla ; but when they began to tuck the coarse meadow hay into the crevices, and this became covered with rime and icicles, it looked like a venerable moss-grown and hoary ruin, built of azure-tinted marble, the abode of winter, that old man we see in the almanac—his shanty, as if he had a design to estivate with us. they calculated that not twenty-five. per cent. of this would reach its destination, and that two or three per cent. would be wasted in the cars. however, a still greater part of this heap had a different destiny from what was intended ; for, either because the ice was found not to keep so well as was expected, containing more air than usual, or for some other reason, it never got to market. this heap, made in the winter of '46–7, and estimated to contain ten thousand tons, was finally covered with hay and boards; and though it was unroofed the following july, and a part of it carried off, the rest remaining exposed to the sun, it stood over that summer and the next winter, and was not quite melted till september 1848. thus the pond recovered the greater part: like the water, the walden ice, seen near at hand, has a green tint, but at a distance is beautifully blue, and you can easily tell it from the white ice of the river or the merely greenish ice of some ponds, a quarter of a mile off. sometimes one of those great cakes slips from the ice-man's sled into the village street, and lies there for a week like a great emerald, an object of interest to all passers. i have noticed that a portion of walden which in the state of water was green, will often, when frozen, appear from the same point of view blue. so the hollows about this pond will, sometimes, in the winter, be filled with a greenish water somewhat like its own, but the next day will have frozen blue. perhaps the blue colour of water and ice is due to the light and air they contain, and the most transparent is the bluest. ice is an interesting subject for contemplation. they told me that they had some in the ice-houses at fresh pond five years old which was as good as why is it that a bucket of water soon becomes putrid, but frozen ice remains sweet forever? it is commonly said that this is the difference between the affections and the intellect: thus for sixteen days i saw from my window, a hundred men at work like busy husbandmen, with teams and horses and apparently all the implements of farming, such a picture as we see on the first page of the almanac; and as often as i looked out i was reminded of the fable of the lark and the reapers, or the parable a ever. a а 232 walden a of the sower, and the like ; and now they are all gone; and in thirty days more, probably, i shall look from the same window on the pure sea-green walden water there, reflecting the clouds and the trees, and sending up its evaporations in solitude, and no traces will appear that a man has ever stood there. perhaps i shall hear a solitary loon laugh as he dives and plumes himself, or shall see a lonely fisher in his boat, like a floating leaf, beholding his form reflected in the waves, where lately a hundred men securely laboured. thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of charleston and new orleans, of madras and bombay and calcutta, drink at my well. in the morning i bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the bhagvat geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial ; and i doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. i lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there i meet the servant of the brahmin, priest of brahma and vishnu and indra, who still sits in his temple on the ganges reading the vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water-jug. i meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets, as it were, grate together in the same well. the pure walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the ganges. with favouring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of atlantis and the hesperides, makes the periplus of hanno, and, floating by ternate and tidore and the mouth of the persian gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the indian seas, and is landed in ports of which alexander only heard the names. spring a the opening of large tracts by the ice-cutters commonly causes a pond to break up earlier; for the water, agitated by the wind, even in cold weather, wears away the surrounding ice. but such was not the case at walden that year, for she had soon got a thick new garment to take the place of the old. this pond never breaks up so soon as the others in this neighbourhood, on account both of its greater depth and its having no stream passing through it to melt or wear away the ice. i never knew it to open in the course of a winter, not excepting that of '52–3, which gave the ponds so severe a trial. it commonly opens about the 1st of april, a week or ten days later than flints' pond and fair-haven, beginning to melt on the north side and in the shallower parts where it began to freeze. it indicates better than any water hereabouts the absolute progress of the season, being least affected by transient changes of temperature. a severe cold of a few days' duration in march may very much retard the opening of the former ponds, while the temperature of walden increases almost uninterruptedly. a thermometer thrust into the middle of walden on the 6th of march 1847, stood at 32°, or freezing point; near the shore at 33° ; in the middle of flints' pond, the same day, at 321°; at a dozen rods from the shore, in shallow water, under ice a foot thick, at 36º. this difference of three and a half degrees between the temperature of the deep water and the shallow in the latter pond, and the fact that a great proportion of it is comparatively shallow, show why it should break up so much sooner than walden. the ice in the shallowest part was at this time several inches thinner than in the middle. in mid-water the middle had been the warmest and the ice thinnest there. so, also, every one who has waded about the shores of a pond in summer must have perceived how much warmer the water is close to the shore, where only three or four inches deep, than a little distance out, and on the surface where it is deep, than near the bottom. in spring the sun not only exerts an influence through the increased temperature of the air and earth, but its heat passes through ice a foot or more thick, and is reflected from the bottom in shallow water, and so also warms the water and melts the under side of the ice, at the same time that it is melting it more directly above, making it uneven, and causing the air bubbles which it a a 233 234 walden a of a a a a contains to extend themselves upward and downward until it is completely honeycombed, and at last disappears suddenly in a single spring rain. ice has its grain as well as wood, and when a cake begins to rot or “comb," that is, assume the appearance honeycomb, whatever may be its position, the air cells are at right angles with what was the water surface. where there is a rock or a log rising near to the surface, the ice over it is much thinner, and is frequently dissolved by this reflected heat; and i have been told that in the experiment at cambridge to freeze water in a shallow wooden pond, though the cold air circulated underneath, and so had access to both sides, the reflection of the sun from the bottom more than counterbalanced this advantage. when a warm rain in the middle of the winter melts off the snow-ice from walden, and leaves a hard dark or transparent ice on the middle, there will be a strip of rotten though thicker white ice, a rod or more wide, about the shores, created by this reflected heat. also, as i have said, the bubbles themselves within the ice operate as burning-glasses to melt the ice beneath. the phenomena of the year take place every day in a pond on a small scale. every morning, generally speaking, the shallow water is being warmed more rapidly than the deep, though it may not be made so warm after all, and every evening it is being cooled more rapidly until the morning. the day is an epitome of the year. the night is the winter, the morning and evening are the spring and fall , and the noon is the summer. the cracking and booming of the ice indicate a change of temperature. one pleasant morning after a cold night, 24th february 1850, having gone to flints' pond to spend the day, i noticed with surprise, that when i struck the ice with the head of my axe, it resounded like a gong for many rods around, or as if i had struck on a tight drumhead. the pond began to boom about an hour after sunrise, when it felt the influence of the sun's rays slanted upon it from over the hills ; it stretched itself and yawned like a waking man with a gradually increasing tumult, which was kept up three or four hours. it took a short siesta at noon, and boomed once more toward night, as the sun was withdrawing his influence. in the right stage of the weather a pond fires its evening gun with great regularity. but in the middle of the day, being full of cracks, and the air also less elastic, it had completely lost its resonance, and probably fishes and musk-rats could not then have been stunned by a blow on it. the fishermen say that the “ thundering of the pond scares the fishes and prevents their biting. the pond does not thunder every evening, and i cannot tell surely when to a a >> spring 235 expect its thundering ; but though i may perceive no difference in the weather, it does. who would have suspected so large and cold and thick-skinned a thing to be so sensitive ? yet it has its law to which it thunders obedience when it should, as surely as the buds expand in the spring. the earth is all alive and covered with papillæ. the largest pond is as sensitive to atmospheric changes as the globule of mercury in its tube. а one attraction in coming to the woods to live was that i should have leisure and opportunity to see the spring come in. the ice in the pond at length begins to be honeycombed, and i can set my heel in it as i walk. fogs and rains and warmer suns are gradually melting the snow; the days have grown sensibly longer; and i see how i shall get through the winter without adding to my wood-pile, for large fires are no longer necessary. i am on the alert for the first signs of spring, to hear the chance note of some arriving bird, or the striped squirrel's chirp, for his stores must be now nearly exhausted, or see the woodchuck venture out of his winter quarters. on the 13th of march, after i had heard the bluebird, song-sparrow, and red-wing, the ice was still nearly a foot thick. as the weather grew warmer it was not sensibly worn away by the water, nor broken up and floated off as in rivers, but though it was completely melted for half a rod in width about the shore, the middle was merely honeycombed and saturated with water, so that you could put your foot through it when six inches thick ; but by the next day evening, perhaps, after a warm rain followed by fog, it would have wholly disappeared, all gone off with the fog, spirited away. one year i went across the middle only five days before it disappeared entirely. in 1845 walden was first completely open on the 1st of april ; in ’46, the 25th of march ; in '47, the 8th of april ; in '51, the 28th of march ; in '52, the 18th of april ; in '53, the 23rd of march ; in '54, about the 7th of april. every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to us who live in a climate of so great extremes. when the warmer days come, they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly going out. so the alligator comes out of the mud with quakings of the earth. one old man, who has been a close observer of nature, and seems as thoroughly wise in regard to all her operations as if she had been put upon the stocks when he was a boy, 2 a 236 walden a and he had helped to lay her keel,—who has come to his growth, and can hardly acquire more of natural lore if he should live to the age of methuselah,-told me, and i was surprised to hear him express wonder at any of nature's operations, for i thought that there were no secrets between them, that one spring day he took his gun and boat, and thought that he would have a little sport with the ducks. there was ice still on the meadows, but it was all gone out of the river, and he dropped down without obstruction from sudbury, where he lived, to fair-haven pond, which he found, unexpectedly, covered for the most part with a firm field of ice. it was a warm day, and he was surprised to see so great a body of ice remaining. not seeing any ducks, he hid his boat on the north or back side of an island in the pond, and then concealed himself in the bushes on the south side to await them. the ice was melted for three or four rods from the shore, and there was a smooth and warm sheet of water, with a muddy bottom, such as the ducks love, within, and he thought it likely that some would be along pretty soon. after he had lain still there about an hour he heard a low and seemingly very distant sound, but singularly grand and impressive, unlike anything he had ever heard, gradually swelling and increasing as if it would have a universal and memorable ending, a sullen rush and roar, which seemed to him all at once like the sound of a vast body of fowl coming in to settle there, and seizing his gun, he started up in haste and excited ; but he found, to his surprise, that the whole body of the ice had started while he lay there, and drifted in to the shore, and the sound he had heard was made by its edge grating on the shore--at first gently nibbled and crumbled off , but at length heaving up and scattering its wrecks along the island to a considerable height before it came to a stand-still. at length the sun's rays have attained the right angle, and warm winds blow up mist and rain, and melt the snow banks, and the sun dispersing the mist smiles on a checkered landscape of russet and white smoking with incense, through which the traveller picks his way from islet to islet, cheered by the music of a thousand tinkling rills and rivulets, whose veins are filled with the blood of winter which they are bearing off. x few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad through which i passed on my way to the village-a phenomenon not very common on so large a scale, though the number of freshly exposed banks of the right material must have been greatly multiplied since railroads were spring 237 invented. the material was sand of every degree of fineness and of various rich colours, commonly mixed with a little clay. when the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before. innumerable little streams overlap and interlace one with another, exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, which obeys half-way the law of currents, and half-way that of vegetation. as it flows it takes for forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and resembling, as you look down on them, the laciniated lobed and imbricated thalluses of some lichens; or you are reminded of coral, of leopards' paws or birds' feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds. it is a truly grotesque vegetation, whose forms and colour we see imitated in bronze-a sort of architectural foliage more ancient and typical than acanthus, chicory, ivy, vine, or any vegetable leaves ; destined, perhaps, under some circumstances, to become a puzzle to future geologists. the whole cut impressed me as if it were a cave with its stalactites laid open to the light. the various shades of the sand are singularly rich and agreeable, embracing the different iron coloursbrown, grey, yellowish, and reddish. when the flowing mass reaches the drain at the foot of the bank it spreads out flatter into strands, the separate streams losing their semi-cylindrical form and gradually becoming more flat and broad, running together as they are more moist, till they form an almost flat sand, still variously and beautifully shaded, but in which you can trace the original forms of vegetation ; till at length, in the water itself, they are converted into banks, like those formed off the mouths of rivers, and the forms of vegetation are lost in the ripple marks on the bottom. the whole bank, which is from twenty to forty feet high, is sometimes overlaid with a mass of this kind of foliage, or sandy rupture, for a quarter of a mile on one or both sides, the produce of one spring day. what makes this sand foliage remarkable is its springing into existence thus suddenly. when i see on the one side the inert bank—for the sun acts on one side first-and on the other this luxuriant foliage, the creation of an hour, i am affected as if in a peculiar sense i stood in the laboratory of the artist who made the world and me,—had come to where he was still at work, sporting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about. i feel as if i were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a a 238 walden foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body. you find thus in the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. no wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labours with the idea inwardly. the atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by it. the overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. internally, whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of fat (leißw, labour, lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing; loßos, globus, lobe, globe; also lap, flap, and many other words), externally a dry thin leaf, even as the f and v are a pressed and dried b. the radicals of lobe are lb, the. soft mass of the b (single lobed, or b, double lobed, with a liquid l behind it pressing it forward. in globe, glb, the guttural-g adds to the meaning the capacity of the throat. the feathers and wings of birds are still drier and thinner leaves. thus, also, you pass from the lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. the very globe continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit. even ice begins with delicate crystal leaves, as if it had flowed into moulds which the fronds of water plants have impressed on the watery mirror. the whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves, whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in their axils. when the sun withdraws, the sand ceases to flow, but in the morning the streams will start once more, and branch and branch again into a myriad of others. you here see, perchance, how blood-vessels are formed. if you look closely you observe that first there pushes forward from the thawing mass a stream of softened sand with a drop-like point, like the ball of the finger, feeling its way slowly and blindly downward, until at last, with more heat and moisture, as the sun gets higher, the most fluid portion, in its effect to obey the law to which the most inert also yields, separates from the latter and forms for itself a meandering channel or artery within that, in which is seen a little silvery stream glancing like lightning from one stage of pulpy leaves or branches to another, and ever and anon swallowed up in the sand. it is wonderful how rapidly yet perfectly the sand organizes itself as it flows, using the best material its mass affords to form the sharp edges of its channel. such are the sources of rivers. in the silicious matter which the water deposits is perhaps the bony system, and in the still finer soil and organic matter the fleshy fibre or cellular tissue. what is man but a mass of thawing clay ? the ball of the human finger is but a drop congealed. the fingers spring 239 for us, and toes flow to their extent from the thawing mass of the body. who knows what the human body would expand and flow out to under a more genial heaven? is not the hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins ? the ear may be regarded, fancifully, as a lichen, umbilicaria, on the side of the head, with its lobe or drop. the lip-labium, from labour (?)—laps or lapses from the sides of the cavernous mouth. the nose is a manifest congealed drop of stalactite. the chin is a still larger drop, the conhuent dripping of the face. the cheeks are a slide from the brows into the valley of the face, opposed and diffused by the cheek bones. each rounded lobe of the vegetable leaf, too, is a thick and now loitering drop, larger or smaller; the lobes are the fingers of the leaf; and as many lobes as it has, in so many directions it tends to flow, and more heat or other genial influences would have caused it to flow yet further. thus it seemed that this one hill-side illustrated the principle of all the operations of nature. the maker of this earth but patented a leaf. what champollion will decipher this hieroglyphic that we may turu over a new leaf at last ? this phenomenon is more exhilarating to me than the luxuriance and fertility of vineyards. true, it is somewhat excrementitious in its character, and there is no end to the heaps of liver, lights, and bowels, as if the globe were turned wrong side outward; but this suggests at least that nature has some bowels, and there again is mother of humanity. this is the frost coming out of the ground; this is spring. it precedes the green and flowery spring, as mythology precedes regular poetry. i know of nothing more purgative of winter fumes and indigestions. it convinces me that earth is still in her swaddling-clothes, and stretches forth baby fingers on fresh curls spring from the boldest brow. there is nothing inorganic. these foliaceous heaps lie along the bank like the slag of a furnace, showing that nature is “ in full blast” within. the earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit,--not a fossil earth, but a living earth ; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. its throes will heave our exuviæ from their graves. you may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out into. and not only it, but the institutions upon it, are plastic like clay in the hands of the potter. every side. a a а 240 walden 2 a a ere long, not only on these banks, but on every hill and plain, and in every hollow, the frost comes out of the ground like a dormant quadruped from its burrow, and seeks the sea with music, or migrates to other climes in clouds. thaw with his gentle persuasion is more powerful than thor with his hammer. the one melts, the other but breaks in pieces. when the ground was partially bare of snow, and a few warm days had dried its surface somewhat, it was pleasant to compare the first tender signs of the infant year just peeping forth with the stately beauty of the withered vegetation which had withstood the winter,-life-everlasting, golden-rods, pinweeds, and graceful wild grasses more obvious and interesting frequently than in summer even, as if their beauty was not ripe till then ; even cotton-grass, cat-tails, mulleins, johnswort, hard-hack, meadowsweet, and other strong-stemmed plants, those unexhausted granaries which entertain the earliest birds,--decent weeds, at least, which widowed nature wears. i am particularly attracted by the arching and sheaf-like top of the wool-grass ; it brings back the summer to our winter memories, and is among the forms which art loves to copy, and which, in the vegetable kingdom, have the same relation to types already in the mind of man that astronomy has. it is an antique style older than greek or egyptian. many of the phenomena of winter are suggestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. we are accustomed to hear this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant ; but with the gentleness of a love he adorns the tresses of summer. at the approach of spring the red squirrels got under my house; two at a time, directly under my feet, as i sat reading or writing, and kept up the queerest chuckling and chirruping and vocal pirouetting and gurgling sounds that ever were heard ; and when i stamped, they only chirruped the louder, as if past all fear and respect in their mad pranks, defying humanity to stop them. no you don't-chickaree-chickaree. they were wholly deaf to my arguments, or failed to perceive their force, and fell into a strain of invective that was irresistible. the first sparrow of spring! the year beginning with younger hope than ever! the faint silvery warblings heard over the partially bare and moist fields from the blue-bird, the song-sparrow, and the red-wing, as if the last flakes of winter tinkled as they fell! what at such a time are histories, chronologies, traditions, and all written revelations ? the brooks sing carols and glees to the spring. the marsh-hawk sailing low over the meadow is а. spring 241 y already seeking the first slimy life that awakes. the sinking sound of melting snow is heard in all dells, and the ice dissolves apace in the ponds. the grass flames up on the hill-sides like a spring fire,—"et primitus oritur herba imbribus primoribus evocata,” -as if the earth sent forth an inward heat to greet the returning sun; not yellow but green is the colour of its flame ;the symbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year's hay with the fresh life below. it grows as steadily as the rill oozes out of the ground. it is almost identical with that, for in the growing days of june, when the rills are dry, the grass blades are their channels, and from year to year the herds drink at this perennial green stream, and the mower draws from it betimes their winter supply. so our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity. walden is melting apace. there is a canal two rods wide along the northerly and westerly sides, and wider still at the east end. a great field of ice has cracked off from the main body. i hear a song-sparrow singing from the bushes on the shore olit, olit, olit,-chip, chip, chip, che char,-che wiss, wiss, wiss. he too is helping to crack it. how handsome the great sweeping curves in the edge of the ice, answering somewhat to those of the shore, but more regular! it is unusually hard, owing to the recent severe but transient cold, and all watered or waved like a palace floor. but the wind slides eastward over its opaque surface in vain, till it reaches the living surface beyond. it is glorious to behold this ribbon of water sparkling in the sun, the bare face of the pond full of glee and youth, as if it spoke the joy of the fishes within it, and of the sands on its shore,-a silvery sheen as from the scales of a leuciscus, as it were all one active fish. such is the contrast between winter and spring. walden was dead and is alive again. but this spring it broke up more steadily, as i have said. the change from storm and winter to serene and mild weather, from dark and sluggish hours to bright and elastic ones, is a memorable crisis which all things proclaim. it is seemingly instantaneous at last. suddenly an influx of light filled my house, though the evening was at hand, and the clouds of winter still overhung it, and the eaves were dripping with sleety rain. i looked out the window, and lo! where yesterday was cold grey ice there lay the transparent pond, already calm and full of hope as in a summer evening, reflecting a summer evening sky in its q 242 walden tell by bosom, though none was visible overhead, as if it had intelligence with some remote horizon. i heard a robin in the distance, the first i had heard for many a thousand years, methought, whose note i shall not forget for many a thousand more,—the same sweet and powerful song as of yore. o the evening robin, at the end of a new england summer day! if i could ever find the twig he sits upon! i mean he ; i mean the twig. this at least is not the turdus migratorius. the pitch-pines and shruboaks about my house, which had so long drooped, suddenly resumed their several characters, looked brighter, greener, and more erect and alive, as if effectually cleansed and restored by the rain. i knew that it would not rain any more. you may looking at any twig of the forest, ay, at your very wood-pile, whether its winter is past or not. as it grew darker, i was startled by the honking of geese flying low over the woods, like weary travellers getting in late from southern lakes, and indulging at last in unrestrained complaint and mutual consolation. standing at my door, i could hear the rush of their wings; when, driving toward my house, they suddenly spied my light, and with hushed clamour wheeled and settled in the pond. so i came in, and shut the door, and passed my first spring night in the woods. in the morning i watched the geese from the door through the mist, sailing in the middle of the pond, fifty rods off, so large and tumultuous that walden appeared like an artificial pond for their amusement. but when i stood on the shore they at once rose up with a great flapping of wings at the signal of their commander, and when they had got into rank, circled about over my head, twenty-nine of them, and then steered straight to canada, with a regular honk from the leader at intervals, trusting to break their fast in muddier pools. a “plump” of ducks rose at the same time, and took the route to the north in the wake of their noisier cousins. for a week i heard the circling, groping clangour of some solitary goose in the foggy mornings, seeking its companion, and still peopling the woods with the sound of a larger life than they could sustain. in april the pigeons were seen again flying express in small flocks, and in due time i heard the martins twittering over my clearing, though it had not seemed that the township contained so many that it could afford me any, and i fancied that they were peculiarly of the ancient race that dwelt in hollow trees ere white men came. in almost all climes the tortoise and the frog are among the precursors and heralds of this season, spring 243 * * * * and birds fly with song and glancing plumage, and plants spring and bloom, and winds blow, to correct this slight oscillation of the poles and preserve the equilibrium of nature. as every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring is like the creation of cosmos out of chaos, and the realization of the golden age. “eurus ad auroram, nabathacaque regna recessit, persidaque, et radiis juga subdita matutinis." the east-wind withdrew to aurora and the nabathæan kingdom, and the persian, and the ridges placed under the morning rays. “man was born. whether that artificer of things, the origin of a better world, made him from the divine seed; or the earth being recent and lately sundered from the high ether, retained some seeds of cognate heaven.” a single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. so our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. we should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass whichconfesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty. we loiter in winter while it is already spring. in a pleasant spring morning all men’s sins are forgiven. such a day is a truce to vice. while such a sun holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may return. through our , own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbours. you may have known your neighbour yesterday for a thief, a drunkard, or a sensualist, and merely pitied or despised him, and despaired of the world ; but the sun shines bright and warm this first spring morning, recreating the world, and you meet him at some serene work, and see how his exhausted and debauched veins expand with still joy and bless the new day, feel the spring influence with the innocence of infancy, and all his faults are forgotten. there is not only an atmosphere of goodwill about him, but even a savour of holiness groping for expression, blindly and ineffectually, perhaps, like a new-born instinct, and for a short hour the south hill-side echoes to no vulgar jest. you see some innocent fair shoots preparing to burst from his gnarled rind and try another year's life, tender and fresh as the youngest plant. even he has entered into the joy of his lord. why the jailer does not leave open his prison doors, -why the judge does not dismiss his case, -why the preacher does not dismiss his congregation! it is because they do not obey the hint which 244 walden god gives them, nor accept the pardon which he freely offers to all. a return to goodness produced each day in the tranquil and beneficent breath of the morning, causes that in respect to the love of virtue and the hatred of vice, one approaches a little the primitive nature of man, as the sprouts of the forest which has been felled. in like manner the evil which one does in the interval of a day prevents the germs of virtues which began to spring up again from developing themselves and destroys them. “after the germs of virtue have thus been prevented many times from developing themselves, then the beneficent breath of evening does not suffice to preserve them. as soon as the breath of evening does not suffice longer to preserve them, then the nature of man does not differ much from that of the brute. men, seeing the nature of this man like that of the brute, think that he has never possessed the innate faculty of reason. are those the true and natural sentiments of man ?” “ the golden age was first created, which without any avenger spontaneously without law cherished fidelity and rectitude. punishment and fear were not; nor were threatening words read on suspended brass ; nor did the suppliant crowd fear the words of their judge ; but were safe without an avenger. not yet the pine felled on its mountains had descendedį to the liquid waves that it might see a foreign world, and mortals knew no shores but their own. * * * there was eternal spring, and placid zephyrs with warm blasts soothed the flowers born without seed." on april 29, as i was fishing from the bank of the river near the nine-acre-corner bridge, standing on the quaking grass and willow roots, where the musk-rats lurk, i heard a singular rattling sound, somewhat like that of the sticks which boys play with their fingers, when, looking up, i observed à very slight and graceful hawk, like a night-hawk, alternately soaring like a ripple and tumbling a rod or two over and over, showing the underside of its wings, which gleamed like a satin ribbon in the sun, or like the pearly inside of a shell. this sight reminded me of falconry and what nobleness and poetry are associated with that sport. the merlin it seemed to me it might be called, but i care not for its name. it was the most ethereal flight i had ever witnessed. it did not simply flutter like a butterfly, nor soar like the larger hawks, but it sported with proud reliance in the fields of air ; mounting again and again, with its strange chuckle, it repeated a spring 245 > a many a first its free and beautiful fall, turning over and over like a kite, and then recovering from its lofty tumbling, as if it had never set its foot on terra firma. it appeared to have no companion in the universe—sporting there alone--and to need none but the morning and the ether with which it played. it was not lonely, but made the earth lonely beneath it. where was the parent which hatched it, its kindred, and its father in the heavens ? the tenant of the air, it seemed related to the earth but by an egg hatched some time in the crevice of a crag ; or was its native nest made in the angle of a cloud, woven of the rainbow's trimmings, and the sunset sky, and lined with some soft midsummer haze caught up from earth ? its eyrie now some cliffy cloud. beside this i got a rare mess of golden and silver and bright cupreous fishes, which looked like a string of jewels. ah! i have penetrated to those meadows on the mo morning of spring day, jumping from hummock to hummock, from willow root to willow root, when the wild river valley and the woods were bathed in so pure and bright a light as would have waked the dead, if they had been slumbering in their graves, as some suppose. there needs no stronger proof of immortality. all things must live in such a light. o death, where was thy sting? o grave, where was thy victory, then ? our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. we need the tonic of wildness,-to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe, to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. at the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed, and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. we can never have enough of nature. we must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigour, vast and titanic features,--the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. we need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. we are cheered when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and disheartens us, and deriving health and strength from the repast. there was a dead horse in the path to my house, which compelled me sometimes to go out of my way, but the assurance it gave me of the strong appetite and inviolable 246 walden health of nature was my compensation for this. i love to see that nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another; that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp,tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood ! with the liability to accident, we must see how little account is to be made of it. the impression made on a wise man is that of universal innocence. poison is not poisonous after all, nor are any wounds fatal. compassion is a very untenable ground. it must be expeditious. its pleadings will not bear to be stereotyped. early in may, the oaks, hickories, maples, and other trees, just putting out amidst the pine woods around the pond, imparted a brightness like sunshine to the landscape, especially in cloudy days, as if the sun were breaking through mists and shining faintly on the hill-sides here and there. on the 3rd or 4th of may i saw a loon in the pond, and during the first week of the month i heard the whip-poor-will, the brown-thrasher, the veery, the wood-peewee, the chewink, and other birds. i had heard the wood-thrush long before. the phoebe had already come once more and looked in at my door and window, to see if my house was cavern-like enough for her, sustaining herself on humming-wings with clinched talons, as if she held by the air, while she surveyed the premises. the sulphur-like pollen of the pitch-pine soon covered the pond and the stones and rotten wood along the shore, so that you could have collected a barrelful. these are the sulphur showers we hear of. and so the seasons went on rolling into summer, as one rambles into higher grass. thus was my first year's life in the woods completed ; and the second year was similar to it. i finally left walden september 6th, 1847 66 >> conclusion to the sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of air and scenery thank heaven, here is not all the world. the buckeye does not grow in new england, and the mocking-bird is rarely heard here. the wild goose is more of a cosmopolite than we; he breaks his fast in canada, takes a luncheon in the ohio, and plumes himself for the night in a southern bayou. even the bison, to some extent, keeps pace with the seasons, cropping the pastures of the colorado only till a greener and sweeter grass awaits him by the yellowstone. yet we think that if rail-fences are pulled down, and stone-walls piled up on our farms, bounds are henceforth set to our lives and our fates decided. if you are chosen town-clerk, forsooth, you cannot go to tierra del fuego this summer; but you may go to the land of infernal fire nevertheless. ; the universe is wider than our views of it. yet we should oftener took over the tafferel of our craft, like curious passengers, and not make the voyage like stupid sailors picking oakum. the other side of the globe is but the home of our correspondent. our voyaging is only great circle-sailing, and the doctors prescribe for diseases of the skin merely. one hastens to southern africa to chase the giraffe, but surely that is not the game he would be after. how long, pray, would a man hunt giraffes if he could ? snipes and woodcocks also may afford rare sport, but i trust it would be nobler game to shoot one's self. direct your eye right inward, and you'll find a thousand regions in your mind yet undiscovered. travel them, and be expert in home-cosmography." what does africa—what does the west stand for? is not our own interior white on the chart, black though it may prove, like the coast, when discovered ? is it the source of the nile, or the niger, or the mississippi, or a north-west passage around this continent, that we would find? are these the problems which most concern mankind ? is franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest to find him ? does mr. grinnell know where he himself is ? be rather the mungo park, the lewis and clarke and frobisher, of your own streams and oceans ; -w 247 248 walden explore your own higher latitudes,—with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be necessary, and pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign. were preserved meats invented to preserve meat merely? nay, be a columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. yet some can be patriotic who have no selfrespect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. they love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. patriotism is a maggot in their heads. what was the meaning of that south sea exploring expedition, with all its parade and expenses, but an indirect recognition of the fact that there are continents and seas in the moral world, to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the atlantic and pacific ocean of one's being alone,“erret, et extremos alter scrutetur iberos. plus habet hic vitæ, plus habet ille viæ.” let them wander and scrutinize the outlandish australians : i have more of god, they more of the road. it is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in zanzibar. yet do this even till you can do better, and you may perhaps find some “symmes' hole," by which to get at the inside at last. england and france, spain and portugal, gold coast and slave coast, all front on this private sea; but no bark from them has ventured out of sight of land, though it is without doubt the direct way to india. if you would learn to speak all tongues and conform to the customs of all nations, if you would travel farther than all travellers, be naturalized in all climes, and cause the sphinx to dash her head against a stone, even obey the precept of the old philosopher, and explore thyself. herein are demanded the eye and the nerve. only the defeated and deserters go to the wars, cowards that run away and enlist. start now on that farthest western way, which does not pause at the mississippi or the pacific, nor conduct toward a worn-out china or japan, but leads on direct a tangent to this sphere, summer and winter, day and night, sun down, moon down, and at last earth down too. it is said that mirabeau took to highway robbery “ to ascertain conclusion 249 66 b01 11 sei ni what degree of resolution was necessary in order to place one's self in formal opposition to the most sacred laws of society.” he declared that " a soldier who fights in the ranks does not, require half so much courage as a foot-pad,”“ that honour and religion have never stood in the way of a well-considered and a firm resolve." this was manly, as the world goes ; and yet it was idle, if not desperate. a saner man would have found himself often enough“ in formal opposition” to what are deemed “the most sacred laws of society," through obedience to yet more sacred laws, and so have tested his resolution without going out of his way. it is not for a man to put himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain himself in whatever attitude he finds himself through obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to a just government, if he should chance to meet with such. i left the woods for as good a reason as i went there. perhaps it seemed to me that i had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. it is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. i had not lived there a week before my feet/ wore a path from my door to the pond-side ; and though it is five or six years since i trod it, it is still quite distinct. it is true i fear that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. the surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. how worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world,-how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! i did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there i could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. i do not wish to go below now. i learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. he will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary ; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him ; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favour in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. in proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. if you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. now put the foundations under them. his u d. m t 1 250 walden it is a ridiculous demand which england and america make, that you shall speak so that they can understand you. neither men nor toad-stools grow so. as if that were important, and there were not enough to understand you without them. as if nature could support but one order of understandings, could not sustain birds as well as quadrupeds, flying as well as creeping things, and hush and who, which bright can understand, were the best english. as if there were safety in stupidity alone. i fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enoughmay not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which i have been convinced. extra vagance ! it depends on how you are yarded. the migrating buffalo, which seeks new pastures in another latitude, is not extravagant like the cow which kicks over the pail, leaps the cow-yard fence, and runs after her calf, in milkingtime. i desire to speak somewhere without bounds ; like a man in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments; for i am convinced that i cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression. who that has heard a strain of music feared then lest he should speak extravagantly any more for ever ? in view of the future or possible, we should live quite laxly and undefined in front, our outlines dim and misty on that side ; as our shadows reveal an insensible perspiration toward the sun. the volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement. their truth is instantly translated ; its literal monument alone remains. the words which express our faith and piety are not definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures. why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common-sense ? the commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring. sometimes we are inclined to class those who are once-and-a-half witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate only a third part of their wit. some would find fault with the morning-red, if they ever got up early enough. “they pretend," as i hear, " that the verses of kabir have four different senses-illusion, spirit, intellect, and the exoteric doctrine of the vedas ;” but in this part of the world it is considered a ground for complaint if a man's writings admit of more than one interpretation. while england endeavours to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally? i do not suppose that i have attained to obscurity, but i should be proud if no more fatal fault were found with my pages on this conclusion 251 und si not 70 the 281 7a lily den ed. her the i! am da. sic er? und score than was found with the walden ice. southern customers objected to its blue colour, which is the evidence of its purity, as if it were muddy, and preferred the cambridge ice, which is white, but tastes of weeds. the purity men love is like the mists which envelop the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond. some are dinning in our ears that we americans, and moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even the elizabethan man. but what is that to the purpose ? a living dog is better than a dead lion. shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can ? let every one mind his own business, and endeavour to be what he was made.-rhomat unutra why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? if a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. it is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple-tree or an oak. shall he turn his spring into summer ? if the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute? we will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality. shall we with pains erect a heaven of blue glass over ourselves, though when it is done we shall be sure to gaze still at the true ethereal heaven far above, as if the former were not ? there was an artist in the city of kouroo who was disposed to strive after perfection. one day it came into his mind to make a staff. having considered that in an imperfect work time is an ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not enter, he said to himself, it shall be perfect in all respects, though i should do nothing else in my life. he proceeded instantly to the forest for wood, being resolved that it should not be made of unsuitable material; and as he searched for and rejected stick after stick, his friends gradually deserted him, for they grew old in their works and died, but he grew not older by a moment. his singleness of purpose and resolution, and his elevated piety, endowed him, without his knowledge, with perennial youth. as he made no compromise with time, time kept out of his way, and only sighed at a distance because he could not overcome him. before he had found a stick in all respects suitable, the city of kouroo was a hoary ruin, and he sat on one of its mounds to peel the stick. before he had given it the proper shape the dynasty of the candahars was at an end, and with the point of the stick he wrote the name of the last of that race in the sand, and then resumed his as the tls ich ant od 7.se are the it. up of the tis of ure fot. 113 252 walden t c r ] ६ t ( a 1 6 t i t c s work. by the time he had smoothed and polished the staff kalpa was no longer the pole-star; and ere he had put on the ferule and adorned the head with precious stones, brahma had awoke and slumbered many times. but why do i stay to mention these things ? when the finishing stroke was put to his work, it suddenly expanded before the eyes of the astonished artist into the fairest of all the creations of brahma. he had made a new system in making a staff, a world with full and fair proportions ; in which, though the old cities and dynasties had passed away, fairer and more glorious ones had taken their places. and now he saw by the heap of shavings still fresh at his feet, that, for him and his work, the former lapse of time had been an illusion, and that no more time had elapsed than is required for a single scintillation from the brain of brahma to fall on and inflame the tinder of a mortal brain. the material was pure, and his art was pure ; how could the result be other than wonderful ? no face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at . last as the truth. this alone wears well. for the most part, we are not where we are, but in a false position. through an infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out. in sane moments we regard only the facts, the case that is. say what you have to say, not what you ought. any truth is better than make-believe. tom hyde, the tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked if he had anything to say. “ tell the tailors,” said he,“ to remember to make a knot in their thread before they take the first, stitch.” his 'companion's prayer is forgotten. however mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. it is not so bad as you are. it looks poorest when you are richest. the fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. love your life. poor as it is. you may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house. the setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode ; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. i do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in à palace. the town's poor seem to me often to live the most independent lives of any. maybe they are simply great enough to receive without : misgiving. most think that they are above being supported by the town; but it oftener happens that they are not above supporting 'themselves by dishonest means, which should be more disreputable. cultivate c 8 r c n conclusion 253 2 int men ens far, 20w end gle sas at we sto poverty like a garden herb, like sage. do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. turn the old; return to them. things do not change : we change. sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. god will see that you do not want society. if i were confined to a corner of a garret all my days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while i had my thoughts about me. the philosopher said : “from an army of three divisions one can take away its general, and put it in disorder; from the man the most abject and vulgar one cannot take away his thought.” do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on ; it is all dissipation. humility, like darkness, reveals the heavenly lights. the shadows of poverty and meanness gather around us, “and lo! creation widens to our view." we are often reminded that if there were bestowed on us the wealth of creesus, our aims must still be the same, and our means essentially the same. moreover, if you are restricted in your range by poverty, if you cannot buy books and newspapers, for instance, you are but confined to the most significant and vital experiences; you are compelled to deal with the material which yields the most sugar and the most starch. it is life near the bone where it is sweetest. you are defended from being a trifler. no man loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher. superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul. i live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition was poured a little alloy of bell metal. often, in the repose of my mid-day, there reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum from without. it is the noise of my contemporaries. my neighbours tell me of their adventures with famous gentlemen and ladies, what notabilities they met at the dinner-table ; but i am no more interested in such things than in the contents of the daily times. the interest and the conversation are about costume and manners chiefly; but a goose is a goose still, dress it as you will. they tell me of california and texas, of england and the indies, of the hon. mr. — of georgia or of massachusetts, all transient and fleeting phenomena, till i am ready to leap from their court-yard like the mameluke bey. i delight to come to my bearings, -not walk in procession with pomp and parade, in a conspicuous place, but to walk even with the builder of the universe, if i may,—not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial nineteenth century, but stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by. what are men celebrating ? they are all on a committee of arrangements, and 2t. er, v. a -11 d et > 7 е e s 3 254 walden 66 a hourly expect a speech from somebody. god is only the president of the day, and webster is his orator. i love to weigh, to settle, to gravitate toward that which most strongly and rightfully attracts me ;--not hang by the beam of the scale and try to weigh less,-not suppose a case, but take the case that is ; to travel the only path i can, and that on which no power can resist me. it affords me no satisfaction to commence to spring an arch before i have got a solid foundation. let us not play at kittlybenders. there is a solid bottom everywhere. we read that the traveller asked the boy if the swamp before him had a hard bottom. the boy replied that it had. but presently the traveller's horse sank in up to the girths, and he observed to the boy, “i thought you said that this bog had a hard bottom.” so it has,” answered the latter,“ but you have not got half-way to it yet.” so it is with the bogs and quicksands of society ; but he is an old boy that knows it. only what is thought, said, or done at a certain rare coincidence is good. i would not be one of those who will foolishly drive a nail into mere lath and plastering ; such a deed would keep me awake nights. give me a hammer, and let me feel for the furrowing. do not depend on the putty. drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction,-a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the muse. so will help you god, and so only. every nail driven should be as another rivet in the machine of the universe, you carrying on the work. rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. i sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and i went away hungry from the inhospitable board. the hospitality was as cold as the ices. i thought that there was no need of ice to freeze them. they talked to me of the age of the wine and the fame of the vintage ; but i thought of an older, a newer, and purer wine, of a more glorious vintage, which they had not got, and could not buy. the style, the house and grounds and “entertainment,” pass for nothing with me. i called on the king, but he made me wait in his hall, and conducted like a man incapacitated for hospitality. there was a man in my neighbourhood who lived in a hollow tree. his manners were truly regal. i should have done better had i called on him. how long shall we sit in our porticoes practising idle and musty virtues, which any work would make impertinent ? as if one were to begin the day with long-suffering, and hire a man to hoe his potatoes ; and in the afternoon go forth to practise christian conclusion 255 a 로 ​들를 ​볼 ​e rel eller the ank vou red tis if we oot all will red me meekness and charity with goodness aforethought! consider the china pride and stagnant self-complacency of mankind. this generation inclines a little to congratulate itself on being the last of an illustrious line ; and in boston and london and paris and rome, thinking of its long descent, it speaks of its progress in art and science and literature with satisfaction. there are the records of the philosophical societies, and the public eulogies of great men! is it the good adam contemplating his own virtue. “yes, we have done great deeds, and sung divine songs, which shall never die,”—that is, as long as we can remember them. the learned societies and great men of assyria, -where are they? what youthful philosophers and experimentalists we are ! there is not one of my readers who has yet lived a whole human life. these may be but the spring months in the life of the race. have had the seven-years' itch, we have not seen the seventeenyear locust yet in concord. we are acquainted with a mere pelliche of the globe on which we live. most have not delved six feet beneath the surface, nor leaped as many above it. we know not where we are. besides, we are sound asleep nearly half our time. yet we esteem ourselves wise, and have an established order on the surface. truly, we are deep thinkers, we are ambitious spirits! as i stand over the insect crawling amid the pine needles on the forest floor, and endeavouring to conceal itself from my sight, and ask myself why it will cherish those humble thoughts, and hide its head from me who might, perhaps, be its benefactor, and impart to its race some cheering information, i am reminded of the greater benefactor and intelligence that stands over me, the human insect. there is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dulness. i need only suggest what kind of sermons are still listened to in the most enlightened countries. there are such words as joy and sorrow, but they are only the burden of a psalm, sung with a nasal twang, while we believe in the ordinary and mean. we think that we can change our clothes only. it is said that the british empire is very large and respectable, and that the united states are a first-rate power. we do not believe that a tide rises and falls behind every man which can float the british empire like a chip, if he should ever harbour it in his mind. who knows what sort of seventeen-year locust will next come out of the ground ? the government of the world i live in was not framed, like that of britain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine. the life in us is like the water in the river. it may rise this the ich 2 05 ret 91 se ent mas ze of e де s 8 256 walden year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands ; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our musk-rats. it was not always dry land where we dwell. i see far inland the banks which the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets. every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of new england, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer's kitchen for sixty years, first in connecticut, and afterward in massachusetts, --from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this ? who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb,-heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board,-may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society's most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last! i do not say that john or jonathan will realize all this ; such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. the light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. only that day dawns to which we are awake. there is more day to dawn. the sun is but a morning star. butler & tanner, the selwood printing works, frome, and london. erched vn out dwell. eshed, heard trong table for setts, still, was the and hat der of ing its ars ive y's er is er 0 2 . 1 1 university of michigan the university of michigan date due os 1993 oc nov 19.93 8.998 nոր do not remove or mutuate cards 3 1: university of michigan the university of michigan date due a 1993 nov 1993 que 1998 jun. ley do not remove or mutilate cards mw !v.-t ). <i<w,i,<,i..i:ii wi cornell university library ac4 a25 "'""" """"""" '-"'™'v aesthetic papers / ^„„ 3 1924 031 042 173 "''"' the original of this book is in the cornell university library. there are no known copyright restrictions in the united states on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924031042173 esthetic papers. ^ edited by elizabeth p. peabody. ' beautie is not as fond men misdeeme, an outward show of tbings that only seeme. vouchsafe, then, o thou most ajmightie spright i from whom all gifts of wit and knowledge flow, to shed into my breast some sparkling light of thine eternall truth, that i may show some little beames to mortall eyes below of that immortall beautie, there with thee, which in my weake distraughted mynd i see." ^enser^ boston: the editok, 13, west steeet. new york: g. p. putnam, 155, broadway. 1849. entered, according to act of congress, in the year 1849, by elizabeth p. peabodt, in the clerk's office of the district court of the district of massachusetts. feinted by john wilson, no. 31, school-street. peospectus. the character and purpose of this work are indicated by its title, and by the articles of the present number. the editor wishes to assemble, upon the high aesthetic ground (away from the regions of strife, in any bad sense), writers of different schools, — that the antagonistic views of philosophy, of individual and of social cul ture, which prevail among the various divisions of the church, and of the scientific and literary world, may be brought together, and a white radiance of love and wisdom be evolved from the union of the many-colored rays, that shall cultivate an harmonious intellectual and moral life in our country. individuals of all par ties have already expressed, by letters and in conversation, their interest in this plan ; and the editor hopes another number may present a practical exemplification of the fact, that all believe that on the aesthetic ground all may meet. whether reviewing shall form a large part of the matter of this publication is a question to be answered by future numbers. the object is good matter; and i^o form is prescribed to the author who is alive. one of the editor's correspondents says upon this head : — " there is one species of periodical which i should like to see established ; and that is, a censor of periodicals, a review of reviews, where judgments, unjust or inadequate, expressed in other journals, should be reconsidered and overruled; where arti cles, written in a bad spirit, should meet with just reprobation. as it is, reviewers, and editors of journals, are a class of men who are never called to account. i would have a court constituted iv especially for that order. i would have such writers as , and such articles as , brought to the bar, tried, and judged accord ing to their deserts." no one is better qualified for this duty than the author of the suggestion; and the editor will rejoice to have him or others put the plan into execution in future numbers, and hereby gives invita tion to them to do it. the plan of publication for this work is like that of the " british and foreign review," which has been the model of its form, size, and type ; namely, that a number should appear whenever a suffi cient quantity of valuable matter shall have accumulated to fill 256 pages. this will in no case happen more than three times a year ; perhaps not oftener than once a year. the terms of patronage proposed are peculiar to itself. no person is asked to subscribe for more than one number in advance ; but whoever is so far pleased with the current number as to desire another is requested to send an order to that effect to the editor, who is also publisher, no. 13, west-street, boston. when a sufficient number of orders are given to pay for the publication,, including compensation to the authors, a new number will be. printed ; the editor being content to receive such profit as may accrue from the sale of other numbers not subscribed for before hand. the publisher's subscribers will have the numbers at $1, payable on delivery. the price at the bookstores will be $1.25. boston, may, 1849. table of contents. introduction. — the word " .esthetic." jtrticle. page. i. criticism. — s. gr. ward, esq. 5 n. music. — j. s. dwight, esq 25 m. war. — e. waldo emekson, esq 36 rv. organization. — parke godwin, esq 60 v. genius. — mr. sampson reed 58 vi. the dorian measure, witli a modem application. — the editor. 64 vii. cpirespondence. — j. j. g. wilkinson, esq. member of the koyal college of surgeons, london 112 vm. main-street. — n. hawthorne, esq 145 ix. abuse of representative government. — s. h. perkins, esq. . 174 x. resistance to civil government ; a lecture delivered in 1847. h. d. thoreau, esq 189 xi. language. — the editor 214 xii. vegetation about salem, mass. — an english resident . . 224 poetry. crawford's orpheus. — the editor 110 a spirit's reply hi hymn of a spirit shrouded 211 meditations of a widow 212 the twofold being . 245 the favorite 247 jisthetic papers. the word "esthetic." of all the scientific terms in common use, perhaps no one conveys to the mind a more vague and indeterminable sense than this, at the same time that the user is always conscious of a meaning and appropriateness ; so that he is in the posi tion of one who endeavors to convey his sense of the real presence of an idea, which still he cannot himself fully grasp and account for. we have adopted this vague, this comprehensive, but undefined word, in our titlepage ; thereby rendering ourselves responsible for some account, however incomplete, of that which it stands for to us. we should render little assistance by referring the reader to dictionary or encyclopedia. he might there find, that the word (esthetics impues a " philosophy of poetry and the fine arts : " but he that has used the word but twice perceives, that it is more than this ; that, like carbon or oxygen, it is an element that encounters hia inquiry in the most unexpected forms ; that what he took for simple substances, as air or water, are chemical combinations, into which his new ele ment largely enters, and which cannot exist without it. the " aesthetic element," then, is in our view neither a theory of the beautiful, nor a philosophy of art, but a coni ponent and indivisible part in all human creations which are not mere works of necessity ; in other words, which are based on idea, as distinguished from appetite. 1 2 the word " jesthelic" sundry pairs of words, duajislic philosophical terms, have been long growing into use, and exercising, by the ideas they represent, an influence on the world of thought ; such as subjective and objective, personal and impersonal, the me and the not-me ; all having a reference to the central fact of the constant relation of the individual to the universal, and of their equally constant separation. the one always " works and lives in the other ; " and, according to the pre ponderance of the one or the other element, the most various results appear in individuals and in nations. historians have remarked, and our own eyes see and have seen, the "profouni impersonality" which is the character istic of the german, genius, as distinguished from the vivid personahty of the french. l^etat, c^est mm ! was a concen trated formula of that personal character which is equally apparent in the centralizing murders of the merovingian dynasty, and in those analogous assassinations whereby, thirteen centuries after, each petty deputy strove to make his personality the central life of france. it results from these diverse characteristics, that the french man has always shone in action, where the strong personal feeling, the consciousness of the self, leads to the most bril liant results, — the heroic of action. the german, on the contrary, is infinitely greatest in thought, easily placing his less exacting personality on one side, so that it should shed no disturbing colors upon his calm objective view. into the world of art also, as into that of politics and life, these self-opposing and neutralizing elements enter. each man, according to his personal or unpersonal mode of being, according to the predominance of the subjective or the ob jective in his nature, takes the one or the other position. the french school of criticism, the personal, is based upon taste. it inquires, does this work satisfy and please my taste, that is the taste of cultivated persons ; the taste of the best judges or authorities ? a shifting standard, oifering no absolute criterion ; which places the highest aim of art in pleasing ; asking triumphantly. what, then, becomes of art, if its object be not to please ? according to the german formula, this is to subordinate the object to the observer. the word " jesthetic." 3 the contrary position, the unpersonal, which sinks and sub ordinates the observer to the object, — which, by putting my personality aside, enables me to see the object in a pure uncolored light, — is the sesthetic. ,-— — germany is the discoverer of the sesthetic, because the german mind, more than any other, embodies the unpersonal principle that imderlies the sesthetic view. it became con scious of its own possession, as soon as its criticism began to apply itself to the region of literature and the arts. but it is singular, that, armed with this talismaa to explore and expound the mysteries of art, there is a peculiar deficiency in the modern german attempts in th ; arts that address themselves to the eye. it reminds us o.'" a man, trying, in a painstaking maimer, to imitate the sports and feats that he failed to learn in his youth ; so that the untaught, unscien tific skill of a vigorous child shoots at a bound far beyond him. how, then, do we account for the wonders that german art achieved in architecture in old time, and lately in music ? simply by the recollection, that these arts were german growths, antecedent to any conscious sesthetic criticism. moreover, the arts may be classified, as partaking, in a greater or less degree, of the individual or the universal. music and architecture, by their nature, are of a more uni versal expression than painting and sculpture, and belong more naturally to the german. the progress of art, considered with relation to these two principles, is as follows :, — all art, in its origin, is national and religious. the feeling expressed is of far greater im portance than the vehicle in which it is conveyed. the practical portion of early art is conventional : the spiritual is profoundly significant, confined in its range, narrow but exalted. an expression of the infinite by means of the beautiful, inadequate indeed as expression, but deeply inter esting, as is all inadequate expression, to those who can read the intention through the uncertain and vague embodi ment. the second step in a:rt is when the practical, resting on this deep spiritual basis, advances by means of individual 4 the word " ^esthetic:' powers, by the personal skill, set free from the national con ventionality, yet still confined within certain bounds, the hmit and frame, as it were, of true art ; — a second expression of the infinite by the beautiful, in which the beauty and satisfactoriness of the expression balances the less deep sig nificance of the idea. in the first stage, the aesthetic element prevailed uncon sciously ; for neither taste nor the sbsthetic principle has any conscious place in creative, but only in critical ages. the progress of criticism is the reverse of that of art. in the creative age, appreciation is simple, intuitive, passionate, of which the delight of the people in national songs, the pas sionate enthusiasm with which the florentines welcomed cimabue's madonna, are examples. when criticism springs up, it is first in the form of taste. the individual subjects the productions of art to his own personahty. he says, " this is good, for it pleases me." of course, however perfect this taste may be, it is still limited by the individuahty : it is based on the degree of pleasure and satisfaction conveyed by a work to a cultivated person. it comes to be reauy beheved, that the end and object of art is to please. art becomes a luxury ; its pleasures can be bought and sold ; its appreciation becomes more and more external. such was the condition of criticism, when the profound self-subordinating genius of germany perceived, in the deep significance of ancient works, the presence of an element which the individual mind, with its standard of beauty, and its idea of gratification to the senses, was utterly-unable to account for. the germans went to school to their own ancient paintings, those singularly national works in which a childlike, simple, often unartistic exterior is made to convey the consciousness of the highest spiritual ideal. the word msthetic is difficult of definition, because it is the watchword of a whole revolution in criticism. like whig and tory, it is the standard of a party ; it marks the progress of an idea. it is as a watchword we use it, to designate,'™:' our department, that phase in human progress which subor dinates the individual to the general, that he may re-appear on a higher plane of individuality. criticism.. aet. i. — ceiticism. " tmrcydrdbs was the inventor of an art which before him had been almost unknown, the art of historic criticism, without being conscious of the infinite value of his invention. for he did not apply it to all branches of knowledge, but only to his subject, because it was a natural consequence of that subject. the historic muse had made him acquainted with it : no one before or after him has drawn the line more clearly between history and tradition. and what is this but to draw the distinction between the historic culture of the east and west, and — if we recognize how much depended on this historic culture — between the whole scientific culture of the east and west ? for, to repeat a remark which has been already cursorily made, the great difference between the two consists in this : in the west, the free spirit of criticism was developed ; in the east, never." the above well-known passage of heeren will serve as a suitable introduction to the few remarks we have to make on the same subject ; — a subject which, in this short extract, is made to take so imposing a forrn. a review is, or is supposed to be, an embodiment of this important element ; exercising itself always with reference to the leading interests of the age, holding a middle place between the buzz of the newspapers and the mature judg ment of the historian, less subject to the influences of passion or party than the former, and held to less strict account for severe attention to justice than the latter. our current lite rary ideas and forms are of english growth. 5 the violence of party spirit, the universal interest in politics, have in england made the great reviews into poutical organs. by this means, political passions have been made a touchstone of literary merit, and a spirit of unfairness has prevailed, of which, though the good sense of the english has lately led them to better things, the effects wiu long be visible in eng lish literature. our american defect lies in the opposite extreme. grave men gravely vaunt american productions in a way that, to 6 criticism. an uninterested observer, must seem sadly absurd. we mention these national vices now, only to show the desira bleness of principles of criticism ; and, though a review is not the place for a philosophical inquiry, we shall do no harm by endeavoring to make clear to ourselves and others some notion of what this science of criticism may be. we have seen it stated above, that the greeks were the inventors of criticism. the author goes on to say of thu cydides, in reference to this subject, that " neither his own age nor the following could reach him." if we continue the inquiry down, we shall see that it was not for many ages that this greek invention came to exert an active influence on human aflairs. considering the literatures of europe singly in order, we discover easily some one prevaihng national characteristic in each, as for instance, in the greek — iiiventioh. nearly every form in which human thought and activity have since flowed were invented by the greeks. the roman characteristic, if we subtract the elegant cul ture they derived, almost translated, from the greeks, was patriotism, — the grandeur, the power, the dignity of rome. their errand was to make the world roman. this spirit is visible in every page of the greater romans. there was satire in rome, as there had been in greece ; but satire is not criticism. in the. italians, under circumstances analogous to the greek in certain respects, we see again inventors both in art and literature. the discovery of the ancient literatures, with their inimitable monuments, acted perhaps unfavorably on the originality of italian genius, and accounts for the brevity of that list of great authors, whose small number is as remarkable as their wonderful excellence. it is the remark of a sagacious critic, that the burning of the alexan drian library was perhaps no such misfortune for the world, since it would have been hard for a modern literature to have sprung up in the face of such an overwhelming mass of ancient books. in the french we have a literature of social life. the great french problem is society. it is first in the germans that we discover a pure tendency towards criticism, so that criticism. 7 we may give this as the universally prevailing characteristic of their uterature. to trace the action of the critical element upon litera ture in long periods, let us compare some greek work with a modern. in the "prometheus" of ^schylus, we see gods, demigods, and personages exalted above humanity, as actors. these personages were the subject of an active rehgious behef in the audience ; so that, whilst they viewed the author as a man, they saw something divine, consecrated, and inspired in his work. they recognized the divine spirit in humanity ; but, in becoming divine, it ceased to be human, and was clothed to their minds in forms of superhuman grace, beauty, and strength. the actors in the greek heroic and tragic works were rarely, if ever, mere men. in the early ages of greece, and even till after the age of pericles, whilst such unequalled splendor and magnificence of art were lavished on temples and sacred places, we learn that no private man presumed to appropriate such splendors to his own use and convenience. if we take now a drama of shakspeare, " hamlet," for instance, we find all changed. in greece and rome, the gods gradually ceased to be divine. no longer inspiring belief, they had existed in literature as ornament, until, worn out even for this use, they were laid aside altogether. but literature must have an upper element in which to work. a higher religion succeeded the poetical theology of the greeks^ this hew rehgion also revealed a poetic side, which was availed of for the production of great works of art and literature among the itahans and other nations. in the north, it took a more severe, and at the same time more spiritual character, which, whilst rendering it unavail able for the purposes of art and uterature, made it too sacred for such profanation, as it was esteemed. whilst the divine element was thus removed to a sphere beyond the reach of literature, and skepticism had banished to the vulgar the belief in intermediate powers, a higher element was developed in man himself. the ancient hero was a demigod : the modern is a man. accordingly, we find in hamlet an exalted personage 8 criticism. indeed, a king's son ; but the great interest lies in the cha racter, apart from all mythical interest, all superhmnan or uneartjily attributes. the critical character predominates not only in the form, but in the matter, of this, and in part of all shakspeare's plays, and-all his works. the surpassing interest of hanllet over the other plays kes in the mind of the hero, to whom the whole world, all his relations in life, and his own soul, do but furnish food for a criticism, morbid in its excess ; so that, as he himself says, the current of all enterprise is turned awry, and loses the name of action. the inventive spirit of the greeks was nowhere more exhibited than in the distinct forms they gave to every department of literature and art. a great modern critic has shown, that the arts become debased, when they are suffered to run into each other ; as, for instance, when poetry usurps the province of painting, or the latter of sculpture, &c.* in the greeks, the observance of this law appears almost as a natural instinct, not only in respect to the different arts, but even in the different provinces of the same art. it seems as if the same principle which caused every noun or verb to be so rich in forms of expression, prevailed in making their literature fuu of varied forms of artistic utteranc%. every writing among them had a form, by which it plainly belonged to some one understood class. among the moderns, on the contrary, every writing tends to the formless. we may trace the tendency to form, growing gradually weaker and more artificial through the roman literature, and becoming antiquated in the imitative portion of the french. the effort towards a new establishment of literary form on a critical basis, in germany, is one of the most remarkable literary phenomena of our age. the hterary forms had their origin in the religious and festive observances of a people of prunitive maimers and high intellectual tendencies, among whom, owing to the absence of books, and thp mechanical and other obstacles in the way of communication by writing, the publication or utterance of * lessing. criticism. 9 every literary work must seek public occasions of one sort or another. among such a people, forms acquire a conven tional value, depending first on religious respect and awe, and afterwards on habit, and the perception of a propriety and beauty in such natural promptings of the national genius, as no after-thought or higher culture is ever able to improve upon. they have in this respect a strict analogy with archi tectural forms, which in like manner have their origin in early and prescriptive religious models, gradually reduced to proportion and beauty, without ever leaving the sacred pristine shape. certain of the arts are the nearly pure emanation and property of national genius ; whilst others, in various degrees, become the property of individuals. among the former we may reckon, first. language, which, as far as we can judge, was more perfect in times beyond the record of literature than in later days, so that what languages we possess have been called the pieced frag ments of antiquity ; second. literary forms, which also carry back their highest perfection nearly to the age of their invention ; and, thirdly, architecture. the other arts, religious and national in their origin, are more the province of individual genius, and less strictly subject to eras and races. ' whilst literature and the arts speak by the mouths and hands of gifted individuals, they are based upon the national genius ; and to this they have finally to render account. cultivated minds may perceive the beauty and perfection of a greek temple ; but they cannot persuade a christian peo ple of its fitness and appropriateness for then: worship. literary men may believe the epic, or the pure dramatic, to be the most perfect of literary forms ; yet, since; the people have learned to read to themselves what was formerly read or declaimed to them, these forms have been declared unmanageable. cowper said he could not imagine a man writing, without the intention of publishing, and the idea of a reading public before him ; and, in like maimer, we can readily conceive how the idea of a circle of devoted hearers, fired with enthusiasm as they listened to the deeds of their ancestors, should be^eedm to inspire the baid, and buoy 10 criticism. him up as he floated through oceans of hexameters. how we miss this happy consciousness of the impossibility of satiating a uving audience, in virgil, and all later epic poets ! the rigid dramatic laws of the greeks might easily become a magic inspu-ation to the poet, who was sure of a rapt audience during the performance of a drama, of which each of the three acts was a whole tragedy in itself. it is the greater or less certainty of an audience, and the nature of that audience, which rule the forms of literature, and develope or suppress the powers of the poet. it is true, a great work is written for all time, and the artist wiu always feel that time is necessary to his true appreciation ; but still it is the nature of his immediate audience that gives the form and shape to his efforts. in the first or inventive epoch, a devout and popular audience will demand form as the medium through which thought has always been presented to them. in the second or imitative, the audience is cul tivated, and form is to them the luxury and ornament of literature. in the critical, the form becomes subservient to the matter ; the audience is neither to be enchanted by the beauty, nor charmed by the luxury, of literature ; it is nei ther devout nor cultivated ; it dernands to be interested and informed. literature is no longer the business of a festival, or the ornament of elegant culture : it is the thing of every day, and to be criticised by every-day rules. it is perceived that form is not necessary to the transmission of thought by books, and all those modes of wtiting are adopted where its fetters may be avoided ; and whereas, in its origin, form was the means taken by the author to come into contact with his audience, it is now viewed as an obstacle between the wri ter and his readers. it is like the ceremonious full dress, whereby our ancestors thought to honor themselves and their guests, and to forward the purposes of social intercourse ; but which their descendants have criticised out of existence, because it has become in our day a bar, instead of a gate, between man and man. we have only to consider the almost imperceptible portion of written and printed works, that now make pretension to any stricter form than the facile novel oj the flexible essay. criticism. 11 in poetry what multitudes of " pieces " crowd the corners of our newspapers and magazines, and even find their way / to a more permanent form, to which it is impossible to give any more generic name than " pieces of poetry ; " pieces, indeed, whereof no whole could be constructed ! if they happen to be of fourteen lines, they are " sonnets." there are " songs " that could never be sung. there are " unes," and " fragments," " dramatic scenes," " epical fragments ; " every device that can be suggested to avoid a matured, preconsidered form. yet it may be safely said, that almost every great poetical genius has contemplated, were it only as a day-dream, the undertaking of some great and formal work ; and the respect with which such ideas and undertakings are always regarded, when based upon adequate powers, are a proof of a real ^ existence and value in forms, even at this late day. how many epics have been dreamed of by poets, and despaired of! how many have tested their powers by a dramatic effort that could not stand the test ! what added splendor and importance have invested even the too pedantic form of the classical french school ! we have spoken of the german as the critical litera ture. we have also, in the uterary history of this na tion, the remarkable fact, of a most careful and successfjjl attention to uterary forms, existing contemporaneously with the purest development of critical science. the admirers of goethe would even perhaps go so far as to say, that in him we find a union of the most successful cultivation of literary form in later times, with the greatest critical judg ment and skill the world has ever seen apphed to uterary matters. however this may be, a short consideration of what he accomplished must necessarily have a bearing on our subject. taking his works couectively, we are first caued upon to remark a plain line of division between those . that have a clear, easuy understood, and pre-arranged plan or form^ and others that are not only destitute to common eyes of any such outward form, but have an incoherence and form lessness, which the admirers of the poet have for tlie most pari 12 criticism. been able to account for only on the hypothesis of an internal form and arrangement, not visible to the outward eye'; and this explanation seems plausible enough in an author who professed to regard an inner meaning as a necessary adjunct to a work of art. still, granting this view of the subject, •such internal arrangement is a different thing from the hte rary form, of which we have been speaking ; for, although all form may be said to have a body and a soul, an inward significance as well as an outward appearance, yet this out ward appearance is its essential quauty. as goethe is, of au the moderns, the most complete master of form, we must look upon his defiance of it in the one case as being equally premeditated with his strict attention to it in others. it is easy to see, however high value be placed upon form, that those works of the opposite character were the ones that had the strongest hold upon him. "iphigenia" and "tasso" were finished and dismissed ; but " faust " and " wilhehn meister " seem to have been of perpetual recurrence to his mind. of each he produced a second part in his old age ; and, at a time when we might have looked for greater regu larity and symmetry, the reader finds himself perplexed by a more inexphcable incoherence. we have said above, that we may look upon the german literature as the most complete embodiment the world has seen of the critical element. the inquiry at once suggests itself, whether this side of hterature is to follow the example of the preceding phases, and, having received a full develop ment, cease to appear as the predominant idea ; giving place in its turn to some new domination, if indeed the german may be considered as giving such full completion to the idea. leaving this question for the present, shall we be far wrong if we assume that the greatest literary genius germany has produced owes the peculiar form his development took, to his coincidence with this great national characteristic ? if criticism be a real and living thing, and not a dead letter, its essence consists in this, — to see what has taken place in the /world under a new point of view ; to find a point from which facts arrange themselves in a new and unexpected manner, so that circumstances, before isolated, are seen as a part of criticism. 13 a new whole ; and from this principle it results, that there is such a thing as creative criticism. the mind of" goethe was based on this principle. all the facts of his own experience, all knowledge of the characters of others, all the literature of the past, all the history and results of art, all facts of religion and history, were perpetu ally undergoing this process in his mind. at each success ively new point of view, he placed as a milestone a work, a " dorothea," a " tasso," a " naturhche tochter," a " gotz von berlichengen." but not in this ught are to be viewed the " faust " and " wilhelm," which were rather the com panions of his journey, other forms of the man's self. in goethe we can always perceive at work two separate forms of the principle, — constructive criticism, and destruc tive. that which the demonic natmre of mephistophues . perpetually pulls apart and disjoins, the human nature of faust assimilates, and reconstructs into a whole. in the first part, where the object to be constructed is life, the demonic power is supposed to prevail. in the second part, where the object is art or creative thought, if the success is never complete, there is a succession of beautiful results ; and mephistophiles himself becomes the engine by which these are brought about. if we mistake not, the same idea may be traced in the " meister," though the demonic element of the "faust" becomes unimpassioned observation in the latter. whilst we acknowledge these works as the results of the critical spirit, it may well be asked how the same principles apply in any measure to the other works which we have spoken of as the masterpieces of form, and therefore as divided, toto calo, from these. the germanic nations, including the engush, are remark able for a tendency that has no less bearing on political and religious than on literary action ; viz. that, while the critical spirit is always busy in pulling to pieces, the ulterior purpose of reconstruction is never absent for a moment. this may be illustrated by examples from every department of action or achievement. the reformation of luther was a national criticism of catholicism, resulting in the immediate ^ 14 criticism. establishment of a new religion. compare this with the way in which the destructive element in france, when once aroused against catholicism, criticised it out of fashion, without dreaming of creating any thing new to supply its place. the french revolution was a destructive criticism of royal government. when this flame ceased for want of fuel, france could find no alternative but military power.* compare this with the results of the english revolution and our own. all ancient nations, relaxing from the simple virtues of heroic ancestors, declined and disappeared, pushed from their stools by new and fresher races. modern nations would have followed their example, but for the influence of the r econst ructive principle in the germanic race ; the same principle which is in literature scientific criticism, is in reli gion reformation, is in politics reform. this reconstructive criticism, based upon the profoundest scholarship and strong natural genius, has produced in ger many those works, which are esteemed the flower of their hteraturej in which the mind of the nation is fused into moulds, not of pedantic or even of elegant formauty, but of hving, significant form. has the same taken place in eng land? certainly not in later times; and, since we have included the english among the germanic nations with reference to the presence of the critical spirit, it wiu be inter esting to inquire, why not ? from position and circumstance, as from natural charac ter, england has enjoyed a freer and more active political existence than any other modern nation. the basis of this uberty was criticism. england alone hs^s enjoyed freedom of the press ; and naturally this criticism has been applied to the absorbing interests of politics, and the representatives of pohtical opinions, — persons. a rigid aristocracy assailable in this way only, and freely to be attacked thus, this liberty has in england always been licentious, simply because it was the only liberty ; in other words, the only ground where birth and place had no vantage. personauties always tend to brutahze and degrade ; and it is undeniable, that a brutal * the course of the new kevolution may serve as a farther illustration. criticism. 15 and savage spirit, not unaccompanied by consummate ability, has prevailed in the engush pohtical press ; a" spirit which would be tolerated nowhere else in the relations of life. as a necessary consequence, such writing has usually been anonymous ; — junius, in au his characteristics, was not an exception, but a type ; — and because anonymous, irrespon sible. we have in england the singular spectacle of a whole class of writers, many of them possessed of powers that would under other circumstances have insured them fame, content to pass their hves in obscurity, unknown to the world, which daily feeds on the produce of their indefatiga ble pens. it is useless to speak of exceptions : the tendency of the system is inevitable. this freedom, this uoense of the press, has been indispensable to england ; but its advantages are dearly bought. if the german error be in criticising j political action with the same scientific conscientiousness j that is applied to utereiry or abstract questions, so that with them, as with hamlet, action loses the name of action ; the english fault is no less, of applying to literature the same dashing critique that is unscrupulously used with respect to character and opinion. the favorite is he who can stand being knocked, without being knocked down ; or, if he be down, can rise agaia. they show byron as a proof of the ' value of the system, as if, had there been no " edinburgh," there would have been no byron. but, though byron could defend himself, who cannot see that he was sensitive, and that the truculent enghsh criticism, of which the " edinburgh review " was but one form, soured the whole rmlk of his genius ; urged him to tours de force, to show that he was not to be sneered at ; and incited him to every folly in litera ture and mfe, lest the world shotild discover that he had a genial and poetical nature ? the extravagant praise of mediocre celebrities is a neces sary, and nearly as injurious, part of the system. the author is placed in a false position : he writes for all men ; but he finds he must choose a party, or, giving up the hope of a nation's attention, write for a coterie. again, it is doubtful if the licentiousness of the press in england has not been injurious to freedom of thought, para 16 criticism. doxical as it may seem. the english are free of speech ; but their idea of freedom of thought has been too often com prised in praising and blaming what they choose, and as loudly as they choose. now, are freedom of thought and freedom of speech identical ? or do they necessarily go to gether ? what is freedom of thought ? of course, no out ward force can prevent my thinking what i will : it is not even a matter of will. i think what i must, — what i can not help. i may indeed pin my faith to another man's sleeve, and thus from indolence give up my thought, and become the slave of his ; or i may be the slave of my own prejudices and pa;ssions ; i may bow to the " idols of the forum," and " idols of the den." the man of free thought is he whose mind is open to judgeevery opinion, every work, every man on his own merits. is a licentious press even favorable to such a state of mind? it is simply the machine whereby the rough and hasty instinct of a people is brought efficiently to bear upon the conduct of their rulers ; it is the charter of a people's liberties, not because its judgments are correct, but because, like the geese of the capitol, it awakens men to discover whether good or evu is being done, lest judgment go against them by default. it is noisy, violent, unfair, having a blind tendency, rather than a steady view, towards right. it asks, " right or wrong ? guilty or not guilty ? " it applies the same summary process to books, as we daily see, with most re markable results. for, according to this system, a book that makes any impression at all comes to be regarded as a pubhc enemy or a public idol, according to the poutics or the prejudices of the pubhc accuser. there is no medium. it is evident that either of these positions is injurious to an author, but not equally so. he that writes in the assurance of popular applause has at any rate ample room and space to develope his genius. the crowded audience, the eager, expectant eyes, au comfort and inspire the singer. that this is not in vain, the enormous uterary successes of the popular writers in france and england, of scott and dic kens, of sue and dumas, loudly attest. but as we sow, we must reap. we do not apply our gold and praise in vain. criticism. , 17 we have the best specimens, but if not of the worst class, surely not of the best. in germany, speech has been less and thought more free than m england. the popular element has never had an immediately available voice in public matters. whilst criti cism in england has been busy with daily pohtics ; in ger many a doubtful, if not forbidden ground; it has been applied in the latter country to thought, to literature, philo sophy, and art. in germany the best and most cultivated minds have been the critics : in england these have rather been the criticized. the results are before us : of what value, they are perhaps too near to us, as yet, for us to form a definite opinion. we do not recognize as an original element the conscious, reconstructive, self-restoring principle of criticism in the other european nations. france is indeed hypercritical; but french criticism is skeptical : it destroys the old faith, and leaves no basis upon which to build a new. the german, while he criticises, is never skeptical, but substitutes a hving beuef for that which had become dead and inert. the french revolution could find no reconstructive element on which to pause, and rebuild a political fabric. no truth was left but such as could be found in exact science or brute strength. the former was tried by sieyes and others, and failed, as such attempts always must. the latter prevailed. in napoleon, they found a strong man ; in a european war, necessity of action. wholesome exercise restored health ; but france has since been the sport of fortune, rather than the exemplification of principles. of its htera ture, what shall we say ? that it goes on, dissecting away the ground whereon the social basis rests, a skepticism of all purity and honor ? its literary men seem to us analogous to the politicians of the revolution, — men of wonderful talent, of fearless mind, weighing every old institution, and, as it is found wanting, casting it aside ; but suggesting m their room nothing practicable, finding in the end nothing real but passion and power. do we not hear of a great french discovery whereby all society is to be rernodelled (within six years, the inventor says) upon the principle of 3 18 criticism. harmonizing the passions, instead of restraining them ? the very sieyes of this moral revolution. it is no new theory of fourier, and of the modern french school, that a greater force is to be derived from the har monic action of the passions than from their restraint, and that a future society is to depend upon this law. the idea is true and eternal: it is the foundation of au poetry, the dream of youth ; it is argued in the first page of man's his tory, and the lapse of every few centuries sees the argu ment rehearsed. the human race has passionately clung to the belief. we are so in love with it, that we are always willing to sacrifice ourselves that another may enjoy it. we ask only that some one may enjoy ; and that one is our idol. the principle of loyalty is based on it. what milhons are willing slaves, that the passions of an alexander or a napo leon may meet no check in their superb development ! we feel ourselves impersonated in them. there is no true lover that would not die, that the object of his love might be happy. which is the more subhme object of the two ? are not these vulgar great men, after all ? is man ever sublime but when he renounces ? it is in this point that the french stand in opposition to the critical, no less than the religious, spirit of modern times. the mad behef of the revolution was, that every man might have this theoretic freedom ; the mad career of napoleon was based on their wiu, that one man should have it. that which they failed to realize in the political, they now seek in the social world, and by the same process ; viz. a destructive criticism of the old, and a theory of a new social state based not on experience or criticism, but upon " exact science " and arithmetic. the end of our own revolution was involved in the be ginning. the principle of self-government, derived through our puritan ancestors, was full grown in us. it was a criti cism in which the fate of the world was involved ; and yet how httle was destroyed ! it was the construction of a new world on grounds derived fi-om criticism of the old. only so much struggle was necessary as served to unite us in the effort. the french revolution avas gradual, was blind, not critidsni. 19 knowing whither it went : the american was complete in the person of every man who signed the declaration. such is the nature of all true criticism that lies beyond the region of exact science. the old is reviewed, not from a blind fault-finding, or vague dissatisfaction, but from a com plete new whole, existing in embryo. as we recognize two distract appearances of truth, viz. truths of exact science, and truths of faith ; in like manner we must distinguish a different form of criticism for each. a faith is the sum of the convictions of a man, or a nation, in regard to spiritual things : its form is based on the teach ings of the past ; and its criticism rests on inward, individual experience. when it criticises facts, it is from an internal point of view, and because they disagree with inward ex perience : no fact becomes monstrous whilst it is the sign of an inward conviction. now, not rehgion alone, but the ! whole life of man, social and political, rests upon faith ; in other words, upon a form of truth commensurate to man's progress, — a relative, not an absolute truth. exact science, on the other hand, rests on a correct observation of pheno mena : its safety hes in admitting nothing which is not capa ble of demonstration or proof. it is based upon doubl in the predominance of one or other of these principles, lies the greatest difference between the civihzation and the hterature of the ancient and modern world. among the ancients, the domain of exact science was invaded by faith: in more modern times, the region of faith was usurped by exact science. in our day, there, are signs of an oscillation in the reverse direction. a critique of the development of this new tendency in the greatest minds of our era would include a goethe and a swedenborg in the same category. in individual character, also, we may observe the presence of the critical element to produce the most remarkable con trast between the ancient man and the modern. the ideal ancient hero is a magnificent child, great, simply from the possession of great gifts ; an achilles, unconscious of any struggle, save with circumstance and the world. the mo dern idea always includes inward struggle and conquest. we mark the signs of this changed ideal everywhere. the / 20 criticism. artistic spirit of the greeks was bright, cheerful, joyous, indi cating facility and grace : the modern tends more to gloomy grandeur, a circumscribed, unconscious grace and perfection, in contrast with a limitless and vague sublimity. this latter characteristic existed in a degree also among the jews, and from the same cause to which the moderns owe it, — a more subhme and terribk religious beuef, that darried the mind beyond all visible space and power. the christian revelation has modified this effect, not by rendering the idea of the supreme more familiar, but by presenting a divine perfection as a model to every man. the greek did not criticise himself, because he had no higher standard than the action of creatures like himself. the christian criticises himself from a standard of ineffable perfection, so that the idea of struggle and difficulty, even of the greatest struggle the powers are capable of, is inseparable from that of the true christian. this element being thus in general existence throughout ' the world, even those who are mimoved by the demands of religion partake of the idea of an indefinitely exalted stan dard towards whatever excellence they inchne ; and, as human exertions are limited, instead of resting with that we can easily accomplish, a longiug for the indefinite springs up in every ardent breast, and finds a response, as every genuine feeling does, in nature, and demands it of art. how is it that, while we receive a deeper answer from nature, art has become incapable of adequately responding to it ? instead of producing greater works than of old, we fail of reaching the ancient excellence. is it that outward nature has become too great to our apprehension, that man has been invested with attributes too internal to be repre sented by outward form ; that thus these outward arts decay ; and, if this hypothesis be correct, that we must find in poetry and music what the other arts can no longer repre sent ? however these things may be, we cannot leave this part of our subject, without recurring once more to " hamlet," in illustration of what we have been saying. in the greek works, individual character is subordinate to the general criticism. 21 action of the piece ; when it becomes prominent, its charac teristic, like that of their statues, is a charming propriety and harmony ; in other words, beauty. in " hamlet " the action of the piece is subordinate to the character of the hero ; and this character is more interesting than beautiful or harmo nious. the reason of this change, which aifects the whole of art, may be traced to the struggle we have spoken of as the characteristic of modern character, and which, by its very nature, possesses more interest than beauty. as a sequel to what we said of goethe, it may be remarked, that, even in vforks of carefully observed form like the " tasso," the presence of struggle and the predominant interest of individual character mark a broad une of distinction between their effect, and that of the more simple elements of the ancients. the enghsh were the first great nation in w^hich the prin ciple of a practical criticism was admitted as the pohtical basis. there was a nearer approach to this in the pohty of greece and rome than in any other modern state ; and perhaps the only reason why this principle in those nations did not develope the modern fact of national regeneration may be found in the existence of slavery among them. so long as a person can exist in a state without rights, so long the true and only foundation of pohtical criticism is want ing. unless the principle is admitted that every man is free, no good reason can be given why any man shall be free. the reason why the detrimental influence of slavery was so long inert in the ancient nations, was that the condition of slavery had never been criticised. no error becomes immediately demoralizing, untu it is the subject of criticism. a hundred years ago, a man might get dauy drunk, and still retain his self-respect. now drunkenness is ruin. so, in the ancient states, slavery might exist, and its fatal effects appear only after the lapse of centuries, and then be ascribed to other causes. our southern states are an obvious ex ample. freedom of the press does not exist, criticism does not exist, pohtical or literary. surely that is a strong faith which believes this state of things can be lasting. we have seen 'freedom of thought exist in germany, with a censorship v/ 22 criticism. of the press ; but freedom of thought can surely not exist where the whole energies of the mind are exerted in defence of a falsehood. suppose the energies of the greek mind to have been turned by circumstances to the defence of their system of servitude, what would the world have known of their after-history ? the philosophy of this state of things is this : — as long as an institution is not criticised, we view it as a fixed faict. it has therefore no prominent place in our thoughts among other questions. when criticism of it begins, every man is called on to make up his mind in relation to it. suppos ing, then, the institution to be either false in itself, or worn out and become false, we are reduced to the necessity of either renouncing it, or of hving a lie for the sake of our prejudices or our interests ; a state, of which a man is always more or less clearly conscious, and which soon proves demo ralizing and fatal. in england the critical principle has hved and flourished among institutions otherwise aristocratic and stringent ; or rather we may say, that the english race spht, and that the younger half came to work out on a more spacious field that estabhshment of a free and universal political criticism which, from many causes of outward position, as weu as feudal strength, was felt to be alike inehgible and infeasible at home. if england had become a repubuc after the time of crom well, it is doubtful if the strength would not have been dissipated in internal faction, which, concentrated under monarchical rule, has been able to balance the despotic powers of europe. it is even probable that our o^vn pohti cal existence depended on the same cause. if there had been toleration in the mother-country, it would not have been so fiercely fought for here. in this country, we for the first time see, theoretically at least, a pure critical basis ; a constitution, not the growth of time, or the slow and encumbered fruit of the genius of a nation in combination with circumstance and difficulty, but a free critique from the highest point of view of the past history of the world. the theory of all our action, from the school district to the presidency, is, that the act of to-day criticism. 23 criticises the act of yesterday ; the party of conservation, that of progress. the ideal state of any period would represent the ideal man upon a large scale, exposed to the same temptations, subject to the same weaknesses, subsisting by the same strength. the ancient state, or man unconscious, uncriti cised, subsisting by native strength and superiority, is just or unjust, generous or selfish, as natural disposition or his own wild will may prompt. this spirit was the ancient idea of heroism : of such heroic states and heroic men, his tory gives us many examples. the modern state, hke the modern man, has his being, not merely in strength, but also in principles. of every step he is conscious, always hearing the voice of external or internal criticism. his will and nat ural impulse have ceased to be a law to himself or others, except so far as they, in fact or belief, square with principles. baseness is, to be wanting by the test of one's own standard. this standard, in a rude age, is martial virtue : until that is corrupted, the nation may be destroyed, but cannot be demorahzed. it is no longer so with us. we are like the man who has professed religion, who has separated himself from the world from principle : he caimot sin, without losing his self-respect. if all our political safety lies in the certain criticism to which every pubuc action is amenable, to the same principle are to be traced many of the political vices, of which we ought to be on our guard. the source of power criticises itself, reverses its own decisions, yet will not respect the statesman who changes with it. whoever courts the people to-day is sure to be distrusted by it to-morrow ; yet when can we expect politicians to cease to court the people ? in quiet times, he who will not go' out for office, no matter what may be his powers, is left at home. thus the aspirant is placed in the dilenama of remaining inglorious, or subject ing himself to a criticism that may, as we have so often seen, prove fatal to his independence. and yet it is out of these men, whom we have ruined by not trusting enough, that we make our first magistrates, whom we entrust with all. our great statesmen — public servants we call them — have their 24 criticism. self-respect destroyed by being watched too closely by their masters. the true statesman, interpreting the wisest will, the best instinct of a people, uses the force delegated to him to constrain the nation in that direction. our position is often the reverse of this. our servants have understood and executed our sinister will, and the tardy criticism of bur bet ter judgment comes halting after. that it does come inevit ably is our safety, and perhaps an adequate recompense for these evils, inseparable from our condition. in literature also, the good of free criticism is not un mixed with evil. our first misfortune is, that there is a reference to a standard from without, viz. from england. as the spirit that dictates this is, from many causes, unfair and depreciating, a natural consequence has been to cause au our own criticism to take the opposite ground, to over praise that which we felt to be undervalued, or invidiously regarded. in the second place, although au original literature comes from and refers to the heart of the people, it caimot, except in a rude age, address itself to that people, except through a class capable of receiving it. if great works do not find such a class in their own age, they wait tiu time and their own influence create it. no one wiu pretend, that shak speare or milton spoke to their age in the same sense they do to us. but shakspeare and milton lived in times that could be unconscious of their greatness. it could not be so now. ours is a conscious age, and every man is made the most of. we believe a conscious greatness inseparable from a critical uterature ; and such, therefore, we look for in this country ; — a uterature and art based on thorough criticismj and thorough knowledge of what already exists in the world ; in a word, on a higher culture. music. 25 art. ii. — music. one class of persons seeks the soul of music, and dwells in it ; another, the laws which reign in its creations ; and a third, the form in which it is embodied, the actual beauty as it charms the sense. to one it is a feeling, a sentiment, a passion ; to another it is a science ; to another, a sensible creation and enjoyment. the heart, the intellect, and the senses ; the soul, the body, and the everlasting laws ; the ac tive prompting motive, the passive substance into which it pours its will, and the impersonal regulating reason medi ating between will and action ; — • what more enters into our existence as a whole, or into any single experience or act of ours ? at any moment, there is somewhat prompting us within ; some thought, accompanying that prompting, to guide it to its end ; and some passive instrument or object, endowed with motion or with form, in obedience to that prompting and that thought. we will, from inmost passion ; we see, by light not our own ; we go, as the world opens to receive us. thus in hfe there are three forces : — motives, which are first, and spring from within ; secondly, guiding principles and laws, independent of us, yet involved in us and in every thing ; thirdly, actions or expressions, which are tiie body or thing moved. and these are the three ele ments of music, as well as of our lives, presiding over all its grand and primary divisions. in the history also of music, since music could be called an art, which is only in comparatively modern times, each of these three component elements of music has exercised ascendancy in turn. the scientific phase, that is, the learned style, came first in the order of development, with the bachs ; the music of expression, of sentiment, the grand deep poetry and soul of the art, came next, with haydn and mozart, handel and beethoven ; the music of effect, the music of the senses, the age of rossinis and instrumental virtuosos, has succeeded. historic periods and scientific doctrine corre spond part to part in a series of three terms. to the three spheres of sentiment, of science, and of prac 4 26 music. tice, conform three classes of character, in whom each respectively predominates. we feel the spirit of the first ; we admire the intellect of the second ; we deal only with the actions of the thnd. we turn to the first for inspiration and for influence ; to the second for reasons and methods ; to the third for execution, whether in the way of amusement or of use. the highest type of the first class is the saint ; of the second, the philosopher; and of the thnd, the statesman. thencollective organizations, from of old, have been the church, the university, and the state. a corresponding division holds in every department of life, in every art, in every subject of inquiry. its keen blade passed through each and all, when thought began. it is the primary analy sis of the universe, which the mysteries of the church have carried even into the inmost nature of the deity. these analogies, accidentally started, lead directly into the inmost essence of the science and the art of music. the number three is the number of science ; and there is a cer tain poetry of science, which consists in tracing the presence of the same great laws, and detecting the same type in all things ; so that one sphere becomes an expression and reflec tion, as it were, of every other ; so that the passions and emotions of our soul read themselves acknowledged, and en joy their own harmonies anew, in every kingdom of nature and the arts. so much it is necessary to glance at in the science of music, — that divine som-ce of enthusiasm, that transcendent medium of expression, that homelike yet mys terious element of passion, of the love that yearns for the human, or that climbs in secret aspiration, flame-like, to the infinite heart of hearts, centre of light and warmth,' in whom all spirits seek their unity. but science is not the essence of music. it is not the warm, glowing thing itself. it is only the measure of its heart-beats, the law that distributes the ramification of the innumerable ducts and channels through which that heart propels its hfe blood. it is the principle of order in the system, the divider of the one into the many, which resent resemblance in each other, and wander off in every way from uniformity, only that they may be the more completely one; or, in other music. 27 words, that unity may become miiversality. since, however j, unity precedes variety, since it is only the whole which can explain the parts, we will not follow the spiral path of the restless analyzer and divider. science, before we have cha racterized the whole, which in this case it divides. music is both body and soul, like the man who delights in it. its body is beauty in the sphere of sound, — audible beauty. but in this very word beauty is implied a soul, a moral end, a meaning of some sort, a something which makes it of interest to the mner hfe of man, which relates it to our invisible and real self. this beauty, like au other, results from the marriage of a spiritual fact with a material form, from the rendering external, and an object of sense, what lives in essence only in the soul. here the material part, which is measured sound, is the embodiment and sen sible representative, as well as the re-acting cause, of that which we call impulse, sentiment, feeling, the spring of all our action and expression. in a word, it is the language of the heart ; — not an arbitrary and conventional represen tative, as a spoken or written word is ; but a natural, inva riable, pure type and correspondence. speech, so far as it is distinct from music, sustains the same relation to the head. speech is the language of ideas, the communicator of thought, the mercury of the intellectual olympus enthroned in each of us. but behind all thought, there is something deeper, and much nearer hfe. thought is passive, involuiatary, cold, varying with what it falls upon hke light, a more or less clear-sighted guide to us, but not a prompting energy, and surely not our very essence ; not the source either of any single act, or of that whole complex course and habit of action which we call our character. thought has no impulse in itself, any more than the lungs have. " out of the heart are the issues of life." its loves, its sentiments, its passions, its prompting impulses, its irresistible attractions, its warm desires and aspirations, — these are the masters of the intel lect, if not its law; these people the blank consciousness with thoughts innumerable ; these, though involuntary in one sense, are yet the principle of will in us, and are the spring of all activity, and, of all thought too, since they, in fact, 28 mmic. strike out the light they see to act by. the special moments and phases of this active principle we call emotions ; and music, which i hold to be its natural language, has for its very root and first principle, and is actually born from, motion. sound is generated by motion ; rhythm is measured mo tion ; and this is what distinguishes music from every other art of expression. painting, sculpture, architecture, are all quiescent : they address us in still contemplation. but music is all motion, and it is nothing else. and so in its effects. it does not rest, that we may contem plate it ; but it hurries us away with it. our very first intima tion of its presence is, that we are moved by it. its thrilling finger presses down some secret spring within us, and in stantly the soul is on its feet with an emotion. painting and sculpture rather give the idea of an emotion, than directly move us ; and, if speech can raise or quell a passion, it is because there is kneaded into au speech a certain leaven of the divine fire called music. the same words and sentences convey new impressions with every honest change of tone and modulation in the speaker's voice ; and, when he rises to any thing like eloquence, there is a certain buoyant rhyth mical substratum of pure tone on which his words ride, as the ship rides on the ocean, borrowing its chief eloquence from that. take out the consonants which break up his speech, and the vowels flow on musically. how often wiu the murmur of a devout prayer overcome a remote hearer with more of a religious feeling, than any apprehension of the distinct words could, if he stood nearer ! music is a universal language, subtly penetrating all the walls of time and space. it is no more local than the mathe matics, which are its impersonal reason, just as sound is its body, and feeling or passion is its soul. the passions of the human heart are radically alike, and answer to the same tones everywhere and always, except as they may be unde veloped ; and music has a power to develope them, like an experience of life. it can convey a foretaste of moods and states of feeling yet in reserve for the soul, of loves which yet have never met an object that could call them out. music. 29 a musical composition is the best expression of its author's inmost life. no persons in all history are so intimately known to those that live away from them or after them, as are handel, mozart, beethoven, weber, schubert, bellini, and othfirs, to those who enter into the spirit of their musical works. for they have each bequeathed the very wine of his pecuhar life in this form, that it sparkles still the same as often as it is opened to the air. the sounds may effervesce in each performance ; but they may be woke to life again at any time. so it is with the passions and emotions which first dictated the melodious creations. hence it is that great composers have no biography, ex cept their music. theirs is a life of deep, interior sentitnent, of ever-active passion and affection, of far-reaching aspira tion, rather than of ideas or events ; theirs is the wisdom of love ; their behef is faith, the felt creed of the heart ; and they dwell in the peculiar element of that, in the wondrous tone-world, communicating all the strongest, swiftest, and most delicate pulsations of their feeling to the ready vibra tions of wood or metal or string, which propagate themselves through the equally ready vibrations of the air, and of every other medium, till they reach the chambers of the ear, and set in motion chords more sensitive, that vibrate on the ner vous boundary between matter and the soul ; and there, what was vibration becomes sound, and the hearer has caught the spirit of the composer. yes : the whole soul of a beethoven thrius through your soul, when you have actually heard one of his great symphonies. there is no other com munion of so intimate a nature possible, as that which ope rates through music. intimate, and yet most mystical; intimacy not profaned by outward contact of familiarity, but a meeting and communing of the ideal, one with another, which never grows familiar. why is it but because in sen timent the tendency always is to unity, while thought for ever differentiates and splits ? feeling communicates by sym pathy, or fellow-feeling, the earth round ; and music is its common language, which admits no dialects, and means the same in europe and america. light corresponds to thought ; and light is changed and colored by every me 30 music. dium through which it shoots, by every surface which re flects it. sound, or, which is the same thing, measured motion or vibration, corresponds to feeling, and its vibrations are passed on through every medium unchanged, except as they grow fainter. light is volatile ; but sound is constant : so it is when you compare thought with feehng, which last comes more from the centre where all souls are one. music is religious and prophetic. she is the real sibyl, chanting evermore of unity. over wild, waste oceans of discord floats her silvery voice, the harbinger of love and hope. every genuine strain of music is a serene prayer, or bold, inspired demand, to be united with all, at the heart of au things. her appeal to the world is more loving than the world can yet appreciate. kings and statesmen, and men of affairs, and men of theories, would stand aside from their own over-rated occupations to listen to her voice, if they knew how nearly it concerned them, how much more it goes to the bottom of the matter, and how clearly she forefeels humanity's great destiny. the soul that is truly receptive of music learns angelic wisdom, and grows more chudhke with experience. the sort of experience which music gives does not plough cunning furrows in the brow of the fresh soul, nor darken its expressive face by knitting there the tangled hues 'of satan. here, the most deeply initiated are in spirit the most youth ful ; and hope delights to wait on them. the native impulses of the soul, or what are variously called the passions, aflections, propensities, desires, are, au of them, when considered in their essence and original un warped tendency, so rhany divinely implanted loves. union, harmony of some sort, is their very hfe. to meet, to unite, to blend, by methods intricate as swift, is their whole busi ness and effort through eternity. as is their attraction, such must be their destiny ; not to collision, not to exce;ss followed by exhaustion ; not to discord, chaos, and confusion ; but to binding ties of fitness and conjunction through all spheres, from the simplest to the most universal accords. through these (how else ?) are the hearts of the human race to be knit into one mutually conscious, undivided whole, one hving temple not too narrow, nor too fragmentary for the reception music. pa. of the spirit of good. is not this foretold in music, the natural language of these passions, which cannot express corruption nor any evil feeling, without ceasing to be music ; which has no tone for any bad passion, and translates into harmony and beauty whatever it expresses ? the blending of all these passions harmoniously into one becomes the cen tral love, the deepest and most undivided hfe of man. this is the love of god, as it also, from the first, is the, inbreathing of god, who is love ; to whom the soul seeks its way, by however blind an instinct, through all these partial harmonies, learning by degrees to understand the universal nature of its desire and aim. the sentiment of unity, the strongest and deepest sentiment of avhich man is capable, the great affec tion into which au his affections flow — to find, not lose them selves ; which looks to the source when little wants conflict, and straightway they are reconciled in emulous ardor for the glory of the whole ; which lifts a man above the thought of self, by making him in every sense fully himself, by reuniting his prismatic, party-colored passions into one which is as clear and universal as the hght ; the sentiment which seeks only universal harmony and order, so that all things, whether of the inner or of the outer world, may be perfectly transpa rent to the love in which they have their being, and that the sole condition of all peace and happiness, the consciousness of one in all and au in one, may never more be wanting ; — that is what the common sense of mankind means by the religious sentiment, — that is the. pure essence of religion. music is its natural language, the chief rite of its worship, the rite which cannot lose its sacredness ; for music cannot cease to be harmony, cannot cease to symbolize the sacred relationship of each to au, cannot contract a taint, any more than the sunbeam which shines into all corners. music can not narrow or cloak the message which it bears ; it cannot lie ; it cannot raise questions in the mind, or excite any other than a pure enthusiasm. it is god's alphabet, and not man's ; unalterable and unpervertable ; suited for the har mony of the human passions and affections ; and sent us, in this their long winter of disharmony and strife, to be a perpe tual type and monitor, rather say an actual foretaste, of that 32 music. harmony which must yet come. how could there be reli gion without music ? that sentiment would create it again, would evoke its elements out of the completest jargon of dis cords, if the scale and the accords, and all the use of instru ments, were forgotten. let that feeling deepen in our nation, and absorb its individual ambitions, and we shall have our music greater than the world has known. there was an age of faith, though the doctrinal statements and the forms thereof were narrow. art, however, freed the spirit which the priest imprisoned. music, above all, woke to celestial power and beauty in the bosom of a believing though an ignorant age. the catholic church did not neglect this great secret of ex pression and of influence ; and the beautiful free servant served it in a larger spirit than itself had dreamed of. where it could not teach the bible, where its own formal interpreta tions thereof were perhaps little better than stones for bread, it could breathe the spirit of the bible and of all love and sanctity into the most ignorant and thoughtless worshipper, through its sublime masses, at once so joyous and so solemn, so soul-subduing and so soul-exalting, so full of tenderness, so full of rapture uncontrollable, so confident and so devout. in these, the hearer did, for the time being,' actually, live celestial states. the mystery of the cross and the ascension, the glorious doctrine of the kingdom of heaven, were not reasoned out to his understanding, but passed through his very soul, like an experience, in these all-permeating clouds of sound ; and so the religion became in him an emotion, which could not so easily become a thought, which had better not become such thought as the opinionated teachers of the visible church would give him. the words of the credo never yet went down with all minds ; but their general tenor is universal, and music is altogether so. music extracts and embodies only the spirit of the doctrine, that inmost life of it which all feel, and miraculously revivifies and treinsfigures the cold statements of the understanding with the warm faith of feeling. in music there is no controversy ; in music there are no opinions : its springs are deeper than the foundations of any of these pa;rtition walls, and its breath floats undivided over all their heads. no danger to the catholic whose head music. 33 is clouded by dull superstitions, while his heart is nourished and united with the life of all lives by this refreshing dew ! the growing disposition, here and there, among select musical circles, to cultivate acquaintance with this form of music, is a good sign. "what has been called sacred music in this country has been the least sacred in every thing but the name, and the forced reverence paid it. with the super stitions of the past, the soul of nature also was suppressed ; and the free spirit of music found small sphere amid our loud protestings. a joyless religion of the intellect merely, avhich could almost find fault with the sun's shining, closed every pore of the self-mortified and frozen soul against the subtle, insinuating warmth of this most eloquent apostle of god. the sublime shicerity of that wintry energy of self-denial having for the most part passed away, and the hearts of the descendants of the pilgrims having become opened to all worldly influences, why should they not be also visited by the heavenly corrective of holy and enchanting music, which is sure to call forth and to nourish germs of loftier affection ? can the bitter spirit of sectarianism, can the formal preach ings of a worldly church which strives to keep reugion so dis tinct from life, can the utihtarian ethics of this great day of trade, give the soul such nourishment and such conviction of the higher life as the great religious music of mozart and haydn and beethoven ? the pomp and pageantry of the mass we have not. but the spiritual essence hves in the music itself; and a mere quartette of voices, a social friendly group, bound alike by moral and by musical sympathies, may drink this inspiration, may pour it out on others. the songs and operas of the day, which take the multitude, become insipid in comparison with such music. greatest of all masters in this pecumar line was mozart, — the boy mozart we might say, — who avrote the major part of his eighteen masses ere he had reached his twenty-second year; and .yet they seem, the best of them, to have been wrung from the profoundest experiences of the long-tried heart of a man, as well as to pour forth the raptures of a bright seraph-soul, which has not yet buried any portion of its heavenly inheritance in the earth. 5 34 music. in music of this kind, there is somewhat that is peculiar to the individuality of the composer ; but there is more that is universal, true to the inmost meaning of all hearts. every sentiment, if it is deep enough, becomes religion ; for every sentiment seeks and tends to unity, to harmony, to recogni tion of the one in all. and every sentiment in music is ex pressed in its purity, and carried up as it were to the blending point of all the emotions in one, which is the radical desire and feehng of the soul, its passion to be one with god. if mozart is perhaps the deepest in this order of composi tion, he by no means stands alone. the church afforded to genius that sphere, for its highest and holiest ambition, which it found not elsewhere. the masses of hadyn are more numerous, and more of them elaborate, great efforts, than those of mozart, many of whose masses were composed at so early an age ; and his genius steadily drew him towards that sphere of music, in which he was destined to reign supreme, — the opera. but, though to hadyn we must grant the very perfection of artistic skill and grace, a warm and childlike piety, and a spirit of the purest joy ; and though at times he has surpassing tenderness ; still there is an inde scribable atmosphere, an air of inspiration, a gushing forth as of the very warmest, inmost hfe-blood, in mozart's religious music, which affects us, even when it is simpler than hadyn's, with more power. religion takes in hadyn more the form of gratitude and joy. the mournfulness of a miserere or a crudfixus of his is a passive mood, often but the successful contemplation or painter's study of such a mood, where the subject calls for it, rather than a permanent and inherent quality in the whole music of his own being. his ground tone seems to be a certain domestic grateful sense of hfe, in which the clearest order and the sweetest kindliness and thankfulness for ever reign. in mozart the ground tone is love, the very ecstacy and celestial bliss of the re-union of two souls long separated, at once romantic and platonic, sensuous, and yet exalting the senses to a most spiritual ministry. in him we have what is nearest to the naked soul of music, -r— its most ethereal, transparent, thrilling body. one would scarce suppose, that the soul of mozart ever music. 35 inhabited any other body than those melodies and harmo nies in which it dwells for us. something of a personal love, however, is felt in his most religious strains : it is the worship of the holy virgin ; the music of that phase of the religious sentiment, which swedenborg might call con jugal love. to beethoven's three or four great masses, it comes most natural to add the term solemn ; for, with him, au is a great effort. it is the very sentiment of the man, — aspiration, boundless yearning to embrace the infinite. with him the very discontent of the soul becomes reugion, and opens sub lime visions, which are like a flying horizon of ever near, yet unattainable order and beauty. in the inexhaustibleness of the heart's cravings, he finds revelations ; and out of those depths, with gloomy grandeur, with fire now smoth ered and now breaking out, and always with a rapt impet uosity, the worship of his nature springs, escaping like a flame to heaven. then, too, besides this captivating music of the catholic church, we should think of the plain church, the voices of the united multitude, in simple, solemn, sublime strains, presenting themselves as one before the lord. even our modern psalm, as monotonous and artificial as it often is, satisfying scarcely more than the grammatical conditions of a musical proposition, has oftentimes an unsurpassable gran deur. where thousands sing the same slow melody, the mighty waves of sound wake in the air their own accompa niment, and the effect is that of harmony. on this broad popular basis, handel built. he is the protestant, the people's man, in music. in him the great sentiment of a common humanity found expression. the individual van ishes : it is the mighty music of humanity ; his theme, the one first theme, and properly the burthen of all music, humanity's looking-for and welcome of its messiah. what a prediction and foreshadowing of the future harmony and unity of the whole race is that great oratorio ! what are those choruses, those hallelujahs and amens, but the solemn ecstacy, the calm, because universal and all-sympathizing, everywhere sustained excitement, which all souls shau feel ; 36 war. when all shall feel their unity with all humanity, and with all to god. and it is not alone in the music of the church of any form, whether mass or plainer choral, that this sentiment is strong est. perhaps no music ever stirred profounder depths in the hearer's religious consciousness, than some great orchestral symphonies, say those of beethoven. even a waltz of his, it has been said, is more religious than a prayer of rossini's. his symphonies are like great conflagrations of some grand piles of architecture, in which the material substance seems consumed, while the spirit soars in the graceful but impatient crackling shapes of the devouring element, and is swiftly lost in upper air. akt. iii. — war.* it has been a favorite study of modern philosophy, to indi cate the steps of human progress, to watch the rising of a thought in one man's mind, the communication of it to a few, to a small minority, its expansion and general reception, until it publishes itself to the world by destroying the existing laws and institutions, and the generation of new. looked at in this general and historical way, maiiy things wear a very different face from that they show near by, and one at \ a time, — and, particularly, war. war, which, to sane men at the present day, begins to look like an epidemic insanity, breaking out here and there like the cholera or influenza, infecting men's brains instead of their bowels, — when seen in the remote past, in the infancy of society, appears a part of the connection of events, and, in its place, necessary. as far as history has preserved to us the slowlinfoldings of any savage tribe, it is not easy to see how war could be avoided by such wild, passionate, needy, ungoverned, strong * many persons will remember listening to the present article, delivered as a lecture in boston, in march, 1838. it has been obtaine'd for this publi cation at much solicitation, not having been looked at by the author since that time. war. 37 bodied creatures. for in the infancy of society, when a thin population and improvidence make the supply of food and of shelter insufficient and very precarious, and when hunger, thirst, ague, and frozen limbs universally take precedence of the wants of the mind and the heart, the necessities of the strong will certainly be satisfied at the cost of the weak, at whatever peril of future revenge. it is plain, too, that, in the first dawnings of the religious sentiment, that blends itself with their passions, and is oil to the fire. not only every tribe has war-gods, religious festivals in victory, but reli gious wars. the student of history acquiesces the more readily in this copious bloodshed of the early annals, bloodshed in god's name too, when he learns that it is a temporary and prepai ratory state, and does actively forward the culture of man. war educates the senses, calls into action the wiu, perfects the physical constitution, brings men into such swift and close collision in critical moments that man measures man. on its own scale, on the virtues it loves, it endures no counter feit, but shakes the whole society, until every atom falls into the place its specific gravity assigns it. it presently finds the value of good sense and of foresight, and ulysses takes rank ! next to achilles. the leaders, picked men of a courage and; vigor tried and augmented in fifty battles, are emulous to distinguish themselves above each other by new merits, as clemency, hospitality, splendor of hving. the people imitate the chiefs. the strong tribe, in which war has become an art, attack and conquer their neighbours, and teach them their arts and virtues. new territory, augmented numbers, and extended interests call out new virtues and abilities, and the: tribe makes long strides. and, finally, when much progress has been made, all its secrets of vvisdom and art are dissemi nated by its invasions. plutarch, in his essay " on the for tune of alexander," considers the invasion and conquest \of the east by alexander as one of the most bright and pleasing pages in history ; and it must be owned, he gives sound rea son for his opinion. it had the effect of uniting into one great interest the divided commonwealths of greece, and infusing a new and more enlarged public spirit into the coun 38 war. cils of their statesmen. it carried the arts and language and philosophy of the greeks into the sluggish and barbarous na tions of i'ersia, assyria, and india. it introduced the arts of. husbandry among tribes of hunters and shepherds. itl weaned the scythians and persians from some cruel ana licentious practices, to a more civil way of life. it intro-j duced the sacred ness of marriage among them. it built seventy cities, and sowed the greek customs and humane laws over asia, and united hostile nations under one code. it brought different families of the human race together, — 'to blows at first, but afterwards to truce, to trade, and to inter marriage. it would be very easy to show analogous benefits that have resulted from mihtary movements of later ages. considerations of this kind lead us to a true view of the nature and office of war. we see, it is the subject of all his tory ; that it has been the principal employment of the most conspicuous men ; that it is at this moment the delight of half the world, of almost all young and ignorant persons ; that it is exhibited to us contuiually in the dumb show of brute nature, where war between tribes, and between individuals of the same tribe, perpetually rages. the microscope reveals miniature butchery in atomies and infinitely small biters, that swim and fight in an illuminated drop of "water ; and the lit tle globe is but a too faithful miniature of the large. what does all this war, beginning from the lowest races and reaching up to man, signify ? is it not manifest that it cov ers a great and beneficent principle, which nature had deeply at heart ? what is that principle ? — it is self-help. nature implants vdth fife the instinct of self-help, perpetual struggle to be, to resist opposition, to attain to freedom, to attain to a mastery, and the security of a permanent, self-defended be ing ; and to each creature these objects are made so dear, that it risks its life continually in the struggle for these ends. but whilst this principle, necessarily, is inwrought into the fabric of every creature, yet it is but one instinct ; and though a primary one, or we may say the very first, yet the appear ance of the other instincts immediately modifies and controls this ; turns its energies into harmless, useful, and high courses, showing thereby what was its ultimate design; and, finally, war. 39 takes out its fangs. the instinct of self-help is very early un folded in the coarse and merely brute form of war, only in the childhood and imbecility of the other instincts, and re mains in that form, only until their development. it is the ignorant and childish part of mankind that is the fighting part. idle and vacant minds want excitement, as all boys j kill cats. bull-baiting, cockpits, and the boxer's ring, are the enjoyment of the part of society whose animal nature alone has been developed. in some parts of this country, where the intellectual and moral faculties have as yet scarcely any culture, the absorbing topic of all conversation is whipp ing ; who fought, and which whipped ? of man, boy, or beast, the only trait that much interests the speakers is the pugnacity. and why ? because the speaker has as yet no other image of manly activity and virtue, none of endurance, none of perseverance, none of charity, none of the attainment of truth. put him into a circle of cultivated men, where the conversation broaches the great questions that besiege the human reason, and he would be dumb and unhappy, as an indian in church. to men of a sedate and mature spirit, in whom is any know ledge or mental activity, the detail of battle becomes insup portably tedious and revolting. it is like the talk of one of those monomaniacs, whom we sometimes meet in society, who converse on horses ; and fontenelle expressed a volume of meaning, when he said, " i hate war, for it spoils conver sation." nothing is plainer than that the sympathy with war is a juvenile and temporary state. not only the moral sentiment, but trade, learning, and whatever makes intercourse, conspire to put it down. trade, as all men know, is the antagonist of war. wherever there is no property, the people wul put on the knapsack for bread ; but trade is instantly endangered and destroyed. and, moreover, trade brings men to look each other in the face, and gives the parties the knowledge that these enemies over sea or over the mountain are such men as we ; who laugh and grieve, who love and fear, as we do. and learning and art, and especially religion, weave ties that make war look like fratricide, as it is. and as all his 40 war. i itory is the picture of war, as we have said, so it is no less /true that it is the record of the mitigation and dechne of war. early in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the italian cities had grown so populous and strong, that they forced the rural ', nobility to dismantle their castles, which were dens of cruelty, (and come and reside in the towns. the popes, to their eternal honor, declared religious jubilees, during which all hostihties were suspended throughout christendom, and man had a breathing space. the increase of civihty has abolished the use of poison and of torture, once supposed as necessary as navies now. and, finally, the art of war — what with gunpowder and tactics — has made, as au men know, battles less frequent and less murderous. by au these means, war has been steadily on the decline ; and we read with astonishment of the beastly fighting of the old times. only in elizabeth's time, out of the european waters, piracy was all but universal. the proverb was, — " no peace beyond the fine ; " and the seamen shipped on the i buccaneer's bargain, " no prey, no pay." in 1588, the \ celebrated cavendish, who was thought in his times a^good i christian jnan, wrote thus to lord hunsdon, on his return 'from a voyage round the world: — "sept. 1588. it hath pleased aknighty god to suffer me to circumpass the whole globe of the world, entering in at the strait of magellan, and returning by the cape of buena esperanga ; in which voyage, i have either discovered or brought certain intelligence of au the rich places of the world, which were ever discovered by any christian. i navigated along the coast of chili, peru, and new spain, where i made great spoils. i burnt anrl sunk nineteen sail of ships, small and great. all the villages and toivns that ever i landed at, i burned and spoiled. and had i not been discovered upon the coast, i had taken great quantity of treasure. the matter of most profit to me was a great ship of the king's, which i took at cahfornia," (fee. and the good cavendish piously begins this statement, — " it hath pleased almighty god." indeed, our american annals have preserved the vestiges of barbarous warfare down to more recent times. i read in williams's history of maine, that " assacombuit, the war. 41 sagamore of the anagunticook tribe, was remarkable for his turpitude and ferocity above all other known indians ; that, in 1705, vaudreuil sent him to france, where he was introduced to the king. when he appeared at court, he lifted up his hand, and said, ' this hand has slain a hundred and fifty of your majesty's enemies within the territories of new england.' this so pleased the king, that he knighted him, and ordered a pension of eight livres a day to be paid him during life." this valuable person, on his return to america, took to killing his own neighbors and kindred with such appetite, that his tribe combined against him, and would have killed him, had he not fled his country for ever. the scandal which we feel in such facts certainly shows, that we have got on a little. all history is the decline of war, though the slow decline. all that society has yet gained is_mitigatiqii : the dpctrine of the right of war still remains. for ages (for ideas work in ages, and animate vast socie ties of men) the human race has gone on under the tyranny — shall i so cau it ? — of this first brutish form of their effort to be men ; that is, for ages they have shared so much of the nature of the lower animals, the tiger and the shark, and the savages of the water-drop. they have nearly exhausted all the good and all the evil of this form : they have held as fast to this degradation, as their worst enemy could desire ; but all things have an end, and so has this. the eternal germination of the better has unfolded new powers, new instincts, which were really concealed under this rough and bcise rind. the sublime question has startled one and another happy soul in different quarters of the globe. can not love be, as well as hate ? would not love answer the same end, or even a better ? cannot peace be, as well as war 7 this thought is no man's invention, neither st. pierre's nor rousseau's, but the rising of the general tide in the hu man soul, — and rising highest, and first made visible, in the most simple and pure souls, who have therefore announced it to us beforehand ; but presently we all see it. it has now become so distinct as to be a social thought : societies can be formed on it. it is expounded, illustrated, defined, with dif 6 42 war. ferent degrees of clearness ; and its actualization, or the mea sures it should inspire, predicted according to the light of each seer. the idea itsek is the epoch ; the fact that it has become so distinct to any small number of persons as to become a subject of prayer and hope, of concert and discussion, — that is the commanding fact. this having come, much more will follow. revolutions go not backward. the star once risen, though only one man in the hemisphere has yet seen its upper limb in the horizon, will mount and mount, until it becomes visible to other men, to multitudes, and cumbs the zenith of all eyes. and so, it is not a great matter how long men refuse to believe the advent of peace : w ar is on its. last legs ; and a univer sal peace is as s ure as is the prevalence otcivihzation over barbarjsn^^. tiber a l gover nments, over fejjdarformst — tbrcjuestion for^us is only. how soon ? that the project of peace shouwappear visionary to great numbers of sensible men ; should appear laughable, even, to numbers ; should appear to the grave and good-natured to be embarrassed with extreme practical difficulties, — is very na tural. " this is a poor, tedious society of yours," they say : "we do not see what good can come of it. peace ! why, we are all at peace now. but if a foreign nation should wantonly insult or plunder our commerce, or, worse yet, should land on our shores to rob and kill, you would not have us sit, and be robbed and killed ? you mistake the times ; you over estimate the virtue of men. you forget, that the quiet which now sleeps in cities and in farms, which lets the avagon go unguarded and the farm-house unbolted, rests on the perfect understanding of all men ; that the musket, the halter, and the jail stand behind there, perfectly ready to punish any disturber of it. all admit, that this would be the best policy, if the world were all a church, if all men were the best men, if all would agree to accept this rule. but it is absurd for one nation to attempt it alone." in the first place, we answer, that we make never much account of objections which merely respect the actual state i of the world at this moment, but which admit the general expediency and permanent excellence of the project. what war. 43 is the best must be the true; and what is true^ — that is,| what is at bottom fit and agreeable to the constitution of' man — must at last prevail over au obstruction and au oppo' sition. there is no good now enjoyed by society, that was not once as problematical and visionary as this. it is the tendency of the true interest of man to become his desire and steadfast aim. but, farther, it is a lesson, which all history teaches wise men, to put trust in ideas, and not in circumstances. we i have edl grown up in the sight of frigates and navy yards, of i armed forts and islands, of arsenals and militia. the refer ence to any foreign register will inform us of the number of thousand or million men that are now under arms in the vast colonial system of the british empire, of russia, austria, and france ; and one is scared to find at what a cost the peace of the globe is kept. this vast apparatus of artillery, of fleets, of stone bastions and trenches and embankments ; this incessant patrolling of sentinels ; this waving of national flags ; this reveulee and evening gun ; this martial music, and endless playing of marches, and singing of military and naval songs, seem to us to constitute an imposing actual, which win not yield, in centuries, to the feeble, deprecatory voices of a handful of friends of peace. thus always we are daunted by the appearances; not / seeing that their whole value lies at bottom in the state of / mind. it is rea lly n. thnnght that bnilt this portentous w ar1 establis hment, anda -t hought shall^ isoinelt it away. every nation and every man instantly surrounstebmsfelves with a material apparatus which exactly corresponds to their moral state, or their state of thought. observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of some man's mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers. observe the ideas of the present day, — ortho doxy, skepticism, missions, popular education, temperance, anti-masoruy, anti-slavery ; see how each of these abstrac tions has embodied itself in an imposing apparatus in the community ; and how timber, brick, lime, and stone have flown into convenient shape, obedient to the master-idea reigning in the minds of many persons. 44 war. you shall hear, some day, of a wild fancy, which some man has in his brain, of the mischief of secret oaths. come again, one or two years afterwards, and you shall see it has built great houses of soud wood and brick and mortar. you shall see an hundred presses printing a million sheets ; you shall see men and horses and wheels made to avalk, run, and roll for it : this great body of matter thus executing that one man's wild thought. this happens daily, yearly about us, with half thoughts, often with flimsy hes, pieces of policy and speculation. with good nursing, they will last three or four years, before they will come to nothing. but when a truth appears, — as, for instance, a perception in the wit of one columbus, that there is land in the western sea ; though he alone of all men has that thought, and they all jeer, — it wiil build ships ; it will build fleets ; it will carry over half spain and half england ; it will plant a colony, a state, nations, and half a globe full of men. we surround ourselves always, according to our freedom and ability, with true images of ourselves in things, whether it be ships or books, or cannons or churches. the standing army, the arsenal, the camp, and the gibbet do not appertam to man. they only serve as an index to show where man is now ; what a bad, ungoverned temper he has ; what an ugly neighbor he is ; how his affections halt ; how low his hope lies. he who loves the bristle of bayonets, only sees in their gutter what beforehand he feels in his heart. it is avarice and hatred ; it is that quivering lip, that cold, hating eye, which builded magazines and powder-houses. it follows, of course, that the least change in the man will /change his circumstances ; the least enlargement of his ideas, /the least mitigation of his feelings, in respect to other men ; if, for example,' he could be inspired with a tender kindness 'i to the souls of men, and should come to feel that every man was another self, with whom he might come to join, as left hand works with right. every degree of the ascendancy of "this feeling would cause the most striking changes of external things : the tents would be struck ; the men-of-war would ' rot ashore ; the arms rust ; the cannon would become street posts ; the pikes, a fisher's harpoon ; the marching regiment war. 45 would be a caravan of emigrants, peficeful pioneers at the fountains of the wabash and the missouri. and so it must and ■will be : bayonet and sword must first retreat a little from their present ostentatious prominence ; then quite hide themselves, as the sheriff's halter does now, inviting the attendance only of relations and friends ; and then, lastly, wie be transferred to the museums of the curious, as poison ing and torturing tools are at this day. war and peace thus resolve themselves into a mercury of the state of cultivation. at a certain stage of his progress,\ the man fights, if he be of a sound body and mind. at a' certain higher stage, he makes no offensive demonstration, \ but is alert to repel injury, and of an unconquerable heart, j at a still higher stage, he comes into the region of holiness ; ' passion has passed away from him ; his warlike nature is all i converted into an active medicinal principle ; he sacrifices himself, and accepts with alacrity wearisome tasks of denial and charity ; but, beiaig attacked, he bears it, and turns the other cheek, as one engaged, throughout his being, no longer to the service of an individual, but to the common soul of ail men. since the peace question has been before the public mind, those who affirm its right and expediency have naturally been met with objections more or less weighty. there are cases frequently put by the curious, — moral problems, like those problems in arithmetic, which in long winter evenings the rustics try the hardness of their heads in ciphering out. and chiefly it is said, — either accept this principle for better, for worse, carry it out to the end, and meet its absurd conse quences ; or else, if you pretend to set an arbitrary limit, a " thus far, no farther," then give up the principle, and take that limit which the common sense of all mankind has set, and which distinguishes offensive war as criminal, defensive war as just. otherwise, if you go for no war, then be consistent, and give up self-defence in the highway, in your own house. will you push it thus far ? will you stick to your principle of non-resistance, when your strong-box is broken open, when your wife and babes are insulted and slaughtered in your sight ? if you say yes, you only invite the robber and 46 war. assassin ; and a few bloody-minded desperadoes would soon butcher the good. in reply to this charge of absurdity on the extreme peace doctrine, as shown in the supposed consequences, i wish to say, that such deductions consider only one half of the fact. they look only at the passive side of the friend of peace, only at his passivity ; they quite omit to consider his activity. but no man, it may be presumed, ever embraced the cause of peace and philanthropy, for the sole end and satisfaction of being plundered and slain. a man does not come the length of the spu-it of martyrdom, without some active pur pose, some equal motive, some flaming love. if you have a nation of men who have risen to that height of moral cultiva tion that they will not declare war or carry arms, for they have not so much madness left in their brains, you have a nation of lovers, of benefactors, of true, great, and able men. let me know more of that nation; i shall not find them defenceless, with idle hands springing at their sides. i shall find them men of love, honor, and truth ; men of an immense industry ; men whose influence is felt to the end of the earth ; men whose very look and voice carry the sentence of honor and shame ; and all forces yield to their energy and persua sion. whenever we see the doctrine of peace embraced by a nation, we may be assured it will not be one that invites injury ; but one, on the contrary, which has a friend in the bottom of the heart of every man, even of the violent and the base ; one against which no weapon can prosper ; one which is looked upon as the asylum of the human race, and has the tears and the blessings of mankind. in the second place, as far as it respects individual action in difficult and extreme cases, i will say, such cases seldom or never occur to the good and just man ; nor are we care ful to say, or even to know, what in such crises is to be done. a wise man will never impawn his future being and action, and decide beforehand what he shall do in a given extreme event. nature and god will uistruct him in that hour. the question naturally arises. how is this new aspkation of the human mind to be made visible and real? how is it to pass out of thoughts into things ? war. 47 not, certainly, in the first place, in the vmy of routine and mere forms, — the universal specific of modern politics ; not by organizing a society, and going through a course of reso lutions and public manifestoes, and being thus formally accre dited to the public, and to the civility of the newspapers. we have played this game to tediousness. in some of our cities, they choose noted duellists as presidents and officers of anti duelling societies. men who love that bloated vanity called public opinion, think all is well if they have once got their bantling through a sufficient course of speeches and cheer ings, of one, two, or three p'ubhc meetings, as if they could do any thing : they vote and vote, cry hurrah on both sides, no man responsible, no man caring a pin. the next season, an indian war, or an aggression on our commerce by malays ; or tlie party this man votes with, have an appropriation to carry through congress: instantly he wags his head the other way, and cries. havoc and war ! this is not to be carried by public opinion, but by private opinion, by private conviction, by private, dear, and earnest love. for the only hope of this cause is in the increased insight, and it is to be accomplished by the spontaneous teaching, of the cultivated soul, in its secret experience and meditation, — that it is now time that it should pass out of the state ^)f_b.ea,st into the state of man ; it is to hear the voice of ■god, which bids the devils, that have rended and torn him, come out of him, and let him now be clothed and walk forth in his right mind. nor, in the next place, is the peace principle to be carried into effect by fear. it can never be defended, it can never ^ be executed, by cowards. every thing great must be done in the spirit of greatness. the manhood that has been in war must be transferred to the cause of peace, before war can lose its charm, and peace be venerable to men. the attractiveness of war shows one thing through all the throats of artillery, the thunders of so many sieges, the sack of towns, the jousts of chivalry, the shock of hosts, — this namely, the conviction of man universally, that a man should be himself responsible, with goods, health, and life, for his behaviour ; that he should not ask of the state, protection ; 48 war. should ask nothing of the state ; should be himself a king dom and a state ; fearing no man ; quite willing to use the opportunities and advantages that good government throw in his way, but nothing daunted, and not really the poorer if government, law, and order went by the board ; because in himself reside infinite resources ; because he is sure of him self, and never needs to ask another what in any crisis it behoves him to do. what makes to us the attractiveness of the greek heroes ? of the roman ? what makes the attractiveness of that ro mantic style of living, which is the material of ten thousand plays and romances, from shakspeare to scott ;> the feudal baron, the french, the enghsh nobility, the warwicks, planta genets? it is thenabsolute self-dependence. i do not wonder at the dislike some of the friends of peace have expressed at shakspeare. the veriest churl and jacobin cannot resist the influence of the style and manners of these haughty lords. ,'we are affected, as boys and barbarians are, by the appear ; ance of a few rich and wilful gentlemen, who take their honor into their own keeping, defy the world, so confident are they of their courage and strength, and whose appearance is the arrival of so much hfe and virtue. in dangerous times, they are presently tried, and therefore their name is a flourish of trumpets. they, at least, affect us as a reality. they are not shams, but the substance of which that age and world is made. they are true heroes for their time. they make what is in their minds the greatest sacrifice. they will, for an injurious word, peril all their state and wealth, and go to the field. take away that principle of responsibleness, and they become pirates and ruffians. this self-subsistency is the charm of war ; for this self subsistency is essential to our idea of man. but another age / comes, a truer rehgion and ethics open, and a man puts himself under the dominion of principles. i see him to be the servant of truth, of love, and of freedom, and immoveable in ^envaves of the crowd. the man of principle, that is, the man who, without any flourish of trumpets, titles of lord ship, or train of guards, without any notice of his action abroad, expecting none, takes in solitude the right step uni war. 49 formly, oii his private choice, and disdaining consequences, — does not yield, in my imagination, to any man. he is avill ing to be hanged at his own gate, rather than consent to any compromise of his freedom, or the suppression of his con viction. i regard no longer those names that so tingled in my ear. this is a baron of a better nobility and a stouter stomach. the cause of peace is not .th© cause -of-eowardiee. if peace is sought to be defended or preserved for the safety of the luxurious and the timid, it is a sham, and the peace will be base. war is better, and the peace will be broken. if peace is to be maintained, it must be by brave men, who have come up to the same height as the hero, namely, the will to carry their life in their hand, and slake it at any instant for their principle, but who have gone one step beyond the hero, and will not seek another man's life ; — men who have, by their intellectual insight, or else by their moral elevation, attained such a perception of their own intrinsic worth, that they do not think property or their own body a sufficient good to be saved by such dereliction of principle as treating a man like a sheep. if the universal cry for reform of so many inveterate abuses, with which society rings, — if the desire of a large class of young men for a faith and hope, intellectual and religious, such as they have not yet found, be an omen to be trusted ; if the disposition to rely more in study, and in action on the unexplored riches of the human constitution, — if the search of the sublime laws of morals and the sources of hope and trust in man, and not in books, — in the present, and not in the past, — proceed ; if the rising generation can be pro voked to think it unworthy to nestle into every abomination of the past, and shall feel the generous darings of austerity and virtue ; then war has a short day, and human blood wiu cease to flow. it is of little consequence in what manner, through what organs, this purpose of mercy and holiness is effected. the proposition of the congress of nations is undoubtedly that at which the present fabric of our society and the present course of events do point. but the mind, once prepared for 7 50 organization. the reign of principles, will easily find modes of expressing its will. there is the highest fitness in the place and time in which this enterprise is begun. not in an obscure corner, not in a feudal europe, not in an antiquated appanage where no onward step can be taken without rebellion, is this seed of benevolence laid in the furrow, with tears of hope ; but in this broad america of god and man, where the forest is only now falhng, or yet to fall, and the green earth opened to the inundation of emigrant men from all quarters of oppression and guilt ; here, where not a family, not a few men, but mankind, shall say what shall be ; here, we ask. shall it be war, or shall it be peace ? aet. iv. — organization. society cannot remain stationary. it must either go forward or backward. it is a hving organism, composed of living active members, who are always doing something, both in their individual and collective capacities. every act done, either by individuals or by the social body, has some influence on the existing state of society ; advances or obstructs the general movement ; makes a portion of mankind better or worse ; brings them nearer to, or removes them farther from, their true destinies, as determined by the eternal laws of god. there is no middle ground here. if men are not advancing, they are retrograding ; if society is not improving, we are certain that it does not stand still. but the great question is, how it advances ? what are the laws and characteristics of its progress ? when a change is made in the state of any thing, how do we know that such a change has been for the better ? by what signs do we distinguish an onward from a retrograde movement ? great changes are constantly taking place in the forms of matter, in the lives of men, in the constitution of states, in the whole structure and working of society. the elements, the pas sions, discoveries in literature, in art, all produce stupendous revolutions in human affairs. how do we know, that these organization. 51 various changes are for better or for worse, or that they carry us towards perfection or imperfection ? there is a characteristic, there is a positive internal sign, by which we may detect whether a change in any object has raised it to a higher place of existence, or depressed it to a lower. the mark is this : its approach to a more or less compact organization. the simple principle of organization, i. e. the adjustment of a variety of parts to a unity of end or result, is the test and measure of perfection in any sphere of existence. by this is meant, that a thing or movement is greater or less, better or worse, an advance or a retrogradation, just in the degree in which the organization of its parts is more or less perfect. if it has no organization, it exists on an exceed ingly low plane of creation, in fact, on the very lowest plane ; but the more complete, intricate, and perfect its organization, the more eminent, excellent, and good it is. the perfection of an organism depends upon two things: first, that there shau be a great variety of parts ; and, sec ondly, that these parts shall act harmoniously towards one end. where there are few parts, or where those parts, if many, do not co-operate to the same ends, the organization is incomplete, just in the degree in which the conditions are violated. thus the vegetable kingdom is said to be higher in the order of nature than the mineral, and the animal than the vegetable. but why higher ? why, in the scale of creation, or the classifications of science, is the tree placed in a more elevated rank than the stone, the mon than the tree, or man higher than au ? simply, because the organization in these cases respectively is more and more complete. the mineral kingdom is a mere aggregation or conglomeration of particles held together by the simplest power of attraction ; as any one may discover, who takes a friable stone in his hand, or knock-s a gem into pieces with a hammer. again, the vegetable kingdom, though composed essentially of the same matter as the earthy, exhibits a more compact structure and more per fect forms. its members cannot be fried in the hands, nor broken by a hammer. the relation of part to part is more 52 onranization. o' intricate and compact, and the attractive power by which they are united exhibits a greater and more subtle cohesion. then, the animal kingdom, still composed of the same essen tial matter, shows a still more compact structure, still more perfect forms ; and its parts are bound by higher powers of attraction, which even resist the attractions of the lower spheres, till man, finally, the summit of all the kingdoms, though made up of the same materials, walks abroad the most complex and concentrated of all structures, the most harmonious and beautiful of au forms. the progress of na ture, therefore, from one kingdom to another, from a lower rank in creation to a higher, consists in a gradual passage from a loose and irregular organization to one more compli cated and concentric. again, if you take any of the natural kingdoms separately, to consider the relative rank of its different members, we shall find the distinction of degree marked by the same principle. in the mineral region, for instance, the grain of sand may be regarded as one of its lowest forms, and the crystal one of the highest ; because the former exhibits no traces of organiza tion ; while the latter splits into regular mathematical figures, thereby showing a tendency, or mute prophecy, of an organic arrangement of parts. so, in the vegetable kingdom, mosses and lichens, which are found growing loosely upon the rocks, are among the simplest, and therefore lowest, elements of it ; while among the highest is the firm-knit and lordly oak, whose organization has given it a grace of outline which painters envy, and a strength of structure that defies the blasts of a hundred years. or take, finally, the animal kingdom, with its first rude speci mens of animals, almost formless, ahnost without parts and without powers — as the oyster; and ascend gradually through worms, reptiles, fishes, birds, quadrupeds, up to man, — do we not find one invariable character of progress all along the ascent, in the increasing compactness, delicacy, and finish of the organization ? but further : even in the growth of the individual members of any one of these kingdoms, this fact is strikingly exempli fied. the bird, for example, begins in the lowest phases of organization. 53 its life as a soft, pulpy, formless mass, which can be kept together only by a rude external shell, called the egg ; then a small spot or knot is formed in this, and after a while shoots out a single tendril; next another knot is formed, which shoots out another tendril ; tiu the whole egg begins at last to assume the appearance of a network of knots and tendrils. at a subsequent period in the formation, these points con dense, and fill out, when a chick is formed, having a remote resemblance to a bird, but without plumage ; too weak to move, and not very pleasing to the sight. in the end, as the organization is perfected, this chick grows into the imperial eagle, whose pinions waft him across the loftiest aueganies, and whose eye gazes undaunted into the mid-day sun. and so too man, whose outset and lowest state after birth is that of the flabby, puling, defenceless, unknowing, almost uncon scious infant, becomes in his highest state — each step being marked by a more and more complete organic development — the giant, whose single arm levels the mountains, whose far reaching intellect discovers worlds millions of miles away in the depths of space, whose imperious will uplifts and dashes together nations in tempestuous conflicts. what marks the difference externally between the poor idiot, who cries " pall lal" upon the highways, and the myriad-minded shakspeare, who talks, in his immortal utterances, to the universal heart of all ages ? the degree of difference in their respective physical and spiritual organizations. the greatest of men is known, in that he is the most highly organized of men. the progress of each of us towards a nobler standard of humanity is marked by the growing perfection of our organ isms. when we raise ourselves to higher intellectual power, we feel that our intellectual forces have been trained, disci plined, adjusted, or, in a word, organized. when we reach loftier moral eminences, we feel that we have received fresh accessions of strength, chiefly through the better organization of our spiritual powers. but here we arrive at another step in our argument. we have seen that one invariable characteristic attends all the developments of the natural world, in their transitions from a lower to a higher place ; and the next question is, whelher 54 organization. the same characteristic does not accompany the advances of society ? history shows us conclusively, that nations and bodies of men are in a process of constant change ; and it is universally conceded, also, that in many respects this change has been for the better. the passage from barbarism to civi lization is called a social advancement. one nation is often said to be ahead of other nations in its attainments. there is great talk, too, everywhere, of the progress of the human species ; of the improvement of society ; of the gradual ad vancement of man to a more elevated existence. what does such language mean ? what are the marks and sign of this progress ? we answer, the same as have been shown to exist in the natural world, — i the successive steps of nations or societies to a more and more perfect organization. the first or simplest state of society, known to our annals, is the savage state, where the members of it subsist in almost complete isolation and independence. indeed, the bonds of union between them are so rude, that they can hardly be said to possess society at all. they are rather an aggrega tion, hke the particles of a mineral, than a society, like the elements of a plant. such plans of general government as they have are exceedingly imperfect; and, except occasion ally in cases of war and public festivals, they engage in no concerted or unitary actions. the individual is every thing ; society, nothing. he pitches his tent where he pleases; cares for nobody, and has nobody to care for him ; is without fixed property ; and, save a sort of wild friendsmp which he indulges for his wife or the members of his tribe, is ahnost without affections. of course, it is in vain to look for any social organization among these solitary roamers of the wil derness. it is only in the next state of society above this, which is called the patriarchal, — that traces of organization begin to be clearly seen. men unite in certain family com pacts for mutual defence and assistance. the will of the patriarch is constituted a species of common law ; the ties of consanguinity give rise to more or less compact settlements ; the members of the tribes acknowledge a controlling head, and submit to regular processes of government. the wild and roaming independence of the savage is surrendered for more organization. 55 compact and regular social relations. then the barbaric nation arises, where the patriarch of one united family grows into the king or monarch of many united families. the savage horde., before merged into the patriarchal clan, is further consolidated into the barbaric nmian. the rude and arbitrary regulations of the previous state are converted into settled laws and a constitutional polity. the adjustment of the power of the government, and the relations of different classes of the people to each other, become more compact, and at the same time more complex. men are brought into more intimate connections, get more and more mutually dependent, have broader interests in coirimon, and act more frequently in coiicert. in a word, they are more highly organized. but, after a time, the people rise into greater power as an element of government, which assumes a more definite ajid responsible shape ; industry and wealth, which serve to bind distant nations, are prodigiously developed; men unite more closely, not merely for purposes of war, but to cultivate the innumerable arts of peace ; laws are digested into complete systems ; the industrial and social relations and interests of various classes are consohdated ; all the arrange ments of society grow more intimate and complex. the universal life of man has more aims in common ; au the members of the state feel more closely bound to each other, and act more often and more in concert for comprehensive ends. this state of society is the one in which we live, and is denominated civuization. it is the last term to which sooiety has yet attained. now, who will deny that there is a vast interval between the rude social condition of the savage in his hut, to that of the merchant-prince of england or the united states ? who will deny, that the passage from one to the other denotes a great progress ? yet we have seen, that each step is marked and demonstrated by nearer approaches to a high organization. the change has been a change in organic development. civilization is better than barbarism, barbarism than patriarchalism, patriarchahsm better than savageness, — simply because fhey are respectively better organized. the degree of organization marks the degree of excellence. this 56 organization. »' is the universal fact in all the gradations of nature, and in all the advances of humanity. it is the fortune of the people of the united states, that they see nations springing up almost every day. our ex tensive western frontier is a cradle of infant commonwealths. the whole process of social growth is there laid open to us, as natural growth was in the patent hatchmg machine, or eecolobean, exhibited a few years since. we see the first germ deposited in the form perhaps of a single family ; we see this famuy spread out into numerous branches, or other families moving in to unite with it, till the desert and the sohtary place blossoms into a flourishing and many-columned city. now, what are the successive steps of this progress from the wild wilderness to the thriving mart, from the distant and lonely log-cabin of the prairie to the thronged and temple covered metropolis ? what are the indications of the gradual advance of the settlement from almost savage isolation and insecurity to the peace, wealth, comfort, and refinement of civilized union ? the answer is plain : first, gradual increase in the number of the families or persons ; and, second, a corresponding multiphcation and interweaving of their various relations ; or, in other words, their nearer and nearer approach to complete organization. the original squatter, we know, lives for a while alone, cultivating a narrow patch of ground for food, and shooting his habiliments for the most part from the trees. he is poor, dependent, and half-wild ; his own farmer, miller, merchant, mechanic, and governor. he builds his own house, raises his own wheat, makes his own tools, keeps his own store, argues his own causes, teaches his own school. he is with out society, — the merest fraction of man. the first possibihty of improvement which comes to him is when he is joined by a few other persons, who relieve him at once of a portion of the laborious tasks and anxieties he was before compelled to undertake, and whose very pres ence acts upon him as stimulus to a more wholesome activity. he is no longer his own blacksmith, carpenter, tailor, or tradesman. the functions of these, he finds, are better dis organization. 57 charged by some of his neighbors, who are avilling to exchange the results of their labors for the products of his, whereby he gets more for a less exertion. but both parties soon discover, that there are a great many objects which can be attained only by working in common. accordingly, they lend a hand to each other in felling forests, erecting houses, and cutting roads. as the population multiplies, the occasions for their mutual assistance increase. they combine their judgments and energies for a greater variety and a more extensive range of purposes. they discuss plans of general usefulness ; they lay out streets for their little town ; they put up a church and a school-house ; they club their funds for the purchase of a library ; they organize societies for mutual improvement ; they institute tribunals to decide disputes ; or, in manifold other modes, they contribute to the general defence and security. if, now, we suppose a similar town to have grown up not far off, we shall see the two establishing an intercourse be tween themselves, and combining to construct roads, endow colleges, and accomplish other undertakings convenient to the public good : their internal ties, as they spread, exhibit the same tendency to union which marked their previous inter nal arrangements. other towns, again, spring up, which still further multiply and complicate their respective relations. from time to time, the union is rendered more definite and complete, a regular code of laws determines the relations of the respective communities and of their members respectively, and a constitutional government is finally instituted. thus the single family of the squatter has grown first into a settle ment, then into a village, then a township, then a county, next a state, and at last a federated republic. at each step, the relations of the people have extended, multipued, and complicated. their union has been strengthened ; they have been brought nearer together ; they have had more interests and more labors in common ; isolation has given place to concentration ; rude independence to regulated dependence ; the centrifugal tendency of individuals restrained by the centripetal tendencies of society; and transient expedients and loose arrangements, one by one, have been supplanted 8 68 genius. by a solid and permanent organic unity. "wealth, comfort, refinement, and substantial happiness have, of course, kept pace with the organic movement. the question at this day is, whether men have even here reached the yami of social progress ; whether the principle of social organization is susceptible of any higher apphcations than it has hitherto received ; whether out civilization is the last stage of social improvement ; whether the fact of progress is destined to any higher triumphs in the future, similar to those which have illustrated the past. is it extravagant to anticipate a time when the tendency to union shall have been perfected ; when the whole organization of sobiety shall have been rendered more compact and harmonious ? will god suddenly suspend the great law of providential devel opment ? organization is not hfe, but it is the sign of life ; and the degree and perfection of organization is the test of life.* akt. v. — genius. the world was always busy ; the human heart has always had love of some kind ; there has always been fire on the earth. there is something in the irraiost principles of an in dividual, when he begins to exist, which urges him onward ; there is something in the centre of the character of a nation, to which the people aspire ; there is something which gives activity to the mind in all ages, countries, and worlds. this principle of activity is love : it may be the love of good or of evil ; it may manifest itself in saving life or in killing ; but it is love. the difference in the strength and direction of the affections creates the distinctions in society. every man has a form of mind pecuhar to himself. the mind of the infant contains within itself the first rudiments of all that will be hereafter, * the above article is an extract from an unpublislied course of lectures, ■which, may yet see the light as a whole. genius. 59 and needs nothing but expansion ; as the leaves and branches and fruit of a tree axe said to exist in the seed from which it springs. he is bent in a particular direction ; and, as some objects are of more value than others, distinctions must exist. what it is that makes a man great depends upon the state of society : with the savage, it is physical strength ; with the civilized, the arts and sciences ; in heaven, the perception that love and wisdom are from the divine. there prevails an idea in the world, that its great men are more like god than others. this sentiment carries in its bosom sufficient evil to bar the gates of heaven. so far as a person possesses it, either with respect to himself or others, he has no connection with his maker, no love for his neigh bor, no truth in his understanding. this was at the root of heathen idolatry : it was this that made men worship saints and images. it contains within itself the seeds of atheism, and will ultimately make every man insane by whom it is cherished. the life which circulates in the body is found to commence in the head ; but, imless it be traced through the soul up to god, it is merely corporeal, like that of the brutes. man has often ascribed to his own power the effects of the secret operations of divine truth. when the world is im mersed in darkness, this is a judgment of the most high ; but the hght is the effect of the innate strength of the human intelleet. when the powers of man begin to decay, and approach an apparent dissolution, who cannot see the divinity ? but what foreign aid wants the man who is fuu of his ovni strength ? god sends the lightning that blasts the tree ; but what credulity would ascribe to him the sap that feeds its branches ? the sight of idiotism leads to a train of rehgious reflections ; but the face that is marked with lines of intelli gence is admired for its own inherent beauty. the hand of the almighty is visible to all in the stroke of death ; but few see his face in the smiles of the new-born babe. the intellectual eye of man is formed to see the light, not to make it ; and it is time that, when the causes that cloud the spiritual world are removed, man should rejoice in the 60 genius. truth itself, and not that he has found it. more than once, when nothhig was required but for a person to stand on this world with his eyes open, has the truth been seized upon as a thing of his own making. when the power of divine truth begins to dispel the darkness, the objects that are first disclosed to our view — whether men of strong understand ing, or of exquisite taste, or of deep learning — are called geniuses. luther, shakspeare, milton, newton, stand with the bright side towards us. there is something which is called genius, that carries in itself the seeds of its own destruction. there is an ambi tion which hurries a man after truth, and takes away the power of attaining it. there is a desure which is null, a lust which is impotence. there is no understanding so power ful, that ambition may not in time bereave it of its last truth, even that two and two are four. know, then, that genius is divine, not when the man thinks that he is god, but when he acknowledges that his powers are from god. here is the link of the finite with the infinite, of the divine with the hu man : this is the humility which exalts. the arts have been taken from nature by human inven tion ; and, as the mind returns to its god, they are in a measure swallowed up in the source from which they came. we see,, as they vanish, the standard to which we should refer them. they are not arbitrary, having no founda tion except in taste : they are only modified by taste, which varies according to the state of the human mind. had we a history of music, from the war-song of the savage to the song of angels, it would be a history of the affections that have held dominion over the human heart. had we a his tory of architecture, from the first building erected by man to the house not made with hands, we might trace the varia tions of the beautiful and the grand, alloyed by human con trivance, to where they are lost in beauty and grandeur. had we a history of poetry, from the first rude effusions to where words make one with things, and language is lost in nature, we should see the state of man in the language of licentious passion, in the songs of chivalry, in the descriptions of heroic valor, in the mysterious wildness of ossian ; till the genius. 61 beauties of nature fall on the heart, as softly as the clouds on the summer's water. the mind, as it wanders from heaven, moulds the arts into its own form, and covers its nakedness. feelings of all kinds will discover themselves in music, in painting, in poetry ; but it is only when the heart is purified from every selfish and worldly passion, that they are created in real beauty ; for in their origin they are divine. science is more fixed. it consists of the laws according to which natural things exist ; and these must be either true or false. it is the natural world in the abstract, not in the concrete. but the laws according to which things exist, are from the things themselves, not the opposite. matter has solidity : sohdity makes no part of matter. if, then, the natural world is from god, the abstract properties, as dis sected and combined, are from him also. if, then, science be from him who gave the ten commandments, must not a life according to the latter facilitate the acquirement of the former ? can he love the works of god who does not love his commandments ? it is only necessary that the heart be purified, to have science like poetry its spontaneous growth. self-love has given rise to many false theories, because a selfish man is disposed to make things differently from what god has made them. because god is love, nature exists ; because god is love, the bible is poetry. if, then, the love of god creates the scenery of nature, must not he whose mind is most open to this love be most sensible of natural beauties ? but in nature both the sciences and the arts exist embodied. science may be learned from ambition ; but it must be by the sweat of the brow. the filthy and polluted mind may carve beauties from nature, with which it has no allegiance : the rose is blasted in the gathering. the olive and the vine had rather live with god, than crown the head of him whose love for them is a lust for glory. the man is cursed who would rob nature of her graces, that he may use them to allure the innocent virgin to destruction. men say there is an inspiration in genius. the genius of the ancients was the good or evil spirit that attended the man. the moderns speak of the magic touch of the pencil, 62 genius. and of the inspiration of poetry. but this inspiration has been esteemed so unlike reugion, that the existence of the one ahnost supposes the absence of the other. the spu-it of god is thought to be a very different thing when poetry is written, from what it is when the heart is sanctified. what has the inspiration of genius in common with that of the cloister ? the one courts the zephyrs ; the other flies them. the one is cheerful ; the other, sad. the one dies ; the other writes the epitaph. would the muses take the veil ? would they exchange parnassus for a nunnery ? yet there has been learning, and even poetry, under ground. the yew loves the graveyard ; but other trees have grown there. it needs no uncommon eye to see, that the finger of death has rested on the church. religion and death have in the human mind been connected with the same train of associa tions. the churchyard is the graveyard. the bell which calls men to worship is to toll at their funerals, and the gar ments of the priests are of the color of the hearse and the coffin. whether we view her in the strange melancholy that sits on her face, in her mad reasonings about truth, or in the occasional convulsions that agitate her hmbs, there are symptoms, not of ufe, -but of disease and death. it is not strange, then, that genius, such as could exist on the earth, should take its flight to the mountains. it may be said, that great men are good men. but what i mean is, that, in the human mind, greatness is one thing, and goodness another ; that philosophy is divorced from religion ; that truth is sepa rated from its source ; that that which is called goodness is sad, and that which is called genius is proud. since things are so, let men take care that the life which is received be genuine. let the glow on the cheek spring from the warmth of the heart, and the brightness of the eyes beam from the fight of heaven. let ambition and the love of the world be plucked up by their roots. how can he love his neighbor, who deskes to be above him ? he may love him for a slave ; but that is all. let not the shrouds of death be removed, tiu the living principle has entered. it was not tiu lazarus was raised from the dead, and had received the breath of fife, that the lord said, " loose him, and let hun go." genius. 63 when the heart is purified from all selfish and worldly affections, then may genius find its seat in the church. as the human mind is cleansed of its lusts, truth wiu permit and invoke its approach, as the coyness of the virgin subsides into the tender love of the wife. the arts will spring in full-grown beauty from him who is the source of beauty. the harps which have hung on the willows will sound as sweetly as the first breath of heaven that moved the leaves in the garden of eden. cannot a man paint better when he knows that the picture ought not to be worshipped ? here is no sickly aspiring after fame, — no filthy lust after philosophy, whose very origin is an eternal barrier to the truth. but sentiments will flow from the heart warm as its blood, and speak eloquently ; for eloquence is the language of love. there is a unison of spirit and nature. the genius of the mind wiu descend, and unite with the genius of the rivers, the lakes, and the woods. thoughts fall to the earth with power, and make a language out of nature. adam and eve knew no language but their garden. they had nothing to communicate by words ; for they had not the power of concealment. the sun of the spiritual world shone bright on their hearts, and their senses were open with delight to natural objects. in the eye were the beauties of paradise ; in the ear was the music of birds ; in the nose was the fra grance of the freshness of nature ; in the taste was the fruit of the garden ; in the touch, the seal of their eternal imion. what had they to say ? the people of the golden age have left us no monuments of genius, no splendid columns, no paintings, no poetry. they possessed nothing which evil passions might not obliter ate ; and, when their " heavens were rolled together as a scroll," the curtain dropped between the world and their existence. science will be full of life, as nature is full of god. she will vyring from her locks the dew which was gathered in the wilderness. by science, i mean natural science. the science of the human mind must change with its subject. locke's mind will not always be the standard df metaphysics. had we a description of it in its present state, it would r(iake 64 the dorian measure. a very different book from " locke on the human under standing." the time is not far distant. the cock has crowed. i hear the distant lowing of the cattle which are grazing on the mountains. " watchman, what of the night ? "watch man, what of the night ? the watchman saith, the mornmg cometh." am. vi. — the dorian measure, with a modern application. at this moment when so many nations seem to be waking up to re-assert their individuality, and, more than all, when the idea is started, that the object of providence in societies is to produce unities of hfe, to which the individuals that compose them shall each contribute something, even as every limb and fibre of the physical system contributes to the whole ness of the body of a man, — it is wise to cast the eye back over the records of history, and ask whether there be any thing in the past which predicts such consummation. the assertion of the hebrew nation to an individuality which has ever been beheved to be an especial object of divine providence, and the fact that this faith, developed in the patriarchs of the nation, and guarded by the, system of rehgious rites which has rendered the name of moses immor tal, have resulted in accomplishing what it predicted, — rises immediately before every one's mind. but the case of the hebrews, as it is commonly viewed, rather obscures than illus trates the general truth ; for the very brilliancy of the illustra tion so dazzles the eyes which gaze upon it, that they do not see anywhere else in history the same truth illustrated ; and thus it is looked upon rather as an exception than as an expres sion of a general principle on which nations may act. there is, however, in antiquity another nation, whose idea was also something more than a blind instinct, but which, from the earhest tunes we hear of it, knew itself to be a moral being, and did not live by accident.' this nation was the the dorian measure. 6,5 dorians, whose antiquities and whole kfe have been faithfully set forth to modern times by karl otfried miiller, but which has not yet been considered sufficiently with reference to general edification in social science. in order to be intelligible, and because all persons have not access to miiller's books, it is necessary to begin with some historical sketches, which are derived from several sources, and which pertain to other grecian tribes, as well as to the dorians. greece, in the earliest times of which we have tradition, was a congeries of little nations, independent of each other, but which as a whole were remarkable for one thing ; viz. the pecuuar relations to each other of their religious and civil institutions. these relations were very loose. it would seem, from the tradition which appears under the form of the fabulous war of the titans and olympic gods, that at first a sacerdotal government obtained over this region, but that, through the ambition of some talented younger son, — who led that rebellion which always must be smouldering among the subjects of absolute sway, when there is still any human life left to dream of freedom, — this sacerdotal govern ment was overthrown, and a reign of talent and pohtical power began. the jupiter of the olympic dynasty was some napoleon bonaparte, who began a new regime made briluant with the spoils of a past which had been cultivated, and carried the arts of life to great perfection, but which had no elasticity to receive the new floods of ufe poured forth from the prodi gality of a creator who, in every generation of man, goes forth anew. one does not desire to be altogether pragmatical in the analysis of these old myths. doubtless, we can inter pret the relations of the titanic and olympic dynasties as an allegory of the relations of ideas to each other, without the intervention of their historic manifestation ; and it is unques tionable that ^schylus, and some other greeks, so used them. but it is nevertheless not impossible that they are, at the same time, the magnificent drapery of historic facts. au the stationary nations of antiquity, when we first know of them, are under sacerdotal governments. these govern 9 66 the dorian measure. raents have a genesis and history, that can be discerned, but which we will, just now, pass by. their deadening in huence, combined with that of an enervating climate and other circumstances, succeeded in checking the progressive life of most nations altogether. but this was not the uniform experience ; and in one location especially, circumstances combined favorably, and genius escaped the strait-jacket of custom, and asserted itself. it was genius cultivated ; and it had all the advantages of its cultivation. to its aid came the multitude. let us be pardoned if we analyze, even like euhemerus himself. briareus, the hun dred-handed giant, who comes to the assistance of jupiter, is invoked (so we learn from homer) by thetis. is it the genius of commerce that has made the people rich, and a strong helpmeet, to serve the purposes of the young autocrat, who overthrows the old system, because it is devouring all that it generates ? it is remarkable that afterwards is another war, inevitable in like circumstances, and repeated in all subsequent history, — the war of the conquering olympics, with their instruments the giants. the people has been made use of, and has thereby learned its force : now it asks for participation of power, or perhaps only for a recognized existence as a living part of the body politic. in the gre cian history, jupiter here triumphs again. he stands at that happy point between the cultivated conservative, and the fresh strong children of earth, who are his foster -brethren, that he has the advantage of both. he rules by fulness of natural life. he rules no less by cultivated genius ; for prometheus assisted him.* he has wedded custom, the oldest daughter of saturn ; and, though on occasion he hangs her up and whips her, on the whole he honors her more than all his wives ; and she is juno, queen of olympus. we would not try, even if we were able, to trace out the story into au its details, to join on the old mythology with the plain prose of annals. we only mean to show that it is indicated in grecian traditions, that, in remote antiquity, an immense revolution took place, which broke asunder some * " prometh.eus " of .ieschylus. tlie dorian measure. 67 great social unity ; and that of its fragments were the greek nations which we see in remotest historical narrations, nes tled, in their independence, now among the hills of arcady, now on the euiotas, now on the alpheus, now about the cyclopic architecture of argos, now in the olympic vales of thessaly, and again on every hill-side and by every stream of middle greece ; all being alike only in this, that all are independent of each other, all free from sacerdotal rule. but their antagonism to one another and to the sacerdotal rule is not brutal or furious. they respect each other ; they respect the old traditions. the titans are stiu served. ceres has her eleusis ; neptune, his isthrnus and ^egsean recess ; pluto, his pherse ; the furies are worshipped at athens. the peculiarity of grecian freedom is, that it respects every thing, consecrates every thing that lives. j • worships life as divine, wherever manifested. the very word tlieos, which represents something out, proves manifestation to ^ the apprehension of man, to have been inseparable, in their opinion, from the idea of god ; and their own active character and plastic genius received its impulse from this religious intuition. "as a man's god, so is he." certainly, as a nation's god, so is it. some things were gained by those titanic and giant wars, which distinguished greece, in all future time, from all other nations. the religion, henceforth, was an enacted poetry, and not a sacerdotal rule, as in asia, or a state pageant and formula, as in rome. they had diviners, soothsayers, and priests, elected for the year ; but never a priesthood, in the fuu sense of the word. in the heroic ages, and on public occasions, the kings, and, in au times, fathers of families, conducted reugijous rites. the various worships also dwelt, side by side, with mutual respect. bach tribe, each city, had its own divinities. they were mutually tolerated, mu tually reverenced. hence, the human instincts and divine ideas which each divinity represented were thrown into a common stock. hence, homer made of the gods of the several tribes a commimity acting together ; and explained the variations of man's mortal hfe, by their antagonisms and harmonies. hence, hesiod conceived the idea of a theog ony, in which we see a vain attempt to make into one 68 the dorian measure. consistent whole, what was but the imperfect reflex of the spiritual life of many nations not harmonized. this high influence of toleration came from the dorians, who were pre-eminently the genius of greece. to that large multitude, whose idea of dorians is derived from plutarch's hfe of lycurgus (a personage whom the researches of miiller make to be rather shadowy, certainly mythological) , it will be a new idea that they were not mainly a military race, nor at all of a conquering spirit, like the romans. yet their forcible occupation of peloponnesus in the age after the trojan war, and the military attitude of sparta during the period of recorded history, seem to havfe given a natural basis to such a view. the truth is, we have looked at greece too much with eyes and minds that the romans have pre-occupied. it is necessary to understand distinctly, that greece, at least dorian greece, was, in most important respects, very different from rome. both nations had organic genius, but the greeks only the artistic-oxgame. the romans organized brute force, together with the moral force of the sabines, the cunning of the commercial colonies of magna grsecia, and the formal stateliness of a sacerdotal etruria ; forming a compound whole, which expressed one element of human nature, — that which commands and obeys. on the other hand, the greeks organized the harvest of their sensibihties into ideal forms. it was not strength, merely or mainly which they sought as the highest good, but beauty, order, which might be expressed by a building, a statue, a painting, a procession, a festival, and, more fully still, by the body politic. but what is order ? it surely is not mere subjection. it means subordination according to a true, which is ever, if largely enough apprehended, a beautiful idea. it is an arrangement around a centre. it is a disposition of elements, such that the weak may borrow of the strong, and the strong be adorned. thus their aim in politics was far other than to exhibit the right of the strongest. it avas to have a society perfectly organized to express the beauty of the most beautiful. the genesis of the dorians is yet undiscovered. like the dorian measure. 69 their god apollo, they are the children of the creative wis dom and mystery. that festival of apollo, which com memorates his return from the hyperborseans, is possibly the mythic history of their origin, — too obscure, perhaps too fragmentary, to be clearly elucidated. sometimes it seems as if they must have come from the foot of the^himmelaya mountains, and that apollo and the indian heri are the same. other researches, for instance those of professor henne, would lead us to believe that they were the emigrating life of the ancient nation, which he believes, and endeavors to prove, had its seat, before history began, in europe. in favor of this, wp may remark that the hyperborsean proces sion came from the north-west, passing from the scythians through a chain of nations on the coast of the adriatic, by dodona, through thessaly, euboba, and the island of tenos, accompanied with flutes and pipes to delos.* another argument for the dorians being of european origin is, that their character is in strong antagonism to the asiatic. but we leave these curious and interesting inquiries for the present, to record what" miiller has ascertained.! the dorians, says this indefatigable antiquarian, are first known at the foot of mount olympus. the oldest known temple of apollo was in the vale of tempe. thence they spread in colonies by sea, along the eastern shores of the archipelago, among the islands, into crete especially, where they estab lished themselves long before the trojan war. their where about is always traceable by temples of apollo. these temples were their centres of artistic cultivation. apollo is always the god of music, and of all elegant exercises, whe ther of mind or body, but especially of those of mind. within the borders of the mainland, we do not find that the dorians advanced much, till after the trojan war. to the * "according to the tradition of belphi," says mailer, " apollo, at the expiration of the great period, visited the beloved nation of the hyperbor seans, and danced and played with them, from the vernal equinox to the early setting of the pleiades ; and, when the first corn was cut in greece, he re turned to delphi with the full ripe ears, the offerings of the hyperborseans." t historyof the dorians. 70 t/te dorian measure. early ionian greeks, apollo was a stranger. homer does not profess to xmderstand his nature, or betray any insight into it. one sees occasionally the mythical origin of homer's jupiter. he is generally an autocratic principle, founding his action on natural, self-derived superiority : his will is law, because it has present ascendancy, and is an entity not to be disputed. on the other hand, he is sometimes obviously the ether, and juno the atmosphere, as in the beautiful episode near the end of book xiv. where the flowers of earth spring into being on their embrace. homer's mars, too, is the bhnd, uncultured instinct of violence ; what the phrenologists call destructiveness. he makes him the war-god of the trojans, whose instinctive courage he could not deny ; re serving minerva, the art and science of war, as the war-god of the greeks. there is not a god or goddess, except apollo, that homer does not show he understood, and who is not therefore a plaything in his hands. but apollo comes on the stage, " like night : " he is terrible ; he deals myste? rious death. whatever success or movement of the tro jans homer cannot account for on any natural principle or human instinct, apollo brings about arbitrarily; and this prevails throughout the " iliad." homer was not a do rian to worship apollo inteuigently ; but he was an ionian, and his candid, open nature did not refuse to see the mag nificence and power which avas manifested in his name, or to do a certain homage to his divuaity which he pays to no other. apollo is sometimes confounded with hehus by later gre cian poets ; and homer, in making him the author of the pestilence, may have had a suggestion of the kind. but nothing is proved more clearly by k. o. miiller, than that the apollo of the dorians was not the sun, although the sun's rays are an apt symbol of the genius that radiates beauty everywhere. homer's mode of treating apollo is a testunony to the power of the dorians of his day. his mode of representing the cretans and lycians is another proof of their acknow ledged superiority in cultivation ; for it was the dorian colo nies that civilized crete and lycia. sarpedon, the golden the -dorian measure. 71 mailed son of jupiter from lycia, and idomeneui?, the son of the wise minos, both testify to the same general fact. the dorians appear to us, from the first, as a highly cul tivated race. lycurgus did hot create the cultivation of the dorians. indeed it is probable, that in sparta the breadth and beauty of this cultivation were injured, in order to con centrate strength, and intensify the individuality of the race, which became more and more precious to the wise, as they compared themselves with other races. after the trojan war, the dorians of thessaly moved southward, and at last crossed the gulf at naupactus, and spread over peloponnesus. k. o. miiller thinks only about twenty thousand crossed at naupactus, and that they never were in great numerical force. yet they overturned pelopon nesus. their mode of warfare was to fortify themselves in some place, and make excursions round. as soon as pos sible, they built temples to apouo, and won the people by their superior cultivation. in the course of time, they won laconia entirely : messenia was a later conquest. the lonians fled before them to attica, and across the archi pelago ; while the achseans of sparta and argos retreated to the northern shores, just deserted by the lonians. but it was by moral rather than physical force, thsit they took the precedence of all other races in peloponnesus. their con quering rule was like no other on historical record. they are the only conquering people who have benefited,, by intention and in fact, the nations they conquered. they did give them such freedom as to incorporate them among themselves. the dorian rule was freedom by means of law. their form of government was not at first sight democratical ; but neither could it ever, like the athenian democracy, become an unprincipled tyranny. the dorians governed themselves, as well as others, by law and religion. their king was an occasional officer. hence the moral superiority of the spar tans was always allowed. hence they were always appealed to by nations oppressed by external or internal tyrants. let us therefore examine their religion. the gods of this race were apouo and diana, with their 72 t/te dorian measure. parents, jupiter and latona. the parents, however, remain in the background : hesiod, himself a dorian, makes " the azure-robed latona, ever mild, gracious to man and to immortal gods, — gentlest of au -witliin the olympian courts," the third wife of jove, next after metis and therms. but in all he says, there is nothing but her name which throavs any light upon her nature. leto (latona) means mt/sfsry ; and apollo and diana are the children of mystery, whether we consider the unexplained origin of the dorians, or the nature of the principles, genius and chastity, which they embody. it is noticeable, that the dorian diana, who must be dis criminated from diana of ephesus, — a very different divinity — and also from diana of arcadia, though in later times they were confounded, is the feminine of apollo, and nothing else. as he is the severity of intellect, she is the severity of morals. here the dorian respect for woman, which is brought out in strong rehef by k. o. miiller in his history of grecian litera ture, as well as in his account of the dorian institutions, has its highest expression. apollo and diana are twins, and have equal dignity, united by sympathy of nature and same ness of birth ; and the latter not at all displaying any subor dination to the former. again, we may remark that apollo, with all his power and splendor and autocratic character, is never represented as the supreme god. he tells the mind of his father, jupiter. do we not see here the shadow of god and the word of god ? the dorian jupiter is never at all the ionian jupiter described by homer, but is absolute, un manifest, except by the oracle and action of his son. this oracle and action betray the finiteness inseparable from mani festation ; but, nevertheless, there is a sublimity about apollo which we find nowhere else in the greek heaven. he is no instinct, no power of external nature personified. he is no thing less than the moral and intellectual harmony of the uni verse. in his action we find the practical religion of the dorians. he is beautiful : his recreation is music. he leads the muses with his harp in hand, and even mingles in the dance. he is resplendent ; where he is, darkness cannot be : the dorian measure. 73 his inevitable arrow destroys deformity. excellence is his prerogative : whoever contends with him is worsted and dies. his first great oracle commands to man self-consciousness. it is man's prerogative and duty to act, not blindly, but in the light of the past and the future. there is trace in greece, as everywhere else in the ancient world, of a worship of nature, which grovelled in the material sume. this appears in the mythology as monsters, especi ally as serpents which some hero, personifying or concentrat ing in himself the genius of some grecian tribe, destroys. perhaps one hideous form of earthworship had its seat, in very early times, at delphusa and delphi, and was expelled thence by a dorian colony, who settled there, and built the temple of apollo.* but the most important part of the wor ship was not a commemoration of historical facts, but the ex pression of an idea ; which, though it has not, in the apollonio religion, the complete expression that it afterwards found in the facts of the christian history, was no less deep than the central idea of christianity. apollo kills the pythoness by the necessity of his nature. it is his virtue. but his virtue is a crime that must be ex. piated. no sooner is the deed done, than, by a necessity as irresistible as that by which he did it, he flies from the scene of the slaughter toward the old vale of tempe for purifica tion. on the way occurs the expiation. for eight years, he serves admetus ; and miiller has demonstrated, that admetus is but a title of pluto, and that pherse was from the earliest times a spot where the infernal deities were worshipped. having expiated, he goes on to tempe, and breaks the bough of peace from the laurel groves that encompass the temple, and, returning to delphi, lays it on the altar,. the interpretation of this fable is awful. life, then, is sacred : even the all-divine son of god, if he violate it in its lowest, most degraded manifestation, must expiate the deed afterwards by years of activity in the service of death. the * see homeric hymn to apollo. but there is no proof that it was ■written by the author of the " iliad," although it is called homeria. it is doubtless very ancient, and probably consists of fragments oi several dorian hymns. 10 74 the dorian measure. best life pays this tribute, and thus acknowledges a certain equality before god with its opposite ; for even a bad life has divine right, inasmuch as it is. " to be is respectable." the expiation, indeed, is measured, and comes to an end ; and apollo is interpreter of god for evermore, and king, giv ing a death which does not wound or pain its recipient, — euthanasia, if not immortality. here, indeed, the symbol falls, both in form and meaning, below the christian symbol ; which makes the resurrection swallow up, and annihilate with its glory, the crucifixion. yet it is something, that the ancient story intimates the cheering truth. the whole thing is fainter in the grecian form, because addressed to a nation, and not to humanity, — to a nation at a peculiar stage of cul ture, and not to humanity through countless ages. apollo may be held as the word of god to a tribe of ideal greeks, whose life can be counted by centuries. christ is the word of god to humanity, thinking and suflfering all over the globe and through all time, and whose influences take hold of eternity. but we should not omit to speak here of the fable of apollo's rescuing alcestis from pluto, on his return from tempe towards delphi, after his purification. a later fable, which euripides has immortalized (perhaps originated), makes hercules the rescuer of alcestis. this may have been one of the many interchanges of names which took place with respect to hercules, and that tribe of the dorians called heracleides ; and which led to the misapprehension, very early in grecian history, that the children of hercules were a component part of the dorian nation, and that the dorian invasion of southern greece was the return of these children to the land of thehr fathers. k. o. miiuer has entu-ely cleared up this subject. but the pomt of interest for us is, that this rescue of alcestis from death was, in either form, a dorian fable. muuer says there is also trace of a fable of the death of apollo. that the fable of apollo's killing the pythoness, and ex piating it, and becoming purified, was the heart and marrow of the rehgion of the dorians, is evident from the fact, that a dramatic representation of it, on a theatre stretching from the dorian measure. 75 delphi to the vale of tempe, was the grand mass of the worship. once m a certain number of years, the death of the pythoness was enacted in pantomime by a beautiful boy, representing apouo. having discharged his arrow, he fled away, along a road always kept in order by the grecian nations for the express purpose ; and, when he arrived at phersb, he went through certain pantomimes which repre sented servitude. this done, he proceeded on the road to tempe, where he passed the night, and returned next morn ing with the sacred bough, to break his fast at pherse. thence he proceeded back to delphi, and was met by processions from the sacred city, shouting lo pjban ; and a festival cele brated the laying of the bough upon the altar. the importance of this great act of worship is apt to be overlooked, especially by england old and new, who, on account of their puritan pre-occupations, are not accustomed to look for important results from a form of worship whose festive air and entertaining character give it, in their eyes, the trifling tone of mere amusement. but these nations of the south of europe are merely not sanctimonious. they live seriously, while they dress the festival of life^ the sjmi bolic language of their festivals harmonizes with the symbolic language of nature. they see god in the sunshine and the flowers, rather than in the storm and wilderness. it is utterly impossible for any per'sons to understand greece, who per sist in believing that greek festivals and processions were mere amusements, and had not the higher aim and effect of awakening all human energies, by the expression of serious ideas. every thing in greece became artistic, and over flowed with beauty, precisely because the people were so intelleetual, they caught, and were continually expressing symbohcally, the grand ideas of order and harmony which pervade the universe. they neglected nothing, and trifled about nothing, because, by the wayside or the hearthstone, alone as well as ia company, thfey recognized that " the gods were there." see hesiod, in his " works and days," where he gives the minutest directions about the small moralities of paring naus, and other decencies, and sanctions his counsels by these very words. 76 the dorian measure. the worship of apollo was not the only worship of greece, but it was the only national worship of the dorians ; and the predominance of the dorians in greece, and their influence over all the other tribes, direct or indirect, placed it in the forefront; and at last the shrine of delphi seems to have concentrated all religious feehng into itself. let us compare this dorian rehgion with the other grecian religions. each tribe seems to have had its peculiar god. this god, when examined and analyzed, gives us the genius of the people. they are instincts, which characterized the different tribes, personified. the names only came from foreign lands. thus pan, in egypt, signifies the supreme god, — nature personified. in arcadia, the pelasgic genius wor shipped the beauty and music of the surface of nature ; and therefore their pan, whose name they took from the egyp tians that early settled in peloponnesus, together with the association of god of nature, became a perfect expression of pelasgic genius, — " who, frisking it, ran o'er woody cragg'd pisa, in fun and frolic and laughter, with skipping nymphs after, shouting out, ' pan, pan.' pan, merry musical pan, piping o'er mountain-tops. rough-headed, shaggy, and rusty like tan ; dancing, where'er the goats crop, the precipice round, and his hoofs strike the ground with their musical clop-clop. pan is the lord of the hills. with their summits all covered with snow ; pan is lord of the brooks, of the rivers, and rills, that murmur in thickets below ; there he saunters along. and listens their song, and bends his shagg'd ears as they flow. the dorian measure. 77 where the goats seem to hang in the air, and the cliffs touch the clouds with their jags, how he hurries and leaps, now here and now there. and skips o'er the white shining crags ; and, quick to descry with his keen-searching eye. bounds after the swift-footed stags ! pan drives before him the flocks, to shades of cool caverns he takes and gathers them round him, and, under deep rocks, of the reeds a new instrument makes ; and with out-piping lips blows into their tips. and the spirit of melody wakes."* the earth was worshipped under the name of diana at ephesus and in arcadia, although no trace of the dorian goddess of chastity is to be found in the character or the worship of these divinities. they were, in fact, the manifes tations, in personal form, of the fecundating principle." in syria and other places, where their worship was fully devel oped, their festivals were the gala of licentious passion ; and, if in greece such excesses were checked, it can be ascribed to no cause but that of the restraining presence of the dorian apodo, and the superior character of his votaries. the dark ness fled before the light, and " concious law is king of kings." again, the egyptian hermes, the expression of all severe and awful wisdom, becomes, among the mercenary, thrifty, shifty arcadians, the mercury, who is the m6ssenger of the gods, the paitron of thieves, the ready go-between, the " brain in the hand." there is not in grecian litera!ture or art any thing that suggests more to the historic investigator of such subjects than the homeric hymn to mercury, where apollo is made to say, in a transport of gratitude, because mercury has given to him the lyre, — * see the whole of the homeric hymn to pan. 78 the dorian measure. " now, since thou hast, although so very small. science of arts so glorious, that i swear (and let this cornel javelin, keen and tall, witness between us what i promise here) that i will lead thee to the olympian hall. honored and mighty, with thy mother dear ; and many glorious gifts in joy will give thee. and even at the end will not deceive thee." we might go through all the names of the mythology, and we shall still find that always the grecian gods are some one elemental power of nature or of mind personified and wor shipped by the people, in whom that power of mind, or around whom that power of nature, obtained. but apollo was the manifestation of a triune g od. apouo was never conceived, without a father to give him wisdom and the oracle, and without an object towards whom the activity of his love or hate is manifested. this spiritual superiority of the apouonic religion explains its predominance over all the other worships, which it finally swallowed up. other oracles died out, even that of dodo nsean jupiter ; but delphi ever became greater. this triumph of the religion of apollo is a lesson to sectarian christendom. it triumphed by tolerance ; it conquered by accepting. this fact is most remarkably displayed in its relations with the worship of bacchus. nothing could be more antipodal than the genius of these two worships. bacchus concentrated the spirit of the earth-worships. his name and origin were asiatic, and his worship had au the characteristics of asiatic worship. it was the exciting, even to frenzy, of that ele mental, mysterious, vital power, which is not idea, but seems its polar basis of life, the source of the substance that we are "without form, and void." the asiatics always seem to regard this fury as divinity in its purest form. the dorians opposed to bacchus, apouo, who, by the law which he is, arranges in order this blind force. hence, the characteristic difference of asiatic and dorian worship. with the asiatics, it consisted in a wild excitement of nervous energy, preclud ing all intellection and all reflection. the bacchantes, as described by euripides, could not see with their eyes what the dorian measure. 79 they were doing, much less understand with their mind. agave tears her own son pentheus hmb from hmb, while she is filled with the god, and wakes up afterwards to the horrid truth, but with no misgivings of conscience. moderation, balance, on the other hand, was the character istic of the worshipper of apollo. he was joyous, but cahn ; every thing in balance. self-possession was his beatification. he saw every thing around him in the pure fight of truth and beauty. hence the character of dorian music. it was an old saying, that " apouo hated the sound of the flute," and the lyre was his instrument. their music must compose, clear the mind, soothe and cahn the spirits ; not touch and excite the passions. from a passage in homer, the speech of diomede, in book v. we have reason to infer, that, before his time, there had been an attempt in thessaly to introduce the worship of bacchus ; and the fundamental antagoiusm of the two wor ships is indicated by lycurgus's armed opposition to it. it is intimated, that the disorder of the worshippers disgusted him. but so reverent are the greeks, that his subsequent blindness was referred to the anger of the insulted god. in euripides' tragedy, we see the difficulty of introducing the worship of bacchus into thebes, by pentheus's opposition, which seems to be defended by reason and t6 nqinov, pecufiar to the greeks ; but here the old and wise in experience, represented by cadmus and tiresias, are reverent of the new manifestation ; and the self-respecting worshipper of the god who alone elevates the human mind to full self-consciousness, because he is the uncompromising opposer, becomes the victim of bacchus. the new worship was at last accepted, because it was seen to cover undeniable facts of nature. as in the eumeni des, the battle was admitted to be a drawn one. there is antagonism in fife. life indeed exists only by antagonism, being subjective-objective. so each party of the last mentioned magnificent drama maintains its position. the inteuectual power, which contemplates only the idea, is represented by apollo ; the unmeasured, immeasurable sen sibility, in which inhere the passions, is represented by the 80 tlie dorian measure. furies ; and the man orestes is justified by the free grace of minerva, who represents the compromise of the creator of man, in accepting into fellowship with himself the human being, whose very existence is a compromise between the finite and infinite. are we surprised to meet these great ideas in heathen greece ? but it cannot be denied that here they are ; con ceived, indeed, only by the highest mind of his time, of almost any time, and probably not reauzed very widely ; yet they may have been understood more widely than we think. and why should we doubt ? it is the christian's formula, if not his faith, that " his goings forth were of old," and that " jesus christ is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever." truth has no age ; and the mind, at a certain point of elevation, must necessarily find itself in it. to that ele vation, no condition is so indispensable as an atmosphere of tolerance. it may be observed, that -slschylus was not a dorian. in his time, however, the dorian culture had spread over greece ; and ^schylus was a pythagorean, and pythagor«anism was the philosophic expression of the dorian rehgion ; for, though pythagoras was a samian by birth, he was a dorian by cul ture, and uved in the dorian cities of magna grsecia, where he endeavored to realize in political institutions the dorian idea, to which his plans did, in some respects, do more complete justice than the spartan institutions ascribed to lycurgus. but to return: by accepting with reverence and liberedity the worship of bacchus, apollo modified it. no stronger proof can be given of this than the very fact, that the feasts of bacchus were celebrated ui athens by the tragic drama, which, with both ^schylus and sophocles, was consecrated, as it were, to the worship of apollo. before that era, all the excesses of the bacchic orgies had yielded to the superior genius of the dorian worship. apouo is the god of (edipus and his ill-fated family, of cassandra, of orestes ; and, if he does not appear by name in the " prometheus," yet nowhere is that depth of idea which belonged to his worship more manifest. the dorian measure. 81 nor is this the only fraternization of apollo with the older gods of greece, which is on record. in arcadia there was, on one side of the hill of cyllene, an old temple of mercury ; and, on the other side of the same hill, the dorians afterwards erected a temple to apollo. in the homeric hymn to mercury, mentioned above, we have a mythical story, avhose meaning seems to be a commemora tion of the reconciliation of the two worships. this hymn is a masterpiece of characterization and humor, and evidently of dorian origin; for the dorian god is represented alto gether as the most divine. apollo's majestic honesty and sim pucity are finely contrasted with mercury's subtlety and frisky cunning. it was just the contrast of the dorian and the arcadian character. but mercury supplies the instrument by which the great apollo may express himself ; and this gift becomes the bond of union. so the peloponnesians were the plastic material which supplied to the dorian intellectual power the means of manifesting itself. the dorians may be considered the masculine principle of greece, and the other greeks the feminine. k. o. miiller demonstrates, that the germ of comedy, the germ of tragedy, the germ of architecture and of art generally, always came from the intellectual dorians ; but the seed was thrown into the rich soil of ionian sensibility, pelasgian liveliness of appre hension, achaean subtlety of apphcation ; and hence the rich harvest of art in all its kinds. either race, disconnected with the other, would have been comparatively sterile. in sparta, where there was most isolation, most repugnance to social union with the other states, there was least flowering out. there, however, was most strength in the root, though the least luxuriance in the branches.. in sparta the race vies with the hebrew, in that self-springing power which keeps a people individual, and makes it more forcible to give than to receive influences. like the hebrew race, it has never been lost. to use the eloquent words of john miiller, in the close of his chapter on lacedemon, in his " universal history," vol. i. : — " what an ascendency must that lawgiver have pos sessed who knew how to persuade the opulent of his country to an equal division of their lands, and to the abolition of 11 82 tlie dorian measure. money ; who changed a whole repubhc into a single family, and gave to a corrupt populace a love for their country, capable of producing such wonderful effects ; who infused into a multitude a degree of valor which never yielded even on the calamitous day of leuctra, and such mutual forbear ance that no civil war broke out among them during seven hundred years, even after the decline of manners ; who formed an army which never inquired how strong the enemy was, but only where he was to be foimd ; youth full of obedience and respegt for their elders, and at the same time firmly resolved to conquer or die for the liberty of sparta ; old men who, after the field of leuctra, with only one hundred young soldiers, arrested the victorious enemy in his impetuous ca reer ; women who never repined when their sons fell for their country, but bitterly wept when they were not ashamed to survive their leader and fellow-soldiers ; and, lastly, a nation eloquent in short proverbs and often in silence, in whom two thousand five hundred years have not wholly extinguished the genius of fiber ty ! " for after the repubfic, after lacedemon itself had per ished, neither the roman power nor the turbulent and degrading sway of the byzantine monarchy, nor the arms of the ottoman turks, have been able wholly to subdue the citizens of lycurgus. the bravest among them, as the son of agesilaus long ago counselled them, left their falling country, and fled with their wives and children to the moun tains. after they had lost all, they still saved themselves ; and often they descend from the heights of taygetus, to reap the fields which their more timid countrymen have sown for the oppressor. they still dwell in freedom on the mountains of maina, under two chiefs, fearless of the janissaries the mainottes themselves are strong, warfike men, and rival their forefathers of lacedemon." whence came the life of this wondrous people but from their deep theology of a triune god, theu' justification by faith, and their sanctification by ufe ? even from the begin ning, as we have seen, apollo confesses that he is not the absolute ; for, when he touches the house of life, he suffers re-action. the sacredness of a fife which neither evil nor the dorian measure. 83 deformity could quench, apollo acknowledges by service of pluto. his own superior divinity is manifested, in that he never ceases to act and assert himself, under whatever penalty. let the self-righteous of modern time, who may not learn of christ, meditate this lesson promulgated in greece, and which was one of the formative or creative principles of the dorian culture and character. the greeks dared to look the prime difficulty, the great mystery of life, in the face;, and reverently to bow before it. it is good for man to shun evil and do good ; nay, it is incumbent on him to resist evil. but he must pay the penalty of contact. the, greek was inspired by apollo to go up man-like, and act, with eyes wide open to the expiation that was to follow; and which, in its turn, he also suffered man-like, without subterfuge or meaching. there are amongst us a peoplfe of sickly moral ity, who never do any thing '■ — for fear of doing wrong. " o god ! forgive our crimes : forgive our virtues too, those lesser crimes, balf converts to the right!" apouo may teach such, who will not listen to the same les son given by christ, in a form so subume that its meaning is not dreamed of by thousands who pride themselves on the name of christian, but do not understand as much of the doctrine as is expressed by the dorian apouo. life is antagonism ; action and re-action. will you not act, for fear of the re-action ? you can then choose but to die, or what is worse, — life in death. the muses will never fol low you. but the dorian religion was not a mere symbolic repre sentation, an acknowledged theory of the difficulty of life. it was eminently practical. it enjoined on all its votaries personal culture. these people were pious. their god was in all their thoughts. they lived upon the oracle. it was to them a living guidance, and wise were its utterances. indeed, all wisdom was included prophetically in the motto on the temple of delphi. a temple of apollo, which was a 84 the dorian measure. school of arts and sciences, was the nucleus, the heart of every dorian community. did they found a colony? it was always at apouo's command they went forth, and his temple was their first structure. the last myth was of the nymph cyrene, carried off by apollo into africa. the life of the pious dorian was like his god's, — the destruction of the ugly pythoness, and a manly endurance ; nay, a joyful expiation of all the inevitable consequences of this lofty action, amid the disturbing influences of time and circum stance. he was moderate and severe to himself, but never ascetic : that would not have been moderate. his recrea,tion was music. education itself was called by the dorians, learning music. they did not confine this to learning ac cords of sound ; but it was a study of the harmonies of man within himself, with the state, and with nature. hence the characteristics of the dorian politics. according to miiller, the dorians did not consider the state merely or mainly " an institution for protecting the per sons and property of the individuals contained in it ; " but its essence was, that, " by a recognition of the same opinions and principles, and the direction of actions to the same ends, the whole body became as it were one moral agent." again he says, " whereas, in modern times, that which commonly receives the name of liberty consists in having the fewest possible claims from the community ; or, in other words, in dissolving the social union to the greatest degree possible, as far as the individual is concerned ; the greatest freedom of the spartan, as well as of the greeks in general, was to be a living member of the body of the state. what the dorians endeavored to obtain, as a state, was good order (x6ct/«os),the regular combination of different elements. a fundamental principle of this race is found in the expression of king archidamus, recorded by thucydides, that it is most honor able, and at the same time most secure, for many persons to show themselves obedient to the same order (xdcrfiog). thus this significant word expresses the spirit of the dorian go vernment, as well as of the dorian music and philosophy, which was the pythagorean system. therefore, the supreme magistrate among the cretans was called xdafzog ; among the the dorian measure. 8^ epizephyrean locrians, x6a/ionohg.^' * again, " in the gen uine doric form of government, there were certain predomi nant ideas which were peculiar to that race, and were also expressed in the worship of apollo, viz. those of harmony and order, xa siixoa/mv; of self-control and moderation, crbxpqoavvt; ; and of manly virtue, d^erij. accordingly, the constitution was formed for the education as well of the old as the young ; and, in a doric state, education was upon the whole a sub ject of greater importance than government. and this is the reason that all attempts to explain the legislation of lycuigus, from partial views and considerations, have neces sarily failed. it was soon perceived, that external happiness and enjoyment were not the aim of these institutions ; but then it was thought, with aristotle, that every thing could be traced to the desire of making the spartans courageous war riors, and sparta a dominant and conquering state ; whereas the fact is, that sparta was hardly ever known to seek occa sion for a war, or to follow up a victory : and, during the whole of her flourishing period (i.e. from about the fiftieth olympiad to the battle of leuctra) , she did not make a single conquest by which her territory was enlarged. in fine, the doric state was a body of men acknowledging one strict principle of order, and one unalterable rule of manners ; and so subjecting themselves to this system, that scarcely any thing was unfettered by it, but every .action was influenced and regulated by the recognized principles." , considering the prevalent ignorance, even misconception, of the whole political and social state of the dorians, one is tempted to go into particulars, and copy out the large pro portion of k. o. miiuer's second volume, which shows so satisfactorily that the aristocracy of these states was not an aristocracy of persons, but of principles ; that the' people were the most moderate, gentle, humane, modest of the greeks ; the least overbearing, whether in the relations of governor with governed, master with servant, conquering with con * the spartans called the son of lycurgus esxoa^tag, in honor of his father, says mttuer. might not tliis son have been the state itself? if lycur gus is mythological, his son must have been so. 86 tlie dorian measure. quered race, or paramount state in the eonfederaey. their principle was respect and justice to the inferior, protection to the weak, and true organization for life. "with the rich humor and pure mirthfulness known only to the serious and chaste, they were severe without austerity ; simple in private life, that they might be splendid in all that pertained to rehgious rites and piibhc duties ; with pure and dignified relations of friendship, realized on both sides, by husbands and wives, by the unmarried of both sexes, and by the old and the young. virtue, in the strict sense of the word, seems never to have pervaded any society, ancient or modern, so completely as it did the dorian. for, if friendship — and not philanthropy, or the charity which is founded on the chris tian's faith and hope — was their highest social characteristic, yet, on the other hand, must be subtracted from their con dition those depths of spiritual vice and social wrong, to which the eternities, unfolded by the same hope and faith, have opened the passions of christendom. but the question for us is, whether, on the new platform upon which christendom finds itself, now that the spititual future has descended as it were into human life, there may not be found a harmony corresponding to the dorian mea sure ; — whether there may not be a social organization which does as much justice to the christian religion and philosophy, as the dorian state did to apollo. we have seen, that there is a correspondence, point by point, between apollo and christ. christ attacked sin, as apouo attacked the pythoness ; and, in the contest, the serpent bruised his heel. christ " descended into hell," as apollo served ad metus. the humihation was temporary ; the triumph proved the god. it is the only pagan religion which can be brought into any comparison with christianity, because it is the only one avhich involves the contemplation of man in an objective relation with divinity ; and its inferiority consists, not in its leaving out the antagonism, — rather the tripucity of life ; for it did not do this, — but in its not estimatuig the infinite reach of passion. the dorians do not represent all of humanity : they were of an exceptional organization. apollo was not " tempted in all points, like as we are." he was not all of tke dorian measure. 87 g od, and not all of man. he was only so much of god as the universe, exclusive of passion, manifests ; and so much of man as may be comprehended in the aesthetic element. but he was enough of god and of man, that his chosen people should exhibit a rounded organization in their political and social condition, and so become a type of that future harmony of christendom, when " the lion shall lie down with the lamb, and a young child shall lead them." with the dorians, as we have seen, the political problem wels for the whole body to become x6afwg, by a path which should make each individual x6a/iog ; for they had such faith in the divine order as to beheve these ends were correlative. hence, by necessity, " in a doric state, education was a sub ject of greater importance than government ; " and, in point of fact, as long as the education was uncorrupted, the govern ment lasted. in every doric state where, as in corinth and magna grsecia, intercourse with foreign nations, and oppor tunity for individual accumulation of wealth, relaxed the severity of personal culture, the state deehned, and such luxury and corruption ensued as has made the name of sp barite a by-word among nations. we will first speak of the forms and objects of this educa tion, and then of the spirit of it ; and afterwards proceed to speak of an education of christendom as true to christ as this was to apollo, — out of which, therefore, should grow political forms and activity avorthy the name of kingdom of heaven upon earth. the dorians assumed, that in a company of men guided by apollo, inhered a power which circumscribed the liberty of the individuals that composed it to the interests of the company as such ; and that this social power must legitimate itself, by discharging a duty of which they had also the intui tion, viz. that of unfolding each, of its members into the har monious exercise of his powers. perhaps they saw proof of this priority of the social to the individual right in the fact, that the human being is socially dependant, before he is individually conscious. his growth into bodily perfection is not self-directed. it cannot take place, unless it be subjected to laws, according to an ideal of 88 the dorian measure. which tte individual is not conscious, and which he cannot discover without assistance from the society mto which he is born. the dorian society, therefore, first judged of the body, and decided whether or not it was sufficiently well organized to be capable of its place in the social body, and then assumed, without hesitation, the direction of its development. for a certain number of years, indeed, the child was left with its parents, whose instincts, enlightened by the gefieral tone of the state, were believed to be the most faithful guardians of its physical well-being ; but, at seven years old in sparta, and at a somewhat later date in some other dorian states,* the more pubhc education began, and the child joined classes to be taught song and the choral dance, with other exercises of body, by which a complete physical development and action might take place. here let us observe, that the do rian gymnastic was always accompanied by music, as the intellectual exercises were called. not a shade of brutality was ever alloiyed in the spartan gymnasium. boxing and violent wresthng were prohibited ; also gladiators, i. e. com batants who used arms. the wrestling was never permitted to touch upon that violence which would injure the body, or give occasion for the combatants to -cry for mercy. the foot-race was the exercise in which the dorians oftenest bore away the crown of victory at the olympic games. their bodies were strengthened and hardened by hunting, and ex posure to the extremes of heat and cold, hunger and fatigue, in the refreshing open air. the scourging at the temple of diana orthia, mentioned in history, was not dorian. the diana orthia was not apollo's sister, but the earth-goddess, spoken of above ; and this gloomy and bloody superstition was the tenacity of the old religion upon the doric ground. the custom of compeuing or allowing the children to steal their food, in order to educate them in dexterity and self dependence, seems an exception to the common probity of dorian hfe ; but, in judging of it, we must remember that food was in common, and thus no individual right seemed to * in crete the education was directed by the parents till seventeen. the dorian measure. 89 be invaded. this custom, and that of the bridegroom's stealing his bride, — as the form of marriage, — seem to indicate an open and merry contest of the individual with the social power, in the one case ; and of masculine with feminine force, in the other ; — a gay admission of the fact, that the problem of adjustment, in either case, was not quite solved, and that it should be left to the right of the strongest, heroically exercised. the doric organization of society, in these respects, bears the same relation to the ideal christian organization, as the hero to the saint. but the law of prop erty, and the physical advantage of the masculine sex, never descended with the dorians to the brutality of the roman rule, where the debtor, and woman from her birth to her death, were absolute chattel slaves.* the gymnastic exercises of youth were not confined to the male sex. the virgins also contended in classes. but there is no proof of plutarch's assertion, that they contended naked before men. there is sufficient circumstantial evidence against this.f their bodily exercises were in private, al though, in some religious festivals, they raced in public, as well as danced, but in the usual dorian dress for virgins. this dress, it is true, only covered the bosom, and reached to the knee ; and it is a noticeable fact, in connection with the known chastity of this race, where adultery was unknown before alcibiades' visit to sparta, and every approach to impurity was punished with death. the married women among the dorians alone appeared veiled, or with long gar ments. the education of girls was so invigorating to mind and body,, they could be safely trusted to the chaste instincts of true womanhood. but the athenians, and other later greeks, whom asia had corrupted with its female license, and who were thrown upon the virtue of outward restraints, might have characterized the dorian virgins as " naked ; " not being able to appreciate the drapery of purity. that to which we sequestrate the name of music stands in the forefront of dorian education. the musical ear is that * see dr. arnold's " history of rome," for proof of these fiwsts. t vide k. o. mailer, pitsaim. 12 90 the dorian measure. region which connects the bodily and spiritual life, and it occupies a large portion of the consciousness in the favored organizations of the people of the south of europe. its due proportion denotes physical perfection, and is one of the most obvious indications of the capacity of an individual or of a people for a high culture. since this is so, in the character of the music must be the deepest secret of the education of a people ; and that the do rians thought this, is evident from the rigidity and solemnity of au their regulations about music, and that the penalty of death was threatened against any one who violated the sanc tity of the ancient music by new measures, or even new strings to the lyre. the true dorian music was that which entirely expressed the idea of the dorian character. it was the sound of apollo in the soul. the movement was just that which waked up the intellect to the perception of all law, and checked the passions from falhng into dehquescence ; making the whole human being a calm, clear-sighted, creative power. that they believed this music was in the universe, objective to the soul, is expressed by the pythagorean symbol of the music of the spheres, apprehensible through the silence which was but another name for the perfect act of intellection. there was therefore ideal propriety in the dorians making music their central activity. not only did au bodily exercise thus become more or less of a dance, and an intellectual impress was made upon passion, but, what is more important, thus they formed, in the consciousness of each individual, a stan dard by which all their activity was measured. the dances of the dorians were intellectual in their charac ter, — sometimes representative of historical events, — some times of foreign customs, t— sometimes they were allegorical ; in all instances, even when comic, they expressed thought, and stimulated intellectual activity ; while the dances of other nations expressed the softer passions merely, and tended to immorality. the dancing in chorus of young men, of virgins, and of old men, were parts of the public worship. the motions of the young men, says miiller, were vigorous, and often of a tlie dorian measure. 91 military character ; those of the virgins were in measured steps, with feminine gestures ; and the whole was solemn and grave for the peirticipation of age. it is impossible here to go into the history of dorian music and dancing ; but its early purity, as well as its subsequent corruption, its action upon the ceremonies of other worships than that of apouo, and the re-action of other worships upon it, — all testify to the wisdom of the dorians in making the music and dance an affair of legislation. the power of music and the dance is exemplified especially in the fact, that with the dorians they entered even into war, and elevated the exercise of destructiveness into an elegant art. it may be thought that this has been of no advantage to humanity, in the long run (a point of which we may not judge, perhaps, as the end is not yet) ; but there can be no doubt that, if war does exist, the subjection of it to the dorian measure of music and motion has robbed it, as burke would say, of half its ferociousness, by taking away all its brutality. song was the accompanying, or immediately consequent, step to the mimetic and allegoric dance ; and perhaps here we may discover the origin of the multitude of measures in greek poetry. lyric poetry prevailed over every other among the dorians, and was cultivated by both sexes. it originated with the dorians, as epic poetry has originated in almost all the other tribes, and is to be referred to the predominance of religion. the ode is the natural address of the cultivated mind to the god whose very nature is proportion, and whose own sound is music. the later history of the drama is well known. the earlier history of comedy, as well as tragedy, leads us immediately to the dorians, whose intellectual sharp ness and power originated humorous expression, if not wit itself, to a remarkable degree. humor is impossible with the inteuectuauy effeminate. bucohcs were the accompani ment of rustic dances, and elegies of those dances which celebrated astronomical changes ; and this opens out a new vista of thought as to the derivation of the very idea of danc ing from the motions of the heavenly bodies. the poems of homer were recited at first by ionian rhapsodists ; but ter pander the dorian is said to have first set them to a regular 92 the dorian measure. tune. he is also said to have first mixed greek and asiatic music. another consequence of the dorian music and dance was the sculpture of greece, which took its ideal character from the dorians, who had apollo for model, and the un veiled human form, beheld with a chaste deught in the gym nasium, for thek school of art. their love for proportion, harmony, and regularity, rather than for luxuriance of orna ment and glitter, is also exemplified in their architecture, which betrays a certain relation to the sculpture of the nation and era. thus the dorian measure came to char acterize their artistic eye, as well as ear and limb, and the body received its highest education ; almost reminding one of the subhme image of muton, who speaks of the time when, by the natural ascension of matter, — " bodies shall at last all turn to spirit, improved by tract of time, and, wing'd, ascend ethereal." but the music of the dorians comprehended their moral and intellectual culture, which was very much the same in both sexes. we may infer a natural education of the affections, and that discipline which precludes selfishness in its grossest form, from the fact, that the family spirit was free and genial. the dorian called his wife, mistress ; and it was no unmeaning title ; for women enjoyed a real influence in the management of their families, and as mothers. " aris totle speaks," says miiller, " of their influence on the govern ment, in the time of the ascendency of sparta : it increased," he says, " still more when a large part of the landed property fell into the hands of women." he adds, that, " kttle as the athenians esteemed their own women, they involuntarily revered the heroines of sparta ; and this feeling is sometimes apparent even in the coarse jests of aristophanes." again, " in general, it may be reimarked, that, while among the lonians women were merely considered in an inferior and sensual light, and though the cohans allowed their feelings a more elevated tone, as is proved by the amatory poetesses of lesbos, — the dorians, as well at sparta as in the south of italy, .were almost the only nation who esteemed the higher the dorian measure. 93 attributes of the female mind as capable of cultivation." the anecdote of the daughter of cleomenes, who warned her father, though yet a child, of the persian's gold, is still more in point than the pretty story of agesilaus .found playing horse with a stick to amuse his infant-boy. it proves rational relations and intercourse between parents and children. the moral influence of the relation of friendship is to be considered in the dorian education. every well-educated man was bound to be the love of some youth, who was called his listener, as he was called inspirer; and these words express the pure and intellectual connection. plutarch, who has much misrepresented this " friendship," admits, however, that for some faults the inspirer was punished, instead of the listener. the listener had also liberty by law to punish his inspirer for any insult or disgraceful treatment. the friends could represent each other in the public assembly, and stood side by side in war. cicero testifies to the sanctity of the dorian friendship. it was only in sparta and crete that this institution was recognized by the state ; but it was founded on feehngs which, it is evident, belonged to the dorian race ; for, in their other cities, particular friends are spoken of by name. the relation was not merely of men. noble women would have their female listeners ; and sometimes a female inspirer had a small company of girls, who cultivated music and poetry. in his history of grecian literature, k. o. miiller gives details respecting this. the moral and intellectual training implied in the existence and respect for the family, presided over by cultivated female intelligence, is an explana tion of the long conservation of the dorian virtue, and pre vented the hardening effect of what seems to us uving in public. the dorian men eat in public in messes, and had uuxai, or little clubs, at which they conversed with a freedom guarded by a high sense of honor ; and to these conversa tions the youths were gradually introduced by their inspirers. instead of the gossip which destroys mind, the conversation, rational, brilliant with wit and humor, was of the sort which makes the man, by keeping hun in relation with worthy objects. the sentences of this conversation, which have 94 the dorian measure. been handed down to us, are diamonds cut with diamonds ; and the young dorians were trained in concise, witty, and symbohc expression, to fit them for it. it was the object to learn, in the first place, to see the truth, and sharply define it in their thought, in order to express it exactly. this developed to their mind all the intellectual treasures of the greek language, as the constant demands for the ode and choral song searched out all its melodies. nor was this study of grammar, in the highest and etymological sense, including logic, their only purely intellectual training. in default of the comparative study of languages, which makes our seve rest disciphne, they had geometry. the mystic numbers of pythagoras probably covered an application of mathematics to nature, to trace which had a high intellectual effect ; but they studied geometry with practical apphcations, such as we seldom enter into : witness the discoveries made of the genera tion of beautiful forms from simple ground forms and circles, as displayed in the architecture of the parthenon and recent discoveries of symmetrical beauty in the antique vases.* the dorians proper seemed to have nothing to do in time of peace, but to converse. but the perioikoi, or that part of the nation descended from the conquered race, were included in all the education ; and these were not only warriors, on apparently equal footing with the dorians proper, but agri culturists, artisans, and traders ; manufacturers, artists, and mariners. in some instances, the perioikoi of laconia were citizens of sparta; for, as miiller says, " the doric dominion did not discourage or stifle the intellectual growth of her dependant subjects, but allowed it fuu room for a vigorous development." it might seem like dodging to speak of the dorians, and say nothing of the helots. this subject is undoubtedly involved in some obscurity. but one thing is pretty evident. the helots were not en slaved by the dorians : they were slaves of the conquered people, and the dorians did not destroy their relation to the perioikoi, when they subjected the latter. this is " the height * see hay on " symmetrical beauty." the dorian measure. 95 and front of their offending." as to plutarch's story of the spartans making the helots drunk, in order to teach their children, by the disgusting association, to be temperate, — its foundation, in fact, is indicated by miiller, who, in speak ing of the dances, mentions the dances of the helots, indige nous with themselves ; some of which represented riotous scenes, and in which drunken persons were probably repre sented. the dorians were not responsible for these dances, which very probably it would have been a cruel oppression to suppress. undoubtedly there were evils and injustices in separable from slavery, from which the dorians did not deliver the helots ; but in sparta there was a legal way for them to gain liberty and citizenship. cauicratidas, lysan der, and gyuppus were of the race of the helots. in speaking of the dorian education, we must not omit to say, that the pythagorean philosophy was its highest instru ment. pythagoras was the philosophic interpreter of apouo ; and the triumph and proof of the reality of the dorian intel lectual culture were given in the fact, that, in the pythagorean league, " the philosophy of order, of unison, of xda/wg, — ex pressing, and consequently enhsting on its side, the combined endeavors of the better part of the people, — obtained the management of public affairs, and held possession of it for a considerable time ; so tha.t, the nature and destination of the political elements in existence being understood, and each having assigned to it its proper place, those who were quau fied, both by their rank and talents, were placed at the head of the state ; a strict personal education having, in the first place, been made one of their chief obligations, in order by this means to pave the way for the education of the other members of the community." other effects of this intellectual culture were to be seen in other parts of greece, where the germs of comedy and tra gedy, sculpture and architecture, fructified. the dorian was the father of grxeek literature, in its multifarious forms ; but the mothers were achaean, ionian, pelasgic. does not the dorian genius and character pervade the page of thucy dides ? and, but for spartan culture, would pericles have given name to his era ? 96 the dorian measure. without going any farther into minutise, we may finally speak of the spirit of the dorian education. it was purely human. it began and ended in man. from the exercises of the gymnasium even to the possession and exercise of pohtical power, there was nothing proposed for pursuit beyond the excellence attained, and the honor of that. we see in homer's time, that prizes of realvalue were proposed to the achaean victors, in contests of strength and skill. but with the dorians, crowns of no uitrinsic value were the prizes, — mere symbols of an excellence which was its own reward. the dorian strength and beauty continued un impaired just so long as they could thus symbohze the " superiority of man to his accidents." the son of the morn ing fell, as soon as his eye turned from the worship of objective truth to subjective indulgence : and his works did follow him ; the grand style rapidly giving place to effeminacy, until, where ^schylus had been, was seneca the roman trage dian ; and every thing in proportion. " the ancients described beauty," said goethe ; " the moderns describe beautifully.''^ but the dorian culture was applied only to a fragment of the great race of humanity : it was the perfect form of one wave which has passed away on the tide of time. the ques tion is, may the great flood itself take this perfect form ? can christ govern mankind as completely as apollo governed the dorians ? in order to this, religion must enspirit political forms as truly with us as with them, and an adequate education con serve them. being americans, we can take leave to skip the diflicult task of legitimating, upon the doctrine of chris tianity, the states of modern europe. we doubt whether any philosopher of history may do that. it is our privilege to live under political forms that it is not diflicult to trace quite immediately to our religion. for the united states, in its germ, was a christian colony ; and the oracle which directed it was deeper in the breasts of the pilgrims than they themselves knew, or could adequately unfold, either in doc trine or practice. but later times ' have read the writing ; and the fathers of the federal constitution built the temple, the. dorian measure. 97 whose foundations the pilgrims had laid (we would rever ently say it) after the model of one " not built with hands, eternal in the heavens." for the federal constitution corresponds to the spiritual constitution of man, and has elasticity to admit his growth. it is the imity of a triplicity. ' the universal suffrage expresses the passion ; the legislative and judicial departments, the intelligence ; and the execu tive, the will, of the people. this political form was made out ideally by sir harry vane, in his letter to cromwell, when that remarkable person pretended to call his friends to counsel him as to what form he should give the government of england in the day of his power. cromwell rejected it on the plea, that the sovereign grace of god, on which all progress depended, could be more readily found in an exe cutive officer, whom a church recognized to be one of god's elect, than in the common sense of the electors of a legisla lature. but this was but a new form of the old divine right, as the protectorate proved ; and sir harry vane was farther justified by the growth of our government into an actual fact, a hundred and fifty years later. it follows from such a pohtical form, that the pohtical action of the nation must reflect the character of the nation, point for point. the suffrage shows the prevalent character of its passion ; the congress and supreme court manifest its , degree of intelligence, which necessarily will preserve a certain ratio to its passion, since it is elected by it ; and the president expresses its will, on the penalty of being removed, if he does not execute its will, and also approve himself to the " sober second thought." it is an inevitable evil, that, like the principle of will in an individual, he will ever be more expressive of the passion than of the intelligence ; for his interest depends more immediately upon it. he goes counter to the intelligence, to execute the impulses of the passion. moreover, the intelligence of the people, as that of the individual is liable to be, is rounded in by its passion ; and the too prevalent " doctrine of instructions " increases the danger of this. in the last analysis, then, all is dependant upon the pas sion. " out of the heart are the issues of life." 13 98 tlve dorian measure. from this statement, the dangers to which our political system is exposed are obvious. it is the same as that to which every man is exposed, — the revolving in a vicious circle of unenughtened passion, unprogressive mind, and headlong will. the national safety, like man's individual salvation, depends upon the inteuigence being informed by a spirit above itself, so that it may mediate wisely between the passion and the will ; elevating the character of the one, and directing the movements of the other. in short, a true spirit of culture must do for the national heart what the ever incoming grace of god does for the individual soul. the chief danger to a nation and to a man is from within, that the passion and the will may be too strong for the uncultured inteuigence. and the danger in omnation is in proportion to the breadth of the national life. all humanity is in it. our geographical extent and position expose us to the access of all temptation. not a pleasure, not a dominion, but is opened upon our desire. every susceptibility of human nature to ambition, to avarice, and to sensual indul dulgence, is addressed. what an original affluence of intellect, what a training of mind, is necessary in order to grasp au this ufe, and legislate for it in such a manner that it may not prove suicidal ! in truth, man seems to be placed under the united states' government, free of the universe, and, as in the case of adam in his garden, amid such a luxu riance of all that is desirable, that the chances are entirely that he shall miss of the tree of hfe, which is not so obvious to the eyes, but requireth that they be " purged with euphra sie and rue." nevertheless, it is our only hope that we should eat of the tree of life, and the passion of this people be subjected to the «6(tnoq which breathes in a baptism of fire from the rock of joseph, whence rose man glorified as god. in other words, we must be educated by our religion, which compre hends in its scope the life that now is, no less than that which is to come ; — a rehgion which honoreth the spirit in its regenerate human manifestation, even as it honoreth it abso lute and unmanifest in the fatheri to explain : — the religion we profess teaches us, that tlie dorian measure. 99 men, in the first phase of their existence, become empassioned by any and all the objects in the universe with which they are in contact; and that they are, in fact, hurried hither and thither, perpetually losing themselves through the richness of their subjective nature, in objects which are at best but signs of an absolute good, of which they have the undying but undefined presentiment. for the various objects which en trajice the eye of the natural man, and draw him to adventure his bark towards them, may be likened to hght-houses on the rock-bound coast of a rich country, which are mistaken by savage discoverers for the riches that they indicate ; and the ignorant mariner rushes towards them, and gets shipwrecked on the rocks upon which they are built. to stop here : our rehgion would be gloqmy, but it teaches us another thing. it teaches us, that the first phase of human life does not exhaust us, but that it is ours to see the .futility of all feeling and activity, unenlightened by god's plan for making his finite creature live on an infinite principle. and to see this futility, and bravely acknowledge it, is to die to the life of mere passion, and to rise to the intellection of the secret of life eternal, which is no less than this : all human passion is to re-appear even upon earth, no longer as master, but as servant, to do the behests of that will, become by gratitude an 'infinite principle of love, and displaying the ofiice of every faculty and every feeling of human nature, to manifest something of the divine life. never before the birth of our poutical constitution, which was not made by man, but grew up from the instiocfs of christian men who had brooked no control of their relations with god, was there any nation on earth, within which the life eternal could unfold its proportions ; and it is not wonder ful, therefore, that we are slow to enter upon our inheritance, and have not yet unfolded a system of education correspond ent to our large privileges. let us, however, briefly touch some outhnes of such a system ; and, in order to give form to our remarks, we will run a sort of parallel between the form of culture proper for us, and the dorian form that we have just considered. men do not now, in sitting in judgment upon the physical 100 the dorian measure. system of the new-born, proceed so summarily as did the dorians with the infirm of body. they accept this evil, when it comes ; and the education of the bhnd, of the deaf, even of the idiot, is in proportion to that richness of resource, indicated, as the gift of god to man, by him who is said to have healed by his touch all the ills that flesh is heir to. a study and analysis of the physical constitution of man, and of the origin and law of its ufe, united with a sacred sense and practice of duty, shall, in some future on earth, ensure to all who are born, a fair physical constitution, and a sub sequent preservation of the same — perhaps to euthanasia. this part of culture rests so much with parents, that it can only be indirectly reached by a pubhc system. yet society should feel it a duty, as society, to provide for the study and diffusion of all knowledge on this subject. a partial apprehension of the christian religion, in times past, has led to a general perversion of thought concerning every thing pertaining to the body. to die bodily with christ has been that for which saints were canonized. strange that even those who so clung to the letter which kiueth, should have read so partially the letter, that they did not see, that, if christ's body was tormented and buried, yet it rose again, not subject to decay, but capable of being assimilated to the glory which eye hath not seen; for god did not suffer his holy one to see corruption. the symbolic meaning of the death has been considered much more deeply than the sym bolic meaning of the resurrection, which is the complement of the spiritual truth he died to express. christendom has depreciated the physical system, so that the conscience, which should form and preserve the body in a perfect harmony with nature, has not been developed. truly, as st. james saith, " he that sinneth in one thing sinneth in all." by this neglect, the mind and spirit have been warped, weakened, and in jured, beyond our power to estimate. a truly christian system of culture would not neglect a proper gymnastic of the body. it appropriates all that the dorian culture discovered. not only the military drill, with running, fencing, and every exercise that developes without brutalizing, should be made a part of the exercises of the tke dorian measure. 101 school ; but boys and girls should be exercised, as of old, in every species of dance which expresses an idea. the musi cal ear should be early trained, and the body be taught to move in measure. nothing but the artificial asceticism which arose from that one-sided view of reugion which the too energetic puritans had, could have crushed out of human nature, even so far as it has done in new england, the natu ral tendency to dance, and degraded the music of motion vidth associations of presumptuous sin. it is unquestionable that a corrupt people will dance m a manner to corrupt themselves still more ; but " to them that hath shall be given." the system of dancing, natural to the innocent-minded and intellectually cultivated, will refine and elevate.* * a ■woman of talent of the present day, for mere economic purposes, has discovered to the world, and especially to the american world, which is peculiarly ignorant on the subject, what a power lies in dancing to inform the mind, while the eye is delighted. the viennese children, by performing the various national dances of europe, suggested a means of studying the characteristics of various races, without travelling for the purpose ; and their ideal dances opened out the possibility of a still higher intellectual effect, suggesting to those who criticized their utility the words the poet puts into the mouth of the retired rhodora : — " tell them dear, that if eyea were made for seeing. then beauty is its own excuse for being." of course, it is bad for any human beings to be exclusively dancers. " there is a time to dance," and a time for other things, said solomon. but how easy it would be for all children to be trained to dance, among other things ; and then for talent to ideakze, in the ballet, the customs of nations, historical events, even the processes of many kinds of industry ; whue genius, " at its own sweet wiu," should rise into the region of the allegoric and mystic dance ! it is an encouraging circumstance, that some good-natured persons in boston have 'turned their attention to the object of teaching the whole youthful population the practice of this art. the whole aim of these per sons, however, is only to provide more gentle and elegant exercises, to super sede the rude and boisterous mirth which brutalizes the minds as well as manners of the laboring people, and to provide a harmless channel to lead off the overflowing animal life, that, left to prey on itself and others, turns into intemperance and ferocity. all this is well, but not enough. the swedenborgians of boston have done better, by combining, as a church, to have social dancing parties, disconnected with the dissipation of late hours. but even this is not enough. if dancing is not elevated by those who invent its mazes, to have something of an intellectual character, it will probably degenerate into an expression of mere blind passion, and really become to a 102 the dorian measure. by an intellectual dancing, nothing is meant which is heavy or pedantic. there will undoubtedly be solemn dances; but so there will be fanciful ones, — the mother goose and fairy-tale for the very young, the innocent love tale of later youth, enriched by the imagination, till the ballet is commensurate with the opera. whatever can be expressed in music may be heightened in effect by an accompanying dance ; and sophocles and ^schylus have taught us (for they trained their own choruses, and sophocles led his in person), that the highest and gravest genius may employ itself in idealizing the motions of the body. but mere good-will cannot bring this art to high degrees of perfection. a pecuhar genius, which must be born, and cannot be made, is needed here, not less than to compose for the harp or organ. the dancing of christian europe is still pagan, and even the dorian dances are mostly forgotten. yet out of that pagan material might be raised an art of dancing not unworthy of the name of christian. dancing is an admirable initiation of the young into the love and practice of music ; because the beauty of measure, first appreciated by measured motion, disciplines the mmd to measure time. it is not necessary so elaborately to defend the introduction of music into general education, as of danc ing ; for only one small sect of christendom has undertaken to exclude music absolutely from himian expression.* the largest sect of christendom, the eoman catholic church, has developed it so completely, that, on the wings of harmonies which essay to penetrate and reveal the heart of mysteries too generally hidden by " words without counsel which darken knowledge," the world did for a long period, and, in some degree, does in all tune, rise above the narrowing influences of that creed which condemns to everlasting woe au who are out of the pale of the church, and even excludes from heaven those who, in involuntary unconsciousness of its existence, fail to pass under its baptizing waters.f community the evil wjiich the puritans believed it to be ; and which in fact it is now, in the less favored classes of our own society, in no small degree. * the quakers. t dante. the dorian measure. 103 but though music is made a part of almost all christian worship, and though its great masters have proved by their compositions, that it expresses the highest ideas, and even the most varied thoughts, as well as sentiments, of humanity more adequately than words can do ; yet it does not take its place in american education, even upon a par with reading. somewhat of the practice of music in choral singing, it is true, begins to enter into our common-school education. but this halrdly goes beyond the metropolis ; and the theory of music is not taught in any school or college in our country, with the exception of the asylums for the blind, and a few private schools. there are multitudes of the fathers of our country who, as school-committee men, direct its education, who never have thought of music but as an amusement of the senses ; who never have dreamed of its moral, far less of its intellectual, influences. and there are some who look upon it, when introduced into religious services, as a mere rest of the weak mind from the laborious act of worship. but it is time that the importance of music, taught thoroughly, especially in its theory, should be recognized in education ; and that the hideous screaming, without mel ody, measure, or harmony, which is heard in most places of protestant worship, should be stilled, together with the scrap ing of violins and bass-viols, and the pounding of the keys of piano-fortes and organs, to the destruction of all musical ear, and the derangement of every standard of proportion which god has planted in the nervous organization of man, for the first discipline of the mind to order. one objection that is made to the introduction of music into conmnon education is the time that it would occupy, which, it is said, should be taken up with more useful exer cises. but, waiving the circumstance, that this objection entirely begs the question respectuig the comparative impor tance of music in education, we reply, that, were music and dancing a regular part of school exercises every day, as they should be, it would be no hardship to children to remain more hours at school. these exercises could profitably be so arranged that they would break the monotony of book studies, and supersede the boisterous, and too often mis 104 the dorian measure. chievous play-hours, which make the neighborhood of a school a thing to be eschewed by all decent society. the advantages to health of mind and body are no less to be esteemed than the elegance of carriage and general graceful ness which would inevitably take the place of the uncouth, romping manner, or awkward, stiff want of manner, not only of our country people, but even of the inhabitants of our cities. in the small degree in which music now is introduced into schools, it is appropriated to the forms of rehgious worship. this is well, and might be much extended, when, by a thor ough study of the theory of music, the vast treasury of rehgious strains which the genius of the old world has accumulated, shau be put within the powers of execution of more learners. music affords, indeed, the only means of persuading the soul of childhood into any thing that may bear the name of worship, at the early age before experience has revealed to the soul its necessities, and opened its eyes upon the great truth which solves the problem of evil, and gives the second birth. but music does do this. it awakens presentiments which may be said to be the wings which the condescending deity occasionally fastens upon the child, to raise him into the empyrean where he shall by and by intel ligently dwell. music, as we have intimated above, is in a region above sectarianism, and affords a common groumd upon which the divided in opinion may meet; and if all rehgious instruction (we do not mean all moral science) which is imparted to the young could be confined to that which can be conveyed in music, that perplexity of mind upon the sub ject, which is the generating cause of most of the speculative infidehty of modern times, might never take place, because the mind would not tm-n to the greater questions of hfe, before it was sufficiently enriched by experience, and ma tured in judgment, to cope with them. the protestant education does not wholly err in exercising the understand ing upon these themes. we are not arguing for what fene lon calls, and means to commend it, " the profound darkness of the true faith." we would only have the sesthetic element developed, as nature meant it should be, before the mere the dorian measure. 105 understanding shall be sharpened to chop a logic which, at that stage of development, can make but " a series of empty boxes " for the soul to dwell in. having thus introduced the young mind to the science of order, by the music of motion and of sound, elements in which childhood will dwell in their /«os, if not in their x6ufio;, we proceed to the training of the eye and hand, by imitative drawing and the arts of design. if singing should take the lead of reading, so should draw ing of writing. the eye should be accustomed to piptures from very babyhood ; and it is marvellous to those who are inexperienced, to see how, very early, mere drawing, in the sketchy style, is perfectly understood by children. " severe simple lines " are amongst the readiest means of developing the intellect. the mechanical difficulty, too, of using the chalk or lead may be very easily mastered. quite uttle children will be amused to draw lines, and thus learn to steady the muscles of the hand to a purpose ; and, as soon as the mind is a little developed, a rough imitation of forms begins. by and by, a little practical perspective can be taught by means of holding a thread, horizontally and ver tically, over the points of a solid rectilinear figure, in order to see the bearing of its outlines upon the plane of the pic ture ; and thus the discouraging disgust that children are apt to feel, as they learn to compare their attempts with the originals which they make their models, will be avoided. the idea of perspective drawing once taken, the career of improvement is entered upon at once.* geometry, as well as arithmetic, may be begun at an earlier age with children than is generally befieved, if it is taught disencumbered of the verbiage of demonstration that disgraces our text-books ; and it will unite itself to drawing, by being carried out into descriptive geometry, and applied to the drawing of the antique architecture and vases. this application will recommend it to many minds which now are *. schmid's " perspective," in part first of " common scliool drawing book," and especially frank ^howard's " sketcher's manual," afford adjnirable bints as to a natural mode of learning to draw &om nature. 14 106 the dorian measure. matured without any mathematical discipline, on the idea that this is only necessary for the mechanically scientific. before dismissing the subject of educating the eye to form, it is to be remembered, that modelling, as well as drawing, should be practised in all places of education.* after this preparation of body and mind, readuig and writing should be taught at once, and in such a manner as to make our own language the " open sesame " to all speech. at present, the american people — although a congeries, as it were, of all peoples — is comparatively dumb. in no country which is called civilized, are even the cultivated classes themselves so completely sequestrated to the use of one language. while its economical interests, as well as its intellectual necessities, cry out for a general faci lity in speaking foreign tongues, the system of language teaching falls confessedly below that of other nations. in the schools of holland, the children grow up, speaking with facility four languages, — english, german, french, and dutch. but it begins to be seen, that there is a natural and intellectual philosophy of expression ; and that a true philological art can be taught to every child who learns to read and write, that shall make the native tongue appreciated in au its deep significance, and prepare the mind for such a comparison of our own with other tongues, as shall immensely facuitate their acquisition ; and this glossology, while it affords so great an incidental advantage, shall discipline the intellect, like the learning of any natural science ; showing grammar and logic to be, not mere technics, but the forms of thought, and languages themselves to be nothing less than the monu ments of the history of the human mind in its first intuitions * one lady, -who kept an a b c school in boston, did at one time intro duce into her school-room a long trough, with lumps of clay and some well-shaped toys, together with the ground-forms, — the egg, the sphere, the cylinder, &c. ; and it was made a privilege for her little pupils to go and model by turns, in the intervals of their lessons. it was found an admirable way of keeping quietness and order ; and, although it was done but a short time, and not very long ago, one professional sculptor seems to have grown out of this very partial experiment. such a department of the play-room at home, as well as a blackboard for drawing in the nursery, wiu always be found an aid to the home discipline of tempers as well as of minds. the dorian measure. 107 and reflections. on the ethereal element upon which the spirit of man works with the ethereal instrument voice, is this history carved ; or rather in this element has human thought vegetated, not to the eye, but to the ear. and perhaps it may take no more years to gain a key to the expressed mind of man, than are devoted now to learn by rote a few books in greek and latin ; and which, after all, are so learned that only the exceptions among the uni «era<y-educated (as the frequenters of our partial colleges are, as if in mockery, called) can read latin and greek with pleasure to themselves. still fewer can write these lan guages, and almost none can speak them. philology should be studied as the most important of sciences, not only for the sake of knowing the works of art and science that the various languages contain, but because words themselves are growths of nature and works of art, capable of giving the highest delight as such ; and because their analysis and history reveal the universe in its symbolic character. moreover, no lan guage, learned in the light of philology, could be forgotten. indeed, it would seem as if no knowledge conveyed in words could be forgotten, if the words were understood as the liv ing beings that they are when seen in their origin. but it would take a volume to unfold this subject ade quately. the value of language-learning to discipline the mind into power and refinement has been always blindly felt ; but, not being understood as well as felt, it has not justified itself to the practical sense especially of this country ; and nothing is more common than to hear all study of languages, except of thosie to be used in commercial and other present intercourse, condemned as at best a costly and unprofitable luxury. these languages are therefore learned by rote, more or less, on such a substratum of latin and greek as is thought necessary to facilitate their acquisition. in the best instances, there is some study of idiomatic construction, some investiga tion of the composition of sentences, as characteristic of a people ; but the words themselves are used as counters, and there is no investigation of their composition, and their cor respondent relation to the nature they echo on the one side, and the thought they symbolize on the other. 108 the doriait, measure. a certain preparation is required for children's entering upon the study of language in the right way, which would be involved in the training of ear, eye, and hand, mentioned above. by means of drawings and pictures, a great deal of information will be conveyed respecting objects of nature and art, and such processes as are capable of pictorial repre sentation; and then, if the learning to read and write is delayed to the age even of six or seven, the mind has not been left uncultivated, but has learned to love order, and to use language ; especially if exercised, as children should be at the first schools, to reproduce in their own words what their teachers tell them of the pictures and objects of nature which are put before them.* a true study of language not only involves a development of the relations of nature and mind, in the forming of an intellectual conscience, but leads to a study of nature of a fundamental character. science, which has been defined "the universe in the abstract," when put into appropriate words thoroughly understood, would be breathed into the mind and assimilated, as the body breathes in and assimi lates air and food. thus the common student would, like newton, read the propositions of the euclids of every science, and be able to skip the labored demonstrations without loss. the clear mind, undarkened by " words without knowledge," would find it sport and recreation to apply science to the progress of mechanical art ; and a vast amount of energy would be left to explore new worlds of nature, and manifest thought in new forms of beauty. the mere enjoyment of an education, such as has been here hinted at, is the least of its advantages, though it is one not to be despised. its use in preserving the race under the political forms which, as we showed above, are alone, of all yet discovered, elastic enough to admit the whole man to be unfolded, can be shown to be probable. the mass of man kind have no fancy for governing ; and they would not be driven to meddle with what they know nothing of, if there * mrs. mayo's " lessons on objects" gives a hint upon this subject; but an infinitely richer book might be made. the dorian measure. 109 was no social oppression to cast off, or they could so exercise their energies as to be in a state of enjoyment already. at present, everybody in this country is running to the helm of state, in order to see if they cannot succeed in steering the ship into some pleasanter waters ; and, in the old countries, they are engaged in throwing overboard the cargo it is carry ing, that they may save the ship perchance from sinking, old and leaky as it is. but, in a nation truly cultivated, life would prove so rich, that every man could afford to pursue his own vocation ; and " nothing should hurt or destroy in au the holy mountain." or, if it is fanciful to suppose that quite this millenium is to be attained in this sphere, — into which is born, in every generation, a fresh mass of chaotic life, to be trained and cultivated by truth and beauty, — yet more and more approximation is to be looked for, as the ages rou on. in the mean time, we need lose no opportunity that we have. there is no reason why we should not instantly begin to work on this plan. our country is full of means. europe is pouring out upon us her artists and scholars. we are rich, and can tax ourselves for conservative as well as for destructive purposes. why not employ these artists and scholars to make a new revival of learning, which shall be, to times to come, what that, produced by the dislodged greeks of the captured eastern empire, was to europe in the fourteenth century ? why should not our merchants become, like the merchant-princes of italy, the patrons of science and art, and give their children as well as their money to these pursuits ? how many of the growing evils of our society would be crushed, as they are taking root, if, as fast as americans became rich, they should leave the pursuit of riches to those who are poorer, and use the advantage of the leisure they have earned, to cultivate what the ancients ex pressively call " the humanities ; " at least educate their chil dren to live, rather than to accumulate superfluous means of living; to be living men, rather than instruments of living ! " is not the life more than raiment ? " it is plain, that, if we can spend a hundred millions of dol lars in a year for so questionable a purpose as the late war of mexico, we have resources on which we might draw for 110 crawforiss orpheus. public education. and, were education organized and set to music, as the art of destruction is, and that which it is to gain made as definite an object to the imagination, can it be doubted that it could raise its corps of volunteers, ready to spend and be spent for the truth, beauty, and power over nature, which are offered as rewards to the striving ? great institutions, large and combined efforts, are doubt less necessary ; universities, properly so called, in which a universal culture should be made possible ; and these should exist in au our great cities, sending forth their branches into the country towns, or at least their scholars, until the passion of all this people be inspired with truth and beauty. but, if this only adequate measure is stiu delayed, let every man and woman who see into the subject cultivate their own natures, and those of their children and ' immediate circle. no hour, redeemed from sordid or brutal degradation, but shall tell. thy father worketh hitherto ; and do thou work, nothing doubting. it is thus that thou shalt enter spiritually into the legislature of thy country, and help redeem its heart to progress. for it is with thy country as with thyself : unless an ever-progressing truth inform that department which mediates between the passion and the will, it will revolve in a vicious circle, till all freedom, and all capacity for freedom, expire. only the truth can make us free, and keep us free. crawford's orpheus. for ever passeth beauty's form to nature's deep abyss : not always love, unchanged and warm, dares with his lyre old night to charm, and win the faded bliss. but always poet's heart believeth, "whatever time may say, there is no loss but song retrieveth : he is a coward-heart that leaveth the light of life, — death's prey. a spirws reply. ill blest be the poet's hand that toiled to carve in lasting stone the act that in all time hath foiled despair's terrific power, and spoiled destruction of his own. thus ever, from the vulgar day, the hero shades his eyes ; peering through dim obstruction's sway ; perchance, upon his darkened way the cherished form may rise ! he sees her not ! and what though low lies cerberus overwrought. his lyre hath quickened lethe's flow. cast coolness o'er cocytus' glow ; all this he heedeth not : he only knows thou art not won — the " perfect good and fair : " the race of life is yet to run ; the only deed is yet undone ; the hero still must dare. -^ a spirit's reply. thou who hast sought thy light of life through hades' horrors black. hast charmed them all, and won thy quest, and wouldst thy way retrack, — rest thou — as he of old did not — upon the promise fair. that beauty aye shall follow him' who all for her will dare. as thou didst count no bygone loss. count step by step no gain ; but trust that in the upper air she '11 be with thee again. 113 carrespandence. art. vii. — correspondence. tfle fact that nature answers to spirit is one which is con fined to no new or narrow circle of experiences. the world at large is the school which believes in it ; and daily ufe, in all its immense detail, is the theatre of its exemphiication. the young child acts upon it spontaneously, when the change ful play of the mother's countenance is interpreted into gen tle love or gentle rebuke; and mankind, in the main, are satisfied with the living face, as the natural representative of the soul. love and dislike attach to the human countenance as though it were the inner man. moreover, the whole body, in its obedience to the will, is known universally as answer ing to the spirit ; and its actions are not regarded as mechan ical, but as spiritual, by virtue of the correspondence. the difficulty under which the learned labor, of conceiving a con nection between virtues and machines, is no difficulty at all for the common faith ; which, in truth, embraces the learned themselves, and maintains that the bodily good deeds of good men are noble, and that their willing arms are the real ex tending of their spiritual powers and inchnations. it is the same with the arts, which comprehend all rational actions, as contradistinguished from divine or natural operations ; for whatever arts we learn and practise, answer to particular encte* for which they are acquired and exercised, and are estimated, by all who understand them, in proportion to their correspond ence with the ^design in the mind of the inventor, and to the requirements of those for whose sake they are appked. an art without an end is an absurdity ; a body without a soul is fearful to souls ; a face without a mind is idiocy, avorse than death. no wonder, then, that we enjoy an intuitive percep tion of the correspondence of means to ends, and of nature to spirit ; for otherwise the universe would be a vast charnel house, and society upon earth a mere brotherhood of the dead. if the face, the body, the actions, and the inventions of man kind are always uiterpreted by an instinctive application of the law of correspondence, the frame of nature itself is also correspondence. 113 felt, according to the same law, in the workings of the poetic facijty ; a power the most eminently passive to the great in fluences of substantial truth. for poetry is the synthesis of our other perceptions, the universalization of our common thoughts, the midway hospice in ungenial times for the way worn traveller from the religion of the past to the religion of the future. when church and state, theology and philo sophy, forsake the universal verities of existence, then poetry takes them up. in such times, it becomes the church, the provisional spouse of the father of the fatherless. it is the only faculty to which all facts are welcome in all times. place the most pinched sectary in the seat of the muses, and you see his puckered ups expand into round and flowing smiles ; and " his eye, in a fine frenzy rolling," communes manifestly with superior beings from all the quarters of the opened hea vens. unwittingly he transcends his creed, and all the creeds of his generation, and utters profundities which perplex his own understanding the moment the spiritual wine has ceased to work upon him. as the prisoner of doctrine, he pusil lanimously vikings his hands over the problems of existence, of which his own doctrines are the difficulty ; but in his poetic enfranchisement, by the clue of unfearing love and harmony, he easily and gauy perambulates the open gardens of virtue and beauty, where feeling and delight are au-sufficient ex positors of the unity of creation. obsequious to the guidance of the spirit of nature, he submits himself unconsciously, na turally, to the principles and laws whereby nature issues into satisfaction. the first of these conditions for poetry is, that all things in the world shall be capable of an application to the human heart, — that objects seemingly dead shall still be fitly the objects of love or dislike, from relevancy, whether of harmony or discord, to the affections of mankind. thus poetry is the complement of our social instincts, as it pro claims that the connection of the soul with nature is not limited to correspondence with the head or the body, or the works of the hands or the inventions of the thought, but extends to the kingdoms of the earth and the entire fabric of the universe ; and that every form, great or small, breathes out life, and aspires to personality and animation. in this 15 114 correspondence. way, poetry is creative, because it revives the bodies of nature with new but congenial spirits, and completes their intended animation, by repossessing them in the name of the human soul. this, however, is nearly all that can be said of the apprecia tion of correspondence by mankind at present. it is, wher ever we find it, only an instinctive knowledge, and maintained for the necessity of the case ; enough being admitted to carry on the business of the world, or to authorize the jaded mind to take refreshment in the ideal realms of song. for the rest, correspondence has died away out of religion ; it has had neither revival nor shelter in the conceptions of philo sophy ; and science, preoccupied with engagements and dis tractions, has not yet had leisure to base it, where its lower foundations will lie, upon the rocks and mountains of nature. let us briefly review the reasons which prevent its admission within the pale of knowledge in any of these spheres. it may be premised, that the acknowledgment of cor respondence as a general law, depends upon the acknow ledgment of god as one infinite being, who has created all things for one infinite end. whatever impairs the force of this idea, or perplexes its ultimate unity, also essentially dis turbs the doctrine of correspondence. if there be not unity in the design of nature, then one thing is not answerable to, or serviceable for, another, which is the same as to say, that there is no universal correspondence. but where, among the rehgions and sects of the old world, is the theology which is not virtually polytheism ? as against the heathen rehgions, we admit the charge easily enough : their votaries bow down to wood and stone ; and the fact is as palpable as the idol. they conceive of god as a finite being, man, animal, or thing ; or perhaps they conceive of a multitude of gods ; and it is^ impossible that creative or universal functions should attach to these, or that the uses of all things, ui au worlds, should ascend by steps to such local and partial centres. who can unagine for a moment that any of the gentile or national deities are the infinite ends of creation ? but no finite power, and no number of such powers, could even modify the universe correspondentiauy, stiu less create it so. correspondence. 115 the utmost unanimity among a thousand deities would not amount to particular, but only to general unity, and general only for some one district of the planet. in short, to think finitely of god is to think of him from the resistance of matter, and the environment of adverse circumstances, and not from love, ■wisdom, order, and unity, the omnipotent principles to v»rhich nature is completely plastic, and the grounds of the endless forms that minister to each other in their degrees, and specifically answer to one infinitely manifold end in the mind of the creator. the pagan polytheism, then, can afford no place to a doc trine of universal correspondence ; because paganism does not admit the fact of a creation, but regards matter as either eternal or non-existent, and only conceives of an arbitrary mo dification of natural powers by a multitude of beings generi cauy like ourselves ; and, ave may almost sa-y a fortiori, neither can that more condensed and compact form of the same sensuality, which may be denominated christian polytheism. the theory of three gods and a devil, the cautious heathen ism and manichseism of polite nations, is as destructive of all notions of regime and unity as if the three were three thou sand ; and darkness and light, good and evil, were co-equally universal and divine. thus, the tritheist has no doctrine of a creator, from which to deduce the universality of corres pondence. but the counterpoise to this tritheism lies natu rally in the abstract admission of a unity m the godhead, combined with the practical worship of the three mental idols ; which brings us to the second pouit, or the aspect of philosophy towards correspondences. the present philosophies are the re-action of the human mind, thoroughly ashamed of its theology, but unable to escape from it, except into pure negations. this is the rea son of their abstract character ; for, were they to let them selves down into shapes or images, they would alight at once among the monstrosities of the existing churches. hence they flit over the whole of our intellectual possessions, as though there was no church in the world; and, in their unresting isolation from reality, proclaim in the strongest manner the want of correspondence between the different 116 correspondence. organs of the mind. their general doctrine is, that god is an abstraction ; — an abstraction one and infinite ; force, substance, mind, intelligence, wisdom, love, — what you please ; but all these abstractions still, allied to no form, and barely allowed to be or exist. . where theology commits suicide, philosophy is its unhappy ghost ; a thing with no power of embodiment ; haunting the world, not dwelling in it ; and disturbing the business of hfe, without aiding to bear and lighten its real burdens. nevertheless, philosophy con tains the shells of truth, and the general principle of corre spondence. for force and substance answer to their peculiar manifestations ; mind, intelligence, wisdom, love, infinite as well as finite, correspond to their own appropriate means, adaptations, ends, and delights. au this, philosophy recog nizes, and produces even the general formula, that the human mind is the image of the divine, and that man is the mirror of the universe. but the mischief lies here, that these philo sophical principles are confirmed abstractions, or closed ideas, containing no internal series, and incapable of tallying with the indefinite multiformity of men and things. for where an indivisible unity, hke the god of the metaphysician, or the blank forms of consciousness, is the first degree or term, it is plain that it can correspond to nothing distinct in the second sphere, or the region of causes, and to nothing really various in the third, or the region of effects. spiritualities, seized upon as a general formula, and carefully emptied of all particulars, can bear no relation to a world like ours, or a creature like man, where, and in whom, parts are distin guished from parts, in form as well as function, to a degree which baffles the most instructed facuhy ; and where, indeed, succession and detail of things comprise au the means of god. if there be no series, but a blank, in our knowledge of the higher and the highest, if it number none but closed ideas, plainly we cannot apply it to the series of the lower, and see piece for piece ui each sphere; or discern the spe cific wisdom of any given natural form, still less the distinct carrying-out in nature of any spuritual principle of existence. now, this settled emptuiess is the sole attribute of all con firmed abstractions ; and philosophy, for the present at least, correspondence. 117 is forced, as we have shown, to eontmue abstract, for fear of falling into the incongruous imagery of the vulgar christian ism. the result is, that while, by its antagonism to the corruptions of theology, and the rational examination of the grounds of that antagonism, it gains some true maxims, these are confined to general admissions without details ; for the very existence of this protesting philosophy depends upon its quarrel with the positive sphere, which is the lawful domain of theology. such is the case with the philosophical maxim, that man is a microcosm, and the mirror of the universe, which, although recognized a hundred times, yet remains in the mind tinapphed ; and indeed the very men who enunciate as a maxim would be the last to sanction any attempt at detailed proof of it, in the field of nature or the sciences. all philosophy, in fine, imphes or proclaims correspondence ; no philosophy studies it. the shadow of the doctrine is grasped ; its power and substance are neither believed nor desired. but, if philosophy refuses to impregnate the natural sci ences with those germs which it contains, or to put them through the circle of growth and fructification, it is only to be expected, that a counterpoise and re-action should arise to its abstruse barrenness ; and this counterpoise exists in the sciences confining themselves to reality within the rigid limits of material law. philosophy was seen to be the protest against theology ; science is the protest against both, but proximately and prominently against the former. hence, for the present, science is opposed to all general principles arising at once from the mind, and bestows its favor only upon its own gen eralizations, which are so slow in clearing even the material world, that it must be ages of ages before even the existence of correspondence could come before it as a question. for the prospects of a science which receives the seeds of truth at the beginning are very different from those of a science which has to make them before it can sow them ; for this is a hopeless task, against the nature and possibilities of science. no wonder, then, that science, refusing to be distended with the data of subjective philosophy, should cleave to matter as a practical certainty, and seek to locate the whole of know 118 correspondence. ledge under the dome of the visible heaveps ; building up cities of material philosophy and material theology, in rivalry of those other mansions v>rhich were the prospect and conso lation of seers and prophets, and simple hearts, in less sophis ticated ages. no wonder that she excludes useless truths, from her careful foundations ; for her aim is progress, in contradistinction to the immobility of philosophy, and hence she takes no cognizance even of the truth itself, unless it be presently capable of application and enlargement. this is the reason why there is no science of correspondences ; the doctrine of correspondence being an abstraction standing by itself, which gains from theology no life or impetus sufficient to make it circulate downwards, and take body and clothing among the things of this world. so great is the dread with which the inductive or scientific regard the philosophical class, that the former disregard practically the plainest and truest maxims of the latter, in order to break for ever with all knowledge which is appa rently unprofitable. truth, in its commonest forms, becomes therefore suspect to the scientific analyst, lest some root of philosophic barrenness should lurk under it. you may venture such a truism as this, that the general is made up of its appropriate particulars ; but the scientific man will refuse to apply it in its own mode to organization, or any set of na,tural objects, or to deduce from it any of those harmo nies of construction which it manifestly involves. he will rather postpone indefinitely these precious results of so plain a principle, than run the risk of landuig himself among the eunuchs of philosophical systems. it is, however, far from my intention to deny, that there are exceptions to this view, both with relation to theology and science ; for there are exceptions to every general state ment, and it will indeed be my object to show presently, that there is a theology in existence which not only admits the notion of correspondence, but fills it with details ; and a sci ence in outline which will receive open-armed the instruc tions of that theology, and apply them to natural facts, as its most ennobling function. but this theology and science are not orthodox, or central to our present state, but exceptional correspondence. 119 and transitional, and will require a new general state before they can become ruling influences in the world. meanwhile, nothing could be more destructive to existing limitations and prejudices than a doctrine of correspondences, which might be inferred from the dread wherewith our thinkers regard analogical reasoning, although, by the way, reasoning and analogizing are fundamentally one process. what is the first postulate for the successful prosecution of a science of correspondence ? evidently this, that there be at least as much detail in the higher sphere, as the mind or the senses discern in the lower, with which the higher is to correspond. otherwise it is clear, that the two spheres can not compare with each other in the way of apposite particular equivalents. for example, if light is the lower term, and truth the higher ; and if light embraces the phenomena of reflection, refraction, polarization, &c. ; then truth cannot correspond to hght, unless there be modes of truth answering to reflection, refraction, &c. &c. and to the other exhibitions of which light is the ground. where the two fail to tally, the higher is occult, or its series is confused into uniformity, in which case it is impossible to say what it corresponds to. the beginning of mystery coincides, therefore, with the ces sation of correspondence. we may go a step further than this, and declare that the highest object of knowledge, or the divine nature, must be capable of presenting to the mind as many truths as equal the totality of things ; or otherwise there can be no corre spondence. indeed, in point of number, there never was, or can be, a polytheism which furnished a suflsciency of detail in this respect alone. it is therefore of primary im portance to receive a doctrine of god sufliciently ample to provide all the principles of correspondences, at the same time that is sufficiently unitary to contain them, and all things else, in one divine idea. this doctrine can be no other than that of the humanity of god. for, according to the maxims of the philosophers themselves, au nature is combined in man, so that he is a microcosm, or miniature world, and man him self must be comprised in a divine man ; which shows that the divine humanity is a doctrine co-extensive with all 120 correspondence. things, and therefore an adequate origin for the whole exist ence of correspondences. but, quitting the ground of number or measure, we may assert on other grounds, that the positive root of the doctrine of correspondences, as of all universal doctrines, lies in the admission of the divine humanity. for, apart from this, we have no right, save as a convenience of thought, to attri bute ends, or divine ideas, or even a divine mind, to the creator ; failing which, the idea of god becomes altogether closed or occult, and can answer to no series of existence, either successive or simultaneous. ignorance of correspond ence depends, then, mainly upon ignorance or denial of the divine humanity; and, conversely, the possibility of our knowledge of the doctrine depends expressly upon the quan tity and quality of our knowledge of the love and other attributes of the same intelligible humanity. it is not to be understood, that this doctrine of god need always be con sciously admitted, in order to a belief in the unity of creation, and the universahty of correspondence ; but only that, for this purpose, it must always be accepted, either tacitly or openly, before the laws of divine order can be deduced from their genuine fountain. we know, however, that many simple men do really live an unconscious life, upon this glo rious reception ; nor is it to be doubted, that its bright rays have streamed down often for a few moments upon the pages of philosophers ; nay, have been habitually though invisibly present, wherever worthy and open conceptions of nature and human destiny were the staple thoughts of the good or great in our own and other generations. the divine humanity, then, is the only refuge from ab stractions on the one hand, and from idolatry on the other. it is the only doctrine of god which involves neither mystery nor mental degradation ; therefore the only doctrine which can be central to the whole of human knowledge. it is the sun, of which all the objects of science are the correspon dences ; even that brightness of wisdom by which the worlds were made. radiant in the depths of the human soul, it makes our finite nature the delegated centre of the corre spondential world ; and as it constitutes man the image of correspondence. 121 god, so it enables him to conclude, that his own constitution is in reality the minimal end of correspondence, and the mierpcosm of the microcosm. it opens up a highway from man to god, a broad path upon which the angels are ascend ing and descending ; and empowcits us to conclude with reverent intentions from the one to the other, and to recon cile the science of correspondence with the truth, that " his thoughts are not as our thoughts, nor his ways as our ways." we may, therefore, now pass on to finite man, as the second ary fountain of correspondence, or the modifying principle of the universe. let us, then, narrow our field for a time to this convenient limit, and illustrate the law of correspond ency from our own familiar actions and objects. now, what is the series and procession of all human works ? man undoubtedly uves for a multiplicity of ends, which arise to him one after another ; and he proposes them to himself, in the sevenfold ages of his lifetime. these ends, we must repeat, are not abstractions, but objects containing indefinite details. for instance, the love of which children are the object ; or, to abridge so extensive a theme, let us take only that portion of the love which proposes the education of our oflfepring. here the end or object (the end and object are the same ultimately, and the end is complete in proportion as it is correlative to the object primarily) comprises, or may comprise, all the results of moral and intellectual training, all the perfections of the character of the child ; which per fections are the points to be attained. when the end is somewhat comprehended in detail, the next step is to place under or submit to it a series of means exactly adapted to advance it ; so that, for every item that is desired, there shall be a specific adequate instrument or cause of gratification, and at least as many pieces in the cause as there are general divisions in the end. in the present instance, these pieces of the cause are au the suitable means of education. the last step is to direct the end, and to apply the causes, to the proper subject, or to the child, the genuine natural effect, recipient of education ; an effect, however, less manifold than the cause, even as the cause is comparatively poor, in relation to the universal end. 16 122 correspondence. here observe again, what it is impossible to observe t6o often, that the end we have been considering is not a closed idea or a blank point, but a human being spiritually culti vated towards perfection ; and that the same must be the case with all other ends, because they have the uke divisions with their objects, and thereby correspond piecemeal, as well as in general, with their effects. also that the more thorough the correspondence between end, cause and effect, the more do we reahze in the last sphere that which we intend in the first ; and the less perfect the correspondence, the more devoid of will and intelligence is the worker, and the more abortive the work. in the latter case, the ends are absent from the causes, or the causes omitted from the effects ; or heterogeneous ends and causes are introduced, and operate confusion in the result. let us further observe, as a corol lary from the preceding, since human efforts themselves are always directed to the subjects of the divine creation, that our action can never be perfectly harmonious, until it is con sciously regulated by the universals of correspondence ; until humanity is the transparent medium and directing rein of providence ; or, in other words, until the modifying principle coincides with the creative. this is the attachment of cor respondence to god, or its inauguration into religion. having regarded man in one of his parental functions, let us now regard the creator under the same type of love, and we shall recognize that the divine father has prepared his universe for the spiritual education or sustenance of all his children. the goodness and avisdom of au possible genera tions in au worlds is the object of his works ; a greatest man, containing all men for ever, and for ever increasing in its correspondence to his own infinite humanity. and this end or object, again, is not a closed idea, a blank point, a meta physical unity, or an abstraction, but a subject more abound ing in detail than the created miiverse ; and hence, indeed, its power of abridging itself into a given correspondence with the creation. this indefinitely ample and specific end marches to its accomphshment through all the works of god in either world, and directly through his word, whence there is a most par correspondence, 123 ticular analogy between the word and the works, and cor respondence between both and the end. in fine, revelation and creation are the means of god, answering to and car rying out the divine end or idea. man is the subject to whom the divine care applies, and hence the above end and means generate the very potencies of man ; the great movement of the universe enters his body, and becomes his constitution. the world lives in him, and fits him to live in the world. not a stone, or a plant, or a living creature, but carries up its heart's thread into his loom, there to be wound into human nature, and therefrom and thenceforth, in its form and fortunes, to obey the progress of his own immortal destinies. for, as was said before, while creation is the work of god, modification is the function of man ; or, in other words, the world is continually created by god through man, that is to say, co-ordained to humanity. such are some of the preliminaries of a doctrine of parti cular correspondences : let us now look a httle more closely at what it is that makes correspondence. we have seen, that the created universe consists of chains of specific cor respondences, reachmg from heaven to earth. what, then, is the condition of correspondence between any two things in these different spheres ? to this it may be answered, that gradation or subordination of use is the first principle of the law, and that the same also is the universal principle of coimection between spirit and nature, and particularly between the soul and the body. thus, in studying corre spondence, we are virtually studying the connection between the soul and the body, and between the natural world and the spiritual. this, the pressing difficulty of human thought for thousands of years, turns out to be only soluble upon the neglected theory of correspondence. the body corresponds to the soul. why so ? it will be asked. simply because the body is the soul over again, or is the vicegerent of the soul in a new sphere whither the soul itself could not penetrate. the body is a form co-ordained to the service of the soul, shapen into usefulness by forces emanating from the soul. as the human hand shapes the pen, and then writes with it, so the soul forms the body, and 124 correspondence. then makes active use of the properties resulting from the form. the connection between the soul and the body is not more mysterious than the connection between the pen-maker and the pen ; excepting, indeed, that our knowledge of the pen is so much more complete than our knowledge • of the body. a science of the body, had we such a science, which displayed its uses, or its specific fitness to minister to the soul, would as evidently account for the attachment of the soul to the body, as the capabilities of the pen account for its connection with the fingers of the ready writer. it is, in both cases, the bond of service, of love, of use ; for what other connecting principle is possible ? is this too simple for the philosophers ? nevertheless, it is the one only ground of any connection they ever formed, or could form, either with man or thing, since the world began. unity of system alone would prescribe, that answerableness or correspondence of use be the tie between all spu:it and all nature, and between each particular spirit and its bodily organ, as it confessedly is the tie which unites man to all his works, and the channel which carries forth human ends through the extensive rami fications of our mundane dwelling. correspondence, then, in nature means correspondence of use. let us, however, as the first of all correspondences is that of the soul with the body, proceed to malte the latter somewhat more objective, that we may see its uses more distinctly, and connect it more easily in thought -vvith the uses of other instruments. for this purpose, let us admit that the soul or spirit itself is the spiritual or real body, and that the natural body is the well-furnished house, the admi rable circumstance, of the soul. something like the follow ing analogical discourse may result from this point of view, in which a stand is taken further inwards, to gain distance, distinctness, and integrity for the object. the soul being assumed as the real body, the natural body will represent all the arts of life, whether economic or esthetic. thus the eye is its window, telescope, microscope, and serves for the whole series of media which transparent substances proffer to vision, and which are as curious and exquisite for appearance as they are excellent for use ; for the correspondence. 125 eye receives the finest of impressions from things, and gives the finest of expressions from the soul. so likewise the ear is the hearing trumpet of the real body, which would otherwise be deaf to the sounds of nature ; it embraces all the means of reverberation, whether in the free air, or of cheerful voices from the household ceiling, or of more solemn sounds from the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault; in short, both the whole instrumentahty and the whole architecture of sound. but the nose is to the real body the prophecy of more devi ces than have yet entered our arts ; for hitherto sweet odors and aromas are but casual visitants of the soul, and have few artificial aids for preservation or concentration; they come and go with the fitful winds, and where is the vessel that can hold them ? for the nose seems more deficient of analogies in art than either the eye or the ear, and hence we can only identify it unworthily as the scent-bottle of the real nose. to pass over the other senses, we next observe that the legs are the whole outward art of locomotion, from pas sive to active, from the nails of the toes to the wheel of the knee, and the globe of the hip ; in short, from the cane to the railroad : the real body uses them in nature, whether for the support of its lowhness, or the means of its swiftness, or the equipage of its pride : they are the dignified columns of all movement, material as well as social ; the rich soul's car riage, and the poor soul's crutches. but the arms and hands are au. the finer machineries or inventions which are wielded directly by the arms and hands of the soul; they are the pen and the sword ; the instrument of many strings ; strength and manipulation in all their bearings ; in short, the mecha nics of animal intelligence, whereby the nice conveniences of truth are brought to the rooms and walls of the micro cosmal home. then the abdomen is the natural kitchen of the soul, raising to sublimity the processes of the gastrosophic art ; preparing from all things in its indefinite stores one universal dish, lower than cookery, higher than philosophy, even the natural blood of life, to be served up day by day in repasts for the spiritual man : the viand of viands, solid and fluid all in one ; varying from hour to hour, and suited with more than mathematic truth to the constitution of the eater. 126 correspondence. then, again, the chest distributes, with a power of wisdom dictated from the halls above, this daily bread of the body of the soul ; and the wisdom that ordains and distributes, enters the very feast, and it becomes a living entertainment ; and the brain is the steward and keeper of the animated house, perennially receiving order and law from the soul or unseen body, and transplanting them into its mundane econo my. yea, and "the brain is its natural universe, its wide spread landscapes, its illimitable ocean, its blue vault of heaven ; its royal library, studio, theatre, church, and what ever else is a place of universal sympathy for the soul. and, lastly, the skin is dress and clothing in every sphere, con venient, beautiful, or official, and it is the very mansion itself; for our houses are but our fixed and stiflfest clothes, standing by themselves, and large enough to admit of some degree of movement ; and these houses represent over again, even on theiv outside, the busy scene within, and themselves have eyes or windows, mouths or doors, and in general a paral lelism true beyond our suspicions, with the real bodies of their inhabitants ; for they are clothes vrhich fit generally, ay, and particularly too. now, by this artifice,. of holding out our bodies at some distance from us, we are enabled to illustrate for the com monest thought the connection or correspondence between the soul and the body; and, though there rriay be other motives of connection, yet it is sufficient to remark for the present, that, according to all the foregoing analogy, it is because the body is so replete with the most exquisite con venience, that it is the chosen residence or domestic establish ment of the soul. given a tenement of the kind stored with the sumptuous apparatus of the universe, and it is impossible that the soul which answers to it should not be present to, and fitly use, or, what is the same thing, animate it. not to admit thus much, would be to think meanly indeed of the soul, and of the framer of the soul. this, then, is the first solution, quite satisfactory so faj as it goes, of this hitherto intractable question. other solutions are too simple to be comprehended at all in these difficult ages. but let us now reverse the picture, and suppose, for correspondence. 127 example's sake, that a savage is introduced for the first time into one of our convenient mansions, and that he knows the use neither of table nor chair, imife nor fork, bed nor carriage, but that his naked body and unarmed hand have been accustomed to direct fellowship, or fight, with nature. can he account for the connection of the civilized man ■ with his house ? by no means. unhoused body that he is, we see in him a full type of those who dwell on the purity and freedom of disembodied spirits, and cannot con ceive the bond between spirit and nature, because they know nothing of the uses of nature to spirit. at first, then, the savage cannot divine why his civilized brother limits himself to a house, because he is uninformed of the good of a house. as he learns the uses of the furniture, and, stiu more, the mode of using it, the points of conriection come forth one by one ; and when au the uses are understood, then, for the first time, he has a plenary understanding both of the reason and mode of the permanent act of inhabitation. just so it is with the body and the' soul. the physiologi cal savage (i beg his pardon), who has been unaccustomed to the means of thought, and approaches all subjects directly with his imdoctrinated, undisciplined senses, knows not of the body as a rational abode, but as a raw substance in the midst of nature ; and how, then, should he see its connedtion with a soul ? for the uses of things are the reasons why they are used. and hence the perception of the connection of nature with spirit is the exact measure of the perception of the uses of nature. to see the one is to see the other ; as to miss the one is to miss the other also. the soul corresponds directly to the body ; it corresponds remotely, or through the body, which is the perfection of physi cal art, to the house in which the man lives. or, to put the mat ter proportionally, the soul is to the body as the body is to the house. in a secondary sense, therefore, the house, including all the implements of social hfe, may be said to correspond to the body. for the body has to hve in the material universe ; but this it cannot do nakedly. its skin is not a sufficient shelter, or a sufficient space, for hfe on the planet; its hands are not strong enough, or long enough, to move all and do 128 correspondence. all by themselves. and, not to pursue the enumeration, the body, wishing to be at home in the world, must build up in the world a medium corresponding to itself, for itself to dwell in. this medium is the house ; which is a correspondence, because it extends the active and passive powers of the hu man frame to the general system of nature, and is a defence as well as a medium. the precise uses of the house, and au it contains, are the parts of this correspondence : they are the handles by which the body holds the house ; and the form of the use need only be stated to explain the mode of the con nection. strictly speaking, however, the connection between two things is subsequent to their correspondence, and is the use or fruit of the latter ; and we therefore return, for the present, to the consideration of correspondence, and proceed to remark, that, whenever one thing is to a higher sphere what another thing is to a lower, correspondence has place between the two. correspondence is, therefore, definite proportion between dif ferent spheres. thus truth is to the spiritual world what light is to the natural world ; wherefore truth and light are correspondences. love is to the spiritual world what heat is to the natural ; therefore love and heat correspond to each other. the understanding is to the soul what the lungs are to the body ; therefore the understanding and the lungs cor respond to each other. this is the formula of that high kind of correspondence which is identical with the law and order of creation, whereby the divine ideas are embodied in the creatures. for the threefold world is a celestial equation, always co-ordinated from above and below, and fluent in a widening stream from node to node, and from immensity to immensity. i have said that the lungs correspond to the understanding ; and, to exercise abstraction, which is the ghost of thought, let us draw out the uses of the two a little particularly, that we may see with our eyes that they correspond, or that the one is in the body what the other is in the mind. now, the understanding gives distinct division, or shapen general force, to the affections of the man : it is those affections formed from without, as the will is the same actuated from within. the correspondence. 129 lungs give the capacity of separate or circumstantial action to the organs of the body, and take up or absorb the propul sions of the heart by the formal attractions of the organs them selves: they enfranchise the organs from the general force and form, as the understanding enfranchises the man from the domination of the surrounding universe. the under standing dictates precise motives into the soul from without, and by the bonds of truth, which are its membranes, acts specifically upon the affections. the lungs, through their universal connections in the body, carry distinct motions into the system, and operate physically upon the vital parts. the understanding admits invigorating elements of truth from heaven: the lungs receive fresh air from the atmospheres. the understanding, obeyed in action, conciliates the earth with heaven, and joins spiritual powers to bodily works : the lungs, in their healthy operation upon an obedient frame, mediate between the brain and the body, and draw the animal spirit of the former into the blood and muscles of the latter. but, not to extend too far this parallelism of uses, we may state in brief, that the understanding distributes the affections into series, and provides for the separate and alternate, as well as combined, action of these series; and that analo gously the lungs dispart the natural motions into free series, moment these into expansion and contraction, and also pro vide a general movement into which all particular actions cease as their office expires. now, then, so far as this has gone, the lungs are to the body what the understanding is to the mind. quoad under standing, the mind cannot pass really out of its own sphere, or grapple with the material body ; but it descends in its form, and adopts the prepared lungs, which receive because they express its form of motion, and, in performing their functions, carry out its designs in the lower world. this, then, is the correspondence between the two, that they are co-ordained, and the higher finds in the lower an answerable minister for extending its effects to a new goal. similarity of end ensures correspondence ; also the virtual presence of the superior in the inferior, and reciprocal conjunction of each with each. and this endures so long as the lower can serve the higher, 17 130 correspondence. and rightfully demand the wages of the service, or continuance of life ; but it is annulled, and death takes place, when from any cause such service becomes impossible. correspondence is, then, first, co-ordination by creation; and, secondh/, adoption and inauguration into analogous uses. the lungs are delineated by the soul, as a bodily form capable of communicating, when the time arrives, with its future un derstanding ; the understanding is a spiritual organization co-ordinate with the lungs, and which, as it comes into being, by harmony of end flows into them, and by continuous har mony into the body. in the divine idea, which contains the soul or first end, the understanding generates the lungs, which are but itself according to matter ; in human nature, the lung§ come first, and the understanding afterwards ; and then the two are co-ordinate, and the understanding, as a motion, gen erates the distinct animations of those organs, or the pulmonic functions. in creation, therefore, avhile there is absolute correspondence or causation, particular as weu as general, subsisting between the divine ideas and universal nature, there is on the other hand ^ modifying power assigned to man as always becoming a partaker in the divine end, whereby the creator consents to actuauze in the world all the forms, whether good or bad, which man evolves in his mind ; precisely to maintain inviolate the creative law of cor respondence, whereby the world is the exact habitation of humanity. as a great authority has said, " god passes through man into the world, and has nothing in common with nature excepting through man ; whence the perfection of na ture depends upon the perfection of man. for god, the author and builder of nature, disposes the world exactly according to the character of man, the medium whereby he commimicates with the world." in the earliest ages, indeed, the whole creation corresponded, as far as possible, to the divine idea, and the first men also ; but as the times ran down, and man decayed, then the creation corresponded to our fallen race, as their only dwelhng and their best educa tion. thus the primary as well as the secondary world cor responded at first to the wiu of god ; the later or subversive world, to the reahzed waywardness of mankind itself, free to correspondence. 131 draw to an indefinite extent upon the divine permissions, which granted legions of substantial evils in all the kingdoms of nature. light is to the eye what truth is to the mind ; and heat is to the body what love is to the man. hence heat and light are the natural vicegerents of truth and love ; because, by accordance of use, they prolong and extend the empire of truth and love through inferior nature. the divine light, per se, cannot enter the material creation ; but, by the obse quious arm of light-giving suns, it reaches the lowest world with creative love and power, and becomes omnipresent even through death itself by the perfect correspondence of the in strument to the end. this correspondence necessarily carries with it the greatest force ; for wherever there is a well-adapted instrument of use, a body expressly built and informed by nature for accomplishing a given design, there that design or end is spiritually present with it (for likeness of end or ipve is ^ritual presence),. and inaugurates it into active functions. thenceforth there is no way of severing the two but by injur ing the instrument, or unfitting it for the purposes of that prin ciple which can make use of it. this principle cleaves to its convenient form on the same grounds, and with tenfold the tenacity, that a wealthy citizen cleaves to his comfortable and convenient home, or civilized mankind in general to the ap pliances which make their position in the world. on account of the universality of this force, the magic of the ancient world arose out of the science of correspondences. the conjuring rod and jhe paraphernalia of the magician's cave were symbols, into which, as appropriate bodies, spirit ual forces entered. for, the natural circumstances occurring in a certain order, by the laws of creation the upper world will animate them, and rush down through them with new and marvellous efficacity. this, indeed, is the ground for which the two comprehensive symbols of christianity, bap tism and the lord's supper, are solid means or verities,, and not superstitious abracadabra. but it is not surprising, after obscurant philosophers have been preaching for ages against the power of circumstances, and endeavoring to erect the freedom of the human will upon the ruins of natural facts. 132 correspondence. that the world should know little of natural order, and nothing of the effects which it does, and is designed to, produce in the happiness and highest relations of mankind. if the creations of an infinite being, or the house and do main in which man is to dwell, are necessarily correspond ences, so also are whatever revelations he vouchsafes for the edification of his finite creatures. if, in a real sense, there be a word of god, — if that word be not the fruit of an exalted enthusiasm of our finite faculties, but the outward gift of heaven, — then as the world is made by correspond ence, so must the word be written by correspondence; and the inevitable effect of a devout and still more of an intelhgent reading of such a volume must be the instantane ous presence of the divine soul in the letter, converting the heart, and making wise the simple. this follows in the strict est manner from the premiss of a word sent down from heaven by the golden rod of correspondence. how ama zing our interest in the existence of such a word, and the mmistrations of such a science ! better, for very hope's sake, to hold to them, than to sit in the seat of the wittiest scorner, or to vwap up the proud soul in the threefold honors of skepticism ! philosophy has nothing but darkness to ofierj when it rejects precise and unitary ideas of inspiration, whe ther for the emptiness of rationausm, or for the incoherency and caprice of the protestant ideas of the divine truth, from which the only safeguard is the blessed inconsequence of those who entertain them. a correspondential word is not, however, necessarily un alterable in its outward form, or incapable of modification and contorsion. on the contrary, its letter may take a new and subversive shape, just as the creation itself has received the imprint of the fall, and, in the majority of its subjects, reflects the social and individual depravation of its secondary master. the harshness of the jewish word, arid the hid dermess of much of the christian, is, then, no more against the indwelling of the divin&love in these difficult forms, than the savagery and hostility of the creation is against the fact of a beneficent creator. it is finite man to whom all things ultimately correspond ; and it is even for his benefit correspondence, 183 that all things, good and evil, were and are created. by virtue of the science of correspondences, this will become clear as heaven's light, and the meaning of evil will be seen to be good, even divine goodness itself. it has been said already, that the first and most intelligible of correspondences is that of the body with the soul, and that the specific uses of the body demonstrate the parts of the soul. now branching out from the human body, we find two great series of subsidiary or remote correspondences : viz. on the one part, all the works of the hands, the whole world of art and society ; on the other part, the forms of the three kingdoms of nature. the first of these spheres is noto riously the prolongation of the powers of man ; the second is admitted even by naturalists to be the prolongation of his interior powers, or organization. the first is his own world of finite creation ; the second, his divinely co-ordinated world, where he can modify, but not create ; or where he is the medium, but not the rational origin, of forms. herein lie the origin and currency of the law of series ; of series which work for each other, and reciprocally gratify each other, through the ample range of the universe. .the arts of outward life are to man what the three kingdoms of nature are to the human body : each ensures the secondary omni presence of its principle in its own arena. thus, each vege table, animal, and plant is referable to some province of the human body, and thereby to a corresponding province of the soul, as each invention belongs to some province of human arms, and human wants or wills. for the series runs inwards by many moments, and triple graduations, to the central complex or unit, which corresponds, and offers the series, to the form and mechanism immediately above it, or the unseen soul of the centre, and sun of the extended system. in this way there is a primary correspondence between souls and bodies ; between ends, causes and effects ; between the spir itual world and the natural ; between the centres of life and the centres of intelhgenee and movement ; and a secondary correspondence between the primordial centres and the cir cumferences of the movement, in so far as the circumferences advance the ends of the centres. so the very stones, or the 134 correspondence. horny nails and terminations of the earth, return by mutuality of services to god, and the creation respires its existence on the perpetual condition of spending ahke its worlds and par ticles, or its days and its very seconds, upon humanity. this is an analytic view of correspondence : there is also a synthetic view, and the difference between the two may be perhaps thus illustrated. the analytic form traces the series of nature to the uving body, and the correspondence of the body to the states of the mind or soul, according to the divi sion which is adopted of those states. as an example of this view, birds are said to correspond to rational thought; for they fly in the aerial series which terminates in the lungs, and the lungs correspond to the understanding. the syn thetic form, however, is different : it deals, not with the roots of man, but with his fruits ; not with his principles, but with his actions or ends ; not with individuals, but with that which is the necessary sphere for individuals, viz. societies ; not with the fractions of units, but with the powers of numbers; not with thoughts, but with dramas and representations. thus it takes the life, arts, and manners of the social man as the one term ; and the forms of nature as the other. and although it traces these to ultimate psychological grounds in each individual, yet its method consists in regarding nothing that is more minute than the actions of societies, as paxallel to the developments of the creation. this is a very noble form of the study of universal analogy, in no way contrary to the analytic form, though much more concrete, and deal ing with masses of thought, and expressing its results in new terms ; also criticising man for his politics and social laws, rather than for his religious principles ; in a word, judging of ages by their fruits, both in action, and in the representa tions or tableaux of the universe. the first of these methods is represented in the writings of the penetrating, celestial swedenborg ; the latter, in those of the gigantic and earth born fourier. they are the arms and legs of spiritual sci ence, and the five toes of the one are as indispensable as the five jewelled fingers of the other. the first without the last may be part of a dandy bust, but not of a locomotive being. the analogies of this synthetic method, which, like the correspondence, 135 analytic, has its own limits and advantages, lie between hu man characters, as wholes, and the objects of nature : thus between the concrete terms of friendship, love, obedience, constancy, inconstancy, pride, vanity, coquetry, or any of the other phrases which express the practical shades of dif ference observable in private ufe : also between the various systems, political, social, commercial, with their numberless details, and the same objects of nature ; for these systems are but the mechanized aggregtites of human characters, gravi tating into masses which have such inevitable properties. this species of symbolism is doubtless very ancient ; but, as we said before, it has acquired new importance and precision from the labors of the noble-minded fourier. where the powers of inward contemplation or psycholo gical analysis are feeble, this science of universal analogy win be an invaluable substitute for the science of corre spondences ; and it may serve to educate many minds, and even many nations, in the laws of unity, where the material faculties and interests are more developed than the spiritual. in short, it may prove a mighty lever in the hands of a living doctrine of creation and correspondences, co-ordinating the truths of nature for truths of life which are yet to come. there is, however, one caution which cannot be too often enforced in the prosecution of analogies and corresponden ces. it is, that both terms of the iritellectual equation must lie within some sphere of experience, or no conclusion will be valid from the one to the other. where the upper term is intangible, there may indeed be " analogical conjectures " respecting it ; yet the fact that the lower corresponds to it, wiu not indicate what the higher is, but rather what it is not ; for correspondence subsists where different forms extend the same principles to different spheres. to infer from the lower to the higher, without also having experimental knowledge of the higher, would be like concluding from a staff or walk ing stick, to the hand and arm, or to the limbs ; concluding, in fact, that the arms and legs are superior specimens of wooden manufacture. but this would be to miss out all the difference of the higher correspondent, or to mistake corres pondence for useless identity. experience, therefore, is in 136 correspondence. dispensable in both spheres ; and, if there were no actual experience of the spiritual world, there could be no safe con clusion, except a negative one, from the natural world to the spiritual. therefore correspondence does not engender, but simply follows experience ; and analogies illustrate, but do not demonstrate. as an intellectual fact, correspondence subsists between the known and the known, and not between the known and the unknown. and the notion of sameness excludes that of correspondence. correspondence, moreover, is a science to be worked ; not a bare general intuition to be speculatively particularized. it cannot be drawn out of ignorance by any fineness of deduction. the philosophy that pursues it must be content to study it in the school of facts, with industry, or, what is the same thing, with induction. even its true results, with the exception of a very few general cases, cannot be confirmed by an appeal to self-evidence ; so little attestation of the ma jority of truths does "the self" at present carry with it. when we are told by a writer like swedenborg, that a horse corresponds to intellectual truth, an ass to scientific truth, a camel to general scientifics, the mind makes almost no re sponse to so bizarre a statement, and we even doubt the very existence of the principle which forces us into any such details. and why ? only because we' expect to arrive at the truth of these matters by the force of our inexperience ; because philosophy is too proud to submit to induction. otherwise we should suspend our judgment absolutely, until either the assertion were confirmed or denied by numerous true or false results, or by our repetition of the process by which it was arrived at. for, in contradicting it, we are supplanting something by nothing, and arguing that the first appearance of unlikeliness is justly condemnatory of all as sertions ; than which nothing can be more contrary to fact ; for truth is stranger than fiction, and spirit and nature are more exquisitely modish and formal than human artificiahty. and what is the way to extend the science of correspon dences, or rather to develope the general idea into a science ? undoubtedly, by studying the uses of all things to whatever is around and above them, and so pressing inwards from correspondence. 137 every side to humanity, whose nature is spirit, and whose hght is hfe ; also by studying the evolutions of humanity, as it goes out to meet the uses of the creation, and to marry them by correspondence. but it is in the word of god especially that the study of correspondence may begin, and has begun. for the material elements of the word are the central symbols of nature ; the object of the word is the universal being, even mankind ; and the life of the word is god. here, then, is the concentration of things, the divinely selected field of the principles of science. for this reason, perhaps, the objects mentioned in the word may have a car dinal and representative peculiarity in themselves, so as to constitute them a just abridgment of nature ; and the science of correspondences, without ignoring other objects, may at least begin with them ; especially as the father of our spirits uses them as the immediate vehicles of his instructions, which nature in itself is not, save by reflection, and through long sciences. but, however this may be, probably the first attempt should consist in the verification of those correspondences which are already alleged in worthy writers ; also a gather ing up of those which are implied in human discourse, and in the very texture of many languages. this verification may be attempted by the construction of new tables, representing in series the uses of each object, and dividing these series into degrees ; by which means the connections of nature with nature wiu be wonderfully opened to the mind, and things will be brought together which never shook hands in human sight before. also the upper term must be similarly tabled with reference to the mind. and then the correspondence may be tried, as the spiritual die and the natural cast are per fected. by such tables, not one of which, to my knowledge, has ever been framed, — for the corn of nature has had no granary, though the straw has been carefully stacked, — the mind will be led fi-om sphere to sphere, through regions more wide even on this earth than all our present conceptions of universal existence, and will prove the truth of the adage, that any road duly followed up will lead to the end of the world, and that there is a love in all things which enlarges the least spaces to infinity, and that uses are the vessels or 18 138 correspondence. channels whereby it circulates humanely through all things. i beheve that the construction of only six such tables would be such a wide gate of knowledge, such an oil of flexibility, such a clue to more than cretan labyrinths, such a highway to the acknowledgment of god, that it would open an age of new intellectual power, and form indeed the veritable begin ning of the inductive study of the spiritual sciences. we said before, that it requires experience of both the terms, in order to perceive their reciprocal correspondence : we may now add, that it will also require genius, according to the express declaration of swedenborg, that great induc tive student of correspondences. both these assertions are indeed but truisms ; for where is the science, or where the part of any science, how physical soever it matters not, which has not had to wait for the celestial gifts of experience and genius, before it could take its seat in the congress of know ledge ? genius, in the sense of mental fitness for this study, im plies especially a harmony of mind with the ends of creation, and an entrance thereby into the streams of causative wis dom ; and as correspondence is the connection of things, so also it is their dehght and love, and dehght and tranquility and sweet opportimity are the conditions of the soul which are the most generative of the perceptions of correspondence. therefore the poets hitherto have dwelt in this bond more than others, because they have been resigned and childlike, and have walked with god in liberty, and been content to drink of the river of his pleasures. correspondence, we said, is the nexus of creation, and it will therefore be especially manifest in what lord bacon calls transitive instances, when, in point of fact, creation is taking place. for example, if, when thoughts were arising in the mind, birds of various kinds were invariably to arise in the heavens or upon the earth, the mind would be at no difficulty to assign the minute correspondence between the two things thus emerging piecemeal into visibility together. such new creations would be startling evidences to common sense perception. it is, however, clear that nature upon this planet is far less active now thaii in earlier ages, when the corresporvdenci. 139 scenery of existence, and the living souls of the drama, were entirely changed from age to age, and new species and gen era arose in myriads out of the womb of the universal mother. also the activity of the human mind is similarly in abeyance. scores of sacred books, of influential religions, whose fossils are now extant in asia and in the traditions of northern europe, originated from the powers of man in remoter periods, and were as collateral growths in the great banyan tree of primitive revelation. these religions were at that time spiritual, and full of correspondences. given out by particular men, they yet manifestly wore the impress of the spirit-land, and were genuine powers in nature. they held commissions from heaven, and kept the consciences of na tions. modern ages, however, until of late, have not pro duced one such hieroglyphic, with the exception of the revelations of mahomet and swedenborg. the ages of metaphysical philosophy are not ages of spiritual productive ness, but of doubt, fear, and inaction. they cudgel nature for what they gain, and fail of her co-operation. the world is as stubborn as an ass to their elaborate sciences. it is not remarkable that impuissant ages should know nothing of creation, and nothing of correspondence, since they are not themselves creative ; and nature reflects, by correspondence, their own barrenness and hypocrisy, and appears therefore to be callous and dead to humanity and the soul. hypocrisy i say, because hypocrisy is a superior term of non-correspondence. and this hypocrisy lies in the real sensuality and theoretical puritanism of metaphysical philo sophy, which, recognizing the immense perceptions and pos sessions of the senses, makes of the miiid only the sharp point of the pyramid, of which sense is the broad basis ; and consequently gives the senses all power ; or power as posses sors of all within the horizon, while the mind is limited to a pin's point in space ; for the conception of a mind absolutely sundered from space is a mere pretenqe, which words neces sarily repudiate. however, under the expansive influence of a doctrine and progressive science of correspondences, this pyramidal mode of thought, in which like a wasting flame ttie mind rises 140 correspomdence. upwards, and the point of perfection is the point of cessation, must give place to columnar progress, in which the length and breadth of the spiritual world will be recognized as the top of worldly knowledge, and the sohdity of all things in and from their first principles will be guaranteed by our dis tinct perception of the inahenable spaces that are occupied by their spiritual beginnings. then will idealism and mate rialism be shouldered over the verge of the world by the exceeding fuhiess thereof; and the fitness of things for their perceived divine ends will again engender, as at first, the profound study of correspondence, as the beginning and end of knowledge, or the science of sciences. for, properly speaking, the uses of things are the princi pal knowledges, or the principles of knowledge, and the uses of things are the reasons of usage, or the grounds of corre spondency ; and as all things, whether ends, causes or effects, also have specific uses, so all things are made into ends by the first end, and are the subjects of correspondence. thus correspondence is transferred outwards, with ends, from sphere to sphere, and is omnipresent in the great circle of the universe. its science is thus the crown of those sciences which show the adaptation of nature to the developments of humanity ; and the analytic investigation of uses or ends is the point of union between the ancient and the modern worlds, — between the physical sciences as now studied, and the ancient science of correspondence. the doctrine of correspondence teaches the value and the limits of circumstances in affecting our minds and actions, and shows in what powerful spiritual streams outw-ard situa tions and events may place us. without in the slightest degree perilhng the doctrine of free-will, it rather makes the strength of that freedom an object of statistic and experi mental, than of a priori knowledge. it shows that circum stances are the nidus of both heaven and' hell ; and that the presence of the innermost good depends upon the presence of an order corresponding to it, in the disposition of society, and the distribution of the world ; for every corporeal being, of whatever kind, is used or animated by the spiritual world according to its form, and its form is the essence which pro correspondence. 141 ceeds from without, even as the essence is the form proceed ing from within. in short, outward natm-e, hereditary nature, the influences of the age, the instructions of the parent and the teacher, the ught of truth and revelation, are all circum stances ; and will is the organ which acts according to them, or not at all ; and freedom is the state of preparation, before the will is fully made up to act. thus man is the conductor of correspondences, and also the modifier ; for, in making what use of things he pleases, man draws down new and different influences from the spiritual sphere, which give rise to new and appropriate extensions of the creation. in fine, the science of fcorrespondence is the most mathe matical, mechanical, or intellectual of the sciences. the foundation of it is justice or equation, and the working of the law ensures permanent equilibrium in the world. grounded primarily for human knowledge upon the felt correspondence of the soul with the body, and the connection between the two, it first infers, and then scientifically demonstrates, the pervading fact of correspondence and connection in au other relations. correspondence of the individual with the society, of both with the world, of all with the word, and of the word with divine truth in the heavens, is in reahty the bond wherewith god has bound in one the sheaves of his great universe. it is the system of the world. the perception of this, or of the uses of things, is one important phasis of the un derstanding of universals. when this understanding comes, the main study wiu be to put things through all their uses, or to bring nature into generative conditions with spirit. from the bed of this state, new creations must arise in all the kingdoms of nature, so as to gratify the heavens with many and desirable children ; and the earth, even as sarah, will smile, in her apparent old age, at the fertility of the regenerate creation. " the barren woman shall rejoice, and be a fruitful mother of children." then the doctrine will be exempufied, not in schools or dry diagrams, but in garden and in grove, in arts like nature, and in growths like art, in new messengers of truth and instruction, growing in the night from the sportive soil, from no seed but heaven, yet with no mystery, because in the fulness of time, and in the 142 correspondence. attraction of requirement ; and, even in the physical world, the use and beauty and completing series of all things will be as an advancing testimony of the correspondence of god with nature, and of that supreme correspondence which con stitutes the marriage of the lamb. postscriptum. from what has been said we may infer, that the relation of cause and effect, as of end and cause, is no other than the relation of correspondence ; and that the perception of causation depends primarily upon our perception of the uses of effects as carrying out causes. this appkes to that which is strictly causation. the continuity of the principle reaches, however, to the relation of prior and superior to posterior and inferior effects. thus there is the evolution of actual will into forcible motion, in which production the will passes as motion into the dead sphere, or will is the cause and soul of motion, as motion is the effect and body of will. this is a case of genuine correspondence ; for will and motion are each the other, or the others. will is spiritual force, or force raised into the spiritual world ; force, or active motion, is will dropped down into the lower world : the difference of cause and effect being therefore only the difference between the two spheres into which one single principle introduces itself. besides the alteration or quaufication of will into motion, there is also the expansion and vibration of motion into widening natural spheres, or the transference and trans mission of motion from one subject to another. this is the only kind of cause and effect recognized by one class of metaphysicians. it also is, however, only the continuity of a single principle through different cu-cumstahces ; and that principle is force, and that force is will, the unimpaired transference and account of which fall under the head of the mechanical and dynamical, and not of so-called meta physical sciences. if any one asks what is power, we say therefore that it is originally will, and no abstraction, but embodied in the human arm ; and that from this centrai body and symbol it is transferred to all machineries, and extends correspondence. 143 through the world as a divine arm, or almighty power. for the arts are the comparative anatomy of the will and understanding, the three kingdoms of mind, as the three kingdoms of nature are the comparative anatomy of the soul. and there might with profit be a parallel distribution of the two into mineral, vegetable, and animal ; the body, in both eases, being, though in different departments, a fourth, or what fourier denominates, the hominal kingdom. besides justifying the common-sense perceptions of cause and effect, correspondence also justifies the usage of analo gies, metaphors, and similitudes, so frequent by the human mind, and so attractive in discourse when fitly used. for the one infinitely manifold principle of creation passes down into the worlds by indefinite streams or series, and yet is but one principle, reahzing many uses, tending all to the return to unity. for example, all things in our houses are for the one end of enfranchising man from the wants and forces of nature; and therefore they all carry one principle, but sub divide or anatomize it into different parts. thus are they all images of one principle, and all, therefore, images also of one another ; for things that are equal to the same are equal to each other. hence there is nothing but resembles, if we catch the, right point of view, au other things in all worlds. the human body is an image of the cosmical body ; the house, of both ; the room, of all three ; the trades and com merces also, of au ; and so forth. so the creation may, in considering its analogies, be regarded as a globe, on which the poles are the generative centres, from which radiate, and to which converge, the lines of longitude. these lines each correspond in its whole length ; the frigid to the temperate, the temperate to the torrid. the first part of the line engen ders the second, and the second the third. this generation is, and is by, correspondence. analogy may be represented by the lines of latitude, which intersect the former, and bring them all into relation, making of the whole a solid coherent sphere. the lines of analogy are not, moreover, merely straight, but rim in all curves and declinations, and make the coherence of au things most rhultiple and safe. these lines are to be studied by the constitution of a science of uni 144 correspondence. versa! analogies, whose home shall be the entire globe of knowledge. it is the most superficial in contact with the most deep of the sciences ; analogy in contact with corre spondency ; poetry and imagination in contact with divine, creative truth ; human fancies justified and accepted by god himself: for it is impossible for the most vagrant fancy to fancy half the odd analogies which science reveals ; and hence fancy will become but the useful matter of fact, incom prehensive scullery-maid of science. as instances of these analogies, we may cite many things from the superficial parts of the animal kingdom. thus, for instance, — not to mention man, who is like all the animals, which similitude occasionally blazes out with striking splendor, as in the pig-faced lady,^— the ox tribe, in the buffalo, the bison, the aurochs, &c., by its mane and contour, evidently touches upon the lion, the fountain of the feline ; by the brahmin bull, and other species with humps, it touches upon the camel tribe ; by other characteristics, with the deer tribe ; and so forth. the ass, by the zebra, touches upon the tiger ; and the tiger, and the cats, by their marks, as well as their flexibility, upon the snakes. the camel, very evidently, as fourier has said, upon the slave ; the toad upon the pauper ; and so forth. the blushing rose upon the maiden's cheek ; the fragrance upon her modesty. flowers upon sexual characteristics and de hghts ; and so forth. all these analogies, which extend causation laterally, or give breadth to correspondency, are, in our view, as much running lines of the creation as the lines of correspondency, and are not fanciful, unless fancy be ad mitted as a poor caterer for science. in a word, in the orb of thought, they are, as we said before, the divine or real lines of latitude ; the relation and friendliness of truth sub sisting between all things. it is not going too far to say, that analogy is the breadth or the truth of truth. it is the intersection of the mountains and rivers and hedgerows of analogy that makes the field of truth to be, not a blank arena with a mathematical diagram, but a hving landscape. it is analogy which gives flowing imagery to all ideas ; for that which is not the body of a truth, which is not in its immediate sphere, becomes its clothing. main-street. 145 thus all things are indifferently bodies or clothes, and these clothes are themselves created and living. analogy is indeed the breadth of truth, because it shows how the true is true diversely in many things or parallel fields ; and, in continuity with that analogy which consists in the relation between parallel streams of existence, there is that mere likeness which appears every now and then on the very surface of nature, and proclaims a connection where its reason and principle are at present inscrutable. by such points of likeness every thing is surrounded, and becomes a plenary mean even in visible appearance to other things all around it : as between the stag's antlers and forest-trees ; between flowers and in sects, butterflies and papilionacese, &c. &c. thus, at the very bottom of the vegetable kingdom, a substance, the mush room, fungi, &c. blazes out precisely like animal substance. aet. viii. — main-street. a respectable-looking individual makes his bow, and ad dresses the pubhc. in my daily walks along the principal street of my native town, it has often occurred to me, that, if its growth from infancy upward, and the vicissitude of characteristic scenes that have passed along this thorough fare, during the more than two centuries of its existence, could be presented to the eye in a shifting panorama, it would be an exceedingly efffective method of illustrating the march of time. acting on this idea, i have contrived a certain pictorial exhibition, somewhat in the nature of a puppet-show, by means of which i propose to call up the multiform and many-colored past before the spectator, and show him the ghosts of his forefathers, amid a succession of historic incidents, with no greater trouble than the turning of a crank. be pleased, therefore, my indulgent patrons, to walk into the show-room, and take your seats before yonder mysterious curtain. the little wheels and springs of my machinery have been well oiled ; a multitude of puppets are 19 146 main-street. dressed in character, representing all varieties of fashion, from the puritan cloak and jerkin to the latest oak hall coat ; the lamps are trimmed, and shall brighten into noon tide sunshine, or fade away in moonlight, or muffle their brilliancy in a november cloud, as the nature of the scene may require ; and, in short, the exhibition is just ready to commence. unless something should go wrong, — as, for instance, the misplacing of a picture, whereby the people and events of one century might be thrust into the middle of another ; or the breaking of a wire, which would bring the course of time to a sudden period, — barring, i say, the casu alties to which such a comphcated piece of mechanism is liable, i flatter myself, ladies and gentlemen, that the per formance will elicit your generous approbation. ting-a-ting-ting ! goes the bell ; the curtain rises ; and we behold — not, indeed, the main-street — but the tract of leaf strewn forest-land, over which its dusty pavement is hereafter to extend. you perceive, at a glance, that this is the ancient and primitive wood, — the ever-youthful and venerably old, — verdant with new twigs, yet hoary, as it were, with the snow fall of innumerable years, that have accumulated upon its intermingled branches. the white man's axe has never smitten a single tree ; his footstep has never crumpled a single one of the withered leaves, which all the autumns since the flood have been harvesting beneath. yet, see ! along through the vista of impending boughs, there is already a faintly-traced path, running nearly east and west, as if a pro phecy or foreboding of the future street had stolen into the heart of the solemn old wood. onward goes this hardly perceptible track, now ascending over a natural swell of land, now subsiding gently into a hollow ; traversed here by a httle streamlet, which gutters like a snake through the gleam of sunshine, and quickly hides itself among the under brush, in its quest for the neighboring cove ; and impeded there by the massy corpse of a giant of the forest, which had uved out its incalculable term of life, and been overthrown by mere old age, and lies buried in the new vegetation that is born of its decay. what footsteps can have worn this half main-street. 147 seen path? hark! do we not hear them now rusthng softly over the leaves ? "we discern an indian woman — a majestic and queenly woman, or else her spectral image does not represent her truly — for this is the great squaw sachem, whose rule, with that of her sons, extends from mystic to agawam. that red chief, who stalks by her side, is wap pacowet, her second husband, the priest and magician, whose incantations shall hereafter affright the pale-faced settlers with grisly phantoms, dancing and shrieking in the woods, at midnight. but greater would be the affright of the indian necromancer, if, mirrored in the pool of water at his feet, he could catch a prophetic glimpse of the noon-day marvels which the white man is destined to achieve ; if he could see, as in a dream, the stone-front of the stately hall, which will cast its shadow over this very spot; if he could be aware that the future edifice will contain a noble museum, where, among countless curiosities of earth and sea, a few indian arrow-heads shall be treasured up as memorials of a vanished race ! no such forebodings disturb the squaw sachem and wap pacowet. they pass on, beneath the tangled shade, holding high talk on matters of state and religion, and imagine, doubtless, that their own system of affairs will endure for ever. meanwhile, how fuu of its own proper life is the scene that lies around them ! the gray squirrel runs up the trees, and rustles among the upper branches. was not that the leap of a deer ? and there is the whirr of a partridge ! methinks, too, i catch the cruel and stealthy eye of a wolf, as .he draws back into yonder impervious density of under brush. so, there, amid the murmur of boughs, go the indian queen and the indian priest ; while the gloom of the broad wilderness impends over them, and its sombre mystery in vests them as with something preternatural ; and only mo mentary streaks of quivering sunlight, once in a great while, find their way down, and glimmer among the feathers in their dusky hair. can it be that the thronged street of a city will ever pass into this twilight solitude, — over those soft heaps of the decaying tree-trunks^ — and through the -swampy places, green with water-moss, — and penetrate 148 main-street. that hopeless entanglement of great trees, which have been uprooted and tossed together by a whirlwind ! it has been a wilderness from the creation. must it not be a wilderness for ever ? here an acidulous-looking gentleman in blue, glasses, with bows of berlin steel, who has taken a seat at the extremity of the front row, begins, at this early stage of the exhibition, to criticise. "the avhole affair is a manifest catch-penny," observes he, scarcely under his breath. " the trees look more hke weeds in a garden, thaii a primitive forest; the squaw sachem and wappacowet are stiff in their pasteboard joints ; and the squirrels, the deer, and the wolf, move with all the grace of a child's wooden monkey, shding up and down a stick." " i am obliged to you, sir, for the candor of your remarks," replies the showman, with a bow. " perhaps they are just. human art has its limits, and we must now and then ask a little aid from the spectator's imagination." "you will get no such aid from mine," responds the critic. " i make it a point to see things precisely as they are. but come ! go ahead ! — the stage is waiting ! " the showman proceeds. casting our eyes again over the scene, we perceive that strangers have found their way into the solitary place. in more than one spot, among the trees, an upheaved axe is glittering in the sunshine. roger conant, the first settler in naumkeag, has built his dwelling, months ago, on the border of the forest-path ; and at this moment he comes eastward through the vista of woods, with his gun over his shoulder, bringing home the choice portions of a deer. his stalwart figure, clad in a leathern jerkin and breeches of the same, strides sturdily onward, with such an air of physical force and energy, that we might almost expect the very trees to stand aside, and give him room to pass. and so, indeed, they must ; for, humble as is his name in history, roger conant still is of that class of men who do not merely find, but make, their place in the system of human affairs : a man of thoughts ful strength, he has planted the germ of a city. there stands main-street. 149 his habitation, showing in its rough architecture some features of the indian wigwam, and some of the log-cabin, and some what, too, of the straw-thatched cottage in old england, where this good yeoman had his birth and breeding. the dwelling is surrounded by a cleared space of a few acres, where indian corn grows thrivingly among the stumps of the trees ; while the dark forest hems it in, and seems to gaze silently and solemnly, as if wondering at the breadth of sun shine which the white man spreads around him. an indian, half hidden in the dusky shade, is gazing and wondering too. within the door of the cottage, you discern the wife, with her ruddy engush cheek. she is singing, doubtless, a psalm tune, at her household work ; or perhaps she sighs at the remembrance of the cheerful gossip, and all the merry social life, of her native village beyond the vast and melancholy sea. yet the next moment she laughs, with sympathetic glee, at the sports of her little tribe of children, and soon turns round, with the home-look in hpr face, as her husband's foot is heard approaching the rough-hewn threshold. how sweet must it be for those who have an eden in their hearts, hke roger conant and his wife, to find a new world to project it into, as they have ; instead of dwelling among old haunts of men, where so many household fires have been kindled and burnt out, that the very glow of happiness has something dreary in it ! not that this pair are alone in their wild eden ; for here comes goodwife massey, the young spouse of jeff rey massey, from her home hard by, with an infant at her breast. dame conant has another of like age ; and it shall hereafter be one of the disputed points of history, which of these two babies was the first town-born child. but see ! roger conant has other neighbors within view. peter palfrey likewise has buut himself a house, and so has balch and norman and woodbury. their dwelhngs, indeed, — such is the ingenious contrivance of this piece of pictorial mechanism, — seem to have arisen, at various points of the scene, even while we have been looking , at it. the fqjr est track, trodden more and more by the hob-nailed shoes of these sturdy and ponderous englishmen, has now a distinctness & 150 main-street. which it never could have acquired from the light tread of a hundred times as many indian moccasins. it will be a street, anon. as we observe it now, it goes onward from one clearing to another, here plunging into a shadowy strip of woods, there open to the sunshine, but everywhere showing a decided line, along which human interests have begun to hold their career. over yonder swampy spot, two trees have been felled, and laid side by side, to make a causeway. in another place, the axe has cleared away a confused intricacy of fallen trees and clustered boughs, which had been tossed together by a hurricane. so, now, the little children, just beginning to run alone, may trip along the path, and not often stumble over an impediment, unless they stray from it to gather wood-berries beneath the trees. and, besides the feet of grown people and children, there are the cloven hoofs of a small herd of cows, who seek their subsistence from the native grasses, and help to deepen the track of the future thoroughfare. goats also browse along it, and nibble at the twigs that thrust themselves, across the way. not seldom, in its more secluded portions, where the black shadow of the forest strives to hide the trace of human footsteps, stalks a gaunt wolf, on the watch for a kid or a young calf; or fixes his hungry gaze on the group of children gathering berries, and can hardly forbear to rush upon them. and the indians, coming from their distant wigwams to view the white man's settlement, marvel at the deep track which he makes, .and perhaps are saddened by a flitting presentiment, that this heavy tread wiu find its way over au the land; and that the wild woods, the wild wolf, and the wild indian, wiu alike be trampled beneath it. even so shall it be. the pave ments of the main-street must be laid over the red man's grave. behold ! here is a spectacle which should be ushered in by the peal of trumpets, if naumkeag had ever yet heard that cheery music, and by the roar of cannon, echoing among the woods. a procession — for, by its dignity, as marking an ^och in the history of the street, it deserves that name, — a procession advances along the pathway. the good ship abigail has arrived from england, bringing wares and mer main-street. 151 chandise, for the comfort of the inhabitants, and traffic with the indians ; bringing passengers too, and, more important than all, a governor for the new settlement. roger conant and peter palfrey, with their companions, have been to the shore to welcome him ; and now, with such honor and tri umph as their rude way of life permits, are escorting the sea-flushed voyagers to their habitations. at the point where endicott enters upon the scene, two venerable trees unite their branches high above his head ; thus forming a triumphal arch of living verdure, beneath which he pauses, with his wife leaning on his arm, to catch the first impression of their new-found home. the old settlers gaze not less earnestly at him, than he at the hoary woods and the rough surface of the clearings. they like his bearded face, under the shadow of the broad-brimmed and steeple-crowned puritan hat ; — a visage, resolute, grave, and thoughtful, yet apt to kindle with that glow of a cheerful spirit, by which men of strong character are enabled, to go joyfully on their proper tasks. his form, too, as you see it, in a doublet and hose of sad colored cloth, is of a manly make, fit for toil and hardship, and fit to wield the heavy sword that hangs from his leathern belt. his aspect is a better warrant for the ruler's office, than the parchment commission which he bears, however ■fortified it may be with the broad seal of the london council. peter palfrey nods to roger conant. " the worshipful court of assistants have done wisely," say they between themselves. " they have chosen for our governor a man out of a thousand." then they toss up their hats, — they, and au the uncouth figures, of their company, most of whom are clad in skins, inasmuch as their old kersey and hnsey woolsey garments have been torn and tattered by many a long month's wear, — they au toss up their hats, and salute their new governor and captain with a hearty enghsh shout of welcome. we seem to hear it with our own ears ; so perfectly is the action represented in this hfe-hke, this almost magic picture ! but have you observed the lady who leans upon the arm of endicott? — arose of beauty from an english garden, now to be transplanted to a fresher soil. it may be, that, 152 main-street. long years — centuries indeed — after this fair flower shall have decayed, other flowers of the same race will appear in the same soil, and gladden other generations with hereditary beauty. does not the vision haunt us yet ? has not na ture kept the mould unbroken, deemuig it a pity that the idea should vanish from mortal sight for ever, after only once assuming earthly substance ? do. we not recognize, in that fair woman's face, the model of features which still beam, at happy moments, on what was then the woodland pathway, but has long since grown into a busy street ? " this is too ridiculous ! — positively insufferable ! " mut ters the same critic who had before expressed his disapproba tion. " here is a pasteboard figure, such as a child would . cut out of a card, with a pair of very dull scissors ; and the fellow modestly requests us to see in it the prototype of hereditary beauty ! " " but, sir, " you have not the proper point of view," re marks the showman. " you sit altogether too near to get the best effect of my pictorial exhibition. pray, obuge me by removing to this other bench ; and, i venture to assure you, the proper ught and shadow will transform the spectacle into quite another thing." " pshaw ! " rephes the critic : "i want no other hght and shade. i have already told you, that it is my business to see things just as they are." " i would suggest to the author of this ingenious exhibi tion," observes a gentlemanly person, who has shown signs of being much interested, — "i would suggest, that anna gower, the first wife of governor endicott, and who came with him from england, left no posterity ; and that, conse quently, we cannot be indebted to that honorable lady for any specimens of feminine loveliness, now extant among us." having nothing to allege against this genealogical objec tion, the showman points again to the scene. < during this little interruption, you perceive that the anglo saxon energy — as the phrase now goes — has been at work in the spectacle before us. so many chimneys now send up their smoke, that it begins to have the aspect of a village street ; although every thing is so inartificial and inceptive. main-street. 153 that it seems as if one returning wave of the wild nature might overwhelm it all. but the one edifice, which gives the pledge of permanence to this bold enterprise, is seen at the central point of the picture. there stands the meet ing-house, a small structure, low-roofed, without a spire, and built of rough timber, newly hewn, with the sap still in the logs, and here and there a strip of bark adhering to them. a meaner temple was never consecrated to the worship of the deity. "with the alternative of kneeling beneath the awful vault of the firmament, it is strange that men should creep into this pent-up nook, and expect god's presence there. such, at least, one would imagine, might be the feel ing of these forest-settlers, accustomed, as they had been, to stand under the dim arches of vast cathedrals, and to offer up their hereditary worship in the old, ivy-covered churches of rural england, around which lay the bones of many gen erations of theij* forefathers. how could they dispense with the carved altarwork ? — how, with the pictured windowsj where the light of common day was hallowed by being trans mitted through the glorified figures of saints ? — how, with the lofty roof, imbued, as it must have been, with the prayers that had gone upward for centuries ? — how, with the rich peal of the solemn organ, rolling along the aisles, pervading the whole church, and sweeping the soul away on a flood of audible rehgion ? they needed nothing of all this. their house of worship, like their ceremonial, was naked, simple, and severe. but the zeal of a recovered faith burned like a lamp within their hearts, enriching every thing around them with its radiance ; making of these new walls, and this nar row compass, its own cathedral; and being, in itself, that spiritual mystery and experience, of which sacred architec ture, pictured windows, and the organ's grand solemnity, are remote and imperfect symbols. all was well, so long as their lamps were freshly kindled at the heavenly flame. after a while, however, whether in their time or their chil dren's, these lamps began to burn more dimly, or with a less genuine lustre ; and then it might be seen, how hard, cold, and confined, was their system, — how like an iron cage was that which they called liberty ! 20 154 mmi-street. too much of this. look again at the picture, and observe how the aforesaid anglo-saxon energy is now trampling along the. street, and raising a positive cloud of dust beneath its sturdy footsteps. for there the carpenters are building a new house, the frame of which was hewn and fitted in eng land, of english oak, and sent hither on shipboard ; and here a blacksmith makes huge clang and clatter on his anvil, shap ing out tools and weapons ; and yonder a wheelwright, who boasts himself a london workman, regularly bred to his hand icraft, is fashioning a set of wagonwheels, the track of which shall soon be visible. the wild forest is shrinking back; the street has lost the aromatic odor of the puie-trees, and of the sweet fern that grew beneath them. the tender and modest wild-flowers, those gentle children of savage nature that grew pale beneath the ever-brooding shade, have shrunk away and disappeared, like stars that vanish in the breadth of hght. gardens are fenced in, and display pumpkin-beds and rows of cabbages and beans ; and, though the governor and the minister both view them with a disapproving eye, plants of broad-leaved tobacco, which the cultivators are enjoined to use privily, or not at all. no wolf, for a year past, has been heard to bark, or known to range among the dwellings, exceptthat single one whose grisly head, with a plash of blood beneath it, is now affixed to the portal of the meeting house. the partridge has ceased to run across the too frequented path. of all the wild life that used to throng here, only the indians stiu come into the settlement, bringing the skins of beaver and otter, bear and elk, which they sell to endicott for the wares of england. and there is little john massey, the son of jef&ey massey and first-born of naum keag, playing beside his father's threshold, a child of six or seven years old. which is the better-grown infant, — the town or the boy ? the red men have become aware, that the street is no lon ger free to them, save by the sufferance and permission of the settlers. often, to impress them with an awe of english power, there is a muster and training of the town-forces, and a stately march of the mail-clad band, like this which we now see advancing up the street. there they come, fifty main-street. 155 of them, or more ; all with their iron breastplates and steel caps well burnished, and glimmering bravely against the sun ; their ponderous muskets on their shoulders, their bandajiers about their waists, their lighted matches in their hands, and the drum and fife playing cheerily before them. see ! do they not step like martial men ? do they not manoeuvre hke soldiers who have seen stricken fields ? and well they may ; for this band is composed of precisely such materials as those with which cromwell is preparing to beat down the strength of a kingdom ; and his famous regiment of ironsides might be recruited from just such men. in every thing, at this period. new england was the essential spirit and flower of that which was about to become uppermost in the mother country. many a bold and wise man lost the fame which would have accrued to him in english history, by crossing the atlantic with our forefathers. many a valiant captain, who might have been foremost at marston moor or naseby, exhausted his martial ardor in the command of a log-built fortress, like that which you observe on the gently rising ground at the right of the pathway, — its banner fluttering in the breeze, and the culverins and sakers showing their deadly muzzles over the rampart. a multitude of people were now thronging to new eng land ; some, because the ancient and ponderous frame-work of church and state threatened to crumble down upon their heads ; others, because they despaired of such a downfall. among those who came to naumkeag were men of history and legend, whose feet leave a track of brightness along any pathway which they have trodden. you shall behold their life-like images, — their spectres, if you choose so to call them, — passing, encountering with a familiar nod, stopping to converse together, praying, bearing weapons, laboring or resting from their labors, in the main-street. here, now, comes hugh peters, an earnest, restless man, walking swiftly, as being impelled by that fiery activity of nature which shall hereafter thrust him into the conflict of dangerous affairs, make him the chaplain and counsellor of cromwell, and finally bring him to a bloody end. he pauses, by the meeting house, to exchange a greeting with roger williams, whose 156 main-street. face indicates, methinks, a gentler spirit, kinder and more expansive, than that of peters ; yet not less active for v\rhat he discerns to be the will of god, or the welfare of mankind. and look ! here is a guest for endicott, coming forth out of the forest, through which he has been journeying from boston, and which, with its rude branches, has caught hold of his attire, and has wet his feet with its swamps and streams. still there is something in his mild and venerable, though not aged presence, — a propriety, an, equilibrium in governor win throp's nature, that causes the disarray of his costume to be unnoticed, and gives us the same impression as if he were clad in such grave and rich attire as we may suppose him to have worn in the council chamber of the colony. is not this characteristic wonderfully perceptible in our spectral repre sentative of his person ? but what dignitary is this crossing from the other side to greet the governor ? a stately per sonage, in a dark velvet cloak, with a hoary beard, and a gold chain across his breast : he has the authoritative port of one avho has filled the highest civic station in the first of cities. of all men in the world, we should least expect to meet the ' lord mayor of london — as sir richard saltonstau has been, once and again — in a forest-bordered settlement of the western wilderness. farther down the street, we see emanuel downing, a grave and worthy citizen, with his son george, a stripling who has a career before him : his shrewd and quick capacity and phant conscience shall not only exalt him high, but secure him from a downfall. here is another figure, on whose characteristic make and expressive action i will stake the credit of my pic torial puppet-show. have you not ahready detected a quaint, sly humor in that face, — an eccentricity in the manner, — a certain indescribable waywardness, — all the marks, in short, of an original man, unmistakeably impressed, yet kept down by a sense of clerical restraint ? that is nathaniel ward, the minister of ipswich, but better remembered as the simple cobbler of agawam. he hammered his sole so faithfully, and stitched his upper-leather so well, that the shoe is hardly yet worn out, though thrown aside for some two centuries past. and next, among these puritans and roundheads, we main-street. 157 observe the very model of a cavalier, with the curling love lock, the fantastically trimmed beard, the embroidery, the orna mented rapier, the gilded dagger, and all other foppishnesses that distinguished the wild gallants who rode headlong to their overthrow in the cause of king charles. this is morton of merry mount, who has come hither to hold a council with endi cott, but will shortly be his prisoner. yonder pale, decaying figure of a avhite-robed woman who glides slowly along the street, is the lady arabella, looking for her own grave in the virgin soil. that other female form, who seems to be talk ing — we might almost say preaching or expounding — in the centre of a group of profoundly attentive auditors, is ann hutchinson. and here comes vane. " but, my dear sir," interrupts the same gentleman who before questioned the showman's genealogical accuracy, *' allow me to observe, that these historical personages could not possibly have met together in the main-street. they might, and probably did, all visit our old town, at one time or another, but not simultaneously ; and you have fallen into anachronisms that i positively shudder to think of ! " " the fellow," adds the scarcely civil critic, " has learned a bead-roll of historic names, whom he lugs into his pictorial puppet-show, as he calls it, helter-skelter, without caring whether they were contemporaries or not, — and sets them all by the ears together. but was there ever such a fund of impudence ! to hear his running commentary, you would suppose that these miserable slips of painted pasteboard, with hardly the remotest outlines of the human figure, had all the character and expression of michael angelo's pictures. weu! — goon, sir!" " sir, you break the illusion of the scene," mildly remon strates the showman. " illusion ! what illusion ? " rejoins the critic, with a con temptuous snort. "on the word of a gentleman, i see nothing illusive in the wretchedly bedaubed sheet of canvass that forms your back-ground, orin these pasteboard slips that hitch and jerk along the front. the only illusion, permit me to say, is in the puppet-showman's tongue, — and that but a wretched one, into the bargain ! " 158 main-street. "we public men," replies the showman, meekly, "must lay our account, sometimes, to meet an uncandid severity of criticism. but — merely for your own pleasure, sir — let me entreat you to take another point of view. sit further back, by that young lady, in whose face i have watched the reflection of every changing scene ; only oblige me by sitting there ; and, take my word for it, the slips of pasteboard shall assume spiritual life, and the bedaubed canvass become an airy and changeable reflex of what it purpor;ts to represent." " i know better," retorts the critic, setthng himself in his seat, with sullen, but self-complacent immovableness. " and, as for my own pleasure, i shall best consult it by remaining precisely where i am." the showman bows, and waves his hand; and, at the signal, as if time and vicissitude had been awaiting his per mission to move onward, the mimic street becomes alive again. years have rolled over our scene, and converted the forest track into a dusty thoroughfare, which, being intersected with lanes and cross-paths, may fairly be designated as the main street. on the ground-sites of many of the logbuilt sheds, into which the first settlers crept for shelter, houses of quaint architecture have now risen. these later edifices are buut, as you see, in one generally accordant style, though with such subordinate variety as keeps the beholder's curiosity excited, and causes each structure, like its owner's character, to pro duce its own peculiar impression. most of them have one huge chimney in the centre, with flues so vast that it must have been easy for the witches to fly out of them, as they were wont to do, when bound on a.n aerial visit to the black man in the forest. around this great chimney the wooden house clusters itself, in a whole community of gable-ends, each ascending into its own separate peak ; the second story, with its lattice-windows, projecting over the first ; and the door, which is perhaps arched, provided on the outside with an iron hammer, wherewith the visitor's hand may give a thundering rat-a-tat. the timber frame-work of these houses, as compared with those of recent date, is like the skeleton of an old giant, beside the frail bones of a modern man of main-street. 159 fashion. many of ihem, by the vast strength and soundness of their oaken substance, have been preserved through a length of time which would have tried the stability of brick and stone ; so that, in all the progressive decay and con tinual reconstruction of the street, down to our own days, we shall still behold these old edifices occupying their long accustomed sites. for instance, on the upper corner of that green lane which shall hereafter be north-street, we see the curwen house, newly built, with the carpenters still at work on the roof, nailing down the last sheaf of shingles. on the lower corner stands another dwelling, — destined, at some period of its existence, to be the abode of an unsuc cessful alchymist, — which shall likewise survive to our own generation, and perhaps long outhve it. thus, through the medium of these patriarchal edifices, we have now estab lished a sort of kindred and hereditary acquaintance with the main-street. great as is the transformation produced by a short term of years, each single day creeps through the puritan settlement sluggishly enough. it shall pass before your eyes, con densed into the space of a few moments. the grey light of early morning is slowly diffusing itself over the scene ; and the bellman, whose office it is to cry the hour at the street corners, rings the last peal upon his hand-bell, and goes wearily homewards, with the owls, the bats, and other crea tures of the night. lattices are thrust back on their hinges, as if the town were opening its eyes, in the summer morning. forth stumbles the still drowsy cow-herd, with his horn; putting which to his hps, it emits a bellowing bray, impos sible to be represented in the picture, but which reaches the pricked-up ears of every cow in the settlement, and tells her that the dewy pasture-hour is come. house after house awakes, and sends the smoke up curling from its chimney, like frosty breath from uving nostrils; and as those white wreaths of smoke, though impregnated with earthy admix tures, climb skyward, so, from each dwelling, does the morn ing worship — its spiritual essence bearing up its human imperfection — find its way to the heavenly father's throne. the breakfast-hour being past, the inhabitants do not, as 160 main-street. usual, go to their fields or workshops, but remain within doors; or perhaps walk the street, with a grave sobriety, yet a disengaged and unburthened aspect, that belongs neither to a houday nor a sabbath. and, indeed, this pass ing day is neither, nor is it a common week-day, although partaking of all the three. it is the thursday lecture ; an institution which new england has long ago reunquished, and almost forgotten, yet which it would have been better to retain, as bearing relations to both the spiritual and ordinary life, and bringing each acquainted with the other. the tokens of its observance, however, which here meet our eyes, are of rather a questionable cast. it is, in one sense, a day of pubhc shame ; the day on which transgressors, who have made themselves liable to the minor severities of the puritan law, receive their reward of ignominy. at this very moment, the constable has bound an idle fellow to the whipping-post, and is giving him his deserts with a cat-o' -nine-tails. ever since sunrise, daniel fairfield has been standing on the steps of the meeting-house, with a halter about his neck, which he is condemned to wear visibly throughout his lifetime ; doro thy talby is chained to a post at the corner of prison lane, with the hot sun blazing on her matronly face, and all for no other offence than lifting her hand against her. husband; while, through the bars of that great wooden cage, in the centre of the scene, we discern either a human being or a wild beast, or both in one, whom this public infamy causes to roar, and gnash his teeth, and shake the strong oaken bars, as if he would break forth, and tear in pieces the little children who have been peeping at him. such are the pro fitable sights that serve the good people to while away the earher part of lecture-day. betimes in the forenoon, a traveller — the first traveller that has come hitherward this morning — rides slowly into the street, on his patient steed. he seems a clergyman ; and, as he draws near, we recognize the minister of lynn, who was pre-engaged to lecture here, and has been revolving his discourse, as he rode through the hoary wilderness. behold, now, the whole town thi'onging into the meeting-house, mostly with such sombre visages, that the sunshine becomes little better than a shadow, when it falls main-street. 161 upon them. there go the thirteen men, grim rulers of a grim community ! there goes john massey, the first town born child, now a youth of twenty, whose eye wanders with peculiar interest towards that buxom damsel avho comes up the steps at the same instant. there hobbles goody foster, a sour and bitter old beldam, looking as if she went to curse, and not to pray, and whom many of her neighbors suspect of taking an occasional airing on a broomstick. there, too, slinking shamefacedly in, you observe that same poor do nothing and good-for-nothing, whom we saw castigated just now at the whipping-post. last of all, there goes the tithing man, lugging in a couple of small boys, whom he has caught at play beneath god's blessed sunshine, in a back lane. what native of naumkeag, whose recollections go back more than thirty years, does not still shudder at that dark ogre of his infancy, who perhaps had long ceased to have an actual existence, but still lived in his childish belief, in a hor rible idea, and in the nurse's threat, as the tidy man ! it will be hardly worth our while to wait two, or it may be three, turnings of the hour-glass, for tlie conclusion of the lecture. therefore, by my control over mght and darkness, i cause the dusk, and then the starless night, to brood over the street ; and summon forth again the bellman, with his lantern casting a gleam about his footsteps, to pace wearily from corner to corner, aud shout drowsily the hour to drowsy or dreaming ears. happy are we, if for nothing else, yet because we did not live in those days. in truth, when the first novelty and stir of spirit had subsided, — when the new settlement, between the forest-border and the sea, had become actually a little town, — its daily life must have trudged on ward with hardly any thing to diversify and enliven it, while also its rigidity could not fail to cause miserable distortions of the moral nature. such a life was sinister to the intellect, and sinister to the heart ; especially when one generatipjj had bequeathed its religious gloom, and the counterfeit of its religious ardor, to the next : for these characteristics, as wa,s inevitable, assumed the form both of hypocrisy and exagge ration, by being inherited from the example and precept of other human beings, and not from an original and spiritual 21 162 main-street. source. the sons and grandchildren of the first settlers were a race of lower and narrower souls than their progenitors had been. the latter were stern, severe, intolerant, but not superstitious, not even fanatical ; and endowed, if any men of that age were, with a far-seeing worldly sagacity. but it was impossible for the succeeding race to grow up, m heaven's freedom, beneath the discipline which their gloomy energy of character had established ; nor, it may be, have we even yet thrown off all the unfavorable influences which, among many good ones, were bequeathed to us by our puritan forefathers. let us thank god for having given us such ancestors ; and let each successive generation thank him, not less fervently, for being one step further from them in the march of ages. " what is all this ? " cries the critic. " a sermon ? if so, it is not in the bill." " very true," replies the showman ; " and i ask pardon of the audience." look now at the street, and observe a strange people entering it. their garments are torn and disordered, their faces haggard, their figures emaciated ; for they have made their way hither through pathless deserts, suffering hunger and hardship, with no other shelter than a hollow tree, the lair of a wild beast, or an indian wigwam. nor, in the most inhospitable and dangerous of such lodging-places, was there half the peril that awaits them in this thoroughfare of chris* tian men, with those secure dwellings and warm hearths on either side of it, and yonder meeting-house as the central object of the scene. these wanderers have received from heaven a gift that, in all epochs of the world, has brought with it th.e penalties of mortal suffering and persecution, scorn, enmity, and death itself; — a gift that, thus terrible to its pos sessors, has ever been most hateful to all other men, since its very existence seems to threaten the overthrow of whatever else the toilsome ages have built up ; — the gift of a new idea. you can discern it in them, illuminating their faces — their whole persons, indeed, however earthly and cloddish — with a hght that inevitably shines through, and makes the startled community aware that these men are not as they themselves main-street. 163 are ; not brethren nor neighbors of their thought. forthwith; it is as if an earthquake rumbled through the town, making its vibrations felt at every hearthstone, and especially caus ing the spire of the meeting-house to totter. the quakers have come ! we are in peril ! see ! they trample upon our wise and well-established laws in the person of our chief magistrate ; for governor endicott is passing, now an aged man, and dignified with long habits of authority, — and not one of the irreverent vagabonds has moved his hat ! did you note the ominous frown of the white-bearded puritan governor, as he turned himself about, and, in his anger, half uplifted the staff that has become a needful support to his old age ? here comes old mr. norris, our venerable mini ster. win they doff their hats, and pay reverence to him ? no : their hats stick fast to their ungracious heads, as if they grew there ; and — impious varlets that they are, and worse than the heathen indians ! — they eye our reverend pastor with a peculiar scorn, distrust, unbelief, and utter denial of his sanctified pretensions, of which he himself immediately be comes conscious ; the more bitterly conscious, as he never knew nor dreamed of the like before. but look yonder ! can we believe our eyes ? a quaker woman, clad in sackcloth, and with ashes on her head, has mounted the steps of the meeting-house. she addresses the people in a wild, shrill voice, — wild and shriu it must be, to suit such a figure, — which makes them tremble -and turn pale, although they crowd open-mouthed to hear her. she is bold against established authority; she denounces the priest and his steeple-house. many of her hearers are ap palled ; some weep ; and others listen with a rapt attention, as if a living truth had now, for the first time, forced its way through the crust of habit, reached their hearts, and awa kened them to life. this matter must be looked to ; else we have brought our faith across the seas with us in vain ; and it had been better that the old forest were stiu standing here, waving its tangled boughs, and murmuring to the sky out of its desolate recesses, instead of this goodly street, if such blasphemies be spoken in it. so thought the old puritans. what was their mode of 164 main'street. action may be partly judged from the spectacles which now pass before your eyes. joshua buffum is standing in the pillory. cassandra southwick is led to prison. and there a woman, — it is ann coleman, — naked from the waist up ward, and bound to the tail of a cart, is dragged through the main-street at the pace of a brisk walk, while the con stable follows with a whip of knotted cords. a strong-armed fellow is that constable ; and each time that he flourishes his lash in the air, you see a frown wrinkhng and twisting his brow, and, at the same instant, a smile upon his lips. he loves his business, faithful officer that he is, and puts his soul into every stroke, zealous to fulfil the injunction of major hawthorne's warrant, in the spirit and to the letter. there came down a stroke that has drawn blood ! ten such stripes are to be given in salem, ten in boston, and ten in dedham ; and, with those thirty stripes of blood upon her, she is to be driven into the forest. the crimson trail goes wavering along the main-street ; but heaven grant, that, as the rain of so many years has wept upon it, time after time, and washed it all away, so there may have been a dew of mercy, to clease this cruel blood-stain out of the record of the persecutor's life ! pass on, thou spectral constable, and betake thee to thine own place of torment ! meanwhile, by the silent operation of the mechanism behind the scenes, a considerable space of time would seem to have lapsed over the street. the older dwellings now begin to look weather-beaten, through the effect of the many eastern storms that have moistened their unpainted shingles and clapboards, for not less than forty years. such is the age we would assign to the town, judg ing by the aspect of john massey, the first town-born child, whom his neighbours now call goodman massey, and whom we see yonder, a grave, almost autumnal-looking man, with children of his own about him. to the patriarchs of the settlement, no doubt, the main-street is still but an affair of yesterday, hardly more antique, even if destined to be more permanent, than a path shovelled through the snow. but to the middle-aged and elderly men who came hither in childhood or early youth, it presents the aspect of a long main-street. 165 and well-established work, on which they have expended the strength and ardor of their life. and the younger people, native to the street, whose earliest recollections are of creep ing over the paternal threshold, and rolling on the grassy margin of the track, look at it as one of the perdurable things of our mortal state, — as old as the hills of the great pasture, or the headland at the harbor's mouth. their fathers and grandsires tell them, how, within a few years past, the forest stood here with but a lonely track beneath its tangled shade. vain legend ! they cannot make it true and real to their conceptions. with them, moreover, the main-street is a street indeed, worthy to hold its way with the thronged and stately avenues of cities beyond the sea. the old puritans tell them of the crowds that hurry along cheapside and fleet-street and the strand, and of the rush of tumultuous life at temple bar. they describe london bridge, itself a street, with a row of houses on each side. they speak of the vast structure of thetower, and the solemn grandeur of westminster abbey. the children listen, and still inquire if the streets of london are longer and broader than the one before their father's door ; if the t^^'^^er is bigger than the jail in prison lane ; if the old abbey will hold a larger con gregation than our meeting-house. nothing impresses them, except their own experience. it seems all a fable, too, that wolves have ever prowled here ; and not less so, that the squaw sachem, and the sagamore her son, once ruled over this region, and treated as sovereign potentates with the english settlers, then so few and storm-beaten, now so powerful. there stand some school-boys, you observe, in a little group around a drunken indian, himself a prince of the squaw sachem's lineage. he brought hither some beaver-skins for sale, and has al ready swallowed the larger portion of their price, in deadly draughts of fire-water. is there not a touch of pathos in that picture ? and does it not go far towards telling the whole story of the vast growth and prosperity of one race, and the fated decay of another ? — the children of the stranger mak ing game of the great squaw sachem's grandson ! but the whole race of red men have not vanished with that 166 main-street. wild princess and her posterity. this march of soldiers along the street betokens the breaking-out of king phillip's war ; and these young men, the flower of, essex, are on their way to defend the villages on the connecticut ; where, at bloody brook, a terrible blow shall be smitten, and hardly one of that gallant band be left alive. and there, at that stately mansion, with its three peaks in front, and its two little peaked towers, one on either side of the door, we see brave captain gardner issuing forth, clad in his embroidered buff-coat, and his plumed cap upon his head. his trusty sword, in its steel scabbard, strikes clanking on the door-step. see how the people throng to their doors and windows, as the cavalier rides past, reining his mettled steed so gallantly, and looking so like the very soul and emblem of martial achievement, — destined, too, to meet a warrior's fate, at the desperate assault on the fortress of the narragansetts ! " the mettled steed looks like a pig," interrupts the critic, " and captain gardner himself like the devil, though a very tame one, and on a most diminutive scale." " sir, sir ! " cries the persecuted showman, losing all patience, — for, indeed, he had particularly prided himself on these figures of captain gardner and his horse, — "i see that there is no hope of pleasing you. pray, sir, do me the favor to take back your money, and withdraw ! " " not i ! " answers the unconscionable critic. " i am just beginning to get interested in the matter. come ! turn your drank, and grind out a few more of these fooleries." the showman rubs his brow impulsively, whisks the little rod with which he points out the notabilities of the scene, — but, finally, with the inevitable acquiescence of all public servants, resumes his composure, and goes on. pass onward, onward. time ! build up new houses here, and tear down thy works of yesterday, that have already the rusty moss upon them ! summon forth the minister to the abode of the young maiden, and bid him unite her to the joyful bridegroom ! let the youthful parents carry their first-born to the meeting-house, to receive the baptismal rite ! knock at the door, whence the sable fine of the funeral is next to issue ! provide other successive generations of men, main-street. 167 to trade, talk, quarrel, or walk in friendly intercourse along the street, as their fathers did before them ! do all thy daily and accustomed business, father time, in this thoroughfare, which thy footsteps, for so many years, have now made dusty ! but here, at last, thou leadest along a procession which, once witnessed, shall appear no more, and be remembered only as a hideous dream of thine, or a frenzy of thy old brain. " turn your crank, i say," bellows the remorseless critic, " and grind it out, whatever it be, without further preface ! " the showman deems it best to comply. then, here comes the worshipful capt. curwen, sheriff of essex, on horseback, at the head of an armed guard, escort ing a company of condemned prisoners from the jail to their place of execution on gallows hill. the witches ! there is no mistaking them ! the witches ! as they approach up prison lane, and turn into the main-street, let us watch their faces, as if we made a part of the pale crowd that presses so eagerly about them, yet shrinks back with such shuddering dread, leaving an open passage betwixt a dense throng on either side. listen to what the people say. there is old george jacobs, known hereabouts, these sixty years, as a man whom we' thought upright in all his way of life, quiet, blameless, a good husband before his pious wife was sunmioned from the evil to come, and a good father to the children whom she left him. ah ! but when that blessed woman went to heaven, george jacob's heart was empty, his hearth lonely, his life broken up ; his children were mar ried, and betook themselves to habitations of their own ; and satan, in his wanderings up and down, beheld this forlorn old man, to whom life was a sameness and a weariness, and found the way to tempt him. so the miserable sinner was prevailed with to mount into the air, and career among the clouds ; and he is proved to have been present at a witch meeting as far off as falmouth, on the very same night that his next neighbors saw him, with his rheumatic stoop, going in at his own door. there is john willard too ; an honest man we thought him, and so shrewd and active in his busi ness, so practical, so intent on every-day affairs, so constant at his little place of trade, where he bartered english goods 168 main-street. for indian corn and all kinds of country produce ! how could such a man find time, or what could put it into his mind, to leave his proper calling, and become a wizard 1 it is a mystery, unless the black man tempted him with great heaps of gold. see that aged;' couple, — a sad sight truly, — john proctor, and his wife elizabeth. if there were two old people in all the county of essex who seemed to have led a true christian life, and to be treading hopefully the little remnant of their earthly path, it was this very pair, yet have we heard it sworn, to the satisfaction of the worshipful chief justice sewell, and all the court and jury, that proc tor and his wife have shown their withered faces at children's bedsides, mocking, making mouths, and affrighting the poor little innocents in the night-time. they, or their spectral appearances, have stuck pins into the afflicted ones, and thrown them into deadly fainting-fits with a touch, or but a look. and, while we supposed the old man to be reading the bible to his old wife, — she meanwhile knitting in the chimney-corner, — the pair of hoary reprobates have whisked up the chimney, both on one broomstick, and flown away to a witch-communion, far into the depths of the chiu, dark forest. how fooush ! were it only for fear of rheumatic pains in their old bones, they had better have stayed at home. but away they went ; and the laughter of their decayed, cacklmg voices has been heard at midnight, aloft in the air. now, in the sunny noontide, as they go tottering to the gallows, it is the devil's turn to laugh. behind these two, — who help another along, and seem to be comforting and encouraging each other, in a manner truly pitiful, if it were not a sin to pity the old witch and wizard, — behind them comes a woman, with a dark, proud face that has been beautiful, and a figure that is still majestic. do you know her ? it is martha carrier, whom the devil found in a humble cottage, and looked into her discontented heart, and saw pride there, and tempted her with his promise that -she should be queen of hell. and now, with that lofty demeanor, she is passing to her kingdom, and, by her unquenchable -pride, transforms tjiis escort of shame into a triumphal procession, that shall attend her to the gates of her main-street. 169 infernal palace, and seat her upon the fiery throne. within this hour, she shall assume her royal dignity» last of the miserable train comes a man clad in black, of small stature and a dark complexion, with a clerical band about his neck. many a time, in the years gone by, that face has been uphfted heavenward from the pulpit of the east meeting-house, when the rev. mr. burroughs seemed to worship god. what ! — he ? the holy man ! — the learned ! — the wise ! how has the devil tempted him ? his fellow-criminals, for the most part, are obtuse, unculti vated creatures, some of them scarcely half-witted by nature, and others greatly decayed in their intellects through age. they were an easy prey for the destroyer. not so with this george burroughs, as we judge by the inward light which glows through his dark countenance, and, we might almost say, glorifies his figure, in spite of the soil and haggardness of long imprisonment, — in spite of the heavy shadow that must fall on him, while death is walking by his side. what bribe could satan offer, rich enough to tempt and overcome this man ? alas ! it may have been in the very strength of his high and searching intellect, that the tempter found the weakness which betrayed him. he yearned for knowledge ; he went groping onward into a world of mystery ; at first, as the witnesses have sworn, he summoned up the ghosts, of his two dead wives, and talked with them of matters beyond the grave; and, when their responses failed to satisfy the intense and sinful craving of his spirit, he called on satan, and was heard. yet — to look at him — who, that had not known the proof, could believe him guilty ? who would not say, while we see him offering comfort to the weak and aged peirtners of his horrible crime, — while we hear his ejaculations of prayer, that seem to bubble up out of the depths of his heart, and fly heavenward, unawares, — while we behold a radiance brightening on his features as from the other world, which is but a few steps off, —^ who would not say, that, over the dusty track of the main-street, a christian saint is now going to a martyr's death ? may not the arch fiend have been too subtle for the court and jury, and betrayed them — laughing in his sleeve the while — into the 22 170 main-street. awful error of pouring out sanctified blood as an acceptable sacrifice upon god's altar ? ah ! no ; for listen to wise cotton mather, who, as he sits there on his horse, speaks comfortably to the perplexed multitude, and tells them that au has been rehgiously and justly done, and that satan's power shall this day receive its death-blow in new england. heaven grant it be so ! — the great scholar must be right ! so, lead the poor creatures to their death! do you see that group of children and half-grown girls, and, among them, an old, hag-like indian woman, tituba by name? those are the afflicted ones. behold, at this very instant, a proof of satan's power and malice ! mercy parris, the minister's daughter, has been smitten by a flash of martha carrier's eye, and falls down in the street, writhing with horrible spasms and foaming at the mouth, like the possessed ones spoken of in scripture. hurry on the accursed witches to the gallows, ere they do more mischief ! — ere they fling out their withered arms, and scatter pestilence by handfuls among the crowd ! — ere, as their parting legacy, they cast a bhght over the land, so that henceforth it may bear no fruit nor blade of grass, and be fit for nothing but a sepulchre for their unhallowed carcasses ! so, on they go ; and old george jacobs has stumbled by reason of his infirmity : but goodman proctor and his wife lean on one another, and walk at a reasonably steady pace, considering their age. mr. burroughs seems to administer counsel to martha car rier, whose face and mien, methinks, are milder and humbler than they were. among the multitude, meanwhile, there is horror, fear, and distrust ; and friend looks askance at friend, and the husband at his wife, and the wife at him, and even the mother at her httle child ; as if, in every creature that god has made, they suspected a witch, or dreaded an ac cuser. never, never again, whether in this or any other shape, may universal madness riot in the main-street ! i perceive in your eyes, my indulgent spectators, the criti cism which you are too kind to utter. these scenes, you think, are all too sombre. so, indeed, they are ; but the blame must rest on the sombre spirit of our forefathers, who wove their web of life with hardly a single thread of rose main-street 171 color or gold, and not on me, who have a tropic love of sun shine, and would gladly gild all the world with it, if i knew where to find so much. that you may believe me, i will exhibit one of the only class of scenes, so far as my inves tigation has taught me, in which our ancestors were wont to steep their tough old hearts in wine and strong drink, and indulge an outbreak of grisly jollity. here it comes, out of the same house whence we saw brave captain gardner go forth to the wars. what ! a coffin, borne on men's shoulders, and six aged gentlemen as pall-bearers, and a long train of mourners, with black gloves and black hat-bands, and every thing black, save a white handkerchief in each mourner's hand, to wipe away his tears withal. now, my kind patrons, you are angry with me. you were bidden to a bridal-dance, and find your selves walking in a funeral procession. even so ; but look back through au the social customs of new england, in the first century of her existence, and read all her traits of char acter ; and if you find one occasion, other than a funeral-feast, where jollity was sanctioned by universal practice, i will set fire to my puppet-show without another word. these are the obsequies of old governor bradstreet, the patriarch and survivor of the first settlers, who, having intermarried with the widow gardner, is now resting from his labors, at the great age of ninety-four. the white-bearded corpse, which was his ^irit's esirthly garniture, now lies beneath yonder coffin-lid. many a cask of ale and cider is on tap, and many a draught of spiced wine and aquavitae has been quaffed. else why should the bearers stagger, as they tremulously uphold the coffin ? — and the aged pau-bearers, too, as they strive to walk solemnly beside it ? — and wherefore do the mourners tread on one another's heels ? — and why, if we may ask without offence, should the nose of the ptcverend mr. noyes, through which he has just been delivering the fiineral discourse, glow like a ruddy coal of fire ? well, weu, old friends ! pass on, with your burthen of mortahty, and lay it in the tomb with jouy hearts. people should be permitted to enjoy themselves in their own fashion ; every man to his taste ; but new england must have been a dis 172 main-street. mal abode for the man of pleasure, when the only boon-com panion was death ! under cover of a mist that has settled over the scene, a few years flit by, and escape our notice. as the atmosphere becomes transparent, we perceive a decrepit, grandsire, hob bling along the street. do you recognize him ? we saw him, first, as the baby in goodwife massey's arms, when the primeval trees were flinging their shadow over roger co nant's cabin ; we have seen him, as the boy, the youth, the man, bearing his humble part in all the successive scenes, and forming the index-figure whereby to note the age of his coeval town. and here he is, old goodman massey, taking his last walk, — often pausing, — often leaning over his staff, — and calling to mind whose dwelling stood at such and such a spot, and whose field or garden occupied the site of those more recent houses. he can render a reason for all the bends and deviations of the thoroughfare, which, in its flexible and plastic infancy, was made to swerve aside from a straight line, in order to visit every settler's door. the main-street is still youthful ; the coeval man is in his latest age. soon he will be gone, a patriarch of fourscore, yet shall retain a sort of infantine life in our local history, as the first town-born child. behold here a change, wrought in the twinkling of an eye, like an incident in a tale of magic, even while your obser vation has been fixed upon the scene. the main-street has vanished out of sight. in its stead appears a wintry waste of snow, with the sun just peeping over it, cold and bright, and tinging the avhite expanse with the faintest and most ethereal rose-color. this is the great snow of 1717, famous for the mountain-drifts in which it buried the whole country. it would seem as if the street, the growth of which we have noted so attentively, — following it from its first phase, as an indian track, until it reached the dignity of sidewalks, — were all at once obliterated, and resolved into a drearier pathlessness than when the forest covered it. the gigantic swells and billows of the snow have swept over each man's metes and bounds, and annihilated all the visible distinctions of human property. so that now, the traces of former times main-street. 173 and hitherto aecomphshed deeds being done away, mankind should be at liberty to enter on new paths, and guide them selves by other laws than heretofore ; if, indeed, the race be not extinct, and it be worth our .while to go on with the march of life, over the cold and desolate expanse that lies before us. it may be, however, that matters are not so desperate as they appear. that vast icicle, glittering so cheerlessly in the sunshine, must be the spire of the meeting-house, inerusted with frozen sleet. those great heaps, too, which we mistook for drifts, are houses, buried up to their eaves, and with their peaked roofs rounded by the depth of snow upon them. there, now, comes a gush of smoke from what i judge 'to be the chimney of the ship tavern — and another — another — and another — from the chimneys of other dwellings, where fireside comfort, domestic peace, the sports of children, and the quietude of age, are living yet, in spite of the frozen crust above them. but it is time to change the scene. its dreary monotony shall not test your fortitude like one of our actual new eng land winters, which leave so large a blank — so melancholy a death-spot — in lives so brief that they ought to be all sum mer-time. here, at least, i may claim to be ruler of the seasons. one turn of the crank shall melt away the snow from the main-street, and show the trees in their full foliage, the rose-bushes in bloom, and a border of green grass along the side-walk. there ! but what ! how ! the scene will not move. a wire is broken. the street continues buried beneath the snow, and the fate of herculaneum and pompeii has its parallel in this catastrophe. alas ! my kind and gentle audience, you know not the extent of your misfortune. the scenes to come were far better than the past. the street itself would have been more worthy of pictorial exhibition ; the deeds of its inhabitants, not less so. and how would your interest have deepened, as, passing out of the cold shadow of antiquity, in my long and weary course, i should arrive within the limits of man's memory, and, leading you at last into the sunshine of the present, should give a reflex of the very life that is flitting past us ! your own beauty, my fair townswomen, would 174 abuse of representative government. have beamed upon you, out of my scene. not a gentleman that walks the street but should have beheld his own face and figure, his gait, the peculiar swing of his arm, and the coat that he put on yesterday. then, too, — and it is what i chiefly regret, — i had expended a vast deal of light and brilliancy on a representation of the street in its whole length, from bhifum's corner downward, on the night of the grand illumination for general taylor's triumph. lastly, i should have given the crank one other turn, and have brought out the future, showing you who shall walk the main-street to morrow, and, perchance, whose funeral shall pass through it ! but these, like most other human purposes, lie unaccom plished ; and i have only further to say, that any lady or gentleman, who may feel dissatisfied with the evening's enter tainment, shall receive back the admission fee at the door. " then give me mine," cries the critic, stretching out his palm. " i said that your exhibition would prove a humbug,, and so it has turned out. so hand over my quarter ! " aet. ix. — abuse of representative government. it seems to be very generally felt, that the morals of politics in the united states have declined gradually, since the esta blishment of our constitution ; and yet there is no agreement in the opinions of men, as to the cause of the decline. it can, we think, hardly be attributed to any general de cune of morals in the nation ; for careful observation shows us, that, while certain classes in our cities have been depart ing further and further from the true idea of a republican society, the people of the country at large, and 'especially the farming population, have been approaching nearer to it, and have thus more than compensated for the loss. the votaries of fashion and of pleasure have done something, certainly, to ingraft the vices and fouies of europe upon our native stock; and the debris of the immense flood of emigration which accumulates along our shores cannot but increase the abuse of representative government. 175 grinding competition which is so rapidly swelling the lists of criminals and paupers in our great cities. but, meanwhile, our common school systems, our lyceum lectures and li braries, our newspapers and pamphlets, and especially the great temperance reform, have rendered an immense ser vice in opening the intellectual and moral views of the far mers, and rural population of all classes. our factories, too, have added to their intelligence and property, without, thus far, having injured their morals. on the whole, we think it may be safely affirmed, that the entire population of the iron slaveholding states is better fitted now for the exercise of universal suffrage, than it was when the constitution was proclaimed. we are aware, that, in the opinion of many persons, the undeniable growth of our farming population in intelligence and external morality has been accompanied by a loss of reverence and loyalty which fully counteracts the gain. we are not, however, of this opinion. the loss of reverence complained of has been, we think, rather the growth of a spirit of analysis and inquiry, and a separation of hollow forms from those which still symbolize or express a sentiment, than a real loss of reverence for rehgion or vir tue ; and this is best proved by the fact of the moral reform everywhere visible throughout the country, in the greater sobriety, industry, and refinement of the people, and in the growing disposition to look into the moral and religious basis of our laws and social habits. as for the slaveholding states, it may be true that they have suitered a general moral dechne. we are by no means sure that such is the fact, however ; but, in relation to ques tions of slavery, their legislation seems to indicate it. at the same time, we cannot at all agree with those who are dis posed to trace all our national sins to jthe one foul blot of slavery ; nor can we believe that our constitution, in recog nizing and permitting slavery, and providing for the restora tion of fugitive slaves, has admitted a poison which can be cast out only by breaking up the whole organism. this seems to us a hopeless and a faithless doctrine, and is tanta mount to an assertion that the constitution not only has one great evil in it, but that it has little or no good in it. if it 176 abtise of representative government. has, on the whole, a healthy principle of life in it, which is worth preserving, may it not be made to throw off the poi son, without sacrificing its existence ? does not analogy teach us this mode of treatment ? we do not cut down -the tree because the worm has tapped it, nor kill the animal stricken by disease, — at least, not until well assured that the recuperative powers of life are completely exhausted ; and who shall say that the constitution of these united states has reached that point of prostration ? that slavery has done much, and is still doing much, to retard the moral ad vance of our northern people, we are not disposed to deny ; and that it has had hitherto an undue uifluence in our na tional councils, to which many disgraceful acts of the legisla ture and the executive are entirely due, is beyond question. but why has it possessed this power ? not, ave apprehend, from any sympathy felt by the people of the north with slave holders, as smca, — not because these northern people had become demoralized by slave-legislation, — not because the members of congress had sworn to support the constitution ; but because these northern voters and their representatives were selfish and ignorant and passionate men, more de sirous to gain their private and their party ends, by allying themselves with the slaveholding power, than they were to eradicate a moral blot from our national system, at a sacrifice of, what they supposed to be, their interests. this barrier to improvement is, however, giving way. the voters are be coming more enlightened upon the true merits of the case ; their consciences are getting awakened ; and, besides, the conduct of the south is driving them to action, and their very selfishness will prompt them to prevent further extension of slavery and slaveholding influence. let us now suppose this to have been done ; the party tactics and selfish passions of the north to have been turned fully and successfully against the slave-power ; would there not still remain a vice in our political condition, which would continue to degrade the morals of politics, and warp a fundamental idea of our re public from its original and only true basis ? we appre hend, that, unless other changes than any we have hitherto adverted to were made, there would be such a vice in full abuse of representative government. 177 activity, and that we should still be left in the extraordinary situation of a people who, under a popular form of govern ment, is improving in its social life, while it is degrading in its political life. the vice we allude to, and which appears to us so fatal, is the perversion of the character of the represen tative, and, of course, of the representative government. if there was any one point upon which the founders of our republic especially depended as a security against the mis fortunes avhich have overtaken all the earlier democratic states, it was doubtless our representative system, by means of which they hoped to avoid the introduction of the passions of the multitude into the councils of the nation. mr. madi son, in one of his articles in the " federalist," says, speak ing of the delegation of government to persons elected, — the effect is " to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interests of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to partial and temporary considerations. under such a regulation, it may well happen, that the public voice, pronounced by representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good, than if pronounced by the peo ple themselves convened for the purpose." again, in the same letter, he says, that the representation of the union will present the advantage of a body " whose enlightened views and virtuous sentiments render them supe rior to local prejudices, and to schemes of injustice." this doctrine sounds strangely to us now, with our party pledges and instructing legislatures. it is because we have lost the true idea of a representative, and have substituted for it one of an attorney or agent, — a mouthpiece of a certain number of voters in some obscure district. instead of select ing the wisest and the best man, and allowing him to, go, entirely unshackled, to investigate and decide for us, we have come to choosing the man who will make the most ready professions and promises ; the object not being to select a representative of the wisdom and conscience, that is, of the highest character, of the district, but to select an able or a noisy expounder of the preconceived notions and opi 23 178 abuse of representative government. nions of the district, so as to place the legislature as nearly as possible in the position in which it would be, were the voters of the district personally present, with all their ignorance, prejudice, and passion. but this is precisely what the found ers of the constitution wished to avoid, in establishing a re presentative republic, since, they argued, that it would be more stable and sound than a pure democracy, because the government would not be administered by the people them selves, who are so easily misled by the ruling passions of the hour, but by the choicest spirits, whose wisdom and patriot ism would secure them against local and temporary influen ces, and whose voice would therefore "be more consonant with the public good, than the voice of the people themselves, convened for the purpose." it is not our intention here to inquire how the perversion of the representative character has gradually been brought about ; but merely to call attention to the fact, that it is now complete, and that, without an amendment in this particular, it is in vain to look for a return to the purity of our institu tions. if senators feel that they must either resign or vote as instructed by a majority of their state legislature, whatever may be their own views ; — if they forget that they are chosen by the state, not merely to do its bidding, to represent its loill at any given moment, like an attorney, but to act under the constitution for their state, but in the interests of truth and justice as applied to the union and the world, and with a direct responsibihty to their maker only ; — if they lose sight of this high duty and this high responsibility, how can they preserve the dignity of the senate ? how can they retain the character of authority, without which government becomes contempti ble ? it was clearly not the intention of the founders of our constitution to make senators and representatives directly responsible to the bodies choosing them, as principals whose wishes alone they were to consult ; for such a responsibility takes away all character of freedom, whether of thought of act. it degrades the representative, not only morally, but also intellectually ; for, if all he has to think of is the opinion and will of his constituents, the newspapers will be his chief study, and the caucus his arbiter of political science. he is abuse of representative oovernmeid. 179 degraded from the proper position of a true man, as much so as a lawyer who is arguing, for money, a case which he does not believe in ; and the most that can be expected of senators or representatives, under such a system, is, that they should become keen and unscrupulous. how, then, can we expect men of the highest moral stamp to come forward, or, if they do come forward, to retain their places and their honesty both ? as mere agents, they would be morally bound to re sign, when required to act contrary to their sense of right ; and, with the changing majorities, this would be very likely, in the natural course of things, to happen during the term for which they are chosen.* can any oae believe that it was intended by the fathers of our country to place senators in such a posi tion as this, — rto make them the mere puppets of popular changes ? the idea, as applied to a senate, is ridiculous ; and whether applied to the senate, the house of represen tatives, or the executive, it is destructive of the element of stability, which was chiefly sought in the establishment of a representative form of government, as well as to au true liberty, which can exist only as connected with stability.-] * it follows that, in this view, the chances would be in favor of the senators being forced either to violate their consciences, or to resign very freijuently in the ordinary working of the government. t we axe aware, that there igi supposed to be a difference in the position of the senator and of the representative in this respect. the latter has tmre liberty than the former. he is merely " requested," while the senator is " instructed," to change his vote, by those who have chosen him, and who may, or may not, choose him again, that is, by his masters. the represent tatives, it seems, are not so completely mastered yet as the senators. thig strikes us an extraordinary perversion of the intention of the framers of o\ir constitution, by which v^sit they intended as the conservative branch of the legislature has become gradually the most partisan and puant. it could not be otherwise under the doctrine of " instruction," the most direct and strik ing effect of which is to destroy the unity of the senate, leaving two or three struggling fractions, ruled principally by partisan or sectional prejudice. during the last session, the sectional tyranny in the senate counteracted the endeavors of the house to do common justice. we look in vain in the constitution, or in the writings of its founders, for any distinction in the liberty of the senator and representative to follow his conscience, during the term for which he is chosen. on the other hand, all the arguments in the " federalist," in chap. 62, 63, and 64, show that more stability was looked for in the senate than in the house, because the members were to be chosen for a longer term. but what security could this be. l60 abuse of representative government. the truth is, that the whole notion of a government respon sible to the people, in the sense usually understood, is absurd. it may be best, in certain stages of social progress, to have an elective government, and one chosen, like our ovsm, by universal suffrage ; but this can be true only on the suppo sition, that the nation will, on the whole, choose better men to govern, than would be chosen under an oligarchy or a despotism ; and this can happen only if the men so chosen feel their responsibility to god more directly and intimately than if placed in power by an aristocracy, or the chances of birth or of war. the difference in the mode of selecting the government is of httle importance, excepting so far as it produces this effect; and, when once the choice is made, in one form of govern^ ment or another, the governing power remains responsible only to god. it has the proper character of government, only so far as it embodies the eternal principles of god; and its only right, therefore, is the divine right. there may be a great choice m forms of appointing and changing the rulers, as tending to increase or diminish the temptations to depart from uprightness in the administration ; and we are well convinced, that our own constitution, as understood by those who made it, is better suited to our state of society than any which has yet appeared in the world ; but there can be no difference in the nature of the responsibility of the govern ment, when established. in no case can the parties, chosen to administer it, look to the human appointing power as the guide to right government : here, indeed, they may meet with an exhibition of might, which may support it or over turn it ; but, to find the right, they must look higher. on the other hand, a delegated government should be looked up to if, -with eaoi change in the party majorities of his state, the senator were expected to change his argument and his vote, or to resign ? the truth is, that, if the senator were a mere state officer, he would be perfectly free during his term : how much more important is it when he forms a part of the government of the union ? once chosen, he is no more under the con trol of his state, during his term, than of any other state. his duty is to the union and the world, under his responsibility to his maker ; and, if he faus in his duty, he may be impeached, or the legislature of his state has power, when his term expires, to choose another in his place, and that is au. abuse of representative government. 181 by the citizens, during its existence, with all the respect which can be shown to any government. if it is not more worthy of respect than any other, it should be abandoned, as not the best form of government. it deserves respect as embodying the collective wisdom and virtue of the country, which it is supposed to do, and ought to do ; and, if it does not, it is the fault of the people, and may be remedied at the next election. during its existence, however, it cannot lose its freedom, without losing its character of a government ; it cannot be, at once, the servant and the ruler of the nation. the term " public servants " seems to have added to the confusion of ideas, if it did not arise from them. how can the persons, to whom we have given authority over us, be our servants ? the servile character destroys all authority. there can be no doubt, that the successful candidates for office will be found among those who are content to look no further than to their constituents, so long as the public de mands nothing better. if it wishes its deliberative assembhes to resemble collections of sharp attorneys, squabbling for the so-called interests of their principals, it will find no lack of men well qualified and ready to squabble ; but if it wants men fitted to be legislators in a great nation, which ought to lead the movements of true liberty in the world, and every part of whose pohtical structures is destined to be studied in the old world, and to exert some influence either for good or for evil, it must adhere to the original theory of the con stitution, which is based upon true patriotism and toleration. without these, its machinery will not worlf. no clever pre tences, no balancing of selfish interests, will prevent its run ning down. the latter may do to keep the wheels going in some constitutions, of a lower order ; but ours was intended for, and can only be worked by, men of honesty and intel ligence, " whose enlightened views and virtuous sentiments render them superior to local prejudices, and to schemes of injustice." how far pledges and instruction will conduce to this latter end, can be seen without much elucidation. this brings us back to the apparent contradiction adverted to in the beginning of these remarks, namely, that the morals of the nation have been and. are actually improving, while the 182 abuse of refpresentative government. morals of politics are sinking. we have ascribed this ano malous state of things principally to the perversion of the idea of a representative government ; but it may be a»ked, why, if the people have advanced in knowledge and character, have they allowed this abuse to creep in ? the answer is, that, although the people have improved, they are still far short of the standard which the fathers of our country set before themselves, and had in view for the nation ; and, meanwhile, time has developed the temptation and the opportunities to abuse. the people, instead of being above the constitution, as we hear frequently said, are, in our opinion, still far below it, morally and intellectually, and especially in one grand characteristic, — that of toleration. the obstacles which have constantly retarded the advance of true liberty in the world, in all countries and at all times, may be divided into two classes : those which have beeq wilfully raised and maintained by gross, barefaced selfish ness, cruelty, love of conquest, and the like ; and those which men have unconsciously interposed in the path of freedom, blinded by various forms of self-love and ignorance. among the latter, intolerance has played, and still plays, a most prominent part, and no less in this republic, which boasts of its freedom, than in the older countries, where its baneful effects are known and confessed. by means of this bigotry or intolerance, the great body of honest voters (and ave pre sume that the majority of voters, of all parties, act with honest intentions) are prevented from looking on more than one side of the questions submitted to them, without being at all aware of it themselves. with the best intentions in the world, they may thus conduce to the moral debasement of their represen tatives. having themselves what they conceive to be a full understanding of important social and political questions, in which they are supported by those with whom they princi pally associate and sympathize, they are equally unable and unwilling to look fairly on the other side ; and they naturally, under the circumstances, conclude that, as the other party cannot have any right on its side, they are bound to lake all steps in their power to secure the adoption of their own views. here the evil of the thing begins to show itself, abuse of repi'esentative government. 183 when they are induced to overlook the moral character of the means employed to produce conformity with their views. the first and most obvious means is to secure a candidate who will promise, first of all, to be guided by their opinions, or, what is the same thing, to make his own coincide with theirs. the first point, therefore, is to make sure of your candidate's views : if he be a good man and intelhgent besides, why, so much the better, but first make sure of his views ! this is the feehng, and it may exist among men of zealous, honest, and improving character ; but it cannot be applied to the representative without curtailing his liberty, and reducing his moral status : for making sure of his views means mak ing sure of your man ; he becomes your man, loses property in himself, and feels that he must either do what you expect of him, or betray a trust. is this man fitted to be a leader, a ruler, for ever so short a time ? is he not rather, from the day of his election, tempted to be a follower, an anxious watcher of the tides of popular feeling ? the earnestness which makes men insist on what they believe to be the right qualification in their candidate is a virtue ; but the ignorance which makes them think that none but their own view can possibly be right, and that they can add to a man's fitness to take a part in the important work of government (which must be, either to his intelligence, know ledge, or honesty), by depriving him of his liberty, if not a positive vice, is certainly a deplorable fault. we could hardly believe, if we did not see it done on all sides, that men of inteuigence and of the purest intentions would be disposed to adopt such a course. that corrupt party leaders should seek to bind and direct their tools, we can readily understand ; but that men of conscience, of all parties, the "conscience party" no less than others, should make haste to reduce their candidates, as quickly as possible, to mere partisans, — should wish to curtail them of their full pro portions as men, to take from them, in fact, that which con stitutes them especially men, — which is their freedom of thought and action, — is one of the strangest things under the sun. there may be a confusion in some minds between ^e 184 abuse of representative government. limitations to powers conferred by the constitution on dif ferent members of government, and the abridgment of the liberty of the party acting within the range of those powers. such persons may argue, that, as there is a limit to the legal action of each member of the government, the liberty /of each is curtailed ; and hence that there is no liberty in the repre sentative but to do the will of his constituents. the two things, however, are entirely distinct. the constitution establishes checks and limitations of power, in order to pre vent the abuse of liberty. the establishment of the limita tions shows of itself, that, within the range of the powers granted, liberty should remain unimpaired; otherwise no limitation would be needed. the limitation relates entirely to the nature of the powers to be exercised, not at all to the freedom of mind and will in the exercise of the powers granted, — whereas all party pledges strike at the latter; and they cannot do this under the pretence that it is tp pre vent the abuse of liberty, for two reasons ; first, because the constitution, in the hmitations referred to, has already estab lished the necessary check ; and, secondly, because liberty, to be abused, must be exercised ; whereas they destroy liberty. republicans, who wish to retain the purity of their institu tions, must beware lest they allow their zeal to outstrip their liberality. they must remember that the same reasons, which make it their duty to spread their views of good government by all proper means, make it equally incumbent upon those who differ from them to do likewise ; and that invading the hberty of a citizen, and, above all, of one who is to assume the responsibilities of office, is a highly improper means. it is all-important for the zealous to be liberal and tolerant ; for the salvation of the republic rests with them. the indolent and the selfish will certainly never raise our national stand ard of right ; the work must be done by the zealous. they are the salt ; but, if their saltness be neutralized by the ashes of intolerance, where shall we look for help 1 if now we glance at the actual state of things, as compared to what we have said it should be, the contrast, if it were not too important in its consequences, would be absolutely ridicu abuse of representative government. 185 lous. hardly a candidate for any office is put up, that he is not assailed by a dozen zealous party leaders, who urge him to pledge himself to something. temperance men, tariff men, free-trade men, native americans, free-soilers, aboutionists, all push forward their sine qua non, and say, " agree to our terms first, or we will not vote for you, however otherwise qualified." it is in vain for the candidate to point to his past course and his general character, and beg to be allowed to go to his duties entirely free ; to decide all prac tical questions upon their merits, when they shall arise. this satisfies no one ; and, after being bandied about by his tormenters for a time, he makes a bargain, and agrees to be a sound politician, as party a understands it, if party a will support him, or as party b understands it, if party b will support him ; or sometimes, when the claims are not abso lutely contradictory, he buys the votes of several squads of voters with his ready-coined promises, and so, makes up a bundle of political virtues, at what he perhaps considers a low price. but he is mistaken. the price he has paid is exorbitant beyond reckoning. he has exchanged all that is real in political virtue for a bundle of shams ! the history of our congress, of late years, is the history of this school of politics. the scholars have made rapid pro gress, and in then: anaual exhibitions have given the world ample proof of it ; so that the electors who have chosen them have often become ashamed of their choice, and have come to feel that their representatives, instead of being, as they should be, above the level of the nation, areactually below it; and yet they express astonishment that this should be so. do they not remember that they chose these men to be their " servants," and that the master is greater than the man ? have they forgotten that they chose them without faith, depending not on their virtue and character, but on their promises and supposed interests ; that they did not expect to bind these representatives to them by their independence and courage, but rather by their selfishness and their fears ; and that there is nothing ennobling in this connection, but, on the contrary, every thing degrading? how can they expect, then, that men so chosen should be leaders of the 24 186 abuse of representative government. people ? there may be a few bright examples among them, but the great body must be time-servers. there is no getting the results of virtue and high-mindedness out of selfish calcu lations and fears. arrange it as you will, it always comes back to the hopeless problem, which carlyle says modern shrewdness is wasting time on, — namely, " given a world of knaves, to educe an honesty from their joint action." it may be thought, and perhaps justly, that the election of general taylor by so large a majority, in the face of his refusals to make himself a party man, indicates some re-action in the feelings of the people in regard to pledged candidates. there is no doubt an instinctive admiration felt for one who exhibits an independence of this kind ; and when, as in the case of general taylor, it happens to be supported by other qualities which strike the imagination of the people, it may be triumphantly carried through. but the difficulty is, that it is merely an instinctive feeling, and not an intelligent opinion, in favor of this independence, and that only with a portion of the people. many feel, on the contrary, asif_ it were a kind of underhand proceeding in a candidate to refuse to "support" the party which is about to "support" him. they look upon it as a species of fraudulent reserve in a bargain, by which they may be entrapped into giving their price, without receiving their equivalent. even those who , have an admiration of the kind of mind which disdains to bind itself, are afraid to give way to the feeling. the " sober second thoughts," so much lauded, come in and spoil their ' better instincts. they think they must bind a man by his ambition or his interests to agree with and act for them, lest his intelligence or his conscience should lead him to take some other course. here is exactly the difficulty. the representative is regarded as the agent of his consti tuents, chosen to do their bidding. they would hke to have a noble and a free agent, provided always he will do their bidding : in short, they wish to secure the aid and guidance of virtue, by means which can command the services only of selfishness. even in general taylor's case, we fear that his sound views, shown in refusing to hold out any hopes to any class of partisans, was but little appreciated in fact, abuse of representative government. 187 although it was much talked of, by his supporters. his suc cesses as a soldier, together with his general manliness and humanity of character, were universally acknowledged, and probably obtained him nine-tenths of the votes which were cast for him. if the views we have presented be sound ; if it be true that our poutical character has been degrading, since the first few years of our national existence, without any corresponding dechne in the intelligence and morals of the people, and even in the face of an improvement in those qualities, mainly in consequence of a perversion of the representative character, which has assimilated our republic too closely to a pure democracy, the question becomes interesting, — can this democratic usurpation, which threatens to sweep all before it, be arrested ? in considering this question, we think it must be admitted by all, that the mere fact of a constant improve ment in the character of the people is of itself a very hopeful symptom. if the people have improved under all the degrad ing influences of party warfare, they may improve still more ; they may improve until they see the evil clearly, and have virtue enough to overcome it. it is evident that the only check to the license of democracy in this country is to be found in the character of the people themselves ; and fortu nately our most enlightened men are no longer weighed down by the hopeless theory which still blots out the light of the future from the eyes of many a sincere patriot and worldly-wise legislator of europe. there the opinion has always prevailed, and still prevails with those who have the power, that, when democracy has once begun to feel its influence increasing, nothing can prevent its finally degene rating into hcense and anarchy, excepting an opposing in terest of some kind, as a counterpoise, — such as a wealthy privileged class, or a ruler supported by a powerful army. they do not admit, that any check to the headlong course of democracy can be found in the morahty and intelligence of the people, whom they consider as necessarily too blind and passionate to put any restraints upon themselves; or rather to aeep any. this view may be true enough as applied to the present 188 aiuse of representative government. condition of the people of europe, and we fear not altogether inapplicable to the present condition of this country ; but, ad mitting this, does it follow that, because the democracy has never yet been sufficiently enhghtened to see its errors, and curb its overbearing tendency, it can never become so ? cer tainly it does not follow ; but, on the other hand, if the fact be that the people have improved, with full liberty in their hands, and a tendency to license in pohtical matters gaining ground, it is a fair inference that they can go on advancing until a majority shall see clearly, that, in order to attain the highest results, they must be governed; and that, in order to have a conscientious and efficient government, they must bind themselves to it, in a spirit of loyalty, during its term of existence ; surrendering frankly into the hands of their dele gates the powers apportioned to them by the constitution, to be used, in all freedom, under the best fights which this representative government can command. the people, however, cannot learn this self-restraint, with out a most efficient and extended system of education. as the population increases, with such immense recruits, too, from the ignorant and shiftless of other lands, it will be im possible even to maintain our present relative degree of virtue and avisdom, without constant eflbrt. this subject has been most ably and fuuy handled by the late secretary of the massachusetts board of education in his various reports, in which, we think, he has made it ap parent, that, if the common school system is extended and improved as it ought to be, and especially if in their manage ment the utilitarian views are kept subordinate to those of an elevated morafity, the people ntay be educated to a point which will enable them to carry out fully the highest theory of our constitution, and perhaps eventually lo devise a better one. resistance to civu government. is6 abt. x. — resistance to civil government. i heaktily accept the motto, — "that government is best which governs least ; " and i should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also i believe, — " that government is best which governs not at all ; " and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. government is at best but an expedient ; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. the objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government. the standing army is only an arm of the standing government. the government itself, which i s only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and pervert ''^ j^pfnvp t he people can act throu gh it^ witness the present mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for, in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure. this american government, — what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpair ed to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity ? it has not the vitality and force of a single living man ; for a single man can bend it to his will. it is a sort of wooden gun to the people themselves ; and, if ever they should use it in earnest as a real one against each other, it will surely split. but it is not the less necessary for this ; for the people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its,din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have. governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed on, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage. it is excellent, we must all allow ; yet this government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with w-hich it got out of its way. it does not keep the country free, ^t does not settle the west. it does not educate. the 190 resistance to civil government. character inherent in the american people has done all that has been accomphshed ; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way. for government is an expedient by which men would fain succeed in letting one another alone ; and, as has been said, ^ when it is most expedient, the governed are most let alone ■ by it. trade and commerce, if they were not made of india rubber, would never manage to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way ; and, if one were to judge these men wholly by the effects of their actions, and not partly by their intentions, they would deserve to be classed and punished with those mischievous persons who put obstructions on the railroads. ' but, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those : who call themselves no-government men, i ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better goverment. let ev ery man rnake known what kind of g ovgrnrng^^t. wnn1d command his respect, and that will be one step toward jdb- taining it. after all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule, is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. but a government in which the majority rule in au cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but con science ? — in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is d:pplieable ? must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator ? why has every man a con science, then ? i think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. it k not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. the_only;ob^gafion "^^i^fe.i^^i^.^ "g'^t to assume, is tp.do„..a,t.anx,t:ypie what i think, right. it is truly enough said, that a corporation'kas no conscience ; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation loi^a a conscience., law never made men ai resistance to civil government. 191 whit more just ; and, by means of their respect for it, even / the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. a ' common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, \ that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, : privates, powder-monkeys and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars^^ aga inst their_ wills, aye, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. they have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned ; they are all peaceably inclined. now, what are they ? men at all ? or small moveable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power ? visit the navy yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an american government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts, a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments, though it may be " not a drum tfras heard, nor a funeral note, as his corse to the ramparts we hurried ; not a soldier discharged his farewell shot o'er the grave where our hero we buried." the mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. they are the standing i army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatm, &c. in most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judg ment or of the moral sense ; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones ; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. such conunand no more respect than men of straw, or a lump of dirt. (they have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. yet such as these even are commonly esteemed -good citizens. others, as most legislators, politicians, law ■^ers, ministers, and office-holders, serve the state chiefly with their heads ; and, as they rarely make any moral distinc tions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intend ing it, as god. a very few , as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with theirconsciences also, and so necessarily jresist it forth© most 192 resistance to civil government. part; and they are.cqmnxonly tr£at&dj3y:.it^.s-enemies. a wise man will only be useful as a man, and will -not submit to be " clay," and " stop a hole to keep the wind away," but leave that office to his dust at least : — " i am too high-born to be propertied, to be a secondary at control, or useful serving-man and instrument to any sovereign state throughout the world." 1 he who gives himself entirely to his fellow-men appears to ;' them useless and selfish ; but he who gives himself partially to them is pronounced a benefactor and philanthropist. how does it become a man to behave toward this ameri can government to-day ? i answer that he cannot without disgrace be assocjatei-with it. t i cannot for an instant recog jiize^that-pshtical organization as my government which is ^the slaveys government also. all men recognize the right of revolution ; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to and to resist the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. but almost all say that such is not the case now. but such was the case, they think, in the revolution of '75. if one were to tell me that this was a bad government because it taxed certain foreign commodities brought to its ports, it is most probable that i should not make an ado about it, for i can do without them : all machines have their friction ; and pos sibly this does enough good to counterbalance the evu. at any rate, it is a great evu to make a stir about it. but when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, i say, let us not have such a machine any longer. in other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and con quered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, i think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revo lutionize. what makes this duty the more urgent is the fact, that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army. pgdey;, a common authority with many on moral questions, in his chapter on the " duty of submission to civil govern resistance to civil government. 193 ment," resolves all civil obligation into expediency ; and he proceeds to say, " that so long^ as the interest of the vsrhole society requires it, that is, so long as the established govern ment cannot be resisted or changed without public incon veniency, it is the will of god that the established government be obeyed, and no longer." — "this principle being ad mitted, the justice of every particular case of resistance is reduced to a computation of the quantity of the danger and grievance on the one side, and of the probability and expense of redressing it on the other." of this, he says, every man shall judge for himself. but paley appears never to have contemplated those cases to which the rule of expediency does not apply, in which a people, as well as an individual, must do justice, cost what it may. if i have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, i must restore it to him though i drown myself. this, according to paley, would be incon venient. but he that would save his life, in such a case, shall lose it. this people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people. , in their practice, nations agree with paley ; but does any one think that massachusetts does exactly what is right at the present crisis ? " a drab of state, a cloth-o'-silver slut, to have lier train borae up, and her soul trail in the dirt." practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in massa chusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the south, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to mexico, cost what it may. i quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, co-operate with, and do the bidding of those far away, and without whom the lat ter would be harmless. we ar ^^custorned jo^a y. that the i mass of men are unprepared ; but improvement is slow, b^ f cause the few are not materially wiser or better than the \ saiiyj^ it is not so important that many should be as good ' as you, as that there be some absolute goodness so^iewhere"; 25— • 194 resistance to civil government. for that will leaven the whole lump. there are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them ; who, esteem ing themselves children of washington and franklin, sit down with their hands in their .pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing ; who even postpone the question of freedom to the question of free-trade, and quietly read the prices-current along with the latest advices from mexico, after dinner, and, it may be, fall asleep over them both. what is the price-current of an honest man and patriot to day ? they hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. they will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret. at most, they give only a cheap vote, and a feeble countenance and god speed, to the right, as it goes by them. there are nine hun dred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man ; j jbut it is easier to deal with the real possessor of a thing than ' 'with the temporary guardian of it. all voting is a sort of gaming, like chequers or back gammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions ; and betting naturally accompanies it. the character of the voters is not staked. i cast my vote, perchance, as i think right ; but i am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. i am willing to leave it to the majority. its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. even voting for the right is "^doing nothing for it. it is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. a wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. there is birt^little virtue in the action of ma sses nf mp.r)^ when the majority shall at length vote for the abohtion of slavery, it will be because i they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little sla ! very left to be abolished by their vote. they will then be the only slaves. only ms vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote. i hear of a convention to be held at bahimore, or else where, for the selection of a candidate for the presidency, resistance to civil government. 195 made up chiefly of editors, and men who are politicians by profession ; but i think, what is it to any independent, intelli gent, and respectable man what decision they may come to, shall we not have the advantage of his wisdom and honesty, nevertheless ? can we not count upon some independent votes ? are there not many individuals in the country who do not attend conventions ? but no : i find that the respec table man, so called, has immediately drifted from his posi tion, and despairs of his country, when his country has more reason to despair of him. he forthwith adopts one of the candidates thus selected as the only available one, thus proving that he is himself available for any purposes of the demagogue. his vote is of no more worth than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hirehng native, who may have been bought. oh for a man who is a man, and, as my neighbor i says, has a bone in his back which you cannot pass your hand ; through ! our statistics are at fault : the population has been returned too large. how many mere are there to a square thousand miles in this country ? hardly one. does not america offer any inducement for men to settle here ? the american has dwindled into an odd fellow, — one ^ who may be known by the development of his organ ofi gregariousness, and a manifest lack of intellect and cheerful self-reliance ; whose first and chief concern, on coming into ] the world, is to see that the alms-houses are in good repair ; and, before yet he has lawfully donned the virile garb, to collect a fund for the support of the widows and orphans that ' may be; who, in short, ventures to live only by the aid of, the mutual insurance company, which has promised to buryi him decently. it is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote ; himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong ; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him ; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his • support. if i devote myself to other pursuits and contem plations, i must first see, at least, that i do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders. i must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too. see what 196 resistance to civil government. gross inconsistency is tolerated. i have heard some of my townsmen say, " i should like to have them order me out to help put down an insurrection of the slaves, or to march to mexico, — see if i would go ; " and yet these very men have each, directly by their allegiance, and so indirectly, at least, by their money, furnished a substitute. the soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war ; is applauded by those whose own act and authority he disregards and sets at nought ; as if the state were penitent to that degree that it hired one to scourge it while it sinned, but not to that degree that it left off sinning jfor a moment. thus, under the name of order and civil government, we are all made at last to pay homage to and i support our own meanness. after the first blush of sin, comes its indifference ; and from immoral it becomes, as it were, wwmoral, and not quite unnecessary to that life which we have made. the broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it. the slight reproach to which the virtue of patriotism is commonly liable, the noble are most likely to incur. those who, w hi le they.di§a b.prfi£.e of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support, are undoubtedly its most con scientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform. some are petitioning the state to dissolve the union, to disregard the requisitions of the pre sident. why do they not dissolve it themselves, — the union between themselves and the state, — and refuse to pay their quota into its treasury ? do itot they stand in the same relation to the state, that the state does to the union ? and have not the same reasons prevented the state from resisting the union, which have prevented them from resisting the state ? how can a man be satisfied to entertain an opinion merely, and enjoy it ? is there any enjoyment in it, if his opinion is that he is aggrieved ? if you are cheated out of a single dollar by your neighbor, you do not rest satisfied with knowing that you are cheated, or with saying that you are resistance to civil gover7iment. 197 cheated, or even with petitioning him to pay you your due ; but you take effectual steps at once to obtain the full amount, and see that you are never cheated again. action from principle, — the perception and the performance of right, — changes things and relations ; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with any thing which was. it not only divides states and churches, it divides families; aye, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine. unjust laws exist : shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once ? men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. they think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. but it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. it makes it worse. why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reforrp. ? why does it not cherish its wise minority ? why does it cry and resist before it is hurt ? why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have them ? why does it always crucify christ, and excommunicate copernicus and luther, and pronounce washington and franklin rebels ? one would think, that a deliberate and practical denial of its authority was the only offence never contemplated by government ; else, why has it not assigned its definite, its suitable and proportionate penalty ? if a man who has no property refuses but once to earn niae shillings for the state, he is put in prison for a period unlimited by any law that i know, and determined only by the discretion of those who placed him there ; but if he should steal ninety times nine shillings from the state, he is soon permitted to go at large again. if the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go : perchance it will wear smooth, — certainly the machine will wear out. if the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, ex 198 resistance to civil government. clusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil ; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, i say, break the law. let your hfe be a counter friction to stop the machine. what i have to do is to see, at any rate, that i do not lend myself to the wrong which i condemn. as for adopting the ways which the state has provided for reihedying the evil, i know not of such ways. they take too much time, and a man's life will be gone. i have other |> affairs to attend to. i came into this world, not chiefly to * make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good ' or bad. a man has not every thing to do, but something ; and because be cannot do every thing, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong. it is not my business to be petitioning the governor or the legislature any more than it is theirs to petition me ; and, if they should not hear my petition, what should i do then ? but in this case the state has provided no way : its very constitution is the evil. this may seem to be harsh and stubborn and unconciliatory ; but it is to treat with the utmost kindness and consideration the only spirit that can appreciate or deserves it. so is all change for the better, like birth and death which convulse the body. i do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their support, both in person and property, from the government of massa chusetts, and not wait till they constitute a majority of one, before they suffer the right to prevail through them. i think that it is enough if they have god on their side, without waiting for that other one. moreover, any man more right than his neighbors, constitutes a majority of one already. , i meet this american government, or its representative the state government, directly, and face to face, once a year, no imore, in the person of its tax-gatherer ; this is the only mode jin which a man situated as i am necessarily meets it ; and it ;then says distinctly, recognize me ; and the simplest, the most i effectual, and, in the present posture of affairs, the indispen \ sablest mode of treating with it on this head, of expressing resistance to civil government. 199 your little satisfaction with and love for it, is to deny it then. | my civil neighbor, the tax-gatherer, is the very man i have to deal with, — for it is, after all, with men and not with parch ment that i quarrel, — and he has voluntarily chosen to be an agent of the government. how shall he ever know well what he is and does as an officer of the government, or as a man, until he is obliged to consider whether he shall treat me, his neighbor, for whom he has respect, as a neighbor and well-disposed man, or as a maniac and disturber of the peace, and see if he can get over this obstruction to his neighborhness without a ruder and more impetuous thought or speech corresponding with his action ? i know this well,' that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom i could name, — if ten honest men only, — aye, if one honest man, in this state of massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be ■ locked up in the county jail therefor, it avould be the abolition i of slavery in america. for it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be : what is once well done is done for ever. but we love better to talk about it : that we say is our mission. reform keeps many scores of news papers in its service, but not one man. if my esteemed neighbor, the state's ambassador, who wiu devote his days to the settlement of the question of human rights in the council chamber, instead of being threatened with the prisons of carolina, were to sit down the prisoner of massachusetts, that state which is so anxious to foist the sin of slavery upon her sister, — though at present she can discover only an act of inhospitality to be the ground of a quarrel with her, — the legislature would not whouy waive the subject the following winter. , under a government which imprisons any unjustly, thei true place for a just man is also a prison. the proper place i to-day, the only place which massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be ; put out and locked out of the .state by her own act, as they \ have akeady put themselves out by their principles. it is i there that the fugitive slave, and the mexican prisoner on pa role, and the indian come to plead the wrongs of his race. 200 resistance to civil government. should find them ; on that separate, but more free and hono rable ground, where the state places those who are not with her but against her, — the only house in a slave-state in which a free man can abide with honor. if any think that their influence would be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict the ear of the state, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person. cast 'your whole vote, not a strip ■ of paper merely, but your whole influence. a minority is , p owerless while it conforms to the majority ; it is not even a ■minority then ; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whol e i weight. if the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, i or give up war and slavery, the state will not hesitate which i to choose. if a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bius this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the state to commit vio lence and shed innocent blood. this is, in fact, the defi nition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible. if the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me, as one ijhas done, " but what shall i do ? " my answer is, " if you (really wish to do any thing, resign your office." when the 'i^bject jbas^refused_^auegian^ ajyi^^fcs,. offiae«jias.':s^he3 eso ffice, then the revolution is accomglished. but even sup pose blood should flow. "% thvre not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded ? through this wound a man's real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death. i see this blood flowing now. i have contemplated the imprisonment of the offender, ra ther than the seizure of his goods, — though both will serve the same purpose, — because they who assert the purest right, and consequently are most dangerous to a corrupt state, com monly have not spent much time in accumulating property. to such the state renders comparatively small service, and a slight tax is wont to appear exorbitant, particularly if they are obhged to earn it by special labor with their hands. if there were one who lived wholly without the use of money, the state itself would hesitate to demand it of him. but the resistance to civil government. 201 rich man — not to make any invidious comparison — is al ways sold to the institution which makes him rich. abso lutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue ; for money comes between a man and his objects, and obtains them for him ; and it was certainly no great virtue to obtain it. it puts to rest many questions which he would otherwise be taxed to answer ; while the only new question which it puts is the heird but superfluous one, how to spend it. thus his moral ground is taken from under his feet. the opportuni ties of hving are diminished in proportion as what are called the "means" are increased. the best thing a man can do for his culture when he is rich is to endeavour to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor. christ answered the herodians according to their condition. "show me the tribute-money," said he; — and one took a penny out of his pocket ; — if you use money which has the image of caesar on it, and which he has made current and valuable, that is, if you are men of the state, and gladly enjoy the advantages of caesar's government, then pay hiija back some of his own when he demands it ; " render therefore to caesar that which is caesar's, and to god those things which are god's," — leaving them no wiser than before as to which was which ; for they did not wish to know. when i converse with the freest of my neighbors, i per ceive that, whatever they may say about the magnitude and seriousness of the question, and their regard, for the public tranquillity, the long and the short of the matter is,jlmtjlifiy:. cannot spare the pro tection ■q£j jie.,.£«4&tij3ft.sffitfii:nm{;nt. and, tfiey "aread lie "cosequmices of disobedience to it to their property" and" faihilfesr'' for my own part, i should not hke' tothlnk that lever rely on the protection of the state.' but,| if i deny the authority of the state when it presents its tax bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. this is hard. this makes it impossible for a man to live honestly and at the same time comfortably in outward respects. it will not be worth the while to accumulate property ; that would be sure to go again. you must hire or squat somewhere, and raise but a small crop, and eat that soon. you must live within yourself, 26 202 resistance to civil government. and depend upon yourself, always tucked up. and ready for a start, and not have many affairs. a man may grow rich in turkey even, if he will be in all respects a gopd , subject of the turkish government. confucius said, — "if a state is governed by the principles of reason, poverty and « misery are subjects of shame; if a state is not governed by the principles of reason, riches and honors are the subjects of shame." no : until i want the protection of massachusetts to be extended to me in some distant southern port, where my liberty is endangered, or until i am bent solely on build ing up an estate at home by peaceful enterprise, i can afford to refuse allegiance to massachusetts, and her right to my property and hfe. it costs me less in every sense to incmr the penalty of disobedience to the state, than it would to obey. i should feel as if i w^ere w^orth less in that case. some years ago, the state met me in behalf of the .church, and commanded me to pay a certain sum toward the support of a clergyman whose preaching my father attended, but never i myself. " pay it," it said, " or be locked up in the jail" i declined to pay. but, unfortunately, another man saw fit to pay it. i did not see why the schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest, and not the priest the school master ; for i was not the state's schoolmaster, but i sup ported myself by voluntary subscription. i did not see why the lyceum should not present its tax-bill, and have the state to back its demand, as w^eu as the church. however, at the request of the selectmen, i condescended to make some such ; statement as this in writing : — " know all men by these pre ;, sents, that i, henry thofeau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which i have not joined." this i gave to the town-clerk ; and he has it. the st9,te, having thus learned that i did not wi^h to be regarded as a member of that church, has never made a like demand on me since ; though it said that it must adhere to its original presumption that time. if i had known how to name them, j should then have signed off in detail from au the societies which i never signed on to ; but i did not know where tp find ^ complete list. resistance to civil government. 203 i have paid no poll-tax for six years. i was put into a jail once on this account, for one night ; and, as i stood con sidering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the ught, i could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if i were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. i wondered that it should have concluded at length that this was the best use it could put me to, and had never thought to avail itself of my services in some way. i saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as i was. i did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. i felt as if i alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax. they plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. in every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder ; for they thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall. i could not but smile to see how indus triously they locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let or hinderance, and they were really all that was dangerous. as they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish my body ; just as boys, if they cannot come at some person against whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog., i saw that the state was half1 witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends fronl its foes, and i lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it. ^^ thus the state never intentionally confronts a man's sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. it is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. i was not born to be forced. i will breathe after my own fashion. let us see who is the strong est. what force has a multitude ? they only can force me i who obey a higher law than i. they force me to become ; like themselves. i do not hear of men being forced to uve this way or that by masses of men. what sort of life were that to live ? when i meet a government which says to me, 204 resistance to civil government. " your money or your life," why should i be in haste to give it my money ? it may be in a great strait, and not know what to do: i cannot help that. it must help itself; do as i do. it is not worth the while to snivel about it. i am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society. i am_not the_son^ the engineer. i perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best i they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. if a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies ; and so a man. the night in prison was novel and interesting enough. the prisoners in their shirt-sleeves were enjoying a chat and the even ing air in the door-way, when i entered. but the jailer said, " come, boys, it is time to lock up ; " and so they dispersed, and i heard the sound of their steps returning into the hollow apart ments. my room-mate was introduced to me by the jailer, as " a first-rate fellow and a clever man." when the door was locked, he showed me where to hang my hat, and how he managed matters there. the rooms were whitewashed once a month ; and this one, at least, was the whitest, most simply furnished, and probably the neatest apartment in the town. he naturally wanted to know where i came from, and what brought me there ; and, when i had told him, i asked him in my turn how he came there, presuming him to be an honest man, of course ; and, as the world goes, i believe he was. " why," said he, " they accuse me of burning a barn ; but i never did it." as near as i could discover, he had probably gone to bed in a. barn when drunk, and smoked his pipe there ; and so a barn was burnt. he had the reputation of being a clever man, had been there some three months waiting for his trial to come on, and would have to wait as much longer ; but he was quite domesticated and contented, since he got his board for nothing, and thought that he was well treated. he occupied one window, and i the other ; and i saw, that, if one stayed there long, his principal business would be to look out the window. i had soon read all the tracts that were left there, and examined where former prisoners had broken out, and where a grate had been sawed ofi", and heard the history of the various resistance to civil government. 205 occupants of that room ; for i found that even here there was a history and a gossip which never circulated beyond the walls of the jail. probably this is the only house in the town where verses are composed, which are afterward printed in a circular form, but not published. i was shown quite a long list of verses which were composed by some young men who had been detected in an attempt to escape, who avenged themselves by singing them. i pumped my fellow-prisoner as dry as i could, for fear i should never see him again ; but at length he showed me which was my bed, and left me to blow out the lamp. it was like travelling into a far country, such as i had never expected to behold, to lie there for one night. it seemed to me that i never had heard the town-clock strike before, nor the even ing sounds of the village ; for we slept with the windows open, which were inside the grating. it was to see my native village in the light of the middle ages, and our concord was turned into a rhine stream, and visions of knights and castles passed before me. they were the voices of old burghers that i heard in the streets. i was an involuntary spectator and auditor of whatever was done and said in the kitchen of the adjacent village-inn, — a wholly new and rare experience to me. it was a closer view of my native town. i was fairly inside of it. i never had seen its institutions before. this is one of its peculiar institutions ; for it is a shire town. i began to comprehend what its inhabitants were about. in the morning, our breakfasts were put through the hole in the door, in small oblong-square tin pans, made to fit, and holding a pint of chocolate, with brown bread, and an iron spoon. when they called for the vessels again, i was green enough to return what bread i had left ; but my comrade seized it, and said that i should lay that up for lunch or dinner. soon after, he was let out to work at haying in a neighboring field, whither he went every day, and would not be back till noon ; so he bade me good-day, saying that he doubted if he should see me again. when i came out of prison, — for some one interfered, and paid the tax, — i did not perceive that great changes had taken place on the common, such as he observed who went in a youth, and emerged a tottering and gray-headed man ; and yet a change had to my eyes come over the scene, — the towp, and state, and country, — greater than any that mere time could effect. i saw yet more distinctly the state in which i lived. i saw to what extent the people among whom i lived could be trusted as good neighbors and 206 resistance to civil govefnmenti friends ; that their friendship was for summer weather only ; that they did not greatly purpose to do right ; that they were a distinct race from me by their prejudices and superstitions, as the china men and malays are ; that, in their sacrifices to humanity, they ran j no risks, not even to their property ; that, after all, they were not i so noble but they treated the thief as he had treated them, and hoped, by a certain outward observance and a few prayers, and by walking in a particular straight though useless path from time to time, to save their souls. this may be to judge my neighbors harshly ; for i believe that most of them are not aware that they have such an institution as the jail in their village. it was formerly the custom in our village, when a poor debtor came out of jail, for his acquaintances to salute him, looking through their fingers, which were crossed to represent 'the grating of a jail window, " how do ye do ? " my neighbors did not thus salute me, but first looked at me, and then at one another, as if i had returned from a long journey. i was put into jail as i was i going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. whefl i was let out tha next morning, i proceeded to finish my errand^ and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party,' who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct ; and in half an hour, — for the horse was soon tackled, — was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest huls, two miles ofi'; — i then the state was nowhere to be seen. this is the whole history of " my prisons." i have never declined paying the highway tax, because i am as desirous of being a good neighbor as i am of being a bad subject ; and, as for supporting schools, i am doing my part to educate my fellow-countrymen now. it is for no particular item in the tax-bill that i refuse to pay it. i simply wish to refuse allegiance to the state,, to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually. i do not care to trace the course of my dollar, if i could, till it buys a man, or a musket to shoot one with, — the dollar is innocent, -^ but i am con cerned to trace the effects of my allegiance. in fact, i quietly declare war with the state, after my fashion, though i will still make what use and get what advantage of her i can, as is usual in such cases. resistance to civil government, 207 .if others pay the tax which is demanded of me, from a sympathy with the state, they do but what they have already done in their own case, or rather they abet injustice to a greater extent than the state requires. if they pay the tax from a mistaken interest in the individual taxed, to save his property or prevent his going to jail, it is because they have not considered wisely how far they let their private feelings interfere with the public good. this, then, is my position at present. but one cannot be too much on his guard in such a case, lest his action be biassed by obstinacy, or an undue regard for the opinions of men. let him see that he does only what belongs to himself and to the hour. i think sometimes, why, this people mean well ; they are only ignorant ; they would do better if they knew how : why give your neighbors this pain to treat you as they are not inclined to ? but i think, again, this is no reason why i should do as they do, or permit others to suffer much greater pain of a different kind. again, i sometimes say to myself, "when many millions of men, without heat, without ill-will, without personal feehng of any kind, demand of you a few shillings only, without the possibility, such is their constitu tion, of retracting or altering their present demand, and with out the possibihty, on your side, of appeal to any other naiuions, why expose yourself to this overwhelming brute force ? you do not resist cold and hunger, the winds and the waves, thus obstinately ; you quietly submit to a thousand similar necessities. you do not put your head into the fire. but just in proportion as i regard this as not wholly a brute force, but partly a human force, and consider that i have relations to those millions as to so many millions of men, and not of mere brute or inanimate things, i see that appeal is possible, first and instantaneously, from them to the maker of them, and, secondly, from them to themselves. but, if i put my head deliberately into the fire, there is no appeal to fire or to the maker of fire, and i have only myself to blame. if i could convince myself that i have any right to be satisfied with men as they are, and to treat them accordingly, and not according, in some respects, to my requisitions and expec 208 resistance to civil government. tations of what they and i ought to be, then, like a good mussulman and fatalist, i should endeavor to be satisfied with things as they are, and say it is the will of god. and, above all, there is this difference between resisting this and a purely brute or natural force, that i can resist this with some effect; but i cannot expect, like orpheus, to change the nature of the rocks and trees and beasts. ^ i do not wish to quarrel with any man or nation. i do not wish to spht hairs, to make fine distinctions, or set myself up as better than my neighbors. i seek rather, i may say, even an excuse for conforming to the laws of the land. i am but too ready to conform to them. indeed i have reason to suspect myself on this head ; and each year, as the tax gatherer comes round, i find myself disposed to. review the acts and position of the general and state governments, and the spirit of the people, to discover a pretext for conformity. i believe that the state will soon be-able to take all my work of this sort out of my hands, and then i shall be no better a patriot than my fellow-countrymen. seen from a lower point of view, the constitution, with all its faults, is very good ; the law and the courts are very respectable ; even this state and this american government are, in many respects, very admirable and rare things, to be thankful for, such as a great many have described them ; but seen from a point of view a little higher, they are what i have described them ; seen from a higher still, and the highest, who shall say what they are, or that they are worth looking at or thinking of at all ? > however, the government does not concern me much, and i shall bestow the fewest possible thoughts on it. it is not many moments that i live under a government, even in this world. if a man is thought-free, fancy-free, imagination free, that which is not never for a long time appearing to be to him, unwise rulers or reformers cannot fatally interrupt him. i know that most men think differently from myself; but those whose lives are by profession devoted to the study of these or kindred subjects, content me as little as any. states men and legislators, standing so completely within the insti resistance to civil goperjiment. 209 tution, never distinctly and nakedly behold it. they speak of moving society, but have no resting-place without it. they may be men of a certain experience and discrimination, and have no doubt invented ingenious and even useful sys tems, for which we sincerely thank them ; but all their wit and usefulness lie within certain not very wide limits. they are wont to forget that the world is not governed by policy and expediency. webster never goes behind government, and so cannot speak with authority about it. his words are wisdom to those legislators who contemplate no essen tial reform in the existing government ; but for thinkers, and those who legislate for all time, he never once glances at the subject. i know of those whose serene and wise speculations on this theme would soon reveal the limits of his mind's range and hospitality. yet, compared with the cheap professions of most reformers, and the still cheaper wisdom and eloquence of politicians in general, his are almost the only sensible and valuable words, and we thank heaven for him. compara tively, he is always strong, original, and, above all, practical. still his quality is not wisdom, but prudence. the lawyer's truth is not truth, but consistency, or a consistent expe diency. truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing. he well deserves to be called, as he has been called, the defender of the constitution. there are really no blows to be given by him but defensive ones. he is not a leader, but a follower. his leaders are the men of '87. " i have never made an effort,'" he says, " and never propose to make an effort ; i have never countenanced an effort, and never mean to countenance an effort, to disturb the arrangement as originally made, by which the various states came into the union." still thinking of the sanction which the constitution gives to slavery, he says, " because it was a part of the original compact, — let it stand." not withstanding his special acuteness' and ability, he is unable to take a fact out of its merely poutical relations, and behold it as it lies absolutely to be disposed of by the intellect, — what, for instance, it behoves a man to do here in america to-day with regard to slavery, but ventures, or is driven, to 27 210 resistance to civil government. make some such desperate answer as the following, while professing to speak absolutely, and as a private man, — from which what new and singular code of social duties might be inferred ? — " the manner," says he, " in which the govern ment of those states where slavery exists are to regulate it, is for their own consideration, .under their responsibihty to their constituents, to the general laws of propriety, humanity, and justice, and to god. associations formed elsewhere, springing from a feehng of humanity, or any other cause, have nothing whatever to do with it. they have never re ceived any encouragement from me, and they never will."* they who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced up its stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the bible and the constitution, and drink at it there with reve rence and humihty; but they who behold where it comes trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more, and continue their pilgrimage toward its fountain-head. no man with a genius for legislation has appeared in america. they are rare in the history of the world. there are orators, politicians, and eloquent men, by the thousand ; but the speaker has not yet opened his mouth to speak, avho is capable of settling the muchvexed questions of the day. we love eloquence for its own sake, and not for any truth which it may utter, or any heroism it may inspire. our legislators have not yet learned the comparative value of free-trade and of freedom, of union, and of rectitude, to a nation. they have no genius or talent for comparatively humble questions of taxation and financ'e, commerce and manufactures and agriculture. if we were left solely to the wordy wit of legis lators in congress for our guidance, uncorrected by the seasonable experience and the effectual complaints of the people, america would not long retain her rank among the nations. for eighteen hundred years, though perchance i have no right to say it, the new testament has been written ; yet where is the legislator who has wisdom and practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which it sheds on the science of legislation ? * these extracts have been inserted since the lecture was read. resistance to civil government. 211 the_ authority of p;nvctnt nent, even such as i am willing to submit to, — for i will cheerfully obey those who know and catwio hpttr^ than t, gnr| jp manv things even those who neither know nor can do so well, — is still an hnpure one : to be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent o f t he governed , it can have no pure right over my person andj! property but what i concede to it. the progress from an'' absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual. is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government ? is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man ? there will never b pi a rp.ally frpfnnd j enlie^hte ned state, until t l^ state """-""i \ n recof rn ize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordmgly. 1 please myself with imagining a state at last_ which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the . individual vyith respect as a neighbor ; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own re pose, if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced bv^. who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men . a state which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious state, which also i have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen. hymn of a spirit shrouded. o god ! who, in thy dear still heaven, dost sit, and wait to see the errors, sufferings, and crimes of our humanity, how deep must be thy causal love ! how whole thy final care ! since thou, who rulest over all, canst see, and yet canst bear. 212 medilations of a widow. the meditations of a widow. i. august, 18 — . spkingtime, — it surely came, — its roundelays ! wherefore these full, rich notes and summer tone ? i only knew it was thy spring to life, — above the life of seasons and decay, — true life, not knowing stint, nor blight, nor check, one everlasting growth in incorruption ! now joyous sttmmeb passeth in her wealth. she filleth clusters ; hangeth gold on boughs ; prepareth the full sheaf, the luscious sweets, gorgeous apparel ; dresses for lilies, and for daisies too ; soft hues for even and for morn ; music, the livelong day ; and fountains cool, to freshen all. i only know that heat and taint and toil can never come to thee ! thou'st found thy wealth, where thine affections reached, in thy mock-life ; hast found that river (either side the tree whose leaves — oh thou art rich ! — unfolded to thee fadeless), for the people, past and coming ; the fount of freshness, overflowing all : and thou hast learned the rich undying strain, trumphant, glorious alleluia ! ii. ootobee, 18 — . atmjmn, i know thee well, — thy cool all-hail ! thou introducest change : beauty is pale : those flashes but proclaim " passing away." why art thou stern upon our lingering love ? why dost deride and blow upon our joys ? why spend thyself to strew our seeming wealth, and give our very comforts to the wind ? thine awful whisperings are of grandeur come, and we must hear acclaim of majesty, till, half congealed with awe, we breathe " amen ! let beauty die ; our homage is to thee." meditations of a widow. 213 all change is god ; immutably the same in form of beauty and sublime display ; in most dread hours, his glory beameth out to light up glory in the human soul. thou, thou hast passed all change of human life, and not again to thee shall beauty die, or greatness in his robe of terror come. no devastation passeth o'er those fields ; the fruits abide, and who partake abide their high communings. life and death is not. iii. decembeb, 18 wintek, dread undertaker, thou art come ! and how unique are thy oificial deeds ! the living and the dead, uncoffined, both live in our meanest traversings concealed. the heralds of thy coming scattered truths ; and, gorgeously arrayed, they looked so gay. admiring them, we lost the lesson quite. then those old priests, with withered arms, stood up and read a service : requiems were pealed. and under-tones of death ; long deep-drawn sighs passed o'er the living at their tasks and plays. and what a burial ! sexton nor grave the buried bound about, and palled — all one — and thou dost bury o'er the safe-interred. as thou had'st power to shut them deeper down into the cold dark trophy-room of death. as well might boast of hulls and husks and shells, and other old investments dropped by life, in passage up to higher, purer life. oh ! there is life so pure, commingles nought to satiate the greedy maw of death ; all unincumbered, incorrupt, and free ! those dear remains can feel no adverse power, — the life that laid them down is free from stain, and never shall put off its robe of light ! 214 language. art. xi. — language. no man was ever deeply and intensely fired with a convic tion of a truth which he knew to be of vital importance to his fellow-men, that he did not burn to communicate it. and no man ever felt the full force of this desire of communica tion, who has not brooded at times over the fact of language, and its want of effectiveness ; while at the same time it has seemed to hun, that the difficulty was not altogether in the vagueness and inexpressiveness of language itself; for that the words often unfolded a mysterious power of acting on his own mind, whenever it was raised to a certain pitch of exal tation, assuring him that, if they should find other minds equally in earnest, they would burn and breathe into them also. dr. bushnell could not have evinced so conclusively in any other way, that he was full of a truth it behoved other men to know, than by falling upon language itself, and calling his readers to consider its nature, introductory to the treat ment of a great subject.* but, though his general view is great, and many of his observations upon language are pro found, we take leave to say that he has stopped, in his analysis, short of a truth which might be unfolded, and has admitted to his investigation a boundary which does not ex ist. he has seen and said, that the world which meets the senses has for its final cause to unfold the intelligence of man into consciousness, and to bring about that communion of the finite, with the infinite intelligence which is life. he has seen also, that men live within one another's sight and hearing, and in communion with each other, not only for lower ends, but ulteriorly for that higher end. in fine, he sees that all nature and human life have a representative, as their highest character, and that it is this which it most behoves men to understand. * see introductory essay to " god in christ," published in hartford, conn, by brown & parsons, 1849. language. 215 still more, he has seen that men are linguistic, as truly, naturally, inevitably, as that they are locomotive or intellec tual ; and therefore there is a priori reason to believe, that language is not arbitrary or accidental, but springs out of nature, avith which it has vital connection. he says, that man is a speaking, as he is a seeing creature ; that the parable of god's bringing all creatures to adam, to name, signifies, that men named things by a pre-established law connecting the mind and outward nature with each other. he even sees, that every word is, in the last analysis, the sign or vocal form of some material thing or action ; but what is remarkable is, that while he sees all this, and farther sees that the applica tion of words to moral and religious subjects follows the same laws of imagination that are exemplified in those sen tences which are called " figures of speech, " he does not seem to see that the same laws of imagination determined the elements of single words to their subjects, so that every word which is not an imitation of nature, like hum, buzz, boom, is, as it were, a poem ; in short, that there is some na tural and inevitable reason why every word should be what it is ; that there is a foregoing impossibility of lepus and lupus and vulpes and wolf and fox (fugax) to be tortoise or sloth, though words as different as hare and lepus may both signify the same animal, viewed according to different characteristics. he sees as much difference between sol and sun, and stella and astre, as between nubes and cloud; and ends at last with a restatement of the old and superficial theory, that language is, after all, arbitrary, the creature of convention. but we have not introduced dr. bushnell's name to criti cize the shortcomings of his essay, as philological science, since he does not profess to be an adept in it ; but because the justice he has done to the subject of language as a power / acting and re-acting upon the mind, helping or hindering it in the investigation of truth, must awaken a sense of the impor tance of the subject, and affords a good opportunity to direct an intelligent attention to the philological essay, entitled the " significance of the alphabet." * * a pamphlet published in 1837, at 13, west-street, boston, mass. 216 language. when a great scientific discovery is made, and given forth to the world abstracted from its applications and a fall deve lopment of its uses, it is apt to fall unobserved, and perhaps sleep for years. the world knows only of seeds that have sprouted. and yet, that a theory of language which, as an organic whole, and in some degree demonstrated as true, is certainly original, should have been passed over* so long, as at best but an ingenious and curious speculation, is somewhat strange. for, if it pretends to touch the heart, of the matter, it must be either impertinently foohsh, calling for animadversion and ridicule, or it is of serious import. the truth upon the subject has relations with every department of human knowledge and thought. 1 for what is language ? it is the picture and vehicle of all that has been present to the mind of humanity, stretching back beyond all histories and other literatures ; and its bear ings are incalculable upon the discovery and retention' of truth, as well as upon the disciphne and activity of the human mind which is in relation to it. the human mind is in rela tion to nature as the stone-cutter or the artist to the quarry ; and language is at once the representation and vehicle of au 'l that has been quarried. " one man dies, and other men enter into the fruits of his labor." how ? because these fruits are conserved, or ra ther live and move, in language. language must therefore be a necessary product, and what it is, precisely because it could not be otherwise ; therefore within the multitude of languages, and beneath the confusion of tongues, there must be something of a universal character, which gives meaning to the articulations of sound. this has seemed so probable, a priori, from the time of socrates f to the present day, that again and again the idea has been broached, and sometimes a clue has seemed to be caught. but all experience seems at first sight to be against it. dr. bushnell brings forward * since the present article has been in the hands of the printer, the atten tion of the -writer has been called to two notices of this work, in the jan uary and april numbers of the " north american eeview," which are very important, and will doubtless lead to important consequences. t "cratylus." language. 217 the argument drawn both from the existence of diverse lan guages and from the failure of all systems of etymology that have been broached, as if these were conclusive against it, and as a warning to future inquirers not to stumble on dark mountains. but always the discoveries of science seem impossible till they are made, and every erroneous path that is taken is called a conclusive experience. let us not be discouraged. euler, when announcing the formula of the principle of circular motion, said, " this is trtie, though all experience is against it." the mathematical student of the ce lestial motions understands this, however paradoxical it may sound. language is another exponent of the same paradox. there is a universal truth with respect to language which contradicts those special facts of each language called idioms. and these exceptions also prove the rule. there is, in short, a view to be taken of this subject which reconciles the two opposite views which dr. bushnell speaks of, viz. the a priori probability of a universal language, and the a posteriori fact of a diversity of languages ; and this view wiu account for that strange power in the form of some words which he no tices, and for the pertinacity of being which characterizes these children of the air. the vast importance of nomeilclature to natural science is exemplified in that of chemistry. this nomenclature is, in fact, the best instance of the invention of a language in modern scientific annals. there is a rational principle obvious. the new words explain themselves. a great deal of the time of students of all sciences is used up in settling the meaning of words, — defining; that is, attempting to clear away by one set of words the confusion occasioned by the use of an other set, called scientific terms. grammar and mathematics, for instance, are talked of in a mongrel of latin and greek words, whose laborious paraphrasing into equivalent english keeps off the mind, for a long time, from the real subject in hand. it is a commonly acknowledged drawback on all school-instruction, that the mind is employed about words, as comders, which prevents the faculties from being refreshed by those realities of nature intended to be signified by them; it is a common remark, that it is not until the learner has 28 218 language. left school, and come into relation with things, that his les sons are vivified, made to cultivate his mind, and stimulate his character. ^but the desired revolution in school-education would be accomplished, if words were looked at as transpa rent vases of realities of nature, and every department of science was treated in terms that, instead of hiding, revealed these realities clearly, as a picture reveals the objects of na tural history. and why is it not so ? the reason is, that the key to the meaning of language — its secret — is not in the common possession. dr. bushnell has seen, and verified to his mind in a suffi cient number of instances, that words which consist of several syllables elucidate complex ideas by the combination. he might have spoken of the word consider in english, made of con and sedeo. we consider a subject when we sit down in company with it. in german, the same act of the mind is expressed by iiberlegen. the german lies over the subject of his consideration. to occur means to run (curro) to meet (ob); and in england thoughts occur, and sometimes strike, while in germany they fall into people {einf alien). it is curious enough to run through languages, and trace na tional characteristics evinced by words of this kind, that reveal operations of mind which are familiar or easily ex plained. but it is not necessary to stop here, as dr. bushnell has done. he says, p. 48 : — " there is only a single class of intellectual words that can be said to have a perfectly determinate significance, viz. those which relate to what are called necessary ideas. they are such as time, space, came, truth, right, arithmetical numbers, and geometrical figures. here the names applied are settled into a perfectly determinate meaning, not by any pecuhar virtue in them, but by reason of the absolute exactness of the ideas themselves. time cannot be any thing more or less than time ; truth cannot, in its idea, be any thing different from truth; the numbers suffer no ambiguity of count or measure ; a circle must be a circle, a square a square. as far as language, therefore, has to do with these, it is a per fectly exact algebra of thought, but no further." he, however, had akeady asked : — language. 219 "what is the real and legitimate use of words, when applied to moral subjects ? for we cannot dispense with them, and it is uncomfortable to hold them in universal scepticism, as being only instruments of error." and this question follows a long disquisition, whose object is to show that " physical terms are never exact, being only names of genera." — " much less have we any terms in the spiritual department of language that are exact representatives of thought." he answers his own question, therefore, with this remark, of which he does not seem to follow out the whole value : — " words are used as signs of thoughts to be expressed. they do not literally convey, or pass over, a thought out of one mind into another, as we commonly speak of doing. they are only hints or images held up before the mind of another, to put him upon generating or reproducing the same ftiought, which he can do only as he has the same personal contents, or the generative power out of which to bring the thought required." nay, we would add, he must also have the generative power of making the words so, and not other wise; that, whatever superficial difference they may have, , yet, taken in some point of view, there is a certain identity of all words applied to the same thought. but dr. bushnell does not see this. he says : " yet, in the languages radically distinct, we shall find that the sounds or names which stand for the same objects have generally no sim ilarity whatever ; whence it follows irresistibly, that nothing in the laws of voice or sound has determined the names adopted." this donclusion is drawn so irresistibly by means of the mistake that dr. bushnell, with many famous etymologists, has made, of conceiving " no similarity whatever " in words, except in their sound, i. e. their similarity of effect on the ear. it is very true, as he says, " no theory of sound, as connected with sense, in the names of things, will be found to hold ex tensively enough to give it any moment ; " although, " when sounds are the objects named, they will very naturally be imitated, as in hoarse and hiss." but words should be considered not merely as sounds, but as articulations of sound. 220 language. the discovery and first principle of the author of the " significance of the alphabet " is, that words are to be considered, not merely or chiefly by their effect on the ear, but in the process of their formation by the organs of speech. looked at in this point of view, words may be identified at once, although they may sound differently from each other, as garden and kortus and wirta and ogrod and zahrada. and this is the great idea in which hes a revolution not only for tbe treatment of philology itself, but for the method of intercommunicating the knowledge of all particular lan guages, and of elucidating all sciences communicable by words. dr. bushnell, having quoted prof. gibbs's theory of case, published in the " christian spectator," vol. ix. says, it is there shown that " as words themselves are found in space, so they are declined, or formed into grammar, under the relations of space ; " and infers " that such results in grammar do not take place apart from some inherent law or system pertain ing either to mind or to outward space, or to one as related to the other ; " and adds that it will sometime be fully seen, that " the outer word is a vast menstruum of thought or inteuigence. there is a logos in the forms of things, by which they are prepared to serve as types or images of what is inmost in our souls ; and there is a logos also of con struction in the relations of space, the position, qualities, connections, and predicates of things, by which they are formed into grammar. in one word, the outer world which envelopes our being is itself language, the power of all lan guage. ' day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge ; there is no speech nor language where their sound is not heard ; their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.' " let dr. bushnell add from dr. kraitsir's theory the other element, and see that there is a logos also in the apparatus of articulation ; and he will have, but not otherwise, demonstra ble ground for his next paragraph, which is eloquent with a suggestion, which, as he justly afterwards remarks, is " suffi eient of itself to change a man's intellectual capacities and destiny; for it sets him always in the presence of divine langitage. 221 aoughts and meanings, makes even the words he utters luminous of divinity, and, to the same extent, subjects of love and reverence." this is the passage we mean : — " and if the outer world is the vast dictionary and gram mar of thought. we speak of, then it is also an organ through out of inteuigence. whose inteuigence ? by this question we are set directly cbnfrontmg god, the universal author ; no more to hunt for him by curious arguments and subtle deductions, if haply we may find him ; but he stands expressed everywhere, so that, turn whichsoever way we please, we behold the outlooking of his intelhgence. no series of bridgewater treatises, piled even to the moon, could give a proof of god so immediate, complete, and con clusive." it is not the purpose here to give an abstract of the little book, called the " significance of the alphabet." indeed, it would be impossible. one peculiarity of it is, that it is so condensed it admits of no farther condensation. it rather needs a paraphrase, and it certainly ought to have a sequel of some practical elementary books which may make it possible to apply its principles for the purpose of transform ing the present system of language-teaching in schools. it is said the author is superintending the preparation of some. a whole series is necessary, from the a b c book to a manual of the sanscrit. indeed, from him might be expected the realization of that idea of a lexicon which herder has sketched in his " conversations on the spirit of hebrew poetry." one of the interlocutors of the conversation asks, — after having granted, with respect to the hebrew, "the symbolism of the radical sounds, or the utterance of the feeling that was prompted, while the object itself was present to the senses ; the sound of the feelings in the very intuition of their causes : — but how is it with the derivations from these radical terms ? "what are they but an overgrown jungle of thorns, where no human foot has ever trod ? " eutyphron. " in bad lexicons this is indeed the case, andmany of the most learned philologists of holland have rendered the way 222 language. still more diflscult by their labors. but the time is coming when this jungle will become a pleasant grove of palms. " aloiphron. " your metaphor is oriental. " eutyphron. " so is the object of it. the root of the mother-word will stand in the centre, and around her the grove of her children. by influence of taste, diligence, sound sense, and the judi cious comparison of different dialects, lexicons will be brought to distinguish what is essential from what is accidental in the signification of words, and to trace the gradual process of transition ; while in the derivation of words, and the appli cation of metaphors, we shall behold the invention of the human mind in its act, and more fully understand the logic of ancient figurative language. i anticipate with joy the time, and the first lexicon, in which this shall be well accom phshed. for the present i use the best we have. . . . " alciphron. " it will be long yet before we shall repose ourselves in your palm-grove of oriental lexicography. pray, in the meantime, illustrate your ideas of derivation by an ex ample. " eutyphron. " you may find examples everywhere, even as the lexicons now are. strike at the first radical form that occurs, as the primitive ' he is gone,' and observe the easy gradation of its derivatives. a series of expressions signifying loss, disappear ance, and death, vain purposes, and fruitless toil and trouble, go on in soft transitions ; and, if you place yourself in the circumstances of the ancient herdsmen, in their wandering, unsettled mode of life, the most distant derivative will still give back in its tones something of the original sound of the word, and of the original feeling. it is from this cause that the language addresses itself so much to our senses, and the creations of its poetry become present to us with such stirring effect. the language abounds in roots of this character ; and our commentators, who rather go too deep than too super ficially, have shown enough of them. they never know when to quit, and, if possible, would lay bare all the roots language. 223 and fibres of every tree, even where one would wish to see only the flowers and fruits. " alciphron. " these are the black demons, i suppose, upon your plan tation of palms. " eutyphron. " a very necessary and useful race. we must treat them with mildness ; for, if they do too much, they do it with a good motive." in answer to some criticisms * that have been made upon the " significance of the alphabet," such as that it is a dark hint, rather than a full elucidation of the subject, the history of the book may be given. it was merely the enlargement by dr. kraitsir of some notes taken by a hearer of one or two lectures of a series which he delivered in boston to an audience of about a score of persons ! this particular portion of the series, touching the true pronunciation of the latin language, it was advised by the late john pickering, should be put forth, to excjte, if possible, a controversy that should be the means of introdvicing the whole subject to the public attention ; and he promised to farther it in the periodicals of the day. but the day it was published was the very day when that eminent philologist, having finished correcting the last proof of his greek dictionary, said, " this is the last printed page i shau read." the words were pro phetic : in a few days he was, in fact, no more. the book, however, is not so " dark a hint" as may be sup posed by those who have not studied it. even the notes are treatises. the note on mathematical phraseology, and which involves the reference of the words line and circle to the true standard of meaning, not only serves " to elucidate the life principle of philology, but of mathematical discipline." so the note upon grammatical terms, and the last note on the appropriation of words, are only " dark with excessive bright." in the notes, also, he has collected the authorities for the latin pronunciation out of the ancient grammarians, * a misprint on the last line of the 17th page, oi formation for pronun ciation, obscures the meaning of one of its most important paragraphs. 224 vegetation about salem. to whom latin was vernacular. yet doubtless the whole series of lectures was a much more adequate treatment of the subject ; and we will close this article, which is already a kind of pot-pourri, with an extract from a letter written by one of that small audience, and which vies well with the eloquent passage that dr. bushnell has quoted from prof. gibbs, in the 31st page of his essay : — "language, before apparently a mere ordinary vehicle, be came in his hands the chariot of ezekiel, ' celestial equipage instinct with spirit,' the fabric not behind the noble uses. his science is to all who have the boon of speech what ana tomy is to the painter. his descriptions of the structure arfd nature of vocal sounds charm like the explanations of egyp tian hieroglyphics. indeed, they display a scheme of more subtle symbohsm, and one which, if in its own region less beautiful, is richer than music. " the common enjoyment of the study of languages, aris ing from their social character, their revelations of community of thought and sentiment, is greatly enhanced by dr. krait sir's lively and penetrating methods. the identity of roots presented by him affects the imagination with a sense of the closest fraternity, and recalled to my mind with new force the words of an eloquent advocate for the study of languages, who, in dwelhng upon the sympathies it stirred up, exclaimed avith the prophet, ' have we not all one father ? hath not one god created us ? ' " akt. xii. — vegetation about salem, mass. the vegetation of salem is remarkably foreign. two spe cies belonging to different families, and both of exotic origin, threaten to take complete possession of the soil. the first, the well-known wood-wax {ginista tinctoria), is running rapidly over all the hills and dry pastures. this plant seems to occupy in this vicinity the place which the furze-bush occupies on the heaths and commons of england; or it may resemble, in its manner of possessing the soil, the vegetation about salem. 225 heather of the highlands of scotland. not, indeed, in its appearance : in that particular it faintly resembles the yellow broom, the spartium, so prettily celebrated by mary howitt in her juvenile sketches of natural history : — " oh the broom, the yellow broom ! the ancient poets sung it ; and dear it is on summer-day to lie at rest among it." the wood-wax, however, has found no favor in this vici nity. it is annually burned to the ground, in utter detesta tion ; yet, phoenix-like, it springs from its ashes ; and, by the height of summer, it laughs from the midst of its yellow flowers at all the efforts that have been made to destroy it. in england, this plant is useful in the arts ; it is employed with woad, the isatis tinctoria, another plant, to give a green color to woollen cloth. the woodwax affords a yellow dye, the woad a blue coloring matter ; and the admixture of the products of both plants produces a very fair green. the cheapness of indigo will always prevent the new england farmers from growing the isatis for its blue color ; otherwise we might hope for a market for the wood-wax ; for, where the one is employed , the other becomes necessary. in former times, the genista obtained some celebrity as a medical plant ; but, on this head, i suppose that we must conclude ^vith the naturalist of almondsbury, that the mild assuasives of our forefathers are unequal to contention with the abused consti tutions of these days. second among obnoxious intruders stands the white-weed. this plant is as great a nuisance in our mowing ground as the wood-wax in our pastures. some fields are so infested as to present at haying-time the appearance of a waving ocean of white blossoms. i am not aware of any remedy for the evil, save the application of a more vigorous agricul ture. these foreigners seem to have chosen this vicinity as their favorite place of abode. there is a tradition, that they were introduced as garden ornaments, and that they have strayed away from the flower-border, and sought in the fields and pastures the wild liberty they so much love. it is somewhat 29 226 vegetation about salem. hazardous to impeach a popular tradition ; but it appears much more likely that they were brought over in some of the first grass-seed that came from england. both plants are perennial, spreading rapidly from the root, and propagating with equal facility from the seed. these abundant powers of reproduction meeting with a genial soil and a loose hus bandry, it is no wonder that they should produce the effects so obvious in our neighborhood. the white-weed belongs to that class of plants whose seeds are often furnished with feathery appendages, like the dandehon, thistle, and many others ; a race of wanderers that traverse the earth with as tonishing rapidity. next to the wood-wax and white-weed, the knap-weed {centaur ea nigra) deserves attention. this plant, of recent introduction from europe, is making rapid advances in our neighborhood. it should be pointed out to our farmers, who ought by all means to resist its invasion. it is a most villan ous weed, utterly unfit for fodder, whether green or dry. it is sometimes called the thistle without thorns ; but it wiu prove a thorn in the sides of some of our husbandmen, diffi cult of expulsion, if it is suffered to continue its advances. it propagates by creeping roots and feathery seeds, much after the manner of the white-weed. of all the plants that threaten the agriculturalist, perhaps none is more formidable than the canada thistle ( cnicus ar vensis), which has probably reached us from the great west ern prairies. this plant is known to every one : it forms extensive beds by the road-sides, and frequently in the pas tures. the hard, gravelly soil of this vicinity is not very fa vorable to its growth. it loves a rich loam, through which it can send its runners with ease and facility. mr. curtis, an enghsh gentleman, in order to test the astonishing powers of reproduction possessed by this plant, deposited about two inches of a root in his garden. in the course of one summer, it had thrown out, under ground, runners on every side: some of these runners avere eight feet long; and some of them had thrown up leaves eight feet from the origmal root. the whole together, when taken up and washed, weighed four pounds. in the spring following, it made its appearance. vegeiatiofi about salem. 227 on or about where the small piece was originally planted. there were between fifty and sixty young plants which must have eluded the gardener's search, though he was particularly careful in extracting them. from these facts it may be readily conceived how difficult it is to extirpate this weed, when once it has taken possession of the soil. among our introduced plants, there are some that love to follow the footsteps of civilized man, ajid whose chosen loca lity is always around his dwelling. among the most pro minent of these, are the common shepherd's purse ( thlaspi bursa pastoris) ; the chickweed of our gardens ( stellaria media) ; the knot-grass {polygonum aviculare), that fringes every foot-path, and seems to grow the more for being trod den upon; the plantain {planiago major), that is always found in city, town, or village, whether on the banks of the ganges, the thames, or the missouri. it is said that the in dians of new england used to call this plant " enghshman's foot," because it always sprung up in the footsteps of the first settlers. there is a beautiful little bluebell found between danvers and salem, the campanula glomerata, brought, very ukely, from the chalk hius of england, where it grows abundantly. it is now fairly naturalized, and appears to be as innocent as it is beautiful. it is yearly extending the bounds of its loca lity, though at present, i beueve, it is not found in any other spot in the united states. , it is a flower well worthy of cul tivation, requiring a dry soil, approaching as much as possible the character of the alpine region, of which it is a native. in the vicinity of this city, the english white-thorn, the hawthorn of the poets, of which so much has been written, is slowly naturauzing itself. it is certainly a useful shrub, forming beautiful fences, and contributing much to the gar den-hke appearance of england. to the engush it may well counterbalance the myrtle of more genial chmes. to the people of this section of the united states, it can never become of much importance. here there is abundance of stone; and, whue such an indestructible material can be found, live fences ought not to be.adppted. a five fence has certainly a tendency to beautify the scenery, and to give 228 vegetation about salem. a garden-like aspect to the land it encloses; but it cannot compare in point of utility with a firm stone wall. when a hedge becomes gapped, it requires years to repair it ; but, if a stone wall falls down, it is very soon replaced. live fences, however, may be used to advantage where stone is not to .be found. sometimes they may be introduced as ornaments, with very good effect. there is a native shrub, abundant in this vicinity, most admirably adapted for fences, — the common cockspur-thorn {cratmgus cms galli). in all the essentials of a fencing shrub it fully equals the english hawthorn, to which, indeed, it is closely allied. the spines of this shrub are more than an inch long ; so that a hedge formed of it would present an almost impregnable barrier, bidding defiance to au intruders, whether biped or quadruped. several plants of this shrub have been suffered to stand near the entrance of the forest river road, till they have assumed the size of trees. in the spring, they are covered with a profusion of white blossoms ; and, in the fall, their rich scarlet fruit never fails to attract at tention. in these particulars, this shrub strikingly resembles its english congener. indeed, the points of resemblance are so many and so striking that it ought to be called the ameri can hawthorn. like the english haw, its fruit requires two years to vegetate. the barberry, so very abundant in our vicinity, is sup posed to be an introduced shrub. it corresponds exactly with the berberis vulgaris of europe. it has only a limited locahty on the seaboard of new england, and is not found anywhere else on this continent. the vigor of its growth is especially note-worthy. it rises by the way-side ; it grows in the chinks and crevices of the rocks ; it spreads over neglected pastures, and looks around with a saucy confidence that seems to say, " au the world was made for barberry bushes." it is doubtless the design of nature', that plants should be colonized ; that there should be a change of localities ; that, when any part of the earth is rendered unfit for producing one race of plants, it shall be furnished with seeds of another. the husbandman does but imitate this process of nature, when he pursues what is called a rotation of crops. various vegetation about salem. 229 are the expedients to which nature resorts to produce this end. the seeds of lofty trees are often furnished with wings ; and, by the aid of the autumnal winds, they are borne to a great distance. sometimes birds are employed as the car riers of seeds ; and they transport them with amazing rapi dity. nuttall tells us that " pigeons killed near the city of new york have been found with their crops full of rice col lected in the plantations of georgia or carolina." the para sitical misletoe, the once-sacred emblem of the druids, bears a small white berry of an extremely viscid pulp. the birds, who are fond of this fruit, are apt to encumber their bills with the glutinous substance ; and, to clean them, they rub them upon the branches of trees where they happen to ahght, thus depositing the seeds in the very place where nature intended they should grow. it is perhaps proper to observe, that the misletoe is a para sitical plant that grows in europe and the southern states. it attaches itself to the oak, the apple, the maple, the ash, — indeed, to most deciduous trees, — and grows upon them, a suspended bush of evergreen, altogether unique in its ap peeurance. it sustains itself by drinldng the sap of its sup porter. the oak, the walnut, the chestnut, and some other trees, produce ponderous seeds, too large for distribution by the feathered tribes. but a kind and watchful providence has not been unmindful of their dispersion and deposition in spots favorable to their future growth. these trees are the favorite haunts of the squirrel; and to his charge is committed the planting of future forests of these varieties ; among whose branches his own race may build their soft abodes, lick the morning dew, and pursue their innocent gambols, and finally provide for man a rich material for his industry and enter prise. as a gentleman was one day walking in the woods, his attention was diverted by a squirrel, which sat very com posedly on the ground. he stopped to observe his motions ; in a few minutes the squirrel darted to the top of a noble oak, beneath which he was sitting. in an instant he was down with an acorn in his mouth ; and, after finding a soft 230 vegetation about salem. spot, he quickly dug a small hole, deposited his charge, the germ of a future oak, covered it up, and then darted up the tree again. in a moment he was down with another, which he buried in the same manner ; and thus he continued to labor as long as the observer thought proper to watch him. the instinct of the little animal may be directed to a pro vision for his future wants ; but the giver of au good has endowed him with such an active and untiring industry, that he does more than supply all these ; and the surplus rises to adorn the earth, and proclaim the wondrous works of him who is perfect in knowledge. the capsules of some plants burst with a spring, and the seeds are scattered broadcast by the impulse. the garden balsam, and all the violet race, are examples of this mode. it is well known how the burdock and the burr marygold {bidens frondosa) hook themselves by a mechanical con trivance to the clothes of persons and the coats of animals, illustrating in the most famihar manner the economy of nature in the dispersion of seeds. but, after all, man is the great agent in promoting vege table migration. it is by his agency that the most, precious seeds are borne across the wide ocean. he carries them in au his wanderings among his richest treasures ; while others follow his course, whether he will or not, mingling with his rarer seeds, or adhering unseen to his household stuff. the animal fleabane {erigeron canadense) was sent from canada to france, in bales of fur, and from thence, by natural propa gation, into all the countries of europe. the tree primrose [cenothera biennis), so common in our own vicinity, was first naturalized in the neighborhood of liverpool, and from thence distributed by its own spontaneous effort all over the civilized world. it is by the agency of man that the lofty forests are levelled to the ground, and the bosom of the earth laid bare for the reception of a new race of plants. our own vicinity is a remarkable exemplification of the fact. all around us we see trees, shrubs, and herbacious plants, that once were strangers to the soil. a change is still sweeping over the face of nature. the noble race of forest-trees, and the beau vegetation about salem. 231 tiful tribe of wild-wood flowers that nestle at their feet, and find shelter and shade beneath their boughs, are fast fading away. a few blows of the woodman's axe, and the tree whose branches have braved a hundred winters lies prostrate with the ground. the time is not distant when public attention must be drawn to the planting of forest-trees in this country. timber is growing scarce, while the arts and manufactures, which have taken such deep root among us, are calling for a more enlarged supply. timber has now to be brought from afar, at an annually increasing expense ; while large tracts of land are approaching a state of barrenness, by being laid bare to the searching influence of the sun and wind. we have destroyed our forests with recklessness, and posterity must feel the consequences ! indeed, our bleak pastures and bare hills begin to rej)roach us for not making some effort to shelter the one, and clothe the other. the mechanics have a deep interest in this matter. how often does the profitable prosecution of a certain branch of business depend upon the abundance and cheapness of its staple material! has the ship-builder no interest in the growth of our pasture oaks ? is the wheelwright insensible to the advantages of an abundant supply of ash and elm ? when we see huge loads of barrels entering our cities, when we see high piles of chairs and other manufactures of wood coming from far back in the country, and, above all, when we observe our merchants building their ships on the banks of distant rivers, do not these things proclaim the growing scarcity of tunber around us ? societies of natural history could hot render a greater public service than that of ascertainuig the comparative value of the different species of timber-trees suitable for this climate. in this pursuit they may be materially aided by intelligent and enterprising mariners. these ought to be requested to collect, in their voyages and travels, the seeds of all such forest-trees as are likely to grow in this latitude. evelyn, who spent his life in an effort to enrich his native england by plantations, says, "i would encourage all imaginable industry in those that travel foreign countries, and especially 332 vegetation about sakm. gentlemen who have concerns in our american settlements, to promote the culture of such, plants and shrubs and trees, especially timber, as may yet add to those we find already agreeable to our climate." we all know with what patience, pains, and expense, the modern nations of europe have searched the most distant climes for valuable vegetable pro ductions. we have noticed the astonishing exuberance with which our naturalized vegetation appears to flourish. it is a fact that ought to be regarded, and we may perhaps deduce from it an important lesson. it seems to point to a change of seed, to show that new seeds and a fresh soil are important con ditions in vegetable economy. perhaps we ought to take the hint from nature, and look beyond the old forest stocks of the neighborhood for timber-trees of a rapid and vigorous growth. i would not disparage the goodly race of trees that once adorned the county of essex. i fear that we shall never look upon their like again. but it is doubtful whether they would take to the soil in the form of artificial plantations as kindly as some varieties brought from a distance. every one knows that a new orchard cannot be raised on the site of an old one ; and it is equally well known, that, when a forest of hard-wood trees is cut down, there the pines and softer woods succeed a spontaneous growth. the locust is here attacked by an insect, and is fast declining in our neighborhood, and i believe all along the atlantic shore; while it is now appearing in its pristine vigor, a naturalized tree, in all the south of france. michaux says that it is likely to become abundant in europe, where it is a stranger, and scarce in america, its native clime. a rotation of crops is as needful for forest-trees as for the more humble agricultural productions. where are the forests of lebanon, into which solomon sent his fourscore thousand hewers of wood ? dwindled at last to some half a dozen cedars, as if the earth was tired of pro ducing, for so long a period, the same race of plants. the larch plantations of scotland are a striking example of the importance of a change of seed. in the year 1738, a scottish gentleman was seen ^vending vegetation about salem. 233 his way from the british metropolis to his paternal estate at glenlyon, in perthshire. he travelled on horseback, after the fashion of the times, with his servant well mounted, and bearing his portmanteau behind him. on the top of the portmanteau was lashed one of the richest treasures for scot land that ever passed the tweed. it was a few foreign larch-trees, the larix communis, or common white larch of germany. these few trees this pubhc-spirited individual generously distributed on his route to those persons in scot land who would give them that care and trial which it was desirable they should receive. the course of a few years soon began to demonstrate their superiority over the old scotch pine. growing side by side, these vigorous strangers soon over-topped and looked down upon the aborigines of the sou. the difference in favor of the german larch was found to be immense. " it bears," says sang, a celebrated forest manager, " the ascendency over the scotch pine in the following important circumstances: — it brings double the price per foot, and arrives at a timber size in a half or a third part of the time. the timber of the larch at thirty or forty years is equal in quantity, and vastly superior in quality, to the scotch pine of a hundred years. a larch-tree of fifty years' growth has been sold for twelve guineas, while a scotch pine of the same age, and from the same soil, has not brought more than fifteen shillings." towards the close of the last century, when the arts, com merce, and manufactures, began to rise in scotland, her nobles soon learned to calculate the value of an abundant supply of useful timber. happily the experiment had been tried, and the species of timber-trees best suited to the climate and soil of scotland was already known. in the year 1796, more than five millions of larch-trees were raised by one nurseryman in edinburgh. the duke of athol planted two hundred thousand every year for a number of years, and on one occasion he set out more than a million within the year. nor was it merely planting. in the year 1820, this patriotic nobleman had the satisfaction of seeing a thirty-six gun frigate launched, built entirely of larch timber of his own raising. throughout the british isles^ the larch has been 30 234 veffetaiion about salem. 'b' planted by thousands and millions ; and, what is very extra ordinary, the most barren land is converted into fine pasturage by the process. the larch succeeds best on poor land, while the annual fall of its leaves soon gives rise to a fine natural grass that is highly valuable for grazing. land has been let at a yearly rent of from ten shiuings to three pounds the acre, that, before the planting of the larch, was not worth so many pence. it is calculated that in the next age the high lands of scotland alone will be able to furnish the whole com merce of britain with timber for its shippings the sphit for planting continues to the present time. in 1820, the london society for the promotion of the arts presented a gold medal to one individual, for planting nearly two millions of forest-trees, one half of which were larch. most assuredly, those individuals who have thus enriched their country deserve well of posterity. the celebrated coke, of norfolk, has been a successful planter of forest-trees. it is said that, soon after this gentle man came into possession of his estate, the lease of a certain parcel of land expired. this land (eleven thousand acres) had been let at a yearly rent of three shillings per acre ; but this the lessee thought too much, and offered only two shil lings ; to which coke replied, " no, i will sooner turn it into a hunting-ground ; " and he immediately set to planting it with oak, larch, and the spanish chestnut. in a few years, the annual thinnings alone yielded him more than the former rental. at the time of his marriage, this magnificent wood lot was valued at £220,000. the planting of trees is by no means such a hopeless or heartless affair as some people imagine. a short time since, i called upon an aged gentleman* of this county, and was politely invited to see his trees. as we passed beneath a noble range of plane-trees, whose bending boughs seemed to do homage to their planter, my friend informed me that the trees i was then admiring, some of which were sixty or seventy feet high, and five or six feet in circumference, were a fine seed between his thumb and finger, after he was five * dr. eilham, of wenham. vegetation about salem. 235 and forty years of age. when i alluded to his public spirit and disinterested benevolence, he replied in a tone of mingled satisfaction and regret, " i now wish that i had planted a hundred trees where i only planted one." there is reason to beheve, that the late timothy pickering held the larch-tree in high estimation, and thought of it as a suitable tree for covering the bare hills of his native county. at any rate, he was among the first to give it a trial. some thing like five and twenty years ago, he imported two hun dred of these trees. they now form the ornament of his late estate at wenham. i have known them for more than eighteen years ; and, during that period, they have exhibited a growth of great promise. their seeds ripen kindly in this climate, and a second generation of spontaneous growth has arisen from these imported trees. we may now reckon this valuable timber-tree among the naturahzed products of new england. if the individual who plants a common tree deserves the thanks of posterity, how much larger is the debt of gratitude due to him who introduces and blesses his country with a new and useful race of trees ! those who visit wenham in the middle of the summer, and behold the original range of larch-trees, cannot fail to be struck with their appearance. their hght foliage and fine pyramidal forms, differing materially from the pines around us, suggest at once their exotic origin ; while the richly orna mental and tasteful manner in which they are disposed, tells at once that their planter was no ordinary individual. there is something peculiarly affectionate and grateful in associating the remembrance of a great man with some parti cular tree. who has not heard of pope's willow, or of the mulberry that shakspeare planted? — and who could have stood beneath the shade of the one, or have gazed upon the other, with ordinary emotion ? something of this reverence will be felt by those who ride by the larches of a pickering's planting ; and time will not diminish the interest. i do not wish to be understood as particularly recommending the german larch, though i think it highly worthy of a trial on poor land. nothing but experiment can determine the trees 236 vesretatimi about salem. 'o' best suited to this climate, if indeed any can be found superior to the old stocks. it is time that attention was awakened to the subject; for who can calculate the advantages of an abundant supply of useful timber to a commercial and manufacturing people ? we possess one tree, among many that are richly orna mental, of surpassing beauty. i allude to our common elm ( ulmus americana) . the grace, the beauty, the magnificence of this tree is only to be exceeded by the princely palm. planted in rows along the streets, it is the pride of our towns, suggesting to the mind a far better idea of ease and comfort than it could derive from the most exquisite statuary. in danvers, a little on this side of aborn-street, in a barn yard on the land of the late benjamin putman, stands an elm of great beauty. a finer specimen of the ehn, a more per fect tree, is seldom seen. such is the vigor, the healthiness, and unshorn symmetry of its form, that it appears not yet to have arrived at maturity. there is a remarkable boldness in the manner in which the numerous branches spring from the parent stem, and form its fine symmetrical head. dur ing a ride of six or seven hundred miles along the turnpike roads of england, the summer before last, i carried this tree in the eye of my mind as a standard ; and truly in all that long ride i could not find one that appeared so perfect. the boston elm is a larger tree ; but it is braced and bolted with bars of iron, and the mind is pained with the symptoms of approaching decay. to the lone farm-house or the detached viua, the elm is a most graceful appendage. i hope, however, i shall be forgiven if i say a word on the manner in which it is sometimes planted. it is too common to plant trees, while young, close before the dwelling, so that in a few years they totally obscure the building they were designed to ornament. trees should be planted so as to flank the building, if it be a detached cottage or villa : in this position they will usually furnish sufficient shade, without obscuring the view, either from within or without the dwell ing. this climate does not possess an evergreen ivy ; but our common creeper ( vitis hederacea) is a most excellent substi vegetation about salem. 237 tute. in many respects it surpasses the ivy of europe. be ing deciduous, it never becomes a gathering-place for snow in winter, or dampness in spring. i am surprised that it does not work its way into favor. the ivy has always been a favorite. it was held in reverence by the ancients ; and in the elder world it is associated with all that is venerable. it mantles the lonely abbey ruin, and creeps over the moulder ing remains of feudal power. i think our creeper would be more generally admired, were we more discriminating in the use of it. it is very often trained against a newly painted vestibule of much architectural spruceness ; and it soon be gins to obscure those embellishments that cost the owner no small sum, and then down comes the creeper in disgrace. its proper place is to cover up the blank side of an out-house, or to give grace to some rustic wall or fence. perhaps i shall better convey my idea of its use by observing that the ivy or creeper would be a beautiful ornament to the gothic style of the episcopal church of salem. the wild beauty of its pendant laterals would be in correct keeping with the gothic arch, and add much to the remarkable appearance of the building. but, on the other hand, it would be altogether out of place to allow it to creep over, and mar, the delicate proportions, and obscure the fine architecture, of the south meeting-house. the indigenous vegetation of our immediate vicinity does not, indeed, present a landscape of the most luxuriant growth. we cannot boast the palm, the lemon, the orange, the clove, and the cinnamon-tree. but, if the eye is not allowed to be hold a perpetual spring, it is permitted, during our fleeting summers, to enjoy a beautiful variety of flowers, that spring up in rapid succession, and pass like a shifting scene before it ; filling the heart with joy and gladness, and the imagina tion with a thousand forms of grace and beauty, on which it may love to linger when the charming reality has passed away. from the time that the httle draba opens its tiny pe tals to cheer us with the hope of returning spring, tiu the last flower of the summer, the blue-eyed gentian, weeps over the departed year, it is one succession of bright hues and beau tiful forms. at least, it is so to all who have eyes to behold, 238 vegetation about salem ■&' and souls to enjoy, the pure pleasures that flow irom a con templation of the works of god in creation. how beautiful is all nature in the springtime of flowers ! how lovely are the woods when the young leaves are ex panding, — when the first green garniture of summer is burst ing into existence ! the lowly hepatica opens its gemlike •flowers at the foot of some lofty tree, eager to greet -the first ray of summer-like sunshine that visits the earth. the tinted petals of the anemone quiver in the breeze, as the winds of the spring pass by. the early thalictrum exhibits its singular, flower-like tassels of purple and yellow. the delicate cory* dalis blooms on tbe bare rock ; and the stranger who beholds it for the first time wonders that a flower of so much beauty should be born to " blush unseen." who can tread the green carpet of the earth, in the spring of the year, and not feel delighted at the first appearance of the modest houstonia, peeping out from among the young grass, and seeming, as an eminent naturalist beautifully expresses it, " like handfuls of the pale scattered flowers of the lilac, which had come too early to maturity"? the "wee, modest, crimson-tipped flower," the mountain daisy, which the poet burns buried with his ploughshare, and then sung its requiem in never dying rhyme, was not more worthy of a poet's effort than this graceful harbinger of a new england summer. a love of flowers has always ranked among the refined pleasures of a polished people. " let us crown ourselves with rosebuds before they be withered ; let no flower of the spring pass by us," were the words of the royal sage, in the days of israel's glory, when the sons of jacob sat every man beneath his own vine and fig-tree, — when the roses of sharon bloomed in the palaces of jerusalem, and the daughters of judah gathered lilies by the waters of kedron, to scatter them in the courts of the temple. no sooner had the warlike eoman conquered and incorporated the sur rounding states, and made rome the mistress of all italy, than the villas of the roman citizens studded the whole coun try, from the straits of messina to the mountains that formed her northern barrier. it was to embellish these, that the fruits and the flowers of the east were gathered by the ro vegetation about salem. 239 man soldiers, in their martial expeditions, and poured into the lap of italy. nor is the savage insensible to the charms of nature. we are told that an otaheitean was once taken to paris, and shown all the splendors of that gay metropolis ; but his heart yearned for the simple beauties of his own na tive isle. on being taken to the garden of plants, the unex pected sight of a banana-tree so reminded him of the hills and streams of his distant home, that he sprang forward to embrace it ; and, with his eyes bathed in tears, he exclaimed in a voice of joy, " ah ! tree of my country ! " and seemed by a delightful illusion to be transported to the land of his birth. but to return to our own loved hills, and the flowers that cover them. among these the blood-root {sanguinaria canadensis) well deserves a passing notice. it puts up from the ground with remarkable caution. a single leaf of a white and woolly texture rises from the ground, and enfolds a litde flower-bud, wrapping it round as with a mantle. in this guarded manner, it abides the vicissitudes of our spring weather. when a warm day arrives, a milk-white flower, of singular delicacy, s'hoots up, and bares its lovely bosom to the sun. when clouds obscure the sky, or when night falls, the little flower closes its milk-white petals, the single leaf gathers closer round the flower-stem ; and thus, like a fairy taking her rest, it awaits the touch of another sunbeam. we import the snow-drop, we cherish it with care, and it well repays our attention ; but this delicate native, equally worthy of our regard, is seldom seen in our gardens. so true is it that flowers, like prophets, have no honor in their own country. in the earlier part of spring, the columbine (aquilegia canadensis) shakes its gay bells over all our rocky hius. starting from every chink and crevice, it clothes the rude features of our ancient rocks in a vernal robe of scarlet and gold. this flower seems, in a peculiar manner, to have gamed the regard of the young. on the first fine days of spring, the youth of both sexes may be observed returning into town, laden with ample bouquets of its pendulous flowers; while ever and anon they drop them on the side-walks, as if 240 vesretation about salem. a" to invite the busy crowd of care-worn citizens to leave the town's dull smoke, — to forget for a while their ponderous ledgers, and to go forth into the fields to sympathize with the spirit of loveliness which is abroad in all the land. would this be waste or improvement of time ? let wordsworth reply : — " nature never did betray the heart that loved her. "ks her privilege, through all the years of this our life, to lead from'joy to joy ; for she can so inform the mind that is within us, so impress with quietness and beauty, and so feed with hfly thoughts, that neither evil tongues, rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all the dreary intercourse of common life. shall e'er prevail against ns, or disturb our cheerful faith that all that we behold is pull of blessings." and again, " therefore, let the moon shine on thee in thy solitary walk, and let the misty mountain winds be free to blow against thee ; and, in after-years. when these wild ecstasies shall be matured into a sober pleasure, when thy mind shall be a mansion for all lovely forms, thy memory be a dwelling-place for all sweet sounds and harmonies ; oh ! then, if solitude or fear or pain or giief should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts of tender joy wilt thou remember nature. and these her benedictions ! " i do not know that a more delightful task could be assigned to any one, than that of observing the vegetation of this vici nity. among our plants are many of great interest and beauty ; and certainly nothing can be more fraught with instruction and delight than occasional visits to the charming locahties in which they grow. who is there that has ever pursued this branch of natural history, that does not recollect the many scenes of rural beauty and loveliness into which it has led him ? how often, when gathering his floral trea sures, has he not paused to admire the silent and sylvan vegetation about salem. 241 retreats in which he has found them ! all around this neigh borhood, there are scenes that challenge the best efforts of the painter ; and he who holds converse with the flowers soon learns the best points of view, and becomes a privileged spectator. among our native plants are many that deserve a place in the flower-border, and none more so than the lily tribe. the superb lily, which is rarely found in this vicinity, and the canada and pennsylvanian lilies, are among the most beautiful flowers that bloom. there is something exceed ingly graceful in the general aspect of the canada lily, when it assumes a good size in the rich soil of a garden. it rises with a clean stem, throwing off whorls of green and beau tiful leaves, at regular intervals, to the height of five or six feet ; crowning the whole with a pyramidal cluster of droop ing bells. many of the foreign lilies excel the canadense in the beauty of their flowers ; but none approach the delicate and tropical symmetry of its habit. the superb cardinal flower will be remembered by every one : it is the ornament of our water-courses in the long days of summer. it has been cultivated to high perfection, and should always occupy a place in our gardens. we have growing among us one of the neatest little garden hedge-plants that the earth produces, the httle privet (idgus trum). it is found abundantly on the road to manchester. it is of beautiful foliage, and in summer produces spikes of sweet-smelling flowers, uke miniature bunches of white lilac. in the days of parkinson and evelyn, this shrub used to be clipped into the forms of birds, beasts, and fishes, and nobody knows what. time, however, has not diminished the esti mation in which it is held. i have often observed it forming the screen hedges within the iron railings that surround the public gardens in the great squares of london. for the formation of interior or garden hedges, there are few shrubs that approach it in appearance of neatness and beauty. we have plants all around us of singular habits and strange propensities. the cuscuta, or dodder, which is found in the moist land of this neighborhood, affords a ^ecimen of the parasitic tribe 31 242 ves-eiation about salem ■&' of plants, which fasten and feed upon others. the cuscuta is a bright yellow leafless vine, bearing a profusion-of small white flowers. it rises from the ground like any other vegetable ; and, after attaining a certain height, it looks round, and seizes upon the first plant that comes in its way. like a little vegetable boa constrictor, it takes a few spiral turns round its victim ; and, when it finds itself firmly fixed, it disen gages itself from its own root, lets go its hold upon the earth, and depends for the future on the plant upon which it is seated. in this way it blooms and perfects its seed, without any direct communication with the earth. if the seeds of this plant are sown, they will come up and grow for a season ; but they soon die, if they have no plant to which they can attach themselves. pope, in his " essay on man," says : — " that thus to man the toioe of natviie spake : — go, firom the creatures thy instruction take ; learn from the birds what food the thickets yield ; learn from the beasts the physic of the field ; thy arts of building from the bee receive ; learn of the mole to plough, the worm to weave ; learn of the little nautilus to sail, speed the thin oar, and catch the driving gale." who knows but man caught the idea of multiplying choice fruits by grafting, from observing with what facility parasitic plants attach themselves to others, and draw nourishment from roots that are not their own ? the dog's-bane that is found all around us, the silk-weed that grows by the way-side, and the sundew that is found in every old peat meadow, are all strongly sensitive, and strangely destructive of insect life. the dog's-bane opens its nipper-like filaments ; and when a fly puts in his proboscis in search of honey, they close hke a steel trap, and the fittle victim remains a provision tiu he dies. the leaves of the drosera, or sundew, are furnished with a sort of hair-like spines, which support minute globules of a clear liquor ; and, when thirsty insects descend to drink this nectar, the spines fall upon them and entangle them, and the whole leaf bends with a sort of muscular effort to secure the intruder ; nor is there any escape from the irritated plant. vegetation about salem. 243 these strange propensities are not to be construed as instances of wickedness or cruelty in plants. our profound ignorance of the causes and motives of action of all created things should teach us to humble ourselves before the great creator, whose ways are wondrous and past finding out. "certainly we do know that all unnecessary sufferings, sufferings that have no salutary tendency, or subserviency to the happiness or welfare of created beings, can find no place under the government of an infinitely perfect and gracious ruler." it was noticed by linnaeus, that the flowers of the barberry are remarkably sensitive. if the filament of the flower be touched by any substance, as the blade of a penknife or a bit of stick, it instantly faus upon the stigma avith apparent violence. the common locust is remarkably sensitive of fight. in the glory of a noonday sun, its foliage appears enlivened. the fittle leaflets that form its wing-like leaves look upward, as if they were anxious to drink in the fight and warmth of his reviving rays. at night, or in cloudy weather, they all hang their heads as if asleep. the whole tree wears alto gether a different aspect at eventide. i very weu remember the first time that i observed this sensitiveness in some young trees of this genus. i thought they had met with some acci dent, and were dying. the next morning, however, i was pleasingly surprised to find that they all looked up to the sun as joyously as ever. like some young animal, they ap peared heartily refreshed by a good night's sleep. a fittle girl who had observed this phenomenon in a locust that grew before her nursery window, upon being required to go to bed a uttle earlier than usual, repfied with much acuteness, " o mother ! it is not yet time to go to bed : the locust-tree has not yet begun to say its prayers." some of our most common plants are remarkable in the choice of their localities. the hemlock loves to luxuriate in the ruin and desolation of cities. wherever there is a deserted mansion, with its garden in ruins, there is sure to be found the fatal hemlock, as if the very ground were ac cursed, and brought forth poisonous plants. the ghostly mufiein stalks over worn-out and neglected pastures, the emblem of steriuty. the black nightshade and the dubious 244 vegetation about salem. form of the thorn-apple rise from neglected heaps of rubbish, as if the noxious exhalations had assumed a material form, to warn man of the consequences of uncleanness. there is a spot within the bounds of our county, that is classic ground to the naturalist, — where grow some plants that are not common to these northern regions. i am sure that i need only mention the laurel woods of man chester, the farthest northern boundary of the magnolia, to awaken the most pleasing recollections. those who have seen these kalmia groves, at the time of their flowering, can not soon forget the scene they present. the whole appears like an enchanted land. i have sometimes thought that this wild wood garden, full of sweet odors and graceful forms, must have been torn from some more genial clime, wafted across the calm bosom of our bay, and placed, some stilly night, just where it is, to give us a glimpse of a more favored creation. there, in the low ground, is found the cymbidium, the pogonia, and the beautiful orchis fimbriata ; plants that may vie with the proudest exotics, and which, in another hemisphere, are cherished among the most favored children of the earth. and shall i forget the rhodora, that, like the ahnond, gives forth its lively purple flowers ere yet its leaves are expanded, — a shrub better known and more valued abroad than in its own native land ? above all, there, too, is found the magnolia, with its unrivalled foliage, saturating the air for miles with the odor of its flowers. we are cer tainly favored beyond measure in having within our borders a type of that genus of plants which is esteemed for flower and foliage the most magnificent the earth produces. the pencil can give but a faint idea of the splendor of the magnolia grandiflora ; and the pen altogether fails in the ef fort to describe its charms. the south may well be proud of the possession of a tree of such noble bearing. the leaves are glossy, and of a most luxuriajit softness. the young branches are of a fine, purplish brown, producing flowers at the extremity of each ; and, when the tree rises to the height of sixty or seventy feet, and each branch holds up its petalled vase of ivory whiteness, as if presenting incense to the sun, it affords an appearance of beauty and grandeur that rivals the proudest productions of man. the twofold being. 245 many of the nations of the earth have chosen a flower for their emblem. the roses of england are well known in story. ireland has chosen the lowly shamrock, which is found in every field ; and its adoption is said to be as old as the introduction of christianity into the island. dear is the thistle to the heart of the scotchman ; but faded for ever are the hlies of france. the carohnian rallies beneath the palmetto ; and on the earhest coins of old massachusetts we find a pine-tree, — emblematic, no doubt, of the source from which she drew her earhest wealth. if ever these united states should choose a symbol from the vegetable world, let that symbol be the magnoua ! the twofold being. the dew of youth on her pure brow lay ; her smile was the dawn of spring's softest day ; spring's rosy light was on all her way. she seem'd an oasis in desert lands ; we thank'd god for her with lifted hands, then turn'd again to the weary sands. but life came on with its withering glare, and swept down all the sweet beauty there, and left the fount dry and the branches bare. when i look'd again on her alter'd face. the glow had all vanish' d, and left no trace, — not a lingering gleam of her maiden grace. yet that form, as in earliest beauty fair. can my mind shape out, in this evening air : not a trait, not a shadow, is wanting there. so now two beings for one i find ; one walks on earth, one lives in my mind ; yet mystic relations these two still bind. 246 the 'raofold being. o seer ! which the reality ? — the beauty, all gone ere again i could see ; or this vision my soul hath eternally ! yet there may be more than the eye can scan : have such bright creations no wider plan ? doth god love the beautiful less than man ? it seems as if nothing could fill our dearth ; but the beauty that stayed not on dark cold earth may have fled again to the land of its birth. it fled the pangs of life's constant rack ; but, when the soul takes the heavenward track, it shall come like a sweet child nestling back. for the loveliness that earth's fairest wear must be one and the same with the beauty there of the transfigured angels of heavenly air. and the parted soul shall take its stand in familiar guise 'mid the sister-band, — deck'd with the glory of god's right hand. and for us, when the walls of flesh are riven, and to open'd spirit-eyes is given to see the beloved again in heaven, — 'mid the fathomless joys of that wondrous scene. will come once more the presence serene of that pure beauty's unearthly mien. then shall time's veil uplifted be. and our life's long dreams of anxiety. like clouds o'er a sunny hill, shall flee. and it will be seen by the spirits pure. how little is left upon earth to endure, when we learn that all which is fair is sure. the favorite. 247 the favorite. i "wotrid not have thee criticized by vain or vulgar eyes ; i would not have thee eulogized by one who could not prize that maiden purity and calm which form thy most especial charm. i want a poet's heart, to read thy soft, appealing glance, who, for his pains, should have the meed, while watching thy sweet countenance, of sunny smiles, that sudden spread across thy lips, and, passing thence. upon thy brow their light dispense. half child, half woman ! the pure faith, that every thing was made for love, which saved our childish days from scathe. still bears thy floating feet above the thorns and briars which must tear those who find no such path of air. and, surely, natural to thee such confidence must prove, stealing from every treasury thy proper hoard of love ; for at the first sound of thy voice the closest stores unlock their choice. almost i weep tolet thee go : fain would i watch above thy path. the least approaching shade to know, that thy unventured future hath, to lead thee in life's sweetest ways. and feed thee on love's heartfelt praise. 248 tlie favorite. ii. i watch'd the rose-clouds rise around the scene wherein thy life's fair pageant on did glide, and every hour, with iris-colored sheen. tinging thy ipveliness and girlish pride. fond lingering on childhood's fairy isle. thy innocent feet yet press'd its dewy flowers ; but joys of youth impatient strove to wile thy half-waked soul to more entrancing bowers. the sternest eyes dropp'd gentlest looks of love. the coldest hands strewed incense at thy feet ; and, in the cloudless zenith arch'd above, not one dark shade thy fearless gaze could meet. yet still thine unsuspicious, placid glance found nothing strange in such a beauteous lot, but saw the coming years, like dreams, advance. and of their solemn meaning question'd not. nor fear'd i for thee, — but bewilder'd, charm'd, lured by a magic never felt before, i never dream'd mine idol could be harm'd. and careless flung for thee one perfume more. i saw thy head grow giddy in the breath of adulation, fanning out the air common and pure, and with a subtle death poisoning and making false thine atmosphere. oh ! perishing of too much love and praise ! oh ! foolish mortals, spoiling all their best ! who now our floweret — too much forced — can raise. or from its bloom exotic bravely wrest ? . erketf \ librae v of califo* ma bj&amp;gt; |). 2). cjjoreau. walden ; or, life in the woods. i2mo,gilt top, $1.50. riverside aldine edition. i6mo, $1.00. a week on the concord and merrimack rivers. i2mo, gilt top, $1.50. excursions in field and forest. with a bio graphical sketch by emerson, izmo, gilt top, $1.50. the maine woods. 12010, gilt top, $1.50. cape cod. i2mo, gilt top, $1.50. letters to various persons, to which are added a few poems. 121110, gilt top, $1.50. a yankee in canada. with antislavery and reform papers. 12010, gilt top, $1.50. early spring in massachusetts. from the journal of henry d. thoreau. i2mo, gilt top, $1.50. summer. from the journal of henry d. thoreau. 12 mo, gilt top, $1.50. winter. from the journal of henry d. thoreau. i2mo, gilt top, $1.56. the above ten izmo volumes, $15.00 ; half calf, $27.50. selections from thoreau. with bibliography. i8mo, $1.00. the succession of forest trees and wild apples. with biographical sketch by emerson. i6mo, paper, 15 cents. houghton, mifflin and company, boston and new york. autumn: from the journal of henry d. thoreau. edited by h. g. o. blake &quot; this world is no blot for us nor blank ; it means intensely and means good ; to find its meaning is my meat and drink.&quot; browning, fra lippo tappi. &quot; in the last stage of civilization, poetry, religion and philosophy will be one, and there are glimpses of this truth in the first.&quot; thobeau. december 17, 1837. boston and new york houghton, mifflin and company 1892 copyright, 1892, by houghton, mifflin & co. all rights reserved. the riverside press, cambridge, mass., u. s. a. electrotyped and printed by h. o. houghton & company. preface. with the present volume, the four seasons, as they are represented in thoreau s journal, are nominally completed, though but a part of the spring and summer has been given, and much has been omitted in all the four volumes printed. as i have said before, my own interest in the journal is in the character and genius of the writer, rather than in any account of the phe nomena of nature. according to thoreau s own view, such a journal is, in the strictest sense, an autobiography. &quot; our thoughts,&quot; he says, &quot; are the epochs in our lives ; all else is but as a jour nal of the winds that blew while we were here.&quot; and again in this volume, under october 21, 1857, &quot; is not the poet bound to write his own biography ? is there any other work for him but a good journal ? we do not wish to know how his imaginary hero, but how he the actual hero, lived from day to day.&quot; as the &quot; week on the 878 iv preface. concord and merrimack rivers,&quot; though describ ing a voyage very limited as to time and dis tance, yet from its intermingling of thought with loving observation and poetic description seems a far-reaching journey, so these oft-repeated walks and boating excursions in and about concord, to fair haven, the cliffs, conantum, etc., abound in more genuine life, more of the true spirit of travel, than the most varied adventures of ordi nary travelers in distant lands. one may have visited other continents, and yet never gone so far. in continuing to publish these volumes, i feel sure of an eager and earnest company of read ers, though not a very large one. i have also the satisfaction of discharging a duty which seemed to devolve upon me by inheritance, thus making better known a life which has been to me for so many years of the deepest interest, which in the hurry and rush of our present civi lization is certainly well worth attending to, a life which, however partial, as every finite life must be, points so clearly and steadily towards the highest ideal. here was a young man, with a liberal education and little or no pecuniary preface. v means, who on entering the world determined not to throw obstacles in the way of his true life by attempting to earn such a living and such a position as the usages of society set be fore him. the cheerful serenity which appears in his writings, as it did in his manners and conversation, shows how successful was this plan for him, how with simple wants and in ob scurity he enjoyed the wealth of the world. he knew early, with little experience, through the intimations of his genius, how false the aims of society are ; that real success is not in proportion to the property and distinction one acquires, but to the degree in which he finds heaven here upon earth, though this idea was not expressed by him in the language of religion. many persons talk in this way, listen approvingly to such preaching, but fall in with the current. the remarkable thing about this man is that though not a church-goer, not caring for the institutions of religion, he yet regarded it as the clear dic tate of wisdom thus to make the most of life, and acted upon his conviction. in view of these things, the charge of egotism and selfish ness will at once spring to the lips of many. vi peeface. but probably few of us know better than he did, that an unworthy self-regard is fatal to the object he had in view. &quot; renounce joy for my fellow s sake ? that s joy beyond joy.&quot; though deeply interested and sometimes ac tive in the cause of human freedom, he com monly took little part in works of philanthropy and reform. had he done otherwise, we should probably have lost from his character somewhat of that strong personal element which, though more quiet in its operation than associated schemes of reform, is doubtless the most power ful influence in the progress of mankind. the editor. autumn. september 21, 1854. i sometimes seem to myself to owe all my little success, all for which men commend me, to my vices. i am perhaps more willful than others, and make enormous sacrifices even of others happiness, it may be, to gain my own ends. it would seem as if nothing good could be accomplished without some vice to aid in it. sept. 21, 1859. heard in the night a snap ping sound, and the fall of some small body on the floor from time to time. in the morning i found it was produced by the witch-hazel nuts on my desk springing open and casting their seeds quite across my chamber, hard and stony as these nuts were. for several days they are shooting black seeds about my chamber. ... i suspect that it is not when the witch-hazel nut first gapes open that the seeds fly out, for i see many, if not most of them, open first with the seeds in them ; but when i release a seed, it be ing still held by its base, it flies, as i have said. 2 autumn. i think that its slippery base is compressed by the unyielding shell which at length expels it, just as i can make one fly by pressing it, and letting it slip from between my thumb and finger. it appears to fit close to the shell at its base, even after the shell gapes. the ex-plenipotentiary refers in after speeches with complacency to the time he spent abroad, and the various lords and distinguished men he met, as to a deed done, and an ever memora ble occasion. of what account are titles and offices and opportunities, if you do no memora ble deed? sept. 21, 1860. ... p.m. to easterbrook country. . . . the pods of the broom are nearly half of them open. i perceive that one just ready to open opens with a slight spring, on being touched, and the pod curls a little. i suspect that such seeds as these, which the winds do not transport, will turn out to be more sought by the birds, etc., and so transported by them, than those lighter ones which are furnished with a pappus, and so transported by the wind ; i. e., that those which the wind takes are less gener ally the food of birds and quadrupeds than the heavier and wingless seeds. sept. 22, 1852. . . . in love we impart each to each, in subtlest, immaterial form of thought or atmosphere, the best of ourselves, such as autumn. 3 commonly vanishes or evaporates in aspirations, and mutually enrich each other. the lover alone perceives and dwells in a certain human fra grance. to him humanity is not only a flavor, but an aroma and a flavor also. sept. 22, 1854. . . . p. m. over nawshaw tuck. the river is peculiarly smooth, and the water clear and sunny, as i look from the stone bridge. a painted tortoise, with his head out, outside of the weeds, looks as if resting in the air in that attitude, or suggests it, at an angle of 45, with head and flippers outstretched. . . . as i look off from the hilltop, i wonder if there are any finer days in the year than these, the air is so fine and bracing. the landscape has ac quired some fresh verdure withal. the frosts come to ripen the days like fruits, persimmons. . . . crossing the hill behind minott s just as the sun is preparing to dip below the horizon, the thin haze in the atmosphere north and south along the western horizon reflects a purple tinge, and bathes the mountains with the same, like a bloom on fruits. i wonder if this phenomenon is observed in warmer weather, or before the frosts have come. is it not another evidence of the ripe day ? i saw it yesterday. . . . by moonlight all is simple. we are enabled to erect ourselves, our minds, on account of the fewness of objects. we are no longer distracted. 4 autumn. it is simple bread and water. it is simple as the rudiments of an art, a lesson to be taken be fore sunlight, perchance, to prepare us for that. sept. 22, 1858. a clear, cold day. . . . leave salem for cape ann on foot. . . . one mile southeast of the village of manchester struck the beach of &quot;musical sand,&quot; just this side of a large, high, rocky point called eagle head ! this is a curving beach ; may be one third of a mile long and some twelve rods wide. we found the same kind of sand on a similar but shorter beach on the east side of eagle head. we first perceived the sound when we scratched with an umbrella or the finger swiftly and forcibly through the sand ; also still louder when we struck forcibly with our heels, &quot; scuf fing &quot; along. the wet or damp sand yielded no peculiar sound, nor did that which lay loose and deep next the bank, but only the more compact and dry. the sound was not at all musical, nor was it loud. fishermen might walk over it all their lives, as indeed they have done, without noticing it. e , who had not heard it, was about right when he said it was like that made by rubbing wet glass with your finger. i thought it as much like the sound made in wax ing a table as anything. it was a squeaking sound, as of one particle rubbing on another. i should say it was merely the result of the fric autumn. 5 tion of peculiarly formed and constituted parti cles. the surf was high and made a great noise, yet i could hear the sound made by my com panion s feet two or three rods distant, and if it had been still, probably could have heard it five or six rods. sept. 22, 1860. . . . some of the early bot anists, like gerard, were prompted and com pelled to describe their plants, but most now adays only measure them, as it were. the former is affected by what he sees, and so in spired to portray it ; the latter merely fills out a schedule prepared for him, makes a description pour servir. i am constantly assisted by the books in identifying a particular plant and learning some of its humbler uses, but i rarely read a sentence in a botany which reminds me of flowers or living plants. very few, indeed, write as if they had seen the thing which they pretend to describe. sept. 23, 1855. 8 p. m. i hear from my chamber a screech-owl about monroe s house, this bright moonlight night, a loud, piercing scream, much like the whinner of a colt, per haps, a rapid trill, then subdued or smothered, a note or two. sept. 23, 1859. . . . what an array of non producers society produces ! . . . many think themselves well employed as charitable dispens 6 autumn. ers of wealth which somebody else earned, and these who produce nothing, being of the most luxurious habits, are precisely they who want the most, and complain loudest when they do not get what they want. they who are literally paupers, maintained at the public expense, are the most importunate and insatiable beggars. they cling like the glutton to a living man and suck his vitals up. to any locomotive man there are three or four deadheads clinging, as if they conferred a great favor on society by living upon it. meanwhile, they fill the churches, and die and revive from time to time. they have nothing to do but sin and repent of their sins. how can you expect such blood suckers to be happy? not only foul and poisonous weeds grow in our tracks, but our vileness and luxuriance make simple, wholesome plants rank and weed like. all that i ever got a premium for was a monstrous squash, so coarse that nobody could eat it. some of these bad qualities will be found to lurk in the pears that are invented in the neighborhood of great towns. &quot; the evil that men do lives after them.&quot; the corn and pota toes produced by excessive manuring may be said to have not only a coarse, but a poisonous quality. . . . what creatures is the grain raised in the cornfields of waterloo for, unless it be autumn. 1 for such as prey upon men ? who cuts the grass in the graveyard ? i can detect the site of the shanties that have stood all along the railroad by the ranker vegetation. i do not go there for delicate wild flowers. it is important, then, that we should air our lives by removals, excursions into the fields and woods. starve your vices. do not sit so long over any cellar hole as to tempt your neighbor to bid for the privilege of digging saltpetre there. so live that only the most beautiful wild flowers will spring up where you have dwelt, harebells, vio lets, and blue-eyed grass. sept. 23, 1860. ... i hear that a large owl, probably a cat-owl, killed and carried off a full grown turkey in carlisle, a few days ago. sept. 24, 1851 8 a. m. to lee s bridge via conantum. it is a cool and windy morning, and i have donned a thick overcoat for a walk. the wind is from the north, so that the tele graph harp does not sound where i cross. . . . this windy, autumnal weather is very exciting and bracing, clear and cold after the rain of yes terday, it having cleared off in the night. . . . the river washes up stream before the wind, with white streaks of foam on its dark surface diagonally to its course, showing the direction of the wind. its surface, reflecting the sun, is dazzlingly bright. the outlines of the hills are 8 autumn. remarkably distinct and fine, and their surfaces bare and hard, not clothed with a thick air. i notice one red tree, a red maple, against the woodside in conant s meadow. it is a far brighter red than the blossoms of any tree in summer, and more conspicuous. the huckle berry bushes on conantum are all turned red. what can be handsomer for a picture than our river scenery now! first this smoothly shorn meadow on the west side of the stream, looking from conantum cliff, with all the swaths distinct, sprinkled with apple-trees cast ing heavy shadows, black as ink, such as can be seen only in this clear air, this strong light, one cow wandering restlessly about in it, and low ing ; then the blue river, scarcely darker than, and hardly to be distinguished from, the sky, its waves driven southward or up stream by the wind, making it to appear to flow that way, bordered by willows and button bushes ; then the narrow meadow beyond, with varied lights and shades from its waving grass, which for some reason has not been cut this year, though so dry, now at length each grass-blade bending south before the wintry blast, as if looking for aid in that direction ; then the hill, rising sixty feet to a terrace-like plain, covered with shrub oaks, maples, etc., now variously tinted, clad all in a livery of gay colors, each bush a feather in autumn. 9 its cap ; and further in the rear, the wood crowned cliff, some two hundred feet high, where gray rocks here and there project from amidst the bushes, with its orchard on the slope ; and to the right of the cliff the distant lincoln hills in the horizon; the landscape so handsomely colored, the air so clear and whole some, and the surface of the earth so pleasingly varied that it seems rarely fitted for the abode of man. sept. 24, 1858. [salem.] . . . saw at the east india marine hall a bay lynx killed in danvers july 21st (i think in 1827) ; an other killed in lynnfield in march, 1832. these skins were now, at any rate, quite light, dirty whitish, or white wolfish color, with small pale brown spots. the animals much larger than i expected. saw a large fossil turtle, some twenty inches in diameter, with the plates distinct, in a slate-colored stone from western new york ; also a sword in its scabbard, found in the road near concord, april 19, 1775, and supposed to have belonged to a british officer. sept. 24, 1859. p. m. to melvin s preserve. ... i have many affairs to attend to, and feel hurried these days. great works of art have endless leisure for a background, as the universe has space. time stands still while they are created. the artist cannot be in a hurry. the 10 autumn. earth moves round the sun with inconceivable rapidity, and yet the surface of the lake is not ruffled by it. it is not by compromise, it is not by a timid and feeble repentance, that a man will save his soul, and live at last. he must conquer a clear field, letting repentance & co. go, that well-meaning but weak firm that has assumed the debts of an old and worthless one. you are to fight in a field where no allowances will be made, no courteous bowing to one-handed knights. you are expected to do your duty, not in spite of every thing but one, but in spite of every thing. . . . going along this old carlisle road road for walkers, for berry-pickers, and no more worldly travelers ; road for melvin and clark, not for the sheriff, nor butcher, nor the baker s jingling cart; road where all wild things and fruits abound, where there are countless rocks to jar those who venture in wagons ; road which leads to and through a great but not famous garden, zoological and botanical, at whose gate you never arrive, as i was going along there, i perceived the grateful scent of the dicksonia fern now partly decayed. it reminds me of all up coun try, with its springy mountain sides and unex hausted vigor. is there any essence of dick sonia fern, i wonder? surely that giant who my neighbor expects is to bound up the alle autumn. 11 ghanies will have his handkerchief scented with that. the sweet fragrance of decay ! when i wade through by narrow cow-paths, it is as if i had strayed into an ancient and decayed herb garden. nature perfumes her garments with this essence now especially. she gives it to those who go a-barberrying and on dank au tumnal walks. the very scent of it, if you have a decayed frond in your chamber, will take you far up country in a twinkling. you would think you had gone after the cows there, or were lost on the mountains. it is the scent the earth yielded in the saurian period, before man was created and fell, before milk and water were in vented, and the mints. rana sylvatica passed judgment on it, or rather that peculiarly scented rana palustris. it was in his reign it was in troduced. a man must attend to nature closely for many years to know when, as well as where, to look for his objects, since he must always anticipate her a little. young men have not learned the phases of nature. they do not know what con stitutes a year, or that one year is like another. i would know when in the year to expect certain thoughts and moods, as the sportsman knows when to look for plover. . though you may have sauntered near to heaven s gate, when at length you return toward 12 autumn. the village you give up the enterprise a little, and you begin to fall into the old ruts of thought, like a regular roadster. your thoughts very properly fail to report themselves to headquar ters. they turn toward night and the evening mail, and become begrimed with dust, as if you were just going to put up at (with ?) the tavern, or had even come to make an exchange with a brother clergyman on the morrow. that old carlisle road, which leaves towns be hind ; where you put off worldly thoughts ; where you do not carry a watch nor remember the pro prietor ; where the proprietor is the only tres passer, looking after his apples, the only one who mistakes his calling there, whose title is not good ; where fifty may be a-barberrying, and you do not see one. it is an endless succession of glades where the barberries grow thickest, suc cessive yards amid the barberry bushes where you do not see out. there i see melvin and the robins, and many a nut-brown maid. the lonely horse in its pasture is glad to see company, comes forward to be noticed, and takes an apple from your hand. others are called great roads, but this is greater than they all. it is only laid out, offered to walkers, not accepted by the town and the traveling jvorld ; to be represented by a dotted line on charts, not indicated by guideboards, undiscoverable by the uninitiated, that it may be wild to a warm imagination. autumn. 13 nature, the earth herself, is the only panacea. they bury poisoned sheep up to the neck in earth to take the poison out of them. sept. 25, 1840. birds were very naturally made the subject of augury, for they are but borderers upon the earth, creatures of another and more ethereal element than our existence can be supported in, which seem to flit between us and the unexplored. prosperity is no field for heroism unless it endeavor to establish an independent and super natural prosperity for itself. in the midst of din and tumult and disorder we hear the trum pet sound. defeat is heaven s success. we cannot be said to succeed to whom the world shows any favor. in fact, it is the hero s point d appui, which, by offering resistance to his action, enables him to act at all. at each step he spurns the world. he vaults the higher in proportion as he employs the greater resistance of the earth. it is fatal when an elevation has been gained by too wide a concession, retaining no point of resistance ; for the hero, like the aeronaut, must float at the mercy of the winds, or cannot sail and steer himself for calm weather. when we rise to the step above, we tread hard est on the step below. my friend must be my tent companion. sept. 25, 1851. i am astonished to find how 14 autumn. much travelers both in the east and west per mit themselves to be imposed on by a name ; that the traveler in the east, for instance, presumes so great a difference between one asiatic and another, because one bears the title of christian, and the other not. at length he comes to a sect of christians, armenians or nestorians, predi cates of them a far greater civilization, civility, and humanity than of their neighbors, i suspect not with much truth. at that distance, and therefore impartially viewed, i see but little difference between a christian and a mahometan, and thus i perceive that european and ameri can christians are precisely like these heathen ish armenian and nestorian christians ; not christians, of course, in any true sense, but one other heathenish sect in the west, the difference between whose religion and that of the mahom etans is very slight and unimportant. that nation is not christian where the principles of humanity do not prevail, but the prejudice of race. i expect the christian not to be super stitious, but to be distinguished by the clearness of his knowledge, the strength of his faith, the breadth of his humanity. a man of another race, an african, for instance, comes to amer ica to travel through it, and he meets with treat ment exactly similar to or worse than that which the american meets with among the turks, autumn. 15 arabs, and tartars. the traveler in both cases finds the religion to be a mere superstition and frenzy or rabidness. examined a hornets nest suspended from contiguous huckleberry bushes. the tops of the bushes appearing to grow out of it, little leafy sprigs, had a pleasing effect. it was an inverted cone, eight or nine inches by seven or eight. i found no hornets buzzing about it. its entrance appeared to have been enlarged, so i concluded it had been deserted, but, looking nearer, i discovered two or three dead hornets, men of war, in the entry way. cutting off the bushes which sustained it, i proceeded to open it with my knife. first there were half a dozen layers of waved brownish paper resting loosely on one another, occupying nearly an inch in thickness, for a covering. within were the six sided cells in three stories, suspended from the roof and from one another by one or two suspen sion rods only, the lower story much smaller than the rest ; and in what may be called the attic of the structure were two live hornets, appearing partially benumbed with cold, but which in the sun seemed rapidly recovering themselves. most of the cells were empty, but in some were young hornets still, their heads projecting, apparently still-born, perhaps over taken unexpectedly by cold weather. these 16 autumn. insects appear to be very sensible to cold. the inner circles were of whitish, the outer of gray ish, paper. in these cooler, windier, crystal days, the note of the jay sounds a little more native. stand ing on the cliffs, i see them flitting and scream ing from pine to pine beneath. hawks, too, i perceive, sailing about in the clear air, looking white against the green pines, like the seeds of the milkweed. there is almost always a pair of hawks. their shrill scream and that of the owls and wolves are related to each other. sept. 25, 1852. the scarlet of the dogwood is the most conspicuous and interesting of the autumnal colors at present. you can now easily detect them at a distance. every one in the swamps you have overlooked is revealed. the smooth sumach and the mountain ash are a darker, deeper, bloodier red. found the fringed gentian november 7th last year. sept. 25, 1854. i suspect that i know on what the brilliancy of the autumnal tints will depend. on the greater or less drought of the summer. if the drought has been uncommonly severe, as this year, i should think it would so far destroy the vitality of the leaf that it would attain only to a dull, dead color in autumn ; that to become brilliant in autumn, the plant should be full of sap and vigor to the last. autumn. 17 do i see a fringilla hiemalis in the deep cut ? it is a month earlier than last year. i am detained by the very bright red black berry leaves strewn along the sod, the vine be ing inconspicuous. how they spot it ! on the shrub oak plain as seen from the cliffs, the red at least balances the green. it looks like a rich, shaggy rug now, before the woods are changed. there was a splendid sunset while i was on the water, beginning at the clamshell reach. all the lower edge of a very broad dark slate cloud, which reached backward almost to the zenith, was lit up through and through with a dun golden fire, the sun being below the hori zon, like a furze plain densely on fire a short distance above the horizon. there was a clear pale robin s-egg sky beneath, and some little clouds, on which the light fell, high in the sky, but nearer, seen against the upper part of the distant, uniform, dark slate one, were of a fine grayish silver color, with fine mother-of-pearl tints, unusual at sunset (?). the furze gradually burnt out on the lower edge of the cloud, changed into a smooth, hard, pale pink ver milion, which gradually faded into a gray, sat iny pearl, a fine quaker color. all these colors were prolonged in the rippled reflection to five or six times their proper length. the effect 18 autumn. was particularly remarkable in the case of the reds, which were long bands of red perpendicu lar in the water. sept. 25, 1855. in the evening went to welch s (?) circus with c . approaching, i perceived the peculiar scent which belongs to such places, a certain sourness in the air, sug gesting trodden grass and cigar smoke. the curves of the great tent, at least eight or ten rods in diameter, the main central curve, and wherever it rested on a post, suggested that the tent was the origin of much of the oriental architecture, the arabic, perhaps. there was the pagoda in perfection. it is remarkable what graceful attitudes feats of strength and agility seem to require. sept. 25, 1859. p. m. to emerson s cliff. holding a white pine needle in my hand and turning it in a favorable light as i sit upon this cliff, i perceive that each of its three edges is notched or serrated with minut^ forward-point ing bristles. so much does nature avoid an unbroken line that even this slender leaf is serrated, though, to my surprise, neither gray nor bigelow mentions it. loudon, however, says, &quot; scabrous and inconspicuously serrated in the margin ; spreading in summer, but in whiter contracted, and lying close to the branches.&quot; fine and smooth as it looks, it is serrated, after autumn. 19 all. this is its concealed wildness, by which it connects with the wilder oaks. sept. 26, 1840. the day, for the most part, is heroic only when it breaks. every author writes in the faith that his book is to be the final resting-place, and sets up his fixtures as for a more than oriental permanence ; but it is only a caravansary, which we soon leave without ceremony. we read on his sign only refreshment for man and beast, and a drawn hand directs to ispahan or bagdad. sept. 26, 1852. dreamed of purity last night. the thoughts seemed not to originate with me, but i was invested, my thought was tinged by another s thought. it was not i that originated, but i that entertained the thought. p. m. to ministerial swamp. the small cottony leaves of fragrant everlasting in the fields for some time, protected, as it were, by a little web of cotton against frost and snow; a little dense web of cotton spun over it, entangled in it, as if to restrain it from rising higher. the increasing scarlet and yellow tints around the meadows and river remind me of the opening of a vast flower bud. they are the petals of its corolla, which are of the width of the valleys. it is the flower of autumn, whose expanding bud just begins to blush. as yet, however, in the forest there are very few changes of foliage. 20 autumn. the polygonum articulatum, giving a rosy tinge to jenny s desert, is very interesting now, with its slender dense racemes of rose-tinted flowers, apparently without leaves, rising cleanly out of the sand. it looks warm and brave, a foot or more high, and mingled with deciduous blue curls. it is much divided into many spreading, slender-racemed branches, with in conspicuous linear leaves, reminding me, both by its form and its colors, of a peach orchard in blossom, especially when the sunlight falls on it ; minute rose-tinted flowers that brave the frosts, and advance the summer into fall, warm ing with their color sandy hillsides and deserts, like the glow of evening reflected on the sand ; apparently all flower and no leaf. rising appar ently with clean bare stems from the sand, it spreads out into this graceful head of slender rosy racemes, wisp-like. this little desert of less than an acre blushes with it. the tree fern is in fruit now, with its delicate tendril-like fruit, climbing three or four feet over the asters, golden-rods, etc., on the edge of the swamp. the large ferns are yellow or brown now. larks, like robins, fly in flocks. succory in bloom; ... it bears the frost well, though we have not had much. sept. 26, 1854. it is a warm and very plea sant afternoon. i walk along the river-side in autumn. 21 merrick s pasture. some single red maples are very splendid now ; the whole tree bright scarlet against the cold green pines, while very few trees are changed, is a most remarkable object in the landscape, seen a mile off. it is too fair to be believed, especially seen against the light. some are a reddish or else greenish yellow, others with red or yellow cheeks. i suspect that the yellow maples had not scarlet blossoms. sept. 26, 1857. p. m. up river to clam shell. these are warm, serene, bright autumn afternoons. i see far off the various colored gowns of cranberry pickers against the green of the meadow. the river stands a little way over the grass again, and the summer is over. the pickerel weed is brown, and i see muskrat houses. i see a large black cricket on the river, a rod from shore, and a fish is leaping at it. as long as the fish leaps it is motionless, as if dead ; but as soon as it feels my paddle under it, it is lively enough. i sit on clamshell bank and look over the meadows. hundreds of crickets have fallen into a sandy gully, and now are incessantly striving to creep or leap up again on the sliding sand, out of this dusty road into those bare solitudes which they inhabit ; such their business this september afternoon. i watch a marsh hawk circling low along the edge of the meadow, looking for a frog, and now at last it alights to rest on a tussock. 22 autumn, coming home, the sun is intolerably warm on my left cheek. i perceive it is because the heat of the reflected sun, which is as bright as the real one, is added to that of the real one, for when i cover the reflection with my hand the 1 heat is less intense. that cricket seemed to know that if he lay quietly spread out on the surface, either the fishes would not suspect him to be an insect, or, if they tried to swallow him, would not be able. what blundering fellows these crickets are, both large and small ! they are not only tum bling into the river all along shore, but into this sandy gully, to escape from which is a sisy phus labor. i have not sat there many minutes, watching two foraging crickets which have de cided to climb up two tall and slender weeds almost bare of branches, as a man shins up a liberty pole sometimes, when i find that one has climbed to the summit of my knee. they are incessantly running about on the sunny bank. their still larger cousins, the mole crickets, are creaking loudly and incessantly all along the shore. others have eaten themselves cavern ous apartments, sitting-room and pantry at once, in windfall apples. speaking to rice of that cricket s escape, he said that he once, with several others, saw a small striped snake swim across a piece of water autumn. 23 about half a rod wide to a half-grown bull-frog which sat on the opposite shore, and attempt to seize him, but he found that he had caught a tartar, for the bull-frog, seeing him coming, was not afraid of him, but at once seized his head in his mouth and closed his jaws upon it, and he thus held the snake a considerable time before the latter was able, by struggling, to get away. when that cricket felt my oar he leaped without the least hesitation, or perhaps consideration, trusting to fall in a pleasanter place. he was evidently trusting to drift against some weed which should afford him a point d appui. sept. 26, 1858. i observe that the seeds of the panicum sanguinale smdjiliforme are per haps half fallen, evidently affected by the late frosts as chestnuts, etc., will be by later ones ; and now is the time, too, when flocks of sparrows begin to scour over the weedy fields, especially in the morning. i fancy they are attracted to some extent by this thin harvest of panic seed. the spikes of panicum crus-galli also are par tially bare. evidently the small graminivorous birds abound more after these seeds are ripe. the seeds of the pigweed are yet apparently quite green. may be they are somewhat pecu liar for hanging on all winter. sept. 26, 1859. to clamshell by boat. the solanum dulcamara berries are another kind 24 autumn. which grows in drooping clusters. i do not know any clusters more graceful and beautiful than these drooping cymes of scarlet or translucent, cherry-colored elliptical berries, with steel-blue or lead-colored (?) purple pedicels (not pedun cles) like the leaves on the tips of the branches. no berries, i think, are so well spaced and agreeably arranged in their drooping cymes, somewhat hexagonally, like a honeycomb. then what a variety of color ! the peduncle and its branches are green, the pedicels and sepals only that rare steel-blue purple, and the berries a clear, translucent cherry-red. they hang more gracefully over the river s brim than any pend ant in a lady s ear. yet they are considered poisonous ; not to look at, surely. is it not a re proach that so much that is beautiful is poison ous to us ? but why should they not be poi sonous ? would it not be bad taste to eat these berries which are ready to feed another sense ? sept. 27, 1852. p. m. to c. smith s hill. the flashing clearness of the atmosphere. more light appears to be reflected from the earth, less absorbed. at saw mill brook many finely cut and flat ferns are faded whitish and very handsome, as if pressed ; very delicate. the touch-me-not seed vessels go off like pistols, shoot their seeds off like bullets. they explode in my hat. autumn. 25 the arum berries are now in perfection, cone-shaped spikes one and a half inches long, of scarlet or vermilion-colored, irregular, some what pear-shaped berries springing from a pur plish core. they are exactly the color of bright sealing-wax, on club-shaped peduncles. the changed leaves are delicately white, especially beneath. here and there lies prostrate on the damp leaves or ground this conspicuous red spike. the medeola berries are common now, and the large red berries of the panicled solo mon s seal. it must have been a turtle-dove that eyed me so near, turned its head sidewise to me for a fair view, looking with a st. vitus twitching of its neck, as if to recover its balance on an un stable perch. that is their way. from smith s hill i looked toward the moun tain line. who can believe that the mountain peak which he beholds fifty miles off in the horizon, rising far and faintly blue above an in termediate range, while he stands on his trivial native hills or in the dusty highway, can be the same as that which he looked up at once near at hand from a gorge in the midst of primitive woods ! for a part of two days we traveled across lots, loitering by the way, through primi tive woods and swamps, over the highest peak of the peterboro hills to monadnock, by ways 26 autumn. from which all landlords and stage-drivers en deavored to dissuade us. it was not a month ago. but now that i look across the globe in an instant to that dim monadnock peak, and these familiar fields and copse-woods appear to occupy the greater part of the interval, i cannot realize that joe evely s house still stands there at the base of the mountain, and that i made the long tramp through the woods with invigor ating scents before i got to it. i cannot real ize that on the tops of those cool blue ridges are berries in abundance still, bluer than them selves, as if they borrowed their blueness from their locality. from the mountains we do not discern our native hills, but from our native hills we look out easily to the far blue mountain which seems to preside over them. as i look north westward to that summit from a concord corn field, how little can i realize all the life that is passing between me and it, the retired up-country farmhouses, the lonely mills, wooded vales, wild rocky pastures, new clearings on stark moun tain sides, and rivers murmuring through primi tive woods. i see the very peak, there can be no mistake, but how much i do not see that is between me and it ! in this way we see stars. what is it but a faint blue cloud, a mist that may vanish ! but what is it, on the other hand, to one who has traveled to it day after day, has autumn. 27 threaded the forest and climbed the hills that are between this and that, has tasted the rasp berries and the blueberries that grow on it and the springs that gush from it, has been wearied with climbing its rocky sides, felt the coolness of its summit, and been lost in the clouds there. when i could sit in a cold chamber, muffled in a cloak, each evening till thanksgiving time, warmed by my own thoughts, the world was not so much with me. sept. 27, 1855. yesterday i traced the note of what i have falsely thought the liana palustris, or cricket frog, to its true source. as usual it sounded loud and incessant above all ordinary crickets, and led me at once to a bare and soft sandy shore. after long looking and listening, with my head directly over the spot from which the sound still came at intervals, as i had often done before, i concluded, as no creature was vis ible, that it must issue from the mud, or rather slimy sand. i noticed that the shore near the water was upheaved and cracked as by a small mole track, and, laying it open with my hand, i found a mole cricket, gryllotalpa breviformis. harris says their burrows &quot; usually terminate beneath a stone or clod of turf.&quot; they live on the roots of grass and other vegetables, and in europe the corresponding species does a great 28 autumn. deal of harm. they &quot; avoid the light of day, and are active chiefly during the night ; &quot; have their burrows &quot; in moist and soft ground, partic ularly about ponds.&quot; &quot;there are no house crickets in america.&quot; among crickets, &quot; the males only are musical.&quot; the &quot; shrilling &quot; is produced by shuffling their wing coverts to gether lengthwise. the french call crickets cri-cri. most of them die on the approach of winter, but a few survive under stones. see furrows made by many clams now moving into deep water. some single red maples now fairly make a show along the meadow. i see a blaze of red reflected from the troubled water. sept. 27, 1856. the bluebird family revisit their box and warble as in spring. p. m. to clamshell by boat. it is a very fine afternoon to be on the water, somewhat in dian-summer-like. i do not know what consti tutes the peculiarity and charm of this weather ; the broad water so smooth notwithstanding the slight wind, as if owing to some oiliness the wind slid over without rippling it. there is a slight coolness in the air, yet the sun is occasionally very warm. i am tempted to say that the air is singularly clear, yet i see it is quite hazy. perhaps there is that transparency it is said to possess when full of moisture, before or after autumn. 29 rain. through this i see the trees beginning to put on their october colors, and the creak of the mole cricket sounds late along the shore. the aster multiflorus may be easily con founded with the aster tradescanti. like it, it whitens the roadside in some places. it has purplish disks, but a less straggling top than the tradescanti. sept. 27, 1857. how out of all proportion to the value of an idea, when you come to one, in hindoo literature for instance, is the histori cal fact about it, the when, where, etc., it was actually expressed, and what precisely it might signify to a sect of worshipers ! anything that is called history of india or of the world is im pertinent beside any real poetry or inspired thought which is dateless. white birches have fairly begun to yellow, and blackberry vines here and there in sunny places look like a streak of blood in the grass. i sit on the hillside at miles s swamp. a wood bine, investing the leading stem of an elm in the swamp quite to its top, is seen as an erect, slen der red column through the thin and yellowing foliage of the elm. as i sit there, i see the shadow of a hawk flying above and behind me. i think i see more hawks nowadays. perhaps it is both because the young are grown, and their food, the small birds, are flying in flocks 30 autumn. and are abundant. i need only sit still a few minutes on any spot which overlooks the river meadows before i see some black circling mote beating along the meadow s edge, now lost for a moment as it turns edgewise in a peculiar light, now reappearing farther or nearer. it is most natural, i. e., most in accordance with the natural phenomena, to suppose that north america was discovered from the northern part of the eastern continent, for a study of the range of plants, birds, and quadrupeds points to a connection on that side. many birds are com mon to the northern parts of both continents. even the passenger pigeon has flown across there ; and some european plants have been de tected on the extreme northeastern coast and islands, which do not extend inland. men in their migrations obey the same law. sept. 27, 1860. sawing up my raft by river. monroe s tame ducks sail along and feed near me, as i am working there. looking up, i see a little dipper, about one half their size, in the middle of the river, evidently attracted by these tame ducks as to a place of security. i sit down and watch it. the tame ducks have paddled four or five rods down stream along the shore. they soon detect the dipper three or four rods off, and betray alarm by a twittering note, espe cially when it dives, as it does continually. at autumn. 31 last, when it is two or three rods off, and ap proaching them by diving, they all rush to the shore and come out upon it in their fear ; but the dipper shows itself close to the shore, and when they enter the water again joins them within two feet, still diving from time to time, and threatening to come up in their midst. they return up stream more or less alarmed, and pursued in this wise by the dipper, who does not know what to make of their fears. it is thus toled along to within twenty feet of where i sit, and i can watch it at my leisure. it has a dark bill, and considerable white on the sides of the head or neck with black between, no tufts, and no observable white on back or tail. when at last disturbed by me, it suddenly sinks low (all its body) in the water without diving. thus it can float at various heights. so, on the 30th, i saw one suddenly dash along the surface from the meadow ten rods before me to the mid dle of the river, and then dive, and though i watched fifteen minutes and examined the tufts of grass, i could see no more of it. sept. 28, 1840. the world thinks it knows only what it comes in contact with, and whose repelling points give it a configuration to the senses ; a hard crust aids its distinct knowledge. but what we truly know has no points of repul sion, and consequently no objective form, being 32 autumn. surveyed from within. we are acquainted with the soul and its phenomena as a bird with the air in which it floats. distinction is superficial and formal merely. we touch objects as the earth we stand on, but the soul as the air we breathe. we know the world superficially, but the soul centrally. in the one case our surfaces meet, in the other our centres coincide. sept. 28, 1851. hugh miller, in his &quot; old red sandstone,&quot; speaking of &quot; the consistency of style which obtains among the ichthyolites of this formation &quot; and the &quot; microscopic beauty of these ancient fishes,&quot; says : &quot; the artist who sculptured the cherry-stone consigned it to a cabinet, and placed a microscope beside it ; the microscopic beauty of these ancient fishes was consigned to the twilight depths of a primeval ocean. there is a feeling which at times grows upon the painter and the statuary, as if the per ception and love of the beautiful had been sub limed into a kind of moral sense. art comes to be pursued for its own sake : the exquisite con ception in the mind or the elegant and elaborate model becomes all in all to the worker, and the dread of criticism or the appetite for praise al most nothing ; and thus, through the influence of a power somewhat akin to conscience, but whose province is not the just and the good, but the fair, the refined, the exquisite, have works, pros autumn. 33 ecuted in solitude, and never intended for the world, been found fraught with loveliness.&quot; the hesitation with which this is said, to say no thing of its simplicity, betrays a latent infidel ity, more fatal far than that of the &quot; vestiges of creation &quot; which in another work this author en deavors to correct. he describes that as an ex ception which is in fact the rule. the supposed want of harmony between &quot; the perception and love of the beautiful &quot; and a delicate moral sense betrays what kind of beauty the writer has been conversant with. he speaks of his work becom ing all in all to the worker in rising above the dread of criticism and the appetite of praise, as if these were the very rare exceptions in a great artist s life, and not the very definition of it. 2 p. m. to conantum. for a week or ten days i have ceased to look for new flowers or carry my botany in my pocket. the fall dan delion is now very fresh and abundant, in its prime. this swamp [the spruce swamp in conant s grove] contains beautiful specimens of the side saddle flower, sarracenia purpurea, better called pitcher plant. the leaves ray out around the dry scape and flower, which still remain, rest ing on rich uneven beds of a coarse reddish moss, through which the small-flowered androm eda puts up, presenting altogether a most rich 34 autumn. and luxuriant appearance to the eye. though the moss is comparatively dry, i cannot walk without upsetting the numerous pitchers, which are now full of water, and so wetting my feet. i once accidentally sat down on such a bed of pitcher plants, and found an uncommonly wet seat where i expected a dry one. these leaves are of various colors, from plain green to a rich striped yellow or deep red. no plants are more richly painted and streaked than the inside of the broad lips of these. old josselyn called this &quot; hollow-leaved lavender.&quot; i think we have no other plant so singular and remarkable. here was a large hornets nest which, when i went to take, first knocking on it to see if any body was at home, out came the whole swarm upon me, lively enough. i do not know why they should linger longer than their fellows whom i saw the other day, unless because the swamp is warmer. they were all within, but not working. what honest, homely, earth-loving, unaspiring houses people used to live in ! that on conan tum, for instance, so low you can put your hand on the eaves behind. there are few whose pride could stoop to enter such a house to-day. and then the broad chimney, built for comfort, not for beauty, with no coping of bricks to catch the eye, no alto or basso relievo. autumn. 35 sept. 28, 1852. p. m. to the boulder field. i find the hood-leaved violet quite abundant in a meadow, and the pedata in the boulder field. those now seen, au but the blanda, palmata, and pubescens, blooming again. bluebirds, robins, etc., are heard again in the air. this is the commencement, then, of the second spring. vio lets, potentilla canadensis, lambkill, wild rose, yellow lily, etc., begin again. a windy day. what have these high and roaring winds to do with the fall? no doubt they speak plainly enough to the sap that is in these trees, and perchance check its upward flow. ah, if i could put into words that music which i hear ; that music which can bring tears to the eyes of marble statues, to which the very muscles of men are obedient! ^ sept. 28, 1858. p. m . to great fields via gentian lane. the gentian (andrewsi%) now generally in prime, on low, moist, shady banks. its transcendent blue shows best in the shade and suggests coolness ; contrasts there with the fresh green ; a splendid blue, light in the shade, turning to purple with age. they are particu larly abundant under the north side of the wil low row in merrick s pasture. i count fifteen m a single cluster there, and afterward twenty in gentian lane near flint s bridge, and there were other clusters below ; bluer than the bluest 36 autumn. sky, they lurk in the moist and shady recesses of the banks. /sept. 28, 1859. in proportion as a man has a poor ear for music, or loses his ear for it, he is obliged to go far for it, or fetch it from far, or pay a great price for such as he can hear. operas and the like only affect him. it is like the difference between a young and healthy appetite and the appetite of an epicure, an appe tite for a sweet crust and for a mock-turtle soup. as the lion is said to lie in a thicket or in tall reeds and grass by day, slumbering, and sally out at night, just so with the cat. she will en sconce herself for the day in the grass or weeds in some out-of-the-way nook near the house, and arouse herself toward night. sept. 29, 1840. wisdom is a sort of mo.ngrel between instinct and prudence, which, however, inclining to the side of the father, will finally assert its pure blood again, as the white race at length prevails over the black. it is minister plenipotentiary from earth to heaven, but occa sionally instinct, like a born celestial, comes to earth and adjusts the controversy. all fair action in man is the product of enthusiasm. there is enthusiasm in the sunset. the shell on the shore takes new layers and new tints from year to year with such rapture as the bard writes his poem. there is a thrill in the autumn. 37 spring when it buds and blossoms. there is a happiness in the summer, a contentedness in the autumn, a patient repose in the winter. all the birds and blossoms and fruits are the product of enthusiasm. nature does nothing in the prose mood, though she acts sometimes grimly, with poetic fury, as in earthquakes, etc., and at other times humorously. sept. 29, 1851. the intense brilliancy of the red -ripe maples scattered here and there in the midst of the green oaks and hickories on the hilly shore of walden is quite charming. they are unexpectedly and incredibly brilliant, especially on the western shore and close to the water s edge, where, alternating with yellow birches and poplars and green oaks, they remind me of a line of soldiers, redcoats and riflemen in green mixed together. the pine is one of the richest of trees, to my eye. it stands like a great moss, a luxuriant mildew, the pumpkin pine, which the earth pro duces without effort. sept. 29, 1853. the witch-hazel at lee s cliff, in a favorable situation, has but begun to blos som, has not been long out, so that i think it must be later than the gentian. its leaves are yellowed. bluets [houstonia] still. lambkill blossoms again. sept. 29, 1854. when i look at the stars, 38 autumn. nothing which the astronomers have said at taches to them, they are so simple and remote. their knowledge is felt to be all terrestrial, and to concern the earth alone. this suggests that the same is the case with every object, however familiar ; our so-called knowledge of it is equally vulgar and remote. one might say that all views through a telescope or microscope were purely visionary, for it is only by his eye, and not by any other sense, not by the whole man, that the beholder is there where he is presumed to be. it is a disruptive mode of viewing so far as the beholder is concerned. sept. 29, 1856. p. m. to grape cliff. i can hardly clamber along this cliff without getting my clothes covered with desmodium ticks, these especially, the rotundifolium and paniculatum. though you were running for your life, they would have time to catch and cling to your clothes, often the whole row of pods of the des modium paniculatum, like a piece of saw-blade with three teeth. they will even cling to your hand as you go by. they cling like babes to a mother s breast, by instinct. instead of being caught ourselves and detained by bird-lime, we are compelled to catch these seeds and carry them with us. these almost invisible nets, as it were, are spread for us, and whole coveys of desmodium and bid ens seeds steal transporta autumn. 39 tion out of us. i have found myself often cov ered, as it were, with an imbricated coat of the brown desmodium seeds or a bristling chevaux de-frise of beggar ticks, and had to spend a quarter of an hour or more picking them off in some convenient spot ; and so they get just what they wanted, deposited in another place. how surely the desmodium growing on some rough cliff-side, or the bidens on the edge of a pool, prophesy the coming of the traveler, brute or human, that will transport their seeds on his coat! dr. reynolds told me the other day of a can ada lynx (?) killed in andover, in a swamp, some years ago, when he was teaching school in tewksbury, thought to be one of a pair, the other being killed or seen in derry. its large track was seen in the snow in tewksbury, and traced to andover and back. they saw where it had leaped thirty feet, and where it devoured rabbits. it was on a tree whjen shot. sept. 29, 1859. juniper repens berries are quite green yet. i see some of last year s dark purple ones at the base of the branchlets. there is a very large specimen on the side of fair haven hill, above cardinal shore. it is very handsome this bright afternoon, especially if you stand on the lower and sunny side, on account of the various ways in which its surging flakes 40 autumn. and leaflets, green or silvery, reflect the light. it is as if we were giants and looked down on an evergreen forest from whose flaky surface the light is variously reflected. though so low, it is so dense and rigid that neither men nor cows think of wading through it. we got a bird s-eye view of this evergreen forest, as of a hawk sailing over, looking into its inapproach able clefts and recesses, reflecting a green or else a cheerful silvery light. having just dug my potatoes in the garden, which did not turn out very well, i took a bas ket and trowel and went forth to dig my wild potatoes, or ground nuts, by the railroad fence. i dug up the tubers of some half a dozen plants, and found an unexpected yield. one string weighed a little more than three quarters of a pound. there were thirteen that i should have put with the large potatoes this year, if they had been the common kind. the biggest was two and three quarters inches long, and seven inches in circumference the smallest way. five would have been called good-sized potatoes. it is but a slender vine, now killed by the frost, and not promising such a yield ; but deep in the soil, here sand, five or six inches, or sometimes a foot, you come to the string of brown and commonly knobby nuts. the cuticle of the tuber is more or less cracked longitudinally, autumn. 41 forming meridional furrows, and the root or shoot bears a large proportion to the tuber. in case of a famine i should soon resort to these roots. if they increased in size, on being cul tivated, as much as the common potato, they would become monstrous. sept. 30, 1851. the white ash has got its autumnal mulberry hue. what is the autumnal tint of the black ash? the former contrasts strongly with the other shade trees on the vil lage street, the elms and buttonwoods, at this season, looking almost black at the first glance. the different characters of the trees appear better now, when their leaves, so to speak, are ripe, than at any other season ; than in the win ter, for instance, when they are little remarka ble, and almost uniformly gray or brown, or in the spring and summer, when they are undistin guishably green. now, a red maple, an ash, a white birch, a populus grandidentata, etc., is distinguished almost as far as it is visible. it is with leaves as with fruits and woods, animals and men : when they are mature, their different characters appear. sept. 30, 1852. 10 a. m. to fair haven pond, bee-hunting, pratt, rice, hastings, and myself in a wagon. a fine, clear day after the coolest night and severest frost we have had. our apparatus was first a simple round tin box, 42 autumn. about four and a half inches in diameter and one and a half inches deep, containing a piece of empty honeycomb of its own size and form, filling it within one third of an inch of the top ; then a wooden box, about two and a half inches square, with a glass window occupying two thirds of the upper side under a slide, with a couple of narrow slits in the wood, each side of the glass, to admit air, but too narrow for the bees to pass, the whole resting on a circular bottom a little larger than the lid of the tin box, with a sliding door in it. we were ear nest to go this week, before the flowers were gone, and we feared the frosty night might make the bees slow to come forth. . . . after eating our lunch we set out on our return [hav ing been unsuccessful thus far]. by the road side at walden, on the sunny hillside sloping to the pond, we saw a large mass of golden-rod and aster, several rods square and comparatively fresh. getting out of our wagon, we found it to be resounding with the hum of bees. it was about one o clock. here were far more flow ers than we had seen elsewhere, and bees in great numbers, both bumble-bees and honey bees, as well as butterflies, wasps, and flies. so pouring a mixture of honey and water into the empty comb in the tin box, and holding the lid of the tin box in one hand and the wooden box autumn. 43 with the slides shut in the other, we proceeded to catch the honey-bees by shutting them in suddenly between the lid of the tin box and the large circular bottom of the wooden one, cutting off the flower stem with the edge of the lid at the same time. then holding the lid still against the wooden box, we drew the slide in the bottom, and also the slide covering the win dow at the top, that the light might attract the bee to pass up into the wooden box. as soon as he had done so, and was buzzing against the glass, the lower side was closed, and more bees were caught in the same way. then placing the open tin box close under the wooden one, the slide was drawn again, and the upper slide closed, making it dark, and in about a min ute they went to feeding, as was ascertained by raising slightly the wooden box. then the latter was wholly removed, and they were left feeding or sucking up the honey in broad day light. in from two to three minutes one had loaded himself and commenced leaving the box. he would buzz round it back and forth a foot or more, and then sometimes, perhaps, finding that he was too heavily loaded, alight to empty himself or clear his feet. then, starting once more, he would circle round irregularly at first, in a small circle, only a foot or two in diameter, as if to examine the premises, that he might 44 autumn. know them again, till at length, rising higher and higher, and circling wider and wider, and swifter and swifter, till his orbit was ten or twelve feet in diameter, and as much from the ground, though its centre might be moved to one side (all this as if to ascertain the course to his nest), in a minute or less from his first start ing, he darted off in a bee line, a waving or sinu ous line right and left, toward his nest ; that is, as far as i could see him, which might be eight or ten rods, looking against the sky. you had to follow his whole career very attentively in deed, to see when and where he went off at a tangent. it was very difficult to follow him, especially if you looked against a wood or the hill, and you had to lie low to fetch him against the sky. you must operate in an open place, not in a wood. we sent forth as many as a dozen bees, which flew in about three directions, but all toward the village, or where we knew there were hives. they did not fly almost straight, as i had heard, but within three or four feet of the same course, for half a dozen rods, or as far as we could see. those belonging to one hive all had to digress to get round an apple tree. as none flew in the right direction for us, we did not attempt to line them. in less than half an hour the first returned to the box, which was lying on a woodpile. not one of the bees autumn. 45 in the surrounding flowers had discovered it. so they came back one after another, loaded themselves and departed. but now they went off with very little preliminary circling, as if assured of their course. we were furnished with little boxes of red, blue, green, yellow, and white paint in dry powder, and with a stick we sprin kled a little of the red powder on the back of one while he was feeding, gave him a little dab, and it settled down amid the fuzz of his back, and gave him a distinct red jacket. he went off like most of them toward some hives about three quarters of a mile distant, and we observed, by the watch, the time of his departure. in just twenty-two minutes red jacket came back, with enough of the powder still on his back to mark him plainly. he may have gone more than three quarters of a mile. at any rate, he had a head wind to contend with while laden. they fly swiftly and surely to their nests, never resting by the way, and i was surprised, though i had been informed of it, at the distance to which the village bees go for flowers. the rambler in the most remote woods and pastures little thinks that the bees which are humming so industri ously on the rare wild flowers he is plucking for the herbarium in some out-of-the-way nook, are, like himself, ramblers from the village, perhaps from his own yard, come to get their honey for 46 autumn. his hives. all the honey-bees we saw were on the blue-stemmed golden-rod, solidago ccesia, which lasts long and which emitted a sweet, agreeable fragrance, not on the asters. i feel the richer for this experience. it taught me that even the insects in my path are not loafers, but have their special errands, not merely and vaguely in this world, but in this hour each is about his business. if there are any sweet flow ers still lingering on the hillsides, it is known to the bees, both of the forest and the village. the botanist should make interest with the bees if he would know when the flowers open and when they close. those above named were the only common and prevailing flowers on which to look for them. our red jacket had performed the voyage in safety. no bird had picked him up. are the kingbirds gone? now is the time to hunt bees and take them up, when their combs are full of honey, and before the flowers are so scarce that they begin to consume the honey they have stored. forty pounds of honey was the most our company had got hereabouts. we also caught and sent forth a bumble-bee which manoeuvred like the others, though we thought he took time to eat some before he loaded himself, and then he was so overloaded and bedaubed that he had to alight after he had started, and it took him several minutes to clear autumn. 47 himself. it is not in vain that the flowers bloom, and bloom late, too, in favored spots. to us they are a culture and a luxury, but to bees meat and drink. the tiny bee which we thought lived far away there in a flower-bell, in that remote vale, is a great voyager, and anon he rises up over the top of the wood, and sets sail with his sweet cargo straight for his distant haven. how well they know the woods and fields, and the haunt of every flower ! the flowers are widely dispersed, perhaps because the sweet which they collect from the atmos phere is rare and also widely dispersed, and the bees are enabled to travel far to find it, a precious burden which the heavens bear and deposit on the earth. sept. 30, 1858. a large flock of grackles amid the willows by the river-side, or chiefly concealed low in the button bushes beneath them, though quite near me. there they keep up their spluttering notes, though somewhat less loud, i fancy, than in spring. these are the first i have seen, and now for some time i think the redwings have been gone. these are the first arrivers from the north, where they breed. i observe the peculiar steel-bluish purple of the night-shade, i. &amp;lt;?., the tips of the twigs, while till beneath is green, dotted with bright berries over the water. perhaps this is the most sin 48 autumn. gular among the autumnal tints. it is almost black in some lights, distinctly steel-blue in the shade, contrasting with the green beneath ; but seen against the sun, it is a rich purple, its veins full of fire. the form of the leaf is peculiar. the pearly everlasting is an interesting white at present. though the stem and leaves are still green, it is dry and unwithering like an artificial flower ; its white flexuous stem and branches, too, like wire wound with cotton. neither is there any scent to betray it. its amaranthine quality is instead of high color. its very brown centre now affects me as a fresh and original color. it monopolizes small circles in the midst of sweet fern, perchance, on a dry hillside. in our late walk on the cape [ann], we entered gloucester each time in the dark at mid-evening, traveling partly across lots till we fell into the road, and as we were simply seek ing a bed, inquiring the way of villagers whom we could not see. the town seemed far more home-like to us than when we made our way out of it in the morning. it was comparatively still, and the inhabitants were sensibly or poeti cally employed, too. then we went straight to our chamber, and saw the moonlight reflected from the smooth harbor and lighting up the fishing-vessels, as if it had been the harbor of autumn. 49 venice. by day we went remarking on the peculiar angles of the beveled roofs, of which there is a remarkable variety there. there are also many large square three-story houses, with short windows in the upper story, as if the third story were as good as a gig for re spectability. when entering the town by moon light, we could not always tell whether the road skirted the back yards or the front yards of the houses, and the houses did not so imper tinently stare after the traveler and watch his coming as by day. walking early in the day and approaching the rocky shore from the north, the shadows of the cliffs were very distinct and grateful, and our spirits were buoyant. though we walked all day, it seemed the days were not long enough to get tired in. some villages we went through or by, without communicating with any inhabitant, but saw them as quietly and distantly as in a picture. oct. 1, 1851. 5 p. m. just put a fugitive slave, who has taken the name of henry wil liams, into the cars for canada. he escaped from stafford county, virginia, to boston last october. has been in shadrack s place at the cornhill coffee house ; had been correspond ing through an agent with his master, who is his father, about buying himself, his master asking $600, but he having been able to raise 50 autumn. but $500 ; heard that there were writs out for two williamses, fugitives, and was informed by his fellow-servants and employer that auger hole burns and others of the police had called for him when he was out. accordingly he fled to concord last night on foot, bringing a letter to our family from mr. lovejoy, of cambridge, and another which garrison had formerly given him on another occasion. he lodged with us and waited in the house till funds were collected with which to forward him. intended to dis patch him at noon through to burlington, but when i went to buy his ticket saw one at the station who looked and behaved so much like a boston policeman that i did not venture that time. he was an intelligent and very well be haved man, a mulatto ; said he could guide him self by many other stars than the north star, knowing their rising and setting. they steered for the north star even when it appeared to have got round to the south. they frequently fol lowed the telegraph when there was no railroad. oct. 1, 1856. examined an asdepias cor nuti pod, already opening. as they dry, the pods crack open by the seam along their convex or outer side, revealing the seeds with their silky parachutes, closely packed in an imbricated manner, already right side up, to the number in one instance of 134, as i counted, and again autumn. 51 270. as they lie, they resemble somewhat a round plump fish, with the silk ends exposed at the tail. children call them fishes. the silk is divided once or twice by the raised partition of the spongy core around which they are ar ranged. at the top of some more open and drier is already a little clump of loosened seeds and down two or three inches in diameter, held by the converging tips of the down, like meridi ans, and just ready to float away when the wind rises. i do not perceive the poetic and dramatic capabilities of an anecdote or story which is told me, its significance, till some time afterwards. one of the qualities of a pregnant fact is that it does not surprise us, and we only perceive after wards how interesting it is, and then must know all the particulars. we do not enjoy poetry fully unless we know it to be poetry. oct. 1, 1858. let a full-grown but young cock stand near you. how full of life he is from the tip of his bill through his trembling wattles and comb and his bright eye to the extremity of his clean toes ! how alert and restless, listening to every sound and watching every motion i how various his notes, from the finest and shrill est alarum, as a hawk sails over, surpassing the most accomplished violinist on the short strings, to a hoarse and terrene voice or cluck ! he has a 52 autumn. word for every occasion ; for the dog that rushes past, and partlet cackling in the barn. and then, how, elevating himself and flapping his wings, he gathers impetus and air, and launches forth that world renowned and ear -piercing strain ; not a vulgar note of defiance, but the mere effervescence of life, like the bursting of bubbles in a wine vat. is any gem so bright as his eye ? the cat sleeps on her head ! what does that portend? it is more alarming than a dozen comets. how long prejudice survives! the big-bodied fisherman asks me doubtingly about the comet seen these nights in the northwest if there is any danger to be apprehended from that side. i would fain suggest that only he is dangerous to himself. oct. 1, 1860. remarkable frost and ice this morning ; quite a wintry prospect. the leaves of trees stiff and white at 7 a. m. i hear it was 21 + this morning early. i do not remember such cold at this season. one man tells me he regretted that he had not taken his mittens with him when he went to his morning s work, mow ing in a meadow, and when he went to a spring, at 11 a. m., found the dipper with two inches of ice in it frozen solid. oct. 2, 1851. p. m. some of the white pines on fair haven hill have just reached the autumn. 53 acme of their fall ; others have almost entirely shed their leaves. the same is the state of the pitch pines. oct. 2, 1852. the beggar ticks, bidens, now adhere to my clothes. i also find the desmo dium sooner thus as a magnet discovers the steel filings in a heap of ashes than if i used my eyes alone. how much more beautiful the lakes now, like fair haven, surrounded by the autumn-tinted woods and hills, as in an ornamental frame ! some maples in sprout lands are of a delicate, clear, unspotted red inclining to crimson, sur passing most flowers. i would fain pluck the whole tree and carry it home for a nosegay. oct. 2, 1856. succory still, with its cool blue, here and there, and hieracium canadense still quite fresh, with its pretty, broad, strap shaped rays, broadest at the end, alternately long and short, with five very regular sharp teeth in the end of each. the scarlet leaves and stem of the rhexia, some time out of flower, make almost as bright a patch in the meadow now as the flowers did. its seed vessels are per fect little cream pitchers of graceful form. the prinos berries are in their prime, seven sixteenths of an inch in diameter. they are scarlet, somewhat lighter than the arum berries. they are now very fresh and bright, and what 54 autumn. adds to their effect is the perfect freshness and greenness of the leaves amid which they are seen. gerardia purpurea still. solidago spe ciosa completely out, though not a flower was out september 27th, or five days ago ; say three or four days. now and then i see a hypericum canadense flower still. the leaves of this and the angalosam are turned crimson. i am amused to see four little irish boys, only five or six years old, getting a horse in a pas ture, for their father apparently, who is at work in a neighboring field. they have, all in a row, got hold of a very long halter, and are leading him. all wish to have a hand in it. it is sur prising that he obeys such small specimens of humanity, but he seems to be very docile, a real family horse. at length, by dint of pulling and shouting, they get him into a run down a hill, and though he moves very deliberately, scarcely faster than a walk, all but the one at the end of the line soon run to right and left, without having looked behind, expecting him to be upon them. they stop at last at the bars, which are down, and then the family puppy, a brown pointer (?), about two thirds grown, comes bounding to join them and assist. he is as youthful and about as knowing as any of them. the horse marches gravely behind, obey ing the faint tug at the halter, or honestly stands autumn. 55 still from time to time, as if not aware that they are pulling at all, though they are all together straining every nerve to start him. it is inter esting to behold the faithful beast, the oldest and wisest of the company, thus implicitly obeying the lead of the youngest and weakest. corydalis still fresh. oct. 2, 1857. generally speaking, it is only the lower edge of the woods that now shows the bright autumnal tints, while the superstructure is green, the birches, very young oaks and hick ories, huckleberry bushes, blueberries, etc., that stand around the edges, though here and there some taller maple flames upward amid the masses of green, or some other riper and mellower tree. the chief incidents of minott s life must be more distinct and interesting now than imme diately after they occurred, for he has recalled and related them so often that they are stereo typed in his mind. never having traveled far from his hillside, he does not suspect himself, but tells his stories with fidelity and gusto to the minutest details, as herodotus does in his histories. oct. 3, 1840. no man has imagined what private discourse his members have with sur rounding nature, or how much the tenor of that intercourse affects his own health and sickness. while the head goes star-gazing, the legs are not 56 autumn. necessarily astronomers, too, but are acquiring independent experience in lower strata of nature. how much do they feel which they do not im part ! how much rumor dies between the knees and the ears ! surely instinct was this experi ence. i am no more a freeman of my members than of universal nature. after all, the body takes care of itself. it eats, drinks, sleeps, di gests, grows, dies, and the best economy is to let it alone in all these. why need i travel to seek a site, and consult the points of the compass ? my eyes are south windows, and out of these i command a south ern prospect. the eye does the least drudgery of any of the senses. it oftenest escapes to a higher employment. the rest serve and escort and defend it. i attach some superiority, even priority, to this sense. it is the oldest servant in the soul s household ; it images what it im agines, it ideates what it idealizes. through it idolatry crept in, which is a kind of religion. if any joy or grief is to be expressed, the eye is the swift runner that carries the news. in cir cumspection, double, in fidelity, single, it serves truth always, and carries no false news. of five castes, it is the brahmin. it converses with the heavens. how man serves this sense more than any other ! when he builds a house, he does not forget to put a window in the wall. we autumn. 57 see truth. we are children of light. our des tiny is dark. no other sense has so much to do with the future. the body of science will not be complete till every sense has thus ruled our thought and language and action in its turn. oct. 3, 1852. p. m. to flint s pond. i hear a hylodes (?) from time to time. hear the loud laughing of a loon on the pond from time to time, apparently alone in the middle. a wild sound, heard far, and suited to the wildest lake. seen from heywood s peak at walden, the shore is now more beautifully painted. the most prominent trees are the red maples and the yellowish aspens. the pine fall or change has commenced, and the trees are mottled green and yellowish. oct. 3, 1853. viola lanceolata in moore s swamp. oct. 3, 1857. how much more agreeable to sit in the midst of old furniture like minott s clock and secretary and looking-glass, which have come down from other generations, than amid that which was just brought from the cabinet maker s, and smells of varnish, like a coffin ! to sit under the face of an old clock that has been ticking one hundred and fifty years, there is something mortal, not to say immortal, about it ; a clock that began to tick when massachusetts was a province. 58 autumn. oct. 3, 1858. how many men have a fatal excess of manner ! there was one came to our house the other evening, and behaved very sim ply and well till the moment he was passing out the door. he then suddenly put on the airs of a well-bred man, and consciously described some arc of beauty or other with his head or hand. it was but a slight flourish, but it has put me on the alert. it is interesting to consider how that crotalaria spreads itself, sure to find out the most suitable soil. one year i find it on the great fields, and think it rare. the next i find it in a new and unexpected place. it flits about like a flock of sparrows from field to field. standing on the railroad, i look across the pond to pine hill, where the outside trees, and the shrubs scattered generally through the wood, glow yellow and scarlet through the green, like fires just kindled at the base of the trees, a gen eral conflagration just fairly under way, soon to envelop every tree. the hillside forest is all aglow along its edge, and in all its cracks and fissures, and soon the flames will leap upwards to the tops of the tallest trees. i hear out towards the middle, or a dozen rods from me, the plashing made apparently by the shiners ; for they look and shine like them, leaping in schools on the surface. many lift autumn. 59 themselves quite out for a foot or two, but most rise only part way out, twenty black points at once. there are several schools indulging in this sport from time to time, as they swim slowly along. this i ascertain by paddling out to them. perhaps they leap and dance in the water just as gnats dance in the air at present. i have seen it before in the fall. is it peculiar to this season ? the large leaves of some black oak sprouts are dark purple, almost blackish above, but greenish beneath. oct. 3, 1859. p. m. to bateman s pond ; back by the hog pasture and old carlisle road. some faces that i see are so gross that they affect me like a part of the person improperly exposed, and it seems to me that they might be covered, and, if necessary, some other and per haps better looking part of the person be ex posed. looking from the hog pasture over the valley of spencer brook westward, we see the smoke rising from a huge chimney above a gray roof and the woods at a distance, where some family is preparing its evening meal. there are few more agreeable sights than this to the pedestrian traveler. no cloud is fairer to him than that little bluish one which arises from the chimney. it suggests all of domestic felicity beneath. 60 autumn. there we imagine that life is lived of which we have only dreamed. in our minds we clothe each unseen inhabitant with all the success, all the serenity, we can conceive of. if old, we im agine him serene ; if young, hopeful. we have only to see a gray roof with its plume of smoke curling up, to have this faith. there we sus pect no coarse haste or bustle, but serene labors which proceed at the same pace with the declin ing day. there is no hireling in the barn nor in the kitchen. why are distant valleys, why lakes, why mountains in the horizon, ever fair to us ? because we imagine for a moment that they may be the home of man, and that man s life may be in harmony with them. the sky and clouds and earth itself, with their beauty, forever preach to us, saying, such an abode we offer you, to such a life we encourage you. here is not haggard poverty and harassing debt ; here is not intem perance, moroseness, meanness, or vulgarity. men go about sketching, painting landscapes, or writing verses which celebrate man s oppor tunities. to go into an actual farmer s family at evening, see the tired laborers come in from their day s work thinking of their wages, the sluttish help in the kitchen and sink-room, the indifferent stolidity and patient misery which only the spirits of the youngest children rise above, suggests one train of thought ; it suggests autumn. 61 another to look down on that roof from a dis tance, on an october evening, when its smoke is ascending peacefully to join the kindred clouds above. we are ever busy hiring house and lands, and peopling them in our imaginations. there is no beauty in the sky, but in the eye that sees it. health, high spirits, serenity, are the great landscape painters. turners, claudes, eembrandts, are nothing to them. we never see any beauty but as the garment of some virtue. consider the infinite promise of a man, so that the sight of his roof at a distance sug gests an idyl or a pastoral, or of his grave, an elegy in a country churchyard. how all poets have idealized the farmer s life ! what graceful figures and unworldly characters they have as signed to them ! serene as the sky, emulating nature with their calm and peaceful lives. oct. 4, 1840. it is vastly easier to discover than to see when the cover is off. oct. 4, 1851. minott was telling me to-day that he used to know a man in lincoln who had no floor to his barn, but waited till the ground froze, then swept it clean in the barn and threshed his grain on it. he also used to see men threshing their buckwheat in the field where it grew, having just taken off the surface down to a hard pan. he used the word gavel to de scribe a parcel of stalks cast on the ground to 62 autumn. dry. his are good old english words, and i am always sure to find them in the dictionary, though i never heard them before in my life. i was admiring his cornstalks disposed about the barn, to-day, over or astride the braces and the timbers, of such a fresh, clean, and handsome green, retaining their strength and nutritive properties, so unlike the gross and careless hus bandry of speculating, money-making farmers, who suffer their stalks to remain out till they are dry and dingy and black as chips. minott is perhaps the most poetical farmer, the one who most realizes to me the poetry of the farmer s life, that i know. he does nothing with haste and drudgery, but everything as if he loved it. he makes the most of his labor, and takes infi nite satisfaction in every part of it. he is not looking forward to the sale of his crops, but he is paid by the constant satisfaction which his labor yields him. he has not too much land to trouble him, too much work to do, no hired man nor boy, but simply to amuse himself and live. he cares not so much to raise a large crop as to do his work well. he knows every pin and nail in his barn. if any part of it is to be floored, he lets no hired man rob him of that amusement, but he goes slowly to the woods, and at his leisure selects a pitch-pine tree, cuts it, and hauls it or gets it hauled to the mill ; and so he autumn. 63 knows the history of his barn floor. farming is an amusement which has lasted him longer than gunning or fishing. he is never in a hurry to get his garden planted, and yet it is always planted soon enough, and none in the town is kept so beautifully clean. he always prophesies a failure of the crops, and yet is satisfied with what he gets. his barn floor is fastened down with oak pins, and he prefers them to iron spikes, which he says will rust and give way. he handles and amuses himself with every ear of his corn crop as much as a child with his play things, and so his small crop goes a great way. he might well cry if it were carried to market. the seed of weeds is no longer in his soil. he loves to walk in a swamp in windy weather, and hear the wind groan through the pines. he in dulges in no luxury of food, or dress, or furni ture, yet he is not penurious, but merely simple. if his sister dies before him, he may have to go to the almshouse in his old age, yet he is not poor, for he does not want riches. with never failing rheumatism and trembling hands, he seems yet to enjoy perennial health. though he never reads a book since he finished the &quot; naval monument,&quot; he speaks the best of english. oct. 4, 1858. just at the edge of evening, i saw on the sidewalk something bright like fire, 64 autumn. as if molten lead were scattered along, and then i wondered if a drunkard s spittle were lumi nous, and proceeded to poke it on to a leaf with a stick. it was rotten wood. i found that it came from the bottom of some old fence posts which had just been dug up near by, and there glowed for a foot or two, being quite rotten and soft. it suggested that a lamp-post might be more luminous at bottom than at top. i cut out a handful and carried it about. it was a very pale brown, some almost white, in the light, quite soft and flaky ; and as i withdrew it gradually from the light, it began to glow with a distinctly blue fire in its recesses, becoming more universal and whiter as the darkness in creased. carried toward a candle, its light is quite blue. a man whom i met in the street was able to tell the time by his watch, holding it over what was in my hand. the posts were oak, probably white. mr. m , the mason, told me that he heard his dog barking the other night, and going out found that it was at the bottom of an old post he had dug up during the day, which was all aglow. see b a-fishing notwithstanding the wind. a man runs down, fails, loses self-respect, and goes a-fishing, though he were never on the river before. yet methinks his misfortune is good fortune, and he is the more mellow and humane. a utumn. 65 perhaps he begins to perceive more clearly that the object of life is something else than acquir ing property, and he really stands in a truer relation to his fellow-men than when he com manded a false respect from them. there he stands at length, perchance better employed than ever, holding communion with nature and him self, and coming to understand his real position and relation to men in the world. it is better than a poor debtors prison, better than most successful money-getting. the hickories on the northwest side of this hill are in the prime of their color, of a rich orange ; some with green intimately mixed, handsomer than those that are wholly changed. the outmost parts and edges of the foliage are orange; the recesses green, as if the outmost parts, being turned toward the sunny fire, were first baked by it. oct. 4, 1859. when i have made a visit where my expectations are not met, i feel as if i owed my hosts an apology for troubling them so. if i am disappointed, i find that i have no right to visit them. i have always found that what are called the best of manners are the worst, for they are sim ply the shell without the meat. they cover no life at all. they are the universal slave-holders who treat men as things. nobody holds you 66 autumn. more cheap than the man of manners. they are marks by the help of which the wearers ig nore you, and remain concealed themselves. all men sympathize by their lower natures, few only by the higher. the appetites of the mistress are commonly the same as those of her servant, but her society is commonly more select. the help may have some of the tenderloin, but she must eat it in the kitchen. p. m. to conantum. how interesting now, by wall-sides and on open springy hillsides, the large straggling tufts of the dicksonia fern above the leaf-strewn green sward, the cold, fall green sward ! they are unusually preserved about the corner spring, considering the earli ness of this year. long, handsome, lanceolate green fronds pointing in every direction, re curved and full of fruit, intermixed with yellow ish and sere brown and shriveled ones, the whole clump perchance strewn with fallen and withered maple leaves, and overtopped by now withered and unnoticed osmundas. their lingering green ness is so much the more noticeable now that the leaves generally have changed. they affect us as if they were evergreen, such persistent life and greenness in the midst of decay. no matter how much they are strewn with withered leaves, moist and green they spire above them, not fear ing the frosts, fragile as they are. their green autumn. 67 ness is so much the more interesting, because so many have already fallen, and we know that the first severer frost will cut off them too. in the summer greenness is cheap, now it is a thing comparatively rare, and is the emblem of life to us. it is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know. i do not get nearer by a hair s breadth to any natural object, so long as i presume that i have an introduction to it from some learned man. to conceive of it with a total apprehension, i must for the thousandth time approach it as something totally strange. if you would make acquaintance with the ferns, you must forget your botany. not a single scientific term or distinction is the least to the purpose. you would fain perceive something, and you must approach the object totally unpre judiced. you must be aware that no thing is what you have taken it to be. in what book is this world and its beauty described ? who has plotted the steps toward the discovery of beau ty ? you must be in a different state from com mon. your greatest success will be simply to perceive that such things are, and you will have no communication to make to the royal society. if it were required to know the position of the fruit dots or the character of the indusium, no thing could be easier than to ascertain it ; but if 68 autumn. it is required that you be affected by ferns, that they amount to anything, signify anything, to you, that they be another sacred scripture and revelation to you, helping to redeem your life, this end is not so easily accomplished. i see and hear probably flocks of grackles with their split and shuffling note, but no red wings for a long time ; chipbirds (but without chestnut crowns; is that the case with the young?), bay wings on the walls and fences, and the yellow-browed sparrow. hear the pine warblers in the pines, about the needles, and see them on the ground and on rocks, with a yellow ring round the eye, reddish legs, and a slight whitish bar on the wings. going over the large hillside stubble field west of holdeii wood, i start up a large flock of shore larks, hear their sveet sveet and sveet sveet sveet, and see their tails dark beneath. they are very wary, and run in the stubble, for the most part invisible, while one or two appear to act the sentinel at some rock, peeping out behind it, per haps, and give their note of alarm, when away goes the whole flock. such a flock circled back and forth several times over my head, just like ducks reconnoitring before they alight. if you look with a glass, you are surprised to see how alert the spies are. these larks have dusky bills and legs. autumn. 69 the birds seem to delight in these first fine days of the fall, in the warm hazy light, robins, bluebirds (in families on the almost bare elms), phoebes, and probably purple finches. i hear half -strains from many of them, as the song sparrow, bluebird, etc., and the sweet phe-be of the chickadee. now the year itself begins to be ripe, ripened by the frost like a persimmon. the maiden-hair fern at conantum is appar ently unhurt by frost as yet. oct. 5, 1840. a part of me, which has re posed in silence all day, goes abroad at night like the owl, and has its day. at night we re cline and nestle, and infold ourselves in our being. each night i go home to rest. each night i am gathered to my fathers. the soul departs out of the body, and sleeps in god, a divine slumber. as she withdraws herself, the limbs droop and the eyelids fall, and nature reclaims her clay again. man has always re garded the night as ambrosial or divine. the air is then peopled, fairies come out. oct. 5, 1851. i observe that the woodchuck has two or more holes a rod or two apart : one, or the front door, where the excavated sand is heaped up ; another not so easily discovered, very small, without any sand about it, by which he emerges, smaller directly at the surface than beneath, on the principle by which a well is 70 autumn. dug, making as small a hole as possible at the surface, to prevent caving. still, purplish asters, late golden-rods, fra grant life-everlasting, purple gerardia, great bidens, etc. i hear the red-winged blackbirds by the river side again, as if it were a new spring. they seem to have come to bid farewell. the birds appear to depart with the coming of the frosts which kill the vegetation, and directly or indi rectly the insects on which they feed. the american bittern, ardea minor, flew across the river, trailing his legs in the water, scared up by us. this, according to peabody, is the boomer [stake-driver]. in their sluggish flight, they can hardly keep their legs up. i wonder if they can soar. 8 p. m. to cliffs. moon three quarters full. the nights now are very still, for there is hardly any noise of birds or insects. the whippoor will is not heard, nor the mosquito; only the occasional lisping of some sparrow. as i go through the woods, i perceive a sweet dry scent from the under woods like that of the fragrant life-everlasting. i suppose it is that. i fre quently see a light on the ground within thick and dark woods, where all around is in shadow, and hasten forward, expecting to find some de cayed and phosphorescent stump, but find it to autumn. 71 be some clear moonlight that falls through a crevice in the leaves. the fairies are a quiet, gentle folk, invented plainly to inhabit the moonlight. as moonlight is to sunlight, so are the fairies to men. oct. 5, 1852. i was told at bunker hill monument to-day that mr. savage saw the white mountains several times while work ing on the monument. it required very clear weather in the northwest, and a storm clear ing up here. oct. 5, 1853. the howling of the wind about the house just before a storm to-night sounds extremely like a loon on the pond. how fit ! oct. 5, 1856. p. m. to hill and over the pastures westward. in the huckleberry pasture, by the fence of old barn boards, i notice many little pale-brown, dome-shaped puffballs puck ered to a centre beneath. when you pinch them, a smoke-like, brown, snuff-colored dust rises from the orifice at their top, just like smoke from a chimney. it is so fine and light that it rises into the air, and is wafted away like smoke from a chimney. they are low oriental domes or mosques, sometimes crowded together in nests, like a collection of humble cottages on the moor ; for there is suggested some humble hearth beneath, from which this smoke comes up, as it were the homes of slugs and crickets. 72 autumn. they please ine not a little by their resemblance to rude, dome-shaped, turf-built cottages on the plain, where some humble but everlasting life is lived. i imagine a hearth and pot, and some snug but humble family passing its sunday even ing beneath each one. i locate there at once all that is simple and admirable in human life. there is no virtue which these roofs exclude. i imagine with what contentment and faith i could come home to them at evening. on one i find a slug feeding, with a little hole beneath him ; this is a different species, the white pigeon egg kind, with rough, crystallized surface. a cricket has eaten out the whole inside of an other in which he is housed. this before they are turned to dust. it is well to find your employment and amuse ment in simple and homely things. these wear best and yield most. i think i would rather watch the motions of these cows in their pasture for a day, which i now see all headed one way and slowly advancing, watch them and project their course carefully on a chart, and report all their behavior faithfully, than wander to europe or asia, and watch other motions there ; for it is only ourselves that we report in either case, and perchance we shall report a more rest less, worthless self in the latter case than the former. autumn. 73 oct. 5, 1857. there is not now that pro fusion, and consequent confusion, of events which belongs to a summer walk. there are few flowers, birds, insects, or fruits now, and hence what does occur affects us as more sim ple and significant, as the cawing of a crow or the scream of a jay. the latter seems to scream more fitly and with more freedom through the vacancies occasioned by fallen maple leaves. i hear the alarum of a small red squirrel, and see him running by fits and starts along a chest nut bough toward me. his head looks dispro portionally large for his body, like a bull-dog s, perhaps because he has his chaps full of nuts. he chirrups and vibrates his tail, holds himself in, and scratches along a foot as if it was a mile. he finds noise and activity for both of us. it is evident that all this ado does not proceed from fear. there is at the bottom, no doubt, an excess of inquisitiveness and cau tion, but the greater part is make-believe, and a love of the marvelous. he can hardly keep it up till i am gone, however, but takes out his nut and tastes it in the midst of his agitation. &quot; see there, see there,&quot; says he. &quot; who s that ? oh, dear, what shall i do ? &quot; and makes believe run off, but does not get along an inch, lets it all pass off by flashes through his tail, while he clings to the bark as if he were holding in 74 autumn. a race-horse. he gets down the trunk at last upon a projecting knob, head downward, within a rod of you, and chirrups and chatters louder than ever, trying to work himself into a fright. the hind part of his body is urging the forward part along, snapping the tail over it like a whip lash, but the fore part mostly clings fast to the bark with desperate energy. squirr, &quot; to throw with a jerk,&quot; seems to have quite as much to do with the name as the greek &quot; skia,&quot; &quot; oura,&quot; shadow and tail. oct. 5, 1858. in the evening i am glad to find that my phosphorescent wood of last night still glows somewhat, but i improve it much by putting it in water. the little chips which re main in the water or sink to the bottom are like so many stars in the sky. the comet makes a great show these nights. its tail is at least as long as the whole of the great dipper, to whose handle, till within a night or two, it reached in a great curve, and we plainly see stars through it. oct. 6, 1840. the revolution of the seasons is a great and steady flow, a graceful, peaceful motion, like the swell on lakes and seas. no where does any rigidity grow upon nature, no muscles harden, no bones protrude, but she is supple-jointed now and always. no rubbish ac cumulates from day to day, but still does fresh autumn. 75 ness predominate on her cheek, and cleanliness in her attire. the dust settles on the fences and the rocks and the pastures by the roadside, but still the sward is just as green, nay greener, for all that. the morning air is clear even at this day. it is not begrimed with all the dust that has been raised. the dew makes all clean again. nature keeps her besom always wagging. she has no lumber-room, no dust-hole, in her house. no man was ever yet too nice to walk in her woods and fields. his religion allows the arab to cleanse his body with sand, when water is not at hand. oct. 6, 1851. 7.30 p. m. to fair haven pond by boat, the moon four fifths full ; not a cloud in the sky. the water is perfectly still, and the air almost so, the former gleaming like oil in the moonlight, and the moon s disk re flected in it. when we started, saw some fisher men kindling their fire for spearing, by the river side. it was a lurid, reddish blaze, contrasting with the white light of the moon, with a dense volume of black smoke from the burning pitch pine roots, rolling upward in the form of an in verted pyramid. the blaze was reflected in the water almost as distinct as the substance. it looked like tarring a ship on the shore of styx or cocytus ; for it is dark notwithstanding the moon, and there is no sound but the crackling 76 autumn. of the fire. the fishermen can be seen only near at hand, though their fire is visible far away, and then they appear as dusky, fuliginous figures, half enveloped in smoke, seen only by their enlightened sides. like devils they look, clad in old clothes to defend themselves from the fogs, one standing up forward holding the spear ready to dart, while the smoke and flames are blown in his face, the other paddling the boat slowly and silently along close to the shore with almost imperceptible motion. . . . now the fishermen s fire left behind becomes a star. as surely as the sunlight falling through an irregular chink makes a round fig ure on the opposite wall, so the blaze at a dis tance appears a star. such is the effect of the atmosphere. the bright sheen of the moon is constantly traveling with us, and is seen at the same angle in front on the surface of the pads, and the reflection of its disk on the rippled water by our boat-side appears like bright gold pieces falling on the river s counter. oct. 6, 1857. i have just read euskin s &quot; modern painters.&quot; i am disappointed in not finding it a more out-of-door book, for i had heard that such was its character. but its title might have warned me. he does not describe nature as nature, but as turner painted her. although the work betrays that he has given autumn. 11 close attention to nature, it appears to have been with an artist s and critic s design. how much is written about nature as somebody has portrayed her, how little about nature as she is and chiefly concerns us ; i. e., how much prose, how little poetry ! oct. 7, 1851. by boat to corner spring. a very still, warm, bright, clear afternoon. our boat so small and low that we are close to the water. the muskrats all the way are now build ing their houses ; about two thirds done. they are of an oval form, composed of mouthfuls of pontederia leaf stems, now dead, the capillaceous roots or leaves of the water marigold and other capillaceous-leaved water-plants, flagroot, a plant which looks like a cock s tail or a peacock s feather in form, the potamogeton jrobbinsii, clamshells, etc. ; sometimes rising from amidst the dead pontederia stems or resting on the but ton bushes or the willows. the mouthfuls are disposed in layers successively smaller, forming a somewhat conical mound. seen at this stage, these houses show some art and a good deal of labor. we pulled one to pieces to examine the inside. there was a small cavity which might hold two or three full-grown muskrats, just above the level of the water, quite wet and of course dark and narrow, communicating immedi ately with a gallery under water. there were 78 autumn. a few pieces of the white root of some water plant, perhaps a pontederia or lily, in it. there they dwell in close contiguity to the water it self, always in a wet apartment, in a wet coat never changed, with immeasurable water in the cellar, through which is the only exit. they have reduced life to a lower scale than diogenes. certainly they do not fear cold, ague, or con sumption. think of bringing up a family in such a place, worse than a broad street cellar ! but probably these are not their breeding-places. the muskrat and the fresh-water mussel are very native to our river. the indian, their human confrere, has departed. this is a settler whom our lowlands and our bogs do not hurt. how long has the muskrat dined on mussels ? the river mud itself will have the ague as soon as he. what occasion has he for a dentist ? their unfinished, rapidly rising nests look now like truncated cones. they seem to be all building at once in different parts of the river, and to have advanced equally far. saw the ardea minor walking along the shore like a hen with long green legs. its penciled throat is so like the reeds and other shore plants amid which it holds its head erect to watch the passer that it is difficult to discern it. you can get very near it, for it is unwilling to fly, preferring to hide amid the weeds. autumn. 79 oct. 7, 1852. p. m. to great meadows. i find no fringed gentians. perhaps the autumnal tints are as bright and interesting now as they will be. now is the time to behold the maple swamps, one mass of red and yellow, all on fire ; these and the blood-red huckleberries are the most conspicuous, and then in the village the warm brownish-yellow elms, and there and else where the dark red ashes. i notice the viola ovata, houstonia, ranunculus repens, caducous polygala, small, scratchgrass polygonum, autum nal dandelion very abundant, small bushy white aster, a few golden-rods, polygonum hydropipe roides-) the unknown, flowerless bidens, soapwort gentian, now turned dark purple, yarrow, the white erigeron, red clover, and hedge-mustard. the muskrats have begun to erect their cabins. saw one done. do they build them in the night ? hear and see larks, bluebirds, robins, and song sparrows. also see painted tortoises and shad frogs. i sit on poplar hill. it is a warm, indian summerish afternoon. the sun comes out of clouds, and lights up and warms the whole scene. it is perfect autumn. i see a hundred smokes rising through the yellow elm tops in the village, where the villagers are preparing for tea. it is the mellowing year. the sunshine harmonizes with the imbrowned and fiery foliage. 80 autumn. oct. 7, 1857. halfway up fair haven hill, i am surprised for the thousandth time by the beauty of the landscape, and sit down by the orchard wall to behold it at my leisure. it is always incredibly fair, but ordinarily we are mere objects in it, and not witnesses of it. i see through the bright october air a valley, some two miles across, extending southwest and north east, with a broad, yellow meadow tinged with brown at the bottom, and a blue river winding slowly through it northward, with a regular edg ing of low bushes of the same color with the meadow. skirting the meadow are straggling lines, and occasionally large masses, one quarter of a mile wide, of brilliant scarlet and yellow and crimson trees, backed by green forests and green and russet fields and hills, and on the hills around shoot up a million scarlet and orange and yellow and crimson fires. here and there amid the trees, often beneath the largest and most graceful of them, are white or gray houses. beyond stretches a forest, wreath upon wreath, and between each two wreaths i know lies a similar vale, and far beyond all, on the verge of the horizon, rise half a dozen dark blue mountain summits. large birds of a brilliant blue and white plumage are darting and screaming amid the glowing foliage a quarter of a mile below, while smaller bluebirds are warbling faintly but autumn. 81 sweetly around me. such is the dwelling-place of man ; but go to a caucus in the village to-night, or to a church to-morrow, and see if there is anything said to suggest that the inhabitants of these houses know what manner of world they live in. it chanced that i heard just then the tolling of a distant funeral bell. its serious sound was more in harmony with that scenery than any ordinary bustle would have been. it suggested that man must die to his present life before he can appreciate his opportunities and the beauty of the abode that is appointed him. i do not know how to entertain those who cannot take long walks. the first thing that suggests itself is to get a horse to draw them, and that brings me at once into contact with the stables and dirty harness, and i do not get over my ride for a long time. i give up my forenoon to them, and get along pretty well, the very elasticity of the air and promise of the day abetting me ; but they are as heavy as dumplings by mid-afternoon. if they can t walk, why won t they take an honest nap in the afternoon and let me go? but when two o clock comes, they alarm me by an evident disposition to sit. in the midst of the most glorious indian summer afternoon, there they sit, breaking your chairs and wearing out the house, with their backs to the light, taking no note of the lapse of time. 82 autumn. as i sat on the high bank at the east end of walden this afternoon at five o clock, i saw by a peculiar intention of the eye, a very striking, sub-aqueous rainbow-like phenomenon. a passer by might have noticed the reflections of those bright-tinted shrubs along the high shore on the sunny side, but unless on the alert for such effects he would have failed to perceive the full beauty of the phenomenon. those brilliant shrubs, from three to a dozen feet in height, were all reflected, dimly so far as the details of leaves, etc., were concerned, but brightly as to color, and of course in the order in which they stood, scarlet, yellow, green, etc. ; but there being a slight ripple on the surface, these reflections were not true to the height of their substances, only as to color, breadth of base, and order, but were extended downward with mathematical per pendicularity three or four times too far for the height of the substances, forming sharp pyramids of the several colors gradually reduced to mere dusky points. the effect of this prolongation was a very agreeable softening and blending of the colors, especially when a small bush of one bright tint stood directly before another of a contrary and equally bright tint. it was just as if you were to brush firmly aside with your hand or a brush a fresh hue of paint or so many lumps of friable colored powders. there was accord autumn. 83 ingly a sort of belt, as wide as the height of the hill, extending downward along the whole north or sunny side of the pond, composed of exceed ingly short and narrow inverted pyramids of the most brilliant colors intermixed. i have seen similar inverted pyramids in the old drawings of tattooing about the waists of the aborigines of this country. walden, like an indian maiden, wears this broad, rainbow-like belt of brilliant colored points or cones round her waist in octo ber. the colors seem to be reflected and re reflected from ripple to ripple, losing brightness each time by the softest possible gradation, and tapering towards the beholder. oct. 7, 1860. remarking to old mr. the other day on the abundance of the apples, &quot;yes,&quot; says he, &quot;and fair as dollars, too.&quot; that s the kind of beauty they see in apples. many people have a foolish way of talking about small things, and apologize for themselves or another as having attended to such, having neglected their ordinary business, and amused or instructed themselves by attending to small things, when, if the truth were known, their or dinary business was the small thing, and almost their whole lives were misspent. oct. 8, 1851. 2 p. m. to the marlboro road. picked up an indian gouge on dennis s hill. some white oak acorns in the path by a wood 84 autumn. side i found to be unexpectedly sweet and pal atable, the bitterness being scarcely perceptible. to my taste they are quite as good as chestnuts. no wonder the first men lived on acorns. such as these are no mean food, as they are repre sented to be. their sweetness is like the sweet ness of bread. the whole world is sweeter to me for having discovered such palatableness in this neglected nut. i am related again to the first men. what can be handsomer, wear better to the eye, than the color of the acorn, like the leaves on which it falls, polished or varnished. i should be at least equally pleased, if i were to find that the grass tasted sweet and nutri tious. it increases the number of my friends, it diminishes the number of my foes. how easily, at this season, i could feed myself in the woods ! there is mast for me too, as well as for the pigeon and the squirrels, this dodonean fruit. the sweet-acorn tree is famous and well known to the boys. there can be no question respecting the wholesomeness of this diet. the jointed polygonum in the marlboro road is an interesting flower, it is so late, so bright a red, though inobvious from its minuteness, with out leaves, above the sand like sorrel, mixed with other minute flowers. an arrow-head at the desert. filled my pockets with acorns. found another gouge on autumn. 85 dennis s hill. to have found two indian gouges and tasted sweet acorns, is it not enough for one afternoon ? a warm night like this at this season pro duces its effect on the village. the boys are heard in the street now at nine o clock, in greater force and with more noise than usual, and my neighbor has got out his flute. the moon is full. the tops of the woods in the horizon, seen above the fog, look exactly like long, low, black clouds, the fog being the color of the sky. oct. 8, 1857. walking through the lee farm swamp, a dozen or more rods from the river, i found a large box trap closed. i opened it and found in it the remains of a gray rabbit, skin, bones, and mould closely fitting the right angled corner of one side. it was wholly inof fensive, as so much vegetable mould, and must have been dead some years. none of the furni ture of the trap remained, only the box itself ; the stick which held the bait, the string, etc., were all gone. the box had the appearance of having been floated off in an upright position by a freshet. it had been a rabbit s living tomb. he had gradually starved to death in it. what a tragedy to have occurred within a box in one of our quiet swamps ! the trapper lost his box, the rabbit its life. the box had not 86 autumn. been gnawed. after days and nights of moan ing and struggle, heard for a few rods through the swamp, increasing weakness and emaciation and delirium, the rabbit breathed its last. they tell you of opening the tomb and finding, by the contortions of the body, that it was buried alive. this was such a case. let the trapping boy dream of the dead rabbit in its ark, as it sailed, like a small meeting house with its rude spire, slowly, with a grand and solemn motion, far amid the alders. oct. 9, 1850. i am always exhilarated, as were the early voyagers, by the sight of sas safras, laurus sassafras. the green leaves bruised have the fragrance of lemons and a thousand spices. to the same order belong cinnamon, cassia, camphor. the seed vessel of the sweetbrier is a very beautiful, glossy, elliptical fruit. this shrub, what with the fragrance of its leaves, its blos som, and its fruit, is thrice crowned. oct. 9, 1851. heard two screech owls in the night. boiled a quart of acorns for breakfast, but found them not so palatable as the raw, having acquired a bitterish taste, perchance from being boiled with the shells and skins. yet one would soon get accustomed to this. 2 p. m. to conantum. i hear the green autumn. 87 locust again on the alders of the causeway, but he is turned straw color. the warm weather has revived them. all the acorns on the same tree are not equally sweet. they appear to dry sweet. i see half a dozen snakes in this walk, green and striped, one very young striped snake. they appear to be out enjoying the sun, and to make the most of the last warm days of the year. the hill and plain on the opposite side of the river are covered with the warm deep red leaves of shrub oak. on lee s hillside by the pond, the red leaves of some pitch pines are almost of a golden yellow hue seen in the sunlight, a rich autumnal look. the green are, as it were, set in the yellow. the witch hazel here is in full blossom on this magical hillside, while its broad yellow leaves are falling. some bushes are completely bare of leaves, and leather-colored they strew the ground. it is an extremely interesting plant, october and november child, and yet reminds me of the very earliest spring. its blossoms smell like the spring, like the willow catkins. by their color as well as fragrance they belong to the saffron dawn of the year, suggesting amid all these signs of autumn, falling leaves, and frost, that the life of nature by which she eter nally flourishes is untouched. it stands here in 88 autumn. the shadow on the side of the hill, while the sunlight from over the top of the hill lights up its topmost sprays and yellow blossoms. its spray, so jointed and angular, is not to be mis taken for any other. i lie on my back with joy under its boughs. while its leaves fall, its blossoms spring. the autumn, then, is indeed a spring. all the year is a spring. i see two blackbirds high overhead going south, but i am going in my thoughts with these hazel blossoms. it is a fairy place. this is a part of the immor tality of the soul. when i was thinking that it bloomed too late for bees or other insects to extract honey from its flowers, that perchance they yielded no honey, i saw a bee upon it. how important, then, to the bees this late blos soming plant. a large sassafras tree behind lee s, two feet in diameter at the ground. there is a thick bed of leaves in the road under hubbard s elms. this reminds me of cato, as if the ancients made more use of na ture than we. he says, &quot; stramenta si de erunt, f rondem iligneam legito ; earn substernito ovibus bubusque.&quot; if litter is wanting, gather the leaves of the holm oak, and strew them under your sheep and oxen. in another place he says, &quot; circum vias ulmos serito et partim populos, uti f rondem ovibus et bubus habeas.&quot; autumn. 89 there is little or no use made by us of the leaves of trees, not even for beds, unless it be sometimes to rake them up in the woods, and cast them into hogpens and compost heaps. oct. 9, 1857. it has come to this, that the lover of art is one, and the lover of nature an other, though true art is but the expression of our love of nature. it is monstrous when one cares but little about trees, and much about corin thian columns ; yet this is exceedingly common. oct. 9, 1858. i watch two marsh hawks which rise from the woods before me as i sit on the cliff, at first plunging at each other, gradu ally lifting themselves, as they come round in their gyrations, higher and higher, and floating toward the southeast. slender dark motes they are at last, but every time they come round eastward, i see the light of the westering sun reflected from the under sides of their wings. oct. 9, 1860. up assabet. i now see one small red maple which is all a pure yellow with in, and a bright red or scarlet on its outer sur face and prominences. it is a remarkably dis tinct painting of scarlet on a yellow ground. it is an indescribably beautiful contrast of scarlet and yellow. another is yellow and green where this was scarlet and yellow, and in this case, the bright and liquid green, now getting to be rare, is by contrast as charming a color as the scarlet. 90 autumn. i wonder that the very cows and the dogs in the street do not manifest a recognition of the bright tints about and above them. i saw a terrier dog glance up and down the painted street before he turned in at his master s gate, and i wondered what he thought of these lit trees, if they did not touch his philosophy or spirits, but i fear he had only his common dog gish thoughts after all. he trotted down the yard as if it were a matter of course, or else as if he deserved it all. for two or more nights past we have had re markable glittering golden sunsets as i came home from the post-office, it being cold and cloudy just above the horizon. there was the most intensely bright golden light at the west end of the street extending under the elms, and the very dust a quarter of a mile off was like gold dust. i wondered how a child could stand quietly in that light, as if it had been a furnace. this haste to kill a bird or quadruped, and make a skeleton of it, which many young men and some old men exhibit, reminds me of the fable of the man who killed the hen that laid golden eggs, and so got no more gold. it is a perfectly parallel case. such is the knowledge you get from anatomy as compared witli that you may get from the living creature. every fowl lays golden eggs for him who can find them, or can detect alloy and base metal. autumn. 91 oct. 10, 1851. the air this morning is full of bluebirds, and again it is spring. there are many things to indicate the renewing of spring at this season, the blossoming of spring flowers, not to mention the witch-hazel, the notes of spring birds, the springing of grain and grass and other plants. ah, i yearn toward thee, my friend, but i have not confidence in thee. we do not be lieve in the same god. i am not thou, thou art not i. we trust each other to-day, but we dis trust to-morrow. even when i meet thee un expectedly, i part from thee with disappoint ment. though i enjoy thee more than other men, i am more disappointed with thee than with others. i know a noble man ; what is it hinders me from knowing him better ? i know not how it is that our distrust, our hate, is stronger than our love. here i have been on what the world would call friendly terms with one fourteen years, have pleased my imagina tion sometimes with loving him, and yet our hate is stronger than our love. why are we related thus unsatisfactorily to each other? we are almost a sore to one another. ever and anon will come the thought to mar our love, that change the theme but a hair s breadth, and we shall be tragically strange to one another. we do not know what hinders us from coming 92 autumn. together, but when i consider what my friend s relations and acquaintances are, what his tastes and habits, then the difference between us gets named. i see that all these friends and ac quaintances and tastes and habits are indeed my friend s self. the witch-hazel loves a hillside with or with out wood or shrubs. it is always pleasant to come upon it unexpectedly as you are threading the woods in such places. methinks i attri bute to it some elfish quality apart from its fame. i love to behold its gray speckled stems. the leaf first green, then yellow for a short season ; then, when it touches the ground, tawny leather color. as i stood amid the witch-hazels near flint s pond, a flock of a dozen chickadees came flitting and singing about me with great ado, a most cheering and enlivening sound, with inces sant day day day, and a fine wiry strain, be tween whiles, flitting ever nearer and nearer in quisitively, till the boldest was within five feet of me ; then suddenly, their curiosity sated, they flitted by degrees farther away, disappeared, and i heard with regret their retreating day -day days. oct. 10, 1857. this is the end of the sixth day of glorious weather, which i am tempted to call the finest in the year, so bright and serene the air, such a sheen from the earth, so brilliant autumn. 93 the foliage, so pleasantly warm (except perhaps this day, which is cooler), too warm for a thick coat, yet not sultry nor oppressive, so ripe the season and our thoughts. certainly these are the most brilliant days in the year, ushered in perhaps by a frosty morning, as this. as a dewy morning in summer, compared with a parched and sultry, languid one, so a frosty morning at this season compared with a merely dry or foggy one. these days you may say the year is ripened like a fruit by frost, and puts on the brilliant tints of maturity, but not yet the color of decay. it is not sere and withered as in november. oct. 10, 1858. the simplest and most lump ish fungus has a peculiar interest for us, com pared with a mere mass of earth, because it is so obviously organic and related to ourselves, however remote. it is the expression of an idea, growth according to a law, matter not dormant, not raw, but inspired, appropriated by spirit. if i take up a handful of earth, however separately interesting the particles may be, their relation to one another appears to be that of mere juxtapo sition generally. i might have thrown them to gether thus. but the humblest fungus betrays a life akin to my own. it is a successful poem in its kind. there is suggested something superior to any particle of matter in the idea or mind which uses and arranges the particles. 94 autumn. i find the fringed gentian abundantly open at three and at four p. m. (in fact it must be all the afternoon), open to catch the cool october sun and air in its low position. such a dark blue ! surpassing that of the male bluebird s back. i see dumb-bells in the minister s study, and some of their dumbness gets into his sermons. some travelers carry them round the world in their carpet bags. can he be said to travel who requires still this exercise? a party of school children had a picnic in the easterbrook country the other day, and they carried bags of beans for their gymnasium, to exercise with there. i cannot be interested in these extremely artificial amusements. the traveler is no longer a wayfarer with his staff and pack and dusty coat. he is not a pilgrim, but he travels in a saloon, and carries dumb-bells to exercise with in the intervals of his journey. oct. 11, 1840. it is always easy to infringe the law, but the bedouin of the desert finds it impossible to resist public opinion. oct. 11, 1852. the chestnut leaves already rustle with a great noise as you walk through the woods, lying light, firm and crisp. now the chestnuts are rattling out. the burrs are gap ing and showing the plump nuts. they fill the ruts in the road and are abundant amid the fallen autumn. 95 leaves in the midst of the wood. the jays scream and the red squirrels scold while you are clubbing and shaking the trees. now it is true autumn, and all things are crisp and ripe. i observed the other day that those insects whose ripple i could see from the peak were water bugs. i could detect the progress of a water bug over the smooth surface in ahnost any part of the pond, for they furrow the water slightly, making a conspicuous ripple, bounded by two diverging lines, but the skaters slide over it without producing a perceptible ripple. in this clear air and with this glassy surface, the motion of every water bug, here and there amid the skaters, was perceptible. oct. 11, 1859. the note of the chickadee heard now in cooler weather above many fallen leaves, has a new significance. there was a very severe frost this morning ; ground stiffened, probably a chestnut-opening frost, a season ripeness, opener of the burrs that contain the indian summer. such is the cold of early or mid october. the leaves and weeds had a stiff, hoary appearance. oct. 11, 1860. pears are a less poetic though more aristocratic fruit than apples. they have neither the beauty nor the fragrance of apples, but their excellence is in their flavor, which speaks to a grosser sense, they are glout-mor 96 autumn. ceaux; hence while children dream of apples, judges, ex-judges, and honorables are connois seurs of pears, and discourse of them at length between sessions. how much more attention they get from the proprietor. the hired man gathers the apples and barrels them. the pro prietor plucks the pears at odd hours for a pas time. they are spread on the floor of the best room, they are a gift to the most distinguished guest. they are named after emperors, kings, queens, dukes, and duchesses. i fear i shall have to wait till we get to pears with american names, which a republican can swallow. oct. 12, 1840. the springs of life flow in ceaseless tides down below, and hence this greenness everywhere on the surface. but they are as yet untapped; only here and there men have sunk a well. oct. 12, 1851. i love very well this cloudy afternoon, so sober and favorable to reflection, after so many bright ones. what if the clouds shut out the heavens, provided they concentrate my thoughts and make a more celestial heaven below ! i hear the crickets plainer. i wander less in my thoughts, am less dissipated, am aware how shallow was the current of my thoughts before. deep streams are dark, as if there were a cloud in their sky ; shallow ones are bright and sparkling, reflecting the sun from autumn. 97 their bottoms. the very wind on my cheek seems more fraught with meaning. i seem to be more constantly merged in na ture, my intellectual life is more obedient to nature than formerly, but perchance less obedi ent to spirit. i have less memorable seasons. i exact less of myself. i am getting used to my meanness, getting to accept my low estate. oh, if i could be discontented with myself! if i could feel anguish at each descent ! p. m. to cliffs. i hear lincoln bell tolling for church. at first i thought of the telegraph harp. heard at a distance, the sound of a bell acquires a certain vibratory hum, as it were from the air through which it passes, like a harp. all music is a harp music at length, as if the air were full of vibrating strings. it is not the mere sound of the bell, but the hum ming in the air that enchants me, just as the azure tint which much air or distance im parts, delights the eye. it is not so much the object, as the object clothed with an azure veil. all sound heard at a great distance thus tends to produce the same music, vibrating the strings of the universal lyre. there comes to me a melody which the air has strained, which has conversed with every leaf and needle of the woods. it is by no means the sound of the bell as heard near at hand, and which at this dis 98 autumn. tance i can plainly distinguish, but its vibrating echoes, that portion of the sound which the ele ments take up and modulate, a sound which is very much modified, sifted, and refined before it reaches my ear. the echo is to some extent an independent sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. it is not merely a repetition of my voice, but it is in some measure the voice of the wood. oct. 12, 1852. i am struck by the simplicity of light in the atmosphere in the autumn, as if the earth absorbed none, and out of this profu sion of dazzling light came the autumnal tints. can it be because there is less vapor ? the delicacy of the stratification in the white sand by the railroad, where they have been get ting out sand for the brickyards, the delicate stratification of this great globe, like the leaves of the choicest volume just shut on a lady s table ! the piled up history ! i am struck by the slow and delicate process by which the globe was formed. what an ample share of the light of heaven each pond and lake 011 the surface of the globe enjoys ! no woods are so dark and deep but it is light above the pond. its window or skylight is as broad as its surface. it lies out, patent to the sky. from the mountain top you may not be able to see out, because of the woods, but on the lake you are bathed in light. autumn. 99 oct. 12, 1857. the elm, i think, can be distin guished farther than any other tree, and however faintly seen in the distant horizon, its little dark dome, which the thickness of my nail will con ceal, apparently not so big as the prominence on an orange, suggests ever the same quiet, rural and domestic life passing beneath it. it is like the vignette to an unseen idyllic poem. though the little prominence appears so dark here, i know that it is now a rich brownish or yellow canopy of rustling leaves, whose harvest time has already come, sending down its showers from time to time. homestead telegraphs to homestead through these distant elms seen from the hilltops. i fancy i hear the house dog bark, and lowing of the cows asking admittance to their yard beneath it. the tea-table is spread. the master and the hired men in their shirt sleeves, with the mistress, have just sat down. oct. 12, 1858. i have heard of judges acci dentally met at an evening party, discussing the efficacy of laws and courts, and deciding that with the aid of the jury system substantial jus tice was done. but taking those cases in which honest men refrain from going to law, together with those in which men honest and dishonest do go to law, i think the law is really a humbug, and a benefit principally to the lawyers. this town has made a law recently against cattle 100 autumn. going at large, and assigned a penalty of five dollars. i am troubled by an irish neighbor s cow and horse, and have threatened to have them put in the pound. but a lawyer tells me these town laws are hard to put through, there are so many quibbles. he never knew the complain ant to get his case, if the defendant had a mind to contend. however, the cattle were kept out several days, till a sunday came, and then they were all in my grounds again, as i heard, but all my neighbors tell me that i cannot have them impounded on that day. indeed, i observe that very many of my neighbors do for this reason regularly turn their cattle loose on sun days. the judges may discuss the question of the courts and law over their nuts and raisins, and mumble for the decision that &quot; substantial justice is done,&quot; but i must believe they mean that they really get paid a &quot; substantial &quot; salary. oct. 13, 1840. the only prayer for a brave man is to be a-doing. this is the prayer that is heard. why ask god for a respite when he has not given it? has he not done his work, and made man equal to his occasions, but he must needs have recourse to him again ? god cannot give us any other than self-help. the workers in stone polish only their chim ney ornaments. but their pyramids are roughly done. there is a soberness in a rough aspect, autumn. 101 in unhewn granite, which addresses a depth in us, but the polished surface only hits the ball of the eye. the draft of my stove sounds like the dash ing of waves on the shore, and the lid sings like the wind in the shrouds. the steady roar of the surf on the beach is as incessant in my ear as in tjie shell on the mantelpiece. i see ves sels stranded, and gulls flying, and fishermen running to and fro on the beach. oct. 13, 1851. the alert and energetic man leads a more intellectual life in winter than in summer. in summer the animal and vegetable in him flourish more, as in a torrid zone ; he lives in his senses mainly. in winter cold rea son, not warm passion, has sway ; he lives in thought and reflection. if he has passed a merely sensual summer, he passes his winter in a torpid state like some reptiles and other ani mals. man depends more on himself, his own resources, in winter, less on what is outward. insects disappear for the most part, and those animals which depend upon them, but the nobler animals abide with man the severity of winter. he migrates into his mind, to perpetual summer, and to the healthy man the winter of his discon tent never comes. oct. 13, 1852. p. m. to cliffs. fair haven pond never, i think, looks so handsome as at 102 autumn. this season. it is a sufficiently clear and warm, a rather indian summer day, and they are gath ering the apples in the orchard. the warmth is required now, and we welcome and appreciate it all. the shrub-oak plain is a deep red with grayish, withered, apparently white-oak leaves intermixed. the chickadee takes heart too, and sings above these warm rocks. birches, b hick ories, aspens, etc., are like innumerable small flames on the hillsides about the pond, which is now most beautifully framed with the autumn tinted woods and hills. the water or lake, from however distant a point seen, is always the cen tre of the landscape. fair haven lies more open, and can be seen from more distant points than any other of our ponds. the air is sin gularly fine-grained, the sward looks short and firm. the mountains are more distinct from the rest of the earth and slightly impurpled, seem ing to lie up more. how peaceful great nature ! there is no disturbing sound, but far amid the western hills there rises a pure, white smoke in constant volumes. oct. 13, 1852. to poplar hill. maple fires are burnt out generally, and look smoky in the swamps. when my eyes were resting on those smoke-like bare trees, it did not at first occur to me why the landscape was not as brilliant as a few days ago. the outside trees in the swamps lose their leaves first. autumn. 103 i see a pretty large flock of tree sparrows, very lively and tame, pursuing each other and drifting along a bushy fence and ditch like driving snow. two pursuing each other would curl upward like a breaker in the air, and drop into the hedge again. this has been the ninth of these wonderful days, and one of the warm est. i am obliged to sit with my window wide open all the evening as well as all day. it is the earlier indian summer. oct. 13, 1859. the shad bush is leafing again by the sunny swamp side. it is like a youthful or poetic thought in old age. several times i have been cheered by this sight when surveying in former years. the chickadee seems to lisp a sweeter note at the sight of it. i would not fear the winter more than the shad bush, which puts forth fresh and tender leaves on its approach. in the fall i will take this for my coat of arms. it seems to detain the sun that expands it. these twigs are so full of life that they can hardly contain themselves. they ignore winter. they anticipate spring. what faith! away in some sheltered recess of the swamp you find where these leaves have ex panded. in my latter years let me have some shad-bush thoughts. i perceive the peculiar scent of witch hazel in bloom for several rods around, which at first i refer to the decaying leaves. 104 autumn. british naturalists very generally apologize to the reader for having devoted their attention to natural history to the neglect of some important duty. i remember seeing in an old work a plate of a fungus which grew in a wine-cellar and got its name from that circumstance. it is related in &quot; chambers journal &quot; that sir joseph banks, having ordered a cask of wine to be placed in a cellar in order to improve it, &quot; at the end of three years he directed his butler to ascertain the state of the wine, when on attempting to open the cellar door, he could not effect it in consequence of some powerful obstacle. the door was consequently cut down, when the cellar was found to be completely filled with a fungus production so firm that it was necessary to use an axe for its removal. this appeared to have grown from, or to have been nourished by the decomposing particles of the wine, the cask being empty and carried up to the ceiling, where it was supported by the fungus.&quot; perhaps it was well that the fungus instead of sir joseph banks drank up the wine. the life of a wine bibber is like that of a fungus. oct. 13, 1860. the scientific differs from the poetic or lively description somewhat as the photographs which we become so weary of view ing differ from paintings and sketches, though autumn. 105 the comparison is too favorable to science. all science is only a makeshift, a means to an end which is never attained. after all, the truest description and that by which another living man can most readily recognize a flower, is the unmeasured and eloquent one which the sight of it inspires. no scientific description will supply the want of this, though you should count and measure and analyze every atom which seems to compose it. surely poetry and eloquence are a more universal language than that latin which is confessedly dead. in science i should say all description is postponed till we know the whole, and then science itself will be cast aside. but unconsidered expressions of delight which any natural object draws from us are something complete and final in themselves, since all nature is to be regarded as it concerns man, and who knows how near to absolute truth such uncon scious affirmations may come. which are the truest, the sublime conceptions of hebrew pro phets and seers, or the guarded statements of modern geologists which we must modify or un learn so fast ? a scientific description is such as you would get, if you should send out the scholars of the polytechnic school with all sorts of metres made and patented to take the measure for you of any natural object. in a sense, you have got nothing new thus, for every object that 106 autumn. we see mechanically is mechanically daguerreo typed on our eyes, but a true description growing out of the conception and appreciation of it is itself a new fact, never to be daguerreotyped, indicating the highest quality of the object, its relation to man. the one description interests those chiefly who have not seen the thing, the other chiefly interests those who have seen it and are most familiar with it, and brings it home to the reader. we like to read a good description of nothing so well as of that which we already know the best, as our friend or our selves even. gerard has not only heard of and seen and raised a plant, but smelled and tasted it, applied all his senses to it. you are not distracted from the thing to the system or arrangement. in the true natural order, the order or system is not insisted on. each object is first, and each last. that which presents itself to us this moment, occupies the whole of the present, and rests on the very topmost point of the sphere, under the zenith. the species and individuals of all the natural kingdoms ask our attention and admira tion in a round robin. we make straight lines, putting a captain at the head and a lieutenant at the tail, with sergeants and corporals all along the line, and a flourish of trumpets at the begin ning, where nature has made curves to which autumn. 107 belong their own sphere music. it is indispens able for us to square her circles, and we offer our rewards to him who will do it. the best observer describes the most familiar object with a zest and vividness of imagery as if he saw it for the first time, the novelty consisting not in the strangeness of the object, but in the new and clearer perception of it. oct. 14, 1851. down the railroad before sun rise. a freight train in the deep cut. when the vapor from the engine rose above the woods, the level rays of the rising sun falling on it pre sented the same redness, morning red inclining to saffron, which the clouds in the western hori zon do. there was but little wind this morning, yet i heard the telegraph harp. it does not require a strong wind to wake its strings. it depends more on its direction and the tension of the wire apparently. a gentle but steady breeze will often call forth its finest strains, when a strong but unsteady gale, blowing at the wrong angle withal, will fail to elicit any melodious sound. in the psychological world, there are pheno mena analogous to what zoologists call alternate reproduction, in which it requires several gen erations unlike each other to evolve the perfect animal. some men s lives are but an aspira tion, a yearning toward a higher state, and they 108 autumn. are wholly misapprehended until they are re ferred to or traced through all their metamor phoses. we cannot pronounce upon a man s intellectual and moral state until we foresee what metamorphosis it is preparing him for. oct. 14, 1856. any flowers seen now may be called late ones. i see perfectly fresh succory, not to speak of yarrow, a viola ovata, some pol ygala sanguined, autumnal dandelion, tansy, etc. oct. 14, 1857. p. m. to white pond. an other, the tenth or eleventh of these memorable days. this afternoon it is warmer even than yesterday. i am glad to reach the shade of hubbard s grove. the coolness is refreshing. it is indeed a golden autumn. all kinds of crudities have a chance to get ripe this year. was there ever such an autumn? and yet there was never such a panic and hard times in the commercial world. the merchants and banks are failing all the country over, but not the sand banks, solid and warm, and streaked with bloody blackberry vines. you may run on them as much as you please, even as the crickets do, and find their account in it. they are the stockholders in these banks, and i hear them creaking their content. you may see them on change in any warmer hour. in these banks, too, and such as these, are my funds deposited, funds of health and enjoyment. invest in these autumn. 109 country banks. let your capital be simplicity and contentment. i do not suspect the solvency of these banks. i know who is the president and cashier. i take these walks to every point of the com pass, and it is always harvest time with me. i am always gathering my crop from these woods and fields and waters, and no man is in my way, or interferes with me. my crop is not their crop. to-day i see them getting in their beans and corn, and they are a spectacle to me, but are soon out of my sight. i go abroad over the land each day to get the best i can find, and that is never carted off, even to the last day of november. sat in the old pasture beyond the corner spring woods to look at that pine wood now at the height of its change, pitch and white. their change produces a very singular and pleasing effect. they are regularly parti-colored. the last year s leaves about a foot beneath the ex tremities of the twigs on all sides, now changed and ready to fall, have their period of bright ness as well as broader leaves. they are a clear yellow, contrasting with the fresh and liquid green of the terminal plumes, or this year s leaves. these quite distinct colors are regularly and equally distributed over the whole tree. you have the warmth of the yellow and 110 autumn. the coolness of the green. so it should be with our own maturity, not yellow to the very extrem ity of our shoots, but youthful and untried green ever putting forth afresh at the extremities, foretelling a maturity as yet unknown. the ripe leaves fall to the ground, and become nu triment for the green ones which still aspire to heaven. in the fall of the leaf there is no fruit, there is no true maturity, neither in our &quot;science and wisdom. oct. 14, 1859. to and around flint s pond with blake. a fine indian -summer day. we sit on the rock on pine hill overlooking wai den. there is a thick haze almost concealing the mountains. there is wind enough to raise waves on the pond and make it bluer. what strikes me in the scenery here now is the contrast of the universally blue water with the brilliant tinted woods around it. the tints generally may be about at their height. the earth ap pears like a great inverted shield painted yellow and red, or with imbricated scales of those col ors, and a blue navel in the middle where the pond lies, with a distant circumference of whit ish haze. the nearer woods where chestnuts grow are a mass of warm glowing yellow, but on other sides the red and yellow are intermixed. i hear a man laughed at because he went to europe twice in search of an imaginary wife autumn. ill who he thought was there, though he had never seen nor heard of her. but the majority have gone further while they stayed in america, have actually allied themselves to one whom they thought their wife, and found out their mistake too late to mend it. it would be cruel to laugh at them. oct. 15, 1840. men see god in the ripple, but not in miles of still water. of all the two thousand miles that the st. lawrence flows, pil grims go only to niagara. oct. 15, 1851. 8.30 a. m. up the river in a boat to pelham s pond with w. e. c. the muskrat houses appear now, for the most part, to be finished, though some are still rising. they line the river all the way. some are as big as small haycocks. there is a wind, and the sky is full of flitting clouds, so that sky and water are quite unlike what they were that warm, bright, transparent day when i last sailed on the river and the surface was of such oily smoothness. you could not now study the river bottom for the black waves and the streaks of foam. it is pleasant to hear the sound of the waves, and feel the surging of the boat, inspir iting, as if you were bound on adventures. it is delightful to be tossed about in such a harm less storm, and see the waves look so angry and black. we see objects on shore, trees, etc., 112 autumn. much better from the boat. from a low and novel point of view, it brings them against the sky, and what is low on the meadow is conspicu ous as well as the hills. in this cool sunlight, fair haven hill shows to advantage. every rock and shrub and protuberance has justice done it, the sun shining at an angle on the hills and giving each a shadow. the hills have a hard and distinct outline, and i see into their very texture. on fair haven i see the sunlit light green grass in the hollows where the snow makes pools of water sometimes, and the sunlit russet slopes. cut three white-pine boughs op posite fair haven, and set them up in the bow of our boat for a sail. it was pleasant to hear the water begin to ripple under the prow, telling of our easy progress, and thus without a tack we made the south side of fair haven. then we threw our sails overboard, and the moment after mistook them for green bushes or weeds which had sprung from the bottom unusually far from shore. then to hear the wind sough in your sail, that is to be a sailor and hear a land sound. ... on the return . . . the sun sets when we are off israel rice s. a few golden coppery clouds glow intensely like fishes in some molten metal of the sky, then the small scattered clouds grow blue-black above, or one half, and reddish or pink the other half, and after a short autumn. 113 twilight the night sets in. the reflections of the stars in the water are dim and elongated like the zodiacal light, straight down into the depths. we row across fair haven in the thickening twilight and far below it, steadily and without speaking. as the night draws on her veil, the shores retreat, we only keep in the mid dle of this low stream of light, we know not whether we float in the air or in the lower re gions. it is pleasant not to get home till after dark, to steer by the lights of the villagers. the lamps in the houses twinkle now like stars; they shine doubly bright. we rowed about twenty-four miles going and coming. in a straight line it would be fifteen and a half. oct. 15, 1852. 9 a. m. the first snow is falling (after not veiy cool weather) in large flakes, filling the air and obscuring the distant woods &quot;and houses, as if the inhabitants above were emptying their pillow-cases. like a mist it divides the uneven landscape at a little dis tance into ridges and vales. the ground begins to whiten and our thoughts to prepare for win ter. white-weed. the canada snapdragon is one of the latest flowers noticed, a few buds be ing still left to blossom at the top of its spike or raceme. the snow lasted but half an hour. how father le jeune (?) pestered the poor indians with his god at every turn (they must 114 autumn. have thought it his one idea), only getting their attention when they required some external aid to save them from starving. then indeed they were good christians. oct. 15, 1858. if you stand fronting a hill side covered with a variety of young oaks, the brightest scarlet ones uniformly deep, dark scarlet will be the scarlet oaks. the next most uniformly reddish, a peculiar dull crimson (or salmon ?), are the white oaks. then the large-leaved and variously tinted red oaks, scar let, yellow, and green, and finally the yellowish and half-decayed brown leaves of the black oak. oct. 15, 1859. the chickadees sing as if at home. theirs is an honest, heartfelt melody. shall not the voice of man express as much con tent as the note of a bird ? oct. 16, 1857. p. m. up assabet. i stop a while at cheney s shore to hear an incessant musical twittering from a large flock of young goldfinches which have dull yellow, drab and black plumage. young birds can hardly re strain themselves, and, if they did not leave us, might perchance burst forth into song in the later indian-summer days. am surprised to find an abundance of witch hazel now at the height of its change. the tallest bushes are bare, though in bloom ; but the lowest are full of leaves, many of them green, but chiefly clear and hand autumn. 115 some yellow of various shades, from a pale lemon in the shade or within the bush, to a darker and warmer yellow without. some have even a hue of crimson ; some are green with bright yellow along the veins. this reminds me that plants exposed turn early, or not at all, while the same species in the shade of the woods at a much later date assume very pure and delicate tints. a great part of the pine needles have just fallen. see the pale brown carpet of them un der this pine ; how light it lies up on the grass, and that great rock, and the wall, resting thick on its top and its shelves, and on the bushes and underwood. the needles are not yet flat and reddish, but a more delicate pale brown, and lie up light on joggle sticks, just dropped. the ground is nearly concealed by them. how beau tifully they die, making cheerfully their annual contribution to the soil. they fall to rise again ; as if they knew that it was not one annual de posit alone that made this rich mould in which pine-trees grow. they live in the soil whose fertility and bulk they increase, and in the for ests that spring from it. oct. 16, 1859. p. m. paddle to puffer s, and thence walk to ledum swamp and conant ward. a cold, clear novemberish day. when i get to willow bay, i see the new muskrat 116 autumn. houses erected, conspicuous on the now nearly leafless shores. for thirty years i have annually observed, about this time or earlier, the freshly erected winter lodges of the muskrat along the river-side, reminding us that, if we have no gyp sies, we have a more indigenous race of puny, quadrupedal men maintaining their ground in our midst still. this may not be an annual pheno menon to you, but it has an important place in my kalendar. so surely as the sun appears to be in libra or scorpio, i see the conical winter lodges of the muskrat rising above the withered pontederia and flags. there will be some refer ence to it by way of parable or otherwise in my new testament. surely it is a defect in our bible that it is not truly ours, but a hebrew bible. the most pertinent illustrations for us are to be drawn not from egypt or babylonia, but from new england. natural objects and phenomena are the original symbols or types which express our thoughts and feelings. yet american scholars, having little or no root in the soil, commonly strive with all their might to confine themselves to the imported symbols alone. all the true growth and experience, the living speech, they would fain reject as &quot; american isms.&quot; it is the old error which the church, the state, the school, ever commit, choosing darkness rather than light, holding fast to the old and to autumn. 117 tradition. when i really know that our river pursues a serpentine course to the merrimack, shall i continue to describe it by referring to some other river, no older than itself, which is like it, and call it a meander? it is no more meandering than the meander is musketaquid ing. this clear, cold, novemberish light is inspirit ing. some twigs which are bare, and weeds, be gin to glitter with hoary light. the very edge or outline of a tawny or russet hill has this hoary light on it. your thoughts sparkle like the water surface and the downy twigs. from the shore you look back on the silver-plated river. every rain exposes new arrow-heads. we stop at clamshell, and dabble for a moment in the relics of a departed race. when we emerged from the pleasant footpath through the birches at witherel glade, the glit tering white tufts of the andropogon scoparius lit up by the sun were affectingly fair and cheer ing to behold. how cheerful these cold, but bright, white waving tufts ! they reflect all the sun s light without a particle of his heat, as yel low rays. a thousand such tufts now catch up the sun, and send to us its light, but not heat. light without heat is getting to be the prevail ing phenomenon of the day now. this cold refines and condenses us. our 118 autumn. spirits are strong, like that pint of cider in the middle of a frozen barrel. the cool, placid, silver-plated waters at even coolly await the frost. the muskrat is steadily adding to his winter lodge. there is no need of adding a peculiar instinct telling him how high to build his cabin. he has had a longer experi ence in this river valley than we. i love to get out of cultivated fields, where i walk on an imported sod or english grass, and walk on the fine sedge of woodland hollows, on an american sward. in the former case my thoughts are heavy and lumpish, as if i fed on turnips. in the other, i nibble ground nuts. oct. 17, 1840. in the presence of my friend i am ashamed of my fingers and toes. i have no feature so fair as my love for him. there is a more than maiden modesty between us. i find myself more simple and sincere than in my most private moment to myself. i am literally true with a witness. we should sooner blot out the sun than disturb friendship. oct. 17, 1850. i observed to-day the small blueberry bushes by the pathside, now blood-red, full of white blossoms, as in the spring. the blossoms of spring contrast strangely with the leaves of autumn. the former seemed to have expanded from sympathy with the maturity of the leaves. autumn. 119 oct. 17, 1856. many fringed gentians quite fresh yet, though most are faded and withered. i suspect that their very early and sudden fading and withering has nothing or little to do with frost after all, for why should so many fresh ones succeed still ? as i stood looking, i heard a smart tche day-day-day close to my ear, and looking up saw four or five chickadees which had come to scrape acquaintance with me, hopping amid the alders within three or four feet of me. i had heard them further off at first, and they had followed me along the hedge. they day-day d, and lisped their faint notes alternately, and then, as if to make me think they had some other errand than to peer at me, they pecked the dead twigs, the little top-heavy, black-crowned, volatile fellows. oct. 17, 1857. what a new beauty the blue of the river acquires seen at a distance in the midst of the variously tinted woods, great masses of gray, yellow, etc. ! it appears as color which ordinarily it does not, elysian. the trainers are out with their band of music, and i find my account in it, though i have not subscribed for it. i am walking with a hill be tween me and the soldiers. i think perhaps it will be worth while to keep within hearing of their strains this afternoon. yet i hesitate. i 120 autumn. am wont to find music unprofitable, a luxury. it is surprising, however, that so few habitually intoxicate themselves with music, so many with alcohol. i think, perchance, i may risk it, it will whet my senses so, it will reveal a glory where none was seen before. no doubt these strains do sometimes suggest to abner, walking behind in his red-streaked pants, an ideal which he had lost sight of or never perceived. it is remarkable that our institutions can stand before music, it is so revolutionary. oct. 17, 1858. i think the reflections are never purer and more distinct than now at the season of the fall of the leaf, just before the cool twilight has come, when the air has a finer grain, just as our mental reflections are more distinct at this season of the year when the evenings grow cool and lengthen, and our winter evenings with their brighter fires may be said to begin. one reason why i associate perfect reflections from still water with this and a later season may be that now by the fall of the leaves so much more light is let in to the water. the river re flects more light, therefore, in this twilight of the year, as it were, an afterglow. oct. 17, 1859. what i put into my pocket, whether berry or apple, generally has to keep company with an arrow-head or two. i hear the latter chinking against a key as i walk. these autumn. 121 are the perennial crop of concord fields. if they were sure it would pay, we should see farmers raking the fields for them. oct. 17, 1860. while the man that kiued my lynx thinks, as do many others, that it came out of a menagerie, and the naturalists call it the canada lynx, and at the white mountains they call it the siberian lynx, in each case forget ting or ignoring the fact that it belongs here, i call it the concord lynx. oct. 18, 1840. the era of greatest change is to the subject of it the condition of greatest in variableness. the longer the lever, the less per ceptible its motion. it is the slowest pulsation which is the most vital. i am independent of the change i detect. my most essential progress must be to me a state of absolute rest. so in geology we are nearest to discovering the true causes of the revolutions of the globe, when we allow them to consist with a quiescent state of the elements. we discover the causes of all past change in the present invariable order of the universe. the pulsations are so long that in the interval there is almost a stagnation of life. the first cause of the universe makes the least noise. its pulse has beat but once, is now beating. the greatest appreciable revolutions are the work of the light-footed air, the stealthy paced water, and the subterranean fire. the 122 autumn. wind makes the desert without a rustle. to every being, consequently, its own first cause is an invisible and inconceivable agent. some questions which are put to me are as if i should ask a bird what she will do when her nest is built, and her brood reared. i cannot make a disclosure. you should see my secret. let me open my doors never so wide, still within and behind them, where it is unopened, does the sun rise and set, and day and night alternate. no fruit will ripen on the common. oct. 18, 1855. how much beauty in decay ! i pick up a white-oak leaf, dry and stiff, but yet mingled red and green, october-like, whose pulpy part some insect has eaten, beneath, expos ing the delicate network of its veins. it is very beautiful held up to the light ; such work as only an insect eye could perform. yet, per chance, to the vegetable kingdom, such a revela tion of ribs is as repulsive as the skeleton in the animal kingdom. in each case, it is some little gourmand working for another end, that reveals the wonders of nature. there are countless oak leaves in this condition now, and also with a submarginal line of network exposed. oct. 18, 1856. rain all night and half this day. p. m. a-chestnutting, down turnpike and across to britten s. it is a rich sight, that of autumn. 123 a large chestnut tree, with a dome-shaped top, where the yellow leaves have been thinned out (for most now strew the ground evenly as a car pet throughout the chestnut woods, and so save some seed), all richly rough with great brown burrs which are opened into several segments, so as to show the wholesome-colored nuts peeping forth, ready to fall on the slightest jar. the in dividual nuts are very interesting, and of various forms, according to the season and the number in a burr. they are a pretty fruit, thus com pactly stowed away in their bristly chest. three is the regular number, and there is no room to spare. the two outside nuts have each one con vex side without, and one flat side within. the middle nut has two flat sides. sometimes there are several more in a burr, but this year the burrs are small, and there are not commonly more than two good nuts, very often only one, the middle one, both sides of which will then be convex, each bulging out into a thin, abortive, mere reminiscence of a nut, all shell, beyond it. the base of each nut, where it was joined to the burr, is marked with an irregular dark figure on a light ground, oblong or crescent-shaped, com monly like a spider or other insect with a dozen legs, while the upper or small end tapers into a little white woolly spire crowned with a star, and the whole upper slopes of the nuts are covered 124 autumn. with the same hoary wool which reminds you of the frosts on whose advent they peep forth. within this thick, prickly burr, the nuts are about as safe, until they are quite mature, as a porcupine behind its spines. yet i see where the squirrels have gnawed through many closed burrs, and left the pieces on the stumps. there are sometimes two meats within one chestnut shell, divided transversely, and each covered by its separate brown-ribbed skin, as if nature had smuggled the seed of one more tree into this chest. men commonly exaggerate the theme. some themes they think are significant, and others in significant. i feel that my life is very homely, my pleasures very cheap ; joy and sorrow, suc cess and failure, grandeur and meanness, and indeed most words in the english language, do not mean for me what they do for my neighbors. i see that they look with compassion on me, that they think it is a mean and unfortunate destiny which makes me walk in these fields and woods so much, and sail on this river alone. but so long as i find here the only real elysium, i can iiot hesitate in my choice. my work is writing, and i do not hesitate, though no subject is too trivial for me, tried by the ordinary standards. the theme is nothing, the life is everything. all that interests the reader is the depth and intensity of the life exerted. we touch our autumn. 125 subject but by a point which has no breadth, but the pyramid of our experience, our interest in it, rests on us by a broader or narrower base ; that is, man is all in all, nature nothing but as she draws him out and reflects him. give me sim ple, cheap, and homely themes. oct. 18, 1859. why can we not oftener re fresh one another with original thoughts? if the fragrance of the dicksonia fern is so grate ful and suggestive to us, how much more refresh ing and encouraging, re-creating, would be fresh and fragrant thoughts communicated to us from a man s experience. i want none of his pity nor sympathy in the common sense, but that he should emit and communicate to me his essential fragrance, that he should not be forever repent ing and going to church (when not otherwise sinning), but as it were going a-huckleberrying in the fields of thought, and enriching all the world with his visions and his joys. why flee so soon to the theatres, lecture rooms, and museums of the city ? if you will stay here awhile, i will promise you strange sights. you shall walk on water. all these brooks and rivers and ponds shall be your high way. you shall see the whole earth covered a foot or more deep with purest white crystals in which you slump or over which you glide, and all the trees and stubble glittering in icy armor. 126 autumn. oct. 19, 1840. my friend dwells in the east ern horizon as rich as an eastern city there. there he sails all lonely under the edge of the sky ; but thoughts go out silently from me, and belay him, till at length he rides in my road stead. but never does he fairly come to anchor in my harbor. perhaps i afford no good an chorage. he seems to move in a burnished atmosphere, while i peer in upon him from sur rounding spaces of cimmerian darkness. his house is incandescent to my eye, while i have no house, but only a neighborhood to his. oct. 19, 1855. talking with bellew [?] this evening about fourierism and communities, i said that i suspected any enterprise in which two were engaged together. but, said he, it is difficult to make a stick stand, unless you slant two or more against it. oh, no, i answered, you may split its lower end into three, or drive it single into the ground, which is the best way, but men, when they start on a new enterprise, not only figuratively, but really, pull up stakes. when the sticks prop one another, none, or only one, stands erect. oct. 19, 1856. p. m. conantum. now and for some weeks is the time for flocks of spar rows of various kinds flitting from bush to bush and tree to tree (and both bushes and trees are thinly leaved or bare), and from one seared autumn. 127 meadow to another. they are mingled together and their notes even, being faint, are, as well as their colors and motions, much alike. the sparrow youth are on the wing. they are still further concealed by their resemblance in color to the gray twigs and stems which are now be ginning to be bare. i have often noticed the inquisitiveness of birds, as the other day of a sparrow, whose motions i should not have supposed had any reference to me, if i had not watched it from first to last. i stood on the edge of a pine and birch wood. it flitted from seven or eight rods distant to a pine within a rod of me, where it hopped about stealthily and chirped awhile, then flew as many rods the other side, and hopped about there awhile, then back to the pine again, as near to me as it dared, and again to its first position, very restless all the while. generally i should have supposed that there was more than one bird, or that it was altogether accidental, that the chipping of this sparrow had no refer ence to me, for i could see nothing peculiar about it. but when i brought my glass to bear on it, i found that it was almost steadily eyeing me, and was all alive with excitement. oct. 19, 1858. a remarkably warm day. 74 + at 1 p. m. ride to sam barrett s mill. am pleased again to see the cobweb drapery of 128 autumn. the mill. each fine line, hanging in festoons from the timbers overhead, and on the sides, and on the discarded machinery lying about, is cov ered and greatly enlarged by a coating of meal, like the twigs under thin ridges of snow in winter. it is like the tassels and dimity in a lady s bed-chamber, and i pray that the cobwebs may not have been brushed away from the mill which i visit. it is as if i were aboard a man of-war, and this were the fine rigging, the sails being taken in. all things in the mill wear this drapery, down to the miller s hat and coat. barrett s apprentice, it seems, makes trays of black birch and of red maple in a dark room under the mill. i was pleased to see the work done here, a wooden tray is so handsome. you could count the circles of growth on the end of the tray, and the dark heart of the tree was seen at each end above, producing a semicircular ornament. it was a satisfaction to be reminded that we may so easily make our own trenchers as well as fill them. to see the tree reappear on the table instead of going to the fire or some equally coarse use is some compensation for having it cut down. i was the more pleased with the sight of these trays, because the tools used were so simple, as they were made by hand, not by machinery. they may make equally good pails with the hand-made ones, and cheaper autumn. 129 as well as faster, at the pail factory, but that in terests me less because the man is turned partly into a machine there himself. in the other case, the workman s relation to his work is more poetic. he also shows more dexterity and is more of a man. you come away from the great factory saddened, as if the chief end of man were to make pails ; but in the case of the coun tryman who makes a few by hand rainy days, the relative importance of human life and of pails is preserved, and you come away thinking of the simple and helpful life of the man, and would fain go to making pails yourself. when labor is reduced to turning a crank, it is no longer amusing nor truly profitable. let the business become very profitable in a pecuniary sense, and so be &quot; driven,&quot; as the phrase is, and carried on on a large scale, and the man is sunk in it, while only the pail or tray floats ; we are interested in it only in the same way as the pro prietor or company is. oct. 20, 1840. my friend is the apology for my life. in him are the spaces which my orbit traverses. there is no quarrel between the good and the bad, but only between the bad and the bad. in the former case there is inconsistency merely, in the latter a vicious consistency. men chord sometimes as the flute and the 130 autumn. pumpkin vine, a perfect chord, a harmony, but no melody. they are .not of equal fineness of tone. for the most part i find that in another man and myself the keynote is not the same, so that there are no perfect chords in our gamuts. but if we do not chord by whole tones, never theless his sharps are sometimes my flats, and so we play some very difficult pieces together, though the sameness at last fatigues the ear. we never rest on a full natural note, but i sacrifice my naturalness, and he his. we play no tune through, only chromatic strains, or trill upon the same note till our ears ache. oct. 20, 1852. the clouds have lifted in the northwest, and i see the mountains in sunshine (all the more attractive from the cold i feel here), with a tinge of purple on them, a cold, but memorable and glorious outline. this is an advantage of mountains in the horizon ; they show you fair weather from the midst of foul. many a man, when i tell him that i have been upon a mountain, asks if i took a glass with me. no doubt i could have seen further with a glass, and particular objects more distinctly ; could have counted more meeting-houses; but this has nothing to do with the peculiar beauty and grandeur of the view which an elevated position affords. it was not to see a few particular ob jects as if they were near at hand, as i had been autumn. 131 accustomed to see them, that i ascended the mountain, but to see an infinite variety far and near, in their relation to each other, thus re duced to a single picture. the facts of science in comparison with poetry are wont to be as vulgar as looking from a mountain with a tele scope. it is a counting of meeting-houses. oct. 20, 1854. saw the sun rise from the mountain top [wachusett]. soon after sunrise i saw the pyramidal shadow of the mountain reaching quite across the state, its apex resting on the green or hoosac mountains, appearing as a deep-blue section of a cone there. it rap idly contracted, and its apex approached the mountain itself. when about three miles dis tant, the whole conical shadow was very distinct. the shadow of the mountain makes some min utes difference in the time of sunrise to the in habitants of hubbardston, a few miles west. oct. 20, 1855. i have collected and split up now quite a pile of driftwood, rails and riders and stems and stumps of trees, perhaps one half or three fourths of a tree. it is more amusing not only to collect this with my boat, and bring it from the river on my back, but to split it also, than it would be to speak to a farmer for a load of wood, and to saw and split that. each stick i deal with has a history, and i read it as i am handling it, and last of all, i remember my ad 132 autumn. ventures in getting it, while it is burning in the winter evening. that is the most interesting part of its history. when i am splitting it, i study the effects of water on it, and, if it is a stump, the curiously winding grain by which it separates into so many prongs, how to take ad vantage of its grain, and split it most easily. i find that a dry oak stump will split most easily in the direction of its diameter, not at right an gles with it, or along its circles of growth. i got out some good knees for a boat. thus one half the value of my wood is enjoyed before it is housed, and the other half is equal to the whole value of an equal quantity of the wood which i buy. some of my acquaintances have been wonder ing why i took all this pains, bringing some nearly three miles by water, and have suggested various reasons for it. i tell them, in my de spair of making them understand me, that it is a profound secret, which it has proved, yet i did hint that one reason was that i wanted to get it. i take some satisfaction in eating my food, as well as in being nourished by it. i feel well at dinner time, as well as after it. the world will never find out why you don t love to have your bed tucked up for you, why you will be so per verse. i enjoy more, drinking water at a clear spring, than out of a goblet at a gentleman s autumn. 133 table. i like best the bread which i have baked, the garment which i have made, the shelter i have constructed, the fuel i have gath ered. it is always a recommendation to me to know that a man has ever been poor, has been regularly born into this world, knows the lan guage. i require to be assured of certain phi losophers that they have once been barefooted, footsore, have eaten a crust because they had nothing better, and know what sweetness resides in it. i have met with some barren accom plished gentlemen who seemed to have been at school all their lives, and never had a vacation to live in. oh, if they could only have been stolen by the gypsies, and carried far beyond the reach of their guardians ! they had better have died in their infancy, and been buried un der the leaves, their lips besmeared with black berries, and cock robin for their sexton. oct. 20, 1856. i think that all spiders can walk on water, for when last summer i knocked one off my boat by chance, he ran swiftly back to the boat and. climbed up, as if more to avoid the fishes than the water. this would account for those long lines stretched low over the water from one grass-stem to another. i see one of them now, five or six feet long, and only three or four inches above the surface. it is remarkable that there is no perceptible sag to it, weak as the line must be. 134 a utumn. oct. 20, 1857. p. m. to the easterbrook country. i had gone but little way on the old carlisle road when i saw brooks clark, who is now about eighty, and bent like a bow, hasten ing along the road, barefooted as usual, with an axe in his hand, in haste perhaps on account of the cold wind on his bare feet. when he got up to me, i saw that beside the axe in one hand, he had his shoes in the other, filled with knurly apples and a dead robin. he stopped and talked with me a few moments; said that we had had a noble autumn and might now expect some cold weather. i asked if he had found the robin dead. no, he said, he found it with its wing broken, and killed it. he also added that he had found some apples in the woods, and as he had not anything to carry them in, he put them in his shoes. they were queer looking trays to carry fruit in. how many he got in along toward the toes, i don t know. i noticed, too, that his pockets were stuffed with them. his old frock coat was hanging in strips about the skirts, as were his pantaloons about his naked feet. he appeared to have been out on a scout this gusty afternoon to see what he could find, as the youngest boy might. it pleased me to see this cheery old man, with such a feeble hold on life, bent almost double, thus enjoying the evening of his days. far be it from me autumn. 135 to call it avarice or penury, this childlike de light in finding something in the woods or fields, and carrying it home in the october evening, as a trophy to be added to his winter s stores. oh, no, he was happy to be nature s pensioner still, and bird-like to pick up his living. better his robin than your turkey, his shoes full of apples than your barrels full. they will be sweeter, and suggest a better tale. he can afford to tell how he got them, and i to listen. there is an old wife, too, at home, to share them, and hear how they were obtained ; like an old squirrel shuffling to his hole with a nut. far less pleasing to me the loaded wain, more suggestive of avarice and of spiritual penury. this old man s cheeriness was worth a thousand of the church s sacraments and memento moris. it was better than a prayerful mood. it proves to me old age as tolerable, as happy, as infancy. i was glad of an occasion to suspect that this afternoon he had not been at work, but living somewhat after my own fashion (though he did not explain the axe), and been out to see what nature had for him, and was now hastening home to a burrow he knew of, where he could warm his old feet. if he had been a young man he would probably have thrown away his apples, and put on his shoes for shame when he saw me coming, but old age is manlier. it has 136 autumn. learned to live, makes fewer apologies, like in fancy. this seems a very manly man. i have known him within a few years building stone wall by himself, barefooted. what a wild and rich domain that easter brook country ! not a cultivated, hardly a cul tivable field in it, and yet it delights all natural persons, and feeds more still. such great rocky and moist tracts, which daunt the farmer, are reckoned as unimproved land, and therefore worth but little ; but think of the miles of huc kleberries, and of barberries, and of wild apples, so fair both in flower and fruit, resorted to by men and beasts, clark, brown, melvin, and the robins. there are barberry bushes or clumps there, behind which i could actually pick two bushels of berries without being seen by you on the other side. they are not a quarter picked at last by all creatures together. i walk for two or three miles, and still the clumps of bar berries, great sheaves with their wreaths of scarlet fruit, show themselves before me and on every side. oct. 21, 1852. to second division brook and ministerial swamp. i find caddis -cases with worms in second division brook; and what mean those little piles of yellow sand on dark-colored stones at the bottom of the swift running water, kept together and in place by autumn. 137 some kind of gluten, and looking as if sprin kled on the stones, one eighteenth of an inch in diameter? these caddis-worms build a little case around themselves, and sometimes attach a few dead leaves to disguise it, and then fasten it slightly to some swaying grass-stem or blade at the bottom in swift water, and these are their quarters till next spring. this reminds me that winter does not put his rude fingers in the bot tom of the brooks. when you look into them, you see various dead leaves floating or resting on the bottom, and you do not suspect that some are the disguises which the caddis-worms have borrowed. oct. 21, 1857. i see many myrtle birds now about the house, this forenoon, on the advent of cooler weather. they keep flying up against the house and the window, and fluttering there as if they would come in, or alight on the wood pile or the pump. they would commonly be mistaken for sparrows, but show more white when they fly, beside the yellow on the rump and sides of breast, seen near to, and two white bars on the wings ; chubby birds. p. m. up assabet. cool and windy. those who have put it off thus long make haste now to collect what apples were left out, and dig their potatoes before the ground shall freeze hard. now again as in the spring we begin to 138 autumn. look for sheltered and sunny places where we may sit. i cannot go by a large dead swamp white-oak log this cool evening, but with no little exertion get it aboard, and some blackened swamp white-oak stumps whose earthy parts are all gone. as i am paddling home swiftly be fore the northwest wind, absorbed in my wooding, i see, this cool and grayish evening, that peculiar yellow light in the east, from the sun a little before setting. it has just come out beneath a great cold slate-colored cloud that occupies most of the western sky, as smaller ones the eastern, and now its rays, slanting over the hill in whose shadow i float, fall on the eastern trees and hills with a thin yellow light like a clear yellow wine ; but somehow it reminds me that now the hearth sideis getting to be a more comfortable place than out-of-doors. before i get home the sun has set, and a cold white light in the west suc ceeded. is not the poet bound to write his own biog raphy? is there any other work for him but a good journal ? we do not wish to know how his imaginary hero, but how he the actual hero, lived from day to day. that big swamp white-oak limb or tree which i found prostrate in the swamp was longer than my boat, and tipped it considerably. one whole side, the upper, was covered with green hypnum, autumn. 139 and the other was partly white with fungi. that green coat adhered when i split it. im mortal wood ! that had begun to live again. others burn unfortunate trees that lose their lives prematurely. these old stumps stand like anchorites or yogees, putting off their earthly garments, more and more sublimed from year to year, ready to be translated, and then they are ripe for my fire. i administer the last sac rament and purification. i find old pitch-pine sticks which have lain in the mud at the bottom of the river, nobody knows how long, and weigh them up, almost as heavy as lead, float them home, saw and split them. their pitch, still fat and yellow, has saved them for me, and they burn like candles. i become a connoisseur in wood at last, take only the best. oct. 22, 1853. yesterday toward night, gave sophia and mother a sail as far as the battle ground. one-eyed john goodwin, the fisher man, was loading into a handcart and conveying home the piles of driftwood which of late he had collected with his boat. it was a beautiful evening, and a clear amber sunset lit up all the eastern shores, and that man s employment, so simple and direct (though he is regarded by most as a vicious character), whose whole motive was so easy to fathom, thus to obtain his win ter s wood, charmed me unspeakably. so much 140 autumn. do we love actions that are simple. they are all poetic. we, too, would fain be so employed, in a way so unlike the artificial and complicated pursuits of most men. consider how the broker collects his winter s wood, what sport he makes of it, what is his boat and handcart. postpon ing instant life, he makes haste to boston in the cars, and there deals in stocks, not quite relish ing his employment, and so earns the money with which he buys his fuel. when by chance i meet him about this indirect complicated busi ness, i am not struck with the beauty of his employment. it does not harmonize with the amber sunset. how much more the former consults his genius, some genius, at any rate. now i should love to get my fuel so, have got some of it so. but, though i am glad to have it, i do not love to get it in any other way less simple and direct. if i buy one necessary of life, i cheat myself to some extent. i deprive myself of the pleasure, the inexpressible joy which is the unfailing reward of satisfying any want of my nature simply and truly. no trade is simple, but artificial and complex. it goes against the grain, it postpones life. if the first generation does not die of it, the third or fourth does. in face of all statistics, i will never believe that it is the descendants of tradesmen who keep the state alive, but of simple yeomen autumn. 141 or laborers. this indeed statistics say of the city reinforced by the country. this simplicity it is and the vigor it imparts, that enables the vagabond, though he does get drunk and is sent to the house of correction so often, to hold up his head among men. &quot; if i go to boston every day and sell tape from morning till night,&quot; says the merchant (which we will admit is not a beautiful action), &quot; some time or other i shall be able to buy the best of fuel without stint.&quot; yes, but not the pleasure of picking it up by the river-side, which, i may say, is of even more value than the warmth it yields. it is to give no account of my employment to say that i cut wood to keep me from freezing, or cultivate beans to keep me from starving. oh, no, the greatest value of these labors is received before the wood is teamed home, or the beans are har vested. goodwin stands on the solid earth. for such as he, no political economies, with their profit and loss, supply and demand, need ever be written, for they will need to use no policy. as for the complex ways of living, i love them not, however much i practice them. in as many places as possible, i will get my feet down to the earth. there is no secret in good win s trade more than in the sun s. he is a most constant fisherman. he must well know the taste of pickerel by this time. when i can 142 autumn. remember to have seen him fishing almost daily for some time, if it rains, i am surprised on looking out to see him slowly wending his way to the river in his oilcloth coat, with his basket and pole. i saw him the other day fishing in the middle of the stream, the day after i had seen him fishing on the shore, while by a kind of magic i sailed by him. he said he was catch ing minnows for bait in the winter. when i was twenty rods off, he held up a pickerel that weighed two and a half pounds, which he had forgotten to show me before, and the next morn ing, as he afterwards told me, he caught one that weighed three pounds. if it is ever neces sary to appoint a committee on fish ponds and pickerel, let him be one of them. oct. 22, 1857. p. m. to and round flint s pond. crossing my old beanfield, i see the blue pond between the green pines in the field, and am reminded that we are almost reduced to the russet (i. e., pale brown grass tinged with red blackberry vines) of such fields as this, the blue of water, the green of pines, and the dull reddish-brown of oak leaves. this sight of the blue water between the now perfectly green pines, seen over the light-brown pasture, is pecu liarly novemberish, though it may be like this in early spring. look from the high hill just before sundown, autumn. 143 over the pond. the mountains are a mere cold slate color. but what a perfect crescent of moun tains we have in our northwest horizon. do we ever give thanks for it ? even as pines and larches and hemlocks grow in communities in the wilderness, so it seems do mountains love society. though there may be two or more ranges, one behind the other, and ten or twelve miles between them, yet, if the farthest are the highest, they are all seen as one group at this distance. i look up northwest to my mountains, as a farmer to his hill-lot or rocky pasture from his door. i drive no cattle to the ipswich hills. i own no pasture for them there. my eyes it is alone that wander to those blue pastures which no drought affects. i am content to dwell here and see the sun go down behind my mountain fence. oct. 23, 1852. the milk weed (syriaca) now rapidly discounting. the lanceolate pods having opened, the seeds spring out on the least jar, or when dried by the sun, and form a little fluctuating white silky mass or tuft, each held by a fine thread until a stronger puff of wind sets them free. it is pleasant to see the plant thus dispersing its seeds. october has been the month of autumnal tints. the first of the month, the tints began to be more general, at which time the frosts began. 144 autumn. there were scattered bright tints long before, but not till then did the forest begin to be painted. by the end of the month, the leaves will either have fallen, or be seared and turned brown by the frosts, for the most part. my friend is one who takes me for what i am. a stranger takes me for something else than what i am. we do not speak, we cannot com municate, till we find that we are recognized. the stranger supposes in our stead a third per son whom we do not know, and we leave him to converse with that one. it is suicide for us to become abettors in misapprehending ourselves. suspicion creates the stranger. i cannot abet any man in misapprehending myself. what men call social virtues, good fellowship, is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter which lie close together to keep each other warm. it brings men together in crowds and mobs in bar-rooms and elsewhere, but it does not deserve the name of virtue. oct. 23, 1853. many phenomena remind me that now is to some extent a second spring, not only the new springing and blossoming of flow ers, but the peeping of the hylodes for some time, and the faint warbling of their spring notes, by many birds. oct. 23, 1855. now is the time for chestnuts. a stone cast against the trees shakes them down autumn. 145 in showers upon one s head and shoulders. but i cannot excuse myself for using the stone. it is not innocent, it is not just so to maltreat the tree that feeds us. i am not disturbed by con sidering that if i thus shorten its life, i shall not enjoy its fruit so long, but am prompted to a more innocent course by motives purely of humanity. i sympathize with the tree, yet i heaved a big stone against the trunk, like a robber, not too good to commit murder. i trust i shall never do it again. these gifts should be accepted not merely with gentleness, but with a certain humble gratitude. it is not a time of dis tress when a little haste and violence even might be pardoned. it is worse than boorish, it is crim inal, to inflict an unnecessary injury on the tree that feeds or shades us. if you would learn the secrets of nature, you must practice more human ity than others. the thought that i was robbing myself by injuring the tree did not occur to me, but i was affected as if i had cast a rock at a sentient being, with a duller sense than my own, it is true, but yet a distant relative. behold a man cutting down a tree to come at the fruit ! what is the moral of such an act ? shall we begin, old men in crime ; would that we might grow innocent, at last, as the children of light. oct. 24, 1837. every part of nature teaches that the passing away of one life is the making 146 autumn. room for another. the oak dies down to the ground, leaving within its rind a rich virgin mould which will impart a vigorous life to an infant forest. the pine leaves a sandy and sterile soil, the harder woods, a strong and fruitful mould. so this constant abrasion and decay of our lives makes the soil of our future growth. the wood we now mature, when it becomes mould, deter mines the character of our second growth. if i grow pines and birches, my mould will not sus tain oak, but pines and birches, or, perchance, weeds and brambles. oct. 24, 1857. p. m. to smith s chestnut grove. i get a couple of quarts of chestnuts. i find my account in this long-continued mo notonous labor of picking chestnuts all the afternoon, brushing the leaves aside without looking up, absorbed in that, and forgetting better things awhile. my eye is educated to discover anything on the ground. it is proba bly wholesomer to look at the ground much, than at the heavens. this occupation affords a certain broad pause, and opportunity to start again afterwards, turn over a new leaf. oct. 24, 1858. a northeast storm, though not much rain falls to-day, but a fine driving mizzle. this, as usual, brings the geese, and at 2.30 p. m. i see two flocks go over, faintly honking. a great many must go over to-day, autumn. 147 and also alight in this neighborhood. this weather warns them of the approach of winter, and this wind speeds them on their way. the brilliant autumnal colors are red and yellow, and the various tints and shades of these. blue is reserved to be the color of the sky, but yellow and red are the colors of the earth-flower. every fruit on ripening, and just before its fall, acquires a bright tint. so do the leaves ; so the sky before the end of the day, and the year near its setting. october is the red sunset sky, no vember the later twilight. color stands for all ripeness and success. the noblest feature, the eye, is the fairest-colored, the jewel of the body. oct. 25, 1852. p. m. down river to ball s hill in boat. another perfect indian-summer day. one of my oars makes a creaking sound like a block in a harbor, such a sound as would bring tears into an old sailor s eyes. it sug gests to me adventure and seeking one s fortune. the water for some time has been clear of weeds mostly, and looks cool for fishes. we get into the lee of the hill near abner buttrick s (?) where is smooth water, and here it is very warm and sunny under the pitch pines. some small husky white asters still survive. the autumnal tints grow gradually darker and duller, but not less rich to my eye. and now a hillside near the river exhibits the darkest crispy reds and 148 autumn. browns of every hue, all agreeably blended. at the foot, next the meadow, stands a front rank of smoke-like maples, bare of leaves, inter mixed with yellow birches. higher up are red oaks, of various shades of dull red, with yellow ish, perhaps black oaks, intermixed, and walnuts now brown, and near the hill-top or rising above the rest, a still yellow oak, and here and there amid the rest or in the foreground on the meadow, dull, ashy, salmon-colored white oaks, large and small, all these contrasting with the clear, liquid, sempiternal green of pines. the sheen on the water blinds my eyes. mint is still green and wonderfully recreating to smell. i had put such things behind me. it is hard to remember lilies now. the constitution of the indian mind appears to be the very opposite of the white man s. he is acquainted with a different side of nature. he measures his life by winters, not summers. his year is not measured by the sun, but con sists of a certain number of moons, and his moons are measured not by days, but by nights. he has taken hold of the dark side of nature, the white man of the bright side. oct. 25, 1857. i am amused to see that varro tells us the latin e represents the vowel sound in the bleat of a sheep (bee) ; if he had re ferred instead to some word pronounced by the autumn. 149 romans, we should not be the wiser, but we do not doubt that sheep bleat to-day as they did then. oct. 25, 1860. the thistles which i now see have their heads recurved, which at least saves their down somewhat from moisture. when i pull out the down, the seed is, for the most part, left in the receptacle (?) in reg ular order there, like the pricks in a thimble ; a slightly convex surface, the seeds set like car tridges in a circular cartridge box, in hollow cylinders, which look like circles crowded into more or less of a diamond, pentagonal, or hex agonal form. the perfectly dry and bristly in volucre which hedges them round, so repulsive externally, is very neat and attractive within, as smooth and tender toward its charge as it is rough and prickly externally toward the foes that might do it injury. it is a hedge of im bricated, thin, and narrow leaflets, of a light brown color, beautifully glossy like silk, a most fit receptacle for the delicate, downy parachutes of the seed. the little seeds are kept dry under this unsuspected silky or satiny ceiling, whose old, weather-worn, and rough outside alone we see, like a mossy roof. i know of no object more unsightly to a careless glance than an empty thistle head, yet if you examine it closely, it may remind you of the silk -lined 150 autumn. cradle in which a prince was rocked. that which seemed a mere brown and worn-out relic of the summer, sinking into the earth by the roadside, turns out to be a precious casket. oct. 26, 1851. i awoke this morning to in finite regret. in my dream i had been riding, but the horses bit each other, and occasioned endless trouble and anxiety, and it was my em ployment to hold their heads apart. next i sailed over the sea in a small vessel such as the northmen used, as it were, to the bay of fundy, and thence overland i sailed still, over the shal lows about the sources of rivers toward the deeper channel of a stream which emptied into the gulf beyond. again i was in my own small pleasure boat, learning to sail on the sea, and i raised my sail before my anchor, which i dragged far into the sea. i saw the buttons which had come off the coats of drowned men, and suddenly i saw my dog, when i knew not that i had one, standing in the sea up to his chin to warm his legs, which had been wet, and which the cool wind had numbed. then i was walking in a meadow where the dry season permitted me to walk further than usual. then i met mr. al cott and we fell to quoting and referring to grand and pleasing couplets and single lines which we had read in time past, and i quoted one which in my waking hours i have no know autumn. 151 ledge of, but in my dream it was familiar enough. i only know that those i quoted expressed re gret, and were like the following, though they were not these, viz. : &quot; the short parenthesis of life was sweet,&quot; &quot; the remembrance of youth is a sigh,&quot; etc. then again the instant i awoke, methought i was a musical instrument from which i heard a strain die out, a bugle, a clarionet, or a flute. my body was the organ and channel of melody, as a flute is of the music that is breathed through it. my flesh sounded and vibrated still to the strain, and my nerves were the chords of the lyre. i awoke, therefore, to an infinite regret, to find myself not the thoroughfare of glorious and world-stirring inspirations, but a scuttle full of dirt, such a thoroughfare only as the street and the kennel, where perchance the wind may sometimes draw forth a strain of music from a straw. i can partly account for this. last evening i was reading laing s account of the northmen, and though i did not write in my journal, i re member feeling a fertile regret, and deriving even an inexpressible satisfaction as it were from my ability to feel regret, which made that even ing richer than those which had preceded it. i heard the last strain or flourish, as i woke, played on my body as the instrument. such i 152 autumn. knew i had been and might be again, and my regret arose from the consciousness how little like a musical instrument my body was now. oct. 26, 1852. walden and cliffs, p. m. it is cool to-day and windier. the water is rippled considerably. as i stand in the boat, the far ther off the water, the bluer it is. looking straight down, it is a dark green. hence ap parently the celestial blueness of those distant river reaches, when the water is agitated so that the surfaces of the waves reflect the sky at the right angle. it is a darker blue than that of the sky itself. when i look down on the pond from the peak, it is far less blue. the blue-stemmed and white golden-rod ap parently survive till winter, push up and blos som anew. at this season we seek warm, sunny lees and hillsides, as that under the pitch pines by wal den shore, where we cuddle and warm ourselves in the sun, as by a fire, where we may get some of its reflected as well as direct heat. coming by haden s i see that, the sun setting, its rays, which yet find some vapor to lodge on in the clear cold air, impart a purple tinge to the mountains in the northwest. i think it is only in cold weather that i see this. oct. 26, 1853. i well remember the time this year when i first heard the dreaming of the autumn. 153 toads. i was laying out house lots on little river in haverhill. we had had some raw, cold, and wet weather, but this day was remark ably warm and pleasant, and i had thrown off my overcoat. i was going home to dinner past a shallow pool, green with springing grass, when it occurred to me that i heard the dreaming of the toad. it rung through and filled all the air, though i had not heard it once, before. i turned my companion s attention to it, but he did not appear to perceive it as a new sound in the air. loud and prevailing as it is, most men do not notice it at all. it is to them perchance a sort of simmering or seething of all nature. it affects their thoughts, though they are not conscious of hearing it. how watchful we must be to keep the crystal well that we are made, clear. often we are so jarred by chagrins in dealing with the world that we cannot reflect. everything beautiful impresses us as suffi cient to itself. many men who have had much intercourse with the world, and not borne the trial well, affect me as all resistance, all burr and rind, without any gentle man or tender and innocent core left. it is surprising how any reminiscence of a different season of the year affects us. when i meet with any such in my journal, it affects me as poetry, and i appreciate that other season 154 autumn. and that particular phenomenon more than at the time. the world so seen is all one spring, and full of beauty. you only need to make a faithful record of an average summer day s ex perience and summer mood, and read it in the winter, and it will carry you back to more than that summer day alone could show. only the rarest flower, the purest melody of the season, thus comes down to us. when, after feeling dissatisfied with my life, i aspire to something better, am more scrupu lous, more reserved and continent, as if expect ing somewhat, suddenly i find myself full of life as a nut of meat, even overflowing with a quiet, genial mirthfulness. i think to myself, i must attend to my diet. i must get up earlier and take a morning walk. i must have done with business, and devote myself to my muse. so i dam up my stream, and my waters gather to a head. i am freighted with thought. oct. 26, 1855. p. m. to conantum. i ex amine some frost weed. it is still quite alive, indeed just out of bloom, the leaves now a pur plish brown, and its bark at the ground is quite tight and entire. pulling it up, i find bright pink shoots to have put forth, half an inch long, and starting even at the surface of the sod. is not this, as well as its second blossoming, some what peculiar to this plant ? and may it not be autumn. 155 that when at last the cold is severe, the sap is frozen and bursts the bark, and the breath of the dying plant is frozen about it? i see a red squirrel dash out from the wall, snatch an apple from amid many on the ground, and, running swiftly up the tree with it, proceed to eat it, sitting on a smooth dead limb with its back to the wind, and its tail curled close over its back. it allows me to approach within eight feet. it holds the apple between its two fore paws, and scoops out the pulp mainly with its lower inci sors, making a saucer-like cavity, high and thin at the edge, where it bites off the skin and lets it drop. it keeps its jaws moving very briskly, from time to time turning the apple round and round with its paws, as it eats, like a wheel in a plane at right angles with its body. it holds it up and twirls it with ease. suddenly it pauses, having taken alarm at something, then drops the remainder of the apple in the hollow of a bough, and glides off in short snatches, uttering a faint, sharp, bird-like note. i sometimes think i must go off to some wil derness, where i can have a better opportunity to play life, can find more suitable materials to build my house with, and enjoy the pleasure of collecting my fuel in the forest. i have more taste for the wild sports of hunt ing, fishing, wigwam building, and collecting 156 autumn. wood wherever you find it, than for butchering, farming, carpentry, working in a factory or going to a wood market. oct. 26, 1857. p. m. round by puffer s via clamshell. a driving east or northeast storm. i can see through the stormy mist only a mile. the river is getting partly over the meadows at last, and my spirits rise with it. methinks this rise of the waters must affect every thought and deed in the town. it qualifies my sentence and life. i trust there will appear in this journal some flow, some gradual filling of the springs and raising of the streams, that the accumulat ing grists may be ground. a storm is a new and in some respects more active life in nature. larger migratory birds make their appearance. they at least sympathize with the movements of the watery element and the winds. i see two great fishhawks (possibly blue herons) slowly beating northeast against the storm, by what a curious tie circling ever near each other and in the same direction, as if you might expect the very motes in the air to be paired, two long undulating wings conveying a feathered body through the misty atmosphere and thus insep arably associated with another planet of the same species. i can just glimpse their undulating lives. damon and pythias they must be. the waves beneath, which are of kindred form, are autumn. 157 still more social, multitudinous, dvrjpifytoi/. where is my mate, beating against the storm with me ? they fly according to the valley of the river, northeast or southwest. i start up snipes also at clamshell meadow. this weather sets the migratory birds in motion, and also makes them bolder. these regular phenomena of the seasons get at last to be (they were, at first, of course) simply and plainly phenomena or phases of my life. the seasons and all their changes are in me. i see not a dead eel or floating snake, or a gull, but it sounds my life, and is like a line or accent in its poem. almost i believe the concord would not rise and over flow its banks again, were i not here. after a while i learn what my moods and seasons are. i would have nothing subtracted, i can imagine nothing added. my moods are thus periodical, not two days in the year alike : the perfect cor respondence of nature with man, so that he is at home in her ! many sparrows are flitting past amid the birches and sallows. they are chiefly fringilla hiemalis. how often they may be seen thus flitting along in a straggling manner from bush to bush, so that the hedgerow will be all alive with them, each uttering a faint chip from time to time, bewildering you so that you know not if the greater part are gone by, or still to come. 158 autumn. one rests but a moment in the tree before you and is gone again. you wonder if they know whither they are bound, and how their leader is appointed. those sparrows, too, are thoughts i have ; they come and go, they flit by quickly on their migrations, uttering only a faint chip, i know not whither or why, exactly. one will not rest on its twig for me to scrutinize it. the whole copse will be alive with my rambling thoughts, bewildering me by their very multi tude, but they will be all gone directly without leaving me a feather. my loftiest thought is somewhat like an eagle that suddenly comes into the field of view, sug gesting great things and thrilling the beholder, as if it were bound hitherward with a message for me. but it comes no nearer, circles and soars away, disappointing me, till it is lost be hind a cliff or a cloud. spring is brown ; summer, green ; autumn, yellow ; winter, white ; november, gray. oct. 27, 1851. this morning i awoke and found it snowing and the ground covered with snow, quite unexpectedly, for last night it was rainy and not cold. the strong northwest wind blows the damp snow along almost horizontally. the birds fly about as if seeking shelter. the cold numbs my fingers this morning. winter, with its inwardness, is upon us. a man is con strained to sit down and to think. autumn. 159 the obstacles which the heart meets with are like granite blocks, which one alone cannot move. she who was as the morning light to me, is now neither the morning star nor the evening star. we meet but to find each other further asunder, and the oftener we meet, the more rapid the divergence. so a star of the first magnitude pales in the heavens, not from any fault in the observer s eye, nor from any fault in itself, per chance, but because its progress in its own sys tem has put a greater distance between. the night is oracular. what have been the intimations of the night ? i ask. how have you passed the night ? good night ! my friend will be bold to conjecture. he will guess bravely at the significance of my words. the ardea minor still with us. saw a wood cock or snipe (?) feeding, probing the mud with its long bill, under the railroad bridge, within two feet of me. for a long time i could not scare it far away. what a disproportionate length of bill ! oct. 27, 1853. i love to be reminded of that universal and eternal spring when the minute, crimson-starred female flowers of the hazel are peeping forth on the hillsides, when nature re vives in all her pores. some less obvious and commonly unobserved signs of the progress of the seasons interest me 160 autumn. most, like the loose dangling catkins of the hop hornbeam, or of the black or yellow birch. i can recall distinctly to my mind the image of these things, and that time in which they flour ished is glorious, as if it were before the fall of man. i see all nature for the time under this aspect. these features are particularly promi nent ; as if the first object i saw on approaching this planet in the spring was the catkins of the hop hornbeam on the hillsides. as i sailed by, i saw the yellowish waving sprays. oct. 27, 1857. p. m. up river. the third day of steady rain. wind northeast. i go up the river as far as hillard s second grove in order to share the general commotion and excite ment of the elements, wind and waves and rain. a half dozen boats at the landing were full, and the waves beating over them. it was hard get ting out, hauling up, and emptying mine. it was a rod and a half from the water s edge. now look out for your rails and other fencing stuff and loose lumber, lest it be floated off. i sailed swiftly, standing up, and tipping my boat to make it keel on its side, though at first it was hard to keep off a lee shore. it was exciting to feel myself tossed by the dark waves, and hear them surge about me. the reign of water now begins, and how it gambols and revels ; waves are its leaves, foam its blossoms. how they run autumn. 161 and leap in great droves, deriving new excite ment from each other ; schools of porpoises and blackfish are only more animated waves, and have acquired the gait and gambols of the sea itself. i hear that sammy hoar saw geese go over to-day. the fall, strictly speaking, is approach ing an end in this probably annual northeast storm. thus the summer winds up its accounts. the indians, it is said, did not look for winter till the springs were full. the ducks and other fowl, reminded of the lateness, go by. the few remaining leaves come fluttering down. the snow-fleas, as to-day, are washed out of the bark of meadow trees, and cover the surface of the flood. the winter s wood is bargained for and being hauled. there is not much more for the farmer to do in the fields. this storm reminds men to put things on a winter footing. the real facts of a poet s life would be of more value to us than any work of his art. i mean that the very scheme and form of his poetry, so called, is adopted at a sacrifice of vital truth and poetry. shakespeare has left us his fancies and imaginings, but the truth of his life, with its becoming circumstances, we know nothing about. the writer is reported, the liver not at all. shakespeare s house ! how hol low it is ! no man can conceive of shakespeare in that house. we want the basis of fact, of 162 autumn. an actual life, to complete our shakespeare as much as a statue wants its pedestal. a poet s life, with this broad actual basis, would be as superior to shakespeare s, as a lichen, with its base or thallus, is superior, in the order of being, to a fungus. the littleton giant brought us a load of coal within the week. he appears deformed and weakly, though actually well-formed. he does not nearly stand up straight. his knees knock together. they touch when he is standing most upright, and so reduce his height at least three inches. he is also very round-shouldered and stooping, probably from the habit of crouching to conceal his height. he wears a low hat for the same purpose. the tallest man looks like a boy beside him. he has a seat to his wagon made on purpose for him. he habitually stops before all doors. you wonder what his horses think of him, that a strange horse is not afraid of him. his voice is deep and full, but mild, for he is quite modest and retiring, really a worthy man, t is said. pity he could not have been undertaken by a committee in season, and put through like the boy safford, been well de veloped bodily and mentally, taught to hold up his head, and not mind people s eyes or remarks. it is remarkable that the giants have never cor respondingly great hearts. autumn. 163 oct. 27, 1858. who will attempt to describe in words the difference in tint between two neighboring leaves on the same tree [in autumn] or of two thousand ? for by so many the eye is addressed in a glance. in describing the richly spotted leaves, for instance, how often we find ourselves using ineffectually words which indicate faintly our good intentions, giving them in our despair a terminal twist toward our mark, such as reddish, yellowish, purplish, etc. we cannot make a hue of words, for they are not to be compounded like colors, and hence we are obliged to use such ineffectual expressions as reddish brown, etc. they need to be ground together. oct. 28, 1853. for a year or two past, my publisher, falsely so called, has been writing from time to time, to ask what disposition should be made of the copies of &quot; a week on the concord and merrimack eivers &quot; still on hand, and at last suggesting that he had use for the room they occupied in his cellar. so i had them all sent to me here, and they have arrived to-day by express, filling the man s wagon, 706 copies out of an edition of 1000, which i bought of munroe four years ago, and have been ever since paying for and have not quite paid for yet. the wares are sent to me at last, and i have an opportunity to examine my purchase. they are something more substantial than fame, as 164 autumn. my back knows, which has borne them up two flights of stairs to a place similar to that to which they trace their origin. of the remain ing 290 and odd, 75 were given away, the rest sold. i have now a library of nearly 900 vol umes, over 700 of which i wrote myself. is it not well that the author should behold the fruits of his labor ? my works are piled up on one side of my chamber half as high as my head, my opera omnia. this was authorship, these are the works of my brain. there was just one piece of good luck in the venture. the un bound were tied up by the printer four years ago in stout paper wrappers, and inscribed : h. d. thoreau, concord river, 50 cops. so munroe had only to cross out &quot; river &quot; and write &quot; mass.,&quot; and deliver them to the express man at once. i can see now what i write for, the result of my labors. nevertheless in spite of this result, sitting beside the inert mass of my works, i take up my pen to-night to record what thought or experience i may have had, with as much satisfaction as ever. indeed i believe that the result is more inspiring and better for me than if a thousand had bought my wares. it affects my privacy less and leaves me freer. oct. 28, 1855. by boat to leaning hem autumn. 165 locks. as i paddle under the hemlock bank this shady afternoon, about three o clock, i see a screech-owl sitting on the edge of a hollow hemlock stump about three feet high, at the base of a large hemlock. it sits with its head down, eying me with its eyes partly open, about twenty feet off. when it hears me move, it turns its head toward me, perhaps one eye partly open, with its great, gleaming, golden iris. you see two whitish triangular lines above the eye, meeting at the bill, with a sharp reddish-brown triangle between, and a narrow curved line of black under each eye. at this distance and in this light, you see only a black spot where the eye is, and the question is whether the eyes are open or not. it sits on the lee side of the tree this raw and windy day. you would say this was a bird without a neck. its short bill, which rests upon its breast, scarcely projects at all, but in a state of rest the whole upper part of the bird from the wings is rounded off smoothly, except the horns, which stand up conspicuously or are slanted back. after watching it ten min utes from the boat, i landed two rods above, and, stealing up quietly behind the hemlock, though from the windward, i looked carefully round it, and to my surprise, saw the owl still sitting there ; so i sprang round quickly with my arm outstretched, and caught it in my hand. it was 166 autumn. so surprised that it offered no resistance at first, only glared at me in mute astonishment with eyes as big as saucers. but erelong it began to snap its bill, making quite a noise, and as i rolled it up in my handkerchief and put it in my pocket, it bit my ringer slightly. i soon took it out of my pocket, and tying the hand kerchief, left it on the bottom of the boat. so i carried it home, and made a small cage in which to keep it for a night. when i took it up, it clung so tightly to my hand as to sink its claws into my fingers and bring blood. when alarmed or provoked most, it snaps its bill and hisses. it puffs up its feathers to nearly twice its usual size, stretches out its neck, and with wide-open eyes stares this way and that, moving its head slowly and undulat ingly from side to side with a curious motion. while i write this evening, i see there is ground for much superstition in it. it looks out on me from a dusky corner of its box with its great solemn eyes, perfectly still. i was surprised to find that i could imitate its note, as i remember it, by a guttural whimpering. a remarkably squat figure, being very broad in proportion to its length, with a short tail, and very cat-like in the face with its horns and great eyes. re markably large feet and talons, legs thickly clothed to the talons with whitish down. it autumn. 167 would lower its head, stretch out its neck, and, bending it from side to side, peer at you with laughable circumspection ; from side to side, as if to catch or absorb into its eyes every ray of light, strain at you with complacent yet earnest scrutiny, raising and lowering its head, and moving it from side to side in a slow and regu lar manner, at the same time snapping its bill smartly perhaps and faintly hissing and puffing itself up more and more, cat-like, turtle-like, both in hissing and swelling. the slowness and gravity, not to say solemnity of this motion are striking. there is plainly no jesting in this case. general color of the owl a rather pale and perhaps slightly reddish brown, the feathers centred with black. perches with two claws above, and two below the perch. he has a slight body covered with a mass of soft and light-lying feathers, his head muffled in a great hood. he must be quite comfortable in winter. dropped a pellet of fur and bones (?) in his cage. he sat not really moping, but trying to sleep in a corner of his box all day, yet with one or both eyes slightly open all the while. i never once caught him with his eyes shut. ordinarily he stood rather than sat on his perch. oct. 29. up assabet. carried my owl to the hill again ; had to shake him out of the box, for he did not go of his own accord. (he had 168 autumn. learned to alight on his perch, and it was sur prising how lightly and noiselessly he would hop upon it.) there he stood on the grass, at first bewildered, with his horns pricked up and look ing toward me. in this strong light, the pupils of his eyes suddenly contracted and the iris ex panded, till they were two great brazen orbs with a central spot merely. his attitude ex pressed astonishment more than anything else. i was obliged to toss him up a little that he might feel his wings, and then he flapped away low and heavily to a hickory on a hillside twenty rods off. i had let him out on the plain just east of the hill. thither i followed and tried to start him again. he was now on the qui vive, yet would not start. he erected his head, showing some neck narrower than the round head above. his eyes were broad brazen rings around bullets of black. his horns stood quite an inch high, as not before. as i moved around him, he turned his head always toward me till he looked directly behind himself, as he sat crosswise on a bough. he behaved as if be wildered and dazzled, gathering all the light he could, and even straining his great eyes to make me out, but not inclining to fly. i had to lift him again with a stick to make him fly, and then he only rose to a higher perch, where at last he seemed to seek the shelter of a thicker autumn. 169 cluster of sere leaves, partly crouching there. he never appeared so much alarmed as sur prised and astonished. at the bottom of the hol low [stump?] on the edge of which he sat when i first saw him yesterday, eighteen inches be neath him, was a very soft bed of the fine green moss, hypnum, which grows on the bank close by, probably his own bed. it had been recently put there. i have got a load of great hard-wood stumps. for sympathy with my neighbors, i might about as well live in china. they are to me barbarians, with their committee-works and gregariousness. oct. 28, 1857. as i sat at the wall corner, high on conantum, the sky generally covered with continuous, cheerless-looking slate-colored clouds, except in the west, i saw through the hollows of the clouds here and there the blue appearing, and all at once a low-slanted glade of sunlight from one of heaven s west windows behind me fell on the bare gray maples, lighting them up with an incredibly intense and pure white light; then, going out there, it lit up some white birch stems south of the pond, then the gray rocks and the pale reddish young oaks of the lower cliffs, then the very pale brown meadow grass, and at last the brilliant white breasts of two ducks tossing on the agitated 170 autumn. surface far off on the pond, which i had not de tected before. it was but a transient ray, and there was no sunshine afterward, but the inten sity of the light was surprising and impressive, a halo, a glory in which only the just deserved to live. it was as if the air, purified by the long storm, reflected these few rays from side to side with a complete illumination, like a per fectly polished mirror, while the effect was greatly enhanced by the contrast with the dull, dark clouds and the sombre earth. as if na ture did not dare at once to let in the full blaze of the sun to this combustible atmosphere. it was a serene elysian light, in which the deeds i have dreamed of, but not realized, might have been performed. no perfectly fair weather ever offered such an arena for noble deeds. it was such a light as we behold but dwell not in. late in the year, at the eleventh hour, we have visions of the life we might have lived. in each case, every recess was filled and lit up by the pure white light. the maples were potter s, far down stream, but i dreamed i walked like a liberated spirit in the maze ; the withered meadow grass was as soft and glorious as para dise. and then it was remarkable that the light-giver should have revealed to me for all life the heaving white breasts of those two ducks within this glade of light. it was extin autumn. 171 guished and relit as it traveled. tell me pre cisely the value and significance of these tran sient gleams which come sometimes at the end of the day before the final dispersion of the clouds at the close of a storm ; too late to be of any service to the works of man for the day, and though the whole night after may be over cast. is not this a language to be heard and understood? there is in the brown and gray earth and rocks, and the withered leaves and bare twigs at this season a purity more corre spondent to the light itself than summer offers. i look up and see a male marsh-hawk, with his clean-cut wings, that has just skimmed past over my head, not at all disturbed, only tilting his body a little, now twenty rods off, with a demi-semi-quaver of his wings. he is a very neat flyer. i do not often see the marsh-hawk thus. what a regular figure this fellow makes with his broad tail and broad wings ! does he perceive me, that he rises higher and circles to one side? he goes round now one full circle without a flap, tilting his wing a little. then flaps three or four times, and rises higher. now he comes on like a billow, screaming, steady as a planet in its orbit, with his head bent down, but on second thought that small sprout land seems worthy of a longer scrutiny, and he gives one circle backward over it. his 172 autumn. scream is something like the whinnying of a horse, if it is not rather a split squeal. it is a hoarse, tremulous breathing forth of his winged energy. but why is it so regularly repeated at that height? is it not to scare his prey, that he may see by its motion where it is, or to inform its mate or companion of its where abouts? now he crosses the at present broad river steadily, desiring to have one or two rab bits at least to swing about him. what majesty there is in this small bird s flight ! oct. 28, 1858. how handsome the great red-oak acorns now. i stand under the tree on emerson s lot. they are still falling. i heard one fall into the water as i approached, and thought a muskrat had plunged. they strew the ground and the bottom of the river thickly, and while i stand here, i hear one strike the boughs with force, as it comes down and drops into the water. the part that was covered by the cup is whitish woolly. how munificent is nature to create this profusion of wild fruit, as it were merely to gratify our eyes. though in edible, they stand by me longer than the fruits which i eat. if they had been plums or chest nuts i should have eaten them on the spot, and probably forgotten them. they would have afforded me only a momentary gratification, but, being acorns, i remember and, as it were, feed autumn. 173 on them still. they are untasted fruits, forever in store for me. i know not of their flavor as yet. that is postponed to some unimagined winter evening. these which we admire, but do not eat, are nuts of the gods. when time is no more we shall crack them. i cannot help liking them better than horse chestnuts, , not only because they are of a much handsomer form but because they are indigenous. what pale plump fellows they are ! they can afford not to be useful to me, not to know me or be known by me. they go their way, i go mine, and it turns out that sometimes i go after them. oct. 28, 1859. walnuts commonly fall, and the black walnuts at smith s are at least one half fallen. they are of the form and size of a small lemon, and, what is singular, have a rich nutmeg fragrance. they are turning dark brown. gray says it is rare in the eastern, but very common in the western states. is it indi genous in massachusetts ? emerson says it is, but rare. if so, it is much the most remarkable nut we have. oct. 29, 1837. a curious incident happened a few weeks ago which i think it worth while to record. john and i had been searching for indian relics, and been successful enough to find two arrow-heads and a pestle, when, of a sunday evening, with our heads full of the past 174 autumn. and its remains, we strolled to the mouth of swamp bridge brook. as we neared the brow of the hill forming the bank of the river, inspired by my theme, i broke forth into an extravagant eulogy of the savage times, using most violent gesticulations by way of illustra tion. &quot; there on nawshawtuck,&quot; said i, &quot; was their lodge, the rendezvous of the tribe, and yonder on clamshell hill, their feasting ground. this was no doubt a favorite haunt ; here on this brow was an eligible lookout-post. how often have they stood on this very spot, at this very hour, when the sun was sinking behind yonder woods, and gilding with his last rays the waters of the musketaquid, and pondered the day s success and the morrow s prospects, or communed with the spirits of their fathers gone before them to the land of the shades ! here,&quot; i exclaimed, &quot; stood tahatowan, and there,&quot; to complete the period, &quot; is tahatowan s arrow head.&quot; we instantly proceeded to sit down on the spot i had pointed to, and i, to carry out the joke, to lay bare an ordinary stone which my whim had selected, when lo ! the first i laid hands on, the grubbing stone that was to be, proved a most perfect arrow-head, as sharp as if just from the hands of the indian fabrica tor. oct. 29, 1857. there are some things of autumn. 175 which i cannot at once tell, whether i have dreamed them or they are real, as if they were just perchance establishing or else losing a real basis in my world. this is especially the case in the early morning hours, when there is a gradual transition from dreams to waking thoughts, from illusions to actualities. such early morning thoughts as i speak of occupy a debatable ground between dreams and waking thoughts ; they are a sort of permanent dream in my mind. at least, until we have for some time changed our position from prostrate to erect, and faced or commenced some of the duties of the day, we cannot tell what we have dreamed from what we have actually experi enced. this morning, for instance, for the twentieth time, at least, i thought of that moun tain in the easterly part of the town, where no high hill actually is, which once or twice i had ascended, and often allowed my thoughts alone to climb. i now contemplate it as a familiar thought which i have surely had for many years from time to time, but whether anything could have reminded me of it in the middle of yesterday, whether i ever remembered it before in broad daylight, i doubt. i can now eke out the vision i had of it this morning with my old and yes terday-forgotten dreams. my way up used to be through a dark and unfrequented wood at 176 autumn. its base. (i cannot now tell exactly, it was so long ago, under what circumstances i first as cended, only that i shuddered, as i went along, and have an indistinct remembrance of having been out one night alone.) then i steadily as cended along a rock ridge, half clad with stunted trees, where wild beasts haunted, till i lost my self quite in the upper air and clouds, seeming to pass an imaginary line which separates a hill, mere earth heaped up, from a mountain, into a superterranean grandeur and sublimity. what distinguishes that summit above the earthy line, is that it is unhandseled, awful, grand. it can never become familiar. you are lost the mo ment you set foot there. you know 110 path, but wander, thrilled, over the bare and pathless rock, as if it were solidified air and cloud. that rocky, misty summit, secreted in the cloud, was far more thrillingly awful and sublime than the crater of a volcano spouting fire. this is a matter we can partly understand. the perfect mountain height is already thor oughly purified. it is as if you trod with awe the face of a god turned up, unwillingly, but helplessly, yielding to the law of gravity. in dreams i am shown this height from time to time, and i seem to have asked my fellow once to climb there with me, and yet i am constrained to believe that i never actually ascended it. autumn. 177 now first i recall that it rises in my mind where lies the burying hill. you might go through that gate to enter the dark wood. perchance it was the grave, but that hill and its graves are so concealed and obliterated by the awful moun tain that i never thought of them as underlying it. my old way down was different, and indeed this was another way up, though i never so ascended. i came out, as i descended, from the belt of wood, breathing the thicker air, into a familiar pasture, and along down by a wall. often as i go along the low side of this pasture, i let my thoughts ascend toward the mount, grad ually entering the stunted wood (nature sub dued) and the thinner air. ever there are two ways up, one through the dark wood, the other through the sunny pasture. that is, i reach and discover the mountain only through the dark wood, but i see to my surprise, when i look off between the mists from its summit, how it is ever adjacent to my native fields, nay, im minent over them, and accessible through a sunny pasture. why is it that in the lives of men we hear more of the dark wood than of the sunny pasture ? though the pleasure of ascend ing the mountain is largely mixed with awe, my thoughts are purified and sublimed by it, as if i had been translated. we see mankind generally, who toil to ac 178 autumn. quire wealth, or perhaps inherit it, or acquire it by other accident, having recourse for relaxation after excessive toil, or as a mere relief from idle ennui, to artificial amusements, rarely elevating, often debasing. i think men are commonly mistaken with regard to amusements. every one who deserves to be regarded as higher than the brute may be supposed to have an earnest purpose, to accomplish which is the object of his existence, and this is at once his work and his supreme pleasure, and for diversion and relaxa tion, for suggestion and education and strength, there is offered the never-failing amusement of getting a living, never-failing, i mean, when temperately indulged in. i know of no such amusement, so wholesome, and in every sense profitable, for instance, as to spend an hour or two in a day, picking berries or other fruits which will be food for the winter, or collecting driftwood from the river for fuel, or cultivating the few beans or potatoes which i want. thea tres and operas, which intoxicate for a season, are as nothing compared with these pursuits. and so it is with all the true arts of life. farm ing and building and manufacturing and sailing are the greatest and wholesomest amusements that were ever invented, for god invented them, and i suppose that the farmers and mechanics know it, only i think they indulge to excess autumn. 179 generally, and so what was meant for a joy be comes the sweat of the brow. gambling, horse racing, loafing, and rowdyism generally after all tempt but few. the mass are tempted by those other amusements, of farming, etc. by these various pursuits your experience becomes singu larly complete and rounded. their novelty and significance are remarkable. such is the path by which we climb to the height of our being. compare the poetry which such simple pursuits have inspired with the unreadable volumes which have been written about art. i find when i have been building a fence or surveying a farm, or even collecting simples, that these were the true path to perception and enjoyment. my being seems to have put forth new roots, and to be more strongly planted. this is the true way to crack the nut of happiness. if as a poet or naturalist you wish to explore a given neighborhood, go and live in it, that is, get your living in it. fish in its streams, hunt in its forests, gather fuel from its water, its woods, cultivate the ground, and pluck the wild fruits, etc., etc. this will be the surest and speediest way to those perceptions you covet. no amuse ment has worn better than farming. it tempts men just as strongly to-day as in the day of cin cinnatus. healthily and properly pursued, it is not a whit more grave than huckleberrying, 180 autumn. and if it takes airs on itself as superior, there is something wrong about it. i have aspired to practice in succession all the honest arts of life that i may gather all the fruits. but if you are intemperate, if you toil to raise an unnecessary amount, even the large crop of wheat becomes as a small crop of chaff. if our living were once honestly got, then it would be time to in vent other amusements. after reading ruskin on the love of nature, i think, &quot; drink deep, or taste not the pierian spring ! &quot; he there, to my surprise, expresses the common infidelity of his age and race. he has not implicitly surrendered himself to nature. and what does he substitute for her ? i do not know, unless it be the church of england, ques tioning whether that relation to nature was of so much value after all. it is sour grapes ! he does not speak to the condition of foxes that have more spring in the legs. the love of na ture and fullest perception of the revelation which she is to man, is not compatible with be lief in the peculiar revelation of the bible which ruskin entertains. oct. 29, 1858. the cat comes stealthily creeping towards some prey amid the withered flowers in the garden, which being disturbed by my approach, she runs low toward it, with an unusual glare or superficial light in her eye, autumn. 181 ignoring her oldest acquaintance, as wild as her remotest ancestor, and presently i see the first tree sparrow hopping there. i hear them also amid the alders by the river singing sweetly, but with a few notes. english plants have english habits here. they are not yet acclimated. they are early or late, as if ours were an english spring or autumn, and no doubt in course of time a change will be produced in their constitutions similar to that which is observed in the english man here. oct. 30, 1858. i see that prichard s mountain ash (european) has lately put forth new leaves when all the old have fallen. they are four or five inches long. but the american has not started. it knows better. oct. 31, 1850. this has been the most per fect afternoon of the year. the air quite warm enough, perfectly still and dry and clear, and not a cloud in the sky. scarcely the song of a cricket is heard to disturb the stillness. our indian summer, i am tempted to say, is the finest season of the year. here has been such a day as i think italy never sees. a fair afternoon, a celestial afternoon, cannot occur but we mar our pleasure by reproaching ourselves that we do not make all our days beautiful. the thought of what i am, of my pitiful conduct, deters me from receiving what 182 autumn. joy i might from the glorious days that visit me. after the era of youth is passed, the knowledge of ourselves is an alloy that spoils our satisfac tions. i am wont to think that i could spend my days contentedly in any retired country house that i see, for i see it to advantage now and without incumbrance. i have not yet im ported my humdrum thoughts, my prosaic hab its, into it to mar the landscape. what is this beauty in the landscape but a certain fertility in me? i look in vain to see it realized but in my own life. if i could wholly cease to be ashamed of myself, i think all my days would be fair. oct. 31, 1853. p. m. by boat with sophia to my grapes laid down in front of fair haven. it is a beautiful, warm, and calm indian-summer afternoon, and the river is so high over the meadows, the pads and other low weeds so deeply buried, and the water so smooth and glassy withal that i am reminded of a calm april day during the freshets. the coarse withered grass, and the willows and button-bushes with their myriad balls, and whatever else stands on the brink, is reflected with wonderful distinctness. this shore thus seen from the boat is like the ornamented frame of a mirror. the button balls, etc., are more distinct in the reflection, if i remember, because they have there for back autumn. 183 ground the reflected sky, but the actual ones are seen against the russet meadow. i even see houses a mile off reflected in the meadow flood. the cocks crow in barnyards, as if with new lustiness. they seem to appreciate the day. the river is three feet and more above the sum mer level. i see many pickerel dart away as i push my boat over the meadows. they lie up there now. there are already myriads of snow fleas on the water next the shore, and on the cranberries we pick in the wreck, as if they were peppered. when we ripple the surface, the un dulating light is reflected from the waves upon the bank and bushes and withered grass. is not this already november, when the yellow and scarlet tints are gone from the forest ? it is very pleasant to float along over the smooth mea dow, where every weed and each stem of coarse grass that rises above the surface has another answering to it, and even more distinct in the water beneath, making a rhyme to it, so that the most irregular form appears regular. a few scattered dry and clean very light straw-col ored grasses are a cheap and simple beauty, thus reflected. i slowly discover that this is a gossamer day. i first see the fine lines stretching from one weed, or grass-stem or rush, to another, some times seven or eight feet distant horizontally, 184 autumn. and only four or five inches above the water. when i look further, i find that they are every where and on everything, sometimes forming conspicuous fine white gossamer webs on the heads of grasses. they are so abundant that they seem to have been suddenly produced in the atmosphere by some chemistry, spun out of air, i know not for what purpose. i remember that in kirby and spence it is not allowed that the spider can walk on the water to carry his web across from rush to rush, but here i see myriads of spiders on the water making some kind of progress, and at least with a line attached to them. true, they do not appear to walk well, but they stand up high and dry on the tips of their toes, and are blown along quite fast. they are of various sizes and colors, though mostly a greenish brown or else black, some very small. these gossamer lines are not visible unless be tween you and the sun. we pass some black willows now, of course, quite leafless, and when they are between us and the sun, they are so completely covered with these fine cobwebs or lines, mainly parallel to one another, that they make one solid roof, a misty roof, against the sun. they are not drawn taut, but curved downward in the middle, like the rigging of a vessel, the ropes which stretch from mast to mast, as if the fleets of a thousand lilliputian autumn. 185 nations were collected one behind another under bare poles ; but when we have floated a few feet farther, and thrown the willow out of the sun s range, not a thread can be seen on it. i landed and walked up and down the causeway, and found it the same there, the gossamer reaching across the causeway, though not necessarily sup ported on the other side. they streamed south ward with the slight zephyr, as if the year were weaving her shroud out of light. there were spiders on the rail [of the causeway] that pro duced them, similar to those on the water. the air appeared crowded with them. it was a won der they did not get into the mouth and nostrils, or that we did not feel them on our faces, or con tinually going and coming among them did not whiten our clothes more. and yet one, with his back to the sun, walking the other way, would observe nothing of all this. methinks it is only on these very finest days, late in the autumn, that the phenomenon is seen, as if that fine vapor of the morning were spun into these webs. according to kirby and spence, &quot; in germany these flights of gossamer appear so constantly in autumn that they are there metaphorically called der fliegende sommer, the flying or depart ing summer.&quot; what can possess these spiders, thus to run all at once to every the least eleva tion, and let off this wonderful stream ? harris 186 autumn. tells me he does not know what it means. sophia thought that thus, at last, they emptied them selves and wound up, or, i suggested, unwound themselves, cast off their mortal coil. it looks like a mere frolic spending and wasting of them selves, of their vigor, now that there is no further use for it, their july, perchance, being killed or banished by the frost. oct. 31, 1857. in the lee farm swamp, by the old sam barrett mill-site, i see two kinds of ferns still green and much in fruit, apparently the as pidium spinulosum (?) and cristatum (?). they are also common in the swamps now. they are quite fresh in those cold and wet places, and almost flattened down now. the atmosphere of the house is less congenial to them. in the summer you might not have noticed them. now they are conspicuous amid the withered leaves. you are inclined to approach and raise each frond in succession, moist, trembling, fragile greenness. they linger thus in all moist, clammy swamps under the bare maples and grapevines and witch hazels, and about each trickling spring that is half choked with fallen leaves. what means this persistent vitality? why were these spared when the brakes and osmundas were stricken down ? they stay as if to keep up the spirits of the cold-blooded frogs which have not yet gone into the mud, that the autumn. 187 summer may die with decent and graceful mod eration. is not the water of the spring improved by their presence ? they fall back and droop here and there like the plumes of departing summer, of the departing year. even in them i feel an argument for immortality. death is so far from being universal. the same destroyer does not destroy all. how valuable they are, with the lycopodiums for cheerfulness. green ness at the end of the year, after the fall of the leaf, a hale old age. to my eyes they are tall and noble as palm groves, and always some for est nobleness seems to have its haunt under their umbrage. all that was immortal in the swamp herbage seems here crowded into smaller com pass, the concentrated greenness of the swamp. how dear they must be to the chickadee and the rabbit ! the cool, slowly-retreating rear-guard of the swamp army. what virtue is theirs that enables them to resist the frost? if you are afflicted with melancholy at this season, go to the swamp, and see the brave spears of skunk cabbage buds already advanced toward a new year. their gravestones are not bespoken yet. who shall be sexton to them ? is it the winter of their discontent ? do they seem to have lain down to die, despairing of skunk-cabbagedom ? mortal, human creatures must take a little re spite in this fall of the year. their spirits do 188 autumn. flag a little. there is a little questioning of destiny, and thinking to go like cowards to where the weary shall be at rest. but not so with the skunk cabbage. its withered leaves fall and are transfixed by a rising bud. winter and death are ignored. the circle of life is complete. are these false prophets ? is it a lie or a vain boast underneath the skunk-cabbage bud pushing it upwards and lifting the dead leaves with it? they rest with spears advanced. it is good for me to be here slumping in the mud, a trap cov ered with withered leaves, to see these green cabbage buds lifting the dry leaves in this watery, muddy place. they see over the brow of winter s hill. they see another summer ahead. nov. 1, 1851. it is a rare qualification to be able to state a fact simply and adequately, to digest some experience clearly, to say &quot; yes &quot; and &quot;no&quot; with authority, to make a square edge. a man must see before he can say. statements are made but partially. things are said with reference to certain conventions or institutions, not absolutely. a fact, truly and absolutely stated, is taken out of the region of common sense, and acquires a mythologic or universal significance. say it and have done with it. express it without expressing yourself. see not with the eye of science, which is barren, autumn. 189 nor of youthful poetry, which is impotent. but taste the world and digest it. it would seem as if things got said but rarely and by chance. as you see, so at length will you say. when facts are seen superficially, they are seen as they lie in relation to certain institutions, perchance. i would have them expressed as more deeply seen, with deeper references, so that the hearer or reader cannot recognize them or apprehend their significance from the platform of common life, but it will be necessary that he be in a sense translated in order to understand them. at first blush, a man is not capable of reporting truth. to do that, he must be drenched and saturated with it. then the truth will exhale from him naturally, like the odor of the muskrat from the coat of the trapper. what was enthusiasm in the young man must become temperament in the mature man. without excitement, heat, or passion he will survey the world which excited the youth and threw him off his balance. this on my way to conantum, 2.30 p. m. it is a bright, clear, warm november day. i feel blessed. i love my life. i warm toward all nature. the crickets now sound faintly and from very deep in the sod. fall dandelions look bright still. the grass has got a new greenness in spots. at this season there are stranger sparrows or finches about. the skunk cabbage 190 autumn. is already pushing up again. it is a remarkable day for fine gossamer cobwebs. here in the causeway, as i walk toward the sun, i perceive that the air is full of them, streaming from off the willows and spanning the road, all stretch ing across the road, and yet i cannot see them in any other direction, and feel not one. it looks as if the birds would be incommoded. this shimmer moving along the gossamer lines as they are moved by the wind, gives the effect of a drifting storm of light. it is more like a fine snowstorm which drifts athwart your path than anything else. if there were no sunshine, i should never find out that they existed, i should not know that i was bursting a myriad barriers. why should this day be so distin guished ? what is the peculiar condition of the atmosphere to call forth this activity ? the river is peculiarly sky-blue to-day, not dark as usual. it is all in the air. saw a canoe birch by road beyond the abel minot house ; distinguished it thirty rods off by the chalky whiteness of its limbs. it is of a more unspotted, transparent, and perhaps pink ish white than the common. its branches do not droop and curl down like those of the other. there will be some loose curls of bark about it. the common birch is finely branched, and has frequently a snarly head ; the canoe birch is a autumn. 191 more open and free-growing tree. if at a dis tance you see the birch near its top forking into two or more white limbs, you may know it for a canoe birch. i have heard of a man in maine who copied the whole bible on to birch bark.. it was much easier than to write that sentence which the birch tree stands for. nov. 1, 1852. day before yesterday to the cliffs in the misty rain. as i approached their edge, i saw the woods beneath, fair haven pond, and the hills across the river, which ow ing to the mist was as far as i could see, and seemed much farther in consequence. i saw these between the converging branches of two white pines a rod or two from me on the edge of the rocks, and i thought there was no frame to a landscape equal to this, to see between two near pine boughs whose lichens are distinct, a distant forest and lake, the one, frame, the other, picture. in november a man will eat his heart, if in any month. it is remarkable how native man proves him self to the earth, after all, and the completeness of his life in all its appurtenances. his alli ances how wide! he has domesticated not only beasts, but fowl, not only hens and geese and ducks and turkeys, but his doves winging their way to their dove-cotes over street and vil 192 autumn. lage enhance the picturesqueness of his sky, to say nothing of his trained falcons, his beautiful scouts in the upper air. he is lord of the fowl and the brute. the dove, the martin, the bluebird, the swallow, and in some countries, the hawk, have attached themselves to his fortunes. nov. 1, 1853. few come to the woods to see how the pine lives and grows and spires, lifting its evergreen arms to the light, to see its perfect success. most are content to behold it in the shape of many broad boards brought to market, and deem that its true success. the pine is no more lumber than man is, and to be made into boards and houses is no more its true and high est use than the truest use of a man is to be cut down and made into manure. a pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead hu man carcass is a man. is it the lumberman who is the friend and lover of the pine, stands near est to it, and understands its nature best ? is it the tanner or turpentine distiller who posterity will fable was changed into a pine at last ? no, no, it is the poet who makes the truest use of the pine, who does not fondle it with an axe, or tickle it with a saw, or stroke it with a plane. it is the poet who loves it as his own shadow in the air, and lets it stand. it is as immortal as i am, and will go to as high a heaven, there to autumn. 193 tower above me still. can he who has only dis covered the value of whale-bone and whale-oil be said to have discovered the true uses of the whale ? can he who slays the elephant for his ivory be said to have seen the elephant ? no, these are petty and accidental uses. just as if a stronger race were to kill us in order to make but tons and flageolets of our bones, and then prate of the usefulness of man. every creature is better alive than dead, both men and moose and pine-trees, as life is more beautiful than death. nov. 1, 1855. p. m. up assabet, a-wooding. as i pushed up the river past hildreth s, i saw a blue heron arise from the shore, and disappear round a bend in front ; the greatest of the bitterns (ardec&), with heavy undulating wings low over the water, seen against the woods, just disappearing round a bend in front ; with a great slate-colored expanse of wing, suited to the shadows of the stream, a tempered blue as of the sky and dark water commingled. this is the aspect under which the musketaquid might be represented at this season : a long, smooth lake, reflecting the bare willows and button beeches, the stubble, and the wool grass on its tussock, a muskrat cabin or two conspicu ous on its margin amid the unsightly tops of pontederia, and a bittern disappearing on undu lating wing around a bend. 194 autumn. nov. 1, 1857. i see much witch hazel, some of it quite fresh and bright. its bark is alter nate white and smooth reddish-brown, the small twigs looking as if gossamer had lodged on and draped them. what a lively spray it has, both in form and color ! truly it looks as if it would make divining rods, as if its twigs knew where the true gold was and could point to it. the gold is in the late blossoms. let them alone, and they never point down to earth. they im part to the whole hillside a speckled, parti-col ored look. nov. 1, 1858. as the afternoons grow shorter, and the early evening drives us home to complete our chores, we are reminded of the shortness of life, and become more pensive at least in this twilight of the year. we are prompted to make haste and finish our work before the twilight comes. i leaned over a rail on the walden road, waiting for the evening mail to be distrib uted, when such thoughts visited me. i seemed to remember the november evening as a fa miliar thing come round again, and yet i could hardly tell whether i had ever known it, or only divined it. it appeared like a part of a pano rama at which i sat spectator, a part with which i was perfectly familiar, just coming into view. i foresaw how it would look and roll along and was prepared to be pleased. just such a piece autumn. 195 of art merely, infinitely sweet and good, did it appear to me, and just as little were any active duties required of me. we are independent of all that we see. the hangman whom i have seen cannot hang me. the earth which i have seen cannot bury me. such doubleness and distance does sight prove. only the rich and such as are troubled with ennui are implicated in the maze of phenomena. you cannot see anything until you are clear of it. the long railroad causeway through the meadows west of me, the still twi light, the dark bank of clouds in the horizon, the villagers crowding to the post-office, and then hastening home to supper by candle-light, had i not seen all this before ? what new sweet was i to extract from it? truly they mean that we should learn our lesson well. nature gets thumbed like an old spelling book. yet i sat the bench with perfect contentment, unwilling to exchange the familiar vision that was to be un rolled for any treasure or heaven that could be imagined. i was no nearer to or farther off from my friends. we were sure to keep just so far apart in our orbits still, in obedience to the laws of attraction and repulsion, affording each other only steady, but indispensable starlight. it was as if i was promised the greatest novelty the world has ever seen or shall see, though the utmost possible novelty would be the difference 196 autumn. between me and myself a year ago. this alone encouraged me, and was my fuel for the ap proaching winter. that we may behold the pan orama with this slight improvement or change, this is what we sustain life for from year to year. and yet there is no more tempting nov elty than this new november. no going to europe or to another world is to be named with it. give me the old familiar walk, post-office and all, with this ever new self, with this infinite expectation and faith which does not know when it is beaten. we 11 go nutting once more. we 11 pluck the nut of the world and crack it in the winter evenings. theatres and all other sight-seeing are puppet shows in comparison. i will take another walk to the cliff, another row on the river, another skate on the meadow, be out in the first snow, and associate with the win ter birds. here i am at home. in the bare and bleached crust of the earth, i recognize my friend. one actual frederick that you know is worth a million only read of. pray, am i alto gether a bachelor, or am i a widower, that i should go away and &quot; leave my bride &quot; ? this morrow that is ever knocking with irresistible force at our door, there is no such guest as that. i will stay at home and receive company. i want nothing new. if i can have but a tithe of the old secured to me, i will spurn all wealth autumn. 197 besides. think of the consummate folly of at tempting to go away from here. here are all the friends i ever had or shall have, and as friendly as ever. why, i never had a quarrel with a friend, but it was just as sweet as unan imity could be. i do not think we budge an inch forward or backward in relation to our friends. how many things can you go away from ? they see the comet from the northwest coast just as plainly as we do, and the same stars through its tail. take the shortest way round and stay at home. a man dwells in his native valley like a corolla in its calyx, like an acorn in its cup. here, of course, is all that you love, all that you expect, all that you are. here is your bride-elect, as close to you as she can be got. here is all the best and the worst you can imagine. what more do you want ? foolish people think that what they imagine is somewhere else. that stuff is not made in any factory but their own. jvov. 1, 1860. a perfect indian summer day, wonderfully warm, 72 + at 1 p. m., prob ably warmer at 2. the butterflies are out again. i see the common yellow one, and the vanessa antiopa, also yellow-winged grasshop pers with blackish eyes. nov. 2, 1840. it is well said that the &quot; atti tude of inspection is prone.&quot; the soul does 198 autumn. not inspect, but behold. like the lily, or the crystal, or the rock, it looks in the face of the sky. francis howell says that in garrulous persons &quot; the supply of thought seems never to rise much above the level of its exit.&quot; con sequently their thoughts issue in no jets, but incessantly dribble. in those who speak rarely, but to the purpose, the reservoir of thought is many feet higher than its issue. it takes the pressure of one hundred atmospheres to make one jet of eloquence. nov. 2, 1851. saw a canoe birch beyond nawshawtuck, growing out of the middle of a white-pine stump which still showed the marks of the axe ; sixteen inches in diameter at its bottom, or at two feet from the ground where it had first taken root in the stump. nov. 2, 1852. tall buttercups, red clover, houstonias, polygonum aviculare, still. the month of chickadees and new swollen buds. at long intervals i see or hear a robin still. nov. 2, 1853. the beech leaves have all fallen except some about the lower part of the trees, and they make a fine thick bed on the ground. they are very beautiful, fine and per fect leaves, unspotted, not eaten by insects, of a handsome, clear leather color, like a book bound in calf, crisp and elastic. they cover the ground so perfectly and cleanly as to tempt you to autumn. 199 recline on it, and admire the beauty of the smooth boles from that position, covered with lichens of various colors, green, etc. they im press you as full of health and vigor, so that their bark can hardly contain their spirits, but lies in folds or wrinkles about their ankles like a sack, with the embonpoint, wrinkles of fat, of infancy. nov. 2, 1854. p. m. by boat to clamshell. i see larks hovering over the meadow, and hear a faint note or two, and a pleasant note from tree sparrows (?). sailing past the bank above the railroad, close to the shore on the east side, just before a clear sunset, i see a fainter shadow of the boat, sail, myself, paddle, etc., directly above and upon the first, on the bank. what makes the second ? i at length discovered that it was the reflected sun which cast a higher shadow like the true one. as i moved to the west side, the upper shadow grew larger and less percep tible, and at last when i was so near the west shore that i could not see the reflected sun, it disappeared, but then there appeared one upside down in its place ! nov. 2, 1857. p. m. to bateman s pond. it is very pleasant and cheerful nowadays, when the brown and withered leaves strew the ground and almost every plant is fallen or withered, to come upon a patch of polypody (as 200 autumn. in abundance on hillside between calla swamp and bateman s pond) on some rocky hillside in the woods, where in the midst of dry and rustling leaves, defying frost, it stands so freshly green and full of life. the mere greenness, which was not remarkable in the summer, is pos itively interesting now. my thoughts are with the polypody a long time after my body has passed. the brakes, the sarsaparilla, the os mundas, the solomon s-seals, the lady s-slippers, etc., have long since withered and fallen. the huckleberries and blueberries, too, have lost their leaves. the forest floor is covered with a thick coat of moist brown leaves, but what is that perennial and spring-like verdure that clothes the rocks, of small green plumes point ing various ways ? it is the cheerful community of the polypody. it survives at least as the type of vegetation, to remind us of the spring which shall not fail. these are the green pas tures where i browse now. why is not this form copied by our sculptors instead of the foreign acanthus leaves and bays ? how fit for a tuft about the base of a column ! the sight of this unwithering green leaf excites me like red at some seasons. are not wood-frogs the philosophers who frequent these groves? me thinks i imbibe a cool, composed, frog-like phi losophy when i behold them. the form of the autumn. 201 polypody is strangely interesting, it is even out landish. some forms, though common in our midst, are thus perennially foreign as the growth of other latitudes. we all feel the ferns to be further from us essentially and sympathetically than the pha3nogamous plants, the roses and weeds, for instance. it needs no geology nor botany to assure us of that. the bare outline of the polypody thrills me strangely. it only perplexes me. simple as it is, it is as strange as an oriental character. it is quite indepen dent of my race and of the indian, and of all mankind. it is a fabulous, mythological form, such as prevailed when the earth and air and water were inhabited by those extinct fossil creatures that we find. it is contemporary with them, and affects us somewhat as the sight of them might do. crossed over that high, flat-backed, rocky hill, where the rocks, as usual thereabouts, stand on their edges, and the grain, running by compass east-northeast and west southwest, is frequently kinked up in a curi ous manner, reminding me of a curly head. call the hill curly-pate. eeturning i see the red oak on r. w. e. s shore reflected in the bright sky crater. in the reflection, the tree is black against the clear whitish sky, though as i see it against the oppo site woods, it is a warm greenish yellow. but 202 autumn. the river sees it against the bright sky and hence the reflection is like ink. the water tells me how it looks to it, seen from below. i think that most men, as farmers, hunters, fishers, etc., walk along a river bank, or paddle along its stream without seeing the reflections. their minds are not enough abstracted from the surface, from surfaces generally. it is only a reflecting mind that sees reflections. i am aware often that i have been occupied with shal low and commonplace thoughts, looking for something superficial, when i did not see the most glorious reflections, though exactly in the line of my vision. if the fisherman were look ing at the reflection, he would not know when he had a nibble. i know from my own expe rience that he may cast his line right over the most elysian landscape and sky, and not catch the slightest notion of them. you must be in an abstract mood to see reflections, however dis tinct. i was even startled by the sight of that reflected red oak, as if it were a black water spirit. when we are enough abstracted, the opaque earth itself reflects images to us, that is, we are imaginative, see visions. nov. 3, 1839. if one would reflect, let him embark on some placid stream, and float with the current. he cannot resist the muse. as we ascend the stream, plying the paddle with autumn. 203 might and main, snatched and impetuous thoughts course through the brain. we dream of conflict, power and grandeur ; but turn the prow down stream, and rock, tree, kine, knoll, assuming new and varying positions, as wind and water shift the scene, favor the liquid lapse of thought, far-reaching and sublime, but ever calm and gently undulating. nov. 3, 1840. the truth is only contained, never withheld, as a feudal castle may be the headquarters of hospitality, though the portal is but a span in the circuit of the wall. so of the three envelopes of the cocoanut, one is al ways so soft that it may be pierced with a thorn, and the traveler is grateful for the thick shell which held the liquor so faithfully. nov. 3, 1853. i make it my business to ex tract from nature whatever nutriment she can furnish .me, though at the risk of endless itera tion. i milk the sky and the earth. a man of many ideas and associations must pine in the woods. at the extreme north, the voyagers have to dance and act plays for employ ment. there is not enough of the garden in the wilderness, though i love to see a man some times from whom the usnea will hang as natur ally as from a spruce. our woods and fields are the perfection of parks and groves, and gardens and grottoes and arbors, and paths and parterres, 204 autumn. and vistas and landscapes. they are the natu ral consequence of what art and refinement we as a people have. they are the common which each village possesses, the true paradise, in comparison with which all elaborately and will fully wealth-constructed parks and gardens are paltry imitations. no other creature effects such changes in nature as man. he changes by his presence the nature of the very trees. the poet s is not a logger s path, but a woodman s. the pioneer and logger have preceded him, and banished decaying wood and the spongy mosses which feed on it, and built hearths, and human ized nature for him. nov. 3, 1857. as i return from the boulder field, i see, between two of the boulders which are a dozen rods from me, a dozen feet high and nearly as much apart, the now winter-colored that is, reddish (of oak leaves) horizon of hills with its few white houses, four or five miles distant southward, as a landscape within the frame of a picture. but what a picture-frame ! these two great slumbering masses of rock, re posing like a pair of mastodons on the surface of the pasture, completely shutting out a mile of the horizon on each side, while between their adja cent sides, which are nearly perpendicular, i look to the now purified, dry, reddish, leafy hori zon, with a faint tinge of blue from the distance. autumn. 205 to see a remote landscape between two near rocks !. i want no other gilding to my picture frame. there they lie as perchance they tum bled and split from off an iceberg. what better frame would you have ? the globe itself, here named pasture, for ground and foreground, two great boulders for the sides of the frame, and the sky itself for the top. and for artist and subject, god and nature ! such pictures cost nothing but eyes, and it will not bankrupt me to own them. they were not stolen by any conqueror as spoils of war, and none can doubt but they are really the works of an old master. what more, pray, will you see between any two slips of gilded wood in that pasture you call europe and browse in sometimes? it is singular that several of these rocks should be thus split into twins. even very low ones, just appearing above the surface, are divided and parallel, having a path between them. nov. 3, 1858. the jay is the bird of october. i have seen it repeatedly flitting amid the bright leaves, of a different color from them all, and equally bright, taking its flight from grove to grove. it, too, with its bright color, stands for some ripeness in the bird harvest ; and its scream ! it is as if it blew on the edge of an october leaf. it is never more in its element and at home than when flitting amid these bril 206 autumn. liant colors. no doubt it delights in bright color, and so has begged for itself a brilliant coat. it is not gathering seeds from the sod, too busy to look around, while fleeing the coun try. it is wide awake to what is going on, on the qui vive. it flies to some bright tree and bruits its splendors abroad. at base of anursnack i find one or two fringed gentians yet open, but even the stems are generally killed. how long we follow an illusion ! on meeting that one whom i call my friend, i find that i had imagined something that was not there. i am sure to depart sadder than i came. nothing makes me so dejected as to have met my friends, for they make me doubt if it is possible to have any friends. i feel what a fool i am. i cannot conceive of persons more strange to me than they actually are ; not thinking, not believing, not doing as i do ; interrupted by me. my only distinction must be that i am the greatest bore they ever had. not in a single thought agreed, regularly balking one another. but when i get far away, my thoughts return to them. that is the way i can visit them. perhaps it is unac countable to me why i care for them. thus i am taught that my friend is not an actual per son. when i have withdrawn and am alone, i forget the actual person, and remember only my autumn. 207 ideal. then i have a friend again. i am not so ready to perceive the illusion that is in nature. i certainly come nearer, to say the least, to an actual and joyful intercourse with her. every day i have more or less communion with her, as i think. at least, i do not feel as if i must withdraw out of nature. i feel like a wel come guest. yet, strictly speaking, the same must be true of nature and of man ; our ideal is the only real. it is not the finite and tem poral that satisfies or concerns us in either case. i associate the idea of friendship, methinks, with the person the most foreign to me. this illusion is perpetuated like superstition in a country long after civilization has been reached. we are attracted toward a particular person, but no one has discovered the laws of this attraction. when i come nearest to that one actually, i am wont to be surprised at my selection. it may be enough that we have met some time, and now can never forget it. some time or other we paid each other this wonderful compliment, looked largely, humanely, divinely on one an other, and now are fated to be acquaintances forever. in the case of nature, i am not so con scious of this unsatisfied yearning. nov. 3, 1861. after a violent easterly storm in the night, which clears at noon, i notice that 208 autumn. the surface of the railroad causeway composed of gravel is singularly marked, as if stratified, like some slate rocks on their edges, so that i can tell within a small fraction of a degree from what quarter the rain came. these lines, as it were of stratification, are perfectly parauel and straight as a ruler diagonally across the flat sur face of the causeway for its whole length. be hind each little pebble, as a protecting boulder one eighth or one tenth of an inch in diameter, extends northwest a ridge of sand, an inch or more, which it has protected from being washed away, while the heavy drops driven almost hori zontally have washed out a furrow on each side, and on all sides are these ridges, half an inch apart and perfectly parauel. all this is per fectly distinct to an observant eye, and yet could easily pass unnoticed by most. thus each wind is self-registering. nov. 4, 1840. by your few words, show how insufficient would be many words. if, after conversation, i would reinstate my thought in its primary dignity and authority, i have recourse again to my first simple and concise statement. in breadth we may be patterns of conciseness, but in depth we may well be prolix. dr. ware, jr., said to-day in his speech at the meeting-house, &quot; there are these three, sym pathy, faith, patience ; &quot; then proceeding in true autumn. 209 ministerial style, &quot; and the greatest of these is,&quot; but for a moment he was at a loss, and became a listener along with his audience, and concluded with, &quot; which is it ? i don t know, pray take them all, brethren, and god help you.&quot; nov. 4, 1851. to saw mill brook by turn pike, returning by walden. it was quite a dis covery when i first came upon this brawling mountain stream in concord woods, for some fifty or sixty rods of its course as much ob structed by rocks, rocks out of all proportion to its tiny stream, as a brook can well be ; and the rocks are bared throughout the wood on either side, as if a torrent had anciently swept through here, so unlike the after character of the stream. who would have thought that in tracing it up from where it empties into the larger mill brook in the open peat meadows, it would conduct him to such a headlong and impetuous youth. per chance it should be called a &quot; force.&quot; it sug gests what various moods may attach to the same character. ah, if i but knew that some minds, which flow so muddily in the lowland portion of their course, where they cross the highways, tumbled thus impetuously and musically, mixing themselves with the air in foam, but a little way back in the woods ! that these dark and muddy pools where only the pout and the leech are to be found, issued from pure trout streams higher 210 autumn. up ! that the man s thoughts ever flowed as sparkling mountain water, that trout there loved to glance through his dimples, where the witch hazel hangs over his stream! this stream is here sometimes quite lost amid the rocks, which appear as if they had been arched over it, but which it in fact has undermined and found its way beneath, and they have merely fallen arch wise, as they were undermined. it is truly a raw and gusty day, and i hear a tree creak sharply like a bird, a phoebe. the hypericums stand red or lake over the brook. the jays with their scream are at home in the scenery. i see where trees have spread themselves over the rocks in a scanty covering of soil, been under mined by the brook, then blown over, and, as they fell, lifted and carried with them all the soil, together with considerable rocks. so from time to time by these natural levers rocks are re moved from the middle of the stream to the shore. the slender chestnuts, maples, elms, and white ash trees, which last are uncommonly numerous here, are now all bare of leaves, and a few small hemlocks, with their now thin but unmixed and fresh green foliage, stand over and cheer the stream, and remind me of winter, the snows which are to come and drape them and contrast with their green, and the chickadees that are to flit and lisp amid them. ah, the autumn. 211 beautiful tree, the hemlock, with its green can opy, under which little grows, not exciting the cupidity of the carpenter, whose use most men have not discovered. i know of some memora ble ones worth walking many miles to see. these little cheerful hemlocks, the lisp of chickadees seems to come from them now, each standing with its foot on the very edge of the stream, reaching sometimes part way over its channel, and here and there one has lightly stepped across. these evergreens are plainly as much for shelter for the birds as for anything else. the fallen leaves are so thick they almost fill the bed of the stream and choke it. i hear the runnel gurgling under ground. as if the busy rill had ever tossed these rocks about ! these storied rocks with their fine lichens and some times red stains as of indian blood on them. there are a few bright ferns lying flat by the sides of the brook, but it is cold, cold, withering to all else. a whitish lichen on the witch-hazel rings it here. i glimpse the frizzled tail of a red squirrel with a chestnut in its mouth, on a white pine. the ants appear to be gone into winter quar ters. here are two bushels of fine gravel, piled up in a cone, overpowering the grass, which tells of a corresponding cavity. nov. 4, 1852. autumnal dandelion and yar 212 autumn. row. must be out of doors enough to get ex perience of wholesome reality, as a ballast to thought and sentiment. health requires this relaxation, this aimless life, this life in the present. let a man have thought what he will of nature in the house, she will still be novel out-doors. i keep out of doors for the sake of the mineral, vegetable, and animal in me. how precious a fine day early in the spring ; less so in the fall, less still in the summer and winter. my thought is a part of the meaning of the world, and hence i use a part of the world as a symbol to express my thought. nov. 4, 1855. it takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild apple. i remember two old maids to whose house i enjoyed carry ing a purchaser to talk about buying their farm in the winter, because they offered us wild apples, though with an unnecessary apology for their wildness. nov. 4, 1857. to pine hill via spanish brook. i leave the railroad at walden cross ing, and follow the path to spanish brook. how swift nature is to repair the damage that man does ! when he has cut down a tree, and left only a white-topped and bleeding stump, she comes at once to the rescue with her chemistry, and covers it decently with a first coat of gray, autumn. 213 and in course of time she adds a thick coat of green-cup and bright coxcomb lichens, and it becomes an object of new interest to the lover of nature ! suppose it were always to remain a raw stump instead ! it becomes a shelf on which this humble vegetation spreads and dis plays itself, and we forget the death of the larger in the life of the less. i see in the path some rank thimble-berry shoots covered very thickly with their peculiar hoary bloom. it is only rubbed off in a few places down to the purple skin, by some passing hunter perchance. it is a very singular and delicate outer coat surely for a plant to wear. i find that i can write my name on it with a pointed stick very distinctly, each stroke, however fine, going down to the purple. it is a new kind of enameled card. what is this bloom and what purpose does it serve ? is there anything anal ogous in animated nature? it is the coup de grace, the last touch and perfection of any work, a thin elysian veil cast over it, through which it may be viewed. it is breathed on it by the artist, and thereafter his work is not to be touched without injury. it is the evidence of a ripe and completed work on which the unex hausted artist has breathed out of his super fluous genius. if it is a poem, it must be in vested with a similar bloom by the imagination 214 autumn. of the reader. it is the subsidence of superflu ous ripeness, like a fruit preserved in its own sugar. it is the handle by which the imagi nation grasps it. i climb pine hill just as the sun is setting this cool evening. as i sit with my back to a thick oak sprout whose leaves still glow with life, walden lies, an oblong figure, below, end wise toward me. its surface is slightly rippled, and dusky prolonged reflections extend wholly across its length, or half a mile. (i sit high.) the sun is once or twice its diameter above the horizon, and the mountains north of it stand out grand and distinct, a decided purple. but when i look critically, i distinguish a whitish mist (such is the color of the denser air) about their lower parts, while their tops are dark blue. (so the mountains have their bloom, and is not the bloom on fruits equivalent to that blue veil of air which distance gives to many objects ?) i see one glistening reflection on the dusky and leafy northwestern earth, seven or eight miles off, betraying a window there, though no house can be seen. it twinkles incessantly as from a waving surface, owing probably to the undula tion of the air. now that the sun is actually setting, the mountains are dark blue from top to bottom. as usual, a small cloud attends the sun to the portals of the day, and reflects his autumn. 215 brightness to us now that he is gone. but those grand and glorious mountains, how impossible to remember daily that they are there, and to live accordingly. they are meant to be a perpetual reminder to us, pointing out the way. nov. 4, 1858. on the 1st, when i stood on poplar hill, i saw a man far off by the edge of the river, splitting billets off a stump. suspect ing who it was, i took out my glass, and beheld goodwin, the one-eyed ajax, in his short blue frock, short and square-bodied, as broad as for his height he can afford to be, getting his win ter s wood, for this is one of the phenomena of the season. as surely as the ants which he dis turbs go into winter quarters in the stump when the weather becomes cool, so does goodwin re visit the stumpy shores with his axe. as usual, his powder flask peeped out from a pocket on his breast, and his gun was slanted over a stump near by, and his boat lay a little farther along. he had been at work laying wall still farther off, and now, near the end of the day, he took himself to those pursuits which he loved better still. it would be no amusement to me to see a gentleman buy his winter wood. it is, to see goodwin get his. i helped him tip over a stump or two. he said the owner of the land had given him leave to get them out, but it seemed to me a condescension for him to ask any man s 216 autumn. leave to grub up these stumps. the stumps to those who can use them, i say, to those who will split them. he might as well ask leave of the farmer to shoot the musquash and the meadow hen. i might as well ask leave to look at the landscape. near by were large hollows in the ground, now grassed over, where he had got out white-oak stumps in previous years. but strange to say, the town does not like to have him get his fuel in this way. they would rather the stumps should rot in the ground, or be floated down stream to the sea. they have, almost without dissent, agreed on a different mode of living, with their division of labor. they would have him stick to laying wall, and buy corded wood for fuel as they do. he has drawn up an old bridge sleeper, and cut his name on it for security, and now he gets into his boat and pushes off, saying he will go and see what mr. musquash is about. nov. 5, 1839. ^eschylus. there was one man who lived his own healthy attic life in those days. his words that have come down to us give evidence that their speaker was a seer in his day and generation. at this day they owe nothing to their dramatic form, nothing to stage machinery and the fact that they were spoken under these or those circumstances. all dis play of art for the gratification of a factitious autumn. 217 taste, is silently passed by to come at the least particle of absolute and genuine thought they contain. the reader will be disappointed, how ever, who looks for traits of a rare wisdom or eloquence, and will have to solace himself, for the most part, with the poet s humanity, and what it was in him to say. he will discover that, like every genius, he was a solitary liver and worker in his day. we are accustomed to say that the common sense of this age belonged to the seer of the last, as if time gave us any vantage ground. but not so ; i see not but genius must ever take an equal start. . . . common-sense is not so familiar with any truth, but genius will represent that truth in a strange light to it. let the seer bring his broad eye down to the most stale and trivial fact, and he will make you believe it a new planet in the sky. we are not apt to remember that we grow. it is curious to reflect how the maiden waits patiently and confidingly as the tender houstonia of the meadow for the slowly revolving years to work their will with her, to perfect and ripen her, like it to be fanned by the wind, watered by the rain, shined on by the sun, as if she, too, were a plant drawing in sustenance by a thou sand roots and fibres. these young buds of mankind in the street are like buttercups in the meadows, surrendered to nature as they. 218 autumn. nov. 5, 1840. truth is as vivacious, and will spread itself as fast, as the fungi, which you can by no means annihilate with your heel, for their sporules are so infinitely numerous and subtle as to resemble &quot; thin smoke, so light that they may be raised into an atmosphere, and dispersed in so many ways by the attraction of the sun, by in sects, wind, elasticity, adhesion, etc. ; that it is difficult to conceive a place from which they may be excluded.&quot; nov. 5, 1853. most of the muskrat cabins were lately covered by the flood, but now that it is gone down in a great measure, i notice that they have not been washed away or much in jured, as a heap of manure would have been, they are so artificially constructed ; moreover, for the most part, they are protected as well as concealed by the button-bushes, willows, or weeds about them. what exactly are they for ? this is not the breeding season of the muskrat. i think they are merely an artificial bank or air chamber near the water, houses of refuge. but why do they need them more at this season than in summer? it might be asked. perhaps they are constructed just before the rise of the water in the fall and winter, that they may not have to swim so far as the flood would require in order to eat their clams. nov. 5, 1855. i hate the present modes of autumn. 219 living and getting a living. farming and shop keeping and working at a trade or profession, are all odious to me. i should relish getting my living in a simple, primitive fashion. the life which society proposes to me to live is so artificial and complex, bolstered up on many weak supports, and sure to topple down at last, that no man surely can ever be inspired to live it, and only &quot; old fogies &quot; ever praise it. at best some think it their duty to live it. i believe in the infinite joy and satisfaction of helping myself and others to the extent of my ability. but what is the use in trying to live simply, raising what you eat, making what you wear, building what you inhabit, burning what you cut and dig, when those to whom you are allied outwardly, want and will have a thousand other things which neither you nor they can raise, and nobody else, perchance, will pay for. the fel low-man to whom you are yoked is a steer that is ever bolting right the other way. i was sug gesting once to a man who was wincing under some of the consequences of our loose and ex pensive way of living. &quot;but you might raise your own potatoes,&quot; etc. we had often done it at our house and had some to sell. at which he demurring, i said, setting it high, &quot;you could raise twenty bushels even.&quot; but said he, &quot; i use thirty-five.&quot; &quot; how large is your family ? &quot; 220 autumn. &quot; a wife and three infant children.&quot; this was the real family. i need not enumerate those who were hired to help eat the potatoes and waste them. so he had to hire a man to raise his potatoes. thus men invite the devil in, at every angle, and then prate about the garden of eden and the fall of man. i know many chil dren to whom i would fain make a present on some one of their birthdays, but they are so far gone in the luxury of presents, have such per fect museums of costly ones, that it would absorb my entire earnings for a year to buy them some thing which would not be beneath their notice. that white birch fungus always presents its face to the ground, parallel with it, for here are some on an upright dead birch whose faces or planes are at right angles with the axis of the tree, as usual, looking down, but others, attached to the top of the tree which lies prostrate on the ground, have their planes parallel with the axis of the tree, as if looking round the birch. nov. 5, 1857. sometimes i would rather get a transient glimpse or side view of a thing than stand fronting it, as with these polypodies. the object i caught a glimpse of as i went by, haunts my thought a long time, is infinitely suggestive, and i do not care to front it and scrutinize it, for i know that the thing that really concerns me is not there, but in my relation to that. autumn. 221 that is a mere reflecting surface. it is not the polypody in my pitcher or herbarium, or which i may possibly persuade to grow on a bank in my yard, or which is described in the botanies, that interests me, but the one i pass by in my walks a little distance off, when in the right mood. its influence is sporadic, wafted through the air to me. do you imagine its fruit to stick to the back of the leaf all winter? at this season polypody is in the air. it is worth the while to walk in swamps now, to bathe your eyes in greenness. the terminal-shield fern is the handsomest and glossiest green. i think the man of science makes the mistake, and the mass of mankind along with him, to suppose that you should give your chief atten tion to the phenomenon which excites you, as something independent of you, and not as it is related to you. the important fact is its effect on me. the man of science thinks i have no business to see anything else but just what he defines the rainbow to be, but i care not whether my vision is a waking thought or a dream re membered, whether it is seen in the light or in the dark. it is the subject of the vision, the truth alone that concerns me. the philosopher for whom rainbows, etc., can be explained away never saw them. nov. 5, 1858. the cornus florida on the 222 autumn. island is still full-leafed, and is now completely scarlet, though it was partly green on the twenty eighth [of october]. it is apparently in the height of its color there now, or if more exposed perhaps it would have been on the first of no vember. this makes it the latest tree to change. nov. 5, 1860. i am struck by the fact that the more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and i think the same is true of human beings. we do not wish to see children precocious, making great strides in their early years, like sprouts producing a soft and perishable timber, but better if they expand slowly at first, as if contending with difficulties, and so are solidified and perfected. such trees continue and expand with nearly equal rapidity to an extreme old age. nov. 6, 1853. climbed the wooded hill by holden s spruce swamp, and got a novel view of the river and fair haven bay through the almost leafless woods. how much handsomer a river or lake such as ours seen thus through a foreground of scattered or else partially leafless trees, though at a considerable distance this side of it, especially if the water is open, without a wooded shore or isles. it is the most perfect and beautiful of all frames, which yet the sketcher is commonly careful to brush aside. i mean a pretty thick foreground, a view of the autumn. 223 distant water through the near forest, through a thousand little vistas, as we are rushing towards the former, that intimate mingling of wood and water which excites an expectation that the near and open view rarely realizes. we prefer that some part be concealed which our imagination may navigate. nov. 6, 1857. minott is a very pleasing figure in nature. he improves any scenery, he and his comrades, harry hooper, john wyman, oliver williams, etc. if he gets into a pond hole, he disturbs it no more than a water spirit for me. nov. 7, 1839. we are not commonly aware that there is a rising as well as a risen genera tion. it is a fact, the growing men or women which we do not commonly allow for or re member, who would disturb many a fair theory. speak for yourself, old man. by what degrees of consanguinity is this succulent and rank-grow ing slip of manhood related to me ? what is it but another herb, ranging all the kingdoms of nature, drawing its sustenance by a thousand roots and fibres from all soils ! nov. 7, 1840. i m guided in the darkest night by flashes of auroral light, which overdart thy eastern home, and teach me not in vain to roam. 224 autumn. thy steady light on t other side pales the sunset, makes day abide, and after sunrise, stays the dawn, forerunner of a brighter morn. when others laugh, i am not glad, when others cry, i am not sad. i am a miser without blame, am conscience-stricken without shame, an idler am i without leisure, a busybody without pleasure. i did not think so bright a day would issue in so dark a night, i did not think such sober play would leave me in so sad a plight, and i should be most sorely spent, when first i was most innocent. i thought by loving all beside, to prove to you my love was wide, and by the rites i soared above, to show you my peculiar love. nov. 7, 1853. three bluebirds still braving the cold winds, acton blues. their blue uni form makes me think of soldiers who have re ceived orders to keep the field and not go into winter quarters. a muskrat s house on the top of a rock ; [the soil ?] too thin round the sides for a passage be neath, yet a small cavity at top, which makes me think they use them merely as a sheltered perch above water. they seize thus many autumn. 225 cones to build on, as a hummock left by the ice. the wads of which this muskrat s house was composed were about six inches by four, rounded and massed at one end and flaking off at the other, and were composed chiefly of a little green moss-like weed, for the most part withered dark-brown, and having the strong odor of the fresh water sponge and conferva. nov. 7, 1855. i find it good to be out in this still, dark, mizzling afternoon. my walk or voyage is more suggestive and profitable than in bright weather. the view is contracted by the misty rain. the water is perfectly smooth, and the stillness is favorable to reflection. i am more open to impressions, more sensitive, not calloused or indurated by sun and wind, as if in a chamber still. my thoughts are concentrated. i am all compact. the solitude is real, too, for the weather keeps other men at home. this mist is like a roof and walls, over and around, and i walk with a domestic feeling. the sound of a wagon going over an unseen bridge is louder than ever, and so of other sounds. i am com pelled to look at near objects. all things have a soothing effect. the very clouds and mists brood over me. my power of observation and contemplation is much increased. my attention does not wander. the world and my life are simplified. what now are europe and asia ? 226 autumn. nov. 7, 1857. minott adorns whatever part of nature he touches. whichever way he walks he transfigures the earth for me. if a common man speaks of walden pond to me, i see only a shallow, dull-colored body of water, without re flections, or peculiar color, but if minott speaks of it, i see the green water and reflected hills at once, for he has been there. i hear the rustle of leaves from woods which he goes through. this has been another indian-summer day. thermometer 58 at noon. nov. 7, 1858. p. m. to bateman s pond. i leave my boat opposite the hemlocks, and as i glance upwards between them, seeing the bare but bright hillside beyond, i think, now we are left to the hemlocks and pines with their silvery light, to the bare trees and withered grass. the very rocks and stones in the rocky road (that beyond farmer s) look white in the clear no vember light, especially after the rain. we are left to the chickadee s familiar notes, and the jay for trumpeter. what struck me was a cer tain emptiness beyond, between the hemlocks and the hill, in the cool washed air, as if i appreciated the absence of insects from it. it suggested, agreeably to me, a mere space in which to walk briskly. the fields are, as it were, vacated. the very earth is like a house shut up for the winter, and i go knocking about autumn. 227 it in vain. but just then i heard a chickadee in a hemlock, and was inexpressibly cheered to find that an old acquaintance was yet stirring about the premises, and was, i was assured, to be there all winter. all that is evergreen in me revived at once. the very moss (the little pine moss) in hos mer s meadow is revealed by its greenness amid the withered grass and stubble. going up the lane beyond farmer s, i was surprised to see fly up from the white stony ground two snow buntings, which alighted again close by. they had pale brown or tawny touches on the white breast, on each side oft the head and on top of the head, in the last place with some darker color. had light yellowish bills. they sat quite motionless within two rods, and allowed me to approach within a rod, as if conscious that the white rocks, etc., concealed them. it seemed as if they were attracted to our faces of the same color with themselves. one squatted flat, if not both. their soft rippling notes, as they went off, reminded me of the northeast snowstorms to which erelong they are to be an accompani ment. looking southwest toward the pond just be fore sunset, i saw against the light what i took to be a shad-bush in full bloom, but without a leaflet. i was prepared for this sight after the 228 autumn. very warm autumn, because this tree frequently puts forth leaves in october. or it might be a young wild apple. hastening to it, i found it was only the feathery seeds of the virgin s bower [clematis mrginiana~], whose vine, so close to the branches, was not noticeable. they looked just like dense umbels of white flowers, and in this light, three or four rods off, were fully as light as white apple-blossoms. it is singular how one thing thus puts on the sem blance of another. i thought at first i had made a discovery more interesting than the blos soming of apple trees in the fall. it carried me round t% spring again, when the shadbush, almost leafless, is seen waving its white blos soms amid the yet bare trees, the feathery masses, at intervals along the twigs, just like umbels of apple bloom, so caught and reflected the western light. i pass a musquash house, apparently begun last night. the first mouthfuls of weeds were placed between some small button-bush stems which stood amid the pads and pontederia for a support, and to prevent their being washed away. opposite i see some half concealed amid the bleached phalaris grass (a tall coarse grass), or, in some places, the blue joint. nov. 8, 1850. the stillness of the woods and fields is remarkable at this season of the autumn. 229 year. there is not even the creak of a cricket to be heard. of myriads of dry shrub-oak leaves, not one rustles. your own breath can stir them, yet the breath of heaven does not suf fice to. the trees have the aspect of waiting for winter. the sprouts which had shot up so vigorously to repair the damage which the chop pers had done, have stopped short for the winter. everything stands silent and expectant. if i listen, i hear only the note of a chickadee, our most common bird at present, most identified with our forests, or perchance the scream of a jay, or from the solemn depths of the woods i hear tolling far away the knell of one departed. thought rushes in to fill the vacuum. as you walk, however, the partridge bursts away from the foot of a shrub oak, like its own dry fruit ; immortal bird! this sound still startles us. the silent, dry, almost leafless, certainly fruit less woods, you wonder what cheer that bird can find in them. nov. 8, 1851. ah, those sun-sparkles on dudley pond in this november air, what a heaven to live in ! intensely brilliant as no artificial light i have seen, like a dance of dia monds, coarse mazes of the diamond dance seen through the trees. all objects shine to-day, even the sportsmen seen at a distance, as if a cavern were unroofed, and its crystals gave 230 autumn. entertainment to the sun. this great see-saw of brilliants, the di/&amp;gt;jpi#/aoi&amp;gt; yea.ao-/xa. the squirrels that run across the road sport their tails like banners. when i saw the bare sand at cochit uate, i felt my relation to the soil. these are my sands not yet run out. not yet will the fates turn the glass. in this sand my bones will gladly lie. like the viola pedata, i shall be ready to bloom again here in my indian-sum mer days. here, ever springing, never dying, with perennial root i stand, for the winter of the land is warm to me. when i see the earth s sands thrown up from beneath its surface, it touches me inwardly, it reminds me of my origin, for i am such a plant, so native to new eng land, methinks, as springs from the sand cast up from below. nov. 8, 1853. 10 a. m. our first snow. the children greet it with a shout, when they come out at recess. p. m. it begins to whiten the plowed ground now, but has not overcome the russet of the grass ground. birds generally wear the russet dress of nature at this season. they have their fall, no less than the plants. the bright tints depart from their foliage or feathers, and they flit past like withered leaves in rustling flocks. the sparrow is a withered leaf. perchance i heard the last cricket of the season yesterday, they chirp here and there at autumn. 231 longer and longer intervals till the snow quenches their song, and the last striped squirrel, too, perchance, yesterday. they then do not go into winter quarters till the ground is covered with snow. the partridges go off with a whirr, and then sail a long way, level and low, through the woods with that impetus they have got, displaying their neat forms perfectly. nov. 8, 1857. a warm, cloudy, rain-threat ening morning. about 10 a. m., a long flock of geese are going over from northeast to south west, or parallel with the general direction of the coast, and great mountain ranges. the sonorous, quavering sounds of the geese are the voice of the cloudy air, a sound that comes from directly between us and the sky, an aerial sound, and yet so distinct, heavy and sonorous ; a clanking chain drawn through the heavy air. i saw through my window some children looking up, and pointing their tiny bows into the heavens, and i knew at once that the geese were in the air. it is always an exciting event. the children, in stinctively aware of its importance, rushed into the house to tell their parents. these trav elers are revealed to you by the upward-turned gaze of men. and though these undulating lines are melting into the southwestern sky, the sound comes clear and distinct to you as the 232 autumn. clank of a chain in a neighboring stithy. so they migrate, not flying from hedge to hedge, but from latitude to latitude, from state to state, steering boldly out into the ocean of the air. it is remarkable how these large objects, so plain when your vision is rightly directed, may be lost in the sky, if you look away for a mo ment, as hard to hit as a star with a telescope. it is a sort of encouraging or soothing sound, to assuage their painful fears when they go over a town, as a man moans to deaden a physical pain. the direction of their flight each spring and autumn reminds us inlanders how the coast trends. in the afternoon i met flood, who en deavored to draw my attention to a flock of geese in the mizzling air, but encountering me he lost sight of them, while i at length, looking that way, discovered them, though he could not. this was the third flock to-day. now, if ever, then, we may expect some change in the weather. p. m. to the swamp in front of the c. miles house. i have no doubt that a good farmer, who of course loves his work, takes exactly the same kind of pleasure in draining a swamp, see ing the water flow out in his newly-cut ditch, that a child does in his mud dykes and water wheels. both alike love to play with the natural forces. autumn. 233 there is quite a ravine by which the water of this swamp flows out eastward, and at the bot tom of it many prinos berries are conspicuous, now apparently in their prime. these are ap pointed to be an ornament of this bare season between leaves and snow. the swamp pink s large, yellowish buds, too, are conspicuous now. i see also the swamp pyrus buds, expanded sometimes into small leaves. this then is a reg ular phenomenon. it is the only shrub or tree that i know which so decidedly springs again in the fall, in the indian summer. it might be called the indian-summer shrub. the clethra buds, too, have decidedly expanded there, show ing leaflets, but very small. some of the new pyrus leaves are nearly full-grown. would not this be a pretty device on some hale and cheery old man s shield, the swamp pyrus unfolding its leaves again in the fall? every plant enjoys some preeminence, and this is its : the most for ward to respond to the warmer season. how much spring there is in it! its sap is most easily liquefied. it takes the least sun to thaw and develop it. it makes this annual sacrifice of its very first leaves to its love for the sun. while all other plants are reserved, this is open and confiding. i see it not without emotion. i, too, have my spring thoughts even in november. this i see in pleasant november days, when 234 autumn. rills and birds begin to tinkle in winter fashion through the more open aisles of the swamps. i do not know exactly what that sweet word is which the chickadee says when it hops near to me now in those ravines. when the air is thick and the sky overcast, we need not walk so far. we give our atten tion to nearer objects, being less distracted from them. i take occasion to explore some near wood which my walks commonly overshoot. ah, my friends, i know you better than you think, and love you better, too. the day after never, we will have an explanation. nov. 8, 1858. p. m. to boidder field. . . . nature has many scenes to exhibit, and con stantly draws a curtain over this part or that. she is constantly repainting the landscape and all surfaces, dressing up some scene for our en tertainment. lately we had a leafy wilderness ; now bare twigs begin to prevail, and soon she will surprise us with a mantle of snow. some green she thinks so good for our eyes that, like blue, she never banishes it entirely from our eyes, but has created evergreens. it is remarkable how little any but a lichenist will observe on the bark of trees. the mass of men have but the vaguest and most indefinite notion of mosses, as a sort of shreds and fringes, and the world in which the lichenist dwells is autumn. 235 much further from theirs than one side of this earth from the other. they see bark as if they saw it not. . . . each phase of nature, while not invisible, is yet not too distinct and obstrusive. it is there, to be found when we look for it, but not demanding our attention. it is like a silent but sympathizing companion, in whose company we retain most of the advantages of solitude, with whom we can walk and talk, or be silent, natur ally, without the necessity of talking in a strain foreign to the place. i know of but one or two persons with whom i can afford to walk. with most, the walk degenerates into a more vigorous use of your legs (ludicrously purposeless), while you are discussing some weighty argument, each one having his say, spoiling each other s day, wor rying one another with conversation. i know of no use in the walking part in this case, ex cept that we may seem to be getting on together toward some goal. but of course we keep our distance all the way; jumping every wall and ditch with vigor in the vain hope of shaking our companion off, trying to kill two birds with one stone, though they sit at opposite points of the compass, to see nature and do the honors to one who does not. i wandered over bare fields where the cat tle, lately turned out, roamed restless and un satisfied with the feed. i dived into a rust 236 autumn. ling young oak wood where not a green leaf was to be seen, and again i thought, they are all gone surely, and have left me alone. not even a man friday remains. what nutriment can i extract from these bare twigs ? starva tion stares me in the face. &quot; nay, nay&quot; said a nuthatch, making its way, head downward, about a bare hickory close by, &quot; the nearer the bone, the sweeter the meat. only the superflu ous has been swept away. now we behold the naked truth. if at any time the weather is too bleak and cold for you, keep the sunny side of the trunk, for a wholesome and inspiring warmth is there, such as the summer never afforded. there are the winter morning s with o the sun on the oak wood-tops. while buds sleep thoughts wake.&quot; &quot;hear! hear!&quot; screamed the jay from a neighboring tree, where i had heard a tittering for some time, &quot; winter has a concen trated and nutty kernel, if you know where to look for it,&quot; and then the speaker shifted to an other tree farther off and reiterated his asser tions, and his mate at a distance confirmed them; and now i heard a suppressed chuckle from a red squirrel that heard the last remark, but had kept silent and invisible all the while. the birds being gone, the squirrel came running down a slanting bough, and as he stopped twirl ing a nut, called out rather impudently, &quot; look autumn. 237 here ! just get a snug-fitting fur coat and a pair of fur gloves like mine, and you may laugh at a northeast storm.&quot; then he wound up with a stray phrase in his own lingo, accompanied by a flourish of his tail. nov. 9, 1850. i found many fresh violets ( viola pedata) to-day in the woods. nov. 9, 1851. i would fain set down some thing beside facts. facts should only be the frame to my picture. they should be material to the mythology which i am writing, not facts to assist men to make money, farmers to farm profitably in any common sense, facts to tell who i am, and where i have been, or what i have thought ; as now the bell rings for evening meeting, and its volumes of sound, like smoke which rises from where a cannon is fired, make the tent in which i dwell. my facts shall all be falsehoods to the common sense. i would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologic, facts which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thought, with these i deal. i cherish vague and misty forms, vaguest when the cloud at which i gaze is dissipated quite, and naught but the skyey depths are seen. james p. brown s retired pond, now shallow and more than half dried up, seems far away and rarely visited, known to few, though not 238 autumn. far off. it is encircled by an amphitheatre of low hills, on two opposite sides covered with high pine woods, the two other sides with young white oaks and white pines respectively. i am affected by seeing there reflected this gray day, the gray stems of the pine wood on the hillside, and the sky ; that mirror, as it were a perma nent picture to be seen there, a permanent piece of idealism. i am a little surprised on beholding this reflection which i did not perceive for some minutes after looking into the pond, as if i had not regarded this as a constant phenomenon. what has become of nature s common-sense and love of facts when in the very mud-puddles she reflects the skies and the trees ? does that pro cedure recommend itself entirely to the common sense of men ? is that the way the new eng land farmer would have arranged it ? now the leaves are gone, the birds nests are revealed, the brood being fledged and flown. there is a perfect adaptation in the material used in constructing a nest. here is one which i took from a maple on the causeway at hub bard s bridge. it is fastened to the twigs by white woolen strings (out of a shawl?) which were picked up in the road, though it is more than half a mile from a house ; and the sharp eyes of the bird have discovered plenty of horse hairs out of the tail or mane with which to give autumn. 239 it form by their spring, with meadow hay for body, and the reddish woolly material which invests the ferns in the spring, apparently, for lining. nov. 9, 1852. ranunculus repens, bidens connata, flat in a brook, yarrow, dandelion, autumnal dandelion, tansy, aster undulatus, etc. a late three-ribbed golden-rod, with large serratures in the middle of the narrow leaves, ten or twelve rays, potentilla argentea. early part of november, time for walnutting. nov. 9, 1853. p. m. to fair haven hill by boat with w. e. c. the muskrats have added a new story to their houses since the last flood which covered them, i mean that of october 31st, or thereabouts. they are uncommonly high, i think full four feet by five or more in diameter, a heaping cart-load. there are at least eight such within half a mile. it is re markable how little effect the waves have on them, while a heap of manure or a haycock would be washed away or undermined at once. i opened one. it was composed of coarse grass, pontederia stems, etc., not altogether in mouth fuls. this was three and a half feet above water, others quite four. after taking off a foot, i came to the chamber. it was a regu larly formed oval or elliptical chamber, about eighteen inches the longest way, and seven or 240 . autumn. eight inches deep, shaped like a pebble, with smooth walls of the weeds, and bottomed or bedded with a very little drier grass, a mere coating of it. it would hold four or five, closely packed. the entrance, eight or nine inches wide, led directly from the water at an angle of 45, and in the water there were some green and white stub ends of pontederia (?) stems, i think, looking like flagroot. that thick wall, a foot quite or more above, and eighteen inches or two feet [below?], being of these damp materials soon freezes, and makes a tight and warm house. the walls are of such breadth at the bottom that the water in the gallery probably never freezes. if the height of these houses is any sign of high or low water, this winter it will be uncommonly high. nov. 9, 1855. 9 a. m. with blake up assa bet. saw in the pool at the hemlocks what i at first thought was a brighter leaf moved by the zephyr on the surface of the smooth, dark water, but it was a splendid male summer duck, which allowed us to approach within seven or eight rods. it was sailing up close to the shore, and then rose and flew up the curving stream. it was a perfect floating gem, and blake, who had never seen the like, was greatly surprised, not knowing that so splendid a bird was found in this part of the world. there it autumn. 241 was, constantly moving back and forth by invis ible means, and wheeling on the smooth surface, showing now its breast, now its side, now its rear. it had a large, rich, flowing, green, bur nished crest, a most ample head-dress, two cres cents of dazzling white on the side of the head and the black neck, a pinkish red bill (with black tip) and similar irides, and a long white mark under and at wing -point on sides, the side, as if the form of wing at this distance, light bronze or greenish brown ; but, above all, its breast, when it turns into the right light, all aglow with splendid purple (?) or ruby (?) re flections like the throat of the humming-bird. it might not appear so, close at hand. this was the most surprising to me. what an orna ment to a river, that glowing gem floating in contact with its waters ; as if the humming-bird should recline its ruby throat and its breast there ; like dipping a glowing coal in water. it so affected me. unless you are thus near, and have a glass, the splendor and beauty of its colors will not be discovered. i deal so much with my fuel, what with find ing it, loading it, conveying it home, sawing and splitting it, get so many values out of it, that the heat it will yield when in the stove is of a lower temperature and less value in my eyes, though when i feel it i am reminded of all my 242 autumn. adventures. i just turned to put in a stick. i had my choice in the box of gray chestnut rail, black and brown snag of an oak stump, dead white pine top, or else old bridge plank, and chose the last. yes, i lose sight of the ultimate uses of the wood and work, the immediate ones are so great, and yet most of mankind, those called most successful in obtaining the neces saries of life, getting a living, obtain none of this except a mere vulgar and perhaps stupefy ing warmth. i feel disposed, to this extent, to do the getting a living and the living for any three or four of my neighbors who really want the fuel and will appreciate the act, now that i have supplied myself. i affect what would com monly be called a mean and miserable way of living. i thoroughly sympathize with all sav ages and gypsies in as far as they assert the original right of man to the productions of na ture and a place in her. nov. 9, 1857. mr. [jacob] farmer tells me that one sunday he went to his barn, having nothing to do, and thought he would watch the swallows, republican swallows. the old bird was feeding her young, and he sat within fifteen feet, overlooking them. there were five young, and as often as the bird came with a fly, the one at the door or opening took it, and then they all hitched round one notch, so that a new one was autumn. 243 presented at the door, who received the next fly, and this was the invariable order, the same one never receiving two flies in succession. at last the old bird brought a very small fly, and the young one that swallowed it did not desert his ground, but waited to receive the next, but when the bird came with another of the usual size, she commenced a loud and long scolding at the little one, till it resigned its place, and the next in succession received the fly. nov. 9, 1858. the newspaper tells me that uncannoonuc was white with snow for a short time on the morning of the 7th. thus steadily but unobserved the winter steals down from the north till from our highest hills we can discern its vanguard. next week perchance our own hills will be white. little did we think how near the winter was. it is as if a scout had brought us word that an enemy was approaching in force, only a day s march distant. manchester was the spy this time, who has a camp at the base of that hill. we had not thought seri ously of winter, we dwelt in fancied security yet. it is of no use to plow deeper than the soil is, unless you mean to follow up that mode of culti vation persistently, manuring highly and carting in muck, at each plowing making a soil, in short. yet many a man likes to tackle weighty themes like immortality, but in his discourse he turns 244 autumn. up nothing but yellow sand, under which what little fertile and available surface soil he may have is quite buried and lost. he should teach frugality rather, how to postpone the fatal hour ; should plant a crop of beans. he might have raised enough of them to make a deacon of him, though never a preacher. many a man runs his plow so deep in heavy or strong soil that it sticks fast in the furrow. it is a great art in the writer to improve from day to day just that soil and fertility which he has, to harvest that crop which his life yields, whatever it may be, not be straining as if to reach apples and oranges when he yields only ground-nuts. he should be digging, not soaring. just as earnest as your life is, so deep is your soil. if strong and deep, you will sow wheat and raise bread of life in it. now. 10, 1851. it appears to me that those things which most engage the daily attention of men, as politics, for instance, are, it is true, vital functions of human society, but should be unconsciously performed like the vital functions of the natural body. it is as if a thinker sub mitted himself to be rasped by the great gizzard of creation. politics is, as it were, the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its two opposite halves which grind on each other. not only individuals, but autumn. 245 states, have thus a confirmed dyspepsia, which expresses itself, you can imagine by what sort of eloquence. our life is not altogether a for getting, but also, to a great extent, a remember ing of that which, perchance, we should never have been conscious of, which should not be permitted to distract a man s waking hours. why should we not meet, not always as dys peptics, but sometimes as eupeptics? in our intercourse we refer to no true and absolute account of things, but there is ever a petty ref erence to man, to society, aye, often to christi anity. i come from the funeral of mankind to attend to a natural phenomenon. the signifi cance of any fact in nature, of sun and moon and stars, is so much grander when not referred to man and his needs, but viewed absolutely. then we catch sounds which are wafted from over the confines of time. nov. 10, 1858. hearing in an oak wood near by a sound as if some one had broken a twig, i looked up and saw a jay, pecking at an acorn. there were several of them gathering acorns on a scarlet oak. i could hear them breaking them off. they then flew to a suit able limb, and placing the acorn under one foot, hammered away at it busily, looking round from time to time to see if any foe was ap proaching, and soon reached the meat, and nib 246 autumn. bled at it, holding up their heads to swallow, while they held it very firmly with their claws. (their hammering made a sound like the wood pecker s.) nevertheless, it sometimes dropped to the ground before they had done with it. nov. 11, 1850. this afternoon i heard a sin gle cricket singing, chirruping on a bank, the only one i have heard for a long time, like a squirrel, or a little bird, clear and shrill, as i fancied, like an evening robin, singing in this evening of the year. a very fine and poetical strain for such a little singer. i had never be fore heard the cricket so like a bird. it is a remarkable note, the earth-song. that delicate, waving, feathery dry grass which i saw yesterday is to be remembered with the autumn. the dry grasses are not dead for me. a beautiful form has as much life at one season as at another. i notice that everywhere in the pastures mi nute young fragrant life-everlasting with only four or five flat-lying leaves and thread-like roots, all together as big as a fourpence, spots the ground, like winter rye and grass which roots itself in the fall against another year. these little things have bespoken their places for the next season. they have a little pallet of cotton or down in their centres, ready for an early start in the spring. autumn. 247 i saw an old bone in the woods covered with lichens, which looked like the bone of an old settler, which yet some little animal had recently gnawed. i saw plainly the marks of its teeth, so indefatigable is nature to strip the flesh from bones, and return them to dust again. no lit tle rambling beast can go by some dry and an cient bone, but he must turn aside and try his teeth upon it. an old bone is knocked about till it becomes dust ; nature has no mercy on it. it was quite too ancient to suggest disagreeable associations. it survives like the memory of a man. with time all that was personal and offensive wears off. the tooth of envy may sometimes gnaw it and reduce it more rapidly, but it is much more a prey to forgetfulness. nov. 11, 1851. 2 p. m. a bright, but cold day, finger-cold. one must next wear gloves, put his hands in winter quarters. there is a cold, silvery light on the white pines as i go through j. p. brown s field near jenny du gan s. i am glad of the shelter of the thick pine wood on the marlboro road, on the plain. the roar of the wind over the pines sounds like the surf on countless beaches, an endless shore, and at intervals it sounds like a gong resounding through halls and entries, that is, there is a cer tain resounding woodiness in the tone. the sky looks mild and fair enough from this shelter. 248 autumn. every withered blade of grass and every dry weed as well as pine needle, reflects the light. the lately dark woods are open and light, the sun shines in upon the stems of trees which it has not shone on since spring. around the edges of ponds the weeds are dead, and there, too, the light penetrates. the atmosphere is less moist and gross, and light is universally dis persed. we are greatly indebted to these trans ition seasons or states of the atmosphere, which show us thus phenomena that belong not to the summer or the winter of any climate. the brilliancy of the autumn is wonderful, this flash ing brilliancy, as if the atmosphere were phos phoric. when i have been confined to my chamber for the greater part of several days by some em ployment or perchance by the ague, till i felt weary and house-worn, i have been conscious of a certain softness to which i am otherwise com monly a stranger, in which the gates were loos ened to some emotions ; and if i were to become a confirmed invalid, i see how some sympathy with mankind and society might spring up. yet what is my softness good for, even to tears ? it is not i, but nature in me. i laughed at myself the other day to think that i cried while read ing a pathetic story. i was no more affected in spirit than i frequently am, inethinks. the autumn. 249 tears were merely a phenomenon of the bowels, and i felt that that expression of my sym pathy, so unusual with me, was something mean, and such as i should be ashamed to have the subject of it understand. to-day you may write a chapter on the advan tages of traveling, and to-morrow you may write another on the advantages of not traveling. the horizon has one kind of beauty and attraction to him who has never explored the hills and moun tains in it, and another, i fear a less ethereal and glorious one, to him who has. that blue mountain in the horizon is certainly the most heavenly, the most elysian, which we have not climbed, on which we have not camped for a night. but our horizon, by such exploration, is only moved farther off, and if our whole life should prove thus a failure, the future which is to atone for all, where still there must be some success, will be more glorious still. it is fatal to the writer to be too much pos sessed by his thought ; things must be a little remote to be described. nov. 11, 1853. 9 a. m. to fair haven by boat. the morning is so calm and pleasant, that i must spend the forenoon abroad. the river is smooth as polished silver. some musk rat houses have received a slight addition in the night. the one i opened day before yesterday 250 autumn. has been covered again, though not yet raised so high as before. i counted nineteen between hubbard bathing place and hubbard s further wood, this side the hallowell place, from two to four feet high. i opened one. the floor of the chamber was two feet or more beneath the top, and one foot above the water. it was quite warm from the recent presence of the inhabitants. nov. 11, 1854. minott heard geese go over night before last about 8 p. m. therien, too, heard them &quot; yelling like anything &quot; over wai den, where he is cutting, the same evening. nov. 11, 1855. p. m. up assabet. the bricks of which the muskrat builds his house are little masses or wads of the dead weedy rub bish on the muddy bottom which it probably takes up with its mouth. it consists of various kinds of weeds, now confervae by the slime, agglutinated and dried converbal threads, utri cularia, horn wort, etc., a streaming, tuft-like wad. the building of these cabins appears to be coincident with the commencement of their clam diet, for now their vegetable food, except ing roots, is cut off. i see many small collections of shells already left along the river s brink. thither they resort with their clam, to open and eat it. but if it is the edge of a meadow which is being overflowed, they must raise it, and make a permanent dry stool there, for they cannot autumn. 251 afford to swim far with each clam. i see where one has left half a peck of shells on perhaps the foundation of an old stool or a harder clod which the water is just about to cover. he has begun his stool by laying two or three fresh wads upon the shells, the foundation of his house. thus their cabin is apparently first intended merely for a stool, and afterward, when it is large, perforated as if it were the bank ! there is no cabin for a long way above the hemlocks, where there is no low meadow bordering the stream. nov. 11, 1858. goodwin brings me this morning a this year s loon which he has just killed in the river, the great northern diver, but a smaller specimen than wilson describes, and somewhat differently marked. it is twenty seven inches long to end of feet, by forty-four, bill three and three fourths to angle of mouth. above, bluish gray, with small white spots (two at end of each feather). beneath, pure white, throat and all, except a dusky bar across the vent. bill, chiefly pale bluish and dusky. you are struck by its broad, flat, sharp-edged legs, made to cut through the water rather than to walk with, set far back and naturally stretched out backward, its long and powerful bill, con spicuous white throat and breast. dislodged by winter in the north, it is slowly traveling toward 252 autumn. a warmer climate, diving this morning in the cool river, which is now full of light, the trees and shrubs on its bank having long since lost their leaves. the neighboring fields are white with frost. yet this hardy bird is comfortable and contented there, if the sportsmen will let it alone. nov. 11, 1859. october 24, riding home from acton, i saw the withered leaves blown from an oak by the roadside, dashing off, gyrat ing, and surging upward into the air, so exactly like a flock of birds sporting with one another, that for a moment, at least, i could not be sure they were not birds, and it suggested how far the motions of birds, like those of these leaves, might be determined by currents of air, that is, how far the bird learns to conform to such cur rents. nov. 12, 1837. i yet lack discernment to distinguish the whole lesson of to-day, but it is not lost, it will come to me at last. my desire is to know what i have lived, that i may know how to live henceforth. nov. 12 [?], 1841. music is only a sweet striving to express character. now that lately i have heard of some traits in the character of a fair and earnest maiden whom i had known only superficially, but who has gone hence to make herself more known by distance, these autumn. 253 strains sound like a wild harp music. there is apology enough for all the deficiency and short coming in the world in the patient waiting of any bud of character to unfold itself. only character can command our reverent love. it is all mysteries in itself. what is it gilds the trees and clouds, and paints the heavens so gay, but yonder fast-abiding light with its unchanging ray. i ve felt within ray inmost soul such cheerful morning news, in the horizon of my mind i ve seen such morning hues, as in the twilight of the dawn when the first birds awake, is heard within some silent wood when they the small twigs break ; or in the eastern skies is seen before the sun appears, foretelling of the summer heats which far away he bears. walden. p. m. i seem to discern the very form of the wind when, blowing over the hills, it falls in broad flakes upon the surface of the pond, this subtle element obeying the law of the least subtle. i cannot but be encouraged by the blithe activity of the elements. who hears the rippling of the rivers will not utterly de spair of anything. the wind in the wood yonder 254 autumn. sounds like an incessant waterfall, the water dashing and roaring among the rocks. nov. 12, 1851. write often, write upon a thousand themes, rather than long at a time, not trying to turn too many feeble summersets in the air, and so come down upon your head at last. antaeus-like, be not long absent from the ground. those sentences are good and well discharged which are like so many little resili ences from the spring-floor of our life, each a distinct fruit and kernel springing from terra firma. let there be as many distinct plants as the soil and the light can maintain. take as many bounds in a day as possible, sentences uttered with your back to the wall. those are the admirable bounds when the performer has lately touched the spring-board. a good bound into the air from the air is a good and whole some experience, but what shall we say to a man s leaping off precipices in the attempt to fly. he comes down like lead. but let your feet be planted upon the rock, with the rock also at your back, and as in the case of king james and roderick dhu, you can say, &quot; come one, come all, this rock shall fly from its firm base, as soon as i.&quot; such, uttered or not, is the strength of your sentences, sentences in which there is no strain, no fluttering inconstant and quasi aspiration, autumn. 255 and ever memorable icarian fall wherein your helpless wings are expanded merely by your swift descent into the pelagos beneath. is one who will not stoop to rise. he wants something for which he will not pay the going price. he will only learn slowly by failure, not a noble, but disgraceful failure. this is not a worthy method of learning, to be educated by evitable suffering, like de quincey, for instance. better dive like a muskrat into the mud, and pull up a few weeds to sit on during the floods, a foundation of your own laying, a house of your own building, however cold and cheerless. methinks the hawk that soars so loftily, and circles so steadily and ap parently without effort, has earned this power by faithfully creeping on the ground as a rep tile in a former state of existence. you must creep before you can run, you must run before you can fly. better one effective bound upward with elastic limbs from the valley, than a jump ing from the mountain-tops with attempt to fly. the observatories are not built high, but deep. the foundation is equal to the superstructure. it is more important to a distinct vision that it be steady, than that it be from an elevated point of view. walking through ebby hubbard s wood this afternoon with minott, who was actually taking 256 autumn. a walk for amusement and exercise, he said, on seeing some white pines blown down, that you might know that ground had been cultivated, for otherwise they would have rooted themselves more strongly. . . . he has a story for every woodland path. he has hunted in them all. where we walked last, he had once caught a partridge by the wing. 7 p. m. to conantum. a still cold night. the light of the rising moon in the east. the ground is frozen and echoes to my tread. there are absolutely no crickets to be heard now. they are heard, then, till the ground freezes. i hear no sound of any kind now at night, but sometimes some creature stirring, a rabbit, or skunk, or fox, betrayed by the dry leaves which lie so thick and light. the openness of the leafless woods is particularly apparent now by moonlight ; they are nearly as light as the open field. it is worth the while always to go to the water, when there is but little light in the heavens, and see the heavens and the stars re flected. there is double the light that there is elsewhere, and the reflection has the force of a great silent companion. i thought to-night that i saw glow-worms in the grass on the side of the hill, was almost certain of it, and tried to lay my hands on them, but found it was the moonlight reflected from (apparently) the fine autumn. 257 frost crystals on the withered grass. they were so fine that the reflections went and came like glow-worms. the gleams were just long enough for glow-worms, and the effect was pre cisely the same. nov. 12, 1852. 4 p. m. to cliffs. it clears up. a very bright rainbow, three reds, two greens. i see its foot within half a mile in the southeast, heightening the green of the pines. from fair haven hill, i^see a very distant, long, low, dark-blue cloud still left in the northwest horizon, beyond the mountains, and against this i see, apparently, a narrow white cloud resting on every mountain, and conforming exactly to its outline, as if the white, frilled edge of the main cloud were turned up over them. in fact, the massive dark-blue cloud beyond revealed these distinct white caps resting on the mountains this side, for twenty miles along the horizon. the sun having set, my long, dark-blue cloud has assumed the form of an alligator, and where the sun has just disappeared it is split into two tremendous jaws, between which glows the eter nal city, its crenate lips all coppery-golden, its serrate fiery teeth. its body lies a slumbering mass along the horizon. nov. 12, 1853. i cannot but regard it as a kindness in those who have the steering of me, that by the want of pecuniary wealth, i have 258 autumn. been nailed down to this my native region so long and steadily, and made to study and love this spot of earth more and more. what would signify in comparison a thin and diffused love and knowledge of the whole earth instead, got by wandering ? wealth will not buy a man a home in nature. the man of business does not by his business earn a residence in nature. it is an insignificant, a merely negative good to be provided with thick garments against cold and wet, an unprofitable and weak condition com pared with being able to extract some exhilara tion, some warmth even, out of cold and wet themselves, and to clothe them with our sym pathy. the rich man buys woolens and furs, and sits naked and shivering still, in spirit, but the poor lord of creation makes cold and wet to warm him, and be his garments. the hylodes, as it is the first frog heard in the spring, so it is the last in the autumn. i heard it last, i think, about a month ago. i do not remember any hum of insects for a long time, though i heard a cricket to-day. nov. 12, 1858. it is much the coldest day yet, and the ground is a little frozen and re sounds under my tread. all people move the brisker for the cold, are braced and a little elated by it. they love to say, &quot; cold day, sir.&quot; though the days are shorter, you get more work autumn. 259 out of a hired man than before, for he must work to keep warm. . . . we are now reduced to browsing on buds and twigs, and methinks with this diet and this cold, we shall appear to the stall-fed thinkers like those unkempt cattle in meadows now, grazing the withered grass. i think the change to some higher color in a leaf is an evidence that it has arrived at a late, more perfect, and final maturity, answering to the maturity of fruits, and not to that of green leaves, etc., which merely serve a purpose. the word ripe is thought by some to be derived from the verb to reap, so that what is ripe is ready to be reaped. the fall of the leaf is preceded by a ripe old age. nov. 12, 1859. the first sprinkling of snow, which for a short time whitens the ground in spots. i do not know how to distinguish between our waking life and a dream. are we not always living the life that we imagine we are ? fear creates danger, and courage dispels it. there was a remarkable sunset, i think the twenty -fifth of october. the sunset sky reached quite from west to east, and it was the most varied in its forms and colors that i re member to have seen. at one time the clouds were softly and delicately rippled like the ripple marks on sand. but it was hard for me to see 260 autumn. its beauty then, when my mind was filled with captain brown. so great a wrong as his fate implied overshadowed all beauty in the world. nov. 13, 1837. sin destroys the perception of the beautiful. it is a sure evidence of the health and innocence of the beholder, if the senses are alive to the beauty of nature. this shall be the test of innocence, if i can hear a taunt, and look out on this friendly moon pacing the heavens in queen-like majesty, with the accustomed yearning. truth is ever returning into herself. i glimpse one feature to-day, another to-morrow, and the next day they are blended. nov. 13, 1839. make the most of your re grets. never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it, till it come to have a separate and integral interest. to regret deeply is to live afresh. by so doing you will find yourself restored to all your emoluments. nov. 13 [?], 1841. we constantly anticipate repose. yet it surely can only be the repose that is in entire and healthy activity. it must be a repose without rust. what is leisure but opportunity for more complete and entire ac tion? our energies pine for exercise. the time we spend in the discharge of our duties is so much leisure, so that there is no man but has sufficient of it. autumn. 261 this ancient scotch poetry at which its con temporaries so marveled, sounds like the uncer tain lisping of a child. when man s speech flows freest, it but stammers. there is never a free and clear deliverance ; but read now when the illusion of smooth verse is destroyed by the antique spelling, and the sense is seen to stam mer and stumble all the plainer. to how few thoughts do all these sincere efforts give utter ance? an hour s conversation with these men would have done more. i am astonished to see how meagre that diet is which has fed so many men. the music of sound, which is all-sufficient at first, is speedily lost, and then the fame of the poet must rest on the music of the sense. a great philosophical and moral poet would give permanence to the language by making the best sound convey the best sense. nov. 13, 1851. to fair haven hill. a cold and dark afternoon, the sun being behind clouds in the west. the landscape is barren of objects, the trees being leafless, and so little light in the sky for variety ; such a day as will almost oblige a man to eat his own heart, a day in which you must hold on to life by your teeth. now is the time to cut timber for yokes and ox-bows, leav ing the tough bark on, yokes for your own neck, finding yourself yoked to matter and to time. truly hard times, these ! not a mosquito left, 262 autumn. not an insect to hum. crickets gone into win ter quarters. friends long since gone there, and you left to walk on frozen ground with your hands in your pockets. ah, but is not this a glorious time for your deep inward fires ? will not your green hickory and white oak burn clear in this frosty air ? now is not your manhood taxed by the great assessor ? taxed for having a soul, a rateable soul ? a day when you cannot pluck a flower, cannot dig a parsnip, nor pull a turnip, for the frozen ground. what do the thoughts find to live on ? what avails you now the fire you stole from heaven ? does not each thought become a vulture to gnaw your vitals ? no in dian summer have we had this november. i see but few traces of the perennial spring. we have not even the cold beauty of ice crystals and snowy architecture. nothing but the echo of your steps on the frozen ground, which, it is true, is being prepared for immeasurable snows. still there are brave thoughts within you that shall remain to rustle the winter through, like white-oak leaves upon your boughs, or like shrub oaks that remind the traveler of a fire upon the hillsides, or evergreen thoughts, cold even in midsummer, by their nature. these shall con trast the more fairly with the snow. some warm springs shall still tinkle and fume, and send their column of vapor to the skies. autumn. 263 the mountains are of an uncommonly dark blue to-day. perhaps this is owing not only to the great clearness of the atmosphere, which makes them seem nearer, but to the absence of the leaves. a little mistiness occasioned by warmth would set them further off. i see snow on the peterboro hills reflecting the sun. it is pleasant thus to look from afar into winter. we look at a condition which we have not reached. notwithstanding the poverty of the immediate landscape, in the horizon it is simplicity and gran deur. i look into valleys white with snow and now lit up by the sun, while all this country is in shade. there is a great gap in the mountain range just south of the two peterboro hills. methinks i have been through it, and that a road runs there. humble as these mountains are compared with some, at this distance i am con vinced they answer the purpose of andes. seen at this distance, i know of nothing more grand and stupendous than that great mountain gate or pass, a great cleft or sinus in the blue banks, as in a dark evening cloud, fit portal to lead from one country, from one quarter of the world to another, where the children of israel might file through. little does the new hampshire farmer who drives over that road realize through what a sublime gap he is passing. you would almost as soon think of a road as winding 264 autumn. through and over a dark evening cloud. this prospect of the mountains from our low hills is what i would rather have than pastures on the mountain-side such as my neighbors have, aye, than townships at their base. instead of driv ing my cattle up there in may, i simply turn my eyes thither. they pasture there, and the grass they feed on never withers. just spent a couple of hours (8 to 10) with miss mary emerson at holbrook s ; the witti est and most vivacious woman i know, certainly that woman among my acquaintance whom it is most profitable to meet, the least frivolous, who will most surely provoke to good conver sation. she is singular among women, at least, in being really and perseveringly interested to know what thoughtful people think. she re lates herself surely to the intellectual wherever she goes. it is perhaps her greatest praise and peculiarity that she more surely than any other woman gives her companion occasion to utter his best thought. in spite of her own biases, she can entertain a large thought with hospitality, and is not prevented by any intellectuality in it, as women commonly are. in short, she is a genius, as woman seldom is, reminding you less often of her sex than any woman whom i know. thus she is capable of a masculine appreciation of poetry and philosophy. i never talked with autumn. 265 any other woman who i thought accompanied me so far in describing a poetic experience. miss fuller is the only other i think of in this connection, and of her rather from her fame than from my knowledge of her. miss emer son expressed to-night a singular want of respect for her own sex, saying that they were frivolous, almost without exception, that woman was the weaker vessel, etc. ; and that into whatever fam ily she might go, she depended more upon the clown for society than upon the lady of the house. men are more likely to have opinions of their own. just in proportion to the outward poverty is the inward wealth. in cold weather fire burns with a clearer flame. nov. 13, 1855. in mid forenoon, 10.45, seventy or eighty geese, in three harrows, suc cessively smaller, flying southwest, pretty well west, over the house. a completely overcast, occasionally drizzling forenoon. i at once heard their clangor, and rushed to and opened the window. the three harrows were gradually formed into one great one, before they were out of sight, the geese shifting their places without slacking their progress. p. m. to cardinal shore. i saw in the pond by the roadside, a few rods before me, the sun shining bright, a mink swimming, the whole 266 autumn. length of his back out. it was a rich brown fur, glowing internally as the sun fell on it, like some ladies boas ; not black, as it sometimes appears, especially on ice. it landed within three rods, showing its long, somewhat cat-like neck, and i observed, was carrying something by its mouth, dragging it overland. at first i thought it a fish, maybe an eel, and when it had got half a dozen feet, i ran forward, and it dropped its prey, and went into the wall. it was a muskrat, the head and part of the legs torn off and gone, but the rest still fresh and quite heavy, including hind legs and tail. it had probably killed the muskrat in the brook, eaten so much, and was dragging the remainder to its retreat in the wall. jvoi . 13, 1858. it is wonderful what grada tion and harmony there is in nature. the light reflected from bare twigs at this season, that is, since they began to be bare, in the latter part of october, is not unlike that from gossamer, and like that which will erelong be reflected from the ice that will incrust them. so the bleached herbage of the fields is like frost, and frost like snow, and one prepares for the other. nw. 14 [?], 1841. to find the sunset de scribed by the old scotch poet, douglas, as i have seen it, repays me for many weary pages of antiquated scotch. nothing so restores and har monizes antiquity and makes it blithe, as the autumn. 267 discovery of some natural sympathy. why is it that there is something melancholy in anti quity? &quot;we forget that it had any other future than our present, as if it were not as near to the future as ourselves. no, these ranks of men to right and left, posterity and ancestry, are not to be thridded by any earnest mortal. the heavens stood over the heads of our ancestors as near as to us. any living word in their books abolishes the difference of time. it need only be considered from the present standpoint. nov. 14, 1851. in the evening i went to a party. it is a bad place to go to, thirty or forty persons, mostly young women, in a small room, warm and noisy. was introduced to two young women. the first was as lively and loquacious as a chickadee, had been accustomed to the society of watering places, and therefore could get no refreshment out of such a dry fellow as i. the other was said to be pretty looking, but i rarely look people in their faces, and, moreover, i could not hear what she said, there was such a clacking ; could not see the motion of her lips when i looked that way. i could imagine bet ter places for conversation, where there should be a certain degree of silence surrounding you, and less than forty talking at once. why, this afternoon even i did better. old mr. joseph hosmer and i ate luncheon of cracker and 268 autumn. cheese together in the woods. i heard all he said, though it was not much, to be sure, and he could hear me ; and then he talked out of such a glorious repose, taking a leisurely bite at the cracker and cheese between his words, and so some of him was communicated to me, and some of me to him, i trust. these parties, i think, are a part of the machinery of modern society that young people may be brought together to form marriage con nections. what is the use in going to see people whom yet you never see, and who never see you ? i met a man yesterday afternoon in the road who behaved as if he were deaf, and i talked with him in the cold in a loud tone for fifteen minutes, but that uncertainty about his ears, and the necessity i felt to talk loudly, took off the fine edge of what i had to say, and prevented my saying anything satisfactory. it is bad enough when your neighbor does not understand you, but if there is any uncertainty as to whether he hears you, so that you are obliged to become your own auditor, you are so much the poorer speaker, and so there is a double failure. nov. 14, 1852. still, yarrow, tall buttercup and tansy. nov. 14, 1855. heard to-day in my cham ber about 11 a. m. a singular sharp, crackling autumn. 269 sound by the window, which made me think of an insect s snapping with its wings or striking something. it was produced by one of three small pitch-pine cones which i gathered no vember 7th, and which lay in the sun on the win dow-sill. 1 noticed a slight motion in the scales at the apex, when suddenly, with a louder crack ling, it burst, or the scales separated with a crackling sound on all sides of it. it was a sudden and general bursting or expanding of all the scales with a sharp, crackling sound, and motion of the whole cone as by a force pent up within it. i suppose the strain only needed to be relieved at one point for the whole to go off. nov. 14, 1857. the principal flight of geese was november 8th, so that the bulk of them preceded this cold turn five days. i find my hands stiffened and involuntarily finding their way to my pockets. no wonder that the weather is a standing subject of conversation, since we are so sensitive. if we had not gone through several winters, we might well be alarmed at the approach of cold weather. with this keener blast my hands suddenly fail to fulfill their office, as it were, begin to die. we must put on armor against the new foe. i can hardly tie and untie my shoestrings. what a story to tell an inhab itant of the tropics, perchance, that you went to walk after many months of warmth, when 270 autumn. suddenly the air became so cold and hostile to your nature that it benumbed you, so that you lost the use of some of your limbs, could not untie your shoestrings ! nov. 14, 1858. now while the frosty air be gins to nip your fingers and your nose, the frozen ground rapidly wears away the soles of your shoes, as sandpaper might. . the old she-wolf is nibbling at your very extremities. the frozen ground eating away the soles of your shoes is only typical of the vulture that gnaws your heart this month. now all that moves migrates or has migrated, ducks are gone by, the citizen has sought the town. probably the witch hazel and many other flowers lingered till the eleventh, when it was colder. the last leaves and flowers (?) may be said to fall about the middle of november. snow and cold drive the doves to your door, and so your thoughts make new alliances. nov. 14, 1860. yellow butterflies still. nov. 15, 1840. over and above a man s business there must be a level of undisturbed serenity, only the more serene, as he is the more industrious, as within the reef encircling a coral isle there is always an expanse of still water where the depositions are going on which will finally raise it above the surface. he must pre side over all he does. if his employment rob autumn. 271 him of a serene outlook over his life, it is but idle, though it be measuring the fixed stars. he must know no distracting cares. the bad sense is the secondary one. nov. 15 [?], 1841. a mild summer sun shines over forest and lake. the earth looks as fair this morning as the valhalla of the gods. indeed our spirits never go beyond nature. in the woods there is an inexpressible happiness. their mirth is but just repressed. in winter when there is but one green leaf for many rods, what warm content is in them. they are not rude, but tender, even in the severest cold. their nakedness is their defense. all their sights and sounds are elixir to my spirit. they possess a choice health. god is not more well. every sound is inspiriting, and fraught with the same mysterious assurance from the creaking of the boughs in january to the soft sigh of the wind in july. how much of my well-being, think you, de pends on the condition of my lungs and stomach, such cheap pieces of nature as they, which in deed she is every day reproducing with prodigal ity ? is that arrow indeed fatal which rankles in the breast of the bird on the bough, in whose eye all this fair landscape is reflected, and whose voice still echoes through the wood ? this is my argument in reserve for all cases. 272 autumn. my love is invulnerable. meet me on that ground, and you will find me strong. when i am condemned, and condemn myself, i think straightway, but i love some things. therein i am whole and entire. therein i am god-propped. when i see the smoke curling up through the woods from some farmhouse invisible, it is more suggestive of the poetry of rural and domestic life than a nearer inspection can be. up goes the smoke as quietly as the dew exhales in vapor, as busy as the housewife below, disposing itself in circles and wreaths. it is contemporary with a piece of human biography, and waves as a feather in some man s cap. under that rod of sky there is some plot a-brewing, some ingenuity has planted itself, and we shall see what it will do. it tattles of more things than the boiling of a pot. it is but one of man s breaths. all that is interesting in history or fiction is transpiring beneath that cloud. the subject of all life and death, of happiness and grief, goes thereunder. when the traveler in the forest, attaining to some eminence, discovers a column of smoke in the distance, it is a very gentle hint to him of the presence of man. it seems as if it would establish friendly relations between them with out more ado. nov. 15, 1851. here is a rainy day which keeps me in the house. i am pleased to read in autumn. 273 stoerer s [?] &quot; life of linnaeus &quot; (trapp s trans lation) that his father, being the first learned man of his family, changed his family name, and borrowed that of linnaeus (linden-tree man) from a lofty linden tree which stood near his na tive place ; &quot; a custom,&quot; he says, &quot; not unfrequent in sweden, to take fresh appellations from natural objects.&quot; what more fit than that the advent of a new man into a family should acquire for it and transmit to posterity a new patronymic! such a custom suggests, if it does not argue, an unabated vigor in the race, relating it to those primitive times when men did indeed acquire a name as memorable and distinct as their char acters. it is refreshing to find a man whom you cannot feel satisfied to call john s son or john son s son, but by a new name applicable to him self alone, he being the first of his kind. we may say there have been but so many men as there are surnames, and of all the john smiths there has been but one true john smith, and he of course is dead. get yourself, therefore, a name, and better a nickname than none at all. there was one enterprising boy came to school to me whose name was &quot; buster,&quot; and an honor able name it was. he was the only boy in the school, to my knowledge, who was named. what shall we say of the comparative intel lectual vigor of ancients and moderns, when we 274 autumn. read of theophrastus, the father of botany, that he composed more than two hundred treatises in the third century before christ and the seven teenth before printing, about twenty of which remain, and that these fill six volumes in folio printed at venice ; among the last are two works on natural history, and one on the generation of plants. &quot;by his own avowal&quot; [pliny the elder s] &quot;natural history is a compilation from about twenty-five hundred different authors.&quot; nov. 15, 1853. after having some business dealings with men, i am occasionally chagrined, and feel as if i had done some wrong, and it is hard to forget the ugly circumstance. i see that such intercourse long continued would make one thoroughly prosaic, hard, and coarse. but the longest intercourse with nature, though in her rudest moods, does not thus harden and make coarse. a hard, insensible man whom we liken to a rock, is indeed much harder than a rock. from hard, coarse, insensible men with whom i have no sympathy, i go to commune with the rocks, whose hearts are comparatively soft. i was the other night elected a curator of our lyceum, but was obliged to decline, because 1 did not know where to find good lecturers enough to make a course for the winter. we commonly think we cannot have a good journal in new autumn. 275 england, because we have not enough writers of ability. but we do not suspect likewise that we have not good lecturers enough to make a lyceum. this afternoon has wanted no condition to make it a gossamer day, it seems to me, but a calm atmosphere. plainly the spiders cannot be abroad on the water, unless it is smooth. the one i witnessed this fall was at time of flood. may it be that they are driven out of their re treats like muskrats and sriowfleas, and spin these lines for their support? yet they work on the causeway, too. nov. 15, 1857. p. m. to holden swamp and c. miles swamp. my walk is the more lonely when i perceive that there are no ants upon the hillocks in field or wood. these are deserted mounds. they have commenced their winter sleep. the water is frozen solid in the leaves of the pitcher plant. this is the thickest ice i have seen. this water was most exposed in the cool swamp. going by my owl-nest oak, i saw that it had broken off at the hole, and the top fallen, but seeing in the cavity some leaves, i climbed up to see what kind of nest it was. i took out the leaves slowly, watching to see what spoils had been left with them. some were pretty green, and all had evidently been placed there this fall. 276 autumn. when i had taken all out with my left hand, holding on to the top of the stump with my right, i looked round into the cleft, and there i saw sitting nearly erect at the bottom in one corner, a little mus leucopus, panting with fear, and with its large black eyes upon me. i held my face thus within seven or eight inches of it as long as i cared to hold on there, and it showed no sign of retreating. &quot;when i put in my hand, it merely withdrew downward into a snug little nest of hypnum and apparently the dirty-white, wool-like pappus of some plant, as big as a bat ting ball. wishing to see its tail, i stirred it up again, when it suddenly rushed up the side of the cleft out over my shoulder and right arm, and leaped off, falling down through a thin hemlock spray some sixteen or eighteen feet to the ground on the hillside, where i lost sight of it. these nests, i suppose, are made when the trees are losing their leaves, as those of the squirrels are. nov. 15, 1859. a very pleasant indian sum mer day. p. m. to ledum swamp. i look up the river from the railroad bridge. it is per fectly smooth between the uniformly tawny meadows, and i see several muskrat cabins off hubbard shore, distinctly outlined, as usual, in the november light. i hear in several places a faint cricket note, either a fine s-ing, or a dis tincter creak ; also see and hear a grasshopper s autumn. 277 crackling flight. the clouds were never more fairly reflected in the water than now, as i look up the cyanean reach from clamshell. a fine gossamer is streaming from every fence, tree, and stubble, though a careless observer woidd not notice it. as i look along over the grass toward the sun at hosmer s field beyond lupine hill, i notice the shimmering effect of the gossamer, which seems to cover it almost like a web, occa sioned by its motion, though the air is so still. this is noticed at least forty rods off. i turn down witherel glade, only that i may bring its tufts of andropogon between me and the sun. it is a fact proving how universal and widely related any transcendent greatness is, like the apex of a pyramid to all beneath it, that when i now look over my extracts of the noblest poetry, the best is oftenest applicable in part or wholly to this man s [captain john brown s] position. almost any noble verse may be read either as his elegy or eulogy, or be made the text of an oration about him; indeed such are now first discovered to be parts of a divinely established lit urgy applicable to these rare cases for which the ritual of no church has provided, the case of heroes, martyrs, and saints. this is the formula established on high, their burial service, to which every great genius has contributed its line or syllable. of course the ritual of no church 278 autumn. which is wedded to the state can contain a ser vice applicable to the case of a state criminal unjustly condemned, a martyr. the sense of grand poetry read by the light of this event is brought out distinctly, like an invisible writing held to the fire. nov. 16, 1850. i am accustomed to regard the smallest brook with as much interest, for the time being, as if it were the orinoco or mis sissippi, and when a tributary rill empties into it, it is like the confluence of famous rivers i have read of. when i cross one on a fence, i love to pause in mid-passage and look down into the water, and study its bottom, its little mys tery. there is none so small but you may see a pickerel regarding you with a wary eye, or a pigmy trout dart from under the bank, or in spring perchance a sucker will have found its way far up the stream. you are sometimes as tonished to see a pickerel far up some now shrunken rill where it is a mere puddle by the roadside. i have stooped to drink at a clear spring no bigger than a bushel basket, in a meadow, from which a rill was scarcely seen to dribble away, and seen lurking at its bottom two little pickerel not so big as my finger, sole monarchs of this their ocean, and who probably would never visit a larger water. i hear deep amid the birches some row among autumn. 279 the birds or the squirrels, where evidently some mystery is being developed to them. the jay is on the alert, mimicking every woodland note. &quot;what has happened? who s dead?&quot; the twitter retreats before you, and you are never let into the secret. some tragedy surely is being enacted, but murder will out. how many little dramas are enacted in the depths of the woods at which man is not present ! there seems to be in the fall a sort of attempt at spring, a rejuvenescence, as if the winter were not expected by a part of nature. violets, dan delions, and some other flowers blossom again, and mulleins and innumerable other plants be gin again to spring, and are only checked by the increasing cold. there is a slight uncertainty whether there will be any winter this year. some of our richest days are those in which no sun shines outwardly, but so much the more a sun shines inwardly. i love nature, i love the landscape, because it is so sincere. it never cheats me, it never jests, it is cheerfully, musi cally earnest. i lie and rely on the earth. the sweet-scented life-everlasting has not lost its scent yet, but smells like the balm of the fields. the partridge-berry leaves checker the ground on moist hillsides in the woods. are not they properly called checker-berries ? 280 autumn. my journal should be the record of my love. \ would write in it only of the things i love, my affection for an aspect of the world, what i love to think of. i have no more distinctness or pointedness in my yearnings than an expand ing bud which does indeed point to flower and fruit, to summer and autumn, but is aware of the warm sun and spring influence only. i feel ripe for something, yet do nothing, can t dis cover what that thing is. i feel fertile merely. it is seedtime with me. i have lain fallow long enough. notwithstanding a sense of unworthiness which possesses me not without reason, notwith standing that i regard myself as a good deal of a scamp, yet for the most part the spirit of the universe is unaccountably kind to me, and i enjoy perhaps an unusual share of happiness. but i question sometimes if there is not some settlement to come. nov. 16, 1851. it is remarkable that the highest intellectual mood which the world toler ates is the perception of the truth of the most ancient revelations, now in some respects out of date, but any direct revelation, any original thought, it hates like virtue. so far as think ing is concerned, surely original thinking is the divinest thing. we should reverently watch for the least motions, the least scintillations of autumn. 281 thought in this sluggish world, and men should run to and fro on the occasion more than at an earthquake. we check and repress the divinity that stirs within us to fall down and worship the divinity that is dead without us. i go to see many a good man or good woman, so called, and utter freely that thought which alone it was given me to utter, but there was a man who lived a long, long time ago and his name was moses, and another whose name was christ, and if your thought does not, or does not appear to, coincide with what they said, the good man or good woman has no ears to hear you. they think they love god ! it is only his old clothes, which they make scarecrows for the children. when will they come nearer to god than in these very children? a man lately preached here against the abuse of the sabbath, and recom mended to walk in the fields and dance on that day. good advice enough, which may take ef fect after a while. but with the mass of men, the reason is convinced long before the life is. they may see the church and the sabbath to be false, but nothing else to be true. one woman in the neighborhood says, u nobody can hear mr. preach, hear him through, without see ing that he is a good man.&quot; &quot; well, is there any truth in what he says?&quot; asks another. &quot; oh yes, it s true enough, but then it won t do, you 282 autumn. know, it won t do. now, there s our george, lie s got the whole of it ; and when i say, 4 come, george, put on your things, and go along to meeting, he says, no, mother, i m going out into the fields. it won t do.&quot; the fact is, this woman has not character and reli gion enough to exeyt a controlling influence over her children by her example, and knows of no such police as the church and the minister. if it were not for death and funerals, i think the institution of the church would not stand longer. the necessity that men be decently buried, our fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters and children (notwithstanding the dan ger that they be buried alive), will long, if not forever, prevent our laying violent hands on it. if salaries were stopped off, and men walked out of this world bodily at last, the minister and his vocation would be gone. that sounds like a fine mode of expressing gratitude referred to by linna3us. hermann was a botanist who gave up his place to tourne fort, who was unprovided for. &quot;hermann,&quot; says linnaeus, &quot; came afterwards to paris, and tournefort in honor of him ordered the foun tains to play in the royal garden.&quot; nov. 16, 1852. 9 a. m. sail up river to lee s bridge. colder weather and very windy, but still no snow. very little ice along the autumn. 283 edge of the river which does not melt before night. muskrat houses completed; interesting objects, looking down a river-reach at this sea son, and our river should not be represented without one or two of these cones. they are quite conspicuous half a mile distant, and are of too much importance to be omitted in the river landscape. i see one duck. the pines on shore look very cold, reflecting a silvery light. the waves run high with white caps, and communi cate a pleasant motion to the boat. at lee s cliff the cerastium viscosum. we sailed up well-meadow brook. the water is singularly grayish, clear and cold, the bottom of the brook showing great nuphar roots, like its ribs, with some budding leaves. the water is frozen in the pitcher-plant leaf. the swamp pink and blueberry buds attract. nov. 16, 1854. p. m. sailed to hubbard s bridge. almost every muskrat s house is cov ered by the flood, though they were unusually high as well as numerous, and the river is not nearly so high as last year. i see where they have begun to raise them another story. a few cranberries begin to wash up, and rails, boards, etc., may now -be collected by wreckers. nov. 16, 1858. preaching? lecturing? who are ye that ask for these things ? what do you want to hear, ye puling infants? a trumpet 284 autumn. sound that would train you up to manhood ? or a nurse s lullaby ? the preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath, without caus ing your rotten institutions to come toppling down, by the vacuum he makes. your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so of the state. it would be a relief to breathe one s self occasionally, among men. freedom of speech! it hath not entered into your hearts to conceive what those words mean. the church, the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal and free ! it is the freedom of a prison yard. what is it you tolerate, you church to-day? not truth, but a life-long hypocrisy. the voice that goes up from the monthly concerts is not so brave and cheery as that which rises from the frog-ponds of the land. look at your editors of popular magazines. i have dealt with two or three of the most liberal of them. they are afraid to print a whole sentence, a sound sen tence, a free-spoken sentence. we want to get 30,000 subscribers, and will do anything to get them. they consult the d. d. s and all the letters of the alphabet, before printing a sen tence. nov. 17, 1837. if there is nothing new on earth, still there is something new in the heav autumn. 285 ens. we have always a resource in the skies. they are constantly turning a new page to view. the wind sets the types in their blue ground, and the inquiring may always read a new truth there. nov. 17, 1850. i found this afternoon in a field of winter rye, a snapping-turtle s egg, white and elliptical like a pebble, mistaking it for which i broke it. the little turtle was per fectly formed, even to the dorsal ridge, which was distinctly visible. nov. 17, 1851. all things tend to flow to him who can make the best use of them, even away from their legal owner. a thief, finding with the property of the italian naturalist, donati, whom he had robbed abroad, a collec tion of rare african seeds, forwarded them to linnaeus from marseilles. donati suffered shipwreck, and never returned. nov. 17, 1853. i notice that many plants about this season of the year or earlier, after they have died down at top, put forth fresh and conspicuous radical leaves against another spring ; so some human beings in the november of their days, exhibit some fresh radical green ness, which, though the frosts may soon nip it, indicates and confirms their essential greenness. when their summer leaves have faded and fallen, they put forth fresh radical leaves which 286 autumn. sustain the life in their root still, against a new spring. the dry fields have, for a long time, been spotted with the small radical leaves of the fragrant life-everlasting, not to mention the large primrose, john s-wort, etc. almost every plant, although it may show 110 greenness above ground, if you dig about it, will be found to have fresh shoots already pointing upward, and ready to burst forth in the spring. nov. 17, 1854. paddled up river to clam shell, and sailed back. i think it must have been a fishhawk which i saw hovering over the meadow and my boat (a raw, cloudy afternoon), now and then sustaining itself in one place, a hundred feet or more above the water, intent on a fish, with a hovering or fluttering motion of the wings, somewhat like a kingfisher. its wings were very long, slender, and curved in outline of front edge, thus, perhaps. i think there was some white on rump. it alighted near the top of an oak within rifle-shot of me, afterward on the tip top of a maple by waterside, looking very large. nov. 17, 1855. it is interesting to me to talk with rice, he lives so thoroughly and satis factorily to himself. he has learned that rare art of living, the very elements of which most persons do not know. his life has been not a failure, but a success. seeing me going to autumn. 287 sharpen some plane irons, and hearing me com plain of the want of tools, he said i ought to have a chest of tools. but i said it was not worth the while. i should not use them enough to pay for them. &quot; you would use, them more, if you had them,&quot; said he. &quot; when i came to do a piece of work, i used to find commonly that i wanted a certain tool, and i made it a rule first always to make that tool. i have spent as much as 3,000 thus in my tools.&quot; comparatively speaking, his life is a success ; not such a failure as most men s. he gets more out of any enterprise than his neighbors, for he helps himself more, and hires less. whatever pleasure there is in it he enjoys. by good sense and calculation he has become rich, and has in vested his property well, yet practices a fair and neat economy, dwells not in untidy luxury. it costs him less to live, and he gets more out of life than others. to get his living or keep it is not a hasty or disagreeable toil. he works slowly, but surely, enjoying the sweet of it. he buys a piece of meadow at a profitable rate, works it in pleasant weather, he and his son, when they are inclined, goes a-fishing or bee hunting, or rifle shooting quite as often, and thus the meadow gets redeemed, and potatoes get planted perchance, and he is very sure to have a good crop stored in his cellar in the fall, 288 autumn. and some to sell. he always has the best of potatoes there. in the same spirit in which he and his son tackle up their dobbin (he never keeps a fast horse) and go a-spearing or fishing through the ^ce, they also tackle up and go to their sudbury farm to hoe or harvest a little, and when they return they bring home in their hay-rigging a load of stumps which had impeded their labors, but may supply them with their winter wood. all the woodchucks they shoot or trap in the bean-field are brought home also. thus their life is a long sport, and they know not what hard times are. labaume says that he wrote his journal of the campaign in russia each night in the midst of incredible danger and suffering, with &quot; a raven s quill and a little gunpowder mixed with some melted snow, in the hollow of my hand,&quot; the quill cut and mended with &quot; the knife with which i had carved my scanty morsel of horse flesh.&quot; such a statement promises well for the writer s qualifications to treat such a theme. nov. 17, 1858. p. m. up assabet. the muskrats are more active since the cold weather. i see more of them about the river now, swim ming across back and forth, and diving in the middle where i lose them. they dive off the round-backed black mossy stones, which when small and slightly exposed look much like autumn. 289 themselves. in swimming, show commonly three parts, with water between. one, sitting in the sun, as if for warmth, on the opposite shore to me, looks quite reddish-brown. they avail themselves of the edge of the ice now found along the sides of the river, to feed on. the very sunlight on the pale-brown bleached fields is an interesting object these cold days. i naturally look toward it as to a wood fire. not only different objects are presented to our attention at different seasons of the year, but we are in a frame of body and of mind to appre ciate different objects at different seasons. i see one thing when it is cold and another when it is warm. we are interested at this season by the mani fold ways in which the light is reflected to us. ascending a little knoll covered with sweet fern, the sun appearing but little above the sweet fern, its light was reflected from a dense mass of the bare, downy twigs of this plant in a sur prising manner which would not be believed, if described. it was quite like the sunlight re flected from grass and weeds covered with hoar frost. yet in an ordinary light, these are but dark or dusky-looking with scarcely a noticeable downiness. but as i saw them, there was a per fect halo of light resting on the knoll. i moved to right or left. a myriad of surfaces are now 290 autumn. prepared to reflect the light. this is one of the hundred silvery lights of november. the setting sun, too, is reflected from windows more brightly than at any other season. &quot; november lights &quot; would be a theme for me. nature is moderate, and loves degrees. win ter is not all white and sere. some trees are evergreen to cheer us, and on the forest floor our eyes do not fall on sere brown leaves alone, but some evergreen shrubs are placed there to relieve the eye. mountain laurel, lambkill, checkerberry, wintergreen, etc., keep up the semblance of summer still. nov. 17, 1859. another indian-summer day, as fair as any we have had. i go down the railroad to andromeda ponds this afternoon. i have been so absorbed of late in captain brown s fate as to be surprised wherever i de tected the old routine surviving still, met per sons going about their affairs indifferent. it appeared strange to me that the little dipper should be still diving in the river as of yore, and it suggested to me that this grebe might be diving here when concord shall be no more. any affecting human event may blind our eyes to natural objects. how fair and memorable this prospect, when you stand opposite the sun, these &quot;november afternoons, and look over the red andromeda autumn. 291 swamp, a glowing, warm brown-red in the in dian summer sun, like a bed of moss in a hollow in the woods, with gray high blueberry, and straw colored grasses interspersed ; and when, going round it, you look over it in the opposite direction, it presents a gray aspect. jvov. 18, 1837. nature makes no noise. the howling storm, the rustling leaf, the patter ing rain, are no disturbance. there is an essen tial and unexplored harmony in them. why is it that thought flows with so deep and sparkling a current when the sound of distant music strikes the ear ? when i would muse i com plain not of a rattling tune on the piano, a battle of prague even, if it be harmony, but an irregular, discordant drumming is intolerable. when a shadow flits across the landscape of the soul, where is the substance ? has it always its origin in sin ? and is that sin in me ? nov. 18, 1841. some men make their due impression upon their generation because a petty occasion is enough to call forth all their energies; but are there not others who would rise to much higher levels, whom the world has never provoked to make the effort ? i believe there are men now living who have never opened their mouths in a public assembly, in whom nevertheless there is such a well of eloquence that the appetite of any age could never exhaust 292 autumn. it, who pine for an occasion worthy of them, and will pine till they are dead, who can admire as well as the rest the flowing speech of the orator, but do yet miss the thunder and light ning, and visible sympathy of the elements which would garnish their own utterance. the age may well pine that it cannot put to use the gift of the gods. he lives on still unconcerned, not needing to be used. the greatest occasion will be the slowest to come. if, in any strait, i see a man fluttered and his ballast gone, then i lose all hope of him, he is undone ; but if he reposes still, though he do no thing else worthy of him, if he is still a man in reserve, there is then everything to hope of him. sometimes a body of men do unconsciously assert that their will is fate, that the right is decided by their fiat, without appeal, and when this is the case, they can never be mistaken ; as when one man is quite silenced by the thrilling eloquence of another, and submits to be neg- lected, as to his fate, because such is not the willful vote of the assembly, but their instinctive decision. nov. 18, 1851. surveying these days the ministerial lot. now at sundown i hear the hooting of an owl, hoo h6o hoo-hoorer-hoo. it sounds like the hooting of an idiot or a maniac broke loose. . this is faintly answered in a dif autumn. 293 f erent strain, apparently from a greater distance, almost as if it were the echo, that is, so far as the succession is concerned. i heard it last evening. the men who help me, call it the hooting owl, and think it is the cat-owl. it is a sound ad mirably suited to the swamp and to the twilight woods, suggesting a vast undeveloped nature which men have not recognized. the chopper who works in the woods all day for many weeks or months at a time, becomes intimately acquainted with them in his way. he is more open, in many respects, to the impres sions they are fitted to make than the naturalist who goes to see them. he is not liable to exag gerate insignificant featured. he really forgets himself, forgets to observe, and at night he dreams of the swamp, its phenomena and events. not so the naturalist ; enough of his unconscious life does not pass there. a man can hardly be said to be there, if he knows that he is there, or to go there if he knows where he is going. the man who is bent upon his work is fre quently in the best attitude to observe what is irrelevant to his work. (mem. wordsworth s observations on relaxed attention.) you must be conversant with things for a long time to know much about them, like the moss which has hung from the spruce, and as the partridge and the rabbit are acquainted with the thickets, and 294 autumn. at length have acquired the color of the places they frequent. if the man of science can put all his knowledge into propositions, the woodman has a great deal of incommunicable knowledge. nov. 18, 1852. yarrow and tansy still. nov. 18, 1853. conchologists call those shells &quot;which are fished up from the depths of the ocean &quot; and are never seen on the shore, pelagii, but those which are cast on shore and are never so delicate and beautiful as the former, on account of exposure and abrasion, littorales. so is it with the thoughts of poets. some are fresh from the deep sea, radiant with unimagined beauty, pelagii ; but others are comparatively worn, having been tossed by many a tide, scaled off, abraded, and eaten by worms, littorales. nov. 18, 1854. saw sixty geese go over the great fields in one waving line broken from time to time by their crowding on each other and vainly endeavoring to form into a harrow, honking all the while. nov. 18, 1855. men foolishly prefer gold to that of which it is the symbol, simple, honest, independent labor. can gold be said to buy food, if it does not buy an appetite for food ? it is fouler and uglier to have too much than not to have enough. nov. 18 [?], 1857. much cold slate-colored cloud, bare twigs seen gleaming toward the autumn. 295 light like gossamer, pure green of pines where old leaves have fallen, reddish or yellowish brown oak leaves rustling on the hillsides, very pale brown, bleaching almost hoary fine grass or hay in the fields, akin to the frost which has killed it, and flakes of clear yellow sunlight falling on it here and there, such is november. the fine grass killed by the frost, and bleached till it is almost silvery, has clothed the fields for a long time. now, as in the spring, we rejoice in sheltered and sunny places. some corn is left out still. flannery is the hardest-working man i know. before sunrise and long after sunset he is tax ing his unweariable muscles. the result is a singular cheerfulness. he is always in good spirits. he often overflows with his joy, when you perceive no occasion for it. if only the gate sticks, some of it bubbles up and overflows in his passing comment on that accident. how much mere industry proves ! there is a sparkle often in his passing remark, and his voice is really like that of a bird. in one light, these are old and worn-out fields that i ramble over, and men have gone to law about them long before i was born, but i trust that i ramble over them in a new fashion, and redeem them. there are many ways of feeling one s pulse. 296 autumn. in a healthy state, the constant experience is a pleasurable sensation or sentiment. for in stance, in such a state i find myself in perfect connection with nature, and the perception and remembrance even, of any natural phenomena is attended with a gentle, pleasurable excite ment. prevailing sights and sounds make the impression of beauty and music on me. but in sickness all is deranged. i had yesterday a kink in my back and a general cold, and as usual it amounted to a cessation of life. i lost for the time my support or relation to nature. sympa thy with nature is an evidence of perfect health. you cannot perceive beauty but with a serene mind. the cheaper your amusements, the safer and surer. they who think much of theatres, operas, and the like, are beside themselves. each man s necessary path, though as obscure and apparently uneventful as that of a beetle in the grass, is the way to the deepest joys he is susceptible of. though he converses only with moles and fungi, and disgraces his relatives, it is no matter, if he knows what is steel to his flint. many a man who should rather describe his dinner imposes on us with a history of the grand khan. nov. 18, 1858. p. m. to conantum. i look south from the cliff, the westering sun just out of sight behind the hill. its rays from autumn. 297 those bare twigs across the pond are bread and cheese to me. so many oak leaves have fallen that the white birch stems are more distinct amid the young oaks. i see to the bone, see those bare birches prepared to stand the win ter through on the hillsides. they never sing, what s this dull town to me ? the maples skirting the meadows in dense phalanxes, look like light infantry advanced for a swamp fight. ah, dear november, you must be sacred to the ?iine, surely. the willow catkins already peep out one fourth of an inch. early crowfoot is reddened at lee s. jvov. 19, 1839. light-hearted, thoughtless, shall i take my way, when i to thee this being have resigned, well knowing, on some future day, with usurer s craft, more than myself to find. nov. 19 [?], 1857. i see where a mouse, which had a hole under a stump, has eaten out clean the inside of the little seeds of the prinos verticillata berries. what pretty fruit for them, these bright berries ! they run up the twigs in the night, and gather this shining fruit, take out the small seeds, and eat these kernels at the entrance to their burrows. the ground is strewn with them there. nov. 20, 1850. desor, who has been among the indians at lake superior this summer, told 298 autumn. * me the other day that they had a particular name for each species of tree, as of the maple, but they had but one word for flowers. they did not distinguish the species of the last. it is often the unscientific man who discovers the new species. it would be strange if it were not so. but we are accustomed properly to call that only a scientific discovery which knows the relative value of the thing discovered, and un covers a fact to mankind. nov. 20, 1851. it is often said that melody can be heard farther than noise, and the finest melody farther than the coarsest. i think there is truth in this, and that accordingly those strains of the piano which reach me here in my attic stir me so much more than the sounds which i should hear if i were below in the parlor, be cause they are so much purer and diviner mel ody. they who sit farthest off from the noisy and bustling world are not at pains to distin guish what is sweet and musical, for that alone can reach them, that chiefly comes down to pos terity. hard and steady and engrossing labor with the hands, especially out of doors, is invaluable to the literary man, and serves him directly. here i have been for six days surveying in the woods, and yet when i get home at evening somewhat weary at last, and beginning to feel autumn. 299 that i have nerves, i find myself more suscep tible than usual to the finest influences, as music and poetry. the very air can intoxicate me, or the least sight or sound, as if my finer senses had acquired an appetite by their fast. mr. j. hosmer tells me that one spring he saw a red squirrel gnaw the bark of a maple, and then suck the juice, and this he repeated many times. nov. 20, 1853. i once came near speculating in cranberries. being put to it to raise the wind, and having occasion to go to new york, to peddle some pencils which i had made, as i passed through boston i went to quincy market and inquired the price of cranberries. the dealer took me down cellar, asked if i wanted wet or dry, and showed me them. i gave it to be understood that i might want an indefinite quantity. it made a slight sensation among the dealers, and for aught i know, raised the price of the berry for a time. i then visited various new york packets, and was told what would be the freight on deck and in the hold, and one skipper was very anxious for my freight. when i got to new york, i again visited the markets as a purchaser, and &quot; the best of eastern cran berries &quot; were offered me by the barrel at a cheaper rate than i could buy them in boston. i was obliged to manufacture $ 1,000 worth of 300 autumn. pencils, and slowly dispose of, and finally sacri fice them, in order to pay an assumed debt of 1100. what enhances my interest in dew (i am thinking of summer) is the fact that it is so distinct from rain, formed most abundantly after bright, starlight nights, a product especially of the clear, s*erene air, the manna of fair weather, the upper side of rain, as the country above the clouds. that nightly rain, called dew, gathers and falls in so low a stratum that our heads tower above it like mountains in an ordi nary shower. it only consists with comparative fair weather above our heads. those warm volumes of air forced high up the hillsides in summer nights are driven thither to drop their dew, like kine to their yards to be milked, that the moisture they hold may be condensed, and so dew formed before morning on the tops of the jiills. a writer in &quot; harper s magazine,&quot; vol. vii., p. 505, says that the mist at evening does not rise, &quot; but gradually forms higher up in the air.&quot; he calls it, the moisture of the air become visible, says there is most dew in clear nights because clouds prevent the cooling down of the air, they radiate the heat of the earth back to it, and that a strong wind, by keeping the air in motion, prevents its heat from passing off. he says also that bad conductors of heat have al autumn. 301 ways most dew on them, and that wool or swan s down are &quot; good for experimenting on the quan tity of dew falling,&quot; weighed before and after ; thinks it not safe to walk in clear nights, espe cially after midnight when the dew is most abun dantly forming, better in cloudy nights, which are drier ; also thinks it not prudent to venture out until the sun begins to rise, and warms the air ; but i think this prudence begets a tender ness that will catch more cold at noonday than the opposite hardiness at midnight. nov. 21, 1853. is not the dew but a humble, gentler rain, the nightly rain, above which we raise our heads, and unobstructedly behold the stars? the mountains are giants which tower above the rain, as we above the dew on the grass. it only wets their feet. nov. 20, 1854. 7 a. m. to boston. 9 a. m. boston to new york by express train. see the reddish soil (red sandstone ?) all through con necticut. beyond hartford a range of rocky hills crossing the state on each side the rail road. the second one very precipitous, and ap parently terminating at east rock, new haven. pleasantest part of the whole route between springfield and hartford along the river, per haps including the hilly region this side of springfield. reached canal street at 5 p. m., or candle-light. started for philadelphia from 302 autumn. foot of liberty street at 6 p. m., by newark, bordentown, and camden ferry, all in the dark ; saw only the glossy paneling of the cars reflected out into the dark like the magnificent lit facade of a row of edifices reaching all the way to phil adelphia, except when we stopped, and a lantern or two showed us a ragged boy and the dark buildings of some new jersey town. arrived at 10 p. m. time, four hours from new york, thirteen from boston, fifteen from concord. put up at jones s exchange hotel, 77 dock street. lodgings, thirty-seven cents and a half per night ; meals, separate. not to be named with french s in new york. nov. 21, 1854. was admitted into the build ing of the academy of natural sciences. its collection of birds said to be the largest in the world. they belonged to the son of massena (prince of essling?), and were sold at auction, bought by a yankee for $22,000, over all the crowned heads of europe, and presented to the academy. other collections also are added to this. the academy has received great donations. furness described a lotus identical with an egyptian one, as found somewhere down the river below philadelphia. lodged at the united states hotel, opposite the girard (formerly united states) bank. nov. 22, 1854. left at 7.30 a. m., for new autumn. 303 york. saw greeley. he took me to the new opera house, where i heard grisi and her troupe. he appeared to know and be known by everybody. was admitted free to the opera, and we were led by a page to various parts of the house at different times. nov. 20, 1857. in books, that which is most generally interesting is what comes home to the most cherished private experience of the great est number. it is not the book of him who has traveled farthest on the surface of the globe, but of him who has lived the deepest, and been the most at home. if an equal emotion is ex cited by a familiar homely phenomenon as by the pyramids, there is no advantage in seeing the pyramids. it is on the whole better, as it is simpler, to use the common language. we re quy-e that the reporter be very firmly planted before the facts which he observes, not a mere passer-by, hence the facts cannot be too homely. a man is worth most to himself and to others, whether as an observer, or poet, or neighbor, or friend, who is most contented and at home. there his life is the most intense, and he loses the fewest moments. familiar and surrounding objects are the best symbols and illustrations of his life. if a man who has had deep experi ences should endeavor to describe them in a book of travels, it would be to use the language 304 autumn. of a wandering tribe instead of a universal lan guage. the poet has made the best roots in his native soil, and is the hardest to transplant. the man who is often thinking that it would be better to be somewhere else than where he is, excommunicates himself. here i have been these forty years learning the language of these fields that i may the better express myself. if i should travel to the prairies, i should much less understand them, and my past life would serve me but ill to describe them. many a weed stands for more of life to me than the big trees of california would if i should go there. we need only travel enough to give our intel lects an airing. in spite of malthus and the rest, there will be plenty of room in this world, if every man will mind his own business. i have not heard of any planet running agauist another yet. p. m. to ministerial swamp. some bank swallows nests are exposed by the caving of the bank at clamshell. the very smallest hole is about two and a half inches wide horizontally, and barely one high. all are much wider than high. one nest, with an egg in it still, is com pletely exposed. the cavity at the end is shaped like a thick hoe-cake or lens, about six inches wide and somewhat more than two thick vertically. the nest is a regular but shallow autumn. 305 one, made simply of stubble, about five inches in diameter and three quarters of an inch thick. returning, i see, methinks, two gentlemen plowing a field as if to try an agricultural ex periment. as it is very cold and windy, both plowman and driver have their coats on. but when i get nearer, i hear the driver speak in a peculiarly sharp and petulant manner to the plowman, as they are turning the furrow, and i know at once that they belong to those two races which are so slow to amalgamate. thus my little idyl is disturbed. in the large wheeler field, ranunculus bul bosus in full bloom. the hardy tree sparrow has taken the place of the chipping and song sparrow, so much like the former that most do not know it is another. his faint lisping chip will keep up our spirits till another spring. i observed this afternoon how some bullocks had a little sportiveness forced upon them. they were running down a steep declivity to water, when, feeling themselves unusually im pelled by gravity downward, they took the hint even as boys do, flourished round gratuitously, tossing their hind quarters into the air, and shaking their heads at each other ; but what in creases the ludicrousness of it to me is the fact that such capers are never accompanied by a 306 autumn. smile. who does not believe that their step is less elastic, their movement more awkward, from their long domesticity ? nov. 20, 1855. again i hear that sharp, crackling, snapping sound, and hastening to the window i find that another of the pitch-pine cones, gathered november 7th, lying in the sun, or which the sun has scorched, has separated its scales very slightly at the apex. it is only dis coverable on a close inspection, but while i look the whole cone opens its scales with a smart crackling, and rocks, and seems to bristle up, scattering the dry pitch on the surface. they all thus fairly loosen and open, though they do not at once spread wide open. it is almost like the disintegration of glass. as soon as the ten sion is relaxed in one part, it is relaxed in every part. nov. 20, 1858. p. m. to ministerial swamp. [martial miles] says that a marsh hawk had a nest in his meadow several years, and though he shot the female three times, the male, with but little delay, returned with a new mate. he often watched these birds, and saw that the female could tell when the male was coining, a long way off. he thought the male fed her and the young all together. she would utter a scream when she perceived him, and rising into the air (before or after the scream ?), she turned autumn. 307 over with her talons uppermost, while he passed some three rods above, and caught without fail the prey which he let drop, and then carried it to her young. he had seen her do this many times, and always without failing. i go across the great wheeler pasture. it is a cool but pleasant november afternoon. the glory of november is in its silvery, sparkling lights, the air is so clear, and there are so many bare, polished, bleached or hoary surfaces to re flect the light. few things are more exhilarat ing, if it is only moderately cold, than to walk over bare pastures, and see the abundant sheeny light, like a universal halo, reflected from the russet and bleached earth. the earth shines perhaps more than in spring, for the reflecting surfaces are less dimmed now. it is not a red, but a white light. there are several kinds of twigs, this year s shoots of shrubs, which have a slight down, or haziness, hardly perceptible in ordinary lights, though held in the hand, but which seen toward the sun reflect a sheeny, sil very light. such are not only the sweet-fern, but the hazel in a less degree, alder twigs, and even the short huckleberry twigs, also lespedeza stems. it is as if they were covered with a myriad fine spicula3, which reflect a dazzling white light exceedingly warming to the spirits and imagination. this gives a character of 308 autumn. snug warmth and cheerfulness to the swamp, as if it were a place where the sun consorted with rabbits and partridges. each individual hair on every such shoot above the swamp is bathed in glowing sunlight, and is directly conversant with the day god. as i returned over conantum summit yester day just before sunset, and was admiring the va rious rich browns of the shrub-oak plain across the river, which seemed to me more wholesome and remarkable, as more permanent than the late brilliant colors, i was surprised to see a broad halo traveling with me, and always op posite the sun to me, at least one fourth mile off, and some three rods wide on the shrub oaks. the rare, wholesome and permanent beauty of withered oak leaves of various hues of brown, mottling a hillside, especially seen when the sun is low, quaker colors, sober ornaments, beauty that quite satisfies the eye, the richness and variety are the same as before, the colors differ ent, more incorruptible and lasting. sprague of cohasset states to the natural history society sept. 1, 1858, that the light under the tail of the common glow-worm &quot;re mained for fifteen minutes after death.&quot; nov. 21, 1850. the witch hazel blossom on conantum has, for the most part, lost its ribbons now. autumn. 309 i saw the sun falling on a distant white-pine wood whose gray and moss-covered stems were visible amid the green, in an angle where this forest abutted of. a hill covered with shrub oaks. it was like looking into dreamland. it is one of the avenues to my future. certain coinci dences like this are accompanied by a certain flash as of hazy lightning flooding all the world suddenly with a tremulous, serene light which it is difficult to see long at a time. i saw fair haven pond with its island, and a strip of perfectly still and smooth water in the lee of the island, and two hawks, fish-hawks, per haps, sailing over it. i did not see how it could be improved. yet i do not see what these things can be. i begin to see such an object when i cease to understand it, and see that i did not realize or appreciate it before, but i get no further than this. how adapted these forms and colors to my eye ! a meadow and an island ! what are these things ? yet the hawks and the ducks keep so aloof ! and nature is so reserved ! i am made to love the pond and the meadow, as the wind is made to ripple the water. nov. 21, 1851. better men than they hire to come here never lecture. why don t they ask edmund hosmer or george minott ? i would rather hear them decline than most of these hirelings lecture. 310 autumn. nov. 21 [?], 1857. p. m. up assabet. just above the grape-hung birches, my attention was drawn to a singular looking dry leaf or parcel of leaves on the shore about a r^d off. then i thought it might be the dry and yellowed skele ton of a bird with all its ribs ; then, the shell of a turtle, or possibly some large dry oak leaves peculiarly curled and cut ; and then all at once i saw that it was a woodcock, perfectly still, with its head drawn in, standing on its great pink feet. i had apparently noticed only the yellowish-brown portions of the plumage, refer ring the dark-brown to the shore behind it. may it not be that the yellowish-brown markings of the bird correspond somewhat to its skeleton? at any rate, with my eye steadily on it from a point within a rod, i did not for a considerable time suspect it to be a living creature. exam ining the shore after it had flown with a whis tling flight, i saw that there was a clear shore of mud between the water and the edge of ice crys tals about two inches wide, melted so far by the lapse of the water, and all along the edge of the ice, for a rod or two at least, there was a hole where it had thrust its bill down, probing every half inch, frequently closer. some animal life must be collected at that depth just in that nar row space, savory morsels for this bird. . . . the chubby bird darted away zigzag, carrying its autumn. 311 long tongue-case carefully before it over the witch hazel bushes. this is its walk, the portion of the shore, the narrow strip still left open and unfrozen between the water s edge and the ice. nov. 21, 1860. another finger-cold evening, which i improve in pulling my turnips, the usual amusement of such weather, before they shall be frozen in. it is worth while to see how green and lusty they are yet, still adding to their stock of nutriment for another year, and between the green and also withering leaves it does me good to see their great crimson round or scalloped tops sometimes quite above ground, they are so bold. they remind you of rosy cheeks in cold weather, and indeed there is a relationship. even pull ing turnips when the first cold weather numbs your fingers, like every other kind of harvestry, is interesting, if you have been the sower, and have not sown too many. nov. 22, 1851. at the brook [saw mill brook] the partridge berries checker the ground with their leaves, now interspersed with red ber ries. the cress at the bottom of the brook is doubly beautiful now, because it is green while most other plants are sere. it rises and falls and waves with the current. as i returned through hosmer s field, the sun was just setting beneath a black cloud by which it had been obscured, and as it had been a cold 312 autumn. and windy afternoon, its light, which fell sud denly on some white pines between me and it, lighting them up like a shimmering fire, and also on the oak leaves and chestnut stems, was quite a circumstance. it was, from the contrast between the dark and comfortless afternoon, and this bright and cheerful light, almost fire. the eastern hills and woods, too, were clothed in a still golden light. it was a sort of indian sum mer in the day, which thus far has been denied to the year. after a cold, gray day, this cheer ing light almost warms us by its resemblance to fire. nwo. 22, 1853. geese went over yesterday and to-day, also. if there is any one with whom we have a quarrel, it is most likely such a person makes a demand on us which we disappoint. i was just thinking it would be fine to get a specimen leaf from each changing tree and shrub and plant in autumn, in september and october, when it had got its brightest, characteristic color, intermediate in its transition from the green to the russet or brown state, the color of its ripe ness, outline it, and copy its color exactly with paint in a book, a book which should be a me morial of october, be entitled october hues, or autumnal tints. i remember especially the beautiful yellow of the populus grandidentata autumn. 313 %. and the tints of the scarlet maple. what a memento such a book would be, beginning with the earliest reddening of the leaves, woodbine, ivy, etc., and the lake of radical leaves, down to the latest oaks. i might get the impression of their veins and outlines in summer, and after, color them. nov. 22, 1858. about the first of november, a wild pig from the west, said to weigh three hundred pounds, jumped out of a car at the depot, and made for the woods. the owner had to give up the chase at once not to lose his pas sage, while some railroad employees pursued the pig even to the woods one and a half miles off, but there the pig turned and pursued them so resolutely that they ran for their lives, and one climbed a tree. the next day being sunday, they turned out in force with a gun and a large mastiff, but still the pig had the best of it, fairly frightened the men by his fierce charges, and the dog was so wearied and injured by the pig that the men were obliged to carry him in their arms. the pig stood it better than the dog, ran between the gun-man s legs, threw him over and hurt his shoulder, though pierced in many places by a pitchfork. at the last accounts, he had been driven or baited into a barn in lincoln, but no one durst enter, and they were preparing to shoot him. such pork might be called venison. 314 autumn. * he was caught at last in a snare, and so con veyed to brighton. nov. 22, 1860. p. m. to northwest part of sudbury. the linaria canadensis [wild toad-flax] is still freshly blooming. it is the freshest flower i notice now. considerable ice lasting all day on the meadows and cold pools. this is a very beautiful november day, a cool but clear crystalline air, through which even the white pines, with their silvery sheen, are an affecting sight. it is a day to behold and to ramble over the stiffening and withered surface of the tawny earth. every plant s down glistens with a silvery light along the marlboro road, the sweet fern, the lespedeza, and bare blue berry twigs, to say nothing of the weather-worn tufts of andropogon scoparius. a thousand bare twigs gleam like cobwebs in the sun. i re joice in the bare, bleak, hard, and barren-looking surface of the tawny pastures, the firm outline of the hills, so convenient to walk over, and the air so bracing and wholesome. though you are finger-cold toward night, and you cast a stone on your first ice, and see the unmelted crystals under every bank, it is glorious november weather. you enjoy not only the bracing coolness, but all the heat and sunlight there is, reflected back to you from the earth. the sandy road itself lit by the november sun is beautiful. shrub oaks .autumn. 315 and young oaks generally, and hazel bushes, and other hardy shrubs are your companions, as if it were an iron age, yet in simplicity, innocence, and strength, a golden one. it is glorious to consider how independent man is of all enervating luxuries, and the poorer he is in respect to them, the richer he is. summer is gone with its infinite wealth, and still nature is genial to man. though he no longer bathes in the stream, or reclines on the bank, or plucks berries on the hills, still he beholds the same in accessible beauty around him. what though he has no juice of the grape stored up for him in cellars, the air itself is wine of an older vin tage, and far more sanely exhilarating than any cellar affords. it is ever some gouty senior, and not a blithe child that drinks or cares for that so famous wine. though so many phenomena which we lately admired have now vanished, others are more remarkable and interesting than before. the smokes from distant chimneys, not only greater because more fire is required, but more distinct in the cooler atmosphere, are a very pleasing sight, and conduct our thoughts quickly to the roof and hearth and family be neath, revealing the homes of men. maynard s yard and frontage, and all his barns and fences are singularly neat and sub stantial, and the high road is in effect converted 316 autumn.. into a private way through his grounds. it sug gests unspeakable peace and happiness. yet, strange to tell, i noticed that he had a tiger in stead of a cock for a vane on his barn, and he himself looked overworked. he had allured the surviving forest trees to grow into ancestral trees about his premises, and so attach them selves to him as if he had planted them. the dirty highway was so subdued that it seemed as if it were lost there. he had all but stretched a bar across it. each traveler must have felt some misgivings, as if he were trespassing. however, the farmer s life expresses only such content as an ox in his yard, chewing the cud. what though your hands are numb with cold, your sense of enjoyment is not benumbed. you cannot even find an apple but it is sweet to taste. simply to see a distant horizon through a clear air, the firm outline of a distant hill, or a blue mountain-top through some new vista, this is wealth enough for one afternoon. we journeyed to the foreign land of sudbury, to see how the sudbury men, the hayneses and the puffers and the brighams live ; we traversed their pastures and their wood-lots, and were home again at night. nov. 23, 1850. to-day it has been finger-cold. unexpectedly i found ice by the side of the brooks this afternoon nearly an inch thick. the autumn. 317 difference in temperature of various localities is greater than is supposed. if i was surprised to find ice on the sides of the brooks, i was much more surprised to find a pond in the woods, con taining an acre or more, quite frozen over, so that i walked across it. it was a cold corner where a pine wood excluded the sun. in the larger ponds and the river, of course there is no ice yet. this is a shallow, reedy pond. i lay down on the ice and looked through at the bot tom. the plants appeared to grow more up rightly than on the dry land, being sustained and protected by the water. caddis-worms were everywhere crawling about in their handsome quiver-like sheaths or cases. i find it to be the height of wisdom not to endeavor to oversee myself, and live a life of prudence and common-sense, but to see over and above myself, entertain sublime conjectures, to make myself the thoroughfare of thrilling thoughts, live all that can be lived. the man who is dissatisfied with himself, what can he not do? nov. 23, 1852. this morning the ground is white with snow, and it still snows. this is the first time it has been fairly white this season, though once before, many weeks ago, it was slightly whitened for ten or fifteen minutes. already the landscape impresses me with a 318 autumn. greater sense of fertility. there is something genial even in the first snow, and nature seems to relent a little of her november harshness. men, too, are disposed to give thanks for the bounties of the year all over the land, and the sound of the mortar is heard in all houses, and the odor of summer savory reaches even to poets garrets. this, then, may be considered the end of the flower season for this year, though this snow will probably soon melt again. among the flowers which may be put down as lasting thus far, as i remember, in the order of their hardiness, are yarrow, tansy, these very fresh and common, cerastium [mouse-ear chickweed], autumnal dandelion, dandelion, and perhaps tall buttercup, the last four scarce. the following seen within a fortnight : a late three ribbed golden-rod, blue-stemmed golden-rod (these two perhaps within a week), potentilla argentea, aster undulatus, ranunculus repens, bidens connata, and shepherd s purse. i have not looked for witch hazel nor stellaria media [common chickweed] lately. i had a thought in a dream last night, which surprised me by its strangeness, as if it were based on an experience in a previous state of existence, and could not be entertained by my waking self. both the thought and the language were equally novel to me, but i at once discov autumn. 319 ered it to be true, and to coincide with my ex perience in this state. nov. 23, 1853. 6 a. m. to swamp bridge brook mouth. the cocks are the only birds i hear. but they are a host. they crow as freshly and bravely as ever, while poets go down stream, degenerate into science and prose. by eight o clock the misty clouds disperse, and it turns out a pleasant, calm, and spring like morning. the water, going down, but still spread far over the meadows, is seen from the window perfectly smooth and full of reflections. what lifts and lightens and makes heaven of earth is the fact that you see the reflection of the humblest weed against the sky, but you can not put your head low enough to see the sub stance so. the reflection enchants us, just as an echo does. if i would preserve my relation to nature, i must make my life more moral, more pure and innocent. the problem is as precise and simple as a mathematical one. i must not live loosely, but more and more continently. the indian summer, said to be more remarka ble in this country than elsewhere, no less than the reblossoming of certain flowers, the peep of the hylodes, and sometimes the faint warble of some birds, is the reminiscence or rather the re turn of spring, the year renewing its youth. 320 autumn. at 5 p. m. i saw flying southwest high over head a flock of geese, and heard the faint honk ing of one or two. they are in the usual harrow form, twelve in the shorter line, and twenty-four in the longer, the latter abutting on the former at the fourth bird from the front. this is the sixth flock i have seen or heard of since the morning of the 17th, that is, within a week. nov. 23, 1860. most of us are still related to our native fields as the navigator to undiscovered islands in the sea. we can any autumn dis cover a new fruit there which will surprise us by its beauty or sweetness. so long as i saw one or two kinds of berries in my walks whose names i did not know, the proportion of the unknown seemed indefinitely, if not infinitely, great. famous fruits imported from the east or south and sold in our markets, as oranges, lemons, pineapples, and bananas, do not concern me so much as many an unnoticed wild berry, whose beauty annually lends a new charm to some wild walk, or which i have found to be palatable to an outdoor taste. the tropical fruits are for those who dwell within the tropics. their fairest and sweetest parts cannot be ex ported nor imported. brought here, they chiefly concern those whose walks are through the mar ket-place. it is not those far-fetched fruits which the speculator imports, that concern us autumn. 321 chiefly, but rather those which you have fetched yourself from some far hill or swamp, journeying all the long afternoon, in the hold of a basket, consigned to your friends at home, the first of the season. as some beautiful or palatable fruit is perhaps the noblest gift of nature to man, so is a fruit with which one has in some measure identified himself by cultivating or col lecting it one of the most suitable presents to a friend. it was some compensation for commo dore porter, who may have introduced some cannon-balls and bombshells into parts where they were not wanted, to have introduced the valparaiso squash into the united states. i think that this eclipses his military glory. nov. 24, 1850. plucked a buttercup to-day. i have certain friends whom i visit occasionally, but i commonly part from them early, with a certain bitter-sweet sentiment. that which we love is so mixed and entangled with that we hate in one another that we are more grieved and disappointed, aye, and estranged from one an other, by meeting than by absence. some men may be my acquaintances merely, but one whom i have been accustomed to idealize, to have dreams about as a friend, and mix up intimately with myself, can never degenerate into an ac quaintance. i must know him on that higher ground, or not know him at all. 322 autumn. we do not confess and explain because we would fain be so intimately related as to under stand each other without speech. our friend must be broad. his must be an atmosphere co extensive with the universe, in which we can expand and breathe. for the most part, we are smothered and stifled by one another. i go to see my friend and try his atmosphere. if our atmospheres do not mingle, if we repel each other strongly, it is of no use to stay. nov. 24, 1851. found on the south side of the [ministerial] swamp the lygodium palmatum, which bigelow calls the only climbing fern in our latitude. nov. 24, 1857. some poets have said that writing poetry was for youths only, but not so. in that fervid and excitable season we only get the impulse which is to carry us onward in our future career. ideals are exhibited to us then distinctly which all our lives after we may aim at, but not attain. the mere vision is little compared with the steady, corresponding en deavor thitherward. it would be vain for us to be looking ever at promised lands toward which we were not meanwhile steadily and earnestly traveling, whether the way led over a mountain top or through a dusky valley. in youth, when we are most elastic, we merely receive an impulse in the proper direction. to suppose this is autumn. 323 equivalent to having traveled the road, or obeyed the impulse faithfully throughout a lifetime, is absurd. we are shown fair scenes in order that we may be tempted to inhabit them, and not simply tell what we have seen. nov. 24, 1858. it is a lichen day, with a little moist snow falling. the great green lungwort lichen shows now on the oaks (strange that there should be none on the pines close by), and the fresh, bright chestnut fruit of other kinds, glis tening with moisture, brings life and immortality to light. when i looked out this morning, the land scape presented a very pretty wintry sight, little snow as there was. being very moist, it had lodged on every twig, and every one had its counterpart in a light, downy white one, twice or thrice its own depth, resting on it. here is an author who contrasts love for &quot; the beauties of the person &quot; with that for &quot; excel lences of the mind,&quot; as if these were the alterna tives. i must say that it is for neither of these that i should feel the strongest affection. i love that one with whom i sympathize, be she &quot; beau tiful &quot; or otherwise, of excellent mind or not. nov. 24, 1859. how pretty amid the downy and cottony fruits of november the head of the white anemone, raised a couple of feet from the ground on slender stalks, two or three together, 824 autumn. small heads of yellowishwhite down compact and regular as a thimble beneath, but, at this time, diffusive and bursting forth above, some what like a little torch with its flame. nov. 24, 1860. the first spitting of snow, a flurry or squall, from out a gray or slate-colored cloud that came up from the west. this con sisted almost entirely of pellets an eighth of an inch or less in diameter. they drove along al most horizontally, or curving upward like the outline of a breaker before the strong and chill ing wind. the plowed fields were for a short time whitened with them. the green moss about the bases of trees was very prettily spotted white with them, and also the large beds of cladonia in the pastures. they come to con trast with the red cockspur lichens on the stumps which you had not noticed before. striking against the trunks of the trees on the west side, they fell and accumulated in a white line at the base. though a slight touch, this was the first wintry scene of the season. the air was so filled with these snow pellets that we could not see a hill half a mile off, for an hour. the hands seek the warmth of the pockets, and fingers are so benumbed that you cannot open your jack knife. the rabbits in the swamp enjoy it as well as you. me thinks the winter gives them more liberty, like a night. i see where a boy autumn. 325 has set a box trap, and baited it with half an apple, and, a mile off, come across a snare set for a rabbit or partridge in a cowpath in a pitch pine wood, near where the rabbits have nibbled the apples which strew the wet ground. how pitiable that the most many see of a rabbit should be the snare some boy has set for one ! the bitter-sweet of a white-oak acorn which you nibble in a bleak november walk over the tawny earth, is more to me than a slice of im ported pineapple. we do not think much of table fruits. they are especially for aldermen and epicures. they do not feed the imagina tion. that would starve on them. these wild fruits, whether eaten or not, are a dessert for the imagination. nov. 25, 1850. this afternoon, late and cold as it is, has been a sort of indian summer. in deed, i think we have summer days from time to time the winter through, and that it is often the snow on the ground which makes the whole difference. this afternoon the air was indescrib ably clear and exhilarating, and though the ther mometer would have shown it to be cold, i thought there was a finer and purer warmth than in summer, a wholesome, intellectual warmth in which the body was warmed by the mind s con tentment, the warmth hardly sensuous, but rather the satisfaction of existence. 326 autumn. the landscape looked singularly clean and pure and dry, the air like a pure glass being laid over the picture, the trees so tidy and stripped of their leaves ; the meadow and pastures clothed with clean, dry grass, looked as if they had been swept ; ice on the water and winter in the air, but yet not a particle of snow on the ground. the woods, divested in great part of their leaves, are being ventilated. it is the season of perfect works, of hard, tough, ripe twigs, not of tender buds and leaves. the leaves have made their wood, and a myriad new withes stand up all around, pointing to the sky, and able to survive the cold. it is only the peren nial that you see, the iron age of the year. i saw a muskrat come out of a hole in the ice. he is a man wilder than ray or melvin. while i am looking at him, i am thinking what he is thinking of me. he is a different sort of man, that is all. pie would dive when i went nearer, then reappear again, and had kept open a place five or six feet square, so that it had not frozen, by swimming about in it. then he would sit on the edge of the ice, and busy himself about some thing, i could not see whether it was a clam or not. what a cold-blooded fellow ! thoughts at a low temperature, sitting perfectly still so long on ice covered with water, mumbling a cold, wet clam in its shed. what safe, low, moderate autumn. 327 thoughts he must have ! he does not get upon stilts. the generation of muskrats do not fail. they are not preserved by the legislature of massachusetts. i experience such an interior comfort, far removed from the sense of cold, as if the thin atmosphere were rarefied by heat, were the medium of invisible flames, as if the whole land scape were one great hearthside, that where the shrub-oak leaves rustle on the hillside, i seem to hear a crackling fire and see the pure flames, and i wonder that the dry leaves do not blaze into yellow flames. when i got up high on the side of the cliff, the sun was setting like an indian summer sun. there was a purple tint in the horizon. it was warm on the face of the rocks, and i could have sat till the sun disappeared, to dream there. it was a mild sunset such as is to be attended to. just as the sun shines on us warmly and se renely, our creator breathes on us and re-creates us. nov. 25, 1852. at walden. i hear at sun down what i mistake for the squawking of a hen, for they are firing at chickens hereabouts, but it proved to be a flock of wild geese going south. nov. 25, 1853. just after the sun set to night, i observed the northern part of the 328 autumn. heavens was covered with fleecy clouds which abruptly terminated in a straight line stretching east and west directly over my head, the western end being beautifully rose-tinted. half an hour later, this cloud had advanced southward, show ing clear sky behind it in the north, until its southern edge was seen at an angle of 45 by me, but though its line was straight as before, it now appeared regularly curved like a segment of a melon rind, as usual. nov. 25, 1857. p. m. to hubbard s close, and thence through woods to goose pond and pine hill. a clear, cold, windy afternoon. the cat crackles with electricity when you stroke her, and the fur rises up to your touch. this is november of the hardest kind, bare frozen ground covered with pale brown or straw-colored herbage, a strong, cold, cutting north wind which makes me seek to cover my ears, a perfectly clear and cloudless sky. the cattle in the fields have a cold, shrunken, shaggy look, their hair standing out every way, as if with electricity, like the cat s. ditches and pools are fast skim ming over, and a few slate-colored snowbirds with thick, shuffling twitter, and fine-chipping tree sparrows flit from bush to bush in the other wise deserted pastures. this month taxes a walker s resources more than any other. for my part, i should sooner think of going into autumn. 329 quarters in november than in winter. if you do feel any fire at this season out of doors, you may depend upon it, it is your own. it is but a short time these afternoons before the night cometh in which no man can walk. if you delay to start till three o clock, there will be hardly time left for a long and rich adventure, to get fairly out of town. november eat-heart, is that the name of it? not only the fingers cease to do their office, but there is often a benumbing of the faculties generally. you can hardly screw up your courage to take a walk when all is thus tightly locked or frozen up, and so little is to be seen in field or wood. i am inclined to take to the swamps or woods as the warmest place, and the former are still the openest. nature has herself become, like the few fruits she still affords, a very thick-shelled nut with a shrunken meat within. if i find anything to excite a warming thought abroad, it is an agreeable dis appointment, for i am obliged to go willfully and against my inclination at first, the prospect looks so barren, so many springs are frozen up, not a flower, perchance, and few birds left, not a companion abroad in all these fields for me. i seem to anticipate a fruitless walk. i think to myself hesitatingly, shall i go there, or there, or there ? and cannot make up my mind to any route, all seem so unpromising, mere surface 330 autumn. walking and fronting the cold wind, so that i have to force myself to it often, and at random. but then i am often unexpectedly compensated, and the thinnest yellow light of november is more warming and exhilarating than any wine they tell of. the mite which november con tributes becomes equal in value to the bounty of july. i may meet with something that interests me, and immediately it is as warm as in july, as if it were the south instead of the northwest wind that blew. i do not know if i am singular when i say that i believe there is no man with whom i can associate, who will not, comparatively speaking, spoil my afternoon. that society or encounter may at last yield a fruit which i am not aware of, but i cannot help suspecting that i should have spent those hours more profitably alone. i notice a thimble-berry vine forming an arch four feet high which has firmly rooted itself at the small end. the roar of the wind in the trees over my head sounds as cold as the wind feels. i shiver about awhile on pine hill, waiting for the sun to set. the air appears to me dusky now after four, these days. the land scape looks darker than at any other season, like arctic scenery. there is the sun a quarter of an hour high, shining on it through a per autumn. 331 fectly clear sky, but to my eye it is singularly dark or dusky. and now the sun has disap peared, there is hardly less light for half a min ute. i should not know when it was down, but by looking that way, as i stand at this height. returning i see a fox run across the road in the twilight. he is on a canter, but i see the whitish tip of his tail. i feel a certain respect for him, because, though so large, he still main tains himself free and wild in our midst, and is so original, so far as any resemblance to our race is concerned. perhaps i like him better than his tame cousin, the dog, for it. it is surprising how much, from the habit of regarding writing as an accomplishment, is wasted on form. a very little information or wit is mixed up with a great deal of convention alism in the style of expressing it, as with a sort of preponderating paste or vehicle. some life is not simply expressed, but a long-winded speech is made, with an occasional attempt to put a little life into it. nov. 25, 1858. while most keep close to their parlor fires this cold and blustering thanksgiving afternoon, and think with com passion of those who are abroad, i find the sunny south side of the swamp as warm as is their parlor, and warmer to my spirit. aye, there is a serenity and warmth here, which the 332 autumn. parlor does not suggest, enhanced by the sound of the wind roaring on the northwest side of the swamp a dozen or so rods off. what a whole some and inspiring warmth is this ! pass tarbell s. the farmer, now on the down-hill of life, at length gets his new barn and barn cellar built, far away in some unfre quented vale. this for twoscore years he has struggled for. this is his poem done at last, to get the means to dig that cavity and rear those timbers aloft. how many millions have done just like him, or failed to do it ! there is so little originality, and just as little, and just as much fate, so to call it, in literature. with steady struggle, with alternate failure and suc cess, he at length gets a barn cellar completed, and then a tomb. you would think there was a tariff on thinking and originality. nov. 25, 1860. last night and to-day, very cold and blustering. winter weather has come suddenly this year. the house was shaken by wind last night, and there was a general defi ciency of bed-clothes. this morning some win dows were as handsomely decorated with frost as ever in winter. i wear mittens or gloves, and my greatcoat. there is much ice on the meadows now, the broken edges shining in the sun. now for the phenomena of winter. as i go up the meadow-side toward clamshell i autumn. 333 see a very great collection of crows far and wide on the meadows, evidently gathered by this cold and blustering weather. probably the moist meadows where they feed are frozen up against them. they flit before me in countless num bers, flying very low on account of the strong northwest wind that comes over the hill, and a cold gleam is reflected from the back and wings of each, as from a weather stained shingle. some perch within three or four rods of me, and seem weary. i see where they have been pecking the apples of the meadow -side, an immense cohort of cawing crows which sudden winter has driven near to the habitations of man. when i return after sunset, i see them col lecting, and hovering over and settling in the dense pine woods, as if about to roost there. . . . how is any scientific discovery made ? why, the discoverer takes it into his head first. he must all but see it. ... how often you make a man richer in spirit, in proportion as you rob him of earthly luxuries and comforts. nov. 26, 1837. i look around for thoughts, when i am overflowing, myself. while i live on, thought is still in embryo, it stirs not within me. anon it begins to assume shape and come liness, and i deliver it, and clothe it in its gar ment of language. but, alas ! how often when 334 autumn. thoughts choke me, do i resort to a spat on the back, or swallow a crust, or do anything but ex pectorate them. nov. 26, 1857. minott s is a small, square, one storied, unpainted house, with a hipped roof, and at least one dormer window, a third of the way up the south side of a long hill, which is some fifty feet high, and extends east and west. a traveler of taste may go straight through the village, without being detained a moment by any dwelling, either the form or surroundings being objectionable ; but very few go by this house without being agreeably im pressed, and therefore led to inquire who lives in it. not that its form is so incomparable, nor even its weather-stained color, but chiefly, i think, because of its snug and picturesque posi tion on the hillside, fairly lodged there where all children like to be, and its perfect harmony with its surroundings and position. for if, preserving this form and color, it should be transplanted to the meadow below, nobody would notice it, more than a schoolhouse which was lately of the same form. it is there be cause somebody was independent, bold enough to carry out the happy thought of placing it high on the hillside. it is the locality, not the archi tecture, that takes us captive. there is exactly such a site (only, of course, less open on either autumn. 335 side) between this house and the next westward, but few, if any, even of the admiring travelers, have thought of this as a house-lot, or would be bold enough to place a cottage there. without side fences, or graveled walk, or flower-plots, that simple sloping bank before it is pleasanter than any front yard, though many a visitor, and many times the master, has slipped and fallen on the steep path. from its position and exposure, it has shelter and warmth and dry ness and prospect. he overlooks the road, the meadow and brook, and houses beyond, to the distant fair haven. the spring comes earlier to that door-yard than any other, and summer lingers longest there. nov. 26, 1859. to the colburn farm wood lot. the chickadee is the bird of the wood, the most unfailing. when in a windy or in any day you have penetrated some thick wood like this, you are pretty sure to hear its cheery note. at this season, it is almost its sole inhabitant. i see to-day one brown creeper busily inspect&quot; ing the pitch pines. it begins at the base, and creeps rapidly upward by starts, adhering close to the bark, and shifting a little from side to side often till near the top, then suddenly darts off downward to the base of another tree where it repeats the same course. this has no black cockade like the nuthatch. 336 autumn. nov. 27, 1853. now a man will eat ms heart, if ever, now while the earth is bare, barren, and cheerless, and we have the coldness of winter without the variety of ice and snow. methinks the variety and compensation are in the stars. how bright they are now in contrast with the dark earth ! jvov. 27, 1855. p. m. by river to j. farm er s. he gave me the head of a gray rabbit which his boy had snared. this rabbit is white beneath the whole length, reddish brown on the sides, and the same spotted with black, above ; the hairs coarse and homely, yet the fur beneath thick and slate-colored, as usual ; well defended from the cold ; sides, i might say, pale-brick color, the brown part. the fur under the feet dirty yellowish, as if stained by what it trod upon. farmer said that his grandfather, who could remember one hundred and twenty-five years before this, told him that they used to catch wolves in carter s pasture by the north river, east of dodge s brook, in this manner: they piled up logs cob-house fashion, beginning with a large base, eight or ten feet square, and nar rowing successively each tier, so as to make steps for the wolves to the top, say ten feet high. then they put a dead sheep within. a wolf soon found it in the night, sat down outside, and autumn. 337 howled till he called his comrades to him, and then they ascended step by step, and jumped down within ; but when they had done eating, they could not get out again. they always found one of the wolves dead, and supposed he was punished for betraying the others into this trap. a man in brighton, whom he fully be lieves, told him that he built a bower near a dead horse, and placed himself within, to shoot crows. one crow took his station as sentinel on the top of a tree, and thirty or forty alighted upon the horse. he fired and killed seven or eight. but the rest, instead of minding him, immediately flew to their sentinel, and pecked him to pieces before his eyes. also mr. joseph clark told him that as he was going along the road, he cast a stick over the wall and hit some crows in a field, whereupon they flew directly at their sentinel on an apple-tree and beat and buffeted him away to the woods as far as he could see. nov. 27, 1857. standing before stacy s large glass windows, this morning, i saw that they were gloriously ground by the frost. i never saw such beautiful feather and fir like frosting. his windows are filled with fancy articles and toys for christmas and new year s presents, but this delicate and graceful outside frosting surpassed them all infinitely. i saw countless 338 autumn. feathers with very distinct midribs and fine pinnae. the half of a trunk seemed to rise in each case up along the sash, and these feathers branched off from it all the way, sometimes nearly horizontally. other crystals looked like fine plumes, of the natural size. if glass could be ground to look like this, how glorious it would be. you can tell which shopman has the hot test fire within, by the frost being melted off. i was never so struck by the gracefulness of the curves in vegetation, and wonder that kuskin does not refer to frost work. nov. 27, 1859. the greeks and romans made much of honey, because they had no sugar ; olive oil also was very important. our poets (?) still sing of honey (though we have sugar) and oil, though we do not produce and scarcely use it. nov. 28, 1837. every tree, fence, and spire of grass that could raise its head above the snow was this morning covered with a dense hoar frost. the trees looked like airy creatures of darkness caught napping. on this side, they were huddled together, their gray hairs stream ing, in a secluded valley, which the sun had not yet penetrated, and on that they went hurrying off in indian file by hedgerows and water courses, while the shrubs and grasses, like elves and fairies of the night, sought to hide their autumn. 339 diminished heads in the snow. the branches and taller grasses were covered with a wonder ful ice-foliage answering leaf for leaf to their summer dress. the centre, diverging, and even more minute fibres, were perfectly distinct, and the edges regularly indented. these leaves were on the side of the twig or stubble opposite to the sun (when it was not bent toward the east), meeting it, for the most part, at right angles, and there were others standing out at all possible angles upon this, and upon one another. it struck me that these ghost leaves, and the green ones whose form they assume, were crea tures of the same law. it could not be in obe dience to two several laws, that the vegetable juices swelled gradually into the perfect leaf on the one hand, and the crystalline particles trooped to their standard in the same admirable order on the other. the river viewed from the bank above ap peared of a yellowish green color, but on a nearer approach, this phenomenon vanished, and yet the landscape was covered with snow. nov. 28, 1853. settled with j. munroe & co., and on a new account placed twelve of my books with him on sale. i have paid him di rectly out of pocket, since the book was pub lished, two hundred and ninety dollars, and taken 340 autumn. a receipt for it. this does not include postage, proof-sheets, etc. i have received from other quarters about fifteen dollars. this has been the pecuniary value of the book. dr. harris described to me his finding a new species of cicindela [glow-worm] at the white mountains this fall, the same of which he had found a specimen there some time ago, supposed to be very rare, found at peter s river and lake superior ; but he proves it to be com mon near the white mountains. nov. 28, 1857. spoke to skinner about that wild-cat which he says he heard a month ago in ebby hubbard s woods. he was going down to walden in the evening (with a com panion) to see if geese had not settled in it, when they heard this sound, which his compan ion, at first, thought made by a coon, but skin ner said it was a wild-cat. he says he has heard them often in the adirondack region, where he has purchased furs. he told his com panion he would hear it again soon, and he did, somewhat like the domestic cat, a low sort of growling, and then a sudden quick-repeated caterwaul, or yow-yow-yow or yang-yang-yang. he says they utter this from time to time when on the track of some prey. nov. 28, 1858. a gray, overcast, still day, and more small birds, tree sparrows and chicka autumn. 341 dees, than usual about the house. there have been a very few fine snowflakes falling for many hours, and now, by 2 p. m., a regular snow storm has commenced, fine flakes falling steadily, and rapidly whitening all the landscape. in half an hour the russet landscape is painted white, even to the horizon. do we know of any other so silent and sudden a change ? i cannot now walk without leaving a track behind me. that is one peculiarity of winter walking. anybody may follow my trail. i have walked, perhaps, a particular wild path along some swamp side all summer, and thought to myself, i am the only villager that ever comes here. but i go out shortly after the first snow has fallen, and lo, here is the track of a sportsman and his dog in my secluded path, and probably he preceded me in the summer as well. but my hour is not his, and i may never meet him. nov. 28, 1859. saw abel brooks with a half -bushel basket on his arm. he was picking up chips on his and neighboring lots, had got about two quarts of old and blackened pine chips, and with these was returning home at dusk more than a mile, such a petty quan tity as you would hardly have gone to the end of your yard for, and yet he said he had got more than two cords of them at home, which he 342 autumn. had collected thus, and sometimes with a wheel barrow. he had thus spent an hour or two, and walked two or three miles in a cool novem ber evening, to pick up two quarts of pine chips scattered through the woods. he evidently takes real satisfaction in collecting his fuel, perhaps gets more heat of all kinds out of it than any man in town. he is not reduced to taking a walk for exercise, as some are. it is one thing to own a wood -lot as he does who perambulates its bounds almost daily, so as to have worn a path about it, and another to own one as many a person does, who hardly knows where it is. evidently the quantity of chips in his basket is not essential. it is the chip ping idea which he pursues. it is to him an unaccountably pleasing occupation, and no doubt he loves to see his pile grow at home. think how variously men spend the same hour in the same village. the lawyer sits talking with his client after twilight, the trader is weighing sugar and salt, while abel brooks is hastening home from the woods with his basket half full of chips. i think i should prefer to be with brooks. he was literally as smiling as a basket of chips. nov. 29, 1839. many brave men have there been, thank fortune, but i shall never grow brave by comparison. when i remember my self, i shall forget them. autumn. 348 cambridge, nov. 29, 1841. one must fight his way after a fashion, even in the most civil and polite society. the most truly kind and generous have to be won by a sort of valor, for the seeds of suspicion as well as those of confi dence lurk in every spadeful of earth. officers of respectable institutions turn the cold shoulder to you, though they are known as genial and well disposed persons. they cannot imagine you to be other than a ro^ue. it is that instinctive principle which makes the cat show her talons, when you take her by the paw. certainly that valor which can open the hearts of men is su perior to that which can only open the gates of cities. you must let people see that they serve themselves more than you. nov. 29, 1850. still misty, drizzling weather without snow or ice. the pines standing in the ocean of mist seen from the cliffs are trees in every stage of transition from the actual to the imaginary. the near are more distant, the dis tant more faint, till at last they are a mere shadowy cone in the distance. you can com mand only a circle of thirty or forty rods in diameter. as you advance, the trees gradually come out of the mist, and take form before your eyes. you are reminded of your dreams. life looks like a dream. you are prepared to see visions. 344 a utumn. nov. 29, 1853. p. m. to j. p. brown s pond hole. j. hosmer showed me a pestle which his son had found this summer, while plowing on the plain between his house and the river. it has a rude bird s head, a hawk s or eagle s, the beak and eyes (the latter a mere prominence) serving for a knob or handle. it is affecting as a work of art by a people who have left so few traces of themselves, a step beyond the common arrow-head and pestle and axe, something more fanciful, a step beyond pure utility. as long as i find traces of works of convenience merely, however much skill they show, i am not so much affected as when i dis cover works which evince the exercise of fancy and taste, however rude. it is a great step to find a pestle whose handle is ornamented with a bird s-head knob. it brings the maker still nearer to the races which so ornament their um brellas and cane handles. i have then evidence in stone that men lived here who had fancies to be pleased, and in whom the first steps toward a complete culture were taken. it implies so many more thoughts such as i have. the arrow head, too, suggests a bird, but a relation to it not in the least godlike. but here an indian has patiently sat, and fashioned a stone in a likeness of a bird, and added some pure beauty to that pure utility, and so far has begun to autumn. 345 leave behind him war and even hunting, to redeem himself from the savage state. enough of this would have saved him from extermina tion. it has been cloudy and milder this afternoon, but now i begin to see in the western horizon a clear crescent of yellowish sky, and suddenly a glorious yellow sunlight falls on all the eastern landscape, russet fields and hillsides, evergreens and rustling oaks, and single leafless trees. in addition to the clearness of the air at this sea son, the light is all from one side, and none being absorbed or dissipated in the heavens, but it being reflected both from the russet earth and the clouds, it is intensely bright. all the limbs of a maple seen far eastward rising over a hill are wonderfully distinct and lit. i think we have some such sunsets as this, and peculiar to the season, every year. i should call it the russet afterglow of the year. it may not be warm, but must be clear and comparatively calm. nov. 29, 1857. p. m. to assabet bath, and down bank. again i am struck by the singu larly wholesome colors of the withered oak leaves, especially the shrub oak, so thick and firm and unworn, without speck, clear reddish-brown, sometimes paler or yellowish-brown, the whitish under sides contrasting with the upper in a very cheerful manner, as if the tree or shrub rejoiced 346 autumn. at the advent of winter. it exhibits the fashion able colors of the winter on the two sides of its leaves. it sets the fashions ; colors good for bare ground or for snow, grateful to the eyes of rabbits and partridges. this is the extent of its gaudiness, red-brown and misty-white, and yet it is gay. the colors of the brightest flowers are not more agreeable to my eye. then there is the rich dark brown of the black oak, large and somewhat curled leaf on sprouts, with its light, almost yellowish-brown under side. then the salmonish hue of white-oak leaves, with the under sides less distinctly lighter. many, how ever, have faded already. nov. 29, 1858. p. m. to hiu. about three inches of snow fell last night. how light and bright the day now ; methinks it is as good as a half hour added to the day. white houses no longer stand out and stare in the landscape. the pine woods snowed up look more like the bare oak woods with their gray boughs. the river meadows show now far off a dull straw color or pale brown amid the general white, where the coarse sedge rises above the snow ; and distant oak woods are now indistinctly red dish. it is a clear and pleasant winter day. the snow has taken all the november out of the sky. now, blue shadows and green rivers (both which i see), and still winter life. i see par autumn. 347 tridge and mice and fox tracks, and crows sit silent on a bare oak top. nov. 29, 1859. to copan. saw quite a flock of snow buntings, not yet very white. they rose from the midst of a stubble field unexpectedly. the moment they settled after wheeling around they were perfectly concealed, though quite near. i could only hear their rippling note from the earth from time to time. nov. 29, 1860. if a man has spent all his days about some business by which he has merely got to be rich, as it is called, has got much money, many houses and barns and wood lots, then his life has been a failure, i think. but if he has been trying to better his condition in a higher sense than this, has been trying to be somebody, that is, to invest himself, and get a patent for it, so that all may see his originality, though he should never get above board (and great inventors, you know, commonly die poor), i shall think him comparatively successful. you would think that some men had been tempted to live in this world at all, only by the offer of a bounty by the general government, a bounty on living. i told such a man the other day that i had got a canada lynx here in con cord, and his instant question was, &quot; have you got the reward for him ? &quot; &quot; what reward ? &quot; &quot; why, the ten dollars which the state offers.&quot; 348 autumn. as long as i saw him, he neither said nor thought anything about the lynx, but only about the reward. you might have inferred that ten dollars was something rarer in his neighborhood than a lynx even, and that he was anxious to see it on that account. i had thought that a lynx was a bright-eyed, four-legged, furry beast, of the cat kind, very current indeed, though its natural gait is by leaps. but he knew it to be a draft drawn by the cashier of the wild cat bank on the state treasury, payable at sight. then i reflected that the first currency was of leather, or a whole creature (whence pecunia, from ^jecws, a herd), and since leather was at first furry, i easily understood the connection between a lynx and ten dollars, and found that all money was traceable right back to the wild cat bank. but the fact was that instead of receiving ten dollars for the lynx, i had paid away some dollars in order to get him, so you see, i was away back in a gray antiquity, behind the institution of money, further than history goes. yet though money can buy no fine fruit whatever, and we are never made truly rich by the possession of it, the value of things is com monly estimated by the amount of money they will fetch. a thing is not valuable, for example, a fine situation for a house, until it is convertible into so much money, that is, can cease to be what autumn. 349 it is and become something else which you prefer. so you will see that all prosaic people who pos sess only the common sense, who believe chiefly in this kind of wealth, are speculators in fancy stocks, and continually cheat themselves ; but poets and all discerning people who have an ob ject in life, and know what they want, speculate in real values. the mean and low values of anything depend on its convertibility into some thing else, that is, have nothing to do with its intrinsic value. the world and our life have practically a similar value only to most. a man has his price at the south, is worth so many dollars, and so he has at the north. many a man has set out by saying, i will make so many dollars by such a time, or before i die, and that is his price, as much as if he were knocked off for it by a southern auctioneer. tuesday, nov. 30, 1841. cambridge. when looking over the dry and dusty volumes of the english poets, i cannot believe that those fresh and fair creations i had imagined are contained in them. english poetry, from gower down, collected into an alcove, and so from the library window compared with the commonest nature, seems very mean. poetry cannot breathe in the scholar s atmosphere. the aubreys and hickeses, with all their learning, profane it yet indirectly by their zeal. you need not envy 350 autumn. his feelings who for the first time had cornered up poetry in an alcove. i can hardly be serious with myself when i remember that i have come to cambridge after poetry. i think if it would not be a shorter way to a complete volume to step at once into the field or wood, with a very low reverence to students and librarians. on running over the titles of these books, looking from time to time at their first pages or farther, i am oppressed by an inevitable sadness. one must have come into a library by an oriel win dow as softly and undisturbed as the light which falls on the books through the stained glass, and not by the librarian s door, else all his dreams will vanish. can the valhalla be warmed by steam and go by clock and bell ? good poetry seems so simple and natural a thing that when we meet it, we wonder that all men are not always poets. poetry is nothing but healthy speech. though more than any other, the poet stands in the midst of nature, yet more than any other can he stand aloof from her. the best lines, perhaps, only suggest that this man simply saw or heard or felt what seems the commonest fact in my experience. nothing is so attractive and unceasingly curi ous as character. there is no plant that needs such tender treatment, there is none that will endure so rough. it is the violet and the oak. autumn. 351 it is divine and related to the heavens, as the earth is by the aurora. it has no acquaintance and no companion. it goes silent and unob served longer than any planet in space, but when at length it does show itself, it seems like the flowering of all the world, and its before unseen orbit is lit up like the track of a meteor. i hear no good news ever, but some trait of a noble character. it reproaches me plaintively. i am mean in contrast, but again am thrilled and ele vated so that i can see my own meanness, and again still, that my own aspiration is realized in that other. you reach me, my friend, not by your kind or wise words uttered to me here or there ; but as you retreat, perhaps after .years of vain familiarity, some gesture or unconscious action in the distance speaks to me with more emphasis than all those years. i am not con cerned to know what eighth planet is wandering in space up there, or when venus or orion rises, but if in any cot east or west, and set behind the woods, there is any planetary character illuminating the earth. packed in my mind lie all the clothes which outward nature wears, for, as its hourly fashions change, it all things else repairs. my eyes look inward, not without, and i but hear myself, 352 autumn. and that new wealth which i have got is part of my own pelf. for while i look for change abroad, i can no difference find, till some new ray of peace uncalled illumes my inmost mind. as when the sun streams through the wood upon a winter s morn, where er his silent beams may stray, the murky night is gone. how could the patient pine have known the morning breeze would come, or simple flower anticipate the insect s noonday hum, till that new light, with morning cheer, from far streamed through the aisles, and nimbly told the forest trees for many stretching miles ? nov. 30, 1851. another cold and windy af ternoon, with some snow, not yet melted, on the ground. under the south side of a hill between brown s and tarbell s, in a warm nook, dis turbed three large gray squirrels and some par tridges, which had all sought out this bare and warm place. while the squirrels hid themselves in the treetops, i sat on an oak stump by an old cellar hole, and mused. this squirrel is always an unexpectedly large animal to see frisking about. my eye wanders across the val ley to the pine woods which fringe the opposite autumn. 353 side, and finds in their aspect something which addresses itself to my nature. methiiiks that in my mood i was asking nature to give me a sign. i do not know exactly what it was that attracted my eye. i experienced a transient gladness, at any rate, at something which i saw. i am sure that my eye rested with pleasure on the white pines now reflecting a silvery light, the infinite stories of their boughs, tier above tier, a sort of basaltic structure, a crumbling precipice of pine horizontally stratified. each pine is like a great green feather stuck in the ground. a myriad white-pine boughs extend themselves horizontally, one above and behind another, each bearing its burden of silvery sunlight, with darker seams between them, as if it were a great crumbling piny precipice thus stratified. on this my eyes pastured while the squirrels were up the trees behind me. that, at any rate, it was that i got by my afternoon walk, a certain recognition from the pine, some congratulation. where is my home? it is indistinct as an old cellar-hole now, a faint indentation merely in a farmer s field, which he has plowed into, rounding off its edges, years ago, and i sit by the old site on the stump of an oak which once grew there. such is nature where we have lived. thick birch groves stand here and there, dark brown now, with white lines here and there. the ly 354 autumn. yodium palmatum [climbing fern] is quite abundant on that side of the swamp, twining round the golden-rods, etc. nov. 30, 1852. to pine hiu. the buds of the populus tremuloides show their down as in early spring, and the early willows. from pine hill, wachusett is seen over walden. the country seems to slope up from the west end of walden to the mountain. already a little after four o clock, the sparkling windows and vanes of the village seen under and against the faintly purple -tinged, slate colored mountains, remind me of a village in a mountainous country at twi light, where early lights appear. i think that this sparkle without redness, a cold glitter, is peculiar to this season. nov. 30, 1853. 8 a. m. to river to examine roots. i ascertain this morning that the white root with eyes, and slaty-tinged fibres, and sharp leaves rolled up, found gnawed off and floating about muskrat houses is the root of the great yellow lily. the leaf-stalk is yellow, while that of the white lily is a downy or mildewy blue black. the yellow-lily root is then, it would seem, a principal item in the vegetable diet of the muskrat. i find that those large triangular or rhomboidal or shell-shaped eyes or shoulders on this root are the bases of leaf-stalks which have rotted off, but toward the upper end of the autumn. 355 root are still seen decaying. they are a sort of abutment on which the leaf-stalk rested. the fine black dots on them are the bases of the line threads or fibres of the leaf-stalk, which in the still living leaf-stalk are distinguished by their purple color. these eyes, like the leaves, of course, are arranged spirally across the roots in parallel rows, in quincunx order, so that four make a diamond figure. nov. 30, 1855. this evening i received cholmondeley s gift of indian books, forty-four volumes in all, which came by the canada. on the twenty-seventh, when i made my last voyage for the season, i found a large round pine log about four feet long, floating, and brought it home. off the larger end i sawed two wheels about a foot in diameter, and seven or eight inches thick, and i fitted to them an axletree made of a joist which i also found in the river. thus i had a convenient pair of wheels on which to get my boat up and roll it about. i was pleased to get my boat in by this means rather than on a borrowed wheelbarrow. it was fit that the river should furnish the ma terial, and that in my last voyage on it, when the ice reminded me that it was time to put it in winter quarters. nov. 30, 1856. minott told me on friday of an oldish man and woman who had brought to a 356 autumn. muster here once a great leg of bacon boiled, to turn a penny with. the skin, as thick as sole leather, was flayed and turned back, displaying the tempting flesh. a tall, raw-boned, omniv orous heron of a yankee came along and bar gained with the woman, who was awaiting a customer, for as much of that as he could eat. he ate and ate and ate, making a surprising hole, greatly to the amusement of the lookers on, till the woman in her despair, unfaithful to her engagement, appealed to the police to drive him off. minott pratt tells me that he watched the fringed gentian this year, and it lasted till the first week in november. nov. 30, 1857. a still, warm, cloudy, rain threatening day. surveying the j. richardson lot. the air is full of geese. i saw five flocks within an hour, about 10 a. m., containing from thirty io fifty each, afterward two more flocks, making in all from two hundred and fifty to three hundred, at least, all flying southwest over goose and walden ponds. you first hear a faint honking from one or two in the northeast, and think there are but few wandering there, but look up and see forty or fifty coming on, in a more or less broken harrow, wedging their way southwest. i suspect they honk more, at any rate they are more broken and alarmed, when autumn. 357 passing over a village, and are seen falling into their ranks again, assuming the perfect harrow form. hearing only one or two honking, even for the seventh time, you think there are but few till you see them. according to my calcu lation, ten or fifteen hundred may have gone over concord to-day. when they fly low and near, they look very black against the sky. nov. 30, 1858. p. m. to walden with c., and fair haven hill. it is a pleasant day, and the snow melting considerably. though wal den is open, it is a perfect winter scene ; this withdrawn, but ample recess in the woods, with all that is necessary for a human residence, yet never referred to by the london u times &quot; and galignani s &quot; messenger,&quot; as some of those arctic bays are. some are hastening to europe, some to the west indies, but here is a bay never steered for. these nameless bays, where the &quot; times &quot; and the &quot; tribune &quot; have no corre spondent, are the true bays of all saints for me. green pines on this side, brown oaks on that, the blue sky overhead, and the white counter pane all around. it is an insignificant fraction of the globe which england and russia and the filibusters have overrun. the open pond close by, though considerably rippled to-day, affects me as a peculiarly mild and genial object by contrast with this frozen pool, and i sit down on 358 autumn. the shore in the sun, on the bare rocks. there seems to be a milder air above it, as the water within it is milder. going west through wheel er s owl wood toward weird dell, well meadow field, i beheld a peculiar winter scene, seen many times before, but forgotten. the sun, rather low, is seen through the wood with a cold, dazzling, white lustre, like that of burnished tin, reflected from the silvery needles of the pine. no powerful light streams through, but you stand in the quiet and somewhat sombre aisles of a forest cathedral, where cold green masses alternate with pale-brown, but warm, leather colored ones ; you are inclined to call them red, reddish tawny, almost ruddy. these are the in ternal decorations, while dark trunks streaked with sunlight rise on all sides, and a pure white floor stretches around, and perhaps a single patch of yellow sunlight is seen on the white shaded floor. did ever clouds flit and change, form and dis solve so fast as in this clear cold air ? for it is rapidly growing colder, and at such a time, with a clear air, wind, and shifting clouds, i never fail to see mother-o -pearl tints abundant in the sky. coming over the side of fair haven hill at sunset, we saw a long, large, dusky cloud in the northwest horizon, apparently just this side of autumn. 359 wachusett, or at least twenty miles off, which was snowing, when all the rest was clear sky. it was a complete snow cloud. it looked like rain falling at an equal distance, except that the snow fell less directly, and the upper outline of a part of the cloud was more like that of a dusky mist. it was not much of a snowstorm, just enough to partially obscure the mountains about which it was falling, while the cloud was appar ently high above them, or it may have been a little this side. the cloud was of a dun color, and at its south end, where the sun was just about to set, it was all aglow on its under side with a salmon fulgor, making it look warmer than a furnace, at the same time that it was snowing. it was a rare and strange sight, that of a snowstorm twenty miles off, on the verge of a perfectly clear sky. thus local is all storm, surrounded by serenity and beauty. the terres trial mountains were made ridiculous beneath that stupendous range. the sun seen setting through the snow-carpeted woods, with shimmer ing pine needles, or dark green spruces, and warm brown oak leaves for screens. with the advent of snow and ice, so much cold white, the browns are warmer to the eye. all the red that is in oak leaves and huckleberry twigs comes out. i cannot but still see in my mind s eye those 360 autumn. little striped breams poised in walden s glaucous water. they balance all the rest of the world in my estimation at present, for this is the bream i have just found, and, for the time being, i neglect all its brethren, and am ready to kill the fatted calf on its account. for more than two centuries have men fished here, and have not distinguished this permanent settler of the township. it is not like a new bird, a transient visitor that may not be seen again for years, but there it dwells and has dwelt permanently, who can tell how long ? when my eyes first rested on walden, the striped bream was poised in it, though i did not see it, and when tahatawan paddled his canoe there. how wild it makes the pond and the township to find a new fish in it. america renews her youth here. but in my account of the bream, i cannot go a hair s breadth beyond the mere statement that it exists, the miracle of its existence. my contemporary and neighbor, yet so different from me ! i can only poise my thought there by its side, and try to think like a bream for a moment. i can only think of precious jewels, of music, poetry, beauty, and the mystery of life. i only see the bream in its orbit, as i see a star, but i care not to measure its distance or weight. the bream appreciated floats in the pond, as the centre of the system, another image of god. its life no autumn. 361 man can explain, more than he can his own. i want you to perceive the mystery of the bream. i have a contemporary in walden. it has fins where i have legs and arms. i have a friend among the fishes, at least a new acquaintance. its character will interest me, i trust, and not its clothes and anatomy. i do not want it to eat. acquaintance with it is to make my life more rich and eventful. it is as if a poet or an an chorite had moved into the town, whom i can see from time to time, and think of yet oftener. though science may sometimes compare her self to a child picking up pebbles on the sea shore, that is a rare mood with her. ordinarily her practical belief is that it is only a few peb bles which are not known, weighed and measured. a new species of fish signifies hardly more than a new name. see what is contributed in the scientific reports. one counts the fin-rays, an other measures the intestines, a third daguerreo types a scale, etc. ; as if all but this were done, and these were very rich and generous contribu tions to science. her votaries may be seen wan dering along the shore of the ocean of truth, with their backs toward it, ready to seize on the shells which are cast up. you would say that the scientific bodies were terribly put to it for objects and subjects. a dead specimen of an animal, if it is only well preserved in alcohol, is 362 autumn. just as good for science as a living one preserved in its native element. what is the amount of my discovery to me ? it is not that i have got one in a bottle, and that it has a name in a book, but that i have a little fishy friend in the pond. how was it when the youth first discovered fishes ? was it the number of their fin-rays or other arrangement, or the place of the fish in some system that made the boy dream of them ? is it these things that interest mankind in the fish, the inhabitant of the water? no, but a faint recognition of a living contemporary, a provoking mystery. one boy thinks of fishes, and goes a-fishing from the same motive that his brother searches the poets for rare lines. it is the poetry of fishes which is their chief use, their flesh is their lowest use. the beauty of the fish, that is what it is best worth while to measure. its place in our systems is of comparatively little importance. generally the boy loses some of his perception and his interest in the fish, and degenerates into a fisherman or an ichthyolo gist. nov. 30, 1859. i am one of a committee of four (simon brown, ex lieutenant governor, r. w. emerson, myself, and john keyes, late high sheriff) instructed by a meeting of citi zens to ask liberty from the selectmen to have the bell of the first parish tolled at the time autumn. 363 captain brown is being hanged, and while we shall be assembled in the town house to express our sympathy with him. i applied to the select men yesterday. after various delays, they at length answer me to-night that they &quot; are uncer tain whether they have any control over the bell, but that, in any case, they will not give their consent to have the bell tolled.&quot; beside their private objections, they are influenced by the remarks of a few individuals ; said that he had heard &quot; five hundred &quot; damn me for it, and that he had no doubt, if it were done, some counter demonstration would be made, such as firing minute guns. a considerable part of concord are in the condition of virginia to day, afraid of their own shadows. it is quite warm to-day, and as i go home on the railroad causeway, i hear a hylodes peeping. dec. 1, 1850. i saw a little green hemi sphere of moss which looked as if it covered a stone, but, thrusting my cane into it, i found it was nothing but moss about fifteen inches in diameter, and eight or nine inches high. when i broke it up, it appeared as if the annual growth was marked by successive layers half an inch deep, each. the lower ones were quite rotten, but the present year s quite green, the intermediate, white. i counted fifteen or eigh teen. it was quite solid, and i saw that it con 364 autumn. tinned solid as it grew by branching occasionally just enough to fill the newly gained space, and the tender extremities of each plant, crowded close together, made the firm and compact sur face of the bed. there was a darker line sep arating the growths, where i thought the surface had been exposed to the winter. it was quite saturated with water, though firm and solid. dec. 1, 1852. to cliffs. the snow keeps off unusually. the landscape is of the color of a russet apple, which has no golden cheek. the sunset sky supplies that. but, though it is crude to bite, it yields a pleasant acid flavor. the year looks back to summer, and a summer smile is reflected in her face. there is in these days a coolness in the air which makes me hesi tate to call them indian summer. at this sea son, i observe the form of the buds which are prepared for spring, the large bright yellow and reddish buds of the swamp pink, the already downy ones of the populus tremuloides and the willows, the red ones of the blueberry, etc., also the catkins of the alders and birches. dec. 1, 1853. those trees and shrubs which retain their withered leaves though the winter, shrub oaks, and young white, red, and black oaks, the lower branches of larger trees of the last mentioned species, hornbeams, young hick ories, etc., seem to form an intermediate class autumn. 365 between deciduous and evergreen trees. they may almost be called the ever -reds. their leaves, which are falling all winter long, serve as a shelter to rabbits and partridges, and other winter birds and quadrupeds. even the chicka dees love to skulk amid them, and peep out from behind them. i hear their faint, silvery, lisp ing notes, like tinkling glass, and occasionally a sprightly day-day-day ^ as they inquisitively hop nearer and nearer to me. they are a most hon est and innocent little bird, drawing yet nearer to us as the winter advances, and deserve best of all of the walker. dec. 1, 1856. p. m. by path around wai den. with this little snow of the 29th ultimo there is yet pretty good sledding, for it lies solid. i see the pale-faced farmer out again on his sled for the five thousandth time. cyrus hubbard, a man of a certain new england probity and worth, immortal and natural, like a natural product, like the sweetness of a nut, like the toughness of hickory. he, too, is a re deemer for me. how superior actually to the faith be professes ! he is not an office-seeker. what an institution, what a revelation is a man ! we are wont foolishly to think that the creed a man professes is more significant than the fact he is. it matters not how hard the conditions seemed, how mean the world, for a 366 autumn. man is a prevalent force, and a new law him self. he is system whose law is to be observed. the old farmer condescends to countenance still this nature and order of things. it is a great encouragement that an honest man makes this world his abode. he rides on the sled drawn by oxen world-wise, yet comparatively so young, as if they had seen scores of winters. the farmer spoke to me, i can swear, clean, cold, moderate, as the snow. he does not melt the snow where he stands. yet what a faint impres sion that encounter may make on me after all ! moderate, natural, true, as if he were made of earth, stone, wood, snow. i thus meet in this universe kindred of mine, composed of these ele ments. i see men like frogs. their peeping i partially understand. i go by haden s and take s. wheeler s wood path to railroad. slate-colored snow-birds flit before me in the path, feeding on the seeds, the countless little brown seeds that begin to be scattered over the snow, so much the more obvi ous to bird and beast. a hundred kinds of in digenous grain are harvested now, broadcast upon the surface of the snow. thus, at a criti cal season, these seeds are shaken down on to a clean, white napkin, unmixed with dirt and rubbish, and off this the little pensioners pick them. their clean table is thus spread a few autumn. 367 inches or feet above the ground. . . . will wonder become extinct in me ? shall i become insensible as a fungus ? a ridge of earth, with the red cock s -comb lichen on it, peeps out still at the rut s edge. the dear wholesome color of shrub-oak leaves, so clean and firm, not decaying, but which have put on a kind of immortality, not wrinkled and thin like the white-oak leaves, but full-veined and plump as nearer earth. well-tanned leather on the one side, sun -tanned, color of colors, color of the cow and the deer, silver-downy be neath, turned toward the late bleached and rus set fields. what are acanthus leaves, and the rest, to this ? emblem of my winter condition. i love and could embrace the shrub oak, with its scanty garment of leaves rising above the snow, lowly whispering to me, akin to winter thoughts, and sunsets, to all virtue ; coverts which the hare and the partridge seek, and i too seek. what cousin of mine is the shrub oak? rigid as iron, clean as the atmosphere, hardy as virtue,innocent and sweet as a maiden, is the shrub oak. in proportion as i know and love it, i am natural and sound as a partridge. i felt a positive yearning toward one bush this afternoon. there was a match found for me at last. i fell in love with a shrub oak. tenacious of its leaves which shrivel not, but retain a cer 368 autumn. tain wintry life in them, firm shields painted in fast colors, a rich brown. the deer-mouse, too, knows the shrub oak, and has its hole in the snow by the shrub oak s stem. now, too, i re mark in many places ridges and fields of fine russet or straw-colored grass rising above the snow, and beds of empty, straw-colored heads of everlasting, and ragged looking roman worm wood. the blue curls chalices stand empty, and waiting evidently to be filled with ice. i see great thimble-berry bushes rising above the snow, with still a rich, rank bloom on them, as in july, hypaethral mildew, elysian fungus ! to see the bloom on the thimble-berry stem lasting into midwinter i what a salve that would make, collected and boxed. no, i am a stranger in your towns. i am not at home at french s or lovejoy s, or savery s. i can winter more to my mind amid the shrub oaks. i have made arrangements to stay with them. the shrub oak, lowly, loving the earth, and spreading over it, tough, thick-leaved, leaves firm and sound in winter, rustling like leather shields, leaves fair and wholesome to the eye, clean and smooth to the touch. tough to sup port the snow, not broken down by it, well-nigh useless to man, a sturdy phalanx, hard to break down, product of new england soil, bearing many striped acorns; well named shrub oak. autumn. 369 low, robust, hardy, indigenous, well-known to the striped squirrel and the partridge and the rabbit. the squirrels nibble its nuts, sitting upon an old stump of its larger cousin. what is peruvian bark to your bark ! how many rents i owe to you, how many eyes put out ! how many bleeding fingers i how many shrub oak patches i have been through, stooping, winding my way, bending the twigs aside, guid ing myself by the sun, over hills and valleys and plains, resting in clear grassy spaces i how can any man suffer long ? for a sense of want is a prayer, and all prayers are answered. dec. 1, 1857. p. m. walking in ebby hub bard s woods, i hear a red squirrel barking at me amid the pine and oak tops, and now i see him coursing from tree to tree. how se curely he travels there fifty feet from the ground, leaping from the slender, bending twig of one tree across an interval of three or four feet, and catching at the nearest twig of the next, which so bends under him, that it is hard at first to get up. his traveling is a succession of leaps in the air at that height, without wings ! and yet he gets along about as rapidly as on the ground. i hear the fainted possible quivet from a nut hatch quite near me on a pine. i thus always begin to hear the bird on the approach of winter, 370 autumn. as if it did not breed, but merely wintered, here. [added later.] hear it all the fall, and occa sionally through the summer of 59. dec. 2, 1839. a rare landscape immediately suggests a suitable inhabitant, whose breath shall be its wind, whose moods its seasons, and to whom it will always be fair. to be chafed and worried, and not as serene as nature, does not become one whose nature is as steadfast as she. we do all stand in the front ranks of the battle every moment of our lives. where there is a brave man, there is the thickest of the fight, there the post of honor. not he who procures a substitute to go to florida is exempt from ser vice. he gathers his laurels in another field. waterloo is not the only battle-ground. as many and fatal guns are pointed at my breast now, as are contained in the english arsenals. dec. 2, 1852. the pleasantest day of all. started in boat before 9 a. m., down river to billerica with w. e. c. not wind enough for a sail. i do not remember when i have taken a sail or a row on the river in december before. we had to break the ice about the boathouse for some distance. still no snow. the banks are white with frost. the air is calm and the water smooth. the distant sounds of cars, cocks, hounds, etc., as we glide past n. barrett s farm remind me of spring. it is an anticipation, autumn. 371 a looking through winter to spring. there is a certain resonance and elasticity in the air that makes the least sound melodious as in spring. the old unpainted houses under the trees look as if winter had come and gone. a side of one is painted as if with the pumpkin pies left over after thanksgiving, it is so singular a yellow. the river has risen since the last rain a few feet, and partially floods the meadow. see still two ducks there. hear the jay in distant copses, and the fringilla linaria flies and mews over. some parts of the meadow are covered with ice, through which we row, which yet lasts all day. the waves we make in the river nibble and crumble its edge, and produce a rustling of the grass and seeds, as if a muskrat were stirring. we land behind tarbell s, and walk inland. how warm in the hollows ! the outline of the hills is very agreeable there, ridgy hills with backs to them. a perfect cowpath winds along the side of one. these creatures have such weight to carry that they select the easiest course. again embark. it is remarkably calm and warm in the sun, now that we have brought a hill between us and the wind. there goes a muskrat. he leaves so long a ripple behind that in this light you cannot tell where his body ends, and think him longer than he is. this is a glorious river reach. at length we pass the bridge. every 372 autumn. where the muskrat houses line the shores, or what was the shore, some three feet high, and regu larly sharp, as the peak of teneriffe. c. says, &quot; let us land ; 4 the angle of incidence should be equal to the angle of reflection. &quot; we did so. by the island where i formerly camped, half a mile or more above the bridge on the road from chelmsford to bedford, we saw a mink, slender, black at ten rods distance (emmonds says they are a dark, glossy brown), very like a weasel in form. he alternately ran along the ice and swam in the water, now and then hold ing up his head and long neck, and looking at us, not so shy as a muskrat ; i should say very black. the muskrats would curl up into a ball on the ice, decidedly reddish brown. the ice made no show, being thin and dark. the mink s head is larger in proportion to the body than the muskrat s, not so sharp and rat-like. left our boat just above the last-named bridge on west side. a bright, dazzling sheen for miles on the river as you look up it. crossed the bridge, turned into a path on the left, and as cended a hill a mile and a half off, between us and billerica, somewhat off from the river. the concord affords the water prospects of a larger river, like the connecticut even, hereabouts. i found a spear-head by a mysterious little build ing. on the west side of the river in billerica autumn. 373 here is a grand range of hills, somewhat cliffy, covered with young oaks, whose leaves now give it a red appearance even when seen from ball s hill. it is one of the most interesting and novel features in the river scenery. men commonly talk as if genius were some thing proper to an individual. i esteem it but a common privilege, and if one does not enjoy it now, he may congratulate his neighbor that he does. there is no place for man-worship. we understand very well a man s relation, not to his genius, but to the genius. returning, the water is smoother and more beautiful than before. the ripples we make produce ribbed reflections or shadows on the dense but leafless bushes on shore, thirty or forty rods distant, very regular, and so far they seem motionless and permanent. all the water behind us, as we row, and even on the right and left at a distance, is perfectly unruffled, we move so fast, but before us down stream it is all in commotion from shore to shore. there are some fine shadows on those grand red oaken hills in the north. when a muskrat comes to the surface too near you, how quickly and with what force he turns and plunges again, making a sound in the calm water as if you had thrown into it a large stone with violence. long did it take to sink the carlisle bridge. the reflections 374 autumn. after sunset were distinct and glorious, the heaven into which we unceasingly rowed. i thought now that the angle of reflection was greater than the angle of incidence. it grew cooler ; the stars came out soon after we turned ball s hill, and it became difficult to distinguish our course. the boatman knows a river by reaches. got home in the dark, our feet and legs numb and cold with sitting and inactivity, having been about eight miles by river, etc. it was some time before we recovered the full use of our cramped legs. i forgot to speak of the after glows. the twilight in fact had several stages, and several times after it had grown dusky, acquired a new transparency, and the trees on the hillsides were lit up again. dec. 2, 1853. the skeleton, which at first sight produces only a shudder in all mortals, becomes at last, not only a pure, but a sugges tive and pleasing object to science. the more we know of it, the less we associate it with any goblin of our imagination. the longer we keep it, the less likely it is that any such will come to claim it. we discover that the only spirit which haunts it is a universal intelligence which has created it in harmony with all nature. sci ence never saw a ghost, nor does it look for any, but it sees everywhere the traces, and is itself the agent, of a universal intelligence. autumn. 375 dec. 2, 1856. saw melvin s lank, bluish white, black-spotted hound, and melvin with his gun near by, going home at eve. he follows hunting, praise be to him, as regularly in our tame fields as the farmers follow farming ; per sistent genius, how i respect and thank him for it. i trust the lord will provide us with an other melvin when he is gone. how good in him to follow his own bent, and not continue at the sabbath-school all his days ! what a wealth he thus becomes to the neighborhood. few know how to take the census. i thank my stars for melvin, who is such a trial to his mother. he is agreeable to me as a tinge of russet on the hillside. i would fain give thanks morn ing and evening for my blessings. awkward, gawky, loose-hung, dragging his legs after him, he is my contemporary and neighbor. he is of one tribe, i of another, and we are not at war. how quickly men come on to the highways with their sleds, and improve the first snow. the farmer has begun to play with his sled as early as any of the boys. i see him already with mittens on and thick boots well-greased, and fur cap, and red comforter about his throat, though it is not yet cold, walking beside his team with contented thoughts. this drama every day in the streets ! this is the theatre i go to. there he goes with his venture behind him, and often he gets aboard for a change. 376 autumn. dec. 2, 1857. i find that according to the deed of duncan ingraham to john richardson in 1797, my old beanfield at walden pond then belonged to george minott. (c. minott thinks he bought it of an allen.) this was deacon george minott, who lived in the house next below the east quarter schoolhouse, and was a brother of my grandfather-in-law. he was directly de scended from thomas minott, who, according to shattuck, was secretary of the abbot of wal den (!) in essex, and whose son george was born at saffron walden (!) and was afterwards one of the early settlers of dorchester. dec. 3, 1853. p. m. up river by boat to clamshell hill. i see that muskrats have not only erected cabins, but since the river rose have in some places dug galleries a rod into the bank, pushing the sand behind them into the water. so they dig these now as places of retreat merely, or for the same purpose as the cabins apparently. one i explored this afternoon was formed in a low shore at a spot where there were weeds to make a cabin of, and was apparently never completed, perhaps because the shore was too low. some of the clamshells, probably opened by the muskrats, and left lying on their half-sunken cabins where they are kept wet by the waves, show very handsome rainbow tints. ... it is a somewhat saddening reflection that autumn. 377 the beautiful colors of this shell, for want of light, cannot be said to exist, until its inhabitant has fallen a prey to the spoiler, and it is thus left a wreck upon the strand. its beauty then beams forth, and it remains a splendid cenotaph to its departed tenant, suggesting what glory he has gone to. though fitted to be, it is not a gem &quot;of purest ray serene,&quot; so long as it remains in &quot; the dark, unfathomed caves of ocean,&quot; but only when it is tossed up to light. it is as if the occupant had not begun to live, until the light, with whatever violence, is let into its shell with these magical results. these shells beam ing with the tints of the sky and the rainbow commingled, suggest what pure serenity has oc cupied them. there the clam dwells within a little pearly heaven of its own. look at the trees, bare or rustling with sere brown leaves, except the evergreens ; the buds dormant at the foot of the leaf -stalks ; look at the fields, russet and withered, and the various sedges and weeds with dry, bleached culms : such is our relation to nature at present, such plants are we. we have no more sap, nor verdure, nor color now. i remember how cheerful it has been formerly to sit round a fire outdoors amid the snow, and while i felt some cold, to feel some warmth also, and see the fire gradually in creasing and prevailing over damp steaming and 378 autumn. dripping logs, and making a warm hearth for me. even in winter we maintain a temperate cheer, a serene inward life, not destitute of warmth and melody. dec. 3, 1840. music, in proportion as it is pure, is distant. the strains i now hear seem at an inconceivable distance, yet remotely within me. remoteness throws all sound into my in most being, and it becomes music, as the slum brous sounds of the village, or the tinkling of the forge from across the water or the fields. to the senses, that is farthest from me which addresses the greatest depth within me. dec. 3, 1856. mizzles and rains all day, making sloshy walking, which sends us all to the shoemaker s. bought me a pair of cowhide boots to be prepared for winter walks. the shoemaker praised them, because they were made a year ago. i feel like an armed man now. the man who has bought his boots feels like him who has got in his winter s wood. there they stand beside me in the chamber, expec tant, dreaming of far woods and wood paths, of frost-bound or sloshy roads, or of being bound with skate-straps and clogged with ice dust. for years my appetite was so strong that i browsed on the pine forest s edge seen against the winter horizon. how cheap my diet still ! autumn. 379 dry sand that has fallen in the railroad cuts, and slid on the snow beneath, is a condiment to my walk. i ranged about like a gray moose looking at the spiring tops of the trees, and fed my imagination on them, far away, ideal trees, not disturbed by the axe of the wood -cutter. where was the sap, the fruit, the value of the forest for me but in that line where it was relieved against the sky ! that was my wood lot ; the silvery needles of the pine straining the light. a man killed at the fatal lincoln bridge died in the village the other night. the only words he uttered while he lingered in his delirium were &quot; all right,&quot; probably the last he uttered when he was struck. brave, prophetic words to go out of the world with ! good as &quot; i still live.&quot; how i love the simple, reserved countrymen, my neighbors, who mind their own business and let me alone, who never waylaid nor shot at me, to my knowledge, when i crossed their fields, though each one has a gun in his house. for nearly twoscore years, i have known at a dis tance these long-suffering men, whom i never spoke to, who never spoke to me, and now i feel a certain tenderness for them, as if this long probation were but the prelude to an eternal friendship. what a long trial we have with stood, and how much more admirable we are to 380 autumn. each other, perchance, than if we had been bed fellows. i am not only grateful because homer, and christ, and shakespeare have lived, but i am grateful for minott, and rice, and melvin, and goodwin, and puffer even. i see melvin all alone filling his sphere in russet suit, which no other would fill or suggest. he takes up as much room in nature as the most famous. six weeks ago i noticed the advent of chicka dees, and their winter habits. as you walk along a woodside, a restless little flock of them, whose notes you hear at a distance, will seem to say, &quot; oh, there he goes, let s pay our respects to him ! &quot; and they will flit after and close to you, and naively peck at the nearest twig to you, as if they were minding their own business all the while, without any reference to you. dec. 3, 1857. surveying the richardson lot which bounds on walden pond, i turned up a rock near the pond to make a bound with, and found under it and attached to it, a collection of black ants (say one fourth of an inch long), and an inch in diameter, collected around one mon ster black ant, as big as four or five at least, and a small parcel of yellowish eggs (?). the large ant had no wings, and was probably the queen. the ants were quite lively, though but little way under the rock. the eggs (?) ad hered to the rock, when turned up. autumn. 381 dec. 3, 1858. i improve every opportunity to go into a grist-mill, any excuse to see its cobweb tapestry. i put questions to the miller, as an excuse for staying, while my eye rests delighted on the cobwebs above his head, and perchance on his hat. dec. 3, 1859. suddenly quite cold, and freezes in the house. rode with a man this morning, who said that if he did not clean his teeth when he got up, it made him sick all the rest of the day, but he had found, by late expe rience, that when he had not cleaned his teeth for several days, they cleaned themselves. i as sured him that such was the general rule, that when, from any cause, we were prevented from doing what we had commonly thought indispens able for us to do, things cleaned or took care of themselves. was betrayed by his eyes, which had a glaring film over them, and no serene depth into which you could look. inquired particularly the way to emerson s, and the distance, and when i told him, said he knew it as well as if he saw it. wished to turn and proceed to his house. said, &quot; i know i am insane,&quot; and i knew it too. he also called it &quot; nervous excite ment.&quot; at length when i made a certain re mark, he said, &quot; i don t know but you are emerson ; are you ? you look somewhat like 382 autumn. him.&quot; he said as much, two or three times, and added once, &quot; but then emerson would not lie.&quot; finally put his questions to me, of fate, etc., as if i were emerson. getting to the woods, i remarked upon them, and he men tioned my name, but never to the end suspected who his companion was. then proceeded to business, &quot; since the time was short,&quot; and put to me the questions he was going to put to emer son. his insanity exhibited itself chiefly by his incessant excited talk, scarcely allowing me to interrupt him, but once or twice apologizing for his behavior. what he said was for the most part connected and sensible enough. when i hear of john brown and his wife weeping at length, it is as if the rocks sweated. dec. 3, 1860. talking with and to-day, they declared that john brown did wrong. when i said that i thought he was right, they agreed in asserting that he did wrong because he threw his life away, and that no man had a right to undertake anything which he knew would cost him his life. i inquired if christ did not foresee that he would be crucified, if he preached such doctrines as he did, but they both (though as if it were their only escape) as serted that they did not believe he did. upon which a third party threw in, &quot; you do not think he had as much foresight as brown.&quot; of autumn. 383 course, they as good as said that if christ had foreseen that he would be crucified, he would have &quot;backed out.&quot; such are the principles and the logic of the mass of men. it is to be remembered that by good deeds or words you encourage yourself, who always have need to witness or hear them. dec. 4, 1840. i seem to have experienced a joy sometimes like that with which yonder tree for so long has budded and blossomed, and re flected the green rays. the opposite shore of the pond, seen through the haze of a september afternoon, as it lies stretched out in gray con tent, answers to some streak in me. dec. 4, 1856. i notice that the swallow holes in the bank behind dennis s, which is partly washed away, are flat elliptical, three times or more as wide horizontally as they are deep vertically, or about three inches by one. saw and heard cheep faintly one little tree sparrow, the neat, chestnut-crowned and winged, and white -barred bird, so clean and tough, made to withstand the winter. this color re minds one of the upper side of the shrub-oak leaf. the frinyilla hiemalis also. i love the few homely colors of nature at this season, her strong, wholesome browns, her sober and pri meval grays, her celestial blue, her vivacious green, her pure cold snowy white. thus nature 384 autumn. feeds her children cheaply with color. i have no doubt that it is an important relief to the eyes which have long rested on snow, to rest on brown oak leaves and the bark of trees. we want the greatest variety within the smallest compass, and yet without glaring diversity, and we have it in the colors of the withered oak leaves ; the white, so curled, shriveled, and pale ; the black (?), more flat and glossy, and darker brown ; the red, much like the black, but, per haps, less dark and less deeply cut. the scar let still occasionally retains some blood in its veins. smooth white reaches of ice, as long as the river on each side, are threatening to bridge over its dark-blue artery, any night. they remind me of a trap set for it, which the frost will spring. each day, at present, the wrig gling river nibbles off the edges of the trap which have advanced in the night. it is a close contest between day and night. already you see the tracks of sleds leading by unusual routes, where will be seen no trace of them in summer, into far fields and woods, crowding aside and pressing down the snow, to where some heavy log or stone has thought itself secure, and the spreading tracks, also, of the heavy, slow-paced oxen, and the well-shod farmer who turns out his feet. erelong, when autumn. 385 the cold is stronger, these tracks will lead the walker deep into remote swamps impassable in summer. all the earth is a highway then. sophia says that just before i came home, min caught a mouse, and was playing with it in the yard. it had got away from her once or twice and she had caught it again, and now it was stealing off again, as she was complacently watching it with her paws tucked under her, when her friend, riorden s stout cock, stepped up inquisitively, looked down at it with one eye, turning its head, then picked it up by the tail, gave it two or three whacks on the ground, and giving it a dexterous toss in the air, caught it in its open mouth, and it went, head foremost and alive, down its capacious throat in the twinkling of an eye, never again to be seen in this world ; min all the while, with paws com fortably tucked under her, looking on uncon cerned. what matters it one mouse, more or less, to her ? the cock walked off amid the cur rant-bushes, stretched his neck up and gulped once or twice, and the deed was accomplished. then he crowed lustily in celebration of the ex ploit. it might be set down among the gesta yallorum. there were several human witnesses. it is a question whether min ever understood where that mouse went to. she sits composedly sentinel, with paws tucked under her, a good 386 autumn. part of her days at present, by some ridiculous little hole, the possible entry of a mouse. he who abstains from visiting another for magnanimous reasons, enjoys better society alone. my first botany, as i remember, was &quot; bige low s plants of boston and vicinity,&quot; which i began to use about twenty years ago, looking chiefly for the popular names, and the short refer ences to the localities of plants, even without any regard to the plant. i also learned the names of many, but without using any system, and forgot them soon. i was not inclined to pluck flowers, but preferred to leave them where they were, and liked them best there. i was never in the least interested in plants in the house. but from time to time we look at nature with new eyes. about half a dozen years ago, i found myself again attending to plants with more method, looking out the name of each one, and remembering it. i began to bring them home in my hat, a straw one with a scaffold lining to it, which i called my botany box. i never used any other, and when some whom i visited were evidently surprised at its dilapi dated look, as i deposited it on their front entry table, i assured them it was not so much my hat, as my botany box. i remember gazing with interest at the swamps about those days, autumn. 387 and wondering if i could ever attain to such familiarity with plants that i should know the species of every twig and leaf in them, should be acquainted with every plant (except grasses and cryptogamous ones), summer and winter, that i saw. though i knew most of the flowers, and there were not in any particular swamp more than half a dozen shrubs that i did not know, yet these made it seem like a maze of a thousand strange species, and i even thought of commencing at one end, and look ing it faithfully and laboriously through, till i knew it all. i little thought that in a year or two i should have attained to that knowledge without all that labor. still, i never studied botany, and do not to-day, systematically, the most natural system is still so artificial. i wanted to know my neighbors, if possible, to get a little nearer to them. i soon found myself observing when plants first blossomed and leaved, and i followed it up early and late, far and near, several years in succession, running to different sides of the town and into neighbor ing towns, often between twenty and thirty miles in a day. i often visited a particular plant four or five miles distant half a dozen times within a fortnight, that i might know exactly when it opened, besides attending at the same time to a great many others in different 388 autumn. directions, and some of them equally distant. at the same time i had an eye for birds and whatever else might offer. dec. 4, 1859. awake to winter, and snow two or three inches deep, the first of any conse quence. dec. 5, 1853. p. m. got my boat in. the river frozen over thinly in most places, and whitened with snow which was sprinkled on it this noon. 4 p. m. to cliffs. now for short days and early twilight, in which i hear the sound of wood-chopping. the sun goes down behind a low cloud, and the world is darkened. the partridge is budding on the apple-tree, and bursts away from the pathside. before i got home, the whole atmosphere was suddenly filled with a mellow, yellowish light equally diffused, so that it seemed much lighter around me than immediately after the sun sank behind the hori zon-cloud fifteen minutes before. apparently not till the sun had sunk thus far, did i stand in the angle of reflection. dec. 5, 1856. p. m. as i walk along the side of the hill, a pair of nuthatches flit by toward a walnut tree, flying low in mid course, and then ascending to the tree. i hear one s faint tut-tut or quaji-quah (no doubt heard a good way off by its mate, now flown to the next autumn. 389 tree), as it is ascending the trunk or branch of a walnut in a zigzag manner, wriggling along, prying into the crevices of the bark ; and now it has found a savory morsel which it pauses to devour, then flits to a new bough. it is a chubby bird, white, slate-color, and black. it is a perfectly cloudless and simple winter sky. a white moon half full in the pale or dull blue heaven, and a whiteness like the reflection of the snow extending up from the horizon all around, a quarter of the way up to the zenith. i can imagine that i see it shooting up like an aurora now at 4 p. m. about the sun it is only whiter than elsewhere, or there is only the faintest possible tinge of yellow there. my themes shall not be far-fetched. i will tell of homely, every-day phenomena and adven tures. friends, society ! it seems to me that i have an abundance, there is so much that i re joice in and sympathize with, and men, too, that i never speak to, but only know and think of. what you call bareness and poverty is to me simplicity. god could not be unkind to me, if he should try. i love the winter with its im prisonment and its cold, for it compels the pris oner to try new fields and resources. i love to have the river closed up for a season, and a pause put to my boating, to be obliged to get my boat in. i shall launch it again in the spring with 390 autumn. so much more pleasure. this is an advantage in point of abstinence and moderation compared with the seaside boating, where the boat ever lies on the shore. i love best to have each thing in its season only, and enjoy doing without it at all other times. it is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all. i find it invari ably true, the poorer i am, the richer i am. what you consider my disadvantage, i consider my advantage ; while you are pleased to get knowledge and culture, i am delighted to think i am getting rid of them. i have never got over my surprise that i should have been born into the most estimable place in all the world, and in the very nick of time, too. dec. 5, 1858. how singularly ornamented is that salamander. its brightest side, its yellow belly, sprinkled with fine dark spots, is turned downwards. its back is indeed ornamented with two rows of bright vermilion spots, but they can only be detected on the very closest inspection, and poor eyes fail to discover them even then, as i have found. dec. 6, 1854. to providence to lecture. after lecturing twice this winter, i feel that i am in danger of cheapening myself by trying to become a successful lecturer, that is, to interest my audiences. i am disappointed to find that most that i am, and value myself for, is lost, or autumn. 391 worse than lost, on my audience. i fail to get even the attention of the mass. i should suit them better if i suited myself less. you cannot interest them except as you are like them, and sympathize with them. i would rather that my audience should come to me, than i go to them ; that so they should be sifted ; that is, i would rather write books than lectures. to read to a promiscuous audience, who are at your mercy, the fine thoughts you solaced yourself with, far away, is as violent as to fatten geese by cram ming, and in this case they do not get fatter. dec. 6, 1856. 2 p. m. to hubbard s bridge and holden swamp, and up river on ice to fair haven pond crossing, just below pond ; back on east side of river. skating is fairly begun. i can walk through the spruce swamp now dry shod amid the water andromeda and kalmia glauca. how handsome every one of these leaves that are blown about over the snow crust, or lie neglected beneath, soon to turn to mould ! not merely a matted mass of fibres like a sheet of paper, but a perfect organism and system in itself, so that no mortal has ever yet discerned or explored its beauty. over against this swamp, i take to the river-side where the ice will bear. white snow-ice it is, but pretty smooth. it is quite glare close to the shore, and wherever the water overflowed yesterday. just this side of 392 autumn. bittern cliff, i see the very remarkable track of an otter, made undoubtedly december 3d, when the snow-ice was mere slush. it had come up through a hole (now black ice) by the stem of a button-bush, and apparently pushed its way through the slush, as through snow 011 land, leaving a track eight inches wide, more or less, with the now frozen snow shoved up two inches above the general level on each side. where the ice was firmer were seen only the track of its feet. at bittern cliff i saw where these creatures had been playing, sliding or fishing, apparently to-day, on the snow-covered rocks, on which for a rod upwards and as much in width, the snow was trodden and worn quite smooth, as if twenty had trodden and slid there for several hours. their droppings are a mass of fishes scales and bones, loose, scaly, black masses. at this point, the black ice approached within three or four feet of the rock, and there was an open space just there a foot or two across, which appeared to have been kept open by them. i continued along on that side, and crossed on white ice just below the pond. the river was all tracked up with otters from bittern cliff upward. sometimes one had trailed his tail edgewise, making a mark like the tail of a deer mouse ; sometimes they were moving fast, and there was an interval of five feet between the autumn. 393 tracks. i saw one place where there was a zig zag piece of black ice two rods long and a foot wide in the midst of the white, which i was sur prised to find had been made by an otter push ing his way through the slush. he had left fishes scales, etc., at the end. these very con spicuous tracks generally commenced and termi nated at some button-bush or willow where black ice now marked the hole of that date. it is sur prising that our hunters know no more about them. when i speak of the otter to our oldest village doctor, who should be ex officio a natu ralist, he is greatly surprised, not knowing that such an animal is found in these parts, and i have to remind him that the pilgrims sent home many otter skins in the first vessels that re turned, together with beaver, mink, and black fox skins, 1,156 pounds of other skins in the years 1631-36, which brought fourteen or fifteen shillings a pound, also 12,530 pounds of beaver skins. 1 in many places the otters appeared to have gone floundering along in the slushy ice and water. on all sides in swamps and about their edges, and in the woods, the bare shrubs are sprinkled with buds more or less noticeable and pretty, their little gemma3 or gems their most vital and attractive parts now, almost all the greenness 1 vide bradford s history. 394 autumn. and color left, greens and salads for the birds and rabbits. our eyes go searching along the stem for what is most vivacious and characteris tic, the concentrated summer gone into winter quarters. for we are hunters pursuing the summer on snow-shoes and skates all winter long, and there is really but one season in our hearts. dec. 7, 1838. never do we live a quite free life, like adam s, but are enveloped in an invisi ble network of speculations. our progress is from one such speculation to another, and only at rare intervals do we perceive that it is no progress. could we for a moment drop this by play, and simply wonder without reference or inference ! dec. 7, 1852. p. m. perhaps the warmest day yet. true indian summer. the walker perspires. the shepherd s purse is in full bloom ; the andromeda not turned red. saw a pile of snow-fleas in a rut in the wood-path, six or seven inches long, and three quarters of an inch high ; to the eye exactly like powder, as if a sportsman had spilled it from his flask, and when a stick was passed through the living and skipping mass, each side of the furrow preserved its edge, as in powder. dec. 7, 1856. skate to fair haven pond. this is the first skating. it takes my feet a autumn. 395 few moments to get used to the skates. i see the track of one skater who has preceded me this morning. now i go skating over hobbly places, now shoot over a bridge of ice only a foot wide between the water and the shore at a bend. now i suddenly see the trembling sur face of water where i thought were black spots of ice only, around me. the river is rather low, so that i cannot keep to it above the clam shell bend. i am confined to a very narrow edging of ice on the meadow, gliding with unex pected ease through withered sedge, but slipping sometimes on a twig, again taking the snow to reach the next ice, but this rests my feet ; strad dling the bare black willows, winding between the button-bushes, and following narrow thread ings of ice amid the sedge, which bring me out to clear fields unexpectedly. occasionally i am obliged to take a few strokes over black and thin-looking ice where the neighboring bank is springy, and am slow to acquire confidence in it, but returning, how bold i am ! now i glide over a field of white air-cells close to the sur face, with covering no thicker than egg-shells, cutting through with a sharp crackling sound. there are many of those singular spider-shaped dark places amid the white ice, where the surface water has run through some days ago. that grand old poem called winter is round again 396 autumn. without any connivance of mine. as i sit under lee s cliff, where the snow is melted, amid sere pennyroyal and frostbitten catnip, i look over my shoulder upon an arctic scene, and see with surprise the pond, a dumb white surface of ice speckled with snow, just as so many winters before, where so lately were lapsing waves or smooth, reflecting water. i see the holes which the pickerel fisher has made, and i see him, too, retreating over the hills drawing his sled behind him. the water is already skimmed over again, and i hear the familiar belching voice of the pond. it seemed as if winter had come without any interval since midsummer, and i was pre pared to see it flit away by the time i again looked over my shoulder. it was as if i had dreamed it. the winters come now as fast as snowflakes. it is wonderful that old men do not lose their reckoning. it was summer, and now again it is winter. nature loves this rhyme so well that she never tires of repeating it. so sweet and wholesome is the winter, so simple and moderate, so satisfactory and perfect, that her children will never weary of it. what a poem, an epic in blank verse, enriched with a million tinkling rhymes ! it is solid beauty. it has been subjected to the vicissitudes of millions of years of the gods, and not a superfluous orna ment remains. the severest and coldest of the autumn. 397 immortal critics have shot their arrows at it, and pruned it, till it cannot be amended. you will see full-grown woods where the oaks and pines and birches are separated by right lines, growing in squares or other rectilinear fig ures, because different lots were cut at different times. dec. 7, 1857. running the long northwest side of richardson s fair haven lot. it is a fine, sunny, and warm day in t/ie woods for the season. we eat our dinner in the middle of the line, amid the young oaks in a sheltered and un frequented place. i cut some leafy shrub oaks, and cast them down for a dry and springy seat. as i sit there amid the sweet fern, talking with my man, briney, i observe that its recent shoots (which like many larger bushes and trees have a few leaves in a tuft still at the extremi ties) toward the sun are densely covered with a slight silvery down which looks like frost, so thick and white. looking the other way, i see none of it, but the bare reddish twigs. even this is a cheering and compensating discovery in my otherwise barren work. i get thus a few positive values answering to the bread and cheese which makes my dinner. i owe thus to my week s surveying a few such slight, but posi tive discoveries. dec. 8, 1838. nothing in nature is sneak 398 autumn. ing or chap-fallen, as somewhat maltreated or slighted, but each is satisfied with its being, and so is as lavender and balm. if skunk-cabbage is offensive to the nostrils of men, still has it not drooped in consequence, but trustfully un folded its leaf of two handsbreadth. what was it to lord byron whether england owned or disowned him, whether he smelled sour and was skunk-cabbage to the english nostril, or, vio let-like, the pride of the land and ornament of every lady s boudoir. let not the oyster grieve that he has lost the race ; he has gained as an oyster. dec. 8, 1850. it snowed in the night of the 6th, and the ground is now covered ; our first snow, two inches deep. i see no tracks now of cows or men or boys beyond the edge of the wood. suddenly they are shut up. the re mote pastures and hills beyond the woods are closed to cows and cowherds, aye, and to cow ards. i am struck by this sudden solitude and remoteness which these places have acquired. the dear privacy and retirement and solitude which winter makes possible, carpeting the earth with snow, furnishing more than woolen feet to all walkers ! from fair haven i see the hills and fields, aye and the icy woods in the corner, gleam with the dear old wintry sheen. those are not surely the cottages i have seen all autumn. 399 summer. they are some cottages which i have in my mind. it is interesting to observe the manner in which the plants bear their snowy burden. the dry calyx-leaves, like an oblong cup, of the trichostema dichotomum in the woodpath, have caught the rain or melting snow, and so this little butter-boat is filled with a frozen pure drop which stands up high above the sides of the cup, so many pearly drops covering the whole plant. the pennyroyal there also retains its fragrance under the ice and snow. dec. 8, 1852. one cannot burn or bury even his old shoes without a feeling of sadness and compassion, much more his own body, without a slight sense of guilt. dec. 8, 1853. 7 a. m. how can we spare to be abroad in the morning red, to see the forms of the eastern trees against the dun sky, and hear the cocks crow, when a thin low mist hangs over the ice and frost in meadows. i have come along the river-side in merrick s pasture to col lect for kindling the fat pine roots and knots which the spearers dropped last spring, and which the floods have washed up. get a heap ing bushel-basket full. dec. 8, 1854. p. m. up river and meadow on ice to hubbard s bridge, and thence to wai den. winter has come unnoticed by me, i 400 autumn. have been so busy writing. this is the life most lead in respect of nature. how different from my habitual one ! it is hasty, coarse, and trivial, as if you were a spindle in a factory. the other is leisurely, fine, and glorious, like a flower. in the first case, you are merely getting your living. in the second, you live as you go along. you travel only on roads of the proper grade, without jar or running off the track, and sweep around the hills by beautiful curves. here is the river frozen over in many places. the skating is all hobbled like a coat of mail or thickly bossed shield, apparently sleet frozen in water. how black the water where the river is open, when i look from the light, by contrast with the surrounding white, the ice and snow ! a black artery, here and there concealed under a pellicle of ice. went over the fields on the crust, to walden, over side of bear garden. already foxes have left their tracks. how the crust shines afar, the sun now setting. there is a glorious clear sunset sky, soft and delicate and warm, even like a pigeon s neck. why do the mountains never look so fair as from my native fields ? dec. 8, 1855. this afternoon i go to the woods down the railroad, seeking the society of some flock of little birds, or some squirrel, but in vain. i only hear the faint lisp of probably a a utumn. 401 tree sparrow. i go through empty halls, appar ently unoccupied by bird or beast. yet it is cheering to walk there, while the sun is reflected from far through the aisles with a silvery light from the needles of the pine. the contrast of light or sunshine and shade, though the latter is now so thin, is food enough for me. in a little busy flock of lisping birds, chickadees or lesser red-polls, even in a nuthatch or downy woodpecker, there would have been a sweet society for me. but i did not find it. yet i had the sun penetrating into the deep hollows through the aisles of the wood, and the silvery sheen of its reflection from masses of white pine needles. jacob farmer brought me the head of a mink to-night, and took tea here. he says he can call a male quail close to him by imitating the note of the female, which is only a faint whistle. dec. 8, 1856. 8 above zero. probably the coldest day yet. bradford, in his history of the plymouth plan tation, remembering the condition of the pil grims on their arrival in cape cod bay the llth of november, 1620, o. s., says (p. 79), &quot; which way so ever they turned their eyes (save up ward to the heavens) they could have little sol ace or content in respect of any outward objects, 402 autumn. for, summer being done, all things stared upon them with a weather beaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hue.&quot; such was a new eng land november, in 1620, to bradford s eyes, and such no doubt it would be to his eyes in the country still. it required no little courage to found a colony here at that season of the year. the earliest mention of anything like a glaze in new england that i remember is in the same history, p. 83, where bradford describes the second expedition from cape cod harbor in search of a settlement, the 6th of december, o. s. : &quot; the weather was very cold, and it froze so hard as the spray of the sea lighting on their coats, they were as if they had been glazed.&quot; bradford was one of the ten principal persons. that same night they reached the bottom of the bay, and saw the indians cutting up a black fish. nature has not changed one iota. dec. 8, 1857. s says he came to con cord twenty-four years ago, a poor boy, with a dollar and three cents in his pocket, and he spent the three cents for drink at bigelow s tavern, and now he is worth &quot; twenty hundred dollars clear.&quot; he remembers many who in herited wealth whom he could buy out to-day. i told him that he had done better than i, in a pecuniary respect, for i had only earned my autumn. 403 living. &quot; well,&quot; said he, &quot;that s all i ve done, and i don t know as i ve got much better clothes than you.&quot; i was particularly poorly clad then, in the woods ; my hat, pants, boots, rubbers, and gloves would not have brought fourpence, and i told the irishman that it was n t everybody could afford to have a fringe round his legs, as i had, my corduroys not pre serving a selvage. dec. 8, 1859. how is it that what is actually present and transpiring is commonly perceived by the common sense and understanding only, is bare and bald, without halo, or the blue enamel of intervening air ? but let it be past or to come, and it is at once idealized. the man dead is spiritualized, the fact remembered is idealized. it is ripe and with the bloom on it. it is not simply the understanding now, but the imagina tion that takes cognizance of it. the imagina tion requires a long range. it is the faculty of the poet to see present things as if in this sense past and future, as if distant or universally sig nificant. we do not know poets, heroes, and saints for our contemporaries, but we locate them in some far off vale ; the greater and better, the farther off we are accustomed to con sider them. we believe in spirits, we believe in beauty, but not now and here. they have their abode in the remote past, or in the future. 404 autumn. dec. 9, 1852. p. m. to a. smith s hill. those little ruby-crowned lesser red -polls still about. they suddenly flash away from this side to that, in flocks, with a tumultuous note, half gurgle, half rattle, like nuts shaken in a bag, or a bushel of nutshells, soon returning to the tree they had forsaken on some alarm. they are oftenest seen on the white birch, apparently feeding on its seeds, scattering the scales about. a fresh dandelion. the chestnuts are about as plenty as ever, both in the fauen burrs and out of them. there are more this year than the squirrels can consume. i picked three pints this afternoon, and did not find one mouldy one among those which i picked from under the wet and mouldy leaves. they are plump and tender. i love to gather them, if only for the sense of the bountifulness of nature they give me. a few petals of the witch hazel still hold on. a man tells me he saw a violet to-day. in the &quot; homes of american authors,&quot; it is said of most that at one time they wrote for the &quot;north american review.&quot; it is one of my qualifications that i have not written an article for the &quot; north american review.&quot; dec. 9, 1856. p. m. railroad to lincoln bridge and back by road. from a little east of wyman s i look over the pond westward. the sun is near setting, away beyond fair haven. autumn. 405 a bewitching stillness reigns through all the woodland, and over all the snow-clad landscape. indeed, the winter day in the woods or fields has commonly the stillness of twilight. the pond is perfectly smooth and full of light. i hear only the strokes of a lingering woodchopper at a distance and the melodious hooting of an owl, which is as common and marked a sound as that of the axe or the locomotive whistle ; yet where does the ubiquitous hooter sit? and who sees him? in whose wood-lot is he to be found? few eyes have rested on him hooting, few on him silent on his perch even, yet cut away the woods never so much year after year, though the chopper has not seen him, and only a grove or two is left, still his aboriginal voice is heard in definitely far and sweet, mingled oft in strange harmony with the newly invented din of trade, hooting from his invisible perch at his foes, the woodchoppers who are invading his domains. as the earth only a few inches beneath the sur face is undisturbed and what it was anciently, so are heard still some primeval sounds in the air. some of my townsmen i never see, and of a great proportion i do not hear the voices in a year, though they live within my horizon ; but every week almost, i hear the loud voice of the hooting owl, though i do not see the bird more than once in ten years. 406 autumn. i perceive that more or other things are seen in the reflection than in the substance. as i look over the pond westward, i see in substance the now bare outline of fair haven hill, a mile beyond ; whereas in the reflection i see not this, only the tops of some pines which stand close to the shore, but are invisible against the dark hill beyond, and these are indefinitely prolonged into points of shadow. the sun is set, and over the valley which looks like an outlet of walden toward fair haven, i see a burnished bar of cloud stretched low and level, as if it were the bar over that passage-way to elysium, the last column in the train of the sun. when i get as far as my bean field, the reflected white in the winter horizon of the perfectly cloudless sky is being condensed at the horizon s edge, and its hue deepening into a dun golden, against which the tops of the trees, pines and elms, are seen with a beautiful dis tinctness, and a slight blush begins to suffuse the eastern horizon, and so the picture of the day is done, and set in a gilded frame. such is a winter eve. now for a merry fire, some old poet s pages, or else serene philosophy, or even a healthy book of travels, to last far into the night, eked out perhaps with the walnuts which we gathered in november. the worker who would accomplish much these autumn. 407 short days, must shear a dusky slice off both ends of the night. the chopper must work as long as he can see, often returning home by moonlight, and set out for the woods again by candle-light. the northwest wind meeting the current in an exposed place produces that hobbly ice which i described at cardinal shore day before yester day. such is the case in this place every year, and no doubt the same phenomenon occurred annually at this point in the river, a thousand years before america was discovered. this reg ularity and permanence make these phenomena more interesting to me. dec. 9, 1858. at new bedford. see a song sparrow and a pigeon woodpecker. dr. bryant tells of the latter pecking holes in blinds, and also in his barn roof and sides in order to get into it, holes in the window sashes or casings, as if a nail had been driven into them. dec. 10, 1837. not the carpenter alone car ries his rule in his pocket. space is quite sub dued to us. the meanest peasant finds in a hair of his head, or the white crescent upon his nail, the unit of measure for the distance of the fixed stars. his middle finger measures how many digits into space. he extends a few times his thumb and finger, and the continent is spanned. he stretches out his arms, and the sea is fath omed. 408 autumn. dec. 10, 1840. i discover a strange track in the snow, and learn that some migrating otter has made across from the river to the wood, by my yard and the smith s shop, in the silence of the night. i cannot but smile at my own wealth when i am thus reminded that every chink and cranny of nature is full to overflowing. such an incident as this startles me with the assur ance that the primeval nature is still working, and makes tracks in the snow. it is my own fault that he must thus skulk across my prem ises by night. now i yearn toward him, and heaven to me consists in a complete commu nion with the otter nature. he travels a more wooded path by watercourses and hedgerows, i by the highways, but though his tracks are now crosswise to mine, our courses are not divergent, but we shall meet at last. mere innocence will tame any ferocity. dec. 10, 1853. another still more glorious day, if possible. indian summer, even. these are among the finest days in the year, on account of the wholesome bracing coolness and clearness. paddled up assabet. passed in some places be tween shooting ice crystals extending from both sides of the stream. upon the thinnest black ice crystals, just cemented, was the appearance of broad fern leaves or ostrich plumes, or flat fir-trees with branches bent down. the surface autumn. 409 was far from even, rather in sharp-edged plaits and folds. the form of the crystals was often est that of low flattish or three-sided pyramids. when the base was very broad, the apex was imperfect, with many irregular rosettes of small and perfect pyramids, the largest with bases two or three inches long. all this appeared to advantage only while the ice (one twelfth of an inch thick, perhaps), rested on the black water. what i write about at home, i understand so well comparatively, and i write with such re pose and freedom from exaggeration. dec. 10, 1854. p. m. to nut meadow. weather warmer. snow softened. saw a large flock of snow-buntings (quite white against woods, at any rate), though it is quite warm. snow-fleas in paths ; first i have seen. hear the small woodpecker s whistle ; not much else, only crows and partridges and chickadees. how quickly the snow feels the warmer wind. the crust, which was so firm and rigid, is now sud denly softened, and there is much water in the road. dec. 10, 1856. a fine, clear, cold winter morning, with a small leaf-frost on trees, etc. the thermometer at 7.15 and 7.30 a. m., 3 + it is remarkable how suggestive the slightest drawing is as a memento of things seen. for a few years past i have been accustomed to make 410 autumn. a rude sketch in my journal, of plants, ice, and various natural phenomena, and though the full est accompanying description may fail to recall my experience, these rude outline drawings do not fail to carry me back to that time and scene. it is as if i saw the same thing again, and i may again attempt to describe it in words, if i choose. yesterday i walked under the murderous lincoln bridge, where at least ten men have been swept dead from the cars within as many years. i looked to see if their heads had in dented the bridge, if there were sturdy blows given as well as received, and if their brains lay about. the place looks as innocent as &quot; a bank whereon the wild thyme grows.&quot; the bridge does its work in an artistic manner. we have another of exactly the same character in another part of the town, which has killed one, at least, to my knowledge. surely the approaches to our town are well guarded. these are our modern dragons of wantley. buccaneers of the fitch burg railroad, they lie in wait at the narrow passes, and decimate the employees. the com pany has signed a bond to give up one employee at this pass annually. the vermont mother commits her son to their charge, and when she asks for him again, the directors say, &quot; i am not your son s keeper ; go look beneath the ribs autumn. 411 of the lincoln bridge.&quot; it is a monster which would not have minded perseus with his me dusa s head. if he could be held back only four feet from where he now crouches, all travelers might pass in safety, and laugh him to scorn. this would require but a little resolution in our legislature, but it is preferred to pay tribute still. dec. 11, 1840. a man who had failed to ful fill an engagement, and grossly disappointed me, came to me to-night with a countenance radiant with repentance, and so behaved that it seemed as if i was the defaulter and could not be satis fied till he would let me stand in that light. how long a course of strict integrity might have come short of such confidence and good will i the crack of his whip was before attractive enough, but such conciliatory words from that shaggy coat and coarse comforter i had not ex pected. i saw the meaning which lurked far behind eye, all the better for the dark, as we see some faint stars better when we do not look directly at them with the full light of the eye. a true contrition, when witnessed, will humble integrity itself. dec. 11, 1853. to heywood s pond and up brook. almost a complete indian-summer day, clear and warm. i am without greatcoat. ch. says he saw larks yesterday, a painted tor 412 autumn. toise the day before, under ice at white pond, and a ground robin (?) last week. he conjec tures, i am told, that the landscape looks fairer when we turn our heads upside down, because we behold it with nerves of the eye unused before. perhaps this reason is worth more for suggestion than explanation. it occurs to me that the reflection of objects in still water is in a similar manner fairer than the substance, and yet we do not employ unused nerves to behold it. is it not that we let much more light into our eyes (which in the usual position are shaded by the brows), in the first case, by turning them more to the sky, and in the case of the reflec tions, by having the sky placed under our feet ? that is, in both cases we see terrestrial objects, with the sky or heavens for a background or field ; accordingly they are not dark or terrene, but lit and elysian. dec. 11, 1854. p. m. to bare hill. we have now those early, still, clear winter sunsets over the snow. it is but mid-afternoon when i see the sun setting far through the woods, and there is that peculiar, clear, vitreous, greenish sky in the west, as it were, a molten gem. the day is short. it seems to be composed of two twilights merely. the morning and the evening twilight make the whole day. you must make haste to do the work of the day before it is dark. autumn. 413 i hear rarely a bird except the chickadee, or perchance a jay or a crow. a gray rabbit scuds away over the crust in the swamp on the edge of the great meadows beyond peters s. a par tridge goes off, and coming up, i see where she struck the snow with her wings, making five or six, as it were, finger-marks. dec. 11, 1855. p. m. to holden swamp, conantum. for the first time i wear gloves, but i have not walked early this season. i see no birds, but hear, i think, one or two tree sparrows. no snow, scarcely any ice to be detected ; it is only aggravated november. i thread the tangle of the spruce swamp, admiring the leaflets of the swamp pyrus which had put forth again, now frost-bitten, the great yellow buds of the swamp pink, the round red buds of the high blueberry, and the firm sharp red ones of the panicled andromeda. slowly i worm my way amid the snarl, the thicket of black alder, blueberry, etc., see the forms, apparently of rab bits, at the foot of maples, and cat-birds nests now exposed in the leafless thicket. standing there, though in this bare november landscape, i am reminded of the incredible phenomenon of small birds in winter, that erelong, amid the cold, powdery snow, as it were a fruit of the season, will come twittering a flock of delicate, crimson-tinged birds, lesser red-polls, to sport 414 autumn. and feed on the seeds and buds just ripe for them on the sunny side of a wood, shaking down the powdery snow there in their cheerful social feeding, as if it were high midsummer to them. these crimson aerial creatures have wings which would bear them quickly to the regions of sum mer, but here is all the summer they want. what a rich contrast ! tropical colors, crimson breasts, on cold white snow ! such etherealness, such delicacy in their forms, such ripeness in their colors, in this stern and barren season ! it is as surprising as if you were to find a brilliant crim son flower which flourished amid snow. they greet the hunter and the chopper in their furs. their maker gave them the last touch, and launched them forth the day of the great snow. he made this bitter imprisoning cold, before which man quails, but he made at the same time these warm and glowing creatures to twitter and be at home in it. he said not only, let there be linnets in winter, but linnets of rich plumage and pleasing twitter, bearing summer in their natures. the snow will be three feet deep, the ice will be two feet thick, and last night, perchance, the mercury sank to thirty degrees below zero. all the fountains of nature seem to be sealed up. the traveler is frozen on his way, but under the edge of yonder birch wood will be a little flock of crimson-breasted lesser autumn. 415 red-polls, feeding on the seeds of the birch, as if a flower were created to be now in bloom, a peach to be now first fully ripe on its stem. i am struck by the perfect confidence and success of nature. there is no question about the ex istence of these delicate creatures, their adapt edness to their circumstances. there is added superfluous painting and adornment, a crystal line, jewel-like health and soundness, like the colors reflected from ice-crystals. when some rare northern bird, like the pine grossbeak, is seen thus far south, in the winter, he does not suggest poverty, but dazzles us with his beauty. there is in them a warmth that is akin to the warmth that melts the icicle. here is no im perfection suggested. the winter with its snow and ice is not an evil to be corrected. it is as it was designed and made to be, for the artist has had leisure to add beauty to use. i had a vision thus prospectively, as i stood in the swamp, of these birds, my acquaintances, angels from the north. i saw this familiar, too familiar fact, at a different angle, and i was charmed and haunted by it. i had seen into paradisaic re gions with their air and sky, and i was no longer wholly or merely a denizen of this vulgar earth. yet i had hardly a foothold there. it is only necessary to behold thus the least fact or phe nomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair s 416 a utumn. breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and sig nificance. only what we have touched and worn is trivial, our scurf, repetition, tradition, con formity. to perceive freshly, with fresh senses, is to be inspired. great winter itself looked like a precious gem reflecting rainbow colors from one angle. my body is all sentient. as i go here or there, i am tickled by this or that i come in contact with, as if i touched the wires of a battery. i can generally recall, have fresh in my mind, several scratches last received. these i continually recall to mind, reimpress and harp upon. the age of miracles is each moment thus returned ; now it is wild apples, now river reflections, now a flock of lesser red polls. in winter, too, resides immortal youth and perennial summer. its head is not silvered, its cheek is not blanched, but has a ruby tinge in it. if any part of nature excites our pity, it is for ourselves we grieve, for there is eternal health and beauty. we get only transient and partial glimpses of the beauty of the world. standing at the right angle, we &re dazzled by the colors of the rainbow in colorless ice. from the right point of view, every storm and every drop in it is a rainbow. beauty and music are not mere traits and exceptions; they are the rule and character. it is the exception that we autumn. 417 see and hear. then i try to discover what it was in the vision that charmed and translated me. what if we could daguerreotype our thoughts and feelings ! for i am surprised and enchanted often by some quality which i cannot detect. i have seen an attribute of an other world and condition of things. it is a wonderful fact that i should be affected, and thus deeply and powerfully, more than by aught else in all my experience, that this fruit should be borne in me, sprung from a seed finer than the spores of fungi floated from other atmos pheres ! finer than the dust caught in the sails of vessels a thousand miles from land ! here the invisible seeds settle, and spring, and bear flowers and fruits of immortal beauty. dec. 11, 1856. minott tells me that his and his sister s wood-lot contains about ten acres, and has, with a very slight exception at one time, supplied all their fuel for thirty years, and he thinks would constantly continue to do so. they keep one fire all the time, and two some of the time, and burn about eight cords in a year. he knows his wood-lot, and what grows in it, as well as an ordinary farmer does his cornfield, for he has cut his own wood till within two or three years, knows the history of every stump on it, and the age of every sapling, knows how many beech-trees and black birches there are, as an 418 autumn. other knows his pear or cherry trees. it is more economical as well as more poetical to have a wood-lot, and cut and get your own wood from year to year than to buy it at your own door. minott may say to his trees, &quot; submit to my axe ; i cut your father on this very spot.&quot; how many sweet passages there must have been in his life there, chopping all alone in the short winter days! how many rabbits, partridges, foxes he saw ! a rill runs through the lot where he quenched his thirst, and several times he has laid it bare. at last rheumatism has made him a prisoner, and he is compelled to let a stranger, a vandal it may be, go into his lot with an axe. it is fit that he should be buried there. dec. 12, 1837. there are times when thought elbows her way through the underwood of words to the clear blue beyond : &quot; o er bog or steep, though strait, rough, dense, or rare, with head, hands, wings, or feet, pursues her way, and swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies.&quot; but let her don her cumbersome working-day garment, and each sparkling dewdrop will seem a &quot; slough of despond.&quot; when we speak of a peculiarity in a man or a nation, we think sometimes to describe a mere mathematical point. but in fact it pervades the whole, as a drop of wine in a glass of water tinges the whole glass. some parts may be fur autumn. 419 ther removed than others from the centre, but not a particle so remote as not to be shined on or shaded by it. no part of man s nature is formed with a useless or sinister intent. in no respect can he be wholly bad, but the worst passions have their root in the best. so a spine is proved to be only an abortive branch &quot; which, notwith standing, even as a spine, bears leaves, and in euphorbia heptagona, sometimes flowers and fruit.&quot; dec. 12, 1840. society seems very natural and easy. can i not walk among men as sim ply as in the woods ? i am greeted everywhere with mild looks and words, and it seems as if the eaves were running, and i heard the sough of melting snow all around me. the young pines springing up in the cornfields from year to year are to me a much more refresh ing fact than the most abundant harvests. my last stronghold is the forest. dec. 12, 1851. in regard to my friends, i feel that i know and have communion with a finer and subtler part of themselves which does not put me off when they put me off, which is not cold to me when they are cold, not till i am cold. i hold by a deeper and stronger tie than absence can sunder. ah, dear nature, the mere remembrance, after 420 autumn. a short forgetfulness, of the pine woods ! i come to it as a hungry man to a crust of bread. i have been surveying for twenty or thirty days, living coarsely, even as respects my diet (for i find that will always alter to suit my em ployment), indeed leading a quite trivial life, and to-night, for the first time, made a fire in my chamber and endeavored to return to myself. i wished to ally myself to the powers that rule the universe. i wished to dive into some deep stream of thoughtful and devoted life which meanders through retired and fertile meadows far from towns. i wished to do again, or for once, things quite congenial to my highest, in most, and most sacred nature, to lurk in crystal line thought like the trout under verdurous banks where stray mankind should only see my bub ble come to the surface. i wished to live, ah, as far away as a man can think. i wished for leisure and quiet to let my life flow in its proper channels, with its proper currents, when i might not waste the days, might establish daily prayer and thanksgiving in my family, might do my own work, and not the work of concord and carlisle, which would yield me better than money. i bethought myself, while my fire was kindling, to open one of emerson s books, which it happens that i rarely look at, to try what a chance sentence out of that could do for me, autumn. 421 thinking at the same time of a conversation i had with him the other night, i finding fault with him for the stress he had laid on some of margaret fuller s whims and superstitions, but he declaring gravely that she was one of those persons whose experience warranted her attach ing importance to such things as the sortes vir giliance, for instance, of which her numerous friends could give remarkable accounts. at any rate, i saw that he was disposed to regard such things more seriously than i. the first sentence which i opened upon in his book was this, &quot; if, with a high trust, he can thus submit himself, he will find that ample returns are poured into his bosom, out of what seemed hours of obstruc tion and loss. let him not grieve too much on account of unfit associates,&quot; etc. ; &quot; in a society of perfect sympathy, no word, no act, no record would be. he will learn that it is not much matter what he reads, what he does. be a scholar, and he shall have the scholar s part of everything,&quot; etc. most of this corresponded well enough with my mood, and this would be as good an instance of the sortes virgiliance as most, to quote. but what makes this coincidence very little, if at all, remarkable to me, is the fact of the obviousness of the moral, so that i had per haps thought the same thing myself twenty times during the day, and yet had not been contented 422 autumn. with that account of it, leaving me thus to be amused by the coincidence, rather than impressed as by an intimation out of the deeps. how much forbearance, aye, sacrifice and loss, goes to every accomplishment ! i am thinking by what long discipline and at what cost, a man learns to speak simply at last. nothing is so sure to make itself known as the truth, for what else waits to be known. dec. 12, 1852. colder at last. saw a violet on the c. miles road where the bank had been burned in the fall. beomyces rosea, also. tansy still fresh yellow, by the lower bridge. from cliffs, i see snow on the mountains. last night s rain was then snow there. they now have a parti colored look, like the skin of a pard, as if they were spread with a saddle-cloth for boreas to ride. i hear of a cultivated rose blossoming in a garden in cambridge within a day or two. the buds of the aspen are large, and show wool in the fall. dec. 12, 1856. wonderful, wonderful is our life, and that of our companions ! that there should be such a thing as a brute animal, not human ! that it should attain to a sort of society with our race ! think of cats, for instance ; they are neither chinese nor tartars, they nei ther go to school, nor read the testament. yet how near they come to doing so, how much they autumn. 423 are like us who do so. at length without hav ing solved any of these problems, we fatten and kill and eat some of our cousins ! where is the great natural historian ? is he a butcher ? or the patron of butchers ? as well look for a great anthropologist among cannibals or new zealanders. dec. 12, 1858. up river on ice to fair ha ven hill. i see an immense flock of snow bunt ings, i think the largest i ever saw. there must be a thousand or two, at least. there is but three inches at most of crusted and dry frozen snow, and they are running amid the weeds that rise above it. they are very rest less, and continually changing their ground. they will suddenly rise again a few seconds after they have alighted, as if alarmed, but after a short wheel, settle close by. as they fly from you in some positions, you see only or chiefly the black part of their bodies, and then as they wheel, the white comes into view, contrasted prettily with the former, and in all together at the same time. seen flying higher against a cloudy sky, they look like snowflakes. when they rise all together, their note is like the rattling of nuts in a bag, as if a whole bin-full were rolled from side to side. they also utter from time to time, that is, individuals do, a clear rippling note, perhaps an alarm or call. it 424 autumn. is remarkable that their note, above described, should resemble the lesser red-polls . away goes the great wheeling, rambling flock, rolling through the air, and you cannot easily tell where they will settle. suddenly the pioneers, or a part not foremost, will change their course, when in full career, and, when at length they know it, the rushing flock on the other side will be fetched about, as it were, with an undu lating jerk, as in the boys game of snap-the whip, and those that occupy the place of the. snapper are gradually off after their leaders on the new track. like a snowstorm, they come rushing down from the north. they are unusu ally abundant now. i should like to know where all these snowbirds will roost to-night, for they will probably roost together. what havoc an owl might make among them ! so far as i observe, they confine themselves to the uplands, not alighting in the meadows. but melvin tells me he saw a thousand feeding a long time in the great meadows, he thinks on the seeds of the wool grass, about the same time i saw those above described. dec. 13, 1851. surveying to-day. we had one hour of most indian-summer weather in the middle of the day. i felt the influence of the sun. it softened my stoniness a little. the pines looked like old friends again. cutting a autumn. 425 path through swamp where was much brittle dogwood, etc., i wanted to know the name of every bush. this varied employment to which my necessities compel me serves instead of for eign travel and the lapse of time. if it makes me forget some things which i ought to re member, it no doubt makes me forget many things which i ought to forget. by stepping aside from my chosen path so often, i see my self better, and am enabled to criticise myself better. it seems an age since i took walks and wrote in my journal, and when shall i re visit the glimpses of the moon ? to be able to see ourselves, not merely as others see us, but as we are, that service a variety of absorbing employments does us. i would not be rude to the fine intimations of the gods for fear of incurring the reproach of superstition. saw perez blood in his frock, a stuttering, sure, unpretending man, who does not speak without thinking, does not guess. when i re flected how different he was from his neighbors, i saw that it was not so much outwardly, but that i saw an inner form. we do indeed see through and through each other, through the veil of the body, and see the real form and character, in spite of the garment. any coarseness or ten derness is seen and felt under whatever garb. 420 autumn. how nakedly men appear to us, for the spirit ual assists the natural eye. dec. 13, 1852. walk early through the woods to lincoln to survey. winter weather may be said to have begun yesterday. why have i ever omitted early rising and a morning walk ? as we walked over the cedar hill, mr. weston asked me if i had ever noticed how the frost formed about a particular weed in the grass, and no other. it was a clear cold morn ing. we stooped to examine, and i observed about the base of the cistus the frost formed into little flattened trumpets or bells, an inch or more long, with the mouths down about the base of the stem. they were very conspicuous, dot ting the grass white. but the most remarkable thing about it was that though there were plenty of other dead weeds and grasses about, no other species exhibited this phenomenon. i think it can hardly be because of the form of its top, and that therefore the moisture is collected and con densed, and flows down its stem. it may have something to do with the life of the root, which i noticed was putting forth shoots beneath. per haps the growth generates heat and so steam. dec. 13, 1855. sanborn tells me that he was waked up a few nights ago in boston about mid night by the sound of a flock of geese passing over the city, probably about the same night i autumn. 427 heard them here. they go honking over cities where the arts flourish, waking the inhabitants, over state-houses and capitols, where legislatures sit, over harbors where fleets lie at anchor, mistaking the city, perhaps, for a swamp or the edge of a lake, about settling in it, not sus pecting that it is preoccupied by greater geese than themselves. dec. 13, 1857. in sickness and barrenness, it is encouraging to believe that our life is dammed, and is coming to a head, so that there seems to be no loss, for what is lost in time is gained in power. all at once, unaccountably, as we are walking in the woods, or sitting in our chamber, after a worthless fortnight, we cease to feel mean and barren. dec. 13, 1859. my first true winter walk is perhaps that which i take on the river, or where i cannot go in the summer. it is the walk pe culiar to winter, and now first i take it. i see that the fox has already taken the same walk be fore me, just along the edge of the button-bushes where not even he can go in the summer. we both turn our steps hither at the same time. now at 2.30 p. m., the melon-rind arrange ment of the clouds, really parallel columns of fine mackerel sky reaching quite across the heavens from west to east, with clear intervals of blue sky ; and a fine-grained vapor like spun 428 autumn. glass extending in the same direction beneath the former. in half an hour, all the mackerel sky is gone. what an ever-changing scene is the sky, its drifting cirrus and stratus ! the spectators are not requested to take a recess of fifteen minutes while the scene changes, but, walking commonly with our faces to the earth, our thoughts revert to other objects, and as often as we look up, the scene has changed. now i see it is a column of white vapor reaching quite across the sky from west to east, with locks of fine hair or tow that is carded, combed out on each side, surprising touches here and there which show a peculiar state of the atmosphere. no doubt the best weather signs are in these forms which the vapor takes. when i next look up the locks of hair are perfect fir-trees, with their recurved branches. these trees extend at right angles from the side of the main column. this ap pearance is changed all over the sky in one minute. again it is pieces of asbestos, or the vapor takes the curved form of the surf or breakers, and again, of flames. but how long can a man be in a mood to watch the heavens ? that melon-rind arrange ment, so very common, is perhaps a confirmation of wise the balloonist s statement that at a autumn. 429 certain height there is a current of air moving from west to east. hence we so commonly see the clouds arranged in parallel divisions in that direction. what a spectacle the subtle vapors that have their habitation in the sky pre sent these winter days ! you have not only un varying forms of a given type of cloud, but vari ous types at different heights or hours. it is a scene, for variety, for beauty and grandeur, out of all proportion to the attention it gets. who watched the forms of the clouds over this part of the earth a thousand years ago ? who watches them to-day ? when i reach the causeway at the cut, re turning, the sun has just set, a perfect winter sunset, so fair and pure, with its golden and purple isles, i think the summer rarely equals it. there are real damask-colored isles or continents north of the sun s place, and further off north east they pass into bluish purple. hayden s house, one which i see there, seems the abode of the blessed. the eastern horizon also is purple. but that part of the parallel cloud columns over head is now invisible. at length, the purple travels westward, as the sunk sinks lower below the horizon, the clouds overhead are brought out, and so the purple glow glides down the western sky. dec. 14, 1840. how may a man most cleanly 430 autumn. and gracefully depart out of nature ? at pres ent ms birth and death are offensive and un clean things. disease kills him and his carcass smells to heaven. it offends the bodily sense only so much as his life offended the moral sense. it is the odor of sin. his carcass in vites sun and moisture, and makes haste to burst forth into new and disgusting forms of life with which it already teemed. it was no better than carrion before, but just animated enough to keep off the crows. the birds of prey which hover in the rear of an army are an intolerable satire on mankind, and may well make the soldier shudder. the mosquito sings our dirge, he is charon come to ferry us over the styx. he preaches a biting homily to us. he says, put away beef and pork, small beer and ale, and my trump shall die away, and be no more heard. the intemperate cannot go nigh to any wood or marsh, but he hears his re quiem sung. man lays down his body in the field, and thinks from it, as a stepping-stone, to vault at once into heaven, as if he could estab lish a better claim, when he had left such a witness behind him on the plain. our true epi taphs are those which the sun and wind write upon the atmosphere around our graves so con clusively that the traveler does not draw near to read the lie on our tombstones. shall we not autumn. 431 be judged rather by what we leave behind us, than by what we bring into the world ? the guest is known by his leavings. when we have become intolerable to ourselves, shall we be tolerable to heaven? will our spirits ascend pure and fragrant from our tainted carcasses? may we not suffer our impurities gradually to evaporate in sun and wind with the superfluous juices of the body, and so wither and dry up, at last, like a tree in the woods, which possesses a sort of embalmed life after death, and is as clean as the sapling or fresh buds of spring? let us die by dry rot at least. the dead tree still stands erect without shame or offense amidst its green brethren, the most picturesque object in the wood. the painter puts it into the foreground of his picture, for in its death it is still remembered. when nature finds man returned on her hands, he is not simply the pure elements she has contributed to his growth, but with her floods she must wash away, and with her fires burn up the filth that has accumulated, before she can receive her own again. he poisons her gales, and is a curse to the land that gave him birth. she is obliged to employ her scavengers in self-defense to abate the nui sance. may not man cast his shell with as little offense as the mussel, and it, perchance, be a precious relic to be kept in the cabinets of the 432 autumn. curious ? may we not amuse ourselves with it, as when we count the layers of a shell, and apply it to our ear, to hear the history of its inhabitant in the swells of the sea, the pulsation of the life which once passed therein still faintly echoed ? we confess that it was well done in nature thus to let out her particles of lime to the mussel and coral, to receive them back again with such interest. the ancients were more tidy than we, who subjected the body to the purification of fire be fore they returned it upon nature, for fire is the true washer ; water only displaces the impurity. fire is thorough, water is superficial. dec. 14, 1851. as for the weather, all sea sons are pretty much alike to one who is actively at work in the woods. i should say that there were two or three remarkably warm days, and as many cold ones in the course of the year, but the rest are all alike in respect to tempera ture. this is my answer to my acquaintances, who ask if i have not found it very cold being out all day. i hear the small woodpecker whistle as he flies toward the leafless wood on fair haven, doomed to be out this winter. the chickadees remind me of hudson s bay for some reason. i look on them as natives of a more northern lati tude. autumn. 433 the now dry and empty, but clean-washed cups of the blue curls spot the half snow-covered grain-fields. where lately was a delicate blue flower, now all the winter are held up these dry chalices. what mementos to stand above the snow ! why not live out more yet, and have my friends and relatives altogether in nature ? only my acquaintances among the villagers ? that way diverges from this i follow, not at a sharp, but a very wide angle. ah, nature is serene and immortal. am i not one of the zincali ? there are certain places where the ice will always be open, where, perchance, warmer springs come in. there are such places in every character, genial and open in the coldest seasons. i come from contact with certain acquaint ances, whom even i am disposed to look to ward as possible friends. it oftenest happens that i come from them wounded. only they can wound me seriously, and that perhaps with out their knowing it. dec. 14, 1852. ah, who can tell the serenity and clarity of a new england winter sunset ? this could not be till the cold and the snow came. what isles those western clouds, in what a sea! dec. 14, 1854. p. m. with c. up north 434 autumn. bank of assabet to bridge. the river is open almost its whole length. it is a beautifully smooth mirror with an icy frame. it is well to improve such a time to walk by it. this strip of water of irregular width over the channel be tween broad fields of ice looks like a polished silver mirror, or like another surface of polished ice, and often is distinguished from the sur rounding ice only by its reflections. i have rarely seen any reflections (of weeds, willows, and elms, and the houses of the village) so dis tinct, the stems so black and distinct, for they contrast not with a green meadow, but clear white ice, to say nothing of the silvery surface of the water. your eye slides first over a plane surface of smooth ice of one color, to a watery surface of silvery smoothness, like a gem set in ice, and reflecting the weeds, trees, houses, and clouds with singular beauty. the reflections are particularly simple and distinct. these twigs are not referred to and confounded with a broad green meadow from which they spring, as in summer, but instead of that broad green ground absorbing the light, is the abrupt white field of ice. dec. 15, 1837. jack frost. as further con firmation of the fact that vegetation is a kind of crystallization, i observe that upon the edge of the melting frost on the windows, jack is autumn. 435 playing singular freaks, jiow bundling together his needle-shaped leaves so as to resemble fields waving with grain, or shocks of wheat rising here and there from the stubble. on one side, the vegetation of the torrid zone is presented, high-towering palms, and wide-spread banyans, such as we see in pictures of oriental scenery. on the other, are arctic pines, stiff-frozen, with branches downcast, like the arms of tender men in frosty weather. in some instances, the panes are covered with little feathery flocks where the particles radiate from a common centre, the number of radii varying from three to seven or eight. the crystalline particles are partial to the creases and flaws in the glass, and when these extend from sash to sash, form complete hedgerows, or miniature watercourses, where dense masses of crystal foliage &quot;high over arched embower.&quot; dec. 15, 1838. silence is ever less strange than noise, lurking amid the boughs of the hem lock or the pine, just in proportion as we find ourselves there. the nuthatch tapping the up right trunks by our side is only a partial spokes man for the solemn stillness. silence is the communion of a conscious soul with itself. if the soul attend for a moment to its own infinity, then and there is silence. she is audible to all men, at all times, in all places. 436 autumn. if we will, we may always hearken to her ad monitions. dec. 15, 1840. when most at one with na ture i feel supported and propped on all sides by a myriad influences, as trees in the plain or on the hillside are equally perpendicular. the most upright man is he that most entirely re clines (the prone recline but partially) ; by his entire reliance he is most erect. men of little faith stand only by their feet, or recline on the ground, having lost their reliance on the soul. nature is right, but man is straight. she erects no beams, she slants no rafters, and yet she builds stronger and truer than he. everywhere she preaches not abstract, but practical truth. she is no beauty at her toilet, but her cheek is flushed with exercise. dec. 15, 1856. 3 p. m. to walden. i ob serve b s boat left out at the pond, as last winter. when i see that a man neglects his boat thus, i do not wonder that he fails in his business. it is not only shiftlessness or un thrift, but a sort of filthiness to let things go to wrack and ruin thus. i still recall that characteristic winter evening of december 9th. the cold, dry, and whole some diet my mind and senses necessarily fed on, oak leaves, bleached and withered weeds that rose above the snow, the now dark green of autumn. 437 the pines, and perchance the faint metallic chip of a single tree sparrow ; the hushed stillness of the wood at sundown, aye, all the winter day, the short boreal twilight, the smooth serenity and the reflections of the pond, still alone free from ice ; the melodious hooting of the owl, heard at the same time with the yet more distant whistle of a locomotive, more aboriginal, and perchance more enduring here than that, heard above all the voices of the wise men of concord, as if they were not (how little he is anglicized !), the last strokes of the woodchopper, who pres ently bends his steps homeward ; the gilded bar of cloud across the apparent outlet of the pond, conducting my thoughts into the eternal west, the deepening horizon glow, and the hasty walk homeward to enjoy the long winter evening. the hooting of the owl ; that is a sound which my red predecessors heard here more than a thousand years ago. it rings far and wide, oc cupying the space rightfully, grand, primeval, aboriginal sound. there is no whisper in it of the bulkeleys, the flints, the hosmers, who re cently squatted here, nor of the first parish, nor of concord fight, nor of the last town-meeting. dec. 15, 1859. philosophy is a greek word, by good rights, and it stands almost for a greek thing, yet some rumor of it has reached the commonest mind. m. miles, who came to col 438 autumn. lect his wood-bill to-day, said, when i objected to the small size of his wood, that it was neces sary to split wood fine in order to cure it well ; that he has found that more than four inches in diameter would not dry, and, moreover, a good deal depended on the manner in which it was corded up in the woods. he piled his high and tight. if this were not well done, the stakes would spread and the wood lie loosely, and so the rain and snow find their way into it, and he added, &quot; i have handled a good deal of wood, and i think that i understand the philosophy of it.&quot; dec. 16, 1837. the woods were this morn ing covered with thin bars of vapor, the evap oration of the leaves, according to sprengel, which seemed to have been suddenly stiffened by the cold. in some places it was spread out like gauze over the tops of the trees, forming extended lawns, where elves and fairies held high tournament : &quot; before each van prick forth the aery knights, and couch their spears, till thickest legions close.&quot; the east was glowing with a narrow, but ill defined crescent of light, the blue of the zenith mingling in all possible proportions with the salmon color of the horizon. and now the neighboring hilltops telegraph to us poor crawl autumn. 439 ers of the plain, the monarch s golden ensign in the east. how indispensable to a correct study of na ture is a percaption of her true meaning. the fact will one day flower out into a truth. the reason will mature and fructify what the under standing had cultivated. dec. 16, 1840. speech is fractional, silence is integral. beauty is where it is perceived. when i see the sun shining on the woods across the pond, i think this side the richer which sees it. the motion of quadrupeds is the most con strained and unnatural ; it is angular and abrupt, except in those of the cat tribe, where undulation begins. that of birds and fishes is more graceful and independent. they move on a more inward pivot, the former by their weight or opposition to nature, the latter by their buoyancy or yielding to nature. awk wardness is a resisting motion, gracefulness is a yielding motion. the line which would ex press the former is a tangent to the sphere, that which would express the latter a radius. but the subtlest, most ideal, and spiritual mo tion is undulation. it is produced by the most subtle element falling on the next subtlest. rippling is a more graceful flight. if you con sider it from the hilltop, you will detect in it 440 autumn. the wings of birds endlessly repeated. the two waving lines which express flight seem copied from the ripple. there is something analogous to this in our most inward experience. in en thusiasm we undulate to the divine spiritus, as the lake to the wind. dec. 16, 1850. i noticed [last sunday or the 14th] a bush covered with cocoons which were artfully concealed by two leaves wrapped round them, one still hanging by its stem, so that they looked like a few withered leaves left dangling. the worm, having first incased itself in another leaf, for greater protection folded more loosely around itself one of the leaves of the plant, tak ing care, however, to incase the leaf-stalk and the twig with a thick and strong web of silk. so far from its depending on the strength of the stalk, which is now quite brittle, the strongest fingers cannot break it, and the cocoon can only be got off by slipping it up and off the twig. there they hang themselves secure for the winter, proof against cold and the birds, ready to become butterflies when new leaves push forth. the snow everywhere was covered with snow fleas, like pepper. when you hold a mass in your hand, they skip and are gone before you know it. they are so small that they go through and through the new snow. sometimes, autumn. 441 when collected, they look like some powder which the hunter has spilled in the path. dec. 16, 1852. observed the reflection of the snow on pine hill from walden extending far beyond the true limits of a reflection quite across the pond. also, less obviously, of pines. the sky overcast with thick scud, which in the reflection, the snow ran into. dec. 16, 1853. the elms covered with hoar frost seen in the east, against the morning light, are very beautiful. these days, when the earth is still bare and the weather is so warm as to create much vapor by day, are the best for these frost works. would you be well, see that you are attuned to each mood of nature. dec. 16, 1859. a. m. to cambridge, where i read in gerard s herbal. his admirable though quaint descriptions are to my mind greatly superior to the modern more scientific ones. he describes not according to rule, but according to his natural delight in the plants. he brings them vividly before you, as one who has seen and delighted in them. it is almost as good as to see the plants themselves. it sug gests that one cannot too often get rid of the assumption that is in our science. his leaves are leaves ; his flowers, flowers ; his fruit, fruit. they are colored and fragrant. it is a man s 442 a utumn. knowledge added to a child s delight. modern botanical descriptions approach ever nearer to the dryness of an algebraic formula, as x + y = a love-letter. it is the keen joy and discrimina tion of a child who has just seen a flower for the first time, and comes running in with it to his friends. how much better to describe your object in fresh english words than in these con ventional latinisms ! he has really seen, and smelled, and tasted, and reports his sensations. dec. 17, 1837. in all ages and nations we observe a leaning towards a right state of things. this may especially be seen in the life of the priest, which approaches most nearly to that of the ideal man. the druids paid no taxes, and &quot; were allowed exemption from warfare and all other things.&quot; the clergy are even now a privi leged class. in the last stage of civilization, poetry, religion, and philosophy will be one, and there are glimpses of this truth in the first. dec. 17, 1840. the practice of giving the feminine gender to all ideal excellences personi fied is a mark of refinement observable in the mythologies of even the most barbarous nations. glory and victory even are of the feminine gen der, but it takes manly qualities to gain them. man is masculine, but his manliness (virtus) feminine. it is the inclination of brute force to moral power. autumn. 443 dec. 17, 1850. i noticed, when the snow first came, that the days were very sensibly length ened by the light reflected from the snow. any work which required light could be pursued about half an hour longer, so we may well pray that the ground may not be laid bare by a thaw in these short winter days. dec. 17, 1851. the pitch-pine woods on the right of the corner road. a piercing cold after noon ; wading in the snow. the pitch pines hold the snow well. it lies now in balls on their plumes, and in streaks on their branches, their low branches rising at a small angle and meet ing each other. a sombre twilight comes through this roof of pine leaves and snow, yet in some places the sun streams in, producing the stron gest contrasts of light and shade. the winter morning is the time to see in per fection the woods and shrubs wearing their snowy and frosty dress. even he who visits them half an hour after sunrise will have lost some of their most delicate and fleeting beauties. the trees wear their morning burden but coarsely after midday, and it no longer expresses the character of the tree. i observed that early in the morning every pine needle was covered with a frosty sheath, but soon after sunrise it was all gone. you walk in the pitch-pine woods as under a pent -house. the stems and branches of 444 autumn. the trees look black by contrast. you wander zigzag through the aisles of the wood, where stillness and twilight reign. i do not know but a pine wood is as substantial and as memorable a fact as a friend. i am more sure to come away from it cheered than from those who are nearest to being my friends. improve every opportunity to express yourself in writing, as if it were your last. when they who have aspired to be friends cease to sympathize, it is the part of religion to keep asunder. to explain to a friend is to suppose you are not intelligent of one another. if you are not, to what purpose will you explain ? one of the best men i know often offends me by uttering made words, the very best words, of course, most smooth and gracious and fluent, a dash of polite conversation, a graceful bending, as if i were master kingsley, of promising parts, from the university. oh, would you but be sim ple and downright, would you but cease your palaver. the conversation of gentlemen after dinner, no words are so tedious. never a natural or simple word or yawn. it produces an appearance of phlegm and stupidity in me, the auditor. i am suddenly the closest and most phlegmatic of mortals, and the conversation comes to naught. a utumn. 445 my acquaintances sometimes wonder why i will impoverish myself by living aloof from this or that company, but greater would be the impoverishment if i should associate with them. dec. 17, 1853. while surveying in lincoln, to-day, saw a great many, may be a hundred, sil very brown cocoons of some great moth, wrinkled and flattish, on young alders in a meadow, three or four inches long, fastened to the main stem and branches at the same time, with dry alder and fragments of fern leaves attached to and partially concealing them. dec. 17, 1856. p. m. cold, with a piercing northwest wind and bare ground still. it is pretty poor picking outdoors to-day. there s but little comfort to be found. you go stump ing over bare frozen ground, sometimes clothed with curly, yellowish, withered grass, like the back of half-starved cattle late in the fall, now beating this ear, now that, to keep them warm. it is comparatively summer-like on the south side of woods and hills. when i returned from the south the other day, i was greeted by withered shrub-oak leaves which i had not seen there. it was the most homely and agreeable object that met me. i found that i had no such friend as the shrub oak hereabouts. a farmer once asked me what 446 autumn. they were made for, not knowing any use they served. but i can tell him that they do me good. they are my parish ministers, regularly settled. they never did any man harm that i know. now you have the foliage of summer painted in brown. go through the shrub oaks. all growth has ceased, no greenness meets the eye, except what there may be in the bark of this shrub. the green leaves are all turned to brown, quite dry and sapless, the little buds are sleeping at the base of the slender shrunken petioles. who observed when they passed from green to brown ? i do not remember the transi tion. but these leaves still have a kind of life in them. they are exceedingly beautiful in their withered state. if they hang on, it is like the perseverance of the saints. their colors are as wholesome, their forms as perfect as ever. now that the crowd and bustle of summer is passed, i have leisure to admire them. their figures never weary my eye. look at the few broad scallops in their sides. when was that pat tern first cut ? with what a free stroke the curve was struck ! with how little, yet just enough, variety in their forms ! look at the fine bristles which arm each pointed lobe, as perfect now as when the wild bee hummed about them, or the chewink scratched beneath them. what pleas ing and harmonious colors above and below! autumn. 447 the smooth, delicately brown-tanned upper sur face, acorn-color, and the very pale, some silvery or ashy, ribbed under side. how poetically, how like saints, or innocent and beneficent beings they give up the ghost ! how spiritual ! though they have lost their sap, they have not given up the ghost. rarely touched by worm or insect, they are as fair as ever. dec. 17, 1859. p. m. to walden. i see on the pure white snow what looks like dust for half a dozen inches under a twig. looking closely i find that the twig is hardhack, and the dust its slender, light-brown, chaffy-looking seed, which falls still in copious showers, dusting the snow, when i jar it, and here are the tracks of a sparrow which has jarred the twig, and picked the minute seeds a long time, making quite a hole in the snow. the seeds are so fine that it must have got more snow than seed at each pick. but they probably look large to its microscopic eyes. i see, when i jar it, that a meadow-sweet close by has quite similar, but larger seeds. this is the reason, then, that these plants rise so high above the snow, and retain their seed, dispersing it, on the least jar, over each succes sive layer of snow beneath them ; or it is carried to distant places by the wind. what abundance and what variety in the diet of these small graminivorous birds, while i find only a few 448 autumn. nuts still. these stiff weeds which no snow can break down, hold their provender. what the cereals are to men, these are to the spar rows. the only threshing they require is that the birds fly against their spikes or stalks. a little further i see the seed-box, ludwigia, full of still smaller yellowish seeds. on the ridge, north, is the track of a partridge amid the shrubs. it has hopped up to the low clusters of smooth sumac berries, sprinkled the snow with them, and eaten all but a few. also, here only, or where it has evidently jarred them down (whether intentionally or not, i am not sure), are the large oval seeds of the stiff-stalked lespedeza, which i suspect it ate with the sumac berries. there is much solid food in them. when the snow is deep, the birds can easily pick the latter out of the heads, as they stand in the snow. dec. 18, 1852. p. m. to anursnack. very cold, windy day. loring s pond beautifully frozen. (this the first skating.) so polished the surface, i took many parts of it for water. it was waved or watered with a slight dust, nevertheless. cracked into large squares, like the faces of a reflector, it was so exquisitely polished that the sky and dun-colored scudding clouds, with mother-o -pearl tints, were reflected in it as in the calmest water. i slid over it autumn. 449 with a little misgiving, mistaking the ice before me for water. still the little ruby-crowned birds about. dec. 18, 1856. 12 m. start for amherst, n. h. a very cold day. thermometer at eight a. m., 8, and i hear of others very much lower at an earlier hour, 2 at 11.45. the last half the route from groton junction to nashua is along the nashua river mostly. this river looks less interesting than the concord. it appears even more open, that is, less wooded (?). at any rate, the banks are more uniform, and i notice none of our meadows on it. at nashua, hire a horse and sleigh, and ride to amherst, eleven miles, against a strong northwest wind, this bitter cold afternoon. at my lecture, the audience attended closely, and i was satisfied. that is all i ask or expect generally. not one spoke to me afterward, nor needed they. i have no doubt they liked it in the main, though none of them would have dared say so, provided they were conscious of it. generally, if i can only get the ears of an audience, i do not care whether they say they like my lecture or not. i think i know as well as they can tell. at any rate, it is none of my business, and it would be im pertinent for me to inquire. the stupidity of most of these country towns, not to include the cities, is in their infantile innocence. lectured 450 autumn. in basement (vestry) of the orthodox church, and, i trust, helped to undermine it. i was told to stop at the united states hotel ; an old inhabitant had never heard of it, but i found the letters on a sign without help. it was the ordinary, unpretending (?), desolate looking country tavern. the landlord apologized to me because there was to be a ball there that night, which would keep me awake, and it did. dec. 18, 1859. rain. it rains but little this afternoon, though there is no sign of fair weather. it is a lichen day. the pitch pines are very inspiriting to behold. their green is as much enlivened and freshened as that of the lichens. it suggests a sort of sunlight on them, though not even a patch of clear sky is to be seen to-day. as dry and olive or slate-colored lichens are of a fresh and living green, so the already green pine needles have acquired a far livelier tint, as if they enjoyed this moisture as much as the lichens do. they seem to be lit up more than when the sun falls on them. their trunks and those of trees generally, being wet, are very black, and the bright lichens on them are so much the more remarkable. apples are thawed now, and are very good. their juice is the best kind of bottled cider that i know. they are all good in this state, and your jaws are the cider press. the oak woods a quarter autumn. 451 of a mile off appear more uniformly red than ever. the withered leaves, being thoroughly saturated with moisture, are of a livelier color, and they are not only redder for being wet, but through the obscurity of the mist one leaf runs into another, and the whole mass makes one impression. dec. 19, 1837. hell itself may be contained within the compass of a spark. dec. 19, 1840. this plain sheet of snow which covers the ice of the pond is not such a blank ness as is unwritten, but such as is unread. all colors are in white. it is such simple diet to my senses as the grass and the sky. there is nothing fantastic in them. their simple beauty has sufficed men from the earliest times. they have never criticised the blue sky and the green grass. dec. 19, 1850. the witch hazel is covered with fruit, and droops over gracefully, like a willow, the yellow foundation of its flowers still remaining. dec. 19, 1851. in all woods is heard now, far and near, the sound of the woodchopper s axe ; a twilight sound now in the night of the year, as if men had stolen forth in the arctic night to get fuel to keep their fires a-going. the sound of the axes far in the horizon is like the dropping of the eaves. now the sun 452 autumn. sets suddenly without a cloud, and with scarcely any redness following, so pure is the atmos phere, only a faint rosy blush along the horizon. dec. 19, 1854. p. m. skated half mile up assabet, and then to foot of fair haven hill. this is the first tolerable skating. i am sur prised to find how rapidly and easily i get along, how soon i am at this brook, or that bend in the river, which it takes me so long to reach on the bank or by water. i can go more than double the usual distance before dark. near the island i saw a muskrat close by, swimming in an open reach. he was always headed up stream, a great proportion of the head out of water, and his whole length visible, though the root of the tail is about level with the water. it is surprising how dry he looks, as if that back was never immersed in the water. off clamshell, i heard and saw a large flock of fringilla linaria over the meadow. suddenly they turn aside in their flight, and dash across the river to a large, white birch, fifteen rods off, which plainly they had distinguished so far. i afterward saw many more in the potter swamp up the river. they were commonly brown, or dusky above, streaked with yellowish white or ash, and more or less white or ash beneath. most had a crimson crown or frontlet, and a few a crimson neck and breast, very handsome. autumn. 453 some, with a bright crimson crown, had clean white breasts. i suspect that these were young males. they keep up an incessant twitter ing, varied from time to time with some mew ing notes. occasionally, for some unknown reason, they will all suddenly dash away with that universal loud note (twitter), like a bag of nuts. they are busily clustered in the tops of the birches, picking the seeds out of the catkins, and sustain themselves in all kinds of attitudes, sometimes head downwards, while about this. common as they are now, and were winter be fore last, i saw none last winter. dec. 19, 1859. when a man is young, and his constitution and body have not acquired firmness, that is, before he has arrived at mid dle age, he is not an assured inhabitant of the earth, and his compensation is that he is not quite earthy. the greater uncertainty of his fate seems to ally him to a nobler race of be ings, to whom he in part belongs, or with whom he is in communication. the young man is a demigod, he is but half here, he knows not the men of this world, the powers that be. they know him not. prompted by the reminiscence of that other sphere from which he has so lately arrived, his actions are unintelligible to his seniors. he bathes in light. he is interesting as a stranger from another sphere. he really 454 autumn. thinks and talks about a larger sphere of exist ence than this world. it takes him forty years to accommodate himself to the conditions of this world. this is the age of poetry. afterward he may be the president of a bank, and go the way of all flesh. but a man of settled views, whose thoughts are few and hardened like his bones, is truly mortal, and his only resource is to say his prayers. dec. 20, 1840. my home is as much of na ture as my heart embraces. if i only warm my house, then is that only my home. but if i sympathize with the heats and colds, the sounds and silence of nature, and share the repose and equanimity that reign around me in the fields, then are they my house, as much as if the kettle sang and fagots crackled, and the clock ticked on the wall. i rarely read a sentence which speaks to my muse as nature does. through the sweetness of his verse, without regard to the sense, i have communion with burns. his plaint es capes through the flexure of his verses. it was all the record it admitted. dec. 20, 1851. to fair haven hill and plain below. saw a large hawk circling over a pine wood below me, and screaming, apparently that he might discover his prey by their flight. traveling ever by wider circles, what a symbol autumn. 455 of the thoughts ; now soaring, now descending, taking larger and larger circles, or smaller and smaller. it flies not directly whither it is bound, but advances by circles, like a courtier of the skies. no such noble progress ! how it comes round, as with a wider sweep of thought ! but the majesty is in the imagination of the be holder, for the bird is intent on its prey. cir cling and ever circling, you cannot divine which way it will incline, till perchance it drives down straight as an arrow to its mark. it rises higher above where i stand, and i see with beautiful distinctness its wings against the sky, primaries and secondaries, and the rich tracery of the outline of the latter (?),its inner wings or wing linings, within the outer, like a great moth seen against the sky; a will-o -the-wind, following its path through the vortices of the air ; the poetry of motion, not as preferring one place to another, but enjoying each as long as possible, most gracefully thus surveying new scenes, and revisiting the old. how bravely he came round one of those parts of the wood which he had not surveyed, taking in a new segment, annexing new territories. without &quot; heave yo,&quot; it trims its sail. it goes about without the creaking of a block. that america, yacht of the air, that never makes a tack, though it rounds the globe itself ; takes in and shake out its reefs without 456 autumn. a flutter, its sky-scrapers all under its control ; holds up one wing, as if to admire, and sweeps off this way, then holds up the other, and sweeps off that way. if there are two concentrically circling, it is such a regatta as southampton waters never witnessed. flights of imagina tion ! coleridgean thoughts ! so a man is said to rise in his thought ever to fresh woods and pastures new. red, white, and green, and in the distance dark brown, are the colors of the winter land scape. i view it now from the cliffs. the red shrub oaks on the white ground of the plain beneath make a pretty scene. most walkers are pretty effectually shut up by the snow. it is no doubt a good lesson for the wood chopper, his long day in the woods, and he gets more than his half-dollar a cord. say the thing with which you labor. it is a waste of time for the writer to use his talents merely. be faithful to your genius. write in the strain that interests you most. consult not the popular taste. a clump of white pines seen far westward over the shrub-oak plain which is now lit up by the setting sun, a soft feathery grove, with their gray stems indistinctly seen, like human beings come to their cabin door, standing expectant on the edge of the plain, inspires me with a mild autumn. 457 humanity. the trees indeed have hearts. the sun seems to send its farewell ray far and level over the copses to them, and they silently re ceive it with gratitude, like a group of settlers with their children. the pines impress me as human. a slight vaporous cloud floats high over them, while in the west the sun goes down apace behind glowing pines and golden clouds which like mountains skirt the horizon. no thing stands up more free from blame in this world than a pine-tree. the dull and blundering behavior of clowns will as surely polish the writer at last, as the criticism of men of thought. our country is broad and rich, for here within twenty miles of boston i can stand in a clear ing in the woods, and look a mile or more over the shrub oaks to the distant pine copses and horizon of uncut woods, without a house or road or cultivated field in sight. go out before sunrise, or stay out till sunset. it is wonderful, wonderful, the unceasing de mand that christendom makes on you, that you speak from a moral point of view. though you be a babe, the cry is, repent, repent. the christian world will not admit that a man has a just perception of any truth unless at the same time he cries, &quot; lord, be merciful to me, a sin ner.&quot; 458 autumn. what made the hawk mount? did he not fill himself with air ? before you were aware of it, he had mounted by his spiral path into the heavens. dec. 20, 1854. 9 a. m. to hiu. said to be the coldest morning as yet. the river appears to be frozen everywhere. where was water last night, is a firm bridge of ice this morning. the snow which has blown upon the ice has taken the form of regular star-shaped crystals an inch in diameter. sometimes these are arranged in the form of a spear three feet long, quite straight. i see the mother-o -pearl tints now at sunrise on the clouds high over the eastern hori zon, before the sun has risen above the low bank in the east. the sky in the eastern horizon has that same greenish, vitreous, gem-like appear ance which it has at sundown, as if it were of perfectly clear glass, with the green tint of a large mass of glass. here are some crows already seeking their breakfast in the orchard, and i hear a red squirrel s reproof. the wood choppers are hastening to their work afar off, walking fast to keep warm, before the sun has risen, their ears and hands well covered, the dry cold snow squeaking under their feet. they will be warmer after they have been at work an hour. p. m. skated to fair haven with c. c s skates are not the best, and beside, he is autumn. 459 far from an easy skater, so that, as he said, it was killing work for him. time and again the perspiration actually dropped from his fore head upon the ice, and it froze in long icicles on his beard. yet he kept up his spirits and his fun. it has been a glorious winter day ; its elements so simple, the sharp, clear air, the white snow everywhere covering the earth, and the polished ice. cold as it is, the sun seems warmer on my back even than in summer, as if its rays met with less obstruction. and then the air is so beautifully still, not an insect in it, hardly a leaf to rustle. if there is a grub out, you are sure to detect it on the snow or ice. the shadows of the clamshell hills are beautifully blue, as i look back half a mile at them, and in some places where the sun falls on it, the snow has a pinkish tinge. index. academy of natural sciences, 302. acorn, 83, 84, 86, 87, 172, 173, 325. acquaintances, 433, 445. advantages, 390. jeschylus, 21g, 217. african seeds, 285. afternoon, 21, 28, 181, 182. alcott, mr., 150. alder, 307. alternate reproduction, 107. amherst, n. h.,449. amusements, 178, 179, 180, 196. andrewsii, 35. andromeda, 391, 394, 413. andromeda ponds, 290. andromeda swamp, 391. andropogon scoparius, 117. anemone, 323, 324. antiquity, 267. ants, 211,275,280. anursnack, 206, 448. apple blossoms, 228. apples, 83, 95, 96, 134, 135, 212, ardea minor, 70, 78, 159. arrowheads, 84, 117, 120, 173, 174, 344. art, 89 ; works of, 9. arum berries, 25. asclepias cornuti, 50, 51. ash, 41. ash, black, 41. ash, white, 41, 210. ashes, 79. aspens, 57, 422. aspidium cristatum, 186. aspidium spinulosum, 186. see ferns. aspirations, 154. assabet, 89, 114, 137, 167, 193, 240, 250, 288, 310, 345, 408, 434, 452. associates, 320. aster, 42, 70, 79, 147. aster multiflorus, 29. aster tradescauti, 29. aster undulatus, 239, 318. atmosphere, 24, 248. aubreys, 349. author, 19. authorship, 164. autumn, 108, 248. autumn afternoons, 21, 28. autumnal tints, 16, 19, 55, 58, 79, 102, 110, 143, 147, 312. bacon, leg of, 356. ball s hill, 147, 373, 374. banks, sir joseph, 104. barberries, 136. bare hill, 412. bark of trees, 199, 234, 235. barn, 332. barrett s mill, 127, 186. bateman s pond, 59, 199, 200,226. battle-ground, 370. bays, 357. baywings, 68. beanfield, 376. bear garden, 400. beauty, 439. bee hunting, 42, 43, 44, 45. beech leaves, 198. beeches, 199. bees, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47. beggar ticks, 39, 53. bell, 97, 98, 362, 363. beomyces rosea, 422. berries, 26, 27, 136, 320. bible, 116. bidens, 38, 39, 53, 70. bidens connata, 239, 318. bigelow, 322. bigelow s &quot; plants of boston and vicinity,&quot; 386. billerica, 370, 372, 373. birch, 190, 191, 198. birch groves, 353. birch, white, 41. birches, 297, 310. birches, white, 29, 169, 220, 297. 462 index. birches, yellow, 37, 148. birds, 13, 69, 70, 79, 80, 127, 190, 230, 252, 319, 400, 401, 413, 449. birds, collection of, 303. birds, diet of, 447, 448. birds, motions of, 252. birds nests, 239. bittern, 70, 193, 199. bittern cliff, 392. blackberry leaves, 17. blackberry vines, !i9. blackbirds, 70, 88. blackfish, 402. blake, 240. bleat of sheep, 148. blood, perez, 425. bloom, 213, 214, 368. blueberry buds, 283. blueberry bushes, 118, 413. blueberry twigs, 314. bluebirds, 28, 79, 80, 91, 192, 224. bluets, 37. boat, 355, 388, 389, 436. body, 56, 430, 431, 432. bones, 247. book of autumn leaves, 312. book: &quot;a week on the concord and merrimack rivers,&quot; 163,339. books, 303. books, indian, 355. boomer, 70. boots, 378. botanists, 5. botany, 386, 387. boulder field, 35, 204, 234. boulders, 204, 205. box-trap, 85. boys and horse, 54. bradford, 401, 402. breams, 360, 361, 362. british naturalists, 104. broker, 140. brook, 278. brooks, abel, 341, 342. broom pods, 2. brown, capt. john, 260, 277, 278, 290, 363, 382. brown creeper, 335. brown, simon, 362. brown s, james p., pond, 344, 257. buds, 283, 340, 364, 377. bull-frog, 23. bullocks, 305, 306. bumblebees, 42, 46. bunker hill monument, 71. burns, 454. business dealings, 274. buttercup, 217, 265, 318, 321. butterflies, 42, 197. button-bushes, 182. buttonwoods, 41. buttons, 122. byron, lord, 398. c., w. e., 18, 239, 357, 370, 458, 459. caddis-worms, 136, 137, 317. cambridge, 343, 349, 350, 441. canoe birch, 190, 191, 198. cape ann, 4, 48. cardinal shore, 265, 407. carlisle road, 10, 12, 59, 134. cat, 36, 52, 180, 32^ 385. cat-birds nests, 413. cato, 88. cat-owl, 7, 292, 293. cats, 422. cattle, 235, 259, 328. cattle on sundays, 100. causeway, 429. cedar hill, 426. cerastium, 318. cerastium viscosum, 283. change, 121. character, 252, 253, 350, 351. cheney s shore, 114. chestnut-tree, 123. chestnuts, 94, 95, 110, 113, 124, 144, 146, 404. chickadees, 69, 92, 95, 102-, 103, 114, 119, 187, 198, 210, 211, 226, 227, 229, 234, 335, 340, 365, 380,409,432. chickweed, 318. chipbirds, 68. chips, 341, 342. cholm mondeley, 355. chords, 130. christ, 281, 380, 382, 383. christendom, 457. christians, 14. church, 281, 282, 284. church of england, 180. cicindela, 340. circus, 18. cistus, 426. clam, 250. clamshell, 21, 23, 28, 117. 156, 157, 199, 286, 304, 332, 352. clamshell bank, 21. clamshell hill, 174, 376, 459. clamshell meadow, 157. clamshell reach, 17. clamshells, colors of, 376, 377. clark, brooks, 134. cledonia, 324. clematis virginiana, 228. clergy, 442. clethra, 233. index. 463 cliffs, 17, 70, 97, 101, 152, 191. 257, 343, 364, 388, 422. clock, 57. clothes, 403. cloud, 96, 117, 257, 258, 269, 270, 294, 328, 358, 359, 406, 427, 428, 429, 437. clover, 198. clowns, 457. cobwebs, 183, 184, 185, 190, 381. cochituate, 230. cocks, 51, 52, 183, 319, 385. cocoanut, 203. cocoons, 440, 445. coincidences, 309. colburn farm woodlot, 335. cold, 52, 329, 445. color, 147, 158, 308, 359, 366, 367, 383, 384, 456. comet, 52, 74, 197. comfort, 327. committee, 362. common-sense, 217. communities, 126. companion, 235. conant s grove, 33. conant s meadow, 8. coiiantum, 7, 8, 33, 34, 66, 86, 126, 154, 169, 189, 256, 296, 308, 413. conantum cliff, 8. concord river, 157. concord woods, 372. connecticut, 301. conversation, 444. copan, 347. corner spring, 66, 77 109. cornus florida, 221, 222. corydalis, 55. cottages, 398. country, 457. country tavern, 450. country towns, 449. cowpath, 371. cows, 72. cranberries, 183, 299. creeds, 365. cress, 311. cricket-frog, 27. crickets, 21, 22, 23, 28, 96, 181, 189, 230, 246, 256, 258, 276. crotalaria, 58. crowfoot, 297. crows, 333, 337, 347, 409, 458. crystallization, 434, 435. currency, 348. dandelion, 33, 79, 108, 189, 211, 239, 279, 318, 404. days ripened like fruits, 3. deafness, 268. deep cut, 17, 107. deer-mouse, 368. dennis s hill, 83, 85. de quincey, 255. descriptions, 104, 105, 106. desmodium, 38, 39, 53. desmodium paniculatum, 38. desmodium rotundifolium, 38. desor, 297. dew, 300, 301. dicksonia fern, 10, 66, 125. diet, 378, 379. dipper, 30, 31, 290. discourse with nature, 55. discovery, 333. diver, great northern, 251, 252. dog, 90. dogwood, 16. domestication, 191. donati, 285. douglas, 266. doves, 191, 192, 270. down on plants, 307, 308, 314. drawings, 409, 410. dreamland, 309. dreams, 19,150, 151,175,176, 318, 343. driftwood, 131, 132, 139. druids, 442. ducks, 30, 31, 161, 169, 170, 371. dudley pond, 239. dumb-bells, 94. duty, 10. eagle head, 4. east india marine hall, 9. easterbrook, 2, 94, 134, 136. elephant, 193. elms, 41, 79, 99, 441. eloquence, 291, 292. emerson, miss mary, 264, 265. emerson, r. w., 362, 381, 382, 420, 421. emerson s cliff, 18. emmonds, 372. employment, 425. encouragement, 383, 427. english plants, 181. enjoyment, 316. entertainment, 81. enthusiasm, 36, 37. euphorbia heptagona, 419. evergreens, 234, 290. everlasting, 19, 48, 368. ex-plenipotentiary, 2. eye, 38, 56, 147. faces, 59. facts, 51, 189, 237. 464 index. fair haven. 182, 249. 335, 398, 404, 406, 432. fair haven bay, 222. fair haven hill, 39, 52, 80, 112, 239, 257, 261, 357, 358, 406, 423, 452, 454. fair haven lot, 397. fair haven pond, 41, 53, 75, 101, 102, 113, 191, 309, 391, 394. fairies, 69, 71. falcons, 192. fall, 161. farmer, jacob, 226, 227, 242, 336, 401. farmer, 365, 366, 375. farmer s life, 60, 61, 62, 316, 332. farmer s pleasure, 232. farming, 178, 179. feminine gender, 442. fern, climbing, 322, 354. fern, dicksonia, 10, 66, 125. fern, sweet, 289, 307, 314, 397. fern tree, 20. ferns, 20, 24, 67, 68, 186, 187, 211. fields, 295, 377. finches, 189. fine days precious, 212. fire, 377, 432. fishermen, 75, 76, 139, 141. fishes, 362. fishing, 64, 65. fitchburg railroad, 410. flannery, 295. flies, 42. flint s bridge, 35. flint s pond, 57, 92, 110, 142. flood, 232. flower cups, 433. flowers, 70, 79, 108, 318, 386. forest, 58. fossil turtle, 9. fox, 331, 400, 427. fragrance, 11. fragrant thoughts, 125. frame of landscape, 222, 223. friend, 91, 126, 129, 197, 206, 207, 389, 419. friends, 321, 322, 444. friendship, 118, 207. fringed gentian, 16, 94, 119, 206, 356. fringilla hiemalis, 17, 157, 383. fringilla linaria, 37, 452, 453. frogs, 186, 200. frost, 95, 426. frost weed, 154. frost work, 337, 338. fruits, 320, 321, 325. fuel, 140, 141, 142, 216, 241, 242, 342. fugitive slave, 49, 50. fuller, margaret, 265, 421. fungus, 93, 104, 220. fungi, 218. furness, 302. furniture, 57. garden of eden, 220. gavel, 61. geese, 146, 161, 231, 232, 250, 265, 269, 294, 312, 320, 327, 356, 357, 426, 427. genius, 217, 373. gentian, 16, 35, 94, 119, 206, 356. gentian lane, 35. gentlemen, 133. gerard, 5, 106. gerard s herbal, 441, 442. gerardia purpurea, 54, 70. gesta gallorum, 385. giant, 162. gloucester, 48, 49. glow-worms, 256, 257, 318, 340. gold, 294. golden eggs, 90. golden-rod, 42, 46, 70, 79, 152, 239, 318. goldfinches, 114. goodwin, john, 139, 140, 141, 215, 216, 251, 380. goose pond, 328. gossamer, 183, 184, 185, 190, 277. grackles, 47, 68. granite, 100. grape cliff, 38. grass, 118, 182, 189, 228, 246, 295, 368. grasshoppers, 197, 276. great fields, 35, 58, 294. great meadows, 79, 413. grebe, 290. greeley, 303. green mountains, 131. grisi, 303. grist-mill, 381. grossbeak, 415. ground nuts, 40. growth, 222. haden s, 152, 366. halo, 308. happiness, 280. hard times, 108. hardback seeds, 447. harper s magazine, 300. harris, dr., 340. harvest time, 109. hat, 386. hawks, 16, 29, 30, 192, 255,455,456, 456. index. 465 hazel, 159, 315, 367. health, 296. hell, 451. hemlocks, 164, 165, 210, 211, 226, 240. hermann, 282. herons, 156, 193. heywood s peak, 57. heywood s pond, 411. hickesee, 349. hickories, 37, 65, 364. hieracium canadense, 53. hill, 71, 346, 458. hius, 371, 373. historical facts, 29. hoar frost, 338. holden swamp, 275, 391, 413. holden wood, 68. home, 454. homer, 380. homes, 60, 61. honey, 338. hooper, harry, 223. hoosac mountains, 131. hop hornbeam, 159. horizon, 249. hornbeams, 364. hornets nest, 15, 34. horse, 55. horse chestnuts, 173. hosmer, mr. edmund, 309. hosraer, mr. joseph, 267, 268, 299, 344. hosmer s field, 311. hosmer s meadow, 227, 277. hour variously spent, 242. houses, 34. houstonia, 37, 79, 198, 217. howell, francis, 198. hubbard, cyrus, 365. hubbard s bridge, 283, 391, 399. hubbard s close, 328. hubbard s grove, 108. hubbard s woods, 250, 255, 369. hubbardston, 131. huckleberries, 8, 79, 307. hylodes, 57, 144, 258, 319, 363. hypericum, 54, 210. ice, 316, 317, 384, 391, 407, 433, 434, 448. ice crystals, 408, 409, 435, 458. ice foliage, 339. ichthyolites, 32. illusion, 206, 207. imagination, 403. imaginings, 195, 196, 197. indian books, 355. indian gouge, 83, 84. indian mind, 148. indian relics, 173. indian summer, 102, 103, 110 181, 197, 226, 233, 290, 319, 325, 394, 408,423. indians, 297, 298, 344, 402. insane man, 381. inspection, 197. irishman, 402, 403. jay, 16, 73, 205, 206, 226, 229, 236, 245, 246, 279, 371. jenny s desert, 20. john s-wort, 286. journal, 280. joy, 383. juniper repens, 39. kalmia glauca, 391. keyes, john, 362. kirby and spence, 184, 185 knowledge, 31, 38. labaume, 288. labor, 298. lake superior indians, 297, 298. lambkih, 35, 37. landscape, 80, 81, 191, 330, 364, 412. larks, 20, 68, 79, 199, 411. last words, 379. laurus sassafras, 86. law, 99, 100. leaves, 163, 200, 252, 259, 295, 312, 365, 391. leaves of oaks, 295, 367. leaves of trees, 88, 109. leaves, radical, 285, 286. lecture, 390, 391. lecturer, 449. ledum swamp, 115, 276. lee s bridge, 7, 282. lee s cliff, 37, 283, 396. lee s farm swamp, 85, 186. lee s hillside, 87. leisure, 260. le jeune, 113. lespedeza, 307, 314, 448. lesson, 252. library, 350. lichens, 211, 213, 323, 324, 367, 450. life, 124, 146, 193, 219, 245, 319. life a failure, 347. life, springs of, 96, 400. life in winter, 100. life-everlasting, 70, 246, 279, 286. light, 98, 117, 120, 170, 171, 248, 256, 289, 307, 312, 345, 388. lily, 354. 466 index. linaria canadensis, 314. lincoln, 445. lincoln bridge, 379, 404, 410, 411. lincoln hills, 9. linnaeus, 273, 282, 285. linnets, 414. lion, 36. littorales, 294. living, 219. locust, 87. loon, 57, 251. loring s pond, 448. lotus, 302. love, 272, 323. lover, 3. ludwigia, 448. luxuries, 333. lyceum lectures, 274, 275. lycoppdiums, 187. lygodium palmatum, 322, 354. lynx, 9. lynx, canada, 39, 121, 347, 348. machine work, 129. magazines, 284. maiden, 217, 252. maiden-hair fern, 69. malthus, 304. man, 191, 192. man s nature, 419. man s worth, 303. manchester, 4. manners, 58, 65. maples, 8, 21, 28, 37, 41, 53, 57, 79, 89, 102, 148, 169, 297, 345. marlboro road, 83, 84, 247. marsh-hawk, 21, 89, 171, 172, 306. martin, 192. maynard s, 315, 316. meadow grass, 169, 170. meadow-sweet, 447. meadows, 346. meander, 117. medeola berries, 25. melody, 298. melvin, 375, 380, 423. melvin s preserve, 9. memorial book, 313. men, 153. merrick s pasture, 21, 35, 399. merrimack, 117. migration, 270. migratory birds, 156, 157. miles, c., 232. miles, martial, 306, 437, 438. miles swamp, 29, 275. milkweed, 143. mill, cobweb drapery of, 128. miller, hugh, 32, 33. min, 385. ministerial lot, 292. ministerial swamp, 19, 136, 304, 322. mink, 265, 266, 372, 401. minott, 55, 57, 61, 62, 63, 223, 226, 250, 255, 256, 355, 376, 380, 417, 418. minott, george, 309, 376. minott s house, 334, 335. mint, 148. mole crickets, 22, 27, 29. monadnock, 25, 26. moods, 209, 210. moon, 260. moonlight, 376. moore s swamp, 57. moose, 193. moses, 281. moss, 169, 227, 234, 293, 324, 363, 364. motion, 439. mountain, 131, 176, 177. mountain ash, 16, 181. mountain peak, 25, 26. mountains, 130, 131, 143, 214, 215, 263, 264, 301. mouse, 297, 385. mouse-ear chickweed, 318. mulleins, 279. munroe, j. & co., 163, 339. mus leucopus, 276. music, 35, 36, 97, 119, 120, 252, 291, 378. musical sand, 4. musketaquid, 117, 174, 193. muskrats, 371, 372, 373, 376, 452. muskrats diet, 354. muskrats houses, 77, 78, 79, 111, 116, 118, 218, 224, 225, 228, 239, 240, 249, 250, 251, 255. mussels, 78. myrtle birds, 137. names, 273. nashua river, 449. nature, 76, 77, 180, 212, 213, 234, 436, 454. nature, changes in, 204. nature genial to man, 315. nature, gradation in, 266. nature, home in, 258. nature the only panacea, 13. nature, phases of, 11. nature serene, 433. nature, success of, 415. nature s pensioners, 134, 135, 136. nawshawtuck, 3, 174, 198. neighbors, 169, 379. new bedford, 407. new england, 402. index. 467 new england winter sunsets, 433. night, g9, 85, 159. night-shade, 47, 48. non-producers, 5, 6. north america discovered, 30. &quot; north american review,&quot; 404. northeast storm, 14g, 156. novelty, 195, 196. november, 158, 183, 189, 191, 196, 233, 262, 269, 270, 295, 297, 314. november afternoon, 261, 290, 307, 328. november evening, 194, 195. november in new england, 402. nut meadow, 409. nuthatch, 236, 335, 369, 370, 388, 389, 435. oak, black, 114, 148, 346. oak leaves, 59, 114, 122, 204, 297, 308, 345, 346, 364, 384, 436, 451. oak, red, 114, 148, 201, 202. oak, scarlet, 114. oak, white, 114, 138, 139, 148, 346. oak wood, 236, 346. oaks, 37, 146, 169, 315, 323, 373. oar, 147. obstacles, 159. october, 143, 312. old shoes, 399. olive oil, 338. order or system, 106. osmundas, 66. otters, tracks of, 392, 393, 408. out-doors, 212. owls, 86, 165, 166, 167, 168, 405, 437. owl s nest, 275. oxen, 366. oyster, 398. pagoda, 18. pails, 128, 129. panicum crus-galli, 23. panicum filiforme, 23. panicum sanguinale, 23. partridge, 229, 231, 293, 352, 388, 409, 413, 448. partridge berries, 311. partridge berry leaves, 279. party, 267, 268. passenger pigeon, 30. peabody, 70. pears, 6, 95, 96. peculiarity, 418. pelagii, 294. pelham s pond, 111. pencils, 299, 300. pennyroyal, 399. pestle, 344. peterboro hills, 263. philadelphia, 302. philosophy, 437, 438. phosphorescent wood, 63, 64, 74. pickerel, 183, 278. pickerel fisher, 396. picture-frame, 204, 205, 406. pigweed, 23. pilgrims, 39, 401. pine hill, 58, 110, 212, 214, 328, 330, 354. pine log, 355. pine needles, 18, 115, 401. pine roots and knots, 399. pine warblers, 68. pine wood, 109, 309, 346, 419, 443, 444. pines, 37, 57, 146, 148, 192, 193, 226, 283, 343, 419. pines, pitch, 53, 87, 109, 139, 152, 443, 450. pines, white, 52, 109, 191, 198, 247, 256, 312, 314, 353, 456, 457. pitch-pine cones, 269, 306. pitcher plant, 33, 34, 275, 283. plants, 70, 386, 387. pliny, 274. ploughing, 243, 244. ploughman, 305. plymouth plantation, 401. poet, 192, 204, 304, 319, 322. poetry, 360. poetry, ancient scotch, 261. poetry, english, 349. poet s life, 161, 162. poet s thoughts, 294. politics, 244. polygonum articulatum, 20. polygonum aviculare, 198. polygonums, 84. polygula sanguinea, 108. polypody, 199, 200, 201, 220, 221. pond, 237, 357, 383, 396, 404, 405. pontederia, 239, 240. poplar hill, 79, 102, 215. poplars, 37. populus grandidentata, 41, 312. populus tremuloides, 354, 364. porter, commodore, 321. potatoes, 219, 220, 287. potentilla argentea, 239, 318. potentilla canadensis, 35. poverty, 265. pratt, minott, 356. prayer, 100, 369. preacher, 281, 284. preaching, 283, 284. presents, 220. priest, 442. primrose, 286. 468 index. prinos berries, 53, 233. prinos verticillata, 297. prosperity, 13. providence, 390. public opinion, 94. puffballs, 71, 72. puffer, 380. pyramids, 303. quail, 401. questions, 122. rabbit, 85, 86, 187, 293, 324, 325, 336, 413. railway journeys, 301, 302. rainbow, 257. rana palustris, 11, 27. rana sylvatica, 11. ranunculus bulbosus, 305. ranunculus repens, 79, 239, 318. redpolls, 404, 413-416. redwings, 47, 68. reflections, 406, 412, 434, 441. reflections in water, 183, 199, 202, 238, 319, 373, 374. regrets, 260. reminiscence, 153, 154. repentance, 411. rhexia, 53. rice, 286, 287, 288, 380. richardson, 376, 380, 397. ripe, 259. rising generation, 223. river, 7, 111, 112, 119, 147, 157, 160, 182, 1 83, 190, 249, 283, 339, 370, 371, 372, 384, 388, 389, 400, 434, 458. river scenery, 8. robin, 198. rocks, 201, 211,274. roots, 354, 355. rose, 422. routine, 416. ruskin, 180. ruskin s &quot; modern painters,&quot; 76. 8 , a poor boy, 402, 403. sabbath, 281. safford, 162, saffron-walden, 376. salamander, 390. sanborn, 426. sand, 98. sand banks, 108. sarracenia purpurea, 33. sassafras, 86, 88. saw mill brook, 24, 209, 210, 310. science, 105, 131, 361, 374. science, man of, 221. scott s &quot; lady of the lake &quot; quoted, 254. screech-owl, 5, 86, 165, 166, 167, 168. seasons, 74, 154, 157, 158, 289, 432. second division brook, 136. seeds transported by birds, 2. selectmen, 363. salf knowledge, 182. sentences, 254. serenity, 270. shad-bush, 103, 227, 228. shad frogs, 79. shakespeare, 161, 380. shattuck, 376. shells, 294. shepherd s purse, 318, 394. shiners, 58, 59. shrub oak, 309, 314, 345, 368, 369, 397, 445, 446, 456. shrub oak leaves, 87, 327, 367, 383, 445, 446, 447. shrub oak plain, 17, 102, 308, 456. shrubs, buds on, 393. shrubs reflected, 82, 83. side-saddle flower, 33. side view, 221. sight, 195. silence, 435, 439. sin, 260, 291. skating, 391, 394, 395, 400. 452, 458. skeleton, 374. skies, 285. skinner, 340. skins, 393. skunk cabbage, 187, 188, 189, 398. sky, changes of, 428, 429. small things, 83. smith s hill, 24, 25, 404. smoke, 59, 60, 61, 79, 102, 272, 315. snake, 22, 23, 87. snapdragon, canada, 113. snapping turtle s eggs, 285. snipes, 157, 159. snow, 113, 158, 230, 243, 346, 317, 318, 323, 324, 398, 443, 451. snowbirds, 328, 366. snow-buntings, 227, 347, 409, 423, 424. snow-fleas, 161, 183, 394, 409, 440. snowstorm, 341, 359. social virtues, 144. society, 401, 419. solanum, dulcamara, 23, 24. solidago caesia, 46. solidago speciosa, 54. solomon s seal, 25. song-sparrow, 79, 407. sortes virgilianse, 421. sounds, 101. space, 407. spanish book, 212. index. 409 sparrows, 23, 68, 70, 126, 127, 157, 158, 189, 230, 305, 328, 407. spear-head, 372. species, 298. speculations, 394. speech, freedom of, 284. spencer, brook, 59. spiders, 133, 184, 185, 186, 275. spine, 419. sprague, 308. sprengel, 438. spring, 91, 159, 160, 370, 371. spring, a second, 35, 144, 279, 319. spruce swamp, 413. squash, 6. squirrel, 73, 74, 155, 211, 230, 231, 236, 299, 352, 353, 369, 458. star, 159, 336. statements, 188, 189. stellaria media, 318. stillness, 228, 229, 405. still water, 111, 120. stranger, 144. stream, ascent and descent of, 202, 203. stumps, 169, 215, 216. succory, 20, 53, 108. sudbury, 314, 316. sudbury men, 316. sumac, 16, 448. summer, 394. summer duck, 240, 241. sun, reflected heat of, 22. sunlight, 289. sun-sparkles, 229. sunset, 3, 17, 90, 112, 152, 214, 259, 311, 327, 330, 331, 345, 388, 429. sunsets, new england winter, 433. superstition, 421, 425. swallow, 192, 242, 243. swallow holes, 383. swallows nests, 304. swamp, 33, 186, 187, 231, 232, 331, 387, 425. swamp bridge brook, 174, 319. swamp pink, 233, 283, 364, 413. swamp pyrus, 233, 413. sweetbriar, 86. sweet fern, 289, 307, 314, 397. sword, 9. syriaca, 143. tahatawan, 174, 360. tansy, 108, 239, 268, 294, 318, 422. tarbell s, 332, 371. tastes, 155. tears, 248. teeth, 381. telegraph harp, 107. tent, 18. thanksgiving afternoon, 331. theme, 124, 125. theophrastus, 274. therien, 250. thhnbleberry shoots, 213, 330, 368. thinking. 280. thistles, 149. thoughts, 158, 212, 262, 333, 334. thoughts, old ruts of, 12, 418. threshing, 61. ticks, 38, 39. tiger, 316. toad-flax, 314. tools, 287. tortoise, 3, 79, 412. touch-me-not seed vessels, 24. tournefort, 282. towns, 367. tracks, 384, 385, 408. trade, 140. trail, 341. travel, 304. tree fern, 20. tree, injury to, 145. tree sparrows, 103, 181, 199, 328, 340, 383, 401, 413. treetoads, 153. trees, 210, 222, 338, 377, 379. trees, character of, 41. trees, dead, 431. trichostema dichotomum, 399. truth, 189, 203, 218, 260, 422. turnips, 311. turtle-dove, 25. twilight, 374, 412. uncannoonuc, 243. undulations. 439, 440. valor, 342, 343. valparaiso squash, 321. values, 348, 349. vanessa antiopa, 197. vapor, 107, 428, 429, 438. varro, 148. verses, 223, 224, 253, 297, 351, 352. vestiges of creation, 33. vice an aid to success, 1. viola lanceolata, 57. viola ovata, 79, 108. viola pedata, 230, 237. violet, hood-leaved, 35. violets, 35, 237, 279, 422. virgin s bower, 228. visiting, 65, 386. wachusett, 131, 354, 359. walden, 57, 110, 152, 209,327,354, 357, 360, 3g5, 399, 400, 436, 441, 447. 470 index. walden in essex, 376. walden pond, 37, 42, 82, 83, 214, 226, 253, 380. walk, 235, 328, 329. walking, 328, 329. walnuts, 148, 173. ware, dr., jr., 208, 209. wasps, 42. water, 160, 373. water bugs, 95. water the centre of landscape, 102. water, colors of, 152. waterloo, 6. weather, 92, 93, 225, 269, 314,343. weeds, 6. &quot; week on the concord and merri mack rivers,&quot; 163. weird dell, 358. well meadow brook, 283. well meadow field, 358. weston, mr., 326. whale, 193. wheeler s pasture, 305, 307. wheeler s owl wood, 358. whippoorwill, 70. white mountains, 71. white pine needles, 18. white pond, 108. white-weed, 113. wild apples, 212. wild-cat, 340. wild flowers, 7. wild pig, 313, 314. williams, henry, 49. williams, oliver, 223. willow bay, 115. willow catkins, 297. willows, 182, 184, 354. wind, 35, 71, 253, 330, 332. wind, self-registering, 208. window, 214, 337, 338, 354. winter, 158, 161, 244, 249, 346, 395, 396, 415, 416. winter, love for, 389. winter day, 459. winter eve, 406. winter evening, 436, 437. winter morning, 443. winter scenes, 125, 324, 326, 357, 358, 359. winter sky, 389. winter walk, 427. winter weather, 332. wisdom, 36, 317. wise, the balloonist, 428. wishes, 420. witherel glade, 117, 277. wolves, 336, 337. women, 265, 267. woodbine, 29. wood-choppers, 293, 388, 405, 407, 437, 451, 456, 458. woodchuck, 69. woodcock, 159, 310, 311. wooden trays, 128, 129. wood-lot, 379, 417, 418. wood-path, 366. woodman, 293. woodpecker, 407, 409, 432. woods, 85, 203, 204, 271, 326, 397. woods, drama in, 279. words, 207. wordsworth, 293. world, beauty of, 416, 417. wormwood, 368. writer, 456. writing, 331, 444. wyman, john, 223. yarrow, 108, 211, 239, 268, 294, 318. young men, 453, 454. youth, 322. 14 day use return to desk from which borrowed loan dept. this book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. renewed books are subject to immediate recall. -7pm ld 21a-60m-4. 64 (e4555slo)476b general library university of california berkeley ^ i0i:tteir4mv^j;$itg pilrmg 6603 cornell university library ps 3042.b65 winter :(rom the journal of /henry david 3 1924 022 194 868 the original of tliis bool< is in tine cornell university library. there are no known copyright restrictions in the united states on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022194868 isaofes bp |). 23. 2c!)orcan. walden ; or, life in the woods. i2mo, gilt top, $1.50. a week on the concord and merrimack riv e.rs. i2mo, gilt top, s1.50. excursions in field and forest. with a bio graphical sketch by r. w. emerson, ijmo, gilt top, j1.50. the maine woods. i2mo, gilt top, $1.50. cape cod. i2mo, gilt top, $1.50. letters to various persons, to which are added a few poems. i2mo, gilt top, $1.50. a yankee in canada. with antislavery and reform papers. i2mo, gilt top, $1.50. early spring in massachusetts. fromthe jour nal of henry d. thoreau. i2mo, gilt top, $1.50. summer. selections descriptive of summer from the jour nal of henry d. thoreau. izmo, gilt top, $1.50. winter. selections from the journal of henry d. tho reau. i2mo, gilt top, $1.50. the above ten volumes. $15.00 ; half calf, $27.50. houghton, mifflin & co. boston and new york. winter: erom .the journal of heney di^oeeau edited by hr 6.^0. blake knowledge means ever-renewed assurance by defeat that victory is somehow still to reach.; but love is victory, the prize itself. bbowninq ^^^r^*!^^ '^^^^^^^p ^^b 1 i^^^^^ i mtwmmtm^ s boston and new york houghton, mifflin and company sfe stiviersiae ^ttii-, camiritifle 1890 ® univ':n:ity copyriglit, 1887, br houghton, mieflin & co. all rights reserved. the riverside press, camirirlge, mass., u.s.a. electrotyped and printed by h. o. houghton & company. intkoductory. to those who are not specially interested in the character of thoreau, who regard him merely as a writer who has sometimes expressed original thoughts in a happy way, who has made some interesting observations of natural phenomena, and at times written beautifully about nature, it may seem hardly worth while to publish more of his journal. but from time to time i meet with or receive letters from persons who feel the same deep interest in him as an individual, in his thoughts and views of life, that i do, and who, i am sure, will eagerly welcome any additional expression of that indi viduality. of course there are many such per sons of whom i do not hear. thoreau himself regarded literature as alto gether secondary to life, strange as this may seem to those who think of him as a hermit or dreamer, shunning what are commonly con sidered as among the most important practical realities, trade, politics, the church, the institu tions of society generally. he took little part in iv introductory. these things because he believed they would sstand in the way of his truest life, and to attain that, as far as possible, he knew to be his first business in the world. even in a philanthropic point of view, any superficial benefit he might confer by throwing himself into the current of society would be as nothing compared with the loss of real power and influence which would result from disobedience to his highest instincts. " ice that merely performs the office of a burning glass does not do its duty." it was not sufficient for him to entertain and express as an author " subtle thoughts," but he aspired rather " so ua love wisdom as to live, according to its dictates! i a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimityi and trust," " to solve some of the problems oi life not only theoretically, but practically." it is the clear insight early creating a deep, persistent determination so to live, rather than his genius, which gives value to thoreau's work, though this insight itself may well be regarded as the highest form of genius. it is the attitude one takes toward the world, far more than any abili ties he may possess, which gives significance to his life. it has been well said by brownlee brown that " courage, piety, wit, zeal, learning, eloquence, avail nothing, unless the man is right." introductory. v as the young pass out of childhood, that fore taste or symbol of the kingdom of heaven, the expression of serene innocence is too apt to fade from their faces and the clouds to gather there, while it is considered a matter of course that each one should attach himself to the social machine. one becomes a lawyer, another a clergyman, another a physician, another a merchant, and the treasure which the childlike soul has lost is sought to be regained in some general and far-off way by society at large. but the burden which men thus readily take upon themselves, in the common race for comfort, luxury, and social position is out of all proportion to their spiritual vitality, and so the truest life of individuals is being continually sacrificed to the juggernaut of society. men associate al most universally in the shallower and falser part of their natures, so that while institutions may seem to flourish, corruption is also gaining ground through the spiritual failure of individ uals ; finally the fabric falls, and a new form rises to go through the same round. the highest form of civilization at the present day seems to be an advance upon all that have pre ceded it, though in some particulars it plainly falls behind. perhaps only by this alternate rising and falling can the human race advance. vi introductory. but the progress of individuals is the essential thing ; only so far as that takes place will the real progress of the race follow, and those per sons contribute most to this real progress who, stepping aside from the ordinary routine, give us by their lives and thoughtsa new sense of the reality of what is best, of the ideal towards which all civilization must aim ; who are so in love with truth, rectitude, and the beauty of the world, including in this, first of all, the original, unimpaired beauty of the human soul, that they have little care for material prosperity, social position, or public opinion. it was not merely nature in the ordinary sense, plants, animals, the landsc3.pe, etc., which attracted thoreau. he is continually manifesting a human interest in natural objects, and thoughts of an ideal friend ship are forever haunting him. touching the highest and fairest relation of one human soul to another, i do not believe there can be found in literature, ancient or modern, anything finer, anything which comes closer home to our best experience, than what appears in thoreau's writings generally, and especially in " wednes day" of the " "week on the concord and merri mack rivers." the editor. winter. december 21, 1851. my difficulties with my friends are such as no frankness will settle. there is no precept in the new testament that will assist me. . . . others can confess and ex plain, i cannot. it is not that i am too proud. but explanation is not what is wanted. friend ship is the unspeakable joy and blessing that result to two or more individuals who from con stitution sympathize. such natures are liable to no mistakes, but will know each other through thick and thin. between two by nature alike and fitted to sympathize there is no veil, and there can be no obstacle. who are the estranged ? two friends explaining. i feel sometimes as if i could say to my friends, " my friends, i am aware how i have outraged you, how i have seemingly preferred hate to love, seemingly treated others kindly and you unkindly, sedulously concealed my love, and sooner or later expressed all and more than all my hate." i can imagine how i might utter 2 winter. something like this, in some moment never to be realized, but, at the same time, let me say frankly that i feel i might say it with too little regret, that i am under an awful necessity to be what i am. if the truth were known, which i do not know, i have no concern with those friends whom i misunderstand or who misunder stand me. the fates only are unkind that keep us asunder ; but my friend is ever kind. i am of the nature of stone. it takes the summer's sun to warm it. — my acquaintances sometimes imply that i am too cold, but each thing is warm enough for its kind. is the stone too cold which absorbs the heat of the summer sun, and does not part with it during the night? crystals, though they be of ice, are not too cold to melt ; it was in melting that they were formed. cold ! i am most sensible of warmth in winter days. it is not the warmth of fire that you would have ; everything is warm or cold according to its nature. it is not that i am too cold, but that our warmth and coldness are not of the same nature. hence when i am absolutely warmest, i may be coldest to you. crystal does not complain of crystal any more than the dove of its mate. you who complain that i am cold, find nature cold. to me she is warm. my heat is latent to you. fire itself is cold to whatever is not of a nature to be winter. 3 warmed by it. . . . that i am cold means that i am of another nature. . . . how swiftly the earth appears to revolve at sunset, — which at midday appears to rest on its axis. dec. 21, 1853. we are tempted to call these the finest days of the year. take fair haven pond, for instance, a perfectly level plain of snow, untrodden as yet by any fisherman, sur rounded by snow-clad hills, dark, evergreen woods, and reddish oak leaves, so pure and still. the last rays of the sun falling on baker farm reflect a clear pink color. — i see the feathers of a partridge strewn along on the snow for a long distance, the work of some hawk, perhaps, for there is no track. what a groveling appetite for profitless jest and amusement our countrymen have ! next to a good dinner, at least, they love a good joke, to have their sides tickled, to laugh sociably, as in the east they bathe and are shampooed. cu rators of lyceums write to me, dear sir, — i hear that you have a lecture of some humor. will you do us the favor to read it before the bungtown institute ? dec. 22, 1851. if i am thus seemingly cold compared with my companion's warm, who knows but mine is a less transient glow, a stead ier and more equable heat, like that of the 4 winter. earth in spring, in which the flowers spring and expand. it is not words that i wish to hear or to utter, but relations that i wish to stand in, and it oftener happens, methinks, i go away unmet, unrecognized, ungreeted in my offered relation, than that -you are disappointed of words. i have seen in the form, in the expression of face, of a child three years old the tried magna nimity and grave nobility of ancient and departed worthies. 1 saw a little irish boy, come from the distant shanty in the woods over the bleak rail road to school this morning, take his last step from the last snow-drift on to the school house door-step, floundering still, saw not his face nor his profile, only his mien ; i imagined, saw clearly in imagination, his old worthy face behind the sober visor of his cap. ah i this little irish boy, i know not why, revives to my mind the worthies of antiquity. he is not drawn, he never was drawn, in a wiuow wagon. he progresses by his own brave steps. has not the world waited for such a generation. here he condescends to his a b c, without one smile, who has the lore of worlds uncounted in his brain. he speaks not of the adventures of the causeway. what was the bravery of leonidas and his three hundred boys at the pass of ther mopylae to this infant's ! they but dared to die, winter. 5 he dares to live, and take his "reward of merit," perchance (without relaxing his face into a smile), that overlooks his unseen and unregard able merits. little johnny riorden, who faces cold and routs it like a persian array. while the charitable waddle about cased in furs, he, lively as a cricket, passes them on his way to school. dec. 22, 1853. surveying the hunt farm. a rambling, rocky, wild, moorish pasture this of hunt's, with two or three great white oaks to shade the cattle, which the farmer would not take fifty dollars apiece for, though the ship builder wanted them. it is pleasant, as you are cutting a path through a swamp, to see the color of the differ ent woods, the yellowish dogwood, the green prinos (?), and on the upland, the splendid yel low barberry. . . . you cannot go out so early but. you will find the track of some wild crea ture. returning home just after the sun had sunk below the horizon, i saw from n. barrett's a fire made by boys on the ice near the red bridge which looked like the bright reflection of the setting sun from the water under the bridge, so clear, so^ittle lurid in this winter evening. dec. 22, 1858. p. m. to walden. i see in 6 winter. the cut near the shanty site quite a flock of fringilla hyemalis and goldfinches together on the snow and weeds and ground. hear the well-known mew and watery twitter of the last, and the drier " chill chill " of the former. these burning yellow birds, with a little black and white in their coat flaps, look warm above the snow. there may be thirty goldfinches, very brisk and pretty tame. they hang, head down wards, on the weeds. i hear of their coming to pick sunflower seeds in melvin's garden these days. dec. 22, 1859. another fine winter day. — p. m. to flint's pond, . . . we pause and gaze into the mill brook on the turnpike bridge. i see a good deal of cress there on the bottom for a rod or two, the only green thing to be seen. ... is not this the plant which most, or most conspicuously, preserves its greenness in the winter ? ... it is as green as ever, and waving in the stream as in summer. how nicely is nature adjusted. the least disturbance of her equilibrium is betrayed and corrects itself. as i looked down on the sur face of the brook, i was surprised to see a leaf floating, as i thought, up stream, but i was mis taken. the motion of a mrticle of dust on the surface of any brook far inland shows which way the earth declines toward the sea, which winter. 7 way lies the constantly descending route, and the only one. i see in the chestnut woods near flint's pond where squirrels have collected the small chestnut burs left on the trees, and opened them gener ally at the base o£ the trunks on the snow. these are, i think, all small and imperfect burs, which do not so much as open in the fall, and are rejected then, but hanging on the tree, they have this use, at least, as the squirrels' winter food. . . . the fisherman stands still and erect on the ice, awaiting our approach, as usual forward to say that he has had no luck. he has been here since early morning, and for some reason or other he has had no luck ; the fishes won't bite, you won't catch him here again in a hurry. they all tell the same story. the amount of it is, he has had " fisherman's luck," and if you walk that way, you may find him at his old post to-morrow. it is hard, to be sure ; four little fishes to be divided between three men, and two and a half miles to walk ; and you have only got a more ravenous appetite for the supper which you have not earned. however, the pond floor is not a bad place whereon to spend a win ter day. dec. 23, 1837. crossed the river to-day on the ice. though the weather is raw and win 8 winter. try, and the ground covered with snow, i noticed a solitary robin. . . . in the side of the high bank by the leaning hemlock there were some curious crystalliza tions. wherever the water or other cause had formed a hole in the bank, its throat and outer edge, like the entrance to a citadel of the olden time, bristled with a glistening ice armor. in one place you might see minute ostrich feathers which seemed the waving plumes of the war riors filing into the fortress, in another, the glancing fan-shaped banners of the liliputian host, and in another, the needle-shaped joarticles collected into bundles resembling the plumes of the pine, might pass for a phalanx of spears. the whole hill was like an immense quartz rock with minute crystals sparkling from innumer able crannies. dec. 23, 1841. the best man's spirit makes a fearful sprite to haunt his tomb. the ghost of a priest is no better than that of a highway man. it is pleasant to hear of one who has blest whole regions after his death by having frequented them while alive, who has profaned or tabooed no place by being buried in it. it adds not a little to the fame of little john that his grave was long " celebrous for the yielding of excellent whetstones." a forest is in all mythologies a sacred place ; winter. 9 as the oaks among the druids, and the grove of egeria, and even in more familiar and common life, as " barnsdale vs^ood " and " sherwood. " had robin hood no sherwood to resort to, it would be difficult to invest his story with the charms it has got. it is always the tale that is untold, the deeds done, and the life lived in the unexplored scenery of the wood, that charm us and make us children again, to read his ballads and hear of the greenwood tree. dec. 23, 1851. . . . it is a record of the mel low and ripe moments that i would keep. i would not preserve the husk of life, but the ker nel. when the cup of life is full and flowing over, preserve some drops as a specimen sample ; when the intellect enlightens the heart and the heart warms the intellect. — thoughts sometimes possess our heads when we are up and about our business which are the exact counterpart of the bad dreams we sometimes have by night, and i think the intellect is equally inert in both cases. very frequently, no doubt, the thoughts men have are the consequence of something they have eaten or done. our waking moods and humors are our dreams, but whenever we are truly awake and serene and healthy in all our senses, we have memorable visions. who that takes up a book wishes for the report of the clogged bowels or the impure blood ? 10 winter. bee. 23, 1855. p. m. to conantum end. a very bright and pleasant day with a remarkably soft wind from a little n. of w. the frost has come out so in the rain of yesterday, that i avoid the muddy plowed fields, and keep on the green ground which shines with moisture. . . . i admire those old root fences which have al most disappeared from tidy fields, white pine roots got out when the neighboring meadow was a swamp, the monuments of many a revolution. these roots have not penetrated into the ground, but spread over the surface, and having been cut off four or five feet from the stump were hauled off and set up on their edges for a fence. the roots were not merely interwoven, but grown to gether into solid frames, full of loop-holes like gothic windows of various sizes and all shapes, triangular, and oval, and harp-like, and the slen derer parts are dry and resouant like harp strings. they are rough and unapproachable, with a hun dred snags and horns, which bewilder and balk the calculation of the walker who would sur mount them. the part of the trees above ground present no such fantastic forms. here is one seven paces or more than a rod long, six feet high in the middle, and yet only one foot thick, and two men could turn it up. in this case the roots were six or nine inches thick at the extremities. the roots of pines in swamps winter. 11 grow thus in the form of solid frames or rack ets, and those of different trees are interwoven withal so that they stand on a very broad foot, and stand or fall together to some extent be fore the blasts as herds meet the assaults of beasts of prey with serried front. you have thus only to dig into the swamp a little way to find your fence, post, rails, and slats already solidly grown together, and of material more durable than any timber. how pleasing a thought that a field should be fenced with the roots of the trees got out in clearing the land a century before. i regret them as mementos of the primitive forest. the tops of the same trees made into fencing stuff would have decayed gen erations ago. these roots are singularly unob noxious to the effects of moisture. . . . think of the life of a kitten, ours, for in stance. last night her eyes set in a fit ; it is doubtful if she will ever come out of it, and she is set away in a basket and submitted to the re cuperative powers of nature ; this morning run ning up the clothes' pole, and erecting her back in frisky sport to every passer. dec. 23, 1856. some savage tribes must share the experience of the lower animals in their relation to man. with what thoughts must the esquimau manufacture his knife from the rusty hoop of a cask drifted to his shores, not 12 winter. a natural, but an artificial product, the work of man's hands, the waste of the commerce of a superior race whom perhaj)s he never saw ! the cracking of the ground is a phenomenon of the coldest nights. after being waked by the loud cracks of the 18th at amherst, a man told me in the morning that he had seen a crack running across the plain (i saw it) almost broad enough to put his hand into. this was an exaggeration. it was not one fourth of an inch wide. i saw a great many the same fore noon running across the road in nashua, every few rods, and also by our house in concord the same day when i got home. so it seems the ground was cracking all the country over. part ly, no doubt, because there was so little snow, or none. none at concord. if the writer would interest readers, he must report so much life, using a certain satisfaction always as a point d'appui. however mean and limited, it must be a genuine and contented life that he speaks out of. his readers must have the essence or oil of himself, tried out of the fat of his experience and joy. dec. 23, 1860. . . . larks were about our house the middle of this month. dec. 24, 1840. the same sun has not yet shone on me and my friend. he would hardly have to look at me to recognize me, but glimmer winter. 13 with half-shut eye like some friendly distant taper when we are benighted. ^1 do not talk to any intellect in nature, but am presuming an infinite heart somewhere into which i play. dec. 24, 1841. i want to go soon and live away by the pond where i shall hear only the wind whispering among the reeds. it will be success if i shall have left myself behind. but my friends ask what i wiu do when i get there ! will it not be employment enough to watch the progress of the seasons ? dec. 24, 1850. saw a shrike pecking to pieces a small bird, apparently a snowbird. at length he took him up in his bill, almost half as big as himself, and flew slowly off with his prey dangling from his beak. i find that i had not associated such actions with my idea of birds. it was not bird-like. it is never so cold but it melts somewhere. our mason well remarked that he had some times known it to be melting and freezing at the same time on a particular side of a house ; while it was melting on the roof, icicles were forming under the eaves. it is always melting and freez ing at the same time where icicles are formed. our thoughts are with those among the dead into whose sphere we are rising, or who are now rising into our own. others we inevitably for get, though they be brothers and sisters. thus 14 winter. the departed may be nearer to us than when they were present. at death, our friends and relatives either draw nearer to us, and are found out, or depart farther from us, and are forgot ten. friends arc as often brought nearer to gether as separated by death. dec. 24, 1853. . . . walden almost entirely open again. skated across flint's pond, for the most part smooth, but with rough spots where the rain had not melted the snow. from the hill beyond i get an arctic view n. w. the moun tains are of a cold slate color. it is as if they bounded the continent toward behring's straits. in weston's field in springy land on the edge of a swamp i counted thirty-three or four of those large silvery brown cocoons within a rod or two, and probably there are many more ; about a foot from the ground, commonly on the main stem, though sometimes on a branch close to the stem, of the alder, sweet fern, brake, etc. the largest are four inches long by two and one half wide, bag-shaped and wrinkled, and partly concealed by dry leaves, alder, fern, etc., attached, as if' sprinkled over them. this evi dence of cunning in so humble a creature is affecting, for i am not ready to refer it to an intelligence which the creature does not share, as much as we do the prerogative of reason. this radiation of the brain ! the bare silvery winter. 15 cocoon would otherwise be too obvious. the worm has evidently said to itself, man or some other creature may come by and see my casket. i will disguise it, will hang a screen before it. brake, and sweet fern, and alder leaves are not only loosely sprinkled over it and dangling from it, but often, as it were, pasted close upon and almost incorporated into it. dec. 24, 1854. some three inches of snow fell last night and this morning, concluding with a fine rain, which produced a slight glaze, the first of the winter. this gives the woods a hoary aspect, and increases the stillness by making the leaves immovable even in a consid erable wind. bee. 24, 1856. . . . noticed at e. end of the westernmost andromeda pond the slender spikes of lycopus with half-a-dozen little spher ical dark brown whorls of pungently fragrant or spicy seeds, somewhat nutmeg-like or even like flagroot (?) when bruised. i am not sure that the seeds of any other mint are thus fra grant now. it scents your handkerchief or pocket-book finely when the crumbled whorls are sprinkled over them. — it was very pleas ant walking thus before the storm was over, in the soft, subdued light. we are more domes ticated in nature when our vision is confined to near and familiar objects. did not see a track 16 winter. of any animal till returning, near well-meadow field, where many foxes (?), one of whom i had a glimpse of, had been coursing back and forth in the path and near it for three quarters of a mile. they had made quite a path. i do not take snuff. in my winter walks i stoop and bruise between my thumb and fin ger the dry whorls of the lycopus or water horehound, just rising above the snow, stripping them off, and smell that. that is as near as i come to the spice islands. dec. 24, 1859. ... i measure the blueberry bush on fairhaven pond island. the five stems are united at the ground so as to make one round and solid trunk thirty-one inches in circumference, but probably they have grown together there, for they become separate at about six inches above. they may have sprung from different seeds of one berry. at three feet from the ground they measure eleven, eleven, eleven and one half, eight, and six and one half or on an average nine and one half inches. i climbed up and found a comfortable seat, with my feet four feet from the ground. there was room for three or four more there, but unfortu nately this was not the season for berries. there were several other clumps of large ones in the neighborhood. one clump close by the former contained twenty-three stems within a winter. 17 diameter of three feet, and their average diame ter at three feet from the ground was about two inches these had not beeu cut because they stood on this small island which has little wood beside, and therefore had grown thus large. . . . the stems rise up in a winding and zigzag manner, one sometimes resting in the forks of its neighbor. judging from those whose rings i have counted, the largest of those stems must be about sixty years old. dec. 25, 1840. the character of washing ton has, after all, been undervalued, because not valued correctly. he was a proper puritan hero. it is his erectness and persistency which attract me. a few simple deeds with a digni fied silence for background, and that is all. he never fluctuated, nor lingered, nor stooped, nor swerved, but was nobly silent and assured. he was not the darling of the people, as no man of integrity can ever be, but was as much re spected as loved. his instructions to his stew ard, his refusal of a crown, his interview with his officers at the termination of the war, his thoughts after his retirement, as expressed in a letter to la fayette, his remarks to another cor respondent on his being chosen president, his last words to congress, and the unparalleled re spect which his most distinguished contempora ries, as fox and erskine, expressed for him, are 18 winter. refreshing to read in these unheroic days. his behavior in the field and in council and his dig nified and contented withdrawal to private life were great. he could advance and he could withdraw. dec. 25, 1841. it seems as if nature did for a long time gently overlook the profanity of man. the wood still kindly echoes the strokes of the axe, and when the strokes are few and seldom, they add a new charm to a walk. all the elements strive to naturalize the sound. . . . it is not a true apology for any coarseness to say that it is natural. the grim woods can afford to be very delicate and perfect in the details. i don't want to feel as if my life were a so journ any longer. that philosophy cannot be -true which so paints it. it is time now that i begin to live. dec. 25, 1851. ... i go forth to see the sun set. who knows how it will set even half an hour beforehand ? whether it will go down in clouds or a clear sky ? . . . i witness a beauty in the form or coloring of the clouds which addresses itself to my imagination. it is what it suggests and is the symbol of that i care for, and if, by any trick of science, you rob it of this, you do me no service and explain noth ing. i, standing twenty miles off, see a crim winter. 19 son cloud in the horizon. you tell me it is a mass of vapor which absorbs all other rays and reflects the red; but that is nothing to the pur pose, for this red vision excites me, stirs my blood, makes my thoughts flow. i have new and indescribable fancies, and you have not touched the secret of that influence. if there is not something mystical in your explanation, ... it is quite insufficient. . . . what sort of science is that which enriches the understanding, but robs the imagination ? not merely robs peter to pay paul, but takes from peter more than it ever gives to paul. that is simply the way in which it speaks to the understanding, . . . but that is not the way it speaks to the imagination. . . . just as inadequate to a mere mechanic would be a poet's account of a steam-engine. if we knew all things thus mechanically merely, should we know anything really ? — it would be a true dis cipline for the writer to take the least film of thought that floats in the twilight sky of his mind for his theme, about which he has scarcely one idea (that would be teaching his ideas how to shoot), make a lecture on this, by assiduity and attention get perchance two views of the same, increase a little the stock of knowledge, clear jj. new field instead of manuring the old. . . . we seek too soon to ally the perceptions of the mind to the experience of the hand, to prove 20 winter. oar gossamer truths practical, to show their con nection with every-day life (better show their distance from every-day life), to relate them to the cider mill and the banking institution. , . . that way of viewing things you know of, least insisted on by you however, least remembered, take that view, adhere to that, insist on that ; see all things from that point of view. will you let these intimations go unattended to, and watch the door bell or knocker ? . . . do not speak for other men ; think for yourself. you are shown as in a vision the kingdoms of this world, and of all the worlds, but you prefer to look in upon a puppet show. though you should speak but to one kindred mind in all time, though you should not speak to one, but only utter aloud, that you may the more completely realize and live in, the idea which contains the reason of your life, that you may build yourself up to the height of your conceptions, that you may remember your creator in the days of your youth, and justify his ways to man, that the end of life may not be its amusement. dec. 25, 1853. p. m. skated to fair haven and above. . . . about 4 p. m. the sun sank be hind a cloud and the pond began to whoop or boom. i noticed the same yesterday at the same hour on flint's. it was perfectly silent before. the weather in both cases clear, cold, and windy. winter. 21 it is a sort of belching, and as c. said, somewhat frog-like. i suspect it did not continue to whoop long either night. it is a very pleasing phenom enon, so dependent on the attitude of the sun. when i go to boston, i go naturally straight through the city down to the end of long wharf and look off, for i have no cousins in the back alleys. the water and the vessels are novel and interesting. what are our maritime cities but the shops and dwellings of merchants about a wharf projecting into the sea where there is a convenient harbor, on which to land the produce of other climes, and at which to load the exports of your own. next in interest to me is the market where the produce of our own country is collected. boston, new york, phila delphia, charleston, new orleans, and many others are the names of wharves projecting into the sea. they are good places to take in or to discharge a cargo. i see a great many bar rels and fig drums, and piles of wood for um brella sticks, and blocks of granite and ice, etc., and that is boston. great piles of goods, and the msans of packing and conveying them, much wrapping paper and twine, many crates and hogsheads and trucks, that is boston. the more barrels, the more boston. the museums and scientific societies and libraries are accidental. they gather around the barrels to save carting. 22 winter. apparently the ice is held down on the sides of the river by being frozen to the shore and the weeds, and so is overflowed there; but in the middle it is lifted up and makes room for the tide. i saw just above fair haven pond two or three places where just before the last freezing, when the ice was softened and partly covered with sleet, there had been a narrow canal about eight inches wide quite across the river from meadow to meadow. i am constrained to be lieve, from the peculiar character of it on thq meadow end, where in one case it divided and crossed itself, that it was made either by musk rats or otters or minks repeatedly crossing there. one end was, for some distance, like an otter trail in the soft upper part of the ice, not worn through. dec. 25, 1856. p. m. to lee's cliff. a strong wind from the n. w. is gathering the snow into picturesque drifts behind the walls. as usual, they resemble shells more than any thing else, sometimes the prows of vessels, also the folds of a white napkin or counterpane dropped over a bonneted head. there are no such picturesque snowdrifts as are formed be hind loose and open stone walls. . . . take long walks in stormy weather, or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would winter. 23 keep your spirits up. deal with brute nature. be cold and hungry and weary. dec. 25, 1858. . . . now that the sun is set ting, all its light seems to glance over the snow clad pond [walden], and strike the rocky shore under the pitch pines at the n. e. end. though the bare, rocky shore there is only a foot or a foot and a half high, as i look, it reflects so much light that the rocks are singularly distinct, as if the pond showed its teeth. . . . how full of soft, pure light the western sky now, after sunset ! i love to see the outlines of the pines against it. unless you watch, you do not know when the sun goes down. it is like a candle ex tinguished without smoke. a moment ago you saw that glittering orb amid the dry oak leaves in the horizon and now you can detect no trace of it. . . . but for au voice in that serene hour, i hear an owl hoot. how glad i am to hear him rather than the most eloquent man of the age. dec. 25, 1859. how different are men and women, e. g., in respect to the adornment of their heads. do you ever see an old or jammed bonnet on the head of a woman at a public meet ing? but look at any assembly of men with their hats on; how large a proportion of the hats will be old, weather-beaten, and indented; but, i think, so much more picturesque and in 24 winter. teresting. one farmer rides by my door in a hat whicli it does me good to see, there is so much character in it, so much independence, to begin with, and then affection for his old friends, etc., etc. i should not wonder if there were lichens on it. think of painting a hero in a brand-new hat ! the chief recommendation of the kossuth hat is that it looks old to start with, and almost as good as new to end with. indeed, it is gen erally conceded that a man does not look the w.oi'se for a somewhat dilapidated hat. but go to a lyceum and look at the bonnets and various other head gear of the women and girls (who, by the way, keep their hats on, it being too dan gerous and expensive to take them off), why, every one looks as fragile as a butterfly's wing's, having just come out of a bandbox, as it will go into a bandbox again when the lyceum is over. men wear their hats for use, women theirs for ornament. i have seen the greatest philosopher in the town with what the traders would call a "shocking bad hat" on, but the woman whose bonnet does not come up to the mark is at best a blue-stocking. the man is not particularly proud of his beaver and musquash, but the woman flaunts her ostrich and sable in your face. ladies are in haste to dress as if it were cold or as if it were warm, though it may not yet be so, merely to display a new dress. winter. 25 dec. 26, 1840. . . . when the pond is frozen i do not suspect the wealth under my feet. how many pickerel are poised on easy fin fathoms below the loaded wain. the revolution of the seasons must be a curious phenomenon to them. now the sun and wind brush aside their curtain, and they see the heavens again. sunday, dec. 26, 1841. . . . when i hear this bell ring, i am carried back to years and sabbaths when i was newer and more innocent, i fear, than now, and it seems to me as if there were a world within a world. sin, i am sure, is not in overt acts, or indeed in acts of any kind, but is in proportion to the time which has come behind us, and displaced eternity, to the degree in which our elements are mixed with the ele ments of the world. the whole duty of life is implied in the question, how to respire and as pire both at once. dec. 26, 1850. the pine woods seen from the hill-tops, now that the ground is covered with snow, are not green, but" a dark brown, greenish brown, perhaps. you see dark patches of wood. dec. 26, 1851. i observed this afternoon that when e h came home from sledding wood and unyoked his oxen, they made a busi ness of stretching and scratching themselves with their horns, rubbing themselves against the posts, and licking themselves in those parts 26 winter. which the yoke had prevented their reaching all day. the human way in which they behaved af fected me even pathetically. they were too se rious to be glad that their day's work was done; they had not spirits enough left for that. they behaved as a tired wood-chopper might. this was to me a new phase in the life of the laboring ox. it is painful to think how they may some times be overworked. dec. 26, 1853. this forenoon it snowed pretty hard for some hours, the first snow of any conse quence thus far. it is about three inchea deep. i go out at 2i^ p. m. just as it ceases. now is the time before the wind rises, or the sun has shone, to go forth and see the snow on the trees. the clouds have lifted somewhat, but are still spitting snow a little. the vapor of the steam engine does not rise high in the misty air. . . . the snow has fallen so gently that it forms an upright wall on the slenderest twig. the agree able maze which the branches make is more ob vious than ever, and every twig thus laden is as still as the hillside itself. the pitch pines are covered with soft globular masses. the effect of the snow is to press down the forest, con found it with the grasses, and create a new sur face to the earth above, shutting us in with it, and we go along somewhat like moles through our galleries. the sight of the pure and track winter. 2t less road up brister's hill, with branches and trees supporting snowy burdens bending over it on each side, would tempt us to begin life again. the ice is covered up and skating gone. the bare hills are so white that i cannot see their outlines against the misty sky. the snow lies handsomely on the shrub-oaks, like a coarse braiding in the air. they have so many small and zigzag twigs that it comes near to filling up with a light snow to that depth. the hunters are already out with dogs to follow the first beast that makes a track. — saw a small flock of tree sparrows in the sproutlands under bart lett's cliff. their metallic chip is much like the lisp of the chickadee. — all weeds with their seeds rising dark above the snow are now re markably conspicuous, which before were not ob served against the dark earth. — i passed by the pitch pine that was struck by lightning, and was impressed with awe on looking up and seeing that broad, distinct, spiral mark, more distinct even than when made eight years ago, as one might groove a walking stick, . . . mark where a terrific and resistless bolt came down from heaven, out of the harmless sky, eight years ago. it seemed a sacred spot. i felt that we had not learned much since the days of tullns hostilius. the tree at length shows the effect of the shock, and the woodpeckers have begun to bore it on one side. 28 winter. walden still open. saw in it a small diver, probably a grebe or dobchick, dipper or what not, with the markings, so far as i saw, of the crested grebe, but smaller. it had a black head, a white ring about its neck, a white breast, black back, and apparently no tail. it dived and swam a few rods under water, and when on the surface kept turning round and round warily, nodding its head the while. this is the only pond hereabouts that is open. was overtaken by an irishman seeking work. i asked him if he could chop wood. he said he was not long in this country, that he could cut one side of a tree well enough, but he had not learned to change hands and cut the other, with out going round it, what we call crossing the calf. they get very small wages at this season of the year, almost give up the ghost in the effort to keep soul and body _ together. he left me on the run to find a new master. dec. 26, 1854. at r 's [new bedford]. i do not remember to have ever seen such a day as this in concord. there is no snow here (though there has been excellent sleighing at concord since the 5th), but it is very muddy, the frost coming out of the ground as in spring with us. i went to walk in the woods with e. it was wonderfully warm and pleasant. the cockerels winter. 29 crowed just as in a spring day at home. i felt the winter breaking up in me, and if i had been at home, i should have tried to write poetry. they told me that this was not a rare day there, that they had little or no winter such as we have, and it was owing to the influence of the gulf stream which was only sixty miles from nan tucket at the nearest, or one hundred and twenty miles from them. in midwinter when the wind was s. e. or even s. w., they frequently had days as warm and debilitating as in summer. there is a difference of about a degree in latitude between concord and new bedford, but far more in cli mate. the american holly is quite common there, with its red berries still holding on, and is now their christmas evergreen. i heard the larks sing strong and sweet, and saw robins. . . . e. said that pheasants from england (where they are not indigenous) had been imported into naushon and are now killed there. dec. 26, 1855. after snow, rain, and hail yesterday and last night, we have this morning quite a glaze, there being at least an inch or two of crusted snow on the ground; the most we have had. the sun comes out at 9 a. m. and lights up the iee-incrusted trees. ... i go to walden via the almshouse and up the railroad. trees seen in the west against the dark cloud, the sun shining on them, are perfectly white as 30 winter. frost work, and their outlines very perfectly and distinctly revealed, great wisps that they are and ghosts of trees, with recurved twigs. the walls and fences are incased, and the fields bristle with a myriad of crystal spears. already the wind is rising and a brattling is heard overhead in the street. the sun shining down a gorge over the woods at brister's hill reveals a won derfully brilliant, as well as seemingly solid and diversified region in the air. the ice is from an eighth to a quarter of an inch thick about the twigs and pine needles, only one half as thick commonly on one side. the heads of the trees are bowed, and their plumes and needles stiff as if preserved under glass for the inspection of posterity. . . . the pines thus weighed down are sharp-pointed at top, and remind me of firs and even hemlocks, their drooping boughs being wrapped about them like the folds of a cloak or a shawl. the crust is already strewn with bits of the green needles which have been broken off. frequently the whole top stands up bare, while the middle and lower branches are drooping and massed together, resting on one another. — but the low and spreading weeds in the fields and the woodpaths are the most interesting. here are asters (savory-leaved), whose flat, imbricated calyxes, three quarters of an inch over, are sur mounted and inclosed in a perfectly transparent winter. 31 ice button, like a glass knob, through which you see the reflections of the brown calyx. these are very common. — each little blue curl calyx has a spherical button, like those over a little boy's jacket, little sprigs of them, and the pennyroyal has still smaller spheres more regularly arranged about its stem, chandelier-wise, and still smells through the ice. the finest grasses support the most wonderful burdens of ice and most bunched on their minute threads. these weeds are spread and arched over into the snow again, countless little arches a few inches high, each cased in ice, which you break with a tinkling crash at each step. — the scarlet fruit of the cockspur lichen, seen glowing through the more opaque whitish or snowy crust of a stump, is, on close inspection, the richest sight of all, for the scarlet is in creased and multiplied by reflection through the bubbles and hemispherical surfaces of the crust, as if it covered some vermilion grain thickly strewn. the brown cup lichens stand in their midst. the whole rough bark, too, is incased. already a squirrel has perforated the crust above the mouth of his burrow here and there, by the side of the path, and left some empty acorn shells on the snow. he has shoveled out this morning before the snow has frozen on his doorstep. . . . particularly are we attracted in the winter by 32 winter. greenness and signs of growth, as the green and white shoots of grass and weeds pulled, or float ing on the water, and also by color, as the cock spur lichens, crimson birds, etc. 4 p. m. up railroad. since the sun has risen higher and fairly triumphed over the clouds, the ice has glistened with all the prismatic hues. . . . the whole top of the pine forest, as seen miles o£e in the horizon, is of sharp points, the leading shoots with a few plumes. in a true history or biography, of how little consequence those events of which so much is commonly made. ... i find in ray journal that the most important events in my life, if recorded at all, are not dated. dec. 26, 1858. p. m. to jenny dugan's. . . . call at a farmer's this sunday p. m., where i surprise the well-to-do masters of the house, lounging in very ragged clothes, for which they think it necessary to apologize, and one of them is busy laying the supper table (at which he invites me to sit down at last), bringing up cold meat from the cellar and a lump of butter on the end of his knife, and making the tea by the time his mother gets home from church. thus sincere and homely, as i am glad to know, is the actual life of these new england men, wearing rags indoors there which would disgrace a beg gar (and are not beggars and paupers they who winter. 33 could be disgraced so), and doing the indispen sable work, however humble. how much better and more humane it was than if they had im ported and set up among their penates a headless torso from the ruins of ireland ! i am glad to find that our new england life has a genuine, humane core to it ; that inside, after all, there is so little pretense and brag. . . . the middle aged son sits there in the old unpainted house in a ragged coat, and helps his old mother about her work when the field does not require him. bee. 26, 1859. p. m. skate to lee's bridge. ... i see a brute with a gun in his hand stand ing motionless over a muskrat's house which he h as destroyed. i find that he has visited every one in the neighborhood of fair haven pond, above and below, and broken them all down, laying open the interior to the water, and then stood watchful close by for the poor creature to show its head for a breath of air. there lies the red carcass of one whose pelt he has taken on the spot, . . . and for his afternoon's cruelty that fellow will be rewarded with ninepence, perchance. when i consider the opportunities of the civil ized man for getting ninepences and getting light, this seems to me more savage than savages are. depend on it that whoever thus treats the muskrat's house, his refuge when the water is frozen thick, he and his family wiu not come to 84 winter. a good end. so many of these houses being broken open, twenty or thirty i see, i look into the open hole, and find in it, in almost every in stance, many pieces of the white root, with the little leaf bud curled up, which i take to be the yellow lily root. the leaf bud unrolled has the same scent as the yellow lily. there will be a half dozen of these pointed buds, more or less green, coming to a point at the end of. the root. also i see a little coarser, what i take to be the green leaf stalk of the pontederia, for i see a little of the stipule sheathing the stalk from within it (?) ... in one hole there was a large quantity of the root i have mentioned, its leaf buds attached or bitten off. the root was gen erally five or six eighths of an inch in diameter. it must, i think, be the principal food of the muskrat at this time. if you open twenty cab ins you will find it in at least three quarters of them, and nothing else unless a very little pon tederia leaf stem (?). by eating, or killing at least, so many lily buds, they must thin out the plant considerably. — i saw no fresh clam shells in the holes and scarcely any on the ice anywhere on the edge of open places, nor are they proba bly deposited in a heap under the ice. it may be, however, that the shells are opened in the hole, and then dropped in the water near by. twice this winter i have noticed a muskrat winter. 35 floating in a placid, smooth, open place in the river, when it was frozen for a mile each side, looking at first like a bit of stump or frozen meadow, hut showing its whole upper outline from nose to end of tail, perfectly still till he ob served me, then suddenly diving and steering under the ice toward some cabin's entrance or other retreat half-a-dozen or more rods off. as some of the tales of our childhood, the in ventions of some mother goose, will haunt us when we are grown up, so the race itself still believes in some of the fables with which its in fancy has amused and imposed on it, e. g., the fable of the cranes and pygmies which learned men endeavored to believe or explain in the last century. • aristotle being almost, if not quite, the first to write systematically on animals, gives them of course only popular names, such as were com mon with the hunters, fowlers, fishers, and farm ers of his day. he used no scientific terms. but he having the priority, and having, as it were, created science, and given it its laws, those popular greek names, even when the animal to which they were applied cannot be identified, have been in great part preserved, and make the learned, far-fetched, and commonly unintelligi ble names of genera to-day, e. g., bxo6ovpiov, etc. his " history of animals " has thus become a very storehouse of scientific nomenclature. 36 winter. dec. 26, 1860. m sent to me yesterday a perfect strix asia, or red owl of wilson, not at all gray. this is now generally made the same with the ncevia, but while some consider the red the old, others consider it the young. this is, as wilson says, a bright "nut-brown." ... it is twenty-three inches alar extent by about eleven long. feet extend one inch be yond tail. cabot makes the old bird red, au dubon, the young. to such an excess have our civilization and division of labor come that a., a professional huckleberry picker, has hired b.'s field, and we will suppose is now gathering the crop, perhaps with the aid of a patented machine. c, a pro fessed cook, is superifttending the cooking of a pudding made of some of the berries, while professor d., for whom the pudding is intended, sits in his library writing a book, a work on the vacciniese, of course. ajid now the result of this downward course will be seen in that book, which should be the ultimate fruit of the huckle berry field, and account for the existence of the two professors who come between ix and a. it will be worthless. there will be none of the spirit of the huckleberry in it. the reading of it will be a weariness to the flesh. to use a homely illustration, it is to save at the spile, and waste at the bung. i believe in a different kind winter. 37 of division of labor, and that professor d. should divide himself between the library and the huckleberry field. dec. 27, 1837. . . . the real heroes of min strelsy have been ideal, even when the names of actual heroes have been perpetuated. the real arthur, who " not only excelled the experienced past, but also the possible future," of whom it was affirmed, after many centuries, that he was not dead, but " had withdrawn from the world into some magical region from which at a future crisis he was to reappear, and lead the cymri in triumph through the island," whose character and actions were the theme of the bards of bre tagne, and the foundation of their interminable romances, was only an ideal impersonation. — men claim for the ideal an actual existence also, but do not often expand the actual into the ideal. " if you do not believe me, go into bre tagne, and mention in the streets and villages that arthur is really dead like other men. you will not escape with impunity. you wiu be either hooted with the curses of your hearers, or stoned to death." the most remarkable instance of home-sick ness is that of the colony of franks transplanted by the romans from the german ocean to the euxine, who, at length resolving to a man to abandon the country, seized the vessels which 38 winter. carried them out, and reached at last their native shores, after innumerable difficulties and dangers upon the mediterranean and the at lantic. dec. 27, 1851. sunset from fair haven hill. this evening there are many clouds in the west into which the sun goes down, so that we have our visible or apparent sunset and red evening sky as much as fifteen minutes before the real sunset. you must be early on the hills to witness such a sunset, — by half-past four at least. then all the vales, even to the horizon, are full of a purple vapor which half veils the distant mountains, and the windows of undiscov erable farm-houses shine like an early candle or a fire. after the sun has gone behind a cloud, there appears to be a gathering of clouds around his setting, and for a few moments his light in the amber sky seems more intense, brighter, and purer than at noonday, . . . like the ecstasy which we' are told sometimes lights up the face of a dying man. that is a serene or evening death, like the end of the day. then at last through all the grossness which has accumulated in the atmosphere of day is seen a patch of serene sky, fairer by contrast with the surrounding dark than midday, and even the gross atmosphere of the day is gilded ajid made pure as amber by the setting sun, as if the day's sins were forgiven it. winter. 39 the man is blessed who every day is permitted to behold anything so pure and serene as the western" sky at sunset, while revolutions vex the world. there is no winter necessarily in the sky, though snow covers the earth. the sky is al ways ready to answer our moods. we can see summer there or winter. dec. 27, 1852. not a particle of ice in wal den to-day. paddled across it, and took my new boat out. a black and white duck on it. flint's and fair haven frozen up. ground bare. river open. dec. 27, 1853. high wind with more snow in the night. . . . snowy ridges cross the vil lage street, and make it look as wild and bleak as a pass of the rocky mountains, or the sierra nevada. p. m. to fair harven pond, up meadows and river. the snow blows like spray fifteen feet high across the fields, while the wind roars in the trees as in the rigging of a vessel. it is altogether like the ocean in a storm. . . . it is surprising what things the snow betrays. i had not seen a meadow -mouse all summer, but no sooner does the snow come and spread its mantle over the earth than it is printed with the tracks of countless mice and larger animals. i see where the mouse has dived into a little 40 winter. hole in the snow not larger than my thumb by the side of a weed, and a yard farther reap peared, and so on alternately above and beneath. a snug life it lives. — the crows come nearer to the houses, alight on trees by the roadside, ap parently being put to it for food. . . . it is a true winter sunset, almost cloudless, clear, cold, indigo-like, along the horizon. the evening (?) star is seen shining brightly before the twilight has begun. a rosy tint suffuses the eastern horizon. the outline of the moun tains is wonderfully distinct and hard. they are a dark blue and very near. wachusett looks like a right-whale over our bow, plowing the continent, with his flukes well down. he has a vicious look, as if he had a harpoon in him. i wish i could buy at the shops some kind of india rubber that would rub out at once au that in my writing which it costs me so many perusals, so many months, if not years, and so much reluctance, to erase. dec. 27, 1857. . . . walden is almost en tirely skimmed over. it will probably be com pletely frozen over to-night. i frequently hear a dog bark at some distance in the night, which, strange as it may seem, reminds me of the cooing or crowing of a ring dove which i heard every night a year ago at perth amboy. it was sure to coo on the slightest winter. 41 noise in the house, as good as a watch-dog. the crowing of cocks too reminds nie of it, and now i think of it, it had precisely the intonation and accent of the cat-owl's ho6 hoo-hoo-o-o, in each case, a sonorous dwelling on the last syllable. they get the pitch and break ground with the first note, and then prolong and swell it in the last. the commonest and cheapest sounds, as the barking of a dog, produce the same effect on fresh and healthy ears that the rarest music does. it depends on your appetite for sound. just as a crust is sweeter to a healthy appetite than confectionery to a pampered or diseased one. it is better that these cheap sounds be music to us than that we have the rarest ears for music in any other sense. i have lain awake at night many a time to think of the barking of a dog which i had heard long before, bathing my being again in those waves of sound, as a fre quenter of the opera might lie awake remember ing the music he had heard. as my mother made my pockets once of fa ther's old fire bags, with the date of the forma tion pf the society on them, 1794 (though they made but rotten pockets), so we put our mean ing into those old mythologies. i am sure that the greeks were commonly innocent of any such double entendre as we attribute to them. 42 winter. one while we do not wonder that so many commit suicide, life is so barren and worthless. we only live on by an effort of the will. sud denly our condition is ameliorated, and even the barking of a dog is a pleasure to us. so closely is our happiness bound up with our physical condition, and one reacts on the other. do not despair of your life. you have no doubt force enough to overcome your obstacles. think of the fox prowling through wood and jseld in a winter night for something to satisfy his hunger. notwithstanding cold and the hounds and traps, his race survives. i do not believe any of them ever committed suicide. i saw this afternoon where probably a fox had rolled some small carcass in the snow. i am disappointed by most essays and lec tures, i find that i had expected the authors would have some life, some very private expe rience to report, which would make it compara tively unimportant in what style they expressed themselves, but commonly they have only a talent to exhibit. the new magazines which all had been expecting may contain only another love story, as naturally told as the last,, per chance, but without the slightest noveltj' in it. it may be a mere vehicle for yankee phrases. what interesting contrasts our climate affords. in july you rush panting into the pond to cool winter. 43 yourself in the tepid water, when the stones on the bank are so heated that you cannot hold one tightly in your hand, and horses are melting on the road. — now you walk on the same pond frozen, amid the snow, with numbed fingers and feet, and see the water target bleached and stiff in the ice. bee. 27, 1858. talk of fate ! how little one can know what is fated to another ! what he can do and what he cannot do. i doubt whether one can give or receive any very perti nent advice. in all important crises, one can only consult his genius. though he were the most shiftless and craziest of mortals, if he still recognizes that he has any genius to consult, none may presume to go between him and her. they, methinks, are poor stuff and creatures of a miserable fate who can be advised and per suaded in very ^ important steps. show me a man who consults his genius, and you have shown me a man who cannot be advised. you may know what a thing costs or is worth to you, you can never know what it costs or is worth to me. all the community may scream because one man is born who will not conform, because conformity to him is death. he is so consti tuted. they know nothing about his case, they are fools when they presume to advise him. the man of genius knows what he is aiming at. 44 winter. nobody else knows, and he alone knows when something comes between him and his object. in the course of generations, however, men will excuse you for not doing as they do, if you will bring enough to pass in your own way. dec. 28, 1840. the snow hangs on the trees as the fruit of the season. in those twigs which the wind has preserved naked there is a warmer green for the contrast. the whole tree exhibits a kind of interior and household com fort, a sheltered and covert aspect. it has the snug inviting look of a cottage on the moors, buried in snow. — our voices ring hollowly through the woods as through a chamber, the twigs crackle under foot with private and house hold echoes. i have observed on a clear winter's morning that the woods have their southern win dow as well as the house, through which the first beams of the sun stream along their aisles and corridors. the sun goes up swiftly behind the limbs of the white pine, as the sashes of a window. dec. 28, 1852. . . . both for bodily and mental health court the present. embrace health wherever you find her. . . . it is worth while to apply what wisdom one has to the conduct of his life, surely. i find my self oftenest wise in little things and foolish in great ones. that i may accomplish some petty, winter. 45 particular affair well, i live my whole life coarsely. a broad margin of leisure is as beau tiful in a man's life as in a book. haste makes waste no less in life than in housekeeping. keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars. what are threescore years and ten hurriedly and coarsely lived to moments of divine leisure, in which your life is coincident with the life of the universe. we live too fast and coarsely, just as we eat too fast, and do not know the true savor of our food. we consult our will and our understanding and the expecta tion of men, not our genius. i can impose upon myself tasks which will crush me for life and pre vent all expansion, and this i am but too inclined to do. our moment of life costs many hours, hours not of business, but of preparation and invitation. yet the man who does not betake himself at once and desperately to sawing is called a loafer, though he may be knocking at the doors of heaven all the while, which shall surely be opened to him. that aim in life is highest which requires the highest and finest discipline. how much, what infinite leisure it requires, as of a life-time, to appreciate a single phenomenon ! you must camp down beside it as for life, having reached your land of promise, and give yourself wholly to it. it must stand for the whole world to you, symbolical of all 46 winter. things. the least partialness is your own defect of sight, and cheapens the experience fatally. unless the humming of a gnat is as the music of the spheres, and the music of the spheres is as the humming of a gnat, they are naught to me. it is not communications to serve for a history (which are science), but the great story itself, that cheers and satisfies us. dec. 28, 1853. ... i hear and see tree spar rows about the weeds in the garden. they seem to visit the gardens with the earliest snow, or is it that they are more obvious against the white ground. by their sharp, silvery chip, per chance, they inform each other of their where abouts and keep together. dec. 28, 1854. [nantucket.] a misty rain as yesterday. captain gardiner carried me to siasconset in his carriage. . . . he is exten sively engaged in raising pines on the island. there is not a tree to be seen except such as are set out about houses. . . . he showed me sev eral lots of his of different sizes, one tract of three hundred acres sown in rows with a planter, where the young trees, two years old, were just beginning to green the ground, and i saw one of norway pine and our pitch, mixed, eight years old, which looked quite like a forest at a distance. the norway pines had grown the faster, with a longer shoot, and had a bluer look winter. 47 at a distance, more like the white pine the common pitch pines have a reddish crisped look at top. some are sown in rows, some broad cast. at first captain gardiner was alarmed to find that the ground moles had gone along in the furrows directly under the plants and so in jured the roots as to kill many of the trees, and he sowed over again. he was also discouraged to find that a sort of spindle worm had killed the leading shoot of a great part of his neigh bor's older trees. these plantations must very soon change the aspect of the island. his com mon pitch pine seed obtained from the cape cost him about twenty dollars a bushel ; at least about a dollar a quart with the wings ; and they told him it took about eighty bushels of cones to make one such bushel of seeds. i was surprised to find that the norway pine seed without the wings imported from france had cost not quite two dollars a bushel delivered at new york or philadelphia. he has ordered eight hogsheads of the best, clear wingless seeds, at this rate. i tjiinlc he said it took about a gallon to sow an acre. he had tried to get white pine seed, but in vain. the cones had not contained any of late. (?) this looks as if he meant to sow a good part of the island, though he said he might sell some of theseed. it is an interesting enterprise. . . . this island must look exactly like a prairie. 48 winter. except that the view in clear weather is bounded by the sea. — saw crows and robins, also saw and heard larks frequently, but most abundant run ning along the ruts or circling about just over the ground in small flocks, what the inhabitants call snow-birds, a gray, bunting-like bird about the size of the snow-bunting. can it be the sea side finch, or the savannah 'sparrow, or the shore lark ? . . . a few years ago some one im ported a dozen partridges from the main-land, but though some were seen for a year or two, not one had been seen for some time, and they were thought to be extinct. captain gardiner thought the raccoons, which had been very nu merous, might have caught them. in harrison days some coons were imported and turned loose. they multiplied very fast, and became quite a pest, killing hens, etc., and were killed in turn. finally, people turned out and hunted them with hounds, and killed seventy-five at one time, since which he had not heard of any. there were foxes once, but none now, and no indige ous animal bigger than a ground mole. . . . the last indian, not of pure blood, died this, very month, and i saw his picture with a basket of huckleberries in his hand. dec. 28, 1856. i am surprised to see the fringilla hyemalis here. [walden.j . . . the fishermen sit by their damp fire of rotten pine winter. 49 wood, so wetland chilly that even smoke in their eyes is a kind of comfort. there they sit, ever and anon scanning their reels to see if any have fallen, and if not catching many fish, still getting what they went for, though they may not be aware of it, i. e., a wilder experience than the town affords. ... i thrive best on solitude. if i have had a companion only one day in a week, unless it were one or two i could name, i find that the value of the week to' me has been seriously affected. it dissipates my days, and often it takes me another week to get over it. as the esquimaux of smith's strait in north green land laughed when kane warned them of their utter extermination, cut off as they were by ice on au sides from the race, unless they attempted in season to cross the glacier southward, so do i laugh when you tell me of the danger of impov erishing myself by isolation. it is here that the wae'us and the seal, and the white bear, and the eider ducks and auks on which i batten, most abound. bee. 28, 1858. p. m. to walden. the earth is bare. i walk about the pond looking at the shores, since i have not paddled about it much of late years. what a grand place for a promenade ! . . . that rocky shore under the pitch pines, which so reflects the light, is only 50 winter. three feet wide by one foot high, yet there even to-day the ice is melted close to the edge, and just off this shore the pickerel are most abundant. this is the warm and sunny side to which any one, man, bird, or quadruped, would soonest resort in cool weather. i noticed a few chickadees there in the edge of the pines in the sun, lisping and twittering cheerfully to one another with a reference to me, i think, the cunning and innocent little birds. one a little farther off utters the phoebe note. there is a foot, more or less, of clear, open water at the edge here, and seeing this, one of these birds hops down, as if glad to find any open water at this season, and after prinking, it stands in the water on a stone, up to its belly, and dips its head, and flirts the water about vigorously, giving itself a' good washing. i had not ex pected this at this season. no fear that it wul catch cold. — the ice cracks suddenly with a shivering jav, like crockery or the brittlest mate rial, such as it is, and i notice, as i sit here at this open edge, that each time the ice cracks, though it may be a good distance off toward the middle, the water here is very much agitated. the ice is about six inches thick. dec. 29, 1840. as echo makes me enunci ate distinctly, so the sympathy of a friend gives plainness and point to my speech. this is the advantage of letter-writing. winter. 51 dec. 29, 1841. . . . whole weeks or months of my summer life slide away in thin volumes like mists or smoke, till at length some warm morning, perchance, i see a sheet of mist blown down the brook to the swamp, its shadow flitting across the fields which have caught a new signifi cance from that accident, and as that vapor is raised above the earth, so shall the next weeks be elevated above the plane of the actual ; or a like experience may come when the setting sun slants across the pastures, and the cows low to my inward ^ar, and only enhance the stillness, and the eve is as the dawn, a beginning hour and not a final one, as if it would never have done, with its clear, western amber, inciting men to lives of limpid purity. at evening, other parts of my work shine than i had thought at noon, and i discover the real purport of my toil as when the husbandman has reached the end of the furrow and looks back, he can best tell where the pressed earth shines most. . . . a man should go out of nature with the chirp of the cricket or the trill of the veery singing in his ear. these earthly sounds should only die away for a season, as the strains of the harp rise and fall. death is that expressive pause in the music of the blast. i would be as clean as ye, o woods. i shall not rest till i am as inno cent as you. i know that i shall sooner or later 52 winter. attain to an unspotted innocence, for when i consider that state even now i am thrilled. if we were wise enough, we should see to what virtue we were indebted for any happier moment we might have. no doubt we had earned this at some time. these motions everywhere in nature must surely be the circulations of god ; . . • the run ning stream, the waving tree, the roving wind, whence else their infinite health and freedom. i can see nothing so holy as unrelaxed play and frolic in this bower god has built for us. the suspicion of sin never comes to this experience. if men felt this they would never build temples even of marble or diamond (it would be sacri lege and profane), but disport them forever in this paradise. ... it seems as if only one trait, one little inci dent in human biography need to be said or written in some era, that all readers may go mad after it, and the man who did the miracle is made a demigod henceforth. — what we all do, not one can tell, and when some lucky speaker utters a truth of our experience and not of our speculation, we think he must have had the nine muses and the three graces to help him. /'dec. 29, 1851. the sun just risen. the ground is almost entirely bare. ... it is warm as winter. 63 an april morning. there is a sound of blue birds in the air, and the cocks crow as in the spring. the steam curls up from, the roofs and the ground. you walk with open cloak. it is exciting to behold the smooth, glassy surface of water where the melted snow has formed large puddles and ponds, and to see it running in the sluices. . • . . in the afternoon to saw mill brook with w. e. c. . . . it feels as warm as in sum mer. you sit on any fence rail and vegetate in the sun, and realize that the earth may produce peas again. yet they say that this open and mild weather is unhealthy. that is always the way with them. how admirable it is that we can never foresee the weather, that it is always novel. yesterday nobody dreamed of to-day. nobody dreams of to-morrow. hence the weather is ever the news. . . . this day yester day was as incredible as any other miracle. now all creatures feel it, even the cattle chew ing stalks in the barn-yards, &,nd perchance it has even penetrated to the lurking places of the crickets under the rocks. dec. 29, 1853. ... a driving snow-storm all day, imprisoning most, stopping the cars, blocking up the roads. . . . the snow pene trates through the smallest crevices about doors and windows. ... it is the worst snow-storm to bear that i remember. a strong wind from 54 winter. the north blows the snow almost horizontally, and beside freezing you, almost takes your breath away. the driving snow blinds you, and when you are protected, you can see but a little way, it is so thick. yet in spite of or on account of it all, i see the first flock of arctic snow-birds, emheriza nivalis, near the depot, white and black, with a sharp whistle-like note. what a contrast between the village street now and as it was last summer ; the leafy elms then resounding with the warbling vireo, robins, bluebirds, the fiery hangbird, etc., to which the villagers, kept in doors by the heat, listened through open lattices. now it is like a street in nova zembla, if they were to have any there. i wade to the post office as solitary a traveler as ordinarily in a wood-path in winter. the snow is mid-leg deep, while drifts as high as one's head are heaped against the houses and fences, and here and there range across the street like snowy mountains. . . . there is not a track leading from any door to indicate that the in habitants have been forth to-day, any more than there is the track of any quadruped by the wood paths. it is all pure, untrodden snow, banked up against the houses now at 4 p. m. ... in one place the drift covers the front yard fence, and stretches thence upward to the top of the front door, shutting all in. . . . frequently the winter. 55 snow lies banked up three or four feet high against the front doors, . . . there is a drift over each window, and the clapboards are all hoary with it. it is as if the inhabitants were all frozen to death, and now you threaded the deso late streets, weeks after that calamity. there is not a sleigh or vehicle of any kind on the milldam ; but one saddled horse on which a farmer has come into town. . . . yet they are warmer, merrier than ever there within. at the post office they ask each traveler news of the cars, is there any train up or down, how deep the snow is on a level. of the snow bunting, wilson says that they appear in the northern parts of the united states " early in december, or with the first heavy snow, particularly if drifted by high winds." this day answers to that description exactly. the wind is northerly. he adds that, " they are universally considered as the harbin gers of severe cold weather." they come down from the extreme north, and are common to the two continents. he quotes pennant as saying that they "inhabit not only greenland, but even the dreadful climate of spitzbergen where veg etation is nearly extinct, and scarcely any but cryptogamous plants are found. it therefore excites wonder how birds which are graminivor ous in every other than those frost-bound regions 56 winter. subsist ; yet are there found in great flocks, botli on the land and ice of spitzbergen." pennant also says that they inhabit in summer " the most naked lapland alps," and " descend in rigor ous seasons into sweden, and fill the roads and fields," on which account the uplanders call them " hardwarsfogel" hard weather-birds ; he also says, " they overflow [in winter] the more southern counties in amazing multitudes." wil son says their colors are very variable, "and the whiteness of their plumage is observed to be greatest toward the depth of winter." he also says truly that they seldom sit long, " being a roving, restless bird." peabody says that in summer they are " pure white and black," but are not seen of that color here. those i saw to-day were of that color. . . . he says they are white and rusty brown here. these are the true winter birds for you, these winged snow balls. i could hardly see them, the air was so full of driving snow. what hardy creatures ! where do they spend the night ? . . . the farmer considers how much pork he has in his barrel, how much meal in his bin, how much wood in his shed. each family, perchance, sends forth one representative before night, who makes his way with difficulty to the grocery or the post office to learn the news, i. e., to hear what others say to it, who can give the best ac winter. 57 count of it, best can name it, has waded farthest in it, has been farthest out, and can tell the big gest and most adequate story, and hastens back with the news. . . . the thoughts and associations of summer and autumn are now as completely departed from our minds as the leaves are blown from the trees. some withered deciduoiis ones are left to rus tle, and our cold immortal evergreens. some licheuous thoughts still adhere to us. dec. 29, 1855. down railroad to androme don ponds. ... i see a shrike flying low be neath the level of the railroad, which rises and alights on the topmost twig of an elm within four or five rods. all ash or bluish slate above, down to mid-wings, dirty white breast, and a broad black mark through eyes on side of head ; primaries (?) black, and some white appears when it flies. most distinctive its small hooked bill (upper mandible). it makes no sound, but flits to the top of an oak farther off. probably a male. dec. 29, 1856. p. m. to "warren miles's mill. we must go out and re-ally ourselves to nature every day. we must make root, send out some little fibre at least, even every winter day. i am sensible that i am imbibing health when i open my mouth to the wind. staying in the ' house breeds a sort of insanity always. every 58 winter. house is, in this sense, a sort of hospital, a nisrht and a forenoon is as much confinement to those wards as i can stand. i am aware that i recover some sanity, which i had lost, almost the instant that i come abroad. dec. 29, 1858. p. m. skate to israel eiee's. i think more of skates than of the horse or loco motive as annihilators of distance, for while i am getting along with the speed of the horse, i have at the same time the satisfactions of the horse and his rider, and far more adventure and variety than if i were riding. we never cease to be surprised when we see how swiftly the skater glides along. just compare him with one walking or running. the walker is but a snail in comparison, and the runner gives up the con test after a few rods. the skater can afeord to follow all the windings of a stream, and yet soon leaves far behind and out of sight the walker who cuts across. distance is hardly an obstacle to him. . . . the skater has wings, talaria to his feet. moreover, you have such perfect con trol of your feet that you can take advantage of the narrowest and most winding and sloping bridge of ice in order to pass between the but ton bushes and the open stream, or under a bridge on a narrow shelf where the walker can not go at all. you can glide securely within an inch of destruction on this, the most slippery of winter. 59 surfaces, more securely than you could walk there perhaps on any other material. you can pursue swiftly the most intricate and winding path, even leaping obstacles that suddenly present themselves. . . . h h was fishing a quarter of a mile this side of hubbard's bridge. he had caught a pickerel . . . twenty-six inches long, ... a very handsome fish. dark brown above, yel low and brown on the side, becoming at length almost a clear golden yellow low down, with a white abdomen and reddish fins. they are handsome fellows, both the pikes in the water and the tigers in the jungle. what tragedies are enacted under this dumb, icy platform in the fields ! what an anxious and adventurous life the small fishes must live, liable at any moment to be swallowed by the larger. no fish of moderate size can go stealing along safely in any part of the stream but suddenly there may come rushing out from this jungle or that, some greedy monster and gulp him down. parent fishes, if they care for their offspring, how can they trust them abroad out of their sight. it takes so many fishes a week to fill the maw of this large one. and the large ones ! h h and company are lying in wait for them. dec. 29, 1859. very cold morning. about 60 winter. 15° — at 8 a. m. at our door. i went to the river immediately after sunrise ; could see a little greenness in the ice, and also a little rose color from the snow, but far less than before sunset. do both these phenomena then require a gross atmosphere? apparently the ice is greenest when the sun is twenty or thirty minutes above the horizon. from [a] smooth open place ... a great deal of vapor was rising, to the height of a dozen feet or more, as from a boiling kettle. this, then, is a phenomenon of quite cold weather. i did not notice it yesterday p. m. these open places are a sort of breathing holes of the river. . . . just as cold weather reveals the breath of a man, still greater cold reveals the breath of, i. e., warm, moist air over the river. . . . p. m. . . . when i went to walk it was about 10° above zero, and when i returned 1°+. i did not notice any vapor rising from the open places as i did in the morning when it was 16° — and also when it was 6° — . . . . when the air is, say 4° or 5° below zero, the water being 32°+) then there is a visi ble evaporation. is there the same difference, or some 40° between the heat of the human breath and that of the air in which the moisture in the breath becomes visible in vapor. this has to do with the dew point. — next, what makes the water of those open places thus warm ? and is it winter. 61 any warmer than elsewhere ? there is consider able heat reflected from a sandy bottom where the water is shallow, and at these places it is always sandy and shallow, but i doubt if this actually makes the water warmer, though it may melt the more opaque ice which absorbs it. the fact that holt bend, which is deep, is late to freeze, being narrow, seems to prove it to be the swiftness of the water, and not reflected heat that prevents freezing. the water is apparently kept warm under the ice and down next to the unfrozen earth, and by a myriad springs from within the bowels of the earth. dec. 30, 1840. . . . our golden age must after all be a pastoral one ; we would be simple men in ignorance, and not accomplished in wis dom. we want great peasants more than great heroes. the sun would shine along the high way to some purpose, if we would unlearn our wisdom and practice illiterate truth henceforth. . . . let us grow to the full stature of our hum bleness ere we aspire to be greater. — it is great praise in the poet [virgil] to have made hus bandry famous. " in the cool spring', when cool moisture from the hoary mountains flows, and the mouldering clod is dissolved hy the zephyr. then straightway let the bull with deep-pressed plow begin to groan, and the share, worn by the furrow, to shine." georg. i. 43. 62 winter. and again when the husbandman conducts water down the slope to restore his thirsty crops, " that, falling-, makes a hoarse munnur among the smooth rocks, and tempers the parching fields -with its huhhung streams." — jbid. 109. describing the end of the golden age and the commencement of the reign of jupiter, he says : " he shook honey from the leaves, and removed fire. and stayed the wine everywhere flowing in rivers that experience, hy meditating, might invent various arts by degrees, and seek the blade of corn in f m-rows, and strike out hidden fire from the veins of the flint." ibid. 131. dec. 30, 1841. . . . within the circuit of this plodding life there are moments of an azure hue, ... as unpolluted, fair, as is the violet or anemone, when the springstrews them by some south wood side ; which make the best philosophy . . , untrue. ... to console man for his grievance here, i have remem.hered, when the winter came, high in my chamber, in the frosty nights, how, in the summer past, some unrecorded beam, slanted across . . . [an] upland pasture where the johnswort grew, or heard, amidst the verdure of my mind, the bee's long smothered hum ; so, by the cheap economy of god, made rich to go upon my wintry work again. "when the snow is falling thick and fast, the flakes nearest you seem to be driving straight to the ground, while the more distant seem to winter. 63 float in the air in a quivering tank, like feathers, or like birds at play, and not as if sent on any errand. so, at a little distance, all the works of nature proceed with sport and frolic. they are more in the eye, and less in the deed. dec. 30, 1851. . . . this afternoon, being on fair haven hill, i heard the spund of a saw, and soon after from the clife saw two men sawing down a noble pine beneath, about forty rods off, . . . the last of a dozen or more which were left when the forest was cut, and for fifteen years have waved in solitary majesty over the sproutland. i saw them like beavers or insects gnawing at the trunk of this noble tree, the diminutive manikins with their cross-cut saw which could scarcely span it. it towered up a hundred feet, as i afterwards found by measure ment, one of the tallest probably in the town ship, and straight as an arrow, but slanting a little toward the hillside, its top seen against the frozen river and the hul of conantum. i watch closely to see when it begins to move. now the sawers stop, and with an axe open it a little on the side toward which it leans, that it may break the faster, and now their saw goes again. now surely it is going ; it is inclined one quar ter of the quadrant, and breathless i expect its crashing fall. but no, i was mistaken. it has not moved an inch. it stands at the same 64 winter. angle as at first. it is fifteen minutes yet to its fall. still its branches wave in the wind as if it were destined to stand for a century, and the wind soughs through its needles as of yore ; it is stiu a forest tree, the most majestic tree that waves over musketaquid. the silvery sheen of the sunlight is reflected from its needles, it still affords an inaccessible crotch for the squir rel's nest, not a lichen has forsaken its mast-like stem, its raking mast ; the hill is the hulk. now, now is the moment, the manikins at its base are fleeing from their crime. they have dropped the guilty saw and axe. how slowly and majestically it starts, as if it were only swayed by a summer breeze, and would return without a sigh to its location in the air, and now it fans the hillside with its fall, and lies down to its bed in the valley from which it is never to rise, as softly as a feather, folding its green mantle about it like a warrior, as if, tired of standing, it embraced the earth with silent joy, returning its elements to the dust again. but, hark ! . . . you only saw, you did not hear. there now comes up a deafening crash to these rocks, advertising you that even trees do not die without a groan. ... i went clown and measured it. it was four feet in diameter where it was sawed, and about a hundred feet long. before i had reached it, the axemen had winter. 65 already half divested itof its branches. its gracefully spreading top was a perfect wreck on the hillside, as if it had been made of glass, and the tender cones of one year's growth upon its summit appealed in vain and too late to the mercy of the chopper. already he has meas ured it with his axe, and marked off the small logs it will make. it is lumber. . . . when the fish hawk in the spring revisits the banks of the musketaquid, he will circle in vain to find his accustomed perch, and the hen hawk will mourn for the pines lofty enough to protect his brood. ... i hear no knell tolled, i 'see no procession of mourners in the streets or the woodland aisles. the squirrel has leaped to another tree, the hawk has circled farther off, and has now settled upon a new eyrie, but the woodman is preparing to lay his axe at the root of that also. dec. 30, 1853. in winter every man is, to a slight extent, dormant, just as some animals are but partially awake, though not commonly classed with those that hibernate. the summer circulations are to some extent stopped, the range of his afternoon walk is somewhat nar rower, he is more or less confined to the high way and woodpath ; the weather oftener shuts him up in his burrow, he begins to feel the access of dormancy, and to assume the spherical form of the marmot, the nights are longest, he 66 winter. is often satisfied if he only gets to the post office in the course of the day. the arctic voyagers are obliged to invent and willfully engage in active amusements to keep themselves awake and alive. . . . even our experience is some thing like wintering in the pack. dec. 30, 1856. what an evidence it is, after all, of civilization, or of a capacity for im provement, that savages like our indians, who, in their protracted wars, stealthily slay men, women, and children without mercy, with intense pleas ure, who delight to burn, torture, and devour one another, proving themselves more inhuman in these respects even than beasts, what a won derful evidence it is, i say, of their capacity for improvement, that even they can enter into the most formal compact or treaty of peace, burying the hatchet, etc., and treating with each other with as much consideration as the most enlight ened states. you would say that they had a genius for diplomacy as well as for war. — con sider that iroquois, torturing his cajdtive, roast ing him before a slow fire, biting off the fingers of him alive, and finally eating the heart of him dead, betraying not the slightest evidence of humanity, and now behold him in the council chamber where he meets the representatives of the hostile nation to treat of peace, conducting with such perfect dignity and decorum, betraying winter. 67 sueli a sense of justice. these savages are equal to us civilized men in their treaties, and i fear not essentially worse in their wars. dec. 30, 1859. ... p. m. going by d 's i see a shrike perched on the tip top of the top most, upright twig of an english cherry-tree be fore his house, standing square on the topmost bud, balancing himself by a slight motion of his tail from time to time. i have noticed this habit of the bird before. you would suppose it incon venient for so large a bird to maintain its foot ing there. scared by my passing in the road he flew off, and i thought i would see if he alighted in a similar place. he flew toward a young elm, whose higher twigs were much more slender, though not quite so upright as those of the cherry, and i thought he might be excused if he alighted on the side of one ; but no, to my surprise, he alighted without any trouble upon the very top of one of the highest of all, and looked around as before. . . . what a different phenomenon a muskrat now from what it is in summer. now, if one floats or swims, its whole back out, or crawls out upon the ice at one of those narrow oval water spaces, some twenty rods long (in calm weather, smooth mirrors), in a broad frame of white ice or yet whiter snow, it is seen at once, as conspicuous (or more so) as a fly on a window-pane or a 68 winter. mirror. but in summer, how many hundreds crawl along the weedy shore, or plunge in the long river unsuspected by the boatman ! dec. 30, 1860. ... it is remarkable how universally, as respects soil and exposure, the whortleberry family is distributed with us. one kind or another flourishes in every soil and locality. the pennsylvania and canada blue berries especially in elevated, cool, and airy places, on hills and mountains, in openings in the woods and in sproutlands, the high blueberry in swamps, and the low blueberry in intermedi ate places, or almost anywhere but in swamps hereabouts. the family thus ranges from the highest mountain tops to the lowest swamps, and forms the prevailing shrub of a great part of new england. not only is this true of the family, but hereabouts of the genus, gayliis sacia, or the huckleberry proper, alone. i do not know of a spot where any shrub grows in this neighborhood, but one or another species or variety of the gaylussacia may also grow there. . . . such care has nature taken to furnish to birds and quadrupeds, and to men, a palatable berry of this kind, slightly modified by soil and climate, wherever the consumer may chance to be. corn and potatoes, apples and pears have comparatively a narrow range, but we can fill our basket with whortleberries on the summit winter. 69 of mt. washington, above almost all the shrubs ■with which we are familiar, the same kind which they have in greenland, and again, when we get home, in the lowest swamps, with a kind which the greenlander never found. — first, there is the early, dwarf blueberry, the smallest of the whortleberry shrubs, the first to ripen its fruit, not commonly erect, but more or less reclined, often covering the earth with a sort of dense matting. the twigs are green, the flowers commonly white. both the shrub and its fruit are the most tender and delicate of any that we have. the vaccinium canadense may be consid ered a more northern form of the same. — some ten days later comes the high blueberry, or swamp blueberry, the commonest stout shrub of our swamps, of which i have been obliged to cut down not a few, when running lines in sur veying through the low woods. they are a pretty sure indication of water, and when i see their dense curving tops ahead, i prepare to wade or for a wet foot. the flowers have an agreeable, sweet, and very promising fragrance, and a handful of them plucked and eaten have a subacid t^ste agreeable to some palates. — at the same time with the last, the common low blueberry is ripe. this is an upright slender shrub, with a few long, wand-like branches, with green bark and glaucous green leaves, its 70 winter. recent shoots crimson-colored. the flowers have a considerably rosy tinge, a delicate tint. the last two kinds are more densely flowered than the others. — ^-the huckleberry is an upright shrub, more or less stout according to its expo sure to the sun and air, with a spreading, bushy top, a dark brown bark and thick leaves, the recent shoots red. the flowers are much more red than those of the others. as in old times they who dwelt on the heath, remote from towns, were backward to adopt the doctrines which prevailed there, and were there fore called heathen, so we dwellers in the huckle berry pastures, which are our heathlands, are slow to adopt the notions of large towns and cities, and may perchance be nicknamed hucldeberry people. but the worst of it is that the emis saries of the towns care more for our berries than we for their doctrines. in those days the very race had got a bad name, and ethnicus was only another name for heathen. all our hills are or have been huckleberry hills, — the three hills of boston, and no doubt bunker hill among the rest. in may and june all our hills and fields are adorned with a profusion of the pretty little, more or less bell-shaped flowers of this family, commonly turned toward the earth, and more or less tinged with red or pink, and resounding winter. 71 with the hum of insects, each one the forerun ner of a terry the most natural, wholesome, and palatable that the soil can produce. — the early low blueberry, which i will call " bluet," adopt ing the name from the canadians, is probably the prevailing kind of whortleberry in new england, for the high blueberry and huckle berry are unknown in many sections. in many new hampshire towns, a neighboring mountain top is the common berry field of many villages, and in the season sucli a summit will be swarming with pickers. a hundred at once will rush thither from the surrounding villages, with pails and buckets of all descriptions, espe cially on a sunday, which is their leisure day. when camping on such ground, thinking my self out of the world, i have had my solitude very unexpectedly interrupted by such a com pany, and found that week days were the only sabbath days there. . . . the mountain tops of new hampshire, often lifted above the clouds, are thus covered with this beautiful blue fruit in greater profusion than any garden. what though the woods be cut down. this emergency was long ago foreseen and provided for by nature, and the interregnum is not allowed to be a barren one. she is full of resources, and not only begins instantly to heal that scar, but she consoles and refreshes us with fruits 72 winter. such as the forest did not produce. ... as the sandal wood is said to diffuse its perfume around the woodman who cuts it, so, in this case, nature rewards with unexpected fruits the hand that lays her waste. dec. 31, 1837. as the least drop of wine tinges the whole goblet, so the least particle of truth colors our whole life. it is never isolated, or simply added as treasure to our stock. when any real progress is made, we unlearn and learn anew what we thought we knew before. dec. 31, 1840. . . . there must be respira tion as well as aspiration. we should not walk on tiptoe, but healthily expand to our full cir cumference on the soles of our feet. ... if aspiration be repeated long without respiration, it will be no better than expiration, or simply losing one's breath. in the healthy, for every aspiration there will be a respiration which is to make his idea take shape, and give its tone to the character. every time he steps buoyantly up, he steps solidly down again, and stands the firmer on the ground for his independence of it. we should fetch the whole heel, sole, and toe horizontally down to earth. let not ours be a wiped virtue, as men go about with an array of clean linen, but unwashed as a fresh flower, not a clean sunday garment, but better as a soiled week-day one. winter. 73 dec. 31, 1850. . . . the blue jays evidently notify each other of the presence of an intruder, and will sometimes make a great chattering about it, and so communicate the alarm to other birds, and to beasts. dec. 31, 1851. the third warm day ; now overcast and beginning to drizzle. still it is inspiriting as the brightest weather, though the sun surely is not going to shine. there is a latent light in the mist, as if there were more electricity than usual in the air. there are warm, foggy days in winter which excite us. — it reminds me, this thick, spring-like weather, that i have not enough valued and attended to the pure clarity and brilliancy of the winter skies. . . . shall i ever in summer evenings see so celestial a reach of blue sky contrasting with amber as i saw a few days since. the day sky in winter corresponds for clarity to the night sky in which the stars shine and twinkle so brightly in this latitude. i am too late, perhaps, to see the sand foliage in the deep cut ; should have been there day before yesterday. it is now too wet and soft. yet in some places it is perfect. i see some perfect leopard's paws. these things suggest that there is motion in the earth as well as on the surface; it lives and grows. ... i seem to see some of the life that is in the spring bnd 74 winter. and blossom, more intimately, nearer its foun tain head, the fancy sketches and designs of the artist. it is more simple and primitive growth ; as if for ages sand and clay might have thus flowed into the forms of foliage, before plants were produced to clothe the earth. . . . i observed this afternoon the old irish woman at the shanty in the woods, sitting out on the hillside bare-headed in the rain, and on the icy, though thawing ground, knitting. she comes out like the ground squirrel, at the least intima tion of warmer weather, while i walk still in a great coat, and under an umbrella. she will not have to go far to be buried, so close she lives to the earth. such irish as these are natural izing themselves at a rapid rate, and threaten at last to displace the yankees, as the latter have the indians. the process of acclimation is rapid with them. they draw long breaths in the american sick-room. . . . there is a low mist in the woods. it is a good day to study lichens. the view so confined, it compels your attention to near objects, and the white back ground reveals the disks of the lichens dis tinctly. they appear more loose, flowing, ex panded, flattened out, the colors brighter for the damp. the round, greenish-yellow lichens on the white pines loom through the mist (or are seen dimly) like shields whose devices you winter. 75 would fain read. the trees appear all at once covered with the crop of lichens and mosses of all kinds. . . . this is their solstice, and your eyes run swiftly through the mist to these things only. on every fallen twig even, that has lain under the snows, as well as on the trees, they appear erect, and now first to have attained their fuu expansion. nature has a day for each of her creations. to-day it is an exhi bition of lichens at forest hall. the livid green of some, the fruit of others, they eclipse the trees they cover ; the red, club-shaped (baobab tree-like), on the stumf)s, the erythrean stumps ; ah, beautiful is decay: true, as thales said, the world was made out of water. that is the principle of all things. i do not lay myself open to my friends ? the owner of the casket locks it and unlocks it. — treat your friends for what you know them to be. regard no surfaces. consider not what they did but what they intended. be sure, as you know them, you are known of them again. last night i treated my dearest friend ill. though i could find some excuse for myself, it is not such excuse as under the circumstances could be pleaded in so many words. instantly, i blamed myself, and sought an opportunity to make atonement, but the friend avoided me, and with, kinder feelings even than before i was obliged 76 winter. to depart. and now this morning i feel that it is too late to speak of the trifle, and besides i doubt now, in the cool morning, if i have a right to suppose such intimate and serious rela^ tions as afford a basis for the apology i had con ceived, for even magnanimity must ask this poor earth for a field. the virtues even wait for in vitation. yet i am resolved to know that one centrally, through thick and thin, and though we should be cold to one another, though we should never speak to one another, i will know that inward and essential love may exist under a superficial coldness, and that the laws of at traction speak louder than words. my true re lation this instant shall be my apology for my false relation the last instant. i made haste to cast off my injustice as scurf. i own it less than another. i have absolutely done with it. let the idle and wavering and apologizing friend appropriate it. methinks our estrangement is only like the divergence of the branches which unite in the stem. to-night i heard mrs. lecture on woman hood. the most important fact about the lec ture was that a woman gave it, and in that re spect it was suggestive. went to see her after ward. but the interview added nothing to the impression, rather subtracted from it. she was a woman in the too common sense, after all. winter. 77 you had to fire small charges. i did not have a finger in once, for fear of blowing away all her works, and so ending the game. you had to substitute courtesy for sense and argument. it requires nothing less than a chivalric feeling to sustain a conversation with a lady. i carried her lecture for her in my pocket wrapped in her handkerchief. my pocket exhales cologne to this moment. the championess of woman's rights still asks you to be a ladies' man. i can't fire a salute for fear some of the guns may be shotted. i had to unshot all the guns in truth's battery, and fire powder and wadding only. certainly the heart is only for rare occasions ; the intellect affords the most unfailing entertain ment. it would only do to let her feel the wind of the ball. i fear that to the last, women's lec tures will demand mainly courtesy from men. . . . denuded pines stand in the clearings with no old cloak to wrap about them, only the apexes of their cones entire, telling a pathetic story of the companions that clothed them. so stands a man. his clearing around him, he has no companions on the hills. the lonely trav eler, looking up, wonders why he was left when his companions were taken. dec. 31, 1853. ... it is a remarkable sight, this snow-clad landscape, the fences and bushes half -buried, and the warm sun on it. . . • the 78 winter. town and country is now so still, no rattle of wagons nor even jingle of sleigh bells, every tread being as with woolen feet. ... in such a day as this, the crowing of a cock is heard very far and distinctly. . . . there are a few sounds still which never fail to affect me, the notes of a wood thrush and the sound of a vibrating chord. these affect me as many sounds once did often, and as almost all should. the strain of the seolian harp and of the wood thrush are the truest and loftiest preachers that i know now left on this, earth. i know of no missionaries to us heathen comparable to them. they, as it were, lift us up in spite of ourselves. they in toxicate and charm us. where was that strain mixed, into which this world was dropped, but as a lump of sugar, to sweeten the draught ? i would be drunk, drunk, drunk, dead drunk to this world with it forever. he that hath ears, let him hear. the contact of sound with a hu man ear whose hearing is pure and unimpaired is coincident with an ecstasy. sugar is not so sweet to the palate as sound to a healthy ear. the hearing of it makes men brave. . . . these things alone . remind me of my immortality, which is else a fable. as i hear, i realize and see clearly what at other times i only dimly remember. i get the value of the earth's ex tent and the sky's depth. it . . . gives me the winter. 79 freedom of all bodies, of all nature. i leave my body in a trance, and accompany the zephyr and the fragrance. walden froze completely over last night. it is, however, all snow-ice, as it froze while it was snowing hard. it looks like frozen yeast some what. i waded about in the woods through the snow, which certainly averaged considerably more than two feet deep where i went. . . . saw probably an otter's track, very broad and deep, as if a log had been drawn along. it was nearly as obvious as a man's track ; made be fore last night's snow fell. the creature from time to time went beneath the snow for a few feet to the leaves. this animal i should prob ably never see the least trace of were it not for the snow, the great revealer. i saw some squirrels' nests of oak leaves high in the trees, and directly after a gray squirrel tripping along the branches of an oak and shak ing down the snow. he ran down the oak on the side opposite from me over the snow and up another tall and slender ^oak, also on the side opposite from me which was bare, and leaped down about four feet into a white pine, and then ran up still higher into its thick green top and clung behind the main stem, perfectly still. . . . tills he did to conceal himself, though obliged to come nearer to me to accomplish it. 80 winter. his fore feet make but one track in the snow, about three inches broad, and his hind feet an other similar one, a foot or more distant, and there are two sharp furrows forward, and two slighter ones backward from each track. this track he makes when running, but i am not absolutely certain that all the four feet do not come together. there were many holes in the snow where he had gone down to the leaves and brought up acorns, which he had eaten on the nearest twig, dropping fine bits of shell about on the snow, and also bits of lichen and bark. i noticed the bits of acorn shells, etc., by the holes in many places. at times he made a continu ous narrow trail in the snow, somewhat like a small muskrat, where he had walked or gone several times, and he would go under a few feet and come out again. dec. 31, 1854. p. m. on river to fair haven pond, a beautiful, clear, not very cold day. the shadows on the snow are indigo blue. the pines look very dark. the white-oak leaves are a cinnamon color, the black and red (?) oak leaves a reddish-brown or leather color. ... a partridge rises from the alders and skims across the river at its widest part, just before me ; a fine sight. . . . how glorious the perfect still ness and peace of the winter landscape. dec. 31, 1859. . . . how vain to try to winter. 81 teach youth or anybody truths. they can only learn them after their own fashion, and when they get ready. i do not mean by this to condemn our system of education, but to sliow what it amounts to. a hundred boys at college are drilled in physics, metaphysics, languages, etc. there may be one or two in each hundred, prematurely old, perchance, who approach the subject from a similar point of view to their teachers', but as for the rest and the most prom ising, it is like agricultural chemistry to so many indians. they get a valuable drilling, it may be, but they do not learn what you profess to teach. they at most only learn where the arsenal is, in case they should ever want to use any of its weapons. the young men, being young, necessarily listen to the lecturer on his tory, just as they do to the singing of a bird. they expect to be affected by something he may say. it is a kind of poetic pabulum and imagery that they get. nothing comes quite amiss to their mill. jan. 1, 1841. all, men and women, woo one. there is a fragrance in their breath. *' nosque — equis oriens afflavit auhelis." and if now they hate, i muse as in sombre, cloudy weather, not despairing of the absent ray. " illic sera nibens accendit lumina vesper." 82 winter. jan. 1, 1842. . . . the virtuous soul pos sesses a fortitude and hardihood which not the grenadier nor pioneer can match. it never shrinks. it goes singing to its work. effort is its relaxation. the rude pioneer work of the world has been done by the most devoted wor shipers of beauty. ... in winter is their cam paign. they never go into quarters. they are elastic under the heaviest burden, under the extremest physical suffering. jan. 1, 1852. ... i have observed that one mood is the natural critic of another. when possessed with a strong feeling on any subject foreign to the one i may be writing on, i know very well what of good and what of bad i have written on the latter. it looks to me now as it will ten years hence. my life is then earnest, and will tolerate no makeshifts nor nonsense. what is tinsel, or euphuism, or irrelevant is re vealed to such a touchstone. in the light of a strong feeling all things take their places, and truth of every kind is seen as such. now let me read my verses, and i will tell you if the god has had a hand in them. i wish to survey my composition for a moment from the least favor able point of view. i wish to be translated to the future, and look at my work as it were at a structure on the plain, to observe what portions have crumbled under the influence of the ele ments. winter. 83 9.30 p. m. to fair haven. moon little more than half full. not a cloud in the slsy. it is a remarkably warm night for the season, the ground almost entirely bare. the stars are dazzlingly bright. the fault may be in my own barrenness, but methinks there is a certain pov erty about the winter night's sky. the stars of higher magnitude are more bright and dazzling, and therefore appear more near and numerable ; while those that appear indistinct and infinitely remote in the summer, giving the impression of unfathomableness in the sky, are scarcely seen at all. the front halls of heaven are so bril liantly lighted that they quite eclipse the more remote. the sky has fallen many degrees. the worst kind of tick to get under your skin is yourself in an irritable mood. . . . these are some of the differences between this and the autumn or summer night : the stiffened glebe under my feet, the dazzle and seeming nearness of the stars, the duller gleam from ice on rivers and ponds, the white spots in the fields and streaks by the wall sides where are the remains of drifts yet unmelted. perhaps the only thing that spoke to me in this walk was the bare, lichen-covered, gray rock at the cliff, in the moonlight, naked and almost warm as in summer. i have so much faith in the power of truth to 84 winter. communicate itself that i should not believe a friend, if he should tell me that he had given credit to an unjust rumor concerning me. sus pect ! ah, yes, you may suspect a thousand things, but i well know that what you suspect most confidently of all is just the truth. your other doubts but flavor this your main suspi cion. they are the condiments which, taken alone, do simply bite the tongue. . . . jan. 1, 1853. this morning we have some thing between ice and frost on the trees, etc. the rocks cased in ice look like alum rocks. this, not frozen mist or frost, but frozen drizzle, collected around the slightest cores, gives promi nence to the least withered herbs and grasses. "where yesterday was a plain, smooth field ap pears now a teeming crop of fat, icy herbage. the stems of the herbs on the north side are enlarged from ten to one hundred times. the addition is so universally on the north side that a traveler could not lose the points of the com pass to-day, though it should be never so dark ; for every blade of grass would serve to guide him, telling from which side the storm came yes terday. these straight stems of grasses stand up like white batons, or sceptres, and make a con spicuous foreground to the landscape, from six inches to three feet high. c. thought that these fat, icy branches on the withered grass and winter. 85 herbs had no nucleus, but looking closer i showed him the fine, black, wiry threads on which they impinged, which made him laugh with surprise. . . . the clover and sorrel send up a dull, green gleam through this icy coat, like strange plants. . . . some weeds bear the ice in masses ; some, like the trumpet weed and tansy, in balls for each dried flower. what a crash of jewels as you walk ! the most careless walker, who never deigned to look at these humble weeds beforei, cannot help observing them now. this is why the herbage is left to stand dry in the fields all winter. upon a solid foundation of ice stand out, pointing in all di rections between n. w. and n. e., or within the limits of 90°, little spicula, or crystallized points, half an inch, or more, in length. upon the dark, glazed, plowed ground, where a mere wiry stem rises, its north side is thickly clad ■with these snow-white spears, like some indian head-dress, as if it had attracted all the frost. i saw a prinos bush full of large berries by the wall in hubbard's field. standing on the west side, the contrast of the red berries with their white incrustation or prolongation on the north was admirable. i thought i had never seen the berries so dazzlingly bright. the whole north side of the bush, berries and stock, was beautifully incrusted, and when i went round to 86 winter. the north side the redness of the berries came softened through, and tingeing the allied snow white bush, like an evening sky beyond. these adjoined snow or ice berries, being beset within the limits of 90° on the n. with those icy par ticles or spicula, between which the red glow, and sometimes the clear red itself, was some times visible, produced the appearance of a raspberry bush full of over-ripe fruit. standing on the north side of a bush or tree, looking against the sky, you see only the white ghost of a tree, without a mote of earthiness; but as you go round it, the dark core comes into view. it makes all the odds imaginable whether you are traveling n. or s. the drooping birches along the edges of woods are the most feathery, fairy-like ostrich plumes, and the color of their trunks increases the delusion. the weight of the ice gives to the pines the forms which north ern trees, like the firs, constantly wear, bending and twisting the branches ; for the twigs and plumes of the pines, being frozen, remain as the wind held them, and new portions of the trunk are exposed. seen from the n. there is no greenness in the pines, and the character of the tree is changed. the willows along the edge of the river look like sedge in the meadows. the sky is overcast, and a fine snowy hail and rain is falling, and these ghost-like trees make a seen winter. 87 ery which reminds you of spitzbergen. i see now the beauty of the causeway by the bridge, alders below swelling into the road, overtopped by willows and maples. the fine grasses and shrubs in the meadow rise to meet and mingle with the drooping willows, and the whole makes an indistinct impression like a mist. through all this, the road runs toward those white, ice clad, ghostly or fairy trees in the distance, to ward spirit-land. the pines are as white as a counterpane, with raised embroidery and white tassels and fringes. each fascicle of leaves or needles is held apart by an icy club surmounted by a little snowy or icy ball. finer than the saxon arch is this path running under the pines, roofed, not with crossing boughs, but drooping, ice-covered, irregular twigs. in the midst of this stately pine, towering like the sol emn ghost of a tree, i see the white, ice-clad boughs of other trees appearing, of a different character ; sometimes oaks with leaves incrusted, or fine-sprayed maples or walnuts. but finer than au, this red oak, its leaves incrusted like shields a quarter of an inch thick, and a thousand fine spicula like long serrations at right angles with their planes upon the edges. it produces an indescribably rich effect, the color of the leaf coming softened through the ice, a delicate fawn of many shades. where the plumes of the pitch 88 winter. pine are short and spreading close to the trunk, sometimes perfect cups or rays are formed. pitch pines present rough, massy grenadier plumes, each having a darker spot or cavity in the end where you look in to the bud. i listen to the booming of the pond as if it were a rea sonable creature. i return at last in the rain, and am coated with a glaze, like the fields. . . . after talking with uncle charles, the other night, about the worthies of this country, web ster and the rest, as usual, considering who were geniuses and who not, i showed him up to bed ; and when i had got into bed myself i heard the chamber door opened, after eleven o'clock, and he called out in an earnest, stento rian voice, loud enough to wake the whole house, " henry ! was john quincy adams a genius ? " " no, i think not," was my reply. " well, i did n't think he was," answered he. jan. 1, 1854. le jeune, referring to the death of a young frenchwoman who had de voted her life to the savages of canada, uses this expression: "finally this beautiful soul de tached itself from its body the 15th of march, " etc. the drifts mark the standstill or equilibrium between the currents of air or particular winds. in our greatest snow-storms, the wind being northerly, the greatest drifts are on the south winter. 89 side of houses and fences. ... i notice that in the angle made by our house and shed, a s. w. exposure, the snow-drift does not lie close about the pump, but is a foot off, forming a circular bowl, showing that there was an eddy about it. the snow is like a mould, showing the form of the eddying currents of air which have been im pressed on it, while the drift and all the rest is that which fell between the currents or where they counterbalanced each other. these bound arjr lines are mountain barriers. the white-in-tails, or grass finches, linger pretty late, flitting in flocks. they come only so near winter as the white in their tails indi cates. . . . the snow buntings and the tree sparrows are the true spirits of the snow-storm. they are the animated beings that ride upon it and have their life in it. the snow is the great betrayer. it not only shows the track of mice, otters, etc., etc., which else we should rarely, if ever, see, but the tree sparrows are more plainly seen against its white ground, and they in turn are attracted by the dark weeds it reveals. it also drives the crows and other birds out of the woods to the villages for food. we might expect to find in the snow the footprint of a life superior to our own, of which no zoology takes cognizance. is there no 90 winter. trace of a nobler life than that of an otter or an escaped "convict to be looked for in it ? shall we / suppose that is the only life that has been abroad ( in the night ? it is only the savage that can see the track of no higher life than an otter's. why do the vast snow plains give us pleasure, the twilight of the bent and half -buried woods? is not all there consonant with virtue, justice, purity, courage, magnanimity ; and does not au this amount to the track of a higher life than the otter's, — a life which has not gone by and left a footprint merely, but is there with its beauty, its music, its perfume, its sweetness, to exhilarate and recreate us ? all that we perceive is the impress of its spirit. if there is a perfect gov ernment of the world according to the highest laws, do we find no trace of intelligence there, whether in the snow, or the earth, or in our selves, — no other trail but such as a dog can scent ? is there none which an angel can detect and follow, — none to guide a man in his pil grimage, which water will not conceal ? is there no odor of sanctity to be perceived ? is its trail too old? have mortals lost the scent? . . . are there not hunters who seek for something higher than foxes, with judgment more discrim inating than the senses of fox-hounds, who rally to a nobler music than that of the hunting-horn? as there is contention among the fishermen who winter. 91 shall be the first to reach the pond as soon as the ice will bear, in spite of the cold ; as the hunters are forward to take the field as soon as the first snow has fallen, so he who would make the most of his life for discipline must be abroad early and late, in spite of cold and wet, in pursuit of nobler game, whose traces are there most dis tinct, — a life which we seek not to destroy, but to make our ownj which when pursued does not earth itself, does not burrow downward, but up ward, takes not to the trees, but to the heavens, as its home ; which the hunter pursues with winged thoughts and aspirations (these the dogs that tree it), rallying his pack with the bugle notes of undying faith. . . . do the indian and hunter only need snow-shoes, while the saint sits indoors in embroidered slippers? jan. 1, 1856. . . . p. m. to walden. . . . on the ice at walden are very beautiful large leaf crystals in great profusion. the ice is fre quently thickly covered with them for many rods. they seem to be connected with the ro settes, a running together of them, look like a loose bunch of small white feathers springing from a tuft of down, for their shafts are lost in a tuft of fine snow like the down about the shaft of a feather, as if a feather bed had been shaken over the ice. they are, on a close examination, surprisingly perfect leaves, like ferns, only very 92 winter. broad for their length, and commonly more on one side the midrib than the other. they are from an inch to an inch and a half long, and three fourths of an inch wide, and slanted, where i look, from the s. w. they have first a very distincb midrib, though so thin that they cannot be taken up ; then distinct ribs branch ing from this, commonly opposite ; and minute ribs springing again from these last, as in many ferns, the last running to each crenation in the border. how much farther they are subdivided the naked eye cannot discern. they are so thin and fragile that they melt under your breath while you are looking closely at them. a fisher man says they were much finer in the morning. in other places the ice is strewn with a different kind of frost-work, in little patches, as if oats had been spilled, like fibres of asbestos rolled, one half or three fourths of an inch long and one eighth or more wide. here and there patches of them a foot or two over, like some boreal grain spilled. jan. 1, 1858. ... i have lately been survey ing the walden woods so extensively and mi nutely that i can see it mapped in my mind's eye as so many men's wood-lots, and am aware when i walk there that i am at a sriven moment passing from such a one's wood-lot to such an other's. i fear this particulax dry knowledge winter. 93 may affect my imagination and fancy, that it will not be easy to see so much wildness and native vigor there as formerly. no thicket will seem so unexplored now that i know a stake and stones may be found iu it. in these respects those maine woods differ -essentially from ours. there you are never re minded that the wilderness you are treading is after all some villager's familiar wood-lot, from which his ancestors have sledded their fuel for a generation or two, or some widow's thirds, mi nutely described in some old deed which is recorded, of which the owner has got a plan too, and of which the old boundmarks may be found' every forty rods, if you will search. what a history this concord wilderness, which i affect so much, may have had ! how many old deeds describe it, some particular wild spot, how it passed from cole to robinson, and robinson to jones, and from jones finally to smith in course of years. some had cut it over three times during their lives, built walls and made a pasture of it perchance, and some burned it and sowed it with rye. . . . in ■ the maine woods you are not reminded of these things. 'tis true the map informs you that you stand on land granted by the state to such an academy, or on bingham's purchase ; but these names do not impose on you, for you 94. winter. see nothing to remind you o£ the academy or of bingham. jan. 2, 1841. . . . every needle of the white pine trembles distinctly in the breeze, which on the sunny side gives the whole tree a shimmer ing, seething aspect. . . . i stopped short in the path to-day to admire how the trees grow up without forethought, re gardless of the time and circumstances. they do not wait, as men do. now is the golden age of the sapling; earth, air, sun, and rain are occasion enough. they were no better in primeval centuries. "the winter of" their "discontent" never comes. witness the buds of the native poplar, standing gayly out to the frost, on the sides of its bare switches. they express a naked confi dence. "with cheerful heart 1 could be a sojourner in the wilderness. i should be sure to find there the catkins of the alder. when i read of them in the accounts of northern adventurers by baffin's bay or mackenzie's river, i see how even there too i could dwell. they are my little vegetable redeemers. methinks my virtue will not flag ere they come again. they are worthy to have had a greater than neptune or ceres for their donor. who was the benignant goddess that bestowed them on mankind ? winter. 95 i saw a fox run across the pond to-day with the carelessness of freedom. as at intervals i traced his course in the sunshine, as he trotted along the ridge of a hill on the crust, it seemed as if the sun never shone so proudly, sheer down on the hillside, and the winds and woods were hushed in sympathy. i gave up to him sun and earth as to their true proprietor. he did not go in the sunshine, but the sunshine seemed to fol low him. there was a visible sympathy between him and it. ttan. 2, 1842. the ringing of the church bell is a much more melodious sound than any that is heard within the church. all great values are thus public, and undulate like sound through the atmosphere. wealth cannot pur chase any great private solace or convenience. riches are only the means of sociality. i will depend on the extravagance of my neighbors for my luxuries ; they will take care to pamper me, if i will be overfed. the poor man, who sacrificed nothing for the gratification, seems to derive a safer and more natural enjoyment from his neighbor's extravagance than he does him self. it is a new natural product, from the con templation of which he derives new vigor and solace as from a natural phenomenon. in moments of quiet and leisure my thoughts are more apt to revert to some natural than to any human relation. 96 winter. chaucer's sincere sorrow in his latter days for the grossness of his earlier works, and that he " cannot recall and annul " what he had " writ ten of the base and filthy love of men towards women, but alas, they are now continued from man to man," says he, " and i cannot do what i desire," is all very creditable to his character. jan. 2, 1853. 9 a. m. down railroad to cliffs. a clear day, a pure sky with cirrhi. in this clear air and bright sunlight, the ice-covered trees have a new beauty, especially the birches along under the edge of warren's wood on each side of the railroad, bent quite to the ground in every kind of curve. at a distance, as you are ap proaching them endwise, they look like the white tents of indians under the edge of the wood. the birch is thus remarkable, perhaps, from the feathery form of the tree, whose numerous small branches sustain so great weight, bending it to the ground ; and, moreover, because, from the color of the bark, the core is less observable. the oaks not only are. less pliant in the trunk, but have fewer and stiffer twigs and branches. the birches droop over in all directions, like ostrich feathers. most wood paths are impass able now to a carriage, almost to a foot traveler, from the number of saplings and boughs bent over even to the ground in them. both sides of the deep cut shine in the sun as if silver-plated, winter. 97 and the fine spray of a myriad bushes on the edge of the bank sparkle like silver. the tele graph wire is coated to ten times its size, and looks like a slight fence scalloping along at a distance. . . . when we climb the bank at stow's wood-lot and come upon the piles of freshly split white pine wood (for he is ruth lessly laying it waste), the transparent ice, like a thick varnish, beautifully exhibits the color of the clear, tender, yellowish wood, pumpkin pine (?), and its grain. we pick our way over a bed of pine boughs a foot or two deep, cover ing the ground, each twig and needle thickly in crusted with ice, one vast gelid mass, which our feet crunch, as if we vvere walking through the cellar of some confectioner to the gods. the invigorating scent of the recently cut pines refreshes us, if that is any atonement for this devastation. . . . especially now do i notice the hips, barberries, and winter-berries for their red. the red or purplish oatkins of the alders are in teresting as a winter fruit, and also of the birch. but few birds about. apparently their gran aries are locked up in ice, with which the grasses and buds are coated. even far in the horizon the pine tops are turned to fir or spruce by the weight of the ice bending them down, so that they look like a spruce swamp. no two trees wear the ice alike. the short plumes and needles 98 winter. of the spruce make a very j)retty and peculiar figure. i see some oaks in the distance, which, from their branches being curved and arched downward and massed, are turned into perfect elms, which suggests that this is the peculiarity of the elm. few, if any, other trees are thus wisp-like, the branches gracefully drooping. i mean some slender red and white oaks which have been recently left in a clearing. just apply a weight to the end of the boughs which will cause them to droop, and to each particular twig which will mass them together, and you have perfect elms. seen at the right angle, each ice-incrusted blade of stubble shines like a prism with some color of the rainbow, intense blue, or violet, and red. the smooth field, clad the other day with a low wiry grass, is now converted into rough stubble land, where you walk with crunch ing feet. it is remarkable that the trees can ever recover from the burden which bends them to the ground. i should like to weigh a limb of this pitch pine. the character of the tree is changed. i have now passed the bars, and am approaching the cliffs. the forms and variety of the ice are particularly rich here, there are so many low bushes and weeds before me as i ascend toward the sun, especially very small white pines almost merged in the ice-incrusted ground. all objects are to the eye polished winter. 99 silver. it is a perfect land of faery. le jeune describes the same in canada in 1636 : " nos grands bois ne paroissoient qu'une forest de cristal." . . . the bells are particularly sweet this morning. i hear more, methinks, than ever before. . . . men obey their call and go to the stove-warmed church, though god exhibits him self to the walker in a frosted bush to-day as much as he did in a burning one to moses of old. we build a fire on the cliffs. when kicking to pieces a pine stump for the fat knots which alone would burn this icy day, at the risk of spoiling my boots, having looked in vain for a stone, i thought how convenient would be an indian stone axe to batter it with. the bark of white birch, though covered with ice, burned well. ave soon had a roaring fire of fat pine on a shelf of rock from which we overlooked the icy landscape. the sun, too, was melting the ice on the rocks, and the water was purling downwards in dark bubbles exactly like polly wogs. what a good word is flame, expressing the form and soul of fire, lambent, with forked tongue ! we lit a fire to see it, rather than to feel it, it is so rare a sight these days. it seems good to have our eyes ache once more with smoke. what a peculiar, indescribable colcrr has this flame ! — a reddish or lurid yellow, not so splendid or full of light as of life and heat. 100 winter. these fat roots made much flame and a very black smoke, commencing where the flame left off, which cast fine flickering shadows on the rocks. there was some bluish-white smoke from the rotten part of the wood. then there was the fine white ashes which farmers' wives some times use for pearlash. jan. 2, 1854. . . . the tints of the sunset sky are never purer and more ethereal than in the coldest winter days. this evening, though the colors are not brilliant, the sky is crystal line, and the pale fawn-tinged clouds are very beautiful. i wish to get on to a hill to look down on the winter landscape. we go about these days as if we were in fetters ; we walk in the stocks, stepping into the holes made by our predecessors. . . . the team and driver have long since gone by, but i see the marks of his whiplash on the snow, its recoil ; but, alas i these are not a complete tally of the strokes which fell upon the oxen's back. the unmerci ful driver thought, perhaps, that no one saw him, but unwittingly he recorded each blow on the unspotted snow behind his back as in a book of life. to more searching eyes the marks of his lash are in the air. i paced partly through the pitch-pine wood, and partly the open field from the turnpike by the lee place to the railroad from n. to s., more than one fourth of a mile, meas winter. 101 uring at every ten paces. the average o£ sixty five measurements up hill and down was nine teen inches. this, after increasing those in the woods by one inch (little enough), on account of the snow on the pines. ... i think one would have to pace a mile on a n. and s. line, up and down hill, through woods and fields, to get a quite reliable result. the snow will drift sometimes the whole width of a field, and fill a road or valley beyond, so that it would be well your measuring included several such driftings. very little reliance is to be put on the usual estimates of the depth of snow. i have heard different men set this snow at six, fifteen, eight een, twenty-four, thirty -six, and forty -eight inches. my .snow-shoes sank about four inches into the snow this morning, but more than twice as much the 29th. on the n. side of the railroad, above the eed house crossing, the train has cut through a drift about one fourth of a mile long, and two to nine feet high, straight up and down. it re minds me of the highlands, the pictured eocks, the side of an iceberg, etc. now that the sun has just sunk below the horizon, it is wonderful what an amount of soft light it appears to be absorbing. there appears to be more day just here by its side than anywhere else. i can al most see to a depth of six inches into it. it is made translucent, it is so saturated with light. 102 winter. i have heard of one precious stone found in concord, the cinnamon stone. a geologist has spoken of it as found in this town, and a farmer described to me one he once found, perhaps the same referred to by the other. he said it was as large as a brick, and as thick, and yet you could distinguish a pin through it, it was so transparent. jan. 2, 1855. . . . yesterday [skating] we saw the pink light on the snow within a rod oi us. the shadows of the bridges, etc., on the snow were a dark indigo blue. jan. 2, 1859. . . . going up the hill through stow's young oak wood-land, i listen to the sharp, dry rustle of thp withered oak leaves. this is the voice of the wood now. it would be comparatively still and more dreary here in other respects, if it were not for these leaves that hold on. it sounds like the roar of the . sea, and is inspiriting like that, suggesting how all the land is sea-coast to the aerial ocean. it is the sound of the surf, the rut, of an unseen ocean, — billows of air breaking on the forest, like water on itself or on sand and rocks. it rises and falls, swells and dies away, with agree able alternation, as the sea surf does. perhaps the landsmen can foretell a storm by it. it is remarkable how universal these grand murmurs are, these backgrounds of sound, — the surf. winter. 103 the wind in the forest, waterfalls, etc., — which yet tothe ear and in their origin are essentially one voice, the earth voice, the breathing or snoring of the creature. the earth is our ship, and this is the sound of the wind in her rigging as we sail. just as the inhabitant of cape cod hears the surf ever breaking on its shores, so we countrymen hear this kindred surf on the leaves of the forest. regarded as a voice, though it is not articulate, as our articulate sounds are divided into vowels (though this is nearer a consonant sound), labials, dentals, palatals, sibi lants, miites, aspirates, etc., so this may be called folial or frondal, produced by air driven against the leaves, and comes nearest to our sibilants or aspirates. michaux said that white oaks might be dis tinguished by retaining their leaves in the win ter, but as far as my observation goes they cannot be so distinguished. all our large oaks may retain a few leaves at the base of the lower limbs and about the trunk, though only a few, and the white oak scarcely more than the others ; while the same trees, when young, are all alike thickly clothed in the winter, but the leaves of the white oak are the most withered and shriv eled of them all. there being some snow ou the ground, i can easily distinguish the forest on the mountains 104 winter. (the peterboro hills, etc.), and teu which are forested, those parts and those mountains being dark, like a shadow. i cannot distinguish the forest thus far in summer. when i hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules, — mr. webster, perhaps, not having spoken according to mr. kirkham's rule, — i see they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute, or an interjection : first of all, mother tongue ; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. essentially, your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb's bleat. the grammarian is often one who can neither cry nor laugh, yet thinks he can express human emo tions. so the posture-masters tell you how you shall walk, turning your toes out excessively, perhaps; but so the beautiful walkers are not made. . . . minott says that a fox will lead a dog on to the ice in order that he may get in. tells of jake lakin losing a hound so, which went under the ice and was drowned below the holt. . . . they used to cross the river there on the ice, going to market formerly. jan. 3, 1842. it is pleasant when one can winter. 105 relieve the grossness of the kitchen and the table by the simple beauty of his repast, so that there may be anything in it to attract the eye of the artist, even. 1 have been popping corn to-night, which is only a more rapid blossoming of the seed under a greater than july heat. the popped corn is a perfect winter flower, hinting of anemones and houstonias. . . . here has bloomed for my repast such a delicate flower as will soon spring by the wall sides, and this is as it should be. why should not nature revel , sometimes, and genially relax, and make herself familiar at my board ? i would have my house a bower fit to entertain her. it is a feast of such innocence as might have snowed down ; on my warm hearth sprang these cerealian blos soms ; here was the bank where they grew. me thinks some such visible token of approval would always accompany the simple and healthy repast, — some such smiling or blessing upon it. our appetite should always be so related to our taste, and our board be an epitome of the pri meval table which nature sets by hill and wood and stream for her dumb pensioners. jan. 3, 1852. ... a spirit sweeps the string of the telegraph harp, and strains of music are drawn out suddenly, like the wire itself. . . . what becomes of the story of a tortoise shell on the seashore now? the world is young, and 106 winter. music is its infant voice. i do not despair of a world where you have only to stretch an ordi nary wire from tree to tree to hear such strains drawn from it by new england breezes as make greece and all antiquity seem poor in melody. why was man so made as to be thrilled to his inmost being by the vibrating of a wire ? axe not inspiration and ecstasy a more rapid vibrar tion of the nerves swept by the inrushing ex cited spirit, whether zephyral or boreal in its character ? jan. 3, 1853. ... i love nature partly be cause she is not man, but a retreat from him. none of his institutions control or pervade her. here a different kind of right prevails. in her midst i can be glad with an entire gladness. if this world were all man, i could not stretch my self. i should lose all hope. he is constraint ; she is freedom to me. he makes me wish for another world ; she makes me content with this. none of the joys she supplies is subject to his rules and definitions. what he touches he taints. in thought he moralizes. one would think that no free, joyful labor was possible to him. how infinite and pure the least pleasure of which nature is basis compared with the con gratulation of mankind ! the joy which nature yields is like that afforded by the frank words of one we love. winter. 107 man, man is the devil, j^he source of all evil. methinks these prosers, with their saws and their laws, do not know how glad a man can be. what wisdom, what warning, can prevail against gladness? there is no law so strong which a little gladness may not transgress. i have a room all to myself. it is nature. it is a place beyond the jurisdiction of human govern ments. pile up your books, the records of sad ness, your saws and your laws, nature is glad outside, and her many worms within will ere long topple them down. . . . nature is a prairie for outlaws. there are two worlds, — the post office and nature. i know them both. i con tinually forget mankind and their institutions, as i do a bank. jan. 3, 1856. it is astonishing how far a merely well-dressed and good looking man may go without being challenged by a sentinel. what is called good society will bid high for such. the man whom the state has raised to high office, like that of governor, for instance, from some, it may be, honest but less respected call ing, cannot return to his former humble but profitable pursuits, his old customers will be so shy of him. his ex-honorableness stands seri ously in his way, whether he be a lawyer or a shopkeeper. he can't get ex-honorated. so he 108 winter. becomes a sort of state paupes, an object of charity on its hands, which the state is bound in honor to see through and provide with offices of similar respectability, that he may not come to want. the man who has been president be comes the ex-president, and can't travel or stay at home anywhere, but men will persist in pay ing respect to his ex-ship. it is cruel to remem ber his deeds so long. when his time is out, why can't they let the poor fellow go ? jan. 3, 1861. why should the ornamental tree society confine its labors to the highway only? an englishman laying out his ground does not regard simply the avenues and walks. does not the landscape deserve attention ? what are the natural features which make a township handsome? a river, with its water falls and meadows, a lake, a hill, a cliff or indi vidual rocks, a forest, and ancient trees standing singly. such things are beautiful ; they have a high use which dollars and cents never repre sent. if the inhabitants of a town were wise, they would seek to preserve these things, though at a considerable expense ; for such things edu cate far more than any hired teachers, preach ers, or any system of school education at present organized. far the handsomest thing i saw in boxboro was its noble oak wood. i doubt if there is a finer one in massachusetts. let the winter. 109 town keep it -a century longer, and men will make pilgrimages to it from all parts of the country. and yet it would be very like the rest of new england if boxboro were ashamed of that wood-land. i have since learned, however, that she is contented to let that forest stand, in stead of the houses and farms that might sup plant it, because the land pays a much larger tax to the town now than it would then. i said to myself, if the history of the town is written, the chief stress is probably laid on its parish, and there is not one word about the forest in it. it would be worth while if in each town a com mittee were appointed to see that the beauty of the town received no detriment. if we have the biggest bowlder in the country, then it should not belong to an individual, nor be made into a doorstep. as in many countries precious metals belong to the crown, so here more pre cious natural objects of rare beauty should be long to tlie public. not only the channel, but both banks of every river should be a public highway. it is not the only use of a river, to float on it. think of a mountain top in the township, even to the minds of the indians a sacred place, only accessible through private grounds, — a temple, as it were, which you can not enter except at the risk of letting out or let ting in somebody's cattle, — in fact the temple 110 winter. itself in this case private property, and standing in a man's cow-yard. new hampshire courts have lately been deciding, as if it were for them to decide, whether the top of mt. washing ton belonged to a. or to b., and it being decided in favor of b., as i hear, he went up one winter with the proper officers and took formal posses sion. but i think that the top of mt. wash ington should not be private property ; it should be but an opportunity for modesty and rever ence, or if only to suggest that earth has higher uses than we commonly put her to. . . . thus we behave like oxen in a flower garden. the true fruit of nature can only be plucked with a delicate hand not bribed by any earthly reward, and a fluttering heart. no hired man can help us to gather this crop. how few ever get beyond feeding, clothing, sheltering, and warming themselves in this world, and begin to treat themselves as intellectual and moral beings. . . . most men, it seems to me, do not care for nature, and would sell their share in all her beauty, as long as they may live, for a stated sum. thank god, men cannot as yet fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth. we are safe on that side for the present. we cut down the few old oaks which witnessed the transfer of the township from the indian to the white man, and commence our museum with a cartridge-box taken from a british soldier in 1775. winter. ill jan. 4, 1841. i know a woman who is as true to me, and as incessant with her mild re buke as the blue sky. when i stand under her cope, instantly all pretension drops off, and i am swept by an influence as by a wind and rain which remove all taint. i am fortunate that i can pass and repass before her each day, and prove my strength in her glances. she is far truer to me than to herself. her eyes are like the windows of nature, through which i catch glimpses of the native land of the soul. from them comes a light which is not of the sun. his rays are in eclipse when they shine on me. jan. 4, 1850. the longest silence is the most pertinent question most pertinently put. em phatically silent. the most important ques tions, whose answers concern us more than any others, are never put in any other way. it is difficult for two strangers, mutually well disposed, so truly to bear themselves toward each other that a feeling of falseness and hollowness shall not soon spring up between them. the least anxiety to behave truly, vitiates the rela tion. v jan. 4, 1853. to what i will call yellow birch swamp, e. hubbard's, in the north part of the town, . . . west of the hunt pasture. there are more of these trees in it than any where else in the town that i know. how pleas 112 winter. ing to stand near a new or rare tree ; and few are so handsome as this ; singularly allied to the black birch in its sweet checkerberry scent and its form, and to the canoe birch in its peel ing or fringed and tasseled bark. the top is brush-like as in the black birch. the bark an exquisite . . . delicate gold color, curled off partly from the trunk with vertical clear or smooth spaces, as if a plane had been passed up the tree. the sight of these trees affects me more than california gold. i measured one five and two twelfths feet in circumference at six feet from the ground. we have the silver and the golden birch. this is like a fair, flaxen-haired sister of the dark-complexioned black birch, with golden ringlets. how lustily it takes hold of the swampy soil and braces itself. and here flows a dark cherry-wood or wine-colored brook over the iron-red sands in the sombre swamp, swampy wine. in an undress, this tree. ah, the time will come when these will be all gone. among the primitive trees. what sort of dryads haunt these ? blonde nymphs. near by, the great pasture oaks with horizontal boughs. at pratt's, the stupendous boughy branching elm, like vast thunderbolts stereotyped upon the sky, heaven-defying, sending back dark, vegetable bolts, as if flowing back in the channel of the lightning. — the white oaks have a few leaves winter. 113 about the crown of the trunk, in the lower part of the tree, like a tree within a tree. the tree is thus less wracked by the wind and ice. — in the twilight i went through the swamp, and the yellow birches sent forth a yellow gleam which each time made my heart beat faster. occasion ally you come to a dead and leaning white birch, beset with large fungi like ears or little shelves, with a rounded edge above. i walked with the yellow birch. the prinos is green within. if there were druids whose temples were the oak groves, my temple is the swamp. sometimes i was in doubt about a birch whose vest was but toned, smooth and dark, till i came nearer and saw the yellow gleaming through, or where a button was off. jan. 4, 1857. . . . after spending four or five days surveying and drawing a plan, inces santly, i especially feel the need of putting my self in communication with nature again to re cover my tone, to withdraw out of the wearying and unprofitable world of affairs. the things i have been doing have but a fleeting and acci dental importance, however much men are im mersed in them, and yield very little valuable fruit. i would fain have been wading through the woods and fields, and conversing with the sane snow. having waded in the very shallowest stream of time, i would now bathe my temples 114 winter. in eternity. i wish again to participate in the serenity of nature, to share the happiness of the river and the woods. i thus from time to time break off my connection with eternal truths, and go with the shallow stream of human affairs, grinding at the mill of the philistines. but when my task is done, with never failing confi dence, i devote myself to the infinite again. it would be sweet to deal with men more, i can imagine, but where dwell they? not in the fields which i traverse. jan. 4, 1858. . . .that bright and warm re flection of sunlight from the insignificant edging of stubble was remarkable. i was coming down stream over the meadow on the ice, within four or five rods of the eastern shore, the sun on my left about a quarter of an hour above the hori zon. the ice was soft and sodden, of a dull lead color, quite dark and reflecting no light, as i looked eastward, but my eyes caught, by acci dent, a singular, sunny brightness, reflected from the narrow border of stubble only three or four inches high, and as many feet wide perhaps, which rose along the edge of the ice at the foot of the hill. it was not a mere brightening of the bleached stubble, but the warm and yellow light of the sun, which, as appeared, it was pecul iarly fitted to reflect. it was that amber light from the west which we sometimes witness after winter. 115 a storm, concentrated on the stubble, for the hill beyond was merely a dark russet, spotted with snow. all the yellow rays seemed to be reflected by this insignificant stubble alone, and when i looked more generally a little above it, see ing it with the under part of my eye, . . . the reflected light made its due impression . . . sep arated from the proper color of the stubble, and it glowed almost like a low, steady, and serene fire. it was precisely as if the sunlight had mechanically slid over the ice, and lodged against the stubble. it will be enough to say of something warmly and sunnily bright, that it glowed like lit stubble. it was remarkable that looking eastward this was the only evidence, of the light in the west. jan. 5, 1841. i grudge to the record that lavish expenditure of love and grace which are due rather to the spoken thought. a man writes because he has no opportunity to speak. why should he be the only mute creature, and his speech no part of the melody of the grove ? he never gladdens the ear of nature, and ushers in no spring with his lays. — we are more anx ious to speak than to be heard. jan. 5, 1842'. i find that, whatever hindrances occur, i write just about the same amount of truth jn my journal, for the record is more con centrated, and usually it is some very real and 116 winter. earnest life that interrupts. all flourishes are omitted. if i saw wood from morning to night, though i grieve that i could not observe the train of my thoughts during that time, yet in the evening, the few scrawled lines which describe my day's occupation will make the creaking of the saw more musical than my freest fancies could have been. . . . i discover in raleigh's verses the vices of the courtier. they are not equally sustained, as if his noble genius were warped by the frivolous society of the court. he was capable of rising to a remarkable elevation. his poetry has for the most part a heroic tone and vigor, as of a knight errant. but again there seems to have been somewhat unkindly in his education, as if he had by no means grown up to be the man he promised. he was apparently too genial and loyal a soul, or rather he was incapable of resist ing temptation from that quarter. if to his genius and culture he could have added the tem perament of fox or cromwell, the world would have had cause longer to remember him. . . . one would have said it was by some lucky fate that he and shakespeare flourished at the same time in england, and yet what do we know of their acquaintanceship ? jan. 5, 1852. to-day the trees are white with snow, — i mean their stems and branches, — winter. 117 and have the true wintry look on the storm side. not till this has winter come to the forest. it looks like the small frost-work in the path and on the windows now, especially the oak woods at a distance, and you see better the form which the branches take. that is a picture of winter; and now you may put a cottage under the trees and roof it with snow-drifts, and let the smoke curl up amid the boughs in the morning. it was a dark day, the heavens shut out with dense snow clouds, and the trees wetting me with the melting snow, when going through b 's wood on fair haven, which they are cutting off, and suddenly looking between the stems of the trees, i thought i saw an extensive fire in the western horizon. it was a bright, coppery yellow fair weather cloud along the edge of the horizon, gold with some alloy of copper, in such contrast with the remaining clouds as to suggest nothing less than fire. on that side, the clouds which covered our day, low in the horizon, with a dim and smoke-like edge, were rolled up like a curtain with heavy folds, reveal ing this further bright curtain beyond. jan. 5, 1854. . . . this afternoon, as prob ably yesterday, it being warm and thawing, though fair, the snow is covered with snow fleas. especially they are sprinkled like pepper for half a mile in the tracks of a wood -chopper in 118 winter. deep snow. with the first thawing weather they come. — there is also some blueness now in the snow, the heavens being toward night overcast. the bhieness is more distinct after sunset. jan. 5, 1855. [worcester. ] a. m. walked to southerly end of quinsigamoud pond via quinsigamond village, and returned by floating bridge. saw the straw-built wigwam of an in dian from st. louis (rapids?), canada, appar ently a half-breed. not being able to buy straw, he had made it chiefly of dry grass which he had cut in a meadow with his knife. it was against a bank, and partly of earth all round. the straw or grass laid on horizontal poles, and kept down by similar ones outside, like our thatching. makes them of straw often in can ada, can make one, if he has the straw, in one day. the door, on hinges, was of straw also, put on perpendicularly, pointed at top to fit the roof. the roof steep, six or eight inches thick. he was making baskets, wholly of sugar maple ; could find no black ash. sewed or bound the edge with maple also. did not look up once .while we were there. there was a fire-place of stone running out on one side, and covered with earth. it was the nest of a large meadow mouse. plad he ever hunted moose ? when he was down at green island. where was that ? winter. 119 oh, far down, very far ; caught seals there. no books down that way. . . . r. w. e. told of mr. hill, his classmate, of bangpr, who was much interested in my " wal den," but relished it merely as a capital satire and joke, and even thought that the survey and map of the pond were not real, but a caricature of the coast survey. jan. 5, 1856. . . . the thin snow now driv ing from the north and lodging on my coat con sists of those beautiful star crystals, not cottony and chubby spokes as on the 13th of december, but thin and partly transparent crystals. they are about one tenth of an inch in diameter, per fect little wheels with six spokes, without a tire, or rather with six perfect little leaflets, fern-like, with a distinct, straight, slender, midrib, raying from the centre. on each side of each midrib there is a transparent, thin blade with a crenate edge. how full of the creative genius is the air in which these are generated ! i should hardly admire more, if real stars fell and lodged on my coat. nature is full of genius, full of the divin ity, so that not a snow-flake escapes its fashion ing hand. nothing is cheap and coarse, neither dew-drops nor snow-flakes. soon the storm in creases (it was already very severe to face), and the snow comes finer, more white and powdery. — who knows but this is the original form of 120 winter. all snow-flakes, but that, when i observe these crystal stars falling around me, they are only just generated in the low mist next the earth. i am nearer to the source of the snow, its primal, auroral, and golden hour or infancy ; commonly the flakes reach us travel-worn and agglomer ated, comparatively without order or beauty, far down in their fall, like men in their advanced age. as for the circumstances under which this phenomenon occurs, it is quite cold, and the driving storm is bitter to face, though very little snow is falling. it comes almost horizontally from the north. ... a divinity must have stirred within them, before the crystals did thus shoot and set. wheels of the storm chariots. the same law that shapes the earth and the stars shapes the snow-flake. call it rather snow star. as surely as the petals of a flower are numbered, each of these countless snow stars comes whirl ing to earth, pronouncing thus with emphasis the number six, order, koo-ytios. this was the be ginning of a storm which reached far and wide, and elsewhere was more severe than here. on the saskatchewan, where no man of science is present to behold, still down they come, and not the less fulfill their destiny, perchance melt at once on the indian's face. what a world we live in, where myriads of these little disks, so beautiful to the most prying eye, are whirled winter. 121 down on every traveler's coat, the observant and the imobservant, on the restless squirrel's fur, on the far-stretching fields and forests, the wooded dells and the mountain tops. far, far away from the haunts of men, they roll down some little slope, fall over and come to their bearings, and melt or lose their beauty in the mass, ready anon to swell some little riu with their contribution, and so, at last, the universal ocean from which they came. there they lie, like the wreck of chariot wheels after a battle in the skies. meanwhile the meadow mouse shoves them aside in his gallery, the school -boy casts them in his snow-ball, or the woodman's sled glides smoothly over them, these glorious span gles, the sweepings of heaven's floor. and they all sing, melting as they sing, of the myster ies of the number six; six, six, six. he takes lip the waters of the sea in his hand, leaving the salt ; he disperses it in mist through the skies ; he re-collects and sprinkles it like grain in six rayed snowy stars over the earth, there to lie tiu he dissolves its bonds again. jan. 5, 1859. as i go over the causeway near the railroad bridge, i hear a fine, busy twitter, and looking up, see a nuthatch hopping along and about a swamp white oak branch, in specting every side of it, as readily hanging head downwards as standing upright, and then 122 winter. it utters a distinct quah, as if to attract a com panion. indeed, that other finer twitter seemed designed to keep some companion in tow, or else it was like a very busy man talking to himself. the companion was a single chickadee, which lisped six or eight feet off. there were perhaps no other birds than these within a quarter of a mile. when the nuthatch flitted to another tree two rods off, the chickadee unfailingly fol lowed. jan. 5, 1860. ... a man receives only what he is ready to receive, whether physically, or iu tellectually, or morally, as animals conceive their kind at certain seasons only. we hear and ap prehend only what we already half know. if there is something which does not concern me, which is out of my line, which by experience or by genius my attention is not drawn to, however novel and remarkable it may be, if it is spoken, i hear it not, if it is written, i read it not, or if i read it, it does not detain me. everj' man thus trades /iimse?/' through life, in all his hear ing and reading and observation and travel ing. his observations make a chain. the phenomenon or fact that cannot in any wise be linked with the rest which he has observed, he does not observe. by and by we may be ready to receive what we cannot receive now. i find, for example, in aristotle something about the winter. 123 spawning, etc., of the pout and perch, because i know something about it already, and have my attention aroused, but i do not discover till very late that he has made other equally important observations on the spawning of other fishes, because i am not interested in those fishes. jan. 6, 1838. as a child looks forward to the coming of the summer, so could we contemplate with quiet joy the circle of the seasons return ing without fail eternally. as the spring . came round during so many years of the gods, vve could go out to admire and adorn anew our eden, and yet never tire. jan. 6, 1841. we are apt to imagine that this hubbub of philosophy, literature, and re ligion, which is heard in pulpits, lyceums, and parlors, vibrates through the universe, and is as catholic a sound as the creaking of the earth's axle. but if a man sleeps soundly, he will forget it all between sunset and dawn. it is the three-inch swing of some pendulum in a cupboard, which the great pulse of nature vibrates clearly through each instant. when we lift our lids and open our ears, it disappears with smoke and rattle, like the ears on the rail road. jan. 6, 1857. ... a man asked me the other night whether such and such persons were not as happy as anybody, being conscious, as i 124 winter. perceived, of much unhappiness himself and not aspiring to much more than an animal content. why, said i, speaking to his condition, the stones are happy, concord river is happy, and i am happy too. when i took up a fragment of a walnut shell this morning, i saw by its grain and composition, its form and color, etc., that it was made for happiness. the most brutish and inanimate objects that are made suggest an everlasting and thorough satisfaction. they are the homes of content. wood, earth, mould, etc., exist for joy. do you think that concord river would have continued to flow these mil lions of years by clamshell hill, and round hunt's island, if it had not been happy, if it had been miserable in its channel, tired of exist ence, and cursing its maker and the hour when it sprang. jan. 6, 1858. ... i derive a certain excite ment not to be refused even from going through dennis's swamp on the opposite side of the railroad, where the poison dogwood abounds. this simple-stemmed bush is very full of fruit, hanging in loose, dry, pale green, drooping panicles. some of them are a foot long. it impresses me as the most fruitful shrub there abouts. i cannot refrain from plucking it, and bringing home some fruitful sprigs. other fruits are there which belong to the hard season. winter. 125 the enduring panicled andromeda, and a few partly decayed prinos berries. i walk amid the bare midribs of cinnamon ferns, with at most a terminal leafet, and here and there i see a little dark water at the bottom of a dimple in the snow over which the snow has not yet been able to prevail. — i was feeling very cheap, never theless, reduced to make the most of my dog wood berries. very little evidence of the di vine' did i see just then, and life was not as rich and inviting an enterprise as it should be, when my attention was caught by a snow-flake on my coat sleeve. it was one of those perfect, crys talline, star-shaped ones, six rayed, like a flat wheel with six spokes, only the spokes were per fect little pine trees in shape, arranged around a central spangle. this little object which, with many of its fellows, rested unmelting on my coat, so perfect and beautiful, reminded me that virtue had not lost her pristine vigor yet, and why should man lose heart ? sometimes the pines were worn, and had lost their branches, and again it appeared as if several stars had impinged on one another at various angles, mak ing a somewhat spherical mass. . . . there were mingled with these starry flakes small downy pellets also. . . . we are rained and snowed on with gems. i confess that i was a little en couraged, for i was beginning to believe that 126 winter. nature was poor and mean, and i was now con vinced that she turned off as good work as ever. what a world we live in ! where are the jewel ers' shops ? there is nothing handsomer than a snow-flake and a dew-drop. i may say that the ' maker of the world exhausts his skill with each snow-flake and dew-drop that he sends down. we think that the one mechanically coheres, and that the other simply flows together and falls, but in truth they are the product of enthu siasm, the children of an ecstasy, finished with the artist's utmost skill. jan. 6, 1859. p. m. to martial miles's. . . . miles had hanging in his barn a little owl, strix acadica, which he caught alive with his hands about a week ago. he had induced it to eat, but it died. it was a funny little brown bird, spotted with white, seven and one half inches long to the end of the tail, or eight to the end of the claws, and nineteen in alar extent, not so long by a considerable as a robin, though much stouter. this one had three (not two, and nuttall says three) white bars on its tail, but no noticeable white at the tip. its cunning feet were feathered quite to the extremity of the toes, looking like whitish mice, or as when one pulls stockings over his boots. as usual, the white sjjots on the upper sides of the wings are smaller and a more distinct white, while those winter. 127 beneath are much larger, but a subdued, satiny white. even a bird's wing has an upper and an under side, and the last admits only of more subdued and tender colors. jan. 7, 1851. . . . the knowledge of an un learned man is living and luxuriant like a forest, but covered with mosses and lichens, and for the most part inaccessible and going to waste ; the knowledge of the man of science is like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot. i felt my spirits rise when i had got out of the road into the open fields, and the sky had a new appearance. i stepped along more buoy antly. there was a warm sunset in the wooded valleys, a yellowish tinge on the pines. red dish dun-oolored clouds, like dusky flames, stood over it, and then streaks of 'blue sky were seen here and there. the life, the joy that is in blue sky after a storm. there is no account of the blue sky in history. before, i walked in the ruts of travel, now i adventured. . . . if i have any conversation with a scamp in my walk, my afternoon is wont to be spoiled. jan. 7, 1852. . . . now ... i see the sun descending into the west. there is something new, a snoio bow in the east, on the snow clouds, merely a white bow, hardly any color distin 128 winter. guishable. but in the west what inconceivable crystalline purity of blue sky, . . . and i see feathery clouds on this ground, some traveling north, others directly in the opposite direction, though apparently close together. some of these cloudlets are waifs and droppings from rainbows, clear rainbow through and through, spun out of the fibre of the rainbow, or rather as if the children of the west had been pulling rainbow (instead of tow), that had done ser vice, old junk of rainbow, and cast it into flocks. and then such fantastic, feathery scrawls of gauze-like vapor on this elysian ground ! we never tire of the drama of sunset. i go forth each afternoon and look into the west a quarter of an hour before sunset with fresh curiosity to see what new picture will be painted there, what new phenomenon exhibited, what new dis solving views. . . . every day a new picture is painted and framed, held up for half an hour in such lights as the great artist chooses, and then withdrawn and the curtain falls. the sun goes down, long the after-glow gives light, the dam ask curtains glow along the western window, the first star is lit, and i go home. ttan. 7, 1853. to nawshawtuck. this is one of those pleasant winter mornings when you find the river firmly frozen in the night, but still the air is serene and the sun feels gratefully winter. 129 warm an hour after sunrise. though so fair, ... a whitish vapor fills the lower stratum of the air concealing the mountains. the smokes go up from the village, you hear the cocks with immortal vigor, the children shout on their way to school, and the sound made by the railroad men hammering a rail is uncommonly musical. this promises a perfect winter day. in the heavens, except the altitude of the sun, you have, as it were, the conditions of summer, perfect serenity and clarity, and sonorousness in the earth. all nature is but braced by the cold. it gives tension to both body and mind. . . . about «ten minutes before 10 a. m. i heard a very loud sound, and felt a violent jar which made the house rock and the loose articles on my table rattle. i knew it must be either a powder mill blown up or an earthquake. not knowing but another and more violent shock might take place, i immediately ran down-stairs. i saw from the door a vast expanding column of whitish smoke rising in the west directly over the powder mills four miles distant; it was unfolding its volumes above, which made it wider there. in three or four minutes it had all risen and spread itself into a lengthening, somewhat copper-colored cloud, parallel with the horizon from n. to s., and in about ten min utes after the explosion, it passed over my head, 130 winter. being several miles long from n. to s., and distinctly dark and smoky toward the n., not nearly so high as the few cirrhi in the sky. jumped into a man's wagon and rode toward the mills. in a few moments more, i saw behind me, far in the e., a faint, salmon-col ored cloud carrying the news of the explosion to the sea, and perchance over the head of the absent proprietor. arrived probably before half-past ten. there were perhaps thirty or forty wagons there. the kernel mill had blown up first, and killed three men who were in it, said to be turning a roller with a chisel. in three seconds after, one of the mixiffg houses exploded. the kernel house was swept away, and fragments, mostly but a foot or two in length, were strewn over the hills and meadows for thirty rods. the slight snow on the ground was for the most part melted around. the mixing house about ten rods w. was not so completely dispersed, for most of the machinery remained a total wreck. the press house about twelve rods e. had two thirds of its boards off, and a mixing house next westward from that which blew up had lost some boards on the e. side. the boards fell out (i. e., of those build ings which did not blow up), the air within apparently rushing out to fill up the vacuum occasioned by the explosions. so the powder winter. 131 being bared to the fiery particles in the air, the building explodes. the powder on the floor of the bared press house was six inches deep in some places, and the crowd were thoughtlessly going into it. a few windows were broken thirty or forty rods off. timber six inches square and eighteen feet long was thrown a dozen rods over a hill eighty feet high at least. thirty rods was about the limit of fragments. the drying house, in which was a fire, was perhaps twenty-five rods distant and escaped. . . . some of the clothes of the men were in the tops of the trees where undoubtedly their bodies had been and left them. . . . put the different buildings thirty rods apart, and then but one will blow up at a time. ja7i. 7, 1854. p. m. to ministerial swamp. ... i went to these woods partly to hear an owl, but did not. now that i have left them nearly a mile behind, i hear one distinctly, hoorer hoo. strange that we should hear this sound so often, yet so rarely see the bird, often est at twilight. it has a singular prominence as a sound. ... it is a sound which the wood or the horizon makes. jian. 7, 1855. . . . cloudy and misty. on opening the door i feel a very warm southwest erly wind contrasting with the cooler air of the house, and find it unexpectedly wet in the street. 132 winter. it is in fact a january thaw. tlie channel of the river is quite open in many places, and in others i remark that the ice and water alter nate like waves and the hollow between them. there are long reaches of open water where i look for muskrats and ducks as i go along to clamshell hill. i hear the pleasant sound of running water. . . . the delicious, soft, spring suggesting air, how it fills my veins with life. life becomes again credible to me. a certain dormant life awakes in me, and i begin to love nature again. here is my italy, my heaven, my new england. i understand why the in dians hereabouts placed heaven in the s. w. the soft south. on the slopes, the ground is laid bare, and radical leaves revealed, crowfoot, shepherd's purse, clover, etc., a fresh green, and, in the meadow, the skunk-cabbage buds with a bluish bloom, and the red leaves of the meadow saxifrage. these and the many withered plants laid bare remind me of spring and of botany. — on the same bare sand is revealed a new crop of arrow heads. i pick up two perfect ones of quartz, sharp as if just from the hand of the maker. still, birds are very rare. here comes a little flock of titmice plainly to keep me com pany, with their black caps and throats making them look top-heavy, restlessly hopping along the alders with a sharp, clear, lisping note. winter. 133 . . . the bank is tinged with, a most delicate pink or bright flesh color where the heomyces rosaceus grows. it is a lichen day. . . . the sky seen here and there through the wrack, bluish and greenish, and perchance with a vein of red in the w., seems like the inside of a shell, deserted of its tenant, into which i have crawled. the willow catkins began to peep from under their scales as early as the 26th of last month. many buds have lost their scales. jan. 7, 1857. p. m. to walden. ... it is bitter cold, with a cutting n. w. wind. the pond is now a plain snow field, but there are no tracks of fishers on it. it is too cold for them. . . . all animate things are reduced to their lowest terms. this is the fifth day of cold, blowing weather. all tracks are concealed in an hour or two. some have to make their paths two or three times a day. the fisherman is not here, for his lines would freeze in. i go through the woods toward the cliffs along the side of the well meadow field. there is nothing so sana tive, so poetic, as a walk in the woods and fields even now, when i meet none abroad for pleas ure. nothing so insjdires me, and excites such serene and profitable thought. the objects are elevating. in the street and in society i am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life 134 winter. is unspeakably mean. no amount ofgold or respectability could in the least redeem it, dining with the governor or a member of congress ! ! but alone in distant woods or fields, in unpre tending sproutlands or pastures tracked by rab bits, even in a bleak and, to most, cheerless day like this, when a villager would be thinking of his inn, i come to myself, i once more feel my self grandly related. this cold and solitude are friends of mine. i suppose that this value, in my case, is equivalent to what others get by church going and prayer. i come to my soli tary woodland walk as the homesick go home. i thus dispose of the superfluous, and see things as they are, grand and beautiful. i have told many that i walk every day about half the day light, but i think they do not believe it. i wish to get the concord, the massachusetts, the amer ican, out of my head and be sane a part of every day. i wish to forget a considerable part of every day, all mean, narrow, trivial men (and this requires usually to forego and forget all personal relations so long), and therefore i come out to these solitudes where the problem of ex istence is simplified. i get away a mile or two from the town, into the stillness and solitude of nature, with rocks, trees, weeds, snow about me. i enter some glade in the woods, perchance, where a few weeds and dry leaves alone lift winter. 135 themselves above the surface of the snow, and it is as if i had come to an open window. i see out and around myself. our sky-lights are thus far away from the ordinary resorts of men. i am not satisfied with ordinary windows. i must have a true sky-light, and that is outside the vil lage. i am not thus expanded, recreated, en lightened when i meet a company of men. it chances that the sociable, the town and country club, the farmers' club does not prove a sky-light to me. . . . the man i meet with is not often so instructive as the silence he breaks. this still ness, solitude, wildness of nature is a kind of thoroughwort or boneset to my intellect. this is what i go out to seek. it is as if i always met in those places some grand, serene, immor tal, infinitely encouraging, though invisible com panion, and walked with him. there at last my nerves are steadied, my senses and my mind do their office. i am aware that most of my neigh bors would think it a hardship to be compelled to linger here one hour, especially this bleak day, and yet i receive this sweet and ineffable compensation for it. it is the most agreeable thing i do. i love and celebrate nature even in detail, because i love the scenery of these inter views and translations. i love to remember every creature that was at this club. i thus get off a certain social scurf. . . . t do not consider 136 winter. the other animals brutes in the common sense. i am attracted toward them undoubtedly be cause i never heard any nonsense from them. i have not convicted them of folly, or vanity, or pomposity, or stupidity in dealing with me. their vices, at any rate, do not interfere with me. my fairies invariably take to flight when a man appears upon the scene. in a caucus, a meeting-house, a lyceum, a club-room there is nothing like this fine experience for me. but away out of the town, on brown's scrub oak lot, which was sold the other day for six dollars an acre, i have company such as england cannot buy nor afford. this society is what i live, what i survey for. i subscribe generously to this all that i have and am. there in that well meadow field, perhaps, i feel in my ele ment again, as when a fish is put back into the water. i wash off all my chagrins. all things go smoothly as the axle of the universe. i can remember that when i was very young i used to have a dream night after night, over and over again, which might have been named eough and smooth. all existence, all satisfaction and dissatisfaction, all event, was symbolized in this way. now i seemed to be lying and toss ing, perchance, on a horrible, a fatal rough sur face, which must soon indeed put an end to my existence (though even in my dream i knew it winter. 137 to be the symbol merely of my misery), and then again, suddenly, i was lying on a delicious smooth surface, as of a summer sea, as of gossa^ mer or down, or softest plush, and it was a lux ury to live. my waking experience always has been and is an alternate rough and smooth. in other words it is insanity and sanity. might i aspire to praise the moderate nymph nature, i must be like her, moderate. jan. 7, 1858. the storm is over, and it is one of those .beautiful winter mornings when a vapor is seen hanging in the air between the village and the woods. though the snow is only six inches deep, the yards appear full of those beautiful crystals, star or wheel shaped flakes, as a measure is full of grain. . . . by ten o'clock i notice a very long, level stratum of cloud not very high in the s. e. sky (all the rest being clear), which i suspect to be the vapor from the sea. this lasts for several hours. these are true mornings of creation, original and poetic days, not mere repetitions of the past. there is no lingering of yesterday's fogs, only such a mist as might have adorned the first morning. p. m. i see some tree sparrows feeding on the fine grass seed above the snow. they are flitting along one at a time, commonly sunk in the snow, uttering occasionally a low, sweet war 138 winter. ble, and seemingly as happy there, and with this wintry prospect before them for the night and several months to come, as any man by his fire side. one occasionally hops or flies toward an other, and the latter suddenly jerks away from him. they are searching or hopping up to the fine grass, or oftener picking the seeds from the snow. at length the whole ten have collected within a space a dozen feet square, but soon after, being alarmed, they utter a different and less musical chirp, and flit away into an apple-tree. jan. 8, 1842. when, as now, in january a south wind melts the snow, and the bare ground appears covered with sere grass and occasionally wilted green leaves, which seem in doubt whether to let go their greenness quite or absorb new juices against the coming year, in such a season a perfume seems to exhale from the earth itself, and the south wind melts my integuments also. then is she my mother earth. i derive a real vigor from the scent of the gale wafted over the naked ground, as from strong meats, and realize again how man is the pensioner of nature. we are always conciliated and cheered when we are fed by an influence, and our needs are felt to be part of the domestic economy of nature. what offends me most in my compositions is the moral element in them. the repentant say never a brave word. their resolves should be winter. 139 mumbled in silence. strictly speaking, moral ity is not healthy. the undeserved joys which come uncalled, and make us more pleased than grateful, are they that sing. in the steadiness and equanimity of music lies its divinity. it is the only assured tone. when men attain to speak with as settled a faith, and as firm assurance, their voices will ring and their feet march as do the feet of a soldier. the very dogs howl if time is disre garded. because of the perfect time of this music-box, its harmony with itself, is its greater dignity and stateliness. this music is more nobly related for its more exact measure. so simple a difference as this more even pace raises it to the higher dignity. . . . what are ears, what is time, that this particular series of sounds called a strain of music can be wafted down through the centuries from homer to me, and homer have been conversant with that same wandering and mysterious charm which never had a local habitation in space. ... i feel a sad cheer when i hear these lofty strains, because there must be something in me as lofty that hears. ah, i hear them but rarely. . . . they tell me the secrets of futurity. where are its secrets wound up but in this box ? so much hope had slumbered. — there ase in music such strains as far surpass any faith which man ever 140 winter. had in the loftiness of his destiny. he must be very sad before he can oomprehend them. the clear licpid notes from the morning fields beyond seem to come through a vale of sadness to man which gives to all music a plaintive air. the sadness is in the echo which our lives make and which alone we hear. music hath caught a higher pace than any virtue that i know. it is the arch reformer. it hastens the sun to his setting. it invites him to his rising. it is the sweetest reproach, a measured satire. i know there is somewhere a people where this heroism has place. things are to be learned which it will be sweet to learn. this cannot be all rumor. when i hear this, i think of that ever lasting something which is not mere sound, but is to be a thrilling reality, and i can consent to go about the meanest work for as many years of time as it pleases the hindoo penance, for a year of the gods were as nothing to that which shall come after. what, then, can i do to hasten that other time, or that space where there shall be no time, and where these things shall be a more living part of my life, where there will be no discords in my life ? jan. 8, 1851. . . . the light of the setting sun falling on the snow banks to-day made them glow almost yellow. — the hills seen from fair haven pond make a wholly new landscape. winter. 141 covered with snow and yellowish green or brown pines, and shrub oaks, they look higher and more massive. their white mantle relates them to the clouds in the horizon and to the sky. perhaps what is light-colored looks loftier than what is dark. jan. 8, 1852. . . . even as early as 3 o'clock these winter afternoons the axes in the woods sound like night -fall, as if it were the sound of a twilight labor. reading from my mss. to miss emerson this evening and using the word god, in one instance, in perchance a merely heathenish sense, she in quired hastily in a tone of dignified anxiety, "is that god spelt with a little g?" fortu nately it was. (i had brought in the word god without any solemnity of voice or connection.) so i went on as if nothing had happened. jan. 8, 1854. . . . stood within a rod of a downy woodpecker on an apple tree. how curious and exciting the blood-red spot on its hind head ! i ask why it is there, but no answer is rendered by these snow-clad fields. it is so close to the bark i do not see its feet. it looks behind as it had a black cassock open behind and showing a white under-garment be tween the shoulders and down the back. it is briskly and incessantly tapping all round the dead limbs, but hardly twice in a place, as if to 142 winter. sound the tree, and so see if it has any worm in it, or perchance to start them. how much he deals with the bark of trees, all his life long tap ping and inspecting it. he it is that scatters these fragments of bark and lichens about on the snow at the base of trees. what a lichenest he must be i or rather perhaps it is fungi make his favorite study, for he deals most with dead limbs. how briskly he glides up or drops himself down a limb, creeping round and round, and hopping from limb to limb, and now flitting with a rip pling sound of his wings to another tree. jan. 8, 1857. ... i picked up on the bare ice of the river ... a furry caterpular, black at the two ends and red-brown in the middle, rolled into a ball or close ring, like a woodchuek. i pressed it hard between my fingers and found it frozen, put it into my hat, and when i took it out in the evening, it soon began to stir, and at length crawled about, though a portion of it seemed not quite flexible. it took some time for it to thaw. this is the fifth cold day, and it must have been frozen so long. jan. 8, 1860. . . . to-day it is very warm and pleasant. 2 p. m. walk to walden. . . . after december all weather that is not wintry is spring-like. how changed are our feelings and thoughts by this more genial sky ! when i get to the railroad, i listen from time to time to winter. 143 hear some sound out of the distance which will express the mood of nature. the cock and the hen, that pheasant which we have domesticated, are perhaps the most sensitive among domestic animals to atmospheric changes. you cannot listen a moment such a day as this, but yon will hear from far or near the clarion of the cock celebrating this new season, yielding to the in fluence of the south wind, or the drawling note •of the hen dreaming of eggs that are to be. these are the sounds that fill the air, and no hum of insects. they are aif eeted like voyagers approaching the land. we discover a new world every time we see the earth again, after it has been covered for a season with snow. jan. 8, 1861. . . . the indians taught us not only the use of corn and how to plant it, but also of whortleberries and how to dry them for winter, and made us baskets to put them in. we should have hesitated long to eat some kinds of berries, if they had not set us the example, having learned by long experience that they were not only harmless, but salutary. i have added a few to my number of edible ones by walking behind an indian in maine who ate such as i never thought of eating before. of course they made a much greater account of wild fruits than we do. what we call huckleberry cake made of indian meal and huckleberries was 144 winter. evidently the principal cake of the aborigines, and was generally known and used by them all over this part of north america, as much as or more than plum cake by us. they enjoyed it ages before our ancestors heard of indian meal or huckleberries. if you had traveled here one thousand years ago, it would probably have been offered you alike on the connecticut, the poto mac, the niagara, the ottawa, and the missis sippi. it appears . . . that the indian used the dried berries commonly in the form of huckleberry cake, and also of huckleberry por ridge or pudding. we have no national cake so universal and weu known as this was in all parts of the country where corn and huckleberries grew. jan. 9, 1841. each hearty stroke we deal with these outward hands slays an inward foe. jan. 9, 1842. one cannot too soon forget his errors and misdemeanors. to dwell long upon them is to add to the offense. repentance and sorrow can only be displaced by something better, which is as free and original as if they had not been. not to grieve long for any action, but to go immediately and do freshly and otherwise, subtracts so much from the wrong ; else we may make the delay of repentance the punishment of the sin. a great soul will not consider its sins as its own, but be more absorbed in the prospect of winter. . 145 that valor and virtue for the future which is more properly itself, than in these improper actions which by being sins discover themselves to be not itself. sir walter raleigh's faults are those of a courtier and a soldier. in his counsels and aphorisms we see not unfrequently the haste and rashness of a boy. his philosophy was not wide nor deep, but continually giving way to the generosity of his nature. what he touclies he adorns by his greater humanity and native nobleness, but he touches not the true and origi nal. . . . he seems to have been fitted by his genius for short flights of impulsive poetry, but not for the sustained loftiness of shakespeare or milton. he was not wise nor a seer in any sense, but rather one of nature's nobility, the most generous nature which can be found to linger in the purlieus of a court. — his was a singularly perverted genius, with a great incli nation to originality and freedom, and yet who never steered his own course. of so fair and susceptible a nature, rather than broad or deep, that he lingered to slake his, thirst at the nearest and even somewhat turbid wells of truth and beauty. his homage to the less fair or noble left no space for homage to the all fair. the misfortune of his circumstances or rather of the man appears in the fact that he was the 146 ■ winter. author of " maxims of state," " the cabinet council," and " the soul's errand." jan. 9, 1852. . . . where a path has been shoveled through drifts in the road, i see . . . little heavens in the crannies and crevices. the deeper they are, and the larger masses they are surrounded by, the darker blue they are. some are a very light blue vyith a tinge of green. methinks i oftenest see this when it is snowing. at any rate, the atmosphere must be in a pecul iar state. apparently the snow absorbs the other rays, and reflects the blue. it has strained the air, and only the blue rays have passed through the sieve. . . . into every track which the teamster makes this elysian, empyrean at mosphere rushes. jan. 9, 1853. 3 p. m. to walden and cliffs. the telegraph harp again. always the same unrememberable revelation it is to me. i never hear it without thinking of greece. how the greeks harped upon the words, immor tal, ambrosial. they are what it says. it stings my ear with everlasting truth. it allies concord to athens, and both to elysium. it always . . . makes roe sane, reverses my views of things. i get down the railroad till i hear that which makes all the world a lie. when the . . . west wind sweeps this wire, i rise to the height of my being. . . . this wire is my winter. 147 redeemer. it always brings a special and a gen eral message to me from the highest. day before yesterday i looked at the mangled and blackened bodies of men which had been blown up by powder, and felt that the lives of men are not innocent, and that there was an avenging power in nature. to-day i hear this immortal melody while the west wind is blowing balmily on my cheek and a roseate sunset seems to be preparing. . . . as i climbed the cliff, i paused in the sun and sat on a dry rock, dreaming. i thought of those summery hours, when time is tinged with eternity, runs into it, and becomes of one stuff with it, how much, how perhaps all that is best in our experience in middle life, may be resolved into the memory of our youth ! pulling up the johnswort on the face of the cliff, i am sur prised to see the signs of unceasing growth about the roots, fresh shoots two inches long, white with red leafets, and all the radical part quite green. the leaves of the crowfoot also are quite green, and carry me forward to spring. i dig one up with a stick, and pulling it to pieces, i find deep in the centre of the plant, just beneath the ground, surrounded by all the tender leaves that are to precede it, the blossom bud about half as big as the head of a pin, per fectly white. (?) (i open one next day, and it is 148 winter. yellow.) there it patiently sits and slumbers, how full of faith, informed of a spring which the world has never seen, the promise and prophecy of it, shaped somewhat like some eastern tem ples in which a bud-shaped dome o'ertops the whole. it affected me this tender dome-like bud within the bosom of the earth, like a temple upon its surface resounding with the worship of votaries. methought i saw the priests with yellow robes within it. . . . it will go forth in april, this vestal, now cherishing here her fire, to be married to the sun. how. innocent are nature's purposes ! how unambitious ! i saw to-day the reflected sunset sky in the river, but the colors in the reflection were differ ent from those in the sky. in the latter were dark clouds with coppery or dun-colored under sides ; in the water were dun-colored clouds with bluish-green patches or bars. jan. 9, 1855. what a strong and hearty, but reckless, hit-or-miss style had some of the early writers of new england, like josselyn and wiuiam wood, and others elsewhere in those days ; as if they spoke with a relish, smacking their lips like a coach whip, caring more to speak heartily than scientifically true. they are not to be caught napping by the wonders of nature in a new country, and perhaps are often more ready to appreciate them than she is to winter. 149 exhitit them. they give you one piece of nature at any rate, and that is themselves. . . . the strong new soil speaks through them. i have just been reading somewhat in wood's " new england's prospect." he speaks a good word for new england, indeed will come very near lying for her, and when he doubts the just ness of his praise, he brings it out not the less soundly ; as who cares if it is not so, we love her not the less for all that. certainly that genera tion stood nearer to nature, nearer to the facts than this, and hence their books have more life in them. jan. 9, 1858. snows again. . . . the snow is very moist, with large flakes. looking to ward trillium wood, the nearer flakes appear to move quite swiftly, often making the impression of a continuous white line. they are also seen to move directly,' and nearly horizontally. but the more distant flakes appear to loiter in the air, as if uncertain how they w^ill approach the earth, or even to cross the course of the former, and are always seen as simple and distinct flakes. i think that this difference is simply owing to the fact that the former pass quickly over the field of view, while the latter are much longer in it. jan. 9, 1860. ... i hear that , a rich old farmer, who lives in a large house, with a 150 winter. male housekeeper, and no other family, gets up at three or four o'clock these winter mornings, and milks seventeen cows regularly. when asked why he works so hard, he answers that the poor are obliged to work hard. only think what a creature of fate he is, this old jotun, milking his seventeen cows, though the thermometer goes down to — 25°, and not know ing why he does it. . . . think how helpless, a rich man who can only do as he has done and as his neighbors do, one or all of them. what an account he will have to give of him self ! he spent some time in a world, alternately cold and warm, and every winter morning with lantern in hand, when the first goblins were playing their tricks, he resolutely accomplished his task, milked his seventeen cows, while the man-housekeeper prepared his breakfast. . . . think how tenaciously every man does his deed of some kind or other, though it be idleness ! he is rich, dependent on nobody, and nobody is dependent on him, has as good health as the average, at least, can do as he pleases, as we say, yet he gravely rises every morning by can dle-light, dons his cowhide boots and his frock, takes his lantern, and wends his way to the barn and milks his seventeen cows, milking with one l)and, while he warms the other against the cow or his person. this is but the beginning of his winter. 151 day, and his augean stable work, so serious is the life he lives. jan. 10, 1856. the weather has considera bly moderated, — 2° at breakfast time. it was — 8° at seven last evening, but this has been the coldest night probably. you lie with your feet or legs cuvled up, waiting for the morning, the sheets shining with frost about your month. water left by the stove is frozen thick, and what you sprinkle in bathing falls on the floor, ice. the house plants are all frozen, and soon droop and turn black. i look. out on the roof of a cottage covered a foot deep with snow, wondering how the poor children in its garret, with their few rags, contrive to keep their toes warm. i mark the white smoke from its chimney whose contracted wreaths are soon dissipated in this stinging air, and think of the size of their wood pile. and again i try to realize how they panted for a breath of cool air those sultry nights last summer. recall, realize now, if you can, the hum of the mosquito. it seems that the snow-storm of saturday night was a remarkable one, reaching many hundred miles along the coast. it is said that some thousands passed the night in the cars. — the kitchen windows were magnificeut-jast night with their frost sheaves, surpassing any cut or ground glass. 152 winter. i love to wade and flounder through the swamp now, these bitter cold days, when the snow lies deep on the ground, and i need travel but little way from the town to get to a nova zembla solitude, to wade through the swamps, all snowed up, untracked by man, into which the fine dry snow is still drifting till it is even with the tops of the water andromeda, and half way up the high blueberry bushes. i penetrate to islets inaccessible in summer, my feet slumping to the sphagnum far out of sight beneath, where the alderberry glows yet, . . . and perchance a single tree sparrow lisps by my side ; where there are few tracks even of wild animals. per haps only a mouse or two have burrowed up by the side of some twig, and hopped away in straight lines on the surface of the light, deep snow, as if too timid to delay, to another hole by the side of another bush, and a few rabbits have run in a path amid the blueberries and alders about the edge of the swamp. this is instead of a polar expedition, and going after franklin. there is but little life and the ob jects are few, it is true. we are reduced to admire buds, even like the partridges, and bark, like the rabbits and mice, the great red and forward looking buds of the azalea, the plump red ones of the blueberry, and the fine, sharp red ones of the panicled andromeda sleeping along winter. 153 its stem, the speckled black alder, the rapid growing dogwood, the pale brown and cracked blueberry, etc. even a little shining bud which lies sleeping behind its twig, perhaps half con cealed by ice, is object enough. i feel myself upborne on the andromeda bushes beneath the snow as on a springy basket-work. then down i go, up to my middle in the deep but silent snow, which has no sympathy with my mishap. beneath its level, how many sweet berries will be hanging next august ! — this freezing weather i see the pumps dressed in mats and old clothes, or bundled up in straw. fortunate he who has placed his cottage on the south side of some high hill or some dense wood, and not in the middle of the great fields where there is no hill nor tree to shelter it. there the winds have full sweep, and such a day as yesterday, the house is but a fence to stay the drifting snow. such is the piercing wind, no man loiters be tween his house and barn. the road track is soon obliterated, and the path which leads round to the back of the house, dug this morning, is filled up again, and you can no longer see the tracks of the master of the house who only an hour ago took refuge in some half -subterranean apartment there. you know only by some white wreath of smoke from his chimney, which is at once snapped up by the hungry air, that he sits 154 winter. warming iiis wits there within, studying the almanac to learn how long it is before spring. but his neighbor, who, only half a mile off, has placed his house in the shelter of a wood, is dig ging out of a drift his pile of roots and stumps, hauled from the swamp, at which he regularly dulls his axe and saw, reducing them to billets that will fit into his stove. with comparative safety and even comfort lie labors at this mine. as for the other, the windows give no sign of inhabitants, for they are frosted over as if they were ground glass, and the curtains are clown beside. . . . no sound arrives from within. it remains only to examine the chimney's nostrils. i look very sharp, and fancy that i see some smoke against the sky there, but this is decep tive, for as we are accustomed to walk up to an empty fire-place and imagine that we feel some heat from it, so i have convinced myself that i saw smoke issuing from the chimney of a house which had not been inhabited for twenty years. i had so vivid an idea of smoke that no painter could have matched my imagination. it was as if the spirits of the former inhabitants revisiting their old haunts were once more boiling a spirit ual kettle below. jan. 10, 1858. the n. side of walden is a warm walk in sunny weather. if you are sick and despairing, go forth in winter and see the winter. 155 red alder catkins dangling at the extremity of the twigs all in the wintry air, like long, hard mulberries, promising a new spring and the ful fillment of all our hopes. we prize any ten derness, any softening in the winter, catkins, birds' nests, insect life, etc. the most i get, perchance, is the sight of a mulberry-like red catkin, which i know has a dormant life in it seemingly greater than my own. jan. 10, 1859. . . . the alder is one of the prettiest trees and shrubs in the winter. it is evidently so full of life with its conspicuously pretty red catkins dangling from it on all sides. it seems to dread the winter less than other plants. it has a certain heyday and cheery look, less stiff than most, with more of the flex ible grace of summer. with those dangling clusters of red catkins which it switches in the face of winter, it brags for all vegetation. it is not daunted by the cold, but still hangs grace fully over the frozen stream. jan. 10, 1859. ... i come across to the road s. of the hill, to see the pink on the snow clad hill at sunset. ... i walk back and forth in the road waiting for its appearance. the windows on the skirts of the village reflect the setting sun with intense brilliancy, a dazzling glitter, it is so cold. standing thus on one side of the hill, i begin to see a pink light reflected 156 winter. from the snow there about fifteen minutes be fore the sun sets. this gradually deepens to purple and violet in some places, and the pink is very distinct, especially when, after looking at the simply white snow on other sides, you turn your eyes .to the hill. even after all direct sun light is withdrawn from the hill-top, as well as from the valley in which you stand, you see, if you are prepared to discern it, a faint and deli cate tinge of purple and violet there. this was on a very clear and cold evening when the ther mometer was — 6°. this is one of the phenomena of the winter sunset, this distinct pink light reflected from the brows of snow-clad hills on one side of you, as you are facing the sun. the cold rapidly increases, and it is — 14° in the evening. i hear the ground crack with a very loud sound, and a great jar in the evening and in the course of the night several times. it is once as loud and heavy as the explosion of the acton powder 'mills. jan. 11, 1839. the thaw. i saw the cml sun drying earth's tears, her tears of joy that only faster flowed. fain would i stretch me by' the highway side to thaw and trickle with the melting snow, that mingled, soul and body, with the tide, i too may through the pores of nature flow. winter. 157 jan. 11, 1852. . . . the glory of these after noons, though the sky may be mostly overcast, is in the ineffably clear blue, or else pale green ish-yellow patches of sky in the west just before sunset. the whole cope of heaven seen at once is never so elysian; windows to heaven, the heavenward windows of the earth. the end of the day is truly hesperian. . . . we sometimes find ourselves living fast, un profitably, and coarsely even, as we catch our selves eating our meals in unaccountable haste. but in one sense we cannot live too leisurely. let me not live as if time was short. catch the pace of the seasons, have leisure to attend to every phenomenon of nature, and to entertain every thought that comes to you. let your life be a leisurely progress through the realms of nature, even in guest-quarters. . . . the question is not where did the traveler go ? what places did he see ? it would be difficult to choose between places. but who was the traveler? how did he travel? how genuine an experience did he get ? for traveling is, in the main, like as if you stayed at home, and then the question is. how do you live and conduct yourself at home ? what i mean is that it might be hard to decide whether i would travel to lake superior or labrador or florida. per haps none would be worth the while if i went 158 winter. by the usual mode. but if i travel in a simple, primitive, original manner, standing in a truer relation to men and nature, travel away from the old and commonplace, get some honest ex perience of life, if only out of my feet and home sickness, then it becomes less important whither i go or how far. i so see the world from a new and more commanding point of view. perhaps it is easier to live a true and natural life while traveling, as one can move about less awkwardly than he can stand stul. jan. 11, 1857. . . . for some years .past i have partially offered myself as a lecturer, have been advertised as such several years. yet i had but two or three invitations to lecture in a year, and some years none at all. i congratu late myself on having been permitted to stay at home thus. i am so much richer for it. i do not see what i should have got of much value, .except money, by going about. but i do see what i should have lost. it seems to me that i have a longer and more liberal lease of life thus. i cannot afford to be telling my experience, es pecially to those who perhaps wiu take no inter est in it. i wish to be getting experience. you might as well recommend to a bear to leave his hollow tree and run about all winter scratch ing at all the hollow trees in the woods. he would be leaner in the spring than if he had winter. 169 stayed at home and sucked his claws. as for the lecture-goers, it is none of their business what i think. i perceive that most make a great account of their relations, more or less personal or direct, to many men, coming before them as lecturers, writers, or public men. but all this is impertinent and unprofitable to me. i never get recognized, nor was recognized by a crowd of men. i was never assured of their existence, nor they of mine. there was wit and even poetry in the negro's answer to the man who tried to persuade him that the slaves would not be obliged to work in heaven, — " oh, you g' way, massa, i know better. if dere 's no work for cullered folks up dar, dey '11 make soine fur 'em, and if dere 's nuffin better to do, dey '11 make 'em shub de clouds along. you can't fool dis chile, massa." i was describing, the other day, my success in solitary and distant woodland walking outside the town. i do not go, there to get my dinner, but to get that sustenance which dinners only preserve me to enjoy, without which dinners are a vain repetition. but how little men can help me in this, only by having a kindred experience. of what use to tell them of my happiness. thus, if ever we have anything important to say, it might be introduced with the remark, it is nothing to you, in particular. it is none of l60 winter. your business, i know. that is what might be called going into good society. i never chanced to meet with any man so cheering and elevating and encouraging, so infinitely suggestive as the stillness and solitude of the well meadow field. men even think me odd and perverse because i do not prefer their society to this nymph or wood god rather. but i have tried them. i have sat down with a dozen of them together in a club. . . . they did not inspire me. one or another abused our ears with many words and a few thoughts which were not theirs. there was very little genuine goodness apparent. we are such hollow pretenders. i lost my time. but out there ! who shall criticise that companion ? it is like the hone to the knife. i bathe in that element, and am cleansed of all social impurities. i become a witness with unprejudiced senses to the order of the universe. there is nothing petty or impertinent, none to say, " see what a great man i am ! " there, chiefly, and not in the society of wits, am i cognizant of wit. shall i prefer a part, an infinitely small fraction to the whole. there i get my underpinnings laid and repaired, cemented, leveled. there is my country club. we dine at the sign of the shrub oak, the new albion house. i demand of my companion some evidence winter. 161 that he has traveled farther than to the sources of the nile, that he has been out of town, out of the house, not that he can teu a good story, but that he can keep a good silence. has he attended to a silence more significant than any story ? did he ever get out of the road which all men and fools travel ? you call yourself a great traveler, perhaps, but can you get beyond the influence of a certain class of ideas ? ^ s^-v jan. 11, 1859. at 6 a. m. —22°, and how much lower i know not, the mercury [?] in our thermometer having gone into the bulb, but that is said to be the lowest. going to boston to-day, i find that the cracking of the ground last night is the subject of conversation in the cars, and that it was quite general. i see many cracks in cambridge and concord. it would appear, then, that the ground cracks on the ad vent of very severe cold weather. i had not heard it before this winter. it was so when i went to amherst a winter or two ago. jan. 11, 1861. h m brings mo the contents of a crow's stomach in alcohol. it was killed in the village within a day or two. it is quite a mass of frozen-thawed apple pulp and skin, with a good many pieces of skunk-cabbage berries, a quarter of an inch or less in diameter, and commonly showing the pale brown or black ish outside, interspersed, looking like bits of 162 winter. acorns, never a whole or even half a berry, and two little bones as of frogs, or mice, or tadpoles. also a street pebble, a quarter of an inch in diameter, hard to be distinguished in appearance from the cabbage seeds. e/aw. 12, 1852. ... i sometimes think that i may go forth and walk hard and earnestly, and live a more substantial life, get a glorious ex perience, be much abroad in heat and cold, day and night, live more, expend more atmospheres, be weary often, etc., etc. but then swiftly the thought comes to me, go not so far out of your way for a truer life, keep strictly onward in that path alone which your genius points out, do the things which lie nearest to you, but which are difficult to do, live a purer, a more thoughtful and laborious life, more true to your friends and neighbors, more noble and magnanimous, and that will be better than a wild walk. to live in relations of truth and sincerity with men is to dwell in a frontier country. wjiat a wild and unfrequented wilderness that would be! what saguenays of magnanimity that might be ex plored ! — then talk about traveling this way and that, as if seeing were all. in the eyes, and a man coidd sufficiently report what he stood bodily before, when the seeing depends ever on the being. all report of travel is the report of victory or defeat, of a contest with every event winter. 163 and phenomenon, and how you come out of it. a blind man who possesses inward truth and consistency will see more than one who has faultless eyes, but no serious and laborious, or strenuous soul to look through them. as if the eyes were the only part of the man that traveled. men convert their property into cash, ministers fall sick to obtain the assistance of their par ishes, all chaffer with sea-captains, etc., as if the whole object were to get conveyed to some part of the world, a pair of eyes merely. a telescope conveyed to and set up at the cape of good hope at great expense, and only a bushman to look through it. nothing like a little activity, called life, if it were only walking much in a day, to keep the eye in good order, no such couyrium. jan. 12, 1855. p. m. to flint's pond via minott's meadow. after a spitting of snow in the forenoon, i see the blue sky here and there. the sun is coming out. it is still and warm. the earth is two thirds bare. i walk along the mill brook below emerson's, looking into it for some life. perhaps what most moves us in winter is some reminiscence of far-off summer. . . . what beauty in the running brooks ! what life ! what society i the cold is merely super ficial. it is summer still at the core. far, far within, it is in the cawing of the crow, the 164 winter. crowing of the cock, the warmth of the sun on our backs. i hear faintly the cawing of a crow far, far away, echoing from some unseen woodside, as if deadened by the spring-like vapor which the sun is drawing from the ground. it mingles with the slight murmur of the village, the sound of children at play, as one stream empties gently into another, and the wild and tame are one. what a delicious sound ! it is not merely crow calling to crow, for it speaks to me too. i am part of one great creature with him. if he has voice, i have ears. i can hear when he calls, and have engaged not to shoot or stone him, if he will caw to me each spring. on the one hand, it may be, is the sound of children at school saying their a, b, abs ; on the other, far in the wood-fringed horizon, the cawing of crows from their blessed eternal vacation, out at their long recess, chil dren who have got dismissed, while the vapor, as incense, goes up from all the fields of the spring (if it were spring). bless the lord, o my soul, bless him for wildness, for crows that will not alight within gunshot, and bless him for hens, too, that croak and cackle in the yard. jan. 12, 1859. mr. farmer brings me a hawk which he thinks has caught thirty or forty of his chickens since summer, for he has lost so many, and he has seen a hawk like this catch winter. 165 some of them. thinks he has seen this same one sitting a long time upright on a tree, high or low, about his premises, and when at length a hen or this year's chicken had strayed far from the rest, he skimmed along and picked it up without pausing, and bore it off, the chicken not having seen him approaching. he found the hawk caught by one leg and frozen to death in a trap which he had set for mink by a spring and baited with fish. — this one measures nineteen by forty-two inches, and is, according to wilson and nuttall, a young falco uneatus, or red shouldered hawk. it might as well be called the red or rusty-breasted hawk. according to the "birds of long island," mine is the old bird.(?) nuttall says it lives on frogs, crayfish, etc., and does not go far north, not even to massachusetts, he thought. its note, kee-oo. he never saw one soar, at least in winter. . . . farmer says that he saw what he calls the common hen hawk, soaring higli, with appar ently a chicken in its claws, while a young hawk circled beneath, when the former suddenly let drop the chicken. but the young one failing to catch it, he shot down like lightning, and caught and bore off the falling chicken before it reached the earth. . jan. 12, 1860. ... i go forth to walk on the hill at 3 p. m. thermometer about -|-30°. 166 winter. it is a very beautiful and spotless snow now, it having just ceased falling. you are struck by its peculiar tracklessness, as if it were a thick, white blanket just spread. as it were, each snow-flake lies as it first fell, or there is a regu lar gradation from the denser bottom up to the surface which is perfectly light, and as it were fringed with the last flakes that fell. this was a star snow, dry, but the stars of considerable size. it lies up lightas down. wheii i look closely, it seems to be chiefly composed of crys tals in which the six rays or leaflets are more or less perfect, with a cottony powder intermixed. it is not yet in the least melted by the sun. the sun is out very bright and pretty warm, and going from it, i see a myriad sparkling points scattered over the surface of the snow, little mirror-like facets, which on examination i find to be, each, one of those star wheels, more or less entire, from one eighth to one third of an inch in diameter, which has fallen in the proper position, reflecting an intensely bright little sun, as if it were a thin and uninterrupted scale of mica. such is the glitter or sparkle on the sur face of such a snow freshly fallen when the sun comes out, and you walk from it, the points of light constantly changing. i suspect that these ai'e good evidence of the freshness of the snow. the sun and wind have not yet destroyed these delicate reflectors. . . . winter. 167 as i stand by the hemlocks, i am greeted by the lively and unusually prolonged tche -de -de de-de-de of a little flock of chickadees. the snow has ceased falling, the sun comes out, and it is warm and still, and this flock of chickadees, feeling the influences of this genial season, have begun to flit amid the snow-covered fans of the hemlocks, jarring down the snow, for there are hardly bare twigs enough for them to rest on, or they plume themselves in some sunny recess on the sunny side of the tree, only pausing to utter their tche-de-de-de. jan. 13, 1841. we should offer up our per fect (rexaa) thoughts to the gods daily. our writing should be hymns and psalms. who keeps a journal is purveyor to the gods. there are two sides to every sentence. the one is contiguous to me, but the other faces the gods, and no man ever fronted it. when i utter a thought, i launch a vessel which never sails in my harbor more, but goes sheer off into the deep. consequently it demands a godlike in sight, a fronting view, to read what was greatly written. jan. 13, 1852. told me this afternoon of a white pine in carlisle which the owner was offered thirty dollars for and refused. he had bought the lot for the sake of the tree which he left standing. 168 winter. here i am on the cliffs at half-past three or four o'clock. the snow more than a foot deep over all the land. few, if any, leave the beaten paths. a few clouds are floating overhead, downy and dark. clear sky and bright sun, yet no redness. remarkable, yet admirable, moder ation that this should be confined to the morning and evening. greeks were they who did it. a mother-o'-pearl tint at the utmost they wiu give you at mid-day, and this but rarely. singular enough ! twenty minutes later, looking up, i saw a long, light-textured cloud, stretching from n. to s. with a dunnish mass and an enlightened border, with its under edge toward the west all beautiful mother-o'-pearl, as remarkable as a rainbow, stretching over half the heavens, and underneath it in the w. were flitting mother o'-pearl clouds which change their loose-tex tured form, and melt rapidly away, never any so fast, even while i write. before i can complete this sentence, i look up and they are gone, like smoke or rather the steam from the engine in the winter air. even a considerable cloud, like a fabulous atlantis or unfortunate isle in the hesperian sea, is dissolved and dispersed in a minute or two, and nothing is left but the pure ether. then another comes by magic, is born out of the pure blue, empyrean with beautiful mother-o'-pearl tints, where not a shred of vapor winter. 169 was to be seen before, not enough to stain a glass, or polisbed steel blade. it grows more light and porous, the blue deeps are seen through it here and there, only a few flocks are left, and now these, too, have disappeared, and no one knows whither it is gone. you are com pelled to look at the sky, for the earth is in visible. . . . why can't i go to his office and talk with , and learn his facts ? but i shpuld im pose a certain restraint on him. we are strictly confined to our men, to whom we give liberty. . . . we forget to strive and aspire, to do better even thaa is expected of us. i cannot stay to be congratulated. i would leave the world behind me. we must withdraw from our flat terers, even from our friends. they drag us down. it is rare that we use our thinking faculty as resolutely as an irishman his spade. to please our friends and relatives we turn out our silver ore in cart-loads, while we neglect to work our mines of gold known only to ourselves, far up in the sierras, where we pulled up a bush in our mountain walk, and saw the glittering treasure. let us return thither. let it be the price of our freedom to make that known. jan. 13, 1854. ... in the deep hollow this side of brittau's camp, i heard a singular buzzing sound from the ground exactly like that of a large 170 winter. fly or bee in a spider's web. i kneeled down and with pains traced it to a small bare spot as big as my hand amid the snow, and searched there amid the grass and stubble for several minutes, putting the grass aside with my fingers, till, when i got nearest to the spot, nob know ing but i might be stung, i used a stick. the sound was incessant, like that of a large fly in agony. but though it made my ears ache, and i had my stick directly on the spot, i could find neither prey nor oppression. at length i found that i interrupted or changed the tone with my stick, and so traced it to a few spires of dead grass, occupying about one quarter of an inch in diameter, and standing in the melted snow water. when i bent these one side, it produced a duller and baser tone. it was a sound issuing from the earth, and as i stooped over it, the thought came over me that it might be the first puling, infantine cry of an earthquake, which would ere long ingulf me. perhaps it was air confined under the frozen ground, now expanded by the thaw, and escaping upward through the water by a hollow grass stem. i left it after ten min utes buzzing as loudly as at first. could hear it more than a rod away. schoolcraft says [of rhode island] , " the present mime is derived from the dutch, who called it roode eylant (red island) from the winter. 171 autumnal color of its foliage." (coll. r. i. hist. soc. vol. iii.) jan. 13, 1856. . . . took to pieces a pensile nest which i found . . . probably a vireo's, may be a red-eye's. in our workshops we pride ourselves on discovering a use for what had been previously regarded as waste, but how partial and accidental our economy compared with nature's. in nature nothing is wasted. every decayed leaf and twig and fibre is only the better fitted to serve in some other depart ment, and all at last are gathered in her com post heap. what a wonderful genius it is that leads the vireo to select the tough fibre of the inner bark, instead of the more brittle grasses, for its basket, the elastic pine needles and the twigs curved as they dried to give it form, and, as i suppose, the silk of cocoons, etc., to bind it together with. i suspect that estensive use is made of these abandoned cocoons by the birds, and they, if anybody, know where to find them. there were at least seven materials used in con structing this nest, and the bird visited as many distinct localities many times, always with the purpose or design of finding some particular one of these materials, as much as if it had said to itself, " now i will go and get some old hor net's nest from one of those that i saw last fall, down in the maple swamp, perhaps thrust my 172 winter. bill into them, or some silk from those cocoons i saw this morning." jan. 13, 1857. i hear one thrumming a guitar below stairs. it reminds me of moments that i have lived. what a comment on our life is the least strain of mvisic ! it lifts me above all the dust and mire of the universe. i soar or hover with clean skirts over the field of my life. it is ever life within life in concentric spheres. the field wherein i toil or rust at any time is at the same time the field for such different kinds of life ! the farmer's boy or hired man has an instinct which tells him as much indistinctly; hence his dreams and his restlessness, hence even it is that he wants money to realize his dream with. the identical field where i am leading my humdrum life, let but a strain of music be heard there, is seen to be the field of some unrecorded crusade or tournament, the thought of which excites in us an ecstasy of joy. the way in which i am affected by this faint thrumming advertises me that there is still some health and immortality in the springs of me. what an elixir is this sound ! i who but lately came and went and lived under — a dish cover — live now under the heavens. it releases me, bursts my bonds. almost all, perhaps all, our life is, speaking comparatively, a stereo typed despair, i. e., we never at any time realize wij^ter. 173 the full grandeur of our destiny. "we habit-^ uallj', forever and ever, underrate our ^fate. talk of infidels, why, all of the race of man, except in the rarest moments wheff they are lifted above themselves by an ecstasy, are infi dels. with the very best disposition, what does my belief amount to? this poor, timid, unen lightened, thick skinned creature, what can it believe? i am, of course, hopelessly ignorant and unbelieving until some divinity stirs within me. ninety-nine one hundredths of our lives we are mere hedgers and ditchers, but from time to time we meet with reminders of our destiny. — we hear the kindred vibrations, music ! and we put out our dormant feelers into the limits of the universe. we attain to wisdom that passeth understanding. the stable continents undulate. the hard and fixed becomes fluid. " unless above himself he can erect himself) how poor a thing is man." when i hear music, i fear no dauger. i am invulnerable. i see no foe. i am related to the earliest times, and to the latest. there are infinite degrees of life, from that which is next to sleep and death to that which is forever awake and immortal. we must not confound man with man. we cannot conceive of a greater difference than that between the life of one man and that of another. i am con 174 winter. "^trained to believe that the mass of men are never so lifted above themselves that their des tiny is' 3een to be transcendently beautiful and grand. jan. 13, 18q8. ... at jonathan buffum's, lynn. lecture iit john b. alley's parlor. mr. j. buffum describes t&me ancient wolf traps, made probably by the eatiy settlers in lynn, perhaps after an indian models one some two miles from the shore near satigiis, another, more northerly, holes say seven feet deep, about as long, and some three feet wide, stoned up very smoothly and perhaps converging a little, so that the wolf could not get out. — tradition says that a wolf and a squaw were one morning found in the same hole, staring at each other. jan. 13, 1860. . . . farmer says that he remem bers his father saying that as he stood in a field once, he saw a hawk soaring above and eying something on the ground. looking round, he. saw a weasel there eying the hawk. just then the hawk stooped, and the weasel at the same instant sprang upon him. up went the hawk with the weasel, but by and by began to come down as fast as he went up, rolling over and over, till he struck the ground. his father going to him, raised him up, when out hopped the weasel from under his wing, and ran off, none the worse for his fall. winter. 175 jan. 14, 1852. ... i love to see now a cock of deep, reddish meadow hay full of ferns and other meadow plants of the coarsest kind. my imagination supplies the green and the hum of bees. what a memento of summer such a hay cock ! to stand beside one covered with snow in winter through which the dry meadow plants peep out ! and yet our hopes survive. . . . as usual, there was no blueness in the ruts and crevices of the snow to-day. what kind of atmosphere does this require? when i ob served it the other day, it was a rather moist air, some snow falling, the sky completely over cast, and the weather not very cold. it is one of the most interesting phenomena of the winter. jan. 14, 1854. if the writers of the brazen age are most suggestive to thee, confine thyself to them, and leave those of the augustan age to dust and the bookworms. . . . cato makes the vineyard of first importance to a farm ; second, a well-watered garden ; third, a willow plantation qsalictum) ; fourth, an olive yard (pletiun') ; fifth, a meadow, or grass ground (^praturn) ; sixth, a grain field or tillage {campus frumentarius) ; seventh, a wood for fuel (?) {silva ccedua) ; varro speaks of planting and cultivating this ; eighth, an arbustum ; colu mella says it is a plantation of elms, and for 176 winter. vines to rest on ; ninth, a wood that yields mast qglandaria silva). he says elsewhere the ar hustum yields ligna et virgoe. he says, " in early manhood, the master of a family must study to plant his ground. as for building, he must think a long time about it (diu cogitare). he must not think about plant ing, but do it. when he gets to be thirty-six years old, then let him build, if he has his ground planted. so build that the villa may not have to seek the farm, nor the farm the villa." this contains sound advice, as pertinent now as ever. ..." if you have done one thing late, you will do all your work late," says cato to the farmer. — they raised a sallow (salicem), to tie vines with. ground subject to fogs is called nehulosus. . . . oxen " must have muz zles (or little baskets, _y?scez?as) that they may not go in quest of grass (ne herham sectentur), when they plow." jan. 14, 1855. skated to baker farm with a rapidity which astonished myself, before the wind, feeling the rise and fall (the water having settled in the suddenly cold night) which i had not time to see. ... a man feels like a new creature, a deer perhaps, moving at this rate. he takes new possession of nature in the name of his own majesty. there was i, and there, and there, as mercury went down the idsean winter. 177 mountains. i judged that in a quarter of an hour i was three and one half miles from home without having made any particular exertion. jan. 14, 1857. up assabet on ice. ... i notice on the black willows, and also on the alders and white maples overhanging the stream, numerous dirty-white cocoous, about an inch long, attached by their sides to the base of the recent twigs, and disguised by dry leaves curled about them, a sort of fruit which these trees bear now. the leaves are not attached to the twigs, but artfully arranged about, and fastened to the cocoons. almost every little cluster of leaves contains a cocoon, apparently of one species, so that often when you would think the trees were retaining their leaves, it is not the trees, but the caterpillars that have re tained them. i do not see a cluster of leaves on a maple, unless on a dead twig, but it con ceals a cocoon. yet i canuot find one alive. they are all crumbled within. the black wil lows retain very few of their narrow curled leaves here and there, like the terminal leaflet of a fern. the maples and alders scarcely any ever. yet these few are just enough to with draw attention from those which surround the cocoons. what kind of understanding was there between the mind that determined that these leaves should hang on during the winter 178 winter. and that of the worm that fastened a few of these leaves to its cocoon in order to disguise it ? i thus walk along the edge of the trees and bushes which overhang the stream, gathering the cocoons which probably were thought to be doubly secure here. these cocoons, of course, were attached before the leaves had fallen. al most every one is already empty, or contains only the relics of a nymph. it has been attacked and devoured by some foe. these numerous cocoons attached to the twigs overhanging the stream in the still and biting winter day suggest a certain fertility in the river borders, impart a kind of life to them, and so are company to me. there is so much more life than is suspected in the most solitary and dreary scene. they are as much as the lisping of a chickadee. jan. 14, 1858. mr. buffum says that in 1817-1819 he saw the sea-serpent at swamp scott, and so did several hundred others. he was to be seen off and on for some time. there were many people on the beach the first time in carriages partly in the water, and the serpent came so near that they, thinking he might come ashore, involuntarily turned their horses to the shore, as with a general consent, and this move ment caused him to sheer off also. the road from boston was lined with people directly, coming to see the monster. prince came with winter. 179 his spy-glass, saw, and printed his account of him. buffum says he has seen him twenty times ; once alone from the rocks at little nahant, where he passed along close to the shore just beneath the surface, and within fifty or sixty feet of him, so that he could have touched him with a very long pole, if he had dared to. buffum is about sixty, and it should be said, as affecting the value of his evidence, that he is a firm believer in spiritualism. jan. 14, 1860. ... it is a mild day, and i notice, what i have not observed for some time, that blueness of the air only to be per ceived in a mild day. i see it between me and woods half a mile distant. the softening of the air amounts to this. the mountains are quite invisible. you come forth to see this great blue presence lurking about the woods and the hoi'izon. jan. 15, 1838. after all that has been said in praise of the saxon race, we must allow that our blue-eyed and fair-haired ancestors were originally an ungodly and reckless crew. jan. 15, 1852. ... i do not know but the poet is he who generates poems. by continence he rises to creation on a higher level, a super natural level. . . . for the first time this winter i notice snow fleas this afternoon in walden wood. wher 180 winter. ever i go, they are to be seen, especially in the deepest ruts and foot-tracks. their number is almost infinite. it is a rather warm and moist afternoon, and feels like rain. i suppose that some peculiarity in the weather has called them forth fi'om the bark of the trees. it is good to see minott's hens pecking and scratching the ground. what never-failing health they suggest ! even the sick hen is so naturally sick, like a green leaf turning to brown. no wonder men love to have hens about them, and hear their creaking note. they are even laying eggs from time to time stiu, the undespairing race ! jan. 15, 1853. . . . mrs. ripley told me this p. m. that russell had decided that that green (and sometimes yellow) dust on the underside of stones in walls was a decaying state of l&pra ria chlorina, a lichen ; the yellow another spe cies of lepraria. i have long known this dust, but as i did not know the name of it, i. e., what others called it, and therefore could not conven iently speak of it, it has suggested less to me, and i have made less use of it. i now first feel as if i had got hold of it. jan. 15, 1857. . . . as i passed the south shed at the depot, observed what i thought at first a tree sparrow on the wood in the shed, a mere roof open at the sides, under which several men winter. 181 were at that time employed sawing wood with a horse-power. looking closer, i saw, to my sur prise, that it must be a song sparrow, it having the usual marks on its breast, and no bright chestnut crown. the snow is nine or ten inches deep, and it appeared to have taken refuge in this shed where was much bare ground exposed by removing the wood. when i advanced, in stead of flying away, it concealed itself in the wood, just as it often dodges behind a wall. what is there in music that it should so stir our deeps ? we are all ordinarily in a state of desperation. such is our life, it oftfcimes drives us to suicide. to how many, perhaps to most, life is barely tolerable, and if it were not for the fear of death or of dying, what a multitude would immediately commit suicide. but let us hear a strain of music, and we are at once ad vertised of a life which no man had told us of, which no preacher preaches. suppose i try to describe faithfully the prospect which a strain of music exhibits to me. the field of my life becomes a boundless plain, glorious to tread, with no death nor disappointment at the end of it. all meanness and trivialness disappear. i become adequate to my deed. no particulars survive this expansion. persons do not survive it. in the light of this strain there is no thou nor i. we are actually lifted above ourselves. 182 winter. the tracks of the mice near the head of "well meadow were particularly interesting. there was a level of pure snow there, unbroken by bushes or grass, about four rods across, and here were the tracks of mice running across it, from the bushes on this side to those on the other, the tracks quite near together, but re peatedly crossing each other at very acute angles, though each particular course was generally quite direct. the snow was so light that only one distinct track was made by all four of the feet,. . . . but the tail left a very distinct mark. a single track stretching away almost straight, sometimes half a dozen rods over the unspotted snow, is very handsome, like a chain of a new pattern, and suggests an airy lightness in the body that impressed it. though there may have been but one or two here, the tracks sug gest quite a little company that had gone gad ding over to their neighbors under the opposite bush. such is the delicacy of the impression on the surface of the lightest snow, where other creatures sink, and night, too, being the season when these tracks are made, they remind me of a fairy revel. it is almost as good as if the actors were here. i can easily imagine all the rest. hopping is expressed by the tracks themselves. yet i should like much to see, by broad day light, a company of these revelers hopping winter. 183 over the snow. there is a still life in america that is little observed or dreamed of. . . . how snug they are somewhere under the snow now, not to be thought of, if it were not for these pretty tracks. for a week, or fortnight even, of pretty still weather, the tracks will remain to tell of the nocturnal adventures of a tiny mouse. . . . so it was so many thousands of years before gutenberg invented printing with ms types, and so it will be so many thousands of years after his types are forgotten perchance. the deer mouse will be printing in the snow of well meadow to be read by a new race of men. jan. 16, 1838. man is like a cork which no tempest can sink, but it will float securely to its haven at last. the world is never the less beautiful, though viewed through a chink or knot-hole. jan. 16, 1852. i see that to some men their relation to mankind is all important. it is fatal in their ej'es to outrage the opinions and cus toms of their fellow-men. failure and success are therefore never proved by them by absolute and universal tests. i feel myself not so vitally related to my fellow-men. i impinge on them but by a point on one side. it is not a siamese-' twin ligature that binds me to them. it is un safe to defer so much to mankind and the opin ions of society, for these are always, and without 184 winter. exception, heathenish and barbarous, seen from the heights of philosophy. a wise man sees as clearly the heathenism and barbarity of his own countrymen as those of the nations to whom his countrymen send missionaries. the english man and american are subject equally to many national superstitions with the hindoos and chinese. my countrymen are to me foreigners. i have but little more sympathy with them than with the mob of india or of china. all nations are remiss in their duties, and fall short of their standards. madame pfeiffer says of the par sees or fire-worshipers in bombay, who should all have been on hand on the esplanade to greet the first rays of the sun, that she found only a few here and there, and some did not make their appearance till nine o'clock. — i see no im portant difference between the assumed gravity and bought funeral sermon of the parish clergy man and the bowlings and strikings of the breast of the hired mourning women of the east. bill wheeler had two clumps for feet, and progressed slowly by short steps, having frozen his feet once, as i understood. him i have been sure to meet once in five years, progressing into the town on his stubs, holding the middle of the road, as if he drove the invisible herd of the world before him, especially on a military winter. 185 day ; out of what coii£ues, whose hired man having been, in what remote barn having quar tered all these years, i never knew. he seemed to belong to a different caste from other men, and reminded me both of the indian pariah and martyr. i understood that somebody was found to give him his drink for the few chores he could do. his meat was never referred to, he had so sublimed his life. one day since this, not long ago, i saw in my walk a kind of shelter, such as woodmen might use, in the woods by the great meadows, made of meadow hay cast over a rude frame. thrusting my head in at a hole, as i am wont to do in such cases, i found bill wheeler there curled up asleep on the hay, who, being suddenly wakened from a sound sleep, rubbed his eyes, and inquired if i found any game, thinking i was sporting. i came away reflecting much on that man's life, how he com municated with none, how now, perchance, he did chores for none, how he lived perhaps from a deep principle, that he might be some mighty philosopher, greater than socrates or diogenes, simplifying life, returning to nature, having turned his back on towns, how many things he had put off, luxuries, comforts, human society, even his feet, wrestling with his thoughts. i felt even as diogenes when he saw the boy drink ing out of his hands, and threw away his cup. 186 winter. here was one who went alone, did no work, and had no relatives that i knew of, was not ambitious that i could see, did not depend on the good opin ions of men. must he not see things with an impartial eye, disinterested, as the toad observes the gardener. perchance here is one of a sect of philosophers, the only one, so simple, so ab stracted in thought and life from his contempo raries, that his wisdom is indeed foolishness to them. who knows but in his solitary meadow hay bunk he indulges in thought only in trium phant satires on men. who knows but here is a superiority to literature, etc., unexpressed and inexpressible, one who has resolved to humble and mortify himself as never man was humbled and mortified, whose very vividness of percep tion, clear knowledge, and insight have made him dumb, leaving no common consciousness and ground of parlance with his kind, or rather his unlike kindred ! whose news plainly is not my news nor yours. i was not sure for a moment but here was a philosopher who had left far be hind him the philosophers of greece and india, and i envied him his advantageous point of view. i was not to be deceived by a few stupid words, of course, and apparent besottedness. it was his position and career that i contemplated. c has a great respect for mckean, he stands on so low a level; says. he is great for winter. 187 conversation. he never says anything, hardly answers a question, but keeps at work, never exaggerates, nor uses an exclamation, and does as he agrees to. he appears to have got his shoulder to the wheel of the universe. but the other day he went greater lengths with me, as he and barry were sawing down a pine, both kneeling of necessity. i said it was wet work for the knees in the snow. he observed, looking up at me, " we pray without ceasing." but to return to bill. i would have liked to know what view he took of life. — a month or two after this, as i heard, he was found dead among the brush over back of the hill, so far decomposed that his coffin was carried to his body, which was put into it with pitch-forks. — i have my misgivings still that he may have died a brahmin's death, dwelling at the roots of trees at last, though i have since been assured that he suffered from disappointed love (was what is called love-cracked), than which can there be any nobler suffering, any fairer death for a human creature ? that this made him drink, froze his feet, and did all the rest for him. why have not the world the benefit of his long trial? jan. 16, 1853. . . . trench says that " rivals, in the primary sense of the word, are those who dwell on the banks of the same stream," or " on opposite banks," but (as he says in the case of 188 winter. many words) since the use of water rights is a fruitful source of contention between such neigh bors, the word has acquired this secondary sense. my friends are my rivals on the concord in the primitive sense of the word. tliere is no strife between us respecting the use of the stream. the concord ofifers many privileges, but none to quarrel about. it is a peaceful, not a brawl ing stream. , . . bailey, i find, has it, " rival [rivalis l. . . . qui juxta eundem rivum pas cit]." jan. 16, 1859. p. m. to walden, and thence via cassandra ponds to fair haven, and down river. . . . as we go south west ward through the cassandra hollows toward the declining sun, they look successively, both by their form and color, like burnished silver shields in the midst of which we walked, looking toward the sun. the whole surface of the snow, the country over, and of the ice, as yesterday, is rough, as if com posed of hailstones half melted together. . . . the snow which three quarters conceals the cassandra in these ponds, and every twig and trunk and blade of withered sedge, is . . . cased with ice, and accordingly, as i have said, when you go facing the sun, the hollows look like glitter ing shields set round with brilliants. that bent sedge in the midst of the shield, each particular blade of it, being married to an icy wire, twenty winter. 189 times its size at least, shines like polished silver rings or semicircles. it must have been far more splendid yesterday before any of the ice fell off. no wonder my english companion says that our scenery is more spirited than that of england. the snow crust is rough with the wrecks of brilliants under the trees, an inch or two thick with them under many trees where they last several days. jan. 16, 1860. ... i see a flock of tree sparrows picking something from the surface of the snow amid some bushes. watching one attentively, i find that it is feeding on the very fine brown chaffy-looking seed of the panicled andromeda. it understands how to get its din ner, to make the plant give down, perfectly. it fiies up and alights on one of the dense brown panicles of the hard berries, and gives it a vigorous shaking and beating with its claws and bill, sending down a shower of seed to the snow beneath. it lies very distinct, though fine almost as dust, on the spotless snow. it then hops down and briskly picks up from the snow what it wants. how very clean and agree able to the imagination, and withal abundant, is this kind of food ! how delicately they fare ! these dry persistent seed vessels hold their crusts of bread until shaken. the snow is the white table-cloth on which they fall. ... it 190 winter. shakes down a hundred times as much as it wants, and shakes the same or another cluster after each successive snow. how bountifully nature feeds them. no wonder they come to spend the winter with us, and are at ease with regard to their food. . . . how neatly and sim ply they feed ! this shrub grows unobserved by most, only known to botanists, and at length matures its hard, dry seed vessels, which, if no ticed, are hardly supposed to contain seed ; but there is no shrub or weed which is not known to some bird. though you may have never noticed it, the tree sparrow comes from the north in the winter straight to this shrub, and confidently shakes its panicles, and then feasts on the fine shower of seeds that falls from it. jan. 17, 1841. a true happiness never hap pened, but rather is proof against all hope. i would not be a happy, that is, a lucky man, but rather a necessitated and doomed one. after so many years of study, i have not learned my duty for one hour. i am stranded at each reflux of the tide, and i, who sailed as buoyantly on the middle deep as a ship, am as helpless as a muscle on the rock. i cannot account to myself for the hour i live. here time has given me a dull prosaic evening, not of kin to vesper or cynthia, a dead lapse, where time's stream seems settling into a pool, a still winter. 191 ness not as if nature's breath were held, but expired. let me know that such hours as this are the wealthiest in time's gift. it is the in sufficiency of the hour which, if we but feel and understand, we shall reassert our independence then. jan. 17, 1852. . . . the other day as i was passing the house . . . with my pantaloons as usual tucked into my boots (there was no path beyond h 's), i heard some persons in 's shed, but did not look round, and when i had got a rod or two beyond, i heard some one call out impudently from the shed, something like, " holloa, mister, what do you think of the walking ? " i turned round directly, and saw three men standing in the shed. i was resolved to discomfit them, that they should prove their manhood, if they had any, and find something to say, though they had nothing before, that they should make amends to the universe by feeling cheap. they should either say to my face and eye what they had said to my back, or they should feel the meanness of having to change their tone. so i called out, looking at one, " do you wish to speak to me, sir ? " no answer. so i stepped a little nearer and re peated the question, when one replied, " yes, sir." so i advanced with alacrity up the path they had shoveled. in the mean while one ran 192 winter. into the house. i thought i had seen the near est one. he called me by name faintly and with hesitation, and held out his hand half un consciously, which i did not decline. i inquired gravely if he wished to say anything to me. he could only wave to the other, and mutter, " my brother." i approached him and repeated the question. he looked as if he were shrinking into a nutshell, a pitiable object he was, and looked away from me while he began to frame some business, some surveying that he might wish to have done. i saw that he was drunk, that his brother was ashamed of him, and i turned my back on him in the outset of this indirect and drunken apology. . . . in proportion as i have celestial thoughts is the necessity for me to be out and behold the western sky before sunset these winter days. that is the symbol of the unclouded mind that knows neither winter nor summer. what is your thought like'? that is the hue, that the purity and transparency and distance from earthly taint of my inmost mind ; for whatever we see without is a symbol of something within, and that which is farthest off is the symbol of what is deepest within. the lover of contem plation, accordingly, will gaze much into the sky. fair thoughts and a serene mind make fair days. winter. 193 here, also, is the symbol of the triumph which succeeds to a grief that has tried us to our ad vantage, so that at last we can smile through our tears. it is the aspect with which we come out of the house of mourning. we have found our relief in tears. — as the skies appear to a man, so is his mind. some see only clouds there, some prodigies and portents ; some scarce look up at all, their heads, like those of the brutes, are directed towards earth. some behold there serenity, purity, beauty ineffable. — the world run to see the panorama, while there is a pano rama in the sky which few go out to see. . . . there might be a chapter, when i speak of hens in the thawy days and spring weather on the chips, called chickweed or plantain. those western . . . vistas through clouds to the sky show the clearest heavens, clearer and more elysian than when the whole sky is compar atively free from clouds, for then there is wont to be a vapor more generally diffused, especially near the horizon, which in cloudy days is ab sorbed, as it were, or collected into masses, and the vistas are clearer than the unobstructed cope of heaven. what endless variety in the form and texture of the clouds, some fine, some coarse-grained ! i saw to-night what looked like the back bone with portions of the ribs of a fossu monster. 194 winter. every form and creature is thus shadowed forth in vapor in the heavens. . . . it appears to me that at a very early age the mind of man, perhaps at the same time with his body, ceases to be elastic. his intellectual power becomes something defined and limited. he does not think expansively, as he was wont to stretch himself in his growing days. what was flexible sap hardens into heart wood, and there is no further change. in the season of youth man seems to me capable of intellectual effort and performance which surpass all rules and bounds as the youth lays out his whole strength without fear or prudence, and does not feel his limits. it is the transition from poetry to prose. the young man can run and leap, he has not learned exactly how far. . . . the grown man does not exceed his daily labor. he has no strength to waste. jan. 17, 1853. . . . cato, prescribing a med icamentum for oxen, says, " when you see a snake's slough, take it and lay it up, that you may not have to seek it when it is wanted." this was mixed with bread, corn, etc. he tells how to make bread and different kinds of cakes, viz., a libum, a placenta, a spira (so called because twisted like a rope, perhaps like doughnuts), scriblita (because ornamented with characters like writing), globi (globes), winter. 195 etc. ; tells how to make vows for your oxen with an offering to mars, and sylvanus in a wood, no woman to be present, or to know how it is done. ... if you wish to remove an ill savor from wine, he recommends to heat a brick, pitch it, and let it down by a string to the bottom of the cask, and let it remain there two days, the cask being stopped. " if you wish to know if water has been added to wine, make a little vessel of ivy wood (materia ederacea). put into it the wine which you think has water in it. if it has water, the wine will run out (efflvety, the water will remain, for a vessel of ivy wood does not hold wine." " make a sacrificial feast for the oxen when the pear is in blossom. afterward begin to plow in the spring." — " that day is to be holy (jerice) to the oxen, and herdsmen, and those who make the feast." they offer wine and mut ton to jupiter dapalis, also to vesta if they choose. . . . when they thinned a consecrated grove (lu cum conlucare, as if to let in the light to a shady place) they were to offer a hog by way of expiation, and pray the god or goddess to whom it was sacred to be propitious to them, their house, and family, and children. should not every grove be regarded as a lucus or conse 196 winter. crated grove in this sense. i wish that our farm ers felt some such awe when they cut down our consecrated groves. he gives several charms to cure diseases, mere magician's words. jan. 17, 1860. . . . alcott said well the other day that this was his definition of heaven, "a place where you can have a little conver sation." jan. 18, 1841. we must expect no income beside our outgoes. we must succeed now, and we shall not fail hereafter. so soon as we be gin to count the cost, the cost begins. if our scheme is well built within, any mis hap to the outbuilding will not be fatal. the capital wanted is an entire independence of all capital but a clear conscience and a reso lute will. when we are so poor that the howling of the wind shall have a music in it, and not declare war against our property, the proprietors may well envy us. — we have been seeking riches not by a true industry or building within, but by mere accumulation, putting together -what was without till it rose a heap beside us. we should rather acquire them by the utter renun ciation of them. if i hold a house and land as property, am i not disinherited of sun, wind, rain, and all good beside? the richest are winter. 197 only some degrees poorer than nature. it is impossible to have more property than we dis pense. genius is only as rich as it is generous. if it hoards, it impoverishes itself. what the hanker sighs for, the meanest clown may have, leisure and a quiet mind. jan. 18, 1852. ... i still remember those wonderful sparkles at pelham pond. the very sportsmen in the distance with their dogs and guns presented some surfaces on which a sparkle could impinge, such was the transparent, flash ing air. it was a most exhilarating, intoxicating air, as when poets sing of the sparkling wine. . . . what is like the peep or whistle of a bird in the midst of a winter storm ? the pines, some of them, seen through this fine driving snow, have a bluish hue. jan. 18, 1856. . . . p. m. to walden, to learn the temperature of the water. . . . this is a very mild, melting winter day, but clear and bright. yet i see the blue shadows on the snow at walden. the snow lies very level there, about ten inches deep, and, for the most part, bears me as i go across with my hatchet. i think i never saw a more elysian blue than my shadow. i am turned into a tall blue persian from my cap to my boots, such as no mortal dye can pro duce, with an amethystine hatchet in my hand. i am in raptures with my own shadow. our 198 winter. very shadows are no longer black, but a celestial blue. this has nothing to do with^cold i think, but the sun must not be too low. i cleared a little space in the snow, which was nine or ten inches deep, over the deepest part o£ the pond, and cut through the ice, which was about seven inches thick. . . . the moment i reached the water, it gushed up and overflowed the ice, driving me out of this yard in the snow, where it stood at least tov^o and one half inches deep above the ice. the thermometer indicated 33i° at top, and 34|° when drawn up rapidly from thirty feet beneath ; so, apparently, it is not much warmer beneath. jan. 18, 1859. that wonderful frostwork of the 13th and 14th was too rare to be neg lected, succeeded as it was also by two days of glaze, but having company, i lost half the advantage of it. . . . we did not have an opportunity to see how it would look in the sun, but seen against the mist or fog, it was too fair to be remembered. the trees were the ghosts of trees appearing in their winding sheets, an inteuser white against the comparatively dusky ground of the fog. i rode to acton in the afternoon of the 13th, and i remember the wonderful avenue of these faery trees which everywhere overarched my road. the elms, from their form and size, were partic winter. 199 ularly beautiful. as far as i observed^ the frostwork was deepest in the low grounds, especially on the salix alba there. i learn from the papers that this phenomenon prevailed all over this part of the country, and attracted the admiration of all. the trees on boston com mon were clad in the same snow-white livery with our musketaquid trees. . . . every one, no doubt, has looked with delight, holding his face low, at that beautiful frostwork which so frequently in winter mornings is seen bristling about the throat of every breathing hole in the earth's surface. in this case, the fog, the earth's breath made visible, was in such abundance that it invested all our vales and hills, and the frostwork, instead of being con fined to the chinks and crannies of the earth, covered the mightiest trees, so that we, walking beneath them, had the same wonderful prospect and environment that an insect would have . . . making its way through a chink in the earth which was bristling with hoar frost. that glaze ! i know what it was by my own experience ; it was the frozen breath of the earth upon its beard. . . . take the most rigid tree, the whole effect is peculiarly soft and spirit-like, for there is no marked edge or outline. how could you draw the outline of these snowy fingers seen against the fog, without exaggeration. . . . 200 winter. hardly could the new england farmer drive to market under these trees without feeling that his sense of beauty was addressed. ... a farmer told me in all sincerity that, having occa^ sion to go into walden woods in his sleigh, he thought he' never saw anything so beautiful in all his life, and if there had been men there who knew how to write about it, it would have been a great occasion for them. many times i thought that if the particular tree, commonly an elm, under which i was walking or riding were the only one like it in the country, it would be worth a journey across the continent to see it. indeed, i have no doubt that such journeys would be undertaken on hearing a true account of it. but instead of being confined to a single tree, this wonder was as cheap and common as the air itself. every man's wood-lot was a mir acle and surprise to him, and for those who could not go far there were the trees in the street and the weeds in the yard. . . . the weeping willow with its thickened twigs seemed more precise and regularly curved than ever, and was as still as if carved from alabaster. . . . it was remarkable that when the fog was a little thinner, so that you could see the pine woods a mile or more off, they "were a distinct dark blue. — if any tree is set and stiff, it was now more stiff ; if any airy and graceful, it was winter. 201 now more graceful. the birches, especially, were a great ornament. jan. 18, 1860. . . . as i stood under lee's cliff, several chickadees, uttering their faint notes, came flitting near to me as usual. they are busily prying under the bark of the pitch pines, occasionally knocking off a piece, while they cling with their claws on any side of the limb. of course they are ia search of animal food, but i see one suddenly dart down to a seedless pine seed wing on the snow, and then up again. c says that he saw them busy about these wings on the snow the other day, so i have no doubt that they eat this seed. the sky in the reflection at the open reach at hubbard's bath is more green than in reality, and also darker blue. the clouds are blacker, and the purple more distinct. jan. 19, 1841. . . . coleridge, speaking of the love of god, says, " he that loves, may be sure he was loved first." the love wherewith we are loved is already declared, and afloat in the atmosphere, and our love is only the inlet to it. it is an inexhaustible harvest, always ripe and ready for the sickle. it grows on every bush, and let not those complain of their fates who will not pluck it. we need make no beggarly demand for it, but pay the price, and depart. no transaction can be simpler. love's 202 winter. accounts are kept by single entry. when we are amiable, then is love in the gale, and in sun and shade, and day and night; and to sigh under the cold, cold moon for a love unrequited is to put a slight upon nature ; the natural remedy would be to fall in love with the moon and the night, and find our love requited. i anticipate a more thorough sympathy with nature when my thigh bones shall strew the ground like the boughs which the wind has scat tered. these troublesome humors will flower into early anemones, and perhaps in the very lachrymal sinus, nourished by its juices, some young pine or oak will strike root. what i call pain, when i speak in the spirit of a partisan, and not as a citizen of the body, would be serene being, if our interests were one. sickness is civil war. we have no external foes. even death will take place when i make peace with my body^ and set my seal to that treaty which transcendent justice has so long re quired. i shall at length join interest with it. the mind never makes a great effort without a corresponding energy of the body. when great resolves are entertained, its nerves are not relaxed, nor its limbs reclined. jan. 19, 1854. ... in josselyn's account of his voyage from london to boston in 1638, he says, " june, the first day in the afternoon, very winter. 203 thick, foggie weather, we sailed by an enchanted island," etc. this kind of remark, to be found in so many accounts of voyages, appears to be a fragment of tradition come down from the ear liest account of atlantis and its disappearance. varro, having enumerated certain writers on agriculture, says accidentally that they wrote " soluta ratione," i. e., in prose. this suggests the difeerence between the looseness of prose and the precision of poetry. a perfect expres sion requires a particular rhythm or measure for which no other can be substituted. the prosaic is always a loose expression. jan. 19, 1856. another bright winter day. p. m. to river to get some water-asclepias, to see what birds' nests are made of. . . . as i came home through the village at 8.15 p. m., by a bright moonlight, the moon nearly full and not more than 18° from the zenith, the wind n. w. but not strong, and the air pretty cold, i saw the melon-rind arransfement of the clouds on a larger scale and more distinct than ever before. there were eight or ten courses of clouds, so broad that with equal intervals of blue sky they occupied the whole width of the heavens, broad white cirro-stratus, in per fectly regular curves from w. to e. across the whole sky. the four middle ones, occupying the greater part of the visible cope, were par 204 winter. ticvilarly distinct. they were all as regularly arranged as the lines on a melon, and with much straighter sides, as if cut with a knife. i hear that it attracted the attention of those who were abroad at 7 p. m., and now at 9 p. m. it is scarcely less remarkable. on one side of the heavens, n. or s., the intervals of blue look almost black by contrast. there is now, at nine, a strong wind from the n. w. why do these bars extend east and west ? is it the influence of the sun which set so long ago? or of the rotation of the earth ? the bars which i notice so often morn ing and evening are apparently connected with the sun at those periods. i/an. 20, 1841. disappointment will make us conversant with the nobler part of our nature. it win chasten us and prepare us to meet acci dent on higher ground the next time. as han nibal taught the romans the art of war, so is all misfortune only a stepping-stone to fortune. the desultory moments which are the grimmest feature of misfortune are a step before me on which i should set foot, and not stumbling blocks in the path. to extract its whole good, i must be disappointed with the best fortune, and not be bribed by sunshine or health. o happiness, what is the stuff thou art made of ? — is it not gossamer and floating spider's webs ? a crumpled sunbeam — a coiled winter. 205 dew-line settling on some flower? what mo ments will not supply the reel from which thou mayst be wound off? thou art as subtle as the pollen of flowers and the sporules of the fungi. when i meet a person unlike me, i find my self wholly in the unlikeness. in what i am unlike others, in that i am. when we ask for society, we do not want the double of ourselves, but the complement rather. society should be additive and helpful. we would be reinforced by its alliance. true friends will know how to use each other in this respect, and never barter or exchange their common wealth, just as barter is unknown in families. they will not dabble in the general coffers, but each will put his finger into the private coffer of the other. they will be most familiar, they will be most unfamiliar, for they will be so one and single that common themes and things wiu have to be bandied between them, but in silence they wiu digest them ag one mind ; they will at the same time be so true and double that each will be to the other as admirable and as inaccessible as a star. when my friend comes, i view his orb " through optic glass " " at evening from the top of fdsole." after the longest earthly period, he.wiu still be in apogee to me. : — but we should so meet ourselves as we meet our 206 winter. friends, and still ever seek for ourselves in that ■which is above us and unlike us. so only shall we see what has been well called the light of our own countenances. jan. 20, 1853. . . . ah, our indescribable win ter sky, between emerald (?) and amber (?), such as summer never sees. what more beautiful or soothing to the eye than those finely divided . . . clouds, like down or loose-spread cotton batting, now reaching up from the west above my head ! beneath this a different stratum, all whose ends are curved like spray or wisps. all kinds of figures are drawn on the blue ground with this fibrous white paint. "^ jan. 20, 1855. ... in certain places, stand ing on their snowiest side, the woods were incred ibly fair, white as alabaster. indeed, the young pines reminded you of the purest statuary, and the stately, fuu-grown ones, towering around, affected you as if you stood in a titanic sculp tor's studio, so purely and delicately white, trans mitting the light, their dark trunks all concealed ; and in many places where the snow lay on with ered oak leaves between you and the light, va rious delicate, fawn-colored tints blending with the white enhanced the beauty. . . . how new all things seem! here is a broad, shallow pool in the fields which^yesterday was slush, now converted into a soft, white. winter. " 207 fleecy snow ice. ... it is like the beginning of the world. there is nothing hackneyed where a new snow can come and cover all the landscape. . . . the world is not only new to the eye, but is still as at creation. every blade and leaf is hushed, not a bird or insect is heard, only, perchance, a faint tinkling sleigh-bell in the distance. . . . the snow still adheres conspicuously to the n. w. sides of the stems of the trees, quite up to their summits, with a remarkably sharp edge in that direction. ... it would be about as good as a compass to steer by in a cloudy day or by night. . . . we come upon the tracks of a man and dog, which i guessed to be c.'s. further still, . . . as i was showing to t. under a bank the single flesh-colored or pink apothecium of a beomyces which was not covered by the snow, i saw the print of c.'s foot by its 'side, and knew that his eyes had rested on it that afternoon. it was about the size of a pin's head. saw also where he had examined the lichens on the rails. . . . very musical and sweet now, like a horn, is the hounding of a fox-hound heard in some dis tant wood, while i stand listening in some far solitary and silent field. i doubt if i can convey an idea of the appear ance of the woods yesterday. as you stood in their midst, and looked round on their boughs 208 * winter. and twigs laden with snow, it seemed as if there could be none left to reach, the ground. these countless zigzag white arms crossing each other at every possible angle completely closed up the view like a light drift within three or four rods on every side, the wintriest prospect imaginable. that snow which sifted down into the wood paths was much drier and lighter than else where. jan. 20, 1856. in my experience i have found nothing so truly impoverishing as what is called wealth,, i. e., the command of greater means than you had before possessed, however few and slight stiu, for you thus inevitably ac quire a more expensive habit of living, and even the very same necessaries and comforts cost you more than they once did. instead of gaining, you have lost some independence, and if your income should be suddenly lessened, you would find yourself poor, though possessed of the same means which once made you rich. within the last five years i have had the command of a lit tle more money than in the previous five years, for i have sold some books and some lectures, yet i have not been a whit better fed or clothed or warmed or sheltered, not a whit richer, except that i have been less concerned about my living ; but perhaps my life has been the less serious for it, and to balance it, i feel now that there is winter. 209 a possibility of failure. who knows but i may gome upon tlie town, if, as is likely, the pub lic want no more of my books or lectures, as, with regard to the last, is already the case. be fore, i was much likelier to take the town upon my shoulders. that is, i have lost some of my independence on them, when they would say that i had gained an independence. if you wish to give a man a sense of poverty, give him a thou sand dollars. the next hundred dollars he gets will not be worth more than ten that he used to get. have pity on him. withhold your gift. p. m. up river. ... it is now good walking on the river, for though there has been no thaw since the snow came, a great part of it has been converted into snow-ice by sinking the old ice beneath the water. the crust of the rest is stronger than in the fields, because the snow is so shallow and has ibgen so moist. the river is thus an advantage as a highway, not only in summer, and when the ice is bare in winter, but even when the snow lies very deep in the fields. it is invaluable to the walker, being now, not only the most interesting, but, excepting the narrow and unpleasant track in the highway, the only practicable route. the snow never lies so deep over it as elsewhere, and, if deep, it sinks the ice and is soon converted into snow-ice to a great extent, beside being blown out of the river 210 winter. valley. neither is it drifted here. here, where you cannot walk at all in the summer, is better walking than elsewhere in the winter. but what a different aspect has the river's brim from what it wears in summer ! i do not at this moment hear an insect's hum, nor see a bird or a flower. that museum of animal and vegetable life, a meadow, is now reduced to a uniform level of white snow, with only half a dozen kinds of shrubs and weeds rising here and there above it. jan. 20, 1857. ... i hear that boston har bor froze over on the 18th down to fort inde pendence. the river has been frozen everywhere except at the very few swiftest places since about de cember 18th, and everywhere since about january 1st. at e. vf . e.'s this evening at about 6 p. m., i was called out to see e.'s "cave in the snow. it was a hole about two and a half feet wide and six feet long into a drift, a little winding, and he had got a lamp at the inner extremity. i observed as i approached in a course at right angles with the length of the cave, that its mouth was lit as if the light were close to it, so that i did not suspect its depth. indeed, the light of this lamp was remarkably reflected and distrib uted. the snowy walls were one universal re flector with countless facets. i think that one winter. 211 lamp would light sufficiently a hall built of this material. the snow about the mouth of the cave within had the yellow color of the flame to me approaching, as if the lamp were close to it. we afterward buried the lamp in a little crypt in this snow-drift, and walled it in, and found that its light was visible even in this twilight through fifteen inches thickness of snow. the snow was all aglow with it. if it had been darker, probably it would have been visible through a much greater thickness. — • but what was most surprising to me, when e. crawled into the extremity of his cave, and shouted at the top of his voice, it sounded ridiculously faint, as if he were a quarter of a mile off. at first i could not believe that he spoke loud, but we all of us crawled in by turns, and though our heads were only six feet from those outside, our loudest shouting only amused and surprised them. ap parently the porous snow drank up all the sound. the voice was in fact muffled by the surround ing snow walls, and i saw that we might lie in that hole screaming for assistance in vain while travelers were passing along twenty feet distant. it had the effect of ventriloquism. so you need only make a snow house in your yard and pass an hour in it, to realize a good deal of esqui maux life. jan. 20, 1859. . . . among four or five pick 212 winter. erel in a " well " on the river, i see one with distinct transverse bars, as i look down on its back, not quite across the back, but plain as they spring from the side of the back, while all the others are uniformly dark above. is not the former esox fasciatus f . . . the green of the ice and water begins to be visible about half an hour before sunset. is it produced by the reflected blue of the sky min gling with the yellow or pink of the setting sun ? jan. 21, 1838. man is the artificer of hiaown happiness. let him beware how he complains of the disposition of circumstances, for it is his own disposition he blames. if this is sour, or that rough, or the other steep, let him think if it be not his work. if his look curdles all hearts, let him not complain of a sour reception ; if he hobble in his gait, let him not grumble at the roughness of the way; if he is weak in the knees, let him not call the hiu steep. this was the pith of the inscription on the wall of the swedish inn, " you will find at trolhate excel lent bread, meat, and wine, provided you bring them with you ! " every leaf and twig was this morning cov ered with a sparkling ice armor. even the grasses in exposed fields were hung with innu merable diamond pendants which jingled mer rily when brushed by the foot of the traveler. winter. 213 ... it was as if some superincumbent stratum of the earth had been removed in the night, exposing to light a bed of untarnished crystals. the scene changed at every step, or as the head was inclined to the right or to the left. there were the opal, and sapphire, and emerald, and jasper, and beryl, and topaz, and ruby. such is beauty ever, neither here nor there, now nor then, neither in rome nor in athens, but wherever there is a soul to admire. if i seek her elsewhere because i do not find her at home, my search vnll be a fruitless one. jan. 21, 1841. "we can render men the best assistance by letting them see how rare a thing it is to need any assistance. i am not in haste to help men more than god is. if they will not help themselves, shall i become their abettor ? if i have unintentionally injured the feelings of any, or profaned their sacred character, we shall be necessitated to know each other better than before. i have gained a glorious vantage ground then, and to the other the shaft which carried the wound will bear its own remedy with it, for we cannot be profaned without the con sciousness that we have a holy fane for our asy lum somewhere. would that sincere words might always drive men thus to earth them selves ! jan. 21, 1852. ... to recoi'd truths which 214 winter. have the same relation and value to the next world, i. e., the world of thought and of the soul, that political news have to this. . . . heard lecture to-night. . . . why did i not like it better ? can i deny that it was good? perhaps i am bound to account to my self at least for any lurking dislike for what others admire, and t am not prepared to find fault with. well, i did not like it then because it did not make me like it, it did not carry me away captive. the lecturer was not simple enough. for the most part, the manner over bore, choked off, stifled, put out of sight the matter. i was inclined to forget that he was speaking, conveying ideas, thought there had been an intermission. never endeavor to sup ply the tone which you think proper for certain sentences. it is as if a man whose mind was at ease should supply the tones and gestures for a man in distress who found only the words. one makes a speech and another behind him makes the gestures. • — then he reminded me of emer son, and i could not afford to be reminded of christ himself. yet who can deny that it was good ? but it was that intelligence, that way of viewing things (combined with much pecul iar talent^, which is the common property of this generatio"h. a man does best when be is most himself. winter. 215 i never realized so distinctly as at this mo ment that i am peacefully parting company with the best friend i ever had, from the fact that each is pursuing his proper path. i perceive that it is j)ossib]e we may have a better under standing now than when we were more at one, not expecting such essential agreement as before. simply our paths diverge. jan. 21, 1853. a fine, still, warm moonlight evening. . . . moon not yet full. to the woods by the deep cut at nine o'clock. the blueness of the sky at night is an everlasting surprise to me, suggesting the constant presence and preva lence of light in the firmament, the color it wears by day, that we see through the veil of night to the constant blue. the iiight is not black when the air is clear, but blue still, as by day. the great ocean of light and^ther is unaffected by our partial night. ... at midnight i see into the universal day. i am somewhat oppressed and saddened, by the sameness and apparent poverty of the heav ens, that these irregular and fw geometrical figures which the constellations make are no other than those seen by the chaldsean shep herds. i pine for a new world in the heavens as well as on the earth, and though it is some consolation to hear of the wilderness of stars and systems invisible to the naked eye, yet the 216 winter. sky does not make that impression of variety and wildness that even the forest does, as it ought to do. it makes an impression rather of simplicity and unchangeableness, as of eternal laws. ... i seem to see it pierced with visual rays from a thousand observatories. it is more the domain of science than of poetry. it is the stars as not known to science that i would know, the stars which the lonely traveler knows. the chaldsean shepherds saw not the same stars which i see, and if i am elevated in the least toward the heavens, i do not accept their classification of them. i am not to be dis tracted by the names which they have imposed. the sun which i know is not apollo, nor is the evening star venus. the hea,ven should be as new, at least, as the world is new. the clas sification of the stars is old and musty. it is as if a mildew had taken place in the heavens, as if the stars, so closely packed, had heated and moulded there. if they appear fixed, it is because men have been thus necessitated to see them. ... a few good anecdotes is our science, with a few imposing statements respecting dis tance and size, and little or nothing about the stars as they concern man. it teaches how he may survey a country or sail a ship, and not how he may steer his life. astrology contained the germ of a higher truth than this. it may winter. 217 happen that the stars are more significant and truly celestial to the teamster than to the astron omer. . . . children study astronomy at the district school, and learn that the sun is ninety five millions of miles distant and the like, • a statement which never made any impression on me, because i never walked it, and which i can not be said to believe. but the sun shines nev ertheless. though observatories are multiplied, the heavens receive very little attention. the naked eye may easily see farther than the armed. it depends on who looks through it. man's eye is the true star-finder, the comet seeker. no superior telescope to this has been invented. in those big ones, the recoil is equal to the force of the discharge. " the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling " ranges from earth to heaven, which the astronomer's eye not often does. it does not see far beyond the dome of the observatory. . . . as i walk the railroad causeway, i am dis turbed by the sound of my steps on the frozen ground. i wish to hear the silence of the night, i cannot walk with my ears covered, for the silence is something positive and to be heard. i must stand still and listen with open ear, far from the noises of the village, that the night may make its impression on me, a fertue and eloquent silence. sometimes the silence is 218 winter. merely negative, an arid and barren waste in which i shudder, where no ambrosia grows. i must hear the whispering of a myriad voices. silence alone is worthy to be heard. it is of various depths and fertility like soil. now it is a mere sahara where men perish of hunger and thirst, now a fertile bottom and prairie of the west. as i leave the village, drawing nearer to the woods, i listen from time to time to hear the hounds of silence baying the moon, to know if they are on the track of any game. if there is no diana in the night, what is it worth? . . . the silence sings. it is mu sical. i remember a night when it was audible. i heard the unspeakable. . . . if night is the mere negation of day, i hear nothing but my own steps in it. death is with me, and life far away. if the elements are not human, if the winds do not sing or sigh, as the stars twinkle, my life runs shallow. i measure the depth of my own being. . . . when i enter the woods, i am fed by the variety, the forms of the trees above against the blue, with the stars seen through the pines, like the lamps hung on them in an illumination, the somewhat indistinct and misty fineness of the pine tops, the finely divided spray of the oaks, etc., and the shadow of all these on the snow. the first shadow i came to, i thought was a black winter. 219 place where the woodchoppers had had a fire. these myriad shadows checker the white ground and enhance the brightness of the enlightened portions. see the shadows of these young oaks which have lost half their leaves, more beau tiful than the trees themselves, like the shadow of a chandelier, and motionless as fallen leaves on the snow ; but shake the tree, and all is in motion. in this stillness and at this distance i hear the nine o'clock bell in bedford, five miles off, which i might never hear in the village ; but here its music surmounts the village din and has something very sweet and noble and in spiring in it, associated in fact with the hooting of owls. returning, i thought i heard the creaking of a wagon, just starting from hubbard's door, and rarely musical it sounded. it was the telegraph harp. it began to sound at one spot only. it is very fitful, and only sounds when it is in the mood. you may go by twenty times both when the wind is high and when it is low, and let it blow which way it will, and yet hear no strain from it. but at another time, at a particular spot, you may hear a strain rising and swelling on the string, which may at last ripen to something glorious. the wire will perhaps labor long with it before it attains to melody. 220 winter. even the creaking of a wagon in a frosty night has music in it which allies it to the highest and purest strains of the muse. . . . minott says his mother told him she had seen a deer come down the hill behind her house, where j. moore's now is, and cross the road and the meadow in front. thinks it may have been eighty years ago. jan. 21, 1857. ... it is remarkable how many tracks of foxes you will see quite near the village, where they have been in the night, and yet a regular walker will not glimpse one oftener than once in eight or ten years. . . . as i flounder along the corner road against the root fence, a very large flock of snow bun tings alight with a wheeling flight amid the weeds rising above the snow ... a hundred or two of them. they run restlessly amid the weeds, so that i can hardly get sight of them through my glass. then suddenly all arise and fly only two or three rods, alighting within three rods of me. they keep up a constant twittering. it is as if they were ready any instant for a longer flight, but their leader had not so ordered it. sud denly away they sweep again, and i see them alight in a distant field where the weeds rise above the snow, but in a few minutes they have left that also, and gone farther north. beside their rippling note, they have a vibratory twitter, winter. 221 and from the loiterers you have a quite tender peep, as they fly after the vanishing flock. what independent creatures ! they go seeking their food from north to south. if new hamp shire and maine are covered deeply with snow, they scale down to massachusetts for their breakfast. not liking the grains in this field, away they dash to another distant one, attracted by the weeds rising, above the snow. who cau guess in what field, by what river or mountain, they breakfasted this morning. they did not seem to regard me so near, but as they went off, their wave actually broke over me as a rock. they have the pleasure of society at their feasts, a hundred dining at once, busily talking while eating, remembering what occurred in grinnell land. as they flew past me, they presented a pretty appearance, somewhat kke broad bars of white alternating with bars of black. jan. 22, 1852. having occasion to get up and light afanip in the middle of a sultry night, perhaps to exterminate mosquitoes, i observed a stream of large black ants passing up and down one of the bare corner posts, those descending having their large white eggs or larvae in their mouths, the others making haste up for another load. i supposed that they had found the heat so great just under the roof as to compel them to remove their progeny to a cooler place. 222 winter. they had evidently taken and communicated the resolution to improve the coolness of the night to remove their young to a cooler and safer locality, one stream running up, and another down, with great industry. but why did i change ? why did i leave the woods ? i do not think that i can tell. i have often wished myself back. i do not know any better how i came to go there. perhaps it is none of my business, even if it is yours. per haps i wanted change. there was a little stag nation, it may be, about two o'clock in the after noon. the world's axle creaked, as if it wanted greasing, as if the oxen labored with the wain, and could hardly get their load over the ridge of the day. perhaps if i lived there much longer, 1 might live there forever. one would think twice before he accepted heaven on such terms. a ticket to heaven must include a ticket to limbo, purgatory, and hell. your ticket to the boxes admits you to the pit alscf. how much botany is indebted to the ara bians. a great part of our common names of plants appear to be arabic. . . . the pleasures of the intellect are permanent, the pleasures of the heart are transitory. — my friend invites me to read my papers to him. gladly would i read, if he would hear. he must not hear coarsely, but finely, suffering not winter. 223 the least to pass through the sieve of hearing. — to associate with one for years with joy who never met you thought with thought ! an over flowing sympathy, while yet there is no intellect ual communion. could we not meet on higher ground with the same heartiness? it is dull work reading to one who does not apprehend you. how can it go on ? i will still abide by the truth in my converse and intercourse with my friends, whether i am so brought nearer to or removed farther from them. i shall not be less your friend for answering you truly, though coldly. even the estrangement of friends is a fact to be serenely contemplated, as in the course of nature. it is of no use to lie either by word or action. is not the everlasting truth agreeable to you? to set down such choice experiences that my own writings may inspire me, and at last i may make wholes of parts. certainly it is a distinct profession to. rescue from oblivion and to fix the sentiments and thoughts which visit all men more or less generally. that the contemplation of the unfinished picture may suggest its har monious completion. associate reverently and as much as you can with your loftiest thoughts. each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest-egg by the side of which more will be laid. . . . perhaps this is the main value of a 224 winter. habit of writing, of keeping a journal, that so we remember our best hours, and stimulate our selves. my thoughts are my company. they have a certain individuality and separate exist ence, age, personality. having by chance re corded a few disconnected thoughts, and then brought them into juxtaposition, they suggest a whole new field in which it was possible to labor and think. thought begat thought. . . . when a man asks me a question, i look him in the face. if i do not see any inquiry there, i cannot answer it. a man asked me about the coldness of this winter compared with others, last night. i looked at him. his face expressed no more curiosity or relationship to me than a custard pudding. i made him a random an swer. i put him off till he was in earnest. he wanted to make conversation. . . . that in the preaching or mission of the jes uits in canada which converted the indians was their sincerity. they could not be suspected of sinister motives. the savages were not poor observers or reasoners. the priests were there fore sure of success, for they had paid the price of it. "we resist no true invitations. they are irre sistible. when my friend asks me to stay, and i do not, unless i have another engagement, it is because i do not find myself invited. it is winter. 225 not in his will to invite me. we should deal with the real mood of our .friends. i visited my friend constantly for many years, and he postponed our friendship to trivial engagements, so that i saw him not at all. when in after years he had leisure to meet me, i did not find myself invited to go to him. jan. 22, 1854. . . . ■ once or twice of late i have seen the mother-of-pearl tints and rainbow flecks in the western sky. the usual time is when the air is clear and pretty cool, about an hour before sunset. yesterday i saw a very permanent specimen, like a long knife handle of mother-of-pearl, very pale, with an interior blue, and rosaceous tinges. i think the summer sky never exhibits this so finely. no second snow-storm in the winter can be so fair and interesting as the first. jan. 22, 1855. heavy rain in the night and half of to-day, with very high wind from the southward washing off the snow, and filling the road with water. ... it is very exciting to see where was so lately only ice and snow dark, wavy lakes dashing in furious torrents through the commonly dry channels under the cause ways, to hear only the rush and roar of waters, and look down on mad billows where in summer are commonly only dry pebbles. . . . the musk rats driven out of their holes by the water are 226 winter. exceedingly numerous. yet many of their cabins are above water on the s. branch. here there are none. we saw fifteen or twenty of these creatures at least between derby's bridge and the tarbel spring, either swimming with surprising swiftness up or down or across the stream, to avoid us, or sitting at the water's edge, or resting on the ■ edge of the ice, or on some alder bough just on the surface. one re freshed himself after his cold swim regardless of us, probed his fur with his nose, and scratched his ear like a dog. they frequently swam to ward an apple-tree in the midst of the m'ater, in the vain hope of finding a resting place and refuge there. i saw one looking quite a red dish brown, busily feeding on some plant just at the water's edge, thrusting his head under for it. but i hear the sound of g 's gun up stream, and see his bag stuffed out with their dead bodies. jan. 22, 1857. ... 1 asked minott about the cold friday. he said " it was plaguey cold. it stung like a wasp." he remembers seeing them toss up water in a shoemaker's shop, usually a very warm place, and when it struck the floor it was frozen, and rattled like so many shot. jan. 22, 1859. . . . the muskrat hunter last night with his increased supply of powder and shot, and boat turned up somewhere on the winter. 227 bank, now that the river is rapidly rising, dreaming of his exploits to-day in shooting muskrats, of the great pile of dead rats that will weigh down his boat before night when he will return wet and weary and weather-beaten to his hut with an appetite for his supper, and for much sluggish . . . social intercourse with his fellows, even he, dark, dull, much battered flint as he is, is an inspired man to his extent now, perhaps the most inspired by this freshet of any, and the musketaquid meadows cannot spare him. there are poets of all kinds and degrees, little known to each other. the lake school is not the only or the principal one. they love various things ; some love beauty and some love rum. some go to rome, and some go a-fishing, and are sent to the house of correc tion once a month. they keep up their fires by means unknown to me. i know not their com ings and goings. how can i tell what violets they watch for ? i know them wild, and ready to risk all when their muse invites. the most sluggish will be up early enough then, and face any amount of wet and cold. i meet these gods of the river and woods with sparlding faces (like apollo's), late from the house of correction, it may be, carrying whatever mystic and forbidden bottles or other vessels concealed, while the dull, regular priests are steering their 228 winter. parish rafts in a prose mood. "what care i to see galleries full of representations of heathen gods, when i can see actual living ones, by an infinitely superior artist. ... if you read the rig veda, oldest of books, as it were, describing a very primitive people and condition of things, you hear in their prayers of a still older, more primitive and aboriginal race in their midst and roundabout, warring on them, and seizing their flocks and herds, infesting their pastures. thus is it in another sense in all communities, and hence the pi-isons and idolice. i hear these guns going to-day, and i must confess they are to me a springlike and exhilarating sound, like the cock-crowing, though each one may report the death of a muskrat. this, methinks, or the like of this, with whatever mixture of dross, is the real morning or evening hymn that goes up from these vales to-day, and which the stars echo. this is the best sort of glorifying god and enjoying him that at all prevails here to-day. ... as a mother loves to see her children take nourishment and expand, so god loves to see his children thrive on the nutriment he has fur nished them. . . . these aboriginal men cannot be repressed, but under some guise or other they survive and reappear continually. just as sim ply as the crow picks up the worms which are over the fields, having been washed out by the winter. 229 thaw, these men pick up the muskrats that have been washed out of the banks. and to some such ends men plow and sail, and powder and shot are made, and the grocer exists to retail them, though he may think himself much more the deacon of some church. jan. 22, 1860. up river to fair haven pond. . . . where the. sedge grows rankly and is uncut, as along the edge of the river and meadows, what fine coverts are made for mice, etc., at this season. it is arched over, and the snow rests chiefly on its ends, while the middle part is elevated from six inches to a foot, and forms a thick thatch, as it were, even when all is covered with snow, under which the mice, etc., can run freely, out of the way of the wind and of foxes. after a pretty deep snow has just partially melted, you are surprised to find, as you walk through such a meadow, how high and lightly the sedge lies up, as if there had been no pressure upon it. it grows, perhaps, in dense tufts or tussocks, and when it falls over, it forms a thickly thatched roof. nature provides shelter for her creatures in various ways. if the muskrat has no longer extensive fields of weeds and grass to crawl in, what an extensive range it has under the ice of the meadows and river sides ; for the water settling directly after freezing, an icy roof of 230 winter. indefinite extent is thus provided for it, and it passes almost its whole winter under shelter, out of the wind, and invisible to men. jan. 23, 1841. a day is lapsing. i hear cockerels crowing in the yard, and see them stalking among the chips in the sun. i hear busy feet on the floors, and the whole house jars with industry. surely the day is well spent, and the time is full to overflowing. mankind is as busy as the flowers in summer, which make haste to unfold themselves in the forenoon, and close their petals in the afternoon. the momentous topics of human life are always of secondary importance to the business in hand, just as car penters discuss politics between the strokes of the hammer, while they are shingling a roof. the squeaking of the pump sounds as necessary as the music of the spheres. the solidity and apparent necessity of this routine insensibly recommend it to me. it is like a cane or a cushion for the infirm, and in view of it all are infirm. if there were but one erect and solid standing tree in the woods, all creatures would go to rub themselves against it, and make sure of their footing. routine is a ground to stand on, a wall to retreat to. "we cannot draw on our boots without bracing ourselves against it. our health requires that we should recline on it from time to time. when we are in it, the winter. 231 hand stands still on the face of the clock, and we grow like corn in the genial darkness and silence of the night. our weakness wants it, but oar strength uses it. good for the body is the work of the body, and good for the soul, the work of the soul, and good for either, the work of the other. let them not call hard names, nor know a divided interest. when i detect a beauty in any of the recesses of nature, i am reminded by the serene and retired spirit in which it requires to be contem plated of the inexpressible privacy of a life. how silent and unambitious it is ! the beauty there is in mosses will have to be considered from the holiest, quietest nook. — the gods delight in stillness. . . . my truest, serenest moments are too still for emotion. they have woolen feet. in all our lives, we live under the hill, and if we are not gone, we live there still. jan. 23, 1852. . . . deep cut going to fair haven hill. no music from the telegraph harp on the causeway where the wind is strong, but in the cut this cold day i hear memorable strains. what must the birds and beasts think where it passes through woods, who heard only the squeaking of the trees before ? i should think that these strains would get into their music at last. wiu not the mocking-bird be heard one day inserting this strain in his medley ? it in 232 winter. toxicates me. orpheus is still alive. all poetry and mythology revive. the spirits of all bards sweep the strings. i hear the clearest silver lyre-like tones, tyrtsean tones. ... it is the most glorious music i ever heard. all those bards revive and flourish again in those five min utes in the deep cut. the breeze came through an oak still waving its dry leaves. the very fine, clear tones seemed to come from the very core and pith of the telegraph pole. i know not but it is my own chords that tremble so divinely. there are barytones and high, sharp tones, and some come sweeping seemingly from farther along the wire. the latent music of the earth had found here a vent, music ^olian. there were two strings in fact, one each side. . . . thus, as ever, the finest uses of things are the accidental. mr. morse did not invent this music. . . . there are some whose ears help me so that my things have a rare significance when i read to them. it is almost too good a hearing, so that, for the time, i regard my own writing from too favorable a point of view. jan. 23, 1854. love tends to purify and sublime itself. it mortifies and triumphs over the flesh, and the bond of its union is holiness. the increased length of the days is very observable of late. what is a winter unless winter. 233 you have risen and gone abroad frequently before sunrise and by starlight. — yarro speaks of what he calls, i believe, before-light (antelti cana') occupations in winter, on the farm. such is especially milking in this neighborhood. speaking of the rustic viua, he says, you must see that the kitchen is convenient, " because some things are to be done there in the winter before daylight (antelucanis temporibus), food is to be prepared and taken." in the study, are not some things to be done before daylight, and a certain food to be prepared there ? jan. 23, 1857. the coldest day that i re member recording, clear and bright, but very high wind, blowing the snow. ink froze ; had to break the ice in my pail with a hammer. thermometer at 6j a. m., — 18°, at loj, —14°, at 12|, —9°, at 4 p. m., — 5^°; at 7^ p. m., —8°. i may safely say that — 5° has been the highest temperature to-day by our thermometer. walk ing this p. m., i notice that the face inclines to stiffen. . . . on first coming out in very cold weather, i find that i breathe fast, though with out walking faster or exerting myself more than usual. jan. 24, 1857. about 6j a. m. [mercury (?)] in the bulb of thermometer. smith's on the same nail, —80°. at 9, a. m., ours —18°, smith's — 22°, which indicates that ours would have 234 winter. stood at 26° at 6j a. m., if the thermometer had been long enough. at llj^ a. m., ours was — 1°, at 4 p. m., +12°. jan. 25, 1857. still another very cold morn ing. smith's thermometer over ours, at — 29°, [mercury ?] in bulb of ours. but about 7 ours was 18°, and smith's at 24°. ours, therefore, at first, about —23°. jan. 26, 1857. another cold morning. none looked early, but about 8, it was — 14°. saw bos ton harbor frozen over, as it had been for some time. it reminded me of, i think, parry's win ter harbor, with vessels frozen in. saw thou sands on the ice, a stream of men where they were cutting a channel toward the city. ice said to reach fourteen miles. snow untracked on many decks. ice did not finally go out tiu about february 15th. jan. 23, 1858. the wonderfully mild and pleasant weather continues. the ground has been bare since the 11th. this morning was colder than before. i have not been able to walk up the north branch this winter, nor along the channel of the south branch at any time. p. m. to saw mill brook. a fine afternoon. there has been but little use for gloves this win ter, though i have been surveying a great deal for three months. the sun and cock-crowing, bare ground, etc., remind me of spring. winter. 235 standing on the bridge over the mill brook, on the turnpike, there being but little ice on the s. side, i see several small water bugs {gyrans) swimming about, as in the spring. . . . at ditch pond, i hear what i suppose to be a fox barking, an exceedingly husky, hoarse, and ragged note, prolonged perhaps by the echo, like a feeble puppy, or even a child endeavoring to scream, but checked by fear. yet it is on a high key. it sounds so through the wood, while i am in the hollow, that i cannot tell from which side it comes. i hear it bark forty or fifty times, at least. it is a peculiar sound, quite unlike any other woodland sound that i know. . . . who can doubt that men are by a certain fate what they are, contending with unseen and un imagined difficulties, or encouraged and aided by equally mysterious, auspicious circumstances ? who can doubt this essential and innate dif ference between man and man, when he con siders a whole race, like the indian, inevitably and resignedly passing away in spite of our efforts to christianize and educate them? indi viduals accept their fate and live according to it as the indian does. everybody notices that the indian retains his habits wonderfully, is still the same man that the discoverers found. the fact is, the history of the white man is a history 236 winter. of improvement, that of the red man, a history of fixed habits or stagnation. to insure health, a man's relation to nature must come very near to a personal one. he must be conscious of a friendliness in her. when human friends fail or die, she must stand in the gap to him. i cannot conceive of any life which deserves the name, unless there is in it a certain tender relation to nature. this it is which makes winter warm, and supplies society in the desert and wilderness. unless nature sympathizes with and speaks to us, as it were, the most fertile and blooming regions are bar ren and dreary. ... i do not see that i can live tolerably without affection for nature. if i feel no softening toward the rocks, what do they signify. . . . the dog is to the fox as the white man to the red. the former has attained to more clear ness in his bark ; it is more ringing and musical, more developed ; he explodes the vowels of his alphabet better, and besides he has made his place so good in the world that he can run with out skulking in the open field. what a smoth ered, ragged, feeble, and unmusical sound is the bark of the fox ! it seems as if he scarcely dared raise his voice lest he should catch the ear of his tame cousin and inveterate foe. . . . i do not think much of that chemistry that winter. 237 can extract corn and potatoes out of a barren soil, compared with that which can extract thought and sentiment out of the life of a man on any soil. it is in vain to write of the seasons unless you have the seasons in you. jan. 23, 1859 there is a cold n. w. wind, and i notice that the snow fleas, which were so abundant over this water yesterday, have hopped to some lee, i. e., are collected like powder under the s. e. side of posts or trees, sticks of ridges in the ice. you are surprised to see that they manage to get out of the wind. on the s. e. side of every such barrier along the shore there is a dark line or heap of them. jan. 24, 1841. i almost shrink from the arduousness of meeting men erectly day by day. be resolutely and faithfully what you are, be humbly what you aspire to be. be sure you give men the best of your wares, though they be poor enough,' and the gods will help you to lay up a better store for the future. man's noblest gift to man is his sincerity, for it embraces his integrity also. let him not dole out of himself anxiously to suit their weaker or stronger stom achs, but make a clear gift of himself, and empty his coffers at once. i would be in society as in the landscape ; in the presence of nature there is no reserve nor effrontery. 238 winter. coleridge says of the " ideas spoken out every where in the old and new testaments," that they " resemble the fixed, stars which appear of the same size to the naked or the armed eye, the magnitude of which the telescope may rather seem to diminish than to increase." it is more proper for a spiritual fact to have suggested an analogous natural one than for the natural fact to have preceded the spiritual in our minds. by spells seriousness wiu be forced to cut capers, and drink a deep and refreshing draught of silliness, to turn this sedate day of lucifer's and apollo's into an all fools' day for harlequin and cornwallis. the sun does not grudge his rays to either, but they are alike patronized, by the gods. like overtasked school-boys, all my members and nerves and sinews petition thought for a recess, and my very thigh bones itch to slip away from under me, and run and join in the mel^e. i exult in stark inanity. — we think the gods reveal themselves only to sedate and musing gentlemen, but not so ; the buffoon in the midst of his antics catches unobserved glimpses which he treasures for the lonely hour. when i have been playing torn fool, i have been driven to exchange the old for a more liberal and catholic philosophy. jan. 24, 1852. if thou art a writer, write as winter. 239 if thy time were short, for it is indeed short, at the longest. improve each occasion when the soul is reached. drain the cup of inspiration to its last dregs. fear no intemperance in that, for the years will come when otherwise thou wilt regret opportunities unimproved. the spring will not last forever. these fertile and expanding seasons of thy life, when the rain reaches thy root, when thy vigor shoots, when thy flower is budding, shall be fewer and farther between. again i say, remember thy creator in the days of thy youth. use and commit to life what you cannot commit to memory. i hear the tones of my sister's piano below. it reminds me of strains which once i heard more frequently, when possessed with the inaudible rhythm i sought my chamber in the cold, and communed with my own thoughts. i feel as if i then re ceived the gifts of the gods with too much indif ference. why did i not cultivate those fields they introduced me to? does nothing with stand the inevitable march of time? why did i not use my eyes when i stood on pisgah ? now i hear those strains but seldom. my rhythmical mood does not endure. i cannot draw from it and return to it in my thought as to a well, all the evening or the morning. i cannot dip my pen iu it. i cannot work the vein, it is so fine and volatile. ah, sweet, ineffable ]*eminiscences. 240 winter. in thy journal let there never be a jest. to the earnest, there is nothing ludicrous. . . . when the telegraph harp trembles and wavers, i am most affected, as if it were approaching to articulation. it sports so with my heart strings. when the harp dies away a little, then i revive for it. it cannot be too faint. i almost envy the irish whose shanty in the cut is so near that they can hear this music daily, standing at their door. how strange to think that a sound so soothing, elevating, educating . . . might have been heard sweeping other strings when only the red man ranged these fields, might, perchance, in course of time have civilized him ! jan. 24, 1856. a journal is a record of ex periences and growth, not a preserve of things weu done or said. i am occasionally reminded of a statement which i have made in conversa tion and immediately forgotten, which would read much better than what i put in my jour nal. it is a ripe, dry fruit of long past experi ence which falls from me easily without giving pain or pleasure. the charm of the journal must consist in a certain greenness, though freshness, and not in maturity. here i cannot afford to be remembering what i said or did, my scurf cast off, but what i am and aspire to become. reading the hymns of the rig veda, trans lated by wilsonj which consist, in a great winter. 241 measure, of simple epithets addressed to the fir mament, or the dawn, or the winds, which mean more or less as the reader is more or less alert and imaginative, and seeing how widely the va rious translators have differed, they regarding not the poetry, but the history and philology, dealing with very concise sanskrit which must almost always be amplified to be understood, i am sometimes inclined to doubt if the translator has not made something out of nothing, -whether a real idea or sentiment has been thus trans mitted to us from so primitive a period. i doubt if learned germans might not thus edit pebbles from the sea-shore into hymns of the rig veda, and translators translate them accordingly, ex tracting the meaning which the sea has imparted to them in very primitive times. while the commentators and translators are disputing about the meaning of this word or that, i hear only the resounding of the ancient sea, and put into it the deepest meaning i am possessed of, for i do not the least care where i get my ideas, or what suggests them. . . . i have seen many a collection of stately elms which better deserved to be represented at the general court than the manikins beneath, than the bar-room, the victualing cellar, and groceries they overshadowed. when i see their magnificent domes miles away in the horizon. 242 winter. over intervening valleys and forests, they sug gest a village, a community there. but, after all, it is a secondary consideration whether there are human dwellings beneath them. these may have long since passed away. i find that into my idea of the village has entered more of the elm than of the human being. they are worth many a political borough. they constitute a borough. the poor human representative of his party sent out from beneath their shade will not suggest a tithe of the dignity, the true noble ness and comprehensiveness of view, the sturdi riess and independence, and serene beneficence that they do. they look from township to township. . . . they battle with the tempests of .a century. see what scars they bear, what limbs they lost before we were born. yet they never adjourn, they steadily vote for their prin ciples, and send their roots farther and wider from the same centre. they die at tbfeir posts, and they leave a tough butt for the choppers to exercise themselves about, and a stump which serves for their monument. they attend no caucus, they make no compromise, they use no policy. their one principle is growth. they combine a true radicalism with a true conserva tism. their radicalism is not a cutting away of roots, but a multiplication and extension of them under all surrounding institutions. they take winter. 243 a firmer hold on the earth that they may rise higher into the heavens. . . . their conserva tism is a dead but solid heart-wood which is the pivot and firm column of support to all their growth, appropriating nothing to itself, but forever, by its support, assisting to extend the area of their radicalism. half a century after they are dead at the core, they are preserved by radical reforms. they do not, like men, from radicals turn conservatives. their conservative part dies out first, their radical and growing part survives. they acquire new states and territories while the old dominions decay and become the habitation of bearsand owls and coons. jan. 24, 1858. p. m. nut meadow brook. the river is broadly open as usual this winter. you can hardly say that we have had any sleigh ing at all . . . though five or six inches of snow lay on the ground five days after january 6th. but i do not quite like this warm weather and bare ground at this season. what is a winter without snow and ice in this latitude ? the bare earth is unsightly. this winter is but tin buried summer. . . . at nut meadow brook the small sized water bugs are as abundant and active as in sum mer. i see forty or fifty circling together in the smooth and sunny bays all along the 244 winter. brook. this is something new to me. what must they think of this winter? it is like a child waked up and set to playing at midnight. they seem more ready than usual to dive to the bottom when disturbed. at night, of course, they dive to the bottom and bury themselves, and if in the morning they perceive no curtain of ice drawn over their sky and the pleasant weather continues, they gladly rise again and resume their gyrations in some sunny bay amid the alders and the stubble. i think i never noticed them more numerous, but i never looked for them so particularly. . . . the sun falling thus warmly, for so long, on the open surface of the brook tempts them upward gradually. . . . what a funny way they have of going to bed. they do not take a light and retire up-stairs, they go below. suddenly it . is heels up and heads down, and they go down to their muddy bed, and let the unresting stream flow over them in their dreams. they go to bed in another element. what a deep slumber must be theirs, and what dreams down in the mud there ! so the insect life is not withdrawn far off, but a warm sun would soon entice it forth. some times they seem to have a little difficulty in making the plunge. may be they are too dry to slip under. i saw one floating on its back, and it struggled a little while before it righted winter. 245 itself. suppose you were to plot the course of one for a day. what kind of a figure would it make ? probably this feat, too, will one day be performed by science, that maid of all work. i see one chasing a mote, and the wave the crea^ ture makes always causes the mote to float away from it. i would like to know what it is they communicate to one another, they who appear to value each other's society so much. how many water-bugs make a quorum ? how many hundreds does their fourier think it takes to make a complete bug ? where did they get their backs polished so? they will have oc casion to remember this year, that winter when we were waked out of our annual sleep. what is their precise hour for retiring ? i see stretching from side to side of this smootli brook where it is three or four feet wide what seems to indicate an invisible waving line, like a cobweb, against which the water is heaped up a very little. this line is constantly swayed to and fro, as by the current or wind, bellying forward here and there. i try repeatedly to catch and break it with my hand and let the water run free, but still to my surprise i clutch nothing but fluid, and the imaginary line keeps its place. is it the fluctuating edge of a lighter, perhaps more oily, fluid, overflowing a heavier ? i sec several such lines. it is somewhat like the 246 winter. slightest conceivable smooth fall over a dam. i must ask the water-bug that glides across it. ah, if i had no more sins to answer for than a water-bug ! they are only the small water bugs that i see. they are earlier in the spring and apparently hardier than the others. . . . between winter and summer there is to my mind an immeasurable interval. when i pry into the old bank swallow holes to-day, see the marks of their bills, and even whole eggs left at the bottom, these things affect me as the phe nomena of a former geological period. yet per chance the very swallow which laid those eggs will revisit this hole next spring. the upper side of her gallery is a low arch quite firm and durable. jan. 24, 1859. ... i see an abundance of caterpillars of various kinds on the ice of the meadows, many of them large, dark, hairy, with longitudinal light stripes, somewhat like the com mon apple one. many of them are frozen in still, some for two thirds their length, though all are alive. yet it has been so cold since the rise that you can now cross the channel almost anywhere. — i also see a great many of those lit tle brown grasshojjpers, and one perfectly green, some of them frozen in, but generally on the surface, showing no sign of life, yet when i brought them home to experiment on, i found winter. 247 them all aliv^and kicking in my pocket. there were also a small kind of reddish wasp quite lively on the ice, and other insects. there were naked or smooth worms or caterpillars. this shows what insects have their winter quarters in the meadow grass. this ice is a good field for the entomologist. . . . the larger spiders gen erally rest on the ice with all their bags spread, but on being touched they gather them up. monday, jan. 25, 1841. on the morning when the wild geese go over i, too, feel the mi gratory instinct strong within me, and anticipate the breaking up of winter. if i yielded to this impulse, it would surely guide me to summer haunts. this indefinite restlessness and flut tering on the perch no doubt prophesy the final migration of souls out of nature to a serener summer, in long harrows and waving lines, in the spring weather, over what fair uplands and fertile elysian meadows, winging their way at evening, and seeking a resting place with loud cackling and uproar. . . . we should strengthen and beautify and in dustriously mould our bodies to be fit comjian ions of the soul, assist them to grow up like trees, and be agreeable and wholesome objects in nature. i think if i had had the disposal of this soul of man, i should have bestowed it sooner on some antelope of the plains than upon this sickly and sluggish body. 248 winter. jan. 25, 1852. . . . the cold f^r some weeks has been intense, ... a canadian winter. . . . but last night and to-day the weather has mod erated. it is glorious to be abroad this after noon, the snow melts on the surface ; the warmth of the sun reminds me of summer. the dog runs before us on the railroad causeway, and ap pears to enjoy it as much as ourselves. . . . the clay in the deep cut is melting and streaming down, glistening in the sun. it is i that melts, while the harp sounds on high. the snow-drifts on the west side look like clouds. — we turned down the brook at heywood's meadow. it was worth while to see how the water even in the marsh, where the brook is almost stagnant, sparkled in this atmosphere, for, though warm, it is remarkably clear. water, which in sum mer would look dark, and perhaps, turbid, now sparkles like the lakes in november. the water is the more attractive, since all around is deep snow. the brook here is full of cat-tails, typha latifolia, reed-mace. i found on pulling open, or breaking in my hand as one would break bread, the still perfect spikes of this fine reed, that the flowers were red or crimson at their base where united to the stem. when i rubbed off what was at first but a thimble full of these dry flowerets, they suddenly took in air and flashed up like powder, expanding like feathers winter. 249 or foam, filling and overflowing my hand to whicli they imparted a sensation of warmth quite remarkable. ... i could not tire of re peating the experiment. i think a single one would more than fill a half peck measure, if they lay as light as at first in the air. it is something magical to one who tries it for the first time. . . . you do not know at first where it all comes from. it is the conjurer's trick in nature, equal to taking feathers enough to fill a bed out of a hat. when you had done, but yet scraped the almost bare stem, they still over flowed your hand as before. . . . as the flow erets are opening and liberating themselves, showing their red extremities, it has the effect of a changeable color. ah, then, the brook beyond, its rippling wa waters and its sunny sands. they made me for get that it was winter. where springs oozed out of the soft bank over the dead leaves and the green sphagnum, they had melted the snow, or the snow had melted as it fell perchance, and the rabbits had sprinkled the mud about on the snow. the sun reflected from the sandy, grav elly bottom, sometimes a bright sunny streak no bigger than your finger reflected from a rip ple as from a prism, and the sunlight reflected from a hundred points of the surface of the rip pling brook, enabled me to realize summer. , . . 250 winter. having gone a quarter of a mile beyond the bridge where c. calls this his spanish brook, i looked back from the . top of the hill into this deep dell, where the white pines stood thick, rising one above another, reflecting the sunlight, so soft and warm by contrast with the snow, as never in summer, for the idea of warmth pre vailed over the colfl which the snow suggested, though i saw through and between them to a distant snow-clad hill, and also to oaks red with their dry leaves, and maple limbs were mingled with the pines. i was on the verge of seeing something, but i did not. if i had been alone, and had had more leisure, i might have seen something to report. now we are on fair haven, still but a snow plain. far down the river the shadows on co nantum are bluish. . . . the sun is half an hour high, perhaps. standing near the outlet of the pond, i look up and down the river with delight, it is so warm, and the air is notwithstanding so clear. when i invert my head and look at the woods half a mile down the stream, they sud denly sink lower in the horizon, and are re moved full two miles ofie. yet the air is so clear that i seem to see every stem and twig with beautiful distinctness. the iine tops of the trees are so relieved against the sky, that i never cease to admire the minute subdivisions. it is winter. 251 the same when i look up the stream. a bare hickory under lee's cliff seen against the sky becomes an interesting, even beautiful object to behold. i think, where have i been staying all these days ? i will surely come here again. jan. 25, 1853. ... i have noticed that leaves are green and violets bloom later where a bank has been burnt over in the fall, as if the fire warmed it. saw to-day where a creeping juniper had been burnt, radical leaves of johns wort, thistle, clover, a dandelion, etc., as well as sorrel and veronica. jan. 25, 1856. ... a closed pitch pine cone, gathered january 22d, opened last night in my chamber. if you would be convinced how differ ently armed the squirrel is naturally for dealing with pitch pine cones, just try to get one open with your teeth. he who extracts the seeds from a single closed cone, with the aid of a knife, will be constrained to confess that the squirrel earns his dinner. he has the key to this conical and spiny chest of many apart ments. he sits on a post vibrating his tail, and twirls it as a plaything. so is a man com monly a locked-up chest to us, to open whom, unless we have the key of sympathy, will make our hearts bleed. jan. 25, 1858. . . . what a rich book might be made about buds, including, perhaps, sprouts. 252 winter. the impregnable, vivacious willovr catkins, but half asleep along the twigs, under the armor of their black scales, the birch and oak sprouts, the rank and lusty dogwood sprouts, the sound, red buds of the blueberry, the small pointed red buds, close to the twig, of the panicled androm eda, the large yellowish buds of the swamp pink, etc. how health j"^ and vivacious must he be who would treat of these things. you must love the crust of the earth on which you dwell more than the sweet crust of any bread or cake ; you must be able to extract nutriment out of a sand heap. . . . the creditor is servant to his debtor, espe cially if the latter is about paying any his due. i am amused to see what airs men take upon themselves when they have money to pay me, no matter how long they have deferred it. they imagine that they are my benefactors or patrons, and send me word graciously that, if i will come to their houses, they will pay me, when it is their business to come to me. jan. 25, 1860. . . . when the river begins to break up, it becomes clouded like a mackerel sky, but in this case, the blue portions are where the current clearing away the ice beneath begins to show dark. the current of the water strik ing the ice breaks it up at last into portions of the same form with those which the wind gives to vapor. winter. 253 jan. 26, 1840. constantly, as it were, through a remote skylight, i have glimpses of a serene friendship-land, and know the better why brooks murmur and violets grow. jan. 26, 1841. i have as much property as i can command and use. if by a fault in my character i do not derive my just revenues, there is virtually a mortgage on my inheritance. a m^an's wealth is never entered in the regis trar's office. wealth does not come in along the great thoroughfares, it does not float on the erie or pennsylvania canal, but is imported by a solitary track without bustle or competition from a brave industry to a quiet mind. i had a dream last night which had reference to an act in my life, in which i had been most disinterested, and true to my highest instinct, but completely failed in realizing my hopes ; and now, after so many months, in the stillness of sleep, complete justice was rendered me. it was a divine remuneration. in my waking hours, i could not have conceived of such retri bution ; the presumption of desert would have damned" the whole. but now i was permitted to be not so much a subject as a partner to that retribution. it was the award of divine justice which will at length be, and is even now, accom plished. good writing as well as good acting will be 254 winter. obedience to conscience. there must not be a particle of will or whim mixed with it. if we can listen we shall hear. by reverently listen ing to the inner voice, we may reinstate our selves on the pinnacle of humanity. jan. 27, 1841. in the compensation of the dream, there was no implied loss to any, but immeasurable advantage to au. the punishment of sin is not positive as is the reward of virtue. tor a flower, i like the name pansy or jpensee best of any. jan. 26, 1852. whatever has been produced on the spur of the moment will bear to be re considered and reformed with phlegm. the arrow had best not be loosely shot. the most transient and passing remark must be recon sidered by the writer, made sure and warranted, as if the earth had rested on its axle to back it, and all the natural forces lay behind it. the writer must direct his sentence as carefully and leisurely as the marksman his rifle, who is sit ting and with a rest, with patent sights and con ical balls beside. he must not merely seem to speak the truth. he must really speak it. if you foresee that a part of your essay will topple down after the lapse of time, throw it down now yourself. a tree seen against other trees is a mere winter. 255 dark mass, but against the sky it has parts, has symmetry and expansion. . . . the thousand fine points and tops o£ the trees delight me. they are the plumes and standards and bayonets of a host that march to victory over the earth. the trees are handsome toward the heavens, as well as up their boles. they are good for other things than boards and shingles. obey the spur of the moment. these ac cumulated it is that make the impulse and the impetus of the life of genius. these are the spongioles and rootlets by which its trunk is fed. if you neglect the moments, if you cut off your fibrous roots, what but a languishing life is to be expected. let the spurs of countless moments goad us incessantly into life. i feel the spur of the moment thrust deep into my side. the present is an inexorable rider. the mo ment always spurs either with a sharp or a blunt spur. are my sides calloused ? let us trust the rider that he knows the way, that he knows when speed and effort are required. what other impulse do we wait for ? let us preserve religiously, secure, protect the coincidence of our life with the life of nature. else what are heat and cold, day and night, sun, moon, and stars to us ? was it not from sympathy with the present life of nature that we were born at this epoch rather than at 256 winter. another ? . . . my life as essentially belongs to tie present as that of a willowtree in the spring. now, now, its catkins expand, its yel low bark shines, its sap flows, now or never must you make whistles of it. get the day to back you. let it back you, and the night. the truest account of heaven is the fairest, and i will accept none which disappoints ex pectation. it is more glorious to expecf a better, than to enjoy a worse. when the thermometer is down to 20°, the streams of thought tinkle underneath like the rivers under the ice. thought, like the ocean, is nearly of one temperature. . . . in winter we will think brave, hardy, and most native thoughts. then the tender summer birds are flown. in few countries do they enjoy so fine a con trast of summer and winter. we really have four seasons, each incredible to the other. winter cannot be mistaken for summer here. though i see the boat turned up on the shore, and half buried under snow, as i walk over the invis ible river, summer is far away with its rustling reeds. it only suggests the want of thrift, the carelessness of its owner. poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses a particle of it. would you see your mind, look into the sky. winter. 257 would you know your own moods, be weather wise. he whom the weather disappoints, dis appoints himself. let all things give way to the impulse of ex pression. it is the bud unfolding, the perennial spring. as well stay the spring. who shall resist the thaw ? . . . the word is well naturalized or rooted that can be traced back to a celtic original. it is like getting out stumps and fat pine roots. . . . nature never indulges in exclamations, never says ah ! or alas ! she is not french. she is a plain writer, uses few gestures, does not add to her verbs, uses few adverbs, no expletives. i find that i use many words for the sake of em phasis, which really add nothing to the force of my sentences, and they look relieved the mo ment i have canceled these, words which ex press my mood, my conviction, rather than the simple truth. youth supplies us with colors, age with can vas. . . . paint is costly. ... i think the heavens have had but one coat of paint since i was a boy, and their blue is paled and dingy and worn off in many places. i cannot afford to give them another coat. where is the man so rich that he can give the earth a second coat of green in his manhood, or the heavens a second coat of blue. our paints are all mixed when 258 winter. we are young. . . . you would not suspect that some men's heavens had ever been azure or celestial, but that their painter had cheated them. . . . it is good to break and smell the black birch twigs now. — the lichens look rather bright to day. . . . when they are bright and expanded, is it not a sign of a thaw or of rain? the beauty of lichens with their scalloped leaves, the small at tractive fields, the crinkled edge ! i could study a single piece of bark for hours. how they flourish ! i sympathize with their growth. . . . from these cliffs at this moment, the clouds in the west have a singular brassy color, and they are arranged in an unusual manner. a new disposition of the clouds will make the most familiar country appear foreign, like tartary or arabia felix. . . . jan. 26, 1853. up river on ice, 9 a. m., above pantry. a sharp cutting air. this is a pretty good winter morning, however. not one of the rarer. there are from time to time mornings, both in summer and winter, when es pecially the world seems to begin anew, beyond which memory need not go, for not behind them is yesterday and our past life, when as in the morning of a hoar frost there are visible the effects as of a certain creative energy. the world has visibly been recreated in the night. winter. 259 mornings of creation i call them. in the midst of these marks of a creative energy recently active, vi^hile the sun is rising with more than usual splendor, i look back for the era of this creation not into the night, but to a dawn for which no man ever rose early enough — a morn ing which carries us back beyond the mosaic creation, where crystallizations are fresh and unmelted. it is the poet's hour. mornings when men are new born, men who have the seeds of life in them. it should be a part of my religion to be abroad then. this is not one of those mornings, but a clear, cold, airy winter day. it is surprising how much room there is in nature if a man will follow his proper path. in these broad fields, in these extensive woods, on this stretching river, i never meet a walker. passing behind the farm-houses, i see no man out. perhaps i do not meet so many men as i should have met three centuries ago when the indian hunter roamed these woods. i enjoy the retirement and solitude of an early settler. men have cleared some of the earth, which is no doubt an advantage to the walker. i see a man sometimes chopping in the woods, or planting or hoeing in a field at a distance, and yet there may be a lyceum meeting in the evening, and there is a book shop and library in the village, 260 winter. and five times a day i can be whirled to boston in an hour. . . . a slight fine snow has fallen in the night and drifted before the wind. i observe that it is so distributed over the ice as to show equal spaces of bare ice and of snow at pretty regular dis tances. i have seen the same phenomenon on the surface of snow in fields as if the little drifts disposed themselves according to the same law that makes waves of water. there is now a fine steam-like snow blowing over the ice, which continually lodges here and there, and forthwith a little drift accumulates. but why does it lodge at such regular intervals ? i see this fine drifting snow in the air, ten or twelve feet high at a distance. perhaps it may have to do with the manner in, or the angle at, which the wind strikes the earth. jan. 26, 1855. . . . p. m. a thick driving snow, something like, but less than, that of the 19th. there is a strong easterly wind. ... i am afraid i have not described vividly enough the aspect of that lodging snow of the 19th and to-day partly. imagine the innumerable twigs and boughs of the forest, as you stand in its midst, crossing each other at every conceivable angle on every side, from the ground to thirty feet in height, with each its zigzag wall of snow four or five inches high, so innumerable at dif winter. 261 ferent distances, one behind another, that they completely close up the view like a loose woven and downy screen into which, however, stooping and winding, you ceaselessly advance. the win triest scene, which perhaps can only be seen in perfection while the snow is yet fauing before wind and thaw begin. else you miss the deli cate touch of the master. a coarse woof and warp of snowy batting, leaving no space for a bird to perch. i see where a partridge has waddled through the snow still falling, mak ing a continuous track. i look in the direc tion to which it points, and see the bird just skimming over the bushes fifteen rods off. the plumes of pitch pines are first filled up solid, and then they begin to make great snowy casse tetes or pestles. in the fields the air is thick with driving snow. you see only a dozen rods into its warp and woof. it fills either this ear or that and your eyes with hard, cutting, blind ing scales, if you face it. it is forming shelly drifts behind the walls, and stretches in folds across the roads. but in deep, withdrawn hol lows in the woods the flakes at last come gently and deviously down, lodging on every twig and leaf, forming deep, downy, level beds between, and on the ice of the pools. jan. 26, 1856. ... as i was talking with miss mary emerson this evening, she said, " it 262 winter. was not the fashion to be so original when i was young." she is readier to take my view, to look through my eyes for the time being, than any young woman that i know in the town. jan. 26, 1858. . . . one may eat and drink and sleep and digest, and do the ordinary duties of a man, and have no excuse for sending for a doctor, and yet he may have reason to doubt if his life is as valuable and divine as that of an oyster. he may be the very best citizen in the town, and yet it shall occur to him to prick him self with a pin to see if he is alive. it is won derful how quiet, harmless, and ineffective a liv ing creature may be. no more energy may it have than a fungus that lifts the bark of a decaying tree. i raised last summer a squash which weighed 123^ lbs. if it had fallen on me it would have made as deep and lasting an im pression as most men do. i would just as lief know what it thinks about god as what most men think, or are said to think. in such a squash you have already got the bulk of a man. many a man, perchance, when i have put such a question to him, opens his eyes for a moment, essays to think like a rusty firelock out of order, then calls for a plate of that same squash to eat, and goes to sleep, as it is called, and that is no great distance to go, surely. some men have a peculiar taste for bad words, winter. 263 mouthing and licking them into lumpish shapes, as the bear treats her cubs, words like tribal and ornamentation which drag a dead tail after them. they will pick you out of a thousand the still-born words, the falsettoes, the wing-clipt and lame words, as if only the false notes caught their ears. they cry encore to. all the discords. the cocks crow in the yard, and the hens cackle and scratch all this winter. eggs must be plenty. jan. 1840. you might as well think to go in pursuit of the rainbow, and embrace it on the next hill as to embrace the complete idea of poetry even in thought. the best book is only an ad vertisement of it, such as is sometimes sewed in with its cover. it has a logic more severe than the logician's. jan. 27, 1840. what a tame life we are living ! how little heroic it is ! let us devise never so perfect a system of living, and straight way the soul leaves it to shuffle along its own way alone. it is easy enough to establish a dur able and harmonious routine. immediately all parts of nature consent to it. the suu-dial still points to the noon mark, and the sun rises and sets for it. the neighbors are never fatally ob stinate when such a scheme is to be instituted, but forthwith all lend a hand, ring the bell, bring fuel and lights, put by work, and don their 264 winter. best garments, with an earnest conformity wmeli matches the operations of nature. there is al ways a present and extant life which men com bine to uphold, though its insufficiency is mani fest enough. still the sing-song goes on. only make something take the place of something, and men will behave as if it were the thing they wanted. they must behave at any rate, and will work up any material. jan. 27, 1852. the peculiarity of a work of genius is the absence of the speaker from his speech. he is but the medium. you behold a perfect work, but you do not behold the worker. i read its page, but it is as free from any man that can be remembered as an impassable desert. ■ — i think that the one word which will explain the shakespeare miracle is unconsciousness. if he had known his own comparative eminence, he would not have failed to publish it incessantly, though bacon did not. there probably has been no more conscious age than the present. . . . i do not know but thoughts written down thus in a journal might be printed in the same form with greater advantage than if the related ones were brought together into separate essays. they are now allied to life, and are seen by the reader not to be far-fetched. it is . . . less artificial. i feel that in the other case i should have no proper frame for my sketches. mere winter. 265 facts and names and dates communicate more than we suspect. whether the flower looks better in tlie nosegay than in the meadow where it grew, and we had to wet our feet to get it ! is the scholastic air any advantage ? jan. 28, 1852. perhaps i can never find so good a setting for my thoughts as i shall thus have taken them out of. the crystal never sparkles more brightly than in the cavern. the world has always loved best the fable with the moral. the children could read the fable alone — the grown up read both. the truth so told has the best advantage of the most abstract state ment, for it is not the less universally applicable. where else will you ever find the cement for your thoughts ? how will you ever rivet them together without leaving the marks of the file? yet plutarch did not so. montaigne did not so. men have written travels in this form, but per haps no man's daily life has been rich enough to be journalized. our life should be so active . and progressive as to be a journey. our meals should all be of journey cake and hasty pudding. we should be more alert, see the sun rise, not keep fashionable hours, enter a house, our own house as a khan or caravansary. at noon i did not dine, i ate my journey cake, i quenched my thirst at a spring or a brook. as i sat at the table, the hospitality was so perfect and the re 266 winter. past so sumptuous that i seemed to be breaking my fast upom a bank in the midst of an arduous journey, that the water seemed to be a living spring, the napkins grass, the conversation free as the winds, and the servants that waited on us were our simple desires. cut o£e from pilpay and jesop the moral alone at the bottom, would that content you ? jan. 27, 1853. trench says a wild man is a willed man ; well, then, a man of will who does what he wills or wishes, a man of hope and of the future tense, for not only the obstinate is wuled, but, far more, the constant and persever ing. the obstinate man, properly speaking, is one who wills not. the perseverance of the saints is positive willedness, not a mere passive willingness. the fates are wild, for they will, and the almighty is wild above all, as fate is. what are our fields but felds or felled woods. they bear a more recent name than the woods, suggesting that previously the earth was covered with woods. always in a new country a field is a clearing. jan. 27, 1854. i have an old accoimt book found in dea. e. brown's garret since his death. the first leaf or two is gone. its cover is brown paper, on which, amid many marks and scribblings, i find written : — winter. 267 "mr. ephkaim jones his wast book anno domini 1742." it extends from november 8, 1742, to june 20, 1743, inclusive. it appears without doubt from the contents of this book that [this jones] is the one of whom shattuek writes in his history that he "married mary hayward, 1728, and died nov. 29, 1756, aged 51, having been captain, town-clerk, and otherwise distinguished." his father's name was ephraim, and he had a son ephraim. . . . the book is filled with familiar concord names, the grandfathers and great grandfathers of the present generation. dr. hartshorn, who lived to be ninety-two, and dr. temple send to the store once or twice. it is more important now what was bought than who bought it. the articles most commonly bought are mohair (a kind of twist to sew on buttons with), usually with buttons, rum, often only a gill to drink at the store (more of these than anything else), salt, molasses, shauoon, fish, calico, some sugar, a castor hat, almanac, psal ter, and sometimes primer and testament, paper, knee buckles and shoe buckles, garters and spurs, . . . deer skins, a fan, a cart -whip, various kinds of cloth and trimmings, . . . gloves, a spring knife, an ink-horn, a gun cap, 268 winter. spice, . . . timber, iron, earthenware, etc., no tea (i am in doubt about one or two entries), nor coffee, nor meal, nor flour. of the last two they probably raised all they wanted. credit is frequently given for timber, and once for cloth brought to the store. on the whole, it is remarkable how little pro vision was sold at the store. the inhabitants raised almost everything for themselves. choc olate is sold once. rum, salt, molasses, fish, a biscuit with their drink, a little spice and the like, are all that commonly come under this head that i remember. on a loose piece of paper ... is jonathan d wight's (innholder's (?)) bill against the estate of captain ephraim jones for entertainment, etc. (apparently he treated his company), at divers times for half a dozen years, amounting to over £146.' — the people appar ently made their own cloth and even thread, and hence for the most part bought only buttons and mohair and a few trimmings. . . . jan. 18th '42 (3) "john melvin c. by 1 grey fox 0-2-3." feb. 14 '42 (3) "aaron parker c. by 100 squirell skins 0-6-8." deer skins were sold at from ten to seventeen shillings. some times it is written " old " or " new tenor." many of the customers came from as far as har vard or much farther. . . . winter. 269 no butter, nor rice, nor oil, nor candles are sold. they must have used candles, made their own butter, and done without rice. there is no more authentic history of those days than this " wast book " contains, and relating to money matters, it is more explicit than almost any other statement. something must be said. each line contains and states explicitly a fact. it is the best of evidence of several facts. it tells distinctly and authoritatively who sold, who bought, the article, amount, and value, and the date. you could not easily crowd more facts into one line. you are informed when the doc tor or deacon had a new suit of clothes by the charge for mohair, buttons and trimmings, or a castor hat, and here also is entered the rum which ran down their very throats. . . . we begin to die not in our senses and extrem ities, but in our divine faculties. our members may he sound, our sight and hearing perfect, but our genius and imagination betray signs of decay. you tell me that you are growing old, and are troubled to see without glasses, but this is unimportant if the divine faculty of the seer shows no signs of decay. jan. 27, 1857. . . . the most poetic and truest account of objects is generally given by those who first observe them, or the discoverers of them, whether a sharper perception and 270 winter. curiosity in them led to the discovery or the greater novelty more inspired their report. ac cordingly, i love most to read the accounts of a country, its natural productions and curiosities, by those who first settled it, and also the earliest, though often unscientific writers on natural sci ence. ^^ jem. 27, 1858. p. m. to hill and beyond. it is so mild and moist as i saunter along by the wall and cast of the hill that i remember or anticipate one of those warm rain storms in the spring when the earth is just laid bare, the wind is south, and the cladonia lichens are swollen and lusty with moisture, your foot sinking into them, and pressing the water out as from a sponge, and the sandy places also are drinking it in. you wander indefinitely in a beaded coat, wet to the skin of your legs, sit on moss-clad rocks and stumps, and hear the lisping of mi grating sparrows flitting amid the shrub oaks, sit long at a time, still, and have your thoughts. a rain which is as serene as fair weather, suggest ing fairer weather than was ever seen. you could hug the clods that defile you. you feel the fertilizing influence of the rain in your mind. the part of you that is wettest is fullest of life, like the lichens. you discover evidences of immortality not known to divines. you cease to die. you detect some buds and sprouts winter. 271 of life. every step in the old rye field is on virgin soil. — and then the rain comes thicker and faster than before, thawing the remaining part of the ground, detaining the migrating bird, and you turn your back to it, full of se rene, contented thoughts, soothed by the steady dropping on the withered leaves, more at home for being abroad, sinking at each step deep into the thawing earth, gladly breaking through the gray rotting ice. the dullest sounds seem sweetly modulated by the air. you leave your tracks in fields of spring rye, scaring the fox colored sparrows along the woodsides, . . . full of joy and expectation, seeing nothing but beauty, hearing nothing but music, as free as the fox-colored sparrow, . . . not indebted to any academy or college for this expansion, but chiefly to the april sun which shineth on all alike, not encouraged by men in your walks, not by the divines or the professors, and to the law giver an outlaw. . . . steadily the eternal rain falls, drip, drip, drip, the mist drives and clears your sight, the wrind blows and warms your sit ting on that sandy upland that april day. jan. 27, 1859. i see some of those little cells, perhaps of a wasp or bee, made of clay or clayey mud. it suggests that those insects were the first potters. they look somewhat like small stone jugs. 272 winter. jan. 27, 1860. . . . "when you think your walk is profitless and a failure, and you can hardly persuade yourself not to return, it is on the point of being a success, for then you are in that subdued and knocking mood to which nature never fails to open. jan. 28, 1841. no innocence can quite stand up under suspicion, if it is conscious of being suspected. in the company of one who puts a mean construction upon your actions, they are apt really to deserve such a construction. while in that society i can never retrieve myself. at tribute to me a great motive and i shall not fail to have one, but a mean one, and the fountain of virtue will be poisoned by the suspicion. show men unlimited faith as the coin with which you will deal with them, and they wiu invariably exhibit the best wares they have. i would meet men as the friend of all their virtue, and the foe of all their vice, for no man is the part ner of his guilt. if you suspect me, you wiu never see me, but all our intercourse will be the politest leave-tak ing. i shall constantly defer and apologize, and postpone myself in your presence. the self defender is accursed in the sight of gods and men ; he is a superfluous knight who serves no lady in the land. he will find in the end that he has been fighting windmills, and has battered winter. 273 his mace to no purpose. the injured man resisting his fate is like a tree struck by light ning which rustles its sere leaves the winter through, not having vigor enough to cast them off. . . . eesistance is a very wholesome and delicious morsel at times. when venus advanced against the greeks with resistless valor, it was by far the most natural attitude into which the poet could throw his hero, to make him resist hero ically. to a devil one might yield gracefully, but a god would be a worthy foe, and would par don the affront. . . . let your mood determine the form of saluta tion, and approach the creature with a natural nonchalance, as though he were anything but what he is, and you were anything but what you are, — as though he were he, and you were you — in short, as though he were so insignificant that it did not signify — and so important that it did not import. jan. 28, 1852. . . . they showed me johnny riorden to-day, with one thickness of ragged cloth over his little shirt for all this cold weather, with shoes having large holes in the toes into which the snow got, as he said, without an outer garment, walking a mile to school every day over the bleakest of causeways where i know, by my own experience, a grown man could not 274 winter. walk at times without freezing his ears, if they were exposed, but infant blood circulates faster. the clothes with countless patches which claimed descent from pantaloons of mine set as if his mother had fitted them to a tea-kettle first. this little specimen of humanity, this tender gobbet of the fates cast into a cold world with a torn lichen leaf wrapped about him ; is man so cheap that he cannot be clothed but with a mat or rag ? that we should bestow on him our cold victuals ? . . . let the mature rich wear the rags and insufficient clothing, let the infant poor wear the purple and fine linen. i shudder when i think of the fate of innocency. ... a charity which dispenses the crumbs which fall from its overloaded tables, which are left after its feasts, whose waste and whose example pro duced that poverty ! 3 p. m. went round by tuttle's road and so out on to the walden road. these warmer days the wood -chopper finds that the wood cuts easier than when it had the frost in its sap wood, though it does not split so readily. thus every change in the weather has its influence on him, and is appreciated by him in a peculiar way. the wood-cutter and his practices and ex periences are more to be attended to. his ac cidents, perhaps more than any others, should mark the epochs in the winter day. now that winter. 275 the indian is gone, he stands nearest to nature. who has written the history of his day? how far still is the writer of books from the man, his old playmate it may be, who chops in the woods ? there are ages between them. homer refers to the progress of the woodcutter's work to mark the time of day on the plains of troy, and the inference commonly is that he lived in a more primitive state of society than the present. but i think this is a mistake. like proves like in all ages, and the fact that i myself should take pleasure in referring to just such simple and peaceful labors which are always proceed ing, that the contrast itself always attracts the civilized poet to what is rudest and most primi tive in his contemporaries, all this rather proves a certain interval between the poet and the chop per whose labor he refers to, than an unusual nearness to him, on the principle that familiar ity breeds contempt. homer is to be subjected to a very different kind of criticism from any he has received. that reader who most fully appreciates the poet, and derives the greatest pleasure from his work, himself lives in circum stances most like those of the poet himself. about brister's spring the ferns which have been covered with snow are still quite green. the skunk cabbage in the water is already pushed up, and i find the pinkish head of flowers within its spathe is bigger than a pea. 276 winter. jan. 28, 1853. saw three ducks sailing in the river . . . this afternoon, black with white on wings, though these two or three have been the coldest days of the winter, and the river is generally closed. jan, 28, 1857. am again surprised to see a song sparrow sitting for hours on our wood-pile ... in the midst of snow in the yard. it is un willing to move. people go to the pump, and the cat and dog walk round the wood-pile with out starting it. i examine it at my leisure through a glass. remarkable that this coldest of all winters this bird should remain. perhaps it is no more comfortable this season farther south wliere they are accustomed to abide. in the afternoon this sparrow joined a flock of tree sparrows on the bare ground west of the house. it was amusing to see the tree sparrows wash themselves, standing in the puddles and tossing the water over themselves. they have had no opportunity to wash for a month perhaps, there having been no thaw. the song sparrow did not go off with them. jan. 28, 1858. minott has a sharp ear for the note of any migratory bird. though confined to his dooryard by rheumatism, he commonly hears them sooner than the widest rambler. may be he listens all day for them, or they come and sing over his house, report themselves to winter. 277 him, and receive their season ticket. he is never at fault. if he says he heard such a bird, though sitting by his chimney side, you may de pend on rett he can swear through glass. he has not spoiled his ears by attending lectures and caucuses. the other day the rumor went that a flock of geese had been seen flying over con cord, mid-winter as it was by the almanac. i traced it to minott, and yet i was compelled to doubt. i had it directly that he had heard them within a week. i made haste to him, his repu tation was at stake. he said that he stood in his shed one of the late muggy, april-like morn ings, when he heard one short, but distinct honk of a goose. he went into tlie house, took his cane, exerted himself, or that sound imparted strength to him, lame as he was, went up on to the hill, a thing he had not done for a year, that he might hear all around. he saw nothing, but heard the note agaiu. it came from over the brook. it was a wild goose. he was sure of it. he thought that the back of the winter was broken, if it had any this year, but he feared such a winter would kill him too. hence the rumor spread and grew. i was silent, pondered, and abandoned myself to unseen guides. i drew into my mind all its members like the tor toise. suddenly the truth flashed on me, and i remembered that within a week i had heard of 278 winter. a box at the tavern which had come by railroad express containing three wild geese, and directed to his neighbor over the brook. the april-like morning had excited one so that he honked, and minott's reputation acquired new lustre. . . . as i come through the village at 11 p. m., the sky is completely overcast, and the perhaps thin clouds are very distinctly pink or reddish, some what as if reflecting a distant fire, but this phe nomenon is universal, all round and overhead. i suspect there is a red aurora borealis behind. jan. 29, 1840. a friend in history looks like some premature soul. the nearest approach to a community of love in these days is like the distant breaking of waves on the sea^shore. an ocean there must be, for it washes our beach. this alone do all men sail for, trade for, plow for, preach for, fight for. the greeks, like those of the south generally, expressed themselves with more facility than we, in distinct and lively images, and so far as re lates to the grace and completeness with which they treated the subjects suited to their genius, they must be allowed to retain their ancient su premacy. but a rugged and uncouth array of thought, though never so modern, may rout them at any moment. it remains for other than greeks to write the literature of the next cen tury. winter. 27& ieschylus had a clear eye for the commonest thiugs. his genius was only an enlarged com mon sense. he adverts with chaste severity to all natural facts. his sublimity is greek sin cerity and simpleness, naked wonder at what . mythology had not helped to explain. he is competent to express any of the common manly feelings,. if his hero is to make a boast, it does not lack fullness, it is as boastful as could be desired. he has a flexible mouthand can fill it readily with strong, sound words, so that you will say the man's speech wants nothing. he has left nothing unsaid, but has actually wiped his lips of it. whatever the common eye sees at all and expresses as best it may, he sees un commonly, and expresses with rare complete ness. the multitude that thronged the theatre could no doubt go along with him to the end. — the greeks had no transcendent geniuses like milton and shakespeare, whose merit only pos terity could fully appreciate. the social condition is the same in all ages. ^eschylus was undoubtedly alone and without sympathy in his simple reverence for the mystery of the universe. jan. 29, 1841. there is something proudly thrilling in the thought that this obedience to conscience and trust in god, which is so sol emnly preached in extremities and arduous cir 280 winter. cumstances, is only a retreat to one's self and reliance on one's own strength. in trivial cir cumstances i find myself sufficient to myself, and in the most momentous, i have no ally hut myself, and must silently put hy their harm by my own strength, as i did with the former. as my own hand bent aside the willow in my path, so must my single arm put to flight the devil and his angels. god is not our ally when we shrink, and neuter when we are bold. . . . when you trust, do not lay aside your armor, but put it on and buckle it tighter. if by reliance on the gods i have disbanded one of my forces, then was it poor policy. . . . there is more of god and divine help in a man's little finger than in idle prayer and ti-ust. the best and bravest deed is that which the whole man, heart, lungs, hands, fingers, and toes at any time prompt. each hanger-on in the purlieus of the camp . . . must fall into the line of march. if a single sutler delay to make up his pack, then suspect the fates and consult the oracles again. this is the meaning of integrity ; this it is to be an integer, and not a fraction. be even for all virtuous ends, but odd for au vice. . . . friends will have to be introduced each time they meet. they will be eternally strange to one another, and when they have mutually ap winter. 281 propriated the last hour, they will go and gather a new measure of strangeness for the next. they are like two boughs crossed inthe wood, which play backwards and forwards upon one another in the wind, and only wear into each other, but never does the sap of the one flow into the pores of the other, for then the wind would no more draw from them those strains which enchanted the wood. they are not two united, but rather one divided. of all strange and unaccountable things this journalizing is the strangest. it will allow noth ing to be predicated of it. its good is not good, nor its bad, bad. if i make a huge effort to expose my innermost and richest wares to light, my counter seems cluttered with the meanest home-made stuff, but after months or years, i may discover the wealth of india, and whatever rarity is brought overland from cathay, in that confused heap, and what seemed perhaps a fes toon of dried apple or pumpkin will prove a string of brazilian diamonds, or pearls from^ co romandel. men lie behind the barrier of a relation as effectually concealed as the landscape by a mist ; and when at length some unforeseen accident throws me into a new attitude toward them, i am astounded as if for the first time i saw the sun on the hillside. they lie out before me like 282 winter. a new order of things, as when the master meets his pupil as a man. then first do we stand un der the same heavens, and master and. pupil alike go down the resistless ocean stream together. jan. 29, 1852. we must be very active, if we would be clean, live our own life and not a languishing and scurvy one. the trees which are stationary are covered with parasites, espe cially those which have grown slowly. the air is filled with the fine sporules of countless mosses, algae, lichens, fungi, which settle and plant themselves on all quiet surfaces. under the nails and between the joints of the fingers of the idle flourish crops of mildew, algae, fungi, and other vegetable sloths, though they may be invisible, the lichens where life still exists, the fungi where decomposition has begun to take place, and the sluggard is soon covered with sphagnum. algae take root in the corners of his eyes, and lighens cover the bulbs of his fingers and his head. . . . this is the definition of dirt. we fall a prey to others of nature's tenants who take possession of the unoccupied house. with the utmost inward alacrity we have to wash and comb ourselves ... to get rid of the adhering seeds. cleanliness is by activ ity not to give any quiet shelf for the seeds of parasitic plants to take root on. . . . the forcible writer does not go far for his winter. 283 themes. his ideas are not far-fetched. he de rives inspiration from his chagrins and his satis factions. his theme being ever an instant one, his own gravity assists him, gives impetus to what he says. he does not speculate while others drudge for him. i am often reminded that if i had bestowed on me the wealth of croesus, my aims must still be the same, and my means essentially the same. . . . few are the days when the telegraph harp rises into a pure, clear melody. the wind may blow strong or soft in this or that direction, naught will you hear but a low hum or murmur, or even a buzzing sound, but at length when some undistinguishable zephyr blows, when the con ditions, not easy tp be detected, arrive, it sud denly and unexpectedly rises into melody, as if a god had touched it, and fortunate is the walker who chances to be within hearing. so is it with the lyres of bards. for the most part it is only a feeble and ineffectual hum that comes from them, which leads you to expect the mel ody you do not hear. when the gale is modi fied, when the favorable conditions occur and the indescribable coincidence takes place, then there is music. of a thousand buzzing strings, only one yields music. it is like the hum of the shaft or other machinery of a steamboat, 284 winter. whicli at leng'tli might become music in a divine hand. . . . heard c. lecture to-night. it was a bushel of nuts, perhaps the most original lecture i ever heard ; ever so unexpected, not to be foretold, and so sententious that you could not look at him, and take his thought at the same time. you had to give your undivided attention to the thoughts, for you were not assisted by set phrases or modes of speech intervening. there was no sloping up or down to or from his points. it was all genius, no talent. it required more close attention, more abstraction from surround ing circumstances than any lecture i have heard, for well as i know c, he more than any man disappoints my expectation. when i meet him in the dark, hear him, i cannot realize that i ever saw him before. he will be strange, un expected to his best acquaintance. i cannot as sociate the lecturer with the companion of my walks. the lecture was from so original and peculiar a point of view, yet just to himself in the main, that i doubt if three in the audience apprehended a tithe of what he said. it was so hard to hear that doubtless few made the exer tion, a thick succession of mountain passes, and no intermediate slopes and plains. other lec tures, even the best, in which so much space is given to the elaborate development of a few winter. . 285 ideas, seemed somewhat meagre in comparison. yet it would be how much more glorious if tal ent were added to genius, if there were a just arrangement and development of the thoughts, if each step were not a leap, but he ran a space to take a yet higher leap. most of the specta tors sat in front of the performer, but here was one who, by accident, sat all the while on one side, and his report was peculiar and startling. jan. 30, 1852. channing's lecture was full of wise, acute, and witty observations, yet most of the audience did not know but it was mere incoherent and reckless verbiage and nonsense. i lose my respect for people who do not know what is good and true. i know full well that readers and hearers, with the fewest exceptions, ask me for my second best. jan. 29, 1854. a very cold morning. mer cury 18° below zero. — varro says arista, the beard of grain, is so called because it dries first (^quod arescit prima), the grain, granum, is a gerendo, for the object of planting is that this may be borne. " but the spiea or ear which the rustics call speca, as they have received it from their forefathers, seems to be named from spe (^hope), earn enim quod sperant fore, be cause they hope that this will be hereafter." jan. 29, 1856. ... it is observable that not only the moose and the wolf disappear before 286 winter. the civilized man, but even many species of in sects, such as the black fly and the almost mi croscopic "no-see-em." how imperfect a no tion have we commonly of what was the actual condition of the place where we dwell, three centuries ago. jan. 29, 1858. p. m. to great meadows at copan. . . . found some splendid fungi on old aspens used for a fence ; quite firm, reddish white above, and bright vermilion beneath, or perhaps more scarlet, reflecting various shades as it is turned. it is remarkable that the upper side of the fungus, which must, as here, com monly be low on decaying wood, so that we look down on it, is not bright colored nor handsome, and it was only when i had broken it off and turned it over that i was surprised by its brilliant color. this intense vermilion (?) face, which would be known to every boy in the town if it were turned upward, faces the earth, and is discerned only by the curious naturalist. its ear is turned down listening to the honest praises of the earth. it is like a light red vel vet or damask. these silent and motionless fungi with their ears turned ever downward to the earth, revealing their bright color perchance only to the prying naturalist who turns them upward, remind me of the " hear-all " of the story. winter. 287 jan. 29, 1860. ... as usual, i now see, as i walk on the river and river meadow ice, thinly covered with the fresh snow, that conical rain bow, or parabola of rainbow-colored reflections from the myriad refliecting crystals of the snow, i. e., as i walk toward the sun, always a little in advance of me, of course, the angle of re flection being equal to that of incidence. jan. 30, 1841. . . . the fashions of the wood are more fluctuating than those of paris. snow, rime, ice, green and dry leaves incessantly make new patterns. there are au the shapes and hues of the kaleidoscope, and the designs and ciphers of books of heraldry, in the outlines of the trees. every time i see a nodding pine top, it seems as if a new fashion of wearing plumes had come into vogue. . . . you glance up these paths, closely embraced by bent trees, as through the side aisles of a cathedra], and expect to hear a choir chanting from their depths. you are never so far in them as they are far before you. their secret is where you are not, and where your feet can never carry you. . . . here is the distinct trail of a fox stretching a quarter of a mile across the pond. ... i am curious to know what has determined its grace ful curvatures, its greater or less spaces and dis tinctness, and how surely they were coincident 288 winter. with the fluctuations of some mind, why they now lead me two steps to the right, and then three to the left. if these things are not to be called up and accounted for in the lamb's book of life, i shall set them down for careless ac countants. here was the expression of the divine mind this morning. the pond was his journal, and last night's snow made a tabula rasa for him. i know which way a mind wended this morning, what horizon it faced, by the set ting of these tracks, whether it moved slowly or rapidly, by the greater or less intervals and clis tinctness, for the swiftest step leaves yet a last ing trace. . . . fair haven pond is scored with the trails of foxes, and you may see where they have gamboled and gone through a hundred evolutions, which testify to a singular listless ness and leisure in nature. suddenly looking down the river, i saw a fox some sixty rods off making across the hills on my left. as the snow lay five inches deep, he made but slow progress,but it was no impedi ment to me. so yielding to the instinct of the chase, i tossed my head aloft, and bounded away, snuffing the air like a fox-hound, and spurning the world and human society at each bound. it seemed the woods rang with the hun ter's horn, and diana and all the satyrs joined in the chase and cheered me on. olympian and winter. 289 elean youths were waving palms on the hills. in the meanwhile, i gained rapidly on the fox, but he showed a remarkable presence of mind, for in stead of keeping up the face of the hill, which was steep and unwooded in that part, he kept along the slope in the direction of the forest, though he lost ground by it. notwithstanding his fright, he took no step which was not beautiful. the course on his part was a series of most graceful curves. it was a sort of leopard can ter, i should say, as if he were nowise impeded by the snow, but were husbanding his strength all the while. when he doubled, i wheeled and cut him off, bounding with fresh vigor, autseus like recovering my strength each time i touched the snow. having got near enough for a fair view, just as he was slipping into the wood, i gracefully yielded him the palm. he ran as if there were not a bone in his back, occasionally dropping his muzzle to the snow for a rod or two, and then tossing his head aloft, when satisfied of his course. when he came to a declivity, he put his fore feet together, and slid down it like a cat. he trod so softly that you could not have heard from any nearness, and yet with such expression that it would not have been quite inaudible from any distance. so hoping this experience would prove a useful lesson to him, i returned to the village by the highway of the river. 290 winter. jan. 30, 1852. i feel as if i were gradually parting compauy with certain friends, just as i perceive familiar objects successively disap pear when i am leaving my native town in the cars. . . . after all, where is the flower lore? for the first book, not the last, should contain the poetry of flowers. the natural system may tell us the value of a plant in medicine or the arts, or for food, but neither it nor the linnsean, to any great extent, tells us its chief value and signifi cance to man, what in any measure accounts for its beauty, its flower-like jdroperties. there wiu be pages about some fair flower's qualities as food or medicine, but perhaps not a sentence about its significance to the eye (as if the cow slip were better for greens than for yellows), about what children and all flower-lovers gather flowers for. [the book i refer to should bej not addressed to the cook, or the physician, or the dyer merely, but to the lovers of flowers young and old, the most poetical of books in which is breathed man's love of flowers. do nothing merely out of good resolutions. discipline yourself only to yield to love. suffer yourself to be attracted. it is in vain to write on chosen themes. we must wait till they have kindled a flame in our minds. there must be the . . . generating force of love behind every winter. ' 291 effort destined to be successful. the cold re solve gives birth to, begets nothing. the theme that seeks me, not i, it. the poet's relation to his theme is the relation of lovers. it is no more to be courted. obey, report. though they are cutting off the wood at wal den, it is not all loss. it makes some new and unexpected prospects. ... as i stood on the partially cleared bank at the e. end of the pond, i looked s. over the side of the hill into a deep dell, still wooded, and saw not more than thirty rods off a chopper at his work. i was half a dozen rods distant from the standing wood, and i saw him through a vista between two trees. he appeared to me charmingly dis tinct as in a picture, of which the two trees were the frame. he was seen against the snow on the hillside beyond. i could distinguish each part of his dress perfectly, and the axe with dis tinct outline, as he raised it above his head, the black iron against the snow. i could hear every stroke distinctly. yet i should have deemed it ridiculous to call to him, he ajipeared so distant. he appeared with the same distinctness as ob jects seen through a pin hole in a card. this was the effect rather than what would have been by comparison of him, his size with the nearer trees between which i saw him, and which made the canopied roof of the grove far above his 292 ' winter. head. it was, perhaps, one of those coincidences and effects which have made men painters. i could not behold him as an actual man. he was more ideal than in any picture i have seen. he refused to be seen as actual ; far in the hol low, yet somewhat enlightened aisles of this wooded dell. some scenes will thus present themselves as picture, . . . subjects for the pen cil, . . . distinctly marked. they do not re quire the aid of genius to idealize them. they must be seen as ideal. . . . i am afraid to travel much,' or to famous places, lest it might completely dissipate the mind. then i am sure that what we observe at home, if we observe anything, is of more im portance than what we observe abroad. the far-fetched is of the least value. what we ob serve in traveling are, to some extent, the acci dents of the body ; what we observe when sitting at home are, in the same proportion, phenomena of the mind itself. a wakeful night will yield as much thought as a long journey. if we try thoughts by their quality, not their quantity, i may find that a restless night will yield more than the longest journey. . . . it is remarkable that there is no man so coarse and insensible but he can be profane, can pronounce the word " god " with emphasis in the woods when anything happens to disturb winter. 293 him, as a spoiled child loves to see what liberties he can presume to take. i am only astonished that b should think it any daring, that he should believe iu god so much, look round to see if his auditors appreciated his boldness. jan. 30, 1854. another cold morning. 13° below zero. . . . this morning, though not so cold by a degree or two as yesterday morning, the cold has got more into the house. . . . the sheets are frozen about the sleeper's face. the teamster's beard is white with ice. last night i felt it stinging cold as i came up the street at nine o'clock. it bit my ears and face, but the stars shone all the brighter. the windows are all closed up with frost, as if they were of ground glass. . . . the snow is dry and squeaks under the feet, and the teams creak, as if they needed greasing, sounds associated with extremely cold weather. p. m. up river on ice and snow to fair ha ven pond. . . . we look at every track in the snow. every little while there is the track of a fox, may be the same one, across the river, turn ing aside sometimes to a muskrat's cabin or a point of ice where he has left. some traces, and frequently the larger track of a hound which has followed his trail. . . . this road is so wide that you do not feel confined in it, and you never meet travelers with whom you have no sym 294 winter. pathy. the winter, cold and bound out, as it is, is thrown to us like a bone to a famishing dog, and we are expected to get the marrow out of it. while the milkmen in the outskirts are milking so many scores of cows before sunrise these win ter mornings, it is our task to milk the winter itself. it is true it is like a cow that is dry, and our fingers are numb, and there is none to wake us up. some desert the fields, and go into win ter quarters in the city. they attend the ora^ torios, while the only music we countrymen hear is the squeaking of the snow under our boots. but the winter was not given us for no purpose. we must thaw its cold with our genialness. we are tasked to find out and appropriate all the nutriment it yields. if it is a cold and hard season, its fruit no doubt is the more concen trated and nutty. it took the cold and bleak ness of november to ripen the walnut, but the human brain is the kernel which the winter it self matures. not till then does its shell come off. . . . because the fruits of the earth are al ready ripe, we are not to suppose there is no fruit left for winter to ripen. . . . then is the great harvest of the year, the harvest of thought. all previous harvests are stubble to this, mere fodder and green crop. our oil is winter-strained. now we burn with a purer flame like the stars. — shall we take refuge in cities in november ? winter. 295 shall the nut fall green from the tree ? let not the year be disappointed of its crop. i knew a crazy man who walked into an empty pulpit one sunday, and taking up a hymn book, remarked, " we have had a good fall for getting in corn and potatoes, let us sing winter." so i say, " let us sing winter." what else can we sing, and our voices be in harmony with the season. . . . as we walked up the river, a little flock of chickadees apparently flew to us from a wood side fifteen rods off, and uttered their lively day day day, and followed us along a considerable distance, flitting by our side on the button bushes and willows. it is the most, if not the only, sociable bird we have. jan. 30, 1856. . . . what a difference be tween life in the city and life in the country at present ! between walking in washington street, threading your way between countless sledges and travelers over the discolored snow, and crossing walden pond, a spotless field of snow surrounded by woods, whose intensely blue shadows • and your own are the only objects. what a solemn silence reigns here ! jan. 30, 1859. how peculiar is the hooting of an owl ; not shrill and sharp like the scream of a hawk, but full, round, and sonorous, wak ing the echoes of the wood. jan. 30, 1860. 2 p. m. to nut meadow 296 winter. and white pond road. thermometer +45°. fair, with a few cumuli of indefinite outline in the n. and s., and dusky under sides. a gentle west wind and a blue haze. thaws. . . . the ice has so melted on the meadows that i see where the muskrat has left his clamshells in a heap near the river side where there was a hol low in the bank. — the small water-bugs are gyrating abundantly in nut meadow brook. it is pleasant also to see the very distinct ripple marks in the sand at the bottom, of late so rare a sight. i go through the piny field n. 'w. of martial miles's. there are no more beautiful natural parks than these pastures in which the white pines have sprung up spontaneously, standing at handsome intervals, where the wind chanced to let the seed lie at last, and the grass and blackberry vines have not yet been killed by them. there are certain sounds invariably heard in warm and thawing days in winter, such as the crowing of cocks, the cawing of crows, and some times the gobbling of turkeys. the crow, flying high, touches the tymjjanum of the sky for us, and reveals the tone of it. what does it avail to look at a thermometer or barometer compared with listening to his note ! he informs me that nature is in the tenderest mood possible, and i hear the very flutterings of her heart. — crows winter. 297 have singularly wild and suspicious ways. you will see a couple flying high, as if about tlieir business, but, lo, they turn and circle over your head again and again for a mile, and this is their business, as if a mile and an afternoon were nothing for them to thro'^ away ; this even in winter when they have no nests to be anxious about. but it is affecting to hear them cawing about their ancient seat . . . which the choppers are laying low. . . . the snow flea seems to be a creature whose summer and prime of life is a thaw in the win ter. it seems not merely to enjoy this interval like other animals, but then chiefly to exist. it is the creature of the thaw. moist snow is its element. that thaw which merely excites the cock to sound his clarion, as it were, calls to life the snow flea. jan. 31, 1852. ... i am repeatedly aston ished by the coolness and obtuse bigotry with which some will appropriate the new testament in conversation with you. it is as if they were to appropriate the sun, and stand between you and it, because they understood you had walked once by moonlight, though that was in the re flected light of the sun which you could not get directly. i have seen two persons conversing at a tea-table, both lovers of the new testament, each in his own way, the one a lover of all 298 winter. kiudred expression of truth also, and yet the other appropriated the book wholly to herself, and took it for granted with singular or rather lamentable blindness and obtuseness that the former neither knew nor cared anything about it. horace greeley found some fault with me to the world, because i presumed to speak of the new testament, using my own words and thoughts, and challenged me to a controversy. the one thought i had was that it would give me real pleasure to know that he loved it as sin cerely and intelligently as i did. . . . that work of man's must be vast indeed which, like the pyramids, looks blue in the hori zon, as mountains. few works of man rise high enough, and with breadth enough to be blued by the air between them and the spectator. i hear my friend say, " i have lost my faith in men, there are none true, magnanimous, holy, etc., etc., meaning all the while that i do not possess those imattainable virtues. but, worm as i am, this is not wise in my friend, and i feel simply discouraged, so far as my relation to him is concerned. we must have infinite faith in each other. . . . he erects his want of faith as a barrier between us. when i hear a grown man or woman say, " once i had faith in men, now i have not," i am inclined to ask, " who are you whom the world has disappointed? winter. 299 have not you rather disappointed the world? there is the same ground for faith now that ever there was. it needs only a little love in you who complain so, to ground it on." for my own part, i am thankful there are those who come so near being my friends that they can be estranged from me. i had faith before ; they would destroy the little i have. the mason asks but a narrow shelf to spring his brick from; man requires only an infinitely narrower one to spring the arch of faith from. . . . i am not sure that i have any right to address to you the words i am about to write. the reason i have not visited you oftener and more earnestly is that 1 am offended by your pride, your sometime assumption of dignity, your man ners which come over me like waves of lethe. i know that if i stood in that relation to you which you seem to ask, i should not be met. per haps i am wiser than you think. do you never for an instant treat me as a thing, flatter me ? you treat me with politeness and i make myself scarce. we have not sympathy enough, do not always apprehend each other. you talk too, too often, as if i were mr. tompkins of the firm of , a retired merchant. if i had never thought of you as a friend, i could make much use of you as an acquaintance. . . . the value of the pitch pine in winter is that 300 winter. it holds the snow so finely. i see it now afar on the hillsides decking itself with it, its whited towers forming coverts where the rabbit and the gray squirrel lurk. it makes the most cheerful winter scenery, beheld from the window, you know so well the nature of the coverts and the sombre light it makes. the young oaks with their red leaves, covering so many acres, are also an indispensable feature of the winter landscape, and th§ limbs of oak woods where some of the trees have been cut off. jan. 31, 1854. p. m. to great meadows and beck stow's. the wind is more southerly, and now the warmth of the sun prevails and is' felt on the back. the snow softens and melts. it is a beautiful, clear, and mild winter day. . . . but i do not melt. there is no thaw in me. i am bound out still. — i see the tree sparrows one or two at a time now and then all winter uttering a faint note, with their bright chestnut crown, and spot on breast, and barred wings. they represent the sparrows in winter. . . . in winter when there are no fiowers, and leaves are rare, even large buds are interesting and somewhat exciting. i go a budding like a part ridge. i am always attracted at this season by the buds of the swamp pink, the poplars, and the sweet gale. ... we too have our thaws. they come to our winter. ?0l jamiary moods, when our ice cracks, and our sluices break loose. thought that was frozen up under stern experience gushes forth in feel ing and expression. this is a fresheii which carries away dams of accumulated ice. our thoughts hide~ unexpressed like the buds under the downy or resinous scales. they would hardly keep a partridge from starving. if you would know what are my winter thoughts look in the partridge's crop. they are like the laurel buds, some leaf, some blossom buds, which, though food for such indigenous creatures, will not expand into leaves and flowers until summer comes. jan. 31, 1855. a clear, cool, beautiful day ; fine skating ; an unprecedented expanse of ice. at 10 a. m. skated up the river to explore far ther than i had been. . . . the country almost completely bare of snow, only some ice in the roads and fields, and the frozen freshet at this remarkable height. i skated up as far as the boundary between wayland and sudbury, just above pelham's pond, about twelve miles, be tween 10 a. m. and 1, quite leisurely. there i found the river open unexpectedly, as if there were a rapid there, and as i walked three quarters of a mile farther, it was still open be fore me. . . . all the way i skated there was a chain of meadows, with the muskrat houses still 302 winter. rising above the ice, commonly on the bank of the river, and marking it like smaller haycocks amid the large ones still left. — as i skated near the shore under lee's cliff, i saw what i took to be some scrags or knotty stubs of a dead limb, lying on the bank beneath a white oak, close by me. yet while i looked closely at them, i could not but admire their close resem blance to partridges. i had come along with a rapid whir, and suddenly halted right against them, only two rods distant, and as my eyes watered a little from skating against the wind, i was not convinced they were birds, till i had pulled out my glass and deliberately examined them. they sat and stood, three of them, per fectly still, with their heads erect, some darker feathers, like ears methinks, increasing their re semblance to scrags, as where a small limb is broken off. i was much surprised at the re markable stillness they preserved, instinctively relying on their resemblance to the ground for their protection, i. e., withered grass, dry oak leaves, dead scrags, and broken twigs. . . . for some time after i had noted their resemblance to birds, standing only two rods off, i coidd not be sure of their character on account of their perfect motionlessness, and it was not till i brought my glass to bear on them, and distinctly saw their eyes steadily glaring on me and their winter. 303 necks and every muscle tense with anxiety, that i was convinced. at length, on some signal which i did not perceive, they went with a whir, as if shot off, over the bushes. feb. 1, 1852. when i hear that a friend on whom i relied has spolcen of me, not with cold words, perhaps, but even with a cold and indifferent tone, to another, ah ! what treachery i feel it to be ! the crime of all crimes against humanity. my friend may cherish a thousand suspicions against me, and they may but repre sent his faith and expectation, till he cherishes them so heartlessly that he can speak of them. if i have not succeeded in my friendships, it was because i demanded more of them, and did not put up with what i could get ; and i got no more, partly because i gave so little. i must be dumb to those who do not, as i believe, appreciate my actions, not knowing the springs of them. while we preach obedience to human laws, and to .that portion of the divine laws set forth in the new testament, the natural laws of genius, of love and friendship, we do not preach nor insist upon. how many a seeming heart lessness is to be explained by the very abun dance of the heart. how much of seeming recklessness, even selfishness, is to be explained by obedience to this code of the divine laws. 304 winter. it is evident that as buyers and sellers we obey a very different law from what we do as lovers and friends. the hindoo is not to be tried in all things by the christian standard, nor the christian by the hindoo. how much fidelity to law of a kind not commonly recognized, how much magnanimity even may be thrown away on mankind, is like pearls cast before swine ! the hero obeys his own law, the christian, his, the lover and friend, theirs: they are to some extent different codes. what incessant tragedy between men when one silently obeys the code of friendship, the other, the code of philan thropy, in their dealings with one another. as our constitutions and geniuses are different, so are our standards, and we are amenable to dif ferent codes. my neighbor asks me in vain to be good as he is good. i must be good as i am made to be good, whether i am heathen or christian. every man's laws are hard enough to obey. the christian falls as far short of obeying the heathen moral law as the heathen does. one of little faith looks for his rewards and punishments to the next world, and, de spairing of this w6rld, behaves accordingly in it ; another thinks the present a worthy occasion and arena, sacrifices to it, and expects to hear sympathizing voices. the man who believes in another world and not in this is wont to put me winter. 305 off with christianity. the present world in which we talk is of a little less value to him than the next world. so we are said to hope in proportion as we do not realize. it is all hope deferred. but one grain of realization, of in stant life on which we stand, is equivalent to acres of the leaf of hope hammered out to gild our prospect. the former so qualifies the vis ion that it gilds all we look upon with the splen dor of truth. we must meet the hero on heroic grounds. some tribes inhabit the moun tains. some dwell on the plains. we discour age one another. we obey different laws. my friends ! my friends ! it does not cheer me to see them. they but express their want of faith in me or in mankind. their coldest, cruellest thought comes clothed in polite and easy spoken words at last. i am silent to their invitations, because i do not feel invited, and we have no reasons to give for what we do not do. one says, " love me out of this mire." the other says, " come out of it and be lovely." feb. 1, 1855. as i skated up the river yes terday, now here, now there, past the old king doms of my fancy, i was reminded of lan dor's eichard the first. " i sailed along the realms of my family ; on the right was england, on the left was france [on the right was sud bury, on the left was way land ] ; little else 306 winter. could i discover than sterile eminences and ex tensive shoals. they fled behind me ; so pass away generations ; so shift and sink, and die away affections." " i debark in sicily." [that was tail's island.] " i sail again, and within a day or two [hour or two] i behold, as the sun is setting, the solitaiy majesty of crete [that was nobscot surely], mother of a religion, it is said, that lived two thousand years. onward, and many specks bubble up along the blue iegean." these must have been the muskrat houses in the meadows. " every one," i have no doubt, " the monument of a greater man [being ?] than i am." the swelling river was belching on a high key from ten to eleven, quite a musical cracking, running like chain lightning of sound athwart my course. ... as i passed, the ice forced up by the water on one side suddenly settled on another with a crash, and quite a lake was formed above the ice behind me, so that my successor two hours after, to his wonder and alarm, saw my tracks disappear on one side of it and come out on the other. my seat from time to time is the springy horizontal bough of some fallen tree which is frozen into the ice, some old maple that was blown over and retained some life a year after, in the water, covered with the great shaggy perforate parmelia. lying flat i quench my thirst where the ice is melted winter. 307 about it, blowing aside the snow fleas. the great arundo in the sudbury meadows was all level with the ice. there was a great bay of ice stretching up the pantry, and up larned brook. i looked up a broad, glaring bay of ice at the last place which seemed to reach to the base of nobscot and almost to the horizon. some dead maple or oak saplings laid side by side made my bridges, by which i got on to the ice along the watery shore. it was a problem to get off, and another to get on, dry shod. feb. 1, 1857. 3 p. m. down railroad. ther mometer at -(-42°. warm as it is, i see a large flock of snow buntings on the railroad cause way. their wings are white above, next the body, but black or dark beyond, and on the back. this produces that regular black and white effect when they fly past you. feh. 1, 1858. measured gowing's swamp two and one half rods n. e. of the middle of the hole, i. e., in the andromeda and sphagnum near its edge, where i stand in the summer ; also five rods n. e. of the middle of the open hole, or in the midst of the andromeda. in both these places the pole went hard at first, but broke through a crust of roots and sphag num at about three feet beneath the surface, and i then easily pushed it down just twenty feet. this being a small pole, i could not push 308 winter. it any farther, holding it by the small end. it bent then. with a longer and stiffer pole, i could probably have fathomed thirty feet. it seems then that there is over this andromeda swamp a crust about three feet thick of sphag num, andromeda calyculata and polifolia, and kalmia glauca, beneath which there is almost clear water, and under that an exceedingly thin mud. there can be no soil above the mud, and yet there are three or four larch trees three feet high or more between these holes, or over ex actly the same water, and small spruce trees near by. for aught that appears, the swamp is as deep under the andromedas as in the middle. the two andromedas and the kalmia glauca may be more truly said to grow in water than in sou. there. when the surface of a swamp shakes for a rod around you, you may conclude that it is a network of roots two or three feet thick resting on water or very thin mud. the surface of that swamp, composed in great part of sphagnum, is really floating. it evidently begins with sphag num which floats on the surface of clear water, and accumulating, at length affords a basis for that large-seeded sedge(?), andromeda, etc. the filling up of a swamp then, in this case at least, is not the result of a deposition of vegetable matter washed into it, settling to the bottom, and leaving the surface clear, so filling it up from winter. 309 the bottom to the top. but the vegetation first extends itself over it in a film, which gradually thickens till it supports shrubs, and completely conceals the water. the under part of this crust drops to the bottom, so that it is filled up first at the top and bottom, and the middle part is the last to be reclaimed from the water. per haps this swamp is in the process of becoming peat. it has been partially drained by a ditch. — i fathomed also two rods within the edge of the blueberry bushes, in the path, but i could not force a pole down more than eight feet five inches, so it is much more solid there, and the blueberry bushes require a firmer soil than the water andromeda. — this is a regular quag or shaking surface, and in this way evidently float ing islands are formed. i am not sure but that meadow, with all its bushes in it, would float a man-of-war. feb. 2, 1841. it is easy to repeat, but hard to originate. nature is readily made to repeat herself in a thousand forms, and, in the daguerre otype, her own light is amanuensis. the pic ture, too, has more than a surface significance, a depth equal to the prospect, so that the micro scope may be applied to the one, as the spy glass to the other. thus we may easily multi ply the forms of the outward, but to give the within outwardness, that is not easy. 310 winter. that an impression may be taken, perfect stillness, though but for an instant, is necessary. there is something analogous in the birth of all rhymes. our sympathy is a gift whose value we can never know, nor when we impart it. the in stant of communion is when, for the least point of time, we cease to oscillate and coincide in rest, by as fine a point as a star pierces the firma ment. . . . there is always a single ear in the audience to which we address ourselves. how much does it concern j-ou, the good opinion of your friend ! therein is the meas ure of fame. for the herd of men multiplied many times will never come up to the value of one friend. in this society there is no fame but love, for as our name may be on the lips of men, so are we in each other's hearts. there is no ambition but virtue, for why should we go round about who may go direct ? . . . for our aspirations there is no expression as yet, but if we obey steadily, by another year we shall have learned the language of last year's aspirations. . . . weight has something very imposing in it, for we cannot get rid of it. once in the scales we must weigh. and are we not always in the scales, and weighing just our due, though we winter. 311 kick the beam, and do all we can to make our selves heavier or lighter ? feb. 2, 1853. the stellaria media [common chiekweed] is full of frost-bitten blossoms con taining stamens, etc., still, and half-grown buds. apparently it never rests. feb. 2, 1854. up river on ice to clematis brook. another warm, melting day, like yester day. you can see some softening and relenting in the sky. apparently the vafjor in the air makes a grosser atmosphere more like that of a summer eve. we go up the corner road and talie the ice at potter's meadow. the cliff hill is nearly bare on the west side, and you hear the rush of melted snow down its side in one place. here and there are regular round holes in the ice over the meadow two or three feet in diameter where the water appears to be warmer, and where are springs, perchance. therein in shallow water is seen the cress and one or two other plants still quite fresh. the shade of pines on the snow is in some lights quite blue. we stopped a while under bittern cliff, the south side, where it is very warm. there are a few greenish radical leaves to be seen, primrose, johnswort, strawberry, etc., and spleenwort still green in the clefts. these sunny old gray rocks completely covered with white and gray licheus, and overrun with ivy, 312 winter. are a very cozy place. you hardly detect the melted snow swiftly trickling down them, until you feel the drops on your cheek. the winter gnat is seen in the air before the rocks. in their clefts are the latebrs3 of many insects, spiders, etc. . . . the ice is eighteen inches thick on fair haven. saw some pickerel just caught there with a fine lustre on them. — went to the pond in the woods which has an old ditch dug from it near clematis brook. the red twigs of the cornel and the yellow ones of the sallows sur rounding it are interesting at this season. we prize the least color now. as it is a melting day, the snow is everywhere peppered with snow fleas, even twenty rods from the woods, on the pond and meadows. the scream of the jay is a true winter sound. it is wholly without sentiment, and in harmony with winter. — i stole up within five or six rods of a pitch pine behind which a downy wood pecker was pecking. from time to time he hopped round to the side towards me, and ob served me without fear. they are very confident birds, not easily scared, but incline to keep the other side of the bough from you, perhaps. already we begin to anticipate spring, to say that the day is spring-like. this is an important difference between this time and a month a,s:o. winter. 313 is not january the hardest month to get through? when you have weathered that, you get into the gulf stream of winter, nearer the shores of spring. feb. 2, 1855. . . . this last half inch of snow which fell in the night is just enough to track animals on the ice by. all about the hill and eock i see the tracks of rabbits which have run back and forth close to the shore re peatedly since the night. in the case of the rabbit, the fore feet are farther apart than the hind ones, the first, four or five inches to the stride, the last, two or three. they are gener ally not quite regular, but one of the fore feet a little in advance of the other, and so with the hind feet. there is an interval of about sixteen inches between each four tracks. sometimes they are in a curve or crescent, all touching. i saw what must have been a muskrat's or mink's track, i think, since it came out of the water ; the tracks roundish, and toes much rayed four or five inches apart on the trail, with only a trifle more between the fore and hind legs, and the mark of the tail in successive curves as it struck the ice. — another track puzzled me, as if a hare had been running like a dog ( — • . — • . — • . eighteen inches apart), and touched its tail, if it had one. this in several places. 314 winteu. feb. 2, 1858. ... as i return from the post office i hear the hoarse, robin-like chirp of a song sparrow, . . . and see him perched on the top most twig of a heap of brush, looking forlorn, and drabbled, and solitary in the rain. feh.2,im0. 6°atabout 8 a. m. . . . 2 p.m. to fair haven pond. the river, which was breaking up, is frozen over again. the new ice over the channel is of a yellow tinge, and is cov ered with handsome rosettes two or three inches in diameter where the vapor which rose through froze and crystallized. this new ice for forty rods together is thickly covered with these rosettes, often as thick as snow, an inch deep. . . . the frozen breath of the river at a myriad breathing holes. . . . it is remarkable that the straw-colored sedge of the meadows, which in the fall is one of the least noticeable colors, should now, that the land scape is mostly covered with snow, be perhaps the most noticeable of all objects in it for its color, and an agreeable contrast to the snow. . . . i see where some meadow mouse (if not mole) just came to the surface of the snow, enough to break it with his back for three or four inches, then put his head out, and at once withdrew it. we walked as usual in the fresh track of a winter. 315 fox, peculiarly pointed, and sometimes the mark of two toe-nails in front separate from the track of the foot in very thin snow. as we were kin dling a fire on the pond by the side of the island, we saw the fox himself at the inlet of the river. he was busily examining along the sides of the pond by the button bushes and wil lows, smelling in the snow. not appearing to regard us much, he slowly explored along the shore of the pond thus half way round it ; at pleasant meadow evidently looking for mice (or moles ?) in the grass of the bank, smelling in the shallow snow there, amid the stubble, often retracing his steps, and pausing at particular spots. he was eagerly searching for food, intent on finding some mouse to help fill his empty stomach. he had a blackish tail and blackish feet, looked lean, and stood high. the tail peculiarly large for any creature to carry round. he stepped daintily about, softly, and is more to the manor born than a dog. it was a very arctic scene this cold day, and i suppose he would hardly have ventured out in a warm one. — the fox seems to get his living by industry and perseverance. he runs smelling for miles along the most favorable routes, especially the edge of rivers and ponds, till he smells the track of a mouse beneath the snow, or the fresh track of a partridge, and then follows it till he comes 316 winter. upon his game. . . . there may be a dozen partridges resting in the snow within a square mile, and his work is simply to find them with the end of his nose. compared with the dog he affects me as high-bred, unmixed. there is nothing of the mongrel in him. he belongs to a noble family which has seen its best days, a younger son. now and then he starts, and turns, and doubles on his track, as if he heard or scented danger. (i watch him through my glass.) he does not mind us at the distance of only sixty rods. i have myself seen to-day one place where a mouse came to the surface in the snow. probably he has smelled out many such galleries. perhaps he seizes them through the snow. — i had a transient vision of one mouse this winter, and that the first for a number of years. feh. 3, 1841. the present seems never to get its due. it is the least obvious, neither before nor behind, but within us. all the past plays into this moment, and we are what we are. my aspiration is one thing, my reflection, another ; but, over all, myself and condition — is and does. to men and nature i am each moment a finished tool, — a spade, a barrow, a pickaxe. this immense promise is no efficient qualitj'. for all practical purposes i am done. . . . we are constantly invited to be what we are, winter. . 317 as to something worthy and nohle. i never waited but for myself to come round ; none ever detained me, but i lagged or staggered after myself. it steads us to be as true to children and boors, as to god himself. it is the only atti tude which will meet all occasions. it only will make the earth yield her increase, — and by it do we effectually expostulate with the wind. if i run against a post, this is the remedy. i would meet the morning and evening on very sincere ground. when the sun introduces me to a new day, i silently say to myself, " let us be faithful all round. we will do justice and receive it." something like this is the secret charm of nature's demeanor towards us, strict conscientiousness, and disregard of us when we have ceased to have regard for our selves. so she can never offend us. how true she is, and never swerves. in her most genial moment, her laws are as steadfastly and relent lessly fulfilled (though the decalogue is rhymed and set to sweetest music), as in her sternest. any exhibition of affection, as an inadvertent word, or act, or look, seems premature, as if the time were not ripe for it, like the buds which the warm days near the end of winter cause to push out and unfold before the frosts are yet gone. 318 winter. my life must seem as if it were passing on a higher level than that which i occupy. it must possess a dignity which will not allow me to be familiar. feb. 3, 1852. when i review the list of my acquaintances from the most impartial point of view, and consider each one's excesses and de fects of character which are the subject of mutual i'idicule and astonishment and pity (and i class myself among them), i cannot help ask ing myself, " if this is the sane world, what must a mad-house be ? " it is only by a certain flattery, and an ignoring of their faults, that even the best are made available for society. i have been to the libraries (yesterday) at cambridge and boston. it would seem as if all things compelled us to originality. how happens it that i find not in the country, in the fields and woods, the works even of like-minded naturalists and poets. those who have ex pressed the purest and deepest love of nature have not recorded it on the bark of the trees with the lichens, they have left no memento of it there ; but if i would read their books, i must go to the city, so strange and repulsive both to them and to me, and deal with men and institu tions with whom i have no sympathy. when i have just been there on this errand, it seems too great a price to pay even for access to the works winter. 319 of homer or chaucer or linnaeus. greece and asia minor should henceforth bear iliads and odysseys, as their trees lichens. but, no; if the works of nature are, to any extent, collected in the forest, the works of men are, to a still greater extent, collected in the city. i have sometimes imagined a library, i. e., a collection of the works of true poets, philosophers, natu ralists, etc., deposited not in a brick or marble edifice in a crowded and dusty city, guarded by cold-blooded and methodical officials, and preyed on by bookworms, in which you own no share, and are not likely to, but rather far away in the depths of a primitive forest, like the ruins of central america, where you could trace a series of crumbling alcoves, the older books protecting the more modern from the elements, partially buried by the luxuriance of nature, which the heroic student could only reach after adventures in the wilderness amid wild beasts and wild men. that, to my imagination, seems a fitter place for these interesting relics which owe no small part of their interest to their antiquity, and whose occasion is nature, than the well-pre served edifice, with its well-preserved officials, on the side of a city's square. more terrible than lions and tigers, these libraries. access to na ture for original observation is secured by one ticket, by one kind of expense ; but access to the 320 winter. works of your predecessors, by a very different kind of expense. all things tend to cherish the originality of the original. nature, at least, takes no pains to introduce him to the works of his predecessors, but only presents him with her own opera omnia. is it the lover of nature who has access to all that has been written on the subject of his favorite studies ? no ; he lives far away from this. it is the lover of books and systems who knows nature chiefly at second hand. . . . about 6 p. m. walked to cliffs via railroad. snow quite deep. the sun had set without a cloud in the sky ; a rare occurrence, but i missed the clouds which make the glory of evening. the sky must have a few clouds, as the mind a few moods ; nor is the evening less serene for them. there is only a tinge of red along the horizon. the moon is nearly f iiu to-night, and the moment is passed when the light in the east (i. e., of the moon) balances the light in the west. . . . it is perfectly still, and not very cold. the shadows of the trees on the snow are more minutely dis tinct than at any other season, not dark masses merely, but finely reticulated, each limb and twig represented, as cannot be in summer both from the leaves and the inequality and darkness of the ground. ... i hear my old acquaintance, the owl, from the causeway. the reflector of winter. 321 the cars, as i stand over the deep cut, makes a large and dazzling light in this air, . . . and now whizzes the boiling, sizzling kettle by me, in which the passengers make me think of pota toes which a fork would show to be done by this time. the steam is denser for the cold, and more white ; like the purest downy clouds in the summer sky its volumes roll up between me and the moon, and far behind, when the cars are a mile off, it still goes shading the fields with its wreaths, the breath of the panting traveler. i now cross from the railroad to the road. this snow, the last of which fell day before yesterday, is two feet deep, pure and powdery. . . . from a myriad little crystal mirrors the moon is re flected, which is the untarnished sparkle of its surface. i hear a gentle rustling of the oak leaves as i go through the woods, but this snow has yet no troops of leaves on its surface the snow evidently by its smooth crust assists in the more equal dispersion and distribution of the leaves which course over it, blown by the wind. perchance, for this reason, the oak leaves and some others hang on. . . . [on fair haven hill, j instead of the sound of his [the chopper's] axe, i hear the hooting of an owl, nocturnus ululatus, whose haunts he is laying waste. the ground is au pure white, powdery snow, which his sled, etc., has stirred 322 winter. up, except the scattered twigs and pine plumes. i can see every track distinctly where the team ster drove his oxen and loaded his sled, and even the tracks of his dog, in the moonlight, and plainly to write this. — the moonlight now is very splendid in the untouched pine woods above the cliffs, alternate patches of shade and light. the light has almost the brightness of sunlight, the fulgor. the stems of the trees are more obvious than by day, being simple black against the moonlight and the snow. the sough of the breeze in the pine tops sounds far away like the surf on a distant shore, and for all sound be7 side, there is only the rattling or chafing of little dry twigs, perchance a little snow falling on them, or they are so brittle that they break and fall with the motion of the trees. — my owl sounds hoo-hoo-hoo — hoo. the landscape covered with snow seen from these cliffs, encased in snowy armer two feet thick, gleaming in the moonlight and of spotless white, who can believe that this is the habitable globe. the scenery is wholly arctic. fair ha ven pond is a baffin's bay. man must have ascertained the limits of the winter before he ventured to withstand it, and not migrate with the birds. no cultivated field, no house, no candle. all is as dreary as the shores of the frozen ocean. i can tell where there is wood winter. 323 and where open land for many miles in the hori zon by the darkness of the former and whiteness of the latter. ... it looks as if the snow and ice of the arctic world, traveling like a glacier, had crept down southward and overwhelmed new england. see if a man can think his sum mer thoughts now. — but the evening star is preparing to set, and i will return, floundering through snow, sometimes up to my middle. . . . the forcible writer stands bodily behind his words with his experience. he does not make books out of books, but he has been there in person. . . . that is a good mythological incident told of the wounded farmer who, his foot being lacer ated and held fast between his plow and a fallen tree in a forest clearing, drew his oxen to him with difficulty, smeared their horns with blood which the mosquitoes had drawn from his bare arms, and cutting the reins, sent them home as an advertisement to his family. feb. 3, 1854. . . . varro speaks of two kinds of pigeons, one of which was wont to alight on the ( columinihiis villm) columns of a villa (a qico appellatce columbob), from which they were called " columbce." these, on ac count of their natural timidity (^summa loca in tectis captanf), delight in the highest places on the roofs (or jmder cover) ? 324 winter. feb. 3, 1855. . . . skated up the river with t n in spite of the snow and wind. . . . we went up the pantry meadow . . . and came down . . . again with the wind and snow dust, spreading our coat tails, like birds, though some what at the risk of our necks, if we had struck a foul place. i found that i could sail on a tack pretty well, trimming with my skirts. sometimes we had to jump suddenly over some obstacle, which the snow had concealed, to save our necks. it was worth the while for one to look back against the sun and wind, and see the other sixty rods off, . . . floating down like a graceful demon in the midst of the broad meadow, all covered and lit with the curling snow steam, between which you saw the ice in dark, waving streaks, like a mighty river orellana braided of a myriad steaming cur rents ; like the demon of the storm driving his flocks and herds before him. in the midst of this tide of curling snow steam, he sweeps and surges this way and that, and comes on like the spirit of the whirlwind. at lee's cliff we made a fire, kindling with white pine cones, after oak leaves and twigs, else we had lost it. the cones saved us, for there is a resinous drop at the point of each scale. there we forgot that we were out doors in a blustering winter day. flash go your dry leaves like powder, and leave a few winter. 325 bare and smoking twigs. then you sedulously feed a little flame until the fire takes hold of the solid wood and establishes itself. what an uncertain and negative thing is fire when it finds nothing to suit its appetite after the first flash. what a positive and inexpugnable thing, when it begins to devour the solid wood with a relish, burning with its own wind. you must think as long at last how to put it out as you did how to kindle it. close up under some upright rock where you scorch the yellow sul phur lichens. then cast on some creeping juni per wreaths or hemlock boughs to hear them crackle, realizing scripture. some little boys ten years old are as hand some skaters as i know. they sweep along with a graceful, floating motion, leaning now to this side, then to that, like a marsh hawk beat ing the bush. . . . i still recur in my mind to that skating tour of the 31st. i was thus enabled to get a bird's eye view of the river, to survey its length and breadth within a few hours, connect one part or shore with another in my mind, and realize what was going on upon it from end to end, to know the whole, as i ordinarily knew a few miles of it only. i connected the chestnut-tree house near the shore in wayland with the chim ney house in billerica, pelham's pond with 326 winter. nutting's pond in billerioa. there is good skating from the mouth to saxonville, measure ing in a straight line some twenty-two miles, by the river say thirty now. it is all the way of one character, a meadow river, or dead stream. musketicook, the abode of muskrats, pickerel, etc., crossed within these dozen miles each way, or thirty in all, by some twenty low wooden bridges, sublicii pontes, connected with the mainland by willowy causeways. thus the long shallow lakes are divided into reaches. these long causeways all under water and ice now, only the bridges peeping out from time to time, like a dry eyelid. you must look close to find them in many cases, mere islands are they to the traveler in this waste of water and ice. only two villages lying near the river. concord and wayland, and one at each end of this thirty miles. ... i used some bits of wood with a groove in them for crossing the causeways and gravelly places, that i might not scratch my skate irons. feb. 3, 1856. ... p. m. up north branch. a strong n. w. wind (and thermometer 11°) driving the snow like steam. about five inches of soft snow now on ice. . . . returning, saw near the island a shrike glide by, cold and blus tering as it was, with a remarkably even and steady sail or gliding motion, like a hawk, eight winter. 327 or ten feet above the ground, and alight on a tree from which, at the same instant, a small bird, perhaps a creeper or nuthatch, flitted tim idly away. the shrike was apparently in pur suit. we go wading through snow now up the bleak river, in the face of a cutting n. w. wind and driving snow-storm, turning now this ear, now that, to the wind, our gloved hands in our bosoms or our pockets. how different this from sailing or paddling up the stream here in july, or poling amid the rocks ! yet still, in one square rod where they have got out ice and a thin transparent covering has formed, i can see the pebbly bottom as in summer. there comes a deep snow in midwinter cover ing up the ordinary food of many birds and quadrupeds, but anon a high wind scatters the seeds of pines, hemlocks, birches, alders, etc., far and wide over the surface of the snow, for them. you may now observe plainly the habit of the rabbits to run in paths about the swamps. mr. emerson, who returned last week from lecturing, on the mississippi, having been gone but a month, tells me that he saw boys skating on the mississippi, and on lake erie, and on the hudson, and has no doubt they are skating on lake superior. probably at boston he might have seen them skating on the atlantic. 328 winter. ill barber's " historical collections," p. 476, there is a letter by cotton mather dated " bos ton, 10th dec, 1717," describing the great snow of the preceding february, from which i quote : " on the twentieth of the last february there came on a snow, which being added unto what had covered the ground a few days before, made a thicker mantle for our mother than what was usual. and thestorm with it was, for the fol lowing day, so violent as to make all communi cation between the neighbors everywhere to cease. people, foi some hours, could not pass from one side of a street to another." " on the twenty-fourth day of the month came pelion upon ossa. another snow came on, which almost buried the memory of the for mer, with a storm so famous that heaven laid an interdict on the religious assemblies through out the country on the lord's day, the like whereunto had never been seen before. the indians near an hundred years old affirm that their fathers never told them of anything that equaled it. vast numbers of cattle were de stroyed in this calamity, whereof some there were of the stranger [stronger ?] sort, were found standing dead on their legs, as if they had been alive, many weeks after when the snow melted away. and others had their eyes glazed over with ice at such a rate, that being winter. 329 not far from the sea, their mistake of their way drowned them there. one gentleman on whose farms were lost above eleven hundred sheep, which with other cattle, were interred (shall i say) or innived in the snow, writes me word that there were two sheep very singularly cir cumstanced. for, no less than eight and twenty days after the storm, the people pulling out the ruins of above an hundred sheep out of a snow bank which lay sixteen foot high drifted over them, there was two found alive which had been there all this time, and kept themselves alive by eating the wool of their dead companions. when they were taken out, they shed their own fleeces, but soon got into good case again." " a man had a couple of young hogs which he gave over for dead, but on the twenty-seventh day after their burial, they made their way out of a snow bank, at the bottom of which they had found a little tansy to feed upon." " hens were found alive after seven days ; turkeys were found alive after five and twenty days, buried in the snow, and at a distance from the ground, and altogether destitute of anything to feed them." — " the wild creatures of the woods, [at] the outgoing of the evening, made their descent as well as they could in this time of scarcity for them, towards the sea-side. a vast multitude of deer, for the same cause, taking 330 winter. the same course, and the deep snow spoillug them of theiv only defense, which is to run, they became such a prey to these devourers that it is thought not one in twenty escaped." — " it is incredible how much damage is done to the or chards, for the snow freezing to a crust as high as the bows of the trees, anon split them to pieces. the cattle, also, walking on the crusted snow a dozen feet from the ground, so fed upon the trees as very much to damnify them." " cot tages were totally covered with the snow, and not the very tops of their chimneys to be seen." these " odd accidents," he says, " would afford a story. but there not being any relation to philosophy in them, i forbear them." he little thought that his simple testimony to such facts as the above would be worth all the philosophy he might dream of. feh. 3, 1857. to fitchburg to lecture. — though the snow was not deep, i noticed that an unbroken snow crust stretched around fitch burg ; and its several thousand inhabitants had been confined so long to the narrow streets, some of them a track only six feet wide. hardly one individual had anywhere departed from this nar row walk, and struck out into the surrounding fields and hills. if i had had my cowhide boots, i should not have confined myself to those narrow limits, but have climbed some of the hills. winter. 331 it is surprising to go into a n. e. town in mid winter and find its five thousand inhabitants all living thus on the limits, confined at most to their narrow moose-yard in the snow. scarcely here and there has a citizen stepped aside one foot to let a sled pass. and about as circum scribed is their summer life, going out from house to shop, and back to house again. if, indian like, one examined the dew or beaded grass, he would be surprised to discover how little trod den or frequented the surrounding fields were. ... it is as if some vigilance committee had given notice that if any should transgress these narrow limits, he should be outlawed and his blood should be upon his own head. i^e&. 3, 1858. ... i do not see this year, and i do not know that i ever have seen, any un seasonable swelling of the buds of indigenous plants in mild winters. feb. 8, 1859. five minutes before 3 p. m. father died. ... i have touched a body which was flexible and warm, yet tenantless — warmed by what fire ? when the spirit that animated some matter has left it, who else, what else, can animate it? how enduring are our bodies after all ! the forms of our brothers and sisters, our parents and children and wives, lie still in the hills and fields round about us, not to mention those of 332 winter. our remoter ancestors, and the matter which composed the body of our first human father still exists under another name. "when in sickness the body is emaciated, and the expression of. the face in various ways is changed, you perceive unexpected resemblances to other members of the same family, as if within the same family there was a greater general similarity in the framework of the face than in its filling up and clothing. . . . some have spoken slightingly of the indians, as a race possessing so little skill and wit, so low in the scale of humanity, and so brutish that they hardly deserved to be remembered, using only the terms, miserable, wretched, piti ful, and the like. in writing their histories of this country, they have so hastily disposed of this refuse of humanity (as they might have called it), which littered and defiled the shore and the interior. but even the indigenous ani mals are inexhaustibly interesting to us. how much more then the indigenous men of amer ica ! if wild men, so much more like ourselves than they are unlike, have inhabited these shores before us, we wish to know particidarly what manner of men they were, how they lived here, their relation to nature, their arts and their cus toms, their fancies and superstitions. they paddled over these waters, they wandered in winter. 333 these woods, and they had their fancies and be liefs connected with the sea and the forest, which concern us quite as much as the fables of oriental nations do. it frequently happens that the historian, though he professes more human ity than the trapper, the mountain man, or gold digger, who shoots one as a wild beast, in reality exhibits and practices a similar inhumanity to his, wielding a pen instead of a rifle. — one tells you with more contempt than pity that the indian has no religion, holding up both hands, and this to all the shallow-brained and bigoted seems to mean something important. but it is a distinction without a difference. pray bow much more religion has the historian ? if knows so much more about god than another, if he has made some discovery of truth in this di rection, i would thank him to publish it in " silli man's journal," with as few flourishes as possi ble. it is the spirit of humanity, that which animates both so-called savages and civilized nations, working through a man, and not the man expressing himself, that interests us most. the thought of a so-called savage tribe is gen erally far more just than that of a single civil ized man. i perceive that we partially die ourselves, through sympathy, at the death of each of our friends or near relatives. each such experience 334 winter. is an assault on our vital force. it becomes a source of wonder that they who have lost many friends still live. after long watching around the sick-bed of a friend, we too partially give up the ghost with him, and are the less to be iden tified with this state of things. the writer must, to some extent, inspire him self. most of the sentences may at first be dead in his essay, but when all are arranged, some life and color wul be refiected on them from the mature and successful lines. they will appear to pulsate with past life, and he will be enabled to eke out their slumbering sense, and make them worthy of their neighborhood. in his first essay on a given theme, he produces scarcely more than a frame and ground-work for his sen timent and poetry. each clear thought that he attains to, draws in its train many kindred thoughts or perceptions. the writer has much to do even to create a theme for himself. most that is first written on any subject is a mere groping after it, mere rubble-stone and foun dation. it is only when many observations of different periods have been brought together that he begins to grasp his subject, and can make one pertinent and just observation. feh. 8, 1860. . . . when i read some of the rules for speaking and writing tlie english lan guage correctly, as that a sentence must never winter. 335 end with a particle, and perceive liow implicitly even the learned obey it, i think any fool can make a rule, and every fool "wiil mind it. fab. 4, 1841. . . . music can make the moat nervous chord vibrate healthily! . . . wait till you can be genuinely polite, though it be tiu doomsday, and not lose your chance everlastingly by a cowardly yielding to young etiquette. . . . not only by his cunning hand and brain, biit when he speaks, too, does man assert his superi ority. he conquers the spaces with his voice as well as the lion. the voice of a strong man modulated to the cadence of some tune is more imposing than any natural sound. the keeper's is the most commanding voice in the menag erie, and is heard over all its din. a strong, musical voice imposes a new order and harmony upon nature. from it as a centre, a law is promulgated to the universe. what it lacks in volume and loudness may always be made up in musical expression and distinctness. the brute growls to secure obedience, he threatens ; the man speaks as if obedience were already secured. feb. 4, 1852. a mild, thawy day. the needles of the pine are the touchstone for the air. any change in that element is revealed to the practiced eye by their livelier green or increased 336 winter. motion. they are the tell-tales. now they are (the white pine) a cadaverous, misty blue, anon a lively . . . light plays on them, and they seem to erect themselves unusually, while the pitch pines are a brighter yellowish green than usual. the sun loves to nestle in the boughs of the pine and pass rays through them. — the scent of bruised pine leaves where a sled has passed is a little exciting to me now. i saw this afternoon such lively, blood-red colors on a white pine stump recently cut, that at first i thought the chopper had cut himself. the heart of the tree was partly decayed, and here and there the sounder parts were of this vermilion (?) color alternating with the ordinary white of the wood where it was apparently in the earlier stages of decay. the color was live lier for being wet with the melting snow. feb. 4, 1854. . . . we have not much that is poetic in the accompaniments of the farmer's life. varro speaks of the swineherd as accus toming the swine or boars to come at the sound of a horn when he fed them with acorns. i re member that my grandmother used to call her cow home at evening from a near pasture to be milked by thumping on the mortar which held her salt. the tinkling cow-bell cannot be spared. even what most attracts us in the farmer's life is not its profitableness. we love to go after the winter. 337 cow not for the sake of her milk or her beef, or the money they yield, but perchance to hear the tinkling of the cow -bell. . . . we would keep hens not for eggs, but t4 hear the cocks crow and the hens cackle. as for the locality of bee-hives, varro says they must be placed near the villa, " potissimum ubi non resonent imagines, hie enim sonus harum fugae causa existimatur esse," especially where there are no echoes, " for this sound is thought to be the cause of their flight." feb. 4, 1855. . . . saw this p. m. a very dis tinct otter track by the rock, at the junction of the two rivers. the separate foot tracks were quite round, more than two inches in diameter, showing the five toes distinctly in the snow, which was about half an inch deep. in one place where it had crossed last night to merrick's pas ture, its trail about six inches wide and of fur rows in the snow was on one side of its foot tracks, and there were about nine inches between its fore and hind feet. close by the great aspen i saw where it had entered or come out of the water under a shelf of ice left adhering to a maple. there it apparently played or slid on the level ice, making a broad trail, as if a shovel had been shoved along, just eight inches wide, without a foot track in it for four feet or more. and again the trail was only two inches wide and 338 winter. between the foot tracks, which were side by side and twenty-two inches apart. . . . about the edge of the hole, where the snow was all rubbed off, was something white which looked and smelt exactly like bits of the skin of pouts or eels. minott tells of one shot once while eating an eel. v saw one this winter in this town eating fish by a brook. ... i sometimes hear a prominent, but dull-witted worthy man say, or hear that he has said rarely, that if it were not for his firm belief in " an overruling power," or " a perfect being," etc. but such poverty-stricken expressions only con vince me of his habitual doubt, and that he is surprised into a transient belief. such a man's expression of faith, moving solemnly in the traditional furrow, and casting out all free thinking and living souls with the rusty mould board of his compassion or contempt, thinking that he has moses and all the prophets in his wake, discourages and saddens me as an ex pression of his narrow and barren want of faith. i see that the infidels and skeptics have formed themselves into churches, and weekly gather to gether at the ringing of a bell. sometimes when in conversation or a lecture, i have been grasping at, or even standing and reclining upon the serene and everlasting truths that underlie and support our vacillating life, i have seen winter. 339 my auditors standing on their terra firma, a quaking earth, crowded together on their lisbon quay, and compassionately or timidly watching my motions as if they were the antics of a rope dancer or mountebank intending to walk on air. feb. 4, 1858. p. m. to c. miles swamp. discover the ledum latifolium quite abundant on a space about six rods in diameter just e. of the small pond-hole, growing with the androm eda calyculata, polifolia, kalmia glauea, etc. , , . the ledum bears a general resemblance to the water andromeda, with its dark-reddish, pur plish, or rather mulberry leaves, reflexed; but nearer, it is distinguished by its coarseness, the perfect tent form of its upper leaves, and the large, conspicuous, terminal, roundish (strictly oval) red buds, nearly as big as the swamp pink's, but rounded. the woolly stem for a couple of inches beneath the bud is frequently bare, and conspicuously club-shaped. the rust on the under sides of the leaves is of a lighter color than that of maine. the seed vessels, which open at the base first, still hold on. the plant might be easily confounded with the water andromeda by a careless observer. . . . i brought some home, and had a cup of tea made of it, which, in spite of a slight piny or tur pentine flavoi', seemed unexpectedly good. . . . as usual with the finding of new plants, i had a 340 winter. presentiment that i should find the ledum in concord. it is a remarkable fact that in the case of the most interesting plants which i have discovered in this vicinity, i have anticipated finding them j)erhaps a year before the dis covery. feb. 5, 1841. . . . music is the crystalliza tion of sound. there is something in the effect of a harmonious voice upon the disposition of its neighborhood analogous to the law of crystals. it centralizes itself, and sounds like the pub lished law of things. if the law of the universe were to be audibly promulgated, no mortal law giver would suspect it, for it would be a finer melody than his ears ever attended to. it would be sphere music. . . . in all emergencies there is always one step which you may take on firm ground, where gravity will assure your footing. so you hold a draft on fate payable at sight. feb. 5, 1852. . . . men do believe in sym bols yet and can understand some. when sir francis head left his government in upper can ada, and the . usual farewell had been said, as the vessel moved off, he, standing on the deck, pointed, for all reply, to the british flag floating over his head, and a shriek rather than a cheer went up from the crowd on the piers who had observed his gesture. . . . winter. 341 time never passes so rapidly and unaccount as when i am engaged in recording my thoughts. the world may perchance reach its end for us in a profounder thought, and time itself run down. feb. 5, 1853. ... the frost is out of the ground in many places. a stellaria media [common chickweed] in blossom in the garden, as was the case, of course, last month. feb. 5, 1854. . . . shall we not have sym pathy with the muskrat, which gnaws its third leg off, not as pitying its suffering, but, through our kindred mortality, appreciating its majestic pains and its heroic virtue ? are we not made its brothers by fate ? for whom are psalms sung and mass said, if not for such worthies as these ? when i hear the church organ peal, or feel the trembling tones of the bass-viol, i see in imag ination the muskrat gnawing off his leg. i offer up a note that his affliction may be sanctified to each and all of us. . . . when i think of the tragedies which are constantly permitted in the course of all animal life, they make the plaintive strain of the universal harp which elevates us above the trivial. . . . even as the worthies of mankind are said to recommend human life by having lived it, so i could not spare the example of the muskrat. feb. 5, 1859> when we have experienced 342 winter. many disappointments^ such as the loss of friends, the notes of birds cease to affect us as they did. feb, 6, 1841. one may discover a new side to his most intimate friend when for the first time he hears him speak in public. he will be strange to him as he is more familiar to the au dience. the longest intimacy could not foretell how he would behave then. when i observe my friend's ponduct toward others, then chiefly i learn the traits in his character, and in each case i am unprepared for the issue. . . . how little do we know each other. who can tell how his friend would behave on any occasion. . . . what i am must make you forget what i wear. the fashionable world is content to be eclipsed by its dress, and never will bear the contrast. . . . lu ral lu ral lu — may be moi'e impressively sung than very respectable wisdom talked. it is well timed, as wisdom is not always. feb. 6, 1852. . . . the artificial system has been very properly called the dictionary, and the natural method, the grammar of the science of botanj-, by botanists themselves. but are we to have nothing but grammars and dictionaries of this literature ? are there no woi'ks written in the language of flowers ? i asked a learned and accurate naturalist, who is at the same time the courteous guardian of a public library, to winter. 343 direct me to those works which contained the more . . . popular account or biography of par ticular flowers from which the botanies i had met with appeared to draw sparingly, for i trusted that each flower had had many lovers and faithful describers in past times. but he in formed me that i had read all, that no one was acquainted with them, they were only catalogued like his books. . . . who will not confess that the necessity to get money has helped to ripen some of his schemes ? feb. 6, 1853. observed some buds on a young apple-tree partially unfolded at the extremity and apparently swollen. probably blossom buds. feb. 6, 1855. the coldest morning this win ter. our thermometer stands at — 14° at 9 a. m. others, we hear, at 6 a. m. stood at — 18°. there are no loiterers in the street, and the wheels of wagons squeak as they have not for a long time, actually shriek. frostwork keeps its place on the window within three feet of the stove all day in my chamber. at 4 p. m., the thermometer is at — 10°. at six it is at — 14°. i was walking at five, and found it stinging cold. . . . when i look out at the chimneys, i see that the cold and hungry air snaps up the smoke at once. the smoke is clear and light colored, and does not get far into the air before it is dis sipated(?), condensed. the setting sun no 344 winter. sooner leaves our west windows than a solid, but beautiful crystallization coats them, except, it may be, a triangularish bare spot at one corner which, perhaps, the sun has warmed and dried. ... a solid, sparkling field in the midst of each pane, with broad, flowing sheaves surround ing it. it has been a very mild as well as open winter up to this. at 9 o'clock p. m., thermom eter at — 16°. they say it did not rise above —6° to-day. feb. 7, 1853. the coldest night for a long, long time. sheets froze stiff about the face. . . . people dreaded to go to bed. the ground cracked in the night as if a powder-miu had blown up, and the timbers of the house also. my pail of water was frozen in tbe morning so that i could not break it. . . . iron was like fire in the hands. [mercury ?] at about 7.30 a. m. gone into the bulb of the thermometer — 19° at least. . . . bread, meat, milk, cheese, etc., all frozen. . . . the inside of your cellar door all covered and sparkling with frost like golconda. the latches are white with frost, and evei'y nail-head in entries, etc., has a white head. . . . neighbor smith's thermometer stood at — 26° early this morning. but the day is at length more moderate than yesterday. . . . this will be remembered as the cold tuesday. the old folks still refer to the cold friday, when they winter. 345 sat before great fires of wood four feet long, with a fence of blankets behind them, and water froze on the mantel-piece. feb. 7, 1838. zeno, the stoic, stood in pre cisely the same relation to the world that i do now. he is forsooth bred a merchant, as how many still, and can trade, and barter, and perhaps higgle, and moreover he can be shipwrecked and cast ashore at the piraeus, like one of your johns or thomases. he strolls into a shop, and is charmed by a book, by xenophon, and straightway he becomes a philosopher. the sun of a new life's day rises to him serene and unclouded, which looks over a-toa. and stiu the fleshly zeno sails on, shipwrecked, buffeted, tempest-tossed, but the true zeno sails over a placid sea. play high, play low, rain, sleet, or snow, it 's all the same with the stoic. . . . when evening comes, he sits down unwearied to the review of his day, what 's done that 's to be un done, what not done at all still to be done ; himself truth's unconcerned helpmate. an other system of book-keeping this, then, that the cyprian trader to phoenicia practiced. this was he who said to a certain garrulous young man, " on this account have we two ears and but one mouth, that we may hear more, and speak less." . . . the wisest may apologize that he only said so to hear himself talk, for if he 346 winter. heard not, as well for hm liad he never spoken. what is all this gabble to the gabbler ? only the silent reap the profit of it. jf'eb. 7, 1841. . . . there would be a new year's gift, indeed, if we would bestow on each other our sincerity. we should communicate our wealth, and not purchase that which does not belong to us, for a sign. why give each other a sign to keep ? if we gave the thing itself, there would be no need of a sign. . . . the eaves are running on the south side of the house, the titmouse lisps in the poplar, the beus are ringing for church, while the sun pre sides over all and makes his simple warmth more obvious than all else. what shall i do with the hour so like time and yet so fit for eternity? where in me are these russet patches of ground, and scattered logs and chips in the yard ? i do not feel cluttered. — i have some notion what the johnswort and life-everlasting may be thinking about when the sun shines on me as on them, and turns my prompt thought into just such a seething shimmer. i lie out as indistinct as a heath at noonday. i am evapo rating and ascending into the sun. . . . the most i can do for my friend is simply to be his friend. i have no wealth to bestow on him. if he knows that i am happy in loving him, he wiu want no other reward. is not friendship divine in this ? winter. 347 i have myself to respect, but to myself i am not amiable ; but my friend is my amiableness personified. . . . the world has never learned what men can build each other up to be, when both master and pupil work in love. . . . wait not till i invite thee, but observe that i am glad to see thee when thou comest. the most ardent lover holds yet a private court, and his love can never be so strong and ethereal that there will not be danger that judgment be rendered against the beloved. . . , so far as we respond to our ideal estimate of each other, do we have profitable intercourse. feb. 7, 1857. hayden, the elder, tells me that the quails have come to his yard every day for about a month, and are just as tame as chickens. they come about his wood shed, he supposes, to pick up the worms that have dropped out of the wood, and when it storms hard, gather together in a corner of the shed. he walks within about three or four feet of them without disturbing them. . . . they wiu be about his yard the greater part of the day; were there yesterday, though it was so warm, but now prob ably can get food enough elsewhere. they go just the same to poland's across the road. about ten years ago there was a bevy of fifteen that used to come from the same woods, and one 348 winter. day they being in the barn and scared by the cat, four ran into the hay and died there. . . . thus it seems in severe winters the quails ven ture out of the woods, and join the poultry of the farmer's yard, if it be near the edge of the wood. it is remarkable that this bird, which thus half domesticates itself, should not be found wholly domesticated before this. feb. 7, 1858. ... if possible, come upon the top of a hill unexpectedly, perhaps through ■woods, and then look off from it to the distant earth which lies behind a bluer veil, before you can see directly down it, i. e., bringing its own near top against the distant landscape. feb. 7, 1859. evidently the distant woods are more blue in a warm and moist or misty day in winter, and is not this connected with the blue in snow in similar days ? going along the nut meadow on jimmy miles's road, when i see the sulphur lichens on the rails, brightening with the moisture, i feel like study ing them again as a relisher and tonic, to make life go down and digest well, as we use pepper and vinegar and salads. they are a sort of winter green which we gather and assimilate with our eyes. that 's the true use of the study of lichens. i expect thus the lichenist will have the keenest relish for nature in her every day mood and dress. he will have the appetite of the worm that never dies, of the grub. to winter. 349 study lichens is to get a taste of earth and health, to go gnawing the rails and rocks. this proctect of the bark is the essence of all tonics. the lichenist extracts nutriment from the very crust of the earth. a taste for this study is an evidence of titanic health, a rare earthiness. it makes not so much blood as soil of life. it fits a man to deal with the barrenest and rockiest experience. a little moisture, a fog, or rain, or melted snow makes his wilderness to blossom like the rose. as some strong animal appetites, not satisfied with starch and muscle and fat, are fain to eat that which eats and digests the con tents of the crop, the stomach and entrails themselves, so the lichenist loves the tripe of the rock, that which eats and digests the rocks. he eats the eater. eat-all may be his name. a lichenist fattens where others starve. his prov ender never fails. . . . there is no such couy rium or salve for sore eyes as these brightening lichens on a moist day. go bathe and screen your eyes with them in the softened light of the woods. feb. 8, -1839. when the poetic frenzy seizes us, we run and scratch with our pen, delighting, like the cock, in the dust we make, but do not detect where the jewel lies which we have in the mean time cast to a distance, or quite covered up again. feb. 8, 1841. all we have experienced is so much gone within us, and there lies. it is the 350 winter. company we keep. one day, in health or sick ness, it will come out and be remembered. neither body nor soul forgets anything. «qrhe twig always remembers the wind that shook it, and the stone the cu£e it received. ask the old tree and the sand. . . are we not always in youth so long as we face heaven ? we may always live in the morn ing of our days. to him who seeks early, the sun never gets over the edge of the horizon, but his rays fall slanting forever. . . . my journal is that of me which would else spill over and run to waste, gleanings from the field which in action i reap. i must not live for it, but, in it, for the gods. they are my correspondent to whom daily i send o£e this sheet, post-paid. i am clerk in their counting room, and at evening transfer the account from day-book to ledger. it is a leaf which hangs over my head in the path. i bend the twig, and write my prayers on it ; then, letting it go, the bough springs up and shows the scrawl to heaven ; as if it were not kept shut in my desk, but were as public a leaf as any in nature. it is papyrus by the river side, it is vellum in the pastures, it is parchment on the hills. . . . like the sere leaves in yonder vase, these have been gathered far and wide. upland and lowland, forest and field, have been ransacked. winter. 351 in our holiest moment, our devil with a leer stands close at hand. he is a very busy devil. . . . when i go forth with zeal to some good work, my devil is sure to get his robe tucked up the first, and arrives there as soon as i, with a look of sincere earnestness, which puts to shame my best intent. . . . he has a winning way of recommending himself by making him self useful. how readily he comes into my best project, and does his work with a quiet and steady cheerfulness which even virtue may take pattern from. ... i never did a charitable thing, but there he stood, scarce in the rear, hat in hand, partner in the same errand, ready to share the smile of gratitude. though i shut the door never so quick, and tell him to stay home like a good dog, he will out with me, for i shut in my own legs so, and he escapes in the mean while, and is ready to back and reinforce me in most virtuous deeds. if i turn and say, " get thee behind me," he then indeed turns too, and takes the lead, though he seems to re tire with a pensive and compassionate look, as much as to say, " ye know not what ye do." feb. 8, 1852. . . . tuckerman says cunning ly, " if the rapt admirer of the wonders and beauties of life and being might well come to learn of our knowledge the laws and the history of what he loves, let us remember that we have 362 winter. the best right to all the pleasure that he has dis covered, and that we are not complete if we do not possess it all. linnaeus was as hearty a lover and admirer of nature, as if he had been nothing more." . . . carried a new cloak to johnny eiorden. i found that the shanty was warmed by the simple social relations of the irish. on sunday they come from the town and stand in the doorway, and so keep out the cold. one is not cold among his brothers and sisters. what if there is less fire on the hearth, if there is more in the heart. these irish are not succeeding so ill after all. the little boy goes to the primary school, and proves a foremost boy there, and the mother's brother, who lias let himself in the vil lage, teus me that he takes " the flag of our union," if that is the paper edited by an irishman. it is musical news that johnny does not love to be kept at home from school in deep snows. feb. 8, 1854. . . . josselyn, speaking of crick ets, says, "the italian who hath them cryed up and down the streets (^grilli che cantano), and buyeth them to put into his gardens, if he were in new england would gladly be rid of them, they make such a din in the evening." i am more charmed by the italian's taste than by josselyn's impatience. feb. 8, 1857. debauched and worn out winter. 353 senses require the violent vibrations of an in strument to excite them, but sound and still youthful senses, not enervated by luxury, hear music in the wind and rain and running water. one would think, from reading the critics, that music was intermittent, as a spring in the desert, dependent on some paganini or mozart, or heard only when the pierians or euterpeans drive through the villages, but music is perpet ual, and only hearing is intermittent. i hear it in the softened air of these warm february days which have broken the back of the winter. . . . again and again i congratulate myself on my so-called poverty. i was almost disappointed yesterday to find thirty dollars in my desk which i did not know that i possessed, though now i should be sorry to lose them. the week that i go away to lecture is unspeakably cheapened. the preceding and succeeding days are a mere sloping down to and up from it. in the society of many men, or in the midst of what is called success, i find my life of no account, and my spirits rapidly fall. i would rather be the bar renest pasture lying fallow than cursed with the compliments of kings, than be the sulphurous and accursed desert where babylon once stood. but when i hear only the rustling oak leaf, or the faint metallic cheep of the tree sparrow, for variety in my winter walk, my life becomes 354 winter. continent, and sweet as the kernel of a nut. i would rather hear a single shrub oak leaf at the end of a wintry glade rustle of its own accord at my approach than receive a ship-load of stars and garters from the strange kings and peoples of the earth. by poverty, i. e., sim plicity of life and fewness of incidents, i am solidified and crystallized as a vapor or liquid by cold. it is a singular concentration of strength, and energy and flavor. chastity is perpetual acquaintance with the all. my diffuse and va porous life becomes as the frost leaves and spiculab radiant as gems on the weeds and stub ble in a winter morning. you think i am im poverishing myself by withdrawing from men, but in my solitude i have woven for myself a silken v?eb or chrysalis, and nymph-like shall erelong burst forth a more perfect creature, fitted for a higher society. . . . and now another friendship is ended. i do not know what has made my friend doubt me, biit i know that in love there is no mistake, and thai any estrangement is well-founded. but my destiny is not narrowed, rather, if possible, the broader for it. the heavens withdraw, and arch themselves higher. i am sensible not only of a moral, but even of a grand physical pain, such as gods may feel, about my head and breast, a certain ache and fullness. this rending of a winter. 355 tie, it is not my work nor thine. it is no acci dent that we may avoid, it is only the award of fate that is affecting us. i know of no aeons or periods, no life and death, but these meetings and separations. my life is like a stream that is suddenly dammed and has no outlet. but it rises higher up the hills that shut it in, and will become a deep and silent lake. certainly there is no event comparable for grandeur with the eternal separation, if we may conceive it so, from a being that we have known. i become in a degree sensible of the meaning of finite and infinite. what a grand significance the word " never " acquires ! with one with whom we have walked on high ground, we cannot deal on any lower ground ever after. we have tried so many years to put each other to this immortal use, and have failed. undoubtedly our good genii have mutually found the material unsuitable. we have hitherto paid each other the highest possible compliment, we have recognized each other constantly as divine, have afforded each other that opportunity to live that no other wealth or kindness can afford. and now for some reason inappreciable by us, it has become necessary for us to withhold this mutual aid. perchance there is none beside who knows us for a god, and none whom we know for such. each man and woman is a veritable god or god 356 winter. dess, but to the mass of their fellows disguised. there is only one in each case who sees through the disguise. that one who does not stand so near to any man as to see the divinity in him is truly alone. i am perfectly sad at parting from you. i could better have the earth taken away from under my feet, than the thought of you from my mind. one while i think that some great injury has been done, with which you are implicated ; again, that you are no party to it. i fear that there may be incessant tragedies, that one may treat his feuow as a god, but receive somewhat less regard from him. i now almost for the first time fear this. yet i believe that in the long run there is no such inequality. feb. 8, 1860. 2 p. m. up river to fair haven hill. thermometer 43°. . . . there is a pe culiarity in the air when the temperature is thus high, and the weather fair at this season, which makes sounds more clear and pervading, as if they trusted themselves abroad farther in this genial state of the air. a different sound comes to my ear now from iron rails which are struck, from the cawing of crows, etc. sound is not abrupt, piercing, or rending, but softly sweet and musical. there must be a still more genial and milder air before the bluebird's warble can be heard. feb. 8, 1861. coldest day yet. —22° at winter. 357 least (all we can read), at 8 a. m., and so far as i can learn, not above — 6° all day. feb. 9, 1838. it is wholesome advice " to be a man amongst folks." — go into society, if you will, or if you are unwilling, and take a human interest in its affairs. if you mistake these messieurs and mesdames for so many men and women, it is but erring on the safe side, or rather it is their error and not yours. armed with a manly sincerity, you shall not be trifled with, but drive this business of life. to manage the small talk of a party is to make an effort to do what was at first done admirably, because naturally, at your own fireside. feb. 9, 1841. . . . " whoe'er is raised for wealth he has not, he is taxed, not praised," says jonson. if you mind the flatterer, you rob yourself, and still cheat him. the fates never exaggerate. men pass for what they are. the state never fails to get a revenue out of you without a direct tax. what i am praised for which i have not, i put to the account of the gods. it needs a skillful eye to distinguish between their coin and my own. however, there can be no loss either way. for what meed i have earned is equally theirs. let neither fame nor infamy hit you, but one go as far beyond ■ as the other falls behind. let the one glance 358 winter. past you to the gods, and the other wallow where it was engendered. the home thrusts are at hel mets upon blocks, and my worst foes but stab an armor through. my life at this moment is like a summer moi'n ing when birds are singing. yet that is false, for nature's is an idle pleasure in comparison. my hour has a more solid serenity. i have been breaking silence these twenty three years, and have hardly made a rent in it. silence has no end. speech is but the begin ning of it. my friend thinks i tceep silence who am only choked with letting it out so fast. does he forget that new mines of secrecy are constantly opening in me ? . . . when your host shuts his door on you, he incloses you in the dwelling of nature. he thrusts you over the threshold of the world. my foes restore me to my friends. — i might say friendship had no ears, as love has no eyes, for no word is evidence in its court. the least act fulfills more than all words profess. the most gracious speech is but partial kindness, but the smallest genuine deed takes the whole man. if we had waited till doomsday, it could never have been uttered. feb. 9, 1852. i am interested to see the seeds of the poke, about a dozen, shiny, black, with a white spot, somewhat like a saba bean in shape, the still full granary of the birds. winter. 359 9 a. m. up river to fair haven pond. . . . met on the river, . . . fishing, wearing an old coat much patched with many colors. he represents the indian still. the very patches on his coat and his improvident life do so. i feel that he is as essential a part, nevertheless, of our community as the lawyer in the village. he tells me that he caught three pickerel here the other day that weighed seven pounds all to gether. it is the old story. the fisherman is a natural story-teller. no man's imagination plays more pranks than his, while he is tending his reels, and trotting from one to another, or watch ing his cork in summer. he is ever waiting for the sky to fall. he has sent out a venture. he has a ticket in the lottery of fate, and who knows what it may draw. he ever expects to catch a bigger fish yet. he is the most patient and believing of men. who else will stand so long in wet places ? when the hay-maker runs to shelter, h6 takes down his pole, and bends his steps to the river, glad to have a leisure day. . . . he is more like an inhabitant of nature. . . . men tell about the mirage to be seen in cer tain deserts, and in peculiar states of the atmos phere. the mirage is constant. the state of the atmosphere is continually varying, and to a keen observer objects do not twice present ex actly the same appearance. if i invert my head 360 winter. this morning and look at the woods in the horizon, they do not look so far off and elysian like as in the afternoon. if i mistake not, it is late in the afternoon when the atmosphere is in such a state that we derive the most pleasure from and are most surprised by this experiment. the prospect is thus a constantly varying mirage answering to the condition of our perceptive fac ulties and our fluctuating imagination. if we incline our heads never so little, the most famil iar things begin to put on some new aspect. if we invert our heads completely, our desecrated wood-lot appears far off, incredible, elysian, un profaned by us. as you cannot swear through glass, no more can you swear through air, the thinnest section of it. . . . when was not the air as elastic as our spirits. ... it is a new glass placed over the picture every hour. . . . when i break off a twig of g^een-barked sassafras, as i am going through the woods now, and smell it, i am startled to find it fragrant as in summer. it is an importation of all the spices of oriental summers into our new england winter, very foreign to the snow and the oak leaves. feb. 9, 1853. . . . saw the grisly bear near the haymarket [boston] to-day, said (?) to weigh nineteen hundred pounds ; apparently too much. he looked four feet and a few inches in height winter. 361 by as much in length, not including his great head and his tail, which was invisible. he looked gentle, and continually sucked his claws, and cleaned between them with his tongue. small eyes and funny little ears. perfectly bear ish, with a strong wild beast scent ; fed on indian meal and water. hind paws a foot long. ly ing down with his feet up against the bars ; often sitting up in the corner on his hind quarters. feb. 9, 1855. snowed harder in the night, and blew considerably. ... i was so sure this storm would bring snowbirds that i went to the window at ten to look for them, and there they were. also, a downy woodpecker (perhaps a hairy) flitted high across the street to an elm in front of the house, and commenced assidu ously tapping, his head going like a hammer. feb. 9, 1858. . . . saw, at simon brown's, a sketch, apparently made with a pen, on which was written, " concord jail, near boston, amer ica," and on a fresher piece of paper, on which the above was pasted, was written, " the jail in which general sir archw campbell and wilson were confined when taken off boston in america by a french privateer." a letter on the back side from mr. lewis of framingham to mr. brown stated that mr. lewis had re ceived the sketch from a grandson of wilson who drew it. — you are supposed to be in the 362 winter. jail yard, or close to it westward, and see the old jail, gambrel-roofed, the old hurd house (partly) west of the grave-yard, the grave-yard and dr. hurd house, and over the last, and to the north of it, a wooded hill, apparently windmill hill. just north of the hurd house, beyond it, appar ently the court-house and sehool-house, both with belfries, also the road to the battle ground, and a distant farmhouse on a hiu, french's or buttrick's, perhaps. i'eb. 10, 1841. . . . our thoughts and actions may be very private for a long time, for they demand a more catholic publicity to be dis played in than the world can afford. our best deeds shun the narrow walks of men, and are not ambitious of the faint light the world can shed on them, but delight to unfold themselves in that public ground between god and con science. . . . within, where i resolve and deal with principles, there is more space and room than anywhere without where my hands execute. men should hear of your virtue only as they hear the creaking of the earth's axle and the music of the spheres. it will fall into the course of nature, and be effectually concealed by publicness. j^eb. 10, 1852. now if there are any who think i am vainglorious, that i set myself up above others, and crow over their low estate, winter. 363 let me say that i could tell a pitiful story re specting myself as ^ye]l as them, if my spirits held out to do it. i could encourage them with a sufficient list of failures, and could flow as humbly as the very gutters themselves. ... i think worse of myself than they can possibly think of me, being better acquainted with the man. i put the best face on the matter. i will tell them this secret, if they will not tell it to anybody else. write while the heat is in you. when the farmer burns a hole in his yoke, he carries the iron quickly from the fire to the wood, for every moment it is less effectual to penetrate it. . . . the writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts, uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. he cannot inflame the minds of his audience. . . . i saw yesterday in the snow on the ice on the s. side of fair haven pond some hundreds of honey bees dead and sunk half an inch be low the crust. they had evidently come forth from their hive, perhaps in a large hemlock on the bank close by, and had fallen on the snow, chilled to death. their bodies extended about three rods from the tree toward the pond. feb. 10, 1854. ... i observe the great, well protected buds of the balm of gilead, spear head-like. there is no shine upon them now, 364 winter. and their viscidness is not very apparent. a great many willow catkins show a little down, peeping from under the points of the scales, but i have no doubt that all this was done last fall. i noticed it then. feb. 10, 1855. ... i hear the faint metallic chirp of a tree sparrow in the yard from time to time, or perchance the mew of a linaria. it is worth while to let some pigweed grow in your garden, if only to attract these winter visitors. it would be a pity to have these weeds burned in the fall. of the former, i see in the winter but three or four commonly at a time ; of the latter, large flocks. this is in or after consider able snow-storms. fei. 10, 1856. . . . p. m. to walden, ee turning i saw a fox on the railroad, . . . eight or nine rods from me. he looked of a dirty yellow, and lean. i did not notice the white tip to his tail. seeing me, he pricked up his ears, and at first ran up and along the e. bank on the crust, then changed his mind, and came down the steep bank, crossed the railroad before me, and gliding up the west bank, disappeared in the woods. he coursed or glided along easily, appearing not to lift his feet high, leaping over obstacles with his tail extended straight behind. he leaped over the ridge of snow about two feet high and three wide between the tracks, winter. 365 very gracefully. i followed examining his tracks. there was about a quarter of an inch of recent snow above the crust, but for the most part he broke in two or three inches. i slumped from one to three feet. . . . he went off at an easy gliding pace such as he might keep up for a long time, pretty direct after his first turn ing. feb. 10, 1857. . . . burton, the traveler, quotes an arab saying, " voyaging is a victory," which he refers to the feeling of independence on over coming the difficulties and dangers of the des ert. but i think that commonly voyaging is a defeat, a rout to which the traveler is compelled by want of valor. the traveler's peculiar valor is commonly a bill of exchange. he is at home anywhere but where he was born and bred, petitioning some sir joseph banks or other rep resentative of a geographical society to avail himself of his restlessness, and if not receiving a favorable answer, necessarily going off some where next morning. it is a prevalent disease which attacks americans especially, both men and women, the opposite to nostalgia. yet it does not differ much from nostalgia. i read the story of one voyager round the world, who it seemed to me, having started, had no other object but to get home again, only she took the longest way round. the traveler, fitted out by 366 winter. some sir joseph banks, snatches at a fact or two in behalf of science, as he goes, just as a panther in his leap will take off a man's sleeve, and land twenty feet beyond him, when travel ing down hill. feb. 10, 1860. . . . the river where open is very black, as usual, when the waves run high, for each wave casts a shadow. theophrastus notices that the roughened water is black, and says it is because fewer rays fall on it, and the light is dissipated. . . . i do not know of any more exhilarating walk ing than up or down a broad field of smooth ice like this in a cold, glittering, winter day, when your rubbers give you a firm hold on the ice. feb. 11, 1841. true help, for the most part, implies a greatness in him who is to be helped as well as in the helper. it takes a god to be helped even. a great person, though unconsciously, will constantly give you great opportunities to serve him, but a mean one will quite preclude all active benevolence. it needs but simply and greatly to want it for once, that all true men may contend who shall be foremost to render aid. my neighbor's state must pray to heaven so devoutly, yet disinterestedly, as he never prayed in words, before my ears can hear. it must ask divinely. but men so cobble and botch their request that you must stoop as low winter. 367 as they to give them aid. their meanness would drag down your deed to be a compromise with conscience, and not leave it to be done on the high table-land of the benevolent soul. . . . but if i am to serve them, i must not serve the devil. . . . we go about mending the times when we should be building the eternity. feb. 11, 1852. ... i have lived some thirty odd years on this planet, and i have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest ad vice from my seniors. they have told me noth ing, and probably can tell me nothing, to the purpose. there is life, an experiment untried by me, and it does not avail me that you have tried it. if i have any valuable experience i am sure to reflect that this my mentors said nothing about. what were mysteries to the child remain mysteries to the old man. it is a mistake to suppose that in a country where railroads and steamboats and the print ing press and the church, where the usual evi dences of civilization exist, the condition of a very large body of the inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages. . . . to know this, i should, not need to look farther than to the shanties which everywhere line our railroads, that last improvement in civilization. but i will refer you to ireland, which is marked as one of the white, or enlightened spots on the map. 368 winter. yet i have no doubt that that nation's rulers are as wise as the average of civilized rulers. feb. 12. living all winter with an open door for light, and no visible wood -pile, the forms of old and young are permanently contracted through long shrinking from cold, and their faces pinched by want. i have seen an old crone sitting bare-headed on the hillside in the middle of january, while it was raining, and the ground was slowly thawing under her, knitting there. . . . there is no greater squalidness in any part of the world. contrast the condition of these irish with that of the north american indian, or the south sea islander, or any other savage race before they are degraded by contact with civilized man. feb. 11, 1853. . . . "while surveying on the hunt farm the other day, behind simon brown's house', i heard a remarkable echo. in the course of surveying, being obliged to call aloud to my assistant from every side and almost every part of a farm in succession and at various hours of a day, i am pretty sure to discover an echo, if any exists. that day it was encouraging and soothing to hear one. after so many days of comparatively insignificant drudgery with stupid companions, this leisure, this sportiveness, this generosity in nature, sympathizing with the better part of me, somebody i could talk with, winter. 369 ane degree at least better than talking with one's self. ah, simon brown's premises harbor a hired man and a hired maid he wots not of ; some voice of somebody i pined to hear, with whom i could form a community. i did wish rather to linger there and call all day to the air, and hear my words repeated, but a vulgar neces sity dragged me along round the bounds of the farm to hear only the stale answers of my chain man shouted back to me. . . . has it to do with the season of the year ? i have since heard an echo on moore's farm. it was the memorable event of the day, that echo i heard, not anything my companions said, or the travelers i met, or my thoughts, for they were all mere repetitions or echoes in the worst sense of what i had heard and thought before many times, but this echo was accompa nied with novelty, and by its repetition of my voice it did more than double that. it was a profounder socratic method of suggesting thoughts unutterable to me the speaker. here was one i heartily love to talk with. under such favorable auspices, i could converse with myself, could reflect. the hour, the atmosphere, and the conformation of the ground permitted it. feh. 11, 1854. 7.30 a. m. snow fleas lie in black patches like some of those dark, rough lichens on rocks, or like ink spots three or four 370 winter. inches in diameter, about the grass stems or willows, on the ice which froze last night. when i breathe on them, i find them all alive and ready to skip. also the water, when i break the ice, arouses them. i saw yesterday in a muddy spring in tarbell's meadow many cockle shells on the bottom, with their feet out, and marks as if they had been moving. when i read of the catkins of the alder and the willow, etc., scattering their yellow pollen, they impress me as a vegetation which belongs to the earliest and most innocent dawn of nature, as if they must have preceded other trees in the order of creation, as they precede them annually in their blossoming and leafing. . . . for how many »ons did the willow shed its yellow pollen annually before man was created ! in the winter we so value the semblance of fruit that even the dry, black female catkins of the alder are an interesting sight, not to men tion, on shoots rising a foot or two above these, the red or mulberry male catkins in little par cels dangling at a less than right angle with the stems, and the short female ones at their bases. apparently i read cato and varro from the same motives that virgil did, and as i read the . almanac,the " n. e. farmer," or " cultivator," or howitt's " seasons." winter. 371 feb. 11, 1856. . . . saw a partridge by the river side . . . which at first i mistook for the toj) of a fence post above the snow amid some alders. i shouted and waved my hand four rods off to see if it was one, but there was no motion, and i thought surely it must be a post. nevertheless i resolved to investigate. within three rods i saw to my surprise that it was in deed a partridge, standing perfectly still, with its head erect and neck stretched upward. it was as complete a deception as if it had designedly placed itself on the line of the fence and in the proper place for a post. it finally stepped off daintily with a teetering gait and head up, and took to wing. feb. 11, 1859. . . . now, as after a freshet in cold weather, the ice which had formed around and frozen to the trees and bushes along the shore, settling, draws them down to the ground or water, after breaking them exten sively. it reminds you of an alligator or other evil genius of the river pulling the trees and bushes, which had come to drink, into the water. if a maple or alder is unfortunate enough to slip its lower limbs into the freshet, dallying with it, their fate is sealed, for the water freez ing that night takes fast hold of them like a vise, and when the water runs out from beneath, an irresistible weight brings them down to the 372 winter. ground and holds them there. only the spring sun will soften the heart of this relentless mon ster when commonly it is too late. ^eb. 12, 1840. . . . ejaavery is more foolish than folly, since, half knowing its own foolish ness, it still persists. the knave has reduced folly to a system, is the prudent, common-sense fool. feb. 12, 1851. ... i find that it is an ex cellent walk for variety and novelty and wild ness to keep round the edge of the meadow. the ice not being strong enough to bear, and transparent as water, on the bare ground or snow just between the highest water mark and the pres ent water line is a narrow, meandering walk rich in unexpected views and objects. the line of rubbish which marks the higher tides, withered flags and seeds and twigs and cranberries, is to my eyes a very agreeable and significant line which nature traces along the edge of the mead ows. it is a strongly marked, enduring, natural line which in summer reminds me that the water has once stood over where i walk. sometimes the grooved trees tell the same tale. the wrecks of the meadow fill a thousand coves, and teu a thousand tales to those who can read them ; our prairial, mediterranean shore. ... if you cannot go on the ice, you are then gently com pelled to take this course, which is, on the whole, winter. 373 more beautiful, to follow the sinuosities of the meadow. feb. 12, 1854. . . . p. m. skate to pantry brook. . . . one accustomed to glide over a boundless and variegated ice floor like this can not be much attracted by tessellated floors and mosaic work. i skate over a thin ice all tessel lated, so to speak, or on which you see the forms of the crystals as they shoot. ... to make a perfect winter day like this, you must have a clear, sparkling air, with a sheen from the snow, sufficient cold, no wind, and the warmth must come directly from the sun. it must not be a thawing warmth. the tension of nature must not be relaxed. the earth must be resonant, if bare. you hear the lisping music of chickadees from time to time, and the unrelenting steel-cold scream of a jay, unmelted, that never flows into a song, a sort of wintry trumpet, screaming cold, hard, tense, frozen music like the winter sky itself. . . . there is no hint of incubation in the jay's scream. there is no cushion for sound now. it tears our ears. i frequently see three or four old white birches standing together on the edge of a pond or meadow, and am struck by the pleasing man ner in which they will commonly be grouped, how they spread so as to make room for each other, and make an agreeable impression upon 374 winter. the eye. me thinks i have seen groups of three in different places arranged almost exactly alike. returning i overhauled a muskrat's house by bidens brook. for want of other material it was composed of grass flags, and in a great measure (one half ) of twigs and sticks, mostly sweet-gale, both dead and alive, and roots, from six inches to two feet in length. these were in fact the principal material of it, and it was a large one, two feet above the ice. i was sur prised to find that these sticks, both green and dead, had the greater part of them been gnawed off by the rat, and some were nearly half an inch in diameter. they were cut off not at a right angle, with a smooth cut, but by successive cuts, smooth as with a knife, the twig being at the same time bent down, which jdroduced a sloping, and, so to speak, terraced surface. i did not know before that the muskrat resembled the beaver in this respect also. it was chiefly the sweet-gale thus cut, commonly the top left on two feet long, but sometimes cut off six inches long. i see, as i skate, reflected from the surface of the ice, flakes of rainbow, somewhat like cobwebs, where the great slopes of the crystalliz ation fall at the right angle, six inches or a foot across, but at so small an angle with the horizon winter. 375 that they had seemed absolutely flat and level before. think of this kind of mosaic and tessellation for your floor, composed of crystals variously set, made up of surfaces not absolutely level, though level to the touch of the feet and to the noonday eye, but just enough inclined to reflect the colors of the rainbow when the sun gets low. feb. 12, 1857. 7.30 a. m. the caterpillar which i placed last night on the snow beneath the thermometer is frozen stiff again, this time not being curled up, the temperature being — 6° now. yet being placed on the mantel-piece, it thaws and begins to crawl in five or ten minutes, before the rear part of its body is limber. per haps they were revived last week when the ther mometer stood at 52° and 53°. feb. 12, 1860. 2 p. m. 22°. walk up river to fair haven pond. clear and windy. . . . in this cold, clear, rough air from the n. w. we walk amid what simple surroundings, surrounded by our thoughts or imaginary objects. . . . above me is a cloudless blue sky, beneath is the sky blue, i. e., sky-reflecting ice, with patches of snow scattered over it like mackerel clouds. at a distance in several directions i see the tawny earth streaked or spotted with white, where the bank, or hills and fields appear, or the green-black, evergreen forests, or the brown, 376 winter. or russet, or tawny deciduous woods, and here and there, where the agitated surface of the river is exposed, the hlue-black water. that dark eyed water, especially where i see it at right angles with the direction of the sun, is it not the first sign of spring ? how its darkness contrasts with the general lightness of the winter ! it has more life in it than any part of the earth's surface. it is where one of the arteries of the earth is palpable, visible. in winter not only some creatures, but the very earth is partially dormant. vegetation ceases, and rivers, to some extent, cease to flow. therefore when i see the water exposed in mid -winter, it is as if i saw a skunk or even a striped squirrel out. it is as if the woodchuck consoled himself, and snuffed the air to see if it were warm enough to be trusted. it excites me to see early in the spring that black artery leaping once more through the snow clad town. ah is tumult and life there. . . , where this artery is shallowest, i. e., comes near est to the surface and runs swiftest, there it shows itself soonest, and you may see its pulse beat. tkere are the wrists, temples of the earth where i feel its pulse with my eye. the living waters, not the dead earth. . . . returning just before sunset, i see the ice beginning to be green, and a rose color to be reflected from the low snow patches. i see the color from the winter. 377 snow first where there is some shade, as where the shadow of a maple falls afar over the ice and snow. from this is reflected a purple tinge when i see none elsewhere. some shadow or twilight then is necessary, umbra mixed with the reflected sun. 0£e holden wood where the low rays fall on the river through the fringe of the wood, the patches are not rose color, but a very dark purple, like a grape, and thus there are all degrees from pure white to black. as i cross hubbard's broad meadow, the snow patches are a most beautiful crystalline purple, like the petals of some flowers, or as if tinged with cran berry juice. . . . i walk over a smooth green sea or sequor, the sun just disappearing in the cloudless hori zon, amid thousands of these flat isles as purple as the petals of a flower. it would not be more enchanting to walk amid the purple clouds of the sunset sky. and, by the way, this is but a sunset sky under our feet, produced by the same law, the same slanting rays and twilight. here the clouds are these patches of snow or frozen vapor, and the ice is the greenish sky between them. thus all of heaven is realized on earth. you have seen those purple, fortunate isles in the sunset heavens, and that green and amber sky between them. would you believe that you could ever walk amid those isles ? you can on 378 winter. many a winter evening. i have done so a hun dred times. thus the sky and the earth sympathize, and are subject to the same laws, and in the horizon they, as it were, meet and are seen to be one.. . . we have such a habit of looking away that we see not what is around us. how few are aware that in winter, when the earth is covered with snow and ice, the phenomenon of the sunset sky is double. the one is on the earth around us, the other in the horizon. feb. 13, 1838. it is hard to subject ourselves to an influence. it must steal upon us when we expect it not, and its work be all done ere we are aware of it. if we make advances, it is shy ; if, when we feel its presence, we presume to pry into its freemasonry, it vanishes, and leaves us alone in our folly. all fear of the world or consequences is swallowed up in a manly anxiety to do truth justice. feb. 13, 1840. an act of integrity is to an act of duty what the french verb etre is to devoir. duty is that which devrait etre. duty belongs to the understanding, but genius is not dutiful. . . . the perfect man has both genius and talent ; the one is his head, the other, his foot. by one, he is ; by the other, he lives. winter. 379 the consciousness of man is the consciousness of god, the end of the world. the very thrills of genius are disorganizing. the body is never quite acclimated to its atmos phere, but how often succumbs, and goes into a decline. feb. 13, 1841. by the truthfulness of our story to-day, we help explain ourselves for all our life henceforth. how we hamper and belay ourselves by the least exaggeration. the truth is god's concern ; he will sustain it. but who can afford to maintain a lie ? we have taken away one of the pillars of hercules, and must support the world on our shoulders, who might have walked freely upon it. feb. 13, 1851. skated to sudbury. a beau tiful summer-like day. the meadows were frozen just enough to bear. examined now the fleets of ice flakes close at hand. they are a very singular and interesting phenomenon which i do not remember to have seen. i should say that when the water was frozen about as thick as pasteboard, a violent gust had here and there broken it up, and while the wind and waves held it on its edge, the increasing cold froze it in firmly. so it seemed, for the flakes were, for the most part, turned one way, i. e., standing on one side, you saw only their edges, on another, the n. e. or s. w., their sides. they were com 380 wijrrer. nionly of a triangular form, like a shoulder-of mutton (?) sail, slightly scalloped, like shells. they looked like a fleet of a thousand mackerel fishers under a press of sail, careering before a smacking breeze. sometimes the sun and wind had reduced them to the thinness of writing paper, and they fluttered and rustled and tin kled merrily. i skated through them and scat tered their wrecks around. every half mile or mile, as you skate up the river, you see these crystal fleets. . . . again i saw to-day half a mile off in sud bury a sandy spot on the top of a hill, where i prophesied that i should find traces of the in dians. when within a dozen rods, i distin guished the foundation of a lodge, and merely passing over it, i saw many fragments of the arrowhead stone. i have frequently distinguished these localities half a mile off, gone forward, and picked up arrowheads. saw in a warm, muddy brook in sudbury, quite open and exposed, the skunk cabbage spathes above water. the tops of the spathes were frost-bitten, but the fruit sound. there was one partly expanded, the first flower of the season, for it is a flower. i doubt if there is a month without its flower. . . . in society, in the best institutions of men, i remark a certain precocity. when we should winter. 381 be growing children, we are already little men. infants as we are, we make haste to be weaned from our great mother's breast, and cultivate our parts by intercourse with one another. ... i would not have every man, nor every part of a man, cultivated any more than i would have eyery acre of earth cultivated. some must be preparing a mould by the annual decay of the forests which they sustain. feb. 13, 1852. color, which is the poet's wealth, is so expensive, that most take to mere outline or pencil sketches, and become men of science. jpeh. 13, 1855. . . . the tracks of partridges are more remarkable in this snow than usual, it is so light, being, at the same time, a foot deep. ... i see where many have dived into the snow, apparently last night, on the side of a shrub oak hollow. in four places they have passed quite underneath it for more than a foot ; in one place, eighteen inches. they ap pear to have dived or burrowed into it, then passed along a foot or more underneath, and squatted there, perhaps with their heads out. ... i scared one from its hole only half a rod in front of me, now at 11 a. m. . . . it is evi dently a hardy bird, and ia the above respects, too, is like the rabbit, which squats under a brake or bush in the snow. i see the traces of the 382 winter. latter in hollows in the snow in such places, their forms. . . . one of these pigweeds in the yard lasts the snowbirds all winter. after every snow-storm, they revisit it. how inexhaustible their granary. to resume the subject of partridges, looking farther in an open place . . . amid the shrub oaks and low pitch pines, i found as many as twenty or thirty places where partridges had lodged in the snow apparently the last night or the night before. you could see commonly where their bodies had first struck the snow, and furrowed it for a foot or two, twenty-six inches wide, then entered and gone underneath two feet, and rested at the farther end. ... is it not likely that they remain quite under the snow there, and do not put their heads out tul ready to start ? they do not go under deep, and the gallery they make is mostly filled up behind them, leaving only a thin crust above. then invariably just beyond this resting place, you could see the marks made by their wings when they took their departure. these distinct impressions made by their wings on the pure snow, so common on all hands, though the bird that made it is gone, and there is no trace beyond, affect me like some mystic oriental sym bol, the winged globe or what not, as if made by a spirit. in some places you would see a furrow winter. 383 and hollow in the snow where there was no track for rods around, as if a large snow-ball or cannon-ball had struck it, where apparently the birds had not paused in their flight. it is evi dently a regular thing with them thus to lodge in the snow. feb. 13, 1859. p. m. on ice to fair haven pond. . . . the yellowish ice which froze yes terday and last night is thickly and evenly strewn with fibrous frost crystals very much like bits of asbestos, an inch or more long, sometimes arranged like a star or rosette, one for every inch or two. ... i think this is the vapor from the water which found its way up through the ice, and froze in the night. it is sprinkled like some kind of grain,, and is in certain places much more thickly strewn, as where a little snow shows itself above the ice. — the old ice is cov ered with a dry,' powdery snow about one inch deep, from which as i walk toward the sun, this perfectly clear, bright afternoon at half -past three o'clock, the colors of the rainbow are re flected from a myriad fine facets. it is as if the dust of diamonds and other precious stones were spread all around. the blue and red pre dominate. though i distinguish these colors everywhere toward the sun, they are so much more abundantly reflected to me from two direc tions that i see two distinct rays or arms, so to 884 winter. call them, of this rainbow-like dust stretching away from me and about half a dozen feet wide, the two arms including an angle of about 60°. when i look from the sun, i see merely daz zling white points. i can easily see some of these dazzling grains fifteen or twenty rods distant on any side, though the facet which reflects the light cannot be more than a tenth or twelfth of an inch at most. yet i might easily, and com monly do, overlook all this. winter comes to make walking possible where there was no walking in summer. not till win ter can we take possession of the whole of our territory. i have three great highways raying out from one centre which is near my door. i may walk down the main river, or up either of its two branches. could any avenues be con trived more convenient ? with the river i am not compelled to walk in. the tracks of horses. never is there so much light in the air as in one of these bright winter afternoons when all the earth is covered with new-fallen snow, and there is not a cloud in the sky. the sky is much the darkest side, like the bluish lining of an egg shell. with this white earth beneath, and that spotless, skimmed-milk sky above him, man is but a black speck inclosed in a white egg-shell. sometimes, in our prosaic moods, life appears winter. 385 to us but a certain number more of days like those we have lived, to be cheered not by more friends and friendship, but probably fewer and less, as perchance we anticipate the end of this day before it is done, close the shutters, and, with a cheerless resignation, commence the bar ren evening whose fruitless end we clearly see. we despondingly think that all of life which is left is only this experience repeated a certain number of times, and so it would be, if it were not for the faculty of imagination. the wonderful stillness of a winter day ! the sources of sound are, as it were, frozen up. scarcely a tinkling rill of it is to be heard. when we listen, we hear only that sound of the surf of our internal sea rising and swelling in our ears as in two sea-shells. it is the sabbath of the year, stilluess audible, or at most we hear the ice belching and crackling, as if struggling for utterance. a transient acquaintance' with any phenom enon is not sufficient to make it completely the subject of your muse. you must be so conver sant with it as to remember it, and be reminded of it long afterward, while it lies remotely fair and elysiau in the horizon, approachable only by the imagination. feb. 13, 1860. ... it is surprising what a variety of distinct colors the winter can show us, 386 winter. using but few pigments. the principal cliarm of a winter walk over ice is perhap* the pecul iar and pure colors exhibited. there is the red of the sunset sky and of the snow at evening, and in rainbow flocks during the day, and in sun-dogs. the blue of the sky, and of the ice and water reflected, and of shadows on snow. •the yellow of the sun, and the morning and evening sky, and of the sedge (or sti-aw color, bright when lit on the edge of ice at even ing), and all these three colors in hoar frost crystals. then there is the purple of the snow in drifts or on hills, of the mountains, and the clouds at evening. the green of evergreen woods, of the ice and water, and of the sky toward evening. the orange of the sky at evening. the white of snow and clouds, and the hlack of clouds, of water agitated, and water saturat ing thin snow or ice. the russet, and brown, gray, etc., of decid uous woods. the tawny of the bare earth. i suspect that the green and rose (or purple) are not noticed on ice and snow unless it is pretty cold, and perhaps there is less greenness of the ice now than in december when the days winter. 387 were shorter. the ice now may be too old and white. . . . the sun being in a cloud, partly ob scured, i see a very dark purple tinge on the flat drifts on the ice, earlier than usual, and when afterward the sun comes out below the cloud, i see no purple nor rose. hence it seems that the twilight has as much or more to do with this phenomenon, supposing the sun to be low, than the slight angle of its rays with the horizon. always you have to contend with the stupidity of men. it is like a stiff soil, a hard. pan. if you go deeper than usual, you are sure to meet with a pan made harder even by the super ficial cultivation. the stupid you have always with you. men are more obedient at first to words than to ideas. they mind names more than things. read them a lecture on " educa tion," naming the subject, and they will think they have heard something important, but call it " transcendentalism," and they will think it moonshine. or halve your lecture, and put a psalm at the beginning and a prayer at the end of it, and they will pronounce it good with out thinking. the scripture rule, " unto him • that hath, shall be given," is true of composition. the more you have thought and written on a given theme, the more you can still write. thought breeds thought. it grows under your hands. 388 winter. feb. 14, 1840. ... a very meagre natural history suffices to make me a child. only their names and genealogy make me love fishes. i would know even the number of their fin rays, and how many scales compose the lateral line. i fancy i am amphibious and swim in all the brooks and pools in the neighborhood, with the perch and bream, or doze under the pads of our river amid the winding aisles and corridors formed by their stems, with the stately pick erel. feb. 14, 1841. i am confined to the house by bronchitis, and so seek to content myself with that quiet and serene life there is in a warm corner by the fireside, and see the sky through the chimney -top. sickness should not be al lowed to extend farther than the body. we need only to retreat farther within us, to pre serve uninterrupted the continuity of serene hours to the end of our lives. as soon as 1 find my chest is not of tempered steel, and heart of adamant, i bid good-by to them and look out for a new nature. i will be liable to no acci dents. i shall never be poor while i can command a still hour in which to take leave of my sin. feb. 14, 1851. consider the farmer who is commonly regarded as the healthiest man. he may be the toughest, but he is not the healthiest. winter. 389 he has lost his elasticity. he can neither run nor jump. health is the free use and command of all our faculties, and equal development. his is the health of the ox, an overworked buf falo. his joints are stiff. the resemblance is true even in particulars. he is cast away in a pair of cowhide boots, and travels at an ox's pace. ... it would do him good to be thoroughly shampooed to make him supple. his health is an insensibility to all influence. but only the healthiest man in the world is sensible to the finest influence ; he who is affected by more or less electricity in the air. we shall see but a little way, if we require to understand what we see. how few things can a man measure with the tape of his under standing ! how many greater things might he be seeing in the mean while ! one afternoon in the fall, november 21st, i saw fair haven pond with its island and meadow ; between the island and the shore, a strip of perfectly smooth water in the lee of the island and two ducks sailing on it, and something more i saw which cannot easily be described, which made me say to my self that the landscape could not be improved. i did not see how it could be improved. yet i do not know what these things can be. i>be gin to see such objects only when i leave off understanding them, and afterwards remember 390 winter. them. i did not appreciate them before. but i get no farther than this. how adapted these forms and colors to our eyes, a meadow and its islands. what are these things? yet the hawks and the ducks keep so aloof, and nature is so reserved. we are made to love the river and the meadow, as the wind to ripple the water. feb. 14, 1852. ... i hate that my motive for visiting a friend should be that i want so ciety, that it should lie in my poverty and weak ness, and not in his and my riches and strength. his friendship should make me strong enough to do without him. feb. 14, 1854. p. m. down railroad. a moist, thawing, cloudy afternoon, preparing to rain. the telegraph resounds at every post. the finest strain from the american lyre. in stow's wood by the deep cut, hear the quah quah of the white-breasted, black-capped nuthatch. i went up the bank and stood by the fence. a little family of titmice gathered about me searching for their food both on the ground and on the trees with great industry and intentness, now and then pursuing each other. there were two nuthatches at least talking to each other. one hung with his head down on a large pitch pine pecking the bark for a long time, leaden blue above, with a black cap and whitebreast. it uttered almost constantly a faint but sharp . . . winter. 391 creak, difficult to trace home, which, appeared to be answered by a baser and louder quah quah from the other. a downy woodpecker with the red spot on his hind head and his cassock open behind, showing his white robe, kept up an in cessant loud tapping on another pitch pine. all at once, an active little brown creeper makes its appearance, a small, rather slender bird with, a long tail and sparrow-colored back, and white beneath. it commences at the bottom of a tree and glides up very rapidly, then suddenly darts to the bottom of a new tree, and repeats the same movement, not resting long in one place, or on one tree. these birds are all feeding and flitting along together, but the chickadees are the most numerous and the most confiding. i notice that three of the four kinds thus associ ated, viz., the chickadee, nuthatch, and wood pecker, have black crowns, at least the first two, very conspicuous black caps. i cannot but think that this sprightly association and readi ness to burst into song have to do with the pros pect of spring, more light, and warmth, and thawing weather. the titmice keep up an in cessant, faint, tinkling tchip ; now and then one utters a brief day-day-day, and once or twice one commenced a gurgling strain quite novel, startling, and spring-like. beside this i heard the distant crowing of cocks, and the divine 392 winter. humming of the telegraph, all spring-promising sounds. the chickadee has quite a variety of notes. the phoebe one i did not hear to-day. feb. 14, 1856. . . . how impatient, how ram pant, how precocious these osiers ! they have hardly made two shoots from the sand in as many springs, when silvery catkins burst out .along them, and anon, golden blossoms and downy seeds, spreading their race with incredi ble rapidity. thus they multiply and clan to gether. thus they take advantage even of the railroad, which elsewhere disturbs and invades their domains. may i ever be in as good spirits as a willow. they never despair. is there no moisture longer in nature which they can transmute into sap? they are emblems of youth, joy, and everlasting life. scarcely is their growth restrained by winter, but their silvery down peeps forth in the warmest days in january (?). feb. 14, 1857. ... it is a fine, somewhat spring-like day. the ice is softening so that skates begin to cut in, and numerous caterpillars are now crawling about on the ice and snow, the thermometer in the shade n. of house standing at 42°. so it appears that they must often thaw in the course of the winter and find noth ing to eat. feb, 15, 1840. the good seem to inhale a winter. 393 generous atmosphere, and to be bathed in a more precious light than other men. accordingly, virgil describes the sedes beatas thus, lar^or hie campos sether et lumine testit purpureo : solemque suuiu, sua sidera norunt. feb. 15, 1851. alas ! alas ! when my friend begins to deal in confessions, breaks silence, makes a theme of friendship (which then is al ways something past), and descends to merely human relations. as long as there is a spark of love remaining, cherish that alone. only that can be kindled into a flame. — i thought that friendship, that love was possible between us. i thought that we had not withdrawn very far asunder. but now that my friend rashly, thoughtlessly, profanely speaks, recognizing the distance between us, that distance seems in finitely increased. of our friends we do not incline to speak, to complain to others ; we would not disturb the foundations of confidence that may still be. . why should we not still continue to live with the intensity and rapidity of infants? is not the world, are not the heavens, as unfathomed as ever ? have we exhausted any joy, any sen timent? feb. 15, 1852. perhaps i am descended from the northman named " thorer, the dogfooted." thorer hund, to judge from his name, belonged 394 winter. to the same family. " he was one of the most powerful men in the north." thorer is one of the most common names in the ch.ronicles of the northmen, if not the most so. feb. 15, 1855. . . . all day a steady, warm, imprisoning rain, carrying off the snow, not un musical on my roof. it is a rare time for the student and reader who cannot go abroad in the p. m., provided he can keep awake, for we are wont to be as drcavsy as cats in such weather. without, it is not walking, but wading. it is so long since i haije heard it, that the steady rush ing, soaking sound of the rain on the shingles is musical. the fire needs no replenishing, and we save our fuel. it seems like a distant fore runner of spring. it is because i am allied to the elements that the sound of the rain is thus soothing to me. this sound sinks into my spirit, as the water into the earth, reminding me of the season when snow and ice will be no more, when the earth will be thawed, and drink up the rain as fast as it falls. feb. 15, 1858. to cambridge and boston. saw at a menagerie a canada lynx, said to have been taken at the white mountains. it looked much like a monstrous gray cat standing on stilts, with its tail cut to five inches, a tuft of hair on each ear, and a ruff under the throat. feb. 15, 1861. ... a kitten is so flexible winter. 395 that she is almost double. the hind parts are equivalent to another kitten with which the fore part plays. she does not discover that her tail belongs to her till you tread upon it. how elo quent she can be with her tail. she jumps into a chair and then stands on her hind legs to look out the window, looks steadily at objects far and near, first gazing this, side, then that, for she loves to look out a window as much as any gossip. ever and anon she bsnds back her ears to hear what is going on within the room, and all the while her eloquent tail is reporting the prog ress and success of her survey by speaking ges tures. . . . then what a delicate hint she can give with her tail, passing perhaps underneath as you sit at table, and letting the tip of her tail just touch your legs, as much as to say i am here and ready for that milk or meat, though she may not be so forward as to look round at you when she emerges. — only skin deep lies the feral nature of the cat unchanged still. i just had the misfortune to rook on to our cat's legs, as she was lying playfully spread out under my chair. imagine the sound that arose, and which was excusable, but what will you say to the fierce growls and flashing eyes with which she met me for a quarter of an hour there after. no tiger in its jungle could have been savager. 396 winter. feb. 16, 1841. for how slight an accident shall two noble souls wait to bring them to gether. feb. 16, 1852. it is interesting to meet an ox with handsomely spreading horns. there is a great variety of sizes and forms, though one horn commonly matches the other. i am willing to turn out for those that spread their branches wide. large and spreading horns, 1 fancy, in dicate a certain vegetable force and naturaliza tion in the wearer ; they soften and ease off the distinction between the animal and the vegeta ble, the unhorned animals and the trees. . . . the deer that run in the woods, as the moose, for instance, carry perfect trees on their heads. the french call them " bois." no wonder there are fables of centaurs and the like. no wonder there is a story of a hunter who when his bullets failed fired cherry stones into the heads of his game and so trees sprouted out of them, and the hunter refreshed himself with the cherries. it is a perfect piece of mythology which belongs to these days. oxen, which are deanimalized, to some extent, approach nearer to the vegetable, perchance, than bulls and cows, and hence their bulky bodies, and large and spreading horns. nothing more natural than that a deer should appear with a tree growing out of his head. feb. 16, 1854. by this time in the winter i winter. 397 do not look for those clear sparkling mornings and delicate leaf frosts which seem to belong to the earlier part of the winter, as if the air were now somewhat tarnished and debauched, had lost its virgin purity. every judgment and action of a man qualifies every other, i. e., corrects our estimation of every other, as, for instance, a man's idea of immor tality who is a member of a church, or his praise of you coupled with his praise of those whom you do not esteem. for, in this sense, a man is awfully consistent above his own consciousness. all a man's strength and all his weakness go to make up the authority of any particular opinion which he may utter. ... if he is your friend, you may have to consider that he loves you, but perchance he also loves gingerbread. . . . columella, after saying that many authors had believed that the climate, qualitatem codi statumque, was changed by lapse of time, longo cevi situ, refers to hipparchus as having given out that the time would be when the poles of the earth would be moved from their places, tempus fore quo cardines mundi loco moverentur ; and as confirmatory of this, he, columella, goes on to say that the vine and olive flourish now in some places where formerly they failed. he gives the names of about fifty authors who had treated de rusticis. rebus before him. 398 winter. feb. 16, 1857. ... i perceive that some com monly talented persons are enveloped and con fined by a certain crust of manners, which, though it may sometimes be a fair and trans parent enamel, yet only repels and saddens the beholder, since by its rigidity it seems to re press all further expansion. they are viewed as at a distance, like an insect under a tumbler. they have, as it were, prematurely hardened both seed and shell, and this has severely taxed, if not put a period to, the life of the plant. this is to stand upon your dignity. . . . such per sons are after all but hardened sinners in a mild sense. the pearl is a hardened sinner. man ners get to be human parchment, in which sensi ble books are often bound and honorable titles engrossed, though they may be very stiff and dry. feb. 16, 1859. from the entrance of the mill road, i look back through the sunlight, this soft afternoon, to some white pine tops near jenny dugan's. their flattish boughs rest stratum above stratum like a cloud, a green mackerel sky, hardly reminding me of the concealed earth so far beneath. they are like a flaky crust of the earth, a more ethereal, terebinthine, ever green earth. it occurs to me that my eyes rest on them with the same pleasure as do those of the henhawk which has been nestled in them. my eyes nibble the piny sierra which makes winter. 399 the horizon's edge as a hungry man nibbles a cracker. the henhawk and the pine are friends. the same thing which keeps the henhawk in the woods, away from cities, keeps me here. that bird settles with confidence on a white pine top, and not upon your weather-cock. that bird will not be poultry of yours, lays no eggs for you, forever hides its nest. though willed or wild, it is not willful in its wudness. the un sympathizing man regards the wildness of some animals, their strangeness to him, as a sin, as if all their virtue consisted in their tamableness. he has always a charge in his gun ready for their extermination. what we call wildness is a civilization other than our own. the hen hawk shuns the farmer, but it seeks the friendly shelter and support of the pine. it will not consent to walk in the barnyard, but it loves to soar above the clouds. it has its own way and is beautiful when we would fain subject it to our will. so any surpassing work of art is strange and wild to the mass of men, as is genius itself. no hawk that soars and steals our poultry is wilder than genius, and none is more persecuted or above persecution. it can never be poet laureate, to say, " pretty poll," and " polly want a cracker." feh. 17, 1841. our work should be fitted to and lead on the time, as bud, flower, and fruit 400 winter. lead the circle of the seasons. — the mechanic works no longer than his labor will pay for lights, fuel, and shop rent. would it not be well for us to consider if our deed will warrant the expense of nature? will ib maintain the sun's light ? — our actions do not use time in dependently, as the bud does. they should con stitute its lapse. it is their room. but they shuffle after and serve the hour. feb. 17, 1852. perhaps the peculiar attrac tiveness, of those western vistas was partly ow ing to the shortness of the days, when we natu rally look to the heavens and make the most of the little light, when we live an arctic life, when the woodchopper's axe reminds us of twilight at three o'clock in the afternoon, when the morning and the evening literally make the whole day, when we travel as it were through the portals of the night, and the way is narrow as well as blocked with snow, when, too, the sun has the least opportunity to fill the air with vapor. . . . if you would read books ou botany, go to the fathers of the science. read linnaeus at once, and come down from him as far as you please. i lost much time reading the florists. it is remarkable how little the mass of those interested in botany are acquainted with linnaeus. i doubt if his " philosophia botanica," which rous seau, sprengel, and others praised so highly, has winter. 401 ever been translated into english. it is simpler, more easy to understand, than any of the hundred manuals to which it has given birth. a few pages of cuts representing the different parts of plants, with their botanical names attached, are worth whole volumes of explanation. accord ing to the classification of linnaeus, i come under the head of miscellaneous botanophilists. "botanophili sunt qui varia de vegetabilibus tradiderunt, licet ea non proprie ad scientiam botanieam spectant," feb. 17, 1854. p. m. to gowing's swamp. . . . the mice tracks are very amusing. it is surprising how numerous they are, and yet i rarely see a mouse. they must be nocturnal iu their habits. any tussocky ground is scored with them. i see, too, where they have run over the ice on the swamp (there is a mere sugaring of snow on it), ever trying to make an entrance, to get beneath it. you see deep and distinct channels in the snow in some places, as if a whole colony had long traveled to and fro in them, a highway, a weu-known trail, but suddenly they will come to an end. and yet they have not dived beneath the surface, for you see where the single traveler who did it all has nimbly hopped along, as if suddenly scared, making but a slight impression, squirrel-like, in the snow. the squirrel also, though rarely, will 402 winter. make a channel for a short distance. ... i sus pect that the mice sometimes build their nests in bushes from the foundation, for . . . where i found two mice nests last fall, i find one begun with ;i very few twigs and some moss, close by where the others were, at the same height, and also on prinos bushes, plainly the work of mice wholly. feb. 18, 1838. ... i had not been out long to-day when it seemed that a new spring was already born ; not quite weaned, it is true, but verily entered upon existence. nature struck up " the same old song in the grass," despite eight een inches of snow. . . . feb. 18, 1840. all romance is grounded on friendship. what is this rural, this pastoral, this poetic life but its invention ? does not the moon shine for eiidymion ? smooth pastures and mild airs are for some coridon and phyllis. paradise belongs to adam and eve. plato's republic is governed by platonic love. feb. 18, 1841. . . . my recent growth does not appear in any visible new talent ; but its deed will enter into my gaze when i look into the sky or vacancy. it will help me to consider ferns and everlasting. man is like a tree which is limited to no age, but grows as long as it has its root in the ground. we have only to live in the alburnum, and not in the old wood. winter. 403 a man is the hydrostatic paradox, the coun terpoise of the system. you have studied flowers and birds cheaply enough, but you must lay your self out to buy him. i^eh. 18, 1842. ... i have a commonplace book for facts, and another for poetry, but i find it difficult always to preserve the vague distinc tion which i had in my mind, for the most in teresting and beautiful facts are so much the more poetry, and that is their success. they are translated from earth to heaven. i see that if my facts were sufficiently vital and significant, perhaps transmuted more into the substance of the human mind, i should need but one book of poetry to contain them all. it is impossible for the same person to see thitigs from the poet's point of view and that of the man of science. the poet's second love may be science (not his first), when use has worn off the bloom. i realize that men may be born to a condition of mind at which others arrive in mid dle age by the decay of their poetic faculties. feb. 18, 1854. ... it is a little affecting to walk over the hills now, looking at the reindeer lichens here and there amid the snow, and re member that erelong we shall find violets also in their midst. what an odds the season makes ! the birds know it ; whether a rose-tinted water lily is sailing amid the pads, or neighbor hob 404 winter. son is getting out ms ice with a cross-cut saw, while his oxen are eating their stalks. i noticed that the ice which garrison cut the other day con tained the lily pads and stems within it. how different their environment now from when the queenly flower, floating on the trembling surface, exhaled its perfume amid a cloud of insects ! . . . what a contrast between the upper and un der side of many leaves, the indurated and col ored upper side, and the tender, more or less colorless under side, male and female, even when they are almost equally exposed. the un der side is commonly white, however, as turned away from the light toward the earth. many in which the contrast is finest are narrow, revolute leaves, like the delicate and beautiful androm eda polifolia, the ledum, kalmia glauca. . . . the handsome lanceolate leaves of the androm eda polifolia, dark, but pure and uniform dull red above, strongly revolute, and of a delicate bluish-white beneath, deserve to be copied on works of art. feh. 18, 1857. ... p. m. the frost out of the ground and the ways settled in many places. ... i am excited by this wonderful air, and go listening for the note of the bluebii'd or other comer. the very grain of the air seems to have undergone a change, and is ready to split into the form of the bluebird's warble. methinks if winter. 405 it were visible, or i could cast up some fine dust which would betray it, it would take a corre sponding shape. the bluebird does not come till the air consents, andhis wedge will enter easily. . . . what a poem is this of spring, so often re peated ! i am thrilled when i hear it spoken of as the spring of such a year, that fytte of the glorious epic. feb. 18, 1860. ... i think the most impor tant requisite in describing an animal is to be sure that you give its character and spirit, for in that you have, without error, the sum and ef fect of all its parts, known and unknown. you must tell what it is to man. surely the most important part of an animal is its anima, its vital spirit, on which is based its character, and all the particulars by which it most concerns us. yet most scientific books which treat of animals leave this out altogether, and what they describe are, as it were, phenomena of dead matter. what is most interesting in a dog, for instance, is his attachment to his master, his intelligence, courage, and the like, and not his anatomical structure, and even many habits which affect us less. if you have undertaken to write the biog raphy of an animal, you must present to us the living creature, i. e., a result which no man can understand. he can only, in his degree, report 406 winter. the impression made by it on him. science, in many departments of natural history, does not pretend to go beyond the shell, i. e., it does not get to animated nature at all. a history of animated nature nmst itself be animated. the ancients, one would say, with their gorgons, sphinxes, satyrs, mantichora, etc., could imag ine more than existed, while the moderns can not imagine so much as exists. we are as often injured as benefited by our systems, for, in fact, no human system is a true one. a name is at most a convenience, and carries no information with it. as soon as i begin to be aware of the life of any creature, i forffet its name. when we have learned to dis o tingiiish creatures, the sooner we forget their names the better, so far as any true apprecia tion of them is concerned. i think, therefore, that the best and most harmless names are those •which are an imitation of the voice or note of an animal, as they are the most poetic ones. but the name adheres only to the accepted and con ventional bird or quadruped, never an instant to the real one. there is always something ridicu lous in the name of a great man, as if he were named john smith. the name is convenient in communicating with others, but it is not to be remembered when i communicate with myself. k you look over a list of medicinal recipes in winter. 407 vogue in the last century, how foolish and use less they are seen to be, and yet we use equally absurd ones with faith to-day. feb. 19, 1841. a truly good book . . teaches uie better than to read it. i must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. i do not see how any can be written more, but this is the last effusion of genius. ... it is slipping out of my fingers while i read. it creates no atmosphere in which it may be j)e rused, but one in which its teachings may be practiced. it confers on me such wealth that i lay it down with the least regret. what i began by reading, i must finish by acting. so i can not 'stay to hear a good sermon, and applaud at the conclusion, but shall be half-way to ther mopylae before that. we linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they are half forgotten ere we acquire the faculty of expressing them. it is the unexplored grandeur of the storm which keeps up the spirits of the traveler. when i contemplate a hard and bare life in the woods, i find my last consolation in its untrivial ness. shipwreck is less distressing because the breakers do not trifle with us. we are resigned as long as we recognize the sober and solemn mystery of nature. the dripping mariner finds consolation and sympathy in the infinite sublim 408 winter. ity of the storm. it is a moral force as well as he. with courage he can lay down his life on the strand, for it never turned a deaf ear to him, nor has he ever exhausted its sympathy. in the love of narrow souls i make many short voyages, but in vain. i find no sea room but in great souls, i sail before the wind without a watch, and never reach the shore. feb. 19, 1852. the sky appears broader now than it did. the day has opened its eye lids wider.' the lengthening of the days, commenced a good while ago, is a kind of fore runner of the spring. of course it is then that the ameliorating cause begins to work. to white pond. . . . the strains from my muse are as rare nowadays or of late years as the notes of birds in the winter, the faintest occasional tinkling sound, and mostly of the woodpecker kind, or the harsh jay, or the crow. it never melts into a song, only the day-day-day of an inquisitive titmouse. everywhere snow, gathered'into sloping drifts about the walls and fences, and beneath the snow the frozen ground, and men are com pelled to deposit the summer's provision in burrows in the earth, like the ground squirrel. many creatures, daunted by the prospect, mi grated in the fall, but man remains, and walks over the frozen snow crust, and over the stiff winter. 409 ened rivers and ponds, and draws now upon his summer stores. life is reduced to its lowest terms. there is no home for you now in this freezing wind, but in that shelter which you pre pared in the summer. you steer straight across the fields to that in season. i can with difficulty tell when i am over the river. there is a simi lar crust over my heart. where i rambled in the summer, and gathered fl.owers, and rested on the grass by the brook side in the shade, now no grass, nor flowers, nor brook, nor shade, but cold unvaried snow, stretching mile after mile, and no place to sit. look at white pond, that crystal drop that was, in which the umbrageous shore was reflected, and schools of fabulous perch and shiners rose to the surface, and where with difficulty you made your way along the pebbly shore in a summer afternoon, to the bathing place. now you stalk rapidly across where it was, muffled in your cloak, over a more level snow field than usual, furrowed by the wind ; its finny inhabitants and its pebbly shore all hidden and forgotten, and you would shudder at the thought of wetting your feet. a fine display of the northern lights aften ten p. m., flashing up from all parts of the horizon to the zenith, where there was a kind of core formed, stretching s.s.e. n.n.w., surrounded by what looked like a permanent white cloud, 410 winter. which, however, was very variable in form. the light -flashes or trembles upward, as if it were the light of the sun reflected from a frozen mist in the upper atmosphere. feb. 19, 1854. ... to fair haven by river, back by railroad. . . . the large moths appar ently love the neighborhood of water, and are wont to suspend their cocoons over the edge of the meadow and river, places more or less inacces sible to men, at least. i saw a button-bush with what, at first sight, looked like the open pods of the locust or of the water asclepias, attached. they were the light, ash-colored cocoons of the attacus promethea, with the completely with ered and faded leaves wrapped around them, carefully and admirably secured to the twigs by fine silk wound round the leaf stalk and the twig. they add nothing to the strength of the co coon, being deciduous, but aid in deception. they are taken at a little distance for a few curled and withered leaves left on. though the particular twigs on which you find some co coons may never, or very rarely, retain any leaves, there are enough leaves left on other shrubs and trees to warrant the adoption of this disguise. yet it is startling to think that the inference has in this case been drawn by some mind, that as most other plants retain some leaves, the walker will suspect these also to. winter. 411 each and all such disguises and other resources remind us that not merely some poor worm's instinct, as we call it, but the mind of the uni verse rather, which we share, has been intended upon each particular object. all the wit in the world was brought to bear on each case to secure its end. it was long ago in a full senate of all intellects determined how cocoons had best be suspended. kindred mind with mine, that ap proves and admires, decided it so. . . . much study, a weariness of the flesh ! ah, but did they not intend that we should read and ponder, who covered the whole earth with alpha bets, primers, or bibles, coarse or fine print? the very debris of the cliffs . . . are covered with geographic lichens. no surface is per mitted to be bare long. . . . was not he who creates lichens the abettor of cadmus when he invented letters ? types almost arrange themselves into words and sentences, as dust arranges itself under the magnet. print ! it is a close-hugging lichen that forms on a favorable surface, which paper offers. the linen gets itself wrought into paper that the song of the shirt may be printed on it. who placed us with eyes between a microscopic and a telescopic world ? feb. 19, 1855. many will complain of my lectures that they are transcendental, can't under 412 winter. stand them. " would you have us return to the savage state ? " etc., etc., a criticism true enough, it may be, from their point of view. but the fact is, the earnest lecturer can speak only to his like, and adapting himself to his audience is a mere compliment which he pays them. if you wish to know how i think, you must endeavor to put yourself in my place. if you wish me to speak as if i were you, that is another affair. feb. 19, 1857. a man cannot be said to suc ceed in this life who does not satisfy one friend. feb. 19, 1858. the traveler is defended and calloused. he deals with surfaces, has a great coat on ; but he who stays at home and writes about homely things gives us naked and tender thoughts and sentiments. feb. 20, 1840. the coward's hope is suspi cion ; the hero's doubt, a sort of hope. the gods neither hope nor doubt. feb. 20, 1841. when i am going out for an evening, i arrange the fire in my stove so that i do not fail to find a good one when i return, though it would have engaged my frequent at tention, present ; so that when i know i am to be at home, i sometimes make believe that i may go out to save trouble. and this is the art of living, too, to leave our life in a condition to go alone, and not to require a constant supervis winter. 413 ion. we will then sit down serenely to live, as by the side of a stove. when i sit in earnest, nothing must stand. all must be sedentary with me. i hear the faint sound of a viol and voices from the neighboring cottage, and think to myself, i will believe the muse only forever more. it assures me that no gleam which comes over the serene soul is deceptive. it warns me of a reality and substance of which the best that i see is but the phantom and shadow. o music, thou tellest me of things of which mem-, ory takes no heed; thy strains are whispered aside from memory's ear. . . . thou openest all my senses to catch the least hint, and givest me no thought. it would be good to sit at my door of summer evenings forever, and hear thy strains. thou makest me to toy with speech, or walk content without it. . . . i am pleased to think how ignorant and shiftless the wisest are. my imperfect sympathies with my friend are a cheerful, glimmering light in the valley. feb. 20, 1842. i never yet saw two men suf ficiently great to meet as two. in proportion as they are great, the differences are fatal, be cause they are felt not to be partial, but total. frankness to him who is unlike me will lead to the utter denial of him. . . . when two ap proach to meet, they incur no petty dangers j 414 winter. they run terrible risks. between the sincere there will be no civilities. no greatness seems prepared for the little decorums ; even savage unmannerliness it meets from equal greatness. my path hitherto has been like a road through a diversified country, now climbing high moun tains, then descending into the lowest vales. from the summits i saw the heavens, from the vales i looked up at the heights again. in pros perity i remember god, or memory is one with consciousness ; in adversity i remember my own elevation, and only hope to see god again. . . . the death of friends should inspire us as much as their lives. if they are great and rich enough, they will leave consolation to the mourn ers before the expenses of their funerals. it wul not be hard to part with worth, because it is worthy. how can any good depart ? it does not go and come, but we. feb. 20, 1856. p. m. up assabet. see a broad and distinct otter trail made last night or yesterday. it came out to the river through the low woods n. of pinxter swamp, making a very conspicuous trail from seven to nine or ten inches wide and three or four deep, with sometimes singularly upright sides, as if a square timber had been drawn along, but commonly rounded. it made some' short turns and zigzags, passed under limbs which were only five inches above winter. 415 the snow, not over them, had apparently slid down all banks and declivities, making a uni form, broad, hollow trail there, without any marks of its feet. on reaching the river, it had come along under the bank, from time to time looking into the crevices, where it might get under the ice, sometimes ascending the bank and sliding back. on level ground its trail had this appearance . . . tracks of feet twenty to twenty-four inches apart, but sometimes there was no track of the feet for twenty-five feet, frequently for six. in the last case there was a swelling in the outline as above. ... it entered a hole under the ice at assabet spring, from which it has not issued. feb. 20, 1857. what is the relation between a bird and the ear that appreciates its melody, to whom, perchance, it is more charming and sig nificant than to any one else ? certainly they are intimately related, and the one was made for the other. it is a natural fact. if i were to discover that a certain kind of stone by the pond shore was affected, say partially disintegrated, by a particular natural sound, as of a bird or insect, i see that one could not be completely described without describing the other. i am that stone by the pond side. what is hope, what is expectation, but a seed 416 winter. time whose harvest cannot fail, an irresistible ex pedition of the mind, at length to be victorious ? feb. 20, 1859. have just read "counter parts, or the cross of love," by the author of " charles auchester." it is very interesting, its illustration of love and friendship, as showing how much we can know of each other through sympathy merely, without any of the ordinary information. you know about a person who deeply interests you more than you can be told. a look, a gesture, an act, which to everybody else is insignificant, tells you more about that one than words can. ... if he wished to con ceal something from you, it would be apparent. it is as if a bird told you. . . . sometimes from the altered manner of a friend which no cloak can possibly conceal, we know that something has happened, and what it was, au the essential particulars, though it would be a long story to tell, though it may involve the agency of four or five persons, who never breathed it to you, yet you are sure as if you detected all their tracks in the wood. you are the more sure, be cause, in the case of love, effects follow their causes more inevitably than usual, this being a controlling power. how much the writer lives and endures in coming before the public so often ! a few years or books are with him equal to a long life of ex winter. 417 perience, suffering, etc. it is well if he does not become hardened. he learns how to bear contempt, and to despise himself. he makes, as it were, a post-mortem examination of him self before he is dead. such is art. feb. 21, 1842. ... i must confess there is nothing so strange to me as my own body. i love any other piece of nature, almost, better. i was always conscious of sounds in nature which my ears could not hear, that i caught but a prelude to a strain. she always retreats as i advance. away behind and behind is she and her meaning. will not this faith and ex pectation make itsel{ ears at length ? i never saw to the end, nor heard to the end, but the best part was unseen and unheard. i am like a feather floating in the atmosphere. on every side is depth unfathomable. i have lived ill [of late] for the most part, because too near myself. i have tripped myself up, so that there was no progress for my own narrowness. i cannot walk conveniently and pleasantly but when i hold myself far off in the horizon, but when the soul dilutes the body and makes it passable. my soul and body have tottered along together, . . . tripping and hinder ing one another, like unpracticed siamese twins. they two should walk as one that no obstacle may be nearer than the firmament. 418 winter. there must be some narrowness in the soul that compels one to have secrets. feb. 21, 1855. ... a clear air, with a north westerly march-like wind, as yesterday. what is the peculiarity in the air that both the in valid in his chamber and the traveler on the highway say, " these are perfect march days " ? the wind is rapidly drying up the earth, and elevated sands already begin to look whitish. how nmch light there is in the sky and on the surface of the russet earth ! it is reflected in a flood from au cleansed surfaces which rain and snow have washed, from the railroad rails, the mica on the rocks and the gilvery latebrae of in sects there, and i never saw the white houses of the village more brightly white. now look for an early crop of arrowheads, for they wiu shine. when i have entered the wooded hol low on the east of the deep cut, it is novel and pleasant to hear the sound of the dry leaves and twigs, which have so long been damp and silent, crackling again under my feet, though there is still considerable snow along wall-sides, etc., and to see the holes and galleries recently made by the mice (?) in the fine withered grass of such places. i see the peculiar softened blue sky of spring over the tops of the pines, and when i am sheltered from the wind i feel the warmer sun of the season reflected from the withered winter. 419 grass and twigs on the side of this elevated hol low. . . . when the leaves on the forest floor are dried and begin to rustle under such a sun and wind as these, the news is told to how many myriads of grubs that underlie them ! when i perceive this dryness under my feet, i feel as if i had got a new sense, or rather i realize what was incredible to me before, that there is a new life in nature beginning to awake. ... it is whispered through all the aisles of the forest that another spring is approach! ag. the wood mouse listens at the mouth of his burrow, and the chickadee' passes the news along. we now notice the snow on the mountains, because on the remote rim of the horizon its whiteness con trasts with the russet and darker hues of our bare fields. i looked at the peterboro mountains, with my glass, from fair haven hill. i think there can be no more arctic scene than these mountains, on the edge of the horizon, completely crusted over with snow, the sun shining on them, seen through a telescope over bare russet fields and dark forests, with perhaps a house on some bare ridge seen against them. they look like great loaves incrusted with pure white sugar, and i think this must have been the origin of the name " sugar-loaf " sometimes given to moun tains, and not their form. we look thus from russet fields into a landscape still sleeping under 420 winter. the mantle of winter. the snow on the moun tains has, in this case, a singular smooth and crusty appearance, and by contrast you see even single evergreens rising here and there above it ; and where a promontory casts a shadow along the mountain side, i saw what looked like a large lake of misty, bluish water on the side of the farther peterboro mountain, its edges or shore very distinctly defined. this i concluded was the shadow of another part of the mountain, and it suggested that in like manner what on the surface' of the moon is taken for water may be shadows. feb. 21, 1860. ... it was their admiration of nature that made the ancients attribute those magnanimous qualities, which are surely to be found in man, to the lion, as her masterpiece. it is only by a readiness or preparedness to see more than appears in a creature that we can appreciate what is manifest. feb. 21, 1861. . . . this plucking and strip ping of a pine cone is a business which he [the squirrel] and his family understand perfectly. . . . he does not jjrick his fingers, nor pitch his whiskers, nor gnaw the solid cone any more than he needs to. having sheared oif the twigs and needles that may be in his way (for, like a skillful wood-chopper, he first secures room and verge enough), he neatly cuts off the stout stem winter. 421 of the cone with a few strokes of his chisels, and it is his. to be sure, he may let it fall to the ground, and look down at it for a moment curiously, as if it were not his. but he is tak ing note where it lies, that he may add it to his heap of a hundred more like it, and it is only so much the more his for his seeming carelessness. and when he comes to open it, observe how he proceeds. he holds it in his hands a solid era bossed cone, so hard it almost rings at the touch of his teeth. he pauses for a moment, perhaps, but it is not because he does not know how to begin. he only listens to hear what is in the wind. he knows better than to cut off the top, and work his way downward against a cheval-de jrise of advanced scales and prickles, or to gnaw into the side for three quarters of an inch in the face of many armed shields. he whirls it bot tom upward in a twinkling, where the scales are smallest and the prickles slight or none, and the short stem is cut so close as not to be in his way, and there he proceeds to cut through the thin and tender bases of the scales, and each stroke tells, laying bare at once a couple of seeds. thus he strips it as easily as if its scales were chaff, and so rapidly, twirling it as he advances, that you cannot tell how he does it till you drive him off, and inspect his unfinished work. if there ever was an age of the world when the 422 winter. squirrels opened their cones at the wrong end, it was not the golden age, at any rate. feb. 22, 1841. . . . friends will be much apart. they will respect more each other's privacy than their communion, for therein is the fulfillment of our high aims and the conclusion of our arguments. that we know and would associate with, not only has high intents, but goes on high errands, and has much private business. the hours my friend devotes to me were snatched from a higher society. he is hardly a gift level to me, but i have to reach up to take it. . . . we have to go into retirement religiously, and enhance our meeting by rarity and a degree of unfamiliarity. would you know why i see thee so seldom, my friend ? in solitude i have been making up a packet for thee. some actions which grow out of common but natural relations affect me strangely, as some times the behavior of a mother to her children. so quiet and noiseless an action often moves me more than many sounding exploits. feb. 22, 1852. . . . every man will take such views as he can afford to take. views one would think were the most expensive guests to entertain. i perceive that the reason my neighbor cannot entertain certain views is the narrow limits within which he is obliged to live on account of the smallness of his means. his winter. 423 instinct tells him that it will not do to relax his hold here, end take hold where he cannot keep hold. feb. 22, 1855. ... j. farmer showed me an ermine weasel he caught in a trap three or four weeks ago. they are not very uncommon about his barns. all white but the tip of the tail. two conspicuous canine teeth in each jaw. in summer they are distinguished from the red weasel, which is a little smaller, by the length of their tails particularly, six or more inches, while the red one's is not more than two inches long. . . . he had seen a partridge drum standing on a wall ; said it stood very upright, and produced the sound by striking its wings together behind its back, as a cock often does, but did not strike the wall nor its body. this he is sure of, and declares that he is mistaken who affirms the con trary, though it were audubon himself. wil son says he " begins to strike with his stiffened wings," while standing on a log, but does not say what he strikes, though one would infer it was either the log or his body. peabody says he beats his body with his wings. feh. 22, 1856. . . . now first, the snow melting and the ice beginning to soften, i see those slender, grayish-winged insects creeping with closed wings over the snow-clad ice. have seen none before this winter. they are on all 424 winter. parts of the river, of all sizes, from one third of an inch to an inch long ; are to be seen every ■warm clay afterward. feb. 23, 1841. . . . there is a subtle elixir in society which makes it a fountain of health to the sick. we vrant no consolation which is not the overflow of our friend's health. we will have no condolence, who are not dolent our selves. we would have our friend come and respire healthily before us with the fragrance of many meadows and heaths in his breath, and we will inhabit his body while our own recruits. — nothing is so good medicine in sickness as to witness some nobleness in another which will advertise us of health. in sickness it is our faith that ails, and noble deeds reassure us. that anybody has thought of you on some indifferent occasion frequently implies more good will than you had reason to expect. you have henceforth a stronger motive for conduct. we do not know how many amiable thoughts are current. feb. 23, 1842. . . . true politeness is only hope and trust in men. it never addresses a fallen or falling man, but salutes a rising gener ation. it does not flatter, but only congratu lates. feb. 23, 1853 i think myself in a wilder country, and a little nearer to primitive times, winter. 425 when i read in old books which spell the word savages with an i (salvages), like john smith's " general historie of virginia," etc., reminding me of the derivation of the word from sylva, some of the wild wood and its bristling branches still left in their language. the savages they describe are really salvages, men of the woods. feh. 23, 1854. a. m. the snow drives hori zontally from the north or northwesterly in long waving lines like the outline of a swell or billow. p. m. saw some of those a,rchitectural drifts forming. the fine snow came driving along over the field like steam curling from a roof. as the current rises to go over the wall, it pro duces a lull in the angle made by the wall and the ground, and accordingly just enough snow is deposited there to fill the triangular calm, but the greater part passes over, and is deposited in the larger calm. a portion of the wind also apparently passes through the chinks of the wall, and curves upward against the main drift, appearing to carve it, and perforate it in various fashions, holding many snowy particles in sus pension, in vertical eddies. i am not sure to what extent the drift is carved and perforated, and how far the snow is originally deposited in these forms. feh. 23, 1855. . . . mr. l. says that he and 426 winter. his son george fired at white swans in texas on the water, and though george shot two with ball, and killed them, the others in each case gathered about them, and crowded them off out of their reach. feb. 23, 1856. ... i read in the papers that the ocean is frozen, or has been lately, on the back side of cape cod, at the highland light, one mile out from the shore (not to bear or walk on probably), a phenomenon which, it is said, the oldest have not witnessed before. feb. 23, 1857. p. m. see two yellow-spotted tortoises in the ditch s. of trillium wood. you saunter expectant in the mild air along the soft edge of a ditch filled with melted snow, and paved with leaves in some sheltered place, yet perhaps with some ice at "one end still, and are thrilled to see stirring mid the leaves at the bottom, sluggishly burying themselves from your sight again, these brilliantly spotted crea tures. there are commonly two, at least. the tortoise is stirring in the ditches again. in your latest spring, they still look incredibly strange when first seen, and not like cohabitants and contemporaries of yours. i say in my thought to my neighbor who was once my friend. it is of no use to speak the truth to you. you will not hear it. what then shall i say to you ? winter. 427 at the instant tbat i seem to be saying fare well forever to one who has been my friend, i find myself unexpectedly near to him, and it is our very nearness and dearness to each other that gives depth and significance to that " for ever." thus i am a helpless prisoner, and these chains i have no skill to break. while i think i have broken one link, i have been forging another. — i have not yet known a friendship to cease, i think. i fear i have experienced its decaying. morning, noon, and night, i suffer a physical pain, an aching of the breast which unfits me for my tasks. it is perhaps most intense at evening. with respect to friendship i feel like a wreck that is driving before the gale, with a crew suffering from hunger and thirst, not knowing what shore, if any, they may reach, so long have i breasted the conflict ing waves of this sentinent, my seams open and my timbers laid bare. i float on friendship's sea simply because my specific gravity is less than its, but no longer that stanch and graceful vessel that careened so buoyantly over it. my planks and timbers are scattered. at most i hope to make a sort of raft of friendship on which with a few of our treasures we may float to some land. — that aching of the breast, the grandest pain that man endures, which no ether can assuage ! 428 winter. you cheat me, you keep me at a distance with your manners. i know of no other dishonesty, no other devil. why this doubleness, these compliments? they are the worst of lies. a lie is not worse between traders than a compli ment between friends. i would not, i cannot speak. i will let you feel my thought, my feel ing. — friends ! they are united for good, for evil. they can delight each other as none other can. lying on lower levels is but a trivial offense compared with civility and compliments on the level of friendship. i visit my friend for joy, not for disturbance. if my coming hinders him in the least conceiva ble degree, i will exert myself to the utmost to stay away. i will get the titans to help me stand aloof, will labor night and day to construct a rampart between us. if my coming casts but the shadow of a shadow before it, i wiu retreat swifter than the wind, and more untrackable. i will be gone irrevocably, if possible, before he fears that i am coming. if the teeth ache, they can be pulled. if the heart aches, what then ? shall we pluck it out ? must friends then expect the fate of those oriental twins, that one shall at last bear about the corpse of the other, by that same ligature that bound him to a living companion ? look before you leap. let the isthmus be winter. 429 cut through, unless sea meets sea at exactly the same level, unless a perfect understanding and equilibrium has been established from the beginning around cape horn and that unnamed northern cape, what a tumult ! it is atlantic and atlantic, or atlantic and pacific. i have seen signs of the spring. i have seen a frog swiftly sinking in a pool, or where he dimpled the surface as he leapt in, i have seen the brilliant spotted tortoise stirring at the bot tom of ditches, i have seen the clear sap trick ling from the red maple. feh. 23; 1859. [worcester.] p. m. walk to quinsigamond pond, where was very good skating yesterday, but this very pleasant and warm day it is suddenly quite too soft. i was just saying to b that i should look for hard ice in the shade or on the n. side of some hill close to the shore, though skating was out of the question elsewhere, when looking up i saw a gen tleman and lady very gracefully gyrating, and, as it were, courtesying to each other, in a small bay under such a hill on the opposite shore of the pond. intervening bushes and shore con cealed the ice, so that their swift and graceful motions, their bodies inclined at various angles, as they gyrated forward and backward about a small space, looking as if they would hit each other, reminded me of the circling of two 430 winter. winged insects in the air, or hawks receding and approaching. i first hear and then see eight or ten bluebirds going over. feb. 23, 1860. 3 p. m. thermometer 68° and snow ahnost gone, river rising. we have not had so warm a day since the beginning of december, which was unusually warm. i walk over the moist nawshawtuck hillside, and see the green radical leaves of the buttercup, shepherd's purse, sorrel, chickweed, cerastium, etc., revealed. a fact must be the vehicle of some humanity in order to interest us. otherwise it is like giving a man a stone when he asks for bread. ultimately the moral is all in all, and we do not mind it if inferior truth is sacrificed to superior, as when the annalist fables, and makes animals speak and act like men. it must be warm, moist, incarnated, have been breathed on at least. a man has not seen a thing who has not felt it. index. abobigines, t44. account book, 266-269. acquaintances, 318. activity, 282. acton, 198. adams, john quincy, 88. adversity, 414. advice, 43, 367. .ffi)3chylus, 279. air, 404, 418. alcott, 196. alderberry, 152. alders, 87, 89, 94, 97, 152, 153, 155, 177, 370, 371. alley,,johnb.,174. ambition, 310*' amherst, 12, 161. ancients, 406, 420. andromeda, 125, 152, 163, 189, 190, 252, 307, 308, 339, 404. andromeda ponds, 15, 57. animals, 136, 405. ants, 221. aphorisms, 137, 144, 183, 196, 254, 256, 396. apple-tree, 343. arabians, 222. arctic animals, 49. arctic voyagers, 66. aristotle, 35, 122. arrowheads, 132, 380, 418. arthur, 37, 213. ashes, 100. aspirations, 310. assabet, 177, 414. assabet spring, 415. asters, 30. astrology, 216. astronomy, 217. atlantis, 168, 203. atmosphere, 146, 175, 359, 360. attacua fromethea, 410. audience, the, 310. auditors, 339. authors, 42. azalea, 152. bacon, 264. bafsn's bay, 94. bailey, 188. baker farm, 3, 176. balm of gilead, 363. barberry, 5, 97. barber's historical collections, 328. barnsdale wood, 9. barrett, n., 5. barry, 187. birtlett's cliff, 27 baskets, 118, 143. bear, 158, 360, 301. bsauty, 82, 105, 213. beehives, 337. bees, 363. beliefs,^!, 305, 338. ball, 25, 219, 338. bsomyces rosaceus, 133, 207. berries, 29, 70, 71, 85, 80, 97, 125, 143, 153. bidens brook, 374. billerica, 325. bingham's purchase, 93. birches, 86, 96, 97, 111, 112, 113, 201, 252, 258, 373. birches, black, 112, 258. birches, canoe, 112. birches, white, 113, 373. birches, yellow. 111, 112, 113. birds, 50, 97, 132, 197, 276, 317, 327, 331, 391, 408. birds' nests, 171, 203. bittern cliff, 311. blueberry, 68, 69, 152, 153, 252. blueberry bushes, 16. bluebirds, 63, 54, 404, 430. bluejays, 73. blueness, 179, 215, 298, 348. bluet, 70. body, 202, 331, 332, 379, 417. 432 index. bombay^ 184. bonuetb, 23, 24, books, 318, 323, 407. booming of pond, 88. boston, 21, 70, 161, 178, 394. boston common, 199. boston harbor, 210, 234. botany, 222, 342, 400. boxboro', 108, 109. boys skating, 325, 327. bretagne, 37. bridges, 326. briluants, 188, 189. brister'b hill, 27, 30, 70. biater's spring, 275. britton's camp, 169. brooks, 112, 163, 249. brown, simon, 361, 368, 369. brown's ecrub oak lot, 136. buds, 251, 300, 301, 363. builoonery, 238. bufeum, jonatlian, 174, 178, 179. building, 176. bunker hill, 70. burton, 365. buzzing sound, 169, ito. c, w. e., 53. " cabinet council," the, 146. cake, 143, 144. cambridge, 161, 394. canada, 99, 118. canada lynx, 394. canal, 22. cape cod, 103, 426. capital, 196. carlisle, 167. ■ cars, 321. cartridge-box, 110. cassandra ponds, 188. caterpillar, 142, 177, 246, 247, 375, catkins, 94, 97, 133, 155, 252, 256, 364, 370, 392. cato, 175, 176, 194, 195, 370. cat-owl, 41. cat-tails, 248. cattle, 53. causeways, 326. cawing of crows, 164, 296, 297. channmg, 285. character, 72. chaucer, 86. chemistry, 236. chestnut burs, 7 chickadees, 50, 122, 167, 178, 201, 295,373,391,392,419. chickweed, 193, 311, 341. church bells, 8. cinnamon stone, 102. civilization, 307, 368. clamsheu hill, 124, 132. clamshells, 34. clematis brook, 311, 312. cuff hill, 311. cliffs, 96, 98, 99, 146, 168, 320. climate, 42. clouds, 18, 38, 127, 128, 130, 137, 148, 168, 193, 203, 204, 206, 258, 278, 320. clover, 85, 132, 251. club, 135, 160. cock-crovring, 28, 41, 53, 78, 129, 143, 164, 228, 230, 234, 263, 297, 298, 391. cockle shells, 370. cocoons, 14, 171, 177, 178, 410. cold, 13, 59, 133, 134, 161, 161, 226, 233, 234, 248, 285, 293, 343, 344, 366. cold friday, 226, 344. coleridge, 233. college teaching, 81. colors, 381, 386. colors on snow and ice, 155, 156, 377, 383, 384, 387. columella, 175, 176, 397. commonplace books, 403. companions, 49, 77, 135, 160. composition, 387. couantum, 63, 250. conantmn end, 10. concord, 12, 25, 28, 29, 93, 102, 134, 146, 161, 326. concord kiver, 124, 188. conscience, 254, 279. consciousness, 379, consistency, 397. constellations, 215. conversation, 77, 127. com, 143. cornel, 312. comer road, 220, 311. " counterparts," 416. cow-bell, 337. cows, 160, 336. cracking of ground, 12, 156, 344. creaking of wagon, 220, 343. creeper, 391. cress, 0, 311. crickets, 53, 352. cromwell, 116. crowfoot, 147, 148. crows, 40, 48, 89, 161, 164, 228, 296, 297. crystallizations, 8, 344, 374. crystals, 2, 91, 92, 119, 137, 166, 213, 287, 321, 375, 383. cymri, 37. index. 433 daguerreotype, 309, 310. dandelion, 2^1. days, lengthening of, 408. days, shortness of, 400. dead, the, 13. death, 14, 51, 202, 331, 333, 414. dehtor and creditor, 252. decay, 269. deep cut, 215, 231, 232, 248, 418. deer, 220, 396. demigod, 52. dennis's swamp, 124. derby's bridge, 226. devil, 351. dew-drops, 119, 120. diogenes, 185. diplomacy, 66. disappointments, 204, 342. discipline, 91. ditoh pond, 235. diver, 28. dob-chick, 28. dog, 236, 248, 316, 405. dog-barking, 40, 41, 42. dogwood, 5, 124, 163, 252. dormancy, 65, 376. dronms, 136, 253, 254, 407. d!'>99s, 24, 343. drizzle, 84. duck, 39, 132, 276, 389, 390. dugan, -jenny, 32, 398. duty, 378. e., r. w., 119, 210. early new enerluid writers, 148. e>urly rising, 233. earth, the, 3, 73, 143. earth, perfume from, 138. earth voice, 103. echo, 50, 368, 369. elms, 51, 98, 112, 198, 200, 241, 242. emberiza nivalis, 54. emergencies, 340. emerson, 1g3, 214, 327. emerson, miss, 141, 261. england, 116. englishman, 108. ermine weasel, 423. erskine, 17. esox fasciatus, 212. esquimaux, 11, 49, 211. estrangement, 76, 223, 354, 356, 356. etiquette, 335. experience, 147, 153, 162. expression, 257. eyes, 163. fables, 35, 235. fact, 430. facts, precedence in, 238. failures, 363. fair haven, 83, 117, 188, 250, 312, 410. fair haven hill, 38, 63, 83, 231, 321, 356. fair haven island, 16, 389. fair haven pond, 3, 20, 22, 33, 39, 80, 140, 229, 288, 293, 314, 322, 359, 363, 375, 383, 389. faith, 298, 299. falco lineatus, 165. fame, 310. farmer, j., 423. farmer, mr., 104, 165, 174. farmers, 32, 56, 160, 200, 323, 336, 388, 389. fences, 10. ferns, 125, 275. fields, 266. finches, 48, 89. fire, 5, 99, 324, 325, 412. firs, 30, 86. fisherman, 7, 48, 91, 359. fishes, 7, 59, 123, 388. fish-hawk, 65. fitchburg, 330. flame, 99. flattery, 357. funt's pond, 6, 7, 14, 20, 39, 163. floating islands, 309. flowers, 290, 343. forest, 8. forest hall, 75. forest voices, 103. fox [charles james], 17, 116. foxes, 16, 42, 48, 94, 104, 220, 235, 287, 288, 289, 293, 315, 316, 364, 365. fox-hound, 207. freezing, 13, 61. friends, 1, 2, 12, 14, 75,76, 205, 216, 223, 225, 278, 280, 290, 298, 299, 303, 305, 310, 342, 347, 393, 412, 422 426 428 friendship, 1, '253, 346, 354, 355, 356, 358, 393, 402, 416, 427, 428. fringilla hyemalis, 6, 48. frost, 151, 343. frost-work, 198, 199. funeral customs, 184. fungi, 113, 262, 286. future, the, 140. game, 91. gardiner, captain, 46, 48. gaylussacia, 68. " general historie of virginia," 425. genivla, 43, 197, 265, 264, 378, 379, 399. 434 index. georgic, 61, 62. g-hosts, s. gladness, 107. glaze, 15, 29, 198, 199. gods, 228. golden age, 61, g2. goldfinches, g. good, the, 392, 393. goodwill, 424. gowjng's swamp, 307, 401. grammar, 104. grasses, 31, 84, 87. grasshoppers, 246. great fields, 153. great meadows, 185, 286, 300. grebe, 28. greece, 106, 146, 186. greeks, 41, 146, 168. 278, 279. greeley, horace, 298. green island, 118. greenland, 69. greenness, 32, 212. grief, 193. grisly bear, 360, 361. groves, 195, 196. growth, 402. guitar, 172. gulf stream, 29. gutenberg, 183. hangbirds, 54. hannibal, 204. happiness, 114, 123, 159, 190, 204, 212. haste, 45. hats, 23, 24. hawks, 65, 164, 165, 174, 295, 390. haycocks, 175. haydcn, 347. head, sir francis, 340. . health, 44, 57, 389. heath, 70. heaven, 256. help, 366, 367. hemlocks, 8, 30, 167. hen-hawk, 65, 165, 396, 399. hens, 143, 164, 180, 193, 337. heywood's meadow, 248. hickory, 251. highland light, 426. hiu, mr., 119. hill, the, 165, 270. hills, 70, 140, 141. hips, 97. " history of animals," 35. holden wood, 377. holly, 29. holt, 104. holt bend, 61. h(»ner, 139, 275. homesickness, 37. hope, 412, 415. hubbard's bath, 201. hubbard's bridge, 59. hubbard's field, 85. hubbard's meadow, 377. hubbard's swamp, 111. hubbub, 123. huckleberries, 48. huckleberry, 36, 68, 70. huckleberry cake, 143, 144. huckleberry pastures, 70. hume, 99. humor, 3. hunt farm, 5. hunt pasture. 111. hunters, 27, 90, 226. hunt's island, 124. hymn, 228. ice, 22, 30, 32, 50, 60, 84, 85, 91, 96, 97, 98, 114, 188, 212, 234, 247, 252, 258, 301, 306, 307, 311, 314, 366, 371, 376, 383, 392, 401. ice-cracks, 50, 306. ice-flakes, 379, 380. icicles, 13. imagination, 19, 385. india rubber, 40. indian heaven, 132. indians, 48, 66, 91, 109, 118, 143, 224, 235, 275, 332, 333, 380. industry, 230. infidel, 173, 338. influence, 378. innocence, 52, 272. insanity, 57. insects, 247, 271, 286, 312, 423. instinct, 411. integrity, 281, 378. invitation, 224, 225, 305. january, 313. january thaw, 132, 138. jays, 73, 312, 373. jesuits, 224. johnswort, 62, 147, 251, 311, 346. jones, ephralm, 267. jonson, 357. josselyn, 148, 202, 352. journal, 32, 116, 167, 240, 264, 2k, 281, 350. journey, 265. juniper, 251. kslmia glauca, 308, 339, 404. kirkham, 104. kitten, 11, 394, 386. knavery, 372. knowledge, 137. index. 435 labor, division of, 36. lake scliool, 227. lakin, jake, 104. laudor quoted, 305, 306. landscape, 86, 87, 97, 99, 100, 108, 109, 322, 348. language, 334. larks, 12, 29, 48. lamed brook, 307. laws, 303, 304. leaves, 404, 430. lecture, 76, 174, 208, 209, 214, 284, 285, 411. lecturer, 158. ledum latitolium, 339, 406. lee place, 100. lee^s bridge, 33. lee's cliff, 22, 201, 302, 324. leisure, 45, 157. le jeune quoted, 88, 89. lepraria chloriua, 180. letter writing, 50. libraries, 318, 319. lichens, 31, 32, 74, 75, 133, 180, 207, 258, 270, 311, 348, 349, 403, 411. life, 9, 12, 18, 32, 42, 44, 45, 51, 82, 89, 90, 91, 132, 140, 162, 163, 172, 173, 181, 218, 231, 255, 263, 318, 353, 358, 385, 409. life everlasting, 346. light, 384, 418. lily roots, 34. limits, 330, 331. linaria, 364. linnsus, 352, 400, 401. lion, 420. little john, 8. little kaliant, 179. lives, 147. living, 157, 412. loafer, 45. long wharf, 21. love, 201, 232, 290. love-cracked, 187. lover, 347. lumber, 65. lu ral lu ral lu, 342. lycopus, 15, 16, lynn, 174. mackenzie's river, 94. magazines, 42. maine, 143. maine woods, 93. man, 106, 107, 122, 135, 160, 173, 183, 212, 262, 335. manners, 398, 426. maples, 87, 177, 250, 306, 371. marsh, 248. mather, cotton, letter of, 328, 329. "maxims of state," 146. mckean, 186, 187. meadow, 390. meadow mouse, 39, 314, 316. meadow walk, 372. medicinal recipes, 406. meeting, 413. men, 110, 135, 159, 160, 183, 213, 228, 237, 281, 335, 403. mice, 182. migratory instinct, 247. miles, martial, 126, 296. mill brook, 6, 163. mm dam, 65. milton, 145, 279. ministerial swamp, 131. minott, 104, 220, 228, 276, 277, 278, 338. minott's meadow, 163. minetrelsy, heroes of, 37. mirage, 359, 360. mist, 73, 137. mocking bird, 231. moles, 47, 48. moment, the, 255. money, 343. montaigne, 265. moods, 9, 82, 83. moonught, 203, 215, 320, 322. moose, 285. morality, 138, 139. morning, 128, 137, 258, 259. mosses, 75, 231. moths, 410. motions in nature, 52. mountains, 14, 40. mount washington, 69, 110. mouse, 152, 183, 316, 419. music, 41, 139, 140, 172, 173, 181, 232, 335, 340, 353, 413. musketaquid, 64, 65, 199, 227. musketicook, 326. muskrats, 33, 35, 67, 132, 226, 226, 228, 229, 296, 302, 306, 341, 374. myself, 316, 317, 347, 363. mythologies, 41, 396. nsevia, 36. names, 406. nantucket, 29, 46, 47. nashua, 12. natural history, 406. natural objects, 109. nature, 6, 15, 18, 71, 72, 105, 106, 109, 110, 126, 135, 137, 147, 231, 236, 267, 309, 317. naushon, 29. nawshawtuck, 128, 430. neighbor, 95, 154. 436 index. nevr bedford, 28, 29. kew england, 32, 33, 109, 132. " new england's prospect," 149. new hampshire, 71, 110. new testament, 1, 297, 298. news, 55, 56. night, 83, 215, 217, 218. nobacot, 306, 307. north branch, 326. northern lights, 409. november, 294. nuthatch, 121, 390. nut meadow, 295, 348. nut meadow brook, 243, 296. nutting's pond, 325. oak leaves, 23, 102, 206, 321. oak lot, 136. oak woods, 117. oaks, 5, 80, 87, 96, 98, 102, 103, 108, 110, 112, 218, 219, 250, 252, 300. observers, 209, 270. ocean, freezing of, 421. officials, 107. otter, 22, 79, 90, 337, 414. owls, 23, 41, 126, 131, 219, 295, 320, 321 322. oxenj 25, 176, 194, 195, 396. pacing, 100, 101. pain, 202. paint, 257. pansy, 254. pantry, 258, 307. pantry brook, 373. pantry meadow, 324. parasites, 282. paimelia, 306. farsees, 184. partialness, 40. partridges, 3, 48, 60, 80, 152, 261, 301, 302, 316, 371, 381, 382, 423. peat, 309. pelham pond, 197, 301, 325. pennyroyal, 31. perrian, 197. perth amboy, 40. peterboro' bhuf, 104, 419, 420. pfeifier, mad.ame, 184. pheasants, 29. pliilistines, 114. philosopher, 185, 186. fhilosophia botanica, 400. pane, 239. pickerel, 26, 50, 59, 212, 312. picture, a, 291, 292. pigeons, 313. pigweed, 364, 382. pino cones, 77, 251, 324, 420. pine needles, 30, 335. pine roots, 10. pine stump, 336. pine woods, 26, 30, 32. pines, 63, 64, 77, 80, 86, 87, 97, 197, 200, 218, 311. pines, norway, 46, 47. pines, pitch, 23, 26, 27, 46, 47, 49, 88, 98, 99, 261, 299, 300, 336. pines, white, 10, 44, 94, 97, 98, 167, 260, 296, 336, 398, 399. pioneer work, 82. plantain, 193. pleasant meadow, 315. plutarch, 266. pockets, 41. poetic frenzy, 349. poetry, 263, 403. poets, 179, 217. poke, 358. politeness, 424. ponds, 13, 25, 43, 88, 250. pontederia, 34. poplar, 94. popped cova, 105. post-office, 55, 56. potter's meadow, 30. poverty,209, ^353, 354. powder mill, 129, 130, 131. pratt's, 112. precocity, 380, 381. present, the, 316. presentiments, 340. primrose, 311. prince, 178. prinos, 85, 113, 125. print, 411. privacy, 422. profanity, 292. property, 196. prose, 203. prosperity, 253, 414. quails, 347, 348. questioning, 224. quinsigamond pond, 118, 429. quinsigamond village, 118. babbits, 134, 162, 313, 327, 381. kaccoons, 48, railroad shcinties, 367. rain, 270, 271, 394. kmnbow, 128. raleigh, 110, 116, 145. reading, 222. record on snow, 39, 89, 100. red bridge, 5. red-bouse crossing, 101. reed-mace, 248. relations, 4, 76, 95, 162, 183, 218. index. 437 keli^on, 333. keminiscencea, 213. kepentance, 1g4. repetition, 309. resemblance, 332. resistance, 273. respiration, 72. restraints, 169. retirement, 422. rliode island, 170. rliymes, 310. rice, israel, 58. rig veda, 228, 240, 241. ringdove, 40. riorden, jolinny, 6, 2t3, 274, 352. kipley, mrs., 180. rivals, 187, 188. river, tlie, 7, 60, 80, 132, 148, 188, 203, 209, 210i 234, 243, 250, 252, 258, 276, 293. rivers, 144, 177. robin hood, 9. robins, 8, 29, 48, 54. roclc, 83, 84. romadce, 402. rough and smooth, 136, 137. routine, 230, 263. rudeness, 191, 192. rumor, 84. russell, 180. sabbath bell, 25. salix alba, 199. sallows, 312. sxlutations, 273. silvages, 425. smd foliage, 73. smity, 58. saasltrit, 241. saskatchewan, 120. sassafras, 3g0. saugus, 174. savages, 11, 66, 67, 90. sawing, 187. saw-mill brook, 53, 234. sawyers, 63, 64. saxifrage, 132. saxon race, 179. saxonvllle, 326. scenery, 189, 322. schoolcraft, 170. science, ip, 216, 403, 406. sea-room, 408. sex-serpent, 178. seasons, 13, 123, 237, 256. secrets, 418. sedge, 188, 229, 314 seed vessels, 190. seeds, 185, 189, 327 self-reliance, 280. 128, 215, 116, shadows, 102, 197, 198, 218, 219, 250, 320, 420. shakespeare, 116, 145, 204, 279. shelter, 229. shepherd's purse, 132. sherwood, 9. shore lark, 48. shrikes, 13, 57, 67, 326. shrub oaks, 27, 141. siasconset, 46, sickness, 202, 388, 414. silence, 111, 217, 218, 358. sin, 25, 111, sincerity, 237, 317, 346, sins, 144, 145. six, mysteries of the number, 120,121. skating, 20, 58, 176, 301, 303, 324, 325, 327, 373, 380, 429. sketch, 361, 362. skunk-cabbage, 132, 275, 380. sky, "39, 73, 83, 96, 100, 127, 133, 157, 192, 193, 201, 206, 216, 225, 257, 311, 384, 418. smoke, 100, 153, 154, 343. snow, 20, 27, 44, 54, 79, 101, 140, 149, 166, 168, 181, 188, 207, 209, 260, 261, 300, 321, 323, 327, 328, aw, 408. snow, a betrayer, 38, 79, 89, 100. snow-birds, 13, 48, 59, 361, snow-bow, 127, snow-buntintr, 55, 69, 89, 220, 307. snow-cave, 210, 211. snow-drifts, 21, 39, 64, 88, 80, 101, 117, 146, 152, 153, 261, 425. snow-flakes, 62, 119, 120, 126, 137, 149, 166. snow-fleas, 117, 179, 237, 297, 312, 369. snow-shoes, 91. snow-stars, 120, 121. snow-storms, 39, 54, 119, 120, 151, 225 society, 133, 136, 160, 205, 272, 353, 357, 424. socrates, 185. soutude, 49, 134, 162, 259, 354. song sparrow, 181, 271, 276, 314. sorrel, 85, 251. soul, the, 247. " soul's errand," the, 146. sounds, 41, 44, 51, 78, 102, 129, 141, 143, 147, 164, 296, 322, 356, 385, 417. southwest, 132. spanish brook, 250. sparrows, 48, 181, 271, 276, 300. spawning of flshes, 123. speech, 116. sphagnum, 152, 249, 307 438 index. spice islands, 16. spioula, 85, 86, 87. spiders, 247. spitzbergeii, 56, 56, 87. spleenwort, 311. spring, 312, 402, 105, 419, 429. spruce, 07. squaeh, 262. squirrels, 7, 31, 65, 79, 251, 402, 420, 421. stars, 40, 83, 216, 238, 323. steam, 321. stellaria media, 311, 341. still ufe, 183. storm, 407, 408. stow, beck, 300. stow's wood lot, 97, 102, 390. strangers, 111. strawberry, sll. strix acadica, 126. strix asio, 36. stubble, 98, 114. stupidity, 387. sudbury, 301, 305, 379, 380. suicide, 42, 181. summer, 163. summer life, 51. summer, memories of, 57, 62, 163. sun, 217, 346. sunbeams, 44. sunday, 71. sunlight, 114, 249, 250. sunrise, 62. sunsets, 18, 23, 38, 40, 100, 127, 128, 156, 378. superstitions, 184. surveying, 113, 234, 368, 369. swallows, 241. swamp pink, 252. swamp walk, 152. swamps, 5, 10, 111, 112, 124, 131, 152, 308, 309, 339. swampscott, 178. swans, 426. swedish inn, 212. symbols, 340, 382. sympathy, 60, 202, 310, 378, 413, 416. systems, 406. tali's island, 306. tansy, 85. tarbel spring, 226. tarbell's meadow, 370. tea, 339. telegraph harp, 105, 1462, 19, 231, 240, 248, 283, 390. telegraph wire, 97, 146. telescope, 163, 217. texas, 426. thaw, 132, 156, 300, 301. thistle, 251. thorer, 393, 394. thouglits, 223, 224, 256, 301, 341. thoughts and dreams, 9. tickets, 222. time, 147, 190, 191, 341. titmice, 132," 391. tortoises, 421, 426. townships, 108, 109. tracks, 207, 293, 313, 322, 401. tragedies, 341. trail, 90, 287, 414, 415. translators, 241. travel, 457, 158, 161, 162, 163, 292, 365. . traveler, 412. treatise, 66, 67. tree-sparrow, 27, 46, 89, 137, 152, 189, 190, 364. trees, 44, 46, 86, 87, 94, 96, 97, 116, 198, 199, 250, 255, 287. " trench, 487, 266. trillium wood, 149. trumpet weed. 85. truth, 72, 83, 254, 378, 379. truths, 52, 81, 336. tuckerman, 351. turnpike bridge, 6. tuttle's road, 274. types, 183. typha latifolia, 248. uncle charles, 88. unconsciousness, 264. understanding, 389. unukeness, 205. vaccinium ganadense, 69. vapor, 26, 61, 60, 129, 137, 164, 193. varro, 175, 203, 233, 285, 323, 336. 337, 370. veronica, 251. verses, 62, 156. views, 422. village, 242. village street, p** vireo, 54, 171. virgil, 61, 393. virtue, 62, 72, 76, 145. vision, confined, 15. visiting, 390, 428. voice, the, 335. ■wachusett, 40. " walden" [the book], 119. ■walden, 5, 14, 29, 48, 49, 91, 133, 142, 146, 154, 183, 197, 274, 291, 366. walden pond, 14, 23, 28, 39, 40, 49, 79, 133, 197, 295. index. 439 ■walden woods, 92, 179, 200. walking, 163, 209, 269, 3g6, 384. walks, 15, 22, 86, 133, 154, 274. walnuts, ig. walrus, etc., 49. warmth and coldness, 2, 3. warren miles's mill, 57. warren's wood, 96. washington, }7. wasp, 247. water, 53, 75, 225, 376. water asclepias, 203. water-bugs, 235, 243, 244, 245, 246, 296. water-horehound, 16. water lily, 403, 404. water rights, 188. wayland, 301, 305, 325, 320. we receive what concerns us, 122. wealth, 95, 208, 253, 283. weasel, 174. weather, 7, 53, 143, 257. webster, 88, 104. weeds, 27, 30, 31, 85. weight, 310. weu meadow field, 16, 133, 136, 160, 182, 183. weston's field, 14. wheeler,' biil, 184, 185, 186, 187. white pond, 296, 408, 409. whooping ol ponds, 20. whortleberry family, 68. whortleberj-ies, 68, 143. wigwam, 118. wild geese, 247, 277, 278. wilderness, 93, 94. wildness, 399. wiu, 266. wiuow, 86, 87, 133, 177, 200, 262, 250, 364, 370, 392. wilson, 56. winter, 117, 128, 137, 151, 153, 164, 243, 266, 294, 295, 397. winter afternoons, 141, 157. winter berries, 97. winter morning, 128, 137. winter night thoughts, 62. winter walk, 409. withdrawal, 169. wolf, 285. wolf-traps, 174. woman, a, 76, hi. womanhood, 76. wood, william, 148, 149. wood-chopper, 26, 28, 63, 274, 276, 291. woodland, 109. woodland wafts, 133, 134, 135, 159. woodlots, 93, 93, 200. woodpaths, 96 wood-peckers, 27, 141, 312, 361, 391. wood-thrush, 78. woods, 9, 15, 18, 44, 206, 207, 218, 222,250. worcester, 118, 429. words, 257, 263. words and relations, 4, 76; work, 231, 399, 400. work in heaven, 159. writer, the, 12, 19, 20, 175, 239, 254, 282, 333, 363, 416. tellow birch swamps. 111. youth, 194, 350. youth and age, 257. zeno, 34s. ,t>,.;^^;5*r:^;5i^v fn i' thoreau s cp •"oo^ ^cc no°<. ^^* '. s o ^ ^' % •/». '^ "^^^ v^ c"-^^^^^'.^ ., 0^ ^^""^ c>, >^% . * a , ^ ^ ' ^ « ■"^ a*^ , . « 'c' -^ , x ^ , \v *>. * ^ •x^ /% ^^-. c xoq,. "-.."*.. '^ v^^\ \ " '°.l. * 8 1 ^ longmans' english classics edited by ashley h. thorndike, ph.d., l.h.d. peofessor of english in columbia university henry david thoreau walden longmans' (sngligb claggtcs thoreau's walden edited with notes and an introduction by raymond macdonald alden, ph.d. associate pkofessor of english, leland stanford juniob university new york longmans, green, and co. london, bombay, and calcutta 1910 \ copyright, 1910 by loxntgmans, green and co. the scientific press robert drdmmond and company new york (^ci.a^65887 o contents. page introduction ix bibuography xviii chronological table. xix walden: chapter i. economy 3 ii. where i lived, and what i lived for 68 iii. reading 83 iv. sounds 93 v. solitude 108 \i. visitors 116 vii. the beanfield 129 viii. the village 139 ix. the ponds 144 x. baker farm 166 xi. higher laws 173 xii. brute neighbors 183 xiii. house-warming 195 xiv. former inhabitants; and winter visitors 20s xv. winter animals 220 xvi. the pond in winter 229 xvii. spring 242 xviii. conclusion 258 notes 271 v introduction. henry thoreau was a man of whom there is little that is significant to know which cannot be found in his chief book, walden. from the worldlystandpoint his life was wholh^ uneventful, even the publication of his writings causing little comment at the time. he was born, lived, and died in concord, massachusetts, the friend and associate of the great men of his time who lived there, notably emerson. he went to harvard college, being graduated in 1837; taught school for a time; assisted his father in the manufacture of plumbago and pencils (a few of the pencils still survive in massachu setts, stamped ''thoreau and son"); worked as surveyor when he was in need of money; gave occasional lectures in the popular "lyceums" of the day; and read and wrote abundantly, but not at all in the manner or for the pur poses of a professional literary man. for the most part he sought only to live, in a spiritually rich sense, and it has been truly said that his " was a life in which the pick ing up of an arrow-head or the discovery of a richer blueberry patch were events, and the election of a new president but an incident." when statistics concerning his college class were being gathered, ten years after graduation, thoreau replied to the questions asked : "am not married. i don't know whether mine is a profession, or a trade, or what not. it is not yet learned ... i am a schoolmaster, a private tutor, a surveyor, a gardener, a farmer, a painter (i mean a house painter), a carpenter, a mason, a day-laborer, a pencilmaker, a glass-paper-maker, a writer, and sometimes a poet aster. ... i have found out a way to live without what is commonly called employment or industry, attractive or otherwise. indeed, my steadiest employment, if such it can be called, is to keep myself at the top of my condition, and ready for whatever may turn up in heaven or on earth.'' ¥iii introduction. thoreau's literary work is composed of the two books published in his lifetime, a week on the concord and merrimack rivers (1s49), and walden, or life in the woods (1s54), and of various papers which he contributed to periocucals; these last, together with portions of his journals and correspondence, were made into books after his death. the whole fills some dozen volumes, but the method and spirit of all that thoreau said were so stead fast and simple that to know one of the volumes, one might say, is to know the rest. they contain many thoughts drawn from thoreau's reading, which covered as wide a range as that of any american of his time; they also echo some of the teachings of the " concord philos ophers," emerson and bronson alcott, of whom thoreau was a friend and — to some extent — a disciple; but chiefly they contain his own thoughts " on man, on nature, and on human life," and from that standpoint are among the most original writings of their age. there are two chiefly significant aspects of these writ ings, and the first is their connection with nature. •» tho reau's love of the out-door world and all its creatures perhaps impressed his friends more than any other char acteristic. bronson alcott wrote of him: " i had never thought of knowing a man so thoroughly of the country, and so purely a son of nature. i think he had the profoundest passion for it of any one of his time. . . . he seemed one with things, of nature's essence and core, knit of strong timbers, — like a wood and its mhabitants. there was in him sod and shade, wilds and waters manifold, — the mold and mist of earth and sky. . . . he, of all men, seemed to be the native new englander, as much so as the oak, the granite ledge; our best sample of an indigenous american, untouched by the old country, unless he came down rather from thor the northman, whose name he bore." so it was his occupation, not his recreation, to roam the open country, never using the railroad or other artificial means of locomotion if he could help it, and to find in almost every foot of ground something worth seeing and remembering. "he knew the country like a fox or a bird," wrote introduction. is emerson, ''and passed through it as freely by paths of his own. he knew every track in the snow or on the ground, and what creature had taken this path before him. . . . on the day i speak of he looked for the men yanthes, detected it across the wide pool, and, on examina tion of the florets, decided that it had been in flower five days. he drew out of his breast-pocket his diary, and read the names of all the plants that should bloom on this day, whereof he kept account as a banker when his notes fall due. the cypripedium not due till to-morrow. he thought that, if waked up from a trance in this swanip, he could tell by the plants what time of the year it was within two days. . . . his power of observation seemed to indicate additional senses. he saw as with microscope, heard as with ear-trumpet, and his memory was a photo graphic register of all he saw and heard. and yet none knew better than he that it is not the fact that imports, but the impression or effect of the fact on your mind. every fact lay in glory in his mind, a tj'pe of the order and beauty of the whole." from this standpoint, then, walden is one of the few great books which are especially valued for their power of communicating the richness of the flavor of the world of nature. but by "nature," when thoreau is concerned, we must understand not merely the landscape and its creatures, but natural living, as contrasted with the complex and artificial life of society. many of us like to free ourselves from the bustle and trappings of civilization for a few days' outing, but thoreau honestly and consistently wished to do so all the time. he not only enjoyed "the simple life," but he believed in it, and proclaimed: "a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone." so to him " life in the woods " was typical of freedom from the drudgery, the blind money getting and moncj'-spending, of the great part of mankind. and after thinking a good while about the things that one "can afford to let alone," he put his theories to the test by building a little hut on the shore of walden pond, and living in it for some two years. (see the text itself for an account' of what the cxrjerinient cost him, and the x introduction. proportionate time which he saved for more important things than earning money.) "i went to the woods because i wished to hve deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if i could learn what it had to teach, and not, when i came to die, discover that i had not lived. ... i wanted to live deep, and suck out all the marrow of life." the book w olden is not only the record of his experiment, but the evidence of what he found ^' the marrow of life " to be. this brings us to the second of the significant aspects of thoreau's work. besides being a great naturalist, he was a great idealist. far more than most men, he valued and loved both the world of things and the world of ideas. he found in himself, he said, "an instinct toward a higher, or as it is named, spiritual life, and another toward a primitive, rank and savage one: and i reverence them both." so his thoughts roamed from the fishes and the pebbles in walden pond to the deepest recesses of the mind, and in both directions he found happiness. "while i enjoy the friendship of the seasons, i trust that nothing can make life a burden to me." ancl he bade others test their happiness by their relation to nature: "if the day and the night arc such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal — that is your success." but in such sayings he was of course not referring chiefly to the physical side of life; that was only a means to the life of the spirit. as truly as any man who ever lived, thoreau believed that "the life is more than meat, and the body than raiment." and he persistently looked at human activ ities from this ideal standpoint. if his doctrines appeared only in what he wrote for pul^lication, it might be thought that he was posing — as some did think, in his lifetime. but his letters show the same ideas everywhere. in 1857, after a general financial panic, he wrote to a friend : "the merchants and company have long laughed at transcendentalism [on the meaning of this word, see page xiv], higher laws, etc., crying ' none of your moonshine,' as if they were anchored to something not only definite. introduction. xi but sure and permanent. if there was any institution which was presumed to rest on a solid and secure basis, and more than any other represented this boasted com mon sense, prudence, and practical talent, it was the bank; and now those very banks are found to be mere reeds shaken by the wind. scarcely one in the land has kept its promise. . . . but there is the moonshine still, serene, beneficent, unchanged." this passage may well be compared with the defence of ideals in the closing pages of w olden: ^' if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. ... if you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. now put the foundations under them." no better word than this has been spoken to youth by any american writer. but it must be said that, despite the nobility and purity of thoreau's thinking, it can hardly be taken as a safe guide. in his concern for individual freedom, he never sufficiently regarded man's place and duties in organized society, and a portion of his teaching reads like the expression of a kind of exalted selfishness; — com pare, for example, his rather scornful references to "doing-good" and ''philanthropy," in the closing pages of the first chapter. from such sayings one must sub tract something, because of his love of paradox and exaggeration; the same sjdirit that led him to say, "i could easily do without the post-office. i think that there are very few important communications made through it," or, when he wished to urge the younger generation to act on its own best impulses, to utter this absurdity: " i have lived some thirty years on this planet, and i have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable advice from my seniors." such utterances he himself explained, in the conclusion to walden, saying: "i fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough. ... i desire to speak somewhere without bounds, for i am convinced that i cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the founda tion of a true expression." but no allowance for exaggera tion will enable one to feel that thoreau could ever have xii introduction. worked much with other men for the good of the community. as an individual, however, he was deeply interested in certain public questions. on account of his disap proval of the mexican war he refused to pay his poll tax, and in 1845 was arrested and imprisoned for this refusal. (see page 142, and the note on it.) later he proposed similar action for those who wished to protest against slavery, saying, ''under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison." from the same standpoin the admired and befriended the revolutionary abolitionist, john brown, when he came to concord; and when, in 1859, brown was about to be executed for his daring raid at harper's ferr}'-, it was thoreau who gathered his fellow-citizens together at concord, and read them a ringing address in honor of the man who had so conspicuously represented his own principle of ''civil disobedience." but with ordinary, orderly matters of social good he had little concern; and in the thrilling days of 18g1 we find him writing to a friend: " i do not so much regret the present condition of things in this country as i do that 1 ever heard of it. i know one or two who have this year, for the first time, read a president's message; but they do not see that this implies a fall in themselves rather than a rise in the president. blessed were the days before you read a president's message. blessed are they who never read a newspaper." thoreau's criticism of life, then, is valuable chiefl}^ in a negative way. for those who feel that they are social beings, and must live in cooperation with othei-s, he has little positive advice. but he strikes splendid blows at the stupidity and wastefulness of many men's lives, and such scorn is ennobling. "i have seen more men than usual, lately," he writes (in a letter of aug. 8, 1854), "and well as i was acquainted with one, i am surprised to find what vulgar fellows they are. they do a little business commonly each day, in order to pay their board, and then they congregate in sitting-rooms and feebly fabulate and paddle in the social slush; and when i think that they have sufficiently relaxed, and am prepared ta introduction. xiii see them steal away to their shrines, they go unashamed to their beds, and take on a new layer of sloth." the salty vigor of this is more like carlyle's than it is like any american writer, and often thoreau's virile satire sug gests the temper of carlyle rather than that of emerson, with whom he is more commonly associated. the strictly literary value of his work is very uneven. he wrote freely and unsystematically, as he thought and lived, not seeking to order his material carefully, or to build up the structure of his thought in the manner of one who really tries to prove something. sometimes he will linger and amble when we would wish to go more speedily.* but aside from these things, thoreau's style is singularly rich aijd rewarding. he studs his writing with gems from every quarter of literature, so that to understand all his allusions might be said to be a liberal education. his moral earnestness at times has a dignity quite the equal of emerson's, and flashes out in the same sort of noble, compact utterances. ''the morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted." "god himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine." "there is more day to dawn; the sun is but a morning star." on the other hand, his humor is far more ready and abundant than his friend's. " i retained the landscape, and i have annually carried off what it yielded without a wheel barrow." " we are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from maine to texas; but maine and texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate." or, compare the account of circulating library novels in chapter iii, or the delicious contrast, in chapter v, between thoreau going comfortal)ly to bed in his hut and the prosperous farmer driving cattle to market through the darkness and the mud, in order to enjoy "the comforts of life." sometimes he will revel in a bit of pure verbal melody, like the old seventeenth-century * walden is certainly longer than it need be. those who prefer to read less than the whole may be advised to include the first five chapters, and perhaps the eighth, eleventh, sixteenth, and eighteenth, for the rest — by no means omitting the last. xiv introduction. writers whom he knew and loved; such is the beautiful close of the sixteenth chapter, where the walden water is followed "past the site of the fabulous islands of atlantis and the hesperides," till it "makes the periplus of hanno, and, floating by ternate and tidore and the mouth of the persian gull, melts in the tropic gales of the indian seas." and sometimes, again, there is a masterly bit of narrative or description, which may be taken out and made to stand by itself as a work of art in miniature. such is the battle of the ants, in chapter xii, for narra tion; and, for description, the splendid picture of the old fisherman in the week on the concord and merrimack, too good not to be quoted here: "i often discovered him unexpectedly amid the pads and the gray willows when he moved, fishing in some old country method — for youth and age then went a fishing together — full of incommunicable thoughts, perchance about his own tyne and northuml^erland. he was always to be seen in serene afternoons haunting the river, and almost rustling with the sedge; so many sunny hours in an old man's life, entrapping silly fish; almost grown to be the sun's familiar; what need had he of hat or raiment any, having served out his time, and seen through such thin disguises? i have seen how his coeval fates rewarded him with the yellow perch, and yet i thought his luck was not in proportion to his years; and i have seen when, with slow steps and weighed down with aged thoughts, he disappeared with his fish under his low-roofed house on the skirts of the village. i think nobody else saw him; nobody else remembers him now, for he soon after died, and migrated to new tyne streams. his fishing was not a sport, nor solely a means of sub sistence, but a sort of solemn sacrament and withdrawal from the world, just as the aged read their bibles." certain aspects of thoreau's work cannot be under stood without remembering his connection with the group of new england " transcendcntalists " who exerted an important influence on american thought and literature in the 40's of the nineteenth century. transcendentalism may be ]:)riefly defined as the belief that there are sources of knowledge which transcend — introduction. xv that is, are of higher origin than — the five senses and the common reason; that the spirit of man may l<now certain truths through its very nature, or through communica tion with the divine spirit (see the passage on brahma, page 81, and the note on it). consistently with this idea, all the writers of the group — notably emerson, alcott, and thoreau — will be found to state many teachings which they make no attempt to prove, but which they conceive will appeal as true to the right perceptions of those addressed. we must not think of the group as forming any definite organization, or even a systematic "school" of thought; on the contrary, it was of the very nature of their beliefs that every man should think for himself. this freedom of individual thought found many different expressions, from the most noble to the most absurd. reforms in matters of eating, clothing, and social and political organization, were everywhere "in the air." james russell lowell described the more amusing aspect of the times: "bran had its apostles, and the pre-sartorial simplicity of adam its martyrs. . . . not a few impecunious zealots abjured the use of money (unless earned by other people), professing to live on the internal revenues of the spirit. . . . communities were established where everything was to be common but common-sense." while emerson gave this account, in 1840, of its deeper aspect: "no one can converse much with different classes of society in new england without remarking the progress of a revolution. those who share in it have no external organization, no badge, no creed, no name. they do not vote, or print, or even meet together. they do not know each other's faces or names. they are united only in a common love of truth and love of its work. . . . they have silently given in their several adherence to a new hope, and in all companies do signify a greater trust in the nature and resources of man than the laws or the popular opinions will well allow." an important representative of this movement was the magazine called the dial, which was published quarterly from 1840 to 1844 under the editorship, first of 5largaret fuller, then of emerson. to this thoreau was a leading xvi introduction. contributor, and indeed for a brief period acted as editor. more of his poems v/ere published here than elsewhere during his life, and to look through the numbers of the dial is to come into the same atmosphere that pervades his writings. one series of articles in the journal is particularly significant for readers of wcdden — the so called "ethnical scriptures." all the concord tran scendentalists had become interested in the ethical and religious writings of asia, — particularly of china and india, — some of which had lately become accessible to english readers ; for they found in them certain aspects of thought which harmonized with their own thinking, in ways which cannot be discussed here, and their new sense of religious freedom led them to think that these "bibles" of other nations might be as truly worthy of study as the bible of jews and christians. in the dial for july, 1s42, occurs this note, probably written by emerson : "we commence in the present number the printing of a series of selections from the oldest ethical and religious writings of men, exclusive of the hebrew and greek scriptures. each nation has its bible more or less pure; none has yet been willing or aljle in a wise and devout spirit to collate its own with those of other nations, and, sinking the civil-historical and the ritual portions, to bring together the grand expressions of the moral sentiment in different ages and races, the rules for the guidance of life, the bursts of piety and of abandonment to the in visible and eternal; — a work inevitable sooner or later." in accordance with this plan the editors reprinted extracts from the hindu "laws of menu," the persian " desatir or regulations," the chinese "four books" of confucius and others, "the preaching of buddha," and the "chaldaean oracles." for a number of these articles thoreau was probably responsible, and it is certain that he was deeply interested in the plan. there is a story that, when a friend said something to him about the bible, he replied " which one? " and the reader of walden will sec how consistently he followed up the study of these scriptures of other peoples, and illustrated his ideas from their writings. now that these oriental introduction. xvii writings have been known to the western world for a century, it is pretty clear that thoreau and his friends exaggerated their value, on both the religious and the literary side. they are very far from having taken a place, among the christian peoples, by the side of the hebrew bible and the new testament. but many of their nobler elements have been handed down in modern literature, through the influence of thoreau and emerson — the charm of which is perhaps best exemplified, for readers of w olden, by the story of the artist of kouroo (pp. 263-264), surely one of the gems of the book. the noble idealism expressed by this little tale is closely akin to that which emerson attributed to his friend in the closing words of the sketch he wrote after thoreau's death; and nothing better could be found as a conclusion to these introductory pages: "there is a flower known to botanists, one of the same genus with our summer plant called life-everlasting, a gnaphaliiim like that, which grows on the most inac cessible cliffs of the tyrolese mountains, where the chamois dare hardly venture, and which the hunter, tempted by its beauty, and by his love (for it is immensely valued by the swiss maidens) climbs the cliffs to gather, and is sometimes found dead at the foot, with the flower in his hand. it is called ])y botanists the gnaphaliwn leonto ■podiuvi, but by the swiss edehveisse, which signifies noble purity. thoreau seemed to me living in the hope to gather this plant, which belonged to him of right. the scale on which his studies proceeded was so large as to require longevity, and we were the less prepared for his sudden disappearance. the country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost. . . . but he, at least, is content. his soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, , wherever there is beauty, he will find a home." n bibliographical note. thoreau's collected writings are published in eleven volumes in the riverside edition (houghton-mifflin co., boston). emerson's biographical sketch of thoreau is included in volume x, called miscellanies. it may also be found in the original edition (1s63) of the volume called excursions, and in the cambridge classics edition of walden (houghton-mifflin co.). the best extended life of thoreau is that of henry s. salt (walter scott, london), which contains some admirable critical chapters and a complete bibliography. william euery channing's memoir, called thoreau, the poet-naturalist (1873), while rambling and uneven, contains considerable interesting matter; a new edition, with notes by f. b. sanborn, was pubhshed in 1902 (c. e. goodspeed, boston). mr. san born is also the author of the volume on thoreau in the american men of letters series (houghton-mifflin co., 1ss2) ; its account of the concord of thoreau's time is more satisfactory than the biographical matter. other interesting accounts of thoreau, by his contemporaries, will be found in bronson alcott's concord days (1872), moncure conway's emerson at home and abroad (1882), thomas wentworth higginson's short studies of american authors (1888), and charles j. woodbury's talks with ralph waldo emerson (1890). perhaps the most important critical articles on thoreau's writings are that by james russell lowell (in my study windoivs), which, however, is rather lacking in sympathic appreciation; that by john bur roughs, in indoor studies; and that by robert louis stevenson in familiar studies of men and books. for other references, see the bibliography in salt's ldfe, already referred to. there are also good brief critical notices of thoreau in pancoast's introduction to american literature (holt, new york), and newcomer's american literature (scott, foresman & co., chicago). chronological table. xix 1 i i "3 c > a -0 b «5 u x o 3 "c "o >, « c 2 1 o c c 1 a a .2 sj3 o ce-' c o o -3 o tn h ^ h c ■^.2 h (5 s :o ^ t-^ .1 -to oc 71 n ml co-^ -t -r a: x <xi 00 qc oo oc •— • ^^ •— ^^ ■"* ^ i -1: s i £ c * a ■►2:§ fti 3 h cs p <: s 3 s =•= ■ .. o s o s 1 o o 1 t>2 i^ a, a"? s ,• "^ b "^ £ •• § s s rt ?< ^ h ^ _o a ^ ►s^l o j c z w 5s c a ci o 1 5 5 w 1=^ .s ^-i vj' 5 .-3 ^ o co s to e ^ cjk t^ o r~ >ii^ ^ ■^ s c-l co co zco"-i -f c' -•r > rf c-i< *< t a. « x oc 00 00 oc' oci otj cc gt' vj ^^ ^^ ^h ^ ^^ . e 8 g ^ o <: n. 1 1 o ts a a u k m c o £ c u cj as i <; cj a c *^ w m >1 o q 'h s la o o h o w s* ph hj r _^ co to t-^ x irf t c-j co co co -t< -f '^l 2 « 00 00 00 cc x oc »— ' — ' ^^ -^ ^h ^h -7: .= £ s 'j ii ^ s " 2 a o bo •s 2 h 1 ^ ^ ^■^ "o o eg o s o g 03 o — •73 g-l . • -ja coco 0) h k k 5 is h < eg. "go 8 1 l| t^ co a in.f-i-o °r-,'^ t cj tt<0-*chtt>w eo •<)<•* 2 1 s ■ si >i co orh o oi t. eo tj'tfjs t — "a 00 00 00 00 00 go oc cc |-» »— 1 .— ( r-t 1— t t— 1 .— 1 »— ' xx chronological table. e: d i = .2 "-o d j •5 j" > c3 a "tl— -b 3 ^ c s ■s da tj i o p to c3 1^ h -3 cj o m m u co v 3 i -^^ ■< ts fa q h-lw s o o u u ja e j3 h p pl is h o tdrt :5 ^h s o oj: o co co oc co ^h r^ -^ s " g ^ "2 ■2 « -2 c s c^ ■^ i =5 1 _a < ^ 6 t? k ^i ^ (d f^ ^ o u a x go ■^ >> 3 i i 1 >. ^ o |s >. ^ k-. 13 c ^-3 «■ 2sii 8 o o . 1 a o w . . 5 . -^fe o ?m -~ co lo o *! lo co e ce 00 co cci co co .— »— ' -^ s; ss fa .co o -5 s ft: k ►j s 1 c o o o o o o 5 m ^ ra c c3 - 1 en 5 < o^! co oko o3 5^ o-)oo cc' co co 00 00 co ^i »-h '^ "^ 14 .s c s m ^ a j= •a « f^ ^ o =»a 1 lis cd c3 3^ o <| 1 °s a o s c _c o o -; co -; .. -3" s s^i^ o k ? o«s s >i ■ j^ o oc -■ s® h 3 .2-3 5^ tg 2 :s:| •-5 in lo;:^ co i-o^o co oo oo c<0 00 00 00 sti tm , l-h l-( '-' walden henry david thoreau walden. economy. whex i wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, i lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which i had built myself, on the shore of walden pond, in concord, massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. i lived there two years and two months. at present i am a sojourner in civilized life again. i should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life, which some would call impertinent, though they do not appear to me at all impertinent, but, considering the circumstances, very natural and pertinent. some have asked what i got to eat; if i did not feel lonesome; if i was not afraid; and the like. others have been curious to learn what portion of my income i devoted to charitable purposes; and some, who have large families, how many poor children i maintained. i will there fore ask those of my readers who feel no particular interest in me to pardon me if i undertake to answer some of these questions in this book. in most books, the /, or first person, is omitted, in this it will be retained ; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. we commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. i should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom i knew as well. unfortunately, i am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. moreover, i, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what 4 walden. he has heard of other men's kves; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a dis tant land to me. perhaps these pages are more particu larl}' addressed to poor students. as for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. i trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits. i would fain say something, not so much concerning the chinese and sandwich islanders, as you who read these pages, who are said to live in new england ; some thing about your condition, especially j'our outward condition or circumstances in this world, in this town, what it is, whether it is necessary that it be as bad as it is, whether it cannot be improved as well as not. i have travelled a good deal in concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand re markable ways. what i have heard of brahmins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads down avard, over flames; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders ''until it becomes impossible for them to re sume their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach;" or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the tops of pillars, — even these forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which i daily witness. the twelve labors of hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neigh bors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but i could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor. they have no friend lolaus to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra's head, but as soon as one head is crushed, two spring up. i see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than economy. 5 got rid of. better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clear eyes what field they were called to labor in. who made them serfs of the soil? why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only -his peck of dirt? avhy should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? they have got to live a man's life, pushing all these things "l3efore them, and get on as well as they can. how many a poor im mortal soul have i met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot! the portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encum brances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh. but men labor under a mistake. the better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. by a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. it is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before. it is said that deucalion and pyrrha created men by throwing stones over their heads behind them: — inde genus durum sumus, experien'sque laborum, et documenta damus qua simus origine nati. or, as raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way, — "from thence our kind hard-hearted is, enduring pain and care, approving that our bodies of a stony nature are." so much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the stones over their heads behind them, not seeing where they fell. most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life, that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and 6 waldex. tremble too much for that. actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. he has no time to be anything but a machine. how can he remember well his ignorance — which his ' growth re quires — who. has so often to use his knowledge? we should feed and clothe him gratuitously someljimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him. the finest c|ualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate hand ling. yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly. some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. i have no doubt that some of you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have actu ally eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast w'earing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour. it is very evident wdiat mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by experience; always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the latins ces alienum, another's brass, for some of their coins were made of brass; still liv ing, and dying, and buried by this other's brass; always promising to pay, promising to pay, to-morrow, and dying to-day, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offences; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civilit}^, or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let j^ou make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in a brick bank; no matter where, no matter how much or how little. i sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, i economy. 7 may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called negro slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both north and south. it is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself. talk of a divinity in man! look at the teamster on the highway,^ wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir within him? his highest duty to fodder and water his horses! what is his destiny to him compared with the shipping interests? does not he drive for squire make-a-stir? how godlike, how immortal, is he? see how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. public opinion is a weak tyrant com pared with our own private opinion. what a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate. self-emancipation even in the west indian provinces of the fancy and imagination, — what wilberforce is there to bring that about? think, also, of the ladies of the land weaving toilet cushions against the last day, not to betray too green an interest in their fates! as if you could kill time without injuring eternity. the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. what is called resignation is confirmed desperation. from the desperate city you go into the desj^erate coun try, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. a stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. there is no play in them, for this comes after work. but it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things. when we consider what, to use the words of the cate chism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. yet they honestly think there is no choice left. but alert and healthy natures remember that the syn rose clear. it is ne\"er too late to give up our prejudices. no way of think 8 walden. ing or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. what everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. what old people say you cannot do you try and find that you can. old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new. old people did not know enough once, per chance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the phrase is. age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. one may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living. practically, the old have no very im portant advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miser able failures, for private reasons, as they must believe; and it may be that they have some faith left which belies that experience, and they are only less young than they were. i have lived some thirty years on this planet, and i have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. they have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything, to the purpose. here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it. if i have any experience which i think valuable, i am sure to reflect that this my men tors said nothing about. one farmer says to me, " you cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;" and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his s3^stem with the raw material of bones, walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plough along in spite of every obstacle. some things are really necessaries of life in some circles, the most helpless and diseased, which in others are luxuries merely, and in others still are entirely unknown. the whole ground of human life seems to some to economy. 9 have been gone over by their predecessors, both the heights and the valleys, and all things to have been cared for. according to evelyn, "the wise solomon prescribed ordinances for the very distances of trees; and the koman prsetors have decided how often you may go into your neighbor's land to gather the acorns which fall on it without trespass, and what share be longs to that neighbor." hippocrates has even left directions how we should cut our nails; that is, even with the ends of the fingers, neither shorter nor longer. undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which pre sume to have exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as adam. but man's capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried. what ever have been thy failures hitherto, "be not afflicted, my child, for who shall assign to thee what thou hast left undone?" we might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for instance, that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of earths like ours. if i had remembered this it would have prevented some mistakes. this was not the light in which i hoed them. the stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! \miat distant and different beings in the various man sions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment! nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. who shall say what prospect life offers to another? could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant? we should live in all the ages of the world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages. history, poetry, mythology! — i know of no reading of another's experience so startling and informing as this would be. the greater part of what my neighbors call good i believe in my soul to be bad, and if i 'repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. what demon possessed me that i behaved so well? you may say the wisest thing you can, old man, — you. who have lived seventy yearsj not without honor of a kind, — i hear an 10 waldex. irresistible voice which invites me away from all that. one generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels. i think that we may safel}^ trust a good deal more than we do. we may waive just so much care of our selves as we honestly bestow elsewhere. nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength. the incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well-nigh in curable form of disease. we are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do; and yet how much is not done by us! or, what if we had been taken sick? how vigilant we are! determined not to live by faith if we can avoid it; all the day long on the alert, at night we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to uncertainties. so thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. this is the only way, we say; l3ut there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. all change is a miracle to contem plate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant. confucius said, "to know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge." when one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, i foresee that all men will at length establish their lives on that basis. let us consider for a moment what most of the trouble and anxiety which i have referred to is about, and how much it is necessary that we be troubled, or, at least, careful. it would be some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross neces saries of life and what methods have been taken to ob tain them; or even to look over the old day-books of the merchants, to see what it was that men most com monly bought at the stores, what they stored, that is, what are the grossest groceries. for the improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man's existence; as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors. economy. 11 by the words, necessary of life, i mean whatever, of all that man obtains by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long use has become, so important to human life that few, if any, whether from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it. to many creatures there is in this sense but one necessary of life, food. to the bison of the prairie it is a few inches of palatable grass, with water to drink; unless he seeks the shelter of the forest or the moun tain's shadow. none of the brute creation requires more than food and shelter. the necessaries of life for man in this climate may, accurately enough, be distributed under the several heads of food, shelter, clothing, and fuel; for not till we have secured these are we prepared to entertain the true problems of life with freedom and a prospect of success. man has in vented, not only houses, but clothes and cooked food; and possibly from the accidental discovery of the warmth of fire, and the consequent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the present necessity to sit by it. we observe cat? and clogs acquiring the same second nature. by proper shelter and clothing we legitimately retain our own internal heat; but with an excess of these, or of fuel, that is, with an external heat greater than our own internal, may not cookery properly be said to begin? darwin, the naturalist, says of the inhabitants of terra del fuego that, while his own party, who were well clothed and sitting close to a fire, were far from too warm, these naked savages, who were farther off, were observed, to his great surprise, ''to be streaming with perspiration at undergoing such a roasting." so, we are told, the new hollander goes naked with impunity, while the european shivers in his clothes. is it im possible to combine the hardiness of these savages with the intellectualness of the civilized man? according to liebig, man's body is a stove, and food the fuel which keeps up the internal combustion in the lungs. in cold weather we eat more, in warm less. the animal heat is the result of a slow combustion, and disease and death take place when this is too rapid; or for want of fuel, or from some defect in the draught, the fire goes 12 walden. out. of course the vital heat is not to be confounded with fire; but so much for analogy. it appears, there fore, from the above list, that the expression, animal life, is nearly synonymous with the expression, animal heat; for while food may be regarded as the fuel which keeps up the fire within us, — and fuel serves only to prepare that food or to increase the warmth of our bodies by addition from without, — shelter and clothing also serve only to retain the heat thus generated and absorbed. the grand necessity, then, for our bodies is to keep warm, to keep the vital heat in us. what pains we accordingly take, not only with our food, and clothing, and shelter, but with our beds, which are our night clothes, rob])ing the nests and breasts of birds to pre pare this shelter within a shelter, as the mole has its bed of grass and leaves at the end of its burrow! the poor man is wont to complain that this is a cold world; and to cold, no less physical than social, we refer directly a great part of our ails. the summer, in some cumates, makes possible to man a sort of elysian life. fuel, except to cook his food, is then unnecessary; the sun is his fire, and many of the fruits are sufficiently cooked by its rays; while food generally is more various, and more easily oldtained, and clothing and shelter are wholly or half unnecessary. at the present day, and in this country, as i find my own experience, a few imple ments, a knife, an axe, a spade, a wheelbarrow, &c., and for the studious, lamplight, stationer}', and access to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and can all be obtained at a trifling cost. yet some, not wise, go to the other side of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and devote themselves to trade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may live, — that is, keep com fortably warm, — and die in new england at last. the luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm but unnaturally hot; as i implied before, they are cooked, of course a la mode. most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called com forts, of life are not only not indispensable, bvit positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. with respect economy. 13 to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor. the an cient philosophers, chinese, hindoo, persian, and greek, were a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward. we know not much about them. it is remarkable that loe know so much of them as we do. the same is true of the more modern reformers and benefactors of their race. none can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call volun+ar}poverty. of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art. there are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. yet it is admirable to profess because.it wa; once admirable to live. to be a philos opher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live, ac cording to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. it is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. the success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. they make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men. but why do men degenerate ever? what makes families run out? what is the nature of the luxury which enervates and destroys nations? are we sure that there is none of it in our own lives? the philosopher is in advance of his age even in the outward form of his life. he is not fed, sheltered, clothed, warmed, like his contemporaries. how can a man be a philosopher and not maintain his vital heat by better methods than other men? when a man is warmed by the several modes which i have described, what does he want next? surely not more warmth of the same kind, as more and richer food, larger and more splendid houses, finer and more abundant clothing, more numerous, incessant, and hotter fires, and the like. when he has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life 14 walden. now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced. the soil, it appears, is suited to the seed, for it has sent its radicle downward, and it may now send its shoot up ward also with conficlence. why has man rooted him self thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the same proportion into the heavens above? — for the nobler plants are valued for the fruit they bear at last in the air and light, far from the ground, and are not treated like the humbler esculents, which, though the}' may be biennials, are cultivated only till they have perfected their root, and often cut down at top for this purpose, so that most would not know them in their flowering season. i do not mean to prescribe rules to strong and val iant natures, who will mind their own affairs whether in heaven or hell, and perchance build more magnifi cently and spend more lavishly than the richest, with out ever impoverishing themselves, not knowing how they live, — if, indeed, there are any such, as has been dreamed; nor to those who find their encouragement and inspiration in precisely the present condition of things, and cherish it with the fondness and enthusiasm of lovers, — and, to some extent, i reckon myself in this number; i do not speak to those who are well employed, in whatever circumstances, and they know whether they are well emplo3'ed or not; — but mainly to the mass of men who are discontented, and idly complaining of the hardness of their lot or of the times, when they might improve them. there are some who complain most energetically and inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their duty. i also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy but most terribly im poverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, bvit know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters. if i should attempt to tell how i have desired to spend my life in years past, it would probably surprise those of my readers who are somewhat acciuainted with its actual history; it would certainly astonish those who know nothing about it. i will only hint at some of the enterprises which i have cherished. economy. 15 in any weather, at any hour of the day or night, i have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past 'and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that hne. you will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. i would gladly tell all that i know about it, and never paint ''no admit tance" on my gate. 1 long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle dove, and am still on their trail. many are the trav ellers i have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. i have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if the}'had lost them themselves. to anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, nature herself! how many mornings, summer and winter, before yet an}' neighbor was stir ring about his business, have i been al)out mine! no doubt, many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise, farmers starting for boston in the itwilight, or woodchoppers going to their work. it is true, i never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it. so many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town, trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express! i well-nigh sunk all my capital in it, and lost my own breath into the bargain, running in the face of it. if it had concerned either of the political parties, depend upon it, it would have appeared in the gazette with the earliest intelligence. at other times watching from the observatory of some cliff or tree, to telegraph any new arrival; or waiting at evening on the hill-tops for the sky to fall, that i might catch some thing, though i never caught much, and that, manna wise, would dissolve again in the sun. for a long time i was reporter to a journal, of no 16 walden. veiy wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, i got only my labor for my pains. however, in this case my pains were their own reward. for many years i was self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain storms, and did my duty faith fully; surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility. i have looked after the wild stock of the town, which give a faithful herdsman a good deal of trouble by leap ing fences, and i have had an eye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of the farm; though i did not always know whether jonas or solomon worked in a particular field to-day; that was none of my business. i have watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle tree, the red pine ancl the black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might have withered else in dry seasons. in short, i went on thus for a long time, i may say it without boast'ng, faithfully minding my business, till it became more and more evident that my towns men would not after all admit me into the list of town officers, nor make my place a sinecure with a moderate allowance. my accounts, which i can swear to have kept faithfully, i have, indeed, never got audited, still less accepted, still less paid and settled. however, i have not set my heart on that. not long since, a strolling indian went to sell bas kets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neigh borhood. "do you wish to buy any baskets?" he asked. "no, we do not want any," was the reply. "what!" exclaimed the indian, as he went out the gate, "do you mean to starve us?" having seen his industrious white neighl^ors so well off, — that the law yer had only to weave arguments, and by some magic wealth and standing followed, he had said to himself: i will go into business; i will weave baskets; it is a thing which i can do. thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it economy. 17 would bo tho white man's to buy them. he had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other's while to buy them, or at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while to buy. i too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but i had not made it worth any one's while to buy them. yet not the less, in my case, did i think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy m}^ baskets, i studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them. the life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others? finding that my fellow-citizens were not likely to offer me any room in the court house, or any curacy or living anywhere else, ])ut i must shift for myself, i turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods, where i was better known. i determined to go into business at once, and not wait to acquire the usual capital, using such slender means as i had already got. my purpose in going to walden pond was not to live cheaply nor to live deai-ly there, but to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles; to be hindered from accomplish ■ ing which for want of a little common sense, a little enterprise and business talent, appeared not so sad as foolish. i have always endeavored to accjuire strict business habits; they are indispensable to everj^ man. if your trade is with the celestial empire, then some small counting house on the coast, in some salem harbor, will be fixture enough. you will export such articles as the country affords, purely native products, much ice and pine timber and a little granite, always in native bottoms. these will be good ventures. to oversee all the details yourself in person; to be at once pilot and captain, and owner and underwriter; to lauy and sell and keep the accounts; to read every letter received, and write or read every letter sent; to superintend the discharge of imports night and day; to be upon many parts of the coast almost at the same time; — often the 18 walden. lichcst freight will be discharged upon a jersey shore; — to be your own telegraph, unweariedly sweeping the horizon, speaking all passing vessels bound coastwise; to keep up a steady despatch of commodities, for the supply of such a distant and exorbitant market; to keep yourself informed of the state of the markets, prospects of war and peace every w^here, and anticipate the tendencies of trade and civilization, — taking advan tage of the results of all exploring expeditions, using new passages and all improvements in navigation; — charts to be studied, the position of reefs and new lights and buoys to be ascertained, and ever, and ever, the loga rithmic tables to be corrected, for by the error of some calculator the vessel often splits upon a rock that should have reached a friendly pier, — there is the un told fate of la perouse; — universal science to be kept pace with, studying the lives of all great discoverers and navigators, great adventurers and merchants, from hanno and the pha3nicians down to our day; in fine, account of stock to be taken from time to time, to know how you stand. it is a labor to task the faculties of a man, — such problems of profit and loss, of interest, of tare and tret, and gauging of all kinds in it, as demand a universal knowledge. i have thought that walden pond would be a good • place for business, not solely on account of the railroad and the ice trade; it offers advantages which it may not be good policy to divulge; it is a good post and a good foundation. no neva marshes to be filled; though you must everywhere build on piles of your own driving, it is said that a flood-tide, with a westerly wind, and ice in the neva, would sweep st. petersburg from the face of the earth. as this business was to be entered into without the usual capital, it may not be easy to conjecture where those means, that will still be indispensable to every such undertaking, were to be obtained. as for cloth ing, to come at once to the practical part of the question, perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty, and a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than economy. 19 by a true utility. let him who has work to do recollect that the object of clothing is, first, to retain the vital heat, and secondly, in this state of society, to cover nakedness, and he may judge how much of any necessary or important work may be accomplished without add ing to his wardrobe. kings and queens who wear a suit but once, though made by some tailor or dressmaker to their majesties, cannot know the comfort of wearing a suit that fits. they are no better than wooden horses to hang the clean clothes on. every da our garments become more assimilated to ourselves, receiving the im press of the wearer's character, until we hesitate to lay them aside, without such delay and medical appliances and some such solemnity even as our bodies. no man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet i am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched, clothes than to have a sound conscience. but even if the rent is not mended, perhaps the worst vice betrayed is improvidence. i sometimes try my acquaintances by such tests as this; — who could wear a patch, or two extra seams only, over the knee? most behave as if they believed that their prospects for life would be ruined if they should do it. it would be easier for them to holsble to town with a broken leg than with a broken pantaloon. often if an accident happens to a gentleman's legs, they can be mended; but if a similar accident happens to the legs of his pantaloons, there is no help for it; for he considers, not what is truly respectable, but what is respected. we know but few men, a great many coats and breeches. dress a scare crow in your last shift, you standing shiftless by, who would not soonest salute the scarecrow? passing a corn field the other day, close by a hat and coat on a stake, i recognized the owner of the farm. he was only a little more weather-beaten than when i saw him last. i have heard of a dog that barked at every stranger who ap proached his master's premises with clothes on, but was easily quieted by a naked thief. it is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes. could you, in 20 walden. such a case, tell surely of any compan}' of civilized men, wliich belonged to the most respected class? when madam pfeiffer, in her adventurous travels round the world, from east to west, had got so near home as asiatic russia, she says that she felt the necessity of wearing other than a travelling dress, when she went to meet the authorities, for she "was now in a civilized country, where . . . people are judged of by their clothes." even in our democratic new england towns the acci dental possession of wealth, and its manifestation in dress and equipage alone, obtain for the possessor almost universal respect. but they who yield such respect, numerous as they are, are so far heathen, and need to have a missionary sent to them. besides, clothes in troduced sewing, a kind of work which you may call endless; a woman's dress, at least, is never done. a man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeter minate period. old shoes will serve a hero longer than they have served his valet, — if a hero ever has a valet, — bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make them do. only they who go to soirees and legislative halls must have new coats, coats to change as often as the man changes in them. but if my jacket and trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship god in, they will do; will they not? who ever saw ,his old clothes, — his old coat, actually worn out, resolved into its primitive elements, so that it was not a deed of charity to bestow it on some poor boy, by him perchance to be bestowed on some poorer still, or shall we say richer, who could do with less? i say, beware of all enterprises that re quire new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. if there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? if you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. all men want, not some thing to do with, but something to do, or rather some thing to he. perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would economy. 21 be like keeping new wine in old bottles. our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. the loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. thus also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind. we don garment after garment, as if we grew like exogenous plants by addition without. our outside and often thin and fanciful clothes are our epidermis or false skin, which partakes not of our life, and may be stripped off here and there without fatal injury; our thicker garments, constantly worn, are our cellular integument, or cortex; but our shirts are our liber or true bark, which cannot be removed without girdling and so destroying the man. i believe that all races at some seasons wear something equivalent to the shirt. it is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety. while one thick garment is, for most purposes, as good as three thin ones, and cheap clothing can be obtained at prices really to suit customers; while a thick coat can be bought for five dollars, which will last as many years, thick pantaloons for two dollars, cowhide boots for a dollar and a half a pair, a summer hat for a quarter of a dollar, and a winter cap for sixty-two and a half cents, or a better be made at home at a nominal cost, where is he so poor that, clad in such a suit, of his own earn ing, there will not be found wise men to do him rever ence? when i ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me gravely, "they do not make them so now," not emphasizing the "they" at all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the fates, and i find it difficult to get made what i want, simply because she cannot believe that i mean what i say, that i am so rash. 22 walden. when i hear this oracular sentence, i am for a moment absorbed in thought, emphasizing to myself each word separately that i may come at the meaning of it, that i may find out by what degree of consanguinity they are related to 7ne, and what authority they may have in an affair which affects me so nearly; and, finally, i am inclined to answer her with equal mystery, and without any more emphasis of the ''they," — "it is true, they did not make them so recently, but they do now." of what use this measuring of me if she does not measure my character, but only the breadth of my shoulders, as it were a peg to hang the coat on? we worship net the graces, nor the parcse, but fashion. she spins and weaves and cuts with full authorit}-. the head monkey at paris puts on a traveller's cap, and all the monkeys in america do the same. i sometimes despair of getting anything quite simple and honest done in this v/orld by the help of men. they would have to be passed through a powerful press first, to squeeze their old no tions out of them, so that they would not soon get upon their legs again, and then there would be some one in the company with a maggot in his head, hatched from an egg deposited there nobody knows wdien, for not even fire kills these things, and you would have lost your labor. nevertheless we will not forget that some egyptian wheat was handed down to us id}^ a inummy. on the whole, i think that it cannot be maintained that dressing has in this or any country risen to the dignity of an art. at present, men make shift to wear what they can get. like shipwrecked sailors, they put on what they can find on the beach, and at a little dis tance, whether of space or time, laugh at each other's masquerade. every generation laughs at the old fashions, ])ut follows religiously the new. we are amused at be holding the costume of henry viii., or queen elizabeth, as much as if it was that of the king and queen of the cannibal islands. all costume off a man is pitiful or grotesque. it is only the serious eye peering from and the sincere life passed within it, which restrain laughter and consecrate the costume of any people. let harlequin be taken with a fit of colic and his trappings will have t economy. 23 serve that mood too. when the soldier is hit idv a cannon ball, rags are as becoming as purple. the childish and savage taste of men and women for new patterns keeps how many shaking and sc[uinting through kaleidoscopes that they may discover the partic ular figure which this generation re^iuires to-day. the manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a particular color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf, though it fre quently happens that after the lapse of a season the latter becomes the most fashionable. comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. it is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin-deep and unalterable. i cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing. the condition of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the english; and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as i have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that the corporations may be enriched. in the long run men hit only what they aim at. there fore, though they should fail immecliately, they had better aim at something high. as for a shelter, i will not deny that this is now a neces sary of life, though there are instances of men having done without it for long periods in colder countries than this. samuel laing says that "the laplander in his skin dress, and in a skin bag which he puts over his head and shoulders, will sleep night after night on the snow . . . in a degree of cold which would extinguish the life of one exposed to it in any woollen clothing." he has seen them asleep thus. yet he adds, "they are not hardier than other people." but, probabl}^ man did not live long on the earth without discovering the con venience which there is in a house, the domestic com forts, which phrase may have originally signified the satisfactions of the house more than of the family; though these must be extremely partial and occasional 24 walden. in those climates where the house is associated in our thoughts with winter or the rainy season chiefly, and two thirds of the year, except for a parasol, is unneces sary. in our climate, in the summer, it was formerly almost solely a covering at night. in the indian gazettes a wigwam was the symbol of a day's march, and a row of them cut or painted on the bark of a tree signified that so many times they had camped. man was not made so large limited and robust but that he must seek to narrow his world, and wall in a space such as fitted him. he was at first bare and out of doors; but though this was pleasant enough in serene and warm weather, by daylight, the rainy season and the winter, to say nothing of the torrid sun, would perhaps have nipped his race in the bud if he had not made haste to clothe himself with the shelter of a house. adam and eve, according to the fable, wore the bower before other clothes. man wanted a home, a place of warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections. we may imagine a time when, in the infancy of the human race, some enterprising mortal crept into a hol low in a rock for shelter. every child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay out doors, even in wet and cold. it plays house, as well as horse, hav ing an instinct for it. who does not remember the interest with which when young he looked at shelving rocks, or any approach to a cave? it was the natural yearning of that portion of our most primitive ancestor which still survived in us. from the cave we have advanced to roofs of palm leaves, of bark and boughs, of linen woven and stretched, of grass and straw, of boards and shingles, of stones and tiles. at last, we know not what it is to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more senses than we think. from the hearth to the field is a great distance. it would be well perhaps if we were to spend more of our daj-s and nights without an}' obstruction between us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or the saint dwell there so long. birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots. economy. 25 however, if one designs to construct a dwelling house, it behooves him to exercise a little yankee shrewdness, lest after all he find himself in a workhouse, a labyrinth without a clew, a museum, an almshouse, a prison, or a splendid mausoleum instead. consider first how slight a shelter is absolutely necessary. i have seen penobscot indians, in this town, living in tents of thin cotton cloth, while the snow was nearly a foot deep around them, and i thought that they would be glad to have it deeper to keep out the wind. formerly, when how to get my living honestly, with freedom left for my proper pur suits, was a question which vexed even more than it does now, for unfortunately i am becomesomewhat callous, i used to see a large box by the railroad, six feet long by three wide, in which the laborers locked up their tools at night, and it suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed might get such a one for a dollar, and, having bored a few auger holes in it, to admit the air at least, get into it when it rained and at night, and hook down the lid, and so have freedom in his love, and in his soul be free. this did not appear the worst, nor by any means a despicable alternative. you could sit up as late as you pleased, and, whenever you got up, go abroad without any landlord or house-lord dogging you for rent. many a man is harassed to death to pay the rent of a larger and more luxurious box who would not have frozen to death in such a box as this. i am far from jesting. economy is a subject which admits of being treated with levity, but it cannot so be disposed of. a comfortable house for a rude and hardy race, that lived mostly out of doors, was once made here almost entirely of such materials as nature furnished ready to their hands. gookin, who was superintendent of the indians subject to the massachu setts colony, writing in 1674, says, "the best of their houses are covered very neatly, tight and warm, with barks of trees, slipped from their bodies at those seasons when the sap is up, and made into great flakes, with pressure of weighty timber, when they are green. . . . the meaner sort are covered with mats which they make of a kind of bulrush, and are also indifferently tight and 26 walden. warm, but not so good as the former. . . . some i have seen, sixty or a hundred feet long and thirty feet broad. ... i have often lodged in their wigwams, and found them as warm as the best english houses." he adds that they were commonly carpeted and lined within with well-wrought embroidered mats, and were furnished with various utensils. the indians had ad vanced so far as to regulate the effect of the wind by a mat suspended over the hole in the roof and moved by a string. such a lodge was in the first instance con structed in a clay or two at most, and taken down and put up in a few hours; and every family owned one, or its apartment in one. in the savage state every fainily owns a shelter aa good as the best, and sufficient for its coarser and sim pler wants; but i think that i speak within bounds when i say that, though the birds of the air have their nests, and the foxes their holes, and the savages their wigwams, in modern civilized society not more than one half the families own a shelter. in the large towns and cities, where civilization especially prevails, the number of those who own a shelter is a very small fraction of the whole. the rest pay an annual tax for this outside garment of all, become indispensable summer and win ter,' which would buy a village of indian wigwams, but now helps to keep them poor as long as they live. i do not mean to insist here on the disadvantage of hiring compared with owning, but it is evident that the savage owns his shelter because it costs so little, while the civilized man hires his commonly because he cannot afford to own it; nor can he, in the long run, any better afford to hire. but, answers one, by merely paying tliis tax the poor civilized man secures an abode which is a palace compared with the savage's. an annual rent of from twenty-five to a hundred dollars, these are tha country rates, entitles him to the benefit of the improve-} ments of centuries, spacious apartments, clean painu and paper, rumford fireplace, back plastering, venetian blinds, copper pump, spring lock, a commodious cellar, and many other things. but how happens it that he who is said to enjoy these things is so commonly a poor economy. 27 civilized man, while the savage, who has them not, is rich as a savage? if it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man, — and i think that it is, though only the wise improve their advantages, — it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is the amount of what i will call life which is re quired to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. an average house in this neighborhood costs per haps eight hundred dollars, and to lay up this sum will take ten to fifteen years of the laborer's life, even if he is not encuml^ered with a family; — estii^ating the pecu niar}' value of every man's labor at one dollar a day, for if some receive more, others receive less; — so that he must have spent more than half his life commonly be fore his wigwam will be earned. if we suppose him to pay a rent instead, this is but a doubtful choice of evils. would the savage have been wise to exchange his wig wam for a palace on these terms? it may be guessed that i reduce almost the whole advantage of holding this superfluous property as a fund in store against the future, so far as the individual is concerned, mainly to the defraying of funeral expenses. but perhaps a man is not required to bury himself. nevertheless this points to an important distinction between the civilized man and the savage; and, no doubt, they have designs on us for our benefit, in making the life of a civilized people an institution, in which the life of the individual is to a great extent absorbed, in order to preserve and perfect that of the race. but i wish to show at what a sacrifice this advantage is at present obtained, and to suggest that we may possibly so live as to secure all the advantage without suffering any of the disadvantage. what mean ye by saying that the poor ye have always with you, or that the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge? "as i live, saith the lord god, ye shall not have occa sion any more to use this proverb in israel." "behold all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth it shall die." 28 walden. when i consider my neighbors, the farmers of concord, who are at least as well off as the other classes, i find that for the most part they have been toiling twenty, thirty^ or forty years, that they may become the real owners of their farms, which commonly they have in herited with encumbrances, or else bought with hired money, — and we may regard one third of that toil as the cost of their houses, — but commonly they have not paid for them yet. it is true, the encumbrances some times outweigh the value of the farm, so that the farm itself becomes one great encumbrance, and still a man is found to inherif it, being well acquainted with it, as he says. on applying to the assessors, i am surprised to learn that they cannot at once name a dozen in the town who own their farms free and clear. if you would know the history of these homesteads, inquire at the bank where they are mortgaged. the man who has actually paid for his farm with labor on it is so rare that every neighbor can point to him. i doubt if there are three such men in concord. what has been said of the mer chants, that a very large majority, even ninety-seven in a hundred, are sure to fail, is equally true of the farm ers. with regard to the merchants, however, one of them says pertinently that a great part of their failures are not genuine pecuniary failures, but merely failures to fulfil their engagements, because it is inconvenient; that is, it is the moral character that breaks down. but this puts an infinitely worse face on the matter, and suggests, besides, that probably not even the other three succeed in saving their souls, but are perchance bankrupt in a worse sense than they who fail honestly. bankruptcy and repudiation are the spring-boards from which much of our civilization vaults and turns its somersets, but the savage stands on the unelastic plank of famine. yet the middlesex cattle show goes off here with eclat annually, as if all the joints of the agricultural machine were suent. ^ the farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a formula more complicated than the problem itself. to get his shoestrings he speculates in herds of cattle. with consummate skill he has set economy, 29 his trap with a hair spring to catch comfort and inde pendence, and then, as he turned away, got his own leg into it. this is the reason he is poor; and for a sim ilar reason we are all poor in respect to a thousand savage comforts, though surrounded by luxuries. as chapman sings : — " the false society of men — — for earthly greatness all heavenly comforts rarefies to air." and when the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him. as i understand it, that was a valid objection urged by momus against the house which minerva made, that she "had not made it movable, by which means a bad neighborhood might be avoided;" and it may still be urged, for our houses are such un wieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them; and the bad neighborhood to be avoided is our own scurvy selves. i know one or two families, at least, in this town, who, for nearly a genera tion, have been wishing to sell their houses in the out skirts and move into the village, but have not been able to accomplish it, and only death wall set them free. granted that the majority are able at last either to own or hire the modern house with all its improvements. while civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. it has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings. and if the civilized man's pursuits are no worthier than the savage's, if he is employed the greater part of his life in obtaining gross necessaries and comforts merely, why should we have a better dwelling than the former? but how do the poor minority fare? perhaps it will be found that just in proportion as some have been placed in outward circumstances above the savage, others have been degraded below him. the luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of another. on the one side is the palace, on the other are the almshouse and "silent poor." the myriads who 30 walden. built the pyramids to be the tombs of the pharaohs were fed on garhc, and it may be were not decently buried themselves. the mason who finishes the cornice of the palace returns at night perchance to a hut not so good as a wigwam. it is a mistake to suppose that, in a country where the usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition of a very large body of the inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages. i refer to the degraded poor, not now to the degraded rich. to know this i should not need to look farther than to the •shanties which everywhere border our railroads, that last improvement in civilization; where i see in my daily walks human beings living in sties, and all winter with an open door, for the sake of light, without any visible, often imaginable, wood pile, and the forms of both old and young are permanently contracted by the long habit of shrinking from cold and misery, and the development of all their limbs and faculties is checked. it certainly is fair to look at that class by whose labor the works which distinguish this generation are accom plished. such too, to a greater or less extent, is the condition of the operatives of every denomination in england, which is the great workhouse of the world. or i could refer you to ireland, which is marked as one of the white or enlightened spots on the map. con trast the physical condition of the irish with that of the north american indian, or the south sea islander, or any other savage race before it was degraded by con tact with the civilized man. yet i have no doubt that that people's rulers are as wise as the average of civilized tulers. their condition only proves what squalidness may consist with civilization. i hardly need refer. now to the laborers of our southern states who produce the staple exports of this country, and are themselves a staple production of the south. but to confine myself to those who are said to be in moderate circumstances. most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have. as if one were to wear any sort of coat which the tailor might cut out for him, ecoxomy. 31 or, gradually leaving off palmlcaf hat. or cap of wood chuck skin, complain of hard times because he could not afford to buy him a crown! it is possible to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious than wc have^ which yet all would admit that man could not afford to pay for. shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less? shall the respectable citizen thus gravely teach, by precept and example, the necessity of the young man's provid ing a certain number of superfluous glowshoes, and umbrellas, and empty guest chambers for empty guests, before he dies? why should not our furniture be as simple as the arab's or the indian's? when i think of the benefactors of the race, whom we have apotheosized as messengers from heaven, bearers of divine gifts to man, i do not see in my mind any retinue at their heels, any car-load of fashional^le furniture. or what if i were to allow — would it not be a singular allowance? — that our furniture should be more complex than the arab's, in proportion as we are morally and intellectually his superiors! at present our houses are cluttered and defiled with it, and a good housewife would sweep out the greater part into the dust hole, and not leave her morning's work undone. morning work! by the blushes of aurora and the music of memnon, what should be man's morning work in this world? i had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but i was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and i threw them out the window in disgust. how, then, could i have a furnished house? i would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has broken ground. it is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which the herd so diligently follow. the traveller who stops at the best houses, so called, soon discovers this, for the republicans presume him to be a sardanapalus, and if he resigned himself to their tender mercies he w^ould soon be completely emasculated. i think that in the railroad car we are inclined to spend more on luxury than on safety and convenience, and it threatens with 32 , walden. out attaining these to become no better than a modern drawing-room, with its divans, and ottomans, and sun shades, and a hundred other oriental things, which we are taking west with us, invented for the kxdies of the harem and the effeminate natives of the celestial empire, which jonathan should be ashamed to know the names of. i would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion. i would rather ride on earth in an ox cart with free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way. the very simplicity and nakedness of man's life in the primitive ages imply this advantage at least, that they left him still but a sojourner in nature. when he was refreshed with food and sleep, he contemplated his journey again. he dwelt, as it were, in a tent in this world, and was either threading the valleys, or crossing the plains, or climbing the mountain tops. but lo! men have become the tools of their tools. the man who independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry is become a farmer: and he who stood under a tree for shelter, a housekeeper. we now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven. we have adopted christianity merely as an improved method of agr?-i-culture. we have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb. the best works of art are the expression of man's struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten. there is actually no place in this village for a work of fine art, if any had come down to us, to stand, for our lives, our houses and streets, furnish no proper pedestal for it. there is not a nail to hang a picture on, nor a shelf to receive the bust of a hero or a saint. when i consider how our houses are built and paid for, or not paid for, and their internal economy managed and sustained, i wonder that the floor does not give way under the visitor while he is admiring the gewgaws upon the mantle-piece, and let him through into the cellar, to some solid and honest though earthy foundation. i cannot but per economy. 33 ceive that this so-called rich and refined life is a thing jumped at, and i do not get on in the enjoyment of the fine ai-ts which adorn it, my attention being wholly occupied with the jump; for i remember that the greatest genuine leap, due to human muscles alone, on record is that of certain wandering arabs, who are said to have cleared twenty-five feet on level ground. without factitious support, man is sure to come to earth again beyond that distance. the first question which i am tempted to put to the proprietor of such great impro priety is, who bolsters you? are you one of the ninety seven who fail, or the three who succeed? answer me these questions, and then perhaps i may look at your baubles and find them ornamental. the cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful. before we can adorn om' houses with ijeautiful objects the walls must be stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful living be laid for a foundation: now, a taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors, where there is no house and no housekeeper. old johnson, in his "wonder-working providence," speaking of the first settlers of this town, with whom he was contemporary, tells us that "they burrow them selves in the earth for their first shelter under some hillside, and, casting the soil aloft upon timber, they make a smoky fire against the earth, at the highest side." they did not "provide them houses," says he^ "till the earth, by the lord's blessing, brought forth bread to feed them," and the first year's crop was so light that " they were forced to cut their bread very thin for a long season." the secretary of the province of new netherland, writing in dutch, in 1650, for the in formation of those who wished to take up land there, states more particularly, that "those in new netherland, and especially in new england, who have no means to build farm houses at first according to their wishes, dig a square pit in the ground, cellar fashion, six or seven feet deep, as long and as broad as they think proper, case the earth inside with wood all round the wall, and line the wood with the bark of trees or something else to pre 34 walden. vent the caving in of the earth; floor this cellar with plank, and wainscot it overhead for a ceiling, rais« a roof of spars clear up, and cover the spars with bark or green sods, so that they can live dry and warm in these houses with their entire families for two, three, and four years, it being understood that partitions are run through those cellars, which are adapted to the size of the family. the wealthy and principal men in new england, in the ijeginning of the colonies, commenced their first dwelling houses in this fashion for two reasons: firstly, in order not to waste time in building, and not to want food the next season; secondly, in order not to discourage poor laboring people whom they brought over in numbers from fatherland. in the course of three or four years, when the country became adapted to agriculture, they built themselves handsome houses, spending on them several thousands." in this course which our ancestors took there was a show of prudence at least, as if their principle were to satisfy the more pressing wants first. but are the more pressing wants satisfied now? when i think of acquiring for myself one of our luxurious dwellings, i am deterred, for, so to speak, the country is not yet adapted to human culture, and we are still forced to cut our spiritual bread far thinner than our forefathers did their wheaten. not that all architectural ornament is to be neglected even in the rudest period; but let our houses first be lined with beauty, where they come in contact with our lives, like the tenement of the shellfish, and not over laid with it. but, alas! i have been inside one or two of them, and know what they are lined with. though we are not so degenerate but that we might possibly live in a cave or a wigwam or wear skins to-day, it certainly is better to accept the advantages, though so dearly bought, which the invention and industry of mankind offer. in such a neighborhood as this, boards and shingles, lime and bricks, are cheaper and more easily obtained than suitable caves, or whole logs, or bark in sufficient quantities, or even well-tempered clay or flat stones. i speak undcrstandingly on this sub ject, for i have made myself acquainted with it both econom y. 35 theoretically and practically. with a little more wit we might use these materials so as to become richer than the richest now are, and make our civilization a blessing. the civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage. but to make haste to my own experiment. xear the end of march, 1s45, i borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by walden pond, nearest to where i intended to build my house, and began to cut down some tall arrowy white pines, still in their youth, for timber. it is difficult to begin without borrowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to per mit your fellow-men to have an interest in your enter prise. the owner of the axe, as he released his hold on it, said that it was the apple of his eye; but i returned it sharper than i received it. it was a pleasant hillside where i worked, covered with pine woods, through which i looked out on the pond, and a small open field in the woods where pines and hickories were springing up. the ice in the pond was not yet dissolved, though there were some open spaces, and it was all dark colored and saturated with water. there were some slight flurries of snow during the days that i worked there; but for the most part when i came out on the railroad, on my way home, its yellow sand heap stretched away gleaming in the hazy atmosphere, and the rails shone in the spring sun, and i heard the lark and pewee and other birds already come to commence another year with us. they were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man's discontent was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid began to stretch itself. one day,, when my axe had come off and i had cut a green hickory for a wedge, driving it with a stone, and had placed the whole to soak in a pond hole in order to swell the wood, i saw a striped snake run into the water, and he lay on the bottom, apparently without inconvenience, as long as i stayed there, or more than a quarter of an hour; perhaps because he had not yet fairly come out of the torpicl state. it appeared to me that for a like reason men remain in their present low and primitive condition; but if they should feel the influence of the 36 walden. spring of springs arousing them, they would of necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life. i had previously seen the snakes in frosty mornings in my path with por tions of their bodies still numb and inflexible, waiting for the sun to thaw them. on the 1st of april it rained and melted the ice, and in the early part of the day, which was very foggy, i heard a stray goose groping about over the pond and cackling as if lost, or like the spirit of the frog. so i went on for some days cutting and hewing tim ber, and also studs and rafters, all wnth my narrow axe, not having many communicable or scholar-like thoughts, singing to myself, — men say they know many things; but lo! they have taken wings, the arts and sciences, and a thoasand apphances; the wind tliat blows is all that anybody knows. i hewed the main timbers six inches square, most of the studs on two sides only, and the rafters and floor timbers on one side, leaving the rest of the bark on, so that they were just as straight and much stronger than sawed ones. each stick was carefully mortised or tenoned by its stump, for i had borrowed other tools by this time. my days in the woods were not very long ones; yet i usually carried my dinner of bread and butter, and read the newspaper in which it was wrapped, at noon, sitting amid the green pine boughs which i had cut off, and to my bread was imparted some of their fragrance, for my hands were covered with a thick coat of pitch. before i had done i was more the friend than the foe of the pine tree, though i had cut dow^n some of them, having become better acquainted with it. some times a rambler in the wood was attracted by the sound of my axe, and we chatted pleasantly over the chips which i had made. by the middle of april, for i made no haste in my work, but rather made the most of it, my house was framed and ready for the raising. i had already bought the shanty of james collins, an irishman who worked economy. 37 on the fitchburg railroad, for boards. james col lins' shanty was considered an uncommonly fine one. when i called to see it he was not at home. i walked about the outside, at first unobserved from within, the window was so deep and high. it was of small dimen sions, with a peaked cottage roof, and not much else to be seen, the dirt being raised five feet all around as if it were a compost heap. the roof was the soundest part, though a good deal warped and made brittle by the sun. door-sill there was none, but a perennial passage for the hens under the door board. mrs. c. came to the door and asked me to view it from the in side. the hens were driven in by my approach. it was dark, and had a dirt floor for the most part, dank, clammy, and aguish, only here a board and there a boarcl which would not bear removal. she lighted a lamp to show me the inside of the roof and the walls, and also that the board floor extended under the bed, warning me not to step into the cellar, a sort of dust hole two feet deep. in her own words, they were "good boards overhead, good boards all around, and a good window," — of two whole squares originally, only the cat had passed out that way lately. there was a stove, a bed, and a place to sit, an infant in the house where it was born, a si k parasol, gilt-framed looking-glass, and a patent new coffee mill nailed to an oak sapling, all told. the bargain was soon concluded, for james had in the mean while returned. i to pay four dollars and twenty-five cents to-night, he to vacate at five to-morrow morning, selling to nobody else meanwhile: i to take possession at six. it were well, he said, to be there early, and anticipate certain indistinct but wholly unjust claims, on the score of ground rent and fuel. this he assured me was the only encumbrance. at six i passed him and his family on the road. one large bundle held their all, — bed, coffee mill, looking-glass, hens, — all but the cat, she took to the woods and became a wild cat, and, as i learned afterward, trod in a trap set for woodchucks, and so became a dead cat at last. i took down this dwelling the same morning, drawing the nails, and removed it to the pond side by small cart 38 walden. loads, spreading the boards on the grass there to bleach and warp back again in the sun. one early thrush gave me a note or two as i drove along the woodland path. i was informed treacherously by a young patrick that neighbor seeley, an irishman, in the intervals of the carting, transferred the still tolerable, straight, and drivable nails, staples, and spikes to his pocket, and then stood when i came back to pass the time of day, and look freshly up, unconcerned with spring thoughts, at the devastation; there l^eing a dearth of work, as he said. he was there to represent spectatordom, and help make this seemingly insignificant event one with the removal of the gods of troy. i dug my cellar in the side of a hill sloping to the south, where a woodchuck had formerly dug his burrow, clown through sumach and blackberry roots, and the lowest stain of vegetation, six feet square by seven deep, to a fine sand where potatoes would not freeze in any win ter. the sides were left shelving, and not stoned; but the sun having never shone on them, the sand still keeps its place. it was but two hours' work. i took partic ular pleasure in this breaking of ground, for in almost all latitudes men dig into the earth for an equable tem perature. under the most splendid house in the city is still to be found the cellar where they store their roots as of old, and long after the superstructure has disap peared posterity remark its dent in the earth. the house is still but a sort of porch at the entrance of a burrow. at length, in the beginning of may, with the help of some of my acquaintances, rather to improve so good an occasion for neighborliness than from an}necessity, i set up the frame of my house. no man was ever more honored in the character of his raisers than i. they are destined, i trust, to assist at the raising of loftier structures one day, i began to occupy my house on the 4th of july, as soon as it was boarded and roofed, for the boards were carefully feathor-edged and lapped, so that it was perfectly impervious to rain; but l)efore l^oarding i laid the foundation of a chimney at one end, bringing two cartloads of stones up the hill from the pond in economy. 39 my arms. i built the chimney after my hoeing in the fall, before a fire became necessary for warmth, doing my cooking in the meanwhile out of doors on the ground, early in the morning: which mode i still think is in some respects more convenient and agree able than the usual one. when it stormed before my bread was baked, i fixed a few boards over the fire, and sat under them to watch my loaf, and passed some pleasant hours in that way. in those days, when my hands were much employed, i read but little, but the least scraps of paper which lay on the ground, my holder, or tablecloth, afforded me as much entertainment, in fact answered the same purpose, as the iliad. it would be worth the while to build still more de liberately than i did, considering, for instance, what foundation a door, a window, a cellar, a garret, have in the nature of man, and perchance never raising any superstructure until we found a better reason for it than our temporal necessities even. there is some of the same fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's building its own nest. who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so en gaged? but alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes. shall we forever resign the pleasure of construc tion to the carpenter? what does architecture amount to in the experience of the mass of men? i never in all my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and natural an occupation as building his house. we belong to the community. it is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of man: it is as much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer. where is this division of labor to end? and what object does it finally serve? xo doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself. 40 waldex. true, there are architects so called in this country, and i have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beaut}', as if it were a revelation to him. all very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism. a sentimental reformer in architecture, he began at the cornice, not at the foundation. it was only how to put a core of truth within the ornaments, that every sugar plum in fact might have an almond or caraway seed in it, — though i hold that almonds are most wholesome without the sugar, — and not how the inhabitant, the in dweller, might build trul}^ within and without, and let the ornaments take care of themselves. what reasonable man ever supposed that ornaments were something out ward and in the skin merety, — that the tortoise got his spotted shell, or the shellfish its mo the r-o' -pearl tints, by such a contract as the inhabitants of broadway their trinity church? but a man has no more to do with style of architecture of his house than a tortoise with that of its shell: nor need the soldier be so idle as to try to paint the precise color' of his virtue on his standard. the enemy will find it out. he may turn pale when the trial comes. this man seemed to me to lean over the cornice, and timidly whisper his half truth to the rude occupants, who really knew it better than he. what of architectural beauty i now see, i know has gradually grown from within outward, out of the necessities and character of the indweller, who is the only builder, — out of some unconscious truthfulness, and nobleness, without ever a thought for the appearance; and what ever additional beauty of this kind is destined to be pro duced will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of life. the most interesting dwellings in this countr}', as the painter knows, are the most unpretending, humble log huts and cottages of the poor commonly; it is the life of the inhabitants whose shells they are, and not any peculiarity in their surfaces merely, which makes them picturesque; and equally interesting will be the citizen's suburban box, when his life shall be as simple and as agreeable to the imagination, and there is as little strain economy. 41 ing after effect in the stj-le of his dwelling. a great proportion of architectural ornaments are literally hollow, and a september gale would strip them off, like bor rowed plumes, without injury to the substantials. they can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar. what if an equal ado were made about the ornaments of style in literature, and the architects of our bibles spent as much time about their cornices as the architects of our churches do? so are made the belles-lettres and the beaux-arts and their professors. much it concerns a man, forsooth, how a few sticks are slanted over him or under him, and what colors are daubed upon his box. it would signify somewhat, if, in any earnest sense, he slanted themand daubed it; but the spirit having departed out of the tenant, it is of a piece with constructing his own coffin, — the architec ture of the grave, and "carpenter" is but another name for "coffin-maker." one man says, in his despair or indifference to life, take up a handful of the earth at your feet and paint your house that color. is he thinking of his last and narrow house? toss up a copper for it as well. what an abundance of leisure he must have! why do you take up a handful of the dirt? better paint your house your own complexion; let it turn pale or blush for you. an enterprise to improve the style of cottage architecture! when you have got my ornaments ready i will wear them. before winter i built a chimney, and shingled the sides of my house, which were already impervious to rain, with imperfect and sappy shingles made of the first slice of the log, whose edges i was obliged to straighten with a plane. i have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by fifteen long, and eight-feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a large window on each side, two trap doors, one door at the end, and a brick fire-place opposite. the exact cost of my house, paying the usual price for such materials as i used, but not counting the work, all of which was done by myself, was as follows; and i give the details because very few are able to tell exactly what their houses cost, and fewer still, if any, 4'2 waldex. the separate cost of the various materials which compose them : — boards $8 03j / mostly shanty \ boards. refuse shingles for roof and sides 4 00 ^ laths 1 25 two second-hand windows with glass. . . 2 43 one thousand old brick 4 00 two casks of lime 2 40 that was high. hair .> 31 (morethanl \ needed. mantle-tree iron 15 nails 3 90 hinges and screws 14 latch 10 chalk 01 transportation ^ { ^ ^'^l^^^s' in all $28 12^ these are all the materials excepting the timber, stones, and sand, which i claimed by scjuatter's right. i have also a small wood-shed adjoining, made chiefly of the stuff which was left after building the house. i intend to build me a house which w411 surpass any on the main street in concord in grandeur and luxury, as soon as it pleases me as much and will cost me no more than my present one. i thus found that the student who wishes for a slielter can obtain one for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent which he now pays annually. if i seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that i brag for humanity rather than for myself; and my short comings and inconsistencies do not affect the truth of my statement. notwithstanding much cant and hypoc risy, — chaff which i find it difficult to separate from my wheat, but for which i am as sorry as any man, — i will breathe freely and stretch myself in this respect, it is such a relief to both the -moral and physical system; and i am resolved that i will not through humility be come the devil's attorney. i will endeavor to speak a good word for the truth. at cambridge college the mere rent of a student's room, which is only a little larger economy. 43 than my own, is thirty dollars each year, though the corporation had the advantage of building thirty-two side by side and under one roof, and the occupant suffers the inconvenience of many and noisy neighbors, and per haps a residence in the fourth story. i cannot but think that if we had more true wisdom in these respects, not only less education would be needed, because, forsooth, more would already have been acquired, but the pecuniary expense of getting an education would in a great measure vanish. those conveniences which the student requires at cambridge or elsewhere cost him or somebody else ten times as great a sacrifice of life as they would with proper management on both sides. those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made. the mode of founding a college is, commonly, to get up a subscription of dollars and cents, and then following blindly the principles of a division of labor to its extreme, a principle which should never be fol lowed but with circumspection, — to call in a contractor who makes this a subject of speculation, and he employs irishmen or other operatives actually to lay the founda tions, while the students that are to be are said to be fitting themselves for it; and for these oversights suc cessive generations have to pay. i think that it would be better than this, for the students, or those who desire to be benefited by it, even to lay the foundation them selves. the student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by sj'stematically shirking any labor neces sary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful. ''but," says one, "you do not mean that the students should go to work with their hands instead of their heads?" i do not mean that exactly, but i mean something which he might think a good deal like that; i mean that they should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from 44 walden. beginning to end. how could j'ouths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics. if i wished a boy to know something about the arts and sciences, for instance, i would not pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the neighl^orhood of some professor, where any thing is professed and practised but the art of life; — to survey the world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his natural eye; to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is made, or mechanics, and and not learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites to neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to what vaga])ond he is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the monsters that swarm all around him, while con templating the monsters in a drop of vinegar. which would have advanced the most at the end of a month, — the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this, — or the boy who had at tended the lectures on metallurgy at the institute in the meanwhile, and had received a rogers' penknife from his father? which would be most likely to cut his fingers? ... to my astonishment i was informed on leaving college that i had studied navigation! — why, if i had taken one turn down the harbor i should have known more about it. even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. the consequence is that while he is reading adam smith, ricardo, and say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably. as with our colleges, so with a hundred ''modern improvements": there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. the devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which dis tract our attention from serious things. they are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was alreadv l)ut too easy to arrive at; as railroads^ economy. 45 lead to boston or now york. wc are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from maine to texas; l3ut ]mainc and texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distin guished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had noth ing to say. as if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. we are eager to tunnel under the atlantic and bring the old w^orld some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping american ear will be that the princess adelaide has the whooping cough. after all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages; he is not an evangelist, nor does he come round eating locusts and wild honey. i doubt if flying childers ever carried a peck of corn to mill. one says to me, " i wonder that you do not lay up money; you love to travel; you might take the cars and go to fitchburg to-day and see the country." but i am wiser than that. i have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot. i say to my friend, suppose we try who will get there first. the distance is thirty miles; the fare ninety cents. that is almost a day's wages. i remember when wages were sixty cents a day for laborers on this very road. well, i start now on foot, and get there before night; i have travelled at that rate by the week together. you will in the mean while have earned your fare, and arrive there sometime to-morrow, or possil)ly this evening, if you are lucky enough to get a job in season. instead of going to fitch burg, you will be working here the greater part of the daly. and so, if the railroad reached round the world, i think that i should keep ahead of you; and as for see ing the country and getting experience of that kind, i should have to cut your acquaintance altogether. such is the universal law, which no man can ever out wit, and with regard to the railroad even we may say it is as broad as it is long. to make a railroad round the world available to all mankind is equivalent to grading 46 walden. the whole surface of the planet. men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor shouts ''all aboard!" when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over, — and it will be called, and will be, "a melancholy accident." no doubt they can ride at last who shall have earned their fare, that is, if they survive so long, but they will probably have lost their elasticity and desire to travel by that time. this spend ing of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the englishn;an who went to india to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to england and live the life of a poet. he should have gone up garret at once. ''what!" exclaim a mil lion irishmen starting up from all the shanties in the land, "is not this railroad which we have built a good thing?" yes, i answer, com'paratively good, that is, you might have clone worse; but i wish, as you are brothers of mine, that you could have spent your time better than digging in this dirt. before i finished my house, wishing to earn ten or twelve dollars by some honest and agreeable method, in order to meet my unusual expenses, i planted aljout two acres and a half of light and sandy soil near it chiefly with beans, but also a small part with potatoes, corn, peas, and turnips. the whole lot contains eleven acres, t mostly growing up to pines and hickories, and was solcl | the preceding season for eight dollars and eight cents i an acre. one farmer said that it was "good for nothing but to raise cheeping squirrels on." i put no manure whatever on this land, not being the owner, but merely a squatter, and not expecting to cultivate so much again, and i did not quite hoe it all once. i got out several cords of stumps in ploughing, which supplied me with fuel for a long time, and left small circles of virgin mould, easily distinguishable through the summer by the greater ecoxomy. 47 luxuriance of the boans there. the dead and for the most part unmerchantable wood ijehind my house, and the driftwood from the pond, have supplied the remainder of my fuel. i was obliged to hire a team and a man for the ploughing, though i held the plough myself. my farm outgoes for the first season were, for implements, seed, work, &c., $14 72^. the seed corn was given me. this never costs anything to speak of, unless you plant more than enough. i got twelve bushels of beans, and eighteen bushels of potatoes, besides some peas and sweet corn. the yellow corn and turnips were too late to come to anything. iniy whole income from the farm was there are left $8 7u besides produce consumed and on hand at the time this estimate was made of the value of $4 50, — the amount on hand much more than balancing a little grass which i did not raise. all things considered, that is, consider ing the importance of a man's soul and of to-day, not withstanding the short time occupied by my experiment, nay, partly even because of its transient character, i believe that that was doing better than any farmer in concord did that year. the next year i did better still, for i spaded up all the land which i required, about a third of an acre, and i learned from the experience of both years, not being the least awed by many celebrated works on hus bandry, arthur young among the rest, that if one would live simply and eat only the crop which he raised, and raise no more than he ate, and not exchange it for an insuf ficient quanity of more luxurious and expensive things, he would need to cultivate only a few rods of ground, and that it would be cheaper to spade up that than to use oxen to plough it, and to select a fresh spot from time to time than to manure the old, and he could do all his necessary farm work as it were with his left hand at odd hours in the summer; and thus he would not be tied to an ox, or horse, or cow, or pig, as at present. i desire 48 walden. to speak impartially on this point, and as one not in terested in the success or failure of the present economical and social arrangements. i was more independent than any farmer in concord, for i was not anchored to a house or farm, but could follow the bent of my genius, which is a very crooked one, every moment. besides being better off than the}^ already, if my house had been burned or my crops had failed, i should have been nearly as well off as before. i am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men, the former are so much the freer. men and oxen exchange work; but if we consider necessary work only, the oxen will be seen to have greatly the advantage, their farm is so much the larger, man does some of his part of the exchange work in his six weeks of haying, and it is no boy's play. certainly no nation that lived simply in all respects, that is, no nation of philosophers, would commit so great a blunder as to use the labor of animals. true, there never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am i certain it is desirable that there should be. however, / should never have broken a horse or bull and taken him to board for any work he might do for me, for fear i should become a horseman or a herdsman merely; and if society seems to be the gainer by so doing, are we certain that what is one man's gain is not another's loss, and that the stable-boy has ec^ual cause with his master to be satisfied? granted that some public works would not have been constructed without this aid, and let man share the glory of such with the ox and horse; does it follow that he could not have accomplished works yet more worthy of himself in that case? when men begin to do. not merely un necessary or artistic, but luxurious and idle work, with their assistance, it is inevitable that a few do all the exchange work with the oxen,' or, in other words, be come the slaves of the strongest. man thus not only woi'ks for the animal within him, but, for a symlsol of this, he works for the animal without him. though we have many substantial houses of brick or stone, the pros perity of the farmer is still measured by the degree to economy. 49 which the barn overshadows the house. this town is said to have the hirgest houses for oxen, cows, and horses hereabouts, and it is not behindhand in its pubhc build ings; but there are very few halls for free worship or free speech in this count}'. it should not be by their architecture, but why not even by their power of abstract thought, that nations should seek to commemorate themselves? how much more admirable the bhagvat geeta than all the ruins of the east ! towers and temples are the luxury of princes. a simple and independent mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince. genius is not a retainer to any emperor, nor is its material silver, or gold, or marble, except to a trifling extent. to what end, pray, is so much stone hammered? in arcadia, when i was there, i did not see any hammering stone. nations are possessed with an insane ambition to per petuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. what if equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners? one piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monu ment as high as the moon. i love better to see stones in place. the grandeur of thebes was a vulgar grandeur. more sensible is a rod of stone wall that bounds an honest man's field than a hundred-gated thebes that has wan dered farther from the true end of life. the religion and civilization which are barbaric and heathenish build splendid temples; but what you might call christianity does not. most of the stone a nation hammers goes toward its tomlj onl}'. it buries itself alive. as for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found de graded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have clrowned in the nile, and then given his body to the dogs. i might possibly invent some excuse for them and him, but i have no time for it. as for the religion and love of art of the builders, it is much the same all the world over, whether the build ing be an egyptian temple or the united states bank. it costs more than it comes to. the mainspring is vanity, assisted by the love of garlic and bread and 50 waldex butter. mr. balcom, a promising young architect, de signs it on the back of his vitruvius, with hard pencil and ruler, and the job is let out to dobson & sons, stone cutters. when the thirty centuries begin to look down •on it, mankind begin to look up at it. as for your high towers and monuments, there was a crazy fellow once in this town who undertook to dig through to china, and he got so far that, as he said, he heard the chinese pots and kettles rattle; but i think that i shall not go out of my way to admire the hole which he made. many are concerned about the monuments of the west and east, — to know who built them. for my part, i should like to know who in those days did not build them, — who were above such trifling. but to proceed with my statistics. by surveying, carpentry, and day-labor of various other kinds in the village in the meanwhile, for i have as many trades as fingers, i had earned s13 34. the expense of food for eight months, namely, from july 4th to march 1st, the time when these estimates were made, though i lived there more than two years,— not counting potatoes, a little green corn, and some peas, which i had raised, nor considering the value of what was on hand at the last date, was rice $1 73^ molasses 1 7.3 rye meal 1 04-j indian meal 99f pork 22 flour 88 sugar 80 lard 65 apples 25 dried apples 22 sweet potatoes 10 one pumpkin 06 one watermelon .... 02 salt 03 cheapest form of the saccharine. cheaper than rye. / costs more than indian meal, \ both money and trouble. > ^'4 yes, i did eat $s 74, all told; but i should not thus unblushingly pubhsh my guilt, if i did not know that most of my readers were equally guilty with myself, and economy. 51 that their deeds would look no better in print. the next year i sometimes caught a mess of fish for my dinner, and once i went so far as to slaughter a wood chuck which ravaged my beanfield, — effect his trans migration, as a tartar would say, — and devour him, partly for experiment's sake; but though it affordecl me a momentary enjoyment, notwithstanding a musky flavor, i saw that the longest use would not make that a good practice, however it might seem to have your woodchucks ready dressed by the village butcher. clothing and some incidental expenses within the same dates, though little can be inferred from this item, amounted to $8 40i oil and some household utensils 2 00 so that all the pecuniary outgoes, excepting for wash ing and mending, which for the most part were done out of the house, and their bills have not yet been received, — and these are all and more than all the ways by which money necessarily goes out in this part of the world, — were house $28 12+ farm one year 14 72+ food eight months 8 74 clothing, &c., eight months 8 40f oil, &c., eight months 2 00 in all $61 99f i address myself now to those of my readers who have a living to get. and t^ meet this i have for farm pro duce sold $23 44 earned by day-labor 13 34 t in all $36 78 which subtracted from the sum of the outgoes leaves a balance of s2o 21f on the one side, — this being very nearly the means with which i started, and the measure of expenses to be incurred, — and on the other, besides the leisure and independence and health thus secured, 52 walden. a comfortable house for me as long as i choose to oc cupy it. these statistics, however accidental and therefore uninstructive they may appear, as they have a certain completeness, have a certain value also. nothing was given me of which i have not rendered some account. it appears from the above estimate, that my food alone cost me in money about twenty-seven cents a week. it was, for nearly two years after this, rye and indian meal without yeast, potatoes, rice, a very little salt pork, molasses, and salt, and my drink water. it was fit that i should live on rice, mainly, who loved so well the philos ophy of india. to meet the objections of some inveterate cavillers, i may as well state that if i dined out occa sionally, as i always had done, and i trust shall have opportunities to do again, it was frequently to the detri ment of my domestic arrangements. but the dining out, being, as i have stated, a constant element, does not in the least affect a comparative statement like this. i learned from my two years' experience that it would cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one's necessary food, even in this latitude; that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength. i have made a satisfactory dinner, satisfactor}^ on sev eral accounts, simply off a dish of purslane (portulaca oleracea) which i gathered in my cornfield, boiled and salted. i give the latin on account of the savoriness of the trivial name. and pray what more can a reasonable man desire, in peaceful times, in ordinary noons, than a sufficient number of ears of green sweet-corn boiled, with the addition of salt? even the little variety which i used was a yielding to the demands of appetite, and not of health. yet men have come to such a pass that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want of luxuries; and i know a good woman who thinks that her son lost his life because he took to drinking water only. the reader will perceive that i am treating the sub ject rather from an economic than a dietetic point of view, and he will not venture to put my al^stemious ness to the test unless he has a well-stocked larder. economy. 53 bread i at first made of pure indian meal and salt, genuine hoe-cakes, which i baked before my fire out of doors on a shingle or the end of a stick of timber sawed off in building my house; but it was wont to get smoked and to have a piny flavor. i tried flour also; but have at last found a mixture of rye and indian meal most convenient and agreeable. in cold weather it was no little amusement to bake several small loaves of this in succession, tending and turning them as carefully as an egyptian his hatching eggs. they were a real cereal fruit which i ripened, and they had to my senses a fragrance like that of other noble fruits, which i kept in as long as possible by wrapping them in cloths. i made a study of the ancient and indispensable art of bread making, consulting such authorities as offered, going back to the primitive days and first invention of the un leavened kind, when from the wildness of nuts and meats men first reached the mildness and refinement of this diet, and travelling gradually down in my studies through that accidental souring of the dough which, it is sup posed, taught the leavening process, and through the various fermentations thereafter, till i came to "good, sweet, wholesome bread," the staff of life. leaven, which some deem the soul of bread, the spiritus which fills its cellular tissue, which is religiously preserved like the vestal fire, — some precious bottle-full, i sup pose, first brought over in the mayflower, did the business for america, and its influence is still rising, swelling, spreading, in cerealian billows over the land, — this seed i regularly and faithfully procured from the village, till at length one m.orning i forgot the rules, and scalded my yeast; by which accident i discovered that even this was not indispensable, — for my discoveries were not by the synthetic but analytic process, — and i have gladly omitted it since, though most housewives earnestly assured me that safe and wholesome bread without yeast might not be, and elderly people prophesied a speedy decay of the vital forces. yet i find it not to be an essential ingredient, and after going without it for a year am still in the land of the living; and i am glad to escape the trivialness of carrying a bottle-full 54 waldex. in m}' pocket, which would sometimes pop and dis charge its contents to my discomfiture. it is simpler and more respectable to omit it. man is an animal who more than any other can adapt himself to all climates and circumstances. neither did i put any sal soda, or other acid or alkali, into my bread. it would seem that i made it according to the recipe which marcus porcius / cato gave about two centuries before christ. " panem depsticium sic facito. manus mortariumque bene lavato. farinam in mortarium indito, ac|ute paulatim addito, subigitoque pulchre. ubi bene subegeris, defingito, coquitoque sub testu." which i take to mean — "make kneaded bread thus. wash your hands and trough well. put the meal into the trough, add water gradually, and knead it thoroughly. when you have kneaded it well, mould it, and bake it under a cover," that is, in a baking kettle. not a word about leaven. but i did no.t always use this staff of life. at one time, owing to the emptiness of m}" purse, i saw none of it for more than a month. every new englander might easily raise all his own breadstuff s in this land of rye and indian corn, and not depend on distant and fluctuating markets for them. yet so far are we from simplicity and independence that, in concord, fresh and sweet meal is rarely sold in the shops, and hominy and corn in a still coarser form are hardly used by any. for the most part the farmer gives to his cattle and hogs the grain of his own produc ing, and buys flour, which is at least no more wholesome, at a greater cost, at the store. i saw that i could easily raise my bushel or two of rye and indian corn, for the ' former will grow on the poorest land, and the latter does not require the best, and grind them in a hand-mill, and so do without rice and pork; and if i must have some concentrated sweet, i found b}' experiment that i could make a very good molasses either of pumpkins or beets, and i knew that i needed only to set out a few maples to obtain it more easily still, and while these were grow ing i could use various substitutes besides those which i have named. " for," as the forefitthers sang, — "we can make liquor to sweeten our lips of pumpkins and parsni_)s and walnut-tree chips." ecoxomy. 55 finally, as for salt, that grossest of groceries, to obtain this might be a fit occasion for a visit to the seashore, or, if i did without it altogether, i should probably drink the less water. i do not learn that the indians ever troubled themselves to go after it. thus i could avoid all trade and barter, so far as my food was concerned, and having a shelter already, it would only remain to get clothing and fuel. the panta loons which i now wear were woven in a farmer's family, — thank heaven there is so much virtue still in man; for i think the fall from the farmer to the operative as great and memorable as that from the man to the far mer; — and in a new country fuel is an encumbrance. as for a habitat, if i were not permitted still to squat, i might purchase one acre at the same price for which the land i cultivated was sold — namely, eight dollars and eight cents. but as it was, i considered that i en hanced the value of the land b}' squatting on it. there is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes ask me such questions as, if i think that i can live on vegetable food alone; and to strike at the root of the matter at once, — for the root is faith, — i am accustomed to answer such, that i can live on board nails. if they cannot understand that, they cannot understand much that i have to say. for my part, i am glad to hear of experiments of this kind being tried; as that a young man tried for a fortnight to live on hard, raw corn on the ear, using his teeth for all mortar. the squirrel tribe tried the same and succeeded. the human race is interested in these experiments, though a few old women who are incapacitated for them, or who own their thirds in mills, may be alarmed. my furniture, part of which i made myself, and the rest cost me nothing of which i have not rendered an account, consisted of a bed, a table, a desk, three chairs, a looking-glass three inches in diameter, a pair of tongs and andirons, a kettle, a skillet, and a frying-pan, a dipper, a wash bowl, two knives and forks, three plates, one cup, one spoon, a jug for oil, a jug for molasses, and a japanned lamp. none is so poor that he need sit on a 56 . walden, pumpkin. that is shiftlessness. there is a plenty of such chairs as i hke best in the village garrets to be had for taking them away. furniture! thank god, i can sit and i can stand without the aid of a furniture ware house. what man but a philosopher would not be ashamed to see his furniture packed in a cart and going up country exposed to the light of heaven and the eyes of men, a beggarly account of empty boxes? that is spaulding's furniture. i could never tell from inspect ing such a load whether it belonged to a so-called rich man or a poor one; the owner always seemed poverty stricken. indeed, the more you have of such things the poorer j^ou are. each load looks as if it contained the contents of a dozen shanties; and if one shanty is poor, this is a dozen times as poor. pray, for what do we move ever but to get rid of our furniture, our exuvioe; at last to go from this world to another newly furnished, and leave this to be burned? it is the same as if all these traps were buckled to a man's belt, and he could not move over the rough country where our lines are cast without dragging them, — dragging his trap. he was a lucky fox that left his tail in the trap. the muskrat will gnaw his third leg off to be free. no wonder man has lost his elasticity. how often he is at a dead set! "sir, if i may be so bold, what do you mean by a dead set?" if you are a seer, whenever 3^ou meet a man you will s.ce all that he owns, ay, and much that he pretends to disown, behind him, even to his kitchen furniture and all the trumpery which he saves and will not burn, and he will appear to be harnessed to it and making what headway he can. i think that the man is at a dead set who has got through a knot hole or gateway where his sledge load of furniture cannot follow him. i cannot but feel compassion when i hear some trig, compact looking man, seemingly free, all girded and ready, speak of his "furniture," as whether it is insured or not. "but what shall i do with my furniture? " my gay butterfly is entangled in a spider's web then. even those who seem for a long while not to have an}^, if you inquire more narrowly you will find have some stored in some body's barn. i look upon england to-day as an old economy. ^ : 57 gentleman who is travelling with a great deal of baggage, trumpery which has accumulated from long housekeep ing, which he has not the courage to burn; great trunk, little trunk, bandbox, and bundle. throw away the first three at least. it would surpass the powers of a well man nowadays to take up his bed and walk, and i should certainly advise a sick one to lay down his bed and run. when i have met an immigrant tottering under a bundle which contained his all — looking like an enormous wen which had grown out of the nape of his neck — i have pitied him, not because that was his all, but because he had all that he could carry. if i have got to drag my trap, i will take care that it be a light one and do not nip me in a vital part. but perchance it would be wisest never to put one's paw into it. i w^ould observe, by the way, that it costs me noth ing for curtains, for i have no gazers to shut out but the sun and moon, and i am willing that they should look in. the moon will not sour milk nor taint meat of mine, nor will the sun injure my furniture or fade my carpet, and if he is sometimes too warm a friend, i find it still better economy to retreat l^ehind some curtain which nature has provided, than to add a single item to the details of housekeeping. a lady once offered me a mat, but as i had no room to spare within the house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, i declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before m}^ door. it is best to avoid the beginnings of evil. not long since i was present at the auction of a deacon's effects, for his life had not been ineffectual: — "the evil that men do lives after them." as usual, a great proportion was trumpery which had begun to accumulate in his father's clay. among the rest was a dried tapeworm. and now, after lying half a century in his garret and other dust holes, these things were not burned ; instead of a bonfire, or purifying destruc tion of them, there was an auction, or increasing of them. the neighbors eagerly collected to view them, bought them all, and carefully transported them to their garrets 58 • ^ waldex. and dust holes, to lie there till their estates are settled, when they will start again. when a man dies he kicks the dust. the customs of some savage nations might, perchance, be profitably imitated by us, for they at least go through the semblance of casting their slough annually; they have the idea of the thing, whether they have the reality or not. would it not be well if we were to celebrate such a "busk/' or ''feast of first fruits," as bartram describes to have been the custom of the mucclasse indians? "when a town celebrates the busk," says he, "having previously provided themselves with new clothes, new pots, pans, and other household utensils and furniture, they collect all their worn-out clothes and other despicable things, sweep and cleanse their houses, squares, and the whole town, of their filth, which with all the remaining grain and other old provisions they cast together into one common heap, and consume it with fire. after having taken medicine, and fasted for three days, all the fire in the town is extinguished. during this fast they abstain from the gratification of ever}' appetite and pas sion whatever. a general amnesty is proclaimed; all malefactors may return to their town. . . . "on the fourth morning, the high priest, by rubbing dry wood together, produces new fire in the public square,, from whence every habitation in the town is supplied with the new and pure flame." they then feast on the new corn and fruits and dance . and sing for three days, " and the four following days they i receive visits and rejoice with their friends from neigh boring towns who have in like manner purified and pre pared themselves." the mexicans also practised a similar purification at the end of every fifty-two years, in the belief that it was time for the world to come to an end. i have scarcely heard of a truer sacrament, that is, as the dictionary defines it, "outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace," than this, and i have no doubt that they were originally inspired directly from heaven to do thus, though the}have no biblical record of the revelation. economy. 59 y for more than five 3'ears i maintained myself thus solely by the labor of my hands, and i found that by working about six weeks in a year, i could meet all the expenses of living. the whole of my winters, as well as most of my summers, i had free and clear for study. i have thoroughly tried schoolkeeping, and found that my expenses were in proportion, or rather out of pro portion, to my income, for i was obliged to dress and train, not to say think and believe, accordingly, and i lost my time into the bargain. as i did not teach for the good of my fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure. i have tried trade; but i found that it would take ten years to get under way in that, and that then i should probably be on my w'ay to the devil. i was actually afraid that i might l)y that time be doing what is called a good business. when formerly i w^as looking about to see what i could do for a living, some sad expe rience in conforming to the wishes of friends being fresh in my mind to tax my ingenuity, i thought often and seriously of picking huckleberries; that surely i could do, and its small profits might suffice, — for my greatest skill has been to want but little, — so little capital it required, so little distraction from my wonted moods, i foolishly thought. while my acquaintances went un hesitatingly into trade or the professions, i contemplated this occupation as most like theirs; ranging the hills all summer to pick the berries which came in my way, and thereafter carelessly dispose of them; so, to keep the flocks of admetus. i also dreamed that i might gather the wild herbs, or carry evergreens to such villagers as loved to be reminded of the woods, even to the city, by hay cart loads. but i have since learned that trade curses everything it handles; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business. as i preferred some things to others, and especially valued my freedom, as i could fare hard and yet succeed well, i did not wish to spend my time in earning rich ■carpets or other fine furniture, or delicate cookery, or a house in the grecian or the gothic stjde just yet. if there are any to whom it is no interruption to acquire 60 walden. these things, and who know how to use them when acquired, i rehnquish to them the pursuit. some are . "industrious/' and appear to love labor for its own sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out of worse mischief; to such i have at present nothing to say. those who would not know what to do with more leisure than they now enjoy, i might advise to work twice as hard as they do, — work till they pay for themselves, and get their free papers. for myself i found that the occupation of a day-laborer was the most independent of any, espe cially as it required only thirty or forty days in a year to support one. the laborer's day ends with the going down of the sun, and he is then free to devote himself to his chosen pursuit, independent of his lal^or; but his employer, who speculates from month to month, has no respite from one end of the year to the other. in short, i am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship i but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely; as the* pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial. it is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats.] easier than i do. one young man of my acquaintance, who has in herited some acres, told me that he thought he should live as i did, if he had the means. i would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account; for, be sides that before he has fairly learned it i may have found out another for myself, i desire that there may be as many different persons in the v/orlcl as possible ; but i j i would have each one be very careful to find out and |j pursue his own way, and not his father's or his mother's or his neighbor's instead. the vouth may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do. it is by a mathematical point only that we are wise, as the sailor or the fugitive slave keeps the polestar in his eye; but that is sufficient guidance for all our life. we may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we would preserve the true course. undoubtedly, in this case, what is true for one is truer economy. 61 still for a thousand, as a large house is not proportionally more expensive than a small one, since one roof may cover, one cellar underlie, and one wall separate several apartments. but for my part, i preferred the solitary dwelling. moreover, it will commonly be cheaper to build the whole yourself than to convince another of the advantage of the common wall; and when you have done this, the common partition, to be much cheaper, must be a thin one, and that other may prove a bad neighbor, and also not keep his side in repair. the only cooperation which is commonly possible is exceed ingly partial and superficial; and what little true coopera tion there is, is as if it were not, being a harmony inaudible to men. if a man has faith he will cooperate with equal faith everywhere; if he has not faith, he will continue to live like the rest of the world, whatever company he is joined to. to cooperate, in the highest as well as the lowest sense, means to get our living together. i heard it proposed lately that two young men should travel together over the world, the one without money, earning his means as he went, before the mast and be hind the plough, the other carrying a bill of exchange in his pocket. it was easy to see that they could not long be companions or cooperate, since one would not operate at all. they would part at the first interesting crisis in their adventures. above all, as i have implied, the man who goes alone can start to-day; but he who travels with anotlier must wait till that other is ready, and it may be a long time before they get off. but all this is very selfish, i have heard some of my townsmen say. i confess that i have hitherto indulged very little in philanthropic enterprises. i have made some sacrifices to a sense of duty, and among others have sacrificed this pleasure also. there are those who have used all their arts to persuade me to undertake the support of some poor family in the town; and if i had nothing to do, — for the devil finds employment for the idle, — i might try my hand at some such pastime as that. however, when i have thought to indulge myself in this respect, and lay their heaven under an 62 walden. obligation by maintaining certain poor persons in all respects as comfortably as i maintain myself, and have even ventured so far as to make them the offer, they have one and all unhesitatingly preferred to remain poor. while my townsmen and women are devoted in so many ways to the good of their fellows, i trust that one at least may be spared to other and less humane pursuits. you must have a genius for charity as well as for anything else. as for doing-good, that is one of the professions which are full. moreover, i have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution. probably i should not consciously and deliberatel}'' forsake my particular calling to do the good which society demands of me, to save the universe from annihilation; and i believe that a like but infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it. but i would not stand be tween any man and his genius; and to him who does this work, which i decline, with his whole heart and soul and life, i would say, persevere, even if the world call it doing evil, as it is most likely they will. i am far from supposing that my case is a peculiar one; no doubt many of my readers would make a similar defence. at doing something, — i will ■ not engage that my neighbors shall pronounce it good, — i do not hesitate to say that i should be a capital fellow to hire; but what that is, it is for my employer to find out. what good i do, in the common sense of that word, must be aside from my main path, and for the most part wholly unintended. men say, practically. begin where you are and such as you are, without aiming mainly to become of more worth, and with kindness aforethought go about doing good. if i were to preach at all in this strain, i should say rather, set about being good. as if the sun should stop when he has kindled his fires up to the splendor of a moon or a star of the sixth magnitude, and go al:)out like a robin goodfellow, peeping in at every cottage window, inspiring lunatics, and tainting meats, and making darkness visible, instead of steadily increas ing his genial heat and l^eneficcnce till he is of such ijright ness that no mortal can look him in the face, and then, economy. 63 and in the meanwhile too, going about the world in his own orbit, doing it good, or rather, as a truer philosophy has discovered, the world going about him getting good. when phaeton, wishing to prove his heavenly birth by his beneficence, had the sun's chariot but one day, and drove out of the lieaten track, he burned several blocks of houses in the lower streets of heaven, and scorched the surface of the earth, and dried up every spring, and made the great desert of sahara, till at length jupiter hurled him headlong to the earth with a thunderbolt, and the sun, through grief at his death, did not shine for a year. there is no odor so bad as that which arises from good ness tainted. it is human, it is divine, carrion. if i knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, i should run for my life, as from that dr}^ and parching wind of the african deserts called the simoom, whicli fills the mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust till you are suffocated, for fear that i should get some of his good done to me, — some of its virus mingled with my blood. no, — in this case i would rather suffer evil the natural way. a man is not a good man to me because he will feed me if i should be starving, or warm me if i should be freezing, or pull me out of a ditch if i should ever fall into one. i can find 3'ou a newfound land dog that will do as much. philanthropy is not love for one's fellow-man in the broadest sense. howard was no doubt an exceedingly kind and worthy man in his way, and has his reward; but, comparatively speaking, what are a hundred howards to us, if their philanthropy do not help lis in our best estate, when we are most worthy to be helped? i never heard of a philanthropic meeting in which it was sincerely proposed to do any good to me, or the like of me. the jesuits were quite balked by those indians who, being burned at the stake, suggested new modes of torture to their tormentors. being superior to physical suffering, it sometimes chanced that they were superior to any consolation which the missionaries could offer; and the law to do as you would be done by fell with less 64 walden. persuasiveness on the ears of those who, for their part, did not care how they were done by, who loved their enemies after a new fashion, and came very near freely forgiving them all they did. be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need, though it be your example which leaves them far behind. if you give money, spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them. we make curious mistakes sometimes. often the poor man is not so cold and hungry as he is dirty and ragged and gross. it is partly his taste, and not merely his misfortune. if you give him money, he will perhaps buy more rags with it. i was wont to pity the clumsy irish laborers who cut ice on the pond, in such mean and ragged clothes, while i shivered in my more tidy and somewhat more fashionable garments, till, one bitter cold day, one who had slipped into the water came to my house to warm him, and i saw him strip off three pairs of pants and two pairs of stockings ere he got down to the skin, though they were dirty and ragged enough, it is true, and that he could afford to refuse the extra garments which i offered him, he had so many intra ones. this ducking was the very thing he needed. then i began to pity myself, and i saw that it would be a greater charity to bestow on me a flannel shirt than a whole slop-shop on him. there are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to pro duce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve. it is the pious slave-breeder devoting the i^roceeds of every tenth slave to buy a sunday's liberty for the rest. some show their kindness to the poor by employing them in their kitchens. would they not be kinder if they em ployed themselves there? you boast of spending a tenth part of your income in charity; maybe you should spend the nine tenths so, and done with it. society recovers only a tenth part of the property then. is this owing to the generosity of him in whose possession it is found, or to the remissness of the officers of justice? philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is suf economy. 65 ficiently appreciated by mankind. nay, it is greatly overrated; and it is our selfishness which overrates it. a roljust poor man, one sunny day here in concord, praised a fellow-townsman to me, because, as he said, he was kind to the poor; meaning himself. the kind uncles and aunts of the race are more esteemed than its true spiritual fathers and mothers. i once heard a reverend lecturer on england, a man of learning and intelligence, after enumerating her scientific, literary, and political worthies, shakspeare, bacon, cromwell, milton, newton, and others, speak next of her christian heroes, whom, as if his profession required it of him, he elevated to a place far above all the rest, as the greatest of the great. they were penn, howard, and mrs. fry. every one must feel the falsehood and cant of this. the last were not england's best men and women; only, perhaps, her best philanthropists. i would not subtract anything from the praise that is due to philanthropy, but merely demand justice for all who by their lives and works are a blessing to man kind. i do not value chiefly a man's uprightness and benevolence, which are, as it were, his stem and leaves. those plants of whose greenness withered we make herb tea for the sick, serve but a humble use, and are most emploj-ed by quacks. i want the flower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse. his goodness must not be a partial and transitory act, but a constant superfluity, which costs him nothing and of which he is unconscious. this is a charity which hides a multitude of sins. the philanthropist too often sur rounds mankind with the remembrance of his own cast off griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it sympathy. we shoidd impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion. from what southern plains comes up the voice of wailing? under what lat itudes reside the heathen to whom we send light? who is that intemperate and brutal man whom we would redeem? if anything ail a man, so that he does not per form his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even, — g6 walden. for that is the seat of sympathy, — he forthwith sets about reforming — the world. being a microcosm himself, he discovers, and it is a true discovery, and he is the man to make it, — that the world has been eating green apples; to his eyes, in fact, the globe itself is a great green apple, which there is danger awful to think of that the children of men will nibble before it is ripe; and straightway his drastic philanthropy seeks out the esquimau and the patagonian, and embraces the populous indian and chinese villages; and thus, b}^ a few years of phil anthropic activity, the powers in the meanwhile using him for their own ends, no doubt, he cures himself of his dyspepsia, the globe acquires a faint blush on one or both of its cheeks, as if it were beginning to be ripe, and life loses its crudity and is once more sweet ancl wholesome to live. i never dreamed of any enormity greater than i have committed. i never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself. i believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy with his fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of god, is his private ail. let this be righted, let the spring come to him, the morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his generous companions without apology. my excuse for not lectur ing against the use of tobacco is that i never chewed it; that is a penalty which reformed tobacco-chewers have to pay; though there are things enough i have chewed, which i could lecture against. if you should ever be betrayed into any of these philanthropies, do not let your left hand know what 3'our right hand does, for it is not worth knowing. rescue the drowning and tie your shoe-strings. take your time, and set about some free labor. our manners have been corrupted by communica tion with the saints. our hymn-books resound with a melodious cursing of god and enduring him forever. one would say that even the prophets and redeemers had rather consoled the fears than confirmed the hopes of man. there is nowhere recorded a simple and irre pressible satisfaction with the gift of life, any memo rable praise of god. all health and success does me economy. 67 good, however far off and withdrawn it may appear; all disease and failure helps to make me sad and does me evil, however much sympathy it may have with me or i with it. if, then, we would indeed restore man kind by truh' indian, botanic, magnetic, or natural means, let us first be as simple and well as nature our selves, dispel the clouds which hang over our own brows, and take up a little life into our pores. do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world. i read in the gulistan, or flower garden, of sheik sadi of shiraz, that "they asked a wise man, saying: of the many celebrated trees which the most high god has created lofty and umbrageous, they call none azad, or free, excepting the cypress, which bears no fruit; what mystery is there in this? he replied: each has its appropriate produce, and appointed season, during the continuance of which it is fresh and blooming, and during their absence dry and withered; to neither of which states is the cypress exposed, being always flourishing; and of this nature are the azads, or religious independents. — fix not thy heart on that which is transitory; for the dijlah, or tigris, will continue to flow through bagdad after the race of caliphs is extinct: if thy hand has plenty, be liberal as the date tree; but if it aff"ords nothing to give away, be an azad, or free man, like the cypress.'' complemental verses. the pretensions of poverty. "thou dost presume too much, poor needy wretch, to claim a station in the firmament, because thy humble cottage, or thy tub. nurses some lazy or pedantic virtue in the cheap sunshine or by shady springs, with roots and pot-herbs; where thy right hand, tearing those humane passions from the mind, upon whose stocks fair blooming virtues flourish, ) degradeth nature, and benumbeth sense. and, gorgon-like, turns active men to stone. we not require the dull society of your necessitated temperance, 68 walden. or that unnatural stupidity that knows nor joy nor sorrow; nor your forc'd falsely exalted passive fortitude above the active. this low abject brood, that fix their seats in mediocrity, become your servile minds; but we advance such virtues only as admit excess. brave, bounteous acts, regal magnificence, all-seeing prudence, magnanimity that knows no bound, and that heroic virtue for which antiquity hath left no name, but patterns only, such as hercules, achilles, theseus. back to thy loath'd cell; and when thou seest the new enlightened sphere, study to know but what those worthies were." t. cakew. ii. where i lived, and what i lived for. at a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house. i have thus surveyed the country on every side within a dozen miles of where i live. in imagination i have bought all the farms in succession, for all were to be bought, and i knew their price. i walked over each farmer's premises, tasted his wild apples, discoursed on husbandry avith him, took his farm at his price, at any price, mortgaging it to him in my mintl; even put a higher price on it, — took everything but a deed of it, — took his word for his deed, for i dearly love to talk, — cultivated it, and him too to some extent, i trust, and with drew when i had enjoyed it long enough, leaving him to carry it on. this experience entitled me to be regarded as a sort of real-estate broker by my friends. wherever i sat, there i might live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly. what is a house but a sedes, a seat? — better if a country seat. i discovered many a site for a house not likely to be soon improved, which some might have thought too far from the village, but to my eyes the village was too far from it. well, there i might live, i said; and there i did live, for an hour, a summer and a winter life; saw how i could let the years where i lived, and what i lived fur. 69 run off, buffet the winter through, and see the spring come in. the future inhabitants of this region, where cver they may place their houses, may be sure that they have been anticipated. an afternoon sufficed to lay out the land into orchard, woodlot, and pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or pines should be left to stand before the door, and whence each blasted tree could be seen to the best advantage; and then i let it lie, fallow perchance, for a man is rich in proportion to the num ber of things which he can afford to let alone. my imagination carried me so far that i even had the refusal of several farms, — the refusal was all i wanted, — but i never got my fingers burned by actual possession. the nearest that i came to actual possession was when i bought the hollowell place, and had begun to sort my seeds, and collected materials with which to make a wheelbarrow to carry it on or off with; but before the owner gave me a deed of it, his wife — every man has such a wife — changed her mind and w^ished to keep it, and he offered me ten dollars to release him. now, to speak the truth, i had but ten cents in the world, and it sur passed my arithmetic to tell, if i was that man who had ten cents, or who had a farm, or ten dollars, or all to gether. however, i let him keep the ten dollars and the farm too, for i had carried it far enough; or rather, to be generous, i sold him the farm for just what i gave for it, and, as he was not a rich man, made him a present of ten dollars, and still had my ten cents, and seeds, and materials for a wheelbarrow left. i found thus that i had been a rich man without any damage to my property. but i retained the landscape, and i have since annually carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow. with respect to landscapes, — "i am monarch of all i survey, my right there is none to dispute. i have freciuently seen a poet withdraw, having en joyed the most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he had got a few wild apples only. why, the owner does not know it for many years when a poet has put his farm in rhyme, the most admirable 70 walden. kind of invisible fence, has fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk. the real attractions of the hollo well farm, to me, were: its complete retirement, being about two miles from the village, half a mile from the nearest neighbor, and separated from the highway by a broad field; its bounding on the river, which the owner said protected it by its fogs from frosts in the spring, though that was nothing to me; the gray color and ruinous state of the house and barn, and the dilapidated fences, which put such an interval between me and the last occupant; the hollow and lichen-covered apple trees, gnawed by rab bits, showing what kind of neighbors i should have; but above all, the recollection i had of it from my earliest voyages up the river, when the house was concealed behind a dense grove of red maples, through which i heard the house-dog bark. i was in haste to buy it, before the proprietor finished getting out some rocks, cutting down the hollow apple trees, and grubbing up some young birches which had sprung up in the pasture, or, in short, had made any more of his improvements. to enjoy these advantages i was ready to carry it on; like atlas, to take the world on my shoulders, — i never heard what compensation he received for that, — and do all those things which had no other motive or excuse but that i might pay for it and l^e unmolested in my posses sion of it; for i knew all the while that it would yield the most abundant crop of the kind i wanted if i could , only afford to let it alone. but it turned out as i have said. all that i could say, then, with respect to farming on a large scale (i have always cultivated a garden), was that i had had my seeds ready. many think that seeds improve with age, i have no doubt that time dis criminates between the good and the bad: and when at last i shall plant, i shall be less likely to be disappointed. but i would say to my fellows, once for all. as long as possible live free and uncommitted. it makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail. where i lived, axd what i lived for. 71 old cato, whose "de re rustica" is mj' '^ cultiva tor," says, and the only translation i have seen makes sheer nonsense of the passage, "when you think of getting a farm, turn it thus in your mind, not to buy greedily; nor spare your pains to look at it, and do not think it enough to go round it once. the oftener you go there the more it will please you, if it is good." i think i shall not buy greedily, but go round and round it as long as i live, and be buried in it first, that it may please me the more at last. the present was my next experiment of this kind, which i purpose to describe more at length; for con venience, putting the experience of two years into one. as i have said, i do not propose to write an ode to de jection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up. when first i took up my abode in the woods, that is, began to spend my nights as well as daj's there, which, by accident, was on independence da}', or the fourth of july, 1s45, my house was not finished for winter, ]jut was merely a defence against the rain, without plastering or chimney, the walls being of rough weather stained boards, with wide chinks, which made it cool at night. the upright white hewn studs and freshly planed door and window casings gave it a clean and airy look, especiall}' in the morning, when its timbers were saturated with dew, so that i fancied that by noon some sweet gum would exude from them. to my imagination it retained throughout the day more or less of this auroral character, reminding me of a certain house on a mountain which i had visited the year before. this was an airy and unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a travelling god, and where a goddess might trail her garments. the winds which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial parts only, of terrestrial music. the morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; ]jut few are the ears that hear it. olympus is but the outside of the earth evervwhere. 72 walden. the only house i had been the owner of before, if i except a boat, was a tent, which i used occasionally when making excursions in the summer, and this is still rolled up in my garret; but the boat, after passing from hand to hand, has gone down the stream of time. with this more sul^stantial shelter about me, i had made some progress toward settling in the world. this frame, so slightly clad, was a sort of crystallization around me, and reacted on the builder. it was suggestive somewhat as a picture in outlines. i did not need to go out of doors to take the air, for the atmosphere within had lost none of its freshness. it was not so much within doors as behind a door where i sat, even in the rainiest weather. the harivansa says, "an abode without birds is like a meat without seasoning." such was not my abode, for i found myself suddenly neighbor to the birds; not by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near them. i was not only nearer to some of those which commonly frequent the garden and the orchard, but to those wilder and more thrilling songsters of the forest which never, or rarely, serenade a villager, — the wood-thrush, the veery, the scarlet tanager, the field sparrow, the whippoorwill, and many others. i was seated by the shore of a small pond, about a mile and a half south of the village of concord and some what higher than it, in the midst of an extensive wood between that town and lincoln, and about two miles south of that our only field known to fame, concord battle ground; but i was so low in the woods that the opposite shore, half a mile off, like the rest, covered with wood, was my most distant horizon. for the first week, whenever i looked out on the pond it impressed me like a tarn high up on the side of a mountain, its bottom far above the surface of other lakes, and, as the sun arose, i saw it throwing off its mighty clothing of mist, and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface were revealed, while the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the breaking upof some nocturnal conventi cle. the very dew seemed to hang upon the trees later into the day than usual, as on the sides of mountains. where i lived, and what i lived for. 73 this smull lake was of most value as a neighbor in the intervals of a gentle rain storm in august, when, both air and water being perfectly still, but the sky overcast, mid-afternoon had all the serenity of even ing, and the wood-thrush sang around, and was heard from shore to shore. a lake like this is never smoother than at such a time; and the clear portion of the air above it being shallow and darkened by clouds, the water, full of light and reflections, becomes a lower heaven itself so much the more important. from a hill top near by, where the wood had recently been cut off, there was a pleasing vista southward across the pond, through a wide indentation in the hills which form the shore there, where their opposite sides sloping toward each other suggested a stream flowing out in that direction through a wooded valley, but stream there was none. that way i looked between and over the near green hills to some distant and higher ones in the horizon, tinged with blue. indeed, by standing on tiptoe i could catch a glimpse of some of the peaks of the still bluer and more distant mountain ranges in the northwest, those true blue coins from heaven's own mint, .and also of some portion of the village. but in other directions, even from this point, i could not see over or beyond the woods which surrounded me. it is well to have some water in your neighborhood, to give buoyancy to and float the earth. one value even of the smallest well is that when you look into it you see that the earth is not con tinent but insular. this is as important as that it keeps butter cool. when i looked across the pond from this peak toward the sudbury meadows, which in time of flood i distinguished elevated perhaps by a mirage in their seething valley, like a coin in a basin, all the earth beyond the pond appeared like a thin crust insulated and floated even by this small sheet of intervening water, and i was reminded that this on which i dwelt was but dry land. though the view from my door was still more con tracted, i did not feel crowded or confined in the least. there was pasture enough for my imagination. the low shrub-oak plateau to which the opposite shore arose, 74 waldex. stretched away toward the prairies of the "west and the steppes of tartary, affording ample room for all the rov ing families of men. " there are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon," — said damodara, when his herds required new and larger pastures. both place and time were changed and i dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those ears in his tory which had most attracted me. where i live was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers. we are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind the constellation of cassiopeia's chair, far from noise and disturbance. i discovered that my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe. if it were worth the while to settle in those parts near to the pleiades or the hyades, to aldebaran or altair, then i was really there, or at an equal remoteness from the life which i had left behind, dwindled and twinkling with as fine a ray to my nearest neighbor, and to be seen only in moonless nights by him. .such was that part of creation where i had squatted : — "there was a shepherd that did hve, and held his thoughts as high as were the mounts whereon his flocks did hourly feed him by." what should we think of the shepherd's life if his flocks always wandered to higher pastures than his thoughts? every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and i may say innocence, with nature herself. i have been as sincere a worshipper of aurora as the greeks. i got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which i did. they say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of king tching-thang to this effect: "renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, ancl forever again." i can under stand that. morning brings back the heroic ages. i was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito where i lived, and what i lived for. 75 making its invisible and unimaoinable tour through my apartment at earhcst dawn, when i was sitting with door and windows open, as i could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. it was homer's requiem; itself an iliad and od}'ssey in the air, singing its own w'rath and wanderings. there was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the ever lasting vigor and fertility of the world. the morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened ]jy our genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awak ened by our own newly acquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied by the undulations of celestial music, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance filling the air — to a higher life than we fell asleep from; and thus the darkness bear its fruit, and prove itself to be good, no less than the light. that man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way. after a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his genius tries again what noble life it can make. all memorable events, i should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. the vedas say, "all intelligences awake with the morning." poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour. all poets and heroes, like memnon, are the children of aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. to him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. it matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. morning is when i am awake and there is a dawn in me. moral re form is the effort to throw off sleep. why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? they are not such poor calculators. 76 walden. if they had not been overcome with drowsiness they would have performed something. the milhons are awake enough for phj-sical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. to be awake is to be alive. i have never yet met a man who was quite awake. how could i have looked him in the face? we must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. i know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. it is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. to effect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. if we refused, or rather used up, such paltry information as we get, the oracles would distinctly inform us how this might be done. i went to the woods because i wished to live delibr erately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if i could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when i came to die, discover that i had not lived. i ditl not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did i wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite neces sary. i wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. for most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of god, and have somewhat hastily con where i lived, and what i lived for. 77 eluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify god and enjoy him forever." still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men ; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitablc wretchedness. our life is frittered away by detail. an honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. sim plicity, simplicity, simplicity! i say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; in stead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail. in the midst of this chop ping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. simplify, simplify. instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion. our life is like a german confederacy, made up of petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a german cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment. the nation itself, with all its so-called internal improvements, which, by the way, are all external and superficial, is just such an un wieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the only cure for it as for them is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than spartan simplicity of life and eleva tion of purpose. it lives too fast. men think that it is essential that the nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk -through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. if we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go 78 walden. ■ to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads? and if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season? but if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? we do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? each one is a man, an irishman, or a yankee man. the rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. they are sound sleepers, i assure you. and every few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the mis fortune to be ridden upon. and when they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly . stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception. i am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may sometime get up again. why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? we are determined to be starved before we are hungry. men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches to-day to save nine to-morrow. as for ivork, we haven't any of any conse quence. we have the saint vitus' dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still. if i should only give a few pulls at the parish bell-rope, as for a fire, that is, without setting the bell, there is hardly a man on his farm in the outskirts of concord, notwithstanding that press of engagements which was his excuse so many times this morning, nor a boy, nor a woman, i might almost say, but would forsake all and follow that sound, not mainly to save property from the flames, but, if we will confess the truth, much more to see it burn, since burn it must, and we, be it known, did not set it on fire, — or to see it put out, and have a hand in it, if that is done as handsomely; yes, even if it were the parish church itself. hardly a man takes a half hour's nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, "what's the news?" as if the rest of mankind had stood j where i lived, and what i lived for. 79 his sentinels. some give directions to be waked every half hour, doubtless for no other purpose; and then, to pay for it, they tell what they have dreamed. after a night's sleep the news is as indispensable as the break fast. "pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere on this globe," — and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the wachito river; never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself. for my part, i could easily do without the post office. i think that there are very few important com munications made through it. to speak critically, i never received more than one or two letters in my life — i wrote this some years ago — that were worth the postage. the penny-post is, commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thought which is so often safely offered in jest. and i am sure that i never read any memorable news in a newspaper. if we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the western railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, — we never need read of another. one is enough. if you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? to a philosopher all 7iews,^ as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. there was such a rush, as i hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn the foreign news by the last arrival, that several large squares of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure, — news which i seriously think a ready wit might write a twelvemonth or twelve years beforehand with sufficient accuracy. as for spain, for instance, if you know how to throw in don carlos and the infanta, and don pedro and seville and granada, from time to time in the right proportions, — they may have changed the names a little since i saw the papers, — and serve up a 80 walden. bull-fight when other entertainments fail, it will be true to the letter, and give us as good an idea of the exact state or ruin of things in spain as the most succinct and lucid reports under this head in the newspapers: and as for england, almost the last significant scrap of news from that quarter was the revolution of 16-19; and if 3'ou have learned the history of her crops for an average year, you never need attend to that thing again, unless your speculations are of a merely pecuniary character. if one may judge who rarely looks into the newspapers, nothing new does ever happen in foreign parts, a french revolution not excepted. what news! how much more important to know what that is which was never old! "kieou-he-yu (great dig nitary of the state of wei) sent a man to khoung-tseu to know his news. khoung-tseu caused the messenger to be seated near him, and questioned him in these terms: what is your master doing? the messenger answered with respect: my master desires to diminish the number of his faults, but he cannot come to the end of them. the messenger being gone, the philosopher remarked: what a worthy messenger! what a worthy messenger!" the preacher, instead of vexing the ears of drowsy farm ers on their day of rest at the end of the week, — for sunday is the fit conclusion of an ill-spent week, and not the fresh and brave beginning of a new one, — with this one other draggletail of a sermon, should shout with thundering voice, — "pause! avast! why so seeming fast, but deadly slow?" shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. if men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the arabian nights' entertain ments. if we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. when we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, — that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. this is aways exhilarating and sublime. by closing the eyes ' ' where i lived, and what i lived for. 81 and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their dail_y life of i'outine and habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations. children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure. i have read in a hindoo book that "there was a king's son, who, being expelled in infancy from his native city, was brought up by a forester, and, growing up to maturity in that state, imagined himself to belong to the idarbarous race with which he lived. one of his father's ministers having discovered him, revealed to him what he was, and the misconception of his character was removed, and he knew himself to be a prince. so soul," continues the hindoo philosopher, "from the circumstances in which it is placed, mistakes its own character, until the truth is revealed to it by some holy teacher, and then it knows itself to be brahme." i perceive that we inhabitants of new england live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface of things. we think that that is which appears to be. if a man should walk through this town and see only the reality, where, think you, would the "mill-dam" go to? if he should give us an account of the realities he beheld there, we should not recognize the place in his description. look at a meeting-house, or a courthouse, or a jail, or a shop, or a dwelling-house, and say what that thing really is before a true gaze, and they would all go to pieces in j^our account of them. men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before adam and after the last man. in eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. but all these times and places and occasions are now and here. god himself culminates in the present moment, and* will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. and we are enabled to apprehend at ail what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. the universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. let us spend 82 walden. our lives in conceiving then. the poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it. let us spend one clay as deliberately as nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mos quito's wing that falls on the rails. let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry, — determined to make a day of it. why should we knock under and go with the stream? let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the merid ian shallows. weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. with unrelaxecl nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like ulysses. if the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. if the bell rings, v/hy should we run? we will consider what kind of music they are like. let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through paris and london, through new york and boston and concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard l^ottom and rocks in place, which we can call realitij, and say, this is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point cvappui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a nilometer, but a realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. if you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. be it life or death, we crave only reality. if we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business. time is but the stream i go a-fishing in. i drink at reading. 83 it; but while i drink i sec the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. i would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. i cannot count one. i know not the first letter of the alphabet, i have always been regretting that i was not as wise as the day i was born. the intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. i do not wish to be any more busy with ni}^ hands than is necessary. my head is hands and feet. i feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. my instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws, and with it i would mine and bur row my way through these hills. i think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining rod and thin rising vapors i judge; and here i will begin to mine. iii. reading. with a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike. in accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident. the oldest egyptian or hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trem bling robe remains raised, and i gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was i in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. no dust has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed. that time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is neither past, present, nor future. my residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but to serious reading, than a university; and though 84 walden. i was be^'ond the range of the ordinary circulating hbrary, i had more than ever come withm the influence of those books which circulate round the world, whose sentences were first written on bark, and are now merely copied from time to time on to linen paper. says the poet mir camar uddin mast, "being seated to run through the region of the spiritual world; i have had this advantage in books. to be intoxicated by a single glass of wine; i have experienced this pleasure wdien i have drunk the liquor of the esoteric doctrines." i kept homer's iliad on my table through the summer, though i looked at his page only now and then. incessant labor with my hands, at first, for i had my house to finish and my beans to hoe at the same time, made more study impossible. yet i sustained myself by the prospect of such reading in future. i read one or two shallow books of travel in the intervals of my work, till that employ ment made me ashamed of myself, and i asked where it was then that / lived. the student may read homer or ^schylus in the greek without danger of dissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies that he in some measure emulate their heroes, and consecrate morning hours to their pages. the heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger .sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. the modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity. they seem as solitary, and the letter in which they are printed as rare and curious, as ever. it is worth the expense of youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some words of an ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialncss of the street, to be perpetual suggestions and provocations. it is not in vain that the farmer remembers and repeats the few latin words which he has heard. men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will reading. 85 always stud}classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they ma}' be. for what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? they are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as delphi and dodona never gave. we might as w^ell omit to study nature because she is old. to read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. it requires a training such as the athletes underavent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. it is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read. the one is commonly transitory, a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. the other is the maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to sjdeak. the crowds of men who merely spoke the greek and latin tongues in the middle ages were not entitled by the accident of birth to read the works of genius written in those languages; for these were not written in that greek or latin which the}' knew, but in the select language of literature. they had not learned the nobler dialects of greece and rome, but the very materials on which they were written were waste paper to them, and they prized instead a cheap con temporary literature. but when the several nations of europe had acquired distinct though rude written languages of their own, sufficient for the purposes of their rising literatures, then first learning revived, and scholars were enabled to discern from that remoteness the treasures of antiquity. what the roman and grecian multitude could not hear, after the lapse of ages a few scholars read, and a few scholars only are still reading it. 86 walden. however much we may admire the orator's occasional bursts of eloquence, the noblest written words are com monly as far behind or above the fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind the clouds. there are the stars, and they who can' may read them. the astronomers forever comment on and observe them. they are not exhalations like our daily colloquies and vaporous breath. what is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. the orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the in tellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him. no wonder that alexander carried the iliad with him on his expeditions in a precious casket. a written word is the choicest of relics. it is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. it is the work of art nearest to life itself. it may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; — not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. the symbol of an ancient man's thought becomes a modern man's speech. two thousand summers have imparted to the monuments of grecian literature, as to her marbles, only a maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have carried their own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to protect them against the corrosion of time. books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. they have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. ' their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind. when the illiterate and perhaps scornful trader has earned by enterprise and industry reading. 87 his coveted leisure and independence, and is admitted to the circles of wealth and fashion, he turns inevitably at last to those still higher but j'ct inaccessible circles of intellect and genius, and is sensible only of the imperfec tion of his culture and the vanity and insufficiency of all his riches, and further proves his good sense by the pains which he takes to secure for his children that in tellectual culture whose want he so keenly feels; and thus it is that he becomes the founder of a family. those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language in which they were written must have a very imperfect knowledge of the history of the human race; for it is remarkable that no transcript of them has ever been made into any modern tongue, unless our civ ilization itself may be regarded as such a transcript. homer has never yet been printed in english, nor ^schy lus, nor virgil even, — works as refined, as solidly done, and as beautiful almost as the morning itself; for later writers, say what we will of their genius, have rarely, if ever, ecjualled the elaborate beauty and finish and the lifelong and heroic literary labors of the ancients. they only talk of forgetting them who never knew them. it will be soon enough to forget them when we have the learning and the genius which will enable us to attend to and appreciate them. that age will be rich indeed when those relics which we call classics, and the still older and more than classic but even less known scrip tures of the nations, shall have still further accumulated, when the vaticans shall l^e filled with ^'edas and zend avestas and bibles, with homers and dantes and shak speares, and all the centuries to come shall have succes sively deposited their trophies in the forum of the world. by such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at last. the works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. they have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologicalh', not astronomically. most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this 88 walden. only is reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to stand on tiptoe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to. i think that having learned our letters we should read the best that is in literature, and not be forever repeating our a b abs, and words of one syllable, in the fourth or fifth classes, sitting on the lowest and foremost form all our lives. most men are satisfied if they read or hear read, and perchance have been convicted by the wisdom of one good book, the bible, and for the rest of their lives vegetate and dissipate their faculties in what is called easy reading. there is a work in several volumes in our circulating library entitled little reading, which i thought referred to a town of that name which i had not been to. there are those who, like cormorants and ostriches, can digest all sorts of this, even after the fullest dinner of meats and vegetables, for they suffer nothing to be wasted. if others are the machines to provide this provender, they are the machines to read it. they read the nine thousandth tale about zebulon and se phronia, and how they loved as none had ever loved before, and neither did the course of their true love run smooth, — at any rate, how it did run and stumble, and get up again and go on! how some poor unfortunate got up on to a steeple, who had l^etter never have gone up as far as the belfry; and then, having needlessly got him up there, the happy novelist rings the bell for all the world to come together and hear, o dear! how he did get down again! for my part, i think that they had better metamorphose all such aspiring heroes of universal noveldom into man weather-cocks, as they used to put heroes among the constellations, and let them swing round there till they are rusty, and not come down at all to bother honest men with their pranks. the next time the novelist rings the bell i will not stir though the meeting-house burn down. "the skip of the tip-toe hop, a romance of the middle ages, by the celebrated author of ' tittle-tol-tan,' to appear in monthly parts; a great rush; don't all come together." all this they read with saucer eyes, and erect and primitive curiosity, reading. 89 and with unwearied gizzard, whose corrugations even yet need no sharpening, just as some little four-year-old bencher his two-cent gilt-covered edition of cinderella, — without any improvement, that i can see, in the pro nunciation, or accent, or emphasis, or any more skill in extracting or inserting the moral. the result is dulness of sight, a stagnation of the vital circulations, and a general deliciuium and sloughing off of all the in tellectual faculties. this sort of gingerbread is baked daily and more sedulously than pure wheat or rye-and indian in almost every oven, and finds a surer market. the best books are not read even by those who are called good readers. what does our concord culture amount to? tliere is in this town, with a very few ex ceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even in english literature, whose words all can read and spell. even the college-bred and so-called liberally educated men here and elsewhere have really little or no acquaintance with the english classics; and as for the recorded wisdom of mankind, the ancient classics and bibles, which are accessible to all who will know of them, there are the feeblest efforts anywhere made to ijecome acc[uainted with them. i know' a woodchopper, of middle age, who takes a french paper, not for news as he says, for he is above that, but to " keep himself in practice," he being a canadian b}^ birth; and when i ask him what he considers the best thing he can do in this world, he says, besides this, to keep up and add to his english. this is about as much as the college-bred generally do or aspire to do, and they take an english paper for the purpose. one who has just come from reading perhaps one of the best english books will find how many with whom he can converse about it? or suppose he comes from reading a greek or latin classic in the original, whose praises are familiar even to the so called illiterate; he will find nobody at all to speak to, but must keep silence about it. indeed, there is hardly the professor in our colleges who, if he has mastered the difficulties of the language, has proportionally mastered the difficulties of the wit and poetry of a cireek poet, and has any sympathy to impart to the alert and heroic 90 walden. reader; and as for the sacred scriptures, or bibles of mankind, who in this town can tell me even their titles? most men do not know that any nation but the hebrews have had a scripture. a man, any man, will go con siderably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every suc ceeding age have assured us of; — and yet we learn to read only as far as easy reading, the primers and class books, and when we leave school, the " little reading," and story books, which are for boys and beginners; and our reading, our conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins. i aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our concord soil has produced, whose names are hardly known here. or shall i hear the name of plato and never read his book? as if plato were my townsman and i never saw him, — my next neighbor and i never heard him speak or attended to the wisdom of his words. but how actually is it? his dialogues, which contain what was immortal in him, lie on the next shelf, and yet i never read them. we are underbred and low-lived and illiterate; and in this respect i confess i do not riake any very broad distinction between the illiteratencss of my townsman who cannot read at all, and the illitcrateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects. we should be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were. we are a race of tit-men, and soar but little higher in our intellectual flights than the columns of the daily paper. it is not all books that are as dull as their readers. there are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. how many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. the book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. the at ]:)resent unutterable things reading. 91 we may find somewhere uttered. these same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life. moreover, with wisdom we shall learn liberality. the solitary hired man on a farm in the outskirts of concord, who has had his second birth and peculiar religious experience, and is driven as he believes into silent gravity and exclusive ness by his faith, may think it is not true; but zoroaster, thousands of years ago, travelled the same road and had the same experience; but he, being wise, knew it to be universal, and treated his neighbors accordingly, and is even said to have invented and established worship among men. let him humbly commune with zoroaster then, and, through the liberalizing influence of all the worthies, with jesus christ himself, and let "our church" go l)y the board. we boast that we belong to the nineteenth century and are making the most rapid strides of any nation. but consider how little this village does for its own cul ture. i do not wish to flatter my townsmen, nor to be flattered by them, for that will not advance either of us. we need to be provoked, — goaded like oxen, as we are, into a trot. we have a comparatively decent sys tem of common schools, schools for infants only; but excepting the half-starved lyceum in the winter, and latterly the puny beginning of a library suggested by the state, no school for ourselves. we spend more on almost any article of bodily aliment or ailment than on our mental aliment. it is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. it is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure — if they are indeed so well off — to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives. shall the world be confined to one paris or one oxford forever? cannot students be boarded here and get a liberal education under the skies of concord? can we not hire some abelard to lecture to us? alas! what with foddering the cattle and tending the store, we are kept 92 waldex. from school too long, and our education is sadly neglected. in this country, the village should in some respects take the place of the nobleman of europe. it should be the patron of the fine arts. it is rich enough. it wants only the magnanimity and refinement. it can spend money enough on such things as farmers and traders value, but it is thought utopian to propose spending money for things which more intelligent men know to be of far more worth. this town has spent seventeen thousand dollars on a town-house, thank fortune or politics, but proljably it will not spend so much on living wit, the true meat to put into that shell, in a hundred years. the one hundred and twenty-five dollars an nually subscril^ed for a lyceum in the winter is better spent than any other equal sum raised in the town. if we live in the nineteenth century, why should we not enjoy the advantages which the nineteenth century offers? why should our life be in any respect provincial? if we will read newspapers, why not skip the gossip of boston and take the best newspaper in the world at once? — not be sucking the pap of "neutral family" papers, or browsing "olive branches" here in new england. let the reports of all the learned societies come to us, and we will see if they know anything. why should we leave it to harper & brothers and redding & co. to select our reading? as the nobleman of culti vated taste surrounds himself with whatever conduces to his culture, — genius — learning — wit — books — paint ings — statuary — music — philosophical instruments, and the like; so let the village do, — not stop short at a peda gogue, a parson, a sexton, a parish library, and three selectmen, because our pilgrim forefathers got through a cold winter once on a bleak rock with these. to act collectively is according to the spirit of our institutions ; and i am confident that, as our circumstances are more flourishing, our means are greater than the nobleman's. new england can hire all the wise men in the world to come and teach her, and board them round the while, and not be provincial at all. that is the uncommon school we want. instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men. if it is necessary, omit one bridge souxds. 93 ever the river, go round a little there, and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us. iv. sounds. but while we are confined to books, though the most select and classic, and read only particular written languages, which are themselves but dialects and pro vincial, we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is coj)ious and standard. much is pub lished, but little printed. the raj's which stream through the shutter will be no longer remembered when the shutter is wholly removed. no method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert-. what is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the dis cipline of looking always at what is to be seen? will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity. i did not read books the first summer; i hoed beans. nay, i often did better than this. there were times when i could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. i love a broad margin to my life. sometimes,. in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, i sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a re very, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant high "w^ay, i was reminded of the lapse of time. i grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. they were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. i realized 94 walden. what the orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. for the most part, i minded not how the hours went. the day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished. in stead of singing like the birds, i silently smiled at my incessant good fortune. as the sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hickory before my door, so had i my chuckle or suppressed warble which he might hear out of my nest. my days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for i lived like the puri indians, of whom it is said that ''for yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow they have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning by point ing backward for yesterday, forward for to-morrow, and overhead for the passing day." this was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, i should not have been found wanting. a man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. the natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence. i had this advantage, at least, in my mode of life, over those who were obliged to look abroad for amuse ment, to society and the theatre, that my life itself was become my amusement and never ceased to be novel. it was a drama of many scenes and without an end. if we were always indeed getting our living, and regulat ing our lives according to the last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with ennui. fol low your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour. housework was a pleasant pastime. when my floor was dirty, i rose early, and, setting all my furniture out of doors on the grass, bed and bedstead making but one budget, dashed water on the floor, and sprinkled white sand from the pond on it, and then with a broom scrubbed it clean and white; and by the time the villagers had broken their fast the morning sun had dried my house sufficiently to allow me to move in again, and my meditations were almost uninterrupted. it was pleasant to see my whole sounds. 95 household effects out on the grass, making a little pile like a gypsy's pack, and my three-legged table, from which i did not remove the books and pen and ink, standing amid the pines and hickories. they seemed glad to get out themselves, and as if unwilling to be brought in. i was sometimes tempted to stretch aii awning over them and take my seat there. it was worth the while to see the sun shine on these things, and hear the free wind blow on them; so much more interesting most familiar objects look out doors than in the house. a bird sits on the next bough, life-everlasting grows under the table, and blackb'erry vines run round its legs; pine cones, chestnut burs, and strawberry leaves are strewn about. it looked as if this was the way these v forms came to be transferred to our furniture, to tables, chairs, and bedstead, — because they once stood in their midst. my house was on the side of a hill, immediate^ on the edge of the larger wood, in the midst of a young forest of pitch pines and hickories, and half a dozen rods from the pond, to which a narrow footpath led down the hill. in my front yard grew the strawberry, black berry, and life-everlasting, johnswort and goldenrod, shrub-oaks and sand-cherry, blueberry and ground-nut. near the end of may, the sand-cherry {cerasus putnila) adorned the sides of the path with its delicate flowers arranged in umbels cylindrically about its short stems, which last, in the fall, weighed down with good-sized and handsome cherries, fell over in wreaths like rays on every side. i tasted them out of compliment to nature, though they were scarcely palatable. the sumach (rhus glabra) grew luxuriantly about the house, pushing up through the embankment which i had made, and growing five or six feet the first season. its broad pinnate tropical leaf was pleasant though strange to look on. the large buds, suddenly pushing out late in the spring from dry sticks which had seemed to be dead, developed themselves as by magic into graceful green and tender boughs, an inch in diameter; and some times, as i sat at my window, so heedlessly did they grow and tax their weak joints, i heard a fresh and tender 96 walden. bough suddenl}^ fall like a fan to the ground, when there was not a breath of air stirring, broken otf by its own weight. in august, the large masses of berries, which, when in flower, had attracted many wild bees, gradually fissumed their bright velvety crimson hue, and by their weight again bent down and broke the tender limbs. as i sit at my window this summer afternoon, hawks are circling about my clearing; the tantivy of wild pigeons, flying by twos and threes athwart my view, or perching restless on the white-pine boughs behind my house, gives a voice to the air; a fishhawk dimples the glassy surface of the pond and bi''in"gs up a fish; a mink steals out of the marsh before my door and seizes a frog by the shore; the sedge is bending under the weight of the reed-bircls flitting hither and thither; and for the last half hour i have heard the rattle of railroad cars, now dying away and then reviving like the beat of a partridge, conveying travellers from boston to the country. for i did not live so out of the world as that boy who, as i hear, was put out to a farmer in the east part of the town, but erelong ran away and came home again, ciuite down at the heel and homesick. he had never seen such a dull and out-of-the-way place; the folks were all gone off; why, you couldn't even hear the whistle! i doubt if there is such a place in massachusetts now: — " in truth, our village has become a butt for one of those fleet railroad shafts, and o'er our peaceful plain its soothing sound is — concord." the fitchburg railroad touches the pond about a hundred rods south of where i dwell. i usually go to the village along its causewa}'', and am, as it were, re lated to society by this link. the men on the freight trains, who go over the whole length of the road, bow to me as to an old acquaintance, they pass me so often, and apparently they take me for an employee; and so i am. i too would fain be a track-repairer somewhere in the orbit of the earth. the whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter, sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer's yard, informing me that many souxds. 97 restless city merchants are arriving within the circle of the town, or adventurous country traders from the other side. as they come under one horizon, they shout their warning to get off the track to the other, heard sometimes through the circles of two towns. here come your groceries, country; your rations, countrymen i nor is there any man so independent on his farm that he can say them nay. and here's your pay for them i screams the countryman's whistle; timber like long bat tering rams going twenty miles an hour against the city's walls, and chairs enough to seat all the weary and heavy laden that dwell within them. with such huge and lumbering civility the country hands a chair to the city. all the indian huckleberry hills are stripped, all the cranberry meadows are raked into the city. up comes the cotton, down goes the woven cloth; up comes the silk, down goes the woolen; up come the books, but' down goes the wit that writes them. when i meet the engine with its train of cars mov ing off with planetary motion, — or, rather, like a comet, for the beholder knows not if with that velocity and with that direction it will ever revisit this system, since its orbit does not look like a returning curve, — with its steam cloud like a banner streaming behind in golden and silver wreaths, like many a downy cloud which i have seen, high in the heavens, unfolding its masses to the light, — as if this travelling demigod, this cloud compeller, ' would erelong take the sunset sky for the livery of his train; when i hear the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils (what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put into the new mythology i don't know), it seems as if the earth had got a race now worthy to inhabit it. if all were as it seems, and men made the elements their servants for noble ends! if the cloud that hangs over the engine were the perspiration of heroic deeds, or as beneficent as that which floats over the farmer's fields, then the elements and nature herself would cheerfully accompany men on'their errands and be their escort. i watch the passage of the morning cars with the 98 walden-. same feeling that i do the rising of the sun, which is hardly more regular. their train of clouds stretching far behind and rising higher and higher, going to heaven while the cars are going to boston, conceals the sun for a minute and casts my distant field into the shade, a celestial train beside which the petty train of cars which hugs the earth is but the barb of the spear. the stabler of the iron horse was up early this winter morning by the light of the stars amid the mountains, to fodder and harness his steed. fire, too, was awakened thus early to put the vital heat in him and get him off. if the enterprise were as innocent as it is early! if the snow lies deep, they strap on his snow-shoes, and with the giant plough plough a furrow from the mountains to the seaboard, in which the cars, like a following drill barrow, sprinkle all the restless men and floating mer chandise in the country for seed. all day the fire-steed flies over the country, stopping only that his master may rest, and i am awakened by his tramp and defiant snort at midnight, when in some remote glen in the woods he fronts the elements incased in ice and snow; and he will reach his stall only with the morning star, to start once more on his travels without rest or slum ber. or perchance, at evening, i hear him in his stable blowing off the superfluous energy of the day, that he may calm his nerves and cool his liver and brain for a few hours of iron slumber. if the enterprise were as heroic and commanding as it is protracted and un wearied ! far through unfrequented woods on the confines of towns, where once only the hunter penetrated by day, in the darkest night dart these bright saloons without the knowledge of their inhabitants; this moment stopping at some brilliant station-house in town or city, where a social crowd is gathered, the next in the dismal swamp, scaring the owl and fox. the startings and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs in the village day. they go and come with such regularity and precision, and their ;vhistle can be heard so far, that the farmers set their clocks by them, and thus one well-conducted institution regulates a whole country. have not men improved sounds. 99 somev;hat in punctuality since the railroad was invented? do they not talk and think faster in the depot than they did in the stage-office? there is something electrifying in the atmosphere of the former place. i have been astonished at the miracles it has wrought; that some of my neighbors, who, i should have prophesied, once for all, would never get to boston by so prompt a con veyance, are on hand when the bell rings. to do things "railroad fashion" is now the by-word; and it is worth the while to be warned so often and so sincerely by any power to get off its track. there is no stopping to read the riot act, no firing over the heads of the mob, in this case. we have constructed a fate, an atropos, that never turns aside. (let that be the name of your engine.) men are advertised that at a certain hour and minute these bolts will be shot toward particular points of the compass.; yet it interferes with no man's business, and the children go to school on the other track. we live the steadier for it. we are all educated thus to be sons of tell. the air is full of invisible bolts. every path but your own is the path of fate. keep on your own track, then. wliat recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery. it does not clasp its hands and pray to jupiter. i see these men every day go about their business with more or less courage and content, doing more even than they suspect, and perchance better employed than they could have consciously devised. i am less affected by their heroism who stood up for half an hour in the front line at buena vista, than by the steady and cheerful valor of the men who inhabit the snow-plough for their winter quarters; who have not merel}^ the three o'clock in the morning courage, which bonaparte thought was the rarest, but whose courage does not go to rest so early, who go to sleep only when the storm sleeps or the sinews of their iron steed are frozen. on this morning of the great snow, perchance, which is still raging and chilling men's blood, i hear the muffled tone of their engine bell from out the fog bank of their chilled breath, which announces that the cars are coming, without long delay, notwithstanding the veto of a new 100 walden. england northeast snow storm, and i behold the plough men covered with snow and rime, their heads peering above the mould-board which is turning down other than daisies and the nests of field-mice, like boulders of the sierra nevada, that occupy an outside place in the universe. commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert, adventurous, and unwearied. it is very natural in its methods withal, far more so than many fantastic enterprises and sentimental experiments, and hence its singular success. i am refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me, and i smell the stores which go dispensing their odors all the way from long wharf to lake champlain, reminding me of foreign parts, of coral reefs, and indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the extent of the globe. i feel more like a citizen of the world at the sight of the palm-leaf which will cover so many flaxen new england heads the next summer, the manilla hemp and cocoa-nut husks, the old junk, gunny bags, scrap iron, and rusty nails. this carload of torn sails is more legible and interesting now than if they should be wrought into paper and printed books. who can write so graphically the history of the storms they have weathered as these rents have done? they are proof-sheets which need no correction. here goes lumber from the maine woods, which did not go out to sea in the last freshet, risen four dollars on the thousand because of what did go out or was split up: pine, spruce, cedar, — first, second, third, and fourth qualities, so lately all of one quality, to wave over the bear, and moose, and caribou. next rolls thomaston lime, a prime lot, which will get far among the hills before it gets slacked. these rags in bales, of all hues and qualities, the lowest condition to which cotton and linen descend, the final result of dress, — of patterns which are now no longer cried up, unless it be in mil waukee, as those splendid articles, english, french, or american prints, ginghams, muslins, &c., gathered from all quarters both of fashion and poverty, going to be come paper of one color or a few shades only, on which forsooth will be written tales of real life, high and low, sounds. 101 and founded on fact! this closed car smells of salt fish, the strong new england and commercial scent, remind ing me of the grand banks and the fisheries. who has not seen a salt fish, thoroughly cured for this world, so that nothing can spoil it, and putting the perseverance of the saints to the blush? with which you may sweep or pave the streets, and split j^our kindlings, and the teamster shelter himself and his lading against sun, wind, and rain behind it, — and the trader, as a concord trader once did, hang it up by his door for a sign when he com mences business, until at last his oldest customer cannot tell surely whether it be animal, vegetable, or mineral, and yet it shall be as pure as a snowflake, and if it be put into a pot and boiled, will come out an excellent dun fish for a saturday's dinner. next spanish hides, with the tails still preserving their twist and the angle of elevation they had when the oxen that wore them were careering over the pampas of the spanish main, — a type of all obstinac}', and evincing how almost hopeless and incurable are all constitutional vices. i confess that, practically speaking, when i have learned a man's real disposition, i have no hopes of changing it for the better or worse in this state of existence. as the orientals say, "a cur's tail may be warmed, and pressed, and bound round with ligatures, and after a twelve years' labor bestowed upon it, still it will retain its natural form." the only effectual cure for such inveteracies as these tails exhibit is to make glue of them, which i believe is what is usually done with them, and then they will stay put and stick. here is a hogshead of molasses or of brandy directed to john smith, cuttingsville, vermont, some trader among the green mountains, who imports for the farmers near his clearing, and now perchance stands over his bulk-head and thinks of the last arrivals on the coast, how they may affect the price for him, telling his customers this moment, as he has told them twenty times lief ore this morning, that he expects some by the next train of prime ciuality. it is advertised in the cut tingsville times. avhile these things go up other things come down. warned by the whizzing sound, i look up from my book 102 walden. and see some tall pine, hewn on far northern hills, which has winged its way over the green mountains and the connecticut, shot like an arrow through the township within ten minutes, and scarce another eye beholds it; going " to be the mast of some great ammiral." ' and hark! here comes the cattle-train bearing the cattle of a thousand hills, sheepcots, stables, and cow-yards in the air, drovers wdth their sticks, and shepherd boys in the midst of their flocks, all but the mountain pastures, whirled along like leaves blown from the mountains by the september gales. the air is filled with the bleating of calves and sheep, and the hustling of oxen, as if a pastoral valley were going by. when the old bell wether at the head rattles his bell, the mountains do indeed skip like rams and the little hills hke lambs. a car-load of drovers, too, in the midst, on a level with their droves now, their vocation gone, but still clinging to their useless sticks as their badge of office. but their dogs, where are they? it is a stampede to them; they are quite thrown out; they have lost the scent. me thinks i hear them barking behind the peterboro' hills, or panting up the western slope of the green mountains. they will not be in at the death. their vocation, too, is gone. their fidelity and sagacity are below par now. they will slink back to their kennels in disgrace, or per chance run wild and strike a league with the wolf and the fox. so is your pastoral life whirled past and away. ibut the bell rings, and i must get off the track and let ' the cars go by: — what's the railroad to me? i never go to see where it ends. it fills a few hollows, and makes banks for the swallows, it sets the sand a-blowing, and the blackberries a-growing, but i cross it like a cart-path in the woods. i will not have my eyes put out and my ears spoiled by its smoke and steam and hissing. sounds. 103 xow that the cars are gone by and all the restless world with them, and the fishes in the pond no longer feel their rumbling, i am more alone than ever. for the rest of the long afternoon, perhaps, my meditations are interrupted only by the faint rattle of a carriage or team along the distant highway. sometimes, on sundays, i heard the bells, the lin coln, acton, bedford, or concord bell, avhen the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness. at a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. all sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it. there came to me in this case a melody which the air had strained, and which had conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the sound which the elements had taken up and modu lated and echoed from vale to vale. the echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. it is not merely a repetition of what was w'orth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood ; the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph. at evening, the distant lowing of some cow in the horizon beyond the woods sounded sweet and melodious, and at first i would mistake it for the voices of certain minstrels by whom i was sometimes serenaded, who might be straying over hill and dale; but soon i was not unpleasantly disappointed when it was prolonged into the cheap and natural music of the cow. i do not mean to be satirical, but to express my appreciation of those youths' singing, when i state that i perceived clearly that it was akin to the music of the cow, and they were at length one articulation of nature. regularly at half-past seven, in one part of the sum mer, after the evening train had gone by, the whippoor wills chanted their vespers for half an hour, sitting on a 104 waldex. stump by my door, or upon the ridge pole of the house. they would begin to sing almost with as much precision as a clock, within five minutes of a particular time, referred to the setting of the sun, ever}evening. i had a rare opportunity to become accpiainted with their habits. sometimes i heard four or five at once in dif ferent parts of the wood, by accident one a bar behind another, and so near me that i distinguished not onh' the cluck after each note, but often that singular buzzing sound like a fly in a spider's web, only proportionally louder. sometimes one would circle round and round me in the woods a few feet distant as if tethered by a string, when probably i was near its eggs. they sang at intervals throughout the night, and were again as musical as ever just before and about dawn. when other birds are still the screech owls take up the strain, like mourning women their ancient u-lu-lu. their dismal scream is truly ben jonsonian. wise midnight hags! it is no honest and blunt tu-whit tu-who of the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn grave yard ditty, the mutual consolations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs and delights of supernal love in the infernal groves. yet i love to hear their wailing, their doleful responses, trilled along the woodside; re minding me sometimes of music and singing birds; as if it were the dark and tearful side of music, the regrets and sighs that would fain be sung. they are the spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen souls that once in human shape night-walked the earth and did the deeds of darkness, now expiating their sins with their wailing hymns or threnodies in the scenery of their transgressions. they give me a new sense of the variety and capacity of that nature which is our common dwelling. oh-o-o-o-o that i never had been hor-r-r-r-n! sighs one on this side of the pond, and circles with the restlessness of despair to some new perch on the gray oaks. then — that i never had been bor-r-r-r-n! echoes another on the farther side with tremulous sincerity, and — bor-7'-r-r-n! comes faintly from far in the lincoln woods. i was also serenaded by a hooting owl. near at hand sounds. 105 you could fancy it the most melancholy sound in nature, as if she meant by this to stereot^^pe and make permanent in her choir the dying moans of a human being,— some ])oor weak relic of mortality who has left hope behind, and howls like an animal, yet with human sobs, on entering the dark valley, made more awful by a certain gurgling melodiousness, — i find myself beginning with the letters gl when i try to imitate it, — expressive of a mind which has reached the gelatinous mildewy stage in the mortifica tion of all healthy and courageous thought. it reminded me of ghouls and idiots and insane howlings. but now one answers from far woods in a strain made really melodious by distance, — hoo hoo hoo hoorer hoo; and indeed for the most part it suggested only pleasing associations, whether heard by day or night, summer or winter. i rejoice that there are owls. let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. it is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight woods which no day illustrates,' suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized. they represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have. all day the sun has shone on the surface of some savage swamp, where the single spruce stands hung with usnea lichens, and small hawks circulate above, and the chick adee lisps amid the evergreens, and the partridge and rabbit skulk beneath; but now a more dismal and fitting day dawns, and a different race of creatures awakes to express the meaning of nature there. late in the evening i heard the distant rumbling of wagons over bridges, — a sound heard farther than almost any other at night, — the baying of dogs, and some times again the lowing of some disconsolate cow in a distant barn-yard. in the meanwhile all the shore rang with the trump of bullfrogs, the sturdy spirits of ancient wine-bibbers and wassailers, still unrepentant, trying to sing a catch in their stygian lake, — if the walden nymphs will pardon the comparison, for though there are almost no weeds, there are frogs there, — who would fain keep up the hilarious rules of their old festal tables, though their voices have waxed hoarse and solemnly 106 walden. grave, mocking at mirth, and the wine has lost its flavor, and become only liquor to distend their paunches, and sweet intoxication never comes to drown the memory of the past, but mere saturation and waterloggedness and distention. the most aldermanic, with his chin upon a heart-leaf, which serves for a napkin to his drooling chaps, under this northern shore quaffs a deep draught of the once scorned water, and passes round the cup with the ejaculation tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r-oonk! and straightway comes over the water from some distant cove the same password repeated, where the next in seniority and girth has gulped down to his mark; and when this observance has made the circuit of the shores, then ejaculates the master of ceremonies, with satisfac tion, tr-r-r-oonk! and each in his turn repeats the same down to the least distended, leakiest, and flabbiest paunched, that there be no mistake; and then the bowl goes round again and again, until the sun disperses the morning mist, andonly the patriarch is not under the pond, but vainly bellowing troonk from time to time, and pausing for a reply. i am not sure that i ever heard the sound of cock crowing from my clearing, and i thought that it might be worth the while to keep a cockerel for his music merely, as a singing bird. the note of this once wild indian pheasant is certainly the most remarkable of any bird's, and if they could be naturalized without being domesticated, it would soon become the most famous sound in our woods, surpassing the clangor of the goose and the hooting of the owl; and then imagine the cackling of the hens to fill the pauses when their lords' clarions rested! no wonder that man added this bird to his tame stock, — to say nothing of the eggs and drumsticks. to walk in a winter morning in a wood where these birds abounded, their native woods, and hear the wild cockerels crow on the trees, clear and shrill for miles over the resounding earth, drowning the feebler notes of other birds, — think of it! it would put nations on the alert. who would not be early to rise, and rise earlier and earlier every successive day of his life, till he became unspeakably healthy, wealthy, and wise? sounds. 107 this foreign bird's note is celebrated by the poets of all countries along with the notes of their native songsters. all climates agree with brave chanticleer. he is more indigenous even than the natives. his health is ever good, his lungs are sound, his spirits never flag. even the sailor on the atlantic and pacific is awakened by his voice; but its shrill sound never roused me from my slumbers. i kept neither dog, cat, cow, pig, nor hens, so that you would have said there was a deficiency of domestic sound; neither the churn, nor the spinning wheel, nor even the singing of the kettle, nor the hissing of the urn, nor children crying, to comfort one. an old fashioned man would have lost his senses or died of ennui before this. not even rats in the wall, for they ^vere starved out, or rather were never baited in, — only squirrels on the roof and under the floor, a whippoorwill on the ridge pole, a blue-jay screaming beneath the win dow, a hare or woodchuck under the house, a screech owl or a cat-owl behind it, a flock of wild geese or a laugh ing loon on the pond, and a fox to bark in the night. not even a lark or an oriole, those mild plantation birds, ever visited my clearing. no cockerels to crow nor hens to cackle in the yard. no yard! but unfenced nature reaching up to your very sills. a young forest growing up under your windows, and wild sumachs and black berry vines breaking through into your cellar; sturdy pitch-pines rubbing and creaking against the shingles for want of room, their roots reaching quite under the house. instead of a scuttle or a blind blown off in the gale, — a pine tree snapped off or torn up by the roots behind your house for fuel. instead of no path to the front-yard gate in the great snow, — no gate — no front yard, — and no path to the civihzed world! 108 walden. v. solitude. this is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. i go and come with a strange liberty in nature, a part of herself. as i walk along the stony shore of the pond in my shirt sleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, and i see nothing special to attract me, all the elements are unusually congenial to me. the bull frogs trump to usher in the night, and the note of the whippoorwill is borne on the rippling wind from over the water. s3anpathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath; yet, like the lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled. these small waves raised by the evening wind are as remote from storm as the smooth reflecting surface. though it is now dark, the wind still blows and roars in the wood, the waves still dash, and some creatures lull the rest with their notes. the repose is never complete. the wildest animals do not repose, but seek their prey now; the fox, and skunk, and rabbit, now roam the fields and woods without fear. they are nature's watchmen, — links which connect the days of animated life. when i return to my house i find that visitors have been there and left their cards, either a bunch of flowers, or a wreath of evergreen, or a name in pencil on a yellow walnut leaf or a chip. they who come rarely to the woods take some little piece of the forest into their hands to play with by the way, which they leave, either in tentionally or accidentally. one has peeled a willow wand, woven it into a ring, and dropped it on my table. i could always tell if visitors had called in my absence, either by the bended twigs or grass, or the print of their shoes, and generally of what sex or age or quality they were by some shght trace left, as a flower dropped, or a bunch of grass plucked and thrown away, even as far off as the railroad, half a mile distant, or by the lingering solitude. 109 odor of a cigar or pipe. nay, i was frequently notified of the passage of a traveller along the highway sixt}' rods off by the scent of his pipe. there is commonly sufficient space about us. our horizon is never quite at our elbows. the thick wood is not just at our door, nor the pond, but somewhat is always clearing, familiar and worn by us, appropriated and fenced in some way, and reclaimed from nature. for what reason have i this vast range and circuit, some square miles of unfrequented forest, for my privacy, abandoned to me by men? my nearest neighbor is a mile distant, and no house is visible from any place but the hill tops wathin half a mile of my own. i have my horizon bounded by woods all to myself; a distant view of the railroad where it touches the pond on the one hand, and of the fence which skirts the woodland road on the other. but for the most part it is as solitary where i live as on the prairies. it is as much asia or africa as new england. i have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself. at night there was never a traveller passed my house, or knocked at my door, more than if i were the first or last man; unless it were in the spring, when at long intervals some came from the village to fish for pouts, — they plainly fished much more in the walden pond of their own natures, and baited their hooks with darkness, — but they soon retreated, usually with light baskets, and left *hhe world to darkness and to me," and the black kernel of the night was never profaned by any human neigh borhood. i believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, and christianity and candles have been introduced. yet i experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object, even for the poor misanthrope and most melancholy man. there can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and has his senses still. there was never yet such a storm but it was ieolian music to a healthy and innocent ear. nothing can rightly compel a simple and brave man to a vulgar sadness. while i enjoy the 110 walden. friendship of the seasons i trust that nothing can make hfe a burden to me. the gentle rain which waters my beans and keeps me in the house to-day is not drear and melancholy, but good for me, too. though it prevents my hoeing them, it is of far more worth than my hoeing. if it should continue so long as to cause the seeds to rot in the ground and destroy the potatoes in the low lands, it would still be good for the grass on the uplands, and, being good for the grass, it would be good for me. some times, when i compare myself with other men, it seems as if i were more favored by the gods than they, beyond any deserts that i am conscious of ; as if i had a warrant and surety at their hands which my fellows have not, and were especialh' guided and guarded. i do not flatter mj'self, but if it be possible they flatter me. i have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few weeks after i came to the woods, when, for an hour, i doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. to bd alone was something unpleasant. but i was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery. in the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, i was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friend liness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, and i have never thought of them since. every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. i was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that i thought no place could ever be strange to me again. — "mourning untimely consumes the sad; few are their days in the land of the living, beautiful daughter of toscar." solitude. ill some of my plcasantcst hours were during the long rain storms in the spring or fall, which confined me to the house for the afternoon as well as the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless roar and pelting; when an early twilight ushered in a long evening in which many thoughts had time to take root and unfold themselves. in those driving northeast rains which tried the village houses so, when the maids stood ready with mop and pail in front entries to keep the deluge out, i sat behind my door in my little house, which was all entry, and thoroughly enjoyed its protection. in one heavy thun der shower the lightning struck a large pitch-pine across the pond, making a very conspicuous and perfectly regular spiral groove from top to bottom, an inch or more deep, and four or five inches wide, as you would groove a walking-stick. i passed it again the other day, and was struck with awe on looking up and be holding that mark, now more distinct than ever, where a terrific and resistless bolt came down out of the harmless sky eight years ago. ' men frec^uently say to me, " i should think \o\x would feel lonesome down there, and want to be nearer to folks, rain}' and snowy days and nights especially." i am tempted to reply to such, — this whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. how far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments? why should i feel lonely? is not our planet in the milky way? this which 3'ou put seems to me not to be the most important question. what sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? i have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another. what do we want most to dwell near to? not to many men surety, the depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the school house, the grocery, beacon hill, or the five points, where men most congregate, but to the perennial source of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots in that direction. this will vary with different natures, but this is the place where a wise man 112 walden. will dig his cellar. ... i one evening overtook one of my townsmen, who has accumulated what is called "a handsome property," — though i never got a fair view of it, — on the walden road, driving a pair of cattle to market, who inquired of me how i could bring my mind to give up so many of the comforts of life. i answered that i was very sure i liked it passably well; i was not joking. and so i went home to my bed, and left him to pick his way through the darkness and the mud to brighton, — or bright-town, — which place he would reach sometime in the morning. any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a dead man makes indifferent all times and places. the place where that may occur is always the same, and in describably pleasant to all our senses. for the most part we allow only outlying and transient circumstances to make our occasions. they are, in fact, the cause of our distraction. nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being. a^ext to us the grandest laws are continually being executed. next to us is not the workman wdiom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are. " how vast and profound is the influence of the subtile powers of heaven and of earth! " "we seek to perceive them, and we do not see them; we seek to hear them, and we do not hear them; identified with the substance of things, they cannot be separated from them." "the}^ cause that in all the universe men purify and sanctify their hearts, and clothe themselves in their holiday garments to offer sacrifices and oblations to their ancestors. it is an ocean of subtile intelligences. they are everywhere, above us, on our left, on our right; they environ us on all sides." we are the subjects of an experiment which is not a little interesting to me. can we not do without the society of our gossips a little while under these circum stances, — have our own thoughts to cheer us? con fucius says truly, " virtue does not remain as an aban doned orphan; it must of necessity have neighbors." with thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane solitude. 113 sense. by a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent. we are not wholly involved in nature. i may be either the driftwood in the stream, or indra in the sky looking down on it. imay be affected by a theatrical exhibi tion; on the other hand, i may not be affected by an actual event which appears to concern me much more. i only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which i can stand as remote from myself as from another. however intense my experience, i am conscious of the presence of and criti cism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it; and that is no more i than it is you. when the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the specta tor goes his way. it was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned. this doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends sometimes. i find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. to be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. i love to be alone. i never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. we are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. a man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. the really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of cambridge college is as solitary as a dervish in the desert. the farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel lonesome, because he is employed; but when he comes home at night he cannot sit down in a room "alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but must be where he can "see the folks," and recreate, and as he thinks remunerate, himself for his day's solitude; and hence he wonders how the student can sit alone in the house all night and most of the day without ennui and "the blues;" but he 114 walden. does not realize that the student, though in the house, is still at work in his field, and chopping in his woods, as the farmer in his, and in turn seeks the same recreation and society that the latter does, though it may be a more condensed form of it. society is commonly too cheap. wq meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. we meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. we have to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war. we meet at the post-office, and at the sociable, and about the fireside every night; we live ■thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another, and i think that we thus lose some respect for one another. certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communications. con sider the girls in a factory, — never alone, hardly in their dreams. it would be better if there were but one in habitant to a square mile, as where i live. the value of a man is not in his skin, that we should touch him. i have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine and exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved by the grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness, his diseased imagina tion surrounded him, and which he believed to be real. so also, owing to bodily and mental health and strength, we may be continually cheered by a like but more normal and natural society, and come to know that we are never alone. i have a great deal of company in my house; es pecially in the morning, when nobody calls. let me suggest a few comparisons, that some one may convey an idea of my situation. i am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than walden pond itself. what company has that lonely lake, i pray? and yet it has not the blue devils, but the blue angels in it, in the azure tint of its waters. the sun is alone, except in thick weather, when there sometimes appear to be two, but one is a mock sun. god is alone, — ■ solitude. 115 but the devil, he is far from ijeiiig alone; he sees a great deal of company; he is legion. i am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a humble-bee. i am no more lonely than the mill brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an april shower, or a january thaw, or the first spider in a new house. i have occasional visits in the long winter evenings, when the snow falls fast and the wind howls in the wood, from an old settler and original proprietor, who is re ported to have dug walden poncl, and stoned it, and fringed it with pine woods; who tells me stories of old time and of new eternity; and between us we manage to pass a cheerful evening with social mirth and pleasant views of things, even without apples or cider, — a most wise and humorous friend, whom i love much, who keeps himself more seci-et than ever did goffe or whalley; and though he is thought to be dead, none can show where he is buried. an elderly dame, too, dwells in my neighborhood, invisible to most persons, in whose odorous herb garden i love to stroll sometimes, gathering simples and listening to her fables; for she has a genius of un equalled fertility, and her memory runs back farther than mythology, and she can tell me the original of every fable, and on what fact every one is founded, for the incidents occurred when she was young. a ruddy and lusty old dame, who delights in all weathers and seasons, and is likely to outlive all her children yet. the indescribable innocence and beneficence of nature, — of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter, — such health, such cheer, they afford forever! and such sym pathy have they ever with our race, that all nature would be affected, and the sun's brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put pn mourn ing in midsummer, if any man should ever for a just cause grieve. shall i not have intelligence with the earth? am i not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself? what is the pill which will keep us well, serene, con tented? not my or thy great-grandfather's, but our 116 walden. great-grandmother nature's universal, vegetable, botanic medicines, by which she has kept herself young always, outlived so many old parrs in her day, and fed her health with their decaying fatness. for my panacea, instead of one of those quack vials of a mixture dipped from acheron and the dead sea, which come out of those long shallow black-schooner-looking wagons which we sometimes see made to carry bottles, let me have a draught of vmdiluted morning air. morning air! if men will not drink of this at the fountain-head of the day, why, then, we must even bottle up some and sell it in the shops, for the benefit of those who have lost their subscription ticket to morning time in this world. but remember, it will not keep quite till noonday even in the coolest cellar, but drive out the stopples long ere that and follow westward the steps of aurora. i am no worshipper of hygeia, who was the daughter of that old herb-doctor iesculapius, and who is represented on monuments holding a serpent in one hand, and in the other a cup out of which the serpent sometimes drinks; but rather of hebe, cupbearer to jupiter, who was the daughter of juno and wild lettuce, and who had the power of restoring gods and men to the vigor of youth. she was probably the only thoroughly sound-conditioned, healthy, and robust young lady that ever walked the globe, and wherever she came it was spring. vi. visitors. i think that i love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man that comes in my way. i am naturally no hermit, but might possibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room, if my business called me thither. i had three chairs in my house: one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. when visitors came in larger and unexpected numbers, there was but the visitors. 117 third chair for thorn all, but they generally economized the room by standing up. it is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain. i have had twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often parted without being aware that we had come very near to one another. many of our houses, both public and private, with their almost innumerable apartments, their huge halls and their cellars for the storage of wines and other munitions of peace, appear to me extravagantly large for their in habitants. they are so vast and magnificent that the latter seem to be only vermin which infest them. i am surprised when the herald blows his summons before some tremont or astor or middlesex house, to see come creeping out over the piazza for all inhabitants a ridiculous mouse, which soon again slinks into some hole in the pavement. one inconvenience i sometimes experienced in so small a house, the difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when we began to utter the big thoughts in big words. you want room for your thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they make their port. the bullet of your thought must have overcome its lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last and steady course before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may plough out again through the side of his head. also our sentences wanted room to unfold and forai their columns in the interval. in dividuals, like nations, must have suitable broad and natural boundaries, even a considerable neutral ground, between them. i have found it a singular luxury to talk across the pond to a companion on the opposite side. in my house we were so near that we could not begin to hear, — we could not speak low enough to be heard; as when you throw two stones into calm water so near that they break each other's undulations. if we are merely loquacious and loud talkers, then we can afford to stand very near together, cheek by jowl, and feel each other's breath; but if we speak reservedly and thoughtfully, we want to be farther apart, that all animal heat and moisture may have a chance to evaporate. 118 waldex. if wo would enjoy the most intimate societ}^ with that in each of us which is without, or above, being spoken to, we must not only be silent, but commonly so far apart bodily that we cannot possibly hear each other's voice in any case. referred to this standard, speech is for the con venience of those who are hard of hearing; but there are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout. as the conversation began to assume a loftier and grander tone, we gradually shoved our chairs farther apart till they touched the wall in opposite corners, and then commonly there was not room enough. my ''best" room, however, my withdrawing room, always ready for company, on whose carpet the sun rarely fell, was the pine wood behind my house. thither in summer days, when distinguished guests came, i took them, and a priceless domestic swept the floor and dusted the furniture and kept the things in order. if one guest came he sometimes partook of my frugal meal and it was no interruption to conversation to be stirring a hasty pudding, or watching the rising and maturing of a loaf of bread in the ashes, in the mean while. but if twenty came and sat in my house, there was nothing said about dinner, though there might be bread enough for two, more than if eating were a forsaken habit ; but we naturally practised abstinence ; and this was never felt to be an offence against hospitality, but the most proper and considerate course. the waste and decay of physical life, which so often needs repair, seemed miraculously retarded in such a case, and the vital vigor stood its ground. i could entertain thus a thousand as well as twenty; and if any ever went away disappointed or hungry from my house when they found me at home, you may depend upon it that i sympathized with them at least. so easy is it, though many housekeepers doubt it, to establish new and better customs in the place of the old. you need not rest your reputation on the dinners j'ou give. for my own part, i was never so effectually deterred from frequenting a man's house, by any kind of cerberus whatever, as by the parade one made about dining me, which i took to be a very polite and roundabout hint never to trouble him so again. visitors. 119 i think i shall jiever revisit those scenes. i should be proud to have for the motto of my cabin those hues of spenser which one of my visitors inscribed on a yellow walnut leaf for a card: — "arrived there, the little house they fill, ne looke for entertainment where none was; rest is their feast, and all things at their will: the noblest mind the best contentment has." when winslow, afterward governor of the plymouth colony, went with a companion on a visit of ceremony to massasoit on foot through the woods, and arrived tired and hungry at his lodge, they were well received by the king, but nothing was said about eating that day. when the night arrived, to quote their own words, — " he laid us on the vjed with himself and his wife, they at the one end and we at the other, it being onh' a plank, laid a foot from the grovmd, and a thin mat upon them. two more of his chief men, for want of room, pressed by and upon us; so that we were worse weary of our lodging than of our journey." at one o'clock the next day massasoit "brought two fishes that he had shot," about thrice as big as a bream; "these being boiled, there were at least forty looked for a share in them. the most ate of them. this meal only we had in two nights and a day; and had not one of us bought a partridge, we had taken our journey fasting." fearing that they would be light headed for want of food and also sleep, owing to ".the savages' barbarous singing (for they used to sing them selves asleep)," and that they might get home while they had strength to travel, they departed. as for lodging, it is true they were but poorly entertained, though what they found an inconvenience was no doubt intended for an honor; but as far as eating was concerned, i do not see how the indians could have done better. they had nothing to eat themselves, and they were wiser than to think that apologies could supply the place of food to their guests; so they drew their belts tighter and said nothing about it. another time when winslow visited them, it being a season of plenty with them, there was no deficiency in this respect. 120 walden. as for men, they will hardly fail on.e anywhere. i had more visitors while i lived in the woods than at any other period of my life; i moan that i had some. i met several there under more favorable circumstances than i could anywhere else. but fewer came to see me upon trivial business. in this respect, my company was winnowed by my mere distance from town. i had withdrawn so far within the great ocean of solitude, into which the rivers of society empty, that for the most part, so far as my needs were concerned, only the finest sediment was deposited around me. besides, there were wafted to me evidences of unexplored and un cultivated continents on the other side. who should come to my lodge this morning but a true homeric or paphlagonian man, — he had so suitable and poetic a name that i am sorry i cannot print it here, — a canadian, a wood-chopper and post-maker, who can hole fifty posts in a day, who made his last supper on a woodchuck which his dog caught. he, too, has heard of homer, and, "if it were not for books," would "not know what to do rainy days," though perhaps he has not read one wholly through for many rainy seasons. some priest who could pronounce the greek itself taught him to read his verse in the testament in his native parish far awav; and now i must translate to him, while he holds the l^ook, achilles' reproof to patroclus, for his sad countenance. — "why are you in tears, patroclus, like a young girl?" — "or have you alone heard some news from phthia? they say that menoetius hves yet, son of actor, and peleus hves, son of ji^acus, among the myrmidons, either of whom having died, we should greatly grieve." he says, "that's good." he has a great bundle of white-oak l)ark under his arm for a sick man, gathered this sunday morning. "i suppose there's no harm in going after such a thing to-day," says he. to him homer was a great writer, though what his writing was about he did not know. a more simple and natural man it would be hard to find. vice and disease, which cast such a sombre moral hue over the world, seemed to have visitors. 121 hardly any existence for him. he was about twenty eight years old, and had left canada and his father's house a dozen years before to work in the states, and earn money to buy a farm with at last, perhajds in his native countr}-. he was cast in the coarsest mould; a stout but sluggish body, yet gracefully carried, with a thick sunburnt neck, dark bushy hair, and dull sleepy blue eyes, which were occasionally lit up with expres sion. he wore a fiat gray cloth cap, a dingy wool colored greatcoat, and cowhide boots. he was a great consumer of meat, usually carrying his dinner to his work a couple of miles past my house, — for he chopped all summer, — in a tin pail; cold meats, often cold wood chucks, and coffee in a stone bottle which dangled by a string from his belt; and sometimes he offered me a drink. he came along early, crossing my beanfield, though without anxiety or haste to get to his work, such as yankees exhibit. he wasn't a-going to hurt him self. he didn't care if he only earned his board. fre quently he would leave his dinner in the bushes, when his dog had caught a woodchuck by the way, and go back a mile and a half to dress it and leave it in the cellar of the house where he boarded, after deliberating first for half an hour whether he could not sink it in the pond safely till nightfall, — loving to dwell long upon these themes. he would say, as he went by in the morning: " how thick the pigeons are ! if working every day were not my trade, i could get all the meat i should want by hunting, — pigeons, woodchucks, rabbits, partridges, — by gosh! i could get all i should want for a week in one he was a skilful chopper, and indulged in some flourishes and ornaments in his art. he cut his trees level and close to the ground that the sprouts which came up afterward might be more vigorous and a sled might slide over the stumps; and instead of leaving "a whole tree to support his corded wood, he would pare it away to a slender stake or splinter which you could break off with your hand at last. he interested me because he was so quiet and soli tary and so happy withal: a well of good humor and 122 walden. contentment which overflowed at his eyes. his mirth was without alloy. sometimes i saw him at his work in the woods, felling trees, and he would greet me with a laugh of inexpressible satisfaction, and a salutation in canadian french, though he spoke english as well. when i approached him he would suspend his work, txnd with half-suppressed mirth lie along the trunk of a pine which he had felled, and, peeling off the inner bark, roll it up into a ball and chew it while he laughed and talked. such an exuberance of animal spirits had he that he sometimes tuml^led down and rolled on the ground with laughter at anything which made him think and tickled him. looking round upon the trees he would exclaim, — ''by george! i can enjoy myself well enough here chopping; i want no better sport." some times, when at leisure, he amused himself all day in the woods with a pocket pistol, firing salutes to himself at regular intervals as he walked. in the winter he had a fire by which at noon he warmed his coffee in a kettle; and as he sat on a log to eat his dinner the chickadees would sometimes come round and alight on his arm and peck at the potato in his fingers; and he said that he " liked to have the little fellers about him." in him the animal man chiefly was developed. in physical endurance and contentment he was cousin to the pine and the rock. i asked him once if he was not sometimes tired at night, after working all day; and he answered with a sincere and serious look, " gorrappit, i n^ver was tired in my life." but the intellectual ancl what is called spiritual man in him were slumbering as in an infant. he had been instructed only in that inno cent and ineffectual way in which the catholic priests teach the aborigines, by which the pupil is never educated to the degree of consciousness, but only to tlie degree of trust, and reverence, and a child is not made a man, but kept a child. when nature made him, she gave him a strong ])ody and contentment for his portion, and propped him on every side with reverence and reliance, that he might live out his threescore years and ten a child. he was so genuine and unsophisticated that no introduction would serve to introduce him, more than visitors. 123 if 3'ou introduced a woodchuck to your neighbor. he had got to find him out as you did. he would not play any part. men paid him wages for work, and so helped to feed and clothe him; but he never exchanged opinions with them. he was so simply and naturally humble — if he can be called humble who never aspires — that humility was no distinct quality in him, nor could he cohceive of it. wiser men were demigods to him. if you told him that such a one was coming, he did as if he thought that anything so grand would expect nothing of himself, but take all responsibility ou itself, and let him be forgotten still. he never heard the sound of praise. he particularly reverenced the writer and the preacher. their performances were miracles. when i told him that i wrote considerably, he thought for a long time that it was merely the handwriting which i meant, for he could write a remarkably good hand him self. i sometimes found the name of his native parish handsomely written in the snow by the highway, with the proper french accent, and knew that he had passed. i asked him if he ever wished to write his thoughts. he said that he had read and written letters for those who could not, but he never tried to write thoughts, — no, he could not, he could not tell what to put first, it would kill him, and then there was spelling to be attended to at the same time! i heard that a distinguished wise man and reformer asked him if he did not want the world to be changed; but he answered with a chuckle of surprise in his cana dian accent, not knowing that the question had ever been entertained before, ''no, i like it well enough." it would have suggested many things to a philosopher to have dealings with him. to a stranger he appeared to know nothing of things in general; yet i sometimes saw in him a man whom i had not seen before, and i did not know whether he was as wise as shakspeare or as simply ignorant as a child, whether to suspect him of a fine poetic consciousness or of stupidity. a towns man told me that when he met him sauntering through the village in his small close-fitting cap, and whistling to himself, he reminded him of a prince in disguise. 124 walden: his only books were an almanac and an arithmetic, in which last he was considerably expert. the former was a sort of cyclopaedia to him, which he supposed to contain an abstract of human knowledge, as indeed it does to a considerable extent. i loved to sound him on the various reforms of the day, and he never failed to look at them in the most simple and practical light. he had never heard of such things before. could he do without factories? i asked. he had worn the home made vermont gray, he said, and that was good. could he dispense with tea and coffee? did this countiy afford any beverage besides water? he had soaked hemlock leaves in water and drunk it, and thought that was better than water in warm weather. when i asked him if he could do without money, he showed the convenience of money in such a way as to suggest and coincide with the most philosophical accounts of the origin of this institu tion, and the very derivation of the word -pecunia. if an ox were his property, and he wished to get needles and thread at the store, he thought it would be incon venient, and impossible soon, to go on mortgaging some portion of the creature each time to that amount. he could defend many institutions better than any philosopher, because, in describing them as they con cerned him, he gave the true reason for their prevalence, and speculation had not suggested to him any other. at another time, hearing plato's definition of a man, — a biped without feathers — and that one exhibited a cock plucked and called it plato's man, he thought it an important difference that the knees bent the wrong way. he would sometimes exclaim: "how i love to talk! by george, i could talk all day!" i asked him once, when i had not seen him for many months, if he had got a new idea this summer. '^good lord," said he, "a man that has to work as i do, if he does not forget the ideas he has had, he will do well. maybe the man you hoe with is inclined to race; then, by gorry, 3^our mind must be there; you think of weeds." he would sometimes ask mo first, on such occasions, if i had made any improvement. one winter day i asked him if he was always satisfied with himself, wishing to suggest visitors. 125 a substitute within him for the priest without, and some higher motive for hving. '' satisfied !"' said he; ''some men are satisfied with one thing, and some with another. one man, perhaps, if he has got enough, will be satisfied to sit all day with his back to the fire and his l^elly to the table, by george!" yet i never, by any manoeuvring, could get him to take the spiritvial view of things; the highest that he appeared to conceive of was a simple expediency, such as you might expect an animal to appreciate; and this, practicall}-, is true of most men. if i suggested any improvement in his mode of life, he merely answered, without expressing any regret, that it was too late. yet he thoroughly believed in honesty and the like virtues. there was a certain positive originality, however slight, to be detected in him, and i occasionally observed that he was thinking for himself and expressing his own opinion, a phenomenon so rare that i would any day walk ten miles to observe it, and it amounted to the reorigination of many of the institutions of society. though he hesitated, and perhaps failed to express him self distinctly, he always had a presentable thought be ximd. yet his thinking was so primitive and immersed in his animal life, that, though more promising than a merety learned man's, it rarely ripened to anything which can be reported. he suggested that there might be men of genius in the lowest grades of life, however permanently humble and illiterate, who take their own view always, or do not pretend to see at all; who are as bottomless even as walden pond was thought to be, though they may be dark and muddy. many a traveller came out of his way to see me and the inside of my house, and, as an excuse for calling, asked for a glass of water. i told them that i drank at the pond, and pointed thither, offering to lend them a dipper. far off as i lived, i was not exempted from that annual visitation which occurs, methinks, about the first of april, when everybody is on the move; and i had my share of good luck, though there were some curious specimens among my visitors. half-witted men from 126 walden. the almshouse and elsewhere came to see me; but i endeavored to make them exercise all the wit they had, and make their confessions to me; in such cases making wit the theme of our conversation; and so was com pensated. indeed, i found some of them to be wiser than the so-called overseers of the poor and selectmen of the town, and thought it was time that the tables were turned. with respect to wit, i learned that there was not much difference between the half and the whole. one day, in particular, an inoffensive, simple-minded pauper, whom with others i had often seen used as fencing stuff, standing or sitting on a bushel in the fields to keep cattle and himself from straying, visited me, and expressed a wish to live as i did. he told me, with the utmost simplicity and truth, quite superior, or rather inferior, to anything that is called humility, that he was "deficient in intellect." these were his words. the lord had made him so, yet he supposed the lord cared as much for him as for another, "i have always been so," said he, ''from my childhood; i never had much mind; i was not like other children; i am weak in the head. it was the lord's will, i suppose." and there he was to prove the truth of his words. he was a meta physical puzzle to me. i have rarely met a fellow-man on such promising ground, — it was so simple and sincere and so true, all that he said. and, true enough, in pro portion as he appeared to humble himself was he exalted. i did not know at first but it was the result of a wise policy. it seemed that from such a basis of truth and frankness as the poor weak-headed pauper had laid, our mtercourse might go forward to something better than the intercourse of sages. i had some guests from those not reckoned commonly among the town's poor, but who should be; who are among the world's poor, at any rate, guests who appeal not to your hospitality, but to your hospitalality; who earnestly wish to be helped, and preface their appeal with the information that they are resolved, for one thing, never to help themselves. i require of a visitor that he be not actually starving, though he may have the very best appetite in the' world, however he got it. visitors. 127 objects of charity are not guests. men who did not know when their visit had terminated, though i went about my business again, answering them from greater and greater remoteness. men of ahnost every degree of wit called on me in the migrating season. some who had more wits than they knew what to do with; runaway slaves with plantation manners, who listened from time to time, like the fox in the fable, as if they heard the hounds a-baying on their track, and looked at me ijc scechingly, as much as to say, — " o christian, will you send me back? " one real runaway slave, among the rest, whom i helped to forward toward the north star. men of one idea, like a hen with one chicken, and that a duckling; men of a thou sand ideas, and unkempt heads, like those hens which arc made to take charge of a hundred chickens, all in pur suit of one bug, a score of them lost in every morning's dew, — and become frizzled and mangy in consequence; men of ideas instead of legs, a sort of intellectual centi pede that made you crawl all over. one man proposed a book in which visitors should write their names, as at the white mountains; but, alas! i have too good a memory to make that necessary. i could not but notice some of the peculiarities of my visitors. girls and boys and young women gen erally seemed glad to be in the woods. they looked in the pond and at the flowers, and improved their time. men of business, even farmers, thought only of solitude and employment, and of the great distance at which i dwelt from something or other; and though they saicl that they loved a ramble in the woods occasionally, it was obvious that they did not. restless committed men, whose time was all taken up in getting a living or keeping it; ministers who spoke of god as if they enjoyed a monopoly of the subject, who covild not bear all kinds of opinions; doctors, lawyers, uneasy house keepers who pried into my cupboard and bed when i was out, — how came mrs. to know that my sheets were not as clean as hers? — young men who had ceased to be young, and had concluded that it was safest to 128 walden. follow the beaten track of the professions, — all these generally said that it was not possible to do so much good in my position. ay! there was the rub. the old and infirm and the timid, of whatever age or sex, thought most of sickness, and sudden accident and death; to them life seemed full of danger, — what danger is there if you don't think of any? — and they thought that a prudent man would carefully select the safest position, where dr. b. might be on hand at a moment's warning. to them the village was literally a co7n-munity, a league for mutual defence, and you would suppose that they would not go a-huckleberrying without a medicine chest. the amount of it is, if a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in joroportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. a man sits as many risks as he runs. finally, there were the self-stjded reformers, the greatest bores of all, who thought that i was forever singing, — this is the house that i built; this is the man that hves in the house that i built; but they did not know that the third line was, — these are the folks that worry the man that lives in the house that i built. t did not fear the hen-harriers, for i kept no chickens; but i feared the men-harriers rather. i had more cheering visitors than the last. children come a-berrying, railroad men taking a sunday morning walk in clean shirts, fishermen and hunters, poets and philosophers, in short, all honest pilgrims, who came out to the woods for freedom's sake, and really left the village behind, i was ready to greet with, — ''welcome, englishmen! welcome. englishmen!" for i had had communication with that race. the be ax field. 129 vii. the beanfield. meanwhile my beans, the length of whose rows, added together, was seven miles already planted, were impatient to be hoed, for the earliest had grown con siderably before the latest were in the ground; indeed, they were not easily to be put off. what was the meaning of this so steady and self-respecting, this small herculean labor, i knew not. i came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than i wanted. they attached me to the earth, and so i got strength like antaeus. but why should i raise them? only heaven knows. this was my curious labor all summer, — to make this por tion of the earth's surface, which had yielded only cinquefoil, blackberries, johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wild fruits and pleasant flowers, produce instead this pulse. what shall i learn of beans or beans of me? i cherish them, i hoe them, early and late i have an eye to them; and this is my day's work. it is a fine broad leaf to look on. my auxiliaries are the dews and rains which water this dry soil, and what fertility is in the soil itself, which for the most part is lean and effete. my enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all wood chucks. the last have nibbled for me a quarter of an acre clean. but what right had i to oust johnswort and the rest, and break up their ancient herb garden? soon, however, the remaining beans will be too tough for them, and go forward to meet new foes. when i was four years old, as i well remember, i was brought from boston to this my native town, through these very woods and this field, to the pond. it is one of the oldest scenes stamped on my memory. and now to-night my flute has waked the echoes over that very water. the pines still stand here older than i; or, if some have fallen, i have cooked my supper with their stumps, and a new growth is rising all around, preparing another aspect for new infant eyes. almost the same 130 walden. jolinswort springs from the same perennial root in this pasture, and even i have at length helped to clothe that fabulous landscape of my infant dreams, and one of the results of my presence and influence is seen in these bean leaves, corn blades, and potato vines. i planted about two acres and a half of upland; and as it was only about fifteen years since the land was cleared, and i myself had got out two or three cords of stumps, i did not give it any manure; but in the course of the summer it appeared by the arrow-heads which i turned up in hoeing, that an extinct nation had anciently dwelt here and planted corn and beans ere white men came to clear the land, and so, to some extent, had exhausted the soil for this very crop. before yet any woodchuck or squirrel had run across the road, or the sun had got above the shrulj-oaks, while all the dew was on, though the farmers warned me against it, — i would advise you to do all your work if possible while the dew is on, — i began to level the ranks of haughty weeds in my beanfield and throw dust upon their heads. early in the morning i worked barefooted, dabbling like a plastic artist in the dewy and crumbling sand, but later in the day the sun blistered my feet. there the sun lighted me to hoe beans, pacing slowly backward and forward over that yellow gravelly upland, between the long green row3, fifteen rods, the one end terminating in a shrub-oak copse where i could rest in the shade, the other in a blackberry field where the green berries deepened their tints by the time i had made another bout. removing the weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean stems, and encouraging this weed which i had sown, making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and millet grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass, — this was my daily work. as i had little aid from horses or cattle, or hired men or boys, or improved implements of husbandry, i was much slower, and became much more intimate with my beans than usual. but labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness. it has a constant and the be ax field. 131 imperishable moral, antl to the scholar it yields a classic result. a very agricula laboriosus was i to travellers bound westward through lincoln and wayland to no body knows where; they sitting at their ease in gigs, with elbows on knees, and reins loosely hanging in festoons; i the homestaying laborious native of the soil. but soon my homestead was out of their sight and thought. it was the only open and cultivated field for a great distance on either side of the road; so they made the most of it; and sometimes the man in the field heard more of travellers' gossip and comment than was meant for his ear: "beans so late! peas so late!" — for i con tinued to plant when others had begun to hoe, — the ministerial husbandman had not suspected it. "corn, my boy, for fodder; corn for fodder." "does he live there?" asks the black bonnet of the gray coat; and the hard-featured farmer reins up his grateful clobbin to inquire what you are doing where he sees no manure in the furrow, and recommends a little chip dirt, or any little waste stuff, or it may be ashes or plaster. " but here were two acres and a half of furrows, and only a hoe for cart and two hands to draw it, — there being an aversion to other carts and horses, — and chip dirt far away. fellow-travellers as they rattled by compared it aloud with the fields which they had passed, so that i came to know how i stood in the agricultural world. this was one field not in mr. coleman's report. and, by the way, who estimates the value of the crop which nature yields in the still wilder fields unimproved by man? the crop of english hay is carefulty weighed, the moisture calculated, the silicates and the potash; but in all dells and pond holes in the woods and pastures and swamps grows a rich and various crop only unreaped b}^ man. mine was, as it were, the connecting link between wild and cultivated fields; as some states are civilized, and others half-civilized, and others savage or barbarous, so my field was, though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated field. they were beans cheerfully returning to their wild and primitive state that i culti vated, and my hoe played the rfuis des vaches for them. near at hand, upon the topmost spray of a birch, 132 walden. sings the brown-thrashcr — or red mavis, as some love to call him — all the morning, glad of your society, that would find out another farmer's field if yours were not here. while you are planting the seed, he cries, — " drop it, drop it, — cover it up, cover it up, — pull it up, pull it up, pull it up." but this was not corn, and so it was safe from such enemies as he. you may wonder what his rigmarole, his amateur paganini performances on one string or on twenty, have to do with your planting, and yet prefer it to leached ashes or plaster. it was a cheap sort of top dressing in which i had entire faith. as i drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe, i disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years lived under these heavens, and their small implements of war and hunting were brought to the light of this modern day. they lay mingled with other natural stones, some of which bore the marks of having been burned by indian fires, and some l^y the sun, and also bits of pottery and glass brought hither by the recent cultivators of the soil. when my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. it was no longer beans that i hoed, nor i that hoed beans; and i remembered with as much pity as pride, if i remembered at all, my acc^uaintances who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios. the night-hawk circled over head in the sunny afternoons — for i sometimes made a day of it — like a mote in the eye, or in heaven's eye, falling from time to time with a swoop and a sound as if the heavens were rent, torn at last to very rags and tatters, and yet a seamless cope remained; small imps that fill the air and lay their eggs on the ground on bare sand or rocks on the tops of hills, where few have found them; graceful and slender, like ripples caught up from the pond, as leaves are raised by the wind to float in the heavens; such kindredship is in nature. the hawk is aerial brother of the wave which he sails over and surveys, those his perfect air-inflated wings answering to the elemental unfledged pinions of the sea. or sometimes i watched a pair of hen-hawks circling high in the sky, the be an field. 133 alternately soaring and descending, approaching and leaving one another, as if they were the embodiment of my own thoughts. or i was attracted by the passage of wild pigeons from this wood to that, with a slight quivering winnowing sound and carrier haste; or from under a rotten stump my hoe turned up a sluggish, portentous, and outlandish spotted salamander, a trace of egypt and the nile, yet our contemporary. when i paused to lean on my hoe, these sounds and sights i heard and saw anywhere in the row, a part of the inexhaustible entertainment which the country offers. on gala days the town fires its great guns, which echo like popguns to these woods, and some waifs of martial music occasionally penetrate thus far. to me, away there in my beanfield at the other end of the town, the big guns sounded as if a puff ball had burst; and when there was a military turnout of which i was ignorant, i have sometimes had a vague sense all the clay of some sort of itching and disease in the horizon as if some eruption would break out there soon, either scarla tina or canker-rash, until at length some more favorable puff of wind, making haste over the fields and up the waylancl road, brought me information of the "trainers." it seemed by the distant hum as if somebody's bees had swarmed, and that the neighbors, according to virgil's advice, by a faint tintinnabulum upon the most sonorous of their domestic utensils, were endeavoring to call them down into the hive again. and when the sound died quite away, and the hum had ceased, and the most favorable breezes told no tale, i knew that they had got the last drone of them all safely into the middlesex hive, and that now their minds were bent on the honey with which it was smeared. i felt proud to know that the liberties of massachu setts and of our fatherland were in such safe keeping; and as i turned to my hoeing again i was filled with an inexpressible confidence, and pursued my labor cheerfully with a calm trust in the future. when there were several bands of musicians, it sounded as if the village was a vast bellows, and all the buildings expanded and collapsed alternately with a din. but 134 walden. sometimes it was a really noble and inspiring strain that reached these woods, and the trumpet that sings of fame, and i felt as if i could spit a mexican with a good relish, — for why should we always stand for trifles? — and looked round for a woodchuck or a skunk to exercise my chivalry upon. these martial strains seemed as far away as palestine, and reminded me of a march of crusaders in the horizon, with a slight tantivy and tremu lous motion of the elm-tree tops which overhang the village. this was one of the great days; though the sky had from my clearing only the same everlastingly great look that it wears daily, and i saw no difference in it. it was a singular experience, that long acquaintance which i cultivated with beans, what with planting, and hoeing, and harvesting, and thrashing, and picking over, and selling them, — the last was the hardest of all, — i might add eating, for i did taste. i was deter mined to know beans. when they were growing, i used to hoe from five o'clock in the morning till noon, and commonly spent the rest of the day about other affairs. consider the intimate and curious acquaintance one makes with various kinds of weeds, — it will bear some iteration in the account, for there was no little iteration in the labor, — disturbing their delicate organ izations so ruthlessly, and making such invidious dis tinctions with his hoe, levelling whole ranks of one species, and sedulously cultivating another. that's roman wormwood, — that's pigweed, — that's sorrel, — that's piper grass, — have at him, chop him up, turn his roots up ward to the sun, don't let him have a fibre in the shade, if you do he'll turn himself t'other side up and be as green as a leek in two days. a long war, not with cranes, but with weeds, those trojans who had sun and rain and dews on their side. daily the beans saw me come to their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of their enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy dead. many a lusty crest-waving hector, that towered a whole foot above his crowding comrades, fell before my weapon and rolled in the dust. those summer days which some of mv contemporaries devoted to the fine arts in boston and rome, and others the be an field. 135 to contemplation in india, and others to trade in london or new york, i thus, with the other farmers of new england, devoted to husbandry. not that i wanted beans to eat. for i am by natiu'e a pythagorean, so far as beans are concerned, whether they mean porridge or voting, and exchanged them for rice; but, perchance, as some must work in fields if only for the sake of tropes and expression, to serve a parable-maker one day. it was on the whole a rare amusement, which, continued too long, might have become a dissipation. though i gave them no manure, and did not hoe them all once, i hoed them unusually well as far as i went, and was paid for it in the end, "there being in truth," as evelyn says, "no compost or laetation whatsoever comparable to this continual motion, repastination, and turning of the mould with the spade." "the earth," he adds else where, "especially if fresh, has a certain magnetism in it, by which it attracts the salt, power, or virtue (call it either) which gives it life, and is the logic of all the labor and stir we keep about it, to sustain us; all dungings and other sordid tempering.*? being . but the vicars succeclaneous to this improvement." moreover, this being one of those "worn-out and exhausted lay fields which enjoy their sabbath," had perchance, as sir kenelm digby thinks likely, attracted "vital spirits" from the air. i harvested twelve bushels of beans. but to be more particular, for it is complained that mr. coleman has reported chiefly the expensive experi ments of gentlemen farmers, my outgoes were, — for a hoe $0 54 ploughing, harrowing, and furrowing 7 50 too much. beans for seed 3 12^ potatoes " 1 33 peas for seed 40 turnip seed 06 white hne for crow fence 02 horse cultivator and boy three hours 1 00 horse and cart to get crop 75 in all $14 72^ m}^ income was (patrem familias vendacem, non emacem esse oportet) , from 136 walden. nine bushels and twelve quarts of beans sold $16 94 five bushels large potatoes 2 50 nine bushels small potatoes 2 25 grass 1 00 stalks 75 in all $23 44 leaving a pecuniary profit, as i have elsewhere said, of $8 71^. this is the result of my experience in raising beans. plant the common small white bush bean about the first of june, in rows three feet by eighteen inches apart, being careful to select fresh round and unmixed seed. first look out for worms, and supply vacancies, by plant ing anew. then look out for woodchucks, if it is an exposed place, for they will nibble off the earliest tender leaves almost clean as they go; and again, when the young tendrils make their appearance, they have notice of it, and will shear them off with both buds and young pods, sitting erect like a squirrel. but above all, harvest as early as possible, if you would escape frosts and have a fair and salable crop; you may save much loss by this means. this further experience also i gained, i said to my self, i will not plant beans and corn with so much in dustry another summer, but such seeds, if the seed is not lost, as sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith, innocence, and the like, and see if they will not grow in this soil, even with less toil and manurance, and sustain me, for surely it has not been exhausted for these crops. alas! i said this to myself; but now another summer is gone, and another, and another, and i am obliged to say to you, reader, that the seeds which i planted, if indeed they were the seeds of those virtues, were wormeaten or had lost their vitality and so did not come up. commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or timid. this generation is very sure to plant corn and beans each new year precisely as the indians did cen turies ago, and taught the first settlers to do, as if there were a fate in it. i saw an old man the other day, to my astonishment, making the holes with a hoe for the seventieth time at least, and not for himself to lie down i the be an field. 137 in! but wh}should not the new englander try new adventures, and not lay so much stress on his grain, his potato and grass crop, and his orchards, — raise other crops than these? why concern ourselves so much about our beans for seed, and not be concerned at all about a new generation of men? we should really be fed and cheered if when we met a man we were sure to see that some of the qualities which i have named, which we all prize more than those other productions, but which are for the most part broadcast and floating in the air, had taken root and grown in him. here comes such a subtile and ineffable quality, for instance, as truth or justice, though the slightest amount or new variety of it, along the road. our ambassadors should be instructed to send home such seeds as these, and congress help to distribute them over all the land. we should never stand upon ceremony with sincerity. we should never cheat and insult and banish one another by our mean ness, if there were present the kernel of worth and friend liness. we should not meet thus in haste. i\iost men i do not meet at all, for they seem not to have time; they are busy about their beans. we would not deal with a man thus plodding ever, leaning on a hoe or a spade as a staff between his work, not as a mushroom, l)ut partially risen out of the earth, something more than erect, like swallows alighted and walking on the ground : — "and as he spake, his wings would now and then spread, as he naeant to fly, then close again," so that we should suspect that we might be conversing with an angel. bread may not always nourish us; but it always does us good, it even takes stiffness out of our joints, and makes us supple and buoyant, when we knew not what ailed us, to recognize any generosity in man or nature, to share any unmixed and heroic joy. ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry was once a sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us, our object being to have large farms and large crops merely. we have no festival, nor procession, nor ceremony, not 138 walden. excepting our cattle-shows and so-called thanksgivings, by which the farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is reminded of its sacred origin. it is the premium and the feast which tempt him. he sacrifices not to ceres and the terrestrial jove, but to the infernal plutus rather. by avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefl}^, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. he knows nature but as a robl:)er. cato saj's that the profits of agriculture are particularly pious or just {maximeque pius quoestus), and according to varro, the old romans " callecl the same earth mother and ceres, and thought that they who cultivated it led a pious and useful life, and that they alone were left of the race of king saturn." we are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cul tivated fields and on the prairies and forests without distinction. they all reflect and absorb his rays ahke, and the former make but a small part of the glorious picture which he beholds in his daily course. in his view the earth is all et^ually cultivated like a garden. therefore we should receive the benefit of his light and heat with a corresponding trust and magnanimity. what though i value the seed of these beans, and harvest that in the fall of the year? this broad field which i have looked at so long looks not to me as the principal cultivator, but away from me to influences more genial to it, which water and make it green. these beans have results which are not harvested by me. do they not grow for woodchucks partly? the ear of wheat (in latin spica, obsolete^ speca, from spe, hope) should not be the only hope of the husbandman; its kernel or grain igranum, from gerendo, bearing) is not all that it bears. how, then, can our harvest fail? shall i not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds? it matters little comparatively whether the fields fill the farmer's barns. the true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this j'ear the village. 139 or not, and finish his labor with every day, rehnquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first but his last fruits also. viii. the village. after hoeing, or perhaps reading and writing, in the forenoon, i usually bathed again in the pond, swim ming across one of its coves for a stint, and washed the dust of labor from my person, or smoothed out the last wrinkle which study had made, and for the afternoon was absolutely free. every day or two i strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there, circulating either from mouth to mouth, on from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken in homoeopathic doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs. as i walked in the woods to. see the birds and squirrels, so i walked in the village to see the men and boys; instead of the wind among the pines i heard the carts rattle. in one direction from my house there was a colony of muskrats in the river meadows; under the grove of elms and buttonwoods in the other horizon was a village of busy men, as curious to me as if they had been prairie dogs, each sitting at the mouth of its burrow, or running over to a neighbor's to gossip. i went there frequently to observe their habits. the village appeared to me a great news room; and on one side to support it, as once at redding & company's on state street, they kept nuts and raisins, or salt and meal and other groceries. some have such a vast appetite for the former commodit}^, that is, the news, and such sound digestive organs, that they can sit forever in public avenues without stirring, and let it simmer and whisper through them like the etesian winds, or as if inhaling ether, it only producing numbness and insensibility to pain, — otherwise it would be often painful to hear, — without affecting the consciousness. i hardly ever failed, when i rambled through the village. 140 waldex. to see a row of such worthies, either sitting on a ladder sunning themselves, with their bodies inclined forward and their eyes glancing along the line this way and that, from time to time, with a voluptuous expression, or else leaning against a barn with their hands in their pockets, like caryatides, as if to prop it up. they, being commonly out of doors, heard whatever was in the wind. these are the coarsest mills, in which all gossip is first rudely digested or cracked up before it is emptied into finer and more delicate hoppers within doors. i observed that the vitals of the village were the grocery, the bar-room, the post-office, and the bank; and, as a necessary part of the machinery, they kept a bell, a big gun, and a fire engine, at convenient places; and the houses were so arranged as to make the most of mankind, in lanes and fronting one another, so that every traveller had to run the gantlet, and every man, woman, and child might get a lick at him. of course, those who were stationed nearest to the head of the line, where they could most see and be seen, and have the first blow at him, paid the highest prices for their places ; and the few straggling inhabitants in the outskirts, where long gaps in the line began to occur, and the traveller could get over walls or turn aside into cow paths, and so escape, paid a very slight ground or window tax. signs were hung out on all sides to allure him; some to catch him by the appetite, as the tavern and victualling cellar; some by the fanc}^, as the dry goods store and the jeweller's; and others by the hair or the feet or the skirts, as the barber, the shoemaker, or the tailor. besides, there was a still more terrible standing invitation to call at every one of these houses, and company expected about these times. for the most part i escaped wonderfully from these dangers , either by proceeding at once boldly and without deliberation to the goal, as is recommended to those who run the gantlet, or by keeping my thoughts on high things, like orpheus, who, ''loudly singing the praises of the gods to his lyre, drowned the voices of the sirens, and kept out of danger." sometimes i bolted suddenly, and nobody could tell my whereabouts, for i did not stand much about gracefulness, and never hesitated at the village. 141 a gap in the fence i was even accustomed to make an irruption into some houses, where i was well entertained, and after learning the kernels and very last sieve-ful of news, what had subsided, the prospects of war and peace, and whether the world was likely to hold together much longer, i was let out through the rear avenues, and so escaped to the woods again. it was very pleasant, when i stayed late in town, to launch myself into the night, especially if it was dark and tempestuous, and set sail from some bright village parlor or lecture room, with a bag of rye or indian meal upon my shoulder, for my snug harbor in the woods, having made all tight without and withdrawn under hatches with a merry crew of thoughts, leaving only my outer man at the helm, or even tying up the helm when it was plain sailing. i had many a genial thought by the cabin fire "as i sailed." i was never cast away nor distressed in any weather, though i encountered some severe storms. it is darker in the woods, even in com mon nights, than most suppose. i frequently had to look up at the opening idetween the trees above the path in order to learn my route, and, where there was no cart path, to feel with my feet the faint track which i had worn, or steer by the known relation of particular trees which i felt with my hands, passing between two pines for instance, not more than eighteen inches apart, in the midst of the woods, invariably in the darkest night. sometimes, after coming home thus late in a dark and muggy night, when my feet felt the path which my eyes could not see, dreaming and absent-minded all the way, until i was aroused by having to raise my hand to lift the latch, i have not been able to recall a single step of my walk, and i have thought that perhaps my body would find its way home if its master should forsake it, as the hand finds its way to the mouth without assistance. several times, when a visitor chanced to stay into even ing, and it proved a dark night, i was obliged to conduct him to the cart-path in the rear of the house, and then point out to him the direction he was to pursue, and in keeping which he was to be guided rather by his feet than his eyes. one very dark night i directed thus on their 142 walden. way two young men who had been fishing in the pond. they lived about a mile off through the woods, and were quite used to the route. a day or two after one of them told me that they wandered about the greater part of the night, close by their own premises, and did not get home till toward morning, by which time, as there had been several heavy showers in the meanwhile, and the leaves were very wet, they were drenched to their skins. i have heard of many going astray even in the village streets, when the darkness was so thick that you could cut it with a knife, as the saying is. some who live in the outskirts, having come to town a-shopping in their wagons, have been obliged to put up for the night, and gentlemen and ladies making a call have gone half a mile out of their way, feeling the sidewalk only with their feet, and not knowing when they turned. it is a surprising and memorable, as well as valual)le ex perience, to be lost in the woods any time. often in a snow storm, even by day, one will come out upon a well-known road and yet find it impossible to tell which way leads to the village. though he knows that he has travelled it a thousand times, he cannot recognize a feature in it, but it is as strange to him as if it were a road in siberia. by night, of course, the perplexity is infinitely greater. in our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and head-lands, and if we go beyond our usual covirse we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round, — for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost, — do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the in finite extent of our relations. one afternoon, near the end of the first summer, when i went to the village to get a shoe from the cob bler's, i was seized and put into jail, because, as i have the village. 143 elsewhere related, i did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the state, which buys and sells men, women, and chikh'en, like cattle at the door of its senate house. i had gone down to the woods for other pur poses. but, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. it is true, i might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run "amok" against society; but i preferred that society should run "amok" against me, it being the desperate party. however, i was released the next day, obtained my mended shoe, and returned to the woods in season to get my dinner of huckleberries on fair-haven hill. i was never molested ijy any person but those who represented the state. i had no lock nor bolt but for the desk which held my papers, not even a nail to put over my latch or windows. i never fastened my door night or day, though i was to be absent several days; not even when the next fall i spent a fortnight in the woods of maine. and yet my house was more respected than if it had been surrounded by a file of soldiers. the tired rambler could rest and warm himself by my fire, the literary amuse himself with the few books on my table, or the curious, by opening my closet door, see what was left of my dinner, and what prospect i had of a supper. yet, though many people of every class came this way to the pond, i suffered no serious inconvenience from these sources, and i never missed anything but one small book, a volume of homer, which perhaps was improperly gilded, and this i trust a soldier of our camp has found by this time. i am convinced that if all men were to live as simply as i then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. these take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough. the pope's homers would soon get properly distributed. — " nee bella fuerunt, faginus astabat dum scyphus ante dapes," " nor wars did men molest, when only beechen bowls were in request." 144 walden. " you who govern public affairs, what need have you to employ punishments? love virtue, and the people will be virtuous. the virtues of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man are like the grass; the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends." ix. the ponds. sometimes, having had a surfeit of human society and gossip, and worn out all my village friends, i rambled still farther westward than i habitually dwell, into yet more unfrequented parts of the town, ''to fresh woods ^ and pastures new," or, while the sun was setting, made my supper of huckleberries and blueberries on fair haven hill, and laid up a store for several days. the fruits do not yield their true flavor to the purchaser of them, nor to him who raises them for the market. there is but one way to obtain it, yet few take that way. if you would know the flavor of huckleberries, ask the cow-boy or the partridge. it is a vulgar error to suppose that you have tasted huckleberries who never plucked them. a huckleberry never reaches boston; they have not been known there since they grew on her three hills. the ambrosial and essential part of the fruit is lost with the bloom which is rubbed off in the market cart, and they become mere provender. as long as eternal justice reigns, not one innocent huckleberry can be transported thither from the country's hills. occasionally, after my hoeing was done for the day, i joined some impatient companion who had been fish ing on the pond since morning, as silent and motionless as a duck or a floating leaf, and, after practising various kinds of philosophy, had concluded commonly, by the time i arrived, that he belonged to the ancient sect of coenobites. there was one older man, an excellent fisher and skilled in all kinds of woodcraft, who was pleased to look upon my house as a building erected for the con venience of fishermen; and i was equally pleased when the ponds. 145 he sat in my doorway to arrange his hnes. once in a while we sat together on the pond, he at one end of the boat, and i at the other; but not many words passed between us, for he had grown deaf in his later years, but he occasionally hummed a psalm, which harmonized well enough with my philosophy. our intercourse was thus altogether one of unbroken harmony, far more pleasing to remember than if it had been carried on by speech. when, as was commonly the case, i had none to commune with, i used to raise the echoes by striking with a paddle on the side of my boat, filling the surrounding woods •with circling and dilating sound, stirring them up as the keeper of a menagerie his wild beasts, until i elicited a growl from every wooded vale and hill side. in warm evenings i frequently sat in the boat play ing the flute, and saw the perch, which i seemed to have charmed, hovering around me, and the moon travelling over the ribbed bottom, which w^as strewed with the wrecks of the forest. formerly i had come to this pond adventurously, from time to time, in dark summer nights, with a companion, and making a fire close to the water's edge, which we thought attracted the fishes, we caught pouts with a bunch of worms strung on a thread; and when we had done, far in the night, threw the burning brands high into the air like sky-rockets, which, coming down into the pond, were quenched wnth a loud hissing, and we were suddenly groping in total darkness. through this, whistling a tune, we took our way to the haunts of men again. but now i had made my home by the shore. sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family had all retired, i have returned to the woods, and, partly with a view to the next daj-'s dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. these experiences were very memorable and valuable to me, — anchored in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded some times by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and com municating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal 146 waldeiy. fishes which had their clweuing forty feet below, or some times dragging sixty feet of hue about the pond as i <h"ifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain blundering pur pose there, and slow to make up its mind. at length you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand, some horned pout squeaking and squirming to the upper air. it was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to nature again. it seemed as if i might next cast my line upward into into the air, as well as downward into this element which was scarcely more dense. thus i caught two fishes as it were with one hook. the scenery of walden is on a humble scale, and, though very beautiful, does not approach to grandeur, nor can it much concern one who has not long frequented it, or lived by its shore; yet this pond is so remarkable for its depth and purity as to merit a particular descrip tion. it is a clear and deep green well, half a mile long and a mile and three quarters in circumference, and contains about sixty-one and a half acres; a perennial spring in the midst of pine and oak woods, without any visible inlet or outlet except by the clouds and evapora tion. the surroiuiding hills rise abruptly from the water to the height of forty to eighty feet, though on the south east and east they attain to about one hundred and one hundred and fifty feet respectively, within a c^uarter and a third of a mile. they are exclusively woodland. all our concord waters have two colors at least, one when viewed at a distance, and another, more proper, close at hand. the first depends more on the light, and follows the sky. in clear weather, in summer, they appear blue at a little distance, especially if agitated, and at a great distance all appear alike. in stormy weather tliey are sometimes of a dark slate color. the sea, however, is said to be blue one day and green another without any perceptible change in the atmosphere. i have seen our river, when, the landscape being covered the ponds. 147 with snow, both water and ice were almost as green as grass. some consider blue "to be the color of pure water, whether liquid or solid." but, looking directl}^ down into our waters from a boat, they are seen to be of very different colors. walden is blue at one time and green at another, even from the same point of view. lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both. viewed from a hill top it reflects the color of the sky, but near at hand it is of a yellowish tint next the shore where you can see the sand, then a light green, which gradually deepens to a uniform dark green in the body of the pond. in some lights, viewed even from a hill top, it is of a vivid green next the shore. some have referred this to the reflection of the verdure; but it is equally green there against the railroad sand-bank, and in the spring, before the leaves are expanded, and it may be simply the result of the prevailing blue mixed with the yellow of the sand. such is the color of its iris. this is that portion, also, where in the spring, the ice being warmed by the heat of the sun reflected from the bottom, and also transmitted through the earth, melts first and forms a narrow canal about the still frozen middle. like the rest of our waters, when much agitated, in clear weather, so that the surface of the waves may reflect the sky at the right angle, or because there is more light mixed with it, it appears at a little distance of a darker blue than the sky itself; and at such a time, being on its surface, and looking with divided vision, so as to see the reflection, i have discerned a matchless and indescribable light blue, such as watered or changeable silks and sword blades suggest, more cerulean than the sky itself, alternating with the original dark green on the opposite sides of the waves, which last appeared but muddy in comparison. it is a vitreous greenish blue, as i remember it, like those patches of the winter sky seen through cloud vistas in the west before sundown. yet a single glass of its water held up to the light is as colorless as an equal quantity of air. it is well-known that a large plate of glass will have a green tmt, owing, as the makers say, to its "body," but a small piece of the same will be colorless. how 14s v.'aldex. large a body of walden water would be required to re flect a green tint i have never proved. the water of our river is black or a very dark brown to one looking directly down on it, and like that of most ponds, imparts to the body of one bathing in it a yellowish tinge; but this water is of such crystalline purity that the body of the bather appears of an alabaster whiteness, still more ' unnatural, which, as the hmbs are magnified and dis torted withal, produces a monstrous effect, making fit studies for a michael angelo. the water is so transparent that the bottom can easily be discerned at the depth of twenty-five or thirty feet. paddling over it, you may see many feet beneath the surface the schools of perch and shiners, perhaps only an inch long, yet the former easily distinguished by their transverse bars, and you think that they must be ascetic fish that find a subsistence there. once, in the winter, many years ago, when i had been cutting holes through the ice in order to catch pickerel, as i stepped ashore i tossed my axe back on to the ice, but, as if some evil genius had directed it, it slid four or five rods directly into one of the holes, where the water was twenty-five feet deep. out of curiosity, i lay down on the ice and looked through the hole, until i saw the axe a little on one side, standing on its head, with . its helve erect and gently swaying to and fro with the pulse of the pond; and there it might have stood erect and swaying till in the course of time the handle rotted off, if i had not disturbed it. making another hole directly lover it with an ice chisel which i had, and cutting down the longest birch which i could find in the neighborhood with my knife, i made a slip-noose, wdiich i attached to its end, and, letting it down carefully, passed it over the knob of the handle, and drew it by a line along the birch, and so pulled the axe out again. the shore is composed of a belt of smooth rounded white stones like paving stones, excepting one or two short sand beaches, and is so steep that in many places a single leap will carry you into water over your head; and were it not for its remarkable transparency, that would be the last to be seen of its bottom till it rose the ponds. 149 on the opposite side. some think it is bottomless. it is nowhere muddy, and a casual observer would say that there were no weeds at all in it; and of noticeable plants, except in the little meadows recently overflowed, which do not properly belong to it, a closer scrutiny does not detect a flag nor a bulrush, nor even a lily, yellow or white, but only a few small heart-leaves and potamogetons, and perhaps a water-target or two; all which however a bather might not perceive; and these plants are clean and bright like the element they glow m. the stones extend a rod or two into the water, and then the bottom is pure sand, except in the deepest parts, where there is usually a little sediment, probably from the decay of the leaves, which have been wafted on to it so many successive falls, and a bright green weed is brought up on anchors even in midwinter. we have one other pond just like this. white pond in nme acre corner, about two and a half miles wes terly, but, though i am acquainted with most of the ponds within a dozen miles of this centre, i do not know a thu'd of this pure and well-like character. successive nations perchance have drunk at, admired, and fathomed it, and passed away , and still its water is green and pellu cid as ever. not an intermitting s]3ring! perhaps on that spring morning when adam and eve w^ere driven out of eden walden pond w^as already in existence, and even then breakmg up in a gentle spring rain accompanied with mist and a southerly wind, and covered with myriads of ducks and geese, which had not heard of the fall, when still such pure lakes sufficed them. even then it had commenced to rise and fall, and had clarified its waters and colored them of the hue they now wear, and obtained a patent of heaven to be the only walden pond in the world and chstiller of celestial dews. who knows m how many un remembered nations' literatures this has been the castalian fountain? or what nymphs presided over it in the golden age*? it is a gem of the first "water which concord wears in her coronet. yet perchance the first who came to this well have left some trace of their footsteps. i have been sur prised to detect encirclmg the pond, even where a thick 150 waldex. wood has just been cut down on the shore, a narrow shelf dike path in the steep hill side, alternately rising and falling, approaching and receding from the water's edge, as old probably as the race of man here, worn by the feet of aboriginal hunters, and still from time to time un wittingly trodden by the present occupants of the land. this is particularly distinct to one standing on the middle of the pond in winter, just after a light snow has fallen, appearing as a clear undulating white line, unobscured by weeds and twigs, and very obvious a quarter of a mile off in many places where in summer it is hardly dis tinguishable close at hand. the snow reprints it, as it were, in clear white type alto-relievo. the ornamented grounds of villas avhich will one day be built here may still preserve some trace of this. the pond rises and falls, but whether regularly or not, and within what period, nobody knows, though, as usual, man}^ pretend to know. it is commonly higher in the winter and lower in the summer, though not correspond ing to the general wet and dryness. i can remember when it was a fo"ot or two lower, and also when it was at least five feet higher, than when i lived by it. , there is a narrow sand-bar running into it, very deep water on one side, on which i helped boil a kettle of chowder, some six i^ods from the main shore, about the year 1824, w^hich it has not been possible to do for twenty-five years; and on the other hand, my friends used to listen with incredulity when i told them that a few j'ears later i was accustomed to fish from a boat in a secluded cove in the woods, fifteen rods from the only shore they knew, which place was long since converted into a meadow. but the pond has risen steadily for two years, and now, in the summer of '52, is just five feet higher than when i lived there, or as high as it was thirty years ago, and fishing goes on again in the meadow. this makes a difference of level, at the outside, of six or seven feet; and yet the water shed by the surrounding hills is in significant in amount, and this overflow must be referred to causes which affect the deep springs. this same sum mer the pond has begun to fall again. it is remarkable that this fluctua'tion, whether periodical or not, appears the ponds. \151 thus to require many years for its accomplishment. in have observed one rise and a part of two falls, and i expect that a dozen or fifteen years hence the water will again be as low as i have ever known it. flint's pond, a mile eastward, allowing for the disturbance occasioned by its inlets and outlets, and the smaller intermediate ponds also, sympathize with walden, and recently at tained their greatest height at the same time with the latter. the same is true, as far as my observation goes, of white pond. this rise and fall of walden at long intervals serves this use at least: the water standing at this great height for a year or more, though it makes it difficult to walk round it, kills the shrubs and trees which have sprung up about its edge since the last i'ise, pitch-pines, birches, alders, aspens, and others, and, falling again, leaves an unobstructed shore; for, unlike many ponds, and all waters w^hich are subject to a daily tide, its shore is cleanest when the water is lowest. on the side of the pond next my house, a row of pitch-pines fifteen feet high has been killed and tipped over as if by a lever, and thus a stop put to their encroach ments; and their size indicates how many years have elapsed since the last rise to this height. by this fluctua tion the pond asserts its title to a shore, arid thus the shore is shorn, and the trees cannot hold it by right of possession. these are the lips of the lake on which no beard grows. it licks its chaps from time to time. when the water is at its height, the alders, willows, and maples send forth a mass of fibrous red roots several feet long from all sides of their stems in the water, and to the height of three or four feet from the ground, in the effort to maintain themselves; and i have known the high blueberry bushes about the shore, which commonly produce no fruit, bear an abun dant crop under these circumstances. some have been puzzled to tell how the shore became so regularly paved. my townsmen have all heard the tradi tion, the oldest people tell me that they heard it in their youth, that anciently the indians were holding a pow wow upon a hill here, which rose as high into the heavens as the pond now sinks deep into the earth, and they used much profanity, as the story goes, though this vice is one 152) walden. of which the indians were never guilty, and while they were thus engaged the hill shook and suddenly sank, and only one old squaw, named walden, escaped, and from her the pond was named. it has been conjectured that when the hill shook these stones rolled down its side and became the present shore. it is very certain, at any rate, that once there was no pond here, and now there is one; and this in dian fable does not in any respect conflict with the account of that ancient settler whom i have mentioned, who re members so well when he first came here with his divining rod,, saw a thin vapor rising from the sward, and the hazel pointed steadily downward, and he concluded to dig a well here. as for the stones, many still think that they are hardly to be accounted for by the action of the waves on these hills ; but i observe that the surrounding hills are remarkably full of the same kind of stones, so that they have been obliged to pile them up in walls on both sides of the railroad cut nearest the pond ; and, moi'cover, there are most stones where the shore is most abrupt; so that, un fortunately, it is no longer a mystery to me. i detect the paver. if the name was not derived from that of some english locality, — saffron walden, for instance, — one might suppose that it was called, originally, walled-in pond. the pond was my well ready dug. for four months in the year its water is as cold as it is pure at all times ; and i think that it is then as good as any, if not the best, in the town. in the winter, all water which is expovsed to the air is colder than springs and wells which arc protected from it. the temperature of the pond water which had stood in the room where i sat from five o'clock in the afternoon till noon the next day, the sixth of march, 1846, the ther mometer having been up to 65° or 70° some of the time, owing partly to the sun on the roof, was 42°, or one de gree colder than the water of one of the coldest wells in the village just drawn. the temperature of the boiling spring the same day was 45°, or the wannest of any water tried, though it is the coldest that i know of in summer, when, besides, shallow and stagnant surface water is not mingled with it. moreover, in summer, walden never becomes so warm as most water which is exposed to the sun, on ac the ponds. 153 count of its depth. in the wannest weather i usually placed a pailful in my cellar, where it became cool in the night, and remained so during the day; though i also re sorted to a spring in the neighborhood. it was as good when a week old as the day it was dipped, and had no taste of the pump. whoever camps for a week in summer b}' the shore of a pond, needs onty bury a pail of water a few feet deep in the shade of his camp to be independent of the luxury of ice. there have been caught in walden, pickerel, one weigh ing seven pounds, to say nothing of another which carried off a reel with great velocity, which the fisherman safely set down at eight pounds because he did not see him, perch and pouts, some of each weighing over two pounds, shiners, and pouts, some of each weighing over two pounds, shiners, chivins or roach (leucisus pulchellus) , a very few breams, and a couple of eels, one weighing four pounds, — i am thus particular because the weight of a fish is com monly its only title to fame, and these are the only eels i have heard of here; — also, i have a faint recollection of a little fish some five inches long, with silvery sides and a greenish back, somewhat dace-like in its character, which i mention here chiefly to link my facts to fable. neverthe less, this pond is not very fertile in fish. its pickerel, though not abundant, are its chief boast. i have seen at one time lying on the ice pickerel of at least three different kinds: a long and shallow one, steel-colored, most like those caught in the river; a bright golden kind, with greenish reflections and remarkably deep, which is the most common here; and another, golden-colored, and shaped like the last, but peppered on the sides with small dark brown or black spots, intermixed with a few faint blood-red ones very much like a trout. the specific name reticulatus would not apply to this; it should be guttatus rather. these are all very firm fish, and weigh more than their size promises. the shiners, pouts, and perch, also, and indeed all the fishes which inhabit this pond, are much cleaner, handsomer, and firmer fleshed than those in the river and most other ponds, as the water is purer, and they can easily be distinguished from them. probably many ichthyologists would make new varieties of some of them. 154 walden. there are also a clean race of frogs and tortoises, and a few mussels in it; muskrats and minks leave their traces about it, and occasionally a travelling mud-turtle visits it. sometimes, when i pushed off my boat in the morning, i disturbed a great mud-turtle which had secreted himself under the boat in the night. ducks and geese frequent it in the spring and fall, the white-bellied swallows {hirundo hicolor) skim over it, and the pectwcets (totanus macu larius) " teter " along its stony shores all summer. i have sometimes cjisturbed a fishhawk sitting on a white-pine over the water; but i doubt if it is ever profaned by the wing of a gull, like fair-haven. at most, it tolerates one annual loon. these are all the animals of consequence which frequent it now. you may see from a boat, in calm weather, near the sandy eastern shore, where the water is eight or ten feet deep, and also in some other parts of the pond, some cir cular heaps half a dozen feet in diameter by a foot in height, consisting of small stones less than a hen's egg in size, where all around is bare sand." at first you wonder if the indians could have formed them on the ice for any purpose, and so, when the ice molted, they sank to the bottom ; but they are too regular and some of them plainly too fresh for that. they are similar to those found in rivers; but as there are no suckers nor lampreys here, i know not by what fish they could be made. perhaps they are the nests of the chivin. these lend a pleasing mystery to the bottom. the shore is irregular enough not to be monotonous. i have in my mind's eye the western indented with deep bays, the bolder northern, and the beautifully scalloped southern shore, where successive capes overlap each other and suggest unexplored coves between. the forest has never so good a setting, nor is so distinctly beautiful, as when seen from the middle of a small lake amid hills which rise from the water's edge; for the water in which it is re flected not only makes the best foreground in such a case, but, with its winding shore, the most natural and agreeable boundary to it. there is no rawness nor imperfection in its edge there, as where the axe has cleared a part, or a cultivated field abuts on it. the trees have ample room to the ponds. 155 expand on the water side, and each sends forth its most vigorous branch in that direction. there nature has woven a natural selvage, and the eye rises by just grada tions from the low shrubs of the shore to the highest trees. there are few traces of man's hand to beseen. the water laves the shore as it did a thousand years ago. a lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. it is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. the fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhang ing brows. standing on the smooth sandy beach at the east end of the pond, in a calm september afternoon, when a slight haze makes the opposite shore line indistinct, i have seen whence came the expression, "the glassy surface of a lake." when you invert your head, it looks like a thread of finest gossamer stretched across the valley, and gleam ing against the distant pine woods, separating one stratum of the atmosphere from another. you would think that 3'ou could walk dry under it to the opposite hills, and that the swallows which skim over might perch on it. indeed, they sometimes dive below the line, as it were by mistake, and are undeceived. as you look over the pond westward you are obliged to employ both your hands to defend your eyes against the reflected as well as the true sun, for they are equally bright; and if, between the two, you survey its surface critically, it is literally as smooth as glass, except where the skater insects, at equal intervals scattered over its whole extent, by their motions in the sun produce the finest imaginable sparkle on it, or, perchance, a duck plumes itself, or, as i have said, a swallow skims so low as to touch it. it may be that in the distance a fish describes an arc of three or four feet in the air, and there is one bright flash where it emerges, and another where it strikes the water; sometimes the whole silvery arc is revealed; or here and there, perhaps, is a thistle-down floating on its sur face, which the fishes dart, at and so dimple it again. it is like molten glass cooled but not congealed, and the few motes in it are pure and beautiful like the imperfections in glass. you may often detect a yet smoother and darker 156 walden. water, separated from the rest as if by an invisible cob web, boom of the water nymphs, resting on it. from a hill top you can see a fish leap in almost any part; for not a pickerel or shiner picks an insect from this smooth sur face but it manifestly disturbs the equilibrium of the whole lake. it is wonderful with what elaborateness this simple fact is advertised, — this piscine murder will out, — and from my distant perch i distinguish the circling un dulations when they are half a dozen rods in diameter. you can even detect a water-bug {gyrinus) ceaselessly progressing over the smooth surface a quarter of a mile off; for they furrow the water slightly, making a conspicuovis ripple bounded by two diverging lines, but the skaters glide over it without rippling it perceptibly. when the surface is considerably agitated there are no skaters nor water-bugs on it, but apparently, in calm days, they leave their havens and adventurously glide forth from the shore by short impulses till they completely cover it. it is a soothing cmplo3aiient, on one of those fine days in the fall when all the warmth of the sun is fully appreciated, to sit on a stump on such a height as this, overlooking the pond, and study the dimpling circles which are incessantly in scribed on its otherwise invisible surface amid the reflected skies and trees. over this great expanse there is no dis turbance but it is thus at once gently smoothed aw^ay and assuaged, as, when a vase of water is jarred, the trem bling circles seek the shore and all is smooth again. not a fish can leap or an insect fall on the pond but it is thus re ported in circling dimples, in lines of beauty, as it were the constant welling up of its fountain, the gentle pulsing of its life, the heaving of its breast. the thrills of joy and thrills of pain are undistinguishable. how peaceful the phenomena of the lake ! again the works of man shine as in the spring. a3', every leaf and twig and stone and cob web sparkles now at mid-afternoon as when covered with dew in a spring morning. every motion of an oar or an insect produces a flash of light; and if an oar falls, how sweet the echo ! in such a day in september or october, waldcn is a per fect forest mirror, set round with stones as precious to my eye as if fewer or rarer. nothing so fair, so pure, and at the ponds. 157 the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, hes on the sur face of the earth. sky water. it needs no fence. nations come and go without defihng it. it is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding nature continually repairs; no storms, no dust, can dim its surface ever fresh; — a mirror in which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the sun's hazy brush, — this the light dust-cloth, — which re tains no breath that is breathed on it, but sends its own to loift as clouds high above its surface, and be reflected in its bosom still. a field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. it is continually receiving new life and motion from above.it is intermediate in its nature between land and sk}'. on land only the grass and trees wave, but the water itself is rippled b}' the wind. i see where the breeze dashes across it by the streaks or flakes of light. it is remarkable that we can look down on its surface. we shall, perhaps, look down thus on the surface of air at length, and mark where a still subtler spirit sweeps over it. the skaters and water-bugs finally disappear in the latter part of october, when the severe frosts have come; and then and in november, usually, in a calm da}^, there is absolutely nothing to ripple the surface. one novem ber afternoon, in the calm at the end of a rain storm of several days' duration, when the sky was still completely overcast and the air was full of mist, i observed that the pond w^as remarkably smooth, so that it was difficult to distinguish its surface; though it no longer reflected the bright tints of october, but the sombre november colors of the surrounding hills. though i passed over it as gently as possible, the slight undulations produced by my boat extended almost as far as i could see, and gave a ribbed appearance to the reflections. but, as i w^as looking over the surface, i saw here and there at a dis tance a faint glimmer, as if some skater insects which had escaped the frosts might be collected there, or, perchance, the surface, being so smooth, betrayed where a spring welled up from the bottom. paddling gently to one of these places, i was surprised to find myself surrounded by myriads of small perch, about five inches long, of a. 158 walden. rich bronze color in the green water, sporting there and constantly rising to the surface and dimpling it, some times leaving bubbles on it. in such transparent and seemingly bottomless water, reflecting the clouds, i seemed to be floating through the air as in a balloon, and their swimming impressed me as a kind of flight or hover ing, as if they were a compact flock of birds passing just beneath my level on the right or left, their fins, like sails, set all around them. there were many such schools in the pond, apparently improving the short season before winter would draw an icy shutter over their broad sky light, sometimes giving to the surface an appearance as if aslight breeze struck it, or a few rain-drops fell there. when i approached carelessly and alarmed them, they made a sudden plash and rippling with their tails, as if one had struck the water with a brushy bough, and in stantly took refuge in the depths. at length the wind rose, the mist increased, and the waves began to run, and the perch leaped much higher than before, half out of water, a hundred black points, three inches long, at once above the surface. even as late as the fifth of december, one year, i saw some dimples on the surface, and thinking it was going to rain hard immediately, the air being full of mist, i made haste to take my place at the oars and row homeward; already the rain seemed rapidly increas ing, though i felt none on my cheek, and i anticipated a thorough soaking. but suddenly the dimples ceased, for they were produced by the perch, which the noise of my oars had scared into the depths, and i saw their schools dimly disappearing; so i spent a dry afternoon after all. an old man who used to frequent this pond nearly sixty years ago, when it was dark with surrounding forests, tells me that in those days he sometimes saw it all alive with ducks and other water fowl, and that there were many eagles about it. he came here a-fishing, and used an old log canoe which he found on the shore. it was made of two white-pine logs dug out and pinned together, and was cut off square at the ends. it was very clumsy, but lasted a great many years before it became water logged and perhaps sank to the bottom. he did not know whose it was; it belonged to the pond. he used to the ponds. 159 make a cable for his anchor of strips of hickory bark tied together. an old man, a potter, who lived by the pond before the revolution, told him once that there was an iron chest at the bottom, and that he had seen it. some times it would come floating up to the shore; but when you went toward it, it would go back into deep water and disappear. i was pleased to hear of the old log canoe, which took the place of an indian one of the same ma terial but more graceful construction, which perchance had first been a tree on the bank, and then, as it were, fell into the water, to float there for a generation, the most proper vessel for the lake. i remember that when i first looked into these depths there were many large trunks to be seen indistinctly lying on the bottom, which had either been blown over formerly, or left on the ice at the last cutting, when wood was cheaper; but now they have mostly disappeared. when i first paddled a boat on walden, it was com pletely surrounded by thick and lofty pine and oak woods, and in some of its coves grape vines had run over the trees next the water and formed bowers under which a boat could pass. the hills which form its shores are so steep, and the woods on them were then so high, that, as you looked down from the west end, it had the appearance of an amphitheatre for some kind of sylvan spectacle. i have spent many an hour, when i was younger, floating over its surface as the zephyr willed, having paddled my boat to the middle, and lying on my back across the seats, in a summer forenoon, dreaming awake, until i was aroused by the boat touching the sand, and i arose to see what shore my fates had impelled me to; days when idle ness was the most attractive and productive industr}-. many a forenoon have i stolen away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day; for i was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly; nor do i regret that i did not waste more of them in the workshop or the teacher's desk. but since i left those shores the wood-choppers have still further laid them waste, and now for many a year there will be no more rambling through the aisles of the wood, with occasional vistas through which you see the water. my 160 ■ walden. muse may be excused if she is silent henceforth. how can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down? now the trunks of trees on the bottom, and the old log canoe, and the dark surrounding woods, are gone, and the villagers, who scarcely know where it lies, instead of going to the pond to bathe or drink, arc thinking to bring its water, which should be as sacred as the ganges at least, to the village in a pipe, to wash their dishes with! — to earn their walden by the turning of a cock or drawing of a plug! that devilish iron horse, whose ear rending neigh is heard throughout the town, has muddied the boiling spring with his foot, and he it is that has browsed off all the woods on walden shore; that trojan horse, with a thousand men in his belly, introduced by mercenary greeks! where is the country's champion, the moore of moore hall, to meet him at the deep cut and thrust an avenging lance between the ribs of the bloated pest? nevertheless, of all the characters i have known, perhaps walden wears best, and best preserves its purity. many men have been likened to it, but few deserve that honor. though the wood-choppers have laid bare first this shore and then that, and the irish have l^uilt their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its border, and the ice-men have skimmed it once, it is itself un changed, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on; all the change is in me. it has not acquired one per manent wrinkle after all its ripples. it is perennially young, and i may stand and see a swallow dip apparently to pick an insect from its surface as of yore. it struck me again to-night, as if i had not seen it almost daily for more than twenty years, — why, here is walden, the same woodland lake that i discovered so many years ago ; where a forest was cut down last winter another is spring ing up by its shore as lustily as ever; the same thought is welling up to its surface that was then; it is the same liquid joy and happiness to itself and its maker, ay, and it may be to me. it is the work of a brave man, surely, in whom there was no guile ! he rounded this water with his hand, deepened and clarified it in his thought, and in the ponds. . 161 his will bequeathed it to concord. i see by its face that it is visited by the same reflection; and i can almost say, walden, is it you? it is no dream of mine, to ornament a line; i cannot come nearer to god and heaven than i live to walden even. i am its stony shore, and the breeze that passes o'er; in the hollow of my hand are its water and its sand, and its deepest resort lies high in my thought. the cars never pause to look at it; yet i fancy that the engineers and firemen and brakemen, and those passen gers who have a season ticket and see it often, are better men for the sight. the engineer does not forget at night, or his nature does not, that he has beheld this vision of serenity and purity once at least during the day. though seen but once, it helps to wash out state-street and the engine's soot. one proposes that it be called "god's drop." i have said that walden has no visible inlet nor outlet, but it is on the one hand distantly and indirectly related to flint's pond, which is more elevated, by a chain of small ponds coming from that quarter, and on the other directly and manifestly to concord river, which is lower, by a similar chain of ponds through which in some other geological period it may have flowed, and by a little dig ging, which god forbid, it can be made to flow thither again. if by living thus reserved and austere, like a hermit in the woods, so long, it has acquired such wonder ful purity, who would not regret that the comparatively impure waters of flint's pond should be mingled with it, or itself should ever go to waste its sweetness in the ocean wave? flint's or sandy pond, in lincoln, our greatest lake and inland sea, lies about a mile east of walden. it is much larger, being said to contain one hundred and ninety-seven acres, and is more fertile in fish; but it is comparatively shallow, and not remarkably pure, a 162 walden. walk through the woods thither was often my recreation. it was worth the while, if only to feel the wind blow on your cheek freely, and see the waves run, and remember the life of mariners. i went a-chestnutting there in the fall, on windy days, when the nuts were dropping into the water and were washed to my feet; and one day, as i crept along its sedgy shore, the fresh spray blowing in my face, i came upon the mouldering wreck of a boat, the sides gone, and hardly more than the impression of its flat bottom left amid the rushes; yet its model was sharply defined, as if it were a large decayed pad, with its veins. it was as impressive a wreck as one could imagine on the sea-shore, and had as good a moral. it is by this time mere vegetable mould and undistinguish able pond shore, through which rushes and flags have pushed up. i used to admire the ripple marks on the sandy bottom, at the north end of this pond, made firm and hard to the feet of the wader by the pressure of the water, and the rushes which grew in indian file, in waving lines, corresponding to these marks, rank behind rank, as if the waves had planted them. there also i have found, in considerable quantities, curious balls, composed apparently of fine grass or roots, of pipewort perhaps, from half an inch to four inches in diameter, and per fectly spherical. these wash back and forth in shallow water on a sandy bottom, and are sometimes cast on the shore. they are either solid grass, or have a little sand in the middle. at first you would say that they were formed by the action of the waves, like a pebble; yet the smallest are made of equally coarse materials, half an inch long, and they are produced only at one season of the year. moreover, the waves, i suspect, do not so much construct as wear down a material which has al ready acquired consistency. they preserve their form when dry for an indefinite period. flint's pond! such is the poverty of our nomenclature. what right had the unclean and stupid farmer, whose farm abutted on this sky water, whose shores he has ruth lessly laid bare, to give his name to it? some skin-flint, who loved better the reflecting surface of a dollar, or a bright cent, in which he could see his own brazen face ; who the ponds. 163 regarded even the wild ducks which settled in it as tres passers; his fingers grown into crooked and horny talons from the long habit of grasping harpy-like; — so it is not named for me. i go not there to see him nor to hear of him; who neter saw it, who never bathed in it, who never loved it, who never protected it, who never spoke a good word for it, nor thanked god that he had made it. rather let it be named from the fishes that swim in it, the wild fowl or quadrupeds which frequent it, the wild flowers which grow by its shores, or some wild man or child the thread of whose history is interwoven with its own; not from him who could show no title to it but the deed which a like-minded neighbor or legislature gave him, — him who thought only of its money value; whose presence perchance cursed all the shore; who exhausted the land around it, and would fain have exhausted the waters within it; who regretted only that it was not english hay or cranberry meadow, — there was nothing to redeem it, forsooth, in his eyes, — and would have drained and sold it for the mud at its bottom. it did not turn his mill, and it was no privi lege to him to behold it. i respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price; who w^ovild carry the land scape, who would carry his god to market if he could get anything for him; who goes to market /o?* his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars; who loves not the beauty of his fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him till they are turned to dollars. give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth. farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor, — poor farmers. a model farm! where the house stands like a fungus in a muck-heap, chambers for men, horses, oxen, and swine, cleansed and uncleansed, all con tiguous to one another! stocked with men! a great grease-spot, redolent of manures and buttermilk! under a high state of cultivation, being manured with the hearts, and brains of men ! as if you were to raise your potatoes in the churchyard ! such is a model farm. no, no ; if the fairest features of the landscape are to be named after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone. let our lakes receive as true names at least as 164 walden. the icarian sea, where " still the shore " a " brave attempt resounds." goose pond, of small extent, is on my way to flint's; fair-haven, an expansion of concord river, said to con tain some seventy acres, is d mile southwest; and white pond, of about forty acres, is a mile and a half beyond fair-haven. this is my lake countiy. these, with con cord river, are my water privileges; and night and day, year in and year out, they grind such grist as i carry to them. since the wood-cutters, and the railroad, and i myself have profaned walden, perhaps the most attractive, if not the most beautiful, of all our lakes, the gem of the woods, is white pond; — a poor name from its commonness, whether derived from the remarkable purity of its waters or the color of its sands. in these as in other respects, however, it is a lesser twin of walden. they are so much alike that you would say they must be connected under ground. it has the same stony shore, and its waters are of the same hue. as at walden, in sultry dog-day weather, looking down through the woods on some of its bays which are not so deep but that the reflection from the bottom tinges them, its waters are of a misty bluish green or glau cous color. many years since i used to go there to collect the sand by cart-loads, to make sand-paper with, and i have continued to visit it ever since. one who frequents it proposes to call it virid lake. perhaps it might be called yellow-pine lake, from the following circumstance. about fifteen years ago you could see the top of a pitch pine of the kind called yellow-pine hereabouts, though it is not a distinct species, projecting above the surface in deep water, many rods from the shore. it was even supposed by some that the pond had sunk, and this was one of the primitive forest that formerly stood there. i find that even so long ago as 1792, in a "topographical description of the town of concord," by one of its citizens, in the col lections of the massachusetts historical society, the au thor, after speaking of walden and white ponds, adds: " in the middle of the latter may be seen, when the water is very low, a tree which appears as if it grew in the place the ponds. 165 where it now stands, although the roots are fifty feet be low the surface of the water; the top of this tree is broken off, and at that place measures fourteen inches in diame ter." in the spring of '49 i talked with the man who lives nearest the pond in sudbury, who told me that it was he who got out this tree ten or fifteen years before. as near as he could remember, it stood twelve or fifteen rods from the shore, where the water was thirty or forty feet deep. it was in the winter, and he had been getting out ice in the forenoon, and had resolved that in the afternoon, with the aid of his neighbors, he would take out the old yellow pine. he sawed a channel in the ice toward the shore, and hauled it over and along and out on to the ice with oxen ; but, be fore he had gone far in his work, he was surprised to find that it was wrong end upward, with the stumps of the branches pointing down, and the small end firmly fastened in the sandy bottom. it was about a foot in diameter at the big end, and he had expected to get a good saw-log, but it was so rotten as to be fit only for fuel, if for that. he had some of it in his shed then. there were marks of an axe and of woodpeckers on the but. he thought that it might have been a dead tree on the shore, but was finally blown over into the pond, and after the top had be come water-logged, while the but-end was still dry and light, had drifted out and sunk wrong end up. his father, eighty years old, could not remember when it was not there. several pretty large logs may still be seen lying on the bottom, where, owing to the undulation of the surface, they look like huge v/ater snakes in motion. this pond has rarely been profaned by a boat, for there is little in it to tempt a fisherman. instead of the white lily, which requires mud, or the common sweet flag, the blue flag (iris versicolor) grows thinly in the pure water, rising from the stony bottom all around the shore, where it is visited by humming birds in june, and the color both of its bluish blades and its flowers, and especially their re flections, are in singular harmony with the glaucous water. white pond and walden are great crystals on the sur face of the earth. lakes of light. if they m^ere perma nently congealed, and small enough to be clutched, they would, perchance, be carried off by slaves, like precious 166 walden. stones, to adorn the heads of emperors; but being hquid, and ample, and secured to us and our successors forever, we disregard them, and run after the diamond of kohi noor. they are too pure to have a market vahie; they contain no muck. how much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters, are they! we never learned meanness of them. how much fairer than the pool before the farmer's door, in which his ducks swim ! hither the clean wild ducks come. nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates her. the birds with their plumage and their notes are in har mony with the flowers, but what youth or maiden con spires with the wild luxuriant beauty of nature? she flourishes most alone, far from the towns where they re side. talk of heaven ! ye disgrace earth. baker farm. sometimes i rambled to pine groves, standing like temples, or like fleets at sea, full-rigged, with wavy boughs, and rippling with light, so soft and green and shady that the druids would have forsaken their oaks to worship in them; or to the cedar wood beyond flint's pond, where the trees, covered with hoary blue berries, spiring higher and higher, are fit to stand before valhalla, and the creep ing juniper covers the ground with wreaths full of fruit; or to swamps where the usnea lichen hangs in festoons from the white-spruce trees, and toadstools, round tables of the swamp gods, cover the ground, and more beautiful fungi adorn the stumps, like butterflies or shells, vegetable winkles; where the swamp-pink and dogwood grow, the red alder-berry glows like eyes of imps, the waxwork grooves and crushes the hardest woods in its folds, and the wild-holly berries make the beholder fovget his home with their beauty, and he is dazzled and tempted by nameless other wild forbidden fruits, too fair for mortal taste. in stead of calling on some scholar, i paid many a visit to particular trees, of kinds which are rare in this neighbor baker farm. 1g7 hood, citanding far away in the middle of some pasture, or in the depths of a wood or swamp, or on a hill top: such as the black-birch, of which we have some handsome speci mens two feet in diameter; its cousin the yellow-birch, with its loose golden vest, perfumed like the first; the beech, avhich has so neat a bole and beautifully lichen painted, perfect in all its details, of which, excepting scattered specimens, i know but one small grove of sizable trees left in the township, supposed by some to have been planted by the pigeons that were once baited with beech nuts near b}'; it is worth the while to see the silver grain sparkle when you split this wood ; the bass ; the hornbeam ; the celtis occidentalis, or false elm, of which we have but one well-grown; some taller mast of a pine, a shingle tree, or a more perfect hemlock than usual, standing like a pagoda in the midst of the woods; and many others i could mention. these were the shrines i visited both summer and winter. once it chanced that i stood in the very abutment of a rainbow's arch, which filled the lower stratum of the at mosphere, tingeing the grass and leaves around, and daz zling me as if i looked through colored crystal. it was a lake of rainbow light, in which, for a short while, i lived like a dolphin. if it had lasted longer it might have tinged my employments and life. as i walked on the railroad causeway, i used to wonder at the halo of light around my shadow, and would fain fancy myself one of the elect. one who visited me declared that the shadows of some irishmen before him had no halo about them, that it was only natives that were so distinguished. benvenuto cellini tells us in his memoirs, that, after a certain terrible dream or vision which he had during his confinement in the castle of st. angelo, a resplendent light appeared over the shadow of his head at morning and evening, whether he was in italy or france, and it was particularly conspicuous when the grass was moist with dew. this was probably the same phenomenon to which i have referred, which is especially observed in the morning, but also at other times, and even by moonlight. though a constant one, it is not commonly noticed, and, in the case of an excitable imagination like cellini's, it would be basis enough for su 168 walden. perstition. besides, he tells us that he showed it to very few. but are they not indeed distinguished who are con scious that they are regarded at all? i set out one afternoon to go a-fishing to fair-haven, through the woods, to eke out my scanty fare of vege tables. my way led through pleasant meadow, an adjunct of the baker farm, that retreat of which a poet has since sung, beginning, — "thy entry is a pleasant field, which some mossy fruit trees yield partly to a ruddy brook, by gliding musquash undertook, and mercurial trout. darting about." i thought of living there before i went to walden. i " hooked " the apples, leaped the brook, and scared the musquash and the trout. it was one of those afternoons which seem indefinitely long before one, in which many events may happen, a large portion of our natural life, though it was already half spent when i started. by the way there came up a shower, which compelled me to stand half an hour under a pine, piling boughs over my head, and wearing my handkerchief for a shed; and when at length i had made one cast over the pickerel-weed, standing up to my middle in water, i found myself suddenly in the shadow of a cloud, and the thunder began to rumble with such emphasis that i could do no more than listen to it. the gods must be proud, thought i, with such forked flashes to rout a poor unarmed fisherman. so i made haste for shelter to the nearest hut, which stood half a mile from any road, but so much the nearer to the pond, and had long been uninhabited: — "and here a poet builded, in the completed years, for behold a trivial cabin that to destruction steers." so the muse fables. but therein, as i found, dwelt now john field, an irishman, and his wife, and several chil dren, from the broad-faced boy who assisted his father at baker farm. 1g9 his work, and now came running by his side from the bog to escape the rain, to the wrinkled, sibyl-hke, cone-headed infant that sat upon its father's knee as in the palaces of nobles, and looked out from its home in the midst of wet and hunger inquisitively upon the stranger, with the privi lege of infancy, not knowing but it was the last of a noble line, and the hope and cynosure of the world, instead of john field's poor starveling brat. there we sat together under that part of the roof which leaked the least, while it showered and thundered without. i had sat there many times of old before the ship was built that floated this family to america. an honest, hard-working, but shift less man plainly was john field; and his wife, she too was brave to cook so many successive dinners in the recesses of that loft}^ stove; with round greasy face and bare breast, still thinking to improve her condition one da}'; with the never absent mop in one hand, and yet no effects of it visible anywhere. the chickens, which had also taken shelter here from the rain, stalked about the room like members of the family, too humanized methought to roast well. they stood and looked in my eye or pecked at my shoe significantly. meanwhile my host told me his story, how hard he worked "bogging" for a neighboring farmer, turning up a meadow with a spade or bog hoe at the rate of ten dollars an acre and the use of the land with manure for one year, and his little broad-faced son worked cheerfully at his father's side the while, not knowing how poor a bargain the latter had made. i tried to help him with my experience, telling him that he was one of my nearest neighbors, and that i too, who came a-fishing here, and looked like a loafer, was getting my living like him self; that i lived in a tight, light, and clean house, which hardly cost more than the annual rent of such a ruin as his commonly amounts to; and how, if he chose, he might in a month or two build himself a palace of his own; that i did not use tea, nor coffee, nor butter, nor milk, nor fresh meat, and so did not have to work to get them; again, as i did not work hard, i did not have to eat hard, and it cost me but a trifle for my food ; but as he began with tea, and coffee, and butter, and milk, and beef, he had to work hard to pay for them, and when he had worked hard he 170 walden. had to eat hard again to repair the waste of his system, — and so it was as broad as it was long, indeed it was broader than it was long, for he was discontented and wasted his life into the bargain; and yet he had rated it as a gain, in coming to america, that here you could get tea, and coffee, and meat every day. but the only true america is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without these, and where the state does not endeavor to compel you to sustain the slavery and war and other superfluous expenses which di rectly or indirectly result from the use of such things. for i purposely talked to him as if he were a philosopher, or desired to be one. i should be glad if all the meadows on the earth were left in a wild state, if that were the conse quence of men's beginning to redeem themselves. a man will not need to study history to find out what is best for his own culture. but alas ! the culture of an irishman is an enterprise to be undertaken with a sort of moral bog hoe. i told him, that as he worked so hard at bogging, he re quired thick boots and stout clothing, which yet were soon soiled and worn out, but i wore light shoes and thin cloth ing, which cost not half so much, though he might think that i was dressed like a gentleman (which, however, was not the case), and in an hour or two, without labor, but as a recreation, i could, if i wished, catch as many fish as i should want for two days, or earn enough money to sup port me a week. if he and his family would live simply, they might all go a-huckleberrying in the summer for their amusement. john heaved a sigh at this, and his wife stared with arms akimbo, and both appeared to be won dering if they had capital enough to begin such a course with, or arithmetic enough to carry it through. it was sailing by dead reckoning to them, and they saw not clearly how to make their port so ; therefore i suppose they still take life bravely, after their fashion, face to face, giv ing it tooth and nail, not having skill to split its massive columns with any fine entering wedge, and rout it in de tail ; — thinking to deal with it roughly, as one should handle a thistle. but they fight at an overwhelming disadvan tage, — living, john field, alas! without arithmetic, and failing so. baker farm. 171 "do 3'ou ever fish?" i asked. "oh, yes, i catch a mess now and then when i am lying by; good perch i catch." "what's your bait?" "i catch shiners with fish-worms, and bait the perch with them." "you'd better go now, john," said his wife, with glistening and hopeful face; but john demurred. the shower was now over, and a rainbow above the eastern woods promised a fair evening; so i took my departure. when i had got without i asked for a dish, hoping to get a sight of the well bottom, to complete my survey of the premises; but there, alas! are shallows and quicksands, and rope broken withal, and bucket irre coverable. meanwhile the right culinary vessel was selected, water was seemingly distilled, and after consul tation and long delay passed out to the thirsty one, — not yet suffered to cool, not yet to settle. such gruel sus tains life here, i thought; so, shutting my eyes, and ex cluding the motes by a skilfully directed under-current, i drank to genuine hospitality the heartiest draught i could. i am not squeamish in such cases when manners are concerned. as i was leaving the irishman's roof after the rain, bending my steps again to the pond,' my haste to catch pickerel, w^ading in retired meadows, in sloughs and bog holes, in forlorn and savage places, appeared for an in stant trivial to me who had been sent to school and col lege; but as i ran down the hill toward the reddening west, w'ith the rainbow over my shoulder, and some faint tinkling sounds borne to my ear through the cleansed air, from i know not what quarter, my good genius seemed to say, — go fish and hunt far and wide day by day, — farther and wider, — and rest thee by many brooks and hearthsides without misgiving. remember thy creator in the days of thy youth. rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures. let the noon find thee by other lakes, and the night overtake thee everywhere at home. there are no larger fields than these, no worthier games than may here be played. grow wild according to thy nature, like these sedges and brakes, which will never become english hay. let the thunder rumble; what if it threaten ruin to farmer's 172 walden. crops? that is not its errand to thee. take shelter under the cloud, while they flee to carts and sheds. let not to get a living be thy trade, but thy sport. enjoy the land, but own it not. through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like serfs. o baker farm! "landscape where the richest elemeat is a httle sunshine innocent." . . , " no one runs to revel on thy rail-fenced lea." . . . " debate with no man hast thou, with questions art never perplexed, as tame at the first sight as now. in thy plain russet gabardine dressed." . . . "come ye who love. and ye who hate. children of the holy dove, and guy faux of the state. and hang conspiracies from the tough rafters of the trees!" men come tamely home at night only from the next field or street, where their household echoes haunt, and their life pines because it breathes its own breath over again; their shadows morning and evening reach farther than their daily steps. we should come home from far, from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day, with new experience and character. before i had reached the pond some fresh impulse had brought out john field, with altered mind, letting go " bogging " ere this sunset. but he, poor man, disturbed only a couple of fins while i was catching a fair string, and he said it was his luck; but when he changed seats in the boat luck changed seats too. poor john field! — i trust he does not read this, unless he will improve by it, — thinking to live by some derivative old country mode in this primitive new country, — to catch perch with shiners. it is good bait sometimes, i allcnv. with his horizon all his own, yet he a poor man, born to be poor, with his inherited irish poverty or poor life, his adam's higher laws. 173 grandmother and boggy ways, not to rise in this world, he nor his posterity, till their wading, webbed, bog-trotting feet get talaria to their heels. xi. higher laws. as i came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, i caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that i was hungry then, except for that wildness which he repre sented. once or twice, however, while i lived at the pond, i found myself ranging the woods, like a half-starved hound, with a strange abandonment, seeking some kind of venison which i might devour, and no morsel could have been too savage for me. the wildest scenes had become unaccountably familiar. i found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primi tive rank and savage one, and i reverence them both. i love the wild not less than the good. the wildness and ad venture that are in fishing still recommended it to me. i like sometimes to take rank hold on life and spend my day more as the animals do. perhaps i have owed to this employment and to hunting, when quite young, my closest acquaintance with nature. they early introduce us to and detain us in scenery with which otherwise, at that age, we should have little acquaintance. fishermen, hunters, wood-choppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a pai't of nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observ ing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than philoso phers or poets even, who approach her with expectation. she is not afraid to exhibit herself to them. the traveller on the prairie is naturally a hunter, on the head waters of the missouri and columbia a trapper, and at the falls of ist. mary a fisherman. he who is only a traveller 174 walden. learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. we are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or in stinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience. they mistake who assert that the yankee has few amusements, because he has not so many public holidays, and men and boys do not play so many games as they do in england, for here the more primitive but solitary amusements of hunting, fishing, and the like have not yet given place to the former. almost every new eng land boy among my contemporaries shouldered a fowling piece between the ages of ten and fourteen ; and his hunt ing and fishing grounds were not limited like the preserves of an english nobleman, but were more boundless even than those of a savage. no wonder, then, that he did not oftener stay to play on the common. but already a change is taking place, owing, not to an increased hu manity, but to an increased scarcity of game, for perhaps the hunter is the greatest friend of the animals hunted, not excepting the humane society. moreover, when at the pond, i wished sometimes to add fish to my fare for variety. i have actually fished from the same kind of necessity that the first fishers did. what ever humanity i might conjure up against it was all facti tious, and concerned my philosophy more than my feel ings. i speak of fishing only now, for i had long felt differently about fowling, and sold my gun before i went to the woods. not that i am less humane than others, but i did not perceive that my feelings were much af fected. i did not pity the fishes nor the worms. this was habit. as for fowling, during the last years that i carried a gun my excuse was that i was studying ornithology, and sought only new or rare birds. but i confess that i am now inclined to think that there is a finer way of studying ornithology than this. it requires so much closer attention to the habits of the birds, that, if for that reason only, i have been willing to omit the gun. yet notwithstanding the objection on the score of humanity, i am compelled to doubt if equally valuable sports are ever substituted for these; and when some of my friends higher laws. 175 have asked me anxiousl}^ about their boys, whether they should let them hunt, i have answered, yes, — remember ing that it was one of the best parts of my education, — make them hunters, though sportsmen only at first, if possible, mighty hunters at last, so that they shall not find game large enough for them in this or any vegetable wilderness, — hunters as well as fishers of men. thus far i am of the opinion of chaucer's nun, who "yave not of the text a pulled hen that saith that hunters ben not holy men." there is a j^eriod in the history of the individual, as of the race, when the hunters are the "best men," as the algonquins called them. we cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun; he is no more humane, while his education has been sadty neglected. this was my answer with respect to those youths who were bent on this pursuit, trusting that they would soon outgrow it. no humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does. the hare in its extrem ity cries like a child. i warn you, mothers, that my sympathies do not always make the usual ]a\\\anthropic distinctions. such is oftenest the young man's introduction to the forest, and the most original part of himself. he goes thither at first as a hunter and fisher, until at last, if he has the seeds of a better life in him, he distinguishes his proper objects, as a poet or naturalist it may be, and leaves the gun and fish-pole behind. the mass of men are still and always young in this respect. in some countries a hunting parson is no uncommon sight. such a one might make a good shepherd's dog, but is far from being the good shepherd. i have been surprised to con sider that the only obvious employment, except wood chopping, ice-cutting, or the like business, which ever to my knowledge detained at walden pond for a whole half day any of my fellow-citizens, whether fathers or children of the town, with just one exception, was fishing. com monly they did not think that they were lucky, or well paid for their time, unless they got a long string of fish, 176 walden. though they had the opportunity of seeing the pond all the while. they might go there a thousand times before the sediment of fishing would sink to the bottom and leave their purpose pure; but no doubt such a clarifying process would be going on all the while. the governor and his council faintly remember the pond, for they went a-fishing there when they were bo3^s; but now they are too old and dignified to go a-fishing, and so they know it no' more forever. yet even they expect to go to heaven at last. if the legislature regards it, it is chiefly to regu late the number of hooks to be used there; but they know nothing about the hook of hooks with which to angle for the pond itself, empaling the legislature for a bait. thus, even in civilized communities, the embryo man passes through the hunter stage of development. i have found repeatedly, of late years, that i cannot jfish without falling a little in self-respect. i have tried it again and again. i have skill at it, and, like many of my fellows, a certain instinct for it, which revives from time to time; but always when i have done i feel that it would have been better if i had not fished. i think that i do not mistake. it is a faint intimation, yet so are the first streaks of morning. there is unquestionably this instinct in me which belongs to the lower orders of crea tion; yet with every year i am less a fisherman, though without more humanity or even wisdom; at present i am no fisherman at ail. but i see that if i were to live in a wilderness i should again be tempted to become a fisher and hunter in earnest. besides, there is something essentially unclean about this diet, and all flesh, and i began to see where housework commences, and whence the endeavor, which costs so much, to wear a tidy and respectable appearance, each day, to keep the house sweet and free from all ill odors and sights. having been my own butcher and scullion and cook, as well as the gentleman for whom the dishes were served up, i can speak from an unusually complete experience. the practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness; and, besides, when i had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. it was insignificant and unnecessary, higher laws. 177 and cost more than it came to. a little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth. like many of my contemporaries, i had rarely for many years used animal food, or tea, or coffee, &c.; not so much because of any ill effects which i had traced to them, as because they were not agreeable to my imagina tion. the repugnance to animal food is not the effect of experience, but is an instinct. it appeared more beauti ful to live low and fare hard in many respects ; and though i never did so, i went far enough to please my imagina tion. i believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best con dition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind. it is a significant fact, stated by entomologists, i find it in kirby and spcnce, that "some insects in their perfect state, though furnished with organs of feeding, make no use of them;" and they lay it down as ''a general rule, that almost all insects in this state eat much less than in that of larvae. the voracious caterpillar when trans formed into a butterfly," . . . "and the gluttonous maggot when become a fly," content themselves with a drop or two of honey or some other sweet liquid. the abdomen under the wings of the butterfly still represents the larva. this is the tidbit which tempts his insectivo rous fate. the gross feeder is a man in the larva state; and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without fancy or imagination, whose vast abdomens be tray them. it is hard to provide and cook so simple and clean a diet as will not offend the imagination; but this, i think, is to be fed when we feed the body; they should both sit down at the same table. yet perhaps this may be done. the fruits eaten temperately need not make us ashamed of our appetites, nor interrupt the worthiest pursuits. but put an extra condiment into your dish, and it will poison you. it is not worth the while to live by rich cookery. most men would feel shame if caught preparing with their own hands precise^ such a dinner, whether of animal or vegetable food, as is every day prepared for them by others. yet till this is otherwise we are not 178 walden. civilized, and, if gentlemen and ladies, are not true men and women. this certainly suggests what change is to be made. it may be vain to ask why the imagination will not be reconciled to flesh and fat. i am satisfied that it is not. is it not a reproach that man is a carnivorous animal? true, he can and does live, in a great measure, by preying on other animals; but this is a miserable way, — as any one who will go to snaring rabbits, or slaughtering lambs, may learn, — and he will be regarded as a bene factor of his race w^ho shall teach man to confine himself to a more innocent and wholesome diet. whatever my own practice may be, i have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in con tact with the more civilized. if one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of his genius, which are certainly true, he sees not to what extremes, or even insanity, it may lead him; and yet that v/ay, as he grows more resolute and faithful, his road lies. the faintest assured objection which one healthy man feels will at length prevail over the argu ments and customs of mankind. no man ever followed his genius till it misled him. though the result were bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the consequences were to be regretted, for these were a life in conformity to higher principles. if the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal, — that is your success. all nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. the greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. we easily come to doubt if they exist. we soon forget them. they are the highest reality. perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. the true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. it is a little stardust caught, a segment of the rainbow which i have clutched. yet, for my part, i was never unusually squeamish; higher laws. 179 i could sometimes cat a fried rat with a good relish, if it were necessary. i am glad to have drunk water so long, for the same reason that i prefer the natural sky to an opium-eater's heaven. i would fain keep sober always; and there are infinite degrees of drunkenness. i believe that water is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor; and think of dashing the hopes cf a morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea! ah, how low i fall when i am tempted by them! even music may be intoxicating. such appar enth' slight causes destroyed greece and rome, and will destroy england and america. of all ebriosity, who does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes? i have found it to be the most serious objection to coarse labors long continued, that they compelled me to eat and drink coarsely also. but to tell the truth, i find myself at present somewhat less particular in these respects. i carry less religion to the table, ask no blessing; not be cause i am wiser than i was, but, i am obliged to confess, because, however much it is to be regretted, with years i have grown more coarse and indifferent. perhaps these questions are entertained only in youth, as most believe of poetry. m)' practice is "nowhere," my opinion is here. nevertheless i am far from regarding myself as one of those privileged ones to whom the ved refers when it says that "he who has true faith in the omnipresent supreme being may eat all that exists," that is, is not bound to inquire what is his food, or who prepares it; and even in their case it is to be observed, as a hindoo com mentator has remarked, that the vedant limits this privi lege to "the time of distress." who has not sometimes derived an inexpressible satis faction from his food in which appetite had no share? i have been thrilled to think that i owed a mental percep tion to the commonly gross sense of taste, that i have been inspired through the palate, that some berries which i had eaten on a hillside had fed my genius. " the soul not being mistress of herself," says thseng-tseu, "one looks, and one does not see; one listens, and one does not hear; one eats, and one does not know the savor of food." he who dis tinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton; 180 walden. he who does not cannot be otherwise. a puritan may go to his brown-bread crust with as gross an appetite as ever an alderman to his turtle. not that food which entereth into the mouth defileth a man, but the appetite with which it is eaten. it is neither the quality nor the quantity, but the devotion to sensual savors; when that which is eaten is not a viand to sustain our animal, or inspire our spiritual life, but food for the worms that possess us. if the hunter has a taste for mud-turtles, muskrats, and other such sav age tidbits, the fine lady indulges a taste for jelly made of a calf's foot, or for sardines from over the sea, and they are even. he goes to the mill-pond, she to her preserve-pot. the wonder is how they, how you and i, can live this slimy beastly life, eating and drinking. our whole life is startlingly moral. there is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice. goodness is the only investment that never fails. in the music of the harp which trembles round the world it is the insisting on this "which thrills us. the harp is the travelling patterer for the universe's insurance company, recommending its laws, and our little goodness is all the assessment that we pay. though the youth at last grows indifferent, the laws of the universe are not indifferent, but are forever on the side of the most sensitive. listen to every zephyr for some reproof, for it is surely there, and he is unfortunate who does not hear it. we cannot touch a string or move a stop but the charming moral transfixes us. many an irksome noise, go a long way off, is heard as music, a proud sweet satire on the meanness of our lives. we are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. it is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled; like the worms which, even in life and health, occupy our bodies. possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change its nature. i fear that it may enjoy a certain health of its own; that we may be well, yet not pure. the other day i picked up the lower jaw of a hog, with white and sound teeth and tusks, which suggested that there was an animal health and vigor distinct from the spiritual. this creature succeeded by other means than temperance and purity. "that in which men differ from brute beasts," says men higher laws. 181 cius, "is a thing very inconsiderable; the common herd lose it very soon; superior men preserve it carefully." who knows what sort of life would result if we had at tained to purity? if i knew so wise a man as could teach me purity i would go to seek him forthwith. "a com mand over our passions, and over the external senses of the body, and good acts, are declared by the ved to be in dispensable in the mind's approximation to god." yet the spirit can for the time pervade and control every mem ber and function of the body, and transmute what in form is the grossest sensuality into purity and devotion. the generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us. chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called genius, heroism, holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it. man flows at, once to god when the channel of purity is open. by turns our purity inspires and our impurity casts us down. he is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by da}-, and the divine being established. perhaps there is none but has cause for shame on account of the in ferior and brutish nature to which he is allied. i fear that we are such gods or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, and that, to some extent, our very life is our disgrace. — " how happy's he who hath due place assigned to his beasts and disafforested his mind! can use his horse, goat, wolf, and ev'ry beast, and is not ass himself to all the rest! else man not only is the herd of swine. but he's those devils too which did incline them to a headlong rage, and made them worse." all sensuality is one, though it takes many forms; all purity is one. it is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or sleep sensually. they are but one appetite, and we only need to see a person do any one of these things to know how great a sensualist he is. the impure can neither stand nor sit with purity. when the reptile is at tacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another. if you would be chaste, you must be temperate. 182 walden. what is chastity? how shall a man know if he is chaste? he shall not know it. we have heard of this virtue, but we know not what it is. we speak conformably to the rumor which we have heard. from exertion come wisdom and purity; from sloth ignorance and sensuality. in the student sensuality is a sluggish habit of mind. an un clean person is universally a slothful one, one who sits by a stove, whom the sun shines on prostrate, who reposes without being fatigued. if you would avoid uncleanness, and all the sins, work earnestly, though it be at cleaning a stable. nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be overcome. what avails it that you are christian, if you are not purer than the heathen, if you deny yourself no more, if you are not more religious? i know of many sys tems of religion esteemed heathenish whose precepts fill the reader with shame, and provoke him to new endeavors, though it be to the performance of rites merely. i hesitate to say these things, but it is not because of the subject, — i care not how" obscene my ivords are, — but be cause i cannot speak of them without betraying my im purity. we discourse freely without shame of one form of sensuality, and are silent about another. we are so de graded that we cannot speak simpty of the necessary functions of human nature. in earlier ages, in some coun tries, every function was reverently spoken of and regu lated by law. nothing was too trivial for the hindoo law giver, however offensive it may be to modern taste. he teaches how to eat, drink, cohabit, void excrement and urine, and the like, elevating what is mean, and does not falsely excuse himself by calling these things trifles. every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. we are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. any nobleness begins at once to re fine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to im brute them. john farmer sat at his door one september evening, after a hard day's work, his mind still running, on his la bor more or less. having bathed he sat down to recreate his intellectual man. it was a rather cool evening, and brute neighbors. 183 some of his neighbors were apprehending a frost. he had not attended to the train of his thoughts long when he heard some one puiying on a flute, and that sound har monized with his mood. still he thought of his work; but the burden of his thought was that though this kept run ning in his head, and he found himself planning and con triving it against his will, yet it concerned him very little. it was no more than the scurf of his skin, which was con stantly shuffled off. but the notes of the flute came home to his ears out of a different sphere from that he worked in, and suggested work for certain faculties which slumbered in him. they gently did away with the street, and the village, and the state in which he lived. a voice said to him, — why do j'ou stay here and live this mean moiling life, when a glorious existence is possible for j^ou? those same stars twinkle over other fields than these. — but how to come out of this condition and actually migrate thither? all that he could think of was to practise some new aus terity, to let his mind descend into his body and redeem it, and treat himself with ever increasing respect. xii. brute neighbors. sometimes i had a companion in my fishing, who came through the village to my house from the other side of the town, and the catching of the dinner was as much a social exercise as the eating of it. hermit. i wonder what the world is doing now. i have not heard so much as a locust over the sweet-fern these three hours. the pigeons are all asleep upon their roosts, — no flutter from them. was that a farmer's noon horn which sounded from beyond the woods just now? the hands are coming in to boiled salt beef and cider and in dian bread. w'hy will men worry themselves so? he that does not eat need not work. i wonder how much they have reaped. who would live there where a body can never think for the barking of bose? and oh, the house keeping! to keep bright the devil's door-knobs, and scour 184 walden. his tubs this bright day ! better not keep a house. say, some hollow tree; and then for morning calls and dinner parties! only a wood-pecker tapping. oh, the}^ swarm; the sun is too warm there: they are born too far into life for me. i have water from the spring, and a loaf of brown bread on the shelf. — hark ! i hear a rustling of the leaves. is it some ill-fed village hound yielding to the instinct of the chase? or the lost pig which is said to be in these woods, whose tracks i saw after the rain? it comes on apace; my sumachs and sweet-briers tremble. — eh, mr. poet, is it you? how do you like the world to-day? poet. see those clouds; how they hang! that's the greatest thing i have seen to-day. there's nothing like it in old paintings, nothing like it in foreign lands, — unless when we were off the coast of spain. that's a true med iterranean sky. i thought, as i have my living to get, and have not eaten to-day, that i might go a-fishing. that's the true industry for poets. it is the only trade i have learned. come, let's along. hermit. i cannot resist. my brown bread will soon be gone. i will go with you gladly soon, but i am just con cluding a serious meditation. i think that i am near the end of it. leave me alone, then, for a while. but that we may not be delayed, you shall be digging the bait mean while. angle-worms are rarely to be met with in these parts, where the soil was never fattened with manure; the race is nearly extinct. the sport of digging the bait is nearly equal to that of catching the fish, when one's ap petite is not too keen; and this you may have all to your self to-day. i would advise you to set in the spade down yonder among the ground-nuts, where you see the johns wort waving. i think that i may warrant you one worm to every three sods you turn up, if you look well in among the roots of the grass, as if you were weeding. oi', if you choose to go farther, it will not be unwise, for i have found the increase of fair bait to be veiy nearly as the squares of the distances. hermit alone. let me see, where was i? methinks i was nearly in this frame of mind; the world lay about at this angle. shall i go to heaven or a-fishing? if i should soon bring this meditation to an end, would another so sweet brute neighbors. 185 occasion be likely to offer? i was as near being resolved into the essence of things as ever i was in my life. i fear my thoughts will not come back to me. if it would do any good, i would whistle for them. when they make us an offer, is it wise to say, we will think of it? my thoughts have left no track, and i cannot find the path again. what was it that i was thinking of? it was a very hazy day. i wall just try these three sentences of con-fut-see; they may fetch that state about again. i know not whether it was the dumps or a budding ecstasy. mem. there never is but one opportunity of a kind. poet. how now. hermit, is it too soon? i have got just thirteen whole ones, besides several which are imperfect or undersized ; but they will do for the smaller fry ; they do not cover up the hook so much. those village worms are quite too large; a shiner may make a meal off one without finding the skewer. hermit. well, then, let's be off. shall we to the con cord? there's good sport there if the water be not too high. why do precisely these objects which we behold make a world? why has man just these species of animals for his neighbors; as if nothing but a mouse could have filled this crevice? i suspect that pilpay & co. have put animals to their best use, for they are all beasts of burden, in a sense, made to cany some portion of our thoughts. the mice which haunted my house were not the com mon ones, which are said to have been introduced into the country, but a wild native kind not found in the vil lage. i sent one to a distinguished naturalist, and it in terested him rpuch. when i was building, one of these had its nest undei-neath the house, and before i had laid the second floor, and swept out the shavings, would come out regularly at lunch time and pick up the crumbs at my feet. it probably had never seen a man before; and it soon became quite familiar, and would run over my shoes and up my clothes. it could readily ascend the sides of the room by short impulses, like a squirrel, which it resembled in its motions. at length, as i leaned with my elbow on the bench one day, it ran up my clothes, and along my sleeve, 186 walden. and round and round the paper which held m}^ dinner, while i kept the latter close, and dodged and played at bo peep with it ; and when at last i held still a piece of cheese between my thumb and finger, it came and nibbled it, sitting in my hand, and afterward cleaned its face and paws, like a fly, and walked away. a phoebe soon built in my shed, and a robin for pro tection in a pine which grew against the house. in june the partridge {tetrao umbdlus), which is so shy a bird, led her brood past my windows, from the woods in the rear to the front of my house, clucking and calling to them like a hen, and in all her behavior proving herself the hen of the woods. the young suddenly disperse on your approach, at a signal from the mother, as if a whirlwind had swept them away, and they so exactly resemble the dried leaves and twigs that many a traveller has placed his foot in the midst of a brood, and heard the whir of the old bird as she flew off, and her anxious calls and mewing, or seen her trail her wings to attract his attention, without suspecting their neighborhood. the parent will sometimes roll and spin round before you in such a dishabille, that you cannot, for a few moments, detect what kind of creature it is. the young squat still and flat, often running their heads under a leaf, and mind only their mother's directions given from a distance, nor wall your approach make them run again and betray themselves. you may even tread on them, or have your ej^es on them for a minute, without discovering them. i have held them in my open hand at such a time, and still their only care, obedient to their mother and their instinct, was to squat there without fear or trembling. so perfect is this instinct, that once, when i had laid them on the leaves again, and one accidentally fell on its side, it was found with the rest in exactly the same position ten minutes afterward. they are not callow like the young of most birds, but more perfectly developed and precocious even than chickens. the remarkably adult yet innocent expression of their open and serene eyes is very memorable. all intelligence seems reflected in them. they suggest not merely the purity of infancy, but a wisdom clarified by ex perience. such an eye was not born when the bird was, but is coeval with the sky it reflects. the woods do not brute neighbors. 187 yield another such gem. the traveller does not often look into such a limpid well. the ignorant or reckless sports man often shoots the parent at such a time, and leaves these innocents to fall a prey to some prowling beast or bird, or gradually mingle with the decaying leaves which they so much resemble. it is said that when hatched b}' a hen they will directly disperse on some alarm, and so are lost, for they never hear the mother's call which gathers them again. these were my hens and chickens. it is remarkable how many creatures live wild and free though secret in the woods, and still sustain themselves in the neighborhood of towns, suspected by hunters only. how retired the otter manages to live here ! he grows to be four feet long, as big as a small bo}^, perhaps without any human being getting a glimpse of him. i formerly saw the raccoon in the woods behind where my house is built, and probably still heard their whinnering at night. commonly i rested an hour or two in the shade at noon, after planting, and ate my lunch, and read a little by a spring which was the source of a swamp and of a brook, oozing from under brister's hill, half a mile from my field. the approach to this was through a succession of descending grassy hollows, full of young pitch-pines, into a larger wood about the swamp. there, in a very secluded and shaded spot, under a spreading white-pine, there was yet a clean firm sward to sit on. i had dug out the spring and made a well of clear gray water, avhere i could dip up a pailful without roiling it, and thither i went for this purpose almost every day in midsummer, when the pond was warmest. thither too the wood-cock led her brood, to probe the mud for worms, flying but a foot above them down the bank, while they ran in a troop beneath; but at last, spying me, she would leave her young and circle round and round me, nearer and nearer till within four or five feet, pretending broken wings and legs, to attract my attention, and get off her young, who would already have taken up their march, with faint wiry peep, single file through the swamp, as she directed. or i heard the peep of the young when i could not see the parent bird. there too the turtle-doves sat over the spring, or fluttered from bough to bough of the soft white 188 walden. pines over ni}^ head; or the red squirrel, coursing down the nearest bough, was particularly familiar and inquisi tive. you only need sit still long enough in some attrac tive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns. i was witness to events of a less peaceful character. one day when i went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, i observed two large ants, the one red, the other much larger, nearly half an inch long, and black, fiercely contending with one another. having once got hold they never let go, but struggled and wrestled and rolled on the chips incessantly. looking farther, i was surprised to find that the chips were covered with such combatants, that it was not a duellum, but a helium, a war between two races of ants, the red always pitted against the black, and frequently two red ones to one black. the legions of these myrmidons covered all the hills and vales in my wood-yard, and the ground w^as already strewn with the dead and dying, both red and black. it was the only battle which i have ever witnessed, the only battle-field i ever trod while the battle was rag ing; internecine w^ar; the red republicans on the one hand, and the black imperialists on the other. on every side they were engaged in deadly combat, yet without any noise that i could hear, and human soldiers never fought so resolutely. i watched a couple that were fast locked in each other's embraces, in a little sunny valley amid the chips, now at noonday prepared to fight till the sun went down, or life went out. the smaller red champion had fastened himself like a vice to his adversary's front, and through all the tumblings on that field never for an instant ceased to gnaw at one of his feelers near the root, having already caused the other to go by the board ; while the stronger black one dashed him from side to side, and, as i saw on looking nearer, had already divested him of several of his members. they fought with more perti nacity than bull-dogs. neither manifested the least disposition to retreat. it was evident that their battle cry was conquer or die. in the meanwhile there came along a single red ant on the hill side of this valley, evi dently full of excitement, who either had despatched his brute neighbors. 189 foo, or had not yet taken part in the battle; probably the latter, for he had lost none of his limbs ; whose mother had chargetl him to return with his shield or upon it. or perchance he was some achilles, who had nourished his wrath apart, and had now come to avenge or rescue his patroclus. he saw this unequal combat from afar, — for the blacks were nearly twice the size of the red, — he drew near with rapid pace till he stood on his guard within half an inch of the combatants; then, w^atching his oppor tunity, he sprang upon the black warrior, and commenced his operations near the root of his right fore-leg, leaving the foe to select among his own members; and so there were three united for life, as if a new kind of attraction had been invented which put all other locks and cements to shame. i should not have wondered by this time to find that they had their respective musical bands sta tioned on some eminent chip, and playing their national airs the while, to excite the slow and cheer the dying combatants. i was myself excited somewhat even as if they had been men. the mora you think of it, the less the difference. and certainly there is not the fight re corded in concord histor}'^, at least, if in the histor}of america, that will bear a moment's comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patri otism and heroism displayed. for numbers and for car nage it was an austerlitz or dresden. concord fight! two killed on the patriots' side, and luther blanchard wounded! why, here every ant was a buttrick, — "fire! for god's sake fire!" — and thousands shared the fate of davis and hosmer. there was not one hireling there. i have no doubt that it was a principle they fought for, as much as our ancestors, and not to avoid a three-penny tax on their tea; and the results of this battle will be as important and memorable to those whom it concerns as those of the battle of bunker hill, at least. i took up the chip on which the three i have particularly described w^re struggling, carried it into my house, and placed it under a tumbler on my window-sill, in order to see the issue. holding a microscope to the first-mentioned red ant, i saw that, though he was assiduously gnawing at the near fore-leg of his enemy, having severed his 190 waldex. remaining feeler, his own breast was all torn away, expos ing what vitals he had there to the jaws of the black warrior, whose breast-plate was apparently too thick for him to pierce; and the dark carbuncles of the sufferer's eyes shone with ferocity such as war only could excite. they struggled half an hour longer under the tumbler, and when i looked again the black soldier had severed the heads of his foes from their bodies, and the still living heads were hanging on either side of him like ghastly tro phies at his saddle-bow, still apparently as firmly fastened as ever, and he was endeavoring with feeble struggles, being without feelers and with only the remnant of a leg, and i know not how many other wounds, to divest him self of them ; which at length, after half an hour more, he accomplished. i raised the glass, and he went off over the window-sill in that crippled state. whether he finally survived that combat, and spent the remainder of his days in some hotel des invalidcs, i do not know; but i thought that his industry would not be worth much there after. i never learned which party was victorious, nor the cause of the war; but i felt for the rest of that day as if i had had my feelings excited and harrowed by witness ing the struggle, the ferocity and carnage, of a human battle before my door. kirby and spence tell us that the battles of ants have long been celebrated and the date of them recorded, though they say that hubcr is the only modern author wdio appears to have witnessed them, "^neas sylvius," say they, " after giving a very circumstantial account of one contested with great obstinacy by a great and small species on the trunk of a pear tree," adds that "'this action was fought in the pontificate of eugenius the fourth, in the presence of nicholas pistoriensis, an eminent lawyer, who related the wholehistory of the battle with the greatest fidelity.' a similar engagement between great and small ants is recorded by olaus magnus, in which the small ones, being victorious, are said to have buried the bodies of their own soldiers, but left those of their giant enemies a prey to the birds. this event happened previous to the expulsion of the tyrant chris tiern the second from sweden." the battle which i brute neighbors. 191 witnessed took place in the presidency of polk, five years before the passage of webster's fugitive-slave bill. • many a village bose, fit only to course a mud-turtle in a victualling cellar, sported his heavy quarters in the woods, without the knowledge of his master, and ineffectu ally smelled at old fox burrows and woodchucks' holes; led perchance by some slight cur which nimbly threadecl the wood, and might still inspire a natural terror in its denizens; now far behind his guide, barking like a canine bull toward some small squirrel avhich had treed itself for scrutiny, then, cantering off, bending the bushes with his weight, imagining that he is on the track of some stray member of the jerbilla family. once i was surprised to see a cat walking along the stony shore of the pond, for they rarely wander so far from home. the surprise was mutual. nevertheless the most domestic cat, which has lain on a rug all her days, appears quite at home in the woods, and, by her sly ancl stealthy idehavior, proves her self more native there than the regular inhabitants. once, when berrying, i met with a cat with young kittens in the woods, quite wild, and they all, like their mother, had their backs up and were fiercely spitting at me. a few j^ears before i lived in the woods there was what was called a "winged cat" in one of the farm-houses in lin coln nearest the pond, mr. gilian baker's. when i called to see her in june, 1842, she was gone a-hunting in the woods, as was her v/ont (i am not sure whether it was a male or female, and so use the more common pronoun), but her mistress told me that she came into the neighbor hood a little more than a year before, in april, and was finally taken into their house; that she was of a dark brownish gray color, with a white spot on her throat, and white feet, and had a large bushy tail like a fox; that in the winter the fur grew thick and flatted out along her sides, forming strips ten or twelve inches long by two and a half wide, and under her chin like a muff, the upper side loose, the under matted like felt, and in the spring these appendages dropped off. they gave me a pair of her ''wings," which i keep still. there is no appearance of a membrane about them. some thought it was part flying squirrel or some other wild animal, which is not 192 walden. impossible, for, according to naturalists, prolific hybrids have been produced by the union of the marten and do mestic cat. this would have been the right kind of cat for me to keep, if i had kept any; for why should not a poet's cat be winged as well as his horse? in the fall the loon {colymhus glacialis) came, as usual, to moult and bathe in the pond, making the woods ring with his wild laughter before i had risen. at rumor of his arrival all the mill-dam sportsmen are on the alert, in gigs and on foot, two by two and three by three, with patent rifles and conical balls and spy-glasses. they come rustling through the woods like autumn leaves, at least ten men to one loon. some station themselves on this side of the pond, some on that, for the poor bird can not be omnipresent ; if he dive here he must come up there. but now the kind october wind rises, rustling the leaves and rippling the surfr.ce of the water, so that no loon can be heard or seen, tl.ough his foes sweep the pond with spy-glasses, and mcaiq the woods resound with their dis charges. the waves generously rise and dash angrily, taking sides with all water-fowl, and our sportsmen must beat a retreat to town and shop and unfinished jobs. but they were too often successful. when i went to get a pail of water early in the morning i frequently saw this stately bird sailing out of my cove within a few rods. if i endeavored to overtake him in' a boat, in order to see how he would manoeuvre, he would dive and be completely lost, so that i did not discover him again, sometimes, till the latter part of the day. but i was more than a match for him on the surface. he commonly went off in a rain. as i was paddling along the north shore one very calm october afternoon, for such days especially they settle on to the lakes, like the milkweed down, having looked in vain over the pond for a loon, suddenly one, sailing out from the shore toward the middle a few rods in front of me, set up his wild laugh and betrayed himself. i pur sued with a paddle and he dived, but when he came up i was nearer than before. he dived again, but i miscalcu lated the direction he would take, and we were fifty rods apart when he came to the surface this time, for i had helped to widen the interval; and again he laughed long brute neighbors. 193 and loud, and with more reason than before. he ma noeuvred so cunningly that i could not get within half a dozen rods of him. each time, when he came to the sur face, turning his head this way and that, he coolly sur veyed the water and the land, and apparently chose his course so that he might come up where there was the widest expanse of water and at the greatest distance from the boat. it was surprising how cjuickl}^ he made up his mind and put his resolve into execution. he led me at once to the widest part of the pond, and could not be driven from it. while he was thinking one thing in his brain, i was endeavoring to divine his thought in mine. it was a pretty game, played on the smooth sur face of the pond, a man against a loon. suddenly your adversary's checker disappears beneath the board, and the problem is to place yours nearest to where his will appear again. sometimes he would come up unexpect edly on the opposite side of me, having apparently passed directly under the boat. so long winded was he and so unweariable, that when he had swum farthest he would immediately plunge again, nevertheless; and then no wit could divine where in the deep pond, beneath the smooth surface, he might be speeding his way like a fish, for he had time and ability to visit the bottom of the pond in its deepest part. it is said that loons have been caught in the new york lakes eighty feet beneath the surface, with hooks set for trout, — though walden is deeper than that. how surprised must the fishes be to see this un gainly visitor from another sphere speeding his way amid their schools! yet he appeared to know his course as surely uncicr water as on the surface , and swam much faster there. once or twice i saw a ripple where he ap proached the surface, just put his head out to reconnoitre, and instantly dived again. i found that it was as well for me to rest on my oars and wait his reappearing as to endeavor to calculate w^here he would rise; for again and again, when i was straining my eyes over the surface one way, i would suddenly be startled by his unearthly laugh behind me. but why, after displaying so much cunning, did he invariably betray himself the moment he came up by that loud laugh? did not his white breast enough 194 walden. betray him? he was indeed a silly loon, i thought. i could commonly hear the plash of the water when he came up, and so also detected him. but after an hour he seemed as fresh as ever, dived as willingly and swam yet farther than at first. it was surprising to see how serenely he sailed off with unruffled breast wncn he came to the surface, doing all the work with his webbed feet beneath. his usual note was this demoniac laughter, yet somewhat like that of a water-fowl; but occasionally, when he had balked nie most successfully and come up a long way off, he uttered a long-drawn unearthly howl, probably more like that of a wolf than any bird ; as when a. beast puts his muzzle to the ground and deliberately howls. this was his looning, — perhaps the wildest sound that is ever heard here, making the woods ring far and wide. i con cluded that he laughed in derision of my efforts, confident of his own resources. though the sky was by this time overcast, the pond was so smooth that i could see where he broke the surface when i did not hear him. his white breast, the stillness of the air, and the smoothness of the water were all against him. at length, having come up fifty rods off, he uttered one of those prolonged howls, as if calling on the god of loons to aid him, and immedi ately there came a wind from the east and rippled the surface, and filled the whole air with, misty rain, and i was impressed as if it were the pra^-er of the loon answered, and his god was angry with me; and so i left him disap pearing far away on the tumultuous surface. for hours, in fall days, i watched the ducks cunningly tack and veer and hold the middle of the pond, far from the sportsman; tricks which they will have less need to practice in louisiana bayous. when compelled to rise they would sometimes circle round and round and over the pond at a considerable height, from which they could easily see to other ponds and the river, like black motes in the sky; and when i thought they had gone off thither long since, they would settle down by a slanting flight of a quarter of a mile on to a distant part which was left free; but what besides safety they got by sailing in the middle of walden i do not know, unless they love its water for the same reason that i do. house-warming. 195 xiii. house-waeming. in october i went a-graping to the river meadows, and loaded myself with clusters more precious for their beauty and fragrance than for food. there too i admired, though i did not gather, the cranberries, small waxen gems, pend ants of the meadow grass, pearly and red, avhich the farmer plucks with an ugly rake, leaving the smooth meadow in a snarl, heedlessly measuring them by the bushel and the dollar only, and sells the spoils of the meads to boston and new york; destined to be jammed, to satisfy the tastes of lovers of nature there. so butchers rake the tongues of bison out of the prairie grass, regardless of the torn and drooping plant. the barberry's brilliant fruit was likewise food for my eyes merely; but i collected a small store of wild apples for coddling, which the proprie tors and travellers had overlooked. when chestnuts were ripe i laitl up half a bushel for winter. it was very excit ing at that season to roam the then boundless chestnut woods of lincoln, — they now sleep their long sleep under the railroad, — with a bag on my shoulder, and a stick to open burrs with in my hand, for i did not always wait for the frost, amid the rustling of leaves and the loud reproofs of the red-squirrels and the jays, whose half-consumed nuts i sometimes stole, for the burrs which they had se lected were sure to contain sound ones. occasionally i climbed and shook the trees. they grew also behind my house, and one large tree which almost overshadowed it was, when in flower, a bouquet which scented the whole neighborhood, but the squirrels and the jays got most of its fruit ; the last coming in flocks early in the morning and picking the nuts out of the burrs before they fell. i re linquished these trees to them and visited the more dis tant woods composed wholly of chestnut. these nuts, as far as they went, were a good substitute for bread. many other subvstitutes might, perhaps, be found. digging one day for fish-worms i discovered the ground-nut (apios tuber osa) on its string, the potato of the aborigines, a sort 196 walden. of fabulous fruit, which i had begun to doubt if i had ever dug and eaten in childhood, as i had told, and had not dreamed it. i had often since seen its crimpled red velvety blossom supported by the stems of other plants without knowing it to be the same. cultivation has well-nigh ex terminated it. it has a sweetish taste, much like that of a frostbitten potato, and i found it better boiled than roasted. this tuber seemed like a faint promise of nature to rear her own children and feed them simply here at some future period. in these days of fatted cattle and waving grain-fields, this humble root, which was once the totem of an indian tribe, is quite forgotten, or known only by its flowering vine; but let wild nature reign here once more, and the tender and luxurious english grains will probably disappear before a myriad of foes, and without the care of man the crow may carry back even the last seed of corn to the great cornfield of the indian's god in the southwest, whence he is said to have brought it; but the now almost exterminated ground-nut will perhaps revive and flourish in spite of frosts and wildness, prove it self indigenous, and resume its ancient importance and dignity as the cliet of the hunter tribe. some indian ceres or minerva must have been the inventor and bestower of it; and when the reign of poetry commences here, its leaves and string of nuts may be represented on our works of art. • already, by the first of september, i had seen two or three small maples turned scarlet across the pond, beneath where the white stems of three aspens diverged, at the point of a promontory, next the water. ah, man}' a tale their color toldi and gradually from week to week the character of each tree came out, and it admired itself re flected in the smooth mirror of the lake. each morning the manager of this galler}' substituted some new picture, distinguished by more brilliant or harmonious coloring, for the old upon the walls. the wasps came by thousands to my lodge in october, as to winter cjuarters, and settled on my windows within and on the walls overhead, sometimes deterring visitors from entering. each morning, when they were numbed with cold, i swept some of them out, but i did not trouble my self much to get rid of them; i even felt complimented by house-warming. 197 their regarding my house as a desirable shelter. they never molested me seriously, though they bedded with me; and they gradually disappeared, into what crevices i do not know, avoiding winter and unspeakable cold. like the wasps, before i finally went into winter quar ters in november, i used to resort to the northeast side of walden, which the sun, reflected from the pitch-pine woods and the stony shore, made the fireside of the pond; it is so much pleasanter and wholesomer to be warmed by the sun while you can be, than by an artificial fire. i thus warmed myself by the still glowing embers which the summer, like a departed hunter, had left. when i came to build my chimney i studied masonry. my bricks being second-hand ones required to be cleaned with a trowel, so that i learned more than usual of the qualities of bricks and trowels. the mortar on them was fifty years old, and was said to be still growing harder; but this is one of those sayings which men love to repeat whether they are true or not. such sayings themselves grow harder and adhere more firmly with age, and it would take many blows with a trowel to clean an old wiseacre of them. many of the villages of mesopotamia are built of second-hand bricks of a very good quality, obtained from the ruins of babylon, and the cement on them is older and probably harder still. however that may be, i was struck by the peculiar toughness of the steel which bore so many violent blows without being worn out. as my bricks had been in a chimney before, though i did not read the name of nebuchadnezzar on them, i picked out as many fire place bricks as i could find, to save work and waste, and i filled the spaces between the bricks about the fireplace with stones from the pond shore, and also made my mor tar with the white sand from the same place. i lingered most about the fireplace, as the most vital part of the house. indeed, i worked so deliberately, that though i commenced at the ground in the morning, a course of bricks raised a few inches above the floor served for my pillow at night ; yet i did not get a stiff neck for it that i remember; my stiff neck is of older date. i took a poet to board for a fortnight about those times, which caused me 198 walden. to be put to it for room. he brought his own knife, though i had two, and we used to scour them by thrusting them into the earth. he shared with me the labors of cooking. i was pleased to see my work rising so square and solid by degrees, and reflected that, if it proceeded slowly, it was calculated to endure a long time. the chimney is to some extent an independent structure, standing on the ground and rising through the house to the heavens; even after the house is burned it still stands sometimes, and its im portance and independence are apparent. this was to ward the end of summer. it was now november. the north wind had already begun to cool the pond, though it took many weeks of steady blowing to accom plish it, it is so deep. when i began to have a fire at evening, before i plastered my house, the chimney carried smoke particularly well, because of the numerous chinks between the boards. yet i passed some cheerful evenings in that cool and aiiy apartment, surrounded by the rough brown boards full of knots, and rafters with the bark on high overhead. my house never pleased my eye so much after it was plastered, though i was obliged to confess that it was more comfortable. should not every apart ment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters? these forms are more agree able to the fancy and imagination than fresco paintings or the most expensive furniture. i now first began to .iihabit my house, i may say, when i began to use it for warmth as well as shelter. i had got a couple of old fire dogs to keep the wood from the hearth, and it did me good to see the soot form on the back of the chimney which i had built, and i poked the fire with more right and more satisfaction than usual. my dwelling was small, and i could hardly entertain an echo in it; but it seemed larger for being a single apartment and remote from neighbors. all the attractions of a house were concentrated in one room; it was kitchen, chamber, parlor, and keeping-room; and whatever satisfaction parent or child, master or serv ant, derive from living in a house, i enjoyed it all. cato says, the master of a family {jyatremfamilias) must have in house-warming. 199 his rustic villa '^cellam olcariam, vinariam, dolia miilta, uti lubeat caritatem expectare, et rei, et virtuti, et gloriae erit," that is, "an oil and wine cellar, many casks, so that it may be pleasant to expect hard times; it will be for his advantage, and virtue, and glory." i had in my cellar a firkin of potatoes, about two quarts of peas with the wee vil in them, and on my shelf a little rice, a jug of molasses, and of lyo and indian meal a peck each. i sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house, standing in a golden age, of enduring materials, and with out gingerbread-work, which shall still consist of only one room, a vast, rude, substantial, primitive hall, without ceiling or plastering, -with bare rafters and purlins sup porting a sort of lower heaven over one's head, — useful to keep off rain and snow; where the king and queen posts stand out to receive your homage, when you have done reverence to the prostrate saturn of an older dynasty on stepping over the sill; a cavernous house, wherein you must reach up a torch upon a pole to see the roof; where some may live in the fireplace, some in the recess of a win dow, and some on settles, some at one end of the hall, some at another, and some aloft on rafters with the spiders, if they choose; a house wdiich you have got into when you have opened the outside door^ and the ceremony is over; where the weary traveller may wash, and eat, and con verse, and sleep, without further journey; such a shelter as 5'ou would be glad to reach in a tempestuous night, con taining all the essentials of a house, and nothing for house keeping; where you can see all the treasures of the house at one view, and everything hangs upon its peg that a man should use; at once kitchen, pantry, parlor, chamber, store-house, and garret; where you can see so necessary a thing as a barrel or a ladder, so convenient a thing as a cupboard, and hear the pot boil, and pay your respects to the fire that cooks your dinner and the oven that bakes your bread, and the necessary furniture and utensils are the chief ornaments; where the washing is not put out, nor the fire, nor the mistress, and perhaps you are sometimes requested to move from off the trap-door, when the cook would descend into the cellar, and so learn whether the ground is solid or hollow beneath you without stamping. 200 walden. a house whose inside is as open and manifest as a bird's nest, and you cannot go in at the front door and out at the back without seeing some of its inhabitants ; where to be a guest is to be presented with the freedom of the house, and not to he carefully excluded from seven eighths of it, shut up in a particular cell, and told to make yourself at home there, — in solitary confinement. nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospi tality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance. there is as much secrecy about the cooking as if he had a design to poison you. i am aware that i have been on many a man's premises, and might have been legally ordered off, but i am not aware that i have been in many men's houses. i might visit in my old clothes a king and queen who lived simply in such a house as i have de scribed, if i w^ere going their way; but backing out of a modern palace will be all that i shall desire to learn, if ever i am caught in one. it w^ould seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into 'parlaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its sym bols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched, through slides and dumb-waiters, as it were; in other words, the parlor is so far from the kitchen and work shop. the dinner even is onl}^ the parable of a dinner, commonl}'. as if only the savage dwelt near enough to nature and truth to borrow a trope from them. how can the scholar, wdio dwells aw^ay in the north west territory or the isle of man, tell what is parliamentary in the kitchen? however, only one or two of my guests were ever bold enough to stay and eat a hast,v-pudding with me; but when they saw that crisis approaching they beat a hasty retreat rather, as if it would shake the house to its founda tions. nevertheless, it stood through a great many hasty puddings. i did not plaster till it was freezing weather. i brought over some whiter and cleaner sand for this purpose, from the opposite shore of the pond in a boat, a sort of convey ance which would have tempted me to go much farther if house-warming. 201 necessary. my house had in the meanwhile been shingled down to the ground on every side. in lathing i was pleased to be able to send home each nail with a single blow of the hammer, and it was my ambition to transfer the plaster f j'om the board to the wall neatly and rapidly. i remembered the story of a conceited fellow, who, in fine clothes, was wont to lounge about the village once, giving advice to workmen. venturing one day to substitute deeds for words, he turned up his cuffs, seized a plasterer's board, and having loaded his trowel without mishap, with a complacent look toward the lathing overhead, made a bold gesture thitherward; and straightway, to his com plete discomfiture, received the whole contents in his ruffled bosom. i admired anew the economy and con venience of plastering, which so effectually shuts out the cold and takes a handsome finish, and i learned the vari ous casualties to which the plasterer is liable. i was sur prised to see how thirsty the bricks were, which drank up all the moisture in my plaster before i had smoothed it, and how many pailfuls of water it takes to christen a new hearth. i had the previous winter made a small quantity of lime by burning the shells of the unio fluviatilis, which our river affords, for the sake of the experiment ; so that i knew where my materials came from. i might have got good limestone within a mile or two and burned it myself, if i had cared to do so. the pond had in the meanwhile skimmed over in the shadiest and shallowest coves, some days or even weeks before the general freezing. the first ice is especially in teresting and perfect, being hard, dark, and transparent, and affords the best opportunity that ever offers for ex amining the bottom where it is shallow; for you can lie at 3'our length on ice only an inch thick, like a skater insect on the surface of the water, and study the bottom at your leisure, only two or three inches distant, like a picture be hind a glass, and the water is necessarily always smooth then. there are many furrows in the sand where some creature has travelled about and doubled on its tracks; and, for wrecks, it is strewn with the cases of cadis worms made of minute grains of white quartz. perhaps these have creased it, for you find some of their cases in the fur 202 walden. rows, though they are deep and broad for them to make. but the ice itself is the object of most interest, though you must improve the earhest opportunity to study it. if you examine it closely the morning after it freezes, you find that the greater part of the bubbles, which at first ap peared to be within it, are against its under surface, and that more are continually rising from the bottom; while the ice is as yet comparatively solid and dark, that is, you see the water through it. these bubbles are from an eightieth to an eighth of an inch in diameter, very clear and beautiful, and you see your face reflected in them through the ice. there may be thirty or forty of them to a square inch. there are also already within the ice nar row oblong perpendicular bubbles about half an inch long, sharp cones with the apex upward ; or of tener, if the ice is quite fresh, minute spherical bubbles, one directly above another, like a string of beads. but these within the ice are not so numerous nor obvious as those beneath. i sometimes used to cast on stones to try the strength of the ice, and those which broke through carried in air with them, which formed very large and conspicuous white bubbles beneath. one day when i came to the same place forty-eight hours afterward, i found that those large bub bles were still perfect, though an inch more of ice had formed, as i could see distinctly by the seam in the edge of a cake. but as the last two days had been very warm, like an indian summer, the ice was not now transparent, show ing the dark green color of the water, and the bottom, but opaque and whitish or gray, and though twice as thick was hardly stronger than before, for the air bubbles had greatly expanded under this heat and run together, and lost their regularity; they were no longer one directly over another, but often like silvery coins poured from a bag, one over lapping another, or in thin flakes, as if occupying slight cleavages. the beauty of the ice was gone, and it was too late to stud}' the bottom. being curious to know what position my great bubbles occupied with regard to the new ice, i broke out a cake containing a middling-sized one, and turned it bottom upward. the new ice had formed around and under the bubble, so that it was included be tween the two ices. it was wholly in the lower ice, but i house-warming. 203 close against the upper, and was flattish, or perhaps shghtly lenticuhir, with a rounded edge, a quarter of an inch deep by four inches in diameter; and i was surprised to find that directly under the bubble the ice was melted with great regularity in the form of a saucer reversed, to the height of five-eighths of an inch in the middle, leaving a thin partition there between the water and the bubble, hardly an eighth of an inch thick; and in many places the small ])ubbles in this partition had burst out dowaiward, and probably there was no ice at all under the largest bubbles, which avcre a foot in diameter. i inferred that the infinite number of minutes bubbles which i had first seen against the under surface of the ice were now frozen in likewise, and thp„t each, in its degree, had operated like a burning-glass on the ice beneath to melt and rot it. these are the little air guns which contribute to maice the ice crack and whoop. at length the winter set in in good earnest, just as i had finished plastering, and the wind began to howl around the house as if it had not had permission to do so till then. night after night the geese came lumbering in in the dark with a clangor and a whistling of wings, even after the ground was covered with snow, some to alight in walden, and some flying low over the woods toward fair-haven, bound for mexico. several times, when returning from the village at ten or eleven o'clock at night, i heard the tread of a flock of geese, or else ducks, on the dry leaves in the woods by a pond-hole behind my dwelling, where they had come up to feed, and the faint honk or quack of their leader as they hurried off. in 1845 walden froze entirely over for the first time on the night of the 22d of december, flint's and other shallower ponds and the river having been frozen ten days or more; in '46, the 16th; in '49, about the 31st; and in '50, about the 27th of december; in '52, the 5th of january; in '53, the 31st of december. the snow had already covered the ground since the 25th of november, and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery of winter. i withdrew yet farther into my shell, and en deavored to keep a bright fire both wnthin my house and within my breast. my employment out of doors now was 204 walden. to collect the dead wood in the forest, bringing it in my hands or on my shoulders, or sometimes trailing a dead pine tree under each arm to my shed. an old forest fence which had seen its best days was a great haul for me. i sacrificed it to vulcan, for it was past serving the god terminus. how" much more interesting an event is that man's supper avho has just been forth in the snow to hunt, nay, you may say, steal, the fuel to cook it with! his bread and meat are sweet. there are enough fagots and waste wood of all kinds in the forests of most of our towns to support many fires, but which at present warm none, and, some think, hinder the growth of the young wood. there was also the drift-wood of the pond. in the course of the summer i had discovered a raft of pitch-pine logs with the bark on, pinned together by the irish when the railroad was built. this i hauled up partly on the shore. after soaking two years and then lying high six months it was perfectly sound, though water-logged past drying. i amused myself one winter day with sliding this piece-meal across the pond, nearly half a mile, skating behind with one end of a log fifteen feet long on my shoulder, and the other on the ice; or i tied several logs together wdth a birch withe, and then, with a longer birch or alder which had a hook at the end, dragged them across. though com pletely waterlogged and almost as heavy as lead, they not only burned long, but made a very hot fire; nay, i thought that they burned better for the soaking, as if the pitch, being confined by the water, burned longer as in a lamp. gilpin, in his account of the forest borderers of england, says that "the encroachments of trespassers, and the houses and fences thus raised on the borders of the forest," were " considered as great nuisances by the old forest law, and were severely punished under the name of purpres tures, as tending ad terrorem ferarum — ad nocumentuni forestaa% &c.," to the frightening of the game and the det riment of the forest. but i was interested in the preserva tion of the venison and the vert more than the hunters or wood-choppers, and as much as though i had been the lord warden himself; and if any part was burned, though i burned it myself by accident, i grieved with a grief that lasted longer and was more inconsolable than that of the house-warming. 205 proprietors; nay, i grieved when it was cut clown by the proprietors themselves. i would that our farmers when they cut down a forest felt some of that awe which the old romans did when they came to thin, or let in the light to, a consecrated grove (lucum conlucare), that is, would be lieve that it is sacred to some god. the roman made an expiatory offering, and praj^ed. whatever god or goddess thou art to whom this grove is sacred, be propitious to me, my famil}', and children, &c. it is remarkable what a value is still put upon wood even in this age and in this new country, a value more perma nent and universal than that of gold. after all our dis coveries and inventions no man will go by a pile of wood. it is as precious to us as it was to our saxon and norman ancestors. if they made their baws of it, we make our gun-stocks of it. michaux, more than thirty years ago, says that the price of wood for fuel in new york and phila delphia '■ nearly equals, and sometimes exceeds, that of the best wood in paris, though this immense capital annually requires more than three hundred thousand cords, and is surrounded to the distance of three hundred miles by cul tivated plains." in this town the price of wood rises al most steadily, and the only question is, how much higher it is to be this year than it was the last. mechanics and tradesmen who come in person to the forest on no other errand, are sure to attend the wood auction, and even pay a high price for the privilege of gleaning after the wood chopper. it is now many years that men have resorted to the forest for fuel and the materials of the arts; the new englander and the new hollander, the parisian and the celt, the farmer and robin hood, goody blake and harry gill, in most parts of the world the prince and the peasant, the scholar and the savage, equally require still a few sticks from the forest to warm them and cook their food. neither could i do without them. every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affec tion. i loved to have mine before my window, and the more chips the better to remind me of my pleasing work. i had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which by spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, i played about the stumps which i had got out of my bean 206 walden. field. as my driver prophesied when i was ploughing, they warmed me twice, once while i was splitting them, and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel could give out more heat. as for the axe, i was advised to get the village blacksmith to "jump" it; but i jumped him, and, putting a hickory helve from the woods into it, made it do. if it was dull, it was at least hung true. a few pieces of fat pine were a great treasure. it is in teresting to remember how much of this food for fire is still concealed in the bowels of the earth. in previous years i had often gone " prospecting " over some bare hill side, where a pitch-pine wood hacl formerly stood, and got out the fat pine roots. they are almost indestructible. stumps thirty or forty years old, at least, will still be sound at the core, thqugh the sapwood has all become vegetable mould, as appears by the scales of the thick bark forming a ring level with the earth four or five inches distant from the heart. with axe and shovel you explore this mine, and follow the marrow}'' store, yellow as beef tallow, or as if you had struck on a vein of gold, deep into the earth. but commonly i kindled my fire with the dry leaves of the forest, which i had stoi'cd up in my shed be fore the snow came. green hickory finely split makes the wood-chopper's kindlings, when he has a camp in the woods. once in a while i got a little of this. when the villagers were lighting their fires beyond the horizon, i too gave notice to the various wild inhabitants of walden vale, by a smoky streamer from my chimney, that i was awake. — light-winged smoke, icarian bird, melting thy pinions in thy upward flight, lark without song, and messenger of dawn, circhng above the hamlets as thy nest; or else, departing dream, and shadowy form of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts; by night star-veiling, and by day darkening the light and blotting out the sun; go thou my incense upward from this hearth, and ask the gods to pardon this clear flame. hard green wood just cut, though i used but little of that, answered my purpose better than any other. i sometimes left a good fire when i went to take a walk in a house-warming. 207 winter afternoon; and when i returned, three or four hours afterward, it would be still alive and glowing. my house was not empty though i was gone. it was as if i had left a cheerful housekeeper behind. it was i and fire that lived there; and commonly my housekeeper proved trust worth}'. one day, however, as i was splitting wood, i thought that i would just look in at the window and see if the house was not on fire; it was the only time i remember to have been particularly anxious on this score ; so i looked and saw that a spark had caught my bed, and i went in and extinguished it when it had burned a place as big as my hand. but my house occupied so sunny and sheltered a position, and its roof was so low, that i could afford to let the fire go out in the middle of almost any winter day. the moles nested in my cellar, nibbling every third po tato, and making a snug bed even there of some hair left after plastering and of brown paper; for even the wildest animals love comfort and warmth as well as man, and they survive the winter only because they are so careful to se cure them. some of my friends spoke as if i was coming to the woods on purpose to freeze myself. the animal merely makes a bed, which he warms with his body in a sheltered place; but man, having discovered fire, boxes up some air in a spacious apartment, and warms that, instead of robbing himself, makes that his bed, in which he can move about divested of more cumbrous clothing, main tain a kind of summer in the midst of winter, and by means of windows even admit the light, and with a lamp lengthen out the day. thus he goes a step or two beyond instinct, and saves a little time for the fine arts. though, when i had been exposed to the rudest blasts a long time, my whole body began to grow torpid, wdien i reached the genial atmosphere of my house i soon recovered my fac ulties and prolonged my life. but the most luxuriously housed has little to boast of in this respect, nor need we trouble ourselves to speculate how the human race may be at last destroyed. it would be easy to cut their threads any time with a little sharper blast from the north. we go on dating from cold fridays and great snows; but a little colder friday, or greater snow, would put a period to man's existence on the globe. 208 walden. the next winter i used a small cooking-stove for econ omy, since i did not own the forest ; but it did not keep fire so well as the open fire-place. cooking was then, for the most part, no longer a poetic, but merely a chemic process. it will soon be forgotten^ in these days of stoves, that we used to roast potatoes in the ashes, after the indian fash ion. the stove not only took up room and scented the house, but it concealed the fire, and i felt as if i had lost a companion. you can always see a face in the fire. the laborer, looking into it at evening, purifies his thoughts of the dross and earthiness which they have accumulated during the day. but i could no longer sit and look into the fire, and the pertinent words of a poet recurred to me with new force. — "never, bright flame, may be denied to me tliy dear, life imaging, close sj^mpathy. what but my hopes shot upward e'er so bright? what but my fortunes sunk so low in night? " why art thou banished from our hearth and hall, thou who art welcomed and beloved by all? was thj' existence then too fanciful for our life's common light, who are so dull? did thy bright gleam mysterious converse hold with our congenial souls? secrets too bold? well, we are safe and strong, for now we sit beside a hearth where no dim shadows flit, where nothing cheers nor saddens, but a fire warms feet and hands — nor does to more aspire; by whose compact utilitarian heap tlie present may sit down and go to sleep. nor fear the ghosts who from the dim past walked. and with us by the unequal light of the old wood fire talked." xiv. former inhabitants; and winter visitors. i weathered somc merry snow-storms, and spent some cheerful winter evenings by my fire-side, while the snow whirled wildly without, and even the hooting of the owl was hushed. for many aveeks i met no one in my walks but those who came occasionally to cut wood and sled it to former inhabitants. 209 the village. the elements, however, abetted me in mak ing a path through the deepest snow in the woods, for when i had once gone through the wind blew the oalc leaves into my tracks, where they lodged, and by absor!:) ing the rays of the sun melted the snow, and so not only made a dry bed for my feet, but in the night their dark line was my guide. for human society i was obliged to conjure up the former occupants of these woods. within the memory of many of my townsmen the road near which my house stands resounded with the laugh and gossip of inhabitants, and the woods which border it were notched and dotted here and there with their little gardens and dwellings, though it was then much more shut in by the forest than now. in some places, within my own remem brance, the pines would scrape both sides of a chaise at once, and women and children who were compelled to go this way to lincoln alone and on foot did it with fear, and often ran a good part of the distance. though mainly but a humble route to neighboring villages, or for the wood man's team, it once amused the traveller more than now by its variety, and lingered longer in his memory. where now firm open fields stretch from the village to the woods, it then ran through a maple swamp on a foundation of logs, the remnants of which, doubtless, still underlie the present dusty highway, from the stratton, now the alms house, farm, to brister's hill. east of my beanfield, across the road, lived cato in graham, slave of duncan ingraham, esquire, gentleman of concord village; who built his slave a house, and gave him permission to live in walden woods; — cato, not uticensis, but concordiensis. some say that he was a guinea negro. there are a few who remember his little patch among the walnuts, which he let grow up till he should be old and need them; but a younger and whiter speculator got them at last. he too, however, occupies an equally narrow house at present. cato's half-obliterated cellar hole still remains, though known to few, being con cealed from the traveller b}^ a fringe of pines. it is now filled with the smooth sumach (rhus glabra), and one of the earliest species of goldenrod {soudago strida) grows there luxuriantly. 210 walden. here, by the very corner of my field, still nearer to town, zilpha, a colored woman, had her little house, where she spun linen for the townsfolk, making the walden woods ring with her shrill singing, for she had a loud and notable voice. at length, in the war of 1812, her dwelling was set on fire by english soldiers, prisoners on parole, when she was away, and her cat and dog and hens were all burned up together. she led a hard life, and somewhat inhumane. one old frequenter of these woods remembers that as he passed her house one noon he heard her mutter ing to herself over her gurgling pot, — "ye are all bones, bones ! " i have seen bricks amid the oak copse there. down the road, on the right hand, on brister's hill, lived brister freeman, "a handy negro," slave of squire cummings once, — there where grow still the apple trees which brister planted and tended ; large old trees now, but their fruit still wild and ciderish to my taste. not long since i read his epitaph in the old lincoln bur3-ing-ground, a little on one side, near the unmarked graves of some british grenadiers who fell in the retreat from concord, — where he is styled " sippio brister," — scipio africanus he had some title to be called, — "a man of color," as if he were discolored. it also told me, with staring emphasis, when he died ; which was but an indirect way of informing me that he ever lived. with him dwelt fenda, his hos pitable wife, wdio told fortunes, yet pleasantly, — large, 'round, and black, blacker than any of the children of night, such a dusky orb as never rose on concord before or since. farther down the hill, on the left, on the old road in the woods, are marks of some homestead of the stratton family; whose orchard once covered all the slope of bris ter's hill, but was long since killed out by pitch-pines, ex cepting a few stumps, whose old roots furnish still the wild stocks of many a thrifty village tree. nearer yet to town, you come to breed's location, on the other side of the way, just on the edge of the avood; ground famous for the pranks of a demon not distinctly named in old mythology, who has acted a prominent and astounding part in our new england life, and deserves, as much as any mythological character, to have his biog former inhabitants. 211 raphy written one day; who first comes in the guise of a friend or hired man, and then robs and murders the whole family, — new england rum. but history must not yet tell the tragedies enacted here; let time intervene in some measure to assuage and lend an azure tint to them. here the most indistinct and dubious tradition says that once a tavern stood ; the well the same, which tempered the trav eller's beverage and refreshed his steed. here then men saluted one another, and heard and told the news, and went their ways again. breed's hut was standing only a dozen years ago, though it had long been unoccupied. it was about the size of mine. it was set on fire by mischievous boys, one elec tion night, if i do not mistake. i lived on the edge of the village then, and had just lost myself over davenant's gondibert, that winter that i labored with a lethargy, — which, by the way, i never knew whether to regard as a family complaint, having an uncle who goes to sleep shav ing himself, and is obliged to sprout potatoes in a cellar sundays, in order to keep awake and keep the sabbath, or as the consequence of my attempt to read chalmers' col lection of english poetry wdthout skipping. it fairly over came my nervii. i had just sunk my head on this when the bells rang fire, and in hot haste the engines rolled that way, led by a straggling troop of men and boys, and i among the foi'emost, for i had leaped the brook. we thought it was far south over the woods, — we who had run to fires before, — barn, shop, or dwelling-house, or all to gether. "it's baker's barn," cried one. "it is the cod man place," affirmed another. and then fresh sparks went up above the wood, as if the roof fell in, and w"e all shouted " concord to the rescue ! " wagons shot past with furious speed and crushing loads, bearing, perchance, among the rest, the agent of the insurance company, who was bound to go however far; and ever and anon the engine bell tinkled behind, more slow and sure, and rear most of all, as it was afterward whispered, came they who set the fire and gave the alarm. thus we kept on like true idealists, rejecting the evidence of our senses, until at a turn in the road we heard the crackling and actually felt the heat of the fire from over the wall, and realized, alas i 212 walden. that we were there. the very nearness of the fire but cooled our ardor. at first we thought to throw a frog pond on to it; but concluded to let it burn, it was so far gone and so worthless. so we stood round our engine, jostled one another, expressed our sentiments through speaking trumpets, or in lower tone referred to the great conflagrations which the world has witnessed, including bascom's shop, and, between ourselves, we thought that, were we there in season with our "tub" and a full frog pond by, we could turn that threatened last and universal one into another flood. we finally retreated without do ing any mischief, — returned to sleep and gondibert. but as for gondibert, i would except that passage in the pref ace about wit being the soul's powder, — " but most of man kind are strangers to wit, as indians are to powder." it chanced that i walked that way across the fields the following night, about the same hour, and hearing a low moaning at this spot, i drew near in the dark, and dis covered the only survivor of the family that i know, the heir of both its virtues and its vices, who alone was in terested in this burning, lying on his stomach and looking over the cellar wall at the still smouldering cinders be neath, muttering to himself, as is his wont. he had been working far off in the river meadow all daj' , and had im proved the first moments that he could call his own to visit the home of his fathers and his youth. he gazed into the cellar from all sides and points of view by turns, always lying down to it, as if there was some treasure, which he remembered, concealed between the stones, where there was absolutely nothing but a heap of bricks and ashes. the house being gone, he looked at what there was left. he was soothed by the sympathy which my mere presence implied, and showed me, as well as the darkness per mitted, where the well was covered up; which, thank heaven, could never be burned ; and he groped long about the wall to find the well-sweep which his father had cut and mounted, feeling for the iron hook or staple by which a burden had been fastened to the heavy end, — all that he could now cling to, — to convince me that it was no com mon "rider." i felt it, and still remark it almost daily in my walks, for by it hangs the history of a family. former inhabitants. 213 once more, on the left, where are seen the well and lilac bushes b}' the wall, in the now open field, lived nutt ing and le grosse. but to return toward lincoln. farther in the woods than any of these, where the road approaches nearest to the pond, wyman the potter squatted, and furnished his townsmen with earthen ware, and left descendants to succeed him. neither were they rich in worldly goods, holding the land by sufferance avhilc they lived; and there often the sheriff came in vain to collect the taxes, and "attached a chip," for form's sake, as i have read in his accounts, there being nothing else that he could lay his hands on. one day in mid summer, when i was hoeing, a man who was carrying a load of pottery to market stopped his horse against my field and inquired concerning wyman the younger. he had long ago bought a potter's wheel of him, and wished to know what had become of him. i had read of the potter's clay and wheel in scripture, but it had never occurred to me that the pots we use were not such as had come down unbroken from those days, or grown on trees like gourds somewhere, and i was pleased to hear that so fictile an art was ever practised in my neighborhood. the last inhabitant of these woods before me was an irishman, hugh quoil (if i have spelt his name with coil enough), who occupied wyman's tenement, — col. quoil, he was called. rumor said that he had been a soldier at waterloo. if he had lived i should have made him fight his battles over again. his trade here was that of a ditcher. napoleon went to st. helena; quoil came to walden woods. all i know of him is tragic. he was a man of manners, like one who had seen the world, and was capable of moi'e civil speech than you could well attend to. he wore a great coat in midsummer, being affected with the trembling delirium, and his face was the color of carmine. he died in the road at the foot of brister's hill shortly after i came to the woods, so that i have not remembered him as a neighbor. before his house was pulled down, when his comrades avoided it as '' an unlucky castle," i visited it. there lay his old clothes curled up by use, as if they were himself, upon his raised plank bed. his pipe lay broken on the hearth, instead 214 walden. of a bowl broken at the fountain. the last could never have been the symbol of his death, for he confessed to me that, though he had heard of brister's spring, he had never seen it ; and soiled cards, kings of diamonds, spades, and hearts, wei'e scattered over the floor. one black chicken which the administrator could not catch, black as night and as silent, not even croaking, awaiting rey nard, still went to roost in the next apartment. in the rear there was the dim outline of a garden, which had been planted but had never received its first hoeing, ow ing to those terrible shaking fits, though it was now harvest time. it was overrun with roman wormwood and beggar-ticks, which last stuck to my clothes for all fruit. the skin of a woodchuck was freshly stretched upon the back of the house, a trophy of his last waterloo; but no warm cap or mittens would he want more. now only a dent in the earth marks the site of these dwellings, with buried cellar stones, and strawberries, raspberries, thimble-berries, hazel bushes, and sumachs growing in the sunny sward there; some pitch-pine or gnarled oak occupies what was the chimney nook, and a sweet-scented black-birch, perhaps, waves where the door-stone was. sometimes the well dent is visible, where once a spring oozed ; now dry and tearless grass ; or it was covered deep, — not to be discovered till some late day, — ■■ with a flat stone under the sod, when the last of the race departed. what a sorrowful act must that be, — the covering up of wells ! coincident with the opening of wells of tears. these cellar dents, like deserted fox burrows, old holes, are all that is left where once were the stir and bustle of human life, and " fate, free-will, foreknowledge . absolute," in some form and dialect or other were by turns discussed. but all i can learn of their conclusions amounts to just this, that "cato and brister pulled wool ; " which is about as edifying as the history of more famous schools of philosophy. still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door and lintel and the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet scented flowers each spring, to be plucked by the musing traveller; planted and tended once b}^ children's hands, in front-yard plots, — now standing by wall-sides in retired winter visitors. 215 pastures, and giving place to new-rising forests; — the last of that stirp, sole survivor of that family. little did the dusky children think that the puny slip with its two eyes only, which they stuck in the ground in the shadow of the house and daily watei'ed, would root itself so, and outlive them, and house itself in the rear that shaded it, and grow man's garden and orchard, and tell their story faintly to the lone wanderer a half century after they had grown up and died, — blossoming as fair, and smelling as sweet, as in that first spring. i mark its still tender, civil cheerful, lilac colors. but this small village, germ of something more, why did it fail while concord keeps its ground? were there no natural advantages, — no water privileges, forsooth? ay, the deep walden pond and cool brister's spring, — privilege to drink long and healthy draughts at these, all unimproved by these men but to clilute their glass. they were universally a thirsty race. might not the basket, stable-broom, mat-making, corn-parching, linen-spinning, and pottery business have thrived here, making the wilder ness to blossom like the rose, and a numerous posterity have inherited the land of their fathers? the sterile soil would at least have been proof against a low-land de generacy. alas! how little does the memory of these hu man inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape! again, perhaps, nature will try, with me for a first settler, and my house raised last spring to be the oldest in the hamlet. i am not aware that any man has ever built on the spot which i occupy. deliver me from a city built on the site of a more ancient city, whose materials are ruins, whose gardens cemeteries. the soil is blanched and ac cursed there, and before that becomes necessary the earth itself will be destroyed. with such reminiscences i re peopled the woods and lulled myself asleep. at this season i seldom had a visitor. when the snow lay deepest no wanderer ventured near my house for a week or a fortnight at a time, but there i lived as snug as a meadow mouse, or as cattle and poultry which are said to have survived for a long time buried in drifts, even 216 walden. without food; or like that early settler's famil}' in the town of sutton, in this state, whose cottage was com pletely covered by the great snow of 1717 when he was absent, and an indian found it only by the hole which the chimne3''s breath made in the drift, and so relieved the family. but no friendly indian concerned himself about me ; nor needed he, for the master of the house was at home. the great snow! how cheerful it is to hear of! when the farmers could not get to the woods and swamps with their teams, and were obliged to cut down the shade trees before their houses, and when the crust was harder cut off the trees in the swamps ten feet from the ground, as it appeared the next spring. in the deepest snows, the path which i used from the highway to my house, about half a mile long, might have been represented by a meandering dotted line, with wide intervals between the dots. for a week of even weather i took exactly the same number of steps, and of the same length, coming and going, stepping deliberately and with the precision of a pair of dividers in my own deep tracks, — to such routine the winter reduces us,— yet often they were filled with heaven's own blue. but no weather interfered fatally with my walks, or rather my going abroad, for i frequently tramped eight or ten miles, through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech tree, or a yellow-birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines; when the ice and snow, causing their limbs to droop, and so sharpening their tops, had changed the pines into fir trees; wading to the tops of the highest hills when the snow was nearly two feet deep on a level, and shaking down another snow-storm on my head at every step ; or sometimes creeping and floundering thither on my hands and knees, when the hunters had gone into winter quarters. one afternoon i amused myself by watching a barrel owl {strix nebulosa) sitting on one of the lower dead limbs ct a white-pine, close to the trunk, in broad daylight, i standing within a rod of him. he could hear me when i moved and crouched the snow with my feet, but could not plainly see me. when i made noise he would stretch out his neck, and erect his neck feathers, and open his eyes wide; but their lids soon fell winter visitors. 217 again, and he began to nod. i too felt a slumberous influence after watching him half an hour, as he sat thus with his eyes half open, like a cat, winged brother of the cat. there was only a narrow slit left between their lids, by which he preserved a peninsular relation to me; thus with half-shut eyes, looking out from the land of dreams, and endeavoring to realize me, vague object or mote that interrupted his visions. at length, on some louder noise or my nearer approach, he would grow uneasy and slug gishly turn about on his perch, as if impatient at having his dreams disturbed; and when he launched himself off and flapped through the pines, spreading his wings to unexpected breadth, i could not hear the slightest sound from them. thus, guided amid the pine boughs rather by a delicate sense of their neighborhood than by sight, feeling his twilight way as it were with his sensitive pin ions, he found a new perch, where he might in peace await the dawning of his day. as i walked over the long causeway made for the rail road through the meadows, i encountered many a blus tering and nipping wind, for nowhere has it freer play; and when the frost had smitten me on one cheek, heathen as i was, i turned to it the other also. nor was it much better by the carriage road from brister's hill. for i came to town still, like a friendly indian, when the con tents of the broad open fields were all piled up between the walls of the walden road, and half an hour sufficed to obliterate the tracks of the last traveller. and when i returned new drifts would have formed through w^hich i floundered, where the busy northwest wind had been depositing the powdery snow round a sharp angle in the road, and not a rabbit's track, nor even the fine print, the small type, of a meadow mouse was to be seen. yet i rarely failed to find, even in mid-winter, some warm and springy swamp where the grass and the skunk-cabbage still put forth with perennial verdure, and some hardier bird occasionally awaited the return of spring. sometimes, notwithstanding the snow, wdien i re turned from my walk at evening i crossed the deep tracks of a woodchopper leading from my door, and found his pile '■ " whittlings on the hearth, and my house filled with 218 walden. the odor of his pipe. or on a sunday afternoon, if i chanced to be at home, i heard the cronching of the snow made by the step of a long-headed farmer, who from far through the woods sought my house, to have a social "crack"; one of the few of his vocation who are '"men on their farms " ; who donned a frock instead of a pro fessor's gown, and is as ready to extract the moral out of church or state as to haul a load of manure from his barn yard. we talked of rude and simple times, when men sat about large fires in cold bracing weather, with clear heads; and when other dessert failed, we tried our teeth on many a nut which wise squirrels have long since abandoned, for those which have the thickest shells are commonly empty. the one who came from farthest to my lodge, through deepest snows and most dismal tempests, was a poet. a farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter, even a philosopher, rasij be daunted; but nothing can deter a poet, for he is actuated by pure love. who can predict his comings and goings? his business calls him out of all hours, even, when doctors sleep. we made that small house ring with boisterous mirth and resound with the murmur of much sober talk, making amends then to waldcn vale for the long silences. broadway was still and deserted in com parison. at suitable intervals there were regular salutes of laughter, which might have been referred indifferently to the last-uttered or the forthcoming jest. we made many a "bran new" theory of life over a thin dish of gruel, which combined the advantages of conviviality with the clear-headedness which philosophy requires. i should not forget that during my last winter at the pond there was another welcome visitor, who at one time came through the village, through snow and rain and darkness, till he saw my lamp through the trees, and shared with me some long winter evenings. one of the last of the philosophers, — connecticut gave him to the world, — he peddled first her wares, afterwards, as he de clares, his brains. these he peddles still, prompting god and disgracing man, bearing for fruit his brain only, like the nut its kernel. i think that he must be the man of the most faith of any alive. his words and attitude always winter visitors. 219 suppose a better state of things than other men are ac quainted with, and he will be the last man to be disap pointed as the ages revolve. he has no venture in the present. but though comparatively disregarded now, when his day comes, laws unsuspected by most will take effect, and masters of families and rulers will come to him for advice. — "how blind that cannot see serenity! " a true friend of man; almost the only friend of human progress. an old mortality, say rather an immortality, with unwearied patience and faith making plain the image engraven in men's bodies, the god of whom they are but defaced and leaning monuments. with his hos pitable intellect he embraces children, beggars, insane, and scholars, and entertains the thought of all, adding to it commonly some breadth and elegance. i think that he should keep a caravansary on the world's highway, where philosophers of all nations might put up, and on his sign should be printed: "entertainment for man, but not for his beast. enter ye that have leisure and a quiet mind, who earnestly seek the right road." he is perhaps the sanest man and has the fewest crotchets of any i chance to know; the same yesterday and to-morrow. of yore we had sauntered and talked, and effectually put the world behind us; for he was pledged to no institution in it, freeborn, ingenuus. whichever way we turned, it seemed that the heavens and the earth had met together, since he enhanced the beauty of the landscape. a blue robed man, whose fittest roof is the overarching sky avhich reflects his serenity. i do not see how he can ever die; nature cannot spare him. having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled them., trying our knives, and admiring the clear yellowish grain of the pumpkin pine. we waded so gently and reverently, or we pulled together so smoothly, that the fishes of thought were not scared from the stream, nor feared any angler on the bank, but came and went grandly, like the clouds which float through the western sky, and the mother-o'-pearl flocks wdiich sometimes form and dissolve there. there we worked, 220 walden. revising mythology, rounding a fable here and there, and building castles in the air for which earth offered no worthy foundation. great looker! great expecter! to converse with whom was a new england night's entertainment. ah! such discourse we had, hermit and philosopher, and the old settler i have spoken of, — we three, — it expanded and racked my little house; i should not dare to say how many pounds' weight there was above the atmospheric pressure on every circular inch; it opened its seams so that they had to be calked with much dulness thereafter to stop the consequent leak; — but i had enough of that kind of oakum already picked. there was one other with whom i had "solid seasons," long to be remembered, at his house in the village, and who looked in upon me from time to time; but i had no more for society there. there too, as everywhere, i sometimes expected the visitor who never comes. the vishnu purana says,. ''the house-holder is to remain at eventide in his court yard as long as it takes to milk a cow, or longer if he pleases, to await the arrival of a guest." i often per formed this duty of hospitality, waited long enough to milk a whole herd of cows, but did not see the man ap proaching from the town. xv. winter animals. when the ponds were firmly frozen, they afforded not only new ancl shorter routes to man}^ points, but new views from their surfaces of the familiar landscape around them. when i crossed flint's pond, after it was covered with snow, though i had often paddled about and skated over it, it was so unexpectedly wide and so strange that i could think of nothing but baffin's bay. the lincoln hills rose up around me at the extremity of a snowy plain, in which i did not remember to have stood before; and the fishermen, at an indeterminable distance over the ice, moving slowly about with their wolfish dogs, passed for winter animals. 221 sealers or esquimaux, or in misty weather loomed like fabulous creatures, and i did not know whether they were giants or pygmies. i took this course when i w'ent to lecture in lincoln in the evening, travelling in no road and passing no house between my own hut and the lecture room. in goose pond, which lay in my way, a colony of muskrats dwelt, and raised their cabins high above the ice, though none could be seen abroad w'hen i crossed it. walden, being like the rest usually bare of snow, or with only shallow and interrupted drifts on it, was my yard, where i could walk freely when the snow was nearly two feet deep on a level elsewhere and the villagers were con fined to their streets. there, far from the village street, and, except at very long intervals, from the jingle of sleigh-bells, i slid and skated, as in a vast moose-yard well trodden, overhung by oak woods and solemn pines bent down with snow or l^ristling with icicles. for sounds in winter nights, and often in winter days, i heard the forlorn but melodious note of a hooting owl indefinitely far; such a sound as the frozen earth would yield if struck with a suitable plectrum, the very lingua vernacula of walden wood, and quite familiar to me at last, though i never saw the bird while it was making it. i seldom opened my door in a winter evening without hearing it ; hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo, sounded sonorously, and the first three syllables accented somewhat like how der do; or sometimes hoo hoo only. one night in the begin ning of winter, before the pond froze over, about nine o'clock, i was startled by the loud honking of a goose, and, stepping to the door, heard the sound of their wings like a tempest in the woods, as they flew low over my house. they passed over the pond toward fair-haven, seemingly deterred from settling by my light, their commodore honking all the while with a regular beat. suddenly an unmistakable cat-owl from very near me, with the most harsh and tremendous voice i ever heard from any inhabitant of the woods, responded at regular intervals to the goose, as if determined to expose and disgrace this intruder from hudson's bay by exhibiting a greater compass and volume of voice in a native, and boo-hoo him out of concord horizon. what do you mean 222 walden. by alarming the citadel at this time of night consecrated to me? do you think i am ever caught napping at such an hour, and that i have not got lungs and a lar^^nx as well as yourself? boo-hoo, boo-hoo, boo-hoo! it was one of the most thrilling discords i ever heard. and yet, if you had a disci'iminating ear, there were in it the ele ments of a concord such as these plains never saw nor heard. i also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great bed-fellows in that part of concord, as if it were restless in its bed and would fain turn over, were troubled with flatulency and bad dreams; or i was waked by the cracking of the ground by the frost, as if some one had driven a team against my door, and in the morning would find a crack in the earth a quarter of a mile long and a third of an inch wide. sometimes i heard the foxes as they ranged over the snow crust, in moonlight nights, in search of a partridge or other game, barking raggedly and demoniacally like forest dogs, as if laboring with some anxiety, or seeking expression, struggling for light and to be clogs outright and run freely in the streets; for if we take the ages into our account, may there not be a civilization going on among brutes as well as men? they seemed to me to be rudimental, burrowing men, still standing on their de fence, awaiting their transformation. sometimes one came near to my window, attracted by my light, barked a vul pine curse at me, and then retreated. usually the red squirrel (sciurus hudsonius) waked me in the dawn, coursing over the roof and up and down the sides of the house, as if sent out of the woods for this purpose. in the course of the winter i threw out half a bushel of ears of sweet-corn, which had not got ripe, on to the snow crust by m}^ door, and was amused by watch ing the motions of the various animals which were baited by it. in the twilight and the night the rabbits came regularly and made a hearty meal. all day long the red squirrels came and went, and afforded me much enter tainment by their manoeuvres. one would approach at first warily through the shrub-oaks, running over the snow crust by fits and starts hke a leaf blown by the winter animals. 223 wind, now a few paces this way, with wonderful speed and waste of energy, making inconceivable haste with his "trotters," as if it m^ere for a wager, and now as many paces that way, but never getting on more than half a rod at a time ; and then suddenly pausing with a ludicrous expression and a gratuitous somerset, as if all the eyes in the universe were fixed on him, — for all the motions of a squirrel, even in the most solitary recesses of the forest, imply spectators as much as those of a dancing girl, — wasting more time in delay and circumspection than would have sufficed to walk the whole distance, — i never saw one walk, — and then suddenly, before you could say jack robinson, he would be in the top of a young pitch-pine, winding up his clock and chiding all imaginary spectators, soliloquizing and talking to all the universe at the same time, — for no reason that i could ever detect, or he himself was aware of, i suspect. at length he would reach the corn, and selecting a suitable ear, brisk about in the same uncertain trigonometrical way to the top most stick of my wood-pile, before my window, where he looked me in the face, and there sit for hours, supplying himself with a new ear from time to time, nibbling at first voraciously and throwing the half naked cobs about; till at length he grew more dainty still and played with his food, tasting only the inside of the kernel, and the ear, which was held balanced over the stick by one paw, slipped from his careless grasp and fell to the ground, when he would look over at it with a ludi crous expression of uncertainty, as if suspecting that it had life, with a mind not made up whether to get it again, or a new one, or be off; now thinking of corn, then listen ing to hear what was in the wind. so the little impudent fellow would waste many an ear in a forenoon; till at last, seizing some longer and plumper one, considerably bigger than himself, and skilfully balancing it, he would set out with it to the woods, like a tiger with a buffalo, by the same zigzag course and frequent pauses, scratching along with it as if it were too heavy for him and falling all the avhile, making its fall a diagonal between a per pendicular and horizontal, being determined to put it through at any rate; — a singularly frivolous and whim 224 walden. sical fellow; — and so he would get off with it to where he lived, perhaps carry it to the top of a pine tree forty or fifty rods distant, and i would afterwards find the cobs strewed about the woods in various directions. at length the jays arrive, whose discordant screams were heard long before, as they were warily making their approach an eighth of a mile off; and in a stealthy and sneaking manner they flit from tree to tree, nearer and nearer, and pick up the kernels which the squirrels have dropped. then, sitting on a pitch-pine bough, they attempt to swallow in their haste a kernel which is too '^ig for their throats and chokes them; and after great .abor they disgorge it, and spend an hour in the endeavor to crack it by repeated blows with their bills. they were manifestly thieves, and i had not much respect for them; but the squirrels, though at first shy, went to work as if they were taking what was their own. meanwhile also came the chickadees r.i flocks, which, picking up the crumbs the squirrels had dropped, flew to the nearest twig, and, placing them under their claws, hammered away at them with their little bills, as if it were an insect in the bark, till they were sufficiently re duced for their slender throats. a little flock of these titmice came daily to pick a dinner out of my wood-pile, or the crumbs at my door, with faint flitting lisping notes, like the tinkling of icicles in the grass, or else with sprightly day day day, or more rarely, in spring-like days, a wiry summery phe-be from the wood-side. they were so fa miliar that at length one alighted on an armful of wood which i was carrying in, and pecked at the sticks with out fear. i once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment avhile i was hoeing in a village garden, and i felt that i was more distinguished by that circumstance than i should have been by any epaulet i could have worn. the squirrels also grew at last to be quite familiar, and occasionally stepped ui3on my shoe, when that was the nearest way. when the ground was not yet quite covered, and again near the end of winter, when the snow was melted on my south hill side and about my wood-pile, the partridges came out of the woods mornino; and evening; to feed there. winter animals. 225 whichever side you walk in the woods the partridge bursts away on whirring wings, jarring the snow from the dry leaves and twigs on high, which comes sifting down in the sunbeams like golden dust; for this brave bird is not to be scared by winter. it is frequently cov ered up by drifts, and, it is said, "sometimes plunges from on wing into the soft snow, where it remains con cealed for a day or two." i used to start them in the open land also, where they had come out of the woods at sunset to "bud" the wild apple trees. they will come regularly every evening to particular trees, where the cunning sportsman lies in wait for them, and the distant orchards next the woods suffer thus not a little. i am glad that the partridge gets fed, at any rate. it is na ture's own bird which lives on buds and diet-drink. in dark winter mornings, or in short winter afternoons, i sometimes heard a pack of hounds threading all the woods with hounding cry and yelp, unable to resist the instinct of the chase, and the note of the hunting horn at intervals, proving that man was in the rear. the woods ring again, and yet no fox bursts forth on to the open level of the pond, nor following pack pursuing their actseon. and perhaps at evening i see the hunters re turning with a single brush trailing from their sleigh for a troplw, seeking their inn. they tell me that if the fox would remain in the bosom of the frozen earth he would be safe, or if he would run in a straight line away no fox hound could overtake him; but, having left his pursuers far behind, he stops to rest and listen till they come up, and when he runs he circles round to his old haunts, where the hunters await him. sometimes, however, he will run upon a wall many rods, and then leap off far to one side, and he appears to know that water will not retain his scent. a hunter told me that he once saw a fox pursued by hounds burst out on to walden when the ice was covered w^ith shallow puddles, run part way across, and then return to the same shore. erelong the hounds arrived, but here they lost the scent. sometimes a pack hunting by themselves would pass my door, and circle round my house, and j^elp and hound without re garding me^ as if afflicted by a species of madness, so that 226 walden. nothing could divert them from the pursuit. thus they circle until they fall upon the recent trail of a fox, for a wise hound will forsake everything else for this. one day a man came to my hut from lexington to inquire after his hound that made a large track, and had been hunting for a week by himself. but i fear that he was not the wiser for all i told him, for every time i attempted to answer his questions he interrupted me by asking, "what do you clo here?" he had lost a dog, but found a man. one old hunter who has a dry tongue, who used to come to bathe in walden once every year when the water was warmest, and at such times looked in upon me, told me that many years ago he took his gun one after noon and went out for a cruise in walden ^^'ood, and as he walked the wayland road he heard the cry of hounds approaching, and erelong a fox leaped the wall into the road, and as quick as thought leaped the other wall out of the road, and his swift bullet had not touched him. some way behind came an old hound and her three pups in full pursuit, hunting on their own account, and disap peared again in the woods. late in the afternoon, as he was resting in the thick woods south of walden, he heard the voice of the hounds far over toward fair-haven still pursuing the fox; and on they came, their hounding cry which made all the woods ring sounding nearer and nearer, now from well-meadow, now from the baker farm. for a long time he stood still and listened to their music, so sweet to a hunter's ear, when suddenly the fox appeared, threading the solemn aisles with an easy cours ing pace, whose sound was concealed by a sympathetic rustle of the leaves, swift and still, keeping the ground, leaving his pursuers far behind; and, leaping upon a rock amid the woods, he sat erect and listening, with his back to the hunter. for a moment compassion restrained the latter's arm; but that was a short-lived mood, and as quick as thought can follow thought his piece was levelled, and whang! — the fox rolling over the rock lay dead on the ground. the hunter still kept his place and listened to the hounds. still on they came, and now the near avoods resounded throu";h all their aisles with their de winter animals. 227 moniac cry. at length the old hound burst into view with muzzle to the ground, and snapping the air as if possessed, and ran directly to the rock; but spying the dead fox she suddenly ceased her hounding, as if struck dumb with amazement, and walked round and round him in silence; and one by one her pups arrived, and, like their mother, were sobered into silence by the mystery. then the hunter came forward and stood in their midst, and the mystery was solved. they waited in silence while he skinned the fox, then followed the brush awhile, and at length turned off into the woods again. that evening a weston squire came to the concord hunter's cottage to inquire for his hounds, and told how for a week they had been hunting on their own account from wes ton woods. the concord hunter told him what he knew and offered him the skin; but the other declined it and departed. he did not find his hounds that night, but the next day learned that they had crossed the river and put up at a farm-house for the night, whence, having been well fed, they took their departure early in the morning. the hunter who told me this could remember one sam nutting, who used to hunt bears on fair-haven ledges, and exchange their skins for rum in concord village; who told him, even, that he had seen a moose there. xutting had a famous fox-hound named bur goyne, — he pronounced it bugine, — which my informant used to borrow. in the "wast book" of an old trader of this town, who was also a captain, town-clerk, and representative, i find the following entry: jan. isth, 1742-3, "john mclven cr. by 1 grey fox 0—2—3;" they are not found here; and in his ledger, feb. 7th, 1743, hezekiah stratton has credit " by ^ a catt skin — 1 — 4^ ; " of course a wild-cat, for stratton was a sergeant in the old french war, and would not have got credit for hunt ing less noble game.credit is given for deerskins also, and they were daily sold. one man still preserves the horns of the last deer that was killed in this vicinity, and another has told me the particulars of the hunt in which his uncle was engaged. the hunters were formerly a numerous and merry crew here. i remember well one gaunt nimrod who would catch up a leaf by the road 228 walden. side and play a strain on it wilder and more melodious, if my memory serves me, than any hunting horn. at midnight, when there was a moon, i sometimes met with hounds in my path prowling about the woods, which would skulk out of my way, as if afraid, and stand silent amid the bushes till i had passed. squirrels and wild mice disputed for my store of nuts. there were scores of pitch-pines around my house, from one to four inches in diameter, which had been gnawed by mice the previous winter, — a norwegian ^^'inter for them, for the snow lay long and deep, and they were obliged to mix a large proportion of pine bark with their other diet. these trees were alive and apparently flour ishing at mid-summer, and many of them had grown a foot, though completely girdled; but after another winter such were without exception dead. it is remarkable that a single mouse should thus be allowed a whole pine tree for its dinner, gnawing round instead of up and down it; but perhaps it is necessary in order to thin these trees, which are wont to grow up densely. the hares {lepus americanus) were very familiar. one had her form under my house all winter, separated from me only by the flooring, and she startled me each morning by her hasty departure when i began to stir, — thump, thump, thump, striking her head against the floor timbers in her hurry. they used to come round my door at dusk to nibble the potato parings which i had thrown out, and were so nearly the color of the ground that they could hardly be distinguished when still. sometimes in the twilight i alternately lost and recovered sight of one sitting motionless under my window. when i opened my door in the evening, off they would go with a squeak and a bounce. near at hand they only excited my pity. one evening one sat by my door two paces from me, at first trembling with fear, yet unwilling to move; a poor wee thing, lean and bony, with ragged ears and sharp nose, scant tail and slender paws. it looked as if nature no longer contained the breed of nobler bloods, but stood on her last toes. its large eyes appeared 3'oung and un healthy, almost dropsical. i took a step, and lo, away it scudded with an elastic spring over the snow crust, the pond in winter. 229 straightening its body and its limbs into graceful length, and soon put the forest between me and itself, — the wild free venison, asserting its vigor and the dignity of nature, not without reason was its slenderness. such then was its nature. (lepus, levipes, lightfoot, some think.) what is a country without rabbits and partridges? they are among the most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable families known to antiq uity as to modern times; of the very hue and substance of nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground, — and to one another; it is either winged or it is legged. it is hardly as if you had seen a wild creature when a rabbit or a partridge bursts away, only a natural one, as much to be exjdected as rustling leaves. the partridge and the rabbit are still sure to thrive, like true natives of the soil, whatever revolutions occur. if the forest is cut off, the sprouts and bushes which spring up afford them concealment, and they become more numerous than ever. that must be a poor country indeed that does not support a hare. our woods teem with them both, and around every swamp may be seen the partridge or rabbit walk, beset with twiggy fences and horse-hair snares, which some cow-boy tends. xvi. the pond in winter. after a still winter night i awoke with the impression that some question had been put to me, which i had been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep, as what — how — when — where? but there was dawning nature, in whom all creatures live, looking in at my broad windows with serene and satisfied face, and no question on her lips. i awoke to an answered ciuestion, to nature and daylight. the snow lying deep on the earth dotted with young pines, and the very slope of the hill on which my house is placed, seemed to say. forward! nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. she has long ago taken her resolution. "o prince, our eyes contemplate wath admiration and transmit to the soul the wonderful 230 walden. and varied spectacle of this universe. the night veils without doubt a part of this glorious creation; but day comes to reveal to us this great work, which extends from earth even into the plains of the ether." then to my morning work. first i take an axe and pail and go in search of water; if that be not a dream. after a cold and snowy night it needed a divining rod to find it. every winter the liquid and trembling surface of the pond, which was so sensitive to every breath, and re flected every light and shadow, becomes solid to the depth of a foot or a foot and a half, so that it will support the heaviest teams, and perchance the snow covers it to an equal depth, and it is not to be distinguished from any level field. like the marmots in the surrounding hills, it closes its eyelids and becomes dormant for three months or more. standing on the snow-covered plain, as if in a pasture amid the hills, i cut my wa}^ first through a foot of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a window under my feet, where, kneeling to drink, i look down into the quiet parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as in summer; there a perennial waveless serenity reigns as in the amber twilight sky, correspond ing to the cool and even temperament of the inhab itants. heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads. early in the morning, avhile all things are crisp with frost, men come with fishing reels and slender lunch, and let down their fine lines through the snowy field to take pickerel and perch; wild men, who instinctively follow other fashions and trust other authorities than their townsmen, and by their goings and comings stitch towns together in parts where else they would be ripped. they sit and cat their luncheon in stout fear-naughts on the dry oak leaves on the shore, as wise in natural lore as the citi zen is in artificial. they never consulted with books, and know and can tell much less than they have done. the things which they practise are said not yet to be known. here is one fishing for pickerel with grown perch for bait. you look into his pail with wonder as into a summer pond, as if he kept summer locked up at home, or knew where the pond in winter. 231 she had retreated. how, pray, did he get these in mid avinter? oh, he got worms out of rotten logs since the ground froze, and so he caught them. his hfe itself passes deeper in nature than the studies of the naturalist pene trate; himself a subject for the naturalist. the latter raises the moss and bark gently with his knife in search of insects ; the former lays open logs to their core with his axe, and moss and bark fly far and wide. he gets his living by barking trees. such a man has some right to fish, and i love to see nature carried out in him. the perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled. when i strolled around the pond in misty weather i was sometimes amused by the primitive mode which some ruder fisherman had adopted. he would perhaps have placed alder branches over the narrow holes in the ice, which were four or five rods apart and an equal distance from the shore, and having fastened the end of the line to a stick to prevent its being pulled through, have passed the slack line over a twig of the alder, a foot or more above the ice, and tied a dry oak leaf to it, which, being pulled down, would show when he had a bite. these alders loomed through the mist at regular intervals as you walked halfway round the pond. ah, the pickerel of walden! when i see them lying on the ice, or in the well which the fisherman cuts in the ice, making a little hole to admit the water, i am always sur prised by their rare beauty, as if they were fabulous fishes, they are so foreign to the streets, even to the woods, for eign as arabia to our concord life. they possess a quite dazzling and transcendent beauty which separates them by a wide interval from the cadaverous cod and haddock whose fame is trumpeted in our streets. they are not green like the pines, nor gray like the stones, nor blue like the sky; but they have, to my eyes, if possible, yet rarer colors, like flowers and precious stones, as if they were the pearls, the animalized nuclei or crystals of the walden water. they, of course, are walden all over and all through; are themselves small w^aldens in the animal kingdom, waldenses. it is surprising that they are caught 232 walden. here, — that in this deep and capacious spring, far beneath the ratthng teams and chaises and tinkhng sleighs that travel the walden road, this great gold and emerald fish swims. i never chanced to see its kind in an}' market; it would be the cynosure of all eyes there. easily, with a few convulsive quirks, they give up their watery ghosts, like a mortal translated before his time to the thin air of heaven. as i was desirous to recover the long-lost bottom of walden pond, i surveyed it carefully, before the ice broke up, early in '46, with compass and chain and sounding line. there have been many stories told about the bottom, or rather no bottom, of this pond, which certainly had no foundation for themselves. it is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it. i have visited two such bottomless ponds in one walk in this neighborhood. many have believed that walden reached quite through to the other side of the globe. some who have lain flat on the ice for a long time, looking down through the illusive medium, perchance with watery eyes into the bargain, and driven to hasty conclusions by the fear of catching cold in their breasts, have seen vast holes "into which a load of hay might be driven," if there were anybody to drive it, the undoubted source of the styx and entrance to the in fernal regions from these parts. others have gone down from the village with a "fifty-six" and a wagon load of inch rope, but yet have failed to find any bottom; for while the "fifty-six" was resting by the way, they were paying out the rope in the vain attempt to fathom their truly immeasurable capacity for marvellousness. but i can assure my readers that walden has a reasonably tight bottom at a not unreasonable, though at an unusual, depth. i fathomed it easily with a cod-line and a stone aveighing about a pound and a half, and could tell accu rately when the stone left the bottom, by having to pull so much harder before the water got underneath to help me. the greatest depth was exactly one hundred and two feet; to which may be added the five feet which it has risen since, making one hundred and seven. this is a remark the pond in winter. 233 able aepth for so small an aroa; yet not an inch of it can be spared by the imagination. what if all ponds avere shal low? would it not react on the minds of men? i am thankful that this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol. while men believe in the infinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless. a factory owner, hearing what depth i had found, thought that it could not be true, for, judging from his ac quaintance with dams, sand would not lie at so steep an angle. but the deepest ponds are not so deep in propor tion to their area as most suppose, and, if drained, would not leave very remarkable valleys. they are not like cups between the hills; for this one, which is so unusually deep for its area, appears in a vertical section through its centre not deeper than a shallow plate. most ponds, emptied, would leave a meadow no more hollow than we frequently see. william gilpin, who is so admirable in all that re lates to landscapes, and usually so correct, standing at the head of loch fyne, in scotland, which he describes as "a bay of salt water, sixty or seventy fathoms deep, four miles in breadth," and about fifty miles long, surrounded by mountains, observes, " if we could have seen it im mediately after the diluvian crash, or whatever convul sion of nature occasioned it, before the waters gushed in, what a horrid chasm it must have appeared!" "so high as heaved the tumid hills, so low down sunk a hollow bottom, broad, and deep, capacious bed of waters " but if, using the shortest diameter of loch fyne, we apply these proportions to walden, which, as we have seen, ap pears already in a vertical section only like a shallow plate, it will appear four times as shallow. so much for the in creased horrors of the chasm of loch yyne when emptied. no doubt many a smiling valley with its stretching corn fields occupies exactly such a "horrid chasm," from which the waters have receded, though it requires the insight and the far sight of the geologist to convince the unsus pecting inhabitants of this fact. often an inquisitive eye. may detect the shores of a primitive lake in the low ho rizon hills, and no subsequent elevation of the plain have 234 waldex. been necessary to conceal their history. but it is easiest, as they who work on the highways know, to find the hol lows by the puddles after a shower. the amount of it is, the imagination, give it the least license, dives deeper and soars higher than nature goes. so, probably, the depth of the ocean will be found to be very inconsiderable com pared with its breadth. as i sounded through the ice i could determine the shape of the bottom with greater accuracy than is possible in surveying harbors which do not freeze over, and i was surprised at its general regularity. in the deepest part there are several acres more level than almost any field which is exposed to the sun, wind, and plough. in one in stance, on a line arbitrarily chosen, the depth did not vary more than one foot in thirty rods ; and generally, near the middle, i could calculate the variation for each one hun dred feet in any direction beforehand within three or four inches. some are accustomed to speak of deep and dan gerous holes even in quiet sandy ponds like this, but the effect of water under these circumstances is to level all in equalities. the regularity of the bottom and its con formity to the shores and the range of the neighboring hills were so perfect that p. distant promontory betrayed itself in the soundings quite across the pond, and its di rection could be determined by observing the opposite shore.. cape becomes bar, and plain shoal, and valley and gorge deep water and channel. when i had mapped the pond by the scale of ten rods to an inch, and put clown the soundings, more than a hun dred in all, i observed this remarkable coincidence. hav ing noticed that the number ijidicating the greatest depth was apparently in the centre of the map, i laid a rule on the map lengthwise, and then breadthwise, and found, to my surprise, that the line of greatest length intersected the line of greatest breadth exactly at the point of greatest depth, notwithstanding that the middle is so nearly level, the outline of the pond far from regular, and the extreme length and breadth were got by measuring into the coves; and i said to myself. who knows but this hint would con duct to the deepest part of the ocean as well as of a pond or puddle? is not this the rule also for the height of moun the pond in winter. 235 tains, regarded as the opposite of valleys? we know that a hill is not highest at its narrowest part. of five coves, three, or all which had been sounded, were obse ved to have a bar quite across their mouths and deeper water within, so that the bay tended to be an ex pansion of water within the land not onl_v horizontally but vertically, and to form a basin or independent pond, the direction of the tavo capes showing the course of the bar. every harbor on the sea-coast, also, has its bar at its en trance. in proportion as the mouth of the cove was w'ider compared with its length, the water over the bar was deeper compared with that in the basin. given, then, the length and breadth of the cove, and the character of the surrounding shore, and you have almost elements enough to make out a formula for all cases. in order to see how nearly i could guess, with this ex perience, at the deepest point in a pond, by observing the outlines of its surface and the character of its shores alone, i made a plan of white pond, which contains about forty one acres, and, like this, has no island in it, nor any visible inlet or outlet ; and as the line of greatest breadth fell very near the line of least breadth, where two opposite capes ap proached each other and two opposite bays receded, i ventured to mark a point a short distance from the latter line, but still on the line of greatest length, as the deepest. the deepest part was found to be within one hundred feet of this, still farther in the direction to which i had in clined, and was only one foot deeper, namely sixty feet. of course, a stream running through, or an island in the pond, would make the problem much more complicated. if we knew all the laws of nature, we should need only one fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point. now we know only a few laws, and our result is vitiated, not, of course, by any confusion or irregularity in nature, but by our ignorance of essential elements in the calculation. our notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to those instances which we detect; but the harmony which results from a far greater number of seemingly conflict ing, but really concurring, laws, which we have not de tected, is still more wonderful. the particular laws are 236 walden. as our points of view, as, to the traveller, a mountain out line varies with every step, and it has an infinite number of profiles, though absolutely but one form. even when cleft or bored through it is not comprehended in its en tireness. what i have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics. it is the law of average. such a rule of the two diameters not only guides us toward the sun in the sys tem and the heart in man; but draw lines through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man's particular daily behaviors and waves of life into his coves and inlets, and where they intersect will be the height or depth of his character. perhaps we need only to know how his shores trend and his adjacent country or circumstances, to infer his depth and concealed bottom. if he is sur rounded by mountainous circumstances, an achillean shore, whose peaks overshadow and are reflected in his bosom, they suggest a corresponding depth in him. but a low and smooth shore proves him shallow on that side. in our bodies, a bold projecting brow falls off to and indicates a corresponding depth of thought. also there is a bar across the entrance of our every cove, or particular inclination; each is our harbor for a season, in which we are detained and partially land-locked. these inclina tions are not whimsical usually, but their form, size, and direction are determined by the promontories of the shore, the ancient axes of elevation. when this bar is gradu ally increased by storms, tides, or currents, or there is a subsidence of the waters, so that it reaches to the surface, that which was at first but an inclination in the shore in which a thought was harbored becomes an individual lake, cut off from the ocean, wherein the thought secures its own conditions, changes, perhaps, from salt to fresh, becomes a sweet sea, dead sea, or a marsh. at the ad vent of each individual into this life, may we not suppose that such a bar has risen to the surface somewhere? it is true, we are such poor navigators that our thoughts, for the most part, stand off and on upon a harborless coast, are conversant only with the bights of the bays of poesy, or steer for the public ports of entry, and go into the dry docks of science, where they merely refit for this the pond in winter, 237 world, and no natural currents concur to individualize them. as for the inlet or outlet of walden, i have not dis covered any but rain and snow and evaporation, though perhaps, with a thermometer and a line, such places may be found, for where the water flows into the pond it will probably be coldest in summer and warmest in winter. when the ice-men were at work here in '46-7, the cakes sent to the shore were one day rejected by those who were stacking them up there, not being thick enough to lie side by side with the rest ; and the cutters thus discovered that the ice over a small space was two or three inches thinner than elsewhere, which made them think that there was an inlet there. they also showed me in another place what they thought was a " leach hole," through which the pond leaked out under a hill into a neighboring meadow, pushing me out on a cake of ice to see it. it was a small cavity under ten feet of water; but i think that i can war rant the pond not to need soldering till they find a worse leak than that. one has suggestecl that if such a ''leach hole," should be found, its connection with the meadow, if any existed, might be proved by conveying some col ored powder or sawdust to the mouth of the hole, and then putting a strainer over the spring in the meadow, which would catch some of the particles carried through by the current. while i was surveying, the ice, which was sixteen inches thick, undulated under a slight wind like water. it is well known that a level cannot be used on ice. at one rod from the shore its greatest fluctuation, when observed by means of a level on land directed toward a graduated staff on the ice, was three quarters of an inch, though the ice appeared firmly attached to the shore. it was probably greater in the middle. who knows but if our instruments were delicate enough we might detect an undulation in the crust of the earth? when two legs of my level were on the shore and the third on the ice, and the sights were directed over the latter, a rise or fall of the ice of an almost infinitesimal amount made a differ ence of several feet on a tree across the pond. when i began to cut holes for sounding, there were three or four 238 waldex. inches of water on the ice under a deep snow which had sunk it thus far; but the water began immediately to run into these holes, and continued to run for two days in deep streams, which wore away the ice on every side, and contributed essentially, if not mainly, to dry the surface of the pond; for, as the avater ran in, it raised and floated the ice. this was somewhat like cutting a hole in the bottom of a ship to let the water out. when such holes freeze, and a rain succeeds, and finally a new freezing forms a fresh smooth ice over all, it is beautifully mottled internally by dark figures, shaped somewhat like a spider's web, what you may call ice rosettes, produced by the grhannels worn by the water flowing fz'om all sides to a centre. sometimes, also, when the ice avas covered with shallow puddles, i saav a double shadow of myself, one standing on the head of the other, one on the ice, the other on the trees or hill side. while yet it is cold januar}-, and snow and ice are thick ancl solid, the prudent landlord comes from the village to get ice to cool his summer drink; impressively, even pathetically wise, to foresee the heat and thirst of july now in january, — wearing a thick coat and mittens! when so many things are not provided for. it may be that he lays up no treasures in this world which wall cool his summer drink in the next. he cuts and saws the solid pond, unroofs the house of fishes, and carts off their very element and air, held fast by chains and stakes like corded wood, through the favoring winter air, to wintry cellars, to underlie the summer there. it looks like solidi fied azure, as, far off, it is drawn through the streets. these ice-cutters are a merry race, full of jest and sport, and when i went among them they were wont to invite me to saw pit-fashion with them, i standing luiderneath. in the winter of '4g-7 there came a hundred men of hy perborean extraction swooping down on to our pond one morning, with -many car-loads of ungainly-looking farm ing tools, sleds, ploughs, drill-barrows, turf-knives, spades, saws, rakes, and each man was armed with a double pointed pike-staff, such as is not described in the neiv engknul farmer or the cultivator. i did not know whether the pond in winter. 239 thej' had come to sow a crop of winter rye, or some other kind of grain recently introduced from iceland. as i saw no manure, i judged that they meant to skim the land, as i had done, thinking the soil was deep and had lain fallow long enough. they said that a gentleman farmer, who was behind the scenes, wanted to doul^le his money, which, as i understood, amounted to half a million already; but, in order to cover each one of his dol lars with another, he took off the only coat, ay, the skin itself, of walden pond in the midst of a hard winter. they went to work at once, ploughing, harrowing, roll ing, furrowing, in admirable order, as if they were bent on making this a model farm; but when i was looking sharp to see what kind of seed they dropped into the furrow, a gang of fellows by my side suddenly began to hook up the virgin mould itself, with a peculiar jerk, clean down to the sand, or rather the water, — for it was a very springy soil, — indeed, all the terra firma there was, — and haul it away on sleds, and then i guessed that they must be cutting peat in a bog. so they came and went every day, with a peculiar shriek from the locomotive, from and to some point of the polar regions, as it seemed to me, like a flock of arctic snow-birds. but sometimes squaw walden had her revenge, and a hired man, walk ing behind his team, slipped through a crack in the ground down toward tartarus, and he who was so brave before suddenly became but the ninth part of a man, almost gave up his animal heat, and was glad to take refuge in my house, and acknowledged that there was some virtue in a stove; or sometimes the frozen soil took a piece of steel out of a ploughshare, or a plough got set in the furrow and had to be cut out. to speak literally, a hundred irishmen, with yankee overseers, came from cambridge every day to get out the ice. they divided it into cakes by methods too well known to require description, and these, being sledded to the shore, were rapidly hauled off on to an ice platform, and raised by grappling irons and block and tackle, worked by horses, on to a stack, as surely as so many barrels of flour, and there placed evenly side by side, and row upon row, as if they formed the solid base of an ol)e 240 walden. lisk designed to pierce the clouds. they told me that in a good day they could get out a thousand tons, which was the yield of about one acre. deep ruts and "cradle holes" were worn in the ice, as on terra jirma, by the passage of the sleds over the same track, and the horses invariably ate their oats out of cakes of ice hollowed out like buckets. they stacked up the cakes thus in the open air in a pile thirty-five feet high on one side and six or seven rods square, putting hay between the outside layers to exclude the air; for when the wind, though never so cold, finds a passage through, it will wear large cavities, leaving slight supports or studs only here and there, and finally topple it down. at first it looked like a vast blue fort or valhalla; but when they began to tuck the coarse meadow hay into the crevices, and this became covered with rime and icicles, it looked like a venerable moss grown and hoary ruin, built of azure-tinted marble, the abode of winter, that old man we see in the almanac, — his shanty, as if he had a design to estivate with us. they calculated that not twenty-five per cent of this would reach its destination, and that two or three per cent would be wasted in the cars. however, a still greater part of this heap had a different destiny from what was intended ; for, either because the ice was found not to keep so well as was expected, containing more air than usual, •or for some other reason, it never got to market. this heap, made in the winter of '46-7 and estimated to con tain ten thousand tons, was finally covered with hay and boards; and though it was unroofed the following july, and a part of it carried off, the rest remaining exposed to the sun, it stood over that summer and the next winter, and was not quite melted till september, 1s4s. thus the pond recovered the greater part. like the water, the walden ice, seen near at hand, has a green tint, but at a distance is beautifully blue, and you can easily tell it from the white ice of the river, or the merely greenish ice of some ponds, a quarter of a mile off. sometimes one of those great cakes slips from the ice man's sled into the village street, and lies there for a week like a great emerald, an object of interest to all passers. i have noticed that a portion of walden which in the the pond in winter. 241 state of water was green will often, when frozen, appear from the same point of view blue. so the hollows about this pond will, sometimes, in the winter, be filled with a greenish water somewhat like its own, but the next day will have frozen blue. perhaps the blue color of water and ice is due to the light and air they contain, and the most transparent is the bluest. ice is an interesting sub ject for contemplation. they told me that they had some in the ice-houses at fresh pond five years old which was as good as ever. why is it that a bucket of water soon becomes putrid, but frozen remains sweet forever? it is commonly said that this is the difference between the affections and the intellect. thus for sixteen days i saw from my window a hundred men at work like busy husbandmen, with teams and horses and apparently all the implements of farming, such a picture as we see on the first page of the almanac; and as often as i looked out i was reminded of the fable of the lark and the reapers, or the parable of the sower, and the like; and now they are all gone, and in thirty days more, probably, i shall look from the same window on the pure sea-green walden water there, reflecting the clouds and the trees, and sending up its evaporations in solitude, and no traces will appear that a man has ever stood there. perhaps i shall hear a solitary loon laugh as he dives and plumes himself, or shall see a lonely fisher in his boat, like a floating leaf, beholding his form reflected in the waves, w^here lately a hundred men securely labored. thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of charleston and new orleans, of madras and bombay and calcutta, drink at ni}^ well. in the morning i bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the bhagvat geeta, since whose composition j^ears of the gods have elasped, and in comparison with which our modern world ancl its literature seem puny and trivial; and i doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. i lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there i meet the servant of the brahmin, priest of brahma and vishnu and indra, who still sits in his temple on the ganges reading the vedas, 242 walden. or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. i meet his servant come to draw avater for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. the pure walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the ganges. with favoring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of atlantis and the hesperides, makes the periplus of hanno, and, floating by ternate and tidore and the mouth of the persian gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the indian seas, and is landed in ports of which alexander only heard the names. xvii. spring. the opening of large tracts by the ice-cutters com monly causes a pond to break up earher; for the water, agitated by the wind, even in cold weather, wears away the surrounding ice. but such was not the effect on walden that year, for she had soon got a thick new gar ment to take the place of the old. this pond never breaks up so soon as the others in this neighborhood, on account both of its greater depth and its having no stream passing through it to melt or wear away the ice. i never knew it to open in the course of a winter, not excepting that of '52-3, which gave the ponds so severe a trial. it com monly opens about the first of april, a week or ten days later than fhnt's pond and fair-haven, beginning to melt on the north side and in the shallower parts where it began to freeze. it indicates better than any water hereabouts the absolute progress of the season, being least affected by transient changes of temperature. a severe cold of a few days' duration in march may very much retard the opening of the former ponds, while the temperature of walden increases almost uninterruptedly. a thermometer thrust into the middle of walden on the 6th of march, 1s47, stood at 32°, or freezing point; near the shore at 33°; in the middle of flint's pond, the same day, at 32^°; at a dozen rods from the shore, in shallow water, under ice a foot thick, at 36°. this difference of spring. 243 three and a half degrees between the temperature of the deep water and the shallow in the latter pond, and the fact that a great proportion of it is comparatively shallow^ show why it should l^rcak up so much sooner than walden. the ice in the shallowest part was at this time sevei-al inches thinner than in the middle. in mid-winter the mid dle had been the warmest and the ice thinnest there. so, also, every one who has waded about the shores of a pond in summer must have perceived how much warmer the water is close to the shore, where only three or four inches deep, than a little distance out, and on the surface where it is deep, than near the bottom. in spring the sun not only exerts an influence through the increased tempera ture of the air and earth, but its heat passes through ice a foot or more thick, and is reflected from the bottom in shallow water, and so also warms the water and melts the under side of the ice, at the same time that it is melting it more directly above, making it uneven, and causing the air bubbles which it contains to extend themselves upward and downward until it is completely honey combed, and at last disappears suddenly in a single spring rain. ice has its grain as well as wood, and when a cake begins to rot or " comb," that is, assume the apjdearance of honeycomb, whatever may be its position, the air cells are at right angles with what was the water surface. where there is a rock or a log rising near to the surface the ice over it is much thinner, and is frequently quite dissolved by this reflected heat ; and i have been told that in the experiment at cambridge to freeze water in a shallow wooden pond, though the cold air circulated underneath, and so had access to both sides, the reflec tion of the sun from the bottom more than counter balanced this advantage. avhen a warm rain in the mid dle of the winter m.elts off the snow-ice from walden, and leaves a hard, dark, or transparent ice on the middle, there will be a strip of rotten though thicker white ice, a rod or more wide, about the shores, created by this re flected heat. also, as i have said, the bubbles themselves within the ice operate as burning-glasses to melt the ice beneath. the phenomena of the year take place every day in a 244 walden. pond on a small scale. every morning, generally speak ing, the shallow water is being warmed more rapidly than the deep, though it may not be made so warm after all, and every evening it is being cooled more rapidly until the morning. the day is an epitome of the year. the night is the winter, the morning and evening are the spring and fall, and the noon is the summer. the cracking and booming of the ice indicate a change of temperature. one pleasant morning after a cold night, february 24th, 1850, having gone to flint's pond to spend the day, i noticed with surprise that when i struck the ice with the head of my axe, it resounded like a gong for many rods around, or as if i had struck on a tight drumhead. the pond began to boom about an hour after sunrise, when it felt the influence of the sun's rays slanted upon it from over the hills ; it stretched itself and yawned like a waking man with a gradually increasing tumult, which was kept up three or four hours. it took a short siesta at noon, and boomed once more toward night, as the sun was with drawing his influence. in the right stage of the weather a pond fires its evening gun with great regularity. but in the middle of the day, being full of cracks, and the air also being less elastic, it had completely lost its resonance, and probably fishes and muskrats could not then have been stunned by a blow on it. the fishermen say that the " thundering of the pond " scares the fishes and pre vents their biting. the pond does not thunder every even ing, and i cannot tell surely when to expect its thunder ing; but though i may perceive no difference in the weather, it does. who would have suspected so large and cold and thick-skinned a thing to be so sensitive? yet it has its law to which it thunders obedience when it should as surely as the buds expand in the spring. the earth is all alive and covered with papilla). the largest pond is as sensitive to atmospheric changes as the globule of mercury in its tube. one attraction in coming to the woods to live was that i should have leisure and opportunity to see the spring come in. the ice in the pond at length begins to be honeycombed, and i can set my heel in it as i walk. spring. 245 fogs and rains and warmer suns are gradually melting the snow; the days have grown sensibly longer; and i see how i shall get through the winter without adding to my wood-pile, for large fires are no longer necessary. i am on the alert for the first signs of spring, to hear the chance note of some arriving bird, or the striped squirrel's chirp, for his stores must be now nearly exhausted, or see the woodchuck venture out of his winter cjuarters. on the 13th of march, after i had heard the bluebird, song sparrow, and red-wing, the ice was still nearly a foot thick. as the weather grew warmer, it was not sensibly worn away by the water, nor broken up and floated off as in rivers, but, though it was completely melted for half a rod in width about the shore, the middle was merely honeycombed and saturated with water, so that you could put your foot through it when six inches thick; but by the next day evening, perhaps, after a warm rain followed by fog, it would have wholly disappeared, all gone off with the fog, spirited away. one year i went across the middle only five days before it disappeared en tirely. in 1845 walden was first completelv open on the 1st of april; in '46, the 25th of march; in '47, the sth of april; in '51, the 28th of march; in '52, the 18th of april; in '53, the 23rd of march; in '54, about the 7th of april. every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather is partic ularly interesting to us who live in a climate of so great extremes. when the warmer days come, they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly going out. so the alhgator comes out of the mud with quakings of the earth. one old man, who has been a close observer of nature, and seems as thoroughly wise in regard to all her operations as if she had been put upon the stocks when he was a boy, and he had helped to lay her keel, — who has come to his growth, and can hardly acquire more of natural lore if he should live to the age of methuselah, — told me, and i was surprised to hear him express wonder at any of nature's operations, for i thought that there were no secrets between them, that 246 walden. one spring day he took his gun and boat, and thought that he would have a httle sport with the ducks. there was ice still on the meadows, but it was all gone out of the river, and he dropped down without obstruction from sudbury, where he lived, to fair-haven pond, which he found, unexpectedly, covered for the most part with a firm field of ice. it was a warm day, and he avas sur prised to see so great a body of ice remaining. not see ing any ducks, he hid his boat on the north or back side of an island in the pond, and then concealed himself in the bushes on the south side, to await them. the ice was melted for three or four rods from the shore, and there was a smooth and warm sheet of water, with a muddy bottom, such as the ducks love, within, and he thought it likely that some would be along pretty soon. after he had lain still there about an hour he heard a low and seemingly very distant sound, but singularly grand and impressive, unlike anything he had ever heard, gradually swelling and increasing as if it would have a universal and memorable ending, a sullen rush and roar, which seemed to him all at once like the sound of a vast body of fowl coming in to settle there, and, seizing his gun, he started up in haste and excited; but he found, to his sur prise, that the whole body of the ice had started while he lay there, and drifted in to the shore, and the sound he had heard was made by its edge grating on the shore, — at first gently nibbled and crumbled off, but at length heav ing up and scattering its wrecks along the island to a considerable height before it came to a standstill. at length the sun's rays have attained the right angle, and warm winds blow up mist and rain and melt the snow-banks, and the sun dispersing the mist smiles on a checkered landscape of russet and white smoking with incense, through which the traveller picks his way from islet to islet, cheered by the music of a thousand tinkling rills and rivulets whose veins are filled with the blood of winter which they are bearing off. few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad through which i passed on my way to the village, a phenomenon spring. 247 not very common on so large a scale, though the number of freshly exposed banks of the right material must have been greatly multiplied since railroads were invented. the material was sand of every degree of fineness and of various rich colore, commonly mixed with a little clay. when the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before. innumerable little streams overlap and inter lace one with another, exhibiting a sort of hybrid prod uct, which obeys halfway the law of currents, and half way that of vegetation. as it flows it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and resembling, as you look down on them, the laciniated, lobed, and imbricated thalluses of some lichens ; or you are reminded of coral, of leopards' paws or birds' feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and ex crements of all kinds. it is a truly grotesque vegetation, whose forms and color we see imitated in bronze, a sort of architectural foliage more ancient and typical than acanthus, chiccory, ivy, vine, or any vegetable leaves; destined perhaps, under some circumstances, to become a puzzle to future geologists. the whole cut impressed me as if it were a cave with its stalactites laid open to the light. the various shades of the sand are singularly rich and agreeable, embracing the different iron colors, brown, gray, yellowish, and reddish. when the flowing mass reaches the drain at the foot of the bank it spreads out flatter into st7xinds, the separate streams losing their semi-cylindrical form and gradually becoming more flat and broad, running together as they are more moist, till they form an almost flat sand, still variously and beauti fulh' shaded, but in which you can trace the original forms of vegetation; till at length, in the water itself, they are converted into banks, like those formed off the mouths of rivers, and the forms of vegetation are lost in the ripple marks on the bottom. the whole bank, which is from tw^enty to forty feet high, is sometimes overlaid with a mass of this kind of foliage, or sandy rupture, for a quarter of a mile on one 248 walden. or both sides, the produce of one spring day. what makes this sand fohage remarkable is its springing into existence thus suddenly. when i see on the one side the inert bank, — for the sun acts on one side first, — and on the other this luxuriant foliage, the creation of an hour, i am affected as if in a peculiar sense i stood in the labora tory of the artist who made the world and me — had come to where he was still at work, sporting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about. i feel as if i were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sand}^ overflow is something such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body. you find thus in the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. no wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea inwardly. the atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by it. the overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. internally, whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of fat (xecfso), labor, lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing; ao^qos, globus, lobe, globe; also lap, flap, and many other words), externally a dry thin leaf, even as the / and v are a pressed and dried b. the radicals of lobe are lb, the soft mass of the b (single lobed, or b, double lobed), with a liquid i behind it pressing it forward. in globe, gib, the guttural g adds to the meaning the capac ity of the throat. the feathers and wings of birds are still drier and thinner leaves. thus, also, you pass from the lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. the very globe continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit. even ice begins with delicate crystal leaves, as if it had flowed into moulds which the fronds of water plants have im pressed on the water}^ mirror. the whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is in tervening earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in their axils. when the sun withdraws the sand ceases to flow, but in the morning the streams will start once more and l^ranch and branch again into a myriad of others. you here see perchance how blood vessels are formed. if you j spring. 249 look closely 3^011 observe that first there pushes forward from the thawing mass a stream of softened sand with a drop-like point, like the ball of the finger, feeling its way slowly and blindly downward, until at last with more heat and moisture, as the sun gets higher, the most fluid portion, in its effort to obey the law to which the most inert also yields, separates from the latter and forms for itself a meandering channel or artery within that, in which is seen a little silvery stream glancing like lightning from one stage of pulpy leaves or branches to another, and ever and anon swallowed up in the sand. it is wonder ful how rapidly yet perfectly the sand organizes itself as it flows, using the best material its mass affords to form the sharp edges of its channel. such are the sources of rivers. in the silicious matter which the water deposits is perhaps the bony system, and in the still finer soil and organic matter the fleshy fibre or cellular tissue. what is man but a mass of thawing clay? the ball of the human finger is but a drop congealed. the fingers and toes flow to their extent from the thawing mass of the body. who knows what the human body would expand and flow out to under a more genial heaven? is not the hand a spread ing palm leaf with its lobes and veins? the ear may be regarded, fancifully, as a lichen, umbilicaria, on the side of the head, with its lobe or drop. the lip — labium, from labor (?) — laps or lapses from the sides of the cavernous mouth. the nose is a manifest congealed drop or stalac tite. the chin is a still larger drop, the confluent drip ping of the face. the cheeks are a slide from the brows into the valley of the face, opposed and diffused by the cheek bones. each rounded lobe of the vegetable leaf, too, is a thick and now loitering drop, larger or smaller; the lobes are the fingers of the leaf; and as many lobes as it has, in so many directions it tends to flow, and more heat or other genial influences would have caused it to flow yet farther. thus it seemed that this one hill side illustrated the principle of ah the operations of nature. the maker of this earth but patented a leaf. w^hat champollion will de cipher this hieroglyphic for us, that we may turn over a new leaf at last? this phenomenon is more exhilarating 250 walden. to me than the kixuriance and fertihty of vineyards. true, it is somewhat excrementitious in its character, and there is no end to the heaps of hver, hghts, and bowels, as if the globe were turned wrong side outward; but this suggests at least that nature has some bowels, and there again is mother of humanity. this is the frost coming out of the ground; this is spring. it precedes the green and flowery spring, as mythology precedes regular poetry, i know of nothing more purgative of winter fumes and indigestions. it convinces me that earth is still in her swaddling clothes, and stretches forth baby fingers on every side. fresh curls spring from the baldest brow. there is nothing in organic. these foliaccous heaps lie along the bank like the slag of a furnace, showing that nature is "in full blast" within. the earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit, — not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. its throes will heave our exuvia) from their graves. you may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out into. and not only it, but the institutions upon it, are plastic like clay in the hands of the potter. ere long, not only on these banks, but on every hill and plain and in every hollow, the frost comes out of the ground like a dormant quadruped from its burrow, and seeks the sea w4th music, or migrates to other climes in clouds. thaw with his gentle persuasion is more powerful than thor with his hammer. the one melts, the other but breaks in pieces. when the ground was partially bare of snow, and a few warm days had dried its surface somewhat, it was pleasant to compare the first tender signs of the infant year just' peeping forth with the stately beauty of the withered vege tation which had withstood the winter, — life-everlasting, goldenrods, pinweeds, and graceful wild grasses, more obvious and interesting frequently than in summer even, as if their beauty was not ripe till then; even cotton-grass, spring. 251 cattails, mulleins, johnswort, harclhack, meadow-sweet, and other strong stemmed plants, those unexhausted gran aries which entertain the earliest birds, — decent weeds, at least, which widowed nature wears. i am particularly attracted by the arching and sheaf-like top of the wool grass ; it brings back the summer to our winter memories, and is among the forms which art loves to copy, and which, in the vegetable kingdom, have the same relation to types already in the mind of man that astronomy has. it is an antique style older than greek or egyptian. many of the phenomena of winter are suggestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. we are accustomed to hear this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant; but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of summer. at the approach of spring the red squirrels got under my house, two at a time, directly under my feet as i sat read ing or writing, and kept up the queerest chuckling and chirruping and vocal pirouetting and gurgling sounds that ever were heard; and when i stamped they only chirruped the louder, as if past all fear and respect in their mad pranks, defying humanity to stop them. no you don't — chickaree — chickaree. they were wholly deaf to my argu ments, or failed to perceive their force, and fell into a strain of invective that was irresistible. the first sparrow of spring! the year beginning with younger hope than ever! the faint silvery warblings heard over the partially bare and moist fields from the bluebird, the song-sparrow, and the red-wing, as if the last flakes of winter tinkled as they fell ! what at such a time are histories, chronologies, traditions, and all written revelations? the brooks sing carols and glees to the spring. the marsh-hawk sailing low over the meadow is already seeking the first slimy life that awakes. the sink ing sound of melting snow is heard in all dells, and the ice dissolves apace in the ponds. the grass flames up on the hill sides like a spring fire, — "et primitus oritur herba imbrilnis primoribus evocata," — as if the earth sent forth an inward heat to greet the returning sun; not yellow but green is the color of its flame; — the symbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams 252 walden. from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year's hay with the fresh life below. it grows as steadily as the rill oozes out of the ground. it is almost identical with that, for in the growing days of june, when the rills are dry, the grass-blades are their channels, and from year to year the herds drink at this perennial green stream, and the mower draws from it betimes their winter supply. so our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity. walden is melting apace. there is a canal two rods wide along the northerly and westerly sides, and wider still at the east end. a great field of ice has cracked off from the main body. i hear a song-sparrow singing from the bushes on the shore, — olit, olit, olit, — ckij), chip, chip, che, chew, — che iciss, iviss, wiss. he too is helping to crack it. how handsome the great sweeping curves in the edge of the ice, answering somewhat to those of the shore, but more regular! it is unusually hard, owing to the recent severe but transient cold, and all watered or waved like a palace floor. but the wind slides eastward over its opaque sur face in vain, till it reaches the living surface beyond. it is glorious to behold this ribbon of water sparkling in the sun, the bare face of the pond full of glee and youth, as if it spoke the joy of the fishes within it, and of the sands on its shore, — a silvery sheen as from the scales of a leuciscus, as it were all one active fish. such is the contrast between winter and spring. walden was dead and is alive again. but this spring it broke up more steadily, as i have said. the change from storm and winter to serene and mild weather, from dark and sluggish hours to bright and elas tic ones, is a memorable crisis which all things proclaim. it is seemingly instantaneous at last. suddenly an in flux of light filled my house, though the evening was at hand, and the clouds of winter still overhung it, and the eaves were dripping with sleety rain. i looked out the window, and lo! where yesterday was cold gray ice there lay the transparent pond already calm and full of hope as in a summer evening, reflecting a summer evening sky in its bosom, though none was visible overhead, as if it had in telligence with some remote horizon. i heard a robin in spring. 253 the distance, the first i had lieard for many a thousand years, metliought, whose note i shall not forget for many a thousand more, — the same sweet and j^owerful song as of yore. o tlie evening robin, at the end of a new england summer day ! if i could ever find the twig he sits upon ! i mean he; i mean the twig. this at least is not the turdus 7mgratorius. the pitch-pines and shrub-oaks about my house, which had so long drooped, suddenly resumed their several characters, looked brighter, greener, and more erect and alive, as if effectually cleansed and restored by the rain. i knew that it would not rain any more. you may tell by looking at any twig of the forest, ay, at your very wood-pile, whether its winter is past or not. as it grew darker, i was startled by the honking of geese flj'ing low over the woods, like weary travellers getting in late from southern lakes, and indulging at last in unrestrained complaint and mutual consolation. standing at my door, i could hear the rush of their wings; when, driving toward my house, they suddenly spied my light, and with hushed clamor wheeled and settled in the pond. so i came in, and shut the door, and passed my first spring night in the woods. in the morning i watched the geese from the door through the mist, sailing in the middle of the pond, fifty rods off, so large and tumultuous that walden appeared like an artificial pond for their amusement. but when i stood on the shore they at once rose up with a great flap ping of wings at the signal of their commander, and when they had got into rank, circled about over my head, twenty-nine of them, and then steered straight to canada, with a regular honk from the leader at intervals, trusting to break their fast in muddier pools. a " plump " of ducks rose at the same time and took the route to the north in the wake of their noisier cousins. for a week i heard the circling groping clangor of some solitary goose in the foggy mornings, seeking its com panion, and still peopling the woods with the sound of a larger life than they could sustain. in april the pigeons were seen again flying express in small flocks, and in due time i heard the martins twittering over my clearing, though it had not seemed that the township contained so 254 walden. many that it could afford me any, and i fancied that they were pecuharly of the ancient race that dwelt in hollow trees ere white men came. in almost all climes the tor toise and the frog are among the precursors and heralds of this season, and birds fly with song and glancing plum age, and plants spring and bloom, and winds blow, to correct this slight oscillation of the poles and preserve the equilibrium of nature. as every season seems best to us in its turn, so the com ing in of spring is like the creation of cosmos out of chaos and the realization of the golden age. — "eurus ad auroram, nabathaeaque regna recessit, persidaque, et radiis juga subdita matutinis." *'the east-wind withdrew to aurora and the xabathoean kingdom, and the persian, and the ridges placed under the morning rays. ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ man was born. whether that artificer of things, the origin of a better world, made him from the divine seed; or the earth being recent and lately sundered from the high ether, retained some seeds of cognate heaven." a single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. so our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. we should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty. we loiter in winter while it is already spring. in a pleasant spring morning all men's sins are forgiven. such a day is a truce to vice. avhile such a sun holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may return. through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors. you may have known your neighbor yes terda}' for a thief, a drunkard, or a sensualist, and merely pitied or despised him, and despaired of the world; but the sun shines bright and warm this first spring morning, re creating the world, and you meet him at some serene work and see how his exhausted and debauched veins expand with still joy and bless the new day, feel the spring in fluence with the innocence of infancy, and all his faults spring. 255 are forgotten. there is not only an atmosphere of good will about him, but even a savor of holiness groping for ex pression, blindly and ineffectually perhaps, hke a new born instinct, and for a short hour the south hill side echoes to no vulgar jest. you see some innocent fair shoots pre paring to burst from his gnarled rind and try another year's life, tender and fresh as the youngest plant. even he has entered into the joy of his lord. why the jailer does not leave open his prison doors, — why the judge does not dismiss his case, — why the preacher does not dismiss his congregation ! it is because they do not obey the hint which god gives them, nor accept the pardon which he freely offers to all. "a return to goodness produced each day in the tran quil and beneficent breath of the morning, causes that in respect to the love of virtue and the hatred of vice, one approaches a little the primitive nature of man, as the sprouts of the forest which has been felled. in like maimer the evil which one does in the interval of a day prevents the germs of virtues which began to spring up again from developing themselves and destroys them. "after the germs of virtue have thus been prevented many times from developing themselves, then the benefi cent breath of evening does not suffice to preserve them. as soon as the breath of evening does not suffice longer to preserve them, then the nature of man does not differ much from that of the brute. men seeing the nature of this man like that of the brute, think that he has never possessed the innate faculty of reason. are those the true and natural sentiments of man?" "the golden age was first created, which without any avenger spontaneously without law cherished fidelity and rectitude. punishment and fear were not; nor were threatening words read on suspended brass; nor did the suppliant crowd fear the words of their judge; but were safe without an avenger. not yet the pine felled on its mountains had descended to the liquid waves that it might see a foreign world, and mortals knew no shores but their own. there was eternal spring, and placid zephyrs with warm blasts soothed the flowers born without seed." on the 29th of april, as i was fishing from the bank of 236 walden. the river near the nine-acre-corner bridge, standing on the quaking grass and willow roots, where the muskrats lurk, i heard a singular rattling sound, somewhat like that of the sticks which boys play with their fingers, when, look ing up, i observed a very slight and graceful hawk, like a night-hawk, alternately soaring like a ripple and tumbling a rod or two over and over, showing the underside of its wings, which gleamed like a satin ribbon in the sun, or like the pearly inside of a shell. t^is sight reminded me of falconry and what nobleness and poetry are associated with that sport. the merlin it seemed to me it might be called : but i care not for its name. it was the most ethe real flight i had ever witnessed. it did not simply flutter like a butterflj-, nor soar like the larger hawks, but it sported with proud reliance in the fields of air; mounting again and again with its strange chuckle, it repeated its free and beautiful fall, turning over and over like a kite, and then recovering from its lofty tumbling, as if it had never set its foot on terra firma. it appeared to have no companion in the universe, — sporting there alone, — and to need none but the morning and the ether with which it played. it was not lonely, but made all the earth lonely beneath it. where was the parent which hatched it, its kindred, and its father in the heavens? the tenant of the air, it seemed related to the earth but by an egg hatched sometime' in the crevice of a crag ; — or was its native nest made in the angle of a cloud, woven of the rainbow's trim mings and the sunset sky, and lined with some soft mid summer haze caught up from earrh? its eyry now some cliffy cloud. besides this i got a rare mess of golden and silver and bright cupreous fishes, which looked like a string of jewels. ah ! i have penetrated to those meadows on the morning of many a first spring day, jumping from hummock to hummock, from willow root to willow root, when the wild river valley and the woods were bathed in so pure and bright a light as would have waked the dead, if they had been slumbering in their graves, as some suppose. there! needs no stronger proof of immortality. all things must live in such a light. death, where was thy sting? grave, where was thy victory, then? spring. 257 our villag'o life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. aa'e need the tonic of wildness, — to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe ; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. at the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we rec^uire that all things be mysterious and un explorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsur veyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. we can never have enough of nature. we must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic fea tures, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. we need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. we are cheered when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and disheartens us, and deriving health and strength from the repast. there was a dead horse in the hollow by the path to m}^ house, which compelled me sometimes to go out of m}' way, especiall}' in the night when the air was heavy, but the assurance it gave me of the strong appetite and inviolable health of nature was my compensation for this. i love to see that nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another; that tender organ izations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp; — tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood ! with the liability to accident, we must see how little account is to be made of it. the im pression made on a wise man is that of universal innocence. poison is not poisonous after all, nor are any wounds fatal. compassion is a very untenable ground. it must be ex peditious. its pleadings will not bear to be stereotyped. early in may, the oaks, hickories, maples, and other trees, just putting out amidst the pine woods around the pond, imparted a brightness like sunshine to the land scape, especially in cloudy days, as if the sun were break 258 waldeiy. ing through mists and shining faintly on the hill sides here and there. on the third or fourth of may i saw a loon in the pond, and during the first week of the month i heard the whippoorwill, the brown thrasher, the veery, the wood pewee, chewink, and other birds. i had heard the wood thrush long before. the phoebe had alread}^ come once more and looked in at my door and window, to see if my house was cavern-like enough for her, sustaining herself on humming wings with clinched talons, as if she held by the air, while she surveyed the premises. the sulphur-like pollen of the pitch-pine soon covered the pond and the stones and rotten wood along the shore, so that you could have collected a barrelful. this is the "sulphur showers" w^e hear of. even in calidasa's drama of sacontala, we read of " rills dyed yellow with the golden dust of the lo tus." and so the seasons went rolling on into summer, as one rambles into higher and higher grass. thus was my first year's life in the woods completed; and the second year was similar to it. i finally left walden september 6th, 1847. xviii. conclusion. to the sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of air and scenery. thank heaven, here is not all the world. the buckeye does not grow in xew england, and the mocking-bird is rarety heard here. the wild goose is more of a cosmopolite than we; he breaks his fast in canada, takes a luncheon in the ohio, and plumes himself for the night in a southern bayou. even the l^ison to some extent keeps pace with the seasons, cropping the pastures of the colorado only till a greener and sweeter grass awaits him by the yellowstone. yet we think that if rail-fences are pulled down, and stone-walls piled up on our farms, bounds are henceforth set to our lives and our fates de cided. if you are chosen town clerk, forsooth, you cannot go to terra del fuego this summer; but you may go to the land of infernal fire nevertheless. the imivei"se is wider than our views of it. conclusion. 259 yet we should oftener look over the tafferel of our craft, like curious passengers, and not make the voyage like stu pid sailors picking oakum. the 'other side of the globe is but the home of our correspondent. our voyage is only great-circle sailing, and the doctors prescribe for diseases of the skin merely. one hastens to southern africa to chase the giraffe; l^ut surely that is not the game he would be after. how long, pray, would a man hunt giraffes if he could? snipes and woodcocks also may afford rare sport; but i trust it would be nobler game to shoot one's self. — "direct your eye right inward, and you'll find a thousand regions in your mind yet undiscovered. travel them, and be expert in home-cosmography." what does africa, — ^what does the west stand for? is not our o^^^l interior white on the chart? black though it may prove, like the coast, when discovered. is it the source of the xile, or the niger, or the mississippi, or a northwest passage around this continent, that we would find? are these the problems which most concern man kind? is franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest to find him? does mr. grinnell know where he himself is? be rather the mungo park, the lewis and clarke and frobisher, of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes, — with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be necessary; and pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign. were preserved meats invented to preserve meat merely? nay, be a columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly em pire of the czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. they love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. patriotism is a maggot in their heads. what was the meaning of that south-sea exploring expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact that there are continents and seas in the moral world, to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but 260 walden. that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the atlantic and pacific ocean of one's being alone. — "erret, et extremos alter scrutetur iberos. plus habet hie vitse, plus habet ille vise." "let them wander and scrutinize the outlandish australians. i have more of god, they more of the road." it is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in zanzibar. yet do this even till you can do better, and you may perhaps find some "symmes' hole " by which to get at the inside at last. england and france, spain and portugal, gold coast and slave coast, all front on this private sea; but no bark from them has ventured out sight of land, though it is without doubt the direct way to india. if you would learn to speak all tongues and conform to the customs of all nations, if you would travel farther than all travellers, be naturalized in all climes, and cause the sphinx to dash her head against a stone, even obey the precept of the old philoso pher, and explore thyself. herein are demanded the eye and the nerve. only the defeated and deserters go to the wars, cowards that run away and enlist. start now on that farthest western way, which docs not pause at the mississippi or the pacific, nor conduct toward a worn out china or japan, but leads on direct a tangent to this sphere, summer and winter, day and night, sun down, moon down, and at last earth down too. it is said that mirabeau took to highway robbery "to ascertain what degree of resolution was necessary in order to place one's self in formal opposition to the most sacred laws of society." he declared that " a soldier who fights in the ranks does not require half so much courage as a foot-pad," — "that honor and religion have never stood in the way of a well-considered and a firm resolve." this was manly, as the world goes; and yet it was idle, if not desperate. a saner man would have found himself often enough " in formal opposition " to what are deemed conclusion. 261 "the most sacred laws of society," through obedience to yet more sacred laws, and so have tested his resolution without going out of his way. it is not for a man to put himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain himself in whatever attitude he find himself through obe dience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to a just government, if he should chance to meet with such. i left the woods for as good a reason as i went there. perhaps it seemed to me that i had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. it is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. i had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since i trod it, it is still quite distinct. it is true, i fear that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. the surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. how worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! i did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there i could best see the moon light amid the mountains. i do not wish to go below now. i learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. he will put some things behind, will pass an invisible bound ary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. in proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. if you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. now put the foundations under them. 262 walden. it is a ridiculous demand which england and america make, that you shall speak so that they can understand you. neither men nor toadstools grow so. as if that were important, and there were not enough to under stand you without them. as if nature could support but one order of understandings, could not sustain birds as well as quadrupeds, flying as well as creeping things, and hush and who, which bright can understand, were the best english. as if there were safety in stupidity alone. i fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which i have been convinced. extravagance! it depends on how you are yarded. the migrating buffalo which seeks new pastures in another latitude, is not ex travagant like the cow which kicks over the pail, leaps the cowyard fence, and runs after her calf, in milking-time. i desire to speaksomewhere without bounds; like a man in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments: for i am convinced that i cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression. who that has heard a strain of music feared then lest he should speak extravagantly any more forever? in view of the future or possible, we should live quite laxly and undefined in front, our outlines dim and misty on that side; as our shadows reveal an insensible perspiration toward the sun. the vola tile truth of our words should continually betray the inad equacy of the residual statement. their truth is instantly translated; its literal monument alone remains. the words which express our faith and piety are not definite ; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures. why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? the commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring. sometimes we are inclined to class those who are once-and-a-half-witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate only a third part of their wit. some would find fault with the morning-red, if they ever got up early enough. "they pretend," as i hear, "that the verses of kabir have four different senses: illusion, spirit, intellect, conclusion. 263 and the exoteric doctrine of the vedas;" but in this part of the world it is considered a ground for complaint if a man's writings admit of more than one interpretation. while england endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally? i do not suppose that i have attained to obscurity, but i should be proud if no more fatal fault were found with my pages on this score than was found with the walden ice. southern customers objected to its blue color, which is the evidence of its purity, as if it were muddy, and preferred the cambridge ice, which is white, but tastes of weeds. the purity men love is like the mists w^hich envelop the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond. some are dinning in our ears that we americans, and moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even the elizabethan men. but what is that to the purpose? a living dog is better than a dead lion. shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? let every one mind his own business, and en deavor to be what he was made. why should we be in such deperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? if a man does not keep pace wnth his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. it is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak. shall he turn his spring into summer? if the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute? we will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality. shall we with pains erect a heaven of blue glass over ourselves, though when it is done we shall be sure to gaze still at the true ethereal heaven far above, as if the former were not? there was an artist in the city of kouroo who was dis posed to strive after perfection. one day it came into his mind to make a staff. havingconsidered that in an im perfect work time is an ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not enter, he said to himself. it shall be 264 walden. perfect in all respects, though i should do nothing else in my life. he proceeded instantly to the forest for wood, being resolved that it should not be made of unsuitable material; and as he searched for and rejected stick after stick, his friends gradually deserted him, for they grew old in their works and died, but he grew not older by a moment. his singleness of purpose and resolution, and his elevated piety, endowed him, without his knowledge, with perennial youth. as he made no compromise with time, time kept out of his way, and only sighed at a dis tance because he could not overcome him. before he had found a stock in all respects suitable the city of kouroo was a hoary ruin, and he sat on one of its mounds to peel the stick. before he had given it the proper shape the dynasty of the candahars was at an end, and with the point of the stick he wrote the name of the last of that race in the sand, and then resumed his work. by the time he had smoothed and polished the staff kalpa was no longer the pole-star; and ere he had put on the ferule and the head adorned with precious stones, brahma had awoke and slumbered many times. but why do i stay to mention these things? when the finishing stroke was put to his work, it suddenly expanded before the eyes of the astonished artist into the fairest of all the creations of brahma. he had made a new system in making a staff, a world with full and fair proportions; in which, though the old cities and dynasties had passed away, fairer and more glorious ones had taken their places. and now he saw b}^ the heap of shavings still fresh at his feet, that, for him and his work, the former lapse of time had been an illusion, and that no more time had elapsed than is required for a single scintillation from the brain of brahma to fall on and inflame the tinder of a mortal brain. the material was pure, and his art was pure; how could the result be other than wonderful? no face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. this alone wears well. for the most part, we are not where we are, but in a false posi tion. through an infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get conclusion. 265 out. in sane moments we regard only the facts, the case that is. say what you have to say, not what you ought. any truth is better than make-beheve. tom hyde, the tinker, standing on the gahows, was asked if he had any thing to say. '.'tell the tailors," said he, "to remember to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch." his companion's prayer is forgotten. however mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. it is not so bad as you are. it looks poorest when you are richest. the fault finder will find faults even in paradise. love your life, poor as it is. you may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. the setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. i do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace. the town's poor seem to me often to live the most independent lives of any. maybe they are simply great enough to receive without misgiving. most think that they are above being sup ported by the town; but it oftencr happens that they are not above supporting themselves by dishonest means, which should be more disreputable. cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. turn the old ; return to them. things do not change ; wc change. sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. god will see that you do not want society. if i were confined to a corner of a garret all my days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while i had my thoughts about me. the philosopher said : " from an army of three divi sions one can take away its general, and put it in disorder; from the man the most abject and vulgar one cannot take away his thought." do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all dissipation. humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights. the shadows of poverty and meanness gather around us, " and lo ! creation widens to our view." we are often reminded that if there were bestowed on us the wealth of croesus, our aims must still 266 walden. be the same, and our means essentially the same. ]\iore over, if you are restricted in your range by poverty, if you cannot buy books and newspapers, for instance, you are but confined to the most significant and vital experi ences; you are compelled to deal with the material wdiich yields the most sugar and the most starch. it is life near the bone where it is sweetest. you are defended from being a trifler. no man loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher. superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. money is not required to buy one necessaiy of the soul. i live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composi tion was poured a little alloy of bell metal. often, in the repose of my midday, there reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum from without. it is the noise of my con temporaries. my neighbors tell me of their adventures with famous gentlemen and ladies,, what notabilities they met at the dinner-table; but i am no more interested in such things than in the contents of the dciilij times. the interest and the conversation are about costume and manners chiefly; but a goose is a goose still, dress it as 5^ou will. they tell me of california and texas, of eng land and the indies, of the hon. mr. of georgia or of massachusetts, all transient and fleeting phenomena, till i am ready to leap from their coiut-yard like the mameluke bey. i delight to come to my bearings, — not walk in procession with pomp and parade, in a conspicu ous place, but to walk even with the builder of the imi versc, if i may, — not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial nineteenth century, but stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by. what are men celebrat ing? they are all on a committee of arrangements, and hourly expect a speech from somebody. god is only the president of the day, and webster is his orator. i love to weigh, to settle, to gravitate toward that which most strongly and rightfully attracts me; — not hang by the beam of the scale and try to weigh less, — not suppose a ease, but take the case that is; to travel the only path i can, and that on which no power can resist me. it affords me no satisfaction to commence to spring an arch before i have got a solid foundation. let us not play at kittly conclusion. 2g7 benders. there is a solid bottom everywhere. we read that the traveller asked the boy if the swamp before him had a hard bottom. the boy replied that it had. but presently the traveller's horse sank in up to the girths, and he observed to the boy, " i thought you said that this bog had a hard bottom." "so it has," answered the latter, "but you have not got half way to it yet." so it is with the bogs and quicksands of society; but he is an old boy that knows it. only what is thought, said, or done at a certain rare coincidence is good. i would not be one of those who wall foolishly drive a nail into mere lath and plastering; such a deed would keep me awake nights. give me a hammer, and let me feel for the fur ring. do not depend on the putty. drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of 3'our work with satisfaction, — a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the muse, so will help 3'ou god, and so only. every nail driven should be as another rivet in the machine of the universe, you carrying on the work. rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. i sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth w-ere not; and i went away hungry from the inhospitable board. the hospitality was as cold as the ices. i thought that there w'as no need of ice to freeze them. they talked to me of the age of the wine and the fame of the vintage; but i thought of an older, a newer, and purer wine, of a more glorious vintage, which they had not got, and could not buy. the style, the house and grounds and "entertainment," pass for nothing with me. i called on the king, but he made me wait in his hall, and conducted like a man incapacitated for hospi tality. there was a man in my neighborhood who lived in a hollow tree. his manners were truly regal. i should have done better had i called on him. how long shall we sit in our porticos practising idle and musty virtues, which any work would make imperti nent? as if one were to begin the day with long-suffering, and hire a man to hoe his jiotatoes; and in the afternoon go forth to practise christian meekness and charity with 268 walden. goodness aforethought! consider the china pride and stagnant self-complacency of mankind. this generation reclines a little to congratulate itself on being the last of an illustrious line; and in boston and london and paris and rome, thinking of its long descent, it speaks of its progress in art and science and literature with satisfac tion. there are the records of the philosophical societies, and the public eulogies of great men! it is the good adam contemplating his own virtue. ''yes, we have done great deeds, and sung divine songs, which shall never die," — that is, as long as we can remember them. the learned societies and great men of assyria, — where, are they? what youthful philosophers and experi-l mentalists we are! there is not one of my readers who has yet lived a whole human life. these may be but the spring months in the life of the race. if we have had the seven-years' itch, we have not seen the seventeen-year locust yet in concord. we are acquainted with a mere pellicle of the globe on which we live. most have not delved six feet beneath the surface, nor leaped as many above it. we know not where we are. besides, we are sound asleep nearly half our time. yet we esteem our selves wise, and have an established order on the surface. truly, we are deep thinkers, we are ambitious spirits! as i stand over the insect crawling amid the pine needles on the forest floor, and endeavoring to conceal itself from my sight, and ask myself why it will cherish those humble thoughts and hide its head from me who might, perhaps, be its benefactor and impart to its race some cheering in formation, i am reminded of the greater benefactor and intelligence that stands over me, the human insect. there is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dulness. i need only sug gest what kind of sermons are still listened to in the most enlightened countries. there are such words as joy and sorrow, but they are only the burden of a psalm, sung with a nasal twang, while we believe in the ordinary and mean. we think that we can change our clothes only. it is said that the british empire is very large and re spectable, and that the united states are a first-rate power. we do not believe that a tide rises and falls be |i coa'clusiox. 269 lind every man which can float the british empire like i chip, if he should ever harbor it in his mind. who cnows what sort of seventeen-year locust will next come )ut of the ground? the government of the world i live n was not framed, like that of britain, in after-dinner 'onversations over the wine. the life in us is like the water in the river. it may •ise this year higher than man has ever known it, and lood the parched uplands; even this may be the event "ul year, which will drown out all our muskrats. it was lot always dry land where we dwell. i see far inland the oanks which the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets. every one has heard the ^tory which has gone the rounds of new england, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer's kitchen for sixty years, first in connecticut, and afterward in massachusetts, — from an egg deposited in the living tree many j^ears earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. who does not feel his faith in a resurrec tion and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at the first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb, — heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board, — may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society's most trivial and hand selled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last! i do not say that john or jonathan will reahze all this; but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. the light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. only that day dawns to which we are awake. there is more day to dawn. the sun is but a morning star. notes. [the numerals in bold-faced type indic-ate the page and the line.] walden was first published in 1854: . the present edition follows the original text. many passages are taken from the journal which thoreau was already keeping while living at the pond. this journal, which was the source of his numerous posthumous books, is now accessible in the " manuscript edition " of thoreau, 1906. 3-6. two years and two months. that is, from july, 1845, to vseptember, 1s47. 4—31. labors of hercules. thoreau's writings are sprinkled throughout with allusions to classical literature and mythology, which may be found explained in any classical dictionary. on the present reference, and in particular on the incident of lolaus and the hydra, see (jayley's classic myths, p. 235. 5-12. augean stables. see classic myths, p. 235. 5-22. moth and rust will corrupt. see mattheiv 6 : 19. 5-25. deucalion and pyrrha. see classic myths, p. 49. the two latin lines are from ovid's metamorphoses, i, 414-415. 7-21. wilberforce. william wilberforce (1759-1833) was a leader in the movement for the abolition of slavery in the british possessions. 7-35. the chief end of man. a reference to the first question in the westminster shorter catechism; the answer being that man's chief end is "to glorify god and enjoy him forever." 9-3. john evelyn, the famous diarist, was the author of a learned work on trees, called sylva, published 1664. 9-8. hippocrates was considered by the ancient world to be the " father of medicine " ; he died in the year 377. 10-21. on thoreau's interest in oriental writers, see the intro duction, p. xiv. confucius, the chief sage of china, died 478 b.c. thoreau reprinted in the dial, in april, 1843, certain "sayings of confucius," from translations made by dr. marshman. 11-26. darwin visited south america in 1831, and published an account of his voyage in 1840. 11-32. new hollander is the older name for australian. 11-36. liebig was a great german chemist (1803-1873). 15-6. secrets in my trade. see thoreau's account of his "present employment," quoted in the introduction, p. v. 15-11. i long ago lost a hound, etc. this symbohc passage has never been explained in detail. emerson called it thoreau's "mythical record of his disappointments," and remarked that he "knew well how to throw a poetic veil over his experience." 271 272 notes. 15-40. manna-wise, would dissolve. see exodus 16 : 21. 18-16. la perouse (1741-17ss) was a french navigator who perished by shipwreck, with his whole expedition, off the santa cruz islands. 18-19. hanno was a carthaginian navigator, said to have lived in the fifth century b.c. 20-3. madam pfeiffer (1797-1s5s) was an austrian traveler who published in 1s50 her account of a journey around the world. 21-6. mortal coil. an allusion to shakespeare's words, "when we have shuffled off this mortal coil," in hamlet, iii, i, 67. the word coll means tumult, trouble, but thoreau probably supposed it to involve some idea of a hindering envelope or entangling garment of the soul. 22-13. the parcae. the fates. see classic myths, p. 72. 22-40. harlequin was the conventional clown of italian comedies and puppet-shows. 23-"?9. samuel laing (1780-1s6s) was a scottish traveler; his jounuil of a residence in xorway was published 1s36. 24^35. our lives are domestic. alluding to the connection of the word with domus, a house. 25-33. daniel gookin (died 1687) wrote historical collections of the indians of massachusetts, published 1792. 27-35. the fathers have eaten sour grapes. see ezekiel is : 2; the verses quoted are from the same passage. 28-37. suent. a rare provincial word, meaning smooth. 29-4. chapman. the elizaliethan dramatist and translator of homer. the quotation is from liis tragedy, ca'sar and fompey, act v, scene ii. 29-13. momus. a greek deity representing censure and mockery, who was represented as raising unexpected objections to any creation of the other gods. 31-10. glowshoes. apparently a corruption of galoshes, over shoes. 31-35. on aurora and memnon, see classic myths, pp. 73, 199. with the ideas in this passage, compare thoreau's words in a letter of august 8, 1854: "only think, for a moment, of a man about his affairs! how we should respect him! how glorious he would appear! not working for any corporation, its agent, or president, ])ut fulfilling the end of his being! a man about his business would be the cj'nosure of all eyes." 31-37. sardanapalus, otherwise asurbanipal, was king of assyria in the seventh centiuy b.c., and his reign was celebrated for its wealth and splendor. cf. byron's tragedy sardanapalus. 33-22. edward johnson's history of new england, otherwise called the " wonder-working providence," was pubh.shed in 1654. 33-33. this secretary of new netherland was cornelius van tienhofen, some of whose writings are preserved in the collection called documents relating to the colonial history of the state of xcic york. 36-14. men say they know, etc. the verses printed without marks of quotation are thoreau's own — scraps from his tliaries notes. 273 or commonplace-books which he occasionally intersperses in his prose writings. 38-13. removal of the gods. that is, by ^eneas; see the open ing lines of the .eiwid. 38-34. character of his raisers. among these "raisers" were ■ bronson alcott, cjeorge william curtis, and edmund hosmer, one of thoreau's best friends at concord. curtis describes the occasion m his contribution to the volume called homes of american authors. 44-31. adam smith (1723-1790), david ricardo (1772-1s23), and jean baptiste say (1767-1832) were the most distinguished of the early modern writers on economics. 45-17. flying childers was a celebrated english race-horse of the early eighteenth centurj'. 47-28. arthur young's annals of agriculture were published in england between 17.s4 and isu'j. 49-8. bhagvat-geeta. the "song of bhagavat," a poem of india supposed to date from the first or second century. 49-14. in arcadia. perhaps an allusion to the motto "et in arcadia ego" ("i also have been in arcadia"), found in poussin's famous painting called "arcadia," and frequently cited in modern hterature'. the land of arcadia is commonly taken as a symbol of rustic simplicity and contentment. 50-2. vitruvius was the author of a work on architecture, written in the age of augustus. 54-8. the passage is from the 74th chapter of cato's treatise de agri cultura. 57-31. the evil that men do, etc. from julius cccsar. ill, ii, so. 57-37. auction. an allusion to the connection of the word with the latin augcre, to increase. 58-9. william bartram, an early american naturalist, pub lished ills travels through north and south carolina, georgia, etc., in 1791. in part 3, chapter 8, he dsecribes the "moccalassa" indians. 59-28. keep the flocks of admetus. that is, like apollo: see classic myths, p. 130. 63-37. robin goodfellow. the wandering "puck" of early fairy lore, descriljed in shakespeare's midsummer n'ight's dream, ii, i, 32-57. 63-4. phaeton. see classic myths, pp. 121-125. 63-28. john howard was an englishman who devoted himself to the reform of prisons; his state of t lie prisons was published 1777. 65-14. wiuiam penn (1644-1718) and elizabeth fry (1780 1845) were prominent friends or quakers; mrs. fry, like flowari^l, was a prison reformer. 66-36. enduring him forever. an ironic perversion of the answer to the first question of the westminster catechism (see note to p. 7 above), perhaps with some reference to the refrain of the 118th psalm, — " his mercy endureth forever." in thoreau's present mood the formal piety of his ancestors and his neighbors, as expressed in public worship, seemed forced, conventional, and 274 notes. lacking in true spiritual joy. it is interesting to find that to his friend ellery clianning it seemed tliat even thoreau and emerson showed in their own temperaments the same puritan seriousness and want of " simple and irrepressible satisfaction with the gift of life." "emerson was never in the least contented," he wtote in a note to his book on thoreau, the poet-naturalist. " ' when shall i be perfect? when shall i t)e moral? when shall i be this and that? when will the really good rhyme get written?' here is the emerson colic. thoreau had a like disease." (1902 ed., p. 132.) 67-13. sadi of shiraz was a celeljrated persian poet, said to have lived 1190-1291. the gulistan has been translated into english by eastwick. 67-38. the pretensions of poverty. these verses are ivom carew's masque called caium britannicum (1634); mercury is represented in them as addressing poverty. 69-34. " i am monarch," etc. the opening lines of cowper's poem on alexander selkirk. 71-1. de re rustica. the same as the de agri cultura (see p. 54, and note). the passage is from the first chapter. 71-14. an ode to dejection. thoreau probably had in mind coleridge's ode with this title. 72-14. the ijarivansa. a sanscrit poem (the name meaning hari's — that is, vishnu-kri.';hna's — race) of some 16,000 lines, connected with the epic called the mahabharata, but of later date. 74—5. damodara, a name for krishna, a divinity of hindoo mythology. 74-17. the pleiades and hyades are constellations, like cas siopeia; aldebaran and altair stars of the first magnitude. 74-32. aurora. cjoddess of morn; see classic myths, p. 73. with the passage compare p. 31 above, and note. 75-28. the vedas. the ancient religious books of india, com posed largely of collections of hjtnns and ceremonial writings. 75-32. on memnon and aurora, see note to p. 31. 77-1. the chief end of man. see p. 7, and note. 77-4. like pygmies. the pygmies were a tiny legendary people of ancient lore, and, it was said, were attacked each spring by flocks of cranes. (see the iliad, iii, 5.) 77-7. life is frittered away. with this passage compare thoreau's words in a letter of march 27, 1s4s: "it is astonishing, as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest man thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. when the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incuml)rances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. to simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. probe the earth to see where your main roots run. ... i know many men who, in common things, are not to be deceived; who trust no moonshine; who count their money correctly, and know how to invest it; who are said to be prudent and knowing, who yet will stand at a desk the greater part of their lives, as cashiers in l)anks, and glimmer and rust and finally go out there. if they know anything, vrhat notes. 27 o under the sun do they do that for? do they know what bread is? or what it is for? do they know what life is? if they knew something, the places which know them now would know them no more forever." * 81-19. brahme. according to one form of hindu religion, this word stands for the divine essence which fills the universe, and is sometimes worshiped as a person, sometimes thought of as a sacred impersonal reality everywhere present. the meaning of the passage, then, is substantially this: that when the soul per ceives truth, it realizes that it is in some sense divine. 82-16. tied to the mast like ulysses. that is, that he might not be moved l\y the song of the sirens. see classic myths, p. 321. 81-27. point d'appui. point of support, basis. 84-6. mir camar qddin mast. this poet has not been identified by the editors. the word mast probably means mystic. 85-6. delphi and dodona. ancient oracles. see classic myths, pp. 52, gl. 87-16. never yet been printed in english. thoreau of course means the real homer, the real .eschylus; there had been plenty of translations. 87-29. vedas and zenda vestas. on the vedas, see note to p. 75. the zenda vesta (that is, the avesta and zend, "the law and commentary") is the bible of zoroastrianism, the national religion of persia. 90-1. bibles of mankind. see introduction, p. xiv. 91-10. zoroaster, more properly written zarathustra, was the traditional founder of the ancient persian religion. 91-40. abelard. a learned french .scholar (1079-1142). 92-21. "neutral family" papers. that is, characterless peri odicals which attempted to gain a "family" circulation among all classes, on the ground that they remained neutral on disputed questions like slavery. 92-23. " olive branches." in thorcau's boyhood there was a religious weekly published under the name "olive branch," to which this may be an allusion; or he may have had vaguely in mind some recent didactic works of mrs. sigourney, called olive leaves and olive buds. 92-25. redding & co. were boston publishers of cheap fiction, in thoreau's time. 94-13. puri indians, a nearly extinct brazilian tribe. 99-13. one of the fates. see classic myths, p. 72. 99-19. sons of tell. that is, to be as "steady" as was william tell's son when his father shot the apple from his head. 99-30. buena vista. the battle of that name, when general taylor defeated the mexican army, in february, 1s47. 102-7. -great ammiral. for "admiral," that is, vessel; a quotation from milton's paradise lost, i, 294. 102-17. skip like rams. see psalm 114 : 4. 104-18. ben jonsonian. it is uncertain why the owl's scream should have reminded thoreau of ben jonson, the chief eliza bethan dramatist after shakespeare. he was a somewhat harsh 276 notes. satirist, and more saturnine in temper than his great contem porary, but does not deserve such an appropriation of his name as this. • 105-20. no day illustrates. a uteral but rare use of the word with the meaning illuminate. 109-38. left " the world to darkness," etc. from the first stanza of gray's elegy. 109-39. jeolian. that is, caused by the wind. 110-38. " mourning untimely," etc. from a metrical render ing of ossian's croma. in macpherson's text tl^e passage runs: "but sorrow wastes tlie mournful, o daughter of toscar! and their days are few!" 113-5. indra in the sky. in the mythology of the vedas, indra is the chief of the gods of the air, the wielder of the thunderbolt. 115-2. he is legion. see mark 5:9. 115-10. original proprietor. it is a little difficult to be sure what thoreau had in mind in the two distinct personifications of nature in this paragraph. the "settler and proprietor" would seem to symbolize the primitive creative forces; the " elderly dame " the perpetual, beneficent forces of growth. 115-17. goffe or whalley. these men were concerned in the execution of charles i, and lived in concealment in new england after the restoration of 1660. they appear in cooper's the wept of w ish-ton-w ish and scott's peveril of the peak. 116-3. old parrs. thomas parr was famous for his age, which was reputed to be 152 at his death in 1635. 116-17. hygeia. see clasiiic myths, p. 72. hygeia was gotldess of health, but l^ecause she was daughter of a physician thoreau rejects her, as representative of restored health sought through medicine, preferring hebe as symbohzing perpetual youth and native vigor. 116-18. iesculapius. god of medicine. see classic myths, p. 130. 116-23. wild lettuce. juno, according to some accounts, gave birth to hel)e after eating wilil lettuce. 117-14. tremont or astor or middlesex. prominent hotels of the day. 117-15. ridiculous mouse. an allusion to horace's line, exem plifying much display with small accomplishment: "the mountains are in labor, but only a ridiculous mouse will be born." 118-16. a priceless domestic. the summer breeze? 118-39. cerberus. watch-dog. see classic mytlis, p. 79. 119-5. " arrived there," etc. from the faerie queene, i, i, 35. 119-10. visit of ceremony to massasoit. this occurred in march, 1621. 120-27. " why are you in tears," etc. from the iliad, xvi, 7-16. 124-18. derivation of the word pecunia. meaning money, and derived from pecus, cattle, — in primitive times the chief form of jiroperty. 128-10. com-munity. thoreau connects the word with munire, to fortify. notes. 277 138-31. " welcome, englishmen! " an allusion to the familiar incident of the coming of an indian (samoset) into plymouth, march 16, 1621, uttering these words, greatly to the surprise of the colonists, in their own language. 129-9. antaeus. see classic mrjths, p. 238. 131-3. agricola laboriosus. hardworking husbandman. 131-28. mr. coleman's report. rev. henry colman, 1785-1849, was commissioner to investigate agriculture in massachusetts, from 1836-1842, and published several reports. later he published two books on agriculture in europe. 131-41. ranz des vaches. a swiss strain played by herdsmen on the alpine horn (literally, "chime of the cows") 133-4. paganini performances. paganini (1782-1840) was a great italian violinist, famous for playing effectively on the single g-string. 133-35. virgil's advice. in the georgics, iv, 64. 13-4-3. " spit a mexican." that is, impale a mexican soldier; — the mexicans being the most recent military enemies of amer icans. 134:-32. not with cranes. see note to page 77, 1. 4. thoreau changes the allusion to the trojan war, apparently because of the long and obstinate character of the struggle. 135-4. a pythagorean. the allusion is to a story of pythagoras, the ancient pliilosopher, to the effect that he advised his disciples to abstain from beans, meaning thereby to abstain from politics, because beans were used by the greeks in voting. 135-13. evelyn. see note to page 9. 135-35. sir keneim digby (1603-1665) was a man of varied occupations, among them that of an amateur scientist. his treatise concerning the vegetation of plants (1661) is said to have been the first to notice the importance of vital air or oxygen to plants. it was later published together with an earlier essay of his "of bodies." 135-40. patrem familias, etc. "the master of a family should be a seller, not a buyer;" quoted from cato's work on agriculture (see note to p. 54), chapter 2. 138-5. ceres, etc. on ceres, see classic myths, p. 52. plutus means wealth, personified as a kind of deity, and thoreau plays on the resemblance laetween tliis word and the name of pluto, god of the underworld. (but the two names may be etymologically connected: see classic myt/is, p. 431.) 138-11. cato says. in the preface of the work already met with. see pp. 54 and 71, and notes. 138-13. varro. in a work called reruni rusticarum, written in the first century b.c. 138-33. from spe, hope. these etymologies of thoreau's must not be taken too seriously; this one was an ancient conjecture, which he probably found in varro, but is doubtless a mistaken one, and the same is true of granum. 140-37. orpheus. this is an incident of the expedition of the argonauts. 278 notes. 141-17. " as i sailed." quoted from the ballad of captain kivld. this may be found in our familiar songs, h. holt <fc co., 18s1. 14:3-4]. put into jail. on this incident, see the introduction, p. x. thoreau discussed it further in his essay on "civil diso bedience" (1849). "as i stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, i could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if i were mere flesh and bones, to be locked up. i wondered that it should have concluded at length that this was the liest use it could put me to, and had never thought to avail itself of my services in some way. ... it was like travelling into a far country, such as i had never expected to behold, to lie there for one night. it seemed to me that i never had heard the town clock strike before, nor the evening sounds of the village; for we slept with the windows open, which were inside the grating. it was to see my native village in the light of the middle ages, an»l our concord was turned into a rhine stream, and visions of knights and castles passed before me. . . . when i came out of prison, — for some one interfered, and paid that tax, — i did not perceive that great changes had taken place on the common, such as he observed who went in a youth, and emerged a tottering and gray headed man; and yet a change had to my eyes come over the scene, — the town, and state, and country, — greater than any that mere time could effect. i saw yet more distinctly the state in which i hved. i saw to what extent the people among whom i lived could be trusted as good neighbors and friends; that their friend ship was for summer weather only; that they did not greatly propose to do right; that they were a distinct race from me by their prejudices and superstitions, as the chinamen and malays are; that, in their sacrifices to humanity, they ran no risks, not even to their property; that, after all, they were not so nol)le but they treated the thief as he had treated them, and hoped, by a certain outward old.?ervance and a few prayers, and by walking in a particular straight though useless path from time to time, to save their souls." 143-9. run " amok." this is a malay word, meaning "rushing furiously into battle;" usually s]>elled amuck. 143-38. " nee bella fuerunt." from the elegies of tibullus; i, x, 7. 144-9. " fresh woods," etc. from the last line of milton's lycidm^. 144-27. coenobites. not a sect, but a general term for members of monastic orders; here, of course, a pun. 149-36. castalian fountain. see classic myths, p. 418. 153-34. reticulatus means net-like in markings; guttatus, spott<>d. 154-13. fair haven. see the map. 156-3. boom is here used in the sense of a pole set in water, or a barrier, to mark a channel or a boundary. notes. 279 160-17. moore of moore hall. the hero of the ballad of the dragon of wantley, found in percy's rcliques. it is interesting to compare thoreau's protest against the intruding railroad with that of wordsworth against the windermere railway. addressing the mountauis of the lake country, he said: "heard ye that whistle? as her long-linked train swept onwards, did the vision cross your view? yes, ye were startled; — and, in balance true, aveighing the mischief with the promised gain, mountains, and vales, and floods, i call on you to share the passion of a just disdain." but thoreau's disdain must not be taken too seriously; and that he could feel the poetic and the humaner sides of the locomotive and of commerce we have already seen evidence (see pp. 96-102; " i am refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me," etc.). 164-1. icarian sea. a part of the ^egean, named from the flight of icarus. see classic myths, p. 2.56. 16-4-7. my lake country. see the map. 166-3. kohinoor. one of the largest diamonds known, ac quired by the british crown in isoo. 166-32. valhalla. the hall of odin; see classic myths, p. 367. 167-30. benvenuto cellini. .-vii italian artist and autobiogra pher, 1500-1571. 168-9. " thy entry," etc. this, the quatrain that follows, and the lines on page 172, are from ellery channing's poem on baker farm (1s4s). f. b. sanborn, in his note to the poem in his edition of channing's book on thoreau, says: "when this poem was written, the retreat here celebrated was a most retired spot, the outlands on fairhaven bay of james baker's large farm in lincoln, two miles southeast of concord village, and a mile or so from thoreau's cove and cabin ... it is now the frontage of c. f. adams's villa" (1902). 171-33. remember thy creator. ecclesiastes 12 : 1. 173-3. talaria. the winged sandals of mercury and other fleet divinities. 175-9. " yave not of the text," etc. that is, did not think the text worth a pulled hen. chaucer's nun is a mistake for chaucer's monk (in the prologue to the canterbury tales). 175-22. philanthropic. that is, loving mankind (as distin guished from other hving creatures). 177-16. kirby and spence were authors of an introduction to entomology, published 1815-1826. 179-2.5. the ved. one of the vedas; see note to p. 75. the vedant (hne 30) is the writer. 179-38. thseng-tseu was a di.sciple of confucius, born about 505 b.c., who wrote two works on ethics. 180-3. not that food which entereth, etc. see matthew 15 : 11, 180-41. mencius (otherwise meng tsze) was a chinese philoso pher who died about 289 b.c. in the dial for october, 1843, thoreau printed extracts from his writings foand in "the chinese 280 notes. classical work, commonly called the four books," translated by rev. david collie. 181-23. fauns and satyrs. partly human, partly goat-like; see classic myths, pp. 77, 89. with the thought of this passage com pare tennyson's lines by an evolutionist: " if my body come from brutes, tho' somewhat finer than their own, i am heir, and this my iiingdom. shall the royal voice be mute? no, but if the rebel subject seek to drag me from the throne, hold the sceptre, human soul, and rule thy province of the brute." 181-26. " how happy's he," etc. from a poem by john donne (1573-1631), to sir edward herbert. 181-31. " those devils." see mark 5 : 11-13. 183. the hindoo law-giver. thoreau probably refers to the "laws of menu," reputed to be a son or grandson of brahma. extracts from this code were printed in the dial for january, 1s43. 183-21. a companion. doubtless william euery channing, who lived in concord, near emerson, after 1841, and was one of thoreau's few intimate friends. in his book on tlioreau. the poet-naturalist, he recorded conversations remembered from their walks together, in the manner of tliis chapter of thoreau's. 185-8. con-fut-see. one form of the original chinese name of confucius (the common form being latinized, as in the case of mencius). 185-24. pilpay & co. that is, the writers of animal fables with moral significance; the "fables of pilpay (or bidpai) '' came into europe, through the arabic, from the sanskrit language. 188-17. the name of the greek warriors called myrmidons was traditionally derived from myrnie.r, ant. see classic myths, p. 102. 189-6. patroclus. see classic myths, pp. 294-297.^ 189-26. austerlitz and dresden were victories of napoleon, the first, in 1805, the second in islo. concord fight occurred on the same day as the battle of lexington, april 19, 1775, buttrick being one of the commanders of the hevolutionary troops. 190-18. the hotel des invalides is the national estabhshment of fraiice for disabled solidcrs. 190-27. franv;ois huber was a swiss naturalist (1750-1831). 190-28. .^neas sylvius, otherwise pius ii, was pope from 1458 1464. 190-32. eugenius iv was pope from 1431-1447. 190-36. olaus magnus was a swedish historian (1490-1558). 190-40. christiern ii was king of denmark and norway from 1513-1523. 191-2. the fugitive slave bill was passed in 1850. 191-13. jerbilla. a diminutive form of the more common jerboa. 192-5. his horse. pegasus, of course; see classic myths, p. 233. 196-22. ceres or minerva. see classic myths, pp. 52, 56. 197-3!». a poet, l^llcry channing again. 198-40. cato. in de agri cultura, chapter 3. notes. 281 199-17. prostrate saturn. see classic myths, pp. 52, 56. 201-22. unio fluviatilis. the river-mussel. 204-5, 6. vulcan, the god of fire. terminus of boundaries. 204-29. gilpin. william gilpin published a work called remarks on forest scenery in 17i)l. he was the author of many volumes on scenery. see note to p. 233. 205-16. michaux. author of a work on the forest trees of the united states, which was translated from the french 1817-1s19. 205-31. goody blake and harry gill. see wordsworth's poem so entitled. 206-30. " light-winged smoke," etc. this little poem, com plete in ten lines, is considered to be one of thoreau's best pieces of verse; it was first printed in the dial for april, 1843. 208-15. the verses are from a poem, " the wood-fire," by ellen h. hooper, printed in the dial, 1840. 209-31. cato uticensis. that is, "of utica;" marcus porcius cato, 95-4(5 b.c. 210-21. scipio africanus. two roman generals nanied scipio were called "africanus" because of military exploits in africa. 211-16. gondibert. a long and wearisome epic poem, pub lished 1651. 211-21. chalmers' collection. a collection, in many volumes, of the works of the most important, and many unimportant, english poets, published isio. 211-23. nervii. an ancient people of gaul. here, of course, a hardly defensil)le pun. 214-31. " fate, free-will," etc. from paradise lost, ii, 560. 214-1. bowl broken at the fountain. misquoted from eccle siastes 12 : 6. 217-23. turned to it the other. see matthew 5 : 39. 218-3. a long-headed farmer. probably edmund plosmer; see note to page 38. 218-16. a poet. doubtless c'hanning again. 218-36. last of the philosophers. amos bronson alcott, who founded the concord "school of philosophy"; born at wolcott, conn., (1799-1888). 219-10. old mortality. a character in scott's novel of the same name. 220-13. one other. doubtless emerson. 220-18. the vishnu purana is the most famous of the eighteen "puranas" of india. — poems in which are told the legendary histories of the hindoo gods. it was englished by h. h. wilson in 1840. 220-23. did not see the man approaching from the town. quoted from the old ballad of the babes in the wood. 221-21. lingua vernacula. the natural language of the place. 225-23. actaeon. see classic myths, p. 145. 229-5. lepus, levipes. another fanciful etymology. 231-25. the styx. see classic myths, p. 78. 232-27. a " fifty-six." that is, a weight of that number of pounds. cf. hawthorne, in the house of the seven gables (chap. 282 notes. viii): "the modern judge pyneheon, if weighed m tne same' balance with his ancestor, would have required at least an old fashioned fifty-six to keep the scale in equilibrio." this was half a "hundredweight" (112 pounds). 233-17. william gilpin. see note to page 204. the quotation is from gilpin's obi^ervaiinns on the highlands of scotland, isoo. 333-26. " so high as heaved," etc. quoted from paradise lost, vii, 2s8-290. 239-25. tartarus. see classic myths, pp. 39, 41. 24rl-.3."j. bhagvat geeta. see note to p. 49. 241-40. brahma and vishnu and indra form the triad or trinity of the hindoo mythology. 242-6. atlantis and the hesperides. see classic myths, pp. 73, 82. 242-7. the periplus of hanno. on hanno see note to p. 18. his voyage was called periplus, that is, circumnavigation. ternate and tidore are east indian islands of the molucca group. 248-20. labor, lapsus, etc. these etymologies, again, are imaginative rather than historical. so with labium, on the follow ing page. 249-39. champouion was a french orientalist, who in 1822 discovered the key to the egyptian hieroglyphic writing. 250-5. has some bowels. thoreau plays on the old use of the word in the sense of compassion. 250-32. thor. see classic myths, p. 369. 251-3. weeds. a play on the old word weeds, meaning clothing; preserved longest in connection with mourning, as " widow's weeds." 251-37. " et primus oritur," etc. "and first the grass springs up, called forth by the early rains." from varro's rerum rusti carum, ii, 2. 253-6. i mean he; i mean the twig. that is, the very indi vidual robin; the particular twig. one is reminded of words worth's lines: " but thcre'.s a tree, of many, one, a single field which i have looked upon, both of them speak of something that is gone." 254-12. " eurus ad^ auroram," etc. from ovid's metamor phoses, i, 61, 62; the lines that follow are from the same passage, 78-81. 254-29. while such a sun holds out to burn, etc. altered from a hymn by isaac watts. ' while the lamp holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may return." 255-8. tb3 joy of his lord. see matthew 2.5 : 21. 254-31. "the golden age," etc. from the metamorphoses, i, 89-'. 16, 107-108. 256 lo. death, etc. see 1 corinthians 15 : 55. 257-.36. compassion is a very untenable ground. this whole i notes. 283 passage is a fine exampie ot what has often been called thoreau's stoicism. 258-14. calidasa was a poet of ancient india; his drama sakuntala was translated by sir william jones in 1789. 258-34. terra del fuego. literally, the land of fire. 259-5. great-circle sailing. this, properly speaking, is follow ing the curve of the earth so as to keep to the line of the shortest distance between two points; but thoreau appears to mean merely sailing on the surface of the globe, as opposed to getting into the interior of things. 259-21. sir john franklin was lost on an arctic expedition in 1847. thirty-nine relief expeditions were sent out, traces of his tleath being found only in 1859. grinnell was an american merchant who fitted out one of the relief ships, in 1850. mungo park was an african explorer, who died about 1806. lewis and clark explored the region from st. louis to the mouth of the columbia, 1804-1806. frobisher was one of the earhest english explorers (died 1594). 260-6. erret, et extremes, etc., the closing unes of claudian's poem de sene veronensi. 260-13. " symmes' hole." john cleves symmes, naval cap tain in the war of 1812, advocated a theory that the earth and other planets are composed of hollow concentric spheres, open at the poles, and habitable on the inside. he petitioned congress to fit out an expedition to the north pole to test his theory, and published many pamphlets and one l)ook, theory of concentric spheres, 1826. see the atlantic monthly, april, 1873. 260-30. mirabeau was a frenchman of the revolution (1749 1791). 262-8. bright was formerly a common name for a horse. 262-41. kabir was a hindoo religious reformer who lived at benares between 1488 and 1512. 265-39. " lo, creation widens," etc. from blanco white's once famous sonnet to night, written about 1825. the octave runs: " imysteriou.s night! when our first parent knew thee from report divine, and heard thy name, did he not tremble for this lively frame. this glorious canopy of light and blue? yet 'neath a curtain of translucent dew, bathed in the rays of the great setting flame, hesperus with the host of heaven came, and lo! creation widened in man's view." 265-41. croesus was a very rich king of lydia (560 b.c.). 266-26. the mameluke bey. the mamelukes were a military body which long exercised great power in egypt; its officers were known as beys. in 1811 the mamelukes were nearly exterminated by mahomet ali, who invited the order to court and then am bushed and massacred them. the bey, referred to in the text, is, perhaps, the one who is said to have escaped by forcing his horse to leap from the parapet. longmans' english classics arnold's sohrab and rustum and other poems. edited by ashley h. thorndike, professor of english in columbia university. $0.25. 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[for study.] cooper's the last of the mohicans. edited by charles f. richardson, professor of english in dartmouth college. $0.50. defoe's history of the plague in london. edited by george r. carpenter, late professor of rhetoric and english composition in columbia university. $0.60. de quincey's flight of a tartar tribe. edited by charles sears baldwin, professor of rhetoric in yale university. $0.40. dryden's palamon and arcite. edited by william tenney brewster, professor of english in columbia university. $0.40. living's life of goldsmith. edited by lewis b. semple, instructor in english, brooklyn commercial high school, new york. $0.25. irving's tales of a traveller. with an introduction by brander matthews, professor of dramatic literature in columbia university, and explanatory notes by professor george r. carpenter. $0.80. macaulay's essay on milton. edited by james greenleaf croswell, head-master of the brearley school, new york. $0.40. macaulay's essays on milton and addison. edited by james greenleaf croswell, head-master of the brearley school, new york. $0.40. macaulay's johnson and addison. 1. life of samuel johnson, edited by huber gray buehler, hotchkiss school. 2. addison, edited by james greenleaf croswell, brearley school. $0.40. milton's paradise lost. books i. and h. edited by edward everett hale, jr., professor of the eng lish language and literature in union college. $0.40. prpe's homer's iliad. books i., vl, xxh. and xxiv. edited by william h. maxwell, superintendent of new york city schools; and percival chubb, director of english in the ethical culture schools, new york. $0.40. scott's marmion. edited by robert morss lovett, professor of english in the university of chicago. $0.60. scott's woodstock. edited by bliss perry, professor of english literature in harvard university. $0.60. southey's life of nelson. edited by edwin l. miller, head of the english depart ment, central high school, detroit, mich. $0.60. jun 231210 n g ^ ' » it >p'=i.. o 0^ * •) m o ' ^^' v ^ ■> <" " , > ■^ j" .0^, iniije ^^^ a^' <^^ .^•^ ; i thoiimj mi i mm;ms^awi\ b0wm4w immftmma class / o o book_ ^ copightis' 10 / cof^ricut deposit. general editor lindsay todd damon, a.b. professor of enerlish in brown university addison — the sir roger de coverley papers — abbott 35c addison and steele — selections from the tatlerand the spec tator — abbott 35c ^neid of virgil — allinson 40c browning — selected poems — reynolds 40c bunyan — the pilgrim's progress — latham 30c burke — speech on concilicuion vaih america — denney 30c carlyle — essay on burns — aiton 25c chaucer — selections — greenlaw 40c coleridge — tjie ancient mahner } ^ , ,, lowell-yi^ion of sir launfal ] * voi.-moody 25c cooper — the last of ttie mohicans — lewis 40c cooper — the spy — damon 40c dana — two years before the mast — ^westcott 45c defoe — robinson crusoe — hastings 40c de quince y — joan of arc and selections — moody 25c de quincey — the flight of a tartar tribe — fsencn 25c dickens — a christmas carol, etc. — broadus 35c dickens — a tale of two cities — baldwin 45c dickens — david copperfield — baldwin 50c dryden — palamon and arcite — cook 25c emerson — essays and addresses — heydrick 35c englisb poems — from pope, gray, goldsmith, coleridge, byron, macaulay, arnold and others — scudder 45c englisli popular ballads — hart 40c familiar letters — greenlaw 40c franklin — autobiography — griffin 35c gaskell (mrs.) — cranford — hancock 35c george eliot — silas marner — hancock 35c george eliot— tae mill on the floss — ward 45c goldsmith — the vicar of wakefield — morton 30c hawthorne — the house of the seven gables — elerrick 40c hawthorne — twice-told tales — herrick and bruere 45c hughes — tom brown's school days — de mille 40c irving — lifeof goldsmith — krapp 40c irving — the sketch boot — krapp 40c irving — tales of a traveller — and parts of the sketch book — krapp 45c lamb — essays of ella— benedict 35c ®i|? ffilak^ 1ettglisi][ qilasbtrs— tmttuwfh longfellow — narrative poems — powell 40c lowell — vision of sir launfal — see (doleridge. mac aula y — essaj/s on addison and johnson — newcomeb 35c macaulay — essays on clive and hastings — newcomeb 35c macaulay — goldsmith, frederic thegreat, madame d'aruav — new comer 35c macaulay — essays on milton and addison — newcomer 35c milton — l' allegro. ii penseroso, comus, and lycidas — neilson 30c milton — paradise lost, books i and ii — farley 30c old testament narratives — rhodes 40c palgrave — golden treasury — newcomer ■. 40c parkman — the oregon trail — macdonald 40c poe — poems and tales, selected — newcomer 35c pope — homer's iliad. books i,vi. xxii. xxiv — cresst and moodt 25c ruskin — sesame and lilies — linn 25c scott — ivanhoe — simonds 45c scott — quentin durward — simonds 45c scott — lady of the lake — moodt 35c scott — lay of the last minstrel — moody and willard 25c scott — marmion — moody and willard 35c shakspere — the neilson edition — edited by w. a, neilson, each. .30c as yott like it macbeth hamlet midsummer-night's dream henry v romeo and juliet julius caesar the tempest twelfth night shakspeker— merchant of fenice— lovett 30c southey — life of nelson— westcott 40c stevenson — itoand voyage and travels ^dith a d-nitey — ^leonard. 35c stevenson— ijlidnapped— leonard 35c stevenson — treasure island — broadus 30c tennyson— selected poems— reynolds 40c tennyson — the princess — copeland 25c thackeray — henry esmond — phelps 5dc thackfiay — english humorists — cunliffb and watt 30c three american poems — the raven, snow-bound. miles standtsh — greever 25c types of the short story — heydrick 40c washington. webster, lincoln — dennet 30c scott, foresman and company chicago : 623 s. wabash ave. new york : 8 east 34th street walden or life in the woods by henry d. thoreau edited for school use by james cloyd bowman, m.a. associate professor of english in the iowa state coixege scott, foresman and company chicago new york ^k k^ \^'^ copyright 1917 by scott, foresman and company ^0 4^ oct 27 m ©c1,a477289 contents page i. economy 27 ii. where i lived, and what i lived for 97 iii. beading 114 iv. sounds 125 v. solitude ; 141 vi. visitors 151 vii. the beanfield 164 viii. the village 175 ix. the ponds 181 x. baker farm 2()6 xi. higher laws 214 xii. brute neighbors 226 xiii. house-warming 239 xiv. former inhabitants and winter visitors 255 xv. winter animals 269 xvi. the pond in winter 279 xvii. spring 294 xviii. conclusion 313 introduction 1 biographical sketch henry david thoreau was born july 12, 1817, in concord, massachusetts. on his father's side he was descended from a merchant family. his grandfather, a man of scotch and french extraction, came to new england from the island of jersey, and opened a store on long wharf in boston. before his death, he moved to concord, where henry's father earned on the family business until through reverses he lost all of his inherited substance. later, he found a modest support for his family through the manufacture of lead pencils, henry thus characterized his father : "i think i may say that he was wholly unpretending, and there was this peculiarity in his aim, that though he had pecuniary difficulties to contend with the greater l)art of his life, he always studied how to make a good article, pencil or other (for he practiced various arts), and was never satisfied with what he had produced. nor was he ever in the least disposed to put off a poor one for the sake of pecuniary gain, as if he labored for a higher end," the personality of henry's mother stood in broad contrast to that of his father. she was of old new england stock, possessed unusual vivacity, inherent nimbleness of wit, and a natural love of society. an incessant talker, she had an unfailing fund of reminiscence and anecdote, and never hesitated, when necessity arose, to defend herself with sarcastic rejoinder. she possessed the good taste which was necessary to make the simple furnish ings of her home attractive, and the finesse which enabled her 5 6 walden to impress her guests with the charm and artistry of her enter tainment. although the brilliant color of her bonnet sometimes shocked her puritan neighbors, her stability of character main tained their respect. from the blending of parental characteristics, there was pro duced in thoreau a strikingly complex personality with many contradictory traits of character. from his father he in herited a quiet, retiring manner, an unflinching honesty, a puritanic conscience, an unusual ideality, and a lofty aim; from his paternal ancestry came also a "stimulating contrariness," and a great love of nature, avhich invited him to spend much of his time out-of-doors; from his mother, a gift of fine con versation, and a convivial vein that notr infrequently dominated his action. he also received by birth a mechanical bent, which made him clever in the use of tools. thureau's boyhood days were spent in concord. he drove iiis father's cow to pasture, supplied logs for the family fire jdace, and early began his lifelong attachment to the out-of doors. as a boy he often preferred to watch his playmates rather than to take part in their games, although when the mood was on, he could lead them all in rollicking fun. most of all, he enjoyed wandering alone across the fields and along the river in search for rare flowers and herbs or for indian relics, and he felt especially repaid if he chanced to see an occasional indian canoeing down the stream. with his brother john, he often hunted and fished. he was such a serious lad that at the age of ten the boys .nicknamed him "judge." he was fitted — or as he preferred to say, "made unfit" — for college at the concord academy. although he was frequently indifferent to the prescribed studies, he was always recognized as a lad of uncommonly "good understanding." it was during this period that he grounded himself in elementary latin and greek, the study of which later led him into the secrets of the philoso phy and poetry of the ancient peoples, which he so much loved. introduction 7 he lays whatever deficiencies liis academic training suffered, not to his teachers, but to the fact that "those hours that should have been devoted to study have been spent in scouring the woods and exploring the lakes and streams of my native village." during these years he kept everything about the house in fault less repair, and raised the best fruit and melons in the village. at the age of sixteen thoreau entered harvard. he helped to pay his way in part by occasional terms of teaching, and the college added to the small amount furnished in this way from a fund set apart for needy students. he was housed in hollis, "with many and noisy neighbors." preferring the library to the classroom, and a book and a secluded corner to a room filled with boisterous companions, he read everything he could find which related to classical english literature; so eager was he that he fairly devoured the twenty-one bulky volumes of chal mers' collection of the english poets. one of the members of his class describes him as "cold and unimpassioned," and adds that "he did not care for people; his classmates seemed very remote." he himself writes: "though bodily i have been a member of harvard university, heart and soul i have been far away among the scenes of my boyhood. . . , my spirit yearned for the sympathy of my old and almost forgotten friend. nature." "methinks i should be content to sit at the back door in concord, under the poplar-tree, henceforth forever." one can understand why he wrote: "the really diligent stu dent in one of the hives of cambridge college is as solitary as the dervish in the desert." one must not forget, however, that there was a very different side to his nature. he could also say with equal sincerity: "think not that my classmates have no place in my heart, — but that is too sacred a matter even for a class-book." during his college days he acquired much knowl edge that no professor ever required in a quiz. he read widely ; he often walked alone and fronted the essential facts of life; above all, he kept his own personality constantly expanding. g waldex tlioreau was graduated from harvard at the age of twenty, and president quincy gave him a recommendation to the effect that he was "well qualified as an instructor, for employment in any public or private school or private family." he made a fruitless journey to maine in search of a position. on his i'eturn for a few weeks during the fall of 1837 he taught in the concord grammar school; but when the directors demanded that he administer corporal punishment, he resigned. during the following three years, in partnership with his brother john, he maintained a private academy in concord. in addition to his regular duties, he read his first lecture on society before the ( 'oncord lyceum and began his first journal or day-book. he made a voyage of exploration in a boat of his own construction, on the concord and merrimack rivers with his brother john; an experience which was later turned into his first published vvork, the week. about this time he began to write for the dial. he also found time to fall in love; but when he dis (mjvered his brother john's attachment for the same girl, he resigned in his favor. when thoreau abandoned teaching in 1841, he accepted the invitation to become a member of the emerson household, and lived for the following two years with one of the most intellectu ally stimulating families in america. his acquaintance with emerson dates back to 1837 when a friend of the two families called emerson's attention to the fact that a certain passage from the young man's diary contained a thought similar to one expressed by the older man in a recent lecture. the result was that emerson made an appointment to meet thoreau, and ever after wards took an active interest in his advancement. thoreau's duties during the time he lived with emerson were as varied as the qualities of his personality. he kept the house in repair; he furnished the fuel for the fire ; he planted and hoed the garden ; he helped with the editing and business management of tlii' dial. on one or two occasions when mr. emerson was absent introduction 9 ou a lecture tour, he acted as sole editor of the magazme. in these ways, he gave full return for his entertainment. this intimate contact with emerson had a marked influence upon thoreau. for a time his manners, his tone of voice, his mode of expression, hecame almost the exact counterpart of emerson's. probably, however, this outward transformation came about through a strong natural magnetism in emerson rather than though any conscious imitation by thoreau. it is certain that the younger man's independence of mind and nobil ity of character impressed the older man not a little. emer son's son relates that his father "delighted to be led to the very inner shrines of the wood-gods by this man, clear-eyed and true and stern enough to be trusted avith their secrets." as thoreau grew older, he sturdily maintained his individuality, and lived his own life according to the genius of his own being. thoreau was also stimulated much by mrs. emerson's high opinion of him. during this period he continued to write for the biol, and to study literature, philosophy, and nature. he pub lished a walk to wachusett in the "boston miscellany." he grasped the opportunity for rapid mental expansion which came to him through meeting and sharing the talk of the many distinguished visitors who flocked to mr. emerson. diligently he kept his daily entries in his journal. during the winter of 1842 occurred the death of thoreau's brother john and of emerson's son waldo. in john he lost the only really intimate friend that he had ever possessed except emerson ; in waldo, the child that he loved most. these events had a marked effect in deepening his introspective life. con cerning his brother, he wrote: "a man can attend but one fu neral in his life, can behold but one cornse." "only nature has a right to prieve pernetuallv, for she onlv is innocent. soon the ice will melt, and the blackbirds sing" alonsr the river which he frequented, as pleasantly as ever. the same everlastingserenity will appear in the face of god, and will not be sorrowful, if he 10 walden is not." "as for waldo," he said, "lie died as the mist rises from the brook, which the sun will soon dart his rays through. do not the flowers die every autumn'? ... i was not startled to hear that he was dead : it seemed the most natural event that could happen. his fine organization demanded it, and nature gently yielded its request. . . . neither will nature manifest any sorrow at this death, but soon the note of the lark will be heard down in the meadow, and fresh dandelions will spring from the old stocks where he plucked them last summer." in this experience with death he came to view human life in its larger aspects as related to the serenity of the universe. in 1843, he received an invitation to tutor the children of emerson's brother william, who lived at castleton, staten island. the offer was accepted in the hope that it might lead to permanent literary employment in new york city, as he was already recognized as one of the most promising contributors to the dial. he met the various new york publishers, but with little success aside from forming a lasting friendship witli horace greeley. he also tried to find employment as a school teacher, but failed in this, too, and returned to concord in the fall of 1843, when he had completed his engagement as tutor. during the following year, he lived at home, and helped his father manufacture lead pencils. he applied himself with great diligence, and was soon able "from a box containing a bushel or more of loose pencils to take up just a dozen pencils at every grasp." in attempting to improve the quality and make a better pencil than was then on the market, he carried on a tireless series of experiments, and having somewhat satisfied himself with the results, took his work to the chemists and artists of boston for their examination. they reported that his pencil was the equal of the best imported product of london. when he came home with the proof of the excellence of his workmanship, his friends assured him that his fortune was as good as made. he, however, replied that he was done with lead introduction h pencils. "i would not do again that i have done once." the fact is — though he maintained the utmost silence on the subject — that he was dreamingdreams and building castles in the air. he was interested in knowledge, in the development of his own personality, in the art of living well, rather than in the conven tional routine of business. he was constantly aiming at turn ing his experience into books; this explains why he studied nature so consistently^ and why he kept his journal so faith fully for so many years. "here have i been these forty years learning the language of these fields that i may the better ex press myself." arrived at the age of twenty-eight, thoreau faced the crisis of his life. on the one hand, business invited him to comfort, to local popularity, to wealth ; on the other, authorship and the development of his own i)ersonality, to the disappointment of his friends and neighbors, to poverty. thoreau proved him self a man who "dared to live his thoughts." his nature de manded for its fullest development "a retreat suitable for phil osophical meditation, and the practice of a simpler, hardier, and healthier life." he was influenced not a little in his de cision by the silent influence of emerson, by the encourage ment of channing and alcott, and by the spirit of the times. social reform dominated the thought of concord. almost every person had some scheme or other for improving society. most people advocated a return from the complex, artificial life of society, to simplicity, to nature. in order to attain to this state it was pretty generally agreed that each should largely earn his living with his own hands. but this was only the minor part of the program : the real fruits were to be garnered in high thinking, in "the feeling of the infinite." the movement was, in fact, a healthy reaction against the narrow, selfish, conventional materialism of the age. as to the most practical means for securing these ends, there was a difference of opinion. some maintained that the solution lay in 12 walden collective action, in communism ; for these, the brook farm ex periment was the most noteworthy effort. others believed in individualism; for these, thoreau's life at walden pond was the most successful experiment. thoreau seems to have considered trying the experiment of retiring from society as early as 1841. for several days dur ing this year he visited his friend, stearns wheeler, who was attempting a solitary life in a hut on flint's pond. thoreau wrote in his journal at the time : "i want to go soon and live away by the pond, where i shall hear only the wind whispering among the reeds." later, thoreau's fancy w^as attracted to the hollowell farm, which stood in deep seclusion near the river, about two miles distant from concord. he went so far as to make a bargain to buy it, and was disappointed for a time when the owner asked to be released from his agreement. later still, after the death of his brother john, he naturally turned to walden pond. it was here that as boj's he and john had swum and fished and hunted. it was here that he had often drifted about in his boat, lost in musings and day-dreams. it was here that emerson was planning to establish a summer camp. it was here that his friend channing strongly urged him to estab lish himself : "i see nothing for you in this earth but that field which i once christened 'briers' ; go out upon that, build youi- self a hut, and there begin the grand process of devouring your self alive. i see no alternative, no other hope for you. eal yourself up ; you will eat nobody else, nor anything else." early one morning near the end of march, 1845, thoreau obeyed the insistent impulse which had been growing upon him for three or four years. he secured emerson's permission to "squat" on his land, borrowed alcott's axe, and betook himself to the shore of walden pond. leisurely he began to cut and frame logs for his hut. he took special pains to find time to get the full enjoyment from his avork. each evening he went home to the village to sleep. within three or four weeks he had introduction i3 the logs ready for the walls. he dug bis cellar on the southern slope of a hill, thirty or forty yards from the water's edge, bought the planks from the shanty of an irishman who worked on the fitchburg railroad, and transported them to his build ing site. in the beginning of may, "rather to improve so good an occasion for neighborliness than from any necessity," tho reau invited some of his friends to help "raise'' his house. he was especially proud that among those present were emerson, curtis, channing, and alcott. on the fourth day of july — in commemoration of his own individual independence — he took up his abode in the hut, and gradually brought it to completion before the winter set in. thoreau was fitted as one man in a thousand for the experi ment which he undertook. "my greatest skill,". he wrote, "has been to want but little." he was always rich i.acause his wants were so few, and because he knew so well how to supply them himself. when in need of money he could turn his hand to any sort of job that wanted to be done since he had "as many trades as fingers." "he was expert as a walker, swimmer, runner, rower, and in all outdoor employments." in fact, he was more at home without than within doors. his personality was especially fitted to en j03' li\nng alone ; he "never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude." he was fortunate, too, in that his nearest neighbor dwelt a mile away. it gave him elbow room to exercise unobserved his individuality. the wild flowers and herbs, the fishes, and the wild animals were his nearest neighbors; they satisfied his incessant thirst for the wild in nature. and yet he was not so far removed as to become a confirmed hermit. his friends came frequently to share his copious conversation and his simple hospitality. nearly every day he walked to the village to acquaint himself with the hap penings of the world, and to meet his immediate family and his friends. often he was invited out to supper, and did not return to his lodge until a late hour. above all, his life at 14 walden walden pond gave him the long desired leisure for meditation and for the practice of writing. his thoughts gradually rip ened, and his style refined itself under ceaseless effort. his idea in going to walden pond was not after all to separate himself from society; it was rather to develop his own personality in order that he might the better contribute to society. he went to the pond in the spirit of a student ; he came back to concord a teacher. thoreau's manner of life at walden pond was picturesque and striking, to say the least. his first "religious exercise" of the day avas an early morning bath in the pond. after break fast he scrupulously swept his floor and dusted his furniture, — though he was careful that no time should be wasted that might be emjdloyed in "dusting his brain." some mornings his hoe resounded merrily on the stones of his bean field; other morn ings, says he, "i sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a reverie, midst the pines, and hickories, and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude, while the birds sang around or flitted noiselessly through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveler's wagon on the distant highway, i was reminded of the lapse of time." he found long intervals for the study of wild nature ; he spent on the average of at least one-half of each day in the open air.. he became the "self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain storms" and watched with much pleasure the dawns and the sunsets. not a flavor of the breeze passed him unheeded and he opened every sense to its natural surroundings. he became as truly a part of nature as were the trees and the birds and the wild animals. a portion of each day he set apart for the reading of his favorite authors and for the careful writ ing of his diligent observations and experiences. "if the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs — is more elastic, starrv, and imnkh'tal — that is your success." he introduction 15 was never in a hurry; he was never unemployed. his indi viduality found a perfect environment for its normal growth and expression. the crudities of youth, which he had brought with him to walden pond, gradually disappeared as he took on the decision and dignity of manhood. when a friend called, thoreau would seat him opposite him self, and would lead him, with rare conversational power, into the ideal realms of philosophy or oriental religion and poetry or contemporary life; or he would take him forth under the trees and along the pond, where he found inexhaustible re sources for entertainment. "every plant or flower on the bank or in the water, and every fish, turtle, frog, lizard about us, was transformed by the wand of his knowledge from the low form into which the spell of our ignorance had reduced it, into a mystic beauty. like no one else, he knew the meaning of every note and movement of bird and beast, and fish and insect."^ when his guest chanced to stay beyond the dinner hour, thoreau took him to the hillside in front of his cabin, where he had made a hole in the ground inlaid with cobblestones. here he built a wood fire, and while the stones heated, brought flour or meal from the hut, carried it to the shore, and mixed it with pond water. returning, he raked the coals aside, spread the dough upon the heated stones, brought from his cellar dressed horned pouts, placed them upon other stones, and served beans which had been previously baked. soon the guest was captivated by the delicious flavor of the primitive cuisine. on these occasions there was one thing that thoreau never did: he never explained or apologized for anything that was imper fect or lacking. he shared exactly avhat he had; and few guests ever left him without feeling the charm of his enter tainment. after maintaining his residence at walden pond for two years and two months, thoreau returned to his father's house im"oncure conway, fraser's magazine, april, 1666. iq walden to live. he was now a man of thirty ; he was a deep student of literature and a profound observer of nature; he was, too, a master of prose style. he says : "i left the woods for as good reason as i went there. perhaps it seemed to me that i had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one." perhaps it seemed to him that he had exhausted the possibilities of the experiment. he doubtless said to himself as he had said earlier with reference to the manufacturing of lead pencils : "i would not do again that i have done once." at any rate, so far as he himself avas concerned, his experiment was an entire success. he had so simplified his life that with a weekly outlay of seven-and-twent}'' cents he had an abundance of all sorts. he was thus able to maintain himself by working on the average six weeks a year. the remainder of his time he had industriously spent in establishing his philosophy of life, in developing the finest qualities of his personalitj^, and in perfecting his style of writing. when he left walden pond, his character was no longer in a plastic state ; the trend of his life was established. thoreau's influence upon others has gradually grown until it has become very marked. his writing revealed the almost un limited possibilities of a careful, accurate observation of the water, the fields, and the woods. in fact it opened an entirely new field to literature, and gave rise to a school of american naturalists.^ his philosophy of life attracted wide attention in england and america, and encouraged many persons to turn from the artificial toward the natural and the real, to simplify their mode of living. his constantly increasing popularity is sutlicient evidence as to the success of his experiment. what remains of thoreau's life may be briefly related. he again accepted an invitation to live in the emerson home from lamong the writers of this school may be mentioned thomas went worth higginson, john burroughs, john muir, bradford torrey, william hamilton gibson, frank bolles, charles conrad abbott, harriett mann miller, and florence merrlam bailey. introduction 17 october, 1847, to july, 184s. while the master of the house was making his second european tour. when emerson returned, thoreau went back to his father's house, and, except when ab sent upon excursions, he lived with his family for the remainder of his life. in 1847, through the kind offices of horace greeley, thoreau published an essay on "carlyle" in graham's magazine, and in 1848, a paper on "ktaadn and the maine woods" in the union magazine. for these he received his first money for his writing, the sura of one hundred and twenty-five dollai^s. in 1849, thoreau published at his own expense, through a boston bookseller, his first book, a week on the concord and merrimack rivers. in addition to a description of his river voy age, the book contained a rather miscellaneous collection of poems, of articles which had appeared in the dial, of passages from his journal, and of brief philosophical discourses. at the end of four years but three hundred copies of the book had been sold and given out for review. the remaining seven hundred copies were returned to the author. thoreau writes thus with a dry humor concerning the incident : "the wares are sent me at last, and i have an opportunity to examine my purchase. they are something more substantial than fame, as my back knows, which has borne them np two flights of stairs to a place similar to that to which they trace their origin. ... i have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred o1: which i wrote myself. . . . this is authorship. these are the work of my brain. ... i can see now what i write for, and the result of my labors. nevertheless, in spite of this result, sitting beside the inert mass of my works, i take up my pen tonight, to record what thought or experience i may have had, with as much satisfaction as ever." in the fall of the same year, thoreau, with a friend, took the first of his cape cod tramps. in the fall of 1850, with chaii ning, he spent a week in canada. in 1853, he made his second excursion into the maine woods. these journeys furnished hira 18 walden with material for a number of articles in putnam's montlili/ magazine and the atlantic monthly, and for two posthumous hooks. he thus describes his usual method of travel: "the cheapest way to travel is to go afoot, carrying a dipper, a spoon, and a fish-line, some indian meal, some salt, and some sugar. when you come to a brook or pond, you can catch fish and cook them; or you can buy a loaf of bread at a farmer's house for fourpence, moisten it in the next brook that crosses the road, and dip it into your sugar — this alone will last you the whole day." he also included a supply of tea. he wore serviceable old clothes, and carried a small bundle of necessaiy luggage. thus aecoutered, he traveled at the rate of thirtj' miles per day "by the week together." when necessity de manded, he found entertainment at some farmhouse; otherwise, he slept out-of-doors. people usually, at first sight, thought him a peddler of small wares, or a tramp. this method of travel, however, exactly suited his purpose. it gave him the first-hand knowledge of nature which he desired; but during these years thoreau's writing brought him so little financial return that he was compelled to earn most of his living by surv^eying land and making pencils. he earned a small amount each year from lecturing. he kept his life so simple and his wants so few, however, that he needed to work but a few weeks during the spring and fall. the remainder of the time he spent in the jiursuit of his favorite interests. during the summer of 1854 came the greatest event of tho reau's literary career, — the publication of walden, by ticknor and company, of boston. the greater portion of the book was oiiginally set down in his diary during the time that he lived at avalden pond. not a few passages, however, were written at a later date, while he was selecting, arranging, and remodeling ills materials, and putting them into final form. he published i lie book, he says, in order to satisfy his curious townsmen who weie constantly inquiring concerning his mode of life. he also introduction 19 felt that he had certain not unimportant truths to contribute to the social and intellectual life of his neighbors in concord. the book attracted a considerable amount of attention, and the en tire first edition was sold within a few years. the reputation of the book brought thoreau into demand as a lecturer, and thus relieved his straitened circumstances to some extent. it also brought him a number of new friends. among these was frank b. sanborn, who associated himself rather intimately with the author for two years, and later became his first biographer. in 1856 avhile lecturing near new york city, thoreau visited walt whitman. he wrote soon after this visit : "whitman is apparently the greatest democrat the world has seen. kings and aristocracy go by the board at once, as they have long de served to." in 1857, john brown visited concord, and found thoreau one of the most friendly toward his cause. two years later brown visited him again. when brown fell into the hands of his captors at harper's feriy in 1859, it was thoreau who most fearlessly championed his cause. the address which he delivered at concord, worcester, and boston, is by far the most important of all thoreau's public utterances. his indignation at his cautious and fearful neighbors reaches almost to the sublimity of the hebrew prophets. he looses his contempt for the petty conventions and tlie hypocrisies of the commonplace life everywhere about him, and lets his words fairly burn as they strike home. in the address which emerson delivered at thoreau's funeral, he spoke of whitman and brown and joe polls, thoreau's indian guide in maine, as the three men who most impressed thoreau during his later years. in this choice one sees afresh the assertion of the contradictoiy elements of thoreau's personality. during the early summer of 1858, thoreau, in company with his friend blake, camped on monadnoc. later in the summer he took a trip to the white mountains with his neighbor, ed 20 waldkn ward hoar. late in the fall, his english friend, cholmondelay, tempted him with a trip to the west indies. thoreau, how e\er, was obliged to refuse because of the sickness of his father. in the summer of 1860 he made a second visit to monadnoc, — this time in company with his friend, channing. these fre (juent trips satisfied his incessant craving for the wild in nature and in animal life, and supplied him with material for his writ ing. whenever it became necessary, he busied himself for a few days or weeks at one or the other of his trades in order to earn a livelihood. in december, 1860, through exposure while surveying land, thoreau contracted a severe cold, which soon developed into tuberculosis. this disease was constitutional with him; his brother john and his sister helen had earlier succumbed to it. in the spring and early summer of 1861, his friends induced him to make an expedition to minnesota and in company with the son of the educator, horace mann, he visited st. paul and journeyed as far up the minnesota kiver as redwood. here he interested himself for a time in the sioux indians. soon he became restless, and in july returned to concord little benefited by his excursion. during the following winter his ailment rap idly grew upon him. his sister sophia wrote : "his spirits do not fail him ; he continues in his usual serene mood." he enter tained numerous visitors during his last months. to one who solicitously inquired if he had made his peace with god, he re plied: "i have never quarrelled with him." to a friend he wrote: "i am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret nothing." at another time he wrote : "for joy i could em brace the earth. i shall delight to be buried in it. and then 1 think of those amongst men who will know i love them, though 1 tell them not." it was in this mood that he died, may 6, 1862. as long as any strength remained in him, he revised, rewrote, and rearranged the materials which he had collected in his jour nal; he followed his individual genius to the very end. emer introduction 21 son at the grave appropriately said: "his soul was made for the noblest society ; he had in a short life exhausted the capabili ties of this world ; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home." the posthumous fame of thoreau is without parallel in amer ican letters. during his life he studiously avoided personal ad vertisement. at the time of his death he was generally un known outside the boundaries of concord. of his two pub lished works, the first was an almost complete failure and the second lacked much of phenomenal success. at his death he left behind him nothing to keep alive his meager reputation. his sister, into whose hands his manuscripts descended, did what she could to prevent their publication. lowell, the first critic of renown to notice his work, scathed and belittled him unmercifully, and seemed to leave little more to be said. his few immediate friends mostly injured his chance for success by exaggerating his wrong traits of character. yet in spite of his rejection by his own generation, a change began to come about during the eighties, and by the end of the nineties his fame had grown so rapidly as to beat down all opposition. ten volumes of his works have been published since his death. he has found something like a dozen biographers, and the critical articles concerning him reach into the hundreds. the interesting fact is that the tide of favorable opinion is still flowing in his direction. thoreau's genius perhaps did not lie primarily in the field of literature. many of his readers have sought him because of his delightful revelations of the out-of-doors; many others, because of the charm of his unique personality. in its com i::lexity, its inapproachable austerity, its delightful • surprises, its perplexing contradictions, it furnishes much the same inex haustible attraction as does nature herself. his seeing eye satisfies the searcher after fact ; his idealistic imagination floods the vision of the lover of fancy. his fame, -however, is based ■2-2 walden most securely upon his simple philosophy of life. in an age of increasing artificiality and extravagance, he maintained his naturalness and freedom. he distinguished clearly between the essentials of life and its mere external trappings. for him the joy of living was to be found in life itself; not in its artificial recreation. his advice is: "however mean your life is, meet it and live it. . . . do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. turn to the old; return to them. things do not change; we change. sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. god will see that you do not want society. . . . we are often reminded that if there were bestowed on us the wealth of croesus, our aims must still be the same, and our means essentially the same. ... it is life near the bone where it is sweetest. . . . superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. money is not required to buy one neces sity of the soul." when one reads such a philosopher he feels — in spite of all the multiplied teachings in the opposite direction — that the realities of life are secure. and so long as they remain secure, so long the fame of thoreau is likely to last. ii walden in walden^ thoreau describes the experiment which he under took on the shore of walden pond, "for convenience sake put ting the experience of two years into one." in a general way, the narrative follows the order of the seasons. in chapter i, the author discusses the slavery of modem life and shows how one may make himself independent and happy, and then gives a detailed account of the expense involved in building his house. in chapter ii, he describes the location of his house and the man ner of his life. in chapter iii, he discourses upon reading. in chapters iv to xii inclusive, he describes those of his activi ties that have to do primarily with summer; in chapter xiii, inteoduction 23 with autumn and the preparations for winter ; in chapters xiy to xvi inclusive, with winter ; in chapter xvii, with spring. in chapter xviii, he summarizes the teaching of the entire book. viewed as a whole, the book lacks form. this is due in part to the influence of carlyle, and in part to thoreau's manner of writing. the material was written in his journal at intervals during a period of fifteen years. the entries were made inde pendently of one another. when thoreau came to put them to gether in walden, he found it impossible to blend the various parts into a perfect whole. the lack of form, however, had its advantage; it formed a receptacle into which thoreau was able to place unhampered each of his moods and idiosyncrasies. the result is that walden is one of the most intim.ate and human of written documents. the author's style is his ready servant. with it he can express each mood with equal felicity. the itemized bill for the construction of his house is related with the same fidelity and ease as are the descriptions of nature and the statements in regard to his ideal philosophy. the epigram matic quality of walden is due largely to the influence of emer son; its exaggeration, to the deliberate attempt of the author to wake his neighbors up. his style is, in fact, a sort of "celes tial homespun," plain and not without harshness, but inter woven with the golden woof of an intense, penetrative, sympa thetic imagination. it shares, too, with thoreau's personality something of the tang of the wild crab. bibliography list of thoreau's books. riverside edition — a week on the concord and merrimack rivers. walden; or, life in the woods. the maine woods. cape cod. early spring in massachusetts: from the journal of thoreau. summer: from the journal of thoreau. autumn : from the journal of thoreau. winter: from the journal of thoreau. excursions (including a yankee in canada). miscellanies. familiar letters of henry david thoreau. edited by f. b. sanborn. walden edition — a twenty-volume edition. this is the only edition that contains the journal. biographies of thoreau : william ellery channing. thoreau, the poet-naturalist. new edition, edited by f. b. sanborn, boston, 1902. h. a. page. thoreau: his life and aims. boston, 1877. henry s. salt. the life of henry david thoreau. revised edition, lon 24 bibliography 25 annie russell marble. thoreau: his home, friends, and books. new york, 1902. f. b. sanborn. henry d. tlwreau. revised edition, boston, 1909. mark van doren. • henry d. thoreau. boston, 1916. bibliographies of thoreau : john p. anderson. bibliography of henry david thoreau. published as an appendix to mr. salt's life of thoreau. revised edi tion, london, 1896. francis h. allen. a bibliography of henry david thoreau. boston, 1908. critical essays: emerson, ralph waldo. "thoreau" in lectures and bio graphical sketches, london, 1883. lowell, james russell. "thoreau" in my study windows, boston, 1871. stevenson, robert louis. "henry david thoreau: his character," in familiar studies of men and books, lon* don, 1882. higginson, thomas wentworth. "thoreau" in short studies of american authors, boston, 1888. burroughs, john. (1) "henry d. thoreau" in indoor studies, boston, 1889. (2) "thoreau's wildness" in essays from the critic, boston, 1882. more, paul elmer. (1) "a hermit's notes on thoreau" in shelburne essays, first series, new york, 1904. (2) "thoreau's journal" in shelburne essays, fifth series, new york, 1908. walden economy when i wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, i lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which i had built myself, on the shore of walden pond, in concord, massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. i lived there two years and two months. at present i am a sojourner in ci\dlized life again. i should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life, which some would call impertinent, though they do not appear to me -at all impertinent, but, considering the circumstances, very natural and pertinent. some have asked what i got to eat; if i did not feel lonesome; if i was not afraid; and the like. others have been curious to learn what portion of my income i devoted to charitable purposes ; and some, who have large families, how many poor children i maintained. i will therefore ask those of my readers who feel no particular interest in me to pardon me if i undertake to answer some of these questions in this book. in most books, the i, or first person, is omitted ; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. we commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. i should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom i knew as well. unfortunately, i am confined to this theme by the narrow 28 walden ness of my experience. moreover, i, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives ; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a dis tant land ; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me. perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. as for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. i trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits. i would fain say something, not so much concerning the chinese and sandwich islanders, as you who read these pages, who are said to live in ncav england; something about your condition, especially your outward condition or circumstances in this world, in this town, what it is, whether it is necessary that it be as bad as it is, whether it cannot be improved as well as not. i have traveled a good deal in concord; and eveiywhere, in shojds, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. what i have heard of brahmins sitting exposed to four fires and look ing in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders "until it becomes impossible for them to resume their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach" ; or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree ; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires ; or standing on one leg on the tops of pillars, — even these forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which i daily witness. the twelve labors of hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end ; but i could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or flnished any labor. they have no friend lolas to burn with a hot iron the economy 29 root of the hydra's head, but as soon as one head is crushed, two spring up. i see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called co labor in. who made them serfs of the soin why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born ? they have got to live a man's life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they can. how many a poor immortal soul have i met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot! the portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh. but men labor under a mistake. the better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost. by a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. it is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before. it is said that deucalion and pyrrha created men by throwing stones over their heads behind them : — inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum, et documenta, damus qua simus origine nati. or, as raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way, — from thence our kind-hearted is, enduring pain and care, approving that our bodies of a stony nature are. 30 walden so much for a blind obedience to a blundering: oracle, throwing the stones over their heads behind them, not seeing where they fell. most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life, that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day ; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men ; his labor would be depreciated in the market. he has no time to be any thing but a machine. how can he remember well his igno rance — ^which his growth requires — who has so often to use liis knowledge 1 we should feed and clothe him gratuitously some times, and recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him. the finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly. some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. i have no doubt that some of you who read this book are unable to pay for all the din ners which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast w^earing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour. it is very evident w4iat mean and sneak ing lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by experience ; always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the latins ces alienum, another's brass, for some of their coins were made of brass ; still living, and dying, and buried by this other's brass; always promising to pay, promising to pay, tomorrow, and dying today, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get cus tom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offenses ; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civil economy 31 ity, or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous gener osity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his gro ceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day, something to be tiieked away in an old chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in a brick bank ; no matter where, no matter how much or how little. i sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, i may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called negro slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both north and south. it is hard to have a southern overseer ; it is worse to have a northern one : but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself. talk of a divinity in man. look at the teamster on the highway, wending to market by day or night ; does any divinity stir within him ? his highest duty to fodder and water his horses ! what is his destiny to him compared with the shipping interests ? does not he drive for squire make-a-stir? how godlike, how immortal, is-he? see how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and pris oner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. what a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate. self-emancipation even in the west indian provinces of the fancy and imagination, — what wilberf orce is there to bring that about *? think, also, of the ladies of the land weaving toilet cushions against the last day, not to betray too green an interest in their fates ! as if you could kill time without injuring eternity. the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. what is called resignation is confirmed desperation. from the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console your self with the bravery of minks and mnskrats. a stereotyped but 32 walden unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. there is no play in them, for this comes after work. but it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things. when we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. yet they honestly think there is no choice left. but alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. it is never too late to give up our prejudices. no way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. what every body echoes or in silence passes by as true today may turn out to be falsehood tomorrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. what old people say you cannot do you try and find that you can. old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new. old people did not know enough once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going ; new people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the phrase is. age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. one may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living. practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has. been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must believe ; and it may be that they have some faith left which belies that experience, and they are only less young than they were. i have lived some thirty years on this planet, and i have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. they have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything, to the purpose. here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me ; but it does not economy 33 avail me that they have tried it. if i have any experience which i think valuable, i am sure to reflect that this my mentors said nothing about. one farmer says to me, "you cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with" ; and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones, walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerks him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle. some things are really necessaries of life in some circles, the most helpless and diseased, which in others are luxuries merely, and in others still are entirely unknown. the whole ground of human life seems to some to have been gone over by their predecessors, both the heights and the valleys, and all things to have been cared for. according to evelyn, "the wise solomon prescribed ordinances for the very distances of trees; and the roman praetors have decided how often you may go into your neighbor's land to gather the acorns which fall on it without trespass, and what share belongs to that neighbor." hippocrates has even left directions how we should cut our nails; that is, even with the ends of the fingers, neither shorter nor longer. undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which pre sume to have exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as ovd as adam. but man's capacities have never been measured ; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried. whatever have been thy failures hitherto, "bo not afflicted, my child, for who shall assign to thee what thou hast left undone?" we might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for instance, that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of earths like ours. if i had remembered this it would have prevented some mistakes. this was not the light in which i hoed them. the stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! what distant and different beings in the various 34 walden" mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment! nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. who shall say what prospect life offers to another? could a gi'eater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant? we should live in all the ages of the world in an hour ; ay, in all the worlds of the ages. history, poetry, mythology ! — i know of no reading of another's experience so startling and informing as this would be. the greater part of what my neighbors call good i believe in my soul to be bad, and if i repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. what demon possessed me that i behaved so well? you may say the wisest thing you can, old man, — you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind, — i hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that. one generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels. i think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. we may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere. nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength. the incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well-nigh incurable form of disease. we are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do ; and yet how much is not done by us! or, what if we had been taken sick? how vigilant we are ! determined not to live by faith if we can avoid it ; all the day long on the alert, at night we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to uncertainties. so thoroughly and sin cerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and deny ing the possibility of change. this is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one center. all change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant. confucius said, "to know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge." when one man economy ^ 35 has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his under standing-, i foresee that all men will at lengrth establish their lives on that basis. let us consider for a moment what most of the trouble and anxiety which i have referred to is about, and how much it is necessary that we be troubled, or, at least, careful. it would be some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life and what methods have been taken to obtain them; or even to look over the old day-books of the merchants, to see what it was that men most commonly bought at the stores, what they stored, that is, ^vhat are the grossest groceries. for the improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man's existence ; as our skele tons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors. by the words, necessari/ of life, i mean whatever, of all that man obtains bj^ his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long use has become, so important to human life that few^, if any, whether from savageness, or jioverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it. jto many creatures there is in this i sense but one necessary of life. food. to the bison of the prairie it is a few inches of palatable grass, with water to drink ; unless he seeks the shelter of the forest or the mountain's shadow. none of the brute creation requires more than food and shelter. the necessaries of life for man in this climate may, accurately enough, be distributed under the several heads of food, shelter, clothing, and fuel; for not till we have secured these are we prepared to entertain the true problems of life with freedom and a prospect of success. man has invented, not only houses, but clothes and cooked food; and possibly from the accidental discovery of the warmth of fire, and the conse quent use of it, at first a luxurj-, arose the present necessity to sit by it. we observe cats and dogs acquiring the same second 36 walden nature. by proper shelter and clothing we legitimately retain our own internal heat ; but with an excess of these, or of fuel, that is, with an external heat greater than our own internal, may not cookery properly be said to begin ? darwin, the naturalist, says of the inhabitants of terra del fuego that, while his own party, who were well clothed and sitting close to a fire, were far from too warm, these naked savages, who were farther off, were observed, to his great surprise, "to be streaming with perspira tion at undergoing such a roasting." so, we are told, the new hollander goes naked with impunity, while the european shiv ers in his clothes. is it impossible to combine the hardiness of these savages with the intellectualness of the civilized man? according to liebig, man's body is a stove, and food the fuel which keeps up the internal combustion in the lungs. in cold weather we eat more, in warm less. the animal heat is the result of a slow combustion, and disease and death take place when this is too rapid ; or for want of fuel, or from some defect in the draught, the fire goes out. of course the vital heat is not to be confounded with fire; but so much for analogy. it appears, therefore, from the above list, that the expression, animal life, is nearly synonymous with the expression, animal heat; for while food may be regarded as the fuel which keeps up the fire within us, — and fuel serves only to prepare that food or to increase the warmth of our bodies by addition from without, — shelter and clothing also serve only to retain the heat thus generated and absorbed. the grand necessity, then, for our bodies is to keep warm, to keep the vital heat in us. what pains we accordingly take, not only with our food, and clothing, and shelter, but with our beds, which are our night-clothes, robbing the nests and breasts of birds to rrer)are this shelter within a shelter, as the mole has its bed of grass and leaves at the end of its burrow! the poor man is wont to complain that this is a cold world; and to cold, no less pliysical than social, we refer directly a great part of our economy 37 ails. the summer, in some climates, makes possible to man a sort of elysian life. fuel, except to cook his food, is then unnecessary; the sun is his fire, and many of the fruits are sufficiently cooked by its rays; while food generally is more various, and more easily obtained, and clothing and shelter are wholly or half unnecessary. at the present day, and in this country, as i find my own experience, a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a wheelbarrow, etc., and for the studious, lamp light, stationery, and access to a few books, rank next to neces saries, and can all be obtained at a trifling cost. yet some, not wise, go to the other side of the globe, to barbarous and un healthy regions, and devote themselves to trade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may live,^ — that is, keep comfortably warm, — and die in new england at last. the luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot ; as i implied before, they are cooked, of course a la mode. most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts, of life are not only not indispensable, but j^ositive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. with respect to luxuries and com forts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meager life than the poor. the ancient philosophers, chinese, hindoo, persian, and greek, were a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward. we know not much about them. it is remarkable that we know so much of them as we do. the same is true of the more modern reformers and benefactors of their race. none can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty. of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agiiculture, or commerce, or literature, or art. there are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. to be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wis dom as to live, according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, 38 walden independence, magnanimity, and trust. it is to solve some of tlie problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. the success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier like success, not kingly, not manly. they make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men. but why do men degenerate ever ? what makes families run out ? what is the nature of the luxury which enervates and destroys nations'? are we sure that there is none of it in our own lives'? the philosopher is in advance of his age even in the outward form of his life. he is not fed, sheltered, clothed, warmed, like his contemporaries. how can a man be* a philosopher and not maintain his vital heat by better methods than other men ? when a man is warmed by the several modes which i have described, what does he want next ? surely not more warmth of the same kind, as more and richer food, larger and more splen did houses, finer and more abundant clothing, more numerous, incessant, and hotter fires, and the like. when he has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another alter native than to obtain the superfluities ; and that is, to adventure on life now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced. the soil, it appears, is suited to the seed, for it has >ent its radicle downward, and it may now send its shoot upward also with confidence. why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the same proportion into the heavens above? — for the nobler plants are valued for the fruit they bear at last in the air and light, far from the ground, and are not treated like the humbler esculents, which, though they may be biennials, are cultivated only till they have perfected their root, and often cut down at top for this ])urpose, so that most would not know them in their flowering season. i do not mean to prescribe rules to strong and valiant natures, who will mind their own affairs whether in heaven or hell, and economy 39 perchance build more magnificently and spend more lavishly than the richest, without ever impoverishing themselves, not knowing how they live, — if, indeed, there are any such, as has been dreamed; nor to those who find their encouragement and inspiration in precisely the present condition of things, and cherish it with the fondness and enthusiasm of lovers, — and, to some extent, i reckon myself in this number ; i do not speak to those who are well employed, in whatever circumstances, and they know whether they are well employed or not ; — but mainly to the mass of men who are discontented, and idly complain ing of the hardness of their lot or of the times, when they might improve them. there are some who complain most energetically and inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their duty. i also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters. if i should attempt to tell how i have desired to spend my life in years past, it would probably surprise those of my readers who are somewhat acquainted with its actual history ; it would certainly astonish those who know nothing about it. i will only hint at some of the enterprises which i have cherished. in any weather, at any hour of the day or night, i have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment ; to toe that line. you will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. i would gladly tell all that i know about it, and never paint "no admittance" on my gate. i long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove, and am still on their trail. many are the travelers i have spoken con cerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they 40 walden answered to. i have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves. to anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, nature herself! how many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have i been about mine ! no doubt, many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise, farmers starting for boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers going to their work. it is true, i never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it. so many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside .the town, trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express ! i well-nigh sunk all my capital in it, and lost my own breath into the bargain, running in the face of it. if it had con cerned either of the political parties, depend upon it, it would have appeared in the gazette with the earliest intelligence. at other times watching from the observatory of some cliif or tree, to telegtaph any new arrival ; or waiting at evening on the hill tops for the sky to fall, that i might catch something, though i never caught much, and that, manna-wise, would dissolve again in the sun. for a long time i was reporter to a journal, of no very wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to i:>rint the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, i got only my labor for my pains. however, in this case my pains were their own reward. for many years i was self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain storms, and did my duty faithfully ; survej'or, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility. i have looked after the wild stock of the town, which sive a economy 41 faithful herdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping fences ; and i have had an eye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of the farm ; though i did not always know whether jonas or solomon worked in a particular field today; that was none of my busi ness. i have watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle tree, the red pine and the black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might have withered else in dry seasons. in short, i went on thus for a long time, i may say it without boasting, faithfully minding my business, till it became more and more evident that my townsmen would not after all admit me into the list of town officers, nor make my place a sinecure with a moderate allowance. my accounts, which i can swear to have kept faithfully, i have, indeed, never got audited, still less accepted, still less paid and settled. however, i have not set my heart on that. not long since, a strolling indian went to sell baskets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. "do you wish to buy any baskets ?" he asked. "no, we do not want any," was the reply. "what!" exclaimed the indian, as he went out the gate, "do you mean to starve us?" having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off, — that the lawyer had only to weave argu ments, and by some magic wealth and standing followed, he had said to himself : i will go into business ; i will weave baskets ; it is a thing which i can do. thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would be the white man's to buj'them. he had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other's while to buy them, or at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while to buy. i too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but i had not made it worth any one's while to buy them. yet not the less, in my case, did i think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of 42 walden studying bow to make it avorth men's while to buy my baskets, i studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them. the life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others? finding that my fellow-citizens were not likely to offer me any room in the court house, or any curacy or living anywhere else, but i must shift for myself, t turned my face more exclu sively than ever to the woods, where i was better known. i determined to go into business at once, and not wait to acquire the usual capital, using such slender means as i had already got. my purpose in going to walden pond was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly there, but to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles; to be hindered from accomplishing which for want of a little common sense, a little enterprise and business talent, appeared not so sad as foolish. i have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits; they are indispensable to every man. if your trade is with the celestial empire, then some small counting house on the coast, in some salem harbor, will be fixture enough. you will export such articles as the country affords, purely native products, much ice and pine timber and a little granite, always in native bottoms. these will be good ventures. to oversee all the details yourself in person; to be at once julot and captain, and owner and underwriter; to buy and sell and keep uhe accounts; to read every letter received, and write or read every letter sent; to superintend the discharge of imports night and day; to be upon many parts of the coast almost at the same time; — often the richest freight will be discharged upon a jersey shore; — to be your own telegraph, unweariedly sweeping the horizon, speaking all passing vessels bound coastwise; to keep up a steady dis patch of commodities, for the supply of such a distant and exorbitant market; to keep yourself informed of the state of the markets, prospects of war and peace everywhere, and anticipate economy 43 the tendencies of trade and civilization, — taking advantage of the results of all exploring expeditions, using new passages and all improvements in navigation ; — charts to be studied, the posi tion of reefs and new lights and buoys to be ascertained, and ever, and ever, the logarithmic tables to be corrected, for by the error of some calculator the vessel often splits upon a rock that should have reached a friendly pier, — there is the untold fate of la perouse ; — universal science to be kept pace with, study ing the lives of all great discoverers and navigators, great adven turers and merchants, from hanno and the phoenicians down to our day; in fine, account of stock to be taken from time to time, to know how you stand. it is a labor to task the faculties of a man, — such problems of profit and loss, of interest, of tare and tret, and gauging of all kinds in it, as demand a universal knowledge. i have thought that walden pond would be a good place for business, not solely on account of the railroad and the ice trade ; it offers advantage which it may not be good policy to divulge ; it is a good post and a good foundation. no neva marshes to be filled ; though you must everywhere build on piles of your own driving. it is said that a flood-tide, with a westerly wind, and ice in the neva, would sweep st. petersburg from the face of the earth. as this business was to be entered into without the usual capital, it may not be easy to conjecture where those means, that will still be indispensable to every such undertaking, were to be obtained. as for clothing, to come at once to the prac tical part of the question, perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty, and a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility. let him who has work to do recollect that the object of clothing is, first, to retain the vital heat^ and secondly, in this state of society, to cover nakedness, and he may judge how much of any necessary or important work may be 44 walden accomplished without adding" to his wardrobe. kings and queens who wear a suit but once, though made by some tailor or dressmaker to their majesties, cannot know the comfort of wearing a suit that fits. they are no better than wooden horses to hang the clean clothes on. every day our garments become more assimilated to ourselves, receiving the impress of the wearer's character, until we hesitate to lay them aside, without such delay and medical appliances and some such solemnity even as our bo*dies. no man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet i am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched, clothes than to have a sound conscience. but even if the rent is not mended, perhaps the worst vice betrayed is improvidence. i sometimes try my acquaintances by such tests as this ; — ^who could wear a patch, or two extra seams only, over the knee ? most behave as if they believed that their pros pects for life would be ruined if they should do it. it would be easier for them to hobble to town with a broken leg than with a broken pantaloon. often if an accident happens to a gentle man's legs, they can be mended ; but if a similar accident hap pens to the legs of his pantaloons, there is no help for it ; for he considers, not what is truly respectable, but what is respected. we know but few men, a gteat many coats and breeches. dress a scarecrow in your last shift, you standing shiftless by, who would not soonest salute the scarecrow ? passing a cornfield the other day, close by a hat and coat on a stake, i recognized the owner of the farm. he was only a little more weather-beaten than when i saw him last. i have heard of a dog that barked at every stranger who approached his master's premises with clothes on, but was easily quieted hy a naked thief. it is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes. could you, in such a case, tell surely of any company of civilized men, which belonged to the most respected class? when madam pfeiffer, economy 45 in her adventurous travels round the world, from east to west, had got so near home as asiatic russia, she says that she felt the necessity of wearing other than a traveling dress, when she went to meet the authorities, for she "was now in a civilized country, where . . . people are judged of by their clothes." even in our democratic new england towns the accidental pos session of wealth, and its manifestation in dress and equipage alone, obtain for the possessor almost universal respect. but they who yield such respect, numerous as they are, are so far heathen, and need to have a missionary sent to them. besides, clothes introduced sewing, a kind of work which you may call endless; a woman's dress, at least, is never done. a man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in ; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period. old shoes will serve a hero longer than they have served his valet, — if a hero ever has a valet, — bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make them do. only they who go to soirees and legislative halls must have new coats, coats to change as often as the man changes in them. but if my jacket and trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship god in, they will do; will they not? who ever saw his old clothes, — his old coat, actually worn out, resolved into its primitive elements, so that it was not a deed of charity to bestow it on some poor boy, by him perchance to be bestowed on some poorer still, or shall we say richer, who could do with less ? i say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. if there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? if you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. all men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeo 46 walden ing" new wine in old bottles. our moultingseason, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. the loon retires to soli tary ponds to spend it. thus also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expan^^ion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind. we don garment after garment, as if we grew like exogenous plants by addition without. our outside and often thin and fan ciful clothes are our epidermis or false skin, which partakes not of our life, and may be stripped off here and there without fatal injury; our thicker garments, constantly worn, are our cellular integitment, or cortex ; but our shirts are our liber or true bark, which cannot be removed without girdling and so destroying the man. i believe that all races at some seasons wear something equivalent to the shirt. it is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety. while one thick garment is, for most purposes, as good as three thin ones, and cheap clothing can be obtained at prices really to suit customers ; while a thick coat can be bought for five dollars, which will last as many years, thick pantaloons for two dollars, cowhide boots for a dollar and a half a pair, a summer hat for a quarter of a dollar, and a winter cap for sixty-two and a half cents, or a better be made at home at a nominal cost, where is he so poor that, clad in such a suit, of his own earning, there will not be found wise men to do him reverence ? when i ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me gravely, "they do not make them so now," not empha sizing the "they" at all, as if she quoted an authority as imper sonal as the fates, and i find it difficult to get made what i want, economy 47 simply because she cannot believe that i mean what i say, that i am so rash. when i hear this oracular sentence, i am for a moment absorbed in thought, emphasizing to myself each word separately that i may come at the meaning of it, that i may find out by what degree of consanguinity they are related to me, and what authority they may have in an affair which affects me so nearly: and, finally, i am inclined to answer her with equal mystery, and without any more emphasis of the "they," — "it is true, they did not make them so recently, but they do now." of what use this measuring of me if she does not measure my char acter, but only the breadth of my shoulders, as it were a peg to hang the coat on ? we worship not the graces, nor the parcae, but fashion . she spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. the head monkey at paris puts on a traveler's cap, and all the monkeys in america do the same. i sometimes despair of get ting anything quite simple and honest done in this world by the help of men. they would have to be passed through a powerful press first, to squeeze their old notions out of them, so that they would not soon get upon their legs again, and then there would be some one in the company with a maggot in his head, hatched from an egg deposited there nobody knows when, for not even fire kills these things, and you would have lost your labor. nevertheless we will not forget that some egyptian wheat was handed down to us by a mummy. on the whole, i think that it cannot be maintained that dress ing has in this or any country risen to the dignity of an art. at present, men make shift to wear what they can get. like shipwrecked sailors, they put on what they can find on the beach, and at a little distance, whether of space or time, laugh at each other's masquerade. every generation laughs at the old fash ions, but follows religiously the new. we are amused at behold ing the costume of henry viii, or queen elizabeth, as much as if it was that of the king and queen of the cannibal islands. all costume off a man is pitiful or grotesque. it is only the 48 walden serious eye peering from and the sincere life passed within it, which restrain laughter and consecrate the costume of any people. let harlequin be taken with a fit of colic and his trap pings will have to serve that mood too. when the soldier is hit by a cannon ball, rags are as becoming as purple. the childish and savage taste of men and women for new patterns keeps how many shaking and squinting through kalei doscopes that they may discover the particular figure which this generation requires toda}^ the manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a particular color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf, though it fre quently happens that after the lapse of a season the latter becomes the most fashionable. comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. it is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin-deep and unalterable. i cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing. the condition of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the english ; and it can not be wondered at, since, as far as i have heard or observed^ the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and hon estly clad, but, unquestionably, that the corporations may be enriched. in the long run men hit only what they aim at. therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at somethinghigh. as for a shelter, i will not deny that this is now a necessary of life, though there are instances of men having done without it for long periods in colder countries than this. samuel laing says that "the laplander in his skin dress, and in a skin bag which he puts over his head and shoulders, will sleep night after night on the snow ... in a degree of cold which would extin guish the life of one exposed to it in any woolen clothing." he has seen them asleep thus. yet he adds, "they are not hardier economy 49 than other people." but, probably, man did not live long on the earth without discovering the convenience which there is in a house, the domestic comforts, which pln-ase may have originally signified the satisfactions of the house more than of the family; though these must be extremely partial and occasional in tiiose climates where the house is associated in our thoughts with winter or the rainy season chiefly, and two thirds of the year, except for a parasol, is unnecessary. in our climate, in the summer, it was formerly almost solely a covering at night. in the indian gazettes a wigwam was the symbol of a day's march, and a row of them cut or painted on the bark of a tree signified that so many times they had camped. man was not made so large limbed and robust but that he must seek to narrow his world, and wall in a space such as fitted him. he w^as at first bare and out of doors ; but though this was pleasant enough in serene and warm weather, by daylight, the rainy season and the winter, to say nothing of the torrid sun, would perhaps have nipped his race in the bud if he had not made haste to clothe himself with the shelter of a house. adam and eve, according to the fable, wore the bower before other clothes. ivian wanted a home, a place of warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections. we may imagine a time when, in the infancy of the human race, some enterprising mortal crept into a hollow in a rook for shelter. every child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay out doors, even in wet and cold. it plays house, as well as horse, having an instinct for it. who does not remem ber the interest with which when young he looked at shelving rocks, or any approach to a cave? it was the natural yearning of that portion of our most primitive ancestor which still sur vived in us. from the cave we have advanced to roofs of palm leaves, of bark and boughs, of linen woven and stretched, of grass and straw, of boards and shingles, of stones and tiles. at last, we know not what it is to live in the open air, and our lives 50 walden are domestic in more senses than we think. from the hearth to the field is a g:i'eat distance. it would be well perhaps if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or the saint dwell there so long. birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots. however, if one designs to construct a dwelling house, it behooves him to exercise a little yankee shrewdness, lest after all he find himself in a workhouse, a labyrinth without a clew, a museum, an almshouse, a prison, or a splendid mausoleum instead. consider first how^ slight a shelter is absolutely nec essary. i have seen penobscot indians, in this town, living in tents of thin cotton cloth, while the snow was nearly a foot deep around them, and i thought that they would be glad to have it deeper to keep out the wind. formerly, when how to get my living honestly, with freedom left for my proper pursuits, was a question which vexed me even more than it does now, for unfor tunately i am become somewhat callous, i used to see a large box by the railroad, six feet long by three wide, in which the laborers locked up their tools at night, and it suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed might get such a one for a dollar, and, having bored a few auger holes in it, to admit the air at least, ^et into it when it rained and at night, and hook down the lid, and so have freedom in his love, and in his soul be free. this did not appear the worst, nor by any means a despicable alter native. you could sit up as late as you pleased, and, whenever you got up, go abroad without any landlord or house-lord dog ging you for rent. many a man is harassed to death to pay the rent of a larger and more luxurious box who would not have frozen to death in such a box as this. i am far from jesting. economy is a subject which admits of being treated with levity, but it cannot so be disposed of. a comfortable house for a rude aiul hardy race, that lived mostly out of doors, was once made economy 51 here almost entirely of such materials as nature furnished ready to their hands. goodkin, who was superintendent of the indians subject to the massachusetts colony, writing in 1674, says, "the best of their houses are covered very neatly, tight and warm, with barks of trees, slipped from their bodies at those seasons when the sap is up, and made into great flakes, with pressure of weighty timber, when they are green. . . . the meaner sort are covered with mats which they make of a kind of bulrush, and are also indifferently tight and avarm, but not so good as the former. . . . some i have seen, sixty or a hundred feet long and thirty feet broad. ... i have often lodged in their wig wams, and found them as warm as the best english houses." he adds that they were commonly carpeted and lined within with well-wrought embroidered mats, and were furnished with various utensils. the indians had advanced so far as to regu late the effect of the wind by a mat suspended over the hole in the roof and moved by a string. such a lodge was in the first instance constructed in a day or two at most, and taken down and put up in a few hours ; and every family owned one, or its apartment in one. in the savage state every family owns a shelter as good as the best, and sufficient for its coarser and simpler wants; but i think that i speak within bounds when i say that, though the birds of the air have their nests, and the foxes their holes, and the savages their wigwams, in modern civilized society not more than one half the families own a shelter. in the large towns and cities, where civilization especiallj'^ prevails, the number of those who own a shelter is a very small fraction of the whole. the rest pay an annual tax for this outside garment of all, become indispensable summer and winter, which would buj^ a village of indian wigwams, but now helps to keep them poor as long as they live. i do not mean to insist here on the disad vantage of hiring compared with owning, but it is evident that the savage owns his shelter because it costs so little, while the 52 walden civilized man hires his commonly because he cannot afford to own it; nor can he, in the loug run, any better afford to hire. but, answers one, by merely paying this tax the poor civilized man secures an abode which is a j^alace compared with the sav age's. an annual rent of from twenty-five to a hundred dollars, these are the country rates, entitles him to the benefit of the improvements of centuries, spacious apartments, clean paint and paper, rumford fireplace, back plastering, venetian blinds, cop per jdump, spring lock, a commodious cellar, and many other things. but how happens it that he who is said to enjoy these things is so commonly a poor civilized man, while the savage, who has them not, is rich as a savage? if it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man, — and i think that it is, thoiigh only the wise improve their advantages, — it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly ; and the cost of a thing is the amount of what i will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. an average house in this neighborhood costs perhaps eight hundred dollars, and to lay up this sum will take from ten to fifteen years of the laborer^s life, even if he is not encumbered with a family; — estimating the pecuniary value of every man's labor at one dollar a day, for if some receive more, others receive less ; — so that he must have spent more than half his life commonly before his wigwam will be earned. if we suppose him to pay a rent instead, this is but a doubtful choice of evils. would the savage have been wise to exchange his wigwam for a palace on these terms? / it may be guessed that i reduce almost the whole advantage / of holding this superfluous property as a fund in store against the future, so far as the individual is concerned, mainly to the defraying of funeral expenses. but perhaps a man is not required to bury himself. nevertheless this points to an impor tant distinction between the civilized man and the savage; and, no doubt, they have designs on us for our benefit, in making the economy 53 life of a civilized people an institution, in which the life of the individual is to a great extent absorbed, in order to preserve and perfect that of the race. but i wish to show at what a sacrifice this advantage is at present obtained, and to suggest that we may possibly so live as to secure all the advantage without suf fering any of the disadvantage. what mean ye by saying that the poor ye have always with you, or that the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge? "as i live, saith the lord god, ye shall not have occasion any more to use this proverb in israel." "behold all souls are mine ; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine : the soul that sinneth it shall die." when i consider my neighbors, the farmers of concord, who are at least as well off as the other classes, i find that for the most part they have been toiling twenty, thirty, or forty years, that they may become the real owners of their farms, which commonly they have inherited with encumbrances, or else bought with hired money, — and we may regard one third of that toil as the cost of their houses, — but commonly they have not paid for them yet. it is true, the encumbrances sometimes outweigh the value of the farm, so that the farm itself becomes one gi'eat encumbrance, and still a man is found to inherit it, being well acquainted with it, as he says. on applying to the assessors, i am surprised to learn that they cannot at once name a dozen in the town who own their farms free and clear. if you would know the history of these homesteads, inquire at the bank where they are mortgaged. the man who has actually paid for his farm with labor on it is so rare that every neighbor can point to him. i doubt if there are three such men in concord. what has been said of the merchants, that a very large majority, even ninety-seven in a hundred, are sure to fail, is equally true of the farmers. with regard to the merchants, however, one of them says pertinently that a great part of their failures are not genuine pecuniary failures, but merely failures to fulfil their 54 walden engagements, because it is inconvenient ; that is, it is the moral character that breaks down. but this puts an infinitely worse face on the matter, and suggests, besides, that probably not even the other three succeed in saving their souls, but are perchance bankrupt in a worse sense than they who fail honestly. bank ruptcy and repudiation are the spring-boards from which much of our civilization vaults and turns its somersets, but the savage stands on the unelastic plank of famine. yet the middlesex cattle show goes off here with eclat annually, as if all the joints of the agricultural machine were suent. the farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a formula more complicated than the problem itself. to get his shoestrings he speculates in herds of cattle. with con summate skill he has set his trap with a hairspring to catch comfort and independence, and then, as he turned away, got his own leg into it. this is the reason he is poor ; and for a similar reason we are all poor in respect to a thousand savage comforts, though surrounded by luxuries. as chapman sings: — the false society of men — — for earthly greatness all heavenly comforts rarefies to air. and when the farmer has got his house, he may. not be the richer but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him. as i understand it, that was a valid objection urged by momus against the house which minerva made, that she "had not made it movable, by which means a bad neighborhood might be avoided"; ^nd it may still be urged, for our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than lioused in them ; and the bad neighborhood to be avoided is our own scurvy selves. i know one or two families, at least, in this town, who, for nearly a generation, have been wishing to sell their houses in the outskirts and move into the village, but have not been able to accomplish it, and only death will set them free. economy 55 granted that the majority are able at last either to own or hire the modern house with all its improvements. while civ ilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally im proved the men who are to inhabit them. it has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings. and if the civilized man's pursuits are no worthiei than^ the savage's, if he is employed the greater part of his life in obtaining gross necessaries and comforts merely, why should we have a better dwelling than the former f but how do the poor minority fare? perhaps it will be found that just in proportion as some have been placed in outward circumstances above the savage, others have been degraded below him. the luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of another. on the one side is the palace, on the other are the almshouse and "silent poor." the myriads who built the pyramids to be the tombs of the pharaohs were fed on garlic, and it may be were not decently buried themselves. the mason who finishes the cornice of the palace returns at night perchance to a hut not so good as a wig-wam. it is a mistake to suppose that, in a country where the usual evidences of civiliza tion exist, the condition of a very large body of the inhabitants may not be as degi-aded as that of savages. i refer to the degraded poor, not now to the degraded rich. to know this i should not need to look farther than to the shanties which everywhere border our railroads, that last improvement in civ ilization; where i see in my daily walks human beings living in sties, and all winter with an open door, for the sake of light, without any visible, often imaginable, wood pile, and the forms of both old and young are permanently contracted by the long habit of shrinking from cold and misery, and the development of all their limbs and faculties is checked. it certainly is fair to look at that class by whose labor the works which distinguish this generation are accomplished. such, too, to a greater or less extent, is the condition of the operatives of every denomination 56 walden in england, which is the great workhouse of the world. or i could refer you to ireland, which is marked as one of the white or enlightened spots on the map. contrast the physical condi tion of the irish with that of the north american indian, or the south sea islander, or any other savage race before it was degraded by contact with the civilized man. yet i have no doubt that that people's rulers are as wise as the average of civilized rulers. their condition only i3roves what squalidness may consist with civilization. i hardly need refer now to the laborers of our southern states who produce the staple exports of this country, and are themselves a staple production of the south. but to confine myself to those who are said to be in moderate circumstances. most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think, that they must have such a one as their neighbors have. as if one were to wear any sort of coat which the tailor might cut out for him, or, gradually leaving off palmleaf hat or cap of woodchuek skin, comjdlain of hard times because he could not afford to buy him a crown ! it is possible to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious than we have, which yet all would admit that man could not afford to pay for. shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not some-, times to be content with less? shall the resjdectable citizen thus gravely teach, by precept and example, the necessity of the young man's providing a certain number of superfluous glowshoes, and umbrellas, and empty guest chambers for empty guests, before he dies? why should not our furniture be as simple as the arab's or the indian's? when i think of the benefactors of the race, whom we have apotheosized as mes sengers from heaven, bearers of divine gifts to man, i do not see in my mind any retinue at their heels, any car-load of fashionable furniture. or what if i were to allow — would it not be a singular allowance? — that our furniture should be more economy 57 complex than the arab's, in proportion as we are morally and intellectually his superiors! at present our houses are clut tered and defiled with it, and a good housewife would sweep out the greater part into the dust hole, and not leave her morning's work undone. morning work ! by the blushes of aurora and the music of memnon, what should be man's morning work in this world? i had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but i was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and i threw them out the window in disgust. how, then, could i have a furnished house? i would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has broken ground. it is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which the herd so diligently follow. the traveler who stops at the best houses, so called, soon discovers this, for the publicans presume him to be a sardanapalus, and if he resigned himself to their tender mercies he would soon be completely emasculated. i think that in the railroad car we are inclined to spend more on luxury than on safety and convenience, and it threatens without attain ing these to become no better than a modern drawing-room, with its divans, and ottomans, and sunshades, and a hundred other oriental things, which we are taking west with us, invented for the ladies of the harem and the effeminate natives of the celes tial empire, which jonathan should be ashamed to know the names of. i would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion. i would rather lide on earth in an ox cart with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way. the very simplicity and nakedness of man's life in the primi tive ages imply this advantage at least, that they left him still but a sojourner in nature. "when he was refreshed with food and sleep, he contemplated his journey again. he dwelt, as it 58 walden were, in a tent in this world, and was either threading the valleys, or crossing the plains, or climbing the mountain tops. but lo ! men have become the tools of their tools. the man who independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry is become a farmer: and he who stood under a tree for shelter, a house keeper. we now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven. we have adopted chris tianity merely as an improved method of agri-culture. we have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb. the best works of art are the expression of man's struggle to free himself from this condition^ but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten. there is actually no place in this village for a work of fine art, if any had come down to us, to stand, for our lives, our houses and streets, furnish no proper pedestal for it. there is not a nail to hang a picture on, nor a shelf to receive the bust of a hero or a saint. when i consider how our houses are built and paid for, or not paid for, and their internal economy managed and sustained, i wonder that the floor does not give way under the visitor while he is admiring the gew gaws upon the mantel-piece, and let him through into the cellar, to some solid and honest though earthy foundation. i cannot but jdcrceive that this so-called rich and refined life is a thing jumped at, and i do not get on in the enjoyment of the fine arts which adorn it, my attention being wholly occupied with the jump; for i remember that the greatest genuine leap, due to human muscles alone, on record is that of certain wandering arabs, who are said to have cleared twenty-five feet on level ground. without factitious support, man is sure to come to earth again beyond that distance. the first question which i am tempted to put to the proprietor of such great impropriety is. who bolsters you? are you one of the ninety-seven who fail, or the three who succeed? answer me these questions, and then perhaps i may look at your baubles and find them ornamental. economy 59 the cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful. before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must be stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful living be laid for a foundation: now, a taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors, where there is no house and no housekeeper. old johnson, in his "wonderworking providence," speak ing of the first settlers of this town, with whom he was con temporary, tells us that "they burrow themselves in the earth for their first shelter under some hillside, and, casting the soil aloft upon timber, they make a smoky fire against the earth, at the highest side." they did not "provide them houses," says he, "till the earth, by the lord's blessing, brought forth bread to feed them," and the first j^ear's crop was so light that "they were forced to cut their bread very thin for a long season." the secretary of the province of new netherland, writing in dutch, in 1650, for the information of those who wished to take up land there, states more particularly, that "those in new netherland, and especially in new england, who have no means to build farm houses at first according to their wishes, dig a square pit in the ground, cellar fashion, six or seven feet deep, as long and as broad as they think proper, case the 'earth inside with w^ood all round the wall, and line the wood with the bark of trees or something else to prevent the caving in of the earth ; floor this cellar with plank, and wainscot it overhead for a ceil ing, raise a roof of spars clear up, and cover the sjdars with bark or green sods, so that they can live dry and warm in these houses with their entire families for two, three, and four years, it being understood that partitions are run through those cellars, which are adapted to the size of the family. the wealthy and principal men in new england, in the beginning of the colonies, commenced their first dwelling houses in this fashion for two reasons : firstly, in order not to waste time in building, and not to want food the next season ; secondly, in order not to discour 60 walden age poor laboring people whom they brought over in numbers from fatherland. in the course of three or four years, when the country became adapted to agriculture, they built themselves handsome houses, spending on them several thousands." in this course which our ancestors took there was a show of prudence at least, as if their principle were to satisfy the more pressing wants first. but are the more pressing w^ants satisfied now? when i think of acquiring for myself one of our luxu rious dwellings, i am deterred, for, so to speak, the country is not yet adapted to human culture, and we are still forced to cut our spiritual bread far thinner than our forefathers did their wheaten. not that all architectural ornament is to be neglected even in the rudest period ; but let our houses first be lined with beauty, where they come in contact with our lives, like the tene ment of the shellfish, and not overlaid with it. but, alas ! i have been inside one or two of them, and know what they are lined with. though we are not so degenerate but that we might possibly live in a cave or a wigwam or wear skins today, it certainly is better to accept the advantages, though so dearly bought, which the invention and industry of mankind offer. in such a neigh borhood as this, boards and shingles, lime and bricks, are cheaper and more easily obtained than suitable caves, or whole logs, or bark in sufficient quantities, or even well-tempered clay or flat stones. i speak understandingly on this subject, for i have made myself acquainted with it both theoretically and practi cally. with a little more wit we might use these materials so as to become richer than the richest now are, and make our civilization a blessing. the civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage. but to make haste to my own experiment. near the end of march, 1845, i borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by walden pond, nearest to where i intended to build my house, and began to cut down some tall arrowy economy 61 white pines, still in their youth, for timber. it is difficult to begin without borrowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your fellow-men to have an interest in your enterprise. the owner of the axe, as he released his hold on it, said that it was the apple of his eye; but i returned it sharper than i received it. it was a pleasant hillside where i worked, covered with pine woods, through which i looked out on the pond, and a small open field in the woods where pines and hickories were springing up. the ice in the pond was not yet dissolved, though there were some open spaces, and it was all dark colored and saturated with water. there were some slight flurries of snow during the days that i worked there ; but for the most part when i came out on to the railroad, on my way home, its yellow sand heap stretched away gleaming in the hazy atmosphere, and the rails shone in the spring sun, and i heard the lark and pewee and other birds already come to com mence another year with us. they were plea3ant spring days, in which the winter of man's discontent was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid began to stretch itself. one day, when my axe had come off and i had cut a green hickory for a wedge, driving it with a stone, and had placed the whole to soak in a pond hole in order to swell the wood, i saw a striped snake run into the water, and he lay on the bottom, apparently without inconvenience, as long as ] stayed there, or more than a quarter of an hour; perhaps be cause he had not yet fairly come out of the torpid state. it appeared to me that for a like reason men remain in their present low and primitive condition; but if they should feel the influence of the spring of sjdrings arousing them, they would of necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life. i had pre viously seen the snakes in frosty mornings in my path with portions of their bodies still numb and inflexible, waiting for the sun to thaw them. on the 1st of april it rained and melted the ice, and in the early part of the day, which was very foggy, 52 walden i heard a stray goose groping about over the pond and cackling as if lost, or like the spirit of the fog. so i went on for some days cutting and hewing timber, and also studs and rafters, all with my narrow axe, not hav ing many communicable or scholar-like thoughts, singing to myself, — men say they know many things; but lo! they have taken wings, the arts and sciences. and a thousand appliances ; the wind that blows is all that anybody knows. i hewed the main timbers six inches square, most of the studs on two sides only, and the rafters and floor timbers on one side, leaving the rest of the bark on, so that they were just as straight and much stronger than sawed ones. each stick was carefully mortised or tenoned by its stump, for i had borrowed other tools by this time. my days in the woods were not very long ones ; yet i usually carried my dinner of bread and butter, and read the newspaper in which it was wrapped, at noon, sitting amid the green pine boughs which i had cut off, and to my bread was imparted some of their fragrance, for my hands were covered with a thick coat of pitch. before i had done i was more the friend than the foe of the pine tree, though i had cut down some of them, having becoming better acquainted with it. sometimes a rambler in the wood was attracted by the sound of my axe, and we chatted pleasantly over the chips which i had made. by the middle of april, for i made no haste in my work, but rather made the most of it, my house was framed and ready for the raising. i had already bought the shanty of james collins, an irishman who worked on the fitchburg railroad, for boards. james collins' shanty was considered an uncom monly fine one. when t called to see it he was not at home. economy 63 i walked about the outside, at first unobserved from within, the window was so deep and high. it was of small dimensions, with a peaked cottage roof, and not much else to be seen, the dirt being raised five feet all around as if it were a compost heap. the roof was the soundest part, though a good deal warped and made brittle by the sun. door-sill there was none, but a perennial passage for the hens under the door board. mrs. c. came to the door and asked me to view it from the inside. the hens were driven in by my approach. it was dark, and had a dirt floor for the most part, dank, clammy, and aguish, only here a board and there a board which would not bear removal. she lighted a lamp to show me the inside of the roof and the walls, and also that the board floor extended under the bed, warning me not to step into the cellar, a sort of dust hole two feet deep. in her own words, they were "good boards overhead, good boards all around, and a good window," — of two whole squares originally, only the cat had passed out that way lately. there was a stove, a bed, and a place to sit, an infant in the house where it was born, a silk parasol, a gilt-framed looking glass, and a patent new coffee mill nailed to an oak sapling, all told. the bargain was soon completed, for james had in the meanwhile returned. i to pay four dollars and twenty-five cents tonight, he to vacate at five tomorrow morning, selling to nobody else meanwhile : i to take possession at six. it were well, he said, to be there early, and anticipate certain indistinct but wholly unjust claims, on the score of ground rent and fuel. this he assured me was the onlj^ encumbrance. at six i passed him and his family on the road. one large bundle held their all, — bed, coffee mill, looking-glass, hens, — all but the cat, she took to the woods and became a wild cat, and, as i learned afterward, trod in a trap set for woodehucks, and so became a dead cat at last. i took down this dwelling the same morning, drawing the nails, and removed it to the pond side by small cartloads, 64 walden spreading the boards on the grass there to bleach and warp back again in the sun. one early thrush gave me a note or two as i drove along the woodland path. i was informed treacher ously by a young patrick that neighbor seeley, an irishman, in the intervals of the carting, transferred the still tolerable, straight, and drivable nails, staples, and spikes to his pocket, and then stood when i came back to pass the time of day, and look freshly up, unconcerned with spring thoughts, at the devastation; there being a dearth of work, as he said. he was there to represent spectatordom, and help make this seemingly insignificant event one with the removal of the gods of troy. i dug my cellar in the side of a hill sloping to the south, where a woodchuck had formerly dug his burrow, doavn through sumach and blackberry roots, and the lowest stain of vegeta tion, six feet square by seven deep, to a fine sand where potatoes would not freeze in any winter. the sides were left shelving, and not stoned; but the sun having never shone on them, the sand still keeps its place. it was but two hours' work. i took particular pleasure in this breaking of gi^ound, for in almost all latitudes men dig into the earth for an equable temjderature. under the most splendid house in the city is still to be found the cellar where they store their roots as of old, and long after the superstructure has disappeared posterity remark its dent in the earth. the house is still but a sort of porch at the entrance of a burrow. at length, in the beginning of may, with the help of some of my acquaintances, rather to improve so good an occasion for neighborliness than from any necessity, i set up the frame of my house. no man was ever more honored in the character of his raisers than i. they are destined, i trust, to assist at the raising of loftier structures one day. i began to occupy my house on the 4th of july, as soon as it was boarded and roofed, for the boards were carefully feather-edged and lapped, economy 65 so tliat it was perfectly impervious to rain; but before board ing i laid the foundation of a chimney at one end, bringing two cart-loads of stones up the hill from the pond in my arms. i built the chimney after my hoeing in the fall, before a lire became necessary for warmth, doing my cooking in the mean while out of doors on the ground, early in the morning: which mode i still think is in some respects more convenient and agreeable than the usual one. when it stormed before my bread was baked, i fixed a few boards over the fire, and sat under them to watch my loaf, and passed some pleasant hours in that way. in those days, when my hands were much em ployed, i read but little, but the least scraps of paper which lay on the ground, my holder, or tablecloth, afforded me as much entertainment, in fact answered the same purpose, as the iliad. it would be worth the while to build still more deliberately than i did, considering, for instance, what foundation a door, a window, a cellar, a garret, have in the nature of man, and perchance never raising any superstructure until we found a better reason for it than our temporal necessities even. there is some of the same fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's building its own nest. who knows but if men constructed their dwellings avith their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged? but alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveler with their chattering and unmusical notes. shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter? what does archi tecture amount to in the experience of the mass of men ? i never in all my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and natural an occupation as building his house. we belong to the 66 walden community. it is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man: it is as much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer. where is this division of labor to end? and what object does it finally serve ? no doubt another may also think for me ; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself. true, there are architects so called in this country, and i have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making archi tectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. all very well per haps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism. a sentimental reformer in architecture, he began at the cornice, not at the foundation. it was only how to put a core of truth within the ornaments, that every sugar plum in fact might have an almond or caraway seed in it, — though i hold that almonds are most wholesome without the sugar, — and not how the inhabitant, the indweller, might build truly within and without, and let the ornaments take care of themselves. what reasonable man ever supposed that orna ments were something outward and in the skin merely, — that the tortoise got his spotted shell, or the shellfish its mother-o' pearl tints, by such a contract as the inhabitants of broadway their trinity church ? but a man has no more to do with the style of architecture of liis house than a tortoise with that of its shell : nor need the soldier be so idle as to try to paint the precise color of his virtue on his standard. the enemy will find it out. he may turn }>ale when the trial comes. this man seemed to me to lean over the cornice, and timidly whisper his half truth to the rude occupants, who really knew it better than he. what of architectural beauty i now see, i know has grad ually grown from within outward, out of the necessities and character of the indweller, who is the only builder, — out of some unconscious truthfulness, and nobleness, without ever a thought for the appearance ; and whatever additional beauty of economy 67 this kind is destined to be produced will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of life. the most interesting dwellings in this country, as the painter knows, are the most unpretending-, humble log huts and cottages of the poor commonly; it is the life of the inhabitants whose shells they are, and not any pecu liarity in their surfaces merely, which makes them picturesque ; and equally interesting will be the citizen's suburban box, when his life shall be as simple and as agreeable to the imagination, and there is as little straining after effect in the style of his dwelling, a great proportion of architectural ornaments are literally hollow, and a september gale would strip them off, like borrowed plumes, without injury to the substantials. they can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar. what if an equal ado were made about the ornaments of style in literature, and the architects of our bibles spent as much time about their cornices as the architects of our churches do? so are made the belles-lettres and the beaux-arts and their pro fessors. much as it concerns a man, forsooth, how a few sticks are slanted over him or under him, and what colors are daubed upon his box. it would signify somewhat, if, in any earnest sense, he slanted them and daubed it; but the spirit having departed out of the tenant, it is of a piece with constructing his own coffin, — the architecture of the gtave, and "carpenter" is but another name for "coffin-maker." one man says, in his despair or indifference to life, take up a handful of the earth at your feet, and paint your house that color. is he thinking of his last and narrow house? toss up a copper for it as well. what an abundance of leisure he must have ! why do you take up a handful of the dirt? better paint your house your own complexion; let it turn pale or blush for you. an enterprise to improve the style of cottage architecture! when you have got my ornaments ready i will wear them. before winter i built a chimney, and shingled the sides of 5 my house, which were already impervious to rain, with imper ■63 walden feet and sappy shingles made of the first slice of the log, avhose edges i was obliged to straighten with a plane. i have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by fifteen long, and eight-feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a large window on each side, two trap doors, one door at the end, and a brick fireplace opposite. the exact cost of my house, paying the usual price for such materials as i used, but not counting the work, all of which was done by myself, was as follows ; and i give the details because very few are able to tell exactly what their houses cost, and fewer still, if any, the separate cost of the various materials which compose them : "{ »".* «■«■[ ""it"" refuse shingles for roof and sides 4.00 laths 1.25 two second-hand windows with glass. . . . 2.43 one thousand old brick 4.00 two casks of lime 2.40 that was high. hair 31 j ^^'^ f^^ ^ [ needed. mantel-tree iron 15 nails 3.90 hinges and screws 14 latch 10 chalk 01 ^■ j i carried a good transportation ^-^0 jpart on my back. in all $28,121/0 these are all the materials excepting the timber, stones, and sand, which i claimed by squatter's right. i have also a small woodshed adjoining, made chiefly of the stuff which was left after building the house. i intend to build me a house which will surpass any on the main street in concord in gi-andeur and luxury, as soon economy 69' as it pleases me as much and will cost me no more than my present one. i thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter can obtain one for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent which he now pays annually. if i seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that i brag for humanity rather than for myself; and my shortcomings and inconsistencies do not affect the truth of my statement. notwithstanding much cant and hypocrisy, — chaff which i find it difficult to separate from my wheat, but for which i am as sorry as any man, — i will breathe freely and stretch myself in this respect, it is such a relief to both the moral and physical system ; and i am resolved that i will not through humility become the devips attorney. i will endeavor to speak a good word for the truth. at cambridge college the mere rent of a student's room, which is only a little larger than my own, is thirty dollars each year, though the corporation had the advantage of building thirty two side by side and under one roof, and the occupant suffers the inconvenience of many and noisy neighbors, and perhaps a residence in the fourth story. i cannot but think that if we had more true wisdom in these respects, not only less education would be needed, because, forsooth, more would already have been acquired, but the pecuniary expense of getting an educa tion would in a great measure vanish. those conveniences which the student requires at cambridge or elsewhere cost him or somebody else ten times as great a sacrifice of life as they would with proper management on both sides. those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made. the mode of founding a college is, commonly, to get up a subscription of dollars and cents, and then following blindly the principles of a division 70 walden of labor to its extreme, a principle which should never be fol lowed but with circumspection, — to call in a contractor who makes this a subject of speculation, and he employs irishmen or other operatives actually to lay the foundations, while the students that are to be are said to be fitting themselves for it; and for these oversights successive generations have to pay. i think that it would be better than this, for the students, or those who desire to be benefited by it, even to lay the foundation themselves. the student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful. ^'but," says one, "you do not mean that the students should go to work with their hands instead of their heads'?" i do not mean that exactly, but i mean something which he might think a good deal like that; i mean that they should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. how could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics. if i wished a boy to know something about the arts and sciences, for instance, i would not pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where anything is pro fessed and practiced but the art of life; — to survey the world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his natural eye; to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is made, or mechanics, and not learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites to neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to what vagabond he is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the monsters that swarm all around him, while contemplat ing the monsters in a drop of vinegar. which would have advanred the most at the end of a month, — the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and economy 71 smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this, the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the institution in the meanwhile, and had received a rogers' pen knife from his father? which would be most likely to cut his fingers'? ... to my astonishment i was informed on leaving college that i had studied navigation ! — why, if i had taken one turn down the harbor i should have known more about it. even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philos ophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. the conse quence is that while he is reading adam smith, ricardo, and say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably. as with our colleges, so with a hundred "modern improve ments" : there is an illusion about them ; there is not ahvays a positive advance. the devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding invest ments in them. our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. they are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to boston or new york. we are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegrai3h from maine to texas ; but maine and texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. as if the main object avere to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. we are eager to tunnel under the atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new ; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapi^ing ameri can ear will be that the princess adelaide has the whooping cough. after all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages ; he is not an evan gelist, nor does he come round eating locusts and wild honev. 72 walden i doubt if flying childers ever carried a peck of corn to mill. one says to me, "i wonder that you do not lay up money; you love to travel ; you might take the ears and go to fitchburg today and see the country." but i am wiser than that. i have learned that the swiftest traveler is he that goes afoot. i say to my friend, suppose we try who will get there first. the dis tance is thirty miles; the fare ninety cents. that is almost a day's wages. i remember when wages avere sixty cents a day for laborers on this very road. well, i start now on foot, and get there before night ; i have traveled at that rate by the week together. you will in the meanwhile have earned your fare, and arrive there sometime tomorrow, or possibly this evening, if you are lucky enough to get a job in season. instead of going to fitchburg, you will be working here the greater part of the day. and so, if the railroad reached round the world, i think that i should keep ahead of you ; and as for seeing the country and getting experience of that kind, i should have to cut your acquaintance altogether. such is the universal law, which no man can ever outwit, and with regard to the railroad even ave may say it is as broad as it is long. to make a railroad round the world available to all mankind is equivalent to grading the whole surface of the planet. men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activitj^ of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor shouts "all aboard!" when the smoke is bloavn away and the vapor con densed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over, — and it will be called, and will be, "a melancholy accident." no doubt they can ride at last who shall have earned their fare, that is, if they survive so long, but they will probably have lost their elasticity and desire to travel by that time. this spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order economy 73 to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the englishman who went to india to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to england and live the life of a poet. he should have gone up garret at once. ''what!" exclaim a million irishmen starting up from all the shanties in the land, "is not this railroad which we have built a good thing?" yes, i answer, comparatively good, that is, you might have done worse ; but i wish, as you are brothers of mine, that you could have spent your time better than digging in this dirt. before i finished my house, wishing to earn ten or twelve dollars by some honest and agreeable method, in order to meet my unusual expenses, i planted about two acres and a half of light and sandy soil near it chiefly with beans, but also a small part with i3otatoes, corn, peas, and turnips. the whole lot contains eleven acres, mostly growing up to pines and hickories, and was sold the preceding season for eight dollars and eight cents an acre. one farmer said that it was "good for nothing but to raise cheeping squirrels on." i put no manure whatever on this land, not being the owner, but merely a squatter, and not expecting to cultivate so much again, and i did not quite hoe it all once. i got out several cords of stumps in plowing, which supplied me with fuel for a long time, and left small circles of virgin mold, easily distinguishable through the summer by the greater luxuriance of the beans there. the dead and for the most part unmerchantable wood behind my house, and the drift wood from the pond, have supidlied the remainder of my fuel. i was obliged to hire a team and a man for the plowing, though i held the plow myself. my farm outgoes for the first season were, for implements, seed, work, etc., $14,721/2. the seed corn was given me. this never costs anything to speak of, unless you plant more than enough. i got twelve bushels of beans, and eighteen bushels of potatoes, besides some peas and sweet 74 walden corn. the yellow corn and turnips were too late to come t( anything. my wliole income from the farm was $23.44 deducting the outgoes * 14.721/^ there are left $ 8.71% besides produce consumed and on hand at the time this estimate was made of the value of $4.50, — the amount on hand much more than balancing a little grass which i did not raise. all things considered, that is, considering the importance of a man's soul and of today, notwithstanding the short time occupied by my experiment, nay, partly even because of its transient char acter, i believe that that was doing better than any farmer in concord did that year. the next year i did better still, for i spaded up all the land which i required, about a third of an acre, and i learned from the experience of both years, not being in the least awed by many celebrated works on husbandry, arthur young among the rest, that if one would live simplj^ and eat only the crop which he raised, and raise no more than he ate, and not exchange it for an insufficient quantity of more luxurious and expensive things, he would need to cultivate only a few rods of ground, and that it would be cheaper to spade up that than to use oxen to plow it, and to select a fresh spot from time to time than to manure the old, and he could do all his necessary farm work as it were with his left hand at odd hours in the summer; and thus he avould not be tied to an ox, or horse, or cow, or pig, as at present. i desire to speak impartially on this point, and as one not interested in the success or failure of the present eco nomical and social arrangements. i was more independent than any farmer in concord, for i was not anchored to a house or farm, but could follow the bent of my genius, which is a very crooked one, every moment. besides being better off than they economy 75 already, if my house had been burned or my crops had failed, i should have been nearly as well off as before. i am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men, the former are so much the freer. men and oxen exchange work; but, if we consider necessary work only, the oxen will be seen to have greatly the advantage, their farm is so much the larger. man does some of his part of the exchange work in his six weeks of haying, and it is no boy's play. certainly no nation that lived simply in all respects, that is, no nation of philosophers, would commit so great a blunder as to use the labor of animals. true, there never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am i certain it is desirable that there should be. however, i should never have broken a horse or bull and taken him to board for any work he might do for me, for fear i should become a horseman or a herdsman merely; and if society seems to be the gainer by so doing, are we certain that what is one man's gain is not another's loss, and that the stable-boy has equal cause with his master to be satisfied? granted that some public works would not have been constructed without this aid, and let man share the glory of such with the ox and horse; does it follow that he could not have accomplished works yet more worthy of himself in that case ? when men begin to do, not merely unnec essary or artistic, but luxurious and idle work, with their assist ance, it is inevitable that a few do all the exchange work with the oxen, or, in other words, become the slaves of the strongest. man thus not only works for the animal within him, but, for a symbol of this, he works for the animal without him. though we have many substantial houses of brick or stone, the pros perity of the farmer is still measured by the degree to which the barn overshadows the house. this town is said to have the largest houses for oxen, cows, and horses hereabouts, and it is not behindhand in its public buildings; but there are very few halls for free worship or free speech in this county. it should 76 walden not be by their architecture, but why not even by their power of abstract thought, that nations should seek to commemorate themselves? how much more admirable the bhagvat-geeta than all the ruins of the east! towers and temples are the luxuiy of princes. a simple and independent mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince. genius is not a retainer to any emperor, nor is its material silver, or gold, or marble, except to a trifling extent. to what end, pray, is so much stone hammered? in arcadia, when i was there, i did not see any hammering stone. nations are possessed with an insane ambi tion to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. what if equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners? one jdiece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon. i love better to see stones in place. the grandeur of thebes was a vulgar grandeur. more sensible is a rod of stone wall that bounds an honest man's field than a hundred-gated thebes that has wandered farther from the true end of life. the religion and civilization which are barbaric and heathenish build splendid temples; but what you might call christianity does not. most of the stone a nation hammers goes toward its tomb only. it buries itself alive. as for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so manj^ men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives con structing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the nile, and then given his body to the dogs. i might possibly invent some excuse for them and him, but i have no time for it. as for the religion and love of art of the builders, it is much the same all the world over, whether the building be an egyptian temple or the united states banks. it costs more than it comes to. the mainspring is vanity, assisted by the love of garlic and bread and butter. mr. balcom, a promising young architect, designs it on the back of his vitruvius, with hard pencil and ruler, and economy 77 the job is let out to dobson & sons, stonecutters. when the thirty centuries begin to look down on it, mankind begin to look up at it. as for your high towers and monuments, there was a crazy fellow once in this town who undertook to dig through to china, and he got so far that, as he said, he heard the chinese pots and kettles rattle ; but i think that i shall not go out of my way to admire the hole which he made. many are concerned about the monuments of the west and east, — to know who built them. for my part, i should like to know who in those days did not build them, — who were above such trifling. but to proceed with my statistic*. by surveying, carj^entry, and day-labor of various other kinds in the village in the meanwhile, for i have as many trades as fingers, i had earned $13.34. the expense of food for eight months, namely, from july 4th to march 1st, the time when these estimates were made, though i lived there more than two years, — not counting potatoes, a little green corn, and some peas, which i had raised, nor considering the value of what was on hand at the last date, was rice $1,731/2 molasses 1.73 cheapest form of the saccharine. rye meal 1.04% indian meal 99% cheaper than rye. pork 22 f costs more than indian meal/ 1 both money and trouble. flour 88 sugar .80 lard 65 apples 25 dried apple . 22 sweet potatoes 10 one pumpkin 06 one watermelon 02 salt 03 j t yes, i did eat $8.74, all told ; but i should not thus unblush ingiy publish my gaiilt, if i did not know that most of my 78 walden readers were equally guilty with myself, and that their deeds would look no better in print. the next year i sometimes caught a mess of fish for my dinner, and once i went so far as to slaughter a woodchuck which ravaged my beanfield, — effect his transmigration, as a tartar would say, — and devour him, partly for experiment's sake ; but though it afforded me a momentary enjoyment, nothwithstanding a musky flavor, i saw that the longest use would not make that a good practice, however it might seem to have your woodchueks ready dressed by the village butcher. clothing' and some incidental expenses within the same dates, though little can be inferred from this item, amounted to $8.40% oil and some household utensils 2.00 so that all the pecuniary outgoes, excepting for washing and mending, which for the most part were done out of the house, and their bills have not yet been received, — and these are all and more than all the ways by which money necessarily goes out in this part of the world, — were house $28,121/2 farm one year 14.72% . food eight months 8.74 clothing, etc., eight months 8.40% oil, etc., eight months 2.00 in all 1 . .$61.99% i address myself now to those of my readers who have a living to get. and to meet this i have for farm produce sold $23.44 earned by day-labor 13.34 in all $36.78 economy 79 which subtracted from the sum of the outgoes leaves a balance of $25.21% on the one side, — this being very nearly the means with which i started, and the measure of expenses to be in curred, — and on the other, besides the leisure and independence and health thus secured, a comfortable house for me as long as i choose to occupy it. these statistics, however accidental and therefore uninstruct ive they may appear, as they have a certain completeness, have a certain value also. nothing was given me of which i have not rendered some account. it appears from the above estimate, that my food alone cost me in money about twenty-seven cents a week. it was, for nearly two years after this, rye and indian meal without yeast, potatoes, rice, a very little salt pork, mo lasses, and salt, and my drink water. it was fit that i should live on rice, mainly, who loved so well the philosophy of india. to meet the objections of some inveterate cavillers, i may as well state that if i dined out occasionally, as i always had done, and i trust shall have opportunities to do again, it was fre quently to the detriment of my domestic arrangements. but the dining out, being, as i have stated, a constant element, does not in the least affect a comparative statement like this. i learned from my two years' experience that it would cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one's necessary food, even in this latitude ; that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength. i have made a satisfactory dinner, satisfactory on several accounts, simply off a dish of purslane {portulaca oleracea) which i gathered in my cornfield, boiled and salted. i give the latin on account of the savoriness of the trivial name. and pray what more can a reasonable man desire, in peaceful times, in ordinary noons, than a sufficient number of ears of green sweet-corn boiled, with the addition of salt ? even the little variety which i used was a yielding to the demands of appetite, and not of health. yet men have come to such a pass that they frequently starve, not for want of neces 80 walden saries, but for want of luxuries ; and i know a good woman who thinks that her son lost his life because he took to drinking water only. the reader will perceive that i am treating the subject rather from an economic than a dietetic point of view, and he will not venture to put my abstemiousness to the test unless he has a well-stocked larder. bread i at first made of pure indian meal and salt, genuine hoe-cakes, which i baked before my fire out of doors on a shingle or the end of a stick of timber sawed off in building my house ; but it was wont to get smoked and to have a piny flavor. i tried flour also ; but have at last found a mixture of rj-e and indian meal most convenient and agreeable. in cold weather it was no little amusement to bake several small loaves of this in succes sion, tending and turning them as carefully as an egyptian his hatching eggs. they were a real cereal fruit which i ripened, and they had to my senses a fragrance like that of other noble fruits, which i kept in as long as possible by wrapping them in cloths. i made a study of the ancient and indispensable art of bread-making, consulting such authorities as offered, going back to the primitive days and first invention of the unleavened kind, when from the wildness of nuts and meats men first reached the mildness and refinement of this diet, and traveling gradually down in my studies through that accidental souring of the dough which, it is supposed, taught the leavening process, and through the various fermentations thereafter, till i came to "good, sweet, wholesome bread," the staff of life. leaven, which some deem the soul of bread, the spiritm which fills its cellular tissue, which is religiously preserved like the vestal fire, — some precious bottle-full, i suppose, first brought over in the maj^ower, did the business for america, and its influence is still rising, swell ing, spreadino-. in cerealian billows over the land. — this seed i regularly and faithfully procured from the \dllage, till at length one morning i forgot the rules, and scalded my yeast ; by which economy 81 accident i discovered that even this was not indispensable, — for my discoveries were not by the synthetic but analytic proc ess, — and i have gladly omitted it since, though most housewives earnestly assured me that safe and wholesome bread without yeast might not be, and elderly people x:)rophesied a speedy decay of the vital forces. yet i find it not to be an essential ingredient, and after going without it for a year am still in the land of the living; and i am glad to escape the trivialness of carrying a bottle-full in my pocket, which would sometimes pop and discharge its contents to my discomfiture. it is simpler and more respectable to omit it. man is an animal who more than any other can adapt himself to all climates and circumstances. neither did i put any sal soda, or other acid or alkali, into my bread. it would seem that i made it according to the recipe which marcus porcius cato gave about two centuries before christ. "panem depsticium sic facito. manus mortariumque bene lavato. farinam in mortarium indito, aquae paulatim addito, subigitoque pulchre. ubi bene subegeris, defingito, coquitoque sub testu." which i take to mean — "make kneaded bread thus. 'wash your hands and trough well. put the meal into the trough, add water gradually, and knead it thoroughly. when you have kneaded it well, mold it, and bake it under a cover," that is, in a baking-kettle. not a word about leaven. but i did not always use this staff of life. at one time, owing to the emptiness of my purse, i saw none of it for more than a month. every new englander might easily raise all his own bread stuffs in this land of rye and indian corn, and not depend on distant and fluctuating markets for them. yet so far are we from simplicity and independence that, in concord, fresh and sweet meal is rarely sold in the shops, and hominy and corn in a still coarser form are hardly used by any. for the most part the farmer gives to his cattle and hogs the grain of his own producing, and buys flour, which is at least no more wholesome. 82 walden at a greater cost, at the store. . i saw that i could easily raise my bushel or two of rye and indian corn, for the former will grow on the poorest land, and the latter does not require the best, and grind them in a hand-mill, and so do without rice and pork ; and if i must have some concentrated sweet, i found by experiment that i could make a very good molasses either of pumpkins or beets, and i knew that i needed only to set out a few maples to obtain it more easily still, and while these were growing i could use various substitutes besides those which i have named. "for," as the forefathers sang, — we can make liquor to sweeten our lips of i)umpkins and parsnips and walnut-tree chips. finally, as for salt, that grossest of groceries, to obtain this might be a fit occasion for a visit to the seashore, or, if i did without it altogether, i should probably drink the less water. i do not learn that the indians ever troubled themselves to go after it. thus i could avoid all trade and barter, so far as my food was concerned, and having a shelter alread}^, it would only remain to get clothing and fuel. the pantaloons which i now wear were woven in a farmer's family, — thank heaven there is so much virtue still in man ; for i think the fall from the farmer to the operative as great and memorable as that from the man to the farmer; — and in a new country fuel is an encumbrance. as for a habitat, if i were not permitted still to squat, t might purchase one acre at the same price for which the land i culti vated was sold — namely, eight dollars and eis-ht cents. but as it was. i considered that t enhanced the value of the land by squatting on it. there is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes ask me such mi potions as. if t think that i can live on vearetable food alonpand to strike at the root of the matter at once, — for the root i« faith, — t am accustomed to answer such, that i can live economy 83 on board nails. if they cannot understand that, they cannot understand much that i have to say. for my part, i am glad to hear of experiments of this kind beingtried ; as that a young man tried for a fortnight to live on hard, raw corn on the ear, using his teeth for all mortar. the squirrel tribe tried the same and succeeded. the human race is interested in these experi ments, though a few old women who are incapacitated for them, or who own their thirds in mills, may be alarmed. my furniture, part of which i made myself, and the rest cost me nothing of which i have not rendered an account, consisted of a bed, a table, a desk, tln^ee chairs, a looking-glass three inches in diameter, a i^air of tongs and andirons, a kettle, a skillet, and a frying-pan, a dipper, a wash-bowl, two knives and forks, three plates, one cup, one spoon, a jug for oil, a jug for molasses, and a japanned lamp. none is so jdoor that he need sit on a pumpkin. that is shiftlessness. there is a plenty of such chairs as i like best in the village garrets to be had for taking them away. furniture ! thank god, i can sit and i can stand without the aid of a furniture warehouse. what man but a philosopher would not be ashamed to see his furniture packed in a cart and going up country exposed to the light of heaven and the eyes of men, a beggarly account of empty boxes? that is spaulding's furniture. i could never tell from ins^decting such a load whether it belonged to a so-called rich man or a jdoor one; the owner always seemed poverty-stricken. indeed, the more you have of such things the jdoorer you are. each load looks as if it contained the contents of a dozen shanties ; and if one shanty is poor, this is a dozen times as poor. pray, for what do we move ever but to get rid of our furniture, our exuvics; at last to go from this world to another newly furnished, and leave this to be burned? it is the same as if all these traps were buckled to a man^s belt, and he could not move over the rough country where our lines are cast without dragging them, — drag 84 walden ging his trap. he was a lucky fox that left his tail in the trap. the muskrat will gnaw his third leg off to be free. no wonder man has lost his elasticity. how often he is at a dead set ! "sir, if i may be so bold, what do you mean by a dead set ?" if you are a seer, whenever you meet a man you will see all that he owns, ay, and much that he pretends to disown, behind him, even to his kitchen furniture and all the trumpery which he saves and will not burn, and he will appear to be harnessed to it and making what headway he can. i think that the man is at a dead set who has got through a knot hole or gateway where his sledge load of furniture cannot follow him. i cannot but feel com passion when i hear some trig, compact-looking man, seemingly free, all girded and ready, speak of his "furniture," as whether it is insured or not. "but what shall i do with my furniture?" my gay butterfly is entangled in a spider's web then. even those who seem for a long while not to have any, if you inquire more narrowly you will find have some stored in somebody's barn. i look upon england today as an old gentleman who is traveling with a great deal of baggage, trumpery which has accumulated from long housekeeping, which he has not the courage to burn ; great trunk, little trunk, bandbox, and bundle. throw away the first three at least. it would surpass the powers of a well man nowadays to take up his bed and walk, and i should certainly advise a sick one to lay down his bed and run. when i have met an immigrant tottering under a bundle which contained his all — looking like an enormous wen which had grown out of the nape of his neck — i have pitied him, not because that was his all, but because he had all that he could carry. if i have got to drag my trap, i will take care that it be a light one and do not nip me in a vital part. but perchance it would be wisest never to put one's paw into it. i would observe, by the way, that it costs me nothing for cur tains, for i have no gazers to shut out but the sun and moon, and i am willing that they should look in. the moon will not economy 85 sour milk nor taint meat of mine, nor will the sun injure my furniture or fade my carpet, and if he is sometimes too warm a friend, i find it still better economy to retreat behind some cur tain which nature has provided, than to add a single item to the details of housekeeping. a lady once offered me a mat, but as i had no room to spare within the house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, i declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. it is best to avoid the beginnings of evil. not long since i was present at the auction of a deacon's effects, for his life had not been ineffectual : — the evil that men do lives after them. as usual, a great proportion was trumpery which had begun to accumulate in his father's day. among the rest was a dried tapeworm. and now, after lying half a century in his garret and other dust holes, these things were not burned ; instead of a bonfire^ or purifying destruction of them, there was an auction, or increasing of them. the neighbors eagerly collected to view them, bought them all, and carefully transported them to their garrets and dustholes, to lie there till their estates are settled, when they will start again. when a man dies he kicks the dust. the customs of some savage nations might, perchance, be profitably imitated by us, for they at least go through the semblance of casting their slough annually ; they have the idea of the thing, whether they have the reality or not. would it not be well if we were to celebrate such a "busk," or "feast of first fruits," as bartram describes to have been the custom of the mucclasse indians'? "when a town celebrates the busk," says he, "having previously provided themselves with new clothes, new pots, pans, and other household utensils and furniture, they collect all their worn-out clothes and other despicable things, sweep and cleanse their houses, squares, and the whole town, of their filth, which with all the remaining grain and other old pro 36 walden visions they cast together into one common heap, and consume it with fire. after having taken medicine, and fasted for three days, all the fire in the town is extinguished. during this fast they abstain from the gratification of every appetite and passion whatever. a general amnesty is proclaimed; all malefactors may return to their town. "on the fourth morning, the high priest, by rubbing dry wood together, jdroduces new fire in the public square, from whence every habitation in the town is supplied with the new and pure flame." they then feast on the new corn and fruits and dance and sing for three days, "and the four following days they receive visits and rejoice with their friends from neighboring towns who have in like manner purified and prepared themselves." the mexicans also practiced a similar purification at the end of every fifty-two years, in the belief that it was time for the world to come to an end. i have scarcely heard of a truer sacrament, that is, as the dictionary defines it, "outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace," than this, and i have no doubt that they were originally inspired directly from heaven to do thus, though they have no biblical record of the revelation. for more than five years i maintained myself thus solely by the labor of my hands, and i found that by working about six weeks in a year, i could meet alj the expenses of living. the whole of my winters, as well as most of my summers, i had free and clear for study. i have thoroughly tried school-keeping, and found that my expenses were in proportion, or rather out of proportion, to my income, for i was obliged to dress and train, not to say think and believe, accordingly, and i lost my time into the bargain. as i did not teach for the good of my fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure. i have tried trade ; but i found that it would take ten years to get economy 87 under way in that, and that then i should probably be on ray way to the devil. i was actually afraid that i might by that time be doing what is called a good business. when formerly i was looking about to see what i could do for a living, some sad experience in conforming to the wishes of friends being fresh in my mind to tax my ingenuity, i thought often and seriously of picking huckleberries ; that surely i could do, and its small profits might suffice, — for my greatest skill has been to want but little, — so little capital it required, so little distraction from my wonted moods, i foolishly thought. while my acquaintances went unhesitatingly into trade or the professions, i contem plated this occupation as most like theirs; ranging the hills all summer to pick the berries which came in my way, and there after carelessly dispose of them; so, to keep the flocks of admetus. i also dreamed that i might gather the wild herbs, or carry evergreens to such villagers as loved to be reminded of the woods, even to the city, by hay-cart loads. but i have since learned that trade curses everything it handles; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business. as i preferred some things to others, and especially valued my freedom, as i could fare hard and yet succeed well, i did not wish to spend my time in earning rich carpets or other fine furniture, or delicate cookery, or a house in the grecian or the gothic style just yet. if there are any to whom it is no inter ruption to acquire these things, and who know how to use them when acquired, i relinquish to them the pursuit. some are "industrious," and appear to love labor for its own sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out of worse mischief; to such i have at present nothing to say. those who would not know what to do with more leisure than they now enjoy, i might advise to work twice as hard as they do, — ^work till they pay for themselves, and get their free papers. for myself i found that the occupation of a day-laborer was the most independent 88 walden of any, especially as it required only thirty or forty days in a year to support one. the laborer's day ends with the going down of the sun, and he is then free to devote himself to his chosen pursuit, independent of his labor ; but his employer, who speculates from month to month, has no respite from one end of the year to the other. in short, i am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pas time, if we will live simply and wisely ; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial. it is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than i do. one young man of my acquaintance, who has inherited some acres, told me that he thought he should live as i did, if he had the means. i would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account; for, besides that before he has fairly learned it i may have found out another for myself, i desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible ; but i would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father's or his mother's or his neigh bor's instead. the youth may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do. it is by a mathematical point only that we are wise, as the sailor or the fugitive slave keeps the polestar in his eye ; but that is sufficient guidance for all our life. we may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we would preserve the true course. undoubtedly, in this case, what is true for one is truer still for a thousand, as a large house is not proportionally more expensive than a small one, since one roof may cover, one cellar underlie, and one wall separate several apartments. but for my part, i preferred the solitary dwelling. moreover, it will com monly be cheaper to build the whole yourself than to convince another of the advantage of the common wall; and when you economy 89 have done this, the common partition, to be much cheaper, must be a thin one, and that other may prove a bad neighbor, and also not keep his side in repair. the only cooperation which is commonly possible is exceedingly partial and superficial; and what little true cooperation there is, is as if it were not, being a harmony inaudible to men. if a man has faith he will cooperate with equal faith every^vhere ; if he has not faith, he will continue to live like the rest of the world, whatever com pany he is joined to. to cooperate, in the highest as well as the lowest sense, means to get our living together. i heard it proposed lately that two young men should travel together over the world, the one without money, earning his means as he went, before the mast and behind the plow, the other carrying a bill of exchange in his pocket. it was easy to see that they could not long be companions or cooperate, since one would not operate at all. they would part at the first interesting crisis in their adventures. above all, as i have implied, the man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready, and it may be a long time before they get off. but all this is verj^ selfish, i have heard some of my towns men say. i confess that i have hitherto indulged very little in jdhilanthropic enterprises. i. have made some sacrifices to a sense of duty, and among others have sacrificed this pleasure also. there are those who have used all their arts to persuade me to undertake the supi3ort of some jooor family in the town ; and if i had nothing to do, — for the devil finds employment for the idle, — i might try my hand at some such pastime as that. however, when i have thought to indulge myself in this respect, and lay their heaven under an obligation by maintaining cer tain poor persons in all respects as comfortably as i maintain myself, and have even ventured so far as to make them the offer, they have one and all unhesitatingly preferred to remain poor. 90 walden while my townsmen and women are devoted in so many ways to the good of their fellows, i trust that one at least may be spared to other and less humane purs\iits. you must have a genius for charity as well as for anything else. as for doing good, that is one of the professions which are full. moreover, i have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution. probably i should not consciously and deliberately forsake my particular calling to do the good which society demands of me, to save the uni verse from annihilation ; and i believe that a like but infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it. but i would not stand between any man and his genius ; and to him who does this work, which i decline, with his whole heart and soul and life, i would say. persevere, even if the world call it doing evil, as it is most likely they will. i am far from supposing that my case is a peculiar one; no doubt many of my readers would make a similar defense. at doing something, — i will not engage that my neighbors shall pronounce it good, — i do not hesitate to say that i should be a capital fellow to hire ; but what that is, it is for my employer to find out. what good i do, in the common sense of that word, must be aside from my main path, and for the most part wholly unintended. men say, practically, begin where you are and such as you are, without aiming mainly to become of more worth, and with kindness aforethought go about doing good. if i were to preach at all in this strain, i should say rather. set about being good. as if the sun should stop when he has kin dled his fires up to the splendor of a moon or a star of the sixtli magnitude, and go about like a robin goodfellow, peeping in at every cottage window, inspiring' lunatics, and tainting meats, and making darkness visible, in=:tend of steadilv increasing his geni*^! heat and beneficence till he is of such brightness that no mortal can look him in the face, and then, and in the mean while too, going about the world in his own orbit, doing it good, economy 91 or rather, as a truer philosophy has discovered, the world going about him getting good. when phaeton, wishing to prove his heavenly birth by his beneficence, had the sun's chariot but one day, and drove out of the beaten track, he burned several blocks of houses in the lower streets of heaven, and scorched the sur face of the earth, and dried up every spring, and made the great desert of sahara, till at length jupiter hurled him headlong to the earth with a thunderbolt, and the sun, through grief at his death, did not shine for a year. there is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted. it is human, it is divine, carrion. if i knew for a cer tainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, i should run for my life, as from that dry and parching wind of the african deserts called the simoom, which fills the mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust till you are suffocated, for fear that i should get some of his good done to me, — some of its virus mingled with my blood. no; — in this case i would rather suffer evil the natural way. a man is not a good man to me because he will feed me if i should be starving, or warm me if i should be freezing, or pull me out of a ditch if i should ever fall into one. i can find you a new foundland dog that will do as much. philanthropy is not love for one's fellow-man in the broadest sense. howard was no doubt an exceedingly kind and worthy man in his way, and has his reward; but, comparatively speaking, what are a hundred howards to us, if their philanthropy do not heljd us in our best estate, when we are most worthy to be helped? i never heard of a philanthropic meeting in which it was sincerely proposed to do any good to me, or the like of me. the jesuits were quite balked by those indians who, being burned at the stake, suggested new modes of torment to their tormentors. being superior to physical suffering, it sometimes chanced that they were superior to any consolation which the missionaries could offer ; and the law to do as you would be done 92 walden by fell with less persuasiveness on the ears of those who, for their part, did not care how they were done by, who loved their enemies after a new fashion, and came very near freely for giving them all they did. be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need, though it be your example which leaves them far behind. if you give money, spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them. we make curious mistakes sometimes. often the poor man is not so cold and hungry as he is dirty and ragged and gross. it is partly his taste, and not merely his misfortune. if you give him money, he will perhaps buy more rags with it. i was wont to idity the clumsy irish laborers who cut ice on the pond, in such mean and ragged clothes, while i shivered in my more tidy and somewhat more fashionable garments, till, one bitter cold day, one who had slipped into the water came to my house to warm him, and i saw him strip off three pairs of pants and two pairs of stockings ere he got down to the skin, though they were dirty and ragged enough, it is true, and that he could afford to refuse the extra garments which i offered him, he had so many intra ones. this ducking was the very thing he needed. then i began to pity myself, and i saw that it would be a greater charity to bestow on me a flannel shirt than a whole slop-shop on him. there are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve. it is the j^ious slave-breeder devoting the proceeds of every tenth slave to bu}^ a sunday's liberty for the rest. some show their kindness to the poor by employing them in their kitchens. would they not be kinder if they employed themselves there f you boast of spending a tenth part of your income in charity; maybe you should spend the nine tenths so, and done with it. society recovers only a tenth part of the property then. is this owing to the generosity of economy 93 him in whose possession it is found, or to the remissness of the officers of justice? philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated by mankind. nay, it is greatly overrated ; and it is our selfishness which overrates it. a robust poor man, one sunny day here in concord, praised a fellow-townsman to me, because, as he said, he was kind to the poor; meaning himself. the kind uncles and aunts of the race are more esteemed than its true spiritual fathers and mothers. i once heard a reverend lecturer on england, a man of learning and intelligence, after enumerating her scientific, literary, and political worthies, shakespeare, bacon, cromwell, milton, newton, and others, speak next of her christian heroes, whom, as if his profession required it of him, he elevated to a place far above all the rest, as the greatest of the great. they were penn, howard, and mrs. fry. every one must feel the falsehood and cant of this. the last were not england's best men and women; only, perhaps, her best philanthropists. i would not subtract anything from the praise that is due to philanthropy, but merely demand justice for all who by their ■ lives and works are a blessing to mankind. i do not value chiefly a man's uprightness and benevolence, which are, as it were, his stem and leaves. those plants of whose greenness withered we make herb tea for the sick, serve but a humble use, and are most employed by quacks. i want the flower and fruit of a man ; that some fragrance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripe ness flavor our intercourse. his goodness must not be a partial and transitory act, but a constant superfluity, which costs him nothing and of which he is unconscious. this is a charity which hides a multitude of sins. the i^hilanthropist too often sur rounds mankind with the remembrance of his own cast-off griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it sympathy. we should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion. 94 walden from what southern plains comes up the voice of wailing? under what latitudes reside the heathen to whom we would send light ? who is that intemperate and brutal man whom we would redeem ? if anythingail a man, so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even, — for that is the seat of sympathy, — he forthwith sets about reforming — the world. being a microcosm himself, he discovers, and it is a true discovery, and he is the man to make it, — that the world has been eating green apples ; to his eyes, in fact, the globe itself is a great green apple, which there is danger awful to think of that the children of men will nibble before it is ripe; and straightway his drastic philanthropy seeks out the esquimau and the patagonian, and embraces the populous indian and chinese villages; and thus, by a few years of jdhilanthropic activity, the powers in the meanwhile using him for their own ends, no doubt, he cures himself of his dyspepsia, the globe acquires a faint blush on one or both of its cheeks, as if it were beginning to be ripe, and life loses its crudity and is once more sweet and wholesome to live. i never dreamed of any enormity • greater than i have committed. i never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself. i believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sym pathy with his fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of god, is his private ail. let this be righted, let the spring come to him, the morning rise over his couch, and he will for sake his generous companions without apology. my excuse for not lecturing against the use of tobacco is that i never chewed it; that is a penalty which reformed tobacco-chewers have to pay; though there are things enough i have chewed, which i could lecture against. if you should ever be betrayed into any of these philanthropies, do not let your left hand know what your right hand does, for it is not worth knowing. rescue the drowning and tie your shoe-strings. take your time, and set about some free labor. economy 95 our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints. our hymn-books resound with a melodious cursing of god and enduring him forever. one would say that even the prophets and redeemers had rather consoled the fears than con firmed the hopes of man. there is nowhere recorded a simple and irrepressible satisfaction with the gift of life, any memor able praise of god. all health and success does me good, how ever far off and withdrawn it may appear; all disease and failure helps to make me sad and does me evil, however much sympathy it may have with me or i with it. if, then, we would indeed restore mankind by truly indian, botanic, magnetic, or natural means, let us first be as simple and well as nature our selves, dispel the clouds which hang over our own brows, and take up a little life into our pores. do not stay to be an over seer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world. i read in the gulistan, or flower garden, of sheik sadi of shiraz, that "they asked a wise man, saying: of the many cele brated trees which the most high god has created lofty and umbrageous, they call none azad, or free, excepting the cypress, which bears no fruit; what mystery is there in this? he replied : each has its approi:>riate produce, and appointed sea son, during the continuance of which it is fresh and blooming, and during their absence dry and withered ; to neither of which states is the cypress exposed, being always flourishing; and of this nature are the azads, or religious independents. — fix not thy heart on that which is transitory ; for the dijlah, or tigris, will continue to flow through bagdad after the race of caliphs is extinct : if thy hand has plenty, be liberal as the date tree ; but if it affords nothing to give away, be an azad, or free man, like the cypress," 96 walden complemental verses the pretensions of poverty "thou dost presume too much, poor needy wretch, to claim a station in the firmament, because thy humble cottage, or thy tub, nurses some lazy or pedantic virtue in the cheap sunshine or by shady springs, with roots and pot-herbs ; where thy right hand. tearing those humane passions from the mind, upon whose stocks fair blooming virtues flourish, degradeth nature, and benumbeth sense. and, gorgon-like, turns active men to stone. we not require the dull society of your necessitated temperance. or that unnatural stupidity that knows nor joy nor sorrow ; nor your f orc'd falsely exalted passive fortitude above the active. this low abject brood. that fix their seats in mediocrity. become your servile minds; but w^e advance such virtues only as admit excess. brave, bounteous acts, regal magnificence. all-seeing prudence, magnanimity that knows no bound, and that heroic virtue for which antiquity hath left no name. but patterns only, such as hercules, achilles, theseus. back to thy loath'd cell ; and when thou seest the new enlightened sphere, study to know but what those worthies were." t. carew. ii where i lived, and what i lived for at a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house. i have thus surveyed the country on every side within a dozen miles of where i live. in imagination i have bought all the farms in succession, for all were to be bought, and i knew their price. i walked over each farmer's premises, tasted his wild apples, discoursed on husbandry with him, took his farm at his price, at any price, mortgaging it to him in my mind; even put a higher price on it, — took everything but a deed of it, — took his word for his deed, for i dearly love to talk, — cultivated it, and him too to some extent, i trust, and withdrew when i had enjoyed it long enough, leaving him to carry it on. this experience entitled me to be regarded as a sort of real-estate broker by my friends. wherever i sat, there i might live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly. what is a house but a sedes, a seat? — better if a country seat. i discovered many a site for a house not likely to be soon improved, which some might have thought too far from the village, but to my eyes the village was too far from it. well, there i might live, i said ; and there i did live,, for an hour, a summer and a winter life; saw how i could let the years run off, buffet the winter through, and see the spring come in. the future inhabitants of this region, wherever they may place their houses, may be sure that they have been antici pated. an afternoon sufficed to lay out the land into orchard, woodlot, and pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or pines should be left to stand before the door, and whence each blasted 97 98 walden tree could be seen to the best advantage; and then i let it lie, fallow perchance, for a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone. my imagination carried me so far that i even had the refusal of several farms, — the refusal was all i wanted, — but i never got my fingers burned by actual possession. the nearest that i came to actual possession was when i bought the hollowell l^lace, and had begun to sort my seeds, and collected materials with which to make a wheelbarrow to carry it on or off with; but before the owner gave me a deed of it, his wife — every man has such a wife — changed her mind and avished to keep it, and he offered me ten dollars to release him. now, to speak the truth, i had but ten cents in the world, and it surpassed my arithmetic to tell, if i was that man who had ten cents, or who had a farm, or ten dollars, or all together. however, i let him keep the ten dollars and the farm, too, for i had carried it far enough; or rather, to be generous, i sold him the farm for just what i gave for it, and, as he was not a rich man, made him a present of ten dollars, and still had my ten cents, and seeds, and materials for a wheelbarrow left. i found thus that i had been a rich man without any damage to my property. but i retained the landscape, and i have since annually carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow. with respect to landscapes, — i am monarch of all i survey, my right there is none to dispute. i have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he had got a few vsdld apples only. why, the owner does not know it for many years when a poet has put his farm in rime, the most admirable kind of invisible fence, has fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk. where i lived, and what i lived for 99 the real attractions of the hollowell farm, to me, were: its' complete retirement, being about two miles from the village, half a mile from the nearest neighbor, and separated from the highway by a broad field ; its bounding on the river, which the owner said protected it by its fogs from frosts in the si3ring, though that was nothing to me; the gray color and ruinous state of the house and barn, and the dilapidated fences, avhich put such an interv^al between me and the last occupant; the hollow and lichen-covered apple trees, g-nawed by rabbits, show ing what kind of neighbors i should have; but above all, the recollection i had of it from my earliest voyages up the river, when the house was concealed behind a dense grove of red maples, through which i heard the house-dog bark. i was in haste to buy it, before the proprietor finished getting out some rocks, cutting down the hollow apple trees, and grubbing up some young birches which had sprung up in the pasture, or, in short, had made any more of his improvements. to enjoy these advantages i was ready to carry it on ; like atlas, to take the world on my shoulders, — i never heard what compensation he received for that, — and do all those things w^hich had no other motive or excuse but that i might pay for it and be unmolested in my possession of it ; for i knew all the while that it would yield the most abundant crop of the kind i wanted if i could only afford to let it alone. but it turned out as i have said. all that i could say, then, with respect to farming on a large scale (i have always cultivated a garden), was that i had had my seeds ready. many think that seeds improve with age. i have no doubt that time discriminates between the good and the bad: and when at last i shall plant, i shall be less likely to be disappointed. but i would say to my fellows, once for all, as long as possible live free and uncommitted. it makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail. old cato, whose "de re rustica" is my "cultivator," says, iqq walden and the only translation i have seen makes sheer nonsense of the passage, "when you think of getting a farm, turn it thus in your mind, not to buy greedily; nor spare your pains to look at it, and do not think it enough to go round it once. the oftener you go there the more it will please you, if it is good." i think i shall not buy greedily, but go round and round it as long as i live, and be buried in it first, that it may please me the more at last. the present was my next experiment of this kind, which i ]nirpose to describe more at length; for convenience, putting the experience of two years into one. as i have said, i do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up. when first i took up my abode in the woods, that is, began to spend my nights as well as days there, which, by accident, was on independence day, or the fourth of july, 1845, my house was not finished for winter, but was merely a defense against the rain, without plastering or chimney, the walls being of rough weather-stained boards, with wide chinks, which made it cool at night. the upright white hewn studs and freshly planed door and window casings gave it a clean and airy look, especially in the morning, when its timbers were saturated with dew, so that i fancied that by noon some sweet gum would exude from them. to my imagination it retained throughout the day more or less of this auroral character, reminding me of a certain house on a mountain which i had visited the year ])efore. this was an airy and unplastered cabin, fit to enter lain a traveling god, and where a goddess might trail her gar ments. the winds which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial parts only, of terrestrial music. the morn ing wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted ; where i lived, and what i lived for iql but few are the ears that hear it. olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere. the only house i had been the owner of before, if i except a boat, was a tent, which i used occasionally when making excur sions in the summer, and this is still rolled up in my garret; but the boat, after passing from hand to hand, has gone down the stream of time. with this more substantial shelter about me i had made some progress toward settling in the world. this frame, so slightly clad, was a sort of crystallization around me, and reacted on the builder. it was suggestive somewhat as a picture in outlines. i did not need to go outdoors to take the air, for the atmosphere within had lost none of its freshness. it was not so much within doors as behind a door where i sat, even in the rainiest weather. the harivansa says, "an abode without birds is like a meat without seasoning." such was not my abode, for i found myself suddenly neighbor to the birds; not by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near them. i was not only nearer to some of those which commonly frequent the garden and the orchard, but to those wilder and more thrilling songsters of the forest which never, or rarely, serenade a villager, — the wood-thrush, the veery, the scarlet tanager, the field-sparrow, the whippoorwill, and many others. i was seated by the shore of a small pond, about a mile and a half south of the village of concord and somewhat higher than it, in the midst of an extensive wood between that town and lincoln, and about two miles south of that our only field known to fame, concord battle ground ; but i was so low in the woods that the opposite shore, half a mile off, like the rest, covered with wood, was my most distant horizon. for the first week, whenever i looked out on the pond it impressed me like a tarn high up on the side of a mountain, its bottom far above the surface of other lakes, and, as the sun arose, i saw it throwing off its mighty clothing of mist, and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface were revealed, 102 ^xr-^ . walden while the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing m every €lireetion into the woods, as at the breaking up of some nocturnal conventicle. the very dew seemed to hang upon the trees later into the day than usual, as on the sides of mountains. this small lake was of most value as a neighbor in the inter ^•als of a gentle rainstorm in august, when, both air and water being perfectly still, but the sky overcast, mid-afternoon had all the serenity of evening, and the wood-thrush sang around, and was heard from shore to shore. a lake like this is never smoother than at such a time; and the clear portion of the air above it being shallow and darkened by clouds, the water, full of light and reflections, becomes a lower heaven itself so much the more imjdortant. from a hilltop nearby, where the wood had recently been cut off, theie was a pleasing vista southward across the pond, through a wide indentation in the hills which form the shore there, where their opposite sides sloping toward each other suggested a stream flowing out in that direction through a wooded valley, but stream there was none. that avay i looked between and over the near green hills to some distant and higher ones in the horizon, tinged with blue. indeed, by standing on tiptoe i could catch a glimpse of some of the ]:)eaks of the still bluer and more distant mountain ranges" in the northwest, those true-blue coins from heaven's own mint, and also of some portion of the village. but in other directions, even from this point, i could not see over or beyond the woods avhich surrounded me. it is well to have some water in your neighborhood, to give buoyancy to and float the earth. one value even of the smallest well is that when you look into it you see that the earth is not continent but insular. this is as important as that it keeps butter cool. when i looked across the pond from this peak toward the sudbury meadows, which in time of flood i distinguished elevated perhaps by a mirage in their seething valley, like a coin in a basin, all the earth beyond the pond appeared like a thin crust insulated and floated wheke i lived, and what i lived for 103 even by this small sheet of intervening water, and i was reminded that this on which i dwelt was but dry land. though the view from my door was still more contracted, i did not feel crowded or confined in the least. there was pasture enough for my imagination. the low shrub-oak plateau to which the opposite shore arose, stretched away toward the prairies of the west and the steppes of tartary, affording ample room for all the roving families of men. "there are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon,'' — said damodara, when his herds required new and larger pastures. both place and time were changed and i dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those ears in history which had most attracted me. where i live was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers. we are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind the constellation of cassiopeia's chair, far from noise and disturbance. i discovered that my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe. if it were worth the while to settle in those parts near to the pleiades or the hyades, to aldebaran or altair, then i was really there, or at an equal remoteness from the life which i had left behind, dwindled and twinkling with as fine a ray to my nearest neighbor, and to be seen only in moonless nights by him. such was that part of creation where i had squatted: — there was a shepherd that did live, and held his thoughts as high as were the mounts whereon his flocks did hourly feed him by. what should we think of the shepherd's life if his flocks always wandered to higher pastures than his thoughts? every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of 104 walden ■ equal simplicity, and i may say innocence, with nature herself. i have been as sincere a worshiper of aurora as the greeks. i got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which i did. they say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of king tching thang to this effect: "renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again." i can understand that. morning brings back the heroic ages. i was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when i was sitting with door and windows open, as i could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. it was homer's requiem ; itself an iliad and odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. 'there was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world. the morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. then there is least somnolence in us ; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called , a day, to which we are not awakened by our genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newly acquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied by the undulations of celestial music, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance filling the air — to a higher life than we fell asleeid from; and thus the darkness bear its fruit, and prove itself to be good, no less than the light. that man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way. after a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his genius tries again what noble life it can make. all mem orable events, i should say, transpire in morning time and in a wheke i lived, and what i lived for 105 monung atmosphere. the vedas say, "all intelligences awake with the morning." poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour. all poets and heroes, like memnon, are the children of aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. to him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morn ing. it matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. morning is when i am awake and there is a dawn in me. moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. "why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? they are not such poor calculators. if they had not been overcome with drowsiness they would have performed something. the millions are awake enough for phys ical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. to be awake is to be alive. i have never yet met a man who was quite awake. how could i have looked him in the face ? we must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. i know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. it is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful ; but it is far more glo rious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. to effect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. if we refused, or rather used up, such paltry information as we get, the oracles would distinctly inform us how this might be done. i went to the woods because i wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if i could not learn 106 walden what it had to teach, and not, when i came to die, discover that i had not lived. i did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear ; nor did i wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. i wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. for most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of god, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify god and enjoa^ him forever." still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men ; like pyg-mies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. our life is frittered away by detail. an honest man has hardlj^ need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! i say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail. in the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. simplify, simplify. instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion. our life is like a german confederacy, made up of petty states, with its where i lived, and what i lived for 107 boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a german cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment. the nation itself, with all its so-called internal improvements, which, by the way, are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and over grown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the only cure for it as for them is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. it lives too fast. men think that it is essential that the nation have comnaerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraidh, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. if we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkeringupon our lives to improve tliem, who will build railroads'? and if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season ? but if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads'? we do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? each one is a man, an irishman, or a yankee man. the rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. they are sound sleepers, i assure you. and every few years a new lot is laid down and run over ; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. and when they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumera7-y sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception, i am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may some time get up again. why should we live with such hurry and waste of life ? we 108 walden are determined to be starved before we are hungry. men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine tomorrow. as for work, we haven't any of any consequence. we have the saint vitus dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still. if i should only give a few pulls at the parish bell-rope, as for a fire, that is, without setting the bell, there is hardly a man on his farm in the out skirts of concord, notwithstanding that press of engagements which was his excuse so many times this morning, nor a boy, nor a woman, i might almost say, but would forsake all and follow that sound, not mainly to save property from the flames, but, if we will confess the truth, much more to see it burn, since burn it must, and we, be it known, did not set it on fire, — or to see it put out, and have a hand in it, if that is done as hand somely ; yes, even if it were the parish church itself. hardly a man takes a half hour's nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, "what's the news?" as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels. some give directions to be waked every half hour, doubtless for no other purpose; and then, to pay for it, they tell what they have dreamed. after a night's sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast. "pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man any where on this globe," — and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the wachito river; never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself. for my part, i could easily do without the postoffice. i think that there are very few important communications made through it. to speak critically, i never received more than one or two letters in my life — i wrote this some years ago — that were worth the postage. the penny-post is, commonly, an institu tion through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thought which is so often safely offered in jest. and i am where i lived, and what i lived for 109 sure that i never read any memorable news in a newspaper. if we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by acci dent, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steam boat blown up, or one cow run over on the western railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, ■ — we never need read of another. one is enough. if you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? to a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. there was such a rush, as i hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn the foreign news by the last aitival, that several large squares of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure, — news which i seriously think a ready wit might write a twelvemonth or twelve years beforehand with sufficient accuracy. as for spain, for instance, if you know how to throw in don carlos and the infanta, and don pedro and seville and granada, from time to time in the right propor tions, — they may have changed the names a little since i saw the papers, — and serve up a bull-fight when other entertain ments fail, it will be true to the letter, and give us as good an idea of the exact state or ruin of things in spain as the most succinct and lucid reports under this head in the newspapers: and as for england, almost the last significant scrap of news from that quarter was the revolution of 1649 ; and if you have learned the history of her crops for an average year, you never need attend to that thing again, unless your speculations are of a merely jdecuniary character. if one may judge who i rarely looks into the newspapers, nothing new does ever happen i in foreign parts, a french revolution not excepted. what news! how much more important to know what that is which was never old! "kieou-he-yu (great dignitary of the state of wei) sent a man to khoung-tseu to know his news. khoung-tseu caused the messenger to be seated near him, and 110 walden questioned him in these terms: what is your master doing? the messenger answered with respect: my master desires to diminish the number of his faults, but he cannot come to the end of them. the messenger being gone, the i^hilosopher remarked: what a worthy messenger! what a worthy mes senger!" the preacher, instead of vexing the ears of drowsy farmers on their day of rest at the end of the week, — for sunday is the fit conclusion of an ill-spent aveek, and not the fresh and brave beginning of a new one, — with this one other draggle tail of a sermon, should shout with thundering voice, — "pause ! avast! why so seeming fast, but deadly slow?" shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. if men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the arabian nights' entertainments. if we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. when we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only gi^eat and worthy things have any per manent and absolute existence, — that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. this is always exhilarating and sublime. by closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations. children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure. i have read in a hindoo book that "there was a king's son, who, being expelled in infancy from his native city, was brought up by a forester, and, growing up to maturity in that state, imagined himself to belong to the barbarous race with which he lived. one of his father's ministers having discovered him, revealed to him what he was, and the misconception of his character was removed, where i lived, and what i lived fok m and he knew himself to be a prince. so soul," continues the hindoo philosopher, "from the circumstances in which it is placed, mistakes its own character, until the truth is revealed to it by some holy teacher, and then it knows itself to be brahme." i perceive that we inhabitants of new england live this mean life that we do because our vision does not j^enetrate the surface of things. we think that that is which appears to be. if a man should walk through this town and see only the reality, where, think you, would be the "mill-dam" go to? if he should give us an account of the realities he beheld there, we should not recognize the place in his description. look at a meeting-house, or a courthouse, or a jail, or a shop, or a dwelling-house, and say what that thing really is before a true gaze, and they would all go to pieces in your account of them. men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before adam and after the last man. in eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. but all these times and places and occasions are now and here. god himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. and we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. the universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. let us spend our lives in conceiving then. the poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it. let us spend one day as deliberately as nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails. let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry, — deter mined to make a day of it. why should we knock under and go with the stream? let us not be upset and overwhelmed in 112 walden that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is downhill. with unrelaxed nerves,, with morning' vigor, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like ulysses. if the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. if the bell rings, why should we run ? we will consider what kind of music they are alike. let us settle ourselves, and w^ork and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and jjrejudice, and tradition, and delusion and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through paris and london, through new york and boston and concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosojdhy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say. this is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a avail or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a nilometer, but a realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. if you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. be it life or death, we crave only reality. if we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities ; if we are alive, let us go about our business. time is but the stream i go a-fishing in. i drink at it; but while i drink i see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. i would drink deeper ; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. i cannot count one. i know not the first letter of the alphabet, i have always been regretting that i was not as wise as the day i was born. the intellect is a cleaver ; it discerns and rifts wheee i lived, and what i lived for ii3 its way into the secret of things. i do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. my head is hands and feet. i feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. my instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some crea tures use their snout and fore-paws, and with it i would mine and burrow my way through these hills. i think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining rod and thin rising vapors i judge j and here i will begin to mine, ill reading "with a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observ ers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting' to all alike. in accumulating jiroperty for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident. the oldest egyptian or hindoo philoso]^her raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and i gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was i in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. no dust has settled on that robe ; no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed. that time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is neither past, present, nor future. my residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but to serious reading, than a university ; and though i was beyond the range of the ordinary circulating library, i had more than ever come within the influence of those books which circulate round the world, whose sentences were first written on bark, and are now merely copied from time to time on to linen paper. says the poet mir camar uddin mast, "being seated to run through the region of the spiritual world ; i have had this advan tage in books. to be intoxicated by a single glass of wine; i have experienced this pleasure when i have drunk the liquor of the esoteric doctrines." i kept homer's iliad on my table through the summer, though i looked at his page only now and 114 reading 115 then. incessant labor with my hands, at first, for i had my house to finish and my beans to hoe at the same time, made more study impossible. yet i sustained myself by tiie prospect of such reading in future. i read one or two shallow books of travel in the intervals of my work, till that employment made me ashamed of myself, and i asked where it was then that / lived. the student may read homer or yesehylus in the greek with out danger of dissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies that he in some measure emulate their heroes, and consecrate morn ing hours to their jdages. the heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate . times ; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and gen erosity we have. the modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity. they seem as solitary, and the letter in which they are printed as rare and curious, as ever. it is worth the expense of youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some avords of an ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be perpetual suggestions and provocations. it is not in vain that the farmer remembers and repeats the few latin words which he has heard. men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. for what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? they are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as delphi and dodona never gave. we might as well omit to study nature because she is old. to read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will lie walden task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. it requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this ohjeet. books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as tliey were written. it is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read. the one is commonly transitory, a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. the other is the maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother tong-ue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak. the crowds of men who merely spoke the greek and latin tongues in the middle ages were not entitled by the accident of birth to read the works of genius written in those languages; for these were not written in that greek or latin which they knew, ]3ut in the select language of literature. they had not learned the nobler dialects of greece and rome, but the very materials on which they were written were waste paper to them, and they prized instead a cheap contemporary literature. but when the several nations of europe had acquired distinct though rude written languages of their own, sufficient for the purposes of their rising literatures, then first learning revived, and scholars avere enabled to discern from that remoteness the treasures of antiquity. what the roman and grecian multitude could not hear, after the lapse of ages a few scholars read, aiid a few scholars only are still reading it. however much we may admire the orator's occasional bursts of eloquence, the noblest avritten words are commonly as far behind or above the fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind the clouds. there are the stars, and they who can may read them. the astronomers forever com keading 117 meut on and observe them. they are not exhalations like our daily colloquies and vaporous breath. what is called elo quence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. the orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him ; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occa sion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him. no wonder that alexander carried the iliad with him on his expeditions in a precious casket. a written word is the choic est of relics. it is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. it is the work of art nearest to life itself. it may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; — not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. the symbol of an ancient man's thought becomes a modern man's speech. two thousand summers have imparted to the monuments of grecian literature, as to her marbles, only a maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have carried their own serene and celestial atmos phere into all lands to protect them against the corrosion of time. books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. they have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind. when the illiterate and perhaps scornful trader has earned by enterprise and industry his cov eted leisure and independence, and is admitted to the circles of wealth and fashion, he turns inevitably at last to those still higher but yet inaccessible circles of intellect and genius, and 118 walden is sensible only of the imperfection of his culture and the vanity and insufficiency of all his riches, and further proves his good sense by the pains which he takes to secure for his children that intellectual culture whose want he so keenly feels; and thus it is that he becomes the founder of a family. those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language in which they were written must have a very imperfect knowledge of the history of the human race; for it is remarkable that no transcript of them has ever been made into any modern tongue, unless our civilization itself may be regarded as such a transcript. homer has never yet been printed in english, nor ^^sehylus, nor virgil even, — works as refined, as solidly done, find as beautiful almost as the morn ing itself; for later writers, say what we will of their genius, have rarely, if ever, equaled the elaborate beauty and finish and the lifelong and heroic literary labors of the ancients. they only talk of forgetting them who never knew them. it will be soon enough to forget them when we have the learning and the genius which will enable us to attend to and appreciate them. that age will be rich indeed when those relics which we call classics, and the still older and more than classic but even less known scriptures of the nations, shall have still further accu mulated, when the vaticans shall be filled with vedas and zendavestas and bibles, with homers and dantes and shake speares, and all the centuries to come shall have successively deposited their trophies in the forum of the world. by such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at last. the works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. they have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically. most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade ; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet reading 119 this only is reading', in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to stand on tiptoe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to. i think that having learned our letters we should read the best that is in literature, and not be forever repeating our a b abs, and words of one syllable, in the fourth or fifth classes, sitting on the lowest and foremost form all our lives. most men are satisfied if they read or hear read, and jjerchance have been convicted by the wisdom of one good book, the bible, and for the rest of their lives vegetate and dissipate their faculties in what is called easy reading. there is a work in several volumes in our circulating library entitled little reading, which i thought referred to a town of that name which i had not been to. there are those who, like cormorants and ostriches, can digest all sorts of this, even after the fullest dinner of meats and vegetables, for they suffer nothing to be wasted. if others are the machines to provide this provender, they are the machines to read it. they read the nine thousandth tale about zebulon and sephronia, and how they loved as none had ever loved before, and neither did the course of their true love rim smooth, — at any rate, how it did run and stumble, and get up again and go on! how some poor unfortunate got up on to a jteeple, who had better never have gone up as far as the belfry; and then, having needlessly got him up there, the happy novelist rings the bell for all the world to come together and hear. o dear ! how he did get dow^n again ! for my jdart, i think that they had better metamorjdhose all such aspiring heroes of uni versal noveldom into man weather-cocks, as they used to put heroes among the constellations, and let them swing round there till they are rusty, and not come down at all to bother honest men with their pranks. the next time the novelist rings the bell i will not stir though the meeting-house burn down. "the skip of the tip-toe-hop, a romance of the middle ages, by 120 walden the celebrated author of 'tittle-tol-tan/ to appear in monthly parts; a great rush; don't all come together." all this they read with saucer eyes, and erect and primitive curiosity, and with unwearied gizzard, whose corrugations even yet need no sharpening, just as some little four-year-old bencher his two cent gilt-covered edition of cinderella, — without any improve ment, that i can see, the j^ronunciation, or accent, or emphasis, or any more skill in extracting or inserting the moral. the result is dullness of sight, as stagnation of the vital circulations, and a general deliquium and sloughing off of all the intellectual faculties. this sort of gingerbread is baked daily and more sedulously than pure wheat or rye-and-indian in almost every oven, and finds a surer market. the best books are not read even by those who are called good readers. what does our concord culture amount to? there is in this town, with a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even in english literature, whose words all can read and spell. even the college-bred and so called liberally educated men here and elsewhere have really little or no acquaintance with the english classics; and as for the recorded wisdom of mankind, the ancient classics and bibles, which are accessible to all who will know of them, there are the feeblest efforts anywhere made to become acquainted with them. i know a woodchopper, of middle age, who takes a french paper, not for news as he says, for he is above that, but to "keep himself in practice," he being a canadian by birth; and when i ask him what he considers the best thing he can do in this world, he says, besides this, to keep up and add to his english. this is about as much as the college-bred gen ora]lv do or aspire to do, and they take an english paper for llig purpose. one who has just come from reading perhaps ono of the best english books will find how many with whom ^ can converse about it. or suppose he comes from reading greek or latin classic in the original, whose praises are reading 121 familiar even to the so-called illiterate; he will find nobody at all to speak to, but must keep silence about it. indeed, there is hardly the professor in our colleges who, if he has mastered the difficulties of the language, has proportionately mastered the difficulties of the wit and poetry of a greek poet, and has any sympathy to impart the alert and heroic reader; and as for the sacred scriptures, or bibles of mankind, who in this town can tell me even their titles? most men do not know that any nation but the hebrews have had a scripture. a man, any man, will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquitj'have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of; — and yet we learn to read only as far as easy reading, the primers and class books, and when we leave school, the "little reading," and story books, which are for boys and beginners ; and our reading, our conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins. i aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our con cord soil has produced, whose names are hardly known here. or shall i hear the name of plato and never read his book? as if plato were my townsman and i never saw him, — my next neighbor and i never heard him speak or attended to the wis dom of his words. but how actually is it ? his dialogues, which contain what was immortal in him, lie on the next shelf, and yet i never read them. we are underbred and low-lived and illiterate; and in this respect i confess i do not make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of -my towns man who cannot read at all, and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intel-. lects. we should be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were. we are a race of tit-men, and soar but little higher in our intellectual flights than the columns of the daily paper. 122 walden it is not all books that are as dull as their readers. there are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new asi^ect on the face of things for us. how many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. the book exists for us j^erchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. the at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. these same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all tlie wise men ; not one has been omitted ; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life. more over, with wisdom we shall learn liberality. the solitary hired man on a farm in the outskirts of concord, who has had his second birth and x^eculiar religious experience, and is driven as he believes into silent gravity and exclusiveness by his faith, may tliink it is not true ; but zoroaster, thousands of years ago, traveled the same road and had the same experience; but he, being wise, knew it to be universal, and treated his neighbors accordingly, and is even said to have invented and established worship among men. let him humbly commune with zoroaster then, and, through the liberalizing influence of all the worthies, with jesus christ himself, and let "our church" go by the board. we boast that we belong to the nineteenth century and are making the most rapid strides of any nation. but consider how little this village does for its own culture. i do not wish to flatter my townsmen, nor to be flattered by them, for that will not advance either of us. we need to be provoked, — goaded like oxen, as we are, into a trot. we have a compara tively decent system of common schools, schools for infants only; but excepting the half-starved lyceum in the winter, and latterly the puny beginning of a library suggested by the state, no school for ourselves. we spend more on almost any reading 123 article of bodily aliment or ailment than on onr mental aliment. it is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. it is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure — if they are indeed so well off — to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives. shall the world be confined to one paris or one oxford forever ? cannot students be boarded here and get a liberal education under the skies of concord? can we not hire some abelard to lecture to us? alas! what with foddering the cattle and tending the store, we are kept from school too long, and our education is sadly neglected. in this country, the village should in some respects take the place of the nobleman of europe. it should be the patron of the fine arts. it is rich enough. it wants only the magnanimit}^ and refinement. it can spend money enough on such things as farmers and traders value, but it is thought utopian to propose spending money for things which more intelligent men know to be far more worth. this town has spent seventeen thousand dollars on a townhouse, thank fortune or politics, but jirobably it will not spend so much on living wit, the true meat to put into that shell, in a hundred years. the one hundred and twenty-five dollars annu ally subscribed for a lyceum in the winter is better spent than any other equal sum raised in the town. if we live in the nine teenth century, why should we not enjoy the advantages which the nineteenth century offers? why should our life be in any respect provincial? if we will read newspapers, why not skijd the gossip of boston and take the best newspaper in the world at once? — not be sucking the pap of "neutral family" papers, or browsing "olive branches" here in new england. let the reports of all the learned societies come to us, and we will see if they know anything. why should we leave it to harper & brothers and redding & company to select our reading? as the nobleman of cultivated taste surrounds himself with what 124 walden ever conduces to his culture, — genius — learning — wit — books — paintings — statuary — music — philosophical instruments, and the like; so let the village do, — not stop short at a pedagogue, a parson, a sexton, a parish library, and three selectmen, because our pilgrim forefathers got through a cold winter once on a bleak rock with these. to act collectively is according to the spirit of our institutions; and i am confident that, as our cir cumstances are more flourishing, our means are greater than the nobleman's. new england can hire all the wise men in the world to come and teach her, and board them round the while, and not be provincial at all. that is the uncommon school we want. instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men. if it is necessary, omit one bridge over the river, go round a little there, and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of isiiorance which surrounds us. iv sounds but while we are confined to books, though the most select and classic, and read only particular written languages, which are themselves but dialects and provincial, w^e are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard. much is published, but little printed. the rays which stream through the shutter will be no longer remembered when the shutter is wholly removed. no method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. what is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, com pared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen ? will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer ? read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity. i did not read books the first summer; i hoed beans. nay, i often did better than this. there were times when i could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. i love a broad margin to my life. sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, i sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some trav eler's wagon on the distant highway, i was reminded of the lapse of time. i grcav in those seasons like corn in the night, 125 126 waldek and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. they were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. i realized what the orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. for the most part, i minded not how the hours went. the day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished. instead of singing like the birds, i silently smiled at my incessant good fortune. as the sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hickory before my door, so had i my chuckle or suppressed warble which he might hear out of my nest. my days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock ; for i lived like the puri indians, of whom it is said that "for yesterday, today, and tomorrow they have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning by pointing backward for yesterday, forward for tomorrow, and overhead for the passing day." this was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt ; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, i should not have been found wanting. a man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. the natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence. i had this advantage, at least, in my mode of life, over those who were obliged to look abroad for amusement, to society and the theater, that my life itself was become my amusement and never ceased to be novel. it was a drama of many scenes and without an end. if we were always indeed getting our living, and resrulating our lives according to the last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with ennui. follo>^^ your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour. housework was a pleasant pastime. when my floor was dirty, i rose early, and, setting all my furniture out of doors on the grass, bed and bedstead making sounds 127 but one budget, dashed water on the floor, and sprinkled white sand from the pond on it, and then with a broom scrubbed it clean and white ; and by the time the villagers had broken their fast the morning sun had dried my house sufficiently to allow me to move in again, and my meditations were almost uninter rupted. it was pleasant to see my whole household effects out on the gtass, makinga little pile like a gypsy's pack, and my three-legged table, from which i did not remove the books and pen and ink, standing amid the pines and hickories. they seemed glad to get out themselves, and as if unwilling to be brought in. i was sometimes tempted to stretch an awning over them and take my seat there. it was worth the while to see the sun shine on these things, and hear the free wind blow on them ; so much more interesting most familiar objects look outdoors than in the house. a bird sits on the next bough, life everlasting grows under the table, and blackberry vines run round its legs ; pine cones, chestnut burs, and strawberry leaves are strewn about. it looked as if this was the way these forms came to be transferred to our furniture, to tables, chairs, and bedstead, — because they once stood in their midst. my house was on the side of a hill, immediately on the edge of the larger wood, in the midst of a young forest of pitch pines and hickories, and half a dozen rods from the pond, to which a narrow footpath led down the hill. in my front yard grew the strawberry, blackberry, and life-everlasting, johnswort and goldenrod, shrub-oaks and sand-cherry, blueberry and ground nut. near the end of may, the sand-cherry (cerasus pumila) adorned the sides of the path with its delicate flowers arranged in umbels cylindrically about its short stems, which last, in the fall, weighed down with good-sized and handsome cherries, fell over in wreaths like rays on every side. i tasted them out of compliment to nature, though they were scarcely palatable. the sumach (rhus glabra) grew luxuriantly about the house, pushing up through the embankment which i had made, and 128 ' walden growing five or six feet the first season. its broad pinnate tropical leaf was pleasant though strange to look on. the large buds, suddenly pushing out late in the spring from dry sticks which had seemed to be dead, developed themselves as by magic into graceful green and tender boughs, an inch in diameter; and sometimes, as i sat at my window, so heed lessly did they grow and tax their weak joints, i heard a fresh and tender bough suddenly fall like a fan to the ground, when there was not a breath of air stirring, broken off by its own weight. in august, the large masses of berries, which, when in flower, had attracted many wild bees, gradually assumed th.eir bright velvety crimson hue, and by their weight again bent down and broke the tender limbs. as i sit at my window this summer afternoon, hawks are cir cling about mj' clearing; the tantivy of wikl pigeons, flying by twos and threes athwart my view, or perching restless on the white-pine boughs behind my house, gives a voice to the air ; a fishhawk dimples the glassy surface of the pond and brings up a fish; a mink steals out of the marsh before my door and seizes a frog by the shore; the sedge is bending under the weight of the reed-birds flitting hither and thither; and for the last half hour i have heard the rattle of railroad cars, now dying away and then reviving like the beat of a partridge, conveying travelers from boston to the country. for i did not live so out of the world as that bo}^ who, as i hear, w^as put out to a farmer in the east part of the town, but ere long ran away and came home again, quite down at the heel and homesick. he had never seen such a dull and out-of-the-way place ; the folks were all gone off; why, yon couldn't even hear the whistle! i doubt if there is such a place in massachusetts now : — in truth, our village has become a butt * for one of those fleet railroad shafts, and o 'er our peaceful plain its soothing sound is — concord. sounds 129 the fitchburg railroad touches the pond about a hundred rods south of where i dwell. i usually go to the village along its causeway, and am, as it were, related to society by this link. the men on the freight trains, who go over the whole length of the road, bow to me as an old acquaintance, they pass me so often, and apparently they take me for an employee; and so i am. i, too, would fain be a track-repairer somewhere in the orbit of the earth. the whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter, sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer's yard, informing me that many restless city merchants are arriving within the circle of the town, or adven turous country traders from the other side. as they come under one horizon, they shout their warning to get off the track to the other, heard sometimes through the circles of two towns. here come your groceries, country; your rations, countiymen! nor is there any man so independent on his farm that he can say them nay. and here's your pay for them! screams the countryman's whistle; timber like long battering rams going twenty miles an hour against the city's walls, and chairs enough to seat all the weaiy and heavy laden that dwell within them. with such huge and lumbering civility the country hands a chair to the city. all the indian huckleberry hills are stripped, all the cranberry meadows are raked into the city. up comes the cotton, down goes the woven cloth; up comes the silk, down goes the woolen; up come the books, but down goes the wit that writes them. when i meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with planetary motion, — or, rather, like a comet, for the beholder knows not if with that velocity and with that direction it wilt ever revisit this system, since its orbit does not look like a returning curve, — with its steam cloud like a banner streaming behind in golden and silver wreaths, .like many a downy cloud 130 walden which i have seen, high in the heavens, unfolding its masses to the light, — as if this traveling demigod, this cloud-compeller, would ere long take the sunset sky for the livery of his train ; when i hear the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils (what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put into the new mythology i don't know), it seems as if the earth had got a race now worthy to inhabit it. if all were as it seems, and men made the elements their serv ants for noble ends! if the cloud that hangs over the engine were the perspiration of heroic deeds, or as beneficent as that which floats over the farmer's fields, then the elements and nature herself would cheerfully accompany men on their errands and be their escort. i watch the passage of the morning cars with the same feeling that i do the rising of the sun, which is hardly more regular. their train of clouds stretching far behind and rising higher and higher, going to heaven while the cars are going to boston, conceals the sun for a minute and casts my distant field into the shade, a celestial train beside which the petty train of cars which hugs the earth is but the barb of the spear. the stabler of the iron horse was up early this winter morning by the light of the stars amid the mountains, to fodder and harness his steed fire, too, was awakened thus early to put the vital heat in him and get him off. if the enterprise were as innocent as it is early! if the snow lies deep, they strap on his snow-shoes, and with the giant plow plow a furrow from the mountains to the seaboard, in which the cars, like a following drill-barrow, sprinkle all the restless men and floating merchandise in the country for seed. all day the fire-steed flies over the country, stopping only that his master may rest, and i am awakened by his trauip and defiant snort at midnight, when in some remote glen in the woods he fronts the elements incased in ice and snow ; and he will reach his stall only with the morning star, to sounds 131 start once more on his travels without rest or slumber. or per chance, at evening, i hear him in his stable blowing off the superfluous energy of the day, that he may calm his nerves and cool his liver and brain for a few hours of iron slumber. if the enterprise were as heroic and commanding as it is protracted and unwearied ! far through unfrequented woods on the confines of towns, where once only the hunter penetrated by day, in the darkest night dart these bright saloons without the knowledge of their inhabitants; this moment stopping at some brilliant station house in town or city, where a social crowd is gathered, the next in the dismal swamp, scaring the owl and fox. the start ings and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs in the village day. they go and come with such regularity and precision, and their whistle can be heard so far, that the farmers set their clocks by them, and thus one well-conducted institution regu lates a whole country. have not men improved somewhat in punctuality since the railroad was invented ? do they not talk and think faster in the depot than they did in the stage-office? there is something electrifying in the atmosphere of the former place. i have been astonished at the miracles it has wrought ; that some of my neighbors, who, i should have prophesied, once for all, would never go to boston by so prompt a conveyance, are on hand when the bell rings. to do things "railroad fashion" is now the by-word ; and it is worth the while to be warned so often and so sincerely by any power to get off its track. there is no stopping to read the riot act, no firing over the heads of the mob, in this case. we have constructed a fate, an atropos, that never turns aside. (let that be the name of your engine.) men are advertised that at a certain hour and minute these bolts will be shot toward particular points of the compass; yet it interferes with no man's business, and the children go to school on the other track. we live the steadier for it. we are all edu cated thus to be sons of tell. the air is full of invisible bolts. 132 walden every path but your own is the path of fate. keep on your own track, then. what recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery. it does not clasp its hands and pray to jupiter. i see these men every day go about their business with more or less courage and content, doing more even than they suspect, and perchance better employed than they could have consciously devised. i am less affected by their heroism who stood up for half an hour in the front line at buena vista than by the steady and cheerful valor of the men who inhabit the snow plow for their winter quarters; who have not merely the three o'clock in the morning courage, which bonaparte thought was the rarest, but whose courage does not go to rest so early, who go to sleep only when the storm sleeps or the sinews of their iron steed are frozen. on this morning of the great snow, perchance, which is still raging and chilling men's blood, i hear the muffled tone of their engine bell from out the fog bank of their chilled breath, which announces that the cars are coming, without long delay, notwithstanding the veto of a new england northeast snow storm, and i behold the plowmen covered with snow and rime, their heads peering above the mold-board which is turning down other than daisies and the nests of fieldmice, like bouldei-s of the sierra nevada, that occupy an outside place in the universe. commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert, adven turous, and unwearied. it is very natural in its methods withal, far more so than many fantastic enterprises and sentimental experiments, and hence its singular success. i am refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me, and i smell the stores which go dispensing their odors all the way from long wharf to lake champlain, reminding me of foreign parts, of coral reefs, and indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the extent of the globe. i feel more like a citizen of the world at the sight of the palm-leaf which will cover so many sounds 133 flaxen new england heads the next summer, the manilla hemp and cocoanut husks, the old junk, gninny bags, scrap iron, and rusty nails. this carload of torn sails is more legible and inter esting now than if they should be wrought into paper and printed books. who can avrite so graphically the history of the storms they have weathered as these rents have done? they are proof-sheets which need no correction. here goes lumber from the maine woods, which did not go out to sea in the last freshet, risen four dollars on the thousand because of what did go out or was split up : pine, spruce, cedar, — first, second, third, and fourth qualities, so lately all of one quality, to wave over the bear, and moose, and caribou. next rolls thomaston lime, a prime lot, which will get far among the hills before it gets slacked. these rags in bales, of all hues and qualities, the lowest condition to which cotton and linen descend,the final result of dress, — of patterns which are now no longer cried up, unless it be in milwaukie, as those splendid articles, english, french, or american prints, ginghams, muslins, etc., gathered from all quarters both of fashion and poverty, going to become paper of one color or a few shades only, on which forsooth will be written tales of real life, high and low, and founded on fact ! this closed car smells of salt fish, the strong new england and commercial scent, reminding me of the grand banks and the fisheries. who has not seen a salt fish, thoroughly cured for this world, so that nothing can spoil it, and putting the perse verance of the saints to the blush? with which you may sweep or pave the streets, and split your kindlings, and the teamster shelter himself and his lading against sun, wind, and rain behind it, — and the trader, as a concord trader once did, hang it up by his door for a sign when he commences business, until at last his oldest customer cannot tell surely whether it be animal, vegetable, or mineral, and yet it shall be as pure as a snow flake, and if it be put into a pot and boiled, will come out an excellent dun fish for a saturday's dinner. next spanish hides, 134 walden with the tails still preserving their twist and the angle of eleva tion they had when the oxen that wore them avere careering over the pampas of the spanish main, — a type of all obstinacy, and evincing how almost hopeless and incurable are all consti tutional vices. i confess that, practically speaking, when i have learned a man's real disposition, i have no hopes of chang ing it for the better or worse in this state of existence. as the orientals say, "a cur's tail may be warmed, and pressed, and bound round with ligatures, and after a twelve years' labor bestowed upon it, still it will retain its natural form." the only effectual cure for such inveteracies as these tails exhibit is to make glue of them, which i believe is what is usually done with them, and then they will stay put and stick. here is a hogs head of molasses or of brandy directed to john smith, cuttings ville, vermont, some trader among the green mountains, who imports for the farmers near his clearing, and now perchance stands over his bulkhead and thinks of the last arrivals on the coast, how they may affect the price for him, telling his custom ers this moment, as he has told them twenty times before this morning, that he expects some by the next train of prime quality. it is advertised in the cutting-sville times. while these things go up other things come down. warned by the whizzing sound, i look up from my book and see some tall pine, hewn on far northern hills, which has winged its way over the green mountains and the connecticut, shot like an arrow through the township within ten minutes, and scarce another eye beholds it ; going to be the mast of some great ammiraj. and hark! here comes the cattle-train bearing the cattle of a thousand hills, sheepcots, stables, and cow-yards in the air, drovers with their sticks, and shepherd boys in the midst of their flocks, all but the mountain pastures, whirled along like sounds • 135 leaves blown from the mountains by the september gales. the air is filled with the bleating of calves and sheep, and the hus tling of oxen, as if a pastoral valley were going by. when the old bell-wether at the head rattles his bell, the mountains do indeed skip like rams and the little hills like lambs. a carload of drovers, too, in the midst, on a level with their droves now, their vocation gone, but still clinging to their useless sticks as their badges of office. but their dogs, where are they? it is a stampede to them; they are quite thrown out; they have lost the scent. methinks i hear them barking behind the peterboro hills, or panting up the western slope of the green mountains. they will not be in at the death. their vocation, too, is gone. their fidelity and sagacity are below par now. they will slink back to their kennels in disgrace, or perchance run wild and strike a league with the wolf and the fox. so is your pastoral life whirled past and away. but the bell rings, and i must get off the track and let the cars go by : — wliat 's the railroad to me? i never go to see where it ends. it fills a few hollows, and makes banks for the swallows, it sets the sand a-blowing, and the blackberries a-growing, but i cross it like a cart-path in the woods. i will not have my eyes put out and m}^ ears si:)oiled by its smoke and steam and now that the cars are gone by and all the restless world with them, and the fishes in the pond no longer feel their rumbling, i am more alone than ever. for the rest of the long afternoon, perhaps, my meditations are interrupted only by the faint rattle of a carriage or team along the distant highway. sometimes, on sundays, i heard the bells, the lincoln, acton, 136 walden bedford, or concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness. at a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. all sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the inter vening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it. there came to me in this case a melody which the air had strained, and which had conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the sound which the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale to vale. the echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. it is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood; the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph. at evening, the distant lowing of some cow in the horizon beyond the woods sounded sweet and melodious, and at first i would mistake it for the voices of certain minstrels by whom i was sometimes serenaded, who might be straying over hill and dale ; but soon i was not unpleasantly disappointed when it was prolonged into the cheap and natural music of the cow. i do not mean to be satirical, but to express my appreciation of those youths' singing, when i state that i perceived clearly that it was akin to the music of the cow, and they were at length one articu lation of nature. regularly at half-past seven, in one part of the summer, after the evening train had gone by, the whippoorwills chanted their vespers for half an hour, sitting on a stump by my door, or upon the ridge pole of the house. they would begin to sing almost with as much precision as a clock, within five minutes of a particular time, referred to the setting of the sun, every evening. t had a rare opportunity to become acquainted with sounds 137 their habits. sometimes i heard four or five at once in different parts of the wood, by accident one a bar behind another, and so near me that 1 distinguished not only the cluck after each note, but often that singuhir buzzing sound like a fly in a spider's aveb, only jdroportionally louder. sometimes one would circle round and round me in the woods a few feet distant as if tethered by a string, when probably i was near its eggs. they sang at intervals throughout the night, and were again as musi cal as ever just before and about dawn. "when other birds are still the screech owls take up the strain, like mourning women their ancient u-lu-lu. their dismal scream is truly ben jonsonian. wise midnight hags! it is no honest and blunt tu-whit tu-who of the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn graveyard ditty, the mutual consolations of suicide lovers remembering tlie pangs and delights of supernal love in the infernal groves. yet i love to hear their wailing, their dole ful responses, trilled along the woodside; reminding me some times of music and singing birds; as if it were the dark and tearful side of music, the regrets and sighs that would fain be sung. they are the spirits, the low spirits and melancholy fore bodings, of fallen souls that once in human shape night-walked the earth and did the deeds of darkness, now expiating their sins with their wailing hymns or threnodies in the scenery of tlieir transgressions. they give me a new sense of the variety and capacity of that nature which is our common dwelling. oh-o-o-o-o that i never had been bor-r-r-r-n! sighs one on this side of the pond, and circles with the restlessness of despair to some new jderch on the gray oaks. then — that i never d been hor-r-r-r-n! echoes another on the farther side avith tremulous sincerity, and — bor-r-r-r-n! comes faintly from far in the lin coln woods. i was also serenaded by a hooting owl. near at hand you could fancy it the most melancholy sound in nature, as if she meant by this to stereotype and make permanent in her choir 138 walden the dying moans of a human being, — some poor weak relic of mortality who has left hope behind, and howls like an animal, yet with human sobs, on entering the dark valley, made more awful by a certain g-urgling melodiousness, — i find myself begin ning with the letters gi when i try to imitate it, — expressive of a mind which has reached the gelatinous mildewy stage in the mortification of all healthy arid courageous thought. it reminded me of ghouls and idiots and insane bowlings. but now one answers from far woods in a strain made really melodious by distance, — hoo hoo hoo hoorer lioo ; and indeed for the most part it suggested only pleasing associations, whether heard by day or night, summer or winter. i rejoice that there are owls. let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. it is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized. they represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have. all day the sun has shone on the surface of some savage savamp, where the single spruce stands hung with usnea lichens, and small hawks circulate above, and the chickadee lisps amid the evergreens, and the partridge and rabbit skulk be neath; but now a more dismal .and fitting day dawns, and a different race of creatures awakes to express the meaning of nature there. late in the evening i heard the distant rumbling of wagons over bridges, — a sound heard farther than almost any other at night, — the baying of dogs, and sometimes again the lowing of some disconsolate cow in a distant barn-yard. in the mean while all the shore rang with the trump of bullfrogs, the sturdj^ spirits of ancient wine-bibbers and wassailers, still unrepentant, trying to sing a catch in their stygian lake, — if the walden nymphs will pardon the comparison, for though there are almost no weeds, there are frogs there, — who would fain keep up the hilarious rules of their old festal tables, though their sounds 139 voices have waxed hoarse and solemnly gi-ave, mocking at mirth, and the wine has lost its flavor, and become only liquid to dis tend their paunches, and sweet intoxication never comes to drown the memory of the past, but mere saturation and water loggedness and distention. the most aldermanic, with his chin upon a heart-leaf, which serves for a napkin to his drooling chaps, under this northern shore quaffs a deep draught of the once scorned water, and passes round the cup with the ejaculation tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r-oonk! and straightway comes over the water from some distant cove the same pass word repeated, where the next in seniority and girth has gulped down to his mark ; and when this observance has made the cir cuit of the shores, then ejaculates the master of the ceremonies, with satisfaction, tr-r-r-oonk! and each in his turn repeats the same down to the least distended, leakiest, and flabbiest paunched, that there be no mistake; and then the bowl goes round again and again, until the sun disperses the morning mist, and only the patriarch is not under the pond, but vainly bellowing troonk from time to time, and pausing for a reply. i am not sure that i ever heard the sound of cock-crowing from my clearing, and i thought that it might be worth the while to keep a cockerel for his music merely, as a singing bird. the note of this once wild indian pheasant is certainly the most remarkable of any bird's, and if they could be naturalized with out being domesticated, it would soon become the most famous sound in our woods, surpassing the clangor of the goose and the hooting of the owl; and then imagine the cackling of the hens to fill the pauses when their lord's clarion rested! no wonder that man added this bird to his tame stock, — to say nothing of the eggs and drumsticks. to walk in a winter morn ing in a wood where these birds abounded, their native woods, and hear the wild cockerels crow on the trees, clear and shrill for miles over the resounding earth, drowning the feebler notes of other birds, — think of it ! it would put nations on the alert. 140 walden who would not be early to rise, and rise earlier and earlier every successive day of liis life, till he became unspeakably healthy, wealthy, and wise? this foreign bird's note is cele brated by the poets of all countries along with the notes of their native songsters. all climates agree with brave chanticleer. he is more indigenous even than the natives. his health is ever good, his lungs are sound, his spirits never flag. even the sailor on the atlantic and pacific is awakened by his voice; but its shrill sound never roused me from my slumbers. i kept neither dog, cat, cow, pig, nor hens, so that you would have said there was a deficiency of domestic sounds ; neither the churn, nor the spinning-wheel, nor even the singing of the kettle, nor the hiss ing of the urn, nor children crying, to comfort one. an old fashioned man would have lost his senses or died of ennui before this. not even rats in the wall, for they were starved out, or rather were never baited in, — only squirrels on the roof and under the floor, a whippoorwill on the ridge pole, a blue-jay screaming beneath the window, a hare or woodchuck under the house, a screech-owl or a cat-owl behind it, a flock of wild geese or a laughing loon on the pond, and a fox to bark in the night. not even a lark or an oriole, those mild plantation birds, ever visited my clearing. no cockerels to crow nor hens to cackle in the yard. no yard ! but unf enced nature reaching up to your very sills. a young forest growing up under your windows, and wild sumach and blackberry vines breaking through into your cellar; sturdy pitch-pines rubbing and creaking against the shingles for want of room, their roots reaching quite under the house. instead of a scuttle or a blind blown off in the gale, — a pine tree snapped off or torn up by the roots behind your house for fuel. instead of no path to the front-yard gate in the great snow, — no gate — no front-yard, — and no path to the civilized world ! solitude this is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. i go and come with a strange liberty in nature, a part of herself. as i walk along the stony shore of the pond in my shirt sleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, and i see nothing special to attract me, all the elements are unusually congenial to me. the bullfrogs trump to usher in the night, and the note of the whip poorwill is borne on the rippling wind from over the water. sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath ; yet, like the lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled. these small waves raised by the evening wind are as remote from storm as the smooth * reflecting surface. though it is now dark, the wind still blows and roars in the wood, the waves still dash, and some creatures lull the rest with their notes. the repose is never complete. the wildest animals do not repose, but seek their prey now ; the fox, and skunk, and rabbit now roam the fields and woods without fear. they are nature's watchmen, — links which connect the daj^s of animated life. when i return to my house i find that visitors have been there and left their cards, either a bunch of flowers, or a wreath of evergreen, or a name in pencil on a yelloav walnut leaf or chip. they who come rarely to the woods take some little piece of the forest into their hands to play with by the way, which they leave, either intentionally or accidentally. one has peeled a willow wand, woven it into a ring, and dropped it on my 141 142 walden table. i could always tell if visitors had called in my absence, either by the bended twigs or grass, or the print of their shoes, and generally of what sex or age or quality they were by some slight trace left, as a flower dropped, or a bunch of grass plucked and thrown away, even as far off as the railroad, half a mile distant, or bj^ the lingering odor of a cigar or pipe. nay, i was frequently notified of the passage of a traveler along the highway sixty rods off by the scent of his pipe. there is commonly sufficient space about us. our horizon is never quite at our elbows. the thick wood is not just at our door, nor the pond, but somewhat is always clearing, familiar and worn by ns, appropriated and fenced in some way, and reclaimed from nature. for what reason liave i this vast range and circuit, some square miles of unfrequented forest, for mj'' privacy, abandoned to me by men? my nearest neighbor is a" mile distant, and no house is ^dsible from any place but the hill tops within half a mile of my own. i have my horizon bounded by woods all to myfeelf ; a distant vieav of the railroad where it touches the pond on the one hand, and of the fence which skirts the woodland road on the other. but for the most part it is as solitary where i live as on the prairies. it is as much asia or africa as new england. i have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself. at night there was never a traveler passed my house, or knocked at my door, more than if i were the first or last man ; unless it were in the spring, when at long intervals some came from the village to fish for pouts, — they plainly fished much more in the walden pond of their own natures, and baited their hooks wdth darkness, — but they soon retreated, usually with light baskets, and left "the world to darkness and to me." and the black kernel of the night was never profaned by any human neighborhood. i believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, and christianity and candles have been introduced. solitude 143 yet i experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object, even for the poor misanthrope and most melan choly man. there can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and has his senses still. there was never yet such a storm but it was jeolian music to a healthy and innocent ear. nothing can rightly compel a simple and brave man to a vulgar sadness. "while i enjoy the friendship of the seasons i trust that nothing can make life a burden to me. the gentle rain which waters my beans and keeps me in the house today is not drear and melancholy, but good for me, too. though it prevents my hoeing them, it is of far more worth than my hoeing. if it should continue so long as to cause the seeds to rot in the ground and destroy the potatoes in the low lands, it would still be good for the gtass on the uplands, and, being good for the grass, it would be good for me. sometimes, when i compare myself with other men, it seems as if i were more favored by the gods than they, beyond any deserts that i am conscious of ; as if i had a warrant and surety at their hands which my fellows have not, and were especially guided and guarded. i do not flatter myself, but if it be possible they flatter me." i have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed b}^ a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few weeks after i came to the woods, when, for an hour, i doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. to be alone was something unpleasant. but i was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery. in the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, i was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neigh borhood insignificant, and i have never thought of them since. 144 walden eveiy little pine needle exj^anded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. i was so distinctly made aware of the pres ence of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that i thought no place could ever be strange to me again. — mourning untimely consumes the sad; few are their days in the land of the living, beautiful daughter of tosear. some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rain storms in the spring or fall, whioh confined me to the house for the afternoon as well as the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless roar and pelting ; when an early twilight ushered in a long evening in which many thoughts had time to take root and unfold themselves. in those driving northeast rains which tried the village houses so, when the maid stood ready with mop and ])ail in front of entries to keep the deluge out, i sat behind my door in my little house, which was all entry, and thoroughly enjoyed its protection. in one heavy thunder shower the light ning struck a large pitch-pine across the pond, making a very conspicuous and perfectly regular spiral groove from top to bottom, an inch or more deep, and four or five inches wide, as you would groove a walking-stick. i passed it again the other day, and was struck with awe on looking up and beholding that mark, now more distinct than ever, where a terrific and resist less bolt came down out of the harmless sky eight years ago. men frequently say to me, ^'i should think you would feel lone some down there, and want to be nearer to folks, rainy and snowy days and nights especially." i am tempted to reply to such, — this whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. how far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant inhabit ants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appre ciated by our instruments'? why should i feel lonely? is not solitude 145 our planet in the milky way? this which you put seems to me not to be the most important question. what sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? i have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another. what do we want most to dwell near to? not to many men surely, the depot, the post office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the school-house, the grocery, beacon hill, or the five points, where men most con gregate, but to the perennial source of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots in that direction. this will vary with different natures, but this is the place where a wise man will dig his cellar. ... i one evening overtook one of my townsmen, who has accumulated what is called "a hand some proi^erty," — though i never got a fair view of it, — on the walden road, driving a pair of cattle to market, who inquired of me how i could bring my mind to give up so many of the comforts of life. i answered that i was very sure i liked it passably well; i was not joking. and so i went home to my bed, and left him to pick his way through the darkness and the mud to brighton, — or bright-town, — avhich place he would reach some time in the morning. any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a dead man makes indifferent all times and i:)laces. the place where that may occur is always the same, and indescribably pleasant to all our senses. for the most part we allow only outlying and tran sient circumstances to make our occasions. they are, in fact, the cause of our distraction. nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being. next to us the grandest laws are continually being executed. next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are. "how vast and profound is the influence of the subtile })owers of heaven and of earth !" 146 walden "we seek to perceive tliem, and we do not see them ; we seek to hear them, and we do not hear them ; identified with the sub stance of things, they cannot be separated from them." "they cause that in all the universe men purify and sanctify their hearts, and clothe themselves in their holiday garments to offer sacrifices and oblations to their ancestors. it is an ocean of subtile intelligences. they are everywhere, above us, on our left, on our right; they environ us on all sides." we are the subjects of an experiment which is not a little interesting to me. can we not do without the society of our gossips a little while under these circumstances, — have our own thoughts to cheer us? confucius says truly, "virtue does not remain as an abandoned orphan; it must of necessity have neighbors." with thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. by a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent. we are not wholly involved in nature. i may be either the driftwood in the stream, or indra in the sky looking down on it. i may be affected by a theatrical exhi bition; on the other hand, i may not he affected by an actual event which appears to concern me much more. i only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections ; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which i can stand as remote from myself as from another. however intense my experience, i. am conscious of the presence of any criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it ; and that is no more i than it is you. when the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. it was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned. this doubleness may easily make us poor neigh bors and friends sometimes. i find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. solitude 147 to be in eompauy, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissij^ating'. i love to be alone. 1 never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. we are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. a man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. the really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of cam bridge college is as solitary as a dervish in the desert. the farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing* or chopping, and not feel lonesome, because he is emploj^ed; but when he comes, home at night he cannot sit down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but must be where he can "see the folks," and recreate, and as he thinks remunerate, him self for his day's solitude; and hence he wonders how the stu dent can sit alone in the house all night and most of the day without ennui and "the blues" ; but he does not realize that the student, though in the house, is still at work in his field, and chopping in his woods, as the farmer in his, and in turn seeks the same recreation and society that the latter does, though it may be a more condensed form of it. society is commonly too cheap. we meet at very short inter vals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. we meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. we have to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war. we meet at the postoffice, and at the sociable, and about the fireside every night ; we live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another, and i think that we thus lose some respect for one another. certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communications. con sider the girls in a factory, — never alone, hardly in their dreams. it would be better if there were but one inhabitant to a square . 148 walden mile, as where i live. the value of a man is not in his skin, that we should touch him. i have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine and exliaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved by the grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness, his diseased imagination surrounded him, and which he believed to be real. so also, owing to bodily and mental health and strength, we may be continually cheered by a like but more normal and natural society, and come to know that we are never alone. i have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls. let me suggest a few com parisons, that some one may convey an idea of my situation. i am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than walden pond itself. what company has that lonely lake, i pray? and yet it has not the blue devils, but the blue angels in it, in the azure tint of its waters. the sun is alone, except in thick weather, when there sometimes appear to be two, but one is a mock sun. god is alone, — but the devil, he is far from being alone ; he sees a great deal of company ; he is legion. i am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a humble bee. i am no more lonely than the mill brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an april shower, or a january thaw, or the first spider in a new house. t have occasional adsits in the long winter evenings, when the snow falls fast and the wind howls in the wood, from an old settler and original proprietor, who is reported to have dug walden pond, and stoned it, and fringed it with pine woods; who tells me stories of old time and of new eternity; and be tween us we manage to pass a cheerful evening with social mirth and pleasant views of things, even without apples or cider, — a most wise and humorous friend, whom i love much, who keeps himself more secret than ever did goffe or whalley ; and though solitude 149 he is thought to be dead, none can show where he is buried. an elderly dame, too, dwells in my neighborhood, invisible to most l^ersons, in whose odorous herb garden i love to stroll some times, gathering simples and listening to her fables; for she has a genius of unequaled fertility, and her memory runs back farther than mythology, and she can tell me the original of every fable, and on what fact every one is founded, for the incidents occurred when she was young. a ruddy and lusty old dame, who delights in all weathers and seasons, and is likelj^ to outlive all her children yet. the indescribable innocence and beneficence of nature, — of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter, — such health, such cheer, they afford forever! and such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all nature would be affected, and the sun's brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a just cause giieve. shall i not have intelligence with the earth? am i not partly leaves and vegetable mold myself? what is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented? not my or thy gteat-grandfather's, but our gi-eat-grandmother nature's universal, vegetable, botanic medicines, by which she has kept herself young always, outlived so many old parrs in her day, and fed her health with their decaying fatness. for my panacea, instead of one of those quack vials of a mixture dipped from acheron and the dead sea, which come out of those long shallow black-schooner-looking wagons which we sometimes see made to carry bottles, let me have a draught of undiluted morning air. morning air ! if men will not drink of this at the fountain-head of the day, why, then, we must even bottle up some and sell it in the shops, for the benefit of those who have lost their subscription ticket to morning time in this world. but remember, it will not keep quite till noonday even in the coolest cellar, but drive out the stopples long ere that 150 walden and follow westward the steps of aurora. i am no worshiper of hygeia, who was the daughter of that old herb-doetor ^seu lajnus, and who is represented on monuments holding a serpent in one hand, and in the other a cup out of which the serpent sometimes drinks; but rather of hebe, cupbearer to jupiter, avho was the daughter of juno and wild lettuce, and who had the power of restoring gods and men to the vigor of youth. she was probably the only thoroughly sound-conditioned, healthy, and robust young lady that ever walked the globe, and wherever, she came it was spring. vi visitors i think that i love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man that comes in my way. i am naturally no hermitj but might possibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room, if my business called me thither. i had three chairs in my house : one for solitude, two for friendship, three for societj^. when visitors came in larger and unexpected numbers, there was but the third chair for them all, but they generally economized the room by standing up. it is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain. i have had twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often parted without being aware that we had come very near to one another. many of our houses, both public and private, with their almost innu merable apartments, their huge halls and their cellars for the storage of wines and other munitions of peace, appear to me extravagantly large for their inhabitants. they are so vast and magnificent that the latter seem to be only vermin which infest them. i am surprised when the herald blows his summons before some tremont or astor or middlesex house, to see come creeping out over the piazza for all inhabitants a ridiculous mouse, which soon again slinks into some hole in the pavement. one inconvenience i sometimes experienced in so small a house, the difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when we began to utter the big thoughts in big words. you want room for your thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they make their port. the bullet 151 152 walden of your thought must have overcome its lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last and steady course before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may plow out again through the side of his head. also, our sentences wanted room to unfold and form their columns in the interval. individuals, like nations, must have suitable broad and natural boundaries, even a considerable neutral ground, between them. i have found it a singular luxury to talk across the pond to a comi:)anion on the opposite side. in my house we were so near that we could not begin to hear, — we could not speak low enough to be heard ; as when you throw two stones into calm water so near that they break each other's undulations. if we are merely loquacious and loud talkers, then we can afford to stand very near togetlier, cheek by jowl, and feel each other's breath; but if we speak reservedly and thoughtfully, we want to be farther apart, that all animal heat and moisture may have a chance to evaporate. if we would enjoy the most intimate society with that in each of us which is without, or above, being spoken to, we must not only be silent, but commonly so far apart bodily that we cannot possibly hear each other's voice in any case. referred to this standard, speech is for the convenience of those who are hard of hearing; but there are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout. as the conversation began to assume a loftier and grander tone, we gradually shoved our chairs farther apart till they touched the avail in oj^posite corners, and then commonly there was not room enough. my "best" room, however, my withdrawing room, always ready for company, on whose carpet the sun rarely fell, was the pine wood behind my house. thither in summer days, avhen distingtiished guests came, i took them, and a priceless domestic swept the floor and dusted the furniture and kept the things in order. if one guest came he sometimes partook of my frugal meal and it was no interruption to conversation to be stirring a hasty visitors 153 pudding, or watching the rising and maturing of a loaf of bread in the ashes, in the meanwhile. but if twenty came and sat in ray house, there was nothing said about dinner, though there might be bread enough for two, more than if eating were a forsaken habit; but we naturally practiced abstinence; and this was never felt to be an offense against hospitality, but the most ]n-oper and considerate course. the waste and decay of physical life, which so often needs repair, seemed miraculously retarded in such a case, and the vital vigor stood its gtound. i could entertain thus a thousand as well as twenty; and if any ever went away disappointed or hungry from my house when they found me at home, they may depend upon it that i sympathized with them, at least. so easy is it, though many housekeepers doubt it, to establish new and better customs in the place of the old. you need not rest your reputation on the dinners you give. for my own part, i was never so effectually deterred from frequenting a man's house, by any kind of cerberus whatever, as by the parade one made about dining me, which i took to be a very polite and roundabout hint never to trouble him so again. i think i shall never revisit those scenes. i should be proud to have for the motto of my cabin those lines of spenser which one of my visitors inscribed on a yellow walnut leaf for a card : arrived there, the little house they fill, ne looke for entertainment where none was; rest is their feast, and all things at their will : the noblest mind the best contentment has. when winslow, afterward governor of the plj^mouth colony, went with a companion on a visit of ceremony to massasoit on foot through the woods, and arrived tired and hungry at his lodge, they were well received by the king, but nothing was said about eating that day. when the night arrived, to quote their own words, — "he laid us on the bed with himself and his wife, they at the one end and we at the other, it being only 154 walden plank, laid a foot from the ground, and a thin mat upon them. two more of his chief men, for want of room, pressed by and upon us ; so that we were worse weary of our lodging than of our journey." at one o'clock the next day massasoit "brought two fishes that he had shot," about thrice as big as a bream; "these being boiled, there were at least forty looked for a share in them. the most ate of them. this meal only we had in two nights and a day; and had not one of us bought a partridge, we had taken our journey fasting." fearing that they would be light-headed for want of food and also sleep, owing to "the savages' barbarous singing (for they used to sing themselves asleep)," and that they might get home avhile they had strength to travel, they departed. as for lodging, it is true they were but poorly entertained, though what they found an inconve nience was no doubt intended for an honor; but as far as eating was concerned, i do not see how the indians could have done better. they had nothing to eat themselves, and they were wiser than to think that apologies could supply the place of food to their guests; so they drew their belts tighter and said nothing about it. another time when winslow visited them, it being a season of plenty with them, there was no deficiency in this respect. as for men, they will hardly fail one anywhere. i had more visitors while i lived in the woods than at any other period of my life ; i mean that i had some. i met several there under more favorable circumstances than i could anywhere else. but fcaver came to see me upon trivial business. in this respect, my comjdany was winnowed by my mere distance from town. i had withdrawn so far within the great ocean of solitude, into which the rivers of society empty, that for the most part, so far as my needs were concerned, only the finest sediment was deposited around me. besides, there were wafted to me e\ddences of unexplored and uncultivated continents on the other side. who should come to my lodge this morning but a true visitors 155 homeric or paphlagoiiian man, — he had so suitable and poetic a name that i am sorry i cannot print it here, — a canadian, a wood-chopper and post-maker, who can hole fifty posts in a day, who made his last supper on a woodchuck which his dog had caug'ht. he, too, has heard of homer, and, "if it were not for books," would "not know what to do rainy days," though per haps he has not read one wholly through for many rainy seasons. some priest who could pronounce the greek itself taught him to read his verse in the testament in his native parish far away; and now i must translate to him, while he holds the book, achilles' reproof to patroclus, for his sad countenance. — "why are you in tears, patroclus, like a young girl?" — or have you alone heard some news from phtliia? they say that menoetius lives yet, son of actor, and peleus lives, sou of -^acus, among the myrmidons, either of whom having died, we should greatly grieve. he says, "that's good." he has a great bundle of w^hite-oak bark under his arm for a sick man, gathered this sunday morn ing. "i suppose there's no harm in going after such a thing today," says he. to him homer was a great writer, though what his writing was about he did not know. a more simple and natural man it would be hard to find. vice and disease, which cast such a somber moral hue over the world, seemed to have hardly any existence for him. he was about twenty-eight years old, and had left canada and his father's house a dozen years before to work in the states, and earn money to buy a farm with at last, perhaps in his native country. he was cast in the coarsest mold ; a stout but sluggish body, yet gracefully carried, with a thick sunburnt neck, dark bushy hair, and dull sleepy blue eyes, which were occasionally lit up with expression. he wore a flat gray cloth cap, a dingy wool-colored greatcoat, and cowhide boots. he was a great consumer of meat, usually carrying his dinner to his work a couple of miles past my 156 walden" house, — for he chopped all summer, — in a tin pail ; cold meats, often cold woodchucks, and coffee in a stone bottle which dan gled by a string from his belt ; and sometimes he offered me a drink. he came along early, crossing my beanfield, though with out anxiety or haste to get to his work, such as yankees exhibit. he wasn't a-going to hurt himself. he didn't care if he only earned his board. frequently he would leave his dinner in the bushes, when his dog had caught a woodchuck by the way, and go back a mile and a half to dress it and leave it in the cellar of the house where he boarded, after deliberating first for half an hour whether he could not sink it in the pond safely till night fall, — loving to dwell long upon these themes. he would say, as he went by in the morning: "how thick the pigeons are! if working every day were not ray trade, i could get all the meat i should want by hunting, — pigeons, woodchucks, rabbits, partridges, — by gosh ! i could get all i should want for a week in one day." he was a skilful chopper, and indulged in some flourishes and ornaments in his art. he cut his trees level and close to the ground, that the sprouts which came up afterward might be more vigorous and a sled might slide over the stumps; and instead of leaving a whole tree to support his corded wood, he would pare it away to a slender stake or splinter which you could break off with your hand at last. he interested me because he was so quiet and solitary and so happy withal: a well of good humor and contentment which overflowed at his eyes. his mirth was without alloy. some times i saw him at his work in the woods, felling trees, and he would greet me with a laugh of inexpressible satisfaction, and a salutation in canadian french, though he spoke english as well. when i approached him he would suspend his work, and with half-suppressed mirth lie along the trunk of a pine which he had felled, and, peeling off the inner bark, roll it up into a ball and chew it while he laughed and talked. such an exubernnce visitors 157 of animal spirits had he that he sometimes tumbled down and rolled on the ground with laughter at anything which made him think and tickled him. looking round upon the trees he would exclaim, — "by george! i can enjoy myself well enough here chopping ; i want no better sport." sometimes, when at leisure, he amused himself all day in the woods with a pocket pistol, firing salutes to himself at regular intervals as he walked. in the winter he had a fire by which at noon he warmed his coffee in a kettle ; and as he sat on a log to eat his dinner the chicka dees would sometimes come round and alight on his arm and peck at the potato in his fingers ; and he said that he "liked to have the little fellers about him." in him the animal man chiefly was developed. in physical endurance and contentment he was cousin to the pine and the rock. i asked him once if he was not sometimes tired at night, after working all day; and he answered with a sincere and serious look, "gorrappit, i never was tired in my life." but the intellectual and what is called spiritual man in him were slumbering as in an infant. he had been instructed only in that innocent and ineffectual way in which the catholic priests teach the aborigines, by which the pupil is never educated to the degree of consciousness, but only to the degree of trust and reverence, and a child is not made a man, but kept a child. when nature made him, she gave him a strong body and con tentment for his portion, and propped him on every side with reverence and reliance, that he might live out his threescore years and ten a child. he was so genuine and unsophisticated that no introduction would serve to introduce him, more than if you introduced a woodchuck to your neighbor. he had got to find him out as you did. he would not play any part. men paid him wages for work, and so helped to feed and clothe him ; but he never exchanged opinions with them. he was so simply iand naturally humble — if he can be called humble who never aspires — that humility was no distinct quality in him, nor could he 158 walden conceive of it. wiser men were demigods to him. if you told him that such a one was coming, he did as if he thought that anything so grand would expect nothing of himself, but take all the responsibility on itself, and let him be forgotten still. he never heard the sound of praise. he particularly reverenced the writer and the preacher. their performances were miracles. when i told him that i wrote considerably, he thought for a long time that it was merely the handwriting which i meant, for he could write a remarkably good hand himself. i sometimes found the name of his native parish handsomely written in the snow by the highway, with the proper french accent, and knew that he had i^assed. i asked him if he ever wished to write his thoughts. he said that he had read and written letters for those who could not, but he never tried to write thoughts, — no, he could not, he could not tell what to put first, it would kill him, and then there was spelling to be attended to at the same itime ! i heard that a distinguished wise man and reformer asked him if he did not want the world to be changed ; but heanswered with a chuckle of surprise in his canadian accent, not knowing that the question had ever been entertained before, "no, i like it well enough." it would have suggested many things to a phi losopher to have dealings with him. to a stranger he appeared to know nothing of things in general ; yet i sometimes saw in him a man whom i had jiot seen before, and i did not know whether he was as wise as shakspeare or as simply ignorant as a child, whether to susjdect him of a fine poetic consciousness or of stupidity. a townsman told me that when he met him saun tering through the village in his small close-fitting cap, and whistling to himself, he reminded him of a prince in disguise. his only books were an almanac and an arithmetic, in which last he was considerably expert. the former was a sort of cyelo pasdia to him, which he supposed to contain an abstract of human knowledge, as indeed it does to a considerable extent. i loved to sound him on the various reforms of the day, and he visitors 159 iiqver failed to look at them in the most simple and practical light. he had never heard of such things before. could he do without factories? i asked. he had worn the home-made ver mont gray, he said, and that was good. could he dispense with tea and coffee? did this country aftord any beverage besides water? he had soaked hemlock leaves in water and drunk it, and thought that was better than water in warm weather. when i asked him if he could do without money, he showed the con venience of money in such a way as to suggest and coincide with the most j^hiiosophical accounts of the origin of this institution, and the very derivation of the word pecunia. if an ox were his i3roperty, and he wished to get needles and thread at the store, he thought it would be inconvenient, and impossible soon, to go on mortgaging some portion of the creature each time to that amount. he could defend many institutions better than any philosopher, because, in describing them as they concerned him, he gave the true reason for their prevalence, and specula tion had not suggested to him any other. at another time, hear ing plato's definition of a man, — a biped without feathers, — and that one exhibited a cock plucked and called it plato's man, he thought it an important difference that the knees bent the wrong way. he would sometimes exclaim: "how i love to talk! by george, i could talk all day!" i asked him once, when i had not seen him for many months, if he had got a new idea this summer. "good lord," said he, "a man that has to work as i do, if he does not forget the ideas he has had, he will do well. maybe the man you hoe with is inclined to race; then, by gorry, your mind must be there; you think of weeds." he would sometimes ask me first, on such occasions, if i had made any improvement. one winter day i asked him if he was always satisfied with himself, wishing to suggest a substitute within him for the priest without, and some higher motive for living. "satisfied !" said he; "some men are satisfied with one thing, and some with another. one man, perhaps, if he has got enough. i 160 walden will be satisfied to sit all day with his back to the fire and his belly to the table, by george !" yet i never, by any maneuver ing, could get him to take the spiritual view of things; the highest that he appeared to conceive of was a simple expe diency^, such as you might expect an animal to appreciate ; and this, practically, is true of most men. if i suggested any im provement in his mode of life, he merely answered, without expressing any regtet, that it was too late. yet he thoroughly believed in honesty and the like virtues. there was a certain positive originality, however slight, to be detected in him, and i occasionally observed that he was thinking for himself and expressing his own opinion, a phe nomenon so rare that i would any day walk ten miles to observe it, and it amounted to the reorigination of many of the institu tions of society. though he hesitated, and perhaps failed to express himself distinctly, he always had a presentable thought behind. yet his thinking was so primitive and immersed in his animal life, that, though more promising than a merely learned man's, it rarely ripened to anything which can be reported. he suggested that there might be men of genius in the lowest grades of life, however permanently humble and illiterate, who take their own view always, or do not pretend to see at all ; who are as bottomless even as walden pond was thought to be, though they may be dark and muddy. many a traveler came out of his way to see me and the inside of my house, and, as an excuse for calling, asked for a glass of water. i told them that i drank at the pond, and pointed thither, offering to lend them a dijdper. far off as i lived, i was not exempted from that annual visitation which occurs, methinks, about the first of april, when everybody is on the move ; and i had my share of good luck, though there were some curious specimens among my visitors. half-witted men from the alms house and elsewhere came to see me ; but i endeavored to make visitoes 161 them exercise all the wit they had, and make their confessions to me ; in such cases making wit the theme of our conversation ; and so was compensated. indeed, i found some of them to be wiser than the so-called overseers of the poor and selectmen of the town, and thought it was time that the tables were turned. with respect to wit, i learned that there was not much differ ence between the half and the whole. one daj^, in particular, an inoffensive, simple-minded pauper, whom with others t had often seen used as fencing stuff, standing or sitting on a bushel in the fields to keep cattle and himself from straying, visited me, and expressed a wish to live as i did. he told me, with the utmost simplicity and truth, quite superior, or rather inferior, to any thing that is called humility, that he was "deficient in intellect." these were his words. the lord had made him so, yet he sup posed the lord cared as much for him as for another. "i have always been so," said he, "from my childhood; i never had much mind; i was not like other children; i am weak in the head. it was the lord's will, i suppose." and there he was to prove the truth of his words. he was a metaphysical puzzle to me. i have rarely met a fellow-man on such promising ground, — it was so simple and sincere and so true, all that he said. and, true enough, in proportion as he appeared to humble himself was he exalted. i did not know at first but it was the result of a wise policy. it seemed that from such a basis of truth and frank ness as the poor weak-headed pauper had laid, our intercourse might go forward to something better than the intercourse of sages. i had some guests from those not reckoned commonly among the town's poor, but who should be ; who are among the world's poor, at any rate; guests who appeal, not to your hospitality, but to your jiospitalality; who earnestly wish to be helped, and preface their appeal with the information that they are resolved, for one thing, never to help themselves. i require of a visitor that he be not actually starving, though he may have the very 162 walden best appetite in the world, however he got it. objects of charity are not guests. men who did not know when their visit had terminated, though i went about my business again, answering them from greater and greater remoteness. men of almost every degree of wit called on me in the migrating season. some who had more wits than they knew what to do with ; runaway slaves with plantation manners, who listened from time to time, like the fox in the fable, as if they heard the hounds a-baying on their track, and looked at me beseechingly, as much as to say, — christian, will you send me backf one real runaway slave, among the rest, whom i helped to for ward toward the north star. men of one idea, like a hen with one chicken, and that a duckling ; men of a thousand ideas, and unkempt heads, like those hens which are made to take charge of a hundred chickens, all in pursuit of one bug, a score of them lost in every morning's dew, — and become frizzled and mang>' in consequence ; men of ideas instead of legs, a sort 'of intellec tual centipede that made you crawl all over. one man proposed a book in which visitors should write their names, as at the white mountains ; but, alas, i have too good a memory to make that necessary. i could not but notice some of the peculiarities of my visitors. girls, and boys and j^oung women generally seemed glad to be in the woods. they looked in the i)ond and at the flowers, and imjiroved their time. men of business, even farmers, thought only of solitude and employment, and of the great distance at which i dwelt from something or other; and though they said that they loved a ramble in the woods occasionally, it was obvious that they did not. restless committed men, whose time was all taken up in getting a living or keeping it; ministers who spoke of god as if they enjoyed a monopoly of the subject, who could not bear all kinds of opinions; doctors, lawyers, uneasy housekeepers who pried into my cupboard and bed when i was visitors 163 out, — how came mrs. to know that my sheets were not as clean as hers?— young men who had ceased to be young, and had conchided that it was safest to follow the beaten track of the professions, — all these generally said that it was not pos sible to do so much good in my position. ay! there was the rub. the old and infirm and the timid, of avhatever age or sex, thought most of sickness, and sudden accident and death; to them life seemed full of danger, — what danger is there if you don't think of any? — and they thought that a prudent man would carefully select the safest position, where dr. b. might be on hand at a moment's warning. to them the village was literally a com-munity, a league for mutual defense, and you would suppose that they would not go a-huekleberrying without a medicine chest. the amount of it is, if a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. a man sits as many risks as he runs. finally, there were the self-styled reformers, the greatest bores of all, who thought that i was forever singing, — this is the house that i built; this is the man that lives in the house that i built ; but they did not know that the third line was, — these are the folks that worry the man that lives in the house that i built. i did not fear the hen-harriers, for i kept no chickens; but i feared the men-harriers rather. i had more cheering visitors than the last. children come a-berrying, railroad men taking a sunday morning walk in clean shirts, fishermen and hunters, poets and philosophers, in short, all honest pilgrims, who came out to the woods for free dom's sake, and really left the village behind, i was ready to greet with, — "welcome, englishmen! welcome, englishmen!'* for i had had communication with that race. vii the beanfield meanwhile my beans, the length of whose rows, added together, was seven miles already planted, were impatient to be hoed, for the earliest had grown considerably before the latest were in the ground; indeed, they were not easily to be put off. what was the meaning of this so steady and self-respecting, this small herculean labor, i knew not. i came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than i wanted. they attached me to the earth, and so i got strength like antaeus. but why should i raise them? only heaven knows. this was my curious labor all summer, — to make this portion of the earth's surface, which had yielded only cinquefoil, blackberries, johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wild fruits and pleasant flowers, produce instead this pulse. what shall i learn of beans or beans of me? i cherish them, i hoe them, early and late i have an eye to them ; and this is my day's work. it is a fine broad leaf to look on. my auxiliaries are the dews and rains which water this dry soil, and what fertility is in the soil itself, which for the most jdart is lean and effete. my enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks. the last have nibbled for me a quarter of an acre clean. but what right had i to oust johnswort and the rest, and break up their ancient herb garden? soon, however, the remaining beans avill be too tough for them, and go forward to meet new foes. when i was four years old, as i well remember, i was brought from boston to this my native town, through these very woods and this field, to the pond. it is one of the oldest scenes stamped 164 the beanfield 165 on my memory. and now tonight my flute has waked the echoes over that very water. the pines still stand here older tlian i ; or, if some have fallen, i have cooked my supper with their stumps, and a new growth is rising all around, preparing an other aspect for new infant eyes. almost the same johnswort springs from the same perennial root in this pasture, and even i have at length helped to clothe that fabulous landscape of my infant dreams, and one of the results of my presence and influ ence is seen in these bean leaves, corn blades, and potato vines. i planted about two acres and a half of upland; and it was only about fifteen years since tlie land was cleared, and i m.yself had got out two or three cords of stumps, i did not give it any manure; but in the course of the summer it aj^peared by the aitow-heads which i turned up in hoeing, that an extinct nation had anciently dwelt here and planted corn and beans ere white men came to clear the land, and so, to some extent, had exhausted the soil for this very crop. before yet any woodchuck or squirrel had run across the road, or the sun had got above the shrub-oaks, while all the dew was on, though the farmers warned me against it, — i would advise you to do all your work if possible while the dew is on, — i began to level the ranks of haughty weeds in my beanfield and throw dust upon their heads. early in the morning i worked bare footed, dabbling like a plastic artist in the dewy and crumbling sand, but later in the day the sun blistered my feet. there the sun lighted me to hoe beans, pacing slowly backward and for ward over that yellow gravelly upland, between the long green rows, fifteen rods, the one end terminating in a shrub-oak copse where i could rest in the shade, the other in a blackberry field where the green berries deepened their tints by the time i had made another bout. removing the weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean stems, and encouraging this weed which i had sown, making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and iqq walden millet grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass, — this avas my daily work. as i had little aid from horses or cattle, or hired men or boys, or improved implements of husbandry, i was much slower, and became much more intimate with my beans than usual. but labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is j^erhaps never the worst form of idleness. it has a constant and imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a classic result. a very agricola lahoriosus was i to travelers bound westward through lincoln and wayland to nobody knows where; they sitting at their ease in gigs, with elbows on knees, and reins loosely hanging in festoons; i the home-staying laborious native of the soil. but soon my homestead was out of their sight and thought. it was the only open and cultivated field for a great distance on either side of the road ; so they made the most of it ; and sometimes the man in the field heard more of travelers' gossip and comment than was meant for his ears: "beans so late! peas so late!" — for i continued to plant when others had begun to hoe, — the minis terial husbandman had not suspected it. "corn, my boy, for fodder; corn for fodder." "does he live there?" asks the black bonnet of the gray coat ; and the hard-featured farmer reins up his grateful dobbin to inquire what you are doing where he sees no manure in the furrow, and recommends a little chij:) dirt, or any little waste stuff, or it may be ashes or plaster. but here were two acres and a half of furrows, and only a hoe for cart and two hands to draw it, — there being an aversion to other carts and ho.rses, — and chip dirt far* away. fellow-travelers as they rattled by compared it aloud with the fields which they had passed, so that i came to know how i stood in the agi'icul tural world. this was one field not in mr. coleman's report. and, by the way, who estimates the value of the crop which nature yields in the still wilder fields unimproved by man? the crop of english hay is carefully weighed, the moisture calcu lated, the silicates and the potash; but in all dells and pond the beanfield 16? holes in the woods and pastures and swamps gi'ows a rich and various crop only unreaped by man. mine was, as it were, the connecting link between wild and cultivated fields; as some states are civilized, and others half-civilized, and others savage or barbarous, so my field was, though not in a bad sense, a half cultivated field. they were beans cheerfully returning to their wild and primitive state that i cultivated, and my hoe plaj^ed the bans des vaches for them. near at hand, upon the topmost spray of a birch, sings the brown thrasher — or red mavis, as some love to call him — all the morning, glad of your society, that would find out another farmer's field if yours were not here. "while you are planting the seed, he cries, — "droj) it, drop it, — cover it up, cover it up, — pull it up, pull it up, pull it up." but this was not corn, and so it was safe from such enemies as he. you may wonder what his rigmarole, his amateur paganini performances on one string or on twenty, have to do with your planting, and yet prefer it to leached ashes or plaster. it was a cheap sort of top dressing in which i had entire faith. as i drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe, i disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years lived under these heavens, and their small implements of war and hunting were brought to the light of this modern day. they lay mingled with other natural stones, some of which bore the marks of having been burned by indian fires, and some by the sun, and also bits of pottery and glass brought hither by the recent cultivators of the soil. when my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant and im measurable crop. it was no longer beans that i hoed, nor i that hoed beans; and i remembered with as much pity as pride, if i remembered at all, my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios. the night-hawk circled overhead in the sunny afternoons — for i sometimes made a day of it — 168 walden like a mote in the eye, or in heaven's eye, falling from time to time with a swoop and a sound as if the heavens were rent, torn at last to very rags and tatters, and yet a seamless cope re mained; small imps that fill the air and lay their eggs on the ground in bare sand or rocks on the tops of hills, where few have found them; graceful and slender, like ripples caught up from the pond, as leaves are raised by the wind to float in the heavens; such kindredship is in nature. the hawk is aerial brother of the wave which he sails over and surveys, those his perfect air-inflated wings ansavering to the elemental unfledged pinions of the sea. or sometimes i watched a pair of hen hawks circling high in the sky, alternately soaring and descend ing, approaching and leaving one another, as if they were the embodiment of my own thoughts. or i was attracted by the passage of wild pigeons from this wood to that, with a slight quivering winnowing sound and carrier haste; or from under a rotten stump my hoe turned up a sluggish, portentous, and outlandish spotted salamander, a trace of egypt and the nile, yet our contemporary. when i paused to lean on my hoe, these sounds and sights i heard and saw anywhere in the row, a part of the inexhaustible entertainment which the country offers. on gala days the town fires its great guns, which echo like popguns to these woods, and some waifs of martial music occa sionally penetrate thus far. to me, away there in my bean field at the other end of the town, the big guns sounded as if a puff ball had burst ; and when there was a military turnout of which i was ignorant, i have sometimes had a vague sense all the day of some sort of itching and disease in the horizon as if some eruption would break out there soon, either scar latina or canker-rash, until at length some more favorable puff of wind, making haste over the fields and up the wayland road, brought me information of the "trainers." it seemed by the distant hum as if somebody's bees had swarmed, and that the neighbors, according to virgil's advice, by a faint tintinnab the beanfield 169 uliim upon the most sonorous of their domestic utensils, were endeavoring to call them down into the hive again. and when the sound died quite away, and the hum had ceased, and the most favorable breezes told no tale, i knew that they had got the last drone of them all safely into the middlesex hive, and that now their minds were bent on the honey with which it was smeared. i felt proud to know that the liberties of massachusetts and of our fatherland were in such safe keeping ; and as i turned to my hoeing again i was filled with an inexpressible confidence, and pursued my labor cheerfully with a calm trust in the future. when there were several bands of musicians, it sounded as if all the village was a vast bellows, and all the buildings expanded and collapsed alternately with a din. but sometimes it was a really noble and inspiring strain that reached these woods, and the trumpet that sings of fame, and i felt as if i could spit a mexican with a good relish, — for why should we always stand for trifles? — and looked round for a woodchuck or a skunk to exercise my chivalry upon. these martial strains seemed as far away as palestine, and reminded me of a march of crusaders in the horizon, with a slight tantivy and tremulous motion of the elm-tree tops which overhang the village. this was one of the great days; thougfi the sky had from my clearing only the same everlastingly great look that it wears daily, and i saw no difference in it. it was a singular experience, that long acquaintance which i cultivated with beans, what with planting, and hoeing, and har vesting, and threshing, and picking over, and selling them, — the last was the hardest of all, — i might add eating, for i did taste. i was determined to know beans. when they were growing, i used to hoe from five o'clock in the morning till noon, and com monly sjdent the rest of the day about other affairs. consider the intimate and curious acquaintance one makes avith various kinds of weeds, — it will bear some iteration in the account, for irjq walden there was no little iteration in the labor, — disturbing their deli cate organizations so ruthlessly, and making such invidious dis tinctions with his hoe, leveling whole ranks of one species, and sedulously cultivating another. that's roman wormwood, — that's pigweed, — that's sorrel, — that's piper-grass, — have at him, chop him up, turn his roots upward to the sun, don't let him have a fiber in the shade; if you do, he'll turn himself t'other side up and be as green as a leek in two days. a long war, not with cranes, but with weeds, those trojans who had sun and rain and dews on their side. daily the beans saw me come to their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of their enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy dead. many a lusty crest-waving hector, that towered a whole foot above his crowd ing comrades, fell before my weapon and rolled in the dust. those summer days which some of my contemporaries devoted to the fine arts in boston and rome, and others to contempla tion in india, and others to trade in london or new york, i thus, with the other farmers of new england, devoted to hus bandry. not that i wanted beans to eat, for i am by nature a pythagorean, so far as beans are concerned, whether they mean porridge or voting, and exchanged them for rice; but, perchance, as some must work in fields if only for the sake of tropes and expression, to serve a parable-maker one day. it was on the whole a rare amusement, which, continued too long, might have become a dissipation. though i gave them no manure, and did not hoe them all once, i hoed them unusually well as far as i went, and was paid for it in the end, "there being in truth," as evelyn says, "no compost or isetation what soever comparable to this continual motion, repastination, and turning of the mold with the spade." "the earth," he adds elsewhere, "especially if fresh, has a certain magnetism in it, by which it attracts the salt, power, or virtue (call it either) which gives it life, and is the logic of all the labor and stir we keep about it, to sustain us ; all dungings and other sordid tem the beanfield 171 perings being but the vicars suceedaneous to this improvement." moreover, this being one of those "worn-out and exhausted lay fields which enjoy their sabbath/' had perchance, as sir kenelm digby thinks likely, attracted "vital spirits" from the air. i harvested twelve bushels of beans. but to be more particular, for it is complained that mr. cole man has reported chiefly the expensive experiments of gentlemen farmers, my outgoes were, — for a hoe $ 0.54 plowing, harrowing, and furrowing ' 7.50 too much beans for seed 3.12i^ potatoes for seed '. 1.33 peas for seed 40 turnip seed 06 white line for crow fence 02 horse cultivator and boy three hours 1.00 horse and cart to get crop 75 in all $14.72i/> my income was (patrem familias vendacem, nou emacem esse oportet), from nine bushels and twelve quarts of beans sold $16.94 five bushels large potatoes 2.50 nine bushels small potatoes 2.25 grass 1.00 stalks 75 in all $23.44 leaving a pecuniary profit, as i have elsewhere said, of . . . .$8.71% this is the result of my experience in raising beans. plant the common small white bush bean about the first of june, in rows three feet by eighteen inches apart, being careful to select fresh round and unmixed seed. first look out for worms, and supply vacancies by planting anew. then look out for wood chucks, if it is an exposed place, for they will nibble off the 172 walden earliest tender leaves almost clean as they go ; and again, when the young tendrils make their appearance, they have notice of it, and will shear them off with both buds and young pods, sitting erect like a squirrel. but above all, harvest as early as possible, if you would escape frosts and have a fair and salable crop ; you may save much loss by this means. this further experience also i gained. i said to myself, i will not plant beans and corn with so much industry another sum mer, but such seeds, if the seed is not lost, as sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith, innocence, and the like, and see if they will not grow in this soil, even with less toil and manurance, and sustain me, for surely it has not been exhausted for these crops. alas ! i said this to myself; but now another summer is gone, and another, and another, and i am obliged to say to you. reader, that the seeds which i planted, if indeed they were the seeds of those virtues, were wormeaten or had lost their vitality and so did not come up. commonly men will only be brave' as their fathers were brave, or timid. this generation is very sure to plant corn and beans each new year precisely as the indians did centuries ago, and taught the first settlers to do, as if there were a fate in it. i saw an old man the other day, to my astonish ment, making the holes with a hoe for the seventieth time at least, and not for himself to lie down in ! but why should not the new englander try new adventures, and not lay so much stress on his grain, his potato, and grass crop, and his orchards, — raise other crops than these ? why concern ourselves so much about our beans for seed, and not be concerned at all about a new generation of men ? we should really be fed and cheered if when we met a man w^e were sure to see that some of the quali ties which i have named, avhich we all prize more than those other productions, but which are for the most part broadcast and floating in the air, had taken root and grown in him. here comes such a subtile and ineffable quality, for instance, as truth or justice, though the slightest amount or new variety of it, the beanfield 173 along the road. our ambassadors should be instructed to send home such seeds as these, and congress help to distribute them over all the land. we should never stand upon ceremony with sincerity. we should never cheat and insult and banish one another by our meanness, if there were present the kernel of worth and friendliness. we should not meet thus in haste. most men i do not meet at all, for they seem not to have time ; they are busy about their beans. we would not deal with a man thus plodding ever, leaning on a hoe or a spade as a staff between his work, not as a mushroom, but partially risen out of the earth, something more than erect, like swallows alighted and walking on the ground : — and as he spake, his avings would now and then spread, as he meant to fly, then close again, so that we should suspect that we might be conversing with an angel. bread may not always nourish us; but it always does us good, it even takes stiffness out of our joints, and makes us supple and buoyant, when we knew not what ailed us, to recog nize any generosity in man or nature, to share any unmixed and heroic joy. ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that hus bandry avas once a sacred art ; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us, our object being to have large farms and large crops merely. we have no festival, nor pro cession, nor ceremony, not excepting our cattle-shows and so called thanksgivings, by which the farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is reminded of its sacred origin. it is the premium and the feast which tempt him. he sacri fices not to ceres and the terrestrial jove, but to the infernal plutus rather. by avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads 174 walden the meanest of lives. he knows nature but as a robber. cato says that the profits of agriculture are particularly pious or just {maximeque plus qucestus), and according to varro, the old romans "called the same earth mother and ceres, and thought that they who cultivated it led a pious and useful life, and that they alone were left of the race of king saturn." we are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cultivated fields and on the jdrairies and forests without distinction. they all reflect and absorb his rays alike, and the former make but a small part of the glorious picture which he beholds in his daily course. in his view the earth is all equally cultivated like a garden. therefore we should receive the benefit of his light and heat with a corresponding trust and magnanimity. what though i value the seed of these beans, and harvest that in the fall of the year ? this broad field which i have looked at so long looks not to me as the principal cultivator, but away from me to influences more genial to it, which water and make it green. these beans have results which are not harvested by me. do they not grow for woodchucks partly? the ear of wheat (in latin spica, obsoletely speca, from spe, hope) should not be the only hope of the husbandman; its kernel or grain [granum, from gerendo, bearing) is not all that it bears. how, then, can our harvest fail? shall i not rejoice also at the abundance. of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds ? it matters little comparatively whether the fields fill the farmer's barns. the true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first but his last fruits also, viii the village after lioeing, or perhaps reading and writing, in the fore noon, i usually bathed again in the pond, swimming across one df its coves for a stint, and washed the dust of labor from my person, or smoothed out the last wrinkle which study had made, and for the afternoon was absolutely free. every day or two e strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there, circulating either from mouth to qqouth, or from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken in homeopathic doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs. as i walked in the w^oods to see the birds and squirrels, so i walked in the village to see the men and boys ; instead of the wind among the pines, i heard the carts rattle. in one direction from my house there was a colony of muskrats in the river meadows ; under the grove of elms and buttonwoods in the other horizon was a village of busy men, as curious to me as if they had been prairie dogs, each sitting at the mouth of its burrow, or running over to a neighbor's to gossip. i went there frequently to observe their habits . the village appeared to me a great news room ; and on one side to support it, as once at redding & company's on state street, they kept nuts and raisins, or salt and meal and other groceries. some have such a vast appetite for the former commodity, that is, the news, and such sound digestive organs, that they can sit forever in public avenues without stirring, and let it simmer and whisper through them like the etesian winds, or as if inhaling ether, it only producing numbness and insensi 175 i 176 walden bility to pain, — otherwise it would be often painful to hear, without affecting the consciousness. i hardly ever failed, wl^ i rambled through the village, to see a row of such worthier, either sitting on a ladder sunning themselves, with their bodi inclined forward and their eyes glancing along the line this -u and that, from time to time, with a voluptuous expression, else leaning against a barn with their hands in their pocket-, like caryatides, as if to prop it up. they, being commonly out of doors, heard whatever was in the wind. these are the coar est mills, in which all gossip is first rudely digested or crackel up before it is emptied into finer and more delicate hoppf within doors. i observed that the vitals of the village w the grocery, the bar-room, the postoffiee, and the bank ; and, ; a necessary part of the machinery, they kept a bell, a big gin. and a fire-engine, at convenient places; and the houses were ^ ) arranged as to make the most of mankind, in lanes and fronting,' one another, so that every traveler had to run the gantlet, aul every man, woman, and child might get a lick at him. of coursi^, those who were stationed nearest t^ the head of the line, wbeie they could most see and be seen, and have the first blow at hin, paid the highest prices for their places; and the few straggling' inhabitants in the outskirts, where long gaps in the line beganj to occur, and the traveler could get over walls or turn aside into] cow paths, and so escape, paid a very slight ground or window' tax. signs were hung out on all sides to allure him; some to catch him by the appetite, as the tavern and victualing cellar;! some by the fancy, as the dry goods store and the jeweler's ; audi others by the hair or the feet or the skirts, as the barber, tliej shoemaker, or the tailor. besides, there was a still more ter-j rible standing invitation to call at every one of these houses,! and company expected about these times. for the most part i escaped wonderfully from these dangers, either by proceeding at once boldly and without deliberation to the goal, as is recom mended to those who run the gantlet, or by keeping my thoughts' the village 177 on high things, like orpheus, who, "loudly singing the praises of the gods to his lyre, drowned the voices of the sirens, and kept out of danger." sometimes i bolted suddenly, and nobody could tell my whereabouts, for i did not stand much about grace fulness, and never hesitated at a gap in the fence. i was even accustomed to make an irruption into some houses, where i was well entertained, and after learning the kernels and very last sieve-ful of news, what had subsided, the prospects of war and peace, and whether the world was likely to hold together much longer, i was let out through the rear avenues, and so escaped to the woods again. it was very pleasant, when i stayed late in town, to launch myself into the night, especially if it was dark and tempestuous, and set sail from some bright village parlor or lecture room, with a bag of rye or indian meal upon my shoulder, for my snug harbor in the woods, having made all tight without and withdrawn under hatches with a merry crew of thoughts, leaving only my outer man at the helm, or even tying up the helm when it was plain sailing. i had many a genial thought by the cabin r fire "as i sailed." i was never cast away nor distressed in any 1^ weather, though i encountered some severe storms. it is darker in the woods, even in common nights, than most suppose. i fre quently had to look up at the opening between the trees above the path in order to learn my route, and, where there was no cart path, to feel with my feet the faint track which i had worn, or steer by the known relation of particular trees which i felt with my hands, passing between two pines, for instance, not more than eighteen inches apart, in the midst of the woods, invariably in the darkest night. sometimes, after coming home thus late in a dark and muggy night, when my feet felt the path which my eyes could not see, dreaming and absent-minded all the way, until i was aroused by having to raise my hand to lift the latch, i have not been able to recall a single step of my walk, and i have thought that perhaps my body would find its way .x78 walden home if its master should forsake it, as the hand finds its way to the mouth without assistance. several times, when a visitor chanced to stay into evening, and it proved a dark night, i was obliged to conduct him to the cart path in the rear of the house, and then point out to him the direction he was to pursue, and in keeping which he was to be guided rather by his feet than his eyes. one very dark night i directed thus on their way two young men who had been fishing in the jdond. they lived about a mile off through the woods, and were quite used to the route. a day or two after one of them told me that they wandered about the greater part of the night, close by their own jdremises, and did not get home till toward morning, by which time, as there had been several heavy showers in the meanwhile, and the leaves were very wet, they were drenched to their skins. i have heard of many going astray even in the village streets, when the darkness was so thick that you could cut it with a knife, as the saying is. some who live in the outskirts, having come to town a-shopping in tlieir wagons, have been obliged to put up for the night ; and gentlemen and ladies making a call have gone half a mile out of their way, feeling the sidewalk only with their feet, and not knowing when they turned. it is a surprising and mem orable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time. often in a snow storm, even by day, one will come out upon a well-known road and yet find it impossible to tell which way leads to the village. though he knows that he has traveled it a thousand times, he cannot recognize a feature in it, but it is as strange to him as if it were a road in siberia. by night, of course, the perplexity is infinitely greater. in our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and head-lands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bear ing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round, — for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost, — do we appre the village 179 ciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. every man lias to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations. one afternoon, near the end of the first summer, when i went to the village to get a shoe from the cobbler's, i was seized and put into jail, because, as i have elsewhere related, i did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the state, which buys and sells men, women, and children, like cattle at the door of its senate-house. i had gone down to the woods for other purposes. but, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. it is true, i might have 'resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run "amok" against society ; but i j:* referred that society should run "amok" against me, it being the desperate party. however, i was released the next day, obtained my mended shoe, and returned to the woods in season to get my dinner of huckleberries on fair-haven hill. i was never molested by any person but those who represented the state. i had no lock nor bolt but for the desk which held my pajiers, not even a nail to put over my latch or windows. i never fastened my door night or day, though i was to be absent several days ; not even when the next fall i spent a fortnight in the woods of maine. and yet my house was more respected than if it had been surrounded by a file of soldiers. the tired rambler could rest and warm himself by my fire, the literary amuse himself with the few books on my table, or the curious, by opening my closet door, see what was left of my dinner, and what prospect i had of a supper. yet, though many people of every class came this way to the pond, i suffered no serious inconvenience from these sources, and i never missed anything but one small book, a volume of homer, which per 180 walden haps was improperly gilded, and this i trust a soldier of our camp has found by this time. i am convinced that if all men were to live as simply as i then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. these take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough. the pope's homers would soon get properly distributed. — nee bella fiierunt, faginus astabat diim scyphus ante dapes. nor wars did men molest, when only beechen bowls were in request. "you who govern public affairs, what need have you to employ punishments'? love virtue, and the people will be virtuous. the virtues of a superior man are like the wind ; the virtues of a common man are like the grass; the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends," ix the ponds sometimes, having had a surfeit of human society and gossip, and worn out all my village friends, i rambled still farther west ward than i habitually dwell, into yet more unfrequented parts of the town, "to fresh woods and pastures new," or, while the sun was setting, made my supper of huckleberries and blue berries on fair-haven hill, and laid up a store for several days. the fruits do not yield their true flavor to the purchaser of them, nor to him who raises them for the market. there is but one way to obtain it, yet few take that way. if you would know the flavor of huckleberries, ask the cow-boy or the partridge. it is a vulgar error to suppose that you have tasted huckle berries who never plucked them. a huckleberry never reaches boston ; they have not been known there since they grew on her three hills. the ambrosial and essential i^art of the fruit is lost with the bloom which is rubbed oft in the market cart, and they become mere jdrovender. as long as eternal justice reigns, not one innocent huckleberry can be transported thither from the country's hills. occasionally, after my hoeing was done for the day, i joined some impatient companion who had been fishing on the pond since morning, as silent and motionless as a duck or a floating leaf, and, after practicing various kinds of philosophy, had con cluded commonly, by the time i arrived, that he belonged to the ancient sect of coenobites. there was one older man, an excel lent fisher and skilled in all kinds of woodcraft, who was pleased to look upon my house as a building erected for the convenience 181 182 walden of fishermen ; and i was equally pleased when be sat in my door way to arrange his lines. onee in a while we sat together on the jdond, he at one end of the boat, and i at the other; but not many words passed between us, for he had gtown deaf in his later years, but he occasionally hummed a psalm, which har monized well enough with my philosophy. our intercourse was thus altogether one of unbroken harmony, far more pleasing to remember than if it had been carried on by speech. when, as was commonly the case, i had none to commune with, i used to raise the echoes by striking with a paddle on the side of my boat, filling the surrounding woods with circling and dilating sound, stirring them up as the keeper of a menagerie his wild beasts, until i elicited a growl from every wooded vale and hill side. in warm evenings i frequently sat in the boat playing the flute, and saw the jdcrch, which i seemed to have charmed, hover ing around me, and the moon traveling over the ribbed bottom, which was strewed with the wrecks of the forest. formerly i had come to this pond adventurously, from time to time, in dark summer nights, with a companion, and making a fire close to the water's edge, which we thought attracted the fishes, we caught l^outs with a bunch of worms strung on a thread ; and when we had done, far in the night, threw the burning brands high into the air like sky-rockets, which, coming down into the pond, were quenched with a loud hissing, and we were suddenly groping ii\ total darkness. through this, whistling a tune, we took our way to the haunts of men again. but now i had made my home by the shore. sometimes, after staying in a village i^arlor till the family had all retired, i have returned to the woods, and, partly with a view to the next day's dinner, spent the hours of midnight fish ing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown ])ird close at hand. these experiences were very memorable and valuable to me, — anchored in forty feet of water, and twenty or the ponds 183 thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as i drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind. at length you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand, some horned pout squeaking and squirming to the upper air. it was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to nature again. it seemed as if i might next east my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element which was scarcely more dense. thus i caught two fishes as it were with one hook. the scenery of walden is on a humble scale, and, though very beautiful, does not approach to grandeur, nor can it much con cern one who has not long frequented it, or lived by its shore; yet this pond is so remarkable for its depth and purity as to merit a particular description. it is a clear and deep green well, half a mile long and a mile and three quarters in circumference, and contains about sixty-one and a half acres; a perennial spring in the midst of pine and oak woods, without any visible inlet or outlet except by the clouds and evaporation. the sur rounding hills rise abruptly from the water to the height of forty to eighty feet, though on the southeast and east tliey attain to about one hundred and one hundred and fifty feet respect ively, within a quarter and a third of a mile. they are exclu sivel}^ woodland. all our concord waters have two colors at least, one when viewed at a distance, and another, more proper, close at hand. the first depends more on the light, and follows the sky. in clear weather, in summer, they appear blue at a 184 walden little distance, especially if agitated, and at a great distance all appear alike. in stormy weather they are sometimes of a dark slate color. the sea, however, is said to be blue one day and green another without any jderceptible change in the atmosphere. i have seen our river, when, the landscape being covered with snow, both water and ice were almost as green as gi-ass. some consider blue "to be the color of pure water, whether liquid or solid." but, looking directly down into our waters from a boat, they are seen to be of very different colors. walden is blue at one time and gi-een at another, even from the same point of view. lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both. viewed from a hill top it reflects the color of the sky, but near at hand it is of a yellowish tint next the shore where you can see the sand, then a light green, which gradually deepens to a uniform dark green in the body of the pond. in some lights, viewed even from a hill top, it is of a vivid green next the shore. some have referred this to the reflection of the verdure ; but it is equally green there against the railroad sand bank, and in the spring, before the leaves are expanded, and it may be simply the result of the prevailing blue mixed with the yellow of the sand. such is the color of its iris. this is that portion, also, where in the spring, the ice being warmed by the heat of the sun reflected from the bottom, and also transmitted through the earth, melts first and forms a narrow canal about the still frozen middle. like the rest of our waters, when much agitated, in clear weather, so that the surface of the waves may reflect the sky at the right angle, or because there is more light mixed with it, it appears at a little distance of a darker blue than the sky itself; and at such a time, being on its surface, and looking ^vith divided vision, so as to see the reflection, i have discerned a matchless and indescribable light blue, such as watered or changeable silks and sword blades suggest, more cerulean tha i the sky itself, alternating with the original dark green on the opposite sides of the waves, which last appeared the ponds 185 but muddy in comparison. it is a vitreous greenish blue, as i remember it, like those patches of the winter sky seen through cloud vistas in the west before sundown. yet a single glass of its water held up to the light is as colorless as an equal quantity of air. it is well-known that a large plate of glass will have a green tint, owing, as the makers say, to its "body," but a small piece of the same will be colorless. how large a body of walden water would be required to reflect a green tint i have never proved. the water of our river is black or a very dark brown to one looking directly down on it, and like that of most ponds, imparts to the body of one bathing in it a yellowish tinge ; but this water is of such crystalline purity that the body of the bather appears of an alabaster whiteness, still more unnatural, which, as the • limbs are magnified and distorted withal, produces a monstrous effect, making fit studies for a michael angelo. the water is so transparent that the bottom can easily be discerned at the depth of twenty-five or thirty feet. paddling over it, you may see many feet beneath the surface the schools of perch and shiners, perhaps only an inch long, yet the former easily distinguished by their transverse bars, and you think that they must be ascetic fish that find a subsistence there. once, in the winter, many years ago, when i had been cutting holes through the ice in order to catch pickerel, as i stepped ashore i tossed my axe back on to the ice, but, as if some evil genius had directed it, it slid four or five rods directly into one of the holes, where the water was twenty-five feet deep. out of curiosity, r lay down on the ice and looked through the hole, until i saw the axe a little on one side, standing on its head, with its helve erect and gently swaying to and fro with the pulse of the pond ; and there it might have stood erect and swaying till in the course of time the handle rotted off, if i had not disturbed it. making another hole directly over it with an ice chisel which i had, and cutting down the longest birch which i could find in the neigh 186 walden borhood with my knife, i made a slip-noose, which i attached to its end, and, letting it down carefully, passed it over the knob of the handle, and drew it by a line along the birch, and so pulled the axe out again. the shore is composed of a belt of smooth rounded white stones like paving stones, excepting one or two short sand beaches, and is so steep that in many places a single l6ap will carry you into water over your head; and were it not for its remarkable transparency, that would be the last to be seen of its bottom till it rose on the opposite side. some think it is bot tomless. it is nowhere muddy, and a casual observer would say that there were no weeds at all in it; and of noticeable plants, except in the little meadows recently overflowed, which do not properly belong to it, a closer scrutiny does not detect a flag nor a bulrush, nor even a lily, yellow or white, but only a few small heart-leaves and potamogetons, and perhaps a avater-target or two ; all which however a bather might not per ceive; and these plants are clean and bright like the element they grow in. the stones extend a rod or two into the water, and then the bottom is pure sand, except in the deepest parts, where there is usually a little sediment, probably from the decay of the leaves, which have been wafted on to it so many succes sive falls, and a bright green weed is brought up on anchors even in midwinter. we have one other pond just like this. white pond in nine acre corner, about two and a half miles westerly ; but, though i am acquainted with most of the ponds within a dozen miles of this center, i do not know a third of this pure and well-like character. successive nations perchance have drunk at, ad mired, and fathomed it, and passed away, and still its water is green and pellucid as ever. not an intermitting spring! per haps on that spring morning when adam and eve were driven out of eden walden pond was already in existence, and even then breaking up in a gentle spring rain accompanied with mist the ponds 187 and a southerly wind, and covered with myriads of ducks and geese, which had not heard of the fall, when still such pure lakes sufficed them. even then it had commenced to rise and fall, and had clarified its waters and colored them of the hue they now wear, and obtained a patent of heaven to be the only walden pond in the world and distiller of celestial dews. who knows in how many unremembered nations' literatures this has been the castalian fountain ? or what nymphs presided over it in the golden age? it is a gem of the first water which concord wears in her coronet. yet perchance the first who came to this well have left some trace of their footsteps. i have been surprised to detect encircling the pond, even where a thick wood has just been cut down on the shore, a narrow shelf-like path in the steep hill side, alternately rising and falling, approaching and receding from the water's edge, as old probably as the race of man here, worn by the feet of aboriginal hunters, and still from time to time unwittingly trodden by the present occupants of the land. this is particularly distinct to one standing on the middle of the pond in winter, just after a light snow has fallen, appearing as a clear undulating white line, unobscured by weeds and twigs, and very obvious a quarter of a mile off in many places whert in summer it is hardly distinguishable close at hand. the snow reprints it, as it were, in clear white type alto-relievo. the ornamented grounds of villas which will one day be built here may still preserve some trace of this. the pond rises and falls, but whether regularly or not, and within what period, nobody knows, though, as usual, many pretend to know. it is commonly higher in the winter and lower in the summer, though not corresponding to the general wet and dryness. i can remember when it was a foot or two lower, and also when it was at least five feet higher, than when i lived by it. there is a narrow sand-bar running into it, very deep water on one side, on which i helped boil a kettle of chow 188 walden der, some six rods from the main shore, about the year 1824, which it has not been possible to do for twenty-five years ; and on the other hand, my friends used to listen with incredulity when i told them that a few years later i was accustomed to fish from a boat in a secluded cove in the woods, fifteen rods from the only shore they knew, which place was long since con verted into a meadow. but the pond has risen steadily for two years, and now, in the summer of '52, is just five feet higher than when i lived there, or as high as it was thirty years ago, and fishing goes on again in the meadow. this makes a differ ence of level, at the outside, of six or seven feet; and yet the water shed by the surrounding hills is insignificant in amount, and this overflow must be referred to causes which affect the deep springs. this same summer the pond has begun to fall again. it is remarkable that this fluctuation, whether periodical or not, appears thus to require many years for its accomplish ment. i have observed one rise and a part of two falls, and i expect that a dozen or fifteen years hence the water will again be as low as i have ever known it. flints^ pond, a mile east ward, allowing for the disturbance occasioned by its inlets and outlets, and the smaller intermediate ponds also, sympathize with walden, and recently attained their greatest height at the same time with the latter. the same is true, as far as my obser vation goes, of white pond. this rise and fall of walden at long intervals serves this use at least : the water standing at this great height for a year or more, though it makes it difficult to walk around it, kills the shrubs and trees which have sprung up about its edge since the last rise, pitch-pines, birches, alders, aspens, and others, and, falling again, leaves an unobstructed shore; for, unlike many ])onds, and all waters which are subject to a daily tide, its shore is cleanest when the water is lowest. on the side of the pond next my house, a row of pitch-pines fifteen feet high has been killed and tipped over as if by a lever, and thus a stop put to the ponds 189 their encroachments; and their size indicates how many years have elapsed since the last rise to this height. by this fluctu ation the pond asserts its title to a shore, and thus the shore is shorn, and the trees cannot hold it by right of possession. these are the lips of the lake on which no beard grows. it licks its chaps from time to time. when the water is at its height, the alders, willows, and maples send forth a mass of fibrous red roots several feet long from all sides of their stems in the water, and to the height of three or four feet from the ground, in the effort to maintain themselves ; and i have known the high blue berry bushes about the shore, which commonly produce no fruit, bear an abundant crop under these circumstances. some have been puzzled to tell how the shore became so reg ularly paved. my townsmen have all heard the tradition, the oldest people tell me that they heard it in their youth, that anciently the indians were holding a pow-wow upon a hill here, which rose as high into the heavens as the pond now sinks deep into the earth, and they used much profanity, as the story goes, though this vice is one of which the indians were never guilty, and while they were thus engaged the hill shook and suddenly sank, and only one old squaw, named walden, escaped, and from her the pond was named. it has been conjectured that when the hill shook these stones rolled down its side and became the present shore. it is very certain, at any rate, that once there was no pond here, and now there is one ; and this indian fable does not in any respect conflict with the account of that ancient settler whom i have mentioned, who remembers so well when he first came here with his divining-rod, saw a thin vapor rising from the sward, and the hazel pointed steadily downward, and he concluded to dig a well here. as for the stones, many still think that they are hardly to be accounted for by the action of the waves on these hills ; but i observe that the surrounding hills are remarkably full of the same kind of stones, so that they have been obliged to pile them up in walls on both sides of the rail 190 walden road cut nearest the pond ; and, moreover, there are most stones where the shore is most abrupt ; so that, unfortunately, it is no longer a mystery to me. i detect the paver. if the name was not derived from that of some english locality, — saffron , walden, for instance, — one might suppose that it was called, originally, walled-in pond. the pond was my well ready dug. for four months in the year its water is as cold as it is pure at all times; and i think that it is then as good as any, if not the best, in the town. in the winter, all water which is exposed to the air is colder than springs and wells which are protected from it. the tempera ture of the pond water which had stood in the room where i sat from five o'clock in the afternoon till noon the next day, the sixth of march, 1846, the thermometer having been up to 65° or 70° some of the time, owing j^artly to the sun on the roof, was 42°, or one degree colder than the water of one of the coldest wells in the village just drawn. the temperature of the boiling spring the same day was 45°, or the warmest of any water tried, though it is the coldest that i know of in summer, when, besides, shallow and stagnant surface water is not mingled with it. moreover, in summer, walden never becomes so warm as most water which is exposed to the sun, on account of its depth. in the warmest weather i usually placed a pailful in my cellar, where it became cool in the night, and remained so during the day ; though i also resorted to a spring in the neighborhood. it was as good when a week old as the day it was dipped, and had no taste of the pump. whoever camps for a week in summer by the shore of a pond, needs only bury a pail of water a few feet deep in the shade of his camp to be independent of the luxury of ice. there have been caught in walden, pickerel, one weighing seven pounds, to say nothing of another which carried off a reel with great velocity, which the fisherman safely set down at eight pounds because he did not see him, perch and pouts, some of the ponds 191 each weighing over two pounds, shiners, ehivins or roach {leuciscus pulchellus), a very few breams, and a couple of eels, one weighing four pounds, — i am thus particular because the weight of a fish is commonly its only title to fame, and these are the only eels i have heard of here; — also, i have a faint recol lection of a little fish some five inches long, with silvery sides and a greenish back, somewhat dace-like in its character, which i mention here chiefly to link my facts to fable. nevertheless, this i^ond is not very fertile in fish. its pickerel, though not abundant, are its chief boast. i have seen at one time lying on the ice pickerel of at least three different kinds : a long and shal low one, steel-colored, most like those caught in the river; a bright golden kind, with greenish reflections and remarkably deep, which is the most common here; and another, golden colored, and shaped like the last, but peppered on the sides with small dark brown or black spots, intermixed with a few faint blood-red ones very much like a trout. the specific name reticu latus would not apply to this; it should be guttatus rather. these are all very firm fish, and weigh more than their size promises. the shiners, pouts, and perch, also, and indeed all the fishes which inhabit this pond, are much cleaner, handsomer, and firmer fleshed than those in the river and most other ponds, as the water is purer, and they can easily be distinguished from them. probably many ichthyologists would make new varieties of some of them. there are also a clean race of frogs and tor toises, and a few mussels in it ; muskrats and minks leave their traces about it, and occasionally a traveling mud-turtle visits it. sometimes, when i pushed off my boat in the morning, i dis turbed a great mud-turtle which had secreted himself under the boat in the night. ducks and geese frequent it in the spring and fall, the white-bellied swallows {hirundo bicolor) skim over it, and the peetweets {totanus macularius) "teter" along its stony shores all summer. i have sometimes disturbed a fish hawk sitting on a white-pine over the water; but i doubt if it 1^2 walden is ever profaned by the wing of a gull, like fair-haven. at most, it tolerates one annual loon. these are all the animals of consequence which frequent it now. you may see from a boat, in calm weather, near the sandy eastern shore, where the water is eight or ten feet deep, and also in some other jdarts of the pond, some circular heaps half a dozen feet in diameter by a foot in height, ' consisting of small stones less than a hen's eog in size, where all around is bare sand. at first you wonder if the indians could have formed them on the ice for anj^ purpose, and so, when the ice melted, they sank to the bottom ; but they are too regular and some of them plainly too fresh for that. they are similar to those found in rivers ; but as there are no suckers nor lampreys here, i know not by avhat fish they could be made. perhaps they are the nests of the chivin. these lend a pleasing mystery' to the bottom. the shore is irregular enough not to be monotonous. i have in my mind's eye the western indented with deep bays, the bolder northern, and the beautiful scalloped southern shore, where successive capes overlap each other and suggest unex plored coves between. the forest has never so good a setting. nor is so distinctly beautiful, as when seen from the middle of a ] small lake amid hills which rise from the water's edge ; for the ] water in which it is reflected not only makes the best foreground in such a case, but, with its winding shore, the most natural and agreeable boundary to it. there is no rawness nor imperfec tion in its edge there, as where the axe has cleared a part, or a cultivated field abuts on it. the trees have ample room to expand on the water side, and each sends forth its most vigor ous branch in that direction. there nature has woven a natural selvage, and the eye rises by just gradations from the lowj shrubs of the shore to the highest trees. there are few traces^, of man^s hand to be seen. the water laves the shore as it did^ a thousand years ago. the ponds 193 a lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. it is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. the fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows. standing on the smooth sandy beach at the east end of the pond, in a calm september afternoon, when a slight haze makes the opposite shore line indistinct, i have seen whence came the expression, "the glassy surface of a lake." when you invert your head, it looks like a thread of finest gossamer stretched across the valley, and gleaming against the distant pine woods, separating one stratum of the atmosphere from another. you would think that you could walk dry under it to the opposite hills, and that the swallows which skim over might perch on it. indeed, they sometimes dive below the line, as it were by mistake, and are undeceived. as you look over the pond westward you are obliged to employ both your hands to defend your eyes against the reflected as well as the true sun, for they are equally bright ; and if, between the two, you survey its surface critically, it is literally as smooth as glass, except '^m^here the skater insects, at equal intervals scattered over its i'whole extent, by their motions in the sun produce the finest ^imaginable sparkle on it, or, perchance, a duck plumes itself, i or, as i have said, a swallow skims so low as to touch it. it may ' be that in the distance a fish describes an arc of three or four feet in the air, and there is one bright flash where it emerges, and another where it strikes the water; sometimes the whole i silvery are is revealed; or here and there, perhaps, is a thistle ! down floating on its surface, which the fishes dart at and so dimple it again. it is like molten glass cooled but not con gealed, and the few motes in it are pure and beautiful like the imperfections in glass. you may often detect a yet smoother and darker water, separated from the rest as if by an invisible cobweb, boom of the water nymphs, resting on it. from a hill .;[94 walden top you can see a fish leap in almost any part ; for not a pickerel or sinner picks an insect from this smooth surface but it mani festly disturbs the equilibrium of the whole lake. it is wonder ful with what elaborateness this simple fact is advertised, — this piscine murder will out, — and from my distant perch i dis tinguish the circling undulations when they are half a dozen rods in diameter. you can even detect a water-bug (gyrinus) ceaselessly progressing over the smooth surface a quarter of a mile off; for they furrow the water slightly, making a conspicu ous ripple bounded by two diverging lines, but the skaters glide over it without rippling it perceptibly. when the surface is considerably agitated there are no skaters nor water-bugs on it, but apparently, in calm daj^s, they leave their havens and adven turously glide forth from the shore by short impulses till they completely cover it. it is a soothing employment, on one of those fine days in the fall when all the warmth of the sun is fully a;ipreciated, to sit on a stump on such a height as this, overlook ing the pond, and study the dimpling circles which are inces santly inscribed on its otherwise invisible surface amid the reflected skies and trees. over this great expanse there is no disturbance but it is thus at once gently smoothed away and assuaged, as, when a vase of water is jarred, the trembling circles seek the shore and all is smooth again. istot a fish can leap or an insect fall on the pond but it is thus reported in circling dimples, in lines of beauty, as it were the constant welling up of its fountain, the gentle pulsing of its life, the heaving of its breast. the thrills of joy and thrills of pain are undistinguishable. how peaceful the phenomena of the lake! again the works of man shine as in the spring. ay, every leaf and twig and stone and cobweb sparkles now at mid-afternoon as when covered with dew in a spring morning. every motion of an oar or an insect produces a flash of light ; and if an oar falls, how sweet the echo ! in such a day in september or october, walden is a ])erfect the ponds 195 forest mirror, set round with stones as precious to my eye as if fewer or rarer. nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. sky water. it needs no fence. nations come and go without defiling it. it is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding nature con tinually repairs; no storms, no dust, can dim its surface ever fresh; — a mirror in which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the sun's hazy brush, — this the light dust cloth, — which retains no breath that is breathed on it, but sends its own to float as clouds high above its surface, and be reflected in its bosom still. a field of w^ater betrays the spirit that is in the air. it is con tinually receiving new life and motion from above. it is inter mediate in its nature between land and sky. on land only the grass and trees wave, but the water itself is rippled by the wind. i see where the breeze dashes across it by the streaks or flakes of light. it is remarkable that we can look down on its surface. we shall, perhaps, look down thus on the surface of air at length, and mark where a still subtler spirit sweeps over it. the skaters and water-bugs finally disappear in the latter part of october, when the severe frosts have come; and then and in november, usually, in a calm day, there is absolutely nothing to ripple the surface. one november afternoon, in the calm at the end of a rain storm of several days' duration, when the sky was still completely overcast and the air was full of mist, i observed that the pond was remarkably smooth, so that it was difficult to distinguish its surface; though it no longer reflected the bright tints of october, but the somber november colors of the surrounding hills. though i passed over it as gently as pos sible, the slight undulations produced by my boat extended almost as far as i could see, and gave a ribbed appearance to the reflections. but, as i was looking over the surface, i saw here and there at a distance a faint glimmer, as if some skater insects 196 walden wliieli had escaped the frosts might be collected there, or, per chance, the surface, being so smooth, betrayed where a spring welled up from the bottom. paddling gently to one of these places, i was surprised to find myself surrounded by myriads of small perch, about five inches long, of a rich bronze color in the green water, sporting there and constantly rising to the surface and dimpling it, sometimes leaving bubbles on it. in such transparent and seemingly bottomless water, reflecting the clouds, i seemed to be floating through the air as in a balloon, and their swimming impressed me as a kind of flight or hover ing, as if they were a compact flock of birds passing just be neath my level on the right or left, their fins, like sails, set all around them. there were many such schools in the pond, apparently improving the short season before winter would draw an icy shutter over their broad skylight, sometimes giving to the surface an appearance as if a slight breeze struck it, or a few rain-drops fell there. when i approached carelessly and alarmed them, they made a sudden plash and rippling with their tails, as if one had struck the water with a brushy bough, and instantly took refuge in the depths. at length the wand rose, the mist increased, and the waves began to run, and the perch leaped much higher than before, half out of water, a hundred black points, three inches long, at once above the surface. even as late as the fifth of december, one year, i saw some dimples on the surface, and thinking it was going to rain hard immedi ately, the air being full of mist, i made haste to take my place at the oars and row homeward ; already the rain seemed rapidly increasing, though i felt none on my cheek, and i anticipated a thorough soaking. but suddenly the dimples ceased, for they were produced by the perch, which the noise of my oars had scared into the depths, and i saw their schools dimly disap pearing; so i spent a dry afternoon after all. an old man who used to frequent this pond nearly sixty years ago, when it was dark with surrounding forests, tells me that the ponds ^ 197 in those days he sometimes saw it all alive with ducks and other wiiter fowl, and that there were many eagles about it. he came , here a-fishing, and used an old log canoe which he found on the shore. it was made of two white-pine log's dug out and pinned together, and was cut off square at the ends. it was very clumsy, but lasted a great many years before it became water logged and perhaps sank to the bottom. he did not know whose ,it was; it belonged to the pond. he used to make a cable for his anchor of strips of hickory bark tied together. an old man, a potter, who lived by the pond before the revolution, told him once that there was an iron chest at the bottom, and that he had seen it. sometimes it would come floating up to the shore ; but when you went toward it, it would go back into deep water and disappear. i was pleased to hear of the old log canoe, which took the place of an indian one of the same material but more graceful construction, which perchance had first been a tree on the bank, and then, as it were, fell into the water, to float there for a generation, the most proper vessel for the lake. i remem ber that when i first looked into these depths there were many large trunks to be seen indistinctly lying on the bottom, which i had either been blown over formerly, or left on the ice at the jilast cutting, when wood was cheaper; but now they have mostly i disappeared. j when i first paddled a boat on walden, it was completely surrounded by thick and lofty pine and oak woods, and in some of its coves grape vines had run over the trees next the water and formed bowers under which a boat could pass. this hills' 'which form its shores are so steep, and the woods on thenl were i then so high, that, as you looked down from the west end, it had ! the appearance of an amphitheater for some kind of sylvan [spectacle. i have spent many an hour, when i was younger, j floating over its surface as the zephyr willed, having paddled 'my boat to the middle, and lying on my back across the seats, in a summer forenoon, dreaming awake, until i was aroused by 298 walden the boat touching the sand, and i arose to see what shore my fates had impelled me to; days when idleness avas the most attractive and productive industry. many a forenoon have i stolen away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day; for i was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly; nor do i regret that i did not waste more of them in the workshop or the teacher's desk. but since i left those shores the wood-choppers have still further laid them waste, and now for many a year there will be no more rambling through the aisles of the wood, with occasional vistas through which you see the water. my muse may be excused if she is silent henceforth. how can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down ? now the trunks of trees on the bottom, and the old log canoe, and the dark surrounding woods, are gone, and the villagers, who scarcely know where it lies, instead of going to the pond to bathe or drink, are thinking to bnng its water, which should be as sacred as the ganges at least, to the village in a pipe, to wash their dishes with ! — to earn their walden by the turning of a cock or drawing of a plug! that devilish iron horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout the town, has muddied the boiling spring with his foot, and he it is that has browsed off all the woods on walden shore; that trojan horse, with a thousand men in his belly, introduced by mercenary greeks ! where is the country's champion, the moore of moore hall, to meet him at the deep cut and thrust an avenging lance between the ribs of the bloated pest. nevertheless, of all the characters i have known, perhaps walden wears best, and best preserves its purity. many men have been likened to it, but few deserve that honor. though the wood-choppers have laid bare first this shore and then that, and the irish have built their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its border, and the ice-men have skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged, the same water which mv vouthful eves the ponds 199 fell on; '»») uie change is in me. it has not acquired one per manent wriijkle after all its ripples. it is perennially young, and i may stand and see a swallow dip apparently to pick an insect from its surface as of yore. it struck me again tonight, as if i had not seen it almost daily for more than twenty years, — why, here is walden, the same woodland lake that i discovered so many years ago ; where a forest was cut down last winter another is sj"^ ringing up by its shore as lustily as ever ; the same thought is welling uji to its surface that was then ; it is the same liquid joy and happiness to itself and its maker, ay, and it may be to me. it is the work of a brave man, surely, in whom there was no guile ! he rounded this water with his hand, deep ened and clarified it in his thought, and in his will bequeathed it to concord. i see by its face that it is visited by the same reflection; and i can almost say, walden, is it you? it is no dream of mine, to ornament a line; i cannot come nearer to god and heaven than i live to walden even. i am its stony shore, and the breeze that passes o 'er ; in the hollow of my hand are its water and its sand, and its deepest resort lies high in my thought. the cars never j^ause to look at it ; yet i fancy that the engi neers and firemen and brakemen, and those passengers who have a season ticket and see it often, are better men for the sight. the engineer does not forget at night, or his nature does not, that he has beheld this vision of serenity and purity once at least during the day. though seen but once, it helps to wash out state-street and the engine's soot. one proposes that it be called "god's drop." i have said that walden has no visible inlet nor outlet, but it 200 walden is on the one hand distantly and indirectly related to flint's pond, which is more elevated, by a chain of small ponds coming from that quarter, and on the other directly and manifestly to concord river, which is lower, by a similar chain of ponds through which in some other geological period it may have flowed, and by a little digging, which god forbid, it can be made to flow thither again. if by living thus reserved and austere, like a hermit in the woods, so long, it has acquired such wonder ful purity, who would not regret that the comparatively impure waters of flint's pond should be mingled with it, or itself should ever go to waste its sweetness in the ocean wave? flint's or sandy pond, in lincoln, our greatest lake and inland sea, lies about a mile east of walden. it is much larger, being said to contain one hundred and ninety-seven acres, and is more fertile in fish ; but it is comparatively shallow, and not remarkably pure. a walk through the woods thither was often my recreation. it was worth'the while, if only to feel the wind blow on your cheek freely, and see the waves run, and remem ber the life of mariners. i went a-chestnutting there in the fall, on windy days, when the nuts were dropping into the water and were washed to my feet ; and one day, as i crept along its sedgy shore, the fresh spray blowing in my face, i came upon the moldering wreck of a boat, the sides gone, and hardly more than the impression of its flat bottom left amid the rushes ; yet its model was sharply defined, as if it were a large decayed pad, with its veins. it was as impressive a wreck as one could imagine on the sea-shore, and had as good a moral. it is by this time mere vegetable mold and undistinguishable pond shore, through which rushes and flags have pushed up. i used to admire the ripple marks on the sandy bottom, at the north end uf this pond, made firm and hard to the feet of the wader by the pressure of the water, and the rushes which grew in indian file, i"». waving lines, corresponding to these marks, rank behind the ponds 201 rank, as if the waves had planted them. there also i have found, in considerable quantities, curious balls, composed apparently of fine grass or roots, of pipewort perhaps, from half an inch to four inches in diameter, and perfectly spherical. these wash back and forth in shallow water on a sandy bottom, and are sometimes cast on the shore. they are either solid grass, or have a little sand in the middle. at first you would say that they were formed by the action of the waves, like a j:)ebble; yet the smallest are made of equally coarse materials, half an inch long, and they are produced only at one season of the year. moreover, the waves, i suspect, do not so much con struct as wear down a material which has already acquired con sistency. they preserve their form when dry for an indefinite l)eriod. flint's pond! such is the poverty of our nomenclature. what right had the unclean and stupid farmer, whose farm abutted on this sky water, whose shores he has ruthlessly laid bare, to give his name to it? some skin-flint, who loved better the reflecting surface of a dollar, or a bright cent, in which he could see his own brazen face ; who regarded even the wild ducks which settled in it as trespassers ; his fingers grown into crooked and horny talons from the long habit of grasping harpy-like; ---so it is not named for me. i go not there to see him nor to hear of him; who never saw it, who never bathed in it, who never loved it, who never protected it, who never spoke a good v;ord for it, nor thanked god that he had made it. rather let it be named from the fishes that swim in it, the wild fowl or quadrupeds which frequent it, the wild flowers which grow by its shores, or some wild man or child the thread of whose history is interwoven with its own; not from him who could show no title to it but the deed which a like-minded neighbor or legisla ture gave him, — him who thought only of its money value; avhose presence perchance cursed all the shore; who exhausted the land around it, and would fain have exhausted the waters 202 walden within it, who regretted only that it was not english hay or cranberry meadow, — there was nothing to redeem it, forsooth, in his eyes, — and would have drained and sold it for the mud at its bottom. it did not turn his mill, and it was no privilege to him to behold it. i respect not his labors, his farm where every thing has its price; who would cany the landscape, who would carry his god to market if he could get anything for him ; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars; who loves not the beauty of his fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him till they are turned to dollars. give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth. farmers are respectable and interesting to me in pro portion as they are poor, — poor farmers. a model farm ! where the house stands like a fungus in a muck-heap, chambers for men, horses, oxen, and swine, cleansed and uncleansed, all con tiguous to one another. stocked with men! a great gtease spot, redolent of manures and buttermilk! under a high state of cultivation, being manured with the hearts and brains of men ! as if you were to raise your potatoes in the church yard! such is a model farm. no, no; if the fairest features of the landscape are to be named after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone. let our lakes receive as true names at least as the icarian sea, where "still the shore" a "brave attempt resounds." goose pond, of small extent, is on my way to flint's; fair haven, an expansion of concord river, said to contain some seventy acres, is a mile southwest; and white pond, of about forty acres, is a mile and a half beyond fair-haven. this is my lake country. these, with concord river, are my water privileges; and night and day, year in and year out, they giind such grist as t carry to them. since the wood-cutters, and the railroad, and i myself have the ponds 203 profaned walden, perhaps the most attractive, if not the most beautiful, of all our lakes, the gem of the woods, is white pond; — a poor name from its commonness, whether derived from the remarkable purity of its waters or the color of its sands. in these as in other respects, however, it is a lesser twin of walden. they are so much alike that you would say they must be connected under ground. it has the same stony shore, and its waters are of the same hue. as at walden, in sultry dog-day weather, looking down through the woods on some of its bays which are not so deep but that the reflection from the bottom tinges them, its waters are of a misty bluish green or glaucous color. many years since i used to go there to collect the sand by cart-loads, to make sand-paper with, and i have continued to visit it ever since. one who frequents it proj^oses to call it virid lake. perhaps it might be called yellow-pine lake, from the following circumstance. about fifteen years ago you could see the top of a pitch-pine of the kind called yellow pine hereabouts, though it is not a distinct species, projecting above the surface in deep water, many rods from the shore. it was even supposed by some that the pond had sunk, and this was one of the primitive forests that formerly stood there. i find that even so long ago as 1792, in a "topographical description of the town of concord," by one of its citizens, in the collec tions of the massachusetts historical society, the author, after speaking of walden and white ponds, adds : "in the middle of the latter may be seen, when the water is very low, a tree which appears as if it grew in the place where it now stands, although the roots are fifty feet below the surface of the water; the top of this tree is broken off, and at that place measures fourteen inches in diameter." in the spring of '49 i talked with the man who lives nearest the pond in sudbury, who told me that it was he who got out this tree ten or fifteen years before. as near as he could remember, it stood twelve or fifteen rods from the shore, where the water was thirty or forty feet deep. it was 204 walden in the winter, and he had been getting out ice in the forenoon, and had resolved that in the afternoon, with the aid of his neigh bors, he would take out the old yellow pine. he sawed a chan nel in the ice toward the shore, and hauled it over and along and out on to the ice with oxen ; but, before he had gone far in his work, he was surprised to find that it was wrong end upward, with the stumps of the branches pointing down, and the small end firmly fastened in the sandy bottom. it was about a foot in diameter at the big end, and he had expected to get a good saw log, but it was so rotten as to be fit only for fuel, if for that. he had some of it in his shed then. there were marks of an axe and of woodpeckers on the butt. he thought that it might have been a dead tree on the shore, but was finally blown over into the pond, and after the top had become water-logged, while the butt-end was still dry and light, had drifted out and sunk wrong end up. his father, eighty years old, could not remem ber when it was not there. several pretty large logs may still be seen ijdng on the bottom, where, owing to the undulation of the surface, they look like huge water snakes in motion. this pond has rarely been profaned by a boat, for there is little in it to tempt a fisherman. instead of the white lily, which requires mud, or the common sweet flag, the blue flag {iris versicolor) grows thinly in the pure water, rising from the stony bottom all around the shore, where it is visited by hum ming birds in june, and the color both of its bluish blades and its flowers, and especially their reflections, are in singular har mony with the glaucous water. white pond and walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth. lakes of light. if they were permanently con gealed, and small enough to be clutched, they would, perchance, be carried off by slaves, like precious stones, to adorn the heads of emperors ; but being liquid, and ample, and secured to us and our successors forever, we disregard them, and run after the diamond of kohinoor. they are too pure to have a marke^/ the ponds 205 value; they contain no muck. how much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters, are they ! we never learned meanness of them. how much fairer than the pool before the farmer's door, in which his ducks swim ! hither the clean wild ducks come. nature has no human inhab itant who appreciates her. the birds with their plumage and their notes are in harmony with the flowers, but what youth or maiden conspires with the wild luxuriant beauty of nature? she flourishes most alone, far from the towns where they reside. talk of heaven ! ye disgrace earth. baker farm sometimes i rambled to pine groves, standing like temples, or like fleets at sea, full-rigged, with wavy boughs, and rip pling with light, so soft and green and shady that the druids would have forsaken their oaks to worship in them; or to the cedar wood beyond flint's pond, where the trees, covered with hoary blue berries, spiring higher and higher, are fit to stand before valhalla, and the creeping juniper covers the ground with wreaths full of fruit; or to swamps where the usnea lichen hangs in festoons from the white-spruce trees, and toadstools, round tables of the swamp gods, cover the ground, and more beautiful fungi adorn the stumps, like butterflies or shells, vegetable winkles; where the swamp-pink and dogwood gtow, the red alder-berry glows like eyes of imps, the waxwork grooves and crushes the hardest woods in its folds, and the wild holly berries make the beholder forget his home with their beauty, and he is dazzled and tempted by nameless other wild forbidden fruits, too fair for mortal taste. instead of calling on some scholar, i paid many a visit to particular trees, of kinds which are rare in this neighborhood, standing far away in the middle of some jdasture, or in the depths of a wood or swamp, or on a hill top : such as the black-birch, of which we have some handsome specimens two feet in diameter ; its cousin the yellow birch, with its loose golden vest, perfumed like the first; the beech, which has so neat a bole and beautifully lichen-painted, perfect in all its details, of which, excepting scattered speci mens, i know but one small grove of sizable trees left in the 206 baker farm 207 township, supposed by some to have been planted by the pigeons that were once baited with beech nuts near by; it is worth the while to see the silver grain sparkle when you split this wood ; the bass ; the hornbeam ; the celtis occidentalis, or false elm, of which we have but one well-grown ; some taller mast of a pine, a shingle tree, or a more perfect hemlock than usual, standing like a pagoda in the midst of the woods; and many others i could mention. these were the shrines i visited both summer and winter. once it chanced that i stood in the very abutment of a rain bow's arch, which filled the lower stratum of the atmosphere, tingeing the grass and leaves around, and dazzling me as if i looked through colored crystal. it was a lake of rainbow light, in which, for a short while, i lived like a dolphin. if it had lasted longer it might have tinged my employments and life. as i walked on the railroad causeway, i used to wonder at the halo of light around my shadow, and would fain fancy myself one of the elect. one who visited me declared that the shadows of some irishmen before him had no halo about them, that it was only natives that were so distinguished. benvenuto cellini tells us in his memoirs, that, after a certain terrible dream or vision which he had during his confinement in the castle of st. angelo, a resplendent light appeared over the shadow of his head at morning and evening, whether he was^in italy or france, and it was particularly conspicuous when the grass was moist with dew. this was probably the same phe nomenon to which i have referred, which is especially observed in the morning, but also at other times, and even by moonlight. though a constant one, it is not commonly noticed, and, in the case of an excitable imagination like cellini's, it would be basis enough for superstition. besides, he tells us that he showed it to very few. but are they not indeed distinguished who are conscious that they are regarded at all? i set out one afternoon to go a-fishing to fair-haven, through 208 walden the woods, to eke out my scanty fare of vegetables. my way led throug'h pleasant meadow, an adjunct of the baker farm, that retreat of which a poet has since sung-, beginning, — thy entry is a pleasant field, which some mossy fruit trees yield partly to a ruddy brook, by gliding musquash undertook, and mercurial trout, darting about. i thought of living there before i went to walden. i "hooked" the apples, leaped the brook, and scared the musquash and the trout. it was one of those afternoons which seem indefinitely long before one, in which many events may happen, a large portion of our natural life, though it was already half spent when i started. by the way there came up a shower, which compelled me to stand half an hour under a pine, piling boughs over my head, and wearing my handkerchief for a shed; and when at length i had made one cast over the pickerel-weed, standing up to my middle in water, i found myself suddenly in the shadow of a cloud, and the thunder began to rumble with such emphasis that i could do no more than listen to it. the gods must be proud, thought i, with such forked flashes to rout a poor unarmed fisherman. so i made haste for shelter to the nearest hut, which stood half a mile from any road, but so much the nearer to the pond, and had long been unin habited : — and here a poet builded, in the completed years, for behold a trivial cabin that to destruction steers. so the muse fables. but therein, as i found, dwelt now john field, an irishman, and his wife, and several children, from the broad-faced bov who assisted his father at his work, and baker farm 209 now came riinniiig by bis side from tbe bog to escape tbe rain, to tbe wrinkled, sibyl-like, cone-headed infant that sat upon its father's knee as in the palaces of nobles, and looked out from its home in the midst of wet and hunger inquisitively upon the stranger, with the privilege of infancy, not knowing but it was the last of a noble line, and the hope and cynosure of the world, instead of john field's poor starveling brat. there we sat together under that jdart of the roof "which leaked the least, while it showered and thundered without. i had sat there many times of old before the ship was built that floated this family to america. an honest, hard-working, but shiftless man plainly was john field; and his wife, she too was brave to cook so many successive dinners in the recesses of that lofty stove ; with round greasy face and bare breast, still thinking to improve her condition one day ; with the never absent mop in one hand, and yet no effects of it visible anywhere. the chickens, which had also taken shelter here from the rain, stalked about the room like members of the family, too humanized methought to roast well. they stood and looked in my eye or pecked at my shoe significantly. meanwhile my host told me his story, how hard he worked "bogging" for a neighboring farmer, turning up a meadow with a spade or bog hoe at the rate of ten dollars an acre and the use of the land with manure for one year, and his little broad-faced son worked cheerfully at his father's side the while, not knowing how poor a bargain the latter had made. t tried to help him with my experience, telling him that he was one of my nearest neighbors, and that i too, who came a-fishing here, and looked like a loafer, was getting my living like him self ; that i lived in a tight, light, and clean house, which hardly cost more than the annual rent of such a ruin as his commonly amounts to; and how, if he chose, he might in a month or two build himself a palace of his own ; that i did not use tea, nor coffee, nor butter, nor milk, nor fresh meat, and so ^id not have to work to get them; again, as i did not work hard, i did not 210 walden have to eat hard, and it cost me but a trifle for my food ; but as he began with tea, and coffee, and butter, and milk, and beef, he had to work hard to pay for them, and when he had worked hard he had to eat hard again to repair the waste of his sysi tem, — and so it was as broad as it was long, indeed it was ! broader than it was long, for he was discontented and wasted his life into the bargain ; and yet he had rated it as a gain, in coming to america, that here you could get tea, and coffee, and meat every day. but the only true america is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without these, and where the state does not endeavor to compel you to sustain the slavery and war and other superfluous expenses which directly or indirectly result from the use of such things. for i purposely talked to him as if he were a philosopher, or desired to be one. i should be glad if all the meadows on the earth were left in a wild state, if that were the consequence of men's beginning to redeem themselves. a man will not need to study history to find out what is best for his own culture. but alas! the culture of an irishman is an enterprise to be undertaken with a sort of moral bog hoe. i told him, that as he worked so hard at bogging, he required thick boots and stout clothing, which yet were soon soiled and worn out, but i wore light shoes and thin clothing, which cost not half so much, though he might think that i was dressed like a gentle man (which, however, was not the case), and in an hour or two, without labor, but as a recreation, i could, if i wished, catch as many fish as i should want for two days, or earn enough money to support me a week. if he and his family would live simply, they might all go a-huckleberrying in the summer for their amusement. john heaved a sigh at this, and his wife stared with arms akimbo, and both appeared to be wondering if they had capital enough to begin such a course with, or arithmetic enough to carry it through. it was sailing by dead reckoning to them, and they saw not clearly how to make their port so; therefore i baker farm 211 suppose they still take life bravely, after their fashion, face to face, giving it tooth and nail, not having" skill to split its mas sive columns with any fine entering wedge, and rout it in detail ; — thinking to deal with it roughly, as one should handle a thistle. but they fight at an overwhelming disadvantage, — living, john field, alas ! without arithmetic, and failing so. "do you ever fish*?" i asked. "oh, yes, i catch a mess now and then when i am lying by; good perch i catch." "what's your bait?" "i catch shiners with fish-worms, and bait the perch with them." "you'd better go now, john," said his wife, with glistening and hoj^eful face ; but john demurred. the shower was now over, and a rainbow above the eastern woods promised a fair evening ; so i took my departure. when i had got without i asked for a dish, hoping to get a sight of the well bottom, to complete my survey of the premises; but there, alas! are shallows and quicksands, and rope broken withal, and bucket irrecoverable. meanwhile the right culinary vessel was selected, water was seemingly distilled, and after consultation and long delay passed out to the thirsty one, — not yet suffered to cool, not yet to settle. such gruel sustains life here, i thought; so, shutting my eyes, and excluding the motes by a skilfully directed under-current, i drank to genuine hospitality the heartiest draught i could. i am not squeamish in such cases when manners are concerned. as i was leaving the irishman's roof after the rain, bending my steps again to the pond, my hasto to catch pickerel, wading in retired meadows, in sloughs and bog-holes, in forlorn and savage places, appeared for an instant trivial to me who had been sent to school and college; but as i ran down the hill toward the reddening west, with the rainbow over my shoulder, and some faint tinkling sounds borne to my ear through the cleansed air, from i know not what quarter, my good genius seemed to say, — go fish and hunt far and wide day by daj^, — farther and wider, — and rest thee by many brooks ?nr' hearth 212 walden sides without misgiving'. remember thy creator in the days of thy youth. rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures. let the noon find thee by other lakes, and the night overtake thee everywhere at home. there are no larger fields than these, no worthier games than may here be played. grow wild according to thy nature, like these sedges and brakes, which will never become english hay. let the thunder rumble; what if it threaten ruin to farmers' crops'? that is not its errand to thee. take shelter under the cloud, while they flee to carts and sheds. let not to get a living be thy trade, but thy sport. enjoy the land, but own it not. through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like serfs. baker farm ! landscape where the richest element is a little sunshine innocent. ... no one runs to revel on thy rail-fenced lea. ... debate with no man hast thou, with questions art never perplexed, as tame at the first sight as now, in thy plain russet gabardine dressed. ... come ye who love, and ye who hate, children of the holy dove, and guy faux of the state, and hang conspiracies from the tough rafters of the trees! men come tamely home at night only from the next field or street, where their household echoes haunt, and their life })ines because it breathes its own breath over again; their shadows morning and evening reach farther than their daily steps. we baker farm 213 should come home from far, from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day, with new experience and character. before i had reached the pond some fresh impulse had brought out john field, with altered mind, letting go "bogging" ere this sunset. but he, poor man, disturbed only a couple of fins while i was catching a fair string, and he said it was his luck ; but when he changed seats in the boat luck changed seats too. poor john field! — i trust he does not read this, unless he will improve by it, — thinking to live by some derivative old country mode in this primitive new country, — to catch perch wdth shiners. it is good bait sometimes, i allow\ with his horizon all his own, yet he a poor man, born to be poor, with his inherited irish poverty or poor life, his adam's grandmother and boggy ways, not to rise in this world, he nor his posterity. till their wading, webbed, bog-trotting feet* get talaria to their heels. xi higher laws as i came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, i caught a glimpse of a woodehuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw ; not that i was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented. once or twice, however, while i lived at the pond, i found myself ranging the woods, like a half -starved hound, with a strange abandonment, seeking some kind of veni son which i might devour, and no morsel could have been too savage for me. the wildest scenes had become unaccountably familiar. i found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and i reverence them both. i love the wild not less than the good. the wild ness and adventure that are in fishing still recommended it to me. i like sometimes to take rank hold on life and spend my day more as the animals do. perhaps i have owed to this em plovment and to hunting, when quite young, my closest acquaint ance with nature. they early introduce us to and detain us in scenery with which otherwise, at that age, we should have little acquaintance. fishermen. ininters, wood-choppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a ]^art of nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, who approach her with expectation. she is not afraid to exhibit herself to them. the traveler on 214 higher laws 215 the prairie is naturally a hunter, on the head waters of the missouri and columbia a trapper, and at the falls of st. mary a fisherman. he who is only a traveler learns things at second hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. we are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience. they mistake who assert that tlie yankee has few amusements, because he has not so many public holidays, and men and boys do not play so many games as they do in england, for here the more primitive but solitary amusements of hunting, fishing, and the like have not yet given place to the former. almost every new england boy among my contemporaries shouldered a fowling-piece between the ages of ten and fourteen; and his hunting and fishing grounds were not limited like the preserves of an english nobleman, but were more boundless even than those of a savage. no wonder, then, that he did not oftener stay to play on the common. but already a change is taking place, owing, not to an increased humanity, but to an increased scarcity of game, for perhaps the hunter is the greatest friend of the animals hunted, not excepting the humane society. moreover, when at the pond, i wished sometimes to add fish to my fare for variety. i have actually fished from the same kind of necessity that the first fishers did. whatever humanity i might conjure up against it was all factitious, and concerned my philosophy more than my feelings. i speak of fishing only now, for i had long felt differently about fowling, and sold my gun before i went to the woods. not that i am less humane than others, but i did not perceive that my feelings were much affected. i did not pity the fishes nor the worms. this was habit. as for fowling, during the last years that 1 carried a gun my excuse was that i was studying ornithology, and sought only new or rare birds. but i confess that i am now inclined to think that there is a finer way of studying ornithology than 216 walden this. it requires so much closer attention to the habits of the birds, that, if for that reason only, i have been willing to omit the gun. yet notwithstanding the objection on the score of humanity, i am compelled to doubt if equally valuable sports are ever substituted for these; and when some of my friends have asked me anxiously about their boys, whether they should let them hunt, i have answered, yes, — remembering that it was one of the best parts of my education, — make them hunters, though sportsmen only at first, if possible, mighty hunters at last, so that they shall not find game large enough for them in this or any vegetable wilderness, — hunters as well as fishers of men. thus far i am of the opinion of chaucer's nun, who yave not of the text a pulled hen that salth that hunters ben not holy men. there is a period in the history of the individual, as of the race, when the hunters are the "best men," as the algonquins called them. we cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun ; he is no more humane, while his education has been sadly neg lected. this was my answer with respect to those youths who were bent on this pursuit, trusting that they would soon outgrow it. no humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which ho'lds its life by the same tenure that he does. the hare in its extremity cries like a child. i warn you, mothers, that my sympathies do not always make the usual philanthropic distinctions. such is oftenest the young man's introduction to the forest, and the most original part of himself. he goes thither at first as a hunter and fisher, until at last, if he has the seeds of a better life in him, he distinguishes his proper objects, as a poet or naturalist it may be, and leaves the gun and fish-pole behind. the mass of men are still and always young in this respect. in some countries a hunting parson is no uncommon sight. such higher laws ^ 217 a one might make a good shepherd's dog, but is far from being the good shepherd. i have been surprised to consider that the only obvious employment, except wood-chopping, ice-cutting, or the like business, which ever to my knowledge detained at walden pond for a whole half day any of my fellow-citizens, whether fathers or children of the town, with just one exception, was fishing. commonly they did not think that they were lucky, or well paid for their time, unless they got a long string of fish, though they had the opportunity of seeing the pond all the while. they might go there a thousand times before the sedi ment of fishing would sink to the bottom and leave their purpose pure ; but no doubt such a clarifying process would be going on all the while. the governor and his council faintly remember the pond, for they went a-fishing there when they were boys; but now they are too old and dignified to go a-fishing, and so they know it no more forever. • yet even they expect to go to heaven at last. if the legislature regards it, it is chiefly to regulate the number of hooks to be used there ; but they know nothing about the hook of hooks with which to angle for the pond itself, empaling the legislature for a bait. thus, even in civilized communities, the embryo man passes through the hunter stage of development. i have found repeatedly, of late years, that i cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect. i have tried it again and again. i have skill at it, and, like many of my fellows, a certain instinct for it, which revives from time to time ; but always when t have done i feel that it would have been better if i had not fished. i think that i do not mistake. it is a faint intimation, yet so are the first streaks of morning. there is unquestionably this instinct in me which belongs to the lower orders of creation ; yet with every year i am less a fisherman, though without more humanity or even wisdom ; at present i am no fisherman at all. but i see that if i were to live in a wilderness i should again be tempted to become a fisher and hunter in earnest. besides, 218 . walden there is something essentially unclean about this diet, and all flesh, and i began to see where housework commences, and whence the endeavor, which costs so much, to wear a tidy and respectable appearance, each day, to keep the house sweet and free from all ill odors and sights. having been my own butcher and scullion and cook, as well as the gentleman for whom the dishes were served up, i can speak from an unusually complete experience. the practical objection to animal food in my ease was its uneleanness; and, besides, when i had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. it was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. a little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth. like many of my contemporaries, i had rarely for many years used animal food, or tea, or coffee, &c. ; not so much because of any ill effects w^hich i had traced to them, as because they were not agreeable to my imagination. the repugnance to animal food is not the effect of experience, but is an instinct. it appeared more beau tiful to live low and fare hard in many respects ; and though i never did so, i went far enough to please my imagination. i believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been par ticularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind. it is a significant fact, stated by entomolo gists, i find it in kirby and spence, that "some insects in their perfect state, though furnished with organs of feeding, make no use of them"; and they lay it down as "a general rule, that almost all insects in this state eat much less than in that of larvae. the voracious caterpillar when transformed into a but terfly," . . . "and the gluttonous maggot when become a fly," content themselves with a drop or two of honey or some other sweet liquid. the abdomen under the wings of the butterfly still represents the larva. this is the tidbit which tempts his insectivorous fate. the gross feeder is a man in the larva state; higher laws 219 and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without fancy or imagination, whose vast abdomens betray them. it is hard to provide and cook so simple and clean a diet as will not offend the imagination ; but this, i think, is to be fed when we feed the body ; they should both sit down at the same table. yet perhaps this may be done. the fruits eaten tem perately need not make us ashamed of our appetites, nor inter rupt the worthiest i:)ursuits. but put an extra condiment into your dish, and it will poison you. it is not worth the while to live by rich cooker3\ most men would feel shame if caught pre ])aring with their own hands precisely such a dinner, whether of animal or vegetable food, as is every day prepared for them by others. yet till this is otherwise we are not civilized, and, if gentlemen and ladies, are not true men and women. this cer tainly suggests what change is to be made. it may be vain to ask why the imagination will not be reconciled to flesh and fat. i am satisfied that it is not. is it not a reproach that man is a carnivorous animal? true, he can and does live, in a great measure, by preying on other animals; but this is a miserable way, — as any one who will go to snaring rabbits, or slaughter ing lambs, may learn, — and he will be regarded as a benefactor of his race who shall teach man to confine himself to a more innocent and wholesome diet. whatever my own practice may be, i have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized. if one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of his genius, which are certainly true, he sees not to what extremes, or even insanity, it may lead him ; and yet that way, as he grows more resolute and faithful, his road lies. the faintest assured objection which one healthy man feels will at length prevail over the arguments and customs of mankind. no man ever followed his genius till it misled him. though the result were 220 walden bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the conse quences were to be regretted, for these were a life in conformity to higher principles. if the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal, — that is your success. all nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. the greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. "we easily come to doubt if they exist. we soon forget them. they are the highest reality. perhaps the facts most astound ing and most real are never communicated by man to man. the true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and inde scribable as the tints of morning or evening. it is a little star dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which i have clutched. yet, for my part, i was never unusually squeamish ; i could sometimes eat a fried rat with a good relish, if it were necessary. i am glad to have drunk water so long, for the same reason that i prefer the natural sky to an opium-eater's heaven. i would fain keep sober always ; and there are infinite degrees of drunk enness. i believe that water is the only drink for a wise man ; wine is not so noble a liquor ; and think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea ! ah, how low i fall when i am tempted by them ! even music may be intoxicating. such apparently slight causes destroyed greece and rome, and will destroy england and america. of all ebriosity, who does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes? i have found it to be the most serious objection to coarse labors long continued, that they compelled me to eat and drink coarsely also. but to tell the truth, i find myself at present somewhat less particular in these respects. i carry less religion to the table, ask no blessing ; not because i am wiser than i was, but, i am obliged to confess, because, how ever much it is to be regretted, with years i have grown more coarse and indifferent. perhaps these questions are entertained higher laws 221 only in youth, as most believe of poetry. my practice is "no where," my opinion is here. nevertheless i am far from regard ing myself as one of those privileged ones to whom the ved refers when it says that "he who has true faith in the omnipres ent supreme being may eat all that exists," that is, is not bound to inquire what is his food, or who prepares it; and even in their case it is to be observed, as a hindoo commentator has remarked, that the vedant limits this privilege to "the time of distress." who has not sometimes derived an inexpressible satisfaction from his food in which appetite had no share? i have been thrilled to think that i owed a mental perception to the com monly gross sense of taste, that i have been inspired through the palate, that some berries which i had eaten on a hillside had fed my genius. "the soul not being mistress of herself," says thseng-tseu, "one looks, and one does not see; one listens, and one does not hear ; one eats, and one does not know the savor of food." he who distinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton ; he w^ho does not cannot be otherwise. a puritan may go to his brown-bread crust with as gross an appetite as ever an alderman to his turtle. not that food which entereth into the moutb defileth a man, but the appetite with which it is eaten. it is neither the quality nor the quantity, but the devo tion to sensual savors ; when that which is eaten is not a viand to sustain our animal, or inspire our spiritual life, but food for the worms that possess us. if the hunter has a taste for mud turtles, muskrats, and other such savage tidbits, the fine lady indulges a taste for jelly made of a calf's foot, or for sardines from over the sea, and they are even. he goes to the mill-pond, she to her preserve-pot. the wonder is how they, how you and i, can live this slimy beastly life, eating and drinking. our whole life is startlingly moral. there is never an in stant's truce between virtue and vice. goodness is the only investment that never fails. in the music of 'the harp which 222 walden trembles round the world it is the insisting on this which thrills us. the harp is the traveling patterer for the universe's insur ance company, recommending its laws, and our little goodness is all the assessment that we pay. though the youth at last .grows indifferent, the laws of the universe are not indifferent, but are forever on the side of the mpst sensitive. listen to every zephyr for some reproof, for it is surely there, and he is unfortunate who does not hear it. we cannot touch a string or move a stop but the charming moral transfixes us. many an irksome noise, go a long way off, is heard as music, a proud sweet satire on the meanness of our lives. we are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in pro portion as our higher nature slumbers. it is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled ; like the worms which, even in life and health, occupy our bodies. possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change its nature. i fear that it may enjoy a certain health of its own ; that we may be well, yet not pure. the other day i picked up the lower jaw of a hog, with white and sound teeth and tusks, which suggested that there was an animal health and vigor distinct from the spiritual. this creature succeeded by other means than temperance and purity. "that in which men differ from brute beasts," says mencius, "is a thing very inconsiderable ; the common herd lose it very soon ; superior men preserve it carefully." who knows what sort of life would result if we had attained to purity? if i knew so wise a man as could teach me purity i would go to seek him forthwith. "a command over our passions, and over the external senses of the body, and good acts, are declared by the ved to be indispensable in the mind's approximation to god." yet the spirit can for the time pervade and control every member and function of the body, and transmute what in form is the grossest sensuality into purity and devotion. the generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and in higher laws 223 spires us. chastity is th^ flowering of man ; and what are called genius, heroism, holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it. man flows at once to god when the channel of purity is open. by turns our purity inspires and our impur ity easts us down. he is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day, and the divine being established. perhaps there is none but has cause for shame on account of the inferior and brutish nature to which he is allied. i fear that we are such gods or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, and that, to some extent, our very life is our disgrace. — how happy 's he who hath due place assigned to his beasts and disaf ©rested his mind! ****** can use his horse, goat, wolf, and ev'ry beast, and is not ass himself to all the rest! else man not only is the herd of swine. but he's those devils too which did incline them to a headlong rage, and made them worse. all sensuality is one, though it takes many forms ; all j^ui'ity is one. it is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or sleep sensually. they are but one appetite, and we only need to see a person do any one of these things to know how great a sensualist he is. the impure can neither stand nor sit with purity. when the reptile is attacked at one mouth of his bur row, he shows himself at another. if you would be chaste, you must be temperate. what is chastity ? how shall a man know if he is chaste? he shall not know it. we have heard of this virtue, but we know not what it is. we speak conformably to the rumor which we have heard. from exertion come wisdom and purity; from sloth ignorance and sensuality. in the stu dent sensuality is a sluggish habit of mind. an unclean person ris universally a slothful one, one who sits by a stove, whom the 224 walden snn shines on prostrate, who reposes without being fatigued. if you would avoid uncleanliness, and all the sins, work ear nestly, though it be at cleaning a stable. nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be overcome. what avails it that you are christian, if you are not purer than the heathen, if you deny yourself no more, if you are not more religious'? i know of many systems of religion esteemed heathenish whose precepts fill the reader with shame, and provoke him to new endeavors, though it be to the performance of rites merely. i hesitate to say these things, but it is not because of the sub ject, — i care not how obscene my words are, — but because i cannot speak of them without betraying mj^ impurity. we dis course freely without shame of one form of sensuality, and are silent about another. we are so degraded that we cannot speak simply of the necessary functions of human nature. in earlier ages, in some countries, every function was reverently spoken of and regulated by law. nothing was too trivial for the hindoo lawgiver, however offensive it may be to modern taste. he teaches how to eat, drink, cohabit, void excrement and urine, and the like, elevating what is mean, and does not falsely excuse himself by calling these things trifles. every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. we are all sculptors and paint ers, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them. john farmer sat at his door one september evening, after a hard day's work, his mind still running on his labor more or less. having bathed he sat down to recreate his intellectual man. it was a rather cool evening, and some of his neighbors were apprehending a frost. he had not attended to the train of his thoughts long when he heard some one playing on a flute, and that sound harmonized with his mood. still he thought of his higher laws 225 work; but the burden of his thought was that though this kept running in his head, and he found himself planning and con triving it against his will, yet it concerned him very little. it was no more than the scurf of his skin, which was constantly shuffled off. but the notes of the flute came home to his ears out of a different sphere from that he worked in, and suggested work for certain faculties which slumbered in him. they gently did away with the street, and the village, and the state in which he lived. a voice said to him, — why do you stay here and live this mean moiling life, when a glorious existence is possible for you? those same stars twinkle over other fields than these. — but how to come out of this condition and actually migrate thither? all that he could think of was to practice some new austerity, to let his mind descend into his body and redeem it, and treat himself with ever increasing respect. xii brute neighbors sometimes i had a companion in my fishing, who came tlirough the village to my house from the other side of the town, and the catching of the dinner was as much a social exer cise as the eating of it. hermit. i wonder what the world is doing now. i have not lieard so much as a locust over the sweet-fern these three hours. the pigeons are all asleep upon their roosts, — no flutter from them. was that a farmer's noon horn which sounded from beyond the woods just now? the hands are coming in to boiled salt beef and cider and indian bread. why will men worry themselves so? he that does not eat need not work. i wonder how much they have reaped. who would live there where a body can never think for the barking of bose? and oh, the housekeeping ! to keep bright the devil's door-knobs, and scour his tubs this bright day ! better not keep a house. say, some hollow tree; and then for morning calls and dinner-parties! only a wood-pecker tapping. oh, they swarm; the sun is too avarm there: they are born too far into life for me. i have water from the spring, and a loaf of brown bread on the shelf. — hark ! i hear a rustling of the leaves. is it some ill-fed village hound yielding to the instinct of the chase? or the lost pig which is said to be in these woods, w^hose tracks i saw after the rain? it comes on apace; my sumachs and sweet-briers trem ble. — eh, mr. poet, is it you? how do you like the world today? 226 brute neighbors 227 poet. see those clouds; how they hang! that's the greatest thing i have seen today. there's nothing like it in old paint ings, nothing like it in foreign lands, — unless when we were oif the coast of spain. that's a true mediterranean sky. i thought, as i have my living to get, and have not eaten today, that i might go a-fishing. that's the true industry for poets. it is the only trade i have learned. come, let's along. hermit. i cannot resist. my brown bread will soon be gone. i will go with you gladly soon, but i am just concluding a seri ous meditation. i think that i am near the end of it. leave me alone, then, for a while. but that we may not be delayed, you shall be digging the bait meanwiiile. angle-worms are rarely to be met with in these parts, where the soil was never fattened with manure; the race is nearly extinct. the sport of digging the bait is nearly equal to that of catching the fish, when one's appetite is not too keen ; and this you may have all to yourself today. i would advise you to set in the spade down yonder among the ground-nuts, where j^ou see the johnswort waving. i think that i may warrant you one worm to every three sods you turn up, if you look well in among the roots of the grass, as if you were weeding. or, if you choose to go farther, it will not be unwise, for i have found the increase of fair bait to be very nearly as the squares of the distances. hermit alone. let me see, where was i? methinks i avas nearly in this frame of mind ; the world lay about at this angle. shall i go to heaven or a-fishing? if i should soon bring this meditation to an end, would another so sweet occasion be likely to offer ? i was as near being resolved into the essence of things as ever i was in my life. i fear my thoughts will not come back to me. if it would do any good, i would whistle for them. when they make us an offer, is it wise to say, we will think of it? my thoughts have left no track, and i cannot find the path again. what was it that i was thinking of? it was a vers^ hazy day. i will just try these three sentences of con-f ut-see ; 228 walden iliey may fetch that state about again. i know not whetlier it avas the dumps or a budding ecstasy. mem. there never is but one opportunity of a kind. poet. how nof, hermit, is it too soon? i have got just thirteen whole ones, besides several which are imperfect or undersized; but they will do for the smaller fry; they do not cover up the hook so much. those village worms are quite too large; a shiner may make a meal off one without finding the skewer. hermit. well, then, let's be off. shall we to the concord? there's good sport there if the water be not too high. avhy do precisely these objects which we behold make a world? why has man just these species of animals for his neighbors; as if nothing but a mouse could have filled this crevice? i suspect that pilpay & co. have put animals to their best use, for they are all beasts of burden, in a sense, made to carry some portion of our thoughts. the mice w^hich haunted my house were not the common ones, which are said to have been introduced into the country, but a avild native kind not found in the village. i sent one to a dis tinguished naturalist, and it interested him much. when i was building, one of these had its nest underneath the house, and before i had laid the second floor, and swept out the shavings, avould come out regularly at lunch time and pick up the crumbs at my feet. it probably had never seen a man before; and it soon became quite familiar, and would run over my shoes and up my clothes. it could readily ascend the sides of the room by short impulses, like a squirrel, which it resembled in its motions. at length, as i leaned with my elbow on the bench one day, it ran up my clothes, and along my sleeve, and round and round the paper which held my dinner, while i kept the latter close, and dodged and played at bo-peep with it; and when at last i held still a piece of cheese between my thumb and finger, it brute neighbors 229 came and nibbled it, sitting' in my hand, and afterward cleaned its face and paws, like a fly, and walked away. a phoebe soon built in my shed, and a robin for protection in a pine which grew against the house. in june the partridge {tetrao umhellus), which is so shy a bird, led her brood past my windows, from the w^oods to the rear to the front of my house, clucking and calling to them like a hen, and in all her behavior proving herself the hen of the woods. the young sud denly disperse on your approach, at a signal from the mother, as if a whirlwind had swept them away, and they so exactly resemble the dried leaves and twigs that many a traveler has placed his foot in the midst of a brood, and heard the whir of the old bird as she flew off, and her anxious calls and mewing, or seen her trail her wings to attract his attention, without sus pecting their neighborhood. the parent will sometimes roll and spin round before you in such a dishabille, that you cannot, for a few moments, detect what kind of creature it is. the young squat still and flat, often running their heads under a leaf, and mind only their mother's directions given from a dis tance, nor will your approach make them run again and betray themselves. you may even tread on them, or have your eyes on them for a minute, without discovering them. i have held them in my open hand at such a time, and still their only care, obedi ent to their mother and their instinct, was to squat there without fear or trembling. so perfect is this instinct, that once, when i had laid them on the leaves again, and one accidentally fell on its side, it was found with the rest in exactly the same position ten minutes afterward. they are not callow like the young of most birds, but more perfectly developed and precocious even than chickens. the remarkably adult yet innocent expression of their open and serene eyes is very memorable. all intelli gence seems reflected in them. they suggest not merely the purity of infancy, but a w^isdom clarified by experience. such an eye was not born when the bird was, but is coeval with the 230 walden sky it reflects. the woods do not yield another such gem. the traveler does not often look into such a limpid well. the igno rant or reckless sportsman often shoots the parent at such a time, and leaves these innocents to fall a prey to some prowling beast or bird, or gradually mingle with the decaying leaves which they so much resemble. it is said that when hatched by a lieii they will directly disperse on some alarm, and so are lost, for they never hear the mother's call which gathers them again. these were my hens and chickens. it is remarkable how many creatures live wild and free though secret in the woods, and still sustain themselves in the neighborhood of towns, suspected by hunters only. how re tired the otter manages to live here ! he grows to be four feet long, as big as a small boy, perhaps without any human being getting a glimpse of him. i formerly saw the raccoon in the woods behind where my house is built, and probably still heard their whinnering at night. commonly i rested an hour or two in the shade at noon, after planting, and ate my lunch, and read a little by a spring which was the source of a swamp and of a brook, oozing from under brister's hill, half a mile from my field. the approach to this was through a succession of de scending grassy hollows, full of young pitch-pines, into a larger wood about the swamp. there, in a very secluded and shaded s))ot, under a spreading white-pine, there was yet a clean firm sward to sit on. i had dug out the spring and made a well of clear gi'ay water, where i could dip up a pailful without roiling it, and thither i went for this purpose almost every day in mid summer, when the pond was warmest. thither too the wood cock led her brood, to probe the mud for worms, flying but a foot above them down the bank, while thej^ ran in a troo}") beneath; but at last, spying me, she would leave her young and circle round and round me, nearer and nearer till within four or five feet, pretending broken wings and legs, to attract my attention, and get off her young, who would already have brute neighbors 231 taken up their march, with faint wiry peep, single file through the swamp, as she directed. or i heard the peep of the young when i could not see the parent bird. there too the turtle doves sat over the spring, or fluttered from bough to bough of the soft white-pines over my head; or the red squirrel, coursing down the nearest bough, was particularly familiar and inquisi tive. you only need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns. i was witness to events of a less jieaceful character. one day when i went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, i observed two large ants, the one red, the other much larger, nearly half an inch long, and black, fiercely contending with one another. having once got hold they never let go, but struggled and wrestled and rolled on the chips incessantly. looking far ther, i was surprised to find that the chips were covered with such combatants, that it was not a duellum, but a helium, a war between two races of ants, the red always pitted against the black, and frequently two red ones to one black. the legions of these myrmidons covered all the hills and vales in my wood yard, and the ground was already strewn with the dead and dying, both red and black. it was the only battle which i have ever witnessed, the only battle-field i ever trod while the battle was raging; internecine war; the red republicans on the one hand, and the black imperialists on the other. on every side they were engaged in deadly combat, yet without any noise that i could hear, and human soldiers never fought so resolutely. i watched a couple that were fast locked in each other's em braces, in a little sunny valley amid the chips, now at noonday prepared to fight till the sun went down, or life went out. the smaller red champion had fastened himself like a vice to his adversary's front, and through all the tumblings on that field never for an instant ceased to gnaw at one of his feelers near the root, having already caused the other to go by the board; 232 walden while the stronger black one dashed him from side to side, and, as i saw on looking nearer, had already divested him of several of his members. they fought with more pertinacity than bull dogs. neither manifested the least disposition to retreat. it was evident that their battle-cry was conquer or die. in the meanwhile there came along a single red ant on the hill side of this valley, evidently full of excitement, who either had dis patched his foe, or had not yet taken part in the battle ; prob ably the latter, for he had lost none of his limbs ; whose mother had charged him to return with his shield or upon it. or per chance he was some achilles, who had nourished his wrath apart, and had now come to avenge or rescue his patroclus. he saw this unequal combat from afar, — for the blacks were nearly twice the size of the red, — he drew near with rapid pace till he stood on his guard within half an inch of the combatants ; then, watching his opportunity, he sprang upon the black war rior, and commenced his operations near the root of his right fore-leg, leaving the foe to select among his own members ; and so there were three united for life, as if a new kind of attrac tion had been invented w^iich put all other locks and cements to shame. i should not have wondered by this time to find that they had their respective musical bands stationed on some emi nent chip, and playing their national airs the while, to excite the slow and cheer the dying combatants, i was myself excited somewhat even as if they had been men. the more you think of it, the less the difference. and certainly there is not the fight recorded in concord history, at least, if in the history of america, that will bear a moment's comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed. for numbers and for carnage it was an austerlitz or dresden. concord fight ! two killed on the patriots' side, and luther blanehard wounded ! wliy, here every ant was a buttrick, — "fire! for god's sake fire!" — and thousands shared the fate of davis and hosmer. there was bkute neighboes 233 not one hireling there. i have no doiibt that it was a principle they fought for, as much ?3 our ancestors, and not to avoid a three-penny tax on their tea ; and the results of this battle will be as important and memorable to those whom it concerns as those of the battle of bunker hill, at least. i took up the chip on which the three i have particularly described were struggling, carried it into my house, and placed it under a tumbler on my window-sill, in order to see the issue. holding a microscope to the first-mentioned red ant, i saw that, though he was assiduously gnawing at the near fore-leg of his enemy, having severed his remaining feeler, jhis own breast was all torn away, exposing what vitals he had there to the jaws of the black warrior, whose breast-jilate was appa rently too thick for him to pierce; and the dark carbuncles of the sufferer's eyes shone with ferocity such as war only could excite. they struggled half an hour longer under the tumbler, and when i looked again the black soldier had severed the heads of his foes from their bodies, and the still living heads were hanging on either side of him like ghastly trophies at his saddle bow, still apparently as firmly fastened as ever, and he was endeavoring with feeble struggles, being without feelers and with only the remnant of a leg, and i know not how many other wounds, to divest himself of them ; which at length, after half an hour more, he accomplished. i raised the glass, and he went off over the window-sill in that crippled state. whether he finally survived that combat, and spent the remainder of his days in some hotel des invalides, i do not know; but i thought that his industry would not be worth much thereafter. i never learned which party was victorious, nor the cause of the war; but i felt for the rest of that day as if i had had my feelings excited and harrowed by witnessing the struggle, the ferocity and carnage, of a human battle before my door. kirby and spence tell us that the battles of ants have long been celebrated and the date of them recorded, though they say 234 walden that huber is the only modern author who appears to have witnessed them. "^ilneas sylvius/' say they, "after giving a very circumstantial account of one contested with great obsti nacy by a great and small species on the trunk of a pear tree," adds that " ^this action w^as fought in the pontificate of eu genius the fourth, in the presence of nicholas pistoriensis, an eminent lawyer, who related the whole history of the battle with the greatest fidelity/ a similar engagement between great and small ants is recorded by olaus magnus, in which the small ones, being victorious, are said to have buried the bodies of their own soldiers, but left those of their giant enemies a prey to the birds. this event happened previous to the expulsion of the tyrant christiern the second from sweden." the battle which i witnessed took place in the presidency of polk, five years before the passage of webster's fugitive-slave bill. many a village bose, fit only to course a mud-turtle in a victualling cellar, sported his heavy quarters in the woods, without the knowledge of his master, and ineffectually smelled at old fox burrows and wood-chucks' holes; led perchance by some slight cur which nimbly threaded the wood, and might still inspire a natural terror in its denizens; now far behind his guide, barking like a canine bull toward some small squirrel which had treed itself for scrutiny, then, cantering off, bending the bushes with his weight, imagining that he is on the track of some stray member of the jerbilla family. once i was surprised to see a cat walking along the stony shore of the pond, for they rarely wander so far from home. the surprise was mutual. nevertheless the most domestic cat, which has lain on a rug all her days, appears quite at home in the woods, and by her sly and stealthy behavior, proves herself more native there than the regular inhabitants. once, when berrying, i met with a cat with young kittens in the woods, quite wild, and they all, like their mother, had their backs up and were fiercely spitting at me. a few years before i lived in the woods there was what beute neighboks 235 was called a "winged cat" in one of the farm-houses in lincoln nearest the pond, mr. gilian baker's. when i called to see her in june, 1842, she was gone a-hunting in the woods, as was her wont (i am not sure whether it was a male or female, and so use the more common pronoun), but her mistress told me that she came into the neighborhood a little more than a year before, in april, and was finally taken into their house; that she was of a dark brownish gray color, with a white spot on her throat, and white feet, and had a large bushy tail like a fox; that in the winter the fur grew thick and flatted out along her sides, forming strips ten or twelve inches long by two and a half wide, and under her chin like a muff, the upper side loose, the under matted like felt, and in the spring these appendages dropped off. they gave me a pair of her "wings," which i keep still. there is no appearance of a membrane about them. some thought it was part flying squirrel or some other wild animal, which is not impossible, for, according to naturalists, prolific hj'brids have been produced by the union of the marten and domestic cat. this would have been the right kind of cat for me to keep, if i had kept any ; for why should not a poet's cat be winged as well as his horse? in the fall the loon {colymhus glacialis) came, as usual, to moult and bathe in the pond, making the woods ring with his wild laughter before i had risen. at rumor of his arrival all the mill-dam sportsmen are on the alert, in gigs and on foot, two by two and three by three, with patent rifles and conical balls and spy-glasses. they come rustling through the woods like autumn leaves, at least ten men to one loon. some station themselves on this side of the pond, some on that, for the poor bird cannot be omnipresent; if he dive here he must come up there. but now the kind october wind rises, rustling the leaves and rippling the surface of the water, so that no loon can be heard or seen, though his foes sweep the pond with spy-glasses, and make the woods resound with their discharges. the waves 236 walden generously rise and dash angrily, taking sides with all water fowl, and our sportsmen must beat a retreat to town and shop and unfinished jobs. but they were too often successful. when i went to get a pail of water early in the morning i frequently saw this stately bird sailing out of my cove within a few rods. if i endeavored to overtake him in a boat, in order to see how he would maneuver, he would dive and be completely lost, so that i did not discover him again, sometimes, till the latter part of the day. but i was more than a match for him on the surface. he commonly went off in a rain. as i was paddling along the north shore one very calm october afternoon, for such days especially they settle on to the lakes, like the milkweed down, having looked in vain over the pond for a loon, suddenly one, sailing out from the shore toward the middle a few rods in front of me, set up his wild laugh and betrayed himself. i pursued with a paddle and he dived, but when he came up i was nearer than before. he dived again, but i miscalculated the direction he would take, and we were fifty rods apart when he came to the surface this time, for i had helped to widen the interval; and again he laughed long and loud, and with more reason than before. he maneuvered so cunningly that i could not get within half a dozen rods of him. each time, when he came to the surface, turning his head this way and that, he coolly surveyed the water and the land, and apparently chose his course so that he might come up where there was the widest expanse of water and at the greatest distance from the boat. it was surprising how quickly he made up his mind and put his resolve into execution. he led me at once to the widest part of the pond, and could not be driven from it. while he was thinking one thing in his brain, i was endeavoring to divine his thought in mine. it was a pretty game, played on the smooth surface of the pond, a man against a loon. suddenly your adversary's checker disappears beneath the board, and the problem is to bjiute neighbors 237 place yours nearest to where his will appear again. sometimes he would come up unexpectedly on the opposite side of me, havingapparently passed directly under the boat. so long% winded was he and so unweariable, that when he had swum farthest he would immediately plunge again, nevertheless; and then no wit could divine where in the deep pond, beneath the smooth surface, he might be speeding his way like a fish, for he had time and ability to visit the bottom of the pond in its deepest part. it is said that loons have been caught in the new york lakes eighty feet beneath the surface, with hooks set for trout, — though walden is deeper than that. how surprised must the fishes be to see this ungainly visitor from another sphere speeding his way amid their schools! yet he appeared to know his course as surely under water as on the surface, and swam much faster there. once or twice i saw a ripple where he approached the surface, just put his head out to reconnoiter, and instantly dived again. i found that it was as well for me to rest on my oars and wait his reappearing as to endeavor to calculate where he would rise; for again and again, when i was straining my eyes over the surface one way, i would suddenly be startled by his unearthly laugh behind me. but why, after displaying so much cunning, did he invariably betray himself the moment he came up by that loud laugh? did not his white breast enough betray him? he was indeed a silly loon, i thought. i could commonly hear the plash of the water when he came up, and so also detected him. but after an hour he seemed as fresh as ever, dived as willingly and swam yet farther than at first. it was surprising to see how serenely he sailed off with unruffled breast when he came to the surface, doing all the work with his webbed feet beneath. his usual note was this demoniac laughter, yet somewhat like that of a water-fowl; but occasionally, when he had balked me most successfully and come up a long way off, he uttered a long-drawn unearthly howl, probably more like 238 walden that of a wolf than any bird ; as when a beast puts his muzzle to the ground and deliberately howls. this was his looning, — perhaps the wildest sound that is ever heard here, making the woods ring far and wide. i concluded that he laughed in derision of my efforts, confident of his own resources. though the sky was by this time overcast, the pond was so smooth that i could see where he broke the surface when i did not hear him. his white breast, the stillness of the air, and the smooth ness of the water were all against him. at length, having come up fifty rods off, he uttered one of those prolonged howls, as if calling on the god of loons to aid him, and immediately there came a wind from the east and rippled the surface, and filled the whole air with misty rain, and i was impressed as if it were the prayer of the loon answered, and his god was angry with me; and so i left him disappearing far away on the tumultuous surface. for hours, in fall days, i watched the ducks cunningly tack and veer and hold the middle of the pond, far from the sports man; tricks which they will have less need to practice in louisiana bayous. when compelled to rise they would some times circle round and round and over the pond at a consider able height, from which they could easily see to other ponds and the river, like black motes in the sky ; and when i thought they had gone off thither long since, they would settle down by a slanting flight of a quarter of a mile on to a distant part which was left free ; but what besides safety they got by sailing in the middle of walden i do not know, unless they love its water for the same reason that i do. xiii house-warming in october i went a-graping to the river meadows, and loaded myself with clusters more precious for their beauty and fragrance than for food. there too i admired, though i did not gather, the cranberries, small waxen gems, pendants of the meadow grass, pearly and red, which the farmer plucks with an ugly rake, leaving the smooth meadow in a snarl, heedlessly measuring them by the bushel and the dollar only, and sells the spoils of the meads to boston and new york; destined to be jammed, to satisfy the tastes of lovers of nature there. so butchers rake the tongues of bison out of the prairie grass, regardless of the torn and drooping plant. the bar berry's brilliant fruit was likewise food for my eyes merely; but i collected a small store of wild apples for coddling, which the proprietors and travelers had overlooked. when chestnuts were ripe i laid up half a bushel for winter. it was very exciting at that season to roam the then boundless chestnut woods of lincoln, — they now sleep their long sleep under the railroad, — with a bag on my shoulder, and a stick to open burrs with in my hand, for i did not always wait for the frost, amid the rustling of leaves and the loud reproofs of the red squirrels and the jays, whose half-consumed nuts i some times stole, for the burrs which they had selected were sure to contain sound ones. occasionally i climbed and shook the trees. they grew also behind my house, and one large tree which almost overshadowed it was, when in flower, a bouquet which scented the whole neighborhood, but the squirrels and 239 240 walden the jays got most of its fruit; the last coming in flocks early in the morning and picking the nuts out of the burrs before they fell. i relinquished these trees to themand visited the more distant woods composed wholly of chestnut. these nuts, as far as they went, were a good substitute for bread. many other substitutes might, perhaps, be found. digging one day for fishworms i discovered the ground-nut (apios tuherosa) on its string, the potato of the aborigines, a sort of fabulous fruit, which i had begun to doubt if i had ever dug and eaten in childhood, as i had told, and had not dreamed it. i had often since seen its crimpled red velvety blossom supported by the stems of other plants without knowing it to be the same. cultivation has well-nigh exterminated it. it has a sweetish taste, much like that of a frostbitten potato, and i found it better boiled than roasted. this tuber seemed like a faint ]>romise of nature to rear her own children and feed them simply here at some future period. in these days of fatted cattle and waving grain-fields, this humble root, which was once the totem of an indian tribe, is quite forgotten, or known only by its flowering vine; but let wild nature reign here once more, and the tender and luxurious english grains will probably disappear before a myriad of foes, and without the care of man the crow may carry back even the last seed of corn to the great cornfield of the indian's god in the southwest, whence he is said to have brought it ; but the now almost exterminated ground-nut will perhaps revive and flourish in spite of frosts and wildness, prove itself indigenous, and resume its ancient importance and dignity as the diet of the hunter tribe. some indian ceres or minerva must have been the inventor and bestower of it ; and when the reign of poetry commences here, its leaves and string of nuts may be represented on our works of art. already, by the first of september, i had seen two or three small maples turned scarlet across the pond, beneath where house-warming 241 the white stems of three aspens diverged, at the point of a promontory, next the water. ah, many a tale their color told ! and gradually from week to week the character of each tree came out, and it admired itself reflected in the smooth mirror of the lake. each morning the manager of this gallery sub stituted some new picture, distinguished by more brilliant or harmonious coloring, for the old upon the walls. the wasps came by thousands to my lodge in october, as to winter quarters, and settled on my windows within and on the walls overhead, sometimes deterring visitors from entering. each morning, when they were numbed with cold, i swept some of them out, but i did not trouble myself much to get rid of them ; i even felt complimented by their regarding my house as a desirable shelter. they never molested me seriously, though they bedded with me ; and they gradually disappeared, into what crevices i do not know, avoiding winter and unspeak able cold. like the wasps, before i finally went into winter quarters in november, i used to resort to the northeast side of walden, w^hich the sun, reflected from the pitch-pine woods and the stony shore, made the fireside of the pond; it is so much pleasanter and wholesomer to be warmed by the sun while you can be, than by an artificial fire. i thus warmed myself by the still glowing embers which the summer, like a departed hunter, had left. when i came to build my chimney i studied masonry. my bricks, being second-hand ones, required to be cleaned with a trowel, so that i learned more than usual of the qualities of bricks and trowels. the mortar on them was fifty years old, and was said to be still growing harder; but this is one of those sayings which men love to repeat whether they are true or not. such sayings themselves grow harder and adhere more firmly with age, and it would take many blows with a trowel 242 walden to clean an old wiseacre of them. many of the villages of mesopotamia are built of second-hand bricks of a ver}^ good quality, obtained from the ruins of babylon, and the cement on them is older and probably harder still. however that may be, i was struck by the peculiar toughness of the steel avhich bore so many violent blows without being worn out. as my bricks had been in a chimney before, though i did not read the name of nebuchadnezzar on them, i picked out as many fireplace bricks as i could find, to save work and waste, and i filled the spaces between the bricks about the fireplace with stones from the pond shore, and also made my mortar wdth the white sand from the same place. i lingered most about the fireplace, as the most vital part of the house. indeed, i worked so deliberately, that though i commenced at the ground in the morning, a course of bricks raised a few inches above the floor served for my pillow at night; yet i did not get a stiff neck for it that i remember ; my stiff neck is of older date. i took a poet to board for a fortnight about those times, which caused me to be put to it for room. he brought his own knife, though i had two, and we used to scour them by thrusting them into the earth. he shared with me the labors of cooking. i was pleased to see my work rising so square and solid by degrees, and reflected that, if it proceeded slowly, it was calculated to endure a long time. the chimney is to some extent an inde pendent structure, standing on the ground and rising through the house to the heavens ; even after the house is burned it still stands sometimes, and its importance and independence are apparent. this was toward the end of summer. it was now november. the north wind had already begun to cool the pond, though it took many weeks of steady blowing to accomplish it, it is so deep. when i began to have a fire at evening, before i plastered my house, the chimney carried smoke particularly well, because house-warming 243 of the numerous chinks between the boards. yet i passed some cheerful evenings in that cool and airy apartment, surrounded by the rough brown boards full of knots, and rafters with the bark on high overhead. my house never pleased my eye so much after it was plastered, though i was obliged to confess that it was more comfortable. should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters? these forms are more agreeable to the fancy and imagination than fresco paintings or other the most expensive furniture. i now first began to inhabit my house, i may say, when i began to use it for w^armth as well as shelter. i had got a couple of old fire-dogs to keep the wood from the hearth, and it did me good to see the soot form on the back of the chimney which i had built, and i poked the fire with more right and more satisfaction than usual. my dwelling was small, and i could hardly entertain an echo in it ; but it seemed larger for being a single apartment and remote from neighbors. all the attractions of a house were concentrated in one room; it was kitchen, chamber, parlor, and keeping-room; and what ever satisfaction parent or child, master or servant, derive from living in a house, i enjoyed it all. cato says, the master of a family (paterfamilias) must have in his rustic villa "cellam oleariam, vinariam, dolia multa, uti lubeat caritatem expectare, et rei, et virtuti, et gloriae erit," that is, "an oil and wine cellar, many casks, so that it may be pleasant to expect hard times; it will be for his advantage, and virtue, and glory." i had in my cellar a firkin of potatoes, about two quarts of peas with the weevil in them, and on my shelf a little rice, a jug of molasses, and of rye and indian meal a peck each. i sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house, standing in a golden age, of enduring materials, and without gingerbread-work, which shall still consist of only one room, a vast, rude, substantial, primitive hall, without ceiling or 244 walden plastering, with bare rafters and purlins supporting a sort of lower heaven over one's head, — useful to keep off rain and snow; where the king and queen posts stand out to receive your homage,' when you have done reverence to the prostrate saturn of an older dynasty on stepping over the sill ; a caver nous house, wherein you must reach up a torch upon a pole to see the roof; where some may live in the fireplace, come in the recess of a window, and some on settles, some at one end of the hall, some at another, and some aloft on rafters with the spiders, if they choose ; a house which you have got into when you have opened the outside door, and the ceremony is over; where the weary traveler may wash, and eat, and converse, and sleep, without further journey ; such a shelter as you would be glad to reach in a tempestuous night, containing all the essen tials of a house, and nothing for house-keeping, where you can see all the treasures of the house at one view, and every thing hangs upon its peg that a man should use ; at once kitchen, pantry, parlor, chamber, store-house, and garret; where you can see so necessary a thing as a barrel or a ladder, so con venient a thing as a cupboard, and hear the pot boil, and pay your resjdects to the fire that cooks your dinner and the oven that bakes your bread, and the necessary furniture and utensils are the chief ornaments; where the washing is not put out, nor the fire, nor the mistress, and perhaps you are sometimes requested to move from off the trap-door, when the cook would descend into the cellar, and so learn whether the ground is solid or hollow beneath you without stamping. a' house whose inside is as open and manifest as a bird's nest, and you can not go in at the front door and out at the back without seeing some of its inhabitants ; where to be a guest is to be jd resented with the freedom of the house, and not to be carefully excluded from seven-eighths of it, shut up in a particular cell, and told to make yourself at home there, — in solitary confinement. now adays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the house-warming 245 mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance. there is as much secrecy about the cooking as if he had a design to poison you. i am aware that i have been on many a man's premises, and might have been legally ordered off, but i am not aware that i have been in many men's houses. i might visit in my old clothes a king and queen who lived simply in such a house as i have described, if i were going their w^ay; but backing out of a modern palace will be all that i shall desire to learn, if ever i am caught in one. it would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into parlaver wholly, ou.r lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched, through slides and dumb-waiters, as it were; in other w^ords, the parlor is so far from the kitchen and workshop. the dinner even is only the parable of a dinner, commonly. as if only the savage dwelt near enough to nature and truth to borrow a trope from them. how can the scholar, who dwells away in the north west ter ritory or the isle of man, tell what is parliamentary in the kitchen ? however, only one or two of my guests were ever bold enough to stay and eat a hasty-pudding with me; but when they saw that crisis approaching they beat a hasty retreat rather, as it would shake the house to its foundations. nevertheless, it stood through a great m'any hasty-puddings. i did not plaster till it was freezing weather. i brought over some whiter and cleaner sand for this purpose from the opposite shore of the pond in a boat, a sort of conveyance which would have tempted 'me to go much farther if necessary. my house had in the meanwhile been shingled down to the ground on every side. in lathing i was pleased to be able to send home each nail with a single blow of the hammer, and 246 walden it was my ambition to transfer the plaster from the board to the wall neatly and rajjidly. i remembered the story of a conceited fellow, who, in fine clothes, was wont to lounge about the village once, giving advice to workmen. venturing one day to substitute deeds for words, he turned up his cuffs, seized a plasterer's board, and having loaded his trowel without mis lia]), with a complacent look toward the lathing overhead, made a bold gesture thitherward ; and straightway, to his complete discomfiture, received the whole contents in his ruffled bosom. i admired anew the economy and convenience of plastering, which so effectually shuts out the cold and takes a handsome finish, and i learned the various casualties to which the plas terer is liable. i was suri)rised to see how thirsty the bricks were, which drank up all the moisture in my plaster before i had smoothed it, and how many pailfuls of water it takes to christen a new hearth. i had the previous winter made a small quantity of lime by burning the shells of the unio fluviatilis, which our river affords, for the sake of the experiment ; so that i knew where my materials came from. i might have got good limestone within a mile or two and burned it myself, if i had cared to do so. the pond had in the meanwhile skimmed over in the shadiest and shallowest coves, some days or even weeks before the general freezing. the first ice is especially interesting and perfect, being hard, dark, and transparent, and affords the best opportunity that ever offers for examining the bottom where it is shallow; for you can lie at your length on ice only an inch thick, like a skater insect on the surface of the water, and study the bottom at your leisure, only two or three inches distant, like a picture behind a glass, and the water is neces sarily always smooth then. there are many furrows in the sand where some creature has traveled about and doubled on its tracks ; and, for wrecks, it is strewn with the cases of cadis worms made of minute grains of white quartz. perhaps these house-warming 247 have creased it, for you find some of their cases in the furrows, though they are deep and broad for them to make. but the ice itself is the object of most interest, though you must improve the earliest opportunity to study it. if you examine it closely the morning after it freezes, you find that the greater part of the bubbles, which at first appeared to be within it, are against the under surface, and that more are continually rising from the bottom; while the ice is as yet comparatively solid and dark, that is, you see the water through it. these bubbles are from an eightieth to an eighth of an inch in diameter, very clear and beautiful, and you see your face reflected in them through the ice. there may be thirty or forty of them to a square inch. there are also already within the ice narrow oblong perpendicular bubbles about half an inch long, sharp cones with the apex upward; or oftener, if the ice is quite fresh, minute spherical bubbles, one directly above another, like a string of beads. but these within the ice are not so numerous nor obvious as those beneath. i sometimes used to east on stones to try the strength of the ice, and those which broke through carried in air with them, which formed very large and conspicuous white bubbles beneath. one day when i came to the same place forty-eight hours afterward, i found that those large bubbles were still perfect, though an inch more of ice had formed, as i could see distinctly by the seam in the edge of a cake. but as the last two days had been very warm, like an indian summer, the ice was not now transparent, showing the dark green color of the water, and the bottom, but opaque and whitish or gray, and though twice as thick was hardly stronger than before, for the air bubbles had greatly expanded under this heat and run together, and lost their regu larity ; they were no longer one directly over another, but often like silvery coins poured from a bag, one overlapping another, or in thin flakes, as if occupying slight cleavages. the beauty of the ice was gone, and it was too late to study the bottom. 248 * walden being curious to know what position my great bubbles occupied with regard to the new ice, i broke out a cake containing a middling-sized one, and turned it bottom upward. the new ice had formed around and under the bubble, so that it was included between the two ices. it was wholly in the lower ice, but close against the upper, and was flattish, or perhaps slightly lenticular, with a rounded edge, a quarter of an inch deep by four inches in diameter; and i was surprised to find that directly under the bubble the ice was melted with great regu larity in the form of a saucer reversed, to the height of five eighths of an inch in the middle, leaving a thin partition there between the water and the bubble, hardly an eighth of an inch thick; and in many places the small bubbles in this partition had burst out downward, and probably there was no ice at all under the largest bubbles, which were a foot in diameter. i inferred that the infinite number of minute bubbles which i had first seen against the under surface of the ice were now frozen in likewise, and that each, in its degree, had operated like a burning-glass on the ice beneath to melt and rot it. these are the little air guns which contribute to make the ice crack and whoop. at length the winter set in in good earnest, just as i had finished jdlastering, and the wdnd began to howl around the house as if it had not had permission to do so till then. night after night the geese came lumbering in in the dark w^ith a clangor and a whistling of wings, even after the ground was covered with snow, some to alight in walden, and some flying low over the woods toward fair-haven, bound for mexico. several times, when returning from the village at ten or eleven o'clock at night, i heard the tread of a flock of geese, or else ducks, on the dry leaves in the woods by a pond-hole behind my dwelling, where they had come up to feed, and the faint honk or quack of their leader as they hurried off. in 1845 house-warming 249 walden froze entirely over for the first time on the night of the 22d of december, flint's and other shallower ponds and the river having been frozen ten days or more ; in '46, the 16th ; in '49, about the 31st ; and in '50, about the 27th of december ; in '52, the 5th of january ; in '53, the 31st of december. the snow had already covered the ground since the 25th of novem ber, and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery of winter. i avithdrew yet farther into my shell, and endeavored to keep a bright fire both within my house and within my breast. my employment out of doors now was to collect the dead wood in the forest, bringing it in my hands or on my shoulders, or sometimes trailing a dead pine tree under each arm to my shed. an old forest fence which had seen its best days was a great haul for me. i sacrificed it to vulcan, for it was past serving the god terminus. how much more interesting an event is that man's supper who has just been forth in the snow to hunt, nay, you may say, steal, the fuel to cook it with! his bread and meat are sweet. there are enough fagots and waste wood of all kinds in the forests of most of our towns to support many fires, but which at present warm none, and, some think, hinder the growth of the young wood. there was also the drift-wood of the pond. in the course of the summer i had discovered a raft of pitch-pine logs with the bark on, pinned together by the irish when the railroad was built. this i hauled up j)artly on the shore. after soaking two years and then lying high six months it was perfectly sound, though waterlogged past .drying. i amused myself one winter day vvith sliding this piecemeal across the pond, nearly half a mile, skating behind with one end of a log fifteen feet long on my shoulder, and the other on the ice ; or i tied several logs together with a birch withe, and then, with a longer birch or alder which had a hook at the end, dragged them across. though completely waterlogged and almost as heavy as lead, they not only burned long, but made a very hot fire; nay, i thought 250 walden that they burned better for the soaking, as if the pitch, being confined by the water, burned longer as in a lamp. gilpin, in his account of the forest borderers of england, says that "the encroachments of trespassers, and the houses and fences thus raised on the borders of the forest," were "considered as great nuisances by the old forest law, and were severely punished under the name of purprestures, as tending ad terrorem fcrarum — ad nocumentum forestce, etc.,'' to the frightening of the game and the detriment of the forest. but i was interested in the preservation of the venison and the vert more tlian the hunters or wood-choppers, and as much as though i had been the lord warden himself; and if any part was burned, though i burned it myself by accident, i grieved with a grief that lasted longer and was more inconsolable than that of the proprietors; nay, i grieved when it was cut down by the ])roprietors themselves. i would that our farmers when they cut down a forest felt some of that awe which the old romans did when they camo to thin, or let in the light to, a consecrated grove {lucum conlucare), that is, would believe that it is sacred to some god. the roman made an expiatory offering, and prayed. whatever god or goddess thou art to whom this grove is sacred, be propitious to me, my family, and children, etc. it is remarkable what a value is still put upon wood even in this age and in this new country, a value more j^ermanent and universal than that of gold. after all our discoveries and inventions no man will go by a jiile of wood. it is as precious ' to us as it was to our saxon and norman ancestors. if they made their bows of it, we make our gun-stocks of it. miehaux, more than thirty years ago, says that the j^rice of wood for fuel in new york and philadelphia "nearly equals, and some times exceeds, that of the best wood in paris, though this immense capital annually requires more than three hundred thousand cords, and is surrounded to the distance of three house-warming • 251 hundred miles by cultivated j^lains." in this town the price of wood rises almost steadily, and the only question is, how much higher it is to be this year than it was the last. mechanics and tradesmen who come in person to the forest on no other errand, are sure to attend the wood auction, and even pay a liigh price for the privilege of gleaning after the wood-chopper. it is now many years that men have resorted to the forest for fuel and the materials of the arts; the new englander and the new hollander, the parisian and the celt, the farmer and robinhood, goody blake and harry gill, in most parts of the world the prince and the peasant, the scholar and the savage, equally require still a few sticks from the forest to warm them and cook their food. neither could i do without them. every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection. i loved to have mine before my window, and the more chips the better to remind me of my pleasing work. i had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which by spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, i played about the stumps which i had got out of my beanfield. as my driver prophesied when i was plowing, they warmed me twice, once while i was splitting them, and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel could give out more heat. as for the axe, i was advised to get the village blacksmith to "jump" it; but i jumped him, and, putting a hickory helve from the woods into it, made it do. if it was dull, it was at least hung true. a few pieces of fat pine were a great treasure. it is inter esting to remember how much of this food for fire is still concealed in the bowels of the earth. in previous years i had often gone "prospecting" over some bare hill side, where a i)iteh-pine wood had formerly stood, and got out the fat pine roots. they are almost indestructible. stumps thirty or forty years old, at least, will still be sound at the core, though the sapwood has all become vegetable mold, as appears by 252 walden the scales of the thick bark forming' a ring level with the earth four or five inches distant from the heart. with axe and shovel you explore this mine, and follow the marrowy store, yellow as beef tallow, or as if you had struck on a vein of gold, deep into the earth. but commonly i kindled my fire with the dry leaves of the forest, which i had stored up in my shed before the snow came. green hickory finely sjdlit makes the wood chopper's kindlings, when he has a camp in the woods. once in a while i got a little of this. when the villagers were lighting their fires beyond the horizon, i too gave notice to the various wild inhabitants of walden vale, by a smoky streamer from my chimney, that i was awake. — light-winged smoke, icarian bird, melting thy pinions in thy upward flight, ' lark without song, and messenger of dawn, circling above the hamlets as thy nest; or else, departing dream, and shadowy form of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts; by night star-veiling, and by day darkening the light and blotting out the sun ; go thou my incense upward from this hearth, and ask the gods to pardon this clear flame. hard gteen wood just cut, though i used but little of that, answered my purpose better than any other. i sometimes left a good fire when i went to take a walk in a winter afternoon; and when i returned, three or four hours afterward, it would be still alive and glowing. my house was not empty though i was gone. it was as if i had left a cheerful housekeeper behind. it was i and fire that lived there; and commonly my housekeeper proved trustworthy. . one day, however, as i was splitting wood, i thought that i would just look in at the window and see if the house was not on fire; it was the only time i remember to have been particularly anxious on this score; so i looked and saw that a spark had caught my house-warming 253 bed, and i went in and extinguished it when it had burned a place as big as my hand. but my house occupied so sunny and sheltered a position, and its roof was so low, that i could afford to let the fire go out in the middle of almost any winter day. the moles nested in my cellar, nibbling every third potato, and making a snug bed even there of some hair left after plastering and of brown paper ; for even the wildest animals love comfort and warmth as well as man, and they survive the winter only because they are so careful to secure them. some of my friends spoke as if i was coming to the woods on i^urpose to freeze myself. the animal merely makes a bed, w^hich he warms with his body in a sheltered place; but man, having discovered fire, boxes up some air in a spacious apart ment, and warms that, instead of robbing himself, makes that his bed, in which he can move about divested of more cumbrous clothing, maintain a kind of summer in the midst of winter, and by means of windows even admit the light, and with a lamp lengthen out the day. thus he goes a step or two beyond instinct, and saves a little time for the fine arts. though, when i had been exposed to the rudest blasts a long time, my whole body began to gi'ow torpid, when i reached the genial atmosphere of my house i soon recovered my faculties and prolonged my life. but the most luxuriously housed has little to boast of in this respect, nor need ave trouble ourselves to speculate how the human race may be at last destroyed. it would be easy to cut their threads any time with a little sharper blast from the north. we go on dating from cold fridays and great snows; but a little colder friday, or greater snow, would put a idcriod to man's existence on the globe. the next winter i used a small cooking-stove for economy, since i did not own the forest; but it did not keep fire so well as the open fire place. cooking was then, for the most part, no longer a poetic, but merely a chemic, process. it will soon 254 walden be forgotten, in these days of stoves, that we used to roast potatoes in the ashes, after the indian fashion. the stove not only took up room and scented the house, but it concealed the fire, and i felt as if i had lost a companion. you can always see a face in the fire. the laborer, looking into it at evening, purifies his thoughts of the dross and earthiness which they have accumulated during the day. but i could no longer sit and look into the fire, and the pertinent words of a poet ^ecurred to me with new force. — ■ never, bright flame, may be denied to me thy dear, life imaging, close sympathy. what but my hopes shot upward e'er so bright? "what but my fortunes sunk so low in night? why art thou banished from our hearth and hall, thou who art welcomed and beloved by all? was thy existence then too fanciful for our life 's common light, who are so dull ? did thy bright gleam mysterious converse hold with our congenial souls? secrets too bold? well, we are safe and strong, for now we sit beside a hearth where no dim shadows flit. where nothing cheers nor saddens, but a fire warms feet and hands — nor does to more aspire ; by whose compact utilitarian heap the present may sit down and go to sleep. nor fear the ghosts who from the dim past walked, and with us by the unequal light of the old wood fire talked. xiv former inhabitants and winter visitors i weathered some merry snow-storms, and spent some cheer ful winter evenings by my fireside, wkile the snow whirled wildly without, and even the hooting of the owl was hushed. for many weeks i met no one in my walks but those who came occasionally to cut wood and sled it to the village. the elements, however, abetted me in making a path through the deepest snow in the woods, for when i had once gone through the wind blew the oak leaves into my tracks, where they lodged, and by absorbing the rays of the sun melted the snow, and so not only made a dry bed for my feet, but in the night their dark line was my guide. for humaji society i was obliged to conjure up the former occupants of these woods. within the memory of many of my townsmen the road near which my house stands resounded with the laugh and gossip of inhabitants, and the woods which border it were notched and dotted here and there with their little gardens and dwellings, though it was then much more shut in by the forest than now. in some places, within my own remembrance, the pines would scrape both sides of a chaise at once, and women and children who were compelled to go this way to lincoln alone and on foot did it with fear, and often ran a good part of the distance. though mainly but a humble route to neighboring villages, or for the avoodman^s team, it once amused the traveler more than now by its variety, and lingered longer in his memory. where now firm open fields stretch from the village to the woods, it then ran through a maple swamp on a foundation of logs, the remnants of which, doubtless, still underlie the present 255 25g waldex dusty highway, from the stratten, now the alms house, farm, to brister's hill. east of my beanfield, across the road, lived cato ingraham, slave of duncan ingraham, esquire, gentleman of concord village; who built his slave a house, and gave him permission to live in walden woods; — cato, not uticensis, but concordi ensis. some say that he was a guinea negro. there are a few who remember his little patch among the walnuts, which he let grow up till he should be old and need them; but a younger and whiter speculator got them at last. he, too, however, occupies an equally narrow house at present. cato's half-obliterated cellar hole still remains, though known to few, being concealed from the traveler by a fringe of pines. it is now filled with the smooth sumach {rhus glabra), and one of the earliest species of goldenrod {solidago stricta) grows there luxuriantly. here, by the very covner of my field, still nearer to town, zilpha, a colored woman, had her little house, where she spun linen for the townsfolk, making the walden woods ring with her shrill singing, for she had a loud and notable voice. at length, in the war of 1812, her dwelling was set on fire by english soldiers, prisoners on j^arole, when she was away, and her cat and dog and hens were all burned up together. she led a hard life, and somewhat inhumane. one old frequenter of these woods remembers that as he passed her house one noon he heard her muttering to herself over her gurgling joot, — "ye are all bones, bones!" i have seen bricks amid the oak copse there. down the road, on the right hand, on brister's hill, lived brister freeman, "a handy negro," slave of squire cummings once, — there where grow still the apple trees which brister planted and tended; large old trees now, but their fruit still wild and ciderish to my taste. not long since i read his epitaph in the old lincoln burying-ground, a little on one former inhabitants and winter visitors 257 side, near the unmarked graves of some british grenadiers who fell in the retreat from concord, — where he is styled "sippio brister," — scipio africanus he had some title to be called, — "a man of color," as if he were discolored. it also told me, with staring emphasis, when he died ; which was but an indirect way of informing me that he ever lived. with him dwelt fenda, his hospitable wife, who told fortunes, yet pleasantly, — large, round, and black, blacker than any of the children of of the night, such a dusky orb as never rose on concord before or since. farther down the hill, on the left, on the old road in the woods, are marks of some homestead of the stratton family; whose orchard once covered all the slope of brister's hill, but was long since killed out by pitch-pines, excepting a few stumps, whose old roots furnish still the wild stocks of many a thrifty village tree. nearer yet to town, you come to breed's location, on the other side of the way, just on the edge of the wood; ground famous for the pranks of a demon not distinctly, named in old mythology, who has acted a prominent and astounding part in our new england life, and deserves, as much as any mytho logical character, to have his biography written one day; who first comes in the guise of a friend or hired man, and then robs and murders the whole family, — new england rum. but history must not yet tell the tragedies enacted here; let time intervene in some measure to assuage and lend an azure tinjt to them. here the most indistinct and dubious tradition says that once a tavern stood; the well the same, which tempered the traveler's beverage and refreshed his steed. here then men saluted one another, and heard and told the news, and went their ways again. breed's hut was standing only a dozen years ago, though it had long been unoccupied. it was about the size of mine. it was set on fire by mischievous boys, one election night, if 258 walden i do not mistake. i lived on the edge of the village then, and iiad just lost myself over davenant's gondibert, that winter that i labored with a lethargy, — which, by the way, i never knevi^ whether to regard as a family complaint, having an nncle who goes to sleep shaving himself, and is obliged to sprout potatoes in a cellar sundays, in order to keep awake and keep the sabbath, or as the consequence of my attempt to read chalmers' collection of english poetry without skip l^ing. it fairly overcame my nervii. i had just sunk my head on this when the bells rang fire, and in hot haste the engines rolled that way, led by a straggling troop of men and boys, and i among the foremost, for i had leaped the brook. we thought it was far south over the woods, — we who had run to fires before, — barn, shoj), or dwelling-house, or all together. "it's baker's barn," cried one. "it is the codman place," affirmed another. and then fresh sparks went up above the wood, as if the roof fell in, and we all shouted "concord to the rescue!" wagons shot past with furious speed and crushing loads, bearing, perchance, among the rest, the agent of the insurance company, who was bound to go however far ; and ever and anon the engine bell tinkled behind, more slow and sure, and rearmost of all, as it was afterward whispered, came they who set the fire and gave the alarm. thus we kept on like true idealists, rejecting the evidence of our senses, until at a turn in the road we heard the crackling and actually felt the heat of the fire from over the wall, and realized, alas! that we were there. the very nearness of the fire but cooled our ardor. at first we thought to throw a frog-pond on to it; but concluded to let it burn, it was so far gone and so worthless. so we stood round our engine, jostled one another, expressed our sentiments through speaking trumpets, or in lower tone referred to the great conflagrations which the world had witnessed, including bascom's shop, and, between ourselves, we thought that, were we there in season with our former inhabitants and winter visitors 259 "tub" and a full frog-pond by, we could turn that threatened last and universal one into another flood. we finally retreated without doing any mischief, — i-eturned to sleep and gondibert. but as for gondibert, i would except that passage in the preface about wit being the soul's powder, — "but most of mankind are strangers to wit, as indians are to powder." i it chanced that i walked that way across the fields the following night, about the same hour, and hearing a low moaning at this spot, i drew near in the dark, and discovered the only survivor of the family that i know, the heir of both its virtues and its adces, who alone avas interested in this burning, lying on his stomach and looking over the cellar wall at the still smoldering cinders beneath, muttering to himself, as is his wont. he had been working far off in the river meadow all day, and had improved the first moments that he could call his own to visit the home of his fathers and his youth. he gazed into the cellar from all sides and points of view by turns, alw^ays lying down to it, as if there was some treasure, which he remembered, concealed between the stones, where there was absolutely nothing but a heap of bricks and ashes. the house being gone, he looked at what there was left. he was soothed by the sympathy which my mere presence implied, and showed me, as well as the darkness permitted, where the well was covered up; which, thank heaven, could never be burned; and he groped long about the wall to find the well-sw^eep which his father had cut and mounted, feeling for the iron hook or staple by which a burden had been fastened to the heavy end, — all that he could now cling to, — to convince me that it was no common "rider." i felt it, and still remark it almost daily in my walks, for by it hangs the history of a family. once more, on the left, where are seen the well and lilac bushes by the wall, in the now open field, lived nutting and le grosse. but to return toward lincoln. 260 walden farther in the woods than any of these, where the road approaches nearest to the pond, wyman the potter squatted, and furnished his townsmen with earthen ware, and left descendants to succeed him. neither were they rich in worldly goods, holding the land by sufferance while they lived; and there often the sheriff came in vain to collect the taxes, and '^attached a chip," for form's sake, as i have read in his accounts, there being nothing else that he could lay his hands on. one day in midsummer, when i w^as hoeing, a man who was carrying a load of pottery to market stopped his horse against my field and inquired concerning wyman the younger. he had long ago bought a potter's wheel of him, and wished to know what had become of him. i had read of the potter's clay and wheel in scripture, but it had never occurred to me that the pots we use were not such as had come down unbroken from those days, or grown on trees like gourds somewhere, and i was pleased to hear that so fictile an art was ever prac ticed in my neighborhood. the last inhabitant of these woods before me was an irish man, hugh quoil (if i have spelt his name with coil enough), who occupied wyman's tenement, — col. quoil, he was called. rumor said that he had been a soldier at waterloo. if he had lived i should have made him fight his battles over again. his trade here was that of a ditcher. napoleon went to st. helena; quoil came to walden woods. all i know of him is tragic. he was a man of manners, like one who had seen the world, and was capable of more civil speech than you could well attend to. he avore a great coat in midsummer, being affected with the trembling delirium, and his face was the color of carmine. he died in the road at the foot of brister's hill shortly after i came to the woods, so that i have not remembered him as a neighbor. before his house was pulled down, when his comrades avoided it as "an unlucky castle," i visited it. there lay his old clothes curled up by former inhabitants and winter visitors 261 use, as if they were himself, ui^on his raised plank bed. his pipe lay broken on the hearth, instead of a bowl broken at the fountain. the last could never have been the symbol of his death, for he confessed to me that, though he had heard of brister's spring, he had never seen it ; and soiled cards, kings of diamonds, spades, and hearts, were scattered over the floor. one black chicken which the administrator could not catch, black as night and as silent, not even croaking, awaiting rey nard, still went to roost in the next apartment. in the rear there was the dim outline of a garden, which had been planted but had never received its first hoeing, owing to those terrible shaking fits, though it was now harvest time. it was overrun with roman wormwood and beggar-ticks, which last stuck to my clothes for all fruit. the skin of a woodchuck was freshly stretched upon the back of the house, a trophy of his last waterloo; but no warm cap or mittens would he want more. now only a dent in the earth marks the site of these dwellings, with buried cellar stones, and strawberries, raspberries, thimble berries, hazel bushes, and sumachs growing in the sunny sward there; some pitch-pine or gnarled oak occupies what was the chimney nook, and a sweet-scented black-birch, perhaps, wave^ where the door-stone was. sometimes the well dent is visible^ where once a spring oozed; now dry and tearless grass; or it was covered deep, — not to be discovered till some late day, — with a flat stone under the sod, when the last of the race departed. avhat a sorrowful act must that be, — the covering up of wells ! coincident with the opening of wells of tears. these cellar dents, like deserted fox burrows, old holes, are all that is left where once were the stir and bustle of human life, and "fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute," in some form and dialect or other were by turns discussed. but all i can learn of their conclusions amounts to just this, that "cato and brister pulled wool"; which is about as edifying as the history of more famous schools of philosophy. 262 walden still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door and lintel and the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet-scented flowers each spring, to be plucked by the musing traveler; planted and tended once by children's hands, in front-yard plots, — now standing by wall-sides in retired pastures, and giving place to new-rising forests ; — the last of that stirp, sole survivor of that family. little did the dusky children think that the puny slip avith its two eyes only, w^hich they stuck in the ground in the shadow of the house and daily watered, would root itself so, and outlive them, and house itself in the rear that shaded it, and grow man's garden and orchard, and tell their story faint ij^ to the lone wanderer a half centuiy after they had grown up and died, — blossoming as fair, and smelling as sweet, as in that first spring. i mark its still tender, civil, cheerful, lilac colors. but this small village, germ of something more, why did it fail while concord keeps its ground? were there no natural advantages, — no water j^rivileges, forsooth? ay, the deep walden pond and cool brister's spring, — privilege to drink long and healthy draughts at these, all unimproved by these men but to dilute their glass. they were universally a thirsty race. might not the basket, stable-broom, mat-making, corn parching, linen-spinning, and pottery business have thrived here, making the wilderness to blossom like the rose, and a numerous posterity have inherited the land of their fathers? the sterile soil would at least have been proof against a low land degeneracy. alas! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape! again, perhaps, nature will tiy, with me for a first settler, and my house raised last spring to be the oldest in the hamlet. i am not aware, that any man has ever built on the spot which i occupy. deliver me from a city built on the site of a more ancient city, whose materials are ruins, whose gardens cemeteries. the soil is blanched and accursed there, and before former inhabitants and winter visitors 263 that becomes necessary the earth itself will be destroyed. with such reminiscences i repeopled the woods and lulled myself asleep. at this season i seldom had a visitor. when the snow lay deepest no wanderer ventured near my house for a week or a fortnight at a time, but there i lived as snug as a meadow mouse, or as cattle and poultry which are said to have survived for a long time buried in drifts, even without food; or like that early settler's family in the town of sutton, in this state, whose cottage was comjiletely covered by the great snow of 1717 when he was absent, and an indian found it only by the hole which the chimney's breath made in the drift, and so relieved the family. but no friendly indian concerned himself about me; nor needed he, for the master of the house was at home. the great snow ! how cheerful it is to hear of ! when the farmers could not get to the woods and swamps with their teams, and were obliged to cut down the shade trees before their houses, and when the crust was harder cut off the trees in the swamps ten feet from the ground, as it appeared the next spring. in the deepest snow^s, the path avhich i used from the high way to my house, about half a mile long, might have been represented by a meandering dotted line, with wide intervals between the dots. for a week of even weather i took exactly the same number of steps, and of the same length, coming and going, stepping deliberately and with the precision of a pair of dividers in my own deep tracks, — to such routine the winter reduces us, — yet often they were filled with heaven's own blue. but no weather interfered fatally with my walks, or rather my going abroad, for i frequently tramjied eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a l)eech tree, or a j^ellow-birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines ; when the ice and^ snow, causing their limbs to droop, 264 walden and so sharpening their tops, had changed the pines into fir trees; wading to the tops of the highest hills when the snow was nearly two feet deep on a level, and shaking down another snow-storm on my head at every step; or sometimes creej^ing and floundering thither on my hands and knees, when the hunters had gone into winter quarters. one afternoon i amused myself by watching a barred owl {strix nehulosa) sitting on one of the lower dead limbs of a white-pine, close to the trunk, in broad daylight, i standing within a rod of him. he could hear me when i moved and crouched the snow with my feet, but could not plainly see me. when i made most noise he would stretch out his neck, and erect his neck feathers, and open his eyes wide; but their lids soon fell again, and he began to nod. i too felt a slumberous influence after watching him half an hour, as he sat thus with his eyes half open, like a cat, winged brother of the cat. there was only a narrow slit left between their lids, by which he preserved a peninsular relation to me; thus, with half-shut eyes, looking out from the land of dreams, and endeavoring to realize me, vague object or mote that interrupted his visions. at length, on some louder noise or my nearer approach, he would grow uneasy and sluggishly turn about on his perch, as if impatient at having his dreams disturbed; and when he launched himself off and flapped through the pines, spreading his wings to unexpected breadth, i could not hear the slightest sound from them. thus, guided amid the pine boughs rather by a delicate sense of their neighborhood than by sight, feeling his twilight way as it were with his sensitive pinions, he found a new perch, where he might in peace await the dawning of his day. as i walked over the long causeway made for the railroad through the meadows, t encountered many a blustering and nipping wind, for nowhere has it freer play; and when the frost had smitten me on one cheek, heathen as i was, i turned to it the other also. nor was it much better by the carriage fokmer inhabitants and winter visitors 265 road from brister's hill. for i came to town still, like a friendly indian, when the contents of the broad, open fields were all piled up between the walls of the walden road, and half an hour sufficed to obliterate the tracks of the last traveler. and when i returned new drifts would have formed through which i floundered, where the busy northwest wind had been depositing the powdery snow round a sharp angle in the road, and not a rabbit's track, nor even the fine print, the small type, of a meadow mouse was to be seen. yet i rarely failed to find, even in mid-winter, some warm and springy swamp where the grass and the skunk-cabbage still put forth with perennial verdure, and some hardier bird occasionally awaited the return of spring. sometimes, notwithstanding the snow, when i returned from my walk at evening i crossed the deep tracks of a woodchopper leading from my door, and found his pile of whittlings on the hearth, and my house filled w^ith the odor of his pipe. or on a sunday afternoon, if i chanced to be at home, i heard the crouching of the snow made by the step of a long-headed farmer, who from far through the woods sought my house, to have a social "crack"; one of the few of his vocation who are "men on their farms"; who donned a frock instead of a pro fessor's gown, and is as ready to extract the moral out of church or state as to haul a load of manure from his barn-yard. we talked of rude and simple times, when men sat about large fires in cold bracing weather, with clear heads; and when other dessert failed, we tried our teeth on maiiy a nut which wise squirrels have long since abandoned, for those which have the thickest shells are commonly empty. the one who came from farthest to my lodge, through deepest snows and most dismal tempests, • was a poet. a farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter, even a philosopher, may be daunted; but nothing can deter a poet, for he is actuated by pure love. who can predict his comings and goings'? his 266 walden business calls him out at all hours, even when doctors sleep. ave made that small house ring with boisterous mirth and resound with the murmur of much sober talk, making amends then to walden vale for the long silences. broadway was still and deserted in comparison. at suitable intervals there were regular salutes of laughter, which might have been referred indifferently to the last-uttered or the forthcoming jest. we made many a "bran new" theory of life over a thin dish of gruel, which combined the advantages of conviviality with the clearheadedness which philosophy requires. i should not forget that during my last winter at the pond there was another welcome visitor, who at one time came through the village, through snow and rain and darkness, till he saw my lamp through the' trees and shared with me. some long winter evenings. one of the last of the philosophers, — connecticut gave him to the world, — he peddled first her wares, afterwards, as he declares, his brains. these he peddles still, prompting god and disgracing man, bearing for fruit his brain only, like the nut its kernel. i think that he must be the man of the most faith of any alive. his words and attitude always suppose a better state of things than other men are acquainted with, and he will be the last man to be disappointed as the ages revolve. he has no venture in the present. but though comparatively disregarded now, when his day comes, laws unsuspected by most will take effect, and masters of families and rulers will come to him for advice. — how blind that cannot see serenity! a true friend of man ; almost the only friend of human progress. an old mortality, say rather an immortality, with unwearied patience and faith making plain the image engtaven in men's bodies, the god of whom they are but defaced and leaning monuments. with his hospitable intellect he embraces former inhabita>^ts and winter visitors 267 children, beggars, insane, and scholars, and entertains the thought of all, adding to it commonly some breadth and^ elegance. i think that he should keep a caravansary on the world's highway, where philosophers of all nations might j^ut up, and on his sign should be printed : "entertainment for man, but not for his beast. enter ye that have leisure and a quiet miqd, who earnestly seek the right road." he is perhaps the sanest man and has the fewest crotchets of any i chance to know ; the same yesterday and tomorrow. of yore we had sauntered and talked, and effectually put the world behind us ; for he was pledged to no institution in it, freeborn, ingenuus. "whichever way we turned, it seemed that the heavens and the earth had met together, since he enhanced the beauty of the landscape. a blue-robed man, whose fittest roof is the overarching sky which reflects his serenity. i do not see how he can ever die; nature cannot spare him. having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled them, trying our knives, and admiring the clear yellowish grain of the pumjikin jiine. we waded so gently and reverently, or we i:>ulled togetlier so smoothly, that the fishes of thought were not scared from the stream, nor feared any angler on the bank, but came and went gi'andly, like the clouds which float through the western sky, and the mother-o' pearl flocks which sometimes form and dissolve there. there we worked, revising mythology, rounding a fable here and there, and building castles in the air for which earth offered no worthy foundation. great looker! great expecter! to converse with whom was a new england night's entertainment. ah! such discourse we had, hermit and philosopher, and the old settler i have spoken of, — we three, — it expanded and racked my little house; i should not dare to say how many ])ounds' weight there was above the atmospheric pressure on every circular inch; it opened its seams so that they had to be calked with much dulness thereafter to stop the consequent 268 walden leak; — but i had enough of that kind of oakum ah'eady picked. there was one other with whom i had "solid seasons," long to be remembered, at his house in the village, and who looked in upon me from time to time; but i had no more for society there. there too, as everywhere, i sometimes expected the visitor who never comes. the vishnu purana says, "the house-holder is to remain at eventide in his courtyard as long as it takes to milk a cow, or longer if he pleases, to await the arrival of a guest." i often performed this duty of hospitality, waited long enough to milk a whole herd of cows, but did not see tlie man approaching from the town. xv winter animals wlien the ponds were firmly frozen, they afforded not only new and shorter routes to many points, but new views from their surfaces of the familiar landscape around them. when i crossed flint's pond, after it was covered with snow, though i had often paddled about and skated over it, it was so unex pectedly wide and so strange that i could think of nothing but baffin's bay. the lincoln hills rose up around me at the extremity of a snowy plain, in which i did not remember to have stood before; and the fishermen, at an indeterminable distance over the ice, moving slowly about with their wolfish dogs, passed for sealers or esquimos, or in misty weather loomed like fabulous creatures, and i did not know whether they were giants or i^ygtiiies. i took this course when i went to lecture in lincoln in the evening, traveling in no road and ]iassing no house between my own hut and the lecture room. in goose pond, which lay in my way, a colony of muskrats dwelt, and raised their cabins high above the ice, though none could be seen abroad when i crossed it. walden, being like the rest usually bare of snow, or with only shallow and inter rupted drifts on it, was my yard, where i could walk freely when the snow was nearly two feet deep on a level elsewhere and the villagers were confined to their streets. there, far from the village street, and, except at very long intervals, from the jingle of sleigh-bells, i slid and skated, as in a vast moose yard well trodden, overhung by oak woods and solemn pines bent down with snow or bristling with icicles. ■ 269 270 walden for sounds in winter nights, and often in winter days, i-^ heard the forlorn but melodious note of a hooting owl indefi nitely far; such a sound as the frozen earth would yield if struck with a suitable plectrum, the very lingua vernacula of walden wood, and quite familiar to me at last, though i never saw the bird while it was making it. i seldom opened my door in a winter evening without hearing it ; hoo jioo jioo, jioorer hoo, sounded sonorously, and the first three syllables accented some what like how der do; or sometimes hoo hoo only. one night in the beginning of w^inter, before tlie pond froze over, about nine o'clock, i was startled by the loud honking of a goose, and, stepping to the door, heard the sound of their wings like a tempest in the woods as they flew low over my house. they passed over the pond toward fair-haven, seemingly deterred from settling by my light, their commodore honking all the while with a regular beat. suddenly an unmistakable cat-owl from very near me, with the most harsh and tremendous voice i ever heard from any inhabitant of the woods, responded at regular intervals to the goose, as if determined to expose and disgtace this intruder from hudson's bay by exhibiting a greater compass and volume of voice in a native, and hoo-hoo him out of concord horizon. "vyhat do you mean by alarming the citadel at this time of night consecrated to me? do you think i am ever caught napping at such an hour, and that i have not got lungs and a larynx as well as yourself? boo-hoo, hoo-hoo, boo-hoo! it was one of the most thrilling discords t ever heard. and yet, if you had a discrimin-ating ear, there were in it the elements of a concord such as these plains never saw nor heard. i also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great bed-fellow in that part of concord, as if it were restless in its bed and would fain turn over, were troubled with flatulency and bad dreams ; or i was waked by "i^he cracking of the ground by the frost, as if some one had driven a team against my door. winter animals 271 and in the morning would find a crack in the earth a quarter of a mile long and a third of an inch wide. sometimes i heard the foxes as they ranged over the snow crust, in moonlight nights, in search of a partridge or other game, barking raggedly and demoniacally like forest dogs, as i*f laboring with some anxiety, or seeking expression, struggling for light and to be dogs outright and run freely in the streets ; for if we take the ages into our account, may there not be a civilization going on among brutes as well as men? they seemed to me to be rudimental, burrowing men, still standing on their defense, awaiting their transformation. sometimes one came near to my window, attracted by my light, barked a vulpine curse at me, and then retreated. usually the red squirrel (sciurus hudsonius) waked me in the dawn, coursing over the roof and up and down the sides of the house, as if sent out of the woods for this purpose. in the course of the winter i threw out half a bushel of ears of sweet-corn, which had not got ripe, on to the snow crust by my door, and was amused by watching the motions of the various animals which were baited by it. in the twilight and the night the rabbits came regularly and made a hearty meal. x\ll day long the red squirrels came and went, and afforded me much entertainment by their maneuvers. one would approach at first warily through the shrub-oaks, running over the snow crust by fits and starts like a leaf blown by the wind, now a few paces this way, with wonderful speed and waste of energy, making inconceivable haste with his "trotters," as if it were for a wager, and now as many paces that way, but never getting on more than half a rod at a time; and then suddenly pausing with a ludicrous expression and a gratuitous somerset, as if all the eyes in the universe were fixed on him, — for all the motions of a squirrel, even in the most solitary recesses of the forest, imply spectators as much as those of a dancing girl, — wasting more time in delay and circumspection than would have sufficed 272 walden to walk the whole distance, — i never saw one walk, — and then suddenly, before you could say jack robinson, he would be in the top of a young pitch-pine, winding up his clock and chiding all imaginary spectators, soliloquizing and talking to all the universe at the same time, — for no reason that i could ever detect, or he himself was aware of, i suspect. at length he would reach the corn, and selecting a suitable ear, brisk about in the same uncertain trigonometrical way to the topmost stick of my wood-pile, before my window, where he looked me in the face, and there sit for hours, supplying himself with a new ear from time to time, nibbling at first voraciously and throwing the half-naked cobs about ; till at length he grew more dainty still and played with his food, tasting only the inside of the kernel, and the ear, which was held balanced over the stick by one paw, slipped from his careless grasp and fell to the ground, when he would look over at it with a ludicrous expression of uncer tainty, as if suspecting that it had life, with a mind not made ujd whether to get it again, or a new one, or be off; now think ing of corn, then listening to hear what was in the wind. so the little impudent fellow would waste many an ear in a fore noon; till at last, seizing some longer and plumper one, con siderably bigger than himself, and skilfully balancing it, he would set out with it to the woods, like a tiger with a buffalo, by the same zigzag course and frequent pauses, scratching along with it as if it were too heavy for him and falling all the while, making its fall a diagonal between a perpendicular and horizontal, being determined to put it through at any rate ; — a singularly frivolous and whimsical fellow; — and so he would get off with it to where he lived, perhaps carry it to the top of a ]iine tree forty or fifty rods distant, and i would afterwards find the cobs strewed about the woods in various directions. at length the jays arrive, whose discordant screams were heard long before, as they were warily making their approach an eighth of a mile off; and in a stealthy and sneaking manner winter animals 273 they tlit from tree to tree, nearer and nearer, and pick up the kernels which the squirrels have dropped. then, sitting on a pitch-pine bough, they attempt to swallow in their haste a kernel which is too big for their throats and chokes them ; and after great labor they disgorge it, and spend an hour in the endeavor to crack it by repeated blows with their bills. they were manifestly thieves, and i had not much respect for them ; but the squirrels, though at first shy, went to work as if they were taking what was their own. meanwhile also came the chickadees in flocks, which, picking up the crumbs the squirrels had dropped, flew to the nearest twig, and, placing them under their claws, hammered away at them with their little bills, as if it were an insect in the bark, till they were sufficiently reduced for their slender throats. a little flock of these titmice came daily to pick a dinner out of my wood-pile, or the crumbs at my door, with faint flitting lisp ing notes, like the tinkling of icicles in the grass, or else with sprightly day day day, or more rarely, in spring-like days, a wiry summery phe-be from the wood-side. they were so famil iar that at length one alighted on an armful of wood which i was carrying in, and pecked at the sticks without fear. i once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment while i was hoeing in a village garden, and i felt that i was more dis tinguished by that circumstance than i should have been by any epaulet i could have worn. the squirrels also grew at last to be quite familiar, and occasionally stepped upon my shoe, when that was the nearest way. when the ground was not yet quite covered, and again near the end of winter, when the snow was melted on my south hill side and about my wood-pile, the partridges came out of the woods morning and evening to feed there. whichever side you walk in the woods the partridge bursts away on whirring wings, jarring the snow from the dry leaves and twigs on high, which comes sifting down in the sunbeams like golden dust; for this 274 walden brave bird is not to be seared by winter. it is frequently cov ei-ed up by drifts, and, it is said, "sometimes plunges from on wing into the soft snow, where it remains concealed for a day or two." i used to start them in the open land also, where they liad come out of the woods at sunset to "bud" the wild apple trees. they will come regularly every evening to particular trees, where the cunning si:)ortsman lies in wait for them, and the distant orchards next the woods suffer thus not a little. i am glad that the partridge gets fed, at any rate. it is nature's own bird which lives on buds and diet-drink. in dark winter mornings, or in short winter afternoons, i sometimes heard a pack of hounds threading all the woods with hounding cry and yelp, unable to resist the instinct of the chase, and the note of the hunting horn at intervals, proving that man was in the rear. the woods ring again, and yet no fox bursts forth on to the open level of the pond, nor following pack pursuing their actseon. and perhaps at evening i see the hunters returning with a single brush trailing from their sleigh for a trophy, seeking their inn. they tell me that if the fox would remain in the bosom of the frozen earth he would be safe, or if he would run in a straight line away no fox-hound could overtake him ; but, having left his pursuers far behind, he stops to rest and listen till they come up, and when he runs he circles round to his old haunts, where the hunters await him. sometimes, however, he w^ill run upon a wall manj^ rods, and then leap off far to one side, and he appears to know that water will not retain his scent. a hunter told me that he once saw a fox pursued by hounds burst out on to walden when the ice avas covered with shallow puddles, run part way across, and then return to the same shore. erelong the hounds arrived, but here they lost the scent. sometimes a pack hunting by them selves would pass my door, and circle round my house, and yelp and hound without regarding me, as if afflicted by a species of madness, so that nothing could divert them from the pursuit. winter animals 275 thus tliey circle until tliey fall upon the recent trail of a fox, for a wise hound will forsake everything else for this. one day a man came to my hut from lexington to inquire after his hound that made a large track, and had been hunting for a weelv by himself. but i fear that he was not the wiser for all i told him, for every time i attempted to answ^er his questions, he interrupted me by asking, "what do you do heref he had lost a dog, but found a man. one old hunter who has a dry tongue, who used to come to bathe in walden once every year when the water was warmest, and at such times looked in upon me, told me that many years ago he took his gun one afternoon and went out for a cruise in walden wood, and as he walked the wayland road he heard the cry of hounds approaching, and erelong a fox leaped the wall into the road, and as quick as thought leaped the other wall out of the road, and his swift bullet had not touched him. some way behind came an old hound and her three pups in full pur suit, hunting on their own account, and disappeared again in the woods. late in the afternoon, as he was resting in the thick woods south of walden, he heard the voice of the hounds far over toward fair-haven still pursuing the fox; and on they came, their hounding cry which made all the woods ring sound ing nearer and nearer, now from well-meadow, now from the baker farm. for a long time he stood still and listened to their music, so sweet to a hunter's ear, when suddenly the fox appeared, threading the solemn aisles with an easy coursing pace, whose sound was concealed by a sympathetic rustle of the leaves, swift and still, keeping the ground, leaving his pursuers far behind ; and leaping upon a rock amid the woods, he sat erect and listening, with his back to the hunter. for a moment com passion restrained the latter's arm; but that was a short-lived mood, and as quick as thought can follow thought his piece was leveled, and whang! — the fox rolling over the rock lay dead on the ground. the hunter still kept his place and listened to the 276 walden hounds. still on they came, and now the near woods resounded through all their aisles with their demoniac cry. at length the old hound burst into view with muzzle to the ground, and snap ping the air as if possessed, and ran directly to the rock ; but spying the dead fox she suddenly ceased her hounding, as if struck dumb with amazement, and walked round and round him in silence; and one by one her pups arrived, and, like their mother, were sobered into silence by the mystery. then the hunter came forward and stood in their midst, and the mystery was solved. they waited in silence while he skinned the fox, then followed the brush awhile, and at length turned off into the woods again. that evening a weston squire came to the concord hunter's cottage to inquire for his hounds, and told how for a week they had been hunting on their own account from weston woods. the concord hunter told him what he knew and offered him the skin; but the other declined it and departed. he did not find his hounds that night, but the next day learned that they had crossed the river and put up at a farm-house for the night, whence, having been well fed, they took their departure early in the morning. the hunter who told me this could remember one sam nut ting, who used to hunt bears on fair-haven ledges, and ex change their skins for rum in concord village; who told him, even, that he had seen a moose there. nutting had a famous fox-hound named burgoyne, — he pronounced it bugine, — which my informant used to borrow. in the "wast book" of an old trader of this town, who was also a captain, town-clerk, and representative, i find the following entry: jan. 18th, 1742-3, "john melven cr. by 1 gray fox 0—2—3" ; they are not found here; and in his ledger, feb. 7th, 1743, hezekiah stratton has credit "by yz a catt skin — 1 — 4v2" ; of course a wild-cat, for stratton was a sergeant in the old french war, and would not have got credit for hunting less noble game. credit is given for deerskins also, and they were daily sold. one man still pre winter animals 277 serves the horns of the last deer that was killed in this vicinity, and another has told me the particulars of the hunt in which his uncle was engaged. the hunters were formerly a numerous and merry crew here. i remember well one gaunt nimrod who would catch up a leaf by the road-side and play a strain on it wilder and more melodious, if my memory serves me, than any hunting horn. at midnight, when there was a moon, i sometimes met with liounds in my path prowling about the woods, which would skulk out of my w^ay, as if afraid, and stand silent amid the bushes till i had passed. squirrels and wild mice disputed for my store of nuts. there were scores of jntch-pines around my house, from one to four inches in diameter, which had been gnawed by mice the previous winter,— a norwegian winter for them, for the snow lay long and deep, and they were obliged to mix a large proportion of pine bark with their other diet. these trees were alive and apparently flourishing at mid-summer, and many of them had grown a foot, though completely girdled; but after another winter such were without exception dead. it is remarkable that a single mouse should thus be allowed a whole x-)ine tree for its dinner, gnawing round instead of up and down it; but per haps it is necessary in order to thin these trees, which are wont to grow up densely. the hares {lepus americanus) were very familiar. one had her form under vay house all wmter, separated from me only by the flooring, and she startled me each morning by her hasty departure when i began to stir, — thump, thump, thump, strik ing her head against the floor timbers in her hurry. they used to come round my door at dusk to nibble the potato parings which i had thrown out, and were so nearly the color of the ground that they could liardly be distinguished when still. sometimes in the twilight i alternately lost and recovered sight of one sitting motionless under my window. when i opened my 278 walden door in the evening, off they would go with a squeak and a bounce. near at hand they only excited my pity. one evening one sat by my door two paces from me, at first trembling with fear, yet unwilling to move ; a poor wee thing, lean and bony, with ragged ears and sharp nose, scant tail and slender paws. it looked as if nature no longer contained the breed of nobler bloods, but stood on her last toes. its large eyes appeared young and unhealthy, almost dropsical. i took a step, and lo, away it scudded with an elastic spring over the snow crust, straightening its body and its limbs into graceful length, and soon jdut the forest between me and itself, — the wild free veni son, asserting its vigor and the dignity of nature. not without reason was its slenderness. such then was its nature. (lepus, levipesf lightfoot, some think.) what is a country without rabbits and partridges'? they are among the most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times; of the very hue and substance of nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground, — and to one another; it is either winged or it is legged. it is hardly as if you had seen a wild creature when a rabbit or a partridge bursts away, only a nat ural one, as much to be expected as rustling leaves. the iiar tridge and the rabbit are still sure to thrive, like true natives of the soil, whatever revolutions occur. if the forest is cut off, the sprouts and bushes which spring up afford them concealment, and they become more numerous than ever. that must be a poor country indeed that does not support a hare. our woods teem with them both, and around every swamp may be seen the jiartridge or rabbit walk, beset with twiggy fences and horse hair snares, which some cowboy tends. xvi the pond in winter after a still winter night i awoke with the impression that some question had been put to me, which i had been endeavor ing in vain to answer in my sleep, as what — how — when — where? but there was dawning nature, in whom all creatures live, looking in at my broad windows with serene and satisfied face, and no question on her lips. i awoke to an answered ques tion, to nature and daylight. the snow hdng deep on the earth dotted with young pines, and the very slope of the hill on which my house is placed, seemed to say, forward ! nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. she has long ago taken her resolution. "0 prince, our eyes contemplate with admiration and transmit to the soul the wonderful and varied spectacle of this universe. the night veils without doubt a part of this glorious creation ; but day comes to reveal to us this great work, which extends from earth even into the plains of the ether." then to my morning work. first i take an axe and pail and go in search of water, if that be not a dream. after a cold and snowy night it needed a divining rod to find it. every win ter the liquid and trembling surface of the pond, which was so sensitive to every breath, and reflected every light and shadow, becomes solid to the depth of a foot or a foot and a half, so that it will support the heaviest teams, and perchance the snow covers it to an equal depth, and it is not to be distinguished from anj' level field. like the marmots in the surrounding hills, 279 280 walden" it closes its eyelids and becomes dormant for three months or " more. standing on the snow-covered plain, as if in a pasture amid the hills, i cut my way first through a foot of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a window under my feet, where, kneeling to drink, i look down into the quiet parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as in summer ; there a perennial waveless serenity reigns as in the amber twi light sky, corresponding to the cool and even temperament of the inhabitants. heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads. early in the morning, while all things are crisp with frost, men come with fishing reels and slender lunch, and let down their fine lines through the snowy field to take pickerel and perch; wild men, who instinctively follow other fashions and trust other authorities than their townsmen, and by their goings and comings stitch towns together in parts where else they would be ripped. they sit and eat their luncheon in stout fear naughts on the dry oak leaves on the shore, as wise in natural lore as the citizen is in artificial. they never consulted with books, and know and can tell much less than they have done. the things which they practice are said not yet to be known. here is onefishing for pickerel with grown perch for bait. you look into his pail with w^onder as into a summer pond, as if he kept summer locked up at home, or knew where she had retreated. how, pray, did he get these in mid-winter? oh, he got worms out of rotten logs since the ground froze, and so he caught them. his life itself passes deeper in nature than the studies of the naturalist penetrate; himself a subject for the naturalist. the latter raises the moss and bark gently with his knife in search of insects; the former lays open logs to their core with his axe, and moss and bark fly far and wide. he gets his living by barking trees. such a man has some right to fish, and i love to see nature carried out in him. the perch swal the pond in winter 281 lows the gtiib-worm, the pickert 1 swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled. when i strolled around the pond in misty weather i was sometimes amused by the primitive mode which some ruder fisherman had adopted. he would perhaps have placed alder branches over the narrow holes in the ice, which were four or five rods apart and an equal distance from the shore, and having fastened the end of the line to a stick to prevent its being pulled through, have passed the slack line over a twig of the alder, a foot or more above the ice, and tied a dry oak leaf to it, which, being pulled down, would show when he had a bite. these alders loomed through the mist at regular intervals as you avalked halfway round the pond. ah, the pickerel of walden ! when i see them lying on the ice, or in the well which the fisherman cuts in the ice, making a little hole to admit the water, i am always surprised by their rare beauty, as if they were fabulous fishes, they are so foreign to the streets, even to the woods, foreign as arabia to our con cord life. they possess a quite dazzling and transcendent beauty which separates them by a wide interval from the cadaverous cod and haddock whose fame is trumjieted in our streets. they are not green like the pines, nor gray like the stones, nor blue like the sky ; but they have, to my eyes, if pos sible, yet rarer colors, like flowers and precious stones, as if they were the pearls, and animalized nuclei or crystals of the walden water. they, of course, are walden all over and all through; are themselves small waldens in the animal kingdom, waldenses. it is surprising that they are caught here, — that in this deep and capacious spring, far beneath the rattling teams and chaises and tinkling sleighs that travel the walden road, this great gold and emerald fish swims. i never chanced to see its kind in any market; it would be the cynosure of all eyes there. easily, with a few convulsive quirks, they give up their 282 avalden watery ghosts, like a mortal translated before his time to the thin air of heaven. as i was desirous to recover the long-lost bottom of walden pond, i surveyed it carefully, before the ice broke up, early in '46, with compass and chain and sounding line. there have been many stories told about the bottom, or rather no bottom, of this pond, which certainly had no foundation for themselves. it is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of ?. pond without taking the trouble to sound it. i have visited two such bottomless ponds in one walk in this neighborhood. many have believed that walden reached quite through to the other side of the globe. some who have lain fiat on the ice for a long time, looking down through the illusive medium, per chance avith watery eyes into the bargain, and driven to hasty conclusions by the fear of catching cold in their breasts, have seen vast holes "into which a load of hay might be driven,'' if there were anybody to drive it, the undoubted source of the styx and entrance to the infernal regions from these parts. others have gone down from the village with a "fifty-six" and a wagon load of inch rope, but yet have failed to find any bot tom ; for while the "fifty-six" was resting by the w^ay, they w^ere paying out the rope in the vain attempt to fathom their truly immeasurable capacity for marvelousness. but i can assure my readers that walden has a reasonably tight bottom at a not unreasonable, though at an unusual depth. i fathomed it easily with a cod-line and a stone weighing about a pound and a hal f, and could tell accurately when the stone left the bottom, by having to pull so much harder before the water got underneath to help me. the greatest "depth was exactly one hundred and two feet; to which may be added the five feet which it has risen since, making one hundred and seven. this is a remark able depth for so small an area; yet not an inch of it can be spared by the imagination. what if all ponds were shallow? the pond in winter 283 would it not react on the minds of men? i am thankful that this i)ond was made deep and pure for a symbol. while men believe in the infinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless. a factory owner, hearing what depth i had found, thought that it could not be true, for, judging from his acquaintance avith dajns, sand would not lie at so steep an angle. but the deepest ponds are not so deep in proportion to their area as most suppose, and, if drained, would not leave very remarkable valleys. they are not like cups between the hills ; for this one, which is so unusually deep for its area, appears in a vei'tical section through its center not deeper than a shallow plate. most ponds, emptied, would leave a meadow no more hollow than we frequently see. william gilpin, who is so admirable in all that relates to landscapes, and usually so correct, standing at the head of loch fyne, in scotland, which he describes as "a bay of salt water, sixty or seventy fathoms deep, four miles in breadth," and about fifty miles long, surrounded by mountains, observes, "if ave could haa^e seen it immediately after the diluvian crash, or avhatever convulsion of nature occasioned it, before the avaters gushed in, what a horrid chasm it must have appeared ! so high as heaved the tumid hills, so low down sunk a hollow bottom, broad, and deep, capacious bed of waters but if, using the shortest diameter of loch fyne, ave apply these proportions to walden, avhich, as we have seen, appears already in a vertical section only like a shalloav plate, it will appear four times as shallow. so much for the increased hor rors of the chasm of loch fyne when emptied. no doubt many a smiling valley with its stretching cornfields occupies exactly such a "horrid chasm," from which the waters have receded, though it requires the insight and the far sight of the geologist 284 walden to convince the unsuspecting inhabitants of this fact. often an inquisitive eye may detect the shores of a primitive lake in the low horizon hills, and no subsequent elevation of the plain have been necessary to conceal their history. but it is easiest, as they who work on the highways know, to find the hollows by the l^uddles after a shower. the amount of it is, the imagination, give it the least license, dives deeper and soars higher than nature goes. so, probably, the depth of the ocean will be found to be very inconsiderable compared with its breadth. as i sounded through the ice i could determine the shape of the bottom with greater accuracy than is possible in surveying harbors which do not freeze over, and i was surprised at its general regularity. in the deepest part there are several acres more level than almost any field which is exposed to the sun, wind, and plow. in one instance, on a line arbitrarily chosen, the depth did not vary more than one foot in thirty rods ; and generally, near the middle, i could calculate the variation for each one hundred feet in any direction beforehand within three or four inches. some are accustomed to speak of deep and dangerous holes even in quiet sandy ponds like this, but the effect of water under these circumstances is to level all inequali ties. the regularity of the bottom and its conformity to the shores and the range of the neighboring hills were so perfect that a distant promontory betrayed itself in the soundings quite across the pond, and its direction could be determined by obser\-ing the opposite shore. cape becomes bar, and plain shoal, and valley and gorge deep water and channel. when i had mapped the pond by the scale of ten rods to an inch, and put down the soundings, more than a hundred in all, i observed this remarkable coincidence. having noticed that the number indicating the greatest depth was apparently in the center of the map, i laid a rule on the map lengthwise, and then breadthwise, and found, to my surprise, that the line of greatest length intersected the line of greatest breadth exactly at the the pond in winter 285 point of greatest g3ptli, notwithstanding that the middle is so nearly level, the outline of the pond far from regular, and the extreme length and breadth were got by measuring into the coves; and i said to myself, who knows but this hint would conduct to the deepest part of the ocean as well as of a pond or puddle ? is not this the rule also for the height of mountains, regarded as the opposite of valleys? we know that a hill is not highest at its narrowest part. of five coves, three, or all which had been sounded, were observed to have a bar quite across their mouths and deeper water within, so that the hscy tended to be an expansion of water within the land not only horizontally but vertically, and to form a basin or independent pond, the direction of the two capes showing the course of the bar. every harbor on the sea coast, also, has its bar at its entrance. in proportion as the mouth of the cove was avider compared with its length, the water over the bar was deeper compared with that in the basin. given, then, the length and breadth of the cove, and the char acter of the surrounding shore, and you have almost elements enough to make out a formula for all cases. in order to see how nearly i could guess, with this experience, at the deepest jioint in a pond, by observing the outlines of its surface and the character of its shores alone, i made a plan of \mnte pond, which contains about forty-one acres, and, like this, has no island in it, nor any visible inlet or outlet ; and as the line of greatest breadth fell very near the line of least breadth, where two opjdosite capes approached each other and two opposite bays receded, i ventured to mark a point a short distance from the latter line, but still on the line of greatest length, as the deepest. the deepest part was found to jv. within one hundred feet of this, still farther in the direction to which i had inclined, and was only one foot deeper, namely sixty feet. of course, a stream running through, or an island in the pond, would make the problem much more complicated. 286 walden if we knew all the laws of nature, we should need only one fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point. now we know only a few laws, and our result is vitiated, not, of course, by any confusion or irregularity in nature, but by our ignorance of essential elements in the calculation. our notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to those instances which we detect; but the harmony which results from a far greater number of seem ingly conflicting, but really concurring, laws, which we have not detected, is still more wonderful. the particular laws are as our points of view, as, to the traveler, a mountain outline varies with every step, and it has an infinite number of profiles, though absolutely but one form. even when cleft or bored through it is not comprehended in its entireness. what i have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics. it is the law of average. such a rule of the two diameters not only guides us toward the sun in the system and the heart in man; but draw lines through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man's particular daily behaviors and waves of life into his coves and inlets, and where they intersect will be the height or depth of his character. perhaps we need only to know how his shores trend and his adjacent country or circum stances, to infer his depth and concealed bottom. if he is sur rounded by mountainous circumstances, an achillean shore, whose peaks overshadow and are reflected in his bosom, they suggest a corresponding depth in him. but a low and smooth shore proves him shallow on that side. in our bodies, a bold projecting brow falls off to and indicates a corresponding depth of thought. also there is a bar across the entrance of our every cove, or particular inclination; each is our harbor for a season, in which we are detained ans partially land-locked. these inclinations are not whimsical usually, but their form, size, and direction are determined by the promontories of the shore, the ancient axes of elevation. wlien this bar is gradually increased the pond in winter 287 by storms, tides, or currents, or there is a subsidence of the waters, so that it reaches to tlie surface, that which was at first but an inclination in the shore in which a thought was har bored becomes an individual lake, cut off from the ocean, wherein the thought secures its own conditions, changes, per haps, from salt to fresh, becomes a sweet sea, dead sea, or a marsh. at the advent of each individual into this life, may we not suppose that such a bar has risen to the surface somewhere ? it is true, we are such poor navigators that our thoughts, for the most part, stand off and on upon a harborless coast, are conversant only with the bights of the bays of poesy, or steer for the public ports of entry, and go into the dry docks of science, where they merely refit for this world, and no natural currents concur to indi\d dualize them. as for the inlet or outlet of walden, i have not discovered any but rain and snow and evaporation, though perhaps, avith a thermometer and a line, such places may be found, for where the avater flows into the pond it will probably be coldest in summer and warmest in winter. when the ice-men were at work here in '46-7, the cakes sent to the shore were one day rejected by those who were stacking them up there, not being thick enough to lie side by side with the rest; and. the cutters thus discovered that the ice over a small space was two or three inches thinner than elsewhere, which made them think that there was an inlet there. they also showed me in another place what they thought was a "leach hole," through which the jdond leaked out under a hill into a neighboring meadow, pushing me out on a cake of ice to see it. it was a small cavity under ten feet of water ; but i think that i can warrant the pond not to need soldering till they find a worse leak than that. one has suggested that if such a "leach hole" should be found, its con nection with the meadow, if any existed, might be proved by conveying some colored powder or sawdust to the mouth of the hole, and then putting a strainer over the spring in the meadow, 288 walden which would catch some of the particles carried through by the current. while i was surveying, the ice, which was sixteen inches thick, undulated under a slight wind like water. it is well known that a level cannot be used on ice. at one rod from the shore its greatest fluctuation, when observed by means of a level on land directed toward a graduated staff on the ice, was three quarters of an inch, though the ice appeared firmly at tached to the shore. it was probably greater in the middle. who knows but if our instruments were delicate enough we might detect an undulation in the crust of the earth? when two legs of my level were on the shore and the third on the ice, and the sights were directed over the latter, a rise or fall of the ice of an almost infinitesimal amount made a difference of sev eral feet on a tree across the pond. when i began to cut holes for sounding, there were three or four inches of water on the ice under a deep snow which had sunk it thus far; but the water began immediately to run into these holes, and continued to run for two days in deep streams, which wore away the ice on every side, and contributed essentially, if not mainly, to dry the sur face of the pond ; for, as the water ran in, it raised and floated the ice. this was somewhat like cutting a hole in the bottom of ~a ship to let the water out. when such holes freeze, and a rain succeeds, and finally a new freezing forms a fresh smooth ice over all, it is beautifully mottled internally by dark figures, shaped somewhat like a spider's web, what you may call ice rosettes, produced by the channels worn by the water flowing from all sides to a center. sometimes, also, when the ice was covered with shallow puddles, i saw a double shadow of myself, one standing on the head of the other, one on the ice, the other on the trees or hill side. while yet it is cold january, and snow and ice are thick and solid, the prudent landlord comes from the village to get ice to the pond in winter 289 cool his summer drink ; impressively, even pathetically wise, to foresee the heat and thirst of july now in january, — wearing a thick coat and mittens! when so many things are not pro vided for. it may be that he lays up no treasures in this world which will cool his summer drink in the next. he cuts and saws the solid pond, unroofs the house of fishes, and carts off their very element and air, held fast by chains and stakes like corded wood, through the favoring winter air, to wintry cellars, to underlie the summer there. it looks like solidified azure, as, far off, it is drawn through the streets. these ice-cutters are a merry race, full of jest and sport, and when i went among them they were w^ont to invite me to saw pit-fashion with them, i standing underneath. in the winter of '46-7 there came a hundred men of hyper borean extraction swoop down on to our pond one morning, with many car-loads of ungainly-looking farming tools, sleds, plows, drill-borrows, turf-knives, spades, saws, rakes, and each man was armed with a double-pointed pike-staff, such as is not described in the new england farmer or the cultivator. i did not know whether they had come to sow a crop of winter rye, or some other kind of grain recently introduced from ice land. as i saw no manure, i judged that they meant to skim the land, as i had done, thinking the soil was deep and had lain fallow long enough. they said that a gentleman farmer, who was behind the scenes, wanted to double his money, which, as i understood, amounted to half a million already; but, in order to cover each one of his dollars with another, he took off the only coat, ay, the skin itself, of walden pond in the midst of a hard winter. they went to work at once, plowing, harrowing, rolling, furrowing, in admirable order, as if they were bent on making this a model farm ; but when i was looking sharp to see what kind of seed they dropped into the furrow, a gang of fellows by my side suddenly began to hook up the virgin mold itself, with a peculiar jerk, clean down to the sand, or rather 290 walden the water, — for it was a very springy soil, — indeed, all the lerra firma there was, — and haul it away on sleds, and then i ^,a8ssed that they must be cutting peat in a bog. so they came and went every day, with a peculiar shriek from the locomotive, from and to some point of the polar regions, as it seemed to me, like a flock of arctic snow-birds. but sometimes squaw walden had her revenge, and a hired man, walking behind his team, slipped through a crack in the gi'ound down toward tartarus, and he who was so brave before suddenly became but the ninth part of a man, almost gave up his animal heat, and was glad to take refuge in my house, and acknowledged that there was some virtue in a stove ; or sometimes the frozen soil took a piece of steel out of a plowshare, or a plow got set in the furrow and had to be cut out. to speak literally, a hundred irishmen, with yankee over seers, came from cambridge every day to get out the ice. they divided it into cakes by methods too well known to require description, and these, being sledded to the shore, were rapidly hauled off on to an ice platform, and raised by grappling irons and block and tackle, worked by horses, on to a stack, as surely as so many barrels of flour, and there placed evenly side by side, and row upon row, as if they formed the solid base of an obelisk designed to pierce the clouds. they told me that in a good day they could get out a thousand tons, which was the yield of about one acre. deep ruts and "cradle holes" were worn in the ice, as on terra firma, by the passage of the sleds over the same track, and the horses invariably ate their oats out of cakes of ice hollowed out like buckets. they stacked up the cakes thus in the open air in a pile thirty-five feet high on one side and six or seven rods square, putting hay between the outside layers to exclude the air; for when the wind, though never so cold, finds a passage through, it will wear large cavi ties, leaving slight supports or studs only here and there, and finally topple it down. at first it looked like a vast blue fort the pond in winter 291 or valhalla; but when they began to tuck the coarse meadow hay into the crevices, and this became covered with rime and icicles, it looked like a venerable moss-grown and hoary ruin, built of azure-tinted marble, the abode of winter, that old man we see in the almanac, — his shanty, as if he had a design to estivate with us. they calculated that not twenty five per cent of this would reach its destination, and that two or three per cent would be wasted in the cars. however, a still greater part of this heap had a different destiny from what was intended; for, either because the ice was found not to keep so well as was expected, containing more air than usual, or for some other reason, it never got to market. this heap, made in the winter of '46-7 and estimated to contain ten thou sand tons, was finally covered with hay and boards ; and though it was unroofed the following july, and a part of it carried off, the rest remaining exposed to the sun, it stood over that sum mer and the next winter, and was not quite melted till septem ber, 1848. thus the pond recovered the greater part. like the water, the walden ice, seen near at hand, has a green tint, but at a distance is beautifully blue, and you can easily tell it from the white ice of the river, or the merely green ish ice of some ponds, a quarter of a mile off. sometimes one of those great cakes slips from the ice-man's sled into the village street, and lies there for a week like a great emerald, an object of interest to all passers. i have noticed that a portion of walden which in the state of water was green will often, when frozen, appear from the same point of view blue. so the hol lows about this pond will, sometimes, in the winter, be filled with a greenish water somewhat like its own, but the next day will have frozen blue. perhaps the blue color of water and ice is due to the light and air they contain^ and the most trans parent is the bluest. ice is an interesting subject for contem plation. they told me that they had some in the ice-houses at fresh pond five years old which was as good as ever. why is 292 walden it that a bucket of water soon becomes putrid, but frozen remains sweet forever? it is commonly said that this is the difference between the affections and the intellect. thus for sixteen days i saw from my window a hundred men at work like busy husbandmen, with teams and horses and apparently all the implements of farming, such a picture as we see on the first page of the almanac; and as often as i looked out i was reminded of the fable of the lark and the reapers, or the parable of the sower, and the like; and now they are all gone, and in thirty days more, probably, i shall look from the same window on the pure sea-green walden water there, reflect ing the clouds and the trees, and sending up its evaporations in solitude, and no traces will appear that a man has ever stood there. perhaps i shall hear a solitary loon laugh as he dives and plumes himself, or shall see a lonely fisher in his boat, like a floating leaf, beholding his form reflected in the waves, where lately a hundred men securely labored. thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of charleston and new orleans, of madras and bombay and calcutta, drink at my well. in the morning i bathe my intellect in the stupen dous and cosmogonal philosophy of the bhagvat geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in com parison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and i doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sub limity from our conceptions. i lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo ! there i meet the servant of the brahmin, priest of brahma and vishnu and indra, who still sits in his temple on the ganges reading the vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. i meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same avell. the joure walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the ganges. with favoring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of atlantis and the pond in winter 293 the hesperides, makes the peripkis of hanno, and, floating by ternate and tidore and the mouth of the persian gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the indian seas, and is landed in ports of which alexander only heard the names. xvii spring the opening of large tracts by the iee-cutters commonly causes a pond to break up earlier; for the water, agitated by the wind, even in cold weather, wears away the surrounding ice. but such was not the effect on walden that year, for she had soon got a thick new garment to take the place of the old. this pond never breaks up so soon as the others in this neighborhood, on account both of its greater depth and its having no stream passing through it to melt or wear away the ice. i never knew it to open in the course of a avinter, not excepting that of '52-3, which gave the ponds so severe a trial. it commonly opens about the first of april, a week or ten days later than flint's pond and fair-haven, beginning to melt on the north side and in the shallower parts where it began to freeze. it indicates better than any water hereabouts the absolute progress of the season, being least affected by transient changes of temperature. a severe cold of a few days' duration in march may very much retard the opening of the former ponds, while the temperature of walden increases almost uninterruptedly. a thermometer thrust into the middle of walden on the 6th of march, 1847, stood at 32°, or freezing point; near the shore at 33°; in the* middle of flint's pond, the same day, at 32i/2° ; at a dozen rods from the shore, in shallow water, nnder ice a foot thick, at 36°. this difference of three and a half degrees between the tem l)erature of the deep water and the shallow in the latter pond, and the fact that a great })roportion of it is comparatively shallow, show why it should break up so much sooner than 294 spring 295 walden. the ice in the shallowest part was at this time several inches thinner than in the middle. in mid-winter the middle had been the warmest and the ice thinnest there. so, also, every one who has waded about the shores of a pond in summer must have perceived how much warmer the water is close to the shore, where only three or four inches deep, than a little distance out, and on the surface where it is deep, than near the bottom. in spring the sun not only exerts an influence through the increased temperature of the air and earth, but its heat passes through ice a foot or more thick, and is reflected from the bottom in shallow water, and so also warms the water and melts the under side of the ice, at the same time that it is melt ing it more directly above, making it uneven, and causing the air bubbles which it contains to extend themselves upward and downward until it is completely honeycombed, and at last dis appears suddenly in a single spring rain. ice has its grain as well as wood, and when a cake begins to rot or "comb," that is, assume the appearance of honey-comb, whatever may be its position, the air cells are at right angles with what was the water surface. where there is a rock or a log rising near to the surface the ice over it is much thinner, and is frequently quite dissolved by this reflected heat ; and i have been told that in the experiment at cambridge to freeze water in a shallow wooden jdond, though the cold air circulated underneath, and so had access to both sides, the reflection of the sun from the bot tom more than counterbalanced this advantage. when a avarm rain in the middle of the winter melts off the snow-ice from walden, and leaves a hard, dark, or transjdarent ice on the middle, there will be a strip of rotten though thicker white ice, a rod or more wide, about the shores, created by this reflected heat. also, as i have said, the bubbles themselves within the ice operate as burning-glasses to melt the ice beneath. the phenomena of the year take place every day in a i>ond on a small scale. every morning, generally speaking, the shal 296 walden low water is being warmed more rapidly than the d^ep, though it may not be made so warm after all, and every evening it is being cooled more rapidly until the morning. the day is an epitome of the year. the night is the winter, the morning and evening are the spring and fall, and the noon is the summer. the cracking and booming of the ice indicate a change of tem perature. one pleasant morning after a cold night, february "^ith, 1850, having gone to flint's pond to spend the day, i noticed with surprise that when i struck the ice with the head of my axe, it resounded like a gong for many rods around, or as if i had struck on a tight drum-head. the pond began to boom about an hour after sunrise, when it felt the influence of the sun's rays slanted upon it from over the hills; it stretched itself and yawned like a waking man with a gradually increas ing tumult, which was kept up three or four hours. it took a short siesta at noon, and boomed once more toward night, as the sun was withdrawing his influence. in the right stage of the weather a pond fires its evening gun with great regularity. but in the middle of the day, being full of cracks, and the air also being less elastic, it had completely lost its resonance, and probably fishes and muskrats could not then have been stunned by a blow on it. the fishermen say that the "thundering of the pond" scares the fishes and prevents their biting. the pond does not thunder every evening, and i cannot tell surely when to jxpeet its thundering; but though i may perceive no differ ence in the weather, it does. who would have suspected so large and cold and thick-skinned a thing to be so sensitive ? yet it has its law to which it thunders obedience when it should as surely as the buds expand in the spring. the earth is all alive and covered with papillae. the largest pond is as sensitive to atmospheric changes as the globule of mercury in its tube. one attraction in coming to the woods to live was that i should have leisure and opportunity to see the spring come in. spring 297 the ice in the pond at length begins to be honeycombed, and 1 can set my heel in it as i walk. fogs and rains and warmer suns are gradually melting the snow ; the days have grown sen sibly longer ; and i see how i shall get through the winter with out adding to my wood-pile, for large fires are no longer neces sary. i am on the alert for the first signs of spring, to hear the chance note of some arriving bird, or the striped squirrel's chirp, for his stores must be now nearly exhausted, or see the wood chuck venture out of his winter quarters. on the 13th of march, after i had heard the bluebird, song-sparrow, and red wing, the ice was still nearly a foot thick. as the weather grew warmer, it was not sensibly worn away by the water, nor broken up and floated off as in rivers, but, though it was completely melted for half a rod in width about the shore, the middle was merely honeycombed and saturated with water, so that you could put your foot through it when six inches thick ; but by the next day evening, perhaps, after a warm rain followed by fog, it would have wholly disappeared, all gone off with the fog, spirited away. one year i went across the middle only five 5ays before it disappeared entirely. in 1845 walden was first completely open on the 1st of april ; in '46, the 25th of march ; in '47, the 8th of april; in '51, the 28th of march; in '52, the 18th of april; in '53, the 23rd of march; in '54, about the 7th of april. every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly inter esting to us who live in a climate of so great extremes. "when the warmer days come, they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly going out. so the alligator comes out of the mud with quakings of the earth. one old man, who has been a close observer of nature, and seems as thoroughly wise in regard to all her operations as if she had been put upon the 298 walden stocks when he was a boy, and he had helped to lay her keel, — who has come to his growth, and can hardly acquire more of natural lore if he should live to the age of methuselah, — told me, and i was surprised to hear him express wonder at any of nature's operations, for i thought that there were no secrets between them, that one spring day he took his gun and boat, and thought that he would have a little sport with the ducks. there was ice still on the meadows, but it was all gone out of the river, and he dropped down without obstruction from sud bury, where he lived, to fair-haven pond, which he found, unexpectedly, covered for the most part with a firm field of ice. it was a warm day, and he was surprised to see so great a body of ice remaining. not seeing any ducks, he hid his boat on the north or back side of an island in the pond, and then concealed himself in the bushes on the south side, to await them. the ice was melted for three or four rods from the shore, and there was a smooth and warm sheet of water, with a muddy bottom, such as the ducks love, within, and he thought it likely that some would be along pretty soon. after he had lain still there about an hour he heard a low and seemingly very distant sound, but singularly grand and impressive, unlike anything he had ever heard, gradually swelling and increasing as if it would have a universal and memorable ending, a sullen rush and roar, which seemed to him all at once like tlie sound of a vast body of fowl coming in to settle there, and, seizing his gun, he started up in haste and excited; but he found, to his surprise, that the whole body of the ice had started while he lay there, and drifted in to the shore, and the sound he had heard was made by its edge grating on the shore, — at first gently nibbled and crumbled off, but at length heaving up and scattering its wrecks along the island to a considerable height before it came to a standstill. at length the sun's rays have attained the right angle, and warm winds blow up mist and rain and melt the snow-banks, and the sun dispersing the mist smiles on a checkered landscape spring 299 of russet and white smoking with incense, through which the traveler picks his way from islet to islet, cheered by the music of a thousand tinkling rills and rivulets whose veins are filled with the blood of winter which they are bearing off. few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad through which i passed on my way to the village, a phenomenon not very common on so large a scale, though the number of freshly exposed banks of the right material must have been greatly multiplied since railroads were invented. the material was sand of every degree of fineness and of various rich colors, commonly mixed with a little clay. when the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before. innumerable little streams overlaj^ and interlace one with another, exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, which obeys halfway the law of currents, and halfway that of vegetation. as it flows it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and resembling, as you look down on them, the laciniated, lobed, and imbricated thalluses of some lichens; or you are reminded of coral, of leopards' paws or birds' feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds. it is a truly grotesque vege tation, whose forms and color we see imitated in 'bronze, a sort of architectural foliage more ancient and typical than acanthus, chicory, ivy, vine, or any vegetable leaves; destined perhaps, under some circumstances, to become a puzzle to future geologists. the whole cut impressed me as if it were a cave with its stalactites laid open to the light. the various shades of the sand are singularly rich and agreeable, embracing the different iron colors, brown, gray, yellowish, and reddish. wh^n the flowing mass reaches the drain at the foot of the 300 walden bank it spreads out flatter into strands, the separate streams losing their semi-cylindrical form and gradually becoming more flat and broad, running together as they are more moist, till they form an almost flat sand, still variously and beautifully shaded, but in which you can trace the original forms of vege tation; till at length, in the water itself, they are converted into hanks, like those formed ofl" the mouths of rivers, and the forms of vegetation are lost in the ripple marks on the bottom. the whole bank, which is from twenty to forty feet high, is sometimes overlaid with a mass of this kind of foliage, or sandy rupture, for a quarter of a mile on one or both sides, the produce of one spring day. what makes this sand foliage remarkable is its springing into existence thus suddenly. when i see on the one side the inert bank, — for the sun acts on one side first, — and on the other this luxuriant foliage, the creation of an hour, i am affected as if in a peculiar sense i stood in the laboratory of the artist who made the world and me — had come to where he was still at work, sporting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about. i feel as if i were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body. you find thus in the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. no wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea inwardly. the atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by it. the overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. internally, whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of fat (act^co, labor, lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing; xopo^, globus, lobe, globe; also lap, flap, and many other words), externally a dry thin leaf, even as the / and v are a pressed and dried h. the radicals of lobe are lb, the soft mass of the h (single lobed, or b, double spring 301 lobed), with a liquid i behind it pressing it forward. in globe, gib, the guttural g adds to the meaning the capacity of the throat. the feathers and wings of birds are still drier and thinner leaves. thus, also, you pass from the lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. the very globe continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit. even ice begins with delicate crystal leaves, as if it had flowed into molds which the fronds of water plants have impressed on the watery mirror. the whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in their axils. when the sun withdraws the sand ceases to flow, but in the morning the streams will start once more and branch and branch again into a myriad of others. you here see perchance how blood vessels are formed. if you look closely you observe that first there pushes forward from the thawing mass a stream of softened sand with a drop-like point, like the ball of the finger, feeling its way slowly and blindly downward, until at last with more heat and moisture, as the sun gets higher, the most fluid portion, in its effort to obey the law to which the most inert also yields, separates from the latter and forms for itself a meandering channel or artery within that, in which is seen a little silvery stream glancing like lightning from one stage of pulpy leaves or branches to another, and ever and anon swallowed up in the sand. it is wonderful how rapidly yet perfectly the sand organizes itself as it flows, using the best material its mass affords to form the sharp edges of its channel. such are the sources of rivers. in the silicious matter which the water deposits is perhaps the bony system, and in the still finer soil and organic matter the fleshy fiber or cellular tissue. what is man but a mass of thawing clay? the ball of the human finger is but a drop congealed. the fingers and toes flow to their extent from the thawing mass 302 walden of the body. who knows what the human body would expand and flow out to under a more genial heaven? is not the hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins? the ear may be regarded, fancifully, as a lichen, umhilicaria, on the side of the head, with its lobe or drop. the lip — labium, from labor (?) — laps or lapses from the sides of the cavernous mouth. the nose is a manifest congealed drop or stalactite. the chin is a still larger drop, the confluent dripping of the face. the cheeks are a slide from the brows into the valley of the face, opposed and diffused by the cheek bones. each rounded lobe of the vegetable leaf, too, is a thick and now loitering drop, larger or smaller; the lobes are the fingers of the leaf; and as many lobes as it has, in so many directions it tends to flow, and more heat or other genial influences would have caused it to flow yet farther. thus it seemed that this one hill side illustrated the principle of all the operations of nature. the maker of this earth but patented a leaf. what champollion will decipher this hiero glyphic for us, that we may turn over a new leaf at last? this phenomenon is more exhilarating to me than tl o luxuriance and fertility of vineyards. true, it is somewhat excremen titious in its character, and there is no end to the heaps of liver, lights, and bowels, as if the globe were turned wrong side outward; but this suggests at least that nature has some bowels, and there again is mother of humanity. this is the frost coming out of the ground; this is siting. it precedes the green and flowery spring, as mythology precedes regular poetry. i know of nothing more purgative of winter fumes and indigestionsm it convinces me that earth is still in her swaddling clothes, and stretches forth baby fingers on every side. fresh curls spring from the baldest brow. there is nothing inorganic. these foliaceous heaps lie along the bank like the slag of a furnace, showing that nature is "in full blast" within. the earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon speing 303 stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit, — not a fossil earth, but a living earth; comj^ared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. its throes will heave our exuviae from their graves. you may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful molds you can"; they will never excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out into. and not only it, but the institutions upon it, are plastic like clay in the hands of the potter. ere long, not only on these banks, but on every hill and plain and in every hollow, the frost comes out of the ground like a dormant quadruj^ed from its burrow, and seeks the sea with music, or migrates to other climes in clouds. thaw with his gentle persuasion is more powerful than thor with his hammer. the one melts, the other but breaks in pieces. when the ground was partially bare of snow, and a few warm days had dried its surface somewhat, it was pleasant to compare the first tender signs of the infant year just peeping forth with the stately beauty of the withered vegetation which had withstood the winter, — life-everlasting, goldenrods, pin weeds, and graceful wild grasses, more obvious and interesting frequently than in summer even, as if their beauty w^as not ripe till then; even cotton-grass, cattails, mulleins, johnswort, hardback, meadow-sweet, and other strong stemmed plants, those unexhausted granaries which entertain the earliest birds, — decent weeds, at least, which widowed nature wears. i am l^articularly attracted b^' the arching and sheaf-like top of the wool-gtass; it brings back the summer to our winter mem ories, and is among the forms which art loves to copy, and which, in the vegetable kingdom, have the same relation to types already in the mind of man that astronomy has. it is an antique style older than greek or egyptian. many of the phenomena of winter are suggestive of an inexpressible 304 walden tenderness and fragile delicacy. aye are accustomed to hear this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant; but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of summer. at the approach of spring tlie red squirrels got under my house, two at a time, directly under my feet as i sat reading or writing, and kept up the queerest chuckling and chirruping and vocal pirouetting and gurgling sounds that ever were heard; and when i stamped they only chirruped the louder, as if past all fear and respect in their mad pranks, defying humanity to stop them. no you don't — chickaree — chickaree. they were wholly deaf to my arguments, or failed to perceive their force, and fell into a strain of invective that was irre sistible. the first sparrow of spring! the year beginning with younger hope than ever! the faint silvery warblings heard over the partially bare and moist fields from the bluebird, the song-sparrow, and the red-wing, as if the last flakes of winter tinkled as they fell ! what at such a time are histories, chro nologies, traditions, and all written revelations? the brooks sing carols and glees to the spring. the marsh-hawk sailing low over the meadow is already seeking the first slimy life that awakes. the sinking sound of melting snow is heard in all dells, and the ice dissolves apace in the ponds. the grass flames up on the hill sides like a spring fire, — "et i3rimitus orbitur herba imbribus primoribus evocata," — as if the earth sent forth an inward heat to greet the returning sun; not yellow but green is the color of its flame; — the symbol of ])erpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long gi-een ribbon, streams from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year's hay with the fresh life below. it grows as steadily as the rill oozes out of the ground. it is almost identical with that, for in the growing days of june, when the rills are dry, the grass blades are their channels, and from year to year the herds spring 305 drink at this perennial green stream, and the mower draws from it betimes their winter supply. so our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity. walden is melting apace. there is a canal two rods wide along the northerly and westerly sides, and wider still at the east end. a great field of ice has cracked off from the main body. i hear a song-sparrow singing from the bushes on the shore, — olit, out, olit, — chip, chip, chip, che, char, — che tuiss, wiss, wiss. he too is helping to crack it. how handsome the great sweeping curves in the edge of the ice, answering somewhat to those of the shore, but more regular! it is unusually hard, owing to the recent severe but transient cold, and all watered or waved like a palace floor. but the wind slides eastward over its opaque surface in vain, till it reaches the living surface beyond. it is glorious to behold this ribbon of water sparkling in the sun, the bare face of the pond full of glee and youth, as if it spoke the joy of the fishes within it, and of the sands on its shore, — a silvery sheen as from the scales of a leuciscus, as it were all one active fish. such is the contrast between winter and spring. walden was dead and is alive again. but this sjdring it broke up more steadily, as i have said. the change from storm and winter to serene and mild weather, from dark and sluggish hours to bright and elastic ones, is a memorable crisis which all things j^roclaim. it is seemingly instantaneous at last. suddenly an influx of light filled my house, though the evening was at hand, and the clouds of winter still overhung it, and the eaves were drij^ping with sleety rain. i looked out the window, and lo ! where yesterday was cold gray ice there lay the transparent pond already calm and full of hope as in a summer evening, reflecting a summer evening sky in its bosom, though none was visible overhead, as if it had intelligence with some remote horizon. i heard a robin in the distance, the first i had heard for many a 306 walden thousand years, methouglit, whose note i shall not forget for many a thousand more, — the same sweet and powerful song as of yore. the evening robin, at the end of a new england summer day! if i could ever find the twig he sits upon! i mean he; i mean the twig. this at least is not the turdus migratorius. the pitch-pines and shrub-oaks about my house, which had so long drooped, suddenly resumed their several characters, looked brighter, greener, and more erect and alive, as if effectually cleansed and restored by the rain. i knew that it would not rain any more. you may tell by looking at any twig of the forest, ay, at your very wood-pile, whether its winter is past or not. as it grew darker, i was startled by the honking of geese flying low over the woods, like weary travelers getting in late from southern lakes, and indulging at last in unrestrained comjdlaint and mutual consolation. standing at my door, i could hear the rush of their wings; when, driving toward my house, they suddenh'' spied my light, and with hushed clamor wheeled and settled in the pond. so i came in, and shut the door, and passed my first spring night in the woods. in the morning i watched the geese from the door through the mist, sailing in the middle of the pond, fifty rods off, so large and tumultuous that walden appeared like an artificial ]iond for their amusement. but when i stood on the shore they at once rose up with a gi^eat flapping of wings at the signal of their commander, and when they had got into rank, cii'cled about over my head, twenty-nine of them, and then steered straight to canada, with a regular honk from the leader at intervals, trusting to break their fast in muddier pools. a "plump" of ducks rose at the same time and took the route to the north in the wake of their noisier cousins. for a week i heard the circling groping clangor of some solitary goose in the foggy mornings, seeking its companion, and still peopling the woods with the sound of a larger life spring 307 than they could sustain. in april the pigeons were seen again flying express in small flocks, and in due time i heard the martins twittering over my clearing, though it had not seemed that the township contained so many that it could afford me any, and i fancied that they were peculiarly of the ancient race that dwelt in hollow trees ere white men came. in almost all climes the tortoise and the frog are among the precursors and heralds of this season, and birds fly with song and glancing plumage, and plants spring and bloom, and winds blow, to correct this slight oscillation of the poles and preserve the equilibrium of nature. as every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring is like the creation of cosmos out of chaos and the realization of the golden age. — eurus ad auroram, nabathacaque regna recessit, persidaque, et radiis juga subdita matutinis. the east-wmd withdrew to aurora and the nabathasan kingdom, and the persian, and the ridges placed under the morning rays. ****** man was born. whether that artificer of things. the origin of a better world, made him from the divine seed-; or the earth being recent and lately sundered from the high ether, retained some seeds of cognate heaven. a single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. so our jdrospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. we should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty. we loiter in winter while it is already spring. in a pleasant spring morning all men's sins are forgiven. such a day is a truce to 308 walden vice. while such a sun holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may return. through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors. you may have known your neighbor yesterday for a thief, a drunkard, or a sensualist, and merely pitied or despised him, and despaired of the world ; })ut the sun shines bright and warm this first spring morning, recreating the world, and you meet him at some serene work, and see how his exhausted and debauched veins expand with still joy and bless the new day, feel the spring influence with the innocence of infancy, and all his faults are forgotten. there is not only an atmosphere of good will about him, but even a savor of holiness groping for expression, blindly and ineffectually perhaps, like a new-born instinct, and for a short hour the south hill side echoes to no vulgar jest. you see some innocent fair shoots preparing to burst from his gnarled rind and try another year's life, tender and fresh as the youngest plant. p'ven he has entered into the joy of his lord. why the jailer does not leave open his prison doors, — why the judge does not dismiss his case, — why the preacher does not dismiss his congregation! it is because they do not obey the hint which god gives them, nor accei>t the pardon which he freely offers to all. "a return to goodness produced each day in the tranquil and beneficent breath of the morning, causes that in respect to the love of virtue and the hatred of vice, one approaches a little the primitive nature of man, as the sprouts of the forest which has been felled. in like manner the evil which one does in the interval of a day prevents the germs of virtues which began "to spring up again from developing themselves and destroys them. "after the germs of virtue have thus been prevented many times from developing themselves, then the beneficent breath of evening does not suffice to preserve them. as soon as the breath of evening does not suffice longer to preserve them, speing 309 then the nature of man does not differ much from that of the brute. men seeing the nature of this man like that of the brute, think that he has never possessed the innate faculty of reason. are those the true and natural sentiments of man?'^ the golden age was first created, which without any avenger spontaneously without law cherished fidelity and rectitude. punishment and fear were not; nor avere threatening words read on suspended brass; nor did the suppliant crowd fear the words of their judge; but were safe without an avenger. not yet the pine felled on its mountains had descended to the liquid waves that it might see a foreign world, and mortals knew no shores but their own. ****** there was eternal spring, and placid zephyrs with warm blasts soothed the flowers born without seed. on the 29th of april, as i was fishing from the bank of the river near the nine-acre-corner bridge, standing on the quaking grass and willow roots, where the muskrats lurk, i heard a singular rattling sound, somewhat like that of the sticks which boys play with their fingers, when, looking up, i obsei-ved a very slight and graceful hawk, like a night-hawk, alternately soaring like a ripple and tumbling a rod or two over and over, showing the underside of its wings, which gleamed like a satin ribbon in the sun, or like the pearly inside of a shell. this sight reminded me of falconry and what nobleness and poetry are associated with that sport. the merlin it seemed to me it might be called: but i care not for its name. it was the most ethereal flight i had ever witnessed. it did not simply flutter like a butterfly, nor soar like the larger hawks, but it sported with proud reliance in the fields of air; mounting again and again with its strange chuckle, it repeated its free and beautiful fall, turning over and over like a kite, and then recovering from its lofty tumbling, as if it had never set its foot on terra firma. it appeared to have no companion in the 310 walden universe, sidorting there alone, — and to need none but the morning and the ether with which it played. it was not lonely, but made all the earth lonely beneath it. where was the parent whieh hatched it, its kindred, and its father in the heavens? the tenant of the air, it seemed related to the earth but by an egg hatched sometime in the crevice of a crag; — or was its native i>est made in the angle of a cloud, woven of the rainbow's trimmings and the sunset sky, and lined with some soft midsummer haze caught up from earth? its eyry now some cliffy cloud. besides this i got a rare mess of golden and silver and bright cupreous fishes, which looked like a string of jewels. ah! i have penetrated to those meadows on the morning of many a first spring day, jumping from hummock to hummock, from willow root to willow root, w^hen the wild river valley and the woods were bathed in so pure and bright a light as would have waked the dead, if they had been slumbering in their graves, as some suppose. there needs no stronger proof of immortality. all things must live in such a light. death, w^iere was thy sting? grave, where was thy victory, then? our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unex plored forests and meadows which surround it. we need the tonic of wildness, — to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meado^v-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe ; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wulder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. at the same time that wo are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and cea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. we can never have enough of nature. w^e must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thundercloud, and spring 311 the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. we need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturingfreely where we never wander. we are cheered when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and disheartens us, and deriving health and strength from the repast. there was a dead horse in the hollow by the path to my house, which compelled me sometimes to go out of my way, especially in the night when the air avas heavy, but the assurance it gave me of the strong appetite and inviolable health of nature was my compensation for this. i love to see that nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another; that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp, — tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood ! with the liability to accident, we must see how little account is to be made of it. the impres sion made on a wise man is that of universal innocence. poison is not poisonous after all, nor are any wounds fatal. com passion is a very untenable ground. it must be .expeditious. its pleadings will not bear to be stereotyped. early in may, the oaks, hickories, maples, and other trees, just putting out amidst the pine woods around the pond, imparted a brightness like sunshine to the landscape, especially in cloudy days, as if the sun were breaking through mists and shining faintly on the hill sides here and there. on the third or fourth of may i saw a loon in the pond, and during the first week of the month i heard the whippoorwill, the brown thrasher, the veery, the wood-pewee, chewink, and other birds. i had heard the wood-thrush long before. the j^hoebe had already come once more and looked in at my door and window, to see if my house was cavern-like enough for her, sustaining herself on humming wings with clinched talons, as if she held by the air, while she surveyed the premises. the sulphur 312 walden like pollen of the pitch-pine soon covered the pond and the stones and rotten wood along the shore, so that you could have collected a barrelful. this is the "sulphur showers" we hear of. even in calidasa's drama of sacontala, we read of "rills dyed yellow with the golden dust of the lotus." and so the seasons went rolling on into summer, as one rambles into higher and higher grass. thus was my first year's life in the woods completed; and the second year was similar to it. i finally left waldeii september 6th, 1847. i xviii conclusion to the sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of air and scenery. thank heaven, here is not all the world. the buckeye does not groav in new england, and the mocking-bird is rarely heard here. the wild goose is more of a cosmopolite than we; he breaks his fast in canada, takes a luncheon in the ohio, and plumes himself for the night in a southern bayou. even the bison to some extent keeps pace with the seasons, cropping the pastures of the colorado only till a greener and sweeter grass aavaits him by the yellowstone. yet we think that if rail-fences are pulled down, and stone-walls piled up on our farms, bounds are henceforth set to our lives and our fates decided. if you are chosen town clerk, forsooth, you cannot go to terra del fuego this summer: but you may go to the land of infernal fire nevertheless. the universe is wider than our views of it. yet we should oftener look over the tafferel of our craft, like curious passengers, and not make the voyage like stupid sailors picking oakum. the other side of the globe is but the home of our correspondent. our voyage is only great circle sailing, and the doctors prescribe for diseases of the skin merely. one hastens to southern africa to chase the giraffe; but surely that is not the game he would be after. how long, pray, would a man hunt giraffes if he could? snipes and woodcocks also may afford rare sport; but i trust it would be nobler game to shoot one's self. — 313 314 walden direct your eye right inward, and you '11 find a thousand regions in your mind yet undiscovered. travel them, and be expert in home-cosmography. what does africa, — what does the west stand for? is not our own interior white on the chart ? black though it may prove, like the coast, when discovered. is it the source of the nile, or the niger, or the mississippi, or a northwest passage around this continent, that we would find? are these the problems which most concern mankind? is franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest to find him? does mr. grinnell know where he himself is? be rather the mungo park, the lewis and clark and frobisher, of your own streams and oceans ; explore your own higher latitudes, — with shiploads of jdreserved meats to support you, if thej^ be necessary; and pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign. were preserved meats invented to preserve meat merely? nay, be a columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. yet some can be patriotic who have no sez/-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. they love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. patriotism is a maggot in their heads. what was the meaning of that south-sea exjdloring expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact that there are continents and seas in the moral world, to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the atlantic and pacific ocean of one's being, alone. — conclusion 315 erret, et extremos alter scrutetur iberos. plus habet hie vitae, plus habet ille viae. let them wander and scrutinize the outlandish australians. i have more of god, they more of the road. it is not worth the while to go round the world to count the eats in zanzibar. yet do this even till you can do better, and you may perhaps find some "symmes' hole" by which to get at the inside at last. england and france, spain and portugal, gold coast and slave coast, all front on this private sea; but no bark from them has ventured out of sight of land, though it is without doubt the direct way to india. if you would learn to speak all tongues and conform to the customs of all nations, if you would travel farther than all travelers, be naturalized in all climes, and cause the sphinx to dash her head against a stone, even obey the precept of the old philosopher, and explore thyself. herein are demanded the eye and the nerve. only the defeated and deserters go to the wars, cowards that run away and enlist. start now on that farthest western way, which does not pause at the mississippi or the pacific, nor conduct toward a worn-out china or japan, but leads on direct a tangent to this sphere, summer and winter, day and night, sun down, moon down, and at last earth down too. it is said that mirabeau took to highway robbery "to ascer tain what degree of resolution was necessary in order to place one's self in formal opposition to the most sacred' laws of society." he declared that "a soldier who fights in the ranks does not require half so much courage as a foot-pad," — "that honor and religion have never stood in the way of a well considered and a firm resolve." this was manly, as the world goes; and yet it was idle, if not desperate. a saner man avould have found himself often enough "in formal opposition" to what are deemed "the most sacred laws of society," through obedience to yet more sacred laws, and so have tested his 316 walden ^ resolution without going out of his way. it is not for a man to put himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain himself in whatever attitude he find himself through obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of opposi tion to a just government, if he should chance to meet with| such. i i left the woods for as good a reason as i went there. i perhaps it seemed to me that i had several more lives to live, ' and could not spare any more time for that one. it is remark■ able how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, i and make a beaten track for ourselves. i had not lived there \ a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond| side ; and though it is five or six years since i trod it, it is still ' quite distinct. it is true, i fear that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. the surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. how worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! i did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there i could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. i do not wish to go below now. i learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. he will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish them selves around and within him ; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. in proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. if you have built castles in conclusion 317 the air, your work need not be lost ; that is where they should be. now put the foundations under them. it is a ridiculous demand which england and america make, that you shall speak so that they can understand you.' neither men nor toadstools gtow so. as if that were important, and there were not enough to understand you without them. as if nature could support but one order of understandings, could not sustain birds as well as quadrupeds, flying as well as creeping things, and hush and who, which bright can under stand, were the best english. as if there were safety in stupidity alone. i fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which i have been convinced. extravagance! it depends on how you are yarded. the migrating buffalo which seeks new pastures in another latitude, is not extravagant like the cow which kicks over the pail, leaps the cowyard fence, and runs after her calf, in milking-time. i desire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a man in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments; for i am convinced that i cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression. who that has heard a strain of music feared then lest he should speak extravagantly any more forever? in view of the future or possible, we should live quite laxly and i undefined in front, our outlines dim and misty on that side; i as our shadows reveal an insensible perspiration toward the • sun. the volatile truth of our words should continually betray ithe inadequacy of the residual statement. their truth is i instantly translated; its literal monument alone remains. the •words which express our faith and piety are not definite; yet i they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior ' natures. why level downward to our dullest perception always, and i praise that as common sense? the commonest sense is the 318 walden sense of men asleep, -wbicli the}' express by snoring. some times we are inclined to class those who are once-and-a-half witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate only a third part of their wit. some would find fault with the morning red, if they ever got up early enough. "they pretend," as i hear, "that the verses of kabir have four different senses: illusion, spirit, intellect, and the exoteric doctrine of the yedas" ; but in this part of the world it is considered a ground for complaint if a man's writings admit of more than one interpretation. while england endeavors to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally? i do not suppose that i have attained to obscurity, but i should be proud if no more fatal fault were found with my pages on this score than was found with the walden ice. southern customers objected to its blue color, which is the evidence of its purity, as if it were muddy, and preferred the cambridge ice, which is white, but tastes of weeds. the purity men love is like the mists which envelop the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond. some are dinning in our ears that we americans, and moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even the elizabethan men. but what is that to the purpose? a living dog is better than a dead lion. shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made. why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? if a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. it is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak. shall he turn his spring into summer? if the condition of things which we conclusion 319 were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute? we will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality. shall we with pains erect a heaven of blue glass over ourselves, though when it is done we shall be sure to gaze still at the true ethereal heaven far above, as if the former were not? there was an artist in the city of kouroo who was disposed to strive after perfection. one day it came into his mind to make a staff. having considered that in an imperfect work time is an ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not enter, he said to himself, it shall be perfect in all respects, though i should do nothing else in my life. he proceeded instantly to the forest for wood, being resolved that it should not be made of unsuitable material; and as he searched for and rejected stick after stick, his friends gradually deserted him, for they grew old in their works and died, but he grew not older by a moment. his singleness of purpose and reso lution, and his elevated piety, endowed him, without his knowl edge, with perennial youth. as he made no compromise with time, time kept out of his way, and only sighed at a distance because he could not overcome him. before he had found a stock in all respects suitable, the city of kouroo was a hoary ruin, and he sat on one of its mounds to j^eel the stick. before he had given it the proper shape the dynasty of the candahars was at an end, and with the point of the stick he wrote the name of the last of that race in the sand, and then resumed his work. by the time he had smoothed and polished the staff kalpa was no longer the pole-star; and ere he had put on the ferrule and the head adorned with precious stones, brahma had awoke and slumbered many times. but why do i stay to mention these things ? when the finishing stroke was put to his work, it suddenly expanded before the eyes of the astonished artist into the fairest of all the creations of brahma. he had made a new system in making a staff, a world with full and fair proportions; in which, though the old cities and 320 walden dynasties had passed away, fairer and more glorious ones had taken their places. and now he saw by the heap of shavings still fresh at his feet, that, for him and his work, the former lapse of time had been an illusion, and that no more time had elapsed than is required for a single scintillation from the brain of brahma to fall on and inflame the tinder of a mortal i brain. the material was pure, and his art was pure; how ! could the result be other than wonderful? no face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well , at last as the truth. this alone wears well. for the most part, j we are not where we are, but in a false position. through an infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves | into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is 'doubly difficult to get out. in sane moments we regard only i the facts, the case that is. say what you have to say, not what j you ought. any truth is better than make-believe. tom hyde, the tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked if he i had anything to say. "tell the tailors," said he, "to remember | to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch." | his companion's prayer is forgotten. | however mean your life is, meet it and live it ; do not shun i it and call it hard names. it is not so bad as you are. it | looks poorest when you are richest. the faultfinder will find | faults even in paradise. love your life, poor as it is. you i may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, i even in a poorhouse. the setting sun is reflected from the i windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. i do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace. the town's poor seem to me often to live the most independent lives of any. maybe they are simply great enough to receive without mis giving. most think that they are above being supported by the town ; but it oftener happens that they are not above support conclusion 321 ing themselves by dishonest means, which should be more dis reputable. cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. turn the old ; return to them. things do not change ; we change. sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. god will see that you do not want society. if i were confined to a corner of a garret all my days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while i had my thoughts about me. the johilosopher said: "from an army of three divisions one can take away its general, and put it in disorder : from the man the most abject and vulgar one cannot take away his thought." do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be jilayed on ; it is all dissipation. humil ity like darkness reveals the heavenly lights. the shadows of poverty and meanness gather around us, "and lo ! creation widens to our view." we are often reminded that if there were bestowed on us the wealth of croesus, our aims must still be the same, and our means essentially the same. moreover, if you are restricted in your range by poverty, if you cannot buy books and newspapers, for instance, you are but confined to the most significant and vital experiences; you are compelled to deal with the material which yields the most sugar and the most starch. it is life near the bone where it is sweetest. you are defended from being a trifler. .no man loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher. superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul. i live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition was poured a little alloy of bell metal. often, in the repose of my midday, there reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum from without. it is the noise of my contemporaries. my neighbors tell me of their adventures with famous gentlemen and ladies, what notabilities they met at the dinner-table ; but i am no more interested in such things than in the contents of the 322 walden daily times. the interest and the conversation are about cos tume and manners chiefly; but a goose is a goose still, dress it as you will. they tell me of california and texas, of england and the indies, of the hon, mr. of georgia or of massa chusetts, all transient and fleeting phenomena, till i am read) to leap from their court-yard like the mameluke bey. i delight to come to my bearings,— not walk in procession with pomp and parade, in a conspicuous place, but to walk even with the builder of the universe, if i may, — not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial nineteenth century, but stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by. what are men celebrating? they are all on a committee of arrangements, and hourly expect a speech from somebody. god is only the president of the day, and webster is his orator. i love to weigh, to settle, to gravi tate toward that which most stronglj^ and rightfully attracts me ; — not hang by the beam of the scale and try to weigh less, — not suppose a case, but take the case that is ; to travel the only path i can, and that on which no power can resist me. . it affords me no satisfaction to commence to spring an arch before i have got a solid foundation. let us not play at kittlybenders. there is a solid bottom everywhere. we read that the traveler asked the boy if the swamp before him had a hard bottom. the boy replied that it had. but presently the traveler's horse sank in up to the girths, and he observed to the boy, "i thought you said that this bog had a hard bottom." "so it has," answered the latter, "but you have not got half way to it yet." so it is with the bogs and quicksands of society; but he is an old boy that knows it. only what is thought, said, or done at a certain rare coincidence is good. i would not be one of those who will foolishly drive a nail into mere lath and plastering; such a deed would keep me awake nights. give me a hammer, and let me feel for the furring. do not depend on the putty. drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction, — a work at conclusion 323 which you would not be ashamed to invoke the muse. so will help you god, and so only. every nail driven should be as another rivet in the machine of the universe, you carrying on the work. rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. i sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and i went away hungry from the inhospitable board. the hospital ity was as cold as the ices. i thought that there was no need of ice to freeze them. they talked to me of the age of the wine and the fame of the vintage ; but i thought of an older, a newer, and purer wine, of a more glorious vintage, which they had not got, and could not buy. the style, the house and grounds and "entertainment," pass for nothing with me. i called on the king, but he made me wait in his hall, and conducted like a man incapacitated for hospitality. there was a man in my neighborhood who lived in a hollow tree. his manners were truly regal. i should have done better had i called on him. how long shall we sit in our porticos practicing idle and musty virtues, which any work would make impertinent? as if one were to begin the day with long-suffering, and hire a man to hoe his potatoes; and in the afternoon go forth to practice christian meekness and charity with goodness aforethought! consider the china pride and stagnant self-complacency of mankind. this generation reclines a little to congratulate itself on being the last of an illustrious line ; and in boston and lon don and paris and rome, thinking of its long descent, it speaks of its progress in art and science and literature with satisfac tion. there are the records of the philosophical societies, and the public eulogies of great men! it is the good adam eon-" templating his own virtue. "yes, we have done great deeds, and sung divine songs, which shall never die," — that is, as long as we can remember them. the learned societies and great men of assyria, — where are they ? what youthful philosophers and 324 walden experimentalists we are i there is not one of my readers who has yet lived a whole human life. these may be but the spring months in the life of the race. if we have had the seven-years* itch, we have not seen the seventeen-year locust yet in concord. we are acquainted with a mere pellicle of the globe on which we live. most have not delved six feet beneath the surface, nor leaped as many above it. we know not where we are. besides, we are sound asleep nearly half our time. yet we esteem our selves wise, and have an established order on the surface. truly, we are deep thinkers, we are ambitious spirits ! as i stand over the insect crawling amid the pine needles on the forest floor, and endeavoring to conceal itself from my sight, and ask myself why it will cherish those humble thoughts and hide its head from me who might, perhaps, be its benefactor and impart to its race some cheering information, i am reminded of the greater benefactor and intelligence that stands over me, the human insect. there is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness. i need only suggest what kind of sermons are still listened to in the most enlightened countries. there are such words as joy and sorrow, but they are only the burden of a psalm, sung with a nasal twang, while we believe in the ordinary and mean. we think that we can change our clothes only. it is said that the british empire is very large and respectable, and that the united states are a first-rate power. we do not believe that a tide rises and falls behind every man which can float the british empire like a chip, if he should ever harbor it in his mind. who knows what sort of seventeen-year locust will next come out of the ground? the government of the world i live in was not framed, like that of britain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine. the life in us is like the water in the river. it may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown \ il conclusion 325 out all our muskrats. it was not always dry land where we dwell. i see far inland the banks which the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets. every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of new england, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer's kitchen for sixty years, first in connecticut and afterward in massachusetts, — from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. who does not feel his faith in a resui-rection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under man concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at the first in the alburnum of the green and kving tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb, — heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board, — may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society's most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last! i do not say that john or jonathan will realize all this ; but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. the light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. only that day dawns to which we are awake. there is more day to dawn. the sun is but a morning star. notes page 27. two years and three months. beginning july 4, 1845. thoreau did not publish walden, however, until 1854. 28. traveled a good deal in concord. thoreau believed in emerson's maxim: "traveling is the fool's paradise." alcott said: "thoreau thought he lived in the center of the universe and would annex the rest of the planet to concord." 28. brahmins. the religious i:pper caste of the hindoos. the reference here is to the various tortures which they underwent in order to gain favor with their gods. 28. twelve labors of hercules. a succession of desperate undertakings enjoined by eurystheus. cf. gayley's classic myths (revised edition), pp. 216-221. 29. augean stables. the cleansing of these was one of the. twelve labors of hercules. 29. deucalion and pyrrha. cf. gayley's classic myths, p. 16. 29. raleigh, sir walter (1552? -1618). the passage is from ovid. thoreau enjoyed the vigor of raleigh's style. '31. wilberforce, william (1759-1833). an english anti-slavery leader, 33. evelyn, john (1620-1706). famous principally as a diarist. he was also the author of a learned work on trees entitled sylva. 33. hippocrates. considered "the father of medicine" by the ancient world. 34. confucius (550-478 b. c). a celebrated chinese philosopher. the founder of the chief chinese religion. 36. liebig, baron justus von (1803-1873). a famous german chemist. 37. elysian. in greek mythology, elysium was the abode of the blessed after death. cf. gayley's classic myths, pp. 51, 52. 39. i long ago lost a hound, etc. this is perhaps thoreau's best state ment of his transcendental search for the unfindable, for the ideal. 42. to transact some private business. thoreau desired to study books and nature, and to learn to write. 42. celestial empire. china; used here figuratively for the spiritual world. the reference is to the extensive trade which was being carried on between china and the united states through the port at salem, massa chusetts. 43. la perouse. a famous french navigator who made discoveries in the far east. he was supposedly lost at sea in 1788. 327 328 walden 43. hanno. a carthaginian navigator of the fifth century b. c. who explored the west coast of africa. 43. neva. a river at whose mouth petrograd (formerly st. petersburg) is situated. 44. if they were divested of their clothes. thoreau in this passage is influenced by carlyle. read "the world out of clqthes," chapter 8, book i of sartor resartus. 44. madam pfeiffer (1797-1858). a celebrated viennese traveler who journeyed twice around the world. she published in 1850, a woman's journey round the world. 46. new wine in old bottles. the allusion is to matthew, ix, 17. 46. the old philosopher. bias, who was one of the seven wise men of greece. 46. fates. according to greek mythology the three fates, clotho, lachesis, and atropos, spun, measured, and cut the thread of human destiny, cf. gayley's classic myths, p. 38. 47. egyptian wheat. reference to stories — now discredited — of the germination of wheat which had lain thousands of years in the tombs of egypt. 48. harlequin. the conventional clown of italian comedies and puppet shows. 48. samuel laing (1/80-1868). a scottish traveler; publisher of several works on xorway and sweden. 49. domestic. see origin of the word. from the latin, domus, house. 51. goodkin, daniel (1612-1678). the quotation is from historical collec tions of the indians of massachusetts. 52. rumford fireplace. an improved fireplace, the principles of which were first discovered by benjamin thompson, count rumford (1753-1814). 53. the fathers have eaten sour grapes. this and the two following verses are taken from esekicl, xviii, 2-4. 54. suent. a dialectal word; here used in the sense of working smoothly. 54. chapman, george. elizabethan dramatist. the quotation is from his tragedy, caesar and pompey, act v, scene ii. 54. momus. the greek god of censure and faultfinding. 57. aurora. the goddess of dawn. 57. memnon. the son of aurora. the "column of memnon," which was a colossal statue at thebes, egypt, was supposed to give forth music when the rays of the rising sun fell upon it. 57. sardanapalus (668-626 b. c). a king of assyria whose reign was celebrated for its material prosperity. cf. byron's sardanapalus. 57. jonathan. "brother jonathan," the american people as a whole. 57. malaria. italian, mal' aria, bad air. 58. agri-culture. latin, agri cultura, the tilling of a field. 59. old johnson. edward johnson (1599-1672). the author of a history of new england entitled the wonder-working providence of zion's saviour in new england. notejs 329 60. i borrowed an axe. of his friend, a. bronson alcptt, one of the leaders of the brook farm experiment and the father of louisa may alcott. 62. singing to myself. thoreau here quotes from his own verses. 64. the removal of the gods of troy. cf. ^neidj book ii. 64. the character of his raisers. among these "raisers" were ralph waldo emerson, george william curtis, william ellery channing, and a. bronson alcott. cf. homes of american authors. 66. the ninth part of a man. the allusion is to the familiar saying, "it takes nine tailors to make a man." 66. trinity church. the reference is to the church which stands oppo site the head of wall street, new york city. 68. squatter's right. "thoreau delighted to call himself a 'squatter' on emerson's land, for this nomadic term well suited his mood." — marble. 69. cambridge college. harvard college. thoreau lived in hollis hall during his undergraduate days, where he had "many and noisy neighbors, and a residence in the fourth story." cf. f. b. sanborn's henry d. thoreau, p. 55. 71. rogers. joseph rogers and sons, cutlers of shefifield, england. 71. adam smith (1723-1790), ricardo, david (1772-1823), and say, jean baptiste (1767-1823) were leading economists. 72. flying childers. a famous english race horse of the eighteenth century that was never beaten. 72. fitchburg. a town thirty miles west from concord; at the time, the terminus of the fitchburg railroad. 74. arthur young (1741-1820). an englishman, the author of many books dealing with scientific agriculture. 76. bhagvat-geeta. a sacred book of the hindoos, supposed to date from the first or second century of our era. 76. thebes. this reference is to the egyptian thebes. cf. iliad, book ix, line 383, "the hundred gated." 76. vitruvius. marcus vitruvius pollia, a roman architect of the age of augustus. 77. thirty centuries. perhaps an inexact reference to the words of napoleon to his soldiers when in egypt: "from the summit of those monuments forty centuries look down upon you." 77. as many trades as fingers. in 1847, thoreau wrote to the secretary of his harvard class: "i am a schoolmaster, a private tutor, a surveyor, a gardener, a farmer, a painter (i mean house painter), a carpenter, a mason, a day-laborer, a pencil-maker, a glass-paper-maker, a writer, and sometimes a poetaster." 78. their bills have not yet been received. the washing and mending were done at his home. channing writes: "some have fancied because he moved to walden he left his family. he bivouacked there, and really lived at home, where he went every day." 81. cato. the quotation is from de agri cultura, chap. 74. 330 walden 82. forefathers sang. the quotation is from "new england annoy ances," one of the earliest pieces of verse produced in america, 82. indicms. burroughs writes: "doubtless the wildest man new eng land has turned out since the red aborigines vacated her territory was henry thoreau, — a man in whom the indian re-appeared on the plane of taste and morals. . . . his whole life was a search for the wild, not only in nature, but in literature, in life, in morals. ... he, for the most part, despised the white man; but his enthusiasm kindled at the mention of the indian; he coveted his knowledge, his arts, his wood craft. he credited him with a more 'practical and vital science' than was contained in the books," read also arthur rickett on this point in the vagabond in literature. 83. experiments. thoreau lived in an age of experimentation. in 1840 emerson wrote to carlyle: "we are all a little wild with numberless projects of social reform; not a reading-man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket." 85. the evil that men do. the quotation is from julius caesar, iii, ii, 80. 85. bartram, william (1739-1823). an early american botanist. the mucclasse indians are described in part iii, chap. 8, of his travels through north and south carolina, georgia, etc. 86. mexicans. cf. prescott's conquest of mexico, book i, chap. iv. 87. keep the flocks of admetus. cf. gayley's classic myths, pp. 104, 105. 88. each one ... his own way. in another place, thoreau says: "but i say that i have no scheme about it, — no designs on man at all." 90. robin goodfellow. "puck." cf. shakspere's midsummer-night's dream. ii, i, 32-57. 91. phaeton. cf. gayley's classic myths, pp. 94-98. 91. howard, john. a famous prison reformer of the latter part of the eighteenth century. he published in 1777 his work, state of the prisons. 91. jesuits. "the society of jesus." the jesuits were zealous mission aries among the indians. 93. penn, william (1644-1718) and fry, elizabeth (1780-1845), were promi nent quakers. 95. our manners have been corrupted. the allusion is to 1 corinthians, xv, 33. 95. cursing of god and enduring him forever. a sarcastic reference to the article in the westminster catechism, which, in answer to the ques tion, "what is the chief end of man?" reads, "to glorify god and to enjoy him forever." 95. sheik sadi of shiraz (1190-1291). a famous persian poet. 96. thomas carew (1598-1639). an english poet; the earliest of the cavalier singers. 98. i bought the hollowell place. it is reported that thoreau was some what disappointed when the owner changed his mind about the bargain. thoreau had intended at that time to use this farm for a place of retreat. later, when this failed, he chose walden pond, ii notes 331 98. i am monarch of all i survey. quoted from cowper's verses sup posed to be written by alexander selkirk. 99. atlas. according to greek mythology, atlas held the pillars of the sky on his shoulders. cf. gayley's classic myths, p. 57. 99. old cato. marcus porcius cato (234-149 b. c). author of de re riistica (concerning agriculture). 99. "cultivator." the boston cultivator, an agricultural journal. 100. experiment. thoreau regards his life at walden an experimcn he had no intention of becoming permanently a hermit. see note, 83. 100. ode to dejection. an allusion to coleridge's ode to dejection. thoreau here explains why he consciously exaggerates his experience. 101. a boat. the boat which thoreau and his brother john built and which they used during their journey which is recorded in a week on the concord and merrimack rivers. the boat was later owned by haw thorne. 101. the harivansa. a sanskrit poem. 103. damodara. a name for krishna, a divine hero of hindoo mythol ogy. 103. pleiades or the hyades. these are constellations. 103. aldebaran or altair. these are fixed stars of the first magni tude. 104. aurora. the greek goddess of dawn. cf. gayley's classic myths. pp. 39, 95. 105. the vedas. the early religious books of india. 105. memnon. see note, p. 57. 105. i went to the woods, etc. "the writer in this surely ranges himself with the prophets, — with ruskin and emerson and carlyle; in the very essence of the matter with goethe, the clearest sighted of all modern men." — payne. 106. spartan-like. the spartans trained themselves in hardy simplicity for the service of the state. 106. next excursion. the next or future life. 106. glorify god and enjoy him forever. see note, p. 95. 106. let your affairs be as two or three. the entire passage is broadly parallel to the sermon on the mount. 108. setting the bell. ringing a bell so hard that it balances in an in verted position. 108. wachito river. rises in arkansas and empties into the red river in louisiana. 108. rudiment of an eye. the fishes in the mammoth cave of kentucky are blind. 111. mill-dam. "the center of concord village, where the postoffice and shops are — so called from an old mill-dam where now is a street." — f. b. sanborn. 112. tied to the mast like ulysses. in passing the sirens, ulysses had 332 walden the ears of the sailors stopped with wax, and had himself tied to the mast. cf. gayley's classic myths, pp. 328, 329. 112. point d* appui. french, meaning "basis, support." 112. nilometer. an instrument for gauging the height of the water in the nile river. thoreau here makes a pun on the word as though it were derived from the latin nil, and in this meaning, sets the word in contrast with rezdometer, a word of his own coining. lis. noblest recorded thoughts of man. matthew^ arnold called the classics "the best that has been thought and said in the world." 115. delphi and dodona. the oracle of apollo was at delphi; the oracle of zeus, at dodona. 117. alexander. alexander the great. there is a tradition that he slept nightly with his sword and with a copy of the iliad under his pillow. 118. vedas. see note, p. 105. 118. zendavestas. the bible of zoroastrianism, the ancient national religion of persia. 119. referred to a town. reading and north reading are towns in massachusetts, not far from concord. 120. a woodchopper. alek therien. he is described at length in chap ter vi. 121. tit-men. small men, pygmies. 122. zoroaster. the founder of zoroastrianism. see note above. 123. abelard (1079-1142). a learned french scholar. 123. utopian. ideal but impracticable. an adjective from utopia, a book by sir thomas more. 123. "olive branches." the olive branch was a methodist weekly magazine which was published in boston. 123. redding and co. of boston. publishers of popular fiction. 126. puri indians. a brazilian tribe. see previous note on indians, i.. 82. 128. partridge. the ruffed grouse, commonly called a partridge in america. 128. in truth, our village has become a butt. the quotation is from william ellery channing's poem entitled ivalden spring. 131. atropos. the fate whose business it was to cut the thread of man's life. 132. buena vista. a battle fought february 22 and 23, 1847, in which the americans had a great victory over the mexicans. 132. daisies and the nests of fieldmice. the reference is to robert ijurns's poems, to a mountain daisy and to a mouse. 132. long wharf. in boston. 133. thomaston lime. lime from thomaston, maine. 134. to be the mast. quoted from milton's paradise lost, bk. i, 293, 294. 134. cattle of a thousand hills. the allusion is to psalms, 1, 10. 135. mountains do indeed skip like rams. the allusion is to psalms, cxiv, 4. notes 333 135. peterboro* hills. these are visible on the northwestern horizon, from concord. 137. ben jonsonism. thoreau perhaps had in mind the witches' scene in ben jonson's masque of queens. 138. illustrates. illuminates. 138. stygian. of the lower world. from the river styx. 139. aldermanic. the conventional alderman is noticeably corpulent. 139. domm to his mark. the reference is to the pegtankard. a series of marks was placed on the inside of the cup in order to gauge the draughts, as it was passed from hand to hand. 142. pouts. hornpouts, bullheads. 142. "the world to darkness and to me." quoted from gray's elegy in a country churchyard. 143. /eolian. wind music. from .^eolus, god of the winds. cf. gayley's classic myths, p. 39. 144. mourning untimely consumes the sad. quoted from macpherson's alleged translation of ossian's gaelic poem, croma. 145. beacon hill. in boston. the state house now occupies the sum mit of this hill. 145. the five points. in new york city. named because of the peculiar intersection of the streets. 145. brighton. now a part of boston. in thoreau's day it was the center of the local cattle market. concord was situated on the direct trade route between new hampshire and boston. 146. indra. in hindoo mythology, indra was the chief of the gods of the air. 148. blue devils. apparitions supposed to be seen by persons suffering with delirium tremens; hence, very low spirits. 148. mock sun. sun-dog. 148. legion. the allusion is to mark v, 9. 148. mill brook. a brook which flowed through concord. 148. go£fe or whalley. these englishmen were members of the court which condemned king charles i. they escaped to cambridge, massa chusetts, and from there fled to new haven, connecticut, and later to hadley, massachusetts, in both of which places they lived in concealment. see hawthorne's the gray champion. 149. simples. medicinal herbs. 149. old pau-rs. thomas parr. at his death in 1635, he was reputed to be one hundred and fifty-two years of age. 149. acheron. a river in hades. cf. gayley's classic myths, p. 47. 149. dead sea. in palestine. this is one of the saltiest bodies of water in the world. 150. wild lettuce. the reference is to the myth that the birth of hebe was due to the fact that juno, her mother, at a banquet given by jupiter, ate heartily of wild lettuce. cf. ovid, metamorphoses, ix. 334 walden 151. tremont or astor or middlesex house. the tremont house was in boston; the astor, in new york city; the middlesex, in concord. 152. ricochet motion. the motion such as a skipping stone makes over the surface of the water. 153. cerberus. the three-headed, serpent-tailed watch dog that stood guard at the entrance to hades. cf. gayley's classic myths, p. 47. 153. arrived there, etc. the quotation is from the faerie queen, i, 1, o:. 153. winslow, edward (1595-1655). one of the settlers who came in the mayflower. the quotation is from alexander young's chronicles of the pilgrim fathers of the colony of plymouth. 153. visit of ceremony. this visit was made in 1621. 155. paphlagonian man. paphlagonia was an ancient mountainous dis trict of asia minor, incorporated into the roman empire in 65 b.c. the rulers of the country bore the name pylaemenes to show that they claimed descent from the chieftain of that name who figures in homer's iliad as the leader of the paphlagonians. 155. wood-chopper. in his journal thoreau writes: "who should come to my lodge but a true homeric boor, one of those paphlagonian men. alek therien, he called himself." (vol. i, p. 365.) 155. why are you in tears. iliad, opening verse of book xvi. 159. pecunia. from the latin pecus, cattle. 162. proposed a book. in his jourtial (vol. ill, pp. 215, 216), thoreau writes: "as if it were any use, when a man failed to make any memorable impression on you, for him to leave his name no! i kept a book to keep their fames in." 163. com-munity. thoreau infers that the origin of the word is from the latin munire, to fortify. 163. "welcome englishmen." these words were uttered by the indian chief, samoset, when he entered plymouth, march 16, 1621. 164. antaeus. antaeus received his strength from contact with the earth. for hercules's contest with him cf. gayley's classic myths, p. 220. 164. brought from boston. thoreau's father moved from boston to concord in 1823. see sanborn's henry d. thoreau, p. 4. 165. my flute. thoreau played skilfully on the flute. cf. louisa m. alcott's poem, thoreau's flute. 166. agricola laboriosus. hardworking farmer. 166. lincoln and wayland. small towns within five or ten miles of concord. 166. mr. coleman's report. the reverend henry coleman (1785-1849), was state commissioner for the agricultural survey of massachusetts. he published four reports. 167. rans des vaches. literally, "chime of the cows." a swiss air played by herdsmen to call the cattle. 167. paganini, nicolo (1784-1840). a celebrated italian violinist. espe cially famous for making music on a single string. notes 335 168. tintinnabulum. virgil's word is tinnitus, jingling. cf. georgia. book iv. 169. spit a mexican. impale a mexican soldier. thoreau was living at walden during the timfe the mexican war w^s in progress (1846-1847). 170. not with cranes. an allusion to the annual struggle between the pygmies and the cranes. see classical dictionary. 170. a pythagorean. pythagoras was a greek philosopher of the sixth century b.c., who prohibited his followers from eating meat and fish and beans. 170. evelyn, john. see note p. zi. 171. sir kenelm digby (1603-166s), was the first to observe the im portance of atmospheric oxygen to the growth of plants. his work. con cerning the vegetation of plants, was published in 1661. 171. patrem familias ... esse oportet. a householder must be a seller, not a buyer. the quotation is from cato's de re rustica, chap. 2. 171. plant the common small white bush bean. this paragraph is a half-playful imitation of the kind of advice that was given in farm journals. 173. ceres. the goddess of agriculture. cf. gzyl&y's classic myths, -^.az. 173. terrestrial jove. thus designated to distinguish him from pluto, the infernal jove. 173. plutus. god of wealth. 174. varro. marcus terentius (116-28 b.c.), wrote rerum rusticarum. 175. state street. in boston. 175. etesian winds. the regular northerly summer winds. the refer ence is from ancient greek and latin literature. 176. the vitals of the village were the grocery, etc. *'a11 this does not mean that thoreau was a shy and faun-like creature; still less that he was a victim of misanthropy; it means only that often he found himself his own best companion, and was determined to resist those social im portunities which, if a man submit to them, leave him no time for the development of the inner life and for quiet intellectual growth." — payne. 177. orpheus. this incident occurred while orpheus was sailing home with the argonauts from capturing the golden fleece. cf. the life and death of jason by morris. 179. elsewhere related. in "resistance to civil government" (1849). 179. amok. amuck. , ^ • 180. nee bella fuerunt. quoted from the elegies of tribullus, i, x 7. 181. to fresh woods and pastures new. quoted from milton's lycidas. 181. coenobites. members of religious orders living in conrents or communities. a pun. 185. michael angelo. referring to the characteristic over-develoiaaent of the muscles in this artist's figures. 187. castalian fountain. a spring sacred to apollo and the muses. 189. divining-rod. a forked stick which was used to discover the presence of an underground vein of water. 336 walden wt. the paver. the glacier which deposited the rocks. 192. fair-haven. fairhaven pond, which is a widening of the sudbury kivcr in gdncord. 19s. invert your head. thoreau was fond of this method of viewing landscape. 198. moore of moore hall. according to the old ballad, the knight who slew the dragon of wantley. 202. icarian sea. named from the flight of icarus. cf. gayley's classic myths, p. 246. 204. kohinoor. a large diamond belonging to the british crown. 208. vadhalla. the hall of odin the abode of the norse gods. 207. benvenuto cellini (1500-1571). a celebrated italian goldsmith and sculptor. 208. thy entry is a pleasant field, etc. quoted from william ellery channing's poem, baker farm. 208. musquash. muskrat. 208. and here a poet builded, etc. this quotation is also from chan ning's baker farm. 212. landscape where, etc. the quotation is again from channing's baker farm. 213. talaria. wings. 214. except for that wildness. for a discussion of this side of thoreau's nature, read john burrough's essay, thoreau's wildness. 215. a finer way of studying ornithology. read in this connection emerson's forbearance. 216. chaucer's nun. should be chaucer's monk. the quotation is from the prologue to the canterbury tales, lines 177, 178. 216. algonquins. a number of tribes of indians that roved over the country north of the st. lawrence river. 216. philzmthropic. characterized by love of mankind. thoreau here tqcang to indicate that he does not distinguish between his love for man and his lov'e for animals. 218. kirby and spence. william kirby and william spence. authors of an introdxiction to entomology, which was published 1826 221. ved. veda. cf. note, p. 105. 221. vedant, or vedanta. the philosophy founded on the veda. 221. thseng-tseu. a follower of confucius. 221. not that food . . . defileth. an inexact quotation from matthew \v, 11. 222. mencius. latinized from meng-tse. a chinese philosopher of the third century b.c. he was a leading teacher of confucianism. 223. how happy *s he, etc. quoted from dr. john donne's epistle to sir edward herbert, since lord herbert of cherbury. z2s. a companion. william ellery channing, the poet, an intimate friend of thoreau. 226. hermit. thoreau himself. notes 337 226. bose. the farm dog. 227. con-fut-see. confucius. 228. mem. memorandum. 228. pilpajr & co. pilpay and other makers of fables. pilpay (or bidpai) is not a proper name but a title applied to a scholar and teller of tales in an indian court. 228. a wild native kind. whitefooted or deer mouse. 231. not a duellum but a bellum. not a duel but a war. 231. myrmidons. the followers of achilles. 232. achilles . . . patroclus. because of a quarrel with agamemnon, achilles sulked in his tent. when he heard that patroclus was killed, however, he hastened into the thick of the battle to avenge him. 232. austerlitz. in this battle, which was fought december 2, 1805, napoleon defeated the forces of russia and austria. 232. dresden. in this battle, which was fought august 26, 27, 1813, napoleon defeated the combined forces of russia, austria, and prussia. 233. hotel des invalides. a home for disabled soldiers, which is main tained by the government of france. 233. kirby and spence. see note, p. 218. 234. huber, francois (1750-1831). a swiss naturalist who was cele brated for his observations on the honey bee. 234. /eneeis sylvius (1405-1464). occupied the papal throne as pius ii. 234. olaus magnus (1490-1558). a swedish historian. 234. christiern the second (1481-1559). king of denmark and norway, often called christian the cruel. 234. fugitive-slave bill. was made a law as a part of clay's "com promise bill" in 1850. this bill had the support of daniel webster, to the great disgust of his friends. 235. horse. pegasus. cf. gayley's classic myths, pp. 214, 215. 240. totem. each indian tribe had its distinguishing symbolical natural objects and animals. these the tribe carved on its totem poles. 240. ceres. the roman goddess of agriculture. 240. minerva. the greeks received through this goddess the olive tree and the plow. 242. a poet to board for a fortnight. channing. cf. note, p. 226. 243. keeping-room. sitting-room. 245. parlaver. flattery, deception. 246. unio fluviatilis. a variety of fresh-water clam. 24i9. vulcan. the god of fire, especially of terrestrial fire, cf. gayley's classic myths, p. 24-26, 249. terminus. the god of boundaries. cf. gayley's classic myths, p. 89. 250. gilpin, william (1724-1804), an english clergyman who wrote ex tensively on the natural scenery of england, 250. vert"woods, lawns," etc, 250. michaux, andre (1746-1802). a french botanist who traveled in america and wrote a work on forest trees of the united states. 338 walden 251. goody blake and harry gill. the reference is to the characters of wordsworth's poem of the same name. 251. jump it. hammer out the blade to a sharper edge. 252. light-winged smoke. this is one of thoreau's best poems. it was first published in the dial for april, 1843. 254. never, bright flame. quoted from ellen ii. hooper's poem. the wood-fire. 257. scipio africanus (237-183 b.c.). one ot rome's greatest generals. after his defeat of hannibal, the surname africanus was bestowed upon him by the roman people. 258. gond.bert. a long, tedious, epic poem, published in 1651. 258. an uncle who goes to sleep shaving. see description in chan ning's thoreau the poet-naturalist, pp. 22, 23. 258. chsdmers' collection. an enlarged edition of johnson's collection of the english poets, with some additional lives, 21 vols., published in 1810. thoreau mastered this collection of poetry while in college. 258. nervii. the warlike inhabitants of ancient belgic gaul conquered by caesar. 261. bowl broken at the fountain. an allusion to ecclesiastes, xii, 6. 261. reynard. the fox; the hero of the beast epics. 261. fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute. quoted from milton's paradise lost, bk. ii, line 560. 265. woodchopper. alek therien. cf. note, p. 120. 265. lon._ -headed farmer. edmond hosmer of concord, a good friend of both thoreau and emerson. a descendant of one of the oldest families of concord. 265. crack. a cozy, comfortable chat. 265. tried our teeth on many a nut. tried to find a solution for some of the unsolved problems of the world. 265. a poet. the reference is still to channing. 266. last of the philosophers. amos bronson alcott. see note, p. 60. 267. ingenuus. latin, ' .e-born, candid, ingenuous. 267. pumpkin pine. used in maine to designate a certain quality of white pine which is clear and soft and destitute of resin. 267. flocks. of wool. 267. the old settler. dame nature. 268. one other. ralph waldo emerson. 268. the visitor who never comes. a vague, mystical, ideal person for whom thoreau was ev r senrching. 268. vishnu purana. the best known of the later writings of the hindoos. an illuminating manual of sectarian brahmanism. 269. moose-yard. when the snow is deep the moose come together in herds, and trample the snow down so that they may the easier feed. 270. lingua vernacula. the language of the common people. 276. alarming the citadel. an allusion to the cackling of the geese, when the gauls captured rome in 390 b.c. notes 339 274. actseon. an allusion to the greek myth of how a hunter sur prised diana at her bath, and of how he was changed into a stag by the injured goddess, and pursued and killed by his own hounds. 276. wast (waste) book. day book. the book was used by ephraim jones during the year 1742. thoreau describes at length in his journal many of the quaint entries which he found in this day book. cf. journal, vol. vi., pp. 77-80, 94-96. 276. 0-2-3. the figures indicate the price paid in pounds, shillings, pence. 278. lepus, levipes. a fanciful etymology. 279. nature puts no question. cf. matthew arnold's dover beach. 279. marmots. woodchucks. 281. trumpeted. the fish vender commonly blew a horn to call the attention of his customers to his approach. 282. two such bottomless ponds. white pond and tratt's pond. 282. a fifty-six. a fifty-six pound weight. the half of the olden "hundredweight." 283. william gilpin. see note, p. 250. 283. so high as heaved, etc. quoted from milton's paradise lost, bk. vii, 288-290. 289. hyperborean. far northern. 289. new england farmer. the new england farmer and gardener's journal, founded in 1821. 289. the cultivator. see note, p. 99. 289. sow a crop of winter rye. a little far fetched. thoreau knew that winter rye was planted in the fall of the year. 290. tartarus. the lowest of the underworlds wherein were held the fallen titans. cf. gayley's classic myths, pp. 5, 6. 290. cambridge. fifteen miles east of walden pond, 291. valhalla. see note, p. 206. 291. estivate. pass the summer. 291. fresh pond. situated in the outskirts of cambridge. 292. bhagvat geeta. see note, p. 76. 292. brahma and vishnu and indra. three important gods of hinduism. 292. atlantis. a mythical, fortunate island of the blessed. see plato's timaeus. cf. gayley's classic myths, p. 52. 293. hesperides. a mythical island in the far west where were guarded the golden apples. cf. gayley's classic myths, p. 57. 293. the periplus of hanno. his voyage along the west coast of africa. cf. note, p. 43. 293. ternate and tidore. islands of the melanesian archipelago. 296. stunned by a blow on it. the reference is to the common practice of stunning fish by striking the ice a hard blow immediately above them. 298. methuselah. lived to be nine hundred and sixty-nine years old. cf. genesis, v. 27. 300. lobe. this passage is characteristic of thoreau. he is ever fond of speculating as to the origin of words. 340 walden 302. chatnpolhon, jean francois. in 1822 by means of the rosetta stone, he discovered the key to the egyptian hieroglyphics. 303. thor, in scandinavian mythology, thor is the god of thunder. our thursday is named for this god. 304. et primitus orbitur, etc. "and for the first time the grass springs up, called forth by the early rains." the quotation is from varro. return rusticarum, 2, 2, 14. 305. leuciscus. dace. 306. i mean he; i mean the twig. the individual robin; the particn lar twig. 306. turdus migratorius. the american robin. now classified as planesticus migratorius. 306. first spring night in the woods. march 26, 1846. 307. eurus ad auroram. the quotation is from ovid's metamorphoses. bk. i, 61, 62, 78-81. 308. while such a sun, etc. the quotation is from isaac watts's hymn 88, book i, in hymns and spiritual songs. "and while the lamp holds out to burn. the vilest sinner may return." 308. entered into the joy of his lord. the quotation is from matthew xxv, 21, 23. 309. the golden age, etc. translated from ovid's metamorphoses. bk. i, 89-96, 107, 108. 309. sticks which boys play with their fingers. clappers or "bones." 309. merlin. in falconry, the sparrow-hawk. the bird which thoreau is describing is the marsh hawk, thoreau said that the sight of this bird in the concord meadows was of more interest to him than the entry of the allies into paris. 310. cupreous. copper-colored. 310. o death, where is thy sting? etc. the quotation is from 1 corinthians, xv, 55. 310. we need the tonic of wildness. see note, p. 82. 312. calidasa's drama of sacontala. an ancient sanskrit play. 313. terra del fuego. literally, land of fire. so named by the dis coverer because he sighted indian fires on the coast. 313. picking oakum. preparing old rope ends for use in calking the seams of vessels. a good description of this work is found in dana's two years before the mast, chap. iii. 313. only great-circle sailing. we skim but the surface of things. ■j14. franklin, sir john (1786-1847). discoverer of the northwest pas sage. he was lost in the arctic ocean. before definite news of his fate had been received, as many as fifteen expeditions were sent out in search of him. 314. grinnell, henry (1800-1874). an american merchant who fitted out two diflferent relief expeditions to search for franklin. notes 341 314. mungo park, a scottish explorer who lost his life in 1806 whik discoveriijg the source of the niger river. 314. lewis and clark made an exploring expedition through thr northwest to the mouth of the columbia river in 1804-1806. 314. frobisher, sir martin. an english explorer who tried to k>cati the northwest passage in 1576. 314. south-sea exploring expedition. an expedition fitted out by tht united states government in 1838. during the four years that followed, this expedition explored the pacific ocean and its islands. 315. erret, et extremes, etc. the quotation is from claudian's, on c« old man of verona. 315. symmes* hole. this hole was alleged by symmes to be found at the north pole. it was supposed to open into the concentric spheres of which the earth was thought to be composed. 315. explore thyself. "know thyself." this is an old greek maxim. it has been the battle cry of humanism ever since the renaissance. see babbitt's literature and the american college, chap. i. 315. mirabeau, gabriel riquetti (1749-1791). the greatest orator of the period of the french revolution. 316. my experiment. see notes, pp. 83 and 100. 317. bright. a common name for an ox. 317. extra-vagant. literally, "wandering beyond." 317. translated. literally, "carried across." 318. kabir. a hindoo religious reformer. he lived at benares between 1488 and 1512, and attempted to construct a creed that would unite the hindoos and the mussulmans. 319. kalpa. a day of brahma, equal to 4,320,000,000 of our years. 319. brahma had awoke and slumbered. many kalpas had passed. 321. creation widens. the quotation is from blanco white's sonnet, "night and death." 321. crcesus. a king of lydia in the sixth century b.c. he was so wealthy that his name has passed into proverb. 321. in the repose ... a confused tintinnabulum. in this connection, one should remember that thoreau also wrote: "i would not run round the corner to see the world blow up." however, when a powder-mill in the next town did blow up, he heard it, ran downstairs, jumped into a wagon, and drove post-haste to the scene of the disaster. 322. mameluke bey. the reference is to the single bey or officer of the warlike mamelukes who escaped death by forcing his horse to leap the parapet when mohamet ah massacred his comrades. the event occurred at cairo, egypt, in 1811, 323. china pride. thoreau means to say that mankind in general is as self-satisfied and as unprogressive t.s are the chinese. 325. john or jonathan. john bull or brother jonathan; the english or the american people. library of congress 016 225 937 4 liptili class ./^73. copight n" copntlgiit deposit. a week on the concord and merrimack rivers by henry d. thoreau with an introduction by nathan h. dole new york thomas y. crowell & co. publishers c5t5^ 2g069 jul ^3 mo 1 top , ••'• "-"try i h 3c^/f^oi ..0.. ylz.^k sb>"' "•^r^ copy., j d( -e-'fid <to , oroi.^ dtvisra, 1 aug 8 1900 73352 u-44u-i copyright, 1900, by thomas y. crowell & co. where'er thou saipst who sailed with me though now thou dimbest loftier mounts, and fairer rivers dost ascend, be thou my muse, my brother—. i am bound, i am bound, for a distant shore, by a lonely isle, by a far azore, there it is, there it is, the treasure i seek. on the barren sands of a desolate creek. i sailed up a river with a pleasant wind, new lands, new people, and new thoughts to find ; many fair reaches and headlands appeared, and many dangers were there to be feared ; but when i remember where i have been, and the fair landscapes that i have seen. thou seemest the only permanent shore. the cape never rounded, nor wandered o'er. introduction. most of us live as unconscious of the animated world about us as we are of the cloud of unseen wit nesses by which we are said to be surrounded. we turn a deaf ear to all but the most obvious songs ; our eyes gaze into the haunts of the birds and we see only sparrows and robins. we go our way and let our humble brothers go theirs. what we know of " animated nature " we take on faith from gold smith and those of his school. as browning says : — " a fiower is just a flower : man, bird, beast are but beast, bird, many we have learned in the last hundred years to ap preciate the picturesque. search through the litera ture of greece and rome and we shall find few references to the beauties of mountain and sea. the ancients had only a limited spectrum and even the nightingale did not inspire their flights of song. chau cer and milton and goldsmith went to italy, but the sight of the alps did not rouse one of them to break forth into such a hymn as coleridge, with a little help from a german master, sung to the dawn in the valley of chamounix. brunetto latini personifies nature as a gracious woman of colossal stature gathering into her arms viii intr od uc tion. all the creatures that live, but in all his long poem there is not another gleam of picturesqueness. his greater pupil, dante, introduced passages of radiant beauty into the divine co7nedy, but the test of their picturesqueness in our modern sense of the word would be to try to paint them. the nature of mil ton was as formal as the closely trimmed hedges or the cropped trees which he must have seen on the continent. pope's famous grotto was a type of the nature which he loved. this larger aspect of nature is, as i have said, modern ; but the microscopic study of every phase of life in field, forest, and stream has its roots in classic literature. it is well worth one's while to take theokritos or vergil and see how the homely details of country life there depicted antici pate the school of writers of which thoreau is such a conspicuous example. hear theokritos : — " t^ere we reclined on deep beds of fragrant len tisk, lowly strown, and rejoicing we lay in new-stript leaves of the vine. and high above our heads waved many a poplar, many an elm tree, while close at hand the sacred water from the nymphs' own cave welled forth with murmur musical. on shadowy boughs the burnt cicalas kept their chattering toil ; far off the little owls cried in the thick corn brake, the larks and finches were singing, the ringdove moaned, the yellow bees were flitting about the springs. all breathed the scent of the opulent summer, of the season of fruits ; pears at our feet and apples by our sides were rolling plentiful ; the tender branches with wild plums laden were earthward bowed, and the intr od uc tion. ix four-year-old pitch seal was loosened from the mouth of the wine-jars." and vergil : — " here among familiar rivers and these sacred founts, shalt thou take the shadowy coolness. on this side, a hedge along the neighbori7ig cross-road. where hyblcean bees ever feed on the flower of the willow. often with gentle susurrus to fall asleep shall persuade thee. yonder betieath the high rock, the pruner shall sing to the breezes ; nor meanwhile shall thy heart's delight, the hoarse wood pig eons. nor the turtledove, cease to mourn from aerial elm trees." there are dozens of passages in thoreau which sound as if they were a prose paraphrase of classic idyls — at least six such in the first twenty pages of the present book. the roots of a thing are not the flower ; and the modern development, and particularly the develop ment of nature-literature in prose in this century, is very interesting. perhaps we may regard white of selborne as the first who in modern times brought to the study of nature carefully adjusted powers of obser vation. but during the past half-century nature has been most persistently wooed and won. there comes into literature something more than a mere detailed description and infinitesimal analysis: it is a deep, sympathetic appreciation of beauty. says emerson : — ' ' nature beats in perfect tune and romtds with rime her every rune. whether she work in land or sea or hide underground her alchemy. x intr od uction. " thou canst not wave thy staff in air or dip thy paddle in the lake. but it carves the bow of beauty there. and the ripples in rimes the oar for sake y without a touch of pantheism such cult of nature would be impossible. the finding of something beyond nature makes it worth while to study so minutely the infinite variety of leaf and flower and bird-note. it is better than the worship of " the great god pan " which one finds in the poems of so many of the poets of the present day. if that filthy and dis reputable old character should really come at their call, they, especially the woman poets, would find his hoofs and horns as unpleasant as they seemed to the hamadryads of old. bnt the affectation after all stands for something and covers a certain genuine feeling. it is sometimes a little morbid in young poets, but the young poets have a passionate delight in recondite phenomena whether they understand them or not, and there is a hearty welcome for the interpret ers who have gone straight to nature herself, have lived her life, and practised in her language. these interpreters have nearly all of them a strong flavor of wildness ; they are, if not barbarians, charac terized by some of the better qualities of barbarism. thoreau says, ^' there is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness '' ; and fiirther on in the same sunday on the concord which you will shortly read, he boasts of his paganism : *• i am not sure but i should betake myself in extremities to the liberal divinities of greece, rather than to my introduction. xi country's god. ... in my pantheon, pan still reigns in his pristine glory, with his ruddy face, his flowing beard, and his shaggy body, his pipe and his crook, his nymph echo, and his chosen daughter lambe ; the great pan is not dead, as was rumored. perhaps of all the gods of new england and of an cient greece, i am most constant at his shrine." of thoreau, it has been said that he lived and died to transfuse external nature into human words. his personality was acutely developed. now indi viduality is well worth cultivating, but not at the expense of symmetry. in this respect, apollo is a god more worthy of worship than the horn-hoofed pan with his rural pipes. a lopsided genius may do great things ; we forgive him for his lopsided ness and put up with his idiosyncrasies. socrates was not even picturesque, and did not clean his fingernails ; he would have done just as much good and had a far wider personal influence, and probably lived several years longer unmolested, and possibly made xantippe a very diff"erent wife and woman, if he had not allowed his eccentricities to get such a hold upon him. in thoreau also we have to distinguish between the man and the writer. his critics found it hard to do so. many of them have been unduly severe upon him because they did not really understand him and never knew him. robert louis stevenson says of him: — " thoreau's thin, penetrating, big-nosed face, even in a bad woodcut, conveys some hint of the limitations of his mind and character. with his almost acid xu intr od uc tion. sharpness of insight, with his almost animal dexterity in act, there went none of that large unconscious ge niality of the world's heroes. he was not easy, not ample, not urbane, not even kind ; his enjoyment was hardly smiling, or the smile was not broad enough to be convincing ; he had no waste lands nor kitchen midden in his nature, but was all improved and sharp ened to a point." so he goes on till he comes to the conclusion — "thoreau was a skulker! " emerson, who was his townsman, and house-mate, judged him just as unfairly. james russell lowell ridiculed him, declaring — " the tub of diogenes had a sounder bottom! " john burroughs says of him, " he was a man devoid of compassion, devoid of sympathy, devoid of patriotism, as these words are usually under stood — he was also destitute of pity and love (in the human sense) and of many other traits that are thought to be both human and divine." a recent history of american literature says of him, "not withstanding his life among large things and the breadth of his writing, his personal character was not large." the late francis h. underwood declared that his experiment as a recluse " was the experiment of a selfish misanthrope, the freak of a literary bar barian." almost all accounts of thoreau assert that he was so full of love for the universe that he had no room for love for his fellow-men. and yet there is very good reason to believe that this disagreeable notion of thoreau is quite unjust. in reading the works of those that lived long ago, we have a decided advantage over their contemporaries. introduction. xiii we can dissociate their works from their lives. we forget the dissoluteness of burns and byron ; we care not if shakespeare was a poacher. this fact is a strong proof that as a general thing too much atten tion is paid to the personal element in the study of literature. perhaps it is a little harder in the case of thoreau because he boasts of being an egotist. he says in walden : " in most books the / or first person is omitted ; in this it will be retained ; that in respect to egotism is the main difference. we do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. i should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom i knew as well."" thus he paints himself in his books, and out of these various pictures we can make a composite which will approximate to the truth. and yet we are far enough away from him to study his work on its own merits, and to apply our knowledge of his life only as far as it instructs or elucidates. he was of mixed lineage — french and scotch. his great-grandparents were well-to-do citizens of st. helier in the island of jersey. a younger son came to new england in 1773, and married a scotswoman, jane burns. their son, john thoreau, jr., having failed in mercantile business and lost the property in herited from his father, became a pencil-maker and acquired a competence and distinction. he lived in concord, massachusetts. his wife was cynthia dun bar, daughter of a keene (new hampshire) gentle man — a witty, intellectual woman, " fond of dress and xiv intr od uc tion. fond of gossip, a great talker.'' once, when some one remarked a resemblance between thoreau's style and emerson's, she replied, " yes, mr. emerson's style is like my son's." henry david was the third child of these parents, and was born july 12, 181 7, in a house on the so called virginia road near the bedford levels. as a child he was afraid of thunder-showers : yet when told, at the age of three, that, like the godly men of whom he read in his religious exercise books, he too would have to die, was not alarmed, but declared that he did not want to go to heaven because he could not carry his sled to heaven with him. he was a sturdily honest lad ; when charged with taking a knife he contented himself with saying, " i did not take it " ; and when the real culprit was found and he was asked why he did not sooner explain, he still repeated laconically, " i did not take it." the boys called him " the judge." at sixteen he was sent to harvard, having been prepared at the concord academy. during his vaca tions he taught school. through emerson's kindly offices he received assistance from the college funds, but his dislike of routine kept him from winning dis tinction. he refused to take his degree, on the ground that five dollars was too high a price to pay for it. the rev. john weiss, who was his room-mate, thus pictured him : — " he was cold and unimpressionable. the touch of his hand was moist and indifferent. . . . revery hung always about him, and not so loosely as the odd introduction. xv garments which the pious household care furnished. thought had not yet awakened his countenance ; it was serene and ratlier dull, rather plodding. the lips were not yet firm, there was almost a look of smug satisfaction lurking round their corners. it is plain now that he was preparing to hold his future views with great setness and personal appreciation of their importance. the nose was prominent, but its curve fell forward without firmness on the upper lip, and we remember him as looking very much like some egyptian sculptures of faces — large-featured, but brooding, immobile, fixed in a mystic egoism." one of his friends remarked of him : " i love henry, but i cannot like him. ... as for taking his arm, i should as soon think of taking the arm of an elm tree." he made few friends. neither his classmates nor his teachers regarded him as likely to attain distinction. in a letter written a few years after graduation he says that what he learned in col lege was chiefly to express himself. speaking of his college course in navigation, he exclaimed, " why, if i had taken one turn down the harbor, i should have known more about it." even then he had resolved to " read no book, take no walk, undertake no enterprise, but such as he could endure to give an account of to himself and live thus deliberately for the most part." this giv ing an account to himself of his life gave rise to his diaries, which with walden and the present book are his literary legacy to posterity. after graduation he taught school for a year or two ; he was engaged with xvi intr od uc rion. his brother in keeping the concord academy. like alcott he determined not to flog his pupils, but such leniency did not suit the committee, — they insisted that mr. thoreau should use the ferule. he put this stringency into immediate practice, and feruled six pupils after school one day, — one of them was the maid-servant in his own house. what the effect on their domestic affairs was is not on record, but he shortly afterwards resigned his position. he also withdrew from dr. ripley's congregation ; in this respect he was the true type of the anarchist. he refused to pay the church tax on the ground that he did not see why the schoolmaster should support the priest any more than the priest should support the schoolmaster; he avoided the penalty by signing a statement that he was not a member of the church. he resolved to reduce his necessities to the lowest terms ; his wants were few, his means were slender. he had a natural aptitude for all kinds of mechanical work. for a time he devoted himself to the ancestral work of making lead-pencils, and succeeded in pro ducing a better kind than was in the market. he obtained certificates from dealers and artists that his work was equal to that of the best london makers. there he stopped : " i shall never make another pencil," said he; "why should i? i would not do again what i have done once." yet the exigencies of life compelled him to break that rash vow; he had to do something to earn his daily bread. he preferred the outdoor occupation of surveying; he delighted in reckoning measures and distances, the intr on uc tion. xvii size of trees, the depths and surfaces of ponds and rivers ; so it was natural for him to take up the art of mensuration for his neighbors : his accuracy and skill became proverbial, he had all the work he needed. he himself put it in his quaint characteristic way, " to tell the truth, i saw an advertisement for able bodied seamen, when i was a boy sauntering in my native port, and as soon as i came of age i embarked." he recapitulates his favorite enterprises: "to anticipate not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but if possible nature herself. how many mornings. summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have i been about mine. no doubt many of my townspeople have met me returning from this enterprise — farmers starting for boston in the twilight, or wood-choppers going to their work. it is true i never assisted the sun mate rially in his rising, but doubt not it was of the last importance only to be present at it. . . . so many autumn and winter days spent outside the town, trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express. i well-nigh sunk all my capital in it, and lost my own breath into the bargain, running in the face of it. if it had concerned either of the political parties, depend upon it, it would have ap peared in the gazette with the earliest intelligence. at other times watching from the observatory of some cliff or tree, to telegraph any new arrival, or waiting at evening on the hill-top for the sky to fall, that i might catch something, though i never caught much, and that, manna-wise, would resolve again in the x vlli intr od uc tion. sun. for a long time i was a reporter to a journal of no great circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my communications, and as is too common with writers i got only my labors for my pains. however, in this case my pains were their own reward." this "journal," for which he was the reporter, was his diary, which he kept after the manner of emer son, jotting down in it briefly or voluminously his observations and comments, and from which he drew as from a reservoir when he wished to write an essay or a book. his journals comprised thirty large vol umes, and extend from 1837 till 1862. his literary executor, the late h. g. o. blake, made up from these journals a perfect calendar of the year, giving minute observations on the changing seasons and all the graces thereof. " nothing," says thoreau, " can shock a brave man but dulness." he was never dull to himself. he had his duties to perform, and this minute chronicling of his observations was no small part of them. " for many years," he says, " i was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms, and did my duty faith fully ; surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths, and all across-lot routes, keeping them open and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility. ... i have watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry, and the nettle tree, the red pine and the black ash, the white grape, and the yellow violet, which might have else perished in dry seasons. . . , in intr od uc tion. xix short," he concludes, " i went on thus for a long time, i may say it without boasting, faithfully minding my business, till it became more and more evident that my townsmen would not after all admit me into the list of town officers, nor make my place a sinecure with a moderate allowance." he expressed the same idea in his rugged, in artistic rhymes: — "great god, i ask thee for no meaner pelf than that 1 7?iay not disappoint myself, that in my action i may soar as high as i cannot discertt with this clear eye. "and next in value, which thy kindness lends. that i may greatly disappoint my friends : howe'er they think or hope that it may be they may not dream how thou 'st disfinguisht rne." they did not dream it until long after he was dead, when to their surprise this man, whom some of them at least thought to be an idler, was found to be more and more the glory of the town. thoreau was rewarded by nature as few men have been rewarded in their fealty. he had amazingly quick senses and almost miraculous power of insight ; he could make his way through the darkest * woods at darkest night, where other men would have been lost at high noon. his keenness of scent was like a dog's. he needed no watch or almanac: the time of day he could tell by his eye ; the time of the year he could tell to a day by the curious clock of the changing flowers. he could measure distances and xx intr od uction. gauge depths without gunter's line or plummet. he could infallibly grasp a dozen lead-pencils out of a mixed heap. he could measure bulk by silent com putation. moreover, mother nature taught her other children — the birds and animals — to have no fear of their human brother. he was trained in the school of hiawatha. squirrels would leap down from forest trees to his shoulder, and nestle in his pocket. he would visit the festive woodchuck in her holes ; she regarded it as no insult if he reached in his arm and pulled her out by the tail. more than once, when he was out on the concord river, he was seen to put his hand down among the lily-pads and lift out a glittering fish ; he knew where they nested, and they loved to take their little foretaste of im mortality from his gentle hand. he knew the haunts of all the wild creatures of the woods and fields. everything came ready to his wish. once, when out walking, a friend asked him where indian arrow heads could be found. " everywhere," was his reply, and, stooping down, picked one up. when he sprained his ankle in tuckerman's ravine he found, all ready for application, the leaves of the arnica 7nollis. " it was a pleasure to walk with him," said emerson. " he knew the country like a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own. he knew every track in the snow or on the ground, and what creature had taken this path before him. . . . under his arm he carried an old intr od uc tion, xxi music-book in which to press plants ; in his pocket, his diary and pencil, a spy-glass for birds, micro scopes, jack-knife, and twine. he wore a straw hat, stout shoes, strong gray trowsers to brave scrub oaks and smilax and to climb a tree for a hawk or squirrel's nest. he waded into a pool for the water plants, and his strong legs were no insignificant part of his equipment." he was sometimes as brusque as a hedgehog. he would not throw away his walks on uncongenial per sons, and he did not hesitate to express himself frankly, like the weather. some one sent him an invitation : " such are my engagements to myself that i dare not promise," was his reply. in the autumn of 1839 ^^ ^^^ ^^-^ brother made an excursion down the sluggish concord, to the merri mac, and up the merrimac to its source in the white mountains — two days on the one and four days on the other. almost every incident, almost every phe nomenon, was chronicled and made to form the intro duction to an essay. now he tells scientifically of the habits of the genera of the finny tribes inhabiting the stream ; the sight of a church leads him to a soliloquy on rituals ; transcendental reveries are interrupted by rugged and unrhythmical and carelessly constructed jingles of verse. such a style can be only superficially compared to emerson's. listen to emerson : — " whenever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, whenever day and night meet in twilight, whenever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries. xxu intr od uc tion. wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger and awe and love, there is beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldst walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condi tion inopportune or ignoble." there will be found in thoreau thoughts not unlike that, but where in emerson a bird is a bird, and a beast a beast, thoreau tickets the bird with its scien tific name and relates its habits and distinguishes it from all other birds. emerson is vaguely general ; thoreau accurate and particular. in that respect they are a world apart, and the resemblance between them is only accidental and superficial : only alike are they in their attempts at poetic efflatus, and in those emer son, in spite of his faulty rhythms, is vastly superior to thoreau, just as thoreau, in all that concerns na ture, is far more entertaining than emerson because he is the reporter for her. both of them quote hafiz and the bagvhat gita and all poets with transcendental bias . the boat in which the thoreau brothers made their famous inland voyage afterwards became hawthorne's, and is mentioned in the mosses from an old majise, and the fruit of the excursion was thoreau's first volume. he got it ready for the press while liv ing in his hut by walden pond. parts of it had already appeared in the dial, but when he was asked to offer a memoir of his observations to the natural history society, he exclaimed : " why should i ? to detach the description from its connection in my mind would make it no longer true or valuable to me, and they do not wish what belongs with it." introduction. xxlll the manuscript went from publisher to publisher, and he finally borrowed the money necessary to bring it out. it was issued in the summer of 1849, by james munroe and company. though it received some complimentary notices, it did not pay its expenses, and thoreau had to earn money by surveying in order to make good the loss. four years after it was published thoreau was asked to remove the unsold copies from the cellar of the publishing house. seventy-five had been given away ; 215 had been sold, and the rest were sent to thoreau by express. he confided to his diary, october 28, 1853, that "he had a library of nearly 900 volumes, over 700 of which he had written himself." it did not affect his spirits ; he took the public in difference philosophically ; he himself saw the good that was in it — its outdoor, or, as he calls it, " hypaethral," character. the world, which stones its living prophets and lets its poets beg their bread, has grown aware of its charm. now everything from his pen is treas ured, as the legacy of a prophet and a poet. he did not live to see his growing popularity. in 1841 he went to live with emerson — apollo serving admetus. in 1844 he borrowed an axe of alcott and built his famous little hut by walden pond, and underwent the experiences detailed in the book that bears that name — the only other that was published during his lifetime. that same year he refused to pay his poll tax, and was lodged in jail. "henry, why are you here?" asked emerson, xxiv introduction. " why are you not here ? " was the yankee answer of the young anarchist. in 1846 he made his excursion to the maine woods and explored the region around mt. ktaadn. he also made an excursion to cape cod, and the account of that has become classic. he was interested in the abolition movement, and it was whispered that the walden hut was a station of the underground rail way. when john brown was tried and executed, thoreau called his townspeople together and gave them a ringing address. his cry for liberty placed him in the vanguard of the liberals. at the outbreak of the war of the rebellion his health had begun to fail. in 1 861 he went to minnesota, but the climate there did not work the hoped-for benefit. after a long illness, borne with patience, he died on may 6, 1862. no one can read the concord and merrimack rivers without becoming fond of thoreau ; the mixture of humor, of sound common sense, of wide information, of broad reading, of deep thought, of liberal theology, and above all of genuine love of nature, all couched in a singularly clear and pellucid style — not faultless, but simple and definite — makes it a perpetual delight, not necessarily for consecutive reading, but for literary browsing. one may pick it up anywhere and find it full of suggestion and charm. it has become one of the classics of out-of-door literature. nathan haskell dole. concord river. ' beneath low hills, in the broad interval through which at will our indian rivulet winds mindful still of sannup and of squaw, whose pipe and arrow oft the plough unburies, here, in pine houses, built of new-fallen trees, supplanters of the tribe, the farmers dwell." emerson. the musketaquid, or grass-ground river, though probably as old as the nile or euphrates, did not begin to have a place in civilized history, until the fame of its grassy meadows and its fish attracted settlers out of england in 1635, when it received the other but kindred name of concord from the first plantation on its banks, which appears to have been commenced in a spirit of peace and harmony. it will be grass ground river as long as grass grows and water runs here ; it will be concord river only while men lead peaceable lives on its banks. to an extinct race it was grass-ground, where they hunted and fished, and it is still perennial grass-ground to concord farmers, who own the great meadows, and get the hay from year to year. " one branch of it," according to the historian of concord, for i love to quote so good authority, "rises in the south part of hopkinton, and another from a pond and a large cedar swamp in west borough," and flowing between hopkinton and south borough, through framingham, and between sudbury 2 a week on the concord river. and wayland, where it is sometimes called sudbury river, it enters concord at the south part of the town, and after receiving the north or assabeth river, which has its source a little further to the north and west, goes out at the north-east angle, and flowing between bedford and carlisle, and through billerica, empties into the merrimack at lowell. in concord it is, in summer, from four to fifteen feet deep, and from one hundred to three hundred feet wide, but in the spring freshets, when it overflows its banks, it is in some places nearly a mile wide. between sudbury and wayland the meadows acquire their greatest breadth, and when covered with water, they form a handsome chain of shallow vernal lakes, resorted to by numer ous gulls and ducks. just above sherman's bridge, between these towns, is the largest expanse, and when the wind blows freshly in a raw march day, heaving up the surface into dark and sober billows or regular swells, skirted as it is in the distance with alder swamps and smoke-like maples, it looks like a smaller lake huron, and is very pleasant and exciting for a lands man to row or sail over. the farm-houses along the sudbury shore, which rises gently to a considerable height, command fine water prospects at this season. the shore is more flat on the wayland side, and this town is the greatest loser by the flood. its farmers tell me that thousands of acres are flooded now, since the dams have been erected, where they remember to have seen the white honeysuckle or clover growing once, and they could go dry with shoes only in sum mer. now there is nothing but blue-joint and sedge and cut-grass there, standing in water all the year round. for a long time, they made the most of the driest season to get their hay, working sometimes concord river. 3 till nine o'clock at night, sedulously paring with their scythes in the twilight round the hummocks left by the ice ; but now it is not worth the getting, when they can come at it, and they look sadly round to their wood-lots and upland as a last resource. it is worth the while to make a voyage up this stream, if you go no farther than sudbury, only to see how much country there is in the rear of us ; great hills, and a hundred brooks, and farm-houses, and barns, and hay-stacks, you never saw before, and men everywhere, sudbury, that is soiithboroiigh men, and wayland, and nine-acre-corner men, and bound rock, where four towns bound on a rock in the river, lincoln, wayland, sudbury, concord. many waves are there agitated by the wind, keeping nature fresh, the spray blowing in your face, reeds and rushes waving; ducks by the hundred, all uneasy in the surf, in the raw wind, just ready to rise, and now going off with a clatter and a whistling, like riggers straight for labrador, flying against the stiff gale with reefed wings, or else circling round first, with all their paddles briskly moving, just over the surf, to reconnoitre you before they leave these parts ; gulls wheeling overhead, muskrats swimming for dear life, wet and cold, with no fire to warm them by that you know of; their labored homes rising here and there like hay-stacks ; and countless mice and moles and winged titmice along the sunny, windy shore ; cranberries tossed on the waves and heaving up on the beach, their little red skiffs beating about among the alders ; — such healthy natural tumult as proves the last day is not yet at hand. and there stand all around the alders, and birches, and oaks, and maples full of glee and sap, holding in their buds until the 4 a week on the concord river. waters subside. you shall perhaps run aground on. cranberry island, only some spires of last year's pipegrass above water, to show where the danger is, and get as good a freezing there as anywhere on the north-west coast. i never voyaged so far in all my life. you shall see men you never heard of before, whose names you don't know, going away down through the meadows with long ducking guns, with water-tight boots, wading through the fowl-meadow grass, on bleak, wintry, distant shores, with guns at half cock, and they shall see teal, blue-winged, green-winged, shelldrakes, whistlers, black ducks, ospreys, and many other wild and noble sights before night, such as they who sit in parlors never dream of. you shall see rude and sturdy, experienced and wise men, keeping their castles, or teaming up their summer's wood, or chop ping alone in the woods, men fuller of talk and rare adventure in the sun and wind and rain, than a chest nut is of meat ; who were out not only in '75 and 1812, but have been out every day of their lives ; greater men than homer, or chaucer, or shakspeare, only they never got time to say so ; they never took to the way of writing. look at their fields, and imag ine what they might write, if ever they should put pen to paper. or what have they not written on the face of the earth already, clearing, and burning, and scratching, and harrowing, and plowing, and subsoil ing, in and in, and out and out, and over and over, again and again, erasing what they had already writ ten for want of parchment. as yesterday and the historical ages are past, as the work of to-day is present, so some flitting perspectives, and demi-experiences of the life that is in nature are in time veritably future, or rather outside to time, concord river. 5 perennial, young, divine, in the wind and rain which never die. the respectable folks, — where dwell they ? they whisper in the oaks, and they sigh in the hay ; summer and winter, night and day, out on the meadow, there dwell they. they never die, nor snivel, nor cry, nor ask our pity with a wet eye. a sound estate they ever mend, to every asker readily lend ; to the ocean wealth. to the meadow health, to time his length. to the rocks strength, to the stars light, to the weary night, to the busy day, to the idle play ; and so their good cheer never ends, for all are their debtors, and all their friends. concord river is remarkable for the gentleness of its current, which is scarcely perceptible, and some have referred to its influence the proverbial modera tion of the inhabitants of concord, as exhibited in the revolution, and on later occasions. it has been pro posed, that the town should adopt for its coat of arms a field verdant, with the concord circhng nine times round. i have read that a descent of an eighth of an inch in a mile is sufficient to produce a flow. our river has, probably, very near the smallest allowance. the story is current, at any rate, though i believe that strict history will not bear it out, that the only bridge 6 a week on the concord river. ever carried away on the main branch, within the limits of the town, was driven up stream by the wind. but wherever it makes a sudden bend it is shallower and swifter, and asserts its title to be called a river. com pared with the other tributaries of the merrimack, it appears to have been properly named musketaquid, or meadow river, by the indians. for the most part, it creeps through broad meadows, adorned with scat tered oaks,where the cranberry is found in abundance, covering the ground like a moss-bed. a row of sunken dwarf willows borders the stream on one or both sides, while at a greater distance the meadow is skirted with maples, alders, and other fluviatile trees, overrun with the grape vine, which bears fruit in its season, purple, red, white, and other grapes. still further from the stream, on the edge of the firm land, are seen the gray and white dwellings of the inhabit ants. according to the valuation of 1831, there were in concord two thousand one hundred and eleven acres, or about one-seventh of the whole territory, in meadow ; this standing next in the list after pasturage and unimproved lands, and, judging from the returns of previous years, the meadow is not reclaimed so fast as the woods are cleared. the sluggish artery of the concord meadows steals thus unobserved through the town, without a murmur or a pulse-beat, its general course from south-west to north-east, and its length about fifty miles; a huge volume of matter, ceaselessly rolling through the plains and valleys of the substantial earth, with the moccasined tread of an indian warrior, making haste from the high places of the earth to its ancient reser voir. the murmurs of many a famous river on the other side of the globe reach even to us here, as to concord river. 7 more distant dwellers on its banks ; many a poet's stream floating the helms and shields of heroes on its bosom. the xanthus or scamander is not a mere dry channel and bed of a mountain torrent, but fed by the ever-flowing springs of fame ; — " and thou simois, that as an arrowe, clere through troy rennest, aie downward to the sea ;" — and i trust that i may be allowed to associate our muddy but much abused concord river with the most famous in history. " sure there are poets which did never dream upon parnassus, nor did taste the stream of helicon ; we therefore may suppose those made not poets, but the poets those." the mississippi, the ganges, and the nile, those journeying atoms from the rocky mountains, the himmaleh, and mountains of the moon, have a kind of personal importance in the annals of the world. the heavens are not yet drained over their sources, but the mountains of the moon still send their annual tribute to the pasha without fail, as they did to the pharaohs, though he must collect the rest of his reve nue at the point of the sword. rivers must have been the guides which conducted the footsteps of the first travellers. they are the constant lure, when they flow by our doors, to distant enterprise and adventure, and, by a natural impulse, the dwellers on their banks will at length accompany their currents to the low lands of the globe, or explore at their invitation the interior of continents. they are the natural high ways of all nations, not only levelling the ground, and removing obstacles from the path of the traveller, quenching his thirst, and bearing him on their bos 8 a week on the concord river. oms, but conducting him through the most interesting scenery, the most populous portions of the globe, and where the animal and vegetable kingdoms attain their greatest perfection. i had often stood on the banks of the concord, watching the lapse of the current, an emblem of all progress, following the same law with the system, with time, and all that is made ; the weeds at the bottom gently bending down the stream, shaken by the watery wind, still planted where their seeds had sunk, but ere long to die and go down likewise ; the shining peb bles, not yet anxious to better their condition, the chips and weeds, and occasional logs and stems of trees, that floated past, fulfilling their fate, were ob jects of singular interest to me, and at last i resolved to launch myself on its bosom, and float whither it would bear me. saturday. " come, come, my lovely fair, and let us try these rural delicates." invitation to the soul. quarles, at length, on saturday, the last day of august, 1839, we two, brothers, and natives of concord, weighed anchor in this river port ; for concord, too, lies under the sun, a port of entry and departure for the bodies as well as the souls of men ; one shore at least exempted from all duties but such as an honest man will gladly discharge. a warm drizzling rain had obscured the morning, and threatened to delay our voyage, but at length the leaves and grass were dried, and it came out a mild afternoon, as serene and fresh as if nature were maturing some greater scheme of her own. after this long dripping and oozing from every pore, she began to respire again more healthily than ever. so with a vigorous shove we launched our boat from the bank, while the flags and bulrushes curtseyed a god-speed, and dropped silently down the stream. our boat, which had cost us a week's labor in the spring, was in form like a fisherman's dory, fifteen feet long by three and a half in breadth at the widest part, painted green below, with a border of blue, with reference to the two elements in which it was to spend its existence. it had been loaded the evening before 9 10 a week on the concord river. at our door, half a mile from the river, with potatoes and melons from a patch which we had cultivated, and a few utensils, and was provided with wheels in order to be rolled around falls, as well as with two sets of oars, and several slender poles for shoving in shallow places, and also two masts, one of which served for a tent-pole at night ; for a buffalo skin was to be our bed, and a tent of cotton cloth our roof. it was strongly built but heavy, and hardly of better model than usual. if rightly made, a boat would be a sort of amphibious animal, a creature of two elements, related by one half its structure to some swift and shapely fish, and by the other to some strong-winged and graceful bird. the fish shows where there should be the greatest breadth of beam and depth in the hold ; its fins direct where to set the oars, and the tail gives some hint for the form and position of the rudder. the bird shows how to rig and trim the sails, and what form to give to the prow that it may balance the boat, and divide the air and water best. these hints we had but partially obeyed. but the eyes, though they are no sailors, will never be satisfied with any model, however fashionable, which does not answer all the requisitions of art. however, as art is all of a ship but the wood, and yet the wood alone will rudely serve the purpose of a ship, so our boat being of wood gladly availed itself of the old law that the heavier shall float the lighter, and though a dull water fowl, proved a sufficient buoy for our purpose. " were it the will of heaven, an osier bough were vessel safe enough the seas to plow." some village friends stood upon a promontory lower down the stream to wave us a last farewell ; but we, sa turd a y. 1 1 having already performed these shore rites with ex cusable reserve, as befits those who are embarked on unusual enterprises, who behold but speak not, silently glided past the firm lands of concord, both peopled cape and lonely summer meadow, with steady sweeps. and yet we did unbend so far as to let our guns speak for us, when at length we had swept out of sight, and thus left the woods to ring again with their echoes ; and it may be many russet-clad children lurking in those broad meadows, with the bittern and the woodcock and the rail, though wholly concealed by brakes and hardback and meadow-sweet, heard our salute that afternoon. we were soon floating past the first regular battle ground of the revolution, resting on our oars between the still visible abutments of that " north bridge," over which in april, 1775, rolled the first faint tide of that war, which ceased not, till, as we read on the stone on our right, it "gave peace to these united states." as a concord poet has sung, — " by the rude bridge that arched the flood, their flag to april's breeze unfurled, here once the embattled farmers stood. and fired the shot heard round the world. " the foe long since in silence slept ; alike the conqueror silent sleeps ; and time the ruined bridge has swept down the dark stream which seaward creeps." our reflections had already acquired a historical remoteness from the scenes we had left, and we our selves essayed to sing. ah, 't is in vain the peaceful din that wakes the ignoble town, 12 a week on the concord river. not thus did braver spirits win a patriot's renown. there is one field beside this stream, wherein no foot does fall, but yet it beareth in my dream a richer crop than all. let me believe a dream so dear, some heart beat high that day, above the petty province here, and britain far away ; some hero of the ancient mould, some arm of knightly worth, of strength unbought, and faith unsold. honored this spot of earth ; who sought the prize his heart described, and did not ask release. whose free born valor was not bribed by prospect of a peace. the men who stood on yonder height that day are long since gone ; not the same hand directs the fight and monumental stone. ye were the grecian cities then, the romes of modern birth, where the new england husbandmen have shown a roman worth. in vain i search a foreign land, to find our bunker hill, and lexington and concord stand by no laconian rill. with such thoughts we swept gently by this now peaceful pasture ground, on waves of concord, in which was long since drowned the din of war. saturday. 1 3 but since we sailed some things have failed, and many a dream gone down the stream. here then an aged shepherd dwelt, who to his flock his substance dealt, and ruled them with a vigorous crook. by precept of the sacred book ; but he the pierless bridge passed o'er, and solitary left the shore. anon a youthful pastor came, whose crook was not unknown to fame, his lambs he viewed with gentle glance. spread o'er the country's wide expanse, and fed with " mosses from the manse." here was our hawthorne in the dale, and here the shepherd told his tale. that slight shaft had now sunk behind the hills, and we had floated round the neighboring bend, and under the new north bridge between ponkawtasset and the poplar hill, into the great meadows, which, like a broad moccasin print, have levelled a fertile and juicy place in nature. on ponkawtasset, since, with such delay, down this still stream we took our meadowy way, a poet wise has settled, whose fine ray doth faintly shine on concord's twilight day. like those first stars, whose silver beams on high, shining more brightly as the day goes by, most travellers cannot at first descry, but eyes that wont to range the evening sky. and know celestial lights, do plainly see. and gladly hail them, numbering two or three; for lore that 's deep must deeply studied be, as from deep wells men read star-poetry. 14 a week on the concord river. these stars are never pal'd, though out of sight, but hke the sun they shine forever bright ; aye, they are suns, though earth must in its flight put out its eyes that it may see their hght. who would neglect the least celestial sound. or faintest light that falls on earthly ground, if he could know it one day would be found that star in cygnus whither we are bound. and pale our sun with heavenly radiance round? gradually the village murmur subsided, and we seemed to be embarked on the placid current of our dreams, floating from past to future as silently as one awakes to fresh morning or evening thoughts. we glided noiselessly down the stream, occasionally driv ing a pickerel from the covert of the pads, or a bream from her nest, and the smaller bittern now and then sailed away on sluggish wings from some recess in the shore, or the larger lifted itself out of the long grass at our approach, and carried its precious legs away to deposit them in a place of safety. the tortoises also rapidly dropped into the water, as our boat ruffled the surface amid the willows, breaking the reflections of the trees. the banks had passed the height of their beauty, and some of the brighter flowers showed by their faded tints that the season was verging towards the afternoon of the year ; but this sombre tinge enhanced their sincerity, and in the still unabated heats they seemed like a mossy brink of some cool well. the narrow-leaved willow lay along the surface of the water in masses of light green foliage, interspersed with the large white balls of the button-bush. the rose-colored polygonum raised its head proudly above the water on either hand, and, flowering at this season and in these locali saturday. 1 5 ties, in the midst of dense fields of the white species, which skirted the sides of the stream, its little streak of red looked very rare and precious. the pure white blossoms of the arrow-head stood in the shallower parts, and a few cardinals on the margin still proudly surveyed themselves reflected in the water, though the latter, as well as the pickerel-weed, was now nearly out of blossom. the snake-head, ckelone glabra, grew close to the shore, while a kind of coreopsis, turning its brazen face to the sun, full and rank, and a tall dull red flower, eiipatorhun purpiirejun, or trumpet weed, formed the rear rank of the fluvial array. the bright blue flowers of the soap-wort gentian were sprinkled here and there in the adjacent meadows, like flowers which proserpine had dropped, and still further in the fields, or higher on the bank, were seen the vir ginian rhexia, and drooping neottia or ladies'-tresses ; while from the more distant waysides, which we occa sionally passed, and banks where the sun had lodged, was reflected a dull yellow beam from the ranks of tansy, now in its prime. in short, nature seemed to have adorned herself for our departure with a pro fusion of fringes and curls, mingled with the bright tints of flowers, reflected in the water. but we missed the white water-lily, which is the queen of river flowers, its reign being over for this season. he makes his voyage too late, perhaps, by a true water clock who delays so long. many of this species inhabit our concord water. i have passed down the river before sunrise on a summer morning between fields of lilies still shut in sleep ; and when at length the flakes of sunlight from over the bank fell on the surface of the water, whole fields of white blossoms seemed to flash open before me, as i floated along, like the unfolding 1 6 a week on the concord river. of a banner, so sensible is this flower to the influence of the sun's rays. as we were floating through the last of these famil iar meadows, we observed the large and conspicuous flowers of the hibiscus, covering the dwarf willows, and mingled with the leaves of the grape, and wished that we could inform one of our friends behind of the locality of this somewhat rare and inaccessible flower before it was too late to pluck it ; but we were just gliding out of sight of the village spire before it oc curred to us that the farmer in the adjacent meadow would go to church on the morrow, and would carry this news for us ; and so by the monday, while we should be floating on the merrimack, our friend would be reaching to pluck this blossom on the bank of the concord. after a pause at ball's hill, the st. ann's of con cord voyageurs, not to say any prayer for the success of our voyage, but to gather the few berries which were still left on the hills, hanging by very slender threads, we weighed anchor again, and were soon out of sight of our native village. the land seemed to grow fairer as we withdrew from it. far away to the south-west lay the quiet village, left alone under its elms and button-woods in mid afternoon ; and the hills, notwithstanding their blue, ethereal faces, seemed to cast a saddened eye on their old playfellows ; but, turning short to the north, we bade adieu to their familiar outlines, and addressed ourselves to new scenes and adventures. nought was familiar but the heavens, from under whose roof the voyageur never passes ; but with their countenance, and the acquaint ance we had with river and wood, we trusted to fare well under any circumstances. saturday, 1 7 from this point, the river runs perfectly straight for a mile or more to carlisle bridge, which consfsts of twenty wooden piers, and when we looked back over it, its surface was reduced to a line's breadth, and appeared like a cobweb gleaming in the sun! here and there might be seen a pole sticking up, to mark the place where some fisherman had enjoyed unusual luck, and in return had consecrated his rod to the deities who preside over these shallows. it was full twice as broad as before, deep and tranquil, with a muddy bottom, and bordered with willows' beyond which spread broad lagoons covered with pads, bulrushes, and flags. late in the afternoon we passed a man on the shore fishing with a long birch pole, its silvery bark left on, and a dog at his side, rowing so near as to agitate his cork with our oars, and drive away luck for a sea son ; and when we had rowed a mile as straight as an arrow, with our faces turned towards him, and the bubbles in our wake still visible on the tranquil sur face, there stood the fisher still with his dog, like statues under the other side of the heavens, the only objects to relieve the eye in the extended meadow ; and there would he stand abiding his luck, till he took his way home through the fields at evening with his fish. thus, by one bait or another. nature allures inhabitants into all her recesses. this man was the last of our townsmen whom we saw, and we silently through him bade adieu to our friends. the characteristics and pursuits of various ages and races of men are always existing in epitome in every neighborhood. the pleasures of my earliest youth have become the inheritance of other men. this 1 8 a week on the concord river. man is still a fisher, and belongs to an era in which i myself have lived. perchance he is not confounded by many knowledges, and has not sought out many inventions, but how to take many fishes before the sun sets, with his slender birchen pole and flaxen line, that is invention enough for him. it is good even to be a fisherman in summer and in winter. some men are judges these august days, sitting on benches, even till the court rises ; they sit judging there honorably, between the seasons and between meals, leading a civil politic life, arbitrating in the case of spaulding versus cummings, it may be, from highest noon till the red vesper sinks into the west. the fisherman, meanwhile, stands in three feet of water, under the same summer's sun, arbitrating in other cases between muckworm and shiner, amid the fragrance of water lilies, mint, and pontederia, leading his life many rods from the dry land, within a pole's length of where the larger fishes swim. human life is to him very much like a river, — " renning aie downward to the sea." this was his observation. his honor made a great discovery in bailments. i can just remember an old brown-coated man who was the walton of this stream, who had come over from newcastle, england, with his son, the latter a stout and hearty man who had lifted an anchor in his day. a straight old man he was who took his way in silence through the meadows, having passed the period of communication with his fellows ; his old experienced coat hanging long and straight and brown as the yellow pine bark, glittering with so much smoth ered sunlight, if you stood near enough, no work of saturday, 1 9 art but naturalized at length. i often discovered him unexpectedly amid the pads and the gray willows when he moved, fishing in some old country method, — for youth and age then went a-fishing together, — full of incommunicable thoughts, perchance about his own tyne and northumberland. he was always to be seen in serene afternoons haunting the river, and almost rustling with the sedge ; so many sunny hours in an old man's life, entrapping silly fish, almost grown to be the sun's familiar ; what need had he of hat or raiment any, having served out his time, and seen through such thin disguises? i have seen how his coeval fates rewarded him with the yellow perch, and yet i thought his luck was not in proportion to his years ; and i have seen when, with slow steps and weighed down with aged thoughts, he disappeared with his fish under his low-roofed house on the skirts of the village. i think nobody else saw him; nobody else remembers him now, for he soon after died, and migrated to new tyne streams. his fishing was not a sport, nor solely a means of subsistence, but a sort of solemn sacrament and withdrawal from the world, just as the aged read their bibles. whether we live by the sea-side, or by the lakes and rivers, or on the prairie, it concerns us to attend to the nature of fishes, since they are not phenomena confined to certain localities only, but forms and phases of the life in nature universally dispersed. the countless shoals which annually coast the shores of europe and america, are not so interesting to the student of nature, as the more fertile law itself, which deposits their spawn on the tops of mountains, and on the interior plains ; the fish principle in nature, from which it results that they may be found in water 20 a week on the concord river. in so many places, in greater or less numbers. the natural historian is not a fisherman, who prays for cloudy days and good luck merely, but as fishing has been styled, " a contemplative man's recreation," introducing him profitably to woods and water, so the fruit of the naturalist's observations is not in new gen era or species, but in new contemplations still, and science is only a more contemplative man's recreation. the seeds of the life of fishes are everywhere dissem inated, whether the winds waft them, or the waters float them, or the deep earth holds them ; wherever a pond is dug, straightway it is stocked with this viva cious race. they have a lease of nature, and it is not yet out. the chinese are bribed to carry their ova from province to province in jars or in hollow reeds, or the water-birds to transport them to the mountain tarns and interior lakes. there are fishes wherever there is a fluid medium, and even in clouds and in melted metals we detect their semblance. think how in winter you can sink a line down straight in a pasture through snow and through ice, and pull up a bright, slippery, dumb, subterranean silver or golden fish ! it is curious, also, to reflect how they make one family, from the largest to the smallest. the least minnow, that lies on the ice as bait for pickerel, looks like a huge sea-fish cast up on the shore. in the waters of this town there are about a dozen distinct species, though the inexperienced would expect many it enhances our sense of the grand security and serenity of nature, to observe the still undisturbed economy and content of the fishes of this century, their happiness a regular fruit of the summer. the saturday. 21 fresh-water sun fish, bream, or ruff, pomoiis vtd garis, as it were, without ancestry, without posterity, still represents the fresh water sun fish in nature. it is the most common of all, and seen on every ur chin's string ; a simple and inoffensive fish, whose nests are visible all along the shore, hollowed in the sand, over which it is steadily poised through the summer hours on waving fin. sometimes there are twenty or thirty nests in the space of a few rods, two feet wide by half a foot in depth, and made with no little labor, the weeds being removed, and the sand shoved up on the sides, like a bowl. here it may be seen early in sum mer assiduously brooding, and driving away minnows and larger fishes, even its own species, which would disturb its ova, pursuing them a few feet, and circling round swiftly to its nest again : the minnows, like young sharks, instantly entering the empty nests, meanwhile, and swallowing the spawn, which is at tached to the weeds and to the bottom, on the sunny side. the spawn is exposed to so many dangers, that a very small proportion can ever become fishes, for beside being the constant prey of birds and fishes, a great many nests are made so near the shore, in shallow water, that they are left dry in a few days, as the river goes down. these and the lamprey's are the only fishes' nests that i have observed, though the ova of some species may be seen floating on the sur face. the breams are so careful of their charge that you may stand close by in the water and examine them at your leisure. i have thus stood over them half an hour at a time, and stroked them familiarly without frightening them, suffering them to nibble my fingers harmlessly, and seen them erect their dorsal fins in anger when my hand approached their ova, and have 22 a week on the concord river. even taken them gently out of the water with my hand; though this cannot be accomphshed by a sud den movement, however dexterous, for instant warn ing is conveyed to them through their denser element, but only by letting the fingers gradually close about them as they are poised over the palm, and with the utmost gentleness raising them slowly to the surface. though stationary, they keep up a constant sculling or waving motion with their fins, which is exceedingly graceful, and expressive of their humble happiness ; for unlike ours, the element in which they live is a stream which must be constantly resisted. from time to time they nibble the weeds at the bottom or overhanging their nests, or dart after a fly or a worm. the dorsal fin, besides answering the purpose of a keel, with the anal, serves to keep the fish upright, for in shallow water, where this is not covered, they fall on their sides. as you stand thus stooping over the bream in its nest, the edges of the dorsal and caudal fins have a singular dusty golden reflection, and its eyes, which stand out from the head, are transparent and colorless. seen in its native element, it is a very beautiful and compact fish, perfect in all its parts, and looks like a brilliant coin fresh from the mint. it is a perfect jewel of the river, the green, red, coppery, and golden reflections of its mottled sides being the con centration of such rays as struggle through the float ing pads and flowers to the sandy bottom, and in harmony with the sunlit brown and yellow pebbles. behind its watery shield it dwells far from many acci dents inevitable to human life. there is also another species of bream found in our river, without the red spot on the operculum, which, according to m. agassiz, is undescribed. saturday. 23 the common perch, perca fiavescens, which name describes well the gleaming, golden reflections of its scales as it is drawn out of the water, its red o-ius standing out in vain in the thin element, is one of^'the handsomest and most regularl}' formed of our fishes, and at such a moment as this reminds us of the fish in the picture, which wished to be restored to its native element until it had grown larger ; and indeed most of this species that are caught are not half grown. in the ponds there is a light-colored and slender kind, which swim in shoals of many hundreds in the sunny water, in company with the shiner, averaging not more than six or seven inches in length, while only a fevv larger specimens are found in the deepest water, which prey upon their weaker brethren. i have often attracted these small perch to the shore at evening, by rippling the water with my fingers, and they may sometimes be caught while attempting to pass inside your hands. it is a tough and heedless fish, biting from impulse, without nibbling, and from impulse refraining to bite, and sculling indifferently past. it rather prefers the clear water and sandy bottoms, though here it has not much choice. it is a true fish,' such as the angler loves to put into his basket or hang at the top of his willow twig, in shady afternoons along the banks of the stream. so many unques tionable fishes he counts, and so many shiners, which he counts and then throws away. the chivin, dace, roach, cousin trout, or what ever else it is called, leitciscus pulchellus, white and red, always an unexpected prize, which, however, any angler is glad to hook for its rarity. a name that reminds us of many an unsuccessful ramble by swift streams, when the wind rose to disappoint the fisher. 24 a week on the concord river. it is commonly a silvery soft-scaled fish, of graceful, scholarlike, and classical look, like many a picture in an english book. it loves a swift current and a sandy bottom, and bites inadvertently, yet not without appe tite for the bait. the minnows are used as bait for pickerel in the winter. the red chivin, according to some, is still the same fish, only older, or with its tints deepened as they think by the darker water it inhab its, as the red clouds swim in the twilight atmosphere. he who has not hooked the red chivin is not yet a complete angler. other fishes, methinks, are slightly amphibious, but this is a denizen of the water wholly. the cork goes dancing down the swift rushing stream, amid the weeds and sands, when suddenly, by a coin cidence never to be remembered, emerges this fabulous inhabitant of another element, a thing heard of but not seen, as if it were the instant creation of an eddy, a true product of the running stream. and this bright cupreous dolphin was spawned and has passed its life beneath the level of your feet in your native fields. fishes, too, as well as birds and clouds, derive their armor from the mine. i have heard of mack erel visiting the copper banks at a particular season ; this fish, perchance, has its habitat in the coppermine river. i have caught white chivin of great size in the aboljacknagesic, where it empties into the penobscot, at the base of mount ktaadn, but no red ones there. the latter variety seems not to have been sufficiently observed. the dace, leiiciscics aj-gejiteiis, is a slight silvery minnow, found generally in the middle of the stream, where the current is most rapid, and frequently con founded with the last named. the shiner, lencisacs crysoleucas^ is a soft-scaled saturday. 25 and tender fish, the victim of its stronger neighbors, found in all places, deep and shallow, clear and tur bid ; generally the first nibbler at the bait, but, with its small mouth and nibbling propensities, not easily caught. it is a gold or silver bit that passes current in the river, its limber tail dimpling the surface in sport or flight. i have seen the fry when frightened by something thrown into the water, leap out by doz ens, together with the dace, and wreck themselves upon a floating plank. it is the little light-infant of the river, with body armor of gold or silver span gles, slipping, gliding its life through with a quirk of the tail, half in the water, half in the air, upward and ever upward with flitting fin to more crystalline tides, yet still abreast of us dwellers on the bank. it is almost dissolved by the summer heats. a slighter and lighter colored shiner is found in one of our ponds. the pickerel, esox retiadatiis, the swiftest, wariest, and most ravenous of fishes, is very common in the shaflow and weedy lagoons along the sides of the stream. it is a solemn, stately, ruminant fish, lurking under the shadow of a pad at noon, with still, circum spect, voracious eye, motionless as a jewel set in water, or moving slowly along to take up its position, darting from time to time at such unlucky fish or frog or insect as comes within its range, and swallowing it at a gulp. i have caught one which had swallowed a brother pickerel half as large as itself, with the tail still visible in its mouth, while the head was already digested in its stomach. sometimes a striped snake, bound to greener meadows across the stream, ends its undulatory progress in the same receptacle. they are so greedy and impetuous that they are frequently caught by being entangled in the line the moment it 26 a week on the concord river. is cast. fishermen also distinguish the brook pick erel, a shorter and thicker fish than the former. the horned pout, pimelodus iiebiilosus, sometimes called minister, from the peculiar squeaking noise it makes when drawn out of the water, is a dull and blundering fellow, and like the eel vespertinal in his habits, and fond of the mud. it bites deliberately as if about its business. they are taken at night with a mass of worms strung on a thread, which catches in their teeth, sometimes three or four, with an eel, at one pull. they are extremely tenacious of life, open ing and shutting their mouths for half an hour after their heads have been cut off. a bloodthirsty and bullying race of rangers, inhabiting the fertile river bottoms, with ever a lance in rest, and ready to do battle with their nearest neighbor. i have observed them in summer, when every other one had a long and bloody scar upon his back, where the skin was gone, the mark, perhaps, of some fierce encounter. sometimes the fry, not an inch long, are seen darken ing the shore with their myriads. the suckers, catostomi bostonienses and uiberai lati, common and horned, perhaps on an average the largest of our fishes, may be seen in shoals of a hundred or more, stemming the current in the sun, on their mysterious migrations, and sometimes sucking in the bait which the fisherman suffers to float toward them. the former, which sometimes grow to a large size, are frequently caught by the hand in the brooks, or, like the red chivin, are jerked out by a hook fas tened firmly to the end of a stick, and placed under their jaws. they are hardly known to the mere angler, however, not often biting at his baits, though the spearer carries home many a mess in the .spring. saturday. 2 j to our village eyes, these shoals have a foreign and imposing aspect, realizing the fertility of the seas. the common eel, too, mitrceiia bostome?isis, the only species known in the state, a slimy, squirming creature, informed of mud, still squirming in the pan, is speared and hooked up with various success. methinks it too occurs in picture, left after the deluge, in many a meadow high and dry. in the shallow parts of the river, where the current is rapid, and the bottom pebbly, you may sometimes see the curious circular nests of the lamprey eel, pctrojnyson americanus, the american stone-sucker, as large as a cart wheel, a foot or two in height, and sometimes rising half a foot above the surface of the water. they collect these stones, of the size of a hen's egg, with their mouths, as their name implies, and are said to fashion them into circles with their tails. they ascend falls by clinging to the stones, which may sometimes be raised, by lifting the fish by the tail. as they are not seen on their way down the streams, it is thought by fishermen that they never return, but waste away and die, clinging to rocks and stumps of trees for an indefinite period; a tragic feature in the scenery of the river bottoms, worthy to be remembered with shakspeare's description of the sea-floor. they are rarely seen in our waters at present, on account of the dams, though they are taken in great quantities at the mouth of the river in lowell. their nests, which are very conspicuous, look more like art than anything in the river. if we had leisure this afternoon, we might turn our prow up the brooks in quest of the classical trout and the minnows. of the last alone, according to m. agassiz, several of the species found in this town, 28 a week on the concord river. are yet undescribed. these would, perhaps, com plete the list of our finny contemporaries in the concord waters. salmon, shad, and alewives, were formerly abundant here, and taken in weirs by the indians, who taught this method to the whites, by whom they were used as food and as manure, until the dam, and afterward the canal at billerica, and the factories at lowell, put an end to their migrations hitherward ; though it is thought that a few more enterprising shad may still occasionally be seen in this part of the river. it is said, to account for the destruction of the fishery, that those who at that time represented the interests of the fishermen and the fishes, remembering between what dates they were accustomed to take the grown shad, stipulated, that the dams should be left open for that season only, and the fry, which go down a month later, were consequently stopped and destroyed by myriads. others say that the fish-ways were not properly constructed. perchance, after a few thou sands of years, if the fishes will be patient, and pass their summers elsewhere, meanwhile, nature will have levelled the billerica dam, and the lowell factories, and the grass-ground river run clear again, to be explored by new migratory shoals, even as far as the hopkinton pond and westborough swamp. one would like to know more of that race, now extinct, whose seines lie rotting in the garrets of their children, who openly professed the trade of fishermen, and even fed their townsmen creditably, not skulking through the meadows to a rainy afternoon sport. dim visions we still get of miraculous draughts of fishes, and heaps uncountable by the river-side, from the tales of our seniors sent on horse-back in their sa turd a v. 29 childhood from the neighboring towns, perched on saddle-bags, with instructions to get the one bag filled with shad, the other with ale wives. at least one memento of those days may still exist in the memory of this generation, in the familiar appellation of a celebrated train-band of this town, whose untrained ancestors stood creditably at concord north bridge. their captain, a man of piscatory tastes, having duly warned his company to turn out on a certain day, they, like obedient soldiers, appeared promptly on parade at the appointed time, but, unfortunately, they went undrilled, except in the manoeuvres of a soldier's wit and unlicensed jesting, that may day ; for their captain, forgetting his own appointment, and warned only by the favorable aspect of the heavens, as he had often done before, went a fishing that afternoon, and his company thenceforth was known to old and young, grave and gay, as " the shad," and by the youths of this vicinity, this was long regarded as the proper name of all the irregular militia in christendom. but, alas, no record of these fishers' lives remains, that we know of, unless it be one brief page of hard but unquestionable history, which occurs in day book no. 4, of an old trader of this town, long since dead, which shows pretty plainly what constituted a fisher man's stock in trade in those days. it purports to be a fisherman's account current, probably for the fish ing season of the year 1805, during which months he purchased daily rum and sugar, sugar and rum, n. e. and w. i., " one cod line," " one brown mug," and " a line for the seine ; " rum and sugar, sugar and rum, "good loaf sugar," and "good brown," w. i. and n. e., in short and uniform entries to the bottom of the page, all carried out in pounds, shillings, and pence, 30 a week on the concord river. from march 25th to june 5th, and promptly settled by receiving '' cash in full " at the last date. but perhaps not so settled altogether. these were the necessaries of life in those days ; with salmon, shad, and alewives, fresh and pickled, he was thereafter independent on the groceries. rather a preponderance of the fluid elements; but such was this fisherman's nature. i can faintly remember to have seen the same fisher in my earliest youth, still as near the river as he could get, with uncertain undulatory step, after so many things had gone down stream, swinging a scythe in the meadow, his bottle like a serpent hid in the grass ; himself as yet not cut down by the great mower. surely the fates are forever kind, though nature's laws are more immutable than any despot's, yet to man's daily life they rarely seem rigid, but permit him to relax with license in sunimer weather. he is not harshly reminded of the things he may not do. she is very kind and liberal to all men of vicious habits, and certainly does not deny them quarter; they do not die without priest. still they maintain life along the way, keeping this side the styx, still hearty, still resolute, " never better in their lives ; " and again, after a dozen years have elapsed, they start up from behind a hedge, asking for work and wages for able-bodied men. who has not met such " a beggar on the way, who sturdily could gang ? " * * * " who cared neither for wind nor wet, in lands where'er he past ? " " that bold adopts each house he views, his own ; makes every pulse his checquer, and, at pleasure, walks forth, and taxes all the world, like ceesar; " — saturday. 3 1 as if consistency were the secret of health, while the poor inconsistent aspirant man, seeking to live a pure life, feeding on air, divided against himself, cannot stand, but pines and dies after a life of sickness, on beds of down. the unwise are accustomed to speak as if some were not sick; but methinks the difference between men in respect to health is not great enough to lay much stress upon. some are reputed sick and some are not. it often happens that the sicker man is the nurse to the sounder. shad are still taken in the basin of concord river at lowell, where they are said to be a month earlier than the merrimack shad, on account of the warmth of the water. still patiently, almost pathetically, with instinct not to be discouraged, not to be reasoned with, revisiting their old haunts, as if their stern fates would relent, and still met by the corporation with its dam. poor shad ! where is thy redress? when nature gave thee instinct, gave she thee the heart to bear thy fate? still wandering the sea in thy scaly armor to inquire humbly at the mouths of rivers if man has perchance left them free for thee to enter. by countless shoals loitering uncertain meanwhile, merely stemming the tide there, in danger from sea foes in spite of thy bright armor, awaiting new instruc tions, until the sands, until the water itself, tell thee if it be so or not. thus by whole migrating nations, full of instinct, which is thy faith, in this backward spring, turned adrift, and perchance knowest not where men do 7wt dwell, where there are ?iot factories, in these days. armed with no sword, no electric shock, but mere shad, armed only with innocence and a just cause, with tender dumb mouth only forward, 32 a week on the concord river. and scales easy to be detached. i for one am with thee, and who knows what may avail a crow-bar against that billerica dam ? — not despairing when whole myriads have gone to feed those sea monsters during thy suspense, but still brave, indifferent, on easy fin there, like shad reserved for higher destinies. willing to be decimated for man's behoof after the spawning season. away with the superficial and selfish •ph.\\-a7ithropy of men, — who knows what ad mirable virtue of fishes may be below low-water mark, bearing up against a hard destiny, not admired by that fellow creature who alone can appreciate it ! who hears the fishes when they cry? it will not be for gotten by some memory that we were contemporaries. thou shalt ere long have thy way up the rivers, up all the rivers of the globe, if i am not mistaken. yea, even thy dull watery dream shall be more than realized. if it were not so, but thou wert to be over looked at first and at last, then would not i take their heaven. yes, i say so, who think i know better than thou canst. keep a stiff fin then, and stem all the tides thou mayest meet. at length it would seem that the interests, not of the fishes only, but of the men of wayland, of sud bury, of concord, demand the levelling of that dam. innumerable acres of meadow are waiting to be made dry land, wild native grass to give place to english. the farmers stand with scythes whet, waiting the sub siding of the waters, by gravitation, by evaporation or otherwise, but sometimes their eyes do not rest, their wheels do not roll, on the quaking meadow ground during the haying season at all. so many sources of wealth inaccessible. they rate the loss hereby incurred in the single town of wayland alone saturday, 33 as equal to the expense of keeping a hundred yoke of oxen the year round. one year, as i learn, not long ago, the farmers standing ready to drive their teams afield as usual, the water gave no signs of fall ing; without new attraction in the heavens, without freshet or visible cause, still standing stagnant at an unprecedented height. all hydrometers were at fault ; some trembled for their english even. but speedy emissaries revealed the unnatural secret, in the new float-board, wholly a foot in width, added to their already too high privileges by the dam proprietors. the hundred yoke of oxen, meanwhile, standing patient, gazing wishfully meadowward, at that inac cessible waving native grass, uncut but by the great mower time, who cuts so broad a swathe, without so much as a wisp to wind about their horns. that was a long pull from ball's hill to carhsle bridge, sitting with our faces to the south, a slight breeze rising from the north, but nevertheless water still runs and grass grows, for now, having passed the bridge between carlisle and bedford, we see men hay ing far off in the meadow, their heads waving like the grass which they cut. in the distance the wind seemed to bend all alike. as the night stole over, such a fresh ness was wafted across the meadow that every blade of cut-grass seemed to teem with life. faint purple clouds began to be reflected in the water, and the cow-bells tinkled louder along the banks, while, like sly water rats, we stole along nearer the shore, look ing for a place to pitch our camp. at length, when we had made about seven miles, as far as billerica, we moored our boat on the west side of a httle rising ground which in the spring forms 34 a week on the concord river. an island in the river. here we found huckleberries still hanging upon the bushes, where they seemed to have slowly ripened for our especial use. bread and sugar, and cocoa boiled in river water, made our repast, and as we had drank in the fluvial prospect all day, so now we took a draught of the water with our evening meal to propitiate the river gods, and whet our vision for the sights it was to behold. the sun was setting on the one hand, while our eminence was contributing its shadow to the night, on the other. it seemed in sensibly to grow lighter as the night shut in, and a distant and solitary farm-house was revealed, which before lurked in the shadows of the noon. there was no other house in sight, nor any cultivated field. to the right and left, as far as the horizon, were straggling pine woods with their plumes against the sky, and across the river were rugged hills, covered with shrub oaks, tangled with grape vines and ivy, with here and there a gray rock jutting out from the maze. the sides of these cliffs, though a quarter of a mile distant, were almost heard to rustle while we looked at them, it was such a leafy wilderness ; a place for fauns and satyrs, and where bats hung all day to the rocks, and at evening flitted over the water, and fireflies husbanded their light under the grass and leaves against the night. when we had pitched our tents on the hill-side, a few rods from the shore, we sat looking through its triangular door in the twilight at our lonely mast on the shore, just seen above the alders, and hardly yet come to a stand-still from the swaying of the stream ; the first encroachment of com merce on this land. there was our port, our ostia. that straight geometrical line against the water and the sky stood for the last refinements of civilized life, saturday. 35 and what of sublimity there is in history was there symbolized. for the most part, there was no recognition of human life in the night, no human breathing was heard, only the breathing of the wdnd. as we sat up, kept awake by the novelty of our situation, we heard at intervals foxes stepping about over the dead leaves, and brushing the dewy grass close to our tent, and once a musquash fumbling among the potatoes and melons in our boat, but when we hastened to the shore we could detect only a ripple in the water ruffling the disk of a star. at intervals we were serenaded by the song of a dreaming sparrow or the throttled cry of an owl, but after each sound which near at hand broke the stillness of the night, each crackling of the twigs, or rustling among the leaves, there was a sudden pause, and deeper and more conscious silence, as if the intruder were aware that no life was rightfully abroad at that hour. there was a fire in lowell, as we judged, this night, and we saw the horizon blaz ing, and heard the distant alarm bells, as it were a faint tinkling music borne to these woods. but the most constant and memorable sound of a summer's night, which we did not fail to hear every night after ward, though at no time so incessantly and so favora bly as now, was the barking of the house dogs, from the loudest and hoarsest bark to the faintest aerial palpitation under the eaves of heaven, from the patient but anxious mastiff to the timid and wakeful terrier, at first loud and rapid, then faint and slow, to be imitated only in a whisper ; wow-wow-wow-wow — wo — wo — w — w. even in a retired and uninhabited district like this, it was a sufficiency of sound for the ear of night, and more impressive than any music. 36 a week on the concord river. i have heard the voice of a hound, just before day light, while the stars were shining, from over the woods and river, far in the horizon, when it sounded as sweet and melodious as an instrument. the hounding of a dog pursuing a fox or other animal in the horizon, may have first suggested the notes of the hunting horn to alternate with and relieve the lungs of the dog. this natural bugle long resounded in the woods of the ancient world before the horn was invented. the very dogs that sullenly bay the moon from farm-yards in these nights, excite more heroism in our breasts than all the civil exhortations or war sermons of the age. "i had rather be a dog, and bay the moon," than many a roman that i know. the night is equally indebted to the clarion of the cock, with wakeful hope, from the very setting of the sun, prematurely ushering in the dawn. all these sounds, the crowing of cocks, the baying of dogs, and the hum of insects at noon, are the evidence of nature's health or sound state. such is the never failing beauty and accuracy of language, the most perfect art in the world ; the chisel of a thousand years retouches it. at length the antepenultimate and drowsy hours drew on, and all sounds were denied entrance to our ears. who sleeps by day and walks by night, will meet no spirit but some sprite. sunday. " the river calmly flows, through shining banks, through lonely glen. where the owl shrieks, though ne'er the cheer of men has stirred its mute repose. still if you should walk there, you would go there again." — chatining. " the indians tell us of a beautiful river lying far to the south, which they call merrimac." sieur de monts. relations of the jesuits, 1604. in the morning the river and adjacent country were covered with a dense fog, through which the smoke of our fire curled up like a still subtiler mist ; but before we had rowed many rods, the sun arose and the fog rapidly dispersed, leaving a slight steam only to curl along the surface of the water. it was a quiet sunday morning, with more of the auroral rosy and white than of the yellow light in it, as if it dated from earlier than the fall of man, and still preserved a heathenish integrity ; — an early unconverted saint, free from noontide or evening taint, heathen without reproach, that did upon the civil day encroach, and ever since its birth had trod the outskirts of the earth. but the impressions which the morning makes vanish with its dews, and not even the most "per 37 38 a week on the concord river. severing mortal" can preserve the memory of its freshness to mid-day. as we passed the various islands, or what were islands in the spring, rowing with our backs down stream, we gave names to them. the one on which we had camped we called fox island, and one fine densely wooded island sur rounded by deep water and overrun by grape vines, which looked like a mass of verdure and of flowers cast upon the waves, we named grape island. from ball's hill to billerica meeting-house, the river was still twice as broad as in concord, a deep, dark, and dead stream, flowing between gentle hills and some times cliffs, and well wooded all the way. it was a long woodland lake bordered with willows. for long reaches we could see neither house nor cultivated field, nor any sign of the vicinity of man. now we coasted along some shallow shore by the edge of a dense pali sade of bulrushes, which straightly bounded the water as if dipt by art, reminding us of the reed forts of tlie east indians, of which we had read ; and now the bank slightly raised was overhung with graceful grasses and various species of brake, whose downy stems stood closely grouped and naked as in a vase, while their heads spread several feet on either side. the dead limbs of the willow were rounded and adorned by the climbing mikania, mikania scandens, which filled every crevice in the leafy bank, contrast ing agreeably with the gray bark of its supporter and the balls of the button-bush. the water willow, salix pitrshiana^ when it is of large size and entire, is the most gracefiil and ethereal of our trees. its masses of light green foliage, piled one upon another to the height of twenty or thirty feet, seemed to float on the surface of the water, while the slight gray stems sunda y. 39 and the shore were hardly visible between them. no tree is so wedded to the water, and harmonizes so well with still streams. it is even more graceful than the weeping willow, or any pendulous trees, which dip their branches in the stream instead of being buoyed up by it. its limbs curved outward over the surface as if attracted by it. it had not a new england but an oriental character, reminding us of trim persian gardens, of haroun alraschid, and the artificial lakes of the east. as we thus dipped our way along between fresh masses of foliage overrun with the grape and smaller flowering vines, the surface was so calm, and both air and water so transparent, that the flight of a king fisher or robin over the river was as distinctly seen reflected in the water below as in the air above. the birds seemed to flit through submerged groves, alight ing on the yielding sprays, and their clear notes to come up from below. we were uncertain whether the water floated the land, or the land held the water in its bosom. it was such a season, in short, as that in which one of our concord poets sailed on its stream^ and sung its quiet glories. " there is an inward voice, that in the stream sends forth its spirit to the listening ear, and in a calm content it floweth on, like wisdom, welcome with its own respect. clear in its breast lie all these beauteous thoughts, it doth receive the green and graceful trees, and the gray rocks smile in its peaceful arms, — " and more he sung, but too serious for our page. for every oak and birch too growing on the hill-top, as well as for these elms and willows, we knew that there 40 a week on the concord river. was a graceful ethereal and ideal tree making down from the roots, and sometimes nature in high tides brings her mirror to its foot and makes it visible. the stillness was intense and almost conscious, as if it were a natural sabbath. the air was so elastic and crystalline that it had the same effect on the land scape that a glass has on a picture, to give it an ideal remoteness and perfection. the landscape was clothed in a mild and quiet light, in which the woods and fences checkered and partitioned it with new regularity, and rough and uneven fields stretched away with lawn-like smoothness to the horizon, and the clouds, finely dis tinct and picturesque, seemed a fit drapery to hang over fairy-land. the world seemed decked for some holyday or prouder pageantry, with silken streamers flying, and the course of our lives to wind on before us like a green lane into a country maze, at the season when fruit trees are in blossom. why should not our whole life and its scenery be actually thus fair and distinct ? all our lives want a suitable background. they should at least, like the life of the anchorite, be as impressive to behold as objects in the desert, a broken shaft or crumbling mound against a limitless horizon. character always secures for itself this advantage, and is thus distinct and unrelated to near or trivial objects, whether things or persons. on this same stream a maiden once sailed in my boat, thus unattended but by invisible guardians, and as she sat in the prow there was nothing but her self between the steersman and the sky. i could then say with the poet ; — " sweet falls the summer air over her frame who sails with me ; sunday. 41 her way like that is beautifully free, her nature far more rare, and is her constant heart of virgin purity." at evening still the very stars seem but this maiden^s emissaries and reporters of her progress. low in the eastern sky is set thy glancing eye ; and though its gracious light ne'er riseth to my sight, yet every star that climbs above the gnarled limbs of yonder hill, conveys thy gentle will. believe i knew thy thought, and that the zephyrs brought thy kindest wishes through, as mine they bear to you, that some attentive cloud did pause amid the crowd over my head. while gentle things were said. believe the thrushes sung, and that the flower bells rung, that herbs exhaled their scent, and beasts knew what was meant, the trees a welcome waved. and lakes their margins laved, when thy free mind to my retreat did wind. it was a summer eve. the air did gently heave, while yet a low hung cloud thy eastern skies did shroud ; the lightning's silent gleam, startling my drowsy dream, seemed like the flash under thy dark eyelash. 42 a week on the concord river. still will i strive to be as if thou wert with me; whatever path i take, it shall be for thy sake, of gentle slope and wide, as thou wert by my side. without a root to trip thy gentle foot. i '11 walk with gentle pace, and choose the smoothest place, and careful dip the oar, and shun the winding shore, and gently steer my boat where water lilies float. and cardinal flowers stand in their sylvan bowers. it required some rudeness to disturb with our boat the mirror-like surface of the water, in which every twig and blade of grass was so faithfully reflected ; too faithfully indeed for art to imitate, for only nature may exaggerate herself. the shallowest still water is unfathomable. wherever the trees and skies are reflected there is more than atlantic depth, and no danger of fancy running aground. we noticed that it required a separate intention of the eye, a more free and abstracted vision, to see the reflected trees and the sky, than to see the river bottom merely ; and so are there manifold visions in the direction of every object, and even the most opaque reflect the heavens from their surface. some men have their eyes natu rally intended to the one, and some to the other object. " a man that looks on glass, on it may stay his eye. or, if he pleaseth, through it pass. and the heavens espy." sunda y. 43 two men in a skiff, whom we passed hereabouts, floating buoyantly amid the reflections of the trees, like a feather in mid air, or a leaf which is wafted gently from its twig to the water without turning over, seemed still in their element, and to have very deli cately availed themselves of the natural laws. their floating there was a beautiful and successful experi ment in natural philosophy, and it served to ennoble in our eyes the art of navigation, for as birds fly and fishes swim, so these men sailed. it reminded us how much fairer and nobler all the actions of man might be, and that our life in its whole economy might be as beautiful as the fairest works of art or nature. the sun lodged on the old gray cliffs, and glanced from every pad ; the bulrushes and flags seemed to rejoice in the delicious light and air; the meadows were a drinking at their leisure ; the frogs sat medi tating, all sabbath thoughts, summing up their week, with one eye out on the golden sun, and one toe upon a reed, eyeing the wondrous universe in which they act their part ; the fishes swam more staid and soberly, as maidens go to church ; shoals of golden and silver minnows rose to the surface to behold the heavens, and then sheered off" into more sombre aisles ; they swept by as if moved by one mind, con tinually gliding past each other, and yet preserving the form of their battalion unchanged, as if they were still embraced by the transparent membrane which held the spawn ; a young band of brethren and sisters, trying their new fins ; now they wheeled, now shot ahead, and when we drove them to the shore and cut them off", they dexterously tacked and passed underneath the boat. over the old 44 a week on the concord river. wooden bridges no traveller crossed, and neither the river nor the fishes avoided to glide between the abutments. here was a village not far off behind the woods, billerica, settled not long ago, and the children still bear the names of the first settlers in this late " howl ing wilderness ; " yet to all intents and purposes it is as old as fernay or as mantua, an old gray town, where men grow old and sleep already under moss grown monuments,— outgrow their usefulness. this is ancient billerica (villarica?), now in its dotage. i never heard that it was young. see, is not nature here gone to decay, farms all run out, meeting-house grown gray and racked with age? if you would know of its early youth, ask those old gray rocks in the pasture. it has a bell that sounds sometimes as far as concord woods ; i have heard that, aye, — hear it now. no wonder that such a sound startled the dreaming indian, and frightened his game, when the first bells were swung on trees, and sounded through the forest beyond the plantations of the white man. but to-day i like best the echo amid these cliffs and woods. it is no feeble imitation, but rather its original, or as if some rural orpheus played over the strain again to show how it should sound. dong, sounds the brass in the east, as if to a funeral feast, but i like that sound the best out of the fluttering west. the steeple ringeth a knell, but the fairies' silvery bell is the voice of that gentle folk. or else the horizon that spoke. sunda y. 45 its metal is not of brass, but air, and water, and glass, and under a cloud it is swung, and by the wind it is rung. when the steeple tolleth the noon, it soundeth not so soon. yet it rings a far earlier hour, and the sun has not reached its tower. on the other hand, the road runs up to carlisle, city of the woods, which, if it is less civil, is the more natural. it does well hold the earth together. it gets laughed at because it is a small town, i know, but nevertheless it is a place where great men may be born any day, for fair winds and foul blow right on over it without distinction. it has a meeting-house and horse-sheds, a tavern and a blacksmith's shop for centre, and a good deal of wood to cut and cord yet. and " bedford, most noble bedford, i shall not thee forget." history has remembered thee ; especially that meek and humble petition of thy old planters, like the wail ing of the lord's own people, " to the gentlemen, the selectmen " of concord, praying to be erected into a separate parish. we can hardly credit that so plain tive a psalm resounded but little more than a century ago along these babylonish waters. " in the extreme difficult seasons of heat and cold," said they, '•' we were ready to say of the sabbath, behold what a weariness is it." — "gentlemen, if our seeking to draw off proceed from any disaffection to our present reverend pastor, or the christian society with whom we have taken such sweet counsel together, and walked unto the 46 a week on the concord river. house of god in company, then hear us not this day, but we greatly desire, if god please, to be eased of our burden on the sabbath, the travel and fatigue thereof, that the word of god may be nigh to us, near to our houses, and in our hearts, that we and our little ones may serve the lord. we hope that god, who stirred up the spirit of cyrus to set forward temple work, has stirred us up to ask, and will stir you up to grant, the prayer of our petition ; so shall your humble petitioners ever pray, as in duty bound, — ." and so the temple work went forward here to a happy conclusion. yonder in carlisle the building of the temple was many wearisome years delayed, not that there was wanting of shittim wood, or the gold of ophir, but a site therefor convenient to all the worshippers ; whether on " buttrick's plain," or rather on " poplar hill : " it was a tedious question. in this billerica solid men must have lived, select from year to year, a series of town clerks, at least, and there are old records that you may search. some spring the white man came, built him a house, and made a clearing here, letting in the sun, dried up a farm, piled up the old gray stones in fences, cut down the pines around his dwelling, planted orchard seeds brought from the old country, and persuaded the civil apple tree to blossom next to the wild pine and the juniper, shedding its perfume in the wilderness. their old stocks still remain. he culled the graceful elm from out the woods and from the river-side, and so refined and smoothed his village plot. and thus he plants a town. he rudely bridged the stream, and drove his team afield into the river meadows, cut the wild grass, and laid bare the homes of beaver, otter, muskrat, and with the whetting of his scythe scared off sunda y. 47 the deer and bear. he set up a mill, and fields of english grain sprang in the virgin soil. and with his grain he scattered the seeds of the dandelion and the wild trefoil over the meadows, mingling his eng lish flowers with the wild native ones. the bristling burdock, the sweet scented catnip, and the humble yarrow, planted themselves along his woodland road, they too seeking " freedom to worship god " in their way. the white man's mullein soon reigned in indian corn-fields, and sweet scented enghsh grasses clothed the new soil. where, then, could the red man set his foot? the honey bee hummed through the massachusetts' woods, and sipped the wild flowers round the indian's wigwam, perchance unnoticed, when, with prophetic warning, it stung the red child's hand, forerunner of that industrious tribe that was to come and pluck the wild flower of his race up by the root. the white man comes, pale as the dawn, with a load of thought, with a slumbering intelligence as a fire raked up, knowing well what he knows, not guessing but calculating ; strong in community, yield ing obedience to authority ; of experienced race ; of wonderful, wonderful common sense ; dull but capa ble, slow but persevering, severe but just, of little humor but genuine ; a laboring man, despising game and sport ; building a house that endures, a framed house. he buys the indian's moccasins and baskets, then buys his hunting grounds, and at length forgets where he is buried, and plows up his bones. and here town records, old, tattered, time-worn, weather stained chronicles, contain the indian sachem's mark, perchance an arrow or a beaver, and the few fatal words by which he deeded his hunting grounds away. 48 a week on the concord river. he comes with a list of ancient saxon, norman, and celtic names, and strews them up and down this river, — framingham, sudbury, bedford, carlisle, bil lerica, chelmsford, — and this is new angle-land, and these are the new west saxons, whom the red men call, not angle-ish or english, but yengeese, and so at last they are known for yankees. when we were opposite to the middle of billerica, the fields on either hand had a soft and cultivated english aspect, the village spire being seen over the copses which skirt the river, and sometimes an orchard straggled down to the water side, though, generally, our course this forenoon was the wildest part of our voyage. it seemed that men led a quiet and very civil life there. the inhabitants were plainly culti vators of the earth, and lived under an organized po litical government. the school-house stood with a meek aspect, entreating a long truce to war and sav age life. every one finds by his own experience, as well as in history, that the era in which men cultivate the apple, and the amenities of the garden, is essen tially different from that of the hunter and forest life, and neither can displace the other without loss. we have all had our day dreams, as well as more pro phetic nocturnal visions, but as for farming, i am convinced that my genius dates from an older era than the agricultural. i would at least strike my spade into the earth with such careless freedom but accuracy as the woodpecker his bill into a tree. there is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness. i know of no redeeming quali ties in myself but a sincere love for some things, and when i am reproved i fall back on to this ground. what have i to do with plows? i cut another furrow sunda y. 49 than you see. where the off ox treads, there is it not, it is further off; where the nigh ox walks, it will not be, it is nigher still. if corn fails, my crop fails not, and what are drought and rain to me? the rude saxon pioneer will sometimes pine for that re finement and artificial beauty which are english, and love to hear the sound of such sweet and classical names as the pentland and malvern hills, the cliffs of dover and the trossacks, richmond, derwent, and winandermere, which are to him now instead of the acropolis and parthenon, of baiae, and athens with its sea walls, and arcadia and tempe. greece, who am i that should remember thee, thy marathon and thy thermopylae? is my life vulgar, my fate mean, which on these golden memories can lean? we are apt enough to be pleased with such books as evelyn's sylva, acetarium, and kalendarium hor tense, but they imply a relaxed nerve in the reader. gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw. there may be an excess of cultivation as well as of anything else, until civilization becomes pathetic. a highly culti vated man. — all whose bones can be bent! whose heaven-born virtues are but good manners! the young pines springing up in the corn-fields from year to year are to me a refreshing fact. we talk of civil izing the indian, but that is not the name for his im provement. by the wary independence and aloofness of his dim forest life he preserves his intercourse with his native gods, and is admitted from time to time to a rare and peculiar society with nature. he has glances of starry recognition to which our saloons are 50 a week on the concord river. strangers. the steady illumination of his genius, dim only because distant, is like the faint but satisfy ing light of the stars compared with the dazzling but ineffectual and short-lived blaze of candles. the society islanders had their day-born gods, but they were not supposed to be " of equal antiquity with the atua fauaii po, or night-born gods." it is true, there are the innocent pleasures of country life, and it is sometimes pleasant to make the earth yield her in crease, and gather the fruits in their season, but the heroic spirit will not fail to dream of remoter retire ments and more rugged paths. it will have its gar den plots and its parterres elsewhere than on the earth, and gather nuts and berries by the way for its subsistence, or orchard fruits with such heedlessness as berries. we would not always be soothing and taming nature, breaking the horse and the ox, but sometimes ride the horse wild and chase the buffalo. the indiana's intercourse with nature is at least such as admits of the greatest independence of each. if he is somewhat of a stranger in her midst, the gar dener is too much of a familiar. there is something vulgar and foul in the latter's closeness to his mistress, something noble and cleanly in the former''s distance. in civilization, as in a southern latitude, man degener ates at length, and yields to the incursion of more northern tribes, " some nation yet shut in with hills of ice." there are other, savager. and more primeval aspects of nature than our poets have sung. it is only white man's poetry. honier and ossian even can never revive in london or boston. and yet behold how sunday. 51 these cities are refreshed by the mere tradition, or the imperfectly transmitted fragrance and flavor of these wild fruits. if we could listen but for an instant to the chaunt of the indian muse, we should under stand why he will not exchange his savage ness for civilization. nations are not whimsical. steel and blankets are strong temptations ; but the indian does well to continue indian. after sitting in my chamber many days, reading the poets, i have been out early on a foggy morning, and heard the cry of an owl in a neighboring wood as from a nature behind the common, unexplored by science or by literature. none of the feathered race has yet realized my youthful conceptions of the woodland depths. i had seen the red election-bird brought from their recesses on my comrades' string, and fan cied that their plumage would assume stranger and more dazzling colors, like the tints of evening, in pro portion as i advanced further into the darkness and solitude of the forest. still less have i seen such strong and wild tints on any poet's string. these modern ingenious sciences and arts do not affect me as those more venerable arts of hunting and fishing, and even of husbandry in its primitive and simple form ; as ancient and honorable trades as the sun and moon and winds pursue, coeval with the faculties of man, and invented when these were in vented. we do not know their john gutenberg, or richard arkwright, though the poets would fain make them to have been gradually learned and taught. ac cording to gower, "and ladahel, as saith the boke, firste made nette, and fishes toke. 52 a week on the concord river. of huntyng eke he fond the chace, whiche nowe is knowe in many place; a tent of clothe, with corde and stake, he sette up first, and did it make." also, lydgate says : jason first sayled, in story it is tolde, • toward colchos, to wynne the flees of golde. ceres the goddess fond first the tilthe of londe ; ***** also, aristeus fonde first the usage of mylke, and cruddis, and of honey swote ; peryodes, for grete avauntage, from flyntes smote fuyre, daryng in the roote." we read that aristeus "obtained of jupiter and neptune, tliat the pestilential heat of the dog days, wherein was great mortality, should be mitigated with wind." this is one of those dateless benefits con ferred on man, which have no record in our vulgar day, though we still find some similitude to them in our dreams, in which we have a more liberal and juster apprehension of things, unconstrained by habit, which is then in some measure put off, and divested of memory, which we call history. according to fable, when the island of ^gina was depopulated by sickness, at the instance of ^acus, jupiter turned the ants into men, that is, as some think, he made men of the inhabitants who lived meanly like ants. this is perhaps the fullest history of those early days extant. the fable which is naturally and truly composed, so as to satisfy the imagination, ere it addresses the understanding, beautiful though strange as a wild flower, is to the wise man an apothegm, and admits sunday. 53 of his most generous interpretation. when we read that bacchus made the tyrrhenian mariners mad, so that they leapt into the sea, mistaking it for a meadow full of flowers, and so became dolphins, we are not concerned about the historical truth of this, but rather a higher poetical truth. we seem to hear the music of a thought, and care not if the understanding be not gratified. for their beauty, consider the fables of narcissus, of endymion, of memnon son of morning, the representative of all promising youths who have died a premature death, and whose memory is melo diously prolonged to the latest morning ; the beautiful stories of phaeton, and of the sirens whose isle shone afar off white with the bones of unburied men ; and the pregnant ones of pan, prometheus, and the sphynx; and that long list of names which have already become part of the universal language of civilized men, and from proper are becoming common names or nouns, — the sibyls, the eumenides, the parcae, the graces, the muses, nemesis, &c. it is interesting to observe with what singular unanimity the furthest sundered nations and genera tions consent to give completeness and roundness to an ancient fable, of which they indistinctly appreciate the beauty or the truth. by a faint and dream-like effort, though it be only by the vote of a scientific body, the dullest posterity slowly add some trait to the mythus. as when astronomers call the lately discovered planet neptune ; or the asteroid astraea, that the virgin who was driven from earth to heaven at the end of the golden age, may have her local habitation in the heavens more distinctly assigned her, — for the slightest recognition of poetic worth is significant. by such slow aggregation has mythol 54 a week on the concord river. ogy grown from the first. the very nursery tales of this generation, were the nursery tales of primeval races. they migrate from east to west, and again from west to east; now expanded into the 'tale divine' of bards, now shrunk into a popular rhyme. this is an approach to that universal language which men have sought in vain. this fond reiteration of the oldest expressions of truth by the latest poster ity, content with slightly and religiously re-touching the old material, is the most impressive proof of a common humanity. all nations love the same jests and tales, jews, christians, and mahometans, and the same translated suffice for all. all men are children, and of one family. the same tale sends them all to bed, and wakes them in the morning. joseph wolff, the mis sionary, distributed copies of robinson crusoe, trans lated into arabic, among the arabs, and they made a great sensation. " robinson crusoe's adventures and wisdom," says he, " were read by mahometans in the market-places of sanaa, hodyeda, and loheya, and admired and believed ! " on reading the book, the arabians exclaimed, " oh, that robinson crusoe must have been a great prophet ! " to some extent, mythology is only the most ancient history and biography. so far from being false or fabulous in the common sense, it contains only endur ing and essential truth, the i and you, the here and there, the now and then, being omitted. either time or rare wisdom writes it. before printing was dis covered, a century was equal to a thousand years. the poet is he who can write some pure mythology to-day without the aid of posterity. in how few words, for instance, the greeks would have told the sunda v. 55 story of abelard and heloise, making but a sentence for our classical dictionary, — and then, perchance have stuck up their names to shine in some corner of the firmament. we moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and his tory, " memoirs to serve for a history,'' which itself is but materials to serve for a mythology. how many volumes folio would the life and labors of prome theus have filled, if perchance it had fallen, as per chance it did first, in days of cheap printing! who knows what shape the fable of columbus will at length assume, to be confounded with that of jason and the expedition of the argonauts. and frank lin, — there may be a line for him in the future classi cal dictionary, recording what that demigod did, and referring him to some new genealogy. " son of and . he aided the americans to gain their independence, instructed mankind in economy, and drew down lightning from the clouds." the hidden significance of these fables which is sometimes thought to have been detected, the ethics running parallel to the poetry and history, are not so remarkable as the readiness with which they may be made] to express a variety of truths. as if they were the skeletons of still older and more universal truths than any whose flesh and blood they are for the time made to wear. it is like striving to rhake the sun, or the wind, or the sea, symbols to signify exclusively the particular thoughts of our day. but what signi fies it? in the mythus a superhuman intelligence uses the unconscious thoughts and dreams of men as its hieroglyphics to address men unborn. in the history of the human mind, these glowing and ruddy fables precede the noon-day thoughts of men, as 56 a week on the concord river. aurora the sun's rays. the matutine intellect of the poet, keeping in advance of the glare of philosophy, always dwells in this auroral atmosphere. as we said before, the concord is a dead stream, but its scenery is the more suggestive to the contem plative voyager, and this day its water was fuller of reflections than our pages even. just before it reaches the falls in billerica it is contracted, and be comes swifter and shallower, with a yellow pebbly bottom, hardly passable for a canal boat, leaving the broader and more stagnant portion above like a lake among the hills. all through the concord, bedford, and billerica meadows, we had heard no murmur from its stream, except where some tributary runnel tumbled in, — some tumultuous little rill, purling round its storied pebble, tinkling to the self-same tune, from september until june, which no drought doth e'er enfeeble. silent flows the parent stream. and if rocks do lie below. smothers with her waves the din, as it were a youthful sin, just as still, and just as slow. but now at length we heard this staid and primitive river rushing to her fall, like any rill. we here left its channel, just above the billerica falls, and entered the canal, which runs, or rather is conducted, six miles through the woods to the merrimack at mid dlesex, and as we did not care to loiter in this part of our voyage, while one ran along the tow-path drawing the boat by a cord, the other kept it off the sunday. 57 shore with a pole, so that we accomplished the whole distance in little more than an hour. this canal, which is the oldest in the country, and has even an antique look beside the more modern railroads, is fed by the concord, so that we were still floating on its familiar waters. it is so much water which the river lets for the advantage of commerce. there ajdpeared some want of harmony in its scenery, since it was not of equal date with the woods and meadows through which it is led, and we missed the conciliatory influ ence of time on land and water; but in the lapse of ages. nature will recover and indemnify herself, and gradually plant fit shrubs and flowers along its borders. already the kingfisher sat upon a pine over the water, and the bream and pickerel swam below. thus all works pass directly out of the hands of the architect into the hands of nature, to be perfected. it was a retired and pleasant route, without houses or travellers, except some young men who were loung ing upon a bridge in chelmsford, who leaned impu dently over the rails to pry into our concerns, but we caught the eye of the most forward, and looked at him till he was visibly discomfited. not that there was any peculiar efficacy in our look, but rather a sense of shame left in him which disarmed him. it is a very true and expressive phrase, " he looked daggers at me," for the first pattern and prototype of all daggers must have been a glance of the eye. first, there was the glance of jove's eye, then his fiery bolt, then, the material gradually hardening, tridents, spears, javelins, and finally, for the con venience of private men, daggers, krisses, and so it is wonderful how we get 58 a week on the concord river. about the streets without being wounded by these delicate and glancing weapons, a man can so nimbly whip out his rapier, or without being noticed carry it unsheathed. yet after all, it is rare that one gets seriously looked at. as we passed under the last bridge over the canal, just before reaching the merrimack, the people com ing out of church paused to look at us from above, and apparently, so strong is custom, indulged in some heathenish comparisons ; but we were the truest observers of this sunny day. according to hesiod, " the seventh is a holy day, for then latona brought forth golden-rayed apollo," and by our reckoning this was the seventh day of the week, and not the first. i find among the papers of an old justice of the peace and deacon of the town of concord, this singular memorandum, which is worth preserving as a relic of an ancient custom. after reforming the spelling and grammar, it runs as fol lows : — "men that travelled with teams on the sab bath, dec. 1 8th, 1803, were jeremiah richardson and jonas parker, both of shirley. they nad teams with rigging such as is used to carry barrels, and they were travelling westward. richardson was questioned by the hon. ephraim wood, esq., and he said that jonas parker was his fellow traveller, and he further said that a mr. longley was his employer, who prom ised to bear him out." we were the men that were gliding northward, this sept. ist, 1839, with still team, and rigging not the most convenient to carry barrels, unquestioned by any squire or church dea con, and ready to bear ourselves out, if need were. in the latter part of the seventeenth century, accord sunda v. 59 ing to the historian of dunstable, "towns were directed to erect ^a cage'' near the meeting-house, and in this all offenders against the sanctity of the sabbath were confined." society has relaxed a little from its strictness, one would say, but i presume that there is not less religion than formerly. if the ligature is found to be loosened in one part, it is only drawn the tighter in another. you can hardly convince a man of an error in a life-time, but must content yourself with the reflection that the progress of science is slow. if he is not convinced, his grand-children may be. the geolo gists tell us that it took one hundred years to prove that fossils are organic, and one hundred and fifty more, to prove that they are not to be referred to the noachian deluge. i am not sure but i should betake myself in extremities to the hberal divinities of greece, rather than to my country's god. jehovah, though with us he has acquired new attributes, is more absolute and unapproachable, but hardly more divine, than jove. he is not so much of a gentleman, among gods, not so gracious and catholic, he does not exert so intimate and genial an influence on nature, as many a god of the greeks. i should fear the infinite power and inflexible justice of the almighty mortal, hardly as yet apotheosized, so wholly mascu line, with no sister juno, no apollo, no venus, nor minerva, to intercede for me, ^u/xo) cfivxiovad re, krjso/jiivy) re. the grecian are youthful and erring and fallen gods, with the vices of men, but in many important respects essentially of the divine race. in my pantheon, pan still reigns in his pristine glory, with his ruddy face, his flowing beard, and his shaggy body, his pipe and his crook, his nymph echo, and 6o a week on the concord river. his chosen daughter lambe ; for the great god pan is not dead, as was rumored. perhaps of all the gods of new england and of ancient greece, i am most con stant at his shrine. it seems to me that the god that is commonly wor shipped in civilized countries is not at all divine, though he bears a divine name, but is the overwhelm ing authority and respectability of mankind combined. men reverence one another, not yet god. if i thought that i could speak with discrimination and impartial ity of the nations of christendom, i should praise them, but it tasks me too much. they seem to be the most civil and humane, but i may be mistaken. every people have gods to suit their circumstances ; the society islanders had a god called toahitu, " in shape like a dog ; he saved such as were in danger of falling from rocks and trees." i think that we can do without him, as we have not much climbing to do. among them a man could make himself a god out of a piece of wood in a few minutes, which would frighten him out of his wits. i fancy that some indefatigable spinster of the old school, who had the supreme felicity to be born in " days that tried men's souls," hearing this, may say with nestor, another of the old school, "but you are younger than i. for time was when i conversed with greater men than you. for not at any time have i seen such men nor shall see them, as perithous, and dryas, and trocfxeva aawv," that is probably washington, sole " shepherd of the people." and when apollo has now six times rolled westward, or seemed to roll, and now for the sixth time shows his face in the east, eyes well nigh glazed, long glassed, which have fluctuated only between lamb's wool and sunday. 6 1 worsted, explore ceaselessly some good sermon book. for six days shalt thou labor and do all thy knitting, but on the seventh, forsooth thy reading. happy we who can bask in this warm september sun, which illu mines all creatures, as well when they rest as when they toil, not without a feeling of gratitude ; whose life is as blameless, how blameworthy soever it may be, on the lord's mona-day as on his suna-day. there are various, nay incredible faiths ; why should we be alarmed at any of them ? what man believes, god believes. long as i have lived, and many blas phemers as i have heard and seen, i have never yet heard or witnessed any direct and conscious blas phemy or irreverence ; but of indirect and habitual enough. where is the man who is guilty of direct and personal insolence to him that made him ? — yet there are certain current expressions of blasphemous modes of viewing things, — as, frequently, when we say, " he is doing a good business," — more profane than cursing and swearing. there is sin and death in such words. let not the children hear them. — my neighbor says that his hill farm is "poor stuff," "only fit to hold the world together," — and much more to that effect. he deserves that god should give him a better for so free a treating of his gifts, more than if he patiently put up therewith. but perhaps my farmer forgets that his lean soil has sharpened his wits. this is a crop it was good for. one memorable addition to the old mythology is due to this era, — the christian fable. with what pains, and tears, and blood, these centuries have woven this and added it to the mythology of man kind. the new prometheus. with what miraculous 62 a week on the concord river. consent, and patience, and persistency, has this mythus been stamped upon the memory of the race? it would seem as if it were in the progress of our mythology to dethrone jehovah, and crown christ in his stead. if it is not a tragical life we live, then i know not what to call it. such a story as that of jesus christ, — the history of jerusalem, say, being a part of the universal history. the naked, the embalmed, un buried death of jerusalem amid its desolate hills, — think of it. in tasso's poem i tnist some things are sweetly buried. consider the snappish tenacity with which they preach christianity still. what are time and space to christianity, eighteen hundred years, and a new world? — that the humble life of a jewish peas ant should have force to make a new york bishop so bigoted. forty-four lamps, the gift of kings, now burning in a place called the holy sepulchre ; — a church bell ringing ; — some unaffected tears shed by a pilgrim on mount calvary within the week. — " jerusalem, jerusalem, when i forget thee, may my right hand forget her cunning." " by the waters of babylon there we sat down, and we wept when we remembered zion." i trust that some may be as near and dear to buddha or christ, or swedenborg, who are without the pale of their churches. it is necessary not to be christian, to appreciate the beauty and significance of the life of christ. i know that some will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their christ named beside my buddha, yet i am sure that i am willing they should love their christ more than my buddha, for the love is the main thing, and i like him too. why need christians be still intolerant and superstitious ? the sunda y. 63 simple minded sailors were unwilling to cast over board jonah at his own request. — " where is this love become in later age? alas ! 't is gone in endless pilgrimage from hence, and never to return, i doubt, till revolution wheel those times about." one man says, — " the world 's a popular disease, that reigns within the froward heart and frantic brains of poor distempered mortals." another that — ' all the world 's a stage, and all the men and women merely players." the world is a strange place for a play-house to stand within it. old drayton thought that a man that hved here, and would be a poet, for instance, should have in him certain ^' brave translunary things," and a ''fine madness" should possess his brain. certainly it were as well, that he might be up to the occasion. that is a superfluous wonder, which dr. johnson expresses at the assertion of sir thomas browne, that "his life has been a miracle of thirty years, which to relate, were not history, but a piece of poetry, and would sound like a fable." the wonder is rather that all men do not assert as much. think what a mean and wretched place this world is ; that half the time we have to light a lamp that we may see to live in it. this is half our life. who would undertake the enterprise if it were all? and, pra}', what more has day to offer? a lamp that burns more clear, a purer oil, say winter-strained, that so we may pursue our idleness with less obstruction. 64 a week on the concord river. bribed with a little sunlight and a few prismatic tints, we bless our maker, and stave off his wrath with hymns. i make ye an offer, ye gods, hear the scoffer, the scheme will not hurt you, if ye will find goodness, i will find virtue. though i am your creature, and child of your nature, i have pride still unbended, and blood undescended. some free independence, and my own descendants. i cannot toil blindly, though ye behave kindly, and i swear by the rood, i '11 be slave to no god. if ye will deal plainly, i will strive mainly, if ye will discover. great plans to your lover, and give him a sphere somewhat larger than here. " verily, my angels ! i was abashed on account of my servant, who had no providence but me; there fore did i pardon him." — the gulistan of sadi. most people with whom i talk, men and women even of some originality and genius, have their scheme of the universe all cut and dried, — very dry, i assure you, to hear, dry enough to burn, dry-rotted and pow der-post, methinks, — which they set up between you and them in the shortest intercourse ; an ancient and tottering frame with all its boards blown off. they do not walk without their bed. some to me seemingly very unimportant and unsubstantial things and rela sunda y. 65 tions, are for them everlastingly settled, — as father, son, and holy ghost, and the like. these are like the everlasting hills to them. but in all my wander ings, i never came across the least vestige of author ity for these things. they have not left so distinct a trace as the delicate flower of a remote geological period on the coal in my grate. the wisest man preaches no doctrines ; he has no scheme ; he sees no rafter, not even a cobweb, against the heavens. it is clear sky. if i ever see more clearly at one time than at another, the medium through which i see is clearer. to see from earth to heaven, and see there standing, still a fixture, that old jewish scheme! what right have you to hold up this obstacle to my understanding you, to your understanding me! you did not invent it ; it was imposed on you. examine your authority. even christ, we fear, had his scheme, his conformity to tradition, which slightly vitiates his teaching. he had not swallowed all formulas. he preached some mere doctrines. as for me, abraham, isaac, and jacob, are now only the subtilest imagi nable essences, which would not stain the morning sky. your scheme must be the framework of the universe ; all other schemes will soon be ruins. the perfect god in his revelations of himself has never got to the length of one such proposition as you, his prophets, state. have you learned the alphabet of heaven, and can count three ? do you know the number of god's family ? can you put mysteries into words ? do you presume to fable of the ineifable? pray, what geog rapher are you, that speak of heaven's topography? whose friend are you that speak of god's personality ? do you, miles howard, think that he has made you his confidant? tell me of the height of the moun 66 a week on the concord river. tains of the moon, or of the diameter of space, and i may believe you, but of the secret history of the al mighty, and i shall pronounce thee mad. yet we have a sort of family history of our god, — so have the tahitians of theirs, — and some old poet's grand imagination is imposed on us as adamantine everlast ing truth, and god's own word ! the new testament is an invaluable book, though i confess to having been slightly prejudiced against it in my very early days by the church and the sabbath school, so that it seemed, before i read it, to be the yellowest book in the catalogue. yet i early escaped from their meshes. it was hard to get the commen taries out of one's head, and taste its true flavor. — i think that pilgrim's progress is the best sermon which has been preached from this text ; almost all other sermons that i have heard or heard of, have been but poor imitations of this. — it would be a poor story to be prejudiced against the life of christ, because the book has been edited by christians. in fact, i love this book rarely, though it is a sort of castle in the air to me, which i am permitted to dream. having come to it so recently and freshly, it has the greater charm, so that i cannot find any to talk with about it. i never read a novel, they have so little real life and thought in them. the reading which i love best is the scriptures of the several nations, though it happens that i am better acquainted with those of the hindoos, the chinese, and the persians, than of the hebrews, which i have come to last. give me one of these bibles, and you have silenced me for a while. when i recover the use of my tongue, i am wont to worry my neighbors with the new sentences, sunda v. 67 but commonly they cannot see that there is any wit in them. such has been my experience with the new testament. i have not yet got to the crucifixion, i have read it over so many times. i should love dearly to read it aloud to my friends, some of whom are seriously inclined ; it is so good, and i am sure that they have never heard it, it fits their case exactly, and we should enjoy it so much together, — but i instinct ively despair of getting their ears. they soon show, by signs not to be mistaken, that it is inexpressibly wearisome to them. i do not mean to imply that i am any better than my neighbors ; for, alas ! i know that i am only as good, though i love better books than they. it is remarkable, that notwithstanding the uni versal favor with which the new testament is out wardly received, and even the bigotry with which it is defended, there is no hospitality shown to, there is no appreciation of, the order of truth with which it deals. i know of no book that has so few readers. there is none so truly strange, and heretical, and unpopular. to christians, no less than greeks and jews, it is foolishness and a stumbling block. there are, indeed, severe things in it which no man should read aloud but once. — "seek first the kingdom of heaven." — "lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth." — "if thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven." — "for what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul ? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? " — think of this, yankees! — "verily i say unto you, if ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain. remove hence to yonder place ; and it shall remove ; and nothing shall be impossible 68 a week on the concord river. unto you." — think of repeating these things to a new england audience! thirdly, fourthly, fifteenthly^ till there are three barrels of sermons ! who, without cant, can read them aloud? who, without cant, can hear them, and not go out of the meeting-house? they never were read, they never were heard. let but one of these sentences be rightly read from any pulpit in the land, and there would not be left one stone of that meeting-house upon another. yet the new testament treats of man and man's so-called spiritual affairs too exclusively, and is too constantly moral and personal, to alone content me, who am not interested solely in man's religious or moral nature, or in man even. i have not the most definite designs on the future. absolutely speaking, do unto others as you would that they should do unto you, is by no means a golden rule, but the best of cur rent silver. an honest man would have but little occasion for it. it is golden not to have any mle at all in such a case. the book has never been written which is to be accepted without any allowance. christ was a sublime actor on the stage of the world. he knew what he was thinking of when he said, " heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away." i draw near to him at such a time. yet he taught mankind but imperfectly how to live ; his thoughts were all directed toward another world. there is another kind of success than his. even here we have a sort of living to get, and must buffet it somewhat longer. there are various tough prob lems yet to solve, and we must make shift to live, betwixt spirit and matter, such a human life as we can. sunda y. 69 a healthy man, with steady employment, as wood chopping at fifty cents a cord, and a camp in the woods, will not be a good subject for christianity. the new testament may be a choice book to him on some, but not on all or most of his days. he will rather go a-fishing in his leisure hours. the apostles, though they were fishers too, were of the solemn race of sea-fishers, and never trolled for pickerel on inland streams. men have a singular desire to be good without being good for anything, because, perchance, they think vaguely that so it will be good for them in the end. the sort of morality which the priest inculcates is a very subtle policy, far finer than the politicians, and the world is very successfully ruled by them as the policemen. it is not worth the while to let our imperfections disturb us always. the con science really does not, and ought not to, monopolize the whole of our lives, any more than the heart or the head. it is as liable to disease as any other part. i have seen some whose consciences, owing undoubtedly to former indulgence, had grown to be as irritable as spoilt children, and at length gave them no peace. they did not know when to swallow their cud, and their lives of course yielded no milk. conscience is instinct bred in the house, feeling and thinking propagate the sin by an unnatural breeding in and in. i say, turn it out doors, into the moors. i love a life whose plot is simple, and does not thicken with every pimple ; a soul so sound no sickly conscience binds it, that makes the universe no worse than 't finds it. i love an earnest soul. 70 a week on the concord river. whose mighty joy and sorrow are not drowned in a bowl, and brought to life to-morrow ; that lives one tragedy, and not seventy ; a conscience worth keeping, laughing not weeping ; a conscience wise and steady, and forever ready ; not changing with events. dealing in compliments ; a conscience exercised about large things, where one 7nay doubt, i love a soul not all of wood, predestinated to be good. but true to the backbone unto itself alone, and false to none ; born to its own affairs, its own joys and own cares ; by whom the work which god begun is finished, and not undone ; taken up where he left off, whether to worship or to scoff; if not good, why then evil, if not good god, good devil. goodness ! — you hypocrite, come out of that, live your life, do your work, then take your hat. i have no patience towards such conscientious cowards. give me simple laboring folk. who love their work. whose virtue is a song to cheer god along. i was once reproved by a minister who was driv ing a poor beast to some meeting-house horse-sheds among the hills of new hampshire, because i was bending my steps to a mountain-top on the sabbath, instead of a church, when i would have gone further sunda y. 71 than he to hear a true word spoken on that or any day. he declared that i was "breaking the lord's fourth commandment," and proceeded to enumerate, in a sepulchral tone, the disasters which had befallen him whenever he had done any ordinary work on the sabbath. he really thought that a god was at work to trip up those men who followed any secular work on this day, and did not see that it was the evil con science of the workers that did it. the country is full of this superstition, so that when one enters a village, the church, not only really but from associa tion, is the ugliest looking building in it, because it is the one in which human nature stoops the lowest and is most disgraced. certainly, such temples as these shall ere long cease to deform the landscape. if i should ask the minister of middlesex to let me speak in his pulpit on a sunday, he would object, because i do not pray as he does, or because i am not ordained. what under the sun are these things ? really, there is no infidelity, now-a-days, so great as that which prays, and keeps the sabbath, and rebuilds the churches. the sealer of the south pacific preaches a truer doctrine. the church is a sort of hospital for men's souls, and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies. those who are taken into it live like pensioners in their retreat or sailor's snug harbor, where you may see a row of religious cripples sitting outside in sunny weather. let not the apprehension that he may one day have to occupy a ward therein, discourage the cheerful labors of the able-souled man. while he remembers the sick in their extremities, let him not look thither as to his goal. one is sick at heart of this pagoda worship. it is like the beating of gongs in a hindoo sub 72 a week on the concord river. terranean temple. in dark places and dungeons the preach er"'s words might perhaps strike root and grow, but not in broad daylight in any part of the world that i know. the sound of the sabbath bell far away, now breaking on these shores, does not awaken pleasing associations, but melancholy and sombre ones rather. one involuntarily rests on his oar, to humor his unusually meditative mood. it is as the sound of many catechisms and religious books twanging a canting peal round the earth, seem ing to issue from some egyptian temple and echo along the shore of the nile, right opposite to pha raoh's palace and moses in the bulrushes, startling a multitude of storks and alligators basking in the sun. everywhere "good men '^ sound a retreat, and the word has gone forth to fall back on innocence. fall forward rather on to whatever there is there. chris tianity only hopes. it has hung its harp on the willows, and cannot sing a song in a strange land. it has dreamed a sad dream, and does not yet wel come the morning with joy. the mother tells her falsehoods to her child, but thank heaven, the child does not grow up in its parent's shadow. our mother's faith has not grown with her experience. her experi ence has been too much for her. the lesson of life was too hard for her to learn. it is remarkable, that almost all speakers and writers feel it to be incumbent on them, sooner or later, to prove or to acknowledge the personality of god. some earl of bridgewater, thinking it better late than never, has provided for it in his will. it is a sad mistake. in reading a work on agriculture, we have to skip the author's moral reflections, and the words " providence " and " he " scattered along the page, sunda v. 73 to come at the profitable level of what he has to say. what he calls his religion is for the most part offen sive to the nostrils. he should know better than expose himself, and keep his foul sores covered till they are quite healed. there is more religion in men's science than there is science in their religion. let us make haste to the report of the committee on swine. a man's real faith is never contained in his creed^ nor is his creed an article of his faith. the last is never adopted. this it is tliat permits him to smile ever, and to live even as bravely as he does. and yet he chngs anxiously to his creed, as to a straw, thinking that that does him good service because his sheet anchor does not drag. in most men's religion, the ligature, which should be its umbilical cord connecting them with divinity, is rather like that thread which the accomphces of cylon held in their hands when they went abroad from the temple of minerva, the other end being attached to the statue of the goddess. but fre quently, as in their case, the thread breaks, being stretched, and they are left without an asylum. " a good and pious man reclined his head on the bosom of contemplation, and was absorbed in the ocean of a revery. at the instant when he awaked from his vision, one of his friends, by way of pleas antry, said : what rare gift have you brought us from that garden, where you have been recreating? he replied ; i fancied to myself and said, when i can reach the rose-bower, i will fill my lap with the flow ers, and bring them as a present to my friends ; but 74 a week on the concord river. cated me, that the skirt dropped from my hands. — ' o bird of dawn ! learn the warmth of aitection from the moth ; for that scorched creature gave up the ghost, and uttered not a groan : these vain pretend ers are ignorant of him they seek after ; for of him that knew him we never heard again : — o thou ! who towerest above the fliglits of conjecture, opinion, and comprehension ; whatever has been reported of thee we have heard and read ; the congregation is dis missed, and life drawn to a close ; and we still rest at our first encomium of thee ! ' " — sadi. by noon we were let down into the merrimack through the locks at middlesex, just above pawtucket falls, by a serene and liberal-minded man, who came quietly from his book, though his duties, we supposed, did not require him to open the locks on sundays. with him we had a just and equal encounter of the eyes, as between two honest men. the movements of the eyes express the perpetual and unconscious courtesy of the parties. it is said, that a rogue does not look you in the face, neither does an honest man look at you as if he had his rep utation to establish. i have seen some who did not know when to turn aside their eyes in meeting yours. a truly confident and magnanimous spirit is wiser than to contend for the mastery in such encounters. serpents alone conquer by the steadiness of their gaze. my friend looks me in the face and sees me, that is all. the best relations were at once established between us and this man, and though few words were spoken, he could not conceal a visible interest in us and our excursion. he was a lover of the higher mathemat sunday. 75 ics, as we found, and in the midst of some vast sunny problem, when we overtook him and whispered our conjectures. by this man we were presented with the freedom of the merrimack. we now felt as if we were fairly launched on the ocean-stream of our voy age, and were pleased to find that our boat would float on merrimack water. we began again busily to put in practice those old arts of rowing, steering, and paddling. it seemed a strange phenomenon to us that the two rivers should mingle their waters so readily, since we had never associated them in our thoughts. as we glided over the broad bosom of the merri mack, between chelmsford and dracut, at noon, here a quarter of a mile wide, the rattling of our oars was echoed over the water to those villages, and their slight sounds to us. their harbors lay as smooth and fairy-like as the lido, or syracuse, or rhodes, in our imagination, while, like some strange roving craft, we flitted past what seemed the dwellings of noble home-staying men, seemingly as conspicuous as if on an eminence, or floating upon a tide which came up to those villagers' breasts. at a third of a mile over the water we heard distinctly some children repeat ing their catechism in a cottage near the shore, while in the broad shallows between, a herd of cows stood lashing their sides, and waging war with the flies. two hundred years ago other catechising than this was going on here ; for here came the sachem wan nalancet, and his people, and sometimes tahatawan, our concord sachem, who afterwards had a church at home, to catch fish at the falls ; and here also came john elhot, with the bible and catechism, and baxter's call to the unconverted, and other tracts, 76 a week on the concord river. done into the massachusetts tongue, and taught them christianity meanwhile. " this place," says gookin, referring to wamesit, " being an ancient and capital seat of indians, they come to fish ; and this good man takes this opportu nity to spread the net of the gospel, to fish for their souls." — "may 5th, 1674," he continues, "according to our usual custom, mr. eliot and myself took our journey to wamesit, or pawtuckett ; and arriving there that evening, mr. eliot preached to as many of them as could be got together, out of matt. xxii. 1-14, the parable of the marriage of the king's son. we met at the wigwam of one called wannalancet, about two miles from the town, near pawtuckett falls, and bordering upon merrimak river. this person, wan nalancet, is the eldest son of old pasaconaway, the chiefest sachem of pawtuckett. he is a sober and grave person, and of years, between fifty and sixty. he hath been always loving and friendly to the eng lish."" as yet, however, they had not prevailed on him to embrace the christian religion. " but at this time," says gookin, "may 6, 1674," — "after some deliberation and serious pause, he stood up, and made a speech to this effect : — 'i must acknowledge i have, all my days, used to pass in an old canoe, (alluding to his frequent custom to pass in a canoe upon the river) and now you exhort me to change and leave my old canoe, and embark in a new canoe, to which i have hitherto been umvilling ; but now i yield up myself to your advice, and enter into a new canoe, and do engage to pray to god hereafter.' " one "mr. richard daniel, a gentleman that lived in billerica," who with other "persons of quality" was present, sunda v. yy "desired brother eliot to tell the sachem from him, that it may be, while he went in his old canoe, he passed in a quiet stream ; but the end thereof was death and destruction to soul and body. but now he went into a new canoe, perhaps he would meet with storms and trials, but yet he should be encouraged to persevere, for the end of his voyage would be ever lasting rest." — "since that time, i hear this sachem doth persevere, and is a constant and diligent hearer of god's word, and sanctifieth the sabbath, though he doth travel to wamesit meeting every sabbath, which is above two miles ; and though sundry of his people have deserted him, since he subjected to the gospel, yet he continues and persists." — gookhi's hist. coll. of the indians iii new england, 1674. already, as appears from the records, "at a general court held at boston in new england, the 7th of the first month, 1643-4." — " wassamequin, nashoonon, kutchamaquin, massaconomet, and squaw sachem, did voluntarily submit themselves " to the english ; and among other things did " promise to be willing from time to time to be instructed in the knowledge of god." being asked " not to do any unnecessary work on the sabbath day, especially within the gates of christian towns," they answered, " it is easy to them ; they have not much to do on any day, and they can well take their rest on that day." — " so," says winthrop, in his journal, " we causing them to understand the articles, and all the ten commandments of god, and they freely assenting to all, they were solemnly received, and then presented the court with twenty-six fathom more of wampom ; and the court gave each of them a coat of two yards of cloth, and their dinner; and to them and their men, every of yd> a week on the concord river. them, a cup of sack at their departure ; and so they took leave and went away." what journeying on foot and on horseback through the wilderness, to preach the gospel to these minks and muskrats! who first, no doubt, listened with their red ears out of a natural hospitality and courtesy, and afterward from curiosity or even interest, till at length there were "praying indians," and, as the general court wrote to cromwell, the " work is brought to this perfection, that some of the indians themselves can pray and prophesy in a comfortable manner." it was in fact an old battle and hunting ground through which we had been floating, the ancient dwelling-place of a race of hunters and warriors. their weirs of stone, their arrowheads and hatchets, their pestles, and the mortars in which they pounded indian corn before the white man had tasted it, lay concealed in the mud of the river bottom. tradition still points out the spots where they took fish in the greatest numbers, by such arts as they possessed. it is a rapid story the historian will have to put to gether. miantonimo, — winthrop, — webster. soon he comes from mount hope to bunker hill, from bear-skins, parched corn, bows and arrows, to tiled roofs, wheat fields, guns and swords. pawtucket and wamesit, where the indians resorted in the fishing season, are now lowell, the city of spindles and man chester of america, which sends its cotton cloth round the globe. even we youthful voyagers had spent a part of our lives in the village of chelmsford, when the present city, whose bells we heard, was its obscure north district only, and the giant weaver was not yet fairly born. so old are we ; so young is it. sunda v. 79 we were thus entering the state of new hamp shire on the bosom of the flood formed by the tribute of its innumerable valleys. the river was the only key which could unlock its maze, presenting its hills and valleys, its lakes and streams, in their natural order and position. the merrimack, or sturgeon river, is formed by the confluence of the pemigewasset, which rises near the notch of the white mountains, and the winnepisiogee, which drains the lake of the same name, signifying "the smile of the great spirit." from their junction it nms south seventy eight miles to massachusetts, and thence east thirty five miles to the sea. i have traced its stream from where it bubbles out of the rocks of the white moun tains above the clouds, to where it is lost amid the salt billows of the ocean on plum island beach. at first it comes on murmuring to itself by the base of stately and retired mountains, through moist primitive woods whose juices it receives, where the bear still drinks it, and the cabins of settlers are far between, and there are few to cross its stream ; enjoying in solitude its cascades still unknown to fame ; by long ranges of mountains of sandwich and of squam, slumbering like tumuli of titans, with the peaks of moosehillock, the haystack, and kearsarge reflected in its waters ; where the maple and the raspberry, those lovers of the hills, flourish amid temperate dews; — flowing long and full of meaning, but un translatable as its name pemigewasset, by many a pastured pelion and ossa, where unnamed muses haunt, tended by oreads, dryads, naiads, and receiv ing the tribute of many an untasted hippocrene. there are earth, air, fire, and water, — very well, this is water, and down it comes. 8o a week on the concord river. such water do the gods distil, and pour down every hill for their new england men ; a draught of this wild nectar bring, and i '11 not taste the spring of helicon again. falling all the way, and yet not discouraged by the lowest fall. by the law of its birth never to become stagnant, for it has come out of the clouds, and down the sides of precipices worn in the flood, through beaver dams broke loose, not splitting but splicing and mending itself, until it found a breathing place in this low land. there is no danger now that the sun will steal it back to heaven again before it reach the sea, for it has a warrant even to recover its own dews into its bosom again with interest at every eve. it was already the water of squam and newfound lake and winnepisiogee, and white mountain snow dissolved, on which we were floating, and smith's and baker's and mad rivers, and nashua and souhe gan and piscataquoag, and suncook and soucook and contoocook, mingled in incalculable proportions, still fluid, yellowish, restless all, with an ancient, ineradi cable inclination to the sea. so it flows on down by lowell and haverhill, at which last place it first suffers a sea change, and a few masts betray the vicinity of the ocean. between the towns of amesbury and newbury it is a broad com mercial river, from a third to half a mile in width, no longer skirted with yellow and crumbling banks, but backed by high green hills and pastures, with frequent white beaches on which the fishermen draw up their nets. i have passed down this portion of the river in a steam-boat, and it was a pleasant sight to watch sunday, 8 1 from its deck the fishermen dragging their seines on the distant shore, as in pictures of a foreign strand. at intervals you may meet with a schooner laden with lumber, standing up to haverhill, or else lying at anchor or aground, waiting for wind or tide ; until, at last, you glide under the famous chain bridge, and are landed at newburyport. thus she who at first was ^'poore of waters, naked of renowne," having received so many fair tributaries, as was said of the forth, " doth grow the greater still, the further downe ; till that abounding both in power and fame, she long doth strive to give the sea her name ; " or if not her name, in this case, at least the impulse of her stream. from the steeples of newburyport, you may review this river stretching far up into the country, with many a white sail glancing over it like an inland sea, and behold, as one wrote who was born on its head-waters, " down out at its mouth, the dark inky main blending with the blue above. plum island, its sand ridges scolloping along the horizon like the sea serpent, and the distant outline broken by many a tall ship, leaning, still, against the sky." rising at an equal height with the connecticut, the merrimack reaches the sea by a course only half as long, and hence has no leisure to form broad and fertile meadows like the former, but is huriied along rapids, and down numerous falls without long delay. the banks are generally steep and high, with a narrow interval reaching back to the hills, which is only oc casionally and partially overflown at present, and is much valued by the farmers. between chelmsford and concord in new hampshire, it varies from twenty 82 a week on the concord river. to seventy-five rods in width. it is probably wider than it was formerly, in many places, owing to the trees having been cut down, and the consequent wasting away of its banks. the influence of the pawtucket dam is felt as far up as cromwelps falls, and many think that the banks are being abraded and the river filled up again by this cause. like all our rivers, it is liable to freshets, and the pemigewasset has been known to rise twenty-five feet in a few hours. it is navigable for vessels of burden about twenty miles, for canal boats by means of locks as far as concord in new hampshire, about seventy-five miles from its mouth, and for smaller boats to plymouth, one hundred and thirteen miles. a small steam-boat once plied between lowell and nashua, before the railroad was built, and one now runs from newbury port to haverhill. unfitted to some extent for the purposes of com merce by the sand-bar at its mouth, see how this river was devoted from the first to the service of manu factures. issuing from the iron region of franconia, and flowing through still uncut forests, by inexhausti ble ledges of granite, with squam, and winnepisiogee, and newfound, and massabesic lakes for its mill ponds, it falls over a succession of natural dams, where it has been offering its privileges in vain for ages, until at last the yankee race came to ifuprove them. standing here at its mouth, look up its sparkling stream to its source, — a silver cascade which falls all the way from the white mountains to the sea, — and behold a city on each successive plateau, a busy col ony of human beaver around every fall. not to men tion newburyport and haverhill, see lawrence, and lowell, and nashua, and manchester, and concord, sunda v. 83 gleaming one above the other. when at length it has escaped from under the last of the factories it has a level and unmolested passage to the sea, a mere was/e ivater, as it were, bearing little with it but its fame; its pleasant course revealed by the morning fog which hangs over it, and the sails of the few small vessels which transact the commerce of haverhill and newburyport. but its real vessels are railroad cars, and its true and main stream, flowing by an iron chan nel further south, may be traced by a long line of vapor amid the hills, which no morning wind ever disperses, to where it empties into the sea at boston. this side is the louder murmur now. instead of the scream of a fish-hawk scaring the fishes, is heard the whistle of the steam-engine, arousing a country to its progress. this river too was at length discovered by the white man, " trending up into the land," he knew not how far, possibly an inlet to the south sea. its valley, as far as the winnepisiogee, was first surveyed in 1652. the first settlers of massachusetts supposed that the connecticut, in one part of its course, ran north-west, "so near the great lake as the indians do pass their canoes into it over land. " from which lake and the " hideous swamps " about it, as they sup posed, came all the beaver that was traded between virginia and canada, — and the potomac was thought to come out of or from very near it. afterward the connecticut came so near the course of the merri mack, that with a little pains they expected to divert the current of the trade into the latter river, and its profits from their dutch neighbors into their own pockets. 84 a week on the concord river. unlike the concord, the merrimack is not a dead but a living stream, though it has less life within its waters and on its banks. it has a swift current, and, in this part of its course, a clayey bottom, almost no weeds, and, comparatively, few fishes. we looked down into its yellow water with the more curiosity, who were accustomed to the nile-like blackness of the former river. shad and alewives are taken here in their season, but salmon, though at one time more numerous than shad, are now more rare. bass, also^ are taken occasionally; but locks and dams have proved more or less destructive to the fisheries. the shad make their appearance early in may, at the same time with the blossoms of the pyrus, one of the most conspicuous early flowers, which is for this reason called the shad-blossom. an insect, called the shad fly, also appears at the same time, covering the houses and fences. we are told that "their greatest run is when the apple trees are in full blossom. the old shad return in august ; the young, three or four inches long, in september. these are very fond of fl.ies." a rather picturesque and luxurious mode of fishing was formerly practised on the connecticut, at bellows falls, where a large rock divides the stream. '■'• on the steep sides of the island rock," says belknap, " hang several arm chairs, fastened to ladders, and secured by a counterpoise, in which fishermen sit to catch salmon and shad with dipping nets." the remains of indian weirs, made of large stones, are still to be seen in the winnepisiogee, one of the head-waters of this river. it cannot but affect our philosophy favorably to be reminded of these shoals of migratory fishes, of salmon, shad, alewives, marsh-bankers, and others, sunday. 85 which penetrate up the innumerable rivers of our coast in the spring, even to the interior lakes, their scales gleaming in the sun; and again, of the fry, which in still greater numbers wend their way downward to the sea. <• and is it not pretty sport," wrote capt. john smith, who was on this coast as eariy as 1614, " to pull up twopence, sixpence, and twelvepence, as fast as you can haul and veer a line ? " — " and what sport doth yield a more pleasing content, and less hurt or charge, than angling with a hook, and cross ing the sweet air from isle to isle, over the silent streams of a calm sea." on the sandy shore, opposite the glass-house vil lage in chelmsford, at the great bend, where we landed to rest us and gather a few wild plums, we discovered the ca7npanula rotwidifolia, a new flower to us, the harebell of the poets, which is common to both hemispheres, growing close to the water. here, in the shady branches of an apple tree on the sand^ we took our nooning, where there was not a zephyr to disturb the repose of this glorious sabbath day, and we reflected serenely on the long past and suc cessful labors of latona. " so silent is the cessile air, that every cry and call, the hills and dales, and forest fair. again repeats them all. "the herds beneath some leafy trees, amidst the flowers they lie, the stable ships upon the seas tend up their sails to dry," as we thus rested in the shade, or rowed leisurely along, we had recourse, from time to time, to the 86 a week on the concord river. gazetteer, which was our navigator, and from its bald natural facts extracted the pleasure of poetry. beaver river comes in a little lower down, draining the meadows ofpelham, windham, and londonderry. the scotch-irish settlers of the latter town, according to this authority, were the first to introduce the potato into new england, as well as the manufacture of linen cloth. everything that is printed and bound in a book contains softie echo at least of the best that is in literature. indeed, the best books have a use like sticks and stones, which is above or beside their design, not anticipated in the preface, nor concluded in the appendix. even virgil's poetry serves a very different use to me to-day from what it did to his contemporaries. it has often an acquired and acci dental value merely, proving that man is still man in the world. it is pleasant to meet with such still lines as, " jam laeto turgent in palmite gemmae ; " now the buds swell on the joyful stem ; or " strata jacent passim sua quaeque sub arbore poma." the apples lie scattered everywhere, each under its tree. in an ancient and dead language, any recognition of living nature attracts us. these are such sentences as were written while grass grew and water ran. it is no small recommendation when a book will stand the test of mere unobstructed sunshine and daylight. what would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery, — for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. no history nor philosophy can supply their place. sunda y. sy the wisest definition of poetry the poet will instantly prove false by setting aside its requisitions. we can, therefore, publish only our advertisement of it. there is no doubt that the loftiest written wisdom is either rhymed, or in some way musically measured, — is, in form as well as substance, poetry ; and a volume which should contain the condensed wisdom of mankind, need not have one rhythmless line. yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. as naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. it is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds. what else have the hindoos, the persians, the baby lonians, the egyptians done, that can be told ? it is the simplest relation of phenomena, and describes the commonest sensations with more truth than science does, and the latter at a distance slowly mimics its style and methods. the poet sings how the blood flows in his veins. he performs his functions, and is so well that he needs such stimulus to sing only as plants to put forth leaves and blossoms. he would strive in vain to modulate the remote and transient music which he sometimes hears, since his song is a vital function like breathing, and an integral result like weight. it is not the overflowing of life but of its subsidence rather, and is drawn from under the feet of the poet. it is enough if homer but say the sun sets. he is as serene as nature, and we can hardly detect the enthusiasm of the bard. it is as if nature spoke. he presents to us the simplest pictures of human life, so that childhood itself can understand them, and the man must not think twice to appreciate his naturalness. each reader discovers ss a week on the concord river. for himself, that, with respect to the simpler features of nature, succeeding poets have done little else than copy his similes. his more memorable passages are as naturally bright, as gleams of sunshine in misty weather. nature furnishes him not only with words, but with stereotyped lines and sentences from her mint. "as from the clouds appears the full moon, all shining, and then again it goes behind the shadowy clouds, so hector, at one time appeared among the foremost, and at another in the rear, commanding ; and all with brass he shone, hke to the lightning of aegis-bearing zeus." he conveys the least information, even the hour of the day, with such magnificence and vast expense of natural imagery, as if it were a message from the gods. " while it was dawn, and sacred day was advancing. for that space the weapons of both flew fast, and the people fell; but when now the woodcutter was preparing his morning meal, in the recesses of the mountain, and had wearied his hands with cutting lofty trees, and satiety came to his mind. and the desire of sweet food took possession of his thoughts ; then the danaans, by their valor, broke the phalanxes. shouting to their companions from rank to rank." when the army of the trojans passed the night under arms, keeping watch lest the enemy should re-embark under cover of the dark, " they, thinking great things, upon the neutral ground of war sat all the night ; and many fires burned for them. as when in the heavens the stars round the bright moon appear beautiful, and the air is without wind ; and all the heights, and the extreme summits. and the wooded sides of the mountains appear ; and from the heavens an infinite ether is diffused, sunda y. 89 and all the stars are seen ; and the shepherd rejoices in his heart ; so between the ships and the streams of xanthus appeared the fires of the trojans before ilium, a thousand fires burned on the plain ; and by each sat fifty, in the light of the blazing fire ; and horses eating white barley and corn, standing by the chariots, awaited fair-throned aurora." the "white-armed goddess juno," sent by the father of gods and men for iris and apollo, " went down the idsean mountains to far olympus, as when the mind of a man, who has come over much earth, sallies forth, and he reflects with rapid thoughts, there was i, and there, and remembers many things; so swiftly the august juno hastening flew through the air, and came to high olympus." his scenery is always true, and not invented. he does not leap in imagination from asia to greece, through mid air, irrelt] /xd\a ttowo, fxera^v ovped re crklo^vra, daxdacra re rjxve<t(7a. for there are very many shady mountains and resounding seas between. if his messengers repair but to the tent of achilles, we do not wonder how they got there, but accompany them step by step along the shore of the resounding sea. nestor's account of the march of the pylians against the epeians is extremely lifelike. — " then rose up to them sweet-worded nestor, the shrill orator of the pylians, and words sweeter than honey flowed from his tongue." this time, however, he addresses patroclus alone. — "a certain river, minyas by name, leaps seaward 90 a week on the concord river. near to arene, where we pylians wait the dawn, both horse and foot. thence with all haste we sped as on the morrow ere 't was noon-day, accoutred for the fight, even to alpheus' sacred source, &c." we fancy that we hear the subdued murmuring of the minyas dis charging its waters into the main the live-long night, and the hollow sound of the waves breaking on the shore, — until at length we are cheered at the close of a toilsome march by the gurgling fountains of alpheus. there are few books which are fit to be remembered in our wisest hours, but the iliad is brightest in the serenest days, and embodies still all the sunlight that fell on asia minor. no modern joy or ecstasy of ours can lower its height, or dim its lustre, but there it lies in the east of literature, as it were the earliest and latest production of the mind. the ruins of egypt oppress and stifle us with their dust, foulness pre served in cassia and pitch, and swathed in linen ; the death of that which never lived. but the rays of greek poetry struggle down to us, and mingle with the sunbeams of the recent day. the statue of memnon is cast down, but the shaft of the iliad still meets the sun in his rising. — " homer is gone ; and where is jove ? and where the rival cities seven ? his song outlives time, tower, and god, — all that then was save heaven." so too, no doubt. homer had his homer, and orpheus his orpheus, in the dim antiquity which preceded them. the mythological system of the ancients, and it is still the mythology of the moderns, the poem of mankind, interwoven so wonderfully with their astronomy, and matching in grandeur and har sunday. 91 mony the architecture of the heavens themselves, seems to point to a time when a mightier genius in habited the earth. but after all, man is the great poet, and not homer or shakspeare ; and our lan guage itself, and the common arts of life are his work. poetry is so universally tme and independent of experience, that it does not need any particular biography to illustrate it, but we refer it sooner or later to some orpheus or linus, and after ages to the genius of humanity, and the gods themselves. it would be worth the while to select our reading, for books are the society we keep ; to read only the serenely true ; never statistics, nor fiction, nor news, nor reports, nor periodicals, but only great poems, and when they failed, read them again, or perchance write more. instead of other sacrifice, we might offer up our perfect (rea-eta) thoughts to the gods daily, in hymns or psalms. for we should be at the helm at least once a day. the whole of the day should not be day-time ; there should be one hour, if no more, which the day did not bring forth. scholars are wont to sell their birthright for a mess of learning. but is it necessary to know what the speculator prints, or the thoughtless study, or the idle read, the literature of the russians and the chinese, or even french phi losophy and much of german criticism. read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all. "there are the worshippers with offer ings, and the worshippers with mortifications ; and again the worshippers with enthusiastic devotion ; so there are those, the wisdom of whose reading is their worship, men of subdued passions, and severe man ners : — this world is not for him who doth not 92 a week on the concord river. worship ; and where, o arjoon, is there another ? " certainly, we do not need to be soothed and enter tained always like children. he who resorts to the easy novel, because he is languid, does no better than if he took a nap. the front aspect of great thoughts can only be enjoyed by those who stand on the side whence they arrive. books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring ; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institutions, — such call i good books. all that are printed and bound are not books ; they do not necessarily belong to letters, but are oftener to be ranked with the other luxuries and appendages of civilized life. base wares are palmed off under a thou sand disguises. " the way to trade," as a pedler once told me, " is to put it right t/iroiigh,'''' no matter what it is, anything that is agreed on. — " you grov'ling worldlings, you whose wisdom trades where light ne'er shot his golden ray." by dint of able writing and pen-craft, books are cun ningly compiled, and have their run and success even among the learned, as if they were the result of a new man's thinking, and their birth were attended with some natural throes. but in a little while their covers fall off, for no binding will avail, and it appears that they are not books or bibles at all. there are new and patented inventions in this shape, purporting to be for the elevation of the race, which many a pure scholar and genius who has learned to read is for a moment deceived by, and finds himself reading a horse-rake, or spinning jenny, or wooden nutmeg, sunda y. 93 or oak-leaf cigar, or steam-power press, or kitchen range, perchance, when he was seeking serene and biblical truths. — " merchants, arise, and mingle conscience with your merchandise." paper is cheap, and authors need not now erase one book before they write another. instead of cultivat ing the earth for wheat and potatoes, they cultivate literature, and fill a place in the republic of letters. or they would fain write for fame merely, as others actually raise crops of grain to be distilled into brandy. books are for the most part wilfully and hastily written, as parts of a system, to supply a want real or imagined! books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of god's property, by some clerk. they do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to con duct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.— " to athens gown'd he goes, and from that school returns unsped, a more instructed fool." they teach the elements really of ignorance, not of knowledge, for to speak deliberately and in view of the highest truths, it is not easy to distinguish elementary knowledge. there is a chasm between knowledge and ignorance which the arches of science can never span. a book should contain pure dis coveries, glimpses of terra firma, though by ship wrecked mariners, and not the art of navigation by those who have never been out of sight of land. they must not yield wheat and potatoes, but must 94 a week on the co at cord river. themselves be the unconstrained and natural harvest of their author's lives. — " what i have learned is mine ; i 've had my thought, and me the muses noble truths have taught." we do not learn much from learned books, but from true, sincere, human books, from frank and honest biographies. the life of a good man will hardly improve us more than the life of a freebooter, for the inevitable laws appear as plainly in the infringe ment as in the observance, and our lives are sustained by a nearly equal expense of virtue of some kind. the decaying tree, while yet it lives, demands sun, wind, and rain no less than the green one. it secretes sap and performs the functions of health. if we choose, we may study the alburnum only. the gnarled stump has as tender a bud as the sapling. at least let us have healthy books, a stout horse rake or a kitchen range which is not cracked. let not the poet shed tears only for the public weal. he should be as vigorous as a sugar maple, with sap enough to maintain his own verdure, beside what runs into the troughs, and not like a vine, which being cut in the spring bears no fruit, but bleeds to death in the endeavor to heal its wounds. the poet is he that hath fat enough, like bears and marmots, to suck his claws all winter. he hibernates in this world, and feeds on his own marrow. it is pleasant to think in winter, as we walk over the snowy pastures, of those happy dreamers that lie under the sod, of dormice and all that race of dormant creatures, which have such a superfluity of life enveloped in thick folds of fur, impervious to cold. alas, the poet too is, in one sense, a sort of dormouse gone into winter quarters sunda y. 95 of deep and serene thoughts, insensible to surround ing circumstances ; his words are the relation of his oldest and finest memory, a wisdom drawn from the remotest experience. other men lead. a starved ex istence, meanwhile, like hawks, that would fain keep on the wing, and trust to pick up a sparrow now and then. there are already essays and poems, the growth of this land, which are not in vain, all which, how ever, we could conveniently have stowed in the till of our chest. if the gods permitted their own in spiration to be breathed in vain, these might be over looked in the crowd, but the accents of truth are as sure to be heard at last on earth as in heaven. they already seem ancient, and in some measure have lost the traces of their modern birth. here are they who " ask for that which is our whole life's light, for the perpetual, true, and clear insight." i remember a few sentences which spring like the sward in its native pasture, where its roots were never disturbed, and not as if spread over a sandy embank ment ; answering to the poet's prayer, " let us set so just a rate on knowledge, that the world may trust the poet's sentence, and not still aver each art is to itself a flatterer." but, above all, in our native port, did we not frequent the peaceful games of the lyceum, from which a new era will be dated to new england, as from the games of greece. for if herodotus carried his history to 96 a week on the concord river. olympia to read, after the cestus and the race, have we not heard such histories recited there, which since our countrymen have read, as made greece sometimes to be forgotten? — philosophy, too, has there her grove and portico, not wholly unfrequented in these days. lately the victor, whom all pindars praised, has won another palm, contending with " olympian bards who sung divine ideas below, which always find us young, and always keep us so. " — what earth or sea, mountain or stream, or muses' spring or grove, is safe from his all-searching ardent eye, who drives off phoebus' beaten track, visits un wonted zones, makes the gelid hyperboreans glow, and the old polar serpent writhe, and many a nile flow back and hide his head ! — that phaeton of our day, who 'd make another milky way, and burn the world up with his ray ; by us an undisputed seer, — who 'd drive his flaming car so near unto our shuddering mortal sphere, disgracing all our slender worth, and scorching up the living earth, to prove his heavenly birth. the silver spokes, the golden tire, are glowing with imwonted fire. and ever nigher roll and nigher ; the pins and axle melted are. the silver radii fly afar. ah, he will spoil his father's car! sunda v. 97 who let him have the steeds he cannot steer? henceforth the sun will not shine for a year. and we shall ethiops all appear. from /lis " lips of cunning fell the thrilling delphic oracle." and yet, sometimes, we should not mind if on our ear there fell some less of cunning, more of oracle. it is apollo shining in your face. o rare contempo rary, let us have far off heats. give us the subtler, the heavenlier though fleeting beauty, which passes through and through, and dwells not in the verse ; even pure water, which but reflects those tints which wine wears in its grain. let epic trade-winds blow, and cease this waltz of inspirations. let us oftener feel even the gentle south-west wind upon our cheeks blowing from the indian's heaven. what though we lose a thousand meteors from the sky, if skyey depths, if star-dust and undissolvable nebulse remain ? what though we lose a thousand wise responses of the oracle, if we may have instead some natural acres of ionian earth? though we know well, " that 't is not in the power of kings [or presidents] to raise a spirit for verse that is not born thereto, nor are they born in every prince's days ; " yet spite of all they sang in praise of their " eliza's reign," we have evidence that poets may be born and sing in 02^r day, in the presidency of james k. polk, "and that the utmost powers of english rhyme," were not " within /ler peaceful reign confined." 98 a week on the concord river. the prophecy of samuel daniel is already how much more than fulfilled ! "and who in time knows whither we may vent the treasure of our tongue ? to what strange shores this gain of our best glory shall be sent, t' enrich unknowing nations with our stores ? what worlds in th' yet unformed occident, may come refined with the accents that are ours." enough has been said in these days of the charm of fluent writing. we hear it complained of some works of genius, that they have fine thoughts, but are irregular and have no flow. but even the mountain peaks in the horizon are, to the eye of science, parts of one range. we should consider that the flow of thought is more like a tidal wave than a prone river, and is the result of a celestial influence, not of any declivity in its channel. the river flows because it runs down hill, and descends the faster as it flows more rapidly. the reader who expects to float down stream for the whole voyage, may well complain of nauseating swells and choppings of the sea when his frail shore-craft gets amidst the billows of the ocean stream, which flows as much to sun and moon as lesser streams to it. but if we would appreciate the flow that is in these books, we must expect to feel it rise from the page like an exhalation, and wash away our critical brains like burr millstones, flowing to higher levels above and behind ourselves. there is many a book which ripples on like a freshet, and flows as glibly as a mill stream sucking under a causeway ; and when their authors are in the full tide of their discourse, pythagoras, and plato, and jamblichus, halt beside them. their long stringy slimy sentences are of that consistency that they naturally flow and sunda v. 99 run together. they read as if written for military men, for men of business, there is such a despatch in them. compared with these, the grave thinkers and philosophers seem not to have got their swaddling clothes off; they are slower than a roman army in its march, the rear camping to-night where the van camped last night. the wise jamblichus eddies and gleams like a watery slough. " how many thousand, never heard the name of sidney, or of spenser, or their books? and yet brave fellows, and presume of fame. and seem to bear down all the world with looks." the ready writer seizes the pen, and shouts, fonvard ! alamo and fanning! and after rolls the tide of war. the very walls and fences seem to travel. but the most rapid trot is no flow after all, — and thither you and i, at least, reader, will not follow. a perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. for the most part we miss the hue and fra grance of the thought ; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure. the most attractive sentences are, perhaps, not the wisest, but the surest and roundest. they are spoken firmly and conclusively, as if the speaker had a right to know what he says, and if not wise, they have at least been well learned. sir walter raleigh might well be studied if only for the excellence of his style, for he is remarkable in the midst of so many masters. there is a natural emphasis in his style, like a man's tread, and a breathing space between the sentences, which the best of modern writing does not furnish. his chapters are like english parks, or say rather like lofc. 100 a week on the concord river. a western forest, where the larger growth keeps down the underwood, and one may ride on horseback through the openings. all the distinguished writers of that period, possess a greater vigor and natural ness than the more modern, — for it is allowed to slander our own time, — and when we read a quo tation from one of them in the midst of a modern author, we seem to have come suddenly upon a greener ground, a greater depth and strength of soil. it is as if a green bough were laid across the page, and we are refreshed as by the sight of fresh grass in mid-winter or early spring. you have constantly the warrant of life and experience in what you read. the little that is said is eked out by implication of the much that was done. the sentences are verdur ous and blooming as evergreen and flowers, because they are rooted in fact and experience, but our false and florid sentences have only the tints of flowers without their sap or roots. all men are really most attracted by the beauty of plain speech, and they even write in a florid style in imitation of this. they pre fer to be misunderstood rather than to come short of its exuberance. hussein effendi praised the episto lary style of ibrahim pasha to the french traveller botta, because of '• the difficulty of understanding it ; there was," he saidj "but one person at jidda, who was capable of understanding and explaining the pasha's correspondence." a man's whole life is taxed for the least thing well done. it is its net result. every sentence is the result of a long probation. where shall we look for standard english, but to the words of a standard man ? the word which is best said came nearest to not being spoken at all, for it is cousin to a deed which the speaker could have better sunda v. loi done. nay, almost it must have taken the place of a deed by some urgent necessity, even by some misfor tune, so that the truest writer will be some captive knight, after all. and perhaps the fates had such a design, when, having stored raleigh so richly with the substance of life and experience, they made him a fast prisoner, and compelled him to make his words his deeds, and transfer to his expression the emphasis and sincerity of his action. men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve. we are amused to read how ben jonson en gaged, that the dull masks with which the royal fam ily and nobility were to be entertained, should be " grounded upon antiquity and solid learning.'' can there be any greater reproach than an idle learning? learn to split wood, at least. the necessity of labor and conversation with many men and things, to the scholar is rarely well remembered ; steady labor with the hands, which engrosses the attention also, is un questionably the best method of removing palaver and sentimentality out of one's style, both of speak ing and writing. if he has worked hard from morn ing till night, though he may have grieved that he could not be watching the train of his thoughts during that time, yet the few hasty lines which at evening record his day's experience will be more musical and true than his freest but idle fancy could have furnished. surely the writer is to address a world of laborers, and such therefore must be his own discipline. he will not idly dance at his work who has wood to cut and cord before night-fall in the short days of winter ; but every stroke will be husbanded, and ring soberly through the wood ; and so will the strokes of that 102 a week on the concord river. scholar's pen, which at evening record the story of the day, ring soberly, yet cheerily, on the ear of the reader, long after the echoes of his axe have died away. the scholar may be sure that he writes the tougher truth for the calluses on his palms. they give firmness to the sentence. indeed, the mind never makes a great and successful effort without a corresponding energy of the body. we are often struck by the force and precision of style to which hard-working men, unpractised in writing, easily at tain, when required to make the effort. as if plain ness, and vigor, and sincerity, the ornaments of style, were better learned on the farm and in the workshop than in the schools. the sentences written by such rude hands are nervous and tough, like hardened thongs, the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine. as for the graces of expression, a great thought is never found in a mean dress ; but though it proceed from the lips of the woloffs, the nine muses and the three graces will have conspired to clothe it in fit phrase. its education has always been liberal, and its implied wit can endow a college. the scholar might frequently emulate the propriety and emphasis of the farmer's call to his team, and confess that if that were written it would surpass his labored sentences. whose are the truly labored sentences? from the weak and flimsy periods of the politician and literary man, we are glad to turn even to the de scription of work, the simple record of the month's labor in the farmer's almanac, to restore our tone and spirits. a sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plow instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end. the scholar requires hard and serious labor to give an impetus to sunday. 103 his thought. he will learn to grasp the pen firmly so, and wield it gracefully and effectively, as an axe or a sword. when we consider the weak and nerve less periods of some literary men, who perchance in feet and inches come up to the standard of their race, and are not deficient in girth also, we are amazed at the immense sacrifice of thews and sinews. what! these proportions, — these bones, — and this their work! hands which could have felled an ox have hewed this fragile matter which would not have tasked a lady's fingers! can this be a stalwart man's work, who has a marrow in his back and a tendon achilles in his heel.? they who set up the blocks of stone henge did somewhat, if they only laid out their strength for once, and stretched themselves. yet, after all, the truly efficient laborer will not crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure, and then do but what he loves best. he is anxious only about the fruitful kernels of time. though the hen should sit all day, she could lay only one ^gg, and, besides, would not have picked up materials for an other. let a man take time enough for the most trivial deed, though it be but the paring of his nails. the buds swell imperceptibly, without hurry or con fusion, as if the short spring days were an eternity. — then spend an age in whetting thy desire, thou need'st not hasten if thou dost stand fast. some hours seem not to be occasion for any deed, but for resolves to draw breath in. we do not directly go about the execution of the purpose that thrills us, but shut our doors behind us, and ramble with prepared mind, as if the half were already done. 104 a week on the concord river. our resolution is taking root or hold on the earth then, as seeds first send a shoot downward which is fed by their own albumen, ere they send one upward to the light. there is a sort of homely truth and naturalness in some books which is very rare to find, and yet looks cheap enough. there may be nothing lofty in the sentiment, or fine in the expression, but it is careless country talk. homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. it is next to beauty, and a very high art. some have this merit only. the scholar is not apt to make his most familiar experience come gracefully to the aid of his expression. very few men can speak of nature, for instance, with any truth. they overstep her modesty, somehow or other, and confer no favor. they do not speak a good word for her. most cry better than they speak, and you can get more nature out of them by pinching than by address ing them. the surliness with which the wood chopper speaks of his woods, handling them as indif ferently as his axe, is better than the mealy-mouthed enthusiasm of the lover of nature. better that the primrose by the river's brim be a yellow primrose, and nothing more, than that it be something less. aubrey relates of thomas fuller that his was " a very work ing head, insomuch that, walking and meditating before dinner, he would eat up a penny loaf, not knowing that he did it. his natural memory was very great, to which he added the art of memory. he would repeat to you forwards and backwards all the signs from ludgate to charing-cross." he says of mr. john hales, that ^' he loved canarie," and sunda y. 105 was buried " under an altar monument of black mar ble with a too long epitaph ; " of edmund halley, that he, "■ at sixteen could make a dial, and then, he said, he thought himself a brave fellow ; " of william holder, who wrote a book upon his curing one popham who was deaf and dumb, '' he was be holding to no author; did only consult with nature." for the most part, an author consults only with all who have written before him upon a subject, and his book is but the advice of so many. but a good book will never have been forestalled, but the topic itself will in one sense be new, and its author, by consult ing with nature, will consult not only with those who have gone before, but with those who may come after. there is always room and occasion enough for a true book on any subject ; as there is room for more light the brightest day and more rays will not interfere with the first. we thus worked our way up this river, gradually adjusting our thoughts to novelties, beholding from its placid bosom a new nature and new works of men, and as it were with increasing confidence, finding nature still habitable, genial, and propitious to us ; not following any beaten path, but the windings of the river, as ever the nearest way for us. fortunately we had no business in this country. the concord had rarely been a river or riviis, but barely ^//t^/z/j-, or be t\vqq.nfl2ivi7is and lac2is. this merrimack was neither rhnis nor fluviiis nor laais, but rather aimiis here, a gently swelling and stately rolling flood approaching the sea. we could even sympathize with its buoy ant tide, going to seek its fortune in the ocean, and anticipating the time when "being received within i06 a week on the concord river. the plain of its freer water," it should " beat the shores for banks/' — " campoque recepta liberioris aquae, pro ripis litora pulsant." at length we doubled a low shrubby islet, called rab bit island, subjected alternately to the sun and to the waves, as desolate as if it lay some leagues within the icy sea, and found ourselves in a narrower part of the river, near the sheds and yards for picking the stone known as the chelmsford granite, which is quarried in chelmsford and the neighboring towns. we passed wicasuck island, which contains seventy acres or more, on our right between chelmsford and tyngsboro\ this was a favorite residence of the indians. according to the history of dunstable, "about 1663, the eldest son of passaconaway [chief of the penacooks] was thrown into jail for a debt of £/^c„ due to john tinker, by one of his tribe, and which he had promised verbally should be paid. to relieve him from his imprisonment, his brother wan nalancet and others, who owned wicasuck island, sold it and paid the debt." it was, however, restored to the indians by the general court in 1665. after the departure of the indians in 1683, it was granted to jonathan tyng in payment for his services to the colony, in maintaining a garrison at his house. tyng's house stood not far from wicasuck falls. gookin, who, in his epistle dedicatory to robert boyle, apologizes for presenting his " matter clothed in a wilderness dress," says that on the breaking out of philip's war in 1675, there were taken up by the christian indians and the english in marlborough, and sent to cambridge, seven "indians belonging to narragansett, long island, and pequod, who had all sunda y. 107 been at work about seven weeks with one mr. jona than tyng, of dunstable, upon merrimack river ; and hearing of the war, they reckoned with their master, and getting their wages, conveyed themselves away without his privity, and being afraid, marched secretly through the woods, designing to go to their own country." however, they were released soon after. such were the hired men in those days. tyng was the first permanent settler of dunstable, which then embraced what is now tyngsboro^ and many other towns. in the winter of 1675, in philip's war, every other settler left the town, but " he," says the historian of dunstable, " fortified his house ; and although ' obliged to send to boston for his food,' sat himself down in the midst of his savage enemies, alone, in the wilderness, to defend his home. deeming his position an important one for the defence of the frontiers, in feb. 1676, he petitioned the colony for aid," humbly showing, as his petition runs, that as he lived " in the uppermost house on merrimac river, lying open to ye enemy, yet being so seated that it is, as it were, a watchhouse to the neighboring towns," he could render important service to his country if only he had some assistance, " there being," he said, " never an inhabitant left in the town but myself." wherefore he requests that their " honors would be pleased to order him three or fotir men to help garrison his said house," which they did. but methinks that such a garrison would be weakened by the addition of a " make bandog thy scout watch to bark at a thief, make courage for ufe, to be capitain chief; make trap-door thy bulwark, make bell to begin, make gunstone and arrow shew who is within." i08 a week on the concord river. thus he earned the title of first permanent settler. in 1694 a law was passed " that every settler who deserted a town for fear of the indians, should forfeit all his rights therein.'' but now, at any rate, as i have fre quently observed, a man may desert the fertile frontier territories of truth and justice, which are the state's best lands, for fear of far more insignificant foes, with out forfeiting any of his civil rights therein. nay, townships are granted to deserters, and the general court, as i am sometimes inclined to regard it, is but a deserters' camp itself. as we rowed along near the shore of wicasuck island, which was then covered with wood, in order to avoid the current, two men, who looked as if they had just run out of lowell, where they had been waylaid by the sabbath, meaning to go to nashua, and who now found themselves in the strange, natural, unculti vated and unsettled part of the globe which intervenes, full of walls and barriers, a rough and uncivil place to them, seeing our boat moving so smoothly up the stream, called out from the high bank above our heads to know if we would take them as passengers, as if this were the street they had missed ; that they might sit and chat and drive away the time, and so at last find themselves in nashua. this smooth way they much preferred. but our boat was crowded with necessary furniture, and sunk low in the water, and moreover required to be worked, for even // did not progress against the stream without effort ; so we were obliged to deny them passage. as we glided away with even sweeps, while the fates scattered oil in our course, the sun now sinking behind the alders on the distant shore, we could still see them far off over the water, running along the sunday. 109 shore and climbing over the rocks and fallen trees like insects, — for they did not know any better than we that they were on an island, — the unsympathizing river ever flowing in an opposite direction ; until, hav ing reached the entrance of the island brook, which they had probably crossed upon the locks below, they found a more effectual barrier to their progress. they seemed to be learning much in a little time. they ran about like ants on a burning brand, and once more they tried the river here, and once more there, to see if water still indeed was not to be walked on, as if a new thought inspired them, and by some peculiar disposition of the limbs they could accomplish it. at length sober common sense seemed to have resumed its sway, and they concluded that what they had so long heard must be true, and resolved to ford the shallower stream. when nearly a mile distant we could see them stripping off their clothes and pre paring for this experiment ; yet it seemed likely that a new dilemma would arise, they were so thoughtlessly throwing away their clothes on the wrong side of the stream, as in the case of the countryman with his corn, his fox, and his goose, which had to be trans ported one at a time. whether they got safely through, or v/ent round by the locks we never learned. we could not help being struck by the seeming, though innocent indifference of nature to these men's necessities, vv'hile elsewhere she was equally serving others. like a true benefactress, the secret of her service is unchangeableness. thus is the busiest merchant, though within sight of his lowell, put to pilgrim's shifts and soon comes to staff and scrip and scallop shell. we, too, who held the middle of the stream, came no a week on the concord river. near experiencing a pilgrim's fate, being tempted to pursue what seemed a sturgeon or larger fish, for we remembered that this was the sturgeon river, its dark and monstrous back alternately rising and sinking in mid-stream. we kept falling behind, but the fish kept his back well out, and did not dive, and seemed to prefer to swim against the stream, so, at any rate, he would not escape us by going out to sea. at length, having got as near as was convenient, and looking out not to get a blow from his tail, now the bow-gunner delivered his charge, while the stern-man held his ground. but the halibut-skinned monster, in one of these swift-gliding pregnant moments, without ever ceasing his bobbing up and down, saw fit, without a chuckle or other prelude, to proclaim himself a huge imprisoned spar, placed there as a buoy, to warn sailors of sunken rocks. so, each casting some blame upon the other, we withdrew quickly to safer waters. the scene-shifter saw fit here to close the drama of this day, without regard to any unities which we mortals prize. whether it might have proved tragedy, or comedy, or tragi-comedy or pastoral, we cannot tell. this sunday ended by the going down of the sun, leaving us still on the waves. but they who are on the water enjoy a longer and brighter twilight than they who are on the land, for here the water, as well as the atmosphere, absorbs and reflects the light, and some of the day seems to have sunk down into the waves. the light gradually forsook the deep water, as well as the deeper air, and the gloaming came to the fishes as well as to us, and more dim and gloomy to them, whose day is a perpetual twilight, though sufficiently bright for their weak and watery eyes. vespers had already rung in many a dim and watery chapel down sunda y. ill below, where the shadows of the weeds were extended in length over the sandy floor. the vespertinal pout had already begun to flit on leathern fin, and the finny gossips withdrew from the fluvial street to creeks and coves, and other private haunts, excepting a few of stronger fin, which anchored in the stream, stemming the tide even in their dreams. meanwhile, like a dark evening cloud, we were wafted over the cope of their sky, deepening the shadows on their deluged fields. having reached a retired part of the river where it spread out to sixty rods in width, we pitched our tent on the east side, in tyngsboro', just above some patches of the beach plum, which was now nearly ripe, where the sloping bank was a sufficient pillow, and with the bustle of sailors making the land, we transferred such stores as were required from boat to tent, and hung a lantern to the tent-pole, and so our house was ready. with a buffalo spread on the grass, and a blanket for our covering, our bed was soon made. a fire crackled merrily before the entrance, so near that we could tend it without step ping abroad, and when we had supped, we put out the blaze, and closed the door, and with the semblance of domestic comfort, sat up to read the gazetteer, to learn our latitude and longitude, and write the journal of the voyage, or listened to the wind and the rippling of the river till sleep overtook us. there we lay under an oak on the bank of the stream, near to some farmer's cornfield, getting sleep, and forgetting where we were ; a great blessing, that we are obliged to forget our enterprises every twelve hours. minks, muskrats, meadow-mice, woodchucks, squirrels, skunks, rabbits, foxes and weasels, all inhabit near, but keep very close 112 a week on the concord river. while you are there. the river sucking and eddying away all night down toward the marts and the sea board; a great work and freshet, and no small enter prise to reflect on. instead of the scythian vastness of the billerica night, and its wild musical sounds, we were kept awake by the boisterous sport of some irish laborers on the railroad, wafted to us over the water, still unwearied and unresting on this seventh day, who would not have done with whirling up and down the track with ever increasing velocity and still reviving shouts, till late in the night. one sailor was visited in his dreams this night by the evil destinies, and all those powers that are hostile to human life, which constrain and oppress the minds of men, and make their path seem difficult and narrow, and beset with dangers, so that the most innocent and worthy enterprises appear insolent and a tempting of fate, and the gods go not with us. but the other happily passed serene and even ambrosial or immortal night, and his sleep was dreamless, or only the atmos phere of pleasant dreams remained, a happy natural sleep until the morning, and his cheerful spirit soothed and reassured his brother, for whenever they meet, the good genius is sure to prevail. monday. " i thynke for to touche also the worlde whiche neweth everie dale, so as i can, so as i male." gower. " gazed on the heavens for what he missed on earth." britannia' s pastorals. when the first light dawned on the earth, and the birds awoke, and the brave river was heard ripphng confidently seaward, and the nimble early rising wind rustled the oak leaves about our tent, all men, having reinforced their bodies and their souls with sleep, and cast aside doubt and fear, were invited to unattempted adventures. one of us took the boat over to the opposite shore, which was flat and accessible, a quarter of a mile dis tant, to empty it of water and wash out the clay, while the other kindled a fire and got breakfast ready. at an early hour we were again on our way, rowing through the fog as before, the river already awake, and a million crisped waves come forth to meet the sun when he should show himself. the countrymen, recruited by their day of rest, were already stirring, and had begun to cross the ferry on the business of the week. this ferry was as busy as a beaver dam, and all the world seemed anxious to get across the merrimack river at this particular point, waiting to get set over, — children with their two cents done up in paper, jail-birds broke loose and constable with "3 114 ^ week on the concord river. warrant, travellers from distant lands to distant lands, men and women to whom the merrimack river was a bar. there stands a gig in the gray morning, in the mist, the impatient traveller pacing the wet shore with whip in hand, and shouting through the fog after the regardless charon and his retreating ark, as if he might throw that passenger overboard and return forthwith for himself; he will compensate him. he is to break his fast at some unseen place on the opposite side, k may be ledyard or the wandering jew. whence, pray did he come out of the foggy night ? and whither through the sunny day will he go ? we observe only his transit ; important to us, forgotten by him, transit ing all day. there are two of them. may be, they are virgil and dante. but when they crossed the styx, none were seen bound up or down the stream, that i remember. it is only a transjecttis, a transitory voy age, like life itself, none but the long-lived gods bound up or down the stream. many of these monday men are ministers, no doubt, reseeking their parishes with hired horses, with sermons in their valises all read and gutted, the day after never with them. they cross each other's routes all the country over like woof and warp, making a garment of loose texture; vacation now for six days. they stop to pick nuts and berries, and gather apples by the wayside at their leisure. good religious men, with the love of men in their hearts, and the means to pay their toll in their pockets. we got over this ferry chain without scraping, rowing athwart the tide of travel, — no toll from us that day. the fog dispersed and we rowed leisurely along through tyngsboro', with a clear sky and a mild atmosphere, leaving the habitations of men behind monday. 115 and penetrating yet further into the territory of ancient dunstable. it was from dunstable, then a frontier town, that the famous capt. lovewell, with his company, marched in quest of the indians on the i8th of april, 1725. he was the son of "an ensign in the army of oliver cromwell, who came to this country, and settled at dunstable, where he died at the great age of one hundred and twenty years." in the words of the old nursery tale, sung about a hundred years ago, — " he and his valiant soldiers did range the woods full wide, and hardships they endured to quell the indian's pride." in the shaggy pine forest of pequawket they met the "rebel indians,"' and prevailed, after a bloody fight, and a remnant returned home to enjoy the fame of their victory. a township called lovewelps town, but now, for some reason, or perhaps without reason, pembroke, was granted them by the state. " of all our valiant english, there were but thirty-four, and of the rebel indians, there were about four score; and sixteen of our english did safely home return, the rest were killed and wounded, for which we all must mourn. " our worthy capt. lovewell among them there did die, they killed lieut. robbins, and wounded good young frye, who was our english chaplin; he many indians slew, and some of them he scalped while bullets round him flew." our brave forefathers have exterminated all the indians, and their degenerate children no longer dwell in garrisoned houses, nor hear any war-whoop in their path. it would be well, perchance, if many an " english chaplin " in these days could exhibit as il6 a week on the concord river. unquestionable trophies of his valor as did " good young frye." we have need to be as sturdy pioneers still as miles standish, or church, or lovewell. we are to follow on another trail, it is true, but one as convenient for ambushes. what if the indians are exterminated, are not savages as grim prowling about the clearings to-day ? — " and braving many dangers and hardships in the way, they safe arrived at dunstable the thirteenth (?) day of may." but they did not all " safe arrive in dunstable the thirteenth," or the fifteenth, or the thirtieth " day of may." eleazer davis and josiah jones, both of con cord, for our native town had seven men in this fight, lieutenant farwell, of dunstable, and jonathan frye, of andover, who were all wounded, were left behind, creeping toward the settlements. " after travelling several miles, frye was left and lost," though a more recent poet has assigned him company in his last hours. — " a man he was of comely form, polished and brave, well learned and kind ; old harvard's learned halls he left far in the wilds a grave to find. " ah ! now his blood-red arm he lifts ; his closing lids he tries to raise ; and speak once more before he dies, in supplication and in praise. " he prays kind heaven to grant success, brave lovewell's men to guide and bless, and when they 've shed their heart-blood true, to raise them all to happiness." * * monday, 117 " lieutenant farwell took his hand, his arm around his neck he threw, and said, ' brave chaplain i could wish, that heaven had made me die for you.' " farwell held out eleven days. "a tradition says," as we learn from the history of concord, " that arriv ing at a pond with lieut. farwell, davis pulled off one of his moccasins, cut it in strings, on which he fast ened a hook, caught some fish, fried and ate them. they refreshed him, but were injurious to farwell, who died soon after." davis had a ball lodged in his body, and his right hand shot off; but on the whole, he seems to have been less damaged than his companion. he came into berwick after being out fourteen days. jones also had a ball lodged in his body, but he likewise got into saco after fourteen days, though not in the best condition imaginable. "he had subsisted," says an old journal, "on the spontaneous vegetables of the forest ; and cranberries, which he had eaten, came out of wounds he had re ceived in his body." this was also the case with davis. the last two reached home at length, safe if not sound, and lived many years in a crippled state to enjoy their pension. but alas! of the crippled indians, and their adven tures in the woods, — " for as we are informed, so thick and fast they fell. scarce twenty of their number at night did get home well," — how many balls lodged with them, how it fared with their cranberries, what berwick or saco they got into, and finally what pension or township was granted them, there is no journal to tell. it is stated in the history of dunstable, that just il8 a week on the concord river. before his last march, lovewell was warned to beware of the ambuscades of the enemy, but " he replied, ' that he did not care for them,' and bending down a small elm beside which he was standing into a bow, declared ' that he would treat the indians in the same way.' this elm is still standing [in nashua], a vener able and magnificent tree." meanwhile, having passed the horseshoe interval in tyngsboro', where the river makes a sudden bend to the northwest, — for our reflections have anticipated our progress somewhat, — we were advancing further into the country and into the day, which last proved almost as golden as the preceding, though the slight bustle and activity of the monday seemed to penetrate even to this scenery. now and then we had to muster all our energy to get round a point, where the river broke rippling over rocks, and the maples trailed their branches in the stream, but there was generally a back water or eddy on the side, of which we took advan tage. the river was here about forty rods wide and fifteen feet deep. occasionally one ran along the shore, examining the country, and visiting the nearest farm-houses, while the other followed the windings of the stream alone, to meet his companion at some distant point, and hear the report of his adventures ; how the farmer praised the coolness of his well, and his wife offered the stranger a draught of milk, or the children quarrelled for the only transparency in the window that they might get sight of the man at the well. for though the country seemed so new, and no house was observed by us, shut in between the high banks that sunny day, we did not have to travel far to find where men inhabited, like wild bees, monday. 119 and had sunk wells in the loose sand and loam of the merrimack. there dwelt the subject of the hebrew scriptures, and the esprit des lois, where a thin vapor ous smoke curled up through the noon. all that is told of mankind, of the inhabitants of the upper nile, and the sunderbunds, and timbuctoo, and the orinoko, was experience here. every race and class of men was represented. according to belknap, the historian of nev/ hampshire, who wrote sixty years ago, here too, perchance, dwelt " new lights," and free thinking men even then. "the people in general throughout the state," it is written, " are professors of the christian religion in some form or other. there is, however, a sort of wise men, who pretend to reject it ; but they have not yet been able to sub stitute a better in its place." the other voyageur, perhaps, would in the mean while have seen a brown hawk, or a woodchuck, or a musquash, creeping under the alders. we occasionally rested in the shade of a maple or a willow, and drew forth a melon for our refreshment, while we contemplated at our leisure the lapse of the river and of human life ; and as that current, with its floating twigs and leaves, so did all things pass in review before us, while far away in cities and marts on this very stream, the old routine was proceeding still. there is, indeed, a tide in the affairs of men, as the poet says, and yet as things flow they circulate, and the ebb always balances the flow. all streams are but tributary to the ocean, which itself does not stream, and the shores are unchanged but in longer periods than man can measure. go where we will, we discover infinite change in particulars only, not in generals. when i go into a museum, and see the i20 a week on the concord river. mummies wrapped in their linen bandages,. i see that the times began to need reform as long ago as when they walked the earth. i come out into the streets, and meet men who declare that the time is near at hand for the redemption of the race. but as men lived in thebes, so do they live in dunstable to-day. "time drinketh up the essence of every great and noble action, which ought to be performed, and is delayed in the execution," so says veeshnoo sarma ; and we perceive that the schemers return again and again to common sense and labor. such is the evi dence of history. — " yet i doubt not thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs, and the thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of the suns." there are secret articles in our treaties with the gods, of more importance than all the rest, which the his torian can never know. there are many skilful apprentices, but few master workmen. on every hand we observe a truly wise practice, in education, in morals, and in the arts of life, the embodied wisdom of many an ancient phi losopher. who does not see that heresies have some time prevailed, that reforms have already taken place? all this worldly wisdom might be regarded as the once unamiable heresy of some wise man. some interests have got a footing on the earth which we have not made sufficient allowance for. even they who first built these barns, and cleared the land thus, had some valor. the abrupt epochs and chasms are smoothed down in history as the inequalities of the plain are concealed by distance. but unless we do more than simply learn the trade of our time, we are monday. 121 but apprentices, and not yet masters of the art of life. now that we are casting away these melon seeds, how can we help feeling reproach ? he who eats the fruit, should at least plant the seed ; aye, if possible, a better seed than that whose fruit he has enjoyed. seeds! there are seeds enough which need only to be stirred in with the soil where they lie, by an inspired voice or pen, to bear fruit of a divine flavor. o thou spendthrift ! defray thy debt to the world ; eat not the seed of institutions, as the luxurious do, but plant it rather, while thou devourest the pulp and tuber for thy subsistence ; that so, perchance, one variety may at last be found worthy of preservation. there are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature. all laborers must have their nooning, and at this season of the day, we are all, more or less, asiatics, and give over all work and reform. while lying thus on our oars by the side of the stream, in the heat of the day, our boat held by an osier put through the staple in its prow, and slicing the melons, which are a fruit of the east, our thoughts reverted to arabia, persia, and hindostan, the lands of contem plation and dwelling places of the ruminant nations. in the experience of this noontide we could find some apology even for the instinct of the opium, betel, and tobacco chewers. mount saber, according to the french traveller and naturalist, botta, is celebrated for producing the kdt tree, of which '' the soft tops of the twigs and tender leaves are eaten," says his reviewer, " and produce an agreeable soothing excite ment, restoring from fatigue, banishing sleep, and disposing to the enjoyment of conversation." we 122 a week on the concord river. thought that we might lead a dignified oriental life along this stream as well, and the maple and alders would be our kdt trees. it is a great pleasure to escape sometimes from the restless class of reformers. what if these grievances exist? so do you and i. think you that sitting hens are troubled with ennui these long summer days, sitting on and on in the crevice of a hay-loft, without active employment.^ by the faint cackling in distant barns, i judge that dame nature is interested to know how many eggs her hens lay. the universal soul, as it is called, has an interest in the stacking of hay, the foddering of cattle, and the draining of peat meadows. away in scythia, away in india, it makes butter and cheese. suppose that all farms are run out, and we youths must buy old land and bring it to, still everywhere the relentless opponents of reform bear a strange resemblance to ourselves ; or per chance, they are a few old maids and bachelors, who sit round the kitchen hearth, and listen to the sing ing of the kettle. "the oracles often give victory to our choice, and not to the order alone of the mun dane periods. as, for instance, when they say, that our voluntary sorrows germinate in us as the growth of the particular life we lead." the reform which you talk about can be undertaken any morning before unbarring our doors. we need not call any conven tion. when two neighbors begin to eat corn bread, who before ate wheat, then the gods smile from ear to ear, for it is very pleasant to them. why do you not try it ? don't let me hinder you. there are theoretical reformers at all times, and all the world over, living on anticipation. wolff, travel ling in the deserts of bokhara, says : " another party monday. 123 of derveeshes came to me and observed, ^the time will come when there shall be no difference between rich and poor, between high and low, when property will be in common, even wives and children.' " but forever i ask of such. what then ? the derveeshes in the deserts of bokhara and the reformers in marl boro' chapel sing the same song. " there 's a good time coming, boys," but, asked one of the audience in good faith, " can you fix the date? " said i, " will you help it along? " the nonchalance and dolcc-far-niente air of nature and society hint at infinite periods in the progress of mankind. the states have leisure to laugh from maine to texas at some newspaper joke, and new england shakes at the double-entendres of australian circles, while the poor reformer cannot get a hear ing. men do not fail commonly for want of knowledge, but for want of prudence to give wisdom the prefer ence. what we need to know in any case is very simple. it is but too easy to establish another durable and harmonious routine. immediately all parts of nature consent to it. only make something to take the place of something, and men will behave as if it were the very thing they wanted. they must behave, at any rate, and will work up any material. there is always a present and extant life, be it better or worse, which all combine to uphold. we should be slow to mend, my friends, as slow to require mend ing, " not hurling, according to the oracle, a transcend ent foot towards piety." the language of excitement is at best picturesque merely. you must be calm before you can utter oracles. what was the excitement of the delphic priestess compared with the calm wisdom 124 a week on the concord river. of socrates? — or whoever it was that was wise. — enthusiasm is a supernatural serenity. " men find that action is another thing than what they in discoursing papers read ; the world's affairs require in managing more arts than those wherein you clerks proceed." as in geology, so in social institutions, we may dis cover the causes of all past change in the present invariable order of society. the greatest appreciable physical revolutions are the work of the light-footed air, the stealthy-paced water, and the subterranean fire. aristotle said, "as time never fails, and the universe is eternal, neither the tanais nor the nile, can have flowed forever." we are independent of the change we detect. the longer the lever the less perceptible its motion. it is the slowest pulsation which is the most vital. the hero then will know how to wait, as well as to make haste. all good abides with him who waiteth wisely ; we shall sooner overtake the dawn by remaining here than by hurry ing over the hills of the west. be assured that every man's success is in proportion to his average ability. the meadow flowers spring and bloom where the waters annually deposit their slime, not where they reach in some freshet only. a man is not his hope, nor his despair, nor yet his past deed. we know not yet what we have done, still less what we are doing. wait till evening, and other parts of our day's work will shine than we had thought at noon, and we shall discover the real purport of our toil. as when the farmer has reached the end of the furrow and looks back, he can best tell where the pressed earth shines most. monday. 125 to one who habitually endeavors to contemplate the true state of things, the political state can hardly be said to have any existence whatever. it is unreal, incredible and insignificant to him, and for him to endeavor to extract the truth from such lean material is like making sugar from linen rags, when sugar cane may be had. generally speaking, the political news, whether domestic or foreign, might be written to-day for the next ten years, with sufficient accuracy. most revolutions in society have not power to interest, still less alarm us ; but tell me that our rivers are drying up, or the genus pine dying out in the country, and i might attend. most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by avhich all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate. but will the government never be so w^ell administered, inquired one, that we private men shall hear nothing about it ? " the king answered : at all events, i require a pru dent and able man, who is capable of managing the state affairs of my kingdom. the ex-minister said, the criterion, o sire! of a wise and competent man, is, that he will not meddle with such like matters." alas, that the ex-minister should have been so nearly right. in my short experience of human life, the outward obstacles, if there were any such, have not been living men, but the institutions of the dead. it is grateful to make one's way through this latest generation as through dewy grass. men are as innocent as the morning to the unsuspicious. — " and round about good-morrows fly, as if day taught humanity." 126 a week on the concord river, not being reve of this shire, *' the early pilgrim blithe he hailed, that o'er the hills did stray, and many an early husbandman, that he met on his way ; " — thieves and robbers all nevertheless. i have not so surely foreseen that any cossack or chippeway would come to disturb the honest and simple commonwealth, as that some monster institution would at length embrace and crush its free members in its scaly folds ; for it is not to be forgotten, that while the law holds fast the thief and murderer, it lets itself go loose. when i have not paid the tax which the state demanded for that protection which i did not want, itself has robbed me ; when i have asserted the liberty it presumed to declare, itself has impris oned me. poor creature! if it knows no better i will not blame it. if it cannot live but by these means, i can. i do not wish, it happens, to be associated with massachusetts, either in holding slaves or in conquering mexico. i am a little better than herself in these respects. — as for massachusetts, that huge she briareus, argus, and colchian dragon conjoined, set to watch the heifer of the constitution and the golden fleece, we would not warrant our respect for her, like some compositions, to preserve its qualities through all weathers. — thus it has happened, that not the arch fiend himself has been m my way, but these toils which tradition says were originally spun to obstruct him. they are cobwebs and trifling obstacles in an earnest man's path, it is true, and at length one even becomes attached to his unswept and undusted garret. i love man — kind, but monday. 127 i hate the institutions of the dead unkind. men execute nothing so faithfully as the wills of the dead, to the last codicil and letter. they rule this world, and the living are but their executors. such founda tion too have our lectures and our sermons commonly. they are all diidleian ; and piety derives its origin still from that exploit of prus aliieas^ who bore his father, anchises, on his shoulders from the ruins of troy. or rather, like some indian tribes, we bear about with us the mouldering relics of our ancestors on our shoulders. if, for instance, a man asserts the value of individual liberty over the merely political commonweal, his neighbor still tolerates him, that is he who is living near him, sometimes even sustains him, but never the state. its officer, as a living man, may have human virtues and a thought in his brain, but as the tool of an institution, a jailor or constable it may be, he is not a whit superior to his prison key or his staff. herein is the tragedy ; that men doing outrage to their proper natures, even those called wise and good, lend themselves to perform the office of inferior and brutal ones. hence come war and slavery in ; and what else may not come in by this opening? but certainly there are modes by which a man may put bread into his mouth which will not prejudice him as a companion and neighbor. " now turn again, turn again, said the pinder, for a wrong way you have gone. for you have forsaken the king's highway, and made a path over the corn." undoubtedly, countless reforms are called for, be cause society is not animated, or instinct enough with life, but in the condition of some snakes which i have seen in early spring, with alternate portions of their 128 a week on the concord river, bodies torpid and flexible, so that they could wriggle neither way. all men are partially buried in the grave of custom, and of some we see only the crown of the head above ground. better are the physically dead, for they more lively rot. even virtue is no longer such if it be stagnant. a man's life should be constantly as fresh as this river. it should be the same channel, but a new water every instant. — "virtues as rivers pass, but still remains that virtuous man there was." most men have no inclination, no rapids, no cascades, but marshes, and alligators, and miasma instead. we read that when in the expedition of alexander, one sicritus was sent forward to meet certain of the indian sect of gymnosophists, and he had told them of those new philosophers of the west, pythagoras, socrates, and diogenes, and their doctrines, one of them named dandamis answered, that " they appeared to him to have been men of genius, but to have lived with too passive a regard for the laws." the philosophers of the west are liable to this rebuke still. "they say that lieou-hia-hoei, and chao-lien did not sustain to the end their resolutions, and that they dishonored their character. their language was in harmony with reason and justice ; while their acts were in harmony with the sentiments of men." chateaubriand said, " there are two things which grow stronger in the breast of man, in proportion as he advances in years ; the love of country and reli gion. let them be never so much forgotten in youth, they sooner or later present themselves to us arrayed in all their charms, and excite in the recesses of our hearts, an attachment justly due to their beauty." it monday. 129 may be so. but even this infirmity of noble minds marks the gradual decay of youthful hope and faith. it is the allowed infidelity of age. there is a saying of the yoloflfs, " he who was born first has the greatest number of old clothes/' consequently m. chateaubri and has more old clothes than i have. it is com paratively a faint and reflected beauty that is admired, not an essential and intrinsic one. it is because the old are weak, feel their mortality, and think that they have measured the strength of man. they will not boast ; they will be frank and humble. well, let them have the few poor comforts they can keep. humility is still a very human virtue. they look back on life, and so see not into the future. the prospect of the young is forward and unbounded, mingling the future with the present. in the declining day the thoughts make haste to rest in darkness, and hardly look for ward to the ensuing morning. the thoughts of the old prepare for night and slumber. the same hopes and prospects are not for him who stands upon the rosy mountain-tops of life, and him who expects the setting of his earthly day. i must conclude that conscience, if that be the name of it, was not given us for no purpose, or for a hindrance. however flattering order and experience may look, it is but the repose of a lethargy, and we will choose rather to be awake, though it be stormy, and maintain ourselves on this earth and in this life, as we may, without signing our death-warrant. let us see if we cannot stay here where he has put us, on his own conditions. does not his law reach as far as his light? the expedients of the nations clash with one another, only the absolutely right is expedient for all. 130 a week on the concord river. there are some passages in the antigone of sopho cles, well known to scholars, of which i am reminded in this connection. antigone has resolved to sprinkle sand on the dead body of her brother, polynices. not withstanding the edict of king creon condemning to death that one who should perform this service, which the greeks deemed so important, for the enemy of his country ; but ismene, who is of a less resolute and noble spirit, declines taking part with her sister in this work, and says, — " i, therefore, asking those under the earth to con sider me, that i am compelled to do thus, will obey those who are placed in office ; for to do extreme things is not wise." antigone. " i would not ask you, nor would you, if you still wished, do it joyfully with me. be such as seems good to you. but i will bury him. it is glorious for me doing this to die. i beloved will lie with him beloved, having, like a criminal, done what is holy ; since the time is longer which it is necessary for me to please those below, than those here, for there i shall always lie. but if it seems good to you, hold in dishonor things which are honored by the gods." ismene. ^'i indeed do not hold them in dishonor ; but to act in opposition to the citizens i am by nature unable." antigone being at length brought before king creon, he asks, '* did you then dare to transgress these laws ? " monday. 131 antigone. " for it was not zeus who proclaimed these to me, nor justice who dwells with the gods below ; it was not they who established these laws among men. nor did i think that your proclamations were so strong, as, being a mortal, to be able to transcend the unwritten and immovable laws of the gods. for not something now and yesterday, but forever these live, and no one knows from what time they appeared. i was not about to pay the penalty of violating these to the gods, fearing the presumption of any man. for i well knew that i should die, and why not? even if you had not proclaimed it." this was concerning the burial of a dead body. the wisest conservatism is that of the hindoos. " immemorial custom is transcendent law," says menu. that is, it was the custom of the gods before men used it. the fault of our new england custom is that it is memorial. what is morality but immemo rial custom? conscience is the chief of conserva tives. " perform the settled functions," says kreeshna in the bhagvat-geeta, "action is preferable to inac tion. the journey of thy mortal frame may not suc ceed from inaction." — "a man's own calling, with all its faults, ought not to be forsaken. every undertak ing is involved in its faults as the fire in its smoke." — " the man who is acquainted with the whole, should not drive those from their works who are slow of comprehension, and less experienced than himself." — "wherefore, o arjoon, resolve to fight," — is the advice of the god to the irresolute soldier who fears to slay his best friends. it is a subume conservatism ; 132 a week on the concord river. as wide as the world, and as unwearied as time ; pre serving the universe with asiatic anxiety, in that state in which it appeared to their minds. these philoso phers dwell on the inevitability and unchangeableness of laws, on the power of temperament and constitu tion, the ihrqq goo)i or qualities, and the circumstances of birth and affinity. the end is an immense conso lation ; eternal absorption in brahma. their specu lations never venture beyond their own table lands, though they are high and vast as they. buoyancy, freedom, flexibility, variety, possibility, which also are qualities of the unnamed, they deal not with . the undeserved reward is to be earned by an everlasting moral drudgery ; the incalculable promise of the mor row is, as it were, weighed. and who will say that their conservatism has not been effectual. "assuredly," says a french translator, speaking of the antiquity and durability of the chinese and indian nations, and of the wisdom of their legislators, "there are there some vestiges of the eternal laws which govern the world." christianity, on the other hand, is humane, practi cal, and, in a large sense, radical. so many years and ages of the gods those eastern sages sat contem plating brahm, uttering in silence the mystic " om," being absorbed into the essence of the supreme being, never going out of themselves, but subsiding further and deeper within ; so infinitely wise, yet infinitely stagnant ; until, at last, in that same asia, but in the western part of it, appeared a youth, wholly unforetold by them, — not being absorbed into brahm, but bring ing brahm down to earth and to mankind ; in whom brahm had awaked from his long sleep, and exerted himself, and the day began, — a new avatar. the monda y. 133 brahman had never thought to be a brother of man kind as well as a child of god. christ is the prince of reformers and radicals. many expressions in the new testament come naturally to the lips of all protestants, and it furnishes the most pregnant and practical texts. there is no harmless dreaming, no wise speculation in it, but everywhere a substratum of good sense. it never reflects^ but it repents. there is no poetry in it, we may say, nothing regarded in the light of pure beauty, but moral truth is its object. all mortals are convicted by its conscience. the new testament is remarkable for its pure morality; the best of the hindoo scripture, for its pure intellectuality. the reader is nowhere raised into and sustained in a higher, purer, or rarer region of thought than in the bhagvat-geeta. warren has tings, in his sensible letter recommending the trans lation of this book to the chairman of the east india company, declares the original to be " of a sublimity of conception, reasoning, and diction, almost une qualled," and that the writings of the indian philoso phers "will survive when the british dominion in india shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance." it is unquestionably one of the noblest and most sacred scriptures that have come down to us. books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics, even more than by the manner in which they are treated. the oriental phi losophy approaches, easily, loftier themes than the modern aspires to; and no wonder if it sometimes prattle about them. it only assigns their due rank respectively to action and contemplation, or rather does full justice to the latter. western philosophers 134 ^ week on the concord river. have not conceived of the significance of contempla tion in their sense. speaking of the spiritual disci pline to which the brahmans subjected themselves, and the wonderful power of abstraction to which they attained, instances of which had come under his notice, hastings says : — " to those who have never been accustomed to the separation of the mind from the notices of the senses, it may not be easy to conceive by what means such a power is to be attained ; since even the most studious men of our hemisphere will find it difficult so to re strain their attention, but that it will wander to some object of present sense or recollection ; and even the buzzing of a fly will sometimes have the power to dis turb it. but if we are told that there have been men who were successively, for ages past, in the daily habit of abstracted contemplation, begun in the earli est period of youth, and continued in many to the maturity of age, each adding some portion of knowl edge to the store accumulated by his predecessors ; it is not assuming too much to conclude, that as the mind ever gathers strength, like the body, by exercise, so in such an exercise it may in each have acquired the faculty to which they aspired, and that their col lective studies may have led them to the discovery of new tracks and combinations of sentiment, totally dif ferent from the doctrines with which the learned of other nations are acquainted ; doctrines which, how ever speculative and subtle, still, as they possess the advantage of being derived from a source so free from every adventitious mixture, may be equally founded in truth with the most simple of our own." monday. 135 " the forsaking of works " was taught by kreeshna to the most ancient of men, and handed down from one to another, '^ until at length, in the course of time, the mighty art was lost. " in wisdom is to be found every work without ex ception," says kreeshna. " although thou wert the greatest of all offenders, thou shalt be able to cross the gulf of sin with the bark of wisdom.*" " there is not anything in this world to be com pared with wisdom for purity." ''the action stands at a distance inferior to the application of wisdom." the wisdom of a moonee " is confirmed, when, like the tortoise, he can draw in all his members, and re strain them from their wonted purposes." " children only, and not the learned, speak of the speculative and the practical doctrines as two. they are but one. for both obtain the self-same end, and the place which is gained by the followers of the one, is gained by the followers of the other." " the man enjoyeth not freedom from action, from the non-commencement of that which he hath to do ; nor doth he obtain happiness from a total inactivity. no one ever resteth a moment inactive. every man is involuntarily urged to act by those principles which are inherent in his nature. the man who restraineth his active faculties, and sitteth down with his mind at tentive to the objects of his senses, is called one of an astrayed soul, and the practiser of deceit. so the man is praised, who, having subdued all his passions, performeth with his active faculties all the functions of life, unconcerned about the event." " let the motive be in the deed and not in the 136 a week on the concord river. event. be not one whose motive for action is the hope of reward. let not thy life be spent in inaction." " for the man who doeth that which he hath to do, without affection, obtaineth the supreme." " he who may behold, as it were inaction in action, and action in inaction, is wise amongst mankind. he is a perfect performer of all duty." " wise men call him a pajideet, whose every under taking is free from the idea of desire, and whose actions are consumed by the fire of wisdom. he abandoneth the desire of a reward of his actions ; he is always contented and independent; and although he may be engaged in a work, he, as it were, doeth nothing." " he is both a yogee and a sannyasee who per formeth that which he hath to do independent of the fruit thereof; not he who liveth without the sacrificial fire and without action." " he who enjoyeth but the amreeta which is left of his offerings, obtaineth the eternal spirit of brahm, the supreme." what after all does the practicalness of life amount to? the things immediate to be done are very trivial. i could postpone them all to hear this locust sing. the most glorious fact in our experience is not any thing that we have done or may hope to do, but a transient thought, or vision, or dream, which we have had. i would give all the wealth of the world, and all the deeds of all the heroes, for one true vision. but how can i communicate with the gods who am a pencil-maker on the earth, and not be insane ? '^i am the same to all mankind," says kreeshna; " there is not one who is worthy of my love or hatred." monday. 137 this teaching is not practical in the sense in which the new testament is. it is not always sound sense in practice. the brahman never proposes courage ously to assault evil, but patiently to starve it out. his active faculties are paralyzed by the idea of caste, of impassable limits, of destiny, and the tyranny of time. kreeshna's argument, it must be allowed, is defective. no sufficient reason is given why arjoon should fight. arjoon may be convinced, but the reader is not, for his judgment is not "formed upon speculative doctrines of the sankhya sastra.''"' " seek an asylum in wisdom alone," — but what is wisdom to a western mind ? he speaks of duty, but the duty of which he speaks, is it not an arbitrary one? when was it established? the brahman's virtue consists not in doing right, but arbitrary things. what is that which a man "hath to do"? what is "action"? what are the " settled functions " ? what is " a man's own religion," which is so much better than another's? what is " a man's own particular calling " ? what are the duties which are appointed by one's birth? it is in fact a defence of the institution of caste, of what is called the " natural duty " of the kshetree. or soldier, " to attach himself to the discipline," " not to flee from the field," and the like. but they who are unconcerned about the consequences of their actions, are not therefore unconcerned about their actions. — yet we know not where we should look for a loftier speculative faith. behold the difference between the oriental and the occidental. the former has nothing to do in this world ; the latter is full of activity. the one looks in the sun till his eyes are put out ; the other follows him prone in his westward course. there is such a thing as 138 a week on the concord river, caste, even in the west ; but it is comparatively faint. it is conservatism liere. it says forsake not your calling, outrage no institution, use no violence, rend no bonds. the state is thy parent. its virtue or man hood is wholly filial. there is a struggle between the oriental and occidental in every nation ; some who would be forever contemplating the sun, and some who are hastening toward the sunset. the former class says to the latter, when you have reached the sunset, you will be no nearer to the sun. to which the latter replies, but we so prolong the day. the former " walketh but in that night, when all things go to rest, the night of twie. the contemplative moonee sleepeth but in the day of time when all things wake." to conclude these extracts, i can say, in the words of sanjay, " as, o mighty prince ! i recollect again and again this holy and wonderful dialogue of kreeshna and arjoon, i continue more and more to rejoice ; and as i recall to my memory the more than miraculous form of haree, my astonishment is great, and i marvel and rejoice again and again ! wherever kreeshna the god of devotion may be, wherever arjoon the mighty bowman may be, there too, without doubt, are fortune, riches, victory, and good conduct. this is my firm belief." i would say to the readers of scriptures, if they wish for a good book to read. read the bhagvat geeta, an episode to the mahabharat, said to have been written by kreeshna dwypayen veias, — known to have been written by , more than four thousand years ago, — it matters not whether three or four, or when, — translated by charles wilkins. it deserves to be read avith reverence even by yankees, as a part of the sacred writings of a devout people ; and the monday. 139 intelligent hebrew will rejoice to find in it a moral grandeur and sublimity akin to those of his own scriptures. to an american reader, who, by the advantage of his position, can see over that strip of atlantic coast to asia and the pacific, who, as it were, sees the shore slope upward over the alps to the himmaleh mountains, the comparatively recent literature of europe often appears partial and clannish, and, not withstanding the limited range of his own sympathies and studies, the european writer who presumes that he is speaking for the world, is perceived by him to speak only for that corner of it which he inhabits. one of the rarest of england's scholars and critics, in his classification of the worthies of the world, betrays the narrowness of his european culture and the exclusiveness of his reading. none of her children has done justice to the poets and philosophers of persia or of india. they have been better known to her merchant scholars than to her poets and thinkers by profession. you may look in vain through english poetry for a single memorable verse inspired by these themes. nor is germany to be excepted, though her philological industry is indirectly serving the cause of philosophy and poetry. even goethe, one would say, wanted that universality of genius which could have appreciated the philosophy of india, if he had more nearly approached it. his genius was more practical, dwelling much more in the regions of the understand ing, and less native to contemplation, than the genius of those sages. it is remarkable that homer and a few hebrews are the most oriental names which modern europe, whose literature has taken its rise since the decline of the persian, has admitted into her i40 a week on the concord river. list of worthies, and perhaps the worthiest of man kind, and the fathers of modern thinking, — for the con templations of those indian sages have influenced the intellectual development of mankind, — whose works even yet survive in wonderful completeness, are, for the most part, not recognized as ever having existed. if the lions had been the painters it would have been otherwise. in every one's youthful dreams phi losophy is still vaguely but inseparably, and with singular truth, associated with the east, nor do after years discover its local habitation in the western world. in comparison with the philosophers of the east, we may say that modern europe has yet given birth to none. beside the vast and cosmogonal phi losophy of the bhagvat-geeta, even our shakspeare seems sometimes youthfully green and practical merely. some of these sublime sentences, as the chaldaean oracles of zoroaster, for instance, still sur viving after a thousand revolutions and translations, make us doubt if the poetic form and dress are not transitory, and not essential to the most effective and enduring expression of thought. ex or lent c /?^xmay still be the motto of scholars, for the western world has not yet derived from the east all the light which it is destined to receive thence. it would be worthy of the age to print together the collected scriptures or sacred writings of the several nations, the chinese, the hindoos, the persians, the hebrews, and others, as the scripture of mankind. the new testament is still, perhaps, too much on the lips and in the hearts of men to be called a scrip ture in this sense. such a juxtaposition and compari son might help to liberalize the faith of men. this is a work which time will surely edit, reserved to monday. 141 crown the labors of the printing press. this would be the bible, or book of books, which let the mission aries carry to the uttermost parts of the earth. while engaged in these reflections, thinking our selves the only navigators of these waters, suddenly a canal boat, with its sail set, glided round a point before us, like some huge river beast, and changed the scene in an instant ; and then another and an other glided into sight, and we found ourselves in the current of commerce once more. so we threw our rinds into the water for the fishes to nibble, and added our breath to the life of living men. little did we think in the distant garden in which we had planted the seed and reared this fruit, where it would be eaten. our melons lay at home on the sandy bottom of the merrimack, and our potatoes in the sun and water at the bottom of the boat looked like a fruit of the coun try. soon, however, we were delivered from this fleet of junks, and possessed the river in solitude, rowing steadily upward through the noon, between the ter ritories of nashua on the one hand, and hudson, once nottingham, on the other; from time to time scaring up a king-fisher or a summer duck, the former flying rather by vigorous impulses, than by steady and patient steering with that short rudder of his, sound ing his rattle along the fluvial street. ere long another scow hove in sight, creeping down the river, and hailing it, we attached ourselves to its side, and floated back in company, chatting with the boatmen, and obtaining a draught of cooler water from their jug. they appeared to be green hands from far among the hills, who had taken this means to get to the seaboard, and see the world ; and would 142 a week on the concord river. possibly visit the falkland isles, and the china seas, before they again saw the waters of the merrimack, or perchance, not return this way forever. they had already embarked the private interests of the lands man in the larger venture of the race, and were ready to mess with mankind, reserving only the till of a chest to themselves. but they too were soon lost behind a point, and we went croaking on our way alone. what grievance has its root among the new hampshire hills ? we asked ; what is wanting to human life here, that these men should make such haste to the antipodes ? we prayed that their bright anticipa tions might not be rudely disappointed. though all the fates should prove unkind, leave not your native land behind. the ship, becalmed, at length stands still; the steed must rest beneath the hill ; but swiftly still our fortunes pace, to find us out in every place. the vessel, though her masts be firm, beneath her copper bears a worm ; around the cape, across the line, till fields of ice her course confine ; it matters not how smooth the breeze, how shallow or how deep the seas. whether she bears manilla twine, or in her hold madeira wine. or china teas, or spanish hides. in port or quarantine she rides ; far from new england's blustering shore. new england's worm her hulk shall bore, and sink her in the indian seas, twine, wine, and hides, and china teas. we passed a small desert here on the east bank, between tyngsboro' and hudson, which was interest monda y. 143 ing and even refreshing to our eyes in the midst of the almost universal greenness. this sand was in deed somewhat impressive and beautiful to us. a very old inhabitant, who was at work in a field on the nashua side, told us that he remembered when corn and grain grew there, and it was a cultivated field. but at length the fishermen, for this was a fishing place, pulled up the bushes on the shore, for greater convenience in hauling their seines, and when the bank was thus broken, the wind began to blow up the sand from the shore, until at length it had covered about fifteen acres several feet deep. we saw near the river, where the sand was blown off down to some ancient surface, the foundation of an indian wigwam exposed, a perfect circle of burnt stones four or five feet in diameter, mingled with fine charcoal and the bones of small animals, which had been preserved in the sand. the surrounding sand was sprinkled with other burnt stones on which their fires had been built, as well as with flakes of arrow-head stone, and we found one perfect arrow-head. in one place we noticed where an indian had sat to manufacture arrow-heads out of quartz, and the sand was sprinkled with a quart of small glass-like chips about as big as a fourpence, which he had broken off in his work. here, then, the indians must have fished before the whites arrived. there was another similar sandy tract about half a mile above this. still the noon prevailed, and we turned the prow aside to bathe, and recline ourselves under some buttonwoods by a ledge of rocks, in a retired pasture, sloping to the water's edge, and skirted with pines and hazels, in the town of hudson. still had india, 144 a week on the concord river. and that old noontide philosophy, the better part of our thoughts. it is always singular, but encouraging, to meet with common sense in very old books, as the heetopades of veeshnoo sarma ; a playful wisdom which has eyes behind as well as before, and oversees itself. it asserts their health and independence of the expe rience of later times. this pledge of sanity cannot be spared in a book, that it sometimes pleasantly reflect upon itself. the story and fabulous portion of this book winds loosely from sentence to sentence as so many oases in a desert, and is as indistinct as a camel's track between mourzouk and darfour. it is a comment on the flow and freshet of modern books. the reader leaps from sentence to sentence, as from one stepping-stone to another, while the stream of the story rushes past unregarded. the bhagvat-geeta is less sententious and poetic, perhaps, but still more wonderfully sustained and developed. its sanity and sublimity have impressed the minds even of soldiers and merchants. it is the characteristic of great poems that they will yield of their sense in due proportion to the hasty and the deliberate reader. to the practical they will be common sense, and to the wise wisdom ; as either the traveller may wet his lips, or an army may fill its water casks at a full stream. one of the most attractive of those ancient books that i have met with is the laws of menu. accord ing to sir william jones, '' vyasa, the son of parasara, has decided that the veda, with its angas, or the six compositions deduced from it, the revealed system of medicine, the puranas, or sacred histories, and the code of menu, were four works of supreme authority, which ought never to be shaken by arguments merely monda y. 145 human." the last is beheved by the hindoos "to have been promulgated in the beginning of time, by menu, son or grandson of brahma," and "first of created beings " ; and brahma is said to have " taught his laws to menu in a hundred thousand verses, which menu explained to the primitive world in the very words of the book now translated." others affirm that they have undergone successive abridgments for the convenience of mortals, " while the gods of the lower heaven, and the band of celestial musicians, are engaged in studying the primary code." — "a num ber of glosses or comments on menu were composed by the munis, or old philosophers, whose treatises, together with that before us, constitute the dherma sastra, in a collective sense, or body of law." cul luca bhatta was one of the more modern of these. every sacred book, successively, seems to have been accepted in the faith that it was to be the final resting-place of the sojourning soul ; but after all, it is but a caravansary which supplies refreshment to the traveller, and directs him farther on his way to isphahan or bagdat. thank god, no hindoo tyr anny prevailed at the framing of the world, but we are freemen of the universe, and not sentenced to any caste. i know of no book which has come dowm to us with grander pretensions than this, and it is so impersonal and sincere that it is never offensive nor ridiculous. compare the modes in which modern literature is advertised with the prospectus of this book, and think what a reading public it addresses, what criticism it expects. it seems to have been uttered from some eastern summit, with a sober morning prescience in the dawn of time, and you cannot read a sentence 146 a week on the concord river. without being elevated as upon the table-land of the ghauts. it has such a rhythm as the winds of the desert, such a tide as the ganges, and is as supe rior to criticism as the himmaleh mountains. its tone is of such unrelaxed fibre, that even at this late day, unworn by time, it wears the english and the sanscrit dress indifferently, and its fixed sentences keep up their distant fires still like the stars, by whose dissipated rays this lower world is illumined. the whole book by noble gestures and inclinations seems to render many words unnecessary. english sense has toiled, but hindoo wisdom never perspired. the sentences open, as we read them, unexpensively, and, at first, almost unmeaningly, as the petals of a flower, yet they sometimes startle us with that rare kind of wisdom which could only have been learned from the most trivial experience ; but it comes to us as refined as the porcelain earth which subsides to the bottom of the ocean. they are clean and dry as fossil truths, which have been exposed to the elements for thou sands of years, so impersonally and scientifically true that they are the ornament of the parlor and the cabi net. any moral philosophy is exceedingly rare. this of menu addresses our privacy more than most. it is a more private and familiar, and, at the same time, a more public and universal word than is spoken in parlor or pulpit now-a-days. as our domestic fowls are said to have their original in the wild pheas ant of india, so our domestic thoughts have their pro totypes in the thoughts of her philosophers. we seem to be dabbling in the very elements of our pres ent conventional and actual life ; as if it were the pri meval conventicle where how to eat and to drink and to sleep, and maintain life with adequate dignity and monda y. 147 sincerity, were the questions to be decided. it is later and more intimate even than the advice of our nearest friends. and yet it is true for the widest horizon, and read out of doors has relation to the dim mountain line, and is native and aboriginal there. most books belong to the house and street only, and in the fields their leaves feel very thin. they are bare and obvious, and have no halo nor haze about them. nature lies far and fair behind them all. but this, as it proceeds from, so does it address what is deepest and most abiding in man. it belongs to the noontide of the day, the midsummer of the year, and after the snows have melted, and the waters evapo rated in the spring, still its truth speaks freshly to our experience. it helps the sun to shine, and his rays fall on its page to illustrate it. it spends the morn ings and the evenings, and makes such an impression on us over night as to awaken us before dawn, and its influence lingers around us like a fragrance late into the day. it conveys a new gloss to the meadows and the depths of the wood. its spirit, like a more sub tile ether, sweeps along with the prevailing winds of a country, and the very locusts and crickets of a sum mer day are but later or earlier glosses on the dherma sastra of the hindoos, a continuation of the sacred code. as we have said, there is an orientalism in the most restless pioneer, and the farthest west is but the farthest east. this fair modern world is only a reprint of the laws of menu with the gloss of cul luca. tried by a new england eye, or the mere practical wisdom of modern times, they are the ora cles of a race already in its dotage, but held up to the sky, which is the only impartial and incormptible ordeal, they are of a piece with its depth and serenity, 148 a week on the concord river. and i am assured that they will have a place and sig nificance as long as there is a sky to test them by. give me a sentence which no intelligence can under stand. there must be a kind of hfe and palpitation to it, and under its words a kind of blood must circu late forever. it is wonderful that this sound should have come down to us from so far, when the voice of man can be heard so little way, and we are not now within ear-shot of any contemporary. the wood cutters have here felled an ancient pine forest, and brought to light to these distant hills a fair lake in the south-west ; and now in an instant it is distinctly shown to these woods as if its image had travelled hither from eternity. perhaps these old stumps upon the knoll remember when anciently this lake gleamed in the horizon. one wonders if the bare earth itself did not experience emotion at beholding again so fair a prospect. that fair water lies there in the sun thus revealed, so much the prouder and fairer because its beauty needed not to be seen. it seems yet lonely, sufficient to itself, and superior to observation. — so are these old sentences like serene lakes in the south west, at length revealed to us, which have so long been reflecting our own sky in their bosom. the great plain of india lies as in a cup between the himmaleh and the ocean on the north and south, and the brahmapootra and indus, on the east and west, wherein the primeval race was received. we will not dispute the story. we are pleased to read in the natural history of the country, of the '^pine, larch, spruce, and silver fir," which cover the southern face of the himmaleh range ; of the " gooseberry, rasp berry, strawberry," which from an imminent temperate zone overlook the torrid plains. so did this active monday. 149 modern life have even then a foothold and lurking place in the midst of the stateliness and contempla tiveness of those eastern plains. in another era the " lily-of-the-valley, cowslip, dandelion," were to work their way down into the plain, and bloom in a level zone of their own reaching round the earth. already has the era of the temperate zone arrived, the era of the pine and the oak, for the palm and the banian do not supply the wants of this age. the lichens on the summits of the rocks will perchance find their level ere long. as for the tenets of the brahmans, we are not so much concerned to know what doctrines they held, as that they were held by any. we can tolerate all philosophies, atomists, pneumatologists, atheists, theists, — plato, aristotle, leucippus, democritus, pythagorus, zoroaster, and confucius. it is the atti tude of these men, more than any communication which they make, that attracts us. between these and their commentators, it is true, there is an endless dispute. but if it comes to this that you compare notes, then you are all wrong. as it is, each takes us up into the serene heavens, whither the smallest bubble rises as surely as the largest, and paints earth and sky for us. any sincere thought is irresistible. the very austerity of the brahmans is tempting to the devotional soul, as a more refined and nobler luxury. wants so easily and gracefully satisfied seem like a more refined pleasure. their conception of creation is peaceful as a dream. "when that power awakes, then has this world its full expansion ; but when he slumbers with a tranquil spirit, then the whole system fades away." in the very indistinct ness of their theogony a sublime truth is implied. it 150 a week on the concord river. hardly allows the reader to rest in any supreme first cause, but directly it hints at a supremer still which created the last, and the creator is still behind increate. nor will we disturb the antiquity of this scripture ; "from fire, from air, and from the sun," it was "• milked out." one might as well investigate the chronology of light and heat. let the sun shine. menu understood this matter best, when he said, " those best know the divisions of days and nights who understand that the day of brahma, which endures to the end of a thousand such ages, [infinite ages, nevertheless, according to mortal reckoning,] gives rise to virtuous exertions ; and that his night endures as long as his day."" indeed, the mussulman and tartar dynasties are beyond all dating. methinks i have lived under them myself. in every man's brain is the sanscrit. the vedas and their angas are not so ancient as serene contemplation. why will we be imposed on by antiquity ? is the babe young? when i behold it, it seems more vener able than the oldest man ; it is more ancient than nestor or the sibyls, and bears the wrinkles of father saturn himself. and do we live but in the present ? how broad a line is that .'' i sit now on a stump whose rings number centuries of growth. if i look around i see that the soil is composed of the remains of just such stumps, ances tors to this. the earth is covered with mould. i thrust this stick many aeons deep into its surface, and with my heel make a deeper furrow than the elements have ploughed here for a thousand years. if i listen, i hear the peep of frogs which is older than the slime of egypt, and the distant drumming of mo nba y. 151 a partridge on a log, as if it were the pulse-beat of the summer air. i raise my fairest and freshest flowers in the old mould. why, what we would fain call new is not skin deep ; the earth is not yet stained by it. it is not the fertile ground which we walk on, but the leaves that flutter over our heads. the newest is but the oldest made visible to our senses. when we dig up the soil from a thousand feet below the surface, we call it new, and the plants which spring from it ; and when our vision pierces deeper into space, and detects a remoter star, we call that new also. the place where we sit is called hudson, — once it was nottingham, — once — we should read history as little critically as we consider the landscape, and be more interested by the atmospheric tints and various lights and shades which the intervening spaces create, than by its groundwork and composition. it is the morning now turned evening and seen in the west, — the same sun, but a new light and atmosphere. its beauty is like the sunset ; not a fresco painting on a wall, flat and bounded, but atmospheric and roving or free. in reality, history fluctuates as the face of the land scape from morning to evening. what is of moment is its hue and color. time hides no treasures ; we want not its iheii^ but its now. we do not complain that the mountains in the horizon are blue and indis tinct ; they are the more like the heavens. of what moment are facts that can be lost, — which need to be commemorated? the monument of death will outlast the memory of the dead. the pyramids do not tell us the tale that was confided to them ; the living fact commemorates itself. why 152 a week on the concord river. look in the dark for light? strictly speaking, the historical societies have not recovered one fact from oblivion, but are themselves, instead of the fact, that is lost. the researcher is more memorable than the researched. the crowd stood admiring the mist and the dim outlines of the trees seen through it, when one of their number advanced to explore the phenome non, and with fresh admiration all eyes were turned on his dimly retreating figure. it is astonishing with how little cooperation of the societies, the past is remembered. its story has indeed had another muse than has been assigned it. there is a good instance of the manner in which all history began, in alwakidis' arabian chronicle, "i was informed by alwied ahnatin aljorhami, who had it from rephcia ebn kais aldmiri, who had it from saiph ebn fabalah alchdtquarjm, who had it from thabet ebfi alkamah, who said he was present at the action." these fathers of history were not anxious to preserve, but to learn the fact ; and hence it was not forgotten. critical acumen is exerted in vain to uncover the past; \hq. past cannot ht prese?ited ; we cannot know what we are not. but one veil hangs over past, present, and future, and it is the province of the historian to find out, not what was, but what is. where a battle has been fought, you will find nothing but the bones of men and beasts ; where a battle is being fought, there are hearts beating. we will sit on a mound and muse, and not try to make these skeletons stand on their legs again. does nature remember, think you, that they were men, or not rather that they are bones? ancient history has an air of antiquity. it should be more modern. it is written as if the spectator should be thinking of the backside of the picture on monday. 153 the wall, or as if the author expected that the dead would be his readers, and wished to detail to them their own experience. men seem anxious to accom plish an orderly retreat through the centuries, ear nestly rebuilding the works behind, as they are battered down by the encroachments of time ; but while they loiter, they and their works both fall a prey to the arch enemy. history has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. it does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do ; but consider the universal history, and then tell us — when did burdock and plantain sprout first ? it has been so written for the most part, that the times it describes are with remarkable propriety called dai'k ages. they are dark, as one has observed, because we are so in the dark about them. the sun rarely shines in history, what with the dust and confusion ; and when we meet with any cheering fact which implies the presence of this luminary, we excerpt and modernize it. as when we read in the history of the saxons that edwin of northumbria "caused stakes to be fixed in the highways where he had seen a clear spring," and "brazen dishes were chained to them, to refresh the weary sojourner, whose fatigues edwin had himself experienced." this is worth all arthur's twelve battles. " through the shadow of the world we sweep into the younger day : better fifty years of europe than a cycle of cathay." than fifty years of europe better one new england ray ! biography, too, is liable to the same objection ; it should be autobiography. let us not, as the ger 154 a week on the concord river. mans advise, endeavor to go abroad and vex our bovi^els that we may be somebody else to explain him. if i am not i, w^ho will be ? but it is fit that the past should be dark ; though the darkness is not so much a quality of the past as of tradition. it is not a distance of time, but a dis tance of relation, which makes thus dusky its me morials. what is near to the heart of this generation is fair and bright still. greece lies outspread fair and sunshiny in floods of light, for there is the sun and daylight in her literature and art. homer does not allow us to forget that the sun shone, — nor phidias, nor the parthenon. yet no era has been wholly dark, nor will we too hastily submit to the historian, and congratulate ourselves on a blaze of light. if we could pierce the obscurity of those re mote years, we should find it light enough ; only thej'e is not our day. some creatures are made to see in the dark. there has always been the same amount of light in the world. the new and missing stars, the comets and eclipses, do not affect the general illumination, for only our glasses appreciate them. the eyes of the oldest fossil remains, they tell us, indicate that the same laws of light prevailed then as now. always the laws of light are the same, but the modes and degrees of seeing vary. the gods are partial to no era, but steadily shines their light in the heavens, while the eye of the beholder is turned to stone. there was but the sun and the eye from the first. the ages have not added a new ray to the one, nor altered a fibre of the other. if we will admit time into our thoughts at all, the mythologies, those vestiges of ancient poems, wrecks of poems, so to speak, the world's inheritance, still monday. 155 reflecting some of their original splendor, like the fragments of clouds tinted by the rays of the departed sun ; reaching into the latest summer day, and allying this hour to the morning of creation; as the poet sings : — " fragments of the lofty strain float down the tide of years, as buoyant on the stormy main a parted wreck appears ; " — these are the materials and hints for a history of the rise and progress of the race ; how, from the condi tion of ants, it arrived at the condition of men, and arts were gradually invented. let a thousand sur mises shed some light on this story. we will not be confined by historical, even geological periods, which would allow us to doubt of a progress in human affairs. if we rise above this wisdom for the day, we shall expect that this morning of the race, in which it has been supplied with the simplest necessaries, with corn, and wine, and honey, and oil, and fire, and articulate speech, and agricultural and other arts, reared up, by degrees, from the condition of ants, to men, will be succeeded by a day of equally progres sive splendor ; that, in the lapse of the divine periods, other divine agents and godlike men will assist to elevate the race as much above its present condition. but we do not know much about it. thus did one voyageur waking dream, while his companion slumbered on the bank. suddenly, a boatman's horn was heard, echoing from shore to shore, to give notice of his approach to the farmer's wife, with whom he was to take his dinner, though in 156 a week on the concord river. that place only muskrats and king-fishers seemed to hear. the current of our reflections and our slum bers being thus disturbed, we weighed anchor once more. as we proceeded on our way in the afternoon, the western bank became lower, or receded further from the channel in some places, leaving a few trees only to fringe the water's edge ; while the eastern rose ab ruptly here and there into wooded hols fifty or sixty feet high. the bass, tilia americana, also called the lime or linden, which was a new tree to us, over hung the water with its broad and rounded leaf, inter spersed with clusters of small hard berries, now nearly ripe, and made an agreeable shade for us sailors. the inner bark of this genus is the bast, the material of the fisherman's matting, and the ropes, and peas ant's shoes, of which the russians make so much use, and also of nets and a coarse cloth in some places. according to poets, this was once philyra, one of the oceanides. the ancients are said to have used its bark for the roofs of cottages, for baskets, and for a kind of paper called philyra. they also made buck lers of its wood, '' on account of its flexibility, light ness, and resiliency." it was once much used for carving, and is still in demand for panels of carriages, and for various uses for which toughness and flexibil ity are required. its sap affords sugar, and the honey made from its flowers is said to be preferred to any other. its leaves are in some countries given to cattle, a kind of chocolate has been made of its fruit, a medicine has been prepared from an infusion of its flowers, and finally, the charcoal made of its wood is greatly valued for gunpowder. the sight of this tree reminded us that we had monday. 157 reached a strange land to us. as we sailed under this canopy of leaves we saw the sky through its chinks, and, as it were, the meaning and idea of the tree stamped in a thousand hieroglyphics on the heavens. the universe is so aptly fitted to our organ ization, that the eye wanders and reposes at the same time. on every side there is something to soothe and refresh this sense. look up at the tree-tops and see how finely nature finishes off her work there. see how the pines spire without end higher and higher, and make a graceful fringe to the earth. and who shall count the finer cobwebs that soar and float away from their utmost tops, and the myriad insects that dodge between them. leaves are of more various forms than the alphabets of all languages put together ; of the oaks alone there are hardly two alike, and each expresses its own character. in all her products nature only develops her sim plest germs. one would say that it was no great stretch of invention to create birds. the hawk, which now takes his flight over the top of the wood, was at first perchance only a leaf which fluttered in its aisles. from rustling leaves she came in the course of ages to the loftier flight and clear carol of the bird. salmon brook comes in from the west under the railroad, a mile and a half below the village of nashua. we rode up far enough into the meadows which bor der it, to learn its piscatorial history from a hay-maker on its banks. he told us that the silver eel was formerly abundant here, and pointed to some sunken creels at'its mouth. this man's memory and imagin ation were fertile in fishermen's tales of floating isles in bottomless ponds, and of lakes mysteriously stocked 158 a week on the concord river. with fishes, and would have kept us till night-fall to listen, but we could not afford to loiter in this road stead, and so stood out to our sea again. though we never trod in these meadows, but only touched their margin with our hands, we still retain a pleasant memory of them. salmon brook, whose name is said to be a transla tion from the indian, was a favorite haunt of the aborigines. here too the first white settlers of nashua planted, and some dents in the earth, where their houses stood, and the wrecks of ancient apple trees, are still visible. about one mile up this stream stood the house of old john lovewell, who was an ensign in the army of oliver cromwell, and the father of "famous captain lovewell. '' he settled here before 1690, and died about 1754, at the age of one hundred and twenty years. he is thought to have been engaged in the famous narragansett swamp fight, which took place in 1675, before he came here. the indians are said to have spared him in succeeding wars on account of his kindness to them. even in 1700 he was so old and gray-headed that his scalp was worth nothing, since the french governor offered no bounty for such. i have stood in the dent of his cellar on the bank of the brook, and talked there with one whose grandfather had, whose father might have, talked with lovewell. here also he had a mill in his old age, and kept a small store. he was remembered by some who were recently living, as a hale old man who drove the boys out of his orchard with his cane. — consider the triumphs of the mortal man, and what poor trophies it would have to show, to wit, he cob bled shoes without glasses at a hundred, and cut a handsome swathe at a hundred and five! — lovewelps monday. i^q house is said to have been the first which mrs. dus tin reached on her escape from the indians. here probably the hero of pequawket was born and bred. close by may be seen the cellar and the gravestone of joseph hassell, who, as was elsewhere recorded, with his wife anna and son benjamin, and mary marks, " were slain by our indian enemies on sept. 2d [1691] in the evening." as gookin observed on a previous occasion, "the indian rod upon the eng lish backs had not yet done god's errand." salmoli brook near its mouth is still a solitary stream, mean denng through woods and meadows, while the then unmhabited mouth of the nashua now resounds with the din of a manufacturing town. a stream from otternic pond in hudson comes in just above salmon brook, on the opposite side. there was a good view of uncannunuc, the most conspicu ous mountain in these parts, from the bank here, seen rising over the west end of the bridge above. we soon after passed the village of nashua, on the river of the same name, where there is a covered bridge over the merrimack. the nashua, which is one of the largest tributaries, flows from wachusett mountain, through lancaster, groton, and other towns, where it has formed well-known elm-shaded meadows, but near its mouth it is obstructed by falls and factories, and did not tempt us to explore it. far away from here, in lancaster, with another companion, i have crossed the broad valley of the nashua, over which we had so long looked westward from the concord hills without seeing it to the blue mountains in the horizon. so many streams, so many meadows and woods and quiet dwellings of men had iain concealed between us and those delectable l60 a week on the concord river. mountains ; — from yonder hill on the road to tyngs boro' you may get a good view of them. — there where it seemed uninterrupted forest to our youthful eyes, between two neighboring pines in the horizon, lay the valley of the nashua, and this very stream was even then winding at its bottom, and then, as now, it was here silently mingling its waters with the merri mack. the clouds which floated over its meadows and were born there, seen far in the west, gilded by the rays of the setting sun, had adorned a thousand evening skies for us. but as it were by a turf wall this valley was concealed, and in our journey to those hills it was first gradually revealed to us. summer and winter our eyes had rested on the dim outline of the mountains, to which distance and indistinctness lent a grandeur not their own, so that they served to interpret all the allusions of poets and travellers. standing on the concord cliffs we thus spoke our mind to them : — with frontier strength ye stand your ground, with grand content ye circle round, tumultous silence for all sound, ye distant nursery of rills, monadnock and the peterboro' hills ; — firm argument that never stirs, outcircling the philosophers, — like some vast fleet. sailing through rain and sleet. through winter's cold and summer's heat ; still holding on upon your high emprise. until ye find a shore amid the skies ; not skulking close to land, with cargo contraband, for they who sent a venture out by ye have set the sun to see their honesty. monday, l6] ships of the line, each one, ye westward run, convoying clouds, i which cluster in your shrouds, always before the gale, under a press of sail, with weight of metal all untold, — i seem to feel ye in my firm seat here, immeasurable depth of hold, and breadth of beam, and length of running gear. methinks ye take luxurious pleasure in your novel western leisure ; so cool your brows and freshly blue, as time had naught for ye to do ; for ye lie at your length, an unappropriated strength. unhewn primeval timber, for knees so stiff, for masts so limber ; the stock of which new earths are made, one day to be our western trade. fit for the stanchions of a world which through the seas of space is hurled. while we enjoy a lingering ray, ye still o'ertop the western day, reposing yonder on god's croft like solid stacks of hay ; so bold a line as ne'er was writ on any page by human wit ; the forest glows as if an enemy's camp-fires shone along the horizon. or the day's funeral pyre were lighted there ; edged with silver and with gold, the clouds hang o'er in damask fold, and with such depth of amber light the west is dight, where still a few rays slant. 1 62 a week on the concord river. that even heaven seems extravagant. watatic hill lies on the horizon's sill like a child's toy left over night, and other duds to left and right, on the earth's edge, mountains and trees, stand as they were on air graven. or as the vessels in a haven await the morning breeze. i fancy even through your defiles windeth the way to heaven ; and yonder still, in spite of history's page, linger the golden and the silver age ; upon the laboring gale the news of future centuries is brought. and of new dynasties of thought. from your remotest vale. but special i remember thee, wachusett, who hke me standest alone without society. thy far blue eye, a remnant of the sky, seen through the clearing or the gorge, or from the windows of the forge. doth leaven all it passes by. nothing is true but stands 'tween me and you. thou western pioneer. who know'st not shame nor fear, by venturous spirit driven under the eaves of heaven ; and can'st expand thee there. and breathe enough of air ? even beyond the west thou migratest, into unclouded tracts. without a pilgrim's axe. cleaving thy road on high with thy well-tempered brow, monda v. 163 and mak'st thyself a clearing in the sky. upholding heaven, holding down earth, thy pastime from thy birth ; not steadied by the one, nor leaning on the other, may i approve myself thy worthy brother ! at length, like rasselas and other inhabitants of happy valleys, we had resolved to scale the blue wall which bounded the western horizon, though not with out misgivings that thereafter no visible fairy land would exist for us. but it would be long to tell of our adventures, and we have no time this afternoon, trans porting ourselves in imagination up this hazy nashua valley, to go over again that pilgrimage. we have since made many similar excursions to the principal mountains of new england and new york, and even far in the wilderness, and have passed a night on the summit of many of them. and now when we look again westward from our native hills, wachusett and monadnock have retreated once more among the blue and fabulous mountains in the horizon, though our eyes rest on the very rocks on both of them, where we have pitched our tent for a night, and boiled our hasty-pudding amid the clouds. as late as 1724 there was no house on the north side of the nashua, but only scattered wigwams and gristly forests between this frontier and canada. in september of that year, two men who were engaged in making turpentine on that side, for such were the first enterprises in the wilderness, were taken captive and carried to canada by a party of thirty indians. ten of the inhabitants of dunstable going to look for them, found the hoops of their barrel cut, and the tur pentine spread on the ground. i have been told by 1 64 a week on the concord river. an inhabitant of tyngsboro', who had the story from his ancestors, that one of these captives, when the indians were about to upset his barrel of turpentine, seized a pine knot and, flourishing it, swore so reso lutely that he would kill the first who touched it, that they refrained, and when at length he returned from canada he found it still standing. perhaps there was more than one barrel. — however this may have been, the scouts knew by marks on the trees, made with coal mixed with grease, that the men were not killed, but taken prisoners. one of the company, named farwell, perceiving that the turpentine had not done spreading, concluded that the indians had been gone but a short time, and they accordingly went in instant pursuit. contrary to the advice of farwell, follow ing directly on their trail up the merrimack, they fell into an ambuscade near thornton's ferry, in the pres ent town of merrimack, and nine were killed, only one, farwell, escaping after a vigorous pursuit. the men of dunstable went out and picked up their bodies, and carried them all down to dunstable and buried them. it is almost word for word as in the robin hood ballad : — " they carried these foresters into fair nottingham, as many there did know, they digg'd them graves in their churchyard, and they buried them all a row." nottingham is only the other side of the river, and they were not exactly all a-row. you may read in the churchyard at dunstable, under the " memento mori," and the name of one of them, how they " de parted this life," and monday. 165 " this man with seven more that lies in this grave was slew all in a day by the indians." the stones of some others of the company stand around the common grave with their separate inscrip tions. eight were buried here, but nine were killed, according to the best authorities. " gentle river, gentle river, lo, thy streams are stained with gore. many a brave and noble captain floats along thy willowed shore. all beside thy limpid waters. all beside thy sands so bright, indian chiefs and christian warriors joined in fierce and mortal fight," it is related in the history of dunstable, that on the return of farwell the indians were engaged by a fresh party, which they compelled to retreat, and pur sued as far as the nashua, where they fought across the stream at its mouth. after the departure of the indians, the figure of an indian's head was found carved by them on a large tree by the shore, which circumstance has given its name to this part of the village of nashville, — the " indian head." " it was observed by some judicious," says gookin, referring to philip's war, " that at the beginning of the war, the english soldiers made a nothing of the indians, and many spake words to this effect ; that one englishman was sufficient to chase ten indians ; many reckoned it was no other but veni^ vidi, vict^ but we may conclude that the judicious would by this time have made a different observation. 1 66 a week on the concord river. farwell appears to have been the only one who had studied his profession, and understood the business of liunting indians. he lived to fight another day, for the next year he was lovewell's lieutenant at pequawket, but that time, as we have related, left his bones in the wilderness. his name still reminds us of twilight days and forest scouts on indian trails, with an uneasy scalp ; — an indispensable hero to new england. as the more recent poet of love well's fight has sung, halting a little but bravely still; — " then did the crimson streams that flowed, seem like the waters of the brook, that brightly shine, that loudly dash. far down the cliffs of agiochook." these battles sound incredible to us. i think pos terity will doubt if such things ever were ; if our bold ancestors who settled this land were not struggling rather with the forest shadows, and not with a copper colored race of men. they were vapors, fever and ague of the unsettled woods. now, only a few arrow heads are turned up by the plow. in the pelasgic, the etruscan, or the british story, there is nothing so shadowy and unreal. it is a wild and antiquated looking grave-yard, overgrown with bushes, on the high road, about a quarter of a mile from and overlooking the merri mack, with a deserted mill stream bounding it on one side, where lie the earthly remains of the ancient in habitants of dunstable. we passed it three or four miles below here. you may read there the names of lovewell, farwell, and many others whose families monday. 167 were distinguished in indian warfare. we noticed there two large masses of granite more than a foot thick and rudely squared, lying flat on the ground over the remains of the first pastor and his wife. it is remarkable that the dead lie everywhere under stones, — " strata jacent passim suo quaeque sub " lapide — corpora, we might say, if the measure allowed. when the stone is a slight one, and stands upright, pointing to the skies, it does not oppress the spirits of the trav eller to meditate by it ; but these did seem a little heathenish to us ; and so are all large monuments over men's bodies, from the pyramids down. a monu ment should at least be " star-y-pointing," to indi cate whither the spirit is gone, and not prostrate, like the body it has deserted. there have been some nations who could do nothing but construct tombs, and these are the only traces which they have left. they are the heathen. but why these stones, so up right and emphatic, like exclamation points! what was there so remarkable that lived ? why should the monument be so much more enduring than the fame which it is designed to commemorate, — a stone to a bone? "here lies," — "here hes"; — why do they not sometimes write, there rises? is it a monument to the body only that is intended? " having reached the term of his natural life ; " — would it not be truer to say. having reached the term of his unnatu ral life? the rarest quality in an epitaph is truth. if any character is given it should be as severely true as the decision of the three judges below, and not the partial testimony of friends. friends and 1 68 a week on the concord river. contemporaries should supply only the name and date, and leave it to posterity to write the epitaph. here lies an honest man, rear-admiral van. faith, then ye have two in one grave, for in his favor, here too lies the engraver. fame itself is but an epitaph ; as late, as false, as true. but they only are the true epitaphs which old mortality retouches. a man might well pray that he may not taboo or curse any portion of nature by being buried in it. for the most part, the best man's spirit makes a fearful sprite to haunt his grave, and it is therefore much to the credit of little john, the famous follower of robin hood, that his grave was " long celebrous for the yielding of excellent whetstones." i confess that i have but little love for such collections as they have at the catacombs, pere la chaise, mount au burn, and even this dunstable grave-yard. at any rate, nothing but great antiquity can make grave-yards interesting to me. i have no friends there. it may be that i am not competent to write the poetry of the grave. the farmer who has skimmed his farm might perchance leave his body to nature to be plowed in, and in some measure restore its fertility. we should not retard but forward her economies. soon the village of nashua was out of sight, and the woods were gained again, and we rowed slowly on before sunset, looking for a solitary place in which monday. 169 to spend the night. a few evening clouds began to be reflected in the water, and the surface was dimpled only here and there by a muskrat crossing the stream. we camped at length near penichook brook, on the confines of nashville, by a deep ravine, under the skirts of a pine wood, where the dead pine leaves were our carpet, and their tawny boughs stretched over head. but fire and smoke soon tamed the scene ; the rocks consented to be our walls, and the pines our roof. a woodside was already the fittest locality for us. the wilderness is near, as well as dear, to every man. even the oldest villages are indebted to the border of wild wood which surrounds them, more than to the gardens of men. there is something indescribably inspiriting and beautiful in the aspect of the forest skirting and occasionally jutting into the midst of new towns, which, like the sand-heaps of fresh fox burrows, have sprung up in their midst. the very uprightness of the pines and maples asserts the ancient rectitude and vigor of nature. our lives need the relief of such a background, where the pine flourishes and the jay still screams. we had found a safe harbor for our boat, and as the sun was setting carried up our furniture, and soon arranged our house upon the bank, and while the kettle steamed at the tent door, we chatted of dis tant friends, and of the sights we were to behold, and wondered which way the towns lay from us. our cocoa was soon boiled, and supper set upon our chest, and we lengthened out this meal, like old voyageurs, with our talk. meanwhile we spread the map on the ground, and read in the gazetteer when the first settlers came here and got a township granted. then, when i/o a week on the concord river. supper was done, and we had written the journal of our voyage, we wrapped our buffaloes about us, and lay down with our heads pillowed on our arms, listen ing awhile to the distant baying of a dog, or the mur murs of the river, or to the wind, which had not gone to rest, — the western wind came lumbering in, bearing a faint pacific din, our evening mail, swift at the call of its post-master general ; laden with news fiom californ', whate'er transpired hath since morn, how wags the world by brier and brake from hence to athabasca lake ; — or half awake and half asleep, dreaming of a star which glimmered through our cotton roof. perhaps at mid night one was awakened by a cricket shrilly singing on his shoulder, or by a hunting spider in his eye, and was lulled asleep again by some streamlet purling its way along at the bottom of a wooded and rocky ravine in our neighborhood. it was pleasant to lie with our heads so low in the grass, and hear what a tinkling ever-busy laboratory it was. a thousand little arti sans beat on their anvils all night long. far in the night, as we were falling asleep on the bank of the merrimack, we heard some tyro beating a drum incessantly, in preparation for a country muster, as we learned, and we thought of the line, " when the drum beat at dead of night." we could have assured him that his beat would be answered, and the forces be mustered. fear not, thou drummer of the night, we too will be there. and still he drummed on in the silence and the dark. this monday. 171 stray sound from a far-off sphere came to our ears from time to time, far, sweet, and significant, and we listened with such an unprejudiced sense as if for the first time we heard at all. no doubt he was an insignificant drummer enough, but his music afforded us a prime and leisure hour, and we felt that we were in season wholly. these simple sounds related us to the stars. aye, there was a logic in them so convincing that the combined sense of mankind could never make me doubt their conclusions. i stop my habitual thinking, as if the plow had suddenly run deeper in its furrow through the crust of the world. how can i go on, who have just stepped over such a bottomless skylight in the bog of my life. suddenly old time winked at me, — ah you know me, you rogue, — and news had come that it was well. that ancient universe is in such capital health, i think undoubtedly it will never die. heal yourselves, doctors ; by god i live. — then idle time ran gadding by and left me with eternity alone ; i hear beyond the range of sound, i see beyond the verge of sight, — i see, smell, taste, hear, feel, that everlasting some thing to which we are allied, at once our maker, our abode, our destiny, our very selves ; the one historic truth, the most remarkable fact which can become the distinct and uninvited subject of our thought, the actual glory of the universe ; the only fact which a human being cannot avoid recognizing, or in some way forget or dispense with. — it doth expand my privacies to all, and leave me single in the crowd. 172 a week on the concord river. i have seen how the foundations of the world are laid, and i have not the least doubt that it will stand a good while. now chiefly is my natal hour, and only now my prime of life. i will not doubt the love untold, which not my worth nor want hath bought, which wooed me young and wooes me old, and to this evening hath me brought. what are ears ? what is time ? that this particular series of sounds called a strain of music, an invisible and fairy troop which never brushed the dew from any mead, can be wafted down through the centuries from homer to me, and he have been conversant with that same aerial and mysterious charm which now so tingles my ears? what a fine communication from age to age, of the fairest and noblest thoughts, the aspirations of ancient men, even such as w-ere never communicated by speech ! it is the flower of language, thought colored and curved, fluent and flexible, its crystal fountain tinged with the sun's rays, and its purling ripples reflecting the grass and the clouds. a strain of music reminds me of a passage of the vedas, and i associate with it the idea of infinite remoteness, as well as of beauty and serenity, for to the senses that is furthest from us which addresses the greatest depth within us. it teaches us again and again to trust the remotest and finest as the divinest instinct, and makes a dream our only real experience. as polishing expresses the vein in marble and grain in wood, so music brings out what of heroic lurks any where. the hero is the sole patron of music. that harmony which exists naturally between the hero's monday. 173 moods and the universe the soldier would fain imitate with drum and trumpet. when we are in health all sounds fife and drum for us ; we hear the notes of music in the air, or catch its echoes dying away when we awake in the dawn. marching is when the pulse of the hero beats in unison with the pulse of nature, and he steps to the measure of the universe ; then there is true courage and invincible strength. plutarch says that " plato thinks the gods never gave men music, the science of melody and harmony, for mere delectation or to tickle the ear; but that the discordant parts of the circulations and beauteous fabric of the soul, and that of it that roves about the body, and many times, for want of tune and air, breaks forth into many extravagances and excesses, might be sweetly recalled and artfully wound up to their former consent and agreement." music is the sound of the universal laws promul gated. it is the only assured tone. there are in it such strains as far surpass any man's faith in the loftiness of his destiny. things are to be learned which it will be worth the while to learn. formerly i heard these rumors from an ^olian harp. there is a vale which none hath seen, where foot of man has never been, such as here lives with toil and strife, an anxious and a sinful life. there every virtue has its birth, ere it descends upon the earth. and thither every deed returns, which in the generous bosom burns. there love is warm, and youth is young, and poetry is yet unsung. 174 a week on the concord river. for virtue still adventures there, and freely breathes her native air. and ever, if you hearken well, you still may hear its vesper bell, and tread of high-souled men go by. their thoughts conversing with the sky. according to jamblicluis, '' pythagoras did not pro cure for himself a thing of this kind through instru ments or the voice, but employing a certain ineffable divinity, and which it is difficult to apprehend, he ex tended his ears and fixed his intellect in the sublime symphonies of the world, he alone hearing and under standing, as it appears, the universal harmony and consonance of the spheres, and the stars that are moved through them, and which produce a fuller and more intense melody than anything effected by mortal sounds.'" travelling on foot very early one morning due east from here about twenty miles, from caleb harriman's tavern in hampstead toward haverhill, when i reached the railroad in plaistow, i heard at some distance a faint music in the air like an yeolian harp, which i immediately suspected to proceed from the cord of the telegraph vibrating in the just awakening morning wind, and applying my ear to one of the posts i was convinced that it was so. it was the telegraph harp singing its message through the country, its message sent not by men but by gods. perchance, like the statue of memnon, it resounds only in the morning when the first rays of the sun fall on it. it was like the first lyre or shell heard on the sea-shore, — that vibrating cord high in the air over the shores of earth. so have all things their higher and their lower uses. i heard a fairer news than the journals ever print. it monda y. 175 told of things worthy to hear, and worthy of the electric fluid to carry the news of, not of the price of cotton and flour, but it hinted at the price of the world itself and of things which are priceless, of absolute truth and beauty. still the drum rolled on, and stirred our blood to fresh extravagance that night. the clarion sound and clang of corselet and buckler were heard from many a hamlet of the soul, and many a knight was arming for the fight behind the encamped stars. — " before each van prick forth the aery knights, and couch their spears till thickest legions close ; with feats of arms from either end of heaven the welkin burns." away! away! away! away! ye have not kept your secret well, i will abide that other day, those other lands ye tell. has time no leisure left for these, the acts that ye rehearse ? is not eternity a lease for better deeds than verse ? t is sweet to hear of heroes dead, to know them still alive. but sweeter if we earn their bread. and in us they survive. our life should feed the springs of fame with a perennial wave, as ocean feeds the babbhng founts which find in it their grave. ye skies drop gently round my breast. and be my corselet blue, ye earth receive my lance in rest. my faithful charger you ; 176 a week on the concord river. ye stars my spear-heads in the sky, my arrow-tips ye are, — i see the routed foemen fly, my bright spears fixed are. give me an angel for a foe, fix now the place and time. and straight to meet him i will go above the starry chime. and with our clashing bucklers' clang the heavenly spheres shall ring, while bright the northern lights shall hang beside our tourneying. and if she lose her champion true, tell heaven not despair, for i will be her champion new. her fame i will repair. , there was a high wind this night, which we after wards learned had been still more violent elsewhere, and had done much injury to the cornfields far and near ; but we only heard it sigh from time to time, as if it had no license to shake the foundations of our tent ; the pines murmured, the water rippled, and the tent rocked a little, but we only laid our ears closer to the ground, while the blast swept on to alarm other men, and long before sunrise we were ready to pursue our voyage as usual. tuesday. " on either side the river he long fields of barley and of rye, that clothe the wold and meet the sky ; and thro' the fields the road runs by to many-towered camelot." tennyson. long before daylight we ranged abroad with hatchet in hand, in search of fuel, and made the yet slumber ing and dreaming wood resound with our blows. then with our fire we burned up a portion of the loi tering night, while the kettle sang its homely strain to the morning star. we tramped about the shore, waked all the muskrats, and scared up the bittern and birds that were asleep upon their roosts ; we hauled up and upset our boat, and washed it and rinsed out the clay, talking aloud as if it were broad day, until at length, by three o^clock, we had completed our prepa rations and were ready to pursue our voyage as usual ; so, shaking the clay from our feet, we pushed into the fog. though we were enveloped in mist as usual, we trusted that there was a bright day behind it. ply the oars ! away ! away ! in each dew-drop of the morning lies the promise of a day. rivers from the sunrise flow, springing with the dewy morn ; voyageurs 'gainst time do row, idle noon nor sunset know, ever even with the dawn, ^77 178 a week on the concord river. belknap, the historian of this state, says that "in the neighborhood of fresh rivers and ponds, a whitish fog in the morning, lying over the water, is a sure in dication of fair weather for that day ; and when no fog is seen, rain is expected before night." that which seemed to us to invest the world, was only a narrow and shallow wreath of vapor stretched over the channel of the merrimack from the sea-board to the mountains. more extensive fogs, however, have their own limits. i once saw the day break from the top of saddle-back mountain in massachusetts, above the clouds. as we cannot distinguish objects through this dense fog, let me tell this story more at length. i had come over the hills on foot and alone in se rene summer days, plucking the raspberries by the wayside, and occasionally buying a loaf of bread at a farmer's house, with a knapsack on my back, which held a few traveller's books and a change of clothing, and a staff in my hand. i had that morning looked down from the hoosack mountain, where the road crosses it, on the village of north adams in the val ley, three miles away under my feet, showing how un even the earth may sometimes be, and making it seem an accident that it should ever be level and conven ient for the feet of man. putting a little rice and sugar and a tin cup into my knapsack at this village, i began in the afternoon to ascend the mountain, whose summit is three thousand six hundred feet above the level of the sea, and was seven or eight miles distant by the path. my route lay up a long and spacious valley called the bellows, because the winds rush up or down it with violence in storms, sloping up to the very clouds betv/een the principal tuesday. lyg range and a lower mountain. there were a few farms scattered along at different elevations, each command ing a fine prospect of the mountains to the north, and a stream ran down the middle of the valley, on which near the head there was a mill. it seemed a road for the pilgrim to enter upon who would climb to the gates of heaven. now i crossed a hay-field, and now over the brook on a slight bridge, still gradually as cending all the while, with a sort of awe, and filled with indefinite expectations as to what kind of inhabi tants and what kind of nature i should come to at last. it now seemed some advantage that the earth was un even, for one could not imagine a more noble position for a farm-house than this vale aitorded, further from or nearer to its head, from a glen-like seclusion over looking the country at a great elevation between these two mountain walls. it reminded me of the homesteads of the huguenots on staten island, off the coast of new jersey. the hills in the interior of this island, though compara tively low, are penetrated in various directions by similar sloping valleys on a humble scale, gradually narrowing and rising to the centre, and at the head of these the huguenots, who were the first settlers, placed their houses, quite within the land, in rural and shel tered places, in leafy recesses where the breeze played with the poplar and the gum tree, from which, with equal security in calm and storm, they looked out through a widening vista, over miles of forest and stretching salt marsh, to the huguenots' tree, an old elm on the shore at whose root they had landed, and across the spacious outer bay of new york to sandy hook and the highlands of neversink, and thence over leagues of the atlantic, perchance to some faint vessel in the l80 a week on the concord river, horizon, almost a day's sail on her voyage to that europe whence they had come. when walking in the interior there, in the midst of rural scenery, where there was as little to remind me of the ocean as amid the new hampshire hills, i have suddenly, through a gap, a cleft or "clove road," as the dutch settlers called it, caught sight of a ship under full sail, over a field of corn, twenty or thirty miles at sea. the effect was similar, since i had no means of measuring distances, to seeing a painted ship passed backwards and forwards through a magic lantern. but to return to the mountain. it seemed as if he must be the most singular and heavenly-minded man whose dwelling stood highest up the valley. the thunder had rumbled at my heels all the way, but the shower passed off in another direction, though if it had not, i half believed that i should get above it. i at length reached the last house but one, where the path to the summit diverged to the right, while the summit itself rose directly in front. but i determined to follow up the valley to its head, and then find my own route up the steep, as the shorter and more ad venturous way. i had thoughts of returning to this house, which was well kept and so nobly placed, the next day, and perhaps remaining a week there, if i could have entertainment. its mistress was a frank and hospitable young woman, who stood before me in a dishabille, busily and unconcernedly combing her long black hair while she talked, giving her head the necessary toss with each sweep of the comb, with lively, sparkling eyes, and full of interest in that lower world from which i had come, talking all the while as familiarly as if she had known me for years, and re mindino; me of a cousin of mine. she at first had tuesday. l8l taken me for a student from williamstown, for they went by in parties, she said, either riding or walking, almost every pleasant day, and were a pretty wild set of fellows ; but they never went by the way i was going. as i passed the last house, a man called out to know what i had to sell, for seeing my knapsack, he thought that i might be a pedler, who was taking this unusual route over the ridge of the valley into south adams. he told me that it was still four or five miles to the summit by the path which i had left, though not more than two in a straight line from where i was, but nobody ever went this way ; there was no path, and i should find it as steep as the roof of a house. but i knew that i was more used to woods and mountains than he, and went along through his cow-yard, while he, looking at the sun, shouted after me that i should not get to the top that night. i soon reached the head of the valley, but as i could not see the summit from this point, i ascended a low mountain on the opposite side, and took its bearing with my compass. i at once entered the woods, and began to climb the steep side of the mountain in a diagonal direction, taking the bearing of a tree every dozen rods. the ascent was by no means difficult or unpleasant, and occupied much less time than it would have taken to follow the path. even country people, i have observed, magnify the difficulty of travelling in the forest, and especially among mountains. they seem to lack their usual common sense in this. i have climbed several higher mountains without guide or path, and have found, as might be expected, that it takes only more time and patience commonly than to travel the smoothest highway. it is very rare that you meet with obstacles in this world, which the 1 82 a week on the concord river. humblest man has not faculties to surmount. it is true, we may come to a perpendicular precipice, but we need not jump off, nor run our heads against it. a man may jump down his own cellar stairs, or dash his brains out against his chimney, if he is mad. so far as my experience goes, travellers generally exag gerate the difficulties of the way. like most evil, the difficulty is imaginary; for what's the hurry? if a person lost would conclude that after all he is not lost, he is not beside himself, but standing in his own old shoes on the very spot where he is, and that for the time being he will live there ; but the places that have known him, //;^/ are lost, — how much anxiety and danger would vanish. i am not alone if i stand by myself. who knows where in space this globe is rolling? yet we will not give ourselves up for lost, let it go where it will. i made my way steadily upward in a straight line through a dense undergrowth of mountain laurel, until the trees began to have a scraggy and infernal look, as if contending with frost goblins, and at length i reached the summit, just as the sun was setting. several acres here had been cleared, and were covered with rocks and stumps, and there was a rude observa tory in the middle which overlooked the woods. i had one fair view of the country before the sun went down, but i was too thirsty to waste any light in view ing the prospect, and set out directly to find water. first, going down a well-beaten path for half a mile through the low scrubby wood, till i came to where the water stood in the tracks of the horses which had carried travellers up, i lay down flat, and drank these dry one after another, a pure, cold, spring-like water, but yet i could not fill my dipper, though i contrived tuesday. 183 little syphons of grass stems and ingenious aqueducts on a small scale ; it was too slow a process. then remembering that i had passed a moist place near the top on my w^ay up, i returned to find it again, and here with sharp stones and my hands, in the twilight, i made a well about two feet deep, which was soon filled with pure cold water, and the birds too came and drank at it. so i filled my dipper, and making my way back to the observatory, collected some dry sticks and made a fire on some flat stones, which had been placed on the floor for that purpose, and so i soon cooked my supper of rice, having already whittled a wooden spoon to eat it with. i sat up during the evening, reading by the light of the fire the scraps of newspapers in which some party had wrapped their luncheon ; the prices cur rent in new york and boston, the advertisements, and the singular editorials which some had seen fit to publish, not foreseeing under what critical circum stances they would be read. i read these things at a vast advantage there, and it seemed to me that the advertisements, or what is called the business part of a paper, were greatly the best, the most useful, natural, and respectable. almost all the opinions and senti ments expressed were so little considered, so shallow and flimsy, that i thought the very texture of the paper must be weaker in that part and tear the more easily. the advertisements and the prices current were more closely allied to nature, and were respect able in some measure as tide and meteorological tables are ; but the reading matter, which i remem bered was most prized down below, unless it was some humble record of science, or an extract from some old classic, struck me as strangely whimsical, 1 84 a week on the concord river. and crude, and one-idea'd, like a school-boy's theme, such as youths write and after burn. the opinions were of that kind that are doomed to wear a different aspect to-morrow, like last year's fashions ; as if mankind were very green indeed, and would be ashamed of themselves in a few years, when they had outgrown this verdant period. there was, moreover, a singular disposition to wit and humor, but rarely the slightest real success ; and the apparent success was a terrible satire on the attempt ; as if the evil genius of man laughed the loudest at his best jokes. the advertisements, as i have said, such as were serious, and not of the modern quack kind, suggested pleasing and poetic thoughts ; for commerce is really as interesting as nature. the very names of the commodities were poetic, and as suggestive as if they had been inserted in a pleasing poem, — lumber, cotton, sugar, hides, guano, and logwood. some sober, private, and original thought would have been grateful to read there, and as much in harmony with the circumstances as if it had been written on a mountain top ; for it is of a fashion which never changes, and as respectable as hides and logwood, or any natural product. what an inestimable compan ion such a scrap of paper would have been, containing some fruit of a mature life. what a rehc! what a recipe! it seemed a divine invention, by which not mere shining coin, but shining and current thoughts, could be brought up and left there. as it was cold, i collected quite a pile of wood and lay down on a board against the side of the building, not having any blanket to cover me, with my head to the fire, that i might look after it, which is not the indian rule. but as it grew colder towards midnight, tuesday. jgc i at length encased myself completely in boards managing even to put a board on top of me, with a fortabiy. i was remmded, it is true, of the irish children who inquired what their neighbors did who had no door to put over them in winter nights as they had , but i am convmced that there was nothing very strange in the inquiry. those who have n vef tried it can have no idea how far a door, which keeps comfortable we are constituted a good dea? like chickens which taken from the hen,°and put in a basket of cotton in the chimney corner, will often peep till they die nevertheless, but if you pi t in a book and feel like the hen, they go to sleep directly. my only companions were the mice, which came to pick up the crumbs that had been left in those scraps of paper; still as everywhere, pensioners on man, and not unwisely improving this elevated tract for their tu^t\ ^^^^ ""^''■'^d ~^hat ^vas for them • t nibbled what was for me. once or twice z 'the night, when i looked up, i saw a white cloud drift ng through the windows, and filling the whole uppef this observatory was a building of considerable size, erected by the students of willikmstor"e whose buildings might be seen by daylight gleamint far down in the valley. it would really be no small advantage if every college were thus located ahhe base of a mountain, as good at least as one well cated in th^'tr""?'' ^'"^ '' "^" *° be edu shade, <t -u °f ^""""t^'i" ^ in more classical shades. some will remember, no doubt, not only 1 86 a week on the concord river. that they went to the college, but that they went to the mountain. every visit to its summit would, as it were, generalize the particular information gained below, and subject it to more catholic tests. i was up early and perched upon the top of this tower to see the daybreak, for some time reading the names that had been engraved there before i could distinguish more distant objects. an "untamable fly " buzzed at my elbow with the same nonchalance as on a molasses hogshead at the end of long wharf. even there i must attend to his stale humdrum. but now i come to the pith of this long digression. — as the light increased i discovered around me an ocean of mist, which reached up by chance exactly to the base of the tower, and shut out every vestige of the earth, while i was left floating on this fragment of the wreck of a world, on my carved plank in cloudland ; a situation which required no aid from the imagination to render it impressive. as the light in the east steadily increased, it revealed to me more clearly the new world into which i had risen in the night, the new terra-firma perchance of my future life. there was not a crevice left through which the trivial places we name massachusetts, or vermont, or new york, could be seen, while i still inhaled the clear atmos phere of a july morning, — if it were july there. all around beneath me was spread for a hundred miles on every side, as far as the eye could reach, an undu lating country of clouds, answering in the varied swell of its surface to the terrestrial world it veiled. it was such a country as we might see in dreams, with all the delights of paradise. there were immense snowy pastures apparently smooth-shaven and firm, and shady vales between the vaporous mountains, tuesday. 187 and far in the horizon i could see where some luxuri ous misty timber jutted into the prairie, and trace the windings of a water course, some unimagined ama zon or orinoko, by the misty trees on its brink. as there was wanting the symbol, so there was not the substance of impurity, no spot nor stain. it was a favor for which to be forever silent to be shown this vision. the earth beneath had become such a flitting thing of lights and shadows as the clouds had been before. it was not merely veiled to me, but it had passed away like the phantom of a shadow, o-zctss ovap, and this new platform was gained. as i had climbed above storm and cloud, so by successive days' journeys i might reach the region of eternal day beyond the tapering shadow of the earth ; aye, " heaven itself shall slide and roll away, like melting stars that glide along their oily threads." but when its own sun began to rise on this pure world, i found myself a dweller in the dazzling halls of aurora, into which poets have had but a partial glance over the eastern hills, — drifting amid the safifron-colored clouds, and playing with the rosy fingers of the dawn, in the very path of the sun\s chariot, and sprinkled with its dewy dust, enjoying the benignant smile, and near at hand the far-darting glances of the god. the inhabitants of earth behold commonly but the dark and shadowy under-side of heaven's pavement ; it is only when seen at a favora ble angle in the horizon, morning or evening, that some faint streaks of the rich lining of the clouds are revealed. but my muse would fail to convey an im pression of the gorgeous tapestry by which i was sur 1 88 a week on the concord river. rounded, such as men see faintly reflected afar oflf in the chambers of the east. here, as on earth, i saw the gracious god " flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye, . . . gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy." but never here did "heaven's sun" stain himself. but alas, owing as i think to some unworthiness in myself, my private sun did stain himself, and " anon permit the basest clouds to ride with ugly wrack on his celestial face," — for before the god had reached the zenith the heavenly pavement rose and embraced my wavering virtue, or rather i sank down again into that " forlorn world," from which the celestial sun had hid his visage. — " how may a worm, that crawls along the dust, clamber the azure mountains, thrown so high, and fetch from thence thy fair idea just. that in those sunny courts doth hidden lie, cloth'd with such light, as blinds the angel's eye ? how may weak mortal ever hope to file his unsmooth tongue, and his deprostrate style ? o, raise thou from his corse thy now entombed exile ! " in the preceding evening i had seen the summits of new and yet higher mountains, the catskills, by which i might hope to climb to heaven again, and had set my compass for a fair lake in the south-west, which lay in my way, for which i now steered, descend ing the mountain by my own route, on the side oppo site to that by which i had ascended, and soon found myself in the region of cloud and drizzling rain, and the inhabitants affirmed that it had been a cloudy and drizzling day wholly. tuesda v. 1 89 but now we must make haste back before the fog disperses to the blithe merrimack water. — since that first " away ! away ! " many a lengthy reach we 've rowed, still the sparrow on the spray hastes to usher in the day with her simple stanza'd ode. we passed a canal boat before sunrise, groping its way to the seaboard, and though we could not see it on account of the fog, the few dull, thumping, sterto rous sounds which we heard, impressed us with a sense of weight and irresistible motion. one little rill of commerce already awake on this distant new hamp shire river. the fog, as it required more skill in the steering, enhanced the interest of our early voyage, and made the river seem indefinitely broad. a slight mist, through which objects are faintly visible, has the effect of expanding even ordinary streams, by a singular mirage, into arms of the sea or inland lakes. in the present instance it was even fragrant and invigorating, and we enjoyed it as a sort of earlier sunshine, or dewy and embryo light. low-anchored cloud, newfoundland air, fountain-head and source of rivers, dew cloth, dream drapery. and napkin spread by fays ; drifting meadow of the air, where bloom the daisied banks and violets, and in whose fenny labyrinth the bittern booms and heron wades ; spirit of lakes and seas and rivers. bear only perfumes and the scent of healing herbs to just men's fields. 1 90 a week on the concord river. the same pleasant and observant historian whom we quoted above says, that "in the mountainous parts of the country, the ascent of vapors, and their forma tion into clouds, is a curious and entertaining object. the vapors are seen rising in small columns like smoke from many chimneys. when risen to a cer tain height, they spread, meet, condense, and are attracted to the mountains, where they either distil in gentle dews, and replenish the springs, or descend in showers, accompanied with thunder. after short intermissions, the process is repeated many times in the course of a summer day, afifording to travellers a lively illustration of what is observed in the book of job, ' they are wet with the showers of the mountains.' " fogs and clouds which conceal the overshadowing mountains lend the breadth of the plains to mountain vales. even a small featured country acquires some grandeur in stormy weather, when clouds are seen drifting between the beholder and the neighboring hills. when, in travelling toward haverhill through hampstead in this state, on the height of land be tween the merrimack and the piscataqua or the sea, you commence the descent eastward, the view toward the coast is so distant and unexpected, though the sea is invisible, that you at first suppose the unob structed atmosphere to be a fog in the lowlands con cealing hills of corresponding elevation to that you are upon ; but it is the mist of prejudice alone, which the winds will not disperse. the most stupendous scenery ceases to be sublime when it becomes distinct, or in other words limited, and the imagination is no longer encouraged to exaggerate it. the actual height and breadth of a mountain or a water-fall are always tuesday. 191 ridiculously small ; they are the imagined only that content us. nature is not made after such a fashion as we would have her. we piously exaggerate her wonders as the scenery around our home. such was the heaviness of the dews along this river, that we were generally obliged to leave our tent spread over the bows of the boat till the sun had dried it, to avoid mildew. we passed the mouth of penichook brook, a wild salmon stream, in the fog without seeing it. at length the sun's rays strug gled through the mist and showed us the pines on shore dripping with dew, and springs trickling from the moist banks, — "and now the taller sons, whom titan warms, of unshorn mountains blown with easy winds, dandle the morning's childhood in their arms, and, if they chanced to slip the prouder pines, the under corylets did catch their shines. to gild their leaves." we rowed for some hours between glistening banks before the sun had dried the grass and leaves, or the day had established its character. its serenity at last seemed the more profound and secure for the denseness of the morning's fog. the river became swifter, and the scenery more pleasing than before. the banks were steep and clayey for the most part, and trickling with water, and where a spring oozed out a few feet above the river, the boatmen had cut a trough out of a slab with their axes, and placed it so as to receive the water and fill their jugs con veniently. sometimes this purer and cooler water, bursting out from under a pine or a rock, was col lected into a basin close to the edge of, and level with the river, a fountain-head of the merrimack. 192 a week on the concord river. so near along life's stream are the fountains of inno cence and youth making fertile its sandy margin ; and the voyageur will do well to replenish his vessels often at these uncontaminated sources. some youthful spring, perchance, still empties with tinkling music into the oldest river, even when it is falling into the sea, and we imagine that its music is distin guished by the river gods from the general lapse of the stream, and falls sweeter on their ears in propor tion as it is nearer to the ocean. as the evapora tions of the river feed thus these unsuspected springs which filter through its banks, so, perchance, our aspirations fall back again in springs on the margin of life's stream to refresh and purify it. the yellow and tepid river may float his scow, and cheer his eye with its reflections and its ripples, but the boat man quenches his thirst at this small rill alone. it is this purer and cooler element that chiefly sustains his life. the race will long survive that is thus discreet. our course this morning lay between the territories of merrimack, on the west, and litchfield, once called brenton's farm, on the east, which townships were anciently the indian naticook. brenton was a fur trader among the indians, and these lands were granted to him in 1656. the latter township con tains about five hundred inhabitants, of whom, how ever, we saw none, and but few of their dwellings. being on the river, whose banks are always high and generally conceal the few houses, the country ap peared much more wild and primitive than to the traveller on the neighboring roads. the river is by far the most attractive highway, and those boatmen who have spent twenty or twenty-five years on it, tuesday. 193 must have had a much fairer, more wild and memo rable experience than the dusty and jarring one of the teamster, who has driven, during the same time, on the roads which run parallel with the stream. as one ascends the merrimack, he rarely sees a village, but for the most part, alternate wood and pasture lands, and sometimes a field of corn or potatoes, of rye or oats or english grass, with a few straggling apple trees, and, at still longer intervals, a farmer's house. the soil, excepting the best of the interval, is commonly as light and sandy as a patriot could desire. sometimes this forenoon the country ap peared in its primitive state, and as if the indian still inhabited it ; and again, as if many free new settlers occupied it, their slight fences straggling down to the water's edge, and the barking of dogs, and even the prattle of children, were heard, and smoke was seen to go up from some hearthstone, and the banks were divided into patches of pasture, mowing, tillage, and woodland. but when the river spread out broader, with an uninhabited islet, or a long low sandy shore which ran on single and devious, not answering to its opposite, but far off as if it were seashore or single coast, and the land no longer nursed the river in its bosom, but they conversed as equals, the rustling leaves with rippling waves, and few fences were seen, but high oak woods on one side, and large herds of cattle, and all tracks seemed a point to one centre, behind some statelier grove, — we imagined that the river flowed through an extensive manor, and that the few inhabitants were retainers to a lord, and a feudal state of things prevailed. when there was a suitable reach, we caught sight of the goffstown mountain, the indian uncannunuc, 194 a week on the concord river. rising before us on the west side. it was a calm and beautiful day, with only a slight zephyr to ripple the surface of the water, and rustle the woods on shore, and just warmth enough to prove the kindly dispo sition of nature to her children. with buoyant spirits and vigorous impulses we tossed our boat rapidly along into the very middle of this forenoon. the fish-hawk sailed and screamed overhead. the chipping, or striped squirrel, schirtis striattis, sat upon the end of some virginia fence or rider reach ing over the stream, twirling a green nut with one paw, as in a lathe, while the other held it fast against its incisors as chisels. like an independent russet leaf, with a will of its own, rustling whither it could ; now under the fence, now over it, now peeping at the voyageurs through a crack with only its tail visible, now at its lunch deep in the toothsome kernel, and now a rod off playing at hide-and-seek, with the nut stowed away in its chops, where were half a dozen more beside, extending its cheeks to a ludicrous breadth. as if it were devising through what safe valve of frisk or somerset to let its super fluous life escape ; the stream passing harmlessly off, even while it sits, in constant electric flashes through its tail ; and now with a chuckling squeak it dives into the root of a hazel, and we see no more of it. or the larger red squirrel or chickaree, sometimes called the hudson bay squirrel, striurus hudso7tins, gave warning of our approach by that peculiar alarum of his, like the winding up of some strong clock, in the top of a pine tree, and dodged behind its stem, or leaped from tree to tree, with such caution and adroitness as if much depended on the fidelity of his scout, running along the white pine boughs some tuesday. 195 times twenty rods by our side, with such speed, and hy such unerring routes as if it were some well-worn familiar path to him ; and presently, when we have passed, he returns to his work of cutting oif the pine cones, and letting them fall to the ground. we passed cromwelps falls, the first we met with on this river, this forenoon, by means of locks, with out using our wheels. these falls are the nesen keag of the indians. great nesenkeag stream comes in on the right just above, and little nesenkeag some distance below, both in litchfield. we read in the gazetteer, under the head of merrimack, that " the first house in this town was erected on the margin of the river [soon after 1665] for a house of traffic with the indians. for some time one crom well carried on a lucrative trade with them, weigh ing their furs with his foot, till, enraged at his supposed or real deception, they formed the resolu tion to murder him. this intention being communi cated to cromwell, he buried his wealth and made his escape. within a few hours after his flight, a party of the penacook tribe arrived, and not find ing the object of their resentment, burnt his habi tation." upon the top of the high bank here, close to the river, was still to be seen his cellar, now over grown with trees. it was a convenient spot for such a traffic, at the foot of the first falls above the settle ments, and commanding a pleasant view up the river, where he could see the indians coming down with their furs. the lock-man told us that his shovel and tongs had been plowed up here, and also a stone with his name on it. but we will not vouch for the truth of this story. these were the traces of the white trader. on the opposite bank, where it 196 a week on the concord river. jutted over the stream cape-wise, we picked up four arrow-heads and a small indian tool made of stone, as soon as we had climbed it, where plainly there had once stood a wigwam of the indians with whom cromwell traded, and who fished and hunted here before he came. as usual the gossips have not been silent respect ing cromwell's buried wealth, and it is said that some years ago a farmer's plow, not far from here, slid over a flat stone which emitted a hollow sound, and on its being raised a sum of money was found. the lock-man told us another similar story about a farmer in a neighboring town, who had been a poor man, but who suddenly bought a good farm, and w^as well to do in the world ; and, when he was questioned, did not give a satisfactory account of the matter ; — how few alas, could! this caused his hired man to remember, that one day as they were plowing together the plow struck something, and his employer going back to look, concluded not to go round again, say ing that the sky looked rather louring, and so put up his team. the like urgency has caused many things to be remembered which never transpired. the truth is, there is money buried everywhere, and you have only to go work to find it. not far from these falls stands an oak tree on the interval, about a quarter of a mile from the river, on the farm of a mr. lund, which was pointed out to us as the spot where french, the leader of the party which went in pursuit of the indians from dunstable, was killed. fai-well dodged them in the thick woods near. it did not look as if men had ever had to run for their lives on this now open and peaceful interval. here too was another extensive desert by the side tuesday. 197 of the road in litchfield, visible from the bank of the river. the sand was blown off in some places to the depth of ten or twelve feet, leaving small grotesque hillocks of that height where there was a clump of bushes firmly rooted. thirty or forty years ago, as we were told, it was a sheep pasture, but the sheep being worried by the fleas, began to paw the ground, till they broke the sod, and so the sand began to blow, till now it had extended over forty or fifty acres. this evil might easily have been remedied at first, by spreading birches with their leaves on over the sand, and fastening them down with stakes, to break the wind. the flies bit the sheep, and the sheep bit the ground, and the sore had spread to this extent. it is astonishing what a great sore a little scratch breedeth. who knows but sahara, where caravans and cities are buried, began with the bite of an african flea. this poor globe, how it must itch in many places! will no god be kind enough to spread a salve of birches over its sores? — here too we noticed where the indians had gathered a heap of stones, perhaps for their council fire, which by their weight having prevented the sand under them from blowing away, were left on the summit of a mound. they told us that arrow-heads, and also bullets of lead and iron, had been found here. we noticed seyeral other sandy tracts in our voyage ; and the course of the merrimack can be traced from the nearest mountain by its yellow sandbanks, though the river itself is for the most part invisible. lawsuits, as we hear, have in some cases grown out of these causes. railroads have been made through certain irritable districts, breaking their sod, and so have set the sand to blowing, till it has converted fertile farms igs a week on the concord river. into deserts, and the company has had to pay the damages. this sand seemed to us the connecting hnk between land and water. it was a kind of water on which you could walk, and you could see the ripple marks on its surface, produced by the winds, precisely like those at the bottom of a brook or lake. we had read that mussulmans are permitted by the koran to per form their ablutions in sand when they cannot get water, a necessary indulgence in arabia, and we now understood the propriety of this provision. plum island, at the mouth of this river, to whose formation, perhaps, these very banks have sent their contribution, is a similar desert of drifting sand, of various colors, blown into graceful curves by the wind. it is a mere sand-bar exposed, stretching nine miles parallel to the coast, and, exclusive of the marsh on the inside, rarely more than half a mile wide. there are but half a dozen houses on it, and it is almost without a tree, or a sod, or any green thing with which a countryman is familiar. the thin vegetation stands half buried in sand, as in drift ing snow. the only shrub, the beach plum, which gives the island its name, grows but a few feet high ; but this is so abundant that parties of a hundred at once come from the main land and down the merri mack in september, and pitch their tents, and gather the plums, which are good to eat raw and to preserve. the graceful and delicate beach pea too grows abun dantly amid the sand ; and several strange moss-like and succulent plants. the island for its whole length is scolloped into low hills, not more than twenty feet high, by the v/ind, and excepting a faint trail on the tuesday. 199 edge of the marsh, is as trackless as sahara. there are dreary bluffs of sand and valleys plowed by the wind, where you might expect to discover the bones of a caravan. schooners come from boston to load with the sand for masons' uses, and in a few hours the wind obliterates all traces of their work. yet you have only to dig a foot or two anywhere to come to fresh water ; and you are surprised to learn that woodchucks abound here, and foxes are found, though you see not where they can burrow or hide themselves. i have walked down the whole length of its broad beach at low tide, at which time alone you can find a firm ground to walk on, and probably massachusetts does not furnish a more grand and dreary walk. on the sea side there are only a distant sail and a few coots to break the grand monotony. a solitary stake stuck up, or a sharper sand-hill than usual, is remarka ble as a land-mark for miles ; while for music you hear only the ceaseless sound of the surf, and the dreary peep of the beach birds. there were several canal boats at cromwell's falls, passing through the locks, for which we waited. in the forward part of one stood a brawny new hamp shire man, leaning on his pole, bareheaded and in shirt and trousers only, a rude apollo of a man, coming down from that " vast uplandish country " to the main ; of nameless age, with flaxen hair, and vig orous, weather-bleached countenance, in whose wrin kles the sun still lodged, as little touched by the heats and frosts and withering cares of life, as a mountain maple ; an undressed, unkempt, uncivil man, with whom we parleyed a while, and parted not without a sincere interest in one another. his humanity was 200 a week on the concord river. genuine and instinctive, and his mdeness only a man ner. he inquired, just as we were passing out of ear shot, if we had killed anything, and we shouted after him that we had shot a buoy, and could see him for a long while scratching his head in vain, to know if he had heard aright. there is reason in the distinction of civil and un civil. the manners are sometimes so rough a rind, that we doubt whether they cover any core or sap wood at all. we sometimes meet uncivil men, chil dren of amazons, who dwell by mountain paths, and are said to be inhospitable to strangers ; whose salu tation is as rude as the grasp of their brawny hands, and who deal with men as unceremoniously as they are wont to deal with the elements. they need only to extend their clearings, and let in more sunlight, to seek out the southern slopes of the hills, from which they may look down on the civil plain or ocean, and temper their diet duly with the cereal fruits, consum ing less wild meat and acorns, to become like the inhabitants of cities. a true politeness does not re sult from any hasty and artificial polishing, it is true, but grows naturally in characters of the right grain and quality, through a long fronting of men and events, and rubbing on good and bad fortune. per haps i can tell a tale to the purpose while the lock is filling, — for our voyage this forenoon furnishes but few incidents of importance. early one summer morning i had left the shores of the connecticut, and for the livelong day travelled up the bank of a river, which came in from the west; now looking down on the stream, foaming and rip pling through the forest a mile off, from the hills over tuesday. 201 which the road led, and now sitting on its rocky brink and dipping my feet in its rapids, or bathing adventur ously in mid-channel. the hills grew more and more frequent, and gradually swelled into mountains as i advanced, hemming in the course of the river, so that at last i could not see where it came from, and was at liberty to imagine the most wonderful meanderings and descents. at noon i slept on the grass in the shade of a maple, where the river had found a broader channel than usual, and was spread out shallow, with frequent sand-bars exposed. in the names of the towns i recognized some which i had long ago read on teamsters' wagons, that had come from far up country, quiet, uplandish towns, of mountainous fame. i walked along musing, and enchanted by rows of sugar-maples, through the small and uninquisitive villages, and sometimes was pleased with the sight of a boat drawn up on a sand-bar, where there ap peared no inhabitants to use it. it seemed, however, as essential to the river as a fish, and to lend a certain dignity to it. it was like the trout of mountain streams to the fishes of the sea, or like the young of the land crab born far in the interior, who have never yet heard the sound of the ocean's surf. the hills approached nearer and nearer to the stream, until at last they closed behind me, and i found myself, just before night-fall, in a romantic and retired valley, about half a mile in length, and barely wide enough for the stream at its bottom. i thought that there could be no finer site for a cottage among mountains. you could anywhere run across the stream on the rocks, and its constant murmuring would quiet the passions of mankind forever. suddenly the road, which seemed aiming for the mountain side, turned short to the left, 202 a week on the concord river. and another valley opened, concealing the former, and of the same character with it. it was the most re markable and pleasing scenery i had ever seen. i found here a few mild and hospitable inhabitants, who, as the day was not quite spent, and i was anx ious to improve the light, directed me four or five miles further on my way to the dwelling of a man whose name was rice, who occupied the last and highest of the valleys that lay in my path, and who, they said, was a rather rude and uncivil man. but, " what is a foreign country to those who have science ? who is a stranger to those who have the habit of speaking kindly? " at length, as the sun was setting behind the moun tains in a still darker and more solitary vale, i reached the dwelling of this man. except for the narrowness of the plain, and that the stones were solid granite, it was the counterpart of that retreat to which belphoebe bore the wounded timias ; — " in a pleasant glade, with mountains round about environed, and mighty woods, which did the valley shade, and like a stately theatre it made, spreading itself into a spacious plain ; and in the midst a little river played amongst the pumy stones, which seemed to plain, with gentle murmur, that his course they did restrain." i observed, as i drew near, that he was not so rude as i had anticipated, for he kept many cattle, and dogs to watch them, and i saw where he had made maple sugar on the sides of the mountains, and above all distinguished the voices of children mingling with the murmur of the torrent before the door. as i passed his stable i met one whom i supposed to be a tuesday. 203 hired man, attending to his cattle, and inquired if they entertained travellers at that house. "some times we do," he answered, gruffly, and immediately went to the farthest stall from me, and i perceived that it was rice himself whom i had addressed. but pardoning this incivility to the wildness of the scenery, i bent my steps to the house. there was no sign-post before it, nor any of the usual invitations to the trav eller, though i saw by the road that many went and came there, but the owner's name only was fastened to the outside, a sort of implied and sullen invitation, as i thought. i passed from room to room without meeting any one, till i came to what seemed the guests' apartment, which was neat, and even had an air of refinement about it, and i was glad to find a map against the wall which would direct me on my journey on the morrow. at length i heard a step in a distant apartment, which was the first i had entered, and went to see if the landlord had come in ; but it proved to be only a child, one of those whose voices i had heard, probably his son, and between him and me stood in the door-way a large watch-dog, which growled at me, and looked as if he would presently spring, but the boy did not speak to him ; and when i asked for a glass of water, he briefly said, "it runs in the corner." so i took a mug from the counter and went out of doors, and searched round the corner of the house, but could find neither well nor spring, nor any water but the stream which ran all along the front. i came back, therefore, and setting down the mug, asked the child if the stream was good to drink ; whereupon he seized the mug and going to the corner of the room, where a cool spring which issued from the mountain behind trickled through a pipe into the 204 a week on the concord river. apartment, filled it, and drank, and gave it to me empty again, and calling to the dog, rushed out of doors. ere long some of the hired men made their appearance, and drank at the spring, and lazily washed themselves and combed their hair in silence, and some sat down as if weary, and fell asleep in their seats. but all the while i saw no women, though i some times heard a bustle in that part of the house from which the spring came. at length rice himself came in, for it was now dark, with an ox whip in his hand, breathing hard, and he too soon settled down into his seat not far from me, as if now that his day's work was done he had no further to travel, but only to digest his supper at his leisure. when i asked him if he could give me a bed, he said there was one ready, in such a tone as imphed that i ought to have known it, and the less said about that the better. so far so good. and yet he continued to look at me as if he would fain have me say something further like a traveller. i remarked, that it was a wild and rugged country he inhabited, and worth coming many miles to see. '^ not so very rough neither," said he, and appealed to his men to bear witness to the breadth and smoothness of his fields, which consisted in all of one small interval, and to the size of his crops ; " and if we have some hills,'' added he, " there 's no better pasturage anywhere." i then asked if this place was the one i had heard of, calling it by a name i had seen on the map, or if it was a certain other ; and he answered, gruffly, that it was neither the one nor the other; that he had settled it and cultivated it, and made it what it was, and i could know nothing about it. observing some guns and other implements of tuesda y. 205 hunting hanging on brackets around the room, and his hounds now sleeping on the floor, i took occasion to change the discourse, and inquired if there was much game in that country, and he answered this question more graciously, having some glimmering of my drift ; but when i inquired if there were any bears, he answered impatiently, that he was no more in danger of losing his sheep than his neighbors, he had tamed and civilized that region. after a pause, think ing of my journey on the morrow, and the few hours of daylight in that hollow and mountainous country, which would require me to be on my way betimes, i remarked, that the day must be shorter by an hour there than on the neighboring plains ; at which he gruffly asked what i knew about it, and affirmed that he had as much daylight as his neighbors ; he ventured to say, the days were longer there than where i lived, as i should find if i stayed ; that in some way, i could not be expected to understand how, the sun came over the mountains half an hour earlier, and stayed half an hour later there than on the neighboring plains. — and more of like sort he said. he was, indeed, as rude as a fabled satyr. but i suffered him to pass for what he was, for why should i quarrel with nature? and was even pleased at the discovery of such a singular natural phenomenon. i dealt with him as if to me all manners were indifferent, and he had a sweet wild way with him. i would not question nature, and i would rather have him as he was, than as i would have him. for i had come up here not for sympathy, or kindness, or society, but for novelty and adventure, and to see what nature had produced here. i therefore did not repel his rudeness, but quite innocently welcomed it all, and knew how to 206 a week on the concord river. appreciate it, as if i were reading in an old drama a part well sustained. he was indeed a coarse and sensual man, and, as i have said, uncivil, but he had his just quarrel with nature and mankind, i have no doubt, only he had no artificial covering to his ill humors. he was earthy enough, but yet there was good soil in him, and even a long-suffering saxon probity at bottom. if you could represent the case to him, he would not let the race die out in him, like a red indian. at length i told him that he was a fortunate man, and i trusted that he was grateful for so much light, and rising, said i would take a lamp, and that i would pay him then for my lodging, for i expected to re commence my journey, even as early as the sun rose in his country ; but he answered in haste, and this time civilly, that i should not fail to find some of his household stirring, however early, for they were no sluggards, and i could take my breakfast with them before i started if i chose ; and as he lighted the lamp i detected a gleam of true hospitality and ancient civility, a beam of pure and even gentle humanity from his bleared and moist eyes. it was a look more intimate with me, and more explanatory, than any words of his could have been if he had tried to his dying day. it was more significant than any rice of those parts could even comprehend, and long antici pated this man's culture, — a glance of his pure genius, which did not much enlighten him, but did impress and rule him for the moment, and faintly constrain his voice and manner. he cheerfully led the way to my apartment, stepping over the limbs of his men who were asleep on the floor in an intervening cham ber, and showed me a clean and comfortable bed. tuesda y. 207 for many pleasant hours, after the household was asleep, i sat at the open window, for it was a sultry night, and heard the little river " amongst the pumy stones, which seemed to plain, with gentle murmur, that his course they did restrain." but i arose as usual by starlight the next morning, before my host, or his men, or even his dogs, were awake ; and having left a ninepence on the counter, was already half way over the mountain with the sun, before they had broken their fast. before i had left the country of my host, while the first rays of the sun slanted over the mountains, as i stopped by the wayside to gather some raspberries, a very old man, not far from a hundred, came along with a milking pail in his hand, and turning aside began to pluck the berries near me ; — " his reverend locks in comelye curies did wave ; and on his aged temples grew the blossoms of the grave." — but when i inquired the way, he answered in a low, rough voice, without looking up or seeming to regard my presence, which i imputed to his years ; and pres ently, muttering to himself, he proceeded to collect his cows in a neighboring pasture ; and when he had again returned near to the vv^ayside, he suddenly stopped, while his cows went on before, and, un covering his head, prayed aloud in the cool morning air, as if he had forgotten this exercise before, for his daily bread, and also that he who letteth his rain fall on the just and on the unjust, and without whom not a sparrow falleth to the ground, would not neglect 208 a week on the concord river. the stranger (meaning me), and with even more direct and personal applications, though mainly according to the long established formula common to lowlanders and the inhabitants of mountains. when he had done praying, i made bold to ask him if he had any cheese in his hut which he would sell me, but he answered without looking up, and in the same low and repul sive voice as before, that they did not make any, and went to milking. it is written, "the stranger who turneth away from a house with disappointed hopes, leaveth there his own offences, and departeth, taking with him all the good actions of the owner." being now fairly in the stream of this week's com merce, we began to meet with boats more frequently, and hailed them from time to time with the freedom of sailors. the boatmen appeared to lead an easy and contented life, and we thought that we should pre fer their employment ourselves to many professions which are much more sought after. they suggested how few circumstances are necessary to the well-being and serenity of man, how indifferent all employments are, and that any may seem noble and poetic to the eyes of men, if pursued with sufificient buoyancy and freedom. with liberty and pleasant weather, the simplest occupation, any unquestioned country mode of life which detains us in the open air, is alluring. the man who picks peas steadily for a living is more than respectable, he is even envied by his shop-worn neighbors. we are as happy as the birds when our good genius permits us to pursue any outdoor work without a sense of dissipation. our pen-knife glitters in the sun ; our voice is echoed by yonder wood ; if an oar drops, we are fain to let it drop again. tuesda y. 209 the canal boat is of very simple construction, requiring but little ship timber, and, as we were told, costs about two hundred dollars. they are managed by two men. in ascending the stream they use poles fourteen or fifteen feet long, shod with iron, walking about one third the length of the boat from the for ward end. going down, they commonly keep in the middle of the stream, using an oar at each end ; or if the wind is favorable they raise their broad sail, and have only to steer. they commonly carry down bricks or wood, — fifteen or sixteen thousand bricks, and as many cords of wood, at a time, — and bring back stores for the country, consuming two or three days each way between concord and charlestown. they sometimes pile the wood so as to leave a shelter in one part where they may retire from the rain. one can hardly imagine a more healthful employment, or one more favorable to contem.plation and the observa tion of nature. unlike the mariner, they have the constantly varying panorama of the shore to relieve the monotony of their labor, and it seemed to us that as they thus glided noiselessly from town to town, with all their furniture about them, for their very homestead is a movable, they could comment on the character of the inhabitants with greater advantage and security to themselves than the traveller in a coach, who would be unable to indulge in such broadsides of wit and humor in so small a vessel, for fear of the recoil. they are not subject to great exposure, like the lumberers of maine, in any weather, but inhale the healthfullest breezes, being slightly encumbered with clothing, frequently with the head and feet bare. when we met them at noon as they were leisurely descending the stream, their busy com 2io a week on the concord river. merce did not look like toil, but rather like some ancient oriental game still played on a large scale, as the game of chess, for instance, handed down to this generation. from morning till night, unless the wind is so fair that his single sail will suffice without other labor than steering, the boatman walks backwards and forwards on the side of his boat, nov/ stooping with his shoulder to the pole, then drawing it back slowly to set it again, meanwhile moving steadily forward through an endless valley and an ever-changing scen ery, now distinguishing his course for a mile or two, and now shut in by a sudden turn of the river in a small woodland lake. all the phenomena which sur round him are simple and grand, and there is some thing impressive, even majestic, in the very motion he causes, which will naturally be communicated to his own character, and he feels the slow irresistible movement under him with pride, as if it were his own energy. the news spread like wild fire among us youths, when formerly, once in a year or two, one of these boats came up the concord river, and was seen steal ing mysteriously through the meadows and past the village. it came and departed as silently as a cloud, without noise or dust, and was witnessed by few. one summer day this huge traveller might be seen moored at some meadow's wharf, and another sum mer day it was not there. where precisely it came from, or who these men were who knew the rocks and soundings better than we who bathed there, we could never tell. we knew some river's bay only, but they took rivers from end to end. they were a sort of fabulous river-men to us. it was inconceivable by what sort of mediation any mere landsman could tuesda v. 211 hold communication with them. would they heave to to gratify his wishes ? no, it was favor enough to know faintly of their destination, or the time of their possible return. i have seen them in the summer, when the stream ran low, mowing the weeds in mid channel, and with hayers' jests cutting broad swathes in three feet of water, that they might make a passage for their scow, while the grass in long windrows was carried down the stream, undried by the rarest hay weather. we used to admire unweariedly how their vessel would float, like a huge chip, sustaining so many casks of lime, and thousands of bricks, and such heaps of iron ore, with wheel-barrows aboard, — and that when we stepped on it, it did not yield to the pressure of our feet. it gave us confidence in the prevalence of the law of buoyancy, and we imagined to what infinite uses it might be put. the men appeared to lead a kind of life on it, and it was whis pered that they slept aboard. some affirmed that it carried sail, and that such winds blew here as filled the sails of vessels on the ocean ; which again others much doubted. they had been seen to sail across our fair-haven bay by lucky fishers who were out, but unfortunately others were not there to see. we might then say that our river was navigable, — why not ? in after years i read in print, with no little satisfaction, that it was thought by some that with a little expense in removing rocks and deepening the channel, " there might be a profitable inland naviga tion." /then lived somewhere to tell of. such is commerce, which shakes the cocoa-nut and bread-fruit tree in the remotest isle, and sooner or later dawns on the duskiest and most simple-minded savage. if we may be pardoned the digression, — 212 a week on the concord river. who can help being affected at the thought of the very fine and slight, but positive relation, in which the savage inhabitants of some remote isle stand to the mysterious white mariner, the child of the sun? — as if wc were to have dealings with an animal higher in the scale of being than ourselves. it is a barely rec ognized fact to the natives that he exists, and has his home far away somewhere, and is glad to buy their fresh fruits with his superfluous commodities. under the same catholic sun glances his white ship over pacific waves into their smooth bays, and the poor savage's paddle gleams in the air. man's little acts are grand, beheld from land to land, there as they lie in time, within their native clime. ships with the noon-tide weigh, and glide before its ray, to some retired bay, their haunt, whence, under tropic sun, again they run, bearing gum senegal and tragicant. for this was ocean meant. for this the sun was sent, and moon was lent. and winds in distant caverns pent. since our voyage the railroad on the bank has been extended, and there is now but little boating on the merrimack. all kinds of produce and stores were formerly conveyed by water, but now nothing is car ried up the stream, and almost wood and bricks alone are carried down, and these are also carried on the railroad. the locks are fast wearing out, and will soon be impassable, since the tolls will not pay the tuesda v. 213 expense of repairing them, and so in a few years there will be an end of boating on this river. the boating, at present, is principally between merrimack and lowell, or hooksett and manchester. they make two or three trips from merrimack to lowell and back, about twenty-five miles each way, in a week, according to wind and weather. the boatman comes singing in to shore late at night, and moors his empty boat, and gets his supper and lodging in some house near at hand, and again early in the morning, by star light, perhaps, he pushes away up stream, and, by a shout, or the fragment of a song, gives notice of his approach to the lock-man, with whom he is to take his breakfast. if he gets up to his wood-pile before noon he proceeds to load his boat, with the help of his single " hand '' and is on his way down again before night. when he gets to lowell he unloads his boat, and gets his receipt for his cargo, and hav ing heard the news at the public house at middlesex or elsewhere, goes back with his empty boat and his receipt in his pocket to the owner, and to get a new load. we were frequently advertised of their ap proach by some faint sound behind us, and looking round saw them a mile off, creeping stealthily up the side of the stream like alligators. it was pleasant to hail these sailors of the merrimack from time to time, and learn the news which circulated with them. we imagined that the sun shining on their bare heads had stamped a liberal and public character on their most private thoughts. the open and sunny interval still stretched away from the river, sometimes by two or more terraces, to the distant hill country, and when we climbed the 214 a week on the concord river. bank we commonly found an irregular copse-wood skirting the river, the primitive having floated down stream long ago to the " king's navy.'' some times we saw the river road a quarter or half a mile distant, and the particolored concord stage, with its cloud of dust, its van of earnest travelling faces, and its rear of dusty trunks, reminding us that the country had its places of rendezvous for restless yankee men. there dwelt along at considerable distances on this interval a quiet agricultural and pastoral people, with every house its well, as we sometimes proved, and every household, though never so still and remote it appeared in the noontide, its dinner about these times. there they lived on, those new england people, farmer lives, father and grand-father and great-grand father, on and on without noise, keeping up tradition, and expecting, beside fair weather and abundant harvests, we did not learn what. they were con tented to live, since it was so contrived for them, and where their lines had fallen. — our uninquiring corpses lie more low than our life's curiosity doth go. yet these men had no need to travel to be as wise as solomon in all his glory, so similar are the lives of men in all countries, and fraught with the same homely experiences. one half the world knows how the other half lives. about noon we passed a small village in merrimack at thornton's ferry, and tasted of the waters of naticook brook on the same side, where french and his companions, whose grave we saw in dunstable, were ambuscaded by the indians. the humble vil lage of litchfield, with its steepleless meeting-house, tuesda v. 215 stood on the opposite or east bank, near where a dense grove of willows backed by maples skirted the shore. there also we noticed some shagbark trees, which, as they do not grow in concord, were as strange a sight to us as the palm would be, whose fruit only we have seen. our course now curved gracefully to the north, leaving a low flat shore on the merrimack side, which forms a sort of harbor for canal boats. we observed some fair elms and par ticularly large and handsome white-maples standing conspicuously on this interval, and the opposite shore, a quarter of a mile below, was covered with young elms and maples six inches high, which had probably sprung from the seeds which had been washed across. some carpenters were at work here mending a scow on the green and sloping bank. the strokes of their mallets echoed from shore to shore, and up and down the river, and their tools gleamed in the sun a quarter of a mile from us, and we realized that boat building was as ancient and honorable an art as agri culture, and that there might be a naval as well as a pastoral life. the whole history of commerce was made manifest in that scow turned bottom upward on the shore. thus did men begin to go down upon the sea in ships. we thought that it would be well for the traveller to build his boat on the bank of a stream, instead of finding a ferry or a bridge. in the adven tures of henry the fur-trader, it is pleasant to read that when with his indians he reached the shore of ontario, they consumed two days in making two canoes of the bark of the elm tree, in which to trans port themselves to fort niagara. it is a worthy incident in a journey, a delay as good as much rapid travelling. a good share of our interest in xeno 2l6 a week on the concord river. phon's story of his retreat is in the manoeuvres to get the army safely over the rivers, whether on rafts of logs or fagots, or on sheep-skins blown up. and where could they better afford to tarry meanwhile than on the banks of a river? as we glided past at a distance, these outdoor workmen appeared to have added some dignity to their labor by its very publicness. it was a part of the industry of nature, like the work of hornets and mudwasps. — the waves slowly beat, just to keep the noon sweet, and no sound is floated o'er, save the mallet on shore, which echoing on high seems a-caulking the sky. the haze, the sun's dust of travel, had a lethean influ ence on the land and its inhabitants, and all creatures resigned themselves to float upon the inappreciable tides of nature. woof of the sun, ethereal gauze. woven of nature's richest stuffs. visible heat, air-water, and dry sea. last conquest of the eye ; toil of the day displayed, sun-dust, aerial surf upon the shores of earth, ethereal estuary, frith of light. breakers of air, billows of heat, fine summer spray on inland seas ; bird of the sun, transparent-winged, owlet of noon, soft-pinioned, from heath or stubble rising without song ; establish thy serenity o'er the fields. the routine which is in the sunshine and the finest days, as that which has conquered and prevailed, tuesda y. 217 commends itself to us by its very antiquity and appar ent solidity and necessity. our weakness needs it, and our strength uses it. we cannot draw on our boots without bracing ourselves against it. if there were but one erect and solid standing tree in the woods, all creatures would go to rub against it and make sure of their footing. during the many hours which we spend in this waking sleep, the hand stands still on the face of the clock, and we grow like corn in the night. men are as busy as the brooks or bees, and postpone everything to their busyness; as car penters discuss politics between the strokes of the hammer while they are shingling a roof. this noontide was a fit occasion to make some pleasant harbor, and there read the journal of some voyageur like ourselves, not too moral nor inquisitive, and which would not disturb the noon ; or else some old classic, the very flower of all reading, which we had postponed to such a season " of syrian peace, immortal leisure." but, alas, our chest, like the cabin of a coaster, con tained only its well-thumbed navigator for all litera ture, and we were obliged to draw on our memory for these things. we naturally remembered alexander henry's adventures here, as a sort of classic among books of american travel. it contains scenery and rough sketching of men and incidents enough to inspire poets for many years, and to my fancy is as full of sounding names as any page of history, — lake winnipeg, hudson's bay, ottaway, and portages in numerable ; chipeways, gens de terres, les pilleurs, the weepers ; with reminiscences of hearne's jour 2l8 a week on the concord river. ney, and the like ; an immense and shaggy but sincere country summer and winter, adorned with chains of lakes and rivers, covered with snows, with hemlocks and fir trees. there is a naturalness, an unpretend ing and cold life in this traveller, as in a canadian winter, what life was preserved through low tempera tures and frontier dangers by furs within a stout heart. he has truth and moderation worthy of the father of history, which belong only to an intimate experience, and he does not defer too much to literature. the unlearned traveller may quote his single line from the poets with as good right as the scholar. he too may speak of the stars, for he sees them shoot perhaps when the astronomer does not. the good sense of this author is very conspicuous. he is a traveller who does not exaggerate, but writes for the informa tion of his readers, for science and for history. his story is told with as much good faith and directness as if it were a report to his brother traders, or the directors of the hudson bay company, and is fitly dedicated to sir joseph banks. it reads like the argument to a great poem on the primitive state of the country and its inhabitants, and the reader imag ines what in each case with the invocation of the muse might be sung, and leaves off with suspended interest, as if the full account were to follow. in what school was this fur-trader educated ? he seems to travel the immense snowy country with such purpose only as the reader who accompanies him, and to the latter's imagination, it is, as it were, momentarily cre ated to be the scene of his adventures. what is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the ma terials for the history of pontiac, or braddock, or the north west, which it furnishes ; not the annals of the tuesday. 219 country, but the natural facts, or peretmials, which are ever without date. when out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves. the souhegan, or crooked river, as some translate it, comes in from the west about a mile and a half above thornton's ferry. babboosuck brook empties into it near its mouth. there are said to be some of the finest water privileges in the country still unim proved on the former stream, at a short distance from the merrimack. one spring morning, march 22, in the year 1677, an incident occurred on the banks of the river here, which is interesting to us as a slight memorial of an interview between two ancient tribes of men, one of which is now extinct, while the other, though it is still represented by a miserable remnant, has long since disappeared from its ancient hunting grounds. a mr. james parker at "mr. hinchmanne's farme ner meremack," wrote thus " to the honred governer and council at bostown, hast, post hast.'''' " sagamore wanalancet come this morning to in forme me, and then went to mr. tyng's to informe him, that his son being on ye other sid of meremack river over against souhegan upon the 22 day of this instant, about tene of the clock in the morning, he discovered 15 indians on this sid the river, which he soposed to be mohokes by ther spech. he called to them ; they answered, but he could not understand ther spech ; and he having a conow ther in the river, he went to breck his conow that they might not have ani ues of it. in the mean time they shot about thirty guns at him, and he being much frighted 220 a week on the concord river. fled, and come home forthwith to nahamcock, [paw tucket falls or lowell] wher ther wigowames now stand." penacooks and mohawks ! ubique gentium sunt ? where are they now ? — in the year 1670, a mohawk warrior scalped a naamkeak or wamesit indian maiden near where lowell now stands. she, how ever, recovered. even as late as 1685, john hogkins, a penacook indian, who describes his grand-father as having lived " at place called malamake rever, other name chef natukkog and panukkog, that one rever great many names," wrote thus to the governor : — "may 15 th, 1685. " honor governor my friend, — " you my friend i desire your worship and your power, because i hope you can do som great matters this one. i am poor and naked and i have no men at my place because i afraid allwayes mohogs he will kill me every day and night. if your worship when please pray help me you no let mohogs kill me at my place at malamake river called pannukkog and natukkog, i will submit your worship and your power. — and now i want pouder and such alminishon shatt and guns, because i have forth at my hom and i plant theare. " this all indian hand, but pray you do consider your humble servant, john hogkins." signed also by simon detogkom, king hary, sam linis, mr. jorge rodunnonukgus, john owamosim min, and nine other indians, with their marks against their names. tuesday. 221 but now, one hundred and fifty-four years having elapsed since the date of this letter, we went unalarmed on our way, without " breaking " our " conow/' reading the new england gazetteer, and seeing no traces of " mohogs " on the banks. the souhegan, though a rapid river, seemed to day to have borrowed its character from the noon. where gleaming fields of haze meet the voyageur's gaze, and above, the heated air seems to make a river there, the pines stand up with pride by the souhegan's side, and the hemlock and the larch with their triumphal arch are waving o'er its march to the sea. no wind stirs its waves. but the spirits of the braves hov'ring o'er. whose antiquated graves its still water laves on the shore. with an indian's stealthy tread it goes sleeping in its bed, without joy or grief, or the rustle of a leaf, without a ripple or a billow, or the sigh of a willow, from the lyndeboro' hills to the merrimack mills. with a louder din did its current begin, when melted the snow on the far mountain's brow, and the drops came together in that rainy weather. experienced river, 222 a week on the concord river. hast thou flowed forever ? souhegan soundeth old, but the half is not told, what names hast thou borne in the ages far gone, when the xanthus and meander commenced to wander. ere the black bear haunted thy red forest-floor, or nature had planted the pines by thy shore. during the heat of the day, we rested on a large island a mile above the mouth of this river, pastured by a herd of cattle, with steep banks and scattered elms and oaks, and a sufficient channel for canal boats on each side. when we made a fire to boil some rice for our dinner, the flames spreading amid the dry grass, and the smoke curling silently upward and cast ing grotesque shadows on the ground seemed phenom ena of the noon, and we fancied that we progressed up the stream without eifort, and as naturally as the wind and tide went down, not outraging the calm days by unworthy bustle or impatience. the woods on the neighboring shore were alive with pigeons, which were moving south looking for mast, but now, like ourselves, spending their noon in the shade. we could hear the slight wiry winnowing sound of their wings as they changed their roosts from time to time, and their gentle and tremulous cooing. they so journed with us during the noontide, greater travellers far than we. you may frequently discover a single pair sitting upon the lower branches of the white pine in the depths of the wood, at this hour of the day, so silent and solitary, and with such a hermit-like appearance, as if they had never strayed beyond its tuesday. 223 skirts, while the acorn which was gathered in the forests of maine is still undigested in their crops. we obtained one of these handsome birds, which lingered too long upon its perch, and plucked and broiled it here with some other game, to be carried along for our supper ; for beside the provisions which we carried with us, we depended mainly on the river and forest for our supply. it is true, it did not seem to be putting this bird to its right use, to pluck off its feathers, and extract its entrails, and broil its carcass on the coals ; but we heroically persevered, neverthe less, waiting for farther information. the same re gard for nature which excited our sympathy for her creatures, nerved our hands to carry through what we had begun. for we would be honorable to the party we deserted ; we would fulfil fate, and so at length, perhaps, detect the secret innocence of these inces sant tragedies which heaven allows. — " too quick resolves do resolution wrong, what, part so soon to be divorced so long ? things to be done are long to be debated ; heaven is not day'd, repentance is not dated." we are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke straps our vice. where is the skilful swordsman who can give clean wounds, and not rip up his work with the other edge ? nature herself has not provided the most graceful end for her creatures. what becomes of all these birds that people the air and forest for our solace ment ? the sparrows seem always chipper, never infirm. we do not see their bodies lie about ; yet there is a tragedy at the end of each one of their lives. they must perish miserably ; not one of them 224 ^ week on the concord river. is translated. true, " not a sparrow falleth to the ground without our heavenly father's knowledge," but they do fall, nevertheless. the carcasses of some poor squirrels, however, the same that frisked so merrily in the morning, which we had skinned and embowelled for our dinner, we abandoned in disgust, with tardy humanity, as too wretched a resource for any but starving men. it was to perpetuate the practice of a barbarous era. if they had been larger, our crime had been less. their small red bodies, little bundles of red tissue, mere gobbets of venison, would not have "fattened fire." with a sudden impulse we threw them away, and washed our hands, and boiled some rice for our din ner. "behold the difference between the one who eateth flesh, and him to whom it belonged ! the first hath a momentary enjoyment, whilst the latter is deprived of existence ! " — " who could commit so great a crime against a poor animal, who is fed only by the herbs which grow wild in the woods, and whose belly is burnt up with hunger ? " we remembered a picture of mankind in the hunter age, chasing hares down the mountains, o me miserable! yet sheep and oxen are but larger squirrels, whose hides are saved and meat is salted, whose souls perchance are not so large in proportion to their bodies. there should always be some flowering and matur ing of the fruits of nature in the cooking process. some simple dishes recommend themselves to our imaginations as well as palates. in parched corn, for instance, there is a manifest sympathy between the bursting seed and the more perfect developments of vegetable life. it is a perfect flower with its petals, like the houstonia or anemone. on my warm hearth tuesday. 225 these cerealian blossoms expanded ; here is the bank whereon they grew. perhaps some such visible bless ing would always attend the simple and wholesome repast. here was that "pleasant harbor" which we had sighed for, where the weary voyageur could read the journal of some other sailor, whose bark had plowed, perchance, more famous and classic seas. at the tables of the gods, after feasting follow music and song ; we will recline now under these island trees, and for our minstrel call on anacreon. " nor has he ceased his charming song, but still that lyre, though he is dead, sleeps not in hades." simonides epigram on anacreon. i lately met with an old volume from a london book shop, containing the greek minor poets, and it was a pleasure to read once more only the words, — orpheus, — linus, — musaeus, — those faint poetic sounds and echoes of a name, dying away on the ears of us mod ern men ; and those hardly more substantial sounds, mimnermus — ibycus — alcaeus — stesichorus — me nander. they lived not in vain. we can converse with these bodiless fames without reserve or person ality. i know of no studies so composing as those of the classical scholar. when we have sat down to them, life seems as still and serene as if it were very far off, and i believe it is not habitually seen from any com mon platform so truly and unexaggerated as in the light of literature. in serene hours we contemplate the 226 a week on the concord river. tour of the greek and latin authors with more pleasure than the traveller does the fairest scenery of greece or italy. where shall we find a more re fined society ? that highway down from homer and hesiod to horace and juvenal is more attractive than the appian. reading the classics, or conversing with those old greeks and latins in their surviving works, is like walking amid the stars and constella tions, a high and by way serene to travel. indeed, the true scholar will be not a little of an astronomer in his habits. distracting cares will not be allowed to obstruct the field of his vision, for the higher regions of literature, like astronomy, are above storm and darkness. but passing by these rumors of bards, let us pause for a moment at the teian poet. there is something strangely modern about him. he is very easily turned into english. is it that our lyric poets have resounded only that lyre, which would sound only light subjects, and which simonides tells us does not sleep in hades? his odes are like gems of pure ivory. they possess an ethereal and evanes cent beauty like summer evenings, o xp>; o"^ vouv voov avoei, which you must perceive with the flower of the mind, — and show how slight a beauty could be ex pressed. you have to consider them, as the stars of lesser magnitude, with the side of the eye, and look aside from them to behold them. they charm us by their serenity and freedom from exaggeration and passion, and by a certain flowerlike beauty, which does not propose itself, but must be approached and studied like a natural object. but perhaps their chief merit consists in the lightness and yet security of their tread ; tuesda y. 227 " the young and tender stalk ne'er bends when they do walk." true, our nerves are never strung by them; —it is too constantly the sound of the lyre, and never the note of the trumpet ; but they are not gross, as has been presumed, but always elevated above the sensual. perhaps these are the best that have come down to us. on his lyre. i wish to sing the atridse, and cadmus i wish to sing; but my lyre sounds only love with its chords. lately i changed the strings and all the lyre ; and i began to sing the labors of hercules; but my lyre resounded loves. farewell, henceforth, for me. heroes! for my lyre sings only loves. to a swallow. thou indeed, dear swallow, yearly going and coming, in summer weavest thy nest. and in winter go'st disappearing either to nile or to memphis. but love always weaveth his nest in my heart. * * * on a silver cup. turning the silver, vulcan, make for me, not indeed a panoply. 228 a week on the concord river. for what are battles to me ? but a hollow cup, as deep as thou canst. and make for me in it neither stars, nor wagons, nor sad orion ; what are the pleiades to me ? what the shining bootes ? make vines for me, and clusters of grapes in it. and of gold love and bathyllus treading the grapes with the fair lyaeus. on himself. thou sing'st the affairs of thebes and he the battles of troy, but i of my own defeats. no horse have wasted me, nor foot, nor ships ; but a new and different host, from eyes smiting me. to a dove. lovely dove. whence, whence dost thou fly ? whence, running on air. dost thou waft and diffuse so many sweet ointments ? who art ? what thy errand ? — anacreon sent me to a boy, to bathyllus, who lately is ruler and tyrant of all. cythere has sold me for one little song, and i 'm doing this service for anacreon. and now, as you see, tub sb a y. 229 i bear letters from him. and he says that directly he 'ii make me free, but though he release me, his slave i will tarry with him. for why should i fly over mountains and fields, and perch upon trees. eating some wild thing ? now indeed i eat bread. plucking it from the hands of anacreon himself; and he gives me to drink the wine which he tastes, and drinking, i dance. and shadow my master's face with my wings ; and, going to rest, on the lyre itself i sleep. that is all ; get thee gone. thou hast made me more talkative, man, than a crow. on love. love walking swiftly. with hyacinthine staff, bade me to take a run with him ; and hastening through swift torrents. and woody places, and over precipices, a water-snake stung me. and my heart leaped up to my mouth, and i should have fainted ; but love fanning my brows with his soft wings, said, surely, thou art not able to love. on women. nature has given horns to bulls, and hoofs to horses, 2^0 a week on the concord river. swiftness to hares, to lions yawning teeth, to fishes swimming, to birds flight, to men wisdom. for woman she had nothing beside ; what then does she give ? beauty, — instead of all shields, instead of all spears ; and she conquers even iron and fire, who is beautiful. on lovers. horses have the mark of fire on their sides. and some have distinguished the parthian men by their crests ; so i, seeing lovers, know them at once. for they have a certain slight brand on their hearts. to a swallow. what dost thou wish me to do to thee — what, thou loquacious swallow ? dost thou wish me taking thee thy light pinions to clip ? or rather to pluck out thy tongue from within, as that tereus did ? why with thy notes in the dawn hast thou plundered bathyllus from my beautiful dreams ? to a colt. thracian colt, why at me looking aslant with thy eyes, tuesday. 231 dost thou cruelly flee, and think that i know nothing wise ? know i could well put the bridle on thee, and holding the reins, turn round the bounds of the course. but now thou browsest the meads, and gambolling lightly dost play. for thou hast no skillful horseman mounted upon thy back. cupid wounded. love once among roses saw not a sleeping bee, but was stung ; • and being wounded in the finger of his hand, cried for pain. running as well as flying to the beautiful venus, i am killed, mother, said he, i am killed, and i die. a little serpent has stung me, winged, which they call a bee — the husbandmen. and she said. if the sting of a bee afflicts you, how, think you, are they afflicted, love, whom you smite ? late in the afternoon, for we had lingered long on the island, we raised our sail for the first time, and for a short hour the south-west wind was our ally ; but it did not please heaven to abet us long. with one sail raised we swept slowly up the eastern side of the stream, steering clear of the rocks, while from the top of a hill which formed the opposite bank, some lumberers were rolling down timber to 232 a week on the concord river. be rafted down the stream. we could see their axes and levers gleaming in the sun, and the logs came down with a dust and a rumbling sound, which was reverberated through the woods beyond us on our side, like the roar of artillery. but zephyr soon took us out of sight and hearing of this commerce. hav ing passed read's ferry, and another island called mcgaw's island, we reached some rapids called moore's falls, and entered on " that section of the river, nine miles in extent, converted, by law, into the union canal, comprehending in that space six distinct falls ; at each of which, and at several inter mediate places, work has been done." after pass ing moore's falls by means of locks, we again had recourse to our oars, and went merrily on our way, driving the small sand-piper from rock to rock before us, and sometimes rowing near enough to a cottage on the bank, though they were few and far between, to see the sun-flowers, and the seed vessels of the poppy, like small goblets filled with the water of lethe, before the door, but without disturbing the sluggish household behind. thus we held on, sail ing or dipping our way along with the paddle up this broad river, — smooth and placid, flowing over con cealed rocks, where we could see the pickerel lying low in the transparent water, — eager to double some distant cape, to make some great bend as in the life of man, and see what new perspective would open; looking far into a new country, broad and serene, the cottages of settlers seen afar for the first time, yet with the moss of a century on their roofs, and the third or fourth generation in their shadow. strange was it to consider how the sun and the summer, the buds of spring and the seared tuesday. 233 leaves of autumn, were related to these cabins along the shore; how all the rays which paint the land scape radiate from them, and the flight of the crow and the gyrations of the hawk have reference to their roofs. still the ever rich and fertile shores accompanied us, fringed with vines and alive with small birds and frisking squirrels, the edge of some farmer's field or widow's wood-lot ; or wilder, per chance, where the muskrat, the little medicine of the river, drags itself along stealthily over the alder leaves and mussel shells, and man and the memory of man are banished far. at length the unwearied, never sinking shore, still holding on without break, with its cool copses and serene pasture grounds, tempted us to disembark ; and we adventurously landed on this remote coast, to survey it, unknown to any human inhabitant prob ably to this day. but we still remember the gnarled and hospitable oaks which grew even there for our entertainment, and were no strangers to us, the lonely horse in his pasture, and the patient cows, whose path to the river, so judiciously chosen to overcome the difficulties of the way, we followed, and disturbed their ruminations in the shade ; and, above all, the cool free aspect of the wild apple trees, generously proifering their fruit to us, though still green and crude, the hard, round, glossy fruit, which, if not ripe, still was not poison, but new english too, brought hither its ancestors by ours once. these gentler trees imparted a half-civilized and twilight aspect to the otherwise barbarian land. still further on we scrambled up the rocky channel of a brook, which had long served nature for a sluice there, leaping like it from rock to rock through tangled woods, at 234 ^ week on the concord river, the bottom of a ravine, which grew darker and darker, and more and more hoarse the murmurs of the stream, until we reached the ruins of a mill, where now the ivy grew, and the trout glanced through the crumbling flume; and there we imagined what had been the dreams and speculations of some early settler. but the waning day compelled us to em bark once more, and redeem this wasted time with long and vigorous sweeps over the rippling stream. it was still wild and solitary, except that at intervals of a mile or two the roof of a cottage might be seen over the bank. this region, as we read, was once famous for the manufacture of straw bonnets of the leghorn kind, of which it claims the invention in these parts, and occasionally some industrious damsel tripped down to the water's edge, as it appeared, to put her straw a-soak, and stood awhile to watch the retreating voyageurs, and catch the fragment of a boat song which we had made, wafted over the water. thus, perchance, the indian hunter, many a lagging year agone, gliding o'er thy rippling waters, lowly hummed a natural song. now the sun's behind the willows, now he gleams along the waves, faintly o'er the wearied billows come the spirits of the braves. just before sundown we reached some more falls in the town of bedford, where some stone-masons were employed repairing the locks in a solitary part of the river. they were interested in our adventures, especially one young man of our own age, who in quired at first if we were bound up to '' 'skeag," and tuesday. 235 when he had heard our story, and examined our outfit, asked us other questions, but temperately still, and always turning to his work again, though as if it were become his duty. it was plain that he would like to go with us, and as he looked up the river, many a dis tant cape and wooded shore were reflected in his eye, as well as in his thoughts. when we were ready he left his work, and helped us through the locks with a sort of quiet enthusiasm, telling us we were at coos falls, and we could still distinguish the strokes of his chisel for many sweeps after we had left him. we wished to camp this night on a large rock in the middle of the stream, just above these falls, but the want of fuel, and the difficulty of fixing our tent firmly, prevented us ; so we made our bed on the main land opposite, on the west bank, in the town of bed ford, in a retired place, as we supposed, there being no house in sight. wednesday. " man is man's foe and destiny." cotton. early this morning, as we were rolling up our buffaloes and loading our boat amid the dew, while our embers were still smoking, the masons who worked at the locks, and whom we had seen crossing the river in their boat the evening before while we were exam ining the rock, came upon us as they were going to their work, and we found that we had pitched our tent directly in their path to their boat. this was the only time that we were observed on our camping ground. thus, far from the beaten highways and the dust and din of travel, we beheld the country privately, yet freely, and at our leisure. other roads do some violence to nature, and bring the traveller to stare at her, but the river steals into the scenery it traverses without intrusion, silently creating and adorning it, and is as free to come and go as the zephyr. as we shoved away from this rocky coast, before sunrise, the smaller bittern, the genius of the shore, was moping along its edge, or stood probing the mud for its food, with ever an eye on us, though so demurely at work, or else he ran along over the wet stones like a wrecker in his storm coat, looking out for wrecks of snails and cockles. now away he goes, with a limp ing flight, uncertain where he will alight, until a rod of clear sand amid the alders invites his feet; and now our steady approach compels him to seek a new 236 wednesday. 23/ retreat. it is a bird of the oldest thalesian school, and no doubt believes in the priority of water to the other elements ; the relic of a twilight ante-diluvian age which yet inhabits these bright american rivers with us yankees. there is something venerable in this melancholy and contemplative race of birds, which may have trodden the earth while it was yet in a slimy and imperfect state. perchance their tracks too are still visible on the stones. it still lingers into our glaring summers, bravely supporting its fate with out sympathy from man, as if it looked forward to some second advent of which he has no assurance. one wonders if, by its patient study by rocks and sandy capes, it has wrested the whole of her secret from nature yet. what a rich experience it must have gained, standing on one leg and looking out from its dull eye so long on sunshine and rain, moon and stars ! what could it tell of stagnant pools and reeds and dank night-fogs? it would be worth the while to look closely into the eye which has been open and seeing at such hours, and in such solitudes, its dull, yellowish, greenish eye. methinks my own soul must be a bright invisible green. i have seen these birds stand by the half dozen together in the shallower water along the shore, with their bills thrust into the mud at the bottom, probing for food, the whole head being concealed, while the neck and body formed an arch above the water. cohass brook, the outlet of massabesic pond, — which last is five or six miles distant, and contains fifteen hundred acres, being the largest body of fresh water in rockingham county, — comes in near here from the east. rowing between manchester and bed ford, we passed, at an early hour, a ferry and some 238 a week on the concord river. falls, called goff's falls, the indian cohasset, where there is a small village, and a handsome green islet in the middle of the stream. from bedford and merrimac have been boated the bricks of which lowell is made. about twenty years before, as they told us, one moore, of bedford, having clay on his farm, con tracted to furnish eight millions of bricks to the founders of that city within two years. he fulfilled his contract in one year, and since then bricks have been the principal export from these towns. the farmers found thus a market for their wood, and when they had brought a load to the kilns, they could cart a load of bricks to the shore, and so make a profitable day's work of it. thus all parties were benefited. it was worth the while to see the place where lowell was "dug out." so likewise man chester is being built of bricks made still higher up the river at hooksett. there might be seen here on the bank of the merrimack, near goff 's falls, in what is now the town of bedford, famous " for hops and for its fine domestic manufactures," some graves of the aborigines. the land still bears this scar here, and time is slowly crumbling the bones of a race. yet without fail every spring since they first fished and hunted here, the brown thrasher has heralded the morning from a birch or alder spray, and the undying race of reed-birds still rustles through the withering grass. but these bones rustle not. these mouldering elements are slowly preparing for another metamorphosis, to serve new masters, and what was the indian's will ere long be the white man's sinew. we learned that bedford was not so famous for hops as formerly, since the price is fluctuating, and wednesday. 239 poles are now scarce. yet if the traveller goes back a few miles from the river, the hop kilns will still excite his curiosity. there were few incidents in our voyage this fore noon, though the river was now more rocky and the falls more frequent than before. it was a pleasant change, after rowing incessantly for many hours, to lock ourselves through in some retired place, — for commonly there was no lock-man at hand, — one sitting in the boat, while the other, sometimes with no little labor and heave-yoing, opened and shut the gates, waiting patiently to see the locks fill. we did not once use the wheels which we had provided. taking advantage of the eddy, we were sometimes floated up to the locks almost in the face of the falls ; and, by the same cause, any floating timber was car ried round in a circle and repeatedly drawn into the rapids before it finally went down the stream. these old gray structures, with their quiet arms stretched over the river in the sun, appeared like natural objects in the scenery, and the king-fisher and sand-piper alighted on them as readily as on stakes or rocks. we rowed leisurely up the stream for several hours, until the sun had got high in the sky, our thoughts monotonously beating time to our oars. for out ward variety there was only the river and the receding shores, a vista continually opening behind and closing before us, as we sat with our backs up stream, and for inward such thoughts as the muses grudgingly lent us. we were always passing some low inviting shore or some overhanging bank, on which, however, we never landed. — such near aspects had we of our life's scenery. 240 a week on the concord river. it might be seen by what tenure men held the earth. the smallest stream is mediterranean sea, a smaller ocean creek within the land, where men niay steer by their farm bounds and cottage lights. for my own part, but for the geographers, i should hardly have known how large a portion of our globe is water, my life has chiefly passed within so deep a cove. yet i have sometimes ventured as far as to the mouth of my snug harbor. from an old ruined fort on staten island, i have loved to watch all day some vessel whose name i had read in the morning through the telegraph glass, when she first came upon the coast, and her hull heaved up and glistened in the sun, from the moment when the pilot and most adventurous news-boats met her, past the hook, and up the nar row channel of the wide outer bay, till she was boarded by the health officer, and took her station at quarantine, or held on her unquestioned course to the wharves of new york. it was interesting, too, to watch the less adventurous news-man, who made his assault as the vessel swept through the narrows, defying plague and quarantine law, and fastening his little cock boat to her huge side, clambered up and disappeared in the cabin. and then i could imagine what momentous news was being imparted by the captain, which no american ear had ever heard, that asia, africa, europe — were all sunk ; for which at length he pays the price, and is seen descending the ship's side with his bundle of newspapers, but not where he first got up, for these arrivers do not stand still to gossip, — and he hastes away with steady sweeps to dispose of his wares to the highest bidder, and we shall erelong read something startling, — " by the latest arrival," — " by the good ship ." — on wednesda v. 24 1 sunday i beheld from some interior hill the long procession of vessels getting to sea, reaching from the city wharves through the narrows, and past the hook, quite to the ocean-stream, far as the eye could reach, with stately march and silken sails, all counting on lucky voyages, but each time some of the number, no doubt, destined to go to davy's locker, and never come on this coast again. — and again, in the evening of a pleasant day, it was my amusement to count the sails in sight. but as the setting sun continually brought more and more to light, still further in the horizon, the last count always had the advantage, till by the time the last rays streamed over the sea, i had doubled and trebled my first number ; though i could no longer class them all under the several heads of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and sloops, but most were faint generic vessels only. and then the tem perate twilight light, perchance, revealed the floating home of some sailor whose thoughts were already alienated from this american coast, and directed to wards the europe of our dream.s. — i have stood upon the same hill-top when a thunder shower rolling down from the catskills and highlands passed over the island, deluging the land, and when it had suddenly left us in sunshine, have seen it overtake successively with its huge shadow and dark descending wall of rain the vessels in the bay. their bright sails were suddenly drooping and dark like the sides of barns, and they seemed to shrink before the storm ; while still far beyond them on the sea, through this dark veil, gleamed the sunny sails of those vessels which the storm had not yet reached. — and at midnight, when all around and overhead was darkness, i have seen a field of trembling silvery light far out on the 242 a week on the concord river. sea, the reflection of the moonlight from the ocean, as if beyond the precincts of our night, where the moon traversed a cloudless heaven, — and sometimes a dark speck in its midst, where some fortunate vessel was pursuing its happy voyage by night. but to us [river sailors the sun never rose out of ocean waves, but from some green coppice, and went down behind some dark mountain line. we, too, were but dwellers on the shore, hke the bittern of the morning, and our pursuit the wrecks of snails and cockles. nevertheless, we were contented to know the better one fair particular shore. my life is like a stroll upon the beach, as near the ocean's edge as i can go, my tardy steps its waves sometimes o'erreach, sometimes i stay to let them overflow. my sole employment 't is, and scrupulous care, to place my gains beyond the reach of tides. each smoother pebble, and each shell more rare, which ocean kindly to my hand confides. i have but few companions on the shore, they scorn the strand who sail upon the sea, yet oft i think the ocean they 've sailed o'er is deeper known upon the strand to me. the middle sea contains no crimson dulse. its deeper waves cast up no pearls to view, along the shore my hand is on its pulse, and i converse with many a shipwrecked crew. the small houses which were scattered along the river at intervals of a mile or more, were commonly out of sight to us, but sometimes when we rowed near the shore, we heard the peevish note of a hen, or some slight domestic sound, which betrayed them. wednesda v. 243 the lock-men's houses were particularly well placed, retired, and high, always at falls or rapids, and com manding the pleasantest reaches of the river, — for it is generally wider and more lake-like just above a fall, — and there they wait for boats. these humble dwellings, homely and sincere, in which a hearth was still the essential part, were more pleasing to our eyes than palaces or castles would have been. in the noon of these days, as we have said, we occasionally climbed the banks and approached these houses, to get a glass of water and make acquaintance with their inhabit ants. high in the leafy bank, surrounded commonly by a small patch of corn and beans, squashes and melons, with sometimes a graceful hop-yard on one side, and some running vine over the windows, they appeared like bee-hives set to gather honey for a summer. i have not read of any arcadian life which surpasses the actual luxury and serenity of these new england dwellings. for the outward gilding, at least, the age is golden enough. as you approach the sunny door-way, awakening the echoes by your steps, still no sound from these barracks of repose, and you fear that the gentlest knock may seem rude to the oriental dreamers. the door is opened, per chance, by some yankee-hindoo woman, whose small-voiced but sincere hospitality, out of the bot tomless depths of a quiet nature, has travelled quite round to the opposite side, and fears only to obtrude its kindness. you step over the white-scoured floor to the bright " dresser," lightly, as if afraid to disturb the devotions of the household, — for oriental dynas ties appear to have passed away since the dinner table was last spread here, — and thence to the fre quented curb, where you see your long-forgotten, 244 ^ week on the concord river. unshaven face at the bottom, in juxtaposition with new-made butter and the trout in the well. " perhaps you would like some molasses and ginger,^' suggests the faint noon voice. sometimes there sits the brother who follows the sea, their representative man ; who knows only how far it is to the nearest port, no more distances, all the rest is sea and distant capes, — patting the dog, or dandling the kitten in arms that were stretched by the cable and the oar, pulling against boreas or the trade-winds. he looks up at the stranger half pleased, half astonished, with a mariner's eye, as if he were a dolphin within cast. if men will believe it, sua si bona norint, there are no more quiet tempes, nor more poetic and arcadian lives, than may be lived in these new england dwell ings. we thought that the employment of their inhabitants by day would be to tend the flowers and herds, and at night, like the shepherds of old, to clus ter and give names to the stars from the river banks. we passed a large and densely wooded island this forenoon, between short's and griffith's falls, the fairest which we had met with, with a handsome grove of elms at its head. if it had been evening we should have been glad to camp there. not long after one or two more occurred. the boatmen told us that the current had recently made important changes here. an island always pleases my imagination, even the smallest, as a small continent and integral portion of the globe. i have a fancy for building my hut on one. even a bare grassy isle which i can see entirely over at a glance, has some undefined and mysterious charm for me. it is commonly the offspring of the junction of two rivers, whose currents bring down and deposit their respective sands in the eddy at their confluence, wednesday. 245 as it were the womb of a continent. by what a deli cate and far-fetched contribution every island is made! what an enterprise of nature thus to lay the founda tions of and to build up the future continent, of golden and silver sands and the ruins of forests, with ant-like industry ! pindar gives the following account of the origin of thera, whence, in after times, libyan cyrene was settled by battus. triton, in the form of eu rypylus, presents a clod to euphemus, one of the argonauts, as they are about to return home. — " he knew of our haste, and immediately seizing a clod with his right hand, strove to give it as a chance stranger's gift. nor did the hero disregard him, but leaping on the shore, stretching hand to hand, received the mystic clod. but i hear it sinking from the deck. go with the sea brine at evening, accompanying the watery sea. often indeed i urged the careless menials to guard it, but their minds forgot. and now in this island the imperishable seed of spacious libya is spilled before its hour." it is a beautiful fable, also related by pindar, how helius, or the sun, looked down into the sea one day, — when perchance his rays were first reflected from some increasing ghttering sand-bar, — and saw the fair and fruitful island of rhodes " springing up from the bottom, capable of feeding many men and suitable for flocks ; " " the island sprang from the watery sea ; and the genial father of penetrating beams, ruler of fire-breathing horses, has it." 246 a week on the concord river. the shifting islands ! who would not be willing that his house should be undermined by such a foe ! the inhabitants of an island can tell what currents formed the land which he cultivates ; and his earth is still being created or destroyed. there before his door, perchance, still empties the stream which brought down the material of his farm ages before, and is still bringing it down or washing it away, — the graceful, gentle robber! not long after this we saw the piscataquoag, or sparkling water, emptying in on our left, and heard the falls of amoskeag above. large quantities of lumber, as we read in the gazetteer, were still annu ally floated down the piscataquoag to the merrimack, and there are many fine mill privileges on it. just above the mouth of this river we passed the artificial falls where the canals of the manchester manufacturing company discharge themselves into the merrimack. they are striking enough to have a name, and, with the scenery of a bashpish, would be visited from far and near. the water falls thirty or forty feet over seven or eight steep and narrow terraces of stone, probably to break its force, and is converted into one mass of foam. this canal water did not seem to be the worse for the wear, but foamed and fumed as purely, and boomed as savagely and impressively, as a mountain torrent, and though it came from under a factory, we saw a rainbow here. these are now the amoskeag falls, removed a mile down stream. but we did not tarry to examine them minutely, making haste to get past the village here collected, and out of hearing of the hammer which was laying the foundation of another lowell on the banks. at the time of our voyage manchester was a village wednesda y. 247 of about two thousand inhabitants, where we landed for a moment to get some cool water, and where an inhabitant told us that he was accustomed to go across the river into goffstown for his water. but now, after nine years, as i have been told and in deed have witnessed, it contains sixteen thousand inhabitants. from a hill on the road between goffs town and hooksett, four miles distant, i have since seen a thunder shower pass over, and the sun break out and shine on a city there, where i had landed nine years before in the fields to get a draught of water ; and there was waving the flag of its museum, — where "the only perfect skeleton of a greenland or river whale in the united states " was to be seen, and i also read in its directory of a " manchester athenaeum and gallery of the fine arts." according to the gazetteer, the descent of amos keag falls, which are the most considerable in the merrimack, is fifty-four feet in half a mile. we locked ourselves through here with much ado, sur mounting the successive watery steps of this river's stair-case in the midst of a crowd of villagers, jumping into the canal, to their amusement, to save our boat from upsetting, and consuming much river water in our service. amoskeag, or namaskeak, is said to mean " great fishing place." it was here abouts that the sachem wannalancet resided. tra dition says that his tribe, when at war with the mohawks, concealed their provisions in the cavities of the rocks in the upper part of these falls. the indians who hid their provisions in these holes, and affirmed "that god had cut them out for that purpose," understood their origin and use better than the royal society, who in their transactions, in the 248 a week on the concord river. last century, speaking of these very holes, declare that "they seem plainly to be artificial." similar " pot-holes " may be seen at the stone flume on this river, on the ottaway, at bellows' falls on the connecticut, and in the limestone rock at shelburne falls on deerfield river in massachusetts, and more or less generally about all falls. perhaps the most remarkable curiosity of this kind in new england is the well known basin on the pemigewasset, one of the head-waters of this river, twenty by thirty feet in extent and proportionably deep, with a smooth and rounded brim, and filled with a cold, pellucid and greenish water. at amoskeag the river is divided into many separate torrents and trickling rills by the rocks, and its volume is so much re duced by the drain of the canals that it does not fill its bed. there are many pot-holes here on a rocky island which the river washes over in high freshets. as at shelburne falls, where i first ob served them, they are from one foot to four or five in diameter, and as many in depth, perfectly round and regular, with smooth and gracefully curved brims, like goblets. their origin is apparent to the most careless observer. a stone which the current has washed down, meeting with obstacles, revolves as on a pivot where it lies, gradually sinking in the course of centuries deeper and deeper into the rock, and in new freshets receiving the aid of fresh stones which are drawn into this trap and doomed to re volve there for an indefinite period, doing sisyphus like penance for stony sins, until they either wear out, or wear through the bottom of their prison, or else are released by some revolution of nature. there lie the stones of various sizes, from a pebble wednesda y. 249 rested from their labor only since the spring, and some higher up which have lain still and dry for ages, — we notice some here at least sixteen feet above the present level of the water, — while others are still revolving, and enjoy no respite at any sea son. in one instance, at shelburne falls, they have worn quite through the rock, so that a portion of the river leaks through in anticipation of the fall. some of these pot-holes at amoskeag, in a very hard brown stone, had an oblong cylindrical stone of the same material loosely fitting them. one, as much as fifteen feet deep and seven or eight in diam eter, which was worn quite through to the water, had a huge rock of the same material, smooth but of irregular form, lodged in it. everywhere there were the rudiments or the wrecks of a dimple in the rock ; the rocky shells of whirlpools. as if, by force of example and sympathy after so many lessons, the rocks, the hardest material, had been endeavor ing to whirl or flow into the forms of the most fluid. the finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water work ing at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time. not only have some of these basins been forming for countless ages, but others exist which must have been completed in a former geological period. there are some, we are told, in the town of canaan in this state, with the stones still in them, on the height of land between the merrimack and connecticut, and nearly a thousand feet above these rivers, proving that the mountains and the rivers have changed places. there lie the stones which completed their revolutions perhaps before thoughts began to revolve in the brain 2s0 a week on the concord river. of man. the periods of hindoo and chinese history, though they reach back to the time when the race of mortals is confounded with the race of gods, are as nothing compared with the periods which these stones have inscribed. that which commenced a rock when time was young, shall conclude a pebble in the une qual contest. with such expense of time and natural forces are our very paving stones produced. they teach us lessons, these dumb workers ; verily there are " sermons in stones and books in the running streams." in these very holes the indians hid their provisions ; but now there is no bread, but only its old neighbor stones at the bottom. who knows how many races they have served thus? by as simple a law, some accidental by-law, perchance, our system itself was made ready for its inhabitants. these, and such as these, must be our antiquities, for lack of human vestiges. the monuments of heroes and the temples of the gods which may once have stood on the banks of this river, are now, at any rate, returned to dust and primitive soil. the mur mur of unchronicled nations has died away along these shores, and once more lowell and manchester are on the trail of the indian. the fact that romans once inhabited her reflects no little dignity on nature herself; that from some particular hill the roman once looked out on the sea. she need not be ashamed of the vestiges of her children. how gladly the antiquary informs us that their vessels penetrated into this frith, or up that river of some remote isle ! their military monuments still remain on the hills and under the sod of the valleys. the oft-repeated roman story is written in still legi ble characters in every quarter of the old world, and wednesday. 25 1 but to-day, perchance, a new coin is dug up whose in scription repeats and confirms their fame. some '''■jiidcba capta^^ with a woman mourning under a palm tree, with silent argument and demonstration confirms the pages of history. " rome living was the world's sole ornament ; and dead is now the world's sole monument." ***** " with her own weight down pressed now she lies, and by her heaps her hugeness testifies." if one doubts whether grecian valor and patriotism are not a fiction of the poets, he may go to athens and see still upon the walls of the temple of minerva the circular marks made by the shields taken from the enemy in the persian war, which were suspended there. we have not far to seek for living and un questionable evidence. the very dust takes shape and confirms some story which we had read. as fuller said, commenting on the zeal of camden, " a broken urn is a whole evidence ; or an old gate still surviving out of which the city is run out." when solon endeavored to prove that salamis had formerly belonged to the athenians, and not to the mega reans, he caused the tombs to be opened, and showed that the inhabitants of salamis turned the faces of their dead to the same side with the athenians, but the megareans to the opposite side. there they were to be interrogated. some minds are as little logical or argumentative as nature ; they can offer no reason or " guess," but they exhibit the solemn and incontrovertible fact. if a historical question arises, they cause the tombs to be opened. their silent and practical logic convinces 252 a week on the concord river, the reason and the understanding at the same time. of such sort is always the only pertinent question and the only unanswerable reply. our own country furnishes antiquities as ancient and durable, and as useful, as any ; rocks at least as well covered with moss, and a soil which, if it is virgin, is but virgin mould, the very dust of nature. what if we cannot read rome, or greece, etruria, or carthage, or egypt, or babylon, on these; are our cliffs bare? the lichen on the rocks is a rude and simple shield which beginning and imperfect nature suspended there. still hangs her wrinkled trophy. and here too the poet's eye may still detect the brazen nails which fastened time's inscriptions, and if he has the gift, decipher them by this clue. the walls that fence our fields, as well as modern rome, and not less the parthenon itself, are all built of ruins. here may be heard the din of rivers, and ancient winds which have long since lost their names sough through our woods ; — the first faint sounds of spring, older than the summer of athenian glory, the titmouse lisp ing in the wood, the jay's scream and blue-bird's warble, and the hum of " bees that fiy about the laughing blossoms of sallowy." here is the gray dawn for antiquity, and our to-mor row's future should be at least paulo-post to theirs which we have put behind us. there are the red maple and birchen leaves, old runes which are not yet deciphered ; catkins, pine-cones, vines, oak-leaves, and acorns ; the very things themselves, and not their forms in stone, — so much the more ancient and venerable. and even to the current summer there has wednesday. 253 come down tradition of a hoary-headed master of all art, who once filled every field and grove with statues and god-like architecture, of every design which greece has lately copied ; whose ruins are now min gled with the dust, and not one block remains upon another. the century sun and unwearied rain have wasted them, till not one fragment from that quarry now exists ; and poets perchance will feign that gods sent down the material from heaven. what though the traveller tell us of the ruins of egypt, are we so sick or idle, that we must sacrifice our america and to-day to some man's ill-remembered and indolent story ? carnac and luxor are but names, or if their skeletons remain, still more desert sand, and at length a wave of the mediterranean sea, are needed to wash away the filth that attaches to their grandeur. carnac ! carnac ! here is carnac for me. i behold the columns of a larger and purer temple. this is my carnac, whose unmeasured dome shelters the measuring art and measurer's home. behold these flowers, let us be up with time, not dreaming of three thousand years ago, erect ourselves and let those columns he. not stoop to raise a foil against the sky. where is the spirit of that time but in this present day, perchance this present line ? three thousand years ago are not agone, they are still lingering in this summer morn, and memnon's mother sprightly greets us now, wearing her youthful radiance on her brow. if carnac's columns still stand on the plain, to enjoy our opportunities they remain. in these parts dwelt the famous sachem passacona way, who was seen by gookin " at pawtucket, when 254 ^ ^eek on the concord river. he was about one hundred and twenty years old." he was reputed a wise man and a powwow, and restrained his people from going to war with the english. they believed " that he could make water burn, rocks move, and trees dance, and metamorphose himself into a flaming man ; that in winter he could raise a green leaf out of the ashes of a dry one, and produce a living snake from the skin of a dead one." in 1660, accord ing to gookin, at a great feast and dance, he made his farewell speech to his people, in which he said, that as he was not likely to see them met together again, he would leave them this word of advice, to take heed how they quarrelled with their english neighbors, for though they might do them much mis chief at first, it would prove the means of their own destruction. he himself, he said, had been as much an enemy to the english at their first coming as any, and had used all his arts to destroy them, or at least to prevent their settlement, but could by no means effect it. gookin thought that he "possibly might have such a kind of spirit upon him as was upon balaam, who in xxiii. numbers, 23, said ' surely there is no enchantment against jacob, neither is there any divi nation against israel.' " his son wannalancet care fully followed his advice, and when philip's war broke out, he withdrew his followers to penacook, now concord in new hampshire, from the scene of the war. on his return afterwards he visited the minister of chelmsford, and, as is stated in the his tory of that town, " wished to know whether chelms ford had suffered much during the war; and being informed that it had not, and that god should be thanked for it, wannalancet replied, 'me next.'" manchester was the residence of john stark, a hero wednesday. 255 of two wars, and survivor of a third, and at his death the last but one of the american generals of the revolution. he was bom in the adjoining town of londonderry, then nutfield, in 1728. as early as 1752, he was taken prisoner by the indians while hunting in the wilderness near baker's river; he performed notable service as a captain of rangers in the french war ; commanded a regiment of the new hampshire militia at the battle of bunker hill ; and fought and won the battle of bennington in 1777. he was past service in the last war, and died here in 1822, at the age of 94. his monument stands upon the second bank of the river, about a mile and a half above the falls, and commands a prospect several miles up and down the merrimack. it suggested how much more impressive in the landscape is the tomb of a hero than the dwellings of the inglorious living. who is most dead, — a hero by whose mon ument you stand, or his descendants of whom you have never heard? the graves of passaconaway and wannalancet are marked by no monument on the bank of their native river. every town which we passed, if we may believe the gazetteer, had been the residence of some great man. but though we knocked at many doors, and even made particular inquiries, we could not find that there were any now living. under the head of litchfield we read, — | "the hon. wyseman clagett closed his life in this town." according to another, "he was a classi cal scholar, a good lawyer, a wit, and a poet." we saw his old gray house just below great nesenkeag 2s6 a week on the concord river. brook. — under the head of merrimac, — "hon. mat thew thornton, one of the signers of the declaration of american independence, resided many years in this town." his house too we saw from the river. — "dr. jonathan gove, a man distinguished for his urbanity, his talents and professional skill, resided in this town [goifstown.] he was one of the old est practitioners of medicine in the county. he was many years an active member of the legislature." — " hon. robert means, who died jan. 24, 1823, at the age of 80, was for a long period a resident in amherst. he was a native of ireland. in 1764 he came to this country, where by his industry and ap plication to business, he acquired a large property, and great respect." — "william stinson, [one of the first settlers of dunbarton,] born in ireland, came to lon donderry with his father. he was much respected and was a useful man. james rogers was from ire land, and father to major robert rogers. he was shot in the woods, being mistaken for a bear." — "rev. matthew clark, second minister of london derry, was a native of ireland, who had in early life been an officer in the army, and distinguished himself in the defence of the city of londonderry, when be sieged by the army of king james ii., a.d. 1688-9. he afterwards relinquished a military life for the clerical profession. he possessed a strong mind, marked by a considerable degree of eccentricity. he died jan. 25, 1735, and was borne to the grave, at his particular request, by his former companions in arms, of whom there were a considerable number among the early settlers of this town ; several of whom had been made free from taxes throughout the british dominions by king william, for their bravery in that wednesday. 257 memorable siege." — col. george reid and capt. david m'clary, 'also citizens of londonderry, were " distinguished and brave " officers. — " major andrew m'clary, a native of this town [epsom] , fell at the battle of breed's hill." — many of these heroes, like the illustrious roman, were plowing when the news of the massacre at lexington arrived, and straight way left their plows in the furrow, and repaired to the scene of action. some miles from where we now were, there once stood a guide-board which said, " 3 miles to squire macgaw's." — but generally speaking, the land is now, at any rate, very barren of men, and we doubt if there are as many hundreds as we read of. it may be that we stood too near. uncannunuc mountain in goffstown was visible from amoskeag, five or six miles westward. its name is said to mean "the two breasts," there being two eminences some distance apart. the highest, which is about fourteen hundred feet above the sea, probably affords a more extensive view of the merri mack valley and the adjacent country than any other hill, though it is somewhat obstructed by woods. only a few short reaches of the river are visible, but you can trace its course far down stream by the sandy tracts on its banks. a little south of uncannunuc, about sixty years ago, as the story goes, an old woman who went out to gather pennyroyal, tript her foot in the bail of a small brass kettle in the dead grass and bushes. some say that flints and charcoal and some traces of a camp were also found. this kettle, holding about four quarts, is still preserved and used to dye thread 258 a week on the concord river. in. it is supposed to have belonged to some old french or indian hunter, who was killed in one of his hunting or scouting excursions, and so never re turned to look after his kettle. but we were most interested to hear of the penny royal, it is so soothing to be reminded that wild nature produces anything ready for the use of man. men know that sodiethmg is good. one says that it is yellow-dock, another that it is bitter-sweet, another that it is slippery-elm bark, burdock, catnip, calamint, elicampane, thoroughwort, or pennyroyal. a man may esteem himself happy when that which is his food i.s also his medicine. there is no kind of herb that grows, but somebody or other says that it is good. i am very glad to hear it. i reminds me of the first chapter of genesis. but how should they know that it is good ? that is the mystery to me. i am always agreeably disappointed ; it is incredible that they should have found it out. since all things are good, men fail at last to distinguish which is the bane, and which the antidote. there are sure to be two pre scriptions diametrically opposite. stuff" a cold and starve a cold are but two ways. they are the two practices both always in full blast. yet you must take advice of the one school as if there was no other. in respect to religion and the healing art, all nations are still in a state of barbarism. in the most civil ized countries the priest is still but a powwow, and the physician a great medicine. consider the def erence which is everywhere paid to a doctor's opinion. nothing more strikingly betrays the credulity of man kind than medicine. quackery is a thing universal, and universally successful. in this case it becomes literally true that no imposition is too great for the wednesda v. 259 credulity of men. priests and physicians should never look one another in the face. they have no common ground, nor is their any to mediate between them. when the one comes, the other goes. they could not come together without laughter, or a significant silence, for the one's profession is a satire on the other's, and cither's success would be the other's failure. it is wonderful that the physician should ever die, and that the priest should ever live. why is it that the priest is never called to consult with the physician ? it is because men believe practically that matter is independent of spirit. but what is quack ery ? it is commonly an attempt to cure the diseases of a man by addressing his body alone. there is need of a physician who shall minister to both soul and body at once, that is, to man. now he falls between two stools. after passing through the locks, we had poled our selves through the canal here, about half a mile in length, to the boatable part of the river. above amoskeag the river spreads out into a lake reach ing a mile or two without a bend. there were many canal boats here bound up to hooksett, about eight miles, and as they were going up empty with a fair wmd, one boatman offered to take us in tow if we would wait. but when we came alongside, we found that they meant to take us on board, since other wise we should clog their motions too much ; but as our boat was too heavy to be lifted aboard, we pursued our way up the stream, as before, while the boatmen were at their dinner, and came to anchor at length under some alders on the opposite shore, where we could take our lunch. though far on one side, every sound was wafted over to us from the 260 a week on the concord river. opposite bank, and from the harbor of the canal, and we could see everything that passed. by and by came several canal boats, at intervals of a quarter of a mile, standing up to hooksett with a light breeze, and one by one disappeared round a point above. with their broad sails set, they moved slowly up the stream in the sluggish and fitful breeze, like one winged antediluvian birds, and as if impelled by some mysterious counter current. it was a grand motion, so slow and stately, this "standing out," as the phrase is, expressing the gradual and steady progress of a vessel, as if it were by mere rectitude and dis position, without shuffling. their sails, which stood so still, were like chips cast into the current of the air to show which way it set. at length the boat which we had spoken came along, keeping the middle of the stream, and when within speaking distance the steersman called out ironically to say, that if we would come alongside now he would take us in tow ; but not heeding his taunt, we still loitered in the shade till we had finished our lunch, and when the last boat had disappeared round the point with flap ping sail, for the breeze had now sunk to a zephyr, with our own sails set, and plying our oars, we shot rapidly up the stream in pursuit, and as we glided close alongside, while they were vainly invoking ^olus to their aid, we returned their compliment by proposing, if they would throw us a rope, to " take them in tow," to which these merrimack sailors had no suitable answer ready. thus we gradually over took each boat in succession until we had the river to ourselves again. our course this afternoon was between manchester and gofifstown. wednesday. 26 1 while we float here, far from that tributary stream on whose banks our friends and kindred dwell, our thoughts, like the stars, come out of their horizon still ; for there circulates a finer blood than lavoisier has discovered the laws of, — the blood, not of kindred merely, but of kindness, whose pulse still beats at any distance and forever. after years of vain familiarity, some distant gesture or unconscious behavior, which we remember, speaks to us with more emphasis than the wisest or kindest words. we are sometimes made aware of a kindness long passed, and realize that there have been times when our friends' thoughts of us were of so pure and lofty a character that they passed over us like the winds of heaven unnoticed; when they treated us not as what we were, but as what we aspired to be. there has just reached us, it may be, the nobleness of some such silent behavior, not to be for gotten, not to be remembered, and we shudder to think how it fell on us cold, though in some true but tardy hour we endeavor to wipe off these scores. in my experience, persons, when they are made the subject of conversation, though with a friend, are commonly the most prosaic and trivial of facts. the universe seems bankrupt as soon as we begin to dis cuss the character of individuals. our discourse all runs to slander, and our limits grow narrower as we advance. how is it that we are impelled to treat our old friends so ill when we obtain new ones ? the housekeeper says, i never had any new crockery in my hfe but i began to break the old. i say, let us speak of mushrooms and forest trees rather. yet we can sometimes afford to remember them in private. — lately, alas, i knew a gentle boy, whose features all were cast in virtues' mould, 262 a week on the concord river. as one she had designed for beauty's toy, but after manned him for her own stronghold. on every side he open was as day, that you might see no lack of strength within, for walls and ports do only serve alway for a pretence to feebleness and sin. say not that caesar was victorious, with toil and strife who stormed the house of fame, in other sense this youth was glorious, himself a kingdom wheresoe'er he came. no strength went out to get him victory. when all was income of its own accord ; for where he went none other was to see, but all were parcel of their noble lord. he forayed like the subtil haze of summer, that stilly shows fresh landscapes to our eyes, and revolutions works without a murmur, or rustling of a leaf beneath the skies. so was i taken unawares by this, i quite forgot my homage to confess ; yet now am forced to know, though hard it is, i might have loved him had i loved him less. each moment as we nearer drew to each, a stern respect withheld us further yet, so that we seemed beyond each other's reach, and less acquainted than when first we met. we two were one while we did sympathize. so could we not the simplest bargain drive ; and what avails it now that we are wise. if absence doth this doubleness contrive? eternity may not the chance repeat, but i must tread my single way alone, in sad remembrance that we once did meet. and know that bliss irrevocably gone. wednesda v. 263 the spheres henceforth my elegy shall sing, for elegy has other subject none ; each strain of music in my ears shall ring knell of departure from that other one. make haste and celebrate my tragedy ; with fitting strain resound ye woods and fields ; sorrow is dearer in such case to me than all the joys other occasion yields. is 't then too late the damage to repair? distance, forsooth, from my weak grasp hath reft the empty husk, and clutched the useless tare, but in my hands the wheat and kernel left. if i but love that virtue which he is. though it be scented in the morning air, still shall we be truest acquaintances. nor mortals know a sympathy more rare. friendship is evanescent in every man's experience, and remembered like heat lightning in past summers. fair and flitting like a summer cloud ; — there is always some vapor in the air, no matter how long the drought ; there are even april showers. surely from time to time, for its vestiges never depart, it floats through our atmosphere. it takes place, like vegetation in so many materials, because there is such a law, but always without permanent form, though ancient and familiar as the sun and moon, and as sure to come again. the heart is forever inexperienced. they silently gather as by magic, these never failing, never quite deceiving visions, like the bright and fleecy clouds in the calmest and clearest days. the friend is some fair floating isle of palms eluding the mariner in pacific seas. many are the dangers to be encoun tered, equinoctial gales and coral reefs, ere he may 264 a week on the concord river. sail before the constant trades. but who would not sail through mutiny and storm even over atlantic waves, to reach the fabulous retreating shores of some continent man? the imagination still clings to the faintest tradition of the atlantides. the smothered streams of love, which flow more bright than phlegethon, more low, island us ever, like the sea, in an atlantic mystery. our fabled shores none ever reach, no mariner has found our beach, only our mirage now is seen. and neighboring waves with floating green, yet still the oldest charts contain some dotted outline of our main; in ancient times midsummer days unto the western islands' gaze. to teneriffe and the azores, have shown our faint and cloud-like shores. but sink not yet, ye desolate isles. anon your coast with commerce smiles, and richer freights ye '11 furnish far than africa or malabar, be fair, be fertile evermore. ye rumored but untrodden shore. princes and monarchs will contend who first unto your land shall send, and pawn the jewels of the crown to call your distant soil their own. columbus has sailed westward of these isles by the mariner's compass, but neither he nor his successors have found them. we are no nearer than plato was. the earnest seeker and hopeful discoverer of this new world always haunts the outskirts of his time, wednesday. 265 and walks through the densest crowd uninterrupted^ and as it were in a straight line. — sea and land are but his neighbors, and companions in his labors, who on the ocean's verge and firm land's end doth long and truly seek his friend. many men dwell far inland, but he alone sits on the strand. whether he ponders men or books, always still he seaward looks. marine news he ever reads, and the slightest glances heeds, feels the sea breeze on his cheek at each word the landsmen speak, in every companion's eye a sailing vessel doth descry ; in the ocean's sullen roar from some distant port he hears, of wrecks upon a distant shore. and the ventures of past years. who does not walk on the plain as amid the col umns of tadmore of the desert? there is on the earth no institution which friendship has established ; it is not taught by any religion ; no scripture contains its maxims. it has no temple, nor even a solitary col umn. there goes a rumor that the earth is inhabited, but the shipwrecked mariner has not seen a footprint on the shore. the hunter has found only fragments of pottery and the monuments of inhabitants. however, our fates at least are social. our courses do not diverge ; but as the web of destiny is woven it is fulled, and we are cast more and more into the centre. men naturally, though feebly, seek this alliance, and their actions faintly foretell it. we are inclined to lay the chief stress on likeness and not on difference, and 266 a week on the concord river. in foreign bodies we admit that there are many degrees of warmth below blood heat, but none of cold above it. one or two persons come to my house from time to time, there being proposed to them the faint possibility of intercourse. they are as full as they are silent, and wait for my plectrum to stir the strings of their lyre. if they could ever come to the length of a sentence, or hear one, on that ground they are dreaming of! they speak faintly, and do not obtrude themselves. they have heard some news, which none, not even they themselves, can impart. it is a wealth they bear about them which can be expended in various ways. what came they out to seek ? no word is oftener on the lips of men than friend ship, and indeed no thought is more familiar to their aspirations. all men are dreaming of it, and its drama, which is always a tragedy, is enacted daily. it is the secret of the universe. you may thread the town, you may wander the country, and none shall ever speak of it, yet thought is everywhere busy about it, and the idea of what is possible in this respect affects our behavior toward all new men and women, and a great many old ones. nevertheless, i can remember only two or three essays on this subject in all literature. no wonder that the mythology, and arabian nights, and shakspeare, and scott's novels entertain us, — we are poets and fablers and dramatists and novelists ourselves. we are continually acting a part in a more interesting drama than any written. we are dreaming that our friends are onr friends, and that we are our friends' friends. our actual friends are but distant relations of those to whom we are pledged. we never exchange more than three words with a wednesda y. 267 friend in our lives on that level to which our thoughts and feelings almost habitually rise. one goes forth prepared to say " sweet friends ! " and the salutation is " damn your eyes ! " but never mind ; faint heart never won true friend. o my friend, may it come to pass, once, that when you are my friend i may be yours. of what use the friendliest disposition even, if there are no hours given to friendship, if it is forever postponed to unimportant duties and relations? friendship is first. friendship last. but it is equally impossible to forget our friends, and to make them answer to our ideal. when they say farewell, then indeed we begin to keep them company. how often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends, that we may go and meet their ideal cousins. i would that i were worthy to be any man's friend. what is commonly honored with the name of friendship is no very profound or powerful instinct. men do not, after all, love their friends greatly. i do not often see the farmers made seers and wise to the verge of insanity by their friendship for one another. they are not often transfigured and translated by love in each other's presence. i do not observe them purified, refined, and elevated by the love of a man. if one abates a little the price of his wood, or gives a neighbor his vote at town-meeeting, or a barrel of apples, or lends him his wagon frequently, it is es teemed a rare instance of friendship. nor do the farmers' wives lead lives consecrated to friendship. i do not see the pair of farmer friends of either sex pre pared to stand against the world. there are only two or three couples in history. to say that a man is your friend, means commonly no more than this, that he 268 a week on the concord river. is not your enemy. most contemplate only what would be the accidental and trifling advantages of friendship, as that the friend can assist in time of need, by his substance, or his influence, or his coun sel ; but he who foresees such advantages in this rela tion proves himself blind to its real advantage, or indeed wholly inexperienced in the relation itself. such services are particular and menial, compared with the perpetual and all-embracing service which it is. even the utmost good-will and harmony and practical kindness are not sufficient for friendship, for friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody. we do not wish for friends to feed and clothe our bodies, — neighbors are kind enough for that, — but to do the like office to our spirits. for this few are rich enough, however well disposed they may be. think of the importance of friendship in the edu cation of men. it will make a man honest ; it will make him a hero ; it will make him a saint. it is the state of the just dealing with the just, the magnani mous with the magnanimous, the sincere with the sincere, man with man. — " why love among the virtues is not known, is that love is them all contract in one." all the abuses which are the object of reform with the philanthropist, the statesman, and the house keeper, are unconsciously amended in the intercourse of friends. a friend is one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting from us all the virtues, and who can appreciate them in us. it takes two to speak the truth, — one to speak, and another to hear. how can one treat with magnanimity mere wood and wednesda y. 269 stone? if we dealt only with the false and dishonest, we should at last forget how to speak truth. in our daily intercourse with men, our nobler faculties are dormant and suffered to rust. none will pay us the compliment to expect nobleness from us. we ask our neighbor to suffer himself to be dealt with truly, sincerely, nobly ; but he answers no by his deafness. he does not even hear this prayer. he says practically, — i will be content if you treat me as no better than i should be, as deceitful, mean, dishonest, and selfish. for the most part, we are contented so to deal and to be dealt with, and we do not think that for the mass of men there is any truer and nobler relation possible. a man may have good neighbors, so called, and acquaint ances, and even companions, wife, parents, brothers, sisters, children, who meet himself and one another on this ground only. the state does not demand justice of its members, but thinks that it succeeds very well with the least degree of it, hardly more than rogues practise ; and so do the family and the neigh borhood. what is commonly called friendship even is only a little more honor among rogues. but sometimes we are said to love another, that is to stand in a true relation to him, so that we give the best to, and receive the best from, him. between whom there is hearty truth there is love ; and in pro portion to our truthfulness and confidence in one another, our lives are divine and miraculous, and answer to our ideal. there are passages of affection in our intercourse with mortal men and women, such as no prophecy had taught us to expect, which tran scend our earthly life, and anticipate heaven for us. what is this love that may come right into the middle 2yo a week on the concord river. of a prosaic goflfstown day, equal to any of the gods ? that discovers a new world, fair and fresh and eternal, occupying the place of this old one, when to the com mon eye a dust has settled on the universe? which world cannot else be reached, and does not exist. what other words, we may almost ask, are memorable and worthy to be repeated than those which love has inspired? it is wonderful that they were ever uttered. they are few and rare, indeed, but, like a strain of music, they are incessantly repeated and modulated by the memory. all other words crumble off with the stucco which overlies the heart. we should not dare to repeat them now aloud. we are not compe tent to hear them at all times. the books for young people say a great deal about the selection of friends ; it is because they really have nothing to say about friends. they mean associates and confidants merely. "know that the contrariety of foe and friend proceeds from god." friendship takes place between those who have an affinity for one another, and is a perfectly natural and inevitable result. no professions nor advances will avail. even speech, at first, necessarily has nothing to do with it ; but it follows after silence, as the buds in the graft do not put forth into leaves till long after the graft has taken. it is a drama in which the parties have no part to act. we are all mussul mans and fatalists in this respect. impatient and uncertain lovers think that they must say or do some thing kind whenever they meet ; they must never be cold. but they who are friends do not do what they think they must, but what they 7mist. even their friendship is in one sense but a sublime phenome non to them. wednesday, 27 1 the true and not despairing friend will address his friend in some such terms as these. ^' i never asked thy leave to let me love thee, — i have a right. i love thee not as something private and personal, which is your own, but as something universal and worthy of love, which i have found. o how i think of you! you are purely good, — you are infinitely good. i can trust you forever. i did not think that humanity was so rich. give me an opportunity to live." " you are the fact in a fiction, — you are the truth more strange and admirable than fiction. consent only to be what you are. i alone will never stand in your way." " this is what i would like, — to be as intimate with you as our spirits are intimate, — respecting you as i respect my ideal. never to profane one another by word or action, even by a thought. between us, if necessary, let there be no acquaintance." " i have discovered you ; how can you be concealed from me ? " the friend asks no return but that his friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace his apotheosis of him. they cherish each other's hopes. they are kind to each other's dreams. though the poet says, " 't is the preeminence of friendship to impute excellence," yet we can never praise our friend, nor esteem him praiseworthy, nor let him think that he can please us by any behavior, or ever treat us well enough. that kindness which has so good a reputation elsewhere can least of all consist with this relation, and no such affront can be 2^2 a week on the concord river. offered to a friend, as a conscious good-will, a friend liness which is not a necessity of the friend's nature. the sexes are naturally most strongly attracted to one another, by constant constitutional differences, and are most commonly and surely the complements of one another. how natural and easy it is for man to secure the attention of woman to what interests himself men and women of equal culture, thrown together, are sure to be of a certain value to one another, more than men to men. there exists already a natural disinterestedness and liberality in such society, and i think that any man will more confi dently carry his favorite books to read to some circle of intelligent women, than to one of his own sex. the visit of man to man is wont to be an interruption, but the sexes naturally expect one another. yet friendship is no respecter of sex ; and perhaps it is more rare between the sexes, than between two of the same sex. friendship is, at any rate, a relation of perfect equality. it cannot well spare any outward sign of equal obligation and advantage. the nobleman can never have a friend among his retainers, nor the king among his subjects. not that the parties to it are in all respects equal, but they are equal in all that respects or affects their friendship. the one's love is exactly balanced and represented by the other's. persons are only the vessels which contain the nectar, and the hy drostatic paradox is the symbol of love's law. it finds its level and rises to its fountain-head in all breasts, and its slenderest column balances the ocean. — love equals swift and slow, and high and low, wednesday. 2/3 racer and lame, the hunter and his game. the one sex is not, in this respect, more tender than the other. a hero's love is as delicate as a maiden's. confucius said, " never contract friendship with a man that is not better than thyself." it is the merit and preservation of friendship, that it takes place on a level higher than the actual characters of the parties would seem to warrant. the ra3^s of light come to us in such a curve that every man whom we meet appears to be taller than he actually is. such founda tion has civility. my friend is that one whom i can associate with my choicest thought. i always assign to him a nobler employment in my absence than i ever find him engaged in ; and i imagine that the hours which he devotes to me were snatched from a higher society. the sorest insult which i ever re ceived from a friend was, when he behaved with the license which only long and cheap acquaintance allows to one's faults, in my presence, without shame, and still addressed me in friendly accents. beware, lest thy friend learn at last to tolerate one frailty of thine, and so an obstacle be raised to the progress of thy love. friendship is never established as an understood relation. do you demand that i be less your friend that you may know it? yet what right have i to think that another cherishes so rare a sentiment for me? it is a miracle which requires constant proofs. it is an exercise of the purest imagination and the rarest faith. it says by a silent but eloquent be havior, — "i will be so related to thee as thou canst imagine; even so thou mayest believe. i will spend truth, — all my wealth on thee," — and the friend 2/4 ^ vi^eek on the concord river. responds silently through his nature and life, and treats his friend with the same divine courtesy. he knows us literally through thick and thin. he never asks for a sign of love, but can distinguish it by the features which it naturally wears. we never need to stand upon ceremony with him with regard to his visits. wait not till i invite thee, but observe that i am glad to see thee when thou comest. it would be paying too dear for thy visit to ask for it. where my friend lives there are all riches and every attrac tion, and no slight obstacle can keep me from him. let me never have to tell thee what i have not to tell. let our intercourse be wholly above ourselves, and draw us up to it. the language of friendship is not words but meanings. it is an intelligence above language. one imagines endless conversations with his friend, in which the tongue shall be loosed, and thoughts be spoken without hesitancy, or end ; but the experi ence is commonly far otherwise. acquaintances may come and go, and have a word ready for every occa sion ; but what puny word shall he utter whose very breath is thought and meaning ? suppose you go to bid farewell to your friend who is setting out on a journey ; what other outward sign do you know of than to shake his hand ? have you any palaver ready for him then ? any box of salve to commit to his pocket ? any particular message to send by him .'* any state ment which you had forgotten to make ? — as if you could forget anything. — no, it is much that you take his hand and say farewell ; that you could easily omit ; so far custom has prevailed. it is even pain ful, if he is to go, that he should linger so long. if he must go, let him go quickly. have you any last words ? alas, it is only the word of words, which you have so wednesday. 2/5 long sought and found not ; you have not 2. first word yet. there are few even whom i should venture to call earnestly by their most proper names. a name pro nounced is the recognition of the individual to whom it belongs. he who can pronounce my name aright, he can call me, and is entitled to my love and service. the violence of love is as much to be dreaded as that of hate. when it is durable it is serene and equable. even its famous pains begin only with the ebb of love, for few are indeed lovers, though all would fain be. it is one proof of a man's fitness for friend ship that he is able to do without that which is cheap and passionate. a true friendship is as wise as it is tender. the parties to it yield implicitly to the guidance of their love, and know no other law nor kindness. it is not extravagant and insane, but what it says is something established henceforth, and will bear to be stereotyped. it is a truer truth, it is better and fairer news, and no time will ever shame it, or prove it false. this is a plant which thrives best in a temperate zone, where summer and winter alternate with one another. the friend is a necessarhcs, and meets his friend on homely ground ; not on carpets and cushions, but on the ground and on rocks they will sit, obeying the natural and primitive laws. they will meet without any outcry, and part without loud sorrow. their relation implies such qualities as the warrior prizes ; for it takes a valor to open the hearts of men as well as the gates of cities. the friendship which wawatam testified for henry the fur-trader, as described in the latter's "adven tures," so almost bare and leafless, yet not blossom less nor fruitless, is remembered with satisfaction and security. the stern imperturbable warrior, after fast 276 a week on the concord river. ing, solitude, and mortification of body, comes to the white man's lodge, and affirms that he is the white brother whom he saw in his dream, and adopts him henceforth. he buries the hatchet as it regards his friend, and they hunt and feast and make maple-sugar together. " metals unite from fluxility ; birds and beasts from motives of convenience ; fools from fear and stupidity; and just men at sight.''. if wawatam would taste the " white man's milk " with his tribe, or take his bowl of human broth made of the trader's fellow-countrymen, he first finds a place of safety for his friend, whom he has rescued from a similar fate. at length, after a long winter of undisturbed and happy intercourse in the family of the chieftain in the wilder ness, hunting and fishing, they return in the spring to michilimackinac to dispose of their furs ; and it be comes necessary for wawatam to take leave of his friend at the isle aux outardes, when the latter, to avoid his enemies, proceeded to the sault de sainte marie, supposing that they were to be separated for a short time only. "we now exchanged farewells," says henry, "with an emotion entirely reciprocal. i did not quit the lodge without the most grateful sense of the many acts of goodness which i had experienced in it, nor without the sincerest respect for the virtues which i had witnessed among its members. all the family accompanied me to the beach ; and the canoe had no sooner put off than wawatam commenced an address to the kichi manito, beseeching him to take care of me, his brother, till we should next meet. — we had proceeded to too great a distance to allow of our hearing his voice, before wawatam had ceased to offer up his prayers." we never hear of him again. wednesda y. 277 friendship is not so kind as is imagined ; it has not much human blood in it, but consists with a cer tain disregard for men and their erections, the chris tian duties and humanities, while it purifies the air like electricity. there may be the sternest tragedy in the relation of two more than usually innocent and true to their highest instincts. we may call it an essentially heathenish intercourse, free and irrespon sible in its nature, and practising all the virtues gra tuitously. it is not the highest sympathy merely, but a pure and lofty society, a fragmentary and godlike intercourse of ancient date, still kept up at intervals, which, remembering itself, does not hesitate to dis regard the humbler rights and duties of humanity. it requires immaculate and godlike qualities full grown, and exists at all only by condescension and anticipation of the remotest future. we love noth ing which is merely good and not fair, if such a thing is possible. nature puts some kind of blossom before every fruit, not simply a calyx behind it. when the friend comes out of his heathenism and superstition, and breaks his idols, being converted by the precepts of a newer testament ; when he forgets his mythology, and treats his friend like a christian, or as he can afford ; then friendship ceases to be friendship, and becomes charity ; that principle which established the almshouse is now beginning with its charity at home, and establishing an almshouse and pauper relations there. as for the number which this society admits, it is at any rate to be begun with one, the noblest and greatest that we know, and whether the world will ever carry it further, whether, as chaucer affirms, 27^ a week on the concord river. " there be mo sterres in the skie than a pair," remains to be proved ; — " and certaine he is well begone among a thousand that findeth one." we shall not surrender ourselves heartily to any while we are conscious that another is more deserving of our love. yet friendship does not stand for num bers ; the friend does not count his friends on his fingers; they are not numerable. the more there are included by this bond, if they are indeed included, the rarer and diviner the quality of the love that binds them. i am ready to believe that as private and inti mate a relation may exist by which three are embraced, as between two. indeed we cannot have too many friends ; the virtue which we appreciate we to some extent appropriate, so that thus we are made at last more fit for every relation of life. a base friendship is of a narrowing and exclusive tendency, but a noble one is not exclusive ; its very superfluity and dispersed love is the humanity which sweetens society, and sym pathizes with foreign nations ; for though its founda tions are private, it is in effect, a public affair and a public advantage, and the friend, more than the father of a family, deserves well of the state. the only danger in friendship is that it will end. it is a delicate plant though a native. the least un worthiness, even if it be unknown to one's self, vitiates it. let the friend know that those faults which he observes in his friend his own faults attract. there is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspected. by wednesday. 279 our narrowness and prejudices we say, i will have so much and such of you, my friend, no more. perhaps there are none charitable, none disinterested, none wise, noble, and heroic enough, for a true and lasting friendship. i sometimes hear my friends complain finely that i do not appreciate their fineness. i shall not tell them whether i do or not. as if they expected a vote of thanks for every fine thing which they uttered or did. who knows but it was finely appreciated. it may be that your silence was the finest thing of the two. there are some things which a man never speaks of, which are much finer kept silent about. to the high est communications we only lend a silent ear. our finest relations are not simply kept silent about, but buried under a positive depth of silence, never to be revealed. it may be that we are not even yet ac quainted. in human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood. then there can never be an explanation. what avails it that another loves you, if he does not understand you ? such love is a curse. what sort of companions are they who are presuming always that their silence is more expres sive than yours ? how foolish, and inconsiderate, and unjust, to conduct as if you were the only party ag grieved! has not your friend always equal ground of complaint ? no doubt my friends sometimes speak to me in vain, but they do not know what things i hear which they are not aware that they have spoken. i know that i have frequently disappointed them by not giving them words when they expected them, or such as they expected. whenever i see my friend i speak to him, but the expector, the man with the ears, 2s0 a week on the concord river. is not he. they will complain too that you are hard. o ye that would have the cocoa-nut wrong side out wards, when next i weep i will let you know. they ask for words and deeds, when a true relation is word and deed. if they know not of these things, how can they be informed? we often forbear to confess our feelings, not from pride, but for fear that we could not continue to love the one who required us to give such proof of our affection. i know a woman who possesses a restless and intelli gent mind, interested in her own culture, and earnest to enjoy the highest possible advantages, and i meet her with pleasure as a natural person who not a little provokes me, and i suppose is stimulated in turn by myself. yet our acquaintance plainly does not attain to that degree of confidence and sentiment which women, which all, in fact, covet. i am glad to help her, as i am helped by her ; i like very well to know her with a sort of stranger's privilege, and hesi tate to visit her often, like her other friends. my nature pauses here, i do not well know why. per haps she does not make the highest demand on me, a religious demand. some, with whose prejudices or peculiar bias i have no sympathy, yet inspire me with confidence, and i trust that they confide in me also as a religious heathen at least, — a good greek. i too have principles as well founded as their own. if this person could conceive that, without wilfulness, i asso ciate with her as far as our destinies are coincident, as far as our good geniuses permit, and still value such intercourse, it would be a grateful assurance to me. i feel as if i appeared careless, indifferent, and without principle to her, not expecting more, and yet not con tent with less. if she could know that i make an wednesda y. 28 1 infinite demand on myself, as well as on all others, she would see that this true though incomplete intercourse, is infinitely better than a more unreserved but falsely grounded one, without the principle of growth in it. for a companion, i require one who will make an equal demand on me with my own genius. such a one will always be rightly tolerant. it is suicide and corrupts good manners to welcome any less than this. i value and trust those who love and praise my aspira tion rather than my performance. if you would not stop to look at me, but look whither i am looking and further, then my education could not dispense with your company. my love must be as free as is the eagle's wing, hovering o'er land and sea and everything. i must not dim my eye in thy saloon, i must not leave my sky and nightly moon. be not the fowler's net which stays my flight, and craftily is set t' allure the sight. but be the favoring gale that bears me on. and still doth fill my sail when thou art gone. i cannot leave my sky for thy caprice, true love would soar as high as heaven is. 282 a week on the concord river. the eagle would not brook her mate thus won, who trained his eye to look beneath the sun. nothing is so difficult as to help a friend in matters which do not require the aid of friendship, but only a cheap and trivial service, if your friendship wants the basis of a thorough practical acquaintance. i stand in the friendliest relation, on social and spiritual grounds, to one who does not perceive what practical skill i have, but when he seeks my assistance in such matters, is wholly ignorant of that one whom he deals with ; does not use my skill, which in such matters is much greater than his, but only my hands. i know another, who, on the contrary, is remarkable for his discrimination in this respect ; who knows how to make use of the talents of others when he does not possess the same ; knows when not to look after or oversee, and stops short at his man. it is a rare pleasure to serve him, which all laborers know. i am not a little pained by the other kind of treatment. it is as if, after the friendliest and most ennobling inter course, your friend should use you as a hammer and drive a nail with your head, all in good faith ; not withstanding that you are a tolerable carpenter, as well as his good friend, and would use a hammer cheerfully in his service. this want of perception is a defect which all the virtues of the heart cannot supply. — the good how can we trust ? only the wise are just. the good we use, the wise we cannot choose. these there are none above : wednesday. 283 the good they know and love, but are not known again by those of lesser ken. they do not charm us with their eyes, but they transfix with their advice ; no partial sympathy they feel with private woe or private weal. but with the universe joy and sigh, whose knowledge is their sympathy. confucius said, " to contract ties of friendship with any one, is to contract friendship with his virtue. there ought not to be any other motive in friendship." but men wish us to contract friend ship with their vice also. i have a friend who wishes me to see that to be right which i know to be wrong. but if friendship is to rob me of my eyes, if it is to darken the day, i will have none of it. it should be expansive and inconceivably liberalizing in its effects. true friendship can afford true knowledge. it does not depend on darkness and ignorance. a want of discernment cannot be an ingredient in it. if i can see my friend's virtues more distinctly than another's, his faults too are made more conspicuous by contrast. we have not so good a right to hate any as our friend. faults are not the less faults because they are invariably balanced by corresponding virtues, and for a fault there is no excuse, though it may appear greater than it is in many ways. i have never known one who could bear criticism, who could not be flat tered, who would not bribe his judge, or was content that the truth should be loved always better than him self. if two travellers would go their way harmoniously together, the one must take as true and just a view of things as the other, else their path will not be strewn 284 a week on the concord river. with roses. yet you can travel profitably and pleas antly even with a blind man, if he practises common courtesy, and when you converse about the scenery will remember that he is blind but that you can see ; and you will not forget that his sense of hearing is probably quickened by his want of sight. otherwise you will not long keep company. a blind man, and a man in whose eyes there was no defect, were walk ing together, when they came to the edge of a preci pice, — " take care ! my friend," said the latter, '' here is a steep precipice ; go no further this way." — "i know better," said the other, and stepped off. it is impossible to say all that we think, even to our truest friend. we may bid him farewell forever sooner than complain, for our complaint is too well grounded to be uttered. there is not so good an understanding between any two, but the exposure by the one of a serious fault in the other will produce a misunderstanding in proportion to its heinousness. the constitutional differences which always exist, and are obstacles to a perfect friendship, are forever a forbidden theme to the lips of friends. they advise by their whole behavior. nothing can reconcile them but love. they are fatally late when they undertake to explain and treat with one another like foes. who will take an apology for a friend? they must apol ogize like dew and frost, which are off again with the sun, and which all men know in their hearts to be beneficent. the necessity itself for explanation, — what explanation will atone for that ? true love does not quarrel for slight reasons, such mistakes as mu tual acquaintances can explain away, but alas, how ever slight the apparent cause, only for adequate and fatal and everlasting reasons, which can never be set wednesday. 285 aside. its quarrel, if there is any, is ever recurring, notwithstanding the beams of affection which invari ably come to gild its tears ; as the rainbow, however beautiful and unerring a sign, does not promise fair weather forever, but only for a season. i have known two or three persons pretty well, and yet i have never known advice to be of use but in trivial and transient matters. one may know what another does not, but the utmost kindness cannot impart what is requisite to make the advice useful. we must accept or re fuse one another as we are. i could tame a hyena more easily than my friend. he is a material which no tool of mine will work. a naked savage will fell an oak with a fire-brand, and wear a hatchet out of the rock by friction, but i cannot hew the smallest chip out of the character of my friend, either to beautify or deform it. the lover learns at last that there is no person quite transparent and trustworthy, but every one has a devil in him that is capable of any crime in the long run. yet, as an oriental philosopher has said, "al though friendship between good men is interrupted, their principles remain unaltered. the stalk of the lotus may be broken, and the fibres remain connected." ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without. there may be courtesy, there may be even temper, and wit, and talent, and sparkling conversation, there may be good-will even, — and yet the humanest and divinest faculties pine for exercise. our life without love is like coke and ashes. men may be pure as alabaster and parian marble, elegant as a tuscan villa, sublime as niagara, 286 a week on the concord river. and yet if there is no milk mingled with the wine at their entertainments, better is the hospitality of goths and vandals. my friend is not of some other race or family of men, but flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone. he is my real brother. i see his nature grop ing yonder so like mine. we do not live far apart. have not the fates associated us in many ways? is it of no significance that we have so long partaken of the same loaf, drank at the same fountain, breathed the same air, summer and winter, felt the same heat and cold ; that the same fruits have been pleased to refresh us both, and we have never had a thought of different fibre the one from the other! nature doth have her dawn each day, but mine are far between ; content, i cry, for sooth to say> mine brightest are i ween. for when my sun doth deign to rise, though it be her noontide, her fairest field in shadow ues, nor can my light abide. sometimes i bask me in her day, conversing with my mate, but if we interchange one ray. forthwith her heats abate. through his discourse i climb and see, as from some eastern hill, a brighter morrow rise to me than lieth in her skill. as 'twere two summer days in one. two sundays come together, our rays united make one sun. with fairest summer weather. wednesda y. 287 as surely as the sunset in my latest november shall translate me to the ethereal world, and remind me of the ruddy morning of youth ; as surely as the last strain of music which falls on my decaying ear shall make age to be forgotten, or, in short, the manifold influences of nature survive during the term of our natural life, so surely my friend shall forever be my friend, and reflect a ray of god to me, and time shall foster and adorn and consecrate our friend ship, no less than the ruins of temples. as i love nature, as i love singing birds, and gleaming stubble, and flowing rivers, and morning and evening, and summer and winter, i love thee, my friend. but all that can be said of friendship, is like bot any to flowers. how can the understanding take account of its friendliness 'i even the death of friends will inspire us as much as their lives. they will leave consolation to the mourners, as the rich leave money to defray the ex penses of their funerals, and their memories will be incrusted over with sublime and pleasing thoughts, as their monuments are overgrown with moss. this to our cis-alpine and cis-atlantic friends. also this other word of entreaty and advice to the large and respectable nation of acquaintances, beyond the mountains ; — greeting, my most serene and irresponsible neighbors, let us see that we have the whole advantage of each other ; we will be useful, at least, if not admirable, to one another. i know that the mountains which separate us are high, and covered with perpetual snow, but despair not. improve the serene winter weather to 288 a week on the concord river. scale them. if need be, soften the rocks with vine gar. for here lie the verdant plains of italy ready to receive you. nor shall i be slow on my side to pene trate to your provence. strike then boldly at head or heart or any vital part. depend upon it the timber is well seasoned and tough, and will bear rough usage ; and if it should crack, there is plenty more where it came from. i am no piece of crockery that cannot be jostled against my neighbor without danger of being broken by the collision, and must needs ring false and jarringly to the end of my days, when once i am cracked ; but rather one of the old fashioned wooden trenchers, which one while stands at the head of the table, and at another is a milking stool, and at another a seat for children, and finally goes down to its grave not unadorned with honorable scars, and does not die till it is worn out. nothing can shock a brave man but dulness. think how many rebuffs every man has experienced in his day ; perhaps has fallen into a horse-pond, eaten fresh water clams, or worn one shirt for a week without washing. indeed, you cannot receive a shock unless you have an electric affinity for that which shocks you. use me, then, for i am useful in my way, and stand as one of many petitioners, from toadstool and henbane up to dahlia and violet, supplicating to be put to my use, if by any means ye may find me service able ; whether for a medicated drink or bath, as balm and lavender ; or for fragrance, as verbena and gera nium ; or for sight, as cactus ; or for thoughts, as pansy. — these humbler, at least, if not those higher uses. ah my dear strangers and enemies, i would not forget you. i can well afford to welcome you. let wednesda y. 289 me subscribe myself yours ever and truly — your much obliged servant. we have nothing to fear from our foes ; god keeps a standing army for that service ; but we have no ally against our friends, those ruth less vandals. once more to one and all, " friends, romans, countrymen, and lovers. let such pure hate still underprop our love, that we may be each other's conscience, and have our sympathy mainly from thence. we '11 one another treat like gods, and all the faith we have in virtue and in truth, bestow on either, and suspicion leave to gods below. two solitary stars — unmeasured systems far between us roll, but by our conscious light we are determined to one pole. what need confound the sphere — ■ love can afford to wait. for it no hour 's too late that witnesseth one duty's end. or to another doth beginning lend. it will subserve no use. more than the tints of flowers, only the independent guest frequents its bowers, inherits its bequest. 290 a week on the concord river. no speech though kind has it, but kinder silence doles unto its mates, by night consoles, by day congratulates. what saith the tongue to tongue ? what heareth ear of ear ? by the decrees of fate from year to year. does it communicate. pathless the gulf of feeling yawns — no trivial bridge of words, or arch of boldest span, can leap the moat that girds the sincere man. no show of bolts and bars can keep the foeman out, or 'scape his secret mine who entered with the doubt that drew the line. no warder at the gate can let the friendly in, but, like the sun, o'er all he will the castle win. and shine along the wall. there "s nothing in the world i know that can escape from love. for every depth it goes below. and every height above. it waits as waits the sky, until the clouds go by. yet shines serenely on with an eternal day, wednesday. 29 1 alike when they are gone, and when they stay. implacable is love, — foes may be bought or teazed from their hostile intent. but he goes unappeased who is on kindness bent. having rowed five or six miles above amoskeag before sunset, and reached a pleasant part of the river, one of us landed to look for a farm-house, where we might replenish our stores, while the other remained cruising about the stream, and exploring the opposite shores to find a suitable harbor for the night. in the mean while the canal boats began to come round a point in our rear, poling their way along close to the shore, the breeze having quite died away. this time there was no offer of assistance, but one of the boat men only called out to say, as the truest revenge for having been the losers in the race, that he had seen a wood-duck, which we had scared up, sitting on a tall white-pine, half a mile down stream ; and he re peated the assertion several times, and seemed really chagrined at the apparent suspicion with which this information was received. but there sat the summer duck still undisturbed by us. by and by the other voyageur returned from his inland expedition, bringing one of the natives with him, a little flaxen-headed boy, with some tradition, or small edition, of robinson crusoe in his head, who had been charmed by the account of our adventures, and asked his father's leave to join us. he exam ined, at first from the top of the bank, our boat and furniture, with sparkling eyes, and wished himself already his own man. he was a lively and interest 292 a week on the concord river. ing boy, and we should have been glad to ship him ; but nathan was still his father's boy, and had not come to years of discretion. we had got a loaf of home-made bread, and musk and water-melons for dessert. for this farmer, a clever and well-disposed man, cultivated a large patch of melons for the hooksett and concord markets. he hospitably entertained us the next day, exhibiting his hop-fields and kiln and melon patch, warning us to step over the tight rope which surrounded the lat ter at a foot from the ground, while he pointed to a little bower at the corner, where it connected with the lock of a gun ranging with the line, and where, as he informed us, he sometimes sat in pleasant nights to defend his premises against thieves. we stepped high over the line, and sympathized with our host's on the whole quite human, if not humane, interest in the success of his experiment. that night espe cially thieves were to be expected, from rumors in the atmosphere, and the priming was not wet. he was a methodist man, who had his dwelling between the river and uncannunuc mountain ; who there belonged, and stayed at home there, and by the encouragement of distant political organizations, and by his own tenacity, held a property in his melons, and contin ued to plant. we suggested melon seeds of new varieties and fruit of foreign flavor to be added to his stock. we had come away up here among the hills to learn the impartial and unbribable beneficence of nature. strawberries and melons grow as well in one man's garden as another's, and the sun lodges as kindly under his hill-side, — when we had imag ined that she inclined rather to some few earnest and faithful souls whom we know. wednesda y. 293 we found a convenient harbor for our boat on the opposite or east shore, still in hooksett, at the mouth of a small brook which emptied into the merrimack, where it would be out of the way of any passing boat in the night, — for they commonly hug the shore if bound up stream, either to avoid the current, or touch the bottom with their poles, — and where it would be accessible without stepping on the clayey shore. we set one of our largest melons to cool in the still water among the alders at the mouth of this creek, but when our tent was pitched and ready, and we went to get it, it had floated out into the stream and was nowhere to be seen. so taking the boat in the twilight, we went in pursuit of this property, and at length, after long straining of the eyes, its green disk was discov ered far down the river, gently floating seaward with many twigs and leaves from the mountains that even ing, and so perfectly balanced that it had not keeled at all, and no water had run in at the tap which had been taken out to hasten its cooling. as we sat on the bank eating our supper, the clear light of the western sky fell on the eastern trees and was reflected in the water, and we enjoyed so serene an evening as left nothing to describe. for the most part we think that there are few degrees of sub limity, and that the highest is but little higher than that which we now behold; but we are always de ceived. sublimer visions appear, and the former pale and fade away. we are grateful when we are re minded by interior evidence, of the permanence of universal laws ; for our faith is but faintly remem bered, indeed, is not a remembered assurance, but a use and enjoyment of knowledge. it is when we do not have to believe, but come into actual contact 294 ^ week on the concord river. with truth, and are related to her in the most direct and intimate way. waves of serener life pass over us from time to time, like flakes of sunlight over the fields in cloudy weather. in some happier moment, when more sap flows in the withered stalk of our life,syria and india stretch away from our present as they do in history. all the events which make the annals of the nations are but the shadows of our private experiences. suddenly and silently the eras which we call history awake and glimmer in us, and there is room for alexander and hannibal to march and conquer. in other words, the history which we read is only a fainter memory of events which have happened in our own experience. tradition is a more interrupted and feebler memory. this world is but canvass to our imaginations. i see men with infinite pains endeavoring to realize to their bodies, what i, with at least equal pains, would realize to my imagination, — its capacities ; for certainly there is a life of the mind above the wants of the body and independent of it. often the body is warmed, but the imagination is torpid ; the body is fat, but the imagination is lean and shrunk. but what avails all other wealth if this is wanting ? " imagination is the air of mind," in which it lives and breathes. all things are as i am. where is the house of change ? the past is only so heroic as we see it. it is the canvass on which our idea of heroism is painted, and so, in one sense, the dim prospectus of our future field. our circum stances answer to our expectations and the demand of our natures. i have noticed that if a man thinks that he needs a thousand dollars, and cannot be convinced that he does not, he will commonly be wednesda y. 295 found to have them^ if he lives and thinks a thou sand dollars will be forthcoming, though it be to buy shoe strings with. a thousand mills will be just as slow to come to one who finds it equally hard to convince himself that he needs i/iem. men are by birth equal in this, that given themselves and their condition, they are even. i am astonished at the singular pertinacity and endurance of our lives. the miracle is, that what is zs, when it is so difficult, if not impossible, for any thing else to be ; that we walk on in our particular paths so far, before we fall on death and fate, merely because we must walk in some path ; that every man can get a living, and so few can do any more. so much only can i accomplish ere health and strength are gone, and yet this suffices. the bird now sits just out of gunshot. i am never rich in money, and i am never meanly poor. if debts are incurred, why, debts are in the course of events cancelled, as it were by the same law by which they were incurred. i heard that an engagement was entered into between a certain youth and a maiden, and then i heard that it was broken off, but i did not know the reason in either case. we are hedged about, we think, by accident and circum stance, now we creep as in a dream, and now again we run, as if there were a fate in it and all things thwarted or assisted. i cannot change my clothes but when i do, and yet i do change them, and soil the new ones. it is wonderful that this gets done, when some admirable deeds which i could men tion, do not get done. our particular lives seem of such fortune and confident strength and durability 296 a week on the concord river. as piers of solid rock thrown forward into the tide of circumstance. when every other path would fail, with singular and unerring confidence we advance on our particular course. what risks we run ! famine and fire and pestilence, and the thousand forms of a cruel fate, — and yet every man lives till he — dies. how did he manage that? is there no im mediate danger ? we wonder superfluously when we hear of a somnambulist walking a plank securely, — we have walked a plank all our lives up to this par ticular string-piece where we are. my life will wait for nobody, but is being matured still without delay, while i go about the streets and chaffer with this man and that to secure a living. it is as indifferent and easy meanwhile as a poor man's dog, and making acquaintance with its kind. it will cut its own channel like a mountain stream, and by the longest ridge is not kept from the sea at last. i have found all things thus far, persons and inanimate matter, elements and seasons, strangely adapted to my resources. no matter what imprudent haste in my career ; i am permitted to be rash. gulfs are bridged in a twinkling, as if some unseen baggage train carried pontoons for my convenience, and while from the heights i scan the tempting but unexplored pacific ocean of futurity, the ship is being carried over the mountains piece-meal on the backs of mules and llamas, whose keel shall plow its waves and bear me to the indies. day would not dawn if it were not for the inward morning. packed in my mind lie all the clothes which outward nature wears, wednesda y. 297 and in its fashion's hourly change it all things else repairs. in vain i look for change abroad, and can no difference find, till some new ray of peace uncalled illumes my inmost mind. what is it gilds the trees and clouds, and paints the heavens so gay, but yonder fast abiding light with its unchanging ray ? lo, when the sun streams through the wood, upon a winter's morn. where'er his silent beams intrude the murky night is gone. how could the patient pine have known the morning breeze would come, or humble flowers anticipate the insect's noonday hum, — till the new light with morning cheer from far streamed through the aisles, and nimbly told the forest trees for many stretching miles ? i 've heard within my inmost soul such cheerful morning news, in the horizon of my mind have seen such orient hues, as in the twilight of the dawn, when the first birds awake, are heard within some silent wood, where they the small twigs break. 298 a week on the concord river. or in the eastern skies are seen, before the sun appears, the harbingers of summer heats which from afar he bears. whole weeks and months of my summer life slide away in thin volumes like mist and smoke, till at length, some warm morning, perchance, i see a sheet of mist blown down the brook to the swamp, and i float as high above the fields with it. i can recall to mind the stillest summer hours, in which the grasshopper sings over the mulleins, and there is a valor in that time the bare memory of which is armor that can laugh at any blow of fortune. for our lifetime the strains of a harp are heard to swell and die alternately, and death is but "the pause when the blast is recollecting itself." we lay awake a long while, listening to the mur murs of the brook, in the angle formed by whose bank with the river our tent was pitched, and there was a sort of human interest in its story, which ceases not in freshet or in drought the livelong summer, and the profounder lapse of the river was quite drowned by its din. but the rill, whose " silver sands and pebbles sing eternal ditties with the spring," is silenced by the first frosts of winter, while mightier streams, on whose bottom the sun never shines, clogged with sunken rocks and the ruins of forests, from whose surface comes up no murmur, are strangers to the icy fetters which bind fast a thou sand contributary rills. i dreamed this night of an event which had wednesda v. 299 occurred long before. it was a difference with a friend, which had not ceased to give me pain, though i had no cause to blame myself. but in my dream ideal justice was at length done me for his suspicions, and i received that compensation which i had never obtained in my waking hours. i was unspeakably soothed and rejoiced, even after i awoke, because in dreams we never deceive our selves, nor are deceived, and this seemed to have the authority of a final judgment. we bless and curse ourselves. some dreams are divine, as well as some waking thoughts. donne sings of one " who dreamt devoutlier than most use to pray." dreams are the touchstones of our characters. we are scarcely less afflicted when we remember some unworthiness in our conduct in a dream, than if it had been actual, and the intensity of our grief, which is our atonement, measures inversely the degree by which this is separated from an actual unworthiness. for in dreams we but act a part which must have been learned and rehearsed in our waking hours, and no doubt could discover some waking consent thereto. if this meanness has not its foundation in us, why are we grieved at it ? in dreams we see our selves naked and acting out our real characters, even more clearly than we see others awake. but an un wavering and commanding virtue would compel even its most fantastic and faintest dreams to respect its ever wakeful authority ; as we are accustomed to say carelessly, we should never have drea?ncd of such a thing. our truest life is when we are in dreams awake. 300 a week on the concord river. "and, more to lull him in his slumber soft, a trickling streame from high rock tumbling downe, and ever-drizzling raine upon the loft, mixt with a murmuring winde, much like the sowne of swarming bees, did cast him in a swowne. no other noyse, nor people's troublous cryes, as still are wont t' annoy the walled towne. might there be heard ; but careless quiet lyes wrapt in eternall silence farre from enemyes." thursday " he trode the unplanted forest floor, whereon the all-seeing sun for ages hath not shone, where feeds the moose, and walks the surly bear, and up the tall mast runs the woodpecker. ***** where darkness found him he lay glad at night; there the red morning touched him with its light. ***** go where he will, the wise man is at home, his hearth the earth, — his hall the azure dome; where his clear spirit leads him, there's his road. by god's own light illumined and foreshowed." emerson. when we awoke this morning, we heard the faint deliberate and ominous sound of rain drops on our cotton roof. the rain had pattered all night, and now the whole country wept, the drops falling in the river, and on the alders, and in the pastures, and in stead of any bow in the heavens, there was the trill of the tree-sparrow all the morning. the cheery faith of this little bird atoned for the silence of the whole woodland quire beside. when we first stepped abroad, a flock of sheep, led by their rams, came rushing down a ravine in our rear, with heedless haste and unre served frisking, as if unobserved by man, from some higher pasture where they had spent the night, to taste the herbage by the river-side ; but when their leaders caught sight of our white tent through the mist, struck with sudden astonishment, with their 30i 302 a week on the concord river. fore feet braced, they sustained the rushing torrent in their rear, and the whole flock stood still, endeavor ing to solve the mystery in their sheepish brains. at length, concluding that it boded no mischief to them, they spread themselves out quietly over the field. we learned afterward that we had pitched our tent on the very spot which a few summers before had been occu pied by a party of penobscots. we could see rising before us through the mist a dark conical eminence called hooksett pinnacle, a landmark to boatmen, and also uncannunuc mountain, broad off on the west side of the river. this was the limit of our voyage, for a few hours more in the rain would have taken us to the last of the locks, and our boat was too heavy to be dragged around the long and numerous rapids which would occur. on foot, however, we continued up along the bank, feeling our way with a stick through the show ery and foggy day, and climbing over the slippery logs in our path with as much pleasure and buoyancy as in brightest sunshine ; scenting the fragrance of the pines and the wet clay under our feet, and cheered by the tones of invisible waterfalls ; with visions of toadstools, and wandering frogs, and festoons of moss hanging from the spruce trees, and thrushes flitting silent under the leaves ; our road still holding together through that wettest of weather, like faith, while we confidently followed its lead. we managed to keep our thoughts dry, however, and only our clothes were wet. it was altogether a cloudy and drizzling day, with occasional brightenings in the mist, when the trill of the tree-sparrow seemed to be ushering in sunny hours. " nothing that naturally happens to man, can hurt thursda y. 303 him, earthquakes and thunder storms not excepted," said a man of genius, who at this time lived a few miles further on our road. when compelled by a shower to take shelter under a tree, we may improve that opportunity for a more minute inspection of some of nature's works. i have stood under a tree in the woods half a day at a time, during a heavy rain in the summer, and yet employed myself happily and profit ably there prying with miscroscopic eye into the crev ices of the bark or the leaves or the fungi at my feet. " riches are the attendants of the miser : and the heavens rain plenteously upon the mountains."" i can fancy that it would be a luxury to stand up to one's chin in some retired swamp a whole summer day, scenting the wild honeysuckle and bilberry blows, and lulled by the minstrelsy of gnats and mosquitoes ! a day passed in the society of those greek sages, such as described in the banquet of xenophon, would not be comparable with the dry wit of decayed cranberry vines, and the fresh attic salt of the moss-beds. say twelve hours of genial and familiar converse with the leopard frog ; the sun to rise behind alder and dog wood, and climb buoyantly to his meridian of two hands' breadth, and finally sink to rest behind some bold western hummock. to hear the evening chant of the mosquito from a thousand green chapels, and the bittern begin to boom from some concealed fort like a sunset gun ! — surely one may as profitably be soaked in the juices of a swamp for one day as pick his way dry-shod over sand. cold and damp, — are they not as rich experience as warmth and dryness ? at present, the drops come trickling down the stubble while we lie drenched on a bed of withered 304 a week on the concord river. wild oats, by the side of a bushy hill, and the gather ing in of the clouds, with the last rush and dying breath of the wind, and then the regular dripping of twigs and leaves the country over, enhance the sense of inward comfort and sociableness. the birds draw closer and are more familiar under the thick foliage, seemingly composing new strains upon their roosts against the sunshine. what were the amusements of the drawing room and the library in comparison, if we had them here? we should still sing as of old,— my books i 'd fain cast off, i cannot read, 'twixt every page my thoughts go stray at large down in the meadow, where is richer feed, and will not mind to hit their proper targe. plutarch was good, and so was homer too, our shakspeare's life was rich to live again, what plutarch read, that was not good nor true. nor shakspeare's books, unless his books were men. here while i lie beneath this walnut bough. what care i for the greeks or for troy town, if juster battles are enacted now between the ants upon this hummock's crown? bid homer wait till i the issue learn. if red or black the gods will favor most, or yonder ajax will the phalanx turn. struggling to heave some rock against the host. tell shakspeare to attend some leisure hour. for now i 've business with this drop of dew, and see you not, the clouds prepare a shower, — i '11 meet him shortly when the sky is blue. this bed of herd's-grass and wild oats was spread last year with nicer skill than monarchs use, a clover tuft is pillow for my head, and violets quite overtop my shoes. thursda y. 305 and now the cordial clouds have shut all in, and gently swells the wind to say all 's well, the scattered drops are falling fast and thin, some in the pool, some in the flower-bell. i am well drenched upon my bed of oats ; but see that globe come rolling down its stem, now like a lonely planet there it floats, and now it sinks into my garment's hem. drip, drip the trees for all the country round, and richness rare distils from every bough, the wind alone it is makes every sound, shaking down crystals on the leaves below. for shame the sun will never show himself. who could not with his beams e'er melt me so, my dripping locks — they would become an elf, who in a beaded coat does gaily go. the pinnacle is a small wooded hill which rises very abruptly to the height of about two hundred feet, near the shore at hooksett falls. as uncannunuc mountain is perhaps the best point from which to view the valley of the merrimack, so this hill affords the best view of the river itself. i have sat upon its sum mit, a precipitous rock only a few rods long, in fairer weather, when the sun was setting and filling the river valley with a flood of light. you can see up and down the merrimack several miles each way. the broad and straight river, full of light and life, with its sparkling and foaming falls, the islet which divides the stream, the village of hooksett on the shore almost directly under your feet, so near that you can converse with its inhabitants or throw a stone into its yards, the woodland lake at its western base, and the mountains in the north and north-east, make a scene of rare 306 a week on the concord river. beauty and completeness, which the traveller should take pains to behold. we were hospitably entertained in concord in new hampshire, which we persisted in calling nezu con cord, as we had been wont, to distinguish it from our native town, from which we had been told that it was named and in part originally settled. this would have been the proper place to conclude our voyage, uniting concord with concord by these meandering rivers, but our boat was moored some miles below its port. the richness of the intervals at penacook, now concord in new hampshire, had been observed by explorers, and, according to the historian of haver hill, in the " year 1726, considerable progress was made in the settlement, and a road was cut through the wilderness from haverhill to penacook. in the fall of 1727, the first family, that of capt. ebenezer eastman, moved into the place. his team was driven by jacob shute, who was by birth a frenchman, and he is said to have been the first person who drove a team through the wilderness. soon after, says tra dition, one ayer, a lad of 18, drove a team consisting of ten yoke of oxen to penacook, swam the river, and plowed a portion of the interval. he is supposed to have been the first person who plowed land in that place. after he had completed his work, he started on his return at sunrise, drowned a yoke of oxen while recrossing the river, and arrived at haverhill about midnight. the crank of the first saw-mill was manufactured in haverhill, and carried to penacook on a horse." but we found that the frontiers were not this way any longer. this generation has come into the world fatally late for some enterprises. go where we will thursda y. 30/ on the surface of things, men have been there before us. we cannot now have the pleasure of erecting the last house ; that was long ago set up in the suburbs of astoria city, and our boundaries have literally been run to the south sea, according to the old patents. but the lives of men, though more extended laterally in their range, are still as shallow as ever. undoubt edly, as a western orator said, "men generally live over about the same surface ; some live long and narrow, and others live broad and short ; ^'' but it is all superficial living. a worm is as good a traveller as a grasshopper or a cricket, and a much wiser settler. with all their activity these do not hop away from drought nor forward to summer. we do not avoid evil by fleeing before it, but by rising above or diving below its plane ; as the worm escapes drought and frost by boring a few inches deeper. the frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a ti\2.x\ fronts a fact, though that fact be his neighbor, there is an unsettled wilderness between him and canada, between him and the setting sun, or, further still, between him and //. let him build himself a log-house with the bark on where he is, fronting it, and wage there an old french war for seven or seventy years, with indians and rangers, or what ever else may come between him and the reality, and save his scalp if he can. we now no longer sailed or floated on the river,, but trod the unyielding land like pilgrims. sadi tells who may travel ; among others, — "a common me chanic, who can earn a subsistence by the industry of his hand, and shall not have to stake his reputation for every morsel of bread, as philosophers have said." 308 a week on the concord river. — he may travel who can subsist on the wild fruits and game of the most cultivated country. a man may travel fast enough and earn his living on the road. i have frequently been applied to to do work when on a journey ; to do tinkering and repair clocks, when i had a knapsack on my back. a man once applied to me to go into a factory, stating conditions and wages, observing that i succeeded in shutting the window of a railroad car in which we were travelling, when the other passengers had failed. ^' hast thou not heard of a sufi, who was hammering some nails into the sole of his sandal ; an officer of cavalry took him by the sleeve, saying, come along and shoe my horse." farmers have asked me to assist them in haying, when i was passing their fields. a man once applied to me to mend his umbrella, taking me for an umbrella mender, because, being on a journey, i car ried an umbrella in my hand while the sun shone. another wished to buy a tin cup of me, observing that i had one strapped to my belt, and a sauce-pan on my back. the cheapest way to travel, and the way to travel the furthest in the shortest distance, is to go afoot, carrying a dipper, a spoon, and a fish-line, some indian meal, some salt, and some sugar. when you come to a brook or pond, you can catch fish and cook them ; or you can boil a hasty-pudding ; or you can buy a loaf of bread at a farmer's house for four pence, moisten it in the next brook that crosses the road, and dip into it your sugar, — this alone will last you a whole day; — or, if you are accustomed to heartier living, you can buy a quart of milk for two cents, crumb your bread or cold pudding into it, and eat it with your own spoon out of your own dish. any one of these things i mean, not all together. i have thursda v. 309 travelled thus some hundreds of miles without taking any meal in a house, sleeping on the ground when convenient, and found it cheaper, and in many re spects more profitable, than staying at home. so that some have inquired why it would not be best to travel always. but i never thought of travelling simply as a means of getting a livelihood. a simple woman down in tyngsboro', at whose house i once stopped to get a draught of water, when i said, recog nizing the bucket, that i had stopped there nine years before for the same purpose, asked if i was not a traveller, supposing that i had been travelling ever since, and had now come round again, that travelling was one of the professions, more or less productive, which her husband did not follow. but continued travelling is far from productive. it begins with wearing away the soles of the shoes, and making the feet sore, and ere long it will wear a man clean up, after making his heart sore into the bargain. i have observed that the after-life of those who have travelled much is very pathetic. true and sincere travelling is no pastime, but it is as serious as the grave, or any other part of the human journey, and it requires a long probation to be broken into it. i do not speak of those that travel sitting, the sedentary travellers whose legs hang dangling the while, mere idle symbols of the fact, any more than when we speak of sitting hens we mean those that sit standing, but i mean those to whom travelling is life for the legs. the traveller must be born again on the road, and earn a passport from the elements, the principal powers that be for him. he shall experience at last that old threat of his mother fulfilled, that he shall be skinned alive. his sores shall gradually deepen themselves that they 3io ^ week on the concord river. may heal inwardly, while he gives no rest to the sole of his foot, and at night weariness must be his pillow, that so he may acquire experience against his rainy days. — so was it with us. sometimes we lodged at an inn in the woods, where trout-fishers from distant cities had arrived before us, and where, to our astonishment, the settlers dropped in at night-fall to have a chat and hear the news, though there was but one road, and no other house was visible, — as if they had come out of the earth. there we sometimes read old newspapers, who never before read new ones, and in the rustle of their leaves heard the dashing of the surf along the atlantic shore, instead of the sough of the wind among the pines. but then walking had given us an appetite even for the least palatable and nutritious food. some hard and dry book in a dead language, which you have found it impossible to read at home, but for which you have still a lingering regard, is the best to carry with you on a journey. at a country inn, in the barren society of ostlers and travellers, i could undertake the writers of the silver or the brazen age with confidence. almost the last regular service which i performed in the cause of literature was to read the works of aulus persius flaccus. if you have imagined what a divine work is spread out for the poet, and approach this author too, in the hope of finding the field at length fairly entered on, you will hardly dissent from the words of the prologue, " ipse semipaganus ad sacra vatum carmen affero nostrum." thursda y. 3 1 1 i half pagan bring my verses to the shrine of the poets. here is none of the interior dignity of virgil, nor the elegance and vivacity of horace, nor will any sybil be needed to remind you, that from those older greek poets there is a sad descent to persius. you can scarcely distinguish one harmonious sound amid this unmusical bickering with the follies of men. one sees that music has its place in thought, but hardly as yet in language. when the muse arrives, we wait for her to remould language, and impart to it her own rhythm. hitherto the verse groans and labors with its load, and goes not forward blithely, singing by the way. the best ode may be parodied, indeed is itself a parody, and has a poor and trivial sound, like a man stepping on the rounds of a ladder. homer, and shakspeare, and milton, and marvel, and wordsworth, are but the rustling of leaves and crac kling of twigs in the forest, and there is not yet the sound of any bird. the muse has never lifted up her voice to sing. most of all, satire will not be sung. a juvenal or persius do not marry music to their verse, but are measured fault-finders at best ; stand but just outside the faults they condemn, and so are concerned rather about the monster which they have escaped, than the fair prospect before them. let them live on an age, and they will have travelled out of his shadow and reach, and found other objects to ponder. as long as there is satire, the poet is, as it were, particeps crimiiiis. one sees not but he had best let bad take care of itself, and have to do only with what is beyond suspicion. if 5'ou light on the least vestige of truth, and it is the weight of the whole body still 312 a week on the concord river. which stamps the faintest trace, an eternity will not suffice to extol it, while no evil is so huge, but you grudge to bestow on it a moment of hate. truth never turns to rebuke falsehood ; her own straight forwardness is the severest correction. horace would not have written satire so well if he had not been in spired by it, as by a passion, and fondly cherished his vein. in his odes, the love always exceeds the hate, so that the severest satire still sings itself, and the poet is satisfied, though the folly be not corrected. a sort of necessary order in the development of genius is, first. complaint ; second, plaint ; third, love. complaint, which is the condition of persius, lies not in the province of poetry. ere long the en joyment of a superior good would have changed his disgust into regret. we can never have much sym pathy with the complainer ; for after searching nature through, we conclude that he must be both plaintiff and defendant too, and so had best come to a settle ment without a hearing. he who receives an injury is to some extent an accomplice of the wrong doer. perhaps it would be truer to say, that the highest strain of the muse is essentially plaintive. the saint's are still tears of joy. who has ever heard the innocent sing? but the divinest poem, or the life of a great man, is the severest satire ; as impersonal as nature her self, and like the sighs of her winds in the woods, which convey ever a slight reproof to the hearer. the greater the genius, the keener the edge of the satire. hence we have to do only with the rare and frag mentary traits, which least belong to persius, or shall we say, are the properest utterances of his muse ; thursda y. 3 1 3 since that which he says best at any time is what he can best say at all times. the spectators and ram blers have not failed to cull some quotable sentences from this garden too, so pleasant is it to meet even the most familiar truth in a new dress, when, if our neighbor had said it, we should have passed it by as hackneyed. out of these six satires, you may perhaps select some twenty lines, which fit so well as many thoughts, that they will recur to the scholar almost as readily as a natural image; though when trans lated into familiar language, they lose that insular emphasis, which fitted them for quotation. such lines as the following, translation cannot render com mon-place. contrasting the man of true religion with those who, with jealous privacy, would fain carry on a secret commerce with the gods, he says, — " haud cuivispromptum est, murmurque humilesque susurros, tollere de templis; et aperto vivere voto." it is not easy for every one to take murmurs and low whispers out of the temples, and live with open vow. to the virtuous man, the universe is the only sanc tu7n sanctorum, and the penetralia of the temple are the broad noon of his existence. why should he betake himself to a subterranean crypt, as if it were the only holy ground in all the world which he had left unprofaned ? the obedient soul would only the more discover and familiarize things, and escape more and more into light and air, as having hence forth done with secrecy, so that the universe shall not seem open enough for it. at length, it is neg lectful even of that silence which is consistent with true modesty, but by its independence of all confi 314 a week on the concord river. dence in its disclosures, makes that which it imparts so private to the hearer, that it becomes the care of the whole world that modesty be not infringed. to the man who cherishes a secret in his breast, there is a still greater secret unexplored. our most indifferent acts may be matter for secrecy, but what ever we do with the utmost truthfulness and integrity, by virtue of its pureness, must be transparent as light. in the third satire, he asks, " est aliquid quo tendis, et in quod dirigis arcum? an passim sequeris corvos, testave, lutove, securus quo pes ferat, atque ex tempore vivis? " is there anything to which thou tendest, and against which thou directest thy bow? or dost thou pursue crows, at random, with pottery or clay, careless whither thy feet bear thee, and live ex tempore ? the bad sense is always a secondary one. lan guage does not appear to have justice done it, but is obviously cramped and narrowed in its significance, when any meanness is described. the truest con struction is not put upon it. what may readily be fashioned into a rule of wisdom, is here thrown in the teeth of the sluggard, and constitutes the front of his offence. universally, the innocent man will come forth from the sharpest inquisition and lecturing, the combined din of reproof and commendation, with a faint sound of eulogy in his ears. our vices always lie in the direction of our virtues, and in their best estate are but plausible imitations of the latter. falsehood never attains to the dignity of entire falseness, but is only an inferior sort of truth ; thursda y. 3 i 5 if it were more thoroughly false, it would incur danger of becoming true. " securus quo pes ferat, atque ex tempore vivit," is then the motto of a wise man. for first, as the subtle discernment of the language would have taught us, with all his negligence he is still secure ; but the sluggard, notwithstanding his heedlessness, is insecure. the life of a wise man is most of all extemporane ous, for he lives out of an eternity which includes all time. the cunning mind travels farther back than zoroaster each instant, and comes quite down to the present with its revelation. the utmost thrift and industry of thinking give no man any stock in life ; his credit with the inner world is no better, his capital no larger. he must try his fortune again to day as yesterday. all questions rely on the present for their solution. time measures nothing but itself. the word that is written may be postponed, but not that on the lip. if this is what the occasion says, let the occasion say it. all the world is forward to prompt him who gets up to live without his creed in his pocket. in the fifth satire, which is the best, i find, — " stat contra ratio, et secretam garrit in aurem, ne liceat facere id, quod quis vitiabit agendo." reason opposes, and whispers in the secret ear, that it is not lawful to do that which one will spoil by doing. only they who do not see how anything might be better done, are forward to try their hand on it. even the master workman must be encouraged by the reflection, 3l6 a week on the concord river. that his awkwardness will be incompetent to do that thing harm, to which his skill may fail to do justice. here is no apology for neglecting to do many things from a sense of our incapacity, — for what deed does not fall maimed and imperfect from our hands ? — but only a warning to bungle less. the satires of persius are the farthest possible from inspired ; evidently a chosen, not imposed sub ject. perhaps i have given him credit for more ear nestness than is apparent ; but it is certain, that that which alone we can call persius, which is forever in dependent and consistent, was in earnest, and so sanctions the sober consideration of all. the artist and his work are not to be separated. the most wil fully foolish man cannot stand aloof from his folly, but the deed and the doer together make ever one sober fact. there is but one stage for the peasant and the actor. the buffoon cannot bribe you to laugh always at his grimaces ; they shall sculpture themselves in egyptian granite, to stand heavy as the pyramids on the ground of his character. suns rose and set and found us still on the dank forest path which meanders up the pemigewasset, now more like an otter's or a marten's trail, or where a beaver had dragged his trap, than where the wheels of travel raise a dust ; where towns begin to serve as gores, only to hold the earth together. the wild pigeon sat secure above our heads, high on the dead limbs of naval pines, reduced to a robin's size. the very yards of our hostelries inclined upon the skirts of mountains, and, as we passed, we looked up at a steep angle at the stems of maples waving in the clouds. thursda y. 3 1 7 far up in the country, — for we would be faithful to our experience, — in thornton, perhaps, we met a soldier lad in the woods, going to muster in full regi mentals, and holding the middle of the road ; deep in the forest with shouldered musket and military step, and thoughts of war and glory all to himself. it was a sore trial to the youth, tougher than many a battle, to get by us creditably and with soldierlike bearing. poor man ! he actually shivered like a reed in his thin military pants, and by the time we had got up with him, all the sternness that becomes the soldier had forsaken his face, and he skulked past as if he were driving his father's sheep under a sword-proof helmet. it was too much for him to carry any extra armor then, who could not easily dispose of his nat ural arms. and for his legs, they were like heavy artillery in boggy places ; better to cut the traces and forsake them. his greaves chafed and wrestled one with another for want of other foes. but he did get by and get off with all his munitions, and lived to fight another day ; and i do not record this as cast ing any suspicion on his honor and real bravery in the field. wandering on through notches which the streams had made, by the side and over the brows of hoar hills and mountains, across the stumpy, rocky, for ested and bepastured country, we at length crossed on prostrate trees over the amonoosuck, and breathed the free air of unappropriated land. thus, in fair days as well as foul, we had traced up the river to which our native stream is a tributary, until from merrimack it became the pemigewasset that leaped by our side, and when we had passed its fountain head, the wild amonoosuck, whose puny channel 3l8 a week on the concord river. was crossed at a stride, guiding us toward its distant source among the mountains, and at length, without its guidance, we were enabled to reach the summit of agiocochook. " sweet days, so cool, so calm, so bright, the bridal of the earth and sky. sweet dews shall weep thy fall to-night, for thou must die." herbert. the melon man, in whose corn-barn we had hung our tent and buffaloes and other things to dry, was al ready picking his hops, with many women and chil dren to help him. we bought one watermelon, the largest in his patch, to carry with us for ballast. it was nathan's, which he might sell if he pleased, hav ing been conveyed to him in the green state, and owned daily by his eyes. after due consultation with "father," the bargain was concluded, — we to buy it at a venture on the vine, green or ripe, our risk, and pay "what the gentlemen pleased." it proved to be ripe ; for we had had honest experience in selecting this fruit. finding our boat safe in its harbor, under uncan nunuc mountain, with a fair wind and the current in our favor, we commenced our return voyage at noon, sitting at our ease and conversing, or in silence watch ing for the last trace of each reach in the river as a bend concealed it from our view. as the season was thursday. 319 further advanced, the wind now blew steadily from the north, and with our sail set we could occasionally lie on our oars without loss of time. the lumber men throwing down wood from the top of the high bank, thirty or forty feet above the water, that it might be sent down stream, paused in their work to watch our retreating sail. by this time, indeed, we were well known to the boatmen, and were hailed as the revenue cutter of the stream. as we sailed rapidly down the river, shut in between two mounds of earth, the sound of this timber rolled down the bank enhanced the silence and vastness of the noon, and we fancied that only the primeval echoes were awakened. the vision of a distant scow just heaving in sight round a headland, also increased by contrast the solitude. through the din and desultoriness of noon, even in the most oriental city, is seen the fresh and primitive and savage nature, in which scythians, and ethiopians, and indians dwell. what is echo, what are light and shade, day and night, ocean and stars, earthquake and eclipse, there? the works of man are every where swallowed up in the immensity of nature. the .(4^gean sea is but lake huron still to the indian. also there is all the refinement of civilized life in the woods under a sylvan garb. the wildest scenes have an air of domesticity and homeliness even to the citi zen, and when the flicker's cackle is heard in the clearing, he is reminded that civilization has wrought but little change there. science is welcome to the deepest recesses of the forest, for there too nature obeys the same old civil laws. the little red bug on the stump of a pine, for it the wind shifts and the sun breaks through the clouds. in the wildest nature, 320 a week on the concord river. there is not only the material of the most cultivated life, and a sort of anticipation of the last result, but a greater refinement already than is ever attained by man. there is papyrus by the river-side, and rushes for light, and the goose only flies overhead, ages be fore the studious are born or letters invented, and that literature which the former suggest, and even from the first have rudely served, it may be man does not yet use them to express. nature is prepared to welcome into her scenery the finest work of human art, for she is herself an art so cunning that the artist never appears in his work. art is not tame, and nature is not wild, in the or dinary sense. a perfect work of man's art would also be wild or natural in a good sense. man tames na ture only that he may at last make her more free even than he found her, though he may never yet have succeeded. with this propitious breeze, and the help of our oars, we soon reached the falls of amoskeag, and the mouth of the piscataquoag, and recognized, as we swept rapidly by, many a fair bank and islet on which our eyes had rested in the upward passage. our boat was like that which chaucer describes in his dream, in which the knight took his departure from the island, " to journey for his marriage, and return with such an host, that wedded might be least and most. * * which barge was as a marfs thought, after his pleasure to him brought. the queene herself accustomed aye in the same barge to play. it needed neither mast ne rother, thursday. 32 1 i have not heard of such another, no master for the governance, hie sayled by thought and pleasaunce without labor east and west, all was one, calme or tempest." so we sailed this afternoon, thinking of the saying of pythagoras, though we had no pecuhar right to re member it, — "it is beautiful when prosperity is present with intellect, and when sailing as it were with a prosperous wind, actions are performed look ing to virtue ; just as a pilot looks to the motions of the stars." all the world reposes in beauty to him who preserves equipoise in his life, and moves serenely on his path without secret violence ; as he who sails down a stream, he has only to steer, keeping his bark in the middle, and carry it round the falls. the rip ples curled away in our wake, like ringlets from the head of a child, while we steadily held on our course, and under the bows we watched " the swaying soft. made by the delicate wave parted in front, as through the gentle element we move like shadows gliding through untroubled dreams." the forms of beauty fall naturally around the path of him who is in the performance of his proper work ; as the curled shavings drop from the plane, and borings cluster round the auger. undulation is the gentlest and most ideal of motions, produced by one fluid falling on another. rippling is a more graceful flight. from a hill-top you may detect in it the wings of birds endlessly repeated. the two ivaving lines which represent the flight of birds appear to have been copied from the ripple. 322 a week on the concord river. the trees made an admirable fence to the land scape, skirting the horizon on every side. the single trees and the groves left standing on the interval, ap peared naturally disposed, though the farmer had con sulted only his convenience, for he too falls into the scheme of nature. art can never match the luxury and superfluity of nature. in the former all is seen; it cannot afford concealed wealth, and is niggardly in comparison ; but nature, even when she is scant and thin outwardly, satisfies us still*by the assurance of a certain generosity at the roots. in swamps, where there is only here and there an evergreen tree amid the quaking moss and cranberry beds, the bareness does not suggest poverty. the double-spruce, which i had hardly noticed in gardens, attracts me in such places, and now first i understand why men try to make them grow about their houses. but though there may be very perfect specimens in front-yard plots, their beauty is for the most part ineffectual there, for there is no such assurance of kindred wealth beneath and around them to make them show to advantage. as we have said, nature is a greater and more perfect art, the art of god ; though, referred to herself, she is genius, and there is a similarity between her operations and man's art even in the details and trifles. when the overhanging pine drops into the water, by the sun and water, and the wind rubbing it against the shore, its boughs are worn into fantastic shapes, and white and smooth, as if turned in a lathe, man's art has wisely imitated those forms into which all matter is most inclined to run, as foliage and fruit. a hammock swung in a grove assumes the exact form of a canoe, broader or narrower, and higher or lower at the ends, as more or fewer persons thursday. 323 are in it, and it rolls in the air with the motion of the body, like a canoe in the water. our art leaves its shavings and its dust about; her art exhibits itself even in the shavings and the dust which we make. she has perfected herself by an eternity of practice. the world is well kept ; no rubbish accumulates ; the morning air is clear even at this day, and no dust has settled on the grass. behold how the evening now steals over the fields, the shadows of the trees creep ing further and further into the meadow, and ere long the stars will come to bathe in these retired waters. her undertakings are secure and never fail. if i were awakened from a deep sleep, i should know which side of the meridian the sun might be by the aspect of nature, and by the chirp of the crickets, and yet no painter can paint this difference. the landscape con tains a thousand dials which indicate the natural divisions of time, the shadows of a thousand styles point to the hour. — " not only o'er the dial's face, this silent phantom day by day, with slow, unseen, unceasing pace steals moments, months, and years away; from hoary rock and aged tree, from proud palmyra's mouldering walls, from teneriffe, towering o'er the sea. from every blade of grass it falls." it is almost the only game which the trees play at, this tit-for-tat, now this side in the sun, now that, the drama of the day. in deep ravines under the east ern sides of cliffs, night forwardly plants her foot even at noonday, and as day retreats she steps intb his trenches, skulking from tree to tree, from fence to fence, until at last she sits in his citadel 324 ^ week on the concord river. and draws out her forces into the plahi. it may be that the forenoon is brighter than the afternoon, not only because of the greater transparency of its atmosphere, but because we naturally look most into the west, as forward into the day, and so in the fore noon see the sunny side of things, but in the after noon the shadow of every tree. the afternoon is now far advanced, and a fresh and leisurely wind is blowing over the river, making long reaches of bright ripples. the river has done its stint, and appears not to flow, but lie at its length re flecting the light, and the haze over the woods is like the inaudible panting, or rather the gentle perspira tion of resting nature, rising from a myriad of pores into the attenuated atmosphere. on the thirty-first day of march, one hundred and forty-two years before this, probably about this time in the afternoon, there were hurriedly paddling down this part of the river, between the pine woods which then fringed these banks, two white women and a boy, who had left an island at the mouth of the con toocook before daybreak. they were slightly clad for the season, in the english fashion, and handled their paddles unskilfully, but with nervous energy and determination, and at the bottom of their canoe lay the still bleeding scalps of ten of the aborigines. they were hannah dustan, and her nurse, mary neff, both of haverhill, eighteen miles from the mouth of this river, and an english boy, named samuel len nardson, escaping from captivity among the indians. on the 15th of march previous, hannah dustan had been compelled to rise from childbed, and half dressed, with one foot bare, accompanied by her thursday. 325 nurse, commence an uncertain march, in still inclem ent weather, through the snow and the wilderness. she had seen her seven elder children flee with their father, but knew not of their fate. she had seen her infant's brains dashed out against an apple tree, and had left her own and her neighbors' dwellings in ashes. when she reached the wig wam of her captor, situated on an island in the merrimack, more than twenty miles above where we now are, she had been told that she and her nurse were soon to be taken to a distant indian set tlement, and there made to run the gauntlet naked. the family of this indian consisted. of two men, three women, and seven children, beside an english boy, whom she found a prisoner among them. having determined to attempt her escape, she instructed the boy to inquire of one of the men, how he should despatch an enemy in the quickest manner, and take his scalp. " strike 'em there," said he, placing his finger on his temple, and he also showed him how to take off the scalp. on the morning of the 31st she arose before daybreak, and awoke her nurse and the boy, and taking the indians' tomahawks, they killed them all in their sleep, excepting one favorite boy, and one squaw who fled wounded with him to the woods. the english boy struck the indian who had given him the information on the temple, as he had been directed. they then collected all the provision they could find, and took their master's tomahawk and gun, and scuttling all the canoes but one, com menced their flight to haverhill, distant about sixty miles by the river. but after having proceeded a short distance, fearing that her story would not be believed if she should escape to tell it, they returned ^26 a week on the concord river. to the silent wigwam, and taking off the scalps of the dead, put them into a bag as proofs of what they had done, and then retracing their steps to the shore in the twilight, recommenced their voyage. early this morning this deed was performed, and now, perchance, these tired women and this boy, their clothes stained with blood, and their minds racked with alternate resolution and fear, are mak ing a hasty meal of parched corn and moose meat, while their canoe glides under these pine roots whose stumps are still standing on the bank. they are thinking of the dead whom they have left behind on that solitary isle far up the stream, and of the relent less living warriors who are in pursuit. every with ered leaf which the winter has left seems to know their story, and in its rustling to repeat it and betray them. an indian lurks behind every rock and pine, and their nerves cannot bear the tapping of a wood pecker. or they forget their own dangers and their deeds in conjecturing the fate of their kindred, and whether, if they escape the indians, they shall find the former still alive. they do not stop to cook their meals upon the bank, nor land, except to carry their canoe about the falls. the stolen birch forgets its master and does them good service, and the swollen current bears them swiftly along with little need of the paddle, except to steer and keep them warm by exer cise. for ice is floating in the river ; the spring is opening ; the muskrat and the beaver are driven out of their holes by the flood ; deer gaze at them from the bank ; a few faint-singing forest birds, perchance, fly across the river to the northernmost shore; the fish-hawk sails and screams overhead, and geese fly over with a startling clangor ; but they do not observe thursda v. 327 these things, or they speedily forget them. they do not smile or chat all day. sometimes they pass an indian grave surrounded by its paling on the bank, or the frame of a wigwam, with a few coals left behind, or the withered stalks still rustling in the indian's solitary cornfield on the interval. the birch stripped of its bark, or the charred stump where a tree has been burned down to be made into a canoe, these are the only traces of man, — a fabulous wild man to us. on either side, the primeval forest stretches away uninterrupted to canada or to the " south sea " ; to the white man a drear and howling wilderness, but to the indian a home, adapted to his nature, and cheerful as the smile of the great spirit. while we loiter here this autumn evening, looking for a spot retired enough, where we shall quietly rest to-night, they thus, in that chilly march evening, one hundred and forty-two years before us, with wind and current favoring, have already glided out of sight, not to camp, as we shall, at night, but while two sleep one will manage the canoe, and the swift stream bear them onward to the settlements, it may be, even to old john lovewell's house on salmon brook to-night. according to the historian, they escaped as by a miracle all roving bands of indians, and reached their homes in safety, with their trophies, for which the general court paid them fifty pounds. the family of hannah dustan all assembled alive once more, ex cept the infant whose brains were dashed out against the apple tree, and there have been many who in later times have lived to say that they had eaten of the fruit of that apple tree. 328 a week on the concord river. this seems a long while ago, and yet it happened since milton wrote his paradise lost. but its an tiquity is not the less great for that, for we do not regulate our historical time by the english standard, nor did the english by the roman, nor the roman by the greek. "we must look a long way back," says raleigh, "to find the romans giving laws to nations, and their consuls brmging kings and princes bound in chains to rome in triumph ; to see men go to greece for wisdom, or ophir for gold ; when now nothing remains but a poor paper remembrance of their former condition." — and yet, in one sense, not so far back as to find the penacooks and pawtuckets using bows and arrows and hatchets of stone, on the banks of the merrimack. from this september after noon, and from between these now cultivated shores, those times seem more remote than the dark ages. on beholding an old picture of concord, as it appeared but seventy-five years ago, with a fair, open prospect and a light on trees and river, as if it were broad noon, i find that i had not thought the sun shone in those days, or that men lived in broad daylight then. still less do we imagine the sun shining on hill and valley during philip's war, on the warpath of church or philip, or later of lovewell or paugus, with serene summer weather, but they must have lived and fought in a dim twilight or night. the age of the world is great enough for our imaginations, even according to the mosaic account, without borrowing any years from the geologist. from adam and eve at one leap sheer down to the deluge, and then through the ancient monarchies, through babylon and thebes, brahma and abraham, to greece and the argonauts ; whence we might start thursday. 329 again with orpheus and the trojan war, the pyramids and the olymi^ic games, and homer and athens, for our stages ; and after a breathing space at the build ing of rome, continue our journey down through odin and christ to — america. it is a wearisome while. — and yet the lives of but sixty old women, such as live under the hill, say of a century each, strung together, are sufficient to reach over the whole ground. taking hold of hands they would span the interval from eve to my own mother. a respectable tea-party merely, — whose gossip would be universal history. the fourth old woman from myself suckled columbus, — the ninth was nurse to the norman conqueror, — the nineteenth was the virgin mary, — the twenty-fourth the cumaean sibyl, — the thirtieth was at the trojan war and helen her name, — the thirty-eighth was queen semiramis, — the sixtieth was eve the mother of mankind. so much for the — " old woman that lives under the hill, and if she 's not gone she lives there still." it will not take a very great grand-daughter of hers to be in at the death of time. we can never safely exceed the actual facts in our narratives. of pure invention, such as some suppose, there is no instance. to write a true work of fiction even, is only to take leisure and liberty to describe some things more exactly as they are. a true account of the actual is the rarest poetry, for common sense always takes a hasty and superficial view. though i am not much acquainted with the works of goethe, i should say that it was one of his chief excellencies as a writer, that he is satisfied with giving an exact description of things as they appear to him, and their 330 ^ week on the concord river. effect upon him. most travellers have not self-respect enough to do this simply, and make objects and events stand around them as the centre, but still imagine more favorable positions and relations than the actual ones, and so we get no valuable report from them at all. in his itahan travels goethe jogs along at a snail's pace, but always mindful that the earth is beneath and the heavens are above him. his italy is not merely the fatherland of lazzaroni and virtuosi, and scene of splendid ruins, but a solid turf-clad soil, daily shined on by the sun, and nightly by the moon. even the few showers are faithfully recorded. he speaks as an unconcerned spectator, whose object is faithfully to describe what he sees, and that, for the most part, in the order in which he sees it. even his reflections do not interfere with his descriptions. in one place he speaks of himself as giving so glow ing and truthful a description of an old tower to the peasants who had gathered around him, that they who had been born and brought up in the neighbor hood must needs look over their shoulders, " that," to use his own words, "they might behold with their eyes, what i had praised to their ears " — " and i added nothing, not even the ivy which for centuries had decorated the walls." it would thus be possible for inferior minds to produce invaluable books, if this very moderation were not the evidence of superiority ; for the wise are not so much wiser than others as respecters of their own wisdom. some, poor in spirit, record plaintively only what has happened to them ; but others how they have happened to the universe, and the judgment which they have awarded to circumstances. above all, he possessed a hearty good-will to all men, and never wrote a.cross or even thursday. 33 1 careless word. on one occasion the post-boy snivel ling " signor perdonate, questa e la mia patria,'^ he confesses that '■'■ to me poor northerner came some thing tear-like into the eyes." goethe's whole education and life were those of the artist. he lacks the unconsciousness of the poet. in his autobiography he describes accurately the life of the author of wilhelm meister. for as there is in that book, mingled with a rare and serene wis dom, a certain pettiness or exaggeration of trifles, wisdom applied to produce a constrained and partial and merely well-bred man, — a magnifying of the theatre till life itself is turned into a stage, for which it is our duty to study our parts well, and conduct with propriety and precision, — so in the autobiog raphy, the fault of his education is, so to speak, its artistic completeness. nature is hindered, though she prevails at last in making an unusually catholic impression on the boy. it is the life of a city boy, whose toys are pictures and works of art, whose wonders are the theatre and kingly processions and crownings. as the youth studied minutely the order and the degrees in the imperial procession, and suf fered none of its effect to be lost on him ; so the man aimed to secure a rank in society which would satisfy his notion of fitness and respectability. he was de frauded of much which the savage boy enjoys. indeed he himself has occasion to say in this very autobiog raphy, when at last he escapes into the woods with out the gates, — " thus much is certain, that only the undefinable, wide-expanding feelings of youth and of uncultivated nations are adapted to the sublime, which whenever it may be excited in us through external objects, since it is either formless, or else moulded 332 a week on the concord river. into forms which are incomprehensible, must surround us with a grandeur which we find above our reach." he further says of himself, — "i had lived among painters from my childhood, and had accustomed myself to look at objects as they did, with reference to art." and this was his practice to the last. he was even too well-bred to be thoroughly bred. he says that he had had no intercourse with the lowest class of his towns-boys. the child should have the advantage of ignorance as well as of knowledge, and is fortunate if he gets his share of neglect and exposure. — " the laws of nature break the rules of art." the man of genius may at the same time be, indeed is commonly, an artist, but the two are not to be con founded. the man of genius, referred to mankind, is an originator, an inspired or demonic man,who produces a perfect work in obedience to laws yet unexplored. the artist is he who detects and ap plies the law from observation of the works of genius, whether of man or nature. the artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected. there has been no man of pure genius; as there has been none wholly destitute of genius. poetry is the mysticism of mankind. the expressions of the poet cannot be analyzed ; his sentence is one word, whose syllables are words. there are indeed no words quite worthy to be set to his music. but what matter if we do not hear the words always, if we hear the music? much verse fails of being poetry because it was not written exactly at the right crisis, though it may have been inconceivably near to it. it is only thursday. 333 by a miracle that poetry is written at all. it is not recoverable thought, but a hue caught from a vaster receding thought. a poem is one undivided unimpeded expression fallen ripe into literature, and it is undividedly and unimpededly received by those for whom it was matured. if you can speak what you will never hear, — if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things. the work we choose should be our own, god lets alone. the unconsciousness of man is the consciousness of god. deep are the foundations of sincerity. even stone walls have their foundation below the frost. what is produced by a free stroke charms us, like the forms of lichens and leaves. there is a certain perfection in accident which we never consciously attain. draw a blunt quill filled with ink over a sheet of paper, and fold the paper before the ink is dry, transversely to this line, and a delicately shaded and regular figure will be produced, in some respects more pleasing than an elaborate drawing. the talent of composition is very dangerous, — the striking out the heart of life at a blow, as the indian takes off a scalp. i feel as if my life had grown more outward when i can express it. on his journey from brenner to verona, goethe writes, " the tees flows now more gently, and makes in many places broad sands. on the land, 334 ^ ^eek on the concord river. near to the water, upon the hill-sides, everything is so closely planted one to another, that you think they must choke one another, — vineyards, maize, mulberry trees, apples, pears, quinces, and nuts. the dwarf elder throws itself vigorously over the walls. ivy grows with strong stems up the rocks, and spreads itself wide over them, the lizard glides through the intervals, and everything that wanders to and fro reminds one of the loveliest pictures of art. the women's tufts of hair bound up, the men's bare breasts and light jackets, the excellent oxen which they drive home from market, the little asses with their loads, — everything forms a living, animated heinrich roos. and now that it is evening, in the mild air a few clouds rest upon the mountains, in the heavens more stand still than move, and immediately after sunset the chirping of crickets begins to grow more loud ; then one feels for once at home in the world, and not as concealed or in exile. i am con tented as though i had been born and brought up here, and were now returning from a greenland or whaling voyage. even the dust of my fatherland, which is often whirled about the wagon, and which for so long a time i had not seen, is greeted. the clock-and-bell jingling of the crickets is altogether lovely, penetrating, and agreeable. it sounds bravely when roguish boys whistle in emulation of a field of such songstresses. one fancies that they really en hance one another. also the evening is perfectly mild as the day." " if one who dwelt in the south and came hither from the south should hear of my rapture hereupon, he would deem me very childish. alas ! what i here express i have long known while i suffered under an thursday. 335 unpropitious heaven, and now may i joyful feel this joy as an exception, which we should enjoy everforth as an eternal necessity of our nature." thus we "sayled by thought and pleasaunce," as chaucer says, and all things seemed with us to flow ; the shore itself, and the distant cliffs, were dissolved by the undiluted air. the hardest material seemed to obey the same law with the most fluid, and so indeed in the long run it does. trees were but rivers of sap and woody fibre, flowing from the atmosphere, and emptying into the earth by their trunks, as their roots flowed upward to the surface. and in the heavens there were rivers of stars, and milky ways, already beginning to gleam and ripple over our heads. there were rivers of rock on the surface of the earth, and rivers of ore in its bowels, and our thoughts flowed and circulated, and this portion of time was but the current hour. let us wander where we will, the universe is built round about us, and we are central still. if we look into the heavens they are concave, and if we were to look into a gulf as bottomless, it would be concave also. the sky is curved downward to the earth in the horizon, because we stand on the plain. i draw down its skirts. the stars so low there seem loath to depart, but by a cir cuitous path to be remembering me, and returning on their steps. we had already passed by broad daylight the scene of our encampment at coos falls, and at length we pitched our camp on the west bank, in the northern part of merrimack, nearly opposite to the large island on which we had spent the noon in our way up the river. 336 ^ week on the concord river. there we went to bed that summer evening, on a sloping shelf in the bank, a couple of rods from our boat, which was drawn up on the sand, and just behind a thin fringe of oaks which bordered the river ; with out having disturbed any inhabitants but the spiders in the grass, which came out by the light of our lamp and crawled over our buffaloes. when we looked out from under the tent, the trees were seen dimly through the mist, and a cool dew hung upon the grass, which seemed to rejoice in the night, and with the damp air we inhaled a solid fragrance. having eaten our supper of hot cocoa and bread and water melon, we soon grew weary of conversing and writing in our journals, and putting out the lantern which hung from the tent pole, fell asleep. unfortunately many things have been omitted which should have been recorded in our journal, for though we made it a rule to set down all our experi ences therein, yet such a resolution is very hard to keep, for the important experience rarely allows us to remember such obligations, and so indifferent things get recorded, while that is frequently neglected. it is not easy to write in a journal what interests us at any time, because to write it is not what interests us. whenever we awoke in the night, still eking out our dreams with half-awakened thoughts, it was not till after an interval, when the wind breathed harder than usual, flapping the curtains of the tent, and causing its cords to vibrate, that we remembered that we lay on the bank of the merrimack, and not in our chamber at home. with our heads so low in the grass, we heard the river whirling and sucking, and lapsing downward, kissing the shore as it went, some times ripphng louder than usual, and again its mighty thursday. 33/ current making only a slight limpid trickling sound, as if our water-pail had sprung a leak, and the water were flowing into the grass by our side. the wind, rustling the oaks and hazels, impressed us like a wakeful and inconsiderate person up at midnight, moving about and putting things to rights, occasion ally stirring up whole drawers full of leaves at a puff. there seemed to be a great haste and preparation throughout nature, as for a distinguished visitor; all her aisles had to be swept in the night, by a thousand hand-maidens, and a thousand pots to be boiled for the next day's feasting ; — such a whisper ing bustle, as if ten thousand fairies made their fingers fly, silently sewing at the new carpet with which the earth was to be clothed, and the new dra pery which was to adorn the trees. and then the wind would lull and die away and we like it fell asleep again. friday. " the boteman strayt held on his course with stayed stedfastnesse, ne ever shroncke, ne ever sought to bayt his tryed armes for toylesome wearinesse ; but with his oares did sweepe the watry wildernesse." spenser. " summer's robe grows dusky, and like an oft-dyed garment shows." donne. as we lay awake long before daybreak, listening to the rippling of the river and the rustling of the leaves, in suspense whether the wind blew up or down the stream, was favorable or unfavorable to our voy age, we already suspected that there was a change in the weather, from a freshness as of autumn in these sounds. the wind in the woods sounded like an incessant waterfall dashing and roaring amid rocks, and we even felt encouraged by the unusual activity of the elements. he who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly despair. that night was the turning point in the season. we had gone to bed in summer, and we awoke in autumn ; for summer passes into autumn in some unimaginable point of time, like the turning of a leaf. we found our boat in the dawn just as we had left it, and as if waiting for us, there on the shore, in autumn, all cool and dripping with dew, and our 338 frida y. 339 tracks still fresh in the wet sand around it, the fairies all gone or concealed. before five o'clock we pushed it into the fog, and leaping in, at one shove were out of sight of the shores, and began to sweep downward with the rushing river, keeping a sharp look out for rocks. we could see only the yellow gurgung water, and a solid bank of fog on every side forming a small yard around us. we soon passed the mouth of the souhegan and the village of merrimack, and as the mist gradually rolled away, and we were relieved from the trouble of watching for rocks, we saw by the flit ting clouds, by the first russet tinge on the hills, by the rushing river, the cottages on shore, and tjie shore itself, so coolly fresh and shining with dew, and later in the day, by the hue of the grape vine, the gold finch on the willow, the flickers flying in flocks, and when we passed near enough to the shore, as we fancied, by the faces of men, that the fall had commenced. the cottages looked more snug and comfortable, and their inhabitants were seen only for a moment, and then went quietly in and shut the door, retreating inward to the haunts of summer. "and now the cold autumnal dews are seen to cobweb ev'ry green ; and by the low-shorn rowens doth appear the fast declining year." we heard the sigh of the first autumnal wind, and even the water had acquired a grayer hue. the sumach, grape, and maple were already changed, and the milkweed had turned to a deep rich yellow. in all woods the leaves were fast ripening for their fall ; for their full veins and lively gloss mark the ripe leaf, and not the sered one of the poets ; and we knew 340 a week on the concord river. that the maples, stripped of their leaves among the earliest, would soon stand like a wreath of smoke along the edge of the meadow. already the cattle were heard to low wildly in the pastures and along the highways, restlessly running to and fro, as if in apprehension of the withering of the grass and of the approach of winter. our thoughts too began to rustle. as i pass along the streets of our village of con cord on the day of our annual cattle show, when it usually happens that the leaves of the elms and buttonwoods begin first to strew the ground under the breath of the october wind, the lively spirits in their sap seem to mount as high as any plow-boy's let loose that day; and they lead my thoughts away to the rustling woods, where the trees are preparing for their winter campaign. this autumnal festival, when men are gathered in crowds in the streets as regularly and by as natural a law as the leaves cluster and rustle by the wayside, is naturally associated in my mind with the fall of the year. the low of cattle in the streets sounds like a hoarse symphony or running base to the rusthng of the leaves. the wind goes hurrying down the country, gleaning every loose straw that is left in the fields, while every farmer lad too appears to scud before it, — having donned his best pea-jacket and pepper-and-salt waistcoat, his unbent trousers, outstanding rigging of duck, or kersymere, or cor duroy, and his furry hat withal, — to country fairs and cattle-shows, to that rome among the villages where the treasures of the year are gathered. all the land over they go leaping the fences with their friday. 341 tough idle palms, which have never learned to hang by their sides, amid the low of calves and the bleat ing of sheep, — amos, abner, elnathan, elbridge, — " from steep pine-bearing mountains to the plain." i love these sons of earth, every mother's son of them, with their great hearty hearts rushing tumul tuously in herds from spectacle to spectacle, as if fearful lest there should not be time between sun and sun to see them all, and the sun does not wait more than in haying time. " wise nature's darlings, they live in the world perplexing not themselves how it is hurled." running hither and thither with appetite for the coarse pastimes of the day, now with boisterous speed at the heels of the inspired negro from whose larynx the melodies of all congo and guinea coast have broke loose into our streets ; now to see the proces sion of a hundred yoke of oxen, all as august and grave as osiris, or the droves of neat cattle and milch cows as unspotted as i sis or lo. such as had no love for nature " at all, came lovers home from this great festival." they may bring their fattest cattle and richest fruits to the fair, but they are all eclipsed by the show of men. these are stirring autumn days, when men sweep by in crowds, amid the rustle of leaves, like migrating finches, this is the true harvest of the year, when the air is but the breath of men, and the rus tling of leaves is as the trampling of the crowd. we read now-a-days of the ancient festivals, games, and processions of the greeks and etruscans, with a 342 a week on the concord river. little incredulity, or at least with little sympathy; but how natural and irrepressible in every people is some hearty and palpable greeting of nature. the corybantes, the bacchantes, the rude primitive trage dians with their procession and goat-song, and the whole paraphernalia of the panathenaea, which appear so antiquated and peculiar, have their parallel now. the husbandman is always a better greek than the scholar is prepared to appreciate, and the old custom still survives, while antiquarians and scholars grow gray in commemorating it. the farmers crowd to the fair to-day in obedience to the same ancient law, which solon or lycurgus did not enact, as naturally as bees swarm and follow their queen. it is worth the while to see the country's people, how they pour into the town, the sober farmer folk, now all agog, their very shirt and coat collars point ing forward, — collars so broad as if they had put their shirts on wrong end upward, for the fashions always tend to superfluity, — and with an unusual springiness in their gait, jabbering earnestly to one another. the more supple vagabond, too, is sure to appear on the least rumor of such a gathering, and the next day to disappear, and go into his hole like the seventeen-year locust, in an ever shabby coat, though finer than the farmer's best, yet never dressed ; come to see the sport, and have a hand in what is going, — to know "what's the row," if there is any ; to be where some men are drunk, some horses race, some cockerels fight ; anxious to be shaking props under a table, and above all to see the "striped pig." he especially is the creature of the occasion. he empties both his pockets and his character into the stream, and swims in such a day. frida y. 343 he dearly loves the social slush. there is no reserve of soberness in him. i love to see the herd of men feeding heartily on coarse and succulent pleasures, as cattle on the husks and stalks of vegetables. though there are many crooked and crabbled specimens of humanity among them, run all to thorn and rind, and crowded out of shape by adverse circumstances, like the third chestnut in the burr, so that you wonder to see some heads wear a whole hat, yet fear not that the race will fail or waver in them ; like the crabs which grow in hedges, they furnish the stocks of sweet and thrifty fruits still. thus is nature recruited from age to age, whde the fair and palatable varieties die out and have their period. this is that mankind. how cheap must be the material of which so many are made. the wind blew steadily down the stream, so that we kept our sails set, and lost not a moment of the forenoon by delays, but from early morning until noon, were continually dropping downward. with our hands on the steering paddle, which was thrust deep into the river, or bending to the oar, which indeed we rarely relinquished, we felt each palpitation in the veins of our steed, and each impulse of the wings which drew us above. the current of our thoughts made as sudden bends as the river, which was continually opening new prospects to the east or south, but we are aware that rivers flow most rapidly and shallowest at these points. the stead fast shores never once turned aside for us, but still trended as they were made ; why then should we always turn aside for them ? a man cannot wheedle nor overawe his genius. it 344 ^ week on the concord river. requires to be conciliated by nobler conduct than the world demands or can appreciate. these winged thoughts are like birds, and will not be handled; even hens will not let you touch them like quad rupeds. nothing was ever so unfamiliar and star tling to a man as his own thoughts. to the rarest genius it is the most expensive to succumb and conform to the ways of the world. genius is the worst of lumber, if the poet would float upon the breeze of popularity. the bird of paradise is obliged constantly to fly against the wind, lest its gay trappings, pressing close to its body, may impede its free movements. he is the best sailor who can steer within the fewest points of the wind, and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles. most begin to veer and tack as soon as the wind changes from aft, and as within the tropics it does not blow from all points of the compass, there are some harbors which they can never reach. the poet is no tender slip of fairy stock, who re quires peculiar institutions and edicts for his defence, but the toughest son of earth and of heaven, and by his greater strength and endurance his fainting com panions will recognize the god in him. it is the worshippers of beauty, after all, who have done the real pioneer work of the world. the poet will prevail to be popular in spite of his faults, and in spite of his beauties too. he will hit the nail on the head, and we shall not know the shape of his hammer. he makes us free of his hearth and heart, which is greater than to offer one the freedom of a city. great men, unknown to their generation, have their fame among the great who have preceded them, and i frida y. 345 all true worldly fame subsides from their high esti mate beyond the stars. orpheus does not hear the strains which issue from his lyre, but only those which are breathed into it ; for the original strain precedes the sound, by as much as the echo follows after ; the rest is the perquisite of the rocks and trees and beasts. when i stand in a library where is all the recorded wit of the world, but none of the recording, a mere accumulated, and not truly cumulative treasure, where immortal works stand side by side with antholo gies which did not survive their moth, and cobweb and mildew have already spread from these to the binding of those ; and happily i am reminded of what poetry is, i perceive that shakspeare and milton did not foresee into what company they were to fall. alas ! that so soon the work of a true poet should be swept into such a dust-hole ! the poet will write for his peers alone. he will remember only that he saw truth and beauty from his position, and expect the time when a vision as broad shall overlook the same field as freely. we are often prompted to speak our thoughts to our neighbors, or the single travellers whom we meet on the road, but poetry is a communication from our home and solitude addressed to all intelligence. it never whispers in a private ear. knowing this, we may understand those sonnets said to be addressed to particular persons, or "to a mistress' eyebrow." let none feel flattered by them. for poetry write love, and it will be equally true. no doubt it is an important difference between men of genius or poets, and men not of genius, that the latter are unable to grasp and confront the thought 346 a week on the concord river. which visits them. but it is because it is too faint for expression, or even conscious impression. what merely quickens or retards the blood in their veins and fills their afternoons with pleasure they know not whence, conveys a distinct assurance to the finer organization of the poet. we talk of genius as if it were a mere knack, and the poet could only express what other men con ceived. but in comparison with his task the poet is the least talented of any; the writer of prose has more skill. see what talent the smith has. his ma terial is pliant in his hands. when the poet is most inspired, is stimulated by an aura which never even colors the afternoons of common men, then his talent is all gone, and he is no longer a poet. the gods do not grant him any skill more than another. they never put their gifts into his hands, but they encom pass and sustain him with their breath. to say that god has given a man many and great talents, frequently means, that he has brought his heavens down within reach of his hands. when the poetic frenzy seizes us, we run and scratch with our pen, intent only on worms, calling our mates around us, like the cock, and delighting in the dust we make, but do not detect where the jewel lies, which, perhaps, we have in the meantime cast to a distance, or quite covered up again. the poet's body even is not fed simply like other men's, but he sometimes tastes the genuine nectar and ambrosia of the gods, and lives a divine life. by the healthful and invigorating thrills of inspiration his life is preserved to a serene old age. some poems are for holidays only. they are pol ished and sweet, but it is the sweetness of sugar, and frida y. 347 not such as toil gives to sour bread. the breath with which the poet utters his verse must be that by which he lives. great prose, of equal elevation, commands our respect more than great verse, since it implies a more permanent and level height, a life more pervaded with the grandeur of the thought. the poet often only makes an irruption, like a parthian, and is off again, shooting while he retreats ; but the prose writer has conquered like a roman, and settled col onies. the true poem is not that which the public read. there is always a poem not printed on paper, coinci dent with the production of this, stereotyped in the poet's life. it is what he has become through his work. not how is the idea expressed in stone, or on canvas or paper, is the question, but how far it has obtained form and expression in the life of the artist. his true work will not stand in any prince's gallery. my life has been the poem i would have writ, but i could not both live and utter it. the poet's delay. in vain i see the morning rise, in vain observe the western blaze, who idly look to other skies, expecting life by other ways. amidst such boundless wealth without, i only still am poor within, the birds have sung their summer out. but still my spring does not begin. shall i then wait the autumn wind, compelled to seek a milder day, 348 a week on the concord river. and leave no curious nest behind, no woods still echoing to my lay? this raw and gusty day, and the creaking of the oaks and pines on shore, reminded us of more north ern dimes than greece, and more wintry seas than the ^gean. the genuine remains of ossian, or those ancient poems which bear his name, though of less fame and extent, are, in many respects, of the same stamp with the ihad itself. he asserts the dignity of the bard no less than homer, and in his era we hear of no other priest than he. it will not avail to call him a heathen, because he personifies the sun and addresses it ; and what if his heroes did " worship the ghosts of their fathers," their thin, airy, and unsubstantial forms? we but worship the ghosts of our fathers in more sub stantial forms. we cannot but respect the vigorous faith of those heathen, who sternly believed some what, and we are inchned to say to the critics, who are offended by their superstitious rites, — don't in terrupt these men's prayers. as if we knew more about human life and a god, than the heathen and ancients. does english theology contain the recent discoveries? ossian reminds us of the most refined and rudest eras, of homer, pindar, isaiah, and the american indian. in his poetry, as in homer's, only the sim plest and most enduring features of humanity are seen, such essential parts of a man as stonehenge ex hibits of a temple ; we see the circles of stone, and the upright shaft alone. the phenomena of life ac quire almost an unreal and gigantic size seen through his mists. like all older and grander poetry, it is frida v. 349 distinguished by the few elements in the lives of its heroes. they stand on the heath, between the stars and the earth, shrunk to the bones and sinews. the earth is a boundless plain for their deeds. they lead such a simple, dry, and everlasting life, as hardly needs depart with the flesh, but is transmitted en tire from age to age. there are but few objects to distract their sight, and their life is as unincumbered as the course of the stars they gaze at. — " the wrathful kings, on cairns apart, look forward from behind their shields, and mark the wandering stars, that brilliant westward move." it does not cost much for these heroes to live ; they do not want much furniture. they are such forms of men only as can be seen afar through the mist, and have no costume nor dialect, but for language there is the tongue itself, and for costume there are always the skins of beasts and the bark of trees to be had. they live out their years by the vigor of their constitutions. they survive storms and the spears of their foes, and perform a few heroic deeds, and then, " mounds will answer questions of them, for many future years." blind and infirm, they spend the remnant of their days listening to the lays of the bards, and feeling the weapons which laid their enemies low, and when at length they die, by a convulsion of nature, the bard allows us a short and misty glance into futurity, yet as clear, perchance, as their lives had been. when mac-roine was slain, 350 a week on the concord river. " his soul departed to his warlike sires, to follow misty forms of boars, in tempestuous islands bleak." the hero's cairn is erected, and the bard sings a brief significant strain, which will suffice for epitaph and biography. " the weak will find his bow in the dwelling, the feeble will attempt to bend it." compared with this simple, fibrous life, our civil ized history appears the chronicle of debility, of fash ion, and the arts of luxury. but the civilized man misses no real refinement in the poetry of the rudest era. it reminds him that civilization does but dress men. it makes shoes, but it does not toughen the soles of the feet. it makes cloth of finer texture, but it does not touch the skin. inside the civilized man stands the savage still in the place of honor. we are those blue-eyed, yellow-haired saxons, those slen der, dark-haired normans. the profession of the bard attracted more respect in those days from the importance attached to fame. it was his province to record the deeds of heroes. when ossian hears the traditions of inferior bards, he exclaims, — " i straightway seize the unfutile tales, and send them down in faithful verse." his philosophy of life is expressed in the opening of the third duan of ca-lodin. " whence have sprung the things that are ? and whither roll the passing years ? where does time conceal its two heads. friday, 351 in dense impenetrable gloom, its surface marked with heroes' deeds alone ? i view the generations gone ; the past appears but dim ; as objects by the moon's faint beams, reflected from a distant lake. i see, indeed, the thunderbolts of war, but there the unmighty joyless dwell, all those who send not down their deeds to far, succeeding times." the ignoble warriors die and are forgotten ; " strangers come to build a tower. and throw their ashes overhand ; some rusted swords appear in dust ; one, bending forward, says, ' the arms belonged to heroes gone ; we never heard their praise in song.' " the grandeur of the similes is another feature which characterizes great poetry. ossian seems to speak a gigantic and universal, language. the images and pictures occupy even much space in the landscape, as if they could be seen only from the sides of moun tains, and plains with a wide horizon, or across arms of the sea. the machinery is so massive that it can not be less than natural. oivana says to the spirit of her father, " grey-haired torkil of torne," seen in the skies, " thou glidest away like receding ships." so when the hosts of fingal and starne approach to battle, "with murmurs loud, like rivers far. the race of torne hither moved." 352 a week on the concord river. and when compelled to retire, " dragging his spear behind, cudulin sank in the distant wood, like a fire upblazing ere it dies." nor did fingal want a proper audience when he spoke ; " a thousand orators incuned to hear the lay of fingal." the threats too would have deterred a man. ven geance and terror were real. trenmore threatens the young warrior whom he meets on a foreign strand, "thy mother shall find thee pale on the shore, while lessening on the waves she spies the sails of him who slew her son." if ossian^s heroes weep, it is from excess of strength, and not from weakness, a sacrifice or libation of fer tile natures, like the perspiration of stone in summer's heat. we hardly know that tears have been shed, and it seems as if weeping were proper only for babes and heroes. their joy and their sorrow are made of one stuff, like rain and snow, the rainbow and the mist. when fillan was worsted in fight, and ashamed in the presence of fingal, " he strode away forthwith, and bent in grief above a stream, his cheeks bedewed with tears. from time to time the thistles gray he lopped with his inverted lance." crodar, blind and old, receives ossian, son of fingal, who comes to aid him in war ; — friday. 353 " ' my eyes have failed,' says he, ' crodar is blind, is thy strength like that of thy fathers ? stretch, ossian, thine arm to the hoary-haired.' i gave my arm to the king. the aged hero seized my hand; he heaved a heavy sigh ; tears flowed incessant down his cheek. ' strong art thou, son of the mighty. though not so dreadful as morven's prince. * * * let my feast be spread in the hall. let every sweet-voiced minstrel sing ; great is he who is within my wall, sons of wave-echoing croma.' " even ossian himself, the hero-bard, pays tribute to the superior strength of his father fingal. " how beauteous, mighty man, was thy mind. why succeeded ossian without its strength ? " while we sailed fleetly before the wind, with the river gurgling under our stern, the thoughts of au tumn coursed as steadily through our minds, and we observed less what was passing on the shore, than the dateless associations and impressions which the season awakened, anticipating in some measure the progress of the year. — i hearing get, who had but ears. and sight, who had but eyes before, i moments live, who lived but years. and truth discern, who knew but learning's lore. sitting with our faces now up stream, we studied the landscape by degrees, as one unrolls a map, — rock, tree, house, hill, and meadow, assuming new and varying positions as wind and water shifted the scene, and there was variety enough for our entertainment 354 ^ week on the concord river. in the metamorphoses of the simplest objects. viewed from this side the scenery appeared new to us. the most familiar sheet of water viewed from a new hill-top, yields a novel and unexpected pleasure. when we have travelled a few miles, we do not recog nize the profiles even of the hills which overlook our native village, and perhaps no man is quite familiar with the horizon as seen from the hill nearest to his house, and can recall its outline distinctly when in the valley. we do not commonly know, beyond a short distance, which way the hills range which take in our houses and farms in their sweep. as if our birth had at first sundered things, and we had been thrust up through into nature like a wedge, and not till the wound heals and the scar disappears, do we begin to discover where we are, and that nature is one and continuous everywhere. it is an important epoch when a man who has always lived on the east side of a mountain and seen it in the west, travels round and sees it in the east. yet the universe is a sphere whose center is wherever there is intelligence. the sun is not so central as a man. upon an isolated hill-top, in an open country, we seem to ourselves to be stand ing on the boss of an immense shield, the immediate landscape being apparently depressed below the more remote, and rising gradually to the horizon, which is the rim of the shield, villas, steeples, forests, moun tains, one above another, till they are swallowed up in the heavens. the most distant mountains appear to rise directly from the shore of that lake in the woods by which we chance to be standing, while from the mountain top, not only this, but a thousand nearer and larger lakes, are equally unobserved. seen through this clear atmosphere, the works of friday. 355 the farmer, his plowing and reaping, had a beauty to our eyes which he never saw. how fortunate were we who did not own an acre of these shores, who had not renounced our title to the whole. one who knew how to appropriate the true value of this world would be the poorest man in it. the poor rich man! all he has is what he has bought. what i see is mine. i am a large owner in the merrimack intervals. — men dig and dive but cannot my wealth spend, who yet no partial store appropriate, who no armed ship into the indies send, to rob me of my orient estate. he is the rich man, and enjoys the fruits of riches, who summer and winter forever can find delight in his own thoughts. buy a farm! what have i to pay for a farm which a farmer will take ? when i visit again some haunt of my youth, i am glad to find that nature wears so well. the land scape is indeed something real, and solid, and sincere, and i have not put my foot through it yet. there is a pleasant tract on the bank of the concord, called conantum, which i have in my mind ; — the old de serted farm-house, the desolate pasture with its bleak cliff, the open wood, the river-reach, the green meadow in the midst, and the moss-grown wild-apple orchard, — places where one may have many thoughts and not decide anything. it is a scene which i can not only remember, as i might a vision, but when i will can bodily revisit, and find it even so, un accountable, yet unpretending in its pleasant dreari ness. when my thoughts are sensible of change, i love to see and sit on rocks which i have known, and pry into their moss, and see unchangeableness so 356 a week on the concord river. established. i not yet gray on rocks forever gray, i no longer green under the evergreens. there is something even in the lapse of time by which time recovers itself. as we have said, it proved a cool as well as breezy day, and by the time we reached penichook brook, we were obliged to sit muffled in our cloaks, while the wind and current carried us along. we bounded swiftly over the rippling surface, far by many culti vated lands and the ends of fences which divided innumerable farms, with hardly a thought for the various lives which they separated ; now by long rows of alders or groves of pines or oaks, and now by some homestead where the women and children stood out side to gaze at us, till we had swept out of their sight, and beyond the limit of their longest saturday ram ble. we glided past the mouth of the nashua, and not long after, of salmon brook, without more pause than the wind. — salmon brook, penichook, ye sweet waters of my brain, when shall i look, or cast the hook, in your waves again ? silver eels, wooden creels. these the baits that still allure, and dragon-fly that floated by, — may they still endure ? the shadows chased one another swiftly over wood and meadow, and their alternation harmonized with our mood. we could distinguish the clouds w^hich friday. 357 cast each one, though never so high in the heavens. when a shadow flits across the landscape of the soul, where is the substance? probably, if we were wise enough, we should see to what virtue we are indebted for any happier moment we enjoy. no doubt we have earned it at some time ; for the gifts of heaven are never quite gratuitous. the constant abrasion and decay of our lives makes the soil of our future growth. the wood which we now mature, when it becomes virgin mould, determines the character of our second growth, whether that be oaks or pines. every man casts a shadow ; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit; this is his grief; let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun ; short at noon, long at eve. did you never see it? — but, referred to the sun, it is widest at its base, which is no greater than his own opacity. the divine light is diffused almost entirely around us, and by means of the reflection of light, or else by a certain self-luminousness, or, as some will have it, transparency, if we preserve ourselves untarnished, we are able to enlighten our shaded side. at any rate, our darkest grief has that bronze color of the moon eclipsed. there is no ill which may not be dissipated, like the dark, if you let in a stronger light upon it. shadows, referred to the source of light, are pyramids whose bases are never greater than those of the substances which cast them, but light is a spheri cal congeries of pyramids, whose very apexes are the sun itself, and hence the system shines with uninter rupted light. but if the light we use is but a paltry and narrow taper, most objects will cast a shadow wider than themselves. the places where we had stopped or spent the 358 a week on the concord river. night in our way up the river, had already acquired a slight historical interest for us ; for many upward days' voyaging were unravelled in this rapid down ward passage. when one landed to stretch his limbs by walking, he soon found himself falling behind his companion, and was obliged to take advantage of the curves, and ford the brooks and ravines in haste, to recover his ground. already the banks and the distant meadows wore a sober and deepened tinge, for the september air had shorn them of their sum mer's pride. — " and what 's a life? the flourishing array of the proud summer meadow, which to-day wears her green plush, and is to-morrow hay." the air was really the " fine element " which the poets describe. it had a finer and sharper grain, seen against the russet pastures and meadows, than before, as if cleansed of the summer's impurities. having passed the new hampshire line and reached the horseshoe interval in tyngsboro', where there is a high and regular second bank, we climbed up this in haste to get a nearer sight of the autumnal flowers, asters, golden-rod, and yarrow, and the tri chostema dichotoma^ humble road-side blossoms, and, lingering still, the harebell and the 7-hexia virgiiiica. the last, growing in patches of lively pink flowers on the edge of the meadows, had almost too gay an appearance for the rest of the landscape, like a joink ribbon on the bonnet of a puritan woman. asters and golden-rods were the livery which nature wore at present. the latter alone expressed all the ripeness of the season, and shed their mellow lustre over the fields, as if the now declining summer's sun had be friday. 359 queathed its hues to them. it is the floral solstice a little after mid-summer, when the particles of golden light, the sun-dust, have, as it were, fallen like seeds on the earth, and produced these blossoms. on every hill-side, and in every valley, stood countless asters, coreopses, tansies, golden-rods, and the whole race of yellow flowers, like brahminical devotees, turning steadily with their luminary from morning till night. " i see the golden-rod shine bright, as sun-showers at the birth of day, a golden plume of yellow light. that robs the day-god's splendid ray. " the aster's violet rays divide the bank with many stars for me, and yarrow in blanch tints is dyed. as moonlight floats across the sea. " i see the emerald woods prepare to shed their vestiture once more, and distant elm-trees spot the air with yellow pictures softly o'er. * * " no more the water-lily's pride in milk-white circles swims content, no more the blue-weed's clusters ride and mock the heaven's element. * * " autumn, thy wreath and mine are blent with the same colors, for to me a richer sky than all is lent, while fades my dream-like company. " our skies glow purple, but the wind sobs chill through green trees and bright grass, to-day shines fair, and lurk behind the times that into winter pass. 36o a week on the concord river. " so fair we seem, so cold we are, so fast we hasten to decay, yet through our night glows many a star. that still shall claim its sunny day." so sang a concord poet once. there is a peculiar interest belonging to the still later flowers, which abide with us the approach of winter. there is something witch-like in the appear ance of the witch-hazel, which blossoms late in octo ber and in november, with its irregular and angular spray and petals like furies' hair, or small ribbon streamers. its blossoming, too, at this irregular period, when other shrubs have lost their leaves, as well as blossoms, looks like witches' craft. certainly it blooms in no garden of man's. there is a whole fairy-land on the hill-side where it grows. some have thought that the gales do not at present waft to the voyager the natural and original fra grance of the land, such as the early navigators described, and that the loss of many odoriferous native plants, sweet-scented grasses and medicinal herbs, which formerly sweetened the atmosphere, and rendered it salubrious, by the grazing of cattle and the rooting of swine, is the source of many diseases which now prevail ; the earth, say they, having been long subjected to extremely artificial and luxurious modes of cultivation, to gratify the appetite, con verted into a stye and hot-bed, where men for profit increase the ordinary decay of nature. according to the record of an old inhabitant of tyngsboro', now dead, whose farm we were now glid ing past, one of the greatest freshets on this river friday. 361 took place in october, 1785, and its height was marked by a nail driven into an apple tree behind his house. one of his descendants has shown this to me, and i judged it to be at least seventeen or eighteen feet above the level of the river at the time. before the lowell and nashua railroad was built, the engineer made inquiries of the inhabitants along the banks as to how high they had known the river to rise. when he came to this house he was conducted to the apple tree, and as the nail was not then visible, the lady of the house placed her hand on the trunk where she said that she remembered the nail to have been from her childhood. in the meanwhile the old man put his arm inside the tree, which was hollow, and felt the point of the nail sticking through, and it was exactly opposite to her hand. the spot is now plainly marked by a notch in the bark. but as no one else remembered the river to have risen so high as this, the engineer disre garded this statement, and i learn that there has since been a freshet which rose within nine inches of the rails at biscuit brook, and such a freshet as that of 1785 would have covered the railroad two feet deep. the revolutions of nature tell as fine tales, and make as interesting revelations, on this river's banks, as on the euphrates or the nile. this apple tree, which stands within a few rods of the river, is called " elisha's apple tree," from a friendly indian, who was anciently in the service of jonathan tyng, and, with one other man, was killed here by his own race in one of the indian wars, — the particulars of which affair were told us on the spot. he was buried close by, no one knew exactly where, but 362 a week on the concord river. in the flood of 1785, so great a weight of water standing over the grave, caused the earth to settle where it had once been disturbed, and when the flood went down, a sunken spot, exactly of the form and size of the grave, revealed its locality, but this was now lost again, and no future flood can detect it; yet, no doubt, nature will know how to point it out in due time, if it be necessary, by methods yet more searching and unexpected. thus there is not only the crisis when the spirit ceases to inspire and expand the body, marked by a fresh mound in the church-yard, but there is also a crisis when the body ceases to take up room as such in nature, marked by a fainter depression in the earth. we sat awhile to rest us here upon the brink of the western bank, surrounded by the glossy leaves of the red variety of the mountain laurel, just above the head of wicasuck island, where we could observe some scows which were loading with clay from the opposite shore, and also overlook the grounds of the farmer, of whom i have spoken, who once hos pitably entertained us for a night. he had on his pleasant farm, besides an abundance of the beach plum, or pi-iiniis litto?'alis, w^hich grew wild, the canada plum under cultivation, fine porter apples, some peaches, and large patches of musk and water melons, which he cultivated for the lowell market. elisha's apple tree, too, bore a native fruit, which was prized by the family. he raised the blood peach, which, as he showed us with satisfaction, was more like the oak in the color of its bark and in the setting of its branches, and was less liable to break down under the weight of the fmit, or the snow, than other varieties. it was of slower growth, and its frida v. 363 branches strong and tough. there, also, was his nursery of native apple trees, thickly set upon the bank, which cost but little care, and which he sold to the neighboring farmers when they were five or six years old. to see a single peach upon its stem makes an impression of paradisaical fertility and luxury. this reminded us even of an old roman farm, as described by varro : " cssar vopiscus yedilicius, when he pleaded before the censors, said that the grounds of rosea were the garden {siuneii the tid-bit) of italy, in which a pole being left would not be visible the day after, on account of the growth of the herbage." this soil may not have been remarkably fertile, yet at this distance we thought that this anecdote might be told of the tyngsboro' farm. when we passed wicasuck island, there was a pleasure boat containing a youth and a maiden on the island brook, which we were pleased to see, since it proved that there were some hereabouts to whom our excursions would not be wholly strange. before this, a canal-boatman, of whom we made some inquiries respecting wicasuck island, and who told us that it was disputed property, supposed that we had a claim upon it, and though we assured him that all this was news to us, and explained, as well as we could, why we had come to see it, he believed not a word of it, and seriously offered us one hundred dollars for our title. the only other small boats which we met with were used to pick up drift wood. some of the poorer class along the stream collect, in this way, all the fuel which they require. while one of us landed not far from this island to forage for provisions among the farm-houses whose 364 a week on the concord river. roofs we saw, for our supply was now exhausted, the other, sitting in the boat, which was moored to the shore, was left alone to his reflections. if there is nothing new on the earth, still the trav eller always has a resource in the skies. they are constantly turning a new page to view. the wind sets the types on this blue ground, and the in quiring may always read a new truth there. there are things there written with such fine and subtil tinctures, paler than the juice of limes, that to the diurnal eye they leave no trace, and only the chem istry of night reveals them. every man's daylight firmament answers in his mind to the brightness of the vision in his starriest hour. these continents and hemispheres are soon run over, but an always unexplored and infinite region makes off on every side from the mind, further than to sunset, and we can make no highway or beaten track into it, but the grass immediately springs up in the path, for we travel there chiefly with our wings. sometimes we see objects as through a thin haze, in their eternal relations, and they stand like palen que and the pyramids, and we wonder who set them up, and for what purpose. if we see the reality in things, of what moment is the superficial and ap parent longer? what are the earth and all its in terests beside the deep surmise which pierces and scatters them? while i sit here listening to the waves which ripple and break on this shore, i am absolved from all obligation to the past, and the council of nations may reconsider its votes. the grating of a pebble annuls them. still occasionally in my dreams i remember that rippling water. — frida y. 365 oft, as i turn me on my pillow o'er, i hear the lapse of waves upon the shore, distinct as if it were at broad noon-day, and i were drifting down from nashua. with a bending sail we glided rapidly by tyngs boro' and chelmsford, each holding in one hand half of a tart country apple-pie which we had pur chased to celebrate our return, and in the other a fragment of the newspaper in which it was wrapped, devouring these with divided relish, and learning the news which had transpired since we sailed. the river here opened into a broad and straight reach of great length, which we bounded merrily over before a smacking breeze, with a devil-may-care look in our faces, and our boat a white bone in its mouth, and a speed which greatly astonished some scow boatmen whom we met. the wind in the horizon rolled like a flood over valley and plain, and every tree bent to the blast, and the mountains like school-boys turned their cheeks to it. they were great and cur rent motions, the flowing sail, the running stream, the waving tree, the roving wind. the north wind stepped readily into the harness which we had pro vided, and pulled us along with good will. some times we sailed as gently and steadily as the clouds overhead, watching the receding shores and the motions of our sail ; the play of its pulse so like our own lives, so thin and yet so full of life, so noiseless when it labored hardest, so noisy and impatient when least effective ; now bending to some generous impulse of the breeze, and then fluttering and flapping with a kind of human suspense. it was the scale on which the varying temperature of distant atmos pheres w^as graduated, and it was some attraction 366 ^ week on the concord river. for us that the breeze, it played with had been out of doors so long. thus we sailed, not being able to fly, but as next best, making a long furrow in the fields of the merrimack toward our home, with our wings spread, but never lifting our heel from the watery trench ; gracefully plowing homeward with our brisk and willing team, wind and stream, pulling together, the former yet a wild steer, yoked to his more sedate fellow. it was very near flying, as when the duck rushes through the water with an impulse of her wings, throwing the spray about her, before she can rise. how we had stuck fast if drawn up but a few feet on the shore! when we reached the great bend just above mid dlesex, where the river runs east thirty-five miles to the sea, we at length lost the aid of this propitious wind, though we contrived to make one long and judicious tack carry us nearly to the locks of the canal. we were here locked through at noon by our old friend, the lover of the higher mathematics, who seemed glad to see us safe back again through so many locks ; but we did not stop to consider any of his problems, though we could cheerfully have spent a whole autumn in this way another time, and never have asked what his religion was. it is so rare to meet with a man out-doors who cherishes a worthy thought in his mind, which is independent of the labor of his hands. behind every man's busy-ness there should be a level of undisturbed serenity and industry, as witliin the reef encircling a coral isle there is always an expanse of still water, where the depositions are going on which will finally raise it above the surface. friday. 367 the eye which can appreciate the naked and abso lute beauty of a scientific truth is far more rare than that which is attracted by a moral one. few detect the morality in the former, or the science in the latter. aristotle defined art to be aoyos tov epyov ai/ev va>/s the principle of the zuork without the wood; but most men prefer to have some of the wood along with the principle ; they demand that the truth be clothed in flesh and blood and the warm colors of life. they prefer the partial statement because it fits and meas ures them and their commodities best. but science still exists everywhere as the sealer of weights and measures at least. we have heard much about the poetry of mathe matics, but very little of it has yet been sung. the ancients had a juster notion of their poetic value than we. tlie most distinct and beautiful statement of any truth must take at last the mathematical form. we might so simplify the rules of moral philosophy, as well as of arithmetic, that one formula would ex press them both. all the moral laws are readily translated into natural philosophy, for often we have only to restore the primitive meaning of the words by which they are expressed, or to attend to their literal instead of their metaphorical sense. they are already siiper7iatiiral philosophy. the whole body of what is now called moral or ethical truth existed in the golden age as abstract science. or, if we prefer, we may say that the laws of nature are the purest moral ity. the tree of knowledge is a tree of knowledge of good and evil. he is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn something by behavior as well as by application. it is childish to rest in the discovery 368 a week on the concord river. of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws. the study of geometry is a petty and idle exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger sys tem than the starry one. mathematics should be mixed not only with physics but with ethics, that is mixed m^ih^rmxics. the fact which interests us most is the life of the naturalist. the purest science is still biographical. nothing will dignify and elevate science while it is sundered so wholly from the moral life of its devotee, and he professes another religion than it teaches, and worships at a foreign shrine. anciently the faith of a philosopher was identical with his system, or, in other words, his view of the universe. my friends mistake when they communicate facts to me with so much pains. their presence, even their exaggerations and loose statements, are equally good facts for me. i have no respect for facts even except when i would use them, and for the most part i am independent of those which i hear, and can afford to be inaccurate, or, in other words, to sub stitute more present and pressing facts in their place. the poet uses the results of science and philosoph)', and generalizes their widest deductions. the process of discovery is very simple. an un wearied and systematic application of known laws to nature, causes the unknown to reveal themselves. almost any mode of observation will be successful at last, for what is most wanted is method. only let something be determined and fixed around which ob servation may rally. how many new relations a foot rule alone will reveal, and to how many things still this has not been applied ! what wonderful discover frida y. 369 ies have been, and may still be, made, with a plumb line, a level, a surveyor's compass, a thermometer, or a barometer! where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once. i should say that the most prominent scientific men of our country, and perhaps of this age, are either serving the arts, and not pure science, or are performing faithful but quite subordinate labors in particular departments. they make no steady and systematic approaches to the central fact. a dis covery is made, and at once the attention of all ob servers is distracted to that, and it draws many analo gous discoveries in its train ; as if their work \vere not already laid out for them, but they had been lying on their oars. there is wanting constant and accurate observation with enough of theory to direct and disci pline it. but above all, there is wanting genius. our books of science, as they improve in accuracy, are in danger of losing the freshness and vigor and readiness to appreciate the real laws of nature, which is a marked merit in the oft-times false theories of the ancients. i am attracted by the slight pride and satisfaction, the emphatic and even exaggerated style in which some of the older naturalists speak of the opera tions of nature, though they are better qualified to appreciate than to discriminate the facts. their assertions are not without value when disproved. if they are not facts, they are suggestions for nature herself to act upon. " the greeks," says gesner, " had a common proverb (aayos kob^v^ov) a sleeping hare, for a dissembler or counterfeit ; because the hare sees when she sleeps ; for this is an admirable and rare work of nature, that all the residue of her 370 ^ week on the concord river. bodily parts take their rest, but the eye standeth continually sentinel." observation is so wide awake, and facts are being so rapidly added to the sum of human experience, that it appears as if the theorizer would always be in arrears, and were doomed forever to arrive at im perfect conclusions ; but the power to perceive a law is equally rare in all ages of the world, and depends but little on the number of facts observed. the senses of the savage will furnish him with facts enough to set him up as a philosoplier. the an cients can still speak to us with authority even on the themes of geology and chemistry, though these studies are thought to have had their birth in modern times. much is said about the progress of science in these centuries. i should say that the useful results of science had accumulated, but that there had been no accumulation of knowledge, strictly speaking, for posterity ; for knowledge is to be acquired only by a corresponding experience. how can we kjiow what we are told merely ? each man can interpret another's experience only by his own. we read that newton discovered the law of gravitation, but how many who have heard of his famous discovery have recognized the same truth that he did ? it may be not one. the revelation which was then made to him has not been superseded by the revelation made to any suc cessor. — we see \\\e planet fall, and that is all. in a review of sir james clark ross' antarctic voy age of discovery, there is a passage which shows how far a body of men are commonly impressed by an i frida y. 371 object of sublimity, and which is also a good instance of the step from the sublime to the ridiculous. after describing the discovery of the antarctic continent, at first seen a hundred miles distant over fields of ice, — stupendous ranges of mountains from seven and eight to twelve and fourteen thousand feet high, covered with eternal snow and ice, in solitary and inaccessible grandeur, at one time the weather being beautifully clear, and the sun shining on the icy land scape ; a continent whose islands only are accessible, and these exhibited " not the smallest trace of vegeta tion," only in a few places the rocks protruding through their icy covering, to convince the beholder that land formed the nucleus, and that it was not an iceberg ; — the practical british reviewer proceeds thus, sticking to his last, " on the 22d of january, afternoon, the expedition made the latitude of 74° 20', and by f" p.m., having ground to believe that they were then in a higher southern latitude than had been attained by that enterprising seaman, the late captain james weddel, and therefore higher than all their predeces sors, an extra allowance of grog was issued to the crews as a reward for their perseverance." let not us sailors of late centuries take upon our selves any airs on account of our newtons and our cuviers. we deserve an extra allowance of grog only. we endeavored in vain to persuade the wind to blow through the long corridor of the canal, which is here cut straight through the woods, and were obliged to resort to our old expedient of drawing by a cord. when we reached the concord, we were forced to row once more in good earnest, with neither 372 ^ week on the concord river. wind nor current in our favor, but by this time the rawness of the day had disappeared, and we expe rienced the warmth of a summer afternoon. this change in the weather was favorable to our con templative mood, and disposed us to dream yet deeper at our oars, while we floated in imagination further down the stream of time, as we had floated down the stream of the merrimack, to poets of a milder period than had engaged us in the morning. chelmsford and billerica appeared like old english towns, compared with merrimack and nashua, and many generations of civil poets might have lived and sung here. what a contrast between the stern and desolate poetry of ossian, and that of chaucer, and even of shakspeare and milton, much more of dryden, and pope, and gray. our summer of english poetry, like the greek and latin before it, seems well advanced toward its fall, and laden with the fruit and foliage of the season, with bright autumnal tints, but soon the winter will scatter its myriad clustering and shad ing leaves, and leave only a few desolate and fibrous boughs to sustain the snow and rime, and creak in the blasts of ages. we cannot escape the impres sion that the muse has stooped a little in her flight, when we come to the literature of civilized eras. now first we hear of various ages and styles of poetry ; it is pastoral, and lyric, and narrative, and didactic ; but the poetry of runic monuments is of one style, and for every age. the bard has in a great measure lost the dignity and sacredness of his office. formerly he was called a seer, but now it is thought that one man sees as much as another. he has no longer the friday, 373 bardic rage, and only conceives the deed, which he formerly stood ready to perform. hosts of warriors earnest for battle could not mistake nor dispense with the ancient bard. his lays were heard in the pauses of the fight. there was no danger of his being over looked by his contemporaries. but now the hero and the bard are of different professions. when we come to the pleasant english verse, the storms have all cleared away, and it will never thunder and lighten more. the poet has come within doors, and ex changed the forest and crag for the fireside, the hut of the gael, and stonehenge with its circles of stones, for the house of the englishman. no hero stands at the door prepared to break forth into song or heroic action, but a homely englishman, who culti vates the art of poetry. we see the comfortable fire side, and hear the crackling fagots in all the verse. notwithstanding the broad humanity of chaucer, and the many social and domestic comforts which we meet with in his verse, we have to narrow our vision somewhat to consider him, as if he occupied less space in the landscape, and did not stretch over hill and valley as ossian does. yet, seen from the side of posterity, as the father of english poetry, preceded by a long silence or confusion in history, unenlivened by any strain of pure melody, we easily come to rever ence him. passing over the earlier continental poets, since we are bound to the pleasant archipelago of english poetry, chaucer's is the first name after that misty weather in which ossian lived, which can detain us long. indeed, though he represents so different a culture and society, he may be regarded as in many respects the homer of the english poets. perhaps he is the youthfuuest of them all. we return to him 374 ^ ^^ek on the concord river. as to the purest well, the fountain furthest removed from the highway of desultory life. he is so natural and cheerful, compared with later jdoets, that we might almost regard him as a personification of spring. to the faithful reader his muse has even given an aspect to his times, and when he is fresh from perusing him, they seem related to the golden age. it is still the poetry of youth and life, rather than of thought ; and though the moral vein is obvious and constant, it has not yet banished the sun and daylight from his verse. the loftiest strains of the muse are, for the most part, sublimely plaintive, and not a carol as free as nature's. the content which the sun shines to celebrate from morning to evening, is unsung. the muse solaces herself, and is not ravished but consoled. there is a catastrophe implied, and a tragic element in all our verse, and less of the lark and morning devv's, than of the nightingale and evening shades. but in homer and chaucer there is more of the innocence and seren ity of youth, than in the more modern and moral poets. the iliad is not sabbath but morning reading, and men cling to this old song, because they still have moments of unbaptized and uncommitted life, which give them an appetite for more. to the innocent there are neither cherubim nor angels. at rare in tervals we rise above the necessity of virtue into an unchangeable morning light, in which we have only to live right on and breathe the ambrosial air. the iliad represents no creed nor opinion, and we read it with a rare sense of freedom and irresponsibility, as if we trod on native ground, and were autochthones of the soil. chaucer had eminently the habits of a literary man and a scholar. there were never any times so stirring friday, 375 that there were not to be found some sedentary still. he was surrounded by the din of arms. the battles of halidon hill and neville's cross, and the still more memorable battles of cressy and poictiers, were fought in his youth ; but these did not concern our poet much, wickliffe and his reform much more. he regarded himself always as one privileged to sit and converse with books. he helped to establish the literary class. his character as one of the fathers of the english language, would alone make his works important, even those which have little poetical merit. he was as simple as wordsworth in preferring his homely but vigorous saxon tongue, when it was neglected by the court, and had not yet attained to the dignity of a literature, and rendered a similar ser vice to his country to that which dante rendered to italy. if greek sufificeth for greek, and arabic for arabian, and hebrew for jew, and latin for latin, then english shall suffice for him, for any of these will serve to teach truth " right as divers pathes leaden divers folke the right waye to rome." in the testa ment of love he writes, " let then clerkes enditen in latin, for they have the propertie of science, and the knowinge in that facultie, and lette frenchmen in their frenche also enditen their queinte termes, for it is kyndely to their mouthes, and let us shewe our fantasies in soche wordes as we lerneden of our dames tonge." he will know how to appreciate chaucer best, who has come down to him the natural way, through the meagre pastures of saxon and ante-chaucerian poe try ; and yet, so human and wise he appears after such diet, that we are liable to misjudge him still. in the saxon poetry extant, in the earliest english, and 376 ^ week on the concord river. the contemporary scottish poetry, there is less to remind the reader of the rudeness and vigor of youth, than of the feebleness of a declining age. it is for the most part translation or imitation merely, with only an occasional and slight tinge of poetry, often times the falsehood and exaggeration of fable, without its imagination to redeem it, and we look in vain to find antiquity restored, humanized, and made blithe again by some natural sympathy between it and the present. but chaucer is fresh and modern still, and no dust settles on his true passages. it lightens along the line, and we are reminded that flowers have bloomed, and birds sung, and hearts beaten, in england. before the earnest gaze of the reader, the rust and moss of time gradually drop off, and the orig inal green life is revealed. he was a homely and do mestic man, and did breathe quite as modern men do. there is no wisdom that can take place of human ity, and we find that in chaucer. we can expand at last in his breath, and we think that we could have been that man's acquaintance. he was worthy to be a citizen of england, while petrarch and boccaccio lived in italy, and tell and tamerlane in switzer land and in asia, and bruce in scotland, and wick liffe, and gower, and edward the tliird, and john of gaunt, and the black prince, were his own country men as well as contemporaries ; all stout and stirring names. the fame of roger bacon came down from the preceding century, and the name of dante still possessed the influence of a living presence. on the whole, chaucer impresses us as greater than his repu tation, and not a little like homer and shakspeare, for he would have held up his head in their company. among early english poets he is the landlord and frida y. 377 host, and has the authority of such. the affectionate mention which succeeding early poets make of him, coupling him with homer and virgil, is to be taken into the account in estimating his character and influ ence. king james and dunbar of scotland speak of him with more love and reverence than any modern author of his predecessors of the last century. the same childlike relation is without a parallel now. for the most part we read him without criticism, for he does not plead his own cause, but speaks for his readers, and has that greatness of trust and reliance which compels popularity. he confides in the reader, and speaks privily with him, keeping nothing back. and in return the reader has great confidence in him, that he tells no lies, and reads his story with indul gence, as if it were the circumlocution of a child, but often discovers afterwards that he has spoken with more directness and economy of words than a sage. he is never heartless, " for first the thing is thought within the hart, er any word out from the mouth astart." and so new was all his theme in those days, that he did not have to invent, but only to tell. we admire chaucer for his sturdy english wit. the easy height he speaks from in his prologue to the canterbury tales, as if he were equal to any of the company there assembled, is as good as any par ticular excellence in it. but though it is full of good sense and humanity, it is not transcendent poetry. for picturesque descriptions of persons it is, perhaps, without a parallel in english poetry ; yet it is essen tially humorous, as the loftiest genius never is. hu mor, however broad and genial, takes a narrower view 3/8 ^ week on the concord river. than enthusiasm. to his own finer vein he added all the common wit and wisdom of his time, and every where in his works his remarkable knowledge of the world and nice perception of character, his rare com mon sense and proverbial wisdom, are apparent. his genius does not soar like milton's, but is genial and familiar. it shows great tenderness and delicacy, but not the heroic sentiment. it is only a greater portion of humanity with all its weakness. he is not heroic, as raleigh, nor pious, as herbert, nor philosophical, as shakspeare, but he is the child of the english muse, that child which is the father of the man. the charm of his poetry consists often only in an exceed ing naturalness, perfect sincerity, with the behavior of a child rather than of a man. gentleness and delicacy of character are every where apparent in his verse. the simplest and humblest words come readily to his lips. no one can read the prioress' tale, understanding the spirit in which it was written, and in which the child sings o alma j-edouptoris jnater, or the account of the de parture of constance with her child upon the sea, in the man of lawe's tale, without feeling the native innocence and refinement of the author. nor can we be mistaken respecting the essential purity of his character, disregarding the apology of the manners of the age. a simple pathos and feminine gentleness, which wordsworth only occasionally approaches, but does not equal, are peculiar to him. we are tempted to say that his genius was feminine, not masculine. it was such a feminineness, however, as is rarest to find in woman, though not the appreciation of it ; perhaps it is not to be found at all in woman, but is only the feminine in man. friday. 379 such pure, and genuine, and childlike love of na ture is hardly to be found in any poet. chaucer's remarkably trustful and affectionate char acter appears in his familiar, yet innocent and rever ent, manner of speaking of his god. he comes into his thought v^ithout any false reverence, and with no more parade than the zephyr to his ear. if nature is our mother, then god is our father. there is less love and simple practical trust in shakspeare and milton. how rarely in our english tongue do we find expressed any affection for god. certainly, there is no sentiment so rare as the love of god. herbert almost alone expresses it, " ah, my dear god ! " our poet uses similar words with propriety, and whenever he sees a beautiful person, or other object, prides himself on the " maistry " of his god. he even rec ommends dido to be his bride, — " if that god that heaven and yearth made, would have a love for beauty and goodnesse, and womanhede, trouth, and semeliness." but in justification of our praise, we must refer to his works themselves ; to the prologue to the canter bury tales, the account of gentilesse, the flower and the leaf, the stories of griselda, virginia, ariadne, and blanche the dutchesse, and much more of less dis tinguished merit. there are many poets of more taste and better manners, who knew how to leave out their dulness, but such negative genius cannot detain us long ; we shall return to chaucer still with love. some natures which are really rude and ill developed, have yet a higher standard of perfection than others which are refined and well balanced. even the clown has taste, whose dictates, though he disregards them, 380 ^ week on the concord river. are higher and purer than those which the artist obeys. if we have to wander through many dull and prosaic passages in chaucer, we have at least the satis faction of knowing that it is not an artificial dulness, but too easily matched by many passages in life. we confess that we feel a disposition commonly to concen trate sweets, and accumulate pleasures, but the poet may be presumed always to speak as a traveller, who leads us through a varied scenery, from one eminence to another, and it is, perhaps, more pleasing, after all, to meet with a fine thought in its natural setting. surely fate has enshrined it in these circumstances for some end. nature strews her nuts and flowers broad cast, and never collects them into heaps. this was the soil it grew in, and this the hour it bloomed in ; if sun, wind, and rain came here to cherish and expand the flower, shall not we come here to pluck it? a true poem is distinguished not so much by a felicitous expression, or any thought it suggests, as by the atmosphere which surrounds it. most have beauty of outline merely, and are striking as the form and bearing of a stranger, but true verses come toward us indistinctly, as the very breath of all friendliness, and envelop us in their spirit and fragrance. much of our poetry has the very best manners, but no char acter. it is only an unusual precision and elasticity of speech, as if its author had taken, not an intoxicat ing draught, but an electuary. it has the distinct outhne of sculpture, and chronicles an early hour. under the influence of passion all men speak thus distinctly, but wrath is not always divine. there are two classes of men called poets. the one cultivates life, the other art, — one seeks food for nu friday. 381 triment, the other for flavor ; one satisfies hunger, the other gratifies the palate. there are two kinds of writing, both great and rare ; one that of genius, or the inspired, the other of intellect and taste, in the intervals of inspiration. the former is above criti cism, always correct, giving the law to criticism. it vibrates and pulsates with life forever. it is sacred, and to be read with reverence, as the works of nature are studied. there are few instances of a sustained style of this kind ; perhaps every man has spoken words, but the speaker is then careless of the record. such a style removes us out of personal relations with its author, we do not take his words on our lips, but his sense into our hearts. it is the stream of inspira tion, which bubbles out, now here, now there, now in this man, now in that. it matters not through what ice-crystals it is seen, now a fountain, now the ocean stream nmning under ground. it is in shakspeare, alpheus, in burns, arethuse ; but ever the same. — the other is self-possessed and wise. it is reverent of genius, and greedy of inspiration. it is conscious in the highest and the least degree. it consists with the most perfect command of the faculties. it dwells in a repose as of the desert, and objects are as distinct in it as oases or palms in the horizon of sand. the train of thought moves with subdued and measured step, like a caravan. but the pen is only an instru ment in its hand, and not instinct with life, like a longer arm. it leaves a thin varnish or glaze over all its work. the works of goethe furnish remarkable instances of the latter. there is no just and serene criticism as yet. noth ing is considered simply as it lies in the lap of eternal beauty, but our thoughts, as well as our bodies, must 382 a week on the concord river. be dressed after the latest fashions. our taste is too delicate and particular. it says nay to the poet's work, but never yea to his hope. it invites him to adorn his deformities, and not to cast them off by ex pansion, as the tree its bark. we are a people who live in a bright light, in houses of pearl and porcelain, and drink only light wines, whose teeth are easily set on edge by the least natural sour. if we had been consulted, the backbone of the earth would have been made, not of granite, but of bristol spar. a modern author would have died in infancy in a ruder age. but the poet is something more than a scald, " a smoother and polisher of language ; " he is a cincin natus in literature, and occupies no west end of the world. like the sun, he will indifferently select his rhymes, and with a liberal taste weave into his verse the planet and the stubble. in these old books the stucco has long since crum bled away, and we read what was sculptured in the granite. they are rude and massive in their propor tions, rather than smooth and delicate in their finish. the workers in stone polish only their chimney orna ments, but their pyramids are roughly done. there is a soberness in a rough aspect, as of unhewn gran ite, which addresses a depth in us, but a polished sur face hits only the ball of the eye. the true finish is the work of time and the use to which a thing is put. the elements are still polishing the pyramids. art may varnish and gild, but it can do no more. a work of genius is rough-hewn from the first, because it anti cipates the lapse of time, and has an ingrained polish, which still appears when fragments are broken off, an essential quality of its substance. its beauty is at the same time its strength, and it breaks with a lustre. friday. 383 the great poem must have the stamp of greatness as well as its essence. the reader easily goes within the shallowest contemporary poetry, and informs it with all the life and promise of the day, as the pilgrim goes within the temple, and hears the faintest strains of the worshippers ; but it will have to speak to posterity, traversing these deserts, through the ruins of its outmost walls, by the grandeur and beauty of its proportions. but here on the stream of the concord, where we have all the while been bodily, nature, who is superior to all styles and ages, is now, with pensive face, com posing her poem autumn, with which no work of man will bear to be compared. in summer we live out of doors, and have only im pulses and feelings, which are all for action, and must wait commonly for the stillness and longer nights of autumn and wholly new life, which no man has lived ; that even this earth was made for more mysterious and nobler inhabitants than men and women. in the hues of october sunsets, we see the portals to other mansions than those which we occupy, not far off geographically. — " there is a place beyond that flaming hill, from whence the stars their thin appearance shed, a place beyond all place, where never ill. nor impure thought was ever harbored." sometimes a mortal feels in himself nature, not his father but his mother stirs within him, and he be comes immortal with her immortality. from time to time she claims kindredship with us, and some globule from her veins steals up into our own. 384 ^ week on the concord river. i am the autumnal sun, with autumn gales my race is run ; when will the hazel put forth its flowers, or the grape ripen under my bowers ? when will the harvest or the hunter's moon, turn my midnight into mid-noon ? i am all sere and yellow, and to my core mellow. the mast is dropping within my woods. the winter is lurking within my moods, and the rustling of the withered leaf is the constant music of my grief. to an unskilful rhymer the muse thus spoke in prose : — the moon no longer reflects the day, but rises to her absolute rule, and the husbandman and hunter ac knowledge her for their mistress. asters and golden rods reign along the way, and the life-ever-lasting withers not. the fields are reaped and shorn of their pride, but an inward verdure still crowns them. the thistle scatters its down on the pool, and yellow leaves clothe the vine, and naught disturbs the serious life of men. but behind the sheaves, and under the sod, there lurks a ripe fruit, which the reapers have not gathered, the true harvest of the year, which it bears for ever, annually watering and maturing it, and man never severs the stalk which bears this palatable fruit. men nowhere, east or west, live yet a natural life, round which the vine clings, and which the elm will ingly shadows. man would desecrate it by his touch, and so the beauty of the world remains veiled to him. he needs not only to be spiritualized, but naturalised, on the soil of earth. who shall conceive what kind friday. 385 of roof the heavens might extend over him, what sea sons minister to him, and what employment dignify his life! only the convalescent raise the veil of nature. an immortality in his life would confer immortality on his abode. the winds should be his breath, the seasons his moods, and he should impart of his serenity to nature herself. but such as we know him he is ephemeral like the scenery that sur rounds him, and does not aspire to an enduring exist ence. when we come down into the distant village, visible from the mountain top, the nobler inhabitants with whom we peopled it have departed, and left only vermin in its desolate streets. it is the imagination of poets which puts those brave speeches into the mouths of their heroes. they may feign that cato's last words were "the earth, the air, and seas i know, and all the joys and horrors of their peace and wars ; and now will view the gods' state and the stars," but such are not the thoughts nor the destiny of common men. what is this heaven which they ex pect, if it is no better than they expect? are they prepared for a better than they can now imagine? here or nowhere is our heaven. — " although we see celestial bodies move above the earth, the earth we till and love." we can conceive of nothing more fair than something which we have experienced. " the remembrance of youth is a sigh." we linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they are half forgotten ere we have learned the language. we have need to be earth-born as well as heaven-born, yr^yej/ets, as was 386 ^ week on the concord river. said of the titans of old, or in a better sense than they. there have been heroes for whom this world seemed expressly prepared, as if creation had at last succeeded; whose daily life was the stuff of which our dreams are made, and whose presence enhanced the beauty and ampleness of nature herself. where they walked, " largior hie campos aether at lumine vestit purpureo : solemque suum, sua sidera norunt." "here a more copious air invests the fields, and clothes with purple light ; and they know their own sun and their own stars." we love to hear some men speak, though we hear not what they say ; the very air they breathe is rich and perfumed, and the sound of their voices falls on the ear like the rustling of leaves or the crackling of the fire. they stand many deep. they have the heavens for their abettors, as those who have never stood from under them, and they look at the stars with an answering ray. their eyes are like glow-worms, and their motions graceful and flowing, as if a place were already found for them, like rivers flowing through valleys. the distinctions of morality, of right and wrong, sense and nonsense, are petty, and have lost their significance, beside these pure primeval natures. when i consider the clouds stretched in stupendous masses across the sky, frowning with darkness, or glowing with downy light, or gilded with the rays of the setting sun, like the battlements of a city in the heavens, their grandeur appears thrown away on the meanness of my employ ment ; the drapery is altogether too rich for such poor acting. i am hardly worthy to be a suburban dweller outside those walls. friday. 387 "unless above himself he can erect himself, how poor a thing is man ! " with our music we would fain challenge transiently another and finer sort of intercourse than our daily toil permits. the strains come back to us amended in the echo, as when a friend reads our verse. why have they so painted the fruits, and freighted them with such fragrance as to satisfy a more than animal appetite? " i asked the schoolman, his advice was firee, but scored me out too intricate a way." these things imply, perchance, that we live on the verge of another and purer realm, from which these odors and sounds are wafted over to us. the borders of our plot are set with flowers, whose seeds were blown from more elysian fields adjacent. they are the pot-herbs of the gods. some fairer fruits and sweeter fragrances wafted over to us, betray another realm's vicinity. there, too, does echo dwell, and there is the abutment of the rainbow's arch. a finer race and finer fed feast and revel o'er our head, and we titmen are only able to catch the fragments from their table. theirs is the fragrance of the fruits. while we consume the pulp and roots. what are the moments that we stand astonished on the olympian land ! we need pray for no higher heaven than the pure senses can furnish, a purely sensuous life. our pres ent senses are but the rudiments of what they are destined to become. we are comparatively deaf and dumb and blind, and without smell or taste or feeling. every generation makes the discovery, that its divine 388 a week on the concord river. vigor has been dissipated, and each sense and faculty misapplied and debauched. the ears were made, not for such trivial uses as men are wont to suppose, but to hear celestial sounds. the eyes were not made for such grovelling uses as they are now put to and worn out by, but to behold beauty now invisible. may we not see god? are we to be put off and amused in this life, as it were with a mere allegory? is not nature, rightly read, that of which she is com monly taken to be the symbol merely? when the common man looks into the sky, which he has not so much profaned, he thinks it less gross than the earth, and with reverence speaks of " the heavens," but the seer will in the same sense speak of "the earths," and his father who is in them. " did not he that made that which is within., make that which is ivithoid also ? " what is it, then, to educate but to develop these divine germs called the senses? for individuals and states to deal magnanimously with the rising generation, leading it not into temptation, — not teach the eye to squint, nor attune the ear to profanity? but where is the instructed teacher? where are the 7iormal schools? a hindoo sage said, " as a dancer having exhibited herself to the spectator, desists from the dance, so does nature desist, having manifested herself to soul. — nothing, in my opinion, is more gentle than nature ; once aware of having been seen, she does not again expose herself to the gaze of soul." it is easier to discover another such a new world as columbus did, than to go within one fold of this which we appear to know so well ; the land is lost sight of, the compass varies, and mankind mutiny; and still friday. 389 history accumulates like rubbish before the portals of nature. but there is only necessary a moment's sanity and sound senses, to teach us that there is a nature behind the ordinary, in which we have only some vague preemption right and western reserve as yet. we live on the outskirts of that region. carved wood, and floating boughs, and sunset skies, are all that we know of it. we are not to be imposed on by the longest spell of weather. let us not, my friends, be wheedled and cheated into good behavior to earn the salt of our eternal porridge, whoever they are that attempt it. let us wait a little, and not purchase any clearing here, trusting that richer bottoms will soon be put up. it is but thin soil where we stand ; i have felt my roots in a richer ere this. i have seen a bunch of violets in a glass vase, tied loosely with a straw, which reminded me of myself. — i am a parcel of vain strivings tied by a chance bond together, dangling this way and that, their links were made so loose and wide, methinks, for milder weather. a bunch of violets without their roots, and sorrel intermixed. encircled by a wisp of straw once coiled about their shoots, the law by which i'm fixed. a nosegay which time clutched from out those fair elysian fields. with weeds and broken stems, in haste, doth make the rabble rout that waste the day he yields. 390 a week on the concord river, and here i bloom for a short hour unseen, drinking my juices up, with no root in the land to keep my branches green, but stand in a bare cup. some tender buds were left upon my stem in mimicry of life, but ah ! the children will not know. till time has withered them, the wo with which they 're rife. but now i see i was not plucked for naught, and after in' life's vase of glass set while i might survive, but by a kind hand brought alive to a strange place. that stock thus thinned will soon redeem its hours, and by another year, such as god knows, with freer air, more fruits and fairer flowers will bear. while i droop here. this world has many rings^ like saturn, and we live now on the outmost of them all. none can say deliberately that he inhabits the same sphere, or is contemporary with, the flower which his hands have plucked, and though his feet may seem to crush it, inconceivable spaces and ages separate them, and perchance there is no danger that he will hurt it. what after all do the botanists know? our lives should go between the lichen and the bark. the eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind. we are 1 friday. 391 still being born, and have as yet but a dim vision of sea and land, sun, moon and stars, and shall not see clearly till after nine days at least. that is a pathetic inquiry among travellers and geographers after the site of ancient troy. it is not near where they think it is. when a thing is decayed and gone, how indis tinct must be the place it occupied ! the anecdotes of modern astronomy affect me in the same way as do those faint revelations of the real which are vouchsafed to men from time to time, or rather from eternity to eternity. when i remember the history of that faint light in our firmament, which we call venus, which ancient men regarded, and which most modern men still regard, as a bright spark at tached to a hollow sphere revolving about our earth, but which we have discovered to be ajwther world in itself, — how copernicus, reasoning long and patiently about the matter, predicted confidently concerning it, before yet the telescope had been invented, that if ever men came to see it more clearly than they did then, they would discover that it had phases hke our moon, and that within a century after his death the telescope was invented, and that prediction verified, by galileo, — i am not without hope that we may, even here and now, obtain some accurate information concerning that other world which the instinct of mankind has so long predicted. indeed, all that we call science, as well as all that we call poetry, is a par ticle of such information, accurate as far as it goes, though it be but to the confines of the truth. if we can reason so accurately, and with such wonderful confirmation of our reasoning, respecting so-called material objects and events infinitely removed beyond the range of our natural vision, so that the mind hesi 392 a week on the concord river. tates to trust its calculations even when they are con firmed by observation, why may not our speculations penetrate as far into the immaterial starry system, of which the former is but the outward and visible type? surely, we are provided with senses as well fitted to penetrate the spaces of the real, the substantial, the eternal, as these outward are to penetrate the material universe. veias, menu, zoroaster, socrates, christ, shakspeare, swedenborg, — these are some of our as tronomers. there are perturbations in our orbits produced by the influence of outlying spheres, and no astronomer has ever yet calculated the elements of that undis covered world which produces them. i perceive in the common train of my thoughts a natural and un interrupted sequence, each implying the next, or, if interruption occurs it is occasioned by a new object being presented to my senses. but a steep, and sud den, and by these means unaccountable transition, is that from a comparatively narrow and partial, what is called common sense view of things, to an infinitely expanded and liberating one, from seeing things as men describe them, to seeing them as men cannot describe them. this implies a sense which is not common, but rare in the wisest man's experience ; which is sensible or sentient of more than common. in what inclosures does the astronomer loiter! his skies are shoal ; and imagination, like a thirsty trav eller, pants to be through their desert. the roving mind impatiently bursts the fetters of astronomical orbits, like cobwebs in a corner of its universe, and launches itself to where distance fails to follow, and law, such as science has discovered, grows weak and weary. the mind knows a distance and a space frida v. 393 of which all those sums combined do not make a unit of measure, — the interval between that which appeaj's and that which is. i know that there are many stars, i know that they are far enough off, bright enough, steady enough in their orbits, — but what are they all worth? they are more waste land in the west, — star territory, — to be made slave states, perchance, if we colonize them. i have interest but for six feet of star, and that interest is transient. then farewell to all ye bodies, such as i have known ye. every man, if he is wise, will stand on such bottom as will sustain him, and if one gravitates downward more strongly than another, he will not venture on those meads where the latter walks securely, but rather leave the cranberries which grow there unraked by himself. perchance, some spring a higher freshet will float them within his reach, though they may be watery and frost-bitten by that time. such shrivelled berries i have seen in many a poor man's garret, aye, in many a church bin and state coffer, and with a little water and heat they swell again to their original size and fairness, and added sugar enough, stead man kind for sauce to this world's dish. what is called common sense is excellent in its department, and as invaluable as the virtue of con formity in the army and navy, — for there must be subordination, — but uncommon sense, that sense which is common only to the wisest, is as much more excellent as it is more rare. some aspire to excellence in the subordinate department, and may god speed them. what fuller says of masters of colleges is universally applicable, that " a little alloy of dulness in a master of a college makes him fitter to manage secular affairs." 394 ^ week on the concord river. " he that wants faith, and apprehends a grief because he wants it, hath a true behef ; and he that grieves because his grief's so small, has a true grief, and the best faith of all." or be encouraged by this other poet's strain. " by them went fido marshal of the field : weak was his mother when she gave him day ; and he at first a sick and weakly child, as e'er with tears welcomed the sunny ray ; yet when more years afford more growth and might, a champion stout he was, and puissant knight, as ever came in field, or shone in armor bright. " mountains he flings in seas with mighty hand ; stops and turns back the sun's impetuous course ; nature breaks nature's laws at his command ; no force of hell or heaven withstands his force ; events to come yet many ages hence, he present makes, by wondrous prescience ; proving the senses blind by being blind to sense." " yesterday, at dawn," says hafiz, " god delivered me from all worldly affliction ; and amidst the gloom of night presented me with the water of immortality." in the life of sadi by dowlat shah, occurs this sen tence. " the eagle of the immaterial soul of shaikh sadi shook from his plumage the dust of his body." thus thoughtfully we were rowing homeward to find some autumnal work to do, and help on the revolution of the seasons. perhaps nature would condescend to make use of us even without our knowledge, as when we help to scatter her seeds in our walks, and carry burrs and cockles on our clothes from field to field. i frida y. 395 all things are current found on earthly ground, spirits and elements have their descents. night and day, year on year, high and low, far and near, these are our wn aspects, these are our own regrets. ye gods of the shore. who abide evermore, i see your far headland. stretching on either hand ; i hear the sweet evening sounds from your undecaying grounds ; cheat me no more with time. take me to your clime. as it grew later in the afternoon, and we rowed leisurely up the gentle stream, shut in between fra grant and blooming banks, where we had first pitched our tent, and drew nearer to the fields where our lives had passed, we seemed to detect the hues of our native sky in the south-west horizon. the sun was just setting behind the edge of a wooded hill, so rich a sunset as would never have ended but for some reason unknown to men, and to be marked with brighter colors than ordinary in the scroll of time. though the shadows of the hills were beginning to steal over the stream, the whole river valley undulated with mild light, purer and more memorable than the noon. for so day bids farewell even to solitary vales uninhabited by man. two blue-herons, ardea he rodias, with their long and slender limbs relieved 396 a week on the concord river. against the sky, were seen travelling high over our heads, — their lofty and silent flight, as they were wending their way at evening, surely not to alight in any marsh on the earth's surface, but, perchance, on the other side of our atmosphere, a symbol for the ages to study, whether impressed upon the sky, or sculptured amid the hie roglyjd hies of egypt. bound to some northern meadow, they held on their stately, stationary flight, like the storks in the picture, and disappeared at length behind the clouds. dense flocks of blackbirds were winging their way along the river's course, as if on a short evening pilgrimage to some shrine of theirs, or to celebrate so fair a sunset. " therefore, as doth the pilgrim, whom the night hastes darkly to imprison on his way, think on thy home, my soul, and think aright of what 's yet left thee of life's wasting day : thy sun posts westward, passed is thy morn, and twice it is not given thee to be born." the sun-setting presumed all men at leisure and in a contemplative mood ; but the farmer's boy only whistled the more thoughtfully as he drove his cows home from pasture, and the teamster refrained from cracking his whip, and guided his teain with a subdued voice. the last vestiges of daylight at length disappeared, and as we rowed silently along with our backs toward home through the darkness, only a few stars being visible, we had little to say, but sat absorbed in thought, or in silence listened to the monotonous sound of our oars, a sort of rudimental music, suitable for the ear of night and the acoustics of her dimly lighted halls ; frida v. 397 " pulsse referunt ad sidera valles," and the valleys echoed the sound to the stars. as we looked up in silence to those distant lights, we were reminded that it was a rare imagination which first taught that the stars are worlds, and had conferred a great benefit on mankind. it is recorded in the chronicle of bernaldez, that in co lumbus^s first voyage the natives "pointed towards the heavens, making signs that they believed that there was all power and holiness." we have reason to be grateful for celestial phenomena, for they chiefly answer to the ideal in man. the stars are distant and unobtrusive, but bright and enduring as our fairest and most memorable experiences^ •■' let the immortal depth of your soul lead you, but earnestly extend your eyes upwards." as the truest society approaches always nearer to solitude, so the most excellent speech finally falls into silence. silence is audible to all men, at all times, and in all places. she is when we hear inwardly, sound when we hear outwardly. creation has not displaced her, but is her visible framework and foil. all sounds are her servants and purveyors, proclaiming not only that their mistress is, but is a rare mistress, and earnestly to be sought after. they are so far akin to silence, that they are but bubbles on her surface, which straightway burst, an evidence of the strength and prolificness of the under-current ; a faint utterance of silence, and then only agreeable to our auditory nerves when they contrast themselves with and relieve the former. in proportion as they do this, and are heighteners and intensifiers of the silence, they are harmony and purest melody. 398 a week on the concord river. silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappoint ment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, how ever awkward a figure we may have made in the fore ground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality disturb us. the orator puts off his individuality, and is then most eloquent when most silent. he listens while he speaks, and is a hearer along with his audience. who has not hearkened to her infinite din ? she is truth's speaking trumpet, the sole oracle, the true delphi and dodona, w^hich kings and courtiers would do well to consult, nor will they be balked by an ambiguous answer. for through her all reve lations have been made, and just in proportion as men have consulted her oracle within, they have obtained a clear insight, and their age has been marked as an enlightened one. but as often as they have gone gadding abroad to a strange delphi and her mad priestess, their age has been dark and leaden. such were garrulous and noisy eras, which no longer yield any sound, but the grecian or silent and melo dious era is ever sounding and resounding in the ears of men. a good book is the plectrum with which our else silent lyres are struck. we not unfrequently refer the interest which belongs to our own unwritten sequel, to the written and comparatively lifeless body of the work. of all books this sequel is the most indispensable part. it should be the author's aim to say once and emphatically, "he said," " c<^>7/' £• this is the most the book maker can attain to. if he frida v. 399 make his volume a mole whereon the waves of silence may break, it is well. it were vain for me to endeavor to interpret the silence. she cannot be done into english. for six thousand years men have translated her with what fidelity belonged to each, and still she is little better than a sealed book. a man may run on con fidently for a time, thinking he has her under his thumb, and shall one day exhaust her, but he too must at last be silent, and men remark only how brave a beginning he made; for when he at length dives into her, so vast is the disproportion of the told to the untold, that the former will seem but the bubble on the surface where he disappeared. never theless, we will go on, like those chinese cliff swal lows, feathering our nests with the froth which may one day be bread of life to such as dwell by the seashore. we had made about fifty miles this day with sail and oar, and now, far in the evening, our boat was grating against the bulrushes of its native port, and its keel recognized the concord mud, where some semblance of its outline was still preserved in the flattened flags which had scarce yet erected them selves since our departure; and we leaped gladly on shore, drawing it up, and fastening it to the wild apple tree, whose stem still bore the mark which its chain had worn in the chafing of the spring freshets. electrotyped by j. s. gushing & co., norwood, mass. jul 28 1900 the writings of henry david thoreau in ten volumes volume ix ^v o&amp;gt; w excursions by hknry david thoreau m noston and new york houghton, miffi.in and company bc flrtjcrfibr prrtf, m dccc xciv lj^jlbbja*? copyright, 1863 and 18cg, by ticknor and fields. copyrigl^ 1893, br houghton, mifflin a co. all rights reserved. the rirtrtidf prett, cambridge, mat*., u.s.a. ktoctrotyped *ud frinud by h. o. hougbton & con, f ny. contents face introductory note . i a yankee in canada . i. concord to montreal ii. quebec and montmorenci 49 iii. st. anne iv. the walla of quebec ,v of quebec; and the river st. 105 1 &quot;~ natural himtoky of mjumachotbmf a walk to wachusett thk landlord . a winter walk . o*)&amp;gt;* the succfjmion or forkmt tree*. .walking 305 .autumnal tints . stirt wild applks nloht and moonuoht . mav day. 41 dayh am&amp;gt; niohtb in comx&amp;gt;rd introductory note the title given to this volume is the same as that used in 1803 when, shortly after tho reau s death, his sister collected for messrs. ticknor & fields a number of his fugitive pieces and prefaced the volume with a biograph ical sketch by ralph waldo emerson. the contents of the two volumes are with a few exceptions the same, the chief differences being that mr. emerson s sketch precedes the final volume of the series, and a yankee in can ada, formerly published in a volume with anti slavery and fteform papers, is made here the first in the series of excursions. thoreau made this excursion with his friend ellery channing, and sent his narrative to mr. greeley, who wrote him regarding it, march 18, 1852, &quot;i shall get you some money for the articles you sent me, though not immediately. as to your long account of a canadian tour, 1 don t know. it looks unmanageable. can t you cut it into three or four, and omit all that relates to time? the cities are cltwrilwd to death, but 1 know you are at home with nature, vin introductory note and that die rarely and slowly changes. break this up, if you can, and i \vill try to have it swallowed and digested.&quot; thoreau appears to have taken greeley s advice, and the narrative was divided into chapters. but after it had been begun in putnam s in january, 1853, where it was entitled excursion to canada , the author and the editor, who appears from the following letter to have been mr. g. w. cur tis, disagreed regarding the expediency of in cluding certain passages, and thoreau withdrew all after the third chapter. the letter is as follows: new york, january 2, 1853. friend thoreau. ... i am sorry you and c. cannot agree so as to have your whole j/&amp;gt;s . printed. it will be worth nothing elsewhere after having partly appeared in putnam s. i think it is a mistake to conceal the authorship of the several articles, making them all (so to speak) editorial ; but (/that is done, don t you see that the elimination of very flagrant heresies (like your defiant pantheism) becomes a neces sity ? if you had withdrawn your ms. on ac count of the abominable misprints in the first number, your ground would have been far more tenable. however, do what you will. yours, horace greeley. intnoductory note ix natural history of massachusetts was con tributed to the dial, july, 1842, nominally as a review of a recent state report. a walk to wachusett was printed in the boston mis cdlany, 1843. mr. sanborn, in his volume on thoreau, prints a very interesting letter written by margaret fuller in 1841, in criticism of tf* verses which stand near the beginning of the paper offered at that time for publication in the dial. the landlord was printed in the democratic review for october, 1843. a win ter walk appeared in the dial in the same month and year. emerson in a letter to tho reau, september 8, 1843, says : &quot;i mean to send the winter s walk to the pri nter to-morrow for the dial. i had some hesitation about it, not withstanding its faithful observation and its fine sketches of the pickerel-fisher and of the woodehopper, on account of mannerism, an old charge of mine, as if, by attention, one could get the trick of the rhetoric; for example, to call a cold place sultry, a solitude public, a wil derness domestic (a favorite word), and in the woods to insult over cities, armies, etc. by pretty free omissions, however, i have removed my principal objections/ 1 the address, the succession of forest trees, was printed first in the new york weekly tribune, october 6, x introductory note 1860, and was perhaps the latest of his writings which thoreau saw in print. after his death the interest which had already been growing was quickened by the successive publication in the atlantic monthly in 18g2 of autumnal tints (october), wild apples (november), and night and moonlight (novem ber, 18g3). the last named appeared just be fore the publication of the volume excursions which collected the several pai&amp;gt;ers, but, as chan ning remarks, though the contents of the volume had all been printed before, and some had been used also as lectures, they &quot;are really descrip tions drawn from his journals.&quot; j\iay days has appeared before only in the atlantic for may, 1878. days and nights in concord was published in scribner s monthly , september, 1878. the time of the year covered by these last named extracts is that of august and september, and falls for the most part be tween the two volumes summer and autumn. other extracts from the journal occur in a somewhat mosaic form in thoreau^ the poet naturalist, by w. ellery dimming. a yankee in canada 44 new england to by some affirmed to be an inland, bounded on the north with the hirer canada (o called from mon&ieur cane).&quot; un* and rtlll older, in thomas morton s &quot; new english canaan,&quot; published in 1(3-2, it is aaid, on page 97, &quot; from this lake [erocoiae] northward* is derived the faroou* river of canada, o named, of monaier de cane, a french lord, who first planted a colony of french in america.&quot; a yankee in canada chaptkr i concord to montreal i fear that i have not got much to say about canada, not having seen much ; what i got by going to canada was a cold. i left concord, massachusetts, wednesday morning, september 25th, 1850, for quebec. fare, seven dollars there and back ; distance from boston, five hun dred and ten miles; being obliged to leave mon treal on the return as soon as friday, octol&amp;gt;er 4th, or within ten days. i will not stop to tell the reader the names of my fellow-travelers; there were said to be fifteen hundred of them. i wished only to be set down in canada, and take one honest walk there as i might in con cord woods of an afternoon. the country was new to me beyond fitehburg. in ashburnham and afterward, as we were whirled rapidly along, i noticed the woodbine (arnpelojmih (jhinqitcfolia), its leaves now changed, for the most part on dead trees, drap ing them like a red scarf. it wan a little excit a yankee in canada ing, suggesting bloodshed, or at least a military life, like an epaulet or sash, as if it were dyed with the blood of the trees whose wounds it was inadequate to staneh. for now the bloody au tumn was come, and an indian warfare was waged through the forest. these military trees appeared very numerous, for our rapid progress connected those that were even some miles apart. does the woodbine prefer the elm? the first view of monadnock was obtained five or six miles this side of fitzwilliam, but nearest and best at troy and beyond. then there were the troy cuts and embankments. keene street strikes the traveler favorably, it is so wide, level, straight, and long. i have heard one of my relatives, who was born and bred there, say that you could see a chicken run across it a mile off. i have also been told that when this town was settled they laid out a street four rods wide, but at a subsequent meeting of the proprietors one rose and remarked, &quot;we have plenty of land, why not make the street eight rods wide? and so they voted that it should be eight rods wide, and the town is known far and near for its handsome street. it was a cheap way of se curing comfort, as well as fame, and i wish that all new towns would take pattern from this. it is best to lay our plans widely in youth, for then land is cheap, and it is but too easy to contract concord to montreal 5 our views afterward. youths so laid out, with broad avenues and parks, that they may make handsome and liwral old men! show me a youth whose mind is like some washington city of magnificent distances, prepared for the most remotely successful and glorious life after all, when those spaces shall be built over and the idea of the founder be realized. i trust that every new england boy will begin by laying out a keene street through his head, eight rods wide. i know one such washington city of a man, whose lots as yet are only surveyed and staked out, and, except a cluster of shanties here and there, only the capitol stands there for all structures, and any day you may see from afar his princely idea borne coachwise along the spacious but yet empty avenues. keene is built on a remarkably large and level interval, like the bed of a lake, and the surrounding hills, which are remote from its street, must afford some good walks. the scenery of mountain towns is commonly too much crowded. a town which is built on a plain of some extent, with an opt-ii linii/.on, and surrounded by hills at a distance, att i.nlthe. best walks and views. as we travel northwest up the country, sugar inaples, beeehos, birches, hemlocks, spruce, but ternuts, and ash trees prevail more and more. to the rapid traveler the number of elms in a 6 a yankee in canada town is the measure of its civility. one man in the cars has a bottle full of some liquor. the whole company smile whenever it is exhib ited. i find no difficulty in containing myself. the westmoreland country looked attractive. i heard a passenger giving the very obvious de rivation of this name, west-more-land, as if it were purely american, and he had made a dis covery; but i thought of &quot;my cousin westmore land &quot; in england. every one will remember the approach to bellows falls, under a high cliff which rises from the connecticut. i was disap pointed in the size of the river here; it appeared shrunk to a mere mountain stream. the water was evidently very low. the rivers which we had crossed this forenoon possessed more of the character of mountain streams than those in the vicinity of concord, and i was surprised to see everywhere traces of recent freshets, which had carried away bridges and injured the railroad, though i had heard nothing of it. in ludlow, mount holly, and beyond, there is interesting mountain scenery, not rugged and stupendous, but such as you could easily ramble over, long, narrow, mountain vales through which to see the horizon. you are in the midst of the green mountains. a few more elevated blue peaks are seen from the neighborhood of mount holly, perhaps killington peak is one. some concord to montreal 1 times, as on the western railroad, you arc whirled over mountainous embankments, from which the seared horses in the valleys appear diminished to hounds. all the hills blush; i think that autumn must be the l&amp;gt;est season to journey over even the green mountains. you frequently exclaim to yourself, what red maples! the sugar-maple is not so red. you see some of the latter with rosy spots or cheeks only, blushing on one side like fruit, while all the rest of the tree is green, proving either some partial ity in the light or frosts, or some prematurity in particular branches. tall and slender ash trees, whose foliage is turned to a dark mulberry color, are frequent. the butternut, which is a remarkably spreading tree, is turned completely yellow, thus proving its relation to the hicko ries. i was also struck by the bright yellow tints of the yellow birch. the sugar-maple is remarkable for its clean ankle. the groves of these trees looked like vast forest sheds, their branches stopping short at a uniform height, four or five feet from the ground, like eaves, as if they had lieen trimmed by art, so that you could look under and through the whole grove with its leafy canopy, as under a tent whose cur tain is raised. as you approach lake champlain you begin to see the new york mountains. the first view a yankee in canada of the lake at vergennes is impressive, but rather from association than from any peculiar ity in the scenery. it lies there so small (not appearing in that proportion to the width of the state that it does on the map), but beautifully quiet, like a pie-ture of the lake of lucerne on a music-box, where you trace the name of lu cerne among the foliage; far more ideal than ever it looked on the map. it does not say, here i am, lake champlain,&quot; as the conductor might for it, but having studied the geography thirty years, you crossed over a hill one after noon and beheld it. but it is only a glimpse that you get here. at burlington you rush to a wharf and go on board a steamboat, two hun dred and thirty-two miles from boston. we left concord at twenty minutes before eight in the morning, and were in burlington about six at night, but too late to see the lake. we got our first fair view of the lake at dawn, just be fore reaching plattsburg, and saw blue ranges of mountains on either hand, in new york and in vermont, the former especially grand. a few white schooners, like gulls, were seen in the distance, for it is not waste and solitary like a lake in tartary; but it was such a view as leaves not much to be said; indeed, i have post poned lake champlain to another day. the oldest reference to these waters that i concord to montreal 11 have yet there a solid, red-faced, burly-looking covery ai ian , a little pursy perhaps, who made 1585. sfed of ourselves and our thin and ner and padiitrymen, a gnndfaiherly personage, years befjn his great-eoat, who looked as if he panying a stage proprietor, certainly a railroad against and knew, or had a right to know, in it as , e cars did start. then there were two ant, &amp;lt;e pale-faced, black-eyed, loquacious indians.n french gentlemen there, shrugging from thudders ; pitted as if they had all had the land, tljx. in the mean while some soldiers, tinuingcg, belonging to the barracks near by, the wej.rned out to be drilled. at every impor the ea m t in our route the soldiers showed them tbw ready for us ; though they were evidently the sa raw recruits here, they manoeuvred far they than our soldiers ; yet, as usual, i heard i roqm yankees talk as if they were no great beaut,, aiu l they had seen the acton blues ma as i l re as well. the officers spoke sharply to of otl an d appeared to be doing their part thor whal y. i heard one suddenly coming to the tl exclaim, i% michael donouy, take his and j &quot; though i could not see what the latter of tl, r omitted to do. it was m insured that donouy would have to suffer for that. gome of our party discussing the jwssi poiy o f their driving these troops off the held a yankee in canada of the lake at vergennes is impress. 1 * 68 rather from association than from any jtheu, or ity in the scenery. it lies there so sn where i appearing in that proportion to the wid l( * moun state that it does on the map), but be. two na ~ quiet, like a picture of the lake of lu &amp;gt; in the a music-box, where you trace the name and m cerne among the foliage; far more idej n inter ever it looked on the map. it does i~ e(ls or 44 here i am, lake champlain,&quot; as the cof^p 8 in might for it, but having studied the g eo ression thirty years, you crossed over a hill one two or noon and beheld it. but it is only a g york that you get here. at burlington you i 8 * 118 * a wharf and go on board a steamboat, tw. ul(lrecl dred and thirty-two miles from boston. v -f ur left concord at twenty minutes before ei/ at we the morning, and were in burlington abo lse of at night, but too late to see the lake. ^\ n iik our first fair view of the lake at dawn, jv f the fore reaching plattsburg, and saw blue r: new of mountains on either hand, in new yorl/ the in vermont, the former especially grand l ^ s ^ few white schooners, like gulls, were seen ir fc ^ e distance, for it is not waste and solitary if 6 to lake in tartary; but it was such a vie^ ntle &quot; leaves not much to be said ; indeed, i have p ^ ou poned lake champlain to another day. ivss the oldest reference to these waters thu see concord to montreal 11 here and there a solid, red-faced, burly-looking englishman, a little pursy perhaps, who made us ashamed of ourselves and our thin and ner vous countrymen, a grandfatherly personage, at home in his great-coat, who looked as if he might be a stage proprietor, certainly a railroad director, and knew, or had a right to know, when the cars did start. then there were two or three pale-faced, black-eyed, loquacious canadian french gentlemen there, shrugging their shoulders ; pitted as if they had all had the small-pox. in the mean while some soldiers, red -coats, belonging to the barracks near by, were turned out to be drilled. at every impor tant point in our route the soldiers showed them selves ready for us; though they were evidently rather raw recruits here, they manoeuvred far better than our soldiers ; yet, as usual, i heard some yankees talk as if they were no great shakes, and they had seen the acton blues ma dgbuvre as well. the officers sj&amp;gt;oke sharply to them, and appeared to be doing their part thor oughly. i heard one suddenly coming to the rear, exclaim, &quot;michael donouy, take his name ! &quot; though i could not see what the latter did or omitted to do. it was \\ insured that michael donouy would have to suffer fur that. i heard some of our party discussing the jwssi iilityof their driving these troops off the field 12 a yankee in canada with their umbrellas. i thought that the yankee, though undisciplined, had this advantage at least, that he especially is a man who, every where and under all circumstances, is fully re solved to better his condition essentially, and therefore he could afford to be beaten at first ; while the virtue of the irishman, and to a great extent the englishman, consists in merely main taining his ground or condition. the canadians here, a rather poor-looking race, clad in gray homespun, which gave them the appearance of being covered with dust, were riding about in caleches and small one-horse carts called cha rettes. the yankees assumed that all the riders were racing, or at least exhibiting the paces of their horses, and saluted them accordingly. we saw but little of the village here, for nobody could tell us when the cars would start ; that was kept a profound secret, perhaps for political reasons ; and therefore we were tied to our seats. the inhabitants of st. john s and vicinity are described by an english traveler as &quot;singularly unprepossessing,&quot; and before completing his pe riod he adds, &quot;besides, they are generally very much disaffected to the british crown.&quot; i sus pect that that &quot;besides &quot; should have been a be cause. at length, about noon, the cars began to roll towards la prairie. the whole distance of tif to montreal 13 teen miles was over a remarkably level country, resembling a western prairie, with the moun tains about chambly visible in the northeast. this novel but monotonous scenery was exeit in-. at la prairie we first took notice of the tinned roofs, but above all of the st. lawrence, which looked like a lake ; in fact it is consider ably expanded here; it was nine miles across diagonally to montreal. mount royal in the rear of the city, and the island of st. helen s opposite to it, were now conspicuous. we could also see the sault st. louis about five miles up the river, and the sault norman still farther eastward. the former are described as the most considerable rapids in the st. law rence; but we could see merely a gleam of light there as from a cobweb in the sun. soon the city of montreal was discovered with its tin roofs shining afar. their reflections fell on the eye like a clash of cymbals on the ear. above all the church of notre dame was conspicuous, and anon the bonsecours market-house, occupy ing a commanding position on the quay, in the rear of the shipping. this city makes the more favorable impression from l&amp;gt;eing approached by water, and also being built of stone, a gray limestone found on the island. here, after traveling directly inland the whole breadth of new england, we had struck upon a city s bar 14 a yankee in canada bor, it made on me the impression of a sea port, to which ships of six hundred tons can ascend, and where vessels drawing fifteen feet lie close to the wharf, five hundred and forty miles from the gulf; the st. lawrence being here two miles wide. there was a great crowd assembled on the ferry-boat wharf and on the quay to receive the yankees, and flags of all colors were streaming from the vessels to cele brate their arrival. when the gun was fired, the gentry hurrahed again and again, and then the canadian caleche-drivers, who were most interested in the matter, and who, i perceived, were separated from the former by a fence, hur rahed their welcome; first the broadcloth, then the homespun. it was early in the afternoon when we stepped ashore. with a single companion, i soon found my way to the church of notre dame. i saw that it was of great size and signified something. it is said to be the largest ecclesiastical struc ture in north america, and can seat ten thou sand. it is two hundred and fifty-five and a half feet long, and the groined ceiling is eighty feet above your head. the catholic are the only churches which i have seen worth remem bering, which are not almost wholly profane. i do not speak only of the rich and splendid like this, but of th humblest of them as well. com concord to montreal 15 ing from the hurrahing mob and the rattling carriages, we pushed aside the listed door of this church, and found ourselves instantly in an atmosphere which might be sacred to thought and religion, if one hud any. there sat one or two women who had stolen a moment from uk? concerns of the day, as they were passing; but, if there had been fifty people there, it would still have been the most solitary place imagina ble. they did not look up at us, nor did one regard another. we walked softly down the broad aisle with our hats in our hands. pres ently came in a troop of canadians, in their homespun, who had come to the city in the boat with us, and one and all kneeled down in the aisle before the high altar to their devotions, somewhat awkwardly, as cattle prepare to lie down, and there we left them. as if you were to catch some farmer s sons from marlboro, come to cattle-show, silently kneeling in con r.ml iiir.-tin^-liousr snin.\\ydnrs.lay \ would there not soon be ;i mol. peeping in at the win dows? it is true, th.se roman catholics, priests and all, impress me as a people who have fallen far behind the significance of their syra ik&amp;gt;!s. it is as if an ox had strayed into a church and were trying to bethink himself. neverthe less, they are capable of reverence; but we yankees are a jk^ople in whom this sentiment 16 a yankee in canada has nearly died out, and in this respect we can not l&amp;gt;ethink ourselves even as oxen. i did not mind the pictures nor the candles, whether tal low or tin. those of the former which i looked at appeared tawdry. it matters little to me whether the pictures are by a neophyte of the algonquin or the italian tribe. but i was im pressed by the quiet, religious atmosphere of the place. it was a great cave in the midst of a city; and what were the altars and the tinsel but the sparkling stalaetics, into which you en tered in a moment, and where the still atmo sphere and the sombre light disposed to serious and profitable thought ? such a cave at hand, which you can enter any day, is worth a thou sand of our churches which are open only sun days, hardly long enough for an airing, and then filled with a bustling congregation, a church where the priest is the least part, where you do your own preaching, where the universe preaches to you and can be heard. i am not sure but this catholic religion would be an admirable one if the priest were quite omitted. i think that i might go to church myself sometimes some monday, if i lived in a city where there was such a one to go to. in concord, to be sure, we do not need such. our forests are such a church, far grander and sacn-d. \\ . .iann,,t leave our meeting concord to montreal 17 houses open for fear they would be profaned. such a cave, such a shrine, in one of our groves, for instance, how long would it l&amp;gt;e respected? for what purposes would it be entered, by such baboons as we are? i think of its value not only to religion, but to philosophy and to poe try; besides a reading-room, to have a thinking room in every city! perchance the time will come when every house even will have not only its sleeping-rooms, and dining-room, ami talk ing-room or parlor, but its thinking-room also, and the architects will put it into their plans. let it be furnished and ornamented with what ever conduces to serious and creative thought. i should not object to the holy water, or any other simple symbol, if it were consecrated by the imagination of the worshipers. i heard that some yankees bet that the can dles were not wax, but tin. a euroi&amp;gt;ean as sured them that they were wax; but, inquiring of the sexton, he was surprised to learn that they were tin filled with oil. the church was too poor to afford wax. as for the protestant churches, here or elsewhere, they did not inter est me, for it is only as caves that churches in terest me at all, and in that respect they were inferior. montreal makes the impression of a larger city than you had expected to find, though you 18 a yankee in canada may have heard that it contains nearly sixty thousand inhabitants. in the newer parts, it appeared to be growing fast like a small new york, and to be considerably americanized. the names of the squares reminded you of paris, the champ de mars, the place d armes, and others, and you felt as if a french revolution might break out any moment. glimpses of mount royal rising behind the town, and the names of some streets in that di rection, make one think of edinburgh. that hill sets off this city wonderfully. i inquired at a principal bookstore for books published in montreal. they said that there were none but school-books and the like ; they got their books from the states. from time to time we met a priest in the streets, for they are distinguished by their dress, like the civil police. like cler gymen generally, witli or without the gown, they made on us the impression of effeminacy. we also met some sisters of charity, dressed in black, with shaker-shaped black bonnets and crosses, and cadaverous faces, who looked as if they hail almost cried their eyes out, their com plexions parboiled with scalding tears; insulting the daylight by their presence, having taken an oath not to smile. by cadaverous i mean that their faces were like the faces of those who have been dead and buried for a year, and then un concord to montreal 19 tombed, with the life s grief upon them, and yet, for some unaccountable reason, the process of decay arrested. &quot; truth never fails her servant, sir, nor leave* him with the day s shame upon him.&quot; they waited demurely on the sidewalk while a track laden with raisins was driven in at the seminary of st. sulpiee, never once lifting their eyes from the ground. the soldier here, as everywhere in canada, appeared to be put forward, and by his best foot. they were in the proportion of the sol diers to the laborers in an african ant-hill. the inhabitants evidently rely on them in a great measure for music and entertainment. you would meet with them pacing back and forth before some guard-house or passage-way, guarding, regarding, and disregarding all kinds of law by turns, apparently for the sake of the discipline to themselves, and not because it was important to exclude anylxxly from entering that way. they reminded me of the men who are paid for piling up bricks and then throwing them down again. on every prominent ledge you could see england s hands holding the can atlas, and i judged by the redness of her knuckles that she would soon have to let go. in the rear of such a guard-house, in a large graveled square or parade ground, called the 20 a yankee in canada champ de mars, we saw a large body of soldiers being drilled, we being as yet the only specta tors. but they did not api&amp;gt;ear to notice us any more than the devotees in the church, but were seemingly as indifferent to .fewness of spectators as the phenomena of nature are, whatever they might have been thinking under their helmets of the yankees that were to oome. each man wore white kid gloves. it was one of the most interesting sights which i saw in cana da. the problem appeared to be how to smooth down all individual protuberances or idiosyncrasies, and make a thousand men move as one man, ani mated by one central will; and there was some approach to success. they obeyed the signals of a commander who stood at a great distance, wand in hand; and the precision, and prompt ness, and harmony of their movements could not easily have been matched. the harmony was far more remarkable than that of any choir or band, and obtained, no doubt, at a greater cost. they made on me the impression, not of many individuals, but of one vast centipede of a man, good for all sorts of pulling down ; and why not then for some kinds of building up? if men could combine thus earnestly, and patiently, and harmoniously to some really worthy end, what might they not accomplish? they now put their hands, and partially perchance their concord to montreal 21 heads together, and the result is that they are the imperfect tools of an imperfect and tyranni cal government. but if they eonld put their hands and heads and hearts and all together, such a cooperation and harmony would be the very end and success for which government now exists in vain, a government, as it were, not only with tools, but stock to trade with. i was obliged to frame some sentences that sounded like french in order to deal with the market-women, who, for the most part, cannot speak english. according to the guide-book the relative population of this city stands nearly thus: two fifths are french canadian; nearly one fifth british canadian; one and a half fifth english, irish, and scotch; somewhat less than one half fifth germans, united states people, and others. i saw nothing like pie for sale, and no good cake to put in my bundle, such as you can easily find in our towns, but plenty of fair-looking apples, for which montreal island is celebrated, and also pears, cheaper, and i thought tatter than ours, and peaches, which, though they were probably brought from the south, were as cheap as they commonly are with us. so imperative is the law of demand and supply that, as 1 have been told, the market of montreal is sometimes supplied with green ap ples from the state of new york some weeks 22 a yankee in canada even before they are ripe in the latter place. i saw here the spruce wax which the canadians chew, done up in little silvered papers, a penny a roll; also a small and shriveled fruit which they called cerises mixed with many little stems somewhat like raisins, but i soon returned what i had bought, finding them rather insipid, only putting a sample in my pocket. since my re turn, i find on comparison that it is the fruit of the sweet viburnum ( viburnum letitago), which with us rarely holds on till it is ripe. i stood on the deck of the steamer john munn, late in the afternoon, when the second and third ferry-boats arrived from la prairie, bringing the remainder of the yankees. i never saw so many caleches, cabs, charettes, and similar vehicles collected before, and doubt if new york could easily furnish more. the handsome and substantial stone quay, which stretches a mile along the river-side, and pro tects the street from the ice, was thronged with the citizens who had turned out on foot and in carriages to welcome or to behold the yankees. it was interesting to see the caleche drivers dash up and down the slope of the quay with their active little horses. they drive much faster than in our cities. i have been told that some of them come nine miles into the city every morning and return every night, without chang concord to montreal 23 ing their horses during the day. in the midst of the crowd of carts, i observed one deep one loaded with sheep with their legs tied together, and their bodies piled one upon another, as if the driver had forgotten that they were sheep and not yet mutton. a sight, i trust, peculiar to canada, though i fear that it is not. chapter ii quebec and montmorenci about six o clock we started for quebec, one hundred and eighty miles distant by the river; gliding past longueil and boueherville on the right, and pointe aux trembles, &quot;so called from having been originally covered with as pens,&quot; and bout de v isle, or the end of the island, on the left. i repeat these names not merely for want of more substantial facts to record, but because they sounded singularly poetic to my ears. there certainly was no lie in them. they suggested that some simple, and, perchance, heroic human life might have transpired there. there is all the poetry in the world in a name. it is a poem which the mass of men hear and read. what is poetry in the common sense, but a string of such jingling names? i want nothing better than a good word. the name of a thing may easily be more than the thing itself to me. inexpressibly beau tiful appears the recognition by man of the least natural fact, and the allying his life to it. all the world reiterating this slender truth, that as quebec and mo.vtmorenci 25 pens once grew there; ami the swift inference is, that men were there to see them. and so it would be with the names of our native and neighboring villages, if we had not profaned them. the daylight now failed us, and we went be low ; but i endeavored to console myself for be ing obliged to make this voyage by night, by thinking that i did not lose a great deal, the shores being low and rather unattractive, and that the river itself was much the more interest ing object. i heard something in the night about the boat being at william henry, three rivers, and in the richelieu rapids, but i was still where i had been when i lost sight of pfjinte rt?/x trembles. to hear a man who has been waked up at midnight in the cabin of a steamboat, inquiring, &quot;waiter, where are we now?&quot; is as if, at any moment of the earth s revolution round the sun, or of the system round its centre, one were to raise himself up and in quire of one of the deck hands, &quot;where are we now?&quot; i went on deck at daybreak, when we were thirty or forty miles above quebec. the banks were now higher and more interesting. there was an &quot;uninterrupted succession of white washed cottages,&quot; on each side of the river. this is what every traveler tells. but it is not 26 a yankee in canada to be taken as an evidence of the populousness of the country in general, hardly even of the river banks. they have presented a similar appearance for a hundred years. the swedish traveler and naturalist, kahn, who descended the river in 1749, says, &quot;it could really be called a village, beginning at montreal and end ing at quebec, which is a distance of more than one hundred and eighty miles; for the farm houses are never above five arpents, and some times but three asunder, a few places excep ted.&quot; even in 1684 hontan said that the houses were not more than a gunshot apart at most. ere long we passed cape rouge, eight miles above quebec, the mouth of the chaudiere on the op posite or south side; new liverpool cove with its lumber rafts and some shipping; then sillery and wolfe s cove and the heights of abraham on the north, with now a view of cape dia mond, and the citadel in front. the approach to quebec was very imposing. it was about six o clock in the morning when we arrived. there is but a single street under the cliff on the south side of the cape, which was made by blasting the rocks and filling up the river. three-story houses did not rise more than one fifth or one sixth the way up the nearly perpendicular rock, whose summit is three hundred and forty-five feet above the water. we saw, as we glided querec axd montmorenci 27 past, the sign on the side of the precipice, part way up, pointing to the spot where montgomery was killed in 1775. formerly it was the custom for those who went to quebec for the first time to be ducked, or else pay a fine. not even the governor general escaped. but we were too many to be ducked, even if the custom had not been abolished. 1 here we were, in the harbor of quebec, still three hundred and sixty miles from the mouth of the st. lawrence, in a basin two miles across, where the greatest depth is twenty-eight fathoms, and though the water is fresh, the tide rises seventeen to twenty -four feet, a harlwr &quot;large and deep enough,&quot; says a british trav eler, &quot;to hold the english navy.&quot; i may as well state that, in 1844, the county of quelxk* contained about forty -five thousand inhabitants (the city and suburbs having alnmt forty -three thousand); about twenty -eight thousand being canadians of french origin; eight thousand british; over seven thousand natives of ireland; &amp;gt; hieroame lalemant says in 1648, in lib relation, he bom* superior: &quot;all those who come to new france know weu enouph the mountain of notre dame, because the pilots and aailor*, being arrived at that part of the great kivcr which u opposite to those high mountain*, baptize ordinarily for por the new jiimliifl: ~ &amp;gt; f the ? do not turn mide b&amp;gt; &quot; iue p t&quot;j the inundation of urn baptism which one make* fully on their head*.&quot; 28 a yankee in canada one thousand five hundred natives of england ; the rest scotch and others. thirty-six thou sand belong to the church of rome. separating ourselves from the crowd, we walked up a narrow street, thence ascended by some wooden steps, called the break-neck stairs, into another steep, narrow, and zigzag street, blasted through the rock, which last led through a low, massive, stone portal, called pres cott gate, the principal thoroughfare into the upper town. this passage was defended by cannon, with a guard-house over it, a sentinel at his post, and other soldiers at hand ready to relieve him. i rubbed my eyes to be sure that i was in the nineteenth century, and was not entering one of those portals which sometimes adorn the frontispieces of new editions of old black-letter volumes. i thought it would be a good place to read froissart s chronicles. it was such a reminiscence of the middle ages as scott s novels. men apparently dwelt there for security! peace be unto them! as if the inhabitants of new york were to go over to castle william to live ! what a place it must be to bring up children! being safe through the gate we naturally took the street which was steepest, and after a few turns found ourselves on the durham terrace, a wood, n platform on the site of the old castle of st. louis, still one quebec and monttforenci 29 hundred and fifteen feet inflow the summit of the citadel, overlooking the lower town, the wharf where we had landed, the harlx&amp;gt;r, the isle of orleans, and the river and surrounding country to a great distance. it was literally a splendid view. we could see six or seven miles distant, in the northeast, an indentation in the lofty shore of the northern channel, ap parently on one side of the harbor, which marked the mouth of the montmorenci, whose celebrated fall was only a few rods in the rear. at a shoe-shop, whither we were directed for this purpose, we got some of our american money changed into english. i found that american hard money would have answered as well, excepting cents, which fell very fast before their pennies, it taking two of the former to make one of the latter, and often the penny, which had cost us two cents, did us the service of one cent only. moreover, our robust cents were compelled to meet on even terms a crew of vile half-penny tokens, and bung-town coppers, which had more brass in their composition, and so perchance made their way in the world. wishing to get into the citadel, we were di rected to the jesuits harraeks, a good part of the public buildings here are barracks, to get a pass of the town major. we did not heed the sentries at the gate, nor did they us. 30 a yankee in canada and what under the sun they were placed there for, unless to hinder a free circulation of the air, was not apparent. there we saw soldiers eat ing their breakfasts in their mess-room, from bare wooden tables in camp fashion. we were continually meeting with soldiers in the streets, carrying funny little tin pails of all shapes, even semicircular, as if made to pack conveniently. i supposed that they contained their dinners, so many slices of bread and butter to each, per chance. sometimes they were carrying some kind of military chest on a sort of bier or hand barrow, with a springy, undulating, military step, all passengers giving way to them, even the charette drivers stopping for them to pass, as if the battle were being lost from an inade quate supply of powder. there was a regiment of highlanders, and, as i understood, of royal irish, in the city; and by this time there was a regiment of yankees also. i had already ob served, looking up even from the water, the head and shoulders of some general poniatow sky, with an enormous cocked hat and gun, peering over the roof of a house, away up where the chimney caps commonly are with us, as it were a caricature of war and military awf ulness ; but i had not gone far up st. louis street be fore my riddle was solved, by the apparition of a real live highlander under a cocked hat, and quebec and montmorenci 31 with his knees out, standing and marching sen tinel on the ramparts, between st. louis and st. john s gate. (it must be a holy war that is waged there.) we stood elose by without fear and looked at him. his legs were some what tanned, and the hair had begun to grow on them, as some of our wise men predict that it will in such cases, but i did not think they were remarkable in any respect. notwithstand ing all his warlike gear, when i inquired of him the way to the plains of abraham, he could not answer me without betraying some bashfulness through his broad scotch. soon after, we passed another of these creatures standing sen try at the st. louis gate, who let us go by without shooting us, or even demanding the countersign. we then began to go througli the gate, which was so thick and tunnel -like, as to remind me of those lines in claudian s old man of verona, about the getting out of the gate being the greater part of a journey ; as you might imagine yourself crawling through an architectural vignette at the end of a black-let ter volume. we were then reminded that we had been in a fortress, from which we emerged by numerous zigzags in a ditch-like road, going a considerable distance to advance a few rtxls, where they could have shot us two or thiw times over, if their minds had been disused as their 32 a yankee in canada guns were. the greatest, or rather the most prominent, part of this city was constructed with the design to offer the deadest resistance to leaden and iron missiles that might be cast against it. but it is a remarkable meteorologi cal and psychological fact, that it is rarely known to rain lead with much violence, except on places so constructed. keeping on about a mile we came to the plains of abraham, for having got through with the saints, we came next to the patriarchs. here the highland regiment was being reviewed, while the band stood on one side and played, me thinks it was la claire fontaine, the national air of the canadian french. this is the site where a real battle once took place, to commemorate which they have had a sham fight here almost every day since. the highlanders manoeuvred very well, and if the precision of their movements waj less remarkable, they did not appear so stiffly erect as the english or royal irish, but had a more elastic and graceful gait, like a herd of their own red deer, or as if accustomed to stepping down the sides of mountains. but they made a sad impression on the whole, for it was obvious that all true manhood was in the process of being drilled out of them. i have no doubt that soldiers well drilled are, as a class, peculiarly destitute of originality and indepen quebec and montmorencl 33 dence. the officers appeared like men dressed above their condition. it is inipoettble to give the soldier a good education, without making him a deserter. his natural foe is the government that drills him. what would any philanthro pist, who felt an interest in these men s welfare, naturally do, but first of all teach them bo to respect themselves, that they could not l&amp;gt;e hired for this work, whatever might l&amp;gt;e the conse quences to this government or that; not drill a few, but educate all. i observed one older man among them, gray as a wharf -rat, and sup ple as the devil, marching lock -step with the rest, who would have to pay for that elastic gait. we returned to the citadel along the heights, plucking such flowers as grew there. there \vaan alum-lan.-.of succory mill in blossom, broad leaved golden rod, buttercups, thorn bushes, canada thistles, and ivy, on the very summit of cape diamond. i also found the bladder-campion in the neighl&amp;gt;orhood. we there enjoyed an extensive view, which i will deseril&amp;gt;e in another place. our pass, which stated that all the rides were &quot;to be strictly en forced,&quot; as if they were determined to keep up the semblance of reality to the last gasp, opened to us the dulhousie gate, and we were con ducted over the citadel by a bate-legged high lander in cocked hat and full regimentals. he 34 a yankee in canada told us that he had been here about three years, and had formerly been stationed at gibraltar. as if his regiment, having perchance been nes tled auiid the rocks of edinburgh castle, must flit from rock to rock thenceforth over the earth s surface, like a bald eagle, or other bird of prey, from eyrie to eyrie. as we were going out, we met the yankees coming in, in a body headed by a red-coated officer called the com mandant, and escorted by many citizens, both english and french canadian. i therefore im mediately fell into the procession, and went round the citadel again with more intelligent guides, carrying, as before, all my effects with me. seeing that nobody walked with the red coated commandant, i attached myself to him, and though i was not what is called well dressed, he did not know whether to repel me or not, for i talked like one who was not aware of any deficiency in that respect. probably there was not one among all the yankees who went to canada this time, who was not more splendidly dressed than i was. it would have been a poor story if i had not enjoyed some dis tinction. i had on my &quot;bad-weather clothes,&quot; like olaf trygesson the northman, when he went to the thing in england, where, by the way, he won his bride. as we stood by the thirty-two-pounder on the summit of cajhj dia quebec and afontmorsjfcl 35 , which is tired three times a day, the com mandant told me that it would carry to the isle of orleans, four miles distant, and that no hos tile vessel could come round the island. i now saw the subterranean or, rather, &quot;casemated barracks &quot; of the soldiers, which i had not no tieed before, though i might have walked over them. they had very narrow windows, serving as loop-holes for musketry, and small iron chim neys rising above the ground. there we saw the soldiers at home and in an undress, split ting wood, i looked to see whether with swords or axes, and in various ways endeav oring to realize that their nation was now at peace with this part of the world. a part of each regiment, chiefly officers, are allowed to marry. a grandfatherly, would-be witty eng lishman could give a yankee whom he was pa tronizing no rea.son for the bare knees of the highlanders, other than oddity. the rock within the citadel is a little convex, so that shells falling on it would roll toward the cir cumference, where the barracks of the soldiers and officers are; it has been proposed, there fore, to make it slightly concave, so that they may roll into the centre, where they would be comparatively harmless; and it is estimated that to do this would cost twenty thousand pounds sterling. it may be well to remember 36 a yankee in canada this when i build my next house, and have the roof * 4 all correct* for bombshells. at mid-afternoon we made haste down sault au-matelot street, towards the falls of mont morenci, about eight miles down the st. law rence, on the north side, leaving the further examination of quebec till our return. on our way, we saw men in the streets sawing logs pit fashion, and afterward, with a common wood saw and horse, cutting the planks into squares for paving the streets. this looked very shift less, especially in a country abounding in water power, and reminded me that i was no longer in yankee land. i found, on inquiry, that the excuse for this was, that labor was so cheap; and i thought, with some pain, how cheap men are here ! i have since learned that the english traveler, warburton, remarked, soon after land ing at quebec, that everything was cheap there but men. that must be the difference between going thither from new and from old england. i had already observed the dogs harnessed to their little milk-carts, which contain a single large can, lying asleep in the gutters regardless of the horses, while they rested from their la bors, at different stages of the ascent in the upper town. i was surprised at the regular and extensive use made of these animals for drawing, not only milk, but groceries, woody quebec and moxtmorenci 37 etc. it reminded me that the dog commonly is not put to any use. cats catch mice; but dogs only worry the cats. kalm, a hundred years go, saw sledges here for ladies to ride in, drawn by a pair of dogs. he says, &quot;a middle sized dog is sufficient to draw a single person, when the roads are good;&quot; and he was told by old people, that horses were very scarce in their youth, and almost all the land -carriage was then effected by dogs. they made me think of the esquimaux, who, in fact, are the next people on the north. charlevoix says tliat the first horses were introduced in 1665. we crossed dorchester bridge, over the st. charles, the little river in which cartier, the discoverer of the st. lawrence, put his ships, and spent the winter of 1535, and found our selves on an excellent macadamized road, called le chernin de bcaitport. we had left concord wednesday morning, and we endeavored to realize that now, friday morning, we were tak ing a walk in canada, in the seigniory of beau ]&amp;gt;ort, a foreign country, which a few days l&amp;gt;efore had seemed almost as far off as england and france. instead of rambling to flint s pond or the sudbury meadows, we found ourselves, after being a little detained in cars and steam boats, after spending half a night at burling ton, and half a day at montreal, taking ft 38 a yankee in canada walk down the bank of the st. lawrence to the falls of montmorenci, and elsewhere. well, i thought to myself, here i am in a foreign country; let me have my eyes about me, and take it all in. it already looked and felt a good deal colder than it had in new england, as we might have expected it would. i realized fully that i was four degrees nearer the pole, and shuddered at the thought; and i wondered if it were possible that the peaches might not be all gone when i returned. it was an atmosphere that made me think of the fur-trade, which is so interesting a department in canada, for i had for all head covering a thin palm-leaf hat with out lining, that cost twenty-five cents, and over my coat one of those unspeakably cheap, as well as thin, brown linen sacks of the oak hall pat tern, which every summer appear all over new england, thick as the leaves upon the trees. it was a thoroughly yankee costume, which some of my fellow-travelers wore in the cars to save their coats a dusting. i wore mine, at first, because it looked ix tter than the coat it covered, and last, because two coats were warmer than one, though one was thin and dirty. i never wear my best coat on a journey, though per chance i could show a certificate to prove that i have a more costly one, at least, at home, if that were all that a gentleman required. it is quebec and montmorenci 39 not wise for a traveler to go dressed. i should no more think of it than of putting on a clean dicky and blacking my shoes to go a-fishing; as if you were going out to dine, when, in fact, the genuine traveler is going out to work hard, and fare harder, to eat a crust by the wayside whenever he can get it. honest traveling is about as dirty work as yon can do, and a man needs a pair of overalls for it. as for blacking my shoes in such a case, i should as soon think of blacking my face. i carry a piece of tallow to preserve the leather and keep out the water ; that s all; and many an officious shoeblack, who carried off my shoes when i was slumber ing, mistaking me for a gentleman, lias had oc casion to repent it before he produced a gloss on them. my pack, in fact, was soon made, for i keep a short list of those articles which, from fre quent experience, i have found indispensable to the foot-traveler; and, when i am about to start, i have only to consult that, to be sure that no thing is omitted, and, what is more important, nothing superfluous inserted. most of my fel low-travelers carried carpet-bags, or valises. sometimes one had two or three ponderous yel low valises in his clutch, at each hitch of the can, as if we were going to have another rush for seats; and when then was a rush in earnest, 40 a yaxkee ix canada and there were not a few, i would see my man in the crowd, with two or three affectionate lusty fellows along each side of his arm, between his shoulder and his valises, which last held them tight to his back, like the nut on the end of a screw. i could not help asking in my mind, &quot;\\ hat so great cause for showing canada to those valises, when perhaps your very nieces had to stay at home for want of an escort? i should have liked to be present when the custom-house officer came aboard of him, and asked him to declare upon his honor if he had anything but wearing apparel in them. even the elephant carries but a small trunk on his journeys. the perfection of traveling is to travel without bag gage. after considerable reflection and expe rience, i have concluded that the best bag for the foot-traveler is made with a handkerchief, or, if he study appearances, a piece of stiff brown paper, well tied up, with a fresh piece within to put outside when the first is torn. that is good for both town and country, and none will know but you are carrying home the silk for a new gown for your wife, when it may be a dirty shirt. a bundle which you can carry literally under your arm, and which will shrink and swell with its contents. i never found the carpet-bag of equal capacity, which was not a bundle of itself. we styled ourselves the quebec and mostmorexc1 41 knights of the umbrella and the bundle: for, wherever we went, whether to notre dame or mount royal or the champ de man, to the town major s or the bishop s palace, to the citadel, with a bare-legged highlander for our escort, or to the plains of abraham, to dinner or to bed, the umbrella and the bundle went with us; for we wished to be ready to digress at any moment. we made it our home nowhere in particular, but everywhere where our um brella and bundle were. it would have been an amusing circumstance, if the mayor of one of thoao cities had politely asked us where we were staving. we could only have answered, that we were staying with his honor for the time be ing. i was amused when, after our return, some green ones inquired if we found it easy to get fttfinaamiatt* 1 ; as if we went abroad to get eeommodated, when we can get that at home. we met with many charette*. bringing wood and stone to the city. the most ordinary look ing hones traveled faster than ours, or per haps they were ordinary looking becaaaf, as i am told, the faaadiiim do not use the curry comb. moreover, it is said that on the ap proach of winter their horses acquire an in creased quantity of hair, to ptoteet them from the cold. if this be true, tome of our hones would make you think winter were approaching. 42 a yaxkee ix caxada even in midsummer. we soon began to see women and girls at work in the fields, digging potatoes alone, or bundling up the grain which the men cut. they appeared in rude health, with a great deal of color in their cheeks, and, if their occupation had made them coarse, it impressed me as better in its effects than mak ing shirts at fourpence apiece, or doing nothing at all, unless it be chewing slate pencils, with still smaller results. they were much more agreeable objects, with their great broad brimmed hats and flowing dresses, than the men and boys. we afterwards saw them doing various other kinds of work ; indeed, i thought that we saw more women at work out of doors than men. on our return, we observed in this town a girl, with indian boots nearly two feet high, taking the harness off a dog. the purity and transparency of the atmosphere were wonderful. when we had been walking an hour, we were surprised, on turning round, to see how near the city, with its glittering tin roofs, still looked. a village ten miles off did not ap pear to be more than three or four. i was con vinced that you could see objects distinctly there much farther than here. it is true the villages are of a dazzling white, but the dazzle is to be referred, perhaps, to the transparency of the at mosphere as much as to the whitewash. quebec and mostmorknci 43 we were now fairly in the village of reim port, though there was still but one road. the houses stood close upon this, without any front yards, and at an angle with it, as if they had dropi&amp;gt;ed down, being set with more reference to the road which the sun travels. it being about sundown, and the falls not far off, we iwgan to look round for a lodging, for we preferred to put up at a private house, that we might see more of the inhabitants. we inquired first at the most promising looking houses, if, indeed, any were promising. when we knocked, they shouted some french word for come in, perhaps entrez, and we asked for a lodging in english; but we found, unexpectedly, that they spoke french only. then we went along and tried another house, l&amp;gt;eing generally saluted by a rush of two or three little curs, which readily distin guished a foreigner, and which we were pre pared now to hear bark in french. our first question would be, parlez-cuu* anylais? but the invariable answer was, .vow, monsieur ; and we soon found that the inhabitants were ex clusively french canadians, and nobody spoke english at all, any more than in france ; that, in fact, we were in a foreign country, where the inhabitants uttered not one familiar sound to us. then we tried by turns to talk french with them, in which we succeeded sometimes 44 a yankee in canada pretty well, but for the most part pretty ill. pouvez-vous nous donner un jit cette nuit ? we would ask, and then they would answer with french volubility, so that we could catch only a word here and there. we could understand the women and children generally better than the men, and they us; and thus, after a while, we would learn that they had no more beds than they used. so we were compelled to inquire y a-t-il une maison publique id ? (auberge we should have said, perhaps, for they seemed never to have heard of the other), and they answered at length that there was no tavern, unless we could get lodgings at the mill, le moujin, which we had passed; or they would direct us to a grocery, and almost every house had a small grocery at one end of it. we called on the public notary or village lawyer, but he had no more beds nor english than the rest. at one house there was so good a misunderstanding at once established through the politeness of all parties, that we were encouraged to walk in and sit down, and ask for a glass of water ; and having drank their water, we thought it was as good as to have tasted their salt. when our host and his wife spoke of their poor accommodations, meaning for themselves, we assured them that they were good enough, for we thought that they were quebec and moxtmorenci 45 only apologizing for the j&amp;gt;oornes8 of the accom modations they were alxnit to offer us, and we did not discover our mistake till they took us up a ladder into a loft, and showed to our eyes what they had been laboring in vain to commu nicate to our brains through our ears, that they had but that one apartment with its few beds for the whole family. we made our a-dienx forthwith, and with gravity, perceiving the lit eral signification of that word. we were finally taken in at a sort of public-house, whose mas ter worked for patterson, the proprietor of the extensive saw-mills driven by a portion of the montmorenei stolen from the fall, whose roar we now heard. we here talked, or murdered, french all the evening, with the master of the house and his family, and probably had a more amusing time than if we had completely under stood one another. at length they showed us to a bed in their best chaml&amp;gt;cr, very high to get into, with a low wooden rail to it. it had no cotton sheets, but coarse, home-made, dark-col ored, linen ones. afterward, we had to do with sheets still coarser than these, and nearly the color of our blankets. there was a large open buffet loaded with crockery in one corner of the room, as if to display their wealth to travelers, and pictures of scripture scenes, french, ital ian, and spanish, hung around. our hostess 46 a yankee in canada came back directly to inquire if we would have brandy for breakfast. the next morning, when i asked their names, she took down the temper ance pledges of herself and husband, and chil dren, which were hanging against the wall. they were jean baptiste binet, and his wife, genevieve binet. jean baptiste is the so briquet of the french canadians. after breakfast we proceeded to the fall, which was within half a mile, and at this dis tance its rustling sound, like the wind among the leaves, filled all the air. we were disap pointed to find that we were in some measure shut out from the west side of the fall by the private grounds and fences of patterson, who appropriates not only a part of the water for his mill, but a still larger part of the prospect, so that we were obliged to trespass. this gentle man s mansion house and grounds were formerly occupied by the duke of kent, father to queen victoria. it appeared to me in bad taste for an individual, though he were the father of queen victoria, to obtrude himself with his land titles, or at least his fences, on so remark able a natural phenomenon, which should, in every sense, belong to mankind. some falls should even be kept sacred from the intrusion of mills and factories, as water privileges in an other than the millwright s sense. this small quebec and montmorenci 47 river falls perpendicularly nearly two handled ami fifty feet at one pitch. the st. lawrence falls only one hundred and sixty -four feet at niagara. it is a very simple and noble fall, and leaves nothing to be desired ; but the most that i could say of it would only have the force of one other testimony to assure the reader that it is there. we looked directly down on it from the point of a projecting rock, and saw far below us, on a low promontory, the grass kept fresh and green by the perpetual drizzle, look ing like moss. the rock is a kind of slate, in the crevices of which grew ferns and golden rods. the prevailing trees on the shores were spruce and arbor-vita^ the litter very large and now full of fruit, also aspens, alders, and the mountain-ash with its berries. every emi grant who arrives in this country by way of the st. lawrence, as he opens a point of the isle of orleans, sees the montmorenci tumbling into the great river thus magnificently in a vast white sheet, making its contribution with emphasis. robervars pilot, jean alphonse, saw this fall thus, and described it, in 1542. it is a splen did introduction to the scenery of quebec. in stead of an artificial fountain in its square, quelxm! has this magnificent natural waterfall, to adorn one side of its harbor. within the mouth of the chasm below, which can be entered 48 a yankee in canada only at ebb tide, we had a grand view at once of quebec and of the fall. kalin says that the noise of the fall is sometimes heard at quebec, about eight miles distant, and is a sign of a northeast wind. the side of this chasm, of soft and crumbling slate too steep to climb, was among the memorable features of the scene. in the winter of 1829 the frozen spray of the fall, descending on the ice of the st. lawrence, made a hill one hundred and twenty-six feet high. it is an annual phenomenon which some think may help explain the formation of glaciers. in the vicinity of the fall we began to notice what looked like our red-fruited thorn bushes, grown to the size of ordinary apple-trees, very common, and full of large red or yellow fruit, which the inhabitants called pommettes^ but i did not learn that they were put to any use. chapter iii 8t. anne bv the middle of the forenoon, though it was a rainy day ? we were once more on our way down the north hank of the st. lawrence, in a northeasterly direction, toward the falls of st. anne, which are about thirty miles from que bec. the settled, more level, and fertile por tion of canada east may be described rudely as a triangle, with its apex slanting toward the northeast, about one hundred miles wide at its base, and from two to three or even four hun dred miles long, if you reckon its narrow north eastern extremity ; it being the immediate valley of the st. lawrence and its tributaries, rising by a single or by successive terraces toward the mountains on either hand. though the words canada east on the map stretch over many riv ers and lakes and unexplored wildernesses, the actual ( anada, uhi.-h mi-lit lw the colon .1 [xh tion of the map, is but a little clearing on the banks of the river, which one of those syllables would more than cover. the banks of the st. lawrence art* rather low from montreal to the 50 .1 yankee in canada richelieu rapids, about forty miles above que bec. thence they rise gradually to cape dia mond, or quebec. where we now were, eight miles northeast of quebec, the mountains which form the northern side of this triangle were only five or six miles distant from the river, gradu ally departing farther and farther from it, on the west, till they reach the ottawa, and making haste to meet it on the east, at cape tourmente, now in plain sight about twenty miles distant. so that we were traveling in a very narrow and sharp triangle between the mountains and the river, tilted up toward the mountains on the north, never losing sight of our great fellow traveler on our right. according to bouchette s topographical description of the canadas, we were in the seigniory of the cote de beaupre, in the county of montmorenci, and the district of quebec; in that part of canada which was the first to be settled, and where the face of the country and the population have undergone the least change from the beginning, where the in fluence of the states and of europe is least felt, and the inhabitants see little or nothing of the world over the walls of quebec. this seigniory was granted in 163g, and is now the property of the seminary of quebec. it is the most mountainous one in the province. there are some half a dozen parishes in it, each contain st. anxe 51 a church, parsonage-house, grift-mill, and several raw-mills. we were now in the most westerly parish, called ange gardien, or the guardian angel, which is bounded on the west by the montmorenei. the north bank of the st. lawrence here is formed on a grand scale. it slopes gently, either directly from the shore, or from the edge of an interval, till, at the dis tance of about a mile, it attains the height of four or five hundred feet. the single road runs along the side of the slope two or three hundred feet above the river at first, ami from a quarter of a mile to a mile distant from it, and affords fine views of the north* channel, which is about a mile wide, and of the beautiful isle of or leans, about twenty miles long by five wide, where grow the best apples and plums in the quel&amp;gt;ec district. though there was but this single road, it was a continuous village for as far as we walked this day and the next, or about thirty miles down the river, the houses l&amp;gt;eing as near together all the way as in the middle of one of our smallest straggling country villages, and we could never u-ll by their number when we were on the skirts of a parish, for the road never ran through the fields or woods. we were told that it was just six miles from one parish church to another. i thought that we saw every house in ange gar 52 a yankee in canada (lien. therefore, as it was a muddy day, we never got out of the mud, nor out of the village, unless we got over the fence ; then, indeed, if it was on the north side, we were out of the civil ized world. there were sometimes a few more houses near the church, it is true, but we had only to go a quarter of a mile from the road to the top of the bank to find ourselves on the verge of the uninhabited, and, for the most part, unexplored wilderness stretching toward hud son s bay. the farms accordingly were ex tremely long and narrow, each having a frontage on the river. bouchette accounts for this pecu liar manner of laying out a village by referring to * 4 the social character of the canadian peas ant, who is singularly fond of neighborhood,&quot; also to the advantage arising from a concentra tion of strength in indian tunes. each farm, callihl terre, he says, is, in nine cases out of ten, three arpents wide by thirty deep, that is, very nearly thirty-five by three hundred and forty nine of our rods; sometimes one half arpent by thirty, or one to sixty; sometimes, in fact, a few yards by half a mile. of course it costs more for fences. a remarkable difference be tween the canadian and the new england char art .t apjx ars from the fact that, in 1745, the french government were obliged to pass a law forbidding the farmers or censitaires building st. anne 53 on land less than one and a half arpents front by thirty or forty deep, under a certain jfcnalfcjr, in order to compel emigration, and bring the seigneur s estates all under cultivation; and it is thought that they have now loss reluctance to leave the paternal roof than formerly, &quot;remov ing beyond the sight of the parish spire, or the sound of the parish bell.&quot; but i find that in the previous or seventeenth century, the com plaint, often renewed, was of a totally opposite character, namely, that the inhabitants dis persed and exposed themselves to the iroquois. accordingly, about 1664, the king was obliged to order that &quot;they should make no more clear ings except one next to another, and that they should reduce their parishes to the form of the parishes in france as much as possible.&quot; the canadians of those days, at least, possessed a roving spirit of adventure which carried them further, in exposure to hardship and danger, than ever the new england colonist went, and led them, though not to clear and colonize the wilderness, yet to range over it as coureura de bois, or runners of the woods, or, as hontan prefers to call them, coiireurs de ritques, runners of risks; to say nothing of their enterprising priesthood; and charlevoix thinks that if the authorities had taken the right steps to prevent the youth from ranging the woods (c/e caurtr 1r* 54 a yankee jn canada boi*) they would have had an excellent militia to fightt the indians and english. the road in this clayey -look ing soil was ex ceedingly muddy in consequence of the night s rain. we met an old woman directing her dog, which was harnessed to a little cart, to the least muddy part of it. it was a beggarly sight. hut harnessed to the cart as he was, we heard him barking after we had passed, though we looked anywhere but to the cart to see where the dog was that barked. the houses com monly fronted the south, whatever angle they might make with the road ; and frequently they had no door nor cheerful window on the road side. half the time they stood fifteen to forty rods from the road, and there was no very obvi ous passage to them, so that you would suppose that there must be another road running by them. they were of stone, rather coarsely mortared, but neatly whitewashed, almost in variably one story high and long in proportion to their height, with a shingled roof, the shin gles being pointed, for ornament, at the eaves, like the pickets of a fence, and also one row halfway up the roof. the gables sometimes projected a foot or two at the ridge-pole only. yet they were very humble and unpretending dwellings. they commonly had the date of their erection on them. the windows opened st. anne 55 in tlu middle, like blinds, and were fivqiu-ntl\ provided with solid shutters. sometime*, \\h. n we walked along the back side of a house whi-h stood near the road, we observed stout stakes leaning against it, by which the shutters, now pushed half open, were fastened at night; within, the houses were neatly ceiled with wood not painted. the oven was commonly out of doors, built of stone and mortar, frequently on a raised platform of planks. the cellar was often on the opposite side of the road, in front of or lie hind the houses, looking like an ice-house with us, with a lattice door for summer. the very few mechanics whom we met hail an old-betty ish look, in their aprons and bonnets rougcx, like fools caps. the men wore commonly the same bonnet rouge, or red woolen or worsted cap, or sometimes blue or gray, looking to us aa if they had got up with their night-caps on, and, in fact, i afterwards found that they had. their clothes were of the cloth of the country, etoffe du pay*, gray or some other plain color. the women looked stout, with gowns that stood out stiffly, also, for the most part, apparently of some home-made stuff. we also saw some specimens of the more characteristic winter dress of the canadian, and i have since fre quently detected him in new england by his coarse gray homespun eajwte and picturesque 66 a yankee in canada rr&amp;lt;l sash, and his well-furred cap, made to pro tect his ears against the severity of his climate. it drizzled all day, so that the roads did not improve. we began now to meet with wooden crosses frequently, by the roadside, about a dozen feet high, often old and toppling down, sometimes standing in a square wooden plat form, sometimes in a pile of stones, with a little niche containing a picture of the virgin and child, or of christ alone, sometimes with a string of beads, and covered with a piece of glass to keep out the rain, with the words, pour la vierye, or inri, on them. frequently, on the cross-bar, there would be quite a collection of symbolical knickknacks, looking like an italian s board; the representation in wood of a hand, a hammer, spikes, pincers, a flask of vinegar, a ladder, etc., the whole, perchance, surmounted by a weathercock ; but i could not look at an honest weathercock in this walk with out mistrusting that there was some covert re ference in it to st. peter. from time to time we passed a little one-story chapel-like building, with a tin-roofed spire, a shrine, perhaps it would be called, close to the pathside, with a lattice door, through which we could see an al tar, and pictures about the walls; equally open, through rain and shine, though there was no getting into it. at these places the inhabitants st. axke 57 kneeled and perhaps breathed a fihort prayer. we saw one school-house, in our walk, and lis tened to the sounds which issued from it ; but it ajijm-aiv.l uk ;i plan 1 u li n the pfoci 18, oot ! enlightening, but of obfuscating the mind was going on, and i!mpupilfl ceo lv&amp;lt; d onlj 10 mm ii light as could penetrate the shadow of the cath olic church. the churches were very pictur esque, and their interior much more showy than the dwelling-houses promised. they were of^ stone, for it was ordered, in 1699, that that should be their material. they had tinned spires, and quaint ornaments. that of 1 ange gardien had a dial on it, with the middle age roman numerals on its face, and some images in niches on the outside. probably its counter part has existed in normandy for a thousand years. at the church of chateau richer, which is the next parish to 1 ange gardien, we read, looking over the wall, the inscriptions in the adjacent churchyard, which began with, &quot;7ci git 9 or &quot;7ivy&amp;gt;o*?,&quot; and one over a boy con tained, &quot;priez pour ///.&quot; this answered as well as pere la chaise. we knocked at the door of the curd s house here, when a sleek, friar-like personage, in his sacerdotal robe, ap peared. to our parlez-rous anglais ? even he answered, &quot;a o/i, monsieur;&quot; but at list we made him understand wliat we wanted. it was 58 a yankee in canada to find the ruins of the old chateau. &quot;ah! oui! oui!&quot; he exclaimed, and, donning his coat, hastened forth, and conducted us to a small heap of rubbish which we had already examined. he said that fifteen years before, it was plus considerable. seeing at that mo ment three little red birds fly out of a crevice in the ruins, up into an arbor-vita? tree which grew out of them, i asked him their names, in such french as i could muster, but he neither understood me nor ornithology; he only inquired where we had appris a parlcr franqaix ; we told him, dans les etats-unis ; and so we bowed him into his house again. i was sur prised to find a man wearing a black coat, and with apparently no work to do, even in that part of the world. the universal salutation from the inhabitants whom we met was bon jour, at the same time touching the hat; with bon jour, and touching your hat, you may go smoothly through all canada east. a little boy, meeting us, would remark, &quot;bon jour, monsieur ; le chemin est mauvais,&quot; good morning, sir; it is bad walk ing. sir francis head says that the immigrant is forward to &quot;appreciate the happiness of liv ing in a land in which the old country s servile custom of touching the hat does not exist,&quot; but he was thinking of canada west, of course. it 57*. anns 59 would, indeed, be a serious ixirc to be obliged to touch your hat several times a day. a yan k.-r has iint 1isiire t &amp;lt;&amp;gt;r it. we saw peas, and even beans, collected into heaps in the fields. the former are an impor tant crop li iv. and. i sup]&amp;gt;osc, a:-not so much infested by the weevil as with us. tliere were plenty of apples, very fair and sound, by the roadside, but they were so small as to suggest the origin of the apple, in the crab. tliere was also a small, red fruit which they called &amp;gt;;&amp;gt;//&amp;gt;, and another, also red and very acid, \\li&amp;lt;r name a little boy wrote for me, &quot;pinbena.&quot; it is probably the same with, or similar to, the pcmbina of the voyageurs, a species of vibur num, which, according to kichardson, has given its name to many of the rivers of rupert s land. the forest trees were spruce, arbor-vita?, firs, birches, beeches, two or three kinds of ma ple, bass-wood, wild-cherry, aspens, etc., but no pitch pines (pi nun riyidtt}. i saw very few, if any, trees which had been set out for shade or ornament. the water was commonly run ning streams or springs in the bank by the road side, and was excellent. the parishes are com monly separated by a stream, and frequently the farms. i noticed that the fields were furrowed or thrown into beds seven or eight feet wide to dry the soil. 60 a yankee in canada at the riviere du sault a la puce^ which, i suppose, means the river of the fall of the flea, was advertised in english, as the sports men are english, &quot;the best snipe-shooting grounds,&quot; over the door of a small public-house. these words being english affected me as if i had been absent now ten years from my coun try, and for so long had not heard the sound of my native language, and every one of them was as interesting to me as if i had been a snipe shooter, and they had been snipes. the pru nella, or self-heal, in the grass here, was an old acquaintance. &quot;we frequently saw the inhabi tants washing, or cooking for their pigs, and in one place hackling flax by the roadside. it was pleasant to see these usually domestic operations carried on out of doors, even in tliat cold coun try at twilight we reached a bridge over a little river, the boundary between chateau richer and st. anne, le premier pont de st. anne, and at dark the church of la bonne. st. anne. formerly vessels from france, when they came in sight of this church, gave &quot;a general dis charge of their artillery,&quot; as a sign of joy that they had escaped all the dangers of the river. though all the while we had grand views of the adjacent country far up and down the river, and, for the most part, when we turned about, st. anne 61 of quebec in the horizon l&amp;gt;chind us, uncl we never beheld it without new surprise ami admi ration; yet, throughout our walk, the great river of canada on our right hand was the main feature in the landscape, and this expands so rapidly below the isle of orleans, and creates such a breadth of level horizon above its waters in that direction, that, looking down the river as we approached the extremity of that island, the st. lawrence seemed to be opening into the ocean, though we were still alxmt three hundred and twenty-five miles from what can be called its mouth. 1 when we inquired here for a nuri&on publlque we were directed apparently to that private house where we were most likely to find enter tainment. there were no guide-boards where we walked, because there was but one road; there were no shops nor signs, because there were no artisans to speak of, and the pkple raised their own provisions; and there were no taverns, because there were no travelers. we here be spoke lodging and breakfast. they had, as 1 prom mcculloch a geofrrnphieal dictionary we learn that &quot; immediately beyond the island of orleans it is a mile broad ; where the sa^uenay joins it, eighteen miles ; at point peter, upward of thirty ; at the bay of seven inland*, seventy mile* ; and at the inland of anticowti (about three hundred and fifty miles from quebec), it rolls a flood into um ocean marly one hundred miles across.&quot; 02 a yankee in canada usual, a largo, old-fashioned, two-storied box stove in the middle of the room, out of which, in due time, there was sure to be forthcoming a supper, breakfast, or dinner. the lower half held the fire, the upper the hot air, and as it was a cool canadian evening, this was a com forting sight to us. being four or five feet high it warmed the whole person as you stood by it. the stove was plainly a very important article of furniture in canada, and was not set aside during the summer. its size, and the re spect which was paid to it, told of the severe winters which it had seen and prevailed over. the master of the house, in his long-pointed, red woolen cap, had a thoroughly antique physi ognonn -; i m-&quot;m norman -tamp. !! mi-lit have come over with jacques cartier. his was the hardest french to understand of any we had heard yet, for there was a great difference be tween one speaker and another, and this man talked with a pipe in his mouth beside, a kind of tobacco french. i asked him what he called his dog. he shouted brock! (the name of the breed). we like to hear the cat called min, min! mini min! i inquired if we could cross the river here to the isle of orleans, think ing to return that way when we had been to the falls. he answered, &quot; s il ne fait pas un trop grand vent,&quot; if there is not too much wind. st. anne -ni; ll koats, or pinigurs, :m&amp;lt;l tl \vavrs annt i-n t&quot;&quot; lii_;;i for i bl \\\. \ ! wh hi -. as usual, something between a moccasin and a boot, which he called bnttes fndiennes, indian boots, and had made himself. the tops were of calf or sheep-skin, and the soles of cowhide turned up like a moccasin. they were yellow or reddish, the leather never having wen tanned nor colored. the women wore the same. he told us that he had traveled ten leagues due north into the bush, lie had been to the falls of st. anne, and said that they were more beau tiful, but not greater, than montmorenci, plus /&amp;gt;m. metis non plus grand que montonortnd. as soon as we had retired, the family com menced their devotions. a little boy officiated, and for a long time we heard him muttering over his prayers. in the morning, after a breakfast of tea, ma ple-sugar, bread and butter, and what i suppose is called potage (potatoes and meat boiled with flour), the universal dish as we found, perhaps the national one, i ran over to the church of la bonne st. anne, whose matin bell we had heard, it being sunday morning. our book said that this church had &quot;long been an object of interest, from the miraculous cures said to have been wrought on visitors to the shrine. &quot; there was a profusion of gilding, and i counted 64 a yankee in canada more than twenty-five crutches suspended on the walls, some for grown persons, some for chil dren, which it was to be inferred so many sick had been able to dispense with ; but they looked as if they had been made to order by the car penter who made the church. there were one or two villagers at their devotions at that early hour, who did not look up, but when they had sat a long time with their little book before the picture of one saint, went to another. our whole walk was through a thoroughly catholic country, and there was no trace of any other re ligion. i doubt if there are any more simple and unsophisticated catholics anywhere. em ery de caen, champlain s contemporary, told the huguenot sailors that &quot;monseigneur the duke de ventadour (viceroy) did not wish that they should sing psalms in the great river.&quot; on our way to the falls, we met the habitans coming to the church of la bonne st. anne, walking or riding in charettes by families. i remarked that they were universally of small stature. the toll-man at the bridge over the st. anne was the first man we had chanced to meet, since we left quebec, who could speak a word of english. how good french the inhab itants of this part of canada speak, i am not competent to say; i only know that it is not made impure by being mixed with english. i st. anne 65 do not know why it should not be as good as is spoken in normandy. charlevoix, who was here a hundred years ago, observes, &quot;the french language is nowhere sjx&amp;gt;ken with greater purity, there being no accent perceptible;&quot; and potherie said &quot;they had no dialect, which, in deed, is generally lost in a colony.&quot; the falls, which we were in search of, are three miles up the st. anne. &quot;nve followed for a short distance a foot-path up the east bank of this river, through handsome sugar-maple and arbor-vita; groves. having lost the path which led to a house where we were to get further directions, we dashed at once into the woods, steering by guess and by compass, climbing di rectly through woods a steep hill, or mountain, five or six hundred feet high, which was, in fact, only the bank of the st. lawrence. be yond this we by good luck fell into another path, and following this or a branch of it, at our discretion, through a forest consisting of large white pines, the first we had seen in our walk, we at length heard the roar of falling water, and came out at the head of the falls of st. anne. we had descended into a ravine or cleft in the mountain, whose walls rose still a hundred feet above us, though we were near its to]), and we now stood on a very rock) shore, where the water had lately flowed a dozen feet g6 a yankee in canada higher, as appeared by the stones and drift wood, and large birches twisted and splintered as a fanner twists a withe. here the river, one or two hundred feet wide, came flowing rapidly over a rocky bed out of that interesting wilder ness which stretches toward hudson s bay and davis s straits. ha-ha bay, on the saguenay, was about one hundred miles north of where we stood. looking on the map, i find that the first country on the north which bears a name is that part of rupert s land called east main. this river, called after the holy anne, flowing from such a direction, here tumbled over a pre cipice, at present by three channels, how far down i do not know, but far enough for all our purposes, and to as good a distance as if twice as far. it matters little whether you call it one, or two, or three hundred feet; at any rate, it was a sufficient water-privilege for us. i crossed the principal channel directly over the verge of the fall, where it was contracted to about fifteen feet in width, by a dead tree, which had ikjcu dropped across and secured in a cleft of the opposite rock, and a smaller one a few feet higher, which served for a hand-rail. this bridge was rotten as well as small and slippery, being stripped of bark, and i was obliged to seize a moment to pass when the falling water did not surge over it, and mid-way, though at st. anne the expense of wet feet, i looked down probably more than a hundred feet, into the mint and foam below. this gave me the freedom of an island of precipitous rock by which i descended as by giant steps, the rock being composed of large cubical masses, clothed with delicate close hugging lichens of various colors, kept fresh and bright by the moisture, till i viewed the first fall from the front, and looked down still deeper to where the second and third channels fell into a remarkably large circular basin worn in the stone. the falling water seemed to jar the very rocks, and the noise to be ever increasing. the vista down stream was through a narrow and deep cleft in the mountain, all white suds at the bottom ; but a sudden angle in this gorge pre vented my seeing through to the bottom of the fall. returning to the shore, i made my way down stream through the forest to see how far the fall extended, and how the river came out of that adventure. it was to clamber along the side of a precipitous mountain of loose mossy rocks, covered with a damp primitive forest, and terminating at the bottom in an abrupt precipice over the stream. this was the east side of the fall. at length, after a quarter of a mile, i got down to still water, and, on looking up through the winding gorge, i could just see to the foot of the fall which 1 had l&amp;gt;efore exam 68 a yankee in canada ined ; while from the opposite side of the stream, here much contracted, rose a perpendicular wall, i will not venture to say how many hun dred feet, but only that it was the highest per pendicular wall of bare rock that i ever saw. in front of me tumbled in from the summit of the cliff a tributary stream, making a beautiful cascade, which was a remarkable fall in itself, and there was a cleft in this precipice, appar ently four or five feet wide, perfectly straight up and down from top to bottom, which, from its cavernous depth and darkness, appeared merely as a black streak. this precipice is not sloped, nor is the material soft and crumbling slate as at montmorenci, but it rises perpendic ular, like the side of a mountain fortress, and is cracked into vast cubical masses of gray and black rock shining with moisture, as if it were the min of an ancient wall built by titans. birches, spruces, mountain-ashes with their bright red berries, arbor-vitaes, white pines, alders, etc., overhung this chasm on the very verge of the cliff and in the crevices, and here and there were buttresses of rock supporting trees part way down, yet so as to enhance, not injure, the effect of the bare rock. take it al together, it was a most wild and rugged and stupendous chasm, so deep and narrow where a river had worn itself a passage through a moun st. anne 69 tain of rtx k, and all around wa.s the compara ti\ iv untrodden wilderness. this was the limit of our walk down the st. lawrence. karly in the afternoon we began to retrace our steps, not being able to cross the north channel and return by the isle of orleans, on account of the trop grand rent, or too great wind. though the waves did run pretty hi^h, it was evident that the inhabitants of mont morenci county were no sailors, and made but little use of the river. when we reached the bridge, between st. anne and chateau richer, i ran back a little way to ask a man in the field the name of the river which we were crossing, but for a long time i could not make out what he said, for lie was one of the more unintelligi ble jacques cartier men. at last it flashed upon me that it was la riviere au chien, or the dog river, which my eyes beheld, which brought to my mind the life of the canadian voyageur and coureur de 601*9 a in r e w--t. in and wilder arcadia, methinks, than the world has ever seen; for the greeks, with all their wood and river gods, were not so qualified to name the natural features of a country as the ancestors of these french canadians ; and if any people had a right to substitute their own for the indian names, it was they. they have pre ceded the pioneer on our own frontiers, and 70 a yankee in canada named t\w prairie for us. la riviere au chien cannot, by any license of language, be translated into dog river, for that is not such a giving it to the dogs, and recognizing their place in crea tion, as the french implies. one of the tribu taries of the st. anne is named la riviere de ja roue ; and farther east are la riviere de la illonddle and la rivcere de la friponne. their very riviere meanders more than our river. yet the impression which this country made on me was commonly different from this. to a traveler from the old world, canada east may appear like a new country, and its inhabitants like colonists, but to me coming from new eng land, and l&amp;gt;eing a very green traveler withal, notwithstanding what i have said about hud son s bay, it appeared as old as normandy itself, and realized much that i had heard of europe and the middle ages. even the names of humble canadian villages affected me as if they had been those of the renowned cities of autiijuity. to be told by a habitan, when i asked the name of a village in sight, that it is st. fereole or *sy. anne, the guardian anyel or the 7/o/y joneph x ; or of a mountain, that it was belanyc or &amp;gt;s7. hyacinthe! as soon as you leave the states, these saintly names begin. st. john is the first town you stop at (fortu nately we did not see it), and thenceforward, st. anne 71 the names of the mountains, and streams, ami villages reel, if i may so speak, with the intoxi cation of poetry, chtimbly* longueil^ pu\i&amp;lt;i&amp;gt; aux tremble*. burtholomy^ etc., etc.; as if it needed nly a little foreign accent, a few more liquids and vowels perchance in the language, to make us locate our ideals at onee. i began to dream of provence and the trouhadours, and of places and things which have no existence on the earth. they veiled the indian and the primi tive forest, and the woods toward hudson s buv were onlv as tinforests of france and ger many. i could not at once bring myself to be lieve that the inhabitants who pronounced dailv those beautiful and, to me, significant names l.-ail as prosaic lives as we of n m england, [fl short, the canada which i saw was not merely a place for railroads to terminate in and for crim inals to run to. when i asked the man to whom i have re ferred, if there were any falls on the riviere an chien, for i saw that it came over the same high bank with the montmorenci and st. anne, he answered that there were. how far? i inquired. troia quatre* lieue. how hi-li je jtenne^ qvatre-rinyt-dir jrieds ; that is, ninety feet. we turned aside to look at the falls of the itivierc du sanlt a in pure, lialf a mile from the road, which l&amp;gt;efore we had passed in 72 .4 yankee in canada out haste and ignorance, and we pronounced them as beautiful as any that we saw; yet they seemed to make no account of them there, and, when first we inquired the way to the falls, di rected us to modtmorenci, seven miles distant. it was evident that this was the country for wa terfalls; that every stream that empties into the st. lawrence, for some hundreds of miles, must have a great fall or cascade on it, and in its passage through the mountains was, for a short distance, a small saguenay, with its upright walls. this fall of la puce, tlu least remark able of the four which we visited in this vicinity, we had never heard of till we came to canada, and yet, so far as i know, there is nothing of the kind in new england to be compared with it. most travelers in canada would not hear of it, though they might go so near as to hear it. since my return i find that in the topographical description of the country mention is made of &quot;two or three romantic falls &quot; on this stream, though we saw and heard of but this one. ask the inhabitants respecting any stream, if there is a fall on it, and they will perchance tell you of something as interesting as bashpish or the catskill, which no traveler has ever seen, or if they have not found it, you may possibly trace up the stream and discover it yourself. falls there are a drug; and we became quite dissi st. anne 73 pated in respect to them. we had drank too much of them. beside these which i have re ferred to, there are a thousand other falls on the st. lawrence and its tributaries which i have not seen nor heard of; and al&amp;gt;ove all tln-rr is one which i have heard of, called niagara, so that i think that this river must be the most remarkable for its falls of any in the world. at a house near the western boundary of chateau richer, whose master was said to sj&amp;gt;eak a very little english, having recently lived at queliec, we got lodging for the night. as usual, we had to go down a lane to get round to the south side of the house where the door was, away from the road. for these canadian houses have no front door, properly speaking. every part is for the use of the occupant exclu sively, and no part has reference to the traveler or to travel. every new england house, on the contrary, has a front and principal door opening to the great world, though it may ik? on the cold side, for it stands on the highway of nations, and the road which runs by it conies from the old world and goes to the far west; but the canadian s door opens into his back yard and farm alone, and the road which runs behind his house leads only from the church of one saint to that of another. we found a large family, hired men, wife and children, just eat 74 a } ankee in canada ing their supper. they prepared some for us afterwards. the hired men were a merry crew of short, black-eyed fellows, and the wife a thin faced, sharp-featured french canadian woman. our host s english staggered us rather more than any french we had heard yet ; indeed, we found that even we spoke better french than he did english, and we concluded that a less crime would be committed on the whole if we spoke french with him, and in no respect aided or abetted his attempts to speak english. we had a long and merry chat with the family this sunday evening in their spacious kitchen. while my companion smoked a pipe and par lez-vous d with one party, i parleyed and ges ticulated to another. the whole family was enlisted, and i kept a little girl writing what wa otherwise unintelligible. the geography getting obscure, we called for chalk, and the greasy oiled table-cloth having been wiped, for it needed no french, but only a sentence from the universal language of looks on my part, to indicate that it needed it, we drew the st. lawrence, with its parishes, thereon, and thenceforward went on swimmingly, by turns handling the chalk and committing to the table-cloth what would otherwise have been left in a limbo of unintelligibility. this was greatly to the entertainment of all parties. i was sr. axne 75 amused to hear how much use they made of the wortl oui in conversation with one another. af ter repeated single insertions of it, one would suddenly throw back his head at the same time with his chair, and exclaim rapidly, ** oui. 9 oui! oui! on* /&quot;like a yankee driving pigs. our host told us that the farms thereabouts were generally two acres or three hundred and sixty french feet wide, by one and a half leagues, (?) or a little more than four and a half of our miles deep. this use of the word (icre as long mea sure arises from the fact that the french acre or arpent, the arpent of paris, makes a square of ten perches, of eighteen feet each on a side, a paris foot being equal to 1.06575 english feet. he said that the wood was cut off about one mile from the river. the rest was &quot;bush,&quot; and beyond that the &quot;queen s bush.&quot; old as the country is, each landholder bounds on the prim itive forest, and fuel bears no price. as i had forgotten the french for tickle , they went out in the evening to the barn and got one, and so clenched the certainty of our understanding one another. then, wishing to learn if they used the cradle, and not knowing any french word for this instrument, i set up the knives and forks on the blade of the sickle to represent one; at which they all exclaimed that they knew and had used it. when snell* were mentioned 76 a yankee in canada they went out in the dark and plucked some. they were pretty good. they said they had three kinds of plums growing wild, blue, white, and red, the two former much alike and the best. also they asked me if i would have dex poultries, some apples, and got me some. they were exceedingly fair and glossy, and it was evident that there was no worm in them; but they were as hard almost as a stone, as if the season was too short to mellow them. we had seen no soft and yellow apples by the road side. i declined eating one, much as i admired it, observing that it would be good dans le printemp^ in the spring. in the morning when the mistress had set the eggs a-frving she nodded to a thick-set, jolly -looking fellow, who rolled up his sleeves, seized the long-handled griddle, and commenced a series of revolutions and evolutions with it, ever and anon tossing its contents into the air, where they turned com pletely topsy-turvy and came down t other side up; and this he repeated till they were done. that appeared to be his duty when eggs were concerned. i did not chance to witness this ]mrformanre, but my companion did, and he pronounced it a masterpiece in its way. this man s farm, with the buildings, cost seven hun dred pounds; some smaller ones, two hundred. in 1827, montmorenci county, to which the st. a\xk isle of orleans ha.s since wn added, was nearly as large as massachusetts, being the eighth county out of forty (in lower canada) in ex tent; but by far the greater part still must con tinue to be waste land, lying as it were under the walls of quebec. i quote these old statistics, not merely because of the difficulty of obtaining more recent ones, but also because i saw there so little evidence of any recent growth. there were in this county, at the same date, five roman catholic churches, and no others, five cures and five presbyteries, two schools, two corn-mills, four saw-mills, one earding-mill, no medical man, or notary or lawyer, five shopkeepers, four taverns (we saw no sign of any, though, after a little hesita tion, we were sometimes directed to some undis tinguished hut as such), thirty artisans, and live river crafts, whose tonnage amounted to sixty nine tons! this, notwithstanding that it ha* a frontage of more than thirty miles on the river, and the population is almost wholly confined to its banks. this describes nearly enough what we saw. but double some of these figures, which, however, its growth will not warrant, and you have described a poverty which not even its severity of climate and ruggedness of soil will suffice to account for. the principal produc tions were wheat, potatoes, oats, hay, i&amp;gt;eaa, fiax, 78 a yankee in canada maple-sugar, etc., etc. ; linen cloth, or etoffe du /k/ys, flannel, and homespun, or petite etoffe. in lower canada, according to bouchette, there are two tenures, the feudal and the socagc. tenanciers, censitaires, or holders of land en roture pay a small annual rent to the seigneurs, to which &quot;is added some articles of provision, such as a couple of fowls, or a goose, or a bushel of wheat.&quot; &quot;they are also bound to grind their corn at the moidin banal, or the lord s mill, where one fourteenth part of it is taken for his use&quot; as toll. he says that the toll is one twelfth in the united states where coin ixrtit ion exists. it is not permitted to ex ceed one sixteenth in massachusetts. but worse than this monopolizing of mill rents is what are called loch et rentes, or mutation fines, ac cording to which the seigneur has &quot;a right to a twelfth part of the purchase-money of every es tate within his seigniory that changes its owner by sale.&quot; this is over and above the sum paid to the seller. in such cases, moreover, &quot;the lord possesses the droit de rctrait, which is the privilege of preemption at the highest bidden price within forty days after the sale has taken place, v a right which, however, is said to be seldom exercised. &quot;lands held by roman catholics are further subject to the payment to their curates of one twenty -sixth part of all the st. anne 79 grain produced upon them, and to occasional as &amp;gt;rim-iits for building and repairing churches,&quot; etc., a tax to whieli they are not subject if the proprietors change their faith; hut they are not the less attached to their church in consequence. there are, however, various modifications of the feudal tenure. under the socage tenure, which is that of the townships or more recent settle ments, english, irish, scotch, and others, and generally of canada west, the landholder is wholly unshackled by such conditions as i have quoted, and &quot;is bound to no other obligations than those of allegiance to the king and obedi ence to the laws.&quot; throughout canada u a freehold of forty shillings yearly value, or the payment of ten pounds rent annually, is the qualification for voters.&quot; in 1846 more than one sixth of the whole population of canada east were qualified to vote for memws of par liament, a greater proportion than enjoy a similar privilege in the united states. the imputation which we had seen the last two days i mean the habitans of montmo renci county -appeared very inferior, intel lectually and even physically, to that of new england. in some respects they were incredi bly filthy. it was evident that they had not advanced since the settlement of the country, tliat they were quite behind the age, and fairly a yankee in canada represented their ancestors in normandy a thou saml years ago. even in respect to the com mon arts of life, they are not so far advanced as a frontier town in the west three years old. they have no money invested in railroad stock, and probably never will have. if they have got a french phrase for a railroad, it is as much as you can expect of them. they are very far from a revolution : have no quarrel with church or state, but their vice and their virtue is con tent. as for annexation, they have never dreamed of it; indeed, they have not a clear idea what or where the states are. the eng lish government lias been remarkably liberal to its catholic subjects in canada, permitting them to wear their own fetters, both political and re ligious, as far as was possible for subjects. their government is even too good for them. parliament passed &quot;an act [in 1825] to provide for the extinction of feudal and seigniorial rights and burdens on lands in lower canada, and for the gradual conversion of those tenures into the tenure of free and common socage,&quot; etc. but as late as 1831, at least, the design of the act was likely to be frustrated, owing to the reluctance of the seigniors and peasants. it has been ob served by another that the french canadians do not extend nor j&amp;gt;erpetuate their influence. the british, irish, and other immigrants, who have st. anne 81 settled the townships, are found to have imitated the american settlers and not the french. they reminded me in this of the indians, whom they were slow to displace, and to whose habits of lifo they themselves more readily conformed than the indians to theirs. the governor-gen eral denouville remarked, in 1685, tluit some had long thought that it was necessary to bring the indians near them in order to frenchify (/rfincjvr) them, but that they had evenrea son to think themselves in an error; for those who had come near them and were even col lected in villages in the midst of the colony had not become french, but the french who had haunted them had become savages. kalm said, &quot;though many nations imitate the french cus toms, yet i observed, on the contrary, that the french in canada, in many respects, follow the customs of the indians, with whom they con verse every day. they make use of the tobacco pipes, shoes, garters, and girdles of the indians. they follow the indian way of making war with exactness; they mix the same things with to bacco [he might have said that both french and english learned the use itself of this weed of the indian]; they make use of the indian bark boats, and row them in the indian way; they wrap square pieces of cloth round their feet instead of stockings: and have adopted many a yankee in canada other indian fashions.* thus, while the de scendants of the pilgrims are teaching the eng lish to make pegged boots, the descendants of the french in canada are wearing the indian moccasin still. the french, to their credit be it said, to a certain extent respected the indians as a separate and independent people, and spoko of them and contrasted themselves with them as the english have never done. they not only went to war with them as allies, but they lived at home with them as neighbors. in 1627 the french king declared &quot;that the descendants of the french, settled in&quot; new france, &quot;and the savages who should be brought to the knowledge of the faith, and should make profession of it, should be counted and reputed french born (natwreu fran$oi&)\ and as such could emigrate to france, when it seemed good to them, and there acquire, will, inherit, etc-., etc., without obtaining letters of naturalization.&quot; when the english had possession of quebec, in 1630, the indians, attempting to practice the same famil iarity with them that they had with the french, were driven out of their houses with blows; which accident taught them a difference between the two races, and attached them yet more to the french. the impression made on me was that the french canadians were even sharing the fate of the indians, or at least gradually st. an\e 83 disappearing in what is called the saxon cur rent. the english did not come to america from a mere love of adventure, nor to truck with or convert the savages, nor to hold offices under the crown, as the french to a great extent did, but to live in earnest and with freedom. the latter overran a gr -at extent of country, telling strong water, and collecting its furs, and con verting its inhabitants, or at least baptizing its dying infants (enfan* moribund *\ with out improving it. first, went the coiireitr de bois with the eau de vie ; then followed, if he did not precede, the heroic missionary with the eau d immortafite. it was freedom to hunt, and tish, and convert, not to work, that they sought. hontan says that the coureurs de bois lived like sailors ashore. in no part of the seventeenth century could the french l&amp;gt;e said to have had a foothold in canada; they held only by the fur of the wild animals which they were exterminating. to enable the poor seigneurs to get their living, it was permitted by a decree passed in the reign of louis the fourteenth, in 1685, **to all nobles and gentlemen settled in canada, to engage in commerce, without wing called to account or reputed to have done any thing derogatory.&quot; tin; reader can infer to what extent they had engaged in agriculture, 84 a yankee in canada and how their farms must have shone by this time. the new england youth, on the other hand, were never conreurn de bois nor voyageurs, but backwoodsmen and sailors rather. of all nations the english undoubtedly have proved hitherto that they had the most business here. yet i am not sure but i have most sympathy with that spirit of adventure which distinguished the french and spaniards of those days, and made them especially the explorers of the american continent, which so early carried the former to the great lakes and the missis sippi on the north, and the latter to the same river on the south. it was long before our frontiers reached their settlements in the west. so far as inland discovery was concerned, the adventurous spirit of the english was that of sailors who land but for a day, and their enter prise the enterprise of traders. there was apparently a greater equality of condition among the habitans of montmorenci county than in new england. they are an almost exclusively agricultural, and so far in dependent population, each family producing nearly all the necessaries of life for itself. if the canadian wants energy, perchance he pos sesses those virtues, social and others, which the yankee lacks, in which case he cannot be re gnrded as a poor man. chapter iv the walls of quebec after spending the night at a fann-hou.se in chateau richer, about a dozen miles northeast of quebec, we set out on our return to the city. we stopped at the next house, a picturesque old stone mill, ever the chipre, for so the name sounded, such as you will nowhere see in the states, and asked the millers the age of the mill. they went upstairs to call the master; but the crabbed old miser asked why we wanted to know, and would tell us only for some com pensation. i wanted french to give him a piece of my mind. i had got enough to talk on a pinch, but not to quarrel, so i had to come away, looking all i would have said. this was the utmost incivility we met with in canada. in beauport, within a few miles of quebec, we turned aside to look at a church which was just being completed, a very large and handsome edifice of stone, with a green bough stm-k in its gable, of some significance to catholics. the comparative wealth of the church in this coun try was apparent ; for in this village we did not 8g .1 yankee in canada see one good house besides. they were all humble cottages ; and yet this appeared to me a more imposing structure than any church in boston. but i am no judge of these things. keentering quebec through st. john s gate, we took a caleche in market square for the falls of the chaudiere, about nine miles south west of the city, for which we were to pay so much, beside forty sous for tolls. the driver, as usual, sj&amp;gt;oke french only. the number of these vehicles is very great for so small a town. they are like one of our chaises that has lost its top, only stouter and longer in the body, with a seat for the driver where the dasher is with us, and broad leather ears on each side to protect the riders from the wheel and keep children from falling out. they had an easy jaunting look, which, as our hours were numbered, per suaded us to be riders. we met with them on every road near quebec these days, each with its complement of two inquisitive-looking for eigners and a canadian driver, the former evi dently enjoying their novel experience, for com monly it is only the horse whose language you do not understand; but they were one remove further from him by the intervention of an equally unintelligible driver. we crossed the st. lawrence to point levi in a french cana dian ferry-boat, which was inconvenient and the walls of quebec 87 dirty, and managed with great noise and bu-:l. . the current wn-* v-rv strong ami tmiiultu&amp;gt;u, and the boat tossed enough to make some nick, though it was only a mile across; yet the wind was not to be compared with that of the day be fore, and we saw that the canadians had a good excuse for not taking us over to the isle of orleans in a pirogue, however shiftless they may be for not having provided any other convey ance. the route which we took to the chau diere did not afford us those views of quel&amp;gt;ec which we had expected, and the country and in habitants appeared less interesting to a traveler than those we had seen. the falls of the chaudiere are three miles from its mouth on the south side of the st. lawrence. though they were the largest which i saw in canada, i was not proportionately interested by them, proba bly from satiety. i did not see any peculiar propriety in the name chattd&r&, or caldron. i saw here the most brilliant rainbow that i ever imagined. it w;is just across the stream l&amp;gt;elow the precipice, formed on the mist which this tremendous fall produced; and 1 stood on a level with the key-stone of its arch. it was not a few faint prismatic colors merely, but a full semicircle, only four or five rods in diam t. r. though as wide as usual, so intensely bright as to pain the eye, and apparently as substantial a yankee in canada as an arch of stone. it changed its position and colors as we moved, and was the brighter because the sun shone so clearly and the mist was so thick. evidently a picture painted on mist for the men and animals that came to the falls to look at; but for what special purpose beyond this, i know not. at the farthest point in this ride, and when most inland, unexpectedly at a turn in the road we descried the frowning citadel of quebec in the horizon, like the beak of a bird of prey. we returned by the river road under th bank, which is very high, abrupt, and rocky. when we were opposite to quebec, i was surprised to see that in the lower town, under the shadow of the rock, the lamps were lit, twinkling not unlike crystals in a cavern, while the citadel high above, and we, too, on the south shore, were in broad daylight. as we were too late for the ferry-boat that night, we put up at a maixon de pension at point levi. the usual two-story stove was here placed against an opening in the partition shaped like a fireplace, and so warmed several rooms. we could not understand their french here very well, but the potaye was just like what we had hail wore. there were many small cliambers with doorways, but no doors. the walls of our chamber, all around and over head, were neatly ceiled, and the timbers cased the walls of querec 89 with wood unpainted. the pillows were check ered and tasseled, and the usual long-pointed red woolen or worsted night-cap was placed on each. i pulled mine out to see how it was made. it was in the form of a double cone, one end tucked into the other; just such, it ap peared, as i saw men wearing all day in the streets. probably i should have put it on if the cold had been then, as it is sometimes there, thirty or forty degrees below zero. when we landed at quebec the next morning a man lay on his back on the wharf, apparently dying, in the midst of a crowd and directly in the path of the horses, groaning, &quot; o in a con science!&quot; i thought that he pronounced his french more distinctly than any i heard, as if the dying had already acquired the accents of a universal language. having secured the only unengaged berths in the lord sydenham steamer, which was to leave queliee before sun down, and being resolved, now that i had seen somewhat of the country, to get an idea of tin city, i proceeded to walk round the upper town, or fortified portion, which is two miles and three quarters in circuit, alone, as near as i could get to the cliff and the walls, like a rat looking for a hole ; going round by the south west, where there is but a single street between the cliff and the water, and up the long wooden 90 a yankee in canada stairs, through the suburbs northward to the king s woodyard, which i thought must have iwen a long way from his fireplace, and under the cliffs of the st. charles, where the drains issue under the walls, and the walls are loop holed for musketry ; so returning by mountain street and prescott gate to the upper town. having found my way by an obscure passage near the st. louis gate to the glacis on the north of the citadel proper, i believe that i was the only visitor then in the city who got in there, i enjoyed a prospect nearly as good as from within the citadel itself, which i had ex plored some days before. as 1 walked on the glacis i heard the sound of a bagpipe from the soldiers dwellings in the rock, and was further soothed and affected by the sight of a soldier s cat walking up a elected plank into a high loop hole, designed for mus-catry, as serene as wis dom herself, and with a gracefully waving mo tion of her tail, as if her ways were ways of pleasantness and all her paths were peace. scaling a slat fence, where a small force might have checked me, i got out of the esplanade into the governor s garden, and read the well known inscription on wolfe and montcalm s monument, which for saying much in little, and that to the purpose, undoubtedly deserved the prize medal which it received: the walls of quebec iu mortem . virtus . communkm . famam . historia . m&amp;lt; &amp;gt;m ml.n mm. 1 ! i iii 1 \ dedit. valor gave them one death, history one fame, posterity one monument. thegovernment garden has for nosegays, amid kitchen vegeta bles, beside the common garden flowers, the usual complement of cannon directed toward some future and possible enemy. i then re turned up st. louis street to the esplanade and ramparts there, and went round the upjwr town once more, though i was very tired, this time on the inside of the wall; for i knew that the wall was the main thing in quebec, and liad cost a great deal of money, and therefore i must make the most of it. in fact, these are the only remarkable walls we have in north america, though we have a good deal of virginia fence, it is true. moreover, i cannot say but i yielded in some measure to the soldier instinct, and, having but a short time to spare, thought it test to examine the wall thoroughly, that 1 might l&amp;gt;e the tetter prepared if i should ever te called that way again in the service of my country. i committed all the gates to memory, in their or der, which did not cost me so much trouble as it would have done at the hunt! red -gated city. 92 a yankee in canada there being only five ; nor were they so hard to remember as those seven of boeotian thebes; and, moreover, i thought that, if seven cham pions were enough against the latter, one would in? enough against quebec, though he bore for :dl armor and device only an umbrella and a bundle. i took the nunneries as i went, for i had learned to distinguish them by the blinds ; and i observed also the foundling hospitals and the convents, and whatever was attached to, or in the vicinity of the walls. all the rest i omitted, as naturally as one would the inside of an inedible shell-fish. these were the only pearls, and the wall the only mother-of-pearl for me. quebec is chiefly famous for the thick ness of its parietal bones. the technical terms of its conchology may stagger a beginner a lit tle at first, such as banlieue, esplanade, glacis, ravelin, cavalier, etc., etc., but with the aid of a comprehensive dictionary you soon learn the nature of your ground. i was surprised at the extent of the artillery barracks, built so long ago, casernes nourelles, they used to be called, nearly six hundred feet in length by forty in depth, where the sentries, like peripa tetic philosophers, were so absorbed in thought as not to notice me when i passed in and out at the gates. within are &quot;small arms of every description, sufficient for the equipment of the walls of qt erec 93 twenty thousand men, * so arranged as to give a startling coup d ceil to strangers. i &amp;lt;li&amp;lt;l not enter, not wishing to get a black eye ; for they are said to be &quot;in a state of complete repair and readiness for immediate use/ here, for a short time, i lost sight of the wall, but i recov ered it again on emerging from the barrack yard. there i met with a scotchman who ap peared to have business with the wall, like my self; and, being thus mutually drawn together by a similarity of tastes, we had a little conver sation sub maenibun* that is, by an angle of the wall, which sheltered us. he lived about thirty miles northwest of quebec : had been nineteen years in the country ; said he was disappointed that he was not brought to america after all, but found himself still under british rule and where his own language was not spoken: that many scotch, irish, and english were disap pointed in like manner, and either went to the states, or pushed up the river to canada west, nearer to the states, and where their language was spoken. he talked of visiting the states sometime; and, as he seemed ignorant of geo graphy, i warned him that it was one thing to visit the state of massachusetts, and another to visit the state of california. he said it was colder there than usual at that season, and he was lucky to have brought his thick togue, or 94 a yankee ix canada frock-coat, with him; thought it would snow, and then be pleasant and warm. that is the way we are always thinking. however, his words were music to me in iny thin hat and sack. at the ramparts on the cliff near the old par liament house i counted twenty-four thirty two-poundera in a row, pointed over the harbor, with their balls piled pyramid-wise between them, there are said to be in all about one hundred and eighty guns mounted at quebec, all which were faithfully kept dusted by offi cials, in accordance witli the motto, &quot; in time of peace prepare for war; &quot; but i saw no prepara tions for peace; she was plainly an uninvited guest. having thus completed the circuit of this fortress, both within and without, i went no farther by the wall for fear that i should become wall-eyed. however, i think that i deserve to be made a member of the royal sappers and miners. in short, i observed everywhere the most per fect arrangements for keeping a wall in order, not even permitting the lichens to grow on it, which some think an ornament; but then i saw no cultivation nor pasturing within it to pay for the outlay, and cattle were strictly forbidden to feed on the glacis under the severest penalties. the walls of quebec 95 where the dogs get their milk i don t know, and i fear it is blowly at best. the citadel of quebec says, &quot; i will live here, and you shan t prevent me.&quot; to whieh you return, that you have not the slightest objection : live and let live. the martello towers looked, for all the world, exactly like abandoned wind mills, which had not had a grist to grind these hundred years. indeed, the whole castle here was a &quot;folly,&quot; england s folly, and, in more senses than one, a castle in the air. the inhabitants and the government are gradually waking up to a sense of this truth; for i heard something said about their abandoning the wall around the upper town, and confining the for tifications to the citadel of forty acres. of course they will finally reduce their intrench ments to the circumference of their own brave hearts. the most modern fortifications have an air of antiquity about them; they have the aspect of ruins in better or worse repair from the day they are built, because they are not really the work of this age. the very place where the soldier resides has a peculiar tendency to become old and dilapidated, as the word barrack im plies. i couple all fortifications in my mind with the dismantled spanish forts to be found in so many parts of the world ; and if in any % a yankee i\ canada place they are not actually dismantled, it is be cause that there the intellect of the inhabitants is dismantled. the commanding officer of an o old fort near valdivia in south america, when a traveler remarked to him that, with one dis charge, his gun -carriages would certainly fall to pieces, gravely replied, &quot;no, i am sure, sir, they would stand two.&quot; perhaps the guns of quebec would stand three. such structures carry us back to the middle ages, the siege of jerusalem, and st. jean d acre, and the days of the bucaniera. in the armory of the citadel they showed me a clumsy implement, long since useless, which they called a lombard gun. i thought that their whole citadel was such a lombard gun, fit object for the museums of the curious. such works do not consist with the development of the intellect. huge stone structures of all kinds, both in their erection and by their influence when erected, rather op press than liberate the mind. they are tombs for the souls of men, as frequently for their ixxlies also. the sentinel with his musket be side a man with his umbrella is spectral. there is not sufficient reason for his existence. does my friend there, with a bullet resting on half an ounce of powder, think that he needs that argu ment in conversing with me? the fort was the first institution that was founded here, and it is the walls of quebec 97 amusing to read in champlain how assiduously they worked at it almost from the first day of the settlement. the founders of the colony thought this an excellent site for a wall, and no doubt it was a lietter site, in some respect*, for a wall than for a city, but it chanced that a city got behind it. it chanced, too, that a lower town got before it, and clung like an oyster to the outside of the crags, as you may see at low tide. it is as if you were to come to a country village surrounded by palisades in the old indian fashion, interesting only as a relic of antiquity and barbarism. a fortified town is like a man cased in the heavy armor of an tiquity, with a horse-load of broadswords and small arms slung to him, endeavoring to go about his business. or is this an indispensable machinery for the good government of the coun try? the inhabitants of california succeed pretty well, and are doing better and better every day, without any such institution. what use has this fortress served, to look at it even from the soldiers point of view? at first the french took care of it; yet wolfe sailed by it with impunity, and took the town of quebec without experiencing any hindrance at last from its fortifications. they were only the bone for which the parties fought. then the english began to take care of it. so of any fort in the 98 a yaxkee in ca\ada world, that in boston harbor, for instance. we shall at length hear that an enemy sailed by it in the night, for it cannot sail itself, and both it anil its inhabitants are always benighted. how often we re;wl that the enemy occupied a position which commanded the old, and so the fort was evacuated. have not the school-house and the printing-press occupied a position which commands such a fort as this? however, this is a ruin kept in remarkably good repair. there are some eight hundred or thousand men there to exhibit it. one regi ment goes bare-legged to increase the attraction. if you wish to study the muscles of the leg about the knee, repair to quebec. this uni versal exhibition in canada of the tools and sinews of war reminded me of the keeper of a menagerie showing his animals claws. it was o o the english leopard showing his claws. always the royal something or other ; as at the menagerie, the royal bengal tiger. silliman states that &quot;the cold is so intense in the winter nights, par ticularly on cape diamond, that the sentinels cannot stand it more than one hour, and are re lieved at the expiration of that time;&quot; &quot;and even, as it is said, at much shorter intervals, in case of the most extreme cold.&quot; what a natu ral or unnatural fool must that soldier be, to say nothing of his government, who, when the walls of quebec w quicksilver is freezing and blood is ceasing to be quirk, will stand to have his fare frozen, watching the walls of qwwc, though, so far as they are concerned, both honest and dishonest men all the world over have been in their wds nearly half a century, or at least for that space travelers have visited quebec only as they would read history. i shall never again wake up in a colder night than usual, but i shall think how rapidly the sentinels are relieving one another on the walls of quebec, their quick silver being all frozen, as if apprehensive that some hostile wolfe may even then be scaling the heights of abraham, or some persevering arnold about to issue from the wilderness; some malay or japanese, pe reliance, coming round by the northwest coast, have chosen that moment to assault the citadel! why, i should as soon expect to find the sentinels still relieving one another on the walls of nineveh, which have so long been buried to the world. what a troublesome thing a wall is ! i thought it was to defend me, and not i it! of course, if they hail no wall, they would not need to have any sentinels. you might venture to advertise this farm as well fenced with substantial stone walls (saying nothing about the eight hundred highlanders and royal irish who are required to keep them 100 a yankee in canada from toppling ilown); stock and tools to go with the land if desired. but it would not be wise for the seller to exhibit his farm-book. why should canada, wild and unsettled as it is, impress us as an older country than the states, unless because her institutions are old? all things appeared to contend there, as i have implied, with a certain rust of antiquity, such as forms on old armor and iron guns, the rust of conventions and formalities. it is said that the metallic roofs of montreal and quebec keep sound and bright for forty years in some cases. but if the rust was not on the tinned roofs and spires, it was on the inhabitants and their insti tutions. yet the work of burnishing goes briskly forward. i imagined that the govern ment vessels at the wharves were laden with rotten-stone and oxalic acid, that is what the first ship from england in the spring comes freighted with, and the hands of the colonial legislature are cased in wash-leather. the principal exports must be gunny bags, verdi gris, and iron rust. those who first built this fort, coming from old france with the memory and tradition of feudal days and cus toms weighing on them, were unquestionably behind their age; and those who now inhabit and repair it are behind their ancestors or pre decessors. those old chevaliers thought that the walls of quebec 101 they could transplant the feudal system to america. it has been set out, but it has not thriven. notwithstanding that canada was set tled first, and, unlike n. w kngland. for a long series of years enjoyed the fostering care of the mother country; notwithstanding that, as charlevoix tells us, it had more of the ancient noblftse among its early settlers than any &amp;gt;tli i r of the french colonies, and perhaps than all the others together, there are in both the canadas but 600,000 of french descent to-day, alxhit half so many as the population of massachusetts. the whole population of both canadas is but about 1,700,000 canadians, kiililisli, irish, scotch, indians, and all, put to gether! samuel laing, in his essay on the northmen, to whom especially, rather than the saxons, he refers the energy and indeed the ex cellence of the english character, observes that, when they occupied scandinavia, &quot;each man possessed his lot of land without reference to, or acknowledgment of, any other man, with out any local chief to whom his military service or other quit-rent for his land was due, with out tenure from, or duty or obligation to, any superior, real or fictitious, except the general sovereign. the individual settler held his land, as his descendants in norway still express it, by the same right as the king held his crown. 102 a yankee in canada by utlal right, or adel, that is, noble right.&quot; the french have occupied canada, not udallij, or by noble right, but feudally , or by ignoble right. they are a nation of peasants. it was evident that, both on account of the feudal system and the aristocratic government, a private man was not worth so much in canada as in the united states; and, if your wealth in any measure consists in manliness, in original ity, and independence, you had better stay here. how could a peaceable, freethinking man live neighbor to the forty-ninth regiment? a new englander would naturally be a bad citizen, probably a rebel, there, certainly if he were already a rebel at home. i suspect that a poor man who is not servile is a much rarer phenome non there and in england than in the northern united states. an englishman, methinks, not to speak of other european nations, habit ually regards himself merely as a constituent part of the english nation ; he is a member of the royal regiment of englishmen, and is proud of his company, as he has reason to be proud of it. but an american one who has made a tolerable use of his opportunities cares, com paratively, little about such things, and is ad vantageously nearer to the primitive and the ultimate condition of man in these respects. it is a government, that english one, like most the walls of quebec 103 other european ones, that cannot afford to be forgotten, as you would naturally forget it; under which one cannot l&amp;gt;e wholesomely neg lected, and grow up a man and not an english man merely, cannot be a i&amp;gt;oet even without danger of being made poet-laureate! give me a country where it is the most natural thing in the world for a government that does not under stand you to let you alone. one would say that a true englishman could speculate only within bounds. (it is true the americans have proved that they, in more than one sense, can specu late without bounds.) he has to pay his re spects to so many things, that, before he knows it, he may have paid away all he is worth. ay hat makes the united states government, on the whole, more tolerable, i mean for us lucky white men, is the fact that there is so much less of government with us. here it is only once in a month or a year that a man needs remem l&amp;gt;er that institution ; and those who go to con gress can play the game of the kilkenny cats there without fatal consequences to those who stay at home, their term is so short; but in canada you are reminded of the government every day. it parades itself in-fore you. it is not content to be the servant, but will l&amp;gt;e the master; and every day it goes out to the plains of abraham or to the champ de mars and ex 104 a yankee in canada hibits itself ami its tools. everywhere there appeared an attempt to make and to preserve trivial and otherwise transient distinctions. in the streets of montreal and quebec you met not only with soldiers in red, and shuffling priests in unmistakable black and white, with sisters of charity gone into mourning for their de ceased relative, not to mention the nuns of various orders depending on the fashion of a tear, of whom you heard, but youths belong ing to some seminary or other, wearing coats edged with white, who looked as if their ex panding hearts were already repressed with a piece of tape. in short, the inhabitants of canada appeared to be suffering between two fires, the soldiery and the priesthood. chapter v the scenery of quebec; and the river st. lawrence about twelve o clock this day, being in the lower town, i looked up at the signal-gun by the flag-staff on cape diamond, and saw a sol dier up in the heavens there making prepara tions to fire it, both he and the gun in bold relief against the sky. soon after, being warned by the boom of the gun to look up again, there was only the cannon in the sky, the smoke just blowing away from it, as if the soldier, having touched it off, had concealed himself for effect, leaving the sound to echo grandly from shore to shore, and far up and down the river. this answered the purpose of a dinner-horn. there are no such restaurateurs in quew or montreal as there are in boston. i hunted an hour or two in vain in this town to find one, till i lost my appetite. in one house, called a restaurateur, where lunches were advertised, i found only tables covered with bottles and -la&amp;gt;srs innuinitablc, containing &quot;i i&quot; 11 : ; / :i 106 a yankee in canada sample of every liquid that has been known since the earth dried up after the flood, but no scent of solid food did i perceive gross enough to excite a hungry mouse. in short, i saw nothing to tempt me there, but a large map of canada against the wall. in another place i once more got as far as the bottles, and then asked for a bill of fare; was told to walk up stairs; had no bill of fare, nothing but fare. &quot;have you any pies or puddings?&quot; i inquired, for i am obliged to keep my savageness in check by a low diet. &quot;no, sir; we ve nice mutton-chop, roast beef, beef -steak, cutlets,&quot; and so on. a burly englishman, who was in the midst of the siege of a piece of roast beef, and of whom i have never had a front view to this day, turned half round, with his mouth half full, and remarked, &quot;you ll find no pies nor puddings in quebec, sir; they don t make any here.&quot; i found that it was even so, and therefore bought some musty cake and some fruit in the open market-place. this market place by the water-side, where the old women sat by their tables in the open air, amid a dense crowd jabbering all languages, was the best place in quebec to observe the people ; and the ferry-boats, continually coming and going with their motley crews and cargoes, added much to the entertainment. i also saw them getting quebec and the st. la whence 107 water from the river, for quel&amp;gt;ee is supplied with water by cart and barrel. this city im pressed me as wholly foreign and french, for i scarcely heard the sound of the english lan guage in the streets. more than three fifths of the inhabitants are of french origin; and if the traveler did not visit the fortiti* -atimis par ticularly, he might not be reminded that the english have any foothold here; and, in any case, if he looked no farther than quebec, they would appear to have planted themselves in canada only as they have in spain at (iibral tar; and he who plants upon a rock cannot expect much increase. the novel sights and sounds by the water-side made me think of such ports as boulogne, dieppe, rouen, and havre de grace, which i have never seen ; but i have no doubt that they present similar scenes. i was much amused from first to last with the sounds made by the charette and caleche driv ers. it was that part of their foreign language that you heard the most of, the french they talked to their horses, and which they talked the loudest. it was a more novel sound to me than the french of conversation. the stiv-t&amp;gt; resounded with the cries, u qui done!&quot; &quot; march?, tot ! &quot; i suspect that many of our horses which came from canada would prick up their ears at these sounds. of the shop, i 108 a yankee in canada was most attracted by those where furs and in dian works were sold, as containing articles of genuine canadian manufacture. i have been told that two townsmen of mine, who were in terested in horticulture, traveling once in can ada, and being in quebec, thought it would be a good opportunity to obtain seeds of the real canada crook-neck squash. so they went into a shop where such things were advertised, and inquired for the same. the shopkeeper hiul the very thing they wanted. &quot;but are you sure,&quot; they asked, &quot;that these are the genuine canada crook-neck?&quot; &quot;oh, yes, gentlemen,&quot; answered he, &quot;they are a lot which i have re ceived directly from boston.&quot; i resolved that my canada crook-neck seeds should be such as had grown in canada. too much has not been said about the scenery of quebec. the fortifications of cape diamond are omnipresent. they preside, they frown over the river and surrounding country. you travel ten, twenty, thirty miles up or down the river s banks, you ramble fifteen miles amid the hills on either side, and then, when you have long since forgotten them, perchance slept on them by the way, at a turn of the road or of your body, there they are still, with their geo metry against the sky. the child that is born and brought up thirty miles distant, and has quebec and the st. la wrexce 109 never traveled to the city, reads his country s hutiu-v. &amp;gt;vs the levrl liin-s vi the citadel amid the cloud-huilt eitadels in the western horizon, and is told that that is quebec. no wonder if jacques carrier s pilot exclaimed in norman french, que bed &quot;what a beakl&quot; when he saw this cape, as some suppose. every modern traveler involuntarily uses a similar ex pression. particularly it is said that its sud den apparition on turning point levi makes a memorable impression on him who arrives by water. the view from cape diamond has been compared by european travelers with the most remarkable views of a similar kind in europe, such as from edinburgh castle, gibraltar, ciutra, and others, and preferred by many. a main peculiarity in this, compared with other views which i have beheld, is that it is from the ramparts of a fortified city, and not from a soli tary and majestic river cape alone that this view is obtained. i associate the beauty of quebec with the steel-like and flashing air, which may ihj peculiar to that season of the year, in which the blue flowers of the succory and some late golden-rods and buttercups on the summit of cape diamond were almost my only compan ions, the former bluer than the heavens they faced. yet even i yielded in some degree to the influence of historical associations, and 110 a yankee in canada found it hard to attend to the geology of cape diamond or the botany of the plains of abra ham. i still remember the harbor far beneath me, sparkling like silver in the sun, the an swering highlands of point levi on the south east, the frowning cap tourmente abruptly bounding the seaward view far in the northeast, the villages of lorette and charlesbourg on the north, and further west the distant val cartier, sparkling with white cottages, hardly removed by distance through the clear air, not to mention a few blue mountains along the horizon in that direction. you look out from the ramparts of the citadel beyond the frontiers of civilization. yonder small group of hills, according to the guide-book, forms &quot;the portal of the wilds which are trodden only by the feet of the indian hunters as far as hudson s bay.&quot; it is but a few years since bouchette declared that the country ten leagues north of the british capital of north america was as little known as the middle of africa. thus the citadel under my feet, and all historical associations, were swept away again by an influence from the wilds and from nature, as if the beholder had read her history, an influence which, like the great river itself, flowed from the arctic fast nesses and western forests with irresistible tide over all. quebec axd the st. lawrence 111 the most interesting object in canada to me was the kiver st. lawrence, known far and wide, and for centuries, as the great river. carrier, its discoverer, sailed up it as far as montreal in 1535, nearly a century before the coming of the pilgrims ; and i have seen a pretty accurate map of it so far, containing the city of &quot;hochelaga&quot; and the river &quot;saguenay,&quot; in ortelius s theatrum orbit tcrrarum^ printed at antwerp in 1575, the first edition having appeared in 1570, in which the fa uious cities of &quot;norumbega&quot; and &quot;orsinora&quot; stand on the rough -blocked continent where new england is to-day, and the fabulous but unfortunate isle of demons, and frislant, and others, lie off and on in the unfrequented sea, some of them prowling near what is now the course of the cunard steamers. in this ponder ous folio of the &quot;ptolemy of his age,&quot; said to be the first general atlas published after the revival of the sciences in europe, only one page of which is devoted to the topography of the xovus orlls, the st. lawrence is the only large river, whether drawn from fancy or from observation, on the east side of north amer ica. it was famous in europe before the other rivers of north america were heard of, notwith standing that the mouth of the mississippi is said to have been discovered first, and its stream 112 a yankee in canada was reached by soto not long after; but the st. lawrence had attracted settlers to its cold shores long before the mississippi, or even the hudson, was known to the world. schoolcraft was misled by (iallatin into saying that nar vaez discovered the mississippi. de vega does not say so. the first explorers declared that the summer in that country was as warm as france, and they named one of the bays in the gulf of st. lawrence the bay of chaleur, or of warmth; but they said nothing about the winter being as cold as greenland. in the manuscript account of carrier s second voyage, attributed by some to that navigator himself, it is called &quot;the greatest river, without comparison, that is known to have ever been seen.&quot; the savages told him that it was the &quot;chemin du canada&quot; -the highway to canada, &quot;which goes so far that no man had ever been to the end that they had heard/ the saguenay, one of its tributaries, which the panorama has made known to new england within three years, is described by cartier, in 1535, and still more particularly by jean alphonse, in 1542, who adds, &quot;i think that this river comes from the sea of cathay, for in this place there issues a strong current, and there runs there a terrible tide.&quot; the early explorers saw many whales and other sea-monsters far up the st. law quebec and the st. lawrexce 113 rence. champlain, in his map, represents a whale spouting in the harbor of quebec, three hundred and sixty miles from what is called the mouth of the river; and charlevoix takes his reader to the summit of cape diamond to see the &quot;porpoises, white as snow,&quot; sporting on the surface of the harbor of quebec. and boucher says in 1664, &quot;from there (tadoussac) to mon treal is found a great quantity of mnranuins uancs.&quot; several whales have been taken pretty high up the river sinee i was there. p. a. gosse, in his &quot;canadian naturalist,&quot; p. 171 (london, 1840), speaks of &quot;the white dolphin of the st. lawrence (delph imi* canaden9i*\&quot; as considered different from those of the sea. &quot;the natural history society of montreal of-, fered a prize, a few years ago, for an essay on the cetacea of the st. lawrence, which was, i believe, handed in.&quot; in champlain s day it was commonly called &quot;the great river of canada.&quot; more than one nation has claimed it. in ogil by s &quot;america of 1670,&quot; in the map 3 r ort belfjii, it is called &quot;de groote rivicr van niew nederlandt.&quot; it bears different names in dif ferent parts of its course, as it hows through what were formerly the territories of different nations. from the gulf to lake ontario it is called at present the st. lawrence : from mon treal to the same place it is frequently called 114 a yankee in canada the cateraqui ; and higher up it is known suc cessively as the niagara, detroit, st. clair, st. mary s, and st. louis rivers. humboldt, speaking of the orinoco, says that this name is unknown in the interior of the country; so like wise the tribes that dwell about the sources of the st. lawrence have never heard the name which it bears in the lower part of its course. it rises near another father of waters, the mississippi, issuing from a remarkable spring far up in the woods, called lake superior, fif teen hundred miles in eircumference ; and sev eral other springs there are thereabouts which feed it. it makes such a noise in its tumbling down at one place as is heard all round the world. bouchette, the surveyor-general of the canadas, calls it &quot;the most splendid river on the globe; &quot; says that it is two thousand statute miles long (more recent geographers make it four or five hundred miles longer); that at the kiviere du sud it is eleven miles wide ; at the traverse, thirteen; at the paps of matane, twenty-five; at the seven islands, seventy three; and at its mouth, from cape rosier to the mingan settlements in labrador, near one hundred and five (?) miles wide. according to captain bay field s recent chart it is about ninety-six geographical miles wide at the latter place, measuring at right angles with the stream. quebec and the st. lawrence 11&quot;&amp;gt; it has much the largest estuary, regarding both length uiul breadth, of any river on the gloliu. hiuiibolilt says that the river plate, which has the broadest estuary of the south american rivers, is ninety-two geographical miles wide at its mouth; also he found the orinoco to be more than three miles wide at live hundred and sixty miles from its mouth ; but he does not tell us that ships of six hundred tons can sail up it so far, as they can up the st. lawrence to mon treal, an equal distance. if he had described a fleet of such ships at anchor in a city s jx)rt so far inland, we should have got a very differ ent idea of the orinoco. perhaps charlevoix describes the st. lawrence truly as the most navigable river in the world. between mon treal and quebec it averages about two miles wide. the tide is felt as far up as three riv ers, four hundred and thirty-two miles, which is as far as from boston to washington. as far up as cap aux oyes, sixty or seventy miles below quebec, kaliu found a great part of the plants near the shore to be marine, as glass wort (salicornia), seaside pease (i isum man timum\ sea -milk wort (glavx\ beach-grass (psamma arenarium\ seaside plantain (/vr/w tatjo maritlma), the sea-rocket (fiunias cakilc)* etc. the geographer guyot observes that the 116 a yankee in canada marafton is three thousand miles long, and gathers its waters from a surface of a million and a half square miles; that the mississippi is also three thousand miles long, but its basin covers only from eight to nine hundred thousand square miles ; that the st. lawrence is eighteen hundred miles long, and its basin covers more than a million square miles (darby says five hundred thousand); and speaking of the lakes, he adds, * these vast fresh-water seas, together with the st. lawrence, cover a surface of nearly one hundred thousand square miles, and it has been calculated that they contain about one half of all the fresh water on the surface of our planet.&quot; but all these calculations are necessa rily very rude and inaccurate. its tributaries, the ottawa, st. maurice, and saguenay, are great rivers themselves. the latter is said to be more than one thousand (?) feet deep at its mouth, while its cliffs rise perpendicularly an equal distance above its surface. pilots say there are no soundings till one hundred and fifty miles iij) the st. lawrence. the greatest sounding in the river, given on bayfield s chart of the gulf and river, is two hundred and twenty eight fathoms. mctaggart, an engineer, ob serves that &quot;the ottawa is larger than all the rivers in great britain, were they running in one.&quot; the traveler grey writes : &quot; a dozen dan quebec and the st. lawrence 117 ubes, khines, taguses, and thameaea would l&amp;gt;e imtliiiig to twenty miles of fresh water in 1m :idth [as where he hapi&amp;gt;ened to he], from ten to forty fathoms in depth.&quot; and again: u there is not perhaps in tlie whole extent of this immense continent so fine an approach to it as by the river st. lawrence. in the south ern states you have, in general, :i level country for many miles inland ; here you are introduced at once into a majestic scenery, where every thing is on a grand scale, mountains, woods, lakes, rivers, precipices, waterfalls. * we have not yet the data for a minute com parison of the st. lawrence with the south american rivers; but it is obvious that, taking it in connection with its lakes, its estuary, and its falls, it easily bears off the palm from all the rivers on the globe; for though, as boh chette observes, it may not carry to the ocean a greater volume of water than the amazon and mississippi, its surface and cubic mass are far greater than theirs. but, unfortunately, this noble river is closed by ice from the beginning of december to the middle of april. the arri val of the first vessel from england when the ice breaks up is, therefore, a great event, as when the salmon, shad, and alewives come up a river in the spring to relieve the famishing in hal hunts on its banks. who can say what 118 a yankee in canada would have been the history of this continent if, as has been suggested, this river had emptied into the sea where new york stands! after visiting the museum and taking one more look at the wall, i made haste to the lord sydenham steamer, which at five o clock was to leave for montreal. i had already taken a seat on deck, but finding that i had still an hour and a half to spare, and remembering that large map of canada which i hail seen in the parlor of the restaurateur in my search after pudding, and realizing that i might never see the like out of the country, i returned thither, asked liberty to look at the map, rolled up the mahogany table, put my handkerchief on it, stood on it, and copied all i wanted before the maid came in and said to me standing on the table, &quot;some gentlemen want the room, sir;&quot; and i retreated without having broken the neck of a single bot tle, or my own, very thankful and willing to pay for all the solid food i had got. we were soon abreast of cap rouge, eight miles above quebec, after we got underway. it was in this place, then called &quot;fort du france roys that the sieur de roberval with his company, hav ing sent home two of his three ships, spent the winter of 1542-43. it appears that they fared in the following manner (i translate from the original): &quot;each mess had only two loaves, quebec and the st. la whence 119 weighing each a pound, and half a |x&amp;gt;und of beef. they ato jh)rk for dinner, with half a pound of butter, and beef for supper, with about two hanclfuls of beans without buttr. wednesdays, fridays, and saturdays they ate salted cod, and smnrtiiiirs givni, for diiim-r. with butter; and porpoise and beans for supper. mniimriir roberval administered good justice, and punished each according to his offense. one, named michel gaillon, was hung for theft; john of nantes was put in irons and im prisoned for his fault; and others were likewise put in irons; and many were whipped, both men and women ; by which means they lived in peace and tranquillity.&quot; in an account of a voyage up this river, printed in the jesuit rela tions in the year 1664, it is said: &quot;it was an interesting navigation for us in ascending the river from cap tourmente to quebec, to see on this side and on that, for the space of eight leagues, the farms and the houses of the com pany, built by our french, all along these shoivs. ( )n tli.right, the eigni&amp;lt; riei of bean port, of notre dame des anges; and on the left, this beautiful isle of orleans.&quot; the same traveler names among the fruits of the country observed at the isles of richelieu, at the head of lake st. peter, &quot;kinds (des e*peces) of little apples or haws (semelle*), and of pears, which only ripon with the frost.&quot; 1*20 a yankee in canada night came on before we had passed the high banks. we had come from montreal to que bec in one night. the return voyage, against the stream, takes but an hour longer. jacques cartier, the first white man who is known to have ascended this river, thus speaks of his voyage from what is now quebec to the foot of lake st. peter, or about halfway to montreal : &quot;from the said day, the 19th, even to the 28th of the said month [september, 1535], we had been navigating up the said river without losing hour or day, during which time we had seen and found as much country and lands as level as we could desire, full of the most beautiful trees in the world,&quot; which he goes on to describe. but we merely slept and woke again to find that we had passed through all that country which he was eight days in sailing through. he must have had a troubled sleep. we were not long enough on the river to realize that it had length ; we got only the impression of its breadth, as if we had passed over a lake a mile or two in breadth and several miles long, though we might thus have slept through a european king dom. being at the head of lake st. peter, on the above-mentioned 28th of september, dealing with the natives, cartier says: &quot;we inquired of them by signs if this was the route to hoche laga [montreal]; and they answered that it was, quebec and the st. la whence 121 and that there were yet three days journeys to go there. * he finally arrived at hochelaga on the 2d of october. when i went on deck at dawn we had al ready passed through lake st. peter, and saw islands ahead of us. our boat advancing with a strong and steady pulse over the calm surface, we felt as if we were permitted to be awake in the scenery of a dream. many vivacious loin hardy poplars itlmi^ the distant shores gave them a novel and lively, though artificial, look, and contrasted strangely with the slender and graceful elms on both shores and islands. the church of varennes, fifteen miles from mon treal, was conspicuous at a great distance before us, appearing to belong to, and rise out of, the river; and now, and before, mount royal indi cated where the city was. we arrived about seven o clock, and set forth immediately to as cend the mountain, two miles distant, going across lots in spite of numerous signs threaten ing the severest penalties to trespassers, past an old building known as the mac tavish property, simon mac tavish, i 8upjx&amp;gt;se, whom silli man refers to as &quot;in a sense the founder of the northwestern company.&quot; his tomb was be hind in the woods, with a remarkably high wall and higher monument. the family returned to europe. he could not have imagined how dead 122 a yankee in canada lie would be in a few years, and all the more dead and forgotten for being buried under such a mass of gloomy stone, where not even memory could get at him without a crowbar. ah ! poor man, with that last end of his! however, he may have been the worthiest of mortals for aught that i know. from the mountain-top we got a view of the whole city; the flat, fer tile, extensive island; the noble sea of the st. lawrence swelling into lakes; the mountains about st. hyacinthe, and in vermont and new york ; and the mouth of the ottawa in the west, overlooking that st. anne s where the voyageur sings his &quot;parting hymn,&quot; and bids adieu to civilization, a name, thanks to moore s verses, the most suggestive of poetic associations of any in canada. we, too, climbed the hill which cartier, first of white men, ascended, and named mont real (the 3d of october, o. s., 1535), and, like him, &quot;we saw the said river as far as we could see, grand, large, et spacieux, going to the southwest,&quot; toward that land whither donnacona had told the discoverer that he had been a month s journey from canada, where there grew &quot;force candle et girofle,&quot; much cinnamon and cloves, and where also, as the natives told him, were three great lakes and afterward tine mer douce, a sweet sea, de laquelle n\*t ///&amp;gt; ntion avoir vv le bout, of which quebec and the st. l.\ wrkxck 123 there is no mention to have seen the end. but instead of an indian town far in the interior of a new world, with guides to show us where the river came from, we found a splendid and hus tling stone-built city of white men, and only a few squalid indians offered to sell us baskets at the lachine railroad depot, and ilochelaga is, perchance, but the fancy name of an engine company or an eating-house. we left montreal wednesday, the 2d of october, late in the afternoon. in the la prairie cars the yankees made themselves merry, imitating the cries of the charette dri vers to perfection, greatly to the amusement of some french canadian travelers, and they kept it up all the way to boston. i saw one person on board the boat at st. john s, and one or two more elsewhere in canada, wearing homespun gray great-coats, or cajm)tes, with conical and comical hoods, which fell back between their shoulders like small bags, ready to be turned up over the head when occasion required, though a hat usurped that place now. they looked as if they would ikj convenient and proper enough as long as the coats were new and tidy, but would soon come to have a beggarly and unsightly look, akin to rags and dust-holes. we reached burlington early in the morning, where the yankees tried to pass off their canada coppers, 124 a yankee in canada but the news-boys knew better. returning through the green mountains, i was reminded that i had not seen in canada such brilliant autumnal tints as i had previously seen in ver mont. perhaps there was not yet so great and sudden a contrast with the summer heats in the former country as in these mountain valleys. as we were passing through ashburnham, by a new white house which stood at some distance in a field, one passenger exclaimed, so that all in the car could hear him, &quot; there, there s not so good a house as that in all canada! &quot; i did not much wonder at his remark, for there is a neat ness, as well as evident prosperity, a certain clastic easiness of circumstances, so to speak, when not rich, about a new england house, as if the proprietor could at least afford to make repairs in the spring, which the canadian houses do not suggest. though of stone, they are no better constructed than a stone barn would be with us ; the only building, except the chateau, on which money and taste are ex pended, being the church. in canada an ordi nary new england house would be mistaken for the chateau, and while every village here con tains at least several gentlemen or &quot;squires,&quot; there there is but one to a seigniory. i got home this thursday evening, having sj)ent just one week in canada and traveled quebec and tllk st. lawrkxch 125 eleven hundred miles. the whole expense of this journey, including two guide-books ami a map, which cost one dollar twelve and a half cents, was twelve dollars seventy-five eents. i do not suppose that i have seen all british america; that could not be done by a cheap excursion, unless it were a cheap excursion to the icy sea, as seen by ilearne or mackenzie, and then, no doubt, some interesting features would be omitted. i wished to go a little way behind the word canadense, of which natural ists make such frequent use; and i should like still right well to make a longer excursion on foot through the wilder parts of canada, which perhaps might be called itcr canadense. natfual history of massaciirsktts 1 books of natural history make the most cheerful winter reading. 1 read in audulxm with a thrill of delight, when the snow covers the ground, of the magnolia, and the florida keys, and their warm sea-breezes ; of the fence rail, and the cotton-tree, and the migrations of the rice-bird ; of the breaking up of winter in labrador, and the melting of the snow on the forks of the missouri; and owe an accession of health to these reminiscences of luxuriant na ture. within the circuit of this plodding life, there enu&amp;gt;r moments of an azure hue, untarnished fair as in the viol, t or anemone, when the spring strewn them by tome meandering rivulet, which make the best philosophy untrue that aims but to console man for his grievance*. 1 have remembered when the winter came, high in my chamber in the frosty nights. when in the still light of the cheerful moon, 1 report* on the fia, reptile*, and bird*; the herba ceous plants and quadruped* ; the intects injurious to vegeta tion; and the invertebrate animal$ of mauarhuitttt. pub lished agreeably to an order of the legislature, by the commiaaionera on the zoological and botanical surrey of the state. 128 natural history on every twig and rail and jutting spout, the icy spears were adding to their length against the arrows of the coming sun, how in the shimmering noon of summer past some unrecorded beam slanted across the upland pastures where the johns wort grew ; or heard, amid the verdure of my mind. the bee s long smothered hum, on the blue hag loitering amidst the mead ; or busy rill. which now through all its course itmdt still and dumb, ita own memorial, purling at its play along the slopes, and through the meadows next, until its youthful sound was hushed at last in the staid current of the lowland stream ; or seen the furrows shine but late upturned, and where the fieldfare followed in the rear, when all the fields around lay bound and hoar beneath a thick integument of snow. so by god s cheap economy made rich to go upon my winter s task again. i am singularly refreshed in winter when i hear of service-berries, poke-weed, juniper. is not heaven made up of these cheap summer glo ries? there is a singular health in those words, labrador and east main, which no desponding creed recognizes. how much more than fed eral are these states. if there were no other vicissitudes than the seasons, our interest would never tire. much more is adoing than con gress wots of. what journal do the persim mon and the buckeye keep, and the sharp shi nned hawk? what is transpiring from summer to winter in the carolinas, and the of massachusetts 129 groat pine forest, and the valley of the mo hawk? the merely ]m&amp;gt;litiral aspect of the land is never very ( li i in^; men are degraded wln-n considered as the members of a political organi zation. on this side all lands present only the symptoms of decay. i see but hunker hill and sing-sing, the district of columbia and sulli van s island, with a few avenues connecting them. hut paltry are they all beside one blast of the east or the south wind which blows over them. in society you will not find health, but in nature. uidess our feet at least stood in the midst of nature, all our faces would be pale and livid. society is always diseased, and the best is the most so. there is no scent in it so whole snin.a&amp;gt; that &amp;gt;t tinpines, dot an\ fragrance bo penetrating and restorative as the life-everlast ing in high pastures. i would keep some book of natural history always by me as a sort of elixir, the reading of which should restore the tone of the system. to the sick, indeed, nature is sick, but to the well, a fountain of health. to him who contemplates a trait of natural beauty no harm nor disappointment can e&amp;lt;&amp;gt;m.-. the doctrines of despair, of spiritual or political tyranny or servitude, were never taught by such as shared the serenity of nature. surely good c..urau r(1 u ill i&quot;t ^ :l here on the atlantic lxr 1 natural history der, as long as we are flanked by the fur coun tries. there is enough in that sound to cheer one under any circumstances. the spruce, the hemlock, and the pine will not countenance de spair. methinks some creeds in vestries and churches do forget the hunter wrapped in furs l&amp;gt;y the great slave lake, and that the esqui maux sledges are drawn by dogs, and in the twilight of the northern night the hunter does not give over to follow the seal and walrus on the ice. they are of sick and diseased imagi nations who would toll the world s knell so soon. cannot these sedentary sects do better than pre pare the shrouds and write the epitaphs of those other busy living men? the practical faith of all men belies the preacher s consolation. what is any man s discourse to me, if i am not sensi ble of something in it as steady and cheery as the creak of crickets? in it the woods must be relieved against the sky. men tire me when i am not constantly greeted and refreshed as by the flux of sparkling streams. surely joy is the condition of life. think of the young fry that leap in ponds, the myriads of insects ush ered into being on a summer evening, the inces sant note of the hyla with which the woods ring in the spring, the nonchalance of the butterfly carrying accident and change painted in a thou sand lines upon its wings, or the brook minnow of massachusetts 131 stoutly stemming the current, the lustre of whose sidles, worn bright by the attrition, is re flected upon the bunk. we fancy that this din of religion, literature, atid philosophy, which is heard in pulpits, lyce ums, and parlors, vibrates through the universe, and is as catholic a sound as the creaking of the .arth axle: l&amp;gt;ut it a man d i 1 kwuldly, li-^ill forget it all between sunset and dawn. it is the three-inch swing of a pendulum in a cup board, which the great pulse of nature vibrates by and through each instant. when wo lift our eyelids and open our ears, it disappears with smoke and rattle like the cars on a rail road. when i detect a beauty in any of the recesses of nature, i am reminded, by the serene and retired spirit in which it requires to be con templated, of the inexpressible privacy of a life, how silent and unambitious it is. the l&amp;gt;eauty there is in mosses must be considered from the holiest, quietest nook. what an ad mirable training is science for the more active warfare of life. indeed, the unchallenged brav ery, which these studies imply, is far more im pressive than the trumpeted valor of the war rior. i am pleased to learn that thales was up and stirring by night not unfrequently, as his astronomical discoveries prove. linna?us, set ting out for lapland, surveys his &quot;comb&quot; and 132 natural history &quot;spare shirt,&quot; &quot;leathern breeches&quot; and &quot;gauze cap to keep off gnats,&quot; with as much compla cency as bonaparte a park of artillery for the russian campaign. the quiet bravery of the man is admirable. his eye is to take in fish, flower, and bird, quadruped and biped. sci ence is always brave; for to know is to know good; doubt and danger quail before her eye. what the coward overlooks in his hurry, she calmly scrutinizes, breaking ground like a pioneer for the array of arts that follow in her train. but cowardice is unscientific; for there cannot be a science of ignorance. there may be a science of bravery, for that advances ; but a retreat is rarely well conducted ; if it is, then is it an orderly advance in the face of circum stances. but to draw a little nearer to our promised topics. entomology extends the limits of being in a new direction, so that i walk in nature with a sense of greater space and freedom. it sug gests besides, that the universe is not rough hewn, but perfect in its details. nature will bear the closest inspection ; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. she has no interstices; every part is full of life. i explore, too, with pleasure, the sources of the myriad sounds whirh crowd the summer noon, and which seem of massachusetts 133 ti vt-ry _rr:in :in made. who does not remember the shrill roll call of the harvest fly? there were ears for these sounds in greece long ago, as anacreon i ode will show. &quot; we pronounce thee happy, cicada, for on the tops of the trees, prinking :i little dew, like any king thou ling nit, for thine are they all, whatever thou seest in the field*, and whatever the woods bear. thou art the friend of the husbandmen, in no respect injuring any one ; and thou art honored among men, sweet pn&amp;gt;ph-t f summer. the muses love thee, and phoebus himself love* thee, and has given thee a shrill song ; age does not wrack thee, thou skillful, earthborn. song-loving, i &quot;nsu ffering, bloodless one ; almost thou art like the gods.&quot; in the autumn days, the creaking of crickets is heard at noon over all the land, and as in summer they are heard chiefly at nightfall, so then by their incessant chirp they usher in the evening of the year. nor can all the vanities that vex the world alter one whit the measure that night has chosen. every pulse-lwat is in exact time with the cricket s chant and the tick ings of the death-watch in the wall. alternate with these if you can. 134 natural history about two hundred and eighty birds either reside permanently in the state, or spend the summer only, or make us a passing visit. those which spend the winter with us have ob tained our warmest sympathy. the nut-hatch and chickadee flitting in company through the dells of the wood, the one harshly scolding at the intruder, the other with a faint lisping note enticing him on ; the jay screaming in the or chard ; the crow cawing in unison with the storm ; the partridge, like a russet link extended over from autumn to spring, preserving unbroken the chain of summers; the hawk with warrior-like firmness abiding the blasts of winter; the robin 1 and lark lurking by warm springs in the woods; the familiar snow-bird culling a few seeds in the garden, or a few crumbs in the yard ; and occa sionally the shrike, with heedless and unfrozen melody bringing back summer again : his steady sails he never furls at any time o year, and perching now on winter s curls, he whistles in his car. 1 a white robin and a white quail have occasionally beta seen. it is mentioned in audubon as remarkable that the nest of a robin should be found on the ground ; but this bird seems to be leas particular than most in the choice of a building spot i have seen its nest placed nnder the thatched roof of a de serted barn, and in one instance, where the adjacent country was nearly destitute of trees, together with two of the phujbe, npon the end of a board in tho loft of a saw-mill, but a f-w feet of massachusetts 1 &amp;gt; as the spring advances, and the ice is melting in the river, our earliest ami straggling visitors make their appearance. again does the old teian poet sing as well for new england as for greece, in the return of spring behold, how spring appearing, the grace* send forth rose* ; behold, how the wave of the mft ib made smooth by the calm ; behold, how the duck dives ; behold, how the crane travels ; and titan shines coastantly bright. the shadows of the cloud* are moving ; the works of man shine ; the earth puts forth fruits ; the fruit of the olive puts forth. the cup of bacchus l* crowned, along the leaves, along the branches. the fruit, bending them down, flourishes. the ducks alight at this season in the still water, in company with the gulls, which do not fail to improve an east wind to visit our mead ows, and swim about by twos and threes, plum ing themselves, and diving to peck at the root of the lily, and the cranberries which the frost has not loosened. the first flock of geese is seen beating to north, in long harrows and waving lines; the jingle of the song-sparrow salutes us from the saw, which vibrated several inches with the motion of the machinery. 185 natural history from the shrubs and fences; the plaintive note of the lark comes clear and sweet from the meadow; and the bluebird, like an azure ray, glances past us in our walk. the fish-hawk, too, is occasionally seen at this season sailing majestically over the water, and lie who has once observed it will not soon forget the majesty of its flight. it sails the air like a ship of the line, worthy to struggle with the elements, falling back from time to time like a ship on its beam ends, and holding its talons up as if ready for the arrows, in the attitude of the national bird. it is a great presence, as of the master of river and forest. its eye would not quail before the owner of the soil, but make him feel like an in truder on its domains. and then its retreat, sailing so steadily away, is a kind of advance. i have by me one of a pair of ospreys, which have for some years fished in this vicinity, shot by a neighboring pond, measuring more than two feet in length, and six in the stretch of its wings. nuttall mentions that &quot;the ancients, particu larly aristotle, pretended that the ospreys taught their young to gaze at the sun, and those who were unable to do so were destroyed. linnaeus even believed, on ancient authority, that one of the feet of this bird had all the toes divided, while the other was partly webbed, so that it could swim with one foot, and grasp a fish with the of massachusetts 137 other.&quot; but that educated eye is now dim, and those talons are nerveless. its shrill scream seems yet to linger in its tliro.it, and the roar of the sea in its wings. there i.s the tyranny of jove in its claws, and his wrath in the erectile feathers of the head and neck. it reminds me of the argonautic expedition, and would inspire the dullest to take flight over parnassus. the booming of the bittern, described by goldsmith and nuttall, is frequently heard in our fens, in the morning and evening, sounding like a pump, or the chopping of wood in a frosty morning in some distant farm -yard. the manner iu which this sound is produced i have not seen anywhere described. on one occasion, the bird has been seen by one of my neighbors to thrust its bill into the water, and suck up as much as it could hold, then, raising its head, it pumped it out airain with four or five heaves of the in-rk. o throwing it two or three feet, and making the sound each time. at length the summer s eternity is ushered in by the cackle of the flicker among the oaks on the hillside, and a new dynasty begins with calm security. in may and june the woodland quire is in full tune, and given the immense spaces of hollow air, and this curious human ear, one does not see how the void could be better filled. 188 natural history each summer sound la a summer round. as the season advances, and those birds which make us but a passing visit depart, the woods become silent again, and but few feathers ruffle the drowsy air. but the solitary rambler may still find a response and expression for every mood in the depths of the wood. sometimes i hear the veery s * clarion, or brazen trump of the impatient jay, and in secluded woods the chickadee doles out her scanty notes, which sing the praise of heroes, and set forth the loveliness of virtue evermore. the phrebe still sings in harmony with the sultry weather by the brink of the pond, nor are the desultory hours of noon in the midst of the village without their minstrel. upon the lofty elm-tree sprays the virvo rings the changes sweet, during the trivial summer days, striving to lift our thoughts above the street. with the autumn begins in some measure a new spring. the plover is heard whistling high 1 tills bin!, which is so well described by nut tall, but is apparently unknown by the author of the report, is one of the most common in the woods in this vicinity, and in cambridge i have heard the college yard ring with its trill. the boys call it &quot; yorricjl-,&quot; from the sound of its querulous and chiding note, as it flits near the traveler through the underwood. the t-owbird s egg is occasionally found in its nest, as mentioned by audubon. of mass a cllusetts 189 in the air over the dry pastures, the finches flit from tree to tree, the bobolinks ami flickers fly in flocks, and the goldfinch rides on the earliest blast, like a winged hyla peeping amid the rustle of the leaves. the crows, too, l&amp;gt;egin now to congregate; you may stand and count them as they fly low and straggling over the landscape, singly or by twos and threes, at intervals of half a mile, until a hundred have passed. i have seen it suggested somewhere that the crow was brought to this country by the white man ; but i shall as soon believe that the white man planted these pines and hemlocks. he is no spaniel to follow our steps; but rather flits about the clearings like the dusky spirit of the indian, reminding me oftener of philip and powhatan, than of winthrop and smith. he is a relic of the dark ages. by just so slight, by just so lasting a tenure does superstition hold the world ever; there is the rook in england, and the crow in new england. thou dusky spirit of th wood, bird of an am i. nt hrood. flitting thy lonely way. a meteor in the summer s day. from wood to wood, from hill to hill, low over forest, field, and rill, what wouldnt thou say ? why should.ht thou haunt th&amp;gt; day f what makes thy melancholy float f what bravery iuapires thy throat, 140 natural history and bears thee up above the clouds, over desponding human crowds, which far below lay thy haunta low ? the late walker or sailor, in the october evenings, may hear the murmurings of the snipe, circling over the meadows, the most spirit-like sound in nature ; and still later in the autumn, when the frosts have tinged the leaves, a solitary loon pays a visit to our retired ponds, where he may lurk undisturbed till the season of moult ing is passed, making the woods ring with his wild laughter. this bird, the great northern diver, well deserves its name; for when pur sued with a boat, it will dive, and swim like a fish under water, for sixty rods or more, as fast as a boat can be paddled, and its pursuer, if he would discover his game again, must put his ear to the surface to hear where it comes up. avhen it comes to the surface, it throws the water off with one shake of its wings, and calmly swims about until again disturbed. these are the sights and sounds which reach our senses oftenest during the year. but some times one hears a quite new note, which has for background other carolinas and mexicos than the books describe, and learns that his ornitho logy has done him no service. it appears from the report that there are of massachusetts 141 about forty quadrupeds belonging to the state, and among these one is glad to hear of a few bears, wolves, lynxes, and wildcats. when our river overflows its banks in the spring, the wind from the meadows is la&amp;lt;l-n with a strong scent of musk, and by its fresh ness advertises me of an unexplored wildness. those backwoods are not far off then. i am affected by the sight of the cabins of the musk rat, made of mud and grass, and raised three or four feet along the river, as when i read of the barrows of asia. the musk-rat is the beaver of the settled states. their number has even increased within a few years in this vicinity. among the rivers which empty into the merri mack, the concord is known to the boatmen as a dead stream. the indians are said to have called it musketaquid, or prairie river. its current being much more sluggish and its water more muddy than the rest, it abounds more in fish and game of every kind. accord ing to the history of the town, &quot;the fur-trade was here once very important. as early as 1641, a company was formed in the colony, of which major willard of concord was superin tendent, and had the exclusive right to trade with the indians in furs and other articles; and for this right they were obliged to pay into the public treasury one twentieth of all the furs 142 natural history they obtained.&quot; there are trappers in our midst still, as well as on the streams of the far west, who night and morning go the round of their traps, without fear of the indian. one of these takes from one hundred and fifty to two hundred musk-rats in a year, and even thirty six have been shot by one man in a day. their fur, which is not nearly as valuable as formerly, is in good condition in the winter and spring only ; and upon the breaking up of the ice, when they are driven out of their holes by the water, the greatest number is shot from boats, either swimming or resting on their stools, or slight supports of grass and reeds, by the side of the stream. though they exhibit considerable cun ning at other times, they are easily taken in a trap, which has only to be placed in their holes, or wherever they frequent, without any bait being used, though it is sometimes rubbed with their musk. in the winter the hunter cuts holes in the ice, and shoots them when they come to the surface. their burrows are usually in the high banks of the river, with the entrance under water, and rising within to above the level of high water. sometimes their nests, composed of dried meadow-grass and flags, maybe discovered where the bank is low and spongy, by the yield ing of the ground under the feet. they have from three to seven or eight young in the spring. of massachusetts 143 frequently, in the morning or evening, a long ripple is seen in the still water, where a musk-rat is crossing the stream, with only its nose above the surface, ami sometimes a green bough in its mouth to build its house with. when it finds itself observed, it will dive and swim five or six rods under water, and at length conceal itself in its hole, or the weeds. it will remain under water for ten minutes at a time, and on one occasion has been seen, when undis turbed, to form an air-bubble under the ice, which contracted and expanded as it breathed at leisure. when it suspects danger on shore, it will stand erect like a squirrel, and survey its neighborhood for several minutes, without moving. in the fall, if a meadow intervene between their burrows and the stream, they erect cabins of mud and grass, three or four feet high, near its edge. these are not their breeding-places, though young are sometimes found in them in late freshets, but rather their hunting-lodges, to which they resort in the winter with their food, and for shelter. their food consists chiefly of flags and fresh-water mussels, the shells of the latter being left in large quantities around their lodges in the spring. the penobscot indian wears the entire skin of a musk-rat, with the legs and tail dangling, 144 natural history and the head caught under his girdle, for a pouch, into which he puts his fishing tackle, and essences to scent his traps with. the bear, wolf, lynx, wildcat, deer, beaver, and marten have disappeared; the otter is rarely if ever seen here at present; and the mink is less common than formerly. perhaps of all our untamed quadrupeds, the fox has obtained the widest and most familiar reputation, from the time of pilpay and ^sop to the present day. his recent tracks still give variety to a winter s walk. 1 tread in the steps of the fox that has gone before me by some hours, or which perhaps i have started, with such a tiptoe of expectation as if i were on the trail of the spirit itself which resides in the wood, and expected soon to catch it in its lair. i am curious to know what has determined its graceful curvatures, and how surely they were coincident with the fluctuations of some mind. i know which way a mind wended, what horizon it faced, by the setting of these tracks, and whether it moved slowly or rapidly, by their greater or less intervals and distinctness; for the swiftest step leaves yet a lasting trace. sometimes you will see the trails of many to gether, and where they have gamboled and gone through a hundred evolutions, which testify to :i singular listlessuess and leisure in nature. of massachusetts 145 when i see a fox run across the pond on the snow, with the carelessness of freedom, or at intervals trace his course in the sunshine along the ridge of a hill, i give up to him sun and earth as to their true proprietor. he does not go in the sun, but it seems to follow him, and there is a visible sympathy between him and it. sometimes, when the snow lies light, and but five or six inches deep, you may give chase and come up with one on foot. in such a case he will show a remarkable presence of mind, choosing only the safest direction, though he may lose ground by it. notwithstanding his fright, he will take no step which is not beauti ful. his pace is a sort of leopard canter, as if he were in no wise impeded by the snow, but were husbanding his strength all the while. when the ground is uneven, the course is a ae ries of graceful curves, conforming to the shape of the surface. he runs as though there were not a bone in his back. occasionally dropping his muzzle to the ground for a rod or two, and then tossing his head aloft, when satisfied of his course. when he comes to a declivity, he will put his forefeet together, and slide swiftly down it, shoving the snow before him. he treads so softly that you woidd hardly hear it from any nearness, and yet with such expression that it would not be quite inaudible at any distance. 140 natural history of fishes, seventy-five genera and one hun dred and seven species are described in the re port. the fisherman will be startled to learn that there are but about a dozen kinds in the ponds and streams of any inland town; and almost nothing is known of their habits. only their names and residence make one love fishes. i would know even the number of their fin-rays, and how many scales compose the latoral line. i am the wiser in respect to all knowledges, and the better qualified for all fortunes,&quot; for knowing that there is a minnow in the brook. methinks i have need even of his sympathy, and to be his fellow in a degree. i have experienced such simple delight in the trivial matters of fishing and sporting, formerly, as might have inspired the muse of homer or shakespeare; and now, when i turn the pages and ponder the plates of the angler s souvenir, i am fain to exclaim, &quot; can these things be, and overcome us like a summer s cloud ? &quot; next to nature, it seems as if man s actions were the most natural, they so gently accord with her. the small seines of flax stretched across the shallow and transparent parts of our river are no more intrusion than the cobweb in the sun. i stay my boat in mid-current, and look down in the sunny water to see the civil of massachusetts 147 meshes of his nets, and wonder how the bluster ing people of the town could have done this elvish work. the twine looks like a new river weed, and is to the river as a beautiful memento of man s presence in nature, discovered as si lently and delicately as a footprint in the sand. when the ice is covered with snow, i do not suspect the wealth under my feet; that there is as good as a mine under me wherever i go. how many pickerel are poised on easy fin fath oms below the loaded wain. the revolution of the seasons must be a curious phenomenon to them. at length the sun and wind brush aside their curtain, and they see the heavens again. early in the spring, after the ice has melted, is the time for spearing fish. suddenly the wind, shifts from northeast and east to west and south, and every icicle, which has tinkled on the meadow grass so long, trickles down its stem, and seeks its level unerringly with a million comrades. the steam curls up from every roof and fence. i see the ciril sun drying earth s tears, her tears of joy, which only faster flow. in the brooks is heard the slight grating sound of small cakes of ice, floating with vari ous speed, full of content and promise, and where the water gurgles under a natural bridge, you may hear these hasty rafts hold convert* natural history tion in an undertone. every rill is a channel for the juices of the meadow. in the ponds the ice cracks with a merry and inspiriting din, and down the larger streams is whirled grating hoarsely, and crashing its way along, which was so lately a highway for the woodman s team and the fox, sometimes with the tracks of the skaters still fresh upon it, and the holes cut for pickerel. town committees anxiously inspect the bridges and causeways, as if by mere eye force to intercede with the ice and save the treasury. the river swelleth more and more, like some sweet influence stealing 1 o er the passive town ; and for a while each tussock makes a tiny isle, where, on some friendly ararat, resteth the weary water-rat no ripple shows musketaquid, her very current e en is hid, as deepest souls do calmest rest, when thoughts are swelling in the breast, and she that in the summer s drought doth make a rippling and a rout, sleeps from nahshawtuck to the cliff, unruffled by a single skiff. but by a thousand dlstant hills the louder roar a thousand rills, and many a spring which now is dumb, and many a stream with smothered bum, doth swifter well and faster glide, though buried deep beneath the tide. of massachusetts h9 our village bows a rural v nice, its broad lagoons where yonder fen is ; as lovely m the bay of naples yon placid core amid the maples ; and in my neighbor s field of corn i recognize the golden horn. here nature taught from year to year, when only red men came to hear, methinks twas in this school of art venice and naples learned their part ; but still their iiililliiai, to my mind, her young disciples leaves behind. the fisherman now repairs and launches his boat. the best time for spearing is at this season, before the weeds have begun to grow, and while the fishes lie in the shallow water, for in summer they prefer the cool depths, and in the autumn they are still more or less concealed by the grass. the first requisite is fuel for your crate; and for this purpose the roots of the pitch-pine are commonly used, found under decayed stumps, where the trees have been felled eight or ten years. with a crate, or jack, made of iron hoops, to contain your fire, and attached to the ihiw of your boat about three feet from the water, a fish-spear with seven tines and fourteen feet long, a large basket or barrow to carry your fuel and bring back your fish, and a thick outer garment, you are equipped for a cruisv. it 150 natural history should be a warm and still evening; and then, with a fire crackling merrily at the prow, you may launch forth like a cucullo into the night. the dullest soul cannot go upon such an expe dition without some of the spirit of adventure; as if he had stolen the boat of charon and gone down the styx on a midnight expedition into the realms of pluto. and much speculation does this wandering star afford to the musing night-walker, leading him on and on, jack-o lantern -like, over the meadows ; or, if he is wiser, he amuses himself with imagining what of hu man life, far in the silent night, is flitting moth like round its candle. the silent navigator shoves his craft gently over the water, with a smothered pride and sense of benefaction, as if he were the phosphor, or light-bringer, to these dusky realms, or some sister moon, blessing the spaces with her light. the waters, for a rod or two on either hand and several feet in depth, are lit up with more than noonday distinctness, and he enjoys the opportunity which so many have desired, for the roofs of a city are indeed raised, and he surveys the midnight economy of the fishes. there they lie in every variety of )m)sture ; some on their backs, with their white bellies uppermost, some suspended in mid-water, some sculling gently along with a dreamy mo tion of the fins, and others quite active and wide of massachusetts 151 awake, a scene not unlike what the human city would present. occasionally lie will en counter a turtlf &amp;gt;&amp;lt; -lei-ting tlu choicest morsels, or a musk-rat resting on a tussock. he may exercise his dexterity, if he sees fit, on the more distant and active fish, or fork the nearer into his boat, as potatoes out of a j&amp;gt;ot, or even take the sound sleepers with his hands. but these last accomplishments he will soon learn to dis pense with, distinguishing the real object of his pursuit, and find compensation in the beauty and never-ending novelty of his position. the pines growing down to the water s edge will show newly as in the glare of a conflagration ; and as he floats under the willows with his light, the song-sparrow will often wake on her perch, and sing that strain at midnight, which she had meditated for the morning. and when he has done, he may have to steer his way home through the dark by the north star, and he will feel himself some degrees nearer to it for hav ing lost his way on the earth. the fishes commonly taken in this way are pickerel, suckers, perch, eels, pouts, breams, and shiners, from thirty to sixty weight in a night. some are hard to be recognized in the unnatural light, especially the perch, which, his dark bands being exaggerated, acquires a fero cious aspect. the number of these transverse 152 natural history bands, which the report states to be seven, is, however, very variable, for in some of our ponds they have nine and ten even. it appears that we have eight kinds of torx toises, twelve snakes, but one of which is venomous, nine frogs and toads, nine sala manders, and one lizard, for our neighbors. i am particularly attracted by the motions of the serpent tribe. they make our hands and feet, the wings of the bird, and the fins of the fish seem very superfluous, as if nature had only indulged her fancy in making them. the black snake will dart into a bush when pursued, and circle round and round with an easy and graceful motion, amid the thin and bare twigs, five or six feet from the ground, as a bird flits from bough to bough, or hang in festoons be tween the forks. elasticity and flexibleness in the simpler forms of animal life are equivalent to a complex system of limbs in the higher ; and we have only to be as wise and wily as the ser pent, to perform as difficult feats without the vulgar assistance of hands and feet. in may, the snapping turtle, emysaurus ser pentina, is frequently taken on the meadows and in the river. the fisherman, taking sight over the calm surface, discovers its snout projecting above the water, at the distance of many rods, and easily secures his prey through its unwill of massachusetts 153 to iluturh tli.\vat i imi -i !&amp;lt; &amp;lt;~ tily away, for, gnulually drawing its head un der, it remains resting on some limb or flump of grass. its eggs, whifh are buried at a dis tance from the water, in some soft place, as a pigeon-bed, are frequently devoured by the skunk. it will catch fish by daylight, as a toad catches flies, and is said to emit a transpar ent fluid from its mouth to attract them. nature has taken more care than the fondest parent for the education and refinement of her children. consider the silent influence which flowers exert, no less upon the ditcher in the meadow than the lady in the bower. when i walk in the woods, i am reminded that a wise purveyor has been there before me; my most delicate experience is typified there. i am struck with the pleasing friendships and unani mities of nature, as when the lichen on the trees takes the form of their leaves. in the most stupendous scenes you will see delicate and fragile features, as slight wreaths of vapor, dew lines, feathery sprays, which suggest a high refinement, a noble blood and breeding, as it were. it is not hard to account for elves and fairies; they represent this light grace, this ethereal gentility. bring a spray from the wood, or a crystal from the brook, and place it on your mantel, and your household ornaments 154 natural history will seem plebeian beside its nobler fashion and bearing. it will wave superior there, as if used to a more refined and polished circle. it lias a sal ;: and a response to all \ our enthu siasm and heroism. in the winter, i stop short in the path to ad mire how the trees grow up without forethought, regardless of the time and circumstances. they do not wait as man does, but now is the golden age of the sapling. earth, air, sun, and rain are occasion enough; they were no better in primeval centuries. the &quot;winter of their dis content&quot; never comes. witness the buds of the native poplar standing gayly out to the frost on the sides of its bare switches. they express a naked confidence. with cheerful heart one could be a sojourner in the wilderness, if he were sure to find there the catkins of the willow or the alder. when i read of them in the ac counts of northern adventurers, by baffin s bay or mackenzie s river, i see how even there, too, i could dwell. they are our little vegetable redeemers. methinks our virtue will hold out till they come again. they are worthy to have had a greater than minerva or ceres for their inventor. who was the benignant goddess that bestowed them on mankind? nature is mythical and mystical always, and works with the license and extravagance of gen of massachusetts 155 ius. she has her luxurious and florid style at well as art. having a pilgrim s cup to make, she gives to the whole, stem, bowl, handle, and nose, some fautastie shape, as if it were to be the car of some fabulous marine deity, a nereua or triton. in the winter, the botanist need not confine himself to his books and herbarium, and give over his out-door pursuits, but may study a new department of vegetable physiology, what may be called crystalline botany, then. the winter of 1837 was unusually favorable for this. in december of that year, the genius of vegeta tion seemed to hover by night over its summer haunts with unusual persistency. such a hoar frost as is very uncommon here or anywhere, and whose full effects can never be witnessed after sunrise, occurred several times. as i went forth early on a still and frosty morning, the trees looked like airy creatures of darkness caught napping; on this side huddled together, with their gray hairs streaming, in a woluded valley which the sun had not penetrated; on that, hurrying off in indian file along some water-course, while the shrubs and grasses, like olves and fairies of the night, sought to hide their diminished heads in the snow. the river, viewed from the high bank, appeared of a yel lowish green color, though all the laudarape was 156 natural history white. every tree, shrub, and spire of grass, that could raise its head above the snow, was covered with a dense ice-foliage, answering, as it were, leaf for leaf to its summer dress. even the fences had put forth leaves in the night. the centre, diverging, and more minute fibres were perfectly distinct, and the edges regularly indented. these leaves were on the side of the twig or stubble opposite to the sun, meeting it for the most part at right angles, and there were others standing out at all possible angles upon these and upon one another, with no twig or stubble supporting them. when the first rays of the sun slanted over the scene, the grasses seemed hung with innumerable jewels, which jingled merrily as they were brushed by the foot of the traveler, and reflected all the hues of the rainbow, as he moved from side to side. it struck me that these ghost leaves, and the green ones whose forms they assume, were the crea tures of but one law ; that in obedience to the same law the vegetable juices swell gradually into the perfect leaf, on the one hand, and the crystalline particles troop to their standard in the same order, on the other. as if the mate rial were indifferent, but the law one and inva riable, and every plant in the spring but pushed up into and filled a permanent and eternal mould, which, summer and winter forever, is waiting to be filled. of massachusetts 157 this foliate structure is common to the coral anil the plumage of birds and to how large a part of animate and inanimate nature. the same independence of law on matter is observa ble in many other instances, as in the natural rhymes, when some animal form, color, or odor has its counterpart in some vegetable. as, in deed, all rhymes imply an eternal melody, in dependent of any particular sense. as confirmation of the fact, that vegetation is but a kind of crystallization, every one may observe how, upon the edge of the melting frost on the window, the needle-shaped particles are bundled together so as to resemble fields wav ing with grain, or shocks rising here and there from the stubble ; on one side the vegetation of the torrid zone, high-towering palms and wide spread banyans, such as are seen in pictures of oriental scenery ; on the other, arctic pines stiff frozen, with downcast branches. vegetation has been made the type of all growth ; but as in crystals the law is more obvi ous, their material being more simple, and for the most part more transient and fleeting, would it not be as philosophical as convenient to con sider all growth, all filling up within the limits of nature, but a crystallization more or less rapid ? on this occasion, in the side of the high bank 158 natural history of the river, wherever the water or other cause had formed a cavity, its throat and outer edge, like the entrance to a citadel, bristled with a glistening ice-armor. in one place you might see minute ostrich-feathers, which seemed the waving plumes of the warriors filing into the fortress; in another, the glancing, fan-shaped banners of the lilliputian host; and in another, the needle-shaped particles collected into bun dles, resembling the plumes of the pine, might pass for a phalanx of spears. from the under side of the ice in the brooks, where there was a thicker ice below, depended a mass of crystal lization, four or five inches deep, in the form of prisms, with their lower ends open, which, when the ice was laid on its smooth side, resembled the roofs and steeples of a gothic city, or the vessels of a crowded haven under a press of canvas. the very mud in the road, where the ice had melted, was crystallized with deep rectilinear fissures, and the crystalline masses in the sides of the ruts resembled exactly asbestos in the disposition of their needles. around the roots of the stubble and flower-stalks, the frost was gathered into the form of irregular conical shells, or fairy rings. in some places the ice crystals were lying upon granite rocks, directly over crystals of quartz, the frost-work of a longer night, crystals of a longer ]&amp;gt;eriod ; but, to some eye unprejudiced by of massachusetts 1 the short tertu of human lift*, inciting as fast as the former. in the report on the invertebrate animals, this singular fact is recorded, which teaches us to put a new value on time and space: &quot;the distribution of the marine shells is well worthy of notice as a geological fact. cape cod, the 1 14 lit ami of the commonwealth, reaches out into the ocean, some fifty or sixty miles. it is no where many miles wide; but this narrow point of land has hitherto proved a barrier to the mi grations of many species of mollusca. several genera and numerous species, which are sepa rated by the intervention of only a few miles of land, are effectually prevented from mingling by the cape, and do not pass from one side to the other. ... of the one hundred and ninety seven marine species, eighty-three do not pass to the south shore, and fifty are not found on the north shore of the cape.&quot; that common mussel, the unio compht w// /&amp;gt;-, or more properly jluv iatlli^ left in the spring by the musk-rat upon rocks and stumps, api&amp;gt;ears to have been an important article of food with the indians. in one place, where they are said to have feasted, they are found in large quanti ties, at an elevation of thirty feet above the river, filling the soil to the depth of a foot, and mingled with ashes and indian remains. 160 natural history the works we have placed at the head of our chapter, with as much license as the preacher selects his text, are such as imply more labor than enthusiasm. the state wanted complete cata logues of its natural riches, with such additional facts merely as would be directly useful. the reports on fishes, reptiles, insects, and invertebrate animals, however, indicate labor and research, and have a value independent of the object of the legislature. those on herbaceous plants and birds cannot be of much value, as long as bigelow and nut tall are accessible. they serve but to indicate, with more or less exactness, what specif found in the state. we detect several errors ourselves, and a more practiced eye would no doubt expand the list. the quadrupeds deserved a more final and in structive report than they have obtained. these volumes deal much in measurements and minute descriptions, not interesting to the general reader, with only here and there a col ored sentence to allure him, like those plants growing in dark forests, which bear only leaves without blossoms. but thp ground was compar atively unbroken, and we will not complain of the pioneer, if he raises no flowers with his first crop. let us not underrate the value of a fact ; it will one day flower in a truth. it is aston of massachusetts 161 ishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. the natural history of man himself is still being gradually written. men are knowing enough after their fashion. every countryman and dairy-maid knows that the coats of the fourth stomach of the calf will curdle milk, and what particular mushroom is a safe and nutritious diet. you cannot go into any field or wood, but it will seem as if every stone had been turned, and the bark on every tree ripped up. but, after all, it is much easier to discover than to see when the cover is off. it has been well said that &quot;the attitude of inspection is prone.&quot; wis dom does not inspect, but behold. we must look \ a long time before we can see. slow are the beginnings of philosophy. he has something demoniacal in him, who can discern a law or couple two facts. we can imagine a time when &quot;water runs down hill&quot; may have been taught in the schools. the true man of science wilf know nature better by his finer organiza tion; he will smell, taste, see, hear, feel, better than other men. his will be a deeper and finer experience. we do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sym pathy. it is with science as with ethics, cannot know truth by contrivance and method; l ; natural history the baconian is as false as any other, and with all the helps of machinery and the arts, the most scientific will still be the healthiest and friendliest man, and possess a more perfect in dian wisdom. a walk to wachusett the imdpti of the pine all to the west incline. concord, july 19, 1842. summer and winter our eyes had rested on the dim outline of the mountains in our hori zon, to which distance and indistinctness lent a grandeur not their own, so that they served equally to interpret all the allusions of poets and travelers; whether with homer, on a spring morning, we sat down on the many-peaked olympus, or with virgil and his compeers roamed the etrurian and thessalian hills, or with humboldt measured the more modern andes and teneriffe. thus we spoke our mind to them, standing on the concord cliffs: with frontier strength ye stand your ground, with grand content ye circle round, tumultuous silence for all sound, y distant nursery of rills, monadnock, and the peterboro hills ; like some vast fleet, sailing through rain and sleet, through winter s cold and summtr i biifc 5 still holding on, upon your high emprise, until ye end a shore amid the skies ; 164 a walk to wachusett not skulking close to land. with cargo contraband, for they who sent a venture out by ye have set the sun to we their honesty. ships of the line, each one, ye to the westward run, always before the pale, under a press of sail, with weight of metal all untold. i seem to feel ye, in my firm seat here. immeasurable depth of hold, and breadth of beam, and length of running gear. methinks ye take luxurious pleasure in your novel western leisure ; so cool your brows, and freshly blue, as time had nought for ye to do ; for ye lie at your length, an unappropriated strength, unhewn primeval timber, for knees so stiff, for masts so limber ; the stock of which new earths are made, one day to be our western trade, fit for the stanchions of a world which through the seas of space is hurled. while we enjoy a lingering ray, ye still o ertop the western day, reposing yonder, on god s croft, like solid stacks of hay. edged with silver, and with gold, the clouds hang o er in danuisk fold, and with such depth of amber light the west is dight, where still a few rays slant, that even heaven seems extravagant. a walk to wachusett 165 on the earth s edge mountain* and tree* stand aa they were on air graven, or a* the vessels in a haven await the morning breeze. i fancy even through your defiles windeth the way to heaven ; and yonder hi ill. in spite of history s page, linger the golden and the silver age ; upon the laboring gale the news of future centuries is brought, and of new dynasties of thought, from your remotest vale. but special i remember thee, wachusett, who like me standest alone without society. thy far blue eye, a remnant of the sky, seen through the clearing or the gorge or from the windows on the forge, doth leaven all it passes by. nothing is true, but stands tween me and yon, thou western pioneer, who know st not shame nor fear, by venturous spirit driven, ( nil.-r the eaves of heaven. and can st expand thee there, and breathe enough of air ? upholding heaven, holding down earth, thy pastime from thy birth, not steadied by the one, nor loaning on the other ; may i approve myself thy worthy brother ! at length, like rasselas, and other inhabi tants of happy valleys, we resolved to scale the blue wall which ixnmd the western hori/n. 16g a walk to wachusett though not without misgivings that thereafter no visible fairyland would exist for us. but we will not leap at once to our journey s end, though near, but imitate homer, who conducts his reader over the plain, and along the re sounding sea, though it be but to the tent of achilles. in the spaces of thought are the reaches of land and water, where men go and come. the landscape lies far and fair within, and the deepest thinker is the farthest traveled. at a cool and early hour on a pleasant morn ing in july, my companion and i passed rapidly through acton and stow, stopping to rest and refresh us on the bank of a small stream, a tri butary of the assabet, in the latter town. as we traversed the cool woods of acton, with stout staves in our hands, we were cheered by the song of the red-eye, the thrushes, the phoabe, and the cuckoo; and as we passed through the open country, we inhaled the fresh scent of every field, and all nature lay passive, to be viewed and traveled. every rail, every farm-house, seen dimly in the twilight, every tinkling sound told of peace and purity, and we moved happily along the dank roads, enjoying not such privacy as the day leaves when it with draws, but such as it has not profaned. it was solitude with light ; which is better than dark ness. but anon, the sound of the mower s rifle a walk to wachusett 167 u is lirard in rli.fteldft, ind this, too, with the lowing of kine. this part of our route lay through the coun try of hops, which plant perhaps supplies the want of the vine in american scenery, and may remind the traveler of i tidy and the south of france, whether he traverses the country when the hop-fields, as then, present solid and regular masses of verdure, hanging in graceful festoons from i&amp;gt;ole to pole, the cool coverts where lurk the gales which refresh the wayfarer; or in sep teml&amp;gt;er, when the women and children, and the neighbors from far and near, are gathered to pick the hops into long troughs; or later still, when the poles stand piled in vast pyramids in the yards, or lie in heaps by the roadside. the culture of the hop, with the processes of picking, drying in the kiln, and packing for the market, as well as the uses to which it is ap plied, so analogous to the culture and uses of the grape, may afford a theme for future poets. the mower in the adjacent meadow could not tell us the name of the brook on whose banks we had rested, or whether it had any, but his younger companion, perhaps his brother, knew that it was great brook. though they stood very near together in the field, the tilings they knew were very far apart; nor did they sus pect each other s reserved knowledge, till the 108 .1 walk to wachusett stranger came by. in bolton, while we rested on the rails of a cottage fence, the strains of music which issued from within, probably in compliment to us, sojourners, reminded us that thus far men were fed by the accustomed plea sures. so soon did we, wayfarers, begin to learn that man s life is rounded with the same few facts, the same simple relations everywhere, and it is vain to travel to find it new. the flowers grow more various ways than he. but coming soon to higher land, which afforded a prospect of the mountains, we thought we had not traveled in vain, if it were only to hear a truer and wilder pronunciation of their names from the lips of the inhabitants ; not fpay-tatic, jfay-chusett, but tfor-tatic, tpbr-chusett. it made us ashamed of our tame and civil pronun ciation, and we looked upon them as born and bred farther west than we. their tongues had a more generous accent than ours, as if breath was cheaper where they wagged. a country man, who speaks but seldom, talks copiously, as it were, as his wife sets cream and cheese before you without stint. before noon we hud reached the highlands overlooking the valley of lancaster (affording the first fair and open prospect into the west), and there, on the top of a hill, in the shade of some oaks, near to where a spring bubbled out from a leaden pipe, we a walk to wachl sett rested during the heat of the day, reading virgil and enjoying the scenery. it was such a place as one feels to be on the outside of the earth; for from it we could, in some measure, see the form and structure of the globe. there lay wachusett, the object of our journey, low ering upon us with unchanged proportions, though with a less ethereal aspect than had greeted our morning gaze, while further north, in successive order, slumbered its sister moun tains along the horizon. we could get no further into the ^eneid than atque altie uurnia romie, and the wall of high home, before we were constrained to reflect by what myriad tests a work of genius has to be tried ; that virgil, away in rome, two thousand years off, should have to unfold his meaning, the in spiration of italian vales, to the pilgrim on new hi inland hills. this life so raw and modem, that so civil and ancient ; and yet we read vir gil, mainly to be reminded of the identity of human nature in all ages, and, by the jmwt s own account, we are both the children of a late age, and live equally under the reign of jupiter. &quot; he ahook honey from the leaves, and removed fire, and stayi-d the wine, even-where flowing in river* ; that lj&amp;gt;m wan 1 1 by meditating, might invent various arta by degree*, and mek the blade of com in furrows, and strike out hidden fire fruin the vein* of the hint.&quot; 170 a walk to wachusett the old world stands serenely behind the new, as one mountain yonder towers behind another, more dim and distant. rome imposes her story still upon this late generation. the very children in the school we had that morning passed had gone through her wars, and recited her alarms, ere they had heard of the wars of neighboring lancaster. the roving eye still rests inevitably on her hills, and she still holds up the skirts of the sky on that side, and makes the past remote. the lay of the land hereabouts is well worthy the attention of the traveler. the hill on which we were resting made part of an extensive range, running from southwest to northeast, across the country, and separating the waters of the nashua from those of the concord, whose banks we had left in the morning, and by bear ing in mind this fact, we could easily determine whither each brook was bound that crossed our path. parallel to this, and fifteen miles further west, beyond the deep and broad valley in which lie groton, shirley, lancaster, and boylston, runs the wachusett range, in the same general direction. the descent into the valley on the nashua side is by far the most sudden ; and a couple of miles brought us to the southern branch of the nashua, a shallow but rapid stream, flowing between high and gravelly a walk to wachusett 171 banks. but we soon learned that there were no gelidcv ralles into which we had descended, and, missing the coolness of the morning air, feared it had become the sun s turn to try his jxnver upon us. 44 the sultry nun had gained the middle sky, and not a tree, and not an herb was nigh,&quot; and with melancholy pleasure we echoed the melodious plaint of our fellow-traveler, hassan, in the desert, 44 sad was the hour, and luckless was the day. when first from schiraz walls i bent ray way.&quot; the air lay lifeless between the hills, as in a seething caldron, with no leaf stirring, and in stead of the fresh odor of grass and clover, with which we had before been regaled, the dry scent of every herb seemed merely medicinal. yield ing, therefore, to the heat, we strolled into the woods, and along the course of a rivulet, on whose banks we loitered, observing at our leisure the products of these new fields. he who tra verses the woodland paths, at this season, will have occasion to remember the small, drooping, l&amp;gt;ell-like flowers and slender red stem of the dogsbane, and the coarser stem and berry of the poke, which are both common in remoter and wilder scenes; and if &quot;the sun casts such a reflecting heat from the sweet-fern&quot; as makes 17 2 a walk to wachusett him faint, when he is climbing the bare hills, as they complained who first penetrated into these parts, the cool fragrance of the swamp pink restores him again, when traversing the valleys between. as we went on our way late in the afternoon, we refreshed ourselves by bathing our feet in every rill that crossed the road, and anon, as we were able to walk in the shadows of the hills, recovered our morning elasticity. passing through sterling, we reached the banks of the stillwater, in the western part of the town, at evening, where is a small village collected. we fancied that there was already a certain western look about this place, a smell of pines and roar of water, recently confined by dams, belying its name, which were exceedingly grateful. &quot;when the first inroad has been made, a few acres leveled, and a few houses erected, the forest looks wilder than ever. left to herself, ^nature is always more or less civilized, and de lights in a certain refinement; but where the axe has encroached upon the edge of the forest, the dead and unsightly limbs of the pine, which she had concealed with green banks of verdure, are exposed to sight. this village had, as yet, no post-office, nor any settled name. in the small villages which we entered, the villagers gazed after us, with a complacent, almost com a walk to waciwsett 173 passionate look, as if we were just making our iltbut in the world at a late hour. &quot;neverthe less,&quot; did they seem to say, &quot;come and study us, and learn men and manners.&quot; so is each one s world but a clearing in the forest, so much open and inclosed ground. the landlord had not yet returned from the field with his men, and the cows had yet to be milked. but we remembered the inscription on the wall of the swedish inn, &quot;you will find at trolhate excel lent bread, meat, and wine, provided you bring them with you,&quot; and were contented. but i must confess it did somewhat disturb our plea sure, in this withdrawn spot, to have our own village newspaper handed us by our host, as if the greatest charm the country offered to the traveler was the facility of communication with the town. let it recline on its own everlasting hills, and not be looking out from their sum mits for some petty boston or new york in the horizon. at intervals we heard the murmuring of water, and the slumberous breathing of crickets, throughout the night; and left the inn the next morning in the gray twilight, after it had been hallowed by the night air, and when only the innocent cows were stirring, with a kind of re gret. it was only four miles to the base of the mountain, and the scenery was already more 174 .4 walk to wachusett picturesque. our road lay along the course of the stillwater, which was brawling at the bot tom of a deep ravine, filled with pines and rocks, tumbling fresh from the mountains, so soon, alas! to commence its career of useful ness. at first, a cloud hung between us and the summit, but it was soon blown away. as we gathered the raspberries, which grew abun dantly by the roadside, we fancied that that action was consistent with a lofty prudence; as if the traveler who ascends into a mountainous region should fortify himself by eating of such light ambrosial fruits as grow there, and drink ing of the springs which gush out from the mountain sides, as he gradually inhales the subtler and purer atmosphere of those elevated places, thus propitiating the mountain gods by a sacrifice of their own fruits. the gross pro ducts of the plains and valleys are for such as dwell therein ; but it seemed to us that the juices of this berry had relation to the thin air of the mountain-tops. in due time we began to ascend the moun tain, passing, first, through a grand sugar-ma ple wood, which bore the marks of the auger, then a denser forest, which gradually became dwarfed, till there were no trees whatever. we at length pitched our tent on the summit. it is but nineteen hundred feet above the village of a walk to wachusett 175 princeton, and three thousand above the level of the sea; but by this slight elevation it is in finitely removed from the plain, and when we reached it we felt a sense of remoteness, as if we had traveled into distant regions, to arabia petrsea, or the farthest east. a robin upon a staff was the highest object in sight. swallows were flying about us, and the chewink and cuckoo were heard near at hand. the summit consists of a few acres, destitute of trees, cov ered with bare rocks, interspersed with blue l&amp;gt;erry bushes, raspberries, gooseberries, straw berries, moss, and a fine wiry grass. the common yellow lily and dwarf -cornel grow abundantly in the crevices of the rocks. this clear space, which is gently rounded, is bounded a few feet lower by a thick shrubbery of oaks, with maples, aspens, beeches, cherries, and occa sionally a mountain-ash intermingled, among which we found the bright blue berries of the solomon s seal, and the fruit of the pyrola. from the foundation of a wooden observatory, which was formerly erected on the highest point, forming a rude, hollow structure of stone, a dozen feet in diameter, and five or six in height, we could see monadnock, in simple grandeur, in the northwest, rising nearly a thou sand feet higher, still the &quot;far blue mountain,&quot; though with an altered profile. the first day 17t&amp;gt; a walk to wachusett the weather was so hazy that it was in vain we endeavored to unravel the obscurity. it was like booking into the sky again, and the patches of forest here and there seemed to flit like clouds over a lower heaven. as to voyagers of an aerial polynesia, the earth seemed like a larger island in the ether; on every side, even as low as we, the sky shutting down, like an unfathomable deep, around it, a blue pacific island, where who knows what islanders inhabit ? and as we sail near its shores we see the waving of trees and hear the lowing of kine. we read virgil and wordsworth in our tent, with new pleasure there, while waiting for a clearer atmosphere, nor did the weather prevent our appreciating the simple truth and beauty of peter bell: &quot; and he had lain beside his asses, on lofty cheviot hills ; 14 and he had trudged through yorkshire dales, among the rocks and winding scars, where deep and low the hamlets lie beneath their little patch of sky, and little lot of stars.&quot; who knows but this hill may one day be a helvellyn, or even a parnassus, and the muses haunt here, and other homers frequent the neighboring plains ? not unconcerned wachusett rears his head above the field, so late from nature won, with patient brow reserved, as one who read new annals in thi history of man. a walk to wachusett 177 the blueberries which the mountain afforded, added to the milk we had brought, made our frugal supper, while for entertainment the even song of the wood-thrush rang along the ridge. our eyes rested on no painted ceiling nor car peted hall, but on skies of nature s painting, and hills and forests of her embroidery. before sunset, we rambled along the ridge to the north, while a hawk soared still above us. it was a place where gods might wander, so solemn and solitary, and removed from all contagion with the plain. as the evening came on, the haze was condensed in vapor, and the landscape be came more distinctly visible, and numerous sheets of water were brought to light. et jam summa procul villarum cnlmina fumant, majoresque cadunt altis tie montibus umbra. and now the tops of the villas smoke afar off, and the shadows fad. longer from the high mountains. as we stood on the stone tower while the sun was setting, we saw the shades of night creep gradually over the valleys of the east, and the inhabitants went into their houses, and slnit their doors, while the moon silently rose up, and took possession of that part. and then the same scene was repeated on the west side, as far as the connecticut and the green mountains, and the sun s rays fell on us two alone, of all new england men. 178 a walk to wachusett it was the night but one before the full of the moon, so bright that we could see to read dis tinctly by moonlight, and in the evening strolled over the summit without danger. there was, by chance, a fire blazing on monadnock that night, which lighted up the whole western hori zon, and, by making us aware of a community of mountains, made our position seem less soli tary. but at length the wind drove us to the shelter of our tent, and we closed its door for the night, and fell asleep. it was thrilling to hear the wind roar over the rocks, at intervals when we waked, for it had grown quite cold and windy. the night was in its elements, simple even to majesty in that bleak place, a bright moonlight and a piercing wind. it was at no time darker than twilight within the tent, and we could easily see the moon through its transparent roof as we lay ; for there was the moon still above us, with jupi ter and saturn on either hand, looking down on wachusett, and it was a satisfaction to know that they were our fellow-travelers still, as high and out of our reach as our own destiny. truly the stars were given for a consolation to man. we should not know but our life were fated to be always groveling, but it is permitted to be hold them, and surely they are deserving of a fair destiny. we see laws which never fail, of .1 walk to wachusett 179 whose failure we never conceived; and tlu-ir lamps burn all the night, too, as well as all day, so rich and lavish is that nature which can afford this superfluity of liuht. the morning twilight began as soon as the moon had set, and we arose and kindled our fire, whose blaze might have been seen for thirty miles around. as the daylight increased, it was remarkable how rapidly the wind went tlown. there was no dew on the summit, but coldness supplied its place. when the dawn had reached its prime, we enjoyed the view of a distinct horizon line, and could fancy ourselves at sea, and the distant hills the waves in the horizon, as seen from the deck of a vessel. the cherry-birds flitted around us, the nuthatch and flicker were heard among the bushes, the titmouse perched within a few feet, and the song of the wood-thrush again rang along the ridge. at length we saw the sun rise up out of the sea, and shine on massachusetts ; and from this mo ment the atmosphere grew more and more trans parent till the time of our departure, and we began to realize the extent of the view, and how the earth, in some degree, answered to the hea* vens in breadth, the white villages to the con stellations in the sky. there was little of the sublimity and grandeur which talong to moun tain scenery, but an immense landscape to pou 180 a walk to wachusett der on a summer s day. we could see how ample and roomy is nature. as far as the eye could reach there was little life in the landscape ; the few birds that flitted past did not crowd. the travelers on the remote highways, which in tersect the country on evenside, had no fellow travelers for miles, before or behind. on every side, the eye ranged over successive circles of towns, rising one above another, like the ter races of a vineyard, till they were lost in the horizon. wachusett is, in fact, the observator} of the state. there lay massachusetts, spread out before us in its length and breadth, like a map. there was the level horizon, which told of the sea on the east and south, the well-known hills of new hampshire on the north, and the misty summits of the hoosac and green moun tains, first made visible to us the evening be fore, blue and unsubstantial, like some bank of clouds which the morning wind would dissipate, on the northwest and west. these last distant ranges on which the eye rests unwearied, com mence with an abrupt bowlder in the north, beyond the connecticut, and travel southward, with three or four peaks dimly seen. but mo nadnock, rearing its masculine front in the north west, is the grandest feature. as we beheld it, we knew that it was the height of land between the two rivers, on this side the valley of the a walk to wachusett merrimack, on that of the connecticut, fluctuat ing with their blue seas of air, these rival vales, already teeming with yankee men along their respective streams, born to what destiny who shall tell? watatie and the neighboring hills, in this state and in new hampshire, are a continuation of the same elevated range on wlm-h we were standing. l;n thai new hampshire bluff, that promontory of a state, lowering day and night on this our state of massachusetts, will longest haunt our dreams. we could at length realize the place moun tains occupy on the land, and how they come into the general scheme of the universe. when first we climb their summits and observe their lesser irregularities, we do not give credit to the com prehensive intelligence which shaped them ; but when afterward we behold their outlines in the horizon, we confess that the hand which moulded their opposite slopes, making one to balance the other, worked round a deep centre, and was privy to the plan of the universe. so is the least part of nature in its bearings referred to all space. these lesser mountain ranges, as well as the al leglianies, run from northeast to southwest, and parallel with these mountain streams are the more fluent rivers, answering to the general di rection of the coast, the bank of the great ocean stream itself. even the clouds, with their thin 182 .1 walk to wachusett bars, fall into the same direction by preference, and such even is the course of the prevailing winds, and the migration of men and birds. a mountain-chain determines many things for the statesman and philosopher. the improvements of civilization rather creep along its sides than cross its summit. how often is it a barrier to prejudice and fanaticism? in passing over these heights of land, through their thin atmosphere, the follies of the plain are refined and purified ; and as many species of plants do not scale their summits, so many species of folly no doubt do not cross the alleghanies ; it is only the hardy mountain-plant that creeps quite over the ridge, and descends into the valley beyond. we get a dim notion of the flight of birds, especially of such as fly high in the air, by having ascended a mountain. we can now see what landmarks mountains are to their migrations; how the catskills and highlands have hardly sunk to them, when wachusett and monadnock open a passage to the northeast ; how they are guided, too, in their course by the rivers and valleys ; and who knows but by the stars, as well as the mountain ranges, and not by the petty landmarks which we use. the bird whose eye takes in the green mountains on the one side, and the ocean on the other, need not be at a loss to find its way. a walk to wachusett 183 at noon we descended the mountain, and, having returned to the almdes of men, turned our faces to the east again ; measuring our progress, from time to time, by the more ethereal hues which the mountain assumed. passing swiftly through stillwater and sterling, as with a down ward impetus, we found ourselves almost at home again in the green meadows of lancaster, so like our own concord, for both are watered by two streams which unite near their centres, and have many other features in common. there is an unexpected refinement about this scenery ; level prairies of great extent, interspersed with elms and hop-fields and groves of trees, give it almost a classic appearance. this, it will be remembered, was the scene of mrs. rowland son s capture, and of other events in the indian wars, but from this july afternoon, and under that mild exterior, those times seemed as remote as the irruption of the goths. they were the dark age of new england. on beholding a picture of a new england village as it then ap peared, with a fair open prospect, and a light on trees and river, as if it were broad noon, we find we had not thought the sun shone in those days, or that men lived in broad daylight then. we do not imagine the sun shining on hill and valley during philip s war, nor on the war-path of paugus, or standish, or church, or lovell, with 184 ,1 walk to wachusett serene summer weather, but a dim twilight or night did those events transpire in. they must have fought in the shade of their own dusky deeds. at length, as we plodded along the dusty roads, our thoughts became as dusty as they; all thought indeed stopped, thinking broke down, or proceeded only passively in a sort of rhythmical cadence of the confused material of thought, and we found ourselves mechanically repeating some familiar measure which timed with our tread; some verse of the robin hood ballads, for instance, which one can recommend to travel by : ** sweavens are swift, sayd lyttle john, as the wind blows over the hill ; for if it he never so loud this night, to-morrow it may be still,&quot; and so it went up hill and down till a stone interrupted the line, when a new verse was chosen : &quot; his shoote it was but loosely shot, yet flewe not the arrowe in vaine, for it met one of the sheriffe s men, and william-a-trent was slaine.&quot; there is, however, this consolation to the most wayworn traveler, upon the dustiest road, that the patli his feet describe is so perfectly symbolical of human life, now climbing the a walk to \vachusett 185 hills, now descending into the vales. from the summits he beholds the heavens and the hori zon, from the vales he looks up to the heights again. he is treading his old lessons still, and though he may be very weary and travel-worn, it is yet sincere experience. leaving the nashua, we changed our route a little, and arrived at stillriver village, in the western part of harvard, just as the sun was setting. from this place, which lies to the northward, upon the western slope of the same range of hills on which we had spent the n&amp;lt;xm before, in the adjacent town, the prospect is beautiful, and the grandeur of the mountain outlines unsurpassed. there was such a repose and quiet here at this hour, as if the very hill sides were enjoying the scene, and as we passed slowly along, looking back over the country we had traversed, and listening to the evening song of the robin, we could not help contrasting the equanimity of nature with the bustle and impa tience of man. his words and actions presume always a crisis near at hand, but she is forever silent and unpretending. and now that we have returned to the desul tory life of the plain, let us endeavor to iinjx&amp;gt;rt a little of that mountain grandeur into it. ^ e will remember within what walls we lie, and understand that this level life too has its sum 180 a walk to wachusett mit, and why from the mountain-top the deepest valleys have a tinge of blue ; that there is ele vation in every hour, as no part of the earth is so low that the heavens may not be seen from, and we have only to stand on the summit of our hour to command an uninterrupted horizon. we rested that night at harvard, and the next morning, while one bent his steps to the nearer village of groton, the other took his sep arate and solitary way to the peaceful meadows of concord; but let him not forget to record the brave hospitality of a farmer and his wife, who generously entertained him at their board, though the poor wayfarer could only congratu late the one on the continuance of hay weather, and silently accept the kindness of the other. refreshed by this instance of generosity, no less than by the substantial viands set before him, he pushed forward with new vigor, and reached the banks of the concord before the sun had climbed many degrees into the heavens. the landlord under the one word &quot;house&quot; are included the school-house, the alms-house, the jail, the tavern, the dwelling-house; and the meanest she&amp;lt;l or cave in which men live contains the ele ments of all these. but nowhere on the earth stands the entire and perfect house. the par thenon, st. peter s, the gothic minster, the palace, the hovel, are but imperfect executions of an imperfect idea. who would dwell in them ? perhaps to the eye of the gods the cot tage is more holy than the parthenon, for they look down with no especial favor upon the shrines formally dedicated to them, and that should be the most sacred roof which shelters most of humanity. surely, then, the gods who are most interested in the human race preside over the tavern, where especially men congre gate. methinks i see the thousand shrines erected to hospitality shining afar in all coun tries, as well mahometan and jewish, as chris tian, khans and caravansaries and inns, whither all pilgrims without distinction resort. likewise we look in vain, east or west over 188 the landlord the earth, to find the perfect man; but each represents only some particular excellence. the landlord is a man of more open and gen eral sympathies, who possesses a spirit of hos pitality which is its own reward, and feeds and shelters men from pure love of the creatures. to be sure, this profession is as often filled by imperfect characters, and such as have sought it from unworthy motives, as any other, but so much the more should we prize the true and honest landlord when we meet with him. \vho has not imagined to himself a country inn, where the traveler shall really feel in, and at home, and at his public-house, who was be fore at his private house ; whose host is indeed a host, and a lord of the land, a self-appointed brother of his race ; called to his place, beside, by all the winds of heaven and his good genius, as truly as the preacher is called to preach; a man of such universal sympathies, and so broad and genial a human nature, that he would fain sacrifice the tender but narrow ties of private friendship, to a broad, sunshiny, fair-weather and-foul friendship for his race; who loves men, not as a philosopher, with philanthropy, nor as an overseer of the poor, with charity, but by a necessity of his nature, as he loves dogs and horses; and standing at his open door from morning till night would fain see more and more the landlord 1 s 1 of them come along the highway, and ib never satiated. to him the sun and moon are but travelers, the one by day and the other by night; and they too patronize his house. to his im agination all things travel save his sign-post and himself; and though you may be his neigh bor for years, he will show you only the civili ties of the road. but on the other hand, while nations and individuals are alike selfish and exclusive, he loves all men equally; and if he treats his nearest neighbor as a stranger, since he has invited all nations to share his hospital ity, the farthest traveled is in some measure kindred to him who takes him into the bosom of his family. he keeps a house of entertainment at the sign of the black horse or the spread eagle, and is known far and wide, and his fame travels with increasing radius every year. all the neigh borhood is in his interest, and if the traveler ask how far to a tavern, he receives some such answer as this: &quot;well, sir, there s a house alxnit three miles from here, where they haven t taken down their sign yet; but it s only ten miles to slocum s, and that s a capital house, l&amp;gt;oth for man and beast.&quot; at three miles he passes a cheerless barrack, standing desolate behind its sign-post, neither public nor private, and lia-limpses of a discontented couple who 190 the landlord have mistaken their calling. at ten miles see where the tavern stands, really an entertain ing prospect, so public and inviting that only the rain and snow do not enter. it is no gay pavilion, made of bright stuffs, and furnished with nuts and gingerbread, but as plain and sin cere as a caravansary ; located in no tarrytown, where you receive only the civilities of com merce, but far in the fields it exercises a primi tive hospitality, amid the fresh scent of new hay and raspberries, if it be summer time, and the tinkling of cow-bells from invisible pas tures ; for it is a land flowing with milk and honey, and the newest milk courses in a broad, deep stream across the premises. in these retired places the tavern is first of all a house, elsewhere, last of all, or never, and warms and shelters its inhabitants. it is as simple and sincere in its essentials as the caves in which the first men dwelt, but it is also as open and public. the traveler steps across the threshold, and lo ! he too is master, for he only can be called proprietor of the house here who behaves with most propriety in it. the landlord stands clear back in nature, to niy imagination, with his axe and spade felling trees and raising potatoes with the vigor of a pioneer; with promethean energy making na ture yield her increase to supply the wants of the landlord 191 so many ; and he is not so exhausted, nor of so short a stride, but that he comes forward even to the highway to this wide hospitality and pub licity. surely, he has solved some of the prob lems of life. he comes in at his back door, holding a log fresh cut for the hearth upon his shoulder with one hand, while he greets the newly arrived traveler with the other. here at length we have free range, as not in palaces, nor cottages, nor temples, and intrude nowhere. all the secrets of housekeeping are exhibited to the eyes of men, above and below, l&amp;gt;efore and behind. this is the necessary way to live, men have confessed, in these days, and shall he skulk and hide? and why should we have any serious disgust at kitchens ? perhaps they are the holiest recess of the house. there is the hearth, after all, and the settle, and the fagots, and the kettle, and the crickets. ave have pleasant reminiscences of these. they are the heart, the left ventricle, the very vital part of the house. here the real and sincere life which we meet in the streets was actually fed and sheltered. here burns the taper that cheers the lonely traveler by night, and from this hearth ascend the smokes that populate the valley to his eyes by day. on the whole, a man may not be so little ashamed of any other part of his house, for here is his sincerity and 192 the landlord earnest, at least. it may not be here that the besoms are plied most, it is not here that they need to be, for dust will not settle on the kitchen floor more than in nature. hence it will not do for the landlord to pos sess too fine a nature. he must have health above the common accidents of life, subject to no modern fashionable diseases; but no taste, rather a vast relish or appetite. his sentiments on all subjects will be delivered as freely as the wind blows; there is nothing private or indivi dual in them, though still original, but they are public, and of the hue of the heavens over his house, a certain out-of-door obviousness and transparency not to be disputed. what he does, his manners are not to be complained of, though abstractly offensive, for it is what man does, and in him the race is exhibited. when he eats, he is liver and bowels and the whole digestive apparatus to the company, and so all admit the thing is done. he must have no idiosyncrasies, no particular bents or tendencies to this or that, but a general, uniform, and healthy development, such as his portly person indicates, offering himself equally on all sides to men. he is not one of your peaked and in hospitable men of genius, with particular tastes, but, as we said before, has one uniform relish, and taste which never aspires higher than a the landlord tavern-sign, or the cut of a weather-cock. the man of genius, like a dog with a bone, or the slave who has swallowed a diamond, or a patient with the gravel, flits afar and retired, off the road, hangs out no sign of refreshment for man and beast, but says, by all possible hints and signs, i wish to be alone, good-by, farewell. but the landlord can afford to live without privacy. he entertains no private thought, he cherishes no solitary hour, no sabbath-day, but thinks, enough to assert the dignity of reason, and talks, and reads the newspaper. what he does not tell to one traveler he tells to an other. he never wants to be alone, but sleeps, wakes, eats, drinks, sociably, still rememl&amp;gt;ering his race. he walks abroad through the thoughts of men, and the iliad and shakespeare are tame to him, who hears the rude but homely incidents of the road from every traveler. the mail might drive through his brain in the midst of his most lonely soliloquy, without disturbing his equanimity, provided it brought plenty of news and passengers. there can be no pro fanity where there is no fane behind, and the whole world may see quite round him. per chance his lines have fallen to him in dustier places, and he has heroically sat down when* two roads meet, or at the four corners or the five points, and his life is sublimely trivial for 194 the landlord the good of men. the dust of travel blows ever in his eyes, and they preserve their clear, complacent look. the hourlies and half-hour lies, the dailies and weeklies, whirl on well-worn tracks, round and round his house, as if it were the goal in the stadium, and still he sits within in unruffled serenity, with no show of retreat. his neighbor dwells timidly behind a screen of poplars and willows, and a fence with sheaves of spears at regular intervals, or defended against the tender palms of visitors by sharp spikes, but the traveler s wheels rattle over the door-step of the tavern, and he cracks his whip in the entry. he is truly glad to see you, and sincere as the bull s-eye over his door. the traveler seeks to find, wherever he goes, some one who will stand in this broad and cath olic relation to him, who will be an inhabitant of the land to him a stranger, and represent its human nature, as the rock stands for its inani mate nature ; and this is he. as his crib fur nishes provender for the traveler s horse, and his larder provisions for his appetite, so his con versation furnishes the necessary aliment to his spirits. he knows very well what a man wants, for he is a man himself, and as it were the far thest traveled, though he has never stirred from his door. he understands his needs and des tiny. he would be well fed and lodged, there the landlord 195 can ikj no &amp;lt;lnul&amp;gt;t, and have the transient sym pathy of a cheerful companion, and of a heart which always prophesies fair weather. and after all the greatest men, even, want much more the sympathy which every honest f ll\v can give, than that which the great only can impart. if he is not the most upright, let us allow him this praise, that he is the most down right of men. he has a hand to shake and to l&amp;gt;e shaken, and takes a sturdy and unquestion able interest in you, as if he had assumed the care of you, but if you will break your neck, he will even give you the best advice as to the method. the great poets have not been ungrateful to their landlords. mine host of the tabard inn, in the prologue to the canterbury tales, was an honor to his profession : 44 a seroely man our hoste was, with alle, for to han been a marshal in an halle. a large man he was, with eyen stepe ; a fairer burgeis was ther non in oiepe : bold of his ftpeche, and wise, and well ytaught, and of manhood him lacked righto naught. eke thereto was he right a mery man, and after houper plaien he began, and spake of mirthe nmonp-s &amp;lt;&amp;gt;tli&amp;lt;t thin^-. whan that we hadden made our reckoning^.&quot; he is the true house-band, and centre of the company, of greater fellowship and pnuti.al 19g the landlord social talent than any. he it is that proposes that each shall tell a tale to while away the time to canterbury, and leads them himself, and concludes with his own tale, &quot; now, by my fader s soule that is ded, but ye be mery, smiteth of my hed : hold up your hondes withouten more speche.&quot; if we do not look up to the landlord, we look round for him on all emergencies, for he is a man of infinite experience, who unites hands with wit. he is a more public character than a statesman, a publican, and not consequently a sinner; and surely, he, if any, should be ex empted from taxation and military duty. talking with our host is next best and in structive to talking with one s self. it is a more conscious soliloquy; as it were, to speak generally, and try what we would say provided we had an audience. he has indulgent and open ears, and does not require petty and par ticular statements. &quot;heigh-ho!&quot; exclaims the traveler. them s my sentiments, thinks mine host, and stands ready for what may come next, expressing the purest sympathy by his de meanor. &quot;hot as blazes!&quot; says the other. &quot; 1 lard weather, sir, not much stirring nowa days,&quot; says he. he is wiser than to contradict his guest in any case; he lets him go on; he lets him travel. the landlord 197 the latest sitter leaves him standing fur in the night, prepared to live right on, while sun* rise and set, and his &quot;good-night&quot; has as lri&amp;gt;k a sound as his &quot;good-morning;&quot; and est riser finds him tasting his liquors in tli ere flies begin to buzz, with a countenance ti -h as the morning star over the sanjed floor, and not as one who had watched ali night for travelers. and yet, if beds \ye the subject of conversation, it will appear that no man has been a sounder sleeper in his time. finally, as for his moral character, we do not hesitate to say that he has no grain of vice ar meanness in him, but represents just that degrt*e of virtue which all men relish without being nlili^ed to respect. he is a good man, as his bitters are good, an unquestionable goodness. not what is called a good man, good to be murdered, as a work of art in galleries and museums, but a good fellow, that is, good to l&amp;gt;e associated with. who ever thought of the religion of an inn-keeper, whether he was joined to the church, partook of the sacrament, said his prayers, feared god, or the like? no doubt he has had his experiences, has felt a change, and is a firm believer in the persever ance of the saints. in this last, we suspect, does the peculiarity of his religion consist. but he keeps an inn, and not a conscience. how 198 the landlord many fragrant charities and sincere social vir ;ire implied in this daily offering of himself tftu&amp;gt; public! he cherishes good-will to all, es the wayfarer as good and honest ad direct him on his road as the priest. * to conclude, the tavern will compare favor ably with the church. the church is the place where prayers and sermons are delivered, but. the tavern is where they are to take effect, and if the former are good, the latter cannot be bad. a winter walk the wind has gently murmured through the minds, or puffed with feathery softness against the windows, and occasionally sighed like a summer zephyr lifting the leaves along, the livelong night. the meadow-inouse has slept in his snug gallery in the soil, the owl has sat in a hollow tree in the depth of the swamp, the rabbit, the squirrel, and the fox have all been housed. the watch-dog has lain quiet on the hearth, and the cattle have stood silent in their stalls. the earth itself has slept, as it were its first, not its last sleep, save when some street-sign or wood-house door has faintly creaked upon its hinge, cheering forlorn nature at her midnight work, the only sound awake twixt venus and mars, advertising us of a remote inward warmth, a divine cheer and fel lowship, where gods are met together, but where it is very bleak for men to stand. but while the earth has slumlnred, all the air has been jalive with feathery flakes descending, as if some jiorthern ceres reigned, showering her silvery in ovrr all the fields. 200 a winter walk we sleep, and at length awake to the still reality of a winter morning. the snow lies warm as cotton or down upon the window-sill: the broadened gash and frosted panes admit a dim and private light, which enhances the snug cheer within. the stillness of the morning is impressive. the floor creaks under our feet as we move toward the window to look abroad through some clear space over the fields. we see the roofs stand under their snow burden. from the eares and fences hang stalactites of snow, and in the yard stand stalagmites cover ing some concealed core. the trees and shrubs rear white arms to the sky on every side; and where were walls and fences, we see fantastic forms stretching in frolic gambols across the dusky landscape, as if nature had strewn her fresh designs over the fields by night as models for man s art. silently we unlatch the door, letting the drift fall in, and step abroad to face the cutting air. already the stars have lost some of their sparkle, and a dull, leaden mist skirts the hori zon. a lurid brazen light in the east proclaims the approach of day, while the western land scape is dim and spectral still, and clothed in a sombre tartarian light, like the shadowy realms. they are infernal sounds only that you in -a the crowing of cocks, the barking of dogs, a winter walk -&quot;1 chopping of wood, the lowing of kine, all seem to come from pluto s barn-yard and beyond the styx, not for any melancholy they suggest, but their twilight bustle is too solemn and mys terious for earth. the recent tracks of the fox or otter, in the yard, remind us that each hour of the night is crowded with events, and the primeval nature is still working and making tracks in the snow. opening the gate, we tread l.riskly along the lone country road, crunching the dry and crisped snow under our feet, or aroused by the sharp clear creak of the wood sled, just starting for the distant market, from the early farmer s door, where it has lain the summer long, dreaming amid the chips and stub ble; while far through the drifts and powdered windows we see the farmer s early candle, like a paled star, emitting a lonely beam, as if some severe virtue were at its matins there. and one by ojae the smokes begin to ascend from the chimneys amid the trees and snows. the alaffiam smoke carl* up from some deep dell, the stiffened air exploring in the dawn, and making slow acquaintance with the day delaying now upon it* heavenward course, in wreathed loitering* dallying with itself, with m uncertain purpose and slow dead as its half -wakened master by the hearth, whoso mind still slumbering and alugginh thought* have not yet swept into the onward current of the new day ; and now it streams afar, -&quot;a winteit walk the while the chopper goes with step direct, and mind intent to swing the early axe. first in the dusky dawn he sends abroad llis early scout, his emissary, smoke, the earliest, latest pilgrim from the roof, to feel the frosty air, inform the day ; and while he crouches still beside the hearth, nor musters courage to unbar the door. it has gone down the glen with the light wind, and o er the plain unfurled its venturous wreath, draped the tree-tops, loitered upon the hill, and warmed the pinions of the early bird ; and now, perclxance, high in the crispy air, has caught sight of the day o er the earth s edge, and greets its master s eye at his low door, a* some refulgent cloud in the upper sky. we hear the sound of wood-chopping at the farmers doors, far over the frozen earth, the baying of the house-dog, and the distant clarion of the cock, though the thin and frosty air conveys only the finer particles of sound to our ears, with short and sweet vibrations, as the waves subside soonest on the purest and lightest liquids, in which gross substances sink to the bottom. they come clear and bell-like, and from a greater distance in the horizon, as if there were fewer impediments than in summer to make them faint and ragged. the ground is sonorous, like seasoned wood, and even the or dinary rural sounds are melodious, and the jing ling of the ice on the trees is sweet and liquid. there is the least possible moisture in the at .! winter walk 203 moephere, all l)eing dried up, or congealed, and it is of such extreme tenuity and elasticity that it becomes a source of drli-ht. the withdrawn and tense sky seems groined like the aisles of a cathedral, and the jmlished air sparkles a if there were crystals of ice floating in it. as they who have resided in greenland tell us that when it freezes &quot;the sea smokes like burn ing turf-land, and a fog or mist arises, called frost-smoke,&quot; which &quot;cutting smoke frequently raises blisters on the face and hands, and is very jk rnicious to the health.&quot; but this pure sting ing cold is an elixir to the lungs, and not so much a frozen mist as a crystallized midsum mer haze, refined and purified by cold. the sun at length rises through the distant woods, as if with the faint clashing swinging sound of cymbals, melting the air with his beams, and with such rapid steps the morning travels, that already his rays are gilding the distant western mountains. meanwhile we step hastily along through the jwwdery snow, warmed by an inward heat, enjoying an indian summer still, in the increased glow of thought and feeling. probably if our lives were more conformed to nature, we should not need to defend ourselves against her heats and colds, but find her our constant nurse and friend, as do plants and quadrupeds. if our bodies were fed with pure 204 a winter walk and simple elements, and not with a stimulating and heating diet, they would afford no more pasture for cold than a leafless twig, but thrive like the trees, which find even winter genial to their expansion. \ the wonderful purity of nature at this season is a most pleasing fact. every decayed stump and moss-grown stone and rail, and the dead leaves of autumn, are concealed by a clean nap kin of snow. in the bare fields and tinkling woods, see what virtue survives. in the coldest and bleakest places, the wannest charities still maintain a footliold. a cold and searching wind drives away all contagion, and nothing can withstand it but what has a virtue in it, and ac cordingly, whatever we meet with in cold and bleak places, as the tops of mountains, we re spect for a sort of sturdy innocence, a puritan toughness. all things beside seem to be called in for shelter, and what stays out must be part of the original frame of the universe, and of such valor as god himself. it is invigorating to breathe the cleansed air. its greater fineness and purity are visible to the eye, and we would fain stay out long and late, that the gales may sigh through us, too, as through the leafless trees, and fit us for the winter, as if we hoped so to borrow some pure and steadfast virtue, which will stead us in all seasons. a winter walk 205 there is .1 slumbering subterranean fire in na ture which never goes out, and which no coltl can chill. it finally melts the great snow, and in january or july is only buried under a thick* r or thinner covering. in the coldest day it huws somewhere, and the snow melts around every tree. this field of winter rye, which sprouted late in the fall, and now speedily dissolves the snow, is where the fire is very thinly covered. &quot;we feel warmed by it. in the winter, warmth stands for all virtue, and we resort in thought to a trickling rill, with its bare stones shining in the sun, and to warm springs in the woods, with as much eagerness as rabbits and robins. the steam which rises from swamps and pools is as dear and domestic as that of our own kettle. what fire could ever equal the sunshine of a winter s day, when the meadow mice come out by the wall-sides, and the chickadee lisps in the defiles of the wood? the warmth conies directly from the sun, and is not radiated from the earth, as in summer; and when we feel his l&amp;gt;eams on our backs as we are treading some snowy dell, we are grateful as for a special kindness, and bless the sun which has followed us into that by place. this subterranean fire has its altar in each man s breast ; for in the coldest day, and on the bleakest hill, the traveler cherishes a warmer 206 a winter walk fire within the folds of his cloak than is kindled on any hearth. a healthy man, indeed, is the complement of the seasons, and in winter, sum mer is in his heart. there is the south. thither have all birds and insects migrated, and around the warm springs in his breast are gathered the robin and the lark. at length, having reached the edge of the woods, and shut out the gadding town, we enter within their covert as we go under the roof of a cottage, and cross its threshold, all ceiled and banked up with snow. they are glad and warm still, and as genial and cheery in winter as in summer. as we stand in the midst of the pines in the flickering and checkered light which straggles but little way into their maze, we won der if the towns have ever heard their simple story. it seems to us that no traveler has ever explored them, and notwithstanding the wonders which science is elsewhere revealing every day, who would not like to hear their annals ? our humble villages in the plain are their contribu tion. we borrow from the forest the boards which shelter and the sticks which warm us. i low important is their evergreen to the winter, that portion of the summer which does not fade, the permanent year, the un withered grass. thus simply, and with little expense of altitude, is the surface of the earth diversified. what would .! winter walk 207 human life ik? without forests, those natural t;itigs2 from the tops of mountains they appear like smooth-shaven lawns, yet whither shall we walk but in this tidier grass? in this ghule covered with bushes of a year s growth, see how the silvery dust lies on every seared leaf and twig, deposited in such infinite and luxurious forms as by their very variety atone for the absence of color. observe the tiny tracks of mice around every stem, and the triangular tracks of the rabbit. a pure elas tic heaven hangs over all, as if the impurities of the summer sky, refined and shrunk by the chaste winter s cold, had been winnowed from the heavens upon the earth. nature confountls her summer distinctions at this season. the heavens seem to be nearer the earth. the elements are less reserved and dis tinct. water turns to ice, rain to snow. the day is but a scandinavian night. the winter is i an arctic summer. how much more living is the life that is in nature, the furred life which still survives the stinging nights, and, from amidst fields and woods covered with frost and snow, sees the sun rise. &quot; the f oodle wild* pour forth their brown inhabitants. * the gray squirrel and rabbit are brisk and play 208 a winter walk fill in the remote glens, even on the morning of the cold friday. here is our lapland and labrador, and for our esquimaux and knistcn aux, dog-ribbed indians, novazemblaites, and spitzbergeners, are there not the ice-cutter and wood -chopper, the fox, musk-rat, and mink? still, in the midst of the arctic day, we may trace the summer to its retreats, and sympathize with some contemporary life. stretched over the brooks, in the midst of the frost bound meadows, we may observe the submarine cot tages of the caddice-wonns, the larvae of the plicipennes; their small cylindrical cases built around themselves, composed of flags, sticks, grass, and withered leaves, shells, and pebbles, in form and color like the wrecks which strew the l&amp;gt;ottom, now drifting along over the pebbly bottom, now whirling in tiny eddies and dashing down steep falls, or sweeping rapidly along with the current, or else swaying to and fro at the end of some grass blade or root. anon they will leave their sunken habitations, and, crawling up the stems of plants, or to the surface, like gnats, as perfect insects henceforth, flutter over the surface of the water, or sacrifice their short lives in the flame of our candles at evening. down yonder little glen the shrubs are drooping under their burden, and the red alder-berries contrast with the white ground. here are the a winter walk -&quot; marks of a myriad feet which have already been abroad. the sun rises as proudly over sueh a glen as over the valley of the seine or the tiber, and it seems the residence of a pure and self-subsistent valor, sueh as they never wit nessed; which never knew defeat nor fear. i lere reign the simplicity and purity of a primitive age, and a health and hope far remote from towns and cities. standing quite alone, far in the forest, while the wind is shaking down snow from the trees, and leaving the only human tracks behind us, we find our reflections of a richer variety than the life of cities. the chick adee and nuthatch are more inspiring society than statesmen and philosophers, and we shall return to these last as to more vulgar compan ions. in this lonely glen, with its brook drain ing the slopes, its creased ice and crystals of all hues, where the spruces and hemlocks stand up on either side, and the rush and sere wild oats in the rivulet itself, our lives are more serene and worthy to contemplate. as the day advances, the heat of the sun is reflected by the hillsides, and we hear a faint but sweet music, where flows the rill released from its fetters, and the icicles are melting on the trees; and the nuthatch and partridge are heard and swn. the south wind melts the snow at noon, and the bare ground appears with its 210 a winter walk withered grass and leaves, and we are invigor ated by the perfume which exhales from it, as by the scent of strong meats. let us go into this deserted woodman s hut, and see how he has passed the long winter nights and the short and stormy days. for here man has lived under this south hillside, and it seems a civilized and public spot. we have such as sociations as when the traveler stands by the ruins of palmyra or hecatompolis. singing birds and flowers perchance have begun to ap pear here, for flowers as well as weeds follow in the footsteps of man. these hemlocks whis pered over his head, these hickory logs were his fuel, and these pitch-pine roots kindled his fire ; yonder fuming rill in the hollow, whose thin and airy vapor still ascends as busily as ever, though he is far off now, was his well. these hemlock boughs, and the straw upon this raised platform, were his bed, and this broken dish held his drink. but he has not been here this season, for the phoebes built their nest upon this shelf last summer. i find some embers left as if he had but just gone out, where he baked his pot of beans ; and while at evening he smoked his pipe, whose stemless bowl lies in the ashes, chatted with his only companion, if perchance he had any, about the depth of the snow on the morrow, already falling fast and thick without, a winter walk 211 or disputed whether the last sound was the screech of an owl, or the creak of a bough, or imagination only; and through his broad chim ney throat, in the late winter evening, ere he stretched himself upon the straw, he looked up to learn the progress of the storm, and, seeing the bright stars of cassiopeia s chair shining brightly down upon him, fell contentedly asleep. see how many traces from which we may learn the chopper s history. from this stump we may guess the sharpness of his ax, and from the sloi&amp;gt;e of the stroke, on which side he stood, and whether he cut down the tree without going round it or changing hands; and, from the flex ure of the splinters, we may know which way it fell. this one chip contains inscribed on it the whole history of the wood-chopper and of the world. on this scrap of paper, which held his sugar or salt, perchance, or was the wadding of his gun, sitting on a log in the forest, with what interest we read the tattle of cities, of those larger huts, empty and to let, like this, in high streets and broadways. the eaves are drip ping on the south side of this simple roof, while the titmouse lisps in the pine and the genial warmth of the sun around the door is some what kind and human. after two seasons, this rude dwelling does not deform the scene. already the birds resort to -1a winter walk it, to build their nests, and you may track to its door the feet of many quadrupeds. thus, for a long time, nature overlooks the encroachment and profanity of man. the wood still cheerfully and unsuspiciously echoes the strokes of the axe that fells it, and while they are few and seldom, they enhance its wildness, and all the elements strive to naturalize the sound. now our path begins to ascend gradually to the top of this high hill, from whose precipitous south side we can look over the broad country of forest and field and river, to the distant snowy mountains. see yonder thin column of smoke curling up through the woods from some invisible farmhouse; the standard raised over some rural homestead. there must be a warmer and more genial spot there below, as where we detect the vapor from a spring forming a cloud above the trees. what fine relations are estab lished between the traveler who discovers this airy column from some eminence in the forest and him who sits below. up goes the smoke as silently and naturally as the vapor exhales from the leaves, and as busy disposing itself in wreaths as the housewife on the, hearth below. it is a hieroglyphic of man s life, and suggests more intimate and important things than the boil ing of a pot. where its fine column rises above the forest, like an ensign, some human life has a winter walk 213 planted itself, and such is the beginning of koine, the establishment of the arts, and the foundation of empires, whether on the prairies of america or the steppes of asia. and now we descend again, to the brink of this woodland lake, which lies in a hollow of the hills, as if it were their expressed juice, and that of the leaves which are annually steeped in it. without outlet or inlet to the eye, it has still its history, in the lapse of its waves, in the rounded pebbles on its shore, and in the pines which grow down to its brink. it has not been idle, though sedentary, but, like abu musa, teaches that &quot;sitting still at home is the heavenly way; the going out is the way of the world.&quot; yet in its evajx&amp;gt;ration it travels as far as any. in summer it is the earth s liquid eye ; a mirror in the breast of nature. the sins of the wood are washed out in it. see how the woods form an amphitheatre about it, and it is an arena for all the genialnem of nature. all trees direct the traveler to its brink, all paths seek it out, birds fly to it, quadrujh ds flee to it, and the very ground inclines toward it. it is nature s saloon, where she has sat down to her toilet. consider her silent economy and tidiness ; how the sun comes with his evaporation to sweep the dust from its surface each morning, and a fresh sur face is constantly welling up; and annually, 214 a winter walk after whatever impurities have accumulated herein, its liquid transparency appears again in the spring. in summer a hushed music seems to sweep across its surface. but now a plain sheet of snow conceals it from our eyes, except where the wind has swept the ice bare, and the sere leaves are gliding from side to side, tacking and veering on their tiny voyages. here is one just keeled up against a pebble on shore, a dry beech leaf, rocking still, as if it would start again. a skillful engineer, methinks, might project its course since it fell from the parent stem. here are all the elements for such a cal culation. its present position, the direction of the wind, the level of the pond, and how much more is given. in its scarred edges and veins is its log rolled up. we fancy ourselves in the interior of a larger house. the surface of the pond is our deal table or sanded floor, and the woods rise abruptly from its edge, like the walls of a cot tage. the lines set to catch pickerel through the ice look like a larger culinary preparation, and the men stand about on tho white ground like pieces of forest furniture. the actions of these men, at the distance of half a mile over the ice and snow, impress us as when we read the exploits of alexander in history. they seem not unworthy of the scenery, and as momentous as the conquest of kingdoms. .1 winter walk 2j5 again we have wandered through the arches of the wood, until from its skirts we hear the distant booming of ice from yonder bay of the river, as if it were moved by some other and subtler tide than oceans know. to me it has a strange sound of home, thrilling as the voice of one s distant and noble kindred. a mild sum mer sun shines over forest and lake, and though there is but one green leaf for many roils, yet nature enjoys a serene health. every sound is fraught with the same mysterious assurance of health, as well now the creaking of the boughs in january, as the soft sough of the wind in july. when winter fringes every bough with his fantastic wreath, and puts the seal of silence now upon the leaves beneath ; when ever}stream in ita penthouse goes gnrgling on its way, and in his gallery the mouse nibbleth the meadow hay ; mi-thinks ill. summer still is nigh) and lurkrth underneath, an that same meadow-mouse doth lie snug in that last year s heath. and if perchance the chickadee lisp a faint note anon, the snow is summer s canopy, which she herself put on. 216 a winter walk fair blossoms deck the cheerful trees, and dazzling fruits depend, the north wind sighs a summer breeze, the nipping fronts to fend, bringing glad tidings unto me, tlir while i stand all ear, of a serene eternity, which need not winter fear. out on the silent pond straightway the restless ice doth crack, and pond sprites merry gambols play amid the deafening rack. eager i hasten to the vale, as if i heard brave news, how nature held high festival, which it were hard to lose. i gambol with my neighbor ice, and sympathizing quake, as each new crack darts in a trice across tin _; : idsi inn like. one with the cricket in the ground, and fagot on the hearth, resounds the rare domestic sound along the forest path. before night we will take a journey on skates along the course of this meandering river, as full of novelty to one who sits by the cottage fire all the winter s day, as if it were over the polar ice, with captain parry or franklin ; fol lowing the winding of the stream, now flowing a nv.y //:/; walk 217 amid hills, now spreading out into fair meadows, and forming a myriad coves and bays where the pine and hemlock overarch. the river flows in the rear of the towns, and we see all things from a new and wilder side. the fields and gardens come down to it with a frankness, and freedom from pretension, which they do not wear on the highway. it is the outside and edge of the earth. our eyes are not offended by violent contrasts. the last rail of the farmer s fence is some swaying willow bough, which still pre serves its freshness, and here at length all fences stop, and we no longer cross any road. we may go far up within the country now by the most retired and level road, never climbing a hill, but by broad levels ascending to the upland meadows. it is a beautiful illustration of the law of obedience, the flow of a river ; the path for a sick man, a highway down which an acorn cup may float secure with its freight. its slight occasional falls, whose precipices would not diversify the landscape, are celebrated by mist and spray, and attract the traveler from far and near. from the remote interior, its current conducts him by broad and easy steps, or by one gentler inclined plane, to the sea. thus by an early and constant yielding to the inequalities of the ground it secures itself the easiest passage. no domain of nature is quite closed to man at 218 .1 winter walk all tinu s, and now we draw near to the empire of the fishes. our feet glide swiftly over unfathomed depths, where in summer our line tempted the pout and perch, and where the stately piekerel lurked in the long corridors formed by the bul rushes. the deep, .impenetrable marsh, where the heron waded, and bittern squatted, is made ]&amp;gt;ervious to our swift shoes, as if a thousand rail roads had been made into it. with one impulse we are carried to the cabin of the musk rat, that earliest settler, and see him dart away under the transparent ice, like a furred fish, to his hole in the bank ; and we glide rapidly over meadows where lately &quot; the mower whet his scythe,&quot; through beds of frozen cranberries mixed with meadow grass. we skate near to where the blackbird, the pewee, and the kingbird hung their nests over the water, and the hornets builded from the maple in the swamp. how many gay warblers, following the sun, have radi ated from this nest of silver-birch and thistle down. on the swamp s outer edge was hung the supcrinarine village, where no foot pene trated. in this hollow tree the wood-duck reared her brood, and slid away each day to forage in yonder fen. in winter, nature is a cabinet of curiosities, full of dried specimens, in their natural order and position. the meadows and forests are a .4 winter walk hortti* aiccu*. the leaves and granse* stand perfectly pressed by the air without screw or gum, and the birds nests are not hung cm an artificial twig, but where they bnilded them. we go about dry shod to inspect the summer s wprk in the rank swamp, and see what a growth have got the alders, the willows, and the maples; testifying to how many warm suns, and fertiliz ing dews and showers. see what strides their boughs took in the luxuriant summer, and anon these dormant buds will carry them on ward and upward another span into the heavens. occasionally we wade through fields of snow, under whose depths the river is lost for many rods, to appear again to the right or left, where we least expected ; still holding on its way un derneath, with a faint, stertorous, rumbling sound, as if, like the bear and marmot, it too had hibernated, and we hail followed its faint summer-trail to where it earthed itself in snow and ice. at first we should have thought that rivers would l&amp;gt;e empty and dry in midwinter, or else frozen solid till the spring thawed them; but their volume is not diminished even, for only a superficial cold bridges their surfaces. the thousand springs which feed the likes and streams are flowing still. the issues of a few surface springs only are closed, and they go to swell the deep reservoirs. nature s wells are 2 % 20 a winter walk l&amp;gt;elow the frost. the summer brooks are not filled with snow-water, nor does the mower quench his thirst with that alone. the streams are swollen when the snow melts in the spring, because nature s work has been delayed, the water being turned into ice and snow, whose particles are less smooth and round, and do not find their level so soon. far over the ice, between the hemlock woods and snow-clad hills, stands the pickerel fisher, his lines set in some retired cove, like a finlaa der, with his arms thrust into the pouches of his dreadnought; with dull, snowy, fishy thoughts, himself a finless fish, separated a few inches from his race; dumb, erect, and made to be en veloped in clouds and snows, like the pines on shore. in these wild scenes, men stand about in the scenery, or move deliberately and heav ily, having sacrificed the sprightliness and vi vacity of towns to the dumb sobriety of nature. he does not make the scenery less wild, more than the jays and musk-rats, but stands there as a part of it, as the natives are represented in the voyages of early navigators, at nootka sound, and on the northwest coast, with their furs about them, before they were tempted to loquacity by a scrap of iron. he belongs to the natural family of man, and is planted deeper in nature and has more root than the inhabitants of towns. a h7.y //:# walk 221 go to him, ask what luck, and you will irani that he too is a worshiper of the unseen. hear with what sincere deference and waving gesture in his tone he speaks of the lake pickerel, which he has never seen, his primitive and ideal race of pickerel. he is connected with the shore still, as by a fish-line, and yet remembers tho season \\li.-n h,t&amp;gt;.&amp;gt;k li-h through i m-106 &quot;ii the pond, while the peas were up in his garden at home. but now, while we have loitered, the clouds have gathered again, and a few straggling snow tlakrs are beginning to descend. faster and faster they fall, shutting out the distant objects from sight. the snow falls on every wood and field, and no crevice is forgotten; by the river and the pond, on the hill and in the valley. quadrupeds are confined to their coverts and the birds sit upon their ]&amp;gt;erches this peaceful hour. there is not so much sound as in fair weather, but silently and gradually every slope, and the gray walls and fences, and the polished ice, and the sere leaves, which were not buried before, are concealed, and the tracks of men and beasts are lost. with so little effort does nature reassert her rule and blot out the traces of men. i lear how i lomer has described the same : &quot; the snow-flakes fall thick and fast on a winter s day. the winds are lulled, and the snow falls 222 .1 winter walk iik -i-ssant, covering the tops of the mountains, and the hills, and the plains where the lotus-tree grows, and the cultivated fields, and they are falling by the inlets and shores of the foaming sea, but are silently dissolved by the waves.&quot; the snow levels all things, and infolds them deeper in the bosom of nature, as, in the slow summer, vegetation creeps up to the entablature of the temple, and the turrets of the castle, and helps her to prevail over art. the surly night wind rustles through the wood, and warns us to retrace our steps, while the sun goes down behind the thickening storm, and birds seek their roosts, and cattle their stalls. &quot; drooping the lab rer ox stands covered o er with snow, and now demands the fruit of all his toil.&quot; though winter is represented in the almanac as an old man, facing the wind and sleet, and drawing his cloak about him, we rather think of him as a merry wood-chopper, and warm blooded youth, as blithe as summer. the un explored grandeur of the storm keeps up the spirits of the traveler. it does not trifle with us, but has a sweet earnestness. in winter we lead a more inward life. our hearts are warm and cheery, like cottages under drifts, whose windows and doors are half concealed, but from .-i winter walk 223 whose chimneys the smoke cheerfully ascends. the imprisoning drifts increase the sense of comfort which the house affords, and in the coldest days we are content to sit over the hearth and see the sky through the chimney top, enjoy ing the quiet and serene life that may be had in a warm corner by the chimney side, or feeling our pulse by listening to the low of cattle in the street, or the sound of the flail in distant barns all the long afternoon. no doubt a skillful physi cian could determine our health by observing how these simple and natural sounds affected us. we enjoy now, not an oriental, but a boreal leisure, around warm stoves and fireplaces, and watch the shadow of motes in the sunbeams. sometimes our fate grows too homely and familiarly serious ever to be cruel. consider how for three months the human destiny is wrapped in furs. the good hebrew revelation takes no cognizance of all this cheerful snow. is there no religion for the temperate and frigid zones ? we know of no scripture which records the pure benignity of the gods on a new england winter night. their praises have never been sung, only their wrath deprecated. the best scripture, after all, records but a meagre faith. its saints live reserved and austere. let a brave, devout man upend the year in the woods of maine or labrador, and see if the hebrew 224 a winter walk scriptures speak adequately to his condition and experience, from the setting in of winter to the breaking up of the ice. now commences the long winter evening around the farmer s hearth, when the thoughts of the indwellers travel far abroad, and men are by nature and necessity charitable and liberal to all creatures. now is the happy resistance to cold, when the farmer reaps his reward, and thinks of his preparedness for winter, and, through the glittering panes, sees with equa nimity &quot;the mansion of the northern bear,&quot; for now the storm is over, &quot; the full ethereal round, infinite worlds disclosing to the view, shines out intensely keen ; and all one cope of starry glitter glows from pole to pole.&quot; the succession of forest trees 1 every man is entitled to come to cattleshow, even a transcendentalist ; and for my part i am more interested in the men than in the cattle. i wish to see once more those old familiar faces, whose names i do not know, which for me repre sent the middlesex country, and come as near being indigenous to the soil as a white man can ; the men who are not above their business, whose coats are not too black, whose shoes do not shine very much, who never wear gloves to conceal their hands. it is true, there are some queer specimens of humanity attracted to our festival, but all are welcome. i am pretty sure to meet once more that weak-minded and whimsical fel low, generally weak-bodied too, who prefers a crooked stick for a cane; perfectly useless, you would say, only bizarre, fit for a cabinet, like a jwtrified snake. a ram s horn would ik? as con venient, and is yet more curiously twisted. he brings that much indulged bit of the country with him, from some town s end or other, and 1 an arldrem read to the middlesex agricultural society in coooord, september, 1h4m). 226 the succession of forest trees introduces it to concord groves, as if he had promised it so much sometime. so some, it seems to me, elect their rulers for their crooked ness. but i think that a straight stick makes the best cane, and an upright man the best ruler. or why choose a man to do plain work who is distinguished for his oddity? however, i do not know but you will think that they have com mitted this mistake who invited me to speak to you to-day. in my capacity of surveyor, i have often talked with some of you, my employers, at your dinner tables, after having gone round and round and behind your farming, and ascertained exactly what its limits were. moreover, taking a surveyor s and a naturalist s liberty, i have been in the habit of going across your lots much oftener than is usual, as many of you, perhaps to your sorrow, are aware. yet many of you, to my relief, have seemed not to be aware of it ; and, when i came across you in some out-of-the way nook of your farms, have inquired, with an air of surprise, if i were not lost, since you had nrvt !! me in that part .t the tn\\ m &amp;lt;&amp;gt;] county before; when, if the truth were known, and it had not been for iwtraying my secret, i might with more propriety have inquired if you were not lost, since i had never seen you there before. i have several times shown the proprietor the shortest way out of his wood-lot. the succession of forest trees 227 therefore, it would seem that 1 have some title to speak to you to-day; and considering what that title is, and the occasion that has called us together, i need offer no apology if i invite your attention, for the few moments that are allotted me, to a purely scientific subject. at those dinner tables referred to, i have often been asked, as many of you have been, if i could tell how it happened, that when a pine wood was cut down an oak one commonly sprang up, and vice versa. to which i have answered, and now answer, that i can tell, that it is no mystery to me. as i am not aware that this has been clearly shown by any one, i shall lay the more stress on this point. let me lead you back into your wood-lots again. when, hereabouts, a single forest tree or a forest springs up naturally where none of its kind grew before, i do not hesitate to say, though in some quarters still it may sound para doxical, that it came from a seed. of the vari ous ways by which trees are knwrn to ihj propa gated, by transplanting, cuttings, and the ljk c&amp;lt; this is the only supposable one under these circumstances. no such tree has ever been known to spring from anything else. if any one asserts that it sprang from something else, or from nothing, the burden of proof lies with him. 228 the succession of forest trees it remains, then, only to show how the seed is transported from where it grows to where it is planted. this is done chiefly by the agency of the wind, water, and animals. the lighter seeds, as those of pines and maples, are trans ported chiefly by wind and water; the heavier, as acorns and nuts, by animals. in all the pines, a very thin membrane, in appearance much like an insect s wing, grows over and around the seed, and independent of it, while the latter is being developed within its base. indeed this is often perfectly developed, though the seed is abortive ; nature being, you would say, more sure to provide the means of transporting the seed, than to provide the seed to be transported. in other words, a beautiful thin sack is woven around the seed, with a handle to it such as the wind can take hold of, and it is then committed to the wind, expressly that it may transport the seed and extend the range of the species; and this it does, as effec tually as when seeds are sent by mail in a differ ent kind of sack from the patent-office. there is a patent-office at the seat of government of the universe, whose managers are as much inter ested in the dispersion of seeds as anybody at washington can be, and their operations are in finitely more extensive and regular. there is then no necessity for supposing that the succession of forest trees 229 the pines have sprung up from nothing, and i am aware that i am not at all peculiar in assert ing that they come from seeds, though the nuxle of their propagation by nature has l&amp;gt;cen but little attended to. they are very extensively raised from the seed in europe, and are beginning to be here. when you cut down an oak wood, a pine wood will not at once spring up there unless there are, or have been quite recently, seed-bearing pines near enough for the seeds to be blown from them. but, adjacent to a forest of pines, if you prevent other crops from growing there, you will surely have an extension of your pine forest, pro vhled the soil is suitable. as for the heavy seeds and nuts which are not furnished with wings, the notion is still a very common one that, when the trees which bear these spring up where none of their kind were noticed before, they have come from seeds or other principles spontaneously generated there in an unusual manner, or which have lain dor mant in the soil for centuries, or perhaps been called into activity by the heat of a burning. i do not believe these assertions, and 1 will state some of the ways in which, according to my ob servation, sucli t u-e*its are planted and raised. every one of these seeds, too, will imj found to lie winged or legged in another fashion. sun-ly 230 the succession of forest trees it is not wonderful that cherry-trees of all kinds are widely dispersed, since their fruit is well known to be the favorite food of various birds. many kinds are called bird-cherries, and they appropriate many more kinds, which are not so called. eating cherries is a bird-like employ ment, and unless we disperse the seeds occasion ally, as they do, i shall think that the birds have the best right to them. see how artfully the seed of a cherry is placed in order that a bird may be compelled to transport it in the very midst of a tempting pericarp, so that the creature that would devour this must commonly take the stone also into its mouth or bill. if you ever ate a cherry, and did not make two bites of it, you must have perceived it right in the centre of the luscious morsel, a large earthy residuum left on the tongue. we thus take into our mouths cherry stones as big as peas, a dozen at once, for nature can persuade us to do almost anything when she would com pass her ends. some wild men and children in stinctively swallow these, as the birds do when in a hurry, it being the shortest way to get rid of them. thus, though these seeds are not pro vided with vegetable wings, nature has impelled the thrush tril&amp;gt;e to take them into their bills and fly away with them ; and they are winged in an other sense, and more effectually than the seeds the succession of forest trees 231 of pines, for these are carried even against the wind. the consequence is, that cherry-trees grow not only here but there. the same is true of a great many other seeds. but to come to the observation which sug gested these remarks. as i have said, 1 sus pect that i can throw some light on the fact, that when hereabouts a dense pine wood is cut down, oaks and other hard woods may at once take its place. i have got only to show that the acorns and nuts, provided they are grown in the neighborhood, are regularly planted in such woods; for i assert that if an oak-tree has not grown within ten miles, and man has not car ried acorns thither, then an oak wood will not spring up at once, when a pine wood is cut down. apparently, there were only pines there before. they are cut off, and after a year or two you see oaks and other hard woods springing up there, with scarcely a pine amid them, and the wonder commonly is, how the seed could have lain in the ground so long without decaying. but the truth is, that it has not lain in the ground so long, but is regularly planted each year by various quadrupeds and birds. in this neighl&amp;gt;orhood, where oak and pines are about equally dispersed, if you look through the thickest pine wood, even the seemingly un mixed pitch-pine ones, you will commonly detect 232 the succession of forest trees many little oaks, birches, and other hard woods, sprung from seeds carried into the thicket by squirrels and other animals, and also blown thither, but which are overshadowed and choked by the pines. the denser the evergreen wood, the more likely it is to be well planted with these seeds, because the planters incline to resort with their forage to the closest covert. they also carry it into birch and other woods. this planting is carried on annually, and the old est seedlings annually die ; but when the pines are cleared off, the oaks, having got just the start they want, and now secured favorable con ditions, immediately spring up to trees. the shade of a dense pine wood is more un favorable to the springing up of pines of the same species than of oaks within it, though the former may come up abundantly when the pines are cut, if there chance to be sound seed in the ground. but when you cut off a lot of hard wood, very often the little pines mixed with it have a similar start, for the squirrels have carried off the nuts to the pines, and not to the more open wood, and they commonly make pretty clean work of it; and moreover, if the wood was old, the sprouts will be feeble or entirely fail; to say nothing about the soil being, in a measure, ex hausted for this kind of crop. the succession of fohest trees 233 if a pine wood is surrounded by a \vliit.&amp;lt;&amp;gt;;ik ono chiefly, white oaks may be expected to suc ceed when the pines are cut. if it is surrounded instead by an edging of shrub-oaks, then you will probably have a dense shrub-oak thicket. i have no time to go into details, but will say, in a word, that while the wind is conveying the seeds of pines into hard woods and open lands, the squirrels and other animals are con veying the seeds of oaks and walnuts into the pine woods, and thus a rotation of crops is kept up. i affirmed this confidently many years ago, and an occasional examination of dense pine \vtniiu rnntiniii-tl nif in inv opinion. it liaion been known to observers that squirrels bury nuts in the ground, but i am not aware that any one has thus accounted for the regular succession of [ ..&amp;lt; . on the 24th of september, in 1857, as i was paddling down the assabet, in this town, i saw a red squirrel run along the bank under some herbage, with something large in its mouth. it stopped near the foot of a hemlock, within a couple of rods of me, and, hastily pawing a hole with its forefeet, dropped its booty into it, cov ered it up, and retreated part way up the trunk of the tree. as i approached the shore to ex amine the deposit, the squirrel, descending part 234 the succession of forest trees way, betrayed no little anxiety about its treasure, and made two or three motions to recover it before it finally retreated. digging there, i found two green pig-nuts joined together, with the thick husks on, buried about an inch and a half under the reddish soil of decayed hemlock leaves, just the right depth to plant it. in short, this squirrel was then engaged in accom plishing two objects, to wit, laying up a store of winter food for itself, and planting a hickory wood for all creation. if the squirrel was killed, or neglected its deposit, a hickory would spring up. the nearest hickory-tree was twenty rods distant. these nuts were there still just four teen days later, but were gone when i looked again, november 21st, or six weeks later still. i have since examined more carefully several dense woods, which are said to be, and are ap parently, exclusively pine, and always with the same result. for instance, i walked the same day to a small, but very dense and handsome white-pine grove, about fifteen rods square, in the east part of this town. the trees are large for concord, being from ten to twenty inches in diameter, and as exclusively pine as any wood that i know. indeed, i selected this wood because i thought it the least likely to contain anything else. it stands on an open plain or pasture, except that it adjoins another small the succession of forest trees 235 pine wood, which has a few little oaks in it, on the southeast side. oil every other side, it was at least thirty rods from the nearest woods. standing on the edge of this grove and looking through it, for it is quite level and free from underwood, for the most part bare, red-eari&amp;gt;eted ground, you would have said that there was not a hard-wood tree in it, young or old. hut on looking carefully along over its floor i discovered, though it was not till my eye had got used to the search, that, alternating with thin ferns, and small blueberry bushes, there was, not merely here and there, but as often as every five feet and with a degree of regularity, a little oak, from three to twelve inches high, and in one place i found a green acorn dropped by the base of a pine. i confess i was surprised to find my theory so perfectly proved in this case. one of the prin cipal agents in this planting, the red squirrels, were all the while curiously inspecting me, while i was inspecting their plantation. some of the little oaks had been browsed by cows, which re sorted to this wood for shade. after seven or eight years, the hard woods evidently find such a locality unfavorable to their growth, the pines being allowed to stand. as an evidence of this, i observed a diseased red-maple twenty-five feet long, which had been 286 the succession of forest trees recently prostrated, though it was still covered with green leaves, the only maple in any posi tion in the wood. but although these oaks almost invariably die if the pines are not cut down, it is probable that they do better for a few years under their shel ter than they would anywhere else. the very extensive and thorough experiments of the english have at length led them to adopt a method of raising oaks almost precisely like this, which somewhat earlier had been adopted by nature and her squirrels here; they have sim ply rediscovered the value of pines as nurses for oaks. the english experimenters seem, early and generally, to have found out the importance of using trees of some kind as nurse-plants for the young oaks. i quote from london what he describes as &quot;the ultimatum on the subject of planting and sheltering oaks,&quot; &quot;an abstract of the practice adopted by the government offi cers in the national forests &quot; of england, pre pared by alexander milne. at first some oaks had been planted by them selves, and others mixed with scotch pines; &quot;but in all cases,&quot; says mr. milne, &quot;where oaks were planted actually among the pines and sur rounded by them [though the soil might be in ferior], the oaks were found to be much the best.&quot; &quot; for several years past, the plan pur the successw\ of forest trees 237 sued lias been to plant the inclosures with scotch ]in-s only [a tree very similar to our j&amp;gt;it&amp;lt; h pine], ami when the pines have got to the h^ jit of five or six feet, then to put in good strong oak plants of about four or five years* growth among the pines, not cutting away any pines at first, unless they happen to be so strong and thick as to overshadow the oaks. in about two years it becomes necessary to shred the branches of the pines, to give light and air to the oaks, and in alnnit two or three more years to begin gradually to remove the pines altogether, tak ing out a certain number each year, so that, at the end of twenty or twenty-five years, not a single scotch pine shall be left; although, for the first ten or twelve years, the plantation may have appeared to contain nothing else but pine. the advantage of this mode of planting has been found to be that the pines dry and ameliorate the soil, destroying the coarse grass and brambles which frequently choke and injure oaks; and that no mending over is necessary, as scarcely an oak so planted is found to fail. thus much the english planters have discov ered by patient experiment, and, for aught i know, they have taken out a patent for it ; but they appear not to have discovered that it was discovered before, and that they are merely adopting the method of nature, which she long 238 the succession of forest trees ago made patent to all. she is all the while planting the oaks amid the pines without our knowledge, and at last, instead of government officers, we send a party of wood-choppers to cut down the pines, and so rescue an oak forest, at which we wonder as if it had dropped from the skies. as i walk amid hickories, even in august, i hear the sound of green pig-nuts falling from time to time, cut off by the chickaree over my head. in the fall, i notice on the ground, either within or in the neighborhood of oak woods, on all sides of the town, stout oak twigs three or four inches long, bearing half a dozen empty acorn-cups, which twigs have been gnawed off by squirrels, on both sides of the nuts, in order to make them more portable. the jays scream and the red squirrels scold while you are club bing and shaking the chestnut-trees, for they are there on the same errand, and two of a trade never agree. i frequently see a red or gray squirrel cast down a green chestnut-bur, as i am going through the woods, and i used to think, sometimes, that they were cast at me. in fact, they are so busy about it, in the midst of the chestnut season, that you cannot stand long in the woods without hearing one fall. a sports man told me that he had, the day before, that was in the middle of october, seen a green the successiu\ of 1-orest trees 2*9 chestnut-bur dropped on our groat river meadow, fifty roils from the nearest wood, and much further from the nearest chestnut-tree, and he could not tell how it came there. occasionally, when chestnutting in midwinter, i find thirty or forty nuts in a pile, left in its gallery, just under the leaves, by the common wood -mouse (mm icucopus). hut especially, in the winter, the extent to which this transportation and planting of nuts is carried on is made apparent by the snow. in almost every wood, you will see where the red or gray squirrels have pawed down through the snow in a hundred places, sometimes two feet deep, and almost always directly to a nut or a pine-cone, as directly as if they had started from it and bored upward, which you and i could not have done. it would be difficult for us to find one before the snow falls. commonly, no doubt, they had deposited them there in the fall. you wonder if they remember the localities, or discover them by the scent. the red squirrel commonly has its winter abode in the earth under a thicket of evergreens, frequently under a small clump of evergreens in the midst of a deciduous wood. if there are any nut-trees, which still retain their nuts, standing at a distance without the wood, their paths often lead directly to and from them. we therefore need not suppose 240 the succession of forest trees an oak standing here and there in the wood in order to seed it, but if a few stand within twenty or thirty rods of it, it is sufficient. i think that i may venture to say that every white-pine cone that falls to the earth naturally in this town, before opening and losing its seeds, and almost every pitch-pine one that falls at all, is cut off by a squirrel, and they begin to pluck them long before they are ripe, so that when the crop of white-pine cones is a small one, as it commonly is, they cut off thus almost every one of these before it fairly ripens. i think, more over, that their design, if i may so speak, in cutting them off green, is, partly, to prevent their opening and losing their seeds, for these are the ones for which they dig through the snow, and the only white-pine cones which contain any thing then. i have counted in one heap, within a diameter of four feet, the cores of 239 pitch pine cones which had been cut off and stripped by the red squirrel the previous winter. the nuts thus left on the surface, or buried just beneath it, are placed in the most favorable circumstances for germinating. i have some times wondered how those which merely fell on the surface of the earth got planted ; but, by the end of december, i find the chestnut of the same year partially mixed with the mould, as it were, under the decaying and mouldy leaves, where the succession of forest trees 241 there is all the moisture and manure they want, for the nuts fall fast. in a plentiful year, a large proportion of the nuts are thus covered loosely an inch deep, and are, of course, some what concealed from squirrels. one winter, when the crop had been abundant, i got, with the aid of a rake, many quarts of these nuts as late as the tenth of january, and though some bought at the store the same day were more than half of them mouldy, i did not find a single mouldy one among these which i picked from under the wet and mouldy leaves, where they had been snowed on once or twice. nature knows how to pack them best. they were still plump and tender. apparently, they do not heat there, though wet. in the spring they were all sprouting. loudon says that &quot;when the nut [of the common walnut of europe] is to be preserved through the winter for the purjwse of planting in the following spring, it should ik? laid in a rot heap, as soon as gathered, with the husk on, and the heap should be turned over frequently in the course of the winter.&quot; here, again, he is stealing nature s &quot;thun der/ how can a poor mortal do otherwise? for it is she that finds fingers to steal with, and the treasure to be stolen. in the planting of the seeds of most trees, the best gardeners do no 242 the succession of forest trees more than follow nature, though they may not know it. generally, both large and small ones are most sure to germinate, and succeed best, when only beaten into the earth with the back of a spade, and then covered with leaves or straw. these results to which planters have arrived remind us of the experience of kane and his companions at the north, who, when learning to live in that climate, were surprised to find themselves steadily adopting the customs of the natives, simply becoming esquimaux. so, when we experiment in planting forests, we find our selves at last doing as nature does. would it not be well to consult with nature in the outset? for she is the most extensive and experienced planter of us all, not excepting the dukes of athol. in short, they who have not attended particu larly to this subject are but little aware to what an extent quadrupeds and birds are employed, especially in the fall, in collecting, and so dis seminating and planting the seeds of trees. it is the almost constant employment of the squirrels at that season, and you rarely meet with one that has not a nut in its mouth, or is not just going to get one. one squirrel-hunter of this town told me that he knew of a walnut-tree which bore particularly good nuts, but that on going to gather them one fall, he found that he had been the succession of forest trees 243 anticipated by a family of a dozen red squirrels. he took out of the tree, which was hollow, one bushel and three peeks by measurement, with out the husks, and they supplied him and his family for the winter. it would be easy to mul tiply instances of this kind. how commonly in the fall you see the cheek-poaches of the striped squirrel distended by a quantity of nuts! this speeies gets its scientific name, tamias, or the steward, from its habit of storing up nuts and other seeds. look under a nut-tree a month after the nuts have fallen, and see what propor tion of sound nuts to the abortive ones and shells you will find ordinarily. they have been already eaten, or dispersed far and wide. the ground looks like a platform before a grocery, where the gossips of the village sit to crack nuts and less savory jokes. you have come, you would say, after the feast was over, and are pre sented with the shells only. occasionally, when threading tho woods in the fall, you will hear a sound as if some one had broken a twig, and, looking up, see a jay pecking at an acorn, or you will see a flock of them at once about it, in the top of an oak, and hear them break them off. they then fly to a suita ble limb, and placing the acorn under one foot, hammer away at it busily, making a sound liko a woodpecker s tapping, looking round from time 244 the succession of forest trees to time to see if any foe is approaching, and soon reach the meat, and nibble at it, holding up their heads to swallow, while they hold the remainder very firmly with their claws. nevertheless it often drops to the ground before the bird has done with it. i can confirm what william bar tram wrote to wilson, the ornithologist, that &quot;the jay is one of the most useful agents in the economy of nature, for disseminating forest trees and other nuciferous and hard-seeded vegetables on which they feed. their chief employment during the autumnal season is foraging to supply their winter stores. in performing this neces sary duty they drop abundance of seed in their flight over fields, hedges, and by fences, where they alight to deposit them in the post-holes, etc. it is remarkable what numbers of young trees rise up in fields and pastures after a wet winter and spring. these birds alone are capable, in a few years time, to replant all the cleared lands.&quot; i have noticed that squirrels also frequently drop their nuts in open land, which will still further account for the oaks and walnuts which spring up in pastures, for, depend on it, every new tree comes from a seed. when i examine the little oaks, one or two years old, in such places, i invariably find the empty acorn from which they sprung. the succession of forest trees 245 so far from the seed having lain dormant in the soil since oaks grew there before, as many believe, it is well known that it is difficult to preserve the vitality of acorns long enough to transport them to europe; and it is recom mended in london s &quot;arboretum, &quot;as the safest course, to sprout them in pots on the voyage. the same authority states that &quot;very few acorns of any species will germinate after having been kept a year,&quot; that beechmast &quot;only retains its vital properties one year,&quot; and the black-walnut &quot;seldom more than six months after it has ripened.&quot; i have frequently found that in no vernier, almost every acorn left on the ground im.l sprouted or decayed. wlut with frost, drouth, moisture, and worms, the greater part are soon destroyed. yet it is stated by one botanical writer that &quot;acorns that have lain for centuries, on being ploughed up, have soon vegetated.&quot; mr. george b. emerson, in his valuable re port on the trees and shrubs of this state, says of the pines: &quot;the tenacity of life of the seeds is remarkable. they will remain for many years unchanged in the ground, protected by the coolness and deep shade of the forest alxive them. but when the forest is removed, and the warmth of the sun admitted, they immediately vegetate.&quot; since he does not tell us on what 246 the succession of forest trees observation his remark is founded, i must doubt its truth. besides, the experience of nursery men makes it the more questionable. the stories of wheat raised from seed buried with an ancient egyptian, and of raspberries raised from seed found in the stomach of a man in england, who is supposed to have died six teen or seventeen hundred years ago, are gener-, ally discredited, simply because the evidence is not conclusive. several men of science, dr. carpenter among them, have used the statement that beach-plums sprang up in sand which was dug up forty miles inland in maine, to prove that the seed had lain there a very long time, and some have inferred that the coast has receded so far. but it seems to me necessary to their argument to show, first, that beach-plums grow only on a beach. they are not uncommon here, which is about half that distance from the shore; and i remember a dense patch a few miles north of us, twenty-five miles inland, from which the fruit was annually carried to market. how much further inland they grow, i know not. dr. charles t. jackson speaks of finding &quot;beach-plums&quot; (perhaps they were this kind) more than one hundred miles inland in maine. it chances that similar objections lie against all the more notorious instances of the kind 011 record. the succession of fokkst trees 247 yet i am prepared to believe that some seeds, especially small ones, may retain their vitality for centuries under favorable circumstances. in the spring of 1859, the old hunt house, so called, in this town, whose chimney bore the date 1703, wan taken down. this stood on land which belonged to john winthrop, the first governor of massachusetts, and a part of the house was evidently much older than the above date, and belonged to the winthrop family. for many years i have ransacked this neigh borhood for plants, and i consider myself famil iar with its productions. thinking of the seeds which are said to be sometimes dug up at an unusual depth in the earth, and thus to repro duce long extinct plants, it occurred to me bust fall that some new or rare plants might have sprung up in the cellar of this house, which had been covered from the light so long. searching there on the 22d of september, i found, among other rank weeds, a species of nettle (urtica ?irei0 which i had not found before; dill, which i had not seen growing spontaneously; the jerusalem oak (chenopodium botrys\ which i had seen wild in but one place; black night shade (w&amp;lt;irti/m nigrum), which is quite rare hereabouts, and common tobacco, which, though it was often cultivated here in the last century, has for fifty years been an unknown plant in this 248 the succession of forest trees town, and a few months before this not even i had heard that one man, in the north part of the town, was cultivating a few plants for his own use. i have no doubt that some or all of these plants sprang from seeds which had long been buried under or about that house, and that that tobacco is an additional evidence that the plant was formerly cultivated here. the cellar has been filled up this year, and four of those plants, including the tobacco, are now again extinct in that locality. it is true, i have shown that the animals con sume a great part of the seeds of trees, and so, at least, effectually prevent their becoming trees ; but in all these cases, as i have said, the con sumer is compelled to be at the same time the disperser and planter, and this is the tax which he pays to nature. i think it is linnaeus who says that while the swine is rooting for acorns he is planting acorns. though i do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, i have great fait!) in a seed a, to me, equally mysterious origin for it. convince me that you have a seed there, and i am prepared to expect wonders. i shall even believe that the millennium is at hand, and that the reign of justice is about to com mence, when the patent office, or government, begins to distribute, and the people to plant, the seeds of these things. the succession of forest trees 249 in the spring of 1857 i planted six seeds sent to me from the patent olliiv, and hilu-l.-.l, i think, &quot; poitrine janne grossed large yellow squash. two came up, and one bore a squash which weighed 123j pounds, the other bore four, weighing together 186j pounds. who woidd have believed that there was 310 pounds of poitrine janne grosse in that corner of my gar den ? these seeds were the bait i used to catch it, my ferrets which i sent into its burrow, my brace of terriers which unearthed it. a little mysterious hoeing and manuring was all the abracadabra presto-change that i used, and lo! true to the label, they found for me 310 pounds of poitrine jaune grosse there, where it never was known to be, nor was before. these talis men had perchance sprung from america at first, and returned to it with unabated force. the big squash took a premium at your fair that fall, and i understood that the man who bought it, intended to sell the seeds for ten cents a piece. (were they not cheap at that?) but i have more hounds of the same breed. i learn that one which i despatched to a distant town, true to its instincts, ]x&amp;gt;ints to the large yellow squash there, too, where no hound ever found it before, as its ancestors did here and in france. other seeds i have which will find other things iu that corner of my garden, in like faslii n. 250 the succession of forest trees almost any fruit you wish, every year for ages, until the crop more than tills the whole garden. you have but little more to do than throw up your cap for entertainment these american days. perfect alchemists i keep who can trans mute substances without end, and thus the corner of my garden is an inexhaustible treasure-chest. here you can dig, not gold, but the value which gold merely represents ; and there is no signor blitz about it. yet farmers sons will stare by the hour to see a juggler draw ribbons from his throat, though he tells them it is all deception. surely, men love darkness rather than light. walking i wish to speak a word for nature, for abso lute freedom and wildiiess, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil, to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of nature, rather than a member of society. i wish to make an extreme statement, if so i may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization : the minister and the school -committee and every one of you will take care of that. i have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering : which word is beautifully derived &quot;from idle people who roved alxmt the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going ci la sainte terre,&quot; to the holy land, till the chil dren exclaimed, &quot;there goes a tsdinte-tcrrer^ 9 a saunterer, a holy-lander. they who never i go to the holy land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed men* idlers and vagabonds; 252 walking i but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as i mean. some, however, would derive the word from nans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. for this is the secret of successful sauntering. he who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. but i prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable deriva tion. for every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some peter the hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this holy laud from the hands of the infidels. it is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. our ex peditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we set out. half the walk is but retracing our steps. we should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return, prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. if you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and walking 253 chilil and friends, and never see them again, if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, i; then you are ready for a walk. to come down to my own ex}&amp;gt;erience, my companion and i, for i sometimes have a com panion, take pleasure in 1 fancying ourselves knights of a new, or rather an old, order, not equestrians or chevaliers, not kittnsor ki.l i&amp;lt;, but walkers, a still more ancient and honorable class, i trust. the chivalric and heroic spirit which once belonged to the rider seems now to reside in, or perchance to have subsided into, the walker, not the knight, but walker, errant. he is a sort of fourth estate, outside of church and state and people. we have felt that we almost alone hereabouts practiced this noble art; though, to tell the truth, at least, if their own assertions are to be re ceived, most of my townsmen would fain walk sometimes, as i do, but they cannot. no wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and in dependence which are the capital in this pro/ fession. it comes only by the grace of god. it requires a direct dispensation from heaven to become a walker. you must be born into the family of the walkers. ambulator nascttur, nan ft. some of my townsmen, it is true, can remember and have d. m i il.ed to me some walks 254 walking which they took ten years ago, in which they were so blessed as to lose themselves for half an hour in the woods; but i know very well that they have confined themselves to the highway ever since, whatever pretensions they may make to belong to this select class. no doubt they were elevated for a moment as by the reminiscence of a previous state of existence, when even they were foresters and outlaws. &quot; when he came to grene wode, in a mery niornynge, there he herde the notes small of byrdea mery syngynge. &quot; it is ferre gone, sayd robyn, that i was last here ; me lyste a lytell for to shote at the donne dere.&quot; i think that i cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless i spend four hours a day at least, i and it is commonly more than that, sannv tering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engage ments. you may safely say, a penny for your thoughts, or a thousand pounds. when some times i am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them, as if the legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk walking 255 , _ i think that they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago* i, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust, and when sometimes i have stolen forth for a walk at the eleventh hour or four o clock in the afternoon, too late to redeem the day, when the shades of night were already beginning to be mingled with the daylight, have felt as if i had committed some sin to be atoned for, i confess that i am astonished at the power of endurance, to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my neigh bors who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, aye, and yean almost together, 1 know n&amp;gt;t ^:it manner of stuff they are of, sitting there now at three o clock in the afternoon, as if it were three o clock in the morning. bonaparte may talk of the three-o clock-in-the-morning courage, but it is nothing to the courage which can sit down cheerfully at this hour in the afternoon over against one s self whom you have known all the morning, to starve out a garrison to whom you are lx&amp;gt;und by such strong ties of sympathy. i wonder that alx&amp;gt;ut this time, or say between four and five o clock in the afternoon, too late for the morning papers and too early for the evening ones, there is not a general explosion heanl up and down the street, scattering a legion of an 256 walking tiquated and house-bred notions and whims to the four winds for an airing, and so the evil cure itself. how womankind, who are confined to the house still more than men, stand it i do not know ; but i have ground to suspect that most of them do not stand it at all. when, early in a summer afternoon, we have been shaking the dust of the village from the skirts of our gar ments, making haste past those houses with purely doric or gothic fronts, which have such an air of repose about them, my companion whispers that probably about these times their occupants are all gone to bed. then it is that i appreciate the beauty and the glory of architec ture, which itself never turns in, but forever stands out and erect, keeping watch over the slumberers. no doubt temperament, and, above all, age, have a good deal to do with it. as a man grows older, his ability to sit still and follow indoor occupations increases. he grows vespertinal in , his habits as the evening of life approaches, till \ at last he comes forth only just before sundown, and gets all the walk that he requires in half an hour. but the walking of which i speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours, as the u .ilkino 257 swinging of dumb-bells or chairs; but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day. if you would get exercise, go in search of the springs j of life. think of a man s swinging dumb-bells (i for his health, when those springs are bubbling \j up in far-off pastures unsought by him! moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking. when a traveler asked wordsworth s servant to show him her master s study, she answered, &quot;here is his library, but his study is// out of doors.&quot; living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce a certain roughness of character, will cause a thicker cuticle to grow over some of the finer qualities of our nature, as on the face and hands, op as severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their delicacy of touch. so staying in the house, on the other hand, may produce a softness and smoothness, not to say thinness of skin, accom panied by an increased sensibility to certain impressions. perhaps we should be more sus ceptible to some influences important to our intellectual and moral growth, if the sun had shone and the wind blown on us a little less; and no doubt it is a nice matter to proportion rightly the thick and thin skin. but raethinks that is a scurf that will fall off fast enough, 258 walking that the natural remedy is to be found in the proportion which the night bears to the day, the winter to the summer, thought to experience. there will be so much the more air and sunshine in our thoughts. the callous palms of the laborer are conversant with finer tissues of self respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness. that is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus of experience. when we walk, we naturally go to the lit -ids and woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall? even some sects of philosophers have felt the necessity of importing the woods to themselves, since they did not go to the woods. &quot;they planted groves and walks of platanes,&quot; where they took subdia les ambuhitioncn in ]x&amp;gt;rticos open to the air. of course it is of no use to direct our steps to the woods, if they do not carry us thither. i am alarmed when it happens that i have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. in my afternoon walk 1 would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obli gations to society. but it sometimes happens that i cannot easily shake off the village. the thought of some work will run in my head and 1 am not where my body is, i am out of my walking 259 senses. in my walks i would fain return to my senses. what business have i in the woods, if i am thinking of something out of the woods? i susj&amp;gt;ect myself, and cannot help a shudder, when i find myself so implicated even in what are called good works, for this may sometimes happen. my vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years i have walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days to gether, i have not yet exhausted them. an absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and i can still get this any afternoon. two or three hours walking will carry me to as strange a country as i expect ever to see. a single farm-house which i had not seen before is some times as good as the dominions of the king of dahomey. there is in fact a sort of harmony , discoverable between the capabilities of the land scapr \\itliin a circle of ten miles radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. it will never be come quite familiar to you. nowadays almost all man s improvements, so called, as the building of houses, and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap. a people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest 260 walking stand! i saw the fences half consumed, their ends lost in the middle of the prairie, and some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after his bounds, while heaven had taken place around him, and he did not see the angels going to and fro, but was looking for an old post-hole in the midst of paradise. i looked again, and saw him standing in the middle of a boggy stygian fen, surrounded by devils, and he had found his ixmmls without a doubt, three little stones, where a stake had been driven, and looking nearer, i saw that the prince of darkness was \_his surveyor. i can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do: first along by the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the woodside. there are square miles in my vicinity which have no in habitant. from many a hill i can see civiliza tion and the abodes of man afar. the farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than ^woodchucks and their burrows. man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture, even politics, the most alarming of them all, i am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape. politics is but a narrow field, walking 261 anil that still narrower highway yonder leads to it. i sometimes direct the traveler thitln-r. if you would go to the political world, follow the great road, follow that market-man, keep his dust in your eyes, and it will lead you straight to it ; for it, too, has its place merely, and does not ocriipy all space. i pass from it as from a bean-field into the forest, and it is forgotten. in one half-hour i can walk off to some portion of the earth s surface where a man does not stand from one year s end to another, and there, consequently, politics are not, for they are but as the cigar-smoke of a man. the village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of the highway, as a lake of a river. it is the body of which roads are the arms and legs, a trivial or quadrivial places the thoroughfare and ordinary of travel os. the word is from the latin tr#/a, which together with via, a way, or more anciently red and vella, varro derives from veao, to carry, imulsc th.vill:i u th,j.la,-,. t. an-l from \vlii.-h things are carried. they who got their living by teaming were said veil ti turdm facere. hence, too, the latin word t?i7w and our vile; also rillain. this suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to. they are wayworn by the travel that goes by and over them, without traveling themselves. 2t)2 walking some do not walk at all ; others walk in the highways; a few walk across lots. roads are made for horses and men of business. i do not travel in them much, comparatively, because i am not in a hurry to get to any tavern or grocery or livery-stable or depot to which they lead. i am a good horse to travel, but not from choice a roadster. the landscape-painter uses the figures of men to mark a road. he would not make that use of my figure. i walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets, menu, moses, homer, chaucer, walked in. you may name it america, but it is not america; neither americus vespucius, nor columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. there is a truer account of it in mythology than in any history of america, so called, that i have seen. however, there are a few old roads that may be trodden with profit, as if they led somewhere now that they are nearly discontinued. there is the old marlborough road, which does not go to marlborough now, methinks, unless that is marlborough where it carries me. i am the bolder to speak of it here, because i presume that there are one or two such roads in every town. \\ .\lking 263 the old marlborough road. wbert they once dog for money, hut never found any ; where sometimes martial miles singly files, and elijah wood, i fear for no good : no other man, save elisha i&amp;gt;ugan, o man of wild habits, partridges and rabbits, who hast no carep only to set ^...ires, who liv -c all alone, close *.* the bone, a id where life is sweetest constantly eatest. wlien the spring stirs ray blood with the instinct to travel i can get enough gravel on the old marlborough road. nobody repairs it, for nobody wears it ; it is a living way, as the christians say. not many there be who enter therein. only the guesta of the irixhrnan quin. wh.it is it, what is it. hut a direction out them, and the bare possibility of going somewhere ? tots* guideboarda of stone, but traveler* 264 walking cenotaphs of the towns named on their crowns. it is worth going to see where you might be. what king v l&amp;gt;id the tiling, ^ i am still wondering ; set up how or when, by what selectmen, v gourgaa or lee, clark or darby ? * % they re a great endeavor 1 to be something forever; 1 , -ink tablets of stone, where a traveler might groan, and in one sem en ce grave all that is known ; which another might raid, in his extreme need. i know one or two lines that would do, literature that might stand all over the land, which a man could remember till next december, and read again in the spring, after the thawing. if with fancy unfurled you leave your abode, you may go round the world by the old marlborough road. at present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys compara tive freedom. but possibly the day will come walking 265 when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow anil exclusive pleasure only, when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of god s earth shall be construed to mean trespass ing on some gnitleman s lrn iimu. to enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude your self from the true enjoyment of it. let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come. what is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we will walk? i believe that there is a subtle magnetism in nature, which, if we unim&amp;gt;nseiously~yieid to it, will direct us aright? it fs not indifferent to^rs~trhtc&quot;h way we walk. there is a right way; but we are very liable from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one. we would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through this actual world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the interior and ideal world ; and sometimes, no doubt, we find it dif ficult to choose our direction, because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea. when i go out of the house for a walk, un certain as yet whither i will bend my steps, and 260 walking submit myself to my instinct to decide for me, i find, strange and whimsical as it may seem, that i finally and inevitably settle southwest, toward some particular wood or meadow or de serted pasture or hill in that direction. my needle is slow to settle, varies a few degrees, and does not always point due southwest, it is true, and it has good authority for this varia tion, but it always settles between west and south-southwest. the future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side. the outline which would bound my walks would be, not a circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits which have been thought to be non-re turning curves, in this case opening westward, in which my house occupies the place of the sun. i turn round and round irresolute some times for a quarter of an hour, until i decide, for a thousandth time, that i will walk into the southwest or west. eastward i go only by force; but westward i go free. thither no business leads me. it is hard for me to believe that i shall find fair landscapes or sufficient wildness and freedom behind the eastern horizon. i am not excited by the prospect of a walk thither ; but i believe that the forest which i see in the western horizon stretches uninterruptedly toward the setting sun, and there are no towns u [lking b nor cities in it of rnmi-li consequence t&amp;lt;&amp;gt; duturl me. let me live where i will, on this side is the city, on that the wilderness, and ever i am leaving the city more and more, and withdraw ing into the wilderness. i should not lay so much stress on this fact, if i did not believe that something like this is the prevailing tendency of my countrymen. i must walk toward oregon, and not toward europe. and that way the na tion is moving, and i may say that mankind pro gress from east to west. within a few years we have witnessed the phenomenon of a southeast ward migration, in the settlement of australia ; but this affects us as a retrograde movement, and, judging from the moral and physical char acter of the first generation of australians, has not yet proved a successful experiment. the eastern tartars think that there is nothing west iwyontl thibet. &quot;the world ends there,&quot; say they; &quot;beyond there is nothing but a shoreless sea.&quot; it is unmitigated east where they live. we go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race ; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. the atlantic is a lethean stream, in our pas sage over which we have had an opportunity to forget the old world and its institutions. if we do not succeed this time, there is perhaps one 208 walking more chance for the race left before it arrives on the banks of the styx ; and that is in the lethe of the pacific, which is three times as wide. i know not how significant it is, or how far it is an evidence of singularity, that an individual should thus consent in his pettiest walk with the general movement of the race; but i know that something akin to the migratory instinct in birds and quadrupeds, which, in some in stances, is known to have affected the squirrel tribe, impelling them to a general and mysteri ous movement, in which they were seen, say some, crossing the broadest rivers, each on its particular chip, with its tail raised for a sail, and bridging narrower streams with their dead, that something like the furor which affects the domestic cattle in the spring, and which is referred to a worm in their tails, affects both nations and individuals, either perennially or from time to time. not a flock of wild geese cackles over our town, but it to some extent unsettles the value of real estate here, and, if i were a broker, i should probably take that disturbance into account. &quot; than longen folk to pon on pilgrimages, and palnieres for to sken strange strondes.&quot; every sunset which i witness inspires me with the desire to go to a west as distant and as fair a tliat into which the sun goes down. he ap walking 209 pens to migrate westward daily, and tempt us to follow him. he is the great western pioneer whom the nations follow. we dream all night of those mountain-ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor only, which were last gilded by his rays. the island of atlantis, and the islands and gardens of the 1 lesperides, a sort of terrestrial paradise, appear to have been the great west of the ancients, enveloped in mys tery and poetry. who has not seen in imagi nation, when looking into the sunset sky, the gardens of the i lesperides, and the foundation of all those fables? columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before. he obeyed it, and found a new world for castile and leon. the herd of men in those days scented fresh pastures from afar. ** and now the sun had stretched out all the hills, and now was dropped into the western bay ; at last a# rose, ami twitched his mantle blue ; to-morrow to fresh woods and pasture** now.&quot; where on the globe can there be found an area of equal extent with that occupied by the bulk of our states, so fertile and so rich and varied in its productions, and at the same time so habitable by the european, as this is? mi chaux, who knew but part of them, says that &quot;the species of large trees are much more nu 270 walking merous in north america than in europe ; in the united states there are more than one hundred and forty species that exceed thirty feet in height ; in france there are but thirty that at tain this size.&quot; later botanists more than con firm his observations. ilumboldt came to amer ica to realize his youthful dreams of a tropical vegetation, and he beheld it in its greatest per fection in the primitive forests of the amazon, the most gigantic wilderness on the earth, which he has so eloquently described. the geogra pher guyot, himself a european, goes farther, farther than i am ready to follow him ; yet not when he says : &quot; as the plant is made for the animal, as the vegetable world is made for the animal world, america is made for the man of the old world.-. . . the man of the old world sets out upon his way. leaving the highlands of asia, he descends from station to station towards europe. each of his steps is marked by a new civilization superior to the preceding, by a greater power of development. arrived at the atlantic, he pauses on the shore of this unknown ocean, the bounds of which he knows not, and turns upon his footprints for an instant.&quot; when he has exhausted the rich soil of europe, and reinvigorated himself, &quot;then recommences his adventurous career westward as in the earliest ages.&quot; so far guyot. \\.ilking 271 from this western impulse coming in contact with the barrier of the atlantic sprang the com merce and enterprise of modern times. the younger michaux, in his &quot;travels west of the allcghanies in 1802, &quot; says that the common in quiry in the newly settled west was, ui from what part of the world have you come? as if these vast and fertile regions would naturally be the place of meeting and common country of all the inhabitants of the globe.&quot; to use an obsolete latin word, i might say, ex orient e lux ; ex occidente fkux. from the kast light ; from the west fruit. sir francis head, an english traveler and a governor-general of canada, tells us that &quot;in both the northern and southern hemispheres of the new world, nature has not only outlined her works on a larger scale, but has painted tlje whole picture with brighter and more costly colors than she used in delineating and in beau tifying the old world. . . . the heavens of america appear infinitely higher, the sky is bluer, the air is fresher, the cold is intenser, the moon looks larger, the stars are brighter, the thunder is louder, the lightning is vivider, the wind is stronger, the rain is heavier, the moun tains are higher, the rivers longer, the forests bigger, the plains broader.&quot; this statement will do at least to set against buff on s account of this part of the world and its productions. 272 walking linnaeus said long ago, &quot;nescio quae facies fata, f/labra plantis americanis: i know not what there is of joyous and smooth in the aspect of american plants;&quot; and i think that in this country there are no, or at most very few, africaner bestice, african beasts, as the romans called them, and that in this respect also it is peculiarly fitted for the habitation of man. we are told that within three miles of the centre of the east-indian city of singapore, some of the inhabitants are annually carried off by tigers ; but the traveler can lie down in the woods at night abuost anywhere in north america with out fear of wild beasts. these are encouraging testimonies. if the moon looks larger here than in europe, proba bly the sun looks larger also. if the heavens of america appear infinitely higher, and the stars brighter, i trust that these facts are symbolical of the height to which the philosophy and poetry and religion of her inhabitants may one day soar. at length, perchance, the immaterial heaven will appear as much higher to the amer ican mind, and the intimations that star it as / much brighter. for i believe that climate does thus react on man, as there is something in the mountain-air that feeds the spirit and in spires. will not man grow to greater perfec tion intellectually as well as physically under walking 273 these influences? or is it unimportant how many foggy days there are in his life ? i trust that we shall be more imaginative, that our thoughts will be clearer, fresher, and mom ethereal, as our sky, our understanding more comprehensive and broader, like our plains, our intellect generally on a grander scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers and moun tains and forests, and our hearts shall even correspond in breadth and depth and grandeur to our inland seas. perchanee there will appear to the traveler something, he knows not what, of l(pta and glabra^ of joyous and serene, in our very faces. else to what end does the world go on, and why was america discovered ? to americans i hardly need to say, m westward the star of empire takes its way.&quot; as a true patriot, i should be ashamed to think that adam in paradise was more favorably sit uated on the whole than the backwoodsman in this country. our sympathies in massachusetts are not con fined to new england ; though we may be es tranged from the south, we sympathize with the west. there is the home of the younger sons, as among the scandinavians they took to the ma for their inheritance. it is too late to be study ing hebrew; it is more important to understand even the slang of to-day. 274 walking some months ago i went to see a panorama of the rhine. it was like a dream of the middle ages. i floated down its historic stream in something more than imagination, under bridges built by the romans, and repaired by later heroes, past cities and castles whose very names were music to my ears, and each of which was the subject of a legend. there were ehren breitstein and kolandseck and coblentz, which i knew only in history. they were ruins that interested me chiefly. there seemed to come up from its waters and its vine-clad hills and valleys a hushed music as of crusaders depart ing for the holy land. i floated along under the spell of enchantment, as if i had been transported to an heroic age, and breathed an atmosphere of chivalry. soon after, i went to see a panorama of the mississippi, and as i worked my way up the river in the light of to-day, and saw the steam boats wooding up, counted the rising cities, gazed on the fresh ruins of nauvoo, beheld the in dians moving west across the stream, and, as before i had looked up the moselle, now looked up the ohio and the missouri and heard the legends of dubuque and of wenona s cliff, still thinking more of the future than of the past or present, -i saw that this was a rhine stream of a different kind ; that the foundations walking 275 of castles were yet to be laid, and the famous bridges were yet to be thrown over the river; and i felt that this was the aerate age itself, though we know it not, for the hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men. the west of which i speak is but another name for the wild; and what i have been pre paring to say is, that in wildness is the preser vation of the world. every tree sends its fibres forth in search of the wild. the cities import it at any price. men plough and sail for it. from the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. our ancestors were savages. the story of romulus and re mus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaning less fable. the founders of every state which | ias risen t&amp;gt; eminence have drawn tli -ir nourish ment and vigor from a similar wild source. it was because the children of the empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the northern forests who were. i believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the com grows. we require an infusion of hemlock-spruce or arbor vita? in our tea. there is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and from mere gluttony. the hottentots eagerly devour the 276 walking marrow of the koodoo and other antelopes raw, as a matter of course. some of our northern in dians eat raw the marrow of the arctic reindeer, as well as various other parts, including the summits of the antlers, as long as they are soft. and herein, perchance, they have stolen a march on the cooks of paris. they get what usually goes to feed the fire. this is probably better than stall-fed beef and slaughter-house pork to make a man of. give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure, as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos devoured raw. there are some intervals which border the strain of the wood-thrush, to which i would migrate, wild lands where no settler has squatted; to which, methinks, i am already acclimated. the african hunter cummings tells us that the skin of the eland, as well as that of most other antelopes just killed, emits the most deli cious perfume of trees and grass. i would have every man so much like a wild antelope, so much a part and parcel of nature, that his very per son should thus sweetly advertise our senses of his presence, and remind us of those parts of nature which he most haunts. i feel no dispo sition to be satirical, when the trapper s coat emits the odor of musquash even ; it is a sweeter scent to me than that whirh commonly exhales \\alkino 277 from the men-hunt s or the scholar s garment*. when i go into their wardrobes and handle their vestments, i am reminded of no grassy plains and flowery meads which they have frequented, but of dusty merchants* exchanges and libraries rather. a tanned skin is something more than re b]xk*table, and perhaps olive is a fitter color than white for a man, a denizen of the woods. &quot; the pale white man !&quot; i do not wonder that the african pitied him. darwin the naturalist says, &quot;a white man bathing by the side of a tahitian was like a plant bleached by the gar driirr s art, compared with a fine, dark green one, growing vigorously in the open fields.&quot; ben jonson exclaims, 44 how near to good is what is fair! &quot; so i would say, i low near to good ia what is trilti ! life consists with wildness. the most alive is the wildest. not yet subdued to man, its pres ence refreshes him. one who pressed forward incessantly and never rested from his lalxjrs, who grew fast and made infinite demands on life, would always find himself in a new country or wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life. he would be climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest-trees. 278 walking hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps. when, formerly, i have analyzed my partiality for some farm which i had contem plated purchasing, i have frequently found that i was attracted solely by a few square rods of impermeable and unfathomable bog, a na tural sink in one corner of it. that was the jewel which dazzled me. i derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village. there are no richer parterres to my eyes than the dense beds of dwarf andro meda (cassandra calycuhita) which cover these tender places on the earth s surface. botany cannot go farther than tell me the names of the khrubs which grow there, the high-blueberry, panic-led andromeda, lamb-kill, azalea, and rho dora, all standing in the quaking sphagnum. i often think that i should like to have my house front on this mass of dull red bushes, omitting other hower plots and borders, transplanted spruce and trim box, even graveled walks, to have this fertile spot under my windows, not a few imported barrow-fulls of soil only to cover the sand which was thrown out in digging the cellar. why not put my house, my parlor, be hind this plot, instead of behind that meagre walking 279 assemblage of curi-^itit -, that i&amp;gt;oor apology for a nature and art, which i call my front yard? it is an effort to clear up and make a decent appearance when the carpenter and mason have departed, though done as much for the passer-by as the dweller within. the most tasteful front yard fence was never an agreeable object of study to me ; the most elaborate ornaments, acorn-tops, or what not, soon wearied and disgusted me. bring your sills up to the very edge of the swamp, then (though it may not be the best place for a dry cellar), so that there be no access on that side to citizens. front-yards are not made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you could go in the back way. yes, though you may think me perverse, if it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighbor hood of the most beautiful garden that ever hu man art contrived, or else of a dismal swamp, i should certainly decide for the swamp. how vain, then, have been all your labors, citizens, for me ! my spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness. give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness! in the desert, pure air and solitude compensate for want of moisture and fertility. the traveler burton says of it : &quot;your morale improves; you become frank and cordial, hospitable and single-minded. ... in walking the desert, spirituous liquors excite only disgust. there is a keen enjoyment in a mere animal ex istence.&quot; they who have been traveling long on the steppes of tartary say : &quot; on reentering cultivated lands, the agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of civilization oppressed and suffocated us ; the air seemed to fail us, and we felt every moment as if about to die of asphyxia.&quot; when i would recreate myself, i seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp. i enter a swamp as a sacred place, --a sanctum sanctorum. there is the strength, the marrow of nature. the wild-wood covers the virgin-mould, and the same soil is good for men and for trees. a man s health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck. there are the strong meats on which he feeds. a town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that sur round it. a township where one primitive for est waves above while another primitive forest rots below, such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philoso phers for the coming ages. in such a soil grew homer and confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the reformer eating , locusts and wild honey. to preserve wild animals implies generally \v\lkinq 281 the creation of a forest for them to dwell in or resort to. so it is with man. a hundred years ago they sold bark in our streets peeled from our own woods. in the very as|&amp;gt;ect of those primitive and rugged trees there was, methinks, a tanning principle which hardened and consoli dated the fibres of men s thoughts. ah ! already 1 shudder for these comparatively degenerate days of my native village, when you cannot col lect a load of bark of good thickness, and we no longer produce tar and turpentine. the civilized nations greece, rome, eng land have been sustained by the primitive for ests which anciently rotted where they stand. they survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. alas for human culture ! little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is ex hausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers. there the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous fat, and the philosopher comes down on his marrow bones. it is said to be the task of the american &quot;to work the virgin soil,&quot; and that &quot;agriculture here already assumes proportions unknown every where else.&quot; i think that the farmer displaces the indian even because he redeems the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in some re spects more natural. i was surveying for a man 282 walking the other day a single straight line one hundred and thirty-two rods long, through a swamp, at whose entrance might have been written the words which dante read over the entrance to the infernal regions, &quot;leave all hope, ye that en ter,&quot; that is, of ever getting out again; where at one time i saw my employer actually up to his neck and swimming for his life in his pro perty, though it was still winter. he had an other similar swamp which i could not survey at all, because it was completely under water, and nevertheless, with regard to a third swamp, which i did survey from a distance, he remarked to me, true to his instincts, that he would not part with it for any consideration, on account of the mud which it contained. and that man intends to put a girdling ditch round the whole in the course of forty months, and so redeem it by the magic of his spade. i refer to him only as the type of a class. the weajxms witli which we have gained our most important victories, which should be handed down as heirlooms from father to son, are not the sword and the lance, but the bush whack, the turf -cutter, the spade, and the bog hoe, rusted with the blood of many a meadow, and begrimed with the dust of many a hard fought field. the very winds blew the indian s corn-field into the meadow, and pointed out the \\\lking 283 way which ho had not tho skill to follow. he hud no hotter implement with which to intrench himself in tho land than a clam-shell. but the fanner is armed with plough and spade. in literature it is only the wild that attracts us. dullness is hut another name f or tameness. it is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in &quot;hamlet&quot; and the &quot;iliad,&quot; in all the scriptures and mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us. as the wild duck is more swift and beautifid than the tame, so is the wild the mallard thought, which mid fulling dews wings its way ahove the fens. a truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpect edly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of the west or in the jungles of the east. genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning s flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself, and not a taper lighted at the hearth-stone of the race, which pules before the light of common thy. english literature, from the days of the min strels to the lake poets, chaucer and spenser and milton, and even shakespeare, included, breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. it is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting greece and rome. her wilderness is a greenwood, her wild man a robin 284 walking hood. there is plenty of genial love of nature, but not so much of nature herself. her chron icles inform us when her wild animals, but not when the wild man in her, became extinct. the science of humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing. the poet to-day, notwith standing all the discoveries of science, and the accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over homer. where is the literature which gives expres sion to nature? he would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as fanners drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his words as often as he used them, transplanted them to his page with earth adher ing to their roots; whose words were so true and fresh and natural that they would appear to ex pand like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half-smothered between two musty leaves in a library, aye, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surround ing nature. i do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning for the wild. approached from this side, the best poetry is tame. i do not know where to find in any liter walking s ature, ancient or modern, any account which contents me of that nature with which even i am acquainted. you will perceive that i de mand something which no augustan nor eliza bi than age, which no culture, in short, can give. | mythology comes nearer to it than anything. 1 low much more fertile a nature, at least, has grecian mythology its root in than english literature ! mythology is the crop which the old world bore before its soil was exhausted, before the fancy and imagination were affected with blight; and which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigor is unabated. all other literatures endure only as the elms which overshadow our houses; but this is like the great dragon-tree of the western isles, as old as mankind, and, whether that does or not, will endure as long; for the decay of other literatures makes the soil in which it thrives. the west is preparing to add its fables to those of the east. the valleys of the gauges, the nile, and the rhine having yielded their crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the amazon, the plate, the orinoco, the st. lawrence, and the mississippi will produce. perchance, when, in the course of ages, amer ican liberty has become a fiction of the past, as it is to some extent a fiction of the present, the poets of the world will be inspired by american mythology. 286 walking the wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true, though they may not recommend themselves to the sense which is most common among englishmen and americans to-day. it is not every truth that recommends itself to the common sense. nature has a place for the wild clematis as well as for the cabbage. some ex pressions of truth are reminiscent, others merely .whs/we, as the phrase is, others pro phetic. some forms of disease, even, may pro phesy forms of health. the geologist has dis covered that the figures of serpents, griffins, fly ing dragons, and other fanciful embellishments of heraldry, have their prototypes in the forms of fossil species which were extinct before man was created, and hence u indicate a faint and shadowy knowledge of a previous state of organic existence.&quot; the hindoos dreamed that the earth rested on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent ; and though it may be an unimportant coincidence, it will not be out of place here to state, that a fossil tortoise lias lately been discovered in asia large enough to support an elephant. i confess that i am partial to these wild fancies, which transcend the order of time and development. they are the sublimest recreation of the intel lect. the partridge loves peas, but not those that go with her into the pot. h ilk ing 287 in short, all good things are wild and free. there is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human voice, take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance, which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. it is so much of their wildness as i can under stand. give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. the wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet. i love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights, any evidence that they have not wholly icfet their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor s cow breaks out of her pasture early in the spring and boldly swims the river, a cold, gray tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. it is the buffalo crossing the mississippi. this exploit confers some dignity on the herd in my eyes, already dignified. the seeds of instinct are preserved under the thick hides of cattle and horses, like seeds in the bowels of the earth, an indefinite period. any sportiveness in cattle is unexpected. i saw one day a herd of a dozen bullocks and cows running about and frisking in unwieldy s}m&amp;gt;rt, like huge rats, even like kittens. they shook 288 walking their heads, raised their tails, and rushed up and down a hill, and i perceived by their horns, as well as by their activity, their relation to the deer tribe. but, alas! a sudden loud h^oa/ would have damped their ardor at once, reduced them from venison to beef, and stiffened their sides and sinews like the locomotive. who but the evil one has cried, &quot;whoa! &quot; to mankind? indeed, the life of cattle, like that of many men, is but a sort of locomotiveness ; they move a side at a time, and man, by his machinery, is meeting the horse and the ox half-way. what ever part the whip has touched is thenceforth palsied. who would ever think of a side of any of the supple cat tribe, as we speak of a side of beef? i rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still left to sow before they become submis sive members of society. undoubtedly, all men are not equally fit subjects for civilization ; and because the majority, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inherited disposition, this is no reason why the others should have their natures broken that they may be reduced to the same level. men are in the main alike, but they were made several in order that they might be various. if a low use is to be served, one man will do nearly walking 289 or quite as well as another; if a high one, indi vidual excellence is to be regarded. any man can stop a hole to keep the wind away, but no other man could serve so rare a use as the author of this illustration did. confucius says, &quot;the skins of the tiger and the leopard, when they are tanned, are as the skins of the dog and the sheep tanned.&quot; but it is not the part of a true cul ture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious; and tanning their skins for shoes is not the best use to which they can be put. when looking over a list of men s names in a foreign language, as of military officers, or of authors who have written on a particular subject, i am reminded once more that there is nothing in a name. the name menschikoff, for instance, has nothing in it to my ears more human than a whisker, and it may belong to a rat. as the names of the poles and russians are to us, so are ours to them. it is as if they had been named by the child s rigmarole, lery wicry ichcry van, t\ttle-td-tan. i see in my mind a herd of wild creatures swarming over the earth, and to each the herdsman has affixed some bar barous sound in his own dialect. the names of men are of course as cheap and meaningless as bom and tray, the names of dogs. 290 walking methinks it would be some advantage to philosophy, if men were named merely in the gross, as they are known. it would be neces sary only to know the genus and perhaps the race or variety, to know the individual. we are not prepared to believe that every private soldier in a roman army had a name of his own, because we have not supposed that he had a character of his own. at present our only true names are nicknames. i knew a boy who, from his peculiar energy, was called &quot;buster&quot; by his playmates, and this rightly supplanted his christian name. some travelers tell us that an indian had no name given him at first, but earned it, and his name was his fame; and among some tribes he ac quired a new name with every new exploit. it is pitiful when a man bears a name for conven ience merely, who has earned neither name nor fame. i will not allow mere names to make distinc tions for me, but still see men in herds for all them. a familiar name cannot make a man less strange to me. it may be given to a savage who retains in secret his own wild title earned in the woods. we have a wild savage in us, and a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as ours. i see that my neighbor, who bears the familiar epithet william, or edwin, takes it off \\.ilking 291 with his jacket. it does not adhere to him when asleep or in anger, or aroused by any pas sion or inspiration. i seem to hear pronounced by some of his kin at such a time his original wild mime in some jaw-breaking or else melodi ous tongue. here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, nature.jying alljiround, with such beauty, and such affection foi^jieohildjyn, as the leo pard ; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclu sively an iutvr;i&quot;tifm of man on man^ a sot ^ &amp;gt; f breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely english nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit. in society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. when we should still be growing children, we are already little men. give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil, not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements and modes of culture only ! many a poor sore-eyed student that i have heard of would grow faster, both intellectually and physically, if, instead of sitting up so very late, he honestly slumbered a fool s allowance. there may be ml excess even of informing 292 walking light. niepce, a frenchman, discovered &quot;ac tinism,&quot; that power in the sun s rays which produces a chemical effect ; that granite rocks, and stone structures, and statues of metal, &quot;are all alike destructively acted upon during the hours of sunshine, and, but for provisions of nature no less wonderful, woidd soon perish under the delicate touch of the most subtile of the agencies of the universe.&quot; but he observed that &quot;those bodies wydi underwent this change during the daylight possessed the power of re storing themselves to their original conditions during the hours of night, when this excitement was no longer influencing them.&quot; hence it has been inferred that &quot; the hours of darkness are as necessary to the inorganic creation as we know night and sleep are to the organic kingdom. ^ not even does the moon shine every night, but gives place to darkness. i would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than i would have every acre of earth cultivated : part will be til lage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it sup ports. there are other letters for the child to learn than those which cadmus invented. the span walking 293 iards have a &amp;lt;&amp;gt;,.,! t. mi to express this wild and dusky knowledge, gramdtica parda, tawny grammar, a kind of mother-wit derived from that same leopard to which i have referred. we have heard of a society for the diffusion of useful knowledge. it is said that knowledge is power ; and the like. methiuks there is equal need of a society for the diffusion of useful ignorance, what we will call beautiful know ledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense : for what is most of our toasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual igno rance? what we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance ; ignorance our negative knowledge. by long years of patient industry and reading of the newspapers, for what are the libraries of science but files of newspapers? a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them up in his memory, and then when in some spring of his life he saunters abroad into the great fields of thought, he, as it were, goes to grass like a horse and leaves all his harness behind in the stable. i would say to the society for the diffusion of useful knowledge, sometimes, go to grass. you have eaten hay long eimn-h. the spring has come with its green crop. the very cows are driven to their country pastures before the end of may; though i have heard of 294 walking one unnatural farmer who kept his cow in the barn and fed her on hay all the year round. so, frequently, the society for the diffusion of use ful knowledge treats its cattle. a man s ignorance sometimes is not only use ful, but beautiful, while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly. which is the best man to deal with, he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows some thing about it, but thinks that he knows all? my dcsint .r kn&amp;lt;&amp;gt;\\ [edge is intermittent : imt my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres un known to my feet is perennial and constant. the highest that we can attain to is not know ledge, but sympathy with intelligence. i do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insuffi ciency of all that we called knowledge before, a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philoso phy. it is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. man cannot know in any higher sense than this, any more than he can look serenely and with impunity in the face of the sun: o? r\ vow, ov kfivov votjo-cis, &quot; you will not perceive that, as perceiving a particular thing,&quot; say the oracles. walking 295 there is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which we may obrv. \\ may study the laws of matter at and for our convenience, but a successful life knows no law. it is an unfortunate discovery certainly, that of a law which binds us where we did not know b.-foiv that we were bound. live free, child of the mist, and with respect to knowledge we anall children of the mist. the man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the law-maker. &quot; that is active duty,&quot; says the vishnu purana, &quot;which is not for our bondage ; that is knowledge which is for our liberation : all other duty is good only unto weariness; all other knowledge is only the cleverness of an artist.&quot; it is remarkable how few events or crises there are in our histories; how little exercised we have been in our minds; how few experi ences we have had. i would fain be assured that i am growing apace and rankly, though my very growth disturb this dull equanimity, though it be with struggle through long, dark, mii-irv nights or seasons of gloom. it would bo well, if all our lives were a divine tragedy even, instead of this trivial comedy or farce. dante, hun van, and others appear to have been exer cised in their minds more tlian we: they were 296 walking subjected to a kind of culture such as our dis trict schools and colleges do not contemplate. even mahomet, though many may scream at his name, had a good deal more to live for, aye, and to die for, than they have commonly. when, at rare intervals, some thought visits one, as perchance he is walking on a railroad, then indeed the cars go by without his hearing them. but soon, by some inexorable law, our life goes by and the cars return. &quot;gentle breeze, that wanderest unseen, and bendest the thistles round luira of storms, traveler of the windy glens, why hast tliou left my ear so soon ? &quot; while almost all men feel an attraction draw ing them to society, few are attracted strongly to nature. in their reaction to nature men appear to me for the most part, notwithstand ing their arts, lower than the animals. it is not often a beautiful relation, as in the case of the animals. how little appreciation of the beauty of the landscape there is among us ! we have to be told that the greeks called the world k 007x09, beauty, or order, but we do not see clearly why they did so, and we esteem it at best only a curious philological fact. for my part, i feel that with regard to nature i live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world into which i make occasional and tran walk! no ~ sient forays only, and iny patriotism and alle giance to the state into whose territories 1 seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper. unto a life which i call natural i would gladly fol low even a will-o -the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor firefly has shown me the causeway to it. nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features. the walker in the familiar fields which stretch around my na tive town sometimes finds himself in another land than is described in their owners deeds, as it were in some far-away field on the confines of the actual concord, where her jurisdiction ceases, and the idea which the word concord &amp;gt;u_r4csts ceases to be suggested. these farms which i have myself surveyed, these bounds which i have set up, appear dimly still as through a mist; but they have no chemistry to fix them ; they fade from the surface of the glass: :m&amp;lt;l th.picture \\hi-h th-i&amp;gt;;tiiit&amp;gt;-ipunted stands out dimly from beneath. the world with which we are commonly acquainted leaves no trace, and it will have no anniversary. i took a walk on spaulding s farm the other afternoon. i saw the setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a &amp;gt;tat ly pine wood. its golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble hall. 1 was impressed as if 298 walking some ancient and altogether admirable and shin ing family had settled there in that part of the land called concord, unknown to me, --to whom the sun was servant, who had not gone into society in the village, who had not been called on. i saw their park, their pleasure ground, beyond through the wood, in spauld ing s cranberry-meadow. the pines furnished them with gables as they grew. their house was not obvious to vision ; the trees grew through it. i do not know whether i heard the sounds of a suppressed hilarity or not. they seemed to recline on the sunbeams. they have sons and daughters. they are quite well. the farmer s cart-path, which leads directly through their hall, does not in the least put them out, as the muddy bottom of a pool is sometimes seen through the reflected skies. they never heard of spaulding, and do not know that he is their neighbor, notwithstanding i heard him whis tle as he drove his team through the house. nothing can equal the serenity of their lives. their coat of arms is simply a lichen. i saw it painted on the pines and oaks. their attics were in the tops of the trees. they are of no polities. there was no noise of labor. i did not perceive that they were weaving or spinning. yet i did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done away, the finest imaginable walking 299 sweet musical hum, :is of a distant hive in may, which perchance was the sound of their thinking. they had no idle thoughts, and no one without could see their work, for their in dustry was not as in knots and excrescences em bayed. hut i find it difficult to remember them. they fade irrevocably out of my mind even now while i speak, and endeavor to recall them and recollect myself. it is only after a long and serious effort to recollect my best thoughts that i become again aware of their cohabitaney. if it were not for such families as this, i think i should move out of concord. we are accustomed to say in new england that few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. our forests furnish no mast for them. so, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste, sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill, and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on. they no longer build nor breed with us. in some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the mind, cast by the wings of some thought in its vernal or autumnal migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of the thought it 300 walking self. our winged thoughts are turned to poul try. they no longer sour, and they attain only to a shanghai and cochin china grandeur. those gra-a-ate thoughts, those gra-a-ate men you hear of! we hug the earth, how rarely we mount ! methinks we might elevate ourselves a little more. we might climb a tree, at least. i found my account in climbing a tree once. it was a tall white pine, on the top of a hill ; and though i got well pitched, i was well paid for it, for i discovered new mountains in the hori zon which i had never seen before, so much more of the earth and the heavens. i might have walked about the foot of the tree for three score years an;l ten, and yet i certainly should never have seen them. but, above all, i dis covered around me, it was near the end of june, on the ends of the topmost branches only, a few minute and delicate red cone-like blossoms, the fertile flower of the white pine looking heavenward. i carried straightway to the village the topmost spire, and showed it to stranger jurymen who walked the streets, for it was court-week, and to farmers and lum ber-dealers and wood-choppers and hunters, and not one had ever seen the like before, but they wondered as at a star dropped down. tell of m ilkino 301 ancient architects linmiing their works on the top* of columns as perfectly as on the lower ami more visible parts! nature has from the first expanded the minute blossoms of the forest only toward the heavens, above men s heads and unobserved by them. we see only the flowers that are under our feet in the meadows. the pines have developed their delicate blossoms on the highest twigs of the wood every summer for ages, as well over the heads of nature s red children as of her white ones; yet scarcely a farmer or hunter in the land has ever seen them. -~ above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. he is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remem bering the past. unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barn-yard within our horizon, it is belated. that sound commonly reminds us that we are growing rusty and an tique in our employments and habits of thought. his philosophy comes down to a more recent time than ours. there is something suggested by it that is a newer testament, the gospel according to this moment. he has not fallen astern; he has got up early and kept up early, and to be where he is is to be in season, in the foremost rank of time. it is an expression of the health and soundness of nature, a brag for 302 walking all the world, healthiness as of a spring burst forth, a new fountain of the muses, to celebrate . this last instant of time. where he lives no fugitive slave laws are passed. who has not betrayed his master many times since last he heard that note? the merit of this bird s strain is in its free dom from all plaintiveness. the singer can easily move us to tears or to laughter, but where is he who can excite in us a pure morning joy? when, in doleful dumps, breaking the awful stillness of our wooden sidewalk on a sunday, or, perchance, a watcher in the house of mourn ing, i hear a cockerel crow far or near, i think to myself, &quot;there is one of us well, at any rate,&quot; and with a sudden gush return to my senses. we had a remarkable sunset one day last november. i was walking in a meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before setting, after a cold gray day, reached a clear stratum in the horizon, and the softest, brightest morning sunlight fell on the dry grass and on the stems of the trees in the opposite horizon and on the leaves of the shrub oaks on the hillside, while our shadows stretched long over the meadow eastward, as if we were the only motes in its beams. it was such a \\ilking 303 light as we could not have imagined a moment l&amp;gt;efore, and the air also was so warm and serene that nothing was wanting to make a paradise of that meadow. when we reflected that this was not a solitary phenomenon, never to hap pen again, but that it would happen forever and ever an infinite number of evenings, and cheer and reassure the latest child that walked there, it was more glorious still. the sun sets on some retired meadow, where no house is visible, with all the glory and splen dor that it lavishes on cities, and perchance as it has never set before, where there is but a solitary marsh-hawk to have his wings gilded by it, or only a musquash looks out from his cabin, and there is some little black-veined brook in the midst of the marsh, just beginning to meander, winding slowly round a decaying stump. we walked in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright, i thought i had never bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. the west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the itoundary of elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman driving us home at evening. so we saunter toward the holy land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than 304 walking ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn. autumnal tints europeans coming to america are surprised by the brilliancy of our autumnal foliage. there is no account of such a phenomenon in english poetry, because the trees acquire but few bright colors there. the most that thomson says on this subject in his &quot; autumn &quot; is contained in the lines, &quot; but see the fadinp many-colored woods, shade deepening over shade, the country round imbrown ; a crowded umbrage, dusk and dun, of every hue, from wan declining green to sooty dark ; &quot; and in the line in which he speaks of &quot; autumn beaming o er the yellow woods.&quot; the autumnal change of our woods has not made a deep impression on our own literature yet. octolrcr has hardly tinged our pot try. a great many, who have spent their lives in cities, and have never chanced to come into the country at this season, have never seen this, the flower, or rather the ripe fruit, of the year. i remember riding with one such citizen, who, though a fortnight too late for the most brilliant tints, was taken by surprise, and would not be 306 autumnal tints lieve that there had been any brighter. he had never heard of this phenomenon before. not only many in our towns have never wit nessed it, but it is scarcely remembered by the majority from year to year. most appear to confound changed leaves with withered ones, as if they were to confound ripe apples with rotten ones. i think that the change to some higher color in a leaf is an evidence that it has arrived at a late and perfect maturity, an swering to the maturity of fruits. it is gener ally the lowest and oldest leaves which change first. but as the perfect winged and usually bright-colored insect is short-lived, so the leaves ripen but to fall. generally, every fruit, on ripening, and just before it falls, when it commences a more inde pendent and individual existence, requiring less nourishment from any source, and that not so much from the earth through its stem as from the sun and air, acquires a bright tint. so do leaves. the physiologist says it is &quot;due to an increased absorption of oxygen.&quot; that is the scientific account of the matter, only a reasser tion of the fact. but i am more interested in the rosy cheek than i am to know what particu lar diet the maiden fed on. the very forest and herbage, the pellicle of the earth, must acquire a bright color, an evidence of its ripeness, as autumnal tints 307 if the globe itself were a fruit on its stem, with ever a cheek toward the sun. flowers are but colored leaves, fruits but ripe ones. the edible part of most fruits is, as the physiologist says, &quot;the parenchyma or fleshy ti-ue of the leaf,&quot; of which they are formed. our appetites have commonly confined our views of ripeness and its phenomena, color, mellowness, and perf ectness, to the fruits which we eat, and we are wont to forget that an im mense harvest which we do not eat, hardly use at all, is annually ripened by nature. at our annual cattle shows and horticultural exhibi tions, we make, as we think, a great show of fair fruits, destined, however, to a rather igno ble end, fruits not valued for their beauty chiefly. but round about and within our towns there is annually another show of fruits, on an infinitely grander scale, fruits which address our taste for beauty alone. october is the month for painted leaves. their rich glow now flashes round the world. as fruits and leaves and the day itself acquire a bright tint just before they fall, so the year near its setting. october is its sunset sky; novem ber the later twilight. i formerly thought that it would be worth the while to get a specimen leaf from each chang ing tree, shrub, and herbaceous plant, when it 308 autumnal tints had acquired its brightest characteristic color, in its transition from the green to the brown state, outline it, and copy its color exactly, with paint, in a book, which should be enti tled, &quot;october, or autumnal tints;&quot; begin ning with the earliest reddening, woodbine and the lake of radical leaves, and coming down through the maples, hickories, and sumachs, and many beautifully freckled leaves less gen erally known, to the latest oaks and aspens. what a memento such a book would be! you would need only to turn over its leaves to take a ramble through the autumn woods whenever you pleased. or if i could preserve the leaves themselves, unfaded, it would be better still. i have made but little progress toward such a book, but i have endeavored, instead, to describe all these bright tints in the order in which they present themselves. the following are some extracts from my notes. the purple grasses. by the twentieth of august, everywhere in woods and swamps we are reminded of the fall, both by the richly spotted sarsaparilla leaves and brakes, and the withering and blackened skunk-cabbage and hellebore, and, by the riverside, the already blackening pontederia. autumnal tints 309 tin* i urpit (ji /&amp;gt;crtinacea)i now in the height of its beauty. i remember still when i first noticed this grass particularly. standing on a hillside near our river, i saw, thirty or forty rods off, a strij)e of purple half a dozen rods long, under the edge of a wood, where the ground sloped toward a meadow. it was as liiji coloivd ;m&amp;gt;l inten &amp;lt;1 ing, ili..ii--h not quite so bright, as the patches of rhexia, l-ing a darker purple, like a berry s stain laid on elose and thick. on going to and ex amining it, i found it to be a kind of grass in bloom, hardly a foot high, with but few green blades, and a fine spreading panicle of purple flowers, a shallow, purplish mist trembling around me. close at hand it appeared but a dull purple, and made little impression on the eye; it was even difficult to detect; and if you plucked a single plant, you were surprised to find how thin it was, and how little color it had. but viewed at a distance in a favorable light, it was of a fine lively purple, flower-like, enrich ing the earth. such puny causes combine to produce these decided effects. i was the more surprised and charmed hcrau^* l, r ra-s is com monly of a sober and humble color. with its beautiful purple blush it reminds me, and supplies the place, of the rhexia, which is now leaving off, and it is one of the most 310 autumnal tints interesting phenomena of august. the finest patches of it grow on waste strips or selvages of land at the base of dry hills, just above the edge of the meadows, where the greedy mower does not deign to swing his scythe ; for this is a thin and }k)or grass, beneath his notice. or, it may be, because it is so beautiful he does not know that it exists ; for the same eye does not see this and timothy. he carefully gets the meadow hay and the more nutritious grasses whicli grow next to that, but he leaves this fine purple mist for the walker s harvest, fodder for his fancy stock. higher up the hill, perchance, grow also blackberries, john s wort, and neglected, withered, and wiry june-grass. how fortunate that it grows in such places, and not in the midst of the rank grasses which are annually cut! nature thus keeps use and beauty distinct. i know many such localities, where it does not fail to present itself annually, and paint the earth with its blush. it grows on the gentle slopes, either in a continuous patch or in scat tered and rounded tufts a foot in diameter, and it lasts till it is killed by the first smart frosts. in most plants the corolla or calyx is the part which attains the highest color, and is the most attractive ; in many it is the seed-vessel or fruit; in others, as the red maple, the leaves; and in others still it is the very culm itself which is the principal flower or blooming part. autumnal tints 311 the last is especially the case with the poke or garget (phytolacca dccandra). some which stand under our cliffs quite dazzle me with their purple stems now and early in september. they are as interesting to me as most flowers, and one of the most important fruits of our autumn. every part is flower (or fruit), such is its super fluity of color, stem, branch, peduncle, pedi cel, petiole, and even the at length yellowish purple-veined leaves. its cylindrical racemes of lorries of various hues, from green to dark pur ple, six or seven inches long, are gracefully drooping on all sides, offering repasts to the birds; and even the sepals from which the birds have picked the berries are a brilliant lake-red, with crimson flame-like reflections, equal to any thing of the kind, all on fire with ripeness. hence the lacca^ from /crc, lake. there are at the same time flower-buds, flowers, green berries, dark purple or ripe ones, and these flower-like sepals, all on the same plant. we love to see any redness in the vegetation of the temperate zone. it is the color of colors. this plant speaks to our blood. it asks a bright sun on it to make it show to best advan tage, and it must be seen at this season of the year. on warm hillsides its stems are rij)e by the twenty-third of august. at that date i walked through a beautiful grove of them, six or 312 autumnal tints seven feet high, on the side of one of our cliffs, where they ripen early. quite to the ground they were a deep, brilliant purple, with a bloom contrasting with the still clear green leaves. it appears a rare triumph of nature to have pro duced and perfected such a plant, as if this were enough for a summer. what a perfect matu rity it arrives at! it is the emblem of a success ful life concluded by a death not premature, which is an ornament to nature. what if we were to mature as perfectly, root and branch, glowing in the midst of our decay, like the poke! i confess that it excites me to behold them. i cut one for a cane, for i would fain handle and lean on it. i love to press the ber ries between my fingers, and see their juice staining my hand. to walk amid these upright, branching casks of purple wine, which retain and diffuse a sunset glow, tasting each one with your eye, instead of counting the pipes on a london dock, what a privilege! for nature s vintage is not confined to the vine. our poets have sung of wine, the product of a foreign plant which commonly they never saw, as if our own plants had no juice in them more than the singers. indeed, this has been called by some the american grape, and, though a native of america, its juices are used in some foreign countries to improve the color of the wine; so autumnal tints 313 that the poetaster may be celebrating the virtues of the poke without knowing it. here are ber ries enough to paint afresh the western sky, and play the bacchanal with, if you will. and what flutes its ensanguined stems would make, to be used in sueh a dance! it is truly a royal plant. i could spend the evening of the year musing amid the poke string and pm-ham-i:unid these groves might arise at hist a new school of philosophy or poetry. it lasts all through sep tember. at the same time with this, or near the end of august, a to me very interesting genus of grasses, andropogons, or beard-grasses, is in its prime: andropogonfurcatus, forked beard grass, or call it purple-fingered grass; an dropogon scoparius. purple wood-grass; and andropogon (now called sorghum) nutam, in dian-grass. the first is a very tall and slen der-culmed grass, three to seven feet high, with four or five purple finger-like spikes raying up ward from the top. the second is also quite, b!&amp;lt; nder, growing in tufts two feet high by one wide, with culms often somewhat curving, whirh. as the spikes go out of bloom, have a whitish fuzzy look. these two are prevailing grasses at this season on dry and sandy fields and hillsides. the culms of both, not to mention their pivtty flowers, reflect a purple tinge, and help to de 314 autumnal tints clare the ripeness of the year. perliaps i have the more sympathy with them because they are despised by the farmer, and occupy sterile and neglected soil. they arc high-colored, like ripe grapes, and express a maturity which the spring did not suggest. only the august sun could have thus burnished these culms and leaves. the farmer has long since done his upland hay ing, and he will not condescend to bring his scythe to where these slender wild grasses have at length flowered thinly ; you often see spaces of bare sand amid them. but i walk encour aged between the tufts of purple wood-grass over the sandy fields, and along the edge of the shruboaks, glad to recognize these simple con temporaries. with thoughts cutting a broad swathe i &quot;get &quot; them, with horse raking thoughts i gather them into windrows. the fine-eared poet may hear the whetting of my scythe. these two were almost the first grasses that i learned to distinguish, for i had not known by how many friends i was surrounded; i had seen them simply as grasses standing. the purple of their culms also excites me like that of the pokeweed stems. think what refuge there is for one, before august is over, from college commencements and society that isolates ! i can skulk amid the tufts of purple wood-grass on the borders of autumnal tints 315 the &quot;great fields.&quot; wherever i walk these afternoons, the purple fingered grass also stands like a guide board, and points my thoughts to more poetic paths than they have lately &quot;traveled. a man shall ]&amp;gt;erhaps rush hy and trample down plants as high as his head, and cannot be said to know that they exist, though he may have cut many tons of them, littered his stau-s with them, and fed them to his cattle for years. yet, if he ever favorably attends to them, he may be overcome by their beauty. each hum blest plant, or weed, as we call it, stands there to express some thought or mood of ours ; and yet how long it stands in vain ! i had walked over those great fields so many augusts, and never yet distinctly recognized these purple com panions that 1 had there. i had brushed against tin-in and trodden on them, forsooth; and now, at last, they, as it were, rose up and blessed me. heauty and true wealth are always thus eh. ;ip and despised. heaven might be defined as the place which men avoid. who can doubt that these grasses, which the fanner says are of no account to him, find some roni]&amp;gt;cnsation in your appreciation of them? i may say that i never saw them before; though, when i came to look them face to face, there did come down to me a purple gleam from previous years; and now, 316 autumnal tints wherever i go, i see hardly anything else. it is the reign and presidency of the andropogons. almost the very sands confess the ripening influence of the august sun, and methinks, to gether with the slender grasses waving over them, reflect a purple tinge. the inipurpled sands ! such is the consequence of all this sun shine absorbed into the pores of plants and of the earth. all sap or blood is now wine-colored. at last we have not only the purple sea, but the purple land. the chestnut beard-grass, indian-grass, or wood-grass, growing here and there in waste places, but more rare than the former (from two to four or five feet high), is still handsomer and of more vivid colors than its congeners, and might well have caught the indian s eye. it has a long, narrow, one sided, and slightly nodding panicle of bright purple and yellow flowers, like a banner raised above its reedy leaves. these bright standards are now ad vanced on the distant hillsides, not in large armies, but in scattered troops or single file, like the red men. they stand thus fair and bright, representative of the race which they are named after, but for the most part unob served as they. the expression of this grass haunted me for a week, after i first passed and noticed it, like the glance of an eye. it stands autumnal tints 317 like an indian chief taking a list look at his favorite hunting-grounds. the red maple. by the twenty-fifth of september, the red maples generally are beginning to be ripe. some large ones have been conspicuously chang ing for a week, and some single trees are now very brilliant. i notice a small one, half a mile off across a meadow, against the green wood side there, a far brighter red than the blossoms of any tree in summer, and more conspicuous. i have observed this tree for several autumns invariably changing earlier than its fellows, just as one tree ripens its fruit earlier than another. it might serve to mark the season, perhaps. i should be sorry, if it were cut down. i know of two or three such trees in different parts of our town, which might, perhaps, l&amp;gt;e propagated from, as early ripeners or september trees, and their seed be advertised in the market, as well as that of radishes, if we cared as much au iit them. at present these burning bushes stand clii tly along the edge of the meadows, or i distinguish them afar on the hillsides here and there. sometimes you will s many small ones in a swamp turned quite crimson when all other trees around are still perfectly green, and the 318 autumnal tints former appear so much the brighter for it. they take you by surprise, as you are going by on one side, across the fields, thus early in the season, as if it were some gay encampment of the red men, or other foresters, of whose arrival you had not heard. some single trees, wholly bright scarlet, seen against others of their kind still freshly green, or against evergreens, are more memorable than whole groves will be by and by. how beauti ful, when a whole tree is like one great scarlet fruit full of ripe juices, every leaf, from lowest limb to topmost spire, all aglow, especially if you look toward the sun! what more remnrk n. jwfcs^can there be in the landscape? viable for miles, too fair to be believed. if such a phenomenon occurred but once, it would be handed down by tradition to posterity, and get into the mythology at last. the whole tree thus ripening in advance of its fellows attains a singular preeminence, and sometimes maintains it for a week or two. i am thrilled at the sight of it, bearing aloft its scarlet standard for the regimenwf green-clad foresters around, and i go half a mile out of my way to examine it. a single tree becomes thus the crowning beauty of some meadowy vafe,,and the expression of the whole surrounding forest is at once more spirited for it. autumnal tints 319 a small keel maple has grown, perchance, far away at the head of some retired valley, a mile from any road, unobserved. it has faith fully discharged the duties of a maple there, all winter and summer, neglected none of its econ omies, but added to its stature in the virtue which belongs to a maple, by a steady growth fr so many months, m-ver having gomgadding abroad, and is nearer heaven than it was in the spring. it has faithfully husbanded its sap, and afforded a shelter to the wandering bird, has long since ripened its seeds and committed them to the winds, and has the satisfaction of knowing, perhaps, that a thousand little well iwhav ed maples are already settled in life some where. it deserves well of mapledom. its leaves have been asking it from time to time, in a whisper, &quot;when shall we redden?&quot; and now, in this month of september, this month of traveling, when men are hastening to the sea side, or the mountains, or the lakes, this modest maple, still without budging an inch, travels in its reputation, runs up its scarlet flagon that hillside, wjiimi shows that it has finished its summer s work before all other trees, and with draws from the contest. at the eleventh hour of trf year, the tree which no scrutiny coidd have detected here when it was most industrious is thus, by the tint of its maturity, by its very 320 autumnal tints blushes, revealed at last to the careless and dis tant traveler, and leads his thoughts away from the dusty road into those brave solitudes which it inhabits. it flashes out conspicuous with all the virtue and beauty of a maple, acer ru brum. we may now read its title, or rubric, clear. its virtues, not its sins, are as scarlet. notwithstanding the red maple is the most intense scarlet of any of our trees, the sugar maple has been the most celebrated, and mi chaux in his &quot;sylva&quot; does not speak of the au tumnal color of the former. about the second of october, these trees, both large and small, are most brilliant, though many are still green. in &quot;sprout-lands&quot; they seem to vie with one another, and ever some particular one in the midst of the crowd will be of a peculiarly pure scarlet, and by its more intense color attract our eye even at a distance, and carry off the palm. a large red-maple swamp, when at the height of its change, is the most obviously bril liant of all tangible things, where i dwell, so abundant is this tree with us. it varies much both in form and color. a great many are merely yellow; more, scarlet; others, scarlet deepening into crimson, more red than common. look at yonder swamp of maples mixeclwith pines, at the base of a pine-clad hill, a quarter of a mile off, so that you get the full effect of \rrr\r\al tixts the bright colors, without detecting the imper fections of the leaves, and see their yellow, scar let, and crimson fires, of all tints, mingled and contrasted with the green. some maples are yet green, only yellow or crimson-tipped on the edges of their flakes, like the edges of a ha zel-nut bur ; some are wholly brilliant scarlet, raying out regularly and finely every way, bilaterally, like the veins of a leaf; others, of more irregidar form, when i turn my head slightly, emptying out some of its earthiness and concealing the trunk of the tree, seem to rest heavily flake on flake, like yellow and scar let clouds, wreath upon wreath, or like snow drifts driving through the air, stratified by the wind. it adds greatly to the beauty of such a swamp at this season, that, even though there may be no other trees interspersed, it is not seen as a simple mass of color, but, different trees in-ill^ of different colors and hues, the outline of each crescent tree-top is distinct, and when; one laps on to another. yet a painter would hardly venture to make them thus distinct a quarter of a mile off. as i go across a meadow directly toward a low rising ground this bright afternoon, i see, some, fifty rods off toward the sun, the top of a maple swamp just appearing over the sheeny russet cnlge of the hill, a stripe apparently 322 autumnal tints twenty rods long by ten feet deep, of the most intensely brilliant scarlet, orange, and yellow, equal to any flowers or fruits, or any tints ever painted. as i advance, lowering the edge of the hill which makes the firm foreground or lower frame of the picture, the depth of the brilliant grove revealed steadily increases, sug gesting that the whole of the inclosed valley i.s filled with such color. one wonders that the tithing-men and fathers of the town are not out to see what the trees mean by their high colors and exuberance of spirits, fearing that some mischief is brewing. i do not see what the puritans did at this season, when the maples blaze out in scarlet. they certainly could not have worshiped in groves then. perhaps that is what they built meeting-houses and fenced them round with horse-sheds for. the elm. now too, the first of october, or later, the elms are at the height of their autumnal beauty, great brownish yellow masses, warm from their september oven, hanging over the highway. their leaves are perfectly ripe. i wonder if there is any answering ripeness in the lives of the men who live beneath them. as i look down our street, which is lined with them, they remind me both by their form and color of autumnal tixts 323 yellowing sheaves of grain, as if the harvest ha&amp;lt;l in 1 .-.1 come to the village itself, and we might expect to find some maturity and jflnvor in the thoughts of the villagers at last. under those bright rustling yellow piles just ready to fall on the heads of the walkers, how can any crudity or greenness of thought or act prevail? when i stand where half a dozen large elms droop over a house, it is as if i stood within a ripe pumpkin-rind, and i feel as mellow as if i were the pulp, though i may be somewhat stringy and seedy withal. what is the late greenness of the english elm, like a cucumber out of sea son, which does not know when to have done, compared with the early and golden maturity of the american tree ? the street is the scene of a great harvest-home. it would be worth the while to set out these trees, if only for their au tumnal value. think of these great yellow canopies or parasols held over our heads and houses by the mile together, making the village all one and compact, an ulmarium, which is at the same time a nursery of men ! and then how gently and unobserved they drop their bur den and let in the sun when it is wanted, tip ir leaves not heard when they fall on our roofs and in our streets; and thus the village parasol is shut up and put away! i see the market man driving into the village, and disappear 324 autumnal tl\ts ing under its canopy of elm-tops, with his crop, as into a great granary or barn-yard. i am tempted to go thither as to a husking of thoughts, now dry and ripe, and ready to be separated from their integuments ; but, alas ! i foresee that it will be chiefly husks and little thought, blasted pig-corn, fit only for cob-meal, for, as you sow, so shall you reap. fallen leaves. by the sixth of october the leaves generally begin to fall, in successive showers, after frost or rain ; but the principal leaf-harvest, the acme of the fall, is commonly about the sixteenth. some morning at that date there is perhaps a harder frost than we have seen, and ice formed under the pump, and now, when the morning wind rises, the leaves come down in denser showers than ever. they suddenly form thick beds or carpets on the ground, in this gentle air, or even without wind, just the size and form of the tree above. some trees, as small hickories, appear to have dropped their leaves instanta neously, as a soldier grounds arms at a signal ; and those of the hickory, being bright yellow still, though withered, reflect a blaze of light from the ground where they lie. down they have come on all sides, at the first earnest touch of autumn s wand, making a sound like rain. autumnal tints 826 ( &amp;gt;iel it is after im-mm and rainy weather that w i imtiiv how great a fall of leaves tin n has been in the night, though it may not yet be the touch that loosens the rock-maple leaf. the streets are thickly strewn with the trophi -s and fallen elm-leaves make a dark brown pave ment under our feet. after some remarkably warm indian-summer day or days, i perceive that it is the unusual heat which, more than anything, causes the leaves to fall, there having been, perhaps, no frost nor rain for some time. the intense heat suddenly ripens and wilts them, just as it softens and ripens peaches and otht fruits, and causes them to drop. the leaves of late red maples, still bright, strew the earth, often crimson -spotted on a yel low ground, like some wild apples, though they preserve these bright colors on the ground but a day or two, especially if it rains. on causeways i go by trees here and there all bare and smoke-like, having lost their brilliant cloth ing; but there it lies, nearly as bright as ever on the ground on one side, and making m-arly a; irular a ti^ima&amp;gt; lately on the tree. i wniild nither say that i first observe the trees thus flat on the ground like a permanent mlnn-d shadow, and they suggest to look for the boaji that l&amp;gt;ore them. a queen might be proud to walk where these gallant trees have spread tln-ir 826 autumnal tints bright cloaks in the imul. i see wagons roll over them as a shadow or a reflection, and the drivers heed them just as little as they did their shadows before. birds -nests, in the huckleberry and other shrubs, and in trees, are already being filled with the withered leaves. so many have fallen in the woods that a squirrel cannot run after a falling nut without being heard. boys are rak ing them in the streets, if only for the pleasure of dealing with such clean crisp substances. some sweep the paths scrupulously neat, and then stand to see the next breath strew them with new trophies. the swamp-floor is thickly covered, and the lycopodium hicidulum looks suddenly greener amid them. in dense woods they half cover pools that are three or four rods long. the other day i could hardly find a well known spring, and even suspected that it had dried up, for it was completely concealed by freshly fallen leaves; and when i swept them aside and revealed it, it was like striking the earth, with aaron s rod, for a new spring. wet grounds about the edges of swamps look dry with them. at one swamp, where i was surveying, thinking to step on a leafy shore from a rail, i got into the water more than a foot deep. when i go to the river the day after the autumnal tints principal f:dl of l-a\. ^, the sixteenth, i find my lx&amp;gt;at all covered, bottom and seats, with the of |h&amp;gt; ( i. m.-u \\ ill..\\ under ^ lii-li it u moored, and i set sail with a cargo of them rustling under my feet. if i empty it, it will be full again to-morrow. i do not regard them as litter, to be swept out, but accept them as suitable straw or matting for the bottom of my carriage. when i turn up into the mouth of the assabet, which is wooded, large fleets of leaves are floating on its surface, as it were get ting out to sea, with room to tack ; but next the shore, a little farther up, they are thicker than foam, quite concealing the water for a rod in width, under and amid the alders, button hushes, and maples, still perfectly light and dry, with fibre unrelaxed ; and at a rocky bend where they are met and stopped by the morning wind, they sometimes form a broad and &amp;lt;l&amp;lt; -n^. crescent quite across the river. when i turn my prow that way, and the wave which it makes strikes them, list what a pleasant rustling from these dry substances getting on one anoth.r! often it is their undulation only which reveals the water beneath them. also every motion of the wood-turtle on the shore is betrayed by tln-ir rustling there. or even in mid-channel, when the wind rises, i hear them blown with a rus tling sound. higher up thty are slowly nm\ in^ 328 autumnal tints round and round in some great eddy which the river makes, as that at the &quot;leaning hemlocks,&quot; where the water is deep, and the current is wearing into the bank. perchance, in the afternoon of such a day, when the water is perfectly calm and full of re flections, i paddle gently down the main stream, and, turning up the assabet, reach a quiet cove, where i unexpectedly find myself sur rounded by myriads of leaves, like fellow-voy agers, which seem to have the same purpose, or want of purpose, with myself. see this great fleet of scattered leaf -boats which we paddle amid, in this smooth river-bay, each one curled up on every side by the sun s skill, each nerve a stiff spruce-knee, like boats of hide, and of all patterns, charon s boat probably among the rest, and some witli lofty prows and poops, like the stately vessels of the ancients, scarcely mov ing in the sluggish current, like the great fleets, the dense chinese cities of boats, with which you mingle on entering some great mart, some new york or canton, which we are all steadily approaching together. how gently each has been deposited on the water ! no vio lence has been used towards them yet, though, perchance, palpitating hearts were present at the launching. and painted ducks, too, the splendid wood-duck among the rest, often come autumnal tints 829 to sail and float amid the painted leaves, barks of a nobler model still! what wholesome herb-drinks are to be had id the swamps now! what strong medicinal, but rich scents from the decaying leaves! the rain falling on the freshly dried herbs and leaves, and filling the pools and ditches into which they have dropped thus clean and rigid, will soon convert them into tea, green, black, brown, and yellow teas, of all degrees of strength, enough to set all nature a -gossiping. whether we drink them or not, as yet, before their strength is drawn, these leaves, dried on great nature s coppers, are of such various pure and delicate tints as might make the fame of oriental teas. how they are mixed up, of all species, oak and maple and chestnut and birch! but na ture is not cluttered with them ; she is a perfect husbandman; she stores them all. consider what a vast crop is thus annually shed on the earth ! this, more than any mere grain or seed, is the great harvest of the year. the trees are now repaying the earth with interest what they have taken from it. they are discounting. they are alwut to add a leaf s thickness to the depth of the soil. this is the beautiful way in which nature gets her muck, while i chaffer with this man and that, who talks to me about 330 autumnal tints sulphur and the cost of carting. we are all the richer for their decay. i am more inter ested in this crop than in the english grass alone or in the corn. it prepares the virgin mould for future cornfields and forests, on which the earth fattens. it keeps our homestead in good heart. for beautiful variety no crop can be com pared with this. here is not merely the plain yellow of the grains, but nearly all the colors that we know, the brightest blue not excepted : the early blushing maple, the poison-sumach blazing its sins as scarlet, the mulberry ash, the rich chrome yellow of the poplars, the bril liant red huckleberry, with which the hills backs are painted, like those of sheep. the frost touches them, and, with the slightest breath of returning day or jarring of earth s axle, see in what showers they come floating down ! the ground is all party-colored with them. but they still live in the soil, whose fertility and bulk they increase, and in the forests that spring from it. they stoop to rise, to mount higher in coining years, by subtle chemistry, climbing by the sap in the trees, and the sapling s first fruits thus shed, transmuted at last, may adorn its crown, when, in after years, it has become the monarch of the forest. it is pleasant to walk over the beds of these autumnal tints 331 fresh, crisp, and rustling leaves. how l&amp;gt;eauti ftilly they go to their graves! how gently lay themselves down and turn to mould! -painted of a thousand hues, and fit to make the beds of us living. so they troop to their list resting place, light and frisky. they put on no weeds, but merrily they go scami&amp;gt;ering over the earth, selecting the spot, choosing a lot, ordering no iron fence, whispering all through the woods about it, some choosing the spot where the bodies of men are mouldering beneath, and meeting them half-way. how many flutterings lx?fore they rest quietly in their graves! they that soared so loftily, how contentedly they re turn to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high ! they teach us how to die. one wonders if the time will ever come when men, with their boasted faith in immortality, will lie down as gracefully and jig rjp^ w ith such an indian-summer serenity will shed their bodies, as they do their hair and nails. when the leaves fall, the whole earth is a cemetery pleasant to walk in. i love to wander and muse over them in their graves. here are no lying nor vain epitaphs. what though you own no lot at mount auburn? your lot is 332 autumnal tints surely cast somewhere in this vast cemetery, which has been consecrated from of old. you need attend no auction to secure a place. there is room enough here. the loose-strife shall bloom and the huckleberry-bird sing over your bones. the woodman and hunter shall be your sextons, and tinchildren shall 1 n-;id upon tin borders as much as they will. let us walk in the cemetery of the leaves, this is your true greenwood cemetery. the sugar-maple. but think not that the splendor of the year is over ; for as one leaf does not make a sum mer, neither does one falling leaf make an autumn. the smallest sugar-maples in our streets make a great show as early as the fifth of october, more than any other trees there. as 1 look up the main street, they appear like painted screens standing before the houses; yet many are green. but now, or generally by the seventeenth of october, when almost all red maples, and some white maples, are bare, the large sugar-maples also are in their glory, glowing with yellow and red, and show unex pectedly bright and delicate tints. they are remarkable for the contrast they often afford of deep blushing red on one half and green on the other. they become at length dense masses of .\rrr\ixal tints 333 rich yellow with a deep scarlet blush, or more than blush, on the exposed surfaces. they are the brightest trees now in the street. the large ones on our common are particu larly beautiful. a delicate, but warmer than golden yellow is now the prevailing color, with scarlet cheeks. yet, standing on the east side of the common just before sundown, when the western light is transmitted through them, i see that their yellow even, compared with the pale lemon yellow of an elm close by, amounts to a scarlet, without noticing the bright scarlet por tions. generally, they are great regular oval masses of yellow and scarlet. all the sunny warmth of the season, the indian-summer, seems to be absorbed in their leaves. the lowest and inmost leaves next the bole are, as usual, of the most delicate yellow and green, like the com }&amp;gt;l. \ion of young men brought up in the house. there is an auction on the common to-day, but its red flag is hard to be discerned amid this blaze of color. little did the fathers of the town anticipate this brilliant success, when they caused to be ini]k&amp;gt;rted from farther in the country some straight poles with their tops cut off, which they called sugar-maples; and, as i remember, after they were set out, a neighboring merchant s cleik, by way of jest, planted beans about th-in. 334 autumnal tints those which were then jestingly called bean poles are to-day far the most beautiful objects noticeable in our streets. they are worth all and more than they have cost, though one of the selectmen, while setting them out, took the cold which occasioned his death, if only be cause they have filled the open eyes of children with their rich color unstintedly so many octo l&amp;gt;ers. we will not ask them to yield us sugar in the spring, while they afford us so fair a prospect in the autumn. wealth indoors may be the inheritance of few, but it is equally dis tributed on the common. all children alike can revel in this golden harvest. surely trees should be set in our streets with a view to their october splendor; though i doubt whether this is ever considered by the &quot;tree society.&quot; do you not think it will make some odds to these children that they were brought up under the maples? hundreds of eyes are steadily drinking in this color, and by these teachers even the truants are caught and educated the moment they step abroad. indeed neither the truant nor the studious is at present taught color in the schools. these are instead of the bright colors in apothecaries shops and city windows. it is a pity that we have no more lied maples, and some hickories, in our streets as well. our paiiit-box is very imper autumnal tints 335 fectly filled. instead of, or beside, supplying such paint -1)0x68 as we do, we might supply these natural colors to the young. where else will they study color under greater advantages? what school of design can vie with tin think how much the eyes of painters of all kinds, and of manufacturers of cloth and paper, and paper-stainers, and countless others, are to be educated by these autumnal colors. the stationer s envelopes may be of very various tints, yet not so various as those of the leaves of a single tree. if you want a different shade or tint of a particular color, you have only to look farther within or without the tree or the wood. these leaves are not many dipped in one dye, as at the dye-house, but they are dyed in light of infinitely various degrees of strength, and left to set and dry there. shall the names of so many of our colors con tinue to im? derived from those of obscure for ri ^n 1-m-alitirs. as naples yellow, prussian l&amp;gt;lur, raw sienna, burnt umber, gamljoge? (surely the tyrian purple must have faded by this time), or from comparatively trivial articles of commerce, chocolate, lemon, coffee, cinna mon, claret? (shall we compare our hickory to a lemon, or a lemon to a hickory?) or from ores and oxides which few ever see? shall we so often, when describing to our nrigh 33g autumnal tints bore the color of something we have seen, refer them, not to some natural object in our neigh borhood, but perchance to a bit of earth fetched from the other side of the planet, which possi bly they may find at the apothecary s, but which probably neither they nor we ever saw? have we not an earth under our feet, aye, and a sky over our heads? or is the last all ultramarine? avhat do we know of sapphire, amethyst, emer ald, ruby, amber, and the like, most of us who take these names in vain? leave these precious words to cabinet keepers, virtuosos, and maids-of-honor, to the nabobs, begums, and chobdars of hindostan, or wherever else. i do not see why, since america and her autumn woods have been discovered, our leaves should not compete with the precious stones in giving names to colors ; and, indeed, i believe that in course of time the names of some of our trees and shrubs, as well as flowers, will get into our popular chromatic nomenclature. hut of much more importance than a know ledge of the names and distinctions of color is the joy and exhilaration which these colored leaves excite. already these brilliant trees throughout the street, without any more variety, are at least equal to an annual festival and holi day, or a week of such. these are cheap and innocent gala-days, celebrated by one and all autumnal tints : .: . 7 without the aid of committees or marshals, such a show as may safely be licensed, not attracting gamblers or rum sellers, not requiring any special police to keep the peace. and poor indeed must be that new england village s october which has not the maple in its streets. this octol&amp;gt;er festival costs no powder, nor ring ing of bells, but every tree is a living liberty pole on which a thousand bright flags are wav ing. no wonder that we must have our annual cattle-show, and fall training, and perhaps cornwallis, our september courts, and the like. nature herself holds her annual fair in october, not only in the streets, but in every hollow and on every hillside. when lately we looked into&quot; that redmaple swamp all ablaze, where the trees were clothed in their vestures of most dazzling tints, did it not suggest a thou sand gypsies beneath, a race capable of wild 1 ti.rht, or even the fabled fauns, satyrs, and wood-nymphs come back to earth? or was it only :i congregation of wearied wood -choppers, or of proprietors come to inspect their lots, that we thought of? or, earlier still, when we pad dled on the river through that fine-grained sep teinlwr air, did there not appear to be some thing new going on under the sparkling surface of the stream, a shaking of props, at leaftt, so 883 autumnal tints that we made haste in order to be up in time ? did not the rows of yellowing willows and button -bushes on eaeh side seem like rows of booths, under which, perhaps, some fluviatile egg-pop equally yellow was effervescing? did not all these suggest that man s spirits should rise as high as nature s, should hang out their flag, and the routine of his life be inter rupted by an analogous expression of joy and hilarity? no annual training or muster of soldiery, no celebration with its scarfs and banners, could import into the town a hundredth part of the annual splendor of our october. we have only to set the trees, or let them stand, and nature will find the colored drapery, flags of all her nations, some of whose private signals hardly the botanist can read, while we walk under the triumphal arches of the elms. leave it to nature to appoint the days, whether the same as in neighboring states or not, and let the clergy read her proclamations, if they can understand them. behold what a brilliant drapery is her woodbine flag! what pumi- spirited merchant, think you, has contributed this part of the show? there is no handsomer shingling and paint than this vine, at present covering a whole side of some houses. i do not believe that the ivy never nere is comparable autumnal tints 339 to it. no wonder it has been extensively intro duced into london. let us have a good many m:q.l.-and h i.-unri,-and scarlet oaks* than, i say. blaze away! shall that dirty roll of 1 muting in the gun-house be all the colors a vil lau-.-tii di-j l:iy . a \ill;iu lfl qo1 oomplet*, unless it have these trees to mark the season in it. they are important, like the town-dock* a village that lias them not will not ix? found to work well. it has a screw loose, an essen tial part is wanting. let us have willows for spring, elms for summer, maples and wal nuts and tupeloes for autumn, evergreens for winter, and oaks for all seasons. what is a gallery in a house to a gallery in the streets, \\hirh every market-man rides through, whether he will or not? of course, there is not a pic ture-gallery in the country which would be worth so much to us as is the western view at sunset under the elms of our main street. they are the frame to a picture which is daily painted behind them. an avenue of elms as large as our largest and three miles long would seem to lead to some admirable place, th&quot;iiji only c were at the end of it. a village needs these innocent stimulants of bright and cheering prospects to keep off melan choly and superstition. show me two villages, one emlm)wered in trees and blazing with all the 340 autumnal tints glories of october, the other a merely trivial and treeless waste, or with only a single tree or two for suicides, and i shall l&amp;gt;e sure that in the latter will be found the most starved and bigoted religionists and the most desperate drinkers. every wash-tub and milk-can and gravestone will be exposed. the inhabitants will disappear abruptly behind their barns and houses, like desert arabs amid their rocks, and i shall look to see spears in their hands. they will be ready to accept the most barren and forlorn doctrine, as that the world is speedily coming to an end, or has already got to it, or that they themselves are turned wrong side outward. they will perchance crack their dry joints at one another and call it a spiritual communica tion. but to confine ourselves to the maples. what if we were to take half as much pains in protecting them as we do in setting them out, not stupidly tie our horses to our dahlia stems? what meant the fathers by establishing this perfectly living institution before the church, this institution which needs no repairing nor repainting, which is continually enlarged and repaired by its growth? surely they &quot; wrought in a sad sincerity ; themselves from god they could not free ; autumnal tints 341 th*j planted better than they knew ; the conacioub trt to beauty jrrew.&quot; verily these maples are cheap preachers, permanently settled, which preach their half century, and century, aye, and century-aud-a half sermons, with constantly increasing unction and influence, ministering to many generations of men ; and the least we can do is to supply them with suitable colleagues as they grow in firm. the scarlet oak. belonging to a genus which is remarkable for the beautiful form of its leaves, i suspect that some scarlet-oak leaves surpass those of all other oaks in the rich and wild beauty of their outlines. i judge from an acquaintance with twelve species, and from drawings which i have ii &quot;t&quot; maiiv &amp;gt;i hers. stand under this tree and see how finely its l.-avrs are cut gainst the sky, as it were, only a few sharp points extending from a mid rib. they look like double, treble, or quadru ple crosses. tliey |m far more eih.-r.-al than the less deeply scalloped oak-leaves. they bave so little leaf} / mi firma that they appear init ing away in the light, and scarcely obstruct our view. the leaves of very young plants are, like those of full-grown oaks of other sjhicies, more entire, simple, and lumpish in their out 342 autumnal tints lines, but these, raised high on old trees, have solved the leafy problem. lifted higher and higher, and sublimated more and more, putting off some earthiness and cultivating more inti macy with the light each year, they have at length the least possible amount of earthy mat ter, and the greatest spread and grasp of skyey influences. there they dance, arm in arm with the light, tripping it on fantastic points, fit partners in those aerial halls. so intimately mingled are they with it, that, what with their slenderness and their glossy surfaces, you can hardly tell at last what in the dance is leaf and what is light. and when no zephyr stirs, they are at most but a rich tracery to the forest-win dows. i am again struck with their beauty, when, a month later, they thickly strew the ground in the woods, piled one upon another under my feet. they are then brown above, but purple beneath. with their narrow lobes and their bold deep scallops reaching almost to the mid dle, they suggest that the material must be cheap, or else there has been a lavish expense in their creation, as if so much had been cut out. or else they seem to us the remnants of the stuff out of which leaves have been cut with a die. indeed, when they lie thus one upon another, they remind me of a pile of scrap-tin. autumnal tints 343 or bring one home, and study it closely at your leisure, by the fireside. it is a type, not from any oxford font, not in the basque nor the arrow-headed character, not found on the kosetta stone, but destined to be copied in sculpture one day, if they ever get to whittling stone here. what a wild and pleasing outline, a combination of graceful curves and angles! the eye rests with equal delight on what is not leaf and on what is leaf, on the broad, free, open sinuses, and on the long, sharp, bristle ]m)inted lobes. a simple oval outline would in clude it all, if you connected the points of the leaf; but how much richer is it than that, with its half dozen deep scallops, in which the eye and thought of the beholder are embayed ! if i were a drawing-master, i would set my pupils to copying these leaves, that they might learn to draw firmly and gracefully. regarded as water, it is like a pond with half a dozen broad rounded promontories extending nearly to its middle, half from each side, while its watery bays extend far inland, like sharp friths, at each of whose heads several fine streams empty in, almost a leafy archipelago. hut it oftcner suggests land, and, as diony sius and pliny compared the form of the morea to that of the leaf of the oriental plane-tree, so this leaf remind^ me of some fair wild i-lund 344 autumxal tints in the ocean, whose extensive coast, alternate rounded bays with smooth strands, and sharp pointed rocky capes, mark it as fitted for the habitation of man, and destined to become a centre of civilization at last. to the sailor s eye, it is a much-indented shore. is it not, in fact, a shore to the aerial ocean, on which the windy surf beats? at sight of this leaf we are all mariners, if not vikings, buccaneers, and filibusters. both our love of repose and our spirit of adventure are addressed. in our most casual glance, perchance, we think that if we succeed in doubling those sharp capes we shall find deep, smooth, and secure havens in the ample bays. how different from the white oak leaf, with its rounded headlands, on which no lighthouse need be placed ! that is an eng land, with its long civil history, that may be read. this is some still unsettled new-found island or celebes. shall we go and be rajahs there? by the twenty-sixth of october the large scarlet oaks are in their prime, when other oaks are usually withered. they have been kindling their fires for a week past, and now generally burst into a blaze. this alone of onr indigenous 1 deciduous trees (excepting the dog wood, of which i do not know half a dozen, and they are but large bushes) is now in its glory. autumnal tints 345 tlu? two aspens and the sugar-maple come nearest to it in date, but they have lost the greater part of their leaves. of evergreens, only the pitch-pine is still commonly bright. hut it requires a particular alertness, if not devotion to these phenomena, to appreciate the wide-spread, but late and unexpected glory of the scarlet oaks. i do not speak here of the small trees and shrubs, which are commonly observed, and which are now withered, but of the large trees. most go in and shut their doors, thinking that bleak and colorless novem ber has already come, when some of the most brilliant and memorable colors are not yet lit. this very perfect and vigorous one, about forty feet high, standing in an open pasture, which was quite glossy green on the twelfth, is now, the twenty-sixth, completely changed to bright dark scarlet, every leaf, between you and the sun, as if it had been dipped into a scarlet dye. the whole tree is much like a heart in form, as well as color. was not this worth waiting for? little did you think, ten days ago, that that cold green tree would as sume such color a^ tin-;. its leaves arc still lirmly attached, while those of other trees are falling around it. it seems to say, &quot;i am the last to blush, but i blush deeper than any of ye. i bring up the rear in iny red coat. 346 autumnal tints we scarlet ones, alone of oaks, have not given up the fight.&quot; the sap is now, and even far into november, frequently flowing fast in these trees, as in maples in the spring ; and apparently their bright tints, now that most other oaks an* withered, are connected with this phenomenon. they are full of life. it has a pleasantly astrin gent, acorn-like taste, this strong oak-wine, as i find on tapping them with my knife. looking across this woodland valley, a quar ter of a mile wide, how rich those scarlet oaks embosomed in pines, their bright red branches intimately intermingled with them! they have their full effect there. the pine-boughs are the green calyx to their red petals. or, as we go along a road in the woods, the sun striking endwise through it, and lighting up the red tents of the oaks, which on each side are min gled with the liquid green of the pines, makes a very gorgeous scene. indeed, without the evergreens for contrast, the autumnal tints would lose much of their effect. the scarlet oak asks a clear sky and the brightness of late october days. these bring out its colors. if the sun goes into a cloud they become comparatively indistinct. as i sit on a cliff in the southwest part of our town, the sun is now getting low, and the woods in liu autumnal tints 347 coin, south and east of me, are lit up by its more level rays ; and in the scarlet oaks, scat tered so equally over the forest, there is brought out a more brilliant redness than 1 had believed was in them. every tree of this species which is visible in those directions, even to the hori zon, now stands out distinctly red. some great ones lift their red backs high above the woods, in the next town, like huge roses with a myriad of tine petals; and some more slender ones, in a small grove of white pines on pine hill in the east, on the very verge of the horizon, alter nating with the pines on the edge of the grove, and shouldering them with their red coats, look like soldiers in red amid hunters in green. this time it is lincoln green, too. till the sun got low, i did not believe that there were so many red coats in the forest army. theirs is an intense burning red, which would lose x nif of its strength, mcthinks, with every step you might take toward them; for the shade tliat lurks amid their foliage does not report itself at this distance, and they are unanimously red. the focus of their reflected color is in the atmo sphere far on this side. every such tree be in&quot;* a nucleus of red, as it were, where, with the declining sun, that color grows and glows. it is partly borrowed fire, gathering stnu-tli from the sun on its way to your eye. it has 348 autumnal tints only some comparatively dull red leaves for a rallying-poirili or kindling-stuff, to start it, and it becomes an intense scarlet or red mist, or fire, which finds fuel for itself in the very atmo sphere. so vivacious is redness. the very rails reflect a rosy light at this hour and season. you see a redder tree than exists. if you wish to count the scarlet oaks, do it now. in a clear day stand thus on a hill-top in the woods, when the sun is an hour high, and every one within range of your vision, ex cepting in the west, will be revealed. you might live to the age of methuselah and never find a tithe of them, otherwise. yet sometimes even in a dark day i have thought them as bright as i ever saw them. looking westward, their colors are lost in a blaze of light; but in other directions the whole forest is a flower-gar den, in which these lite roses burn, alternating with green, while the so-called &quot;gardeners,&quot; walking here and there, perchance, beneath, witli spade and water-pot, see only a few little asters amid withered leaves. these are my china-asters, my late garden flowers. it costs me nothing for a gardener. the falling leaves, all over the forest, are pro tecting the roots of my plants. only look at what is to be seen, and you will have garden enough, without deepening the soil in your autumnal tints 349 yard. wo have only to elevate our view a lit tle, to see the whole forest as a garden. the blossoming of the scarlet oak, the forest flower, surpassing all in splendor (at least since the maple)! i do not know but they interest me more than the maples, they are so wil 1\ and equally dispersed throughout the forest; they are so hardy, a nobler tree on the whole ; our chief november flower, abiding the ap proach of winter with us, imparting warmth to early november prospects. it is remarkable that the latest bright color that is general should be this deep, dark scarlet and red, the intensest of colors. the ripest fruit of the year; like the cheek of a hard, glossy, red ap ple, from the cold isle of orleans, which will not be mellow for eating till next spring! when i rise to a hill-top, a thousand of these great oak roses, distributed on every side, as far as the horizon ! i admire them four or five miles off! this my unfailing prosj)ect for a fortnight past! this late forest-flower sur passes all that spring or summer could do. their colors were but rare and dainty sj k comparatively (created for the near-sighted, who walk amid the humblest herbs and uii lt woods), and made no impression on a distant eye. now it is an extended forest or a moun tain-side, through or along which we journey 350 autumnal tints from clay to day, that bursts into bloom. com paratively, our gardening is on a petty scale, the gardener still nursing a few asters amid dead weeds, ignorant of the gigantic asters and roses which, as it were, overshadow him, and ask for none of his care. it is like a little red paint ground on a saucer, and held up against the sunset sky. why not take more elevated and broader views, walk in the great garden, not skulk in a little &quot;debauched&quot; nook of it? consider the beauty of the forest, and not merely of a few impounded herbs ? let your walks now be a little more adven turous; ascend the hills. if, about the last of october, you ascend any hill in the outskirts of our town, and probably of yours, and look over the forest, you may see well, what i have endeavored to describe. all this you surely will see, and much more, if you are prepared to see it, if you look for it. otherwise, regular and universal as this phenomenon is, whether you stand on the hill-top or in the hollow, you will think for threescore years and ten that all the wood is, at this season, sere and brown. objects are concealed from our view, not so much because they are out of the course of our visual ray as because we do not bring our minds and eyes to bear on them ; for there is no power to see in the eye itself, any more than in any autumnal tints 351 other jelly. we do not realize how far and widely, or how near and narrowly, we are to look. the greater part of the phenomena of nature are for this reason concealed from us all our lives. the gardener sees only the gar dener s garden. here, too, as in political econ omy, the supply answers to the demand. na ture does not cast pearls before swine. there is just as much beauty visible to us in the land scape as we are prepared to appreciate, not a grain more. the actual objects which one man will see from a particular hill-top are just as different from those which another will see as the beholders are different. the scarlet oak must, in a sense, be in your eye when you go forth. we cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our heads, and then we can hardly see anything else. in my botanical rambles i find that, first, the idea, or image, of a plant occupies my thoughts, though it may seem very foreign to this locality, no nearer than hudson s bay, and for some weeks ormiionths i go thinking of it, and expecting \t\ unconsciously, and at length i surely see it. this is the history of my finding a score or more of rare plants, which 1 could name. a man sees only what concerns him. a botanist absorbed in the study of grasses does not distinguish the grandest pas 352 autumnal tints ture oaks. he, as it were, tramples down oaks unwittingly in his walk, or at most sees only their shadows. i have found that it re quired a different intention of the eye, in the same locality, to see different plants, even when they were closely allied, as juncacecc and graminecb : when i was looking for the former, i did not see the latter in the midst of them. how much more, then, it requires different in tentions of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of knowledge! how dif ferently the poet and the naturalist look at objects ! take a new-england selectman, and set him on the highest of our hills, and tell him to look, sharpening his sight to the utmost, and put ting on the glasses that suit him best (aye, using a spy -glass, if he likes), and make a full report. what, probably, will he spy? what will he select to look at? of course, he will see a brocken spectre of himself. he will see several nieeting-houscs, at least, and, perhaps, that somebody ought to be assessed higher than he is, since he has so handsome a wood-lot. now take julius caesar, or emanuel swedeu borg, or a fiji islander, and set him up there. or suppose all together, and let them compare notes afterward. will it appear that they have enjoyed the same prospect? what they will autumnal tints 168 see will ih as different as rome was from hea ven or hell, or the last from the fiji islands. for aught we know, as strange a man as any of these is always at our elbow. why, it takes a sharp-shooter to bring down even such trivial game as snip s and wood-cocks; he must take very particular aim, and know what he is aiming at. he would stand a very small chance, if he fired at random into the sky, being told that snipes were flying there. and so is it with him that shoots at beauty; though he wait till the sky falls, he will not bag any, if he does not already know its seasons and haunts, and the color of its wing, if he has not dreamed of it, so that he can anticipate it; then, indeed, he flushes it at every step, shoots double and on the wing, with both barrels, even in cornfields. the sportsman trains himself, dresses and watches unweariedly, and loads and primes for his particular game. he prays for it, and offers sacrifices, and so he gets it. af ter due and long preparation, schooling his eye and hand, dreaming awake and asleep, with gun and paddle and l&amp;gt;oat, he goes out after meadow heus, which most of his townsmen never saw nor dreamed of, and paddles for miles against a bead-wind, and wades in water up to his knees, l&amp;gt;eing out all day without his dinner, and there fore he gets them. he had them half-way into autumnal tints his bag when he started, and has only to shove them down. the true sportsman can shoot you almost any of his game from his windows: what else has he windows or eyes for? it conies and ]&amp;gt;erehes at last on the barrel of his gun ; but the rest of the world never see it with the feathers on. the geese fly exactly under his zenith, and honk when they get there, and he will keep himself supplied by firing up his chimney ; twenty musquash have the refusal of each one of his traps before it is empty. if he lives, and his game-spirit increases, heaven and earth shall fail him sooner than game; and when he dies, he will go to more extensive and, per chance, happier hunting-grounds. the fisher man, too, dreams of fish; sees a bobbing cork in his dreams, till he can almost catch them in his sink-spout. i knew a girl who, being sent to pick huckleberries, picked wild gooseberries by the quart, where no one else knew that there were any, because she was accustomed to pick them up country where she came from. the astronomer knows where to go star-gathering, and sees one clearly in his mind before any have seen it with a glass. the hen scratches and finds her food right under where she stands; but such is not the way with the hawk. these bright leaves which i have mentioned autumnal tints 355 are not the exception, but the rule; for i be lieve that all leaves, even grasses and mosses, acquire brighter colors just before their fall. when you come to observe faithfully the changes of each humblest plant, you find that each has, sooner or later, its peculiar autumnal tint ; and if you undertake to make a complete list of the bright tints, it will be nearly as long as a catalogue of the plants in your vicinity. wild apples the history of the apple-tree it is remarkable how closely the history of the apple-tree is connected with that of man. the geologist tells us that the order of the rosacea&amp;gt;i which includes the apple, also the true grasses, and the labiate, or mints, were introduced only a short time previous to the appearance of man on the globe. it appears that apples made a part of the food of that unknown primitive people whose traces have lately been found at the bottom of the swiss lakes, supposed to be older than the foundation of rome, so old that they had no metallic implements. an entire black and shriveled crabapple has been recovered from their stores. tacitus says of the ancient germans, that they satisfied their hunger with wild apples (ayrcstia poma), among other things. niebuhr observes that &quot;the words for a house, a field, a plough, ploughing, wine, oil, milk, sheep,, apples, and others relating to agri culture and the gentler way of life, agree in wild apples :;&quot;.t latin and greek, while the latin words for all objects pertaining to war or the chase are ut terly alien from the greek.&quot; thus the apple tree may be considered a symbol of peace no less than the olive. the apple was early so important, and gener ally distributed, that its name traced to its root in many languages signifies fruit in general. mi/aw, in greek, moans an apple, also the fruit of other trees, also a sheep and any cat t if, and finally riches in general. the apple-tree has been celebrated by the hebrews, greeks, romans, and scandinavians. some have thought that the first human pair were tempted by its fruit. goddesses are tam. d to have con tended for it, dragons were set to watch it, and heroes were employed to pluck it. the tree is mentioned in at least three places in the old testament, and its fruit in two or three more. solomon sings, &quot;as the ap|l- tree among the trees of the wood, so is my be loved among the sons.&quot; and again, &quot;stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples.&quot; the noblest part of man s noblest feature is named from this fruit, &quot;the apple of the eye.&quot; the apple-tree is also mentioned by homer and herodotus. ulysses saw in the glorious garden of alcinoiis &quot;pears and ])omegranate &amp;gt; 8, 358 wild apples and apple-trees bearing beautiful fruit&quot; (k&amp;lt;u m mat dyxaokaptroi). and according to homer, apples were among the fruits which tantalus could not pluck, the wind ever blowing their boughs away from him. theophrastus knew and described the apple-tree as a botanist. according to the prose edda, &quot;iduna keeps in a box the apples which the gods, when they feel old age approaching, have only to taste of to become young again. it is in this manner that they will be kept in renovated youth until ragnarok &quot; (or the destruction of the gods). i learn from loudou that &quot;the ancient welsh bards were rewarded for excelling in song by the token of the apple-spray;&quot; and &quot;in the highlands of scotland the apple-tree is the badge of the clan lamont.&quot; the apple-tree (pyru mains) belongs chiefly to the northern temperate zone. london says that &quot;it grows spontaneously in every part of europe except the frigid zone, and throughout western asia, china, and japan.&quot; we have also two or three varieties of the apple indige nous in north america. the cultivated apple tree was first introduced into this country by the earliest settlers, and is thought to do as well or better here than anywhere else. probably some of the varieties which are now cultivated were first introduced into britain by the romans. wild apples 359 pliny, adopting the distinction of theophras tus, says, &quot;of trees there are some which are altogether wild (sylrestres), some more civilized (m rbnn lores).&quot; theophrastus includes the apple among the last; and, indeed, it is in this sense the most civilized of all trees. it is as harmless as a dove, as beautiful as a rose, and as val u:il&amp;gt;l as tl.m-ks and herds. it has been longer cultivated than any other, and so is more hu manized ; and who knows but, like the dog, it will at length l&amp;gt;e no longer traceable to its wild original? it migrates with man, like the dog and horse and cow: first, perchance, from greece to italy, thence to england, thence to america; and our western emigrant is still marching steadily toward the setting sun with the seeds of the apple in his pocket, or perhaps a few young trees strapped to his load. at least a million apple-trees are thus set farther westward this year than any cultivated ones grew last year. consider how the blossom week, like the sabbath, is thus annually sjiri ii lin^ over the prairies; for when man mi grates, he carries with him not only his birds, jua&amp;lt;lrupeds, insects, vegetables, and his very sward, but his orchard also. the leaves and tender twigs are an agreeable food to many &amp;lt;lim -tic animals, as the cow, horse, sheep, and goat; and the fruit i 360 wild apples after by the first, as well as by the hog. thus there appears to have existed a natural alliance between these animals and this tree from the first. &quot;the fruit of the crab in the forests of france&quot; is said to be u a great resource for the wild boar.&quot; not only the indian, but many indigenous insects, birds, and quadrupeds, welcomed the apple-tree to these shores. the tent-caterpillar saddled her eggs on the very first twig that was formed, and it has since shared her affections with the wild cherry ; and the canker-worm also in a measure abandoned the elm to feed on it. as it grew apace, the blue-bird, robin, cherry bird, king -bird, and many more came with haste and built their nests and warbled in its boughs, and so became orchard-birds, and mul tiplied more than ever. it was an era in the history of their race. the downy woodpecker found such a savory morsel under its bark that he perforated it in a ring quite round the tree, before he left it, a thing which he had never done before, to my knowledge. it did not take the partridge long to find out how sweet its buds were, and every winter eve she flew, and still flies, from the wood, to pluck them, much to the farmer s sorrow. the rabbit, too, was not slow to learn the taste of its twigs and bark ; and when the fruit was ripe, the squirrel half wild apples 361 rolled, half carried it to his hole; and even the musquash crept up the hank from the brook at evening, and greedily devoured it, until he had worn a path in the grass there; and when it was frozen and thawed, the crow and the jay were glad to taste it occasionally. the owl crept into the first apple-tree that iteeame hol low, and fairly hooted with delight, finding it just the place for him; so, settling down into it, he has remained there ever since. my theme being the wild apple, i will mnvly glance at some of the seasons in the an nual growth of the cultivated apple, and pass on to my special province. the flowers of the apple are perhaps the most iwautiful of any tree s, so copious and so de lii-inis to both sight and scent. the walker is frequently tempted to turn and linger near some more than usually handsome one, whose blossoms are two thirds expanded. how supe rior it is in these respects to the pear, whose blossoms are neither colored nor fragrant ! ry the middle of july, green apples are so large as to remind us of coddling, and of the autumn. the sward is commonly strewed with little ones which fall still-horn, as it were, nature thus thinning them for us. the roman writer palladium said, &quot;if apples are i to fall ixjfon* their time, a *tn placed in 302 }\ ild apples split root will retain them.&quot; some such notion, still surviving, may account for some of the stones which we see placed, to be overgrown, in the forks of trees. they have a saying in suf folk, england, &quot;at michaelmas time, or a little before, half an apple goes to the core.&quot; early apples begin to be ripe about the first of august; but i think that none of them are so good to eat as some to smell. one is worth more to scent your handkerchief with than any perfume which they sell in the shops. the fra grance of some fruits is not to be forgotten, along with that of flowers. some gnarly apple which i pick up in the road reminds me by its fragrance of all the wealth of pomona, carry ing me forward to those days when they will be collected in golden and ruddy heaps in the or chards and about the cider-mills. a week or two later, as you are going by or chards or gardens, especially in the evenings, you pass through a little region possessed by the fragrance of ripe apples, and thus enjoy them without price, and without robbing any body. there is thus about all natural products a certain volatile and ethereal quality which rep resents their highest value, and which cannot be vulgarized, or bought and sold. no mortal has wild apples 363 ever enjoyed the perfect flavor of any fruit, and only the godlike among men begin to taste its ambrosial qualities. for net-tar and ambrosia are only those fine flavors of every eartlily fruit which our coarse palates fail to perceive, -just as we occupy the heaven of the gods without knowing it. when i see a particularly mean man carrying a load of fair and fragrant early apples to market, i seem to see a contest going on between him and his horse, on the one side, and the apples on the other, and, to my mind, the apples always gain it. pliny says that apples are the heaviest of all things, and that the oxen begin to sweat at the mere sight of a load of them. our driver begins to lose his load the moment he tries to transport them to where they do not belong, that is, to any but the most beautiful. though he gets out from time to time, and feels of them, and thinks they are all there, i see the stream of their evanes cent and celestial qualities going to heaven from his cart, while the pulp and skin and core only are going to market. they are not apples, but pomace. are not these still iduna s apples, the taste of which keeps the gods forever young? and think you that they will let loki or thjassi carry them off to jbtunlieim, while they grow wrinkled and gray? no, for rag narbk, or the destruction of the gods, is not yet. 3g4 wild apples there is another thinning of the fruit, com monly near the end of august or in september, when the ground is strewn with windfalls ; and this happens especially when high winds occur after rain. in some orchards you may see fully three quarters of the whole crop on the ground, lying in a circular form beneath the trees, yet hard and green, or, if it is a hillside, rolled far down the hill. however, it is an ill wind that blows nobody any good. all the country over, people are busy pic-king up the windfalls, and this w ill make them cheap for early apple pics. in october, the leaves falling, the apples are more distinct on the trees. i saw one year in a neighboring town some trees fuller of fruit than i remember to have ever seen before, small yellow apples hanging over the road. the branches were gracefully drooping with their weight, like a barberry-bush, so that the whole tree acquired a new character. even the top most branches, instead of standing erect, spread and drooj&amp;gt;ed in all directions ; and there were so many poles supporting the lower ones that they looked like pictures of banian-trees. as an old english manuscript says, &quot;the mo ap pelen the tree bereth the more sche boweth to the folk.&quot; surely the apple is the noblest of fruits. l/ / les 305 let the most beautiful or the swiftest have it. that should l&amp;gt;e the &quot;going&quot; price of apples. between the 5th and 20th of october i see the barrels lie under the trees. and perhaps i talk with one who is selecting some choice barrels to fultill an order. he turns a specked one over many times before he leaves it out. if i were to tell what is passing in my mind, i should say that every one was specked which he had handled ; for he rubs off all the bloom, and those fugacious ethereal qualities leave it. cool evenings prompt the farmers to make haste, and at length i see only the ladders here and there left leaning against the trees. it would be well, if we accepted these gifts with more joy and gratitude, and did not think it enough simply to put a fresh load of compost about the tree. some old english customs are suggestive at least. i find them described chirtiy in brand s &quot;popular antiquities.&quot; it appears that &quot;on christmas eve the farmers and their men in devonshire take a large lx&amp;gt;wl of cider, with a toast in it, and carrying it in state to the orchard, they salute the apple-trees with much ceremony, in order to make them bear well the next season.&quot; this salutation consists in &quot; throwing some of the cider alxmt the roots of the tree, placing bits of the toast on the branches,&quot; and then, &quot;encircling one of the 3gg wild apples best bearing trees in the orchard, they drink the following toast three several times: 4 here s to thee, old apple-tree, whence thou raayst bud, and whence thon raayst blow, and whence thou niayst bear apples enow ! hats-full! caps-full! bushel, bushel, sacks-full ! and my pockets full, too ! hurra ! &quot; also what was called &quot;apple-howling&quot; used to be practiced in various counties of england on new year s eve. a troop of boys visited the different orchards, and, encircling the ap ple-trees, repeated the following words: &quot;stand fast, root ! bear well, top ! pray god send us a good howling 1 crop : every twig, apples big ; every bow. apples enow ! &quot; &quot;they then shout in chorus, one of the boys accompanying them on a cow s horn. during this ceremony they rap the trees with their sticks.&quot; this is called &quot;wassailing&quot; the trees, and is thought by some to be &quot;a relic of the heathen sacrifice to pomona.&quot; llerrick sings, &quot; wassail e the trees that they may beare you many a plum and many a peare ; for more or less fruits they will in inj, r as you so give them wassailing.&quot; our poets have as yet a better right to sing of cider than of wine ; but it behooves them to wild apples 367 sing better than english phillips did, else they will do no credit to their muse. the wild apple. so much for the more civilized apple-trees (urbaniores, as pliny calls them). i love better to go through the old orchards of ungraftcd ap ple-trees, at whatever season of the year, so irregularly planted: sometimes two trees stand ing close together; and the rows so devious that you would think that they not only had grown \vhile the owner wa^ sir. -ping, but had been set out by him in a somuambulic state. the rows of grafted fruit will never tempt me to wander amid them like these. but i now, alas, speak rather from memory than from any recent ex perience, such ravages have been made! some soils, like a rocky tract called the eas terbrooks country in my neighborhood, are so suited to the apple, that it will grow faster in tin-in without any care, or if only the ground is broken up once a year, than it will in many plan s \vitli any amount of care. the owners of this tract allow that the soil is excellent for fruit, but they say that it is so rocky that they have not patience to plough it, and that, to ^vther with the distance, is the reason why it is not cultivated. tln-r.aiv. m* \\vniv-nth, extensive orchards there standing without or 3g8 wild apples der. nay, they spring up wild and bear well there in the midst of pines, birches, maples, and oaks. i am often surprised to see rising amid these trees the rounded tops of apple-trees glowing with red or yellow fruit, in harmony with the autumnal tints of the forest. going up the side of a cliff about the first of november, i saw a vigorous young apple-tree, which, planted by birds or cows, had shot up amid the rocks and open woods there, and had now much fruit on it, uninjured by the frosts, when all cultivated apples were gathered. it was a rank wild growth, with many green leaves on it still, and made an impression of thorni ness. the fruit was hard and green, but looked as if it would be palatable in the winter. some was dangling on the twigs, but more half bur ied in the wet leaves under the tree, or rolled far down the hill amid the rocks. the owner knows nothing of it. the day was not observed when it first blossomed, nor when it first bore fruit, unless by the chickadee. there was no dancing on the green beneath it in its honor, and now there is no hand to pluck its fruit, which is only gnawed by squirrels, as i per ceive. it has done double duty, not only borne this crop, but each twig has grown a foot into the air. and this is swc/i fruit! bigger than many berries, we must admit, and carried wild apples 369 home will be sound and palatable next spring. what care i for iduna s apples so long as i can get these? when i go by this shrub thus late and hardy, and see its dangling fruit, i respect the tree, and i am grateful for nature s bounty, even though i cannot eat it. here on this rugged and wooily hillside has grown an apple tree, not planted by man, no relic of a former or chard, but a natural growth, like the pines and oaks. most fruits which we prize and use de pend entirely on our care. corn and grain, ;&amp;gt; &amp;gt;tatu s, peaches, melons, &amp;lt;! .. &amp;lt;1&amp;gt; ]&quot;-n&amp;lt;l alto gether on our planting; but the apple emulates man s independence and enterprise. it is not simply carried, as i have said, but, like him, to some extent, it has migrated to this new world, and is even, here and there, making its way amid tinaboriginal trees; just as the ox and dog and horse sometimes run wild and main tain themselves. even the sourest and crabbedest apple, grow ing in the most unfavorable position, suggests such thoughts as these, it is so noble a fruit. the crab. nevertheless, ot/r wild apple is wild only like myself, perchance, who belong not to the al&amp;gt;original race here, but have strayed into the 370 wild apples woods from the cultivated stock. wilder still, as i have said, there grows elsewhere in this country a native and aboriginal crab-apple, m&amp;lt;i1u& coronaria, &quot;whose nature has not yet been modified by cultivation.&quot; it is found from western new york to minnesota, and southward. michuux says that its ordinary height &quot;is fifteen or eighteen feet, but it is sometimes found twenty-five or thirty feet high,&quot; and that the large ones &quot;exactly resem ble the common apple-tree.&quot; &quot;the flowers are white mingled with rose color, and are collected in corymbs.&quot; they are remarkable for their delicious odor. the fruit, according to him, is about an inch and a half in diameter, and is in tensely acid. yet they make fine sweetmeats and also cider of them. he concludes that &quot;if, on being cultivated, it does not yield new and palatable varieties, it will at least be celebrated for the beauty of its flowers, and for the sweet ness of its perfume.&quot; i never saw the crabapple till may, 1861. i had heard of it through michaux, but more modern botanists, so far as i know, have not treated it as of any peculiar ini])nrtance. thus it was a half -fabulous tree to me. i contem plated a pilgrimage to the &quot;glades,&quot; a portion of pennsylvania where it was said to grow to perfection. i thought of sending to a nursery wild apples 371 for it, but doubted if they h;ul it, or would dis tinguish it from european varieties. at last i had occasion to go to minnesota, and on enter ing michigan i began to notice from the cars a tree with handsome rose-colored flowers. at first i thought it some variety of thorn; but it was not long before the truth flashed on me, that this was my long-sought crabapple. it was the prevailing flowering shrub or tree to be seen from the cars at that season of the year, about the middle of may. but the cars never stopjxjd before one, and so i was launched on the bosom of the mississippi without having touched one, experiencing the fate of tantalus. i, on arriving at st. anthony s falls, i was sorry to be told that i was too far north for the crab apple. nevertheless i succeeded in finding it about eight miles west of the falls ; touched it and smelled it, and secured a lingering corymb of flowers for my herbarium. this must have been near its northern limit. how the wild apple grows. but though these are indigenous, like the indians, i doubt whether they are any hardier than those backwoodsmen among the apple trees, which, though descended from cultivated stocks, plant themselves in distant fields and forests, where the soil is favorable to tlinn. 1 372 wild apples know of no trees which have more difficulties to contend with, and which more sturdily resist their foes. these are the ones whose story we have to tell. it oftentimes reads thus: near the beginning of may, we notice little thickets of apple-trees just springing up in the pastures where cattle have been, as the rocky ones of our easterbrooks country, or the top of nobscot hill, in sudbury; one or two of. these perhaps survive the drought and other ac cidents, their very birthplace defending them against the encroaching grass and some other dangers, at first. in two years time t had thus beached the level of the rocks, admired the stretching world, nor feared the wandering flocks. but at this tender age its sufferings began : there came a browsing ox and cut it down a span. this time, perhaps, the ox does not notice it amid the grass; but the next year, when it has grown more stout, he recognizes it for a fellow emigrant from the old country, the flavor of whose leaves and twigs he well knows; and though at first he pauses to welcome it, and ex press his surprise, and gets for answer, &quot;the same cause that brought you here brought me,&quot; wild apples 373 he ncvertli -l.^n limwscs it :i^:iin, reflecting, it may be, that he has some title to it. thus cut down annually, it does not despair; but, patting forth two short twigs for every one* cut off, it spreads out low along the ground in the hollows or between the rocks, growing more stout and scrubby, until it forms, not a tree as yet, but a little pyramidal, stiff, twiggy mass, almost as solid and impenetrable as a rock. some of the densest and most impenetrable clumps of bushes that i have ever seen, as well on account of the closeness and stubbornness of their branches as of their thorns, have been these wild-apple scrubs. they are more like the scrubby fir and black spruce on which you stand, and sometimes walk, on the tops of mountains, where cold is the demon they con tend with, than anything else. no wonder they are prompted to grow thorns at last, to defend themselves against such foes. in their thorni ness, however, there is no malice, only some malic acid. the rocky pastures of the tract i have re ferred to, for they maintain their ground best in a rocky field, are thickly sprinkled with these little tufts, reminding you often of some rigid gray mosses or lichens, and you see thou sands of little trees just springing up between them, with the seed still attached to them. 374 wild apples being regularly clipped all around each year by the cows, as a hedge with shears, they are often of a perfect conical or pyramidal form, from one to four feet high, and more or less sharp, as if trimmed by the gardener s art. in the pastures on nobscot hill and its spurs, they make fine dark shadows when the sun is low. they are also an excellent covert from hawks for many small birds that roost and build in them. whole flocks perch in them at night, and i have seen three robins nests in one which was six feet in diameter. no doubt many of these are already old trees, if you reckon from the day they were planted, but infants still when you consider their de velopment and the long life before them. i counted the annual rings of some which were just one foot high, and as wide as high, and found that they were about twelve years old, but quite sound and thrifty ! they were so low that they were unnoticed by the walker, while many of their contemporaries from the nurseries were already bearing considerable crops. but what you gain in time is perhaps in this case, too, lost in power, that is, in the vigor of the tree. this is their pyramidal state. the cows continue to browse them thus for twenty years or more, keeping them down and compelling them to spread, until at last they wild apples ;t ,v so l.r.ki.l tli;il tlh v become tli.-ir owd fence, when some interior shoot, which their foes can not reach, darts upward with joy: for it has not forgotten its high calling, and bears its owh peculiar fruit in triumph. such are the tactics by which it finally defeats its bovine foes. now, if you have watched the progress of a particular shrub, you will see that it is no longer a simple pyramid or cone, but that out of its aj&amp;gt;ex there rises a sprig or two, growing more lustily perchance than an orchard-tree, since the plant now devotes the whole of its repressed energy to these upright parts. in a short time these become a small tree, an inverted pyramid resting on the apex of the other, so that the whole has now the form of a vast hour-glass. the spreading bottom, having served its purpose, finally disappears, and the generous tree permits the now harmless cows to come in and stand in its shade, and rub against and redden its trunk, which has grown in spite of them, and even to taste a part of its fruit, and so disperse the seed. thus the cows create their own shade and food; and the tree, its hour-glass being in verted, lives a second life, as it were. it is an important question with some nowa days, whether you should trim young apple trees as high as your nose or as high as your wild apples eyes. the ox trims them up as high as he can reach, and that is about the right height, 1 think. in spite of wandering kine, and other adverse circumstances, that despised shrub, valued only by small birds as a covert and shelter from hawks, has its blossom-week at last, and in course of time its harvest, sincere, though small. by the end of some october, when its leaves have fallen, i frequently see such a central sprig, whose progress i have watched, when i thought it had forgotten its destiny, as i had, bearing its first crop of small green or yellow or rosy fruit, which the cows cannot get at over the bushy and thorny hedge which surrounds it, and i make haste to taste the new and unde scribed variety. we have all heard of the numerous varieties of fruit invented by van mous and knight. this is the system of van cow, and she has invented far more and more memorable varieties than both of them. through what hardships it may attain to bear a sweet fruit ! though somewhat small, it may prove equal, if not superior, in flavor to that which has grown in a garden, will perchance be all the sweeter and more palatable for the very difficulties it has had to contend with. who knows but this chance wild fruit, planted by a cow or a bird on some remote and rocky hillside, where it is as yet unobserved by man, wild awles 377 may be the choicest of all its kind, and foreign potentates shall hear of it, and royal s&amp;lt;x*i -ti -&amp;gt; seek to propagate it, though the virtues of the perhaps truly crabbed owner of the soil may never be heard of, at least, beyond the limits of his village? it was thus the porter and the lilt id win grew. every wild-apple shrub excites our expecta tion thus, somewhat as every wild child. it is, perhaps, a prince in disguise. what a lesson to man ! so are human beings, referred to the highest standard, the celestial fruit which they suggest and aspire to bear, browsed on by fate ; and only the most persistent and strongest gen ius defends itself and prevails, sends a tender scion upward at last, and drops its perfect fruit on the ungrateful earth. poets and philoso phers and statesmen thus spring up in the country pastures, and outlast the hosts of un original men. such is always the pursuit of knowledge. the celestial fruits, the golden apples of the i lesperides, are ever guarded by a hundred headed dragon which never sleeps, so that it is an herculean labor to pluck them. this is one, and the most remarkable way in which the wild apple is propagated; but com monly it springs up at wide intervals in woods and swamps, and by the sides of roads, as the 378 wild apples soil may suit it, and grows with comparative rapidity. those which grow in dense woods are very tall and slender. i frequently pluck from these trees a perfectly mild and tamed fruit. as palladius says, &quot; et injussu conster nltur itbere mall: &quot; and the ground is strewn with the fruit of an unbidden apple-tree. it is an old notion that, if these wild trees do not bear a valuable fruit of their own, they are the best stocks by which to transmit to pos terity the most highly prized qualities of others. however, i am not in search of stocks, but the wild fruit itself, whose fierce gust has suffered no &quot; integration.&quot; it is not my &quot; highest plot to plant the bergaraot the fruit, and its flavor. the time for wild apples is the last of octo ber and the first of november. they then get to be palatable, for they ripen late, and they are still perhaps as beautiful as ever. i make a great account of these fruits, which the farm ers do not think it worth the while to gather, wild flavors of the muse, vivacious and inspirit ing. the farmer thinks that he has better in his barrels, but he is mistaken, unless he has a walker s appetite and imagination, neither of which can he have. wild apples 379 such as grow quite wild, and an* left out till the first of november, i presume tliat the owner does not mean to gather. they belong to chil dren as wild as themselves, to certain active boys that i know, to the wild -eyed woman of the fields, to whom nothing comes amiss, who gleans after all the world, and, moreover, to us walkers. we have met with them, and they are ours. these rights, long enough insisted upon, have come to be an institution in some old countries, where they have learned how to live. i hear that &quot;the custom of grippling, which may he called apple-gleaning, is, or was formerly, practiced in herefordshire. it con sists in leaving a few apples, which are called the gripples, on every tree, after the general gathering, for the boys, who go with climbing poles and bags to collect them.&quot; as for those i speak of, i pluck them as a wild fruit, native to this quarter of the earth, fruit of old trees that have been dying ever since i was a l&amp;gt;oy and are not yet dead, fre quented only by the woodi&amp;gt;ecker and the squir rel, deserted now by the owner, who has not faith enough to look under their boughs. from the appearance of the tree-top, at a little dis tance, you would expect nothing but lichens to drop from it, but your faith is rewarded by finding the ground strewn with spirited fruit, 380 wild apples some of it, perhaps, collected at squirrel holes, with the marks of their teeth by which they carried them, some containing a cricket or two silently feeding within, and some, espe cially in damp days, a shell-less snail. the very sticks and stones lodged in the tree-top might have convinced you of the savoriness of the fruit which has been so eagerly sought after in past years. i have seen no account of these among the u fruits and fruit-trees of america,&quot; though they are more memorable to my taste than the grafted kinds; more racy and wild american flavors do they possess when october and no vember, when december and january, and per haps february and march even, have assuaged them somewhat. an old farmer in my neigh borhood, who always selects the right word, says that &quot;they have a kind of bow-arrow tang.&quot; apples for grafting appear to have been se lected commonly, not so much for their spirited flavor, as for their mildness, their size, and bearing qualities, not so much for their beauty, as for their fairness and soundness. indeed, i have no faith in the selected lists of pomological gentlemen. their &quot; favorites&quot; and &quot;none-suches&quot; and u seek-no-farthers,&quot; when i have fruited them, commonly turn out very tame and forgettable. they are eaten with wild apples &amp;gt;1 comparatively little zest, and have no real tang nor smnck to them. what if some of these wildings are acrid and puckery, genuine verjuice, do they not still he long to the pomacece, which are uniformly in nocent and kind to our race? i still begrudge them to the cider-mill. perhaps they are not fairly ripe yet. no wonder that these small and high-colored apples are thought to make the best cider. london quotes from the &quot; herefordshire re port,&quot; that &quot;apples of a small size are always, if equal in quality, to be preferred to those of a larger size, in order that the rind and kernel may bear the greatest proportion to the pulp, which affords the weakest and most watery juice.&quot; and he says that, &quot;to prove this, dr. symonds, of hereford, about the year 1800, made one hogshead of cider entirely from the rinds and cores of apples, and another from the pulp only, when the first was found of extraor dinary strength and flavor, while the latter was sweet and insipid.&quot; evelyn says that the &quot;red-strake&quot; was the favorite eider-apple in his day; and he quotes one dr. newburg as saying, &quot;in jersey t is a general observation, as i hear, that the more of red any apple has in its rind, the more proper it is for this use. pale-faced apples they ex 382 wild apples elude as much as may be from their cidervat.&quot; this opinion still prevails. all apples are good in november. those which the farmer leaves out as unsalable and unpalatable to those who frequent the markets are choicest fruit to the walker. but it is re markable that the wild apple, which i praise as so spirited and racy when eaten in the fields or woods, being brought into the house, has fre quently a harsh and crabbed taste. the saun terer s apple not even the saunterer can eat in the house. the palate rejects it there, as it does haw3 and acorns, and demands a tamed one; for there you miss the november air, which is the sauce it is to be eaten with. ac cordingly, when tityrus, seeing the lengthening shadows, invites melibceus to go home and pass the night with him, he promises him mild ap ples and soft chestnuts, mitia poma, cantanea* molles. i frequently pluck wild apples of so rich and spicy a flavor that i wonder all or chardists do not get a scion from that tree, and i fail not to bring home my pockets full. but ]&amp;gt;erchance, when i take one out of my desk and taste it in my chamber, i find it unexpectedly crude, sour enough to set a squirrel s teeth on edge and make a jay scream. these apples have hung in the wind and frost and rain till they have absorbed the qualities of wild apples 888 the weather or season, and thus are highly sea soned, and they pierce and stiny and permeate us with their .spirit. they must l&amp;gt;e eaten in .xt/mo//, accordingly, that is, out-of-doors. to appreciate the wild and sharp flavors of these october fruits, it is necessary that you be breathing the sharp october or november air. the out-door air and exercise which the walker gets give a different tone to his palate, and he craves a fruit which the sedentary would call harsh and crabbed. they must be eaten in the fields, when your system is all aglow with ex ercise, when the frosty weather nips your fin gers, the wind rattles the bare boughs or rustles the few remaining leaves, and the jay is heard screaming around. what is sour in the house a bracing walk makes sweet. some of these apples might be labeled, u to be eaten in the wind. 1 of course no flavors are thrown away ; they are intended for the taste that is up to them. some apples have two distinct flavors, and per haps one half of them must be eaten in the house, the ntlier out-doors. one peter whit ney wrote from northborongh in 1782, for the proceedings of the lioston academy, describing an apple-tree in that town &quot;producing fruit of opposite qualities, part of the same apple wing frequently sour and the other sweet; &quot; also some 384 wild apples all sour, and others all sweet, and this diversity on all parts of the tree. there is a wild apple on nawshawtuck hill in my town which has to me a peculiarly pleas ant bitter tang, not perceived till it is three quarters tasted. it remains on the tongue. as you eat it, it smells exactly like a squash bug. it is a sort of triumph to eat and relish it. 1 hear that the fruit of a kind of plum-tree in provence is &quot; called prunes siba relies, because it is impossible to whistle after having eaten them, from their sourness.&quot; but perhaps they were only eaten in the house and in summer, and if tried out-of-doors in a stinging atmos phere, who knows but you could whistle an oc tave higher and clearer? in the fields only are the sours and bitters of nature appreciated; just as the wood-chopper eats his meal in a sunny glade, in the middle of a winter day, with content, basks in a sunny ray there, and dreams of summer in a degree of cold which, experienced in a chamber, would make a student miserable. they who are at work abroad are not cold, but rather it is they who sit shivering in houses. as with tempera tures, so with flavors ; as with cold and heat, so with sour and sweet. this natural raciuess, the sours and bitters which the diseased palate refuses, are the true condiments. wild apples 385 let your eondiim-nts be in the condition of your senses. to appreciate the flavor of these wild apples requires vigorous and healthy senses, papillte firm and erect on the tongue and palate, not easily flattened and tamed. from my experience with wild apples, i can understand that there may be reason for a sav age s preferring many kinds of food which the civilized man rejects. the former has the pal ate of an out-door man. it takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild fruit. what a healthy out-of-door appetite it takes to relish the apple of life, the apple of the world, then! &quot; nor is it every apple i desire, nor that which pleases every palate belt; t is not the lasting deuxan i require, nor yet the red-cheeked greening i request, nor that which first beshrewed the name of wife, nor that whose beauty caused the golden strife : no. no! }&amp;gt;riiitf mi:tn upplr frmn the tree of life.&quot; so there is one thought for the field, another for the house. i would have my thoughts, like wild apples, to be food for walkers, and will not warrant them to be palatable if tasted in the house. their beauty. almost all wild apples are handsome. they cannot be too gnarly and crabbed and rusty to look at. the gnarliest will have some redeem 386 wild apples ing traits even to the eye. you will discover some evening redness dashed or sprinkled on some protuberance or in some cavity. it is rare that the summer lets an apple go without streaking or spotting it on some part of its sphere. it will have some red stains, com memorating the mornings and evenings it has witnessed; some dark and rusty blotches, in memory of the clouds and foggy, mildewy days that have passed over it; and a spacious field of green reflecting the general face of nature, -green even as the fields; or a yellow ground, which implies a milder flavor, yellow as the harvest, or russet as the hills. apples, these i mean, unspeakably fair, apples not of discord, but of concord! &quot;1 t not so rare but that the homeliest may have a share. painted by the frosts, some a uniform clear bright yellow, or red, or crimson, as if their spheres had regularly revolved, and en joyed the influence of the sun on all sides alike, some with the faintest pink blush imaginable, some brindled with deep red streaks like a cow, or with hundreds of fine blood-red rays running regularly from the stem-dimple to the blossom-end, like meridional lines, on a straw colored ground, some touched with a greenish rust, like a fine lichen, here and there, with crimson blotches or eyes more or less confluent wild awles 387 and fiery when wet, and others gnarly, and freckled or i&amp;gt;eppered all over on the stem side with fine crimson sjwts on a white ground, as if accidentally sprinkled from the brush of him who paints the autumn leaves. others, again, are sometimes red inside, perfused with a beau tiful blush, fairy food, too beautiful to eat, apple of the hesperides, apple of the evening sky! but like shells and pebbles on the sea shore, they must be seen as they sparkle amid the withering leaves in some dell in the woods, in the autumnal air, or as they lie in the wet grass, and not when they have wilted and faded in the house. the naming of them. it would l&amp;gt;e a pleasant pastime to find suita ble names for the hundred varieties which go to a single heap at the cider-mill. would it not tax a man s invention, no one to be named after a man, and all in the linyua vernacula ? who shall stand godfather at the christening of the wild apples? it would -exhaust the latin and greek languages, if they were used, and make the //////*// &amp;gt;/// ///// tia^. we should have to call in the sunrise and the sunset, the rainbow and tinautumn woods and the wild flowers, and the woodpecker and the purple finch and the squirrel and the jay and the but 388 wild apples terfly, the november traveler and the truant boy, to our aid. in 1836 there were in the garden of the lon don horticultural society more than fourteen hundred distinct sorts. but here are species which they have not in their catalogue, not to mention the varieties which our crab might yield to cultivation. let us enumerate a few of these. i find my self compelled, after all, to give the latin names of some for the benefit of those who live where english is not spoken, for they are likely to have a world-wide reputation. there is, first of all, the wood-apple (mahis syhaticd) ; the blue-jay apple ; the apple which grows in dells in the &quot;woods (syhestri vallis), also in hollows in pastures (campcstri vallis) ; the apple that grows in an old cellar hole (mains ccuari*) ; the meadowapple; the partridge apple ; the truant s apple (cessa torifi), which no boy will ever go by without knocking off some, however late it may be ; the sauuterer s apple, you must lose yourself before you can find the way to that; the beauty of the air (decus aeris); december-eating; the frozen-thawed (gelato-soluta\ good only in that state; the concord apple, possibly the same with the mu&ketaquidensis ; the assabet apple; the brindled apple; wine of new wild apples ;&amp;gt; s england; the chickaree apple; the green apple (m&amp;lt;tlu .* r/riw/v), this has many syno nyms: in an imperfect state, it is the cholera morbifent a tit dyscnterlfera^ puerulis dilectis sima ; the apple which atalanta stopped to pick up; the i ledgeapple {mai us sepium); the slug-apple (jimacea) ; the railroad-apple, which perhaps came from a core thrown out of the cars; the apple whose fruit we tasted in our youth; our particular apple, not to be found in any catalogue, pedestriwn sola tium ; also the apple where hangs the forgot ten scythe; iduna s apples, and the apples which loki found in the wood; and a great many more 1 have on my list, too numerous to mention, all of them good. as bodaeus ex claims, referring to the cultivated kinds, and adapting virgil to his case, so i, adapting bo &quot; not if i had a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths, an iron voice, could i describe all the forms and reckon up all the names of these wild apiaet&quot; the last gleaning. by the middle of november the wild apples have lost some of their brilliancy, and have rlii.-tiy fallen. a great part are decayed on the ground, and the sound ours anmniv palatable than u fore. the note of the chickadee s.&amp;gt;un&amp;lt;n 390 wild apples now more distinct, as you wander amid the old trees, and the autumnal dandelion is half closed and tearful. but still, if you are a skillful gleaner, you may get many a pocketful even of grafted fruit, long after apples are supj&amp;gt;osed to be gone out-of-doors. i know a blue-pear inain tree, growing within the edge of a swam]), almost as good as wild. you would not sup ]k&amp;gt;se that there was any fruit left there, on the first survey, but you must look according to sys tem. those which lie exposed -are quite brown and rotten now, or perchance a few still show one blooming cheek here and there amid the wet leaves. nevertheless, with experienced eyes, i explore amid the bare alders and the huckleberry-bushes and the withered sedge, and in the crevices of the rocks, which are full of leaves, and pry under the fallen and decaying ferns, which, with apple and alder leaves, thickly strew the ground. for i know that they lie concealed, fallen into hollows long since and covered up by the leaves of the tree itself, a proper kind of packing. from these lurk ing-places, anywhere within the circumference of the tree, i draw forth the fruit, all wet and glossy, may be nibbled by rabbits and hollowed out by crickets, and perhaps with a leaf or two cemented to it (as curzon an old manuscript from a monastery s mouldy cellar), but still wild apples 391 with a rich bloom on it, and at least as ripe and well kept, if not better than those in barrels, more crisp and lively than they. if these re sources fail to yield anything, i have learned to look between the bases of the suckers which spring thickly from some horizontal limb, for now and then one lodges there, or in the very midst of an alder-clump, where they are covered by leaves, safe from cows which may have smellcd them out. if i am sharp-set, for i do not refuse the blue-pearmain, i fill my pockets on each side ; and as i retrace my steps in the frosty eve, being perhaps four or five miles from home, i eat one first from this side, and then from that, to keep my balance. i learn from topsell s gesner, whose author ity appears to be albertus, that the following is the way in which the hedgehog collects and carries home his apples. he says, &quot;his meat is apples, worms, or grapes: when he find eth apples or grapes on the earth, he rolleth himself upon them, until he have filled all his prickles, and then carrieth them home to his den, never bearing above one in his mouth; and if it fortune that one of them fall off by the way, he likewise shaketh off all the residue, and wallrtweth upon them afresh, until they be all settled upon his back again. so, forth he i;m -tli, making a noise like a cart-wheel ; and if 392 wild apples he have any young ones in his nest, they pull off his load wherewithal he is loaded, eating thereof what they please, and laying up the residue for the time to come.&quot; the &quot;frozen-thawed&quot; apple. toward the end of november, though some of the sound ones are yet more mellow and per haps more edible, they have generally, like the leaves, lost their beauty, and are beginning to freeze. it is finger-cold, and prudent farmers get in their barreled apples, and bring you the apples and cider which they have engaged ; for it is time to put them into the cellar. perhaps a few on the ground show their red cheeks al&amp;gt;ove the early snow, and occasionally some even pre serve their color and soundness under the snow throughout the winter. but generally at the beginning of the winter they freeze hard, and soon, though undecayed, acquire the color of a baked apple. before the end of december, generally, they experience their first thawing. those which a month ago were sour, crabbed, and quite un palatable to the civilized taste, such at least as were frozen while sound, let a warmer sun come to thaw them, for they are extremely sensitive to its rays, are found to be filled with a rich sweet cider, better than any bottled cider that i wild apples 393 know of, ami with which i am tatter acquainted than with wine. all apples are good in this state, and your jaws are the cider-press. oth ers, which have more substance, are a sweet and luscious food, in my opinion of more worth than the pineapples which are imported from the west indies. those which lately even i tasted only to repent of it, for i am semi-civilized, which the farmer willingly left on the tree, i am now glad to find have the prop erty of hanging on like the leaves of the young oaks. it is a way to keep cider sweet without boiling. let the frost come to freeze them first, solid as stones, and then the rain or a warm winter day to thaw them, and they will seem to have borrowed a flavor from heaven through the medium of the air in which they hang. or perchance you find, when you get home, that those which rattled in your pocket have thawed, and the ice is turned to cider. but after the third or fourth freezing and thaw ing they will not be found so good. what are the imported half -ripe fruits of the torrid south, to this fruit matured by the cold of the frigid north? these are those crabbed ~~* apples with which i cheated my companion, and kept a smooth face that 1 might tempt him to eat. now we both greedily fill our pockets with them, bending to drink the cup and save 394 wild apples our lappets from the overflowing juice, and grow more social with their wine. was there one that hung so high and sheltered by the tan gled branches that our sticks could not dislodge it? it is a fruit never carried to market, that i a 111 aware of, quite distinct from the apple of the markets, as from dried apple and cider, and it is not every winter that produces it in perfection. the era of the wild apple will soon be past. it is a fruit which will probably become ex tinct in new england. you may still wander through old orchards of native fruit of great extent, which for the most part went to the cider-mill, now all gone to decay. i have heard of an orchard in a distant town, on the side of a hill, where the apples rolled down and lay four feet deep against a wall on the lower side, and this the owner cut down for fear they should be made into cider. since the temperance re form and the general introduction of grafted fruit, no native apple-trees, such as i see every where in deserted pastures, and where the woods have grown up around them, are set out. 1 fear that he who walks over these fields a cen tury hence will not know the pleasure of knock ing off wild apples. ah, poor man, there are wild awles &quot;&amp;gt; many pleasure* which ho will not know! not withstanding the prevalence of the baldwin and the porter, i doubt if so extensive orchards are set out to-day in my town as there were a century ago, when those vast straggling cil&amp;lt; r orchards were planted, when men l&amp;gt;oth ate and drank apples, when the pomace-heap was the only nursery, and trees cost nothing but the trouble of setting them out. men could afford then to stick a tree by every wall-side and let it take its chance. i see nobody planting trees to-day in such out of the way places, along the lonely roads and lanes, and at the bottom of dells in the wood. now that they have grafted trees, and pay a price for them, they collect them into a plat by their houses, and fence them in, and the end of it all will be that we shall be compelled to look for our apples in a barrel. this is &quot;the word of the lord that came to joel the son of pethuel. &quot;hear this, ye old men, and give ear, jill ye inhabitants of the land! hath this been in your days, or even in the days of your fa thers? . . . &quot;that which the palmerworm hath left hath the locust eaten; and that which the locust hath left hath the cankerworm eaten ; and that which the cankerworm hath left hath the cater pillar eaten. 396 wild apples &quot; awake, ye drunkards, and weep ! and howl, all ye drinkers of wine, because of the new wine ! for it is cut off from your mouth. &quot;for a nation is come up upon my land, strong, and without number, whose teeth are the teeth of a lion, and he hath the cheek teeth of a great lion. &quot; he hath laid my vine waste, and barked my fig-tree; he hath made it clean bare, and cast it away; the branches thereof are made white. . . . &quot;be ye ashamed, o ye husbandmen! howl, o ye vinedressers ! . . . &quot;the vine is dried up, and the fig-tree lan guisheth; the pomegranate -tree, the palm-tree also, and the apple-tree, even all the trees of the field, are withered : because joy is withered away from the sous of men.&quot; night and moonlight chancing to take a memorable walk by moonlight some years ago, i resolved to take more such walks, and make acquaintance with another side of nature : i have done so. according to pliny, there is a stone in ara bia called selenites, &quot;wherein is a white, which increases and decreases with the moon.&quot; my journal for the last year or two has been seleni tic in this sense. is not the midnight like central africa to most of us? are we not tempted to explore it, to penetrate to the shores of its lake tchad, and discover the source of its nile, perchance the mountains of the moon? who knows what fertility and beauty, moral and natural, are there to be found? in the mountains of the moon, in the central africa of the night, there is where all niles -have their hidden heads. the expeditions up the nile as yet extend but to the cataracts, or perchance to the mouth of the white nile; but it is the black nile that concerns ua. i shall be a benefactor if i conquer some 398 night and moonlight realms from the night, if i report to the gazettes anything transpiring about us at that season worthy of their attention, if i can show men that there is some beauty awake while they are asleep, if i add to the domains of poetry. tsight is certainly more novel and less pro fane than day. i soon discovered that i was acquainted only with its complexion, and as for the moon, i had seen her only as it were through a crevice in a shutter, occasionally. why not walk a little way in her light? suppose you attend to the suggestions which the moon makes for one month, commonly in vain, will it not be very different from any thing in literature or religion? but why not study this sanskrit? what if one moon has come and gone with its world of poetry, its weird teachings, its oracular suggestions, so divine a creature freighted with hints for me, and i have not used her? one moon gone by unnoticed ? i think it was dr. chalmers who said, criti cising coleridge, that for his part he wanted ideas which he could see all round, and not such as he must look at away up in the heavens. such a man, one would say, would never look at the moon, because she never turns her other side to us. the light which comes from ideas which have their orbit as distant from the earth, n1uht and moonlight 399 and which is no less cheering and enlightening to the benighted traveler than that of the moon ami stars, is naturally reproached or nicknamed as moonshine by such. they are moonshine, are they? well, then do your night-traveling when there is no moon to light you ; but i will be thankful for the light that reaches me from the star of least magnitude. stars are lesser or greater only as they appear to us so. i will be thankful that i see so much as one side of a celestial idea, one side of the rainbow, and the sunset sky. men talk glibly enough about moonshine, as if they knew its qualities very well, and despised them; as owls might talk of sunshine. none of your sunshine, but this word commonly means merely something which they do not un derstand, which they are abed and asleep to, however much it may be worth their while to be up and awake to it. it must be allowed that the light of the moon, sufficient though it is for the pensive walker, and not disproportionate to the inner light we have, is very inferior in quality and intensity to that of the sun. but the moon is not to be judged alone by the quantity of light she sends to us, but also by her influence on the earth and its inhabitants. &quot;the moon gravitates toward the earth, and the earth reciprocally toward the 400 night and moonlight moon.&quot; the ]x&amp;gt;et who walks by moonlight is conscious of a tide in his thought which is to be referred to lunar influence. 1 will endeavor to separate the tide in my thoughts from the cur rent distractions of the day. i would warn my hearers that they must not try my thoughts bv a daylight standard, but endeavor to realize that i speak out of the night. all depends on your point of view. in drake s &quot; collection of voyages,&quot; wafer says of some albinoes among the indians of darien, &quot;they are quite white, but their whiteness is like that of a horse, quite different from the fair or pale european, as they have not the least tincture of a blush or sanguine complexion. . . . their eyebrows are milk-white, as is likewise the hair of their heads, which is very fine. . . . they seldom go abroad in the daytime, the sun being disagreeable to them, and causing their eyes, which are weak and poring, to water, especially if it shines towards them, yet they see very well by moon light, from which we call them moon-eyed.&quot; neither in our thoughts in these moonlight walks, methinks, is there &quot;the least tincture of a blush or sanguine complexion,&quot; but we are intellectually and morally albinoes, children of endymion, such is the effect of conversing much with the moon. i complain of arctic voyagers that they do night and moonlight 401 not enough remind us of the constant peculiar dreariness of the scenery, and the perpetual twi light of tne arctic night. so he whose theme is moonlight, though he may find it difficult, must, as it were, illustrate it with the light of the moon alone. many men walk by day ; few walk by night. it is a very different season. take a july night, for instance. about ten o clock, when man is asleep, and day fairly forgotten, the beauty of moonlight is seen over lonely pastures when* cattle are silently feeding. on all sides novelties present themselves. instead of the sun there are the moon and stars, instead of the wood-thrush there is the whip-poor-will, instead of butterflies in the meadows, fire flies, winged sparks of fire! who would have believed it? what kind of cool deliberate life dwells in those dewy abodes associated with a spark of fire? so man has fire in his eyes, or blood, or brain. instead of singing birds, the half-throttled note of a cuckoo flying over, the croaking of frogs, and the intcnser dream of crickets. but above all, the wonderful trump of the bullfrog, ringing from maine to geor gia. the potatovines stand upright, the com grows apace, the bushes loom, the grain-fit 1.1s anikmim. 11. &amp;gt;-. ( )n our open river terraces once cultivated by the indian, they appear to occupy 402 night and moonlight the ground like an army, their heads nodding in the breeze. small trees and shrubs are seen in the midst overwhelmed as by an inundation. the shadows of rocks and trees, and shrubs and hills, are more conspicuous than the objects themselves. the slightest irregularities in the ground are revealed by the shadows, and what the feet find comparatively smooth appears rough and diversified in consequence. for the same reason the whole landscape is more varie gated and picturesque than by day. the small est recesses in the rocks are dim and cavernous ; the ferns in the wood appear* of tropical size. the sweet fern and indigo in overgrown wood paths wet you with dew up to your middle. the leaves of the shrub-oak are shining as if a o liquid were flowing over them. the pools seen through the trees are as full of light as the sky. &quot;the light of the day takes refuge in their bos oms,&quot; as the purana says of the ocean. all white objects are more remarkable than by day. a distant cliff looks like a phosphorescent space on a hillside. the woods are heavy and dark. nature slumbers. you see the moonlight re flected from particular stumps in the recesses of the forest, as if she selected what to shine on. these small fractions of her light remind one of the plant called moon-seed, as if the moon were sowing it in such places. night and moonlight 403 in the night the eyes are partly closed or re tire into the head. other senses take the lead. the walker is guided as well by the sense of smell. every plant and field and forest emits its odor now, swamp-pink in the meadow and tansy in the road ; and there is the peculiar dry scent of corn which has begun to show its tas sels. the senses both of hearing and smelling are more alert. we hear the tinkling of rills which we never detected before. from time to time, high up on the sides of hills, you pass through a stratum of warm air. a blast which has come up from the sidtry plains of noon. it tells of the day, of sunny noon-tide hours and banks, of the laborer wiping his brow and the bee humming amid flowers. it is an air in which work has been done, which men have breathed. it circulates about from woodside to hillside like a dog that has lost its master, now that the sun is gone. the rocks retain all night the warmth of the sun which they have absorbed. and so does the sand. if you dig a few inches into it you find a warm bed. you lie on your back on a rock in a pasture on the top of some bare hill at midnight, and sjwculate on the height of the starry canopy. the stars are the jewels of the night, and perchance sur pass anything which day has to show. a com panion with whom i was sailing one very windy 404 night and moonlight but bright moonlight night, when the stars were few and faint, thought that a man could get along with them, though he was considerably reduced in his circumstances, that they were a kind of bread and cheese that never failed. no wonder that there have been astrologers, that some have conceived that they were per sonally related to particular stars. dubartas, as translated by sylvester, says he 11 &quot; not believe that the great architect with all these fires the heavenly arches decked only for show, and with these glistering shields, t* awake poor shepherds, watching in the fields.&quot; he 11 &quot; not believe that the least flower which pranks our garden borders, or our common banks, and the least stone, that in her warming lap onr mother earth doth covetously wrap, hath some peculiar virtue of its own, and that the glorious stars of heav n have none.&quot; and sir walter raleigh well says, &quot;the stars are instruments of far greater use than to give an obscure light, and for men to gaze on after sunset;&quot; and he quotes plotinus as affirming that they &quot;are significant, but not efficient; &quot; and also augustine as saying, &quot; deus reyit inferior a corpora per superiora:&quot; god rules the indies below by those above. but best of all is this which another writer has ex pressed: &quot;sapiens adjuvabil opus astrorum quemadmodum agricola terrce naturam : &quot; a night and moonlight 405 wist* man assist* th the work of the stars as the husbandman hclprth the nature of the soil. it does not concern men who are asleep in their beds, but it is very important to the trav eler, whether the moon shines brightly or is obscured. it is not easy to realize the serene joy of all the earth, when she commences to shine unobstructedly, unless you have often been abroad alone in moonlight nights. she seems to be waging continual war with the clouds in your behalf. yet we fancy the clouds to l&amp;gt;e her foes also. she comes on magnifying her dangers by her light, revealing, displaying them in all their hugeness and blackness, then suddenly casts them behind into the light con cealed, and goes her way triumphant through a small space of clear sky. in short, the moon traversing, or appearing to traverse, the small clouds which lie in her way, now obscured by them, now easily dissi pating and shining through them, makes the drama of the moonlight night to all watchers and night-travelers. sailors sjwak of it as the moon eating up the clouds. the traveler all alone, the moon all alone, except for his sympa thy, overcoming with incessant victory whole squadrons of elouds al&amp;gt;ove the forests and lakes and hills. \vhen she is obscured he so sympa thizes with her that he could whip a dog for 40g night and moonlight her relief, as indians do. when she enters on a clear field of great extent in the heavens, and shines iinobstructedly, he is glad. and when she has fought her way through all the squad ron of her foes, and rides majestic in a clear sky unscathed, and there are no more any ob structions in her path, he cheerfully and con fidently pursues his way, and rejoices in his heart, and the cricket also seems to express joy in its song. how insupportable would be the days, if the night with its dews and darkness did not come to restore the drooping world. as the shades begin to gather around us, our primeval in stincts are aroused, and we steal forth from our lairs, like the inhabitants of the jungle, in search of those silent and brooding thoughts which are the natural prey of the intellect. riehter says that &quot;the earth is every day overspread with the veil of night for the same reason as the cages of birds are darkened, viz. : that we may the more readily apprehend the higher harmonies of thought in the hush and (juiet of darkness. thoughts which day turns into smoke and mist stand about us in the night as light and flames; even as the column which fluctuates above the crater of vesuvius, in the daytime appears a pillar of cloud, but by night a pillar of fire.&quot; night and moonlight l&quot;7 tliere are nights in this climate of such serene mild majrstir hrauty, &amp;gt;&amp;gt; iiu-dirinal and frrtili/ ing to the spirit, that methinks a sensitive na ture would not devote them to oblivion, and ]&amp;gt;erhaps there is no man hut would l&amp;gt;e better and wiser for spending them out of doors, though he should sleep all the next day to pay for it; should sleep an endymion sleep, as the ancients expressed it, nights which warrant the grecian epithet ambrosial, when, as in the land of beulah, the atmosphere is charged with dewy fragrance, and with music, and we take our repose and have our dreams awake, when the moon, not secondary to the sun, &quot; gives us his blaze again, void of its flame, and .sheds a softer day. now through the passing duud she tw*t to stoop, now up the pure cerulean rides sublime.&quot; diana still limits in the new england sky. &quot; in heaven queen she is among the spheres. she, mistress-like, makes all thing* to be pure. eternity in her oft change she bean ; she beauty is ; by her the fair endure. &quot; time wean her not ; she doth his chariot guide ; mortality below her orb is placed ; by her the virtues of the stars down nli&amp;lt;! ; by her is virtue s perfect image cast&quot; the hindoos compare the moon to a saintly being who has reached the last stage of bodily existence. 408 night and moonlight great restorer of antiquity, great enchanter. in a mild night when the harvest or hunter s moon shines unobstructedly, the houses in our village, whatever architect they may have had by day, acknowledge only a master. the vil lage street is then as wild as the forest. new and old things are confounded. i know not whether i am sitting on the ruins of a wall, or on the material which is to compose a new one. nature is an instructed and impartial teacher, spreading no crude opinions, and flattering none ; she will be neither radical nor conserva tive. consider the moonlight, so civil, yet so savage ! the light is more proportionate to our know ledge than that of day. it is no more dusky in ordinary nights than our mind s habitual at mosphere, and the moonlight is as bright as our most illuminated moments are. iu such a night let me abroad remain till morning breaks, and all s confused again.&quot; of what significance the light of day, if it is not the reflection of an inward dawn? to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if the morning reveals nothing to the soul? it is merely garish and glaring. when ossian in his address to the sun ex claims, night and moonlight 409 &quot; where hat darkness it* dwelling ? whenin the cavornouh home of the stars, when thou quickly followest their st-jw, pursuing them lik hunter in the tky, thou climbing the lofty hills, they descending on barren mountains ? &quot; who does not in his thought accompany the stars to their &quot;cavernous home,&quot; &quot;descending&quot; with them &quot;on barren mountains&quot;? nevertheless, even by night the sky is blue and not black, for we see through the shadow of the earth into the distant atmosphere of day, where the sunbeams are reveling. may days may 1, 1841. life in gardens and parlors is unpalatable to ine. it wants rudeness and necessity to give it relish. i would at least strike ray spade into the earth with as good-will as the woodpecker his bill into a tree. may 1, 1851. k haled would have his weary soldiers vigilant still. apprehending a mid night sally from the enemy, u let no man sleep,&quot; said he; &quot;we shall have rest enough after death.&quot; may 1, 1852. five a. m. to cliffs. a smart frost in the night. the ploughed ground and platforms white with it. i hear the little forked-tailed chipping-sparrow (fringitta so ciaux) shaking out his rapid &quot;tchi-tchi-tchi-tchi tchi-tchi,&quot; a little jingle from the oak behind the depot. i hear the note of that plump bird with a dark streaked breast, that runs and hides in the grass, whose note sounds so like a crick et s in the grass. i used to hear it when i walked by moonlight last summer. i hear it now from deep in the sod, for there is hardly grass yet. the bird keeps so low you do not see it. you do not suspect how many there are may days 411 till their heads appear. the word nerinyo re minds me of its note, as if it were produced by some kind of tine metallie spring. it is an earth sound. it is a moist, lowering morning for the may ers. the sun now shines under a cloud in the horizon, and his still yellow light falls on the western fields as sometimes on the eastern after a shower in a summer afternoon. nuttall says the note of the chipping-sparrow is &quot;given from time to time in the night, like the reverie of a dream.&quot; have i not heard it when spearing? found the first violet which would open to-day, v. saylttata var. ovatu, or cucullata? for the leaves are not toothed at base nor arrow shaj)ed as in the first, yet they are hairy, and, i should say, petiole-margined; still, like the lat ter, they are rolled in at base, and the scape is four-angled. . . . the woods have a damp smell this morning. i hear a robin amid them. yet there are fewer singers to be heard than on a very pleasant morning some weeks ago. the low early blueberry (june wry) is well budded. the grass ground low ground, at least wears a good green tinge ; there are no leaves on the woods; the river is high over the meadows. there is a thin, gauze-like veil over the village (i am on fairhaven hill), probably formed of the smokes. as yet we have had no 412 may days morning fogs, to my knowledge. i hear the first towee finch; he says, &quot; towee-to-wee ; &quot; and another, much farther off than i supposed when i went in search of him, says, &quot;whip your ohr-r-r-r-r-r,&quot; with a metallic ring. i hear the first cat-bird, also, mewing, and the wood thrush, which still thrills me, a sound to be heard in a new country from one side of a clear ing. i heard a black and white creeper just now, &quot;wicher-wicher-wicher-wich.&quot; i am on the cliff. it is about six. the flicker cackles. i hear a woodpecker tapping. the tinkle of the huckleberry bird comes up from the shrub oak plain. he commonly lives away from the habitations of men, in retired bushy fields and sprout lands. we have thus flowers and the song of birds before the woods leave out, like ]&amp;gt;oetry. when leaving the woods i heard the hooting of an owl, which sounded very much like a clown calling to his team. saw two large woodpeckers on an oak. i am tempted to say that they were other and larger than the flicker; but i have been deceived in him before. . . . the little peeping frogs which i got last night resemble the description of the ilylodcs picker inyiii and in some respects the j^eping hyla; but they are probably the former, though every way considerably smaller. mine are about three fourths of&quot; an inch long as they sit, seven may days 413 eighths if stretched; four-fingered and five-toed, with small tubercles on the ends of them. si -me difference in their color. one is like a pale oak leaf at this season, streaked with l&amp;gt;ro\vn. two others more ashy. two have crosses on back, of dark brown, with transverse bands on the legs. i keep them in a tumbler. they peep at twilight and evening; occasionally at other times. one that got out in the evening on to the carpet was found soon after, by his j&amp;gt;eeping, on the piano. they easily ascend the glass of the window. jump eighteen inches or more. when they peep, the loose, wrinkled skin of the throat is swelled up into a globular bubble, very large and transparent, and quite round, except on the throat side, behind which their little heads are lost, mere protuberances on the side of this sphere. the peeping wholly absorbs them, their mouths being shut, or ap parently so. will sit half a day on the side of a smooth tumbler. made that trilling note in the house. remain many hours at the bottom of the water in the tumbler, or sit as long on the leaves al&amp;gt;ove. a pulse in the throat always, except in one for an hour or two, apparently asleep. they change their color to a darker or lighter shade, chameleon -like. may 1, 1863. to cliffs. the oak leaves on thplain arc fallen. the colors are now 414 may days light l&amp;gt;lue above (where is my cyanometer? saussure invented one, and humboldt used it in his travels); the landscape russet and green ish, spotted with fawn-colored ploughed knds, with green pine and gray or reddish oak woods intermixed, and dark blue or slate-colored water here and there. it is greenest in the meadows and where water has lately stood, and a strong, invigorating scent comes up from the fresh meadows. it is like the greenness of an apple faintly or dimly appearing through the russet. may 1, 1854. early starlight by river-side. the water smooth and broad. i hear the loud and incessant cackling of probably the pigeon woodpecker, what some time since i thought to be a different kind. thousands of robins are filling the air with their trills, mingling with the peeping of hylodes and ringing of frogs; and now the snipes have just begun their win nowing sounds and squeaks. may 1, 1855. p. m. by boat with s to conantum a-maying. the myrtle bird is one of the commonest and tamest birds now. it catches insects like a ]&amp;gt;ewee, darting off from its perch and returning to it, and sings something like &quot;a-chill chill, chill chill, chill chill, a-twear, twill twill twee/* or it may be all tw (not loud, a little like the frincjula hiemalis, or more like the pine war .v.-ir days ii.&quot;. bier), rapid, and more and more intense a* it advances. there is an unaccountable sweetness as of flowers in the air. a true may day, raw and drizzling in the morning. the grackle still. what various brilliant and evanescent colors on the surface of this agitated water, now, as we are crossing willow bay, looking toward the half-concealed sun over the foam spotted flood ! it reminds me of the sea. . . . went to g s for the hawk of yesterday. it was nailed to the barn in terrorem, and as a trophy. he gave it to me, with an egg. he called it the female, and probably was right, it waa bo ];(!_;.. ii,. tried in rain to shool tli. male, which i saw circling about just out of gunshot, and screaming, while he robbed the nest. he climbed the tree when i was there yesterday p. m., and found two young, which he thought not more than a fortnight old, with only down, at least no feathers, and one addled e gg a lso three or four white-bellied or deer mice (juus /et/ro//t/*), a perch and a sucker, and a gray rabbit s skin. i think they must have found the fish dead. they were now stale. i found the remains of a partridge under the tree. g had seen squirrels, etc., in other nests. may 1, 1857. two p. m. first notice the ring of tin* toad as i am crossing tincommon in front of the m. -ting-house. there is a cool 416 may days and breezy south wind, and the ring of the first toad leaks into the general stream of sound un noticed by most, as the mill brook empties into the river, and the voyager cannot tell if he is above or below its mouth. the bell was ring ing for town meeting, and every one heard it, but none heard this older and more universal bell, rung by more native americans all the land over. it is a sound from amid the waves of the aerial sea, that breaks on our ears with the surf of the air, a sound that is almost breathed with the wind, taken into the lungs instead of being heard by the ears. it comes from far over and through the troughs of the aerial sea, like a petrel ; and who can guess by what pool the singer sits ? whether behind the meeting-house sheds, or over the burying ground hill, or by the river-side. a new reign has commenced. bufo the first has ascended his throne, the surface of the earth, marshaled into office by the south wind. bufo, the double chinned, inflates his throat. attend to his mes sage. take off your great coats, swains, and prepare for the summer campaign. hop a few paces farther toward your goals. the measures which i shall advocate are warmth, moisture, and low-flying insects. . . . it is foolish for a man to accumulate material wealth chiefly, houses and lands. our stock in may days 417 life, our real estate, is that amount of thought which we have hacl, which we have thought out. the ground we have thus created is forever pas turage for our thoughts. i fall back on to vis ions which i have had. what else adds to my possessions, and makes me rich in all lands? if you have ever done any work with those finest tools, the imagination and fancy and reason, it is a new creation, independent of the world, and a possession forever. you have laid up something against a rainy day. you have, to that extent, cleared the wilderness. may 1, 1859. we accuse savages of wor shiping only the bad spirit or devil. though they may distinguish both a good and a bad, they regard only that one which they fear, wor ship the devil only. we too are savages in this, doing precisely the same thing. this oc curred to me yesterday, as i sat in the woods admiring the lxauty of the blue butterfly. we are not chiefly interested in birds and insects, for example, as they are ornamental to the r:utli and cheering to man, but we spare the lives of the former only on condition that they eat more grubs than they do cherries, and the only ac count of the insects which the state encourages is of the insects injurious to vegetation. we too admit both a good and bad spirit, but we worship chiefly the bad spirit whom we fear. 418 may days we do not think first of the good, but of the harm things will do us. the catechism says that the chief end of man is to glorify god and enjoy him forever, which of course is applicable mainly to god as seen in his works. yet the only account of the beautiful insects, butterflies, etc., which god has made and set before us, which the state ever thinks of spending any money on is the account of those which are in jurious to vegetation ! this is the way we glorify god and enjoy him forever. . . . we have attended to the evil, and said no thing about the good. this is looking a gift horse in the mouth, with a vengeance. chil dren are attracted by the beauty of butterflies, but their parents and legislators deem it an idle pursuit. the parents remind one of the devil, but the children of god. though god may have pronounced his work good, we ask, is it not poisonous? science is inhuman. things seen with a microscope begin to be insignificant. so de scribed, they are monstrous, as if they should be magnified a thousand diameters. suppose i should see and describe men and horses and trees and birds as if they were a thousand times larger than they are. with our prying instru ments we disturb the harmony and balance of nature. ami days 419 may 2, 1862. reptiles must not be omit ted, especially frogs. their croaking is the most earthy sound now, a rustling of the scurf of the earth, not to be overlooked in the awak ening of the year. . . . the commonplaces of one age or nation make the poetry of another. . . . the handsome, blood-red, lacquered marks on the edge and under the edge of the painted tor toise s -li.-ll. liur tli.markon ;i waiter, concen tric. few colors like it in nature. this tor toise, too, like the guttata, painted on thin parts of the shell, and on legs and tail in this style, but on throat bright yellow stripes. sternum dull yellowish or buff. it hisses like the spotted tortoise. is the male the larger and flatter, with depressed sternum ? there is some regularity in the guttata s spots, generally a straight row on back. some of the spots are orange sometimes on the head. . . . if you would obtain insight, avoid anat omy,, . . . may 2, 1855. the anemone is well named, for see now the nemorosa amid the fallen brush and leaves, trembling in the wind, so fragile. may 2, 1859. a peetweet and its mate. the river seems really inhabited when the peet weet is back. this bird does not return to our stream until the weather is decidedly pleasant 420 may days and warm. he is perched on the accustomed rock. his note peoples the river like the prat tle of children once more in the yard of a house that has stood empty. . . . i am surprised by the tender yellowish green of the aspen leaves, just expanded suddenly, even like a fire, seen in the sun against the dark brown twigs of the wood, though these leaflets are yet but thinly dispersed. it is very enliv ening. i feel no desire to go to california or pike s peak, but i often think at night, with inexpres sible satisfaction and yearning, of the arrow headiferous sands of concord. i have often spent whole afternoons, especially in the spring, pacing back and forth over a sandy field, look ing for these relics of a race. this is the gold which our sands yield. the soil of that rocky spot of simon brown s land is quite ash-colored (now that the sod is turned up) from indian fires, with numerous pieces of coal in it. there is a great deal of this ash-colored soil in the country. we do literally plough up the hearths of a people, and plant in their ashes. the ashes of their fires colors much of our soil. may 2, 1860. i observed on the 29th that the clams had not only been moving much, fur rowing the sandy bottom near the shore, but generally, or almost invariably, had moved may .days 1-1 toward the middle of the river. perhaps it had something to do with the low stage of the water. i saw one making his way, or perhaps it had rested sinee morning, over that sawdust bar just below turtle bar, toward the river, the surface of the bar wing an inch or two hi-lh-r than the water. probably the water falling left it thus on moist land. a erowd of men seems to generate vermin even of the human kind. in great towns tlu-rc is degradation undreamed of elsewhere, gam blers, dog-killers, rag-pickers. some live by robbing or by luck. there was the concord muster of last september. i see still a well dressed man carefully and methodically search ing for money on the muster field far off across the river. i turn my glass ujwm him and notice how he proceeds. (i saw them searching in the fall till the snow came.) he walks, regularly and slowly, back and forth over the ground where the soldiers had their tents, still marked by the straw, with his head prone, and picking in the straw with a stick, now and then turning back or aside to examine ^&amp;gt;m.-tlnn^ more closely. he is dressed, methinks, l&amp;gt;etter than the aver age man whom you meet in the street*. how can he pay for his board thus? he dreams of finding a few copjhrs, or perchance half a dime, which have fallen from the soldiers )*.. -kt-,. 422 may^days and no doubt he will find something of the kind, having dreamed of it. having knocked, this door will be opened to him. may 3, 1841. we are all pilots of the most intricate bahama channels. beauty may be the sky overhead, but duty is the water underneath. when i see a man with serene countenance in garden or parlor, it looks like a great inward leisure that he enjoys, but in reality he sails on no summer s sea. this steady sailing comes of a heavy hand on the tiller. we do not attend to larks and bluebirds so leisurely but that con science is as erect as the attitude of the listener. the man of principle gets never a holiday. our true character underlies all our words and actions, as the granite underlies the other strata. its steady pidse does not cease for any deed of ours, as the sap is still ascending in the stalk of the fairest flower. may 3, 1852. five a. m. to cliffs. a great brassy moon going down in the west. . . . looking from the cliff, now about six a. m., the landscape is as if seen in a mirage, the cliff being in shadow, and that in the cool sunlight. the earth and water smell fresh and new, and the latter is marked by a few smooth streaks. the atmosphere suits the grayish-brown land scape, the still, ashy maple swamps, and now may days 423 nearly bare shrub oaks. the white pine, left here and there over the sprout land, is never moiv bountiful than with the morning light, be fore the water is rippled and the morning song of the birds is quenched. hear the first brown thrasher, two of them. they drown all the rest. he says, &quot;cherrmvit, cherruwit, go ahead, go ahead, give it to him, give it to him,&quot; etc. plenty of birds in the woods this morning. the huckleberry birds and the chickadees are as numerous, if not as loud, as any. the flicker taps a dead tree somewhat as one uses a knocker on a door in the village street. in his note he begins low, rising higher and higher. anursnack looks green three miles off. this is an important epoch, when the distant bare hills begin to show green or verdurous to the eye. the earth wears a new aspect. not tawny or russet now, but green are such bare hills. some of the notes, the trills of the lark sitting amid the tussocks and stubble, are like the notes of my seringo bird. may these birds that live so low in the grass be called the cricket birds ? and does their song resemble that of the cricket, an earth song? evening. the moon is full. the air is filled with a certain luminous, liquid white you can see the moonlight, as it were 424 may days reflected from the atmosphere, which some might mistake for a haze, a glow of mellow light, somewhat like the light i saw in the af ternoon sky some weeks ago, as if the air were a very thin but transparent liquid, not dry as in winter, nor gross as in summer. the sky has depth, and not merely distance. going through the depot field, i hear the dream frog at a distance. the little peeping frogs make a background of sound in the horizon, which you do not hear unless you attend. the former is a trembling note, some higher, some lower, along the edge of the earth, an all-pervading sound. nearer, it is a blubbering or rather bubbling sound, such as children, who stand nearer to nature, can and do often make. . . . the little peeper prefers a pool on the edge of a wood, which mostly dries up at midsummer, whose shore is covered with leaves, and where there are twigs in the water, as where choppers have worked. theirs is a clear, sharp, ear piereing peep, not shrill, sometimes a squeak from one whose pipe is out of order. . . . they have much the greatest apparatus for peeping of any frogs that i know. ... i go along the side of fairhaven hill. the clock strikes dis tinctly, showing the wind is easterly. there is a grand, rich, musical echo trembling in the air long after the clock has ceased to strike, like a may days 4 2f&amp;gt; vast organ, tilling the air with a trembling music, like a flower of sound. nature adopts it. the water is so calm, the woods and single ,,,,., :uv .l.iiilil,.,! u tli.rchvi-tion, :m&amp;lt;l in tlii light you cannot divide them as you walk along the river. see the spearer s lights, one north east, one southwest, toward sudhury, beyond lee s bridge, scarlet-colored fires. from the hill, the river is a broad blue stream exactly the color of the heavens which it reflects. sit on the cliff with comfort in great-coat. all the tawny and russet earth (for no green is seen upon the ground at this hour) sending only this faint, multitudinous sound (of frogs) to heaven. the vast, wild earth. the first whip-poor-will startles me; i hear three. summer is coining apace. within three or four days the birds have come so fast i can hardly keep the run of them, much faster than the flowers. sunday, may 3, 1857. a remarkably warm and pleasant morning. a. m. to battle ground by river. i heard the ring of toads at six a. m. the flood on the meadows, still high, is quite smooth, and many are out this still and suddenly very warm morning, pushing about in boats. now, thinks many a one, is the time to paddle or push gently far up or down the river, along the still, warm meadow s edge, and j&amp;gt;erhaps we may see some large turtles, or 420 may days musk-rats, or otter, or rare fish or fowl. it will be a grand forenoon for a cruise, to ex plore these meadow shores and inundated maple swamps which we have never explored. now we shall be recompensed for the week s confine ment in shop or garden. we will spend our sabbath exploring these smooth, warm vernal waters. up or down shall we go, to fair haven bay and the sudbury meadows, or to ball s hill and carlisle bridge? along the meadow s edge, lined with willows and alders and maples ; underneath the catkins of the early willow, and brushing those of the sweet-gale with our prow; where the sloping pasture and the ploughed ground submerged are fast drinking up the flood, what fair isles, what remote coast, shall we explore? what san salvador or bay of all saints arrive at? all are tempted forth, like files into the sun. all isles seem fortunate and blessed to-day, all capes are of good hope. the same sun and calm that tempt the turtles out tempt the voyagers. it is an opportunity to explore their own natures, to float along their own shores. the woodpecker cackles and the crow blackbird utters his jarring chatter from the oaks and maples. all well men and women who are not restrained by superstitious custom come abroad this morning, by land or water, and such as have boats launch them and put may days 427 forth in search of adventure. others, less free or it may be less fortunate, take their station on bridges, watching the rush of waters through them and the motions of the departing voyagers, and listening to the note of blackbirds from over the smooth water. perhaps they see a swimming snake or a musk-rat dive, airing and sunning themselves there till the first bell rings. up and down the town men and boys that are un der subjection are polishing their shoes and brushing their go-to-meeting clothes. i sympathize not to-day with those who go to church in newest clothes, and sit quietly in straight -backed pews. i sympathize rather with the boy who has none to look after him, who borrows a boat and paddle, and in common clothes sets out to explore these temporary ver nal lakes. i meet one paddling along under a sunny bank, with bare feet and his pants rolled up above his knees, ready to leap into the water at a moment s warning. better for him to read robinson crusoe than baxter s saints 1 rest. . . . the pine-warbler is perhaps the commonest bird heard now from the wood sides. it seems left to it almost alone to fill the empty aisles. may 4, 1852. this excitement about kos suth is not interesting to me, it is so super! i.-ial. may days men are making speeches to him all over the country, but each expresses only the thought or the want of thought of the multitude. no man stands on truth. they are merely banded together as usual, one leaning on another, and all together on nothing, as the hindoos made the world rest on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and had nothing to put under the tortoise. you can pass your hand under the largest mob, a nation in revolution even, and however solid a bulk they may make, like a hail cloud in the atmosphere, you may not meet so much as a cobweb of support. they may not rest, even by a point, on eternal foundations. hut an individual standing on truth you cannot pass your hand under, for his foundations reach to the centre of the universe. so superficial these men and their doings. it is life on a leaf, or a chip, which has nothing but air or water beneath. i love to see a man with a tap-root, though it make him difficult to transplant. it is unimportant what these men do. let them try forever, they can effect nothing. of what significance are the things you can forget? may 4, 1853. cattle are going up country. hear the &quot;tull-lull&quot; of the white-throated spar row. eight a. m. to walden and cliffs. the sound of the oven-bird. . the woods and may days 429 fields next the cliffs now ring with the silver jin^lf of the field sparrow, the medley of the brown thrasher, the honest qui rire of the ehe wink, or his jingle from the top of a low copse tree, while his mate scratches in the dry leaves beneath. the black and white creeper is hop ping along the oak boughs, head downward, pausing from time to time to utter its note, like a fine, delicate saw sharpening, and ever and anon rises, clear over all, the smooth rich mel ody of the wood-thnish. could that have been a jay? i think it was some large, uncommon woodpecker that uttered that very loud, strange, cackling note. the dry woods have the smell of fragrant everlasting. i am surprised by the cool drops which now at ten o clock fall from the flowers of the amelunehier, while other plants are dry, as if these had attracted more moisture. the white pines have started. the indigo bird and its mate, dark throat, light be neath, white spot on wings which is not de serilxd, a hoarse note and rapid, the first two or three syllables &quot;twe, twe, twee,&quot; the last being dwelt ujwn, or &quot;twe, twe, twe, tweee,&quot; or as if there were an r in it, &quot;tre,&quot; etc., not musical. . . . it is stated in the &quot;life of humliolclt &quot; that he proved &quot;that the expression, the ocean reflects the sky, was a purely poetical, not a scientiti 430 may days cally correct one, as the sea is often blue when the sky is almost totally covered with light, white clouds.&quot; he used saussure s cyanometer even to measure the color of the sea. this might probably be used to measure the intensity of blue flowers, like lupines, at a distance. may 4, 1855. a robin sings, when i in the house cannot distinguish the earliest dawning from the full moonlight. his song first adver tises me of the daybreak when i thought it was night, as i lay looking out into the full moon light. i heard a robin begin his strain, and yielded the point to him, believing that he was better acquainted with the signs of day than i. may 4, 1858. p. m. by boat to holdcn swamp. to go among the willows now and hear the bees hum is equal to going some hun dreds of miles southward toward summer. go into holden swamp to hear warblers. see a little blue butterfly (or moth) (saw one yesterday) fluttering about on the dry brown leaves in a warm place by the swamp side, mak ing a pleasant contrast. from time to time have seen the large vanessa antlopa resting on the black willows, like a leaf still adhering. as i sit by the swamp side this warm summery afternoon i hear the crows cawing hoarsely, and from time to time see one flying toward the top of a tall white pine. at length i distinguish a .v.-ir days 431 hen -hawk perched on the top. the crow re jk utrdly stoops toward him, now from this side, now from that, passing near his head each time, but he pays not the least attention to it. i hear the u veer-e, ver-e, ver-e&quot; of the creeper continually in the swamp. it is the prevailing note there, and methought i heard a redstart s note, but oftener than the last the tweezer or screeper note of the party-colored warbler, bluish al&amp;gt;ove, throat and breast yellow or orange, white on wings, and neck above yel lowish, going restlessly over the trees (maples, etc.) by the swamp, in creeper fashion; and as you may hear at the same time the true creeper s note without seeing it, you might think this bird uttered the creeper s note also. the redwings, though here and there in flocks, are apparently beginning to build. i infer this from their shyness and alarm in the bushes along the river, and their richer solitary warbling. may 4, 1859. p. m. to lee s cliff on foot. . . . crossing the first conantum field 1 per ceive a peculiar fragrance in the air (not the meadow fragrance), like that of vernal flowers or of expanding buds. the ground is covered with the mouse-ear in full bloom, and it may be that in part. it is a temperate southwest , a i il thu ia seen! &amp;lt;&amp;gt;t \\ill..\\. (fk&amp;gt;wbh 432 may days and leaflets), bluets, violets, shad-bush, mouse ear, etc., combined, or perhaps the last chiefly. at any rate, it is very perceptible. the air is more genial, laden with the fragrance of spring flowers. i, sailing on the spring ocean, getting in from my winter voyage, begin to smell the land. such a scent perceived by a mariner would be very exciting. i not only smell the land breeze, but i perceive in it the fragrance of spring flowers. i come out expecting to see the redstart or the party-colored warbler, and as soon as i get within a dozen rods of the iiol den wood i hear the screeper note of the tweezer bird, that is, the party-colored warbler, which also i see, but not distinctly. two or three are flitting from tree-top to tree-top about the swamp there, and you have only to sit still on one side and wait for them to come round. the water has what you may call a summer rip ple and sparkle on it; that is, the ripple does not suggest coldness in the breeze that raises it. it is a hazy day; the air is made hazy, you might fancy, with a myriad expanding buds. after crossing the arrow-head fields, we see a woodchuck run along and climb to the top of a wall and sit erect there, our first. it is al most exactly the color of the ground, the wall, and the bare brown twigs altogether. when in the miles swamp field we see two, one chas may days 433 ing the other, coming very fast down the lilac field hill, straight toward us, while we squat still in the middle of the field. the foremost is a small gray or slaty-colored one ; the other, two or three times as heavy, and a warm tawny, decidedly yellowish in the sun, a very large and fat one, pursuing the first. . . . suddenly the foremost, when thirty or forty rods off, per ceives us, and tries, as it were, to sink into the earth, and finally gets behind a low tuft of grass and peeps out. also the other (which at first appears to fondle the earth, inclining his cheek to it and dragging his body a little along it) tries to hide himself, and at length gets behind an apple-tree and peeps out on one side in an amusing manner. this makes three that we see. they are clumsy runners, with their short legs and heavy bodies, run with an undula ting or wabbling motion, jerking up their hind quarters. they can run pretty fast, however. their tails were dark-tipped. they are low when the animal is running. looking up through this soft and warm south west wind i notice the conspicuous shadow of mid-conantnm cliff, now at three p. m., and elsewhere the shade of a few apple-trees, trunks and boughs. through this warm and ha/y air the sheeny surface of the hill, now con siderably greened, looks soft as velvet, and 434 may days june is suggested to my mind. it is remark able that shadow should only be noticed now when decidedly warm weather comes, though before the leaves have expanded, that is, when it begins to be grateful to our senses. the shadow of the cliff is like a dark pupil on the side of the hill. the first shadow is as notice able and memorable as a flower. i observe annually the first shadow of this cliff, when we begin to pass from sunshine into shade for our refreshment; when we look on shade with yearning, as on a friend. that cliff and its shade suggest dark eyes and eyelashes, and overhanging brows. few things are more sug gestive of heat than this first shade, though now we see only the tracery of tree boughs on the greening grass and the sandy street. this i notice at the same time with the first humble bee; when the rana palustris purrs in the meadow generally; when the white willow and the aspen display their tender green, full of yel low light; when the party-colored warbler is first heard over the swamp; the woodchuck, who loves warmth, is out on the hill-sides in numbers; the jingle of the chipbird and the song of the thrasher are heard incessantly; the first cricket is heard in a warm, rocky place; and that scent of vernal flowers is in the air. this is an intenser expression of that same may days 435 influence or aspect of nature which i began to perceive ten days ago, the same lie/eruny. these days we begin to think in earnest of bathing in the river and to sit at an open win dow. life out-of-doors begins. it would require a good deal of time and pa tience to study the habits of woodchucks, they are so shy and watchful. they hear the least sound of a footstep on the ground, and are quick to see also. one should go clad in a suit somewhat like their own, the warp of tawny and the woof of green, and then with painted or well-tanned face he might lie out on a sunny bank till they appeared. we hear a thrasher sing for half an hour steadily, a very rich singer, and heard one fourth of a mile off very distinctly. this is first heard commonly at planting time. he sings as if conscious of his power. may 4, 1860. r. m. to great meadows by boat. . . . walking over the river meadows to examine the pools and see how much dried up they are, i notice, as usual, the track of the musquash, some five inches wide always, and always exactly in the lowest part of the muddy hollows connecting one pool with another, wind ing as they wind, as if loath to raise itself alx&amp;gt;ve the lowest mud. at first he swam there, and now as the water goes down he follows it stead 436 may days ily, and at length travels on the bare mud, but as low and close to the water as he can get. thus he first traces the channel of the future brook and river, and deepens it by dragging his belly along it. he lays out and engineers its road. as our roads are said to follow the track of the cow, so rivers in another period follow the trail of the musquash. they are perfect rats to look at, and swim fast against the stream. when i am walking on a high bank, i often see one swimming along within half a dozen rods, and land openly, as if regard less of us. probably, being under water at first, he did not notice us. looking across the peninsula toward ball s hill, i am struck by the bright blue of the river (a deeper blue than the sky) contrasting with the fresh yellow-green of the meadow (that is, of coarse sedges just starting), and between them a darker or greener green, next the edge of the river, especially where that small sand bar island is, the green of that early rank river grass. this is the first painting or coloring in the meadows. these several colors are, as it were, daubed on, as on china-ware, or as dis tinct and simple as in a child s painting. i was struck by the amount and variety of color after so much brown. as i stood there i heard a thumping sound, may days 437 which i referred to p , three fourths of a mile off over the meadow. but it was a pigeon woodpecker excavating its nest inside a maple within a rod of me. though i had just landed and made a noise with my boat, he was too busy to hear me, but now he hears my tread, and i see him put out his head and then with draw it warily, and keep still while i stay there. days and nights in concord [the time of year is august and september.] i do not remember any page which will tell me how to spend this afternoon. i do not so much want to know how to economize time as how to spend it; by what means to grow rich. how to extract its honey from the flower of the world that is my every -day business. i am as busy as a bee about it. do i not impreg nate and intermix the flowers, produce rarer and finer varieties, by transferring my eyes from one to another? it is with flowers i would deal. the art of spending a day! if it is possible that we may be addressed, it be hooves us to be attentive. so by the dawning or radiance of beauty are we advertised where are the honey and the fruit of thought, of dis course and of action. the discoveries which we make abroad are special and particular; those which we make at home are general and significant. my profession is to be always on the alert, to find god in nature, to know his lurking-places, to attend all the oratorios, the operas in nature. shall i not have words as days and nights in concord 431) fresh as my thought? shall i use any other mail s word? a genuine thought or feeling can find expression for itself if it have to invent hieroglyphics. it has the universe for tpye metal. since i perambulated the &quot;bounds of the town,&quot; i find that i have in some degree con fined myself (my vision and my walks). on whatever side i look off, i am reminded of the mean and narrow-minded men whom i have lately met there. what can be uglier than a country occupied by groveling, coarse, and low lived men? no scenery can redeem it. hor nets, hyenas, and baboons are not so great a curse to a country as men of a similar character. it is a charmed circle which i have drawn about my abode, having walked, not with god, but the devil. i am too well aware when i have crossed this line. . . . the price-farm road is one of those ever iiiming roads which the sun 1 lights to shine along in an august afternoon, playing truant; which seem to stretch themselves with terrene jest as the weary traveler travels them on ; where there are three white sandy furrows (lira&amp;gt;\ two for the wheels and one between them for the horse, with endless green grass honlrrs !&amp;gt; tween, and room on each side for blueberries and birches; where the walls indulge in freaks, 440 days and nights in concord not always parallel to the ruts, and golden -rod yellows all the path, which some elms began to border and shade over, but left off in despair, it was so long ; from no point of which can you be said to be at any definite distance from a town. . . . old cato says well, patrem famuias ven dacem, non emacem esse oportet. these latin terminations express, better than any english i know, the greediness, as it were, and tenacity of purpose with which the husbandman and householder is required to be a seller and not a buyer. with mastiff-like tenacity these lipped words collect in the sense, with a certain greed. here comes a laborer from his dinner, to resume his work at clearing out a ditch, notwithstand ing the rain, remembering, as cato says, per ferias potuissefostas veteres tergeri. one would think i were come to see if the steward of my farm had done his duty. the prevailing conspicuous flowers at present [august 21] are the early golden-rods, tansy, the life-everlastings, fleabane (though not for its flower), yarrow (rather dry), hard -hack and meadow sweet (both getting dry), also mayweed, purple eupatorium, clethra, rhexia, thoroughwort, polygahi sanguinea, prunella and dogsbane (getting stale), touch-me-not (less observed), canada snapdragon by roadsides, days and nights in concord 441 purple gerardia, horsemint, veronica, marsh speedwell, tall crowfoot (still iu flower), also the epilohium and cow-wheat. half an hour before sunset i was at tupelo cliff, when, looking up from my botanizing (i had i wen examining the rttnunculus jh(fonni, conium maculatum, shim hitifolhim^ and the obtuse gtilium on the muddy shore), i saw the seal of evening on the river. there was a quiet beauty on the landscape at that hour which my senses were prepared to appreciate. avhen i have walked all day in vain under the torrid sun, and the world has been all trivial, as well field and wood as highway, then at eve the sun goes down westward, and the dews be gin to purify the air and make it transparent, and the lakes and rivers acquire a glassy still ness, reflecting the skies, the reflex of the day. thus, long after feeding, the diviner faculties begin to be fed, to feel their oats, their nntri ment, and are not oppressed by the body s load. every sound is music now. how rich, like what we like to read of south american primitive forests, is the scenery of this river; what luxu riance of weeds, what depths of mud, along its sides! these old ante-historic, geologic, ante diluvian rocks, which only primitive wading birds still lingering among us are worthy to tread! the season which we seem to live in 442 days and nights in concord anticipation of is arrived. with what sober joy i stand to let the water drip, and feel my fresh vigor, who have been bathing in the same tub which the muskrat uses, such a medicinal bath as only nature furnishes! a fish leaps, and the dimple he makes is observed now. methinks that for a great part of the time, as much as is possible, i walk as one possessing the advantages of human culture, fresh from the society of men, but turned loose into the woods, the only man in nature, walking and meditating to a great extent, as if man and his customs and institutions were not. the cat bird or the jay is sure of your whole ear now; each noise is like a stain on pure glass. the rivers now, these great blue subterra nean heavens reflecting the supernal skies and red-tinged clouds what unanimity between the water and the sky, one only a little denser element than the other, the grossest part of heaven ! think of a mirror on so large a scale ! standing on distant hills you see the heavens reflected, the evening sky, in some low lake or river in the valley, as perfectly as in any mirror that could be. does it not prove how intimate heaven is with earth ? we commonly sacrifice to supper this serene and sacred hour. our customs turn the hour of sunset to a trivial time, as to the meeting of two roads, one com days axd nights in concord 443 ing from the noon, the other loading to the night. it might be well if our repasts were taken out-of-doors, in view of the sunset and the rising stars; if there were two persons whose pulses beat together; if men cared for the cosmon or beauty of the world; if men were social in a rare or high sense; if they associated on rare or high levels ; if we took with our tea a draught of the dew-freighted, transparent evening air; if with our bread and butter we took a slice of the red western sky; if the smoking, steaming urn was the vapor on a thousand lakes and rivers and meads. the air of the valleys at this hour is the distilled essence of all thos fragrances which during the day have imjcii tilling and have been dispersed in the atmosphere, the fine fragrances, perchance, which have floated in the upper atmospheres, now settled to these low vales. i talked of buying conantum once, but for want of money we did not come to terms. hut i have farmed it, in my own fashion, every year since. i find three or four ordinary laborers to-day putting up the necessary out-door fixtures for a magnetic, telegraph. they cany along a bas ket of simple implements, like traveling tinkers; and with a little rude soldering and twisting and straightening of wire, the work is done, as if you might set your hired man with the 444 days and nights in concord poorest head and hands, with the greatest lati tude of ignorance and bungling, to this work. all great inventions stoop thus low to succeed, for the understanding is but little above the feet. they preserve so low a tone, they are simple almost to coarseness and commonplace ness. some one had told them what he wanted, and sent them forth with a coil of wire to make a magnetic telegraph. it seems not so wonder ful an invention as a common cart or plough. the buckwheat already cut [september 4] lies in red piles in the field. in the marlboro road i saw a purple streak like a stain on the red pine leaves and sand under my feet, which i was surprised to find was made by a dense mass of purple fleas, like snow-fleas. and now we leave the road and go through the woods and swamps toward boon s pond, crossing two or three roads, and by potter s house in stow, still on the east side of the river. beyond pot ter s, we struck into the extensive wooded plain, where the ponds are found in stow, sudbury, and marlboro ; part of it is called boon s plain. boon is said to have lived on or under bailey s hill, at the west of the pond, and was killed by the indians, between boon s and avhite s pond, as he was driving his ox-cart. the oxen ran off to the marlboro garrison house ; his remains have been searched for. days and nights in concord 445 there were two hen-hawks that soared and cir cled for our entertainment when we were in the woods on this plain, crossing each other s orbits from time to time, alternating like the squirrels in their cylinder, till, alarmed by our imitation of a hawk s shrill cry, they gradually inflated themselves, made themselves more aerial, and rose higher and higher into the heavens, and were at length lost to sight; yet all the while earnestly looking, scanning the surface of the earth for a stray mouse or rabbit. ave saw a mass of sunflowers in a farmer s patch; such is the destiny of this large coarse flower, the farmers gather it like pumpkins. we noticed a potato-field yellow with wild radish. knight s new dam has so raised the assabet as to make a permanent freshet, as it were, the fluviatile trees standing dead for fish-hawk perches, and the water stagnant for weeds to grow in. you have only to dam up a running stream to give it the aspect of a dead stream, and in some degree restore its primitive wild appearance. tracts are thus made inaccessible to man and at the same ^time more fertile, the last gasp of wildness before it yields to the civilization of the factory ; to cheer the eyes of the factory ]&amp;gt;eople and educate them, a little wilderness almve the factory. as i looked back up the stream, i saw the 446 days and nights in concord ripples sparkling in the sun, reminding me of the sparkling icy fleets which i saw last winter; and i thought how one corresponded to the other, ice waves to water ones ; the erect ice flakes were the waves stereotyped. it was the same sight, the same reflection of the sun sparkling from a myriad slanting surfaces; at a distance, a rippled water surface or a crys tallized frozen one. we climbed the high hills on the west side of the river, in the east and southeast part of stow. i observed that the walnut-trees conformed in their branches to the slope of the hill, being just as high from the ground on the upper side as the lower. i saw what i thought a small red dog in the road, which cantered along over the bridge, and then turned into the woods; this decided me, this turning into the woods, that it was a fox, the dog of the woods. a few oaks stand in the pastures, still great ornaments. i do not see any young ones springing up to supply their places, and will there be any a hundred years hence? we are a young people and have not learned by experience the consequences of cut ting off the forest. i love to see the yellow knots and their lengthened stain on the dry, unpainted pitch-pine boards on barns and other buildings, as the dugan house. the inde structible yellow fat, it fats my eyes to see it, days and nights in concord 447 worthy for art to imitate, telling of branches in the forest once. from strawl&amp;gt;erry hill we caught the first, and hut a very slight, glimpse of nagog pond, hy standing on the wall. that is enough to relate of a hill, methinks, that its elevation gives you the first sight of some distant lake. the horizon is remarkably blue with mist; look ing from this hill over acton, successive valleys filled with this mist appear, and are divided by darker lines of wooded hills. the shadows of the elms are deepened, as if the whole atmos phere were permeated by floods of ether, that give a velvet softness to the whole landscape; the hills float in it; a blue veil is drawn over the earth. anursnack hill had an exceedingly rich, empurpled look, telling of the juice of the wild grape and poke -berries. noticed^ a large field of sunflowers for hens, in full bloom at temple s, now at six p. m. facing the east. the larches in the front yards have turned red; their fall has come; the roman wormwood (ambroxia ortemisicbfolia) is l&amp;gt;egin ning to yellow-green my shoes, intermingled with the blue-curls in the sand of grain-fields. perchance some poet likened this yellow dust to the ambrosia of the gods. do not the songs of birds and the fireflies go with the grass, whose greenness is the best 448 days and nights in concord symptom and evidence of the earth s health or youth? perhaps a history of the year would be a history of the grass, or of a leaf, regarding the grass-blades as leaves. plants soon cease to grow for the year, unless they may have a fall growth, which is a kind of second spring. in the feelings of the man, too, the year is already past, and he looks forward to the coming winter. it is a season of withering; of dust and heat; a season of small fruits and trivial experiences. but there is an aftermath, and some spring flowers bloom again. may my life be not destitute of its indian summer ! i hear the locust still ; some farmers are sowing their winter rye; i see the fields smoothly rolled. i see others ploughing steep, rocky, and bushy fields for rolling. how beautiful the sprout-land! when you look down on it, the light green of the maples shaded off with the darker red, enlivening the scene yet more. surely this earth is fit to be inhabited, and many enterprises may be undertaken with hope, where so many young plants are pushing up. shall man then despair? is he not a sprout land, too, after never so many searings and witherings? if you witness growth and luxu riance, it is all the same as if you grew luxuri antly. the woodbine is red on the rocks. the poke is a very rich and striking plant, cardinal days and nights in concord 449 in its rank, as in its color. the downy seeds of the groundsel are taking their flight; the calyx has dismissed them and quite curled back, having done its part. when i got into lincoln road [september 11] i perceived a singular sweet scent in the air; but, though i sinelled everything around, i could not detect it. it was one of the sweet scents which go to make up the autumn, which fed and dilated my sense of smell. i felt the better for it. methinks that i possess the sense of smell in greater perfection than usual. how autumnal is the scent of wild grapes, now by the roadside! the cross-leaved polygala emits its fragrance as at will; you must not hold it too near, but on all sides and at all distances. the pendulous, drooping barberries are pretty well reddened. i am glad when the berries look fair and plump. windy autumnal weather is very exciting and bracing, clear and cold after a rain. the winds roars loudly in the woods, the ground is strewn with leaves, especially under the applr trees. the surface of the river reflecting the sun is dazzlingly bright; the outlines of the hills are remarkably distinct and firm, their surfaces bare and hard, not clothed with a thick air. i notice one red maple, far brighter than the blossom of any tree in summer. what can 450 days and nights in concord be handsomer for a picture than our river scen ery now? first, this smoothly shorn meadow on the west side of the stream, looking from the first conantum cliff, with all the swaths dis tinct, sprinkled with apple-trees casting heavy shadows black as ink [9 a. m.], such as can be seen only in this clear air, this strong light, one cow wandering restlessly about in it and lowing; then the blue river, scarcely darker than, and not to be distinguished from, the sky, its waves driven southward (or up the stream), by the wind, making it appear to flow that way, bordered by willows and button-bushes; then the narrow meadow beyond, with varied lights and shades from its waving grass, each grass blade bending south before the wintry blast, as if looking for aid in that direction; then the hill, rising sixty feet to a terrace-like plain cov ered with shrub-oaks, maples, and other trees, each variously tinted, clad all in a livery of gay colors, every bush a feather in its cap; and further in the rear the wood-crowned rlii n, some two hundred feet high, whose gray rocks project here and there from amid the bushes, with an orchard on the slope, and the distant lincoln hills in the horizon. what honest, homely, earth-loving houses they used to live in, so low you can put your hands on the eaves behind ! the broad chimney, built for comfort, days and nights in concord 451 no alto or basso relievo ! the air is of crystal purity, both air and water so transparent, the fisherman tries in vain to deceive the fish with his baits. waldeu plainly can never be spoiled by the wood-chopper; for, do what you will to the shore, there will still remain this crystal well. the intense brilliancy of the red, ripe maples, scattered here and there in the midst of the green oaks and hickories on its hilly shores, is quite charming. alternating witli yellow birches and poplars and green oaks, they remind one of a line of soldiers, red-coats and riflemen in green, mixed together. from ball s hill [september 26], the mead ows, now smoothly shorn, have a quite impos ing appearance, so spacious and level. there is a shadow on the sides of the hills surrounding (it is a cloudy day), and where the meadow meets them it is darkest. now the sun in the west is coming out, and lights up the river a mile off so that it shines with a white light, like a burnished silver mirror. the }k&amp;gt;plar-tree on miss kipley s hill seems quite important to the scene. the patches of sunlight on the meadow look lividly yellow, as if flames were traversing it. it is a day for fishermen. the farmers are gathering in their corn. the climbing hemp weed (mikama seandens) and the button-bushes and the pickerel-weed are sere and flat with 452 days and nights in concord frost. we fell into the path printed by the feet of the calves. the note of the yellow-ham mer is heard from the edges of the fields. sitting by the spruce swamp in conant s woods, i am reminded that this is a perfect day to visit the swamp, with its damp, inistling, mildewy air, so solemnly still. there are the spectre-like black spruces hanging with usnea lichens, and in the rear rise the dark green pines and oaks on the hillside, touched here and there with livelier tints where a maple or birch may shine, this luxuriant vegetation standing heavy, dark, sombre, like mould in a cellar. . . . has one moon gone by unnoticed? it is peculiarly favorable to reflection, a cold and dewy light in which the vapors of the day are condensed, and though the air is obscured by darkness it is more clear. lunacy must be a cold excitement, not such insanity as a torrid sun on the brain would produce. but the moon is not to be judged alone by the quantity of light she sends us, but also by her influence on the thoughts. no thinker can afford to over look her influence any more than the astronomer can. has not the poet his spring-tides and his neap-tides, in which the ocean within him over flows its shores and bathes the dry land, the former sometimes combining with the winds of da ys and nights in concord 453 heaven to produce those memorable high tides which leave their mark forages, when all broad street is submerged and incaleidable damage done the common shipping of the mind? i come out into the moonlit night where men are not, as if into a scenery, anciently deserted by men; the life of men is like a dream. it is three thousand years since night has had ]ws session. go forth and hear the crickets chirp at midnight. hear if their dynasty is not an ancient one and well founded. i feel the anti quity of the night ; she merely repossesses her self of her realms, as if her dynasty were unin terrupted, or she had underlaid the day. no sounds but the steady creaking of crickets, and the occasional crowing of cocks. i go by the farmer s houses and barns, standing there in the dim light under the trees, as if they lay at an immense distance, or under a veil. the fanner and his oxen are all asleep, not even a watch -dog is awake. the human slumlxjrsjx there is less of man in the world. to appreci ate the moonlight, you must stand in the shade and see where a few rods or a few feet distant it falls in between the trees. it is a &quot;milder day,&quot; made for some inhabitants whom you do not see. i am obliged to sleep enough the next night to make up for it (after being out) kndi/mioni* tomnuni dormirf to sleep an endymion s sleep, as the ancients expressed it. 454 days and nights in concord the fog on the lowlands (on the corner road) is never still. it now advances and envelops me as i stand to write these words before sun rise, then clears away with ever noiseless step. it covers the meadows like a web, i hear the clock strike three. the light of orion s belt seems to show traces of the blue day through which it came to us. the sky at least is lighter on that side than in the west, even about the moon. even by night the sky is blue and not black, for we see through the veil of night into the distant atmosphere. i see to the plains of the sun where the sunbeams are reveling. the crickets song by the causeway is not so loud at this hour as at evening, and the moon is get ting low. i hear a wagon cross on one of the bridges leading into the town. 1 smell the ripe apples many rods off l&amp;gt;eyond the bridge. will not my townsmen consider me a benefactor if i conquer some realms from the night, if i can show them that there is some beauty awake while they are asleep ; if i add to the domains of poetry ; if i report to the gazettes anything transpiring in our midst worthy of man s atten tion ? i will say nothing here to the disparage ment of day, for he is not here to defend him self. i hear the farmer harnessing his horse and starting for the distant market, but no man dai s and nights in concord 455 harnesses himself and starts for worthier enter prises. one cock-crow tells the whole story of the fanner s life. i see the little glow-worms deep in the grass by the brooksidc. the moon shines dim and red, a solitary whip-poor-will sings, the clock strikes four, a few dogs bark, a few more wagons start for market, their faint rattling is heard in the distance. i hear my owl without a name, the murmur of the slow approaching freight-train as far off perchance as waltham, and one early bird. the round red moon is disappearing in the west. i detect a whiteness in the east. some dark, massive clouds have come over from the west within the hour, as if attracted by the approaching sun, and have arranged themselves raywise across the eastern portal as if to bar his coming. they have moved, suddenly and almost unob servedly, quite across the sky (which before was clear) from west to east. no trumpet was heard which marshaled and advanced the dark masses of the west s forces thus rapidly against the coming day. column after column the mighty west sent forth across the sky while men slept, but all in vain. the eastern horizon is now grown dun-col ored, showing where the advanced guard of the night are already skirmishing with the vanguard of the sun, a lurid light tinging the atmos 456 days and nights in concord phere there, while a dark -columned cloud hangs imminent over the broad portal un touched by the glare. some bird flies over, making a noise like the barking of a puppy (it was a cuckoo). it is yet so dark that i have dropped my pencil and cannot find it. the sound of the cars is like that of a rushing wind; they come on slowly ; i thought at first a morn ing wind was rising. the whip-poor-wills now begin to sing in ear nest, about half an hour before sunrise, as if making haste to improve the short time that is left them. as far as my observation goes they sing for several hours in the early part of the night, are silent commonly at midnight, though you may meet them sitting on a rock or flitting silent about, then sing again at just before sunrise. it grows more and more red in the east (a fine-grained red under the overhang ing cloud), and lighter too, and the threatening clouds are falling off to southward of the sun s passage, shrunken and defeated, leaving his path comparatively clear. the increased light shows more distinctly the river and the fog. the light now (five o clock) reveals a thin film of vapor like a gossamer veil cast over the lower hills beneath the cliffs, and stretching to the river, thicker in the ravines, thinnest on the even slopes. the distant meadows to the north days and nights in concord 457 beyond conant s grove, full of fog, appear like a vast lake, out of which rise anursnaek and ponkawtasset like wooded islands. and all the farms and houses of concord are at the bottom of that sea. so i forget them, and my thought sails triumphantly over them. i thought of nothing but the surface of a lake, a summer sea over which to sail ; no more would the voyager on the dead sea who had not the testament think of sodom and gomorrah and cities of the plain. i only wished to get off to one of the low isles i saw in the midst of the sea (it may have been the top of ilolbrook s elm) and spend the whole summer day there. meanwhile the redness in the east had dimin ished and was less deep. and next the red was become a sort of yellowish or fawn -colored light, and the sun now set fire to the edges of the broken cloud which had hung over the hori zon, and they glowed like burning turf. it is remarkable that animals are often obvi ously, manifestly related to the plants which they feed upon or live among, as caterpillars, butterflies, tree-toads, partridges, chewinks. i noticed a yellow spider on a golden-rod, as if every condition might have its expression in some form of animated lxing. i have seen the small mulleins in the fields for a day or two as big as a ninepence; rattlesnake grass is ripe; a 458 days and nights in concord stalk of purple eupatorium, eight feet, eight inches high, with a large convex corymb (hem ispherical) of many stories, fourteen inches wide, and the width of the plant, from tip of leaf to tip of leaf, two feet, the diameter of its stalk one inch at the ground. is not disease the rule of existence? there is not a lily-pad floating in the river but has been riddled by insects. almost every tree and shrub has its gall, oftentimes esteemed its chief ornament, and &quot;hardly to be distinguished from its fruit. if misery loves company, misery has company enough. now at midsummer find me a perfect leaf or fruit. the difference is not great be tween some fruits in which the wonn is always present and those gallfruits which were pro duced by the insect. the prunella leaves have turned a delicate claret or lake color by the roadside [september 1]. i am interested in these revolutions as much as in those of king doms. is there not tragedy enough in the au tumn? the pines are dead and leaning red against the shore of walden pond (which is going down at last), as if the ice had heaved them over. thus by its rising it keeps an open shore. i found the succory on the railroad. may not this and the tree primrose, and other plants, be distributed from boston on the rays of the railroads? the feathery-tailed fruit of days and niuhts in concord 459 the fertile flowers of the clematis are conspicu ous now. the shorn meadows looked of a liv ing green as we came home at eve, even greener than in spring. this reminds me of the &quot;fenwn cord urn,&quot; the aftermath, &quot; sic dimenta tie prati**&quot; the second mowing of the meadow, in cato. i now begin to pick wild apples. i walk often in drizzly weather, for then the small weeds (especially if they stand on bare ground), covered with rain-drops like beads, appear more beautiful than ever, the hyperi cums, for instance. they are equally beauti ful when covered with dew, fresh and adorned, almost spirited away in a robe of dew-drops. the air is filled with mist, yet a transparent mist, a principle in it which you might call fla vor, which ripens fruits. this haziness seems to confine and concentrate the sunlight, as if you lived in a halo, it is august. some farmers have taguii to thresh and to winnow their oats. not only the prunella turns lake, but the hypericum viryinicum in the hollows by the roadside, a handsome blush, a part of the autumnal tints. kij&amp;gt;e leaves acquire red blood. ked colors touch our blood and excite us as well as cows and geese. we brushed against the polygonum arruaturn, with its spikes of red dish white flowers, a slender and tender plant which loves the middle of dry and sandy, not 4co days and nights in concord much traveled roads, to find that the very stones bloom, that there are flowers we rudely brush against which only the microscope re veals. the dense fog came into my chamber early, freighted with light, and woke me. it was one of those thick fogs which last well into the day. the farmers simple enterprises! they improve this season, which is the dryest, their haying being done, and their harvest not begun, to do these jobs, burn brush, build walls, dig ditches, cut turf, also topping corn and digging potatoes. sometimes i smell these smokes several miles off, and, by their odor, know it is not a burning building, but withered leaves and the rubbish of the woods and swamps. methinks the scent is a more oracu lar and trustworthy inquisition than the eye. when i criticise my own writing i go to the scent, as it were. it reveals what is concealed from the other senses. by it i detect earthi ness. the jays scream on the right and left as we go by, flitting and screaming from pine to pine. i hear no lark sing at evening as in the spring, only a few distressed notes from the robin. i saw a pigeon place on george hey wood s cleared lot, with the six dead trees set up for the pigeons to alight on, and the brush -house close by to conceal the man. i was rather days and nights in concord 4g1 startled to find such a thing going now in con cord. the pigeons on the trees looked like fabulous birds, with their long tails and their pointed breasts. i could hardly believe they were alive and not some wooden birds used for decoys, they sat so still, and even when they moved their necks i thought it was the effect of art. i scare up the great bittern in the meadow by the i ley wood brook near the ivy. he rises buoyantly as he flies against the wind, and sweeps south over the willow, surveying. i see ducks or teal flying silent, swift, and straight, the wild creatures! the partridge and the rabbit, they still are sure to thrive like true natives of the soil, whatever revolutions occur. if the forest is cut off, many bushes spring up which afford them concealment. in these cooler, windier, crystal days the note of the jay sounds a little more native. i found on the shores of the pond that sin gular willow-herb in blossom, though its petals were gone. it grows up two feet from a large woody horizontal root, and drops over to the sand again, meeting which, it puts a myriad rootlets from the side of its stem, fastens itself and curves upward again to the air, thus span ning or looping itself along. the bark, just above the ground, thickens into a singidar cel lular or sjxmgy substance, which at length ap 4g2 days and nights in concord pears to crack nearer the earth, giving that part of the plant a winged or somewhat four-sided appearance. the caducous polygala is faded in cool places almost white ; knot-grass or door grass (polygonum aviculare) is still in bloom. i saw the lamhkill in flower (a few fresh blos soms), beautiful bright flowers, as of a new spring with it, while the seed-vessels, appar ently of this year, hung diy below. the ripen ing grapes begin to fill the air with their fra grance. i hear the red-wing blackbirds and meadow lurks again by the river-side [october 5], as if it were a new spring. they appear to have come to bid farewell. the birds seem to depart at the coming of the frost, which kills the vegeta tion and directly or indirectly the insects on which they feed. as we sailed up the river, there was a pretty good-sized pickerel poised directly over the sandy bottom close to the shore, and motionless as a shadow. it is won derful how they resist the slight current, and remain thus stationary for hours. he no doubt saw us plainly on the bridge, in the sunny water, his whole form distinct and his shadow, motionless as the steel-trap which does not spring till the fox s foot has touched it. in this drought you see the nests of the bream on the dry shore. the prinos berries are quite red, days and nights in concord 4g3 the dog-wood by the corner road has lost every leaf, its branches of dry greenish berries hang ing straight down from the bare stout twigs, as if their peduncles were broken. it has assumed its winter aspect, a mithridatic look. the black birch is straw-colored, the witch-hazel is now in bloom. the little conical burs of the agrimony stick to my clothes; the pale lobelia still blooms freshly, and the rough hawk-weed holds up its globes of yellowish fuzzy seeds, as well as the panicled. the reclining sun, falling on the willows and on the water, produces a rare soft light i do not often see, a greenish yellow. the milkweed seeds are in the air; i see one in the river which a minnow occasionally jostles. the butternuts have shed nearly all their leaves, and their nuts are seen black against the sky. the white-ash has got its autumnal mulberry hue. it contrasts strangely with the other shade-trees on the village street. it is with leaves as with fruits, and woods, and animals, and men, when they are mature their different characters appear. the elms axe generally of a dirt) or brownish yellow now. some of the white pines have reached the acme of their fall; the same is the state of the pitch pines. the shrub-oaks are almost uniformly of a deep red. the reach of the river between i led ford and 4g4 days and nights in concokd carlisle, seen from a distance, lias a singularly ethereal, celestial, or elysian look. it is of a light sky blue, alternating with smoother white streaks, where the surface reflects the light differently, like a milk-pan full of the milk of valhalla, partially skimmed; more gloriously and heavenly fair and pure than the sky itself. \ve have names for the rivers of hell, but none for the rivers of heaven, unless the milky way may be one. it is such a smooth and shining blue, like a panoply of sky-blue plates. some men, methinks, have found only their hands and feet. at least, i have seen some who appeared never to have found their heads, but used them only instinctively. what shall we say of those timid folks who carry the prin ciple of thinking nothing, and doing nothing, and being nothing, to such an extreme? as if in the absence of thought, that vast yearn ing of their natures for something to fill the vacuum made the least traditionary expression and shadow of a thought to be clung to with in stinctive tenacity. they atone for their pro ducing nothing by a brutish respect for some thing. index ac**, an, m long mea*nr, 75. a.-tou (m.*a.). 166. +t. afriomture, t be taak of a iue ricana, 281-283. aktiin..iiy. t ).-, 463. alphniw, jean, and pall* of moot morrnri, 47 ; quoted, 112, amitira, superioritie* of, 2rt9-27. r . american, money in quebec, 9; t !. . and government, l r . anacreon. quoted, 133, 135. a 1 1 1 1 ii i itoai or 317. ambone, the, 419. ann gardieu pariah, 51 ; church of, 57. ani{l.t souvenir, the, 146. animal*, related to plant* on which they feed, 4. 7. anunmack, 423 ; hill, 447. 457. apple, history of t he tree, 356-367 ; t m 1 1.1, 3&amp;lt;77-3g9 ; the crab-, 371 ; growth of the wild, 371-378 ; map dil by cattle, 372-370; the fruit and flavor of the. 37k-3st, ; beauty of the. mb ml; naming of the, 397-389 ; laat gleaning of t)., .. . t:.,--:. . t!,va.-l. 9k-9m; dying out of the wttd, arrow-headlferous sand* of con , . , aahburnham (ma*a.). 3 ; with a bet ter houm than any in canada, 124. aah-tree*, 7. . 44 j a i .-.. 134, note ; 13*. note. autumn fouag*. brightaeof, 308 ; weather and undrmpe, 4a2 ; the tragedy of. 4.v*. am mxal turn, 3u&-356. biiley hill, 444. b.11-; hill. 42f,.43f., 451. bart ram, william, quoted, 244. 15 it l,i nk feet in brook*, 172; at sun set. 442. rayfleld a chart. captain, 114, 116. inland, 24c&amp;gt;. andropogon* or, 313 beanport (qe.), and le chemin dt, 37; getting lodginga in, 43-44 .; church in, id ; seigniory of. 1 \:&amp;gt;. ileaupre, seigniory of the c6tde, bedford (mam.), 4rt3. &quot;iw-hold, how spring appearing,&quot; 135. behpwfalu(vt.). f,. i;ir.-h, yellow, 7 ; buck, 4g3. bird* and mounuun*, 182. bittern, 1 nnr&quot; t &quot;g of the, 137 ; the great, 401. 151u.-utri.--s and milk, supper of, 177; 411. 151u.-l.inl, the, 136. ii.. i... link, the, 139. 1-..1, . , . :. books on natural hiatory, readiug, 127-129. boon * pond, 444. : lirtia (mm.x 3. x, .0. i .,.:.: bourhenrille(que.),24. bouchette, topographical dearrlp tion of the canadaa, quoted, .vi, 52,78, 79, 110, 114, 117. bout de tide, 24. i ,.. m, brand . puf kl aamj^mll quoted, brmvm of tctoooa, tlm, 131, 132. i; ,,. ,-. ;;; burlington (vt.), 8, 123. 466 index burton, sir richard francis, 279, 280. butterfly, beauty of the, 417,418; a blue, 431). butternut-tree, 7, 463. cabs, montreal, 22 ; quebec. 86. caddice-worm*, 908. caen, emery de, quoted, 64. caleche, the (see cabs), 86. canada, apparently older than the united states, 100; population of, 101 ; the french in, a nation of peasants, 102. canada east, 49. canadense, iter, and the word, 125. canadian, french, 11 ; horses, 41 ; women, 42 ; atmosphere, 42 ; love of neighborhood, 52, 53 ; houses, 54, 73; clothes, 55; salutations, 58 ; vegetables and trees, 59 ; boots, 63 ; tenures, 78, 79. cap aux oyt s, 115. cane, a straight and twisted, 225, 226. cape diamond, 26, 50; signal-gun on, 105 ; the view from, 109. cape rouge, 26, 118. cape boder, 114. cape tourmeiite, 50, 110, 119. carlisle (mass.), 464. carlisle bridge, 426. cartier, jacques, 9; and the st. lawrence, 111, 112; quoted, 120, 121 ; 122. catbird, the, 412. cato major, quoted, 440. cattle show, men at, 225. (vim-tery of fallen leaves, 331. chaleur, the bay of, 112. chalmers, dr., in criticism of cole ridge, 398. chambly (que.), 13. cham jiliiin, samuel, quoted, 9; whales in map of, 9, 113. charlesbourg (que.), 110. charlevoix, quoted, 65, 113. chateau richer, church of, 57 ; co ; lodgings at, 73, 85. chau.-it, geoffrey, quoted, li&amp;gt;5, 196. cl,.i...li, nriver, the, 26; falls of the, 86, 87. cheap men, 36. cherry-stones, transported by bird*, 230. chewink, the, 429. cm.-kadee, the, 134, 423. c hien, la riviere au, g9. chipping-kparrow, the fork-tailed, 410,411. churches, catholic and proteaunt, 15-17 ; roadside, 57. claire fontaine, im, 32. clams, moving, 42o. clothe*, bad-weather, 34 ; canadian, 55. clouds, the moon and, 406. colors, names and joy of, 335-337 ; in a may landscape, 436. conant s woods, 452. conantum, 414, 431, 433, 443. concord (mass.), 3, 6, 8 ; history of, quoted, 141 ; 163, 183, 186, 420, l concord river, the, 141, 170. connecticut river, 6, 177, 180, 181. conrtur* de boit, and de ritquet, \ 63. creeper, the, 412, 429, 431. crickets, the creaking of, 133. crook-neck squash nodi, quebec, lo& crosses, roadside, 56. crow, the, 134 ; not imported from europe, 139; 430. cry-talline botany, 156,1mb culm, bloom in the, 310. cyanometer, a, 414, 430. darby, william, quoted, 116. daybreak, 454-457. dats and nights in concord, 438 464. dogs in harness, 36, 37. dog-wood, 463. !&amp;gt;.. : .-..! . ; _ . drake, sir francis, quoted, 400. dubartas, quoted, translation of sylvester, 404. ducks, 136. &quot; each summer sound,&quot; verse, 138. k.i&amp;gt;t main, labrador and, health in the words, 128. easterbrooks country, the. 367, 372. edda, the prose, quoted, 35*. eggs, a master in cooking, 76. elm, the, 322, 323, 338, 339, 463. i emerson, george b., quoted, 245. ki.nlimi and french in the new world, 83, 84. entomology, the study of, 132, 133. evelyn, john, quoted, 381. everlasting, fragrant, 429. er oriente lux ; er occidtnte frur, ! 271. 1 experiences, the paucity of men s, !s, 296. ! eye*, the sight of different men s, 350-354. index 4(&amp;gt;7 it hill. 411. 424. fallen leave*. x 4-388. fall*, a drug --i. 7*2. finch, the, 13l ; the towee, 412. fish. *|mriiik. 17. h planer, the pickerel, , 221. .;. report, 144i. fuh-hawk. the, 1mb rg(mmft.k,s. if.wk. the, 134 ; and n** and eggm, 415. flicker, the, 137. 412, 423. i . . \ . i fog, 454, 4flo. foreign country, quickly in a, 38. i . . fortification*, ancient and modern, foi. the, 144 ; mistaken for a dog, 446. french, difficult ie. in talking, 43-45, 67; strange, 62; pure, 66; in the .-,-;. in canada, 101, 102; the, .poken ; frog., piping, 412, 413, 414, 424, frotlavrt, good place to read, 28. i fruiu at the l*le. of richelieu, 19. fur countries, inpiriug iu-i^uu&amp;gt;r hood of the, 130. garget, poke or, 311-313. (;re&amp;lt;m&amp;gt;, ttr.t flock of, 13. .. ouier, konrad von, quoted, 391. (toldflnch, the, 130. ooaw, p. a., &quot; canadian !! tot,&quot; 113. oorernment. too much, 102. gnaa, a year 1 * hutory of the, 448. .. . grvt kivit. the, or 8t, lawrence, in. ill green mountains, the, f.. 7. 124, 177, 180. traveler, quoted. 116, 117. ::.. -v. ,-.: . ,. . , gun, a rignal, 106. ony4, arnold, 11&; quoted, 116, 370. harvard (mam.). 185, 1m r fraiu-u, quoted, 58, 271. . ,k. the, 431,445. herrick, kobi-rt, 306. hickory, the, 324. h.khuu ider* inyuejie,-, 3-32, 33, 34, hi. steady .ail. in never furla,&quot; 134. hoar-fro.t, 155, 156. h.n-|,i-lka, 14, 120. 121, 123. ii .,;., h . j . : houaac mountains, 180. hop, culture of the, 167. horaea, canadian, 41. //ortm hccuj, nature in winter a, 218, 219. house, the perfect, 187. in. i &amp;gt;:.. *. 73; american compared with canadian, 124. hii.-kleu.rry bird, the, 412, 423. h.mi| m .ldt, alex. ton, 114, 115, 429. hunt house, the old, 247. h) pericum, the, 459. &quot;i the civil nun drying earth*. tear*,&quot; verne, 147. ice, the booming of, 215. ice formation, in a river-bank. i .&quot;.7. : ignorance, society for the diffusion of f~ imitations of charrtte driven, yan kee, 123. &quot; in two year. time h had thus,&quot; . . indian summer, the, of life, 448. indigo bird, the. 429. indoora, living, 254-25g. inn. inscription on wall of swedish, 173. invertebrate aninnl, mas*. re i jay, the, 134, 243. 344, 429, 400. ted, 119. jeauiu barracks, the, in quebec, : i ; . jonaon. ben, quoted. 277. joaaelyn, john, quoted, 1. kalm. bwisll.h traveler, .1;, 37. 4m, ml ; oo quebec, ll.v 468 ixdex keene (n. h.) street, 4; heads like, 5. kent, the duke of, property of, 4g. khaled, quote*!, 410. killiiiktoii peak, 6. knot-grass, 462. knowledge, the slow growth of, 1c1 ; i society for the diffusion of useful, ] 293 ; true, 294. kosauth, the excitement about, 427, 428. labrador and east main, health in the words, 128. lachine railroad depot, the, 123. lake, a woodland, iu winter, 213, 214. lake champlain, 7-9. lake bt. peter, 119, 121. lalemant, hierosine, quoted, 27. lambkih, the, 402. lancaster (mass.), 168, 170, 183. landlord, thk, 187-198. lan.llor.l, qualities of the, 188-198. la prairie (que.), 12, 13, 22, 123. lark, the, 134, 136. lead, rain of, 32. leaves, fallen, 324-332; scarlet oak, 341-344. lin.., h, (mass.), 346, 347; road, the, 449. linna iis, quoted, 272. longueil (que.), 24. lord sydenham steamer, the, 89, 118. lorette (que.), 110. london. .i.,lin ri.iu.lius, quoted, 241, 381. ludlow (vt.), 6. mcculloch s geographical diction ary, quoted, 61. m.-taggart, john, quoted, 116. mactavihh, simon, 121. map, drawing, on kitrhen table, 74 ; of canada, inspecting a, 118. maple, the red and sugar, 7 ; the red, 317-322, 325 ; the sugar, 320, 332-341. matane, paps of, 114. maranon, the river, 116. marlborough (mass.), 262 ; rod, the, 444. m.:,lo -lark*, 402. mi-rriiuark river, the. 1-1. mirhaux, andre, quoted, 2c9. mirhaux, francois andn 4 , quoted, 271 ; 320. 370. mi.liiikht.i-xpl.irinuthe, 397. milk-weed mm*, 403. miller, a crabbed, 85. milne, alexander, quoted, 236, 237. minu.ui hfttlemeuts, the, iu labra dor, 114. mimiismppi, discovery of the, 111, 112; extent of the, 116; a pano rama of the, 274. monadnock, 4, 175, 178, 180. montcalm, wolfe and, monument to, 90, 91. montmorenci county, 76, 77; the hal. ituns of, 79-84. m.mtn.orenci, falls of, 36, 46-48. mohtr.-al (que.), 10, 13; described, 17-19; the mixed population of, 21 ; from quebec to, 120 ; and its surroundings, beautiful view of, 122 ; the name of, 122. m...-m.ksht, night and, 397-409. moonlight, reading by, 178; 423, 424 ; influence of, 452. moonshine, 3u9. moore, thomas, 122. morning, winter, early, 200-203; landscape, early, 422. morton, thomas, 1. mount holly (vt.), 6. mount bofll (mnntn-al), 13. mountain*, the useof, 181, 182: and 1-lain, influence of the, 185, 180. mouse-ear, the, 431. musketaquid, prairie, or concord river, 141. musk-rat, the, 141-144. musquash, track of the, 435. mussel, the, 159. myrtle bird, the, 414. nagog pond, 447. names, poetry in, 24; of place, french, 70, 71 ; men s, 289-291 ; of colors, 335, 330. nashua river, the, 170, 185. natural histobt or mamachu. kett8, 127-162. natural history, reading books of, 127, 129. nature, health to be found in, 129; man s work the most natural, compared with that of, 146; the hand of, upon her children, 153 ; ,lil!,-rent methods of work, 154 ; the civilized look of, 172; the winter purity of. 204; a hortut gicnu in, 218, 219; men s rela/ tion to, 2% ; finding god in, 438. v nawnhawtuck hill, 384. n.-\\ liv&amp;lt;t|iool cove, 26. new things to be seen near home, index 4g9 n nlebohr, bartbold oeorg, quoted, jowph nlrfphorv, quoted, &amp;lt;xo mooxuort. 3dt mfc night, on wachuaett, 179; the mum in the, 408 ; out of door., : . j ndtecot hill, 372, 374. n ubg*,lll. not unconcerned wachuaett rear. hi* head,&quot; verae, 170. notre dm* (montreal), 13 ; a vi.it to, 14-17. notre dame dm injm, seigniory of, 119. nurve-planta, 236. xut-ltat.-h, tlu-, 134. nutull, thomaa, quoted, 136, 137, i 138, note, 411. oak, succeeding pin**, and viee \ rerw, 227, 22l, 231 ; the scarlet, 341-330; leave*, scarlet, 341-344. ogilby, america of ir.7u, t uoted, 11.: &quot;old marlborough road, the, verse, 263. orinoco, the river, 115. orleans, i*le of, 51, 61. &quot; .:. i i. 111. ort.-liu*. theatrum orbu terra rum. 111. otsian, quoted, 408. ottawa river, the, 60, 116, 122. out, the repeated, 75. palladius, quoted. 361, 378. partridge, the, 461. patent office, seeds aent by the, 248,249. peetweet, the, 419. ponobecot indians, use of musk-rat akin* by. 143. perch, the, 151. i hilip . war, king, 183. r . . . : 1, amntionlea.4tt. i . . . . . : i &quot; i rtnunn. the, 59. pluf, oak urreedinff, and riff . 227, 229, 2-tl . famil&amp;gt; . -. 297-299 ; white and pitrh, 4&. pbm-oom. gripped by iirreu. 240. pte.warbler. the, 427 plain and mounuin, life of the, iv,. 1 planta on ohm dlmmb , quebec, 33 ; and auimau which ima ob tom river, 115. platuburg(n.y.),8. 1 .. .i^nnea, 2otf. : : . , the klder, quoted, 359. plover, the, 138. i .nut l&amp;gt;-vi, by ferry to, 86 ; a night at, 88; 11&quot;. i . : ;.v. poke or garget, the, 311-313, 448. pojygala, the, 462. polygonuni arruatmn, 459. 1 vmmrttt*, 48. ponkawtaaet, 457. 1 otherie, &amp;lt;inothl, f&amp;gt;5. prairie river, mhketa.|uid or, 141. price farm road, the, 439. princeton (haw.), 175. priuoa berriea, the, 4g2. parana, the, quoted, 4&amp;lt;&amp;gt;2. purple graams, the, 3o8-317. quail, a white, 134, note. quebec (que.), 3, 24, 25 ; approach to, 26; harbor and population of, 97 ; medurvalijtm of, 28, 31 ; the citadel, 33-36; 95-100; fine view of, 61 ; remit-riiik, through st. john * gate, 6 ; lighu in the lower town, ss ; unding ajraia at, 89; walk round the upper town, 89-94 ; the walln and gat, 91,9-2; artillery barracka, 92; mounted gui.h. 4; retaurtura, 105, 106; .miery of, 108-110; origin of word, 109 ; departure from, 118. rabbit, the, 461. rainbow in fall* of the chaudiere, 87. raleigh, sir walter, quoted, 404. redwing blarkbirds 462. redwing., 431. report., man*., of alight value, 160. k-turii of spriug, venw, 135. kh.-xi , richelieu, lalea of, 119. i. . . . i i: ver, : i \. . . : . : &amp;gt; river, the how of a, 217. river-batik, ice fonuauona in a. 157, 158. rivere of hell and heaven, nam for, riviere du 8ud, the. 114. riviera more river, 70. 470 ixdex roberval, sieurde, 118, 119. robin, the, 134 ; a white, 134, note ; 414, 430. robin hood ballads, quoted, 1m, 254. rock-maple, the, 325. rouse s point (n. y.), 9. rowlaudsou, mrs., 183. st. anne, the falls of, 49 ; church of la bonne, 60; lodgings in vil lage of, 01-03; interior of the church of la bonne, 03, 64 ; falls of, described, 65-69. st. charles river, the, st. st. helen s island (montreal), 13. st. john s (que.), 10-12. st. john s river, 10. st. lawrence river, 13, 14 ; cottages along the, 25, 26 ; banks of the, above quebec, 49, 50 ; breadth of. 61 ; or great river, 111-118; old maps of, 111, 114 ; compared \\itli oth.-r rivers, 111, 114-117. st. maurice river, 116. saguenay river, 112, 116. salutations, canadian, 58. sault a la puce, riviere du, 60, sault norman, 13. sault st. louis, 13. saunter, derivation of the word, 251, 252. scarlet oak, the, 341-350. scent, aut uii.n, 449 ; more trust worthy than six lit, 400. school-house, a canadian, 57. science, the bravery of, 131, 132. scotchman dissatisfied with canada, s.ri( tures, hebrew, inadequacy of, regarding winter, 1:23, 224. sea-plants near quebec, 115. btofli the traiibportation of, by wind, 228 ; by birds, 229-231 ; by squirrels, 233-244 ; the vitality of, 245-248. se.-ii,^, individual, 350-354. s.-l.-mtes,a07. seven islands, the, 114. shadowk, the routing of, in spring, 433,434. sheep, a load of, 23. shirley (mas*.), 170. sl.rul&amp;gt;-oak8, 463. sign-language, 75, 76. sill.-ry (que.), 26. silliman, 15.-nj.iimn, quoted, 121. skating, 216. smoke, winter morning, 201 ; men from a hilltop, 212; the smell of, vx). snake, the, 152. snipc-minotiug grounds, co. snow, 221, 222; not recognized in hebrew scriptures, 223. snow-bird, the, 134. society, health not to be found in, 129. si l.lier*, english, in canada, 11, 19-21 ; in quebec, 29-33, 98jw. solomon, quoted, 357. &quot; sometimes i hear the veery s clarion,&quot; verse, 138. song-sparrow, the, 135. sounds, winter morning, 200, 202. sorel river, 9, 10. sparrow, the white-throated, 488; the field, 429. spaulding s farm, 297. spearing fish, u j l. .l. speech, country, 108. spending a day, the art of, 438. spirit, worshiping a bad, 417, 418. spring, on the concord river, 147 149. squash, the large yellow, 249. squirrel, a red, burying in 234 ; with nuts under m pine-cones stripped by the, 240; with filled cheek-pouches, 243. stars, the, 403-405. st. -ding (mass.), 172, 183. stillriver village (mass.), 185. stillwater (mass.), 184. stillwati-r, tin-. 17 j, 174. st..m i mass.), 100,444,446. strawberry hill, 447. succession of forest trees, the, as aw. sudbury (mass.), 372, 42.1, 4 jo, 444. sugar-maple, the, 332-341. sunday, keeping, 427. sunflowers, 447. sunrise, 456, 457. sunset, a remarkable, 302-304 ; on the river, 441. supper, an interruption of sunsets, 442, 443. swamp, a day to visit the, 452. tamias, the steward squirrel, 243. tavern, the gods interest in the, 187 ; compared with the chun-h, the, 198. t. -1. -ur.iph, workers on the, 443, 444. tenures, canadian, 78. &quot; the needles of the pine,&quot; verse, 163. index 471 &quot;the nv*r bwelletb more *nd mto.&quot; verse, 148. the luggih noke rurls up f roiu one deep dell.&quot; verse, 201. tv_^_.__-. ... ( 3801 . thorvau. h.-na david. 1-aves con cord for canada, 25th s.-ptember, 1850, 3; traveling outfit of, 3h ;..r montreal on return trip, 118; leaves mon treal (or h &amp;gt;ton. 123; total ex pence of canada excursion, 125; walk from conrord to wachuaett and back. 163-186 ; observation of a red squirrel, 233, 234 ; experi ence with government oojaootv seed, 249. thou diwky spirit of the wood,&quot; terse, 139. thought, the absence of, 464. r, the brown. 423. 429, 435. three riven (que.), 25, 115. three-om.k k i-our-m--, :j.v&amp;gt;. toad, ring of the, 415, 41ti, 425. tmlohii, colors on a, 419. tl of |ll 1 1, 142. . 111. 1 ,. . . .-.: h trees, canadian, 59 ; the mffos tions of, 154 ; the iiatur.il pl.uit ing of, 2-27-248 ; a town s need of, 334, 337-341 ; for season*, 339. tree-tops, things seen and found on, 300,301. troy (n. h.), 4. tupelo cliff, 441. turtle, the snapping, 182. &quot; upon th lofty elm-tree sprays,&quot; terse, 138. val carter (que.), 110. vanessa antiopa, 430. varannea, the church of, 121. veer, the, 138. the type of all growth, verennea (vt.), 8. vermin generated by men, 421. , . . : t-.. . :. ,. : il violet, the first, 411. virgil, reading, 1(9, 176. warhtuett, a view of, 160 ; range, m-eut of, 174; birds on summit of, 175; 178; an observatory, v, , losjflfi ,42! pond. 45s*. walls, quebec and oth.t, 91. walk to wachosvtt. a, 163-186. v. .--.:. r l.-r . walk mo. 251-304. walk*, not on beaten patlis, 262; ::,. dir.--tu.ii , :. tiiroua, 350; by night, 401; in drizzly weather, 459. waltham( mass.), 455. warblers, 430, 431, 432. watatic, 168, 181. &quot; we pronounce thee happy, ci cads, verse, 133. wealth, true, 416, 417. went, walking towards the, 266 269 ; general tendency towards the, 269-275 wiitraon*land, etymology of, 6. whalea in the st. lawrence, 112, 113. &quot; when winter fringes every bough,&quot; verse, 215. i &quot; where they once dug for money,&quot; verse, 2&quot; 3. ; whip-poor-will, the fir*t, 425 ; sing nu1-fore sunrii*, 455, 466. white-ash, the, 4c5. white s pond. 444. whitney, peter, quoted, 383. &quot; whoa,&quot; the crying of, to man kind, 288. wild applks, 356-908. wildnem, the neresnity of, 275-289 ; in literature, 283-286 ; in doinea i tic animals, 287 289. william henry (que.), 25. willow, &amp;lt;;..m.-ii, leaves, 327. willow bay, 415. willow-lm-fli, the, 461. wurm walk. a, 199-224. wint.-r. warmth in, 205; the woods in. jih i. 2o7 ; nature a hortut tic nu in, 218, 219 ; as represented in the almanac, 222 ; iiniored in he brew revelation, 224. v. with frontier strength ye your ground.&quot; verne. 163. , tlie circuit of this plodding life,&quot; 127. , wood-chopper, writer to be seuted as a, ib, 472 index woodehucke, 432, 433, 435. i woods in winter, the, 20c, 207 ..iu, hut aiid work of a, 210wordsworth, reading, it. 212. woodpecker, the, 412, 429: pigeon, 414, 437. wood-thrush, the, 429. t:. wormwood, the roman, 447. tanb in canada, a, 1-125. &quot; yorrick,&quot; the, 138, uote. return circulation department 202 main library 1 \j m *-\s* loan period 1 2 3 home use . . 4 5 6 all books may be recalled after 7 days renewals and recharge, may be made 4 day, prior to the due date books may be renewed by calling 642-3405 due as stamped below auto disc cir form no. dd6 university of california, berkeley berkeley, ca 94720 -v m 8/61 fofci i u c berkeley libraries .4 .,1&amp;gt;c the university of california ubrary berk ?. i e y\ library university of i california/ the library of the university of california in memory of john debo galloway and his daughter bertha galloway foster riverside edition i. a week on the concord and merr! mack rivers. ii. walden; or, life in the woods. iii. the maine woods. iv. cape cod. v. early spring in massachusetts. vi. summer. with a map of concord. vii. autumn. viii. winter. ix. excursions. x. miscellanies. with a biographical sketch by ralph waldo emerson. xi. familiar letters. edited, with an intro duction and notes, by frank b. sanborn. the same. riverside pocket edition, n vols. flex ible leather. notes on new england birds. edited by f. h. allen. walden ; or, life in twe woods holiday edition. with an introduction by bradford torrey, and 28 full-page photogravure illustrations. the same. cambridge classics. with a biographical sketch by ralph waldo emerson. the same. riverside a idine series. 2 vols. thoreau s thoughts. selections from the writ ings of henry d. thoreau. edited by h. g. o. blakb. with bibliography. houghton mifflin company boston and naw york edition the writings of henry david thoreau with bibliographical introductions and full indexes volume i a week on the concord and merrimack rivers by henry david thoreau boston and new york houghton mifflin company ftfcetffte prcjtf cambciboe copyright, 1867, by tickffor and fields. copyright, 1893, by houghton, mifflin & co. all rights reserved. publishers advertisement two only of thoreau s books were published during his lifetime, although a number of the papers afterward collected into volumes were printed by him in magazines. the volumes succeeding a week on the concord and merri mack rivers and walden were composed of papers grouped according to convenience at the time. later, mr. h. g. o. blake drew from thoreau s manuscript journals the four volumes corresponding to the seasons. with the publi cation of autumn the entire series of thoreau s works acquires a certain completeness, and the opportunity therefore arises for a new and uni form edition of his writings on the same general plan as that followed with the works of longfel low, hawthorne, lowell, emerson, whittier, and holmes. the present edition contains not only all that has heretofore been published in the volumes under thoreau s name, but papers also not here tofore included. since it has been necessary to make the older books anew, it has been thought advisable to bring the groups into better har vi publishers advertisement mony. a yankee in canada, therefore, has been grouped under the head of excursions^ and the miscellaneous papers, new and old, have been brought into one volume, to which also mr. emerson s biographical sketch is prefixed. wherever there are interesting facts to be noted regarding the writings they are presented in introductory notes. each volume is provided with a separate index, and a general index in the tenth volume brings together references to thoreau s scattered observations. care has been taken also to verify, whenever it has been possible, the many poetical quotations. four portraits, each a distinct contribution to a knowledge of thoreau s appearance, accom pany the edition. the origin of each is ex plained in a prefatory note to the volume con taining it. boston : 4 park street, september, 1893. contents [the sub-titles under each division are of thoreau s poems and snatches of verse therein included.] introductory note . . . i* concord river . 3 &quot; the respectable folks &quot; ..... 8 saturday 15 &quot; ah, tis in vain the peaceful din &quot; . . . 18 &quot; here then an aged shepherd dwelt &quot; . . .19 &quot; on ponkawtasset, since we took our way &quot; . 20 sunday 53 &quot; an early unconverted saint &quot; .... 53 &quot; low in the eastern sky &quot; . . . . . .58 &quot; dong, sounds the brass in the east &quot; . . 62 * greece, who am i that should remember thee &quot; . 68 &quot; some tumultuous little rill &quot; , ... . 77 &quot; i make ye an offer &quot; . . . . . .86 &quot; conscience is instinct bred in the house &quot; . 94 &quot;such water do the gods distill&quot; . . . .107 &quot;that phaeton of our day&quot; . . . . .128 monday 151 &quot; though all the fates should prove unkind &quot; . 189 mountains . . . . . . . 212 &quot; the western wind came lumbering in &quot; . . 224 &quot; then idle time ran gadding by &quot; . . . . 226 &quot; now chiefly is my natal hour &quot; . . . . 226 rumors from an ^eolian harp .... 229 &quot; away ! away ! away ! away ! &quot; . . . . 231 viii contents tuesday 233 &quot; ply the oars ! away ! away ! &quot; . . . 234 &quot; since that first * away ! away 1 &quot; . . . . 248 mist 249 &quot; man s little acts are grand &quot; 279 &quot; the waves slowly beat &quot; 284 haze 284 &quot; where gleamingfields of haze &quot; . . . . 290 translations from anacreon .... 298 &quot; thus, perchance, the indian hunter &quot; . . . 306 wednesday 309 the fisher s boy 317 &quot; this is my carnac, whose unmeasured dome &quot; . 331 rt true kindness is a pure divine affinity &quot; . . 342 sympathy 343 the atlantides 345 &quot; my love must be as free &quot; 369 &quot; the good how can we trust ? &quot; . . . . 371 &quot; nature doth have her dawn each day &quot; . . . 375 friends, romans, countrymen, and lovers . 379 the inward morning 388 thursday 393 &quot; my books i d fain cast off, i cannot read &quot; . . 397 friday , ... 441 the poet s delay 453 &quot; i hearing get who had but ears &quot;... 460 &quot; men dig and dive but cannot my wealth spend &quot; . 462 &quot; salmon brook &quot; 463 &quot; oft, as i turn me on my pillow o er &quot;... 474 &quot; i am the antumnal sun &quot;..... 499 &quot; a finer race and finer fed &quot;..... 503 &quot; i am a parcel of vain strivings tied &quot; . . . 506 &quot; all things are current found &quot; . . . .512 *#* the portrait prefacing this volume is from the crayon by s. w. rowse in 1854, preserved in the public library of concord. a week on the concord and merrimack rivers introductory note it was in august and september, 1839, as the chronicle notes, that the voyage here re corded was made. thoreau was just past his twenty-second birthday ; he had been two years out of college, and though he had thus far printed nothing, he had already, four years before, be gun that practice of noting his experience, ob servation, and reflection in a diary which he continued through life, so that not only did his journals furnish him with the first draft of what he published in his lifetime, but they formed a magazine from which, after his death, friendly editors drew successive volumes. the week is much more than a mere re production of his journal during the period under consideration. it was not published as a book until 1849, ten years after the excursion which it commemorated; but in its final form were inclosed many verses and some prose pas sages which had already appeared in the short x a week on the lived historic tfie dial. it will be remem bered that thoreau was not only a contributor to that periodical from the beginning, but for a while had editorial charge of it; the editing, in deed, seemed to be handed about from one to another of the circle most concerned in its issue. thus in the first number, july, 1840, appeared the excursus on aulus persius flaccus, printed in the week, pp. 405-412. so, also, his poems on friendship saw the light first in the second number of the dial, and there also appeared the poems the inward morning, the poet s delay, rumors from an ^olian harp, and others, as well as the study of anacreon, with examples in translation. it is easy for the reader to see that the week is thoreau s com monplace book as well as journal. he was living in his hut on walden pond when he edited his manuscripts for publication in book form, and alcott visiting him one even ing there heard him read some passages from the work. it is interesting to observe how im mediately this man of fine instincts perceived the worth of what had as yet struck his ear only, listening as a friend. &quot;the book,&quot; he writes in his diary, &quot;is purely american, fra grant with the life of new england woods and streams, and could have been written nowhere else. especially am i touched by his suffi concord and merrimack rivers xi ciency and soundness, his aboriginal vigor, as if a man had once more come into nature who knew what nature meant him to do with her; virgil and &quot;white of selborne, and izaak wnlfrmj gfld yar&amp;gt;keg^settler all in one. i came home at midnight through the snowy wood paths, and slept with the pleasing dream that presently the press would give me two books to be proud of, emerson s poems and tho reau s week.&quot;* this was written in march, 1847, and tho reau was probably just about to try the publish ers, if his manuscript were not even now resting in his hut from one of its journeys. for in a letter to emerson, at that time in england, written november 14, 1847, thoreau says, &quot;i suppose you will like to hear of my book, though i have nothing worth writing about it. indeed, for the last month or two, i have forgotten it, but shall certainly remember it again. wiley & putnam, munroe, the harpers, and crosby & nichols, have all declined printing it with the least risk to themselves; but wiley & putnam will print it in their series, and any of them anywhere, at my risk. if i liked the book well enough, i should not delay; but for the present i am indifferent. i believe this is, after all, 1 a. bronson alcott ; his life and philosophy. by f. b. sanborn and william t. harris, p. 446. xii a week on the the course you advised, to let it lie.&quot; 1 ap parently he used the opportunity of having it by him to touch it up now and then, for in a letter to mr. j. elliot cabot, written in march, 1848, he says: &quot;my book, fortunately, did not find a publisher ready to undertake it, and you can imagine the effect of delay on an author s esti mate of his own work. however, i like it well enough to mend it, and shall look at it again, directly when i have dispatched some other things.&quot; 2 the essay on friendship which pre cedes the poem friends, romans, country men, and lovers, already referred to, appears to have been written at this time, for mr. alcott in his diary, under date of january 13, 1848, notes : henry thoreau came in after my hours with the children, and we had a good deal of talk on the modes of popular influence. he read me a manuscript essay of his on frien4^ ship v which he had just written, and wmch i thought superior to anything i had heard.&quot; 3 apparently thoreau was convinced of the impossibility of persuading any publisher to take the book at his own risk, and was suffi ciently confident of the worth of the volume to 1 the emerson thoreau correspondence in the atlantic monthly, june, 1892. 2 ibid. 3 henry d. thoreau. by f. b. sauborn [american men of letters], p. 304. concord and merrimack rivers xni bear the expense of publication himself, al though to do this he was obliged to borrow money, and, since the book did not meet its ex penses, afterward to take up the occupation of surveying in order to cancel his obligation. the book was published by james munroe & co., boston and cambridge, apparently in the summer of 1849. mr. george kipley wrote a kindly notice of it in the tribune, and james russell lowell reviewed it in a dozen pages in the massachusetts quarterly review for de cember of the same year. with his own cun ning in literary art he quickly divined the in terior structure of the week. &quot;the great charm,&quot; he says, &quot;of mr. thoreau s book seems to be that its being a book at all is a happy fortuity. the door of the portfolio cage has been left open, and the thoughts have flown out of themselves. the paper and types are only accidents. the page is confidential like a diary. . . . he begins honestly enough as the boswell of musketaquid and merrimack. . . . as long as he continues an honest boswell, his book is delightful, but sometimes he serves his two rivers as hazlitt did northcote, and makes them run thoreau or emerson or indeed any thing but their own transparent element. . . we have digressions on boodh, on aiiacreon (with translations hardly so good as cowley), xiv a week on the on persius, on friendship, and we know not what. we come upon them like snags, jolting us headforemost out of our places as we are row ing placidly up stream, or drifting down. mr. thoreau becomes so absorbed in these discus sions that he seems as it were to catch a crab and disappears uncomfortably from his seat at the bow oar. we could forgive them all, espe cially that on books and that on friendship (which is worthy of one who has so long com muned with nature and with emerson), we could welcome them all were they put by them selves at the end of the book. but, as it is, they are out of proportion and out of place and mar our merrimacking dreadfully. we were bid to a river-party, not to be preached at.&quot; after distributing praise and blame over the poetical interludes, lowell closes his review with the words: &quot;since we have found fault with what we may be allowed to call worsification, we should say that the prose work is done con scientiously and neatly. the style is compact, and the language has an antique purity like wine grown colorless with age.&quot; in spite of the generous reception which the book had thus at the hands of men like alcott, ripley, and lowell, the public was indifferent enough. thoreau recounts the issue of the venture with grim humor in an entry in his concord and merrimack rivers xv diary, october 28, 1853, after the book had been in the bookstores for four years. &quot; for a year or two past my publisher, falsely so called, has been writing from time to time to ask what disposition should be made of the copies of a. week, on the concord and merrimack rivers still on hand, and at last suggesting that he had use for the room they occupied in his cellar. so i had them all sent to me here, and they have arrived to-day by express, filling the man s wagon, 706 copies out of an edition of 1000, which i bought of munroe four years ago, and have been ever since paying for, and have not quite paid for yet. the wares are sent to me at last, and i have an opportunity to examine my purchase. they are something more sub stantial than fame, as my back knows, which has borne them up two flights of stairs to a place similar to that to which they trace their origin. &quot;of the remaining 290 and odd, 75 were given away, the rest sold. i have now a library of nearly 900 volumes, over 700 of which i wrote myself. is it not well that the author should behold the fruits of his labor? my works are piled up on one side of my chamber half as high as my head, my opera omnia. this is authorship, these are the work of my brain. there was just one piece of good luck in the kvi a week on the venture. the unbound were tied up by the printer four years ago in stout paper wrappers, and inscribed, &quot;h. d. thoreau, concord river. 50 cops., so munroe had only to cross out river and write mass., and deliver them to the express man at once. i can see now what i write for, the result of my labors. nevertheless, in spite of this result, sitting beside the inert mass of my works, i take up my pen to-night to record what thought or experience i may have had, with as much satisfaction as ever. indeed, i believe that this result is more inspiring and better for me than if a thousand had bought my wares. it affects my privacy less and leaves me freer.&quot; l we have quoted from the judgments of alcott and lowell on the book because one is curious to know how the contemporaries of thoreau regarded his work; later critics have the advantage and disadvantage of seeing such writing through an atmosphere charged with many men s breathing of criticism and appre ciation. lowell himself, when he returned to thoreau sixteen years later, had in a measure 1 autumn : from the journal of henry d. thoreau, pp. 163, 104. concord and merrimack rivers xvn re-formed his appreciation. but, after all, no judgment of an author is quite so interesting as that which the author himself passes, even though one has to correct this estimate by other observations on the author and his work. at any rate, thoreau shall be the last here to com ment on this book : &quot;i thought that one peculiarity of my week was its hypsethral character, to use an epithet applied to those egyptian temples which are open to the heavens above, under the ether. i thought that it had little of the atmosphere of the house about it, but it might have been written wholly, as in fact it was to a great ex tent, out of doors. it was only at a late period in writing it, as it happened, that i used any phrases implying that i lived in a house or led a domestic life. i trust it does not smell so much of the study and library, even of the poet s attic, as of the fields and woods, that it is a hypaethral or unroofed book, lying open under the ether, and permeated by it, open to all weathers, not easy to be kept on a shelf.&quot; l l summer : from the journal of henry d. thoreau, p. 261. a week on the concord and merkimack rivers where er thou sail st who sailed with me, though now thou climbest loftier mounts, and fairer rivers dost ascend, be thou my muse, my brother . i am bound, i am bound, for a distant shore. by a lonely isle, by a far azore, there it is, there it is, the treasure i seek, on the barren sands of a desolate creek. i sailed up a river with a pleasant wind, new lands, new people, and new thoughts to find ; many fair reaches and headlands appeared, and many dangers were there to be feared ; but when i remember where i have been, and the fair landscapes that i have seen, thou seemest the only permanent shore, the cape never rounded, nor wandered o er. fluminaque obliquis cinxit declivia ripis ; qua$, diversa locis, partim sorbentur ab ipsa ; in mare perveniunt partim, campoque recepta liberioris aquae pro ripis litora pulsant. he confined the rivers within their sloping banks, which in different places are part absorbed by the earth, part reach the sea, and being received within the plain of its freer waters, beat the shore for banks. ovid, met. l 39. concord river. beneath low hills, in the broad interval through which at will our indian rivulet winds mindful still of sannup and of squaw, whose pipe and arrow oft the plough unburies, here, in pine houses, built of new-fallen trees, bupplanters of the tribe, the farmers dwell.&quot; emebson. the musketaquid, or grass-ground river, though probably as old as the nile or eu phrates, did not begin to have a place in civil ized history until the fame of its grassy mea dows and its fish attracted settlers out of eng land in 1635, when it received the other but kindred name of concord from the first planta tion on its banks, which appears to have been commenced in a spirit of peace and harmony. it will be grass-ground river as long as grass grows and water runs here ; it will be concord river only while men lead peaceable lives on its banks. to an extinct race it was grass-ground, where they hunted and fished; and it is still perennial grass-ground to concord farmers, who own the great meadows, and get the hay from year to year. &quot;one branch of it,&quot; according 4 concord river to the historian of concord, for i love to quote so good authority, &quot;rises in the south part of hopkinton, and another from a pond and a large cedar-swamp in westborough,&quot; and flow ing between hopkinton and southborough, through framingham, and between sudbury and wayland, where it is sometimes called sudbury river, it enters concord at the south part of the town, and after receiving the north or assabeth river, which has its source a little farther to the north and west, goes out at the northeast angle, and flowing between bedford and carlisle, and through billerica, empties into the merrimack at lowell. in concord, it is in summer from four to fifteen feet deep, and from one hundred to three hundred feet wide, but in the spring freshets, when it over flows its banks, it is in some places nearly a mile wide. between sudbury and wayland the meadows acquire their greatest breadth, and when covered with water, they form a handsome chain of shallow vernal lakes, re sorted to by numerous gulls and ducks. just above sherman s bridge, between these towns, is the largest expanse ; and when the wind blows freshly in a raw march day, heaving up the surface into dark and sober billows or regular swells, skirted as it is in the distance with alder bwamps and smoke-like maples, it looks like a concord river 5 smaller lake huron, and is very pleasant and exciting for a landsman to row or sail over. the farm-houses along the sudbury shore, which rises gently to a considerable height, command fine water prospects at this season. the shore is more flat on the wayland side, and this town is the greatest loser by the flood. its farmers tell me that thousands of acres are flooded now, since the dams have been erected, where they remember to have seen the white honeysuckle or clover growing once, and they could go dry with shoes only in summer. now there is nothing but blue-joint and sedge and cut-grass there, standing in water all the year round. for a long time, they made the most of the driest season to get their hay, working sometimes till nine o clock at night, sedulously paring with their scythes in the twilight round the hummocks left by the ice ; but now it is not worth the getting when they can come at it, and they look sadly round to their wood-lots and upland as a last resource. it is worth the while to make a voyage up this stream, if you go no farther than sudbury, only to see how much country there is in the rear of us : great hills, and a hundred brooks, and farm-houses, and barns, and haystacks, you never saw before, and men everywhere ; sudbury, that is soutjiborough men, and way 6 concord river land, and nine-acre-corner men, and bound rock, where four towns bound on a rock in the river, lincoln, wayland, sudbury, concord. many waves are there agitated by the wind, keeping nature fresh, the spray blowing in your face, reeds and rushes waving; ducks by the hundred, all uneasy in the surf, in the raw wind, just ready to rise, and now going off with a clatter and a whistling like riggers straight for labrador, flying against the stiff gale with reefed wings, or else circling round first, with all their paddles briskly moving, just over the surf, to reconnoitre you before they leave these parts ; gulls wheeling overhead, muskrats swim ming for dear life, wet and cold, with no fire to warm them by that you know of, their labored homes rising here and there like haystacks ; and countless mice and moles and winged titmice along the sunny, windy shore ; cranberries tossed on the waves and heaving up on the beach, their little red skiffs beating about among the alders ; such healthy natural tumult as proves .the jast day is not yet at hand. and there stand all around the alders, and birches, and oaks, and maples full of glee and sap, holding in their buds until the waters subside. you shall perhaps run aground on cranberry island, only some spires of last year s pipe-grass above water to show where the danger is, and get as concord river 1 good a freezing there as anywhere on the north west coast. i never voyaged so far in all my life. you shall see men you never heard of before, whose names you don t know, going away down through the meadows with long ducking-guns, with water-tight boots wading through the fowl-meadow grass, on bleak, win try, distant shores, with guns at half-cock ; and they shall see teal, blue-winged, green-winged, shelldrakes, whistlers, black ducks, ospreys, and many other wild and noble sights before night, such as they who sit in parlors never dream of. you shall see rude and sturdy, ex perienced and wise men, keeping their castles, or teaming up their summer s wood, or chop ping alone in the woods ; men fuller of talk and rare adventure in the sun and wind and rain, than a chestnut is of meat, who were out not only in 75 and 1812, but have been out every day of their lives ; greater men than homer, or chaucer, or shakespeare, only they never got time to say so ; they never took to the way of writing. look at their fields, and imagine what they might write, if ever they should put pen to paper. or what have they not written on the face of the earth already, clearing, and burning, and scratching, and harrowing, and ploughing, and subsoiling, in and in, and out and out, and over and over, again and again, i 8 concord river erasing what they had already written for want of parchment. as yesterday and the historical ages are past, as the work of to-day is present, so some flit ting perspectives and demi -experiences of the life that is in nature are in time veritably future, or rather outside to time, perennial, young, divine, in the wind and rain which never die. the respectable folks, where dwell they ? they whisper in the oaks, and they sigh in the hay ; summer and winter, night and day, out on the meadow, there dwell they. they never die, nor snivel nor cry, nor ask our pity with a wet eye. a sound estate they ever mend, to every asker readily lend ; to the ocean wealth, to the meadow health, to time his length, to the rocks strength, to the stars light, to the weary night, to the busy day, to the idle play ; and so their good cheer never ends, for all are their debtors, and ajl their friends. concord kiver is remarkable for the gentle ness of its current, which is scarcely percepti concord river 9 ble, and some have referred to its influence the proverbial moderation of the inhabitants of concord, as exhibited in the revolution, and on later occasions. it has been proposed that the town should adopt for its coat of arms a field verdant, with the concord circling nine times round. i have read that a descent of ar eighth of an inch in a mile is sufficient to pro duce a flow. our river has, probably, very near the smallest allowance. the story is cur rent, at any rate, though i believe that strict history will not bear it out, that the only bridge ever carried away on the main branch, within the limits of the town, was driven upstream by the wind. but wherever it makes a sudden bend it is shallower and swifter, and asserts its title to be called a river. compared with the other tributaries of the merrimack, it appears to have been properly named musketaquid, or meadow river, by the indians. for the most part, it creeps through broad meadows, adorned with scattered oaks, where the cranberry is found in abundance, covering the ground like a moss-bed. a row of sunken dwarf willows bor ders the stream on one or both sides, while at a greater distance the meadow is skirted with maples, alders, and other fluviatilo trees, over run with the grape-vine, which bears fruit in its season, purple, red, white, and other grapes 10 concord river still farther from the stream, on the edge of the firm land, are seen the gray and white dwellings of the inhabitants. according to the valuation of 1831, there were in concord two thousand one hundred and eleven acres, or about one seventh of the whole territory, in mea dow; this standing next in the list after pas turage and unimproved lands; and, judging from the returns of previous years, the meadow is not reclaimed so fast as the woods are cleared. let us here read what old johnson says of these meadows in his &quot; wonderworking provi dence,&quot; which gives the account of new eng land from 1628 to 1652, and see how matters looked to him. he says of the twelfth church of christ gathered at concord: &quot;this town is seated upon a fair fresh river, whose rivulets are filled with fresh marsh, and her streams with fish, it being a branch of that large river of merrimack. allwifes and shad in their sea son come up to this town, but salmon and dace cannot come up, by reason of the rocky falls, which causeth their meadows to lie much cov ered with water, the which these people, to gether with their neighbor town, have several times essayed to cut through but cannot, yet it may be turned another way with an hundred pound charge as it appeared.&quot; as to their farming he says: &quot;having laid out their estate concord river 11 upon cattle at 5 to 20 pound a cow, when they came to winter them with inland hay, and feed upon such wild fother as was never cut before, they could not hold out the winter, but, ordina rily the first or second year after their coming up to a new plantation, many of their cattle died.&quot; and this from the same author: &quot;of the planting of the 19th church in the matta chusets government, called sudbury:&quot; &quot;this year [does he mean 1654 ?] the town and church of christ at sudbury began to have the first foundation stones laid, taking up her station in the inland country, as her elder sister concord had formerly done, lying further up the same river, being furnished with great plenty of fresh marsh, but, it lying very low is much indam aged with land floods, insomuch that when the summer proves wet they lose part of their hay ; yet are they so sufficiently provided that they take in cattle of other towns to winter.&quot; the sluggish artery of the concord meadows steals thus unobserved through the town, with out a murmur or a pulse -beat, its general course from southwest to northeast, and its length about fifty miles; a huge volume of matter, ceaselessly rolling through the plains and val leys of the substantial earth with the mocca sined tread of an indian warrior, making haste from the high places of the earth to its ancient 12 concord river reservoir. the murmurs of many a famous river on the other side of the globe reach even to us here, as to more distant dwellers on its banks; many a poet s stream, floating the helms and shields of heroes on its bosom. the xan thus or scamander is not a mere dry channel and bed of a mountain torrent, but fed by the ever-flowing springs of fame : &quot; and thou simois, that as an arrowe, clere through troy rennest, aie downward to the sea ; &quot; and i trust that i may be allowed to associate our muddy but much abused concord eiver with the most famous in history. &quot; sure there are poets which did never dream upon parnassus, nor did taste the stream of helicon ; we therefore may suppose those made not poets, but the poets those.&quot; the mississippi, the ganges, and the nile, those journeying atoms from the rocky moun tains, the himmaleh, and mountains of the moon, have a kind of personal importance in the annals of the world. the heavens are not yet drained over their sources, but the moun tains of the moon still send their annual tribute to the pasha without fail, as they did to the pharaohs, though he must collect the rest of his revenue at the point of the sword. rivers must have been the guides which conducted the foot steps of the first travelers. they are the con concord river 13 stant lure, when they flow by our doors, to dis tant enterprise and adventure ; and, by a natu ral impulse, the dwellers on their banks will at length accompany their currents to the lowlands of the globe, or explore at their invitation the interior of continents. they are the natural highways of all nations, not only leveling the ground and removing obstacles from the path of the traveler, quenching his thirst and bear ing him on their bosoms, but conducting him through the most interesting scenery, the most populous portions of the globe, and where the animal and vegetable kingdoms attain their greatest perfection. i had often stood on the banks of the con cord, watching the lapse of the current, an em blem of all progress, following the same law with the system, with time, and all that is made ; the weeds at the bottom gently bending down the stream, shaken by the watery wind, still planted where their seeds had sunk, but erelong to die and go down likewise ; the shining peb bles, not yet anxious to better their condition, the chips and weeds, and occasional logs and stems of trees that floated past, fulfilling their ;ate, were objects of singular interest to me, and at last i resolved to launch myself on its bosom and float whither it would bear me. satukday. come, come, my lovely fair, and let us try those rural delicacies.&quot; quaklks, christ s invitation to the soul. at length, on saturday, the last day of au gust, 1839, we two, brothers, and natives of concord, weighed anchor in this river port ; for concord, too, lies under the sun, a port of entry and departure for the bodies as well as the souls of men; one shore at least exempted from all duties but such as an honest man will gladly discharge. a warm, drizzling rain had obscured the morning, and threatened to delay our voy age, but at length the leaves and grass were dried, and it came out a mild afternoon, as se rene and fresh as if nature were maturing some greater scheme of her own. after this long dripping and oozing from every pore, she began to respire again more healthily than ever. so with a vigorous shove we launched our boat from the bank, while the flags and bulrushes courtesied a god-speed, and dropped silently down the stream. our boat, which had cost us a week s labor in the spring, was in form like a fisherman s 16 a week dory, fifteen feet long by three and a half in breadth at the widest part, painted green below, with a border of blue, with reference to the two elements in which it was to spend its existence. it had been loaded the evening before at our door, half a mile from the river, with potatoes and melons from a patch which we had culti vated, and a few utensils; and was provided with wheels in order to be rolled around falls, as well as with two sets of oars, and several slender poles for shoving in shallow places, and also two masts, one of which served for a tent pole at night ; for a buffalo-skin was to be our bed, and a tent of cotton cloth our roof. it was strongly built, but heavy, and hardly of better model than usual. if rightly made, a&quot;\ boat would be a sort of amphibious animal, a j creature of two elements, related by one half its i structure to some swift and shapely fish, and by \ the other to some strong-winged and graceful bird. the fish shows where there should be the greatest breadth of beam and depth in the hold ; its fins direct where to set the oars, and the tail gives some hint for the form and position of the rudder. the bird shows how to rig and trim the sails, and what form to give to the prow, that it may balance the boat and divide the air and water best. these hints we had but par tially obeyed. but the eyes, though they are saturday 17 no sailors, will never be satisfied with any model, however fashionable, which does not answer all the requisitions of art. however, as art is all of a ship but the wood, and yet the wood alone will rudely serve the purpose of a ship, so our boat, being of wood, gladly availed itself of the old law that the heavier shall float the lighter, and though a dull water-fowl, proved a suffi cient buoy for our purpose. &quot; were it the will of heaven, an osier bough were vessel safe enough the seas to plough.&quot; some village friends stood upon a promontory lower down the stream to wave us a last fare well; but we, having already performed these shore rites, with excusable reserve, as befits those who are embarked on unusual enterprises, who behold but speak not, silently glided past the firm lands of concord, both peopled cape and lonely summer meadow, with steady sweeps. and yet we did unbend so far as to let our guns or 11 gj when at length we had swept out of sight, and thus left the woods to ring again with their echoes; and it may be many russet clad children, lurking in those broad meadows, with the bittern and the woodcock and the rail, though wholly concealed by brakes and hard hack and meadow-sweet, heard our salute that afternoon. we were soon floating past the first regular 18 a week battle-ground of the revolution, resting on our oars between the still visible abutments of that &quot;north bridge,&quot; over which in april, 1775, rolled the first faint tide of that war which ceased not, till, as we read on the stone on our right, it &quot;gave peace to these united states.&quot; as a concord poet has sung : &quot; by the rude bridge that arched the flood, their flag to april s breeze unfurled, here once the embattled farmers stood, and fired the shot heard round the world. &quot; the foe long since in silence slept ; alike the conqueror silent sleeps ; and time the ruined bridge has swept down the dark stream which seaward creeps/ our reflections had already acquired a histor ical remoteness from the scenes we had left, and we ourselves essayed to sing : ah, t is in vain the peaceful din that wakes the ignoble town, not thus did braver spirits win a patriot s renown. there is one field beside this stream wherein no foot does fall, but yet it beareth in my dream a richer crop than all. let me believe a dream so dear, some heart beat high that day, above the petty province here, and britain far away ; saturday 19 some hero of the ancient mould, some arm of knightly worth, of strength unbought, and faith unsold, honored this spot of earth ; who sought the prize his heart described, and did not ask release, whose free-born valor was not bribed by prospect of a peace. the men who stood on yonder height that day are long since gone ; not the same hand directs the fight and monumental stone. ye were the grecian cities then, the romes of modern birth, where the new england husbandmen have shown a roman worth. in vain i search a foreign land to find our bunker hill, and lexington and concord stand by no laconiau rill, with such thoughts we swept gently by this now peaceful pasture-ground, on waves of con cord, in which was long since drowned the din of war. but since we sailed some things have failed, and many a dream gone down the stream. here then an aged shepherd dwelt, who to his flock his substance dealt, and ruled them with a vigorous crook. by precept of the sacred book ; 20 a week but he the pierless bridge passed o er, and solitary left the shore. anon a youthful pastor came, whose crook was not unknown to fame, hjsjaiabs he viewed with gentle glance, spread o er the country s wide expanse, and fed with &quot; mosses from the manse.&quot; here was our hawthorne in the dale, and here the shepherd told his tale. that slight shaft had now sunk behind the hills, and we had floated round the neighboring bend, and under the new north bridge between ponkawtasset and the poplar hill, into the great meadows, which, like a broad moccasin print, have leveled a fertile and juicy place in nature. on ponkawtasset, since we took our way down this still stream to far billericay, a poet wise has settled, whose fine ray doth often shine on concord s twilight day. like those first stars, whose silver beams on high, shining more brightly as the day goes by, most travelers cannot at first descry, but eyes that wont to range the evening sky, and know celestial lights, do plainly see, and gladly hail them, numbering two or three ; for lore that s deep must deeply studied be, as from deep wells men read star-poetry. these stars are never paled, though out of sight, but like the sun they shine forever bright; saturday 21 ay, they are suns, though earth must in its flight put out its eyes that it may see their light. who would neglect the least celestial sound, or faintest light that falls on earthly ground, if he could know it one day would be found that star in cygnus whither we are bound, and pale our sun with heavenly radiance round ? gradually the village murmur subsided, and we seemed to be embarked on the placid current of our dreams, floating from past to future as silently as one awakes to fresh morning or even ing thoughts. we glided noiselessly down the stream, occasionally driving a pickerel or a bream from the covert of the pads, and the smaller bittern now and then sailed away on sluggish wings from some recess in the shore, or the larger lifted itself out of the long grass at our approach, and carried its precious legs away to deposit them in a place of safety. the tortoises also rapidly dropped into the water, as our boat ruffled the surface amid the wil lows, breaking the reflections of the trees. the banks had passed the height of their beauty, and some of the brighter flowers showed by their faded tints that the season was verging towards the afternoon of the year; but this sombre tinge enhanced their sincerity, and in the still unabated heats they seemed like the mossy brink of some cool well. the narrow 22 a week leaved willow (salix purshiana) lay along the surface of the water in masses of light green foliage, interspersed with the large balls of the button-bush. the small rose-colored polygonum raised its head proudly above the water on either hand, and flowering at this season and in these localities, in front of dense fields of the white species which skirted the sides of the stream, its little streak of red looked very rare and precious. the pure white blossoms of the arrow-head stood in the shallower parts, and a few cardinals on the margin still proudly sur veyed themselves reflected in the water, though the latter, as well as the pickerel-weed, was now nearly out of blossom. the snake-head ( che lone glabrd) grew close to the shore, while a kind of coreopsis, turning its brazen face to the sun, full and rank, and a tall, dull red flower (jeupatorium purpureum, or trumpet weed) formed the rear rank of the fluvial array. the bright blue flowers of the soapwort gentian were sprinkled here and there in the adjacent meadows, like flowers which proserpine had dropped, and still farther in the fields or higher on the bank were seen the purple gerardia, the virginian rhexia, and drooping neottia or la dies -tresses; while from the more distant way sides which we occasionally passed, and banks where the sun had lodged, was reflected still a saturday 23 dull yellow beam from the ranks of tansy, now past its prime. in short, nature seemed to have adorned herself for our departure with a profusion of fringes and curls, mingled with the bright tints of flowers, reflected in the water. but we missed the white water-lily, which is the queen of river flowers, its reign being over for this season. he makes his voyage too late, perhaps, by a true water clock who delays so long. many of this species inhabit our con cord water. i have passed down the river be fore sunrise on a summer morning, between fields of lilies still shut in sleep ; and when, at length, the flakes of sunlight from over the bank fell on the surface of the water, whole fields of white blossoms seemed to flash open before me, as i floated along, like the unfolding of a banner, so sensible is this flower to the influence of the sun s rays. as we were floating through the last of these familiar meadows, we observed the large and conspicuous flowers of the hibiscus, covering the dwarf willows and mingled with the leaves of the grape, and wished that we could inform one of our friends behind of the locality of this somewhat rare and inaccessible flower before it was too late to pluck it ; but we were just glid ing out of sight of the village spire before it occurred to us that the farmer in the adjacent 24 a week meadow would go to church on the morrow, and would carry this news for us; and so by the monday, while we should be floating on the merrimack, our friend would be reaching to pluck this blossom on the bank of the concord. after a pause at ball s hill, the st. ann s of concord voyageurs, not to say any prayer for the success of our voyage, but to gather the few berries which were still left on the hills, hanging by very slender threads, we weighed anchor again, and were soon out of sight of our native village. the land seemed to grow fairer as we withdrew from it. far away to the southwest lay the quiet village, left alone under its elms and button woods in mid-afternoon ; and the hills, notwithstanding their blue, ethereal faces, seemed to cast a saddened eye on their old playfellows ; but, turning short to the north, we bade adieu to their familiar outlines, and addressed ourselves to new scenes and adven tures. naught was familiar but the heavens, from under whose roof the voyageur nevei passes; but with their countenance, and the acquaintance we had with river and wood, we trusted to fare well under any circumstances. from this point the river runs perfectly straight for a mile or more to carlisle bridge, which consists of twenty wooden piers, and when we looked back over it, its surface was saturday 25 reduced to a line s breadth, and appeared like a cobweb gleaming in the sun. here and there might be seen a pole sticking up, to mark the place where some fisherman had enjoyed unusual luck, and in return had consecrated his rod to the deities who preside over these shallows. it was full twice as broad as before, deep and tranquil, with a muddy bottom, and bordered with willows, beyond which spread broad la goons covered with pads, bulrushes, and flags. late in the afternoon we passed a man on the shore fishing with a long birch pole, its silvery bark left on, and a dog at his side, rowing so near as to agitate his cork with our oars, and drive away luck for a season ; and when we had rowed a mile as straight as an arrow, with our faces turned towards him, and the bubbles in our wake still visible on the tranquil surface, there stood the fisher still with his dog, like statues under the other side of the heavens, the only objects to relieve the eye in the extended meadow ; and there would he stand abiding his luck, till he took his way home through the fields at evening with his fish. thus, by one bait or another, nature allures inhabitants into all her recesses. this man was the last of our townsmen whom we saw, and we silently through him bade adieu to our friends* 26 a week *i^* the characteristics and pursuits of various ages and races of men are always existing in epitome in every neighborhood. the pleasures of my earliest youth have become the inherit ance of other men. this man is still a fisher, and belongs to an era in which i myself have lived. perchance he is not confounded by many knowledges, and has not sought out many inventions, but how to take many fishes before the sun sets, with his slender birchen pole and flaxen line, that is invention enough for him. it is good even to be a fisherman in summer and in winter. some men are judges, these august days, sitting on benches, even till the court rises; they sit judging there honorably, between the seasons and between meals, leading a civil politic life, arbitrating in the case of spaulding versus cummings, it may be, from highest noon till the red vesper sinks into the west. the fisherman, meanwhile, stands in three feet of water, under the same summer s sun, arbitrating in other cases between muck worm and shiner, amid the fragrance of water lilies, mint, and pontederia, leading his life many rods from the dry land, within a pole s length of where the larger fishes swim. human life is to him very much like a river, &quot; re mi ing aie downward to the sea.&quot; saturday 27 this was his observation. his honor made a great discovery in bailments. i can just remember an old brown-coated man who was the walton of this stream, who had come over from newcastle, england, with his son, the latter a stout and hearty man who had lifted an anchor in his day. a straight old man he was, who took his way in silence through the meadows, having passed the period of communication with his fellows ; his old ex perienced coat, hanging long and straight and brown as the yellow-pine bark, glittering with so much smothered sunlight, if you stood near enough, no work of art but naturalized at length. i often discovered him unexpectedly amid the pads and the gray willows when he moved, fishing in some old country method, for youth and age then went a-fishing together, full of incommunicable thoughts, perchance about his own tyne and northumberland. he was always to be seen in serene afternoons haunting the river, and almost rustling with the sedge; so many sunny hours in an old man s life, entrapping silly fish; almost grown to be the sun s familiar; what need had he of hat or raiment any, having served out his time, and seen through such thin disguises ? i have seen how his coeval fates rewarded him with the yel low perch, and yet i thought his luck was not 28 a week in proportion to his years; and i have seen when, with slow steps and weighed down with aged thoughts, he disappeared with his fish tinder his low-roofed house on the skirts of the village. i think nobody else saw him; nobody else remembers him now, for he soon after died, and migrated to new tyne streams. his fishing was not a sport, nor solely a means of subsist ence, but a sort of solemn sacrament and with drawal from the world, just as the aged read their bibles. x whether we live by the seaside, or by the lakes and rivers, or on the prairie, it concerns us to attend to the nature of fishes, since they are not phenomena confined to certain localities only, but forms and phases of the life in nature universally dispersed. the countless shoals which annually coast the shores of europe and america are not so interesting to the student of nature as the more fertile law itself, which deposits their spawn on the tops of mountains and on the interior plains ; the fish principle in nature, from which it results that they may be found in water in so many places, in greater or less numbers. the natural historian is not a fisherman who prays for cloudy days and good luck merely; but as fishing has been styled &quot;a contemplative man s recreation,&quot; introducing saturday 29 him profitably to woods and water, so the fruit of the naturalist s observations is not in new genera or species, but in new contemplations still, and .science is only a-onore contemplative man s recreation. the seeds of the life of fishes are everywhere disseminated, whether the winds waft them, or the waters float them, or the deep earth holds them; wherever a pond is dug, straightway it is stocked with this vivacious race. they have a lease of nature, and it is not yet out. the chinese are bribed to carry their ova from province to province in jars or in hollow reeds, or the water-birds to transport them to the mountain tarns and interior lakes. there are fishes wherever there is a fluid me dium, and even in clouds and in melted metals we detect their semblance. think how in win ter you can sink a line down straight in a pasture through snow and through ice, and pull up a bright, slippery, dumb, subterranean silver or golden fish! it is curious, also, to reflect how they make one family, from the largest to the smallest. the least minnow that lies on the ice as bait for pickerel looks like a huge sea fish cast up on the shore. in the waters of this town there are about a dozen distinct spe cies, though the inexperienced would expect many more. 30 a week it enhances our sense of the grand security and serenity of nature to observe the still uiir disturbed pnnnnmy and content of the fishes of this century, their happiness a regular fruit of the summer. the freshwater sun-fish, bream, or ruff (jpomotis wilgaris), as it were, without ancestry, without posterity, still repre sents the fresh-water sun-fish in nature. it is the most common of all, and seen on every urchin s string; a simple and inoffensive fish, whose nests are visible all along the shore, hol lowed in the sand, over which it is steadily poised through the summer hours on waving fin. sometimes there are twenty or thirty nests in the space of a few rods, two feet wide by half a foot in depth, and made with no little labor, the weeds being removed, and the sand shoved up on the sides, like a bowl. here it may be seen early in summer assiduously brooding, and driving away minnows and larger fishes, even its own species, which would disturb its ova, pursuing them a few feet, and circling round swiftly to its nest again; the minnows, like young sharks, instantly entering the empty nests, meanwhile, and swallowing the spawn, which is attached to the weeds and to the bot tom, on the sunny side. the spawn is exposed to so many dangers that a very small propor tion can ever become fishes, for beside being saturday 31 the constant prey of birds and fishes, a great many nests are made so near the shore, in shal low water, that they are left dry in a few days, as the river goes down. these and the lam prey s are the only fishes nests that i have ob served, though the ova of some species may be seen floating on the surface. the breams are so careful of their charge that you may stand close by in the water and examine them at your leisure. i have thus stood over them half an hour at a time, and stroked them familiarly without frightening them, suffering them to nibble my fingers harmlessly, and seen them erect their dorsal fins in anger when my hand approached their ova, and have even taken them gently out of the water with my hand ; though this cannot be accomplished by a sudden move ment, however dexterous, for instant warning is conveyed to them through their denser element, but only by letting the fingers gradually close about them as they are poised over the palm, and with the utmost gentleness raising them slowly to the surface. though stationary, they kept up a constant sculling or waving motion with their fins, which is exceedingly graceful, and expressive of their humble happiness; for unlike_ours, the_element in which theyjhjve_is a stream whio.h mustbe constantly resisted. from time to time they nibble the weeds at the 32 a week bottom or overhanging their nests, or dart after a fly or a worm. the dorsal fin, besides an swering the purpose of a keel, with the anal, serves to keep the fish upright, for in shallow water, where this is not covered, they fall on their sides. as you stand thus stooping over the bream in its nest, the edges of the dorsal and caudal fins have a singular dusty golden reflection, and its eyes, which stand out from the head, are transparent and colorless. seen in its native element, it is a very beautiful and compact .fish, perfect in all its parts, and looks like a brijy^aiil-cinii-jresh-i^^ it is a perfect jewel of the river, the green, red, cop pery, and golden reflections of its mottled sides being the concentration of such rays as struggle through the floating pads and flowers to the sandy bottom, and in harmony with the sunlit brown and yellow pebbles. behind its watery shield it dwells far from many accidents inevi-/ table to human life. there is also another species of bream found in our river, without the red spot on the oper culum, which, according to m. agassiz, is un described. the common perch (percaflavescens, which name describes well the gleaming, golden re flections of its scales as it is drawn out of the water, its red gills standing out in vain in the saturday 33 thin element) is one of the handsomest and most regularly formed of our fishes, and at such a moment as this reminds us of the fish in the picture which wished to be restored to its native element until it had grown larger ; and indeed most of this species that are caught are not half grown. in the ponds there is a light-colored and slender kind, which swim in shoals of many hundreds in the sunny water, in company with the shiner, averaging not more than six or seven inches in length, while only a few larger specimens are found in the deepest water, which prey upon their weaker brethren. i have often attracted these small perch to the shore at even ing, by rippling the water with my fingers, and they may sometimes be caught while attempting to pass inside your hands. it is a tough and heedless fish, biting from impulse, without nib bling, and from impulse refraining to bite, and sculling indifferently past. it rather prefers the clear water and sandy bottoms, though here it has not much choice. it is a true fish, such as the angler loves to put into his basket or hang at the top of his willow twig, in shady afternoons along the banks of the stream. so many unquestionable fishes he counts, and so many shiners, which he counts and then throws away. old josselyn in his &quot;new england s rarities,&quot; published in 1672, mentions the perch or river partridge. 84 a week the chivin, dace, roach, cousin trout, or whatever else it is called (leuciscus pulchellus), white and red, is always an unexpected prize, which, however, any angler is glad to hook for its rarity; a name that reminds us of many an unsuccessful ramble by swift streams, when the wind rose to disappoint the fisher. it is commonly a silvery soft-scaled fish, of graceful, scholarlike, and classical look, like many a pic ture in an english book. it loves a swift cur rent and a sandy bottom, and bites inadvertently, yet not without appetite for the bait. the minnows are used as bait for pickerel in the winter. the red chivin, according to some, is still the same fish, only older, or with its tints deepened as they think by the darker water it inhabits, as the red clouds swim in the twilight atmosphere. he who has not hooked the red chivin is not yet a complete angler. other fishes, methinks, are slightly amphibious, but this is a denizen of the water wholly. the cork goes dancing down the swift-rushing stream, amid the weeds and sands, when suddenly, by a coincidence never to be remembered, emerges this fabulous inhabitant of another element, a thing heard of but not seen, as if it were the instant creation of an eddy, a true product of the running stream. and this bright cupreous dolphin was spawned and has passed its life be* saturday 35 neath the level of your feet in your native fields. fishes too, as well as birds and clouds, derive their armor from the mine. i have heard of mackerel visiting the copper banks at a particu lar season ; this fish, perchance, has its habitat in the coppermine river. i have caught white chivin of great size in the aboljacknagesic, where it empties into the penobscot, at the base of mount ktaadn, but no red ones there. the latter variety seems not to have been sufficiently observed. the dace (leuciscus argenteus) is a slight silvery minnow, found generally in the middle of the stream where the current is most rapid, and frequently confounded with the last named. the shiner (leuciscus chrysoleucus) is a soft scaled and tender fish, the victim of its stronger neighbors, found in all places, deep and shal low, clear and turbid; generally the first nib bier at the bait, but, with its small mouth and nibbling propensities, not easily caught. it is a erold or silver bit that passes current in the o a river, its limber tail dimpling the surface in sport or flight. i have seen the fry, when frightened by something thrown into the water, leap out by dozens, together with the dace, and wreck themselves upon a floating plank. it is the little light-infant of the river, with body armor of gold or silver spangles, slipping, glid 36 a week ing its life through with a quirk of the tail, half in the water, half in the air, upward and ever upward with flitting fin to more crystalline tides, yet still abreast of us dwellers on the bank. it is almost dissolved by the summer heats. a slighter and lighter colored shiner is found in one of our ponds. the pickerel (esox reticulatus), the swiftest, wariest, and most ravenous of fishes, which josselyn calls the freshwater or river wolf, is very common in the shallow and weedy la goons along the sides of the stream. it is a solemn, stately, ruminant fish, lurking under the shadow of a pad at noon, with still, circum spect, voracious eye, motionless as a jewel set in water, or moving slowly along to take up its position, darting from time to time at such un lucky fish or frog or insect as comes within its range, and swallowing it at a gulp. i have caught one which had swallowed a brother pick erel half as large as itself, with the tail still visible in its mouth, while the head was already digested in its stomach. sometimes a striped snake, bound to greener meadows across the stream, ends its undulatory progress in the same receptacle. they are so greedy and im petuous that they are frequently caught by being entangled in the line the moment it is cast. fishermen also distinguish the brook saturday 37 pickerel, a shorter and thicker fish than the former. the horned pout (plmelodus nebulosus\ sometimes called minister, from the peculiar squeaking noise it makes when drawn out of the water, is a dull and blundering fellow, and, like the eel, vespertinal in his habits and fond of the mud. it bites deliberately, as if about its business. they are taken at night with a mass of worms strung on a thread, which catches in their teeth, sometimes three or four, with an eel, at one pull. they are extremely tenacious of life, opening and shutting their mouths for half an hour after their heads have been cut off ; a bloodthirsty and bullying race of rangers, inhabiting the fertile river bottoms, with ever a lance in rest, and ready to do battle with their nearest neighbor. i have observed them in summer, when every other one had a long and bloody scar upon his back, where the skin was gone, the mark, perhaps, of some fierce encoun ter. sometimes the fry, not an inch long, are seen darkening the shore with their myriads. the suckers (catostomi jsostonienses an tuberculati). common and horned, perhaps on an average the largest of our fishes, may be seen in shoals of a hundred or more, stemming the current in the sun, on their mysterious migra tions, and sometimes sucking in the bait which 38 a week the fisherman suffers to float toward them. the former, which sometimes grow to a large size, are frequently caught by the hand in the brooks, or like the red chivin are jerked out by a hook fastened firmly to the end of a stick, and placed under their jaws. they are hardly known to the mere angler, however, not often biting at his baits, though the spearer carries home many a mess in the spring. to our vil lage eyes, these shoals have a foreign and im posing aspect, realizing the fertility of the seas. the common eel, too (.murcena bostonien siy),the only species of eel known in the state, a slimy, squirming creature, informed of mud, still squirming in the pan, is speared and hooked up with various success. methinks it too occurs in picture, left after the deluge, in many a meadow high and dry. in the shallow parts of the river, where the current is rapid and the bottom pebbly, you may sometimes see the curious circular nests of the lamprey eel (petromyzon americanus), the american stone-sucker, as large as a cart wheel, a foot or two in height, and sometimes rising half a foot above the surface of the water. they collect these stones, of the size of a hen s egg, with their mouths, as their name implies, and are said to fashion them into circles with their tails. they ascend falls by clinging to saturday 39 the stones, which may sometimes be raised by lifting the fish by the tail. as they are not seen on their way down the streams, it is thought by fishermen that they never return, but waste away and die, clinging to rocks and stumps of trees for an indefinite period ; a tragic feature in the scenery of the river bottoms wor thy to be remembered with shakespeare s de scription of the sea-floor. they are rarely seen in our waters at present, on account of the dams, though they are taken in great quantities at the mouth of the river in lowell. their nests, which are very conspicuous, look more like art than anything in the river. if we had leisure this afternoon, we might turn our prow up the brooks in quest of the classical trout and the minnows. of the last alone, according to m. agassiz, several of the species found in this town are yet undescribed. these would, perhaps, complete the list of our finny contemporaries in the concord waters. salmon, shad, and alewives were formerly abundant here, and taken in weirs by the in dians, who taught this method to the whites, by whom they were used as food and as manure, until the dam and afterward the canal at bil lerica, and the factories at lowell, put an end to their migrations hitherward; though it is thought that a few more enterprising shad may 40 a week still occasionally be seen in this part of the river. it is said, to account for the destruction of the fishery, that those who at that time rep resented the interests of the fishermen and the fishes, remembering between what dates they were accustomed to take the grown shad, stipu lated that the dams should be left open for that season only, and the fry, which go down a month later, were consequently stopped and destroyed by myriads. others say that the fishways were not properly constructed. per chance, after a few thousands of years, if the fishes will be patient, and pass their summers elsewhere meanwhile, nature will have leveled the billerica dam, and the lowell factories, and the grass-ground river run clear again, to be explored by new migratory shoals, even as far as the hopkinton pond and westborough swamp. one would like to know more of that race, now extinct, whose seines lie rotting in the gar rets of their children, who openly professed the trade of fishermen, and even fed their townsmen creditably, not skulking through the meadows to a rainy afternoon sport. dim visions we still get of miraculous draughts of fishes, and heaps uncountable by the river-side, from the tales of our seniors sent on horseback in their childhood from the neighboring towns, perched on saddle saturday 41 bags, with instructions to get the one bag filled with shad, the other with ale wives. at least one memento of those days may still exist in the memory of this generation, in the familiar appellation of a celebrated train-band of this town, whose untrained ancestors stood credita bly at concord north bridge. their captain, a man of piscatory tastes, having duly warned his company to turn out on a certain day, they, like obedient soldiers, appeared promptly on parade at the appointed time, but, unfortu nately, they went undrilled, except in the ma noeuvres of a soldier s wit and unlicensed jesting, that may day ; for their captain, forgetting his own appointment, and warned only by the fa vorable aspect of the heavens, as he had often done before, went a-fishing that afternoon, and his company thenceforth was known to old and young, grave and gay, as &quot;the shad,&quot; and by the youths of this vicinity this was long re garded as the proper name of all the irregular militia in christendom. but, alas! no record of these fishers lives remains that we know, unless it be one brief page of hard but unques tionable history, which occurs in day book no. 4, of an old trader of this town, long since dead, which shows pretty plainly what constituted a fisherman s stock in trade in those days. it purports to be a fisherman s account current, 42 a week probably for the fishing season of the year 1805, during which months he purchased daily rum and sugar, sugar and rum, n. e. and w. l, &quot;one cod line,&quot; &quot;one brown mug,&quot; and &quot;a line for the seine; &quot; rum and sugar, sugar and rum, &quot;good loaf sugar,&quot; and &quot;good brown,&quot; w. i. and n. e., in short and uniform entries to the bottom of the page, all carried out in pounds, shillings, and pence, from march 25 to june 5, and promptly settled by receiving &quot;cash in full &quot; at the last date. but perhaps not so set tled altogether. these were the necessaries of life in those days ; with salmon, shad, and ale wives, fresh and pickled, he was thereafter in dependent on the groceries. kather a prepon derance of the fluid elements ; but such is the fisherman s nature. i can faintly remember to have seen this same fisher in my earliest youth, still as near the river as he could get, with un certain, undulatory step, after so many things had gone downstream, swinging a scythe in the meadow, his bottle like a serpent hid in the grass ; himself as yet not cut down by the great mower. surely the fates are forever kind, though na ture s laws are more immutable than any des pot s, yet to man s daily life they rarely seem rigid, but permit him to relax with license in summer weather. he is not harshly reminded saturday 43 of the things he may not do. she is very kind and liberal to all men of vicious habits, and certainly does not deny them quarter; they do not die without priest. still they maintain life along the way, keeping this side the styx, still hearty, still resolute, &quot;never better in their lives;&quot; and again, after a dozen years have elapsed, they start up from behind a hedge, asking for work and wages for able-bodied men. who has not met such &quot; a beggar on the way, who sturdily could gang ? . . . who cared neither for wind nor wet, in lands where er he past ? &quot; &quot; that bold adopts each house he views, his own ; makes every purse his checquer, and, at pleasure, walks forth, and taxes all the world, like caesar ;&quot; as if consistency were the secret of health, while the poor inconsistent aspirant man, seeking to live a pure life, feeding on air, divided against himself, cannot stand, but pines and dies after a life of sickness, on beds of down. the unwise are accustomed to speak as if some were not sick ; but methinks the difference between men in respect to health is not great enough to lay much stress upon. some are reputed sick and some are not. it often hap pens that the sicker man is the nurse jfcojbhe 44 a week shad are still taken in the basin of concord river, at lowell, where they are said to be a month earlier than the merrimack shad, on ac count of the warmth of the water. still pa tiently, almost pathetically, with instinct not to be discouraged, not to be reasoned with, revis iting their old haunts, as if their stern fates would relent, and still met by the cktcporatipn with its dam. poor shad ! where is thy redress ? when nature gave thee instinct, gave she thee the heart to bear thy fate? still wandering the sea in thy scaly armor to inquire humbly at the mouths of rivers if man has perchance left them free for thee to enter. by countless shoals loi tering uncertain meanwhile, merely stemming the tide there, in danger from sea foes in spite of thy bright armor, awaiting new instructions, until the sands, until the water itself, tell thee if it be so or not. thus by whole migrating nations, full of jnstinct t which is thy faith, t in this backward spring, turned adrift, and per chance knowest not where men do not dwell, where there are not factories, in these days. armed with no sword, no electric shock, but mere shad, ^armfid-o.nly with innocence and a _just_caiise, with tender dumb mouth only for ward, and scales easy to be detached. i for one am with thee, and who knows what may avail a crow-bar against that billerica dam? not de saturday 45 spairing when whole myriads have gone to feed those sea monsters during thy suspense, but still brave, indifferent, on easy fin there, like shad reserved for higher destinies. willing to be decimated for man s behoof after the spawn ing season. away with the superficial and self ish phil-anthropy of men, who knows what admirable virtue of fishes may be below low water-mark, bearing up against a hard destiny, not admired by that fellow-creature who alone can appreciate it ! who hears the fishes when they cry? it will not be forgotten by some memory that we were contemporaries. thou shalt erelong have thy way up the rivers, up all the rivers of the globe, if i am not mistaken. yea, even thy dull watery dream shall be more than realized. if it were not so, but thou wert to be overlooked at first and at last, then would not i take their heaven. yes, i say so, who think i know better than thou canst. keep a stiff fin, then, and stem all the tides thou mayst meet. at length it would seem that the interests, not of the fishes only, but of the men of way land, of sudbury, of concord, demand the leveling of that dam. innumerable acres of meadow are waiting to be made dry land, wild native grass to give place to english. the farmers stand with scythes whet, waiting the 46 a week subsiding of the waters, by gravitation, by evaporation, or otherwise, but sometimes their eyes do not rest, their wheels do not roll, on the quaking meadow ground during the haying sea son at all. so many sources of wealth inacces sible. they rate the loss hereby incurred in the single town of wayland alone as equal to the expense of keeping a hundred yoke of oxen the year round. one year, as i learn, not long ago, the farmers standing ready to drive their teams afield as usual, the water gave no signs of falling; without new attraction in the heavens, without freshet or visible cause, still standing stagnant at an unprecedented height. all hy drometers were at fault ; some trembled for their english, even. but speedy emissaries revealed the unnatural secret, in the new float-board, wholly a foot in width, added to their already too high privileges by the dam proprietors. the hundred yoke of oxen, meanwhile, standing patient, gazing wishfully meadowward, at that inaccessible waving native grass, uncut but by the grgat tmqwfttj^inm, who cuts so broad a swathe, without so much as a wisp to wind about their horns. that was a long pull from ball s hill to car lisle bridge, sitting with our faces to the south, a slight breeze rising from the north; but nev saturday 47 ertheless water still runs and grass grows, for now, having passed the bridge between carlisle and bedford, we see men haying far off in the meadow, their heads waving like the grass which they cut. in the distance the wind seemed to bend all alike. as the night stole over, such a freshness was wafted across the meadow that every blade of cut grass seemed to teem with life. faint purple clouds began to be reflected in the water, and the cow-bells tinkled louder along the banks, while, like sly water-rats, we stole along nearer the shore, looking for a place to pitch our camp. at length, when we had made about seven miles, as far as billerica, we moored our boat on the west side of a little rising ground which in the spring forms an island in the river. here we found huckleberries still hanging upon the bushes, where they seemed to have slowly ripened for our especial use. bread and sugar, and cocoa boiled in river water, made our re past, and as we had drank in the fluvial pros pect all day, so now we took a draft of the water with our evening meal to propitiate the river gods, and whet our vision for the sights it was to behold. the sun was setting on the one hand, while our eminence was contributing its shadow to the night on the other. it seemed insensibly to grow lighter as the night shut in, 48 a week and a distant and solitary farm-house was re vealed, which before lurked in the shadows of the noon. there was no other house in sight, nor any cultivated field. to the right and left, as far as the horizon, were straggling pine wood; with their plumes against the sky, and acros;^ the river were rugged hills, covered with shrub oaks, tangled with grape-vines and ivy, with here and there a gray rock jutting out from the maze. the sides of these cliffs, though a quar ter of a mile distant, were almost heard to rustle while we looked at them, it was such a leafy wilderness; a place for fauns and satyrs, and where bats hung all day to the rocks, and at evening flitted over the water, and fire -flies husbanded their light under the grass and leaves against the night. when we had pitched our tent on the hillside, a few rods from the shore, we sat looking through its triangular door in the twilight at our lonely mast on the shore just seen above the alders, and hardly yet come to a standstill from the swaying of the stream ; the first encroachment of commerce on this land. there was our port, our ostia. that straight, geometrical line against the water and the sky stood for the last refinements of civilized life, and what of sublimity there is in history was there symbolized. for the most part, there was no recognition saturday 49 of human life in the night, no human breathing was heard, only the breathing of the wind. as we sat up, kept awake by the novelty of our situation, we heard at intervals foxes stepping about over the dead leaves, and brushing the dewy grass close to our tent, and once a mus quash fumbling among the potatoes and melons in our boat; but when we hastened to the shore we could detect only a ripple in the water ruf fling the disk of a star. at intervals we were serenaded by the song of a dreaming sparrow or the throttled cry of an owl; but after each sound which near at hand broke the stillness of the night, each crackling of the twigs, or rustling among the leaves, there was a sudden pause, and deeper and more conscious silence, as if the intruder were aware that no life was rightfully abroad at that hour. there was a fire in low ell, as we judged, this night, and we saw the horizon blazing, and heard the distant alarm bells, as it were a faint tinkling music borne to these woods. but the most constant and memorable sound of a summer s night, which we did not fail to hear every night afterward, though at no time so incessantly and so favor ably as now, was the barking of the house-dogs, from the loudest and hoarsest bark to the faint est aerial palpitation under the eaves of heaven, from the patient but anxious mastiff to the timid 50 a week and wakeful terrier, at first loud and rapid, then faint and slow, to be imitated only in a whisper ; wow-wow-wow-wow wo wo w w. even in a retired and uninhabited district like this, it was a sufficiency of sound for the ear of night, and more impressive than any music. i have heard the voice of a hound, just before daylight, while the stars were shining, from over the woods and river, far in the horizon, when it sounded as sweet and melodious as an instrument. the hounding of a dog pursuing a fox or other animal in the horizon may have first suggested the notes of the hunting-horn to alternate with and relieve the lungs of the dog. this natural bugle long resounded in the woods of the ancient world before the horn was invented. the very dogs that sullenly bay the moon from farm-yards in these nights excite more heroism in our breasts than all the civil exhortations or war sermons of the age. &quot;i would rather be a dog, and bay the moon,&quot; than many a roman that i know. the night is equally indebted to the clarion of the cock, with wakeful hope, from the very setting of the sun, prematurely ushering in the dawn. all these sounds, the crowing of cocks, the baying of dogs, and the hum of insects at noon, are the evidence of nature s health or sound state. such is the never-failing beauty and accuracy saturday 51 of language, the most perfect art in the world; the chisel of a thousand years retouches it. at length the antepenultimate and drowsy hours drew on, and all sounds were denied en trance to our ears. who sleeps by day and walks by night, will meet no spirit, but some sprite. sunday. h the river calmly flows, through shining banks, through lonely glen, where the owl shrieks, though ne er the cheer of men has stirred its mute repose, still if you should walk there, you would go there again.&quot; channino. ** the indians tell us of a beautiful river lying far to the south, which they call merrimack.&quot; sietjb dr monts, relations of the jesuits, 1604. in the morning the river and adjacent coun try were covered with a dense fog, through which the smoke of our fire curled up like a still subtiler mist; but before we had rowed many rods, the sun arose and the fog rapidly dis persed, leaving a slight steam only to curl along the surface of the water. it was a quiet sun day morning, with more of the auroral rosy and white than of the yellow light in it, as if it .dated, from earlier than the fall of man, and still preserved a heathenish integrity : an early unconverted saint, free from noontide or evening taint, heathen without reproach, that did upon the civil day encroach, and ever since its birth had trod the outskirts of the earth. but the impressions which the morning makes 54 a week vanish with its dews, and not even the most &quot;persevering mortal&quot; can preserve the memory of its freshness to midday. as we passed the various islands, or what were islands in the spring, rowing with our backs downstream, we gave names to them. the one on which we had camped we called fox island, and one fine densely wooded island surrounded by deep water and overrun by grape-vines, which looked like a mass of verdure and of flowers cast upon the waves, we named grape island. from ball s hill to billerica meeting-house, the river was still twice as broad as in concord, a deep, dark, and dead stream, flowing between gentle hills and sometimes cliffs, and well wooded all the way. it was a long woodland lake bordered with willows. for long reaches we could see neither house nor cultivated field, nor any sign of the vicinity of man. now we coasted along some shallow shore by the edge of a dense pali sade of bulrushes, which straightly bounded the water as if clipped by art, reminding us of the reed forts of the east-indians of which we had read; and now the bank, slightly raised, was overhung with graceful grasses and various species of brake, whose downy stems stood closely grouped and naked as in a vase, while their heads spread several feet on either side. the dead limbs of the willow were rounded and sunday 55 adorned by the climbing mikania {mikania scandens), which filled every crevice in the leafy bank, contrasting agreeably with the gray bark of its supporter and the balls of the button -bush. the water willow (salix purshiana), when it is of large size and entire, is the most graceful and ethereal of our trees. its masses of light green foliage, piled one upon another to the height of twenty or thirty feet, seemed to float on the surface of the water, while the slight gray stems and the shore were hardly visible between them. no tree is so wedded to the water, and harmonizes so well with still streams. it is even more graceful than the weeping wil low, or any pendulous trees which dip their branches in the stream instead of being buoyed up by it. its limbs curved outward over the surface as if attracted by it. it had not a new england but an oriental character, reminding us of trim persian gardens, of haroun al raschid, and the artificial lakes of the east. as we thus dipped our way along between fresh masses of foliage overrun with the grape and smaller flowering vines, the surface was so calm, and both air and water so transparent, that the flight of a kingfisher or robin over the river was as distinctly seen reflected in the water below as in the air above. the birds seemed to flit through submerged groves, alight* 56 a week ing on the yielding sprays, and their clear notes to come up from below. we were uncertain whether the water floated the land, or the land held the water in its bosom. it was such a sea son, in short, as that in which one of our con cord poets sailed on its stream, and sung its quiet glories. &quot; there is an inward voice, that in the stream sends forth its spirit to the listening ear, and in a calm content it floweth on, like wisdom, welcome with its own respect. clear in its breast lie all these beauteous thoughts, it doth receive the green and graceful trees, and the gray rocks smile in its peaceful arms.&quot; and more he sung, but too serious for our page. for every oak and birch, too, growing on the hill-top, as well as for these elms and willows, we knew that there was a graceful ethereal and ideal tree making down from the roots, and sometimes nature in high tides brings her mir^ ror to its foot and makes it visible. the still ness was intense and almost conscious, as if it were a natural sabbath, and we fancied that the morning was the evening of a celestial day. the air was so elastic and crystalline that it had the same effect on the landscape that a glass has on a picture, to give it an ideal remoteness and perfection. the landscape was clothed in a mild and quiet light, in which the woods and fences checkered and partitioned it with sunday 57 new regularity, and rough and uneven fields stretched away with lawn-like smoothness to the horizon, and the clouds, finely distinct and picturesque, seemed a fit drapery to hang over fairy-land. the world seemed decked for some holiday or prouder pageantry, with silken streamers flying, and the course of our lives to wind on before us like a green lane into a coun try maze, at the season when fruit-trees are in blossom. why should not our whole life and its scenery be actually thus fair and distinct? all our lives want a suitable background. they should at least, like the life of the anchorite, be as im pressive to behold as objects in the desert, a broken shaft or crumbling mound against a lim itless horizon. character always secures for itself this advantage, and is thus distinct and unrelated to near or trivial objects, whether things or persons. on this same stream a maiden once sailed in my boat, thus unattended but by invisible guardians, and as she sat in the prow there was nothing but herself between the steersman and the sky. i could then say with the poet, &quot; sweet falls the summer air over her frame who sails with me ; her way like that is beautifully free, her nature far more rare, and is her constant heart of virgin purity.&quot; 58 a week at evening, still the very stars seem but this maiden s emissaries and reporters of her prog ress. low in the eastern sky is set thy glancing eye ; and though its gracious light ne er riseth to my sight, yet every star that climbs above the gnarled limbs of yonder hill, conveys thy gentle will. believe i knew thy thought, and that the zephyrs brought thy kindest wishes through, as mine they bear to you, that some attentive cloud did pause amid the crowd over my head, while gentle things were said. believe the thrushes sung, and that the flower-bells rung 1 , that herbs exhaled their scent, and beasts knew what was meant, the trees a welcome waved, and lakes their margins laved, when thy free mind to my retreat did wind. it was a summer eve, the air did gently heave while yet a low-hung cloud thy eastern skies did shroud ; the lightning s silent gleam, startling my drowsy dream, seemed like the flash under thy dark eyelash. sunday 69 still will i strive to be as if thou wert with me ; whatever path i take, it shall be, for thy sake, of gentle slope and wide, as thou wert by my side, without a root to trip thy gentle foot. i 11 walk with gentle pace, and choose the smoothest place and careful dip the oar, and shun the winding shore, and gently steer my boat where water-lilies float, and cardinal flowers stand in their sylvan bowers. it required some rudeness to disturb with our boat the mirror-like surface of the water, in which every twig and blade of grass was so faithfully reflected; too faithfully indeed for art to imitate, for only nature may exaggerate herself. the shallowest still water is unfathom able. wherever the trees and skies are re flected, there is more than atlantic depth, and no danger of fancy running aground. we no tice that it required a separate intention of the eye, a more free and abstracted vision, to see the reflected trees and the sky, than to see the river bottom merely ; and so are there manifold visions in the direction of every object, and even the most opaque reflect the heavens from their surface. some men have their eyes natu 60 a week rally intended to the one and some to the other object. &quot; a man that looks on glass, on it may stay his eye, or, if he pleaseth, through it pass, and the heavens espy.&quot; two men in a skiff, whom we passed here abouts, floating buoyantly amid the reflections of the trees, like a feather in mid-air, or a leaf which is wafted gently from its twig to the water without turning over, seemed still in their element, and to have very delicately availed themselves of the natural laws. their floating there was a beautiful and successful experiment in natural philosophy, and it served to ennoble in our eyes the art of navigation; for as birds fly and fishes swim, so these men sailed. it reminded us how much fairer and nobler all the actions of man might be, and that ^our life in its whole economy might be as jbeautifutas the^afrest works of art or nature. the sun lodged on the old gray cliffs, ancl glanced from every pad; the bulrushes and flags seemed to rejoice in the delicious light and air; the meadows were a-drinking at their leisure; the frogs sat meditating, all sabbath thoughts, summing up their week, with one eye out on the golden sun, and one toe upon a reed, eying the wondrous universe in which they act sunday 61 their part; the fishes swam more staid and soberly, as maidens go to church; shoals of golden and silver minnows rose to the surface to behold the heavens, and then sheered off into more sombre aisles ; they swept by as if moved by one mind, continually gliding past each other, and yet preserving the form of their bat talion unchanged, as if they were still embraced by the transparent membrane which held the spawn; a young band of brethren and sisters trying their new fins; now they wheeled, now shot ahead, and when we drove them to the shore and cut them off, they dexterously tacked and passed underneath the boat. over the old wooden bridges no traveler crossed, and neither the river nor the fishes avoided to glide between the abutments. here was a village not far off behind the woods, billerica, settled not long ago, and the children still bear the names of the first settlers in this late &quot;howling wilderness; &quot; yet to all in tents and purposes it is as old as fernay or as mantua, an old gray town whp.rp. mp.n grow p)d .and slftpp already^-under moss-rown_ monu ments^ outgrow their usefulness. this is an cient billerica ( villarica ?), now in its dotage, named from the english billericay, and whose indian name was shawshine. i never heard that it was young. see, is not nature here gone 62 a week to decay, farms all run out, meeting-house grown gray and racked with age ? if you would know of its early youth, ask those old gray rocks in the pasture. it has a bell that sounds sometimes as far as concord woods; i have heard that, ay, hear it now. no wonder that such a sound startled the dreaming indian, and frightened his game, when the first bells were swung on trees, and sounded through the forest beyond the plantations of the white man; but to-day i like best the echo amid these cliffs and woods. it is no feeble imitation, but rather its original, or as if some rural orpheus played over the strain again to show how it should sound. dong, sounds the brass in the east, as if to a funeral feast, but i like that sound the best out of the fluttering west. the steeple ringeth a knell, but the fairies silvery bell is the voice of that gentle folk, or else the horizon that spoke. its metal is not of brass, but air, and water, and glass, and under a cloud it is swung, and by the wind it is rung. when the steeple tolleth the noon, it soundeth not so soon, yet it rings a far earlier hour, and the sun has not reached its tower. sunday 63 on the other hand, the road runs up to car lisle, city of the woods, which, if it is less civil, is the more natural. it does well hold the earth together. it gets laughed at because it is a small town, i know, but nevertheless it is a place where great men may be born any day, for fair winds and foul blow right on over it without distinction. it has a meeting-house and horse-sheds, a tavern and a blacksmith s shop, for centre, and a good deal of wood to cut and cord yet. and &quot; bedford, most noble bedford, i shall not thee forget.&quot; history has remembered thee; especially that meek and humble petition of thy old planters, like the wailing of the lord s own people, &quot;to the gentlemen, the selectmen&quot; of concord, praying to be erected into a separate parish. we can hardly credit that so plaintive a psalm resounded but little more than a century ago along these babylonish waters. &quot;in the ex treme difficult seasons of heat and cold,&quot; said they, &quot;we were ready to say of the sabbath, behold what a weariness is it.&quot; &quot;gentlemen, if our seeking to draw off proceed from any dis affection to our present reverend pastor, or the christian society with whom we have taken such sweet counsel together, and walked unto the house of god in company, then hear us not 64 a week this day ; but we greatly desire, if god please, to be eased of our burden on the sabbath, the travel and fatigue thereof, that the word of god may be nigh to us, near to our houses and in our hearts, that we and our little ones may serve the lord. we hope that god, who stirred up the spirit of cyrus to set forward temple work, has stirred us up to ask, and will stir you up to grant, the prayer of our petition ; so shall your humble petitioners ever pray, as in duty bound&quot; and so the temple work went for ward here to a happy conclusion. yonder in carlisle the building of the temple was many wearisome years delayed, not that there was wanting of shittim wood, or the gold of ophir, but a site therefor convenient to all the wor shipers; whether on &quot;buttrick s plain,&quot; or rather on &quot;poplar hill.&quot; it was a tedious question. in this billerica solid men must have lived, select from year to year ; a series of town clerks, at least ; and there are old records that you may search. some spring the white man came, built him a house, and made a clearing here, letting in the sun, dried up a farm, piled up the old gray stones in fences, cut down the pines around his dwelling, planted orchard seeds brought from the old country, and persuaded the civil apple-tree to blossom next to the wild pine and sunday 65 the juniper, shedding its perfume in the wilder ness. their old stocks still remain. he culled the graceful elm from out the woods and from the river-side, and so refined and smoothed his village plot. he rudely bridged the stream, and drove his team afield into the river mea dows, cut the wild grass, and laid bare the homes of beaver, otter, muskrat, and with the whetting of his scythe scared off the deer and bear. he set up a mill, and fields of english grain sprang in the virgin soil. and with his grain he scat tered the seeds of the dandelion and the wild trefoil over the meadows, mingling his english flowers with the wild native ones. the brist ling burdock, the sweet-scented catnip, and the humble yarrow planted themselves along his woodland road, they, too, seeking &quot;freedom to worship god&quot; in their way. and thus he plants a town. the white man s mullein soon reigned in indian cornfields, and sweet-scented english grasses clothed the new soil. where, then, could the red man set his foot? the honey-bee hummed through the massachusetts woods, and sipped the wild-flowers round the indian s wigwam, perchance unnoticed, when, with prophetic warning, it stung the red child s hand, forerunner of that industrious tribe that was to come and pluck the wild-flower of his race up by the root. 66 a week the white man comes, pale as the dawn, with a load of thought, with a slumbering intelligence as a fire raked up, knowing well what he knows, not guessing but calculating ; strong in commu nity, yielding obedience to authority; of expe rienced race; of wonderful, wonderful common sense; dull but capable, slow but persevering, severe but just, of little humor but genuine ; a laboring man, despising game and sport ; build ing a house that endures, a framed house. he buys the indian s moccasins and baskets, then buys his hunting-grounds, and at length forgets where he is buried and ploughs up his bones. and here town records, old, tattered, time worn, weather-stained chronicles, contain the indian sachem s mark perchance, an arrow or a beaver, and the few fatal words by which he deeded his hunting-grounds away. he comes with a list of ancient saxon, norman, and cel tic names, and strews them up and down this river, framingham, sudbury, bedford, car lisle, billerica, chelmsf ord, and this is new angle-land, and these are the new west sax ons, whom the red men call, not angle-ish or english, but yejigefise, and so at last they are known for yankees. when we were opposite to the middle of bil lerica, the fields on either hand had a soft and cultivated english aspect, the village spire be sunday 67 ing seen over the copses which skirt the river, and sometimes an orchard straggled down to the water-side, though, generally, our course this forenoon was the wildest part of our voyage. it seemed that men led a quiet and very civil life there. the inhabitants were plainly cul tivators of the earth, and lived under an or ganized political government. the school-house stood with a meek aspect, entreating a long truce to war and savage life. every one finds by his own experience, as well as in history, that the era in which men cultivate the apple, and the amenities of the garden, is essentially different from that of the hunter and forest life, and neither can displace the other without loss. we have all had our day-dreams, as well as more prophetic nocturnal vision; but as for farming. i am convinced that my genius dates from an older era than the agricultural. i would at least strike my spade into the earth with such careless freedom but accuracy as the woodpecker his bill into a tree. there is in my -nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward aujwildness,^ ijsnow ;_p_f_no redeeming qualities imayself but a sincere love for some things, and when i am reproved i fall back on to this ground. what have i to do with ploughs? i cut another furrow than you see. where the off ox treads, there is it not, it is farther off; 68 a week where the nigh ox walks, it will not be, it is nigher still. if corn fails, my crop fails not, and what are drought and rain to me? the rude saxon pioneer will sometimes pine for that refinement and artificial beauty which are eng lish, and love to hear the sound of such sweet and classical names as the pentland and mal vern hills, the cliffs of dover and the trosachs, richmond, derwent, and winandermere, which are to him now instead of the acropolis and parthenon, of baiae, and athens, with its sea walls, and arcadia and tempe. greece, who am i that should remember thee, thy marathon and thy thermopylae ? is my life vulgar, my fate mean, which on these golden memories can lean ? we are apt enough to be pleased with such books as evelyn s sylva, acetarium, and ka lendarium hortense, but they imply a relaxed nerve in the reader. gardening is cjvil_and. social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and__the outlaw. there may be an excess of cultivation as well as of anything else, until civilization becomes pathetic. a highly cultivated man,^ all whose bones can be bent! whose heaven-born virtues are but good manners ! the young pines springing up in the cornfields from year to year are to me a refreshing fact. we talk of civilizing the in sunday 69 dian, but that is not the name for his improve ment. by the wary independence and aloofness of his dim forest life he preserves his intercourse with his native gods, and is admitted from time to time to a rare and peculiar society with na ture. he has glances of starry recognition to jvhich .qnr saloons are strangers. the steady illumination of his genius, dim only because distant, is like the faint but satisfying light of the . stars-compared with the dazzling but inef fectual and short-lived blaze of candles. the society-islanders had their day-born gods, but they were not supposed to be &quot;of equal antiquity with the atua fauau po, or night-born gods.&quot; it is true, there are the innocent pleasures of country life, and it is sometimes pleasant to make the earth yield her increase, and gather the fruits in their season; but the heroic spirit will not fail to dream of remoter retirements and more rugged paths. it will have its gar den-plots and its parterres elsewhere than on the earth, and gather nuts and berries by the way for its subsistence, or orchard fruits with such heedlessness as berries. we would not always be soothing and taming nature, breaking the horse and the ox, but sometimes ride the horse wild and chase the buffalo. the jndian s inte^cjourse with nature is at leastjmch as ad jaita_oi_the__greatest independence of each. if 70 a week he is somewhat of a stranger in her midst, the ner is too much of a familiar. there is something vulgar and foul in the latter s close ness to his mistress, something noble and cleanly in_the_former s distance. in civilization, as in a southern latitude, man degenerates at length, and yields to the incursion of more northern tribes, &quot; some nation yet shut in with hills of ice.&quot; there are other, savager, and more primeval aspects of nature than our poets have sung. it is only white man s poetry. homer and ossian even can never revive in london or boston. and yet, behold how these cities are refreshed by the mere tradition, or the imperfectly trans mitted fragrance and flavor of these wild fruits. if we could listen but for an instant to the chant of the indian muse, we should understand why he will not exchange his savageness for civilization. nations are not whimsical. steel and blankets are strong temptations; but the indian does well to continue indian. after sitting in my chamber many days, reading the poets, i have been out early on a foggy morning and heard the cry of an owl in a neighboring wood as from a nature behind the common, unexplored by science or by literature. none of the feathered race has yet realized my sunday 71 youthful conceptions of the woodland depths. i had seen the red election-birds brought from their recesses on my comrades string, and fan cied that their plumage would assume stranger and more dazzling colors, like the tints of even ing, in proportion as i advanced farther into the darkness and solitude of the forest. still less have i seen such strong and wilderness tints on any poet s string. these modern ingenious sciences and arts do not affect me as those more venerable arts of hunting and fishing, and even of husbandry in its primitive and simple form ; as ancient and honorable trades as the sun and moon and winds pursue, coeval with the faculties of man, and invented when these were invented. we do not know their john gutenberg, or richard arkwright, though the poets would fain make them to have been gradually learned and taught. according to gower, &quot; and laclahel, as saith the boke, firste made nette, and fishes toke. of huntyng eke he fond the chace, whiche nowe is knowe in many place ; a tent of clothe, with corde and stake, he sette up first, and did it make.&quot; also, lydgate says : &quot; jason first sayled, in story it is tolde, toward colchos, to wynne the flees of golde, ceres the goddess fond first the tilthe of londe ; 72 a week also, aristeus f onde first the usage of mylke, and cruddis, and of honey swote ; peryodes, for grete avauntage, from flyntes smote fuyre, daryng in the roote.&quot; we read that aristeus &quot;obtained of jupiter and neptune, that the pestilential heat of the dog-days, wherein was great mortality, should be mitigated with wind.&quot; this is one of those dateless benefits conferred on man which have no record in our vulgar day, though we still find some similitude to them in our dreams, in which we have a more liberal and juster appre hension of things, unconstrained by habit, which is then in some measure put off, and di vested of memory, which we call history. according to fable, when the island of jegina was depopulated by sickness, at the instance of uieacus, jupiter turned the ants into men, that is, as some think, he made men of the inhab itants who lived meanly like ants. this is perhaps the fullest history of those early days extant. the fable, which is naturally and truly com posed, so as to satisfy the imagination, ere it addresses the understanding, beautiful though strange as a wild -flower, is to the wise man an apothegm, and admits of his most generous interpretation. when we read that bacchus sunday 73 made the tyrrhenian mariners mad, so that they leapt into the sea, mistaking it for a mea dow full of flowers, and so became dolphins, we are not concerned about the historical truth of this, but rather a higher poetical truth. we seem to hear the music of a thought, and care not if the understanding be not gratified. for their beauty, consider the fables of narcissus, of endymion, of memnon son of morning, the representative of all promising youths who have died a premature death, and whose memory is melodiously prolonged to the latest morning; the beautiful stories of phaeton, and of the sirens whose isle shone afar off white with the bones of unburied men ; and the pregnant ones of pan, prometheus, and the sphinx ; and that long list of names which have already become part of the universal language of civilized men, and from proper are becoming common names or nouns, the sibyls, the eumenides, the parcae, the graces, the muses, nemesis, etc. it is interesting to observe with what singu lar unanimity the farthest sundered nations and generations consent to give completeness and roundness to an ancient fable, of which they indistinctly appreciate the beauty or the truth. by a faint and dream-like effort, though it be only by the vote of a scientific body, the dullest posterity slowly add some trait to the mythus. 74 a week as when astronomers call the lately discovered planet neptune ; or the asteroid astrsea, that the virgin who was driven from earth to heaven at the end of the golden age may have her local habitation in the heavens more distinctly assigned her, for the slightest recognition of poetic worth is significant. by such slow ag gregation has mythology grown from the first. the very nursery tales of this generation were the nursery tales of primeval races. they mi grate from east to west, and again from west to east; now expanded into the &quot;tale divine &quot;of bards, now shrunk into a popular rhyme. this is an approach to that universal language which men have sought in vain. this fond reitera tion of the oldest expressions of truth by the latest posterity, content with slightly and reli giously retouching the old material, is the most impressive proof of a common humanity. all nations love the same jests and tales, jews, christians, and mahometans, and the same translated suffice for all. all men are children, and of one family. the same tale sends them all to bed, and wakes them in the morning. joseph wolff, the missionary, dis tributed copies of robinson crusoe, translated into arabic, among the arabs, and they made a great sensation. &quot;robinson crusoe s adven tures and wisdom,&quot; says he, &quot;were read by ma sunda y 75 hometans in the market-places of sanaa, hody eda, and loheya, and admired and believed!&quot; on reading the book, the arabians exclaimed, &quot;oh, that robinson crusoe must have been a great prophet ! &quot; to some extent, mythology is only the most ancient history and biography. so far from being false or fabulous in the common sense, it contains only enduring and essential truth, the i and you, the here and there, the now and then, being omitted. either time or rare wis dom writes it. before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years. the poet is he who can write some pure mythology to-day without the aid of posterity. in how few words, for instance, the greeks would have told the story of abelard and heloise, making but a sentence for our classical dictionary, and then, perchance, have stuck up their names to shine in some corner of the firmament. we moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, &quot;me moirs to serve for a history,&quot; which itself is but materials to serve for a mythology. how many volumes folio would the life and labors of pro metheus have filled, if perchance it had fallen, as perchance it did first, in days of cheap print ing! who knows what shape the fable of co lumbus will at length assume, to be confounded 76 a week with that of jason and the expedition of the argonauts. and franklin, there may be a line for him in the future classical dictionary, recording what that demigod did, and refer ring him to some new genealogy. &quot;son of and . he aided the americans to gain their independence, instructed mankind in economy, and drew down lightning from the clouds.&quot; the hidden significance of these fables which is sometimes thought to have been detected, the ethics running parallel to the poetry and his tory, are not so remarkable as the readiness with which they may be made to express a va riety of truths. as if they were the skeletons of still older and more universal truths than any whose flesh and blood they are for the time made to wear. it is like striving to make the sun, or the wind, or the sea symbols to sig nify exclusively the particular thoughts of our day. but what signifies it ? in the mythus a superhuman intelligence uses the unconscious thoughts and dreams of men as its hieroglyph ics to address men unborn. in the history of the human mind, these glowing and ruddy fables precede the noonday thoughts of men, as aurora the sun s rays. the matutine intellect of the poet, keeping in advance of the glare of philoso phy, always dwells in this auroral atmosphere. sunday 77 as we said before, the concord is a dead stream, but its scenery is the more suggestive to the contemplative voyager, and this day its water was fuller of reflections than our pages even. just before it reaches the falls in biller ica, it is contracted, and becomes swifter and shallower, with a yellow pebbly bottom, hardly passable for a canal-boat, leaving the broader and more stagnant portion above like a lake among the hills. all through the concord, bedford, and billerica meadows we had heard no murmur from its stream, except where some tributary runnel tumbled in, some tumultuous little rill, purling round its storied pebble, tinkling to the selfsame tune, from september until june, which no drought doth e er enfeeble. silent flows the parent stream, and if rocks do lie below, smothers with her waves the din, as it were a youthfulsjn^. just as still, and just as slow. ibut now at length we heard this staid and prim itive river rushing to her fall, like any rill. we here left its channel, just above the bil lerica falls, and entered the canal, which runs, or rather is conducted, six miles through the woods to the merrimack, at middlesex ; and as we did not care to loiter in this part of our voy 78 a week age, while one ran along the tow-path drawing the boat by a cord, the other kept it off the shore with a pole, so that we accomplished the whole distance in little more than an hour. this canal, which is the oldest in the country, and has even an antique look beside the more modern railroads, is fed by the concord, so that we were still floating on its familiar waters. it is so much water which the river lets for the advantage of commerce. there appeared some want of harmony in its scenery, since it was not of equal date with the woods and meadows through which it is led, and we missed the con ciliatory influence of time on land and water; but in the lapse of ages, nature will recover and indemnify herself, and gradually plant fit shrubs and flowers along its borders. already the kingfisher sat upon a pine over the water, and the bream and pickerel swam below. thus of-jthe hands of_the architect info the hajidg_gf^nature t to be per fected. it was a retired and pleasant route, without houses or travelers, except some young men who were lounging upon a bridge in chelms ford, wjip_leaned impudently^ over the rails to pryjnto our concerns^ but we caught the eye of the most forward, and looked at him till he was visibly_discoinfite4. not that there was any sunday 79 peculiar efficacy in our look, but rather a sense of shame left in him which disarmed him. it is a very true and expressive phrase, &quot;he looked daggers at me,&quot; for the first pattern and prototype of all daggers must have been a glance of the eye. first, there was the glance of jove s eye, then his fiery bolt; then, the material gradually hardening, tridents, spears, javelins; and finally, for the convenience of pri vate men, daggers, krisses, and so forth, were invented. it is wonderful how we get about the streets without being wounded by these delicate and glancing weapons, a man can so nimbly whip out his rapier, or without being noticed carry it unsheathed. yet it is rare that one gets seriously looked at. as we passed under the last bridge over the canal, just before reaching the merrimack, the people coming out of church paused to look at us from above, and apparently, so strong is cus tom, indulged in some heathenish comparisons; but we were the truest observers of this sunny day. according to hesiod, &quot; the seventh is a holy day, for then latona brought forth golden-rayed apollo,&quot; and by our reckoning this was the seventh day of the week, and not the first. i find among the papers of an old justice of the peace and deacon of the town of concord, this singular 80 a week memorandum, which is worth preserving as a relic of an ancient custom. after reforming the spelling and grammar, it runs as follows: &quot;men that traveled with teams on the sab bath, december 18, 1803, were jeremiah rich ardson and jonas parker, both of shirley. they had teams with rigging such as is used to carry barrels, and they were traveling west ward. richardson was questioned by the hon. ephraim wood, esq., and he said that jonas parker was his fellow-traveler, and he further said that a mr. longley was his employer, who promised to bear him out.&quot; we were the men that were gliding northward, this september 1, 1839, with still team, and rigging not the most convenient to carry barrels, unquestioned by any squire or church deacon, and ready to bear ourselves out if need were. in the latter part of the seventeenth century, according to the historian of dunstable, &quot;towns were directed to erect 4 a cage near the meeting-house, and in this all offenders against the sanctity of the sabbath were confined.&quot; society has relaxed a little from its strictness, one would say, but j. presume that there is noteless reliyifw, than l_jhejiyature is found to be loos ened in one part, it is only drawn the tighter in another. you can hardly convince a man of an error sunday 81 in a lifetime, but must content yourself with the reflection that the progress of science is slow. if he is not flrp,n nmy ha. the geologists tell us that it took one hundred years to prove that fossils are organic, and one hundred and fifty more to prove that they are not to be referred to the noachian deluge. i am not sure but i should betake myself in extremities to the liberal di vinities of greece, rather than to my country s god. jehovah, though with us he has ac quired new attributes, jg more absolute and ujiapprgachable, but hardly more divine, than he is not so much of a gentleman, not and jsaj^olic, hjl does not exert so intimate^and genial an influence on nature, as nmnjia god of the greeks. i should fear the infinite power and inflexible justice of the al mighty mortal hardly as yet apotheosized, so wholly masculine, with no sister juno, no apollo, no venus, nor minerva, to intercede for me, ovfj.&amp;lt;*&amp;gt; &amp;lt;iaeovcra t, kr)8ojjlevrj re. the ,glcfi cjan are youthful and erring and fallen gods. with the vices of men, but in many important respects essentially of the divine race. in my pantheon, pan still reigns in his pristine glory, with his ruddy face, his flowing beard, and his shaggy body, his pipe and his crook, his nymph echo, and his chosen daughter lambe; for the 82 a week great god pjuljs not dead, as was rumored. no god ever dies. perhaps of all the gods of new england and of ancient greece, i am most constant at his shrine. /&quot;&quot; it seems to me that the god that is commonly worshiped in civilized countries is not at all divine, though he bears a divine name, but is the oj^whelming authqrity and respectability jf mankind combined. men reverence one an other, not yet god. if i thought that i could speak with discrimination and impartiality of the nations of christendom, i should praise them, but it tasks me too much. they seem to be the most civil and humane, but i may be mistaken. every people have gods to suit their circumstances; the society islanders had a god called toahitu, &quot; in shape like a dog ; he saved such as were in danger of falling from rocks and trees.&quot; i think that we can do with out him, as we have not much climbing to do. among them a man could make himself a god out of a piece of wood in a few minutes, which would frighten him out of his wits. i fancy that some indefatigable spinster of the old school, who had the supreme felicity to be born in &quot;days that tried men s souls,&quot; hear ing this, may say with nestor, another of the old school, &quot;but you are younger than i. for time was when i conversed with greater men sunday 83 than you. for not at any time have i seen such men, nor shall see them, as perithous, and dry as, and troi/xeva a,au&amp;gt;&amp;gt;,&quot; that is probably washington, sole &quot;shepherd of the people.&quot; and when apollo has now six times rolled westward, or seemed to roll, and now for the seventh time shows his face in the east, eyes wellnigh glazed, long glassed, which have fluc tuated only between lamb s wool and worsted, explore ceaselessly some good sermon book. for six days shalt thou labor and do all thy knit ting, but on the seventh, forsooth, thy reading. happy we who can bask in this warm septem ber sun, which illumines all creatures, as well when they rest as when they toil, not without a feeling of gratitude; whose life is as blame less, how blameworthy soever it may be, on the lord s mona-day as on his suna-day. there are various, nay, incredible faiths; why should we be alarmed at any of them? what man believes, god believes. long as i have lived, and many blasphemers as i have heard and seen, i have never yet heard or wit nessed any direct and conscious blasphemy or irreverence; but of indirect and habitual, enough. where is the_manwho jla^guiuyl of jlirec^and personal insolence to^qmjthat_made him? one memorable addition to the old mythol 84 a week ogy is due to this era, the christian fable. with what pains, and tears, and blood these centuries have woven this and added it to the mythology of mankind ! the new prometheus. with what miraculous consent, and patience, and persistency has this mythus been stamped on the memory of the race! it would seem as if it were in the progress of our mythology to dethrone jehovah, and crown christ in his stead. if it is not a tragical life we live, then i know not what to call it. such a story as that of jesus christ, the history of jerusalem, say, being a part of the universal history. the naked, the embalmed, unburied death of jeru salem amid its desolate hills, think of it. in tasso s poem i trust some things are sweetly buried. consider the snappish tenacity with which they preach christianity still. what are time and space to christianity, eighteen hun dred years, and a new world? that the hum ble life of a jewish peasant should have force to make a new york bishop so bigoted. forty four lamps, the gift of kings, now burning in a place called the holy sepulchre ; a church-bell ringing; some unaffected tears shed by a pil grim on mount calvary within the week. &quot;jerusalem, jerusalem, when i forget thee, may my right hand forget her cunning.&quot; sunday 85 &quot;by the waters of babylon there we sat down, and we wept when we remembered zion.&quot; i trust that some may be as near and dear to buddha, or christ, or swedenborg, who are without the pale of their churches, jit isjne to be christian to appreciate the beautj^and significance of the life of christ. i know that some will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their christ named beside my buddha, yet i am sure that i am willing they should love their christ more than my buddha, for the love is the main thing, and i like him too. &quot;god is the letter ku, as well as khu.&quot; why need christians be still intolerant and superstitious? the simple-minded sailors were unwilling to cast overboard jonah at his own request. &quot; where is this love become in later age ? alas ! t is gone in endless pilgrimage from hence, and never to return, i doubt, till revolution wheel those times about.&quot; one man says, &quot; the world s a popular disease, that reigns within the froward heart and frantic brains of poor distempered mortals.&quot; another, that &quot; all the world s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.&quot; the world is a strange place for a playhouse to stand within it. old drayton thought that a 86 a week man that lived here, and would be a poet, fop instance, should have in him certain &quot;brave, translunary things,&quot; and a &quot;fine madness&quot; should possess his brain. certainly it were as well, that he might be up to the occasion. that is a superfluous wonder, which dr. john son expresses at the assertion of sir thomas browne that &quot;his life has been a miracle of thirty years, which to relate were not history but a piece of poetry, and would sound like a fable.&quot; the wonder is, rather, that all men do not assert as much. that would be a rare praise, if it were true, which was addressed to francis beaumont, &quot; spectators sate part in your tragedies.&quot; think what a mean and wretched place this world is ; that half the time we have to light a lamp that we may see to live in it. this is half our life. who would undertake the enterprise if it were all? and, pray, what more has day to offer? a lamp that burns more clear, a purer oil, say winter-strained, that so we may pursue our idleness with less obstruction. bribed with a little sunlight and a few pris matic tints, we bless our maker, and stave off his wrath with h}tnns. i make ye an offer, ye gods, hear the scoffer, the scheme will not hurt you, if ye will find goodness, i will find virtue, sunday 87 though i am your creature, and child of your nature, i have pride still unbended, and blood undescended, some free independence, and my own descendants. i cannot toil blindly, though ye behave kindly, and i swear by the rood, i ll be slave to no god. i ye will deal plainly f i will strive mainly, ill discover. great plans to_your lover r and give him a sphere somewhat larger than here. &quot;verily, my angels! i was abashed on ac count of ray servant, who had no providence but me; therefore did i pardon him.&quot; 1 most people with whom i talk, men and wo men even of some originality and genius, have their scheme of the universe all cut and dried, very dry, i assure you, to hear, dry enough to burn, dry-rotted and powder-post, methinks, which they set up between you and them in the shortest intercourse ; an ancient and totter ing frame with all its boards blown off. they do not walk without their bed. some, to me, seemingly very unimportant and unsubstantial things and relations, are for them everlastingly 1 the gulistan of sadi. 88 a week settled, as father, son, and holy ghost, and the like. these are like the everlasting hills to them. but in all my wanderings i never came across the least vestige of authority for these things. they have not left so distinct a trace as the delicate flower of a remote geological period on the coal in my grate. tile wisest no .doctrines : hejhasjiojjcheme ; he sees no rafter, not even_a_cobweb, against the_heavens. it is clear sky. i. i ever see more clearly at one time than at another, the medium through which i see is clearer. to see from earth to heaven, and see there standing, stilfat fixture, that old jewish scheme ! what jjght have you to hold up this obstacle to my y , j .^understanding you, to your understanding me ! you did not invent it ; it was imposed on you. jexamine your authority. even christ, we fear, had his scheme, his conformity to tradi ^pe^jwhich slightly vitiates his teaching. he had not swallowed all formulas&quot; he ^preached some mere doctrines. as for me, abraham, isaac, and jacob are now only the subtilest im aginable essences, which would not stain the morning sky. your scheme must be the frame work of the universe; all other schemes will soon be ruins. the perfect god in his revela tions of himself has never got to the length of one such proposition as you, his prophets, state. sunday 89 have you learned the alphabet of heaven and can count three? do you know the number of god s family? can you put mysteries into words? do you presume to fable of the in effable? pray, what geographer are you, that speak of heaven s topography? whose friend are you that speak of god s personality? do you, miles howard, think that he has made you his confidant? tell me of the height of the mountains of the moon, or of the diameter of space, and i may believe you, but of the secret history of the almighty, and i shall pronounce thee mad. yet we have a sort of family history of our god, so have the tahitians of theirs, and some old poet s grand imagination is im posed on us as adamantine everlasting truth, and god s own word. pythagoras says, truly enough, &quot;a true assertion respecting god is an assertion of god;&quot; but we may well doubt if there is any example of this in literature. the new testament is an invaluable book, though i confess to having been slightly pre judiced against it in my very early days by the church and the sabbath school, so that it seemed, before i reaji it, to be the yellowest book in the catalogue. yet i early escaped from their meshes. it was hard to get the com mentaries out of one s head and taste its true flavor. i think that pilgrim s progress is the 90 a week best sermon which has been preached from this text; almost all other sermons that i have heard, or heard of, have been but poor imita tions of this. it would be a poor story to be prejudiced against the life of christ because the book has been edited by christians. in fact, i love this book rarely, though it is a sort of castle in the air to me, which i am permitted to dream. having come to it so recently and freshly, it has the greater charm, so that i can not find any to talk with about it. i never read a novel, they have so little real life and thought in them. the reading which i love best is the scriptures of the several nations, though it hap pens that i am better acquainted with those of the hindoos, the chinese, and the persians, than of the hebrews, which i have come to last. give me one of these bibles, and you have si lenced me for a while. when i recover the use of my tongue, i am wont to worry my neigh bors with the new sentences; but commonly they cannot see that there is any wit in them. such has been my experience with the new testament. i have not yet got to the cruci fixion, i have read it over so many times. i should love dearly to read it aloud to my friends, some of whom are seriously inclined; it is so good, and i am sure that they have never heard it, it fits their case exactly, and we should enjoy sunda y 91 it so much together, but i instinctively de spair of getting their ears. they soon show, by signs not to be mistaken, that it is inexpres sibly wearisome to them. i do not mean to imply that i am any better than my neigh bors; for, alas! i know that i am only as good, though i love better books than they. it is remarkable that, notwithstanding the universal favor with which the new testament is outwardly received, and even the bigotry with which it is defended, there is no hospitality shown to, there is no appreciation of, the order of truth with which it deals. i know of no book that has so few readers. there is none so truly strange, and heretical, and unpopular. to christians, no less than greeks and jews, it is foolishness and a stumbling-block. there are, indeed, severe things in it which no man should read aloud more than once. &quot; seek first the kingdom of heaven.&quot; &quot;lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth.&quot; &quot;if thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven.&quot; &quot;for what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?&quot; think of this, yankees! &quot;verily, i say unto you, if ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this 92 a week mountain, remove hence to yonder place, and it shall remove ; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.&quot; think of repeating these things to a new england audience ! thirdly, fourthly, fif teenthly, till there are three barrels of sermons ! who, without cant, can read them aloud? who, without cant, can hear them, and not go out of the meeting-house? they never were read, they never were heard. let but one of these sentences be rightly read, from any pulpit in the land, and there would not be left one stone of that meeting-house upon another. yet the new testament treats of man and man s so-called spiritual affairs too exclusively, and is too constantly moral and personal, to alone content me, who am not interested solely in man s religious or moral nature, or in man even. i have not the most definite designs on the future. absolutely speaking, do unto oth ers as you would that they should do unto you is by no means a golden rule, but the best of current silver. an honest man would have but little occasion for it. it is golden not to have any rule at all in such a case. the book has never been written which is to be accepted with out any allowance. christ was a sublime actor on the stage of the world. he knew what he was thinking of when he said, heaven and j?arth shall pass away, but my words shall not sunday 93 cjmss away*&quot; i draw near to him at such a time. yet h(ttaught mankind but imperfectly how to live ; his thoughts were all directed to ward another world. there is another kind of success than his. even here we have a sort of living to get, and must buffet it somewhat longer. there are various tough problems yet to solve, and we must make shift to live, be twixt spirit and matter, such a human life as we can. a healthy man, with steady employment, as wood-chopping at fifty cents a cord, and a camp in the woods, will not be a good subject for christianity. the new testament may be a choice book to him on some, but not on all or most of his days. he will rather go a-fishing in his leisure hours. the apostles, though they were fishers too, were of the solemn race of sea-fishers, and never trolled for pickerel on inland streams. men have a singular desire to be good with out being good for anything, because, perchance, they think vaguely that so it will be good for them in the end. the sort of morality which thf pripsts inculcate is a very subtle policy, far finer than the politicians , and thejworld is very , supppsftfnlly ml fid by^ thp.m-a^ the_ policemen . it is not worth the while to let our imperfec tions disturb us always. the conscience really 94 a week does not, and ought not to monopolize the whole of our lives, any more than the fceart or the jiead. it is as liable to disease as any other part. i have seen some whose consciences, owing undoubtedly to former indulgence, had grown to be as irritable as spoilt children, and at length gave them no peace. they did not know when to swallow their cud, and their lives of course yielded no milk. inp*&amp;lt;tt bred in the house, feeling and thinking propagate the sin by an unnatural breeding in and in. i say, tnrnjtout doors, into the moors. i love a life -whose plot is simple, and does not thicken with every pimple, a soul so sound no sickly conscience binds it, that makes the universe no worse than t finds it. i love an earnest soul, whose mighty joy and sorrow are not drowned in a bowl, and brought to life to-morrow ; that lives one tragedy, and not seventy ; a conscience worth keeping, laughing not weeping ; a conscience wise and steady, and forever ready ; not changing with events, dealing in compliments ; a conscience exercised about large things, where one may doubt. i love a soul not all of wood, predestinated to be good, sunday 95 but true to the backbone unto itself alone, and false to none ; born to its own affairs, its own joys and own cares ; by whom the work which god begun is finished, and not undone ; .-taken up whej-e he jeft off, whether to worship or to scoff ; if not good, why then evil, if not good god, good devil. goodness ! you hypocrite, come out of that, live your life, do your work, then take your hat. i have no patience towards such conscientious cowards. give me simple laboring folk, who love their work, whose virtue is a song to cheer god along. i was once reproved by a minister who was driving a poor beast to some meeting-house horse-sheds among the hills of new hampshire, because i was bending my steps to a mountain top on the sabbath, instead of a church, when i would have gone farther than he to hear a true word spoken on that or any day. he declared that i was &quot;breaking the lord s fourth com mandment,&quot; and proceeded to enumerate, in a sepulchral tone, the disasters which had befallen him whenever he had done any ordinary work on the sabbath. he really thought that a god was on the watch to trip up those men who fol lowed any secular work on this day, and did not 96 a week see that it was the evil conscience of the workers that did it. the country is full of this super stition, so that when one enters a village, the church, not only really but from association, is the ugliest looking building in it, because it is the one in which human nature stoops the lowest and is most disgraced. certainly, such temples as these shall erelong cease to deform the landscape. there are few things more dis heartening and disgusting than when you are walking the streets of a strange village on the sabbath, to hear a preacher shouting like a boatswain in a gale of wind, and thus harshly profaning the quiet atmosphere of the day. you fancy him to have taken off his coat, as when men are about to do hot and dirty work. if i should ask the minister of middlesex to let me speak in his pulpit on a sunday, he would object because i do not pray as he does, or because i am not ordained. what under the sun are these things? really, there is no infidelity, nowadays, so great as that which prays, and keeps the sab bath, and rebuilds the churches. the sealer of the south pacific preaches a truer doctrine. the church is a sort of hospital for men s souls, and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies. those who are taken into it live like pensioners in their retreat or sailor s snug sunday 97 harbor, where you may see a row of religious cripples sitting outside in sunny weather. let not the . apprehension that he may one day have to occupy a ward therein discourage the cheer ful labors of the able-souled man. while he remembers the sick in their extremities, let him not look thither as to his goal. one is sick at heart of this pagoda worship. it is like the beating of gongs in a hindoo subterranean tem ple. in dark places and dungeons the preach er s words might perhaps strike root and grow, but not in broad daylight in any part of the world that i know. the sound of the sabbath bell far away, now breaking on these shores, does not awaken pleasing associations, but mel ancholy and sombre ones rather. one involun tarily rests on his oar, to humor his unusually meditative mood. it is as the sound of many catechisms and religious books twanging a cant ing peal round the earth, seeming to issue from some egyptian temple and echo along the shore of the nile, right opposite to pharaoh s palace and moses in the bulrushes, startling a multi tude of storks and alligators basking in the sun. everywhere &quot;good men&quot; sound a retreat, and the word has gone forth to fall back on innocence. fall forward rather on to what ever there is there. christianity only hopes. it has hung its harp on the willows, and cannot 98 a week sing a song in a strange land. it has dreamed a sad dream, and does not yet welcome the morning with joy. the mother tells her false hoods to her child, but, thank heaven, the child does not grow up in its parent s shadow. our mother s faith has not grown with her experi ence. her experience has been too much for her. the lesson (rf life was too hard for herto it is remarkable that almost all speakers and writers feel it to be incumbent on them, sooner or later, to prove or to acknowledge the per sonality of god. some earl of bridgewater, thinking it better late than never, has provided for it in his will. it is a sad mistake. in reading a work on agriculture, we have to skip the author s moral reflections, and the words &quot;providence&quot; and &quot;he&quot; scattered along the page, to come at the profitable level of what he has to say. what he calls his religion is for the most part offensive to the nostrils. he should know better than expose himself, and keep his foul sores covered till they are quite healed. there is morej-eligion in men s science than there is science in their religion. let us make haste to the report of the committee on swine. a man s real faith is never contained in his creed, nor is his creed an article of his faith. sunday 99 the last is never adopted. this it is that per mits him to smile ever, and to live even as bravely as he does. and yet he clings anxiously to his creed, as to a straw, thinking that that does him good service because his sheet anchor does not drag. in most men s religion, the ligature which -^shouldbe its umbilical cord connecting them with divinity is~ rather like that thread which the accomplices of cylon held in their hands when they went abroad from the temple of minerva, the other end being attached to the statue of the goddess. but frequently, as in their case, the thread breaks, being stretched, and they are left without an asylum. &quot;a good and pious man reclined his head on the bosom of contemplation, and was absorbed in the ocean of a revery. at the instant when he awaked from his vision, one of his friends, by way of pleasantry, said, what rare gift have you brought us from that garden, where you have been recreating ? he replied, i fancied to myself and said, when i can reach the rose bower, i will fill my lap with the flowers, and bring them as a present to my friends; but when i got there, the fragrance of the roses so intoxicated me, that the skirt dropped from my hands. o bird of dawn ! learn the warmth of affection from the moth; for that scorched 100 a week creature gave up the ghost, and uttered not a groan: these vain pretenders are ignorant of him they seek after ; for of him that knew him we never heard again : o thou ! who towerest above the flights of conjecture, opinion, and comprehension ; whatever has been reported of thee we have heard and read; the congregation is dismissed, and life drawn to a close ; and we still rest at our first encomium of thee! &quot; l by noon we were let down into the merri mack through the locks at middlesex, just above pawtucket falls, by a serene and liberal-minded man, who came quietly from his book, though his duties, we supposed, did not require him to open the locks on sundays. with him we had a just and equal encounter of the eyes, as be tween two honest men. the movements of the eyes express the per petual and unconscious courtesy of the parties. it is said that a rogue does not look you in the face, neither does an honest man look at you as if he had his reputation to establish. i have seen some who did not know when to turn aside their eyes in meeting yours. a truly confident and magnanimous spirit is wiser than to contend for the mastery in such encounters. serpents alone conquer by the steadiness of their gaze. 1 sadi. sunday 101 my friend looks me in the face and sees me, that is all. the best relations were at once established between us and this man, and though few words were spoken, he could not conceal a visible in terest in us and our excursion. he was a lover of the higher mathematics, as we found, and in the midst of some vast sunny problem, when we overtook him and whispered our conjectures. by this man we were presented with the freedom of the merrimack. we now felt as if we were fairly launched on the ocean stream of our voy age, and were pleased to find that our boat would float on merrimack water. we began again busily to put in practice those old arts of rowing, steering, and paddling. it seemed a strange phenomenon to us that the two rivers should mingle their waters so readily, since we had never associated them in our thoughts. as we glided over the broad bosom of the merrimack, between chelmsford and dracut, at noon, here a quarter of a mile wide, the rat tling of our oars was echoed over the water to those villages, and their slight sounds to us. their harbors lay as smooth and fairy-like as the lida, or syracuse, or rhodes, in our imag ination, while, like some strange roving craft, we flitted past what seemed the dwellings of no ble home-staying men, seemingly as conspicuous 102 a week as if on an eminence, or floating upon a tide which came up to those villagers breasts. at a third of a mile over the water we heard dis tinctly some children repeating their catechism in a cottage near the shore, while in the broad shallows between, a herd of cows stood lashing their sides, and waging war with the flies. two hundred years ago, other catechizing than this was going on here ; for here came the sachem wannalancet and his people, and some times tahatawan, our concord sachem, who afterwards had a church at home, to catch fish at the falls; and here also came john eliot, with the bible and catechism, and baxter s call to the unconverted, and other tracts, done into the massachusetts tongue, and taught them christianity meanwhile. &quot;this place,&quot; says gookin, referring to wamesit, &quot;being an an cient and capital seat of indians, they come to fish ; and this good man takes this opportunity to spread the net of the gospel, to fish for their souls.&quot; &quot;may 5, 1674,&quot; he continues, &quot;ac cording to our usual custom, mr. eliot and myself took our journey to wamesit, or paw tuckett; and arriving there that evening, mr. eliot preached to as many of them as could be got together, out of matt. xxii. 1-14, the par able of the marriage of the king s son. we met at the wigwam of one called wannalancet, sunda y 103 about two miles from the town, near pawtuckett falls, and bordering upon merrimak river. this person, wannalancet, is the eldest son of old pasaconaway, the ehiefest sachem of paw tuckett. he is a sober and grave person, and of years, between fifty and sixty. he hath been always loving and friendly to the english.&quot; as yet, however, they had not prevailed on him to embrace the christian religion. &quot;but at this time,&quot; says gookin, &quot;may 6, 1674,&quot; &quot;after some deliberation and serious pause, he stood up, and made a speech to this effect: *i must acknowledge i have, all my days, used to pass in an old canoe, [alluding to his frequent custom to pass in a canoe upon the river,] and now you exhort me to change and leave my old canoe, and embark in a new canoe, to which i have hitherto been unwilling; but now i yield up myself to your advice, and enter into a new canoe, and do engage to pray to god here after. &quot; one &quot;mr. richard daniel, a gentle man that lived in billerica,&quot; who with other &quot;persons of quality&quot; was present, &quot;desired brother eliot to tell the sachem from him, that it may be, while he went in his old canoe, he passed in a quiet stream ; but the end thereof was death and destruction to soul and body. but now he went into a new canoe, perhaps he would meet with storms and trials, but yet 104 a week he should be encouraged to persevere, for the end of his voyage would be everlasting rest.&quot; &quot;since that time, i hear this sachem doth per severe, and is a constant and diligent hearer of god s word, and sanctifieth the sabbath, though he doth travel to wamesit meeting every sab bath, which is above two miles; and though sundry of his people have deserted him, since he subjected to the gospel, yet he continues and persists.&quot; 1 already, as appears from the records, &quot;at a general court held at boston in new eng land, the 7th of the first month, 1643-44,&quot; &quot;wassamequin, nashoonon, kutchamaquin, massaconomet, and squaw sachem, did volun tarily submit themselves &quot; to the english; and among other things did &quot;promise to be willing from time to time to be instructed in the know ledge of god.&quot; being asked &quot;not to do any unnecessary work on the sabbath day, espe cially within the gates of christian towns,&quot; they answered, &quot;it is easy to them; they have not much to do on any day, and they can well take their rest on that day.&quot; &quot;so,&quot; says winthrop, in his journal, &quot;we causing them to understand the articles, and all the ten commandments of god, and they freely assenting to all, they were solemnly received, and then presented the court 1 gookin s hist. coll. of the indians in new england, 1674 sunday 105 with twenty-six fathom more of wampom ; and the court gave each of them a coat of two yards of cloth, and their dinner; and to them and their men, every of them, a cup of sack at their departure; so they took leave and went away.&quot; what journey ings on foot and on horseback through the wilderness, to preach the gospel to these minks and muskrats ! who first, no doubt, listened with their red ears out of a natural hospitality and courtesy, and afterward from curiosity or even interest, till at length there &quot;were praying indians,&quot; and, as the general court wrote to cromwell, the &quot;work is brought to this perfection that some of the indians them selves can pray and prophesy in a comfortable manner.&quot; it was in fact an old battle and hunting ground through which we had been floating, the ancient dwelling-place of a race of hunters and warriors. their weirs of stone, their arrow heads and hatchets, their pestles, and the mor tars in which they pounded indian corn before the white man had tasted it, lay concealed in the mud of the river bottom. tradition still points out the spots where they took fish in the greatest numbers, by such arts as they possessed. it is a rapid story the historian will have to put to gether. miantonimo, winthrop, webster. soon he comes from montaup to bunker hill, 106 a week from bear-skins, parched corn, bows and arrows, to tiled roofs, wheatfields, guns and swords. pawtucket and wamesit, where the indians re sorted in the fishing season, are now lowell, the city of spindles and manchester of america, which sends its cotton cloth round the globe. even we youthful voyagers had spent a part of our lives in the village of chelmsford, when the present city, whose bells we heard, was its ob scure north district only, and the giant weaver was not yet fairly born. so old are we; so young is it. we were thus entering the state of new hampshire on the bosom of the flood formed by the tribute of its innumerable valleys. ,the river was the only key which could unlock its maze, presenting its hills and valleys, its lakes and streams, in their natural order and position. the merrimack, or sturgeon river, is formed by the confluence of the pemigewasset, which rises near the notch of the white mountains, and the winnipiseogee, which drains the lake of the same name, signifying &quot;the smile of the great spirit.&quot; from their junction it runs south seventy-eight miles to massachusetts, and thence east thirty -five miles to the sea. i have traced its stream from where it bubbles out of the rocks of the white mountains above the sunday 107 clouds, to where it is lost amid the salt billows of the ocean on plum island beach. at first it comes on murmuring to itself by the base of stately and retired mountains, through moist primitive woods whose juices it receives, where the bear still drinks it, and the cabins of set tlers are far between, and there are few to cross its stream; enjoying in solitude its cascades still unknown to fame ; by long ranges of moun tains of sandwich and of squam, slumbering like tumuli of titans, with the peaks of moose hillock, the haystack, and kearsarge reflected in its waters; where the maple and the rasp berry, those lovers of the hills, flourish amid temperate dews; flowing long and full of meaning, but untranslatable as its name pemi gewasset, by many a pastured pelion and ossa, where unnamed muses haunt, tended by oreads, dryads, naiads, and receiving the tribute of many an untasted hippocrene. there are earth, air, fire, and water, very well, this is water, and down it comes. such water do the gods distill, and pour down every hill for their new england men ; a draught of this wild nectar bring, and i 11 not taste the spring of helicon again. falling all the way, and yet not discouraged by the lowest fall. by the law of its birth never 108 a week to become stagnant, for it has come out of the clouds, and down the sides of precipices worn in the flood, through beaver-dams broke loose, not splitting but splicing and mending itself, until it found a breathing-place in this low land. there is no danger now that the sun will steal it back to heaven again before it reach the sea, for it has a warrant even to recover its own dews into its bosom again with interest at every eve. it was already the water of squam and new found lake and winnipiseogee, and white mountain snow dissolved, on which we were floating, and smith s and baker s and mad rivers, and nashua and souhegan and piscata quoag, and suncook and soucook and contoo cook, mingled in incalculable proportions, still fluid, yellowish, restless all, with an ancient, ineradicable inclination to the sea. so it flows on down by lowell and haverhill, at which last place it first suffers a sea change, and a few masts betray the vicinity of the ocean. between the towns of amesbury and newbury it is a broad, commercial river, from a third to half a mile in width, no longer skirted with yellow and crumbling banks, but backed by high green hills and pastures, with frequent white beaches on which the fishermen draw up their nets. i have passed down this portion of sunday 109 the river in a steamboat, and it was a pleasant bight to watch from its deck the fishermen drag ging their seines on the distant shore, as in pic tures of a foreign strand. at intervals you may meet with a schooner laden with lumber, standing up to haverhill, or else lying at an chor or aground, waiting for wind or tide; until, at last, you glide under the famous chain bridge, and are landed at newburyport. thus she who at first was &quot;poore of waters, naked of renowne,&quot; having received so many fair tribu taries, as was said of the forth, &quot; doth grow the greater still, the further downe ; till that abounding both in power and fame, she long doth strive to give the sea her name ; &quot; or if not her name, in this case, at least the impulse of her stream. from the steeples of newburyport you may review this river stretch ing far up into the country, with many a white sail glancing over it like an inland sea, and be hold, as one wrote who was born on its head waters, &quot;down out at its mouth, the dark inky main blending with the blue above. plum is land, its sand ridges scolloping along the hori zon like the sea-serpent, and the distant outline broken by many a tall ship, leaning, still 9 against the sky.&quot; rising at an equal height with the connecti cut, the merrimack reaches the sea by a course 110 a week only half as long, and hence has no leisure to form broad and fertile meadows, like the for mer, but is hurried along rapids, and down numerous falls, without long delay. the banks are generally steep and high, with a narrow in terval reaching back to the hills, which is only rarely or partially overflown at present, and is much valued by the farmers. between chelms ford and concord, in new hampshire, it varies from twenty to seventy -five rods in width. it is probably wider than it was formerly, in many places, owing to the trees having been cut down, and the consequent wasting away of its banks. .the influence of the pawtucket dam is felt as far up as cromwell s falls, and many think that the banks are being abraded and the river filled up again by this cause. like all our rivers, it is liable to freshets, and the pemige wasset has been known to rise twenty-five feet in a few hours. it is navigable for vessels of burden about twenty miles; for canal -boats, by means of locks, as far as concord in new hampshire, about seventy -five miles from its mouth; and for smaller boats to plymouth, one hundred and thirteen miles. a small steam boat once plied between lowell and nashua, before the railroad was built, and one now runs from newburyport to haverhill. unfitted to some extent for the purposes of sunday 111 commerce by the sand-bar at its mouth, see how this river was devoted from the first to the service of manufactures. issuing from the iron region of franconia, and flowing through still uncut forests, by inexhaustible ledges of granite, with squam, and winnipiseogee, and newfound, and massabesic lakes for its mill ponds, it falls over a succession of natural dams, where it has been offering its privileges in vain for ages, until at last the yankee race came to improve them. standing at its mouth, look up its sparkling stream to its source, a silver cascade which falls all the way from the white mountains to the sea, and behold a city on each successive plateau, a. busy colony of human beaver around every fall. not to mention newburyport and haverhill, see law rence, and lowell, and nashua, and manches ter, and concord, gleaming one above the other. when at length it has escaped from under the last of the factories, it has a level and unmo lested passage to the sea, a mere waste water, as it were, bearing little with it but its fame ; its pleasant course revealed by the morning fog which hangs over it, and the sails of the few small vessels which transact the commerce of haverhill and newburyport. but its real ves sels are railroad cars, and its true and main stream, flowing by an iron channel farther 112 a week south, may be traced by a long line of vapor amid the hills, which no morning wind ever dis perses, to where it empties into the sea at bos ton. this side is the louder murmur now. instead of the scream of a fish-hawk scaring the fishes, is heard the whistle of the steam-engine, arousing a country to its progress. this river too was at length discovered by the white man, &quot;trending up into the land,&quot; he knew not how far, possibly an inlet to the south sea. its valley, as far as the winnipiseogee, was first surveyed in 1652. the first settlers of massachusetts supposed that the connecticut, in one part of its course, ran northwest, &quot;so near the great lake as the indians do pass their canoes into it over land.&quot; from which lake and the &quot;hideous swamps&quot; about it, as they supposed, came all the beaver that was traded between virginia and canada, and the poto mac was thought to come out of or from very near it. afterward the connecticut came so near the course of the merrimack that, with a little pains, they expected to divert the current of the trade into the latter river, and its profits from their dutch neighbors into their own pockets. unlike the concord, the merrimack is not a dead but a living stream, though it has less life sunday 113 within its waters and on its banks. it has a swift current, and, in this part of its course, a clayey bottom, almost no weeds, and compara tively few fishes. we looked down into its yel low water with the more curiosity, who were accustomed to the nile-like blackness of the former river. shad and alewives are taken here in their season, but salmon, though at one time more numerous than shad, are now more rare. bass, also, are taken occasionally; but locks and dams have proved more or less de structive to the fisheries. the shad make their appearance early in may, at the same time with the blossoms of the pyrus, one of the most con spicuous early flowers, which is for this reason called the shad-blossom. an insect called the shad-fly also appears at the same time, cover ing the houses and fences. we are told that &quot;their greatest run is when the apple-trees are in full blossom. the old shad return in au gust; the young, three or four inches long, in september. these are very fond of flies.&quot; a rather picturesque and luxurious mode of fish ing was formerly practiced on the connecticut, at bellows falls, where a large rock divides the stream. &quot;on the steep sides of the island rock,&quot; says belknap, &quot;hang several arm-chairs, fastened to ladders, and secured by a counter poise, in which fishermen sit to catch salmon 114 a week and shad with dipping nets.&quot; the remains of indian weirs, made of large stones, are still to be seen in the winnipiseogee, one of the head waters of this river. it cannot but affect our philosophy favorably to be reminded of these shoals of migratory fishes, of salmon, shad, alewives, marsh-bank ers, and others, which penetrate up the innu merable rivers of our coast in the spring, even to the interior lakes, their scales gleaming in the sun; and again, of the fry which in still greater numbers wend their way downward to the sea. &quot;and is it not pretty sport,&quot; wrote captain john smith, who was on this coast as early as 1614, &quot;to pull up twopence, sixpence, and twelvepence, as fast as you can haul and veer a line?&quot; &quot;and what sport doth yield ff, more pleasing content, and less hurt or charge, than angling with a hook, and crossing the sweet air from isle to isle, over the silent streams of a calm sea.&quot; on the sandy shore, opposite the glass-house village in chelmsford, at the great bend where we landed to rest us and gather a few wild plums, we discovered the campanula rotundi folia, a new flower to us, the harebell of the poets, which is common to both hemispheres, growing close to the water. here, in the shady sunday 115 branches of an apple-tree on the sand, we took our nooning, where there was not a zephyr to disturb the repose of this glorious sabbath day, and we reflected serenely on the long past and successful labors of latona. &quot; so silent is the cessile air, that every cry and call, the hills, and dales, and forest fair again repeats them all. &quot;the herds beneath some leafy trees, amidst the flowers they lie, the stable ships upon the seas tend up their sails to dry.&quot; as we thus rested in the shade, or rowed lei surely along, we had recourse, from time to time, to the gazetteer, which was our naviga tor, and from its bald natural facts extracted the pleasure of poetry. beaver river comes in a little lower down, draining the meadows of pelham, windham, and londonderry. the scotch-irish settlers of the latter town, accord ing to this authority, were the first to introduce the potato into new england, as well as the manufacture of linen cloth. everything that is printed and bound in a book contains some echo at least of the best that is in literature. indeed, the best books have a use, like sticks and stones, which is above or beside their design, not anticipated in the 116 a week preface, not concluded in the appendix. even virgil s poetry serves a very different use to me to-day from what it did to his contemporaries. it has often an acquired and accidental value merely, proving that man is still man in the world. it is pleasant to meet with such still lines as, &quot;jam laeto turgent in palmite gemmae ; &quot; now the buds swell on the joyful stem. &quot; strata jacent passim sua quaeque sub arbore poma ; &quot; the apples lie scattered everywhere, each under its tree. in an ancient and dead language, any recog nition of living nature attracts us. these are such sentences as were written while grass grew and water ran. it is no small recommendation when a book will stand the test of mere unob structed sunshine and daylight. what would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery, for if men read aright, methinks they would never reacl anything but poems. ]s[o_history nor philosophy can supply their place. the wisest definition of poetry the poet will instantly prove false by setting aside its requi sitions. we can, therefore, publish only our advertisement of it. there is no doubt that the loftiest written sunday 117 wisclom is either rhymed, or in some way musi cally measured, is, in form as well as sub stance, poetry ; and a volume which should con tain the condensed wisdom of mankind need not have one rhythmless line. yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. as naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. it is the chief and most memorable success, qr_history is but j^ proaq n^rratiye_of^oetin^dftft(1s. what else have the hindoos, the persians, the babyloni ans, the egyptians done, that can be told ? it is the simplest relation of phenomena, and de scribes the commonest sensations with more truth than sjejenjce does, and the latter at a dis sjlowly_ mimics its style and methods. the poet sings how the blood flows in his veins. he performs his functions, and is so well that he needs such stimulus to sing only as plants to put forth leaves and blossoms. he would strive in vain to modulate the remote and tran sient music which he sometimes hears, since his is sljital function like breathing, and an integral result like weight, jt-iauiqt_the over-^ jflowing of life, but its subsidence rather, and is drawn from under the feet of the poet. it is &quot; &quot;&quot;&quot; &quot;&quot; ~~~~&quot; -&quot; ,, i| ^ r % i i enough if homer but say the sun sets. he is &amp;lt;4s serene as^nature, and we can hardly detect 118 a week the enthusiasm of the bard. it is aa if nature &amp;lt;-poke. he presents to us the simplest pictures of human life, so the child itself can understand them, and the man must not think twice to ap preciate his naturalness. each reader discov ers for himself that, with respect to the simpler features of nature, succeeding poets have done little else than copy his similes. his more memorable passages are as naturally bright as gleams of sunshine in misty weather. nature furnishes him not only with words, but with stereotyped lines and sentences from her mint. &quot; as from the clouds appears the full moon, all shining, and then again it goes behind the shadowy clouds, so hector, at one time appeared among the foremost, and at another in the rear, commanding ; and all with brass he shone, like to the lightning of segis-bearing zeus.&quot; he conveys the least information, even the hour of the day, with such magnificence and vast expense of natural imagery, as if it were a message from the gods. &quot; while it was dawn, and sacred day was advancing, for that space the weapons of both flew fast, and the peo ple fell; but when now the woodcutter was preparing his morning meal, in the recesses of the mountain, and had wearied his hands with cutting lofty trees, and satiety came to his mind, and the desire of sweet food took possession of his thoughts ; then the danaans, by their valor, broke the phalanxes, shouting to their companions from rank to rank.&quot; sunday 119 when the army of the trojans passed the night under arms, keeping watch lest the enemy should reembark under cover of the dark, &quot;they, thinking great things, upon the neutral ground of war sat all the night ; and many fires burned for them. as when in the heavens the stars round the bright moon appear beautiful, and the air is without wind ; and all the heights, and the extreme summits, and the wooded sides of the mountains appear ; and from the heavens an infinite ether is diffused, and all the stars are seen ; and the shepherd rejoices in his heart ; so between the ships and the streams of xanthua appeared the fires of the trojans before ilium. a thousand fires burned on the plain ; and by each sat fifty, in the light of the blazing fire ; and horses eating white barley and corn, standing by the chariots, awaited fair-throned aurora.&quot; the &quot;white-armed goddess juno,&quot; sent by the father of gods and men for iris and apollo, &quot; went down the idsean mountains to far olympus, as when the mind of a man, who has come over much earth, sallies forth, and he reflects with rapid thoughts, there was i, and there, and remembers many things ; so swiftly the august juno hastening flew through the air, and came to high olympus.&quot; his scenery is always true, and not invented. he does not leap in imagination from asia to greece, through mid air, iirei^i fj.d\a oupfd re ctki6fvra t 6d\affffd t 120 a week for there are very many shady mountains and resounding seas between. if his messengers repair but to the tent of achilles, we do not wonder how they got there, but accompany them step by step along the shore of the resounding sea. nestor s account of the march of the pylians against the epeians is extremely lifelike : &quot;then rose up to them sweet-worded nestor, the shrill orator of the pylians, and words sweeter than honey flowed from his tongue.&quot; this time, however, he addresses patroclus alone: &quot;a certain river, minyas by name, leaps seaward near to arene, where we pylians wait the dawn, both horse and foot. thence with all haste we sped us on the morrow ere t was noonday, accoutred for the fight, even to al pheus s sacred source,&quot; etc. we fancy that we hear the subdued murmuring of the minyas discharging its waters into the main the live long night, and the hollow sound of the waves breaking on the shore, until at length we are cheered at the close of a toilsome march by the gurgling fountains of alpheus. there are few books which are fit to be re membered in our wisest hours, but the iliad is brightest in the serenest days, and embodies still all the sunlight that fell on asia minor. no modern joy or ecstasy of ours can lower its sunday 121 height or dim its lustre, but there it lies in the east of literature, as it were the earliest and latest production of the mind. the ruins of egypt oppress and stifle us with their dust, foulness preserved in cassia and pitch, and swathed in linen ; the death of that which never lived. but the rays of greek poetry struggle down to us, and mingle with the sunbeams of the recent day. the statue of memnon is cast down, but the shaft of the iliad still meets the sun in his rising. &quot; homer is gone ; and where is jove ? and where the rival cities seven ? his song outlives time, tower, and god, all that then was, save heaven. * so, too, no doubt, homer had his homer, and orpheus his orpheus, in the dim antiquity which preceded them. the mythological sys tem of the ancients, and it is still the mythology of the moderns, the poem of mankind, inter woven so wonderfully with their astronomy, and matching in grandeur and harmony the architecture of the heavens themselves, seems to point to a time when a mightier genius in habited the earth. but, after all, man is the great poet, and not homer nor shakespeare; and our language itself, and the common arts of life, are his work. poetry is so universally true and independent of experience that it does not need any particular biography to illustrate 122 a week it, but we refer it sooner or later to some or pheus or linus, and after ages to the genius of humanity and the gods themselves. it would be worth the while to select our reading, for books are the society we keep ; to read only the serenely true; never statistics, nor fiction, nor news, nor reports, nor period icals, but only great poems, and when they failed, read them again, or perchance write more. instead of other sacrifice, we might offer up our perfect (reacm) thoughts to the gods daily, in hymns or psalms. for we should be at the helm at least once a day. the whole of the day should not be daytime ; there should be one hour, if no more, which the day did not bring forth. scholars are wont to sell their birthright for a mess of learning. but is it necessary to know what the speculator prints, or the thoughtless study, or the idle read, the literature of the russians and the chinese, or even french philosophy and much of german criticism? eead the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all. 44 there are the worshipers with offerings, and the worshipers with mortifications; and again the worshipers with enthusiastic devotion; so there are those the wisdom of whose reading is their worship, men of subdued passions and sunda y 123 severe manners; this world is not for him who doth not worship; and where, o arjoon, is there another? &quot; certainly, we do not need to be soothed and entertained always like children. he who resorts to the easy novel, because he is languid, does no better than if he took a nap. the front aspect of great thoughts can only be enjoyed by those who stand on the side whence they arrive. books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought jsj)f unusual^ daring^ such as an idle man can not read, and a timid one would not be enter tained by, which eyeil-inake us dangerous to existing institutions, such call i good books. all that are printed and bound are not books ; they do not necessarily belong to letters, but are oftener to be ranked with the other lux uries and appendages of civilized life. base wares are palmed off under a thousand dis guises. &quot;the way to trade,&quot; as a peddler once told me, &quot;is to put it right through,&quot; no matter what it is, anything that is agreed on. &quot; you grov ling worldlings, you whose wisdom trades where light ne er shot his golden ray.&quot; by dint of able writing and pen-craft, books are cunningly compiled, and have their run and success even among the learned, as if they were the result of a new man s thinking, and their birth were attended with some natural throes. 124 a week but in a little while their covers fall off, for no binding will avail, and it appears that they are not books or bibles at all. there are new and patented inventions in this shape, purport ing to be for the elevation of the race, which many a pure scholar and genius who has learned to read is for a moment deceived by, and finds himself reading a horse-rake, or spinningjenny, or wooden nutmeg, or oak-leaf cigar, or steam power press, or kitchen range, perchance, when he was seeking serene and biblical truths. &quot;merchants, arise, and mingle conscience with your merchandise.&quot; paper is cheap, and authors need not now erase one book before they write another. instead of cultivating the earth for wheat and potatoes, they cultivate literature, and fill a place in the eepublic of letters. or they would fain write for fame merely, as others actually raise crops of grain to be distilled into brandy. books are for the most part willfully and hastily written, as parts of a system to supply a want real or imagined. books of natural history aim com monly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of god s property, by some clerk. they do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell. sunday 125 &quot; to athens gowned he goes, and from that school returns unsped, a more instructed fool.&quot; they teach the elements really of ignorance, not of knowledge ; for, to speak deliberately and in view of the highest truths, it is not easy to distinguish elementary knowledge. , there is a chasm between knowledge and ignorance which the arches of science can never span. a book should contain pure discoveries, glimpses of ^terra^-firma, thoughjby shipwrecked mariners, and not the art of navigation by those who have never been out of sight of land. they must not yield wheat and potatoes, but must them selves be the unconstrained and natural harvest of their author s lives. &quot; what i have learned is mine ; i ve had my thought, and me the muses noble truths have taught.&quot; we do not learn much from learned books, but from true, sincere, human books, from frank and honest biographies. the life of a good man will hardly improve us more than the life of a freebooter, for the inevitable laws ap _gear__as., plainly in the infringement as in the obsgrva.np.ft, and ,0ur_-livesu_aee sustained by a yearly equal expense ofjvirtue of some kind. the decaying tree, while yet it lives, demands sun, wind, and rain no less than the green one. it secretes sap and performs the functions of health. if we choose, we may study the albur 126 a week num only. the gnarled stump has as tender a bud as the sapling. at least let us have healthy books, a stout horse-rake, or a kitchen range which is not cracked. let not the poet shed tears only for the public weal. he should be as vigorous as a sugar-maple, with sap enough to maintain his own verdure, beside what runs into the troughs, and not like a vine, which being cut in the spring bears no fruit, but bleeds to death in the jmdeavor to heal its wounds. the poet is he that hath fat enough, like bears and marmots, iq suck his clawj^all winter* he hibernates in this world, and jeeds job his^own marrow. we love to think in winter, as we waht~dver the snowy pastures, of those happy dreamers that lie under the sod, of dormice and all that race of dormant creatures, which have such a superfluity of life enveloped in thick folds of fur, impervious to cold. alas, the poet too is in one sense a sort of dorjnmise gone into win ter quarters of deep and serene thoughts, insen sible to surrounding circumstances; his words are the relation of his oldest and finest mem ory, a wisdom drawn from the remotest expe rience. other men lead a starved existence, meanwhile, like jyi.wlra 7 that would fain keep on the wing, and trust to pick up a sparrow now and then. sunday 127 there are already essays and poems, the growth of this land, which are not in vain, all which, however, we could conveniently have stowed in the till of our chest. if the gods per mitted their own inspiration to be breathed in vain, these might be overlooked in the crowd, but the accents of truth are as sure to be heard at last on earth as in heaven. they already seem ancient, and in some measure have lost the traces of their modern birth. here are they who &quot;ask for that which is our whole life s light, for the perpetual, true, and clear insight.&quot; i remember a few sentences which spring like the sward in its native pasture, where its roots were never disturbed, and not as if spread over a sandy embankment; answering to the poet s prayer, &quot; let us set so just a rate on knowledge, that the world may trust the poet s sentence, and not still aver each art is to itself a flatterer.&quot; but, above all, in our native port, did we not frequent the peaceful games of the lyceum, from which a new era will be dated to new england, as from the games of greece. for if herodotus carried his history to olympia to read, after the cestus and the race, have we not heard such histories recited there, which since 128 a week our countrymen have read, as made greece sometimes to be forgotten? philosophy, too, has there her grove and portico, not wholly unfrequented in these days. lately the victor, whom all pindars praised, has won another palm, contending with 44 olympian bards who sung divine ideas below, which always find us young, and always keep us so.&quot; what earth or sea, mountain or stream, or muses spring or grove, is safe from his all searching, ardent eye, who drives off phoebus beaten track, visits unwonted zones, makes the gelid hyperboreans glow, and the old polar serpent writhe, and many a nile flow back and hide his head! that phaeton of our day, who d make another milky way, and burn the world up with his ray, by us an undisputed seer, who d drive his flaming car so near unto our shuddering mortal sphere, disgracing all our slender worth, and scorching up the living earth, to prove his heavenly birth. the silver spokes, the golden tire, are glowing with unwonted fire, and ever nigher roll and nigher; sunday 129 the pins and axle melted are, the silver radii fly afar, ah, he will spoil his father s car! who let him have the steeds he cannot steer ? henceforth the sun will not shine for a year ; and we shall ethiops all appear. from his &quot; lips of cunning fell the thrilling delphic oracle.&quot; and yet, sometimes, we should not mind if on our ear there fell some less of cunning, more of oracle. it is apollo shining in your face. o rare con temporary, let us have far-off heats. give us the subtler, the heavenlier, though fleeting beauty, which passes through and through, and dwells not in the verse ; even pure water, which but reflects those tints which wine wears in its grain. let epic trade-winds blow, and cease this waltz of inspirations. let us oftener feel even the gentle southwest wind upon our cheeks blowing from the indian s heaven. what though we lose a thousand meteors from the sky, if skyey depths, if star-dust and undissolv able nebulae remain ? what though we lose a thousand wise responses of the oracle, if we may have instead some natural acres of ionian earth? though we know well, 130 a week &quot; that t is not in the power of kings [or presidents] to raise a spirit for verse that is not born thereto, nor are they born in every prince s days ; &quot; yet spite of all they sang in praise of their &quot;eliza s reign,&quot; we have evidence that poets may be born and sing in our day, in the presi dency of james k. polk, &quot; and that the utmost powers of english rhyme,&quot; were not &quot; within her peaceful reign confined.&quot; the prophecy of the poet daniel is already how much more than fulfilled ! &quot; and who in time knows whither we may vent the treasure of our tongue ? to what strange shores this gain of our best glory shall be sent, t enrich unknowing nations with our stores ? what worlds in th yet unformed occident, may come refined with the accents that are ours.&quot; enough has been said in these days of the charm of fluent writing. we hear it com plained of some works of genius that they have fine thoughts, but are irregular and have no flow. but even the mountain peaks in the ho rizon are, to the eye of science, parts of one range. we should consider that the flow of thought is more like a tidal wave than a prone river, and is the result of a celestial influence, not of any declivity in its channel. the river flows because it runs down hill, and flows the faster, the faster it descends. the reader who expects to float downstream for the whole voy sunday 131 age may well complain of nauseating swells and choppings of the sea when his frail shore craft gets amidst the billows of the ocean stream, which flows as much to sun and moon as lesser streams to it. but if we would appre ciate the flow that is in these books, we must expect to feel it rise from the page like an ex halation, and wash away our critical brains like burr millstones, flowing to higher levels above and behind ourselves. there is many a book which ripples on like a freshet, and flows as glibly as a mill-stream sucking under a cause way ; and when their authors are in the full tide of their discourse, pythagoras and plato and jamblichus halt beside them. their long, stringy, slimy sentences are of that consistency that they naturally flow and run together. they_read asjl written for military men, for men of business, there is such a dispatch in them. compared with these, the ^rave^think _ers and phflnanphftrs seem not to have got their swaddling-clothes off; they are slower than a koman army in its march, the rear camping to-night where the van camped last night. the wise jamblichus eddies and gleams like a watery slough. &quot; how many thousands never heard the name of sidney, or of spenser, or their books ! and yet brave fellows, and presume of fame, and seem to bear down all the world with looks! &quot; 132 a week the ready writer seizes the pen and shouts &quot;f^rward-l alamo and fanning!&quot; and after rolls the tide of war. the very walls and fences seem to travel. but the most rapid trot is no flow after all; and thither, reader, you and i, at least, will not follow. a perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. for the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure. the most attractive sen tences are, perhaps, not the wisest, but the surest and roundest. they are spoken firmly and conclusively, as if the speaker had a right to know what he says, and if not wise, they have at least been well learned. sir walter kaleigh might well be studied, if only for the excellence of his style, for he is remarkable in the midst of so many masters. there is a natural emphasis in his style, like a man s tread, and a breathing space between the sen tences, which the best of modern writing does not furnish. his chapters are like english parks, or say rather like a western forest, where the larger growth keeps down the under wood, and one may ride on horseback through the openings. all the distinguished writers of that period possess a greater vigor and natural sunday 133 ness than the more modern, for it is allowed to slander our own time, and when we read a quotation from one of them in&quot; the midst of a modern author, we seem to have come suddenly upon a greener ground, a greater depth and strength of soil. it is as if a green bough were laid across the page, and we are refreshed as by the sight of fresh grass in midwinter or early spring. you have constantly the warrant of life and experience in what you read. the lit jtlgjthaj^ is said js^jeked out by implication of the much that was done. the sentences are ver durous and blooming as evergreen and flowers, because they are rooted in fact and experience, but our false and florid sentences have only the tints of flowers without their sap or roots. a1j. men are really most attracted by the beauty of plain speech, and they even write, in a florid style in^imitation-xdt _ thi s. ihey_:preier _to be misunderstood rather__than to come short of its jexuberancfi.. hussein effendi praised the epis tolary style of ibrahim pasha to the french traveler botta, because of &quot;the difficulty of un derstanding it; there was,&quot; he said, &quot;but one person at jidda who was capable of understand ing and explaining the pasha s correspondence.&quot; a man s whole life is taxed for the least thing well done. it is its net result. every sen tence is the result of a long probation. where 134 a week shall we look for standard english but to the words of a standard man? the word which is best said came nearest to not being^gokenjit all, for it is cousin jto a deed which the speaker could have better done. ji^,_^lmostit_must have taken the place of a deed by some urgent necessity, even by some misfortune, so that the truest writer will be some captive knight, after &quot;alt 35d^&quot;perhaps~the fates had such a design, when, having stored raleigh so richly with the substance of life and experience, they made him a fast prisoner, and compelled him to make his words his deeds, and transfer to his expres sion the emphasis and sincerity of his action. men have a respect for scholarship and learn ing greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve. we are amused to read how ben jonson engaged that the dull masks with which the royal family and nobility were to be entertained should be &quot;grounded upon antiquity and solid learning.&quot; can there be any greater reproach than an idle learning? learn to split wood, at least. jthe necessity of labor and conversation with many men and things, to the scholar is rarely well remembered ; ..steady labor with the hands, whichjgngrosses the attention also ? is unquestionably the best method of re moving palaver and sentimentality out of one s style,, both of speaking and writing. if he has sunday 135 worked hard from morning till night, though he may have grieved that he could not be watch ing the train of his thoughts during that time, yet the few hasty lines which at evening record his day s experience will be more musical and true than his freest but idle fancy could have furnished. surely the writer isjto address a world of laborerstand such therefore must be his own discipline. he will not idly dance at his work who has wood to cut and cord before nightfall in the short days of winter ; but every stroke will be husbanded, and ring soberly through the wood; and so will the strokes of that scholar s pen, which at evening record the story of the day, ring soberly, yet cheerily, on the ear of the reader, long after the echoes of his axe have died away. the scholar may be sure that he writes the tougher truth for the calluses on his palms. they give firmness to the sentence. indeed, the mind never makes a great and successful effort, without a corre spondtng energy of the body. we are often struck by the force and precision of style to which hard-working men, unpracticed in writ ing, easily attain when required to make the effort. ^4_lll?ieb e ^_ an&amp;lt; ^ v ig or an( l sincer ity, the ornaments of style, were better learned on the farm and in the workshop than in the schools. the sentences written by such rude 136 a week hands are nervous and tough, like hardened thongs, the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine. as for the graces of expression, a great thought is never found in a mean dress; but though it proceed from the lips of the wo lofs, the nine muses and the three graces will have conspired to clothe it in fit phrase. its education has always been liberal, and its im plied wit can endow a college. the world, which the greeks called beauty, has been made such by being gradually divested of every orna ment which was not fitted to endure. the sibyl, &quot;speaking with inspired mouth, smileless, inornate, and unperfumed, pierces through cen turies by the power of the god.&quot; the scholar might frequently emulate the propriety and emphasis of the farmer s call to his team, and confess that if that were written it would sur pass his labored sentences. whose are the truly labored sentences? from the weak and flimsy periods of the politician and literary man, we are glad to turn even to the description of work, the simple record of the month s labor in the farmer s almanac, to restore our tone and spirits. a sentence should read as if its au thor, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end. the scholar requires hard and serious labor to give an impetus to his thought* sunday 137 he will learn to grasp the pen firmly so, and wield it gracefully and effectively, as an axe or a sword. when we consider the weak and nerveless periods of some literary men, who perchance in feet and inches come up to the standard of their race, and are not deficient in girth also, we are amazed at the immense sacri fice of thews and sinews. what ! these propor tions, these bones, and this their work! hands which could have felled an ox have hewed this fragile matter which would not have tasked a lady s fingers ! can this be a stalwart man s work, who has a marrow in his back and a tendon achilles in his heel? they who set tip the blocks of stonehenge did somewhat, if they only laid out their strength for once, and stretched themselves. yet, after all, the truly efficient laborer will not crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task, surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure, and then do but what he loves best. he is anxious only about the fruitful kernels of time. though the hen should sit all day, she could lay only one egg, and, besides, would not have picked up materials for another. let a man take time enough for the most trivial deed, though it be but the paring of his nails. the buds swell imperceptibly, without hurry or confusion, as if the short spring days were an eternity. 138 a week then spend an age in whetting thy desire, thou need st not hasten if thou dost standfast. some hours seem not to be occasion for any deed, but for resolves to draw breath in. we do not directly go about the execution of the purpose that thrills us, but shut our doors be hind us and ramble with prepared mind, as if the half were already done. our resolution is taking root or hold on the earth then, as seeds first send a shoot downward which is fed by their own albumen, ere they send one upward to the light. there is a sort of homely truth and natural ness in some books which is very rare to find, and yet looks cheap enough. there may be nothing lofty in the sentiment, or fine in the expression, but it is careless country talk. homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. it is next to beauty, and a very high art. some have this merit only. the scholar is not apt to make his most familiar experience come grace fully to the aid of his expression. very few men can speak of nature, for instance, with any truth. they overstep her modesty, somehow or other, and confer no favor. they do not speak a good word for her. most cry better than they speak, and you can get more nature out sunday 139 of them by pinching than by addressing them. the surliness with which the woodchopper speaks of his woods, handling them as indiffer ently as his axe, is better than the mealy mouthed enthusiasm of the lover of nature. better that the primrose by the river s brim be a yellow primrose, and nothing more, than that it be something less. aubrey relates of thomas fuller that his was &quot;a very working head, insomuch that, walking and meditating before dinner, he would eat up a penny loaf, not knowing that he did it. his natural mem ory was very great, to which he added the art of memory. he would repeat to you forwards and backwards all the signs from ludgate to charing cross.&quot; he says of mr. john hales, that &quot;he loved canarie,&quot; and was buried &quot;un der an altar monument of black marble with a too long epitaph;&quot; of edmund halley, that he &quot;at sixteen could make a dial, and then, he said, he thought himself a brave fellow; &quot; of william holder, who wrote a book upon his curing one popham who was deaf and dumb, &quot;he was beholding to no author; did only consult with nature.&quot; for the most part, an author consults only with all who have writ ten before him upon a subject, and his book is but the advice of so many. but a good book will never have been forestalled, but the topic 140 a week itself will in one sense be new, and its author, by consulting with nature, will consult not only with those who have gone before, but with those who may come after. there is always room and occasion enough for a true book on any subject; as there is room for more light the brightest day, and more rays will not interfere with the first. we thus worked our way up this river, grad ually adjusting our thoughts to novelties, be holding from its placid bosom a new nature and new works of men, and, as it were with increas ing confidence, finding nature still habitable, genial, and propitious to us ; not following any beaten path, but the windings of the river, as ever the nearest way for us. fortunately we had no business in this country. the concord had rarely been a river, or rivus, but barely fluvius, or between jluvius and lacus. this merrimack was neither rivus nor fluvius nor lacus, but rather amnis here, a gently swelling and stately rolling flood approaching the sea. we could even sympathize with its buoyant tide, going to seek its fortune in the ocean, and, anticipating the time when &quot;being received within the plain of its freer water,&quot; it should &quot;beat the shores for banks,&quot; &quot; campoque recepta liberioris aquse, pro ripis litora pulsant&quot; sunday 141 at length we doubled a low shrubby islet, called rabbit island, subjected alternately to the sun and to the waves, as desolate as if it lay some leagues within the icy sea, and found our* selves in a narrower part of the river, near the sheds and yards for picking the stone known as the chelmsford granite, which is quarried in westford and the neighboring towns. we passed wicasuck island, which contains seventy acres or more, on our right, between chelmsford and tyngsborough. this was a favorite resi dence of the indians. according to the history of dunstable, &quot;about 1663, the eldest son of passaconaway [chief of the penacooks] was thrown into jail for a debt of 45, due to john tinker, by one of his tribe, and which he had promised verbally should be paid. to relieve him from his imprisonment, his brother wan nalancet and others, who owned wicasuck island, sold it and paid the debt.&quot; it was, however, restored to the indians by the general court in 1665. after the departure of the in dians in 1683, it was granted to jonathan tyng in payment for his services to the colony, in maintaining a garrison at his house. tyng s house stood not far from wicasuck falls. gookin, who, in his epistle dedicatory to rob ert boyle, apologizes for presenting his &quot;matter clothed in a wilderness dress,&quot; says that on the 142 a week breaking out of philip s war in 1675, there were taken up by the christian indians and the eng lish in marlborough, and sent to cambridge, seven &quot;indians belonging to narragansett, long island, and pequod, who had all been at work about seven weeks with one mr. jonathan tyng, of dunstable, upon merrimack river; and, hearing of the war, they reckoned with their master, and getting their wages, conveyed themselves away without his privity, and, being afraid, marched secretly through the woods, designing to go to their own country.&quot; how ever, they were released soon after. such were the hired men in those days. tyng was the first permanent settler of dunstable, which then embraced what is now tyngsborough and many other towns. in the winter of 1675, in philip s war, every other settler left the town, but &quot;he,&quot; says the historian of dunstable, &quot;fortified his house; and, although obliged to send to boston for his food, sat himself down in the midst of his savage enemies, alone, in the wilderness, to defend his home. deeming his position an important one for the defense of the frontiers, in february, 1676, he petitioned the colony for aid,&quot; humbly showing, as his peti tion runs, that, as he lived &quot;in the uppermost house on merrimac river, lying open to y e enemy, yet being so seated that it is, as it were, sunday 143 a watch-house to the neighboring towns,&quot; he could render important service to his country if only he had some assistance, &quot;there being,&quot; he said, &quot;never an inhabitant left in the town but myself.&quot; wherefore he requests that their &quot;honors would be pleased to order him three or four men to help garrison his said house,&quot; which they did. but methinks that such a gar rison would be weakened by the addition of a man. &quot; make bandog thy scout watch to bark at a thief, make courage for life, to be capitain chief ; make trap-door thy bulwark, make bell to begin, make gunstone and arrow show who is within.&quot; thus he earned the title of first permanent set tler. in 1694 a law was passed &quot;that every settler who deserted a town for fear of the in dians should forfeit all his rights therein.&quot; but now, at any rate, as i have frequently observed, a man may desert the fertile frontier territories of truth and justice, which are the state s best lands, for fear of far more insignificant foes, without forfeiting any of his civil rights therein. nay, townships are granted to deserters, and the general court, as i am sometimes inclined to regard it, is but a deserters camp itself. as we rowed along near the shore of wica suck island, which was then covered with wood, in order to avoid the current* two men&amp;gt; 144 a week who looked as if they had just run out of low ell, where they had been waylaid by the sab bath, meaning to go to nashua, and who now found themselves in the strange, natural, uncul tivated, and unsettled part of the globe whicl intervenes, full of walls and barriers, a rough and uncivil place to them, seeing our boat mov ing so smoothly up the stream, called out from the high bank above our heads to know if we would take them as passengers, as if this were the street they had missed ; that they might sit and chat and drive away the time, and so at last find themselves in nashua. this smooth way they much preferred. but our boat was crowded with necessary furniture, and sunk low in the water, and moreover required to be worked, for even it did not progress against the stream with out effort; so we were obliged to deny them passage. as we glided away with even sweeps, while the fates scattered oil in our course, the sun now sinking behind the alders on the dis tant shore, we could still see them far off over the water, running along the shore and climbing over the rocks and fallen trees like insects, for they did not know any better than we that they were on an island, the un sympathizing river ever flowing in an opposite direction; until, having reached the entrance of the island brook, which they had probably crossed upon sunda y 145 the locks below, they found a more effectual barrier to their progress. they seemed to be learning much in a little time. they ran about like ants on a burning brand, and once more they tried the river here, and once more there, to see if water still indeed was not to be walked on, as if a new thought inspired them, and by some peculiar disposition of the limbs they could accomplish it. at length sober common sense seemed to have resumed its sway, and they con cluded that what they had so long heard must be true, and resolved to ford the shallower stream. when nearly a mile distant we could see them stripping off their clothes and prepar ing for this experiment; yet it seemed likely that a new dilemma would arise, they were so thoughtlessly throwing away their clothes on the wrong side of the stream, as in the case of the countryman with his corn, his fox, and his goose, which had to be transported one at a time. whether they got safely through, or went round by the locks, we never learned. we cquldjkilbelp being struck by the seeming, thougj^nocent indifference^f nature to these fiasiiksj^^while elsewhere she was equally serving others. ^like a true benefac t$ess,_the secret of her service is unchangeable ness. thus is the busiest merchant, thouget within sight of his lowell, put to pilgrim s 146 a week shifts, and soon comes to staff and scrip and scallop shell. we, too, who held the middle of the stream, came near experiencing a pilgrim s fate, being tempted to pursue what seemed a sturgeon or larger fish, for we remembered that this was the sturgeon river, its dark and monstrous back alternately rising and sinking in midstream. we kept falling behind, but the fish kept his back well out, and did not dive, and seemed to prefer to swim against the stream, so, at any rate, he would not escape us by going out to sea. at length, having got as near as was con venient, and looking out not to get a blow from his tail, now the bow-gunner delivered his charge, while the stern-man held his ground. but the halibut-skinned monster, in one of these swift-gliding pregnant moments, without ever ceasing his bobbing up and down, saw fit, with out a chuckle or other prelude, to proclaim him self a huge imprisoned spar, placed there as a buoy, to warn sailors of sunken rocks. so, each casting some blame upon the other, we withdrew quickly to safer waters. the scene-shifter saw fit here to close the drama of this day without regard to any unities which we mortals prize. whether it might have proved tragedy, or comedy, or tragi-com edy, or pastoral, we cannot tell. this sundaj sunday 147 ended by the going down of the sun, leaving us still on the waves. but they who are on the water enjoy a longer and brighter twilight than they who are on the land, for here the water, as well as the atmosphere, absorbs and reflects the light, and some of the day seems to have sunk down into the waves. the light gradually for sook the deep water, as well as the deeper air, and the gloaming came to the fishes as well as to us, and more dim and gloomy to them, whose day is a perpetual twilight, though sufficiently bright for their weak and watery eyes. vespers had already rung in many a dim and watery chapel down below, where the shadows of the weeds were extended in length over the sandy floor. the vespertinal pout had already begun to flit on leathern fin, and the finny gossips withdrew from the fluvial street to creeks and coves, and other private haunts, excepting a few of stronger fin, which anchored in the stream, stemming the tide even in their dreams. mean while, like a dark evening cloud, we were wafted over the cope of their sky, deepening the shadows on their deluged fields. having reached a retired part of the river where it spread out to sixty rods in width, we pitched our tent on the east side, in tyngsbor ough, just above some patches of the beach plum, which was now nearly ripe, where the 148 a week sloping bank was a sufficient pillow, and with the bustle of sailors making the land, we trans ferred such stores as were required from boat to tent, and hung a lantern to the tent-pole, and so our house was ready. with a buffalo spread on the grass, and a blanket for our covering, our bed was soon made. a fire crackled mer rily before the entrance, so near that we could tend it without stepping abroad, and when we had supped, we put out the blaze, and closed the door, and with the semblance of domestic comfort, sat up to read the gazetteer, to learn our latitude and longitude, and write the journal of the voyage, or listened to the wind and the rippling of the river till sleep overtook us. there we lay under an oak on the bank of the stream, near to some farmer s cornfield, getting sleep, and forgetting where we were; a great blessing, that we are obliged to forget our en terprises every twelve hours. minks, muskrats, meadow-mice, woodchucks, squirrels, skunks, rabbits, foxes, and weasels, all inhabit near, but keep very close while you are there. the river sucking and eddying away all night down toward the marts and the seaboard, a great wash and freshet, and no small enterprise to reflect on. instead of the scythian vastness of the billerica night, and its wild musical sounds, we were kept awake by the boisterous sport of some sunday 149 irish laborers on the railroad, wafted to us over the water, still unwearied and unresting on this seventh day, who would not have done with whirling up and down the track with ever-in creasing velocity and still reviving shouts, till late in the night. one sailor was visited in his dreams this night by the evil destinies, and all those powers that are hostile to human life, which constrain and oppress the minds of men, and make their path seem difficult and narrow, and beset with dan gers, so that the most innocent and worthy en terprises appear insolent and a tempting of fate, and the gods go not with us. but the other happily passed a serene and even ambrosial or immortal night, and his sleep was dreamless, or only the atmosphere of pleasant dreams re mained, a happy, natural sleep until the morn ing; and his cheerful spirit soothed and reas sured his brother, for whenever they meet, the good genius is sure to prevail. monday. ** i thynke for to touche also the worlde whiche neweth ererie daie, so as i can, bo as i male.&quot; goweb. &quot; the hye sheryfe of notynghame, hym holde in your mynde.&quot; robin hood ballads. &quot; his shoote it was but loosely shott, yet flewe not the arrowe in vaine, for it mett one of the sheriffe s men, and william a trent was slaine.&quot; robin hood ballads. &quot; gazed on the heavens for what he missed on earth.&quot; britannia s pastorals. when the first light dawned on the earth, and the birds awoke, and the brave river was heard rippling confidently seaward, and the nimble early rising wind rustled the oak leaves about our tent, all men, having reinforced their bodies and their souls with sleep, and cast aside doubt and fear, were invited to unattempted adventures. &quot; all courageous knichtis agains the day dichtis the breest-plate that bricht is, to f eght with their foue. 152 a week the stoned steed stampis throw curage and crampis, syne on the land lampis ; the night is neir gone.&quot; one of us took the boat over to the opposite shore, which was flat and accessible, a quarter of a mile distant, to empty it of water and wash out the clay, while the other kindled a fire and got breakfast ready. at an early hour we were again on our way, rowing through the fog as before, the river already awake, and a million crisped waves come forth to meet the sun when he should show himself. the countrymen, re cruited by their day of rest, were already stir ring, and had begun to cross the ferry on the business of the week. this ferry was as busy as a beaver dam, and all the world seemed anx ious to get across the merrimack river at this particular point, waiting to get set over, chil dren with their two cents done up in paper, jail birds broke loose and constable with warrant, travelers from distant lands to distant lands, men and women to whom the merrimack river was a bar. there stands a gig in the gray morning, in the mist, the impatient traveler pacing the wet shore with whip in hand, and shouting through the fog after the regardless charon and his retreating ark, as if he might throw that passenger overboard and return monday 153 forthwith for himself; he will compensate him. he is to break his fast at some unseen place on the opposite side. it may be ledyard, or the wandering jew. whence, pray, did he come out of the foggy night? and whither through the sunny day will he go? we observe only his transit ; important to us, forgotten by him, transiting all day. there are two of them. may be, they are virgil and dante. but when they crossed the styx, none were seen bound up or down the stream, that i remember. it is only a transjectus, a transitory voyage, like life itself, none but the long-lived gods bound up or down the stream. many of these monday men are ministers, no doubt, reseeking their parishes with hired horses, with sermons in their valises all read and gutted, the day after never with them. they cross each other s routes all the country over like woof and warp, making a gar ment of loose texture; vacation now for six days. they stop to pick nuts and berries, and gather apples, by the wayside at their leisure. good religious men, with the love of men in their hearts, and the means to pay their toll in their pockets. we got over this ferry chain without scraping, rowing athwart the tide of travel, no toll for us that day. the fog dispersed, and we rowed leisurely along through tyngsborough, with a clear sky 154 a week and a mild atmosphere, leaving the habitations of men behind, and penetrating yet farther into the territory of ancient dunstable. it was from dunstable, then a frontier town, that the famous captain lovewell, with his company, marched in quest of the indians on the 18th of april, 1725. he was the son of &quot;an ensign in the army of oliver cromwell, who came to this country, and settled at dunstable, where he died at the great age of one hundred and twenty years.&quot; in the words of the old nursery tale, sung about a hundred years ago, &quot; he and his valiant soldiers did range the woods full wide, and hardships they endured to quell the indian s pride.&quot; in the shaggy pine forest of pequawket they met the &quot;rebel indians,&quot; and prevailed, after a bloody fight, and a remnant returned home to enjoy the fame of their victory. a township called lovewell s town, but now, for some reason, or perhaps without reason, pembroke, was granted them by the state. &quot; of all our valiant english, there were but thirty-four, and of the rebel indians, there were about four-score ; and sixteen of our english did safely home return, the rest were killed and wounded, for which we all must mourn. &quot;our worthy capt. lovewell among them there did die, they killed lieut. robbins, and wounded good young frye, who was our english chaplin ; he many indians slew, and some of them he scalped while bullets round him flew.&quot; monda y 155 our brave forefathers have exterminated all the indians, and their degenerate children no longer dwell in garrisoned houses nor hear any war-whoop in their path. it would be well, perchance, if many an &quot;english chaplin &quot;in these days could exhibit as unquestionable trophies of his valor as did &quot;good young frye.&quot; we have need to be as sturdy pioneers still as miles standish, or church, or lovewell. we are to follow on another trail, it is true, but one as convenient for ambushes. whaijllihe jhidiajis_ate__to^ not^savages as grim prowling jibout the clearings tp-daty. ? &quot; and braving many dangers and hardships in the way, they safe arrived at dunstable the thirteenth (?) day dl may.&quot; but they did not all &quot; safe arrive in dunstable the thirteenth,&quot; or the fifteenth, or the thirtieth &quot;day of may.&quot; eleazer davis and josiah jones, both of concord, for our native town had seven men in this fight, lieutenant farwell, of dunstable, and jonathan frye, of andover, who were all wounded, were left behind, creep ing toward the settlements. &quot;after traveling several miles, frye was left and lost,&quot; though a more recent poet has assigned him company in his last hours. &quot; a man he was of comely form, polished and brave, well learned and kind ; old harvard s learned halls he left far in the wilds a grave to find. 156 a week &quot; ah ! now his blood-red arm he lifts ; his closing lids he tries to raise ; and speak once more before he dies, in supplication and in praise. u he prays kind heaven to grant success, brave love well s men to guide and bless, and when they ve shed their heart-blood true, to raise them all to happiness. &quot; lieutenant farwell took his hand, his arm around his neck he threw, and said, brave chaplain, i could wish that heaven had made me die for you. &quot; farwell held out eleven days. &quot;a tradition says,&quot; as we learn from the history of concord, &quot;that arriving at a pond with lieut. farwell, davis pulled off one of his moccasins, cut it in strings, on which he fastened a hook, caught some fish, fried and ate them. they refreshed him, but were injurious to farwell, who died soon after.&quot; davis had a ball lodged in his body, and his right hand shot off; but on the whole, he seems to have been less damaged than his companions. he came into berwick after being out fourteen days. jones also had a ball lodged in his body, but he likewise got into saco after fourteen days, though not in the best condition imaginable. &quot; he had subsisted, &quot; says an old journal, &quot;on the spontaneous vege tables of the forest; and cranberries which he monday 157 had eaten came out of wounds lie had received in his body.&quot; this was a* 80 tne case w * tn davis. the last two reached home at length, safe if not sound, and lived many years in a crippled state to enjoy their pension. but alas ! of the crippled indians, and their adventures in the woods, &quot; for as we are informed, so thick and fast they fell, scarce twenty of their number at night did get home well,&quot; how many balls lodged with them, how fared their cranberries, what berwick or saco they got into, and finally what pension or township was granted them, there is no journal to tell. it is stated in the history of dunstable that just before his last march, lovewell was warned to beware of the ambuscades of the enemy, but &quot;he replied, that he did not care for them, and bending down a small elm beside which he was standing into a bow, declared that he would treat the indians in the same way. this elm is still standing [in nashua], a vener able and magnificent tree.&quot; meanwhile, having passed the horseshoe in terval in tyngsborough, where the river makes a sudden bend to the northwest, for our re flections have anticipated our progress some what, we were advancing farther into the 158 a week country and into the day, which last proved almost as golden as the preceding, though the slight bustle and activity of the monday seemed to penetrate even to this scenery. now and then we had to muster all our energy to get round a point, where the river broke rippling over rocks, and the maples trailed their branches in the stream, but there was generally a back water or eddy on the side, of which we took ad vantage. the river was here about forty rods wide and fifteen feet deep. occasionally one ran along the shore, examining the country, and visiting the nearest farm-houses, while the other followed the windings of the stream alone, to meet his companion at some distant point, and hear the report of his adventures; how the farmer praised the coolness of his well, and his wife offered the stranger a draught of milk, or the children quarreled for the only transparency in the window that they might get sight of the man at the well. for though the country seemed so new, and no house was observed by us, shut in between the banks that sunny day, we did not have to travel far to find where men inhabited, like wild bees, and had sunk wells in the loose sand and loam of the merrimack. there dwelt the subject of the hebrew scrip tures, and the esprit des lois, where a thin, vaporous smoke curled up through the noon. monday 159 all that is told of mankind, of the inhabitants of the upper nile, and the sunderbunds, and timbuctoo, and the orinoko, was experience here. every race and class of men was repre sented. according to belknap, the historian of new hampshire, who wrote sixty years ago, &amp;gt;here too, perchance, dwelt &quot;new lights&quot; and free -thinking men, even then. &quot;the people in general throughout the state,&quot; it is written, &quot;are professors of the christian religion in some form or other. there is, however, a sort of wise men who pretend to reject it; but they have not yet been able to substitute a better in its place.&quot; the other voyageur, perhaps, would in the mean while have seen a brown hawk, or a wood chuck, or a musquash creeping under the alders. we occasionally rested in the shade of a maple or a willow, and drew forth a melon for our refreshment, while we contemplated at our leisure the lapse of the river and of human life ; and as that current, with its floating twigs and leaves, so did all things pass in review before us, while far away in cities and marts on this very stream, the old routine was proceeding still. there is, indeed, a tide in the affairs of men, as the poet says, and yet as things flow they circulate, and the ebb always balances the flow. all streams are but tributary to the 160 a week ocean, which itself does not stream, and the shores are unchanged, but in longer periods than man can measure. go where we will, we discover infinite change in particulars only, not in generals. when i go into a museum and see the mummies wrapped in their linen bandages, i see that the lives of men began to need reform as long ago as when they walked the earth. i come out into the streets, and meet men who declare that the time is near at hand for the redemption of the race. but as men lived in thebes, so do they live in dunstable to-day. &quot;time drinketh up the essence of every great and noble action which ought to be performed, and is delayed in the execution.&quot; so says veeshnoo sarma; and we perceive that the schemers return again and again to common sense and labor. such is the evidence of his tory. &quot; yet i doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs, and the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.&quot; there are secret articles in our treaties with the gods, of more importance than all the rest, which the historian can never know. there are many skillful apprentices, but few master workmen. on every hand we observe a truly wise practice, in education, in morals, and monday 161 in the arts of life, the embodied wisdom of many an ancient philosopher. who does not see that heresies have some time prevailed, that reforms have already taken place? all this worldly wisdom might be regarded as the once unamiable heresy of some wise man. some in terests have got a footing on the earth which we have not made sufficient allowance for. even they who first built these barns and cleared the land thus, had some valor. the abrupt epochs and chasms are smoothed down in his tory as the inequalities of the plain are con cealed by distance. but unless we do more than simply learn the trade of our time, we are but apprentices, and not yet masters of the art of life. now that we are casting away these melon seeds, how can we help feeling reproach? he who eats the fruit should at least plant the seed; ay, if possible, a better seed than that whose fruit he has enjoyed. seeds, there are seeds enough which need only be stirred in with the soil where they lie, by an inspired voice or pen, to bear fruit of a divine flavor. o thou spendthrift! defray thy debt to the world; eat not the seed of institutions, as the luxurious do, but plant it rather, while thou devourest the pulp and tuber for thy subsistence; that so, perchance, one variety may at last be found worthy of preservation. 162 a week there are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature. all laborers must have their nooning, and at this season of the day, we are all, more or less, asiatics, and give over all work and reform. while lying thus on our oars by the side of the stream, in the heat of the day, our boat held by an osier put through the staple in its prow, and slicing the melons, which are a fruit of the east, our thoughts re verted to arabia, persia, and hindostan, the lands of contemplation and dwelling-places of the ruminant nations. in the experience of this noontide we could find some apology even for the instinct of the opium, betel, and tobacco chewers. mount saber, according to the french traveler and naturalist, botta, is cele brated for producing the kat-tree, of which &quot;the soft tops of the twigs and tender leaves are eaten,&quot; says his reviewer, &quot;and produce an agreeable soothing excitement, restoring from fatigue, banishing sleep, and disposing to the enjoyment of conversation.&quot; we thought that we might lead a dignified oriental life along this stream as well, and the maple and alders would be our kat-trees. ft.-i* -a -great^pleasure ta escape sometimes .from thft^restless class of reformers. what if these grievances exist? so do you and i. monday 163 think you that sitting hens are troubled with ennui these long summer days, sitting on and on in the crevice of a hay -loft, without active employment? by the faint cackling in distant barns, i judge that dame nature is interested still to know how many eggs her hens lay. the universal soul, as it is called, has an interest in the stacking of hay, the foddering of cattle, and the draining of peat-meadows. away in scythia, away in india, it makes butter and cheese. suppose that all farms are run out, and we youths must buy old land and bring it to, still everywhere the relentless opponents of reform bear a strange resemblance to ourselves ; or, perchance, they are a few old maids and bachelors, who sit round the kitchen hearth and listen to the singing of the kettle. &quot;the ora cles often give victory to our choice, and not to the order alone of the mundane periods. as, for instance, when they say that our voluntary sorrows germinate in us as the growth of the particular life we lead.&quot; the reform which you talk about can be undertaken any morning before unbarring our doors. we need not call any convention. when two neighbors begin to eat corn bread, who before ate wheat, then the gods smile from ear to ear, for it is very pleas ant to them. why do you not try it? don t let me hinder you. 164 a week there are theoretical reformers at all times, and all the world over, living on anticipation. wolff, traveling in the deserts of bokhara, says, &quot;another party of derveeshes came to me j and observed, the time will come when there shall be no difference between rich and poor, between high and low, when property will be in common, even wives and children. &quot; but forever i ask of such, what then? the der veeshes in the deserts of bokhara and the re formers in marlboro chapel sing the same song. &quot;there s a good time coming, boys,&quot; but, asked one of the audience, in good faith, &quot;can you fix the date?&quot; said i, &quot; will you help it along?&quot; the nonchalance and dolce-far-niente air of nature and society hint at infinite periods in the progress of mankind. the states have leisure to laugh from maine to texas at some news paper joke, and new england shakes at the double entendres of australian circles, while the poor reformer cannot get a hearing. men do not fail commonly for want of know ledge, but for want of prudence to give wisdom the preference. what we need to know in any case is very simple. it is but too easy to es tablish another durable and harmonious routine. immediately all parts of nature consent to it. only make something to take the place of some monday 165 thing, and men will behave as if it was the very thing they wanted. they must behave, at any rate, and will work up any material. there is always a present and extant life, be it better or worse, which all combine to uphold. we should be slow to mend, my friends, as slow to require mending, &quot;not hurling, accord ing to the oracle, a transcendent foot towards piety.&quot; the language of excitement is at best picturesque merely. you must be calm before you can utter oracles. what was the excite ment of the delphic priestess compared with the calm wisdom of socrates? or whoever it was that was wise. enthusiasm is a supernat ural serenity. &quot; men find that action is another thing than what they in discoursingpapers read ; the world s affairs require in managing more arts than those wherein you clerks proceed.&quot; as in geology, so in social institutions, we may discover the causes of all past change in the present invariable order of society. the great est appreciable physical revolutions are the work of the light-footed air, the stealthy -paced water, and the subterranean fire. aristotle said, &quot;as time never fails, and the universe is eternal, neither the tanais nor the nile can have flowed forever.&quot; we are independent of the change we detect. the longer the lever, the 166 a week less perceptible its motion. it is the slowest pulsation which is the most vital. the hero then will know how to wait, as well as to make haste. all good abides with him who waiteth wisely ; we shall sooner overtake the dawn by remaining here than by hurrying over the hills of the west. be assured that every man s suc cess is in proportion to his average ability. the meadow flowers spring and bloom where the waters annually deposit their slime, not where they reach in some freshet only. a man is not his hope, nor his despair, nor yet his past deed. we know not yet what we have done, still less what we are doing. wait till evening, and other parts of our day s work will shine than we had thought at noon, and we shall dis cover the real purport of our toil. as when the farmer has reached the end of the furrow and looks back, he can tell best where the pressed earth shines most. to one who habitually endeavors to contem plate the true state of things, the political state can hardly be said to have any existence what ever. it is unreal, incredible, and insignificant to him, and for him to endeavor to extract the truth from such lean material is like making sugar from linen rags, when sugar-cane may be had. generally speaking, the political news, monday 167 whether domestic or foreign, might be written to-day for the next ten years with sufficient accuracy. most revolutions in society have not power to interest, still less alarm us; but tell me that our rivers are drying up, or the genus pine dying out in the country, and i might at tend. most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calcu late. but will the government never be so well ad ministered, inquired one, that we private men shall hear nothing about it? &quot;the king an swered : at all events, i require a prudent and able man, who is capable of managing the state affairs of my kingdom. the ex-minister said : the criterion, o sire ! of a wise and competent man is, that he will not meddle with such like matters.&quot; alas that the ex-minister should have been so nearly right ! in my short experience of human life, the outward obstacles, if there were any such, have not been living men, but the institutions of the dead. it is grateful to make one s way through this latest generation as through dewy grass. men are as innocent as the morning to the un suspicious. &quot; and round about good morrows fly, as if day taught humanity.&quot; 168 a week not being reve of this shire, &quot; the early pilgrim blythe he hailed, that o er the hills did stray, and many an early husbandman, that he met on the way ; &quot; thieves and robbers all, nevertheless. i have not so surely foreseen that any cossack or chippeway would come to disturb the honest and simple commonwealth, as that some mon ster institution would at length embrace and crush its free members in its scaly folds ; for it is not to be forgotten, that while the law holds fast the thief and murderer, it lets itself go loose. when i have not paid the tax which the state demanded for that protection which i did not want, itself has robbed me; when i have asserted the liberty it presumed to declare, it self has imprisoned me. poor creature! if it knows no better i will not blame it. if it can not live but by these means, i can. i do not wish, it happens, to be associated with massa chusetts, either in holding slaves or in conquer ing mexico. i am a little better than herself in these respects. as for massachusetts, that huge she briareus, argus and colchian dragon conjoined, set to watch the heifer of the con stitution and the golden fleece, we would not warrant our respect for her, like some compo sitions, to preserve its qualities through all monday 169 weathers. thus it has happened, that not the arch fiend himself has been in my way, but these toils which tradition says were originally spun to obstruct him. they are cobwebs and trifling obstacles in an earnest man s path, it is true, and at length one even becomes attached to his unswept and undusted garret. i love man kind, but i hate the institutions of the dead unkind. men execute nothing so faith fully as the wills of the dead, to the last codicil and letter. they rule this world, and the liv ing are but their executors. such foundation too have our lectures and our sermons, com monly. they are all dudldan; and piety derives its origin still from that exploit of pius .seneas) who bore his father, anchises, on his shoulders from the ruins of troy. or, rather, like some indian tribes, we bear about with us the mouldering relics of our ancestors on our shoulders. if, for instance, a man asserts the value of individual liberty over the merely po litical commonweal, his neighbor still tolerates him, that is, he who is living near him, some times even sustains him, but never the state. its officer, as a living man, may have human virtues and a thought in his brain, but as the tool of an institution, a jailer or constable it may be, he is not a whit superior to his prison key or his staff. herein is the tragedy : that men 170 a week doing outrage to their proper natures, even those called wise and good, lend themselves tc perform the office of inferior and brutal ones. hence come war and slavery in ; and what else may not come in by this opening? but cer tainly there are modes by which a man may put bread into his mouth which will not prejudice him as a companion and neighbor. &quot; now turn again, turn again, said the pind6r, for a wrong way you have gone, for you have forsaken the king s highway, and made a path over the corn.&quot; undoubtedly, countless reforms are called for because society is not animated, or instinct enough with life, but in the condition of some snakes which i have seen in early spring, with alternate portions of their bodies torpid and flexible, so that they could wriggle neither way. all men are partially buried in the grave of custom, and of some we see only the crown of the head above ground. better are the physi cally dead, for they more lively rot. even vir tue is no longer such if it be stagnant. a man s life should be constantly as fresh as this river. it should be the same channel, but a new water every instant. &quot;virtues as rivers pass, but still remains that virtuous man there was.&quot; most men have no inclination, no rapids, no monday 171 cascades, but marshes, and alligators, and mi asma instead. we read that when, in the ex pedition of alexander, onesicritus was sent forward to meet certain of the indian sect of gymnosophists, and he had told them of those new philosophers of the west, pythagoras, socrates, and diogenes, and their doctrines, one of them, named dandamis, answered that &quot;they appeared to him to have been men of genius, but to have lived with too passive a re gard for the laws.&quot; the philosophers of the west are liable to this rebuke still. &quot;they say that lieou-hia-hoei, and chao-lien did not sustain to the end their resolutions, and that they dishonored their character. their lan guage was in harmony with reason and justice ; while their acts were in harmony with the sen timents of men.&quot; chateaubriand said: &quot;there are two things which grow stronger in the breast of man, in proportion as he advances in years : the love of country and religion. let them be never so much forgotten in youth, they sooner or later present themselves to us arrayed in all their charms, and excite in the recesses of our hearts an attachment justly due to their beauty.&quot; it may be so. but even this infirmity of noble minds marks the gradual decay of youthful hope and faith. it is the allowed infidelity of ago? 172 a week there is a saying of the wolofs, &quot;he who was born first has the greatest number of old clothes,&quot; consequently m. chateaubriand has more old clothes than i have. it is compara tively a faint and reflected beauty that is ad mired, not an essential and intrinsic one. it is because the old are weak, feel their mortality, and think that they have measured the strength of man. they will not boast; they will be frank and humble. well, let them have the few poor comforts they can keep. humility is still a very human virtue. they look back on life, and so see not into the future. the pros pect of the young is forward and unbounded, mingling the future with the present. in the declining day the thoughts make haste to rest in darkness, and hardly look forward to the ensu ing morning. the thoughts of the old prepare for night and slumber. the same hopes and prospects are not for him who stands upon the rosy mountain-tops of life, and him who expects the setting of his earthly day. i must conclude that conscience, if that be the name of it, was not given us for no purpose, or for a hindrance. however flattering order and expediency may look, it is but the repose of a lethargy, and we will choose rather to be awake, though it be stormy, and maintain our selves on this earth, and in this life, as we may, monday 173 without signing our death-warrant. let us see if we cannot stay here, where he has put us, on his own conditions. does not his law reach as far as his light ? the expedients of the nations clash with one another, only the absolutely right is expedient for all. there are some passages in the antigone of sophocles, well known to scholars, of which i am reminded in this connection. antigone has resolved to sprinkle sand on the dead body of her brother polynices, notwithstanding the edict of king creon condemning to death that one who should perform this service, which the greeks deemed so important, for the enemy of his country ; but ismene, who is of a less reso lute and noble spirit, declines taking part with her sister in this work, and says, &quot;i, therefore, asking those under the earth to consider me, that i am compelled to do thus, will obey those who are placed in office ; for to do extreme things is not wise. 5 antigone. &quot;i would not ask you, nor would you, if you still wished, do it joyfully with me. be such as seems good to you. but i will bury him. it is glorious for me doing this to die. i beloved will lie with him beloved, having, like a criminal, done what is holy; since the time is longer which it is necessary for me to please those below, than those here, for there i 174 a week shall always lie. but if it seems good to you, hold in dishonor things which are honored by the gods.&quot; ismene. &quot;i indeed do not hold them in dis honor; but to act in opposition to the citizens i am by nature unable.&quot; antigone being at length brought before king creon, he asks, &quot;did you then dare to transgress these laws?&quot; antigone. &quot;for it was not zeus who pro claimed these to me, nor justice who dwells with the gods below ; it was not they who es tablished these laws among men. nor did i think that your proclamations were so strong, as, being a mortal, to be able to transcend the unwritten and immovable laws of the gods. for not something now and yesterday, but for ever these live, and no one knows from what time they appeared. i was not about to pay the penalty of violating these to the gods, fear ing the presumption of any man. for i well knew that i should die, and why not? even if you had not proclaimed it.&quot; this was concerning the burial of a dead body. the wisest conservatism is that of the hin doos. &quot;immemorial custom is transcendent monday 175 law,&quot; says menu. that is, it was the custom of the gods before men used it. the fault of our new england custom is that it is memorial. what is morality but immemorial custom? conscience is the chief of conservatives. tf per form the settled functions,&quot; says kreeshna in the bhagvat-geeta ; &quot;action is preferable to in action. the journey of thy mortal frame may not succeed from inaction.&quot; &quot;a man s own calling, with all its faults, ought not to be for saken. every undertaking is involved in its faults as the fire in its smoke.&quot; &quot;the man who is acquainted with the whole should not drive those from their works who are slow of comprehension, and less experienced than himself.&quot; &quot;wherefore, o arjoon, resolve to fight.&quot; is the advice of the god to the irresolute soldier who fears to slay his best friends. it is a sublime conservatism; as wide as the world, and as unwearied as time ; preserving the uni verse with asiatic anxiety, in that state in which it appeared to their minds. these philos ophers dwell on the inevitability and unchange ableness of laws, on the power of temperament and constitution, the three goon or qualities, and the circumstances or birth and affinity. the end is an immense consolation ; eternal ab sorption in brahma. their speculations never venture beyond their own table-lands, though 1t6 a week they are high and vast as they. buoyancy, freedom, flexibility, variety, possibility, which also are qualities of the unnamed, they deal not with. the undeserved reward is to be earned by an everlasting moral drudgery; the incalcu lable promise of the morrow is, as it were, weighed. and who will say that their conser vatism has not been effectual? &quot;assuredly,&quot; says a french translator, speaking of the an tiquity and durability of the chinese and indian nations, and of the wisdom of their legislators, &quot;there are there some vestiges of the eternal laws which govern the world.&quot; christianity, on the other hand, is humane, practical, and, in a large sense, radical. so many years and ages of the gods those eastern sages sat contemplating brahm, uttering in si lence the mystic u om,&quot; being absorbed into the essence of the supreme being, never going out of themselves, but subsiding farther and deeper within; so infinitely wise, yet infinitely stag nant; until, at last, in that same asia, but in the western part of it, appeared a youth, wholly unf oretold by them, not being absorbed into brahm, but bringing brahm down to earth and to mankind ; in whom brahm had awaked from his long sleep, and exerted himself, and the day began, a new avatar. the brahman had never thought to be a brother of mankind as monda y 177 well as a child of god. christ is the prince of reformers and radicals. many expressions in the new testament come naturally to the lips of all protestants, and it furnishes the most pregnant and practical texts. there is no harm less dreaming, no wise speculation in it, but everywhere a substratum of good sense. it never reflects, but it repents. there is no poe try in it, we may say, nothing regarded in the light of beauty merely, but moral truth is its object. all mortals are convicted by its con science. the new testament is remarkable for its pure morality; the best of the hindoo scripture, for its pure intellectuality. the reader is no where raised into and sustained in a higher, purer, or rarer region of thought than in the bhagvat-geeta. warren hastings, in his sen sible letter recommending the translation of this book to the chairman of the east india com pany, declares the original to be &quot; of a sublim ity of conception, reasoning, and diction almost unequaled,&quot; and that the writings of the indian philosophers &quot;will survive when the british do minion in india shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance.&quot; it is unquestionably one of the noblest and most sacred scriptures which have come down to us. 178 a week books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated. the oriental phi losophy approaches easily loftier themes than the modern aspires to; and no wonder if it sometimes prattle about them. it only assigns their due rank respectively to action and con templation, or rather does full justice to the latter. western philosophers have not con ceived of the significance of contemplation in their sense. speaking of the spiritual discipline to which the brahmans subjected themselves, and the wonderful power of abstraction to which they attained, instances of which had come under his notice, hastings says : &quot;to those who have never been accustomed to the separation of the mind from the notices of the senses, it may not be easy to conceive by what means such a power is to be attained; since even the most studious men of our hemi sphere will find it difficult so to restrain their attention, but that it will wander to some object of present sense or recollection; and even the buzzing of a fly will sometimes have the power to disturb it. but if we are told that there have been men who were successively, for ages past, in the daily habit of abstracted contempla tion, begun in the earliest period of youth, and continued in many to the maturity of age, each monday 179 adding some portion of knowledge to the store accumulated by his predecessors; it is not as suming too much to conclude, that as the mind ever gathers strength, like the body, by exer cise, so in such an exercise it may in each have acquired the faculty to which they aspired, and that their collective studies may have led them to the discovery of new tracts and com binations of sentiment, totally different from the doctrines with which the learned of other nations are ac quainted; doctrines which, however speculative and subtle, still as they possess the advantage of being derived from a source so free from every adventitious mixture, may be equally founded in truth with the most simple of our own.&quot; &quot;the forsaking of works&quot; was taught by kreeshna to the most ancient of men, and handed down from age to age, &quot;until at length, in the course of time, the mighty art was lost.&quot; &quot;in wisdom is to be found every work with out exception,&quot; says kreeshna. &quot;although thou wert the greatest of all of fenders, thou shalt be able to cross the gulf of sin with the bark of wisdom.&quot; 44 there is not anything in this world to be compared with wisdom for purity.&quot; 44 the action stands at a distance inferior to the application of wisdom.&quot; 180 a week the wisdom of a moonee &quot;is confirmed, when, like the tortoise, he can draw in all his mem bers, and restrain them from their wonted pur poses. * &quot;children only, and not the learned, speak of the speculative and the practical doctrines as two. they are but one. for both obtain the selfsame end, and the place which is gained by the followers of the one is gained by the follow ers of the other.&quot; &quot;the man enjoyeth not freedom from action, from the non-commencement of that which he hath to do ; nor doth he obtain happiness from a total inactivity. no one ever resteth a mo ment inactive. every man is involuntarily urged to act by those principles which are in herent in his nature. the man who restraineth his active faculties, and sitteth down with his mind attentive to the objects of his senses, is called one of an astrayed soul, and the practicer of deceit. so the man is praised, who, having subdued all his passions, performeth with his active faculties all the functions of life, uncon cerned about the event.&quot; &quot; let the motive be in the deed and not in the event. be not one whose motive for action is the hope of reward. let not thy life be spent in inaction.&quot; &quot;for the man who doeth that which he hath monda y 181 to do, without affection, obtaineth the su preme.&quot; &quot;he who may behold as it were inaction in action, and action in inaction, is wise amongst mankind. he is a perfect performer of al] duty.&quot; &quot;wise men call him a pandeet, whose every undertaking is free from the idea of desire, and whose actions are consumed by the fire of wis dom. he abandoneth the desire of a reward of his actions; he is always contented and inde pendent ; and although he may be engaged in a work, he as it were doeth nothing.&quot; &quot;he is both a yogee and a sannyasee who performeth that which he hath to do indepen dent of the fruit thereof; not he who liveth without the sacrificial fire and without action.&quot; &quot;he who enjoyeth but the amreeta which is left of his offerings obtaineth the eternal spirit of brahm, the supreme.&quot; what, after all, does the practicalness of life amount to ? the things immediate to be done are very trivial. i could postpone them all to hear this locust sing. the most glorious fact in my experience is not anything that i have done or may hope to do, but a transient thought, or vision, or dream, which i have had. i would give all the wealth of the world, and all the deeds of all the heroes, for one true vision. 182 a week but how can i communicate witk the gods, who am a pencil-maker on the earth, and not be insane ? &quot;i am the same to all mankind,&quot; says kreeshna ; &quot; there is not one who is worthy of my love or hatred.&quot; this teaching is not practical in the sense in which the new testament is. it is not always sound sense in practice. the brahman never proposes courageously to assault evil, but pa tiently to starve it out. his active faculties are paralyzed by the idea of caste, of impassa ble limits, of destiny and the tyranny of time. kreeshna s argument, it must be allowed, is defective. no sufficient reason is given why arjoon should fight. arjoon may be con vinced, but the reader is not, for his judgment is not &quot;formed upon the speculative doctrines of the sankhya sastra.&quot; &quot;seek an asylum in wisdom alone; &quot; but what is wisdom to a west ern mind ? the duty of which he speaks is an arbitrary one. when was it established ? the brahman s virtue consists in doing, not right, but arbitrary things. what is that which a man &quot; hath to do &quot; ? what is &quot; action &quot; ? what are the &quot;settled functions&quot;? what is &quot;a man s own religion,&quot; which is so much better than another s? what is &quot;a man s own par ticular calling &quot;? what are the duties which monday 183 are appointed by one s birth? it is a defense of the institution of castes, of what is called the &quot; natural duty &quot; of the kshetree, or soldier, &quot; to attach himself to the discipline,&quot; &quot;not to flee from the field,&quot; and the like. but they who are unconcerned about the consequences of their actions are not therefore unconcerned about their actions. behold the difference between the oriental and the occidental. the former has nothing to do in this world ; the latter is full of activity. the one looks in the sun till his eyes are put out; the other follows him prone in his west ward course. there is such a thing as caste, even in the west ; but it is comparatively faint ; it is conservatism here. it says, forsake not your calling, outrage no institution, use no vio lence, rend no bonds; the state is thy parent. its virtue or manhood is wholly filial. there is a struggle between the oriental and occi dental in every nation; some who would be for ever contemplating the sun, and some who are hastening toward the sunset. the former class says to the latter, when you have reached the sunset, you will be no nearer to the sun. to which the latter replies, but we so prolong the day. the former &quot;walketh but in that night, when all things go to rest in the night of time. the contemplative moonee sleepeth but in the day of time, when all things wake.&quot; 184 a week to conclude these extracts, i can say, in the words of sanjay, &quot;as, o mighty prince! i recollect again and again this holy and wonder ful dialogue of kreeshna and arjoon, i con tinue more and more to rejoice; and as i recall to my memory the more than miraculous form of haree, my astonishment is great, and i mar vel and rejoice again and again! wherever kreeshna the god of devotion may be, wher ever arjoon the mighty bowman may be, there too, without doubt, are fortune, riches, victory, and good conduct. this is my firm belief.&quot; i would say to the readers of scriptures, if they wish for a good book, read the bhag vat-geeta, an episode to the mahabharat, said to have been written by kreeshna dwypayen veias, known to have been written by , more than four thousand years ago, it mat ters not whether three or four, or when, translated by charles wilkins. it deserves to be read with reverence even by yankees, as a part of the sacred writings of a devout people ; and the intelligent hebrew will rejoice to find in it a moral grandeur and sublimity akin to those of his own scriptures. to an american reader, who, by the advan tage of his position, can see over that strip of atlantic coast to asia and the pacific, who, as it were, sees the shore slope upward over the monday 185 alps to the himmaleh mountains, the compar atively recent literature of europe often appears partial and clannish; and, notwithstanding the limited range of his own sympathies and studies, the european writer who presumes that he is speaking for the world is perceived by him to speak only for that corner of it which he in habits. one of the rarest of england s scholars and critics, in his classification of the worthies of the world, betrays the narrowness of his eu ropean culture and the exclusiveness of his read ing. none of her children has done justice to the poets and philosophers of persia or of india. they have even been better known to her mer chant scholars than to her poets and thinkers by profession. you may look in vain through english poetry for a single memorable verse inspired by these themes. nor is germany to be excepted, though her philological industry is indirectly serving the cause of philosophy and poetry. even goethe wanted that univer sality of genius which could have appreciated the philosophy of india, if he had more nearly approached it. his genius was more practical, dwelling much more in the regions of the understanding, and was less native to contem plation than the genius of those sages. it is remarkable that homer and a few hebrews are the most oriental names which modern europe, 186 a week t whose literature has taken its rise since the de cline of the persian, has admitted into her list of worthies, and perhaps the worthiest of man kind, and the fathers of modern thinking, for the contemplations of those indian sages have influenced, and still influence, the intellectual development of mankind, whose works even yet survive in wonderful completeness, are, for the most part, not recognized as ever having existed. if the lions had been the painters, it would have been otherwise. . in every one s youthful dreams, philosophy is still vaguely but inseparably, and with singular truth, associated with the east, nor do after years discover its local habitation in the western world. in com parison with the philosophers of the east, we may say that modern europe has yet given birth to none. beside the vast and cosmogonal philosophy of the bhagvat-geeta, even our shakespeare seems sometimes youthfully green and practical merely. some of these sublime sentences, as the chaldaean oracles of zoroaster, still surviving after a thousand revolutions and translations, alone make us doubt if the poetic form and dress are not transitory, and not es sential to the most effective and enduring ex pression of thought. ex oriente lux may still be the motto of scholars, for the western world has not yet derived from the east all the light which it is destined to receive thence. monda y 187 it would be worthy of the age to print to gether the collected scriptures or sacred writ ings of the several nations, the chinese, the hindoos, the persians, the hebrews, and oth ers, as the scripture of mankind. the new testament is still, perhaps, too much on the lips and in the hearts of men to be called a scrip ture in this sense. such a juxtaposition and comparison might help to liberalize the faith of men. this is a work which time will surely edit, reserved to crown the labors of the print ing-press. this would be the bible, or book of books, which let the missionaries carry to the uttermost parts of the earth. while engaged in these reflections, thinking ourselves the only navigators of these waters, suddenly a canal-boat, with its sail set, glided round a point before us, like some huge river beast, and changed the scene in an instant; and then another and another glided into sight, and we found ourselves in the current of commerce once more. so we threw our rinds in the water for the fishes to nibble, and added our breath to the life of living men. little did we think, in the distant garden in which we had planted the seed and reared this fruit, where it would be eaten. our melons lay at home on the sandy bottom of the merrimack, and our potatoes in 188 a week the sun and water at the bottom of the boat looked like a fruit of the country. soon, how ever, we were delivered from this fleet of junks, and possessed the river in solitude, once more rowing steadily upward through the noon, be tween the territories of nashua on the one hand, and hudson, once nottingham, on the other. from time to time we scared up a kingfisher or a summer duck, the former flying rather by vigorous impulses than by steady and patient steering with that short rudder of his, sounding his rattle along the fluvial street. erelong another scow hove in sight, creeping down the river; and hailing it, we attached our selves to its side, and floated back in company, chatting with the boatmen, and obtaining a draught of cooler water from their jug. they appeared to be green hands from far among the hills, who had taken this means to get to the seaboard, and see the world; and would possibly visit the falkland isles, and the china seas, before they again saw the waters of the merrimack, or, perchance, they would not re turn this way forever. they had already em barked the private interests of the landsman in the larger venture of the race, and were ready to mess with mankind, reserving only the till of a chest to themselves. but they too were soon lost behind a point, and we went croaking monday 189 on our way alone. what grievance has its root among the new hampshire hills? we asked; what is wanting to human life here, that these men should make such haste to the antipodes ? we prayed that their bright anticipations might not be rudely disappointed. though all the fates should prove unkind, leave not your native land behind. the ship, becalmed, at length stands still ; the steed must rest beneath the hill ; but swiftly still our fortunes pace to find us out in every place. the vessel, though her masts be firm, beneath her copper bears a worm ; around the cape, across the line, till fields of ice her course confine ; it matters not how smooth the breeze, how shallow or how deep the seas, whether she bears manilla twine, or in her hold madeira wine, or china teas, or spanish hides, in port or quarantine she rides ; far from new england s blustering shore, new england s worm her hulk shall bore, and sink her in the indian seas, twine, wine, and hides, and china teas. we passed a small desert here on the east bank, between tyngsborough and hudson, which was interesting and even refreshing to our eyes in the midst of the almost universal greenness. this sand was indeed somewhat impressive and beautiful to us. a very old 190 a week inhabitant, who was at work in a field on the nashua side, told us that he remembered when corn and grain grew there, and it was a culti vated field. but at length the fishermen, for this was a fishing-place, pulled up the bushes on the shore, for greater convenience in haul ing their seines, and when the bank was thus broken, the wind began to blow up the sand from the shore, until at length it had covered about fifteen acres several feet deep. we saw near the river, where the sand was blown off down to some ancient surface, the foundation of an indian wigwam exposed, a perfect circle of burnt stones, four or five feet in diameter, mingled with fine charcoal, and the bones of small animals which had been preserved in the sand. the surrounding sand was sprinkled with other burnt stones on which their fires had been built, as well as with flakes of arrow-head stone, and we found one perfect arrow-head. in one place we noticed where an indian had sat to manufacture arrow -heads out of quartz, and the sand was sprinkled with a quart of small glass-like chips about as big as a four pence, which he had broken off in his work. here, then, the indians must have fished before the whites arrived. there was another similar sandy tract about half a mile above this. monday 19.1 still the noon prevailed, and we turned the prow aside to bathe, and recline ourselves under some buttonwoods, by a ledge of rocks, in a re tired pasture sloping to the water s edge, and skirted with pines and hazels, in the town of hudson. still had india, and that old noon tide philosophy, the better part of our thoughts. it is always singular, but encouraging, to meet with common sense in very old books, as the heetopades of veeshnoo sarma; a playful wisdom which has eyes behind as well as before, and oversees itself. it asserts their health and independence of the experience of later times. this pledge of sanity cannot be spared in a book, that it sometimes pleasantly reflect upon itself. the story and fabulous portion of this book winds loosely from sentence to sentence as so many oases in a desert, and is as indistinct as a camel s track between mourzouk and dar four. it is a comment on the flow and freshet of modern books. the reader leaps from sen tence to sentence, as from one stepping-stone to another, while the stream of the story rushes past unregarded. the bhagvat-geeta is less sententious and poetic, perhaps, but still more wonderfully sustained and developed. its sanity and sublimity have impressed the minds even of soldiers and merchants. it is the character istic of great poems that they will yield of their 192 a week sense in due proportion to the hasty and the deliberate reader. to the practical they will be common sense, and to the wise wisdom; as either the traveler may wet his lips, or an army may fill its water-casks at a full stream. one of the most attractive of those ancient books that i have met with is the laws of menu. according to sir william jones, &quot;vyasa, the son of parasara, has decided that the veda, with its angas, or the six composi tions deduced from it, the revealed system of medicine, the puranas or sacred histories, and the code of menu, were four works of supreme authority, which ought never to be shaken by arguments merely human.&quot; the last is believed by the hindoos &quot;to have been promulged in the beginning of time, by menu, son or grandson of brahma,&quot; and &quot;first of created beings; &quot; and brahma is said to have &quot;taught his laws to menu in a hundred thousand verses, which menu explained to the primitive world in the very words of the book now translated.&quot; oth ers affirm that they have undergone successive abridgments for the convenience of mortals, &quot;while the gods of the lower heaven and the band of celestial musicians are engaged in studying the primary code.&quot; &quot;a number of glosses or comments on menu were composed by the munis, or old philosophers, whose trea monday 193 tises, together with that before us, constitute the dherma sastra, in a collective sense, or body of law.&quot; culluca bhatta was one of the more modern of these. every sacred book, successively, has been accepted in the faith that it was to be the final resting-place of the sojourning soul; but after all, it was but a caravansary which supplied refreshment to the traveler, and directed him farther on his way to isphahan or bagdat. thank god, no hindoo tyranny prevailed at the framing of the world, but we are freemen of the universe, and not sentenced to any caste. i know of no book which has come down to us with grander pretensions than this, and it is so impersonal and sincere that it is never offen sive nor ridiculous. compare the modes in which modern literature is advertised with the prospectus of this book, and think what a read ing public it addresses, what criticism it ex pects. it seems to have been uttered from some eastern summit, with a sober morning prescience in the dawn of time, and you cannot read a sentence without being elevated as upon the table-land of the ghauts. it has such a rhythm as the winds of the desert, such a tide as the ganges, and is as superior to criticism as the himmaleh mountains. its tone is of such un relaxed fibre that even at this late day, unworn 194 a week by time, it wears the english and the sanskrit dress indifferently ; and its fixed sentences keep up their distant fires still, like the stars, by whose dissipated rays this lower world is illu mined. the whole book by noble gestures and inclinations renders many words unnecessary. english sense has toiled, but hindoo wisdom never perspired. though the sentences open as we read them, unexpensively, and at first almost unmeaningly, as the petals of a flower, they sometimes startle us with that rare kind of wis dom which could only have been learned from the most trivial experience ; but it comes to us as refined as the porcelain earth which subsides to the bottom of the ocean. they are clean and dry as fossil truths, which have been exposed to the elements for thousands of years, so imper sonally and scientifically true that they are the ornament of the parlor and the cabinet. any moral philosophy is exceedingly rare. this of menu addresses our privacy more than most. it is a more private and familiar, and at the same time a more public and universal word, than is spoken in parlor or pulpit nowadays. as our domestic fowls are said to have their original in the wild pheasant of india, so our domestic thoughts have their prototypes in the thoughts of her philosophers. we are dabbling in the very elements of our present conventional monday 195 and actual life ; as if it were the primeval con venticle, where how to eat, and to drink, and to sleep, and maintain life with adequate dignity and sincerity, were the questions to be decided. it is later and more intimate with us even than the advice of our nearest friends. and yet it is true for the widest horizon, and read out of doors has relation to the dim mountain line, and is native and aboriginal there. most books be long to the house and street only, and in the fields their leaves feel very thin. they are bare and obvious, and have no halo nor haze about them. nature lies far and fair behind them all. but this, as it proceeds from, so it addresses, what is deepest and most abiding in man. it belongs to the noontide of the day, the midsum mer of the year, and after the snows have melted, and the waters evaporated in the spring, still its truth speaks freshly to our experience. it helps the sun to shine, and his rays fall on its page to illustrate it. it spends the mornings and the evenings, and makes such an impression on us overnight as to awaken us before dawn, and its influence lingers around us like a fra grance late into the day. it conveys a new gloss to the meadows and the depths of the wood, and its spirit, like a more subtile ether, sweeps along with the prevailing winds of a country. the very locusts and crickets of a 196 a week summer day are but later or earlier glosses on the dherma sastra of the hindoos, a continua tion of the sacred code. as we have said, there is an orientalism in the most restless pioneer, and the farthest west is but the farthest east. while we are reading these sentences, this fair modern world seems only a reprint of the laws of menu with the gloss of culluca. tried by a new england eye, or the mere practical wisdom of modern times, they are the oracles of a race already in its dotage, but held up to the sky, which is the only impartial and incorruptible ordeal, they are of a piece with its depth and serenity, and i am assured that they will have a place and significance as long as there is a sky to test them by. give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand. there must be a kind of life and palpitation to it, and under its words a kind of blood must circulate forever. it is wonderful that this sound should have come down to us from so far, when the voice of man can be heard so little way, and we are not now within ear shot of any contemporary. the woodcutters have here felled an ancient pine forest, and brought to light to these distant hills a fair lake in the southwest; and now in an instant it is distinctly shown to these woods as if its image had traveled hither from eternity. perhaps monday 197 these old stumps upon the knoll remember when anciently this lake gleamed in the horizon. one wonders if the bare earth itself did not ex perience emotion at beholding again so fair a prospect. that fair water lies there in the sun thus revealed, so much the prouder and fairer because its beauty needed not to be seen. it seems yet lonely, sufficient to itself, and supe rior to observation. so are these old sentences like serene lakes in the southwest, at length re vealed to us, which have so long been reflecting our own sky in their bosom. the great plain of india lies as in a cup be tween the himmaleh and the ocean on the north and south, and the brahmapootra and indus on the east and west, wherein the primeval race was received. we will not dispute the story. we are pleased to read in the natural history of the country, of the &quot;pine, larch, spruce, and silver fir,&quot; which cover the southern face of the himmaleh range; of the &quot;gooseberry, rasp berry, strawberry,&quot; which from an imminent temperate zone overlook the torrid plains. so did this active modern life have even then a foothold and lurking-place in the midst of the stateliness and contemplativeness of those east ern plains. in another era the &quot;lily of the valley, cowslip, dandelion,&quot; were to work their way down into the plain, and bloom in a level 198 a week zone of their own reaching round the earth. already has the era of the temperate zone ar rived, the era of the pine and the oak, for the palm and the banian do not supply the wants of this age. the lichens on the summits of the rocks will perchance find their level erelong. as for the tenets of the brahmans, we are not so much concerned to know what doctrines they held, as that they were held by any. we can tolerate all philosophies, atomists, pneu matologists, atheists, theists, plato, aristo tle, leucippus, democritus, pythagoras, zoro aster, and confucius. it is the attitude of these men, more than any communication which they make, that attracts us. between them and their commentators, it is true, there is an endless dis pute. but if it comes to this, that you compare notes, then you are all wrong. as it is, each takes us up into the serene heavens, whither the smallest bubble rises as surely as the largest, and paints earth and sky for us. any sincere thought is irresistible. the very austerity of the brahmans is tempting to the devotional soul, as a more refined and nobler luxury. wants so easily and gracefully satisfied seem like a more refined pleasure. their conception of creation is peaceful as a dream. &quot;when that power awakes, then has this world its full expansion; but when he slumbers with a tranquil spirit, monday 199 then the whole system fades away.&quot; in the very indistinctness of their theogony a sublime truth is implied. it hardly allows the reader to rest in any supreme first cause, but directly it hints at a supremer still which created the last, and the creator is still behind increate. nor will we disturb the antiquity of this scrip ture, &quot;from fire, from air, and from the sun,&quot; it was &quot;milked out.&quot; one might as well investi gate the chronology of light and heat. let the sun shine. menu understood this matter best, when he said, &quot;those best know the divisions of days and nights who understand that the day of brahma, which endures to the end of a thousand such ages, [infinite ages, nevertheless, according fco mortal reckoning,] gives rise to virtuous ex ertions ; and that his night endures as long as his day.&quot; indeed, the mussulman and tartar dynasties are beyond all dating. methinks i have lived under them myself. in every man s brain is the sanskrit. the vedas and their an gas are not so ancient as serene contempla tion. why will we be imposed on by antiquity? is the babe young? when i behold it, it seems more venerable than the oldest man ; it is more ancient than nestor or the sibyls, and bears the wrinkles of father saturn himself. and do we live but in the present ? how broad a line is that ? i sit now on a stump whose rings num 200 a week ber centuries of growth. if i look around i see that the soil is composed of the remains of just such stumps, ancestors to this. the earth is covered with mould. i thrust this stick many aeons deep into its surface, and with my heel make a deeper furrow than the elements have ploughed here for a thousand years. if i listen, i hear the peep of frogs which is older than the slime of egypt, and the distant drumming of a partridge on a log, as if it were the pulse-beat of the summer air. i raise my fairest and freshest flowers in the old mould. why, what we would fain call new is not skin deep; the earth is not yet stained by it. it is not the fertile ground which we walk on, but the leaves which flutter over our heads. the newest is jut the oldest made visible to our senses. when we dig up the soil from a thousand feet below the surface, we call it new, and the plants which spring from it; and when our vision pierces deeper into space, and detects a remoter star, we call that new also. the place where we sit is called hudson, once it was notting ham, once we should read history as little critically as we consider the landscape, and be more inter ested by the atmospheric tints and various lights and shades which the intervening spaces create monday 201 than by its groundwork and composition. it is the morning now turned evening and seen in the west, the same sun, but a new light and atmosphere. its beauty is like the sunset; not a fresco painting on a wall, flat and bounded, but atmospheric and roving or free. in reality, history fluctuates as the face of the landscape from morning to evening. what is of moment is its hue and color. time hides no treasures ; we want not its then, but its now. we do not complain that the mountains in the horizon are blue and indistinct ; they are the more like the heavens. of what moment are facts that can be lost, which need to be commemorated? the mon ument of death will outlast the memory of the dead. the pyramids do not tell the tale which was confided to them ; the living fact commemo rates itself. why look in the dark for light? strictly speaking, the historical societies have not recovered one fact from oblivion, but are themselves instead of the fact that is lost. the researcher is more memorable than the re searched. the crowd stood admiring the mist and the dim outlines of the trees seen through it, when one of their number advanced to ex plore the phenomenon, and with fresh admira tion all eyes were turned on his dimly retreating figure. it is astonishing with how little coop 202 a week eration of the societies the past is remembered. its story has indeed had another muse than has been assigned it. there is a good instance of the manner in which all history began, in al wakidis arabian chronicle: &quot;i was informed by ahmed almatin aljorhami, who had it from kephaa ebn kais aldmiri, who had it from saiph e~bn fabalah alchatquarmi, who had it from thabet ebn alkamah, who said he was present at the action.&quot; these fathers of history were not anxious to preserve, but to learn the fact; and hence it was not forgotten. critical acumen is exerted in vain to uncover the past; the past cannot be presented ; we cannot know what we are not. but one veil hangs over past, present, and future, and it is the province of the historian to find out, not what was, but what is. where a battle has been fought, you will find nothing but the bones of men and beasts ; where a battle is being fought, there are hearts beating. we will sit on a mound and muse, and not try to make these skeletons stand on their legs again. does nature remember, think you, that they were men, or not rather that they are bones? ancient history has an air of antiquity. it should be more modern. it is written as if the spectator should be thinking of the backside of the picture on the wall, or as if the author ex monday 203 pected that the dead would be hrs readers, and wished to detail to them their own experience. men seem anxious to accomplish an orderly retreat through the centuries, earnestly rebuild ing the works behind, as they are battered down by the encroachments of time; but while they loiter, they and their works both fall a prey to the arch enemy. history has neither the ven erableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. it does as if it would go to the begin ning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the universal history, and then tell us, when did burdock and plantain sprout first? it has been so written, for the most part, that the times it describes are with remarkable propriety called dark ages. they are dark, as one has observed, because we are so in the dark about them. the sun rarely shines in history, what with the dust and confusion ; and when we meet with any cheering fact which implies the pres ence of this luminary, we excerpt and modern ize it. as when we read in the history of the saxons that edwin of northumbria &quot;caused stakes to be fixed in the highways where he had seen a clear spring,&quot; and &quot;brazen dishes were chained to them to refresh the weary sojourner, whose fatigues edwin had himself experienced.&quot; this is worth all arthur s twelve battles. 204 a week &quot;through the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day : better fifty years of europe than a cycle of cathay.&quot; than fifty years of europe better one new england ray 1 biography, too, is liable to the same objec tion ; it should be autobiography. let us not, as the germans advise, endeavor to go abroad and vex our bowels that we may be somebody else to explain him. if i am not i, who will be ? but it is fit that the past should be dark; though the darkness is not so much a quality of the past as of tradition. it is not a distance of time, but a distance of relation, which makes thus dusky its memorials. what is near to the heart of this generation is fair and bright still. greece lies outspread fair and sunshiny in floods of light, for there is the sun and daylight in her literature and art. homer does not allow us to forget that the sun shone, nor phidias, nor the parthenon. yet no era has been wholly dark, nor will we too hastily submit to the his torian, and congratulate ourselves on a blaze of light. if we could pierce the obscurity of those remote years, we should find it light enough; only there is not our day. some creatures are made to see in the dark. there has always been the same amount of light in the world. the new and missing stars, the comets and eclipses, do not affect the general illumination, monday 205 for only our glasses appreciate them. the eyes of the oldest fossil remains, they tell us, indicate that the same laws of light prevailed then as now. always the laws of light are the same, but the modes and degrees of seeing vary. the gods are partial to no era, but steadily shines their light in the heavens, while the eye of the beholder is turned to stone. there was but the sun and the eye from the first. the ages have not added a new ray to the one, nor altered a fibre of the other. if we will admit time into our thoughts at all, the mythologies, those vestiges of ancient poems, wrecks of poems, so to speak, the world s inheritance, still reflecting some of their origi nal splendor, like the fragments of clouds tinted by the rays of the departed sun ; reaching into the latest summer day, and allying this hour to the morning of creation ; as the poet sings : &quot; fragments of the lofty strain float down the tide of years, as buoyant on the stormy main a parted wreck appears, &quot; these are the materials and hints for a history t the rise and progress of the race; how, from the condition of ants, it arrived at the condition of men, and arts were gradually invented. let it thousand surmises shed some light on this story. we will not be confined by historical, 206 a week even geological periods which would allow us to doubt of a progress in human affairs. if we rise above this wisdom for the day, we shall ex pect that this morning of the race, in which it has been supplied with the simplest necessaries, with corn, and wine, and honey, and oil, and fire, and articulate speech, and agricultural and other arts, reared up by degrees from the condi tion of ants to men, will be succeeded by a day of equally progressive splendor; that, in the lapse of the divine periods, other divine agents and godlike men will assist to elevate the race as much above its present condition. but we do not know much about it. thus did one voyageur waking dream, while his companion slumbered on the bank. sud denly a boatman s horn was heard echoing from shore to shore, to give notice of his approach to the farmer s wife with whom he was to take his dinner, though in that place only muskrats and kingfishers seemed to hear. the current of our reflections and our slumbers being thus dis* turbed, we weighed anchor once more. as we proceeded on our way in the afternoon, the western bank became lower, or receded farther from the channel in some places, leaving a few trees only to fringe the water s edge; while the eastern rose abruptly here and there monda y 207 into wooded hills fifty or sixty feet high. the bass (tilia americana), also called the lime or linden, which was a new tree to us, overhung the water with its broad and rounded leaf, in terspersed with clusters of small hard berries now nearly ripe, and made an agreeable shade for us sailors. the inner bark of this genus is the bast, the material of the fisherman s matting, and the ropes and peasant s shoes of which the russians make so much use, and also of nets and a coarse cloth in some places. according to poets, this was once philyra, one of the oceanides. the ancients are said to have used its bark for the roofs of cottages, for baskets, and for a kind of paper called philyra. they also made bucklers of its wood, &quot;on account of its flexibility, lightness, and resiliency.&quot; it was once much used for carving, and is still in demand for sounding-boards of piano-fortes and panels of carriages, and for various uses for which toughness and flexibility are required. baskets and cradles are made of the twigs. its sap affords sugar, and the honey made from its flowers is said to be preferred to any other. its leaves are in some countries given to cattle, a kind of chocolate has been made of its fruit, a medicine has been prepared from an infusion of its flowers, and finally, the charcoal made of its wood is greatly valued for gunpowder. 208 a week the sight of this tree reminded us that we had reached a strange land to us. as we sailed under this canopy of leaves, we saw the sky through its chinks, and, as it were, the meaning and idea of the tree stamped in a thousand hieroglyphics on the heavens. the universe is so aptly fitted to our organization that the eye wanders and reposes at the same time. on every side there is something to soothe and re fresh this sense. look up at the tree-tops, and see how finely nature finishes off her work there. see how the pines spire without end higher and higher, and make a graceful fringe to the earth. and who shall count the finer cobwebs that soar and float away from their utmost tops, and the myriad insects that dodge between them. leaves are of more various forms than the alphabets of all languages put together ; of the oaks alone there are hardly two alike, and each expresses its own character. in all her products, nature only develops her simplest germs. one would say that it was no great stretch of invention to create birds. the hawk, which now takes his flight over the top of the wood, was at first, perchance, only a leaf which fluttered in its aisles. from rustling leaves she came in the course of ages to the loftier flight and clear carol of the bird. salmon brook comes in from the west under monday 209 the railroad, a mile and a half below the village of nashua. we rowed up far enough into the meadows which border it to learn its piscatorial history from a haymaker on its banks. he told us that the silver eel was formerly abundant here, and pointed to some sunken creels at its mouth. this man s memory and imagination were fertile in fishermen s tales of floating isles in bottomless ponds, and of lakes mysteriously stocked with fishes, and would have kept us till nightfall to listen, but we could not afford to loiter in this roadstead, and so stood out to our sea again. though we never trod in those meadows, but only touched their margin with our hands, we still retain a pleasant memory of them. salmon brook, whose name is said to be a translation from the indian, was a favorite haunt of the aborigines. here, too, the first white settlers of nashua planted, and some dents in the earth where their houses stood and the wrecks of ancient apple-trees are still visi ble. about one mile up this stream stood the house of old john lovewell, who was an ensign in the army of oliver cromwell, and the father of &quot;famous captain lovewell.&quot; he settled here before 1690, and died about 1754, at the age of one hundred and twenty years. he is thought to have been engaged in the famous 210 a week narragansett swamp fight, which took place in 1675, before he came here. the indians are said to have spared him in succeeding wars on account of his kindness to them. even in 1700 he was so old and gray-headed that his scalp was worth nothing, since the french governor offered no bounty for such. i have stood in ihe dent of his cellar on the bank of the brook, and talked there with one whose grandfather had, whose father might have, talked with lovewell. here also he had a mill in his old age, and kept a small store. he was remem bered by some who were recently living, as a hale old man who drove the boys out of his or chard with his cane. consider the triumphs of the mortal man, and what poor trophies it would have to show, to wit: he cobbled shoes with out glasses at a hundred, and cut a handsome swath at a hundred and five! lovewelts house is said to have been the first which mrs. dustan reached on her escape from the indians. here, probably, the hero of pequawket was born and bred. close by may be seen the cellar and the gravestone of joseph hassell, who, as is else where recorded, with his wife anna, and son benjamin, and mary marks, &quot;were slain by our indian enemies on september 2, [1691,] in the evening.&quot; as gookin observed on a previous ocasiou, &quot;the indian rod upon the monday 211 english backs had not yet done god s errand.&quot; salmon brook near its mouth is still a solitary stream, meandering through woods and mea dows, while the then uninhabited mouth of the nashua now resounds with the din of a manu facturing town. a stream from otternic pond in hudson comes in just above salmon brook, on the op posite side. there was a good view of uncan nunuc, the most conspicuous mountain in these parts, from the bank here, seen rising over the west end of the bridge above. we soon after passed the village of nashua, on the river of the same name, where there is a covered bridge over the merrimack. the nashua, which is one of the largest tributaries, flows from wa chusett mountain, through lancaster, groton, and other towns, where it has formed well known elm-shaded meadows, but near its mouth it is obstructed by falls and factories, and did not tempt us to explore it. far away from here, in lancaster, with an other companion, i have crossed the broad val ley of the nashua, over which we had so long looked westward from the concord hills without seeing it to the blue mountains in the horizon. so many streams, so many meadows and woods and quiet dwellings of men had lain concealed between us and those delectable mountains; 212 a week from yonder hill on the road to tyngsbor ough you may get a good view of them. there where it seemed uninterrupted forest to our youthful eyes, between two neighboring pines in the horizon, lay the valley of the nashua, and this very stream was even then winding at its bottom, and then, as now, it was here si lently mingling its waters with the merrimack. the clouds which floated over its meadows and were born there, seen far in the west, gilded by the rays of the setting sun, had adorned a thousand evening skies for us. but as it were, by a turf wall this valley was concealed, and in our journey to those hills it was first gradually revealed to us. summer and winter our eyes had rested on the dim outline of the mountains, to which distance and indistinctness lent a gran deur not their own, so that they served to inter pret all the allusions of poets and travelers. standing on the concord cliffs, we thus spoke our mind to them : with frontier strength ye stand your ground, with grand content ye circle round, tumultuous silence for all sound, ye distant nursery of rills, monadnock and the peterborough hills ; finn argument that never stirs, outcircling the philosophers, like some vast fleet, sailing through rain and sleet, through winter s cold and summer s heat; monday 218 still holding on upon your high emprise, until ye find a shore amid the skies ; not skulking close to laud, with cargo contraband, for they who sent a venture out by ye have set the sun to see their honesty. ships of the line, each one, ye westward run, convoying clouds, which cluster in your shrouds, always before the gale, under a press of sail, with weight of metal all untold, i seem to feel ye in my firm seat here, immeasurable depth of hold, and breadth of beam, and length of running gear. methinks ye take luxurious pleasure in your novel western leisure ; so cool your brows and freshly blue, as time had naught for ye to do ; for ye lie at your length, an unappropriated strength, unhewn primeval timber, for knees so stiff, for masts so limber ; the stock of which new earths are made, one day to be our western trade, fit for the stanchions of a world which through the seas of space is hurled. while we enjoy a lingering ray, ye still o ertop the western day, reposing yonder on god s croft like solid stacks of hay ; so bold a line as ne er was writ on any page by human wit ; 214 a week the forest glows as if an enemy s camp-fires shone along the horizon, or the day s funeral pyre were lighted there ; edged with silver and with gold, the clouds hang o er in damask fold, and with such depth of amber light the west is dight, where still a few rays slant, that even heaven seems extravagant. watatic hill lies on the horizon s sill like a child s toy left overnight, and other duds to left and right, on the earth s edge, mountains and trees stand as they were on air graven, or as the vessels in a haven await the morning breeze. i fancy even through your denies windeth the way to heaven ; and yonder still, in spite of history s page, linger the golden and the silver age ; upon the laboring gale the news of future centuries is brought, and of new dynasties of thought, from your remotest vale. but special i remember thee, wachusett, who like me standest alone without, society. thy far blue eye, a remnant of the sky, seen through the clearing or the gorge, or from the windows of the forge, doth leaven all it passes by. nothing is true monday 215 but stands tween me and you, thou western pioneer, who know st not shame nor fear, by venturous spirit driven under the eaves of heaven ; and canst expand thee there, and breathe enough of air ? even beyond the west thou migratest, into unclouded tracts, without a pilgrim s axe, cleaving thy road on high with thy well-tempered brow, and mak st thyself a clearing in the sky. upholding heaven, holding down earth, thy pastime from thy birth ; not steadied by the one, nor leaning on the other, may i approve myself thy worthy brother ! at length, like rasselas and other inhabitants of happy valleys, we had resolved to scale the blue wall which bounded the western horizon, though not without misgivings that thereafter no visible fairy-land would exist for us. but it would be long to tell of our adventures, and we have no time this afternoon, transporting ourselves in imagination up this hazy nashua valley, to go over again that pilgrimage. we have since made many similar excursions to the principal mountains of new england and new york, and even far in the wilderness, and have passed a night on the summit of many of them. and now, when we look again westward from 216 a week our native hills, wachusett and monadnocb have retreated once more among the blue and fabulous mountains in the horizon, though our eyes rest on the very rocks on both of them, where we have pitched our tent for a night, and boiled our hasty-pudding amid the clouds. as late as 1724 there was no house on the north side of the nashua, but only scattered wigwams and grisly forests between this fron tier and canada. in september of that year, two men who were engaged in making turpen tine on that side, for such were the first enter prises in the wilderness, were taken captive and carried to canada by a party of thirty indians. ten of the inhabitants of dunstable, going to look for them, found the hoops of their barrel cut, and the turpentine spread on the ground. i have been told by an inhabitant of tyngsbor ough, who had the story from his ancestors, that one of these captives, when the indians were about to upset his barrel of turpentine, seized a pine knot and, flourishing it, swore so resolutely that he would kill the first who touched it, that they refrained, and when at length he returned from canada he found it still standing. perhaps there was more than one barrel. however this may have been, the scouts knew by marks on the trees, made with monday 21t coal mixed with grease, that the men were not killed, but taken prisoners. one of the com pany, named farwell, perceiving that the tur pentine had not done spreading, concluded that the indians had been gone but a short time, and they accordingly went in instant pursuit. con trary to the advice of farwell, following di rectly on their trail up the merrimack, they fell into an ambuscade near thornton s ferry, in the present town of merrimack, and nine were killed, only one, farwell, escaping after a vig orous pursuit. the men of dunstable went out and picked up their bodies, and carried them all down to dunstable and buried them. it is almost word for word as in the robin hood ballad: &quot; they carried these foresters into fair nottingham, as many there did know, they digged them graves in their churchyard, and they buried them all a-row.&quot; nottingham is only the other side of the river, and they were not exactly all a-row. you may read in the churchyard at dunstable, under the &quot;memento mori,&quot; and the name of one of them, how they &quot;departed this life,&quot; and &quot; this man with seven more that lies in this grave was slew all in a day by the indians.&quot; the stones of some others of the company stand 218 a week around the common grave with their separate inscriptions. eight were buried here, but nine were killed, according to the best authorities. &quot; gentle river, gentle river, lo, thy streams are stained with gore, many a brave and noble captain floats along thy willowed shore. &quot; all beside thy limpid waters, all beside thy sands so bright, indian chiefs and christian warriors joined in fierce and mortal fight.&quot; it is related in the history of dunstable, that on the return of farwell the indians were en gaged by a fresh party, which they compelled to retreat, and pursued as far as the nashua, where they fought across the stream at its mouth. after the departure of the indians, the figure of an indian s head was found carved by them on a large tree by the shore, which circumstance has given its name to this part of the village of nashville, the &quot;indian head.&quot; &quot;it was ob served by some judicious,&quot; says gookin, refer ring to philip s war, &quot;that at the beginning of the war the english soldiers made a nothing of the indians, and many spake words to this effect, that one englishman was sufficient to chase ten indians; many reckoned it was no other but fern, vidi, vici.&quot; but we may con clude that the judicious would by this time have made a different observation. monday 219 farwell appears to have been the only one who had studied his profession, and understood the business of hunting indians. he lived to fight another day, for the next year he was love well s lieutenant at pequawket, but that time, as we have related, he left his bones in the wilderness. his name still reminds us of twi light days and forest scouts on indian trails, with an uneasy scalp ; an indispensable hero to new england. as the more recent poet of love welf s fight has sung, halting a little but bravely still, 41 then did the crimson streams that flowed seem like the waters of the brook, that brightly shine, that loudly dash, far down the cliffs of agiochook,&quot; these battles sound incredible to us. i think that posterity will doubt if such things ever were ; if our bold ancestors who settled this land were not struggling rather with the forest shad ows, and not with a copper-colored race of men. they were vapors, fever and ague of the un settled woods. now, only a few arrow-heads are turned up by the plough. in the pelasgic, the etruscan, or the british story, there is no thing so shadowy and unreal. it is a wild and antiquated looking graveyard, overgrown with bushes, on the high-road, about 220 a week a quarter of a mile from and overlooking the merrimack, with a deserted mill-stream bound ing it on one side, where lie the earthly remains of the ancient inhabitants of dunstable. we passed it three or four miles below here. you may read there the names of lovewell, farwell, and many others whose families were distin guished in indian warfare. we noticed there two large masses of granite more than a foot thick and rudely squared, lying flat on the ground over the remains of the first pastor and his wife. it is remarkable that the dead lie everywhere under stones, &quot; strata jacent passim suo quseque sub &quot; lapide corpora, we might say, if the measure allowed. when the stone is a slight one, it does not oppress the spirits of the traveler to meditate by it ; but these did seem a little heathenish to us; and so are all large monuments over men s bodies, from the pyramids down. a monument should at least be &quot;star-y-pointing,&quot; to indicate whither the spirit is gone, and not prostrate, like the body it has deserted. there have been some nations who could do nothing but con struct tombs, and these are the only traces which they have left. they are the heathen. but why these stones, so upright and emphatic, like monday 221 exclamation -points? what was there so re markable that lived? why should the monu ment be so much more enduring than the fame which it is designed to perpetuate, a stone to a bone? &quot;here lies,&quot; &quot;here lies; &quot; why do they not sometimes write, there rises? is it a monument to the body only that is intended? &quot;having reached the term of his natural life; &quot; would it not be truer to say, having reached the term of his unnatural life? the rarest quality in an epitaph is truth. if any character is given, it should be as severely true as the decision of the three judges below, and not the partial testimony of friends. friends and con temporaries should supply only the name and date, and leave it to posterity to write the epi taph. here lies an honest man, rear-admiral van. faith, then ye have two in one grave, for in his favor, here too lies the engraver. fame itself is but an epitaph; as late, as false, as true. but they only are the true epitaphs which old mortality retouches. a man might well pray that he may not taboo or curse any portion of nature by being buried in it. for the most part, the best man s spirit 222 a week makes a fearful sprite to haunt his grave, and it is therefore much to the credit of little john, the famous follower of robin hood, and reflect ing favorably on his character, that his grave was &quot;long celebrous for the yielding of excel lent whetstones.&quot; i confess that i have but little love for such collections as they have at the catacombs, pere la chaise, mount auburn, and even this dunstable graveyard. at any rate, nothing but great antiquity can make graveyards interesting to me. i have no friends there. it may be that i am not competent to write the poetry of the grave. the farmer who has skimmed his farm might perchance leave his body to nature to be ploughed in, and in some measure restore its fertility. we should not retard but forward her economies. soon the village of nashua was out of sight, and the woods were gained again, and we rowed slowly on before sunset, looking for a solitary place in which to spend the night. a few evening clouds began to be reflected in the water, and the surface was dimpled only here and there by a muskrat crossing the stream. we camped at length near penichook brook, on the confines of what is now nashville, by a deep ravine, under the skirts of a pine wood, where the dead pine-leaves were our carpet, and their tawny boughs stretched overhead. but fire and monda y 223 smoke soon tamed the scene; the rocks con sented to be our walls, and the pines our roof. a woodside was already the fittest locality for us. the wilderness is near as well as dear to every man. even the oldest villages are in debted to the border of wild wood which sur rounds them, more than to the gardens of men. there is something indescribably inspiriting and beautiful in the aspect of the forest skirting and occasionally jutting into the midst of new towns, which, like the sand-heaps of fresh fox burrows, have sprung up in their midst. the very uprightness of the pines and maples asserts the ancient rectitude and vigor of nature. our lives need the relief of such a background, where the pine flourishes and the jay still screams. we had found a safe harbor for our boat, and as the sun was setting carried up our furniture, and soon arranged our house upon the bank, and while the kettle steamed at the tent door, we chatted of distant friends and of the sights which we were to behold, and won dered which way the towns lay from us. our cocoa was soon boiled, and supper set upon our chest, and we lengthened out this meal, like old voyageurs, with our talk. meanwhile we spread the map on the ground, and read in the gazetteer when the first settlers came here and 224 a week got a township granted. then, when suppei was done and we had written the journal of our voyage, we wrapped our buffaloes about us and lay down with our heads pillowed on our arms, listening awhile to the distant baying of a dog, or the murmurs of the river, or to the windf which had not gone to rest : the western wind came lumbering in, bearing a faint pacific din, our evening mail, swift at the call of its postmaster-general ; laden with news from calif orn , whate er transpired hath since morn, how wags the world by brier and brake from hence to athabasca lake ; or half awake and half asleep, dreaming of a star which glimmered through our cotton roof. perhaps at midnight one was awakened by a cricket shrilly singing on his shoulder, or by a hunting spider in his eye, and was lulled asleep again by some streamlet purling its way along at the bottom of a wooded and rocky ravine in our neighborhood. it was pleasant to lie with our heads so low in the grass, and hear what a tinkling ever-busy laboratory it was. a thou sand little/artisans v beat on their anvils all night long. far in the night, as we were falling asleep on the bank of the merrimack, we heard some tyro beating a drum incessantly, in preparation fo* monday 225 a country muster, as we learned, and we thought of the line, &quot; when the drum beat at dead of night.&quot; we could have assured him that his beat would be answered, and the forces be mustered. fear, not, thou drummer of the night, we too will be : there. and still he drummed on in the silence and the dark. this stray sound from a far-off sphere came to our ears from time to time, far, sweet, and significant, and we listened with such an unprejudiced sense as if for, the first time we heard at all. no doubt he was an insignificant drummer enough, but his music afforded us a prime and leisure hour, and we felt that we were in season wholly. these sim ple sounds related us to the stars. ay, there was adx)gic)in them so convincing that the com jjined sense of mankinc^^could never makejna. _4oui?t their oonfilusiona. i stop my habitual thinking, ^a^jfjbheplough had suddenly run ^deeper., in its furrow through the &quot;crust of the jworld. how can i go on, who have just stepped over such a bottomless skylight in the bog of my life ? suddenly old time winked at me, ah, you know me, you rogue, and news had come that it was well. that ancient universe is in such capital health, t _i_thjnk will never die, ffeal yourselves, doctors; by 226 a week then idle time ran gadding by and left me with eternity alone ; i hear beyond the range of sound, i see beyond the verge of sight, i see, smell, taste, hear, feel, that everlasting something to which we are allied, at once our maker, our abode, our destiny, our very selves ; rthltone historic truth,] the most remarkable fact which can become the distinct and uninvited subject of our thought, the actual glory of the universe; the_only factwhich a hiunan^being ^cannot avojdjrecognizing, or m some way forget or dispense with. it doth expand my privacies to all, and leave me single in the crowd. i have seen how the foundations of the world are laid, and i have not the least doubt that it will stand a good while. now chiefly is my natahiour, and only now my prime of life. j[ wiu_iwtfudfliib.t_the love untold, which not my worth nor want hath bought, which wooed me young and wooes me old, and to this evening hath me brought. what are ears? what is time? that this par ticular series of sounds called a strain of music, an invisible and fairy troop which never brushed the dew from any mead, can be wafted down through the centuries from homer to me, and he have been conversant with that same aerial monday 227 and mysterious charm which now so tingles my ears ? what a fine communication from age to age, of the fairest and noblest thoughts, the aspirations of ancient men, even such as were never communicated by speech, is music ! it is the flower of language, thought colored and curved, fluent and flexible, its crystal fountain tinged with the sun s rays, and its purling rip ples reflecting the grass and the clouds. a strain of music reminds me of a passage of the vedas, and i associate with it the idea of infi nite remoteness, as well as of beauty and seren ity, for to the senses that is fetl]y^frmn_ii3^ whicji_^ddrfiaafia_the greatest depth within us. it teaches us again and again to trust the re motest and^ finestas the divinest instinct, and makes t a dream our only real experience^ we feel yjtsad cheer/vhen we hear it, perchance be cause we that hear are not one with that which is heard. therefore a torrent of sadness deep through the strains of thy triumph is heard to sweep. the sadness is ours. the indian poet calidas says in the sacontala: &quot;perhaps the sadness of men on seeing beautiful forms and hearing sweet music arises from some faint remembrance of past joys, and the traces of connections in a former state of existence.&quot; as polishing ex presses the vein in marble, and grain in wood, 228 a week so music brings out what of heroic lurks any where. thfrjiero isl-thfiuaple patron of music. ^ ^^ ^^^ 4 _ that harmony which exists naturally between the hero s moods and the universe, the soldier would fain imitate with drum and trumpet. when we are in health, all sounds fife and drum for us ; we hear the notes of music in the air, or catch its echoes dying away when we awake in the dawn. marchingj^ :vdieii^he--pulse of the hero beats jn iinisn_wi^ nature? and he steps to the measure of the universe; then there is true courage and invincible strength,^ plutarch says that &quot;plato thinks the gods never gave men music, the science of melody and harmony, for mere delectation or to tickle the ear; but that the discordant parts of the circulations and beauteous fabric of the soul, and that of it that roves about the body, and many times, for want of tune and air, breaks forth into many extravagances and excesses, might be sweetly recalled and artfully wound up to their former consent and agreement.&quot; music is the sound of the universal laws promulgated. it is the only assured tone. there are in it such strains as far surpass any man s faith in the loftiness of his destiny. things are to be learned which it will be worth the while to learn. formerly i heard these monda y 229 rumors from an aeolian harp. there is a vale which none hath seen, where foot of man has never been, such as here lives with toil and strife, an anxious and a sinful life. there every virtue has its birth, ere it descends upon the earth, and thither every deed returns, which in the generous bosom burns. there love is warm, and youth is young, and poetry is yet unsung, for virtue still adventures there, and freely breathes her native air. and ever, if you hearken well, you still may hear its vesper bell, and tread of high-souled men go by, their thoughts conversing with the sky. according to jamblichus, &quot;pythagoras did not procure for himself a thing of this kind through instruments or the voice, but employing a certain ineffable divinity, and which it is diffi cult to apprehend, he extended his ears and fixed his intellect in the sublime symphonies of the world, he alone hearing and understanding, as it appears, the universal harmony and con sonance of the spheres, and the stars that are moved through them, and which produce a fuller and more intense melody than anything effected by mortal sounds.&quot; 230 a week traveling on foot very early one morning due east from here about twenty miles, from caleb harriman s tavern in hampstead toward haverhill, when i reached the railroad in plais tow, i heard at some distance a faint music in the air like an ^eolian harp, which i immedi ately suspected to proceed from the cord of the telegraghjibrating in the just awakening morn ing wind, and applying my ear to one of the posts i was convinced that it was so. it was the telegraph harp singing its message through the country, ita message sejit^afljlj3y_,iaen, but by_4ods._ perchance, like the statue of mem non, it resounds only in the morning, when the first rays of the sun fall on it. it was like the first lyre or shell heard on the sea-shore, that vibrating cord high in the air over the shores of earth. so have all things their higher and their .lower uses^ iteard a fairer news than the journals ever print. it told of things worthy to hear, and worthy of the electric fluid to carry the news of, not of the price of cotton and flour, but it hinted at the price of the world itself and of things which are priceless, of abso lute truth and beauty. still the drum rolled on, and stirred our blood to fresh extravagance that night. the clarion sound and clang of corselet and buckler were heard from many a hamlet of the soul, monday 231 and many a knight was arming for the fight behind the encamped stars. &quot; before each van prick forth the aery knights, and couch their spears till thickest legions close ; with feats of arms from either end of heaven the welkin burns.&quot; away! away! away! away! ye have not kept your secret well, i will abide that other day, those other lands ye tell. has time no leisure left for these, the acts that ye rehearse ? is not eternity a lease for better deeds than verse ? t is sweet to hear of heroes dead, to know them still alive, but sweeter if we earn their bread, and in us they survive. our life should feed the springs of fame with a perennial wave, as ocean feeds the babbling founts which find in it their grave. ye skies, drop gently round my breast. and be my corselet blue, ye earth, receive my lance in rest, my faithful charger you ; ye stars, my spear-heads in the sky, my arrow-tips ye are ; i see the routed foemen fly, my bright spears fixed are. 232 a week give me an angel for a foe, fix now the place and time, and straight to meet him i will go above the starry chime. and with our clashing bucklers clang the heavenly spheres shall ring, while bright the northern lights shall hang beside our tourneying. and if she lose her champion true, tell heaven not despair, for i will be her champion new, her fame i will repair. there was a high wind this night, which we afterwards learned had been still more violent elsewhere, and had done much injury to the cornfields far and near; but we only heard it sigh from time to time, as if it had no license to shake the foundations of our tent ; the pines murmured, the water rippled, and the tent rocked a little, but we only laid our ears closer to the ground, while the blast swept on to alarm other men, and long before sunrise we were ready to pursue our voyage as usual. tuesday. &quot; on either side the river lie long fields of barley and of rye, that clothe the wold and meet the sky ; and through the fields the road runs by to many-towered camelot.&quot; tennyson. long before daylight we ranged abroad, hatchet in hand, in search of fuel, and made the yet slumbering and dreaming wood resound with our blows. then with our fire we burned up a portion of the loitering night, while the kettle sang its homely strain to the morning star. we tramped about the shore, waked all the muskrats, and scared up the bittern and birds that were asleep upon their roosts; we hauled up and upset our boat, and washed it and rinsed out the clay, talking aloud as if it were broad day, until at length, by three o clock, we had completed our preparations and were ready to pursue our voyage as usual; so, shaking the clay from our feet, we pushed into the fog. though we were enveloped in mist as usual, we trusted that there was a bright day behind it. 234 a week ply the oars ! away ! away ! in each dew-drop of the morning lies the promise of a day. rivers from the sunrise flow, springing with the dewy morn ; voyageurs gainst time do row, idle noon nor sunset know, ever even with the dawn. belknap, the historian of this state, says that, &quot; in the neighborhood of fresh rivers and ponds, a whitish fog in the morning lying over the water is a sure indication of fair weather for that day; and when no fog is seen, rain is expected before night.&quot; that which seemed to us to invest the world was only a narrow and shallow wreath of vapor stretched over the channel of the merrimack from the seaboard to the mountains. more extensive fogs, however, have their own limits. i once saw the day break from the top of saddle-back mountain in massachusetts, above the clouds. as we cannot distinguish objects through this dense fog, let me tell this story more at length. i had come over the hills on foot and alone in serene summer days, plucking the raspberries by the wayside, and occasionally buying a loaf of bread at a farmer s house, with a knapsack on my back which held a few traveler s books and a change of clothing, and a staff in my tuesday 235 hand. i had that morning looked down from the hoosack mountain, where the road crosses it, on the village of north adams in the valley three miles away under my feet, showing how uneven the earth may sometimes be, and mak ing it seem an accident that it should ever be level and convenient for the feet of man. put ting a little rice and sugar and a tin cup into my knapsack at this village, i began in the af ternoon to ascend the mountain, whose summit is three thousand six hundred feet above the level of the sea, and was seven or eight miles distant by the path. my route lay up a long and spacious valley called the bellows, because the winds rush up or down it with violence in storms, sloping up to the very clouds between the principal range and a lower mountain. there were a few farms scattered along at dif ferent elevations, each commanding a fine pros pect of the mountains to the north, and a stream ran down the middle of the valley on which near the head there was a mill. it seemed a road for the pilgrim to enter upon who would climb to the gates of heaven. now i crossed a hay field, and now over the brook on a slight bridge, still gradually ascending all the while with a sort of awe, and filled with indefinite expecta tions as to what kind of inhabitants and what kind of nature i should come to at last. it 236 a week now seemed some advantage that the earth was uneven, for one could not imagine a more noble position for a farm-house than this vale af forded, farther from or nearer to its head, from a glen-like seclusion overlooking the country at a great elevation between these two mountain walls. it reminded me of the homesteads of the huguenots, on staten island, off the coast of new jersey. the hills in the interior of this island, though comparatively low, are pene trated in various directions by similar sloping valleys on a humble scale, gradually narrowing and rising to the centre, and at the head of these the huguenots, who were the first settlers, placed their houses quite within the land, in rural and sheltered places, in leafy recesses where the breeze played with the poplar and the gum-tree, from which, with equal security in calm and storm, they looked out through a widening vista, over miles of forest and stretch ing salt marsh, to the huguenot s tree, an old elm on the shore, at whose root they had landed, and across the spacious outer bay of new york to sandy hook and the highlands of never sink, and thence over leagues of the atlantic, perchance to some faint vessel in the horizon, almost a day s sail on her voyage to that eu rope whence they had come. when walking in tuesda y 237 the interior there, in the midst of rural scenery, where there was as little to remind me of the ocean as amid the new hampshire hills, i have suddenly, through a gap, a cleft or &quot;clove road,&quot; as the dutch settlers called it, caught sight of a ship under full sail, over a field of corn, twenty or thirty miles at sea. the effect was similar, since i had no means of measuring dis tances, to seeing a painted ship passed back wards and forwards through a magic lantern. but to return to the mountain. it seemed as if he must be the most singular and heavenly minded man whose dwelling stood highest up the valley. the thunder had rumbled at my heels all the way, but the shower passed off in another direction, though if it had not, i half believed that i should get above it. i at length reached the last house but cse, where the path to the summit diverged to the right, while the summit itself rose directly in front. but i determined to follow up the valley to its head, and then find my own route up the steep as jie^sjiojter and more adventurous way. i had thoughts of returning to this house, which was well kept and so nobly placed, the next day, and perhaps remaining a week there, if i could have entertainment. its mistress was a frank and hospitable young woman, who stood before me in a dishabille, busily and unconcernedly 238 a week combing her long black hair while she talked, giving her head the necessary toss with each sweep of the comb, with lively, sparkling eyes, and full of interest in that lower world from which i had come, talking all the while as fa miliarly as if she had known me for years, and reminding me of a cousin of mine. she at first had taken me for a student from williamstown, for they went by in parties, she said, either rid ing or walking, almost every pleasant day, and were a pretty wild set of fellows; but they never went by the way i was going. as i passed the last house, a man called out to know what i had to sell, for, seeing my knapsack, he thought that i might be a peddler who was taking this unusual route over the ridge of the valley into south adams. he told me that it was still four or fihe miles to the summit by the path which i had left, though not more than two in a straight line from where i was, but that nobody ever went this way ; there was no path, and i should find it as steep as the roof of a house. but i knew that i was more used to woods and mountains than he, and went along through his cow-yard, while he, looking at the sun, shouted after me that i should not get to the top that night. i soon reached the head of the valley, but as i could not see the summit from this point, i ascended a low mountain on tuesday 239 the opposite side, and took its bearing with my compass. i at once entered the woods, and be gan to climb the steep side of the mountain in a diagonal direction, taking the bearing of a tree every dozen rods. the ascent was by no means difficult or unpleasant, and occupied much less time than it would have taken to follow the path. even country people, i have observed, magnify the difficulty of traveling in the forest, and especially among mountains. they seem to lack their usual common sense in this. i have climbed several higher mountains without guide or path, and have found, as might be expected, that it takes only more time and patience com monly than to travel the smoothest highway. it is very rare that you meet with obstacles in this world which the humblest man has not fac ulties to surmount. it is true we may come to a perpendicular precipice, but we need not jump off, nor run our heads against it. a man may jump down his own cellar stairs, or dash his brains out against his chimney, if he is mad. so far as my experience goes, travelers gener ally exaggerate the difficulties of the way. like most evil, the difficulty is imaginary; for what s the hurry? ifjl^aerson lost would con clude^that after all he is not-lost, he is not be side himself, -terfr-frfrninding 1 in his own olelghogq on the very spot where he is, and that for the 240 a week time being he will live there; but the places that have known him, they are lost, how much anxiety and danger would vanish. i am not alone if i stand by myself. who knows where in space this globe is rolling? yet we will not give ourselves up for lost, let it go where it will. i made my way steadily upward in a straight line, through a dense undergrowth of mountain laurel, until the trees began to have a scraggy and infernal look, as if contending with frost goblins, and at length i reached the summit, just as the sun was setting. several acres here had been cleared, and were covered with rocks and stumps, and there was a rude observatory in the middle which overlooked the woods. i had one fair view of the country before the sun went down, but i was too thirsty to waste any light in viewing the prospect, and set out di rectly to find water. first, going down a well beaten path for half a mile through the low scrubby wood, till i came to where the water stood in the tracks of the horses which had car ried travelers up, i lay down flat, and drank these dry, one after another, a pure, cold, spring-like water, but yet i could not fill my dipper, though i contrived little siphons of grass-stems, and ingenious aqueducts on a small scale; it was too slow a process. then, remern tuesday 241 bering that i had passed a moist place near the top, on my way up, i returned to find it again, and here, with sharp stones and my hands, in the twilight, i made a well about two feet deep, which was soon filled with pure cold water, and the birds too came and drank at it. so i filled my dipper, and, making my way back to the observatory, collected some dry sticks, and made a fire on some flat stones which had been placed on the floor for that purpose, and so i soon cooked my supper of rice, having already whittled a wooden spoon to eat it with. i sat up during the evening, reading by the light of the fire the scraps of newspapers in which some party had wrapped their luncheon ; the prices current in new york and boston, the advertisements, and the singular editorials which some had seen fit to publish, not foresee ing under what critical circumstances they would be read. i read these things at a vast advan tage there, and it seemed to me that the adver tisements, or what is called the business part of a paper, were greatly the best, the most useful, natural, and respectable. almost all the opin ions and sentiments expressed were so little con sidered, so shallow and flimsy, that i thought the very texture of the paper must be weaker in that part and tear the more easily. the ad vertisements and the prices current were more 242 a week closely allied to nature, and were respectable in some measure as tide and meteorological tables are; but the reading-matter, which i remem bered was most prized down below, unless it was some humble record of science, or an ex tract from some old classic, struck me as strangely whimsical, and crude, and one-idea d, like a school -boy s theme, such as youths write and after burn. the opinions were of that kind that are doomed to wear a different aspect to-morrow, like last year s fashions; as if mankind were very green indeed, and would be ashamed of themselves in a few years, when they had outgrown this verdant period. there was, moreover, a singular disposition to wit and humor, but rarely the slightest real success ; and the apparent success was a terrible satire on the attempt; the evil genius of man laughed the loudest at his best jokes. the advertisements, as i have said, such as were serious, and not of the modern quack kind, suggested pleasing and poetic thoughts; for commerce_ is really as _intexestiag_as nature. the very names of the commodities were poetic, and as suggestive as if they had been inserted in a pleasing poem, lumber, cotton, sugar, hides, guano, logwood. some sober, private, and original thought would have been grateful to read there, and as much in harmony with the circumstances tuesda y 243 as if it had been written on a mountain-top ; for it is of a fashion which never changes, and as respectable as hides and logwood, or any nat ural product. what an inestimable companion such a scrap of paper would have been, contain ing some fruit of a mature life ! what a relic ! what a recipe ! it seemed a divine invention, by which not mere shining coin, but shining and current thoughts, could be brought up and left there. as it was cold, i collected quite a pile of wood and lay down on a board against the side of the building, not having any blanket to cover me, with my head to the fire, that i might look after it, which is not the indian rule. but as it grew colder towards midnight, i at length encased myself completely in boards, managing even to put a board on top of me, with a large stone on it, to keep it down, and so slept com fortably. i was reminded, it is true, of the irish children, who inquired what their neigh bors did who had no door to put over them in winter nights as they had; but i am convinced that there was nothing very strange in the in quiry. those who have never tried it can have no idea how far a door, which keeps the single blanket down, may go toward making one com fortable. we are constituted a good deal like chickens, which, taken from the hen, and put in 244 a week a basket of cotton in the chimney-corner, will often peep till they die, nevertheless ; but if you put in a book, or anything heavy, which will press down the cotton, and feel like the hen, they go to sleep directly. my only companions were the mice, which came to pick up the crumbs that had been left in those scraps of paper; still, as everywhere, pensioners on man, and not unwisely improving this elevated tract for their habitation. they nibbled what was for them ; i nibbled what was for me. once or twice in the night, when i looked up, i saw a white cloud drifting through the windows, and filling the whole upper story. this observatory was a building of consider able size, erected by the students of williams town college, whose buildings might be seen by daylight gleaming far down in the valley. it would be no small advantage if every college were thus located at the base of a mountain, as good at least as one well-endowed professorship. it were as well to be educated in the shadow of a mountain as in more classical shades. some will remember, no doubt, not only that they went to the college, but that they went to the mountain. every visit to its summit would, as \ it were, generalize the particular information gained below, and subject it to more catholic tests. ^j tuesda y 245 i was up early and perched upon the top of this tower to see the daybreak, for some time reading the names that had been engraved there, before i could distinguish more distant objects. an &quot;untamable fly&quot; buzzed at my elbow with the same nonchalance as on a mo lasses hogshead at the end of long wharf. even there i must attend to his stale humdrum. but now i come to the pith of this long di gression. as the light increased, i discovered around me an ocean of mist, which by chance reached up exactly to the base of the tower, and shut out every vestige of the earth, while i was left floating on this fragment of the wreck of a world, on my carved plank, in cloudland ; a sit uation which required no aid from the imagina tion to render it impressive. as the light in the east steadily increased, it revealed to me more clearly the new world into which i had risen in the night, the new terra firma per chance of my future life. there was not a crevice left through which the trivial places we name massachusetts or vermont or new york could be seen, while i still inhaled the clear at mosphere of a july morning, if it were july there. all around beneath me was spread for a hundred miles on every side, as far as the eye could reach, an undulating country of clouds, answering in the varied swell of its surface to 246 a week the terrestrial world it veiled. it was such a country as we might see in dreams, with all the delights of paradise. there were immense snowy pastures, apparently smooth shaven and firm, and shady vales between the vaporous mountains ; and far in the horizon i could see where some luxurious misty timber jutted into the prairie, and trace the windings of a water course, some unimagined amazon or orinoko, by the misty trees on its brink. as there was wanting the symbol, so there was not the sub stance of impurity, no spot nor stain. it was a favor for which to be forever silent to be shown this vision. the earth beneath had be~ come such a flitting thing of lights and shadows as the clouds had been before. it was not merely veiled to me, but it had passed away like the phantom of a shadow, cr/aas ovap, and this new platform was gained. as i had climbed above storm and cloud, so by successive days journeys i might reach the region of eternal day, beyond the tapering shadow of the earth; ay, &quot; heaven itself shall slide, and roll away like melting stars that glide along their oily threads.&quot; but when its own sun began to rise on this pure world, i found myself a dweller in the dazzling halls of aurora, into which poets have had but tuesda y 247 a partial glance over the eastern hills, drifting amid the saffron -colored clouds, and playing with the rosy fingers of the dawn, in the very path of the sun s chariot, and sprinkled with its dewy dust, enjoying the benignant smile, and near at hand the far-darting glances of the god. the inhabitants of earth behold com monly but the dark and shadowy under-side of heaven s pavement; it is only when seen at a favorable angle in the horizon, morning or even ing, that some faint streaks of the rich lining of the clouds are revealed. but my muse would fail to convey an impression of the gorgeous tapestry by which i was surrounded, such as men see faintly reflected afar off in the cham bers of the east. here, as on earth, i saw the gracious god &quot; flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye, gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy.&quot; but never here did &quot;heaven s sun&quot; stain himself. but, alas, owing, as i think, to some un wortjiinpss in rnyaftlf^ my private sun did stain himself, and &quot; anon permit the basest clouds to ride with ugly wrack on his celestial face,&quot; for before the god had reached the zenith the heavenly pavement rose and embraced my wa 248 a week vering virtue, or rather i sank down again into that &quot;forlorn world,&quot; from which the celestial sun had hid his visage, &quot; how may a worm that crawls along the dust, clamber the azure mountains, thrown so high, and fetch from thence thy fair idea just, that in those sunny courts doth hidden lie, clothed with such light as blinds the angel s eye ? how may weak mortal ever hope to file his unsmooth tongue, and his deprostrate style ? oh, raise thou from his corse thy now entombed exile ! &quot; in the preceding evening i had seen the summits of new and yet higher mountains, the catskills, by which i might hope to climb to heaven again, and had set my compass for a fair lake in the southwest, which lay in my way, for which i now steered, descending the moun tain by my own route, on the side opposite to that by which i had ascended, and soon found myself in the region of cloud and drizzling rain, and the inhabitants affirmed that it had been a cloudy and drizzling day wholly. but now we must make haste back before the fog disperses to the blithe merrimack water. since that first &quot; away ! away ! &quot; many a lengthy reach we ve rowed, still the sparrow on the spray hastes to usher in the day with her simple stanza d ode. we passed a canal-boat before sunrise, grop tuesday 249 ing its way to the seaboard, and, though we could not see it on account of the fog, the few dull, thumping, stertorous sounds which we heard impressed us with a sense of weight and irresistible motion. one little rill of commerce already awake on this distant new hampshire river. the fog, as it required more skill in the steering, enhanced the interest of our early voy age, and made the river seem indefinitely broad. a slight mist, through which objects are faintly visible, has the effect of expanding even ordi nary streams, by a singular mirage, into arms of the sea or inland lakes. in the present in stance, it was even fragrant and invigorating, and we enjoyed it as a sort of earlier sunshine, or dewy and embryo light. low-anchored cloud, newfoundland air, fountain-head and source of rivers, dew-cloth, dream drapery, and napkin spread by fays ; drifting meadow of the air, where bloom the daisied banks and violets, and in whose fenny labyrinth the bittern booms and heron wades ; spirit of lakes and seas and rivers, bear only perfumes and the scent of healing herbs to just men s fields ! the same pleasant and observant historian whom we quoted above says that, &quot;in the mountainous parts of the country, the ascent of 250 a week vapors, and their formation into clouds, is a cu rious and entertaining object. the vapors are seen rising in small columns like smoke from many chimneys. when risen to a certain height, they spread, meet, condense, and are attracted to the mountains, where they either distill in gentle dews, and replenish the springs, or descend in showers, accompanied with thun der. after short intermissions, the process is repeated many times in the course of a summer day, affording to travelers a lively illustration of what is observed in the book of job, they are wet with the showers of the mountains. fogs and clouds which conceal the overshad owing mountains lend the breadth of the plains to mountain vales. even a small-featured country acquires some grandeur in stormy weather when clouds are seen drifting between the beholder and the neighboring hills. when, in traveling toward haverhill through hamp stead in this state, on the height of land be tween the merrimack and the piscataqua or the sea, you commence the descent eastward, the view toward the coast is so distant and unex pected, though the sea is invisible, that you at first suppose the unobstructed atmosphere to be a fog in the lowlands concealing hills of corre sponding elevation to that you are upon ; but it is the mist of prejudice alone, which the winds tuesday 251 will not disperse. the most stupendous scenery ceases to be sublime when it becomes distinct, or in other words limited, and the imagination is no longer encouraged to exaggerate it. the actual height and breadth of a mountain or a waterfall are always ridiculously small; they are the imagined only that content us. nature is not made after such a fashion as we would have her. we piously exaggerate her wonders, as the scenery around our home. such was the heaviness of the dews along this river that we were generally obliged to leave our tent spread over the bows of the boat till the sun had dried it, to avoid mildew. we passed the mouth of penichook brook, a wild salmon-stream, in the fog, without seeing it. at length the sun s rays struggled through the mist and showed us the pines on shore dripping with dew, and springs trickling from the moist banks, &quot; and now the taller sons, whom titan warms, of unshorn mountains blown with easy winds, dandle the morning s childhood in their arms, and, if they chanced to slip the prouder pines, the under corylets did catch their shines, to gild their leaves.&quot; we rowed for some hours between glistening banks before the sun had dried the grass and leaves, or the day had established its character. its serenity at last seemed the more profound 252 a week and secure for the denseness of the morning s fog. the river became swifter, and the scenery more pleasing than before. the banks were steep and clayey for the most part, and trickling with water, and where a spring oozed out a few feet above the river the boatmen had cut a trough out of a slab with their axes, and placed it so as to receive the water and fill their jugs conveniently. sometimes this purer and cooler water, bursting out from under a pine or a rock, was collected into a basin close to the edge of and level with the river, a fountain head of the merrimack. so near along life s stream are the fountains of innocence and youth making fertile its sandy margin ; and the voy ageur will do well to replenish his vessels often at these uncontaminated sources. some youth ful spring, perchance, still empties with tin kling music into the oldest river, even when it is falling into the sea, and we imagine that its music is distinguished by the river-gods from the general lapse of the stream, and falls sweeter on their ears in proportion as it is nearer to the ocean. as the evaporations of the river feed thus these unsuspected springs which filter through its banks, so, perchance, our aspira tions fall back again in springs on the margin of life s stream to refresh and purify it. the yellow and tepid river may float his scow, and tuesda y 253 cheer ms eye with its reflections and its ripples, but the boatman quenches his thirst at this small rill alone. it is this purer and cooler element that chiefly sustains his life. the race will long survive that is thus discreet. our course this morning lay between the ter ritories of merrimack, on the west, and litch field, once called brenton s farm, on the east, which townships were anciently the indian naticook. brenton was a fur-trader among the indians, and these lands were granted to him in 1656. the latter township contains about five hundred inhabitants, of whom, however, we saw none, and but few of their dwellings. being on the river, whose banks are always high and generally conceal the few houses, the country appeared much more wild and primi tive than to the traveler on the neighboring roads. the river is by far the most attractive highway, and those boatmen who have spent twenty or twenty-five years on it must have had a much fairer, more wild, and memorable ex perience than the dusty and jarring one of the teamster who has driven, during the same time, on the roads which run parallel with the stream. as one ascends the merrimack he rarely sees a village, but for the most part alternate wood and pasture lands, and sometimes a field of corn or potatoes, of rye or oats or english grass, 254 a week with a few straggling apple-trees, and, at still longer intervals, a farmer s house. the soil, excepting the best of the interval, is commonly as light and sandy as a patriot could desire. sometimes this forenoon the country appeared in its primitive state, and as if the indian still inhabited it, and, again, as if many free, new settlers occupied it, their slight fences straggling down to the water s edge; and the barking of dogs, and even the prattle of children, were heard, and smoke was seen to go up from some hearthstone, and the banks were divided into patches of pasture, mowing, tillage, and wood land. but when the river spread out broader, with an uninhabited islet, or a long, low, sandy shore which ran on single and devious, not an swering to its opposite, but far off as if it were sea-shore or single coast, and the land no longer nursed the river in its bosom, but they con versed as equals, the rustling leaves with rip pling waves, and few fences were seen, but high oak woods on one side, and large herds of cattle, and all tracks seemed a point to one centre be hind some statelier grove, we imagined that the river flowed through an extensive manor, and that the few inhabitants were retainers to a lord, and a feudal state of things prevailed. when there was a suitable reach, we caught sight of the goffstown mountain, the indian tuesda y 255 uncannunuc, rising before us on the west side. it was a calm and beautiful day, with only a slight zephyr to ripple the surface of the water, and rustle the woods on shore, and just warmth enough to prove the kindly disposition of nature to her children. with buoyant spirits and vig orous impulses we tossed our boat rapidly along into the very middle of this forenoon. the fish-hawk sailed and screamed overhead. the chipping or striped squirrel, sciurus striatus (tamias lysteri, aud.), sat upon the end of some virginia fence or rider reaching over the stream, twirling a green nut with one paw, as in a lathe, while the other held it fast against its incisors as chisels. like an independent russet leaf, with a will of its own, rustling whither it could; now under the fence, now over it, now peeping at the voyageurs through a crack with only its tail visible, now at its lunch deep in the toothsome kernel, and now a rod off playing at hide-and-seek, with the nut stowed away in its chops, where were half a dozen more besides, extending its cheeks to a ludicrous breadth, as if it were devising through what safe valve of frisk or somerset to let its super fluous life escape ; the stream passing harmlessly off, even while it sits, in constant electric flashes through its tail. and now with a chuckling squeak it dives into the root of a hazel, and we 256 a week see no more of it. or the larger red squirrel or chickaree, sometimes called the hudson bay squirrel (sciurus hudsonius), gave warning of our approach by that peculiar alarum of his, like the winding up of some strong clock, in the top of a pine-tree, and dodged behind its stem, or leaped from tree to tree with such caution and adroitness, as if much depended on the fidelity of his scout, running along the white pine boughs sometimes twenty rods by our side, with such speed, and by such unerring routes, as if it were some well-worn familiar path to him; and presently, when we have passed, he returns to his work of cutting off the pine-cones, and letting them fall to the ground. we passed cromwell s falls, the first we met with on this river, this forenoon, by means of locks, without using our wheels. these falls are the nesenkeag of the indians. great ne senkeag stream comes in on the right just above, and little nesenkeag some distance be low, both in litchfield. we read in the gaz etteer, under the head of merrimack, that &quot;the first house in this town was erected on the mar gin of the river [soon after 1665] for a house of traffic with the indians. for some time one cromwell carried on a lucrative trade with them, weighing their furs with his foot, till, enraged at his supposed or real deception, they tuesday 257 formed the resolution to murder him. this in tention being communicated to cromwell, he buried his wealth and made his escape. within a few hours after his flight, a party of the pena cook tribe arrived, and, not finding the object of their resentment, burnt his habitation.&quot; upon the top of the high bank here, close to the river, was still to be seen his cellar, now over grown with trees. it was a convenient spot for such a traffic, at the foot of the first falls above the settlements, and commanding a pleasant view up the river, where he could see the in dians coming down with their furs. the lock man told us that his shovel and tongs had been ploughed up here, and also a stone with his name on it. but we will not vouch for the truth of this story. in the new hampshire historical collections for 1815 it says, &quot;some time after, pewter was found in the well, and an iron pot and trammel in the sand; the latter are preserved.&quot; these were the traces of the white trader. on the opposite bank, where it jutted over the stream cape-wise, we picked up four arrow-heads, and a small indian tool made of stone, as soon as we had climbed it, where plainly there had once stood a wigwam of the indians with whom cromwell traded, and who fished and hunted here before he came. 1 as usual, the gossips have not been silent 258 a week respecting cromwell s buried wealth, and it is said that some years ago a farmer s plough, not far from here, slid over a flat stone which emitted a hollow sound, and, on its being raised, a small hole six inches in diameter was discov ered, stoned about, from which a sum of money was taken. the lock-man told us another sim ilar story about a farmer in a neighboring town, who had been a poor man, but who sud denly bought a good farm, and was well to do in the world, and, when he was questioned, did not give a satisfactory account of the matter; how few, alas, could! this caused his hired man to remember that one day, as they were ploughing together, the plough struck some thing, and his employer, going back to look, concluded not to go round again, saying that the sky looked rather lowering, and so put up his team. the like urgency has caused many things to be remembered which never transpired. the truth is, there is money buried everywhere, and you have only to go to work to find it. not far from these falls stands an oak-tree, on the interval, about a quarter of a mile from the river, on the farm of a mr. lund, which was pointed out to us as the spot where french, the leader of the party which went in pursuit of the indians from dunstable, was killed. far well dodged them in the thick woods near. it tuesday 259 did not look as if men had ever had to run for their lives on this now open and peaceful interval. here too was another extensive desert by the side of the road in litchfield, visible from the bank of the river. the sand was blown off in some places to the depth of ten or twelve feet, leaving small grotesque hillocks of that height, where there was a clump of bushes firmly rooted. thirty or forty years ago, as we were told, it was a sheep pasture, but the sheep, being worried by the fleas, began to paw the ground, till they broke the sod, and so the sand began to blow, till now it had extended over forty or fifty acres. this evil might easily have been remedied, at first, by spreading birches with their leaves on over the sand, and fasten ing them down with stakes, to break the wind. the fleas bit the sheep, and the sheep bit the ground, and the sore had spread to this extent. it is astonishing what a great sore a little scratch breedeth. who knows but sahara, where caravans and cities are buried, began with the bite of an african flea? this poor globe, how it must itch in many places ! will no god be kind enough to spread a salve of birches over its sores? here too we noticed where the indians had gathered a heap of stones, perhaps for their council-fire, which, by 200 a week their weight having prevented the sand under them from blowing away, were left on the sum mit of a mound. they told us that arrow heads, and also bullets of lead and iron, had been found here. we noticed several other sandy tracts in our voyage; and the course of the merrimack can be traced from the nearest mountain by its yellow sand-banks, though the river itself is for the most part invisible. law suits, as we hear, have in some cases grown out of these causes. railroads have been made through certain irritable districts, breaking their sod, and so have set the sand to blowing, till it has converted fertile farms into deserts, and the company has had to pay the damages. this sand seemed to us the connecting link between land and water. it was a kind of water on which you could walk, and you could see the ripple-marks on its surface, produced by the winds, precisely like those at the bottom of a brook or lake. we had read that mussulmans are permitted by the koran to perform their ablutions in sand when they cannot get water, a necessary indulgence in arabia, and we now understood the propriety of this provision. plum island, at the mouth of this river, to whose formation, perhaps, these very banks have sent their contribution, is a similar desert of drifting sand, of various colors, blown into tuesday 261 graceful curves by the wind. it is a mere sand-bar exposed, stretc*hing nine miles parallel to the coast, and, exclusive of the marsh on the inside, rarely more than half a mile wide. there are but half a dozen houses on it, and it is almost without a tree, or a sod, or any green thing with which a countryman is familiar. the thin vegetation stands half buried in sand, as in drifting snow. the only shrub, the beach-plum, which gives the island its name, grows but a few feet high; but this is so abun dant that parties of a hundred at once come from the main-land and down the merrimack, in september, pitch their tents, and gather the plums, which are good to eat raw and to pre serve. the graceful and delicate beach-pea, too, grows abundantly amid the sand, and sev eral strange, moss-like and succulent plants. the island for its whole length is scolloped into low hills, not more than twenty feet high, by the wind, and, excepting a faint trail on the edge of the marsh, is as trackless as sahara. there are dreary bluffs of sand and valleys ploughed by the wind, where you might expect to discover the bones of a caravan. schooners come from boston to load with the sand for masons uses, and in a few hours the wind ob literates all traces of their work. yet you have only to dig a foot or two anywhere to come to 262 a week fresh water; and you are surprised to learn that woodchucks abound here, and foxes are found, though you see not where they can burrow or hide themselves. i have walked down the whole length of its broad beach at low tide, at which time alone you can find a firm ground to walk on, and probably massachusetts does not furnish a more grand and dreary walk. on the seaside there are only a distant sail and a few coots to break the grand monotony. a solitary stake stuck up, or a sharper sand-hill than usual, is remarkable as a landmark for miles; while for music you hear only the ceaseless sound of the surf, and the dreary peep of the beach-birds. there were several canal-boats at cromwell s falls passing through the locks, for which we waited. in the forward part of one stood a brawny new hampshire man, leaning on his pole, bareheaded and in shirt and trousers only, a rude apollo of a man, coming down from that &quot;vast uplandish country,&quot; to the main; of nameless age, with flaxen hair, and vigorous, weather-bleached countenance, in whose wrin kles the sun still lodged, as little touched by the heats and frosts and withering cares of life as a maple of the mountain ; an undressed, unkempt, uncivil man, with whom we parleyed awhile, tuesda y 263 and parted not without a sincere interest in one another. his humanity was genuine and in stinctive, and his rudeness only a manner. he inquired, just as we were passing out of ear shot, if we had killed anything, and we shouted after him that we had shot a buoy, and could see him for a long while scratching his head in vain to know if he had heard aright. there is reason in the distinction of civil and uncivil. the manners are sometimes so rough a rind that we doubt whether they cover any core or sap-wood at all. we sometimes meet uncivil men, children of amazons, who dwell by mountain paths, and are said to be inhospitable to strangers ; whose salutation is as rude as the grasp of their brawny hands, and who deal with men as unceremoniously as they are wont to deal with the elements. they need only to ex tend their clearings, and let in more sunlight, to seek out the southern slopes of the hills, from which they may look down on the civil plain or ocean, and temper their diet duly with the cereal fruits, consuming less wild meat and acorns, to become like the inhabitants of cities. a true politeness does not result from any hasty and artificial polishing, it is true, but grows naturally in characters of the right grain and quality, through a long fronting of men and events, and rubbing on good and bad fortune. 264 a week perhaps i can tell a tale to the purpose while the lock is filling, for our voyage this fore noon furnishes but few incidents of importance. early one summer morning i had left the shores of the connecticut, and for the livelong day traveled up the bank of a river, which came in from the west; now looking down on the stream, foaming and rippling through the forest a mile off, from the hills over which the road led, and now sitting on its rocky brink and dipping my feet in its rapids, or bathing adventurously in mid-channel. the hills grew more and more frequent, and gradually swelled into mountains as i advanced, hemming in the course of the river, so that at last i could not see where it came from, and was at liberty to imagine the most wonderful meanderings and descents. at noon i slept on the grass in the shade of a maple, where the river had found a broader channel than usual, and was spread out shallow, with frequent sand-bars exposed. in the names of the towns i recognized some which i had long ago read on teamsters wagons, that had come from far up country ; quiet uplandish towns, of mountainous fame. i walked along, musing and enchanted, by rows of sugar-maples, through the small and uninquisitive villages, and sometimes was pleased with the sight of a tuesday 265 boat drawn up on a sand-bar, where there ap peared no inhabitants to use it. it seemed, however, as essential to the river as a fish, and to lend a certain dignity to it. it was like the trout of mountain streams to the fishes of the sea, or like the young of the land-crab born far in the interior, who have never yet heard the sound of the ocean s surf. the hills approached nearer and nearer to the stream, until at last they closed behind me, and i found myself just before nightfall in a romantic and retired val ley, about half a mile in length, and barely wide enough for the stream at its bottom. i thought that there could be no finer site for a cottage among mountains. you could anywhere run across the stream on the rocks, and its constant murmuring would quiet the passions of man kind forever. suddenly the road, which seemed aiming for the mountain-side, turned short to the left, and another valley opened, concealing the former, and of the same character with it. it was the most remarkable and pleasing scen ery i had ever seen. i found here a few mild and hospitable inhabitants, who, as the day was not quite spent, and i was anxious to improve the light, directed me four or five miles farther on my way to the dwelling of a man whose name was rice, who occupied the last and high est of the valleys that lay in my path, and who, 266 a week they said, was a rather rude and uncivil man. but &quot;what is a foreign country to those who have science ? who is a stranger to those who have the habit of speaking kindly? &quot; at length, as the sun was setting behind the mountains in a still darker and more solitary vale, i reached the dwelling of this man. ex cept for the narrowness of the plain, and that the stones were solid granite, it was the counter part of that retreat to which belpho3be bore the wounded timias, &quot; in a pleasant glade, with mountains round about environed, and mighty woods, which did the valley shade, and like a stately theatre it made, spreading itself into a spacious plain ; and in the midst a little river played amongst the pumy stones which seemed to plain, with gentle murmur, that his course they did restrain.&quot; i observed, as i drew near, that he was not so rude as i had anticipated, for he kept many cattle, and dogs to watch them, and i saw where he had made maple-sugar on the sides of the mountains, and above all distinguished the voices of children mingling with the murmur of the torrent before the door. as i passed his stable, i met one whom i supposed to be a hired man, attending to his cattle, and i inquired if they entertained travelers at that house. &quot;sometimes we do,&quot; he answered gruffly, and tuesday 267 immediately went to the farthest stall from me, and i perceived that it was eiee himself whom i had addressed. but pardoning this incivility to the wildness of the scenery, i bent my steps to the house. there was no sign -post before it, nor any of the usual invitations to the trav eler, though i saw by the road that many went and came there, but the owner s name only was fastened to the outside; a sort of implied and sullen invitation, as i thought. i passed from room to room without meeting any one, till i came to what seemed the guests apartment, which was neat, and even had an air of refine ment about it, and i was glad to find a map against the wall which would direct me on my journey on the morrow. at length i heard a step in a distant apartment, which was the first i had entered, and went to see if the landlord had come in ; but it proved to be only a child, one of those whose voices i had heard, probably his son, and between him and me stood in the doorway a large watch-dog, which growled at me, and looked as if he would presently spring, but the boy did not speak to him ; and when i asked for a glass of water, he briefly said, &quot; it runs in the corner.&quot; so i took a mug from the counter and went out of doors, and searched round the corner of the house, but could find neither well nor spring, nor any water but the 268 a week stream which ran all along the front. i came back, therefore, and, setting down the mug, asked the child if the stream was good to drink ; whereupon he seized the mug, and, going to the corner of the room, where a cool spring which issued from the mountain behind trickled through a pipe into the apartment, filled it, and drank, and gave it to me empty again, and, calling to the dog, rushed out of doors. ere long some of the hired men made their appear ance, and drank at the spring, and lazily washed themselves and combed their hair in silence, and some sat down as if weary, and fell asleep in their seats. but all the while i saw no wo men, though i sometimes heard a bustle in that part of the house from which the spring came. at length rice himself came in, for it was now dark, with an ox-whip in his hand, breath ing hard, and he too soon settled down into his seat not far from me, as if, now that his day s work was done, he had no farther to travel, but only to digest his supper at his leisure. when i asked him if he could give me a bed, he said there was one ready, in such a tone as implied that i ought to have known it, and the less said about that the better. so far so good. and yet he continued to look at me as if he would fain have me say something further like a trav eler. i remarked that it was a wild and rug tuesday 269 ged ceurtry he inhabited, and worth coming many miles to see. &quot;not so very rough nei ther,&quot; said he, and appealed to his men to bear witness to the breadth and smoothness of his fields, which consisted in all of one small inter val, and to the size of his crops; &quot;and if we have some hills,&quot; added he, &quot;there s no better pasturage anywhere.&quot; i then asked if this place was the one i had heard of, calling it by a name i had seen on the map, or if it was a certain other; and he answered, gruffly, that it was neither the one nor the other; that he had settled it and cultivated it, and made it what it was, and i could know nothing about it. ob serving some guns and other implements of hunting hanging on brackets around the room, and his hounds now sleeping on the floor, i took occasion to change the discourse, and inquired if there was much game in that country, and he answered this question more graciously, having some glimmering of my drift ; but when i in quired if there were any bears, he answered im patiently that he was no more in danger of los ing his sheep than his neighbors ; he had tamed and civilized that region. after a pause, think ing of my journey on the morrow, and the few hours of daylight in that hollow and mountain ous country, which would require me to be on m j wa j betimes, i remarked that the day must 270 a week be shorter by an hour there than on the neigh boring plains ; at which he gruffly asked what i knew about it, and affirmed that he had as much daylight as his neighbors ; he ventured to say, the days were longer there than where i lived, as i should find if i stayed ; that in some way, i could not be expected to understand how, the sun came over the mountains half an hour ear lier, and stayed half an hour later there than on the neighboring plains. and more of like sort he said. he was, indeed, as rude as a fabled satyr. but i suffered him to pass for what he was, for why should i quarrel with nature? and was even pleased at the discovery of such a singular natural phenomenon. i dealt with him as if to me all manners were indiffer ent, and he had a sweet, wild way with him. i would not question nature, and i would rather have him as he was than as i would have him. for i had come up here not for sympathy, or kindness, or society, but for novelty and adven ture, and to see what nature had produced here. i therefore did not repel his rudeness, but quite innocently welcomed it all, and knew how to appreciate it, as if i were reading in an old drama a part well sustained. he was indeed a coarse and sensual man, and, as i have said, uncivil, but he had his just quarrel with nature and mankind, i have no doubt, only he had no tuesday 271 artificial covering to ms ill-humors. he was earthy enough, but yet there was good soil in him, and even a long-suffering saxon probity at bottom. if you could represent the case to him, he would not let the race die out in him, like a red indian. at length i told him that he was a fortunate man, and i trusted that he was grateful for so much light; and, rising, said i would take a lamp, and that i would pay him then for my lodging, for i expected to recommence my jour ney even as early as the sun rose in his country ; but he answered in haste, and this time civilly, that i should not fail to find some of his house hold stirring, however early, for they were no sluggards, and i could take my breakfast with them before i started, if i chose; and as he lighted the lamp i detected a gleam of true hos pitality and ancient civility, a beam of pure and even gentle humanity, from his bleared and moist eyes. it was a look more intimate with me, and more explanatory, than any words of his could have been if he had tried to his dying day. it was more significant than any rice of those parts could even comprehend, and long anticipated this man s culture, a glance of his pure genius, which did not much enlighten him, but did impress and rule him for the mo ment, and faintly constrain his voice and man 272 a week ner. he cheerfully led the way to my apart ment, stepping over the limbs of his men, who were asleep on the floor in an intervening cham ber, and showed me a clean and comfortable bed. for many pleasant hours after the house hold was asleep i sat at the open window, for it was a sultry night, and heard the little river &quot; amongst the pumy stones, which seemed to plain, with gentle murmur, that his course they did restrain.&quot; but i arose as usual by starlight the next morn ing, before my host, or his men, or even his dogs, were awake ; and, having left a ninepence on the counter, was already half-way over the mountain with the sun before they had broken their fast. before i had left the country of my host, while the first rays of the sun slanted over the mountains, as i stopped by the wayside to gather some raspberries, a very old man, not far from a hundred, came along with a milking-pail in his hand, and turning aside began to pluck the berries near me : &quot; his reverend locks in comelye curies did wave ; and on his aged temples grew the blossoms of the grave.&quot; but when i inquired the way, he answered in a low, rough voice, without looking up or seeming to regard my presence, which i imputed to his tuesday 273 years; and presently, muttering to himself, he proceeded to collect his cows in a neighboring pasture ; and when he had again returned near to the wayside, he suddenly stopped, while his cows went on before, and, uncovering his head, prayed aloud in the cool morning air, as if he had forgotten this exercise before, for his daily bread, and also that he who letteth his rain fall on the just and on the unjust, and without whom not a sparrow f alleth to the ground, would not neglect the stranger (meaning me), and with even more direct and personal applications, though mainly according to the long-established formula common to lowlanders and the inhabit ants of mountains. when he had done pray ing, i made bold to ask him if he had any cheese in his hut which he would sell me, but he an swered without looking up, and in the same low and repulsive voice as before, that they did not make any, and went to milking. it is written, &quot; the stranger who turneth away from a house with disappointed hopes, leaveth there his own offenses, and departeth, taking with him all the good actions of the owner.&quot; being now fairly in the stream of this week s commerce, we began to meet with boats more frequently, and hailed them from time to time with the freedom of sailors. the boatmen ap 274 a week peared to lead an easy and contented life, and we thought that we should prefer their employ ment ourselves to many professions which are much more sought after. they suggested how few circumstances are necessary to the well-be ing and serenity of man, how indifferent all em ployments are, and that any may seem noble and poetic to the eyes of men, if pursued with sufficient buoyancy and freedom. with liberty and pleasant weather, the simplest occupation, any unquestioned country mode of life which detains us in the open air, is alluring. the man who picks peas steadily for a living is more than respectable, he is even envied by his shop worn neighbors. we are as happy as the birds when our good genius permits us to pursue any outdoor work, without a sense of dissipation. our penknife glitters in the sun; our voice is echoed by yonder wood ; if an oar drops, we are fain to let it drop again. the canal-boat is of very simple construction, requiring but little ship-timber, and, as we were told, costs about two hundred dollars. they are managed by two men. in ascending the stream they use poles fourteen or fifteen feet long, pointed with iron, walking about one third the length of the boat from the forward end. going down, they commonly keep in the middle of the stream, using an oar at each end; or if tuesday 275 the wind is favorable they raise their broad sail, and have only to steer. they commonly carry down wood or bricks, fifteen or sixteen cords of wood, and as many thousand bricks, at a time, and bring back stores for the country, consuming two or three days each way between concord and charlestown. they sometimes pile the wood so as to leave a shelter in one part where they may retire from the rain. one can hardly imagine a more healthful employment, or one more favorable to contemplation and the observation of nature. unlike the mariner, they have the constantly varying panorama of the shore to relieve the monotony of their labor, and it seemed to us that as they thus glided noiselessly from town to town, with all their furniture about them, for their very homestead is a movable, they could comment on the char acter of the inhabitants with greater advantage and security to themselves than the traveler in a coach, who would be unable to indulge in such broadsides of wit and humor in so small a ves sel for fear of the recoil. they are not subject to great exposure, like the lumberers of maine, in any weather, but inhale the healthfulest breezes, being slightly incumbered with cloth ing, frequently with the head and feet bare. when we met them at noon, as they were lei surely descending the stream, their busy com 276 a week merce did not look like toil, but rather like some ancient oriental game still played on a large scale, as the game of chess, for instance, handed down to this generation. from morn ing till night, unless the wind is so fair that his single sail will suffice without other labor than steering, the boatman walks backwards and for wards on the side of his boat, now stooping with his shoulder to the pole, then drawing it back slowly to set it again, meanwhile moving stead ily forward through an endless valley and an ever-changing scenery, now distinguishing his course for a mile or two, and now shut in by a sudden turn of the river in a small woodland lake. all the phenomena which surround him are simple and grand, and there is something impressive, even majestic, in the very motion he causes, which will naturally be communicated to his own character, and he feels the slow, irre sistible movement under him with pride, as if it were his own energy. the news spread like wildfire among us youths, when formerly, once in a year or two, one of these boats came up the concord river, and was seen stealing mysteriously through the meadows and past the village. it came and departed as silently as a cloud, without noise or dust, and was witnessed by few. one summer day this huge traveler might be seen moored at tuesday 277 some meadow s wharf, and another summer day it was not there. where precisely it came from, or who these men were who knew the rocks and soundings better than we who bathed there, we could never tell. we knew some river s bay only, but they took rivers from end to end. they were a sort of fabulous river men to us. it was inconceivable by what sort of mediation any mere landsman could hold communication with them. would they heave to, to gratify his wishes? no, it was favor enough to know faintly of their destination, or the time of their possible return. i have seen them in the summer, when the stream ran low, mowing the weeds in mid-channel, and with hayers jests cutting broad swaths in three feet of water, that they might make a passage for their scow, while the grass in long windrows was carried down the stream, undried by the rarest hay-weather. we admired unweariedly how their vessel would float, like a huge chip, sustaining so many casks of lime, and thousands of bricks, and such heaps of iron ore, with wheelbarrows aboard, and that, when we stepped on it, it did not yield to the pressure of our feet. it gave us confidence in the prevalence of the law of buoyancy, and we imagined to what in finite uses it might be put. the men appeared to lead a kind of life on it, and it was whispered 278 a week that they slept aboard. some affirmed that it carried sail, and that such winds blew here as filled the sails of vessels on the ocean; which again others much doubted. they had been seen to sail across our fair haven bay by lucky fishers who were out, but unfortunately others were not there to see. we might then say that our river was navigable, why not? in after years i read in print, with no little satisfaction, that it was thought by some that, with a little expense in removing rocks and deepening the channel, &quot;there might be a profitable inland navigation.&quot; /then lived somewhere to tell of. such is commerce, which shakes the cocoa nut and bread-fruit tree in the remotest isle, and sooner or later dawns on the duskiest and most simple-minded savage. if we may be par doned the digression, who can help being af fected at the thought of the very fine and slight, but positive relation, in which the savage inhab itants of some remote isle stand to the mysteri ous white mariner, the child of the sun? as if we were to have dealings with an animal higher in the scale of being than ourselves. it is a barely recognized fact to the natives that he ex ists, and has his home far away somewhere, and is glad to buy their fresh fruits with his super fluous commodities. under the same catholic sun glances his white ship over pacific waves tuesday 279 into their smooth bays, and the poor savage s paddle gleams in the air. man s little acts are grand, beheld from land to land, there as they lie in time, within their native clime. ships with the noontide weigh, and glide before its ray to some retired bay, their haunt, whence, under tropic sun, again they run, bearing gum senegal and tragicant for this was ocean meant, for this the sun was sent, and moon was lent, and winds in distant caverns pent. since our voyage the railroad on the bank has been extended, and there is now but little boat ing on the merrimack. all kinds of produce and stores were formerly conveyed by water, but now nothing is carried up the stream, and almost wood and bricks alone are carried down, and these are also carried on the railroad. the locks are fast wearing out, and will soon be im passable, since the tolls will not pay the expense of repairing them, and so in a few years there will be an end of boating on this river. the boating at present is principally between merri mack and lowell, or hooksett and manchester. they make two or three trips in a week, accord ing to wind and weather, from merrimack to 280 a week lowell and back, about twenty-five miles each way. the boatman comes singing in to shore late at night, and moors his empty boat, and gets his supper and lodging in some house near at hand, and again early in the morning, by starlight perhaps, he pushes away upstream, and, by a shout, or the fragment of a song, gives notice of his approach to the lock-man, with whom he is to take his breakfast. if he gets up to his wood-pile before noon he proceeds to load his boat, with the help of his single &quot;hand,&quot; and is on his way down again before night. when he gets to lowell he unloads his boat, and gets his receipt for his cargo, and, having heard the news at the public house at middlesex or elsewhere, goes back with his empty boat and his receipt in his pocket to the owner, and to get a new load. we were fre quently advertised of their approach by some faint sound behind us, and looking round saw them a mile off, creeping stealthily up the side of the stream like alligators. it was pleasant to hail these sailors of the merrimack from time to time, and learn the news which circulated with them. we imagined that the sun shining on their bare heads had stamped a liberal and public character on their most private thoughts. the open and sunny interval still stretched away from the river sometimes by two or more tuesday 281 terraces, to the distant hill-country, and when we climbed the bank, we commonly found an irregular copse-wood skirting the river, the primitive having floated downstream long ago to the &quot;king s navy.&quot; sometimes we saw the river-road a quarter or half a mile dis tant, and the particolored concord stage, with its cloud of dust, its van of earnest traveling faces, and its rear of dusty trunks, reminding us that the country had its places of rendezvous for restless yankee men. there dwelt along at considerable distances on this interval a quiet agricultural and pastoral people, with every house its well, as we sometimes proved, and every household, though never so still and re mote it appeared in the noontide, its dinner about these times. there they lived on, those new england people, farmer lives, father and grandfather and great-grandfather, on and on without noise, keeping up tradition, and expect ing, beside fair weather and abundant harvests, we did not learn what. they were contented to live, since it was so contrived for them, and where their lines had fallen. our uninquiring corpses lie more low than our life s curiosity doth go. yet these men had no need to travel to be as wise as solomon in all his glory, so similar are the lives of men in all countries, and fraught 282 a week with the same homely experiences. one half the world knows how the other half lives. about noon we passed a small village in mer rimack at thornton s ferry, and tasted of the waters of naticook brook on the same side, where french and his companions, whose grave we saw in dunstable, were ambuscaded by the indians. the humble village of litchfield, with its steepleless meeting-house, stood on the oppo site or east bank, near where a dense grove of willows backed by maples skirted the shore. there also we noticed some shagbark-trees, which, as they do not grow in concord, were as strange a sight to us as the palm would be, whose fruit only we have seen. our course now curved gracefully to the north, leaving a low, flat shore on the merrimack side, which forms a sort of harbor for canal-boats. we observed some fair elms and particularly large and hand some white-maples standing conspicuously on this interval ; and the opposite shore, a quarter of a mile below, was covered with young elms and maples six inches high, which had probably sprung from the seeds which had been washed across. some carpenters were at work here mending a scow on the green and sloping bank. the strokes of their mallets echoed from shore to shore, and up and down the river, and their tuesda y 283 tools gleamed in the sun a quarter of a mile from us, and we realized that boat-building was as ancient and honorable an art as agriculture, and that there might be a naval as well as a pastoral life. the whole history of commerce was made manifest in that scow turned bottom upward on the shore. thus did men begin to go down upon the sea in ships ; quceque diu ste terant in montibus altis, fluctibus ignotis in sultavere carince; &quot;and keels which had long stood on high mountains careered insultingly (insultavere) over unknown waves.&quot; 1 we thought that it would be well for the traveler to build his boat on the bank of a stream, instead of finding a ferry or a bridge. in the adventures of henry the fur-trader, it is pleasant to read that when with his indians he reached the shore of ontario, they consumed two days in making two canoes of the bark of the elm-tree, in which to transport themselves to fort niagara. it is a worthy incident in a journey, a delay as good as much rapid travel ing. a good share of our interest in xeno phon s story of his retreat is in the manoeuvres to get the army safely over the rivers, whether on rafts of logs or fagots, or sheep-skins blown up. and where could they better afford to tarry meanwhile than on the banks of a river ? 1 ovid, met. i. 133. 284 a week as we glided past at a distance, these out door workmen appeared to have added some dignity to their labor by its very publicness. it was a part of the industry of nature, like the work of hornets and mud-wasps. the waves slowly beat, just to keep the noon sweet, and no sound is floated o er, save the mallet on shore, which echoing on high seems a-calking the sky. the haze, the sun s dust of travel, had a le thean influence on the land and its inhabitants, and all creatures resigned themselves to float upon the inappreciable tides of nature. woof of the sun, ethereal gauze, woven of nature s richest stuffs, visible heat, air-water, and dry sea, last conquest of the eye ; toil of the day displayed, sun-dust, aerial surf upon the shores of earth, ethereal estuary, frith of light, breakers of air, billows of heat, fine summer spray on inland seas ; bird of the sun, transparent-winged owlet of noon, soft-pinioned, from heath or stubble rising without song ; establish thy serenity o er the fields. the routine which is in the sunshine and the finest days, as that which has conquered and prevailed, commends itself to us by its very antiquity and apparent solidity and necessity. tuesday 285 our weakness needs it, and our strength uses it. we cannot draw on our boots without brac ing ourselves against it. if there were but one erect and solid standing tree in the woods, all creatures would go to rub against it and make sure of their footing. during the many hours which we spend in this waking sleep, the hand stands still on the face of the clock, and we grow like corn in the night. men are as busy as the brooks or bees, and postpone everything to their business ; as carpenters discuss politics between the strokes of the hammer while they are shingling a roof. this noontide was a fit occasion to make some pleasant harbor, and there read the journal of some voyageur like ourselves, not too moral nor inquisitive, and which would not disturb the noon ; or else some old classic, the very flower of all reading, which we had postponed to such a season &quot;of syrian peace, immortal leisure.&quot; but, alas, our chest, like the cabin of a coaster, contained only its well-thumbed &quot;navigator&quot; for all literature, and we were obliged to draw on our memory for these things. we naturally remembered alexander henry s adventures here, as a sort of classic among 286 a week books of american travel. it contains scenery and rough sketching of men and incidents enough to inspire poets for many years, and to my fancy is as full of sounding names as any page of history, lake winnipeg, hud son s bay, ottaway, and portages innumerable ; chippeways, gens de terres, les pilleurs, the weepers; with reminiscences of hearne s jour ney, and the like ; an immense and shaggy but sincere country, summer and winter, adorned with chains of lakes and rivers, covered with snows, with hemlocks, and fir-trees. there is a naturalness, an unpretending and cold life in this traveler, as in a canadian winter, what life was preserved through low temperatures and frontier dangers by furs within a stout heart. he has truth and moderation worthy of the fa ther of history, which belong only to an intimate experience, and he does not defer too much to literature. the unlearned traveler may quote his single line from the poets with as good right as the scholar. he too may speak of the stars, for he sees them shoot perhaps when the astron omer does not. the good sense of this author is very conspicuous. he is a traveler who does not exaggerate, but writes for the information of his readers, for science, and for history. his story is told with as much good faith and directness as if it were a report to his brother tuesday 287 traders, or the directors of the hudson s bay company, and is fitly dedicated to sir joseph banks. it reads like the argument to a great poem on the primitive state of the country and its inhabitants, and the reader imagines what in each case, with the invocation of the muse, might be sung, and leaves off with suspended interest, as if the full account were to follow. in what school was this fur-trader educated? he seems to travel the immense snowy country with such purpose only as the reader who ac companies him, and to the latter s imagination, it is, as it were, momentarily created to be the scene of his adventures. what is most inter esting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of pontiac, or brad dock, or the northwest, which it furnishes ; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. when out of history the truth shall be ex tracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves. the souhegan, or crooked river, as some translate it, comes in from the west about a mile and a half above thornton s ferry. bab boosuck brook empties into it near its mouth. there are said to be some of the finest water privileges in the country still unimproved on the 288 a week former stream, at a short distance from the merrimack. one spring morning, march 22, in the year 1677, an incident occurred on the banks of the river here, which is interesting to us as a slight memorial of an interview between two ancient tribes of men, one of which is now extinct, while the other, though it is still repre sented by a miserable remnant, has long since disappeared from its ancient hunting-grounds. a mr. james parker, at &quot;mr. hinchmanne s farme ner meremack,&quot; wrote thus &quot;to the honred governer and council at bostown, hast, post hast:&quot; &quot;sagamore wanalancet come this morning to informe me, and then went to mr. tyng s to in forme him, that his son being on ye other sid of meremack river over against souhegan upon the 22 day of this instant, about tene of the clock in the morning, he discovered 15 indians on this sid the river, which he soposed to be mo hokes by ther spech. he called to them ; they answered but he could not understand ther spech ; and he having a conow ther in the river, he went to breck his conow that they might not have ani ues of it. in the mean time they shot about thirty guns at him, and he being much frighted fled, and come home forthwith to na hamcock [pawtucket falls or lowell], wher ther wigowames now stand.&quot; tuesda y 289 penacooks and mohawks! ubique gentium sunt? in the year 1670, a mohawk warrior scalped a naamkeak or else a wamesit indian maiden near where lowell now stands. she, however, recovered. even as late as 1685, john hogkins, a penacook indian, who de scribes his grandfather as having lived &quot; at place called malamake rever, other name chef natuk kog and panukkog, that one rever great many names,&quot; wrote thus to the governor: &quot;may 15th, 1685. &quot;honor governor my friend, &quot;you my friend i desire your worship and your power, because i hope you can do som great matters this one. i am poor and naked and i have no men at my place because i afraid allwayes mohogs he will kill me every day and night. if your worship when please pray help me you no let mohogs kill me at my place at malamake river called pannukkog and natuk kog, i will submit your worship and your power. and now i want pouder and such al minishon shatt and guns, because i have forth at my horn and i plant theare. &quot;this all indian hand, but pray you do con sider your humble servant, john hogkins.&quot; signed also by simon detogkom, king hary, 290 a week sam linis, mr. jorge rodunnonukgus, john owamosimmin, and nine other indians, with their marks against their names. but now, one hundred and fifty-four years having elapsed since the date of this letter, we went unalarmed on our way without &quot; breaking &quot; our &quot;conow,&quot; reading the new england gaz etteer, and seeing no traces of &quot;mohogs&quot; on the banks. the souhegan, though a rapid river, seemed to-day to have borrowed its character from the noon. where gleaming fields of haze meet the voyageur s gaze, and above, the heated air seems to make a river there, the pines stand up with pride by the souhegan s side, and the hemlock and the larch with their triumphal arch are waving o er its march to the sea. no wind stirs its waves, but the spirits of the braves hov ring o er, whose antiquated graves its still water laves on the shore. with an indian s stealthy tread it goes sleeping in its bed, without joy or grief, or the rustle of a leaf, without a ripple or a billow, or the sigh of a willow, tuesday 291 from the lyndeboro hills ^to the merrimack mills. with a louder din did its current begin, when melted the snow on the far mountain s brow. and the drops came together in that rainy weather. experienced river, hast thou flowed forever ? souhegan soundeth old, but the half is not told, what names hast thou borne, in the ages far gone, when the xanthus and meander commenced to wander, ere the black bear haunted thy red forest-floor, or nature had planted the pines by thy shore ? during the heat of the day, we rested on a large island a mile above the mouth of this river, pastured by a herd of cattle, with steep banks and scattered elms and oaks, and a suf ficient channel for canal boats on each side. when we made a fire to boil some rice for our dinner, the flames spreading amid the dry grass, and the smoke curling silently upward and cast ing grotesque shadows on the ground, seemed phenomena of the noon, and we fancied that we progressed up the stream without effort, and as naturally as the wind and tide went down, not outraging the calm days by unworthy bustle or 292 a week impatience. the woods on the neighboring shore were alive with pigeons, which were mov ing south, looking for mast, but now, like our selves, spending their noon in the shade. we could hear the slight, wiry, winnowing sound of their wings as they changed their roosts from time to time, and their gentle and tremulous cooing. they sojourned with us during the noontide, greater travelers far than we. you may frequently discover a single pair sitting upon the lower branches of the white-pine in the depths of the wood, at this hour of the day, so silent and solitary, and with such a hermit like appearance, as if they had never strayed beyond its skirts, while the acorn which was gathered in the forests of maine is still undi gested in their crops. we obtained one of these handsome birds, which lingered too long upon its perch, and plucked and broiled it here with some other game, to be carried along for our supper; for, beside the provisions which we carried with us, we depended mainly on the river and forest for our supply. it is true, it did not seem to be putting this bird to its right use to pluck off its feathers, and extract its en trails, and broil its carcass on the coals ; but we heroically persevered, nevertheless, waiting for further information. the same regard for na ture which excited our sympathy for her crea tuesday 293 tures nerved our hands to carry through what we had begun. for we would be honorable to the party we deserted ; we would fulfill fate, and so at length, perhaps, detect the secret inno cence of these incessant tragedies which heaven allows. &quot; too quick resolves do resolution wrong, what, part so soon to be divorced so long ? things to be done are long to be debated ; heaven is not day d, repentance is not dated.&quot; we are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke straps our vice. where is the skillful swordsman who can give clean wounds, and not rip up his work with the other edge? nature herself has not provided the most graceful end for her creatures. what becomes of all these birds that people the air and forest for our solacement ? the sparrows seem always chipper, never infirm. we do not see their bodies lie about. yet there is a tragedy at the end of each one of their lives. they must per ish miserably; not one of them is translated. true, &quot;not a sparrow falleth to the ground without our heavenly father s knowledge,&quot; but they do fall, nevertheless. the carcasses of some poor squirrels, how ever, the same that frisked so merrily in the morning, which we had skinned and emboweled 294 a week for our dinner, we abandoned in disgust, with tardy humanity, as too wretched a resource for any but starving men. it was to perpetuate the practice of a barbarous era. if they had been larger, our crime had been less. their small red bodies, little bundles of red tissue, mere gobbets of venison, would not have &quot;fat tened fire.&quot; with a sudden impulse we threw them away, and washed our hands, and boiled some rice for our dinner. &quot; behold the differ ence between the one who eateth flesh, and him to whom it belonged ! the first hath a momen tary enjoyment, whilst the latter is deprived of existence ! &quot; &quot; who would commit so great a crime against a poor animal, who is fed only by the herbs which grow wild in the woods, and whose belly is burnt up with hunger? &quot; we remembered a picture of mankind in the hunter age, chasing hares down the mountains ; o me miserable ! yet sheep and oxen are but larger squirrels, whose hides are saved and meat is salted, whose souls perchance are not so large in proportion to their bodies. there should always be some flowering and maturing of the fruits of nature in the cooking process. some simple dishes recommend them selves to our imaginations as well as palates. in parched corn, for instance, there is a mani fest sympathy between the bursting seed and tuesday 295 the more perfect developments of vegetable life. it is a perfect flower with its petals, like the houstonia or anemone. on my warm hearth these cerealian blossoms expanded; here is the bank whereon they grew. perhaps some such visible blessing would always attend the simple and wholesome repast. here was that &quot;pleasant harbor&quot; which we had sighed for, where the weary voyageur could read the journal of some other sailor, whose bark had ploughed, perchance, more famous and classic seas. at the tables of the gods, after feasting follow music and song; we will recline now under these island trees, and for our minstrel call on anacreon. &quot; nor has he ceased his charming song, for still that lyre, though he is dead, sleeps not in hades.&quot; 1 i lately met with an old volume from a lon don bookshop, containing the greek minor poets, and it was a pleasure to read once more only the words, orpheus, linus, musaeus, those faint poetic sounds and echoes of a name, dying away on the ears of us modern men ; and those hardly more substantial sounds, mimner mus, ibycus, alcaeus, stesichorus, menander. they lived not in vain. we can converse with 1 simonides epigram on anacreon. 296 a week these bodiless fames without reserve or person ality. i know of no studies so composing as those of the classical scholar. when we have sat down to them, life seems as still and serene as if it were very far off, and i believe it is not habitu ally seen from any common platform so truly and unexaggerated as in the light of literature. in serene hours we contemplate the tour of the greek and latin authors with more pleasure than the traveler does the fairest scenery of greece or italy. where shall we find a more refined society? that highway down from homer and hesiod to horace and juvenal is more attractive than the appian. reading the classics, or conversing with those old greeks and latins in their surviving works, is like walking amid the stars and constellations, a high and by way serene to travel. indeed, the true scholar will be not a little of an astronomer in his habits. distracting cares will not be lowed to obstruct the field of his vision, for the higher regions of literature, like astronomy, are, above storm and darkness. but passing by these rumors of bards, let us pause for a moment at the teian poet. there is something strangely modern about him. he is very easily turned into english. tuesday 297 is it that our lyric poets have resounded but that lyre, which would sound only light sub jects, and which simonides tells us does not sleep in hades? his odes are like gems of pure ivory. they possess an ethereal and evanescent beauty like summer evenings, o xpj ere voelv voov avflei, which you must perceive with the flower of the mind, and show how slight a beauty could be expressed. you have to con sider them, as the stars of lesser magnitude, with the side of the eye, and look aside from them to behold them. they charm us by their serenity and freedom from exaggeration and passion, and by a certain flower-like beauty, which does not propose itself, but must be ap proached and studied like a natural object. but perhaps their chief merit consists in the lightness and yet security of their tread, &quot; the young and tender stalk ne er bends when they do walk.&quot; true, our nerves are never strung by them ; it is too constantly the sound of the lyre, and never the note of the trumpet; but they are not gross, as has been presumed, but always elevated above the sensual. these are some of the best that have come down to us. 298 a week on his lyre. i wish to sing the atridae, and cadmus i wish to sing ; but my lyre sounds only love with its chords. lately i changed the strings and all the lyre ; and i began to sing the labors of hercules ; but my lyre resounded loves. farewell, henceforth, for me, heroes ! for my lyre sings only loves. to a swallow. thou indeed, dear swallow, yearly going and coming, in summer weavest thy nest, and in winter go st disappearing either to nile or to memphis. but love always weaveth his nest in my heart. . . on a silver cup. turning the silver, vulcan, make for me, not indeed a panoply, for what are battles to me ? but a hollow cup, as deep as thou canst. and make for me in it neither stars, nor wagons, nor sad orion ; what are the pleiades to me ? what the shining bootes ? tuesday 299 make vines for me, and clusters of grapes in it, and of gold love and bathyllua treading the grapes with the fair lyseus. on himself. thou sing st the affairs of thebes, and he the battles of troy, but i of my own defeats. no horse have wasted me, nor foot, nor ships ; but a new and different host, from eyes smiting me. to a dove. lovely dove, whence, whence dost thou fly ? whence, running on air, dost thou waft and diffuse so many sweet ointments ? who art ? what thy errand ? anacreon sent me to a boy, to bathyllus, who lately is ruler and tyrant of all. cythere has sold me for one little song, and i m doing this service for anacreon. and now, as you see, i bear letters from him. and he says that directly he 11 make me free, but though he release me, his slave will i tarry with him. for why should i fly 300 a week over mountains and fields, and perch upon trees, eating some wild thing ? now indeed i eat bread, plucking it from the hands of anacreon himself ; and he gives me to drink the wine which he tastea and drinking, i dance, and shadow my master s face with my wings ; and, going to rest, on the lyre itself i sleep. that is all ; get thee gone. thou hast made me more talkative, man, than a crow. on love. love walking swiftly, with hyacinthine staff, bade me to take a run with him ; and hastening through swift torrents, and woody places, and over precipices, a water-snake stung me. and my heart leaped up to my mouth, and i should have fainted ; but love, fanning my brows with his soft wings, said, surely, thou art not able to love. on women. nature has given horns to bulls, and hoofs to horses, swiftness to hares, to lions yawning teeth, to fishes swimming, tuesday 301 to birds flight, to men wisdom. for woman she had nothing beside ; what then does she give ? beauty, instead of all shields, instead of all spears ; and she conquers even iron and fire, who is beautiful. on lovers. horses have the mark of fire on their sides, and some have distinguished the parthian men by their crests ; so i, seeing lovers, . know them at once, for they have a certain slight brand on their hearts. to a swallow. what dost thou wish me to do to thee, what, thou loquacious swallow ? dost thou wish me taking thee thy light pinions to clip ? or rather to pluck out thy tongue from within, as that tereus did ? why with thy notes in the dawn hast thou plundered bathyllus from my beautiful dreams ? to a colt. thracian colt, why at me looking aslant with thy eyes, dost thou cruelly flee, and think that i know nothing wise ? 302 a week know i could well put the bridle on thee, and holding 1 the reins, turn round the bounds of the course. but now thou browsest the meads, and gamboling lightly dost play, for thou hast no skillful horseman mounted upon thy back. cupid wounded. love once among roses saw not a sleeping bee, but was stung; and being wounded in the finger of his hand, cried for pain. running as well as flying to the beautiful venus, i am killed, mother, said he, i am killed, and i die. a little serpent has stung me, winged, which they call a bee, the husbandmen. and she said, if the sting of a bee afflicts you, how, think you, are they afflicted, love, whom you smite ? late in the afternoon, for we had lingered long on the island, we raised our sail for the first time, and for a short hour the southwest wind was our ally; but it did not please hea ven to abet us long. with one sail raised we swept slowly up the eastern side of the stream, steering clear of the rocks, while, from the top tuesday 303 of a hill which formed the opposite bank, some lumberers were rolling down timber to be rafted down the stream. we could see their axes and levers gleaming in the sun, and the logs came down with a dust and a rumbling sound, which was reverberated through the woods be yond us on our side, like the roar of artillery. but zephyr soon took us out of sight and hear ing of this commerce. having passed read s ferry, and another island called mcgaw s island, we reached some rapids called moore s falls, and entered on &quot;that section of the river, nine miles in extent, converted, by law, into the union canal, comprehending in that space six distinct falls ; at each of which, and at sev eral intermediate places, work has been done.&quot; after passing moore s falls by means of locks, we again had recourse to our oars, and went merrily on our way, driving the small sandpiper from rock to rock before us, and sometimes rowing near enough to a cottage on the bank, though they were few and far between, to see the sunflowers, and the seed vessels of the poppy, like small goblets filled with the water of lethe, before the door, but without disturb ing the sluggish household behind. thus we held on, sailing or dipping our way along with the paddle up this broad river, smooth and placid, flowing over concealed rocks, where we 304 a week could see the pickerel lying low in the transpar ent water, eager to double some distant cape, to make some great bend as in the life of man, and see what new perspective would open ; look ing far into a new country, broad and serene, the cottages of settlers seen afar for the first time, yet with the moss of a century on their roofs, and the third or fourth generation in their shadows. strange was it to consider how the sun and the summer, the buds of spring and the seared leaves of autumn, were related to these cabins along the shore ; how all the rays which paint the landscape radiate from them, and the flight of the crow and the gyrations of the hawk have reference to their roofs. still the ever rich and fertile shores accompanied us, fringed with vines and alive with small birds and frisk ing squirrels, the edge of some farmer s field or widow s wood-lot, or wilder, perchance, where the muskrat, the little medicine of the river, drags itself along stealthily over the alder-leaves and muscle-shells, and man and the memory of man are banished far. at length the unwearied, never-sinking shore, still holding on without break, with its cool copses and serene pasture -grounds, tempted us to disembark; and we adventurously landed on this remote coast, to survey it, without the knowledge of any human inhabitant probably to tuesda y 305 this day. but we still remember the gnarled and hospitable oaks which grew even there for our entertainment, and were no strangers to us, the lonely horse in his pasture, and the patient cows, whose path to the river, so judiciously chosen to overcome the difficulties of the way, we followed, and disturbed their ruminations in the shade ; and, above all, the cool, free aspect of the wild apple-trees, generously proffering their fruit to us, though still green and crude, the hard, round, glossy fruit, which, if not ripe, still was not poison, but new english too, brought hither its ancestors by ours once. these gentler trees imparted a half-civilized and twilight aspect to the otherwise barbarian land. still farther on we scrambled up the rocky channel of a brook, which had long served nature for a sluice there, leaping like it from rock to rock, through tangled woods, at the bot tom of a ravine, which grew darker and darker, and more and more hoarse the murmurs of the stream, until we reached the ruins of a mill, where now the ivy grew, and the trout glanced through the crumbling flume; and there we imagined what had been the dreams and specu lations of some early settler. but the waning day compelled us to embark once more, and re deem this wasted time with long and vigorous sweeps over the rippling stream. 306 a week it was still wild and solitary, except that at intervals of a mile or two the roof of a cottage might be seen over the bank. this region, as we read, was once famous for the manufacture of straw bonnets of the leghorn kind, of which it claims the invention in these parts ; and oc casionally some industrious damsel tripped down to the water s edge, to put her straw a-soak, as it appeared, and stood awhile to watch the re treating voyageurs, and catch the fragment of a boat-song which we had made, wafted over the water. thus, perchance, the indian hunter, many a lagging year agone, gliding o er thy rippling waters, lowly hummed a natural song. now the sun s behind the willows, now he gleams along the waves, faintly o er the wearied billows come the spirits of the braves. just before sundown we reached some more falls in the town of bedford, where some stone masons were employed repairing the locks in a solitary part of the river. they were interested in our adventure, especially one young man of our own age, who inquired at first if we were bound up to &quot; skeag; &quot; and when he had heard our story, and examined our outfit, asked us other questions, but temperately still, and al ways turning to his work again, though as if it tuesday 307 were become his duty. it was plain that he would like to go with us, and, as he looked up the river, many a distant cape and wooded shore were reflected in his eye, as well as in his thoughts. when we were ready he left his work, and helped us through the locks with a sort of quiet enthusiasm, telling us that we were at coos falls, and we could still distinguish the strokes of his chisel for many sweeps after we had left him. we wished to camp this night on a large rock in the middle of the stream, just above these falls, but the want of fuel, and the difficulty of fixing our tent firmly, prevented us ; so we made our bed on the main-land opposite, on the west bank, in the town of bedford, in a retired place, as we supposed, there being no house in sight. wednesday. &quot; man is man s foe and destiny.&quot; cotton. early this morning, as we were rolling up our buffaloes and loading our boat amid the dew, while our embers were still smoking, the masons who worked at the locks, and whom we had seen crossing the river in their boat the even ing before while we were examining the rock, came upon us as they were going to their work, and we found that we had pitched our tent di rectly in the path to their boat. this was the only time that we were observed on our camp ing-ground. thus, far from the beaten high ways and the dust and din of travel, we beheld the country privately, yet freely, and at our leisure. other roads do some violence to na ture, and bring the traveler to stare at her, but the river steals into the scenery it traverses without intrusion, silently creating and adorn&quot; ing it, and is as free to come and go as the zephyr. as we shoved away from this rocky coast, before sunrise, the smaller bittern, the genius of the shore, was moping along its edge, or 810 a week stood probing the mud for its food, with ever an eye on us, though so demurely at work, or else he ran along over the wet stones like a wrecker in his storm coat, looking out for wrecks of snails and cockles. now away he goes, with a limping flight, uncertain where he will alight, until a rod of clear sand amid the alders invites his feet; and now our steady approach compels him to seek a new retreat. it is a bird of the oldest thalesian school, and no doubt believes in the priority of water to the other elements ; the relic of a twilight antediluvian age which yet inhabits these bright american rivers with us yankees. there is something venerable in this melancholy and contemplative race of birds, which may have trodden the earth while it was yet in a slimy and imperfect state. perchance their tracks, too, are still visible on the stones. it still lingers into our glaring summers, bravely supporting its fate without sympathy from man, as if it looked forward to some sec ond advent of which he has no assurance. one wonders if, by its patient study by rocks and sandy capes, it has wrested the whole of her se cret from nature yet. what a rich experience it must have gained, standing on one leg and looking out from its dull eye so long on sunshine and rain, moon and stars ! what could it tell of stagnant pools and reeds and dank night wednesday 311 fogs! it would be worth the while to look closely into the eye which has been open and seeing at such hours, and in such solitudes, its dull, yellowish, greenish eye. methinks my own soul must be a bright invisible green. i have seen these birds stand by the half dozen together in the shallower water along the shore, with their bills thrust into the mud at the bottom, probing for food, the whole head being con cealed, while the neck and body formed an arch above the water. cohass brook, the outlet of massabesic pond, which last is five or six miles distant, and contains fifteen hundred acres, being the largest body of fresh water in rockingham county, comes in near here from the east. rowing be tween manchester and bedford, we passed, at an early hour, a ferry and some falls, called goff s falls, the indian cohasset, where there is a small village, and a handsome green islet in the middle of the stream. from bedford and merrimack have been boated the bricks of which lowell is made. about twenty years before, as they told us, one moore, of bedford, having clay on his farm, contracted to furnish eight millions of bricks to the founders of that city within two years. he fulfilled his contract in one year, and since then bricks have been the principal export from these towns. the farm 312 a week ers found thus a market for their wood, and when they had brought a load to the kilns, they could cart a load of bricks to the shore, and so make a profitable day s work of it. thus all parties were benefited. it was worth the while to see the place where lowell was &quot;dug out.&quot; so, likewise, manchester is being built of bricks made still higher up the river at hooksett. there might be seen here on the bank of the merrimack, near goff s falls, in what is now the town of bedford, famous &quot;for hops and for its fine domestic manufactures,&quot; some graves of the aborigines. the land still bears this scar here, and time is slowly crumbling the bones of a race. yet, without fail, every spring, since they first fished and hunted here, the brown thrasher has heralded the morning from a birch or alder spray, and the undying race of reed birds still rustles through the withering grass. but these bones rustle not. these mouldering elements are slowly preparing for another met amorphosis, to serve new masters, and what was the indian s will erelong be the white man s sinew. we learned that bedford was not so famous for hops as formerly, since the price is fluctuat ing, and poles are now scarce. yet if the trav eler goes back a few miles from the river, the hop kilns will still excite his curiosity. wednesday 313 there were few incidents in our voyage this forenoon, though the river was now more rocky and the falls more frequent than before. it was a pleasant change, after rowing incessantly for many hours, to lock ourselves through in some retired place, for commonly there was no lock-man at hand, one sitting in the boat, while the other, sometimes with no little labor and heave-yo-ing, opened and shut the gates, waiting patiently to see the locks fill. we did not once use the wheels which we had provided. taking advantage of the eddy, we were some times floated up to the locks almost in the face of the falls ; and, by the same cause, any float ing timber was carried round in a circle and repeatedly drawn into the rapids before it finally went down the stream. these old gray struc tures, with their quiet arms stretched over the river in the sun, appeared like natural objects in the scenery, and the kingfisher and sandpiper alighted on them as readily as on stakes or rocks. we rowed leisurely up the stream for several hours, until the sun had got high in the sky, our thoughts monotonously beating time to our oars. for outward variety there was only the river and the receding shores, a vista continu ally opening behind and closing before us, as we sat with our backs upstream; and, for in 314 a week ward, such thoughts as the muses grudgingly lent us. we were always passing some low, inviting shore, or some overhanging bank, on which, however, we never landed. such near aspects had we of our life s scenery. it might be seen by what tenure men held the earth. the smallest stream is mediterra nean sea, a smaller ocean creek within the land, where men may steer by their farm bounds and cottage lights. for my own part, but for the geographers, i should hardly have known how large a portion of our globe is water, my life has chiefly passed within so deep a cove. yet i have sometimes ventured as far as to the mouth of my snug harbor. from an old ruined fort on staten island, i have loved to watch all day some vessel whose name i had read in the morn ing through the telegraph glass, when she first came upon the coast, and her hull heaved up and glistened in the sun, from the moment when the pilot and most adventurous news-boats met her, past the hook, and up the narrow channel of the wide outer bay, till she was boarded by the health officer, and took her station at quar antine, or held on her unquestioned course to the wharves of new york. it was interesting, too, to watch the less adventurous newsman, who made his assault as the vessel swept through wednesda y 315 the narrows, defying plague and quarantine law, and, fastening his little cockboat to her huge side, clambered up and disappeared in the cabin. and then i could imagine what momen tous news was being imparted by the captain, which no american ear had ever heard, that asia, africa, europe were all sunk ; for which at length he pays the price, and is seen descending the ship s side with his bundle of newspapers, but not where he first got up, for these arrivers do not stand still to gossip; and he hastes away with steady sweeps to dispose of his wares to the highest bidder, and we shall erelong read something startling, &quot; by the latest arrival,&quot; &quot;by the good ship .&quot; on sunday i beheld, from some interior hill, the long procession of vessels getting to sea, reaching from the city wharves through the narrows, and past the hook, quite to the ocean stream, far as the eye could reach, with stately march and silken sails, all counting on lucky voyages, but each time some of the number, no doubt, destined to go to davy s locker, and never come on this coast again. and, again, in the evening of a pleasant day, it was my amusement to count the sails in sight. but as the setting sun continually brought more and more to light, still farther in the horizon, the last count always had the advantage, till, by the 816 a week time the last rays streamed over the sea, i had doubled and trebled my first number ; though i could no longer class them all under the several heads of ships, barks, brigs, schooners, and sloops, but most were faint generic vessels only. and then the temperate twilight light, per chance, revealed the floating home of some sailor whose thoughts were already alienated from this american coast, and directed towards the europe of our dreams. i have stood upon the same hill-top, when a thunder-shower, roll ing down from the catskills and highlands, passed over the island, deluging the land ; and, when it had suddenly left us in sunshine, have seen it overtake successively, with its huge shadow and dark, descending wall of rain, the vessels in the bay. their bright sails were sud denly drooping and dark, like the sides of barns, and they seemed to shrink before the storm ; while still far beyond them on the sea, through this dark veil, gleamed the sunny sails of those vessels which the storm had not yet reached. and at midnight, when all around and overhead was darkness, i have seen a field of trembling, silvery light far out on the sea, the reflection of the moonlight from the ocean, as if beyond the precincts of our night, where the moon traversed a cloudless heaven, and sometimes a dark speck in its midst, where wednesday 317 some fortunate vessel was pursuing its happy voyage by night. but to us river sailors the sun never rose out of ocean waves, but from some green coppice, and went down behind some dark mountain line. we, too, were but dwellers on the shore, like the bittern of the morning; and our pur suit, the wrecks of snails and cockles. never theless, we were contented to know the better one fair particular shore. my life is like a stroll upon the beach, as near the ocean s edge as i can go, my tardy steps its waves sometimes o erreach, sometimes i stay to let them overflow. my sole employment t is, and scrupulous care, to place my gains beyond the reach of tides, each smoother pebble, and each shell more rare, which ocean kindly to my hand confides. i have but few companions on the shore, they scorn the strand who sail upon the sea, yet oft i think the ocean they ve sailed o er is deeper known upon the strand to me. the middle sea contains no crimson dulse, its deeper waves cast up no pearls to view, along the shore my hand is on its pulse, and i converse with many a shipwrecked crew. the small houses which were scattered along the river at intervals of a mile or more were commonly out of sight to us, but sometimes, 318 a week when we rowed near the shore, we heard the peevish note of a hen, or some slight domestic sound, which betrayed them. the lock-men s houses were particularly well placed, retired, and high, always at falls or rapids, and com manding the pleasantest reaches of the river, for it is generally wider and more lake-like just above a fall, and there they wait for boats. these humble dwellings, homely and sincere, in which a hearth was still the essential part, were more pleasing to our eyes than palaces or castles would have been. in the noon of these days, as we have said, we occasionally climbed the banks and approached these houses, to get a glass of water and make acquaintance with their inhabitants. high in the leafy bank, sur rounded commonly by a small patch of corn and beans, squashes and melons, with sometimes a graceful hop-yard on one side, and some run ning vine over the windows, they appeared like beehives set to gather honey for a summer. i have not read of any arcadian life which sur passes the actual luxury and serenity of these new england dwellings. for the outward gild ing, at least, the age is golden enough. as you approach the sunny doorway, awakening the echoes by your steps, still no sound from these barracks of repose, and you fear that the gentlest knock may seem rude to the oriental wednesday 319 dreamers. the door is opened, perchance, by some yankee hindoo woman, whose small voiced but sincere hospitality, out of the bot tomless depths of a quiet nature, has traveled quite round to the opposite side, and fears only to obtrude its kindness. you step over the white-scoured floor to the bright &quot;dresser&quot; lightly, as if afraid to disturb the devotions of the household, for oriental dynasties appear to have passed away since the dinner-table was last spread here, and thence to the frequented curb, where you see your long-forgotten, un shaven face at the bottom, in juxtaposition with new-made butter and the trout in the well. &quot;perhaps you would like some molasses and ginger,&quot; suggests the faint noon voice. some times there sits the brother who follows the sea, their representative man ; who knows only how far it is to the nearest port, no more distances, all the rest is sea and distant capes, patting the dog, or dandling the kitten in arms that were stretched by the cable and the oar, pull ing against boreas or the trade -winds. he looks up at the stranger, half pleased, half as tonished, with a mariner s eye, as if he were a dolphin within cast. if men will believe it, sua si bona nbrint, there are no more quiet tempes, nor more poetic and arcadian lives, than may be lived in these new england dwell* 320 a week ings. we thought that the employment of their inhabitants by day would be to tend the flowers and herds, and at night, like the shep herds of old, to cluster and give names to the stars from the river banks. we passed a large and densely wooded island this forenoon, between short s and griffith s falls, the fairest which we had met with, with a handsome grove of elms at its head. if it had been evening, we should have been glad to camp there. not long after, one or two more were passed. the boatmen told us that the current had recently made important changes here. an island always pleases my imagination, even the smallest, as a small continent and integral por tion of the globe. i have a fancy for building my hut on one. even a bare, grassy isle, which i can see entirely over at a glance, has some undefined and mysterious charm for me. there is commonly such a one at the junction of two rivers, whose currents bring down and deposit their respective sands in the eddy at their confluence, as it were the womb of a con tinent. by what a delicate and far-stretched contribution every island is made! what an enterprise of nature thus to lay the foundations of and to build up the future continent, of golden and silver sands and the ruins of forests, with ant-like industry. pindar gives the fol wednesda y 321 lowing account of the origin of thera, whence, in after times, libyan gyrene was settled by battus. triton, in the form of eurypylus, presents a clod to euphemus, one of the argo nauts, as they are about to return home. &quot; he knew of our haste, and immediately seizing a clod with his right hand, strove to give it as a chance stranger s gift. nor did the hero disregard him, but leaping on the shore, stretching hand to hand, received the mystic clod. but i hear it sinking from the deck, qo with the sea brine at evening, accompanying the watery sea. often indeed i urged the careless menials to guard it, but their minds forgot. and now in this island the imperishable seed of spacious libya is spilled before its hour.&quot; it is a beautiful fable, also related by pindar, how helius, or the sun, looked down into the sea one day, when perchance his rays were first reflected from some increasing, glittering sandbar, and saw the fair and fruitful island of rhodes &quot; springing up from the bottom, capable of feeding many men, and suitable for flocks ;&quot; and at the nod of zeus, &quot; the island sprang from the watery sea ; and the genial father of penetrating beams ruler of fire-breathing horses, has it.&quot; 322 a week the shifting islands ! who would not be will ing that his house should be undermined by such a foe! the inhabitant of an island can tell what currents formed the land which he cul tivates; and his earth is still being created or destroyed. there before his door, perchance, still empties the stream which brought down the material of his farm ages before, and is still bringing it down or washing it away, the graceful, gentle robber! not long after this we saw the piscataquoag, or sparkling water, emptying in on our left, and heard the falls of amoskeag above. large quantities of lumber, as we read in the gazetteer, were still annually floated down the piscataquoag to the merrimack, and there are many fine mill privileges on it. just above the mouth of this river we passed the artificial falls where the canals of the manchester manu facturing company discharge themselves into the merrimack. they are striking enough to have a name, and, with the scenery of a bash pish, would be visited from far and near. the water falls thirty or forty feet over seven or eight steep and narrow terraces of stone, prob ably to break its force, and is converted into one mass of foam. this canal water did not seem to be the worse for the wear, but foamed and fumed as purely, and boomed as savagely wednesday 323 and impressively, as a mountain torrent, and, though it came from under a factory, we saw a rainbow here. these are now the amoskeag falls, removed a mile downstream. but we did not tarry to examine them minutely, mak ing haste to get past the village here collected, and out of hearing of the hammer which was laying the foundation of another lowell on the banks. at the time of our voyage manchester was a village of about two thousand inhabit ants, where we landed for a moment to get some cool water, and where an inhabitant told us that he was accustomed to go across the river into goffstown for his water. but now, as i have been told, and indeed have witnessed, it contains fourteen thousand inhabitants. from a hill on the road between goffstown and hook sett, four miles distant, i have seen a thunder shower pass over, and the sun break out and shine on a city there, where i had landed nine years before in the fields; and there was wav ing the flag of its museum, where &quot;the only perfect skeleton of a greenland or river whale in the united states &quot; was to be seen, and i also read in its directory of a &quot;manchester athe naeum and gallery of the fine arts.&quot; according to the gazetteer, the descent of amoskeag falls, which are the most consider able in the merrimack, is fifty-four feet in half 324 a week a mile. we locked ourselves through here with much ado, surmounting the successive watery steps of this river s staircase in the midst of a crowd of villagers, jumping into the canal to their amusement, to save our boat from upset ting, and consuming much river water in our service. amoskeag, or namaskeak, is said to mean &quot;great fishing-place.&quot; it was hereabouts that the sachem wannalancet resided. tradi tion says that his tribe, when at war with the mohawks, concealed their provisions in the cavities of the rocks in the upper part of these falls. the indians, who hid their provisions in these holes, and affirmed &quot;that god had cut them out for that purpose,&quot; understood their origin and use better than the royal society, who in their transactions, in the last century, speaking of these very holes, declare that &quot;they seem plainly to be artificial.&quot; similar &quot;pot holes &quot; may be seen at the stone flume on this river, on the ottaway, at bellows falls on the connecticut, and in the limestone rock at shel burne falls on deerfield river in massachu setts, and more or less generally about all falls. perhaps the most remarkable curiosity of this kind in new england is the well-known basin on the pemigewasset, one of the head-waters of this river, twenty by thirty feet in extent and proportionably deep, with a smooth and rounded wednesday 325 brim, and filled with a cold, pellucid, and greenish water. at amoskeag the river is di vided into many separate torrents and trickling rills by the rocks, and its volume is so much re duced by the drain of the canals that it does not fill its bed. there are many pot-holes here on a rocky island which the river washes over in high freshets. as at shelburne falls, where i first observed them, they are from one foot to four or five in diameter, and as many in depth, perfectly round and regular, with smooth and gracefully curved brims, like goblets. their origin is apparent to the most careless observer. a stone which the current has washed down, meeting with obstacles, revolves as on a pivot where it lies, gradually sinking in the course of centuries deeper and deeper into the rock, and in new freshets receiving the aid of fresh stones, which are drawn into this trap and doomed to revolve there for an indefinite period, doing sisyphus-like penance for stony sins, until they either wear out, or wear through the bottom of their prison, or else are released by some revo lution of nature. there lie the stones of vari ous sizes, from a pebble to a foot or two in diameter, some of which have rested from their labor only since the spring, and some higher up which have lain still and dry for ages, we no ticed some here at least sixteen feet above the 326 a week present level of the water, while others are still revolving, and enjoy no respite at any sea son. in one instance, at shelburne falls, they have worn quite through the rock, so that a portion of the river leaks through in anticipa tion of the fall. some of these pot-holes at amoskeag, in a very hard brown-stone, had an oblong, cylindrical stone of the same material loosely fitting them. one, as much as fifteen feet deep and seven or eight in diameter, which was worn quite through to the water, had a huge rock of the same material, smooth but of irregular form, lodged in it. everywhere there were the rudiments or the wrecks of a dimple in the rock; the rocky shells of whirlpools. as if by force of example and sympathy after so many lessons, the rocks, the hardest material, had been endeavoring to whirl or flow into the forms of the most fluid. the finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time. not only have some of these basins been forming for countless ages, but others exist which must have been completed in a former geological period. in deepening the pawtucket canal, in 1822, the workmen came to ledges with pot-holes in them, where probably was once the bed of the river, and there are some, wednesda y 327 we are told, in the town of canaan in this state, with the stones still in them, on the height of land between the merrimack and connecticut, and nearly a thousand feet above these rivers, proving that the mountains and the rivers have changed places. there lie the stones which completed their revolutions perhaps before thoughts began to revolve in the brain of man. the periods of hindoo and chinese history, though they reach back to the time when the race of mortals is confounded with the race of gods, are as nothing compared with the periods which these stones have inscribed. that which commenced a rock when time was young shall conclude a pebble in the unequal contest. with such expense of time and natural forces are our very paving-stones produced. they teach us lessons, these dumb workers; verily there are &quot;sermons in stones, and books in the running brooks.&quot; in these very holes the indians hid their provisions; but now there is no bread, but only its old neighbor stones at the bottom. who knows how many races they have served thus ? by as simple a law, some accidental by law, perchance, our system itself was made ready for its inhabitants. these, and such as these, must be our an tiquities, for lack of human vestiges. the monuments of heroes and the temples of the 328 a week gods which may once have stood on the banks of this river are now, at any rate, returned to dust and primitive soil. the murmur of un chronicled nations has died away along these shores, and once more lowell and manchester are on the trail of the indian. the fact that romans once inhabited her re flects no little dignity on nature herself; that from some particular hill the roman once looked out on the sea. she need not be ashamed of the vestiges of her children. how gladly the an tiquary informs us that their vessels penetrated into this frith, or up that river of some remote isle! their military monuments still remain on the hills and under the sod of the valleys. the oft-repeated roman story is written in still legible characters in every quarter of the old world, and but to-day, perchance, a new coin is dug up whose inscription repeats and con firms their fame. some &quot;judaea capta,&quot; with a woman mourning under a palm-tree, with si lent argument and demonstration confirms the pages of history. &quot; rome living was the world s sole ornament ; and dead is now the world s sole monument. with her own weight down pressed now she lies, and by her heaps her hugeness testifies.&quot; if one doubts whether grecian valor and pa wednesda y 329 triotism are not a fiction of the poets, he may go to athens and see still upon the walls of the temple of minerva the circular marks made by the shields taken from the enemy in the persian war, which were suspended there. we have not far to seek for living and unquestionable evi dence. the very dust takes shape and confirms some story which we had read. as fuller said, commenting on the zeal of camden, &quot;a broken urn is a whole evidence ; or an old gate still sur viving out of which the city is run out.&quot; when solon endeavored to prove that salamis had for merly belonged to the athenians, and not to the megareaiis, he caused the tombs to be opened, and showed that the inhabitants of salamis turned the faces of their dead to the same side with the athenians, but the megareans to the opposite side. there they were to be interro gated. some minds are as little logical or argumen tative as nature; they can offer no reason or &quot;guess,&quot; but they exhibit the solemn and incon trovertible fact. if a historical question arises, they cause the tombs to be opened. their silent and practical logic convinces the reason and the understanding at the same time. of such sort is always the only pertinent question and the only satisfactory reply. our own country furnishes antiquities as an 330 a week cient and durable, and as useful, as any ; rocks at least as well covered with lichens, and a soil which, if it is virgin, is but virgin mould, the very dust of nature. what if we cannot read rome, or greece, etruria, or carthage, or egypt, or babylon, on these; are our cliffs bare? the lichen on the rocks is a rude and simple shield which beginning and imperfect nature suspended there. still hangs her wrin kled trophy. and here too the poet s eye may still detect the brazen nails which fastened time s inscriptions, and if he has the gift, de cipher them by this clue. the walls that fence our fields, as well as modern rome, and not less the parthenon itself, are all built of ruins. here may be heard the din of rivers, and ancient winds which have long since lost their names sough through our woods, the first faint sounds of spring, older than the summer of athenian glory, the titmouse lisping in the wood, the jay s scream, and bluebird s warble, and the hum of &quot;bees that fly about the laughing blossoms of sallowy.&quot; here is the gray dawn for antiquity, and our to-morrow s future should be at least paulo-post to theirs which we have put behind us. there are the red-maple and birchen leaves, old runes which are not yet deciphered; catkins, pine wednesday 331 cones, vines, oak leaves, and acorns; the very things themselves, and not their forms in stone, so much the more ancient and venerable. and even to the current summer there has come down tradition of a hoary -headed master of all art, who once filled every field and grove with statues and godlike architecture, of every de sign which greece has lately copied; whose ruins are now mingled with the dust, and not one block remains upon another. the century sun and unwearied rain have wasted them, till not one fragment from that quarry now exists ; and poets perchance will feign that gods sent down the material from heaven. what though the traveler tell us of the ruins of egypt, are we so sick or idle that we must sacrifice our america and to-day to some man s ill-remembered and indolent story? carnac and luxor are but names, or if their skeletons remain, still more desert sand and at length a wave of the mediterranean sea are needed to wash away the filth that attaches to their gran deur. carnac! carnac! here is carnac for me. i behold the columns of a larger and purer temple. this is my carnac, whose unmeasured dome shelters the measuring art and measurer s home. behold these flowers, let us be up with time, not dreaming of three thousand years ago, erect ourselves and let those columns lie, 332 a week not stoop to raise a foil against the sky. where is the spirit of that time but in this present day, perchance the present line ? three thousand years ago are not agone, they are still lingering in this summer morn, and memnon s mother sprightly greets us now, wearing her youthful radiance on her hrow. if carnac s columns still stand on the plain, to enjoy our opportunities they remain. in these parts dwelt the famous sachem pas aconaway, who was seen by gookin &quot;at paw tucket, when he was about one hundred and twenty years old.&quot; he was reputed a wise man and a powwow, and restrained his people from going to war with the english. they believed &quot;that he could make water burn, rocks move, and trees dance, and metamorphose himself into a flaming man; that in winter he could raise a green leaf out of the ashes of a dry one, and produce a living snake from the skin of a dead one, and many similar miracles.&quot; in 1660, according to gookin, at a great feast and dance, he made his farewell speech to his peo ple, in which he said that as he was not likely to see them met together again, he would leave them this word of advice, to take heed how they quarreled with their english neighbors, for though they might do them much mischief at first, it would prove the means of their own destruction. he himself, he said, had been as wednesday 333 much an enemy to the english at their first coming as any, and had used all his arts to de stroy them, or at least to prevent their settle ment, but could by no means effect it. gookin thought that he &quot;possibly might have such a kind of spirit upon him as was upon balaam, who, in numbers xxiii. 23, said, surely, there is no enchantment against jacob, neither is there any divination against israel. his son wannalancet carefully followed his advice, and when philip s war broke out, he withdrew his followers to penacook, now concord in new hampshire, from the scene of the war. on his return afterwards, he visited the minister of chelmsford, and, as is stated in the history of that town, &quot;wished to know whether chelms ford had suffered much during the war; and being informed that it had not, and that god should be thanked for it, wannalancet replied, me next. &quot; manchester was the residence of john stark, a hero of two wars, and survivor of a third, and at his death the last but one of the ameri can generals of the revolution. he was born in the adjoining town of londonderry, then nutfield, in 1728. as early as 1752, he was taken prisoner by the indians while hunting in the wilderness near baker s river; he per formed notable service as a captain of rangers 334 a week in the french war; commanded a regiment of the new hampshire militia at the battle of bunker hill; and fought and won the battle of bennington in 1777. he was past service in the last war, and died here in 1822, at the age of ninety -four. his monument stands upon the second bank of the river, about a mile and a half above the falls, and commands a prospect^ several miles up and down the merrimack. it suggested how much more impressive in the landscape is the tomb of a hero than the dwell ings of the inglorious living. who is most dead, a hero by whose monument you stand, or his descendants of whom you have never heard? the graves of pasaconaway and wannalan cet are marked by no monument on the bank of their native river. every town which we passed, if we may be lieve the gazetteer, had been the residence of some great man. but though we knocked at many doors, and even made particular inqui ries, we could not find that there were any now living. under the head of litchfield we read : &quot;the hon. wyseman clagett closed his life in this town.&quot; according to another, &quot;he was a classical scholar, a good lawyer, a wit, and a poet.&quot; we saw his old gray house just below wednesday 335 great nesenkeag brook. under the head of merrimack: &quot;hon. mathew thornton, one of the signers of the declaration of american in dependence, resided many years in this town.&quot; his house too we saw from the river. &quot; dr. jonathan gove, a man distinguished for his ur banity, his talents and professional skill, resided in this town [goffstown]. he was one of the oldest practitioners of medicine in the county. he was many years an active member of the legislature.&quot; &quot;hon. robert means, who died january 24, 1823, at the age of 80, was for a long period a resident in amherst. he was a native of ireland. in 1764 he came to this country, where, by his industry and application to business, he acquired a large property, and great respect.&quot; &quot;william stinson [one of the first settlers of dunbarton], born in ireland, came to londonderry with his father. he was much respected and was a useful man. james rogers was from ireland, and father to major robert rogers. he was shot in the woods, being mistaken for a bear.&quot; &quot;rev. matthew clark, second minister of londonderry, was a native of ireland, who had in early life been an officer in the army, and distinguished himself in the defense of the city of londonderry, when besieged by the army of king james ii., a. d. 1688-89. he afterwards relinquished a mili 336 a week tary life for the clerical profession. he pos sessed a strong mind, marked by a considerable degree of eccentricity. he died january 25, 1735, and was borne to the grave, at his particu lar request, by his former companions in arms, of whom there were a considerable number among the early settlers of this town; several of them had been made free from taxes through out the british dominions by king william, for their bravery in that memorable siege.&quot; colonel george reid and captain david m clary, also citizens of londonderry, were &quot;distinguished and brave&quot; officers. &quot;major andrew m clary, a native of this town [epsom], fell at the battle of breed s hill.&quot; many of these heroes, like the illustrious roman, were ploughing when the news of the massacre at lexington arrived, and straightway left their ploughs in the furrow, and repaired to the scene of action. some miles from where we now were, there once stood a guide-post on which were the words, &quot; 3 miles to squire mac gaw s.&quot; but, generally speaking, the land is now, at any rate, very barren of men, and we doubt if there are as many hundreds as we read of. it may be that we stood too near. uncannunuc mountain in goffstown was vis ible from amoskeag, five or six miles westward. wednesday 337 it is the northeasternmost in the horizon, which we see from our native town, but seen from there is too ethereally blue to be the same which the like of us have ever climbed. its name is said to mean &quot;the two breasts,&quot; there being two eminences some distance apart. the high est, which is about fourteen hundred feet above the sea, probably affords a more extensive view of the merrimack valley and the adjacent coun try than any other hill, though it is somewhat obstructed by woods. only a few short reaches of the river are visible, but you can trace its course far downstream by the sandy tracts on its banks. a little south of uncannunuc, about sixty years ago, as the story goes, an old woman who went out to gather pennyroyal tripped her foot in the bail of a small brass kettle in the dead grass and bushes. some say that flints and charcoal and some traces of a camp were also found. this kettle, holding about four quarts, is still preserved and used to dye thread in. it is supposed to have belonged to some old french or indian hunter, who was killed in one of his hunting or scouting excursions, and so never returned to look after his kettle. but we were most interested to hear of the pennyroyal; it is soothing to be reminded that wild nature produces anything ready for the use 338 a week of man. men know that something is good. one says that it is yellow-dock, another that it is bitter-sweet, another that it is slippery -elm bark, burdock, catnip, calamint, elecampane, thoroughwort, or pennyroyal. a man may es teem himself happy when that which is his food is also his medicine. there is no kind of herb, but somebody or other says that it is good. i am very glad to hear it. it reminds me of the first chapter of genesis. but how should they know that it is good? that is the mystery to me. i am always agreeably disappointed; it is incredible that they should have found it out. since all things are good, men fail at last to distinguish which is the bane and which the antidote. there are sure to be two prescrip tions diametrically opposite. stuff a cold and starve a cold are but two ways. they are the two practices both always in full blast. yet you must take advice of the one school as if there was no other. in respect to religion and the healing art, all nations are still in a state of barbarism. in the most civilized countries the priest is still but a powwow, and the physi cian a great medicine. consider the deference which is everywhere paid to a doctor s opinion. nothing more strikingly betrays the credulity of mankind than medicine. quackery is a thing universal, and universally successful. in this wednesday 339 case it becomes literally true that no imposition is too great for the credulity of men. priests and physicians should never look one another in the face. they have no common ground, nor is there any to mediate between them. when the one comes, the other goes. they could not i come together without laughter, or a significant silence, for the one s profession is a satire on i the other s, and cither s success would be the / other s failure. it is wonderful that the physi&quot; cian should ever die, and that the priest should ever live. why is it that the priest is never called to consult with the physician? is it because men believe practically that matter is independent of spirit? but what is quackery? it is commonly an attempt to cure the diseases of a man by addressing his body alone. there is need of a physician who shall minister to both soul and body at once, that is, to man. now he falls between two stools. after passing through the locks, we had poled ourselves through the canal here, about half a mile in length, to the boatable part of the river. above amoskeag the river spreads out into a lake reaching a mile or two without a bend. there were many canal-boats here bound up to hooksett, about eight miles, and as they were going up empty, with a fair wind, one boatman offered to take us in tow if we would wait. but 840 a week when we came alongside, we found that they meant to take us on board, since otherwise we should clog their motions too much; but as our boat was too heavy to be lifted aboard, we pur sued our way up the stream, as before, while the boatmen were at their dinner, and came to anchor at length under some alders on the op posite shore, where we could take our lunch. though far on one side, every sound was wafted over to us from the opposite bank, and from the harbor of the canal, and we could see every thing that passed. by and by came several canal-boats, at intervals of a quarter of a mile, standing up to hooksett with a light breeze, and one by one disappeared round a point above. with their broad sails set, they moved slowly up the stream in the sluggish and fitful breeze, like one-winged antediluvian birds, and as if impelled by some mysterious counter-cur rent. it was a grand motion, so slow and stately, this &quot;standing out,&quot; as the phrase is, expressing the gradual and steady progress of a vessel, as if it were by mere rectitude and dis position, without shuffling. their sails, which stood so still, were like chips cast into the cur rent of the air to show which way it set. at length the boat which we had spoken came along, keeping the middle of the stream, and when within speaking distance, the steersman wednesday 341 called out ironically to say that if we could come alongside now, he would take us in tow; but not heeding his taunt, we still loitered in the shade till we had finished our lunch, and when the last boat had disappeared round the point with flapping sail, for the breeze had now sunk to a zephyr, with our own sails set, and plying our oars, we shot rapidly up the stream in pur suit, and as we glided close alongside, while they were vainly invoking 2eolus to their aid, we returned their compliment by proposing, if they would throw us a rope, to &quot;take them in tow,&quot; to which these merrimack sailors had no suitable answer ready. thus we gradually over took and passed each boat in succession until we had the river to ourselves again. our course this afternoon was between man chester and goffstown. while we float here, far from that tributary stream on whose banks our friends and kindred dwell, our thoughts, like the stars, come out of their horizon still; for there circulates a finer blood than lavoisier has discovered the laws of, the blood, not of kindred merely, but of kindness, whose pulse still beats at any distance and forever. 342 a week true kindness is a pure divine affinity, not founded upon human consanguinity. it is a spirit, not a blood relation, superior to family and station. after years of vain familiarity, some distant gesture or unconscious behavior, which we re member, speaks to us with more emphasis than the wisest or kindest words. we are sometimes made aware of a kindness long passed, and real ize that there have been times when our friends thoughts of us were of so pure and lofty a char acter that they passed over us like the winds of heaven unnoticed ; when they treated us not as what we were, but as what we aspired to be. there has just reached us, it may be, the no bleness of some such silent behavior, not to be forgotten, not to be remembered, and we shud der to think how it fell on us cold, though in some true but tardy hour we endeavor to wipe off these scores. in my experience, persons, when they are made the subject of conversation, though with a friend, are commonly the most prosaic and trivial of facts. the universe seems bankrupt as soon as we begin to discuss the character of individuals. our discourse all runs to slander, and our limits grow narrower as we advance. how is it that we are impelled to treat our old friends so ill when we obtain new ones? the wednesday 343 housekeeper says, i never had any new crockery in my life but i began to break the old. i say, let us speak of mushrooms and forest trees rather. yet we can sometimes afford to re member them in private. lately, alas, i knew a gentle boy, whose features all were cast in virtue s mould, as one she had designed for beauty s toy, but after manned him for her own strong-hold. on every side he open was as day, that you might see no lack of strength within, for walls and ports do only serve alway for a pretense to feebleness and sin,. say not that caesar was victorious, with toil and strife who stormed the house of fame, in other sense this youth was glorious, himself a kingdom wheresoe er he came. no strength went out to get him victory, when all was income of its own accord ; for where he went none other was to see, but all were parcel of their noble lord. he forayed like the subtile haze of summer, that stilly shows fresh landscapes to our eyes, and revolutions works without a murmur, or rustling of a leaf beneath the skies. so was i taken unawares by this, i quite forgot my homage to confess ; yet now am forced to know, though hard it is, i might havejoved him had i loved him less. __ each moment as we nearer drew to each, a stern respect withheld us farther yet, 844 a week so that we seemed beyond each other s reach, and less acquainted than when first we met we two were one while we did sympathize, ^s so could we not the simplest bargain drive ; i and what avails it now that we are wise, if absence doth this doubleness contrive ?^/ eternity may not the chance repeat, but i must tread my single way alone, in sad remembrance that we once did meet, and know that bliss irrevocably gone. th e spheres henceforth my elegy shall sing, for elegy has other subject none ; each strain of music in my ears shall ring knell of departure from that other one. make haste andj with fitting strain resound ye woods and fields ; sorrow is dearer jn such case to me than all the joys other occasion yields. is t then too late the damage to repair ? distance, forsooth, from my weak grasp hath reft the empty husk, and clutched the useless tare, but in my hands the wheat and kernel left. if i but love that virtue which he is, though it be scented in the morning air, still shall we be truest acquaintances, nor mortals know a sympathy more rare. friendship is evanescent in every man s ex perience, and remembered like heat lightning in past^ummers. fair and flitting like a summer cloud ;j there is always some vapor in the air, wednesday 34 no matter how long the drought ; there are even april showers. surely from time to time, for its vestiges never depart, it floats through our atmosphere. it takes place, like vegetation in so many materials, because there is such a law, but always without permanent form, though an cient and familiar as the sun and moon, and as sure to come again. _the heart is forever inex perienced.. they silently gather as by magic, these never failing, never quite deceiving vi sions, like the bright and fleecy clouds in the calmest and clearest days. the friend is some fair floating isle of palms eluding the mariner in pacific seas. many are the dangers to be encountered, equinoctial gales and coral reefs, ere he may sail before the constant trades. but who would not sail through mutiny and storm, even over atlantic waves, to reach the fabulous retreating shores of some continent man ? / the imagination still clings to the faintest tradition of the atlantides. the smothered streams of love, which flow more bright than phlegethon, more low, island us ever, like the sea, in an atlantic mystery. our fabled shores none ever reach, no mariner has found our beach, scarcely our mirage now is seen, and neighboring waves with floating green, yet still the oldest charts contain 346 a week some dotted outline of our main ; in ancient times midsummer days unto the western islands gaze, to teneriffe and the azores, have shown our faint and cloud-like shores. but sink not yet, ye desolate isles, anon your coast with commerce smiles, and richer freights ye 11 furnish far than africa or malabar. be fair, be fertile evermore, ye rumored but untrodden shore, princes and monarchs will contend who first unto your land shall send, and pawn the jewels of the crown to call your distant soil their own. columbus has sailed westward of these isles by the mariner s compass, but neither he nor his successors have found them. we are no nearer than plato was. the earnest seeker and hopeful discoverer of this new world al ways haunts the outskirts of his time, and walks through the densest crowd uninterrupted, and, as it were, in a straight line. sea and land are but his neighbors, and companions in his labors, who on the ocean s verge and firm land s end doth long and truly seek his friend. many men dwell far inland, but he alone sits on the strand. whether he ponders men or books always still he seaward looks, marine news he ever reads, and the slightest glances heeds, wednesday 347 feels the sea breeze on his cheek, at each word the landsmen speak in every companion s eye a sailing vessel doth descry ; in the ocean s sullen roar from some distant port he hears of wrecks upon a distant shore, and the ventures of past years. who does not walk on the plain as amid the columns of tadmore of the desert? there is t on the earth no institution which friendship 1 has established; it is not taught by any reli* gion ; no scripture contains its maxims. it has no temple, nor even a solitary column. there goes a rumor that the earth is inhabited, but the shipwrecked mariner has not seen a foot print on the shore. the hunter has found only fragments of pottery and the monuments of inhabitants. however, our fates at least are social. our courses do not diverge; but as the web of des tiny is woven it is fulled, and we are cast more and more into the centre. men naturally, though feebly, seek this alliance, and their ac tions faintly foretell it. we are inclined to lay the chief stress on likeness and not on differ ence, and in foreign bodies we admit that there are many degrees of warmth below blood heat, but none of cold above it. mencius says: &quot;if one loses a fowl or a dog, 348 a week he knows well how to seek them again; if one loses the sentiments of his heart, he does not know how to seek them again. . . . the duties^ of practical philosophy consist only in seeking 1 after those sentiments of the heart which we/ have lost; that is all.&quot; ^ j one or two persons come to my house from time to time, there being proposed to them the faint possibility of intercourse. they are as full as they are silent, and wait for my plectrum to stir the strings of their lyre. if they could ever come to the length of a sentence, or hear one, on that ground they are dreaming of! they speak faintly, and do not obtrude them selves. they have heard some news, which none, not even they themselves, can impart. it is a wealth they can bear about them which can be expended in various ways. what came they out to seek? /no word is oftener on the lips of men than friendship, and indeed no thought is more fai miliar to their aspirations. all men are dream* ing of it, and its drama, which is always a trag edy, is enacted daily. ; it is the secret of the universe. you may thread the town, you may wander the country, and none shall ever speak of it, yet thought is everywhere busy about it, and the idea of what is possible in this respect wednesday 349 affects our behavior toward all new men and women, and a great many old ones. neverthe less, i can remember only two or three essays on this subject in all literature. no wonder that the mythology, and arabian nights, and shakespeare, and scott s novels entertain us, we are poets and fablers and dramatists and novelists ourselves. we are continually acting a part in a more interesting drama than any written. we are dreaming that our friends ; are our friends , and that we are our friends friends. our actual friends are but distant relations of those to whom we are pledged. we never exchange more than three words with . a friend in our lives on that level to which our thoughts and feelings almost habitually rise. one goes forth prepared to say, &quot;sweet friends!&quot; and the salutation is, &quot;damn your eyes! &quot; but never mind; faint heart never won true friend. o my friend, may it come to pass once, that when you are my friend i may, be yours j of what use the friendliest dispositions even, if there are no hours given to friendship, if it is forever postponed to unimportant duties and relations? friendship is first, friendship last. but it is equally impossible to forget our friends, and to make them answer to our ideal. when they say farewell, then indeed we begin 350 a week r to keep them company. how often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends, that we may go and meet their ideal cousins. i would that i were worthy to be any man s friend. what is commonly honored with the name of friendship is no very profound or powerful instinct. men do not, after all, love their friends greatly. i do not often see the farmers made seers and wise to the verge of insanity by their friendship for one another. they are not often transfigured and translated by love in each other s presence. i do not observe them purified, refined, and elevated by the love of a man. if one abates a little the price of his wood, or gives a neighbor his vote at town meeting, or a barrel of apples, or lends him his wagon frequently, it is esteemed a rare instance of friendship. nor do the farmers wives lead lives consecrated to friendship. i do not see the pair of farmer friends of either sex pre pared to stand against the world. there are only two or three couples in history. to say that a man is your friend means commonly no more than this, that he is not your enemv^. most contemplate only what would be the acci dental and trifling advantages of friendship, so that the friend can assist in time of need, by his substance, or his influence, or his counsel; wednesday 351 but he who foresees such advantages in this relation proves himself blind to its real advan tage, or indeed wholly inexperienced in the re lation itself. such services are particular and menial, compared with the perpetual and all embracing service which it is. even the utmost good-will and harmony and practical kindness * are not sufficient for friendship, for friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody .j we do not wish for friends to feed and clothe our bodies, neighbors are kind enough for that, but to do the like office to our spirits. for this few are rich enough, however well disposed they may be. for the most part we stupidly confound one man with another. the dull distinguish only races or nations, or at most classes, but the wise man, individuals. to his friend a man s peculiar i character appears in every feature and in every \ action, and it is thus drawn out and improved/ by him. think of the importance of friendship in the education of men. &quot; he that hath love and judgment too, sees more than any other doe.&quot; it will make a man honest ; it will make him a hero; it will make him a saint. it is the state of the just dealing with the just, the mag nanimous with the magnanimous, the sincere with the sincere, man with man. 352 a week and it is well said by another poet, &quot; why love among the virtues is not known, it is that love contracts them all in one.&quot; all the abuses which are the object of reform with the philanthropist, the statesman, and the housekeeper are unconsciously amended in the intercourse of friends. a friend is one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting from us all the virtues, and who can appreciate them in us. it takes two to speak the truth, w ^ 7 one to speak, and another to hear. how can one treat with magnanimity mere wood and stone? if we dealt only with the false and dis honest, we should at last forget how to speak truth. only lovers know the value and mag-^x vnanimity of truth, while traders prize a cheap i honesty, and neighbors and acquaintance a cheap civility. in our daily intercourse with men, our nobler faculties are dormant and suf fered to rust. none will pay us the compliment to expect nobleness from us. though we have gold to give, they demand only copper. we ask our neighbor to suffer himself to be dealt with truly, sincerely, nobly ; but he answers no by his deafness. he does not even hear this prayer. he says practically, i will be content if you treat me as &quot;no better than i should be,&quot; as deceitful, mean, dishonest, and selfish. for the most part, we are contented so to deal and wednesda y 353 to be dealt with, and we do not think that for ^the mass of men there is any truer and nobler relation possible. a man may have good neigh bors, so called, and acquaintances, and even companions, wife, parents, brothers, sisters, ^children, who meet himself and one another on this ground only. the state does not demand justice of its members, but thinks that it suc ceeds very well with the least degree of it, hardly more than rogues practice ; and so do the neighborhood and the family. what is com monly called friendship even is only a little more honor among rogues. but sometimes we are said to love another, that is, to stand in a true relation to him, so that we give the best to, and receive the best from, him. between whom there is hearty truth, there is love; and in proportion to our truthfulness and confidence in one another, our lives are divine and miraculous, and answer to our ideal. there are passages of affection in our intercourse with mortal men and women such as no prophecy had taught us to expect, which transcend our earthly life, and anticipate heaven for us. what is this love that may come right into the middle of a prosaic goffs town day, equal to any of the gods? that dis covers a new world, fair and fresh and eternal, occupying the place of the old one, when to the j , y fo^ / e] 354 a week common eye a dust has settled on the universe? which world cannot else be reached, and does not exist. what other words, we may almost ask, are memorable and worthy to be repeated than those which love has inspired? it is won derful that they were ever uttered. they are few and rare indeed, but, like a strain of music, they are incessantly repeated and modulated by the memory. all other words crumble off with the stucco which overlies the heart. we should not dare to repeat these now aloud. we are not competent to hear them at all times. the books for young people say a great deal about the selection of friends; it is because they really have nothing to say about friends. they mean associates and confidants merely. &quot;know that the contrariety of foe and friend proceeds from god.&quot; friendship takes place between those who have an affinity for one an other, and is a perfectly natural and inevitable result. no professions nor advances will avail. even speech, at first, necessarily has nothing to do with it ; but it follows after silence, as the buds in the graft do not put forth into leaves till long after the graft has taken. it is a drama in which the parties have no part to act. we are all mussulmans and fatalists in this respect. impatient and uncertain lovers think that they must say or do something kind when wednesday 355 ever they meet; they must never be [cold/ but they who are friends do not do what they think they must, but what they must. even their friendship is to some extent but a sublime phe nomenon to them. the true and not despairing friend will ad dress his friend in some such terms as these. &quot;i never asked thy leave to let me love thee, i have a right. i love thee not as something private and personal, which is your own, but as something universal and worthy of love, which i have found. oh, how i think of you ! you are purely good, you are infinitely good. i can trust you forever. i did not think that hu manity was so rich. give me an opportunity to live.&quot; &quot;you are the fact in a fiction, you are the truth more strange and admirable than fiction. consent only to be what you are. i alone will never stand in your way.&quot; &quot;this is what i would like, to be as inti mate with you as our spirits are intimate, respecting you as i respect my ideal. never to profane one another by word or action, even by a thought. between us, if necessary, let there be no acquaintance.&quot; &quot; i have discovered you ; how can you be con cealed from me?&quot; 856 a week the friend asks no return but that his friend will religiously accept and wear and not dis grace his apotheosis of him. they cherish each other s hopes. they are kind to each other s dreams. though the poet says, &quot; t is the preeminence of friendship to impute excellence,&quot; yet we can never praise our friend, nor esteem him praise worthy, nor let him think that he can please us by any behavior, or ever treat us well enough. that kindness which has so good a reputation elsewhere can least of all consist with this rela tion, and no such affront can be offered to a 9 friend, as a conscious good-will, a friendliness ( which is not a necessity of the friend s nature. ^) the sexes are naturally most strongly at tracted to one another by constant constitu tional differences, and are most commonly and surely the complements of each other. how natural and easy it is for man to secure the attention of woman to what interests himself. men and women of equal culture, thrown to gether, are sure to be of a certain value to one another, more than men to men. there exists already a natural disinterestedness and liberal ity in such society, and i think that any man will more confidently carry his favorite books to read to some circle of intelligent women, than to one of his own sex. the visit of man to man wednesday 357 is wont to be an interruption, but the sexes nat urally expect one another. yet friendship is no respecter of sex ; and perhaps it is more rare between the sexes than between two of the same sex. [friendship is, at any rate, a relation of per feet equality. it cannot well spare any outward sign of equal obligation and advantage. the nobleman can never have a friend among his retainers, nor the king among his subjects.; not that the parties to it are in all respects equal, but they are equal in all that respects or affects their friendship. the one s love is ex actly balanced and represented by the other s. , persons are only the vessels which contain the nectar, and the hydrostatic paradox is the sym bol of love s law. it finds its level and rises to its fountain-head in all breasts, and its slender est column balances the ocean. &quot; and love as well the shepherd can as can the mighty nobleman.&quot; the one sex is not, in this respect, more tender than the other. a hero s love is as delicate as a maiden s. confucius said, &quot;never contract friendship with a man who is not better than thyself.&quot; it is the merit and preservation of friendship, that it takes place on a level higher than the actual characters of the parties would seem to warrant. 358 a week the rays of light come to us in such a curve that every man whom we meet appears to be taller than he actually is. such foundation has civility. my friend is that one whom i can associate with my choicest thought. ^ i always assign to him a nobler employment in my ab sence than i ever find him engaged in ; and i imagine that the hours which he devotes to me were snatched from a higher society. the sorest insult which i ever received from a friend was when he behaved with the license which only long and cheap acquaintance allows to one s faults, in my presence, without shame, and still addressed me in friendly accents. beware, lest thy friend learn at last to tolerate one frailty of thine, and so an obstacle be raised to the progress of thy love. there are times when we have had enough even of our friends, when we begin inevitably to profane one another, and must withdraw religiously into solitude and silence, the better to prepare ourselves forja, loftier intimacy.j silence is the ambrosial night in the intercourse of friends, in which their sincerity is recruited and takes deeper friendship is never established as an stood relation. jdo^j^u^leniand that i be less your friend that you may know-4t? yet what right have i to think that another cherishes so wednesda y 359 rare a sentiment for me? it is a miracle which requires constant proofs. it is an exercise of the purest imagination and the rarest faith. it says by a silent but eloquent behavior, &quot;i will be so related to thee as thou canst imagine ; even so thou mayest believe. i will spend truth, all my wealth on thee,&quot; and the friend responds silently through his nature and life, and treats his friend with the same divine courtesy. he knows us literally through thick and thin. he neverasks for a sign of love, but can distinguish it by tne features which it nat urally^ wears. we never need to stand upon ceremony with him with regard to his visits. wait not till i invite thee, but observe that i am glad to see thee when thou comest. it would be paying too dear for thy visit to ask for it. where my friend lives there are all riches and every attraction, and no slight obstacle can keep me from him. let me never have to tell thee what i have not to tell. let our inter course be wholly above ourselves, and draw us up to it. the language of friendship is not words, but? meanings. it is an intelligence above language.^ one imagines endless conversations with his friend, in which the tongue shall be loosed, and thoughts be spoken without hesitancy or end; but the experience is commonly far otherwise. 360 a week acquaintances may come and go, and have a word ready for every occasion ; but what puny word shall he utter whose very breath is thought f&quot;&quot;^ rft, and meaning? {suppose you go to bid farewell*^ to your friend who is setting out on a journey; what other outward sign do you know than to shake his hand ? have you any palaver ready for him then ? any box of salve to commit to his pocket? any particular message to send by him? any statement which you had forgotten to make ? as if you could forget anything. no, it is much that you take his hand and say fare well ; that you could easily omit ; so far custom has prevailed. it is even painful, if he is to go, that he should linger so long. if he must go, let him go quickly. have you any last words? alas, it is only the word of words, which you have so long sought and found not; you have not a first word yeltj there are few even whom i should venture to call earnestly by their most proper names. a name pro nounced is the recognition of the individual to whom it belongs. he who can pronounce my name aright, he can call me, and is entitled to my love and service. yet reserve is the free dom and abandonment of lovers. it is the re serve of what is hostile or indifferent in their natures, to give place to what is kindred and harmonious. / wednesday 361 the violence of love is as much to be dreaded as that of hate. when it is durable it is serene and equable* even its famous pains begin only with the ebb of love, for few are indeed lovers, though all would fain be. it is one proof of a man s fitness for friendship that he is able to do without that which is cheap and passionate^ * * f\ a true friendship is as wise as it is tender. * the parties to it yield implicitly to the guidance / of their love, and know no other law nor kind ness. it is not extravagant and insane, but what it says is something established henceforth, and will bear to be stereotyped. it is a truer truth, it is better and fairer news, and no time will ever shame it, or prove it false. this is a plant which thrives best in a temperate zone, where summer and winter alternate with one another. the friend is a necessarius, and meets his friend on homely ground; not on carpets and cushions, but on the ground and on rocks they will sit, obeying the natural and primitive laws. they will meet without any outcry, and part without loud sorrow. their relationimplies such qualities as the warrior &quot;tor it takes a valor to open the hearts of astweh as the gates of castles. it is not an idle sympathy and mutual consolation merely, but a heroic sympathy of aspiration and en deavor. a week &quot; when manhood shall be matched so / that fear can take no place, / then weary works make warriors / each other to embrace.&quot; i the friendship which wawatam testified for henry the fur-trader, as described in the lat ter s adventures, so almost bare and leafless, yet not blossomless nor fruitless, is remem bered with satisfaction and security. the stern, imperturbable warrior, after fasting, soli tude, and mortification of body, comes to the white man s lodge, and affirms that he is the white brother whom he saw in his dream, and adopts him henceforth. he buries the hatchet as it regards his friend, and they hunt and feast and make maple sugar together. &quot;met als unite from fluxility ; birds and beasts from motives of convenience; fools from fear and stupidity; and just men at sight.&quot; if wawa tam would taste the &quot;white man s milk&quot; with his tribe, or take his bowl of human broth made of the trader s fellow-countrymen, he first finds a place of safety for his friend, whom he has rescued from a similar fate. at length, after a long winter of undisturbed and happy intercourse in the family of the chieftain in the wilderness, hunting and fishing, they return in the spring to michilimackinac to dispose of their furs; and it becomes necessary for wawa wednesday 363 tarn to take leave of his friend at the isle aux outardes, when the latter, to avoid his enemies, proceeded to the sault de sainte marie, suppos ing that they were to be separated for a short time only. &quot;we now exchanged farewells,&quot; says henry, &quot;with an emotion entirely recipro cal. i did not quit the lodge without the most grateful sense of the many acts of goodness which i had experienced in it, nor without the sincerest respect for the virtues which i had witnessed among its members. all the family accompanied me to the beach; and the canoe had no sooner put off than wawatam com menced an address to the kichi manito, be seeching him to take care of me, his brother, till we should next meet. we had proceeded to too great a distance to allow of our hearing his voice, before wawatam had ceased to offer up his prayers.&quot; we never hear of him again. friendship is not so kind as is imagined ; it has not much human blood in it, but consists with a certain disregard for men and their erec tions, thej21n3stiatt-4iu^ while it purifies the air like electricity. there may be the sternest tragedy in the relation of two more than usually innocent and true to their highest instincts. we may call it an essen tially heathenish intercourse, free and irrespon sible in its nature, and practicing all the virtues 364 a week gratuitously. it is not the highest sympathy merely, but a pure and lofty society, a frag mentary and godlike intercourse of ancient date, still kept up at f intervals, wliio.h t remem bering itself, does not hesitate to disregard the ^rnihlar rights and dntifta nf hiin^prjy. it re quires immaculate and godlike qualities full grown, and exists at all only by condescension and anticipation of the remotest future. we love nothing which is merely good and not fair, if such a thing is possible. nature puts some kind of blossom before every fruit, not simply a calyx behind it. when the friend comes out of his heathenism and superstition, and breaks his idols, being converted by the pre cepts of a newer testament; when he forgets his mythology, and treats his ,friv^d like, a, chh^i tian^ or as he can afford; then friendship ceases to be friendship, and becomes charity; that principle which established the almshouse is now beginning with its charity at home, and establishing an almshouse and pauper relations there. as for the number which this society admits, it is at any rate to be begun with one, the no blest and greatest that we know, and whether the world will ever carry it further, whether, as chaucer affirms, wednesday 365 &quot; there be mo sterres in the skie than a pair,&quot; remains to be proved ; &quot; and certaine he is well begone among a thousand that findeth one.&quot; we shall not surrender ourselves heartily to any while we are conscious that another is more ^ deserving of our love. yet friendship does no stand for numbers ; the friend does not count his friends on his fingers ; they are not numera ble. the more there are included by this bond, if they are indeed included, the rarer and di viner the quality of the love that binds them. j am ready to believe that as private and inti mate a relation may exist by which three are embraced, as between two. indeed, we cannot have too many friends; the virtue which we ap preciate we to some extent appropriate, so that thus we are made at last more fit for every rela tion of life. a base friendship is of a narrow ing and exclusive tendency, but a noble one is not exclusive ; its very superfluity and dispersed love is the humanity which sweetens society, dnd sympathizes with foreign nations; for though its foundations are private, it^ is, in ^effect, a public affair and a public advantage, and the friend, more than the father of^jam ily, deserves well of the state. the only danger in friendship is that it will 3nd. it is a delicate plant, though a native. 366 a week the least unworthiness, even if it be unknown to one s self, vitiates it. let the friend know that those faults which he observes in his friend his own faults attract. there is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for n^r tmspj cions by finding what we suspected. by our narrowness and prejudices we say, i will have so much and such of you, my friend, no more. perhaps there are none charitable, none disin terested, none wise, noble, and heroic enough, for a true and lasting friendship. i sometimes hear my friends complain finely that i do not appreciate their fineness. i shall not tell them whether i do or not. as if they expected a vote of thanks for every fine thing which they uttered or did. who knows but it was finely appreciated. it may be that your silence was the finest thing of the two. there are some things which a man never speaks of, which are much finer kept silent about. to the highest communications we only lend a silent ear. our finest relations are not simply kept silent about, but buried under a positive depth of silence never to be revealed. it may be that we are not even yet acquainted. jn_human in jtercourse the tragedy logins, pot when there is_ misunderstanding about words^lxut-whejx silence isjnot understood. then there can never be an explanation what avails it that another lovoa wednesda y 367 j ^ ^ you, if he does not understand_you ? such love is a curse. what sort of companions are they who are presuming always that their silence is more expressive than yours?^ how foolish, and inconsiderate, and unjust, to conduct as if you were the only party aggrieved^ has not your i always equal ground of complaint ? no ~ doubt my friends sometimes speak to me in vain, but they do not know what things i hear which they are not aware that they have spoken. i know that i have frequently disappointed them by not giving them words when they ex pected them, or such as they expected. when ever i see my friend i speak to him; but the expecter, the man with the ears, is not he. they will complain too that you are hard. o ye that would have the cocoanut wrong side outwards, when next i weep i will let you know. they ask for words and deeds, when a * true relation (is word_and_deed. if they know not of these things, how can they be informed ? je._q.ften forbear to confess our feelings, not -from pride, but for fear that we could not con tinue to love the one who required us to give such proof of our affection. i know a woman who possesses a restless and intelligent mind, interested in her own culture, and earnest to enjoy the highest possible advan 368 a week tages, and i meet her with pleasure as a natural person who not a little provokes me, and i sup pose is stimulated in turn by myself. yet our acquaintance plainly does not attain to that de gree of confidence and sentiment which women, which all, in fact, covet. i am glad to help her, as i am helped by her ; i like very well to know her with a sort of stranger s privilege, and hesitate to visit her often, like her other friends. my nature pauses here, i do not well know why. perhaps she does not_make_-the. highest demand on me^j,__religigus_ demand. some, with whose prejudices or peculiar bias i have no sympathy, yet inspire me with confi dence, and i trust that they confide in me also as a religious heathen at least, a good greek. i, too, have principles as well founded as their own. if this person could conceive that, with out willfulness, i associate with her as far as our destinies are coincident, as far as our good geniuses permit, and still value such inter course, it would be a grateful assurance to me. i feel as if i appeared careless, indifferent, and without principle to her, not expecting more, and yet not content with less. if she could know that i make an infinite demand on myself, as well as on all others, she would see that this is infinitely but wednesda y 369 grounded one, without the principle of growth^ in ifr. for a companion, i require one who will make an equal demand on me with my own gen ius. such a one will always be rightly tolerant. it is suicide, and corrupts good manners, to welcome any less than this. i value and trust those_who love and_praise my aspiration rather jha.n my performance. if you would not stop to look at me, but look whither t am looking, and farther, then my education could not dispense with your company. my love must be as free as is the eagle s wing&quot;, hoveringo er land and sea and everything. i must not dim my eye in thy saloon, i must not leave my sky and nightly moon. be not the fowler s net which stays my flight, and craftily is set t allure the sight. but be the favoring gale that bears me on, and still doth fill my sail r when thou art gone_t i cannot leave my sky for thy caprice, true love would soar as high as heaven is. 370 a week the eagle would not brook her mate thus won, who trained his eye to look beneath the sun. few tilings are more difficult than to help a friend in matters which do not require the aid of friendship, but only a cheap and trivial ser vice, if your friendship wants the basis of a thorough practical acquaintance. i stand in the friendliest relation, on social and spiritual grounds, to one who does not perceive what practical skill i have, but when he seeks my assistance in such matters, is wholly ignorant of that one with whom he deals ; does not use my skill, which in such matters is much greater than his, but only my hands. i know another, who, on the contrary, is remarkable for his dis crimination in this respect; who knows how to make use of the talents of others when he does not possess the same; knows when not to look after or oversee, and stops short at his man. it is a rare pleasure to serve him, which all labor ers know. i am not a little pained by the other kind of treatment. it is as if, after the friend liest and most ennobling intercourse, your friend should use you as a hammer, and drive a nail with your head, all in good faith ; not withstanding that you are a tolerable carpenter, as well as his good friend, and would use a wednesday 371 hammer cheerfully in his service. this want of perception is a defect which all the virtues of the heart cannot supply : the good how can we trust ? only the wise are just. the good we use, the wise we cannot choose. these there are none above ; the good they know and love, but are not known again by those of lesser ken. they do not charm us with their eyes, but they transfix with their advice ; no partial sympathy they feel, with private woe or private weal, but with the universe joy and sigh, whose knowledge is their sympathy. confucius said : &quot; to contract ties of friend ship with any one is to contract friendship with his virtue. there ought not to be any other motive in friendship.&quot; ^^men_wish us to contract friendship with_t^irvicealso. i nave a, friend who wishes mejbo see that to be right whicff i know_to be wrong. but if friendship is to rob me of my eyes, if it is to darken the day, i will have none of it. it should be expansive and inconceivably liberaliz ing in its effects. true friendship can afford true knowledge. it does not depend on dark ness and ignorance. a want of discernment cannot be an ingredient in it. if i can see my 872 a week friend s virtues more distinctly than another s, his faults too are made more conspicuous by contrast. we have not so^good a right to hate anyas our^lmencl faults are not the less faults because they are invariably balanced by corresponding virtues, and for a fault there is no excuse, though it may appear greater than it is in many ways. i have never known one who could bear criticism, who could not be flattered, who would not bribe his judge, .or was content that the truth should be loved always better than himself,, if two travelers would go their way harmoni ously together, the one must take as true and just a view of things as the other, else their path will not be strewn with roses. yet you can travel profitably and pleasantly even with a blind man, if he practices common courtesy, and when you converse about the scenery will remember that he is blind but that you can see ; and you will not forget that his sense of hearing is probably quickened by his want of sight. otherwise you will not long keep company. a blind man, and a man in whose eyes there was no defect, were walking together, when they came to the edge of a precipice. &quot;take care, my friend,&quot; said the latter, &quot;here is a steep precipice; go no farther this way.&quot; &quot;i know better,&quot; said the other, and stepped off. wednesday 373 it is impossible to say all that we think, even to our truest friend. we may bid him farewell forever sooner than complain, for our complaint is too well grounded to be uttered. there is not so good an understanding between any two, but the exposure by the one of a seri ous fault in the other will produce a misunder standing in proportion to its heinousness. ^the constitutional differences wjiiell. always exist, ^andjaretobstacles tpja_perfect friendship, are forever a forbidden theme to the lips of friends. they advise by their whole behavior. nothing can_reconcile_them but love. they are fatally late when they undertake to explain and treat with one another like foes. who will take an f apology_for_ j^jfriend ? they must apologize like dew and frost, which are off again with the sun, and which all men know in their hearts to be beneficent. the necessity itself for explana tion, what explanation will atone for that? true love does not quarrel for slight reasons, such mistakes as mutual acquaintances can ex plain away, but, alas, however slight the appar ent cause, only for adequate and fatal and ever lasting reasons, which can never be set aside. its quarrel, if there is any, is ever recurring, notwithstanding the beams of affection which invariably come to gild its tears; as the rain bow, however beautiful and unerring a sign, 374 a week does not promise fair weather forever, but only for a season. i have known two or three per sons pretty well, and yet i have never known advice to be of use but in trivial and transient matters. one may know what another does not, but the utmost kindness cannot impart what is requisite to make the advice useful. we must accept or refuse one another as we are. i could tame a hyena more easily than my friend. he is a material which no tool of mine will work. a naked savage will fell an oak with a firebrand, and wear a hatchet out of a rock by friction, but i cannot hew the smallest chip out of the character of my friend, either to beautify or deform it. the lover learns at last that there is no per son quite transparent and trustworthy, but every one has a devil in him that is capable of any crime in the long run. yet, as an oriental philosopher has said, &quot;although friendship be tween good men is interrupted, their principles remain unaltered. the stalk of the lotus may be broken, and the fibres remain connected.&quot; ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without. there may be courtesy, there may be even temper, and wit, and talent, and sparkling conversation, there may be good-will even, and yet the humanest wednesday 875 and divinest faculties pine for exercise. our life without love is like coke and ashes. men may be pure as alabaster and parian marble, elegant as a tuscan villa, sublime as niagara, and yet if there is no milk mingled with the wine at their entertainments, better is the hos pitality of goths and vandals. my friend is not of some other race or fam ily of men, but flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone. he is my real brother. i see his nature groping yonder so like mine. we do not live far apart. have not the fates associated us in many ways? it says, in the vishnu purana: &quot;seven paces together is sufficient for the friendship of the virtuous, but thou and i have dwelt together.&quot; is it of no significance that we have so long partaken of the same loaf, drank at the same fountain, breathed the same air summer and winter, felt the same heat and cold; that the same fruits have been pleased to refresh us both, and we have never had a thought of different fibre the one from the other ! nature doth have her dawn each day, but mine are far between ; content, i cry, for sooth to say, mine brightest are i ween. for when my sun doth deign to rise, though it be her noontide, her fairest field in shadow lies nor can my light abide. 876 a week sometimes i bask me in her day, conversing with my mate, but if we interchange one ray, forthwith her heats abate. through his discourse i climb and see as from some eastern hill, a brighter morrow rise to me than lieth in her skill. as t were two summer days in one, two sundays come together, our rays united make one sun, with fairest summer weather. as surely as the sunset in my latest novem ber shall translate me to the ethereal world, and remind me of the ruddy morning of youth ; as surely as the last strain of music which falls on my decaying ear shall make age tq be for gotten, or, in short, the manifold influences of nature survive during the term of our natural life, so surely my friend shall forever be my friend, and reflect a ray of god to me, and time shall foster and adorn and consecrate our friendship, no less than the ruins of temples. as i love nature, as i love singing birds, and gleaming stubble, and flowing rivers, and morn ing and evening, and summer and winter, i love thee, my friend. but all that can be said of friendship is like botany to flowers. how can the understanding take account of its friendliness ? wednesday 377 even the death of friends will inspire us as much as their lives. they will leave consola tion to the mourners, as the rich leave money to defray the expenses of their funerals, and their memories will be incrusted over with sublime and pleasing thoughts, as monuments of other men are overgrown with moss ; for our friends have no place in the graveyard.^ this to our cis alpine and cis atlantic friends. also this other word of entreaty and advice to the large and respectable nation of acquaint ances, beyond the mountains ; greeting. my most serene and irresponsible neighbors, let us see that we have the whole advantage of each other; we will be useful, at least, if not admirable, to one another. i know that the mountains which separate us are high, and cov ered with perpetual snow, but despair not. im prove the serene winter weather to scale them. if need be, soften the rocks with vinegar. for here lie the verdant plains of italy ready to re ceive you. nor shall i be slow on my side to penetrate to your provence. strike then boldly at head or heart or any vital part. depend upon it, the timber is well seasoned and tough, and will bear rough usage; and if it should crack, there is plenty more where it came from. 378 a week i am no piece of crockery that cannot be jostled against my neighbor without danger of being broken by the collision, and must needs ring false and jarringly to the end of my days, when once i am cracked ; but rather one of the old-fashioned wooden trenchers, which one while stands at the head of the table, and at another is a milking-stool, and at another a seat for children, and finally goes down to its grave not unadorned with honorable scars, and does not die till it is worn out. nothing can shock a brave man but dullness. think how many re buffs every man has experienced in his day; perhaps has fallen into a horse -pond, eaten fresh-water clams, or worn one shirt for a week without washing. indeed, you cannot receive a shock unless you have an electric affinity for that which shocks you. use me, then, for i am useful in my way, and stand as one of many petitioners, from toadstool and henbane up to dahlia and violet, supplicating to be put to my use, if by any means ye may find me service able; whether for a medicated drink or bath, as balm and lavender ; or for fragrance, as ver bena and geranium ; or for sight, as cactus ; or for thoughts, as pansy. these humbler, at least, if not those higher uses. ah, my dear strangers and enemies, i would not forget you. i can well afford to welcome wednesday 379 you. let me subscribe myself yours ever _ truly, your much obliged servant. we have nothing to fear from our foes; god keeps a standing army for that service ; but we have no ally against our friends, those ruthless vandals. once more to one and all, &quot;friends, romans, countrymen, and lovers.&quot; let such pure hate still underprop our love, that we may be each other s conscience, and have our sympathy mainly from thence. we 11 one another treat like gods, and all the faith we have in virtue and in truth, bestow on either, and suspicion leave to gods below. two solitary stars, unmeasured systems far between us roll, but by our conscious light we are determined to one pole. what need confound the sphere, love can afford to wait, for it no hour s too late that witnesseth one duty s end, or to another doth beginning lend it will subserve no use, more than the tints of flowers, 580 a week only the independent guest frequents its bowers, inherits its bequest. no speech though kind has it, but kinder silence doles unto its mates, by night consoles, by day congratulates. what saith the tongue to tongue ? what heareth ear of ear ? by the decrees of fate from year to year, does it communicate. pathless the gulf of feeling yawns, no trivial bridge of words, or arch of boldest span, can leap the moat that girds the sincere man. no show of bolts and bars can keep the f oeman out, or scape his secret mine who entered with the doubt that drew the line. no warder at the gate can let the friendly in, but, like the sun, o er all he will the castle win, and shine along the wall. there s nothing in the world i know that can escape from love, for every depth it goes below, and every height above. wednesda y 381 it waits as waits the sky, until the clouds go by, yet shines serenely on with an eternal day, alike when they are gone, and when they stay. implacable is love, foes may be bought or teased from their hostile intent, but he goes unappeased who is on kindness bent. having rowed five or six miles above amos keag before sunset, and reached a pleasant part of the river, one of us landed to look for a farm house, where we might replenish our stores, while the other remained cruising about the stream, and exploring the opposite shores to find a suitable harbor for the night. in the mean while the canal-boats began to come round a point in our rear, poling their way along close to the shore, the breeze having quite died away. this time there was no offer of assistance, but one of the boatmen only called out to say, as the truest revenge for having been the losers in the race, that he had seen a wood-duck, which we had scared up, sitting on a tall, white pine, half a mile downstream; and he repeated the assertion several times, and seemed really cha grined at the apparent suspicion with which this information was received. but there sat the summer duck still, undisturbed by us. 382 a week by and by the other voyageur returned from his inland expedition, bringing one of the na tives with him, a little flaxen-headed boy, with some tradition, or small edition, of robinson crusoe in his head, who had been charmed by the account of our adventures, and asked his fa ther s leave to join us. he examined, at first from the top of the bank, our boat and furni ture, with sparkling eyes, and wished himself already his own man. he was a lively and y nteresting boy, and we should have been glad o ship him; but nathan was still his father s k&amp;gt;y, and had not come to years of discretion. we had got a loaf of home-made bread, and musk and water melons for dessert. for this farmer, a clever and well-disposed man, culti vated a large patch of melons for the hooksett and concord markets. he hospitably enter tained us the next day, exhibiting his hop-fields and kiln and melon patch, warning us to step over the tight rope which surrounded the latter at a foot from the ground, while he pointed to a little bower at one corner, where it connected rith the lock of a gun ranging with the line, tw nd where, as he informed us, he sometimes sat in pleasant nights to defend his premises against thieves. we stepped high over the line, and sympathized with our host s on the whole quite human, if not humane, interest in the sue wednesday 883 cess of his experiment. that night especially thieves were to be expected, from rumors in the atmosphere, and the priming was not wet. he was a methodist man, who had his dwelling between the river and uncannunuc mountain; who there belonged, and stayed at home there and by the encouragement of distant political 7 organizations, and by his own tenacity, held a property in his melons, and continued to plant. we suggested melon seeds of new varieties and fruit of foreign flavor to be added to his stock. we had come away up here among the hills to learn the impartial and unbribable beneficence of nature. strawberries and melons grow as well in one man s garden as another s, and the sun lodges as kindly under his hillside, when we had imagined that she inclined rather to some few earnest and faithful souls whom we know. we found a convenient harbor for our boat on the opposite or east shore, still in hooksett, at the mouth of a small brook which emptied into the merrimack, where it would be out of the way of any passing boat in the night, for they commonly hug the shore if bound up stream, either to avoid the current, or touch the bottom with their poles, and where it would be accessible without stepping on the clayey shore. we set one of our largest melons to 384 a week cool in the still water among the alders at the mouth of this creek, but when our tent was pitched and ready, and we went to get it, it had floated out into the stream, and was nowhere to be seen. so taking the boat in the twilight, we went in pursuit of this property, and at length, after long straining of the eyes, its green disk was discovered far down the river, gently float ing seaward with many twigs and leaves from the mountains that evening, and so perfectly balanced that it had not keeled at all, and no water had run in at the tap which had been taken out to hasten its cooling. as we sat on the bank eating our supper, the clear light of the western sky fell on the eastern trees, and was reflected in the water, and we enjoyed so serene an evening as left nothing to describe. for the most part we think that there are few degrees of sublimity, and that the highest is but little higher than that which we now behold ; but we are always deceived. sub limer visions appear, and the former pale and fade away. we are grateful when we are re minded by interior evidence of the permanence of universal laws; for our faith is but faintly remembered, indeed, is not a remembered as surance, but a use and enjoyment of knowledge. it is when we do not have to believe, but come into actual contact with truth, and are related wednesday 385 to her in the most direct and intimate way. waves of serener life pass over us from time to time, like flakes of sunlight over the fields in cloudy weather. in some happier moment, when more sap flows in the withered stalk of our life, syria and india stretch away from our present as they do in history. all the events which make the annals of the nations are but the shadows of our private experiences. sud denly and silently the eras which we call history awake and glimmer in us, and there is room for alexander and hannibal to march and conquer. in short, the history which we read is only a fainter memory of events which have happened in our own experience. tradition is a more interrupted and feebler memory. this world is but canvas to our imaginations. i^see men with infinite pains endeavoring ta realize to their bodies, what_j, with at least j?qual pains,w^ldjreajizjljax-jny imagination, &quot;^ its-capacities : for certainly there is a life of the mind above the wants of the body, and inde pendent of it. often the body is warmed, but the imagination is torpid ; the body is fat, but the imagination is lean and shrunk. but what avails all other wealth if this is wanting ? &quot; im agination is the air of mind,&quot; in which it lives and breathes. all things are a&i am. wharg^ tibfi fm of change? the past is only so 386 a week heroic as we see it. it is the canvas on which our idea of heroism is painted, and so, in one sense, the dim prospectus of our future field. our circumstances answer to our expectations and the demand of our natures. i have noticed that if a man thinks that he needs a thousand dollars, and cannot be convinced that he does not, he will commonly be found to have them ; if he lives and thinks, a thousand dollars will be forthcoming, though it be to buy shoe-strings with. a thousand mills will be just as slow to come to one who finds it equally hard to con vince himself that he needs them. men are by birth equal in this, that given themselves and. their condition, they are even. i am astonished at the singular pertinacity and endurance of our lives. ^ that what is is, when it is so difficult, if not im possible, for anything else to be ; that we walk on in our parti(mlar_athssoj^r, before we fall on death and fate, merely because we inust jamjfc in pnmn pntvi ?, f.tiflt. every man can get a living, and so few can do anything more, ^o much only can i accomplish ere health and fll nf| yet thisjmffices. the bird now sits just out of gunshot. i am never rich in money, and i am never meanly poor. if debts are incurred, why, debts are in the course of events canceled, as it were, by the wednesda y 387 same law by which they were incurred. i heard that an engagement was entered into between a certain youth and a maiden, and then i heard that it was broken off, but i did not know the reason in either case. we are hedged about, we think, by accident and circumstance ; now we creep as in a dream, and now again we run, as if there were a fate in it, and all things thwarted or assisted. i cannot change my clothes but when i do, and yet i do change them, and soil the new ones. it is wonderful that this gets done, when some admirable deeds which i could mention do not get done. our particular lives seem of such fortune and confident strength and durability as piers of solid rock thrown forward into the tide of circumstance. when every other path would fail, with singular and unerr ing confidence we advance on our particular course. what risks we run! famine and fire and pestilence, and the thousand forms of a cruel fate, and yet every man lives till he jdies. how did he manage that? is there no immediate danger? we wonder superfluously when we hear of a somnambulist walking a plank securely, we have walked a plank all our lives up to this particular string-piece where we are. my life will wait for nobody, but is being matured still without delay, while i go about the streets, and chaffer with this man and 388 a week that to secure it a living. it is as indifferent and easy meanwhile as a poor man s dog, and making acquaintance with its kind. it will cut its own channel like a mountain stream, and by the longest ridge is not kept from the sea at last. i have found all things thus far, persons and inanimate matter, elements and seasons, strangely adapted to my resources. no matter what imprudent haste in my career; i am per mitted to be rash. gulfs are bridged in a twinkling, as if some unseen baggage train car ried pontoons for my convenience, and while from the heights i scan the tempting but unex plored pacific ocean of futurity, the ship is being carried over the mountains piecemeal on the backs of mules and lamas, whose keel shall plough its waves, and bear me to the indies. day would not dawn if it were not for the inward morning. packed in my mind lie all the clothes which outward nature wears, and in its fashion s hourly change it all things else repairs. in vain i look for change abroad, and can no difference find, till some new ray of peace uncalled illumes my inmost mind. what is it gilds the trees and clouds, and paints the heavens so gay, wednesday 389 but yonder fast-abiding light with its unchanging ray ? lo, when the sun streams through the wood upon a winter s morn, where er his silent beams intrude the murky night is gone. how could the patient pine have known the morning breeze would come, or humble flowers anticipate the insect s noonday hum, till the new light with morning cheer from far streamed through the aisles, and nimbly told the forest trees for many stretching miles ? i ve heard within my inmost soul such cheerful morning news, in the horizon of my mind have seen such orient hues, as in the twilight of the dawn, when the first birds awake, are heard within some silent wood, where they the small twigs break, or in the eastern skies are seen, before the sun appears, the harbingers of summer heats which from afar he bears. whole weeks and months of my summer life slide away in thin volumes like mist and smoke, till at length, some warm morning, perchance, i see a sheet of mist blown down the brook to 890 a week the swamp, and i float as high above the fields with it. i can recall to mind the stillest sum mer hours, in which the grasshopper sings over the mulleins, and there is a valor in that time the bare memory of which is armor that can laugh at any blow of fortune. for our lifetime the strains of a harp are heard to swell and die alternately, and death is but &quot;the pause when the blast is recollecting itself.&quot; we lay awake a long while listening to the murmurs of the brook, in the angle formed by whose bank with the river our tent was pitched, and there was a sort of man interest in its story, which ceases not in freshet or in drought the livelong summer, and the profounder lapse of the river was quite drowned by its din. but the rill, whose &quot; silver sands and pebbles sing eternal ditties with the spring,&quot; is silenced by the first frosts of winter, while mightier streams, on whose bottom the sun never shines, clogged with sunken rocks and the ruins of forests, from whose surface comes up no mur mur, are strangers to the icy fetters which bind fast a thousand contributory rills. i dreamed this night of an event which had occurred long before. it was a difference with a friend, which had not ceased to give me pain, wednesda y 391 though i had no cause to blame myself. but in my dream ideal justice was at length done me for his suspicions, and i received that com pensation which i had never obtained in my waking hours. i was unspeakably soothed and rejoiced, even after i awoke, because in dreams we never deceive ourselves, nor are deceived, and this seemed to have the authority of a final judgment. we bless and curse ourselves. some dreams are divine, as well as some waking thoughts. donne sings of one &quot; who dreamt devoutlier than moat use to pray.&quot; dreams are the touchstones of our characters. we are scarcely less afflicted when we remem ber some unworthiness in our conduct in a dream, than if it had been actual, and the in tensity of our grief, which is our atonement, measures the degree by which this is separated from an actual unworthiness. for in dreams we but act a part which must have been learned and rehearsed in our waking hours, and no doubt could discover some waking consent thereto. if this meanness had not its founda tion in us, why are we grieved at it? in dreams we see ourselves naked and acting out our real characters, even more clearly than we see others awake. but an unwavering and commanding 892 a week virtue would compel even its most fantastic and faintest dreams to respect its ever-wakeful au thority; as we are accustomed to say carelessly, we should never have dreamed of such a thing. our truest life is when we are in dreams awake. &quot; and, more to lulle him in his slumber soft, a trickling streame from high rock tumbling downe, and ever-drizzling raine upon the loft, mixt with a murmuring winde, much like the sowne of swarming bees, did cast him in a swowne. no other noyse, nor people s troublous cryes, as still are wont t annoy the walled towne, might there be heard ; but careless quiet lyes wrapt in eternall silence farre from enemyea.&quot; thuksday. * 4 he trode the unplanted forest floor, whereon the all-seeing sun for ages hath not shone, where feeds the moose, and walks the surly bear, and up the tall mast runs the woodpecker. where darkness found him he lay glad at night ; there the red morning touched him with its light. go where he will, the wise man is at home, hie hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome ; where his clear spirit leads him, there s his road, by god s own light illumined and foreshowed.&quot; when we awoke this morning, we heard the faint, deliberate, and ominous sound of rain drops on our cotton roof. the rain had pattered all night, and now the whole country wept, the drops falling in the river, and on the alders, and in the pastures, and instead of any bow in the heavens, there was the trill of the hair bird all the morning. the cheery faith of this little bird atoned for the silence of the whole woodland choir beside. when we first stepped abroad, a flock of sheep, led by their rams, came rushing down a ravine in our rear, with heedless haste and unreserved frisking, as if unobserved by man, from some higher pasture where they had spent the night, to taste the 894 a week herbage by the river-side ; but when their lead ers caught sight of our white tent through the mist, struck with sudden astonishment, with their fore-feet braced, they sustained the rush ing torrent in their rear, and the whole flock stood stock-still, endeavoring to solve the mys tery in their sheepish brains. at length, con cluding that it boded no mischief to them, they spread themselves out quietly over the field. we learned afterward that we had pitched our tent on the very spot which a few summers be fore had been occupied by a party of penob scots. we could see rising before us through the mist a dark conical eminence called hook sett pinnacle, a landmark to boatmen, and also uncannunuc mountain, broad off on the west side of the river. this was the limit of our voyage, for a few hours more in the rain would have taken us to the last of the locks, and our boat was too heavy to be dragged around the long and numerous rapids which would occur. on foot, however, we continued up along the bank, feeling our way with a stick through the showery and foggy day, and climbing over the slippery logs in our path with as much pleasure and buoyancy as in brightest sunshine; scenting the fragrance of the pines and the wet clay under our feet, and cheered by the tones of invisible waterfalls; thursday 395 with visions of toadstools, and wandering frogs, and festoons of moss hanging from the spruce trees, and thrushes flitting silent under the leaves ; our road still holding together through that wettest of weather, like faith, while we confidently followed its lead. we managed te keep our thoughts dry, however, and only our clothes were wet. it was altogether a cloudy and drizzling day, with occasional brightenings in the mist, when the trill of the tree-sparrow seemed to be ushering in sunny hours. &quot;nothing that naturally happens to man can hurt him, earthquakes and thunderstorms not exeepted,&quot; said a man of genius, who at this time lived a few miles farther on our road. when compelled by a shower to take shelter under a tree, we may improve that opportunity for a more minute inspection of some of na ture s works. i have stood under a tree in the woods half a day at a time, during a heavy rain in the summer, and yet employed myself happily and profitably there prying with microscopic eye into the crevices of the bark or the leaves of the fungi at my feet. &quot; riches are the attendants of the miser; and the heavens rain plenteously upon the mountains.&quot; i can fancy that it would be a luxury to stand up to one s chin in some retired swamp a whole summer day, scent ing the wild honeysuckle and bilberry blows, 396 a week and lulled by the minstrelsy of gnats and mos quitoes ! a day passed in the society of those greek sages, such as described in the banquet of xenophon, would not be comparable with the dry wit of decayed cranberry vines, and the fresh attic salt of the moss-beds. say twelve hours of genial and familiar converse with the leopard frog; the sun to rise behind alder and dogwood, and climb buoyantly to his meridian of two hands breadth, and finally sink to rest behind some bold western hummock. to hear the evening chant of the mosquito from a thou sand green chapels, and the bittern begin to boom from some concealed fort like a sunset gun ! surely one may as profitably be soaked in the juices of a swamp for one day as pick his way dry-shod over sand. cold and damp, are they not as rich experience as warmth and dryness ? at present, the drops come trickling down the stubble while we lie drenched on a bed of withered wild oats, by the side of a bushy hill, and the gathering in of the clouds, with the last rush and dying breath of the wind, and then the regular dripping of twigs and leaves the country over, enhance the sense of inward com fort and sociableness. the birds draw closer and are more familiar under the thick foliage, seemingly composing new strains upon their thursday 397 roosts against the sunshine. what were the amusements of the drawing-room and the library in comparison, if we had them here? we should still sing as of old, my books i d fain cast off, i cannot read, twixt every page my thoughts go stray at large down in the meadow, where is richer feed, and will not mind to hit their proper targe. plutarch was good, and so was homer too, our shakespeare s life were rich to live again, what plutarch read, that was not good nor true, nor shakespeare s books, unless his books were men. here while i lie beneath this walnut bough, what care i for the greeks or for troy town, if juster battles are enacted now between the ants upon this hummock s crown ? bid homer waft till i the issue learn, if red or black the gods will favor most, or yonder ajax will the phalanx turn, struggling to heave some rock against the host. tell shakespeare to attend some leisure hour, for now i ve business with this drop of dew, and see you not, the clouds prepare a shower, i 11 meet him shortly when the sky is blue. this bed of herd s-grass and wild oats was spread last year with nicer skill than monarchs use, a clover tuft is pillow for my head, and violets quite overtop my shoes. and now the cordial clouds have shut all in, and gently swells the wind to say all s well, 398 a week the scattered drops are falling fast and thin, some in the pool, some in the flower-bell. i am well drenched upon my bed of oats ; but see that globe come rolling down its stem ; now like a lonely planet there it floats, and now it sinks into my garment s hem. drip, drip the trees for all the country round, and richness rare distills from every bough, the wind alone it is makes every sound, shaking down crystals on the leaves below. for shame the sun will never show himself, who could not with his beams e er melt me so, my dripping locks, they would become an elf, who in a beaded coat does gayly go. the pinnacle is a small wooded hill which rises very abruptly to the height of about two hundred feet, near the shore at hooksett falls. as uncannunuc mountain is perhaps the best point from which to view the valley of the merrimack, so this hill affords the best view of the river itself. i have sat upon its summit, a precipitous rock only a few rods long, in fairer weather, when the sun was setting and filling the river valley with a flood of light. you can see up and down the merrimack several miles each way. the broad and straight river, full of light and life, with its sparkling and foaming falls, the islet which divides the stream, the vil lage of hooksett on the shore almost directly thursday 399 under your feet, so near that you can converse with its inhabitants or throw a stone into its yards, the woodland lake at its western base, and the mountains in the north and northeast, make a scene of rare beauty and completeness, which the traveler should take pains to behold. we were hospitably entertained in concord, new hampshire, which we persisted in calling new concord, as we had been wont, to distin guish it from our native town, from which we had been told that it was named and in part originally settled. this would have been the proper place to conclude our voyage, uniting concord with concord by these meandering rivers, but our boat was moored some miles below its port. the richness of the intervals at penacook, now concord, new hampshire, had been ob served by explorers, and, according to the histo rian of haverhill, in&quot; the &quot;year 1726, considera ble progress was made in the settlement, and a road was cut through the wilderness from ha verhill to penacook. in the fall of 1727, the first family, that of captain ebenezer eastman, moved into the place. his team was driven by jacob shute, who was by birth a frenchman, and he is said to have been the first person who drove a team through the wilderness. soon after, says tradition, one ayer, a lad of eigh 400 a week teen drove a team consisting of ten yoke of oxen to penacook, swam the river, and ploughed a portion of the interval. he is supposed to have been the first person who ploughed land in that place. after he had completed his work, he started on his return at sunrise, drowned a yoke of oxen while recrossing the river, and arrived at haverhill about midnight. the crank of the first saw-mill was manufactured in haverhill, and carried to penacook on a horse.&quot; but we found that the frontiers were not this way any longer. this generation has come into the world fatally late for some enterprises. go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before us. we cannot now have the pleasure of erecting the last house; that was long ago set up in the suburbs of as toria city, and our boundaries have literally been run to the south sea, according to the old patents. but the lives of men, though more extended laterally in their range, are still as shallow as ever. undoubtedly, as a western orator said, &quot;men generally live over about the same surface ; some live long and narrow, and others live broad and short;&quot; but it is all su perficial living. a worm is as good a traveler as a grasshopper or a cricket, and a much wiser settler. with all their activity these do not hop away from drought nor forward to summer. thursday 401 we do not avoid evil by fleeing before it, but by rising above or diving below its plane; as the worm escapes drought and frost by boring a few inches deeper. the frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be his neighbor, there is an unsettled wilderness between him and canada, between him and the setting sun, or, farther still, between him and it. let him build himself a log-house with the bark on where he is, fronting it, and wage there an old french war for seven or seventy years, with indians and rangers, or whatever else may come between him and the reality, and save his scalp if he can. we now no longer sailed or floated on the river, but trod the unyielding land like pil grims. sadi tells who may travel; among others, &quot;a common mechanic, who can earn a subsistence by the industry of his hand, and shall not have to stake his reputation for every morsel of bread, as philosophers have said.&quot; he may travel who can subsist on the wild fruits and game of the most cultivated country. a man may travel fast enough and earn his liv ing on the road. i have at times been applied to, to do work when on a journey; to do tinker ing and repair clocks, when i had a knapsack 402 a week on my back. a man once applied to me to go into a factory, stating conditions and wages, observing that i succeeded in shutting the win dow of a railroad car in which we were trav eling, when the other passengers had failed. &quot;hast thou not heard of a sufi, who was hammering some nails into the sole of his sandal; an officer of cavalry took him by the sleeve, saying, come along and shoe my horse.&quot; farmers have asked me to assist them in haying when i was passing their fields. a man once applied to me to mend his umbrella, taking me for an umbrella-mender, because, being on a journey, i carried an umbrella in my hand while the sun shone. another wished to buy a tin cup of me, observing that i had one strapped to my belt, and a sauce-pan on my back. the cheapest way to travel, and the way to travel the farthest in the shortest distance, is to go afoot, carrying a dipper, a spoon, and a fish-line, some indian meal, some salt, and some sugar. when you come to a brook or pond, you can catch fish and cook them ; or you can boil a hasty-pudding ; or you can buy a loaf of bread at a farmer s house for fourpence, moisten it in the next brook that crosses the road, and dip into it your sugar, this alone will last you a whole day ; or, if you are ac customed to heartier living, you can buy a thursday 403 quart of milk for two cents, crumb your bread or cold pudding into it, and eat it with your own spoon out of your own dish. any one of these things i mean, not all together. i have traveled thus some hundreds of miles without taking any meal in a house, sleeping on the ground when convenient, and found it cheaper, and in many respects more profitable, than staying at home. so that some have inquired why it would not be best to travel always. but i never thought of traveling simply as a means of getting a livelihood. a simple woman down in tyngsborough, at whose house i once stopped to get a draught of water, when i said, recog nizing the bucket, that i had stopped there nine years before for the same purpose, asked if i was not a traveler, supposing that i had been traveling ever since, and had now come round again; that traveling was one of the profes sions, more or less productive, which her hus band did not follow. but continued traveling is far from productive. it begins with wearing away the soles of the shoes, and making the feet sore, and erelong it will wear a man clean up, after making his heart sore into the bargain. i have observed that the after-life of those who have traveled much is very pathetic. true and sincere traveling is no pastime, but it is as serious as the grave, or any part of the human 404 a week journey, and it requires a long probation to be broken into it. i do not speak of those that travel sitting, the sedentary travelers whose legs hang dangling the while, mere idle symbols of the fact, any more than when we speak of sitting hens we mean those that sit standing, but i mean those to whom traveling is life for the legs, and death too, at last. the traveler must be born again on the road, and earn a passport from the elements, the principal powers that be for him. he shall experience at last that old threat_pf his mother fulfilled^jthat he shall be skinned alive. his sores shaltgrad ually deepen themselves that they may heal in wardly, while he gives no rest to the sole of his foot, and at night weariness must be his pillow, that so he may acquire experience against his rainy days. so was it with us. sometimes we lodged at an inn in the woods, where trout fishers from distant cities had ar rived before us, and where, to our astonish ment, the settlers dropped in at nightfall to have a chat and hear the news, though there was but one road, and no other house was visi ble, as if they had come out of the earth. there we sometimes read old newspapers, who never before read new ones, and in the rustle of their leaves heard the dashing of the surf along the atlantic shore, instead of the sough of the thursday 405 wind among the pines. but then walking had given us an appetite even for the least palatable and nutritious food. some hard and dry book in a dead language, which you have found it impossible to read at home, but for which you have still a lingering regard, is the best to carry with you on a jour ney. at a country inn, in the barren society of ostlers and travelers, i could undertake the writers of the silver or the brazen age with con fidence. almost the last regular service which i performed in the cause of literature was to read the works of aulus persius flaccus. if you have imagined what a divine work is spread out for the poet, and approach this au thor too, in the hope of finding the field at length fairly entered on, you will hardly dissent from the words of the prologue, &quot; ipse semipaganus ad sacra vatum carmen affero nostrum. * i half pagan bring my verses to the shrine of the poets. here is none of the interior dignity of virgil, nor the elegance and vivacity of horace, nor will any sibyl be needed to remind you, that from those older greek poets there is a sad de scent to persius. you can scarcely distinguish 406 a week one harmonious sound amid this unmusical bick ering with the follies of men. one sees that music has its place in thought, but hardly as yet in language. when the muse arrives, we wait for her to remould lan guage, and impart to it her own rhythm. hitherto the verse groans and labors with its load, and goes not forward blithely, singing by the way. the best ode may be parodied, in deed is itself a parody, and has a poor and triv ial sound, like a man stepping on the rounds of a ladder. homer and shakespeare and milton and marvell and wordsworth are but the rub tling of leaves and crackling of twigs in the for est, and there is not yet the sound of any bird. the muse has never lifted up her voice to sing. most of all, satire will not be sung. a juvenal or persius do not marry music to their verse, but are measured fault-finders at best; stand but just outside the faults they condemn, and so are concerned rather about the monster which they have escaped, than the fair prospect before them. let them live on an age, and they will have traveled out of his shadow and reach, and found other objects to ponder. as long as there is satire, the poet is, as it were, particeps criminis. one sees not but he had best let bad take care of itself, and have to do only with what is beyond suspicion. if thursday 407 you light on the least vestige of truth, and it is the weight of the whole body still which stamps the faintest trace, an eternity will not suffice to extol it, while no evil is so huge, but you grudge to bestow on it a moment of hate. truth never turns to rebuke falsehood ; her own straightfor wardness is the severest correction, horace would not have written satire so well if he had not been inspired by it, as by a passion, and fondly cherished his vein. in his odes, the love always exceeds the hate, so that the severest satire still sings itself, and the poet is satisfied, though the folly be not corrected. a sort of necessary order in the development of genius is, first, complaint; second, plaint; third, love. complaint, which is the condition of persius, lies not in the province of poetry. erelong the enjoyment of a superior good would have changed his disgust into regret. we can never have much sympathy with the complainer ; for after searching nature through, we conclude that he must be both plaintiff and defendant too, and so had best come to a settlement with out a hearing. he who receives an injury is to some extent an accomplice of the wrong-doer. perhaps it would be truer to say, that the highest strain of the muse is essentially plain tive. the saint s are still tears of joy. who has ever head the innocent sing? 408 a week but the divinest poem, or the life of a great man, is the severest satire; as impersonal as nature herself, and like the sighs of her winds in the woods, which convey ever a slight reproof to the hearer. the greater the genius, the keener the edge of the satire. hence we have to do only with the rare and fragmentary traits, which least belong to per sius, or shall we say, are the properest utter ances of his muse ; since that which he says best at any time is what he can best say at all times. the spectators and ramblers have not failed to cull some quotable sentences from this garden too, so pleasant is it to meet even the most fa miliar truth in a new dress, when, if our neigh bor had said it, we should have passed it by as hackneyed. out of these six satires, you may perhaps select some twenty lines, which fit so well as many thoughts, that they will recur to the scholar almost as readily as a natural image ; though when translated into familiar language, they lose that insular emphasis, which fitted them for quotation. such lines as the follow ing, translation cannot render commonplace. contrasting the man of true religion with those jvho, with jealous privacy, would fain carry on a secret commerce with the gods, he says : ** haud cuivis promptum est, murmurque humilesque susurroa tollere de templis ; et aperto vivere voto.&quot; thursday 409 it is not easy for every one to take murmurs and low whispers out of the temples, and live with open vow. to the virtuous man, the universe is the only sanctum, sanctorum^ and the penetralia of the temple are the broad noon of his existence. why should he betake himself to a subterranean crypt, as if it were the only holy ground in all the world which he had left unprofaned? the obedient soul would only the more discover and familiarize things, and escape more and more into light and air, as having henceforth done with secrecy, so that the universe shall not seem open enough for it. at length, it is neglectful even of that silence which is consistent with true modesty, but by its independence of all confi dence in its disclosures makes that which it im parts so private to the hearer, that it becomes the care of the whole world that modesty be not infringed. to the man who cherishes a secret in his breast, there is a still greater secret unexplored. our most indifferent acts may be matter for secrecy, but whatever we do with the utmost truthfulness and integrity, by virtue of its pure ness, must be transparent as light. in the third satire, he asks : &quot; est aliquid quo tendis, et in quod dirigis arcum ? an passim sequeris corvos, teststve, lutove, securus quo pes f erat, atque ex tempore vivis ? &quot; 410 a week is there anything to which thou tendest, and against which thou directest thy bow ? or dost thou pursue crows, at random, with pottery or clay, careless whither thy feet bear thee, and live ex tempore ? the bad sense is always a secondary one. language does not appear to have justice done it, but is obviously cramped and narrowed in its significance, when any meanness is described. the truest construction is not put upon it. what may readily be fashioned into a rule of wisdom is here thrown in the teeth of the slug gard, and constitutes the front of his offense. universally, the innocent man will come forth from the sharpest inquisition and lecturing, the combined din of reproof and commendation, with a faint sound of eulogy in his ears. our vices always lie in the direction of our virtues, and in their best estate are but plausible imita tions of the latter. falsehood never attains to the dignity of entire falseness, but is only an inferior sort of truth ; if it were more thoroughly false, it would incur danger of becoming true. &quot; securus quo pes ferat, atque ex tempore vivit, &quot; is then the motto of a wise man. for first, as the subtle discernment of the language would have taught us, with all his negligence he is still secure; but the sluggard, notwithstanding his heedlessness, is insecure. the life of a wise man is most of all extern thursday 411 poraneous, for he lives out of an eternity which includes all time. the cunning mind travels further back than zoroaster each instant, and comes quite down to the present with its revela tion. the utmost thrift and industry of think ing give no man any stock in life; his credit with the inner world is no better, his capital no larger. he must try his fortune again to-day as yesterday. all questions rely on the present for their solution. time measures nothing but itself. the word that is written may be post poned, but not that on the lip. if this is what the occasion says, let the occasion say it. all the world is forward to prompt him who gets up to live without his creed in his pocket. in the fifth satire, which is the best, i find, &quot;stat contra ratio, et secretam garrit in aurem, ne liceat facere id, quod quis vitiabit agendo.&quot; reason opposes, and whispers in the secret ear, that it is not lawful to do that which one will spoil by doing. only they who do not see how anything might be better done are forward to try their hand on it. even the master workman must be en couraged by the reflection that his awkwardness will be incompetent to do that thing harm, to which his skill may fail to do justice. here is no apology for neglecting to do many things from a sense of our incapacity, for what deed 412 a week does not fall maimed and imperfect from our hands? but only a warning to bungle less. the satires of persius are the furthest pos sible from inspired; evidently a chosen, not imposed subject. perhaps i have given him credit for more earnestness than is apparent; but it is certain that that which alone we can call persius, which is forever independent and consistent, was in earnest, and so sanctions the sober consideration of all. the artist and his work are not to be separated. the most will fully foolish man cannot stand aloof from his folly, but the deed and the doer together make ever one sober fact. there is but one stage for the peasant and the actor. the buffoon cannot bribe you to laugh always at his grimaces ; they shall sculpture themselves in egyptian granite, to stand heavy as the pyramids on the ground of his character. suns rose and set and found us still on the dank forest path which meanders up the pemige wasset, now more like an otter s or a marten s trail, or where a beaver had dragged his trap, than where the wheels of travel raise a dust; where towns begin to serve as gores, only to hold the earth together. the wild pigeon sat secure above our heads, high on the dead limbs thursday 413 of naval pines, reduced to a robin s size. the very yards of our hostelries inclined upon the skirts of mountains, and, as we passed, we looked up at a steep angle at the stems of maples waving in the clouds. far up in the country, for we would be faithful to our experience, in thornton, per haps, we met a soldier lad in the woods, going to muster in full regimentals, and holding the middle of the road; deep in the forest, with shouldered musket and military step, and thoughts of war and glory all to himself. it was a sore trial to the youth, tougher than many a battle, to get by us creditably and with sol dier-like bearing. poor man! he actually shivered like a reed in his thin military pants, and by the time we had got up with him, all the sternness that becomes the soldier had forsaken his face, and he skulked past as if he were driving his father s sheep under a sword-proof helmet. it was too much for him to carry any extra armor then, who could not easily dis pose of his natural arms. and for his legs, they were like heavy artillery in boggy places ; better to cut the traces and forsake them. his greaves chafed and wrestled one with another for want of other foes. but he did get by and get off with all his munitions, and lived to fight another day ; and i do not record this as casting 414 a week any suspicion on his honor and real bravery in che field. wandering on through notches which the streams had made, by the side and over the brows of hoar hills and mountains, across the stumpy, rocky, forested, and bepastured coun try, we at length crossed on prostrate trees over the amonoosuck, and breathed the free air of unappropriated land. thus, in fair days as well as foul, we had traced up the river to which our native stream is a tributary, until from merrimack it became the pemigewasset that leaped by our side, and when we had passed its fountain-head, the wild amonoosuck, whose puny channel was crossed at a stride, guiding us toward its distant source among the moun tains, at length, without its guidance, we were enabled to reach the summit of agiocochook. &quot; sweet day; so cool, so calm, so bright, the bridal of the earth and sky, the dew shall weep thy fall to-night, for thou must die.&quot; herbert. when we returned to hooksett, a week after ward, the melon man, in whose corn-barn we had hung our tent and buffaloes and other things to dry, was already picking his hops, thursday 415 with many women and children to help him. we bought one watermelon, the largest in his patch, to carry with us for ballast. it was gatkan s, which he might sell if he wished, having been conveyed to him in the green state, and owned daily by his eyes. after due con sultation with &quot;father,&quot; the bargain was con cluded, we to buy it at a venture on the vine, green or ripe, our risk, and pay &quot;what the gentlemen pleased.&quot; it proved to be ripe; for we had had honest experience in selecting this fruit. finding our boat safe in its harbor, under uncannunuc mountain, with a fair wind and the current in our favor, we commenced our re turn voyage at noon, sitting at our ease and conversing, or in silence watching for the last trace of each reach in the river as a bend con cealed it from our view. as the season was further advanced, the wind now blew steadily from the north, and with our sail set we could occasionally lie on our oars without loss of time. the lumbermen throwing down wood from the top of the high bank, thirty or forty feet above the water, that it might be sent downstream, paused in their work to watch our retreating sail. by this time, indeed, we were well known to the boatmen, and were hailed as the revenue cutter of the stream. as we sailed rapidly 416 a week down the river, shut in between two mounds of earth, the sounds of this timber rolled down the bank enhanced the silence and vastness of the noon, and we fancied that only the primeval echoes were awakened. the vision of a distant scow just heaving in sight round a headland alsc increased by contrast the solitude. through the din and desultoriness of noon, even in the most oriental city, is seen the fresh and primitive and savage nature, in which scy thians and ethiopians and indians dwell. what is echo, what are light and shade, day and night, ocean and stars, earthquake and eclipse, there? the works of man are every where swallowed up in the immensity of nature. the ^egean sea is but lake huron still to the indian. also there is all the refinement of civilized life in the woods under a sylvan garb. the wildest scenes have an air of domesticity and homeliness even to the citizen, and when the flicker s cackle is heard in the clearing, he is reminded that civilization has wrought but little change there. science is welcome to the deepest recesses of the forest, for there too na ture obeys the same old civil laws. the little red bug on the stump of a pine, for it the wind shifts and the sun breaks through the clouds. in the wildest nature, there is not only the material of the most cultivated life, and a thursda y 417 sort of anticipation of the last result, but a greater refinement already than is ever attained by man. there is papyrus by the river-side, and rushes for light, and the goose only flies overhead, ages before the studious are born or letters invented, and that literature which the former suggest, and even from the first have rudely served, it may be man does not yet use them to express. nature is prepared to wel come into her scenery the finest work of human art, for she is herself an art so cunning that the artist never appears in his work. art is not tame, and nature is not wild, in the ordinary sense. a perfect work of man s art would also be wild or natural in a good sense. man tames nature only that he may at last make her more free even than he found her, though he may never yet have succeeded. with this propitious breeze, and the help of our oars, we soon reached the falls of amos keag, and the mouth of the piscataquoag, and recognized, as we swept rapidly by, many a fair bank and islet on which our eyes had rested in the upward passage. our boat was like that which chaucer describes in his dream, in which the knight took his departure from the island, &quot;to journey for his marriage, and return with such an host, 418 a week that wedded might be least and most. . which barge was as a man s thought, after his pleasure to him brought, the queene herself accustomed aye in the same barge to play, it needed neither mast lie rother, i have not heard of such another, no master for the governance, hie sayled by thought and pleasaunce, without labor east and west, all was one, calme or tempest.&quot; so we sailed this afternoon, thinking of the say ing of pythagoras, though we had no peculiar right to remember it, &quot;it is beautiful when prosperity is present with intellect, and when sailing as it were with a prosperous wind, ac tions are performed looking to virtue ; just as a pilot looks to the motions of the stars.&quot; all the world reposes in beauty to him who pre serves equipoise in his life, and moves serenely on his path without secret violence; as he who sails down a stream, he has only to steer, keep ing his bark in the middle, and carry it round the falls. the ripples curled away in our wake, like ringlets from the head of a child, while we steadily held on our course, and under the bows we watched &quot; the swaying soft, made by the delicate wave parted in front, as through the gentle element we move like shadows gliding through untroubled realms.&quot; the forms of beauty fall naturally around the thursday 419 path of him who is in the performance of his proper work; as the curled shavings drop from the plane, and borings cluster round the auger. undulation is the gentlest and most ideal of mo tions, produced by one fluid falling on another. rippling is a more graceful flight. from a hill-top you may detect in it the wings of birds endlessly repeated. the two waving lines which represent the flight of birds appear to have been copied from the ripple. the trees made an admirable fence to the landscape, skirting the horizon on every side. the single trees and the groves left standing on the interval appeared naturally disposed, though the farmer had consulted only his convenience, for he too falls into the scheme of nature. art can never match the luxury and superfluity of nature. in the former all is seen; it cannot afford concealed wealth, and is niggardly iu comparison ; but nature, even when she is scant and thin outwardly, satisfies us still by the as surance of a certain generosity at the roots. in swamps, where there is only here and there an evergreen tree amid the quaking moss and cran berry beds, the bareness does not suggest pov erty. the single-spruce, which i had hardly noticed in gardens, attracts me in such places, and now first i understand why men try to make them grow about their houses. but though 420 a week there may be very perfect specimens in front yard plots, their beauty is for the most part in effectual there, for there is no such assurance of kindred wealth beneath and around them, to make them show to advantage. as we have said, nature is a greater and more perfect art, the art of god; though, referred to herself, she is genius ; and there is a similarity between her operations and man s art even in the details and trifles. when the overhanging pine drops into the water, by the sun and water, and the wind rubbing it against the shore, its boughs are worn into fantastic shapes, and white and smooth, as if turned in a lathe. man s art has wisely imi tated those forms into which all matter is most inclined to run, as foliage and fruit. a ham mock swung in a grove assumes the exact form of a canoe, broader or narrower, and higher or lower at the ends, as more or fewer persons are in it, and it rolls in the air with the motion of the body, like a canoe in the water. our art leaves its shavings and its dust about; her art exhibits itself even in the shavings and the dust which we make. she has perfected herself by an eternity of practice. the world is well kept ; no rubbish accumulates ; the morning air is clear even at this day, and no dust has settled on the grass. behold how the evening now steals over the fields, the shadows of the trees thursday 421 creeping farther and farther into the meadow, and erelong the stars will come to bathe in these retired waters. her undertakings are secure and never fail. if i were awakened from a deep sleep, i should know which side of the meridian the sun might be by the aspect of na ture, and by the chirp of the crickets, and yet no painter can paint this difference. the land scape contains a thousand dials which indicate the natural divisions of time, the shadows of a thousand styles point to the hour. &quot;not only o er the dial s face, this silent phantom day by day, with slow, unseen, unceasingpace steals moments, months, and years away ; from hoary rock and aged tree, from proud palmyra s mouldering 1 walls, from teneriffe, towering o er the sea, from every blade of grass it falls.&quot; it is almost the only game which the trees play at, this tit-for-tat, now this side in the sun, now that, the drama of the day. in deep ra vines under the eastern sides of cliffs, night for wardly plants her foot even at noonday, and as day retreats she steps into his trenches, skulk ing from tree to tree, from fence to fence, until at last she sits in his citadel and draws out her forces into the plain. it may be that the fore noon is brighter than the afternoon, not only because of the greater transparency of its at 422 a week mosphere, but because we naturally loolnnost into thejrrflflt, n,pj forward .into the^jjay^and so in the forenoon see the sunny side of things, but in the afternoon the shadow of every tree. the afternoon is now far advanced, and a fresh and leisurely wind is blowing over the river, making long reaches of bright ripples. the river has done its stint, and appears not to flow, but lie at its length reflecting the light, and the haze over the woods is like the inaudible panting, or rather the gentle perspiration of resting nature, rising from a myriad of pores into the attenuated atmosphere. on the thirty-first day of march, one hundred and forty-two years before this, probably about this time in the afternoon, there were hurriedly paddling down this part of the river, between the pine woods which then fringed these banks, two white women and a boy, who had left an island at the mouth of the contoocook before daybreak. they were slightly clad for the season, in the english fashion, and handled their paddles unskillfully, but with nervous en ergy and determination, and at the bottom of their canoe lay the still bleeding scalps of ten of the aborigines. they were hannah dustan, and her nurse, mary neff, both of haverhill, eighteen miles from the mouth of this river, and thursday 423 an english boy, named samuel lennardson, escaping from captivity among the indians. on the 15th of march previous, hannah dus tan had been compelled to rise from childbed, and half dressed, with one foot bare, accom panied by her nurse, commence an uncertain march, in still inclement weather, through the snow and the wilderness. she had seen her seven elder children flee with their father, but knew not of their fate. she had seen her in fant s brains dashed out against an apple-tree, and had left her own and her neighbors dwell ings in ashes. when she reached the wigwam of her captor, situated on an island in the mer rimack, more than twenty miles above where we now are, she had been told that she and her nurse were soon to be taken to a distant indian settlement, and there made to run the gauntlet naked. the family of this indian consisted of two men, three women, and seven children, besides an english boy, whom she found a prisoner among them. having determined to attempt her escape, she instructed the boy to inquire of one of the men, how he should dis patch an enemy in the quickest manner, and take his scalp. &quot; strike em there,&quot; said he, placing his finger on his temple, and he also showed him how to take off the scalp. on the morning of the 31st she arose before daybreak, 424 a week and awoke her nurse and the boy, and taking the indians tomahawks, they killed them all in their sleep, excepting one favorite boy, and one squaw who fled wounded with him to the woods. the english boy struck the indian who had given him the information, on the temple, as he had been directed. they then collected all the provision they could find, and took their mas ter s tomahawk and gun, and scuttling all the canoes but one, commenced their flight to ha verhill, distant about sixty miles by the river. but after having proceeded a short distance, fearing that her story would not be believed if she should escape to tell it, they returned to the silent wigwam, and taking off the scalps of the dead, put them into a bag as proofs of what they had done, and then, retracing their steps to the shore in the twilight, recommenced their voyage. early this morning this deed was performed, and now, perchance, these tired women and this boy, their clothes stained with blood, and their minds racked with alternate resolution and fear, are making a hasty meal of parched corn and moose-meat, while their canoe glides under these pine roots whose stumps are still standing on the bank. they are thinking of the dead whom they have left behind on that solitary isle far up the stream, and of the relentless living warriors thursday 425 who are in pursuit. every withered leaf which the winter has left seems to know their story, and in its rustling to repeat it and betray them. an indian lurks behind every rock and pine, and their nerves cannot bear the tapping of a woodpecker. or they forget their own dangers and their deeds in conjecturing the fate of their kindred, and whether, if they escape the indi ans, they shall find the former still alive. they do not stop to cook their meals upon the bank, nor land, except to carry their canoe about the falls. the stolen birch forgets its master and does them good service, and the swollen current bears them swiftly along with little need of the paddle, except to steer and keep them warm by exercise. for ice is floating in the river; the spring is opening; the musk-rat and the beaver are driven out of their holes by the flood; deer gaze at them from the bank ; a few faint-sing ing forest birds, perchance, fly across the river to the northernmost shore; the fish-hawk sails and screams overhead, and geese fly over with a startling clangor; but they do not observe these things, or they speedily forget them. they do not smile or chat all day. sometimes they pass an indian grave surrounded by its paling on the bank, or the frame of a wigwam, with a few coals left behind, or the withered stalks still rustling in the indian s solitary corn 426 a week field on the interval. the birch stripped of its bark, or the charred stump where a tree has been burned down to be made into a canoe, these are the only traces of man, a fabulous wild man to us. on either side, the primeval forest stretches away uninterrupted to canada, or to the &quot;south sea; &quot; to the white man a drear and howling wilderness, but to the indian a home, adapted to his nature, and cheerful as the smile of the great spirit. while we loiter here this autumn evening, looking for a spot retired enough, where we shall quietly rest to-night, they thus, in that chilly march evening, one hundred and forty two years before us, with wind and current favoring, have already glided out of sight, not to camp, as we shall, at night, but while two sleep one will manage the canoe, and the swift stream bear them onward to the settlements, it may be, even to old john love well s house on salmon brook to-night. according to the historian, they escaped as by a miracle all roving bands of indians, and reached their homes in safety, with their tro phies, for which the general court paid them fifty pounds. the family of hannah dustan all assembled alive once more, except the infant whose brains were dashed out against the apple tree, and there have been many who in later thursday 427 times have lived to say that they had eaten of the fruit of that apple-tree. this seems a long while ago, and yet it hap pened since milton wrote his paradise lost. but its antiquity is not the less great for that, for we do not regulate our historical time by the english standard, nor did the english by the roman, nor the roman by the greek. &quot;we must look a long way back,&quot; says ra leigh, &quot;to find the romans giving laws to na tions, and their consuls bringing kings and princes bound in chains to rome in triumph ; to see men go to greece for wisdom, or ophir for gold; when now nothing remains but a poor paper remembrance of their former condition.&quot; and yet, in one sense, not so far back as to find the penacooks and pawtuckets using bows and arrows and hatchets of stone, on the banks of the merrimack. from this september after noon, and from between these now cultivated shores, those times seemed more remote than the dark ages. on beholding an old picture of concord, as it appeared but seventy-five years ago, with a fair open prospect and a light on trees and river, as if it were broad noon, i find that i had not thought the sun shone in those days, or that men lived in broad daylight then. still less do we imagine the sun shining on hill 428 a week and valley during philip s war, on the war-path of church or philip, or later of lovewell or paugus, with serene summer weather, but they must have lived and fought in a dim twilight or night. the age of the world is great enough for our imaginations, even according to the mosaic ac count, without borrowing any years from the geologist. from adam and eve at one leap sheer down to the deluge, and then through the ancient monarchies, through babylon and thebes, brahma and abraham, to greece and the argonauts; whence we might start again with orpheus and the trojan war, the pyra mids and the olympic games, and homer and athens, for our stages; and after a breathing space at the building of home, continue our journey down through odin and christ to america. it is a wearisome while. and yet the lives of but sixty old women, such as live under the hill, say of a century each, strung together, are sufficient to reach over the whole ground. taking hold of hands they would span the interval from eve to my own mother. a respectable tea-party merely, whose gossip would be universal history. the fourth old woman from myself suckled columbus, the ninth was nurse to the norman conqueror, the nineteenth was the virgin mary, the thursday 429 twenty -fourth the cumaean sibyl, the thirti eth was at the trojan war and helen her name, the thirty -eighth was queen semiramis, the sixtieth was eve, the mother of mankind. so much for the &quot; old woman that lives under the hill, and if she s not gone she lives there still.&quot; it will not take a very great-granddaughter of hers to be in at the death of time. we can never safely exceed the actual facts in our narratives. of pure invention, such as some suppose, there is no instance. to write a true work of fiction even is only to take lei sure and liberty to describe some things more exactly as they are. a true account of the actual is the rarest poetry, for common sense always takes a hasty and superficial view. though i am not much acquainted with the works of goethe, i should say that it was one of his chief excellences as a writer, that he was satisfied with giving an exact description of things as they appeared to him, and their effect upon him. most travelers have not self-respect enough to do this simply, and make objects and events stand around them as the centre, but still imagine more favorable positions and re lations than the actual ones, and so we get no valuable report from them at all. in his ital ian travels goethe jogs along at a snail s pace, 430 a week but always mindful that the earth is beneath and the heavens are above him. his italy is not merely the fatherland of lazzaroni and vir tuosi, and scene of splendid ruins, but a solid turf-clad soil, daily shined on by the sun, and nightly by the moon. even the few showers are faithfully recorded. he speaks as an un concerned spectator, whose object is faithfully to describe what he sees, and that, for the most part, in the order in which he sees it. even his reflections do not interfere with his descrip tions. in one place he speaks of himself as giving so glowing and truthful a description of an old tower to the peasants who had gathered around him, that they who had been born and brought up in the neighborhood must needs look over their shoulders, &quot;that,&quot; to use his own words, &quot;they might behold with their eyes, what i had praised to their ears,&quot; &quot;and i added nothing, not even the ivy which for cen turies had decorated the walls.&quot; it would thus be possible for inferior minds to produce inval uable books, if this very moderation were not the evidence of superiority ; for the wise are not jboinuch^wiser than others as respecters of teeir own wisdom. some, poor in spirit, record plaintively only what has happened to them: but others how they have happened to the uni verse, and the judgment which they have thursday 431 awarded to circumstances. above all, he pos sessed a hearty good-will to all men, and never wrote a cross or even careless word. on one occasion the post-boy sniveling, &quot; signor, per donate, questa e la mia patria,&quot; he confesses that &quot;to me poor northerner came something tear-like into the eyes.&quot; goethe s whole education and life were those of the artist. he lacks the unconsciousness of the poet. in his autobiography he describes accurately the life of the author of wilhelm meister. for as there is in that book, mingled with a rare and serene wisdom, a certain petti ness or exaggeration of trifles, wisdom applied to produce a constrained and partial and merely well-bred man, a magnifying of the theatre till life itself is turned into a stage, for which it is our duty to study our parts well, and con duct with propriety and precision, so in the autobiography, the fault of his education is, so to speak, its merely artistic completeness. na ture is hindered, though she prevails at last in making an unusually catholic impression on the boy. it is the life of a city boy, whose toys are pictures and works of art, whose wonders are the theatre and kingly processions and crown ings. as the youth studied minutely the order and the degrees in the imperial procession, and suffered none of its effect to be lost on him, so 432 a week the man aimed to secure a rank in society which would satisfy his notion of fitness and respecta bility. he was defrauded of much which the savage boy enjoys. indeed, he himself has oc casion to say in this very autobiography, when at last he escapes into the woods without the gates: &quot;thus much is certain, that only the undefinable, wide-expanding feelings of youth and of uncultivated nations are adapted to the sublime, which, whenever it may be excited in us through external objects, since it is either formless, or else moulded into forms which are incomprehensible, must surround us with a grandeur which we find above our reach.&quot; he further says of himself: &quot;i had lived among painters from my childhood, and had accus tomed myself to look at objects, as they did, with reference to art.&quot; and this was his prac tice to the last. he was even too well-bred to be thoroughly bred. he says that he had had no intercourse with the lowest class of his towns boys. the child should have the advantage of ignorance as well as of knowledge, and is fortu nate if he gets his share of neglect and expo sure. &quot; the laws of nature break the rules of art.&quot; the man of genius may at the same time be, indeed is commonly, an artist, but the two are not to be confounded. the man of genius, thursday 433 referred to mankind, is an originator, an in spired or demonic man, who produces a per fect work in obedience to laws yet unexplored. the artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of genius, whether of man or nature. the artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected. there has been no man of pure gen ius ; as there has been none wholly destitute of genius. poetry is the mysticism of mankind. the expressions of the poet cannot be ana lyzed; his sentence is one word, whose syllables are words. there are indeed no words quite worthy to be set to his music. but what mat ter if we do not hear the words always, if we hear the music? much verse fails of being poetry because it was not written exactly at the right crisis, though it may have been inconceivably near to it. it is only by a miracle that poetry is written at all. it is not recoverable thought, but a hue caught from a vaster receding thought. a poem is one undivided, unimpeded expres sion fallen ripe into literature, and it is undi videdly and unimpededly received by those for whom it was matured. if you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things. 434 a week the work we choose should be our own, god lets alone. the unconsciousness of man is the conscious ness of god. deep are the foundations of sincerity. even stone walls have their foundation below the frost. what is produced by a free stroke charms us, like the forms of lichens and leaves. there is a certain perfection in accident which we never consciously attain. draw a blunt quill filled with ink over a sheet of paper, and fold the paper before the ink is dry, transversely to this line, and a delicately shaded and regular figure will be produced, in some respects more pleas ing than an elaborate drawing. the talent of composition is very dangerous, the striking out the heart of life at a blow, as the indian takes off a scalp. i feel as if my life had grown more outward when i can ex press it. on his journey from brenner to verona, goethe writes: &quot;the tees flows now more gently, and makes in many places broad sands. on the land, near to the water, upon the hill sides, everything is so closely planted one to another, that you think they must choke one another, vineyards, maize, mulberry trees, thursday 435 apples, pears, quinces, and nuts. the dwarf elder throws itself vigorously over the walls. ivy grows with strong stems up the rocks, and spreads itself wide over them, the lizard glides through the intervals, and everything that wan ders to and fro reminds one of the loveliest pic tures of art. the women s tufts of hair bound up, the men s bare breasts and light jackets, the excellent oxen which they drive home from market, the little asses with their loads, everything forms a living, animated heinrich roos. and now that it is evening, in the mild air a few clouds rest upon the mountains, in the heavens more stand still than move, and imme diately after sunset the chirping of crickets be gins to grow more loud ; then one feels for once at home in the world, and not as concealed or in exile. i am contented as though i had been born and brought up here, and were now re turning from a greenland or whaling voyage. even the dust of my fatherland, which is often whirled about the wagon, and which for so long a time i had not seen, is greeted. the clock and-bell jingling of the crickets is altogether lovely, penetrating, and agreeable. it sounds bravely when roguish boys whistle in emulation of a field of such songstresses. one fancies that they really enhance one another. also the evening is perfectly mild as the day. 436 a week &quot;if one who dwelt in the south, and came hither from the south, should hear of my rap ture hereupon, he would deem me very childish. alas ! what i here express i have long known while i suffered under an unpropitious heaven, and now may i joyful feel this joy as an excep tion, which we should enjoy everforth as an eternal necessity of our nature.&quot; thus we &quot;sayled by thought and pleasaunce,&quot; as chaucer says, and all things seemed with us to flow; the shore itself and the distant cliffs were dissolved by the undiluted air. the hard est material seemed to obey the same law with the most fluid, and so indeed in the long run it does. trees were but rivers of sap and woody fibre, flowing from the atmosphere, and empty ing into the earth by their trunks, as their roots flowed upward to the surface. and in the heavens there were rivers of stars, and milky ways, already beginning to gleam and ripple over our heads. there were rivers of rock on the surface of the earth, and rivers of ore in its bowels, and our thoughts flowed and circulated, and this portion of time was but the current hour. let us wander where we will, the uni verse is built round about us, and we are cen tral still. if we look into the heavens they are concave, and if we were to look into a gulf as thursda y 437 bottomless, it would be concave also. the sky is curved downward to the earth in the horizon, because we stand on the plain. i draw down its skirts. the stars so low there seem loath to depart, but by a circuitous path to be remem bering me, and returning on their steps. we had already passed by broad daylight the scene of our encampment at coos falls, and at length we pitched our camp on the west bank, in the northern part of merrimack, nearly oppo site to the large island on which we had spent the noon in our way up the river. there we went to bed that summer evening, on a sloping shelf in the bank, a couple of rods from our boat, which was drawn up on the sand, and just behind a thin fringe of oaks which bor dered the river ; without having disturbed any inhabitants but the spiders in the grass, which came out by the light of our lamp, and crawled over our buft aloes. when we looked out from under the tent, the trees were seen dimly through the mist, and a cool dew hung upon the grass, which seemed to rejoice in the night, and with the damp air we inhaled a solid fragrance. having eaten our supper of hot cocoa and bread and watermelon, we soon grew weary of con versing, and writing in our journals, and, put ting out the lantern which hung from the tent pole, fell asleep. 438 a week unfortunately, many things have been omitted which should have been recorded in our journal; for though we made it a rule to set down all our experiences therein, yet such a res olution is very hard to keep, for the important experience rarely allows us to remember such obligations, and so indifferent things get re corded, while that is frequently neglected. it is not easy to write in a journal what interests us at any time, because to write it is not what interests us. whenever we awoke in the night, still eking out our dreams with half -awakened thoughts, it was not till after an interval, when the wind breathed harder than usual, flapping the cur tains of the tent, and causing its cords to vi brate, that we remembered that we lay on the bank of the merrimack, and not in our chamber at home. with our heads so low in the grass, we heard the river whirling and sucking, and lapsing downward, kissing the shore as it went, sometimes rippling louder than usual, and again its mighty current making only a slight limpid, trickling sound, as if our water-pail had sprung a leak, and the water were flowing into the grass by our side. the wind, rustling the oaks and hazels, impressed us like a wakeful and inconsiderate person up at midnight, moving about, and putting things to rights, occasionally thursday 439 stirring up whole drawers full of leaves at a puff. there seemed to be a great haste and preparation throughout nature, as for a distin guished visitor; all her aisles had to be swept in the night by a thousand handmaidens, and a thousand pots to be boiled for the next day s feasting ; such a whispering bustle, as if ten thousand fairies made their fingers fly, silently sewing at the new carpet with which the earth was to be clothed, and the new drapery which was to adorn the trees. and then the wind would lull and die away, and we like it fell asleep again. friday. &quot; the boteman strayt held on his course with stayed stedfastnesse, ne ever shroucke, ne ever sought to bayt his tryed armes for toylesome wearinesse ; but with his oarea did sweepe the watry wildernesse.&quot; spenbhb. &quot; summer s robe grows dusky, and like an oft-dyed garment shows.&quot; donne. as we lay awake long before daybreak, lis tening to the rippling of the river and the rus tling of the leaves, in suspense whether the wind blew up or down the stream, was favorable or unfavorable to our voyage, we already suspected that there was a change in the weather, from a freshness as of autumn in these sounds. the wind in the woods sounded like an incessant waterfall dashing and roaring amid rocks, and we even felt encouraged by the unusual activity of the elements. he who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly despair. that night was the turning-point in the season. we had gone to bed in summer, and we awoke in autumn; for summer passes into autumn in some unimaginable point of ^ime, like the turning of a leaf. 442 a week we found our boat in the dawn just as we had left it, and as if waiting for us, there on the shore, in autumn, all cool and dripping with dew, and our tracks still fresh in the wet sand around it, the fairies all gone or concealed. before five o clock we pushed it into the fog, and, leaping in, at one shove were out of sight of the shores, and began to sweep downward with the rushing river, keeping a sharp lookout for rocks. we could see only the yellow gur gling water, and a solid bank of fog on every side, forming a small yard around us. we soon passed the mouth of the souhegan, and the village of merrimack, and as the mist grad ually rolled away, and we were relieved from the trouble of watching for rocks, we saw by the flitting clouds, by the first russet tinge on the hills, by the rushing river, the cottages on shore, and the shore itself, so coolly fresh and shining with dew, and later in the day, by the hue of the grape-vine, the goldfinch on the wil low, the flickers flying in flocks, and when we passed near enough to the shore, as we fancied, by the faces of men, that the fall had com menced. the cottages looked more snug and comfortable, and their inhabitants were seen only for a moment, and then went quietly in and shut the door, retreating inward to the haunts of summer. friday 443 &quot; and now the cold autumnal dews are seen to cobweb ev ry green ; and by the low-shorn rowens doth appear the fast-declining year.&quot; we heard the sigh of the first autumnal wind, and even the water had acquired a grayer hue. the sumach, grape, and maple were already changed, and the milkweed had turned to a deep, rich yellow. in all woods the leaves were fast ripening for their fall ; for their full veins and lively gloss mark the ripe leaf and not the sered one of the poets; and we knew that the maples, stripped of their leaves among the ear liest, would soon stand like a wreath of smoke along the edge of the meadow. already the cattle were heard to low wildly in the pastures and along the highways, restlessly running to and fro, as if in apprehension of the wither* ing of the grass and of the approach of winter. our thoughts, too, began to rustle. as i pass along the streets of our village of concord on the day of our annual cattle-show, when it usually happens that the leaves of the elms and buttonwoods begin first to strew the ground under the breath of the october wind, the lively spirits in their sap seem to mount as high as any plough-boy s let loose that day; and they lead my thoughts away to the rustling woods, where the trees are preparing for their 444 a week winter campaign. this autumnal festival, when men are gathered in crowds in the streets as regularly and by as natural a law as the leaves cluster and rustle by the wayside, is naturally associated in my mind with the fall of the year. the low of cattle in the streets sounds like a hoarse symphony or running bass to the rustling of the leaves. the wind goes hurrying down the country, gleaning every loose straw that is left in the fields, while every farmer lad too appears to scud before it, having donned his best pea-jacket and pepper-and-salt waistcoat, his unbent trousers, outstanding rigging of duck or kerseymere or corduroy, and his furry hat withal, to country fairs and cattle-shows, to that rome among the villages where the trea sures of the year are gathered. all the land over they go leaping the fences with their tough, idle palms, which have never learned to hang by their sides, amid the low of calves and the bleating of sheep, amos, abner, elnathan, elbridge, &quot; from steep pine-bearing mountains to the plain.&quot; i love these sons of earth, every mother s son of them, with their great hearty hearts rushing tumultuously in herds from spectacle to specta cle, as if fearful lest there should not be time between sun and sun to see them all, and the sun does not wait more than in haying-time. friday 445 &quot; wise nature s darlings, they live in the world perplexing not themselves how it is hurled.&quot; running hither and thither with appetite for the coarse pastimes of the day, now with bois terous speed at the heels of the inspired negro from whose larynx the melodies of all congo and guinea coast have broke loose into our streets ; now to see the procession of a hundred yoke of oxen, all as august and grave as osiris, or the droves of neat cattle and milch cows as unspotted as isis or lo. such as had no love for nature &quot; at all, came lovers home from this great festival.&quot; they may bring their fattest cattle and richest fruits to the fair, but they are all eclipsed by the show of men. these are stirring autumn days, when men sweep by in crowds, amid the rustle of leaves, like migrating finches ; this is the true harvest of the year, when the air is but the breath of men, and the rustling of leaves is as the trampling of the crowd. we read nowa days of the ancient festivals, games, and pro cessions of the greeks and etruscans with a little incredulity, or at least with little sympa thy; but how natural and irrepressible in every people is some hearty and palpable greeting of nature. the corybantes, the bacchantes, the rude primitive tragedians with their procession 446 a week and goat-song, and the whole paraphernalia of the panathensea, which appear so antiquated and peculiar, have their parallel now. the husbandman is always a better greek than the scholar is prepared to appreciate, and the old custom still survives, while antiquarians and scholars grow gray in commemorating it. the farmers crowd to the fair to-day in obedience to the same ancient law, which solon or lycurgus did not enact, as naturally as bees swarm and follow their queen. it is worth the while to see the country s people, how they pour into the town, the so ber farmer folk, now all agog, their very shirt and coat collars pointing forward, collars so broad as if they had put their shirts on wrong end upward, for the fashions always tend to superfluity, and with an unusual springiness in their gait, jabbering earnestly to one another. the more supple vagabond, too, is sure to ap pear on the least rumor of such a gathering, and the next day to disappear, and go into his hole like the seventeen-year locust, in an ever shabby coat, though finer than the farmer s best, yet never dressed ; come to see the sport, and have a hand in what is going, to know &quot;what s the row,&quot; if there is any; to be where some men are drunk, some horses race, some cockerels fight; anxious to be shaking props friday 447 under a table, and above all to see the &quot;striped pig.&quot; he especially is the creature of the oc casion. he empties both his pockets and his character into the stream, and swims in such a day. he dearly loves the social slush. there is no reserve of soberness in him. i love to see the herd of men feeding heartily on coarse and succulent pleasures, as cattle on the husks and stalks of vegetables. though there are many crooked and crabbed specimens of humanity among them, run all to thorn and rind, and crowded out of shape by adverse cir cumstances, like the third chestnut in the burr, so that you wonder to see some heads wear a whole hat, yet fear not that the race will fail or waver in them ; like the crabs which grow in hedges, they furnish the stocks of sweet and thrifty fruits still. thus is nature recruited from age to age, while the fair and palatable varieties die out, and have their period. this is that mankind. how cheap must be the material of which so many men are made. the wind blew steadily down the stream, so that we kept our sails set, and lost not a mo ment of the forenoon by delays, but from early morning until noon were continually dropping downward. with our hands on the steering paddle, which was thrust deep into the river, 01 448 a week bending to the oar, which indeed we rarely re linquished, we felt each palpitation in the veins of our steed, and each impulse of the wings which drew us above. the current of our thoughts made as sudden bends as the river, which was continually opening new prospects to the east or south, but we are aware that rivers flow most rapidly and shallowest at these points. the steadfast shores never once turned aside for us, but still trended as they were made; why then should we always turn aside for them ? a man cannot wheedle nor overawe his gen ius. it requires to be conciliated by nobler conduct than the world demands or can appre ciate. these winged thoughts are like birds, and will not be handled ; even hens will not let you touch them like quadrupeds. nothing was ever so unfamiliar and startling to a man as his own thoughts. to the rarest genius it is the most expensive to succumb and conform to the ways of the world. genius is the worst of lumber, if the poet would float upon the breeze of popularity. the bird of paradise is obliged constantly to fly against the wind, lest its gay trappings, pressing close to its body, impede its free movements. he is the best sailor who can steer within the fewest points of the wind, and extract a motive friday 449 power out of the greatest obstacles. most be gin to veer and tack as soon as the wind changes from aft, and as within the tropics it does not blow from all points of the compass, there are some harbors which they can never reach. the poet is no tender slip of fairy stock, who requires peculiar institutions and edicts for his defense, but the toughest son of earth and of heaven, and by his greater strength and endur ance his fainting companions will recognize the god in him. it is the worshipers of beauty, after all, who have done the real pioneer work of the world. the poet will prevail to be popular in spite of his faults, and in spite of his beauties too. he will hit the nail on the head, and we shall not know the shape of his hammer. he makes us free of his hearth and heart, which is greater than to offer one the freedom of a city. great men, unknown to their generation, have their fame among the great who have pre ceded them, and all true worldly fame subsides from their high estimate beyond the stars. orpheus does not hear the strains which issue from his lyre, but only those which are breathed into it; for the original strain precedes the sound, by as much as the echo follows after. the rest is the perquisite of the rocks and trees and beasts. 450 a week when i stand in a library where is all the recorded wit of the world, but none of the re cording, a mere accumulated, and not truly cumulative treasure, where immortal works stand side by side with anthologies which did not survive their month, and cobweb and mil dew have already spread from these to the bind ing of those; and happily i am reminded oi what poetry is, i perceive that shakespeare and milton did not foresee into what company they were to fall. alas 1 that so soon the work of a true poet should be swept into such a dust hole! the poet will write for his peers alone. he will remember only that he saw truth and beauty from his position, and expect the time when a vision as broad shall overlook the same field as freely. we are often prompted to speak our thoughts to our neighbors, or the single travelers whom we meet on the road, but poetry is a communi cation from our home and solitude addressed to all intelligence. it never whispers in a private ear. knowing this, we may understand those sonnets said to be addressed to particular per sons, or &quot;to a mistress s eyebrow.&quot; let none feel flattered by them. for poetry write love, and it will be equally true. no doubt it is an important difference be friday 451 tween men of genius or poets, and men not of genius, that the latter are unable to grasp and confront the thought which visits them. but it is because it is too faint for expression, or even conscious impression. what merely quickens or retards the blood in their veins and fills their afternoons with pleasure, they know not whence, conveys a distinct assurance to the finer organization of the poet. we talk of genius as if it were a mere knack, and the poet could only express what other men conceived. but in comparison with his task, the poet is the least talented of any ; the writer of prose has more skill. see what talent the smith has. his material is pliant in his hands. when the poet is most inspired, is stimulated by an aura which never even colors the after noons of common men, then his talent is all gone, and he is no longer a poet. the gods do not grant him any skill more than another. they never put their gifts into his hands, but they encompass and sustain him with their breath. to say that god has given a man many and great talents frequently means that he has brought his heavens down within reach of his hands. when the poetic frenzy seizes us, we run and scratch with our pen, intent only on worms, 452 a week calling our mates around us, like the cock, and delighting in the dust we make, but do not de tect where the jewel lies, which, perhaps, we have in the mean time cast to a distance, or quite covered up again. the poet s body even is not fed like other men s, but he sometimes tastes the genuine nec tar and ambrosia of the gods, and lives a divine life. by the healthful and invigorating thrills of inspiration his life is preserved to a serene old age. some poems are for holidays only. they are polished and sweet, but it is the sweetness of sugar, and not such as toil gives to sour bread. the breath with which the poet utters his verse must be that by which he lives. great prose, of equal elevation, commands our respect more than great verse, since it im plies a more permanent and level height, a life more pervaded with the grandeur of the thought. the poet often only makes an irruption, like a parthian, and is off again, shooting while he retreats ; but tlie^rose writer has conquered like a koman, and settled colonies. the true poem is not that which the public read. there is always a poem not printed on paper, coincident with the production of this, stereotyped in the poet s life. it is what he has become through his work. not how is the friday 453 idea expressed in stone, or on canvas or paper, is the question, but how far it has obtained form and expression in the life of the artist. his true work will not stand in any prince s gallery. my life has been the poem i would have writ, but i could not both live and utter it. the poet s delay. in vain i see the morning rise, in vain observe the western blaze, who idly look to other skies, expecting life by other ways. amidst such boundless wealth without, i only still am poor within, the birds have sung their summer out, but still my spring does not begin. shall i then wait the autumn wind, compelled to seek a milder day, and leave no curious nest behind, no woods still echoing to my lay ? this raw and gusty day, and the creaking of the oaks and pines on shore, reminded us of more northern climes than greece, and more wintry seas than the ^egean. the genuine remains of ossian, or those an cient poems which bear his name, though of less fame and extent, are, in many respects, of the same stamp with the iliad itself. he asserts 454 a week the dignity of the bard no less than homer, and in his era we hear of no other priest than he. it will not avail to call him a heathen, because he personifies the sun and addresses it; and what if his heroes did &quot;worship the ghosts of their fathers,&quot; their thin, airy, and unsubstantial forms? we worsiiip but the ghosts qjj)u f atherf in more substantial forms. we cannot but re spect the vigorous faith of those heathen, who sternly believed somewhat, and are inclined to say to the critics, who are offended by their su perstitious rites, don t interrupt these men s prayers. as if we knew more about human life and a god, than the heathen and ancients! does english theology contain the recent dis coveries ? ossian reminds us of the most refined and rudest eras, of homer, pindar, isaiah, and the american indian. in his poetry, as in ho mer s, only the simplest and most enduring fea tures of humanity are seen, such essential parts of a man as stonehenge exhibits of a temple; we see the circles of stone, and the upright shaft alone. the phenomena of life acquire almost an unreal and gigantic size seen through his mists. like all older and grander poetry, it is distinguished by the few elements in the lives of its heroes. they stand on the heath, be tween the stars and the earth, shrunk to the frida y 455 bones and sinews. the earth is a boundless plain for their deeds. they lead such a simple, dry, and everlasting life, as hardly needs depart with the flesh, but is transmitted entire from age to age. there are but few objects to dis tract their sight, and their life is as unincum bered as the course of the stars they gaze at. &quot; the wrathful kings, on cairns apart, look forward from behind their shields, and mark the wandering stars, that brilliant westward move.&quot; it does not cost much for these heroes to live ; they do not want much furniture. they are such forms of men only as can be seen afar through the mist, and have no costume nor dia lect, but for language there is the tongue itself, and for costume there are always the skins of beasts and the bark of trees to be had. they live out their years by the vigor of their consti tutions. they survive storms and the spears of their foes, and perform a few heroic deeds, and then &quot; mounds will answer questions of them, for many future years.&quot; blind and infirm, they spend the remnant of their days listening to the lays of the bards, and feeling the weapons which laid their enemies low, and when at length they die, by a convul sion of nature, the bard allows us a short and 456 a week misty glance into futurity, yet as clear, per* chance, as their lives had been. when mac roine was slain, &quot; his soul departed to his warlike sires, to follow misty forms ot boars, in tempestuous islands bleak.&quot; the hero s cairn is erected, and the bard sings a brief significant strain, which will suffice for epitaph and biography. &quot; the weak will find his bow in the dwelling, the feeble will attempt to bend it.&quot; compared with this simple, fibrous life, our civilized history appears the chronicle of debil ity, of fashion, and the arts of luxury. but the civilized man misses no real refinement in the poetry of the rudest era. it reminds him that civilization does but dress men. it makes shoes, but it does not toughen the soles of the feet. it makes cloth of finer texture, but it does not touch the skin. inside the civilized man stands the savage still in the place of honor. we are those blue-eyed, yellow-haired saxons, those slender, dark-haired normans. the profession of the bard attracted more re spect in those days from the importance attached to fame. it was his province to record the deeds of heroes. when ossian hears the tradi tions of inferior bards, he exclaims, &quot; i straightway seize the unfutile tales, anh send them down in faithful verse. * friday 457 his philosophy of life is expressed in the open ing of the third duan of ca-lodin. &quot; whence have sprung the things that are ? and whither roll the passing years ? where does time conceal its two heads, in dense impenetrable gloom, its surface marked with heroes deeds alone ? i view the generations gone ; the past appears but dim ; as objects by the moon s faint beams, reflected from a distant lake. i see, indeed, the thunderbolts of war, but there the unmighty joyless dwell, all those who send not down their deeds to far, succeeding times.&quot; the ignoble warriors die and are forgotten; &quot; strangers come to build a tower, and throw their ashes overhand ; some rusted swords appear in dust, one, bending forward, says, * the arms belonged to heroes gone ; we never heard their praise in song. &quot; the grandeur of the similes is another feature which characterizes great poetry. ossian seems to speak a gigantic and universal language. the images and pictures occupy even much space in the landscape, as if they could be seen only from the sides of mountains, and plains with a wide horizon, or across arms of the sea. the machinery is so massive that it cannot be less than natural. oivana says to the spirit of her father, &quot;gray-haired torkil of tome,&quot; seen in the skies, 458 a week &quot; thou glidest away like receding ships.&quot; so when the hosts of fingal and starne ap proach to battle, &quot; with murmurs loud, like rivers far, the race of torne hither moved.&quot; and when compelled to retire, &quot; dragging his spear behind, cudulin sank in the distant wood, like a fire upblazing ere it dies.&quot; nor did fingal want a proper audience when he spoke, &quot; a thousand orators inclined to hear the lay of fingal.&quot; the threats too would have deterred a man. vengeance and terror were real. trenmore threatens the young warrior whom he meets on a foreign strand, &quot; thy mother shall find thee pale on the shore, while lessening on the waves she spies the sails of him who slew her son.&quot; if ossian s heroes weep, it is from excess of strength, and not from weakness, a sacrifice or libation of fertile natures, like the perspiration of stone in summer s heat. we hardly know that tears have been shed, and it seems as if weeping were proper only for babes and heroes. their joy and their sorrow are made of one stuff, like rain and snow, the rainbow and the mist. when fillan was worsted in fight, and ashamed in the presence of fingal, fc friday 459 &quot; he strode away forthwith, and bent in grief above a stream, his cheeks bedewed with tears. from time to time the thistles gray he lopped with his inverted lance.&quot; crodar, blind and old, receives ossian, son of fingal, who comes to aid him in war : &quot; my eyes have failed, says he, crodar is blind, is thy strength like that of thy fathers ? stretch, ossian, thine arm to the hoary-haired. i gave my arm to the king. the aged hero seized my hand ; he heaved a heavy sigh ; tears flowed incessant down his cheek. * strong art thou, son of the mighty, though not so dreadful as morven s prince. let my feast be spread in the hall, let every sweet-voiced minstrel sing ; great is he who is within my walls, sons of wave-echoing croma. &quot; even ossian himself, the hero-bard, pays trib ute to the superior strength of his father fingal. &quot; how beauteous, mighty man, was thy mind, why succeeded ossian without its strength ? &quot; while we sailed fleetly before the wind, with the river gurgling under our stern, the thoughts of autumn coursed as steadily through our minds, and we observed less what was passing on the shore, than the dateless associations and impressions which the season awakened, antici pating in some measure the progress of the year. 460 a week i hearing get, who had but ears, and sight, who had but eyes before, i moments live, who lived but years, and truth discern, who knew but learning s lore. sitting with our faces now upstream, we stud ied the landscape by degree?, as one unrolls a map, rock, tree, house, hill, and meadow, as suming new and varying positions as wind and water shifted the scene, and there was variety enough for our entertainment in the metamor phoses of the simplest objects. viewed from this side the scenery appeared new to us. the most familiar sheet of water, viewed from a new hill-top, yields a novel and unexpected pleasure. when we have traveled a few miles, we do not recognize the profiles even of the hills which overlook our native village, and perhaps no man is quite familiar with the horizon as seen from the hill nearest to his house, and can recall its outline distinctly when in the valley. we do not commonly know, beyond a short dis tance, which way the hills range which take in our houses and farms in their sweep. as if our birth had at first sundered things, and we had been thrust up through into nature like a wedge, and not till the wound heals and the scar disappears do we begin to discover where we are, and that nature is one and continuous everywhere. it is an important epoch when a friday 461 man who has always lived on the east side of a mountain, and seen it in the west, travels round and sees it in the east. yet the universe is a sphere whose centre is wherever there is intel ligence. the. sun_js not so central as a man. upon an isolated hiu-tbp,~ in ~ah open country, we seem to ourselves to be standing on the boss of an immense shield, the immediate landscape being apparently depressed below the more re mote, and rising gradually to the horizon, which is the rim of the shield, villas, steeples, forests, mountains, one above another, till they are swal lowed up in the heavens. the most distant mountains in the horizon appear to rise directly from the shore of that lake in the woods by which we chance to be standing, while from the mountain-top, not only this, but a thousand nearer and larger lakes, are equally unobserved. seen through this clear atmosphere, the works of the farmer, his ploughing and reap ing, had a beauty to our eyes which he never saw. how fortunate were we who did not own an acre of these shores, who had not renounced ur title to the whole. one who knew how to appropriate the true value of this world would be the poorest man in it. the poor rich man ! all he has is what he has bought. what i see is mine. i am a large owner in the merrimack intervals. 462 a week men dig and dive but cannot my wealth spend, who yet no partial store appropriate, who no armed ship into the indies send, to rob me of my orient estate. he is the rich man, and enjoys the fruits of riches, who summer and winter forever can find delight in his own thoughts. buy a farm! what have i to pay for a farm which a farmer will take? when i visit again some haunt of my youth, i am glad to find that nature wears so well. the landscape is indeed something real, and solid, and sincere, and i have not put my foot through it yet. there is a pleasant tract on the bank of the concord, called conantum, which i have in my mind ; the old deserted farm-house, the desolate pasture with its bleak cliff, the open wood, the river-reach, the green meadow in the midst, and the moss-grown wild apple orchard, places where one may have many thoughts and not decide anything. it is a scene which i cannot only remember, as i might a vision, but when i will can bodily re visit, and find it even so, unaccountable, yet unpretending in its pleasant dreariness. when my thoughts are sensible of change, i love to see and sit on rocks which i have known, and pry into their moss, and see unchangeableness so established. i not yet gray on rocks forever friday 463 gray, i no longer green under the evergreens. there is something even in the lapse of time by which time recovers itself. as we have said, it proved a cool as well as breezy day, and by the time we reached peni chook brook we were obliged to sit muffled in our cloaks, while the wind and current carried us along. we bounded swiftly over the rip pling surface, far by many cultivated lands and the ends of fences which divided innumerable farms, with hardly a thought for the various lives which they separated; now by long rows of alders or groves of pines or oaks, and now by some homestead where the women and chil dren stood outside to gaze at us, till we had swept out of their sight, and beyond the limit of their longest saturday ramble. we glided past the mouth of the nashua, and not long after, of salmon brook, without more pause than the wind. salmon brook, penichook, ye sweet waters of my brain, when shall i look, or cast the hook, in your waves again ? silver eels, wooden creels, these the baits that still allure, and dragon-fly that floated by, may they still endure ? 464 a week the shadows chased one another swiftly over wood and meadow, and their alternation har monized with our mood. we could distinguish the clouds which cast each one, though never so high in the heavens. when a shadow flits across the landscape of the soul, where is the substance? probably, if we were wise enough, we should see to what virtue we are indebted for any happier moment we enjoy. no doubt we have earned it at some time ; for the gifts of heaven are never quite gratuitous. the constant abrasion and decay of our lives makes the soil of our future growth. the wood which we now mature, when it becomes virgin mould, determines the character of our second growth, whether that be oaks or pines. every man casts a shadow ; not his body only, but his im perfectly mingled spirit. this is his grief. let him turn which way he will, it falls oppo site to the sun ; short at noon, long at eve. did you never see it? but, referred to the sun, it is widest at its base, which is no greater than his own opacity. the divine light is diffused almost entirely around us, and by means of the refraction of light, or else by a certain self luminousness, or, as some will have it, trans parency, if we preserve ourselves untarnished, we are able to enlighten our shaded side. at \ any rate, our darkest grief has that bronze color friday 465 of the moon eclipsed. there is no ill which may not be dissipated, like the dark, if you let in a stronger light upon it. shadows, referred to the source of light, are pyramids whose bases are never greater than those of the substances which cast them, but light is a spherical con geries of pyramids, whose very apexes are the sun itself, and hence the system shines with un interrupted light. but if the light we use is but a paltry and narrow taper, most objects will cast a shadow wider than themselves. the places where we had stopped or spent the night in our way up the river had already acquired a slight historical interest for us; for many upward days voyaging were unraveled in this rapid downward passage. when one landed to stretch his limbs by walking, he soon found himself falling behind his companion, and was obliged to take advantage of the curves, and ford the brooks and ravines in haste, to recover his ground. already the banks and the distant meadows wore a sober and deepened tinge, for the september air had shorn them of their summer s pride. &quot; and what s a life ? the flourishing array of the proud summer meadow, which to-day wears her green plush, and is to-morrow hay.&quot; the air was really the &quot;fine element&quot; which the poets describe. it had a finer and sharper 466 a week grain, seen against the russet pastures and meadows, than before, as if cleansed of the summer s impurities. having passed the new hampshire line and reached the horseshoe interval in tyngsbor ough, where there is a high and regular second bank, we climbed up this in haste to get a nearer sight of the autumnal flowers, asters, golden-rod, and yarrow, and blue-curls (trichos tema dichotomum), humble roadside blossoms, and, lingering still, the harebell and the rhexia virginica. the last, growing in patches of lively pink flowers on the edge of the meadows, had almost too gay an appearance for the rest of the landscape, like a pink ribbon on the bon net of a puritan woman. asters and golden rods were the livery which nature wore at pres ent. the latter alone expressed all the ripeness of the season, and shed their mellow lustre over the fields, as if the now declining summer s sun had bequeathed its hues to them. it is the floral solstice a little after midsummer, when the particles of golden light, the sun-dust, have, as it were, fallen like seeds on the earth, and produced these blossoms. on every hillside, and in every valley, stood countless asters, core opses, tansies, golden-rods, and the whole race of yellow flowers, like brahminical devotees, turning steadily with their luminary from morn ing till night. friday 467 ** i see the golden-rod shine hright, as sun-showers at the birth of day, a golden plume of yellow light, that robs the day-god s splendid ray. &quot;the aster s violet rays divide the bank with many stars for me, and yarrow in blanch tints is dyed, as moonlight floats across the sea. &quot; i see the emerald woods prepare to shed their vestiture once more, and distant elm-trees spot the air with yellow pictures softly o er. &quot;no more the water-lily s pride in milk-white circles swims content, no more the blueweed s clusters ride and mock the heavens element. * autumn, thy wreath and mine are blent with the same colors, for to me a richer sky than all is lent, while fades my dream-like company. &quot; our skies glow purple, but the wind sobs chill through green trees and bright grass, to-day shines fair, and lurk behind the times that into winter pass. &quot; so fair we seem, so cold we are, so fast we hasten to decay, yet through our night glows many a star, that still shall claim its sunny day.&quot; so sang a concord poet once. 468 a week there is a peculiar interest belonging to the still later flowers, which abide with us the ap proach of winter. there is something witch like in the appearance of the witch hazel, which blossoms late in october and in november, with its irregular and angular spray and petals like furies hair, or small ribbon streamers. its blossoming, too, at this irregular period, when other shrubs have lost their leaves, as well as blossoms, looks like witches craft. certainly it blooms in no garden of man s. there is a whole fairy -land on the hillside where it grows. some have thought that the gales do not at present waft to the voyager the natural and original fragrance of the land, such as the early navigators described, and that the loss of many odoriferous native plants, sweet-scented grasses and medicinal herbs, which formerly sweetened the atmosphere, and rendered it salubrious, by the grazing of cattle and the rooting of swine, is the source of many diseases which now prevail; the earth, say they, having been long subjected to extremely artificial and luxurious modes of cultivation, to gratify the appetite, converted into a stye and hot-bed, where men for profit increase the ordinary decay of nature. according to the record of an old inhabitant of tyngsborough, now dead, whose farm we friday 469 were now gliding past, one of the greatest freshets on this river took place in october, 1785, and its height was marked by a nail driven into an apple-tree behind his house. one of his descendants has shown this to me, and i judged it to be at least seventeen or eighteen feet above the level of the river at the time. according to barber, the river rose twenty -one feet above the common high -water mark at bradford in the year 1818. before the lowell and nashua railroad was built, the engineer made inquiries of the inhabitants along the banks as to how high they had known the river to rise. when he came to this house he was conducted to the apple-tree, and as the nail was not then visible, the lady of the house placed her hand on the trunk where she said that she remembered the nail to have been from her childhood. in the mean while the old man put his arm inside the tree, which was hollow, and felt the point of the nail sticking through, and it was exactly opposite to her hand. the spot is now plainly marked by a notch in the bark. but as no one else remembered the river to have risen so high as this, the engineer disregarded this statement, and i learn that there has since been a freshet which rose within nine inches of the rails at biscuit brook, and such a freshet as that of 1785 would have covered the railroad two feet deep. 470 a week the revolutions of nature tell as fine tales, and make as interesting revelations, on this river s banks, as on the euphrates or the nile. this apple-tree, which stands within a few rods of the river, is called &quot;elisha s apple-tree,&quot; from a friendly indian, who was anciently in the service of jonathan tyng, and, with one other man, was killed here by his own race in one of the indian wars, the particulars of which affair were told us on the spot. he was buried close by, no one knew exactly where, but in the flood of 1785, so great a weight of water standing over the grave caused the earth to set tle where it had once been disturbed, and when the flood went down, a sunken spot, exactly of the form and size of the grave, revealed its locality; but this was now lost again, and no future flood can detect it; yet, no doubt, na ture will know how to point it out in due time, if it be necessary, by methods yet more search ing and unexpected. thus there is not only the crisis when the spirit ceases to inspire and expand the body, marked by a fresh mound in the churchyard, but there is also a crisis when the body ceases to take up room as such in nature, marked by a fainter depression in the earth. we sat awhile to rest us here upon the brink of the western bank, surrounded by the glossy friday 471 leaves of the red variety of the mountain laurel, just above the head of wicasuck island, where we could observe some scows which were load ing with clay from the opposite shore, and also overlook the grounds of the farmer, of whom i have spoken, who once hospitably entertained us for a night. he had on his pleasant farm, besides an abundance of the beach-plum, or prunus littoralis, which grew wild, the canada plum under cultivation, fine porter apples, some peaches, and large patches of musk and water melons, which he cultivated for the lowell mar ket. elisha s apple tree, too, bore a native fruit, which was prized by the family ; he raised the blood peach, which, as he showed us with satisfaction, was more like the oak in the color of its bark and in the setting of its branches, and was less liable to break down under the weight of the fruit, or the snow, than other varieties. it was of slower growth, and its branches strong and tough. there, also, was his nursery of native apple-trees, thickly set upon the bank, which cost but little care, and which he sold to the neighboring farmers when they were five or six years old. to see a single peach upon its stem makes an impression of paradisaical fer tility and luxury. this reminded us even of an old roman farm, as described by varro : m caesar vopiscus ^iedilicius, when he pleaded 472 a week before the censors, said that the grounds of rosea were the garden (sumen, the tid-bit) of italy, in which a pole being left would not be visible the day after, on account of the growth of the herbage.&quot; this soil may not have been remarkably fertile, yet at this distance we thought that this anecdote might be told of the tyngsborough farm. when we passed wicasuck island, there was a pleasure boat containing a youth and a maiden on the island brook, which we were pleased to see, since it proved that there were some here abouts to whom our excursion would not be wholly strange. before this, a canal-boatman, of whom we made some inquiries respecting wicasuck island, and who told us that it was disputed property, suspected that we had a claim upon it, and though we assured him that all this was news to us, and explained, as well as we could, why we had come to see it, he be lieved not a word of it, and seriously offered us one hundred dollars for our title. the only other small boats which we met with were used to pick up drift-wood. some of the poorer class ilong the stream collect, in this way, all the fuel which they require. while one of us landed not far from this island to forage for provisions among the farm-houses whose roofs we saw, for our supply was now exhausted, the other, sitting friday 473 in the boat, which was moored to the shore, was left alone to his reflections. if there is nothing new on the earth, still the traveler always has a resource in the skies. they are constantly turning a new page to view. the wind sets the types on this blue ground, and the inquiring may always read a new truth there. there are things there written with such fine and subtile tinctures, paler than the juice of limes, that to the diurnal eye they leave no trace, and only the chemistry of night reveals them. every man s daylight firmament answers in his mind to the brightness of the vision in his starriest hour. these continents and hemispheres are soon run over, but an always unexplored and infinite region makes off on every side from the mind, further than to sunset, and we can make no highway or beaten track into it, but the grass immediately springs up in the path, for we travel there chiefly with our wings. sometimes we see objects as through a thin haze, in their eternal relations, and they stand like palenque and the pyramids, and we won der who set them up, and for what purpose. if we see the reality in things, of what moment is the superficial and apparent longer? what are the earth and all its interests beside the deep surmise which pierces and scatters them? 474 a week while i sit here listening to the waves which ripple and break on this shore, i am absolved from all obligation to the past, and the council of nations may reconsider its votes. the grat ing of a pebble annuls them. still occasionally in my dreams i remember that rippling water. oft, as i turn me on my pillow o er, i hear the lapse of waves upon the shore, distinct as if it were at broad noonday, and i were drifting down from nashua. with a bending sail we glided rapidly by tyngsborough and chelmsford, each holding in one hand half of a tart country apple-pie which we had purchased to celebrate our return, and in the other a fragment of the newspaper in which it was wrapped, devouring these with divided relish, and learning the news which had transpired since we sailed. the river here opened into a broad and straight reach of great length, which we bounded merrily over before a smacking breeze, with a devil-may-care look in our faces, and our boat a white bone in its mouth, and a speed which greatly astonished some scow boatmen whom we met. the wind in the horizon rolled like a flood over valley and plain, and every tree bent to the blast, and the mountains like school-boys turned their cheeks to it. they were great and current motions, the flowing sail, the running stream, the waving frida y 475 tree, the roving wind. the north wind stepped readily into the harness which we had provided, and pulled us along with good will. sometimes we sailed as gently and steadily as the clouds overhead, watching the receding shores and the motions of our sail ; the play of its pulse so like our own lives, so thin and yet so full of life, so noiseless when it labored hardest, so noisy and impatient when least effective; now bending to some generous impulse of the breeze, and then fluttering and flapping with a kind of human suspense. it was the scale on which the vary ing temperature of distant atmospheres was graduated, and it was some attraction for us that the breeze it played with had been out of doors so long. thus we sailed, not being able to fly, but as next best, making a long furrow in the fields of the merrimack toward our home, with our wings spread, but never lifting our heel from the watery trench ; gracefully plough ing homeward with our brisk and willing team, wind and stream, pulling together, the former yet a wild steer, yoked to his more sedate fel low. it was very near flying, as when the duck rushes through the water with an impulse of her wings, throwing the spray about her before she can rise. how we had stuck fast if drawn up but a few feet on the shore ! when we reached the great bend just above 476 a week middlesex, where the river runs east thirty -five miles to the sea, we at length lost the aid of this propitious wind, though we contrived to make one long and judicious tack carry us nearly to the locks of the canal. we were here locked through at noon by our old friend, the lover of the higher mathematics, who seemed glad to see us safe back again through so many locks ; but we did not stop to consider any of his problems, though we could cheerfully have spent a whole autumn in this way another time, and never have asked what his religion was. it is so rare to meet with a man out-doors who cherishes a worthy thought in his mind, which is indepen dent of the labor of his hands. behind every man s busy-ness there should be a level of undis turbed serenity and industry, as within the reef encircling a coral isle there is always an expanse of still water, where the depositions are going on which will finally raise it above the surface. the eye which can appreciate the naked and absolute beauty of a scientific truth is far more rare than that which is attracted by a moral one. few detect the morality in the former, or the science in the latter. aristotle defined art to be aoyos tov cpyov avev va^s, the principle of the work without the wood ; but most men prefer to have some of the wood along with the principle ; friday 477 they demand that the truth be clothed in flesh and blood and the warm colors of life. they prefer the partial statement because it fits and measures them and their commodities best. but science still exists everywhere as the sealer of weights and measures at least. we have heard much about the poetry of mathematics, but very little of it has yet been sung. the ancients had a juster notion of their poetic value than we. the most distinct and beautiful statement of any truth must take at last the mathematical form. we might so sim plify the rules of moral philosophy, as well as of arithmetic, that one formula would express them both. all the moral laws are readily translated into natural philosophy, for often we have only to restore the primitive meaning of the words by which they are expressed, or to attend to their literal instead of their metaphor ical sense. they are already supernatural phi losophy. the whole body of what is now called tooral or ethical truth existed in the golden age as abstract science. or, if we prefer, we may say that the laws of nature are the purest mo rality. the tree of knowledge is a tree of knowledge of good and evil. he is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympa thy to his studies, and expect to learn some thing by behavior as well as by application. il 478 a week is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coin cidences, or of partial and extraneous laws. the study of geometry is a petty and idle exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger system than the starry one. mathematics should be mixed not only with physics but with ethics, that is mixed mathematics. the fact which interests us most is the life of the naturalist. the purest science is still biographical. no thing will dignify and elevate science while it is sundered so wholly from the moral life of its devotee, and he professes another religion than it teaches, and worships at a foreign shrine. anciently the faith of a philosopher was identi cal with his system, or, in other words, his view of the universe. my friends mistake when they communicate facts to me with so much pains. their pres ence, even their exaggerations and loose state ments, are equally good facts for me. i have no respect for facts even except when i would use them, and for the most part i am indepen dent of those which i hear, and can afford to be inaccurate, or, in other words, to substitute more present and pressing facts in their place. the poet uses the results of science and phi losophy, and generalizes their widest deductions. the process of discovery is very simple. an unwearied and systematic application of known frida y 479 laws to nature causes the unknown to reveal themselves. almost any mode of observation will be successful at last, for what is most wanted is method. only let something be de termined and fixed around which observation may rally. how many new relations a foot rule alone will reveal, and to how many things still this has not been applied ! what wonder ful discoveries have been and may still be made, with a plumb-line, a level, a surveyor s com pass, a thermometer, or a barometer! where there is an observatory and a telescope, we ex pect that any eyes will see new worlds at once. i should say that the most prominent scientific men of our country, and perhaps of this age, are either serving the arts and not pure science, or are performing faithful but quite subordinate labors in particular departments. they make no steady and systematic approaches to the cen tral fact. a discovery is made, and at once the attention of all observers is distracted to that, and it draws many analogous discoveries in its train ; as if their work were not already laid out for them, but they had been lying on their oars. there is wanting constant and ac curate observation with enough of theory to di rect and discipline it. but, above all, there is wanting genius. our books of science, as they improve in accuracy, 480 a week are in danger of losing the freshness and vigor and readiness to appreciate the real laws of na ture, which is a marked merit in the ofttimes false theories of the ancients. i am attracted by the slight pride and satisfaction, the emphatic and even exaggerated style, in which some of the older naturalists speak of the operations of nature, though they are better qualified to ap preciate than to discriminate the facts. their assertions are not without value when disproved. if they are not facts, they are suggestions for nature herself to act upon. &quot;the greeks,&quot; says gesner, &quot;had a common proverb (aa-yos icafovsoi ), a sleeping hare, for a dissembler or counterfeit; because the hare sees when she sleeps ; for this is an admirable and rare work of nature, that all the residue of her bodily parts take their rest, but the eye standeth con tinually sentinel.&quot; observation is so wide awake, and facts are being so rapidly added to the sum of human experience, that it appears as if the theorizer would always be in arrears, and were doomed forever to arrive at imperfect conclusions; but the power to perceive a law is equally rare in all ages of the world, and depends but little on the number of facts observed. the senses of the savage will furnish him with facts enough to set him up as a philosopher. the ancients friday 481 can still speak to us with authority, even on the themes of geology and chemistry, though these studies are thought to have had their birth in modern times. much is said about the prog ress of science in these centuries. i should say that the useful results of science had accumu lated, but that there had been no accumulation of knowledge, strictly speaking, for posterity; for knowledge is to be acquired only by a corre sponding experience. how can we know what we are told merely? each man can interpret another s experience only by his own. we read that newton discovered the law of gravita tion, but how many who have heard of his fa mous discovery have recognized the same truth that he did? it may be not one. the revela tion which was then made to him has not been superseded by the revelation made to any suc cessor. we see the planet fall, and that is all. in a review of sir james clark boss s an tarctic voyage of discovery, there is a passage which shows how far a body of men are com monly impressed by an object of sublimity, and which is also a good instance of the step from the sublime to the ridiculous. after describing the discovery of the antarctic continent, at first seen a hundred miles distant over fields 482 a week of ice, stupendous ranges of mountains from seven and eight to twelve and fourteen thousand feet high, covered with eternal snow and ice, in solitary and inaccessible grandeur, at one time the weather being beautifully clear, and the sun shining on the icy landscape ; a conti nent whose islands only are accessible, and these exhibited &quot;not the smallest trace of vegeta tion,&quot; only in a few places the rocks protruding through their icy covering, to convince the be holder that land formed the nucleus, and that it was not an iceberg ; the practical british reviewer proceeds thus, sticking to his last, &quot; on the 22d of january, afternoon, the expedition made the latitude of 74 20 , and by 7 h p. m., having ground [ground! where did they get ground?] to believe that they were then in a higher southern latitude than had been attained by that enterprising seaman, the late captain james weddel, and therefore higher than all their predecessors, an extra allowance of grog was issued to the crews as a reward for their perseverance.&quot; let not us sailors of late centuries take upon ourselves any airs on account of our newtons and our cuviers ; we deserve an extra allowance of grog only. we endeavored in vain to persuade the wind friday 483 to blow through the long corridor of the canal, which is here cut straight through the woods, and were obliged to resort to our old expedient of drawing by a cord. when we reached the concord, we were forced to row once more in good earnest, with neither wind nor current in our favor, but by this time the rawness of the day had disappeared, and we experienced the warmth of a summer afternoon. this change in the weather was favorable to our contempla tive mood, and disposed us to dream yet deeper at our oars, while we floated in imagination farther down the stream of time, as we had floated down the stream of the merrimack, to poets of a milder period than had engaged us in the morning. chelmsford and billerica ap peared like old english towns, compared with merrimack and nashua, and many generations of civil poets might have lived and sung here. what a contrast between the stern and deso late poetry of ossian, and that of chaucer, and even of shakespeare and milton, much more of dryden, and pope, and gray. our summer of english poetry, like the greek and latin before it, seems well advanced toward its fall, and laden with the fruit and foliage of the season, with bright autumnal tints, but soon the winter will scatter its myriad clustering and shading 484 a week leaves, and leave only a few desolate and fibrous boughs to sustain the snow and rime, and creak in the blasts of ages. we cannot escape the impression that the muse has stooped a little in her flight, when we come to the literature of civilized eras. now first we hear of various ages and styles of poetry; it is pastoral, and lyric, and narrative, and didactic ; but the poe try of runic monuments is of one style, and for every age. the bard has in a great measure lost the dignity and sacredness of his office. formerly he was called a seer, but now it is thought that one man sees as much as another. he has no longer the bardic rage, and only con ceives the deed, which he formerly stood ready to perform. hosts of warriors earnest for bat tle could not mistake nor dispense with the an cient bard. his lays were heard in the pauses of the fight. there was no danger of his being overlooked by his contemporaries. but now the hero and the bard are of different professions. when we come to the pleasant english verse, the storms have all cleared away, and it will never thunder and lighten more. the poet has come within doors, and exchanged the forest and crag for the fireside, the hut of the gael, and stonehenge, with its circles of stones, for the house of the englishman. no hero stands at the door prepared to break forth into song 01 frida y 485 heroic action, but a homely englishman, who cultivates the art of poetry. we see the com fortable fireside, and hear the crackling fagots, in all the verse. notwithstanding the broad humanity of chaucer, and the many social and domestic comforts which we meet with in his verse, we have to narrow our vision somewhat to consider him, as if he occupied less space in the land scape, and did not stretch over hill and valley as ossian does. yet, seen from the side of posterity, as the father of english poetry, pre ceded by a long silence or confusion in history, unenlivened by any strain of pure melody, we easily come to reverence him. passing over the earlier continental poets, since we are bound to the pleasant archipelago of english poetry, chaucer s is the first name after that misty weather in which ossian lived, which can detain us long. indeed, though he represents so dif ferent a culture and society, he may be regarded as in many respects the homer of the english poets. perhaps he is the youthfulest of them all. we return to him as to the purest well, the fountain farthest removed from the highway of desultory life. he is so natural and cheer ful, compared with later poets, that we might almost regard him as a personification of spring. to the faithful reader his muse has even given 486 a week an aspect to his times, and when he is fresh from perusing him, they seem related to the golden age. it is still the poetry of youth and life, rather than of thought; and though the moral vein is obvious and constant, it has not yet banished the sun and daylight from his verse. the loftiest strains of the muse are, for the most part, sublimely plaintive, and not a carol as free as nature s. the content which the sun shines to celebrate from morning to evening is unsung. the muse solaces herself, and is not ravished but consoled. there is a catastrophe implied, and a tragic element in all our verse, and less of the lark and morning dews, than of the nightingale and evening shades. but in homer and chaucer there is more of the innocence and serenity of youth than in the more modern and moral poets. the iliad is not sabbath but morning reading, and men cling to this old song, because they still have moments of unbaptized and uncommitted life, which give them an appetite for more. to the innocent there are neither cherubim nor an gels. at rare intervals we rise above the ne cessity of virtue into an unchangeable morning light, in which we have only to live right on and breathe the ambrosial air. the iliad rep resents no creed nor opinion, and we read it with a rare sense of freedom and irresponsibil frida y 487 ity, as if we trod on native ground, and were autochthones of the soil. chaucer had eminently the habits of a liter ary man and a scholar. there were never any times so stirring that there were not to be found some sedentary still. he was surrounded by the din of arms. the battles of hallidon hill and neville s cross, and the still more mem orable battles of cressy and poictiers, were fought in his youth ; but these did not concern our poet much, wickliffe and his reform much more. he regarded himself always as one priv ileged to sit and converse with books. he helped to establish the literary class. his character as one of the fathers of the english language would alone make his works impor tant, even those which have little poetical merit. he was as simple as wordsworth in preferring his homely but vigorous saxon tongue, when it was neglected by the court, and had not yet attained to the dignity of a literature, and ren dered a similar service to his country to that which dante rendered to italy. if greek suf ficeth for greek, and arabic for arabian, and hebrew for jew, and latin for latin, then english shall suffice for him, for any of these will serve to teach truth &quot;right as divers pathes leaden divers folke the right waye to home.&quot; in the testament of love he writes, &quot;let then 488 a week clerkes enditen in latin, for they have the prop ertie of science, and the knowinge in that facul tie, and lette frenchmen in their frenche also enditen their queinte termes, for it is kyndely to their mouthes, and let us shewe our fantasies in soche wordes as we lerneden of our dames tonge.&quot; he will know how to appreciate chaucer best who has come down to him the natural way, through the meagre pastures of saxon and ante chaucerian poetry ; and yet, so human and wise he appears after such diet, that we are liable to misjudge him still. in the saxon poetry ex tant, in the earliest english, and the contempo rary scottish poetry, there is less to remind the reader of the rudeness and vigor of youth than of the feebleness of a declining age. it is for the most part translation of imitation merely, with only an occasional and slight tinge of poetry, oftentimes the falsehood and exaggera tion of fable, without its imagination to redeem it, and we look in vain to find antiquity re stored, humanized, and made blithe again by some natural sympathy between it and the pres ent. but chaucer is fresh and modern still, and no dust settles on his true passages. it lightens along the line, and we are reminded that flowers have bloomed, and birds sung, and hearts beaten in england. before the earnest frida y 489 gaze of the reader, the rust and moss of time gradually drop off, and the original green life is revealed. he was a homely and domestic man, and did breathe quite as modern men do. there is no wisdom that can take place of hu manity, and we find that in chaucer. we can expand at last in his breadth, and we think that we could have been that man s acquaintance. he was worthy to be a citizen of england, while petrarch and boccaccio lived in italy, and tell and tamerlane in switzerland and in asia, and bruce in scotland, and wickliffe, and gower, and edward the third, and john of gaunt, and the black prince were his own countrymen as well as contemporaries ; all stout and stirring names. the fame of roger bacon came down from the preceding century, and the name of dante still possessed the influence of a living presence. on the whole, chaucer im presses us as greater than his reputation, and not a little like homer and shakespeare, for he would have held up his head in their company. among early english poets he is the landlord and host, and has the authority of such. the affectionate mention which succeeding early poets make of him, coupling him with homer and virgil, is to be taken into the account in estimating his character and influence. king james and dunbar of scotland speak of him 490 a week with more love and reverence than any modern author of his predecessors of the last century. the same childlike relation is without a parallel now. for the most part we read him without criticism, for he does not plead his own cause, but speaks for his readers, and has that great ness of trust and reliance which compels popu larity. he confides in the reader, and speaks privily with him, keeping nothing back. and in return the reader has great confidence in him, that he tells no lies, and reads his story with indulgence, as if it were the circumlocution of a child, but often discovers afterwards that he has spoken with more directness and economy of words than a sage. he is never heartless, &quot; for first the thing is thought within the hart, er any word out from the mouth astart.&quot; and so new was all his theme in those days, that he did not have to invent, but only to tell. we admire chaucer for his sturdy english wit. the easy height he speaks from in his prologue to the canterbury tales, as if he were equal to any of the company there assembled, is as good as any particular excellence in it. but though it is full of good sense and human ity, it is not transcendent poetry. for pic turesque description of persons it is, perhaps, without a parallel in english poetry; yet it is essentially humorous, as the loftiest genius friday 491 never is. humor, however broad and genial, takes a narrower view than enthusiasm. to his own finer vein he added all the common wit and wisdom of his time, and everywhere in his works his remarkable knowledge of the world and nice perception of character, his rare com mon sense and proverbial wisdom, are apparent. his genius does not soar like milton s, but is genial and familiar. it shows great tenderness and delicacy, but not the heroic sentiment. it is only a greater portion of humanity with all its weakness. he is not heroic, as raleigh, nor pious, as herbert, nor philosophical, as shakespeare, but he is the child of the english muse, that child which is the father of the man. the charm of his poetry consists often only in an exceeding naturalness, perfect sincerity, with the behavior of a child rather than of a man. gentleness and delicacy of character are everywhere apparent in his verse. the simplest and humblest words come readily to his lips. no one can read the prioress s tale, understand ing the spirit in which it was written, and in which the child sings alma redemptoris mater ) or the account of the departure of con stance with her child upon the sea, in the man of lawe s tale, without feeling the native inno cence and refinement of the author. nor can we be mistaken respecting the essential purity 492 a week of his character, disregarding the apology of the manners of the age. a simple pathos and feminine gentleness, which wordsworth only occasionally approaches, but does not equal, are peculiar to him. we are tempted to say that his genius was feminine, not masculine. it was such a feminineness, however, as is rarest to find in woman, though not the appreciation of it; perhaps it is not to be found at all in woman, but is only the feminine in man. such pure and genuine and childlike love of nature is hardly to be found in any poet. chaucer s remarkably trustful and affection ate character appears in his familiar, yet inno cent and reverent, manner of speaking of his god. he comes into his thought without any false reverence, and with no more parade than the zephyr to his ear. if nature is our mo ther, then god is our father. there is less love and simple, practical trust in shakespeare and milton. how rarely in our english tongue do we find expressed any affection for god. cer tainly, there is no sentiment so rare as the love of god. herbert almost alone expresses it, &quot;ah, my dear god!&quot; our poet uses similar words with propriety; and whenever he sees a beautiful person, or other object, prides himself on the &quot;maistry &quot; of his god. he even recom mends dido to be his bride, friday 493 &quot; if that god that heaven and yearth made, would have a love for beauty and goodnesse, and womanhede, trouth, and semeliness.&quot; but in justification of our praise, we must refer to his works themselves; to the prologue to the canterbury tales, the account of genti lesse, the flower and the leaf, the stories of griselda, virginia, ariadne, and blanche the duchesse, and much more of less distinguished merit. there are many poets of more taste, and better manners, who knew how to leave out their dullness; but such negative genius cannot detain us long ; we shall return to chaucer still with love. some natures, which are really rude and ill-developed, have yet a higher stand ard of perfection than others which are refined and well balanced. even the clown has taste, whose dictates, though he disregards them, are higher and purer than those which the artist obeys. if we have to wander through many dull and prosaic passages in chaucer, we have at least the satisfaction of knowing that it is not an artificial dullness, but too easily matched by many passages in life. we confess that we feel a disposition commonly to concentrate sweets, and accumulate pleasures ; but the poet may be presumed always to speak as a traveler, who leads us through a varied scenery, from one eminence to another, and it is, perhaps, more 494 a week pleasing, after all, to meet with a fine thought in its natural setting. surely fate has en shrined it in these circumstances for some end. nature strews her nuts and flowers broadcast, and never collects them into heaps. this was the soil it grew in, and this the hour it bloomed in; if sun, wind, and rain came here to cherish and expand the flower, shall not we come here to pluck it? a true poem is distinguished not so much by a felicitous expression, or any thought it sug gests, as by the atmosphere which surrounds it. most have beauty of outline merely, and are striking as the form and bearing of a stranger ; but true verses come toward us indistinctly, as the very breath of all friendliness, and envelop us in their spirit and fragrance. much of our poetry has the very best manners, but no character. it is only an unusual precision and elasticity of speech, as if its author had taken, not an intoxicating draught, but an electuary. it has the distinct outline of sculpture, and chronicles an early hour. under the influence of passion all men speak thus distinctly, but wrath is not always divine. there are two classes of men called poets. the one cultivates life, the other art, one seeks food for nutriment, the other for flavor* friday 495 one satisfies hunger, the other gratifies the palate. there are two kinds of writing, both great and rare; one that of genius, or the in spired, the other of intellect and taste, in the intervals of inspiration. the former is above criticism, always correct, giving the law to crit icism. it vibrates and pulsates with life for ever. it is sacred, and to be read with rever ence, as the works of nature are studied. there are few instances of a sustained style of this kind; perhaps every man has spoken words, but the speaker is then careless of the record. such a style removes us out of personal relations with its author; we do not take his words on our lips, but his sense into our hearts. it is the stream of inspiration, which bubbles out, now here, now there, now in this man, now in that. it matters not through what ice-crystals it is seen, now a fountain, now the ocean stream run ning underground. it is in shakespeare, al pheus, in burns, arethuse ; but ever the same. the other is self-possessed and wise. it is rev erent of genius, and greedy of inspiration. it is conscious in the highest and the least degree. it consists with the most perfect command of the faculties. it dwells in a repose as of the desert, and objects are as distinct in it as oases or palms in the horizon of sand. the train of thought moves with subdued and measured step, 496 a week like a caravan. but the pen is only an instru ment in its hand, and not instinct with life, like a longer arm. it leaves a thin varnish or glaze over all its work. the works of goethe furnish remarkable instances of the latter. there is no just and serene criticism as yet. nothing is considered simply as it lies in the lap of eternal beauty, but our thoughts, as well as our bodies, must be dressed after the latest fashions. our taste is too delicate and partic ular. it says nay to the poet s work, but never yea to his hope. it invites him to adorn his deformities, and not to cast them off by expan sion, as the tree its bark. we are a people who live in a bright light, in houses of pearl and porcelain, and drink only light wines, whose teeth are easily set on edge by the least natural sour. if we had been consulted, the backbone of the earth would have been made, not of gran ite, but of bristol spar. a modern author would have died in infancy in a ruder age. but the poet is something m&amp;lt;?re than a scald, &quot;a smoother and polisher of language;&quot; he is a cincinnatus in literature, and occupies no west end of the world. like the sun, he will indifferently select his rhymes, and with a lib eral taste weave into his verse the planet and the stubble. in these old books the stucco has long since friday 497 crumbled away, and we read what was sculp tured in the granite. they are rude and mas sive in their proportions, rather than smooth and delicate in their finish. the workers in stone polish only their chimney ornaments, but their pyramids are roughly done. there is a soberness in a rough aspect, as of unhewn granite, which addresses a depth in us, but a polished surface hits only the ball of the eye. the true finish is the work of time, and the use to which a thing is put. the elements are still polishing the pyramids. art may varnish and gild, but it can do no more. a work of genius is rough-hewn from the first, because it antici pates the lapse of time, and has an ingrained polish, which still appears when fragments are broken off, an essential quality of its substance. its beauty is at the same time its strength, and it breaks with a lustre. the great poem must have the stamp of greatness as well as its essence. the reader easily goes within the shallowest contemporary poetry, and informs it with all the life and promise of the day, as the pilgrim goes within the temple, arid hears the faintest strains of the worshipers ; but it will have to speak to poster ity, traversing these deserts, through the ruins of its outmost walls, by the grandeur and beauty of its proportions. 498 a week but here on the stream of the concord, where we have all the while been bodily, nature, who is superior to all styles and ages, is now, with pensive face, composing her poem autumn, with which no work of man will bear to be com pared. in summer we live out of doors, and have only impulses and feelings, which are all for action, and must wait commonly for the still ness and longer nights of autumn and winter before any thought will subside ; we are sensible that behind the rustling leaves, and the stacks of grain, and the bare clusters of the grape, there is the field of a wholly new life, which no man has lived ; that even this earth was made for more mysterious and nobler inhabitants than men and women. in the hues of october sunsets, we see the portals to other mansions than those which we occupy, not far off geo graphically, &quot; there is a place beyond that flaming hill, from whence the stars their thin appearance shed^ a place beyond all place, where never ill, nor impure thought was ever harbored.&quot; sometimes a mortal feels in himself nature, not his father but his mother stirs within him, and he becomes immortal with her immortality. from time to time she claims kindredship with us, and some globule from her veins steals up into our own. friday 499 i am the autumnal sun, with autumn gales my race is run ; when will the hazel put forth its flowers, or the grape ripen under my bowers ? when will the harvest or the hunter s moon turn my midnight into mid-noon ? i am all sere and yellow, and to my core mellow. the mast is dropping within my woods, the winter is lurking within my moods, and the rustling of the withered leaf is the constant music of my grief. to an unskillful rhymer the muse thus spoke in prose : the moon no longer reflects the day, but rises to her absolute rule, and the husbandman and hunter acknowledge her for their mistress. asters and golden -rods reign along the way, and the life-everlasting withers not. the fields are reaped and shorn of their pride, but an inward verdure still crowns them. the thistle scatters its down on the pool, and yellow leaves clothe the vine, and naught disturbs the serious life of men. but behind the sheaves, and under the sod, there lurks a ripe fruit, which the reapers have not gathered, the true harvest of the year, which it bears forever, annually watering and maturing it, and man never severs the stalk which bears this palatable fruit. 600 a week men nowhere, east or west, live yet a natural life, round which the vine clings, and which the elm willingly shadows. man would desecrate it by his touch, and so the beauty of the world remains veiled to him. he needs not only to be spiritualized, but naturalized, on the soil of earth. who shall conceive what kind of roof the heavens might extend over him, what sea sons minister to him, and what employment dignify his life! only the convalescent raise the veil of nature. an immortality in his life would confer immortality on his abode. the winds should be his breath, the seasons his moods, and he should impart of his serenity to nature herself. but such as we know him he is ephemeral like the scenery which surrounds him, and does not aspire to an enduring exist ence. when we come down into the distant village, visible from the mountain-top, the no bler inhabitants with whom we peopled it have departed, and left only vermin in its desolate streets. it is the imagination of poets which puts those brave speeches into the mouths of their heroes. they may feign that cato s last words were &quot; the earth, the air, and seas i know, and all the joys and horrors of their peace and wars , and now will view the gods state and the stars,&quot; but such are not the thoughts nor the destiny friday 501 of common men. what is this heaven which they expect, if it is no better than they expect? are they prepared for a better than they can now imagine? where is the heaven of him who dies on a stage, in a theatre? here or nowhere is our heaven. &quot;although we see celestial bodies move above the earth, the earth we till and love.&quot; we can conceive of nothing more fair than something which we have experienced. &quot;the remembrance of youth is a sigh.&quot; we linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they are half forgotten ere we have learned the language. we have need to be earth-born as well as heaven -born, y^yems, as was said of the titans of old, or in a better sense than they. there have been heroes for whom this world seemed expressly prepared, as if creation had at last succeeded ; whose daily life was the stuff of which our dreams are made, and whose presence enhanced the beauty and ampleness of nature herself. where they walked, &quot; largior hie campos aether et luniine vestit purpureo : solemque suum, sua sidera norunt.&quot; &quot; here a more copious air invests the fields, and clothes with purple light; and they know their own sun and their own stars.&quot; we love to hear some men speak, though we hear not what they say ; the very air they breathe is rich and 502 a week perfumed, and the sound of their voices falls on the ear like the rustling of leaves or the crack ling of the fire. they stand many deep. they have the heavens for their abettors, as those who have never stood from under them, and they look at the stars with an answering ray. their eyes are like glow-worms, and their mo tions graceful and flowing, as if a place were already found for them, like rivers flowing through valleys. the distinctions of morality, of right and wrong, sense and nonsense, are petty, and have lost their significance, beside these pure primeval natures. when i consider the clouds stretched in stupendous masses across the sky, frowning with darkness or glowing with downy light, or gilded with the rays of the setting sun, like the battlements of a city in the heavens, their grandeur appears thrown away on the meanness of my employment; the dra pery is altogether too rich for such poor acting. i am hardly worthy to be a suburban dweller outside those walls. &quot; unless above himself he can erect himself, how poor a thing is man ! &quot; with our music we would fain challenge transiently another and finer sort of intercourse than our daily toil permits. the strains come back to us amended in the echo, as when a friend reads our verse. why have they so friday 503 painted the fruits, and freighted them with such fragrance as to satisfy a more than animal appetite? &quot; i asked the schoolman, his advice was free, but scored me out too intricate a way.&quot; these things imply, perchance, that we live on the verge of another and purer realm, from which these odors and sounds are wafted over to us. the borders of our plot are set with flowers, whose seeds were blown from more elysian fields adjacent. they are the pot-herbs of the gods. some fairer fruits and sweeter fragrances wafted over to us betray another realm s vicinity. there, too, does echo dwell, and there is the abutment of the rainbow s arch. a finer race and finer fed feast and revel o er our head, and we titmen are only able to catch the fragments from their table. theirs is the fragrance of the fruits, while we consume the pulp and roots. what are the moments that we stand astonished on the olympian land ! we need pray for no higher heaven than the pure senses can furnish, a purely sensuous life. our present senses are but the rudiments of what they are destined to become. we are comparatively deaf and dumb and blind, and without smell or taste or feeling. every gener ation makes the discovery that its divine vigor 504 a week has been dissipated, and each sense and faculty misapplied and debauched. the ears were made, not for such trivial uses as men are wont to suppose, but to hear celestial sounds. the eyes were not made for such groveling uses as they are now put to and worn out by, but to behold beauty now invisible. may we not see god ? are we to be put off and amused in this life, as it were with a mere allegory? is not nature, rightly read, that of which she is com monly taken to be the symbol merely ? when the common man looks into the sky, which he has not so much profaned, he thinks it less gross than the earth, and with reverence speaks of &quot;the heavens, * but the seer will in the same sense speak of &quot;the earths,&quot; and his father who is in them. &quot;did not he that made that which is within make that which is without also?&quot; what is it, then, to educate but to develop these divine germs called the senses? for individuals and states to deal magnani mously with the rising generation, leading it not into temptation, not teach the eye to squint, nor attune the ear to profanity. but where is the instructed teacher? where are the normal schools ? a hindoo sage said, &quot;as a dancer, having exhibited herself to the spectator, desists from the dance, so does nature desist, having mani friday 505 fested herself to soul . nothing, in my opin ion, is more gentle than nature ; once aware of having been seen, she does not again expose herself to the gaze of soul.&quot; it is easier to discover another such a new world as columbus did, than to go within one fold of this which we appear to know so well ; the land is lost sight of, the compass varies, and mankind mutiny ; and still history accumu lates like rubbish before the portals of nature. but there is only necessary a moment s sanity and sound senses, to teach us that there is a na ture behind the ordinary, in which we have only some vague preemption right and western re serve as yet. we live on the outskirts of that region. carved wood, and floating boughs, and sunset skies are all that we know of it. we are not to be imposed on by the longest spell of weather. let us not, my friends, be wheedled and cheated into good behavior to earn the salt of our eternal porridge, whoever they are that attempt it. let us wait a little, and not purchase any clearing here, trusting that richer bottoms will soon be put up. it is but thin soil where we stand; i have felt my roots in a richer ere this. i have seen a bunch of violets in a glass vase, tied loosely with a straw, which reminded me of myself. 606 a week i am a parcel of vain strivings tied by a chance bond together, dangling this way and that, their links were made so loose and wide, methinks, for milder weather. a bunch of violets without their roots, and sorrel intermixed, encircled by a wisp of straw once coiled about their shoots, the law by which i m fixed. a nosegay which time clutched from out those fair elysian fields, with weeds and broken stems, in haste, doth make the rabble rout that waste the day he yields. and here i bloom for a short hour unseen, drinking my juices up, with no root in the land to keep my branches green, but stand in a bare cup. some tender buds were left upon my stem in mimicry of life, but ah ! the children will not know, till time has withered them, the woe with which they re rife. but now i see i was not plucked for naught, and after in life s vase friday 507 of glass set while i might survive, but by a kind hand brought alive to a strange place. that stock thus thinned will soon redeem its hours, and by another year, such as god knows, with freer air, more fruits and fairer flowers will bear, while i droop here. this world has many rings, like saturn, and we live now on the outmost of them all. none can say deliberately that he inhabits the same sphere, or is contemporary, with the flower which his hands have plucked, and though his feet may seem to crush it, inconceivable spaces and ages separate them, and perchance there is no danger that he will hurt it. what do the botanists know? our lives should go between the lichen and the bark. the eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind. we are still being born, and have as yet but a dim vision of sea and land, sun, moon, and stars, and shall not see clearly till after nine days at least. that is a pathetic inquiry among travelers and geographers after the site of ancient troy. it is not near where they think it is. when a thing is decayed and gone, how indistinct must be the place it occupied ! the anecdotes of modern astronomy affect me 508 a week in the same way as do those faint revelations of the real which are vouchsafed to men from time to time, or rather from eternity to eternity. when i remember the history of that faint light in our firmament which we call venus, which ancient men regarded, and which most modern men still regard, as a bright spark at tached to a hollow sphere revolving about our earth, but which we have discovered to be an other world, in itself, how copernicus, rea soning long and patiently about the matter, pre dicted confidently concerning it, before yet the telescope had been invented, that if ever men came to see it more clearly than they did then, they would discover that it had phases like our moon, and that within a century after his death the telescope was invented, and that prediction verified, by galileo, i am not without hope that we may, even here and now, obtain some accurate information concerning that other world which the instinct of mankind has so long predicted. indeed, all that we call science, as well as all that we call poetry, is a particle of such information, accurate as far as it goes, though it be but to the confines of the truth. if we can reason so accurately, and with such wonderful confirmation of our reasoning, re specting so-called material objects and events infinitely removed beyond the range of our nat friday 509 nral vision, so that the mind hesitates to trust its calculations even when they are confirmed by observation, why may not our speculations penetrate as far into the immaterial starry system, of which the former is but the out ward and visible type? surely, we are pro vided with senses as well fitted to penetrate the spaces of the real, the substantial, the eternal, as these outward are to penetrate the material universe. veias, menu, zoroaster, socrates, christ, shakespeare, swedenborg, these are some of our astronomers. there are perturbations in our orbits pro duced by the influence of outlying spheres, and no astronomer has ever yet calculated the ele ments of that undiscovered world which pro duces them. i perceive in the common train of my thoughts a natural and uninterrupted sequence, each implying the next, or, if inter ruption occurs, it is occasioned by a new object being presented to my senses. but a steep, and sudden, and by these means unaccountable transition is that from a comparatively narrow and partial, what is called common -sense view of things, to an infinitely expanded and liberat ing one, from seeing things as men describe them, to seeing them as men cannot describe them. this implies a sense which is not com mon, but rare in the wisest man s experience; 510 a week which is sensible or sentient of more than common. in what inclosures does the astronomer loiter ! his skies are shoal, and imagination, like a thirsty traveler, pants to be through their des ert. the roving mind impatiently bursts the fetters of astronomical orbits, like cobwebs in a corner of its universe, and launches itself to where distance fails to follow, and law, such as science has discovered, grows weak and weary. the mind knows a distance and a space of which all those sums combined do not make a unit of measure, the interval between that which appears and that which is. i know that there are many stars, i know that they are far enough off, bright enough, steady enough in their or bits, but what are they all worth ? they are more waste land in the west, star ter ritory, to be made slave states, perchance, if we colonize them. i have interest but for six feet of star, and that interest is transient. then farewell to all ye bodies, such as i have known ye. every man, if he is wise, will stand on such bottom as will sustain him, and if one gravi tates downward more strongly than another, he will not venture on those meads where the lat ter walks securely, but rather leave the cran friday 511 berries which grow there unraked by himself. perchance, some spring, a higher freshet will float them within his reach, though they may be watery and frost-bitten by that time. such shriveled berries i have seen in many a poor man s garret, ay, in many a church-bin and state-coffer, and with a little water and heat they swell again to their original size and fair ness, and added sugar enough, stead mankind for sauce to this world s dish. what is called common sense is excellent in its department, and as invaluable as the virtue of conformity in the army and navy, for there must be subordination, but uncommon sense, that sense which is common only to the wisest, is as much more excellent as it is more rare. some aspire to excellence in the subordinate department, and may god speed them. what fuller says of masters of colleges is universally applicable, that &quot;a little alloy of dullness in a master of a college makes him fitter to manage secular affairs. * &quot; he that wants faith, and apprehends a, grief because he wants it, hath a true belief ; and he that grieves because his grief s so small, has a true grief, and the best faith of all.&quot; or be encouraged by this other poet s strain, 11 by them went fido, marshal of the field : weak wag his mother when she gave him day ; 512 a week and he at first a sick and weakly child, as e er with tears welcomed the sunny ray ; yet when more years afford more growth and mighty a champion stout he was, and puissant knight, as ever came in field, or shone in armor bright. &quot; mountains he flings in seas with mighty hand ; stops and turns back the sun s impetuous course, nature breaks nature s laws at his command ; no force of hell or heaven withstands his force ; events to come yet many ages hence, he present makes, by wondrous prescience ; proving the senses blind by being blind to sense.&quot; &quot;yesterday, at dawn,&quot; says hafiz, &quot;god deliv ered me from all worldly affliction; and amidst the gloom of night presented me with the water of immortality.&quot; in the life of sadi by dowlat shah occurs this sentence: &quot;the eagle of the immaterial soul of shaikh sadi shook from his plumage the dust of his body.&quot; thus thoughtfully we were rowing homeward to find some autumnal work to do, and help on the revolution of the seasons. perhaps nature would condescend to make use of us even with out our knowledge, as when we help to scatter her seeds in our walks, and carry burrs and cockles on our clothes from field to field. all things are current found on earthly ground, friday 513 spirits and elements have their descents. night and day, year on year, high and low, far and near, these are our own aspects, these are our own regrets. ye gods of the shore, who abide evermore, i see your far headland, stretching on either hand ; i hear the sweet evening sounds from your undecaying grounds ; cheat me no more with time, take me to your clime. as it grew later in the afternoon, and we rowed leisurely up the gentle stream, shut in between fragrant and blooming banks, where we had first pitched our tent, and drew nearer to the fields where our lives had passed, we seemed to detect the hues of our native sky in the southwest horizon. the sun was just set ting behind the edge of a wooded hill, so rich a sunset as would never have ended but for some reason unknown to men, and to be marked with brighter colors than ordinary in the scroll of time. though the shadows of the hills were beginning to steal over the stream, the whole river valley undulated with mild light, purer and more memorable than the noon. for so day bids farewell even to solitary vales unin 514 a week habited by man. two herons (ardea, herodias), with their long and slender limbs relieved against the sky, were seen traveling high over our heads, their lofty and silent flight, as they were wending their way at evening, surely not to alight in any marsh on the earth s sur face, but, perchance, on the other side of our atmosphere, a symbol for the ages to study, whether impressed upon the sky, or sculptured amid the hieroglyphics of egypt. bound to some northern meadow, they held on their stately, stationary flight, like tbe storks in the picture, and disappeared at length behind the clouds. dense flocks of blackbirds were wing ing their way along the river s course, as if on a short evening pilgrimage to some shrine of theirs, or to celebrate so fair a sunset. &quot; therefore, as doth the pilgrim, whom the night hastes darkly to imprison on his way, think on thy home, my soul, and think aright of what s yet left thee of life s wasting day : thy sun posts westward, passed is thy morn, and twice it is not given thee to be born.&quot; the sun-setting presumed all men at leisure, and in a contemplative mood; but the farmer s boy only whistled the more thoughtfully as he drove his cows home from pasture, and the teamster refrained from cracking his whip, and guided his team with a subdued voice. the last vestiges of daylight at length disappeared, friday 515 and as we rowed silently along with our backs toward home through the darkness, only a few stars being visible, we had little to say, but sat absorbed in thought, or in silence listened to the monotonous sound of our oars, a sort of ru dimental music, suitable for the ear of night and the acoustics of her dimly lighted halls ; &quot; pulsaa re fe runt ad sidera valles, and the valleys echoed the sound to the stars. as we looked up in silence to those distant lights, we were reminded that it was a rare im agination which first taught that the stars are worlds, and had conferred a great benefit on mankind. it is recorded in the chronicle of bernaldez that in columbus s first voyage the natives &quot;pointed towards the heavens, making signs that they believed that there was all power and holiness.&quot; we have reason to be grateful for celestial phenomena, for they chiefly answer to the ideal in man. the stars are distant and unobtrusive, but bright and enduring as our fairest and most memorable experiences. &quot;let the immortal depth of your soul lead you, but earnestly extend your eyes upwards.&quot; as the truest society approaches always nearer to solitude, so the most excellent speech finally falls into silence. silence is audible to 516 a week all men, at all times, and in all places. she is when we hear inwardly, sound when we hear outwardly. creation has not displaced her, but is her visible framework and foil. all sounds are her servants, and purveyors, pro claiming not only that their mistress is, but is a rare mistress, and earnestly to be sought after. they are so far akin to silence that they are but bubbles on her surface, which straightway burst, an evidence of the strength and prolific ness of the under-current ; a faint utterance of silence, and then only agreeable to our auditory nerves when they contrast themselves with and relieve the former. in proportion as they do this, and are heighteners and intensifiers of the silence, they are harmony and purest melody. silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment ; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bun gler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality disturb us. the orator puts off his individuality, and is then most eloquent when most silent. he lis tens while he speaks, and is a hearer along with his audience. who has not hearkened to her friday 517 infinite din? she is truth s speaking-trumpet, the sole oracle, the true delphi and dodona, which kings and courtiers would do well to con sult, nor will they be balked by an ambiguous answer. for through her all revelations have been made, and just in proportion as men have consulted her oracle within, they have obtained a clear insight, and their age has been marked as an enlightened one. but as often as they have gone gadding abroad to a strange delphi and her mad priestess, their age has been dark and leaden. such were garrulous and noisy eras, which no longer yield any sound, but the grecian or silent and melodious era is ever sounding and resounding in the ears of men. a good book is the plectrum with which our else silent lyres are struck. we not un frequently refer the interest which belongs to our own unwritten sequel to the written and comparatively lifeless body of the work. of all books this sequel is the most indispensable part. it should be the author s aim to say once and emphatically, &quot;jle said,&quot; fyy. this is the most the bookmaker can attain to. if he make his volume a mole whereon the waves of silence may break, it is well. it were vain for me to endeavor to interpret the silence. she cannot be done into english. for six thousand years men have translated her 518 a week with what fidelity belonged to each, and still she is little better than a sealed book. a man may run on confidently for a time, thinking he has her under his thumb, and shall one day ex haust her, but he too must at last be silent, and men remark only how brave a beginning he made ; for when he at length dives into her, so vast is the disproportion of the told to the un told that the former will seem but the bubble on the surface where he disappeared. never theless, we will go on, like those chinese cliff swallows, feathering our nests with the froth which may one day be bread of life to such as dwell by the seashore. we had made about fifty miles this day with sail and oar, and now, far in the evening, our boat was grating against the bulrushes of its native port, and its keel recognized the concord mud, where some semblance of its outline was still preserved in the flattened flags which had scarce yet erected themselves since our depar ture ; and we leaped gladly on shore, drawing it up, and fastening it to the wild apple-tree, whose stem still bore the mark which its chain had worn in the chafing of the spring freshets. table of poetical quotations used ix 4 a week on the concoed and merrimack biters.&quot; paob 2. fluminaque obliquis cinxit declivia ripis (he confined the rivers). ovid. 3. beneath low hills, in the broad interval. emerson. 12. and thou simois, that as an arrowe, clere. &quot; sure there are poets which did never dream. 15. come, come, my lovely fair, and let us try. francis qljarles. 17. were it the will of heaven, an osier bough, pindar, tr. by emerson. 18. by the rude bridge that arched the flood. emerson. 26. renning aie downward to the sea. 43. a beggar on the way. &quot; that bold adopts each house he views, his own. 53. the river calmly flows. w. e. channing. 66. there is an inward voice that in the stream. w. e. channino. 57. sweet falls the summer air. w. e. channino. 60. a man that looks on glass. george herbert. 63. bedford, most noble bedford. 70. some nation yet shut in. william habinqton. 71. and ladahel, as saith the boke. john gower. &quot; jason first sayled, in story it is tolde. john lydgatb. 79. the seventh is a holy day. hesiod. 85. where is this love become in later age. francis qu akijes. &quot; the world a a popul ir disease, that reigns. 520 poetical quotations 85. all the world s a stage. shakespeare. 109. doth grow the greater still, the further downe. 115. so silent is the cessile air. 116. jam iceto turgent inpalmite gemmce. virgil. &quot; strata jacent passim sua quceque sub arbore poma. vib gil. 118. as from the clouds appears the full moon. homer. &quot; while it was dawn, and sacred day was advancing. homer 119. they, thinking great things, upon the neutral ground of war. homer. &quot; went down the idaean mountains to far olympus. homer. 120. for there are very many. homer. &quot; then rose up to them sweet-worded nestor, the shrill orator of the pylians. homer. 121. homer is gone ; and where is jove ? and where. 123. you grov ling worldlings, you whose wisdom trades. 124. merchants, arise. francis quarles. 125. to athens gowned he goes, and from that school. &amp;gt; francis quarles. what i have learned is mine ; i ve had my thought. 127. ask for that which is our whole life s light. &quot; let us set so just. william habington. 128. olympian bards who sung. emerson. 129. lips of cunning fell. emerson. 130. that t is not in the power of kings to raise. samuel daniel. and that the utmost powers of english rhyme. sam uel daniel. &quot; and who in time knows whither we may vent. samuel daniel. 131. how many thousands never heard the name. samuel daniel. 143. make bandog thy scout watch to bark at a thief. 151. i thynke for to touche also. john gower. the hye sheryfe of notynghame. robin hood bal lads. poetical quotations 521 151. his shoote it was but loosely shott. robin hood ballads. &quot; gazed on the heavens for what he missed on earth. william browne. to all courageous knichtis. 154. he and his valian* soldiers did range the woods full wide. old ballad of love well s fight. &quot; of all our valiant english, there were but thirty-four. old ballad of love well s fight. 155. and braving many dangers and hardships in the way. old ballad of lovewell s fight. &quot; a man he was of comely form. 157. for as we are informed, so thick and fast they fell. old ballad of lovewell s fight. 160. yet i doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs. tennyson. 165. men find that action is another thing. samuel daniel. 167. and round about good morrows fly. charles cotton. 168. the early pilgrim blythe he hailed. robin hood bal lads. 170. now turn again, turn again, said the pinder. old bal lad. &quot; virtues as rivers pass. 204. through the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day. tennyson. 205. fragments of the lofty strain. gray. 217. they carried these foresters into fair nottingham. robin hood ballads. 218. gentle river, gentle river. spanish ballad in percy : &quot; rio verde, rio verde.&quot; 219. then did the crimson streams that flowed. 225. when the drum beat at dead of night. campbell. 231. before each van. milton. 233. on either side the river lie. tennyson. 246. heaven itself shall slide. 247. flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye. shake speare. 522 poetical quotations 247. anon permit the basest clouds to ride. 248. how may a worm that crawls along the dust. giles fletcher. 251. and now the taller sons, whom titan warms. giles fletcher. 266. in a pleasant glade. spenser. 272. amongst the pumy stones, which seemed to plain. spenser. &quot; his reverend locks. bishop percy. 285. of syrian peace, immortal leisure. emerson. 293. too quick resolves do resolution wrong. 295. nor has he ceased his charming song, for still that lyre. simonides. 297. the young and tender stalk. 298-302. translations from anacreon. 809. man is man s foe and destiny. charles cotton. 321. he knew of our haste. pindar. &quot; springing up from the bottom. pindar. the island sprang from the watery. pindar. 328. rome living was the world s sole ornament. spenser. 330. bees that fly. 851. he that hath love and judgment too. 352. why love among the virtues is not known. dr. donne. 357. and love as well the shepherd can. 362. when manhood shall be matched so. 365. there be mo sterres in the skie than a pair. chaucer. 390. silver sands and pebbles sing. 891. who dreamt devoutlier than most use to pray. dr. donne. 392. and, more to lulle him in his slumber soft. spenser. 393. he trode the unplanted forest floor, whereon. emer son. 409-411. lines from persius. 414. sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright. george her bert. 417. to journey for his marriage. chaucer. 418. the swaying soft. w. e. channino. poetical quotations 523 421. not only o er the dial s face. j. montgomery. 429. old woman that lives under the hill. nursery bal lad. 432. the laws of nature break the rules of art. francis quakles. 441. the boteman strayt. spenser. &quot; summer s robe grows. dr. donne. 443. and now the cold autumnal dews are seen. 444. from steep pine-bearing mountains to the plain. mar lowe. 445. wise nature s darlings, they live in the world. mar lowe. &quot; at all, came lovers home from this great festival. marlowe. 455-459. lines from ossian. 465. and what s a life ? the flourishing array. francis quarles. 467. i see the golden-rod shine bright. w. e. channinq. 490. for first the thing is thought within the hart. chau cer. 493. if that god that heaven and yearth made. chaucer. 498. there is a place beyond that flaming hill. sir william davenant. 500. the earth, the air, and seas i know, and all. 501. although we see celestial bodies move. largior hie campos cether et lumine vestit. virgil. 502. unless above himself he can. samuel daniel. 503. i asked the schoolman, his advice was free. francis quarles. 511. he that wants faith, and apprehends a grief. fran cis quarles. &quot; by them went fido, marshal of the field. phineas fletcher. 514. therefore, as doth the pilgrim, whom the night. giles fletcher. 515. pu/e referunt ad sidera voiles. virgil. index &quot; a finer race and finer fed,&quot; verse, 503. advertisements, the best part of newspapers, 241. agassiz, louis, 32, 39. agiocochook, 414. &quot; ah, t is in vain the peaceful din,&quot; verse, 18. alewives, 39, 113, 11*. &quot;all things are current found,&quot; verse, 512. amesbury (mass.), 108, 110. amonoosuck, the, 414. amoskeag falls, 322, 323, 417. amoskeag (n. h.), 324, 325, 326, 336, 339, 381. &quot;an early unconverted saint,&quot; verse, 53. anacreon, 295-297 ; translations from, 298-302. andover (mass.), 155. antiquities, 327, 330-332. apprentices, the abundance of, 160. &quot; apple tree, elisha s,&quot; 470. aristotle, quoted, 165, 476. armchairs for fishermen, 113. arrow-head, 22. art and nature, 419. assabeth river, north or, 4. astronomy, 507-510. atlantides, the, verse, 345. aubrey, john, quoted, 139. autumn, the coming of, 441 ; flow ers of, 466-468 ; 498. average ability, man s success in proportion to his, 166. &quot; away ! away ! away ! away ! &quot; verse, 231. baboosuck brook, 287. background, all lives want a, 57. baker s river, 108, 333. ball s hill, 24, 46, 54. basstree, the, 207. battle-ground, first of the revolu tion, 18. beach-plum, the, 471. beaumont, francis, quoted, 86. beaver river, 115. bedford (mass.), 4, 47 ; petition of planters of, 63 ; 66, 77. bedford (n. h.), 306, 307, 311, 312. belknap, jeremy, quoted, 113, 159, 234, 249. bellows, valley called the, 235. bellows falls (vt.), 113. bells, the sound of sabbath, 97. bhagvat-geeta, the, quoted, 175; pure thought of the, 177 ; beauty of the, 184, 191. bibles of several nations, the, 90. billerica (mass.), 4, 39, 40, 44, 47, 54 ; age of the town of, 61 ; 64, 66, 77, 148, 483. biography, autobiography the best, 204. biscuit brook, 469. bittern, the, 309. boat, t. s, 15 : hints for making a, 16. boat-building, 283. boatmen, the pleasant lives of, 273 280. books, the reading and writing of, 115-140. botta, paul emile, quoted, 133, 162. bound rock, 6. bradford (n. h.), 469. brahm, the bringing to earth of. 176. brahman, virtue of the, 182. bream, the, 30-32. britannia s pastorals, quoted, 151. browne, sir thomas, quoted, 86. buddha and christ, 85. buried money, 258. &quot; but since we sailed,&quot; verse, 19. buttrick s plain, 64. calidas, the sacontala, quoted, 227 canaan (n. h.), 327. canal, an old, 78. 526 index canal-boat, appearance of a, 187 ; passing a, in fog, 249; later and early thoughts about a, 274-280 ; with sails, 340. cardinals, 22. carlisle bridge, 24, 46. carlisle (mass.), 4, 47, 63, 66. carnac, 331. cattle show, the concord, 443-447. channing, w. e., quoted, 53. chateaubriand, quoted, 171. chaucer, geoffrey, quoted, 365, 417, 436 ; in praise of, 483-494. chelmsford (mass.), 66, 78, 101, 106, 110, 114, 141, 333, 474, 483. chivin, dace, roach, or cousin trout, 34. christianity, practical and radical, 176. classics, study of the, 296. coat-of-arms, a concord, 9. cohass brook, 311. cohasset, the indian, 311. commerce, 278. common and uncommon sense, 511. conantum, 462. concord (mass.), settlement of, 3 ; historian of, quoted, 4 ; 6 ; coat-of arms for, 9 ; territory of, in 1831, 10 ; described by johnson, 10 ; meadows, 11 ; a port of entry, 15 ; 17 ; poet, a, 18 ; 45, 54, 62, 63, 77, 79, 102, 155 ; history of, quoted, 156 ; 211 ; cliffs, 212 ; 282, 427 ; cattle show in, 443-447 ; return to, 518. concord (n. h.), 110, 111 ; 333, 382; entertained in, and origin of, 399, 400. concoed rlveb, 3-13. concord river, 3 ; course of, 4 ; gen tleness of, 8 ; 12, 13, 23, 24, 78, 112, 140 ; a canal-boat on, and fair haven, 276-278; conaiituni on the, 462 ; reaching the, 483. confucius, quoted, 357, 371. connecticut river, the, 109, 111, 113, 264, 327. conscience, the, 93, 172; the chief of conservatives, 175. &quot; conscience is instinct bred in the house,&quot; verse, 94. conservatism, the wisest, 174. contoocook, 108. cooking, 294. coos falls, 307, 437. coreopsis, 22. cotton, charles, quoted, 309. cousin trout. see chivin. cranberry island, 6. criticism, 496. cromwell s falls, 110 ; story of cromwell and, 256. crooked river, the souhegan, or, 287. crusoe, robinson, among the arabs, cultivation, wildness and, 68. cupid wounded, verse, 302. custom, the grave of, 170 ; imme morial, 175. dace. see chivin. daggers, looking, 29. de mouts, sieur, quoted, 53. discovery, inner, 505. dogs, barking of house-, 49. &quot;dong, sounds the brass in the east,&quot; verse, 62. donne, dr. john, quoted, 391, 441. dracut (mass.), 101. dreams, 149, 391. drum, sound of a, by night, 224. dunstablc (mass.), 80, 142, 154, 155, 160, 216, 217, 220, 258, 282 ; history of, 218 ; quoted, 141, 157. dustan, hannah, escape with nurse and child from indians, 422-427. eel, the common, the lamprey, 38. election birds, 71. eliot, john, 102. emerson, quoted, 3, 18, 128, 129, 393. end of nature s creatures, the, 293. epitaphs, 221. extemporaneous living, 410. eyes, movement of the, 100. fable, the universal appeal of, 72 ; the christian, 84. fair haven, a canal boat on, 278. farwell of dunstable, 217-219, 258. fisherman, the, 26; account cur rent of a, 41. fishes, the nature of, 28. fish-hawk, the, 255. flea, deserts made by bite of a, 259. floating in a skiff as if in mid-air, 60. flowers, autumn, 4g6. fog, early morning, 233, 249 ; pic turesque effect of, 250. fox island, 54. framingham (mass.), 4, 66. franconia (n. h.), 111. fresh-water or river wolf, 36. freshet on the merrimack, 469. fbiday, 441-518. friends and friendship, 341-381. frontiers, wherever men front, 400. fuller, thomas, quoted, 329, 511. index 527 gazetteer, reading the, 115 ; quoted, 256, 322, 323, 334-336. genius, order in the development of, 407 ; the man of, 432 ; a man and his, 448. gerardia, the purple, 22. gesner, konrad von, quoted, 480. god, t. s idea of, 81, 82 ; men s im pertinent knowledge of, 88, 89 ; the personality of, 98. goethe, 429-432 ; quoted, 434-436. golf s falls, 311. goffstown (n. h.), 254, 323, 33g, 341. gookin, daniel, quoted, 102, 141, 210,218,332. gower, john, quoted, 71, 151. grape island, 54. grass-ground river, 3, 40. graves, indian, 312. graveyards, monuments and, 220. great meadows, the, 3, 20. &quot; greece, who am i that should re member thee,&quot; verse, 68. griffith s falls, 320. groton (mass.), 211. hafiz, quoted, 512. half lives, how the other, 282. hampstead (n. h.), 230, 250. harebell, the, 114. hastings, warren, quoted, 177, 178. haverhill (mass.), 108, 109, 110, 111, 230, 250 ; historian of, quoted, 399; 422. haystack, the, 107. haze, 284. heaven, 501-504. heetopades of veeshnoo sarma, 191. henry, alexander, adventures of, 283, 285-287 ; wawatam s friend ship with, 362. herons, 514. hesiod, quoted, 79. hibiscus, 23. history, the reading and the an tiquity of, 200-203. homer, 121, 486. hooksett (n. h.),279, 312, 323,339, 340, 382, 383, 414; pinnacle, 395 ; falls, 398. hoosack mountain, t. s ascent of, 235-248. hopkinton (mass.), 4, 40. &quot; horses have the mark,&quot; verse, 301. horseshoe interval, the, 157, 466. hudson (n. h.), 188, 189, 191, 211. huguenots of staten island, 236. &quot;i am a parcel of vain strivings tied,&quot; verse, 506. &quot; i am bound, i am bound for a dis tant shore,&quot; verse, 2. &quot;i am the autumnal sun,&quot; verse, 499. &quot; i hearing get, who had but ears,&quot; verse, 460. &quot; i make ye an offer,&quot; verse, 86. &quot; i sailed up a river with a pleasant wind,&quot; verse, 2. &quot; i wish to sing the atridse,&quot; verse, 298. iliad, enduring beauty of the, 120. &quot; in vain i see the morning rise,&quot; verse, 453. indian, crowding out of the, by whites, 66; civilizing the, 69; conversion of the, 102-106; cap ture of two dunstable men, 216 ; attacks, letters to governor about expected, 288, 289 ; captivity, es cape of hannah dustan and others from, 422-i27. infidelity, the real, 96. institutions, the burden of, 169. inward morning, the, verse, 388. islands, 320. &quot; it doth expand my privacies,&quot; verse, 226. jamblichus, quoted, 229. jesus christ, effect of the story of, 84 ; prince of reformers and rad icals, 177. johnson, edward, quoted, 10. jones, sir william, 192. josselyn, john, 33, 36. kearsarge, 107. kreeshna, teachings of, 179-182. ladies tresses, 22. lamprey eel, 38. lancaster (mass.), 211. &quot; lately, alas, 1 knew a gentle boy,&quot; verse, 343. lawrence (mass.), 111. &quot; let such pure hate still under prop,&quot; verse, 379. life, the world and, 385-392. lincoln (mass.), 6. litchfield (n. h.), 253, 256, 282. londonderry (n. h.), 115, 333. &quot; love once among roses,&quot; verse, 302. &quot; love walking swiftly,&quot; verse, 300. &quot; lovely dove,&quot; verse, 299. lovewell, captain, and his indian 528 index fight, 154 ; john, father of, 209 ; 219. low-anchored cloud,&quot; verse, 249. low in the eastern sky,&quot; verse, 58. lowell (mass.), 4, 39, 40, 49, 106, 108, 110, 111, 144, 145, 279 280, 311, 312, 328. lyceum, the, 127. lydgate, john, quoted, 71. mad river, 108. manchester (n. h.), ill, 279, 311, 312 ; mfg. co., 322 ; 323, 328, 333, 341. &quot; man s little acts are grand,&quot; verse, 279. massabesic lake, 111 ; pond, 311. massachusetts, t. s wish not to be associated with, 168. mathematics, 477. mcgaw s island, 303. meadow river, musketaquid or, 9. melon, buying a, 414. men are by birth equal in this, that given,&quot; verse, 386. &quot; men dig and dive, but cannot my wealth spend,&quot; verse, 462. mencius, quoted, 347. menu, the laws of, 192-200. merrimack (n. h.), 279, 282, 311, 437, 442, 483. merrimack river, 4, 9, 24, 77, 79, 100, 101 ; origin and course of the, 106 114 ; 140, 152, 187, 211, 212, 217, 220, 224, 234, 248, 250, 252, 253 ; the gazetteer quoted, 256 ; 260, 261, 279, 280, 282, 288, 312, 322, 323, 327, 334, 337, 383, 398, 427, 438 ; freshet on the, 469 ; 473, 483. mice, visited by, on hoosack moun tain, 244. middlesex (mass.), 77, 100, 280, 476. mikania, the climbing, 55. ministers, on monday morning, 153. monadnock mountain, 216. monday, 151-232. monuments, graveyards and, 220 ; descendants more dead than, 334. moore s falls, 303. moosehillock, 107. morning, impressions of, 53. music, the suggestions of, 227-230. musketaquid or grass-ground river, the, 3, 9. &quot; my books i d fain cast off, i can not read,&quot; verse, 397. &quot; my life has been the poem i would have writ,&quot; verse, 453. &quot; my life is like a stroll upon the beach,&quot; verse, 317. &quot; my love must be as free.&quot; verse, 369. mythology, ancient history, 75. names of places, longing for eng lish, 68. nashua (n. h.), 108, 110, 111, 144, 157, 188, 190, 211, 212, 215, 222, 483 ; river, the, 463. nashville (n. h.), 218, 222. naticook brook, 282. natural life, the, 500. nature, adorned, 23; laws of, for man, 42 ; indifference of, 145 ; provisions of, for end of her crea tures, 293 ; tame and wild, 417 ; and art, 419 ; composing her poem autumn, 498. &quot; nature doth have her dawn each day,&quot; verse, 375. &quot; nature has given horns,&quot; verse, 300. nesenkeag, 256. nests, fishes , 30. new england life, the arcadian ele ment in, 318. new hampshire, 106 ; for the an tipodes, leaving, 189 ; man, a, 262; line, crossing the, 466. new testament, the, 89-93; 177; practicalness of, 182. newbury (mass.), 108. newburyport (mass.), 109, 111. newfound lake, 108, 111. news, getting the, from ocean steam ers, 314. newspapers, reading, on hoosack mountain, 241. night, thoughts in the, 438. night-fall, 47-51 ; 146. nine-acre corner, 6. north adams (mass.), 235. north bridge, 18, 20, 41. north or assabeth river, 4. &quot; now chiefly is my natal hour,&quot; verse, 226. observatory on hoosack mountain, the, 244. &quot; oft, as i turn me on my pillow o er,&quot; verse, 474. on a silver cup, verse, 298. on himself, verse, 299. on his lyre, verse, 298. on love, verse, 300. on lovers, verse, 301. &quot; on ponkawtasset, since we took our way,&quot; versa, 20. index 529 on women, verse, 300. oriental and occidental, the, 183; exclusion of the, in western learning, 185 ; quality in new england life, the, 319. ossian, 453-459, 485. otternic pond, 211. &quot; our uninquiring corpses lie more low,&quot; verse, 281. ovid, quoted, 2, 283. &quot; packed in my mind lie all the clothes,&quot; verse, 388. pan not dead, 81. pasaconaway, 332, 334. past, darkness of the, 204. pawtucket falls, the lock-keeper at, 100 ; dam, 110 ; canal, deepening the, 326. pelham (n. h.), 115. pembroke (n. h.), 154. pemigewasset, the, 106, 107, 110, 412 ; basin on the, 324. penacook, now concord (n. h.), founding of, 399. penichook brook, 222, 251, 463. pennyroyal, 337. perch, the common, 32. persius flaccus, aulus, 405-412. philosophy, asiatic, 175; loftiness of the oriental, 178. physician, priest and, 338. pickerel, the, 36. pickerel-weed, 22. pigeons, 292. pilgrim s progress, the best sermon, 89. pindar, quoted, 321. pinnacle, hooksett, 394, 398. pioneers, old and new, 155. piscataqua, the, 250. piscataquoag, 108, 322. plaistow (n. h.), 230. plum island, 107, 109, 260. plutarch, quoted, 228. &quot;ply the oars! away! away!&quot; verse, 234. plymouth (n.h.), 110. poet and poems, the, 449-453 ; 494 497. poetry, the nature of, 116-122 ; the mysticism of mankind, 433. poet s delay, the, verse, 453. political conditions and news, 166. polygonum, 22. ponkawtasset, 20. poplar hill, 20, 64. pot-holes, various, 324-327. pout, the horned, 37. practicalness, the triviality of, 181. priest, physician and, 338. prose, a poem in, 499. pythagoras, quoted, 418. quarles, francis, quoted, 15. rabbit island, 141. raleigh, sir walter, as a master of style, 132. read s ferry, 303. reformers, 162. religion and ligature, 80, 99. rhexia, the virginian, 22. rice, story of the mountaineer, 264 273. river wolf, fresh-water or, 36. rivers of history, the famous, 12. roach. see chivin. robin hood ballads, quoted, 151, 217. romans, vestiges of the, 328. ross, sir james clark, quoted, 482. ruff, the, 30-32. rumors from an ^eoliau harp. verse, 229. saddleback mountain, 234. sadi, quoted, 87, 99, 401 ; the life of, by dowlat shah, quoted, 512. st. ann s of concord voyageurs, ball s hill, the, 24. salmon, 39, 113. 114. salmon brook, 208, 209, 463 ; love well s house on, 426. &quot; salmon brook,&quot; verse, 463. sand, tracts of, near nashua, 189 ; in litchfield, n. h., 259, 260 ; on plum island, 260-262. sanjay, quoted, 184. satire and poetry, 406-408. saturday, 15-51. savage instinct, the, 69. scene-shifter, the, 146. science, 477-482. scriptures of the world, 187. &quot; sea and land are but his neigh bors,&quot; verse, 346. seeds, the use of, 161. shad, 39, 44 ; train-band nicknamed the, 41 ; 113, 114. shadows, 464. sheep, alarm of a flock of, 393. shelburne falls, 325. sherman s bridge, 4. shiner, the, 35. short s falls, 320. silence, 515-518. &quot; since that first away ! away 1 verse, 248. skies, the, 473. 530 index smith, capt. john, quoted, 114. smith s river, 108. snake-head, 22. soapwort gentian, the, 22. society islanders, gods of, 69, 82. soldier, a young, 413. &quot; some tumultuous little rill,&quot; verse, 77. sophocles, the antigone of, quoted, 173. soucook, 108. souhegan, 108, 442 ; or crooked river, 287. south adams (mass.), 238. southborough (mass.), 4. spenser, edmund, quoted, 441. springs, river-feeding, 252. squam (n. h.), 107, 108, 111. squirrel, the chipping or striped, 255 ; the red, or chickaree, the hudson bay, 256. stark, gen. john, 333. staten island, view from, 236 ; look ing at ships from, 314. sturgeon river, merriniack or, 106, &quot; such near aspects had we,&quot; verse, 314. &quot; such water do the gods distil,&quot; verse, 107. suckers, common and horned, 37. sudbury (mass.), 4, 5, 6, 45, 66 ; early church of, described by johnson, 11. sudbury river, 4. suncook, 108. sunday, 53-149. sunday, the keeping of, 79, 95. sun-fish, bream, or ruff, the fresh water, 30-32. sunrise on hoosack mountain, 246. sunset, 513-515. swamp, the luxury of standing in a, 395. swedenborg, emanuel, 85. tansy, 23. &quot; that phaeton of our day,&quot; 128. &quot; the good how can we trust ? &quot; verse, 371. &quot; the respectable folks,&quot; verse, 8. &quot;the smothered streams of love, which flow,&quot; verse, 345. &quot;the waves slowly beat,&quot; verse, 284. &quot; the western wind came lumbering in,&quot; verse, 224. &quot; then idle time ran gadding by,&quot; verse, 226. &quot; then spend an age in whetting thy desire,&quot; verse, 138. &quot; there is a vale which none hath seen,&quot; verse, 229. &quot; therefore a torrent of sadness deep,&quot; verse, 227. &quot;this is my carnac, whose un measured dome,&quot; verse, 331. thoreau, henry david, started on week s river journey, 15 ; ascent of hoosack mountain, 235-248 ; experience with an uncivil moun taineer, 264-273; invited to do various sorts of work, 401 ; began return voyage, 415. thoreau, john, brother, lines to, 2, 15 ; brings nathan, a country boy, to the boat, 382. thornton s ferry, 217, 282, 287. &quot;thou, indeed, dear swallow,&quot; verse, 298. &quot; thou sing st the affairs of thebes,&quot; verse, 299. &quot; though all the fates should prove unkind,&quot; verse, 189. &quot; thracian colt, why at me,&quot; verse, 301. thursday, 393-439. &quot; thus, perchance, the indian hunt er,&quot; verse, 306. time, measurement of the world s, 428. to a colt, verse, 301. to a dove, verse, 209. to a swallow, verse, 298, 301. traveling, the profession of, 403. trinity, the, 88. &quot;true kindness is a pure divine affinity,&quot; verse, 342. truth, contact with, 384. tuesday, 233-307. &quot;turning the silver,&quot; verse, 298. turpentine makers, indian capture of, 216. tyngsborough (mass.), origin of, 141 ; 142, 147, 153, 158, 189, 212, 216, 403, 466, 468, 472, 474. unappropriated land, the, 414. uncannunuc, 211, 255, 336, 337,383, 394, 398, 415. uncivil men, 263-273. union canal, the, 303. varro, quoted, 471. view, the point of, 460. virgil, quoted, 116. wachusett mountain, 211, 216. walton of concord river, the, 27. wamesit, 102. wannalancet, 333, 334. index 531 water-lily, the white, 23. wawatara, the friendship of, 362. wayland (mass.), 4, 5, 6, 45, 46. &quot; we see theplunet fall,&quot; verse, 481. wednesday, 309-392. westborough (mass.), 4, 40. westford (mass.), 141. &quot; what dost thou wish me to do to thee ? &quot; verse, 301. &quot; where gleaming fields of haze,&quot; verse, 290. &quot; where er thou sail st who sailed with me,&quot; verse, 2. white mountains, the, 106, 111. &quot; who sleeps by day and walks by night,&quot; verse, 51. wicasuck island, 141, 143, 471, 472. wilderness, the need of, 223. wildness and cultivation, 68. williamstown (mass.), 238, 244. willow, the narrow-leaved, 22 ; the water, 55. wiiidham(n. h.), 115. winnipiseogee, 106, 108, 111, 112, 114. &quot;with frontier strength ye stand your ground,&quot; verse, 212. wolff, joseph, quoted, 74, 164. wolofs, the, 136, 172. &quot; woof of the sun, ethereal gauze,&quot; verse, 284. work, quiet, 137. writing, grace and power in, 134 138. yankees, how first called, 66. u.c, berkeley libraries 33p |)enrp 3d. cfjoreatu new riverside edition. i. a week on the concord and merri mack rivers. ii. walden ; or, life in the woods. iii. the maine woods. iv. cape cod. v. early spring in massachusetts. vi. summer. with a map of concord. vii. autumn. viii. winter. ix. excursions. x. miscellanies. with a biographical sketch by ralph waldo emerson. 10 volumes, crown 8vo, $1.50 each ; the set, cloth, in box, $15.00 ; half calf, $27.50; half calf, gift top, $30.00. walden; or, life in the woods. riverside a idine edition. 2 vols. i6mo, $2.00. thoreau s thoughts. selections from the writ ings of henry d. thoreau. edited by h. g. o. blake. with bibliography. i6mo, gilt top, $1.00. the succession of forest trees and wild apples. with biographical sketch by emerson. i6mo, paper, 15 cents, net. houghton, mifflin & co. boston and new york. - familiar letters of henry david thoreau edited, with an introduction and notes by f. b. sanborn boston and new york houghton, mifflin and company piw, cambrib0e 1894 copyright, 1894, by houghton, mifflin & co. all rights reserved. gift the riverside press, cambridge, mass., 77. s. a. electrotyped and printed by h. 0. houghton and company contents. introduction i. years of discipline. sketch of thoreau s life from birth to twenty years ................. 1 letters to his brother john and sister helen 12 early friendship and correspondence with em erson and his family ........... 39 staten island and new york letters to the thoreaus and emersons .......... 76 ii. the golden age of achievement. correspondence with c. lane, j. e. cabot, emer son, and blake ............. 146 iii. friends and followers. the shipwreck of margaret fuller ..... 220 an essay on love and chastity ....... 237 moral epistles to harrison blake of worcester 251 excursions to cape cod, new bedford, new hampshire, new york, and new jersey . , . 302 excursions to monadnoc and minnesota . . . .421 last illness and death .......... 460 index . . 465 introduction. the fortune of henry thoreau as an author of books has been peculiar, and such as to indi cate more permanence of his name and fame than could be predicted of many of his contem poraries. in the years of his literary activity (twenty-five in au), from 1837 to 1862, when he died, not quite forty-five years old, he pub lished but two volumes, and those with much delay and difficulty in finding a publisher. but in the thirty-two years since his death, nine vol umes have been published from his manuscripts and fugitive pieces, the present being the tenth. besides these, two biographies of tho reau have appeared in america, and two others in england, with numerous reviews and sketches of the man and his writings, enough to make several volumes more. at present, the sale of his books and the interest in his life are greater than ever ; and he seems to have grown early vi introduction. into an american classic, like his concord neigh bors, emerson and hawthorne. pilgrimages are made to his grave and his daily haunts, as to theirs, and those who come find it to be true, as was said by an accomplished woman (miss elizabeth hoar) soon after his death, that &quot; concord is henry s monument, adorned with suitable inscriptions by his own hand.&quot; when horace wrote of a noble roman fam ay, crescit occulto velut arbor aevo fama marcelli, he pointed in felicitous phrase to the only fame that posterity has much regarded, the slow growing, deep-rooted laurel of renown. and shakespeare, citing the old english rhyming saw, small herbs have grace, great weeds do grow apace, signified the same thing in a parable, the pop ularity and suddenness of transient things, con trasted with the usefully permanent. there were plenty of authors in thoreau s time (of whom willis may be taken as the type) who would have smiled loftily to think that a rustic introduction. vii from the shawsheen and assabet could compete with the traveled scholar or elegant versifier who commanded the homage of drawing-rooms and magazines, for the prize of lasting remem brance ; yet who now are forgotten, or live a shadowy life in the alcoves of libraries, piping forth an ineffective voice, like the shades in virgil s tartarus. but thoreau was wiser when he wrote at the end of his poem, &quot; inspiration,&quot; fame cannot tempt the bard who s famous with his god ; nor laurel him reward who has his maker s nod. he strove but little for glory, either immediate or posthumous, well knowing that it is the inevi table and unpursued result of what men do or say, our fatal shadow that walks by us still. the letters of thoreau, though not less re markable in some aspects than what he wrote carefully for publication, have thus far scarcely had justice done them. the selection made for a small volume in 1865 was designedly done to exhibit one phase of his character, the most striking, if you will, but not the most native viii introduction. or attractive. &quot; in his own home,&quot; says ellery channing, who knew him more inwardly than any other, &quot; he was one of those characters who may be called household treasures ; always on the spot, with skillful eye and hand, to raise the best melons in the garden, plant the orchard with choicest trees, or act as extempore me chanic ; fond of the pets, his sister s flowers, or sacred tabby ; kittens were his favorites, he would play with them by the half-hour. no whim or coldness, no absorption of his time by public or private business, deprived those to whom he belonged of his kindness and affec tion. he did the duties that lay nearest, and satisfied those in his immediate circle ; and whatever the impressions from the theoretical part of his writings, when the matter is probed to the bottom, good sense and good feeling will be detected in it.&quot; this is preeminently true ; and the affectionate conviction of this made his sister sophia dissatisfied with emerson s rule of selection among the letters. this she confided to me, and this determined me, should occasion offer, to give the world some day a fuller and more familiar view of our friend. introduction. ix for this purpose i have chosen many letters and mere notes, illustrating his domestic and gossipy moods, for that element was in his mixed nature, inherited from the lively maternal side, and even the colloquial vulgarity (using the word in its strict sense of &quot;popular speech&quot;) that he sometimes allowed himself. in his last years he revolted a little at this turn of his thoughts, and, as channing relates, &quot; rubbed out the more humorous parts of his essays, origi nally a relief to their sterner features, saying, i cannot bear the levity i find ; &quot; to which chan ning replied that he ought to spare it, even to the puns, in which he abounded almost as much as shakespeare. his friend was right, the obvious incongruity was as natural to thoreau as the grace and french elegance of his best sentences. thus i have not rejected the com mon and trivial in these letters ; being well as sured that what the increasing number of tho reau s readers desire is to see this piquant original just as he was, not arrayed in the paradoxical cloak of the stoic sage, nor sitting complacent in the cynic earthenware cave of diogenes, and bidding alexander stand out of his sunshine. x introduction. he did those acts also ; but they were not the whole man. he was far more poet than cynic or stoic ; he had the proud humility of those sects, but still more largely that unconscious pride which comes to the poet when he sees that his pursuits are those of the few and not of the multitude. this perception came early to tho reau, and was expressed in some unpublished verses dating from his long, solitary rambles, by night and day, on the seashore at staten island, where he first learned the sombre magnificence of ocean. he feigns himself the son of what might well be one of homer s fishermen, or the shipwrecked seaman of lucretius, saevis projectus ab undis cui tantum in vita restet transire malorum, and then goes on thus with his parable : within a humble cot that looks to sea daily i breathe this curious warm life, beneath a friendly haven s sheltering lea my noiseless day with mystery still is rife. t is here, they say, my simple life began, and easy credence to the tale i lend, for well i know t is here i am a man, but who will simply tell me of the end ? introduction. xi these eyes, fresh-opened, spied the far-off sea, that like a silent godfather did stand, nor uttered one explaining word to me, while introducing straight godmother land. and yonder still stretches that silent main, with many glancing ships besprinkled o er : and earnest still i gaze and gaze again upon the selfsame waves and friendly shore. infinite work my hands find there to do, gathering the relicts which the waves upcast : each storm doth scour the sea for something new, and every time the strangest is the last. my neighbors sometimes come with lumbering carts, as if they wished my pleasant toil to share ; but straight they go again to distant marts, for only weeds and ballast are their care. &quot; only weeds and ballast ? &quot; that is exactly what thoreau s neighbors would have said he was gathering, for the most of his days ; yet now he is seen to have collected something more du rable and precious than they with their imple ments and market-carts. if they viewed him with a kind of scorn and pity, it must be said that he returned the affront ; only time seems to have sided with the poet in the controversy that he maintained against his busy age. xii introduction. superiority, moral elevation, without peev ishness or condescension, this was thoreau s distinguishing quality. he softened it with hu mor, and sometimes sharpened it with indigna tion ; but he directed his satire and his censure as often against himself as against mankind ; men he truly loved, if they would not obstruct his humble and strictly-chosen path. the let ters here printed show this, if i mistake not, and the many other epistles of his, still uncol lected, would hardly vary the picture he has sketched of himself, though they would add new facts. those most to be sought for are his re plies to the generous letters of his one english correspondent. the profile-portrait engraved for this volume is less known than it should be, for it alone of the four likenesses extant shows the aquiline features as his comrades of the wood and moun tain saw them, not weakened by any effort to bring him to the standard of other men in garb or expression. the artist, mr. walton ricket son, knew and admired him. f. b. s. concord, mass., march 1, 1894. familiar letters of thoreau. i. years of discipline. it was a happy thought of thoreau s friend ellery channing, himself a poet, to style our concord hermit the &quot; poet-naturalist ; &quot; for there seemed to be no year of his life, and no hour of his day when nature did not whisper some secret in his ear, so intimate was he with her from childhood. in another connection, speaking of natural beauty, channing said, &quot; there is tho reau, he knows about it; give him sunshine and a handful of nuts, and he has enough.&quot; he was also a naturalist in the more customary sense, one who studied and arranged methodi cally in his mind the facts of outward nature ; a good botanist and ornithologist, a wise student of insects and fishes ; an observer of the winds, the clouds, the seasons, and all that goes to make up what we call &quot; weather &quot; and &quot; climate.&quot; yet he was in heart a poet, and held all the accumu lated knowledge of more than forty years not so much for use as for delight. as gray s poor friend west said of himself, &quot; like a clear-flow 2 years of discipline. [1817-1855. ing stream, he reflected the beauteous prospect around ; &quot; and mother nature had given thoreau for his prospect the meandering indian river of concord, the woodland pastures and fair lakes by which he dwelt or rambled most of his life. born in the east quarter of concord, july 12, 1817, he died in the viuage, may 6, 1862 ; he was there fitted for harvard college, which he entered in 1833, graduating in 1837; and for the rest of his life was hardly away from the town for more than a year in all. consequently his letters to his family are few, for he was usually among them ; but when separated from his elder brother john, or his sisters helen and sophia, he wrote to them, and these are the earliest of his letters which have been pre served. always thoughtful for others, he has left a few facts to aid his biographer, respecting his birth and early years. in his journal of december 27, 1855, he wrote : &quot;recalled this evening, with the aid of mother, the various houses (and towns) in which i have lived, and some events of my life. born in the minott house on the virginia road, where father occupied grandmother s thirds , carrying on the farm. the catherines had the other half of the house, bob catherine, and [brother] john threw up the turkeys. lived there about eight months ; si merriam the next biographical facts. 3 neighbor. uncle david [dunbar] died when i was six weeks old. 1 i was baptized in the old meeting-house, by dr. ripley, when i was three months, and did not cry. in the red house, where grandmother lived, we had the west side till october, 1818, hiring of josiah davis, agent for the woodwards; there were uncle charles and cousin charles (dunbar), more or less. according to the day-book first used by grandfather (thoreau), 2 dated 1797 (his part cut out and then used by father in concord in 1808-9, and in chelmsford in 1818-21), father hired of proctor (in chelmsford), and shop of spaulding. in chelmsford till march, 1821 ; last charge there about the middle of march, 1821. aunt sarah taught me to walk there, when fourteen months old. we lived next the meeting-house, where they kept the powder in the garret. father kept shop and painted signs, etc. . . . 1 he was named david for this uncle ; dr. ripley was the minister of the whole town in 1817. the red house stood near the emerson house on the lexington road ; the wood wards were a wealthy family, afterwards in quincy, to which town dr. woodward left a large bequest. 2 john thoreau, grandfather of henry, born at st. helier s, jersey, april, 1754, was a sailor on board the american priva teer general lincoln, november, 1779, and recognized la terrible, french frigate, which carried john adams from boston to france. see thoreau s summer, p. 102. this john thoreau, son of philip, died in concord, 1800. 4 years of discipline. [1821-1844. &quot; in pope s house, south end of boston (a ten-footer) five or six months, moved from chelmsford through concord, and may have tarried in concord a little while. &quot;day-book says, moved to pinkney street (boston), september 10, 1821, on monday ; whitwell s house, pinkney street, to march, 1823 ; then brick house, concord, to spring of 1826 ; davis house (next to samuel hoar s) to may 7, 1827 ; shattuck house (now w. mun roe s) to spring of 1835 ; hollis hall, cam bridge, 1833 ; aunts house to spring of 1837. [this was what is now the inn called thoreau house. ] at brownson s (canton) while teach ing in winter of 1835. went to new york with father peddling in 1836.&quot; this brings the date down to the year in which henry thoreau left college, and when the family letters begin. the notes continue, and now begin to have a literary value. &quot; parkman house to fall of 1844 ; was gradu ated in 1837 ; kept town school a fortnight that year ; began the big red journal, october, 1837 ; found my first arrow-head, fall of 1837 ; wrote a lecture (my first) on society, march 14, 1838, and read it before the lyceum, in the masons hall, april 11, 1838 ; went to maine for a school in may, 1838 ; commenced school in the park biographical facts. 5 man house l in the summer of that year ; wrote an essay on sound and silence december, 1838 ; fall of 1839 up the merrimack to the white mountains ; aulus persius flaccus (first printed paper of consequence), february 10, 1840 ; the eed journal of 596 pages ended june, 1840 ; journal of 396 pages ended janu ary 31, 1841. &quot;went to r. w. emerson s in spring of 1841 (about april 25), and stayed there till summer of 1843 ; went to william emerson s, staten island, may, 1843, and returned in de cember, or to thanksgiving, 1843 ; made pen cils in 1844 ; texas house to august 29, 1850 ; at walden, july, 1845, to fall of 1847 ; then at r. w. emerson s to fall of 1848, or while he was in europe ; then in the yellow house (re formed) till the present.&quot; 1 this had been the abode of old deacon parkman, a grand uncle of the late francis parkman, the historian, and son of the westborough clergyman from whom this distinguished family descends. deacon parkman was a merchant in con cord, and lived in what was then a good house. it stood in the middle of the village, where the public library now is. the &quot; texas &quot; house was built by henry thoreau and his father john ; it was named from a section of the village then called &quot; texas,&quot; because a little remote from the churches and schools ; perhaps the same odd fancy that had bestowed the name of &quot;virginia&quot; on the road of thoreau s birthplace. the &quot; yellow house re-formed &quot; was a small cottage rebuilt and enlarged by the thoreaus in 1850 ; in this, on the main street, henry and his father and mother died. 6 years of discipline. [1700-1787. as may be inferred from this simple record of the many mansions, chiefly small ones, in which he had spent his first thirty-eight years, there was nothing distinguished in the fortunes of thoreau s family, who were small merchants, artisans, or farmers, mostly. on the father s side they were from the isle of jersey, where a french strain mingled with his english or scan dinavian blood ; on the other side he was of scotch and english descent, counting jones, dunbar, and burns among his feminine ances tors. liveliness and humor came to him from his scotch connection ; from father and grand father he inherited a grave steadiness of mind rather at variance with his mother s vivacity. manual dexterity was also inherited ; so that he practiced the simpler mechanic arts with ease and skill; his mathematical training and his outdoor habits fitted him for a land-surveyor; and by that art, as well as by pencil-making, lec turing, and writing, he paid his way in the world, and left a small income from his writings to those who survived him. he taught pupils also, as did his brother and sisters ; but it was not an occupation that he long followed after john s death in 1842. with these introductory state ments we may proceed to thoreau s first corre spondence with his brother and sisters. as an introduction to the correspondence, and jet. 20.] commencement conference. 1 a key to the young man s view of life, a passage may be taken from thoreau s &quot; part &quot; at his col lege commencement, august 16, 1837. he was one of two to hold what was called a &quot; confer ence &quot; on &quot; the commercial spirit,&quot; his alter native or opponent in the dispute being henry vose, also of concord, who, in later years, was a massachusetts judge. henry thoreau, 1 then just twenty, said : &quot; the characteristic of our epoch is perfect freedom, freedom of thought and action. the indignant greek, the oppressed pole, the jealous american assert it. the skeptic no less than the believer, the heretic no less than the faithful child of the church, have begun to enjoy it. it has generated an unusual degree of energy and activity ; it has generated the commercial spirit. man thinks faster and freer than ever before. he, moreover, moves faster and freer. he is more restless, because he is more independent than ever. the winds and the waves are not enough for him ; he must needs ransack the bowels of the earth, that he may make for himself a highway of iron over its surface. &quot; indeed, could one examine this beehive of 1 during the greater part of his college course he signed himself d. h. thoreau, as he was christened (david henry) ; but being constantly called &quot; henry,&quot; he put this name first about the time he left college, and was seldom afterwards known by the former initials. 8 years of discipline. [1837, ours from an observatory among the stars, he would perceive an unwonted degree of bustle in these later ages. there would be hammering and chipping in one quarter ; baking and brew ing, buying and selling, money-changing and speechmaking in another. what impression would he receive from so general and impartial a survey. would it appear to him that mankind used this world as not abusing it ? doubtless he would first be struck with the profuse beauty of our orb ; he would never tire of admiring its varied zones and seasons, with their changes of living. he could not but notice that restless animal for whose sake it was contrived ; but where he found one man to admire with him his fair dwelling-place, the ninety and nine would be scraping together a little of the gilded dust upon its surface. . . . we are to look chiefly for the origin of the commercial spirit, and the power that still cherishes and sustains it, in a blind and unmanly love of wealth. wherever this exists, it is too sure to become the ruling spirit ; and, as a natural consequence, it infuses into all our thoughts and affections a degree of its own selfish ness ; we become selfish in our patriotism, selfish in our domestic relations, selfish in our religion. &quot; let men, true to their natures, cultivate the moral affections, lead manly and independent lives ; let them make riches the means and not jst.20.] commencement conference. 9 the end of existence, and we shall hear no more of the commercial spirit. the sea will not stag nate, the earth will be as green as ever, and the air as pure. this curious world which we inhabit is more wonderful than it is convenient ; more beautiful than it is useful ; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used. the order of things should be somewhat reversed ; the seventh should be man s day of toil, wherein to earn his living by the sweat of his brow ; and the other six his sabbath of the affections and the soul, in which to range this widespread garden, and drink in the soft influences and sublime revela tions of nature. . . . the spirit we are consider ing is not altogether and without exception bad. we rejoice in it as one more indication of the entire and universal freedom that characterizes the age in which we live, as an indication that the human race is making one more advance in that infinite series of progressions which awaits it. we glory in those very excesses which are a source of anxiety to the wise and good ; as an evidence that man will not always be the slave of matter, but erelong, casting off those earth born desires which identify him with the brute, shall pass the days of his sojourn in this his nether paradise, as becomes the lord of crea tion.&quot; i 1 the impression made on one classmate and former room 10 years of discipline. [1837, this passage is noteworthy as showing how early the philosophic mind was developed in thoreau, and how much his thought and expres sion were influenced by emerson s first book, mate (&quot; chum &quot;) of thoreau, by this utterance, will be seen by this fragment of a letter from james richardson of ded ham (afterwards reverend j. richardson), dated dedharn, september 7, 1837 : &quot; fbiend thoreau, after you had finished your part in the performances of commencement (the tone and sentiment of which, by the way, i liked much, as being 1 of a sound philoso phy), i hardly saw you again at all. neither at mr. quincy s levee, neither at any of our classmates evening entertainments, did i find you ; though for the purpose of taking a farewell, and leaving you some memento of an old chum, as well as on matters of business, i much wished to see your face once more. of course you must be present at our october meeting, notice of the time and place for which will be given in the newspapers. i hear that you are comfortably located, in your native town, as the guardian of its children, in the immediate vicinity, i suppose, of one of our most distinguished apostles of the future, r. w. emerson, and situated under the minis try of our old friend reverend barzillai frost, to whom please make my remembrances. i heard from you, also, that con cord academy, lately under the care of mr. phineas allen of northfield, is now vacant of a preceptor; should mr. hoar find it difficult to get a scholar college-distinguished, perhaps he would take up with one, who, though in many respects a critical thinker, and a careful philosopher of language among other things, has never distinguished himself in his class as a regular attendant on college studies and rules. if so, could you do me the kindness to mention my name to him as of one intending to make teaching his profession, at least for a part of his life. if recommendations are necessary, president quincy has offered me one, and i can easily get others.&quot; 2et.20.] emerson and thoreau. 11 &quot; nature.&quot; but the soil in which that germina ting seed fell was naturally prepared to receive it; and the wide diversity between the master and the disciple soon began to appear. in 1863, reviewing thoreau s work, emerson said, &quot; that oaken strength which i noted whenever he walked or worked, or surveyed wood-lots, the same unhesitating hand with which a field laborer accosts a piece of work which i should shun as a waste of strength, henry shows in his literary task. he has muscle, and ventures on and performs feats which i am forced to decline. in reading him i find the same thoughts, the same spirit that is in me ; but he takes a step beyond, and illustrates by excellent images that which i should have conveyed in a sleepy gener alization.&quot; true as this is, it omits one point of difference only too well known to emerson, the controversial turn of thoreau s mind, in which he was so unlike emerson and alcott, and which must have given to his youthful utter ances in company the air of something requiring an apology. this, at all events, seems to have been the feeling of helen thoreau, 1 whose pride in her 1 this eldest of the children of john thoreau and cynthia dunbar was born october 22, 1812, and died june 14, 1849. her grandmother, mary jones of weston, mass., belonged to a tory family, and several of the jones brothers served as officers in the british army against general washington. 12 years of discipline. [1837, brother was such that she did not wish to see him misunderstood. a pleasing indication of both these traits is seen in the first extant letter of thoreau to this sister. i have this in an autograph copy made by mr. emerson, when he was preparing the letters for partial publication, soon after henry s death. for some reason he did not insert it in his volume ; but it quite de serves to be printed, as indicating the period when it was clear to thoreau that he must think for himself, whatever those around him might think. to helen thoreau (at taunton). concord, october 27, 1837. dear helen, please you, let the defendant say a few words in defense of his long silence. you know we have hardly done our own deeds, thought our own thoughts, or lived our own lives hitherto. for a man to act himself, he must be perfectly free ; otherwise he is in danger of los ing all sense of responsibility or of self-respect. now when such a state of things exists, that the sacred opinions one advances in argument are apologized for by his friends, before his face, lest his hearers receive a wrong impression of the man, when such gross injustice is of fre quent occurrence, where shall we look, and not look in vain, for men, deeds, thoughts ? as 2et.20.] to helen thoreau. 13 well apologize for the grape that it is sour, or the thunder that it is noisy, or the lightning that it tarries not. further, letter-writing too often degenerates into a communicating of facts, and not of truths ; of other men s deeds and not our thoughts. what are the convulsions of a planet, compared with the emotions of the soul? or the rising of a thousand suns, if that is not enlightened by a ray? your affectionate brother, henry. it is presumed the tender sister did not need a second lesson ; and equally that henry did not see fit always to write such letters as he praised above, for he was quite ready to give his cor respondents facts, no less than thoughts, espe cially in his family letters. next to this epistle, chronologically, comes one in the conventional dialect of the american indian, as handed down by travelers and ro mancers, by jefferson, chateaubriand, lewis, clarke, and fenimore cooper. john thoreau, henry s brother, was born in 1815 and died january 11, 1842. he was teaching at taun ton in 1837. 14 years of discipline. [1837, to john thoreau (at taunton). (written as from one indian to another.) musketaquid, 202 summers, two moons, eleven suns, since the coming of the pale faces. (november 11, 1837.) tahatawan, sachimaussan, to his brother sachem, hopeful of hope well, hoping that he is well : brother : it is many suns that i have not seen the print of thy moccasins by our council-fire ; the great spirit has blown more leaves from the trees, and many clouds from the land of snows have visited our lodge ; the earth has be come hard, like a frozen buffalo-skin, so that the trampling of many herds is like the great spir it s thunder ; the grass on the great fields is like the old man of many winters, and the small song-sparrow prepares for his flight to the land whence the summer comes. brother : i write these things because i know that thou lovest the great spirit s creatures, and wast wont to sit at thy lodge-door, when the maize was green, to hear the bluebird s song. so shalt thou, in the land of spirits, not only find good hunting grounds and sharp arrow heads, but much music of birds. brother : i have been thinking how the pale faces have taken away our lands, and was a mt. 20.] to john thoreau. 15 woman. you are fortunate to have pitched your wigwam nearer to the great salt lake, where the pale face can never plant corn. brother : i need not tell thee how we hunted on the lands of the dundees, a great war chief never forgets the bitter taunts of his ene mies. our young men called for strong water ; they painted their faces and dug up the hatchet. but their enemies, the dundees, were women ; they hastened to cover their hatchets with wam pum. our braves are not many; our enemies took a few strings from the heap their fathers left them, and our hatchets are buried. but not tahatawan s ; his heart is of rock when the dundees sing, his hatchet cuts deep into the dundee braves. brother : there is dust on my moccasins ; i have journeyed to the white lake, in the coun try of the ninares. 1 the long-knife has been 1 white pond, in the district called &quot; nine-acre corner,&quot; is here meant; the &quot;lee-vites&quot; were a family then livingon lee s hill. naushawtuck is another name for this hill, where the old tahatawan lived at times, before the english settled in concord in september, 1635. the real date of this letter is november 11-14, 1837, and between its two dates the massa chusetts state election was held. the &quot; great council-house &quot; was the boston state house, to which the concord people were electing deputies ; the &quot; eagle-beak &quot; named below was doubt less samuel hoar, the first citizen of the town, and for a time member of congress from middlesex county. he was the father of rockwood and frisbie hoar, afterwards judge and senator respectively. 16 years of discipline. [1837, there, like a woman i paddled his war-canoe. but the spirits of my fathers were angered ; the waters were ruffled, and the bad spirit troubled the air. the hearts of the lee-vites are gladdened; the young peacock has returned to his lodge at naushawtuck. he is the medicine of his tribe, but his heart is like the dry leaves when the whirlwind breathes. he has come to help choose new chiefs for the tribe, in the great council-house, when two suns are past. there is no seat for tahatawan in the council-house. he lets the squaws talk, his voice is heard above the warwhoop of his tribe, piercing the hearts of his foes ; his legs are stiff, he cannot sit. brother : art thou waiting for the spring, that the geese may fly low over thy wigwam ? thy arrows are sharp, thy bow is strong. has ana wan killed all the eagles ? the crows fear not the winter. tahatawan s eyes are sharp he can track a snake in the grass, he knows a friend from a foe ; he welcomes a friend to his lodge though the ravens croak. brother : hast thou studied much in the medi cine-books of the pale-faces? dost thou un derstand the long talk of the medicine whose words are like the music of the mocking-bird ? but our chiefs have not ears to hear him ; they jst.20.] to john thoreau. 17 listen like squaws to the council of old men, they understand not his words. but, brother, he never danced the war-dance, nor heard the warwhoop of his enemies. he was a squaw ; he stayed by the wigwam when the braves were out, and tended the tame buffaloes. fear not ; the dundees have faint hearts and much wampum. when the grass is green on the great fields, and the small titmouse returns again, we will hunt the buffalo together. our old men say they will send the young chief of the karlisles, who lives in the green wigwam and is a great medicine, that his word may be heard in the long talk which the wise men are going to hold at shawmut, by the salt lake. he is a great talk, and will not forget the enemies of his tribe. 14th sun. the fire has gone out in the coun cil-house. the words of our old men have been like the vaunts of the dundees. the eagle beak was moved to talk like a silly pale-face, and not as becomes a great war-chief in a coun cil of braves. the young peacock is a woman among braves ; he heard not the words of the old men, like a squaw he looked at his medi cine-paper. 1 the young chief of the green wig 1 a delicate sarcasm on young b., who could not finish his speech in town-meeting without looking at his notes. the al lusion to the &quot; medicine whose words are like the music of the 18 years of discipline. [1837, warn has hung up his moccasins; he will not leave his tribe till after the buffalo have come down on to the plains. brother : this is a long talk, but there is much meaning to my words ; they are not like the thunder of canes when the lightning smites them. brother, i have just heard thy talk and am well pleased ; thou art getting to be a great medicine. the great spirit confound the ene mies of thy tribe. tahatawan. his mark (a bow and arrow). this singular letter was addressed to john thoreau at taunton, and was so carefully pre served in the family that it must have had value in their eyes, as recalling traits of the two tho reau brothers, and also events in the village life of concord, more interesting to the young people of 1837 than to the present generation. some of its parables are easy to read, others quite obscure. the annual state election was an important event to henry thoreau then, more so than it afterwards appeared; and he mocking-bird &quot; is hard to explain ; it may mean edward ever ett, then governor of massachusetts, or, possibly, emerson, whose lectures began to attract notice in boston and cam bridge. it can hardly mean wendell phillips, though his melodious eloquence had lately been heard in attacks upon slavery. ast.20.] henry and john thoreau. 19 was certainly on the whig side in politics, like most of the educated youths of concord. his &quot;young chief of the karlisles &quot; was albert nel son, son of a carlisle physician, who began to practice law in concord in 1836, and was after wards chief justice of the superior court. he was defeated at the election of 1837, as candi date of the whigs for representative in the state legislature, by a democrat. henry vose, above named, writing from &quot; butternuts,&quot; in new york, three hundred miles west of concord, october 22, 1837, said to thoreau : &quot; you envy my happy situation, and mourn over your fate, which condemns you to loiter about concord and grub among clamshells [for indian relics]. if this were your only source of enjoyment while in concord, but i know that it is not. i well remember that antique and fish-like office of major nelson (to whom, and to mr. dennis, and bemis, and john thoreau, i wish to be re membered) ; and still more vividly do i remem ber the fairer portion of the community in c.&quot; this indicates a social habit in henry and john thoreau, which the indian &quot;talk&quot; also implies. tahatawan, whom henry here impersonated, was the mythical sachem of musketaquid (the algonquin name for concord river and region), whose fishing and hunting lodge was on the hill naushawtuck, between the two rivers so much 20 years of discipline. [1838, navigated by the thoreaus. in 1837 the two brothers were sportsmen, and went shooting over the concord meadows and moors, but of course the &quot; buffalo &quot; was a figure of speech; they never shot anything larger than a raccoon. a few years later they gave up killing the game. to john thoreau (at taunton). concord, february 10, 1838. dear john, dost expect to elicit a spark from so dull a steel as myself, by that flinty subject of thine? truly, one of your copper percussion caps would have fitted this nail-head better. unfortunately, the &quot;americana&quot; 1 has hardly two words on the subject. the process is very simple. the stone is struck with a mallet so as to produce pieces sharp at one end, and blunt at the other. these are laid upon a steel line (probably a chisel s edge), and again struck with the mallet, and flints of the required size 1 americana, in this note, is the old encyclopedia americana, which had been edited from the german conversations-lexicon, and other sources, by dr. francis lieber, t. g. bradford, and other boston scholars, ten years earlier, and was the only con venient book of reference at thoreau s hand. the inquiry of john thoreau is another evidence of the interest he took, like his brother, in the indians and their flint arrow-heads. the relics mentioned in the next letter were doubtless indian wea pons and utensils, very common about taunton in the region formerly controlled by king philip, ast.20.] to john thoreau. 21 are broken off. a skillful workman may make a thousand in a day. so much for the &quot; americana.&quot; dr. jacob bigelow in his &quot;technology&quot; says, &quot;gunflints are formed by a skillful workman, who breaks them out with a hammer, a roller, and steel chisel, with small, repeated strokes.&quot; your ornithological commission shall be exe cuted. when are you coming home ? your affectionate brother, henky d. thoreau. to john thoreau (at taunton). concord, march 17, 1838. dear john, your box of relics came safe to hand, but was speedily deposited on the car pet, i assure you. what could it be ? some declared it must be tauntoii herrings : &quot; just nose it, sir ! &quot; so down we went onto our knees, and commenced smelling in good earnest, now horizontally from this corner to that, now perpendicularly from the carpet up, now diago nally, and finally with a sweeping movement describing the circumference. but it availed not. taunton herring would not be smelled. so we e en proceeded to open it vi et chisel. what an array of nails! four nails make a quarter, four quarters a yard, i faith, this is n t cloth measure ! blaze away, old boy ! 22 years of discipline. [1838, clap in another wedge, then ! there, softly ! she begins to gape. just give that old stick ler, with a black hat on, another hoist. aye, we 11 pare his nails for him ! well done, old fellow, there s a breathing-hole for you. &quot; drive it in ! &quot; cries one ; &quot; nip it off ! &quot; cries another. be easy, i say. what s clone may be undone. your richest veins don t lie nearest the surface. suppose we sit down and enjoy the prospect, for who knows but we may be disappointed? when they opened pandora s box, all the con tents escaped except hope, but in this case hope is uppermost, and will be the first to escape when the box is opened. however, the general voice was for kicking the coverlid off. the relics have been arranged numerically on a table. when shall we set up housekeep ing ? miss ward thanks you for her share of the spoils ; also accept many thanks from your humble servant &quot; for yourself.&quot; i have a proposal to make. suppose by the time you are released we should start in com pany for the west, and there either establish a school jointly, or procure ourselves separate sit uations. suppose, moreover, you should get ready to start previous to leaving taunton, to save time. go i must, at all events. dr. jar vis enumerates nearly a dozen schools which i could have, all such as would suit you equally 2et.20.] to john thoreau. 23 well. 1 i wish you would write soon about this. it is high season to start. the canals are now open, and traveling comparatively cheap. i think i can borrow the cash in this town. there s nothing like trying. brigham wrote you a few words on the 8th, which father took the liberty to read, with the advice and consent of the family. he wishes you to send him those (numbers) of the &quot; li brary of health&quot; received since 1838, if you are in concord ; otherwise, he says you need not trouble yourself about it at present. he is in c., and enjoying better health than usual. but one number, and that you have, has been received. the bluebirds made their appearance the 14th day of march ; robins and pigeons have also been seen. mr. emerson has put up the blue bird box in due form. all send their love. from your aff. br. h. d. thokeau. [postscript by helen thoreau.] dear john, will you have the kindness 1 dr. edward jarvis, born in concord (1803), had gone to louisville, ky., in april, 1837, and was thriving there as a physician. he knew the thoreaus well, and gave them good hopes of success in ohio or kentucky as teachers. the plan was soon abandoned, and henry went to maine to find a school, but without success. see sanborn s thoreau, p. 57. 24 years of discipline. [1838, to inquire at mr. marston s for an old singing book i left there, the &quot; handel and haydn collection,&quot; without a cover? have you ever got those red handkerchiefs? much love to the marstons, crockers, and muenschers. mr. josiah davis has failed. mr. and mrs. howe have both written again, urging my going to koxbury ; which i suppose i shall do. what day of the month shall you return ? helen. one remark in this letter calls for attention, that concerning the &quot; bluebird box &quot; for mr. emerson. in 1853 emerson wrote in his jour nal : &quot; long ago i wrote of gifts, and neglected a capital example. john thoreau, jr., one day put a bluebird s box on my barn, fifteen years ago it must be, and there it still is, with every summer a melodious family in it, adorning the place and singing his praises. there s a gift for you, which cost the giver no money, but nothing which he bought could have been so good. i think of another, quite inestimable. john thoreau knew how much i should value a head of little waldo, then five years old. he came to me and offered to take him to a daguer reotypist who was then in town, and he (tho reau) would see it well done. he did it, and brought me the daguerre, which i thankfully jst.20.] to john thoreau. 25 paid for. a few months after, my boy died; and i have since to thank john thoreau for that wise and gentle piece of friendship.&quot; little waldo emerson died january 27, 1842, and john thoreau the same month ; so that this taking of the portrait must have been but a few months before his own death, january 11. henry thoreau was then living in the emerson family. to john thoreau (at west roxbury). concord, july 8, 1838. dear john, we heard from helen to-day, and she informs us that you are coming home by the first of august. now i wish you to write and let me know exactly when your vaca tion takes place, that i may take one at the same time. i am in school from 8 to 12 in the morning, and from 2 to 4 in the afternoon. after that i read a little greek or english, or, for variety, take a stroll in the fields. we have not had such a year for berries this long time, the earth is actually blue with them. high blueberries, three kinds of low, thimble and raspberries constitute my diet at present. (take notice, i only diet between meals.) among my deeds of charity, i may reckon the picking of a cherry-tree for two helpless single ladies, who live under the hill ; but i faith, it was robbing peter to pay paul, for while i 26 years of discipline. [1838, was exalted in charity towards them, i had no mercy on my own stomach. be advised, my love for currants continues. the only addition that i have made to my stock of ornithological information is in the shape not of a fring. melod., but surely a melodious fringilla, the f. juncorum, or rush-sparrow. i had long known him by note, but never by name. report says that elijah stearns is going to take the town school. i have four scholars, and one more engaged. mr. fenner left town yes terday. among occurrences of ill omen may be mentioned the falling out and cracking of the inscription stone of concord monument. 1 mrs. lowell and children are at aunts . peabody (a college classmate) walked up last wednes day, spent the night, and took a stroll in the woods. sophia says i must leave off and pen a few lines for her to helen : so good-by. love from all, and among them your aff. brother, h. d. t. the school above mentioned as begun by henry thoreau in this summer of 1838 was 1 this was the old monument of the fight in 1775, for the dedication of which emerson wrote his hymn, &quot; by the rude bridge.&quot; this was sung by thoreau, among others, to the tune of old hundred. jet.21.] to helen thoreau. 27 joined in by john, after finishing his teaching at west roxbury, and was continued for several years. it was in this school that louisa alcott and her sister received some instruction, after their father removed from boston to concord, in the spring of 1840. it was opened in the parkmaii house, where the family then lived, and soon after was transferred to the building of the concord academy, 1 not far off. john thoreau taught the english branches and math ematics ; henry taught latin and greek and the higher mathematics, and it was the cus tom of both brothers to go walking with their pupils one afternoon each week. it is as a pro fessional schoolmaster that henry thus writes to his sister helen, then teaching at roxbury, after a like experience in taunton. to helen thoreau (at roxbury). concord, october 6, 1838. dear helen, i dropped sophia s letter into the box immediately on taking yours out, else the tone of the former had been changed. i have no acquaintance with &quot; cleaveland s first lessons,&quot; though i have peeped into his abridged grammar, which i should think very well calculated for beginners, at least for such 1 for twenty-five years (1866-91) the house of ellery chan ning, and now of charles emerson, nephew of waldo emerson. 28 years of discipline. [1838, as would be likely to wear out one book before they would be prepared for the abstruser parts of grammar. ahem ! as no one can tell what was the roman pro nunciation, each nation makes the latin con form, for the most part, to the rules of its own language ; so that with us of the vowels only a has a peculiar sound. in the end of a word of more than one syllable it is sounded like &quot; ah,&quot; as pennah, lydiah, hannah, etc., without re gard to case ; but &quot; da &quot; is never sounded &quot; dah&quot; because it is a monosyllable. all terminations in es, and plural cases in os, as you know, are pronounced long, as homines (hominese), do minos (dominose), or, in english, johnny vose. for information, see adams &quot; latin gram mar,&quot; before the rudiments. this is all law and gospel in the eyes of the world ; but remember i am speaking, as it were, in the third person, and should sing quite a dif ferent tune if it were i that made the quire. however, one must occasionally hang his harp on the willows, and play on the jew s harp, in such a strange country as this. one of your young ladies wishes to study mental philosophy, hey? well, tell her that she has the very best text-book that i know of in her possession already. if she do not be lieve it, then she should have bespoken another jet. 21.] to helen thoreau. 29 better in another world, and not have expected to find one at &quot; little & wilkins.&quot; but if she wishes to know how poor an apology for a men tal philosophy men have tacked together, syn thetically or analytically, in these latter days, how they have squeezed the infinite mind into a compass that would not nonplus a surveyor of eastern lands making imagination and mem ory to lie still in their respective apartments like ink-stand and wafers in a lady s escritoire, why let her read locke, or stewart, or brown. the fact is, mental philosophy is very like pov erty, which, you know, begins at home ; and in deed, when it goes abroad, it is poverty itself. chorus. i should think an abridgment of one of the above authors, or of abercrombie, would answer her purpose. it may set her a-thinking. probably there are many systems in the market of which i am ignorant, as for themes, say first &quot;miscellaneous thoughts.&quot; set one up to a window, to note what passes in the street, and make her com ments thereon; or let her gaze in the fire, or into a corner where there is a spider s web, and philosophize, moralize, theorize, or what not. what their hands find to putter about, or their minds to think about, that let them write about. to say nothing of advantage or disadvantage of this, that, or the other, let them set down their 30 years of discipline. [1840, ideas at any given season, preserving the chain of thought as complete as may be. this is the style pedagogical. i am much obliged to you for your piece of information. knowing your dislike to a sentimental letter, i remain your affectionate brother, h. d. t. the next letter to helen carries this pedagogi cal style a little farther, for it is in latin, ad dressed &quot; ad helenam l. thoreau, roxbury, mass.,&quot; and postmarked &quot; concord, jan. 25 &quot; (1840). to helen thoreau (at roxbury). concobdiae, dec. kal. feb. a. d. mdcccxl. caka soror, est magnus acervus nivis ad limina, et frigus intolerabile intus. coelurn ip sum ruit, credo, et terrain operit. sero stratum linquo et mature repeto ; in fenestris multa pruina prospectum absumit ; et hie miser scribo, non currente calamo, nam digiti mentesque tor pescunt. canerem cum horatio, si vox non f aucibus haeserit, vides ut alta stet nive candidura nawshawtuct, nee jam sustineant onus silvae laborantes, geluque flumina constiterint acuto ? jst.22.] to helen thoreau. 31 dissolve f rigus, ligna super foco large reponens, etc. seel olim, musa mutata, et laetiore plectro, neque jam stabulis gaudet pecus, aut arator igne, nee prata canis albicant pruinis ; jam cytherea choros ducit venus imminente luua. quam turdus ferrugineus ver recluxerit, tu, spero, linques curas scliolasticas, et, negotio re ligato, desipere in loco audebis ; aut mecum in ter sylvas, aut super scopulos pulchri-portus, aut in cymba super lacum waldensem, mulcens fluctus manu, aut speciem miratus sub uiidas. bulwerius est mihi nomen incognitum, unus ex ignobile vulgo, nee refutandus nee laudandus. certe alicui nonnullam honorem habeo qui in sanabili cacoethe scribendi teneatur. specie flagrantis lexingtonis non somnia de turbat? at non vulcaiium neptunumque cul peinus, cum superstitioso grege. natura curat animalculis aeque ac hominibus ; cum serena, turn procellosa, arnica est. si amas liistoriam et fortia facta heroum, non depone rollin, precor; ne clio offenclas iiuiic, nee ilia det veniam olim. quos libros latinos legis? legis, inquam, non studes. beatus qui potest suos libellos tractare, et saepe perlegere, sine metu domini urgentis ! ab otio injurioso procul est: suos amicos et vocare et dimittere quandocunque velit, potest. bonus liber opus 32 years of discipline. [1840, nobilissimum liominis. hinc ratio non modo cur legeres, sed cur tu quoque scriberes ; nee lectores carent ; ego sum. si non librum medi taris, libellum certe. niliil posteris proderit te spirasse, et vitam nunc leniter iiiinc aspere egisse ; sed cogitasse praecipue et scripsisse. vereor ne tibi pertaesum hujus epistolae sit ; necnon alma lux caret, majoresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae. quamobrem vale, imo valete, et requiescatis placide, sorores. h. d. thoreaus. memento scribere ! cara sophia, samuel niger crebris aegro tationibus, quae agilitatem et aequum animum abstulere, obnoxius est; iis temporibus ad eel lam descendit, et multas horas (ibi) manet. flores, ah crudelis pruina ! parvo leti discrim ine sunt. cactus frigore ustus est, gerania vero adhuc vigent. conventus sociabiles hac hieme reinstituti fu ere. conveniunt (?) ad meum donium niense quarto vel quiiito, ut tu hie esse possis. mater tera sophia cum nobis remanet ; quando urbem revertet non scio. gravedine etiamnum, sed non tarn aegre, laboramus. adolescentula e. white apud pagum paulis 2bt.22.] to helen thoreau. 33 per moratur. memento scribere intra duas heb domedas. te valere desiderium est tui matris, c. thoreaus. p. s. epistolam die soils proxima expecta mus. (amanuense, h. d. t.) barring a few slips, this is a good and lively piece of latin, and noticeable for its thought as well as its learning and humor. the poets were evidently his favorites among latin authors. shall we attempt a free translation, such as thoreau would give ? vernacular version. concokd, january 23, 1840. dear sister, there is a huge snowdrift at the door, and the cold inside is intolerable. the very sky is coming down, i guess, and covering up the ground. i turn out late in the morning, and go to bed early ; there is thick frost on the windows, shutting out the view ; and here i write in pain, for fingers and brains are numb. i would chant with horace, if my voice did not stick in my throat, see how nashawtuck, deep in snow, stands glittering , while the bending woods 34 years of discipline. [1840, scarce bear their burden, and the floods feel arctic winter stay their flow. pile on the firewood, melt the cold, spare nothing 1 , etc. but soon, changing my tune, and with a cheer fuller note, i 11 say, no longer the flock huddles up in the stall, the plowman bends over the fire, no longer frost whitens the meadow ; but the goddess of love, while the moon shines above, sets us dancing in light and in shadow. when robin redbreast brings back the springtime, i trust that you will lay your school duties aside, cast off care, and venture to be gay now and then ; roaming with me in the woods, or climbing the fairhaven cliffs, or else, in my boat on walden, let the water kiss your hand, or gaze at your image in the wave. bulwer is to me a name unknown, one of the unnoticed crowd, attracting neither blame nor praise. to be sure, i hold any one in some esteem who is helpless in the grasp of the writ ing demon. does not the image of the lexington afire trouble your dreams? 1 but we may not, like the superstitious mob, blame vulcan or neptune, neither fire nor water was in fault. nature 1 the steamer lexington lately burnt on long island sound, with dr. follen on board. j5t.22.] to helen thoreau. 35 takes as much care for midgets as for mankind ; she is our friend in storm and in calm. if you like history, and the exploits of the brave, don t give up rollin, i beg ; thus would you displease clio, who might not forgive you hereafter. what latin are you reading? i mean reading, not studying. blessed is the man who can have his library at hand, and oft peruse the books, without the fear of a taskmaster ! he is far enough from harmful idleness, who can call in and dismiss these friends when he pleases. an honest book s the noblest work of man. there s a reason, now, not only for your read ing, but for writing something, too. you will not lack readers, here am i, for one. if you cannot compose a volume, then try a tract. it will do the world no good, hereafter, if you merely exist, and pass life smoothly or roughly ; but to have thoughts, and write them down, that helps greatly. i fear you will tire of this epistle ; the light of day is dwindling, too, and longer fall the shadows of the hills. therefore, good-by; fare ye well, and sleep in quiet, both my sisters ! don t forget to write. h. d. thokeau. 36 years of discipline. [1840, postscript. (by mrs. thoreau.) dear sophia, sam black (the cat) is liable to frequent attacks that impair his agility and good-nature ; at such times he goes down cellar, and stays many hours. your flowers o, the cruel frost ! are all but dead ; the cactus is with ered by cold, but the geraniums yet flourish. the sewing circle has been revived this winter ; they meet at our house in april or may, so that you may then be here. your aunt sophia re mains with us, when she will return to the city i don t know. we still suffer from heavy colds, but not so much. young miss e. white is staying in the village a little while (is making a little visit in town). don t forget to write within two weeks. we expect a letter next sunday. that you may enjoy good health is the prayer of your mother, c. thoreau. (h. d. t. was the scribe). cats were always an important branch of the thoreaus domestic economy, arid henry was more tolerant of them than men are wont to be. flowers were the specialty of sophia, who, when i knew her, from 1855 to 1876, usually had a small conservatory in a recess of the dining sit. 22.] to helen thoreau. 37 room. at this time (1840) she seems to have been aiding helen in her school. the next let ter, to helen, is of a graver tone : to helen thoreau (at roxbury). concord, june 13, 1840. dear helen, that letter to john, for which you had an opportunity doubtless to sub stitute a more perfect communication, fell, as was natural, into the hands of his &quot;transcen dental brother,&quot; who is his proxy in such cases, having been commissioned to acknowledge and receipt all bills that may be presented. but what s in a name ? perhaps it does not matter whether it be john or henry. nor will those same six months have to be altered, i fear, to suit his case as well. but methinks they have not passed entirely without intercourse, provided we have been sincere though humble worship ers of the same virtue in the mean time. cer tainly it is better that we should make ourselves quite sure of such a communion as this by the only course which is completely free from suspi cion, the coincidence of two earnest and as piring lives, than run the risk of a disappoint ment by relying wholly or chiefly on so meagre and uncertain a means as speech, whether writ ten or spoken, affords. how often, when we have been nearest each other bodily, have we 38 years of discipline. [1840, really been farthest off ! our tongues were the witty foils with which we fenced each other off. not that we have not met heartily and with profit as members of one family, but it was a small one surely, and not that other human fam ily. we have met frankly and without conceal ment ever, as befits those who have an instinc tive trust in one another, and the scenery of whose outward lives has been the same, but never as prompted by an earnest and affection ate desire to probe deeper our mutual natures. such intercourse, at least, if it has ever been, has not condescended to the vulgarities of oral communication, for the ears are provided with no lid as the eye is, and would not have been deaf to it in sleep. and now glad am i, if i am not mistaken in imagining that some such transcendental inquisitiveness has traveled post thither, for, as i observed before, where the bolt hits, thither was it aimed, any arbitrary direction notwithstanding. thus much, at least, our kindred tempera ment of mind and body and long family-axiky have done for us, that we already find our selves standing on a solid and natural footing with respect to one another, and shall not have to waste time in the so often unavailing endeavor to arrive fairly at this simple ground. let us leave trifles, then, to accident; and jet. 22.] to helen thoreau. 39 politics, and finance, and such gossip, to the mo ments when diet and exercise are cared for, and speak to each other deliberately as out of one infinity into another, you there in time and space, and i here. for beside this relation, all books and doctrines are no better than gossip or the turning of a spit. equally to you and sophia, from your affectionate brother, h. d. thoreau. we come now to the period when thoreau entered on more intimate relations with emer son. there was a difference of fourteen years in their ages, which had hitherto separated them intellectually ; but now the young scholar, thinker, and naturalist had so fast advanced that he could meet his senior on more equal terms, and each became essential to the other. with all his prudence and common sense, in which he sur passed most men, emerson was yet lacking in some practical faculties ; while thoreau was the most practical and handy person in all matters of every-day life, a good mechanic and gar dener, methodical in his habits, observant and kindly in the domestic world, and attractive to children, who now were important members of the emerson household. he was therefore in vited by emerson to make his house a home, 40 years of discipline. [1841, looking after the garden, the business affairs, and performing the office of a younger brother, or a grown-up son. the invitation was accepted in april, 1841, and thoreau remained in the family, with frequent absences, until he went in may, 1843, to reside with mr. william emer son, near new york, as the tutor of his sons. during these two years much occurred of deep moment to the two friends. young waldo em erson, the beautiful boy, died, and just before, john thoreau, the sunny and hopeful brother, whom henry seems to have loved more than any human being. these tragedies brought the be reaved nearer together, and gave to mrs. emer son in particular an affection for thoreau, and a trust in him which made the intimate life of the household move harmoniously, notwithstand ing the independent and eccentric genius of thoreau. to mrs. lucy brown 1 (at plymouth). concord, july 21, 1841. dear friend, don t think i need any prompting to write to you ; but what tough 1 mrs. brown was the elder sister of mrs. r. w. emerson and of the eminent chemist and geologist, dr. charles t. jack son, of plymouth and boston. she lived for a time in mrs. thoreau s family, and thoreau s early verses, sic vita, were thrown into her window there by the youngpoet, wrapped round a cluster of violets. jet. 24.] to mrs. lucy brown. 41 earthenware shall i put into my packet to travel over so many hills, and thrid so many woods, as lie between concord and plymouth ? thank fortune it is all the way down hill, so they will get safely carried ; and yet it seems as if it were writing against time and the sun to send a letter east, for no natural force forwards it. you should go dwell in the west, and then i would deluge you with letters, as boys throw feathers into the air to see the wind take them. i should rather fancy you at evening dwelling far away behind the serene curtain of the west, the home of fair weather, than over by the chilly sources of the east wind. what quiet thoughts have you nowadays which will float on that east wind to west, for so we may make our worst servants our car riers, what progress made from cant to can, in practice and theory ? under this category, you remember, we used to place all our philoso phy. do you have any still, startling, well mo ments, in which you think grandly, and speak with emphasis ? don t take this for sarcasm, for not in a year of the gods, i fear, will such a golden approach to plain speaking revolve again. but away with such fears ; by a few miles of travel we have not distanced each oth er s sincerity. i grow savager and savager every day, as if 42 years of discipline. [1841, fed on raw meat, and my tameiiess is only the repose of untamableness. i dream of looking abroad summer and winter, with free gaze, from some mountain-side, while my eyes revolve in an egyptian slime of health, i to be nature looking into nature with such easy sympathy as the blue-eyed grass in the meadow looks in the face of the sky. from some such recess i would put forth sublime thoughts daily, as the plant puts forth leaves. now-a-nights i go on to the hill to see the sun set, as one would go home at evening ; the bustle of the village has run on all day, and left me quite in the rear ; but i see the sunset, and find that it can wait for my slow virtue. but i forget that you think more of this human nature than of this nature i praise. why won t you believe that mine is more human than any single man or woman can be ? that in it, in the sunset there, are all the qualities that can adorn a household, and that sometimes, in a fluttering leaf, one may hear all your chris tianity preached. you see how unskillful a letter-writer i am, thus to have come to the end of my sheet when hardly arrived at the beginning of my story. i was going to be soberer, i assure you, but now have only room to add, that if the fates allot 2et. 24.] to mrs. lucy brown. 43 you a serene hour, don t fail to communicate some of its serenity to your friend, henry d. thoeeau. no, no. improve so rare a gift for yourself, and send me of your leisure. to mrs. lucy brown (at plymouth). concord, wednesday evening 1 , september 8, [1841.] dear friend, your note came wafted to my hand like the first leaf of the fall on the sep tember wind, and i put only another interpreta tion upon its lines than upon the veins of those which are soon to be strewed around me. it is nothing but indian summer here at present. i mean that any weather seems reserved expressly for our late purposes whenever we happen to be fulfilling them. i do not know what right i have to so much happiness, but rather hold it in reserve till the time of my desert. what with the crickets and the crowing of cocks, and the lowing of kiiie, our concord life is sonorous enough. sometimes i hear the cock bestir himself on his perch under my feet, and crow shrilly before dawn ; and i think i might have been born any year for all the phenomena i know. we count sixteen eggs daily now, when arithmetic will only fetch the hens up to 44 years of discipline. [1841, thirteen ; but the world is young, and we wait to see this eccentricity complete its period. my verses on friendship are already printed in the &quot; dial ; &quot; not expanded, but reduced to completeness by leaving out the long lines, which always have, or should have, a longer or at least another sense than short ones. just now i am in the mid-sea of verses, and they actually rustle around me as the leaves would round the head of autumnus himself should he thrust it up through some vales which i know ; but, alas ! many of them are but crisped and yellow leaves like his, i fear, and will deserve no better fate than to make mould for new harvests. i see the stanzas rise around me, verse upon verse, far and near, like the mountains from agiocochook, not all having a terrestrial existence as yet, even as some of them may be clouds ; but i fancy i see the gleam of some sebago lake and silver cascade, at whose well i may drink one day. i am as unfit for any practical purpose i mean for the further ance of the world s ends as gossamer for ship timber ; and i, who am going to be a pencil maker to-morrow, 1 can sympathize with god apollo, who served king admetus for a while on earth. but i believe he found it for his ad 1 this business of pencil-making had become the family bread-winner, and henry thoreau worked at it and kindred arts by intervals for the next twenty years. ^et. 24.] to mrs. lucy brown. 45 vantage at last, as i am sure i shall, though i shall hold the nobler part at least out of the service. don t attach any undue seriousness to this threnody, for i love my fate to the very core and rind, and could swallow it without paring it, i think. you ask if i have written any more poems ? excepting those which vulcan is now forging, i have only discharged a few more bolts into the horizon, in all, three hundred verses, and sent them, as i may say, over the moun tains to miss fuller, who may have occasion to remember the old rhyme : &quot; three scipen gode comen mid than flode three hundred cnihten.&quot; but these are far more vandalic than they. in this narrow sheet there is not room even for one thought to root itself. but you must consider this an odd leaf of a volume, and that volume your friend, henry d. thoreau. to mrs. lucy brown (at plymouth). concord, october 5, 1841. dear friend, i send you williams s * let ter as the last remembrancer to one of those &quot; whose acquaintance he had the pleasure to 1 i. t. williams, who had lived in concord, but now wrote from buffalo, n. y. 46 years of discipline. [1841, form while in concord.&quot; it came quite unex pectedly to me, but i was very glad to receive it, though i hardly know whether my utmost sincerity and interest can inspire a sufficient answer to it. i should like to have you send it back by some convenient opportunity. pray let me know what you are thinking about any day, what most nearly concerns you. last winter, you know, you did more than your share of the talking, and i did not com plain for want of an opportunity. imagine your stove-door out of order, at least, and then while i am fixing it you will think of enough things to say. what makes the value of your life at pres ent ? what dreams have you, and what realiza tions? you know there is a high table-land which not even the east wind reaches. now can t we walk and chat upon its plane still, as if there were no lower latitudes ? surely our two destinies are topics interesting and grand enough for any occasion. i hope you have many gleams of serenity and health, or, if your body will grant you no posi tive respite, that you may, at any rate, enjoy your sickness occasionally, as much as i used to tell of. but here is the bundle going to be done up, so accept a &quot; good-night &quot; from henry d. thoreatj. arc. 24.] to mrs. lucy brown. 47 to mrs. lucy brown (at plymouth). concord, march 2, 1842. dear friend, i believe i have nothing new to tell you, for what was news you have learned from other sources. i am much the same person that i was, who should be so much better ; yet when i realize what has transpired, and the greatness of the part i am unconsciously acting, i am thrilled, and it seems as if there were none in history to match it. soon after john s death i listened to a music box, and if, at any time, that event had seemed inconsistent with the beauty and harmony of the universe, it was then gently constrained into the placid course of nature by those steady notes, in mild and unoffended tone echoing far and wide under the heavens. but i find these things more strange than sad to me. what right have i to grieve, who have not ceased to wonder? we feel at first as if some opportunities of kind ness and sympathy were lost, but learn after ward that any pure grief is ample recompense for all. that is, if we are faithful ; for a great grief is but sympathy with the soul that dis poses events, and is as natural as the resin on arabian trees. only nature has a right to grieve perpetually, for she only is innocent. soon the ice will melt, and the blackbirds sing 48 years of discipline. [1841, along the river which he frequented, as pleas antly as ever. the same everlasting serenity will appear in this face of god, and we will not be sorrowful if he is not. we are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it. the memory of some past moments is more persuasive than the experience of present ones. there have been visions of such breadth and brightness that these motes were invisible in their light. i do not wish to see john ever again, i mean him who is dead, but that other, whom only he woidd have wished to see, or to be, of whom he was the imperfect representative. for we are not what we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for what we are capable of being. as for waldo, he died as the mist rises from the brook, which the sun will soon dart his rays through. do not the flowers die every autumn ? he had not even taken root here. i was not startled to hear that he was dead ; it seemed the most natural event that could happen. his fine organization demanded it, and nature gently yielded its request. it would have been strange if he had lived. neither will nature manifest any sorrow at his death, but soon the note of the lark will be heard down in the meadow, and fresh dandelions will spring from the old stocks where he plucked them last summer. 55t.25.] to mrs. lucy brown. 49 i have been living ill of late, but am now doing better. how do you live in that plymouth world, nowadays ? 1 please remember me to mary russell. you must not blame me if i do talk to the clouds, for i remain your friend, henry d. thoreau. to mrs. lucy brown (at plymouth). concord, january 24, 1843. dear friend, the other day i wrote you a letter to go in mrs. emerson s bundle, but, as 1 mrs. brown, to whom this letter and several others of the years 1841-43 were written, lived by turns in plymouth, her native place, and in concord, where she often visited mrs. emerson at the time when thoreau was an inmate of the emerson household. in the early part of 1843 she was in plymouth, and her sister was sending 1 her newspapers and other thing s, from time to time. the incident of the music box, mentioned above, occurred at the old manse, where haw thorne was livingfrom the summer of 1842 until the springof 1845, and was often visited by thoreau and ellery channing 1 . in the letter following-, this incident is recalled, and with it the agreeable gift by richard fuller (a younger brother of margaret fuller and of ellen, the wife of ellery channing 1 , who came to reside in concord about these years, and soon became thoreau s most intimate friend), which was a music box for the thoreaus. they were all fond of music, and enjoyed it even in this mechanical form, one evidence of the simple conditions of life in concord then. the note of thanks to young fuller, who had been, perhaps, a pupil of thoreau, follows this letter to mrs. brown, though earlier in date. mary russell afterwards became mrs. marston watson. 50 years of discipline. [1843, it seemed unworthy, i did not send it, and now, to atone for that, i am going to send this, whether it be worthy or not. i will not venture upon news, for, as all the household are gone to bed, i cannot learn what has been told you. do you read any noble verses nowadays ? or do not verses still seem noble ? for my own part, they have been the only things i remembered, or that which occasioned them, when all things else were blurred and defaced. all things have put on mourning but they ; for the elegy itself is some victorious melody or joy escaping from the wreck. it is a relief to read some true book, wherein all are equally dead, equally alive. i think the best parts of shakespeare would only be enhanced by the most thrilling and affecting events. i have found it so. and so much the more, as they are not intended for consolation. do you think of coming to concord again ? i shall be glad to see you. i should be glad to know that i could see you when i would. we always seem to be living just on the brink of a pure and lofty intercourse, which would make the ills and trivialness of life ridiculous. after each little interval, though it be but for the night, we are prepared to meet each other as gods and goddesses. i seem to have dodged all my days with one jet. 25.] to mrs. lucy brown. 51 or two persons, and lived upon expectation, as if the bud would surely blossom ; and so i am content to live. what means the fact, which is so common, so universal, that some soul that has lost all hope for itself can inspire in another listening soul an infinite confidence in it, even while it is expressing its despair ? i am very happy in my present environment, though actually mean enough myself, and so, of course, all around me ; yet, i am sure, we for the most part are transfigured to one another, and are that to the other which we aspire to be ourselves. the longest course of mean and trivial intercourse may not prevent my practicing this divine cour tesy to my companion. notwithstanding all i hear about brooms, and scouring, and taxes, and housekeeping, i am constrained to live a strangely mixed life, as if even valhalla might have its kitchen. we are all of us apollos serving some admetus. i think i must have some muses in my pay that i know not of, for certain musical wishes of mine are answered as soon as entertained. last summer i went to hawthorne s suddenly for the express purpose of borrowing his music-box, and almost immediately mrs. hawthorne proposed to lend it to me. the other day i said i must go to mrs. barrett s to hear hers, and, lo ! straight 52 years of discipline. [1843, way richard fuller sent me one for a present from cambridge. it is a very good one. i should like to have you hear it. i shall not have to employ you to borrow for me now. good-night. from your affectionate friend, h. d. t. to richard f. fuller (at cambridge). concord, january 16, 1843. dear richard, i need not thank you for your present, for i hear its music, which seems to be playing just for us two pilgrims marching over hill and dale of a summer afternoon, up those long bolton hills and by those bright har vard lakes, such as i see in the placid lucerne on the lid ; and whenever i hear it, it will recall happy hours passed with its donor. when did mankind make that foray into na ture and bring off this booty ? for certainly it is but history that some rare virtue in remote times plundered these strains from above and communicated them to men. whatever we may think of it, it is a part of the harmony of the spheres you have sent me; which has conde scended to serve us admetuses, and i hope i may so behave that this may always be the tenor of your thought for me. if you have any strains, the conquest of your jst.25.] to mrs. lucy brown. 53 own spear or quill, to accompany these, let the winds waft them also to me. i write this with one of the &quot; primaries &quot; of my osprey s wings, which i have preserved over my glass for some state occasion, and now it offers. mrs. emerson sends her love. to mrs. lucy brown (at plymouth). concord, friday evening-, january 25, 1843. dear friend, mrs. emerson asks me to write you a letter, which she will put into her bundle to-morrow along with the &quot; tribunes &quot; and &quot; standards,&quot; and miscellanies, and what not, to make an assortment. but what shall i write ? you live a good way off, and i don t know that i have anything which will bear sending so far. but i am mistaken, or rather impatient when i say this, for we all have a gift to send, not only when the year begins, but as long as inter est and memory last. i don t know whether you have got the many i have sent you, or rather whether you were quite sure where they came from. i mean the letters i have sometimes launched off eastward in my thought; but if you have been happier at one time than another, think that then you received them. but this that i now send you is of another sort. it will 54 years of discipline. [1843, go slowly, drawn by horses over muddy roads, and lose much of its little value by the way. you may have to pay for it, and it may not make you happy after all. but what shall be my new-year s gift, then? why, i will send you my still fresh remembrance of the hours i have passed with you here, for i find in the re membrance of them the best gift you have left to me. we are poor and sick creatures at best ; but we can have well memories, and sound and healthy thoughts of one another still, and an in tercourse may be remembered which was without blur, and above us both. perhaps you may like to know of my estate nowadays. as usual, i find it harder to account for the happiness i enjoy, than for the sadness which instructs me occasionally. if the little of this last which visits me would only be sadder, it would be happier. one while i am vexed by a sense of meanness ; one while i simply wonder at the mystery of life ; and at another, and at another, seem to rest on my oars, as if propelled by propitious breezes from i know not what quarter. but for the most part i am an idle, inefficient, lingering (one term will do as well as another, where all are true and none true enough) member of the great commonwealth, who have most need of my own charity, if i could not be charitable and indulgent to myself, jet. 25.] to mrs. lucy brown. 55 perhaps as good a subject for my own satire as any. you see how, when i come to talk of my self, i soon run dry, for i would fain make that a subject which can be no subject for me, at least not till i have the grace to rule myself. i do not venture to say anything about your griefs, for it would be unnatural for me to speak as if i grieved with you, when i think i do not. if i were to see you, it might be otherwise. but i know you will pardon the trivialness of this letter ; and i only hope as i know that you have reason to be so that you are still happier than you are sad, and that you remember that the smallest seed of faith is of more worth than the largest fruit of happiness. i have no doubt that out of s s death you sometimes draw sweet consolation, not only for that, but for long-standing griefs, and may find some things made smooth by it, which before were rough. i wish you would communicate with me, and not think me unworthy to know any of your thoughts. don t think me unkind because i have not written to you. i confess it was for so poor a reason as that you almost made a princi ple of not answering. i could not speak truly with this ugly fact in the way ; and perhaps i wished to be assured, by such evidence as you could not voluntarily give, that it was a kind ness. for every glance at the moon, does she 56 years of discipline. [1843, not send me an answering ray? noah would hardly have done himself the pleasure to release his dove, if she had not been about to come back to him with tidings of green islands amid the waste. but these are far-fetched reasons. i am not speaking directly enough to yourself now ; so let me say directly from your friend, henry d. thoreau. exactly when correspondence began between emerson and thoreau is not now to be ascer tained, since all the letters do not seem to have been preserved. their acquaintance opened while thoreau was in college, although emer son may have seen the studious boy at the town school in concord, or at the &quot;academy&quot; there, while fitting for college. but they only came to know each other as sharers of the same thoughts and aspirations in the autumn of 1837, when, on hearing a new lecture of emerson s, helen tho reau said to mrs. brown, then living or visiting in the thoreau family, &quot; henry has a thought very like that in his journal &quot; (which he had newly begun to keep). mrs. brown desired to see the passage, and soon bore it to her sister, mrs. emerson, whose husband saw it, and asked mrs. brown to bring her young friend to see am. 25.] thoreau and emerson. 57 him. by 1838 their new relation of respect was established, and emerson wrote to a correspond ent, &quot; i delight much in my young friend, who seems to have as free and erect a mind as any i have ever met.&quot; a year later (aug. 9, 1839), he wrote to carlyle, &quot; i have a young poet in this village, named thoreau, who writes the truest verses.&quot; indeed, it was in the years 1839-40 that he seems to have written the poems by which he is best remembered. thoreau told me in his last illness that he had written many verses and destroyed many, this fact he then regretted, although he had done it at the instance of em erson, who did not praise them. but, said he, &quot; they may have been better than we thought them, twenty years ago.&quot; the earliest note which i find from emerson to thoreau bears no date, but must have been written before 1842, for at no later time could the persons named in it have visited concord together. most likely it was in the summer of 1840, and to the same date do i assign a note asking henry to join the emersons in a party to the cliffs (scopuli pulchri-portus), and to bring his flute, for on that pastoral reed tho reau played sweetly. the first series of letters from thoreau to emerson begins early in 1843, about the time the letters just given were writ ten to mrs. brown. in the first he gives thanks 58 years of discipline. [1843, to emerson for the hospitality of his house in the two preceding years ; a theme to which he returned a few months later, for i doubt not the lovely sad poem called &quot; the departure &quot; was written at staten island soon after his leav ing the emerson house in concord for the more stately but less congenial residence of william emerson at staten island, whither he betook himself in may, 1843. this first letter, how ever, was sent from the concord home to waldo emerson at staten island, or perhaps in new york, where he was that winter giving a course of lectures. in explanation of the passages concerning bronson alcott, in this letter, it should be said that he was then living at the hosmer cottage, in concord, with his english friends, charles lane and henry wright, and that he had re fused to pay a tax in support of what he consid ered an unjust government, and was arrested by the constable, sam staples, in consequence. to r. w. emerson (at new york). concord, january 24, 1843. dear friend, the best way to correct a mistake is to make it right. i had not spoken of writing to you, but as you say you are about to write to me when you get my letter, i make haste on my part in order to get yours the sooner. ast.25.] to r. w. emerson. 59 i don t well know what to say to earn the forth coming epistle, unless that edith takes rapid strides in the arts and sciences or music and natural history as well as over the carpet; that she says &quot; papa &quot; less and less abstractedly every day, looking in my face, which may sound like a ram des vackes to yourself. and ellen declares every morning that &quot;papa may come home to-night ; &quot; and by and by it will have changed to such positive statement as that &quot; papa came home larks night.&quot; elizabeth hoar still flits about these clearings, and i meet her here and there, and in all houses but her own, but as if i were not the less of her family for all that. i have made slight acquaint ance also with one mrs. lidian emerson, who almost persuades me to be a christian, but i fear i as often lapse into heathenism. mr. o sullivan a was here three days. i met him at the atheneum [concord], and went to haw thorne s [at the old manse] to tea with him. he expressed a great deal of interest in your poems, and wished me to give him a list of them, which i did ; he saying he did not know but he should notice them. he is a rather puny looking man, and did not strike me. we had nothing to say to one another, and therefore we 1 editor of the democratic review, for which hawthorne, emerson, thoreau, and whittier all wrote, more or less. 60 years of discipline. [1843, said a great deal ! he, however, made a point of asking me to write for his keview, which i shall be glad to do. he is, at any rate, one of the not-bad, but does not by any means take you by storm, no, nor by calm, which is the best way. he expects to see you in new york. after tea i carried him and hawthorne to the lyceum. mr. alcott has not altered much since you left. i think you will find him much the same sort of person. with mr. lane i have had one regular chat a la george minott, which of course was greatly to our mutual gratiand edification ; and, as two or three as regular conversations have taken place since, i fear there may have been a precession of the equinoxes. mr. wright, according to the last accounts, is in lynn, with uncertain aims and prospects, maturing slowly, perhaps, as indeed are all of us. i suppose they have told you how near mr. alcott went to the jail, but i can add a good anecdote to the rest. when staples came to collect mrs. ward s taxes, my sister helen asked him what he thought mr. alcott meant, what his idea was, and he answered, &quot; i vum, i believe it was nothing but principle, for i never heerd a man talk hon ester.&quot; there was a lecture 011 peace by a mr. spear (ought he not to be beaten into a ploughshare ?), the same evening, and, as the gentlemen, lane ast.25.] to r. w. emerson. 61 and alcott, dined at our house while the matter was in suspense, that is, while the constable was waiting for his receipt from the jailer, we there settled it that we, that is, lane and myself, perhaps, should agitate the state while winkelried lay in durance. but when, over the audience, i saw our hero s head moving in the free air of the universalist church, my fire all went out, and the state was safe as far as i was concerned. but lane, it seems, had cogitated and even written on the matter, in the afternoon, and so, out of courtesy, taking his point of de parture from the spear-man s lecture, he drove gracefully in medias res, and gave the affair a very good setting out ; but, to spoil all, our mar tyr very characteristically, but, as artists would say, in bad taste, brought up the rear with a &quot;my prisons,&quot; which made us forget silvio pellico himself. mr. lane wishes me to ask you to see if there is anything for him in the new york office, and pay the charges. will you tell me what to do with mr. [theodore] parker, who was to lecture february 15th ? mrs. emerson says my letter is written instead of one from her. at the end of this strange letter i will not write what alone i had to say to thank you and mrs. emerson for your long kindness to me. it would be more ungrateful than my constant 62 years of discipline. [1843, thought. i have been your pensioner for nearly two years, and still left free as under the sky. it has been as free a gift as the sun or the sum mer, though i have sometimes molested you with my mean acceptance of it, i who have failed to render even those slight services of the liand which would have been for a sign at least ; and, by the fault of my nature, have failed of many better and higher services. but i will not trou ble you with this, but for once thank you as well as heaven. your friend, h. d. t. mrs. lidian emerson, the wife of r. w. em erson, and her two daughters, ellen and edith, are named in this first letter, and will be fre quently mentioned in the correspondence. at this date, edith, now mrs. w. h. eorbes, was fourteen months old. mr. emerson s mother, madam ruth emerson, was also one of the household, which had for a little more than seven years occupied the well-known house un der the trees, east of the village. to r. w. emerson (at new york). concord, february 10, 1843. dear friend, i have stolen one of your own sheets to write you a letter upon, and i hope, with two layers of ink, to turn it into a mt. 25.] to r. w. emerson. 63 comforter. if you like to receive a letter from me, too, i am glad, for it gives me pleasure to write. but don t let it come amiss; it must fall as harmlessly as leaves settle on the land scape. i will tell you what we are doing this now. supper is done, and edith the dessert, perhaps more than the dessert is brought in, or even comes in per se; and round she goes, now to this altar, and then to that, with her monosyllabic invocation of &quot; oc,&quot; &quot; oc.&quot; it makes me think of &quot; langue d oc.&quot; she must belong to that province. and like the gypsies she talks a language of her own while she un derstands ours. while she jabbers sanscrit, parsee, pehlvi, say &quot; edith go bah ! &quot; and &quot; bah &quot; it is. no intelligence passes between us. she knows. it is a capital joke, that is the reason she smiles so. how well the secret is kept ! she never descends to explanation. it is not buried like a common secret, bolstered up on two sides, but by an eternal silence on the one side, at least. it has been long kept, and comes in from the unexplored horizon, like a blue mountain range, to end abruptly at our door one day. (don t stumble at this steep simile.) and now she studies the heights and depths of nature on shoulders whirled in some eccentric orbit just by old psestum s temples and the perch where time doth plume his wings. 64 years of discipline. [1843, and now she runs the race over the carpet, while all olympia applauds, inamma, grandma, and uncle, good grecians all, and that dark-hued barbarian, partheanna parker, whose shafts go through and through, not backward ! grand mamma smiles over all, and mamma is wonder ing what papa would say, should she descend on carlton house some day. &quot; larks night &quot; s abed, dreaming of &quot;pleased faces&quot; far away. but now the trumpet sounds, the games are over ; some hebe comes, and edith is trans lated. i don t know where ; it must be to some cloud, for i never was there. query : what becomes of the answers edith thinks, but cannot express ? she really gives you glances which are before this world was. you can t feel any difference of age, except that you have longer legs and arms. mrs. emerson said i must tell you about do mestic affairs, when i mentioned that i was going to write. perhaps it will inform you of the state of all if i only say that i am well and happy in your house here in concord. your friend, henry. don t forget to tell us what to do with mr. parker when you write next. i lectured this week. it was as bright a night as you could wish. i hope there were no stars thrown away on the occasion. mt. 25.] to r. w. emerson. 65 [a part of the same letter, though bearing a date two days later, and written in a wholly different style, as from one sage to another, is this postscript.] february 12, 1843. dear feiend, as the packet still tarries, i will send you some thoughts, which i have lately relearned, as the latest public and private news. how mean are our relations to one another ! let us pause till they are nobler. a little silence, a little rest, is good. it would be sufficient em ployment only to cultivate true ones. the richest gifts we can bestow are the least marketable. we hate the kindness which we understand. a noble person confers no such gift as his whole confidence : none so exalts the giver and the receiver ; it produces the truest gratitude. perhaps it is only essential to friend ship that some vital trust should have been re posed by the one in the other. i feel addressed and probed even to the remote parts of my being when one nobly shows, even in trivial things, an implicit faith in me. when such divine com modities are so near and cheap, how strange that it should have to be each day s discovery ! a threat or a curse may be forgotten, but this mild trust translates me. i am no more of this earth ; 66 years of discipline. [1843, it acts dynamically; it changes my very sub stance. i cannot do what before i did. i can not be what before i was. other chains may be broken, but in the darkest night, in the re motest place, i trail this thread. then things cannot happen. what if god were to confide in us for a moment ! should we not then be gods? how subtle a thing is this confidence ! no thing sensible passes between ; never any conse quences are to be apprehended should it be mis placed. yet something has transpired. a new behavior springs ; the ship carries new ballast in her hold. a sufficiently great and generous trust could never be abused. it should be cause to lay down one s life, which would not be to lose it. can there be any mistake up there? don t the gods know where to invest their wealth ? such confidence, too, would be recip rocal. when one confides greatly in you, he will feel the roots of an equal trust fastening themselves in him. when such trust has been received or reposed, we dare not speak, hardly to see each other ; our voices sound harsh and untrustworthy. we are as instruments which the powers have dealt with. through what straits would we not carry this little burden of a magnanimous trust ! yet no harm could pos sibly come, but simply faithlessness. not a jet. 25.] to r. w. emerson. 67 feather, not a straw, is intrusted ; that packet is empty. it is only committed to us, and, as it were, all things are committed to us. the kindness i have longest remembered has been of this sort, the sort unsaid ; so far be hind the speaker s lips that almost it already lay in my heart. it did not have far to go to be communicated. the gods cannot misunder stand, man cannot explain. we communicate like the burrows of foxes, in silence and dark ness, under ground. we are undermined by faith and love. how much more full is nature where we think the empty space is than where we place the solids ! full of fluid influences. should we ever communicate but by these ? the spirit abhors a vacuum more than nature. there is a tide which pierces the pores of the air. these aerial rivers, let us not pollute their currents. what meadows do they course through ? how many fine mails there are which traverse their routes ! he is privileged who gets his letter franked by them. i believe these things. henry d. thoreau. emerson replied to these letters in two epis tles of dates from february 4 to 12, 1843, in the latter asking thoreau to aid him in edit ing the april number of the &quot; dial,&quot; of which 68 years of discipline. [1843, he had taken charge. among other things, emerson desired a manuscript of charles lane, alcott s english friend, to be sent to him in new york, where he was detained several weeks by his lectures. he added : &quot; have we no news from wheeler ? has bartlett none ? &quot; of these persons, the first, charles stearns wheeler, a college classmate of thoreau, and later greek tutor in the college, had gone to germany, where he died the next summer, and was contributing to the quarterly &quot; dial.&quot; robert bartlett, of plymouth, a townsman of mrs. emerson, was wheeler s intimate friend, with whom he corresponded. 1 to this editorial 1 an interesting fact in connection with thoreau and wheeler (whose home was in lincoln, four miles southeast of concord) is related by ellery channing in a note to me. it seems that wheeler had built for himself, or hired from a farmer, a rough woodland study near flint s pond, half way from lincoln to concord, which he occupied for a short time in 1841-42, and where thoreau and channing visited him. mr. channing wrote me in 1883 : &quot; stearns wheeler built a shanty on flint s pond for the purpose of economy, for pur chasing greek books and going abroad to study. whether mr. thoreau assisted him to build this shanty i cannot say, but i think he may have ; also that he spent six weeks with him there. as mr. thoreau was not too original and inven tive to follow the example of others, if good to him, it is very probable this undertaking of stearns wheeler, whom he re garded (as i think i have heard him say) a heroic character, suggested his own experiment on walden. i believe i visited this shanty with mr. thoreau. it was very plain, with bunks of straw, and built in the irish manner. i think mr. wheeler ^t. 25.] to r. w. emerson. 69 request thoreau, who was punctuality itself, re plied at once. to e. w. emerson (at new york). concord, february 15, 1843. my dear friend, i got your letters, one yesterday and the other to-day, and they have made me quite happy. as a packet is to go in the morning, i will give you a hasty account of the &quot; dial.&quot; i called on mr. lane this after noon, and brought away, together with an abun dance of good-will, first, a bulky catalogue of books without commentary, some eight hun dred, i think he told me, with an introduction filling one sheet, ten or a dozen pages, say, though i have only glanced at them ; second, was as good a mechanic as mr. thoreau, and built this shanty for his own use. the object of these two experiments was quite unlike, except in the common purpose of economy. it seems to me highly probable that mr. wheeler s experiment suggested mr. thoreau s, as he was a man he almost wor shiped. but i could not understand what relation mr. low ell had to this fact, if it be one. students, in all parts of the earth, have pursued a similar course from motives of economy, and to carry out some special study. mr. thoreau wished to study birds, flowers, and the stone age, just as mr. wheeler wished to study greek. and mr. hotham came next from just the same motive of economy (necessity) and to study the bible. the prudential sides of all three were the same.&quot; mr. hotham was the young theological student who dwelt in a cabin by walden in 1809-70. 70 years of discipline. [1843, a review twenty-five or thirty printed pages of conversations on the gospels, record of a school, and spiritual culture, with rather copious extracts. however, it is a good sub ject, and lane says it gives him satisfaction. i will give it a faithful reading directly. [these were alcott s publications, reviewed by lane.] and now i come to the little end of the horn ; for myself, i have brought along the minor greek poets, and will mine there for a scrap or two, at least. as for etzler, i don t remember any &quot; rude and snappish speech &quot; that you made, and if you did it must have been longer than anything i had written ; however, here is the book still, and i will try. perhaps i have some few scraps in my journal which you may choose to print. the translation of the ^eschylus i should like very well to continue anon, if it should be worth the while. as for poetry, i have not remembered to write any for some time ; it has quite slipped my mind ; but some times i think i hear the mutterings of the thun der. don t you remember that last summer we heard a low, tremulous sound in the woods and over the hills, and thought it was partridges or rocks, and it proved to be thunder gone down the river ? but sometimes it was over wayland way, and at last burst over our heads. so we 11 not despair by reason of the drought. you see jst.25.] to r. w. emerson. 71 it takes a good many words to supply the place of one deed ; a hundred lines to a cobweb, and but one cable to a man-of-war. the &quot; dial &quot; case needs to be reformed in many particulars. there is no news from wheeler, none from bartlett. they all look well and happy in this house, where it gives me much pleasure to dwell. yours in haste, henry. p. s. wednesday evening, february 16. dear friend, i have time to write a few words about the &quot; dial.&quot; i have just received the three first signatures, which do not yet com plete lane s piece. he will place five hundred copies for sale at munroe s bookstore. wheeler has sent you two full sheets more about the german universities and proper names, which will have to be printed in alphabetical order for convenience ; what this one has done, that one is doing, and the other intends to do. ham mer-purgstall (von hammer) may be one, for aught i know. however, there are two or three tilings in it, as well as names. one of the books of herodotus is discovered to be out of place. he says something about having sent to lowell, by the last steamer, a budget of lit erary news, which he will have communicated to 72 years of discipline, [1843, you ere this. mr. alcott has a letter from he raud, 1 and a book written by him, the life of savonarola, which he wishes to have re published here. mr. lane will write a notice of it. (the latter says that what is in the new york post-office may be directed to mr. alcott.) miss [elizabeth] peabody has sent a &quot; notice to the readers of the dial, &quot; which is not good. mr. chapin lectured this evening, and so rhetorically that i forgot my duty and heard very little. i find myself better than i have been, and am meditating some other method of paying debts than by lectures and writing, which will only do to talk about. if anything of that &quot; other &quot; sort should come to your ears in new york, will you remember it for me ? excuse this scrawl, which i have written over the embers in the dining-room. i hope that you live on good terms with yourself and the gods. yours in haste, henry. mr. lane and his lucubrations proved to be tough subjects, and the next letter has more to say about them and the &quot; dial.&quot; lane had undertaken to do justice to mr. alcott and his books, as may still be read in the pages of that 1 an english critic and poetaster. see memoir of bronson alcott, pp. 292-318. jst.25.] to r. w. emerson. 73 april number of the transcendentalist quar terly. to r. w. emerson (at new york). concord, february 20, 1843. my dear friend, i have read mr. lane s review, and can say, speaking for this world and for fallen man, that &quot;it is good for us.&quot; as they say in geology, time never fails, there is always enough of it, so i may say, criticism never fails ; but if i go and read elsewhere, i say it is good, far better than any notice mr. alcott has received, or is likely to receive from another quarter. it is at any rate &quot; the other side,&quot; which boston needs to hear. i do not send it to you, because time is precious, and because i think you would accept it, after all. after speaking briefly of the fate of goethe and carlyle in their own countries, he says, &quot; to emerson in his own circle is but slowly accorded a worthy response ; and alcott, al most utterly neglected,&quot; etc. i will strike out what relates to yourself, and correcting some verbal faults, send the rest to the printer with lane s initials. the catalogue needs amendment, i think. it wants completeness now. it should consist of such books only as they would tell mr. [f. h.] hedge and [theodore] parker they had got ; 74 years of discipline. [1843, omitting the bible, the classics, and much be sides, for there the incompleteness begins. but you will be here in season for this. it is frequently easy to make mr. lane more universal and attractive ; to write, for instance, &quot; universal ends &quot; instead of &quot; the universal end,&quot; just as we pull open the petals of a flower with our fingers where they are confined by its own sweets. also he had better not say &quot; books designed for the nucleus of a home university,&quot; until he makes that word &quot; home &quot; ring solid and universal too. this is that abominable dia lect, lie had just given me a notice of george bradford s fenelon for the eecord of the months, and speaks of extras of the eeview and catalogue, if they are printed, even a hun dred, or thereabouts. how shall this be ar ranged ? also he wishes to use some manu scripts of his which are in your possession, if you do not. can i get them ? i think of no news to tell you. it is a serene summer day here, all above the snow. the hens steal their nests, and i steal their eggs still, as formerly. this is what i do with the hands. ah, labor, it is a divine institution, and con versation with many men and hens. do not think that my letters require as many special answers. i get one as often as you write to concord. concord inquires for you daily, as jet. 25.] to r. w. emerson. 75 do all the members of this house. you must make haste home before we have settled all the great questions, for they are fast being disposed of. but i must leave room for mrs. emerson. mrs. emerson s letter, after speaking of other matters, gave a lively sketch of thoreau at one of alcott s conversations in her house, which may be quoted as illustrating the young nature worshiper s position at the time, and the more humane and socialistic spirit of alcott and lane, who were soon to leave concord for their exper iment of communistic life at &quot; fruitlands,&quot; in the rural town of harvard. &quot; last evening we had the conversation, though, owing to the bad weather, but few at tended. the subjects were: what is prophecy? who is a prophet? and the love of nature. mr. lane decided, as for all time and the race, that this same love of nature of which henry [thoreau] was the champion, and elizabeth hoar and lidian (though l. disclaimed possess ing it herself) his faithful squiresses that this love was the most subtle and dangerous of sins ; a refined idolatry, much more to be dreaded than gross wickednesses, because the gross sinner would be alarmed by the depth of his degrada tion, and come up from it in terror, but the un happy idolaters of nature were deceived by the 76 years of discipline. [1843, refined quality of their sin, and would be the last to enter the kingdom. henry frankly affirmed to both the wise men that they were wholly defi cient in the faculty in question, and therefore could not judge of it. and mr. alcott as frankly answered that it was because they went beyond the mere material objects, and were filled with spiritual love and perception (as mr. t. was not), that they seemed to mr. thoreau not to appreciate outward nature. i am very heavy, and have spoiled a most excellent story. i have given you no idea of the scene, which was ineffa bly comic, though it made no laugh at the time 5 i scarcely laughed at it myself, too deeply amused to give the usual sign. henry was brave and noble ; well as i have always liked him, he still grows upon me.&quot; before going to staten island in may, 1843, thoreau answered a letter from the same rich ard fuller who had made him the musical gift in the previous winter. he was at harvard college, and desired to know something of tho reau s pursuits there, concerning which chan ning says in his life : l &quot; he was a respectable 1 thoreauj the poet-naturalist. with memorial verses. by william ellery channing (boston: roberts brothers, 1873). this volume, in some respects the best biography of thoreau, is now quite rare. among the memorial verses are those written by channing for his friend s funeral ; at which, also, mr. alcott read thoreau s poem of sympathy. j3t.25.] to richard f. fuller. 11 student, having done there a bold reading in english poetry, even to some portions or the whole of davenant s &amp;lt; gondibert. &quot; this, tho reau does not mention in his letter, but it was one of the things that attracted emerson s no tice, since he also had the same taste for the elizabethan and jacobean english poets. an english youth, henry headley, pupil of dr. parr, .and graduate of oxford in 1786, had pre ceded thoreau in this study of poets that had become obsolete ; and it was perhaps headley s volume, &quot; select beauties of ancient english poetry, with remarks by the late henry head ley,&quot; published long after his death, 1 that served thoreau as a guide to quarles and the fletch ers, daniel, drummond, dray ton, habington, and raleigh, poets that few americans had heard of in 1833. to richard f. fuller (at cambridge). concord, april 2, 1843. dear richard, i was glad to receive a letter from you so bright and cheery. you speak of not having made any conquests with your own spear or quill as yet ; but if you are tempering your spear-head during these days, 1 headley died at the age of twenty-three, in 1788. his posthumous book was edited in 1810 by rev. henry kett, and published in london by john sharp. 78 years of discipline. [1843, and fitting a straight and tough shaft thereto, will not that suffice? we are more pleased to consider the hero in the forest cutting cornel or ash for his spear, than marching in triumph with his trophies. the present hour is always wealthiest when it is poorer than the future ones, as that is the pleasantest site which affords the pleasantest prospects. what you say about your studies furnishing you with a &quot;mimic idiom&quot; only, reminds me that we shall all do well if we learn so much as to talk, to speak truth. the only fruit which even much living yields seems to be often only some trivial success, the ability to do some slight thing better. we make conquest only of husks and shells for the most part, at least apparently, but sometimes these are cinnamon and spices, you know. even the grown hunter you speak of slays a thousand buffaloes, and brings off only their hides and tongues. what immense sacrifices, what hecatombs and holo causts, the gods exact for very slight favors! how much sincere life before we can even utter one sincere word. what i was learning in college was chiefly, i think, to express myself, and i see now, that as the old orator prescribed, 1st, action ; 2d, ac tion ; 3d, action ; my teachers should have pre scribed to me, 1st, sincerity ; 2d, sincerity ; 3d, jst.25.] to richard f. fuller. 79 sincerity. the old mythology is incomplete without a god or goddess of sincerity, on whose altars we might offer up all the products of our farms, our workshops, and our studies. it should be our lar when we sit on the hearth, and our tutelar genius when we walk abroad. this is the only panacea. i mean sincerity in our dealings with ourselves mainly ; any other is comparatively easy. but i must stop before i get to itthly. i believe i have but one text and one sermon. your rural adventures beyond the west cam bridge hills have probably lost nothing by dis tance of time or space. i used to hear only the sough of the wind in the woods of concord, when i was striving to give my attention to a page of calculus. but, depend upon it, you will love your native hills the better for being sepa rated from them. i expect to leave concord, which is my rome, and its people, who are my romans, in may, and go to new york, to be a tutor in mr. wil liam emerson s family. so i will bid you good by till i see you or hear from you again. going to staten island, early in may, 1843, thoreau s first care was to write to his &quot;ro mans, countrymen, and lovers by the banks of the musketaquid,&quot; beginning with his mother, 80 years of discipline. [1843, his sisters, and mrs. emerson. to sophia and mrs. e. he wrote may 22, to helen, with a few touching verses on his brother john, the next day ; and then he resumed the correspond ence with emerson. it seems that one of his errands near new york was to make the ac quaintance of literary men and journalists in the city, in order to find a vehicle for publica tion, such as his neighbor hawthorne had finally found in the pages of the &quot;democratic keview.&quot; for this purpose thoreau made himself known to henry james, and other friends of emerson, and to horace greeley, then in the first fresh ness of his success with the &quot; tribune,&quot; a newspaper hardly more than two years old then, but destined to a great career, in which several of the early transcendentalists took some part. to his father and mother (at concord). castleton, staten island, may 11, 1843. dear mother and friends at home, we arrived here safely at ten o clock on sun day morning, having had as good a passage as usual, though we ran aground and were de tained a couple of hours in the thames river, till the tide came to our relief. at length we curtseyed up to a wharf just the other side of their castle garden, very incurious about them and their city. i believe my vacant looks, jet. 25.] to his father and mother. 81 absolutely inaccessible to questions, did at length satisfy an army of starving cabmen that i did not want a hack, cab, or anything of that sort as yet. it was the only demand the city made on us ; as if a wheeled vehicle of some sort were the sum and summit of a reasonable man s wants. &quot; having tried the water,&quot; they seemed to say, &quot; will you not return to the pleasant se curities of land carriage ? else why your boat s prow turned toward the shore at last?&quot; they are a sad-looking set of fellows, not permitted to come on board, and i pitied them. they had been expecting me, it would seem, and did really wish that i should take a cab ; though they did not seem rich enough to supply me with one. it was a confused jumble of heads and soiled coats, dangling from flesh-colored faces, all swaying to and fro, as by a sort of undertow, while each whipstick, true as the needle to the pole, still preserved that level and direction in which its proprietor had dismissed his forlorn interrogatory. they took sight from them, the lash being wound up thereon, to prevent your attention from wandering, or to make it concen tre upon its object by the spiral line. they be gan at first, perhaps, with the modest, but rather confident inquiry, &quot;want a cab, sir?&quot; but as their despair increased, it took the affirmative tone, as the disheartened and irresolute are apt 82 years of discipline. [1843, to do: &quot;you want a cab, sir,&quot; or even, &quot;you want a nice cab, sir, to take you to fourth street.&quot; the question which one had bravely and hopefully begun to put, another had the tact to take up and conclude with fresh empha sis, twirling it from his particular whipstick as if it had emanated from his lips as the sen timent did from his heart. each one could truly say, &quot;them s my sentiments.&quot; but it was a sad sight. i am seven and a half miles from new york, and, as it would take half a day at least, have not been there yet. i have already run over no small part of the island, to the highest hill, and some way along the shore. from the hill di rectly behind the house i can see new york, brooklyn, long island, the narrows, through which vessels bound to and from all parts of the world chiefly pass, sandy hook and the high lands of neversink (part of the coast of new jersey) and, by going still farther up the hill, the kill van kull, and newark bay. from the pinnacle of one madame grimes house, the other night at sunset, i could see almost round the island. far in the horizon there was a fleet of sloops bound up the hudson, which seemed to be going over the edge of the earth ; and in view of these trading ships, commerce seems quite imposing. ;et.25.] to his father and mother. 83 but it is rather derogatory that your dwelling place should be only a neighborhood to a great city, to live on an inclined plane. i do not like their cities and forts, with their morning and evening guns, and sails flapping in one s eye. i want a whole continent to breathe in, and a good deal of solitude and silence, such as all wall street cannot buy, nor broadway with its wooden pavement. i must live along the beach, on the southern shore, which looks directly out to sea, and see what that great parade of water means, that dashes and roars, and has not yet wet me, as long as i have lived. i must not know anything about my condition and relations here till what is not permanent is worn off. i have not yet subsided. give me time enough, and i may like it. all my inner man heretofore has been a concord impression ; and here come these sandy hook and coney island breakers to meet and modify the former ; but it will be long before i can make nature look as innocently grand and inspiring as in concord. your affectionate son, henky d. thokeau. 84 years of discipline. [1843, to sophia thoreau (at concord). castleton, staten island, may 22, 1843. dear sophia, i have had a severe cold ever since i came here, and have been confined to the house for the last week with bronchitis, though i am now getting out, so i have not seen much in the botanical way. the cedar seems to be one of the most common trees here, and the fields are very fragrant with it. there are also the gum and tulip trees. the latter is not very common, but is very large and beautiful, having flowers as large as tulips, and as handsome. it is not time for it yet. the woods are now full of a large honeysuckle in full bloom, which differs from ours in being red instead of white, so that at first i did not know its genus. the painted cup is very com mon in the meadows here. peaches, and espe cially cherries, seem to grow by all the fences. things are very forward here compared with concord. the apricots growing out of doors are already as large as plums. the apple, pear, peach, cherry, and plum trees have shed their blossoms. the whole island is like a garden, and affords very fine scenery. in front of the house is a very extensive wood, beyond which is the sea, whose roar i can hear all night long, when there is a wind ; if easterly 2et.25.] to sophia thoreau. 85 winds have prevailed on the atlantic. there are always some vessels in sight ten, twenty, or thirty miles off and sunday before last there were hundreds in long procession, stretch ing from new york to sandy hook, and far beyond, for sunday is a lucky day. i went to new york saturday before last. a walk of half an hour, by half a dozen houses along the richmond road, that is the road that leads to richmond, on which we live, brings me to the village of stapleton, in southfield, where is the lower dock ; but if i prefer i can walk along the shore three quarters of a mile farther toward new york to the quarantine vil lage of castleton, to the upper dock, which the boat leaves five or six times every day, a quarter of an hour later than the former place. farther on is the village of new brighton, and farther still port richmond, which villages another steamboat visits. in new york i saw george ward, and also giles waldo and william tappan, whom i can describe better when i have seen them more. they are young friends of mr. emerson. waldo came down to the island to see me the next day. i also saw the great western, the croton water works, and the picture gallery of the national academy of design. but i have not had time to see or do much yet. 86 years of discipline. [1843, tell miss ward i shall try to put my micro scope to a good use, and if i find any new and preservable flower, will throw it into my common place book. garlic, the original of the common onion, grows here all over the fields, and during its season spoils the cream and butter for the market, as the cows like it very much. tell helen there are two schools of late estab lished in the neighborhood, with large prospects, or rather designs, one for boys and another for girls. the latter by a miss errington, and though it is only small as yet, i will keep my ears open for her in such directions. the en couragement is very slight. i hope you will not be washed away by the irish sea. tell mother i think my cold was not wholly owing to imprudence. perhaps i was being acclimated. tell father that mr. tappan, whose son i know, and whose clerks young tappan and waldo are, has invented and established a new and very important business, which waldo thinks would allow them to burn ninety-nine out of one hundred of the stores in new york, which now only offset and cancel one another. it is a kind of intelligence office for the whole country, with branches in the principal cities, giving information with regard to the credit and affairs mt. 25.] to helen thoreau. 87 of every man of business of the country. of course it is not popular at the south and west. it is an extensive business and will employ a great many clerks. love to all not forgetting aunt and aunts and miss and mrs. ward. on the 23d of may he wrote from castleton to his sister helen thus : dear helen, in place of something fresher, i send you the following verses from my journal, written some time ago : brother, where dost thou dwell ? what sun shines for thee now ? dost thou indeed fare well as we wished here below ? what season didst thou find ? t was winter here. are not the fates more kind than they appear ? is thy brow clear again, as in thy youthful years ? and was that ugly pain the summit of thy fears ? l 1 an allusion to the strange and painful death of john thoreau, by lockjaw. he hadslightly wounded himself in shaving, and the cut became inflamed and brought on that hideous and deforming malady, of which, by sympathy, henry also partook, though he recovered. 88 years of discipline. [1843, yet tliou wast cheery still ; . they could not quench thy fire ; thou didst abide their will, and then retire. where chiefly shall i look to feel thy presence near ? along 1 the neighboring brook may i thy voice still hear ? dost thou still haunt the brink of yonder river s tide ? and may i ever think that thou art by my side ? what bird wilt thou employ to bring 1 me word of thee ? for it would give them joy, t would give them liberty, to serve their former lord with wing and minstrelsy. a sadder strain mixed with their song, they ve slowlier built their nests ; since thou art gone their lively labor rests. where is the finch, the thrush i used to hear ? ah, they could well abide the dying year. now they no more return, i hear them not ; they have remained to mourn ; or else forgot. jet. 25.] to mrs. emerson. 89 as the first letter of thoreau to emerson was to thank him for his lofty friendship, so now the first letter to mrs. emerson, after leaving her house, was to say similar things, with a passing allusion to her love of flowers and of gardening, in which she surpassed all his acquaintance in con cord, then and afterward. a letter to emerson followed, touching on the &quot; dial &quot; and on several of his new and old acquaintance. &quot;rockwood hoar &quot; is the person since known as judge and cabinet officer, the brother of senator hoar, and of thoreau s special friends, elizabeth and edward hoar. channing is the poet, who had lately printed his first volume, without finding many readers. to mrs. emerson (at concord). castleton, staten island, may 22, 1843. my dear friend, i believe a good many conversations with you were left in an unfinished state, and now indeed i don t know where to take them up. but i will resume some of the unfinished silence. i shall not hesitate to know you. i think of you as some elder sister of mine, whom i could not have avoided, a sort of lunar influence, only of such age as the moon, whose time is measured by her light. you must know that you represent to me woman, for i have not traveled very far or wide, and what 90 years of discipline. [1843, if i had ? i like to deal with you, for i believe you do not lie or steal, and these are very rare virtues. i thank you for your influence for two years. i was fortunate to be subjected to it, and am now to remember it. it is the noblest gift we can make ; what signify all others that can be bestowed ? you have helped to keep my life &quot; on loft,&quot; as chaucer says of griselda, and in a better sense. you always seemed to look down at me as from some elevation some of your high humilities and i was the better for hav ing to look up. i felt taxed not to disappoint your expectation ; for could there be any acci dent so sad as to be respected for something bet ter than we are ? it was a pleasure even to go away from you, as it is not to meet some, as it apprised me of my high relations ; and such a departure is a sort of further introduction and meeting. nothing makes the earth seem so spa cious as to have friends at a distance ; they make the latitudes and longitudes. you must not think that fate is so dark there, for even here i can see a faint reflected light over concord, and i think that at this distance i can better weigh the value of a doubt there. your moonlight, as i have told you, though it is a reflection of the sun, allows of bats and owls and other twilight birds to flit therein. but i am very glad that you can elevate your life with j5t.25.] to mrs. emerson. 91 a doubt, for i am sure that it is nothing but an insatiable faith after all that deepens and dark ens its current. and your doubt and my confi dence are only a difference of expression. i have hardly begun to live on staten island yet ; but, like the man who, when forbidden to tread on english ground, carried scottish ground in his boots, i carry concord ground in my boots and in my hat, and am i not made of concord dust ? i cannot realize that it is the roar of the sea i hear now, and not the wind in walden woods. i find more of concord, after all, in the prospect of the sea, beyond sandy hook, than in the fields and woods. if you were to have this hugh the gardener for your man, you would think a new dispensa tion had commenced. he might put a fairer aspect on the natural world for you, or at any rate a screen between you and the almshouse. there is a beautiful red honeysuckle now in blossom in the woods here, which should be transplanted to concord ; and if what they tell me about the tulip-tree be true, you should have that also. i have not seen mrs. black yet, but i intend to call on her soon. have you estab lished those simpler modes of living yet ? &quot;in the full tide of successful operation ? &quot; tell mrs. brown that i hope she is anchored in a secure haven and derives much pleasure 92 years of discipline. [1843, still from reading the poets, and that her con stellation is not quite set from my sight, though it is sunk so low in that northern horizon. tell elizabeth hoar that her bright present did &quot; carry ink safely to staten island,&quot; and was a conspicuous object in master haven s inventory of my effects. give my respects to madam emerson, whose concord face i should be glad to see here this summer ; and remember me to the rest of the household who have had vision of me. shake a day-day to edith, and say good night to ellen for me. farewell. to r. w. emerson (at concord). castleton, staten island, may 23. my dear fkiend, i was just going to write to you when i received your letter. i was wait ing till i had got away from concord. i should have sent you something for the &quot; dial &quot; before, but i have been sick ever since i came here, rather unaccountably, what with a cold, bron chitis, acclimation, etc., still unaccountably. i send you some verses from my journal which will help make a packet. i have not time to correct them, if this goes by rockwood hoar. if i can finish an account of a winter s walk in concord, in the midst of a staten island sum mer, not so wise as true, i trust, i will send it to you soon. jet. 25.] to r. w. emerson. 93 i have had no later experiences yet. you must not count much upon what i can do or learn in new york. i feel a good way off here ; and it is not to be visited, but seen and dwelt in. i have been there but once, and have been con fined to the house since. everything there dis appoints me but the crowd ; rather, i was dis appointed with the rest before i came. i have no eyes for their churches, and what else they find to brag of. though i know but little about boston, yet what attracts me, in a quiet way, seems much meaner and more pretending than there, libraries, pictures, and faces in the street. you don t know where any respecta bility inhabits. it is in the crowd in chatham street. the crowd is something new, and to be attended to. it is worth a thousand trinity churches and exchanges while it is looking at them, and will run over them and trample them under foot one day. there are two things i hear and am aware i live in the neighborhood of, the roar of the sea and the hum of the city. i have just come from the beach (to find your letter), and i like it much. everything there is on a grand and generous scale, sea weed, water, and sand ; and even the dead fishes, horses, and hogs have a rank, luxuriant odor ; great shad-nets spread to dry ; crabs and horse shoes crawling over the sand ; clumsy boats, only 94 years of discipline. [1843, for service, dancing like sea-fowl over the surf, and ships afar off going about their business. waldo and tappan carried me to their eng lish alehouse the first saturday, and waldo spent two hours here the next day. but tap pan i have only seen. i like his looks and the sound of his silence. they are confined every clay but sunday, and then tappan is obliged to observe the demeanor of a church-goer to pre vent open war with his father. i am glad that channing has got settled, and that, too, before the inroad of the irish. i have read his poems two or three times over, and par tially through and under, with new and increased interest and appreciation. tell him i saw a man buy a copy at little & brown s. he may have been a virtuoso, but we will give him the credit. what with alcott and lane and haw thorne, too, you look strong enough to take new york by storm. will you tell l,, if he asks, that i have been able to do nothing about the books yet ? believe that i have something better to write you than this. it would be unkind to thank you for particular deeds. jet. 25.] to r. w. emerson. 95 to r. w. emerson (at concord). staten island, june 8, 1843. dear fkiend, i have been to see henry james, and like him very much. it was a great pleasure to meet him. it makes humanity seem more erect and respectable. i never was more kindly and faithfully catechised. it made me respect myself more to be thought worthy of such wise questions. he is a man, and takes his own way, or stands still in his own place. i know of no one so patient and determined to have the good of yon. it is almost friendship, such plain and human dealing. i think that he will not write or speak inspiringly ; but he is a refreshing, forward-looking and forward-moving man, and he has naturalized and humanized new york for me. he actually reproaches you by his respect for your poor words. i had three hours solid talk with him, and he asks me to make free use of his house. he wants an ex pression of your faith, or to be sure that it is faith, and confesses that his own treads fast upon the neck of his understanding. he exclaimed, at some careless answer of mine, &quot; well, you transcendentalists are wonderfully consistent. i must get hold of this somehow ! &quot; he likes car lyle s book, 1 but says that it leaves him in an 1 past and present. 96 years of discipline. [1843, excited and unprofitable state, and that carlyle is so ready to obey ms humor that he makes the least vestige of truth the foundation of any su perstructure, not keeping faith with his better genius nor truest readers. i met wright on the stairs of the society library, and w. h. charming and brisbane on the steps. the former (channing) is a concave man, and you see by his attitude and the lines of his face that he is retreating from himself and from yourself, with sad doubts. it is like a fair mask swaying from the drooping boughs of some tree whose stem is not seen. he would break with a conchoidal fracture. you feel as if you would like to see him when he has made up his mind to run all the risks. to be sure, he doubts because he has a great hope to be disappointed, but he makes the possible disappointment of too much consequence. brisbane, with whom i did not converse, did not impress me favorably. he looks like a man who has lived in a cellar, far gone in consumption. i barely saw him, but he did not look as if he could let fourier go, in any case, and throw up his hat. but i need not have come to new york to write this. i have seen tappan for two or three hours, and like both him and waldo ; but i always see those of whom i have heard well with a slight disappointment. they are so much better than jet. 25.] to r. w. emerson. 97 the great herd, and yet the heavens are not shivered into diamonds over their heads. per sons and things flit so rapidly through my brain nowadays that i can hardly remember them. they seem to be lying in the stream, stemming the tide, ready to go to sea, as steamboats when they leave the dock go off in the opposite direc tion first, until they are headed right, and then begins the steady revolution of the paddle wheels ; and they are not quite cheerily headed anywhither yet, nor singing amid the shrouds as they bound over the billows. there is a cer tain youthfulness and generosity about them, very attractive ; and tappan s more reserved and solitary thought commands respect. after some ado, i discovered the residence of mrs. black, but there was palmed off on me, in her stead, a mrs. grey (quite an inferior color), who told me at last that she was not mrs. black, but her mother, and was just as glad to see me as mrs. black would have been, and so, for sooth, would answer just as well. mrs. black had gone with edward palmer to new jersey, and would return on the morrow. i don t like the city better, the more i see it, but worse. i am ashamed of my eyes that be hold it. it is a thousand times meaner than i could have imagined. it will be something to hate, that a the advantage it will be to me ; 98 years of discipline. [1843, and even the best people in it are a part of it, and talk coolly about it. the pigs in the street are the most respectable part of the population. when will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man ? but i must wait for a shower of shillings, or at least a slight dew or mizzling of sixpences, be fore i explore new york very far. the sea-beach is the best thing i have seen. it is very solitary and remote, and you only re member new york occasionally. the distances, too, along the shore, and inland in sight of it, are unaccountably great and startling. the sea seems very near from the hills, but it proves a long way over the plain, and yet you may be wet with the spray before you can believe that you are there. the far seems near, and the near far. many rods from the beach, i step aside for the atlantic, and i see men drag up their boats on to the sand, with oxen, stepping about amid the surf, as if it were possible they might draw up sandy hook. i do not feel myself especially serviceable to the good people with whom i live, except as in flictions are sanctified to the righteous. and so, too, must i serve the boy. i can look to the latin and mathematics sharply, and for the rest behave myself. but i cannot be in his neigh borhood hereafter as his educator, of course, but jst.25.] to r. w. emerson. 99 as the hawks fly over my own head. i am not attracted toward him but as to youth generally. he shall frequent me, however, as much as he can, and i 11 be i. bradbury l told me, when i passed through boston, that he was coming to new york the following saturday, and would then settle with me, but he has not made his appearance yet. will you, the next time you go to boston, pre sent that order for me which i left with you ? if i say less about waldo and tappan now, it is, perhaps, because i may have more to say by and by. remember me to your mother and mrs. emerson, who, i hope, is quite well. i shall be very glad to hear from her, as well as from you. i have very hastily written out something for the &quot; dial,&quot; and send it only be cause you are expecting something, though something better. it seems idle and howittish, but it may be of more worth in concord, where it belongs. in great haste. farewell. 1 of the publishing house of bradbury & soden, in boston, which had taken nathan hale s boston miscellany off his hands, and had published in it, with promise of payment, tho reau s walk to wachusett. but much time had passed, and the debt was not paid ; hence the lack of a &quot; shower of shil lings &quot; which the letter laments. emerson s reply gives the first news of the actual beginning of alcott s short-lived para dise at fruitlands, and dwells with interest on the affairs of the rural and lettered circle at concord. 100 years of discipline. [1843, to his father and mother (at concord). castleton, june 8, 1843. dear parents, i have got quite well now, and like the lay of the land and the look of the sea very much, only the country is so fair that it seems rather too much as if it were made to be looked at. i have been to new york four or five times, and have run about the island a good deal. george ward, when i last saw him, which was at his house in brooklyn, was studying the daguerreotype process, preparing to set up in that line. the boats run now almost every hour from 8 a. m. to 7 p. m., back and forth, so that i can get to the city much more easily than before. i have seen there one henry james, a lame man, of whom i had heard before, whom i like very much ; and he asks me to make free use of his house, which is situated in a pleasant part of the city, adjoining the university, i have met several people whom i knew before, and among the rest mr. wright, who was on his way to niagara. i feel already about as well acquainted with new york as with boston, that is, about as little, perhaps. it is large enough now, and they intend it shall be larger still. fifteenth street, where some of my new acquaintance live, mi. 25.] to his father and mother. 101 is two or three miles from the battery, where the boat touches, clear brick and stone, and no &quot; give &quot; to the foot ; and they have laid out, though not built, up to the 149th street above. i had rather see a brick for a specimen, for my part, such as they exhibited in old times. you see it is &quot; quite a day s training &quot; to make a few calls in different parts of the city (to say no thing of twelve miles by water and land, i. e., not brick and stone), especially if it does not rain shillings, which might interest omnibuses in your behalf. some omnibuses are marked &quot; broadway fourth street,&quot; and they go no farther ; others &quot; eighth street,&quot; and so on, and so of the other principal streets. (this let ter will be circumstantial enough for helen.) this is in all respects a very pleasant resi dence, much more rural than you would ex pect of the vicinity of new york. there are woods all around. we breakfast at half past six, lunch, if we will, at twelve, and dine or sup at five ; thus is the day partitioned off. from nine to two, or thereabouts, i am the schoolmas ter, and at other times as much the pupil as i can be. mr. and mrs. emerson are not indeed of my kith or kin in any sense ; but they are ir reproachable and kind. i have met no one yet on the island whose acquaintance i shall culti vate or hoe round unless it be our neighbor, 102 years of discipline. [1843, captain smith, an old fisherman, who catches the fish called &quot; moss-bonkers &quot; so it sounds and invites me to come to the beach, where he spends the week, and see him and his fish. farms are for sale all around here, and so, i suppose men are for purchase. north of us live peter wandell, mr. mell, and mr. disosway (don t mind the spelling), as far as the clove road; and south, john britton, van pelt, and captain smith, as far as the fingerboard road. behind is the hill, some 250 feet high, on the side of which we live ; and in front the forest and the sea, the latter at the distance of a mile and a half. tell helen that miss errington is provided with assistance. this were a good place as any to establish a school, if one could wait a little. families come down here to board in the sum mer, and three or four have been already estab lished this season. as for money matters, i have not set my traps yet, but i am getting my bait ready. pray, how does the garden thrive, and what improvements in the pencil line? i miss you all very much. write soon, and send a concord paper to your affectionate son, henry d. thoreau. 2et.25.] to mrs. emerson. 103 the traps of this sportsman were magazine articles, but the magazines that would pay much for papers were very few in 1843. one such had existed in boston for a short time, the &quot; miscellany,&quot; and it printed a good paper of thoreau s, but the pay was not forthcoming. his efforts to find publishers more liberal in new york were not successful. but he contin ued to write for fame in the &quot; dial,&quot; and helped to edit that. to mes. emerson. staten island, june 20, 1843. my very dear friend, i have only read a page of your letter, and have come out to the top of the hill at sunset, where i can see the ocean, to prepare to read the rest. it is fitter that it should hear it than the walls of my cham ber. the very crickets here seem to chirp around me as they did not before. i feel as if it were a great daring to go on and read the rest, and then to live accordingly. there are more than thirty vessels in sight going to sea. i am almost afraid to look at your letter. i see that it will make my life very steep, but it may lead to fairer prospects than this. you seem to me to speak out of a very clear and high heaven, where any one may be who stands so high. your voice seems not a voice, 104 years of discipline. [1843, but comes as much from the blue heavens as from the paper. my dear friend, it was very noble in you to write me so trustful an answer. it will do as well for another world as for this ; such a voice is for no particular time nor person, but it makes him who may hear it stand for all that is lofty and true in humanity. the thought of you will constantly elevate my life ; it will be something always above the horizon to behold, as when i look up at the evening star. i think i know your thoughts without seeing you, and as well here as in concord. you are not at all strange to me. i could hardly believe, after the lapse of one night, that i had such a noble letter still at hand to read, that it was not some fine dream. i looked at midnight to be sure that it was real. i feel that i am unworthy to know you, and yet they will not permit it wrongfully. i, perhaps, am more willing to deceive by appearances than you say you are ; it would not be worth the while to tell how willing; but i have the power perhaps too much to forget my meanness as soon as seen, and not be incited by permanent sorrow. my actual life is unspeak ably mean compared with what i know and see that it might be. yet the ground from which i see and say this is some part of it. it ranges *st.25.] to mrs. emerson. 105 from heaven to earth, and is all things in an hour. the experience of every past moment but belies the faith of each present. we never conceive the greatness of our fates. are not these faint flashes of light which sometimes obscure the sun their certain dawn? my friend, i have read your letter as if i was not reading it. after each pause i could defer the rest forever. the thought of you will be a new motive for every right action. you are another human being whom i know, and might not our topic be as broad as the universe? what have we to do with petty rumbling news ? we have our own great affairs. sometimes in concord i found my actions dictated, as it were, by your influence, and though it led almost to trivial hindoo observances, yet it was good and elevating. to hear that you have sad hours is not sad to me. i rather rejoice at the richness of your experience. only think of some sad ness away in pekin, unseen and unknown there. what a mine it is ! would it not weigh down the celestial empire, with all its gay chinese? our sadness is not sad, but our cheap joys. let us be sad about all we see and are, for so we demand and pray for better. it is the constant prayer and whole christian re ligion. i could hope that you would get well soon, and have a healthy body for this world, 106 years of discipline. [1843, but i know this cannot be ; and the fates, after all, are the accomplishes of our hopes. yet i do hope that you may find it a worthy struggle, and life seem grand still through the clouds. what wealth is it to have such friends that we cannot think of them without elevation ! and we can think of them any time and anywhere, and it costs nothing but the lofty disposition. i cannot tell you the joy your letter gives me, which will not quite cease till the latest time. let me accompany your finest thought. i send my love to my other friend and brother, whose nobleness i slowly recognize. henry. to mbs. thoreau (at concord). staten island, july 7, 1843. dear mother, i was very glad to get your letter and papers. tell father that circumstan tial letters make very substantial reading, at any rate. i like to know even how the sun shines and garden grows with you. i did not get my money in boston, and probably shall not at all. tell sophia that i have pressed some blossoms of the tulip-tree for her. they look somewhat like white lilies. the magnolia, too, is in blossom here. pray, have you the seventeen-year locust in concord? the air here is filled with their din. ast.25.] to mrs. thoreau. 197 they come out of the ground at first in an imper fect state, and, crawling up the shrubs and plants, the perfect insect bursts out through the back. they are doing great damage to the fruit and forest trees. the latter are covered with dead twigs, which in the distance look like the blos soms of the chestnut. they bore every twig of last year s growth in order to deposit their eggs in it. in a few weeks the eggs will be hatched, and the worms fall to the ground and enter it, and in 1860 make their appearance again. i conversed about their coming this season before they arrived. they do no injury to the leaves, but, beside boring the twigs, suck their sap for sustenance. their din is heard by those who sail along the shore from the distant woods, phar-r-r-aoh. phar-r-r-aoh. they are departing now. dogs, cats, and chickens subsist mainly upon them in some places. i have not been to new york for more than three weeks. i have had an interesting letter from mr. lane, 1 describing their new prospects. my pupil and i are getting on apace. he is remarkably well advanced in latin, and is well advancing. your letter has just arrived. i was not aware that it was so long since i wrote home ; i only 1 at fruitlands with the alcotts. see sanborn s thoreau, p. 137, for this letter. 108 years of discipline. [1843, knew that i had sent five or six letters to the town. it is very refreshing to hear from you, though it is not all good news. but i trust that stearns wheeler is not dead. i should be slow to believe it. he was made to work very well in this world. there need be no tragedy in his death. the demon which is said to haunt the jones family, hovering over their eyelids with wings steeped in juice of poppies, has commenced an other campaign against me. i am &quot; clear jones &quot; in this respect at least. but he finds little encour agement in my atmosphere, i assure you, for i do not once fairly lose myself, except in those hours of truce allotted to rest by immemorial custom. however, this skirmishing interferes sadly with my literary projects, and i am apt to think it a good day s work if i maintain a sol dier s eye till nightfall. very well, it does not matter much in what wars we serve, whether in the highlands or the lowlands. everywhere we get soldiers pay still. give my love to aunt louisa, whose benig nant face i sometimes see right in the wall, as naturally and necessarily shining on my path as some star of unaccountably greater age and higher orbit than myself. let it be inquired by her of george minott, as from me, for she sees him, if he has seen any pigeons yet, and j5t.25.] to r. w. emerson. 109 tell him there are plenty of jack-snipes here. as for william p., the &quot;worthy young man,&quot; as i live, my eyes have not fallen on him yet. i have not had the influenza, though here are its headquarters, unless my first week s cold was it. tell helen i shall write to her soon. i have heard lucretia mott. this is badly writ ten ; but the worse the writing the sooner you get it this time from your affectionate son, h. d. t. to r. w. emerson (at concord). staten island, july 8, 1843. dear friends, i was very glad to hear your voices from so far. i do not believe there are eight hundred human beings on the globe. it is all a fable, and i cannot but think that you speak with a slight outrage and disrespect of concord when you talk of fifty of them. there are not so many. yet think not that i have left all behind, for already i begin to track my way over the earth, and find the cope of heaven ex tending beyond its horizon, forsooth, like the roofs of these dutch houses. my thoughts re vert to those dear hills and that river which so fills up the world to its brim, worthy to be named with mincius and alpheus, still drink ing its meadows while i am far away. how can 110 years of discipline. [1845, it run heedless to the sea, as if i were there to countenance it? george miiiott, too, looms up considerably, and many another old familiar face. these things all look sober and respecta ble. they are better than the environs of new york, i assure you. i am pleased to think of chamiing as an in habitant of the gray town. seven cities con tended for homer dead. tell him to remain at least long enough to establish concord s right and interest in him. i was beginning to know the man. in imagination i see you pilgrims taking your way by the red lodge and the cabin of the brave farmer man, so youthful and hale, to the still cheerful woods. and hawthorne, too, i remember as one with whom i sauntered, in old heroic times, along the banks of the* sca mander, amid the ruins of chariots and heroes. tell him not to desert, even after the tenth year. others may say, &quot; are there not the cities of asia ? &quot; but what are they ? staying at home is the heavenly way. and elizabeth hoar, my brave townswoman, to be sung of poets, if i may speak of her whom i do not know. tell mrs. brown that i do not forget her, going her way under the stars through this chilly world, i did not think of the wind, and that i went a little way with her. tell her not to despair. concord s little 2et.25.] to r. w. emerson. ill arch does not span all our fate, nor is what transpires under it law for the universe. and least of all are forgotten those walks in the woods in ancient days, too sacred to be idly remembered, when their aisles were per vaded as by a fragrant atmosphere. they still seem youthful and cheery to my imagination as sherwood and barnsdale, and of far purer fame. those afternoons when we wandered o er olympus, and those hills, from which the sun was seen to set, while still our day held on its way. &quot; at last he rose and twitched his mantle blue ; to-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.&quot; i remember these things at midnight, at rare intervals. but know, my friends, that i a good deal hate you all in my most private thoughts, as the substratum of the little love i bear you. though you are a rare band, and do not make half use enough of one another. i think this is a noble number of the &quot; dial.&quot; 1 it perspires thought and feeling. i can speak of it now a little like a foreigner. be assured that it is not written in vain, it is not for me. i hear its prose and its verse. they provoke 1 emerson also was satisfied with it for once, and wrote to thoreau : &quot; our dial thrives well enough in these weeks. i print w. e. channing s letters, or the first ones, but he does not care to have them named as his for a while. they are very agreeable reading.&quot; 112 years of discipline. [1843, and inspire me, and they have my sympathy. i hear the sober and the earnest, the sad and the cheery voices of my friends, and to me it is a long letter of encouragement and reproof ; and no doubt so it is to many another in the land. so don t give up the ship. methinks the verse is hardly enough better than the prose. i give my vote for the notes from the journal of a scholar, and wonder you don t print them faster. i want, too, to read the rest of the &quot; poet and the painter.&quot; miss fuller s is a noble piece, rich, extempore writing, talking with pen in hand. it is too good not to be better, even. in writing, conversation should be folded many times thick. it is the height of art that, on the first perusal, plain common sense should appear ; on the second, severe truth; and on a third, beauty ; and, having these warrants for its depth and reality, we may then enjoy the beauty for evermore. the sea-piece is of the best that is going, if not of the best that is staying. you have spoken a good word for carlyle. as for the &quot; winter s walk,&quot; i should be glad to have it printed in the &quot;dial&quot; if you think it good enough, and will criticise it ; otherwise send it to me, and i will dispose of it. i have not been to new york for a month, and so have not seen waldo and tappan. james has been at albany meanwhile. you will know jst.26.] to helen thoreau. 113 that i only describe my personal adventures with people ; but i hope to see more of them, and judge them too. i am sorry to learn, that mrs. emerson is no better. but let her know that the fates pay a compliment to those whom they make sick, and they have not to ask, &quot; what have i done ? &quot; kemember me to your mother, and remember me yourself as you are remembered by h. d. t. i had a friendly and cheery letter from lane a month ago. to helen thoreau (at roxbury). staten island, july 21, 1843. deak helen, i am not in such haste to write home when i remember that i make my readers pay the postage. but i believe i have not taxed you before. i have pretty much explored this island, in land, and along the shore, finding my health inclined me to the peripatetic philosophy. i have visited telegraph stations, sailors snug harbors, seaman s retreats, old elm-trees, where the huguenots landed, britton s mills, and all the villages on the island. last sunday i walked over to lake island farm, eight or nine miles from here, where moses prichard 114 years of discipline. [1843, lived, and found the present occupant, one mr. davenport, formerly from massachusetts, with three or four men to help him, raising sweet potatoes and tomatoes by the acre. it seemed a cool and pleasant retreat, but a hungry soil. as i was coming away, i took my toll out of the soil in the shape of arrow-heads, which may after all be the surest crop, certainly not affected by drought. i am well enough situated here to observe one aspect of the modern world at least. i mean the migratory, the western movement. six teen hundred immigrants arrived at quarantine ground on the 4th of july, and more or less every day since i have been here. i see them occasionally washing their persons and clothes : op men, women, and children gathered on an isolated quay near the shore, stretching their limbs and taking the air ; the children running races and swinging on this artificial piece of the land of liberty, while their vessels are under going purification. they are detained but a day or two, and then go up to the city, for the most part without having landed here. in the city, i have seen, since i wrote last, w. h. channing, at whose home, in fifteenth street, i spent a few pleasant hours, discussing the all-absorbing question &quot; what to do for the race.&quot; (he is sadly in earnest about going up jet. 26.] to helen thoreau. 115 the river to rusticate for six weeks, and issues a new periodical called &quot; the present &quot; in sep tember.) also horace greeley, editor of the &quot; tribune,&quot; who is cheerfully in earnest, at his office of all work, a hearty new hampshire boy as one would wish to meet, and says, &quot; now be neighborly,&quot; and believes only, or mainly, first, in the sylvania association, somewhere in penn sylvania ; and, secondly, and most of all, in a new association to go into operation soon in new jersey, with which he is connected. edward palmer came down to see me sunday before last. as for waldo and tappan, we have strangely dodged one another, and have not met for some weeks. i believe i have not told you anything about lucretia mott. it was a good while ago that i heard her at the quaker church in hester street. she is a preacher, and it was adver tised that she would be present on that day. i liked all the proceedings very well, their plainly greater harmony and sincerity than elsewhere. they do nothing in a hurry. every one that walks up the aisle in his square coat and ex pansive hat has a history, and comes from a house to a house. the women come in one after another in their quaker bonnets and handker chiefs, looking all like sisters or so many chick adees. at length, after a long silence wait 116 years of discipline. [1843, ing for the spirit mrs. mott rose, took off her bonnet, and began to utter very deliberately what the spirit suggested. her self-possession was something to see, if all else failed ; but it did not. her subject was, &quot; the abuse of the bible,&quot; and thence she straightway digressed to slavery and the degradation of woman. it was a good speech, transcendentalism in its mild est form. she sat down at length, and, after a long and decorous silence, in which some seemed to be really digesting her words, the elders shook hands, and the meeting dispersed. on the whole, i liked their ways and the plainness of their meeting-house. it looked as if it was indeed made for service. i think that stearns wheeler has left a gap in the community not easy to be filled. though he did not exhibit the highest qualities of the scholar, he promised, in a remarkable degree, many of the essential and rarer ones ; and his patient industry and energy, his reverent love of letters, and his proverbial accuracy, will cause him to be associated in my memory even with many venerable names of former days. it was not wholly unfit that so pure a lover of books should have ended his pilgrimage at the great book-mart of the world. i think of him as healthy and brave, and am confident that if he had lived, he would have proved useful in more jet. 26.] to mrs. thoreau. 117 ways than i can describe. he would have been authority on all matters of fact, and a sort of connecting link between men and scholars of different walks and tastes. the literary enter prises he was planning for himself and friends remind me of an older and more studious time. so much, then, remains for us to do who sur vive. love to all. tell all my friends in con cord that i do not send my love, but retain it still. your affectionate brother. to mrs. thoreau (at concord). staten island, august 6, 1843. deak mother, as mr. william emerson is going to concord on tuesday, i must not omit sending a line by him, though i wish i had something more weighty for so direct a post. i believe i directed my last letter to you by mis take; but it must have appeared that it was addressed to helen. at any rate, this is to you without mistake. i am chiefly indebted to your letters for what i have learned of concord and family news, and am very glad when i get one. i should have liked to be in walden woods with you, but not with the railroad. i think of you all very often, and wonder if you are still separated from me only by so many miles of earth, or 118 years of discipline. [1843, so many miles of memory. this life we live is a strange dream, and i don t believe at all any account men give of it. methinks i should be content to sit at the back-door in con cord, under the poplar-tree, henceforth forever. not that i am homesick at all, for places are strangely indifferent to me, but concord is still a cynosure to my. eyes, and i find it hard to attach it, even in imagination, to the rest of the globe, and tell where the seam is. i fancy that this sunday evening you are poring over some select book, almost transcen dental perchance, or else &quot; burgh s dignity,&quot; or massillon, or the &quot;christian examiner.&quot; father has just taken one more look at the gar den, and is now absorbed in chaptelle, or read ing the newspaper quite abstractedly, only look ing up occasionally over his spectacles to see how the rest are engaged, and not to miss any newer news that may not be in the paper. helen has slipped in for the fourth time to learn the very latest item. sophia, i suppose, is at ban gor ; but aunt louisa, without doubt, is just flitting away to some good meeting, to save the credit of you all. it is still a cardinal virtue with me to keep awake. i find it impossible to write or read except at rare intervals, but am, generally speak ing, tougher than formerly. i could make a 2et.26.] to mrs. thoreau. 119 pedestrian tour round the world, and sometimes think it would perhaps be better to do at once the things i ccm, rather than be trying to do what at present i cannot do well. however, i shall awake sooner or later. i have been translating some greek, and reading english poetry, and a month ago sent a paper to the &quot; democratic review,&quot; which, at length, they were sorry they could not accept ; but they could not adopt the sentiments. how ever, they were very polite, and earnest that i should send them something else, or reform that. i go moping about the fields and woods here as i did in concord, and, it seems, am thought to be a surveyor, an eastern man inquiring narrowly into the condition and value of land, etc., here, preparatory to an extensive specula tion. one neighbor observed to me, in a mys terious and half inquisitive way, that he sup posed i must be pretty well acquainted with the state of things ; that i kept pretty close ; he did n t see any surveying instruments, but per haps i had them in my pocket. i have received helen s note, but have not heard of frisbie hoar yet. 1 she is a faint hearted writer, who could not take the responsi* 1 at present senator hoar of massachusetts, but then in harvard college. 120 years of discipline. [1843, bility of blotting one sheet alone. however, i like very well the blottings i get. tell her i have not seen mrs. child nor mrs. sedgwick. love to all from your affectionate son. to r. w. emerson (at concord). statek island, august 7, 1843. my dear friend, i fear i have nothing to send you worthy of so good an opportunity. of new york i still know but little, though out of so many thousands there are no doubt many units whom it would be worth my while to know. mr. james l talks of going to ger many soon with his wife to learn the language. he says he must know it ; can never learn it here ; there he may absorb it ; and is very anxious to learn beforehand where he had best locate himself to enjoy the advantage of the highest culture, learn the language in its purity, and not exceed his limited means. i referred him to longfellow. perhaps you can help him. i have had a pleasant talk with channing ; and greeley, too, it was refreshing to meet. they were both much pleased with your criti cism on carlyle, but thought that you had over looked what chiefly concerned them in the book, its practical aim and merits. i have also spent some pleasant hours with 1 henry james, senior. 2bt.26.] to r. w. emerson. 121 waldo and tappan at their counting-room, or rather intelligence office. i must still reckon myself with the innumer able army of invalids, undoubtedly in a fair field they would rout the well, though i am tougher than formerly. methinks i could paint the sleepy god more truly than the poets have done, from more intimate experience. indeed, i have not kept my eyes very steadily open to the things of this world of late, and hence have little to report concerning them. however, i trust the awakening will come before the last trump, and then perhaps i may remember some of my dreams. i study the aspects of commerce at its nar rows here, where it passes in review before me, and this seems to be beginning at the right end to understand this babylon. i have made a very rude translation of the seven against thebes, and pindar too i have looked at, and wish he was better worth translating. i believe even the best things are not equal to their fame. perhaps it would be better to translate fame itself, or is not that what the poets themselves do ? however, i have not done with pindar yet. i sent a long article on etzler s book to the &quot; democratic review &quot; six weeks ago, which at length they have determined not to accept, as they could not subscribe to all the opinions, 122 years of discipline. [1843, but asked for other matter, purely literary, i suppose. o sullivan wrote me that articles of this kind have to be referred to the circle who, it seems, are represented by this journal, and said something about &quot; collective we &quot; and &quot; ho mogeneity.&quot; pray don t think of bradbury & soden 1 any more, &quot; for good deed done through praiere is sold and bought too dear, i wis, to herte that of great valor is.&quot; i see that they have given up their shop here. say to mrs. emerson that i am glad to re member how she too dwells there in concord, and shall send her anon some of the thoughts that belong to her. as for edith, i seem to see a star in the east over where the young child is. remember me to mrs. brown. these letters for the most part explain them 1 emerson had written, july 20, &quot; i am sorry to say that when i called on bradbury & soden, nearly a month ago, their partner, in their absence, informed me that they could not pay you, at present, any part of their debt on account of the boston miscellany. after much talking, all the promise he could offer was that within a year it would probably be paid, a probability which certainly looks very slender. the very worst thing he said was the proposition that you should take your payment in the form of boston miscellanies ! i shall not fail to refresh their memory at intervals.&quot; jet. 20.] emerson to thoreau. 123 selves, with the aid of several to thoreau s fam ily, which the purpose of emerson, in 1865, to present his friend in a stoical character, had ex cluded from the collection then printed. men tion of c. s. wheeler and his sad death in ger many had come to him from emerson, as well as from his own family at concord, of whose occupations thoreau gives so genial a picture in the letter of august 6, to his mother. emerson wrote : &quot; you will have read and heard the sad news to the little village of lincoln, of stearns wheeler s death. such an overthrow to the hopes of his parents made me think more of them than of the loss the community will suffer in his kindness, diligence, and ingenuous mind.&quot; he died at leipsic, in the midst of greek stud ies which have since been taken up and carried farther by a child of concord, professor good win of the same university. henry james, several times mentioned in the correspondence, was the moral and theological essayist (father of the novelist henry james, and the distin guished professor james of harvard), who was so striking a personality in the concord and cambridge circle for many years. w. h. chan ning was a christian socialist fifty years ago, cousin of ellery charming, and nephew and biographer of dr. channing. both he and hor ace greeley were then deeply interested in the 124 years of discipline. [1843, fourier ist scheme of association, one develop ment of which was going on. at brook farm, under direction of george ripley, and another, differing in design, at fruitlands, under bron son alcott and charles lane. the jocose allu sions of thoreau to his jones ancestors (the de scendants of the tory colonel jones of weston) had this foundation in fact, that his uncle, charles dunbar, soon to be named in connec tion with daniel webster, suffered from a sort of lethargy, which would put him to sleep in the midst of conversation. webster had been re tained in the once famous &quot; wyman case,&quot; of a bank officer charged with fraud, and had exerted his great forensic talent for a few days in the concord court-house. emerson wrote thoreau, &quot; you will have heard of the wyman trial, and the stir it made in the village. but the cliff and walden knew nothing of that.&quot; to mrs. thoreau (at concord). castleton, tuesday, august 29, 1843. dear mother, mr. emerson has just given me warning that he is about to send to concord, which i will endeavor to improve. i am a great deal more wakeful than i was, and growing stout in other respects, so that i may yet accomplish something in the literary way ; indeed, i should have done so before now but sit. 26.] to mrs. thoreau. 125 for the slowness and poverty of the &quot; reviews &quot; themselveso i have tried sundry methods of earning money in the city, of late, but without success : have rambled into every bookseller s or publisher s house, and discussed their affairs with them. some propose to me to do what an honest man cannot. among others i conversed with the harpers to see if they might not find me useful to them ; but they say that they are making $50,000 annually, and their motto is to let well alone. i find that i talk with these poor men as if i were over head and ears in business, and a few thousands were no consider ation with me. i almost reproach myself for bothering them so to no purpose ; but it is a very valuable experience, and the best introduc tion i could have. we have had a tremendous rain here last monday night and tuesday morning. i was in the city at giles &quot;waldo s, and the streets at daybreak were absolutely impassable for the water. yet the accounts of the storm that you may have seen are exaggerated, as indeed are all such things, to my imagination. on sunday i heard mr. bellows preach here on the island ; but the fine prospect over the bay and narrows, from where i sat, preached louder than he, though he did far better than the average, if i remember aright. i should have liked to see 126 years of discipline. [1843, daniel webster walking about concord ; i sup pose the town shook, every step he took. but i trust there were some sturdy concordians who were not tumbled down by the jar, but repre sented still the upright town. where was george minott ? he would not have gone far to see him. uncle charles should have been there, he might as well have been catching cat naps in concord as anywhere. and then, what a whetter-up of his memory this event would have been ! you d have had all the classmates again in alphabetical order reversed, &quot; and seth hunt and bob smith and he was a student of my father s, and where s put now ? and i wonder you if henry s been to see george jones yet ! a lit tle account with stow, balcom, bigelow, poor miserable t-o-a-d, (sound asleep.) i vow, you, what noise was that? saving grace and few there be that s clear as preaching, easter brooks, morally depraved, how charming is divine philosophy, some wise and some otherwise, heighho ! (sound asleep again) webster s a smart fellow bears his age well, how old should you think he was ? you does he look as if he were ten years younger than i ? &quot; i met, or rather, was overtaken by fuller, who tended for mr. how, the other day, in broad jet. 26.] to r. w. emerson. 127 way. he dislikes new york very much. the mercantile library, that is, its librarian, pre sented me with a stranger s ticket, for a month, and i was glad to read the &quot; re views &quot; there, and carlyle s last article. i have bought some pantaloons ; stockings show no holes yet. these pantaloons cost $2.25 ready made. in haste. to b. w. emerson (at concord). staten island, september 14, 1843. dear friend, miss fuller will tell you the news from these parts, so i will only devote these few moments to what she does n t know as well. i was absent only one day and night from the island, the family expecting me back imme diately. i was to earn a certain sum before winter, and thought it worth the while to try various experiments. i carried &quot; the agricul turist&quot; about the city, and up as far as manhat tanville, and called at the croton reservoir, where, indeed, they did not want any &quot; agricul turists,&quot; but paid well enough in their way. literature comes to a poor market here ; and even the little that i write is more than will sell. i have tried &quot;the dem. review,&quot; &quot;the new mirror,&quot; and &quot; brother jonathan.&quot; l the last 1 it may need to be said that these were new york week lies the mirror, edited in part by n. p. willis, and the new 128 years of discipline. [1843, two, as well as the &quot; new world,&quot; are over whelmed with contributions which cost nothing, and are worth no more. &quot; the knickerbocker &quot; is too poor, and only &quot;the ladies companion&quot; pays. o sullivan is printing the manuscript i sent him some time ago, having objected only to my want of sympathy with the committee. i doubt if you have made more corrections in my manuscript than i should have done ere this, though they may be better ; but i am glad you have taken any pains with it. i have not pre pared any translations for the &quot; dial,&quot; supposing there would be no room, though it is the only place for them. i have been seeing men during these days, and trying experiments upon trees ; have in serted three or four hundred buds (quite a buddhist, one might say). books i have access to through your brother and mr. mckean, and have read a good deal. quarles s &quot; divine po ems &quot; as well as &quot; emblems &quot; are quite a discov ery. i am very sorry mrs. emerson is so sick. re member me to her and to your mother. i like to think of your living on the banks of the mill world by park benjamin, formerly of boston, whose distinc tion it is to have first named hawthorne as a writer of genius. &quot; miss fuller &quot; was margaret, not yet resident in new york, whither she went to live in 1844. mt. 26.] to his mother. 129 brook, in the midst of the garden with all its weeds ; for what are botanical distinctions at this distance? to his mother (at concord). staten island, october 1, 1843. dear mother, i hold together remarka bly well as yet, speaking of my outward linen and woolen man ; no holes more than i brought away, and no stitches needed yet. it is mar velous. i think the fates must be on my side, for there is less than a plank between me and time, to say the least. as for eldorado, that is far off yet. my bait will not tempt the rats, they are too well fed. the &quot; democratic re view &quot; is poor, and can only afford half or quar ter pay, which it will do; and they say there is a &quot; lady s companion&quot; that pays, but i could not write anything companionable. how ever, speculate as we will, it is quite gratuitous; for life, nevertheless and never the more, goes steadily on, well or ill-fed, and clothed somehow, and &quot; honor bright &quot; withal. it is very gratify ing to live in the prospect of great successes always ; and for that purpose we must leave a sufficient foreground to see them through. all the painters prefer distant prospects for the greater breadth of view, and delicacy of tint. but this is no news, and describes no new con ditions. 130 years of discipline. [1843, meanwhile i am somnambulic at least, stir ring in my sleep ; indeed, quite awake. i read a good deal, and am pretty well known in the libraries of new york. am in with the libra rian (one dr. forbes) of the society library, who has lately been to cambridge to learn lib erality, and has come back to let me take out some un-take-out-able books, which i was threat ening to read on the spot. and mr. mckean, of the mercantile library, is a true gentleman (a former tutor of mine), and offers me every privilege there. i have from him a perpetual stranger s ticket, and a citizen s rights besides, all which privileges i pay handsomely for by improving. a canoe race &quot; came off &quot; on the hudson the other day, between chippeways and new york ers, which must have been as moving a sight as the buffalo hunt which i witnessed. but canoes and buffaloes are all lost, as is everything here, in the mob. it is only the people have come to see one another. let them advertise that there will be a gathering at hoboken, having bar gained with the ferryboats, and there will be, and they need not throw in the buffaloes. i have crossed the bay twenty or thirty times, and have seen a great many immigrants going up to the city for the first time : norwegians, who carry their old-fashioned farming-tools to ^et. 26.] to his mother. 131 the west with them, and will buy nothing here for fear of being cheated ; english operatives, known by their pale faces and stained hands, who will recover their birthright in a little cheap sun and wind ; english travelers on their way to the astor house, to whom i have done the honors of the city ; whole families of emigrants cooking their dinner upon the pavement, all sunburnt, so that you are in doubt where the foreigner s face of flesh begins ; their tidy clothes laid on, and then tied to their swathed bodies, which move about like a bandaged finger, caps set on the head as if woven of the hair, which is still growing at the roots, each and all busily cooking, stooping from time to time over the pot, and having something to drop in it, that so they may be entitled to take something out, forsooth. they look like respectable but strait ened people, who may turn out to be counts when they get to wisconsin, and will have this expe rience to relate to their children. seeing so many people from day to day, one comes to have less respect for flesh and bones, and thinks they must be more loosely joined, of less firm fibre, than the few he had known. it must have a very bad influence on children to see so many human beings at once, mere herds of men. i came across henry bigelow a week ago, sit 132 years of discipline. [1843, ting in front of a hotel in broadway, very much as if he were under his father s stoop. he is seeking to be admitted into the bar in new york, but as yet had not succeeded. i directed him to fuller s store, which he had not found, and in vited him to come and see me if he came to the island. tell mrs. and miss ward that i have not forgotten them, and was glad to hear from george with whom i spent last night that they had returned to c. tell mrs. brown that it gives me as much pleasure to know that she thinks of me and my writing as if i had been the author of the piece in question, but i did not even read over the papers i sent. the &quot; mirror &quot; is really the most readable journal here. i see that they have printed a short piece that i wrote to sell, in the &quot; dem. review,&quot; and still keep the review of &quot; paradise,&quot; that i may include in it a notice of another book by the same author, which they have found, and are going to send me. i don t know when i shall come home ; i like to keep that feast in store. tell helen that i do not see any advertisement for her, and i am looking for myself. if i could find a rare open ing, i might be tempted to try with her for a year, till i had paid my debts, but for such i am sure it is not well to go out of new eng land. teachers are but poorly recompensed, 2et.26.] to mrs. emerson. 133 even here. tell her and sophia (if she is not gone) to write to me. father will know that this letter is to him as well as to you. i send him a paper which usually contains the news, if not all that is stirring, all that has stirred, and even draws a little 011 the future. i wish he would send me, by and by, the paper which contains the results of the cattle show. you must get helen s eyes to read this, though she is a scoffer at honest penmanship. to mrs. emerson (at concord). staten island, october 16, 1843. my dear friend, i promised you some thoughts long ago, but it would be hard to tell whether these are the ones. i suppose that the great questions f &quot; fate, freewill, foreknow ledge absolute,&quot; which used to be discussed at concord, are still unsettled. and here comes [w. h.] channing, with his &quot; present,&quot; to vex the world again, a rather galvanic movement, i think. however, i like the man all the better, though his schemes the less. i am sorry for his confessions. faith never makes a confession. have you had the annual berrying party, or sat on the cliffs a whole day this summer ? i suppose the flowers have fared quite as well since i was not there to scoff at them ; and the hens, without doubt, keep up their reputation. 134 years of discipline. [1843, i have been reading lately what of quarles s poetry i could get. he was a contemporary of herbert, and a kindred spirit. i think you would like him. it is rare to find one who was so much of a poet and so little of an artist. he wrote long poems, almost epics for length, about jonah, esther, job, samson, and solomon, in terspersed with meditations after a quite original plan, shepherd s oracles, comedies, ro mances, fancies, and meditations, the quin tessence of meditation, and enchiridions of meditation all divine, and what he calls his morning muse ; besides prose works as curious as the rest. he was an unwearied christian, and a reformer of some old school withal. hope lessly quaint, as if he lived all alone and knew nobody but his wife, who appears to have rev erenced him. he never doubts his genius ; it is only he and his god in all the world. he uses language sometimes as greatly as shake speare ; and though there is not much straight grain in him, there is plenty of tough, crooked timber. in an age when herbert is revived, quarles surely ought not to be forgotten. i will copy a few such sentences, as i should read to you if there. mrs. brown, too, may find some nutriment in them. how does the saxon edith do ? can you tell yet to which school of philosophy she be 2et.2g.] to r. w. emerson. 135 longs, whether she will be a fair saint of some christian order, or a follower of plato and the heathen? bid ellen a good-night or a good morning from me, and see if she will remember where it comes from ; and remember me to mrs. brown, and your mother, and elizabeth hoar. to r. w. emerson (at concord). staten island, october 17, 1843. my dear friend, i went with my pupil to the fair of the american institute, and so lost a visit from tappan, whom i met returning from the island. i should have liked to hear more news from his lips, though he had left me a letter and the &quot; dial,&quot; which is a sort of cir cular letter itself. i find chaniiing s l letters full of life, and i enjoy their wit highly. lane writes straight and solid, like a guideboard, but i find that i put off the &quot; social tendencies &quot; to a future day, which may never come. he is always shaker fare, quite as luxurious as his principles will allow. i feel as if i were ready to be appointed a committee on poetry, i have 1 the allusion here is to ellery channing s &quot; youth of the poet and painter,&quot; in the dial an unfinished autobiography. the present of w. h. channing 1 , his cousin, named above, was a short-lived periodical, begun september 15, 1843, and ended in april, 1844. &quot; mckean &quot; was henry swasey mckean, who was a classmate of charles emerson at harvard in 1828, a tutor there in 1830-35, and who died in 1857. 136 years of discipline. [1843, got my eyes so whetted and proved of late, like the knife-sharpener i saw at the fair, certified to have been &quot; in constant use in a gentleman s family for more than two years.&quot; yes, i ride along the ranks of the english poets, casting terrible glances, and some i blot out, and some i spare. mckean has imported, within the year, several new editions and collections of old poetry, of which i have the reading, but there is a good deal of chaff to a little meal, hardly worth bolting. i have just opened bacon s &quot; ad vancement of learning &quot; for the first time, which i read with great delight. it is more like what scott s novels were than anything. i see that i was very blind to send you my manuscript in such a state ; but i have a good second sight, at least. i could still shake it in the wind to some advantage, if it would hold together. there are some sad mistakes in the printing. it is a little unfortunate that the &quot; ethnical scriptures &quot; should hold out so well, though it does really hold out. the bible ought not to be very large. is it not singular that, while the religious world is gradually picking to pieces its old testaments, here are some com ing slowly after, on the seashore, picking up the durable relics of perhaps older books, and put ting them together again ? your letter to contributors is excellent, and aw. 26.] to r. w. emerson. 137 hits the nail on the head. it will taste sour to their palates at first, no doubt, but it will bear a sweet fruit at last. i like the poetry, espe cially the autumn verses. they ring true. though i am quite weather-beaten with poetry, having weathered so many epics of late. the &quot; sweep ho ! &quot; sounds well this way. but i have a good deal of fault to find with your &quot; ode to beauty.&quot; the tune is altogether unworthy of the thoughts. you slope too quickly to the rhyme, as if that trick had better be performed as soon as possible, or as if you stood over the line with a hatchet, and chopped off the verses as they came out, some short and some long. but give us a long reel, and we 11 cut it up to suit ourselves. it sounds like parody. &quot; thee knew i of old,&quot; &quot;remediless thirst,&quot; are some of those stereotyped lines. i am frequently re minded, i believe, of jane taylor s &quot; philoso pher s scales,&quot; and how the world &quot; flew out with a bounce,&quot; which &quot; yerked the philosopher out of his cell ; &quot; or else of &quot; from the climes of the sun all war-worn and weary.&quot; i had rather have the thought come ushered with a flourish of oaths and curses. yet i love your poetry as i do little else that is near and 138 years of discipline. [1843, recent, especially when you get fairly round the end of the line, and are not thrown back upon the rocks. to read the lecture on &quot;the comic&quot; is as good as to be in our town meeting or ly ceum once more. i am glad that the concord farmers ploughed well this year ; it promises that something will be done these summers. but i am suspicious of that brittonner, who advertises so many cords of good oak, chestnut, and maple wood for sale. good ! ay, good for what ? and there shall not be left a stone upon a stone. but no matter, let them hack away. the sturdy irish arms that do the work are of more worth than oak or maple. methinks i could look with equanimity upon a long street of irish cabins, and pigs and children reveling in the genial concord dirt ; and i should still find my walden wood and fair haven in their tanned and happy faces. i write this in the cornfield it being wash ing-day with the inkstand elizabeth hoar gave me ; l though it is not redolent of corn 1 this inkstand was presented by miss hoar, with a note dated &quot; boston, may 2, 1843,&quot; which deserves to be copied : dear henry, the rain prevented me from seeing 1 you the night before i came away, to leave with you a parting&quot; as surance of good will and good hope. we have become better acquainted within the .two past years than in our whole life as schoolmates and neighbors before ; and i am unwilling to let you go away without telling you that i, among your other j5t.2g.] the dial. 139 stalks, i fear. let me not be forgotten by charming and hawthorne, nor our gray-suited neighbor under the hill [edmund hosmer] . this letter will be best explained by a refer ence to the &quot;dial&quot; for october, 1843. the &quot; ethnical scriptures &quot; were selections from the brahminical books, from confucius, etc., such as we have since seen in great abundance. the autumn verses are by charming ; &quot; sweep ho ! &quot; by ellen sturgis, afterwards mrs. hooper ; the &quot; youth of the poet and painter &quot; also by charming. the letter to contributors, which is headed simply &quot;a letter,&quot; is by em erson, and has been much overlooked by his later readers ; his &quot; ode to beauty &quot; is very well known, and does not deserve the slashing cen sure of thoreau, though, as it now stands, it is better than first printed. instead of friends, shall miss you much, and follow you with remem brance and all best wishes and confidence. will you take this little inkstand and try if it will carry ink safely from concord to staten island ? and the pen, which, if you can write with steel, may be made sometimes the interpreter of friendly thoughts to those whom you leave beyond the reach of your voice, or record the inspirations of nature, who, i doubt not, will be as faithful to you who trust her in the sea-girt staten island as in concord woods and meadows. good-by, and es trparreiv, which, a wise man says, is the only salutation fit for the wise. truly your friend, e. hoar. 140 years of discipline. [1843, &quot; love drinks at thy banquet remediless thirst,&quot; we now have the perfect phrase, &quot;love drinks at thy fountain false waters of thirst&quot; &quot;the comic&quot; is also emerson s. there is a poem, &quot; the sail,&quot; by william tappan, so often named in these letters, and a sonnet by charles a. dana, now of the &quot; new york sun.&quot; to helen thoreau (at concord). staten island, october 18, 1843. dear helen, what do you mean by say ing that &quot; we have written eight times by private opportunity&quot;? isn t it the more the better? and am i not glad of it ? but people have a habit of not letting me know it when they go to concord from new york. i endeavored to get you &quot;the present&quot; when i was last in the city, but they were all sold ; and now another is out, which i will send, if i get it. i did not send the &quot; democratic review,&quot; because i had no copy, and my piece was not worth fifty cents. you think that channing s words would apply to me too, as living more in the natural than the moral world ; but i think that you mean the world of men and women rather, and reformers generally. my objection to channing and all that f rater jst.26.] to helen thoreau. 141 nity is, that they need and deserve sympathy themselves rather than are able to render it to others. they want faith, and mistake their pri vate ail for an infected atmosphere ; but let any one of them recover hope for a moment, and right his particular grievance, and he will no longer train in that company. to speak or do anything that shall concern mankind, one must speak and act as if well, or from that grain of health which he has left. this &quot; present &quot; book indeed is blue, but the hue of its thoughts is yellow. i say these things with the less hesita tion, because i have the jaundice myself ; but i also know what it is to be well. but do not think that one can escape from mankind who is one of them, and is so constantly dealing with them. i could not undertake to form a nucleus of an institution for the development of infant minds, where none already existed. it would be too cruel. and then, as if looking all this while one way with benevolence, to walk off another about one s own affairs suddenly ! something of this kind is an unavoidable objection to that. i am very sorry to hear such bad news about aunt maria ; but i think that the worst is al ways the least to be apprehended, for nature is averse to it as well as we. i trust to hear that she is quite well soon. i send love to her and 142 years of discipline. [1843. aunt jane. for three months i have not known whether to think of sophia as in bangor or con cord, and now you say that she is going directly. tell her to write to me, and establish her where abouts, and also to get well directly. and see that she has something worthy to do when she gets down there, for that s the best remedy for disease. . your affectionate brother, h. d. thoreau. ii. golden age of achievement. this was the golden age of hope and achieve ment for the concord poets and philosophers. their ranks were not yet broken by death (for stearns wheeler was hardly one of them), their spirits were high, and their faith in each other unbounded. emerson wrote thus from concord, while thoreau was perambulating staten island and calling on &quot; the false booksellers : &quot; &quot; ellery charming is excellent company, and we walk in all directions. he remembers you with great faith and hope ; thinks you ought not to see concord again these ten years that you ought to grind up fifty concords in your mill and much other opinion and counsel he holds in store on this topic. hawthorne walked with me yes terday afternoon, and not until after our return did i read his celestial railroad, which has a serene strength which we cannot afford not to praise, in this low life.&quot; the transcendentalists had their &quot; quarterly,&quot; and even their daily organ, for mr. greeley put the &quot; tribune &quot; at their service, and gave places 144 golden age of achievement. [1845, on its staff to margaret fuller and her brother in-law chamiing, and would gladly have made room for emerson in its columns, if the swift utterance of a morning paper had suited his habit of publication. while in the &quot; tribune &quot; office, ellery chamiing thus wrote to thoreau, after he had returned home, disappointed with new york, to make lead pencils in his father s shop at concord. ellery channing to thoreau (at concord). march 5, 1845. my dear thoreau, the handwriting of your letter is so miserable that i am not sure i have made it out. if i have, it seems to me you are the same old sixpence you used to be, rather rusty, but a genuine piece. i see nothing for you in this earth but that field which i once christened &quot; briars ; &quot; go out upon that, build yourself a hut, and there begin the grand pro cess of devouring yourself alive. i see no alter native, no other hope for you. eat yourself up ; you will eat nobody else, nor anything else. concord is just as good a place as any other ; there are, indeed, more people in the streets of that village than in the streets of this. this is a singularly muddy town ; muddy, solitary, and silent. in your line, i have not done a great deal &r. 27.] channing to thoreau: 145 since i arrived here ; i do not mean the pencil line, but the staten island line, having been there once, to walk on a beach by the tele graph, but did not visit the scene of your do minical duties. staten island is very distant from no. 30 ann street. i saw polite william emerson in november last, but have not caught any glimpse of him since then. i am as usual suffering the various alternations from agony to despair, from hope to fear, from pain to pleas ure. such wretched one-sided productions as you know nothing of the universal man; you may think yourself well off. that baker, hecker, who used to live on two crackers a day, i have not seen ; nor black, nor vethake, nor danesaz, nor rynders, nor any of emerson s old cronies, excepting james, a lit tle fat, rosy swedenborgian amateur, with the look of a broker, and the brains and heart of a pascal. william charming, i see nothing of him ; he is the dupe of good feelings, and i have all-too-many of these now. i have seen something of your friends, waldo and tappan, and have also seen our good man mckean, the keeper of that stupid place, the mercantile library. acting on channing s hint, and an old fancy of his own, thoreau, in the summer of 1845, 146 golden age of achievement. [1843, built his cabin at walden and retired there ; while hawthorne entered the salem custom house, and alcott, returning defeated from his fruitlands paradise, was struggling with poverty and discouragement at concord. charles lane, his english comrade, withdrew to new york or its vicinity, and in 1846 to london, whence he had come in 1842, full of hope and enthusiasm. a few notes of his, or about him, may here find place. they were sent to thoreau at concord, and show that lane continued to value his can did friend. the first, written after leaving fruitlands, introduces the late father hecker, who had been one of the family there, to tho reau. the second and third relate to the sale of the alcott-lane library, and other matters. charles lane to thoreau (at concord). boston, december 3, 1843. dear friend, as well as my avounded hands permit, i have scribbled something for friend hecker, which if agreeable may be the opportunity for entering into closer relations with him; a course i think likely to be mutually encouraging, as well as beneficial to all men. but let it reach him in the manner most con formable to your own feelings. that from all perils of a false position you may shortly be re lieved, and landed in the position where you feel jet. 28.] charles lane to thoeeau. 147 &quot; at home,&quot; is the sincere wish of yours most friendly, charles lane. mr. henry thoreau, earl house, coach office. new york, february 17, 1846. dear friend, the books you were so kind as to deposit about two years and a half ago with messrs. wiley & putnam have all been sold, but as they were left in your name it is needful, in strict business, that you should send an order to them to pay to me the amount due. i will therefore thank you to inclose me such an order at your earliest convenience in a letter addressed to your admiring friend, charles lane, post office, new york city. boonton, n. j., march 30, 1846. dear friend, if the human nature parti cipates of the elemental i am no longer in dan ger of becoming suburban, or super-urban, that is to say, too urbane. i am now more likely to be converted into a petrifaction, for slabs of rock and foaming waters never so abounded in my neighborhood. a very peter i shall become : on this rock he has built ms church. you would find much joy in these eminences and in the views therefrom. 148 golden age of achievement. [1846, my pen has been necessarily unproductive in the continued motion of the sphere in which i have lately been moved. you, i suppose, have not passed the winter to the world s unprofit. you never have seen, as i have, the book with a preface of 450 pages and a text of 60. my letter is like unto it. i have only to add that your letter of the 26th february did its work, and that i submit to you cordial thanks for the same. yours truly, chas. lane. i hope to hear occasionally of your doings and those of your compeers in your classic ploughings and diggings. to henry d. thobeau, concord woods. thoreau s letters to lane have not come into any editor s hands. in england, before lane s discovery by alcott, in 1842, he had been the editor of the &quot; mark-lane gazette &quot; (or some thing similar), which gave the price-current of wheat, etc., in the english markets. emerson found him in hampstead, london, in february, 1848, and wrote to thoreau : &quot; i went last sun day, for the first time, to see lane at hamp stead, and dined with him. he was full of 2et.30.] emerson to thoreau. 149 friendliness and hospitality ; has a school of six teen children, one lady as matron, then oldham. that is all the household. they looked just comfortable.&quot; &quot; lane instructed me to ask you to forward his dials to him, which must be done, if you can find them. three bound volumes are among his books in my library. the fourth volume is in unbound numbers at j. munroe & co. s shop, received there in a parcel to my address, a day or two before i sailed, and which i forgot to carry to concord. it must be claimed without delay. it is certainly there, was opened by me and left ; and they can inclose all four vol umes to chapman for me.&quot; this would indicate that he had not lost in terest in the days and events of his american sojourn, unpleasant as some of these must have been to the methodical, prosaic english man. while at walclen, thoreau wrote but few let ters ; there is, however, a brief correspondence with mr. j. e. cabot, then an active naturalist, cooperating with agassiz in his work on the american fishes, who had requested thoreau to procure certain species from concord. the let ters were written from the cabin at walden, and it is this same structure that figures in the letters from thoreau to emerson in england, 150 golden age of achievement. [1847, as the proposed nucleus of the cottage of poor hugh the gardener, before he ran away from concord, as there narrated, on a subsequent page. the first sending of river-fish was in the end of april, 1847. then followed this let ter : to elliot cabot (at boston). concord, may 8, 1847. dear sir, i believe that i have not yet acknowledged the receipt of your notes, and a five dollar bill. i am very glad that the fishes afforded mr. agassiz so much pleasure. i could easily have obtained more specimens of the ster notliaerus odoratus ; they are quite numerous here. i will send more of them erelong. snap ping turtles are perhaps as frequently met with in our muddy river as anything, but they are not always to be had when wanted. it is now rather late in the season for them. as no one makes a business of seeking them, and they are valued for soups, science may be forestalled by appetite in this market, and it will be necessary to bid pretty high to induce persons to obtain or preserve them. i think that from seventy five cents to a dollar apiece would secure all that are in any case to be had, and will set this price upon their heads, if the treasury of science is full enough to warrant it. *2t.29.] to elliot cabot. 151 you will excuse me for taking toll in the shape of some, it may be, impertinent and unsci entific inquiries. there are found in the waters of the concord, so far as i know, the following kinds of fishes : pickerel. besides the common, fishermen dis tinguish the brook, or grass pickerel, which bites differently, and has a shorter snout. those caught in walden, hard by my house, are easily distinguished from those caught in the river, being much heavier in proportion to their size, stouter, firmer fleshed, and lighter colored. the little pickerel which i sent last, jumped into the boat in its fright. pouts. those in the pond are of different appearance from those that i have sent. breams. some more green, others more brown. suckers. the horned, which i sent first, and the black. i am not sure whether the common or boston sucker is found here. are the three which i sent last, which were speared in the river, identical with the three hack suckers, taken by hand in the brook, which i sent before ? i have never examined them minutely. perch. the river perch, of which i sent five specimens in the box, are darker colored than those found in the pond. there are myriads of small ones in the latter place, and but few large 152 golden age of achievement. [1847, ones. i have counted ten transverse bands on some of the smaller. lampreys. very scarce since the dams at lowell and billerica were built. shiners. leuciscus chrysoleucas, silver and golden. what is the difference ? roach or chiverin, leuciscus pulchellus, argenteus, or what not. the white and the red. the former described by storer, but the latter, which deserves distinct notice, not described, to my knowledge. are the minnows (called here dace), of which i sent three live specimens, i believe, one larger and two smaller, the young of this species? trout. of different appearance in different brooks in this neighborhood. eels. red-jinned minnows, of which i sent you a dozen alive. i have never recognized them in any books. have they any scientific name ? if convenient, will you let dr. storer see these brook minnows ? there is also a kind of dace or fresh-water smelt in the pond, which is, perhaps, distinct from any of the above. what of the above does m. agassiz particularly wish to see ? does he want more specimens of kinds which i have already sent ? there are also minks, muskrats, frogs, lizards, tortoise, snakes, jet. 29.] to elliot cabot. 153 caddice-worms, leeches, muscles, etc., or rather, here they are. the funds which you sent me are nearly exhausted. most fishes can now be taken with the hook, and it will cost but little trouble or money to obtain them. the snapping turtles will be the main expense. i should think that five dollars more, at least, might be profita bly expended. to elliot cabot (at boston). concord, june 1, 1847. dear sir, i send you 15 pouts, 17 perch, 13 shiners, 1 larger land tortoise, and 5 muddy tortoises, all from the pond by my house. also 7 perch, 5 shiners, 8 breams, 4 dace ? 2 muddy tortoises, 5 painted do., and 3 land do., all from the river. one black snake, alive, and one dor mouse? caught last night in my cellar. the tortoises were all put in alive ; the fishes were alive yesterday, i. e., monday, and some this morning. observe the difference between those from the pond, which is pure water, and those from the river. i will send the light-colored trout and the pickerel with the longer snout, which is our large one, when i meet with them. i have set a price upon the heads of snapping turtles, though it is late in the season to get them. if i wrote red-firmed eel, it was a slip of the 154 golden age of achievement. [1847, pen ; i meant red-finned minnow. this is their name here ; though smaller specimens have but a slight reddish tinge at the base of the pecto rals. will you, at your leisure, answer these queries ? do you mean to say that the twelve banded minnows which i sent are undescribed, or only one? what are the scientific names of those minnows which have any ? are the four dace i send to-day identical with one of the former, and what are they called ? is there such a fish as the black sucker described, distinct from the common ? agassiz to thoreau (at concord). in october, 1849, agassiz, in reply to a re quest from thoreau that he would lecture in bangor, sent this characteristic letter : &quot; i remember with much pleasure the time when you used to send me specimens from your vicinity, and also our short interview in the marlborough chapel. 1 i am under too many obligations of your kindness to forget it. i am very sorry that i missed your visit in boston ; but for eighteen months i have now been settled in cambridge. it would give me great pleasure to engage for the lectures you ask from me for the bangor lyceum ; but i find it has been last 1 where agassiz was givinga course of lowell lectures. ast.32.] agassiz to thoreau. 155 winter such a heavy tax upon my health, that i wish for the present to make no engagements ; as i have some hope of making my living this year by other efforts, and beyond the neces sity of my wants, both domestic and scientific, i am determined not to exert myself ; as all the time i can thus secure to myself must be exclu sively devoted to science. my only business is my intercourse with nature ; and could i do with out draughtsmen, lithographers, etc., i would live still more retired. this will satisfy you that whenever you come this way, i shall be delighted to see you, since i have also heard something of your mode of living.&quot; agassiz had reason indeed to remember the collections made by thoreau, since (from the letters of mr. cabot) they aided him much in his comparison of the american with the eu ropean fishes. when the first firkin of concord fish arrived in boston, where agassiz was then working, &quot; he was highly delighted, and began immediately to spread them out and arrange them for his draughtsman. some of the species he had seen before, but never in so fresh con dition ; others, as the breams and the pout, he had seen only in spirits, and the little tortoise he knew only from the books. i am sure you would have felt fully repaid for your trouble,&quot; adds 156 golden age of achievement. [1847, mr. cabot, &quot; if you could have seen the eager satisfaction with which he surveyed each fin and scale.&quot; agassiz himself wrote the same day : &quot; i have been highly pleased to find that the small mud turtle was really the sternotliaerus odoratus, as i suspected, a very rare species, quite distinct from the snapping turtle. the suckers were all of one and the same species ( catastomus tuberculatus) ; the female has the tubercles. as i am very anxious to send some snapping turtles home with my first boxes, i would thank mr. t. very much if he could have some taken for me.&quot; mr. cabot goes on : &quot; of the perch agassiz remarked that it was almost identical with that of europe, but distinguishable, on close exami nation, by the tubercles on the sub-operculum. . . . more of the painted tortoises would be acceptable. the snapping turtles are very in teresting to him as forming a transition from the turtles proper to the alligator and crocodile. . . . we have received three boxes from you since the first.&quot; (may 27.) &quot; agassiz was much surprised and pleased at the extent of the col lections you sent during his absence in new york. among the fishes there is one, and prob ably two, new species. the fresh-water smelt he does not know. he is very anxious to see the pickerel with the long snout, which he sus jet. 29.} cabot to thoreau. 157 pects may be the esox estor, or maskalonge ; he has seen this at albany. ... as to the minks, etc., i know they would all be very ac ceptable to him. when i asked him about these, and more specimens of what you have sent, he said, i dare not make any request, for i do not know how much trouble i may be giving to mr. thoreau ; but my method of ex amination requires many more specimens than most naturalists would care for.&quot; (june 1.) &quot; agassiz is delighted to find one, and he thinks two, more new species ; one is a pomotis, the bream without the red spot in the operculum, and with a red belly and fins. the other is the shallower and lighter colored shiner. the four dace you sent last are leuciscus argenteus. they are different from that you sent before under this name, but which was a new species. of the four kinds of minnow, two are new. there is a black sucker {catastomus nigri cans), but there has been no specimen among those you have sent, and a. has never seen a specimen. he seemed to know your mouse, and called it the white-bellied mouse. it was the first specimen he had seen. i am in hopes to bring or send him to concord, to look after new leucisci, etc.&quot; agassiz did afterwards come, more than once, and examined turtles with tho reau. 158 golden age of achievement. [1847, soon after this scientific correspondence, tho reau left his retreat by walden to take the place of emerson in his household, while his friend went to visit carlyle and give lectures in eng land. the letters that follow are among the longest thoreau ever composed, and will give a new conception of the writer to those who may have figured him as a cold, stoical, or selfish person, withdrawn from society and its duties. the first describes the setting out of emerson for europe. to sophia thoreau (at bangor). concord, october 24, 1847. dear sophia, i thank you for those let ters about ktaadn, and hope you will save and send me the rest, and anything else you may meet with relating to the maine woods. that dr. young is both young and green too at trav eling in the woods. however, i hope he got &quot; yarbs &quot; enough to satisfy him. i went to bos ton the 5th of this month to see mr. emerson off to europe. he sailed in the washington irving packet ship ; the same in which mr. [f. ii.] hedge went before him. up to this trip the first mate aboard this ship was, as i hear, one stephens, a concord boy, son of stephens the carpenter, who used to live above mr. den nis s. mr. emerson s stateroom was like a car 2et.30.] to sophia thoreau. 159 peted dark closet, about six feet square, with a large keyhole for a window. the window was about as big as a saucer, and the glass two inches thick, not to mention another skylight overhead in the deck, the size of an oblong doughnut, and about as opaque. of course it would be in vain to look up, if any contemplative promenader put his foot upon it. such will be his lodgings for two or three weeks ; and instead of a walk in walden woods he will take a promenade on deck, where the few trees, you know, are stripped of their bark. the steam-tug carried the ship to sea against a head wind without a rag of sail being raised. i don t remember whether you have heard of the new telescope at cambridge or not. they think it is the best one in the world, and have already seen more than lord rosse or herschel. i went to see perez blood s, some time ago, with mr. emerson. he had not gone to bed, but was sitting in the woodshed, in the dark, alone, in his astronomical chair, which is all legs and rounds, with a seat which can be inserted at any height. we saw saturn s rings, and the moun tains in the moon, and the shadows in their craters, and the sunlight on the spurs of the mountains in the dark portion, etc., etc. when i asked him the power of his glass, he said it was 85. but what is the power of the cam 160 golden age of achievement. [1847, bridge glass ? 2000 ! ! ! the last is about twenty three feet long. i think you may have a grand time this win ter pursuing some study, keeping a journal, or the like, while the snow lies deep without. winter is the time for study, you know, and the colder it is the more studious we are. give my respects to the whole penobscot tribe, and tell them that i trust we are good brothers still, and endeavor to keep the chain of friendship bright, though i do dig up a hatchet now and then. i trust you will not stir from your comfortable winter quarters, miss bruin, or even put your head out of your hollow tree, till the sun has melted the snow in the spring, and &quot; the green buds, they are a-swellin .&quot; from your brother henry. this letter will explain some of the allusions in the first letter to emerson in england. perez blood was a rural astronomer living in the ex treme north quarter of concord, next to carlisle, with his two maiden sisters, in the midst of a fine oak wood ; their cottage being one of the points in view when thoreau and his friends took their afternoon rambles. sophia thoreau, the younger and soon the only surviving sister, was visiting her cousins in maine, the &quot; penob scot tribe &quot; of whom the letter makes mention, mt. 30.] to r. w. emerson. 161 with an allusion to the indians of that name near bangor. his letter to her and those which fol low were written from emerson s house, where thoreau lived during the master s absence across the ocean. it was in the orchard of this house that alcott was building that summer-house at which thoreau, with his geometrical eye, makes merry in the next letter. to b. w. emerson (in england). concord, november 14, 1847. dear fkiend, i am but a poor neighbor to you here, a very poor companion am i. i understand that very well, but that need not prevent my writing to you now. i have almost never written letters in my life, yet i think i can write as good ones as i frequently see, so i shall not hesitate to write this, such as it may be, knowing that you will welcome anything that reminds you of concord. i have banked up the young trees against the winter and the mice, and i will look out, in my careless way, to see when a pale is loose or a nail drops out of its place. the broad gaps, at least, i will occupy. i heartily wish i could be of good service to this household. but i, who have only used these ten digits so long to solve the problem of a living, how can i ? the world is a cow that is hard to milk, life does not 162 golden age of achievement. [1847, come so easy, and oh, how thinly it is watered ere we get it ! but the young bunting calf, he will get at it. there is no way so direct. this is to earn one s living by the sweat of his brow. it is a little like joining a community, this life, to such a hermit as i am ; and as i don t keep the accounts, i don t know whether the experi ment will succeed or fail finally. at any rate, it is good for society, so i do not regret my tran sient nor my permanent share in it. lidian [mrs. emerson] and i make very good housekeepers. she is a very dear sister to me. ellen and edith and eddy and aunty brown keep up the tragedy and comedy and tragic-com edy of life as usual. the two former have not forgotten their old acquaintance; even edith carries a young memory in her head, i find. eddy can teach us all how to pronounce. if you should discover any rare hoard of wooden or pewter horses, i have no doubt he will know how to appreciate it. he occasionally surveys mankind from my shoulders as wisely as ever johnson did. i respect him not a little, though it is i that lift him up so unceremoniously. and sometimes i have to set him down again in a hurry, according to his &quot;mere will and good pleasure.&quot; he very seriously asked me, the other day, &quot;mr. thoreau, will you be my fa ther ? &quot; i am occasionally mr. rough-and-tum jst. 30.] to r. w. emerson. 163 ble with him that i may not miss aim, and lest he should miss you too much. so you must come back soon, or you will be superseded. alcott has heard that i laughed, and so set the people laughing, at his arbor, though i never laughed louder than when i was on the ridge pole. but now i have not laughed for a long time, it is so serious. he is very grave to look at. but, not knowing all this, i strove inno cently enough, the other day, to engage his at tention to my mathematics. &quot;did you ever study geometry, the relation of straight lines to curves, the transition from the finite to the infi nite ? fine things about it in newton and leib nitz.&quot; but he would hear none of it, men of taste preferred the natural curve. ah, he is a crooked stick himself. he is getting on now so many knots an hour. there is one knot at pres ent occupying the point of highest elevation, the present highest point; and as many knots as are not handsome, i presume, are thrown down and cast into the pines. pray show him this if you meet him anywhere in london, for i cannot make him hear much plainer words here. he forgets that i am neither old nor young, nor anything in particular, and behaves as if i had still some of the animal heat in me. as for the building, i feel a little oppressed when i come near it. it has no great disposition to be beau 164 golden age of achievement. [1847, tiful; it is certainly a wonderful structure, on the whole, and the fame of the architect will endure as long as it shall stand. i should not show you this side alone, if i did not suspect that lidian had done complete justice to the other. mr. [edmund] hosmer has been working at a tannery in stow for a fortnight, though he has just now come home sick. it seems that he was a tanner in his youth, and so he has made up his mind a little at last. this comes of reading the new testament. was n t one of the apos tles a tanner ? mrs. hosmer remains here, and john looks stout enough to fill his own shoes and his father s too. mr. blood and his company have at length seen the stars through the great telescope, and he told me that he thought it was worth the while. mr. peirce made him wait till the crowd had dispersed (it was a saturday evening), and then was quite polite, conversed with him, and showed him the micrometer, etc. ; and he said mr. blood s glass was large enough for all ordi nary astronomical work. [rev.] mr. frost and dr. [josiah] bartlett seemed disappointed that there was no greater difference between the cambridge glass and the concord one. they used only a power of 400. mr. blood tells me that he is too old to study the calculus or higher jet. 30.] to r. w. emerson. 165 mathematics. at cambridge they think that they have discovered traces of another satellite to neptune. they have been obliged to exclude the public altogether, at last. the very dust which they raised, &quot; which is filled with minute crystals,&quot; etc., as professors declare, having to be wiped off the glasses, would erelong wear them away. it is true enough, cambridge col lege is really beginning to wake up and redeem its character and overtake the age. i see by the catalogue that they are about establishing a sci entific school in connection with the university, at which any one above eighteen, on paying one hundred dollars annually (mr. lawrence s fifty thousand dollars will probably diminish this sum), may be instructed in the highest branches of science, in astronomy, &quot; theoretical and prac tical, with the use of the instruments &quot; (so the great yankee astronomer may be born without delay), in mechanics and engineering to the last degree. agassiz will erelong commence his lec tures in the zoological department. a chemistry class has already been formed under the direc tion of professor horsford. a new and ade quate building for the purpose is already being erected. they have been foolish enough to put at the end of all this earnest the old joke of a diploma. let every sheep keep but his own skin, i say. 166 golden age of achievement. [1847, i have had a tragic correspondence, for the most part all on one side, with miss . she did really wish to i hesitate to write marry me. that is the way they spell it. of course i did not write a deliberate answer. how could i deliberate upon it ? i sent back as distinct a no as i have learned to pronounce after consid erable practice, and i trust that this no has suc ceeded. indeed, i wished that it might burst, like hollow shot, after it had struck and buried itself and made itself felt there. there was no other way. i really had anticipated no such foe as this in my career. i suppose you will like to hear of my book, though i have nothing worth writing about it. indeed, for the last month or two i have forgot ten it, but shall certainly remember it again. wiley & putnam, muiiroe, the harpers, and crosby & nichols have all declined printing it with the least risk to themselves ; but wiley & putnam will print it in their series, and any of them, anywhere, at my risk. if i liked the book well enough, i should not delay; but for the present i am indifferent. i believe this is, after all, the course you advised, to let it lie. i do not know what to say of myself. i sit before my green desk, in the chamber at the head of the stairs, and attend to my thinking, sometimes more, sometimes less distinctly. i mt. 30.] to r. w. emerson. 167 am not unwilling to think great thoughts if there are any in the wind, but what they are i am not sure. they suffice to keep me awake while the day lasts, at any rate. perhaps they will redeem some portion of the night erelong. i can imagine you astonishing, bewildering, confounding, and sometimes delighting john bull with your yankee notions, and that he be gins to take a pride in the relationship at last ; introduced to all the stars of england in succes sion, after the lecture, until you pine to thrust your head once more into a genuine and unques tionable nebula, if there be any left. i trust a common man will be the most uncommon to you before you return to these parts. i have thought there was some advantage even in death, by which we &quot; mingle with the herd of common men.&quot; hugh [the gardener] still has his eye on the walden agellum, and orchards are waving there in the windy future for him. that s the where i 11-go-next, thinks he ; but no important steps are yet taken. he reminds me occasionally of this open secret of his, with which the very sea son seems to labor, and affirms seriously that as to his wants wood, stone, or timber i know better than he. that is a clincher which i shall have to avoid to some extent ; but i fear that it is a wrought nail and will not break. un 168 golden age of achievement. [1847, fortunately, the day after cattle show the day after small beer he was among the missing, but not long this time. the ethiopian cannot change his skin nor the leopard his spots, nor indeed hugh his hugh. as i walked over conantum, the other after noon, i saw a fair column of smoke rising from the woods directly over my house that was (as i judged), and already began to conjecture if my deed of sale would not be made invalid by this. but it turned out to be john richardson s young wood, on the southeast of your field. it was burnt nearly all over, and up to the rails and the road. it was set on fire, no doubt, by the same lucifer that lighted brooks s lot be fore. so you see that your small lot is compar atively safe for this season, the back fire having been already set for you. they have been choosing between john keyes and sam staples, if the world wants to know it, as representative of this town, and staples is chosen. the candidates for governor think of my writing this to you ! were governor briggs and general gushing, and briggs is elected, though the democrats have gained. ain t i a brave boy to know so much of politics for the nonce ? but i should n t have known it if goombs hadn t told me. they have had a peace meeting here, i should n t think of mt. 30.] to r. w. emerson. 169 telling you if i didn t know anything would do for the english market, and some men, deacon brown at the head, have signed a long pledge, swearing that they will &quot; treat all man kind as brothers henceforth.&quot; i think i shall wait and see how they treat me first. i think that nature meant kindly when she made our brothers few. however, my voice is still for peace. so good-by, and a truce to all joking, my dear friend, from h. d. t. upon this letter some annotations are to be made. &quot; eddy &quot; was emerson s youngest child, edward waldo, then three years old and up ward, of late years his father s biographer. hugh, the gardener, of whom more anoil, bar gained for the house of thoreau on emerson s land at walden, and for a field to go with it ; but the bargain came to naught, and the cabin was removed three or four miles to the north west, where it became a granary for farmer clark and his squirrels, near the entrance to the park known as estabrook s. edmund hosmer was the farming friend and neighbor with whom, at one time, g. w. curtis and his brother took lodgings, and at another time the alcott family. the book in question was &quot; a week on the concord and merrimack rivers.&quot; 170 golden age of achievement. [1847, to these letters emerson replied from eng land : dear henry, very welcome in the parcel was your letter, very precious your thoughts and tidings. it is one of the best things connected with my coming hither that you could and would keep the homestead ; that fireplace shines all the brighter, and has a certain permanent glimmer therefor. thanks, ever more thanks for the kindness which i well discern to the youth of the house : to my darling little horseman of pewter, wooden, rocking, and what other breeds, destined, i hope, to ride pegasus yet, and, i hope, not destined to be thrown ; to edith, who long ago drew from you verses which i carefully preserve ; and to ellen, whom by speech, and now by letter, i find old enough to be compan ionable, and to choose and reward her own friends in her own fashions. she sends me a poem to-day, which i have read three times ! to r. w. emerson (in england). concord, december 15, 1847. dear friend, you are not so far off but the affairs of this world still attract you. per haps it will be so when we are dead. then look out. joshua k. holman, of harvard, who says he lived a month with [charles] lane at 2et.30.j to r. w. emerson. 171 fruitlands, wishes to hire said lane s farm for one or more years, and will pay $125 rent, tak ing out of the same a half, if necessary, for repairs, as for a new bank-wall to the barn cellar, which he says is indispensable. palmer is gone, mrs. palmer is going. this is all that is known or that is worth knowing. yes or no ? what to do ? hugh s plot begins to thicken. he starts thus : eighty dollars on one side ; walden, field and house, on the other. how to bring these together so as to make a garden and a palace ? field 1st, let $10 go over to unite the two lots. $70 $6 for wetherbee s rocks to found your palace on. $64 $64 so far, indeed, we have already got. $4 to bring the rocks to the field. $60 save $20 by all means, to measure the field, and you have left $40 to complete the palace, build cellar, and dig well. build the cellar yourself, and let well alone, and now how does it stand ? $40 to complete the palace somewhat like this. 172 golden age of achievement. [1847, for when one asks, &quot; why do you want twice as much room more ? &quot; the reply is, &quot; parlor, kitchen, and bedroom, these make the pal ace.&quot; &quot; well, hugh, what will you do ? here are forty dollars to buy a new house, twelve feet by twenty-five, and add it to the old.&quot; &quot; well, mr. thoreau, as i tell you, i know no more than a child about it. it shall be just as you say.&quot; &quot;then build it yourself, get it roofed, and get in. &quot; commence at one end and leave it half done, and let time finish what money s begun.&quot; so you see we have forty dollars for a nest egg ; sitting on which, hugh and i alternately and simultaneously, there may in course of time be hatched a house that will long stand, and perchance even lay fresh eggs one day for its owner ; that is, if, when he returns, he gives the young chick twenty dollars or more in addition, by way of &quot; swichin,&quot; to give it a start in the world. the &quot; massachusetts quarterly review &quot; came out the 1st of december, but it does not seem to be making a sensation, at least not here abouts. i know of none in concord who take or have seen it yet. we wish to get by all possible means some jot. 30.] to r. w. emerson. 173 notion of your success or failure in england, more than your two letters have furnished. can t you send a fair sample both of young and of old england s criticism, if there is any printed ? alcott and [ellery] channing are equally greedy with myself. henry thokeau. c. t. jackson takes the quarterly (new one), and will lend it to us. are you not going to send your wife some news of your good or ill success by the newspapers ? to r. w. emerson (in england). concord, december 29, 1847. my dear friend, i thank you for your letter. i was very glad to get it; and i am glad again to write to you. however slow the steamer, no time intervenes between the writing and the reading of thoughts, but they come freshly to the most distant port. i am here still, and very glad to be here, and shall not trouble you with any complaints because i do not fill my place better. i have had many good hours in the chamber at the head of the stairs, a solid time, it seems to me. next week i am going to give an account to the lyceum of my expedition to maine. theodore parker lectures to-night. we have had whipple on genius, 174 golden age of achievement. [1847, too weighty a subject for him, with his antitheti cal definitions new-vamped, what it is, what it is not, but altogether what it is not ; cuffing it this way and cuffing it that, as if it were an india rubber ball. really, it is a subject which should expand, expand, accumulate itself before the speaker s eyes as he goes on, like the snowballs which the boys roll in the street ; and when it stops, it should be so large that he cannot start it, but must leave it there. [h. n.] hudson, too, has been here, with a dark shadow in the core of him, and his desperate wit, so much in debted to the surface of him, wringing out his words and snapping them off like a dish-cloth ; very remarkable, but not memorable. singular that these two best lecturers should have so much &quot; wave &quot; in their timber, their solid parts to be made and kept solid by shrinkage and contraction of the whole, with consequent checks and fissures. ellen and i have a good understanding. i appreciate her genuineness. edith tells me after her fashion : &quot; by and by i shall grow up and be a woman, and then i shall remember how you exercised me.&quot; eddy has been to boston to christmas, but can remember nothing but the coaches, all kendall s coaches. there is no variety of that vehicle that he is not familiar with. he did try twice to tell us something jst. 30.] to r. w. emerson. 175 else, but, after thinking and stuttering a long time, said, &quot; i don t know what the word is,&quot; the one word, forsooth, that would have disposed of all that boston phenomenon. if you did not know him better than i, i could tell you more. he is a good companion for me, and i am glad that we are all natives of concord. it is young concord. look out, world ! mr. alcott seems to have sat down for the winter. he has got plato and other books to read. he is as large-featured and hospitable to traveling thoughts and thinkers as ever ; but with the same connecticut philosophy as ever, mingled with what is better. if he would only stand upright and toe the line ! though he were to put off several degrees of largeness, and put on a considerable degree of littleness. after all, i think we must call him particularly your man. i have pleasant walks and talks with chan ning. james clark the swedenborgian that was is at the poorhouse, insane with too large views, so that he cannot support himself. i see him working with fred and the rest. better than be there and not insane. it is strange that they will make ado when a man s body is buried, but not when he thus really and tragically dies, or seems to die. away with your funeral pro 176 golden age of achievement. [1847, cessions, into the ballroom with them ! i hear the bell toll hourly over there. 1 lidian and i have a standing quarrel as to what is a suitable state of preparedness for a traveling professor s visit, or for whomsoever else ; but further than this we are not at war. we have made up a dinner, we have made up a bed, we have made up a party, and our own minds and mouths, three several times for your professor, and he came not. three several tur keys have died the death, which i myself carved, just as if he had been there ; and the company, too, convened and demeaned themselves accord ingly. everything was done up in good style, i assure you, with only the part of the professor omitted. to have seen the preparation (though lidian says it was nothing extraordinary) i should certainly have said he was a-coming, but he did not. he must have found out some shorter way to turkey, some overland route, i think. by the way, he was complimented, at the conclusion of his course in boston, by the mayor moving the appointment of a committee to draw up resolutions expressive, etc., which was done. i have made a few verses lately. here are some, though perhaps not the best, at any rate 1 the town alrashouse was across the field from the emer son house. jet. 30.] to r. w. emerson. 177 they are the shortest, on that universal theme, yours as well as mine, and several other peo ple s : the good how can we trust ! only the wise are just. the good, we use, the wise we cannot choose ; these there are none above. the good, they know and love, but are not known again by those of lesser ken. they do not choose us with their eyes, but they transfix with their advice ; no partial sympathy they feel with private woe or private weal, but with the universe joy and sigh, whose knowledge is their sympathy. good-night. henry thoreau. p. s. i am sorry to send such a medley as this to you. i have forwarded lane s &quot; dial &quot; to munroe, and he tells the expressman that all is right. to r. w. emerson (in england). concord, january 12, 1848. it is hard to believe that england is so near as from your letters it appears; and that this identical piece of paper has lately come all the way from there hither, begrimed with the eng lish dust which made you hesitate to use it; from england, which is only historical fairyland 178 golden age of achievement. f!848 ? to me, to america, which i have put my spade into, and about which there is no doubt. i thought that you needed to be informed of hugh s progress. he has moved his house, as i told you, and dug his cellar, and purchased stone of sol wetherbee for the last, though he has not hauled it ; all which has cost sixteen dol lars, which i have paid. he has also, as next in order, run away from concord without a penny in his pocket, &quot; crying &quot; by the way, having had another long difference with strong beer, and a first one, i suppose, with his wife, who seems to have complained that he sought other society ; the one difference leading to the other, perhaps, but i don t know which was the leader. he writes back to his wife from sterling, near worcester, where he is chopping wood, his dis tantly kind reproaches to her, which i read straight through to her (not to his bottle, which he has with him, and no doubt addresses orally). he says that he will go on to the south in the spring, and will never return to concord. per haps he will not. life is not tragic enough for him, and he must try to cook up a more highly seasoned dish for himself. towns which keep a barroom and a gun-house and a reading-room, should also keep a steep precipice whereoff im patient soldiers may jump. his sun went down, to me, bright and steady enough in the west, but jffr.30.] to r. w. emerson, 179 it never came up in the east. night intervened. he departed, as when a man dies suddenly ; and perhaps wisely, if he was to go, without settling his affairs. they knew that that was a thin soil and not well calculated for pears. nature is rare and sensitive on the score of nurseries. you may cut down orchards and grow forests at your pleasure. sand watered with strong beer, though stirred with industry, will not produce grapes. he dug his cellar for the new part too near the old house, irish like, though i warned him, and it has caved and let one end of the house down. such is the state of his domestic affairs. i laugh with the parcse only. he had got the upland and the orchard and a part of the meadow ploughed by warren, at an expense of eight dollars, still unpaid, which of course is no affair of yours. i think that if an honest and small-familied man, who has no affinity for moisture in him, but who has an affinity for sand, can be found, it would be safe to rent him the shanty as it is, and the land ; or you can very easily and simply let nature keep them still, without great loss. it may be so managed, perhaps, as to be a home for somebody, who shall in return serve you as fencing stuff, and to fix and locate your lot, as we plant a tree in the sand or on the edge of a stream ; without expense to you in the mean 180 golden age of achievement. [1848, while, and without disturbing its possible future value. i read a part of the story of my excursion to ktaadn to quite a large audience of men and boys, the other night, whom it interested. it contains many facts and some poetry. i have also written what will do for a lecture on &quot; friendship.&quot; i think that the article on you in blackwood s is a good deal to get from the reviewers, the first purely literary notice, as i remember. the writer is far enough off, in every sense, to speak with a certain authority. it is a better judg ment of posterity than the public had. it is singular how sure he is to be mystified by any uncommon sense. but it was generous to put plato into the list of mystics. his confessions on this subject suggest several thoughts, which i have not room to express here. the old word seer, i wonder what the reviewer thinks that means ; whether that he was a man who could see more than himself. i was struck by ellen s asking me, yesterday, while i was talking with mrs. brown, if i did not use &quot; colored words.&quot; she said that she could tell the color of a great many words, and amused the children at school by so doing. eddy climbed up the sofa, the other day, of his own accord, and kissed the picture of his father, &quot; right on his shirt, i did.&quot; 2et.30.] to r. w. emerson. 181 i had a good talk with alcott this afternoon. he is certainly the youngest man of his age we have seen, just on the threshold of life. when i looked at his gray hairs, his conversation sounded pathetic ; but i looked again, and they reminded me of the gray dawn. he is getting better acquainted with channing, though he says that, if they were to live in the same house, they would soon sit with their backs to each other. 1 you must excuse me if i do not write with sufficient directness to yourself, who are a far off traveler. it is a little like shooting on the wing, i confess. farewell. henry thoreau. to r. w. emerson (in england). concord, february 23, 1848. dear waldo, for i think i have heard that that is your name, my letter which was put last into the leathern bag arrived first. whatever i may call you, i know you better than i know your name, and what becomes of the fittest name if in any sense you are here 1 at this date aleott had passed his forty-eighth year, while charming 1 and thoreau were still in the latitude of thirty. hawthorne had left concord, and was in the salem custom-house ; the old manse having gone hack into the occu pancy of emerson s cousins, the ripleys, who owned it. 182 golden age of achievement. [1848, with him who calls, and not there simply to be called ? i believe i never thanked you for your lec tures, one and all, which i heard formerly read here in concord. i know i never have. there was some excellent reason each time why i did not ; but it will never be too late. i have that advantage, at least, over you in my education. lidian is too unwell to write to you ; so i must tell you what i can about the children and herself. i am afraid she has not told you how unwell she is, or to-day perhaps we may say has been. she has been confined to her cham ber four or five weeks, and three or four weeks, at least, to her bed, with the jaundice. the doctor, who comes once a day, does not let her read (nor can she now) nor hear much read ing. she has written her letters to you, till re cently, sitting up in bed, but he said he would not come again if she did so. she has abby and almira to take care of her, and mrs. brown to read to her ; and i also, occasionally, have something to read or to say. the doctor says she must not expect to &quot; take any comfort of her life &quot; for a week or two yet. she wishes me to say that she has written two long and full letters to you about the household economies, etc., which she hopes have not been delayed. the children are quite well and full of spirits, jet. 30.] to r. w. emerson. 183 and are going through a regular course of pic ture-seeing, with commentary by me, every even ing, for eddy s behoof. all the annuals and &quot; diadems &quot; are in requisition, and eddy is for ward to exclaim, when the hour arrives, &quot; now for the demdems ! &quot; i overheard this dialogue when frank [brown] came down to breakfast the other morning. eddy. &quot; why, frank, i am astonished that you should leave your boots in the dining-room.&quot; frank. &quot; i guess you mean surprised, don t you?&quot; eddy. &quot; no, boots ! &quot; &quot; if waldo were here,&quot; said he, the other night, at bedtime, &quot; we d be four going up stairs.&quot; would he like to tell papa anything ? no, not anything; but finally, yes, he would, that one of the white horses in his new ba rouche is broken ! ellen and edith will per haps speak for themselves, as i hear something about letters to be written by them. mr. alcott seems to be reading well this win ter : plato, montaigne, ben jonson, beaumont and fletcher, sir thomas browne, etc., etc. &quot; i believe i have read them all now, or nearly all,&quot; those english authors. he is rallying for another foray with his pen, in his latter years, not discouraged by the past, into that crowd of unexpressed ideas of his, that undis 184 golden age of achievement. [1848, ciplined parthian army, which, as soon as a ro man soldier would face, retreats on all hands, occasionally firing backwards ; easily routed, not easily subdued, hovering on the skirts of society. another summer shall not be devoted to the raising of vegetables (arbors?) which rot in the cellar for want of consumers ; but perchance to the arrangement of the material, the brain crop which the winter has furnished. i have good talks with him. his respect for carlyle has been steadily increasing for some time. he has read him with new sympathy and apprecia tion. i see channing often. he also goes often to alcott s, and confesses that he has made a discovery in him, and gives vent to his admira tion or his confusion in characteristic exaggera tion ; but between this extreme and that you may get a fair report, and draw an inference if you can. sometimes he will ride a broom stick still, though there is nothing to keep him, or it, up but a certain centrifugal force of whim, which is soon spent, and there lies your stick, not worth picking up to sweep an oven with now. his accustomed path is strewn with them. but then again, and perhaps for the most part, he sits on the cliffs amid the lichens, or flits past on noiseless pinion, like the barred owl in the daytime, as wise and unobserved. he j5t.30.] to r. w. emerson. 185 brought me a poem the other day, for me, on walden hermitage : not remarkable. 1 lectures begin to multiply on my desk. i have one on friendship which is new, and the materials of some others. i read one last week to the lyceum, on the rights and duties of the individual in relation to government, much to mr. alcott s satisfaction. joel britton has failed and gone into chan cery, but the woods continue to fall before the axes of other men. neighbor coombs 2 was lately found dead in the woods near goose pond, with his half-empty jug, after he had been riot ing a week. hugh, by the last accounts, was still in worcester county. mr. hosmer, who is himself again, and living in concord, has just hauled the rest of your wood, amounting to about ten and a half cords. the newspapers say that they have printed a pirated edition of your essays in england. is it as bad as they say, and undisguised and un mitigated piracy ? i thought that the printed scrap would entertain carlyle, notwithstanding its history. if this generation will see out of its hind-head, why then you may turn your back 1 see sanborn s thoreau, p. 214, and channing s thoreau, pp. 19(5-199, for this poem. 2 this is the political neighbor mentioned in a former let ter. 186 golden age of achievement. [1848, on its forehead. will you forward it to him for me ? this stands written in your day-book : &quot; sep tember 3d. keceived of boston savings bank, o on account of charles lane, his deposit with interest, 1131.33. 16th. eeceived of joseph palmer, on account of charles lane, three hun dred twenty-three -f^ dollars, being the balance of a note on demand for four hundred dollars, with interest, $323.36.&quot; if you have any directions to give about the trees, you must not forget that spring will soon be upon us. farewell. from your friend, henry thokeau. before a reply came to this letter, thoreau had occasion to write to mr. elliot cabot again. the allusions to the &quot; week&quot; and to the walden house are interesting. to elliot cabot. concord, march 8, 1848. dear sir, mr. emerson s address is as yet, &quot; k. w. emerson, care of alexander ire land, esq., examiner office, manchester, eng land.&quot; we had a letter from him on monday, dated at manchester, february 10, and he was then preparing to go to edinburgh the next jet. 30.] to elliot cabot. 187 day, where he was to lecture. he thought that he should get through his northern journeying by the 25th of february, and go to london to spend march and april, and if he did not go to paris in may, then come home. he has been eminently successful, though the papers this side of the water have been so silent about his ad ventures. my book, 1 fortunately, did not find a pub lisher ready to undertake it, and you can im agine the effect of delay on an author s estimate of his own work. however, i like it well enough to mend it, and shall look at it again directly when i have dispatched some other things. i have been writing lectures for our own ly ceum this winter, mainly for my own pleasure and advantage. i esteem it a rare happiness to be able to tvrite anything, but there (if i ever get there) my concern for it is apt to end. time & co. are, after all, the only quite honest and trustworthy publishers that we know. i can sympathize, perhaps, with the barberry 1 from england emerson wrote: &quot;i am not of opinion that your book should be delayed a month. i should print it at once, nor do i think that yon would incur any risk in doing so that you cannot well afford. it is very certain to have readers and debtors, here as well as there. the dial is ab surdly well known here. we at home, i think, are always a little ashamed of it, i am, and yet here it is spoken of with the utmost gravity, and i do not laugh.&quot; 188 golden age of achievement. [1848, bush, whose business it is solely to ripen its fruit (though that may not be to sweeten it) and to protect it with thorns, so that it holds on all winter, even, unless some hungry crows come to pluck it. but i see that i must get a few dollars together presently to manure my roots. is your journal able to pay anything, provided it likes an article well enough ? i do not promise one. at any rate, i mean always to spend only words enough to purchase silence with ; and i have found that this, which is so valuable, though many writers do not prize it, does not cost much, after all. i have not obtained any more of the mice which i told you were so numerous in my cellar, as my house was removed immediately after i saw you, and i have been living in the village since. however, if i should happen to meet with any thing rare, i will forward it to you. i thank you for your kind offers, and will avail myself of them so far as to ask if you can anywhere borrow for me for a short time the copy of the &quot; revue des deux mondes,&quot; containing a notice of mr. emerson. i should like well to read it, and to read it to mrs. emerson and others. if this book is not easy to be obtained, do not by any means trouble yourself about it. ^t. 30.] to r. w. emerson. 189 to b. w. emerson. 1 concord, march 23, 1848. dear friend, lidian says i must write a sentence about the children. eddy says he can not sing, &quot; not till mother is a-going to be well.&quot; we shall hear his voice very soon, in that case, i trust. ellen is already thinking what will be done when you come home ; but then she thinks it will be some loss that i shall go away. edith says that i shall come and see them, and always at tea-time, so that i can play with her. ellen thinks she likes father best because he jumps her sometimes. this is the latest news from yours, etc., henry. p. s. i have received three newspapers from you duly which i have not acknowledged. there is an anti-sabbath convention held in boston to-day, to which alcott has gone. that friend to whom thoreau wrote most con stantly and fully, on all topics, was mr. harri son blake of worcester, a graduate of harvard two years earlier than thoreau, in the same 1 this letter was addressed, &quot; r. waldo emerson, care of alexander ireland, esq., manchester, england, via new york and steamer cambria, march 25.&quot; it was mailed in boston, march 24, and received in manchester, april 19. 190 golden age of achievement. [1848, class with two other young men from concord, -e. r hoar and h. b. dennis. this cir cumstance may have led to mr. blake s visiting the town occasionally, before his intimacy with its poet-naturalist began, in the year 1848. at that time, as thoreau wrote to horace greeley, he had been supporting himself for five years wholly by the labor of his hands ; his walden hermit-life was over, yet neither its record nor the first book had been published, and thoreau was known in literature chiefly by his papers in the &quot; dial,&quot; which had then ceased for four years. in march, 1848, mr. blake read tho reau s chapter on persius in the &quot;dial&quot; for july, 1840, and though he had read it before, without being much impressed by it, he now found in it &quot;pure depth and solidity of thought.&quot; &quot; it has revived in me,&quot; he wrote to thoreau, &quot; a haunting impression of you, which i carried away from some spoken words of yours. . . . when i was last in concord, you spoke of retir ing farther from our civilization. i asked you if you would feel no longings for the society of your friends. your reply was in substance, no, i am nothing. that reply was memorable to me. it indicated a depth of resources, a com pleteness of renunciation, a poise and repose in the universe, which to me is almost inconceiva ble ; which in you seemed domesticated, and to jet. 30.] blake to thoreau. 191 which i look up with veneration. i would know of that soul which can say i am nothing. i would be roused by its words to a truer and purer life. upon me seems to be dawning with new significance the idea that god is here ; that we have but to bow before him in profound sub mission at every moment, and he will fill our souls with his presence. in this opening of the soul to god, all duties seem to centre ; what else have we to do ? . . . if i understand rightly the significance of your life, this is it : you would sunder yourself from society, from the spell of institutions, customs, conventionalities, that you may lead a fresh, simple life with god. instead of breathing a new life into the old forms, you would have a new life without and within. there is something sublime to me in this atti tude, far as i may be from it myself. . . . speak to me in this hour as you are prompted. ... i honor you because you abstain from ac tion, and open your soul that you may be some what. amid a world of noisy, shallow actors it is noble to stand aside and say, i will simply ~bej could i plant myself at once upon the truth, reducing my wants to their minimum, ... i should at once be brought nearer to na ture, nearer to my fellow-men, and life would be infinitely richer. but, alas ! i shiver on the brink.&quot; 192 golden age of achievement. [1848, thus appealed to by one who had so well at tained the true transcendental shibboleth, &quot; god working in us, both to will and to do,&quot; thoreau could not fail to make answer, as he did at once, and thus : to harbison blake (at worcester). [the first of many letters.] concord, march 27, 1848. i am glad to hear that any words of mine, though spoken so long ago that i can hardly claim identity with their author, have reached you. it gives me pleasure, because i have there fore reason to suppose that i have uttered what concerns men, and that it is not in vain that man speaks to man. this is the value of litera ture. yet those days are so distant, in every sense, that i have had to look at that page again, to learn what was the tenor of my thoughts then. i should value that article, however, if only be cause it was the occasion of your letter. i do believe that the outward and the inward life correspond ; that if any should succeed to live a higher life, others would not know of it ; that difference and distance are one. to set about living a true life is to go a journey to a distant country, gradually to find ourselves sur rounded by new scenes and men ; and as long as the old are around me, i know that i am not j5t.30.] to harrison blake. 193 in any true sense living a new or a better life. the outward is only the outside of that which is within. men are not concealed under habits, but are revealed by them ; they are their true clothes. i care not how curious a reason they may give for their abiding by them. circum stances are not rigid and unyielding, but our habits are rigid. we are apt to speak vaguely sometimes, as if a divine life were to be grafted on to or built over this present as a suitable foundation. this might do if we could so build over our old life as to exclude from it all the warmth of our affection, and addle it, as the thrush builds over the cuckoo s egg, and lays her own atop, and hatches that only ; but the fact is, we so there is the partition hatch them both, and the cuckoo s always by a day first, and that young bird crowds the young thrushes out of the nest. no. destroy the cuck oo s egg, or build a new nest. change is change. no new life occupies the old bodies ; they decay. it is born, and grows, and flourishes. men very pathetically inform the old, accept and wear it why put up with the almshouse when you may go to heaven ? it is embalming, no more. let alone your oint ments and your linen swathes, and go into an infant s body. you see in the catacombs of egypt the result of that experiment, that is the end of it. 194 golden age of achievement. [1848, i do believe in simplicity. it is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest man thinks he must attend to in a day ; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. when the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incum brances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. so simplify the problem of life, distinguish the ne cessary and the real. probe the earth to see where your main roots run. i would stand upon facts. why not see, use our eyes ? do men know nothing ? i know many men who, in com mon things, are not to be deceived ; who trust no moonshine ; who count their money correctly, and know how to invest it ; who are said to be prudent and knowing, who yet will stand at a desk the greater part of their lives, as cashiers in banks, and glimmer and rust and finally go out there. if they know anything, what under the sun do they do that for ? do they know what bread is ? or what it is for ? do they know what life is ? if they knew something, the places which know them now would know them no more forever. this, our respectable daily life, in which the man of common sense, the englishman of the world, stands so squarely, and on which our in stitutions are founded, is in fact the veriest illu sion, and will vanish like the baseless fabric of mt. 30.] to harrison blake. 195 a vision ; but that faint glimmer of reality which sometimes illuminates the darkness of daylight for all men, reveals something more solid and enduring than adamant, which is in fact the cor ner-stone of the world. men cannot conceive of a state of things so fair that it cannot be realized. can any man honestly consult his experience and say that it is so ? have we any facts to appeal to when we say that our dreams are premature ? did you ever hear of a man who had striven all his life faithfully and singly toward an object and in no measure obtained it? if a man constantly as pires, is he not elevated ? did ever a man try heroism, magnanimity, truth, sincerity, and find that there was no advantage in them? that it was a vain endeavor ? of course we do not ex pect that our paradise will be a garden. we know not what we ask. to look at literature ; how many fine thoughts has every man had ! how few fine thoughts are expressed ! yet we never have a fantasy so subtile and ethereal, but that talent merely, with more resolution and faithful persistency, after a thousand failures, might fix and engrave it in distinct and endur ing words, and we should see that our dreams are the solidest facts that we know. but i speak not of dreams. what can be expressed in words can be ex pressed in life. 196 golden age of achievement. [1848, my actual life is a fact, in view of which i have no occasion to congratulate myself ; but for my faith and aspiration i have respect. it is from these that i speak. every man s position is in fact too simple to be described. i have sworn no oath. i have no designs on society, or nature, or god. i am simply what i am, or i begin to be that. i live in the present. i only remember the past, and anticipate the fu ture. i love to live. i love reform better than its modes. there is no history of how bad be came better. i believe something, and there is nothing else but that. i know that i am. i know that another is who knows more than i, who takes interest in me, whose creature, and yet whose kindred, in one sense, am i. i know that the enterprise is worthy. i know that things work well. i have heard no bad news. as for positions, combinations, and details, what are they? in clear weather, when we look into the heavens, what do we see but the sky and the sun ? if you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. but do not care to convince him. men will believe what they see. let them see. pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life, as a dog does his master s chaise. do what you love. know your own bone ; gnaw at j5t.30.] to harrison blake. 197 it, biiry it, unearth it, and gnaw it still. do not be too moral. you may cheat yourself out of much life so. aim above morality. be not simply good; be good for something. all fa bles, indeed, have their morals ; but the inno cent enjoy the story. let nothing come between you and the light. respect men and brothers only. when you travel to the celestial city, carry no letter of introduction. when you knock, ask to see god, none of the servants. in what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions : know that you are alone in the world. thus i write at random. i need to see you, and i trust i shall, to correct my mistakes. perhaps you have some oracles for me. henry thoreau. to harrison blake (at worcester). concord, may 2, 1848. &quot; we must have our bread.&quot; but what is our bread ? is it baker s bread ? methinks it should be very home-made bread. what is our meat? is it butcher s meat? what is that which we must have ? is that bread which we are now earning sweet ? is it not bread which has been suffered to sour, and then been sweet ened with an alkali, which has undergone the vinous, acetous, and sometimes the putrid fer 198 golden age of achievement. [1848, mentation, and then been whitened with vitriol ? is this the bread which we must have? man must earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, truly, but also by the sweat of his brain within his brow. the body can feed the body only. i have tasted but little bread in my life. it has been mere grub and provender for the most part. of bread that nourished the brain and the heart, scarcely any. there is absolutely none even on the tables of the rich. there is not one kind of food for all men. you must and you will feed those faculties which you exercise. the laborer whose body is weary does not require the same food with the scholar whose brain is weary. men should not labor foolishly like brutes, but the brain and the body should always, or as much as possible, work and rest together, and then the work will be of such a kind that when the body is hungry the brain will be hungry also, and the same food will suffice for both ; otherwise the food which repairs the waste energy of the over-wrought body will oppress the sedentary brain, and the degenerate scholar will come to esteem all food vulgar, and all getting a living drudgery. how shall we earn our bread is a grave ques tion; yet it is a sweet and inviting question. let us not shirk it, as is usually done. it is the most important and practical question which ^t.so.j to harrison blake. 199 is put to man. let us not answer it hastily. let us not be content to get our bread in some gross, careless, and hasty manner. some men go a-himting, some a-fishing, some a-gaming, some to war ; but none have so pleasant a time as they who in earnest seek to earn their bread. it is true actually as it is true really ; it is true materially as it is true spiritually, that they who seek honestly and sincerely, with all their hearts and lives and strength, to earn their bread, do earn it, and it is sure to be very sweet to them. a very little bread, a very few crumbs are enough, if it be of the right quality, for it is infinitely nutritious. let each man, then, earn at least a crumb of bread for his body before he dies, and know the taste of it, that it is iden tical with the bread of life, and that they both go down at one swallow. our bread need not ever be sour or hard to digest. what nature is to the mind she is also to the body. as she feeds my imagination, she will feed my body ; for what she says she means, and is ready to do. she is not simply beautiful to the poet s eye. not only the rainbow and sunset are beautiful, but to be fed and clothed, sheltered and warmed aright, are equally beau tiful and inspiring. there is not necessarily any gross and ugly fact which may not be eradi cated from the life of man. we should endeavor 200 golden age of achievement. [1848, practically in our lives to correct all the defects which our imagination detects. the heavens are as deep as our aspirations are high. so high as a tree aspires to grow, so high it will find an atmosphere suited to it. every man should stand for a force which is perfectly irresistible. how can any man be weak who dares to be at all? even the tenderest plants force their way up through the hardest earth, and the crev ices of rocks ; but a man no material power can resist. what a wedge, what a beetle, what a catapult, is an earnest man ! what can resist him? it is a momentous fact that a man may be good, or he may be bad ; his life may be true, or it may be false ; it may be either a shame or a glory to him. the good man builds himself up ; the bad man destroys himself. but whatever we do we must do confidently (if we are timid, let us, then, act timidly), not expecting more light, but having light enough. if we confidently expect more, then let us wait for it. but what is this which we have ? have we not already waited ? is this the beginning of time ? is there a man who does not see clearly beyond, though only a hair s breadth beyond where he at any time stands ? if one hesitates in his path, let him not pro ceed. let him respect his doubts, for doubts, jst. 30.] to harrison blake. 201 too, may have some divinity in them. that we have but little faith is not sad, but that we have but little faithfulness. by faithfulness faith is earned. when, in the progress of a life, a man swerves, though only by an angle infinitely small, from his proper and allotted path (and this is never done quite unconsciously even at first ; in fact, that was his broad and scarlet sin, ah, he knew of it more than he can tell), then the drama of his life turns to tragedy, and makes haste to its fifth act. when once we thus fall behind ourselves, there is no accounting for the obsta cles which rise up in our path, and no one is so wise as to advise, and no one so powerful as to aid us while we abide on that ground. such are cursed with duties, and the neglect of their duties. for such the decalogue was made, and other far more voluminous and terrible codes. these departures, who have not made them? for they are as faint as the parallax of a fixed star, and at the commencement we say they are nothing, that is, they originate in a kind of sleep and forgetfulness of the soul when it is naught. a man cannot be too circumspect in order to keep in the straight road, and be sure that he sees all that he may at any time see, that so he may distinguish his true path. you ask if there is no doctrine of sorrow in my philosophy. of acute sorrow i suppose that 202 golden age of achievement. [1848, i know comparatively little. my saddest and most genuine sorrows are apt to be but tran sient regrets. the place of sorrow is supplied, perchance, by a certain hard and proportionably barren indifference. i am of kin to the sod, and partake largely of its dull patience, in winter expecting the sun of spring. in my cheapest moments i am apt to think that it is not my business to be &quot; seeking the spirit,&quot; but as much its business to be seeking me. i know very well what goethe meant when he said that he never had a chagrin but he made a poem out of it. i have altogether too much patience of this kind. i am too easily contented with a slight and almost animal happiness. my happiness is a good deal like that of the woodchucks. methinks i am never quite committed, never wholly the creature of my moods, being always to some extent their critic. my only integral experience is in my vision. i see, perchance, with more integrity than i feel. but i need not tell you what manner of man i am, my virtues or my vices. you can guess if it is worth the while ; and i do not discrimi nate them well. i do not write this time at my hut in the woods. i am at present living with mrs. emer son, whose house is an old home of mine, for company during mr. emerson s absence. jet. 30.] thoreau s penetration. 203 you will perceive that i am as often talking to myself, perhaps, as speaking to you. here is a confession of faith, and a bit of self portraiture worth having ; for there is little ex cept faithful statement of the fact. its sentences are based on the questions and experiences of his correspondent ; yet they diverge into that atmosphere of humor and hyperbole so native to thoreau ; in whom was the oddest mixture of the serious and the comic, the literal and the romantic. he addressed himself also, so far as his unbending personality would allow, to the mood or the need of his correspondent ; and he had great skill in fathoming character and de scribing in a few touches the persons he encoun tered ; as may be seen in his letters to emerson, especially, who also had, and in still greater measure, this &quot; fatal gift of penetration,&quot; as he once termed it. this will be seen in the contrast of thoreau s correspondence with mr. blake, and that he was holding at the same time with horace greeley, persons radically unlike. in august, 1846, thoreau sent to greeley his essay on carlyle, asking him to find a place for it in some magazine. greeley sent it to r. w. griswold, then editing &quot; graham s maga zine &quot; in philadelphia, who accepted it and promised to pay for it, but did not publish it 204 golden age of achievement. [1848, till march and april, 1847 ; even then the promised payment was not forthcoming. on the 31st of march, 1848, a year and a half after it had been put in griswold s posses sion, thoreau wrote again to greeley, saying that no money had come to hand. at once, and at the very time when mr. blake was open ing his spiritual state to thoreau (april 3, 1848), the busy editor of the &quot; tribune &quot; re plied : &quot;it saddens and surprises me to know that your article was not paid for by graham ; and, since my honor is involved, i will see that you are paid, and that at no distant day.&quot; ac cordingly, on may 17th, he adds : &quot; to-day i have been able to lay my hand on the money due you. i made out a regular bill for the contri bution, drew a draft 011 g. e. graham for the amount, gave it to his brother in new york for collection, and received the money. i have made graham pay you seventy-five dollars, but i only send you fifty dollars,&quot; having deducted twenty-five dollars for the advance of that sum he had made a month before to thoreau for his &quot; ktaadn and the maine woods,&quot; which finally came out in &quot; sartain s union magazine &quot; of philadelphia, late in 1848. to this letter and remittance of fifty dollars thoreau replied, may 19, 1848, substantially thus : ast.30.] to horace greeley. 205 to horace greeley (at new york). concord, may 19, 1848. my friend gkeeley, i have to-day re ceived from you fifty dollars. it is five years that i have been maintaining myself entirely by manual labor, not getting a cent from any other quarter or employment. now this toil has occupied so few days, perhaps a single month, spring and fall each, that i must have had more leisure than any of my brethren for study and literature. i have done rude work of all kinds. from july, 1845, to september, 1847, i lived by myself in the forest, in a fairly good cabin, plastered and warmly covered, which i built myself. there i earned all i needed and kept to my own affairs. during that time my weekly outlay was but seven-and-twenty cents ; and i had an abundance of all sorts. unless the human race perspire more than i do, there is no occasion to live by the sweat of their brow. if men cannot get on without money (the smallest amount will suffice), the truest method of earning it is by working as a laborer at one dollar per day. you are least dependent so ; i speak as an expert, having used several kinds of labor. why should the scholar make a constant com plaint that his fate is specially hard ? we are 206 golden age of achievement. [1848, too often told of &quot;the pursuit of knowledge under difficulties,&quot; how poets depend on pa trons and starve in garrets, or at last go mad and die. let us hear the other side of the story. why should not the scholar, if he is really wiser than the multitude, do coarse work now and then ? why not let his greater wis dom enable him to do without things ? if you say the wise man is unlucky, how could you dis tinguish him from the foolishly unfortunate ? my friend, how can i thank you for your kindness ? perhaps there is a better way, i will convince you that it is felt and appreciated. here have i been sitting idle, as it were, while you have been busy in my cause, and have done so much for me. i wish you had had a better subject ; but j^ood deeds^are no less good because their object is unworthy. ours was the best way to collect money, but i should never have thought of it ; i might have waylaid the debtor perchance. even a business man might not have thought of it, and i cannot be called that, as business is under stood usually, not being familiar with the rou tine. but your way has this to commend it also, if you make the draft, you decide how much to draw. you drew just the sum suitable. the ktaadn paper can be put in the guise of letters, if it runs best so ; dating each part mt. 31.] to horace greeley. 207 on the day it describes. twenty-five dollars more for it will satisfy me ; i expected no more, and do not hold you to pay that, for you asked for something else, and there was delay in sending. so, if you use it, send me twenty five dollars now or after you sell it, as is most convenient ; but take out the expenses that i see you must have had. in such cases carriers generally get the most ; but you, as carrier here, get no money, but risk losing some, besides much of your time ; while i go away, as i must, giving you unprofitable thanks. yet trust me, my pleasure in your letter is not wholly a selfish one. may my good genius still watch over me and my added wealth ! p. s. my book grows in bulk as i work on it ; but soon i shall get leisure for those shorter articles you want, then look out. the &quot; book,&quot; of course, was the &quot; week,&quot; then about to go through the press ; the shorter articles were some that greeley suggested for the philadelphia magazines. nothing came of this, but the correspondence was kept up until 1854, and led to the partial publication of &quot; cape cod,&quot; and &quot; the yankee in canada,&quot; in the newly-launched &quot;putnam s magazine,&quot; of which gr. w. curtis was editor. but he dif fered with thoreau on a matter of style or 208 golden age of achievement. [1849, opinion (the articles appearing as anonymous, or editorial), and the author withdrew his ms. the letters of greeley in this entertaining series are all preserved ; but greeley seems to have given thoreau s away for autographs ; and the only one accessible as yet is that just para phrased. to harkison blake (at milton). concord, august 10, 1849. mr. blake, i write now chiefly to say, be fore it is too late, that i shall be glad to see you in concord, and will give you a chamber, etc., in my father s house, and as much of my poor company as you can bear. i am in too great haste this time to speak to your, or out of my, condition. i might say, you might say, comparatively speaking, be not anxious to avoid poverty. in this way the wealth of the universe may be securely invested. what a pity if we do not live this short time according to the laws of the long time, the eternal laws ! let us see that we stand erect here, and do not lie along by our whole length in the dirt. let our meanness be our footstool, not our cushion. in the midst of this labyrinth let us live a thread of life. we must act with so rapid and resistless a purpose in one direc tion, that our vices will necessarily trail behind. ast.32.] to harrison blake. 209 the nucleus of a comet is almost a star. was there ever a genuine dilemma? the laws of earth are for the feet, or inferior man ; the laws of heaven are for the head, or superior man ; the latter are the former sublimed and ex panded, even as radii from the earth s centre go on diverging into space. happy the man who observes the heavenly and the terrestrial law in just proportion ; whose every faculty, from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head, obeys the law of its level ; who neither stoops nor goes on tiptoe, but lives a balanced life, acceptable to nature and to god. these things i say ; other things i do. i am sorry to hear that you did not receive my book earlier. i addressed it and left it in mimroe s shop to be sent to you immediately, on the twenty-sixth of may, before a copy had been sold. will you remember me to mr. brown, when you see him next : he is well remembered by henry thoeeau. i still owe you a worthy answer. to harrison blake. concord, november 20, 1849. mr. blake, i have not forgotten that i am your debtor. when i read over your let 210 golden age of achievement. [1849, ters, as i have just done, i feel that i am un worthy to have received or to answer them, though they are addressed, as i would have them, to the ideal of me. it behoves me, if i would reply, to speak out of the rarest part of myself. at present i am subsisting on certain wild flavors which nature wafts to me, which unac countably sustain me, and make my apparently poor life rich. within a year my walks have extended themselves, and almost every after noon (i read, or write, or make pencils in the forenoon, and by the last means get a living for my body) i visit some new hill, or pond, or wood, many miles distant. i am astonished at the wonderful retirement through which i move, rarely meeting a man in these excursions, never seeing one similarly engaged, unless it be my companion, when i have one. i cannot help feeling that of all the human inhabitants of na ture hereabouts, only we two have leisure to admire and enjoy our inheritance. &quot; free in this world as the birds in the air, disengaged from every kind of chains, those who have practiced the yoga gather in brahma the certain fruit of their works.&quot; depend upon it, that, rude and careless as i am, i would fain practice the yoga faithfully. &quot;the yogi, absorbed in contemplation, con jet. 32.] to harrison blake. 211 tributes in his degree to creation : he breathes a divine perfume, he hears wonderful things. di vine forms traverse him without tearing him, and, united to the nature which is proper to him, he goes, he acts as animating original matter.&quot; to some extent, and at rare intervals, even i am a yogi. i know little about the affairs of turkey, but i am sure that i know something about bar berries and chestnuts, of which i have collected a store this fall. when i go to see my neigh bor, he will formally communicate to me the latest news from turkey, which he read in yesterday s mail, &quot; now turkey by this time looks determined, and lord palmer ston &quot; why, i would rather talk of the bran, which, unfortunately, was sifted out of my bread this morning, and thrown away. it is a fact which lies nearer to me. the newspaper gossip with which our hosts abuse our ears is as far from a true hospitality as the viands which they set before us. we did not need them to feed our bodies, and the news can be bought for a penny. we want the inevitable news, be it sad or cheer ing, wherefore and by what means they are ex tant this new day. if they are well, let them whistle and dance ; if they are dyspeptic, it is their duty to complain, that so they may in any case be entertaining. if words were invented 212 golden age of achievement. [1849, to conceal thought, i think that newspapers are a great improvement on a bad invention. do not suffer your life to be taken by newspapers. i thank you for your hearty appreciation of my book. i am glad to have had such a long talk with you, and that you had patience to lis ten to me to the end. i think that i had the advantage of you, for i chose my own mood, and in one sense your mood too, that is, a quiet and attentive reading mood. such ad vantage has the writer over the talker. i am sorry that you did not come to concord in your vacation. is it not time for another vacation? i am here yet, and concord is here. you will have found out by this time who it is that writes this, and will be glad to have you write to him, without his subscribing himself henky d. thokeau. p. s. it is so long since i have seen you, that, as you will perceive, i have to speak, as it were, in vacua, as if i were sounding hollowly for an echo, and it did not make much odds what kind of a sound i made. but the gods do not hear any rude or discordant sound, as we learn from the echo ; and i know that the na ture toward which i launch these sounds is so rich that it will modulate anew and wonderfully improve my rudest strain. jet. 32.] to harrison blake. 213 to harrison blake (at milton). concord, april 3, 1850. mr. blake, i thank you for your letter, and i will endeavor to record some of the thoughts which it suggests, whether pertinent or not. you speak of poverty and dependence. who are poor and dependent ? who are rich and independent ? when was it that men agreed to respect the appearance and not the reality ? why should the appearance appear ? are we well acquainted, then, with the reality? there is none who does not lie hourly in the respect he pays to false appearance. how sweet it would be to treat men and things, for an hour, for just what they are ! we wonder that the sinner does not confess his sin. when we are weary with travel, we lay down our load and rest by the wayside. so, when we are weary with the burden of life, why do we not lay down this load of falsehoods which we have volun teered to sustain, and be refreshed as never mortal was ? let the beautiful laws prevail. let us not weary ourselves by resisting them. when we would rest our bodies we cease to support them ; we recline on the lap of earth. so, when we would rest our spirits, we must recline on the great spirit. let things alone ; let them weigh what they will ; let them soar or 214 golden age of achievement. [1850, fall. to succeed in letting only one thing alone in a winter morning, if it be only one poor frozen-thawed apple that hangs on a tree, what a glorious achievement ! methinks it lightens through the dusky universe. what an infinite wealth we have discovered ! god reigns, i. e., when we take a liberal view, when a liberal view is presented us. let god alone if need be. methinks, if i loved him more, i should keep him, i should keep myself rather, at a more respectful dis tance. it is not when i am going to meet him, but when i am just turning away and leaving him alone, that i discover that god is. i say, god. i am not sure that that is the name. you will know whom i mean. if for a moment we make way with our petty selves, wish no ill to anything, apprehend no ill, cease to be but as the crystal which reflects a ray, what shall we not reflect ! what a universe will appear crystallized and radiant around us ! i should say, let the muse lead the muse, let the understanding lead the understanding, though in any case it is the farthest forward which leads them both. if the muse accompany, she is no muse, but an amusement. the muse should lead like a star which is very far off ; but that does not imply that we are to follow ^t.32.] to harrison blake. 215 foolishly, falling into sloughs and over preci pices, for it is not foolishness, but understand ing, which is to follow, which the muse is ap pointed to lead, as a fit guide of a fit follower. will you live ? or will you be embalmed ? will you live, though it be astride of a sun beam ; or will you repose safely in the cata combs for a thousand years ? in the former case, the worst accident that can happen is that you may break your neck. will you break your heart, your soul, to save your neck ? necks and pipe-stems are fated to be broken. men make a great ado about the folly of demand ing too much of life (or of eternity ?), and of endeavoring to live according to that demand. it is much ado about nothing. no harm ever came from that quarter. i am not afraid that i shall exaggerate the value and significance of life, but that i shall not be up to the occasion which it is. i shall be sorry to remember that i was there, but noticed nothing remarkable, not so much as a prince in disguise; lived in the golden age a hired man ; visited olym pus even, but fell asleep after dinner, and did not hear the conversation of the gods. i lived in judaea eighteen hundred years ago, but i never knew that there was such a one as christ among my contemporaries ! if there is any thing more glorious than a congress of men 216 golden age of achievement. [1850, a-framing or amending of a constitution going on, which i suspect there is, i desire to see the morning papers. i am greedy of the faintest rumor, though it were got by listening at the key-hole. i will dissipate myself in that direc tion. i am glad to know that you find what i have said on friendship worthy of attention. i wish i could have the benefit of your criticism; it would be a rare help to me. will you not communicate it ? to harrison blake (at milton). concord, may 28, 1850. mr. blake, &quot;i never found any content ment in the life which the newspapers record,&quot; anything of more value than the cent which they cost. contentment in being covered with dust an inch deep ! we who walk the streets, and hold time together, are but the refuse of ourselves, and that life is for the shells of us, of our body and our mind, for our scurf, a thoroughly scurvy life. it is coffee made of coffee-grounds the twentieth time, which was only coffee the first time, while the living water leaps and sparkles by our doors. i know some who, in their charity, give their coffee grounds to the poor ! we, demanding news, and putting up with such news ! is it a new jst. 32.] to harrison blake. 217 convenience, or a new accident, or, rather, a new perception of the truth that we want ! you say that &quot; the serene hours in which friendship, books, nature, thought, seem alone primary considerations, visit you but faintly.&quot; is not the attitude of expectation somewhat divine ? a sort of home made divineness ? does it not compel a kind of sphere-music to attend on it ? and do not its satisfactions merge at length, by insensible degrees, in the enjoyment of the thing expected ? what if i should forget to write about my not writing ? it is not worth the while to make that a theme. it is as if i had written every day. it is as if i had never written before. i wonder that you think so much about it, for not writing is the most like writing, in my case, of anything i know. why will you not relate to me your dream ? that would be to realize it somewhat. you tell me that you dream, but not what you dream. i can guess what comes to pass. so do the frogs dream. would that i knew what. i have never found out whether they are awake or asleep, whether it is day or night with them. i am preaching, mind you, to bare walls, that is, to myself ; and if you have chanced to come in and occupy a pew, do not think that my re marks are directed at you particularly, and so 218 golden age of achievement, [1850, slam the seat in disgust. this discourse was written long before these exciting times. some absorbing employment on your higher ground, your upland farm, whither no cart path leads, but where you mount alone with your hoe, where the life everlasting grows; there you raise a crop which needs not to be brought down into the valley to a market ; which you barter for heavenly products. do you separate distinctly enough the support of your body, from that of your essence ? by how distinct a course commonly are these two ends attained! not that they should not be attained by one and the same means, that, in deed, is the rarest success, but there is no half and half about it. i shall be glad to read my lecture to a small audience in worcester such as you describe, and will only require that my expenses be paid. if only the parlor be large enough for an echo, and the audience will embarrass themselves with hearing as much as the lecturer would otherwise embarrass himself with reading. but i warn you that this is no better calculated for a pro miscuous audience than the last two which i read to you. it requires, in every sense, a concor dant audience. i will come on next saturday and spend sun day with you if you wish it. say so if you do. mt. 32.] to harrison blake. 219 &quot; drink deep, or taste not the pierian spring 1 .&quot; be not deterred by melancholy on the path which leads to immortal health and joy. when they tasted of the water of the river over which they were to go, they thought it tasted a little bitterish to the palate, but it proved sweeter when it was down. h. d. t. note. the &quot;companion&quot; of his walks, mentioned by thoreau in november, 1849, was ellery channing ; the neigh bor who insisted on talkingof turkey was perhaps emerson, who, after his visit to europe in 1848, was more interested in its politics than before. pencil-makingwas thoreau s manual work for many years ; and it must have been about this time (1849-50) that he &quot; had occasion to go to new york to peddle some pencils,&quot; as he says in his journal for november 20, 1853. he adds, &quot; i was obliged to manufacture one thousand dollars worth of pencils, and slowly dispose of, and finally sacrifice them, in order to pay an assumed debt of one hundred dol lars.&quot; this debt was perhaps for the printing of the week, published in 1849, and paid for in 1853. thoreau s pencils have sold (in 1893) for 25 cents each. for other facts concern ing his debt to james munroe, see sanborn s thoreau, pp. 230, 235. iii. friends and followers. to r. w. emerson 1 (at concord). fire island beach, thursday morning-, july 25, 1850. dear friend, i am writing this at the house of smith oakes, within one mile of the wreck. he is the one who rendered most assist ance. william h. charming came down with me, but i have not seen arthur fuller, nor gree ley, nor marcus spring. spring and charles sumner were here yesterday, but left soon. mr. oakes and wife tell me (all the survivors came, or were brought, directly to their house) that the ship struck at ten minutes after four a. m., and all hands, being mostly in their mghtclothes, made haste to the forecastle, the water coming in at once. there they remained ; the passengers in the forecastle, the crew above it, doing what 1 it will readily be seen that this letter relates to the ship wreck on fire island, near new york, in which margaret ful ler, countess ossoli, with her husband and child, was lost. a letter with no date of the year, but probably written february 15, 1840, from emerson to thoreau, represents them both as takingmuch trouble about a house in concord for mrs. fuller, the mother of margaret, who had just sold her groton house, and wished to live with her daughter near emerson. 2et.33.] to r. w. emerson. 221 they could. every wave lifted the forecastle roof and washed over those within. the first man got ashore at nine ; many from nine to noon. at flood tide, about half past three o clock, when the ship broke up entirely, they came out of the forecastle, and margaret sat with her back to the foremast, with her hands on her knees, her husband and child already drowned. a great wave came and washed her aft. the steward (?) had just before taken her child and started for shore. both were drowned. the broken desk, in a bag, containing no very valuable papers ; a large black leather trunk, with an upper and under compartment, the upper holding books and papers ; a carpet-bag, probably ossoli s, and one of his shoes (?) are all the ossoli effects known to have been found. four bodies remain to be found : the two ossolis, horace sumner, and a sailor. i have visited the child s grave. its body will probably be taken away to-day. the wreck is to be sold at auction, excepting the hull, to-day. the mortar would not go off. mrs. hasty, the captain s wife, told mrs. oakes that she and margaret divided their money, and tied up the halves in handkerchiefs around their persons; that margaret took sixty or seventy dollars. mrs. hasty, who can tell all about margaret up to eleven o clock on friday, is said to be going 222 friends and followers. [1850, to portland, new england, to-day. she and mrs. fuller must, and probably will, come to gether. the cook, the last to leave, and the steward (?) will know the rest. i shall try to see them. in the mean while i shall do what i can to recover property and obtain particulars hereabouts. william h. charming did i write it ? has come with me. arthur fuller 1 has this moment reached the house. he reached the beach last night. we got here yesterday noon. a good part of the wreck still holds to gether where she struck, and something may come ashore with her fragments. the last body was found on tuesday, three miles west. mrs. oakes dried the papers which were in the trunk, and she says they appeared to be of various kinds. &quot; would they cover that table ? &quot; (a small round one). &quot; they would if spread out. some were tied up. there were twenty or thirty books &quot; in the same half of the trunk. another smaller trunk, empty, came ashore, but there was no mark on it.&quot; she speaks of paulina as if she might have been a sort of nurse to the child. i expect to go to patchogue, whence the pilferers must have chiefly come, and advertise, etc. 1 rev. a. b. fuller, then of manchester, n. h., afterward of boston ; a brother of margaret, who died a chaplain in the civil war. jet. 33.] to harrison blake. 223 to harrison blake (ix milton). concord, august 9, 1850. mk. blake, i received your letter just as i was rushing to fire island beach to recover what remained of margaret fuller, and read it on the way. that event and its train, as much as anything, have prevented my answering it be fore. it is wisest to speak when you are spoken to. i will now endeavor to reply, at the risk of having nothing to say. i find that actual events, notwithstanding the singular prominence which we all allow them, are far less real than the creations of my imagina tion. they are truly visionary and insignificant, all that we commonly call life and death, arid affect me less than my dreams. this petty stream which from time to time swells and car ries away the mills and bridges of our habitual life, and that mightier stream or ocean on which we securely float, what makes the difference between them ? i have in my pocket a button which i ripped off the coat of the marquis of ossoli, on the seashore, the other day. held up, it intercepts the light, an actual button, and yet all the life it is connected with is less substantial to me, and interests me less, than my faintest dream. our thoughts are the epochs in our lives : all else is but as a journal of the winds that blew while we were here. 224 friends and followers. [1850, i say to myself, do a little more of that work which you have confessed to be good. you are neither satisfied nor dissatisfied with yourself, without reason. have you not a thinking fac ulty of inestimable value ? if there is an ex periment which you would like to try, try it. do not entertain doubts if they are not agreeable to you. remember that you need not eat unless you are hungry. do not read the newspapers. improve every opportunity to be melancholy. as for health, consider yourself well. do not en gage to find things as you think they are. do what nobody else can do for you. omit to do anything else. it is not easy to make our lives respectable by any course of activity. we must repeatedly withdraw into our shells of thought, like the tortoise, somewhat helplessly ; yet there is more than philosophy in that. do not waste any reverence on my attitude. i merely manage to sit up where i have dropped. i am sure that my acquaintances mistake me. they ask my advice on high matters, but they do not know even how poorly on t i am for hats and shoes. i have hardly a shift. just as shabby as i am in my outward apparel, ay, and more lamentably shabby, am i in my inward substance. if i should turn myself inside out, my rags and meanness would indeed appear. i am something to him that made me, undoubt j5t.33.] to harrison blake. 225 edly, but not much to any other that he has made. would it not be worth while to discover na ture in milton ? be native to the universe ? i, too, love concord best, but i am glad when i discover, in oceans and wildernesses far away, the material of a million concords : indeed, i am lost, unless i discover them. i see less differ ence between a city and a swamp than formerly. it is a swamp, however, too dismal and dreary even for me, and i should be glad if there were fewer owls, and frogs, and mosquitoes in it. i prefer ever a more cultivated place, free from miasma and crocodiles. i am so sophisticated, and i will take my choice. as for missing friends, what if we do miss one another? have we not agreed on a rendez vous ? while each wanders his own way through the wood, without anxiety, ay, with serene joy, though it be on his hands and knees, over rocks and fallen trees, he cannot but be in the right way. there is no wrong way to him. how can he be said to miss his friend, whom the fruits still nourish and the elements sustain ? a man who missed his friend at a turn, went on buoyantly, dividing the friendly air, and hum ming a tune to himself, ever and anon kneeling with delight to study each little lichen in his path, and scarcely made three miles a day for 226 friends and followers. [1850, friendship. as for conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, i do not think much of that. let not your right hand know what your left hand does in that line of busi ness. it will prove a failure. just as success fully can you walk against a sharp steel edge which divides you cleanly right and left. do you wish to try your ability to resist disten sion ? it is a greater strain than any soul can long endure. when you get god to pulling one way, and the devil the other, each having his feet well braced, to say nothing of the con science sawing transversely, almost any tim ber will give way. i do not dare invite you earnestly to come to concord, because i know too well that the ber ries are not thick in my fields, and we should have to take it out in viewing the landscape. but come, on every account, and we will see one another. no letters of the year 1851 have been found by me. on the 27th of december, 1850, mr. cabot wrote to say that the boston society of natural history, of which he was secretary, had elected thoreau a corresponding member, &quot; with all the honores, privilegia, etc., ad gradum tuum pertinentia, without the formality of paying any entrance fee, or annual subscription. your du sst.34.] to t. w. higginson. 227 ties in return are to advance the interests of the society by communications or otherwise, as shall seem good.&quot; this is believed to be the only learned body which honored itself by electing thoreau. the immediate occasion of this elec tion was the present, by thoreau, to the society, of a fine specimen of the american goshawk, caught or shot by jacob farmer, which mr. cabot acknowledged, december 18, 1849, say ing : &quot;it was first described by wilson ; lately audubon has identified it with the european goshawk, thereby committing a very flagrant blunder. it is usually a very rare species with us. the european bird is used in hawking ; and doubtless ours would be equally game. if mr. farmer skins him now, he will have to take second cut ; for his skin is already off and stuffed, his remains dissected, measured, and deposited in alcohol.&quot; to t. w. higginson (at boston). concord, april 2-3, 1852. dear sir, i do not see that i can refuse to read another lecture, but what makes me hesi tate is the fear that i have not another available which will entertain a large audience, though i have thoughts to offer which i think will be quite as worthy of their attention. however, i will try ; for the prospect of earning a few dol 228 friends and followers. [1852, lars is alluring. as far as i can foresee, my subject would be &quot;reality&quot; rather transcenden tally treated. it lies still in &quot; walden, or life in the woods.&quot; since you are kind enough to undertake the arrangements, i will leave it to you to name an evening of next week, decide on the most suitable room, and advertise, if this is not taking you too literally at your word. if you still think it worth the while to attend to this, will you let me know as soon as may be what evening will be most convenient? i cer tainly do not feel prepared to offer myself as a lecturer to the boston public, and hardly know whether more to dread a small audience or a large one. nevertheless, i will repress this squeamishness, and propose no alteration in your arrangements. i shall be glad to accept your invitation to tea. this lecture was given, says colonel higgin son, &quot; at the mechanics apprentices library in boston, with the snow outside, and the young boys rustling their newspapers among the al cotts and blakes.&quot; or, possibly, this remark may apply to a former lecture in the same year, which was that in which thoreau first lectured habitually away from concord. he commenced by accepting an invitation to speak at leyden hall, in plymouth, where his friends the wat jet. 34.] to marston watson. 229 / sons had organized sunday services, that the transcendentalists and abolitionists might have a chance to be heard at a time when they were generally excluded from the popular &quot; lyceum courses &quot; throughout new england. mr. b. m. watson says : &quot; i have found two letters from thoreau in answer to my invitation in 1852 to address our congregation at leydeii hall on sunday morn ings, an enterprise i undertook about that time. i find among the distinguished men who addressed us the names of thoreau, emerson, ellery channing, alcott, higginson, remond, s. johnson, f. j. appleton, edmund quincy, garrison, phillips, j. p. lesley, shackford, w. f. channing, n. h. whiting, adiii ballou, abby k. foster and her husband, j. t. sargent, t. t. stone, jones very, wasson, hurlbut, f. w. holland, and scherb ; so you may depend we had some fun.&quot; these letters were mere notes. the first, dated february 17, 1852, says : &quot; i have not yet seen mr. channing, though i believe he is in town, having decided to come to plymouth myself, but i will let him know that he is expected. mr. daniel foster wishes me to say that he accepts your invitation, and that he would like to come sunday after next. i will take the saturday afternoon train. i shall be glad to 230 friends and followers. [1852, get a winter view of plymouth harbor, and see where your garden lies under the snow.&quot; the second letter follows : to marston watson (at plymouth). concord, december 31, 1852. mr. watson, i would be glad to visit plym outh again, but at present i have nothing to read which is not severely heathenish, or at least secular, which the dictionary defines as &quot; re lating to affairs of the present world, not holy,&quot; though not necessarily unholy ; nor have i any leisure to prepare it. my writing at present is profane, yet in a good sense, and, as it were, sacredly, i may say ; for, finding the air of the temple too close, i sat outside. don t think i say this to get off ; no, no ! it will not do to read such things to hungry ears. &quot; if they ask for bread, will you give them a stone ? &quot; when i have something of the right kind, depend upon it i will let you know. up to 1848, when he was invited to lecture before the salem lyceum by nathaniel haw thorne, then its secretary, thoreau seems to have spoken publicly very little except in concord ; nor did he extend the circuit of his lectures much until his two books had made him known as a thinker. there was little to attract a popular jst.35.] lyceum lectures. 231 audience in his manner or his matter ; but it was the era of lectures, and if one could once gain admission to the circle of &quot; lyceum lecturers,&quot; it did not so much matter what he said ; a lecture was a lecture, as a sermon was a sermon, good, bad, or indifferent. but it was common to ex clude the anti-slavery speakers from the lyceums, even those of more eloquence than thoreau ; this led to invitations from the small band of reformers scattered about new england and new york, so that the most unlikely of platform speakers (ellery channing, for example) some times gave lectures at plymouth, greenfield, newburyport, or elsewhere. the present fash ion of parlor lectures had not come in ; yet at worcester thoreau s friends early organized for him something of that kind, as his letters to mr. blake show. in default of an audience of num bers, thoreau fell into the habit of lecturing in his letters to this friend ; the most marked in stance being the thoughtful essay on love and chastity which makes the bulk of his epistle dated september, 1852. like most of his seri ous writing, this was made up from his daily journal, and hardly comes under the head of &quot; familiar letters ; &quot; the didactic purpose is rather too apparent. yet it cannot be spared from any collection of his epistles, none of which flowed more directly from the quickened moral nature of the man. 232 friends and followers. [1852, to sophia thoreau (at bangor). concord, july 13, 1852. dear sophia, i am a miserable letter writer, but perhaps if i should say this at length and with sufficient emphasis and regret it would make a letter. i am sorry that nothing tran spires here of much moment ; or, i should rather say, that i am so slackened and rusty, like the telegraph wire this season, that no wind that blows can extract music from me. i am not on the trail of any elephants or mas todons, but have succeeded in trapping only a few ridiculous mice, which cannot feed my im agination. i have become sadly scientific. i would rather come upon the vast valley-like &quot; spoor &quot; only of some celestial beast which this world s woods can no longer sustain, than spring my net over a bushel of moles. you must do better in those woods where you are. you must have some adventures to relate and repeat for years to come, which will eclipse even mother s voyage to goldsborough and sissiboo. they say that mr. pierce, the presidential candidate, was in town last 5th of july, visiting hawthorne, whose college chum he was ; and that hawthorne is writing a life of him, for electioneering purposes. concord is just as idiotic as ever in relation jet. 35.] to sophia thoreau. 233 to the spirits and their knockings. most people here believe in a spiritual world which no respec table junk bottle, which had not met with a slip, would condescend to contain even a portion of for a moment, whose atmosphere would ex tinguish a candle let down into it, like a well that wants airing ; in spirits which the very bull frogs in our meadows would blackball. their evil genius is seeing how low it can degrade them. the hooting of owls, the croaking of frogs, is celestial wisdom in comparison. if i could be brought to believe in the things which they believe, i should make haste to get rid of my certificate of stock in this and the next world s enterprises, and buy a share in the first immediate annihilation company that offered. i would exchange my immortality for a glass of small beer this hot weather. where are the heathen ? was there ever any superstition be fore ? and yet i suppose there may be a vessel this very moment setting sail from the coast of north america to that of africa with a mission ary on board ! consider the dawn and the sun rise, the rainbow and the evening, the words of christ and the aspiration of all the saints ! hear music ! see, smell, taste, feel, hear, any thing, and then hear these idiots, inspired by the cracking of a restless board, humbly asking, &quot; please, spirit, if you cannot answer by knocks, answer by tips of the table.&quot; !!!!!!! 234 friends and followers. [1852, to harrison blake (at worcester). concord, july 21, 1852. me. blake, i am too stupidly well these days to write to you. my life is almost altogether outward, all shell and no tender kernel ; so that i fear the report of it would be only a nut for you to crack, with no meat in it for you to eat. moreover, you have not cornered me up, and i enjoy such large liberty in writing to you, that i feel as vague as the air. however, i rejoice to hear that you have attended so patiently to anything which i have said heretofore, and have detected any truth in it. it encourages me to say more, not in this letter, i fear, but in some book which i may write one day. i am glad to know that i am as much to any mortal as a persistent and consistent scarecrow is to a farmer, such a bundle of straw in a man s clothing as i am, with a few bits of tin to sparkle in the sun dangling about me, as if i were hard at work there in the field. however, if this kind of life saves any man s corn, why, he is the gainer. i am not afraid that you will flatter me as long as you know what i am, as well as what i think, or aim to be, and distinguish between these two, for then it will commonly happen that if you praise the last you will condemn the first. i remember that walk to asnebumskit very 2et. 35.] to harrison blake. 235 well, a fit place to go to on a sunday ; one of the true temples of the earth. a temple, you know, was anciently &quot; an open place without a roof,&quot; whose walls served merely to shut out the world and direct the mind toward heaven ; but a modern meeting-house shuts out the heavens, while it crowds the world into still closer quar ters. best of all is it when, as on a mountain top, you have for all walls your own elevation and deeps of surrounding ether. the partridge berries, watered with mountain dews which are gathered there, are more memorable to me than the words which i last heard from the pulpit at least ; and for my part, i would rather look toward rutland than jerusalem. rutland, modern town, land of ruts, trivial and worn, not too sacred, with no holy sepul chre, but profane green fields and dusty roads, and opportunity to live as holy a life as you can, where the sacredness, if there is any, is all in yourself and not in the place. i fear that your worcester people do not often enough go to the hilltops, though, as i am told, the springs lie nearer to the surface on your hills than in your valleys. they have the repu tation of being free-soilers. 1 do they insist on a free atmosphere, too, that is, on freedom for 1 the name of a political party, afterwards called &quot; repub licans.&quot; 236 friends and followers. [1852, the head or brain as well as the feet ? if i were consciously to join any party, it would be that which is the most free to entertain thought. all the world complain nowadays of a press of trivial duties and engagements, which pre vents their employing themselves on some higher ground they know of ; but, undoubtedly, if they were made of the right stuff to work on that higher ground, provided they were released from all those engagements, they would now at once fulfill the superior engagement, and neglect all the rest, as naturally as they breathe. they would never be caught saying that they had no time for this, when the dullest man knows that this is all that he has time for. no man who acts from a sense of duty ever puts the lesser duty above the greater. no man has the desire and the ability to work 011 high things, but he has also the ability to build himself a high staging. as for passing tkrouc/k any great and glo rious experience, and rising above it, as an eagle might fly athwart the evening sky to rise into still brighter and fairer regions of the heavens, i cannot say that i ever sailed so creditably ; but my bark ever seemed thwarted by some side wind, and went off over the edge, and now only occasionally tacks back toward the centre of that sea again. i have outgrown nothing good, but, i do not fear to say, fallen behind by whole con mt.35.] to harrison blake. 237 tinents of virtue, which should have been passed as islands in my course ; but i trust what else can i trust? that, with a stiff wind, some fri day, when i have thrown some of my cargo overboard, i may make up for all that distance lost. perchance the time will come when we shall not be content to go back and forth upon a raft to some huge homeric or shakespearean india man that lies upon the reef, but build a bark out of that wreck and others that are buried in the sands of this desolate island, and such new timber as may be required, in which to sail away to whole new worlds of light and life, where our friends are. write again. there is one respect in which you did not finish your letter : you did not write it with ink, and it is not so good, therefore, against or for you in the eye of the law, nor in the eye of h. d. t. to harrison blake (at worcester). september, 1852. mr. blake, here come the sentences which i promised you. you may keep them, if you will regard and use them as the disconnected fragments of what i may find to be a completer essay, on looking over my journal, at last, and may claim again. 238 friends and followers. [1852, i send you the thoughts on chastity and sen suality with diffidence and shame, not knowing how far i speak to the condition of men gener ally, or how far i betray my peculiar defects. pray enlighten me on this point if you can. love. what the essential difference between man and woman is, that they should be thus attracted to one another, no one has satisfactorily an swered. perhaps we must acknowledge the just ness of the distinction which assigns to man the sphere of wisdom, and to woman that of love, though neither belongs exclusively to either. man is continually saying to woman, why will you not be more wise ? woman is continually saying to man, why will you not be more lov ing ? it is not in their wills to be wise or to be loving ; but, unless each is both wise and loving, there can be neither wisdom nor love. all transcendent goodness is one, though appreciated in different ways, or by different senses. in beauty we see it, in music we hear it, in fragrance we scent it, in the palatable the pure palate tastes it, and in rare health the whole body feels it. the variety is in the sur face or manifestation ; but the radical identity we fail to express. the lover sees in the glance of his beloved the same beauty that in the sun jbt.so.] love and friendship. 239 set paints the western skies. it is the same dai mon, here lurking under a human eyelid, and there under the closing eyelids of the day. here, in small compass, is the ancient and natu ral beauty of evening and morning. what lov ing astronomer has ever fathomed the ethereal depths of the eye ? the maiden conceals a fairer flower and sweeter fruit than any calyx in the field ; and, if she goes with averted face, confiding in her purity and high resolves, she will make the heav ens retrospective, and all nature humbly con fess its queen. under the influence of this sentiment, man is a string of an ^eolian harp, which vibrates with the zephyrs of the eternal morning. there is at first thought something trivial in the commonness of love. so many indian youths and maidens along these banks have in ages past yielded to the influence of this great civilizer. nevertheless, this generation is not disgusted nor discouraged, for love is no indi vidual s experience ; and though we are imper fect mediums, it does not partake of our imper fection ; though we are finite, it is infinite and eternal ; and the same divine influence broods over these banks, whatever race may inhabit them, and perchance still would, even if the hu man race did not dwell here. 240 friends and followers. [1852, perhaps an instinct survives through the in tensest actual love, which prevents entire aban donment and devotion, and makes the most ar dent lover a little reserved. it is the anticipation of change. for the most ardent lover is not the less practically wise, and seeks a love which will last forever. considering how few poetical friendships there are, it is remarkable that so many are married. it would seem as if men yielded too easy an obedience to nature without consulting their ge nius. one may be drunk with love without being any nearer to finding his mate. there is more of good nature than of good sense at the bottom of most marriages. but the good nature must have the counsel of the good spirit or in telligence. if common sense had been consulted, how many marriages would never have taken place ; if uncommon or divine sense, how few marriages such as we witness would ever have taken place! our love may be ascending or descending. what is its character, if it may be said of it, &quot; we must respect the souls above but only those below we love.&quot; love is a severe critic. hate can pardon more than love. they who aspire to love worthily, subject themselves to an ordeal more rigid than any other. j5t.35.] love is not blind. 241 is your friend such a one that an increase of worth on your part will rarely make her more your friend? is she retained is she attracted by more nobleness in you, by more of that virtue which is peculiarly yours ; or is she indif ferent and blind to that ? is she to be flattered and won by your meeting her on any other than the ascending path? then duty requires that you separate from her. love must be as much a light as a flame. where there is not discernment, the behavior even of the purest soul may in effect amount to coarseness. a man of fine perceptions is more truly femi nine than a merely sentimental woman. the heart is blind; but love is not blind. none of the gods is so discriminating. in love and friendship the imagination is as much exercised as the heart; and if either is outraged the other will be estranged. it is com monly the imagination which is wounded first, rather than the heart, it is so much the more sensitive. comparatively, we can excuse any offense against the heart, but not against the imagina tion. the imagination knows nothing escapes its glance from out its eyry and it controls the breast. my heart may still yearn toward the valley, but my imagination will not permit 242 friends and followers. [1852, me to jump off the precipice that debars me from it, for it is wounded, its wings are clipt, and it cannot fly, even descendingly. our &quot; blundering hearts ! &quot; some poet says. the im agination never forgets ; it is a re-membering. it is not foundationless, but most reasonable, and it alone uses all the knowledge of the intellect. love is the profoundest of secrets. divulged, even to the beloved, it is no longer love. as if it were merely i that loved you. when love ceases, then it is divulged. in our intercourse with one we love, we wish to have answered those questions at the end of which we do not raise our voice ; against which we put no interrogation-mark, answered with the same unfailing, universal aim toward every point of the compass. i require that thou knowest everything with out being told anything. i parted from my be loved because there was one thing which i had to tell her. she questioned me. she should have known all by sympathy. that i had to tell it her was the difference between us, the misunderstanding. a lover never hears anything that is told, for that is commonly either false or stale ; but he hears things taking place, as the sentinels heard trenck 1 mining in the ground, and thought it was moles. 1 baron trenck, the famous prisoner. j5t.35.] love and hate. 243 the relation may be profaned in many ways. the parties may not regard it with equal sacred ness. what if the lover should learn that his beloved dealt in incanta-tions and philters! what if he should hear that she consulted a clairvoyant ! the spell would be instantly broken. if to chaffer and higgle are bad in trade, they are much worse in love. it demands directness as of an arrow. there is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone. the lover wants no partiality. he says, be so kind as to be just. canst thou love with thy mind, and reason with thy heart ? canst thou be kind, and from thy darling part ? can st thou range earth, sea, and air, and so meet me everywhere ? through all events i will pursue thee, through all persons i will woo thee. i need thy hate as much as thy love. thou wilt not repel me entirely when thou repellest what is evil in me. indeed, indeed, i cannot tell, though i ponder on it well, which were easier to state, all my love or all my hate. 244 friends and followers. [1852, surely, surely, thou wilt trust me when i say thou doth disgust me. o, i hate thee with a hate that would fain annihilate ; yet, sometimes, against my will, my dear friend, i love thee still. it were treason to our love, and a sin to god above, one iota to abate of a pure, impartial hate. it is not enough that we are truthful ; we must cherish and carry out high purposes to be truthful about. it must be rare, indeed, that we meet with one to whom we are prepared to be quite ideally related, as she to us. we should have no re serve ; we should give the whole of ourselves to that society ; we should have no duty aside from that. one who could bear to be so wonderfully and beautifully exaggerated every day. i would take my friend out of her low self and set her higher, infinitely higher, and there know her. but, commonly, men are as much afraid of love as of hate. they have lower engagements. they have near ends to serve. they have not imagination enough to be thus employed about a human being, but must be coopering a barrel, forsooth. what a difference, whether, in all your walks, you meet only strangers, or in one house is one who knows you, and whom you know. to have xt. 35.] to harrison blake. 245 a brother or a sister ! to have a gold mine on your farm ! to find diamonds in the gravel heaps before your door ! how rare these things are ! to share the day with you, to people the earth. whether to have a god or a goddess for companion in your walks, or to walk alone with hinds and villains and carles. would not a friend enhance the beauty of the landscape as much as a deer or hare ? everything would ac knowledge and serve such a relation ; the corn in the field, and the cranberries in the meadow. the flowers would bloom, and the birds sing, with a new impulse. there would be more fair days in the year. the object of love expands and grows before us to eternity, until it includes all that is lovely, and we become all that can love. chastity and sensuality. the subject of sex is a remarkable one, since, though its phenomena concern us so much, both directly and indirectly, and, sooner or later, it occupies the thoughts of all, yet all mankind, as it were, agree to be silent about it, at least the sexes commonly one to another. one of the most interesting of all human facts is veiled more completely than any mystery. it is treated with such secrecy and awe as surely do not go to any religion. i believe that it is unusual even 246 friends and followers. [1852, for the most intimate friends to communicate the pleasures and anxieties connected with this fact, much as the external affair of love, its comings and goings, are bruited. the shakers do not exaggerate it so much by their manner of speaking of it, as all mankind by their man ner of keeping silence about it. not that men should speak on this or any subject without having anything worthy to say ; but it is plain that the education of man has hardly com menced, there is so little genuine intercom munication. in a pure society, the subject of marriage would not be so often avoided, from shame and not from reverence, winked out of sight, and hinted at only ; but treated naturally and simply, perhaps simply avoided, like the kin dred mysteries. if it cannot be spoken of for shame, how can it be acted of ? but, doubtless, there is far more purity, as well as more im purity, than is apparent. men commonly couple with their idea of mar riage a slight degree at least of sensuality ; but every lover, the world over, believes in its incon ceivable purity. if it is the result of a pure love, there can be nothing sensual in marriage. chastity is some thing positive, not negative. it is the virtue of the married especially. all lusts or base pleas mi. 35.] the deeds of love. 247 ures must give place to loftier delights. they who meet as superior beings cannot perform the deeds of inferior ones. the deeds of love are less questionable than any action of an individ ual can be, for, it being founded on the rarest mutual respect, the parties incessantly stimulate each other to a loftier and purer life, and the act in which they are associated must be pure and noble indeed, for innocence and purity can have no equal. in this relation we deal with one whom we respect more religiously even than we respect our better selves, and we shall neces sarily conduct as in the presence of god. what presence can be more awful to the lover than the presence of his beloved ? if you seek the warmth even of affection from a similar motive to that from which cats and dogs and slothful persons hug the fire, be cause your temperature is low through sloth, you are on the downward road, and it is but to plunge yet deeper into sloth. better the cold affection of the sun, reflected from fields of ice and snow, or his warmth in some still, wintry dell. the warmth of celestial love does not relax, but nerves and braces its enjoyer. warm your body by healthful exercise, not by cowering over a stove. warm your spirit by performing independently noble deeds, not by ignobly seek ing the sympathy of your fellows who are no 248 friends and followers. [1852, better than yourself. a man s social and spirit ual discipline must answer to his corporeal. he must lean on a friend who has a hard breast, as he would lie on a hard bed. he must drink cold water for his only beverage. so he must not hear sweetened and colored words, but pure and refreshing truths. he must daily bathe in truth cold as spring water, not warmed by the sympa thy of friends. ^ can love be in aught allied to dissipation? let us love by refusing, not accepting one an other. love and lust are far asunder. the one is good, the other bad. when the affectionate sympathize by their higher natures, there is love ; but there is danger that they will sympa thize by their lower natures, and then there is lust. it is not necessary that this be deliberate, hardly even conscious ; but, in the close contact of affection, there is danger that we may stain and pollute one another ; for we cannot embrace but with an entire embrace. we must love our friend so much that she shall be associated with our purest and holiest thoughts alone. when there is impurity, we have &quot;descended to meet,&quot; though we knew it not. the luxury of affection, there s the danger. there must be some nerve and heroism in our love, as of a winter morning. in the religion of asr.35.] virginity and marriage. 249 all nations a purity is hinted at, which, i fear, men never attain to. we may love and not elevate one another. the love that takes us as it finds us degrades us. what watch we must keep over the fairest and purest of our affec tions, lest there be some taint about them ! may we so love as never to have occasion to repent of our love ! there is to be attributed to sensuality the loss to language of how many pregnant symbols ! flowers, which, by their infinite hues and fra grance, celebrate the marriage of the plants, are intended for a symbol of the open and unsus pected beauty of all true marriage, when man s flowering season arrives. virginity, too, is a budding flower, and by an impure marriage the virgin is deflowered. who ever loves flowers, loves virgins and chastity. love and lust are as far asunder as a flower garden is from a brothel. j. biberg, in the &quot; amoenitates botanies,&quot; edited by linnaeus, observes (i translate from the latin) : &quot; the organs of generation, which, in the animal kingdom, are for the most part concealed by nature, as if they were to be ashamed of, in the vegetable kingdom are ex posed to the eyes of all ; and, when the nuptials of plants are celebrated, it is wonderful what delight they afford to the beholder, refreshing 250 friends and followers. [1852, the senses with the most agreeable color and the sweetest odor ; and, at the same time, bees and other insects, not to mention the humming-bird, extract honey from their nectaries, and gather wax from their effete pollen.&quot; linnaeus himself calls the calyx the tlialamus, or bridal chamber ; and the corolla the aulaeum, or tapestry of it, and proceeds to explain thus every part of the flower. who knows but evil spirits might corrupt the flowers themselves, rob them of their fragrance and their fair hues, and turn their marriage into a secret shame and defilement ? already they are of various qualities, and there is one whose nuptials fill the lowlands in june with the odor of carrion. the intercourse of the sexes, i have dreamed, is incredibly beautiful, too fair to be remem bered. i have had thoughts about it, but they are among the most fleeting and irrecoverable in my experience. it is strange that men will talk of miracles, revelation, inspiration, and the like, as things past, while love remains. a true marriage will differ in no wise from illumination. in all perception of the truth there is a divine ecstasy, an inexpressible delir ium of joy, as when a youth embraces his be trothed virgin. the ultimate delights of a true marriage are one with this. an:. 35.] to harrison blake. 251 no wonder that, out of such a union, not as end, but as accompaniment, comes the undying race of man. the womb is a most fertile soil. some have asked if the stock of men could not be improved, if they could not be bred as cattle. let love be purified, and all the rest will follow. a pure love is thus, indeed, the panacea for all the ills of the world. the only excuse for reproduction is improve ment. nature abhors repetition. beasts merely propagate their kind ; but the offspring of noble men and women will be superior to themselves, as their aspirations are. by their fruits ye shall know them. to harrison blake (at worcester). concord, february 27, 1853. mr. blake, i have not answered your letter before, because i have been almost constantly in the fields surveying of late. it is long since i have spent many days so profitably in a pecuni ary sense ; so unprofitably, it seems to me, in a more important sense. i have earned just a dollar a day for seventy-six days past; for, though i charge at a higher rate for the days which are seen to be spent, yet so many more are spent than appears. this is instead of lec turing, which has not offered, to pay for that book which i printed. 1 i have not only cheap i the week. 252 friends and followers. [1853, hours, but cheap weeks and months ; that is, weeks which are bought at the rate i have named. not that they are quite lost to me, or make me very melancholy, alas ! for i too often take a cheap satisfaction in so spending them, weeks of pasturing and browsing, like beeves and deer, which give me animal health, it may be, but create a tough skin over the soul and intellectual part. yet, if men should offer my body a maintenance for the work of my head alone, i feel that it would be a dangerous temptation. as to whether what you speak of as the &quot; world s way &quot; (which for the most part is my way), or that which is shown me, is the better, the former is imposture, the latter is truth. i have the coldest confidence in the last. there is only such hesitation as the appetites feel in following the aspirations. the clod hesitates because it is inert, wants animation. the one is the way of death, the other of life everlasting. my hours are not &quot; cheap in such a way that / doubt whether the world s way would not have been better,&quot; but cheap in such a way that i doubt whether the world s way, which i have adopted for the time, could be worse. the whole enterprise of this nation, which is not an upward, but a westward one, toward oregon, california, japan, etc., is totally devoid of inter jet. so.} to harrison blake. 253 est to me, whether performed on foot, or by a pacific railroad. it is not illustrated by a thought ; it is not warmed by a sentiment ; there is nothing in it which one should lay down his life for., nor even his gloves, hardly which one should take up a newspaper for. it is perfectly heathenish, a filibustering to ward heaven by the great western route. no ; they may go their way to their manifest destiny, which i trust is not mine. may my seventy six dollars, whenever i get them, help to carry me in the other direction ! i see them on their winding way, but no music is wafted from their host, only the rattling of change in their pockets. i would rather be a captive knight, and let them all pass by, than be free only to go whither they are bound. what end do they propose to themselves beyond japan ? what aims more lofty have they than the prairie dogs? as it respects these things, i have not changed an opinion one iota from the first. as the stars looked to me when i was a shepherd in assyria, they look to me now, a new-englander. the higher the mountain on which you stand, the less change in the prospect from year to year, from age to age. above a certain height there is no change. i am a switzer on the edge of the glacier, with his advantages and disadvantages, 254 friends and followers. [1853, goitre, or what not. (you may suspect it to be some kind of swelling at any rate.) i have had but one spiritual birth (excuse the word), and now whether it rains or snows, whether i laugh or cry, fall farther below or approach nearer to my standard ; whether pierce or scott is elected, not a new scintillation of light flashes on me, but ever and anon, though with longer intervals, the same surprising and everlastingly new light dawns to me, with only such variations as in the coming of the natural day, with which, indeed, it is often coincident. as to how to preserve potatoes from rotting, your opinion may change from year to year ; but as to how to preserve your soul from rot ting, i have nothing to learn, but something to practice. thus i declaim against them ; but i in my folly am the world i condemn. i very rarely, indeed, if ever, &quot; feel any itch ing to be what is called useful to my fellow-men.&quot; sometimes it may be when my thoughts for want of employment fall into a beaten path or humdrum i have dreamed idly of stopping a man s horse that was running away ; but, per chance, i wished that he might run, in order that i might stop him ; or of putting out a fire ; but then, of course, it must have got well a-going. now, to tell the truth, i do not dream jst.35.] to harrison blake. 255 much of acting upon horses before they run, or of preventing fires which are not yet kindled. what a foul subject is this of doing good ! in stead of minding one s life, which should be his business ; doing good as a dead carcass, which is only fit for manure, instead of as a living man, instead of taking care to flourish, and smell and taste sweet, and refresh all mankind to the extent of our capacity and quality. people will some times try to persuade you that you have done something from that motive, as if you did not already know enough about it. if i ever did a man any good, in their sense, of course it was something exceptional and insignificant com pared with the good or evil which i am con stantly doing by being what i am. as if you were to preach to ice to shape itself into burn ing-glasses, which are sometimes useful, and so the peculiar properties of ice be lost. ice that merely performs the office of a burning-glass does not do its duty. the problem of life becomes, one cannot say by how many degrees, more complicated as our material wealth is increased, whether that needle they tell of was a gateway or not, since the problem is not merely nor mainly to get life for our bodies, but by this or a similar discipline to get life for our souls ; by cultivating the low land farm on right principles, that is, with this 256 friends and followers. [1853, view, to turn it into an upland farm. you have so many more talents to account for. if i accom plish as much more in spiritual work as i am richer in worldly goods, then i am just as worthy, or worth just as much, as i was before, and no more. i see that, in my own case, money might be of great service to me, but probably it would not be ; for the difficulty now is, that i do not improve my opportunities, and therefore i am not prepared to have my opportunities increased. now, i warn you, if it be as you say, you have got to put on the pack of an upland farmer in good earnest the coming spring, the lowland farm being cared for ; ay, you must be selecting your seeds forthwith, and doing what winter work you can ; and, while others are raising potatoes and baldwin apples for you, you must be raising apples of the hesperides for them. (only hear how he preaches !) no man can suspect that he is the proprietor of an upland farm, upland in the sense that it will produce nobler crops, and better repay cultivation in the long run, but he will be perfectly sure that he ought to cultivate it. though we are desirous to earn our bread, we need not be anxious to satisfy men for it, though we shall take care to pay them, but god, who alone gave it to us. men may in effect put us in the debtors jail for that mat jst. 35.] to harrison blake. 257 ter, simply for paying our whole debt to god, which includes our debt to them, and though we have his receipt for it, for his paper is dis honored. the cashier will tell you that he has no stock in his bank. how prompt we are to satisfy the hunger and thirst of our bodies ; how slow to satisfy the hunger and thirst of our souls ! indeed, we would-be-practical folks cannot use this word without blushing because of our infidelity, hav ing starved this substance almost to a shadow. we feel it to be as absurd as if a man were to break forth into a eulogy on his dog, who has n t any. an ordinary man will work every day for a year at shoveling dirt to support his body, or a family of bodies ; but he is an extraordinary man who will work a whole day in a year for the support of his soul. even the priests, the men of god, so called, for the most part confess that they work for the support of the body. but he alone is the truly enterprising and prac tical man who succeeds in maintaining his soul here. have not we our everlasting life to get ? and is not that the only excuse at last for eat ing, drinking, sleeping, or even carrying an umbrella when it rains ? a man might as well devote himself to raising pork, as to fattening the bodies, or temporal part merely, of the whole human family. if we made the true dis 258 friends and followers. [1853, tinction we should almost all of us be seen to be in the almshouse for souls. i am much indebted to you because you look so steadily at the better side, or rather the true centre of me (for our true centre may, and per haps oftenest does, lie entirely aside from us, and we are in fact eccentric), and, as i have elsewhere said, &quot; give me an opportunity to live.&quot; you speak as if the image or idea which i see were reflected from me to you ; and i see it again reflected from you to me, because we stand at the right angle to one another ; and so it goes zigzag to what successive reflecting surfaces, be fore it is all dissipated or absorbed by the more unreflecting, or differently reflecting, who knows? or, perhaps, what you see directly, you refer to me. what a little shelf is re quired, by which we may impinge upon another, and build there our eyry in the clouds, and all the heavens we see above us we refer to the crags around and beneath us. some piece of mica, as it were, in the face or eyes of one, as on the delectable mountains, slanted at the right angle, reflects the heavens to us. but, in the slow geological upheavals and depressions, these mutual angles are disturbed, these suns set, and new ones rise to us. that ideal which i wor shiped was a greater stranger to the mica than to me. it was not the hero i admired, but the j5t.35.] to harrison blake. 259 reflection from his epaulet or helmet. it is nothing (for us) permanently inherent in an other, but his attitude or relation to what we prize, that we admire. the meanest man may glitter with micacious particles to his fellow s eye. these are the spangles that adorn a man. the highest union, the only un-i&amp;lt;m (don t laugh), or central oneness, is the coincidence of visual rays. our club-room was an apartment in a constellation where our visual rays met (and there was 110 debate about the restaurant). the way between us is over the mount. your words make me think of a man of my acquaintance whom i occasionally meet, whom you, too, appear to have met, one myself, as he is called. yet, why not call him jwrself ? if you have met with him and know him, it is all i have done ; and surely, where there is a mutual acquaintance, the my and thy make a distinction without a difference. i do not wonder that you do not like my canada story. it concerns me but little, and probably is not worth the time it took to tell it. yet i had absolutely no design whatever in my mind, but simply to report what i saw. i have inserted all of myself that was implicated, or made the excursion. it has come to an end, at any rate ; they will print no more, but return me my ms. when it is but little more than half 260 friends and followers. [1853, done, as well as another i had sent them, be cause the editor 1 requires the liberty to omit the heresies without consulting me, a privilege california is not rich enough to bid for. i thank you again and again for attending to me ; that is to say, i am glad that you hear me and that you also are glad. hold fast to your most indefinite, waking dream. the very green dust on the walls is an organized vege table ; the atmosphere has its fauna and flora floating in it ; and shall we think that dreams are but dust and ashes, are always disintegrated and crumbling thoughts, and not dust like thoughts trooping to their standard with music, systems beginning to be organized ? these expectations, these are roots, these are nuts, which even the poorest man has in his bin, and roasts or cracks them occasionally in winter evenings, which even the poor debtor retains with his bed and his pig, i. e., his idleness and sensuality. men go to the opera because they hear there a faint expression in sound of this news which is never quite distinctly proclaimed. suppose a man were to sell the hue, the least amount of coloring matter in the superficies of his thought, for a farm, were to exchange an absolute and infinite value for a relative and finite one, to gain the whole world and lose his own soul ! 1 of putnam s magazine. jet. 35.] to harrison blake. 261 do not wait as long as i have before you write. if you will look at another star, i will try to supply my side of the triangle. tell mr. brown, that i remember him, and trust that he remembers me. p. s. excuse this rather flippant preaching, which does not cost me enough ; and do not think that i mean you always, though your let ter requested the subjects. to harrison blake (at worcester). concord, april 10, 1853. mr. blake, another singular kind of spiritual foot-ball, really nameless, handle less, homeless, like myself, a mere arena for thoughts and feelings ; definite enough out wardly, indefinite more than enough inwardly. but i do not know why we should be styled &quot; misters &quot; or &quot; masters : &quot; we come so near to being anything or nothing, and seeing that we are mastered, and not wholly sorry to be mas tered, by the least phenomenon. it seems to me that we are the mere creatures of thought, one of the lowest forms of intellectual life, we men, as the sunfish is of animal life. as yet our thoughts have acquired no definiteness nor solidity ; they are purely molluscous, not verte brate ; and the height of our existence is to float upward in an ocean where the sun shines, ap 262 friends and followers. [1853, pearing only like a vast soup or chowder to the eyes of the immortal navigators. it is wonder ful that i can be here, and you there, and that we can correspond, and do many other things, when, in fact, there is so little of us, either or both, anywhere. in a few minutes, i expect, this slight film or dash of vapor that i am will be what is called asleep, resting ! forsooth from what? hard work? and thought? the hard work of the dandelion down, which floats ovei the meadow all day ; the hard work of a pismire that labors to raise a hillock all day, and even by moonlight. suddenly i can come forward into the utmost apparent distinctness, and speak with a sort of emphasis to you ; and the next moment i am so faint an entity, and make so slight an impression, that nobody can find the traces of me. i try to hunt myself up, and find the little of me that is discoverable is falling asleep, and then i assist and tuck it up. it is getting late. how can / starve or feed ? can / be said to sleep ? there is not enough of me even for that. if you hear a noise, t aint i, t aint i, as the dog says with a tin-kettle tied to his tail. i read of some thing happening to another the other day : how happens it that nothing ever happens to me ? a dandelion down that never alights, set tles, blown off by a boy to see if his mother mi. 35.] to harrison blake. 263 wanted him, some divine boy in the upper pastures. well, if there really is another such a meteor sojourning in these spaces, i would like to ask you if you know whose estate this is that we are on ? for my part i enjoy it well enough, what with the wild apples and the scenery ; but i shouldn t wonder if the owner set his dog on me next. i could remember something not much to the purpose, probably ; but if i stick to what i do know, then it is worth the while to live respectably unto ourselves. we can possibly get along with a neighbor, even with a bedfellow, whom we re spect but very little ; but as soon as it comes to this, that we do not respect ourselves, then we do not get along at all, no matter how much money we are paid for halting. there are old heads in the world who cannot help me by their example or advice to live worthily and satisfac torily to myself ; but i believe that it is in my power to elevate myself this very hour above the common level of my life. it is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are, if indeed you cannot get it above them, than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise. once you were in milton j doubting what to 1 a town near boston. 264 friends and followers. [1853, do. to live a better life, this surely can be done. dot and carry one. wait not for a clear sight, for that you are to get. what you see clearly you may omit to do. milton and worces ter? it is all blake, blake. never mind the rats in the wall : the cat will take care of them. all that men have said or are is a very faint rumor, and it is not worth the while to remem ber or refer to that. if you are to meet god, will you refer to anybody out of that court? how shall men know how i succeed, unless they are in at the life ? i did not see the &quot; times &quot; reporter there. is it not delightful to provide one s self with the necessaries of life, to collect dry wood for the fire when the weather grows cool, or fruits when we grow hungry ? not till then. and then we have all the time left for thought ! of what use were it, pray, to get a little wood to burn, to warm your body this cold weather, if there were not a divine fire kindled at the same time to warm your spirit ? &quot; unless above himself he can erect himself, how poor a thing 1 is man ! &quot; i cuddle up by my stove, and there i get up another fire which warms fire itself. life is so short that it is not wise to take roundabout ways, nor can we spend much time in waiting. is it absolutely necessary, then, that we should do as jst.35.] to harrison blake. 265 we are doing ? are we chiefly under obligations to the devil, like tom walker? though it is late to leave off this wrong way, it will seem early the moment we begin in the right way; instead of mid-afternoon, it will be early morn ing with us. we have not got half way to dawn yet. as for the lectures, i feel that i have some thing to say, especially on traveling, vague ness, and poverty ; but i cannot come now. i will wait till i am fuller, and have fewer engage ments. your suggestions will help me much to write them when i am ready. i am going to haverhill 1 to-morrow, surveying, for a week or more. you met me on my last errand thither. i trust that you realize what an exaggerater i am, that i lay myself out to exaggerate when ever i have an opportunity, pile pelion upon ossa, to reach heaven so. expect no trivial truth from me, unless i am on the witness-stand. i will come as near to lying as you can drive a coach-and-four. if it is n t thus and so with me, it is with something. i am not particular whether i get the shells or meat, in view of the latter s worth. i see that i have not at all answered your let ter, but there is time enough for that. 1 a massachusetts town, the birthplace of whittier. 266 friends and followers. [1853, to harrison blake (at worcester). concord, december 19, 1853. me. blake, my debt has accumulated so that i should have answered your last letter at once, if i had not been the subject of what is called a press of engagements, having a lecture to write for last wednesday, and surveying more than usual besides. it has been a kind of running fight with me, the enemy not always behind me, i trust. true, a man cannot lift himself by his own waistbands, because he cannot get out of him self ; but he can expand himself (which is bet ter, there being no up nor down in nature), and so split his waistbands, being already within himself. you speak of doing and being, and the van ity, real or apparent, of much doing. the suck ers i think it is they make nests in our river in the spring of more than a cart-load of small stones, amid which to deposit their ova. the other day i opened a muskrat s house. it was made of weeds, five feet broad at base, and three feet high, and far and low within it was a little cavity, only a foot in diameter, where the rat dwelt. it may seem trivial, this piling up of weeds, but so the race of muskrats is pre served. we must heap up a great pile of doing, ^t. 36.] to harrison blake. 267 for a small diameter of being. is it not imper ative on us that we do something, if we only work in a treadmill? and, indeed, some sort of revolving is necessary to produce a centre and nucleus of being. what exercise is to the body, employment is to the mind and morals. consider what an amount of drudgery must be performed, how much humdrum and prosaic labor goes to any work of the least value. there are so many layers of mere white lime in every shell to that thin inner one so beautifully tinted. let not the shell-fish think to build his house of that alone ; and pray, what are its tints to him ? is it not his smooth, close-fitting shirt merely, whose tints are not to him, being in the dark, but only when he is gone or dead, and his shell is heaved up to light, a wreck upon the beach, do they appear. with him, too, it is a song of the shirt, &quot; work, work, work ! &quot; and the work is not merely a police in the gross sense, but in the higher sense a discipline. if it is surely the means to the highest end we know, can any work be humble or disgusting? will it not rather be elevating as a ladder, the means by which we are translated ? how admirably the artist is made to accom plish his self -culture by devotion to his art ! the wood-sawyer, through his effort to do his work well, becomes not merely a better wood-sawyer, 268 friends and followers. [1853, but measurably a better man. few are the men that can work 011 their navels, only some brah mins that i have heard of. to the painter is given some paint and canvas instead ; to the irishman a hog, typical of himself. in a thou sand apparently humble ways men busy them selves to make some right take the place of some wrong, if it is only to make a better paste blacking, and they are themselves so much the better morally for it. you say that you do not succeed much. does it concern you enough that you do not ? do you work hard enough at it ? do you get the benefit of discipline out of it? if so, persevere. is it a more serious thing than to walk a thousand miles in a thousand successive hours ? do you get any corns by it? do you ever think of hang ing yourself on account of failure ? if you are going into that line, going to besiege the city of god, you must not only be strong in engines, but prepared with provisions to starve out the garrison. an irishman came to see me to-day, who is endeavoring to get his family out to this new world. he rises at half past four,, milks twenty-eight cows (which has swollen the joints of his fingers), and eats his breakfast, without any milk in his tea or coffee, before six ; and so on, day after day, for six and a half dollars a month ; and thus he keeps his jet. 36.] to harrison blake. 269 virtue in him, if he does not add to it ; and he regards me as a gentleman able to assist him ; but if i ever get to be a gentleman, it will be by working after my fashion harder than he does. if my joints are not swollen, it must be because i deal with the teats of celestial cows before breakfast (and the milker in this case is always allowed some of the milk for his breakfast), to say nothing of the flocks and herds of admetus afterward. it is the art of mankind to polish the world, and every one who works is scrubbing in some part. if the work is high and far, you must not only aim aright, but draw the bow with all your might. you must qualify yourself to use a bow which no humbler archer can bend. &quot; work, work, work ! who shall know it for a bow? it is not of yew tree. it is straighter than a ray of light ; flexi bility is not known for one of its qualities. december 22. so far i had got when i was called off to sur vey. pray read the life of haydon the painter, if you have not. it is a small revelation for these latter days ; a great satisfaction to know that he has lived, though he is now dead. have 270 friends and followers. [1853, you met with the letter of a turkish cadi at the end of layard s &quot; ancient babylon &quot; ? that also is refreshing, and a capital comment on the whole book which precedes it, the oriental genius speaking through him. those brahmins &quot; put it through.&quot; they come off, or rather stand still, conquerors, with some withered arms or legs at least to show ; and they are said to have cultivated the faculty of abstraction to a degree unknown to europeans. if we cannot sing of faith and triumph, we will sing our despair. we will be that kind of bird. there are day owls, and there are night owls, and each is beautiful and even musical while about its business. might you not find some positive work to do with your back to church and state, letting your back do all the rejection of them? can you not go upon your pilgrimage, peter, along the winding mountain path whither you face? a step more will make those funereal church bells over your shoulder sound far and sweet as a natural sound. &quot; work, work, work ! &quot; why not make a very large mud-pie and bake it in the sun ! only put no church nor state into it, nor upset any other pepper-box that way. dig out a woodchuck, for that has no thing to do with rotting institutions. go ahead. xt. 36.] to harrison blake. 271 whether a man spends his day in an ecstasy or despondency, he must do some work to show for it, even as there are flesh and bones to show for him. we are superior to the joy we ex perience. your last two letters, methinks, have more nerve and will in them than usual, as if you had erected yourself more. why are not they good work, if you only had a hundred correspondents to tax you ? make your failure tragical by the earnestness and steadfastness of your endeavor, and then it will not differ from success. prove it to be the inevitable fate of mortals, of one mortal, if you can. you said that you were writing on immor tality. i wish you would communicate to me what you know about that. you are sure to live while that is your theme. thus i write on some text which a sentence of your letters may have furnished. i think of coming to see you as soon as i get a new coat, if i have money enough left. i will write to you again about it. to harrison blake (at worcester). concord, january 21, 1854. mr. blake, my coat is at last done, and my mother and sister allow that i am so far in 272 friends aj^d followers. [1854, a condition to go abroad. i feel as if i had gone abroad the moment i put it on. it is, as usual, a production strange to me, the wearer, invented by some count d orsay ; and the ma ker of it was not acquainted with any of my real depressions or elevations. he only measured a peg to hang it on, and might have made the loop big enough to go over my head. it requires a not quite innocent indifference, not to say in solence, to wear it. ah ! the process by which we get our coats is not what it should be. though the church declares it righteous, and its priest pardons me, my own good genius tells me that it is hasty, and coarse, and false. i expect a time when, or rather an integrity by which, a man will get his coat as honestly and as perfectly fitting as a tree its bark. now our garments are typical of our conformity to the ways of the world, i. e., of the devil, and to some extent react on us and poison us, like that shirt which hercules put on. i think to come and see you next week, on monday, if nothing hinders. i have just re turned from court at cambridge, whither i was called as a witness, having surveyed a water privilege, about which there is a dispute, since you were here. ah ! what foreign countries there are, greater in extent than the united states or russia, and jet. 36.] to harrison blake. 273 with no more souls to a square mile, stretching away on every side from every human being with whom you have no sympathy. their hu manity affects me as simply monstrous. rocks, earth, brute beasts, comparatively are not so strange to me. when i sit in the parlors and kitchens of some with whom my business brings me i was going to say in contact (business, like misery, makes strange bedfellows), i feel a sort of awe, and as forlorn as if i were cast away on a desolate shore. i think of riley s narrative x and his sufferings. you, who soared like a merlin with your mate through the realms of aether, in the presence of the unlike, drop at once to earth, a mere amorphous squab, divested of your air-inflated pinions. (by the way, ex cuse this writing, for i am using the stub of the last feather i chance to possess.) you travel on, however, through this dark and desert world; you see in the distance an intelligent and sym pathizing lineament ; stars come forth in the dark, and oases appear in the desert. but (to return to the subject of coats), we are wellnigh smothered under yet more fatal coats, which do not fit us, our whole lives long. consider the cloak that our employment or sta tion is ; how rarely men treat each other for 1 an american seaman, wrecked on the coast of arabia, once a popular book. 274 friends and followers. [1853, what in their true and naked characters they are ; how we use and tolerate pretension ; how the judge is clothed with dignity which does not belong to him, and the trembling witness with humility that does not belong to him, and the criminal, perchance, with shame or impudence which no more belong to him. it does not mat ter so much, then, what is the fashion of the cloak with which we cloak these cloaks. change the coat ; put the judge in the criminal-box, and the criminal on the bench, and you might think that you had changed the men. no doubt the thinnest of all cloaks is con scious deception or lies; it is sleazy and frays out ; it is not close-woven like cloth ; but its meshes are a coarse network. a man can afford to lie only at the intersection of the threads ; but truth puts in the filling, and makes a consis tent stuff. i mean merely to suggest how much the sta tion affects the demeanor and self-respectability of the parties, and that the difference between the judge s coat of cloth and the criminal s is insignificant compared with, or only partially significant of, the difference between the coats which their respective stations permit them to wear. what airs the judge may put on over his coat which the criminal may not ! the judge s opinion {sententia) of the criminal sen to harrison blake. 275 fences him, and is read by the clerk of the court, and published to the world, and executed by the sheriff ; but the criminal s opinion of the judge has the weight of a sentence, and is pub lished and executed only in the supreme court of the universe, a court not of common pleas. how much juster is the one than the other? men are continually sentencing each other ; but, whether we be judges or criminals, the sentence is ineffectual unless we continue ourselves. i am glad to hear that i do not always limit your vision when you look this way ; that you sometimes see the light through me ; that i am here and there windows, and not all dead wall. might not the community sometimes petition a man to remove himself as a nuisance, a dark ener of the day, a too large mote ? to harrisox blake (at worcester). concord, august $, 1854. mr. blake, methinks i have spent a rather unprofitable summer thus far. i have been too much with the world, as the poet might say. 1 the completest performance of the highest du ties it imposes would yield me but little satis faction. better the neglect of all such, because your life passed on a level where it was impossi ble to recognize them. latterly, i have heard 1 &quot; the world is too much with us.&quot; wordsworth. 276 friends and followers. [1854, the very flies buzz too distinctly, and have ac cused myself because i did not still this super ficial din. we must not be too easily distracted by the crying of children or of dynasties. the irishman erects his sty, and gets drunk, and jabbers more and more under my eaves, and i am responsible for all that filth and folly. i find it, as ever, very unprofitable to have much to do with men. it is sowing the wind, but not reaping even the whirlwind ; only reaping an unprofitable calm and stagnation. our conver sation is a smooth, and civil, and never-ending speculation merely. i take up the thread of it again in the morning, with very much such cour age as the invalid takes his prescribed seidlitz powders. shall i help you to some of the mack erel? it would be more respectable if men, as has been said before, instead of being such pigmy desperates, were giant despairs. emerson says that his life is so unprofitable and shabby for the most part, that he is driven to all sorts of resources, and, among the rest, to men. i tell him that we differ only in our resources. mine is to get away from men. they very rarely affect me as grand or beautiful ; but i know that there is a sunrise and a sunset every day. in the summer, this world is a mere watering place, a saratoga, drinking so many tum blers of congress water ; and in the winter, is it jet. 37.] to harrison blake. 277 any better, with its oratorios ? i have seen more men than usual, lately ; and, well as i was ac quainted with one, i am surprised to find what vulgar fellows they are. they do a little busi ness commonly each day, in order to pay their board, and then they congregate in sitting-rooms and feebly tabulate and paddle in the social slush ; and when i think that they have suffi ciently relaxed, and am prepared to see them steal away to their shrines, they go unashamed to their beds, and take 011 a new layer of sloth. they may be single, or have families in their faineancy. i do not meet men who can have nothing to do with me because they have so much to do with themselves. however, i trust that a very few cherish purposes which they never declare. only think, for a moment, of a man about his affairs ! how we should respect him ! how glorious he would appear! not working for any corporation, its agent, or president, but fulfilling the end of his being ! a man about his business would be the cynosure of all eyes. the other evening i was determined that i would silence this shallow din ; that i would walk in various directions and see if there was not to be found any depth of silence around. as bonaparte sent out his horsemen in the red sea on all sides to find shallow water, so i sent forth my mounted thoughts to find deep water. 278 friends and followers. [1854, i left the village and paddled up the river to fair haven pond. as the sun went down, i saw a solitary boatman disporting on the smooth lake. the falling dews seemed to strain and purify the air, and i was soothed with an infi nite stillness. i got the world, as it were, by the nape of the neck, and held it under in the tide of its own events, till it was drowned, and then i let it go down stream like a dead dog. vast hollow chambers of silence stretched away on every side, and my being expanded in pro portion, and filled them. then first could i appreciate sound, and find it musical. 1 but now for your news. tell us of the year. 1 a lady who made such a night voyage with thoreau, years before, says : &quot; how wise he was to ask the elderly lady with a younger one for a row on the concord river one moonlit night ! the river that night was as deep as the heavens above ; serene stars shone from its depths, as far off as the stars above. deep answered unto deep in our souls, as the boat glided swiftly along, past low-lying fields, under overhanging trees. a neighbor s cow waded into the cool water, she became at once a behemoth, a river-horse, hippopotamus, or river-god. a dog barked, he was diana s hound, he waked endymion. suddenly we were landed on a little isle ; our boatman, our boat glided far off in the flood. we were left alone, in the power of the river-god ; like two white birds we stood on this bit of ground, the river flowing about us ; only the eternal powers of nature around us. time for a prayer, perchance, and back came the boat and oarsman ; we were ferried to our homes, no question asked or answered. we had drank of the cup of the night, had felt the silence and the stars.&quot; mt. 37.] to harrison blake. 279 have you fought the good fight ? what is the state of your crops ? will your harvest answer well to the seed-time, and are you cheered by the prospect of stretching cornfields ? is there any blight on your fields, any murrain in your herds ? have you tried the size and quality of your po tatoes ? it does one good to see their balls dangling in the lowlands. have you got your meadow hay before the fall rains shall have set in ? is there enough in your barns to keep your cattle over ? are you killing weeds nowadays ? or have you earned leisure to go a-fishing ? did you plant any giant regrets last spring, such as i saw advertised ? it is not a new species, but the result of cultivation and a fertile soil. they are excellent for sauce. how is it with your marrow squashes for winter use ? is there likely to be a sufficiency of fall feed in your neighborhood ? what is the state of the springs ? i read that in your county there is more water on the hills than in the valleys. do you find it easy to get all the help you require? work early and late, and let your men and teams rest at noon. be careful not to drink too much sweetened water, while at your hoeing, this hot weather. you can bear the heat much better for it. 280 friends and followers. [1854, to marston watson (at plymouth). concord, september 19, 1854. dear sir, i am glad to hear from you and the plymouth men again. the world still holds together between concord and plymouth, it seems. i should like to be with you while mr. alcott is there, but i cannot come next sunday. i will come sunday after next, that is, october 1st, if that will do ; and look out for you at the depot. i do not like to promise more than one discourse. is there a good precedent for two ? the first of thoreau s many lecturing visits to worcester, the home of his friend, blake, was in april, 1849, and from that time onward he must have read lectures there at least annually, until his last iuness, in 1861-62. by 1854, the lecturing habit, in several places besides con cord, had become established ; and there was a constant interchange of visits and excursions with his friends at worcester, plymouth, new bedford, etc. soon after the publication of &quot;walden,&quot; in the summer of 1854, thoreau wrote these notes to mr. blake, touching on va rious matters of friendly interest. 2et. 37.] to harrison blake. 281 to harrison blake (at worcester). concokd, september 21, 1854. blake, i have just read your letter, but do not mean now to answer it, solely for want of time to say what i wish. i directed a copy of &quot; walden &quot; to you at ticknor s, on the day of its publication, and it should have reached you before. i am encouraged to know that it inter ests you as it now stands, a printed book, for you apply a very severe test to it, you make the highest demand on me. as for the excursion you speak of, i should like it right well, indeed i thought of proposing the same thing to you and brown, some months ago. per haps it would have been better if i had done so then ; for in that case i should have been able to enter into it with that infinite margin to my views, spotless of all engagements, which i think so necessary. as it is, i have agreed to go a-lecturing to plymouth, sunday after next (oc tober 1) and to philadelphia in november, and thereafter to the west, if they shall ^uant me ; and, as i have prepared nothing in that shape, i feel as if my hours were spoken for. however, i think that, after having been to plymouth, i may take a day or two if that date will suit you and brown. at any rate i will write you then. 282 friends and followers. [1854, concord, october 5, 1854. after i wrote to you, mr. watson postponed my going to plymouth one week, i. e., till next sunday ; and now he wishes me to carry my in struments and survey his grounds, to which he has been adding. since i want a little money, though i contemplate but a short excursion, i do not feel at liberty to decline this work. i do not know exactly how long it will detain me, but there is plenty of time yet, and i will write to you again perhaps from plymouth. there is a mr. thomas cholmondeley (pro nounced chumly) a young english author, stay ing at our house at present, who asks me to teach him botany i. &amp;lt;?., anything which i know ; and also to make an excursion to some mountain with him. he is a well-behaved per son, and possibly i may propose his taking that run to wachusett with us if it will be agreea ble to you. nay, if i do not hear any objection from you, i will consider myself at liberty to invite him. concord, saturday p. m., october 14, 1854. i have just returned from plymouth, where i have been detained surveying much longer than i expected. what do you say to visiting wa chusett next thursday ? i will start at 7^ a. m. unless there is a prospect of a stormy day, go jst. 37.] new friends. 283 by cars to westminster, and thence 011 foot five or six miles to the mountain-top, where i may engage to meet you, at (or before) 12 m. if the weather is unfavorable, i will try again, on fri day, and again on monday. if a storm comes on after starting, i will seek you at the tavern in princeton centre, as soon as circumstances will permit. i shall expect an answer at once, to clinch the bargain. the year 1854 was a memorable one in tho reau s life, for it brought out his most successful book, &quot; walden,&quot; and introduced him to the no tice of the world, which had paid small attention to his first book, the &quot;week,&quot; published five years earlier. this year also made him acquainted with two friends to whom he wrote much, and who loved to visit and stroll with him around concord, or in more distant places, thomas cholmondeley, an englishman from shropshire, and daniel ricketson, a new bedford quaker, of liberal mind _and,., cultivated tastes, an au thor and poet, and fond of corresponding with poets, as he did with the howitts and william barnes of england, and with bryant, emerson, channing, and thoreau, in america. few of the letters to cholmondeley are yet found, being buried temporarily in the mass of family papers at condover hall, an old elizabethan mansion 284 friends and followers. [1854, near shrewsbury, which thomas cholmondeley inherited, and which remains in his family s pos session since his own death at florence in 1864. but the letters of the englishman, recently printed in the &quot; atlantic monthly &quot; (december, 1893), show how sincere was the attachment of this ideal friend to the concord recluse, and how well he read that character which the rest of england, and a good part of america, have been so slow to recognize for what it really was. thomas cholmondeley was the eldest son of rev. charles cowper cholmondeley, rector of overleigh, cheshire, and of a sister to reginald heber, the celebrated bishop of calcutta. he was born in 1823, and brought up at hodnet, in shropshire, where his father, a cousin of lord delamere, had succeeded his brother-in-law as rector, on the departure of bishop heber for india, in 1823. the son was educated at oriel college, oxford, a friend, and perhaps pupil of arthur hugh clough, who gave him letters to emerson in 1854. years before, after leaving oxford, he had gone with some relatives to new zealand, and before coming to new england, he had published a book, &quot; ultima thule,&quot; describ ing that australasian colony of england, where he lived for part of a year. he had previously studied in germany, and traveled on the conti nent. he landed in america the first time in 2et.37.] thoreau and cholmondeley. 285 august, 1854, and soon after went to concord, where, at the suggestion of emerson, he became an inmate of mrs. thoreau s family. this made him intimate with henry thoreau for a month or two, and also brought him into acquaintance with ellery charming, then living across the main street of concord, in the west end of the village, and furnishing to thoreau a landing place for his boat under the willows at the foot of channing s small garden. alcott was not then in concord, but cholmondeley made his acquaintance in boston, and admired his charac ter and manners. 1 with channing and thoreau the young eng lishman visited their nearest mountain, wachu sett, and in some of their walks the artist rowse, who made the first portrait of thoreau, joined, for he was then in concord, late in 1854, en graving the fine head of daniel webster from a painting by ames, and this engraving he gave both to thoreau and to cholmondeley. in de cember the englishman, whose patriotism was 1 see memoir of bronson alcott, pp. 485-494. the remark of emerson quoted on p. 486, that cholmondeley was &quot;the son of a shropshire squire,&quot; was not strictly correct, his father being a cheshire clergyman of a younger branch of the an cient race of cholmondeley. but he was the grandson of a shropshire squire (owner of land), for his mother was daugh ter and sister of such gentlemen, and it was her brother rich ard who presented reginald heber and charles cholmondeley to the living of hodnet, near market drayton. 286 friends and followers. [1854, roused by the delays and calamities of england in her crimean war, resolved to go home and raise a company, as he did, first spending some weeks in lodgings at boston (orange street) in order to hear theodore parker preach and visit harvard college, of which i was then a student, in the senior class. he visited me and my class mate, edwin morton, and called on some of the cambridge friends of clough. in january, 1855, he sailed for england, and there received the letter of thoreau printed on pages 295-298. the acquaintance with mr. ricketson began by letter before cholmondeley reached concord, but thoreau did not visit him until december, 1854. mr. ricketson says, &quot; in the summer of 1854 i purchased, in new bedford, a copy of 4 walden. i had never heard of its author, but in this admirable and most original book i found so many observations on plants, birds, and natural objects generally in which i was also in terested, that i felt at once i had found a con genial spirit. during this season i was rebuild ing a house in the country, three miles from new bedford, and had erected a small building which was called my shanty ; and my family being then in my city house, i made this build ing my temporary home. from it i addressed my first letter to the author of walden. in reply he wrote, i had duly received your very jet. 37.] thoreau and ricketson. 287 kind and frank letter, but delayed to answer it thus long because i have little skill as a corre spondent, and wished to send you something more than my thanks. i was gratified by your prompt and hearty acceptance of my book. yours is the only word of greeting i am likely to receive from a dweller in the woods like my self, from where the whippoorwill and cuckoo are heard, and there are better than moral clouds drifting, and real breezes blowing. from that year until his death in 1862 we exchanged visits annually, and letters more frequently. he was much interested in the botany of our region, finding here many marine plants he had not be fore seen. when our friendship began, the ad mirers of his only two published books were few; most prominent among them were emer son, alcott, and channing of concord, messrs. blake and t. brown of worcester, mr. marston watson of plymouth, and myself. many ac cused him of being an imitator of emerson; others thought him unsocial, impracticable, and ascetic. now he was none of these ; a more original man never lived, nor one more thor oughly personifying civility ; no man could hold a finer relationship with his family than he.&quot; in reply to thoreau s letter just quoted, mr. ricketson wrote further of himself and his local ity, and thoreau thus continued : 288 friends and followers. [1854, to daniel ricketson (at new bedford). concord, october 1, 1854. dear sir, your account excites in me a desire to see the middleborough ponds, of which i had already heard somewhat ; as also some very beautiful ponds on the cape, in harwich, i think, near which i once passed. i have some times also thought of visiting that remnant of our indians still living near you. but then, you know, there is nothing like one s native fields and lakes. the best news you send me is, not that nature with you is so fair and genial, but that there is one there who likes her so well. that proves all that was asserted. homer, of course, you include in your list of lovers of nature ; and, by the way, let me men tion here, for this is &quot; my thunder &quot; lately, william gilpin s long series of books on the pic turesque, with their illustrations. if it chances that you have not met with these, i cannot just now frame a better wish than that you may one day derive as much pleasure from the inspection of them as i have. much as you have told me of yourself, you have still, i think, a little the advantage of me in this correspondence, for i have told you still more in my book. you have therefore the broad est mark to fire at. jet. 37.] to harrison blake. 289 a young 1 englishman, mr. cholmondeley, is just now waiting for me to take a walk with him ; therefore excuse this very barren note from yours, hastily at last. to harrison blake. concord, december 22, 1854. mr. blake, i will lecture for your lyceum on the 4th of january next ; and i hope that i shall have time for that good day out of doors. mr. cholmondeley is in boston, yet perhaps i may invite him to accompany me. i have en gaged to lecture at new bedford on the 26th hist., stopping with daniel ricketson, three miles out of town ; and at nantucket on the 28th, so that i shall be gone all next week. they say there is some danger of being weather bound at nantucket ; but i see that others run the same risk. you had better acknowledge the receipt of this at any rate, though you should write nothing else ; otherwise i shall not know whether you get it; but perhaps you will not wait till you have seen me, to answer my letter (of december 19). i will tell you what i think of lecturing when i see you. did you see the notice of &quot; walden &quot; in the last &quot; anti-slavery standard &quot; ? you will not be surprised if i tell you that it reminded me of you. 290 friends and followers. [1854, as above mentioned, thoreau went to lecture at nantucket, and on his way spent a day or two with mr. ricketson, reaching his house 011 christmas day. his host, who then saw him for the first time, says : &quot; i had expected him at noon, but as he did not arrive, i had given him up for the day. in the latter part of the afternoon i was clearing off the snow from my front steps, when, looking up, i saw a man walking up the carriage-road, bearing a portmanteau in one hand and an um brella in the other. he was dressed in a long overcoat of dark color, and wore a dark soft hat. i had no suspicion it was thoreau, and rather supposed it was a peddler of small wares.&quot; this was a common mistake to make. when thoreau ran the gauntlet of the cape cod vil lages, &quot; feeling as strange,&quot; he says, &quot; as if he were in a town in china,&quot; one of the old fish ermen could not believe that he had not some thing to sell. being finally satisfied that it was not a peddler with his pack, the old man said, &quot;wai, it makes no odds what tis you carry, so long as you carry truth along with ye.&quot; mr. ricketson soon came to the same conclusion about his visitor, and in the early september of 1855 returned the visit. j5t. 37.] to harrison blake. 291 to harrison blake (at worcester). concord, december 19, 1854. mr. blake, i suppose you have heard of my truly providential meeting with mr. t. brown ; providential because it saved me from the suspicion that my words had fallen alto gether on stony ground, when it turned out that there was some worcester soil there. you will allow me to consider that i correspond with him through you. i confess that i am a very bad correspondent, so far as promptness of reply is concerned ; but then i am sure to answer sooner or later. the longer i have forgotten you, the more i remem ber you. for the most part i have not been idle since i saw you. how does the world go with you? or rather, how do you get along without it? i have not yet learned to live, that i can see, and i fear that i shall not very soon. i find, however, that in the long run things correspond to my original idea, that they correspond to nothing else so much ; and thus a man may really be a true prophet without any great exer tion. the day is never so dark, nor the night even, but that the laws at least of light still pre vail, and so may make it light in our minds if they are open to the truth. there is considera ble danger that a man will be crazy between 292 friends and followers. [1854, dinner and supper ; but it will not directly an swer any good purpose that i know of, and it is just as easy to be sane. we have got to know what both life and death are, before we can be gin to live after our own fashion. let us be learning our a-b-c s as soon as possible. i never yet knew the sun to be knocked down and rolled through a mud-puddle ; he comes out honor bright from behind every storm. let us then take sides with the sun, seeing we have so much leisure. let us not put all we prize into a foot ball to be kicked, when a bladder will do as well. when an indian is burned, his body may be broiled, it may be no more than a beefsteak. what of that ? they may broil his heart, but they do not therefore broil his courage, his principles. be of good courage ! that is the main thing. if a man were to place himself in an attitude to bear manfully the greatest evil that can be inflicted on him, he would find suddenly that there was no such evil to bear ; his brave back would go a-begging. when atlas got his back made up, that was all that was required. (in this case a priv., not pleon., and ra.f//u.) the world rests on principles. the wise gods will never make underpinning of a man. but as long as he crouches, and skulks, and shirks his *st. 37.] to harrison blake. 293 work, every creature that has weight will be treading on his toes, and crushing him ; he will himself tread with one foot on the other foot. the monster is never just there where we think he is. what is truly monstrous is our cowardice and sloth. have no idle disciplines like the catholic church and others ; have only positive and fruit ful ones. do what you know you ought to do. why should we ever go abroad, even across the way, to ask a neighbor s advice ? there is a nearer neighbor within us incessantly telling us how we should behave. but we wait for the neighbor without to tell us of some false, easier way. they have a census-table in which they put down the number of the insane. do you believe that they put them all down there ? why, in every one of these houses there is at least one man fighting or squabbling a good part of his time with a dozen pet demons of his own breed ing and cherishing, which are relentlessly gnaw ing at his vitals ; and if perchance he resolve at length that he will courageously combat them, he says, &quot;ay! ay! i will attend to you after dinner ! &quot; and, when that time comes, he con cludes that he is good for another stage, and reads a column or two about the eastern war ! pray, to be in earnest, where is sevastopol? 294 friends and followers. [1854, who is menchikoff ? and nicholas behind there? who the allies ? did not we fight a little (little enough to be sure, but just enough to make it interesting) at alma, at balaclava, at inker maim ? we love to fight far from home. ah ! the minie musket is the king of weapons. well, let us get one then. i just put another stick into my stove, a pretty large mass of white oak. how many men will do enough this cold winter to pay for the fuel that will be required to warm them? i sup pose i have burned up a pretty good-sized tree to-night, and for what ? i settled with mr. tarbell for it the other day ; but that was n t the final settlement. i got off cheaply from him. at last, one will say, &quot; let us see, how much wood did you burn, sir? &quot; and i shall shudder to think that the next question will be, &quot; what did you do while you were warm?&quot; do we think the ashes will pay for it ? that god is an ash-man ? it is a fact that we have got to ren der an account for the deeds done in the body. who knows but we shall be better the next year than we have been the past? at any rate, i wish you a really new year, commencing from the instant you read this, and happy or unhappy, according to your deserts. the early part of 1855 was spent by thomas jet. 37.] to thomas cholmondeley. 295 cholmondeley in a tiresome passage to england, whence he wrote (january 27) to say to thoreau that he had reached shropshire, and been com missioned captain in the local militia, in prepa ration for service at sevastopol, but reminding his concord friend of a half promise to visit england some day. to this thoreau made answer thus : to thomas cholmondeley (at hod1stet). concord, mass., february 7, 1855. dear cholmondeley, i am glad* to hear that you have arrived safely at hodnet, and that there is a solid piece of ground of that name which can support a man better than a floating plank, in that to me as yet purely historical england. but have i not seen you with my own eyes, a piece of england herself, and was not your letter come out to me thence ? i have now reason to believe that salop is as real a place as concord ; with at least as good an un derpinning of granite, floating on liquid fire. i congratulate you on having arrived safely at that floating isle, after your disagreeable pass age in the steamer america. so are we not all making a passage, agreeable or disagreeable, in the steamer earth, trusting to arrive at last at some less undulating salop and brother s house ? i cannot say that i ani surprised to hear that 296 friends and followers. [1855, you have joined the militia, after what i have heard from your lips ; but i am glad to doubt if there will be occasion for your volunteering into the line. perhaps i am thinking of the saying that it &quot; is always darkest just before day.&quot; i believe it is only necessary that england be fully awakened to a sense of her position, in order that she may right herself, especially as the weather will soon cease to be her foe. i wish i could believe that the cause in which you are embarked is the cause of the people of england. however, i have no sympathy with the idleness that would contrast this fighting with the teach ings of the pulpit; for, perchance, more true virtue is being practiced at sevastopol than in many years of peace. it is a pity that we seem to require a war, from time to time, to assure us that there is any manhood still left in man. i was much pleased with [j. j. g.] wilkin son s vigorous and telling assault on allopathy, though he substitutes another and perhaps no stronger thy for that. something as good on the whole conduct of the war would be of ser vice. cannot caiiyle supply it? we will not require him to provide the remedy. every man to his trade. as you know, i am not in any sense a politician. you, who live in that snug and compact isle, may dream of a glorious com monwealth, but i have some doubts whether i asx.37.] to thomas cholmondeley. 297 and the new king of the sandwich islands shall pull together. when i think of the gold-diggers and the mormons, the slaves and the slavehold ers and the flibustiers, i naturally dream of a glorious private life. no, i am not patriotic ; i shall not meddle with the gem of the antilles. general quitman l cannot count on my aid, alas for him ! nor can general pierce. 2 i still take my daily walk, or skate over con cord fields or meadows, and on the whole have more to do with nature than with man. we have not had much snow this winter, but have had some remarkably cold weather, the mercury, february 6, not rising above 6 below zero dur ing the day, and the next morning falling to 26. some ice is still thirty inches thick about us. a rise in the river has made uncommonly good skating, which i have improved to the ex tent of some thirty miles a day, fifteen out and fifteen in. emerson is off westward, enlightening the hamiltonians [in canada] and others, mingling his thunder with that of niagara. chamiing still sits warming his five wits his sixth, you know, is always limber over that stove, with 1 quitman, aided perhaps by laurence oliphant, was aim ing to capture cuba with &quot; filibusters &quot; (flibustiers). 2 then president of the united states, whose life haw thorne had written in 1852. 298 friends and followers. [1855, the dog down cellar. lowell has just been ap pointed professor of belles-lettres in harvard university, in place of longfellow, resigned, and will go very soon to spend another year in europe, before taking his seat. i am from time to time congratulating myself on my general want of success as a lecturer; apparent want of success, but is it not a real tri umph? i do my work clean as i go along, and they will not be likely to want me anywhere again. so there is 110 danger of my repeating myself, and getting to a barrel of sermons, which you must upset, and begin again with. my father and mother and sister all desire to be remembered to you, and trust that you will never come within range of russian bullets. of course, i would rather think of you as settled down there in shropshire, in the camp of the english people, making acquaintance with your men, striking at the root of the evil, perhaps assaulting that rampart of cotton bags that you tell of. but it makes no odds where a man goes or stays, if he is only about his business. let me hear from you, wherever you are, and believe me yours ever in the good fight, whether before sevastopol or under the wreken. while cholmondeley s first letter from eng land was on its way to concord, thoreau was ast.37.] thoreau in cambridge. 299 one clay making his occasional call at the har vard college library (where he found and was allowed to take away volumes relating to his manifold studies), when it occurred to him to call at my student-chamber in holworthy hall, and there leave a copy of his &quot; week.&quot; i had never met him, and was then out ; the occasion of his call was a review of his two books that had come out a few weeks earlier in the &quot; har vard magazine,&quot; of which i was an editor and might be supposed to have had some share in the criticism. the volume was left with my classmate lymaxi, accompanied by a message that it was intended for the critic in the maga zine. accordingly, i gave it to edwin morton, who was the reviewer, and notified thoreau by letter of that fact, and of my hope to see him soon in cambridge or concord. 1 to this he replied in a few days as below : 1 i had been visitingemerson occasionally for a year or two, and knew alcott well at this time ; was also intimate with cholmondeley in the autumn of 1854, but had never seen tho reau ; a fact which shows how recluse were then his habits. the letter below, and the long one describing 1 his trip to min nesota, were the only ones i received from him in a friendship of seven years. see sanborn s thoreau, pp. 195-200. edwin morton was my classmate. see pp. 286, 353, 440. 300 friends and followers. [1855, to f. b. sanbobn (at hampton falls, n. h.). concord, february 2, 1855. dear sir, i fear that you did not get the note which i left with the librarian for you, and so will thank you again for your politeness. i was sorry that i was obliged to go into boston almost immediately. however, i shall be glad to see you whenever you come to concord, and i will suggest nothing to discourage your com ing, so far as i am concerned; trusting that you know what it is to take a partridge on the wing. you tell me that the author of the criticism is mr. morton. i had heard as much, and in deed guessed more. i have latterly found con cord nearer to cambridge than i believed i o should, when i was leaving my alma mater ; and hence you will not be surprised if even i feel some interest in the success of the &quot; har vard magazine.&quot; believe me yours truly, henry d. thoreau. at this time i was under engagement with mr. emerson and others in concord to take charge of a small school there in march ; and did so without again seeing the author of &quot; wai den &quot; in cambridge. soon after my settlement at concord, in the house of mr. channing, just ast.37.] to harrison blake. 301 opposite thoreau s, he made an evening call on me and my sister (april 11, 1855), but i had already met him more than once at mr. emer son s, and was even beginning to take walks with him, as frequently happened in the next six years. in the following summer i began to dine daily at his mother s table, and thus saw him almost every day for three years. to harbison blake (at worcester). concord, june 27, 1855. mr. blake, i have been sick and good for nothing but to lie on my back and wait for something to turn up, for two or three months. this has compelled me to postpone several things, among them writing to you, to whom i am so deeply in debt, and inviting you and brown to concord, not having brains ade quate to such an exertion. i should feel a little less ashamed if i could give any name to my disorder, but i cannot, and our doctor cannot help me to it, and i will not take the name of any disease in vain. however, there is one con solation in being sick ; and that is the possibil ity that you may recover to a better state than you were ever in before. i expected in the win ter to be deep in the woods of maine in my canoe, long before this ; but i am so far from this that i can only take a languid walk in con cord streets. 302 friends and followers. [1855, i do not know how the mistake arose about the cape cod excursion. the nearest i have come to that with anybody is this : about a month ago channing proposed to me to go to truro on cape cod with him, and board there a while, but i declined. for a week past, however, i have been a little inclined to go there and sit on the seashore a week or more ; but i do not venture to propose myself as the compan ion of him or of any peripatetic man. not that i should not rejoice to have you and brown or c. sitting there also. i am not sure that c. really wishes to go now ; and as i go simply for the medicine of it, i should not think it worth the while to notify him when i am about to take my bitters. since i began this, or within five minutes, i have begun to think that i will start for truro next saturday morning, the 30th. i do not know at what hour the packet leaves boston, nor exactly what kind of accommoda tion i shall find at truro. i should be singularly favored if you and brown were there at the same time ; and though you speak of the 20th of july, i will be so bold as to suggest your coming to concord friday night (when, by the way, garrison and phillips hold forth here), and going to the cape with me. though we take short walks together there, we can have long talks, and you and brown will mt. 37.] to harrison blake. 303 have time enough for your own excursions be sides. i received a letter from cholmoiideley last winter, which i should like to show you, as well as his book. 1 he said that he had &quot; accepted the offer of a captaincy in the salop militia,&quot; and was hoping to take an active part in the war before long. i thank you again and again for the encour agement your letters are to me. but i must stop this writing, or i shall have to pay for it. north tkuko, july 8, 1855. there being no packet, i did not leave bos ton till last thursday, though i came down on wednesday, and charming with me. there is no public house here ; but we are boarding with mr. james small, the keeper, in a little house attached to the highland lighthouse. it is true the table is not so clean as could be desired, but i have found it much superior in that re spect to the provincetown hotel. they are what is called &quot; good livers.&quot; our host has another larger and very good house, within a quarter of a mile, unoccupied, where he says he can accom modate several more. he is a very good man to deal with, has often been the representative of the town, and is perhaps the most intelligent 1 the book was ultima thule, describing new zealand. 304 friends and followers. [1855, man in it. i shall probably stay here as much as ten days longer : board 13.50 per week. so you and brown had better come down forthwith. you will find either the schooner melrose or an other, or both, leaving commerce street, or else t wharf, at 9 a. m. (it commonly means 10), tuesdays, thursdays, and saturdays, if not other days. we left about 10 a. m., and reached provincetown at 5 p. m., a very good run. a stage runs up the cape every morning but sun day, starting at 4| a. m., and reaches the post office in north truro, seven miles from prov incetown, and one from the lighthouse, about 6 o clock. if you arrive at p. before night, you can walk over, and leave your baggage to be sent. you can also come by cars from boston to yarmouth, and thence by stage forty miles more, through every day, but it costs much more, and is not so pleasant. come by all means,, for it is the best place to see the ocean in these states. i hope i shall be worth meet ing. july 14. you say that you hope i will excuse your fre quent writing. i trust you will excuse my in frequent and curt writing until i am able to resume my old habits, which for three months i have been compelled to abandon. methinks i am beginning to be better. i think to leave the aor.38.] to harrison blake. 305 cape next wednesday, and so shall not see you here ; but i shall be glad to meet you in con cord, though i may not be able to go before the mast, in a boating excursion. this is an admir able place for coolness and sea-bathing and re tirement. you must come prepared for cool weather and fogs. p. s. there is no mail up till monday morning. to harrison blake (at worcester). concord, september 26, 1855. me. blake, the other day i thought that my health must be better, that i gave at last a sign of vitality, because i experienced a slight chagrin. but i do not see how strength is to be got into my legs again. these months of feebleness have yielded few, if any, thoughts, though they have not passed without serenity, such as our sluggish musketaquid suggests. i hope that the harvest is to come. i trust that you have at least warped up the stream a little daily, holding fast by your anchors at night, since i saw you, and have kept my place for me while i have been absent. mr. ricketson of new bedford has just made me a visit of a day and a half, and i have had a quite good time with him. he and channing have got on particularly well together. he is 306 friends and followers. [1855, a man of very simple tastes, notwithstanding his wealth ; a lover of nature ; but, above all, singu larly frank and plain-spoken. i think that you might enjoy meeting him. sincerity is a great but rare virtue, and we pardon to it much complaining, and the betrayal of many weaknesses. r. says of himself, that he sometimes thinks that he has all the infirm ities of genius without the genius ; is wretched without a hair-pillow, etc. ; expresses a great and awful uncertainty with regard to &quot; god,&quot; &quot; death,&quot; his &quot; immortality ; &quot; says, &quot; if i only knew,&quot; etc. he loves cowper s &quot; task &quot; better than anything else ; and thereafter, perhaps, thomson, gray, and even howitt. he has evi dently suffered for want of sympathizing com panions. he says that he sympathizes with much in my books, but much in them is naught to him, &quot; namby-pamby,&quot; &quot; stuff,&quot; &quot; mys tical.&quot; why will not i, having common sense, write in plain english always; teach men in detail how to live a simpler life, etc. ; not go off into ? but i say that i have no scheme about it, no designs on men at all ; and, if i had, my mode would be to tempt them with the fruit, and not with the manure. to what end do i lead a simple life at all, pray ? that i may teach others to simplify their lives ? and so all our lives be simplified merely, like an algebraic arc. 38.] to harrison blake. 307 formula ? or not, rather, that i may make use of the ground i have cleared, to live more wor thily and profitably ? i would fain lay the most stress forever on that which is the most impor tant, imports the most to me, though it were only (what it is likely to be) a vibration in the air. as a preacher, i should be prompted to tell men, not so much how to get their wheat bread cheaper, as of the bread of life compared with which that is bran. let a man only taste these loaves, and he becomes a skillful economist at once. he 11 not waste much time in earning those. don t spend your time in drilling sol diers, who may turn out hirelings after all, but give to undrilled peasantry a country to fight for. the schools begin with what they call the elements, and where do they end ? i was glad to hear the other day that higgin son. and were gone to ktaadn ; it must be so much better to go to than a woman s rights or abolition convention ; better still, to the de lectable primitive mounts within you, which you have dreamed of from your youth up, and seen, perhaps, in the horizon, but never climbed. but how do you do ? is the air sweet to you ? do you find anything at which you can work, accomplishing something solid from day to day ? have you put sloth and doubt behind, consider ably? had one redeeming dream this summer? 308 friends and followers. [1855, i dreamed, last night, that i could vault over any height it pleased me. that was something ; and i contemplated myself with a slight satisfac tion in the morning for it. methinks i will write to you. methinks you will be glad to hear. we will stand on solid foundations to one another, la column planted on this shore, you 011 that. we meet the same sun in his rising. we were built slowly, and have come to our bearing. we will not mutu ally fall over that we may meet, but will grandly and eternally guard the straits. methinks i see an inscription on you, which the architect made, the stucco being worn off to it. the name of that ambitious worldly king is crumbling away. i see it toward sunset in favorable lights. each must read for the other, as might a sailer-by. be sure you are star-y-pointing still. how is it on your side? i will not require an answer until you think i have paid my debts to you. i have just got a letter from ricketson, urg ing me to come to new bedford, which possibly i may do. he says i can wear my old clothes there. let me be remembered in your quiet house. 2et.38.] to daniel ricketson. 309 to daniel ricketson (at new bedford). concord, september 27, 1855. friend ricketson, i am sorry that you were obliged to leave concord without seeing more of it, its river and woods, and various pleasant walks, and its worthies. i assure you that i am none the worse for my walk with you, but on all accounts the better. methinks i am regaining my health ; but i would like to know first what it was that ailed me. i have not yet conveyed your message to mr. hosmer, 1 but will not fail to do so. that idea of occupying the old house is a good one, quite feasible, and you could bring your hair-pillow with you. it is an inn in concord which i had not thought of, a philosopher s inn. that large chamber might make a man s idea expand proportionably. it would be well to have an interest in some old chamber in a deserted house in every part of the country which attracted us. 1 this was edmund hosmer, a concord farmer, before men tioned as a friend of emerson, who was fond of quoting his sagacious and often cynical remarks. he had entertained george curtis and the alcotts at his farm on the &quot; turnpike,&quot; southeast of emerson s ; but now was living on a part of the old manor of governor winthrop, which soon passed to the ownership of the hunts ; and this house which mr. ricketson proposed to lease was the &quot; old hunt farmhouse,&quot; in truth built for the winthrops two centuries before. it was soon after torn down. 310 friends and followers. [1855, there would be no such, place to receive one s guests as that. if old furniture is fashionable, why not go the whole house at once ? i shall endeavor to make mr. hosmer believe that the old house is the chief attraction of his farm, and that it is his duty to preserve it by all honest appliances. you might take a lease of it in per petuo, and done with it. i am so wedded to my way of spending a day, require such broad margins of leisure, and such a complete wardrobe of old clothes, that i am ill-fitted for going abroad. pleasant is it some times to sit at home, on a single egg all day, in your own nest, though it may prove at last to be an egg of chalk. the old coat that i wear is concord ; it is my morning-robe and study-gown, my working dress and suit of ceremony, and my nightgown after all. cleave to the simplest ever. home, home, home. cars sound like cares to me. i am accustomed to think very long of going anywhere, am slow to move. i hope to hear a response of the oracle first. however, i think that i will try the effect of your talisman on the iron horse next saturday, and dismount at tar kiln hill. perhaps your sea air will be good for me. i conveyed your invitation to channing, but he apparently will not come. excuse my not writing earlier ; but i had not decided. 2et.38.] to daniel ricketson. 811 to daniel ricketson (at new bedford). concord, october 12, 1855. mr. ricketson, i fear that you had a lonely and disagreeable ride back to new bed ford through the carver woods and so on, perhaps in the rain, too, and i am in part an swerable for it. i feel very much in debt to you and your family for the pleasant days i spent at brooklawn. tell arthur and walton 1 that the shells which they gave me are spread out, and make quite a show to inland eyes. me thinks i still hear the strains of the piano, the violin, and the flageolet blended together. ex. cuse me for the noise which i believe drove you to take refuge in the shanty. that shanty is indeed a favorable place to expand in, which i fear i did not enough improve. on my way through boston i inquired for gilpin s works at little, brown & co. s, mon roe s, ticknor s, and burirliam s. they have not got them. they told me at little, brown & co. s that his works (not complete), in twelve vols., 8vo, were imported and sold in this coun try five or six years ago for about fifteen dollars. their terms for importing are ten per cent on the cost. i copied from the &quot; london catalogue 1 sons of mr. rieketson; the second, a sculptor, modeled the medallion head of thoreau engraved for this book. 312 friends and followers. [1855, of books, 1846-51,&quot; at their shop, the following list of gilpin s works : gilpin (wm.), dialogues on various subjects. 8vo. 9s. cadell. essays on picturesque subjects. 8vo. 15s. cadell. exposition of the new testament. 2 vols. 8vo. 16s. longman. forest scenery, by sir t. d. lauder. 2 vols. 8vo. 18s. smith & e. lectures on the catechism. 12mo. 3s. qd. longman. lives of the reformers. 2 vols. 12mo. 8s. rivington. sermons illustrative and practical. 8vo. 12s. hatchard. sermons to country congregations. 4 vols. 8vo. 1 16s. longman. tour in cambridge, norfolk, &c. 8vo. 18s. cadell. tour of the river wye. 12mo. 4s. with plates. 8vo. 17s. cadell. gilpin (w. s. (?) ), hints on landscape gardening. royal 8vo. 1. cadell. beside these, i remember to have read one volume on &quot; prints ; &quot; his &quot; southern tour &quot; (1775) ; &quot; lakes of cumberland,&quot; two vols. ; &quot; highlands of scotland and west of england,&quot; two vols. n. b. there must be plates in every volume. i still see an image of those middleborough ponds in my mind s eye, broad shallow lakes, with an iron mine at the bottom, compara tively unvexed by sails, only by tom smith jet. 38.] to daniel ricketson. 313 and his squaw, sepits, &quot; sharper.&quot; i find my map of the state to be the best i have seen of that district. it is a question whether the islands of long pond or great quitticus offer the great est attractions to a lord of the isles. that plant which i found on the shore of long pond chances to be a rare and beautiful flower, the sabattia chloroides, referred to plymouth. in a description of middleborough in the hist. coll., vol. iii., 1810, signed nehemiah ben net, middleborough, 1793, it is said: &quot;there is on the easterly shore of assawampsitt pond, on the shore of betty s neck, two rocks which have curious marks thereon (supposed to be done by the indians), which appear like the steppings of a person with naked feet which settled into the rocks ; likewise the prints of a hand on sev eral places, with a number of other marks ; also there is a rock 011 a high hill a little to the east ward of the old stone fishing wear, where there is the print of a person s hand in said rock.&quot; it would be well to look at those rocks again more carefully ; also at the rock on the hill. i should think that you would like to explore sinpatuct pond in rochester, it is so large and near. it is an interesting fact that the ale wives used to ascend to it, if they do not still, -both from mattapoisett and through great quitticus. 314 friends and followers. [1855, there will be no trouble about the chamber in the old house, though, as i told you, mr. hos mer may expect some compensation for it. he says, &quot; give my respects to mr. ricketson, and tell him that i cannot be at a large expense to preserve an antiquity or curiosity. nature must do its work.&quot; &quot; but,&quot; say i, &quot; he asks you only not to assist nature.&quot; to daniel ricketson (at new bedford). concord, october 16, 1855. friend ricketson, i have got both your letters at once. you must not think concord so barren a place when channing 1 is away. there are the river and fields left yet ; and i, though ordinarily a man of business, should have some afternoons and evenings to spend with you, i trust, that is, if you could stand so much of me. if you can spend your time profitably here, or without ennui, having an oc casional ramble or tete-a-tete with one of the na tives, it will give me pleasure to have you in the neighborhood. you see i am preparing you for our awful unsocial ways, keeping in our dens a good part of the day, sucking our claws per haps. but then we make a religion of it, and that you cannot but respect. 1 mr. channinghad gone, october, 1855, to live in new bed ford, and help edit the mercury there. jet. 38.] to daniel ricketson. 315 if you know the taste of your own heart, and like it, come to concord, and i 11 warrant you enough here to season the dish with, ay, even though channing and emerson and i were all away. we might paddle quietly up the river. then there are one or two more ponds to be seen, etc. i should very much enjoy further rambling with you in your vicinity, but must postpone it for the present. to tell the truth, i am plan ning to get seriously to work after these long months of inefficiency and idleness. i do not know whether you are haunted by any such demon which puts you on the alert to pluck the fruit of each day as it passes, and store it safely in your bin. true, it is well to live abandonedly from time to time ; but to our working hours that must be as the spile to the bung. so for a long season i must enjoy only a low slanting gleam in my mind s eye from the middleborough ponds far away. methinks i am getting a little more strength into those knees of mine ; and, for my part, i believe that god does delight in the strength of a man s legs. 316 friends and followers. [1855, to harrison blake (at worcester). concord, december 9, 1855. mr. blake, thank you ! thank you for going a-wooding with me, and enjoying it, for being warmed by my wood fire. i have in deed enjoyed it much alone. i see how i might enjoy it yet more with company, how we might help each other to live. and to be admitted to nature s hearth costs nothing. none is ex cluded, but excludes himself. you have only to push aside the curtain. i am glad to hear that you were there too. there are many more such voyages, and longer ones, to be made on that river, for it is the water of life. the ganges is nothing to it. observe its reflections, no idea but is familiar to it. that river, though to dull eyes it seems terres trial wholly, flows through elysium. what pow ers bathe in it invisible to villagers ! talk of its shallowness, that hay-carts can be driven through it at midsummer ; its depth passeth my understanding. if, forgetting the allurements of the world, i could drink deeply enough of it ; if, cast adrift from the shore, i could with com plete integrity float on it, i should never be seen on the mill-dam again. 1 if there is any depth in 1 the centre of concord village, where the post-office and shops are, so called from an old mill-dam where now is a street. xt. 38.] to harrison blake. 317 me, there is a corresponding depth in it. it is the cold blood of the gods. i paddle and bathe in their artery. i do not want a stick of wood for so trivial a use as to burn even, but they get it over night, and carve and gild it that it may please my eye. what persevering lovers they are ! what infi nite pains to attract and delight us ! they will supply us with fagots wrapped in the daintiest packages, and freight paid ; sweet-scented woods, and bursting into flower, and resounding as if orpheus had just left them, these shall be our fuel, and we still prefer to chaffer with the wood merchant ! the jug we found still stands draining bottom up on the bank, on the sunny side of the house. that river, who shall say exactly whence it came, and whither it goes ? does aught that flows come from a higher source ? many things drift downward on its surface which would en rich a man. if you could only be on the alert all day, and every day ! and the nights are as long as the days. do you not think you could contrive thus to get woody fibre enough to bake your wheaten bread with? would you not perchance have tasted the sweet crust of another kind of bread in the mean while, which ever hangs ready baked on the bread-fruit trees of the world ? 318 friends and followers. [1855, talk of burning your smoke after the wood has been consumed ! there is a far more impor tant and warming heat, commonly lost, which precedes the burning of the wood. it is the smoke of industry, which is incense. i had been so thoroughly warmed in body and spirit, that when at length my fuel was housed, i came near selling it to the ash-man, as if i had extracted all its heat. you should have been here to help me get in my boat. the last time i used it, november 27th, paddling up the assabet, i saw a great round pine log sunk deep in the water, and with labor got it aboard. when i was floating this home so gently, it occurred to me why i had found it. it was to make wheels with to roll my boat into winter quarters upon. so i sawed off two thick rollers from one end, pierced them for wheels, and then of a joist which i had found drifting on the river in the summer i made an axletree, and 011 this i rolled my boat out. miss mary emerson l is here, the youngest person in concord, though about eighty, and the most apprehensive of a genuine thought; earnest to know of your inner life ; most stimu 1 the aunt of r. w. emerson, then eighty-one years old, an admirer of thoreau, as her notes to him show. for an account of her see emerson s lectures and biographical sketches, pp. 371-404. jet. 38.] to daniel ricketson. 319 lating society ; and exceedingly witty withal. she says they called her old when she was young, and she has never grown any older. i wish you could see her. my books 1 did not arrive till november 30th, the cargo of the asia having been complete when they reached liverpool. i have arranged them in a case which i made in the mean while, partly of river boards. i have not dipped far into the new ones yet. one is splendidly bound and il luminated. they are in english, french, latin, greek, and sanscrit. i have not made out the significance of this godsend yet. farewell, and bright dreams to you ! to daniel ricketson (at new bedford). concord, december 25, 1855. friend ricketson, though you have not shown your face here, i trust that you did not interpret my last note to my disadvantage. i remember that, among other things, i wished to break it to you, that, owing to engagements, i should not be able to show you so much atten tion as i could wish, or as you had shown to me. how we did scour over the country ! i hope your horse will live as long as one which i hear 1 the books on india, egypt, etc., sent by cholmondeley. see p. 321. they are now divided between the concord public library and the libraries of alcott, blake, emerson, sanborn, etc. 320 friends and followers. [1855, just died in the south of france at the age of forty. yet i had no doubt you would get quite enough of me. do not give it up so easily. the old house is still empty, and hosmer is easy to treat with. channing was here about ten days ago. i told him of my visit to you, and that he too must go and see you and your country. 1 this may have suggested his writing to you. that island lodge, especially for some weeks in a summer, and new explorations in your vicin ity, are certainly very alluring ; but sucli are my engagements to myself, that i dare not promise to wend your way, but will for the present only heartily thank you for your kind and generous offer. when my vacation comes, then look out. my legs have grown considerably stronger, and that is all that ails me a but i wish now above all to inform you, though i suppose you will not be particularly interested, that cholmondeley has gone to the crimea, &quot; a complete soldier,&quot; with a design, when he returns, if he ever returns, to buy a cottage in the south of england, and tempt me over ; but that, before going, he busied himself in buying, and has caused to be forwarded to me 1 mr. channing 1 became a frequent visitor at brooklawn, in the years of his residence at new bedford, 1856-58. see p. 324. jet. 38.] to daniel ricketson. 321 by chapman, a royal gift, in the shape of twenty one distinct works (one in nine volumes, forty-four volumes in all), almost exclusively re lating to ancient hindoo literature, and scarcely one of them to be bought in america. 1 i am familiar with many of them, and know how to prize them. i send you information of this as i might of the birth of a child. please remember me to all your family. 1 these books were ordered by cholmondeley in london, and sent to boston just as he was startingfor the crimean war, in october, 1855, calling them &quot; a nest of indian books.&quot; they included mill s history of british india, several transla tions of the sacred books of india, and one of them in sanscrit ; the works of bunsen, so far as then published, and other valu able books. in the ndte accompanying this gift, cholmonde ley said, &quot; i think i never found so much kindness in all my travels as in your country of new england.&quot; in return, thoreau sent his english friend, in 1857, his own week, em erson s poems, walt whitman s leaves of grass, and f. l. olmsted s book on the southern states (then preparing for the secession which they attempted four years later). this was perhaps the first copy of whitman seen in england, and when cholmondeley began to read it to his stepfather, rev. z. macaulay, at hodnet, that clergyman declared he would not hear it, and threatened to throw it in the fire. on reading the week (he had received walden from thoreau when first in america), cholmondeley wrote me, &quot;would you tell dear thoreau that the lines i admire so much in his week begin thus : low-anchored cloud, newfoundland air, etc. in my mind the best thing he ever wrote,&quot; 322 friends and followers. [1856, to daniel ricketson (at new bedford). concord, march 5, 1856. dear sir, i have been out of town, else i should have acknowledged your letter before. though not in the best mood for writing, i will say what i can now. you plainly have a rare, though a cheap, resource in your shanty. per haps the time will come when every country-seat will have one, when every country-seat will be one. i would advise you to see that shanty business out, though you go shanty-mad. work your vein till it is exhausted, or conducts you to a broader one ; so that channing shall stand before your shanty, and sa^, &quot; that is your house.&quot; this has indeed been a grand winter for me, and for all of us. i am not considering how much i have enjoyed it. what matters it how happy or unhappy we have been, if we have minded our business and advanced our affairs. i have made it a part of my business to wade in the snow and take the measure of the ice. the ice on our pond was just two feet thick on the first of march ; and i have to-day been survey ing a wood-lot, where i sank about two feet at every step. it is high time that you, fanned by the warm breezes of the gulf stream, had begun to &quot;lay&quot; jst. 38.] to daniel ricketson. 323 for even the concord hens have, though one wonders where they find the raw material of egg-shell here. beware how you put off your laying to any later spring, else your cackling will not have the inspiring early spring sound. as for visiting you in april, though i am inclined enough to take some more rambles in your neighborhood, especially by the seaside, i dare not engage myself, nor allow you to expect me. the truth is, i have my enterprises now as ever, at which i tug with ridiculous feebleness, but admirable perseverance, and cannot say when i shall be sufficiently fancy-free for such an ex cursion. you have done well to write a lecture on cowper. in the expectation of getting you to read it here, i applied to the curators of our ly ceum ; 1 but, alas, our lyceum has been a failure this winter for want of funds. it ceased some weeks since, with a debt, they tell me, to be car ried over to the next year s account. only one more lecture is to be read by a signor some body, an italian, paid for by private subscription, as a deed of charity to the lecturer. they are not rich enough to offer you your expenses even, though probably a month or two ago they would have been glad of the chance. 1 the concord lyceum, founded in 1829, and still extant, though not performing its original function of lectures and debates. see pp. 61, 185, etc. 324 friends and followers. [1856, however, the old house has not failed yet. that offers you lodging for an indefinite time after you get into it ; and in the mean while i offer you bed and board in my father s house, always excepting hair-pillows and new-fangled bedding. remember me to your family. to daniel ricketson (at new bedford). concord, march 27, 1856. feiend ricketson, i was surprised to hear the other day that channing was in new bedford. when he was here last (in december, i think), he said, like himself, in answer to my inquiry where he lived, &quot; that he did not know the name of the place ; &quot; so it has remained in a degree of obscurity to me. i am rejoiced to hear that you are getting on so bravely with him and his verses. he and i, as you know have been old cronies, 1 &quot; fed the same flock, by fountain, shade, and rill, together both, ere the high lawns appeared under the opening eyelids of the morn, we drove afield, and both together beared,&quot; etc. &quot; but o, the heavy change,&quot; now he is gone. 1 ellery^ channing is mentioned, though not by name, in the week (pp.~~21l7l57), and in walden (p. 414). he was the comrade of thoreau in berkshire, and on the hudson, in new hampshire, canada, and cape cod, and in many rambles nearer concord. he was also a companion of hawthorne in his river voyages, as mentioned in the mosses. i jst.38.] to daniel ricketson. 325 the charming you have seen and described is the real simon pure. you have seen him. many a good ramble may you have together ! you will see in him still more of the same kind to attract and to puzzle you. how to serve him most effectually has long been a problem with his friends. perhaps it is left for you to solve it. i suspect that the most that you or any one can do for him is to appreciate his genius, to buy and read, and cause others to buy and read his poems. that is the hand which he has put forth to the world, take hold of that. review them if you can, perhaps take the risk of publishing something more which he may write. your knowledge of cowper will help you to know charming. he will accept sym pathy and aid, but he will not bear questioning, unless the aspects of the sky are particularly auspicious. he will ever be &quot; reserved and enigmatic,&quot; and you must deal with him at arm s length. i have no secrets to tell you concerning him, and do not wish to call obvious excellences and defects by far-fetched names. nor need i suggest how witty and poetic he is, and what an inexhaustible fund of good fellow ship you will find in him. 326 friends and followers. [1856, to harrison blake (at worcester). concord, march 13, 1856. mr. blake, it is high time i sent you a word. i have not heard from harrisburg since offering to go there, and have not been invited to lecture anywhere else the past winter. so you see i am fast growing rich. this is quite right, for such is my relation to the lecture-goers, i should be surprised and alarmed if there were any great call for me. i confess that i am con siderably alarmed even when i hear that an indi vidual wishes to meet me, for my experience teaches me that we shall thus only be made cer tain of a mutual strangeness, which otherwise we might never have been aware of. i have not yet recovered strength enough for such a walk as you propose, though pretty well again for circumscribed rambles and chamber work. even now, i am probably the greatest walker in concord, to its disgrace be it said. i remember our walks and talks and sailing in the past with great satisfaction, and trust that we shall have more of them erelong, have more woodings-up, for even in the spring we must still seek &quot; fuel to maintain our fires.&quot; as you suggest, we would fain value one an other for what we are absolutely, rather than relatively. how will this do for a symbol of sympathy ? affr.38.] to harrison blake. 327 as for compliments, even the stars praise me, and i praise them. they and i sometimes be long to a mutual admiration society. is it not so with you ? i know you of old. are you not tough and earnest to be talked at, praised, or blamed ? must you go out of the room because you are the subject of conversation? where will you go to, pray ? shall we look into the &quot; letter writer &quot; to see what compliments are admissible ? i am not afraid of praise, for i have practiced it on myself. as for my deserts, i never took an account of that stock, and in this connection care not whether i am deserving or not. when i hear praise coming, do i not ele vate and arch myself to hear it like the sky, and as impersonally ? think i appropriate any of it to my weak legs ? no. praise away till all is blue. i see by the newspapers that the season for making sugar is at hand. now is the time, whether you be rock, or white-maple, or hickory. i trust that you have prepared a store of sap tubs and sumach-spouts, and invested largely in kettles. early the first frosty morning, tap your maples, the sap will not run in summer, you 328 friends and followers. [1856, know. it matters not how little juice you get, if you get all you can, and boil it down. i made just one crystal of sugar once, one twentieth of an inch cube, out of a pumpkin, and it suf ficed. though the yield be no greater than that, this is not less the season for it, and it will be not the less sweet, nay, it will be infinitely the sweeter. shall, then, the maple yield sugar, and not man ? shall the farmer be thus active, and surely have so much sugar to show for it, before this very march is gone, while i read the newspa per ? &quot;while he works in his sugar-camp let me work in mine, for sweetness is in me, and to sugar it shall come, it shall not all go to leaves and wood. am i not a sugar-maple man, then ? boil down the sweet sap which the spring causes to flow within you. stop not at syrup, go on to sugar, though you present the world with but a single crystal, a crystal not made from trees in your yard, but from the new life that stirs in your pores. cheerfully skim your kettle, and watch it set and crystallize, making a holi day of it if you will. heaven will be propitious to you as to him. say to the farmer, there is your crop ; here is mine. mine is a sugar to sweeten sugar with. if you will listen to me, i will sweeten your whole load, your whole life. -ex. 38.] to harrison blake. 329 then will the callers ask, where is blake ? he is in his sugar-camp on the mountain-side. let the world await him. then will the little boys bless you, and the great boys too, for such sugar is the origin of many condiments, blak ians in the shops of worcester, of new form, with their mottoes wrapped up in them. shall men taste only the sweetness of the maple and the cane the coming year ? a walk over the crust to asnybumskit, stand ing there in its inviting simplicity, is tempting to think of, making a fire on the snow under some rock ! the very poverty of outward na ture implies an inward wealth in the walker. what a golconda is he conversant with, thaw ing his fingers over such a blaze ! but but have you read the new poem, &quot; the angel in the house &quot; ? perhaps you will find it good for you. to harrison blake (at worcester). concord, may 21, 1856. mk. blake, i have not for a long time been putting such thoughts together as i should like to read to the company you speak of. i have enough of that sort to say, or even read, but not time now to arrange it. something i have prepared might prove for their entertainment or 330 friends and followers. [1856, refreshment perchance ; but i would not like to have a hat carried round for it. i have just been reading some papers to see if they would do for your company ; but though i thought pretty well of them as long as i read them to myself, when i got an auditor to try them on, i felt that they would not answer. how could i let you drum up a company to hear them ? in fine, what i have is either too scattered or loosely arranged, or too light, or else is too scientific and matter of fact (i run a good deal into that of late) for so hungry a company. i am still a learner, not a teacher, feeding somewhat omnivorously, browsing both stalk and leaves ; but i shall perhaps be enabled to speak with the more precision and authority by and by, if philosophy and sentiment are not buried under a multitude of details. i do not refuse, but accept your invitation, only changing the time. i consider myself in vited to worcester once for all, and many thanks to the inviter. as for the harvard excursion, 1 will you let me suggest another ? do you and 1 this was the town of harvard, not the college. perhaps the excursion was to visit fruitlands, where alcott and lane had established their short-lived community, in a beautiful spot near still river, an affluent of the nashua, and half way from concord to wachusett. &quot; asnebumskit,&quot; mentioned in a former letter, is the highest hill near worcester, as &quot; nob scot &quot; is the highest near concord. both have indian names. jet. 38.] to harrison blake. 331 brown come to concord on saturday, if the weather promises well, and spend the sunday here on the river or hills, or both. so we shall save some of our money (which is of next impor tance to our souls), and lose i do not know what. you say you talked of coming here be fore ; now do it. i do not propose this because i think that i am worth your spending time with, but because i hope that we may prove flint and steel to one another. it is at most only an hour s ride farther, and you can at any rate do what you please when you get here. then we will see if we have any apology to offer for our existence. so come to concord, come to concord, come to concord ! or your suit shall be defaulted. as for the dispute about solitude and society, any comparison is impertinent. it is an idling down on the plain at the base of a mountain, in stead of climbing steadily to its top. of course you will be glad of all the society you can get to go up with. will you go to glory with me ? is the burden of the song. i love society so much that i swallowed it all at a gulp, that is, all that came in my way. it is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thinner till there is none at all. it is either the tribune 1 on 1 the new york newspaper. 332 friends and followers. [1856, the plain, a sermon on the mount, or a very pri vate ecstasy still higher up. we are not the less to aim at the summits, though the multitude does not ascend them. use all the society that will abet you. but perhaps i do not enter into the spirit of your talk. in the spring of 1856, mr. alcott, then living in walpole, n. h., visited concord, and while there suggested to thoreau that the upper valley of the connecticut, in which walpole lies, was good walking-ground, and that he would be glad to see him there. when autumn began to hover in the distance, thoreau recalled this invitation, and sent the letter below. to bronson alcott (at walpole, n. h.). concord, september 1, 1856. mr. alcott, i remember that, in the spring, you invited me to visit you. i feel in clined to spend a day or two with you and on your hills at this season, returning, perhaps, by way of brattleboro. what if i should take the cars for walpole next friday morning ? are you at home ? and will it be convenient and agreeable to you to see me then ? i will await an answer. i am but poor company, and it will not be worth the while to put yourself out on my ac 2bt.39.] to bronson alcott. 333 count ; yet from time to time i have some thoughts which would be the better for an air ing. i also wish to get some hints from sep tember on the connecticut to help me under stand that season on the concord ; to snuff the musty fragrance of the decaying year in the primitive woods. there is considerable cellar room in my nature for such stores ; a whole row of bins waiting to be filled, before i can cele brate my thanksgiving. mould is the richest of soils, yet / am not mould. it will always be found that one flourishing institution exists and battens on another mouldering one. the pres ent itself is parasitic to this extent. your fellow-traveler, henky d. thoreau. as fortune would have it, mr. alcott was then making his arrangements for a conversa tional tour in the vicinity of new york ; but he renewed the invitation for himself, while repeat ing it in the name of mrs. alcott and his daugh ters. thoreau made the visit, i believe, and some weeks later, at the suggestion of mr. al cott, he was asked by marcus spring of new york to read lectures and survey their estate for a community at perth amboy, n. j., in which mr. spring and his friends, the birneys, welds, grimkes, etc., had united for social and educa 334 friends and followers. [1856, tional purposes. it was a colony of radical opin ions and old-fashioned culture; the grimkes having been bred in charleston, s. c., which they left by reason of their opposition to negro slavery, and the elder birney having held slaves in alabama until his conscience bade him eman cipate them, after which he, too, could have no secure home among slaveholders. he was the first presidential candidate of the voting aboli tionists, as lincoln was the last ; and his friend, theodore weld, who married miss grimke, had been one of the early apostles of emancipation in ohio. their circle at eagleswood appealed to thoreau s sense of humor, and is described by him in the next letter. in october, 1856, mr. spring, whom mr. al cott was then visiting, wrote to thoreau inviting him to come to eagleswood, give lectures, and survey two hundred acres of land belonging to the community, laying out streets and making a map of the proposed village. thoreau accepted the proposal, and soon after wrote the following letter, which miss thoreau submitted to mr. emerson for publication, with other letters, in the volume of 1865 ; but he returned it, inscribed &quot;not printable at present.&quot; the lapse of time has removed this objection. sit. 39.] to sophia thoreau. 335 to sophia thoreau. [direct] eagles wood, perth amboy, n. j., saturday eve, november 1, 1856. dear sophia, i have hardly had time and repose enough to write to you before. i spent the afternoon of friday (it seems some months ago) in worcester , but failed to see [harrison] blake, he having &quot; gone to the horse-race &quot; in boston ; to atone for which i have just received a letter from him, asking me to stop at worces ter and lecture on my return. i called on [theo.] brown and [t. w.] higginson ; in the evening came by way of norwich to new york in the steamer commonwealth, and, though it was so windy inland, had a perfectly smooth pas sage, and about as good a sleep as usually at home. reached new york about seven a. m., too late for the john potter (there was n t any jonas), so i spent the forenoon there, called on greeley (who was not in), met [f. a. t.] bel lew in broadway and walked into his workshop, read at the astor library, etc. i arrived here, about thirty miles from new york, about five p. m. saturday, in company with miss e. pea body, who was returning in the same covered wagon from the landing to eagleswood, which last place she has just left for the winter. this is a queer place. there is one large long 336 friends and followers. [1856, stone building, which cost some forty thousand dollars, in which i do not know exactly who or how many work (one or two familiar faces and more familiar names have turned up), a few shops and offices, an old farmhouse, and mr. spring s perfectly private residence, within twenty rods of the main building. the city of perth amboy is about as big as concord, and eagleswood is one and a quarter miles south west of it, on the bay side. the central fact here is evidently mr. [theodore] weld s school, recently established, around which various other things revolve. saturday evening i went to the schoolroom, hall, or what not, to see the children and their teachers and patrons dance. mr. weld, a kind-looking man with a long white beard, danced with them, and mr. [e. j.] cut ler, his assistant (lately from cambridge, who is acquainted with sanborn), mr. spring, and oth ers. this saturday evening dance is a regular thing, and it is thought something strange if you don t attend. they take it for granted that you want society ! sunday forenoon i attended a sort of quaker meeting at the same place (the quaker aspect and spirit prevail here, mrs. spring says, &quot;does thee not?&quot;), where it was expected that the spirit would move me (i having been previ ously spoken to about it) ; and it, or something mt. 39.] to sophia thoreau. 337 else, did, an inch or so. i said just enough to set them a little by the ears and make it lively. i had excused myself by saying that i could not adapt myself to a particular audience ; for all the speaking and lecturing here have ref erence to the children, who are far the greater part of the audience, and they are not so bright as new england children. imagine them sit ting close to the wall, all around a hall, with old quaker-looking men and women here and there. there sat mrs. weld [grimke] and her sister, two elderly gray-headed ladies, the former in ex treme bloomer costume, which was what you may call remarkable ; mr. arnold buffum, with broad face and a great white beard, looking like a pier-head made of the cork-tree with the bark on, as if he could buffet a considerable wave ; james g. birney, formerly candidate for the presidency, with another particularly white head and beard ; edward palmer, the anti-money man (for whom communities were made), with his ample beard somewhat grayish. some of them, i suspect, are very worthy people. of course you are wondering to what extent all these make one family, and to what extent twenty. mrs. kirkland l (and this a name only to me) i saw. she has just bought a lot here. they all know 1 mrs. caroline kirkland, wife of prof. william kirkland, then of new york, a writer of wit and fame at that time. 338 friends and followers. [1856, more about your neighbors and acquaintances than you suspected. on monday evening i read the moose story to the children, to their satisfaction. ever since i have been constantly engaged in surveying eagleswood, through woods, salt marshes, and along the shore, dodging the tide, through bushes, mud, and beggar ticks, having no time to look up or think where i am. (it takes ten or fifteen minutes before each meal to pick the beggar ticks out of my clothes ; burrs and the rest are left, and rents mended at the first con venient opportunity.) i shall be engaged per haps as much longer. mr. spring wants me to help him about setting out an orchard and vine yard, mr. birney asks me to survey a small piece for him, and mr. alcott, who has just come down here for the third sunday, says that gree ley (i left my name for him) invites him and me to go to his home with him next saturday morning and spend the sunday. it seems a twelvemonth since i was not here, but i hope to get settled deep into my den again erelong. the hardest thing to find here is soli tude and concord. i am at mr. spring s house. both he and she and their family are quite agreeable. i want you to write to me immediately (just left off to talk french with the servant man), *st. 39.] to harrison blake. 339 and let father and mother put in a word. to them and to aunts, love from henry. the date of this visit to eagleswood is worthy of note, because in that november thoreau made the acquaintance of the late walt whit man, in whom he ever after took a deep interest. accompanied by mr. alcott, he called on whit man, then living at brooklyn ; and i remember the calm enthusiasm with which they both spoke of whitman upon their return to concord. &quot; three men,&quot; said emerson, in his funeral eulogy of thoreau, &quot; have of late years strongly impressed mr. thoreau, john brown, his in dian guide in maine, joe polis, and a third per son, not known to this audience.&quot; this last was whitman, who has since become well known to a larger audience. to harrison blake (at worcester). eagleswood, n. j., november 19, 1856. mr. blake, i have been here much longer than i expected, but have deferred answering you, because i could not foresee when i should return. i do not know yet within three or four days. this uncertainty makes it impossible for me to appoint a day to meet you, until it shall be too late to hear from you again. i think, there 340 friends and followers. [185(5, fore, that i must go straight home. i feel some objection to reading that &quot; what shall it profit &quot; lecture again in worcester ; but if you are quite sure that it will be worth the while (it is a grave consideration), i will even make an independent journey from concord for that purpose. i have read three of my old lectures (that included) to the eagleswood people, and, unexpectedly, with rare success, i. e., i was aware that what i was saying was silently taken in by their ears. you must excuse me if i write mainly a busi ness letter now, for i am sold for the time, am merely thoreau the surveyor here, and solitude is scarcely obtainable in these parts. alcott has been here three times, and, satur day before last, i went with him and greeley, by invitation of the last, to g. s farm, thirty-six miles north of new york. the next day a. and i heard beecher preach ; and what was more, we visited whitman the next morning (a. had already seen him), and were much inter ested and provoked. he is apparently the greatest democrat the world has seen. kings and aristocracy go by the board at once, as they have long deserved to. a remarkably strong though coarse nature, of a sweet disposition, and much prized by his friends. though peculiar and rough in his exterior, his skin (all over (?)) red, jet. 39.] to harrison blake. 341 he is essentially a gentleman. i am still some what in a quandary about him, feel that he is essentially strange to me, at any rate ; but i am surprised by the sight of him. he is very broad, but, as i have said, not fine. he said that i misapprehended him. i am not quite sure that i do. he told us that he loved to ride up and down broadway all day on an omnibus, sitting beside the driver, listening to the roar of the carts, and sometimes gesticulating and declaiming homer at the top of his voice. he has long been an editor and writer for the news papers, was editor of the &quot; new orleans cres cent &quot; once ; but now has no employment but to read and write in the forenoon, and walk in the afternoon, like all the rest of the scribbling gentry. i shall probably be in concord next week ; so you can direct to me there. to harrison blake (at worcester). concord, december g, 1856. me. blake, i trust that you got a note from me at eagleswood, about a fortnight ago. i passed through worcester on the morning of the 25th of november, and spent several hours (from 3.30 to 6.20) in the travelers room at the depot, as in a dream, it now seems. as the first harlem train unexpectedly connected with the 342 friends and followers. [1856, first from fitchburg, i did not spend the forenoon with you as i had anticipated, on account of baggage, etc. if it had been a seasonable hour, i should have seen you, i. e., if you had not gone to a horse-race. but think of making a call at half past three in the morning ! (would it not have implied a three o clock in the morn ing courage in both you and me ?) as it were, ignoring the fact that mankind are really not at home, are not out, but so deeply in that they cannot be seen, nearly half their hours at this season of the year. i walked up and down the main street, at half past five, in the dark, and paused long in front of brown s store, trying to distinguish its fea tures ; considering whether i might safely leave his &quot;putnam &quot; in the door-handle, but concluded not to risk it. meanwhile a watchman (?) seemed to be watching me, and i moved off. took another turn round there, and had the very earliest offer of the transcript 1 from an urchin behind, whom i actually could not see, it was so dark. so i withdrew, wondering if you and b. would know if i had been there. you little dream who is occupying worcester when you are all asleep. several things occurred there that night which i will venture to say were not put into the transcript. a cat caught a 1 a worcester newspaper. jst.39.] to harrison blake. 343 mouse at the depot, and gave it to her kitten to play with. so that world-famous tragedy goes on by night as well as by day, and nature is emphatically wrong. also i saw a young irish man kneel before his mother, as if in prayer, while she wiped a cinder out of his eye with her tongue ; and i found that it was never too late (or early ?) to learn something. these things transpired while you and b. were, to all practical purposes, nowhere, and good for nothing, not even for society, not for horse-races, nor the taking back of a &quot; putnam s magazine.&quot; it is true, i might have recalled you to life, but it would have been a cruel act, considering the kind of life you would have come back to. however, i would fain write to you now by broad daylight, and report to you some of my life, such as it is, and recall you to your life, which is not always lived by you, even by day light. blake ! brown ! are you awake ? are you aware what an ever-glorious morning this is, -what long-expected, never-to-be-repeated opportunity is now offered to get life and know ledge ? for my part, i am trying to wake up, to wring slumber out of my pores ; for, generally, i take events as unconcernedly as a fence post, absorb wet and cold like it, and am pleasantly tickled with lichens slowly spreading over me. 344 friends and followers. [1856, could i not be content, then, to be a cedar post, which lasts twenty-five years? would i not rather be that than the farmer that set it ? or he that preaches to the farmer? and go to the heaven of posts at last ? i think i should like that as well as any would like it. but i should not care if i sprouted into a living tree, put forth leaves and flowers, and bore fruit. i am grateful for what i am and have. my thanksgiving is perpetual. it is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite, only a sense of existence. well, anything for variety. i am ready to try this for the next ten thousand years, and exhaust it. how sweet to think of ! my extremities well charred, and my intellectual part too, so that there is no danger of worm or rot for a long while. my breath is sweet to me. o how i laugh when i think of my vague, indefinite riches. no run on my bank can drain it, for my wealth is not possession but enjoyment. what are all these years made for ? and now another winter comes, so much like the last? can t we satisfy the beggars once for all ? have you got in your wood for this winter ? what else have you got in? of what use a great fire on the hearth, and a confounded little fire in the heart? are you prepared to make a decisive campaign, to pay for your costly tui in the play. ie necessities in the production of cts. piston produced an apparent ex this was fed by a hose connec -om the boiler-room of the thea )n the first night, as the derailed toppled over, the valve got *d, and the pressure of the steam d&quot; the whole business. nobody urt, and the audience, which sup it was intended, was in ecstacies. heater was crowded the second n expectation of the realistic busi but was doomed to disappoint ve seen, a good many oher full engines put upon the stage, f them in this city, but for 3f finish in the polished metal ; they have all been mani wood and paper &quot;fakes.&quot; a lade property should be illusory, lect seeing a &quot;fake&quot; locomotive at ople s. theater in new york which &amp;gt;ally a painted set piece with prac 5 wheels and some cylinders and 5 working on the face of it. this* [so a first-night occasion and with of noise and a quick curtain have gone well enough, but it vorked by three men walking at ick of it. the topheavy stuff got ;tter of their grasp, which fell on :e, revealing the three astonished to the equally astonished house. in this city by frank marcus, an ac complished modeler. probably among large properties the most imdortant ever made was that of the, egyptian god ptha in &quot;aida&quot; at the metropolitan opera-house in new york. the statue, made in paper upon a wooden framework, was modeled from an authentic example. it represented an egyptian pharaonic divinty, with the peculiar napkin.like headdress known as the &quot;klaft,&quot; and was seated in the characteristic attitude of solemn dignity, with the hands upon the knees, as in the statue of memnon. with its pedestal it reached a height of thir ty-five feet, and, being placed in the center of a scene designed after the famous hall of columns at karnak, it was a remarkable feature of the spectacle. the four corners! of the tem ple were occupied by four other remark able properties gigantic incense tri pods, fanned by the priestesses while singing the famous soprano prayer to the &quot;almighty ptha, god of nature.&quot; when the theater was burned, not only did that enormous property go up, but also one of the most complete and beautiful collections of stage armor, jewelry and weapons was destroyed. most of the armor had been made for the wagnerian operas. some of the pieces, such as the winged helmet of wotan, were works of art, but the collection also contained some fine pieces of genuine armor, one suit of florentine in partic ular being inlaid with florid niello work. the properties, however, made in a theater run by american millionaires, regardless of expense, can hardly be taken as types of ordinary work; yet some of them were very interesting. the gigantic swan in &quot;lohengrin,&quot; which had to be raised on 1 a special trap, and the enormous dragon, opening jaws large enough to swallow a horse, breathing out steam and flames, in wait whitman, frona a photograph taken / his old age. mt. 39.] to harrison blake. 345 tion, to pay for the suns of past summers, for happiness and unhappiness lavished upon you? does not time go by swifter than the swift est equine trotter or racker? stir up brown. eemind him of his duties, which outrun the date and span of worcester s years past and to come. tell him to be sure that he is on the main street, however narrow it may be, and to have a lit sign, visible by night as well as by day. are they not patient waiters, they who wait for us ? but even they shall not be iosers december 7. that walt whitman, of whom i wrote to you, is the most interesting fact to me at present. i have just read his second edition (which he gave me), and it has done me more good than any reading for a long time. perhaps i remem ber best the poem of walt whitman, an amer ican, and the sun-down poem. there are two or three pieces in the book which are disagree able, to say the least ; simply sensual. he does not celebrate love at all. it is as if the beasts spoke. i think that men have not been ashamed of themselves without reason. no doubt there have always been dens where such deeds were unblushingly recited, and it is no merit to com 346 friends and followers. [1856, pete with their inhabitants. but even on this side he has spoken more truth than any ameri ican or modern that i know. i have found his poem exhilarating, encouraging. as for its sensuality, and it may turn out to be less sensual than it appears, i do not so much wish that those parts were not written, as that men and women were so pure that they could read them without harm, that is, without under standing them. one woman told me that no woman could read it, as if a man could read what a woman could not. of course walt whitman can communicate to us no experience, and if we are shocked, whose experience is it that we are reminded of ? on the whole, it sounds to me very brave and american, after whatever deductions. i do not believe that all the sermons, so called, that have been preached in this land put together are equal to it for preaching. we ought to rejoice greatly in him. he oc casionally suggests something a little more than human. you can t confound him with the other inhabitants of brooklyn or new york. how they must shudder when they read him ! he is awfully good. to be sure i sometimes feel a little imposed on. by his heartiness and broad generalities he puts me into a liberal frame of mind prepared jet.39.] to harrison blake. 347 to see wonders, as it were, sets me upon a hill or in the midst of a plain, stirs me well up, and then throws in a thousand of brick. though rude, and sometimes ineffectual, it is a great primitive poem, an alarum or trumpet note ringing through the american camp. wonderfully like the orientals, too, considering that when i asked him if he had read them, he answered, &quot; no : tell me about them.&quot; i did not get far in conversation with him, two more being present, and among the few things which i chanced to say, i remember that one was, in answer to him as representing amer ica, that i did not think much of america or of politics, and so on, which may have been some what of a damper to him. since i have seen him, i find that i am not disturbed by any brag or egoism in his book. he may turn out the least of a braggart of all, hav ing a better right to be confident. he is a great fellow. there is in alcott s diary an account of this interview with whitman, and the sunday morn ing in ward beecher s brooklyn church, from which a few passages may be taken. hardly any person met by either of these concord friends in v their later years made so deep an impression on both as did this then almost unknown poet and 848 friends and followers. [185g, thinker, concerning whom cholmondeley wrote to thoreau in 1857 : &quot;is there actually such a man as whitman? has any one seen or han dled him ? his is a tongue not understanded of the english people. i find the gentleman altogether left out of the book. it is the first book i have ever seen which i should call a 4 new book. &quot; mr. alcott writes under date of november 7, 1856, in new york : &quot; henry thoreau arrives from eagleswood, and sees swinton, a wise young scotchman, and walt whitman s friend, at my room (15 laight street), thoreau declining to accompany me to mrs. botta s parlors, as in vited by her. he sleeps here. (november 8.) we find greeley at the harlem station, and ride with him to his farm, where we pass the day, and return to sleep in the city, greeley coming in with us ; alice gary, the authoress, accompany ing us also. (sunday, november 9.) we cross the ferry to brooklyn, and hear ward beecher at the plymouth church. it was a spectacle, and himself the preacher, if preacher there be anywhere now in pulpits. his auditors had to weep, had to laugh, under his potent magnetism, while his doctrine of justice to all men, bond and free, was grand. house, entries, aisles, galleries, all were crowded. thoreau called it pagan, but i pronounced it good, very good, the best i *3t.39.] to b. b. wiley. 349 had witnessed for many a day, and hopeful for the coming time. at dinner at mrs. manning s miss m. s. was there, curious to see thoreau. after dinner we called on walt whitman (tho reau and i), but finding him out, we got all we could from his mother, a stately, sensible matron, believing absolutely in walter, and telling us how good he was, and how wise when a boy ; and how his four brothers and two sisters loved him, and still take counsel of the great man he has grown to be. we engaged to call again early in the morning, when she said walt would be glad to see us. (monday, 10th.) mrs. tyndale of philadelphia goes with us to see walt, walt the satyr, the bacchus, the very god pan. we sat with him for two hours, and much to our de light ; he promising to call on us at the interna tional at ten in the morning to-morrow, and there have the rest of it.&quot; whitman failed to call at his hour the next day. to b. b. wiley (at chicago). concord, december 12, 1856. mr. wiley, 1 it is refreshing to hear of your earnest purpose with respect to your cul ture, and i can send you no better wish than that 1 b. b. wiley, then of providence, since of chicago, had written to thoreau, september 4, for a copy of the week, which the author was then selling 1 on his own account, having 350 friends and followers. .[1856, you may not be thwarted by the cares and temp tations of life. depend on it, now is the ac cepted time, and probably you will never find yourself better disposed or freer to attend to your culture than at this moment. when they who inspire us with the idea are ready, shall not we be ready also ? i do not remember anything which confucius has said directly respecting man s &quot; origin, pur pose, and destiny.&quot; he was more practical than that. he is full of wisdom applied to human relations, to the private life, the family, government, etc. it is remarkable that, accord ing to his own account, the sum and substance of his teaching is, as you know, to do as you would be done by. he also said (i translate from the french), &quot; conduct yourself suitably towards the persons of your family, then you will be able to instruct and to direct a nation of men.&quot; &quot; to nourish one s self with a little rice, to drink water, to have only his bended arm to sup port his head, is a state which has also its satis faction. to be rich and honored by iniquitous bought back the unsalable first edition from his publisher, munroe. in a letter of october 31, to which the above is a reply, he mentions takinga walk with charles newcomb, then of providence, now of london, one of the dial contributors, and a special friend of emerson ; then inquires about confu cius, the hindoo philosophers, and swedenborg. jst. 39.] to b. b. wiley. 351 means is for me as the floating cloud which passes.&quot; &quot; as soon as a child is born he must respect its faculties : the knowledge which will come to it by and by does not resemble at all its present state. if it arrive at the age of forty or fifty years without having learned anything, it is no more worthy of any respect.&quot; this last, i think, will speak to your condition. but at this rate i might fill many letters. our acquaintance with the ancient hindoos is not at all personal. the full names that can be relied upon are very shadowy. it is, however, tangible works that we know. the best i think of are the bhagvat geeta (an episode in an ancient heroic poem called the mahabarat), the vedas, the vishnu purana, the institutes of menu, etc. i cannot say that swedenborg has been di rectly and practically valuable to me, for i have not been a reader of him, except to a slight ex tent ; but i have the highest regard for him, and trust that i shall read his works in some world or other. he had a wonderful knowledge of our interior and spiritual life, though his illumina tions are occasionally blurred by trivialities. he comes nearer to answering, or attempting to an swer, literally, your questions concerning man s origin, purpose, and destiny, than any of the 352 friends and followers. [1857, worthies i have referred to. but i think that that is not altogether a recommendation ; since such an answer to these questions cannot be discov ered any more than perpetual motion, for which no reward is now offered. the noblest man it is, methinks, that knows, and by his life suggests, the most about these things. crack away at these nuts, however, as long as you can, the very exercise will ennoble you, and you may get something better than the answer you expect. to b. b. wiley (at chicago). concord, april 26, 1857. mr. wiley, i see that you are turning a broad furrow among the books, but i trust that some very private journal all the while holds its own through their midst. books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside. i should say, read goethe s autobiography, by all means, also gib bon s, hay don the painter s, and our franklin s of course ; perhaps also alfieri s, benvenuto cellini s, and de quincey s &quot; confessions of an opium-eater,&quot; since you like autobiography. i think you must read coleridge again, and fur ther, skipping all his theology, i. e., if you value precise definitions and a discriminating use of language. by the way, read de quincey s remi niscences of coleridge and wordsworth. jst. 39.] to b. b. wiley. 353 how shall we account for our pursuits, if they are original ? we get the language with which to describe our various lives out of a common mint. if others have their losses which they are busy repairing, so have i mine, and their hound and horse may perhaps be the symbols of some of them. 1 but also i have lost, or am in danger of losing, a far finer and more ethereal treasure, which commonly no loss, of which they are con scious, will symbolize. this i answer hastily and with some hesitation, according as i now understand my words. . . . methinks a certain polygamy with its troubles is the fate of almost all men. they are married to two wives : their genius (a celestial muse), 1 when in 1855 or 1856 thoreau started to wade across from duxbury to clark s island, and was picked up by a fishing boat in the deep water, and landed on the &quot; backside &quot; of the island (see letter to mr. watson of april 25, 1858), edward watson (&quot; uncle ed &quot;), was &quot; saggin round &quot; to see that every thing was right alongshore, and encountered the unexpected visitor. &quot; how did you come here ? &quot; &quot; oh, from duxbury,&quot; said thoreau, and they walked to the old watson house to gether. &quot; you say in one of your books,&quot; said uncle ed, &quot; that you once lost a horse and a hound and a dove, now i should like to know what you meant by that ? &quot; &quot; why, everybody has met with losses, have n t they ? &quot; &quot; h m, pretty way to answer a fellow ! &quot; said mr. watson ; but it seems this was the usual answer. in the long dining-room of the old house that night he sat by the window and told the story of the norse voyag ers to new england, perhaps to that very island and the gurnet near by, as morton fancies in his review of thoreau in the harvard magazine (january, 1855). 354 friends and followers. [1856, and also to some fair daughter of the earth. unless these two were fast friends before mar riage, and so are afterward, there will be but little peace in the house. to harbison blake (at worcester). concord, december 31, 1856. mk. blake, i think it will not be worth the while for me to come to worcester to lecture at all this year. it will be better to wait till i am perhaps unfortunately more in that line. my writing has not taken the shape of lectures, and therefore i should be obliged to read one of three or four old lectures, the best of which i have read to some of your auditors before. i carried that one which i call &quot; walking, or the wild,&quot; to amherst, n. h., the evening of that cold thursday, 1 and i am to read another at fitchburg, february 3. i am simply their hired man. this will probably be the extent of my lecturing hereabouts. i must depend on meeting mr. wasson some other time. perhaps it always costs me more than it comes to to lecture before a promiscuous audience. it 1 this was when he spoke in the vestry of the calvinistic church, and said, on his return to concord, &quot; that he hoped he had done something to upheave and demolish the structure above,&quot; the vestry being beneath the church. out. 39.] to harrison blake. 355 is an irreparable injury done to my modesty even, i become so indurated. o solitude ! obscurity ! meanness ! i never triumph so as when i have the least success in my neighbor s eyes. the lecturer gets fifty dol lars a night ; but what becomes of his winter ? what consolation will it be hereafter to have fifty thousand dollars for living in the world? i should like not to exchange any of my life for money. these, you may think, are reasons for not lec turing, when you have no great opportunity. it is even so, perhaps. i could lecture on dry oak leaves ; i could, but who could hear me ? if i were to try it on any large audience, i fear it would be no gain to them, and a positive loss to me. i should have behaved rudely toward my rustling friends. 1 1 notwithstanding this unwillingness to lecture, thoreau did speak at worcester, february 13, 1857, on &quot;walking,&quot; but scrupulously added to his consent (february 6), &quot; i told brown it had not been much altered since i read it in worces ter ; but now i think of it, much of it must have been new to you, because, having since divided it into two, i am able to read what before i omitted. nevertheless, i should like to have it understood by those whom it concerns, that i am invited to read in public (if it be so) what i have already read, in part, to a private audience.&quot; this throws some light on his method of preparing lectures, which were afterwards published as essays ; they were made up from his journals, and new entries expanded them. 356 friends and followers. [1857, i am surveying, instead of lecturing, at pres ent. let me have a skimming from your &quot; pan of unwrinkled cream.&quot; to daniel ricketson (at new bedford). concord, april 1, 1857. dear ricketson, i got your note of wel come night before last. i expect, if the weather is favorable, to take the 4.30 train from boston to-morrow, thursday, p. m., for i hear of no noon train, and shall be glad to find your wagon at tarkiln hill, for i see it will be rather late for going across lots. i have seen all the spring signs you mention, and a few more, even here. nay, i heard one frog peep nearly a week ago, methinks the very first one in all this region. i wish that there were a few more signs of spring in myself ; however, i take it that there are as many within us as we think we hear without us. i am decent for a steady pace, but not yet for a race. i have a little cold at present, and you speak of rheu matism about the head and shoulders. your frost is not quite out. i suppose that the earth itself has a little cold and rheumatism about these times ; but all these things together pro duce a very fair general result. in a concert, you know, we must sing our parts feebly some times, that we may not injure the general effect. mi. 39.] to harrison blake. 357 i should n t wonder if my two-year-old invalidity had been a positively charming feature to some amateurs favorably located. why not a blasted man as well as a blasted tree, on your lawn? if you should happen not to see me by the train named, do not go again, but wait at home for me, or a note from yours, henry d. thoreau. to harrison blake (at worcester). concord, april 17, 1857. mr. blake, i returned from new bedford night before last. i met alcott there, and learned from him that probably you had gone to con cord. i am very sorry that i missed you. i had expected you earlier, and at last thought that i should get back before you came ; but i ought to have notified you of my absence. how ever, it would have been too late, after i had made up my mind to go. i hope you lost no thing by going a little round. i took out the celtis seeds at your request, at the time we spoke of them, and left them in the chamber on some shelf or other. if you have found them, very well ; if you have not found them, very well ; but tell hale l of it, if you see 1 rev. edward e. hale, then pastor at worcester. others mentioned in the letter are rev. david a. wasson and dr. seth rogers, the latter a physician with whom mr. wasson was livingin worcester. 358 friends and followers. [1857, him. my mother says that you and brown and rogers and wasson (titles left behind) talk of coming down on me some day. do not fail to come, one and all, and within a week or two, if possible ; else i may be gone again. give me a short notice, and then come and spend a day on concord river, or say that you will come if it is fair, unless you are confident of bringing fair weather with you. come and be concord, as i have been worcestered. perhaps you came nearer to me for not find ing me at home ; for trains of thought the more connect when trains of cars do not. if i had actually met you, you would have gone again ; but now i have not yet dismissed you. i hear what you say about personal relations with joy. it is as if you had said, &quot; i value the best and finest part of you, and not the worst. i can even endure your very near and real approach, and prefer it to a shake of the hand.&quot; this inter course is not subject to time or distance. i have a very long new and faithful letter from cholmondeley, which i wish to show you. he speaks of sending me more books ! ! if i were with you now, i could tell you much of ricketson, and my visit to new bedford ; but i do not know how it will be by and by. i should like to have you meet r., who is the frankest man i know. alcott and he get along xt. 39.] to harrison blake. 359 very well together. channing has returned to concord with me, probably for a short visit only. consider this a business letter, which you know counts nothing in the game we play. re member me particularly to brown. to harrison blake (at worcester). concord, june 6, 1857, 3 p. m. mr. blake, i have just got your note, but i am sorry to say that this very morning i sent a note to channing, stating that i would go with him to cape cod next week on an excursion which we have been talking of for some time. if there were time to communicate with you, i should ask you to come to concord on monday, before i go ; but as it is, i must wait till i come back, which i think will be about ten days hence. i do not like this delay, but there seems to be a fate in it. perhaps mr. wasson will be well enough to come by that time. i will notify you of my return, and shall depend on seeing you all. june 23d. i returned from cape cod last evening, and now take the first opportunity to invite you men of worcester to this quiet med iterranean shore. can you come this week on friday, or next monday ? i mention the earli est days on which i suppose you can be ready. 360 friends and followers. [1857, if more convenient, name some other time within tan days. i shall be rejoiced to see you, and to act the part of skipper in the contemplated voyage. i have just got another letter from cholmondeley, which may interest you some what. to marston watson (at plymouth). concord, august 17, 1857. mr. watson, i am much indebted to you for your glowing communication of july 20th. i had that very day left concord for the wilds of maine ; but when i returned, august 8th, two out of the six worms remained nearly, if not quite, as bright as at first, i was assured. in their best estate they had excited the admira tion of many of the inhabitants of concord. it was a singular coincidence that i should find o these worms awaiting me, for my mind was full of a phosphorescence which i had seen in the woods. i have waited to learn something more about them before acknowledging the receipt of them. i have frequently met with glow-worms in my night walks, but am not sure they were the same kind with these. dr. harris once de scribed to me a larger kind than i had found, &quot; nearly as big as your little finger ; &quot; but he does not name them in his report. the only authorities on glow-worms which i ast.40.] to marston watson. 361 chance to have (and i am pretty well provided), a^e kirby and spence (the fullest), knapp (&quot; journal of a naturalist &quot;), &quot; the library of entertaining knowledge &quot; (^rennie), a french work, etc., etc. ; but there is no minute, scientific description in any of these. this is apparently a female of the genus lampyris ; but kirby and spence say that there are nearly two hun dred species of this genus alone. the one com monly referred to by english writers is the lampyris noctiluea ; but judging from kirby and spence s description, and from the descrip tion and plate in the french work, this is not that one, for, besides other differences, both say that the light proceeds from the abdomen. per haps the worms exhibited by durkee (whose statement to the boston society of natural his tory, second july meeting, in the &quot; traveller &quot; of august 12, 1857, i send you) were the same with these. i do not see how they could be the l. noctiluca, as he states. i expect to go to cambridge before long, and if i get any more light on this subject i will in form you. the two worms are still alive. i shall be glad to receive the drosera at any time, if you chance to come across it. i am looking over london s &quot; arboretum,&quot; which we have added to our library, and it occurs to me that it was written expressly for you, and 362 friends and followers. [1858, that you cannot avoid placing it on your own shelves. i should have been glad to see the whale, and might perhaps have done so, if i had not at that time been seeing &quot; the elephant &quot; (or moose) in the maine woods. i have been associating for about a month with one joseph polis, the chief man of the penobscot tribe of indians, and have learned a great deal from him, which i should like to tell you sometime. to marston watson (at plymouth). concord, april 25, 1858. dear sir, your unexpected gift of pear trees reached me yesterday in good condition, and i spent the afternoon in giving them a good setting out; but i fear that this cold weather may hurt them. however, i am inclined to think they are insured, since you have looked on them. it makes one s mouth water to read their names only. from what i hear of the extent of your bounty, if a reasonable part of the trees succeed, this transplanting will make a new era for concord to date from. mine must be a lucky star, for day before yesterday i received a box of mayflowers from brattleboro, and yesterday morning your pear trees, and at evening a humming-bird s nest from worcester. this looks like fairy housekeeping. 2et.40.] to marstqn watson. 363 i discovered two new plants in concord last winter, the labrador tea (ledum latifolium), and yew (taxis baccata). by the way, in january i communicated with dr. durkee, whose report on glow-worms i sent you, and it appeared, as i expected, that he (and by his account, agassiz, gould, jackson, and others to whom he showed them) did not consider them a distinct species, but a variety of the common, or lampyris noctiluca, some of which you got in lincoln. durkee, at least, has never seen the last. i told him that i had no doubt about their being a distinct species. his, however, were luminous throughout every part of the body, as those which you sent me were not, while i had them. is nature as full of vigor to your eyes as ever, or do you detect some falling off at last ? is the mystery of the hog s bristle cleared up, and with it that of our life ? it is the question, to the exclusion of every other interest. i am sorry to hear of the burning of your woods, but, thank heaven, your great ponds and your sea cannot be burnt. i love to think of your warm, sandy wood-roads, and your breezy island out in the sea. what a prospect you can get every morning from the hilltop east of your house ! 1 i think that even the heathen that i 1 marston watson, whose uncle, edward watson, with his 364 friends and followers. [1857, am could say, or sing, or dance, morning prayers there of some kind. please remember me to mrs. watson, and to the rest of your family who are helping the sun shine yonder. to daniel ricketson (at new bedford). concord, august 18, 1857. dear sir, your wilson flagg 1 seems a serious person, and it is encouraging to hear nephews, owned the &quot; breezy island &quot; where thoreau had vis ited his friends (clark s island, the only one in plymouth bay), had built his own house, &quot; hillside,&quot; on the slope of one of the hills above plymouth town, and there laid out a fine park and garden, which thoreau surveyed for him in the autumn of 1854, alcott and mr. watson carrying the chain. for a de scription of hillside, see channing s wanderer (boston, 1871) and alcott s sonnets and canzonets (boston : roberts, 1882). it was a villa much visited by emerson, alcott, channing, thoreau, george bradford, and the transcendentalists gener ally. mr. watson graduated at harvard two years after tho reau, and in an old diary says : &quot; i remember thoreau in the college yard (1836) with downcast thoughtful look intent, as if he were searching for something ; always in a green coat, green because the authorities required black, i suppose.&quot; in a letter he says : &quot; i have always heard the maiden in the east was mrs. watson, mary russell watson, and i sup pose there is no doubt of it. i may be prejudiced, but i have always thought it one of his best things, and i have highly valued his lines. i find in my dial, no. 6, i have written six new stanzas in the margin of friendship, and they are num bered to show how they should run. i think mrs. brown gave them to me.&quot; 1 a writer on scenery and natural history, who outlived jsr.40.] to daniel ricketson. 365 of a contemporary who recognizes nature so squarely, and selects such a theme as &quot; barns.&quot; (i would rather &quot; mount auburn &quot; were omit ted.) but he is not alert enough. he wants stirring up with a pole. he should practice turning a series of somersets rapidly, or jump up and see how many times he can strike his feet together before coming down. let him make the earth turn round now the other way, and whet his wits on it, whichever way it goes, as on a grindstone ; in short, see how many ideas he can entertain at once. his style, as i remember, is singularly vague (i refer to the book), and, before i got to the end of the sentences, i was off the track. if you indulge in long periods, you must be sure to have a snapper at the end. as for style of writing, if one has anything to say, it drops from him simply and directly, as a stone falls to the ground. there are no two ways about it, but down it comes, and he may stick in the points and stops wherever he can get a chance. new ideas come into this world somewhat like falling meteors, with a flash and an explosion, and perhaps somebody s castle-roof perforated. to try to polish the stone in its descent, to give it a peculiar turn, and make it whistle a tune, thoreau, and never forgave him for the remark about &quot; stir ring 1 up with a pole,&quot; which really might have been less graphic. 366 friends and followers, [1857, perchance, would be of no use, if it were pos sible. your polished stuff turns out not to be meteoric, but of this earth. however, there is plenty of time, and nature is an admirable schoolmistress. speaking of correspondence, you ask me if i &quot; cannot turn over a new leaf in that line.&quot; i certainly could if i were to receive it ; but just then i looked up and saw that your page was dated &quot; may 10,&quot; though mailed in august, and it occurred to me that i had seen you since that date this year. looking again, it appeared that your note was written in 56 ! ! however, it was a new leaf to me, and i turned it over with as much interest as if it had been written the day before. perhaps you kept it so long in order that the manuscript and subject-matter might be more in keeping with the old-fashioned paper on which it was written. i traveled the length of cape cod on foot, soon after you were here, and, within a few days, have returned from the wilds of maine, where i have made a journey of three hundred and twenty-five miles with a canoe and an indian, and a single white companion, edward hoar esq., of this town, lately from california, traversing the headwaters of the kennebec, pe nobscot, and st. john s. can t you extract any advantage out of that ast.40.] to daniel ricketson. 367 depression of spirits you refer to ? it suggests to me cider-mills, wine-presses, etc., etc. all kinds of pressure or power should be used and made to turn some kind of machinery. channing was just leaving concord for plym outh when i arrived, but said he should be here again in two or three days. please remember me to your family, and say that i have at length learned to sing tom bow lin according to the notes. to daniel ricketson (at new bedford). concord, september 9, 1857. friend ricketson, i thank you for your kind invitation to visit you, but i have taken so many vacations this year, at new bedford, cape cod, and maine, that any more relaxa tion call it rather dissipation will cover me with shame and disgrace. i have not earned what i have already enjoyed. as some heads cannot carry much wine, so it would seem that i cannot bear so much society as you can. i have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if i don t get enough of it this year, i shall cry all the next. my mother s house is full at present ; but if it were not, i would have no right to invite you hither, while entertaining such designs as i have hinted at, however, if you care to storm the 368 friends and followers. [1857, town, i will engage to take some afternoon walks with you, retiring into prof oundest soli tude the most sacred part of the day. to harrison blake (at worcester). concord, august 18, 1857. me. blake, fifteenthly. it seems tome that you need some absorbing pursuit. it does not matter much what it is, so it be honest. such employment will be favorable to your de velopment in more characteristic and important directions. you know there must be impulse enough for steerage way, though it be not to ward your port, to prevent your drifting help lessly on to rocks or shoals. some sails are set for this purpose only. there is the large fleet of scholars and men of science, for instance, always to be seen standing off and on every coast, and saved thus from running on to reefs, who will at last run into their proper haven, we trust. it is a pity you were not here with brown and wiley. i think that in this case, /or a rarity, the more the merrier. you perceived that i did not entertain the idea of our going together to maine on such an excursion as i had planned. the more i thought of it, the more imprudent it appeared to me. i did think to have written to you before jbt.40.] to harrison blake. 369 going, though not to propose your going also ; but i went at last very suddenly, and could only have written a business letter, if i had tried, when there was no business to be accomplished. i have now returned, and think i have had a quite profitable journey, chiefly from associating with an intelligent indian. my companion, edward hoar, also found his account in it, though he suffered considerably from being obliged to carry unusual loads over wet and rough &quot; carries,&quot; in one instance five miles through a swamp, where the water was fre quently up to our knees, and the fallen timber higher than our heads. he went over the ground three times, not being able to carry all his load at once. this prevented his ascending ktaadn. our best nights were those when it rained the hardest, on account of the mosquitoes. i speak of these things, which were not unex pected, merely to account for my not inviting you. having returned, i flatter myself that the world appears in some respects a little larger, and not, as usual, smaller and shallower, for having extended my range. i have made a short excursion into the new world which the in dian dwells in, or is. he begins where we leave off. it is worth the while to detect new facul ties in man, he is so much the more divine ; 370 friends and followers. [1857, and anything that fairly excites our admiration expands us. the indian, who can find his way so wonderfully in the woods, possesses so much intelligence which the white man does not, and it increases my own capacity, as well as faith, to observe it. i rejoice to find that intel ligence flows in other channels than i knew. it redeems for me portions of what seemed bru tish before. it is a great satisfaction to find that your oldest convictions are permanent. with re gard to essentials, i have never had occasion to change my mind. the aspect of the world varies from year to year, as the landscape is differently clothed, but i find that the truth is still true, and i never regret any emphasis which it may have inspired. ktaadn is there still, but much more surely my old conviction is there, resting with more than mountain breadth and weight on the world, the source still of fertiliz ing streams, and affording glorious views from its summit, if i can get up to it again. as the mountains still stand on the plain, and far more unchangeable and permanent, -stand still grouped around, farther or nearer to my maturer eye, the ideas which i have entertained, the everlasting teats from which we draw our nourishment. jet. 40.] to harrison blake. 371 to harrison blake (at worcester). concord, november 16, 1857. mr. blake, you have got the start again. it was i that owed you a letter or two, if i mis take not. they make a great ado nowadays about hard times ; 1 but i think that the community gener ally, ministers and all, take a wrong view of the matter, though some of the ministers preaching according to a formula may pretend to take a right one. this general failure, both private and public, is rather occasion for rejoicing, as reminding us whom we have at the helm, that justice is always done. if our merchants did not most of them fail, and the banks too, my faith in the old laws of the world would be staggered. the statement that ninety-six in a hundred doing such business surely break down is perhaps the sweetest fact that statistics have revealed, ex hilarating as the fragrance of sallows in spring. does it not say somewhere, &quot; the lord reigneth, let the earth rejoice &quot; ? if thousands are thrown out of employment, it suggests that they were not well employed. why don t they take the hint ? it is not enough to be industrious ; so are the ants. what are you industrious about ? the merchants and company have long laughed 1 the panic of 1857, the worst since 1837. 372 friends and followers. [1857, at transcendentalism, higher laws, etc., crying, &quot; none of your moonshine,&quot; as if they were an chored to something not only definite, but sure and permanent. if there was any institution which was presumed to rest on a solid and secure basis, and more than any other represented this boasted common sense, prudence, and practical talent, it was the bank ; and now those very banks are found to be mere reeds shaken by the wind. scarcely one in the land has kept its promise. it would seem as if you only need live forty years in any age of this world, to see its most promis ing government become the government of kan sas, and banks nowhere. not merely the brook farm and fourierite communities, but now the community generally has failed. but there is the moonshine still, serene, beneficent, and un changed. hard times, i say, have this value, among others, that they show us what such prom ises are worth, where the sure banks are. i heard some merchant praised the other day be cause he had paid some of his debts, though it took nearly all he had (why, i ve done as much as that myself many times, and a little more), and then gone to board. what if he has ? i hope he s got a good boarding-place, and can pay for it. it s not everybody that can. how ever, in my opinion, it is cheaper to keep house, i. e., if you don t keep too big a one. 2et.40.] to harrison blake. 373 men will tell you sometimes that &quot; money s hard.&quot; that shows it was not made to eat, i say. only think of a man in this new world, in his log cabin, in the midst of a corn and potato patch, with a sheepf old on one side, talking about money being hard ! so are flints hard ; there is no alloy in them. what has that to do with his raising his food, cutting his wood (or breaking it), keeping in-doors when it rains, and, if need be, spinning and weaving his clothes ? some of those who sank with the steamer the other day found out that money was heavy too. think of a man s priding himself on this kind of wealth, as if it greatly enriched him. as if one strug gling in mid-ocean with a bag of gold on his back should gasp out, &quot; i am worth a hundred thousand dollars.&quot; i see them struggling just as ineffectually on dry land, nay, even more hopelessly, for, in the former case, rather than sink, they will finally let the bag go ; but in the latter they are pretty sure to hold and go down with it. i see them swimming about in their great-coats, collecting their rents, really getting their dues, drinking bitter draughts which only increase their thirst, becoming more and more water-logged, till finally they sink plumb down to the bottom. but enough of this. have you ever read ruskin s books ? if not, i would recommend you to try the second and 374 friends and followers. [1857, third volumes (not parts) of his &quot; modern paint ers.&quot; i am now reading the fourth, and have read most of his other books lately. they are singularly good and encouraging, though not without crudeness and bigotry. the themes in the volumes referred to are infinity, beauty, imagination, love of nature, etc., all treated in a very living manner. i am rather surprised by them. it is remarkable that these things should be said with reference to painting chiefly, rather than literature. the &quot; seven lamps of architecture,&quot; too, is made of good stuff: but, as i remember, there is too much about art in it for me and the hottentots. we want to know about matters and things in general. our house is as yet a hut. you must have been enriched by your solitary walk over the mountains. i suppose that i feel the same awe when on their summits that many do on entering a church. to see what kind of earth that is on which you have a house and gar den somewhere, perchance ! it is equal to the lapse of many years. you must ascend a moun tain to learn your relation to matter, and so to your own body, for it is at home there, though you are not. it might have been composed there, and will have no farther to go to return to dust there, than in your garden; but your spirit inevitably comes away, and brings your 2et.40.] to harrison blake. 375 body with it, if it lives. just as awful really, and as glorious, is your garden. see how i can. play with my fingers! they are the funniest companions i have ever found. where did they come from ? what strange control i have over them ! who am i ? what are they ? those little peaks call them madison, jefferson, la fayette. what is the matter ? my fingers ten, i say. why, erelong, they may form the top most crystal of mount washington. i go up there to see my body s cousins. there are some fingers, toes, bowels, etc., that i take an interest in, and therefore i am interested in all their relations. let me suggest a theme for you : to state to yourself precisely and completely what that walk over the mountains amounted to for you, re turning to this essay again and again, until you are satisfied that all that was important in your experience is in it. give this good reason to yourself for having gone over the mountains, for mankind is ever going over a mountain. don t suppose that you can tell it precisely the first dozen times you try, but at em again, especially when, after a sufficient pause, you suspect that you are touching the heart or summit of the mat ter, reiterate your blows there, and account for the mountain to yourself. not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to 376 friends and followers. [1857, make it short. it did not take very long to get over the mountain, you thought ; but have you got over it indeed ? if you have been to the top of mount washington, let me ask, what did you find there? that is the way they prove wit nesses, you know. going up there and being blown on is nothing. we never do much climb ing while we are there, but we eat our luncheon, etc., very much as at home. it is after we get home that we really go over the mountain, if ever. what did the mountain say? what did the mountain do ? i keep a mountain anchored off eastward a lit tle way, which i ascend in my dreams both awake and asleep. its broad base spreads over a vil lage or two, which do not know it ; neither does it know them, nor do i when i ascend it. i can see its general outline as plainly now in nry mind as that of wachusett. i do not invent in the least, but state exactly what i see. i find that i go up it when i am light-footed and earnest. it ever smokes like an altar with its sacrifice. i am not aware that a single villager frequents it or knows of it. i keep this mountain to ride instead of a horse. do you not mistake about seeing moosehead lake from mount washington ? that must be about one hundred and twenty miles distant, or nearly twice as far as the atlantic, which last /et.40.] to harrison blake. 377 some doubt if they can see thence. was it not umbagog ? dr. solger 1 has been lecturing in the vestry in this town on geography, to sanborn s schol ars, for several months past, at five p. m. emer son and alcott have been to hear him. i was surprised when the former asked me, the other day, if i was not going to hear dr. solger. what, to be sitting in a meeting-house cellar at that time of day, when you might possibly be out-doors ! i never thought of such a thing. what was the sun made for? if he does not prize day light, i do. let him lecture to owls and dor o mice. he must be a wonderful lecturer indeed who can keep me indoors at such an hour, when the night is coming in which no man can walk. are you in want of amusement nowadays ? then play a little at the game of getting a living. there never was anything equal to it. do it temperately, though, and don t sweat. don t let this secret out, for i have a design against the 1 reinhold solger, ph. d., a very intellectual and well taught prussian, who was one of the lecturers for a year or two at nay &quot; concord school,&quot; the successor of the concord &quot; acad emy,&quot; in which the children of the emerson, alcott, haw thorne, hoar, and ripley families were taught. at this date the lectures were given in the vestry of the parish church, which thoreau playfully termed &quot; a meeting-house cellar.&quot; it was there that louisa alcott acted plays. 378 friends and followers. [1857, opera. opera ! ! pass along the exclamations, devil. 1 now is the time to become conversant with your wood-pile (this comes under work for the month), and be sure you put some warmth into it by your mode of getting it. do not consent to be passively warmed. an intense degree of that is the hotness that is threatened. but a positive warmth within can withstand the fiery furnace, as the vital heat of a living man can withstand the heat that cooks meat. after returning from the last of his three ex peditions to the maine woods (in 1846, 1853, and 1857), thoreau was appealed to by his friend higginson, then living in worcester, for information concerning a proposed excursion from worcester into maine and canada, then but little visited by tourists, who now go there in droves. he replied in this long letter, with its minute instructions and historical references. the arnold mentioned is general benedict ar nold, who in 1775-76 made a toilsome march through the maine forest with a small new eng land army for the conquest of canada, while young john thoreau, henry s grandfather, was establishing himself as a merchant in boston (not yet evacuated by british troops), previous to his marriage with jane burns. 1 exclamation points and printer s devil. mt. 40.] to t. w. higginson. 379 to t. w. higginson (at worcester). concord, january 28, 1858. dear sir, it would be perfectly practica ble to go to the madawaska the way you pro pose. as for the route to quebec, i do not find the sugar loaf mountains on my maps. the most direct and regular way, as you know, is substantially montresor s and arnold s and the younger john smith s by the chaudiere ; but this is less wild. if your object is to see the st. lawrence eiver below quebec, you will proba bly strike it at the riviere du loup. ( vide hodge s account of his excursion thither via the allegash, i believe it is in the second report on the geology of the public lands of maine and massachusetts in 37.) i think that our indian last summer, when we talked of going to the st. lawrence, named another route, near the madawaska, perhaps the st. francis, which would save the long portage which hodge made. i do not know whether you think of ascend ing the st. lawrence in a canoe ; but if you should, you might be delayed not only by the current, but by the waves, which frequently run too high for a canoe on such a mighty stream. it would be a grand excursion to go to quebec by the chaudiere, descend the st. lawrence to the riviere du loup, and return by the mada 380 friends and followers. [1858, waska and st. john s to frederickton, or fais. ther, almost all the way down stream a very important consideration. i went to moosehead in company with a party of four who were going a-hunting down the alle gash and st. john s, and thence by some other stream over into the restigouche, and down that to the bay of chaleur, to be gone six weeks. our northern terminus was an island in heron lake on the allegash. ( vide colton s railroad and township map of maine.) the indian proposed that we should return to bangor by the st. john s and great schoodic lake, which we had thought of ourselves ; and he showed us on the map where we should be each night. it was then noon, and the next day night, continuing down the allegash, we should have been at the mada waska settlements, having made only one or two portages ; and thereafter, on the st. john s there would be but one or two more falls, with short carries ; and if there was not too much wind, we could go down that stream one hundred miles a day. it is settled all the way below madawaska. he knew the route well. he even said that this was easier, and would take but little more time, though much farther, than the route we decided on, i. e., by webster stream, the east branch, and main penobscot to oldtown ; but he may have arr.40.] to t. w. higginson. 381 wanted a longer job. we preferred the latter, not only because it was shorter, but because, as he said, it was wilder. we went about three hundred and twenty-five miles with the canoe (including sixty miles of stage between bangor and oldtown) ; were out twelve nights, and spent about $40 apiece, which was more than was necessary. we paid the indian, who was a very good one, $ 1.50 per day and 50 cents a week for his canoe. this is enough in ordinary seasons. i had formerly paid $2 for an indian and for white batteau men. if you go to madawaska in a leisurely man ner, supposing no delay 011 account of rain or the violence of the wind, you may reach mt. kineo by noon, and have the afternoon to ex plore it. the next day you may get to the head of the lake before noon, make the portage of two and a half miles over a wooden railroad, and drop down the penobscot half a dozen miles. the third morning you will perhaps walk half a mile about pine stream falls, while the indian runs down, cross the head of chesuncook, reach the junction of the caucomgomock and umbazookskus by noon, and ascend the latter to umbazookskus lake that night. if it is low water, you may have to walk and carry a little on the umbazookskus before entering the lake. 382 friends and followers. [1858, the fourth morning you will make the carry of two miles to mud pond (allegash water), and a very wet carry it is, and reach chamberlain lake by noon, and heron lake, perhaps, that night, after a couple of very short carries at the outlet of chamberlain. at the end of two days more you will probably be at madawaska. of course the indian can paddle twice as far in a day as he commonly does. perhaps you would like a few more details. we used (three of us) exactly twenty-six pounds of hard bread, fourteen pounds of pork, three pounds of coffee, twelve pounds of sugar (and could have used more), besides a little tea, in dian meal, and rice, and plenty of berries and moose-meat. this was faring very luxuriously. i had not formerly carried coffee, sugar, or rice. but for solid food, i decide that it is not worth the while to carry anything but hard bread and pork, whatever your tastes and habits may be. these wear best, and you have no time nor dishes in which to cook anything else. of course you will take a little indian meal to fry fish in ; and half a dozen lemons also, if you have sugar, will be very refreshing, for the water is warm. 1 1 charming says (thoreau, p. 35): &quot;thoreau made for himself a knapsack, with partitions for books and papers, india-rubber cloth, strong and large-spaced, the common jet. 40.] to t. w. higginson. 383 to save time, the sugar, coffee, tea, salt, etc., should be in separate watertight bags, labeled, and tied with a leathern string ; and all the pro visions and blankets should be put into two large india-rubber bags, if you can find them watertight. ours were not. a four-quart tin pail makes a good kettle for all purposes, and tin plates are portable and convenient. don t forget an india-rubber knapsack, with a large flap, plenty of dish-cloths, old newspapers, strings, and twenty-five feet of strong cord. of india-rubber clothing, the most you can wear, if any, is a very light coat, and that you cannot work in. i could be more particular, but per haps have been too much so already. of his habits in mountain-climbing, channing says : l &quot; he ascended such hills as monadnoc by his own path ; would lay down his map on the summit and draw a line to the point he pro posed to visit below, perhaps forty miles away on the landscape, and set off bravely to make the c short-cut. the lowland people wondered to knapsacks being unspaced. after trying the merit of cocoa, coffee, water, and the like, tea was put down as the felicity of a walking travail, tea plenty, strong, with enough sugar, made in a tin pint cup. he commended every party to carry a junk of heavy cake with plums in it, having found by long experience that after toil it was a capital refreshment.&quot; 1 thoreau, the poet-naturalist, pp. 36-38. 384 friends and followers. [1858, see him scaling the heights as if he had lost his way, or at his jumping over their cow-yard fences, asking if he had fallen from the clouds. in a walk like this he always carried his um brella ; and on this monadnoc trip, when about a mile from the station (in troy, n. h.), a tor rent of rain came down ; without the umbrella his books, blankets, maps, and provisions would all have been spoiled, or the morning lost by de lay. on the mountain there being a thick, soak ing fog, the first object was to camp and make tea. he spent five nights in camp, having built another hut, to get varied views. flowers, birds, lichens, and the rocks were carefully examined, all parts of the mountain were visited, and as accurate a map as could be made by pocket com pass was carefully sketched and drawn out, in the five days spent there, with notes of the striking aerial phenomena, incidents of travel and natural history. the outlook across the val ley over to wachusett, with its thunder-storms and battles in the cloud; the farmers back yards in jaffrey, where the family cotton can be seen bleaching on the grass, but 110 trace of the pigmy family; the dry, soft air all night, the lack of dew in the morning ; the want of water, a pint being a good deal, these, and similar things make up some part of such an excur sst. 40.] to harrison blake. 385 the monadnoc excursion above mentioned began june 3d, and continued three days. it inspired thoreau to take a longer mountain tour with his neighbor and friend, edward hoar, to which these letters relate, giving the ways and means of the journey, a memorable one to all concerned. to harrison blake (at worcester). concord, june 29, 1858, 8 a. m. me. blake, edward hoar and i propose to start for the white mountains in a covered wagon, with one horse, on the morning of thurs day the 1st of july, intending to explore the mountain tops botanically, and camp on them at least several times. will you take a seat in the wagon with us ? mr. hoar prefers to hire the horse and wagon himself. let us hear by express, as soon as you can, whether you will join us here by the earliest train thursday morning, or wednesday night. bring your map of the mountains, and as much provision for the road as you can, hard bread, sugar, tea, meat, etc., for we intend to live like gipsies ; also, a blanket and some thick clothes for the moun tain top. july 1st. last monday evening mr. edward hoar said that he thought of going to the white 386 friends and followers. [1858, mountains. i remarked casually that i should like to go well enough if i could afford it. whereupon he declared that if i would go with him, he would hire a horse and wagon, so that the ride would cost me nothing, and we would explore the mountain tops botanically, camping on them many nights. the next morning i suggested you and brown s accompanying us in another wagon, and we could all camp and cook, gipsy-like, along the way, or, perhaps, if the horse could draw us, you would like to bear half the expense of the horse and wagon, and take a seat with us. he liked either propo sition, but said, that if you would take a seat with us, he would prefer to hire the horse and wagon himself. you could contribute something else if you pleased. supposing that brown would be confined, i wrote to you accordingly, by express on tuesday morning, via boston, stating that we should start to-day, suggesting provision, thick clothes, etc., and asking for an answer ; but i have not received one. i have just heard that you may be at sterling, and now write to say that we shall still be glad if you will join us at senter harbor, where we expect to be next monday morning. in any case, will you please direct a letter to us there at once ? 4st.40.] to daniel ricketson. 387 to daniel ricketson (at new bedford). concord, june 30, 1858. friend ricketson, i am on the point of starting for the white mountains in a wagon with my neighbor edward hoar, and i write to you now rather to apologize for not writing, than to answer worthily your three notes. i thank you heartily for them. you will not care for a little delay in acknowledging them, since your date shows that you can afford to wait. indeed, my head has been so full of company, etc., that i could not reply to you fitly before, nor can i now. as for preaching to men these days in the walden strain, is it of any consequence to preach to an audience of men who can fail, or who can be revived ? there are few beside. is it any success to interest these parties ? if a man has speculated and failed, he will probably do these things again, in spite of you or me. i confess that it is rare that i rise to sentiment in my relations to men, ordinarily to a mere pa tient, or may be wholesome, good-will. i can imagine something more, but the truth compels me to regard the ideal and the actual as two things. channing has come, and as suddenly gone, and left a short poem, &quot;near home,&quot; pub 388 friends and followers. [1858, lished (?) or printed by munroe, which i have hardly had time to glance at. as you may guess, i learn nothing of you from him. you already foresee my answer to your invita tion to make you a summer visit : i am bound for the mountains. but i trust that you have vanquished, ere this, those dusky demons that seem to lurk around the head of the river. 1 you know that this warfare is nothing but a kind of nightmare, and it is our thoughts alone which give those ?mworthies any body or exist ence. i made an excursion with blake, of worces ter, to monadnoc, a few weeks since. we took our blankets and food, spent two nights on the mountain, and did not go into a house. alcott has been very busy for a long time re pairing an old shell of a house, and i have seen very little of him. 2 i have looked more at the houses which birds build. watson made us all very generous presents from his nursery in the spring. especially did he remember alcott. excuse me for not writing any more at pres ent, and remember me to your family. 1 near which, at new bedford, mr. ricketson lived. 2 this was the &quot; orchard house,&quot; near hawthorne s &quot;way side.&quot; the estate on which it stands, now owned by dr. w. t. harris, was surveyed for mr. alcott by thoreau in october, 1857, mt. 41.] white mountain trip. 389 in july, 1858, as mentioned in this letter to mr. bicketson, thoreau journeyed from con cord to the white mountains, first visited with his brother john in 1839. his later companion was edward hoar, a botanist and lover of na ture, who had been a magistrate in california, and in boyhood a comrade of thoreau in shoot ing excursions on the concord meadows. they journeyed in a wagon and thoreau disliked the loss of independence in choice of camping-places involved in the care of a horse. he complained also of the magnificent inns (&quot;mountain houses &quot;) that had sprung up in the passes and on the plateaus since his first visit. &quot; give me,&quot; he said, &quot; a spruce house made in the rain,&quot; such as he and channing afterward (1860) made on monadnoc in his last trip to that mountain. the chief exploit in the white mountain trip was a visit to tuckerman s ravine on mt. wash ington, of which mr. hoar, some years before his death (in 1893), gave me an account, con taining the true anecdote of thoreau s finding the arnica plant when he needed it. on their way to this rather inaccessible chasm, thoreau and his comrade went first to what was then but a small tavern on the &quot; tip-top &quot; of mt. washington. it was a foggy day ; and when the landlord was asked if he could furnish a guide to tuckerman s ravine, he replied : 390 friends and followers. [1858, &quot; yes, my brother is the guide ; but if he went to-day he could never find his way back in this fog.&quot; &quot; well,&quot; said thoreau, &quot; if we cannot have a guide we will find it ourselves ; &quot; and he at once produced a map he had made the day before at a roadside inn, where he had found a wall map of the mountain region, and climbed on a table to copy that portion he needed. with this map and his pocket-compass he &quot; struck a bee-line,&quot; said mr. hoar, for the ravine, and soon came to it, about a mile away. they went safely down the steep stairs into the chasm, where they found the midsummer iceberg they wished to see. but as the;y* walked down the bed of the peabody river, flowing from this ravine, over bowlders five or six feet high, the heavy packs on their shoulders weighed them down, and finally, thoreau s foot slipping, he fell and sprained his ankle. he rose, but had not limped five steps from the place where he fell, when he said, &quot; here is the arnica, anyhow,&quot; reached out his hand and plucked the arnica mollis, which he had not before found anywhere. before reaching the mountains they had marked in their botany books forty-six species of plants they hoped to find there, and before they came away they had found forty-two of them. when they reached their camping-place, far ther down, thoreau was so lame he could not 2et. 41.] white mountain trip. 391 move about, and lay there in the camp several days, eating the pork and other supplies they had in their packs, mr. hoar going each day to the inn at the mountain summit. this camp was in a thicket of dwarf firs at the foot of the ra vine, where, just before his accident, by careless ness in lighting a fire, some acres of the moun tain woodland had been set on fire ; but this proved to be the signal for which thoreau had told his worcester friends to watch, if they wished to join him on the mountain. &quot; i had told blake,&quot; says thoreau in his journal, &quot; to look out for a smoke and a white tent. we had made a smoke sure enough. we slept five in the tent that night, and found it quite warm.&quot; mr. hoar added: &quot;in this journey thoreau insisted 011 our carrying heavy packs, and rather despised persons who complained of the burden. he was chagrined, in the maine woods, to find his indian, joe polis (whom, on the whole, he admired), excited and tremulous at sight of a moose, so that he could scarcely load his gun properly. joe, who was a good catholic, wanted us to stop traveling on sunday and hold a meeting ; and when we insisted on going for ward, the indian withdrew into the woods to say his prayers, then came back and picked up the breakfast things, and we paddled on. as to thoreau s courage and manliness, nobody 392 friends and followers. [1858, who had seen him among the penobscot rocks and rapids the indian trusting his life and his canoe to henry s skill, promptitude, and nerve would ever doubt it.&quot; channing says : l &quot;in his later journeys, if his companion was footsore or loitered, he stead ily pursued his road. once, when a follower was done up with headache and incapable of motion, hoping his associate would comfort him and per haps afford him a sip of tea, he said, there are people who are sick in that way every morning, and go about their affairs, and then marched off about his. in such limits, so inevitable, was he compacted. . . . this tone of mind grew out of no insensibility ; or, if he sometimes looked coldly on the suffering of more tender natures, he sympathized with their afflictions, but could do nothing to admire them. he would not injure a plant unnecessarily. at the time of the john brown tragedy, thoreau was driven sick. so 1 channing s thoreau, pp. 3, 8, 9. charming himself was, no doubt, the &quot; follower &quot; and &quot; companion &quot; here mentioned ; no person so frequently walked with thoreau in his longex cursions. they were together in new boston, n. h., when the minister mentioned in the week reproved thoreau for not going to meeting on sunday. when i first lived in concord (march, 1855), and asked the innkeeper what sunday services the village held, he replied : &quot; there s the orthodox, an the unitarian, an th walden pond association,&quot; meaning by the last what emerson called &quot; the walkers,&quot; those who rambled in the walden woods on sundays. jet. 41.] to daniel ricketson. 393 the country s misfortunes in the union war acted on his feelings with great force : he used to say he could never recover while the war lasted. &quot; hawthorne had an experience somewhat similar, though he, too, was of stern stuff when need was, and had much of the old salem sea-captains in his sensitive nature. to daniel ricketson (at new bedford). concord, november 6, 1858. friend eicketson, i was much pleased with your lively and lifelike account of your voyage. you were more than repaid for your trouble after all. the coast of nova scotia, which you sailed along from windsor westward, is particularly interesting to the historian of this country, having been settled earlier than plym outh. your &quot; isle of haut &quot; is properly &quot; isle haute,&quot; or the high island of champlain s map. there is another off the coast of maine. by the way, the american elk, of american authors (cervus canadensis),is a distinct animal from the moose (oervus alees)^ though the latter is called elk by many. you drew a very vivid portrait of the austra lian, short and stout, with a pipe in his mouth, and his book inspired by beer, pot first, pot second, etc. i suspect that he must be pot bellied withal. methinks i see the smoke going 394 friends and followers. [1858, up from him as from a cottage on the moor. if he does not quench his genius with his beer, it may burst into a clear flame at last. however, perhaps he intentionally adopts the low style. what do you mean by that ado about smoking, and my &quot;purer tastes &quot; ? i should like his pipe as well as his beer, at least. neither of them is so bad as to be &quot; highly connected,&quot; which you say he is, unfortunately. no ! i expect no thing but pleasure in &quot; smoke from your pipe.&quot; you and the australian must have put your heads together when you concocted those titles, with pipes in your mouths over a pot of beer. i suppose that your chapters are, whiff the first, whiff the second, etc. but of course it is a more modest expression for &quot; fire from my genius.&quot; you must have been very busy since you came back, or before you sailed, to have brought out your history, of whose publication i had not heard. i suppose that i have read it in the &quot;mercury.&quot; yet i am curious to see how it looks in a volume, with your name on the title page. i am more curious still about the poems. pray put some sketches into the book : your shanty for frontispiece ; arthur and walton s boat (if you can) running for cuttyhunk in a tremendous gale; not forgetting &quot;be honest 2et.41.] to daniel ricketson. 395 boys,&quot; etc., near by ; the middleborough ponds, with a certain island looming in the distance ; the quaker meeting-house, and the brady house, if you like ; the villagers catching smelts with dip-nets in the twilight, at the head of the eiver, etc., etc. let it be a local and villageous book as much as possible. let some one make a characteristic selection of mottoes from your shanty walls, and sprinkle them in an irregular manner, at all angles, over the fly-leaves and margins, as a man stamps his name in a hurry ; and also canes, pipes, and jackknives, of all your patterns, about the frontispiece. i can think of plenty of devices for tail-pieces. indeed, i should like to see a hair-pillow, accurately drawn, for one ; a cat, with a bell on, for another ; the old horse, with his age printed in the hollow of his back ; half a cocoanut shell by a spring ; a sheet of blotted paper ; a settle occupied by a settler at full length, etc., etc., etc. call all the arts to your aid. don t wait for the indian summer, but bring it with you. p. s. let me ask a favor. i am trying to write something about the autumnal tints, and i wish to know how much our trees differ from english and european ones in this respect. will you observe, or learn for me, what english or european trees, if any, still retain their leaves 396 friends and followers. [1858, in mr. arnold s garden (the gardener will sup ply the true names) ; and also if the foliage of any (and what) european or foreign trees there have been brilliant the past month. if you will do this you will greatly oblige me. i return the newspaper with this. to daniel ricketson (at new bedford). concord, november 28, 1858. friend ricketson, i thank you for your &quot; history.&quot; 1 though i have not yet read it again, i have looked far enough to see that i like the homeliness of it ; that is, the good, old fashioned way of writing, as if you actually lived where you wrote. a man s interest in a single bluebird is worth more than a complete but dry list of the fauna and flora of a town. it is also a considerable advantage to be able to say at any time, &quot; if r. is not here, here is his book.&quot; alcott being here, and inquiring after you (whom he has been expecting), i lent the book to him almost immediately. he talks of going west the latter part of this week. channing is here again, as i am told, but i have not seen him. i thank you also for the account of the trees. 1 of new bedford, first published in the mercury of that city, while channing was one of the editors, and afterwards in a volume. ast.41.] to daniel ricketson. 397 it was to my purpose, and i hope you got some thing out of it too. i suppose that the cold weather prevented your coming here. suppose you try a winter walk on skates. please re member me to your family. late in november, 1858, cholmondeley, who had not written for a year and six months, sud denly notified thoreau from montreal that he was in canada, and would visit concord the next week. accordingly he arrived early in december, and urged his friend to go with him to the west indies. john thoreau, the father, was then in his last illness, and for that and other reasons thoreau could not accept the in vitation ; but he detained cholmondeley in con cord some days, and took him to new bedford, december 8th, having first written this note to mr. kicketsoii : &quot; thomas cholmondeley, my english ac quaintance, is here, on his way to the west indies. he wants to see new bedford, a whal ing town. i tell him i would like to introduce him to you there, thinking more of his seeing you than new bedford. so we propose to come your way to-morrow. excuse this short notice, for the time is short. if on any account it is inconvenient to see us, you will treat us accord ingly.&quot; 398 friends and followers. [1858, of this visit and his english visitor, mr. ricketson wrote in his journal the next day : &quot;we were all much pleased with mr. cholmondeley. he is a tall spare man, thirty five years of age, of fair and fresh complexion, blue eyes, light brown and fine hair, nose small and roman, beard light and worn full, with a mustache. a man of fine culture and refinement of manners, educated at oriel college, oxford, of an old cheshire family by his father, a clergy man. he wore a black velvet sack coat, and lighter colored trousers, a sort of genteel traveling suit ; perhaps a cap, but by no means a fashionable castor. he reminded me of our dear friend, george william curtis.&quot; few greater compliments could this diarist give than to compare a visitor to curtis, the lamented. mr. cholmondeley left concord for the south, going as far as to virginia, in december and january ; then came back to concord the 20th of january, 1859, and after a few days returned to canada, and thence to england by way of jamaica. he was in london when theodore parker reached there from santa cruz, in june, and called on him, with offers of service ; but does not seem to have heard of parker s death till i wrote him in may, 1861. at my parting with him in concord, he gave me money with which to buy grapes for the invalid father jet. 41.] to harrison blake. 399 of thoreau, an instance of his constant con sideration for others; the thoreaus hardly af fording such luxuries as hothouse grapes for the sick. sophia thoreau, who perhaps was more appreciative of him than her more stoical brother, said after his death, &quot; we have always had the truest regard for him, as a person of rare integrity, great benevolence, and the sin cerest friendliness.&quot; this well describes the man whose every-day guise was literally set down by mr. bicketson. to harrison blake (at worcester). concord, january 1, 1859. mr. blake, it may interest you to hear that cholmondeley has been this way again, ma montreal and lake huron, going to the west indies, or rather to weiss-nicht-wo, whither he urges me to accompany him. he is rather more demonstrative than before, and, on the whole, what would be called &quot; a good fellow,&quot; is a man of principle, and quite reliable, but very peculiar. i have been to new bedford with him, to show him a whaling town and ricket son. i was glad to hear that you had called on r. how did you like him? i suspect that you did not see one another fairly. i have lately got back to that glorious society called solitude, where we meet our friends con 400 friends and followers. [1859, tinually, and can imagine the outside world also to be peopled. yet some of my acquaintance would fain hustle me into the almshouse for the sake of society, as if i were pining for that diet, when i seem to myself a most befriended man, and find constant employment. however, they do not believe a word i say. they have got a club, the handle of which is in the parker house at boston, and with this they beat me from time to time, expecting to make me tender or minced meat, so fit for a club to dine off. &quot; hercules with his club the dragon did drub ; but more of more hall, with nothing at all, he slew the dragon of wantley.&quot; ah ! that more of more hall knew what fair play was. channing, who wrote to me about it once, brandishing the club vigorously (being set on by another, probably), says now, seriously, that he is sorry to find by my letters that i am &quot; absorbed in politics,&quot; and adds, begging my pardon for his plainness, &quot; beware of an extrane ous life ! &quot; and so he does his duty, and washes his hands of me. i tell him that it is as if he should say to the sloth, that fellow that creeps so slowly along a tree, and cries ai from time to time, &quot; beware of dancing ! &quot; the doctors are all agreed that i am suffer jst. 41.] to harrison blake. 401 ing for want of society. was never a case like it. first, i did not know that i was suffering at all. secondly, as an irishman might say, i had thought it was indigestion of the society i got. as for the parker house, i went there once, when the club 1 was away, but i found it hard to see through the cigar smoke, and men were deposited about in chairs over the marble floor, as thick as legs of bacon in a smoke-house. it was all smoke, and no salt, attic or other. the only room in boston which i visit with alacrity is the gentlemen s room at the fitchburg depot, where i wait for the cars, sometimes for two hours, in order to get out of town. it is a paradise to the parker house, for no smoking is allowed, and there is far more retirement. a large and respectable club of us hire it (town and country club), and i am pretty sure to find 1 the club with which thoreau here makes merry was the saturday club, meeting at parker s hotel in boston the last saturday in each month, of which emerson, agassiz, long-fel low, holmes, lowell, henry james, and other men of letters were members. thoreau, though invited, never seems to have met with them, as channing did, on one memorable occasion, at least, described by mr. james in a letter cited in the me moir of bronson alcott, who also occasionally dined with this club. the conversation at emerson s next mentioned was also memorable for the vigor with which miss mary emerson, then eighty-four years old, rebuked mr. james for what she thought his dangerous antinomian views concerning the moral law. 402 friends and followers. [1859, some one there whose face is set the same way as my own. my last essay, on which i am still engaged, is called autumnal tints. i do not know how read able (i. e., by me to others) it will be. i met mr. james the other night at emer son s, at an alcottian conversation, at which, however, alcott did not talk much, being dis turbed by james s opposition. the latter is a hearty man enough, with whom you can differ very satisfactorily, on account of both his doc trines and his good temper. he utters quasi philanthropic dogmas in a metaphysic dress ; but they are for all practical purposes very crude. he charges society with all the crime committed, and praises the criminal for com mitting it. but i think that all the remedies he suggests out of his head for he goes no farther, hearty as he is would leave us about where we are now. for, of course, it is not by a gift of turkeys on thanksgiving day that he proposes to convert the criminal, but by a true sympathy with each one, with him, among the rest, who lyingly tells the world from the gal lows that he has never been treated kindly by a single mortal since he was born. but it is not so easy a thing to sympathize with another, though you may have the best disposition to do it. there is dobson over the hill. have not ^t. 41.] to harrison blake. 403 you and i and all the world been trying, ever since lie was born, to sympathize with him ? (as doubtless he with us), and yet we have got no farther than to send him to the house of cor rection once at least ; and he, on the other hand, as i hear, has sent us to another place several times. this is the real state of things, as i un derstand it, as least so far as james s remedies go. we are now, alas ! exercising what charity we actually have, and new laws would not give us any more. but, perchance, we might make some improvements in the house of correction. you and i are dobson ; what will james do for us . have you found at last in your wanderings a place where the solitude is sweet? what mountain are you camping on nowa days ? though i had a good time at the moun tains, i confess that the journey did not bear any fruit that i know of. i did not expect it would. the mode of it was not simple and ad venturous enough. you must first have made an infinite demand, and not unreasonably, but after a corresponding outlay, have an all-absorb ing purpose, and at the same time that your feet bear you hither and thither, travel much more in imagination. to let the mountains slide, live at home like a traveler. it should not be in vain that 404 friends and followers. [1859 these things are shown us from day to day. is not each withered leaf that i see in my walks something which i have traveled to find ? traveled, who can tell how far ? what a fool he must be who thinks that his el dorado is anywhere but where he lives ! we are always, methinks, in some kind of ravine, though our bodies may walk the smooth streets of worcester. our souls (i use this word for want of a better) are ever perched on its rocky sides, overlooking that lowland. (what a more than tuckerman s ravine is the body itself, in which the &quot; soul &quot; is encamped, when you come to look into it ! however, eagles always have chosen such places for their eyries.) thus is it ever with your fair cities of the plain. their streets may be paved with silver and gold, and six carriages roll abreast in them, but the real homes of the citizens are in the tuckerman s ravines which ray out from that centre into the mountains round about, one for each man, woman, and child. the masters of life have so ordered it. that is their beau-ideal of a country seat. there is no danger of being tuckered out before you get to it. . so we live in worcester and in concord, each man taking his exercise regularly in his ravine, like a lion in his cage, and sometimes spraining jst. 41.] to harrison blake. 405 his ankle there. we have very few clear days, and a great many small plagues which keep us busy. sometimes, i suppose, you hear a neigh bor halloo (brown, may be) and think it is a bear. nevertheless, on the whole, we think it very grand and exhilarating, this ravine life. it is a capital advantage withal, living so high, the excellent drainage of that city of god. rou tine is but a shallow and insignificant sort of ravine, such as the ruts are, the conduits of pud dles. but these ravines are the source of mighty streams, precipitous, icy, savage, as they are, haunted by bears and loup-cerviers ; there are born not only sacos and amazons, but prophets who will redeem the world. the at last smooth and fertilizing water at which nations drink and navies supply themselves begins with melted glaciers, and burst thunder-spouts. let us pray that, if we are not flowing through some mis sissippi valley which we fertilize, and it is not likely we are, we may know ourselves shut in between grim and mighty mountain walls amid the clouds, falling a thousand feet in a mile, through dwarfed fir and spruce, over the rocky insteps of slides, being exercised in our minds, and so developed. concord, january 19, 1859. mr. blake, if i could have given a favor able report as to the skating, i should have an 406 friends and followers. [1859, swered you earlier. about a week before you wrote there was good skating ; there is now none. as for the lecture, i shall be glad to come. i cannot now say when, but i will let you know, i think within a week or ten days at most, and will then leave you a week clear to make the arrange ments in. i will bring something else than &quot; what shall it profit a man ? &quot; my father is very sick, and has been for a long time, so that there is the more need of me at home. this occurs to me, even when contemplating so short an excur sion as to worcester. i want very much to see or hear your ac count of your adventures in the ravine, 1 and i trust i shall do so when i come to worcester. cholmondeley has been here again, returning from virginia (for he went no farther south) to canada; and will go thence to europe, he thinks, in the spring, and never ramble any more. (january 29.) i am expecting daily that my father will die, therefore i cannot leave home at present. i will write you again within ten days. the death of john thoreau (who was born october 8, 1787) occurred february 3d, and thoreau gave his lecture on &quot; autumnal tints &quot; at worcester, february 22, 1859. mrs. tho 1 this was tuckerman s ravine at the white mountains, where thoreau met with his mishap in the precedingjuly. ast.41.] to daniel ricketson. 407 reau survived all her children except sophia, and died in 1872. in a letter to mr. ricketson, thoreau gave a just sketch of his father s char acter. to daniel ricketson (at new bedford). concord, 12th february, 1859. friend ricketson, i thank you for your kind letter. i sent you the notice of my father s death as much because you knew him as because you knew me. i can hardly realize that he is dead. he had been sick about two years, and at last declined rather rapidly, though steadily. till within a week or ten days before he died he was hoping to see another spring, but he then discovered that this was a vain expectation, and, thinking that he was dying, he took his leave of us several times within a week before his depar ture. once or twice he expressed a slight impa tience at the delay. he was quite conscious to the last, and his death was so easy that, though we had all been sitting around the bed for an hour or more expecting that event (as we had sat before), he was gone at last, almost before we were aware of it. i am glad to read what you say of his social nature. i think i may say that he was wholly unpretending ; and there was this peculiarity in his aim, that though he had pecuniary difficul 408 friends and followers. [1859, ties to contend with the greater part of his life, he always studied how to make a good article, pencil or other (for he practiced various arts), and was never satisfied with what he had pro duced. nor was he ever disposed in the least to put off a poor one for the sake of pecuniary gain, as if he labored for a higher end. though he was not very old, and was not a native of concord, i think that he was, on the whole, more identified with concord street than any man now alive, having come here when he was about twelve years old, and set up for him self as a merchant here, at the age of twenty-one, fifty years ago. as i sat in a circle the other evening with my mother and sister, my mother s two sisters, and my father s two sisters, it oc curred to me that my father, though seventy-one, belonged to the youngest four of the eight who recently composed our family. how swiftly at last, but unnoticed, a genera tion passes away ! three years ago i was called with my father to be a witness to the signing of our neighbor mr. frost s will. mr. samuel hoar, who was there writing it, also signed it. i was lately required to go to cambridge to tes tify to the genuineness of the will, being the only one of the four who could be there, and now i am the only one alive. my mother and sister thank you heartily mt. 42.] to harrison blake. 409 for your sympathy. the latter, in particular, agrees with you in thinking that it is communion with still living and healthy nature alone which can restore to sane and cheerful views. i thank you for your invitation to new bedford, but i feel somewhat confined here for the present. i did not know but we should see you the day after alger was here. it is not too late for a winter walk in concord. it does me good to hear of spring birds, and singing ones too, for spring seems far away from concord yet. i am going to worcester to read a parlor lecture on the 22d, and shall see blake and brown. what if you were to meet me there, or go with me from here ? you would see them to good advan tage. cholmondeley has been here again, after going as far south as virginia, and left for can ada about three weeks ago. he is a good soul, and i am afraid i did not sufficiently recognize him. please remember me to mrs. ricketson, and to the rest of your family. to harrison blake (at worcester). concord, september 26, 1859. mr. blake, i am not sure that i am in a fit mood to write to you, for i feel and think rather too much like a business man, having some very irksome affairs to attend to these 410 friends and followers. [1859, months and years on account of my family. 1 this is the way i am serving king admetus, confound him ! if it were not for my relations, i would let the wolves prey on his flocks to their bellies content. such fellows you have to deal with ! herdsmen of some other king, or of the same, who tell no tale, but in the sense of count ing their flocks, and then lie drunk under a hedge. how is your grist ground? not by some murmuring stream, while you lie dreaming on the bank ; but, it seems, you must take hold with your hands, and shove the wheel round. you can t depend on streams, poor feeble things ! you can t depend on worlds, -left to themselves ; but you ve got to oil them and goad them along. in short, you ve got to carry on two farms at once, the farm on the earth and the farm in your mind. those crimean and italian battles were mere boys play, they are the scrapes into which truants get. but what a battle a man must fight everywhere to maintain his standing army of thoughts, and march with them in orderly array through the always hostile coun 1 he was lookingafter the manufacture of fine plumbago for the electrotypers, which was the family business after pen cil-makinggrew unprofitable. the thoreaus had a grinding mill in acton, and a packing shop attached to their concord house. &quot; parker s society,&quot; mentioned at the close of the let ter, was the congregation of theodore parker, then in italy, where he died in may, 1860. jet. 42.] to harrison blake. 411 try ! how many enemies there are to sane thinking ! every soldier has succumbed to them before he enlists for those other battles. men may sit in chambers, seemingly safe and sound, and yet despair, and turn out at last only hol lowness and dust within, like a dead sea apple. a standing army of numerous, brave, and well disciplined thoughts, and you at the head of them, marching straight to your goal, how to bring this about is the problem, and scott s tac tics will not help you to it. think of a poor fellow begirt only with a sword-belt, and no such staff of athletic thoughts ! his brains rattling as he walks and talks ! these are your praetorian guard. it is easy enough to maintain a family, or a state, but it is hard to maintain these chil dren of your brain (or say, rather, these guests that trust to enjoy your hospitality), they make such great demands ; and yet, he who does only the former, and loses the power to tldiik origi nally, or as only he ever can, fails miserably. keep up the fires of thought, and all will go well. zouaves ? pish ! how you can overrun a country, climb any rampart, and carry any for tress, with an army of alert thoughts ! thoughts that send their bullets home to heaven s door, with which you can take the whole world, with out paying for it, or robbing anybody. see, the 412 friends and followers. [1859, conquering hero comes ! you fail in your thoughts, or you prevail in your thoughts only. provided you think well, the heavens falling, or the earth gaping, will be music for you to march by. no foe can ever see you, or you him ; you cannot so much as think of him. swords have no edges, bullets no penetration, for such a con test. in your mind must be a liquor which will dissolve the world whenever it is dropt in it. there is no universal solvent but this, and all things together cannot saturate it. it will hold the universe in solution, and yet be as translu cent as ever. the vast machine may indeed roll over our toes, and we not know it, but it would rebound and be staved to pieces like an empty barrel, if it should strike fair and square on the smallest and least angular of a man s thoughts. you seem not to have taken cape cod the right way. i think that you should have perse vered in walking on the beach and on the bank, even to the land s end, however soft, and so, by long knocking at ocean s gate, have gained ad mittance at last, better, if separately, and in a storm, not knowing where you would sleep by night, or eat by day. then you should have given a day to the sand behind provincetown, and ascended the hills there, and been blown on considerably. i hope that you like to remember the journey better than you did to make it. 2et. 42.] to harrison blake. 413 i have been confined at home all this year, but i am not aware that i have grown any rus tier than was to be expected. one while i ex plored the bottom of the river pretty extensively. i have engaged to read a lecture to parker s society on the 9th of october next. i am off a barberrying. to harbison blake (at worcester). concord, october 31, 1859. mk. blake, i spoke to my townsmen last evening on &quot; the character of captain brown, now in the clutches of the slaveholder.&quot; i should like to speak to any company at worces ter who may wish to hear me ; and will come if only my expenses are paid. i think we should express ourselves at once, while brown is alive. the sooner the better. perhaps higginson may like to have a meeting. wednesday evening would be a good time. the people here are deeply interested in the matter. let me have an answer as soon as may be. p. s. i may be engaged toward the end of the week. henry d. thoreau. this address on john brown was one of the first public utterances in favor of that hero ; it was made up mainly from the entries in tho 414 friends and followers. [1859, reau s journals, since i had introduced brown to him, and he to emerson, in march, 1857 ; and specially from those pages that thoreau had written after the news of brown s capture in virginia had reached him. it was first given in the vestry of the old parish church in concord (where, in 1774, the provincial congress of massachusetts had met to prepare for armed resistance to british tyranny) ; was repeated at worcester the same week, and before a great audience in boston, the following sunday, after which it was published in the newspapers, and had a wide reading. mr. alcott in his diary mentions it under date of sunday, octo ber 30, thus : &quot; thoreau reads a paper on john brown, his virtues, spirit, and deeds, this even ing, and to the delight of his company, the best that could be gathered at short notice, and among them emerson. (november 4.) thoreau calls and reports about the reading of his lecture on brown at boston and worcester. he has been the first to speak and celebrate the hero s courage and magnanimity ; it is these that he discerns and praises. the men have much in common, the sturdy manliness, straightforwardness, and independence. (no vember 5.) ricketson from new bedford ar rives ; he and thoreau take supper with us. thoreau talks freely and enthusiastically about asx.42.] to harrison blake. 415 brown, denouncing the union, the president, the states, and virginia particularly ; wishes to publish his late speech, and has seen boston publishers, but failed to find any to print it for him.&quot; it was soon after published, along with emerson s two speeches in favor of brown, by a new boston publishing house (thayer & el dridge), in a volume called, &quot; echoes of har per s ferry,&quot; edited by the late james redpath, brown s first biographer. in the following summer, thoreau sent a second paper on brown (written soon after his execution) to be read at a commemoration of the martyr, beside his grave among the adirondac mountains. this is mentioned in his letter to sophia thoreau, july 8, 1860. he took an active part in arrang ing for the funeral service in honor of brown, at concord, the day of his death, december 2, 1859. to harrison blake (at worcester). concord, may 20, 1860. mr. blake, i must endeavor to pay some of my debts to you. to begin where we left off, then. the presumption is that we are always the same; our opportunities, and nature herself, fluctuating. look at mankind. no great dif ference between two, apparently ; perhaps the 416 friends and followers. [1860, same height, and breadth, and weight ; and yet, to the man who sits most east, this life is a weariness, routine, dust and ashes, and he drowns his imaginary cares (!) (a sort of fric tion among his vital organs) in a bowl. but to the man who sits most west, his contemporary (!), it is a field for all noble endeavors, an elysium, the dwelling-place of heroes and demigods. the former complains that he has a thousand affairs to attend to ; but he does not realize that his affairs (though they may be a thousand) and he are one. men and boys are learning all kinds of trades but how to make men of themselves. they learn to make houses ; but they are not so well housed, they are not so contented in their houses, as the woodchucks in their holes. what is the use of a house if you have n t got a tolerable planet to put it on ? if you cannot tolerate the planet it is on ? grade the ground first. if a man believes and expects great things of him self, it makes no odds where you put him, or what you show him (of course you cannot put him anywhere, nor show him anything), he will be surrounded by grandeur. he is in the con dition of a healthy and hungry man, who says to himself, how sweet this crust is ! if he despairs of himself, then tophet is his dwell iiig-place, and he is in the condition of a sick jet. 42.] to harrison blake. 417 man who is disgusted with the fruits of finest flavor. whether he sleeps or wakes, whether he runs or walks, whether he uses a microscope or a telescope, or his naked eye, a man never discovers anything, never overtakes anything, or leaves anything behind, but himself. what ever he says or does, he merely reports himself. if he is in love, he loves ; if he is in heaven, he enjoys, ; if he is in hell, he suffers. it is his condition that determines his locality. the principal, the only thing a man makes, is his condition of fate. though commonly he does not know it, nor put up a sign to this effect, &quot;my own destiny made and mended here.&quot; [not yours. ] he is a master-workman in the business. he works twenty-four hours a day at it, and gets it done. whatever else he neglects or botches, no man was ever known to neglect this work. a great many pretend to make shoes chiefly, and would scout the idea that they make the hard times which they experience. each reaching and aspiration is an instinct with which all nature consists and cooperates, and therefore it is not in vain. but alas ! each relaxing and desperation is an instinct too. to be active, well, happy, implies rare courage. to be ready to fight in a duel or a battle implies desperation, or that you hold your life cheap. 418 friends and followers. [1860, if you take this life to be simply what old religious folks pretend (i mean the effete, gone to seed in a drought, mere human galls stung by the devil once), then all your joy and seren ity is reduced to grinning and bearing it. the fact is, you have got to take the world on your shoulders like atlas, and &quot; put along &quot; with it. you will do this for an idea s sake, and your success will be in proportion to your devotion to ideas. it may make your back ache occasion ally, but you will have the satisfaction of hang ing it or twirling it to suit yourself. cowards suffer, heroes enjoy. after a long day s walk with it, pitch it into a hollow place, sit down and eat your luncheon. unexpectedly, by some immortal thoughts, you will be compensated. the bank whereon you sit will be a fragrant and flowery one, and your world in the hollow a sleek and light gazelle. where is the &quot; unexplored land &quot; but in our own untried enterprises ? to an adventurous spirit any place london, new york, worces ter, or his own yard is &quot; unexplored land,&quot; to seek which fremont and kane travel so far. to a sluggish and defeated spirit even the great basin and the polaris are trivial places. if they can get there (and, indeed, they are there now), they will want to sleep, and give it up, just as they always do. these are the regions of the mt. 42.] to sophia thoreau. 419 known and of the unknown. what is the use of going right over the old track again ? there is an adder in the path which your own feet have worn. you must make tracks into the un known. that is what you have your board and clothes for. why do you ever mend your clothes, unless that, wearing them, you may mend your ways ? let us sing. to sophia thoreau (at campton, n. h.). concord, july 8, 1860. dear sophia, mother reminds me that i must write to you, if only a few lines, though i have sprained my thumb, so that it is ques tionable whether i can write legibly, if at all. i can t &quot; bear on &quot; much. what is worse, i believe that i have sprained my brain too that is, it sympathizes with my thumb. but that is no excuse, i suppose, for writing a letter in such a case, is like sending a newspaper, only a hint to let you know that &quot; all is well,&quot; but my thumb. i hope that you begin to derive some benefit from that more mountainous air which you are breathing. have you had a distinct view of the franconia notch mountains (blue peaks in the northern horizon) ? which i told you you could get from the road in campton, probably from some other points nearer. such a view of the 420 friends and followers. [i860, mountains is more memorable than any other. have you been to squam lake or overlooked it? i should think that you could make an excursion to some mountain in that direction from which you could see the lake and mountains generally. is there no friend of n. p. kogers who can tell you where the &quot; lions &quot; are ? of course i did not go to north elba, 1 but i sent some reminiscences of last fall. i hear that john brown, jr., has now come to boston for a few days. mr. sanborn s case, it is said, will come on after some murder cases have been dis posed of here. i have just been invited formally to be pres ent at the annual picnic of theodore parker s society (that was), at waverley, next wednes day, and to make some remarks. but that is wholly out of my line. i do not go to picnics, even in concord, you know. mother and aunt sophia rode to acton in time yesterday. i suppose that you have heard that mr. hawthorne has come home. i went to meet him the other evening and found that he has not altered, except that he was looking quite 1 he was invited to a gatheringof john brown s friends at the grave in the adirondac woods. &quot; mr. sanborn s case &quot; was an indictment and civil suit against silas carleton et als. for an attempt to kidnap f. b. sanborn, who had refused to accept the invitation of the senate at washington to testify in the john brown investigation. arr. 43.] to harrison blake. 421 brown after his voyage. he is as simple and childlike as ever. i believe that i have fairly scared the kittens away, at last, by my pretended fierceness, which was. i will consider my thumb and your eyes. henry. to harrison blake (at worcester). concord, august 3, 1860. mr. blake, i some time ago asked chan ning if he would not spend a week with me on monadnoc ; but he did not answer decidedly. lately he has talked of an excursion somewhere, but i said that now i must wait till my sister re turned from plymouth, n. h. she has returned, and accordingly, on receiving your note this morning, i made known its contents to chaii ning, in order to see how far i was engaged with him. the result is that he decides to go to monadnoc to-morrow morning ; 1 so i must defer 1 this is the excursion described by thoreau in a subse quent letter, lasting six days, and the first that channing had made which involved &quot;camping out.&quot; it was also tho reau s last visit to this favorite mountain ; but channing con tinued to go there after the death of his friend ; and some of these visits are recorded in his poem, &quot; the wanderer.&quot; the last one was in september, 1869, when i accompanied him, and we again spent five nights on the plateau where he hacl camped with thoreau. at that time, one of the &quot; two good spruce houses, half a mile apart,&quot; mentioned by thoreau, 422 friends and followers. [1860, making an excursion with you and brown to another season. perhaps you will call as you pass the mountain. i send this by the earliest mail. p. s. that was a very insufficient visit you made here the last time. my mother is better, though far from well ; and if you should chance along here any time after your journey, i trust that we shall all do better. the mention by thoreau of john brown and my &quot; case &quot; recalls to me an incident of those excited days which followed the attack by brown on slavery in virginia. the day after brown s death, but before the execution of his comrades, i received a message from the late dr. david thayer of boston, implying, as i thought, that a son of brown was at his house, whither i hurried to meet him. instead, i found young f. j. merriam of boston, who had escaped with owen brown from harper s ferry, and was was still standing, in ruins, the place called by channing &quot; henry s camp,&quot; and thus described : we built our fortress where you see yon group of spruce-trees, sidewise on the line where the horizon to the eastward bounds, a point selected by sagacious art, where all at once we viewed the vermont hills, and the long outline of the mountain-ridge, ever renewing, changeful every hour. see the wanderer (boston, 1871), p. 61. t. 42.] thorea u and frank merriam. 423 now in boston to raise another party against the slaveholders. he was unfit to lead or even join in such a desperate undertaking, and we insisted he should return to safety in canada, a large reward being offered for his seizure. he agreed to go back to canada that night by the fitch burg railroad ; but in his hotheaded way he took the wrong train, which ran no farther than con cord, and found himself in the early evening at my house, where my sister received him, but insisted that i should not see him, lest i might be questioned about my guest. while he had supper and went to bed, i posted down to mr. emerson s and engaged his horse and covered wagon, to be ready at sunrise, he asking no questions. in the same way i engaged mr. thoreau to drive his friend s horse to south acton the next morning, and there put on board the first canadian train a mr. lockwood, whom he would find at my house. thoreau readily consented, asked no questions, walked to the emerson stable the next morning, found the horse ready, drove him to my door, and took up merriam, under the name of lockwood, neither knowing who the other was. merriam was so flighty that, though he had agreed to go to montreal, and knew that his life might de pend on getting there early, he declared he must see mr. emerson, to lay before him his plan 424 friends and followers. [1859, for invading the south, and consult him about some moral questions that troubled his mind. his companion listened gravely, and hurried the horse towards acton. merriam grew more positive and suspicious, &quot; perhaps you are mr. emerson ; you look somewhat like him.&quot; l &quot; no, i am not,&quot; said thoreau, and drove steadily away from concord. &quot; well, then, i am going back,&quot; said the youth, and flung himself out of the wagon. how thoreau got him in again, he never told me ; but i suspected some judicious force, accompanying the grave persuasive speech natural to our friend. at any rate, he took his man to acton, saw him safe on the train, and reported to me that &quot; mr. lockwood had taken passage for canada,&quot; where he arrived that night. nothing more passed between us until, more than two years after, he inquired one day, in his last illness, who my fugitive was. mer riam was then out of danger in that way, and had been for months a soldier in the union army, where he died. i therefore said that &quot; lockwood &quot; was the grandson of his mother s old friend, francis jackson, and had escaped from maryland. in return he gave me the odd incidents of their drive, and mentioned that he 1 see tkoreau s autumn, p. 331. merriam mentioned tho reau s name to him, but never guessed who his companion t.43.] to daniel eicketson. 425 had spoken of the affair to his mother only since his illness. so reticent and practically useful could he be ; as channing says, &quot; he made no useless professions, never asked one of those questions which destroy all relation ; but he was on the spot at the time, he meant friendship, and meant nothing else, and stood by it with out the slightest abatement.&quot; to daniel ricketson (at new bedford). concord, november 4, 1860. friend ricketson, i thank you for the verses. they are quite too good to apply to me. however, i know what a poet s license is, and will not get in the way. but what do you mean by that prose ? why will you waste so many regards on me, and not know what to think of my silence ? infer from it what you might from the silence of a dense pine wood. it is its natural condition, except when the winds blow, and the jays scream, and the chickadee winds up his clock. my silence is just as inhuman as that, and no more. you know that i never promised to correspond with you, and so, when i do, i do more than i prom ised. such are my pursuits and habits, that i rarely go abroad ; and it is quite a habit with me to decline invitations to do so. not that i could 426 friends and followers. [1860, not enjoy such visits, if i were not otherwise occupied. i have enjoyed very much my vis its to you, and my rides in your neighborhood, and am sorry that i cannot enjoy such things oftener; but life is short, and there are other things also to be done. i admit that you are more social than i am, and far more attentive to &quot; the common courtesies of life ; &quot; but this is partly for the reason that you have fewer or less exacting private pursuits. not to have written a note for a year is with me a very venial offense. i think that i do not correspond with any one so often as once in six months. i have a faint recollection of your invitation referred to ; but i suppose that i had no new nor particular reason for declining, and so made no new statement. i have felt that you would be glad to see me almost whenever i got ready to come ; but i only offer myself as a rare vis itor, and a still rarer correspondent. i am very busy, after my fashion, little as there is to show for it, and feel as if i could not spend many days nor dollars in traveling; for the shortest visit must have a fair margin to it, and the days thus affect the weeks, you know. nevertheless, we cannot forego these luxuries altogether. you must not regard me as a regu lar diet, but at most only as acorns, which, too, jet. 43.] to daniel ricketson. 427 are not to be despised, which, at least, we love to think are edible in a bracing walk. we have got along pretty well together in several directions, though we are such strangers in others. i hardly know what to say in answer to your letter. some are accustomed to write many let ters, others very few. i am one of the last. at any rate, we are pretty sure, if we write at all, to send those thoughts which we cherish, to that one who, we believe, will most religiously attend to them. this life is not for complaint, but for satisfac tion. i do not feel addressed by this letter of yours. it suggests only misunderstanding. in tercourse may be good; but of what use are complaints and apologies? any complaint / have to make is too serious to be uttered, for the evil cannot be mended. turn over a new leaf. my out-door harvest this fall has been one canada lynx, a fierce-looking fellow, which, it seems, we have hereabouts; eleven barrels of apples from trees of my own planting; and a large crop of white-oak acorns, which i did not raise. please remember me to your family. i have a very pleasant recollection of your fireside, and i trust that i shall revisit it ; also of your shanty and the surrounding regions. 428 friends and followers. [i860, to harrison blake (at worcester). concokd, november 4, 1860. mr. blake, i am glad to hear any partic ulars of your excursion. as for myself, i looked out for you somewhat on that monday, when, it appears, you passed monadnoc ; turned my glass upon several parties that were ascending the mountain half a mile on one side of us. in short, i came as near to seeing you as you to seeing me. i have no doubt that we should have had a good time if you had come, for i had, all ready, two good spruce houses, in which you could stand up, complete in all respects, half a mile apart, and you and b. could have lodged by yourselves in one, if not with us. we made an excellent beginning of our moun tain life. 1 you may remember that the satur day previous was a stormy day. well, we went up in the rain, wet through, and found our selves in a cloud there at mid-afternoon, in no situation to look about for the best place for a camp. so i proceeded at once, through the cloud, to that memorable stone, &quot; chunk yard,&quot; in which we made our humble camp once, and there, after putting our packs under a rock, hav 1 this was thoreau s last visit to monadnoc, and the one mentioned in the note of august 3, and in channing s wan derer. jst.43.] to harrison blake. 429 ing a good hatchet, i proceeded to build a sub stantial house, which channing declared the handsomest he ever saw. (he never camped out before, and was, no doubt, prejudiced in its favor.) this was done about dark, and by that time we were nearly as wet as if we had stood in a hogshead of water. we then built a fire before the door, directly on the site of our little camp of two years ago, and it took a long time to burn through its remains to the earth be neath. standing before this, and turning round slowly, like meat that is roasting, we were as dry, if not drier, than ever, after a few hours, and so at last, we &quot; turned in.&quot; this was a great deal better than going up there in fair weather, and having no adventure (not knowing how to appreciate either fair weather or foul) but dull, commonplace sleep in a useless house, and before a comparatively use less fire, such as we get every night. of course we thanked our stars, when we saw them, which was about midnight, that they had seem ingly withdrawn for a season. we had the mountain all to ourselves that afternoon and night. there was nobody going up that day to engrave his name on the summit, nor to gather blueberries. the genius of the mountains saw us starting from concord, and it said, there come two of our folks. let us get ready for them. 430 friends and followers. [1860, get up a serious storm, that will send a-packing these holiday guests. (they may have their say another time.) let us receive them with true mountain hospitality, kill the fatted cloud. let them know the value of a spruce roof, and of a fire of dead spruce stumps. every bush dripped tears of joy at our advent. fire did its best, and received our thanks. what could fire have done in fair weather ? spruce roof got its share of our blessings. and then, such a view of the wet rocks, with the wet lichens on them, as we had the next morning, but did not get again ! we and the mountain had a sound season, as the saying is. how glad we were to be wet, in order that we might be dried! how glad we were of the storm which made our house seem like a new home to us ! this day s experience was indeed lucky, for we did not have a thunder shower during all our stay. perhaps our host reserved this attention in order to tempt us to come again. our next house was more substantial still. one side was rock, good for durability; the floor the same ; and the roof which i made would have upheld a horse. i stood on it to do the shingling. i noticed, when i was at the white mountains last, several nuisances which render traveling 2et.43.] to harrison blake. 431 thereabouts unpleasant. the chief of these was the mountain houses. i might have supposed that the main attraction of that region, even to citizens, lay in its wildness and unlikeness to the city, and yet they make it as much like the city as they can afford to. i heard that the crawford house was lighted with gas, and had a large saloon, with its band of music, for dan cing. but give me a spruce house made in the rain. an old concord farmer tells me that he as cended monadnoc once, and danced on the top. how did that happen ? why, he being up there, a party of young men and women came up, bring ing boards and a fiddler ; and, having laid down the boards, they made a level floor, on which they danced to the music of the fiddle. i sup pose the tune was &quot; excelsior.&quot; this reminds me of the fellow who climbed to the top of a very high spire, stood upright on the ball, and hurrahed for what ? why, for harrison and tyler. that s the kind of sound which most ambitious people emit when they culminate. they are wont to be singularly frivolous in the thin atmosphere ; they can t contain themselves, though our comfort and their safety require it ; it takes the pressure of many atmospheres to do this ; and hence they helplessly evaporate there. it would seem that as they ascend, they breathe 432 friends and followers. [i860, shorter and shorter, and, at each expiration, some of their wits leave them, till, when they reach the pinnacle, they are so light-headed as to be fit only to show how the wind sits. i sus pect that emerson s criticism called &quot;monad noc &quot; was inspired, not by remembering the in habitants of new hampshire as they are in the valleys, so much as by meeting some of them on the mountain top. after several nights experience, channing came to the conclusion that he was &quot; lying out doors,&quot; and inquired what was the largest beast that might nibble his legs there. i fear that he did not improve all the night, as he might have done, to sleep. i had asked him to go and spend a week there. we spent five nights, being gone six days, for c. suggested that six working days made a week, and i saw that he was ready to decamp. however, he found his account in it as well as i. we were seen to go up in the rain, grim and silent, like two genii of the storm, by fassett s men or boys ; but we were never identified after ward, though we were the subject of some con versation which we overheard. five hundred persons at least came on to the mountain while we were there, but not one found our camp. we saw one party of three ladies and two gentlemen spread their blankets and spend the night on the 2et.43.] to harrison blake. 433 top, and heard them converse ; but they did not know that they had neighbors who were compar atively old settlers. we spared them the chagrin which that knowledge would have caused them, and let them print their story in a newspaper accordingly. yes, to meet men on an honest and simple footing, meet with rebuffs, suffer from sore feet, as you did, ay, and from a sore heart, as per haps you also did, all that is excellent. what a pity that that young prince 1 could not enjoy a little of the legitimate experience of traveling be dealt with simply and truly, though rudely. he might have been invited to some hospitable house in the country, had his bowl of bread and milk set before him, with a clean pinafore ; been told that there were the punt and the fishing-rod, and he could amuse himself as he chose ; might have swung a few birches, dug out a woodchuck, and had a regular good time, and finally been sent to bed with the boys, and so never have been introduced to mr. everett at all. i have no doubt that this would have been a far more memorable and valuable experience than he got. the snow-clad summit of mount washington must have been a very interesting sight from wachusett. how wholesome winter is, seen far 1 the prince of wales, then visiting america with the duke of newcastle. 434 friends and followers. [1861, or near ; how good, above all mere sentimental, warm-blooded, short-lived, soft-hearted, moral goodness, commonly so-called. give me the goodness which has forgotten its own deeds, which god has seen to be good, and let be. none of your just made perfect, pickled eels ! all that will save them will be their picturesqueness, as with blasted trees. whatever is, and is not ashamed to be, is good. i value no moral good ness or greatness unless it is good or great, even as that snowy peak is. pray, how could thirty feet of bowels improve it? nature is goodness crystallized. you looked into the land of prom ise. whatever beauty we behold, the more it is distant, serene, and cold, the purer and more dur able it is. it is better to warm ourselves with ice than with fire. tell brown that he sent me more than the price of the book, viz., a word from himself, for which i am greatly his debtor. to daniel ricketson (at new bedford). concord, march 22, 1861. fkiend kicketson, the bluebird was here the 26th of february, at least, which is one day earlier than you date; but i have not heard of larks nor pigeon-woodpeckers. to tell the truth, i am not on the alert for the signs of spring, not having had any winter yet. i took jet. 43.} to daniel ricketson. 435 a severe cold about the 3d of december, which at length resulted in a kind of bronchitis, so that i have been confined to the house ever since, excepting a very few experimental trips as far as the post-office in some particularly fine noons. my health otherwise has not been affected in the least, nor my spirits. i have simply been imprisoned for so long, and it has not prevented my doing a good deal of reading and the like. channing has looked after me very faithfully ; says he has made a study of my case, and knows me better than i know myself, etc., etc. of course, if i knew how it began, i should know better how it would end. i trust that when warm weather comes i shall begin to pick up my crumbs. i thank you for your invitation to come to new bedford, and will bear it in mind ; but at present my health will not permit my leaving home. the day i received your letter, blake and brown arrived here, having walked from worces ter in two days, though alcott, who happened in sbon after, could not understand what pleas ure they found in walking across the country in this season, when the ways were so unsettled. i had a solid talk with them for a day and a half though my pipes were not in good order and they went their way again. you may be interested to hear that alcott is 436 friends and followers. [1861, at present, perhaps, the most successful man in the town. he had his second annual exhibition of all the schools in the town, at the town hall last saturday; at which all the masters and misses did themselves great credit, as i hear, and of course reflected some on their teachers and parents. they were making their little speeches from one till six o clock*?. m., to a large audience, which patiently listened to the end. in the mean while, the children made mr. alcott an unexpected present of a fine edition of &quot;pilgrim s progress&quot; and &quot;herbert s poems,&quot; which, of course, overcame all parties. i inclose an order of exercises. 1 we had, last night, an old-fashioned north east snow-storm, far worse than anything in the winter ; and the drifts are now very high above the fences. the inhabitants are pretty much confined to their houses, as i was already. all houses are one color, white, with the snow plas 1 in april, 1859, mr. alcott was chosen superintendent of the public schools of concord, by a school committee of which mr. bull, the creator of the concord grape, and mr. sanborn, were members, and for some years he directed the studies of the younger pupils, to their great benefit and delight. at the yearly &quot; exhibitions,&quot; songs were sung composed by louisa alcott and others, and the whole town assembled to see and hear. the stress of civil war gradually checked this idyllic movement, and mr. alcott returned to his garden and library. it was two years after this that miss alcott had her severe experience as hospital nurse at washington. j2t.43.] to parker pillsbury. 437 tered over them, and you cannot tell whether they have blinds or not. our pump has another pump, its ghost, as thick as itself, sticking to one side of it. the town has sent out teams of eight oxen each, to break out the roads ; and the train due from boston at 8| a. m. has not ar rived yet (4 p. m.). all the passing has been a train from above at 12 m., which also was due at 8j a. m. where are the bluebirds now, think you ? i suppose that you have not so much snow at new bedford, if any. to parker pillsbury (at concord, n. h.). concord, april 10, 1861. friend pillsbury, i am sorry to say that i have not a copy of &quot; walden &quot; which i can spare ; and know of none, unless possibly tick nor & fields may have one. i send, neverthe less, a copy of &quot; the week,&quot; the price of which is one dollar and twenty-five cents, which you can pay at your convenience. as for your friend, my prospective reader, i hope he ignores fort sumter, and &quot; old abe,&quot; and all that ; for that is just the most fatal, and, indeed, the only fatal weapon you can direct against evil, ever ; for, as long as you know of it, you are particeps criminis. what business have you, if you are &quot; an angel of light,&quot; to be pondering over the deeds of darkness, reading the &quot; new york herald,&quot; and the like ? 438 friends and followers. [1861, i do not so much regret the present condition of things in this country (provided i regret it at all), as i do that i ever heard of it. i know one or two, who have this year, for the first time, read a president s message ; but they do not see that this implies a fall in themselves, rather than a rise in the president. blessed were the days before you read a president s message. blessed are the young, for they do not read the president s message. blessed are they who never read a newspaper, for they shall see nature, and, through her, god. but, alas ! / have heard of sumter and pick ens, and even of buchanan (though i did not read his message). i also read the &quot; new york tribune ; &quot; but then, i am reading herodotus and strabo, and blodget s &quot; climatology,&quot; and &quot;six years in the desert of north america,&quot; as hard as i can, to counterbalance it. by the way, alcott is at present our most popular and successful man, and has just pub lished a volume in size, in the shape of the an nual school report, which i presume he has sent to you. yours, for remembering all good things, henky d. thokeau. parker pillsbury, to whom this letter went, was an old friend of the thoreau family, with j3t.43.] cholmondeley to thoreau. 439 whom he became intimate in the anti-slavery agitation, wherein they took part, while he was a famous orator, celebrated by emerson in one of his essays. mr. pillsbury visited thoreau in his last illness, when he could scarcely speak above a whisper, and, having made to him some remark concerning the future life, thoreau re plied, &quot; my friend, one world at a time.&quot; his petulant words in this letter concerning na tional affairs would hardly have been said a few days later, when, at the call of abraham lincoln, the people rose to protect their govern ment, and every president s message became of thrilling interest, even to thoreau. arrangements were now making for the inva lid, about whose health his friends had been anxious for some years, to travel for a better cli mate than the new england spring affords, and early in may thoreau set out for the upper mis sissippi. he thus missed the last letter sent to him by his english friend cholmondeley, which i answered, and then forwarded to him at eed wing, in minnesota. it is of interest enough to be given here. t. cholmondeley to thoreau (in minnesota). shrewsbury [england], april 23, 1861. my dear thoreau, it is now some time since i wrote to you or heard from you, but do 440 friends and followers. [1861, not suppose that i have forgotten you, or shall ever cease to cherish in my mind those days at dear old concord. the last i heard about you all was from morton, 1 who was in england about a year ago ; and i hope that he has got over his difficulties and is now in his own country again. i think he has seen rather more of english country life than most yankee tourists ; and ap peared to find it curious, though i fear he was dulled by our ways ; for he was too full of cere mony and compliments and bows, which is a mistake here ; though very well in spain. i am afraid he was rather on pins and needles ; but he made a splendid speech at a volunteer sup per, and indeed the very best, some said, ever heard in this part of the country. we are here in a state of alarm and appre hension, the world being so troubled in east and west and everywhere. last year the har vest was bad and scanty. this year our trade is beginning to feel the events in america. in reply to the northern tariff, of course we are going to smuggle as much as we can. the sup ply of cotton being such a necessity to us, we must work up india and south africa a little better. there is war even in old new zealand, 1 edwin morton of plymouth, mass., a friend of john brown and gerrit smith, who went to england in october, 1859, to avoid testifying against his friends. ast.43.] cholmondelkt to thoreau. 441 but not in the same island where my people are ! besides, we are certainly on the eve of a conti nental blaze, so we are making merry and liv ing while ice can ; not being sure where we shall be this time a year. give my affectionate regards to your father, mother, and sister, and to mr. emerson and his family, and to channing, sanborn, ricketson, blake, and morton and alcott and parker. a thought arises in my mind whether i may not be enumerating some dead men ! perhaps par ker is ! these rumors of wars make me wish that we had got done with this brutal stupidity of war altogether ; and i believe, thoreau, that the hu/ man race will at last get rid of it, though perv haps not in a creditable way ; but such powers will be brought to bear that it will become mon strous even to the french. dundonald declared to the last that he possessed secrets which from their tremendous character would make war im possible. so peace may be begotten from the machinations of evil. have you heard of any good books lately ? i think &quot; burnt njal &quot; good, and believe it to be genuine. &quot; hast thou not heard &quot; (says stein rora to thangbrand) &quot;how thor challenged christ to single combat, and how he did not dare to fight with thor?&quot; when gunnar 442 friends and followers. [1861, brandishes his sword, three swords are seen in air. the account of ospah and brodir and bri an s battle is the only historical account of that engagement, which the irish talk so much of ; for i place little trust in o halloran s authority, though the outline is the same in both. darwin s &quot; origin of species &quot; may be fanci ful, but it is a move in the right direction. em erson s &quot; conduct of life &quot; has done me good ; but it will not go down in england for a gener ation or so. but these are some of them already a year or two old. the book of the season is du chaillu s &quot; central africa,&quot; with accounts of the gorilla, of which you are aware that you have had a skeleton at boston for many years. there is also one in the british museum ; but they have now several stuffed specimens at the geographical society s rooms in town. i sup pose you will have seen sir emerson tennent s &quot; ceylon,&quot; which is perhaps as complete a book as ever was published ; and a better monument to a governor s residence in a great province was never made. we have been lately astonished by a foreign hamlet, a supposed impossibility ; but mr. fech ter does real wonders. no doubt he will visit america, and then you may see the best actor in the world. he has carried out goethe s idea of hamlet as given in the &quot; wilhelm meister,&quot; 2et.43.] to harrison blake. 443 showing him forth as a fair-haired and fat man. i suppose you are not got fat yet ? yours ever truly, cholmondeley. 1 to harrison blake (at worcester). concord, may 3, 1861. mr. blake, i am still as much an invalid as when you and brown were here, if not more of one, and at this rate there is danger that the cold weather may come again, before i get 1 a word may be said of the after life of this magnanimous englishman, who did not long survive his concord correspond ent. in march, 1863, being then in command of a battalion of shropshire volunteers, which he had raised, he inherited condover hall and the large estate adjacent, and took the name of owen as a condition of the inheritance. a year later he married miss victoria cotes, daughter of john and lady louisa cotes (co. salop), a godchild of the queen, and went to italy for his wedding-tour. in florence he was seized with a malignant fever, april 10, 1864, and died there april 20, not quite two years after thoreau s death. his brother regi nald, who had met him in florence, carried back his remains to england, and he is buried in condover churchyard. writ ing to an american friend, mr. r. cholmondeley said : &quot; the whole county mourned for one who had made himself greatly beloved. during his illness his thoughts went back very much to america and her great sufferings. his large heart felt for your country as if it were his own.&quot; it seems that he did not go to new zealand with the &quot;canterbury pilgrims,&quot; as sug gested in the atlantic monthly (december, 1893), but in the first of lord lyttelton s ships (the charlotte jane), having joined in lord l. s scheme for colonizing the island, where he remained only six months, near christchurch. 444 friends and followers. [1861, over my bronchitis. the doctor accordingly tells me that i must &quot; clear out &quot; to the west indies, or elsewhere, he does not seem to care much where. but i decide against the west indies, on account of their muggy heat in the summer, and the south of europe, on account of the expense of time and money, and have at last concluded that it will be most expedient for me to try the air of minnesota, say somewhere about st. paul s. i am only waiting to be well enough to start. hope to get off within a week or ten days. the inland air may help me at once, or it may not. at any rate, i am so much of an invalid, that i shall have to study my comfort in travel ing to a remarkable degree, stopping to rest, etc., etc., if need be. i think to get a through ticket to chicago, with liberty to stop frequently on the way, making my first stop of consequence at niagara falls, several days or a week, at a private boarding-house ; then a night or day at detroit ; and as much at chicago as my health may require. at chicago i can decide at what point (fulton, dunleith, or another) to strike the mississippi, and take a boat to st. paul s. i trust to find a private boarding-house in one or various agreeable places in that region, and spend my time there. i expect, and shall be prepared, to be gone three months ; and i jet. 43.] to f. b. sanborn. 445 would like to return by a different route, perhaps mackinaw and montreal. i have thought of finding a companion, of course, yet not seriously, because i had no right to offer myself as a companion to anybody, hav ing such a peculiarly private and all-absorbing but miserable business as my health, and not altogether his, to attend to, causing me to stop here and go there, etc., etc., unaccountably. nevertheless, i have just now decided to let you know of my intention, thinking it barely possible that you might like to make a part or the whole of this journey at the same time, and that perhaps your own health may be such as to be benefited by it. pray let me know if such a statement offers any temptations to you. i write in great haste for the mail, and must omit all the moral. to f. b. sanborn (at concord). redwing, minnesota, june 26, 1861. mk. sanborn, i was very glad to find awaiting me, on my arrival here on sunday after noon, a letter from you. i have performed this journey in a very dead and alive manner, but nothing has come so near waking me up as the receipt of letters from concord. i read yours, and one from my sister (and horace mann, his four), near the top of a remarkable isolated 446 friends and followers. [1861, bluff here, called barn bluff, or the grange, or kedwing bluff, some four hundred and fifty feet high, and half a mile long, a bit of the main bluff or bank standing alone. the top, as you know, rises to the general level of the surround ing country, the river having eaten out so much. yet the valley just above and below this (we are at the head of lake pepin) must be three or four miles wide. i am not even so well informed as to the pro gress of the war as you suppose. i have seen but one eastern paper (that, by the way, was the &quot; tribune &quot;) for five weeks. i have not taken much pains to get them ; but, necessarily, i have not seen any paper at all for more than a week at a time. the people of minnesota have seemed to me more cold, to feel less im plicated in this war than the people of massa chusetts. it is apparent that massachusetts, for one state at least, is doing much more than her share in carrying it on. however, i have dealt partly with those of southern birth, and have seen but little way beneath the surface. i was glad to be told yesterday that there was a good deal of weeping here at kedwing the other day, when the volunteers stationed at fort snelling followed the regulars to the seat of the war. they do not weep when their children go up the river to occupy the deserted forts, though they may have to fight the indians there. jst. 43.] to f. b. sanborn. 447 i do not even know what the attitude of eng land is at present. the grand feature hereabouts is, of course, the mississippi river. too much can hardly be said of its grandeur, and of the beauty of this portion of it (from dunleith, and probably from rock island to this place). st. paul is a dozen miles below the falls of st. anthony, or near the head of uninterrupted navigation on the main stream, about two thousand miles from its mouth. there is not a &quot; rip &quot; below that, and the river is almost as wide in the upper as the lower part of its course. steamers go up to the sauk rapids, above the falls, near a hundred miles farther, and then you are fairly in the pine woods and lumbering country. thus it flows from the pine to the palm. the lumber, as you know, is sawed chiefly at the falls of st. anthony (what is not rafted in the log to ports far below), having given rise to the towns of st. anthony, minneapolis, etc., etc. in coming up the river from dunleith, you meet with great rafts of sawed lumber and of logs, twenty rods or more in length, by five or six wide, floating down, all from the pine region above the falls. an old maine lumberer, who has followed the same business here, tells me that the sources of the mississippi were compar atively free from rocks and rapids, making easy 448 friends and followers. [1861, work for them ; but he thought that the timber was more knotty here than in maine. it has chanced that about half the men whom i have spoken with in minnesota, whether trav elers or settlers, were from massachusetts. after spending some three weeks in and about st. paul, st. anthony, and minneapolis, we made an excursion in a steamer, some three hundred or more miles up the minnesota (st. peter s) eiver, to redwood, or the lower sioux agency, in order to see the plains, and the sioux, who were to receive their annual payment there. this is eminently the river of minnesota (for she shares the mississippi with wisconsin), and it is of incalculable value to her. it flows through a very fertile country, destined to be famous for its wheat ; but it is a remarkably winding stream, so that redwood is only half as far from its mouth by land as by water. there was not a straight reach a mile in length as far as we went, generally you could not see a quarter of a mile of water, and the boat was steadily turning this way or that. at the greater bends, as the traverse des sioux, some of the passengers were landed, and walked across to be taken in on the other side. two or three times you could have thrown a stone across the neck of the isthmus, while it was from one to three miles around it. it was a very novel kind of 2et. 43.] to f. b. sanborn. 449 navigation to me. the boat was perhaps the largest that had been up so high, and the water was rather low (it had been about fifteen feet higher). in making a short turn, we repeatedly and designedly ran square into the steep and soft bank, taking in a cart-load of earth, this being more effectual than the rudder to fetch us about again ; or the deeper water was so narrow and close to the shore, that we were obliged to run into and break down at least fifty trees which overhung the water, when we did not cut them off, repeatedly losing a part of our out works, though the most exposed had been taken in. i could pluck almost any plant on the bank from the boat. we very frequently got aground, and then drew ourselves along with a windlass and a cable fastened to a tree, or we swung round in the current, and completely blocked up and blockaded the river, one end of the boat resting on each shore. and yet we would haul ourselves round again with the windlass and ca ble in an hour or two, though the boat was about one hundred and sixty feet long, and drew some three feet of water, or, often, water and sand. it was one consolation to know that in such a case we were all the while damming the river, and so raising it. we once ran fairly on to a concealed rock, with a shock that aroused all the passengers, and rested there, and the mate went 450 friends and followers. [1861, below with a lamp, expecting to find a hole, but he did not. snags and sawyers were so common that i forgot to mention them. the sound of the boat rumbling over one was the ordinary music. however, as long as the boiler did not burst, we knew that no serious accident was likely to happen. yet this was a singularly navigable river, more so than the mississippi above the falls, and it is owing to its very crook edness. ditch it straight, and it would not only be very swift, but soon run out. it was from ten to fifteen rods wide near the mouth, and from eight to ten or twelve at redwood. though the current was swift, i did not see a &quot; rip &quot; on it, and only three or four rocks. for three months in the year i am told that it can be nav igated by small steamers about twice as far as we went, or to its source in big stone lake ; and a former indian agent told me that at high water it was thought that such a steamer might pass into the red river. in short, this river proved so very long and navigable, that i was reminded of the last letter or two in the voyage of the baron la hontan (written near the end of the seventeenth cen tury, i think), in which he states, that, after reaching the mississippi (by the illinois or wis consin), the limit of previous exploration west ward, he voyaged up it with his indians, and at jet. 43.] to r b. sanborn. 451 length turned up a great river coming in from the west, which he called &quot;la riviere longue;&quot; and he relates various improbable things about the country and its inhabitants, so that this let ter has been regarded as pure fiction, or, more properly speaking, a lie. but i am somewhat inclined now to reconsider the matter. the governor of minnesota (ramsay), the superintendent of indian affairs in this quarter, and the newly-appointed indian agent were on board ; also a german band from st. paul, a small cannon for salutes, and the money for the indians (ay, and the gamblers, it was said, who were to bring it back in another boat). there were about one hundred passengers, chiefly from st. paul, and more or less recently from the northeastern states; also half a dozen young educated englishmen. chancing to speak with one who sat next to me, when the voyage was nearly half over, i found that he was the son of the rev. samuel may, 1 and a classmate of yours, and had been looking for us at st. an thony. the last of the little settlements on the river was new ulm, about one hundred miles this side of redwood. it consists wholly of germans. we left them one hundred barrels of salt, which will be worth something more, when the water is lowest, than at present. 1 rev. joseph may, a cousin of louisa alcott. 452 friends and followers. [1861, kedwood is a mere locality, scarcely an in dian village, where there is a store, and some houses have been built for them. we were now fairly on the great plains, and looking south ; and, after walking that way three miles, could see no tree in that horizon. the buffalo was said to be feeding within twenty-five or thirty miles. a regular council was held with the indians, who had come in on their ponies, and speeches were made on both sides through an interpreter, quite in the described mode, the indians, as usual, having the advantage in point of truth and earnestness, and therefore of eloquence. the most prominent chief was named little crow. they were quite dissatisfied with the white man s treatment of them, and probably have reason to be so. this council was to be continued for two or three days, the payment to be made the second day ; and another pay ment to other bands a little higher up, on the yellow medicine (a tributary of the minnesota), a few days thereafter. in the afternoon, the half -naked indians per formed a dance, at the request of the governor, for our amusement and their own benefit ; and then we took leave of them, and of the officials who had come to treat with them. excuse these pencil marks, but my inkstand jst. 43.] to f. b. sanborn. 453 is unscrewable, and i can only direct my letter at the bar. i could tell you more, and perhaps more interesting things, if i had time. i am considerably better than when i left home, but still far from well. our faces are already set toward home. will you please let my sister know that we shall prob cibly start for milwaukee and mackinaw in a day or two (or as soon as we hear from home) ma prairie du chien, and not la crosse. i am glad to hear that you have written to cholmondeley, 1 as it relieves me of some respon sibility. the tour described in this long letter was the first and last that thoreau ever made west of the mohawk valley, though his friend channing had early visited the great prairies, and lived in log cabins of illinois, or sailed on the chain of great lakes, by which thoreau made a part of this journey. it was proposed that channing should accompany him this time, as he had in the tour through lower canada, and along cape cod, as well as in the journeys through the berkshire and catskill mountains, and down the hudson ; but some misunderstanding or temporary incon venience prevented. the actual comrade was 1 i had answered t. cholmondeley s last letter, explaining 1 that thoreau was ill and absent. 454 friends and followers. [1861, young horace mann, eldest son of the school-re former and statesman of that name, a silent, earnest, devoted naturalist, who died early. the place where his party met the indians only a few months before the minnesota massacre of 1862 was in the county of eedwood, in the southwest of the state, where now is a thriving village of 1,500 people, and no buffaloes within five hundred miles. redwing, whence the letter was written, is below st. paul, on the mississippi, and was even then a considerable town, now a city of 7,000 people. the civil war had lately begun, and the whole north was in the first flush of its uprising in defense of the union, for which thoreau, in spite of his earlier defiance of government (for its alliance with slavery) was as zealous as any soldier. he returned in july, little benefited by the journey, of which he did not take his usual sufficiency of notes, and to which there is little allusion in his books. nor does it seem that he visited on the way his corre spondent since january, 1856, c. h. green, of rochester, michigan, who had never seen him in concord. the opinion of thoreau him self concerning this journey will be found in his next letter to daniel ricketson. *t.44.] to daniel ricketson. 455 to daniel kicketson (at new bedford). concord, august 15, 1861. friend kicketson, when your last letter was written i was away in the far northwest, in search of health. my cold turned to bronchitis, which made me a close prisoner almost up to the moment of my starting on that journey, early in may. as i had an incessant cough, my doctor told me that i must &quot;clear out,&quot; to the west indies, or elsewhere, so i selected minnesota. i returned a few weeks ago, after a good deal of steady traveling, considerably, yet not essen tially, better ; my cough still continuing. if i don t mend very quickly, i shall be obliged to go to another climate again very soon. my ordinary pursuits, both indoors and out, have been for the most part omitted, or seri ously interrupted, walking, boating, scribbling, etc. indeed, i have been sick so long that i have almost forgotten what it is to be well ; and yet i feel that it is in all respects only my en velope. channing and emerson are as well as usual; but alcott, i am sorry to say, has for some time been more or less confined by a lame ness, perhaps of a neuralgic character, occasioned by carrying too great a weight on his back while gardening. on returning home, i found various letters 456 friends and followers. [1861, awaiting me ; among others, one from cholmonde ley, and one from yourself. of course i am sufficiently surprised to hear of your conversion ; 1 yet i scarcely know what to say about it, unless that, judging by your account, it appears to me a change which con cerns yourself peculiarly, and will not make you more valuable to mankind. however, perhaps i must see you before i can judge. kemembering your numerous invitations, i write this short note now, chiefly to say that, if you are to be at home, and it will be quite agree able to you, i will pay you a visit next week, and take such rides or sauntering walks with you as an invalid may. the visit was made, and we owe to it the pres ervation of the latest portraiture of thoreau, who, at his friend s urgency, sat to a photogra pher in new bedford ; and thus we have the full bearded likeness of august, 1861 ; from which, also, and from personal recollection, mr. walter ricketson made the fine profile medallion en graved for this volume. 1 a return to religious quakerism, of which his friend had written enthusiastically. 2et. 44.] to daniel ricketson. 457 to daniel ricketson (at new bedford). concord, october 14, 1861. fkiend ricketson, i think that, on the whole, my health is better than when you were here; but my faith in the doctors has not in creased. i thank you all for your invitation to come to new bedford, but i suspect that it must still be warmer here than there; that, indeed, new bedford is warmer than concord only in the winter, and so i abide by concord. september was pleasanter and much better for me than august, and october has thus far been quite tolerable. instead of riding on horse back, i ride in a wagon about every other day. my neighbor, mr. e. r. hoar, has two horses, and he, being away for the most part this fall, has generously offered me the use of one of them ; and, as i notice, the dog throws himself in, and does scouting duty. i am glad to hear that you no longer chew, but eschew, sugar-plums. one of the worst effects of sickness is, that it may get one into the habit of taking a little something his bitters, or sweets, as if for his bodily good from time to time, when he does not need it. however, there is no danger of this if you do not dose even when you are sick. i went with a mr. rodman, a young man of 458 friends and followers. [1861, your town, here the other day, or week, looking at farms for sale, and rumor says that he is in clined to buy a particular one. channing says that he received his book, but has not got any of yours. it is easy to talk, but hard to write. from the worst of all correspondents, henry d. thoreau. no later letter than this was written by tho reau s own hand ; for he was occupied all the winter of 1861-62, when he could write, in pre paring his manuscripts for the press. nothing appeared before his death, but in june, 1862, mr. fields, then editing the &quot; atlantic,&quot; printed &quot; walking,&quot; the first of three essays which came out in that magazine the same year. no thing of thoreau s had been accepted for the &quot;atlantic&quot; since 1858, when he withdrew the rest of &quot; chesuncook,&quot; then coming out in its pages, because the editor (mr. lowell) had made alterations in the manuscript. in april, just before his death, the &quot;atlantic &quot; printed a short and characteristic sketch of thoreau by bronson alcott, and in august, emerson s funeral ora tion, given in the parish church of concord. during the last six months of his illness, his sis ter and his friends wrote letters for him, as will be seen by the two that follow. jet. 44.] to daniel ricketson. 459 sophia thoreau to daniel ricketson (at new bedford). concord, december 19, 1861. mr. ricketson : dear sir, thank you for your friendly in terest in my dear brother. i wish that i could report more favorably in regard to his health. soon after your visit to concord, henry com menced riding, and almost every day he intro duced me to some of his familiar haunts, far away in the thick woods, or by the ponds ; all very new and delightful to me. the air and exercise which he enjoyed during the fine autumn days were a benefit to him ; he seemed stronger, had a good appetite, and was able to attend somewhat to his writing; but since the cold weather has come, his cough has increased, and he is able to go out but seldom. just now he is suffering from an attack of pleurisy, which confines him wholly to the house. his spirits do not fail him ; he continues in his usual serene mood, which is very pleasant for his friends as well as himself. i am hoping for a short winter and early spring, that the invalid may again be out of doors. i am sorry to hear of your indisposition, and trust that you will be well again soon. it would give me pleasure to see some of your newspaper articles, since you possess a hopeful 460 friends and followers. [1862, spirit. my patience is nearly exhausted. the times look very dark. i think the next soldier who is shot for sleeping on his post should be gen. mcclellan. why does he not do some thing in the way of fighting? i despair of ever living under the reign of sumner or phillips. bronson alcott to daniel ricketson (at new bedford). concord, january 10, 1862. dear friend, you have not been informed of henry s condition this winter, and will be sorry to hear that he grows feebler day by day, and is evidently failing and fading from our sight. he gets some sleep, has a pretty good appetite, reads at intervals, takes notes of his readings, and likes to see his friends, conversing, however, with difficulty, as his voice partakes of his general debility. we had thought this old est inhabitant of our planet would have chosen to stay and see it fairly dismissed into the chaos (out of which he has brought such precious jewels, gifts to friends, to mankind generally, diadems for fame to coming followers, forgetful of his own claims to the honors) before he chose simply to withdraw from the spaces and times he has adorned with the truth of his genius. but the masterly work is nearly done for us here. and our woods and fields are sorrowing, though not in jet. 44.] to daniel ricketson. 461 sombre, but in robes of white, so becoming to the piety and probity they have known so long, and soon are to miss. there has been none such since pliny, and it will be long before there comes his like ; the most sagacious and wonder ful worthy of his time, and a marvel to coming ones. i write at the suggestion of his sister, who thought his friends would like to be informed of his condition to the latest date. ever yours and respectfully, a. bronson alcott. the last letter of henry thoreau, written by the hand of his sister, was sent to myron benton, a young literary man then living in dutchess county, new york, who had written a grateful letter to the author of &quot; walden &quot; (january 6, 1862), though quite unacquainted with him. mr. benton said that the news of thoreau s ill ness had affected him as if it were that &quot; of a personal friend whom i had known a long time,&quot; and added : &quot; the secret of the influence by which your writings charm me is altogether as intangible, though real, as the attraction of nature herself. i read and re-read your books with ever fresh delight. nor is it pleasure alone ; there is a singular spiritual healthiness with which they seem imbued, -/the expression of a 462 friends and followers. [1862, soul essentially sound, so free from any morbid tendency.&quot; after mentioning that his own home was in a pleasant valley, once the hunting-ground of the indians, mr. benton said : &quot; i was in hope to read something more from your pen in mr. conway s dial, l but only recognized that fine pair of walden twinlets. of your two books, i perhaps prefer the week, but after all, walden is but little less a favorite. in the former, i like especially those little snatches of poetry interspersed throughout. i would like to ask what progress you have made in a work some way connected with natural his tory, i think it was on botany, which mr. emerson told me something about in a short in terview i had with him two years ago at pough keepsie. ... if you should feel perfectly able at any time to drop me a few lines, i would like much to know what your state of health is, and if there is, as i cannot but hope, a prospect of your speedy recovery.&quot; two months and more passed before thoreau replied ; but his habit of performing every duty, 1 this was a short-lived monthly, edited at cincinnati (1861 62) by moncure d. conway, since distinguished as an author, who had resided for a time in concord, after leaving his native virginia. he wrote asking thoreau and all his concord friends to contribute to this new dial, and several of them did so. jet. 44.] to myron b. benton. 463 whether of business or courtesy, would not ex cuse him from an answer, which was this : to myron b. benton (at leedsville, n. y.). concokd, march 21, 1862. dear sir, i thank you for your very kind letter, which, ever since i received it, i have in tended to answer before i died, however briefly. i am encouraged to know, that, so far as you are concerned, i have not written my books in vain. i was particularly gratified, some years ago, when one of my friends and neighbors said, &quot; i wish you would write another book, write it for me.&quot; he is actually more familiar with what i have written than i am myself. the verses you refer to in con way s &quot; dial,&quot; were written by f. b. sanborn of this town. i never wrote for that journal. i am pleased when you say that in &quot;the week &quot; you like especially &quot; those little snatches of poetry interspersed through the book,&quot; for these, i suppose, are the least attractive to most readers. i have not been engaged in any par ticular work, on botany, or the like, though, if i were to live, i should have much to report on natural history generally. you ask particularly after my health. i sup pose that i have not many months to live ; but, of course, i know nothing about it. i may add 464 friends and followers. [1862. that i am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret nothing. yours truly, henry d. thoreau, by sophia e. thoreau. he died may 6, 1862 ; his mother died march 12, 1872, and his sister sophia, october, 1876. with the death of his aunt, maria thoreau, nearly twenty years after her beloved nephew, the last person of the name in america (or per haps in england) passed away. index. the year of graduation at harvard university is indicated for such of the persons mentioned in this index as were students there. abby and almira (mrs. miner and mrs. small), 182. abercrombie, scotch author, 29. abolition convention, 307. absence, from concord, 58, 79-144, 281 ; in love and friendship, 88, 225. absorbing employment, 218, 269, 277, 315, 368. &quot;abuse of the bible,&quot; mrs. mott s, 115. abuse of marriage, 240, 249. academy at concord, 10, 27, 56. academy of design, new york, 85. acclimation, 86, 92. accord in friendship, 66, 177, 242, 308. acorns, 426, 427. action and being, 191, 196, 215, 253, 266. acton, mass., 410, 420, 423, 424. actual life, 8, 104, 192, 257, 273. adams, john, 3. adams latin grammar, 28. adirondacs, 415, 420. admetus, king of thessaly, 44, 51, 52, 269, 410. admiration, 184, 258, 392. ado about things, 8, 215, 236. adolescentula, e. white, 31, 35. adoration of nature, 42, 75. advice, 28, 29, 78, 137, 144, 160, 172, 214, 224. .eolian harp, 239. aerial effects, 105. aerial rivers, 67. jeschylus, translated, 70, 121. africa, 233. agassiz, louis, and thoreau, 149 157 ; mentioned, 165, 176, 363, 401. age of achievement, 143-219. agiocochook, n. h., 44. agriculturist newspaper, 127. aims in life, xi, 54, 69, 79, 105, 117, 141, 191, 197, 208, 225, 292, 307, 328. alabama, 334. alcott, a. bronson (b. 1799, d. 1888), 58, 60, 70, 72, 73-6, 99, 124, 148, 161, 163, 173, 175, 181, 183-5, 189, 228-9, 287, 299, 332, 338, 357, 364, 388, 396, 402, 414; 436, 438, 441, 460 ; acquaintance with tho reau, 58, 60, 75, 163, 164, 181, etc. ; at home in fruitlands, 75, 99 ; in boston, 285 ; in walpole, 332 ; in concord, at orchard house, 388, 435; builds emerson s summer house, 161-163 ; in concord jail, 60 ; chosen school sup t, 436 ; di ary of, 348 ; holds conversations in concord, 60, 75, 402 ; in eagles wood, n. j., 340; in new york, 333, 348 ; dines with thoreau, 61 ; visits with thoreau in new bed ford, 357 ; in plymouth, 364 ; in brooklyn, 349; describes walt whitman, 349 ; at thoreau s fu neral, 76 ; letter from, 460 ; letter to, 332. alcott, mrs. a. b., 333, 436. alcott, louisa may, 333, 377, 436. alehouse, in new york, 94. alexander the great, ix. alfieri, 352. allegash, maine river, 382. allen, phineas, 10. all for love, 243. almshouse (of concord), 91,175,400. alone in the world, 197. alpheus, grecian river, 109. america, its commercial spirit, 8, 9 ; its indians, 13-21, 130, 239, 292, 313, 339, 366, 369, 452 ; mentioned, 321. americana, encyclopedia, 20, 21. american authors, viii, 20, 27, 51, 57, 59, 61, 68, 76, 80, 94-96, 110, 466 index. 112, 123, 128, 133, 139, 143, 149, 154, 173, 174, 184, 190, 203, 207, 220, 228, 229, 283, 313, 321, 324, 340, 345, 348, 357, 364, 388, 396, 401, 421, 458, 461. american bards, 137, 341. american birds, 14, 23, 26, 31, 34, 48, 88, 184, 227, 270, 409, 425, 434. american characteristics, 9, 93, 101, 127, 130, 165, 252, 276, 434. american cities, 81, 93, 130, 225, 335, 348, 397, 401. american politics, 18, 19, 168, 334, 414. american privateer, general lin coln, 3. american revolution, 11, 414. ainherst, n. h., 354. amcenitates botanicse, a book, 249. anavvan, an indian, 16. anchoring a mountain, 376. ancients, wisdom of the, 136, 350, 351. annihilation company, 233. anti-sabbath convention, 189. anti-slavery meetings, 302, 413, 414. anti-slavery standard, the, 53, 289. appearances, 213, 274. apples, baldwin, 256; dead sea, 411 ; frozen-thawed, 214 ; of hes perides, 256 ; planted bythoreau, 427. architecture, alcott s, 163. &quot;architecture, seven lamps of&quot; (ruskin), 374. arnica mollis, 389, 390. arnold, benedict, 378, 379. arnold, mr., 396. armies, 307, 378, 411. arrow-heads, 4, 20, 114. art, 112, 374. ash-man, is god an ? 294. ask to see god, 197. asnebumskit, 234, 329, 330. assabet, the river, vii, 318. assawampsett, 313. assisting nature, 314. associations : brook farm, 372 ; fourierite, 96, 115, 124, 372. assyria, 253, 270. astor house, new york, 131. astor library, 335. astronomy at cambridge, 159, 164 ; at concord, 159. atlantic monthly, 284, 458. atlantic ocean, x, 15, 82, 98, 220, 230, 304, 353, 412. atlas, the giant, 292, 418. aulus persius, 3, 189. australian englishman, 393. australasia, cholmondeley in, 284. autobiographies of gibbon and goethe, 352 ; of haydon, 269, 352. autumn, a poem, 137 ; the season, 43, 333. &quot;autumnal tints,&quot; 395, 406. autuinnus, 44. awe at visiting mountains, 374. babylon, ancient, 270. babylon, n. y., 121. bacon mentioned, 136. bacchus, whitman compared to. 349. bag of gold in swimming, 373. baldwin apples, 256. bangor, me., 142, 158, 381. banks, 194 ; failures of, 371-373. barberries, 187, 211; barberrying, 413. bartlett, dr. josiah (h. u. 1816), 164, 182, 184, 301. bartlett, robert (h. u. 1836), 68. battery, new york, 101. battles, 410 ; in the cloud, 384. bay of new york, 125, 336; of plymouth, 353. beach at fire island, 220, 223 ; at staten island, x, 83, 98, 102; at truro, 302, 305, 412. beasts, 251, 432. &quot;beauties of ancient english poe try,&quot; 77. beauty, 239; emerson s ode to, 137-140 ; ruskin on, 374. beautiful laws, 213. beecher, henry ward, 340. bedfellows, 263, 273. beer, small and strong, 168, 178, 179. beggars, 344. beggar-ticks, 338. behemoth, 278. bellew, f., an artist. 335. bellows, rev. h. w. (h. u. 1832), 125. bemis, george, concord printer, 19. benjamin, park, 128. bemiet s account of middleborough, 313. benton, myron b., 461. berkshire, mentioned, 324. berries, 25, 133. betty s neck, middleborough, 313. biberg, j. (naturalist), quoted, 249. bible, mentioned, 74, 116, 136. bigelow, dr. j., 21. birney, james g., 333-381. birth, spiritual, 254. black, mrs., 97. index. 467 black, sam (a cat), 32, 36. blake, harrison gray otis (h. u. 1835), 189-191, 228, 280, 329; let ters from, 190, 209, 251, 281 ; let ters to, 192, 197, 208, 209, 213, 216, 223, 234, 237, 251, 261, 2g6, 271, 275, 289, 291, 301-308, 316, 326-332, 339-347, 354, 357, 359, 368-378, 385, 389, 409, 413, 415 425, 428, 443; tours with, 235, 282, 388; visits from, 190, 301, 316. blakians, sugar candy, 329. blood, perez, 159, 160, 164. blueberries, 25, 429. bluebirds, 14,23, 24, 396, 434. bluebird box, 24. blue-eyed grass, 42. bluffs, in minnesota, 446. body and soul, 198, 218, 257. bonaparte, anecdote of, 277. bonnets of quakers, 115. books, catalogue of, 69, 73, 311. boston, agassiz in, 149-157 ; alcott in, 228, 285 ; clubs ridiculed, 401 ; &quot; dial&quot; mentioned, 44, 67, 69-74, 89, 92, 99, 103, 111, 128, 135-139, 141 ; lectures and lecturers, 154, 227, 228, 231, 413 ; miscellany, 99, 103, 122 ; packet for cape cod, 303, 304 ; publishers, 99, 122, 166, 219, 281, 311, 388, 458. botany, thoreau s skill in, 1, 282, 287. botta, mrs. anne lynch, 348. bradbury and soden, publishers, 99, 122. bradford, george p. (h. u. 1825), 74, 364. bradford, t. g. (h. u. 1822), 20. brahma, 210. brahmins, 270, 351. brattleboro, vt., 332. bread, discourse on, 197-199, 307; daily, 205 ; mentioned, 317. briars, a field near walden, 145. bride and bridegroom, 240, 249, 354. broadway, new york, 83, 101, 335, 341. brooklawn, new bedford, 311, 320. brooklyn, n. y., 82, 339, 346, 348. brown, deacon reuben, 169. brown, john, of osawatomie, 339, 392, 415, 420 ; comes to concord, 414; his capture and execution, 413-415 ; is eulogized by thoreau, 414 ; his companions, 422-424. brown, john, jr., son of preceding, visits north elba and boston, 420. brown, mrs. see jackson. brown, theo., of worcester, 287, 301, 331, 335, 342, 345, 358, 368, 389, 406. brown, dr. thomas, of edinburgh, 29. browne, sir thomas, 183. brownson, 0. a., 4. buddhist, 128. buffaloes, 14, 17, 130. buffum, arnold, 337. bull, e. w. (concord grape), 436. bulwer, lord lytton, 31, 34. bunsen, works of, 321. burnham, a boston bookseller, 311. burning woods, 168, 363, 391. burns, thoreau s grandmother, 6. business, remarks on, 8, 127, 186, 204, 206, 372, 410. butternuts, in new york, 19. buying clothes, 127, 271 ; a house, 169-172 ; wood, 294. cabmen of new york, 81. cabot, j. elliott (h. u. 1840), 149, 155, 226 ; letters to, 150-154, 186 ; letters from 155, 157, 227. cactus, 32, 36. caddis-worms, 153. cadi, turkish, 270. cage, lion in, 404. cake, for journeys, 383. calcutta, bishop of (r. heber), 284. calf, the young bunting, 162. california, 252, 260, 366. calling in life, 78, 117, 129, 144, 187, 196. 202, 206, 210, 218, 234, 254, 264. calyx, 239 ; the thalamus or bridal chamber, 250. cambridge, mass., 4, 7, 10, 52, 77-79, 130, 154, 159, 165, 272, 286, 299, 300, 336, 361, 364; library, 299; observatory, 159, 164. camp, thoreau s, on monadnoc, 422. camping out, 421, 429, 432. canada, mentioned, 259, 297, 324, 378-380, 398, 399 ; story, 207, 260 ; lynx, 427. candidates, 17, 19, 168, 232, 254. candor, in friendship, 66, 95, 163. canoes, 130, 301, 379-382. canton, mass., thoreau s school at, 4. cape cod, mentioned, 290, 302-305, 366, 367 ; excursions to, 302, 359, 366, 412. cares, 310, 416. carlisle, mass., 17, 19, 160. carlton house, new york, 64, 468 index. carlyle, thomas, mentioned, 57, 73, 95, 112, 120, 184, 185, 203, 296 ; reviewed by emerson, 112, 120; by thoreau, 203. carpet-race, 59, 64. carver, mass., 311. cascade, silver, 44. cases in court, wyman s, 124 ; san born s, 420 ; other cases, 272. castle garden, new york, 80. castleton, staten island, 80, 84, 85, 87, 89, 92, 100, 124. catacombs, 193, 215. catastomus tubercukttus, etc., 15g, 157. catherine, a concord family, 2. catholic church, 146, 293. cat-naps, 126. cats in thoreau family, viii, 36 ; in worcester, 342. cattle show in concord, 133. caucomgomoc, me., 382. cedar-post, life of, 344. celestial city, 197. celestial cows, 269. celestial empire, 105. &quot; celestial railroad,&quot; 143. cellar, of meeting-house, 377 ; of walden hut, 188. celtis-seeds, 357. centrifugal force of whim, 184. cents and dollars, 150, 205. ceremonies, 105, 270. chagrin, goethe s, 202. chaleur, bay of, 380. chamber in concord, 309, 314, 324. chambers of silence, 278. chamberlain lake in maine, 381, 382. change is change, 193. channing, ellen fuller, wife of el lery, 49. channing, ellery (w. e. channing the younger), 49, 68, 76, 94, 110 112, 123, 135, 139, 143-145, 175, 181, 184, 229, 231, 283, 285-287, 297, 300, 302, 303, 305, 314, 320, 322-325, 359, 364, 383, 384, 389, 392, 396, 400, 401 ; quoted, viii, ix, 1, 77, 144. channing, rev. william henry (h. u. 1829), cousin of ellery, 96, 114, 123, 140, 220, 222. channing, william francis (son of dr. w. e. channing, and cousin of the two named above), men tioned, 229. chapin, rev. e. h. (h. u. 1845), 72. chapman, john, london publisher, 321. character, of alcott, 181, 184; of john brown, 414 ; of w. e. chan ning, 325 ; of w. h. channing, 96, 141 ; of t. cholmondeley, 284, 321; of d. ricketson, 283, 306 ; of walt whitman, 340, 345-349. charleston, s. c., 334. chastity and sensuality, 231, 245 251, 345. chateaubriand, 13. chatham street, 93. chaucer, mentioned, 90 ; quoted, 122. chaudiere, the river, 380. cherries, 25, 84. cheshire, england, 284. chesuncook, me., 259, 381, 458. chicago, visited by thoreau, 444 ; by b. b. wiley, 349. chickadees, 115, 425. child, mrs. lydia maria, 120. china, 105, 290. chippeway indians, 130. cholmondeley, rev. charles, 284, 285. cholmondeley, thomas, 282-286, 289, 295, 299, 320, 321, 348, 358, 397-399, 406, 409, 439-444 ; books sent by, 319, 321 ; letter from, 321, 348, 439 ; letter to, 295-298. christ, 215, 233. christian, 59, 123, 134. &quot; christian examiner,&quot; 118. christianity, 105. christmas, 174, 200. clark, farmer, 169. clark s island, 353, 364. clark, the swedenborgian, 175. church, 93, 115, 235, 270, 272 ; catholic, 146, 293. city and swamp, 225. city of god, 268, 405. clergyman, english, 284, 285, 321. club at parker house, 401 ; town and country, 401. coffee, 382. coffee-grounds, 216. cold weather, 14, 30-36, 297. coleridge, s. t., 352. &quot; come to concord ! &quot; 331. commerce, 121. conantum in concord, 168. concord, mass., its academy, 10, 27, 56 ; aspect of, 14, 42, 43, 79, 109, 168, 210 ; cliffs of, 31, 34, 124, 184 ; lyceum, 4, 56, 60, 61, 72, 173, 180, 185, 187, 323 ; people, and houses, 2-5, 15, 19, 23, 39, 49, 56-58, 60-63, 75,76, 110, 111 ; schools, 4, 10, 25, 56, 377. index. 469 concord river, 2, 89, 109, 316. condover, england, 283, 443. conduct, regulation of, viii, 9, 38, 66, 90, 105, 141, 194, 200, 213, 224, 247. confucius, quoted, 350, 351. congress water and oratorios, 27g. connecticut river, 333. conversations, 75, 76, 402. conway, moncure daniel (h. u. 1854), 462. coombs, neighbor, 168, 185. correction, house of, 403. cotes, lady louisa, 443. counts among immigrants, 131. cowper, the poet, 306, 325. crimea, 320 ; war in the, 286, 294, 298. cuckoo characters, 193. cuffing a subject, 174. cur circling his master s chaise, 196. curtis, george william, 169, 309, 399. cutler, e. j. (h. u. 1853), 336. cuttyhunk, the island, 394. cytherea choros ducit, 31. dace, a fish, 152, 157. daily bread, 197, 205, 307. daily life, 101, 194, 236, 252, 276, 291, 297, 310, 326, 342, 367. dam, in concord street, 316 ; in minnesota river, 449. dandelions, 48, 262. dauesaz, 145. daniel, s., quoted, 264. dare to be singular, 12, 39, 208, 215. darkness, 278, 342. darwin, charles, mentioned, 442. davenant s &quot;gondibert,&quot; 78. davis, josiah, of concord, his house, dawn, 43, 181, 265. day and night, 291, 342, 343, 360. day-dreams, 44, 46, 110, 121, 217. day-owls, 270. day-wages, 205, 251. decalogue, for whom made, 201. delay, in life, 236 ; in dying, 407. demons, 108, 293, 315, 388. destiny, 51 ; our own work, 417. devil, 226, 265 ; the printer s, 378. dew of sixpences, 98. &quot; dial,&quot; the quarterly magazine, 44, 67, 69-74, 89, 92, 99, 103, 111, 128, 135-139, 143, 149, 187, 190. dialect, abominable, 74. difference of men and women, 238. diogenes, ix. diploma, old joke of, 165. dip-nets in twilight, 395. discipline, 255, 293. distant prospects, 129 ; from mt. washington, 376 ; of franconia mountains, 419. dissipation not allied to love, 248 ; to be shunned by thoreau, 367. disunion and slavery, 415. do a man s work, 416. dobson, the criminal, and henry james, 402, 403. doctrine of sorrow, 201 ; of happi ness, 209 ; of letting alone, 214. dogmas, 402. dogs, 107, 247, 257, 262, 278, 298. doing and being, 266, 277. doing good, 255. dollars and cents, 194, 205, 251, 373, 381, 426. d orsay, count, 272. drainage of the city of god, 405. dreams, 260. dress, of cholmondeley, 398 ; of the quakers, 115, 337; of thoreau, 272. drilling soldiers, 307. drosera (the plant), 361. du chaillu, 442. duke of newcastle, and prince of wales, 433. duubar, rev. asa (h. u. 1767), thoreau s grandfather, 6. dunbar charles (uncle of tho reau), 3, 126. dunbar, louisa, 118. duubar, mary (jones), 2, 11. duudees, a nickname, 15, 17. dunleith, a town, 444, 447. durkee, dr., a naturalist, 361, 363. dutch houses, 109. duties, 195, 201, 268, 275. duty, sense of, 117, 236. duxbury, mass, 353. eagles, 236. eagle-beak, 15, 17. eagleswood, n. j., 334-341. earnest man, his force, &quot;a beetle, a wedge, a catapult.&quot; 200. earning bread, 197. 205, 256 ; dol lars, 127, 251, 282. earth, blue with berries, 25 ; in winter, 14. east and west, 41, 114. east branch of penobscot, 380. &quot; easter brooks &quot; (estabrook), 126. eastern mountain anchored, 376. east quarter of concord, 21. 470 index. echo, in nature, 212. &quot; echoes of harper s ferry,&quot; 415. edda, the scandinavian, 144. edith the saxon (daughter of emer son), 134. emerson, charles chauncy (h. u. 1828), 112. emerson, charles (h. u. 1863), 27. emerson, edith (mrs. w. h. forbes), 59, 63, 64, 122, 162, 170, 174, 189. emerson, edward waldo (h. u. 1866), 162, 170, 174, 183, 189. emerson, ellen tucker, 59, 62, 135, 162, 170, 174, 180, 183, 189. emerson, haven (son of william), 92. emerson, miss mary moody (aunt of r. w. e.), 318,401. emerson, ralph waldo (h. u. 1821), vi, viii, 5, 10, 18, 40, 56, 62, 144, 150, 158, 181, 186, 188, 220, 229, 276, 284, 287, 297, 299, 301, 309, 318, 364, 377, 392, 401, 402,414, 415, 423, 424; children of, 59, 62-64, 162, 170, 174, 183, 189 ; and al cott, 73, 94, 99, 163, 229, 287, 299, 319, 364, 377, 402 ; and charles lane, 73, 148, 149 ; and the &quot; dial,&quot; 67-74, 89, 92, 99, 111, 135-138, 187 ; letters from, 56, 57, 67, 92, 99, 111, 122, 124, 143, 148, 170, 186; letters to (from thoreau), 58-67, 69-75, 92-99, 109-113, 120-122 127-129, 135-139, 161-186, 189, 202; quoted, 24, 137, 276, 285, 334, 339. emerson, mrs. r. w. (lidian jack son, of plymouth), 40, 49, 53, 56, 61, 62, 64, 75, 80, 89, 99, 113, 122, 128, 162, 182, 188 ; letter from, 75, 76 ; letters to, 89-92, 103-106, 133 135. emerson, madam ruth (mother of william, ralph, and charles), 62, 92, 113. emerson, waldo (son of r. w. e.) 24, 25, 40, 48 ; death of, 25. emerson, william (h. u. 1818), of stateu island, 58, 98, 117, 124. emersonian influences, 10, 57. employment, 40, 44, 98, 127, 161, 190, 205, 338. england, home of ancestors, 3 ; em erson in, 148-150, 167, 177, 180, 185, 187; friend of thoreau in, 295, 320, 358, 398, 439-443. english critic (heraud), 72 ; of emer son, 180. english market, 148, 169. english opinion of whitman, 321, 348. englishmen, 58, 131, 149, 169, 194, 283-286, 443. entomology, 107, 360, 361, 363. epics, 137. epigrams of thoreau, 22, 29, 31, 32, 47, 60, 65, 67, 71, 78, 81, 90, 98, 105, 110, 112, 141, 179, 188, 193, 196, 208, 211, 214, 224, 240, 242, 250. epistles of thoreau, xii ; latin and english, 30-36 ; take the place of lectures, 231. errington, miss, a teacher, 86, 102. estabrook country (in concord), 169. eternal life, 193, 197, 209, 233, 271. eternal powers, 278. eternity, 215, 245, 308. ethnical scriptures, 136, 139. etzler criticised, 121. etymologies, 38, 292. eulogy on a man s dog, 257. europe, 158. everett, edward (h. u. 1811), 433. everlasting, 257. evil spirits, 250, 272. excursions, in concord, 17, 19, 31, 57, 69, 144, 151, 159, 168, 175, 278, 289, 297, 309, 316, 331, 360; else where in massachusetts, 230, 235, 280, 282, 285, 289, 290, 303,311, 329; to maine, 301, 360, 369, 378-383 ; to monadnoc, 383, 388, 421, 428-433 ; to new hampshire (white moun tains), 5, 385-391, 406; to new york and new jersey, 80-86, 91 94, 97-102, 113-115, 127-131, 220, 334-341, 345-349 ; to the west and northwest, 439, 444, 453. expenses, estimate of, 150, 205; reducing, 205, 219, 264, 310. explorations, arctic, 418. extravagance in living, 257, 371, 373, 404. eyes and insight, 194. eyrie in the clouds, 258. &quot; fabul ate and paddle in the social slush,&quot; 277. failure or success, 226, 271. faineancy, 277. fair and beloved, 239, 243 ; fair and foul, 249-251. fair cities of the plain, 404. fair haven, in concord, 31, 34, 57, 138, 278. fair of concord cattle show, 133 ; of american institute, new york, 135. faith, 54, 67, 201, 203, 272 ; phases index. 471 of, 66, 95, 133, 141, 191, 195, 209, 214, 258, 270, 292, 439 ; intrusted, 66, 67. faithful catechism, 95, 279. fall of the year, 5, 43, 427. falls of niagara, 100, 297 ; of st. anthony, 447, 450. fama marcelli, vi. fame, vii, 78, 110. &quot; fame cannot tempt the bard,&quot; vii. family ancestry, 3, 6, 11, 124; de mon of sleep, 108, 126. family occupation, 44, 410. farms in concord, 110, 309 ; in stat en island, 102, 113 ; at chappaqua, 348. fassett, a farmer in troy, n. h., 432. fate, 45, 90, 133, 417 ; the fates, 42, 87, 129, 179. father hecker, a priest, 145, 146. feebleness of mankind, 252. feeding, 198, 211, 260, 262, 303, 330, 382. feeling, acute, 40 ; indifferent, 202. fellowship, 325. feminine traits, 238, 242. pinch and thrush, 88. fire, 31, 34, 264, 344, 434 ; of drift wood, 317 ; on mt. washington, 391 ; on monadnoc, 429. fire island, 220, 223. fitchburg, mass., 342, 354. fitchburg railroad depot in boston, 401 ; in acton, 423. flagg, wilson, 364. flame and smoke, 394. flesh and bones, 131. flies, buzzing of, 276. fog, 305, 384, 389. follen, dr. charles, 34. foolish aims, 198 ; complaints, 236. formulas, 371. fort sumter, 437, 438. foxes and woodchucks, 67, 202. freedom, advantages of, 7, 12, 38; for the scholar, 205, 210. free-soilers, 235. fremont, j. c. (explorer of rocky mountains), 418. french translation, 350. french explorers, 393. friend, office of a, 50, 61, 95, 111, 161. friends, 65, 225, 248 ; their uses, 65, 67 ; estimate of, 224. friends and followers, 220-470. friendship, offense against, 65-67; advantages of, 66, 111, 206, 225, 244; and love, 216, 244, 354; verses on, 44, 364. frost, rev. barzillai (h. u. 1830), 10, 164. fruitlands (farm of alcott and lane), 75, 107, 146, 171, 186. fuller, rev. arthur b. (h. u. 1843), fuller, ellen (mrs. channing), 49. fuller, margaret (countess ossoli), 45, 49, 112, 127, 144, 220-223. fuller, richard f. (h. u. 1844), 49, 52, 76-79. funeral processions, 176. game we play, 359. game, woodland, 17, 391, 393. ganges, 316. garden, paradise not a, 195. gardens, emerson s, 40, 91, 161, 179 ; thoreau s, 102, 427. garrison, w. l.,302. genius of the mountain, 429 ; of the storm, 430. gifts, 24. gilpin, william, 288; his books, 312. god, 191, 192, 196, 209, 214, 226, 306. god, ask to see, 197 ; city of, 197, 268 ; not an ash-man, 294 ; reigns, 214, 371. godsend of books, 319. goethe, mentioned, 73,202, 352 ; his autobiography, 352. golconda mentioned, 329. good deeds, 206. good and wise (verse), 177. goodwin, prof. william watson (h. u. 1851), 123. gorilla, 442. goshawk, american, 227. government of the country, 185, 415, 438. grange bluff, minn., 446. great quitticus, 313. great spirit, 14, 18. greek, study of, 69, 123. greeley, farmer, 340. greeley, horace, 80, 115, 120, 123, 190, 203-206, 340, 348. green, calvin h., 454. grey, mrs., 97. grief, cause of, 47, 55, 88, 105, 141, 201 ; remedy for, 47, 50, 55. grimke&quot; sisters, 334, 337. gulf stream, 322. gun-house, 178. gunnar (norse hero), 441. gurnet, the (in plymouth bay), 353, habits, ill, remedy for, 178, 251. habits of men, 272, 273. 472 index. hale, rev. edward everett (h. u. 1839), 357. hale, nathan (h. u. 1838), 99. hamlet, fechter s, 493. hall, leyden, at plymouth, 229 ; ma sonic, at concord, 4 ; music, bos ton, 414. hard money, 373. hard times, 371, 372. harlem, n. y., 341, 348. harper & brothers, publishers, 125. harrison and tyler, 431. harris, w. t., 338. harvard college, 2, 10, 76, 123, 165, 286, 299. harvard, a town, 52, 330. hasty, captain, 221. hate, 243 ; and love, 111, 240. hawthorne, nathaniel, vi, 49, 59, 110, 128, 143, 420. hawthorne, sophia, 51. haydon (english painter), 269, 352. head of the river, new bedford, 388, 395. headley, henry, 77. hearts, 145, 241, 242, 344. heathen, 59. heathenish, 230, 253. heaven, 103, 196, 215, 236, 265 ; ad mission to, 197, 265, 268. hecker, isaac, 145, 146. hens, 43, 74, 323. heraud, john a. (english critic), 72. herbert, george, 134, 436. hercules, 272, 400. hermitage, walden, 185. hermit-life, 162, 190. heron lake, maine, 382. hesperides, 256. hester street meeting, 115. higginson, thomas wentworth (h. u. 1841), 227, 228, 307, 378-383. highland light, cape cod, 303. hindoos, 105, 321, 347, 351. history of new bedford, 394, 396. hoar family, 15, 377. hoar, ebenezer rockwood (h. u. 1835), 15, 89, 92, 457. hoar, edward sherman (h. u. 1844), 89, 366, 385, 387, 389-392. hoar, elizabeth, 59, 89, 110, 138 ; letter from, 138, 139. hoar, george frisbie (h. u. 1846), 15, 119. hoar, samuel (h. u. 1802), 15, 408. hoboken, n. y., 130. hodnet, england, 284, 285, 295, 321. hog, the, 268, 363. home, vii, 25, 58, 74 ; affection of thoreau for, 118, 310. homer, 110,237,288,341. hoiitan, french explorer, 450. hood s &quot; song of the shirt,&quot; 267 270. hope, 22. hopeful, sachem (john thoreau), 14,40. horace quoted, 31, 34. horses (playthings), 162, 170, 183, 320, 345, 376, 385, 386, 389, 395. horse-race, 335, 342. hosmer, edmund (the &quot; farmer man&quot;), 110, 164, 185, 309, 314, 320. hotham, edmund stuart, 69. hottentots, and ruskin, 374. house, alcott s, 380. houses lived in by thoreau, 2-5, 27, 68, 153, 169, 171, 172, 178-180, 429, 432. household of emerson, 40, 49, 58, 62, 75, 162, 170, 176, 182, 189. households of the dunbars and thoreaus, 2-5, 27, 30-37, 118, 124 126, 408. howitt, william and mary, 99, 283, 304. hudson, rev. henry n., described, 174. hudson river, 82, 130, 453. human nature, 8, 42, 54, 114, 131, 193, 196, 200, 216, 236, 244, 251, 257, 260. humor, thoreau s sense of, ix, xii. hungry, eat when you are, 224. hunt family, 126, 309 ; farmhouse, 309. hut in the woods, 68, 150, 202. ice, 247, 255, 297, 322. iceberg, 390. idle hours, 19, 54, 251, 301, 302,315. idolatry of money, 194, 373, 387. &quot; i have heard no bad news,&quot; 196 ; &quot; i 11 be i,&quot; 99 ; &quot;i in my folly am the world i condemn,&quot; 254 ; &quot;i laugh when i think of my riches,&quot; 344. imagination, 29, 374. immigrants, 114; norwegian, 130. immortality, 233, 271. independence of scholars, 205, 253, 260. india, 321 ; books concerning, 319 321 ; sacred books of, 351. india-rubber bags, 383. indian guide (joe polis), 339, 38(k 382, 391. indian life, 369, 370. indians, remarks on, 362, 369, 391. indian summer, 43, 395. index. 473 indies, west, 397, 415. insane, census of the, 293. &quot; infinite work my hands find here to do,&quot; xi. inkstand, 130. injustice, 275. innkeeper s reply (j. holbrook), 392. intercourse with nature (agassiz), 155. ireland, alexander, 186, 189. irishmen, 138, 179. islands : clark s, 353, 3g4 ; staten, x, 76, 80, 140. jackson, dr. charles thomas (h. u. 1829), 40, 173. jackson, miss lidian (mrs. r. w. emerson). see emerson. jackson, miss lucy (mrs. brown), 40, 49, 56-7, 122, 134, 162, 364 ; letters to, 40-56. jacobean poetry, 77. jaffrey, n. h., 384. jail in concord, 60. jam cytherea choros, etc., 32. james henry, sr. , meets thoreau, 80, 95; mentioned, 100, 120; his sons, 123, 145, 402, 403. japan, 252. jarvis, dr. edward (h. u. 1826), 23. jaundice, 141, 182. jersey, thoreau s grandfather born in, 3. johnson, dr., mentioned, 162. jones family, 11, 108, 124. judaea, 215, 235. judge and criminal, 274, 275. kalendas feb., 30. kane, dr. e. k., 418. kansas, 180, 206. kentucky, 23. kineo, mt., 381. kirby and spence, 361. kirkland, mrs. caroline, 337. knots of the alcott arbor, 163. ktaadn, 158, 307, 370. labor, uses of, 74, 138, 205, 267; results of, 199, 205. 219, 267. labrador tea, 363. labyrinth of life, 208. ladies studying philosophy, 28. &quot;lady s companion,&quot; a magazine, 128, 129. lamentations, 47-49, 216, 257, 272, 276. lampreys, 152. lampyris noctiluca, 361-363. land and water, x, 15, 81, 98, 316, 317, 353. lane, charles (english reformer), 60, 68, 75, 107, 124, 149; writes for the &quot; dial,&quot; 69-71, 73, 74. lar, 79. latin grammars, 27 ; epistle, 30-33 ; pronunciation, 28 ; writers men tioned or quoted, vi, x, 30, 32. laws, beautiful, 213 ; eternal, 208. lectures by thoreau, 4, 173, 180, 185, 227-231, 280, 281, 289, 298, 326, 338, 355, 406. lecturing, results of, 298, 354. ledum (labrador tea), 363. lee s hill, 15, alias nashawtuc or naushawtuck, 16, 30, 33. lee^vites, a nickname, 15. letters : from louis agassiz, 154. from a. b. alcott, 460 ; to him, 332. from h. g. o. blake, 190, 191 ; to him, 192, 197, 208, 209, 213, 216, 223, 234, 237, 251, 261, 266, 271, 275, 291, 301, 303, 305, 316, 326, 329, 339, 341, 354, 357, 359, 368, 385, 399, 405, 409, 413, 415, 421, 428, 443. from myron b. benton, 461 ; to him, 463. to mrs. lucy cotton brown, 40, 43, 45, 49, 53. from j. e. cabot, 155 ; to him, 150, 153, 186. from ellery channing, 144, 321. from thomas cholmondeley, 440 ; to him, 295. from r. w. emerson, 57, 67, 92, 99, 111, 122, 124, 143, 148, 170, 186 ; to him, 58, 62, 69, 73, 92, 95, 109, 120, 127, 135, 161, 170, 173, 177, 181, 189, 220. from mrs. r. w. emerson, 75; to her, 89, 103, 133. to t. w. higginson, 227, 379. from miss elizabeth hoar, 138. to parker pillsbury, 437. from james richardson, 10. from daniel ricketson, 286 ; to him, 287, 288, 309, 311, 314, 319, 322, 324, 356, 364, 367, 393, 396, 407, 425, 434. to f. b. sanborn, 300, 447. to cynthia thoreau, 80, 100, 106, 117, 124, 129. to helen thoreau, 12, 27, 30, 37, 87, 113, 140. from henry thoreau, 12, 14, 20, 21, 25, 27, 30, 37, 40, 43, 45, 47, 474 index. 49, 52, 53, 58, 62, 69, 73, 77, 80, 84, 87, 89, 92, 95, 100, 103, 106, 109, 113, 117, 120, 124, 127, 129, 133, 135, 140, 150, 153, 158, 161, i 170, 173, 177, 181, 186, 189, 192, 197, 204, 208, 209, 213, 216, 220, 223, 227, 229, 230, 232, 234, 237, 251, 261, 266, 271, 275, 280, 281, 282, 288, 289, 291, 295, 300, 301, 303, 305, 309, 311, 314, 316, 319, 322, 324, 326, 329, 332, 335, 339, 341, 349, 352, 354, 356, 357, 359, 360, 362, 364, 367, 368, 371, 379, 385, 387, 393, 396, 399, 405, 407, 409, 413, 415, 419, 421, 425, 428, 434, 437, 443, 445, 455, 463. to john thoreau, jr. , 14, 20, 21, 25. to sophia thoreau, 36, 84, 158, 232, 335, 419. from b. m. watson, 229, 364 ; to him, 229, 230, 360, 362. to b. b. wiley, 349, 352. leuciscus (argenteus. pulchellus, etc.), 152, 157. libraries, at cambridge, 299, 300; at concord, 319 ; at new york, 96, 127, 130, 136, 145. life, emptiness of ordinary, 194, 216, 252, 257, 277; eternal, 193, 197, 209, 233, 271; facts of, 51, 195, 255 ; labyrinth of, 208 ; perils of, 175 ; phenomena of, x, xi, 46, 54, 239, 245, 260, 267, 273, 317, 363 ; qualifications for practical, 6, 11, 39, 69, 161, 205. lincoln, abraham, 334, 437, 439. lincoln, the town, 363. &quot; linnaeus, 250. literature, 31, 35, 50, 77, 80, 112, 125, 127, 134, 136, 180, 183, 195, 205, 207, 312, 319, 346, 352, 353, 441. lockwood (f. j. merriam), 423, 424. locust, the seventeen-year, 106, 107. log of driftwood, 318. london, mentioned, 163, 187, 398, 418. longfellow, h. w., 120, 298, 401. long pond, 313. long river (la riviere longue), french for the minnesota, 451. lost dove, horse and hound, 353. louisa, aunt (dunbar), 118. love, charms of, 239, 241, 245, 247, 250; corrupted, 240, 248, 250; potency of, 242, 245; and mar riage, 238-251, 353. love of nature, 1, 42, 75, 278, 326. lowell, james russell (h. u. 1838), 71, 298, 401, 458. lowell, mrs. (a cousin), 26. lowell, the city, 152. lucretius, quoted, x. lyceum, of concord, 4, 56, 60, 61, 72, 138, 173, 180, 185, 189, 323 ; at salem, 230 ; at worcester, 355. &quot;lying out-doors,&quot; 432. lymau, benjamin smith (h. u. 1855), 300. lyttelton, lord, 443. macaulay, rev. zachary, 321. mackerel, 276. mackinaw, 445. madawaska, 379-382. mckean, henry swasey (h. u. 1828), 130, 136, 145. magazines : atlantic, 284, 444 ; democratic review, 59, 127-129, 132, 140 ; dial, see &quot; dial &quot; ; har vard, 299, 300, 353; putnam s, 260, 342, 343. mahabharat, 351. maiden in the east, 364. maine, 4, 158, 173, 368. maine lumberer, 447. maine woods, 301, 362, 378, 380-382, 391. male and female, 238, 249. mallet for flints, 20. man, 12, 35, 42 ; his activity, 201, 209, 257 ; his bread, 198 ; his duty, 201, 224 ; his education. 214, 267 ; his freedom, 210, 226, 236; his generation, 250 ; his immortality, 306, 344 ; his meanness, 215, 272. mankind, 8, 35, 95, 162. mann, horace, jr., 445, 454. manse, the old, 49, 59. maple sugar, 327. maps, 383, 390. maria, aunt (thoreau), 141. mark-lane gazette, 148. market-carts, xi. marlborough chapel, boston, 154. marriage, 166, 240, 246, 249-251, 353. marston, john, of taunton, 23. marstonwatson, benjamin (h. u. 1839), 49. see watson. massachusetts, 446. massachusetts election, 17, 19, 168. massachusetts quarterly review, 172, 173. may, rev. joseph (h. u. 1857), 451. may, rev. samuel joseph (h. u. 1818), 451. meadows, of concord, 109, 297, 389 ; birds in the, 14, 42 ; cranberries in, 245. index. 475 mean aspects of life, 82, 93, 97, 276. meanness complained of, 104, 208, 211,224. meat and drink, 198, 199. medicine (indian term), 1g-18. medicine, yellow (a river), 452. mediterranean shore, 359. meeting-houses, 235, 392, 414 ; meet ing-house cellar, 377. melancholy, 47, 219, 252. melodies, 24, 50. melodious fringilla, 26. melons, viii. memorial verses, by channing, 76. memories of former life, 215, 253. memory, 29, 48, 110, 126. men in crowds, 93, 98. men of god, 257. mending, 129, 419. mental philosophy. 28, 29. mercantile library, 130, 145. merchant (thoreau s father), 3, 409. mercury (of new bedford), 314, 394, 396 ; prints ricketson s history, 394. merit and demerit, 104, 116, 174, 194. merlin (a hawk), 273. merriam, francis jackson, a fugi tive, 422-424. merrimack, the river, 5 ; &quot; week on the,&quot; 1g6, 187, 219, 299, 321, 349, 392, 437, 462. message, the president s, 438. methods of action, 8, 37, 54, 65, 78, 105, 128, 141. mice sent to agassiz, 153, 157. michigan, 454. micrometer, 164. microscope, 417. mill-dam, 316; of the thoreaus at acton, 410. mill s &quot; british india,&quot; 321. &quot; million men of no importance com pared with one man,&quot; 98. milton, 324. milton, the town, 208, 263, 264. minnesota, indians of, 451, 452 ; riv ers of, 447-451 ; trip to, 299, 439, 444, 446. minnows, 152, 157. minott, george (concord rustic), go, 108, 110, 126. mirror (new york weekly), 127, 132. misanthropy, not a trait of thoreau, xii, 287. miscellany, boston, 99, 122. mississippi river, 444, 447, 450. mist, 321. mizzling of sixpences, 98. mob in new york, 93, 130. modern commercial spirit, 7-9. &quot; modern painters,&quot; 374. moles, 157, 232. monadnoc, 383-385, 421, 428-433. money, idolatry of, 194, 373, 387; hard, 373. month, work for, 378. monthly. see magazines. monument, concord, 26. moose, 335, 362, 382, 391, 393. moosehead lake, 376, 380. morals, 247, 254, 207, 293, 345. morton, edwin (h. u. 1855), 299, 353, 440. mott, mrs. lucretia, 115. mountains, 235, 258, 370, 374, 379, 383, 385, 389-391, 403, 415, 419, 428, 429. mountains, white, 5, 375, 385, 387, 389, 404, 406, 430. mount washington, 375, 376, 390. muddy tortoise, 153. mud pond, 382. mud-puddle, the sun in a, 292. munroe, james, publisher, 71, 149, 219, 388. muses, the, 51, 214. museum, british, 442. music, 47, 49, 51-53, 88, 232, 278, 311. musketaquid (concord), 14; the river, 70, 305. muskrat s house, 266. muttering thunder, 70. myself and yourself, 259, 417. mystics, 180. neptune, the god, 31 ; the planet, 165. nests, 74, 193. neversink, n. j., 82, 310. new bedford, 283-289, 305, 307, 311, 314, 320, 324, 367, 388, 396, 397, 409, 414, 435. newcomb, charles, 350. new england, 222, 321. new hampshire, 300, 384, 386, 389, 390, 392, 419, 420, 422. new jersey, 82, 333-339. &quot; new orleans crescent &quot; and whit man, 341. news, 216. newspapers denounced, 211, 216, 224. new testament, 164. newton, sir isaac, 163. new world (america), 268. 476 index. &quot;new world &quot; (the newspaper), 128. new york, 19, 40, 58, 61, 72, 79, 82, 85, 93, 94, 95, 98-103, 107, 112, 120, 127, 130, 140. 144, 333, 335, 341, 346, 348, 437. new zealand, 284, 303, 440, 443. niagara, 100, 444. night on the mountain, 432 ; on the river, 278. noah s dove, 56. noble writing, 112. nobscot (a hill), 330. norwegian immigrants, 130, 131. notes from the journal of a scholar (charles emerson), 112. nova scotia, 393. nucleus of a comet is almost a star, 208. nuptials, of plants, 249 ; of man kind, 246. nurture of the soul, 198, 210. nuts, 1, 260, 352. objects of nature, 9, 42, 84, 88, 98, 103, 111, 168. ocean, its phenomena, x, 82, 159, 305, 353, 412. ode to beauty, emerson s, 137-139. ohio, 23, 334. olympia, 64. olympus, 59, 111. opera, 260, 378. oracles of quarles, 134. orchard house, 388. oriel college, oxford, 284, 398. &quot; origin of species,&quot; darwin s, 442. osprey, 53. ossa and pelion, 265. ossoli, margaret fuller, 220-223. ossoli, marquis of, 221-223. o sullivan, 59, 122, 128. owls, 90, 184. pacific ocean, 284. packs, of tourists, 390, 391, 428. paddling, 317, 382. painted cup (a flower), 84. pale-face, 14-17. palmer, edward, 97, 115. palmer, joseph, at fruitlands, 177, 186. palmerston mentioned, 211. pan, and whitman, 349. pandora s box, 22. paradise, 9, 132, 195. parcae, the, 179. parker house, 400, 401. parker, theodore, 61, 286, 398, 410, 413. parkman, deacon, of concord, 5. parkman, francis, 5. parkmau house, 4. parlor lecture, 231, 409. partheanna, 64. parthian army, 184. partridge-berries, 235. partridges, 70. pascal and henry james, 145. &quot; past and present,&quot; 95, 120. patmore, his &quot; angel in the house,&quot; 329. peabody (a classmate of thoreau), 26. peabody, miss elizabeth palmer, 72, 335. peabody river, 290. peace, lecture on, 60 ; remarks on, 169, 296. pedestrian tours, 127, 210, 235, 285, 359. peddler, thoreau taken for, 290. pehlvi, dialect, 63. pekin, 105. pellico, silvio, 61. pencil-making, 5, 194, 210, 219, 410. penna, how pronounced. 28. pennsylvania, 115, 281, 326. penobscot, 160, 362, 381, 392. pepiu, lake, 446. persius, 5, 190. phalansteries, 115. phar-ra-oh (noise of locusts), 107. phenomenal and real, 67, 105, 175, 376, 404. philanthropic dogmas, 402. philanthropists, 140, 231, 255, 334. phillips, wendell (h. u. 1830), 302, 460. philosophers, 11, 29, 60, 75, 76, 184, 350, 351. &quot;philosopher s scales,&quot; 137. philosophy, mental, 28, 29 ; oriental, 136, 319, 347, 351 ; stoical, ix ; the transcendental, 95, 192. phcebus apollo, 51. phosphorescence, 360, 361. pierce, president franklin, 232, 254, 297. piety, 42, 48, 105. pickerel, 151, 153, 157. picturesque, the (gilpin), 288, 312. pilgrims, canterbury, 443. &quot; pilgrim s progress,&quot; 436. pillsbury, parker, (the abolitionist), 437-439. pindar, translation, 121. pipes for smoking, 215, 394, 395 ; of the throat, 435. piracy, 185. pismire and his hillock, 262. index. 477 plato, 180. plymouth church, 348. plymouth, mass., 40, 49, 228, 231, 280-282, 287, 353, 364, 440. poems of charming, 76, 94, 137, 139, 185, 325, 387, 421 ; of emerson, 137, 321, 432; of herbert, 134, 436 ; of quarles, 128, 134 ; of ricketson, 394 ; of sanborn, 463 ; of thoreau, vii, x, 44, 56, 70, 87, 88, 177, 243, 244, 321, 364; of whitman, 345. poet-naturalist, 1, 76. poetry, english, 77, 134, 136, 183, 283, 306, 323-325 ; greek, 70, 119 ; of the &quot; dial,&quot; 44, 70, 137, 147. poets, x, 31, 110, 136. polaris, 418. pole, stirring up with, 365. polis, joe (indian), 339, 362, 379, 391. polygamy, 353. pomotis, a fish, 157. pond, fairhaven, 31, 278; long, 313 ; walden, 31, 34, 68, 145, 149, 153, 158 ; white, 15. pots of beer, 393. pots of poor immigrants, 131. pouts, fish, 151, 153. poverty, 205, 208, 355. powers above us, 48, 54, 66, 191, 209, 214, 254. practice of conformity, 252 ; of fru gality, 205; of manual labor, 74, 205, 219 ; of retirement, 191, 210. preaching, 231, 256. preexistence, 215, 223 ; recollections of, 253, 353. precipice for suicides, 178. &quot; present &quot; (the periodical), 133, 140, 141. president s messages, 438. pretenses of society, 213, 274. probe the earth, 194. professor, the traveling (agassiz), j 176. pronunciation of latin, 28, 29. prince of wales in new england, 433. qitaintness of expression, 28, 59, j 131, 134, 160, 172, 175, 184, 196, j 216, 224. quaker dress, 115; meetings, 116, i 336, 395. quakers at eagleswood, 336, 337 ; at new bedford, 395, 456; at new york, 115. quarantine village, n. y., 85. quarles, francis, 128, 134. quarterly of the transcendentalists, 143 ; its fame in england, 187. quarters of concord, 2, 15. quebec, 379. querulity of reformers, 141. query by thoreau, 64 ; another, 185. questioning to be avoided, 242, 325, 425. questions of friendship, 38, 41, 65 67, 104, 206, 308, 425 ; of love, 238 245 ; of life, 31, 38, 47, 51, 55, 90, 125, 141, 145, 162, 175, 191, 193, 200, 208, 214, 225, 236, 253, 255 258, 262, 267-269, 292, 333, 370, 439 ; of literature, 32, 35, 44, 50, 71, 112, 127, 183, 188, 195, 203, 207, 287, 321 ; of society, 12, 58, 74, 93, 131, 196, 225, 246, 254-256, 273-275, 350, 371, 400. quincy, josiah (h. u. 1790), pres ident of harvard university, 10. quitticus, in middleborough, 313. quotations, from channing, 68, 77, 382, 384, 392, 422, 425 ; confucius, 350, 351 ; daniel, 264 ; emerson, ii, 24, 57, 111, 122, 140, 143, 170, 187, 276, 339 ; goethe, 202 ; hor ace, vi, 31 ; lucretius, x ; milton, iii, 324; shakespeare, vi; tho reau, x, 87 ; virgil, 32. race, the aboriginal, 14, 339, 370, 452. race characteristics, 179, 268, 276, 343. ramsay, gov., of minnesota, 451. rapping of spirits, 233. ravine, tuckerman s, 389, 404, 406. reading, 31, 35, 77, 134, 136, 183, 351, 352, 438, 441, 442. rebellion, southern, 437, 446. &quot; recline on the great spirit,&quot; 213. recluse habits, 19, 42, 69, 93, 145, 191, 205, 235, 287, 299, 314, 364. recollections of early life, x, 2-5, 19. regret, 47, 49, 51, 87, 88. religion, 9, 105, 118, 136, 191, 197, 230, 235, 257, 293, 348, 456. religious life, 192, 215. respectability, 93. restigouche, in canada, 380. review, the democratic, 59, 119, 121, 129, 140. &quot; review, massachusetts quar terly,&quot; 172, 188. review of carlyle by emerson, 112, 120 ; of emerson, in blackwood, 188. &quot; revue des deux mondes,&quot; 188. 478 index. richardson, rev. james (h. u. 1837), 10. riches, thoreau s vague, indefinite, 344. ricketson, daniel, described, 283, 306 ; letters from, 286 ; letters to, 287, 288, 309, 311, 314, 319, 322, 324, 356, 364, 367, 393, 396, 407, 425, 434, 455, 459, 460 ; mentioned, 286, 289, 309, 358, 398, 414, 441 ; conversion of, 456. ricketson, walton, sculptor, xii, 311. ridicule of alcott, 163, 184 ; of man kind, 277, 373 ; of table-tippers, 233. ripley, rev. ezra, d. d. (h. u. 1776), 3. rivers : the alpheus, 109 ; assabet, vii; chaudiere, 379; concord, 2, 88, 109, 150-153, 278, 305, 316, 331, 333, 358; hudson, 120; long, 451 ; loup, 379 ; mincius, 109; minnesota, 448, 449; mis sissippi, 447, 452 ; peabody, 390 ; penobscot, 380, 381, 392 ; st. john, 380; st. lawrence, 379; shaw sheen, vii ; yellow medicine, 452. river, head of the, at new bedford, 395. riviere du loup, 379 ; longue, 451, 452. roach, the fish, 152. roads traveled by thoreau, 3, 5, 52, 85, 102, 168, 379, 384. roberts brothers, mentioned, 76. robin hood, mentioned, 111. rodman, mr., of new bedford, 457. romans, 79, 184. rome, 79. roxbury, mass., mentioned, 25, 27, 30, 37. rubber coat, etc., 382, 383. rural life, 43, 79, 119, 138, 144, 161, 168, 205, 210. rynders, mentioned, 145. sabattia chloroides, 313. sabbath-keeping, 118, 229, 235, 392. sachem tahatawan (of concord), 14, 19. sacred books, 136, 350, 351. sadness, 47, 50, 54, 88, 105, 460. saint, a fair, 135. saint john, the river, 380. saint lawrence, 379. salem, mass., mentioned, 230. salop (shropshire), 295, 443. sam, a cat, 33, 36. sanborn, franklin benjamin (h. u. 1855), letters to, 68, 69, 300, 446-453 ; his life of thoreau, cited, 23, 107, 185, 299; his me moir of alcott cited, 72, 285, 401 ; mentioned, 299, 336, 420, 422, 436, 441, 463 ; his school, 300, 377 ; his version of thoreau s latin, 33-36. sandy hook, near new york, 82, 85, 98. sane and insane, 293. sap of the sugar-maple, 327-329. saratoga mentioned, 276. sanscrit books, 319, 321, 351. sarah, aunt (dunbar), 3. sargent, john turner (h. u. 1827), 229. savings bank, boston, 186. saturday evening dance, 336. saturn, 159. scholars, their complaints, 205, 254, 276, 306 ; their duties, 116, 206 ; their qualities, 116, 123, 174, 210, 310, 330. schools : of thoreau, 4, 25-27 ; of lane, 149 ; of sanborn, 300, 377. schools of concord, 436. science, 232, 330. scott, sir walter, 136. scurvy life, 216. sea and land, x, 15, 81, 93, 98, 221, 302-304, 353. seashore verses, x ; walks, 363, 366, 412. sebago lake, me., 44. seeming and being, 50, 104, 193, 258, 262, 274, 376. sensuality, 245, 260, 346. serenity and cheerfulness, 46, 48, 115, 328, 459. seven against thebes, 121. seventeen-year locust, 106. sewing circle in concord, 32, 36. sex and marriage, 238, 240, 245, 249. shabbiness of emerson s life, 276 ; of thoreau, 224. shackford, rev. charles chauncy (h. u. 1835), 229. shakers, 135, 246. shakespeare mentioned, ix, 50, 237. shame, 200, 238, 250, 345. shanty, of thoreau, 68 ; of ricket son, 286, 311, 322. shawmut (boston), 17. shawsheen (river), vii. shiner, a fish, 152-157. shropshire, eng., 283-285, 295. 298, 439, 443. simplicity, 194, 256, 350. skating, 297, 405. index. 479 skipper, of staten island, 102 ; tho reau as, 3go. silence and speech, 63, 188, 277. silence of the pine wood, 425. sincerity, a rare virtue, 306. slavery, 116, 334, 413-415, 422, 454. sloth, 247, 267, 293; the animal, 400. small, james, of truro, 303. smith, capt., 102. snowstorm, 30, 33, 436, 437. social habit of thoreau, 19, 57, 94, 138, 176, 287, 426. society, 190, 197, 276, 331, 367, 402 ; lecture on, 4. society of natural history, 226, 227. solitude, its praises, 90, 98, 210, 278, 374. song of &quot; tom bowlin,&quot; 367. &quot; song of the shirt &quot; (hood s), 267. song-sparrow, 14. sorrow, doctrine of, 47, 201. soul and body, 198, 210, 216, 233, 257, 264. &quot; species, origin of &quot; (darwin s), 442. spirit, motions of the, 116, 336 ; the great, 14, 18, 213 ; bad, of the in dians, 16. spirit-rapping ridiculed, 233. spiritual birth, football, 261. spring, marcus, of new york, 220, 333-338. spring, signs of, 23, 31, 34, 84, 356, 434. spruce house, 389, 429, 430. standard, the anti-slavery, 53, 289. staples, samuel, constable and sheriff, 58, 60, 168. state and church, 61, 270. staten island, n. y., 5, 58, 76, 79, 84-86, 91, 98, 102, 113, 119, 139, 143, 145. station and appearance, potency of, 274. statistics, 371. steamer voyage of thoreau, 80, 335, 447-450. sternothaerus (turtle), 150, 156. stock in the bank, 194, 257, 372 ; in this world s enterprises, 233. stoicism of thoreau, ix, 55, 146, 158, 205, 206, 287, 392. storm in new york, 125 ; on monad noc, 430. stove of thoreau, 264, 294 ; of chan ning, 297. students, their economy, 69; of greek, 68, 116,121, 123; of law, 19, 126. study, a woodland, 68, 145, 153, 202. style in writing, ix, 78, j12, 365. suburban life, 83, 93, 101, 114, 147. success in life, 129, 191, 197, 209, 214, 260, 292, 344, 373, 418. sucker (a fish), 151, 156, 157, 266. sugar, 327-329. sugar-maple, 328. summer, indian, 43, 395. summer life, 25, 74, 111. sumner, charles (h. u. 1830), 220. sumner, horace, lost at sea, 221. sun (for &quot; day &quot;), 14, 17 ; in a mud puddle, 292. sunday discourses, 229, 281, 340, 348 ; observance, 94, 118 ; in new jersey, 338. surveying of land, 119, 250, 265, 282, 338, 340, 364, 388. swamp and city compared, 225. swedenborg, 351. swedenborgian, h. james, 145 ; j. clark, 175. switzer, a, 253. &quot;tactics,&quot; of scott, 411. tahatawan (indian chief), 14-19. &quot; t ain t i, t ain t i,&quot; 262. talking, 63, 126, 211, 277, 302, 353. tappan, william, of new york, 85, 86, 94, 96, 97, 112, 115, 121, 135, 140, 145. tarbell, deacon, of concord, 294. tarkiln hill, new bedford, 310, 35(5. &quot; task,&quot; of cowper, 306. tauuton, mentioned, 14, 18, 20, 21. taxpaying, 58, 60. taylor, jane, quoted, 137. tea, its value, 382, 383. teaching, by the thoreaus, 4, 10, 25 30, 98. teats, 269. temple, denned, 235; too close, 230. thanksgiving, the emotion, 344 ; the festival, 333, 402. thinking, 167, 195, 411. thoreau, cynthia (dunbar), mother of henry, 2, 11, 33, 79, 232, 271, 285, 298, 301, 339, 407, 408, 419, 420, 422, 423, 441, 464. (see under letters. ) thoreau, helen, sister of henry, 2, 11, 23, 25, 32, 37, 56, 60, 86, 87,101, 109, 113, 117, 119, 132, 140. (see under letters.) thoreau, henry david (h. u. 1837), his fame increasing, vi, 462 ; his character, viii, xi ; industry of, 480 index. viii, 11,39, 161, 205, 338, 429 ; his affection %or his family, viii, 38, 80, 117, 141, 142 ; for his brother john, 40, 47, 87 ; for the emer sons, 58, 61, 111, 122, 162, 170, 189 ; french elegance of, ix ; jest ing habit of, ix ; birth and death, 2 ; ancestry and early days, 2-6 ; epochs in his life, 4, 12, 40, 58, 192 ; affairs of, 5, 25, 39, 44, 125, 127, 128, 150-157, 161, 204-206, 251, 410 ; books written by, 5, 166, 187, 280, 286, 299, 321 ; college &quot;part,&quot; 7-9; philosophic mind of, 10, 29 ; emerson s view of, 11 ; exaggeration by, 11, 244, 265, 270 ; letters from (see letters) ; indian dialect of, 14-20 ; tastes of, 19, 25, 38, 42, 51, 54. 57, 68, 75, 93, 97,111, 135, 136,232; his indian relics, 20-22 ; wish to go west, 23; habits, 25, 26, 39, 161, 231, 382, 423, 424, 429 ; school, 26, 27 ; advises helen, 27-35 ; a tran scendental brother, 37-39; ac quaintance with emerson, 39, 56 ; with mrs. brown, 40-49 (see let ters) ; with r. f. fuller, 52 (see letters) ; love of music, 47, 51, 52 ; writes to emerson, 57 (see let ters) ; at emerson s house, 40, 58 ; intimate with hawthorne, 59 ; with alcott, 60, 75, 163, 175, 181, 184, 287, 332, 340, 348, 357, 364 ; with emerson s children, 63, 162, 180, 183, 189 ; with mrs. emerson, 62 (see letters) ; with c. s. whee ler, 68, 69 ; edits &quot; dial,&quot; 69-74 ; admirers of, 76, 166, 190, 283, 287, 349, 461 ; his college life, 4, 7, 10, 68, 78, 364; college professors and tutors, 68, 130, 164, 174 ; col lege studies, 77-79 ; goes to staten island, 79 ; meets horace gree ley, henry james, etc., 80; de scribes new york, 81-85, 93, 97, etc. ; verses on his brother john, 87 ; describes james, channing, and brisbane, 95, 96 ; and other friends, 97 ; at w. emerson s, 101 ; his pursuits, 100-109 ; criti cises concord and the &quot;dial,&quot; 109-112 ; describes immigration in 1843, 114, 130, 131 ; hears lucre tia mott, 115; laments stearns wheeler,116 ; regrets concord and separation, 117, 118 ; writes for magazines, 119, 121, 127, 129; mentions channing, greeley, james, longfellow, 120; trans lates greek, 121 ; sees publish ers, 125 ; mentions webster and c. dunbar, 126; reads quarles, 134; criticises ellery channing and lane, 135 ; emerson too, 137; likes the irish, 138; but not w. h. charming, 140 ; hears from emerson, 143 ; and ellery channing, 144 ; lives by walden, 145, 148 ; hears from lane, 146 149 ; sends fish to agassiz, 149-157 ; returns to emerson s house, 158 ; writes to sophia, 158 (see let ters) ; cares for the emerson fam ily, 161; helps alcott with the summer-house of emerson, 163 ; describes scientific school, 165; refuses marriage, 166 ; finds no publisher, 166, 187 ; his account of hugh whelan, 167, 171, 172, 178 ; hears from emerson, 170 (see letters) ; hears parker, whipple, and hudson at lyceum, 178, 1 1 9 ; describes a dinner, 176 ; sends verses, 177 ; describes the emer son household, 182, 183 ; and e. channing, 174 ; reads lectures, 4, 64, 185 ; writes to j. e. cabot, 186 (see letters) ; his mode of writ ing, 188 ; meets h. g. o. blake, 190; their correspondence, 191 445 (see letters); believes in simplicity, 194 ; defines his life, 196, 202, 210, 215, 224; lectures on bread, 197-199 ; on duties, 201 ; corresponds with greeley, 203 ; fathoming character, 203 ; lives by hand-labor, 205; writes for &quot; graham&quot; and &quot;putnam,&quot; 203, 207 ; his debts, 219, note, 266 ; visits fire island, 220 ; elected to boston society of natural his tory, 226 ; lectures in boston, 228 ; in plymouth, salem, etc., 228-230; satirizes spiritism, 233 ; will be a scarecrow, 234 ; his temples, 235 ; essay on chastity, 238-251 ; goes land-surveying, 251 ; avoids doing good, 254 ; reflects on life, 255-259 ; differs with g. w. curtis, 260 ; moralizes, 261-269 ; feeble ness of, 262, 323 ; reads haydon and layard, 269 ; gets a new coat, 271 ; lessons therefrom, 272-275 ; finds fault with men, 276 ; pad dles up river by night, 278 ; lec tures in worcester, 280, 355, 406, 413 ; publishes &quot; walden,&quot; 280; meets ricketson and t. cholmondeley, 283; geniality of, index. 481 287, 325, 353 ; visits nantucket and new bedford, 289 ; moralizes to blake, 291-294 : writes to cholmondeley, 295; to sanborn, 300, 445 ; visits cape cod, 302-305 ; describes ricketson, 300 ; deals with e. hosmer for an old house, 309 ; praises g-ilpin, 311 ; finds the rose-gentian, 313 ; gathers drift wood, 316-318; meets mary emer son, 318 ; receives books from cholmondeley, 319, 321 ; describes ellery c banning, 324; is the greatest walker in concord, 326 ; idealizes sugar-making, 328 ; visits alcott in new hampshire, 332, 333; and the eagleswood com munity, 335 ; describes it, 336 338 ; meets walt whitman, 340 ; visits greeley, 340 ; his morning in worcester, 342; describes whitman, 345-347 ; hears h. w. beecher, 348 ; quotes confucius to wiley, 350 (see letters) ; lands on clark s island, 353; meets alcott and channinginnew bedford, 357 ; goes to cape cod with chauning, 359 ; analyzes glow-worms for m. watson, 360 (see letters) ; praises hillside, 363, 364 ; criticises w. flagg, 365 ; in maine woods, 366, 369, 378-382 (see letter to higginson) ; his camp outfit, 383 ; habit in tour ing, 384; visits white mountains (in 1858), 385-391 ; goes to monad noc, 388, 428 ; finds the arnica in tuckerman s ravine, 390 ; his camp on mt. washington, 391 ; writes on autumn tints, 395 ; is visited by cholmondeley in 1858 59, 397; ridicules boston clubs, 400 ; criticises h. james, 402 ; his parable of the mountain ra vine, 404, 405 ; his father dies, 406 ; and is described by thoreau, 407, 408 ; returns to hand-labor, 410 ; praises john brown, 413 ; his speech published, with emerson s, by redpath, 415; reflections on man and fate, 416-418 ; invited to john brown s grave, 420 ; goes with channing to monadnoc, 421 ; speeds frank merriam to canada, 423, 424; explains his silence to ricketson, 426; gets a canada lynx, 427 ; describes life on mo nadnoc, 482-433 ; hints for the prince of wales, 433 ; is visited by blake and brown, 435 ; men tions alcott s success, 436 ; writes to p. pillbsury, 437 ; falls ill and goes to minnesota, 439-444, 446-453 ; his last letter from cholmondeley, 439 ; describes his illness 455 ; sits for his portrait in new bedford, 456; writes for the &quot;atlantic monthly,&quot; 458; grows worse, 459 ; writes his last letter, 463 ; dies, 464. thoreau, jane, mentioned, 142. thoreau, john (father of henry), 2-6, 11, 23, 80, 86, 118, 133, 339, 397, 406 ; day-book of, 4 ; de scribed by thoreau, 407 ; dies, 406, 408. thoreau, john (grandfather of hen ry), 3, 378. thoreau, john (brother of henry), 2, 6, 13, 14, 18-25, 27, 37, 40 ; his death, 47, 87, 88 ; his bluebird box, 23-25. (see letters.) thoreau, maria, 141, 464. thoreau, philip (great-grandfather of henry), 3. thoreau, sophia (sister of henry) (see letters) ; 8, 26, 27, 32, 36, 39, 84, 133, 142, 158, 232, 334, 335, 419, 459,461,464; dies, 464. &quot;thule, ultima&quot; (cholmondeley s book on new zealand), 284, 303. thunder in the woods, 70. &quot; times,&quot; 345. tints, autumnal, 395, 402. tortoise, painted, 153. &quot;transcript,&quot; of worcester, 342. &quot;traveller,&quot; of boston, 361. &quot;tribune,&quot; of new york, 53, 80, 143, 204, 331. truro, mass., 302, 304, 412. trust, 65. &quot; truth along with ye,&quot; 290. tuckerman s ravine, 389, 404, 406. tulip trees, 84, 91, 106. turkey, the country, 176, 211 ; the fowl, 176. tyndale, mrs., 349. ultima thtjlk,&quot; 284, 303. umbagog lake, 377. umbazookskus, 381. union, war for the, 439. 446, 454, 460. &quot; union magazine,&quot; 204. universalist church, 61. vacant hours, 31, 252, 262, 301. vaches, ranz des, 59. valhalla s kitchen, 51. valley of the connecticut, 332 ; of the mississippi, 446. 482 index. vandalic verses, 45. vedas, 351. venus, 31. verses mentioned, sic vita, 40; memorial, 76 ; quoted, 87, 176. vestry of the church, 354, 377, 414. views, distant : from monadnoc, 384 ; from mt. washington, 376. &quot; vides ut alia stet nive candidum,&quot; 30. virgil, vii ; quoted, 32. virginia, road, 2, 5 ; state, 398, 406, 414, 462. virginity, 249. vishnu purana, 351. von hammer, 71. vose, henry (h. u. 1837), 19. voting in concord, 16, 19, 168. vowel sounds, 28. voyages, 80, 295, 335, 447. vulcan, 31, 34, 45. wachusett, a mountain, 99, 282, 285, 330, 376, 384, 433. wagon-journey to white mountains, 385, 389. walden, the pond, 5, 31, 34, 68, 124, 145, 149, 158, 161-169 ; the book, 280, 281, 286, 321, 324, 437, 463, 464. walden woods, 138, 159, 168, 190, 392. waldo, giles, of new york, 85, 94, 96, 99, 115, 125. walks of thoreau, to wachusett, 99. walker, tom, 265; member of a sect, 392. &quot; walking &quot; (a lecture), 354, 458. walpole, n. h., 332. walt (for walter), christian name of the poet whitman, 345, 348, 349. &quot; wanderer, the &quot; (channing s poem), 364, 421 ; quoted, 422. war, 108; stupidity of, 441; cri mean, 826, 294, 298, 320, 321 ; rev olutionary, 378, 414 ; of 1861, 446. ward, george, 85, 100. ward, mrs., 60, 87. warm yourself, how to, 247, 264, 294, 318. washington, general, 11. washington, the city, 436 ; the moun tain, 375, 389, 433. wasson, d. a., 357, 358. watson, edward, 353, 363. watson, b. m., 229, 230, 282, 287, 360, 362-364, 388. watson, mrs. mary, 49, 364. wealth, folly of accumulating, 194, 373. wearing clothes, 272, 274, 290, 310, 419. webster, daniel, mentioned, 124, 126, 285. &quot; week on the concord and merri mack &quot; (first book of thoreau), 166; refused by publishers, 187, 207 ; debt for, 219, 251 ; cited, 321; mentioned, 392, 437, 462, 463. weld, theodore (of eagleswood), 334, 336. weld, mrs. (grimk6), 333, 335. west, the, thoreau would go to, 22 ; a friend in, 41 ; immigrants to 114, 131 ; thoreau s tour in, 439, 444, 446-454. west indies, mentioned, 397, 444. weston, mass., 11, 124. wheeler, charles stearns (h. u. 1837), 68, 69, 71, 108, 116, 123. whelau, hugh, the gardener, 91, 167, 171, 172, 178, 185. whipple, edwin percy, 173, 174. white, miss e., 32, 36. white pond (at nineacre-corner), 15. whitman, walt, 321 ; seen by tho reau, 339-341; genius of, 346; brag of, 347 ; seen by alcott, 349 ; described, 345-347 ; mentioned by emerson, 339 ; and by alcott, 439. whittier, john greenieaf, men tioned, 59. wild, the (a lecture), 354; tho reau s love of, 17, 42, 144, 210. wiley, b. b., 349-354. (see let ters.) williams, i. t., 45. windsor, n. s., 393. &quot; winter s walk,&quot; 112. winthrop, john (governor of mas sachusetts), his concord house, 309. wisconsin, 131, 448. wisdom of the ancients, 136, 350, 351 ; of the indian, 362, 370. woman, her quarrel with man, 238 ; her beauty, 239 ; a merely senti mental, 241. woodchuck, mentioned, 202, 433. worcester, mass, (home of blake and brown), 189, 192 (see let ters); thoreau lectures at, 218, 231, 280, etc. ; visits, 335, 341, 358. wordsworth, quoted, 275. &quot; world, the, a cow that is hard to milk,&quot; 161 ; must look out, 175; index. 483 noble to stand aside from, 191 ; idly complaining, 236 ; its way, 252 ; and atlas, 292 ; no match for a thought, 412 ; pitch it in a hol low place, sit down and eat your luncheon, 418 ; one at a time, 439. worms (lampyris noctiluca), 360, 363. writing, correct, 112, 187, 365; remarks on, ix, 29, 32, 44, 78, 112, 188, 365, 426. wyman trial, the, 124. &quot;yankee in canada,&quot; 207, 259. yarmouth, mass., 304. yellow house, 5. yellow medicine (river), 452. yoga (hindoo observance), 210. yogi, 211. &quot;youth of the poet and painter&quot; (by ellery channing),&quot; 111, 135, 139. u.c.berkeley libraries of es on gland birds hen ry d.thoreau^'ilil! iiiiiiiiiiinii!' ^916 6'i^ u,^f cyf. 7 ( /c/t/,^ ^ / ^yyt^/j^ (5 dx^^jty notes on new england birds heu.mit thrush ox nest umvj. noim notes on '^'^ "^ '''''"' new england birds by henry d. thoreau arranged and edited by francis h. allen with illustrations from photographs of birds in nature boston and new york houghton mifflin company 1910 copyright, 1906, by houghton, mifflin and company copyright, i9io, by houghton mifflin company all rights reserved published may tgio preface scattered through the fourteen volumes of tho reau's published journal are many interesting notes on the natural history of new england, and a large proportion of these relate to birds. in the belief that readers and students would be glad to have these bird notes arranged systematically in a single volume, this book has been prepared. it will perhaps be a matter of surprise to many readers to learn how much tho reau wrote upon this one branch of natural history, and how many species of birds he found something to say about that was worth the saying. thoreau was seldom dull, even in mere records of commonplace facts, and the reader of this book, though he may be well acquainted with the author's picturesque style, can hardly fail to be impressed anew with his power to convey a vivid and interesting picture in a few words. it was, indeed, as a describer rather than as an ob server that thoreau excelled. he never acquired much skill in the diagnosis of birds seen in the field. he never became in any respect an expert ornithologist, and some of the reasons are not far to seek. he was too intent on becoming an expert analogist, for one thing. it better suited his genius to trace some analogy between the soaring hawk and his own thoughts than to make a scientific study of the bird. moreover his field, including as it did all nature, was too wide to admit of specialization in a single branch. then, too, 2051024 vi pkeface he lacked many of the helps that to-day smooth the way for the beginner in bird-study. he had no inti mate acquaintance with ornithologists or scientific men of any sort, and after giving up the gun in his young manhood he waited many years before he purchased a glass, and then bought a spy-glass, or small telescope, an implement which was useful in identifying ducks floating far off on the waters of the river or walden pond, but could hardly have served him very well with the flitting warblers of the tree-tops. the books, too, in those days were far from adequate. wilson and nut tall, upon whom he chiefly relied, are unsurpassed in some respects by anything we have to-day, but their descriptions of birds were not designed to assist in field identification, and they were by no means infallible in other matters. these books were not new even in thoreau's day, but they were the best ornithological manuals to be had, and with wilson making no men tion of so common a bird as the least flycatcher, and nuttall in ignorance of the existence of the olive backed thrush, we may pardon thoreau a few misap prehensions. as a matter of fact, thoreau seems to have seen things pretty accurately, — when he saw them at all, for he was sometimes strangely blind to the presence of birds which must have been fairly common inhabit ants of the woods and fields through which he roamed. his chief difficulty in identification was, perhaps, a tendency to jump at conclusions, — as when, meeting with the pileated woodpecker in the maine woods, he at once set it down as the " red-headed woodpecker preface vii (^picus eryihroce'phalus)^'' evidently because of its conspicuous red crest. the reader who desires to make a special study of thoreau as an ornithologist — to learn his mistakes as well as his discoveries — must go to the journal itself. there he will find the true and complete record of thoreau's bird observations, — in cluding all the brief notes which are of no value except in the compilation of migration data and the like, and the mere identifications, mistaken and otherwise. in the present volume it has seemed best to confine our selves to the notes which have some intrinsic value, whether literary or scientific, — using both terms in a liberal sense. it is to be borne in mind that these notes are from thoreau's journal and therefore have not alwaj^s been cast in a final literary form. regarded as literature, many of them stand in need of shaping and polishing, but they are none the less interesting for that, and it is also to be remembered that thoreau's notes were seldom mere records of fact. he never forgot that writing was his vocation, and when he wrote it was for the purpose of recording his thoughts in the best lan guage that came to his mind at the moment. he wrote rapidly, and occasionally a word was omitted or the wrong word slipped in, though that happened with rather surprising infrequency, all things considered. the editor of this volume was associated with mr. bradford torrey in the editing of thoreau's complete journal^ and he can affirm from personal knowledge that thoreau's omissions and slips of the pen are all carefully indicated there. in the present book it has viii preface seemed best to simplify things for the reader by omit ting the brackets from interpolated words in the case of the unimportant ones where the word to be supplied was obvious, and to retain them only in the case of the more important words, or where there was any possi bility of a misapprehension of thoreau's meaning. it may be well here to point out the office of the brackets, [ ], as differentiated from parentheses, ( ), since their use is not always understood by readers. brackets, as used nowadays by most writers and print ers, show the interpolations of the editor, while the parentheses are the author's own. thus, in the present volume, a question-mark in brackets, [?], indicates that the editors of the journal were in doubt as to whether they had rightly interpreted thoreau's hand writing, but the same in parentheses, (?), is thoreau's own query. so, too, in the notes, those which are bracketed are the editor's, while the unbracketed notes are later an notations by thoreau, usually in pencil, upon the pages of his manuscript journals. the editor has felt free to quote or paraphrase the notes of the published journal^ for a large share of which he was primarily responsi ble, and he believes that mr. torrey will pardon him if in a few cases he has used the latter's phraseology without giving specific credit for it. the present notes are much fuller than those in the journal, the plan of which did not admit of extensive annotation. the bird matter included in thoreau's more formal works — the weeh, walden, the maine woods, cape cod, excursions, and miscellanies — is not inconsid preface ix erable, though it amounts to less than one twelfth as much as that contained in the journal. for the con venience of readers a full index of it is given in an appendix to this volume. the editor desires to thank mr. william brewster and dr. charles w. townsend for generous and help ful advice in the identification of certain of thoreau's birds, and, in closing, to express his confidence that the reader of this book will lay it down at the end with a more lively feeling of gratitude to the man who, writ ing in prose, has written more poetry about american birds than all our poets together. boston, april, 1910. contents page i. diving birds 1 ii. gulls, terns, and petrels 9 iii. ducks and geese 19 iv. herons and rails 63 v. shore-birds 84 vi. quail and grouse 94 vii. pigeons 110 viii. hawks and eagles 120 ix. owls 169 x. cuckoos, kingfishers, and woodpeckers. . 190 xi. goatsuckers, swifts, and hummingbirds. . 203 xii. flycatchers 215 xiii. larks, crows, and jays 224 xiv. blackbirds, orioles, etc 244 xv. finches 265 xvi. tanagers and swallows 325 xvii. waxwings, shrikes, and vireos 340 xviii. warblers 347 xix. titlarks, thrashers, and wrens .... 360 xx. creepers, nuthatches, tits, and kinglets . 366 xxi. thrushes 377 xxii. general and miscellaneous 403 xxiii. domestic birds 434 appendix 443 index 447 illustrations paoe two views of a hermit thrush on her nest, frontispiece photog^raphs by rev. robert s. morison great blue herons and nest 72 photograph by herbert k. job a mourning dove and her nest 118 photographs by herbert w. gleason fish hawk .152 photograph by ernest harold baynes whip-poor-will on nest \ 204 nighthawk disturbed while covering eggs photographs by herbert k. job } } red-winged blackbird ; 250 red-winged blackbird's nest and eggs " what champollion can translate the hieroglyphics on these eggs?" photographs by herbert w. gleason song sparrow photograph by charles h. tolman vesper sparrow on nest photograph by herbert w. gleason . 290 barn swallows 330 photographs by herbert w. gleason map of concord, mass., showing localities mentioned by thoreau in his journal, compiled by herbert w. gleason 442 notes on new england birds i diving birds horned grebe dec. 26, 1853. walden still open. saw in it a small diver, probably a grebe or dobchick, dipper, or what-not, with the markings, as far as i saw, of the crested grebe, but smaller. it had a black head, a white ring about its neck, a white breast, black back, and apparently no tail.* it dove and swam a few rods under water, and, when on the surface, kept turning round and round warily and nodding its head the while. this being the only pond hereabouts that is open. sept. 27, 1860. monroe's tame ducks sail along and feed close to me as i am working there. looking up, i see a little dipper, about one half their size, in the mid dle of the river, evidently attracted by these tame ducks, as to a place of security. i sit down and watch it. the tame ducks have paddled four or j&ve rods down-stream along the shore. they soon detect the dipper three or four rods off, and betray alarm by a tittering note, especially when it dives, as it does continually. at last, when it is two or three rods off and approaching them by diving, they all rush to the shore and come out on it ^ [from the description it would appear to have been a horned grebe, though the white on the throat and neck of that bird does not form a com plete ring. the bird of september, 1860, is more accurately described.] 2 notes on new england birds in their fear, but the dipper shows itself close to the shore, and when they enter the water again joins them within two feet, still diving from time to time and threatening to come up in their midst. they return up-stream, more or less alarmed, and pursued in this wise by the dipper, who does not know what to make of their fears, and soon the dipper is thus tolled along to within twenty feet of where i sit, and i can watch it at my leisure. it has a dark bill and considerable white on the sides of the head or neck, with black between it, no tufts, and no observable white on back or tail. when at last disturbed by me, it suddenly sinks low (all its body) in the water without diving. thus it can float at various heights. (so on the 30th i saw one sud denly dash along the surface from the meadow ten rods before me to the middle of the river, and then dive, and though i watched fifteen minutes and examined the tufts of grass, i could see no more of it.) pied-billed grebe ^ oct. 17, 1855. i saw behind (or rather in front of) me as i rowed home a little dipper appear in mid-river, as if i had passed right over him. it dived while i looked, and i could not see it come up anywhere. sept. 9, 1858. watched a little dipper ^ some ten rods ^ [probably moat of the " little dippers " whicli are referred to cas ually in thoreau's journal were of this species, though some were un doubtedly the (in fresh water) rarer horned grebe and others the buffle head duck.] ^ [on the 30th of the same month thoreau saw a " little dipper " which was "much smaller " than any others he had seen that season and concluded that he had not seen the real little dipper before. what loon 3 off with my glass, but i could see no white on the breast. it was all black and brownish, and head not enlarged. who knows how many little dippers are sailing and sedulously diving now along the edge of the pickerel weed and the button-bushes on our river, unsuspected by most? this hot september afternoon all may be quiet amid the weeds, but the dipper, and the bittern, and the yellow-legs, and the blue heron, and the rail are silently feeding there. at length the walker who sits meditating on a distant bank sees the little dipper sail out from amid the weeds and busily dive for its food along their edge. yet ordinary eyes might range up and down the river all day and never detect its small black head above the water. [/s'ee also under general and miscellaneous, pp. 417, 433.] loon 1845-47 (no exact date). the loon comes in the fall to sail and bathe in the pond,^ making the woods ring with its wild laughter in the early morning, at rumor of whose arrival all concord sportsmen are on the alert, in gigs, on foot, two by two, three by three, with pa tent rifles, patches, conical balls, spy-glass or open hole over the barrel. they seem already to hear the loon laugh ; come rustling through the woods like october leaves, these on this side, those on that, for the poor loon cannot be omnipresent ; if he dive here, must come he haa to say of this hird of september 9th will apply very well to the pied-billed grebe, however, and the paragraph is placed here for want of a better place.] 1 [walden pond.] 4 notes on new england birds up somewhere. the october wind rises, rustling the leaves, ruffling the pond water, so that no loon can be seen rippling the surface. our sportsmen scour, sweep the pond with spy-glass in vain, making the woods ring with rude [?] charges of powder, for the loon went off in that morning rain with one loud, long, hearty laugh, and our sportsmen must beat a retreat to town and stable and daily routine, shop work, unfinished jobs again. or in the gray dawn the sleeper hears the long duck ing gun explode over toward goose pond, and, hasten ing to the door, sees the remnant of a flock, black duck or teal, go whistling by with outstretched neck, with broken ranks, but in ranger order. and the silent hunter emero'es into the carriage road with ruffled feathers at his belt, from the dark pond-side where he has lain in his bower since the stars went out. and for a week you hear the circling clamor, clangor, of some solitary goose through the fog, seeking its mate, peopling the woods with a larger life than they can hold. for hours in fall days you shall watch the ducks cun ningly tack and veer and hold the middle of the pond, far from the sportsmen on the shore, — tricks they have learned and practiced in far canada lakes or in louisi ana bayous. the waves rise and dash, taking sides with all water fowl. oct. 8, 1852. p. m. — walden. as i was paddling along the north shore, after having looked in vain over the pond for a loon, suddenly a loon, sailing toward the middle, a few rods in front, set up his wild laugh and betrayed himself. i pursued with a paddle and he dived, loon 6 but when he came up i was nearer than before. he dived again, but i miscalculated the direction he would take, and we were fifty rods apart when he came up, and again he laughed long and loud. he managed very cunningly, and i could not get within half a dozen rods of him. sometimes he would come up unexpectedly on the opposite side of me, as if he had passed directly under the boat. so long-winded was he, so unweariable, that he would immediately plunge again, and then no wit could divine where in the deep pond, beneath the smooth surface, he might be speeding his way like a fish, perchance passing under the boat. he had time and ability to visit the bottom of the pond in its deepest part. a newspaper authority says a fisherman — giv ing his name — has caught loon in seneca lake, n. y., eighty feet beneath the surface, with hooks set for trout. miss cooper ^ has said the same. yet he appeared to know his course as surely under water as on the surface, and swam much faster there than he sailed on the sur face. it was surprising how serenely he sailed off with unrufled bosom when he came to the surface. it was as well for me to rest on my oars and await his reappear ing as to endeavor to calculate where he would come up. when i was straining my eyes over the surface, i would suddenly be startled by his unearthly laugh behind me. but why, after displaying so much cunning, did he be tray himself the moment he came to the surface with that loud laugh? his white breast enough betrayed him. he was indeed a silly loon, i thought. though he took all this pains to avoid me, he never failed to give notice ^ [susan fenimore cooper, rural hours, p. 10.] 6 notes on new england birds of his whereabouts the moment he came to the surface. after an hour he seemed as fresh as ever, dived as will ingly, and swam yet farther than at first. once or twice i saw a ripple where he approached the surface, just put his head out to reconnoitre, and instantly dived again. i could commonly hear the plash of the water when he came up, and so also detected him. it was commonly a demoniac laughter, yet somewhat like a water-bird, but occasionally, when he had balked me most successfully and come up a long way off, he uttered a long-drawn unearthly howl, probably more like a wolf than any other bird. this was his looning. as when a beast puts his muzzle to the ground and deliberately howls ; per haps the wildest sound i ever heard, making the woods ring ; and i concluded that he laughed in derision of my efforts, confident of his own resources. though the sky was overcast, the pond was so smooth that i could see where he broke the surface if i did not hear him. his white breast, the stillness of the air, the smoothness of the water, were all against him. at length, having come up fifty rods off, he uttered one of those prolonged unearthly howls, as if calling on the god of loons to aid him, and immediately there came a wind from the east and rippled the surface, and filled the whole air with misty rain. i was impressed as if it were the prayer of the loon and his god was angry with me. how surprised must be the fishes to see this ungainly visitant from another sphere speeding his way amid their schools ! i have never seen more than one at a time in our pond, and i believe that that is always a male.' ' [the sexes are indistinguishable.] little auk red-throated loon nov.11, 1858. goodwin* brings me this forenoon a this year's loon, which he just killed on the river, — great northern diver, but a smaller specimen than wil son describes and somewhat differently marked. it is twenty-seven inches long to end of feet by forty-four and bill three and three quarters to angle of mouth ; above blackish-gray with small white spots (two at end of each feather).^ beneath, pure white, throat and all, except a dusky bar across the vent. bill chiefly pale bluish and dusky. you are struck by its broad, flat, sharp-edged legs, made to cut through the water rather than to walk with, set far back and naturally stretched out backward, its long and powerful bill, conspicuous white throat and breast. dislodged by winter in the north, it is slowly travelling toward a warmer clime, diving in the cool river this morning, which is now full of light, the trees and bushes on the brink having long since lost their leaves, and the neighboring fields are white with frost. yet this hardy bird is comfortable and contented there if the sportsman would let it alone. dovekie; little auk july 25, 1860. p. m.— to mr. bradshaw's, way land, with ed. hoar. i was surprised to see among the birds which brad shaw has obtained the little auk of nuttall (^3iergulus ^ [john goodwin, a concord gunner and fisherman.] ^ [the size and markings indicate this species in spite of its rarity in fresh water in massachusetts. ] 8 notes on new england birds alle,^ or common sea-dove), which he says that he shot in the fall on the pond of the assabet at knight's fac tory. there were two, and the other was killed with a paddle. nov. 19, 1860. mr. bradshaw says that he got a little auk in wayland last week, and heard of two more, one in weston and the other in natick. thinks they came with the storm of the 10th and 11th. ^ [now called alle alle by the ornithologists.] ii gulls, terns, and petrels herring gull* april 4, 1852. there are three great gulls sailing in the middle [of fair haven], now my shouting (per chance) raises one, and, flying low and heavily over the water, with heavy shoulders and sharp beak, it ut ters its loud mewing or squeaking notes, — some of them like a squeaking pump-handle, — which sound very strange to our woods. it gives a different character to the pond, april 15, 1852. thinking of the value of the gull to the scenery of our river in the spring, when for a few weeks they are seen circling about so deliberately and heavily yet gracefully, without apparent object, beating like a vessel in the air, gilpin ^ says something to the purpose, — that water-fowl " discover in their flight some determined aim. they eagerly coast the river, or return to the sea ; bent on some purpose, of which they never lose sight. but the evolutions of the gull appear ca pricious, and undirected, both when she flies alone, and, as she often does, in large companies. — the more however her character suffers as a loiterer, the more it is raised in picturesque value, by her continuing longer ^ [most, if not all, of the large gulls seen by thoreau at conoord were doubtless of this species.] ^ [william gilpin, bemarks on forest scenery, london, 1794.] 10 notes on new england birds before the eye ; and displaying, in her elegant sweeps along the air, her sharp-pointed wings, and her bright silvery hue. — she is beautiful also, not only on the wing, but when she floats, in numerous assemblies on the water ; or when she rests on the shore, dotting either one or the other with white spots ; which, minute as they are, are very picturesque : . . . giving life and spirit to a view." he seems to be describing our very bird. i do not remeynher to have seen them over or in our river mead ows when there was not ice there. they come annually a-fishing here like royal hunters, to remind us of the 5ea and that our town, after all, lies but further up a creek of the universal sea, above the head of the tide. so ready is a deluge to overwhelm our lands, as the gulls to circle hither in the spring freshets. to see a gull beating high over our meadowy flood in chill and windy march is akin to seeing a mackerel schooner on the coast. it is the nearest approach to sailing vessels in our scenery. i never saw one at walden. oh, how it salts our fresh, our sweet-watered fair haven * all at once to see this sharp-beaked, greedy sea-bird beating over it ! for a while the water is brackish to my eyes. it is merely some herring pond, and if i climb the eastern bank i expect to see the atlantic there covered with countless sails. we are so far maritime, do not dwell beyond the range of the seagoing gull, the littoral birds. does not the gull come up after those suckers which i see ? ^ he is never to me perfectly in harmony ^ [fairhaven pond, or bay, in the sudbury river.] ■■' [dead suckers, which he goes on to philosophize about.] herring gull 11 with the scenery, but, like the high water, something unusual. ajjril 19, 1852. what comes flapping low with heavy wing over the middle of the flood ? is it an eagle or a fish hawk ? ah, now he is betrayed, i know not by what motion, — a great gull, right in the eye of the storm. he holds not a steady course, but suddenly he dashes upward even like the surf of the sea which he frequents, showing the under sides of his long, pointed wings, on which do i not see two white spots ? he sud denly beats upward thus as if to surmount the airy bil lows by a slanting course, as the teamster surmounts a slope. the swallow, too, plays thus fantastically and luxuriously and leisurely, doubling some unseen cor ners in the sky. here is a gull, then, long after ice in the river. it is a fine sight to see this noble bird lei surely advancing right in the face of the storm. april 7, 1853. a great gull, though it is so fair and the wind northwest, fishing over the flooded meadow. he slowly circles round and hovers with flapping wings in the air over particular spots, repeatedly returning there and sailing quite low over the water, with long, narrow, pointed wings, trembling throughout their length. march 29, 1854. a gull of pure white, — a wave of foam in the air. how simple and wave-like its outline, the outline of the wings presenting two curves, between which the tail is merely the point of junction, — all wing like a birch scale ; tail remarkably absorbed. march 18, 1855. i see with my glass as i go over the railroad bridge, sweeping the river, a great gull standing 12 notes on new england birds far away on the top of a muskrat-cabin which rises just above the water opposite the hubbard bath. when i get round within sixty rods of him, ten minutes later, he still stands on the same spot, constantly turning his head to every side, looking out for foes. like a wooden image of a bird he stands there, heavy to look at ; head, breast, beneath, and rump pure white ; slate-colored wings tipped with black and extending beyond the tail, — the herring gull. i can see clear down to its webbed feet. but now i advance, and he rises easily, goes off north eastward over the river with a leisurely flight. at clamshell hill i sweep the river again, and see, stand ing midleg deep on the meadow where the water is very shallow with deeper around, another of these wooden images, which is harder to scare. i do not fairly distin guish black tips to its wings. it is ten or fifteen minutes before i get him to rise, and then he goes off in the same leisurely manner, stroking the air with his wings, and now making a great circle back on its course, so you cannot tell which way it is bound. by standing so long motionless in these places they may perchance accom plish two objects, i. e., catch passing fish (suckers ?) like a heron and escape the attention of man. its utmost motion was to plume itself once and turn its head about. if it did not move its head, it would look like a decoy. our river is quite low for the season, and yet it is here without freshet or easterly storm. it seems to take this course on its migrations without regard to the state of the waters. april 15, 1855. before we rounded ball's hill, — the water now beautifully smooth, — at 2.30 p. m., we _j! herring gull 13 saw three gulls sailing on the glassy meadow at least half a mile off, by the oak peninsula, — the plainer because they were against the reflection of the hills. they looked larger than afterward close at hand, as if their white ness was reflected and doubled. as we advanced into the great meadows, making the only ripples in their broad expanse, there being still not a ray of sunshine, only a subdued light through the thinner crescent in the north, the reflections of the maples, of ponkawtasset and the poplar hill, and the whole township in the southwest, were as perfect as i ever saw. a wall which ran down to the water on the hillside, without any re markable curve in it, was exaggerated by the reflection into the half of an ellipse. the meadow was expanded to a large lake, the shore-line being referred to the sides of the hills reflected in it. it was a scene worth many such voyages to see. it was remarkable how much light those white gulls, and also a bleached post on a distant shore, absorbed and reflected through that sombre atmosphere, — conspicuous almost as candles in the night. when we got near to the gulls, they rose heavily and flapped away, answering a more distant one, with a remarkable, deliberate, melancholy, squeaking scream, mewing, or piping, almost a squeal. it was a little like the loon. is this sound the origin of the name sea-mew? notwithstanding the smoothness of the water, we could not easily see black ducks against the reflection of the woods, but heard them rise at a distance before we saw them. april 22, 1857. a dozen gulls are circling over fair haven pond, some very white beneath, with very long, 14 notes on new england birds narrow-pointed, black-tipped wings, almost regular semicircles like the new moon. as they circle beneath a white scud in this bright air, they are almost invisible against it, they are so nearly the same color. what glo rious fliers ! but few birds are seen ; only a crow or two teetering along the water's edge looking for its food, with its large, clumsy head, and on unusually long legs, as if stretched, or its pants pulled up to keep it from the wet, and now flapping off with some large morsel in its bill ; or robins in the same place ; or perhaps the sweet song of the tree sparrows from the alders by the shore, or of a song sparrow or blackbird. the phcebe is scarcely heard. not a duck do we see ! march 22, 1858. there is a strong and cool northwest wind. leaving our boat just below n. barrett's, we walk down the shore. we see many gulls on the very opposite side of the meadow, near the woods. they look bright white, like snow on the dark-blue water. it is surpris ing how far they can be seen, how much light they re flect, and how conspicuous they are. being strung along one every rod, they made me think of a fleet in line of battle. we go along to the pitch pine hill off abner buttrick's, and, finding a sheltered and sunny place, we watch the ducks from it with our glass. there are not only gulls, but about forty black ducks and as many sheldrakes, and, i think, two wood ducks. the gulls ap pear considerably the largest and make the most show, they are so uniformly light-colored. at a distance, as i have said, they look like snowy masses, and even nearer they have a lumpish look, like a mass of cotton, the head being light as well as the breast. they are seen herring gull 15 sailing about in the shallow water, or standing motion less on a clod that just rises above the surface, in which position they have a particularly clumsy look ; or one or two may be seen slowly wheeling about above the rest. from time to time the whole flock o£ gulls suddenly rises and begins circling about, and at last they settle down in some new place and order. with these were at first associated about forty black ducks, pretty close to gether, sometimes apparently in close single lines, some looking lumpish like decoys of wood, others standing on the bottom and reminding me of penguins. they were constantly diving with great energy, making the water fly apparently two feet upward in a thick shower. then away they all go, circling about for ten minutes at least before they can decide where to alight. the black heads and white breasts, which may be golden-eyes, for they are evidently paired, male and female, for the most part,^ — and yet i thought that i saw the red bill of the sheldrake, — these are most in cessantly and skillfully plunging and from time to time apparently pursuing each other. they are much more active, whether diving or swimming about, than you ex pect ducks to be. now, perchance, they are seen chang ing their ground, swimming off, perhaps, two by two, in pairs, very steadily and swiftly, without diving. i see two of these very far off on a bright-blue bay where the waves are running high. they are two intensely white specks, which yet you might mistake for the foaming crest of waves. now one disappears, but soon is seen 1 they are sheldrakes [t. e. american mergansers]. 16 notes on new england birds again, and then its companion is lost in like manner, having dived. march 16, 1859. we meet one great gull beating up the course of the river against the wind, at flint's bridge. (one says they were seen about a week ago, but there was very little water then.) its is a very leisurely sort of limping flight, tacking its way along like a sailing vessel, yet the slow security with which it advances sug gests a leisurely conteraplativeness in the bird, as if it were working out some problem quite at its leisure. as often as its very narrow, long, and curved wings are lifted up against the light, i see a very narrow distinct light edging to the wing where it is thin. its black-tipped wings. afterwards, from ball's hill, looking north, i see two more circling about looking for food over the ice and water. march 18, 1859. rice ^ thinks that he has seen two gulls on the sudbury meadows, — the white and the gray gulls. he has often seen a man shoot the large gull from cambridge bridge by heading him off, for the gull flies slowly. he would first run this way, and when the gull turned aside, run that, till the gull passed right over his head, when he shot him. rice saw fair haven pond still covered with ice, though open along the shore, yesterday. i frequently see the gulls flying up the course of the stream, or of the river valley at least. march 23, 1859. then i see come slowly flying from the southwest a great gull, of voracious form, which at length by a sudden and steep descent alights in fair * [israel rice, a sudbury farmer living near the river.] common tern; mackerel gull 17 haven pond, scaring up a crow which was seeking its food on the edge of the ice. this shows that the crows get along the meadow's edge also what has washed up. march 16, 1860. i also see two gulls nearly a mile off. one stands still and erect for three quarters of an hour, or till disturbed, on a little bit of floated meadow crust which rises above the water, — just room for it to stand on, — with its great white breast toward the wind. then another comes flying past it, and alights on a similar perch, but which does not rise quite to the sur face, so that it stands in the water. thus they will stand for an hour, at least. they are not of handsome form, but look like great wooden images of birds, bluish-slate and white. but when they fly they are quite another creature. [/s'ee also under american merganser, p. 27; wild ducks, p. 50 ; wild goose, p. 61 ; general and miscel laneous, pp. 412, 413.] common tern; mackerel gull june 21, 1857. at east harbor river, as i sat on the truro end of the bridge, i saw a great flock of mackerel gulls, one hundred at least, on a sandy point, whitening the shore there like so many white stones on the shore and in the water, uttering all together their vibrating shrill note. they had black heads, light bluish-slate wings, and light rump and tail and be neath. from time to time all or most would rise and circle about with a clamor, then settle again on the same spot close together. 18 notes on new england birds wilson's petrel; mother-carey's-chicken june 18, 1857. i had shortly before picked up a mother-carey's-ehicken, which was just washed up dead on the beach. ^ this i carried tied to the tip of my umbrella, dangling outside. when the inhabitants saw me come up from the beach this stormy day, with this emblem dangling from my umbrella, and saw me set it up in a corner carefully to be out of the way of cats, they may have taken me for a crazy man. . . . the mother-carey's-chicken was apparently about thirteen inches in alar extent, black-brown, with seven primaries, the second a little longer than the third ; rump and vent white, making a sort of ring of white, breast ashy -brown, legs black with yellowish webs, bill black with a protuberance above. jtine 22, 1857. it was a thick fog with some rain, and we saw no land nor a single sail, till near minot's ledge. ^ the boat stopped and whistled once or twice. the monotony was only relieved by the numerous pet rels,^ those black sea-swallows, incessantly skimming over the undulating [surface], a few inches above and parallel with it, and occasionally picking some food from it. now they dashed past our stern and now across our bows, as if we were stationary, though going at the rate of a dozen knots an hour. 1 [on cape cod.] ^ [on the steamer from provincetown to boston.] ^ [the season would indicate that these were probably wilson's petrels, rather than leach's, which in the latter part of june would be on their breeding-grounds.] ill ducks and geese american merganser; sheldrake; goosander march 29, 1853. four ducks, two by two, are sail ing conspicuously on the river. there appear to be two pairs. in each case one two-thirds white and another grayish-brown and, i think, smaller. they are very shy and fly at fifty rods' distance. are they whistlers ? ^ . . . would it not be well to carry a spy-glass in order to watch these shy birds such as ducks and hawks .'' in some respects, methinks, it would be better than a gun. the latter brings them nearer dead, but the former alive. you can identify the species better by killing the bird, because it was a dead specimen that was so minutely described, but you can study the habits and appearance best in the living specimen. these ducks first flew north, or somewhat against the wind (was it to get under weigh?), then wheeled, flew nearer me, and went south up-stream, where i saw them after ward. april 23, 1854. i had first seen two white ducks far off just above the outlet of the pond, mistaking them ^ these were either mergansers or the golden-eye ; i think the for mer, t. e. mergus serrator, or red-breasted merganser (?), or sheldrake. [thoreau's " sheldrakes " were doubtless with few exceptions ameri can mergansers (mergus americanus) , which species is much commoner in fresh water than the red-breasted. his descriptions indicate this fpecies.] 20 notes on new england birds for the foaming crest of a wave. these flew soon, per haps scared by the eagle. i think they were a male and female red-breasted merganser (though i did [not] see the red of the breast), for i saw his red bill, and his head was not large with a crest like the golden-eye ; very white on breast and sides, the female browner.^ as ducks often do, they first flew directly and unhesi tatingly up the stream, low over the water, for half a mile, then turned and came down, flying thirty or forty feet above the water, the male leading till they were out of sight. this is the way with them, i notice ; they first fly in one direction and thep go ofif to alight in another. when they came down the river, the male leading, they were a very good example of the peculiar flight of ducks. they appeared perfectly in a line one behind the other. when they are not they preserve perfect parallelism. this is because of their long necks and feet, — the wings appearing to be attached mid way, — and moreover, in this case, of their perfectly level flight, as if learned from skimming over the water. april 6, 1855. you can hear all day, from time to time, in any part of the village, the sound of a gun fired at ducks. yesterday i was wishing that i could find a dead duck floating on the water, as i had found musk rats and a hare, and now i see something bright and reflecting the light from the edge of the alders five or six rods off. can it be a duck ? i can hardly believe my eyes. i am near enough to see its green head and neck. i am delighted to find a perfect specimen of the mcrgu& ^ certainly mergansers, probably sheldrakes. american merganser 21 merganser,^ or goosander, undoubtedly shot yesterday by the fast-day sportsmen, and i take a small flattened shot from its wing, — flattened against the wing-bone, apparently. the wing is broken, and it is shot through the head. 2 it is a perfectly fresh and very beautiful bird, and as i raise it, i get sight of its long, slender vermil ion bill (color of red sealing-wax) and its clean, bright orange legs and feet, and then of its perfectly smooth and spotlessly pure white breast and belly, tinged with a faint salmon (or tinged with a delicate buff inclining to salmon). . . . my bird is 25|^ inches long and 35 in alar extent ; from point of wing to end of primaries, 11 inches. it is a great diver and does not mind the cold. it appears admirably fitted for diving and swimming. its body is flat, and its tail short, flat, compact, and wedge shaped ; its eyes peer out a slight slit or semi-circle in the skin of the head ; and its legs are flat and thin in one di rection, and the toes shut up compactly so as to create the least friction when drawing them forward, but their broad webs spread them three and a half inches when they take a stroke. the web is extended three eighths of an inch beyond the inner toe of each foot. there are very conspicuous black teeth-like serrations along the edges of its bill, and this also is roughened so that it may hold its prey securely. the breast appeared quite dry when i raised it from the water. 1 [the american species, of course, now known as mergus americanus ] 2 the chief wound was in a wing, which was broken. i afterward took three small shot from it, which were flattened against the bill's base and perhaps (?) the quills' shafts. 22 notes on new england birds the head and neck are, as wilson says, black, glossed with green, but the lower part of the neck pure white, and these colors bound on each other so abruptly that one appears to be sewed on to the other. it is a perfect wedge from the middle of its body to the end of its tail, and it is only three and a quarter inches deep from back to breast at the thickest part, while the greatest breadth horizontally (at the root of the legs) is five and a half inches. in these respects it reminds me of an otter, which, however, i have never seen. i suspect that i have seen near a hundred of these birds this spring, but i never got so near one before. aphl 7, 1855. in my walk in the afternoon of to day, i saw from conantum,' say fifty rods distant, two sheldrakes, male and probably female, sailing on a. wheeler's cranberry meadow. i saw only the white of the male at first, but my glass revealed the female. the male is easily seen a great distance on the water, being a large white mark. but they will let you come only within some sixty rods ordinarily. i observed that they were uneasy at sight of me and began to sail away in different directions. i could plainly see the vermilion bill of the male and his orange legs when he flew (but he appeared all white above), and the reddish brown or sorrel of the neck of the female, and, when she lifted herself in the water, as it were preparatory to flight, her white breast and belly. she had a grayish look on the sides. soon they approached each other again and * [a tract of land on the sudbury river, so called by thoreau from the conant family, who formerly lived there.] american merganser 23 seemed to be conferring, and then tliey rose and went off, at first low, down-stream, soon up-stream a hundred feet over the pond, the female leading, the male follow ing close behind, the black at the end of his curved wings very conspicuous. i suspect that about all the conspicuous white ducks i see are goosanders. i skinned my duck yesterday and stuffed it to-day. it is wonderful that a man, having undertaken such an enterprise, ever persevered in it to the end, and equally wonderful that he succeeded. to skin a bird, drawing backward, wrong side out, over the legs and wings down to the base of the mandibles ! who would expect to see a smooth feather again? this skin was very ten der on the breast. i should have done better had i stuffed it at once or turned it back before the skin be came stiff. look out not to cut the ear and eyelid. but what a pot-bellied thing is a stuffed bird com pared even with the fresh dead one i found! it looks no longer like an otter, like a swift diver, but a mere waddling duck. how perfectly the vent of a bird is covered ! there is no mark externally. april 10, 1855. i see afar, more than one hundred rods distant, sailing on hubbard's meadow, on the smooth water in the morning sun, conspicuous, two male sheldrakes and apparently one female. they glide along, a rod or two apart in shallow water, alternately passing one another and from time to time plunging their heads in the water, but the female (whom only the glass reveals) almost alone diving. i think i saw one male drive the other back. one male with the female kept nearly together, a rod or two ahead of the other. 24 notes on new england birds april 16, 1855. at flint's/ sitting on the rock, we see a great many ducks, mostly sheldrakes, on the pond, which will hardly abide us within half a mile. with the glass i see by their reddish heads that all of one party — the main body — are females. you see little more than their heads at a distance and not much white but on their throats, perchance. when they fly, they look black and white, but not so large nor with that brilliant contrast of black and white which the male exhibits. in another direction is a male by himself, conspicuous, per haps several. anon alights near us a flock of golden eyes — surely^ with their great black (looking) heads and a white patch on the side ; short stumpy bills (after looking at the mergansers) ; much clear black, contrast ing with much clear white. their heads and bills look ludicrously short and parrot-like after the others. our presence and a boat party on the pond at last drove nearly all the ducks into the deep easterly cove. we stole down on them carefully through the woods, at last crawling on our bellies, with great patience, till at last we found ourselves within seven or eight rods — as i measured afterward — of the great body of them, and watched them for twenty or thirty minutes with the glass through a screen of cat-briar, alders, etc. there were twelve female sheldrakes close together, and, near est us, within two rods of the shore, where it was very shallow, two or more constantly moving about within about the diameter of a rod and keeping watch while the rest were trying to sleep, — to catch a nap with their heads in their backs ; but from time to time one ' [flint's, or sandy, pond, in lincoln, mass.] american merganser 25 would wake up enough to plume himself. it seemed as if they must have been broken of their sleep and were trying to make it up, having an arduous journey before them, for we had seen them all disturbed and on the wing within half an hour. they were headed various ways. now and then they seemed to see or hear or smell us, and uttered a low note of alarm, something like the note of a tree-toad, but very faint, or perhaps a little more wiry and like that of pigeons, but the sleepers hardly lifted their heads for it. how fit that this note of alarm should be made to resemble the croaking of a frog and so not betray them to the gunners ! they ap peared to sink about midway in the water, and their heads were all a rich reddish brown, their throats white. now and then one of the watchmen would lift his head and turn his bill directly upward, showing his white throat. there were some black or dusky ducks in company with them at first, apparently about as large as they, but more alarmed. their throats looked straw-colored, somewhat like a bittern's, and i saw their shovel bills. these soon sailed further off. at last we arose and rushed to the shore within three rods of them, and they rose up with a din, — twenty six mergansers (i think all femailes), ten black ducks, — and five golden-eyes from a little further off, also another still more distant flock of one of these kinds. the black ducks alone uttered a sound, their usual hoarse quack. they all flew in loose array, but the three kinds in separate flocks. we were surprised to find ourselves looking on a company of birds devoted to 26 notes on new england birds slumber after the alarm and activity we had just witnessed. march 1, 1856. it is remarkable that though i have not been able to find any open place in the river almost all winter, except under the further stone bridge and at loring's brook, — this winter so remarkable for ice and snow, — coombs * should (as he says) have killed two sheldrakes at the falls by the factory,^ a place which i had forgotten, some four or six weeks ago. singular that this hardy bird should have found this small opening, which i had forgotten, while the ice everywhere else was from one to two feet thick, and the snow sixteen inches on a level. if there is a crack amid the rocks of some waterfall, this bright diver is sure to know it. ask the sheldrake whether the rivers are completely sealed up. april 5, 1856. saw half a dozen white sheldrakes in the meadow, where nut meadow brook was covered witli the flood. there were two or three females with them. these ducks would all swim together first a little way to the right, then suddenly turn together and swim to the left, from time to time making the water fly in a white spray, apparently with awing. nearly half a mile off i could see their green crests in the sun. they were partly concealed by some floating pieces of ice and snow, which they resembled. april 24, 1856. a garfield (i judge from his face) confirmed the story of sheldrakes killed in an open place in the river between the factory and harrington's, just after the first great snow-storm (which must have ^ [a concord man, one of the pigeon-catchers.] 2 [on the assabet river.] american merganser 27 been early in january) when the river was all frozen elsewhere. there were three, and they persisted in staying and fishing there. he killed one. march 27, 1858. p. m. — sail to bittern cliff. scare up a flock of sheldrakes just off fair haven hill, the conspicuous white ducks, sailing straight hither and thither. at first they fly low up the stream, but, having risen, come back half-way to us, then wheel and go up-stream. soon after we scare up a flock of black ducks. we land and steal over the hill through the woods, expecting to find them under lee's cliff, as indeed we do, having crawled over the hill through the woods on our stomachs ; and there we watched various water-fowl for an hour. there are a dozen sheldrakes (or goosanders) and among them four or five females. they are now pairing. i should say one or two pairs are made. at first we see only a male and female quite on the alert, some way out on the pond, tacking back and forth and looking every way. they keep close together, headed one way, and when one turns the other also turns quickly. the male appears to take the lead. soon the rest appear, sailing out from the shore into sight. we hear a squeaking note, as if made by a pump, and presently see four or five great herring gulls wheeling about. sometimes they make a sound like the scream of a hen-hawk. they are shaped somewhat like a very thick white rolling-pin, sharpened at both ends. at length they alight near the ducks. the sheldrakes at length acquire confidence, come close inshore and go to preening themselves, or it may be they are troubled with lice. they are all busy about 28 notes on new england birds it at once, continually thrusting their bills into their backs, still sailing slowly along back and forth offshore. sometimes they are in two or three straight lines. now they will all seem to be crossing the pond, but pre sently you see that they have tacked and are all head ing this way again. among them, or near by, i at length detect three or four whistlers, by their wanting the red bill, being considerably smaller and less white, having a white spot on the head, a black back, and altogether less white, and also keeping more or less apart and not diving when the rest do. now one half the sheldrakes sail off southward and suddenly go to diving as with one consent. seven or eight or the whole of the party will be under water and lost at once. in the meanwhile, coming up, they chase one another, scooting over the surface and making the water fly, sometimes three or four making a rush toward one. the sheldrake has a peculiar long clipper look, often moving rapidly straight forward over the water. it sinks to very various depths in the water sometimes, as when apparently alarmed, showing only its head and neck and the upper part of its back, and at others, when at ease, floating buoyantly on the surface, as if it had taken in more air, showing all its white breast and the white along its sides. sometimes it lifts itself up on the surface and flaps its wings, revealing its whole rosaceous breast and its lower parts, and look ing in form like a penguin. when i first saw them fly up-stream i suspected that they had gone to fair american merganser 29 haven pond and would alight under the lee of the cliff. so, creeping slowly down through the woods four or five rods, i was enabled to get a fair sight of them, and finally we sat exposed on the rocks within twenty-five xods. they appear not to observe a person so high above them. it was a pretty sight to see a pair of them tacking about, always within a foot or two of each other and heading the same way, now on this short tack, now on that, the male taking the lead, sinking deep and looking every way. when the whole twelve had come together they would soon break up again, and were continually changing their ground, though not diving, now sailing slowly this way a dozen rods, and now that, and now coming in near the shore. then they would all go to preening themselves, thrusting their bills into their backs and keeping up such a brisk motion that you could not get a fair sight of one's head. from time to time you heard a slight titter, not of alarm, but perhaps a breeding-note, for they were evidently selecting their mates. i saw one scratch its ear or head with its foot. then it was surprising to see how, briskly sailing off one side, they went to diving, as if they had suddenly come across a school of minnows. a whole company would disappear at once, never rising high as before. now for nearly a minute there is not a feather to be seen, and the next minute you see a party of half a dozen there, chasing one another and making the water fly far and wide. when returning, we saw, near the outlet of the pond, seven or eight sheldrakes standing still in a line on the 30 notes on new england birds edge of the ice, and others swimming close by. they evidently love to stand on the ice for a change. march 30, 1858. landing at bittern cliff, i went round through the woods to get sight of ducks on the pond. creeping down through the woods, i reached the rocks, and saw fifteen or twenty sheldrakes scattered about. the full-plumaged males, conspicuously black and white and often swimming in pairs, appeared to be the most wary, keeping furthest out. others, with much less white and duller black, were very busily fishing just north the inlet of the pond, where there is about three feet of water, and others still playing and preen ing themselves. these ducks, whose tame representa tives are so sluggish and deliberate in their motions, were full of activity. a party of these ducks fishing and playing is a very lively scene. on one side, for in stance, you will see a party of eight or ten busily diving and most of the time under water, not rising high when they come up, and soon plunging again. the whole sur face will be in commotion there, though no ducks may be seen. i saw one come up with a large fish, where upon all the rest, as they successively came to the sur face, gave chase to it, while it held its prey over the water in its bill, and they pursued with a great rush and clatter a dozen or more rods over the surface, mak ing a great furrow in the water, but, there being some trees in the way, i could not see the issue. i saw seven or eight all dive together as with one consent, remain ing under half a minute or more. on another side you see a party which seem to be playing and pluming themselves. they will run and dive and come up and american merganser 31 dive again every three or four feet, occasionally one pursuing another ; will flutter in the water, making it fly, or erect themselves at full length on the surface like a penguin, and flap their wings. this party make an incessant noise. again you will see some steadily tacking this way or that in the middle of the pond, and often they rest there asleep with their heads in their backs. they readily cross the pond, swimming from this side to that. april 19, 1858. rice tells me of winging a sheldrake once just below fair haven pond, and pursuing it in a boat as it swam down the stream, till it went ashore at hubbard's wood and crawled into a woodchuck's hole about a rod from the water on a wooded bank. he could see its tail and pulled it out. jiarch 23, 1859. as we sit there, we see coming, swift and straight, northeast along the river valley, not seeing us and therefore not changing his course, a male goosander, so near that the green reflections of his head and neck are plainly visible. he looks like a paddle wheel steamer, so oddly painted up, black and white and green, and moves along swift and straight like one. ere long the same returns with his mate, the red throated, the male taking the lead. march 30, 1859. see on walden two sheldrakes, male and female, as is common. so they have for some time paired. they are a hundred rods off. the male the larger, with his black head and white breast, the female with a red head. with my glass i see the long red bills of both. they swim at first one way near to gether, then tack and swim the other, looking around 32 notes on new england birds incessantly, never quite at their ease, wary and watch ful for foes. a man cannot walk down to the shore or stand out on a hill overlooking the pond without dis turbing them. they will have an eye upon him. the locomotive-whistle makes every wild duck start that is floating within the limits of the town. i see that these ducks are not here for protection alone, for at last they both dive, and remain beneath about forty pulse-beats, — and again, and again. i think they are looking for fishes. perhaps, therefore, these divers are more likely to alight in walden than the black ducks are. april 2, 1859. from near this cliff, i watch a male sheldrake in the river with my glass. it is very busily pluming itself while it sails about, and from time to time it raises itself upright almost entirely out of water, showing its rosaceous breast. it is some sixty rods off, yet i can see the red bill distinctly when it is turned against its white body. soon after i see two more, and one, which i think is not a female, is more gray and far less distinctly black and white than the other. i think it is a young male and that it might be called by some a gray duck. however, if you show yourself within sixty rods, they will fly or swim off, so shy are they. yet in the fall i sometimes get close upon a young bird, which dashes swiftly across or along the river and dives. aiiril 12, 1859. saw a duck, apparently a sheldrake, at the northeast end of cyanean meadow, it disap peared at last by diving, and i could not find it. but i saw what looked like a ripple made by the wind, which moved slowly down the river at least forty rods amekican merganser 33 toward the shore and there disappeared. though i saw no bird there, i suspect that the ripple was made by it. two sheldrakes flew away from this one when first ob served. why did this remain? was it wounded? or can those which dart so swiftly across the river and dive be another species and not the young of the sea son or females of the common one ? is it not, after all, the red-breasted merganser, and did i not see them in maine? ^ i see half a dozen sheldrakes very busily fishing around the base of lupine hill or promontory. there are two full-plumaged males and the rest females, or perhaps some of them young males. they are coasting along swiftly with their bodies sunk low and their heads half under, looking for their prey, one behind another, frequently turning and passing over the same ground again. their crests are very conspicuous, thus : when one sees a fish he at first swims rapidly after it, and then, if necessary, flies close over the water after it, and this excites all the rest to follow, swimming or flying, and if one seizes the fish, which 1 suspect is commonly a pickei-el, they all pursue the lucky fisher, and he makes the water fly far in his efforts to get away and gulp down his fish. i can see the fish in his bill all the while, and he must swallow it very skillfully and quickly, if at all. i was first attracted to them by seeing these great birds rushing, shooting, thus swiftly through the air and water and throwing the water high about them. sometimes they dive and swim quietly ■' [if the males as well as the females had the crests mentioned later the birds were, of course, red-breasted mergansers.] 34 notes on new england birds beneath, looking for their game. at length they spy me or my boat, and i hear a faint quack indicative of alarm, and suddenly all arise and go off. in the meanwhile i see two black ducks sailing with them along the shore. these look considerably smaller, and of course carry their heads more erect. they have a raw, gosling look beside the others, and i see their light bills against their dusky necks and heads. at length, when i get near them, i hear their peculiar quack also, and off they go. the sheldrakes appear to be a much more lively bird than the black duck. how different from the waddling domestic duck ! the former are all alive, eagerly fishing, quick as thought, as they need to be to catch a pickerel. feb. 27, 1860. i had noticed for some time, far in the middle of the great meadows, something dazzlingly white, which i took, of course, to be a small cake of ice on its end, but now that i have climbed the pitch pine hill and can overlook the whole meadow, i see it to be the white breast of a male sheldrake, accompanied per haps by his mate (a darker one). they have settled warily in the very midst of the meadow, where the wind has blown a space of clear water for an acre or two. the aspect of the meadow is sky-blue and dark-blue, the former a thin ice, the latter the spaces of open water which the wind has made, but it is chiefly ice still. thus, as soon as the river breaks up or begins to break up fairly, and the strong wind widening the cracks makes at length open spaces in the ice of the meadow, this hardy bird ajjpears, and is seen sailing in the first widened crack in the ice, where it can come at the american merganser 35 water. instead of a piece of ice i find it to be the breast of the sheldrake, which so reflects the light as to look larger than it is, steadily sailing this way and that with its companion, who is diving from time to time. they have chosen the opening farthest removed from all shores. as i look i see the ice drifting in upon them and contracting their water, till finally they have but a few square rods left, while there ai-e forty or fifty acres near by. this is the first bird of the spring that i have seen or heard of. march 16, 1860. saw a flock of sheldrakes a hundred rods off, on the great meadows, mostly males with a few females, all intent on fishing. they were coasting along a spit of bare ground that showed itself in the middle of the meadow, sometimes the whole twelve apparently in a straight line at nearly equal distances apart, with each its head under water, rapidly coasting along back and forth, and ever and anon one, having caught something, would be pursued by the others. it is remarkable that they find their finny prey on the middle of the meadow now, and even on the very inmost side, as i afterward saw, though the water is quite low. of course, as soon as they are seen on the meadows there are fishes there to be caught. i never see them fish thus in the channel. perhaps the fishes lie up there for warmth already. march 17, 1860. i see a large flock of sheldrakes, which have probably risen from the pond, go over my head in the woods. a dozen large and compact birds flying with great force and rapidity, spying out the land, eyeing every traveller, fast and far they " steam it " on 36 notes on new england birds clipping wings, over field and forest, meadow and flood ; now here, and you hear the whistling of their wings, and in a moment they are lost in the horizon. like swift propellers of the air. whichever way they are headed, that way their wings propel them. what health and vigor they suggest ! the life of man seems slow and puny in comparison, — reptilian. [<see also under herring gull, p. 15 ; w^ild ducks, pp. 50, 51 ; general and miscellaneous, p. 423.] black duck; dusky duck april 1, 1853. saw ten black ducks at clamshell. had already started two, who probably occupied an outpost. they all went off with a loud and disagreeable quacking like ducks in a poultry-yard, their wings ap pearing lighter beneath. march 21, 1854. at sunrise to clamshell hill. river skimmed over at willow bay last night. thought i should find ducks cornered up by the ice ; they get behind this hill for shelter. saw what looked like clods of plowed meadow rising above the ice. looked with glass and found it to be more than thirty black ducks asleep with their heads in their backs, motion less, and thin ice formed about them. soon one or two were moving about slowly. there was an open space, eight or ten rods by one or two. at first all within a space of apparently less than a rod in diameter. it was 6.30 a. m., and the sim shining on them, but bitter cold. how tough they are ! i crawled far on my stomach and got a near view of them, thirty rods off. at length they de tected me and quacked. some got out upon the ice, and black duck 37 when i rose up all took to flight in a great straggling flock which at a distance looked like crows, in no order. yet, when you see two or three, the parallelism pro duced by their necks and bodies steering the same way gives the idea of order. april 21, 1855. watched for some time a dozen black ducks on the meadow's edge in a retired place, some on land and some sailing. fifty rods off and with out the glass, they looked like crows feeding on the meadow's edge, with a scarcely perceptible tinge of brown. i^eh. 29, 1856. he * loves to recall his hunting days and adventures, and i willingly listen to the stories he has told me half a dozen times already. one day he saw about twenty black ducks on goose pond, and stole down on them, thinking to get a shot, but it chanced that a stray dog scared them up before he was ready. he stood on the point of the neck of land between the ponds, and watched them as they flew high toward flint's pond. as he looked, he saw one separate from the flock when they had got half-way to flint's pond, or half a mile, and return straight toward goose pond again. he thought he would await him, and give him a shot if he came near enough. as he flew pretty near and rather low, he fired, whereupon the duck rose right up high into the air, and he saw by his motions that he was wounded. suddenly he dropped, by a slanting fall, into the point of a thick pine wood, and he heard him plainly strike the ground like a stone. he went there and searched for a long time, and was about giviug it up, ^ [george minott.] 38 notes on new england birds when at length he saw the duck standing, still alive and bleeding, by the side of a stump, and made out to kill liim with a stick before he could reach the water. april 9, 1856. paddled quite to the head of pinxter swamp, where were two black ducks amid the maples, which went off with a hoarse quacking, leaving a feather on the smooth dark water amid the fallen tree-tops and over the bottom of red leaves. april 14, 1856. there go a couple of ducks, which probably i have started, now scaling far away on mo tionless pinions, with a slight descent in their low flight, toward some new cove. anon i scare up two black ducks which make one circle around me, reconnoitring and rising higher and higher, then go down the river. is it they that so commonly practice this manceuvre ? june 23, 1857. skinner, the harness-maker, tells me that he found a black duck's nest sunday before the last, i. e. the 14th, with perhaps a dozen eggs in it, a mere hollow on the top of a tussock, four or five feet within a clump of bushes forming an islet (in the spring) in hubbard's great meadow. he scared up the duck when within a few feet. . . . p. m. — looked for the black duck's nest, but could find no trace of it. probably the duck led her young to the river as soon as hatched. what with gunners, dogs, pickerel, bullfrogs, hawks, etc., it is a wonder if any of them escape. «/zf 7ie 24, 1857. melvin^ thinks there cannot be many black ducks' nests in the town, else his dog would find them, for he will follow their trail as well as another ^ [george melvin, a concord gunner and fisherman.] black duck 39 bird's, or a fox. the dog once caught five black ducks here but partly grown. july 2), 1857. minott says that old joe merriam used to tell of his shooting black ducks in the dam meadows and what luck he had. one day he had shot a couple of ducks and was bringing them home by the legs, when he came to a ditch. as he had his gun in the other hand, and the ditch was wide, he thought he would toss the ducks over before he jumped, but they had no sooner struck the ground than they picked themselves up and flew away, which discouraged him with respect to duck-shooting. oct. 14, 1857. approaching white pond by the path, i see on its perfectly smooth surface what i at first mistake for a large raft of dead and black logs and limbs, but it soon elevates itself in the form of a large flock of black ducks, which go off with a loud quacking. march 31, 1858. i see about a dozen black ducks on flint's pond, asleep with their heads in their backs and drifting across the pond before the wind. i suspect that they are nocturnal in their habits and therefore require much rest by day. so do the seasons revolve and every chink is filled. while the waves toss this bright day, the ducks, asleep, are drifting before it across the ponds. every now and then one or two lift their heads and look about, as if they watched by turns. . . . the leaves are now so dry and loose that it is almost impossible to ap proach the shore of the pond without being heard by the ducks. april 2, 1858. see how those black ducks, swimming in pairs far off on the river, are disturbed by our ap 40 notes on new england birds pearance, swimming away in alarm, and now, when we advance again, they rise and fly up-stream and about, uttering regularly a crack cr-r-rack of alarm, even for five or ten minutes, as they circle about, long after we have lost sight of them. now we hear it on this side, now on that. [xs'ee also under herring gull, pp. 13, 15 ; american merganser, pp. 25, 34 ; wild goose, p. 60 ; general and miscellaneous, p. 418.] wood duck; summer duck oct. 29, 1887. two ducks, of the summer or wood species, which were merrily dabbling in their favorite basin [at goose pond], struck up a retreat on my approach, and seemed disposed to take french leave, paddling off with swan-like majesty. they are first-rate swimmers, beating me at a round pace, and — what was to me a new trait in the duck character — dove every minute or two and swam several feet under water, in order to escape our attention.^ just before immersion they seemed to give each other a significant nod, and then, as if by a common understanding, 't was heels up and head down in the shaking of a duck's wing. when they reappeared, it was amusing to observe with what a self-satisfied, darn-it-how-he-nicks-'em air they paddled off to repeat the experiment. aug. 6, 1855. at ball's hill see five summer ducks, a brood now grown, feeding amid the pads on the op posite side of the river, with a whitish ring, perhaps ^ [wood ducks do not commonly dive. thoreau may have been mis taken as to the species.] wood duck; summer duck 41 nearly around neck. a rather shrill squeaking quack when they go off. it is remarkable how much more game you will see if you are in the habit of sitting in the fields and woods. as you pass along with a noise it hides itself, but presently comes forth again. ivbv. 9, 1855. saw in the pool at the hemlocks what i at first thought was a brighter leaf moved by the zephyr on the surface of the smooth dark water, but it was a splendid male summer duck, which allowed us to approach within seven or eight rods, sailing up close to the shore, and then rose and flew up the curving stream. we soon overhauled it again, and got a fair and long view of it. it was a splendid bird, a perfect floating gem, and blake, ^ who had never seen the like, was greatly surprised, not knowing that so splendid a bird was found in this part of the world. there it was, con stantly moving back and forth by invisible means and wheeling on the smooth surface, showing now its breast, now its side, now its rear. it had a large, rich, flowing, green burnished crest, — a most ample head-dress, — two crescents of dazzling white on the side of the head and the black neck, a pinkish(?)-red bill (with black tip) and similar irides, and a long white mark under and at wing point on sides ; the side, as if the form of wing at this distance, light bronze or greenish brown ; but, above all, its breast, when it turns into the right light, all aglow with splendid purple (?) or ruby (?) reflections, like the throat of the hummingbird. it might not appear so close at hand. this was the most surprising to me. what an ornament to a river to see ^ [thoreau's friend harrison g. 0. blake of worcester, mass.] 42 notes on new england birds that glowing gem floating in contact with its waters ! as if the hummingbird should recline its ruby throat and its breast on the water. like dipping a glowing coal in water ! it so affected me. it became excited, fluttered or flapped its wings with a slight whistling noise, and arose and flew two or three rods and alighted. it sailed close up to the edge of a rock, by which it lay pretty still, and finally sailed fast up one side of the river by the willows, etc., off the duck swamp beyond the spring, now and then turning and sailing back a foot or two, while we paddled up the opposite side a rod in the rear, for twenty or thirty rods. at length we went by it, and it flew back low a few rods to where we roused it. it never offered to dive. we came equally near it again on our return. unless you are thus near, and have a glass, the splendor and beauty of its colors will not be discovered. that duck was all jewels combined, showing differ ent lustres as it turned on the unrippled element in various lights, now brilliant glossy green, now dusky violet, now a rich bronze, now the reflections that sleep in the ruby's grain. aug. 3, 1856. two small ducks (probably wood ducks) flying south. already grown, and at least look ing south ! ! it reminds me of the swift revolution of the seasons. arig. 16, 1858. in my boating of late i have sev eral times scared up a couple of summer ducks of this year, bred in our meadows. they allowed me to come quite near, and helped to people the river. i have not wood duck; summer duck 43 seen them for some days. would you know the end of our intercourse? goodwin shot them, and mrs. , who never sailed on the river, ate them. of course, she knows not what she did. what if i should eat her canary? thus we share each other's sins as well as burdens. the lady who watches admiringly the matador shares his deed. they belonged to me, as much as to any one, when they were alive, but it was considered of more importance that mrs. should taste the flavor of them dead than that i should enjoy the beauty of them alive. july 27, 1860. see, twenty rods or more down stream, four or five young ducks, which appear already to be disturbed by my boat. so, leaving that to attract their attention, i make my way alongshore in the high grass and behind the trees till i am opposite to them. at a distance they appear simply black and white, as they swim deep, — black backs and white throats. now i find that they have retreated a little into the ponte deria, and are very busily diving, or dipping, not im mersing their whole bodies, but their heads and shoul ders while their bodies are perfectly perpendicular, just like tame ducks. all of them close together will be in this attitude at the same moment. i now see that the throat, and probably upper part, at least, of breast, is clear-white, and there is a clear line of white above eye and on neck within a line of black; and as they stand on their heads, the tips apparently of their tails (pos sibly wings??) are conspicuously white or whitish; the upper part, also, is seen to be brownish rather than black. i presume these to be young summer ducks, though so dark ; say two-thirds grown. 44 notes on new england birds how easy for the young ducks to hide amid the pick erel-weed along our river, while a boat goes by ! and this plant attains its height when these water-fowl are of a size to need its shelter. thousands of them might be concealed by it along our river, not to speak of the luxuriant sedge and grass of the meadows, much of it so wet as to be inaccessible. these ducks are diving scarcely two feet within the edge of the pickerdl-weed, yet one who had not first seen them exposed from a distance would never suspect their neighborhood. sej)t. 17, 1860. see a flock of eight or ten wood ducks on the grindstone meadow, with glass, some twenty-five rods off, — several drakes very handsome. they utter a creaking scream as they sail there, — being alarmed, — from time to time, shrill and loud, very unlike the black duck. at last one sails off, call ing the others by a short creaking note. [/s'ee also under general and miscellaneous, pp. 418, 432, 433.] american golden-eye; whistler [^see under american merganser, pp. 24, 25, 28.] buffle-head ; buffle-headed duck april 19, 1855. from heywood's peak i thought i saw the head of a loon in the pond, thirty-five or forty rods distant. bringing my glass to bear, it seemed sunk very low in the water, — all the neck concealed, — but i could not tell which end was the bill. at length i discovered that it was the whole body of a little duck, asleep with its head in its back, exactly in the middle buffle-head 45 of the pond. it had a moderate-sized black head and neck, a white breast, and seemed dark-brown above, with a white spot on the side of the head, not reaching to the outside, from base of mandibles, and another, perhaps, on the end of the wing, with some black there. it sat drifting round a little, but with ever its breast to ward the wind, and from time to time it raised its head and looked round to see if it were safe. i think it was the smallest duck lever saw. floating buoyantly asleep on the middle of walden pond. was it not a female of the buffle-headed or spirit duck? i believed the wings looked blacker when it flew, with some white beneath. it floated like a little casket, and at first i doubted a good while if it possessed life, until i saw it raise its head and look around. it had chosen a place for its nap exactly equidistant between the two shores there, and, with its breast to the wind, swung round only as much as a vessel held by its anchors in the stream. at length the cars scared it. wild ducks (species unnamed) march 16, 1840. the ducks alight at this season on the windward side of the river, in the smooth water, and swim about by twos and threes, pluming themselves and diving to peck at the root of the lily and the cran berries which the frost has not loosened. it is impos sible to approach them within gunshot when they are accompanied by the gull, which rises sooner and makes them restless. they fly to windward first, in order to get under weigh, and are more easily reached by the shot if approached on that side. when preparing to 46 notes on new england birds fly, they swim about witli their heads erect, and then, gliding along a few feet with their bodies just touching the surface, rise heavily with much splashing and fly low at first, if not suddenly aroused, but otherwise rise directly to survey the danger. the cunning sportsman is not in haste to desert his position, but waits to ascer tain if, having got themselves into flying trim, they will not return over the ground in their course to a new resting-place. april 10, 1852. took boat at stedman buttrick's, a gunner's boat, smelling of rauskrats and provided with slats for bushing the boat. having got into the great meadows, after grounding once or twice on low spits of grass ground, we begin to see ducks which we have scared, flying low over the water, always with a striking parallelism in the direction of their flight. they fly like regulars. they are like rolling-pins with wings. a few gulls, sailing like hawks, seen against the woods ; crows ; white-bellied swallows even here, already, which, i sup pose, proves that their insect food is in the air. . . . ducks most commonly seen flying by twos or threes. from carlisle bridge we saw many ducks a quar ter of a mile or more northward, black objects on the water, and heard them laugh something like a loon. might have got near enough to shoot them. a fine sight to see them rise at last, about fifty of them, apparently black ducks. ^ while they float on the water they ap ^ [probably not black ducks, to judg'e by what he says of their note. it seems possible that they might have been brant, though brant are extremely rare in fresh water in new england.] wild ducks 47 pear to preserve constantly their relative distance. their note not exactly like that of a goose, yet re sembling some domestic fowl's cry, you know not what one ; like a new species of goose. april 16, 1852. flight of ducks and partridges ear nest but not graceful. april 17, 1852. these deep withdrawn bays, like that toward well meadow, are resorts for many a shy flock of ducks. they are very numerous this afternoon. we scare them up every quarter of a mile. mostly the whitish duck which brown thinks the golden-eye (we call them whistlers), and also black ducks, perchance also sheldrakes. they are quite shy ; swim rapidly away far into the pond. a flock which we surprised in the smooth bay of well meadow divided and showed much cunning, dodging under the shore to avoid us. oct. 12, 1852. paddled on walden. a rippled sur face. scared up ducks. saw them first far over the surface, just risen, — two smaller, white-bellied, one larger, black. they circled round as usual, and the first went off, but the black one went round and round and over the pond five or six times at a considerable height and distance, when i thought several times he had gone to the river, and at length settled down by a slanting flight of a quarter of a mile into a distant part of the pond which i had left free ; but what beside safety these ducks get by sailing in the middle of walden i don't know. that black rolling-pin with wings, circling round you half a mile off for a quarter of an hour, at that height, from which he sees the river and fair haven all the while, from which he sees so many things, while 48 notes on new england birds i see almost him alone. their wings set so far back. they are not handsome, but wild. march 18, 1855. meanwhile a small dark-colored duck, all neck and wings, a winged rolling-pin, went over, — perhaps a teal. march 27, 1855. the ducks sleep these nights in the shallowest water which does not freeze, and there may be found early in the morning. i think that they prefer that part of the shore which is permanently covered. april 22, 1856. i raised my sail and, cowering under my umbrella in the stern, wearing the umbrella like a cap and holding the handle between my knees, i steered and paddled, almost perfectly sheltered from the heavy rain. yet my legs and arms were a little exposed some times, in my endeavors to keep well to windward so as to double certain capes ahead. for the wind occasion ally drove me on to the western shore. from time to time, from under my umbrella, i could see the ducks spinning away before me, like great bees. for when they are flying low directly from you, you see hardly anything but their vanishing dark bodies, while the rapidly moving wings or paddles, seen edgewise, are almost invisible. oct. 22, 1857. as i go through the woods now, so many oak and other leaves have fallen the rustling noise somewhat disturbs my musing. however, nature in this may have intended some kindness to the ducks, which are now loitering hereabouts on their migration southward, mostly young and inexperienced birds, for, as they are feeding in goose pond, for instance, the rustling of the leaves betrays the approach of the sports wild ducks 49 man and his dog, or other foe ; so perhaps the leaves oil the ground protect them more than when on the trees. march 25, 1858. there are so many sportsmen out that the ducks have no rest on the great meadows, which are not half covered with water. they sit uneasy on the water, looking about, without feeding, and i see one man endeavor to approach a flock crouchingly through the meadow for half a mile, with india-rubber boots on, where the water is often a foot deep. this has been going on, on these meadows, ever since the town was settled, and will go on as long as ducks settle here. march 28, 1858. from wheeler's ploughed field on the top of fair haven hill, i look toward fair haven pond, now quite smooth. there is not a duck nor a gull to be seen on it. i can hardly believe that it was so alive with them yesterday. apparently they improve this warm and pleasant day, with little or no wind, to continue their journey northward. the strong and cold northwest wind of about a week past has probably detained them. knowing that the meadows and ponds were swarming with ducks yesterday, you go forth this particularly pleasant and still day to see them at your leisure, but find that they are all gone. no doubt there are some left, and many more will soon come with the april rains. it is a wild life that is associated with stormy and blustering weather. when the invalid comes forth on his cane, and misses improve the plea sant air to look for signs of vegetation, that wild life has withdrawn itself. ajpril 13, 1858. speaking to j. b. moore * about the ^ [of concord.] 50 notes on new england birds partridges being run down/ he says that he was told by lexington people some years ago that they found a duck lying dead under the spire of their old meeting house (since burned) which stood on the battle-ground. the weathercock — and it was a cock in this case — was considerably bent, and the inference was that the duck had flown against it in the night. march 24, 1860. from holbrook's clearing i see five large dark-colored ducks, probably black ducks, far away on the meadow, with heads erect, necks stretched, on the alert, only one in water. indeed, there is very little water on the meadows. for length of neck those most wary look much like geese. they appear quite large and heavy. they probably find some sweet grass, etc., where the water has just receded. there are half a dozen gulls on the water near. they are the large white birds of the meadow, the whitest we have. as they so commonly stand above water on a piece of meadow, they are so much the more conspic uous. they are very conspicuous to my naked eye a mile off, or as soon as i come in sight of the meadow, but i do not detect the sheldrakes around them till i use my glass, for the latter are not only less conspicu ously white, but, as they are fishing, sink very low in the water. three of the gulls stand together on a piece of meadow, and two or three more are standing solitary half immersed, and now and then one or two circle slowly about their companions. the sheldrakes appear to be the most native to the river, briskly moving along up and down the side of 1 [see pp. 107, 108.] wild goose; canada goose 51 the stream or the meadow, three-fourths immersed and with heads under water, like cutters collecting the re venue of the river bays, or like pirate crafts peculiar to the stream. they come the earliest and seem to be most at home. the water is so low that all these birds are collected near the holt. the inhabitants of the village, poultry fanciers, perchance, though they be, [know not] these active and vigorous wild fowl (the sheldrakes) pursuing their finny prey ceaselessly within a mile of them, in march and april. probably from the hen-yard fence with a good glass you can see them at it. they are as much at home on the water as the pickerel is within it. their serrated bill reminds me of a pickerel's snout. you see a long row of these schooners, black above with a white stripe beneath, rapidly gliding along, and occasionally one rises erect on the surface and flaps its wings, showing its white lower parts. they are the duck most common and most identified with the stream at this season. they appear to get their food wholly within the water. less like our domestic ducks. [/see also under loon, p. 4; general and miscella neous, pp. 408, 412.] wild goose ; canada goose march 26, 1846. a flock of geese has just got in late, now in the dark flying low over the pond. they came on, indulging at last like weary travellers in complaint and consolation, or like some creaking evening mail late lumbering in with regular anserine clangor. i stood 52 notes on new england birds at my door * and could hear their wings when they sud denly spied my light and, ceasing their noise, wheeled to the east and apparently settled in the pond. march 27, 1846. this morning i saw the geese from the door through the mist sailing about in the middle of the pond, but when i went to the shore they rose and circled round like ducks over my head, so that i counted them, — twenty-nine. i after saw thirteen ducks. march 28, 1852. 10.15 p. m. — the geese have just gone over, making a great cackling and awaking people in their beds. they will probably settle in the river. who knows but they had expected to find the pond open ? april 15, 1852. how indispensable our one or two flocks of geese in spring and autumn ! what would be a spring in which that sound was not heard ? coming to unlock the fetters of northern rivers. those annual steamers of the air. april 18, 1852. going through dennis's field with c.,^ saw a flock of geese on east side of river near wil lows. twelve gfreat birds on the troubled surface of the meadow, delayed by the storm. we lay on the ground behind an oak and our umbrella, eighty rods off, and watched them. soon we heard a gun go off, but could see no smoke in the mist and rain. and the whole flock rose, spreading their great wings and flew with clangor ' a few rods and lit in the water again, then swam swiftly 1 [of his hut at walden pond.] "^ [william ellery channing, the younger, the concord poet, tho reau's most intimate friend and afterwards his biographer.] ^ the " honk " of the goose. wild goose; canada goose 53 toward our shore with outstretched necks. i knew them first from ducks by their long necks. soon appeared the man, running toward the shore in vain, in his great coat ; but he soon retired in vain. we remained close under our umbrella by the tree, ever and anon looking through a peep-hole between the umbrella and the tree at the birds. on they came, sometimes in two, some times in three, squads, warily, till we could see the steel-blue and green reflections from their necks. we held the dog close the while, — c, lying on his back in the rain, had him in his arms, — and thus we gradually edged round on the ground in this cold, wet, windy storm, keeping our feet to the tree, and the great wet calf of a dog with his eyes shut so meekly in our arms. we laughed well at our adventure. they swam fast and warily, seeing our umbrella. occasionally one expanded a gray wing. they showed white on breasts. and not till after half an hour, sitting cramped and cold and wet on the ground, did we leave them. heard the cackling of geese from over the ministerial swamp, and soon appeared twenty-eight geese that flew over our heads toward the other river we had left,^ we now near the black birches. with these great birds in it, the air seems for the first time inhabited. we detect holes in their wings. their clank expresses anxiety. april 19, 1852. that last flock of geese yesterday is still in my eye. after hearing their clangor, looking southwest, we saw them just appearing over a dark pine wood, in an irregular waved line, one abreast of the ^ [that is, the sudbury river. they were then near the assabet.] 54 notes on new england birds other, as it were breasting the air and pushing it before them. it made you think of the streams of cayster, etc., etc. they carry weight, such a weight of metal in the air. their dark waved outline as they disappear. the grenadiers of the air. man pygmifies himself at sight of these inhabitants of the air. these stormy days they do not love to fly ; they alight in some retired marsh or river. from their lofty pathway they can easily spy out the most extensive and retired swamp. how many there must be, that one or more flocks are seen to go over almost every farm in new england in the spring ! nov. 25, 1852. at walden. — i hear at sundown what i mistake for the squawking of a hen, — for they are firing at chickens hereabouts,^ — but it proved to be a flock of wild geese going south. this proves how much the voices of all fowls are alike. nov. 29, 1852. geese in river swam as fast as i walked. march 26, 1853. saw about 10 a. m. a gaggle of geese, forty-three in number, in a very perfect harrow flying northeasterly. one side of the harrow was a little longer than the other. they appeared to be four or five feet apart. at first i heard faintly, as i stood by minott's gate, borne to me from the southwest through the confused sounds of the village, the indistinct honk ing of geese. i was somewhat surprised to find that mr. loring at his house should have heard and seen the same flock. i should think that the same flock was commonly seen and heard from tlie distance of a mile ^ [a thanksgiving-day cliicken-shoot.] wild goose; canada goose 55 east and west. it is remarkable that we commonly see geese go over in the spring about 10 o'clock in the morning, as if they were accustomed to stop for the night at some place southward whence they reached us at that time. goodwin saw six geese in walden about the same time. nov. 23, 1853. at 5 p. m. i saw, flying southwest high overhead, a flock of geese, and heard the faint honking of one or two. they were in the usual harrow form, twelve in the shorter line and twenty-four in the longer, the latter abutting on the former at the fourth bird from the front. i judged hastily that the interval between the geese was about double their alar extent, and, as the last is, according to wilson, five feet and two inches, the former may safely be called eight feet. i hear they were fired at with a rifle from bunker hill the other day. this is the sixth flock i have seen or heard of since the morning of the 17th, i. e. within a week. nov. 18, 1854. saw sixty geese go over the great fields, in one waving line, broken from time to time by their crowding on each other and vainly endeavor ing to form into a harrow, honking all the while. march 20, 1855. trying the other day to imitate the honking of geese, i found myself flapping my sides with my elbows, as with wings, and uttering something like the syllables mow-ack with a nasal twang and twist in my head ; and i produced their note so perfectly in the opinion of the hearers that i thought i might pos sibly draw a flock down. april 19, 1855. 5 a. m. — i hear a faint honh and, 56 notes on new england birds looking up, see going over the river, within fifty rods, thirty-two geese in the form of a hay-hook, only two in the hook, and they are at least six feet apart. probably the whole line is twelve rods long. at least three hun dred have passed over concord, or rather within the breadth of a mile, this spring (perhaps twice as many) ; for i have seen or heard of a dozen flocks, and the two i counted had about thirty each. nov. 13, 1855. in mid-forenoon (10.45), seventy or eighty geese, in three harrows successively smaller, fly ing southwest — pretty well west — over the house. a completely overcast, occasionally drizzling forenoon. i at once heard their clangor and rushed to and opened the window. the three harrows were gradually formed into one great one before they were out of sight, the geese shifting their places without slackingr their pro gress. nov. 19, 1855. speaking of geese, he ^ says that dr. hurd told a tough story once. he said that when he went out to the well there came a flock of geese flying so low that they had to rise to clear the well-sweep. m. says that there used to be a great many more geese formerly ; he used to hear a great many flocks in a day go "yelling" over. brant, too, he used to see. dec. 13, 1855. sanborn^ tells me that he was waked up a few nights ago in boston, about midnight, by the sound of a flock of geese passing over the city, probably about the same night i heard them here. they go honking over cities where the arts flourish, waking the inhabit ^ [george minott.] ^ [mr. f. b. sanborn of concord, thoreau's biographer-l wild goose; canada goose 57 ants ; over state-houses and capitols, where legislatures sit ; over harbors where fleets lie at anchor ; mistaking the city, perhaps, for a swamp or the edge of a lake, about settling in it, not suspecting that greater geese than they have settled there. nov. 8, 1857. a warm, cloudy, rain-threatening morning. about 10 a. m. a long flock of geese are going over from northeast to southwest, or parallel with the general direction of the coast and great mountain ranges. the sonorous, quavering sounds of the geese are the voice of this cloudy air, — a sound that comes from directly between us and the sky, an aerial sound, and yet so distinct, heavy, and sonorous, a clanking chain drawn through the heavy air. i saw through my window some children looking up and pointing their tiny bows into the heavens, and i knew at once that the geese were in the air. it is always an exciting event. the children, instinctively aware of its importance, rushed into the house to tell their parents. these travellers are revealed to you by the upward-turned gaze of men. and though these undulating lines are melting into the southwestern sky, the sound comes clear and distinct to you as the clank of a chain in a neighboring stithy. so they migrate, not flitting from hedge to hedge, but from latitude to latitude^ from state to state, steering boldly out into the ocean of the air. it is remarkable how these large ob jects, so plain when your vision is rightly directed, may be lost in the sky if you look away for a moment, — as hard to hit as a star with a telescope. it is a sort of encouraging or soothing sound to as 68 notes on new england birds suage their painful fears when the}'' go over a town, as a man moans to deaden a physical pain. the direction of their flight each spring and autumn reminds us inlanders how the coast trends. in the afternoon i met flood, who had just endeavored to draw my attention to a flock of geese in the mizzling air, but encountering me he lost sight of them, while i, at length, looking that way, discerned them, though he could not. this was the third flock to-day. now if ever, then, we may expect a change in the weather. ivov. 30, 1857. the air is full of geese. i saw five flocks within an hour, about 10 a. m., containing from thirty to fifty each, and afterward two more flocks, making in all from two hundred and fifty to three hundred at least, all flying southwest over goose and walden ponds. the former was apparently well named goose pond. you first hear a faint honking from one or two in the northeast and think there are but few wandering there, but, looking up, see forty or fifty com ing on in a more or less broken harrow, wedging their way southwest. i suspect they honk more, at any rate they are more broken and alarmed, when passing over a village, and are seen falling into their ranks again, assuming the perfect harrow form. hearing only one or two honking, even for the seventh time, you think there are but few till you see them. according to my calculation a thousand or fifteen hundred may have gone over concord to-day. when they fly low and near, they look very black against the sky. march 31, 1858. just after sundown i see a large flock of geese in a perfect harrow cleaving their way wild goose; canada goose 59 toward the northeast, with napoleonic tactics splitting the forces of winter. april 1, 1858. i observed night before last, as often before, when geese were passing over in the twilight quite near, though the whole heavens were still light and i knew which way to look by the honking, i could not distinguish them. it takes but a little obscurity to hide a bird in the air. how difficult, even in broadest daylight, to discover again a hawk at a dis tance in the sky when you have once turned your eyes away! oct. 24, 1858. a northeast storm, though not much rain falls to-day, but a fine driving mizzle or " drisk." this, as usual, brings the geese, and at 2.30 p. m. i see two flocks go over. i hear that some were seen two or three weeks ago (? ?), faintly honking. a great many must go over to-day and also alight in this neighborhood. this weather warns them of the approach of winter, and this wind speeds them on their way. surely, then, while geese fly overhead we can live here as contentedly as they do at york factory on hudson's bay. we shall perchance be as well provisioned and have as good so ciety as they. let us be of good cheer, then, and expect the annual vessel which brings the spring to us without fail. march 24, 1859. c* sees geese go over again this afternoon. how commonly they are seen in still rainy weather like this ! he says that when they had got far off they looked like a black ribbon almost perpendicular waving in the air. ^ [william ellery channing, the younger.] 60 notes on new england birds marcti 28, 1859. we see eight geese floating afar in the middle of the meadow, at least half a mile off, plainly (with glass) much larger than the ducks in their neighborhood and the white on their heads very dis tinct. when at length they arise and fly off northward, their peculiar heavy undulating wings, blue-heron-like and unlike any duck, are very noticeable. the black, sheldrake, etc., move their wings rapidly, and" remind you of paddle-wheel steamers. methinks the wings of the black duck appear to be set very far back when it is flying. the meadows, which are still covered far and wide, are quite alive with black ducks. when walking about on the low east shore at the bedford bound, i heard a faint honk, and looked around over the water with my glass, thinking it came from that side or perhaps from a farmyard in that direction. i soon heard it again, and at last we detected a great flock passing over, quite on the other side of us and pretty high up. from time to time one of the company uttered a short note, that peculiarly metallic, clangorous sound. these were in a single undulating line, and, as usual, one or two were from time to time crowded out of the line, apparently by the crowding of those in the rear, and were flying, on one side and trying to recover their places, but at last a second short line was formed, meeting the long one at the usual angle and making a figure somewhat like a hay-hook. i suspect it will be found that there is really some advantage in large birds of passage flying in the wedge form and cleaving their way through the air, — that they really do overcome its resistance best in this way, — and perchance the direc wild goose; canada goose 61 tion and strength of the wind determine the comparative length of the two sides. the great gulls fly generally up or down the river valley, cutting off the bends of the river, and so do these geese. these fly sympathizing with the river, — a stream in the air, soon lost in the distant sky. we see these geese swimming and flying at midday and when it is perfectly fair. if you scan the horizon at this season of the year you are very likely to detect a small flock of dark ducks moving with rapid wing athwart the sky, or see the undulating line of migrating geese against the sky. perhaps it is this easterly wind which brings geese, as it did on the 24th. undoubtedly the geese fly more numerously over rivers which, like ours, flow northeasterly, — are more at home with the water under them. each flock runs the gantlet of a thousand gunners, and when you see them steer off from you and your boat you may remem ber how great their experience in such matters may be, how many such boats and gunners they have seen and avoided between here and mexico, and even now, per chance (though you, low plodding, little dream it), they see one or two more lying in wait ahead. they have an experienced ranger of the air for their guide. the echo of one gun hardly dies away before they see another pointed at them. how many bullets or smaller shot have sped in vain toward their ranks ! ducks fly more irregularly and shorter distances at a time. the geese 62 notes on new england birds rest in fair weather by day only in the midst of our broadest meadow or pond. so they go, anxious and earnest to hide their nests under the pole.^ [/see also under loon, p. 4; great blue heron, p. 72.] ^ [of course they do not go quite so far north as thoreau intimates. he was perhaps thinking of the breeding-grounds of the brant.] i iv herons and rails american bittern ; stake-driver. june 14, 1851. as i proceed along the back road i hear the lark still singing in the meadow, and the bob olink, and the gold robin on the elms, and the swallows twittering about the barns. a small bird chasing a crow high in the air, who is going home at night. all nature is in an expectant attitude. before goodwin's house, at the opening of the sudbury road, the swallows are div ing at a tortoise-shell cat, who curvets and frisks rather awkwardly, as if she did not know whether to be scared or not. and now, having proceeded a little way down this road, the sun having buried himself in the low cloud in the west and hung out his crimson curtains, i hear, while sitting by the wall, the sound of the stake-driver at a distance, — like that made by a man pumping in a neighboring farmyard, watering his cattle, or like chopping wood before his door on a frosty morning, and i can imagine like driving a stake in a meadow. the pumper. i immediately went in search of the bird, but, after going a third of a mile, it did not sound much nearer, and the two parts of the sound did not appear to proceed from the same place. what is the peculiarity of these sounds which penetrate so far on the keynote of nature ? at last i got near to the brook in the meadow behind hubbard's wood, but i could 64 notes on new england birds not tell if it were further or nearer than that. when i got within half a dozen rods of the brook, it ceased, and i heard it no more. i suppose that i scared it. as before i was further off than i thought, so now i was nearer than i thought. it is not easy to understand how so small a creature can make so loud a sound by merely sucking in or throwing out water with pump like lungs. ^ it was a sound as of gulping water. sept. 20, 1851. i scare up the great bittern in meadow by the heywood brook near the ivy. he rises buoyantly as he flies against the wind, and sweeps south over the willow with outstretched neck, surveying. oct. 5, 1851. the american bittern (^ardea minory flew across the river, trailing his legs in the water, scared up by us. this, according to peabody,' is the boomer (stake-driver). in their sluggish flight they can hardly keep their legs up. wonder if they can soar. oct. 7, 1851. saw the ardea minor walking along the shore, like a hen with long green legs. its pencilled throat is so like the reeds and shore, amid which it holds its head erect to watch the passer, that it is diflfi ^ [no -water is used in producing the sound. thoreau had been mis informed by one of his neig-hbors. see the account in his paper on the " natural history of massachusetts " in excursions. for an interesting account of this habit of the bittern's see mr. bradford torrey's paper on " the ' booming ' of the bittern " in the auk for january, 1889 cvol. vi, pp. 1-8).] ^ [now called botanies lentiginosus.1 ' [w. b. 0. peabody, report on the birds of massachusetts.^ american bittern; stake-driver 65 cult to discern it. you can get veiy near it, for it is unwilling to fly, preferring to hide amid the weeds. oct. 12, 1851. minott calls the stake-driver "bel cher-squelcher." says he has seen them when making the noise. they go slug-toot, slug-toot, slug-toot. june 16, 1852. i hear a stake-driver, like a man at his pump, which sucks, — fit sound for our sluggish river. . . . most would suppose the stake-driver the sound of a farmer at a distance at his pump, watering his cattle. it of tener sounds like this than like a stake, but sometimes exactly like a man driving a stake in the meadow. june 20, 1852. the stake-driver is at it in his fa vorite meadow. i followed the sound. at last i got within two rods, it seeming always to recede and draw ing you like a will-o'-the-wisp further away into the meadows. when thus near, i heard some lower sounds at the beginning, much more like striking on a stump or a stake, a dry, hard sound ; and then followed the gurgling, pumping notes, fit to come from a meadow. this was just within the blueberry and pyrus arhuti folia (choke-berry) bushes, and when the bird flew up alarmed, i went to the place, but could see no water, which makes me doubt if water is necessary to it in making the sound. perhaps it thrusts its bill so deep as to reach the water where it is dry on the surface. it sounds the more like wood-chopping or pumping, be cause you seem to hear the echo of the stroke or the reverse motion of the pump-handle. i hear them morn ing and evening. after the warm weather has come, both morning and evening you hear the bittern pump 66 notes on new england birds ing in the fens. it does not sound loud near at band, and it is remarkable tbat it sbould be beard so far. perhaps it is pitched on a favorable key. is it not a call to its mate ? methinks that in the resemblance of this note to rural sounds, to sounds made by farmers, the protection, the security, of the bird is designed. july 18, 1852. again under weigh, we scare up the great bittern amid the pontederia, and, rowing to where he alights, come within three feet of him and scare him up again. he flies sluggishly away, plowing the air with the coulter of his breast-bone, and alighting ever higher up the stream. we scare him up many times in the course of an hour. aug. 13, 1852. saw the head and neck of a great bittern projecting above the meadow-grass, exactly like the point of a stump, only i knew there could be no stump there. aug. 31, 1852. the pigeon woodpecker darts across the valley ; a catbird mews in the alders ; a great bit tern flies sluggishly away from his pine tree perch on tupelo cliff, digging his way through the air. these and crows at long intervals are all the birds seen or heard. there goes a great bittern plodding home over the meadows at evening, to his perch on some tree by the shore. the rain has washed the leaves clean where he perches. there stands another in the meadow just like a stake, or the point of a stump or root. its secur ity was consulted both in its form and color. the latter is a sober brown, pale on the breast, as the less exposed american bittern; stake-driver 67 side of a root might be ; and its attitude is accidental, too, bent forward and 'perfectly motionless. therefore there is no change in appearance but such as can be referred to the motion of the sailor. may 13, 1853. heard a stake-driver in hubbard's meadow from corner road. thus far off, i hear only, or chiefly, the last dry, hard click or stroke part of the note, sounding like the echo from some near wood of a distant stake-driving. here only this portion of the note, but close by it is more like pumping, when the dry stroke is accompanied by the incessant sound of the pump. may 27, 1853. heard a stake-driver yesterday in the rain. it sounded exactly like a man pumping, while another man struck on the head of the pump with an axe, the last strokes sounding peculiarly dry and hard like a forcible echo from the wood-side. one would think all concord would be built on piles by this time. very deliberately they drive, and in the intervals are considering the progress of the pile into the soft mud. they are working by the day. he is early and late at his work, building his stake [?] -house, yet did anybody ever see the pile he had driven ? he has come back from his southern tour to finish that job of spile driving which he undertook last year. it is heavy work — not to be hurried. only green hands are overhasty. may 20, 1856. see and hear a stake-driver in the swamp. it took one short pull at its pump and stopped. june 15, 1857. it was pleasant walking thus * at 5 p. m. by solitary sandy paths, through commonly low 1 fin plyraoutli, mass.] 68 notes on new england birds dry woods of oak or pine, through glistening oak woods (their fresh leaves in the june air), where the yellow throat (or black-throat?') was heard and the wood thrush sang, and, as i passed a swamp, a bittern boomed. as i stood quite n^r, i heard distinctly two or three dry, hard sucks, as if the bird were drawing up water from the swamp, and then the sounds usually heard, as if ejecting it. 3iay 28, 1858. from time to time i hear the sound of the bittern, concealed in the grass, indefinitely far or near, and can only guess at the direction, not the distance. i fail to find the nest. junell, 1858. the stake-driver comes beating along, like a long, ungainly craft, or a revenue cutter, looking into the harbors, and if it finds a fisherman there, stand ing out again. aug. 19, 1858. we scare up a stake-driver several times. the blue heron has within a week reappeared in our meadows, and the stake-driver begins to be seen of tener, and as early as the 5th i noticed young summer ducks about ; the same of hawks, owls, etc. this occurs as soon as the young birds can take care of themselves, and some appear to be very early on the return south ward, with the very earliest prospect of fall. such birds are not only more abimdant but, methinks, more at lei sure now, having reared their family, and perhaps they are less shy. yes, bitterns are more frequently seen now to lift themselves from amid the pontederia or flags, and take their sluggish flight to a new resting-place, — ^ [the black-throated bunting', or dickcissel, formerly a common bird in the cape cod region of massachusetts.] american bittern; stake-driver 69 bitterns which either have got through the labors of breed ins: or are now first able to shift for themselves. and likewise blue herons, which have bred, or been bred not far from us (plainly), are now at leisure, or are im pelled to revisit our slow stream. i have not seen the last since spring. oct.^ 26, 1858. he * says that some call the stake driver " belcher-squelcher," and some, " wouerkertoot." i used to call them " pump-er-gor'." some say " slug toot." nov. 17, 1858. i am surprised to see a stake-driver fly up from the weeds within a stone's throw of my boat's place. it drops its excrement from thirty feet in the air, and this falling, one part being heavier than an other, takes the form of a snake, and suggests that this may be the origin of some of the stories of this bird swallowing a snake or eel which passed through it. april 17, 1860. looking off on to the river meadow, i noticed, as i thought, a stout stake aslant in the meadow, three or more rods off, sharp at the top and rather light-colored on one side, as is often the case ; yet, at the same time, it occurred to me that a stake driver often resembled a stake very much, but i thought, nevertheless, that there was no doubt about this being a stake. i took out my glass to look for ducks, and my companion, seeing what i had, and asking if it was not a stake-driver, i suffered my glass at last to rest on it, and i was much surprised to find that it was a stake driver after all. the bird stood in shallow water near a tussock, perfectly still, with its long bill pointed up 1 [minott.] 70 notes on new england birds wards in the same direction with its body and neck, so as perfectly to resemble a stake aslant. if the bill had made an angle with the neck it would have been be trayed at once. its resource evidently was to rely on its form and color and immobility solely for its concealment. this was its instinct, whether it implies any conscious artifice or not. i watched it for fifteen minutes, and at length it relaxed its muscles and changed its attitude, and i observed a slight motion ; and soon after, when i moved toward it, it flew. it resembled more a piece of a rail than anything else, — more than anything that would have been seen here before the white man came. it is a question whether the bird consciously cooperates in each instance with its maker, who contrived this concealment. i can never believe that this resemblance is a mere coincidence, not designed to answer this very end — which it does answer so perfectly and usefully. june 6, 1860. ever and anon we hear a few sucks or strokes from the bittern, the stake-driver, wherever we lie to, as if he had taken the job of extending all the fences into the river to keep cows from straying round. oct. 16, 1860. horace mann ^ tells me that he found in the crop or inside of the stake-driver killed the other day one grasshopper, several thousand-legs one to one and a half inches long, and not much else. april 16, 1861. he ^ brought me some days ago the contents of a stake-driver's stomach or crop. it is ap ^ [tlie son of the famous educator of that name. he was living' in concord, aud he accompanied thoreau on his journey to minnesota in the following summer.] ^ [horace mann.] great blue heron 71 parently a perch (?), some seven inches long originally, with three or four pebble-shaped, compact masses of the fur of some very small quadruped, as a meadow mouse, some one fourth inch thick by three fourths in diameter, also several wing-cases of black beetles such as i see on the meadow flood. [see also under great blue heron, p. 79; kingbird, p. 218.] great blue heron 1850. john garfield brought me this morning (sep tember 6th) a young great heron (^ardea herodias)^ which he shot this morning on a pine tree on the north branch.^ it measured four feet, nine inches, from bill to toe and six feet in alar extent, and belongs to a dif ferent race from myself and mr. frost. ^ i am glad to recognize him for a native of america, — why not an american citizen ? • april 19, 1852. scared up three blue herons in the little pond close by, quite near us. it was a grand sight to see them rise, so slow and stately, so long and lim ber, with an undulating motion from head to foot, undulating also their large wings, undulating in two directions, and looking warily about them. with this graceful, limber, undulating motion they arose, as if so they got under way, their two legs trailing parallel far behind like an earthy residuum to be left behind. they are large, like birds of syrian lands, and seemed to op press the earth, and hush the hillside to silence, as they 1 [the assabet river.] 2 [rev. barzillai frost, the concord minister.] 72 notes on new england birds winged their way over it, looking back toward tis. it would affect our thoughts, deepen and perchance darken our reflections, if such huge birds flew in numbers in our sky. have the effect of magnetic passes! they are few and rare. among the birds of celebrated flight, storks, cranes, geese, and ducks. the legs hang down like a weight which they [ ?] raise, to pumj) up as it were with its [sic] wings and convey out of danger. to see the larger and wilder birds, you must go forth in the great storms like this. at such times they fre quent our neighborhood and trust themselves in our midst. a life of fair-weather walks might never show you the goose sailing on our waters, or the great heron feeding here. when the storm increases, then these great birds that carry the mail of the seasons lay to. to see wild life you must go forth at a wild season. when it rains and blows, keeping men indoors, then the lover of nature must forth. then returns nature to her wild estate. in pleasant sunny weather you may catch butterflies, but only when the storm rages that lays prostrate the forest and wrecks the mariner, do you come upon the feeding-grounds of wildest fowl, — of heron and geese. may 14, 1853. suddenly there start up from the riverside at the entrance of fair haven pond, scared by our sail, two great blue herons, — slate-color rather, — slowly flapping and undulating, their projecting breast-bones very visible, — or is it possibly their necks bent back? — their lesrs stuck out straig^ht behind. get (ikeat klie hekoxs axl) nest great blue heron 73 ting higher by their flight, they straight come back to reconnoitre us. land at lee's cliff, where the herons have preceded us and are perched on the oaks, conspicuous from afar, and again we have a fair view of their flight. again we scare up the herons, who, methinks, will build hereabouts. they were standing by the water side. and again they alight farther below, and we see their light-colored heads erect, and their bodies at vari ous angles as they stoop to drink. and again they flap away with their great slate-blue wings, necks curled up (?) and legs straight out behind, and, having at tained a great elevation, they circle back over our heads, now seemingly black as crows against the sky, — crows with long wings, they might be taken for, — but higher and higher they mount by stages in the sky, till heads and tails are lost and they are mere black wavelets amid the blue, one always following close be hind the other. they are evidently mated. it would be worth the while if we could see them oftener in our sky. azig. 23, 1853. i see to-day — and may add to yes terday's list — the blue heron launch off from an oak by the river and flap or sail away with lumbering flight; also kingbirds and crows. sept. 14, 1854. we see half a dozen herons in this voyage. their wings are so long in proportion to their bodies that there seems to be more than one undulation to a wing as they are disappearing in the distance, and so you can distinguish them. you see another begin be fore the first has ended. it is remarkable how common 74 notes on new england birds these birds are about our sluggish and marshy river. we must attract them from a wide section of country. it abounds in those fenny districts and meadow pond holes in which they delight. april 15, 1855. returning, we had a fine view of a blue heron, standing erect and open to view on a meadow island, by the great swamp south of the bridge, looking as broad as a boy on the side, and then some sheldrakes sailing in the smooth water beyond. these soon sailed behind points of meadow. the heron flew away, and one male sheldrake flew past us low over the water, reconnoitring, large and brilliant black and white. when the heron takes to flight, what a change in size and appearance ! it is presto change i there go two great undulating wings pinned together, but the body and rteck must have been left behind somewhere. aug. 5, 1855. as i was paddling back at 6 a. m., saw, nearly half a mile off, a blue heron standing erect on the topmost twig of the great buttonwood on the street in front of mr. prichard's house, ^ while pei'haps all within were abed and asleep. little did they think of it, and how they were presided over. he looked at first like a spiring twig against the sky, till you saw him flap his wings. presently he launched off and flew away over mrs. brooks's house. oct. 29, 1855. returning, i scare up a blue heron from the bathing-rock this side the island. it is whitened by its droppings, in great splotches a foot or more wide. he has evidently frequented it to watch for fish there. ^ [in the centre of the village of concord.] great blue heron 75 nov. 1, 1855. as i pushed up the river past hil dreth's, i saw the blue heron (probably of last monday) arise from the shore and disappear with heavily-flapping wings around a bend in front ; the greatest of the bit terns (-4r<?ece), with heavily -undulating wings, low over the water, seen against the woods, just disappearing round a bend in front ; with a great slate-colored ex panse of wing, suited to the shadows of the stream, a tempered blue as of the sky and dark water commingled. this is the aspect under which the musketaquid^ might be represented at this season : a long, smooth lake, re flecting the bare willows and button-bushes, the stubble, and the wool-grass on its tussock, a muskrat-cabin or two conspicuous on its margin amid the unsightly tops of pontederia, and a bittern disappearing on undulating wing around a bend. april 26, 1856. a blue heron sails away from a pine at holden swamp shore and alights on the meadow above. again he flies, and alights on the hard conantum side, where at length i detect him standing far away stake-like (his body concealed), eying me and depending on his stronger vision. aug. 16, 1858. a blue heron, with its great undulat ing wings, prominent cutwater, and leisurely flight, goes over southwest, cutting off the bend of the river west of our house. aug. 19, 1858. when i see the first heron, like a dusky blue wave undulating over our meadows again, i think, since i saw them going northward the other day, how many of these forms have been added to the land 1 [the concord river. see note, pp. so, 81.] 76 notes on new england birds scape, complete from bill to toe, while, perhaps, i have idled ! i see two herons. a small bird is pursuing the heron as it does a hawk. perhaps it is a blackbird and the herons gobble up their young ! sept. 18, 1858. near the pond ^ we scare up twenty or thirty ducks, and at the pond three blue herons. they are of a hoary blue. one flies afar and alights on a limb of a large white pine near well meadow head, bending it down. i see him standing there with out stretched neck. aug. 14, 1859. when i reached the upper end of this weedy bar, at about 3 p. m., this warm day, i noticed some light-colored object in mid-river, near the other end of the bar. at first i thought of some larsre stake or board standing amid the weeds there, then of a fisherman in a brown holland sack, referring him to the shore beyond. supposing it the last, i floated nearer and nearer till i saw plainly enough the motions of the person, whoever it was, and that it was no stake. look ing through my glass thirty or forty rods off, i thought certainly that i saw c.,who had just bathed, making signals to me with his towel, for i referred the object to the shore twenty rods further. i saw his motions as he wiped himself, — the movements of his elbows and his towel. then i saw that the person was nearer and there fore smaller, that it stood on the sand-bar in mid-stream in shallow water and must be some maiden in a bath ing-dress, — for it was the color of brown holland web, — and a very peculiar kind of dress it seemed. but about this time i discovered with my naked eye that it 1 [fairhaven pond.] 2 |-^. £_ channing.] great blue heron 77 was a blue heron standing in very shallow water amid the weeds of the bar and pluming itself. i had not noticed its legs at all, and its head, neck, and wings, be ing constantly moving, i had mistaken for arms, elbows, and towel of a bather, and when it stood stiller its shapely body looked like a peculiar bathing-dress. i floated to within twenty-five rods and watched it at my leisure. standing on the shallowest part of the bar at that end, it was busily dressing its feathers, passing its bill like a comb down its feathers from base to tip. from its form and color, as well as size, it was singu larly distinct. its great spear-shaped head and bill was very conspicuous, though least so when turned toward me (whom it was eying from time to time). it coils its neck away upon its back or breast as a sailor might a rope, but occasionally stretches itself to its full height, as tall as a man, and looks around and at me. growing shy, it begins to wade off, until its body is partly im mersed amid the weeds, — potamogetons, — and then it looks more like a goose. the neck is continually vary ing in length, as it is doubled up or stretched out, and the legs also, as it wades in deeper or shallower water. suddenly comes a second, flying low, and alights on the bar yet nearer to me, almost high and dry. then i hear a note from them, perhaps of warning, — a short, coarse, frog-like purring or eructating sound. you might easily mistake it for a frog. i heard it half a dozen times. it was not very loud. anything but musical. the last proceeds to plume himself, looking warily at me from time to time, while the other continues to edge off through the weeds. now and then the latter 78 notes on new england birds holds its neck as if it were ready to strike its prey, — stretched forward over the water, — but i saw no stroke. the arch may be lengthened or shortened, sin gle or double, but the great spear-shaped bill and head are ever the same. a great hammer or pick, prepared to transfix fish, frog, or bird. at last, the water be coming too deep for wading, this one takes easily to wing — though up to his body in water — and flies a few rods to the shore. it rather flies, then, than swims. it was evidently scared. these were probably birds of this season. i saw some distinct ferruginous on the angle of the wing. there they stood in the midst of the open river, on this shallow and weedy bar in the sun, the leisurely sentries, lazily pluming themselves, as if the day were too long for them. they gave a new character to the stream. adjutant they were to my idea of the river, these two winged men. you have not seen our weedy river, you do not know the significance of its weedy bars, until you have seen the blue heron wading and pluming itself on it. i see that it was made for these shallows, and they for it. now the heron is gone from the weedy shoal, the scene appears incomplete. of course, the heron has sounded the depth of the water on every bar of the river that is fordable to it. the water there is not so many feet deep,> but so many heron's tibiae. instead of a foot rule you should use a heron's leg for a measure. if you would know the depth of the water on these few shoalest places of musketaquid, ask the blue heron that wades and fishes there. in some places a heron can wade across. how long we may have gazed on a particular scenery green heron; green bittern 79 and think that we have seen and known it, when, at length, some bird or quadruped comes and takes pos session of it before our eyes, and imparts to it a wholly new character ! the heron uses these shallows as i can not. i give them up to him. oct. 10, 1860. horace mann shows me the skeleton of a blue heron. the neck is remarkably strong, and the bill. the latter is 5 + inches long to the feathers above and 6| to the gape. a stake-driver which he has, freshly killed, has a bill 3 inches long above and 4|^ to the gape and between | and | deep vertically at the base. this bird weighs a little over two pounds, being quite large and fat. its nails are longer and less curved than those of the heron. the sharp bill of the heron, like a stout pick, wielded by that long and stout neck, would be a very dangerous weapon to encounter. he has made a skeleton of the fish hawk which was brought to me within a month. i remark the great eye-sockets, and the claws, and perhaps the deep, sharp breast bone. including its strong hooked bill it is clawed at both ends, harpy-like. \_see also under american bittern, pp. 68, 69 ; fish hawk, p. 159.] green heron ; green bittern june 11, 1840.^ we stole noiselessly down the stream, occasionally driving a pickerel from the cov ert of the pads, or a bream from her nest, and the small green bittern would now and then sail away on ^ [under this date thoreau enters in his journal some notes of the concord and merrimac excursion of august and september, 1839.] 80 notes on new england bieds sluggish wings from some recess of the shore. with its patient study by rocks and sandy capes, has it wrested the whole of her secret from nature yet? it has looked out from its dull eye for so long, standing on one leg, on moon and stars sparkling through silence and dark, and now what a rich experience is its ! what says it of stagnant pools, and reeds, and damp night fogs ? it would be worth while to look in the eye which has been open and seeing at such hours and in such solitudes. when i behold that dull yellowish green, i wonder if my own soul is not a bright, invisible green. i would fain lay my eye side by side with its and learn of it. june 25, 1854. a green bittern, apparently, awk wardly alighting on the trees and uttering its hoarse, zarry note, zsjceow-zskeow-zsheoio. july 12, 1854. i see a green bittern wading in a shallow muddy place, with an awkward teetering, flut tering pace. aug. 2, 1856. a green bittern comes, noiselessly flapping, with stealthy and inquisitive looking to this side the stream and then that, thirty feet above the water. this antediluvian bird, creature of the night, is a fit emblem of a dead stream like this musketicook. ^ this especially is the bird of the river. there is a sym pathy between its sluggish flight and the sluggish flow of the stream, — its slowly lapsing flight, even like the rills of musketicook and my own pulse sometimes. ^ [the concord river. musketaquid was the indian name for con cord. on his maine woods excursion in 1853, thoreau had asked some indians what it meant, " but they changed it to musketicook, and repeated that, and tahmunt said that it meant dead stream, which is virginia rail; meadow-hen 81 aug. 1, 1858. edward bartlett ^ and another brought me a green bittern, this year's bird, apparently full grown but not full plumaged, which they caught near the pool on a. iley wood's land behind sleepy hollow. they caught it in the woods on the hillside. it had not yet acquired the long feathers of the neck. the neck was bent back on itself an inch or more, — that part being bare of feathers and covered by the long feathers from above, — so that it did not appear very long until stretched out. this doubling was the usual condition and not apparent, but could be felt by the hand. so the green bitterns are leaving the nest now. virginia rail; meadow-hen june 16, 1853. coming down the river, heard oppo site the new houses, where i stopped to pluck the tall grass, a sound as of young blackbirds amid the button bushes. after a long while gazing, standing on the roots of the button-bushes, i detected a couple of meadow or mud hens (^rallus virginianus) gliding about under the button-bushes over the mud and through the shal low water, and uttering a squeaking or squawking note, as if they had a nest there or young. bodies about the size of a robin; short tail; wings and tail white-edged; bill about one and a half inches long, orange beneath in one bird; brown, deepening into black spots above; turtle-dove color on breasts and beneath; ashy about eyes and cheeks. seemed not willing to fly, and for a probably true. cook appears to mean stream, and perhaps quid signi fies the place or ground."] ^ [one of thoreau's boy friends in concord.] 82 notes on new england birds long time unwilling to pass me, because it must come near to keep under the button-bushes. sora ; carolina rail oct. 3, 1858. one brings me this morning a carolina rail alive, this year's bird evidently from its marks. he saved it from a cat in the road near the battle-ground. on being taken up, it pecked a little at first, but was soon quiet. it staggers about as if weak on my window sill and pecks at the glass, or stands with its eyes shut, half asleep, and its back feathers hunched up. possibly it is wounded. i suspect it may have been hatched here. its feet are large and spreading, qualifying it to run on mud or pads. its crown is black, but chin white, and its back feathers are distinctly edged with white in streaks. rail (unidentified) july 16, 1860. standing amid the pipes of the great meadow, i hear a very sharp creaking peep., no doubt from a rail quite near me, calling to or directing her young, who are meanwhile uttering a very faint, some what similar peep, which you would not hear if not very much inclined to hear it, in the grass close around me. sometimes the old bird utters two short, sharp creaks. i look sharp, but can see nothing of them. she sounds now here, now there, within two or three rods of me, incessantly running in the grass. i had already heard, more distant, a more prolonged note from some water fowl, perhaps a plover, if not possibly a male rail, here abouts. american coot 83 american coot april 24, 1856. goodwin shot, about 6 p. m., and brought to me a cinereous coot (^fulica americana) which was flying over the willows at willow bay, where the water now runs up. it measures fourteen inches to end of tail ; eighteen and one half to end of legs. tail projects a half-inch beyond closed wings. alar extent twenty-six inches. (these dimensions are somewhat stretched.) above it is a bluish slate, passing into olive behind the wings, the primaries more brownish. beneath, ash-color or pale slate. head and neck, uniform deep black. legs, clear green in front, passing into lead-color behind and on the lobes. edging of wings, white ; also the tips of the secondaries for one fourth of an inch, and a small space under the tail. wings beneath, very light, almost silvery, slate. vent, for a small space, black. bill, bluish-white, with a chestnut bar near tip, and corre sponding chestnut spot on each side of lower mandible and a somewhat diamond-shaped chestnut spot at base in front. no noticeable yellow on bill. irides, reddish. no noticeable whitish spot beneath eyes ; only bare lid. legs and feet are very neat ; talons very slender, curv ing, and sharp, the middle ones ^ inch -h long. lobes chiefly on the inner side of the toes. legs bare half an inch above the joint. from its fresh and tender look i judge it to be a last year's bird. it is quite lousy. v shore-birds woodcock oct. 27, 1851. saw a woodcock ' feeding, probing the mud with its long bill, under the railroad bridge within two feet of me for a long time. could not scare it far away. what a disproportionate length of bill ! it is a sort of badge they [wear] as a punishment for greediness in a former state. july 9, 1852. nowadays i scare up the woodcock (?) by shaded brooks and springs in the woods. it has a carry-legs flight and goes off with a sort of whistle. dec. 17, 1856. at clamshell, to my surprise, scare up either a woodcock or a snipe. i think the former, for i plainly saw considerable red on the breast, also a light stripe along the neck. it was feeding alone, close to the edge of the hiu, where it is springy and still soft, almost the only place of this character in the neighbor hood, and though i started it three times, it each time flew but little way, round to the hillside again, perhaps the same spot it had left a moment before, as if un willing to leave this unfrozen and comparatively warm locality. it was a great surprise this bitter cold day, when so many springs were frozen up, to see this hardy bird loitering still. once alighted, you could not see it till it arose again. ^ or snipe ? i 1 woodcock 86 nov. 21, 1857. just above the grape-hung birches, my attention was drawn to a singular-looking dry leaf or parcel of leaves on the shore about a rod off. then i thought it might be the dry and yellowed skeleton of a bird with all its ribs ; then the shell of a turtle, or possibly some large dry oak leaves peculiarly curved and cut ; and then, all at once, i saw that it was a woodcock, perfectly still, with its head drawn in, standing on its great pink feet. i had, apparently, noticed only the yellowish-brown portions of the plumage, referring the dark-brown to the shore behind it. may it not be that the yellowish brown markings of the bird correspond somewhat to its skeleton? at any rate with my eye steadily on it from a point within a rod, i did not for a considerable time suspect it to be a living creature. examining the shore after it had flown with a whistling flight, i saw that there was a clear space of mud between the water and the edge of ice-crystals about two inches wide, melted so far by the lapse of the water, and all along the edge of the ice, for a rod or two at least, there was a hole where it had thrust its bill down, probing, every half-inch, fre quently closer. some animal life must be collected at that depth just in that narrow space, savory morsels for this bird. i was paddling along slowly, on the lookout for what was to be seen, when my attention was caught by a strange-looking leaf or bunch of leaves on the shore, close to the water's edge, a rod distant. i thought to myself, i may as well investigate that, and so pushed slowly toward it, my eyes resting on it all the while. it then looked like a small shipwrecked hulk and, strange to say, like the 86 notes on new england birds bare skeleton of a fowl that has been picked and turned yellowish, resting on its breast-bone, the color of a with ered black or red oak leaf. again i thought it must be such a leaf or cluster of leaves peculiarly curved and cut or torn on the upper edges. the chubby bird dashed away zigzag, carrying its long tongue-case carefully before it, over the witch-hazel bushes. this is its walk, — the portion of the shore, the narrow strip, still kept open and unfrozen between the water's edge and the ice. the sportsman might discover its neighborhood by these probings. wilson's snipe feb. 27, 1853. mr. herbert is strenuous that i say "ruffed grouse " for " partridge" and " hare " for " rab bit." he says of the snipe, "i am myself satisfied that the sound is produced by the fact that the bird, by some muscular action or other, turns the quill-feathers edge wise, as he drops plumb through the air ; and that while in this position, during his accelerated descent, the vibra tion of the feathers and the passage of the air between them gives utterance to this wild humming sound." april 10, 1854. there are many snipes now feeding in the meadows, which you come close upon, and then they go off with hoarse cr-r-r-ack cr-r-r-ack. they dive down suddenly from a considerable height sometimes when they alight. april 18, 1854. scared up snipes on the meadow's edge, which go off with their strange zigzag, crazy flight and a distressed sound, — craik craik or cr-r-acjc cr-r rack. one booms now at 3 p. m. they circle round and wilson's snipe 87 round, and zigzag high over the meadow, and finally alight again, descending abruptly from that height. april 20, 1854. the sound of the snipes, winnowing the evening air now at starlight, visible but for an in stant high over the meadows, is heard far into the village, — hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo, rising higher and higher or dying away as they circle round, — a ghostly sound. april 15, 1856. at the same time, i hear a part of the hovering note of my first snipe, circling over some distant meadow, a mere waif, and all is still again. a-lulling the watery meadows, fanning the air like a spirit over some far meadow's bay. april 25, 1856. i landed on merrick's pasture near the rock, and when i stepped out of the boat and drew it up, a snipe flew up, and lit again seven or eight rods off. after trying in vain for several minutes to see it on the ground there, i advanced a step and, to my sur prise, scared up two more, which had squatted on the bare meadow all the while within a rod, while i drew up my boat and made a good deal of noise. in short, i scared up twelve, one or two at a time, within a few rods, which were feeding on the edge of the meadow just laid bare, each rising with a sound like squeak squeak, hoarsely. that part of the meadow seemed all alive with them. it is almost impossible to see one on the meadow, they squat and run so low, and are so completely the color of the ground. they rise from within a rod, fly half a dozen rods, and then drop down on the bare open meadow before your eyes, where there seems not stubble enough to conceal them, and are at once lost as completely as if they liad 88 notes on new england birds sunk into the earth. i observed that some, wheo finally seared from this island, flew off rising quite high, one a few rods behind the other, in their peculiar zigzag manner, rambling about high over the meadow, making it uncertain where they would settle, till at length i lost sight of one and saw the other drop down almost perpendicularly into the meadow, as it appeared. march 29, 1858. at the first pool i also scared up a snipe. it rises with a single cra-a-ck and goes off with its zigzag flight, with its bill presented to the earth, ready to charge bayonets against the inhabitants of the mud. april 9, 1858. i hear the booming of snipe this evening, and sophia * says she heard them on the 6th. the meadows having been bare so long, they may have begun yet earlier. persons walking up or down our village street in still evenings at this season hear this singular winnowing sound in the sky over the meadows and know not what it is. this " dooming " of the snipe is our regular village serenade. i heard it this evening for the first time, as i sat in the house, through the window. yet common and annual and remarkable as it is, not one in a hundred of the villagers hears it, and hardly so many know what it is. yet the majority know of the germanians who have only been here once. mr. hoar was almost the only inhabitant of this street whom i had heard speak of this note, which he used annually to hear and listen for in his sundown or evening walks. ^ [his sister.] greater yellow-legs 89 april 2, 1859. as i go down the street just after sunset, i hear many snipe to-night. this sound is an nually heard by the villagers, but always at this hour, i. e. in the twilight, — a hovering sound high in the air, — and they do not know what to refer it to. it is very easily imitated by the breath. a sort of shudder ing with the breath. it reminds me of calmer nights. hardly one in a hundred hears it, and perhaps not nearly so many know what creature makes it. per haps no one dreamed of snipe an hour ago, but the air seemed empty of such as they; but as soon as the dusk begins, so that a bird's flight is concealed, you hear this peculiar spirit-suggesting sound, now far, now near, heard through and above the evening din of the village. i did not hear one when i returned up the street half an hour later. \_see also under woodcock, p. 84.] greater yellow-legs ; telltale oct 25, 1853. p. m.— sailed down river to the pitch pine hill behind abner buttrick's, with a strong northwest wind, and cold. saw a telltale on cheney's shore, close to the water's edge. i am not quite sure whether it is the greater or lesser, but am inclined to think that all i have seen are the lesser. ^ it was all white below and dark above, with a pure white tail prettily displayed in flying. it kept raising its head with a jerk as if it had the st. vitus's dance. it would alight in the water and swim ^ [the date and the note would indicate that the bird was probably the greater yellow-legs, not the lesser.] 90 notes on new england birds like a little duck. once, when i went ashore and started it, it flew so as to bring a willow between it and me, and alighted quite near, much nearer than before, to spy me. when it went oif, it uttered a sharp te-te-te te-te, flying with quivering wings, dashing about. i think that the storm of yesterday and last night brought it up. 3iay 31, 1854. saw a greater telltale, and this is the only one ^ i have seen probably ; distinguished by its size. it is very watchful, but not timid, allowing me to come quite near, while it stands on the lookout at the water's edge. it keeps nodding its head with an awk ward jerk, and wades in the water to the middle of its yellow legs ; goes off with a loud and sharp phe phe phe phe, or something like that. it acts the part of the telltale, though there are no birds here, as if it were with a flock. kemarkable as a sentinel for other birds. solitary sandpiper sept. 24, 1855. i suppose it was the solitary sand piper (^totanus solitariusy which i saw feeding at the water's edge on cardinal shore, like a snipe. it was very tame ; we did not scare it even by shouting. i walked along the shore to within twenty-five feet of it, and it still ran toward me in feeding, and when i flushed it, it flew round and alighted between me and c.,^ who was only three or four rods off. it was about as large as a snipe ; had a bluish dusky bill about an inch and a quarter long, apparently straight, which it kept thrust ing into the shallow water with a nibbling motion, a ^ [that is, the only species of telltale.] ^ [now known as uelodromas solitarius.^ * [channing'.] spotted sandpiper; peetweet 91 perfectly white belly, dusky-green legs; bright brown and black above, with duskier wings. when it flew, its wings, which wei'e uniformly dark, hung down much, and i noticed no white above, and heard no note. upland plover june 15, 1860. as i stood there i heard that peculiar hawk-like (for rhythm) but more resonant or clanging kind of scream which i may have heard before this year, plover-like, indefinitely far, — over the clamshell plain. after proceeding half a dozen rods toward the hill, i heard the familiar willet note of the upland plover and, looking up, saw one standing erect — like a large telltale, or chicken with its head stretched up — on the rail fence. after a while it flew off southwest and low, then wheeled and went a little higher down the river. of pigeon size, but quick quivering wings. finally rose higher and flew more or less zigzag, as if uncertain where it would alight, and at last, when almost out of sight, it pitched down into a field near cyrus hubbard's. spotted sandpiper; peetweet aug. 22, 1853. a peetweet flew along the shore and uttered its peculiar note. their wings appear double as they fly by you, while their bill is cumbrously carried pointing downward in front. june 14, 1855. looked at the peetweet's nest which c* found yesterday. it was very difficult to find again in the broad open meadow ; no nest but a mere hollow ^ [c. in thoreau's journal always stands for his friend channing.] 92 notes on new england birds in the dead cranberry leaves, the grass and stubble ruins, under a little alder. the old bird went off at last from under us ; low in the grass at first and with wings up^ making a worried sound which attracted other birds. i frequently noticed others afterward flying low over the meadow and alighting and uttering this same note of alarm. there were only four eggs in this nest yes terday,^ and to-day, to c.'s surprise, there are the two eggs which he left and a young peetweet beside ; a gray pinch of down with a black centre to its back, but al ready so old and precocious that it runs with its long legs swiftly off from squatting beside the two eggs, and hides in the grass. we have some trouble to catch it. how came it here with these eggs, which will not be hatched for some days ? c. saw nothing of it yesterday. j. farmer ^ says that young peetweets run at once like partridges and quails, and that they are the only birds he knows that do. these eggs were not addled (i had opened one, c. another). did this bird come from another nest, or did it belong to an earlier brood .? eggs white, with black spots here and there all over, dim at great end. may 4, 1856. see a peetweet on dove kbck,^ which just peeps out. as soon as the rocks begin to be bare the peetweet comes and is seen teetering on them and skimming away from me. july 6, 1856. in a. hosmer's ice-bared meadow south of turnpike, hear the distressed or anxious jieet of a peetweet, and see it hovering over its young, half grown, ^ [channing' had taken two of them.] ^ [jacob farmer, of concord, a farmer by occupation and an observer of wild creatures.] ^ [in the assabet.] plover 93 which runs beneath and suddenly hides securely in the grass when but few feet from me. sept. 18, 1858. i notice that the wing of the peet weet, which is about two inches wide, has a conspicuous and straight-edged white bar along its middle on the under side for half its length. it is seven eighths of an inch wide and, being quite parallel with the darker parts of the wing, it produces that singular effect in its fly ing which i have noticed. this line, by the way, is not mentioned by wilson, yet it is, perhaps, the most no ticeable mark of the bird when flying ! the under side of the wings is commonly slighted in the description, though it is at least as often seen by us as the upper. may 2, 1859. a peetweet and its mate at mantatuket rock. the river seems realjy inhabited when the peet weet is back and those little li^twinged millers ( ?). this bird does not return to our stream until the weather is decidedly pleasant and warm. he is perched on the accustomed rock. its note peoples the river, like the prattle of children once more in the yard of a house that has stood empty. hay 8, 1860. the simple peep peep of the peetweet, as it flies away from the shore before me, sounds hol low and rather mournful, reminding me of the seashore and its wrecks, and when i smell the fresh odor of our marshes the resemblance is increased. plover 1850. as i was stalking over the surface of this planet in the dark to-night, i started a plover resting on the ground and heard him go off with whistling wings. vi quail and grouse bob-white; quail july 21, 1851. the quail, invisible, whistles, and who attends ? jan. 17, 1856. henry shattuck tells me that the quails come almost every day and get some saba beans within two or three rods of his house, — some which he neglected to gather. probably the deep snow drives them to it. feb. 7, 1857. hayden tl^e elder tells me that the quails have come to his yard every day for almost a month and are just as tame as chickens. they come about his wood-shed, he supposes to pick up the worms that have dropped out of the wood, and when it storms hard gather together in the corner of the shed. he walks within, say, three or four feet of them without disturbing them. they come out of the woods by the graveyard, and sometimes they go down toward the river. they will be about his yard the greater part of the day ; were there yesterday, though it was so warm, but now probably they can get food enough elsewhere. they go just the same to poland's, across the road. about ten years ago there was a bevy of fifteen that used to come from the same woods, and one day, they being in the barn and scared by the cat, four ran into the hay and died there. the former do not go to the ruffed grouse; partridge 95 houses further from the woods. thus it seems in severe winters the quails venture out of the woods and join the poultry of the farmer's yard, if it be near the edge of the wood. it is remarkable that this bird, which thus half domesticates itself, should not be found wholly domesticated before this. [>s'ee also under' general and miscellaneous, pp. 414, 431.] ruffed grouse; partridge 1850. the fire stopped within a few inches of a par tridge's nest to-day, june 4th, whom we took off in our hands and found thirteen creamy-colored eggs. i started up a woodcock when i went to a rill to drink, at the westernmost angle of r. w. e.'s ^ wood-lot. june 13, 1851. i heard partridges drumming to-night as late as 9 o'clock. what singularly space penetrating and filling sound ! why am i never nearer to its source ? july 16, 1851. some thoughtless and cruel sports man has killed twenty-two young partridges not much bigger than robins, against the laws of massachusetts and humanity. sept. 23, 1851. the partridge and the rabbit, — they still are sure to thrive like true natives of the soil, what ever revolutions occur. if the forest is cut off, many bushes spring up which afford them concealment, and they become more numerous than ever. dec. 21, 1851. who ever saw a partridge soar over the fields? to every creature its own nature. they are very wild ; but are they scarce ? or can you exterminate them for that ? ^ [ralph waldo emerson's.] 96 notes on new england birds feb. 18, 1852. i find the partridges among the fallen pine-tops on fair haven these afternoons, an hour be fore sundown, ready to commence budding in the neigh boring orchard. ajyril 22, 1852. our dog sends off a partridge with a whir, far across the open field and the river, like a winged bullet. may 1, 1852. a partridge bursts away from under the rock below me on quivering wings, like some moths i have seen. jtine 27, 1852. i meet the partridge with her brood in the woods, a perfect little hen. she spreads her tail into a fan and beats the ground with her wings fearlessly within a few feet of me, to attract my attention while her young disperse; but they keep up a faint, wiry kind of peep, which betrays them, while she mews and squeaks as if giving them directions. oct. 15, 1852. the flight of a partridge, leaving her lair (?) on the hillside only a few rods distant, with a gentle whirring sound, is like the blowing of rocks at a great distance. perhaps it produces the same kind of undulations in the air. aj)ril 6, 1853. hear the faint, swelling, far-off beat of a partridge. may 11, 1853. i hear the distant drumming of a partridge. its beat, however distant and low, falls still with a remarkably forcible, almost painful, impulse on the ear, like veritable little drumsticks on our tympa num, as if it were a throbbing or fluttering in our veins or brows or the chambers of the ear, and belonging to buffed grouse; partridge 97 ourselves, — as if it were produced by some little in sect which had made its way up into the passages of the ear, so penetrating is it. it is as palpable to the ear as the sharpest note of a fife. of course, that bird can drum with its wings on a log which can go off with such a powerful whir, beating the air. i have seen a thoroughly frightened hen and cockerel fly almost as. powerfully, but neither can sustain it long. beginning slowly and deliberately, the partridge's beat sounds faster and faster from far away under the boughs and through the aisles of the wood until it becomes a regu lar roll, but is speedily concluded. how many things shall we not see and be and do, when we walk there where the partridge drums! june 12, 1853. going up pine hill, disturbed a partridge and her brood. she ran in deshabille directly to me, within four feet, while her young, not larger than a chicken just hatched, dispersed, flying along a foot or two from the ground, just over the bushes, for a rod or two. the mother kept close at hand to attract my attention, and mewed and clucked and made a noise as when a hawk is in sight. she stepped about and held her head above the bushes and clucked just like a hen. what a remarkable instinct that which keeps the young so silent and prevents their peeping and betraying themselves ! the wild bird will run almost any risk to save her young. the young, i be lieve, make a fine sound at first in dispersing, some thing like a cherry-bird. nov. 8, 1853. the partridges go off with a whir, and then sail a long way level and low through the 98 notes on new england bikds woods with that impetus they have got, displaying their neat forms perfectly. jan. 31, 1854. many tracks of partridges there along the meadow-side in the maples, and their drop pings where they appear to have spent the night about the roots and between the stems of trees. i think they ,eat the buds of the azalea. and now, with a mew, pre luding a whir, they go off before me. coming up, i follow her tracks to where she eased herself for light ness, and immediately after are j5ve or six parallel cuts in the snow, where her wing struck when she lifted herself from the ground, but no trace more. april 25, 1854. the first partridge drums in one or two places, as if the earth's pulse now beat audibly with the increased flow of life. it slightly flutters all nature and makes her heart palpitate. july 6, 1854. disturbed two broods of partridges this afternoon, — one a third grown, flying half a dozen rods over the bushes, yet the old, as anxious as ever, rushing to me with the courage of a hen. jan. 25, 1855. in the partridge-tracks the side toes are more spread than in crows ; and i believe the hind one is not so long. both trail the middle toe. jan. 31, 1855. as i skated near the shore under lee's cliff, i saw what i took to be some scrags or knotty stubs of a dead limb lying on the bank beneath a white oak, close by me. yet while i looked directly at them i could not but admire their close resemblance to partridges. i had come along with a rapid whir and suddenly halted right against them, only two rods distant, and, as my eyes watered a little from skating ruffed grouse; partridge 99 against the wind, i was not convinced that they were birds till i had pulled out my glass and deliberately examined them. they sat and stood, three of them, per fectly still with their heads erect, some darker feathers like ears, methinks, increasing their resemblance to scrabs [szc], as where a small limb is broken off. i was much surprised at the remarkable stillness they pre served, instinctively relying on the resemblance to the ground for their protection, i. e. withered grass, dry oak leaves, dead scrags, and broken twigs. i thought at first that it was a dead oak limb with a few stub ends or scrabbs [sic] sticking up, and for some time after 1 had noted the resemblance to birds, standing only two rods off, i could not be sure of their character on ac count of their perfect motionlessness, and it was not till i brought my glass to bear on them and saw their eyes distinctly, steadily glaring on me, their necks and every muscle tense with anxiety, that i was con vinced. at length, on some signal which i did not perceive, they went with a whir, as if shot, off over the bushes. ^eb. 12, 1855. i see at warren's crossing where, last night perhaps, some partridges rested in this light, dry, deep snow. they must have been almost com pletely buried. they have left their traces at the bot tom. they are such holes as would be made by crowding their bodies in backwards, slanting-wise, while perhaps their heads were left out. the dog scared them out of similar holes yesterday in the open orchard. j^eb. 13, 1855. the tracks of partridges are more remarkable in this snow than usual, it is so light, being 100 notes on new england birds at the sa,me time a foot deep. i see where one has wad dled along several rods, making a chain-like track about three inches wide (or two and a half), and at the end has squatted in the snow, making a perfectly smooth and regular oval impression, like the bowl of a spoon, five inches wide. then, six inches beyond this, are the marks of its wings where it struck the snow on each side when it took flight. it must have risen at once without running. in one place i see where one, after running a little way, has left four impressions of its wings on the snow on each side extending eighteen or twenty inches and twelve or fifteen in width. in one case almost the entire wing was distinctly impressed, eight primaries and five or six secondaries. in one place, when alighting, the primary quills, five of them, have marked the snow for a foot. i see where many have dived into the snow, apparently last night, on the side of a shrub oak hollow. in four places they have passed quite underneath it for more than a foot ; in one place, eighteen inches. they appear to have dived or burrowed into it, then passed along a foot or more underneath and squatted there, perhaps, with their heads out, and have invariably left much dung at the end of this hole. i scared one from its hole only half a rod in front of me now at 11 a. m. to resume the subject of partridges, looking further in an open placfe or glade amid the shrub oaks and low pitch jdines, i found as many as twenty or thirty places where partridges had lodged in the snow, apparently the last night or the night before. you could see com ruffed grouse; partridge 101 monly where their bodies had first struck the snow and furrowed it for a foot or two, and six inches wide, then entered and gone underneath two feet and rested at the farther end, where the manure is left. is it not likely that they remain quite under the snow there, and do not put their heads out till ready to start? in many places they walked along before they went under the snow. they do not go under deep, and the gallery they make is mostly filled up behind them, leaving only a thin crust above. then invariably, just beyond this resting-place, you could see the marks made by their wings when they took their departure : *v '^ jill ci*n^ «-^ l"l'u ii ''hir >!' these distinct impressions made by their wings, in the pure snow, so common on all hands, though the bird that made it is gone and there is no trace beyond, affect me like some mystic oriental symbol, — the winged globe or what-not, — as if made by a spirit. in some places you would see a furrow and hollow in the snow where there was no track for rods around, as if a large snowball or a cannon-ball had struck it, where ap parently the birds had not paused in their flight. it is evidently a regular thing with them thus to lodge in tlie snow. their tracks, when perfectly distinct, are seen to 102 notes on new england birds be almost in one straight line thus, trailing the middle toe : v_ about five inches *~ ^" t— — ^v" =( ^ apart. in one place i saw where one had evidently trailed the tips of the wings, making two distinct lines five or six inches apart, one on each side the foot-tracks ; probably made by a male. feb. 16, 1855. i find in the leavings of the par tridges numerous ends of twigs. they are white with them, some half an inch long and stout in proportion. perhaps they are apple twigs. the bark (and bud, if there was any) has been entirely digested, leaving the bare, white, hard wood of the twig. some of the ends of apple twigs looked as if they had been bitten off. it is surprising what a quantity of this wood they swal low with their buds. what a hardy bird, born amid the dry leaves, of the same color with them, that, grown up, lodges in the snow and lives on buds and twigs ! where apple buds are just freshly bitten off they do not seem to have taken so much twig with them. jfeh. 22, 1855. he * had seen a partridge drum standing on a wall. said it stood very upright and produced the sound by striking its wings together be hind its back, as a cock often does, but did not strike the wall nor its body. this he is sure of, and declares that he is mistaken who affirms the contrary, though it were audubon himself. wilson says he " begins to strike with his stiffened wings " while standing on a log, but does not say what he strikes, though one would 1 [mr. jacob farmer.] ruffed grouse; partridge 103 infer it was either the log or his body. peabody says he beats his body with his wings.* dec. 14, 1855. suddenly i heard the screwing mew and then the whir of a partridge on or beneath an old decaying apple tree which the pines had surrounded. there were several such, and another partridge burst away from one. they shoot off swift and steady, show ing their dark-edged tails, almost like a cannon-ball. i saw one's track under an apple tree and where it had pecked a frozen-thawed apple. feb. 4, 1856. i see that the partridges feed quite extensively on the sumach berries, e. g. at my old house.^ they come to them after every snow, making fresh tracks, and have now stripped many bushes quite bare. feb. 8, 1856. e. garfield says that he saw the other day where a fox had caught in the snow three par tridges and eaten two. he himself last winter caught two, on the hillside south of fair haven, with his hands. they flew before him and dived into the snow, which was about a foot deep, going twice their length into it. he thrust his hand in and caught them. puffer said that his companion one night speared a partridge on the alders on the south side the pond. feb. 11, 1856. saw a partridge by the riverside, ^ [it is now known that the ruffed grouse in drumming simply beats the air with his wings, which do not strike his body or the log or each other. in bird-lore for nov.-dec, 1908 (vol. x, pp. 246-249) mr. e. j. sawyer describes the drumming and shows a photograph of a bird taken in the act. the same magazine for march-april, 1909 (vol. xi, p. 77), shows a photograph by dr. c. f. hodge of one of his tame grouse in the act of drumming.] 2 [his hut at walden pond.] 104 notes on new england birds opposite fair haven hill, which at first i mistook for the top of a fence-post above the snow, amid some al ders. i shouted and waved my hand four rods off, to see if it was one, but there was no motion, and i thought surely it must be a post. nevertheless i resolved to in vestigate. within three rods, i saw it to be indeed a partridge, to my surprise, standing perfectly still, with its head erect and neck stretched upward. it was as complete a deception as if it had designedly placed itself on the line of the fence and in the proper place for a post. it finally stepped off daintily with a teeter ing gait and head up. and took to wing. may 24, 1856. [humphrey buttrick]* has known a partridge to fly at once from one to two miles after being wounded (tracked them by the blood) without alighting. says he has caught as many as a dozen par tridges in his hands. he lies right down on them, or where he knows them to be, then passes his hands back and forth under his body till he feels them. you must not lift your body at all or they will surely squeeze out, and when you feel one must be sure you get hold of their legs or head, and not feathers merely. june 11, 1856. a partridge with young in the saw mill brook path. could hardly tell what kind of crea ture it was at first, it made such a noise and fluttering amid the weeds and bushes. finally ran off with its body flat and wings somewhat spread. march 8, 1857. a partridge goes off from amid the pitch pines. it lifts each wiug so high above its back ^ [a concord man.] ^ [these most have been young partridges, of course.] ruffed grouse; partridge 105 and flaps so low, and withal so rapidly, that they present the appearance of a broad wheel, almost a revolving sphere, as it whirs off like a cannon-ball shot from a gun. april 29, 1857. sweet-fern at entrance of ministe rial swamp. a partridge there drums incessantly. c. says it makes his heart beat with it, or he feels it in his breast. july 25, 1857. as we were returning over the track * where i had passed but a few moments before, we started a partridge with her young partly from beneath the wooden rails. while the young hastened away, she sat within seven feet of us and plumed herself, perfectly fearless, without making a noise or ruffling her feathers as they do in our neighborhood, and i thought it would be a good opportunity to observe whether she flew as quietly as other birds when not alarmed. we observed her till we were tired, and when we compelled her to get out of our way, though she took to wing as easily as if we had not been there and went only two or three rods, into a tree, she flew with a considerable whir, as if this were unavoidable in a rapid motion of the wings. oct. 20, 1857. melvin says he has caught partridges in his hands. if there 's only one hole, knows they 've not gone out. sometimes shoots them through the snow. jvov. 20, 1857. i see a partridge on the ground under a white oak by tarbell's black birches, looking just like a snag. this is the second time i have seen them in such a place. are they not after acorns ? jvov. 28, 1857. p. m. — around ebby hubbard's wood-lot. ^ [on the northeast carry, moosehead lake, maine.] 106 notes on new england birds on the hillside above his s-wamp, near the ministe rial land, i found myself walking in one of those shelf like hillside paths made by indians, hunters, cows, or what-not, and it was beset with fresh snares for par tridges. . . . upright twigs are stuck in the ground across the path, a foot or more in height and just close enough together to turn a partridge aside, leaving a space about four inches wide in the middle, and some twigs are stretched across above to prevent the birds hopping over. then a sapling about an inch in diame ter or less is bent over, and the end caught under one of the twigs which has a notch or projection on one side, and a free-running noose, attached to the sapling, hangs in the opening and is kept spread by being hung on some very slight nicks in the two twigs. this seems to suppose the bird to be going one way only, but per haps if it cannot escape one way it will turn and try to go back, and so spring the trap. i saw one that was sprung with nothing in it, another whose slip-noose was blown or fallen one side, and an other with a partridge still warm in it. it was a male bird hanging dead by the neck, just touching its toes to the ground. it had a collar or ruff about its neck, of large and conspicuous black feathers with a green reflection. this black is peculiar to the male, the fe male's being brown. its feet, now clinched in its agony, were the strangest-looking pale blue, with a fine fringe, of scales or the like, on each side of each toe. the small black feathers were centred with gray spots. the scapulars were darker brown, dashed with large clear pale-brown spots ; the breast-feathers light with light ruffed grouse; partridge 107 brown marks. the tail-feathers had each a broad black bar, except the middle one, which was more mixed or grayish there. the bands of the females are said to be more brown, as is their collar. there were a few drop pings of the bird close by the snare in two instances. were they dropped after it was caught ? or did they determine the locality of the snare? these birds appear to run most along the sides of wooded banks around swamps. at least these paths and snares occur there oftenest. i often scare them up from amid or near hemlocks in the woods. the general color of the bird is that of the ground and dry leaves on it at present. the bird hanging in the snare was very inconspicuous. i had gone close by it once without noticing it. its wings are short and stout and look as if they were a little worn by striking the ground or bushes, or perhaps in drumming. i ob served a bare bright-red or scarlet spot over each eye. ajyi'il 12, 1858. returning on the railroad, the noon train down passed us opposite the old maid hosmer's house. in the woods just this side, we came upon a partridge standing on the track, between the rails over which the cars had just passed. she had evidently been run down, but, though a few small feathers were scat tered along for a dozen rods beyond her, and she looked a little ruffled, she was apparently more disturbed in mind than body. i took her up and carried her one side to a safer place. at first she made no resistance, but at length fluttered out of my hands and ran two or three feet. i had to take her up again and carry and drive her further off, and left her standing with head 108 notes on new england birds erect as at first, as if beside herself. she was not lame, and i suspect no wing was broken. i did not suspect that this swift wild bird was ever run down by the cars. we have an account in the newspapers of every cow and calf that is run over, but not of the various wild creatures who meet with that accident. it may be many generations before the partridges learn to give the cars a sufficiently wide berth. april 22, 1859. scare up partridges feeding about the green springy places under the edge of hills. see them skim or scale away for forty rods along and up ward to the woods, into which they swiftly scale, dodg ing to right and left and avoiding the twigs, yet with out once flapping the wings after having launched themselves. dec. 24, 1859. i saw the tracks of a partridge more than half an inch deep in the ice, extending from this island ' to the shore, she having walked there in the slosh. they were quitfe perfect and reminded me of bird-tracks in stone. she may have gone there to bud on these blueberry trees. i saw where she spent the night at the bottom of that largest clump, in the snow. this blueberry grove must be well known to the partridges ; no doubt they distinguish their tops from afar. t/an. 22, 1860. i scare a partridge that was eating the buds and ends of twigs of the vaccinium vacillans on a hillside. april 19, 1860. toward night, hear a partridge drum. ^ [an islaud in flint's pond whereon were some remarkably larg^e blueberry bashes which thoreau has been describing.] 1 ruffed grouse; partridge 109 you will hear at first a single beat or two far apart and have time to say, "there is a partridge," so distinct and deliberate is it often, before it becomes a rapid roll. june 14, 1860. a brood of little partridges in the woodpaths. the old bird utters a loud wiry, mewing sound of alarm, the young a very fine sharp sound like cherry-birds. june 27, 1860. 2 p. m. —up assabet to farmer's. see on the open grassy bank and shore, just this side the hemlocks, a partridge with her little brood. being in ray boat, i went within three rods, and they were hardly scared at all. the young were but little bigger than chickens four or five days old, yet could fly two or three rods. the partridge now takes out her brood to feed, all the country over ; and what an extensive range they have ! — not confined to a barnyard. \_see also under tree sparrow, p. 297 ; general and miscellaneous, pp. 405, 413, 414, 418, 431, 432.] vii pigeons passenger pigeon ; wild pigeon * aug. 1845. i sit here at my window like a priest of isis, and observe the phenomena of three thousand years ago, yet unimpaired. the tantivy of wild pigeons, an ancient race of birds, gives a voice to the air, flying by twos and threes athwart my view or perching restless on the white pine boughs occasionally ; a fish hawk dim ples the glassy surface of the pond and brings up a fish ; and for the last half-hour i have heard the rattle of railroad cars conveying travellers from boston to the country. 1850.^ the fire reached the base of the cliff and then rushed up its sides. the squirrels ran before it in blind haste, and three pigeons dashed into the midst of the smoke. july 21, 1851. some pigeons here are resting in the thickest of the white pines during the heat of the day, migrating, no doubt. they are unwilling to move for me. flies buzz and rain about my hat, and the dead twigs and leaves of the white pine, which the choppers have left here, exhale a dry and almost sickening scent. ^ [on account of the interest attaching to this bird, once so abundant and now nearly or quite extinct, practically every reference to it in thoreau's journal, however seemingly trivial, is here reproduced.] ^ [though this was written in 1850, the fire referred to had hap pened some years earlier.] wild pigeon 111 a cuckoo chuckles, half throttled, on a neighboring tree, and now, flying into the pine, scares out a pigeon, which flies with its handsome tail spread, dashes this side and that between the trees helplessly, like a ship carrying too much sail in midst of a small creek, some great ammiral having no room to manoeuvre, — a flut tering flight. sept. 12, 1851. saw a pigeon-place on george hey wood's cleared lot, — the six dead trees set up for the pigeons to alight on, and the brush house close by to conceal the man. i was rather startled to find such a thing going now in concord. the pigeons on the trees looked like fabulous birds with their long tails and their pointed breasts. i could hardly believe they were alive and not some wooden birds used for decoys, they sat so still ; and, even when they moved their necks, i thought it was the effect of art. as they were not catching then, i approached and scared away a dozen birds who were perched on the trees, and found that they were freshly baited there, though the net was carried away, per chance to some other bed. the smooth sandy bed was covered with buckwheat, wheat or rye, and acorns. sometimes they use corn, shaved off the ear in its pre sent state with a knife. there were left the sticks with which they fastened the nets. as i stood there, i heard a rushing sound and, looking up, saw a flock of thirty or forty pigeons dashing toward the trees, who suddenly whirled on seeing me and circled round and made a new dash toward the bed, as if they would fain alight if i had not been there, then steered off. i crawled into the bough house and lay awhile looking through the leaves, k 112 notes on new england birds hoping to see them come again and feed, but they did not while i stayed. this net and bed belong to one harrington of weston, as i hear. several men still take pigeons in concord every year ; by a method, methinks, extremely old and which i seem to have seen pictured in some old book of fables or symbols, and yet few in concord know exactly how it is done. and yet it is all done for money and because the birds fetch a good price, just as the farmers raise corn and potatoes. i am always expecting that those engaged in such a pursuit will be somewhat less grovelling and mercenary than the regular trader or farmer, but i fear that it is not so. may 9, 1852. saw pigeons in the woods, with their inquisitive necks and long tails, but few representatives of the great flocks that once broke down our forests. sept. 2, 1852. small flocks of pigeons are seen these days. distinguished from doves by their sharper wings and bodies. march 29, 1853. he ^ saw two pigeons to-day. prated \j,ic\ for them ; they came near and then flew away. march 30, 1853. a range-pole on the side of mt. tabor,^ twenty-odd feet long and ten or twelve from the ground, slanted upward on three forked posts like a rafter, a bower ^ being opposite the lower end two rods off, and this end of the pole full of shot. aug. 9, 1853. saw pigeons the other day (august 5). sept. 2, 1853. hear the sharp quivet of pigeons at 1 [dupan, of concord.] 2 [a hill near beaver pond in lincoln.] ^ [a pigeon-stand.] wild pigeon 113 the thrush alley clearing. mistook it for a jay at first, but saw the narrow, swift-flying bird soon. dec. 15, 1853. he ^ had ten live pigeons in a cage under his barn. he used them to attract others in the spring. the reflections from their necks were very beautiful. they made me think of shells cast up on a beach. he placed them in a cage on the bed and could hear them prate at the house. . . . the turtle doves ^ plagued him, for they were restless and frightened the pigeons. march 19, 1854. goodwin killed a pigeon yesterday. july 18, 1854. brooks has let out some of his pigeons, which stay about the stands or perches to bait others. wild ones nest in his woods quite often. he begins to catch them the middle of august. aug. 15, 1854. crossed from top of annursnack to top of strawberry hill ^ past a pigeon-bed. in the meanwhile we came upon another pigeon-bed, where the pigeons were being baited, a little corn, etc., being spread on the ground, and, [as ?] at the first, the bower was already erected. sept. 5, 1854. saw two pigeons, which flew about his pond and then lit on the elms over his house. he ^ said they had come to drink from brooks's, as they often did. sept. 12, 1854. i scare pigeons from hubbard's oaks beyond. how like the creakingof trees the slight sounds ^ [mr. george brooks of concord.] ^ [mourningdoves.] ' [in acton.] * [samuel barrett, who had a sawmill and a gristmill on spencer brook, a tributary of the assabet.] 114 notes on new england birds they make! thus they are concealed. not only their prating or quivet is like a sharp creak, but i heard a sound from them like a dull grating or cracking of bough on bough. on a white oak beyond everett's orchard by the road, i see quite a flock of pigeons; their blue-black droppings and their feathers spot the road. the bare limbs of the oak apparently attracted them, though its acorns are thick on the ground. these are found whole in their crops. they swallow them whole. i should think from the droppings that they had been eating berries. i hear that wetherbee caught ninety-two dozen last week. april 16, 1855. in the meanwhile heard the quivet through the wood, and, looking, saw through an opening a small compact flock of pigeons flying low about. april 26, 1855. going over ponkawtasset, hear a golden-crested (?) wren,^ — the robin's note, etc., — in the tops of the high wood ; see myrtle-birds and half a dozen pigeons. the prate of the last is much like the creaking of a tree. they lift their wings at the same moment as they sit. there are said to be many about now. see their warm-colored breasts. aj)ril 27, 1855. heard a singular sort of screech, somewhat like a hawk, under the cliff, and soon some pigeons flew out of a pine near me. may 26, 1855. saw a beautiful blue-backed and long tailed pigeon sitting daintily on a low white pine limb. sept. 2, 1856. a few pigeons were seen a fortnight ^ [he afterwards learned that this hird with the robin-like notes in its song was the rubj'-crowned wren, or kinglet, not the golden-crowned.] wild pigeon 115 ago. i have noticed none in all walks, but g. minott, whose mind runs on them so much, but whose age and infirmities confine him to his wood-shed on the hillside, saw a small flock a fortnight ago. i rarely pass at any season of the year but he asks if i have seen any pigeons. one man's mind running on pigeons, he will sit thus in the midst of a village, many of whose inhabit ants never see nor dream of a pigeon except in the pot, and where even naturalists do not observe them, and he, looking out with expectation and faith from morning till night, will surely see them. sej^t. 16, 1856. see a flock of pigeons dash by. from a stout breast they taper straightly and slenderly to the tail. they have been catching them a while. may 14, 1857. abel hosmer * tells me that he has collected and sown white pine seed, and that he has found them in the crop of pigeons. (?) se^it. 30, 1857. minott said he had seen a couple of pigeons go over at last, as he sat in his shed. at first he thought they were doves, but he soon saw that they were pigeons, they flew so straight and fast. sept. 9, 1858. r.^ says that he has caught pigeons which had ripe grapes in their crops long before any were ripe here, and that they came from the southwest. sejjt. 13, 1858. a small dense flock of wild pigeons dashes by over the side of the hill, from west to east, — perhaps from wetherbee's to brooks's, for i see the latter's pigeon-place. they make a dark slate-gray im pression. sept. 23, 1858. met a gunner from lynn on the ^ [a concord farmer.] ^ [israel rice, the sudbury farmer.] 116 notes on new england birds beach, ^ who had several pigeons which he had killed in the woods by the shore. said that they had been blown off the mainland. may 7, 1859. i frequently see pigeons dashing about in small flocks, or three or four at a time, over the woods here.^ theirs is a peculiarly swift, dashing flight. sejit. 9, 1859. i start many pigeons now in a sprout land. sept. 13, 1859. it is a wonder how pigeons can swal low acorns whole, but they do. sept. 14, 1859. they are catching pigeons nowadays. coombs has a stand west of nut meadow, and he says that he has just shot fourteen hawks there, which were after the pigeons. sept. 15, 1859. p. m. — to annursnack. dense flocks of pigeons hurry-skurry over the hill. pass near brooks's pigeon-stands. there was a flock perched on his poles, and they sat so still and in such regular order there, being also the color of the wood, that i thought they were wooden figures at first. they were perched not only in horizontal straight lines one above the other, which the cross-bars required, but at equal distances apart on these perches, which must be their own habit ; and it struck me that they made just such a figure seen against the sky as pigeonholes cut in a doves' house do, i. e. a more or less triangular figure, and possibly the seeing them thus perched might have originally suggested this arrangement of the holes. pigeons dart by on every side, — a dry slate color, ^ [on the south shore of rockport, mass.] [in acton, adjoining concord on the west.] wild pigeon 117 like weather-stained wood (the weather-stained birds), fit color for this aerial traveller, a more subdued and earthy blue than the sky, as its field (or path) is be tween the sky and the earth, — not black or brown, as is the earth, but a terrene or slaty blue, suggesting their aerial resorts and habits. sept. 21, 1859. i sat near coombs's pigeon-place by white pond. the pigeons sat motionless on his bare perches, from time to time dropping down into the bed and uttering a quivet or two. some stood on the perch ; others squatted flat. i could see their dove-colored breasts. then all at once, being alarmed, would take flight, but ere long return in straggling parties. he tells me that he has fifteen dozen baited, but does not intend to catch any more at present, or for two or three weeks, hoping to attract others. rice says that white oak acorns pounded up, shells and all, make the best bait for them. sept. 28, 1859. the white pine seed is very abundant this year, and this must attract more pigeons. coombs tells me that he finds the seed in their crops. also that he found within a day or two a full-formed egg with shell in one. jvov. 8, 1859. coombs says that quite a little flock of pigeons bred here last summer. he found one nest in a small white pine near his pigeon-stand (where he baited them in the summer), so low he could put his hand in it(!?). jan. 23, 1860. minott says that pigeons alight in great flocks on the tops of hemlocks in march, and he thinks they eat the seed. (but he also thought for the 118 notes on new england birds same reason that they ate the white pine seed at the same season, when it is not there ! they might find a little of the last adhering to the pitch.) june 14, 1860. see a pigeon.^ se'pt. 4, 1860. saw flocks of pigeons the 2d and 3d. mourning dove ; turtle dove july 12, 1852. the turtle dove flutters before you in shady wood-paths, or looks out with extended neck, losing its balance, slow to leave its perch. sept. 27, 1852. it must have been a turtle dove that eyed me so near, turned its head sideways to me for a fair view, looking with a st. vitus twitching of its neck, as if to recover its balance on an unstable perch, — that is their way. may 27, 1858. ed. emerson ^ shows me an e^^ of a bittern (^ardea minor^ from a nest in the midst of the great meadows, which four boys found, scaring up the bird, last monday, the 24th. it was about a foot wide on the top of a tussock, where the water around was about one foot deep. i will measure the egg.^ they were a little developed. also an egg of a turtle dove, one of two in a nest in a pitch pine, about six feet from the ground, in sleepy hollow cemetery, by the side of a frequented walk, on a fork on a nearly horizontal limb. the egg is milk-white, elliptical, one and three six teenths inches long by seven eighths wide. ^' [in the western part of concord.] 2 [edward waldo emerson, son of ralph waldo emerson, then a boy of thirteen.] * it is clay-colored, one and seven eighths inches long by one and nine sixteenths, about the same size at each end. ^sl im v^^^^^^l ,'v^pp^li9esc^l^$ss^^|^ ^pmw^srffv^^j^ k'wti'hh ^[^^ ifj^^j^^ssfkse^^sl^wk wsi^s^p-'^wvkw' wfmmftkrl' j^s|» f&^orau ^tf^b^^^^^^eb^^v^h^ m ^vwc ^^^^^^h ^ r feim fevffmmfm ^^m v1^ r^l^r' i^ jfm^m} vbn 1 ptutvvf ■uvh jkikk pms|r3 wkto^sl^^^:mll]^jk»rfnfra fl^l^ ' illff' ^h h ^^ i^^sffl ^^ ^»sj[; k ^^ ^^^^m m^m ^^hb^ ^sm ^^^^^ k^sd hph^h k^ ^^mvi ^^ esfl^v-j n ib a mourning dovk and hkl! ni:>r mourning dove 119 may 28, 1858. i get the nest of the turtle dove above named, it being deserted and no egg left. it appears to have been built on the foundation of an old robin's nest and consists of a loose wisp of straw and pinweed, the seedy ends projecting, ten inches long, laid across the mud foundation of the robin's nest, with a very sliglit depression. very loose and coarse material is artificially disposed, without any lining or architecture. it was close to a frequented path of the cemetery and within reach of the hand. dec. 30, 1860. eben conant's sons tell me that there has been a turtle dove associating with their tame doves and feeding in the yard from time to time for a fort night past. they saw it to-day. [/see also under passenger pigeon, p. 113.] viii hawks and eagles marsh hawk ; frog hawk ; hen-harrier april 24, 1852. the sparrows, frogs, rabbits, etc., are made to resemble the ground for their protection ; but so is the hawk that preys on them ; but he is of a lighter color beneath, that creeping things over which he hovers may confound him with the sky. the marsh hawk is not easily distinguished from the meadow or the stems of the maples. july 29, 1853. i see three or four (apparently) young marsh hawks, but full grown, circling and tum bling about not much above the ground and playing with one another. they are quite a reddish brown. they ut ter a squeak (not a shrill scream), much like a small bird or animal. april 23, 1855. see a frog hawk beating the bushes regularly. what a peculiarly formed wing! it should be called the kite. its wings are very narrow and pointed, and its form in front is a remarkable curve, and its body is not heavy and buzzard-like. it occasion ally hovers over some parts of the meadow or hedge and circles back over it, only rising enough from time to time to clear the trees and fences. may 14, 1855. see a male hen-harrier skimming low along the side of the river, often within a foot of the muddy shore, looking for frogs, with a very compact marsh hawk 121 flock of small birds, probably swallows, in pursuit. oc casionally he alights and walks or hops flutteringly a foot or two over the ground. nov. 5, 1855. at hubbard's crossing i see a large male hen-harrier skimming over the meadow, its deep slate somewhat sprinkled or mixed with black ; perhaps young. it flaps a little and then sails straight forward, so low it must rise at every fence. but i perceive that it follows the windings of the meadow over many fences. april 8, 1856. the marsh hawks ^ flew in their usual irregular low tacking, wheeling, and circling flight, leisurely flapping and beating, now rising, now falling, in conformity with the contour of the ground. the last i think i have seen on the same beat in former years. he and his race must be well acquainted with the musketicook and its meadows. no sooner is the snow off than he is back to his old haunts, scouring that part of the meadows that is bare, while the rest is melting. if he returns from so far to these meadows, shall the sons of concord be leaving them at this sea son for slight cause? april 22, 1856. a marsh hawk, in the midst of the rain, is skimming along the shore of the meadow, close to the ground, and, though not more than, thirty rods off, i repeatedly lose sight of it, it is so nearly the color of the hillside beyond. it is looking for frogs. may 20, 1856. two marsh hawks, male and female, flew about me a long time, screaming, — the female largest, with ragged wings, — as i stood on the neck of the peninsula. this induced me to climb four pines, 1 [two seen that afternoon.] 122 notes on new england birds but i tore my clothes, got pitched all over, and found only squirrel; yet they have, no doubt, a nest there abouts.^ may 14, 1857. see a pair of marsh hawks, the smaller and lighter-colored male, with black tips to wings, and the large brown female, sailing low over j. hosmer's sprout-land and screaming, apparently looking for frogs or the like. or have they not a nest near? they hover very near me. the female, now so near, sails very grandly, with the outer wing turned or tilted up when it circles, and the bars on its tail when it turns, etc., reminding me of a great brown moth. sometimes alone; and when it approaches its mate it utters a low, grating note like cur-r-r. suddenly the female holds straight toward me, descending gradually. steadily she comes on, without swerving, until only two rods off, then wheels. oct. 28, 1857. i look up and see a male marsh hawk with his clean-cut wings, that has just skimmed past above my head, — not at all disturbed, only tilting his body a little, now twenty rods off, with demi-semi-quaver of his wings. he is a very neat flyer. ajyril 19, 1858. spend the day hunting for my boat, which was stolen. as i go up the riverside, i see a male marsh hawk hunting. he skims along exactly over the edge of the water, on the meadowy side, not more than three or four feet from the ground and winding with the shore, looking for frogs, for in such a tortuous line do the frogs sit. they probably know about what time 1 [later, as will be seen, he learned that marsh hawks' nests are not to be looked for in trees.] j marsh hawk 123 to expect his visits, being regularly decimated. particu lar hawks farm particular meadows. it must be easy for him to get a breakfast. far as i can see with a glass, he is still tilting this way and that over the water-line. may 2, 1858. if i were to be a frog hawk for a month i should soon know some things about the frogs. how patiently they skim the meadows, occasionally alighting, and fluttering as if it were difficult ever to stand still on the ground. i have seen more of them than usual since i too have been looking for frogs. may 30, 1858. p. m. — to hen-harrier's nest and to ledum swamp. edward emerson shows me the nest which he and another discovered. it is in the midst of the low wood, sometimes inundated, just southwest of hubbard's bath, the island of wood in the meadow. the hawk rises when we approach and circles about over the wood, uttering a note singularly like the common one of the flicker. the nest is in a more bushy or open place in this low wood, and consists of a large mass of sedge and stubble with a very few small twigs, as it were accidentally intermingled. it is about twenty inches in diameter and remarkably flat, the slight de pression in the middle not exceeding three quarters of an inch. the whole opening amid the low bushes is not more than two feet in diameter. the thickness of it raises the surface about four inches above the ground. the inner and upper part is jmiformly rather fine and pale-brown sedge. there are two dirty, or rather dirtied, white eggs left (of four that were), one 124 notes on new england birds o£ them one and seven tenths inches long, and not " spherical," as brewer says, but broad in proportion to length.^ june 8, 1858. the marsh hawk's eggs are not yet hatched. she rises when i get within a rod and utters that peculiar cackling or scolding note, much like, but distinct from, that of the pigeon woodpecker. she keeps circling over the nest and repeatedly stoops within a rod of my head in an angry manner. she is not so large as a hen-hawk, and is much more slender. she will come sailing swiftly and low over the tops of the trees and bushes, etc., and then stoop as near to my head as she dares, in order to scare me away. the primaries, of which i count but five, are very long and loose, or distant, like fingers with which she takes hold of the air, and form a very distinct part of the wing, making an angle with the rest. yet they are not broad and give to the wing a long and slender appearance. the legs are stretched straight back under the tail.^ i see nothing of the male, nor did i before. a red-wing and a kingbird are soon in pursuit of the hawk, which proves, i think, that she meddles with their nests or themselves. she circles over me, scolding, as far as the edge of the wood, or fifteen rods. june 17, 1858. p. m.— to hawk's nest. one q.gg is hatched since the 8th, and the young bird, all down, with a tinge of fawn or cinnamon, lies motion ^ another is one and seven eighths inches long by one and a half inches. ^ [this is the habitual manner of carrying the legs in flight among the birds of prey and some other orders. see dr. c. w. townsend's paper in the auk, apru, 1909, vol. xxvi, p. 109.] marsh hawk 125 less on its breast with its head down and is already about four inches long! an hour or two after, i see the old hawk pursue a stake-driver which was flying over this spot, darting down at him and driving him off. aug. 8, 1858. saw yesterday a this year's (?) marsh hawk, female, flying low across the road near hildreth's. i took it to be a young bird, it came so near and looked so fresh. it is a fine rich-brown, full-breasted bird, with a long tail. some hens in the grass beneath were greatly alarmed and began to run and fly with a cackling to the shelter of a corn-field. they which did not see the hawk and were the last to stir expressed the most alarm. meanwhile the hawk sails low and steadily over the field away, not thinking of disturbing them. oct. 9, 1858. methinks hawks are more commonly seen now, — the slender marsh hawk for one. i see four or five in different places. i watch two marsh hawks which rise from the woods before me as i sit on the cliff, at first plunging at each other, gradually lifting themselves as they come round in their gyrations, higher and higher, and floating toward the southeast. slender dark motes they are at last, almost lost to sight, but every time they come round eastward i see the light of the westering sun reflected from the under sides of their wings. jvbv. 20, 1858. he * says that a marsh hawk had his nest in his meadow several years, and though he shot the female three times, the male with but little delay returned with a new mate. he often watched these ^ [martial miles, a concord farmer.] 126 notes on new england birds birds, and saw that the female could tell when the male was coming a long way off. he thought that he fed her and the young all together (?). she would utter a scream when she perceived him, and, rising into the air (before or after the scream?), she turned over with her talons uppermost, while he passed some three rods above, and caught without fail the prey which he let drop, and then carried it to her young. he had seen her do this many times, and always without failing. march 24, 1860. i see a male frog hawk beating a hedge, scarcely rising more than two feet from the ground for half a mile, quite below the level of the wall within it. how unlike the hen-hawk in this ! maij 8, 1860. how the marsh hawk circles or skims low, round and round over a particular place in a meadow, where, perhaps, it has seen a frog, screaming once or twice, and then alights on a fence-post ! how it crosses the causeway between the willows, at a gap in them with which it is familiar, as a hen knows a hole in a fence ! i lately saw one flying over the road near our house. may 29, 1860. we next proceeded to the marsh hawk's nest from which the eggs were taken a fortnight ago and the female shot. it was in a long and narrow cassandra swamp northwest of the lime-kiln and some thirty rods from the road, on the side of a small and more open area some two rods across, where were few if any bushes and more [?] sedge with the cassandra. the nest was on a low tussock, and about eighteen marsh hawk 127 inches across, made of dead birch twigs around and a pitch pine plume or two, and sedge grass at bottom, with a small cavity in the middle. the female was shot and eggs taken on the 16th ; yet here was the male, hovering anxiously over the spot and neighborhood and scolding at us. betraying him self from time to time by that peculiar clacking note reminding you of a pigeon woodpecker. we thought it likely that he had already got another mate and a new nest near by. he would not quite withdraw though fired at, but still would return and circle near us. they are said to find a new mate very soon. july 3, 1860. looked for the marsh hawk's nest (of june 16th) in the great meadows.* it was in the very midst of the sweet-gale (which is three feet high), oc cupying an opening only a foot or two across. we had much difficulty in finding it again, but at last nearly stumbled on to a young hawk. there was one as big as my fist, resting on the bare, flat nest in the sun, with a great head, staring eyes, and open gaping or panting mouth, yet mere down, grayish-white down, as yet ; but i detected another which had crawled a foot one side amid the bushes for shade or safety, more than half as large again, with small feathers and a yet more angry, hawk-like look. how naturally anger sits on the young hawk's head ! it was 3.30 p. m., and the old birds were gone and saw us not. meanwhile their callow young lie panting under the sweet-gale and rose bushes in the swamp, waiting for their parents to fetch them food. ^ [this was another nest than that described under may 29.] 128 notes on new england bikds sharp-shinned hawk may 4, 1855.' sitting in abel brooks's hollow, see a small hawk go over high in the air, with a long tail and distinct from wings. it advanced by a sort of limp ing flight yet rapidly, not circling nor tacking, but flapping briskly at intervals and then gliding straight ahead with rapidity, controlling itself with its tail. it seemed to be going a journey. was it not the sharp shinned, or jfalco /uscus ? ^ july 21, 1858. p. m. — to walden, with e. bart lett and e. emerson. the former wished to show me what he thought an owl's nest he had found. near it, in abel brooks's wood-lot, heard a note and saw a small hawk fly over. it was the nest of this bird. saw several of the young flitting about and occasionally an old bird. the nest was in a middling-sized white pine, some twenty feet from the ground, resting on two limbs close to the main stem, on the south side of it. it was quite solid, com posed entirely of twigs about as big round as a pipe stem and less ; was some fifteen inches in diameter and one inch deep, or nearly flat, and perhaps five inches thick. it was very much dirtied on the sides by the droppings of the young. as we were standing about the tree, we heard again the note of a young one approach ing. we dropped upon the ground, and it alighted on the edge of the nest; another alighted near by, and a third a little further off. the young were apparently as big as the old, but still lingered about the nest and ^ [the sharp-shinned hawk is now known as accipiter velox.] sharp-shinned hawk 129 returned to it. i could hear them coming some distance off. their note was a kind of peeping squeal, which you might at first suspect to be made by a jay; not very loud, but as if to attract the old and reveal their whereabouts. the note of the old bird, which occasion ally dashed past, was somewhat like that of the marsh hawk or pigeon woodpecker, a cackling or clattering sound, chiding us. the old bird was anxious about her inexperienced young, and was trying to get them off. at length she dashed close past us, and appeared to fairly strike one of the young, knocking him off his perch, and he soon followed her off. i saw the remains of several birds lying about in that neighborhood, and saw and heard again the young and old thereabouts for several days thereafter. a young man killed one of the young hawks, and i saw it. it was the falco fuscus^ the american brown or slate-colored hawk. its length was thirteen inches; alar extent, twenty-three. the tail reached two or more inches beyond the closed wings. nuttall says the upper parts are " a deep slate color " (these were very dark brown) ; also that the nest is yet unknown. but wilson describes his f.velox (which is the same as nuttall's f. fuscus) as " whole upper parts very dark brown," but legs, greenish-yellow (these were yellow). the toes had the peculiar pendu lous lobes which w. refers to. as i saw it in the woods, i was struck by its dark color above, its tawny throat and breast, brown-spotted, its clean, slender, long yel low legs, feathered but little below the knee, its white vent, its wings distinctly and rather finely dark-barred beneath, short, black, much curved bill, and slender 130 notes on new england birds black sharp claws. its tail with a dark bar near edge beneath. in hand i found it had the white spots on scapulars of the f.fuscus, and had not the white bars on tail of the f. pennsylvanicus.^ it also had the fine sharp shin. [zs'ee also under blackbirds, p. 264.] cooper's hawk may 29, 1860. we proceeded to the cooper's hawk nest in an oak and pine wood (clark's) north of ponkawtasset. i found a fragment of one of the eggs which he ^ had thrown out. farmer's egg^ by the way, was a dull or dirty white, i. e. a rough white with large dirty spots, perhaps in the grain, but not surely, of a regular oval form and a little larger than his marsh hawk's egg. i climbed to the nest, some thirty to thirty five feet high in a white pine, against the main stem. it was a mass of bark -fibre and sticks about two and a half feet long by eighteen inches wide and sixteen high. the lower and main portion was a solid mass of fine bark-fibre such as a red squirrel uses. this was sur rounded and surmounted by a quantity of dead twigs of pine and oak, etc., generally the size of a pipe-stem or less. the concavity was very slight, not more than an inch and a half, and there was nothing soft for a lining, the bark-fibres being several inches beneath the twigs, but the bottom was floored for a diameter of six inches or more with flakes of white oak and pitch pine ^ [the broad-winged hawk, now called buteo platypterus.] " [jacob farmer, who had found the nest and shot the female hawk may 16, saving one of the eggs.] red-tailed hawk 131 bark one to two inches long each, a good handful of theni, and on this the eggs had lain. we saw nothing of the hawk. red-tailed hawk; hen-hawk march 26, 1853. up the assabet, scared from his perch a stout hawk, — the red-tailed undoubtedly, for i saw very plainly the cow-red when he spread his wings from oj6f his tail (and rump ?). i rowed the boat three times within gunshot before he flew, twice within four fods, while he sat on an oak over the water, — i think because i had two ladies with me, which was as good as bushing the boat. each time, or twice at least, he made a motion to fly before he started. the ends of his primaries looked very ragged against the sky. this is the hen-hawk of the farmer, the same, probably, which i have scared off from the cliff so often. it was an interesting eagle-like object, as he sat upright on his perch with his back to us, now and then looking over his shoulder, the broad-backed, flat-headed, curve beaked bird. april 4, 1853. at conantum end i saw a red-tailed hawk launch himself away from an oak by the pond at my approach, — a heavy flier, flapping even like the great bittern at first, — heavy forward. april 30, 1855. i hear from far the scream of a hawk circling over the holden woods and swamp. this accounts for those two men with guns just entering it. what a dry, shrill, angry scream ! i see the bird with my glass resting upon the topmost plume of a tall white pine. its back, reflecting the light, looks white in 132 notes on new england birds patches; and now it circles again. it is a red-tailed hawk. the tips of its wings are curved upward as it sails. how it scolds at the men beneath ! i see its open bill. it must have a nest there. hark ! there goes a gun, and down it tumbles from a rod or two above the wood. so i thought, but was mistaken. in the mean while, i learn that there is a nest there, and the gun ners killed one this morning, which i examined. they are now getting the young. above it was brown, but not at all reddish-brown except about head. above perhaps i should call it brown, and a dirty white be neath ; wings above thickly barred with darker, and also wings beneath. the tail of twelve reddish feathers, once black-barred near the end. the feet pale-yellow and very stout, with strong, sharp black claws. the head and neck were remarkably stout, and the beak short and curved from the base. powerful neck and legs. the claws pricked me as i handled it. it measured one yard and three eighths plus from tip to *tip, i. e. four feet and two inches. some ferruginous on the neck ; ends of wings nearly black. may 1, 1855. went to garfield's for the hawk of yesterday. it was nailed to the barn in terrorem and as a trophy. he gave it to me with an egg. he called it the female, and probably was right, it was so large. he tried in vain to shoot the male, which i saw circling about just out of gunshot and screaming, while he robbed the nest. he climbed the tree when i was there yesterday afternoon, the tallest white pine or other tree in its neighborhood, over a swamp, and found two young, which he thought not more than a fortnight old, red-tailed hawk 133 — with only down, at least no feathers, — and one ad dled egg, also three or four white-bellied or deer mouse (^mus le^icopus^'), a perch, and a sucker,^ and a gray rabbit's skin. he had seen squirrels, etc., in other nests. these fishes were now stale. i found the remains of a partridge under the tree. the reason i did not see my hawks at well meadow last year was that he found and broke up their nest there, containing five eggs. the hawk measures exactly 22| inches in length and 4 feet 4:^ inches in alar extent, and weighs 3^ pounds. the ends of closed wings almost two inches short of end of tail. general color above of wings and back an oli vaceous brown, thickly barred with waving lines of very dark brown, there being a much broader bar next to the tip of the secondaries and tertiaries ; and the first five primaries are nearly black toward the ends. a little white appears, especially on the tertiaries. the wing coverts and scapulars glossed with purple reflections. the twelve tail-feathers (which macgillivray says is the number in all birds of prey, i. e. the falconincb and strigince) showing five and three quarters inches a clear brown red, or rather fox-color, above, with a nar row dark band within half an inch of the end, which is tipped with dirty white. a slight inclination to dusky bars near the end of one side feather. lower tail coverts for nearly an inch white, barred with fox-color. head and neck a paler, inclining to ferruginous, brown. beneath : breast and wing-linings brown and white, the feathers of first centred with large dark-brown has ^ [now known as peromyscus leucopus noveboracensis. ] 2 i think these must have been dead fish they found. 134 notes on new england birds tate spots, and the wing-linings streaked with ferrugi nous. wings white, barred with dusky. " vent and femorals," as nuttall says, "pale ochreous." tail white, softened by the superior color. i do not perceive that the abdomen is barred. bill very blue black, with a short, stout curved tip, — curving from the cere more than a quarter of a cir cle, extends not quite a quarter of an inch beyond the lower mandible, — and is proportionally stouter at tip than in any of his falconince, judging from plates of heads ; whole visible, including cere, 1|^ inches long, and 1 inch deep at base ; cere yellowish-green. tarsus and toes very pale yellow ; claws blue-black. as macgillivray says of buteo, claws flattened beneath, "that of the middle toe with an inner sharp edge." (he says, as i gather, that all the diurnal birds of prey of great britain, i. e. falconince, have claws either flattened or concave beneath, except pandlon, the inner edge of the middle one being more or less sharp, but least so in circus, or harrier.) tarsus feathered in front one third the way down. the toes for length stand in this order, — the first (or hind), second, fourth, third, the first being the shortest ; for stoutness thus, — one, two, three, four. claws for stoutness fol low the same order with the toes. utmost spread of toes and claws 4| inches. a considerable web between third and fourth toes.^ toes with papillae not rigid beneath. the wing extends nearly two feet from the body, and is 10| inches wide; from flexure is 15| inches. 1 in thia respect circus and falco much the same ; aquila and pernis and milvus have several short webs ; haliaetus, pandion, and acdpiter are free. eed-tailed hawk 135 when fully expanded it has a rounded outline and a ragged appearance owing to the separation of the first five or six primaries, as i noticed the male bird while resting. the first primary short ; they stand, first and eighth, seventh, sixth, second, fifth, third, fourth. the fifth and third are about the same length, and the fourth only a quarter of an inch longer than the third. as in the buteo vulgaris of macgillivray, found in europe and in our north, the four first primaries " abruptly cut out on the inner web " ; the second, third, fourth, and fifth, but not the first and sixth, " slightly so on the outer." there are ten primaries and there are fourteen secondaries. (macgillivray says the primaries of the falconinm are ten, the seconda ries from thirteen to eighteen.) the wing, i see, natu rally opens at the primaries. this is evidently very closely allied to the buteo vulgaris^ but apparently the wings are not so long com pared with the tail, and there is a difference in the comparative length and stoutness of the toes ; the feet of this are not " hright yellow," and the upper man dible is much stouter and more recurved at tip, judging from his plate of the head and his description. it is recurved as much as his osprey's. the ear looked like a large round hole in the side of the head behind the eye. the egg is a very dirty brownish white, with brown spots about the smaller end, though one end is about as large as the other. it is larger than a hen's egg, — 2| inches by 2. 136 notes on new england birds early in spring i occasionally see hen-hawks perched about river, and approach quite near them, but never at any other time. this hawk's flesh had a very disagreeable rank scent, as i was cutting it up, though fresh, — cutting off the wings, etc., etc. sei^t. 14, 1855. p. m.— to hubbard's close. i scare from an oak by the side of the close a young hen-hawk, which, launching off with a scream and a heavy flight, alights on the topmost plume of a large pitch pine in the swamp northward, bending it down, with its back toward me, where it might be mistaken for a plume against the sky, the light makes all things so black. it has a red tail ; black primaries ; scapulars and wing-coverts gray-brown ; back showing much white and whitish head. it keeps looking round, first this side then that, warily. oct. 28, 1857. i hear the scream of a hen-hawk, soaring and cii'cling onward. i do not often see the marsh hawk thus. what a regular figure this fellow makes on high, with his broad tail and broad wings ! does he perceive me, that he rises higher and circles to one side ? he goes round now one full circle without a flap, tilting his wing a little ; then flaps three or four times and rises higher. now he comes on like a billow, screaming. steady as a planet in its orbit, with his head bent down, but on second thought that small sprout-land seems worthy of a longer scrutiny, and he gives one circle backward over it. his scream is some what like the whinnering of a horse, if it is not rather red-tailed hawk 13t a, split squeal.^ it is a hoarse, tremulous breathing forth of his winged energy. but why is it so regularly repeated at that height ? is it to scare his prey, that he may see by its motion where it is, or to inform its mate or companion of its whereabouts ? now he crosses the at present broad river steadily, deserving to have one or two rabbits at least to swing about him. what majesty there is in this small bird's flight ! the hawks are large-souled. march 23, 1859. as we entered well meadow, we saw a hen-hawk perch on the topmost plume of one of the tall pines at the head of the meadow. soon another appeared, probably its mate, but we looked in vain for a nest there. it was a fine sight, their soaring above our heads, presentp. ing a perfect outline and, as they came round, show ing their rust-colored tails ^ ^■ with a whitish rump, or, *"-' j as they sailed away from us, that slight teetering or quivering motion of their dark-tipped wings seen edge wise, now on this side, now that, by which they balanced and directed themselves. these are the most eagle-like of our common hawks. they very commonly perch upon the very topmost plume of a pine, and, if motionless, are rather hard to distinguish there. 1 [the note described is evidently that of the red-tailed hawk rather than that of the other " hen-hawk," the red-shouldered.] 138 notes on new england birds hen-hawks (species unidentified)^ sept. 7, 1851. there were two hen-hawks soared and circled for our entertainment, when we were in the woods on that boon plain^ the other day, crossing each other's orbits from time to time, alternating like the squir rels of the morning,^ till, alarmed by our imitation of a hawk's shrill cry, they gradually inflated themselves, made themselves more aerial, and rose higher and higher into the heavens, and were at length lost to sight ; yet all the while earnestly looking, scanning the surface of the earth for a stray mouse or rabbit. june 8, 1853. as i stood by this pond, i heard a hawk scream, and, looking up, saw a pretty large one circling not far off and incessantly screaming, as i at first supposed to scare and so discover its prey, but its scream ing was so incessant and it circled from time to time so near me, as i moved southward, that i began to think it had a nest near by and was angry at my intrusion into its domains. as i moved, the bird still followed and ^ [the term " hen-hawk " is applied in new england ordinarily to the large buzzard hawks, or buteos, — the red-tailed hawk {buteo bore alis) and the red-shouldered hawk (h. lineatus). thoreau, however, seems never to have identified the latter species except in the case of a dead bird brought to him jan. 12, 1859, and mr. william brewster, the ornithologist, who has known the concord country intimately for many years, informs the editor that the red-tailed hawk was up to about 1s8s the common hen-hawk there, though it is now almost entirely super seded by the red-shouldered. it seems probable, therefore, that most of thoreau's hen-hawks were red-tails, as was certainly the case with many which he describes.] ^ [in stow, mass., near concord.] ^ [two caged squirrels revolving their cylinder alternately.] hen-hawks 139 screamed, coming sometimes quite near or. within gun shot, then circling far off or high into the sky. at length, as i was looking up at it, thinking it the only living creature within view, i was singularly startled to behold, as my eye by chance penetrated deeper into the blue, — the abyss of blue above, which i had taken for a soli tude, — its mate silently soaring at an immense height and seemingly indifferent to me. we are surprised to dis cover that there can be an eye on us on that side, and so little suspected, — that the heavens are full of eyes, though they look so blue and spotless. then i knew it was the female that circled and screamed below. at last the latter rose gradually to meet her mate, and they circled together there, as if they could not possibly feel any anxiety on my account. when i drew nearer to the tall trees where i suspected the nest to be, the female de scended again, swept by screaming still nearer to me just over the tree-tops, and finally, while i was looking for the orchis in the swamp, alighted on a white pine twenty or thirty rods off. (the great fringed orchis just open.) at length i detected the nest about eighty feet from the ground, in a very large white pine by the edge of the swamp. it was about three feet in diameter, of dry sticks, and a young hawk, apparently as big as its mother, stood on the edge of the nest looking down at me, and only moving its head when i moved. in its imperfect plumage and by the slow motion of its head it reminded me strongly of a vulture, so large and gaunt. it appeared a tawny brown on its neck and breast, and dark brown or blackish on wings. the mother was light beneath, and apparently lighter still on rump. 140 notes on new england birds june 9, 1853. i have come with a spy-glass to look at the hawks. they have detected me and are already screaming over my head more than half a mile from the nest. i find no difficulty in looking at the young hawk (there appears to be one only, standing on the edge of the nest), resting the glass in the crotch of a young oak. i can see every wink and the color of its iris. it watches me more steadily than i it, now looking straight down at me with both eyes and outstretched neck, now turn ing its head and looking with one eye. how its eye and its whole head express anger ! its anger is more in its eye than in its beak. it is quite hoary over the eye and on the chin. the mother meanwhile is incessantly cir cling about and above its charge and me, farther or nearer, sometimes withdrawing a quarter of a mile, but occasionally coming to alight for a moment almost within gunshot, on the top of a tall white pine ; but i hardly bring my glass fairly to bear on her, and get sight of her angry eye through the pine-needles, before she circles away again. thus for an hour that i lay there, screaming every minute or of tener with open bill. now and then pursued by a kingbird or a blackbird, who appear merely to annoy it by dashing down at its back. meanwhile the male is soaring, apparently quite undis turbed, at a great height above, evidently not hunting, but amusing or recreating himself in the thinner and cooler air, as if pleased with his own circles, like a ge ometer, and enjoying the sublime scene. i doubt if he has his eye fixed on any prey, or the earth. he probably descends to hunt. june 12, 1853. i forgot to say that i visited my hawk's hen-hawks 141 nest, and the young hawk was perched now four or five feet above the nest, still in the shade. it will soon fly. now, then, in secluded pine woods, the young hawks sit high on the edges of their nests or on the twigs near by in the shade, waiting for their pinions to grow, while their parents bring to them their prey. their silence also is remarkable, not to betray themselves, nor will the old bird go to the nest while you are in sight. she pursues me half a mile when i withdraw. june 13, 1853. 9 a. m. — to orchis swamp. find that there are two young hawks ; one has left the nest and is perched on a small maple seven or eight rods distant. this one appears much smaller than the former one. i am struck by its large, naked head, so vulture like, and large eyes, as if the vulture's were an inferior stage through which the hawk passed. its feet, too, are large, remarkably developed, by which it holds to its perch securely like an old bird, before its wings can per form their office. it has a buff breast, striped with dark brown. pratt, when i told him of this nest, said he would like to carry one of his rifles down there. but i told him that i should be sorry to have them killed. i would rather save one of these hawks than have a hun dred hens and chickens. it was worth more to see them soar, especially now that they are so rare in the land scape. it is easy to buy eggs, but not to buy hen-hawks. my neighbors would not hesitate to shoot the last pair of hen-hawks in the town to save a few of their chick ens ! but such economy is narrow and grovelling. it is unnecessarily to sacrifice the greater value to the less. i would rather never taste chickens' meat nor hens' eggs 142 notes on new england birds than never to see a hawk sailing through the upper air again. this sight is worth incomparably more than a chicken soup or a boiled egg. so we exterminate the deer and substitute the hog. it was amusing to observe the swaying to and fro of the young hawk's head to counterbalance the gentle motion of the bough in the wind. may 4, 1858. as i sit there by the swamp-side this warm summery afternoon, i hear the crows cawing hoarsely, and from time to time see one flying toward the top of a tall white pine. at length i distinguish a hen hawk perched on the top. the crow repeatedly stoops toward him, now from this side, now from that, passing near his head each time, but he pays not the least atten tion to it. jyov. 9, 1858. now the young hen-hawks, full-grown but inexperienced, still white-breasted and brown (not red)-tailed, swoop down after the farmer's hens, between the barn and the house, often carrying one o£e in their clutches, and all the rest of the pack half fly, half run, to the barn. unwarrantably bold, one ventures to stoop before the farmer's eyes. he clutches in haste his trusty gun, which hangs, ready loaded, on its pegs ; he pursues warily to where the marauder sits teetering on a lofty pine, and when he is sailing scornfully away he meets his fate and comes fluttering head forward to earth. the exulting farmer hastes to secure his trophy. he treats the proud bird's body with indignity. he carries it home to show to his wife and children, for the hens were his wife's special care. he thinks it one of his best shots, full thirteen rods. this gun is " an all-jired good hen-hawks 143 piece" — nothing but robin-shot. the body of the vic tim is delivered up to the children and the dog and, like the body of hector, is dragged so many times round troy. but alas for the youthful hawk, the proud bird of prey, the tenant of the skies ! we shall no more see his wave-like outline against a cloud, nor hear his scream from behind one. he saw but a pheasant in the field, the food which nature has provided for him, and stooped to seize it. this was his offense. he, the native of these skies, must make way for those bog-trotters from an other land, which never soar. the eye that was con versant with sublimity, that looked down on earth from under its sharp projecting brow, is closed ; the head that was never made dizzy by any height is brought low ; the feet that were not made to walk on earth now lie useless along it. with those trailing claws for grap nels it dragged the lower sky. those wings which swept the sky must now dust the chimney-corner, perchance. so weaponed, with strong beak and talons, and wings, like a war-steamer, to carry them about. in vain were the brown-spotted eggs laid, in vain were ye cradled in the loftiest pine of the swamp. where are your father and mother ? will they hear of your early death ? before ye had acquired your full plumage, they who nursed and defended ye so faithfully ? nqv. 11, 1858. the tail-coverts of the young hen hawk, i. e. this year's bird, at present are white, very handsomely barred or watered with dark brown in an irregular manner, somewhat as above, the bars on op posite sides of the midrib alternating in an agreeable 144 notes on new england birds manner. such natural objects have suggested the " wa tered " figures or colors in the arts. few mortals ever look down on the tail-coverts of a young hen-hawk, yet these are not only beautiful, but of a peculiar beauty, being differently marked and colored (to judge from wilson's account of the old) from those of the old bird. thus she finishes her works above men's sight. jan. 12, 1859. farmer says that he saw what he calls the common hen-hawk, one soaring high with apj^arently a chicken in its claws, while a young hawk circled be neath, when former suddenly let drop the chicken, but the young failing to catch, he shot down like lightning and caught and bore off the falling chicken before it reached the earth. fch. 16, 1859. the hen-hawk and the pine are friends. the same thing which keeps the hen-hawk in the woods, away from the cities, keeps me here. that bird settles with confidence on a white pine top and not upon your weathercock. that bird will not be poultry of yours, lays no eggs for you, forever hides its nest. though willed, or wild., it is not willful in its wildness. the un hen-hawks 145 sympathizing man regards the wildness of some animals, their strangeness to him, as a sin ; as if all their virtue consisted in their tamableness. he has always a charge in his gun ready for their extermination. what we call wildness is a civilization other than our own. the hen hawk shuns the farmer, but it seeks the friendly shelter and support of the pine. it will not consent to walk in the barn-yard, but it loves to soar above the clouds. it has its own way and is beautiful, when we would fain subject it to our will. so any surpassing work of art is strange and wild to the mass of men, as is genius itself. no hawk that soars and steals our poultry is wilder than genius, and none is more persecuted or above persecu tion. it can never be poet laureate, to say " pretty poll " and " polly want a cracker." march 15, 1860. a hen-hawk sails away from the wood southward. i get a very fair sight of it sailing overhead. what a perfectly regular and neat outline it presents ! an easily recognized figure anywhere. yet i never see it represented in any books. the exact cor respondence of the marks on one side to those on the other, as the black or dark tip of one wing to the other, and the dark line midway the wing. i have no idea that one can get as correct an idea of the form and color of the under sides of a hen-hawk's wings by spreading those of a dead specimen in his study as by looking up at a free and living hawk soaring above him in the fields. the penalty for obtaining a petty knowledge thus dishonestly is that it is less interesting to men generally, as it is less significant. some, seeing and admiring the neat figure of the hawk sailing two or three hundred 146 notes on new england birds feet above their heads, wish to get nearer and hold it in their hands, perchance, not realizing that they can see it best at this distance, better now, perhaps, than ever they will again. what is an eagle in captivity, screaming in a courtyard? i am not the wiser respect ing eagles for having seen one there. i do not wish to know the length of its entrails. how neat and all compact this hawk ! its wings and body are all one piece, the wings apparently the greater part, while its body is a mere fullness or protuberance between its wings, an inconspicuous pouch hung there. it suggests no insatiable maw, no corpulence, but looks like a larger moth, with little body in proportion to its wings, its body naturally more etherealized as it soars higher. these hawks, as usual, begin to be common about the first of march, showing that they were returning from their winter quarters. april 22, 1860. see now hen-hawks, a pair, soaring high as for pleasure, circling ever further and further away, as if it were midsummer. the peculiar flight of a hawk thus fetches the year about. i do not see it soar in this serene and leisurely manner very early in the season, methinks. \_see also under crow, p. 241; general and miscel laneous, p. 408.] rough-legged hawk march 29, 1858. as i sit two thirds the way up the sunny side of the pine hill, looking over the meadows, which are now almost completely bare, the crows, by \ rough-legged hawk 147 their swift flight and scolding, reveal to me some large bird of prey hovering over the river. i perceive by its markings and size that it cannot be a hen-hawk, and now it settles on the topmost branch, of a white maple, bending it down. its great armed and feathered legs dangle heljjlessly in the air for a moment, as if feeling for the perch, while its body is tipping this way and that. it sits there facing me some forty or fifty rods off, pluming itself but keeping a good lookout. at this distance and in this light, it appears to have a rusty brown head and breast and is white beneath, with rusty leg-feathers and a tail black beneath. when it flies again it is principally black varied with white, regular light spots on its tail and wings beneath, but chiefly a conspicuous white space on the forward part of the back ; also some of the upper side of the tail or tail coverts is white. it has broad, ragged, buzzard-like wings, and from the white of its back, as well as the shape and shortness of its wings and its not having a gull-like body, i think it must be an eagle.' it lets it self down with its legs somewhat helplessly dangling, as if feeling for something on the bare meadow, and then gradually flies away, soaring and circling higher and higher until lost in the downy clouds. this lofty soaring is at least a grand recreation, as if it were ^ [thoreau was evidently thinking' only of distinguishing' the bird from the fish hawk with its long and narrow wings. the description answers very well to that of the rough-legged hawk, the only new england species with fully feathered legs except the much rarer golden eagle, which lacks the white markings described. neither of the eagles has short wings, while the wings of the rough-legged hawk are notably broad and buzzard-like.] 148 notes on new england birds nourishing sublime ideas. i should like to know why it soars higher and higher so, whether its thoughts are really turned to earth, for it seems to be more nobly as well as highly employed than the laborers ditching in the meadow beneath or any others of my fellow-towns men. bald eagle ; white-headed eagle april 8, 1854. saw a large bird sail along over the edge of wheeler's cranberry meadow just below fair haven, which i at first thought a gull, but with my glass found it was a hawk and had a perfectly white head and tail and broad or blackish wings. it sailed and circled along over the low cliff, and the crows dived at it in the field of my glass, and i saw it well, both above and beneath, as it turned, and then it passed off to hover over the cliffs at a greater height. it was un doubtedly a white-headed eagle. it was to the eye but a large hawk. a2)ril 23, 1854. saw my white-headed eagle again, first at the same place, the outlet of fair haven pond. it was a fine sight, he is mainly — i. e. his wings and body — so black against the sky, and they contrast so strongly with his white head and tail. he was first fly ing low over the water ; then rose gradually and circled westward toward white pond. lying on the ground with my glass, i could watch him very easily, and by turns he gave me all possible views of himself. when i observed him edgewise i noticed that the tips of his wings curved upward slightly the more, like a stereo typed undulation. he rose very high at last, till i al bald eagle 149 most lost hitn in the clouds, circling or rather looping along westward, high over river and wood and farm, effectually concealed in the sky. we who live this plod ding life here below never know how many eagles fly over us. they are concealed in the empyrean. i think i have got the worth of my glass now that it has re vealed to me the white-headed eagle.* now i see him edgewise like a black ripple in the air, his white head still as ever turned to earth, and now he turns his under side to me, and i behold the full breadth of his broad black wings, somewhat ragged at the edges. aug. 22, 1858. at baker farm a large bird rose up near us, which at first i took for a hen-hawk, but it appeared larger. it screamed the same, and finally soared higher and higher till it was almost lost amid the clouds, or could scarcely be distinguished except when it was seen against some white and glowing cu mulus. i think it was at least half a mile high, or three quarters, and yet i distinctly heard it scream up there each time it came round, and with my glass saw its head steadily bent toward the ground, looking for its prey. its head, seen in a proper light, was distinctly whitish, and i suspect it may have been a white-headed eagle.^ it did not once flap its wings up there, as it circled and sailed, though i watched it for nearly a mile. how fit that these soaring birds should be haughty and fierce, not like doves to our race! aug. 29, 1858. ah! what a voice was that hawk's or 1 [he had bought a spy-glass a few weeks before.] 2 [the eagle is so very much larger than any of our hawks that it seems doubtful if this bird could have been one.] 150 notes on new england birds eagle's of the 22d ! think of hearing, as you walk the earth, as usual in leaden shoes, a fine, shrill scream from time to time, which you would vainly endeavor to refer to its true source if you had not watched the bird in its upward flight. it comes from yonder black spot on the bosom of a cloud. i should not have suspected that sound to have issued from the bosom of a cloud if i had not seen the bii*d. what motive can an eagle have for screaming among the clouds, unobserved by ter restrial creatures ? we walk invested by sound, — the cricket in the grass and the eagle in the clouds. and so it circled over, and i strained my eyes to follow it, though my ears heard it without effort. l^see also under hen-hawks, p. 146 ; fish hawk, p. 158 ; hawks, p. 166 ; junco, p. 303 ; general and miscellaneous, pp. 418, 427 ; and for birds mistakenl3^ supposed to be eagles see under rough-legged hawk, pp. 146-148, and fish hawk, p. 151.] sparrow hawk sept. 24, 1851. a spai-row hawk,^ hardly so big as a nighthawk, flew over high above my head, — a pretty little graceful fellow, too small and delicate to be ra pacious. fish hawk march 27, 1842. cliffs. — two little hawks have just come out to play, like butterflies rising one above ^ [thoreau at this time had made but little acquaintance with the hawks, and this bird was probably not very exactly identified as to species.] fish hawk 151 the other in endless alternation far below me. they swoop from side to side in the broad basin of the tree tops, with wider and wider surges, as if swung by an invisible pendulum. they stoop down on this side and scale up on that. suddenly i look up and see a new bird, probably an eagle, quite above me, laboring with the wind not more than forty rods off. it was the largest bird of the falcon kind i ever saw. i was never so impressed by any flight. she sailed the air, and fell back from time to time like a ship on her beam ends, holding her talons up as if ready for the arrows. i never allowed before for the grotesque attitudes of our national bird.^ the eagle must have an educated eye. march 31, 1842. i cannot forget the majesty of that bird at the cliff. it was no sloop or smaller craft hove in sight, but a ship of the line, worthy to struggle with the elements. it was a great presence, as of the master of river and forest. his eye would not have quailed before the owner of the soil; none could challenge his rights. and then his retreat, sailing so steadily away, was a kind of advance. how is it that man always feels like an interloper in nature, as if he had intruded on the domains of bird and beast ? ^ april 14, 1852. a fish hawk is calmly sailing over all, looking for his prey. the gulls are all gone now, though the water is high, but i can see the motions of ^ [see the next note.] ^ [this bird appears to have been a fish hawk, not an eagleat least in his paper on the " natural history of massachusetts," included in excursions, thorean uses the same terms in writing of the fish hawk.] 152 notes on new england birds a muskrat on the calm sunny surface a great way off. so perfectly calm and beautiful, and yet no man look ing at it this morning but myself. it is pleasant to see the zephyrs strike the smooth surface of the pond from time to time, and a darker shade ripple over it. the streams break up; the ice goes to the sea. then sails the fish hawk overhead, looking for his prey. oct. 22, 1852. when i approached the pond * over heywood's peak, i disturbed a hawk (a fish hawk?) on a white pine by the water watching for his prey, with long, narrow, sharp wings and a white belly. he flew slowly across the pond somewhat like a gull. he is the more picturesque object against the woods or water for being white beneath. nov. 17, 1854. i think it must have been a fish hawk which i saw hovering over the meadow and my boat (a raw cloudy afternoon), now and then sustaining itself in one place a hundred feet or more above the water, intent on a fish, with a hovering or fluttering motion of the wings somewhat like a kingfisher. its wings were very long, slender, and curved in outline of front edge. i think there was some white on rump. it alighted near the top of an oak within rifle-shot of me and my boat, afterward on the tip-top of a maple by waterside, look ing very large. apmll5, 1855. the great meadows are covered, ex cept a small island in their midst, but not a duck do we see there. on a low limb of a maple on the edge of the river, thirty rods from the present shore, we saw a fish hawk eating a fish. sixty rods off we could see his 1 [walden pond.] fish hawk 153 white crest. we landed, and got nearer by stealing through the woods. his legs looked long as he stood up on the limb with his back to us, and his body looked black against the sky and by contrast with the wliite of his head. there was a dark stripe on the side of the head. he had got the fish under his feet on the limb, and would bow his head, snatch a mouthful, and then look hastily over his right shoulder in our direction, then snatch another mouthful and look over his left shoulder. at length he launched off and flapped heavily away. we found at the bottom of the water beneath where he sat numerous fragments of the fish he had been eating, parts of the fins, entrails, gills, etc., and some was dropped on the bough. from one fin which i examined, i judged that it was either a sucker or a pout. there were small leeches adhering to it. in the meanwhile, as we were stealing through the woods, we heard the pleasing note of the pine warbler, bringing back warmer weather, and we heard one honk of a goose, and, looking up, saw a large narrow har row of them steering northeast. half a mile further we saw another fish hawk, upon a dead limb midway up a swamp white oak over the water, at the end of a small island. we paddled directly toward him till within thirty rod^. a crow came scolding to the tree and lit within three feet, looking about as large, compared with the hawk, as a crow blackbird to a crow, but he paid no attention to him. we had a very good view of him, as he sat sideways to us, and of his eagle-shaped head and beak. the white feathers of his head, which were erected somewhat, made him look like a copple 154 notes on new england birds crowned hen. when he launched off, he uttered a clear whistling note, — iiilie jihe^ phe phe, phe phe^ — somewhat like that of a telltale, but more round and less shrill and rapid, and another, perhaps his mate, fifty rods off, joined him. they flew heavily, as we looked at them from behind, more like a blue heron and bittern than i was aware of, their long wings un dulating slowly to the tip, like the heron's, and the bodies seeming sharp like a gull's and unlike a hawk's. in the water beneath where he was perched, we found many fragments of a pout, — bits of red gills, entrails, fins, and some of the long flexible black feelers, — scattered for four or five feet. this pout appeared to have been quite fresh, and was probably caught alive. we afterward started one of them from an oak over the water a mile beyond, just above the boat-house, and he skimmed off very low over the water, several times striking it with a loud sound heard plainly sixty rods off at least; and we followed him with our eyes till we could only see faintly his undulating wings against the sky in the western horizon. you could prob ably tell if any were about by looking for fragments of fish under the trees on which they would perch. may 12, 1855. from beyond the orchard saw a large bird far over the cliff hill, which, with my glass, i soon made out to be a fish hawk advancing. even at that distance, half a mile off, i distinguished its gull like body, — pirate-like fishing body fit to dive, — and that its wings did not curve upward at the ends like a hen-hawk's (at least i could not see that they did), but rather hung down. it came on steadily, bent on fishing, fish hawk 155 with long and heavy undulating wings, with an easy, sauntering flight, over the river to the pond, and hov ered over pleasant meadow a long time, hovering from time to time in one spot, when more than a hundred feet high, then making a very short circle or two and hovering again, then sauntering off against the wood side. at length he reappeared, passed downward over the shrub oak plain and alighted on an oak (of course now bare), standing this time apparently lengthwise on the limb. soon took to wing again and went to fish ing down the stream a hundred feet high. when just below bittern cliff, i observed by its motions that it observed something. it made a broad circle of observa tion in its course, lowering itself somewhat ; then, by one or two steep sidewise flights, it reached the water, and, as near as intervening trees would let mo see, skimmed over it and endeavored to clutch its prey in passing. it failed the first time, but probably succeeded the second. then it leisurely winged its way to a tall bare tree on the east side of the cliffs, and there we left it apparently pluming itself. it had a very white belly, and indeed appeared all white beneath its body. i saw broad black lines between the white crown and throat. returning over conantum, i directed my glass toward the dead tree on cliffs, and was surprised to see the fish hawk still sitting there, about an hour after he first alighted ; and now i found that he was eating a fish, which he had under his feet on the limb and ate as i have already described. at this distance his whole head looked white with his breast. 156 notes on new england birds may 14, 1855. under the dead pine on which the fish hawk sat on the 12th inst.^ a half-mile from the river, i find a few fish bones — one, i am pretty sure from comparison, the jaw of a pout. so that in three instances, the only ones observed this year, they were feeding on pouts. probably the mice, etc., had picked up the rest of his droppings. thus these inhabitants of the interior get a taste of fish from time to time, — crumbs from the fish hawk's table. april 6, 1856. as i am going along the corner road by the meadow mouse brook, hear and see, a quarter of a mile northwest, on those conspicuous white oaks near the river in hubbard's second grove, the crows buffet ing some intruder. the crows had betrayed to me some large bird of the hawk kind which they were buffeting. i suspected it before i looked carefully. i saw several crows on the oaks, and also what looked to my naked eye like a cluster of the palest and most withered oak leaves with a black base about as big as a crow. look ing with my glass, i saw that it was a great bird. the crows sat about a rod off, higher up, while another crow was occasionally diving at him, and all were caw ing. the great bird was just starting. it was chiefly a dirty white with great broad wings with black tips and black on other parts, giving it the appearance of dirty white, barred with black. i am not sure whether it was a white-headed eagle or a fish hawk. there appeared much more white than belongs to either, and more black than the fish hawk has. it rose and wheeled, flapping several times, till it got under way ; then, with its rear to me, presenting the least surface, it moved fish hawk 157 off steadily in its orbit over the woods northwest, with the slightest possible undulation of its wings, — a noble planetary motion, like saturn with its ring seen edge wise. it is so rare that we see a large body self-sus tained in the air. while crows sat still and silent and confessed their lord. through my glass i saw the out lines of this sphere against the sky, trembling with life and power as it skimmed the topmost twigs of the wood toward some more solitary oak amid the meadows. to my naked eye it showed only so much black as a crow in its talons might. was it not the white-headed eagle in the state when it is called the sea eagle ? ^ perhaps its neck-feathers were erected. april 14, 1856. see from my window a fish hawk flying high west of the house, cutting off the bend be tween willow bay and the meadow, in front of the house, between one vernal lake and another. he sud denly wheels and, straightening out his long, narrow wings, makes one circle high above the last meadow, as if he had caught a glimpse of a fish beneath, and then continues his course down the river. p. m. — sail to hill by bedford line. wind southwest and pretty strong; sky overcast; weather cool. start up a fish hawk from near the swamp white oaks southwest of the island, undoubtedly the one of the morning. i now see that this is a much darker bird, both above and beneath, than that bird of the 6th. it flies quite low, surveying the water, in an undulating, buoyant manner, like a marsh hawk, or ^ [wilson, in his american ornithology, gave an account of the " sea eagle," which he suspected to be the young of the bald eagle.] 158 notes on new england birds still more a nighthawk, with its long curved wings. he flies so low westward that i lose sight of him against the dark hillside and trees. april 16, 1856. as i walk along the bank of the assabet, i hear the yeep yeep yeep yeeep yeeep yeep, or perhaps peop, of a fish hawk, repeated qnite fast, but not so shrill and whistling as i think i have heard it, and directly i see his long curved wings undulating over pinxter swamp, now flooded. aug. 25, 1856. i cross the meadows in the face of a thunder-storm rising very dark in the north. there were several boats out, but their crews soon retreated homeward before the approaching storm. it came on rapidly, with vivid lightning striking the northern earth and heavy thunder following. just before, and in the shadow of, the cloud, i saw, advancing majesti cally with wide circles over the meadowy flood, a fish hawk and, apparently, a black eagle (maybe a young white-head). the first, with slender curved wings and silvery breast, four or five hundred feet high, watching the water while he circled slowly southwesterly. what a vision that could detect a fish at that distance ! the latter, with broad black wings and broad tail, thus: o hovered only about one hundred feet high ; evi dently a different species, and what else but an eagle? they soon disappeared southwest, cut ting off a bend. the thunder-shower passed off to the southeast. oct. 26, 1857. a storm is a new, and in some re spects more active, life in nature. larger migrating birds make their appearance. they, at least, sympa fish hawk 159 thize with the movements of the watery element and the winds. i see two great fish hawks (^possibly bhie herons) slowly beating northeast against the storm, by what a curious tie circling ever near each other and in the same direction, as if you might expect to find the very motes in the air to be paired ; two long undulating wings conveying a feathered body through the misty atmosphere, and this inseparably associated with an other planet of the same species. i can just glimpse their undulating lines. damon and pythias they must be. the waves beneath, which are of kindred form, are still more social, multitudinous, dvrjpiofxov. where is my mate, beating against the storm with me? they fly according to the valley of the river, northeast or south west. i start up snipes also at clamshell meadow. this weather sets the migratory birds in motion and also makes them bolder. april 25, 1858. p. m. — to assabet. approaching the island, i hear the phe phe,phe phe., phe phe, phe jjhe, phe, the sharp whistling note, of a fish hawk, and, looking round, see him just afterward launching away from one of the swamp white oaks southwest of the island. there is about half a second between each note, and he utters them either while perched or while flying. he shows a great proportion of wing and some white on back. the wings are much curved. he sails along some eighty feet above the water's edge, looking for fish, and alights again quite near. i see him an hour afterward about the same spot. 160 notes on new england birds april 28, 1858. i see the fish hawk again [two or three indecipherable words] island. as it flies low, directly over my head, i see that its body is white beneath, and the white on the forward side of the wings beneath, if extended across the breast, would form a regular crescent. its wings do not form a reg ular curve in front, but an abrupt angle. they are .^^^^-— i \^^ loose and broad at tips. ^"^ \k ^-^_ 1 his bird goes lishmg «•^ ^ =p^z . „i i„ j „:j„ !^~ slowly down one side of the river and up again on the other, forty to sixty feet high, continually poising itself almost or quite stationary, with its head to the northwest wind and looking down, flapping its wangs enough to keep its place, sometimes stationary for about a minute. it is not shy. this boisterous weather is the time to see it. may 1, 1858. suddenly a large hawk sailed over from the assabet, which at first i took for a hen-har rier, it was so neat a bird and apparently not very large. it was a fish hawk, with a very conspicuous white crown or head and a uniform brown above else where ; beneath white, breast and belly. probably it was the male, which is the smaller and whiter beneath. a wedge-shaped tail. he alighted on a dead elm limb on prichard's ground, and at this distance, with my glass, i could see some dark of head above the white of throat or breast. he was incessantly looking about as if on his guard. after fifteen minutes came a crow from the assabet and alighted cawing, about twenty fish hawk 161 rods from him, and ten minutes later another. how alert they are to detect these great birds of prey ! they do not thus pursue ordinary hawks, and their attendance alone might suggest to unskillful observers the presence of a fish hawk or eagle. some crows up the assabet evidently knew that he was sitting on that elm far away. he sailed low almost directly over my boat, fishing. his wings had not obviously that angular form which i thought those of another had the other day. april 7, 1859. standing under the north side of the hill, i hear the rather innocent phe phe, phe phe, phe phe, phe' of a fish hawk (for it is not a scream, but a rather soft and innocent note), and, looking up, see one come sailing from over the hill. the body looks quite short in proportion to the spread of the wings, which are quite dark or blackish above. he evidently has something in his talons. we soon after disturb him again, and, at length, after circling around over the hill and adjacent fields, he alights in plain sight on one of the half-dead white oaks on the top of the hill, where probably he sat before. as i look through my glass, he is perched on a large dead limb and is evi dently standing on a fish (i had noticed something in his talons as he flew), for he stands high and uneasily, finding it hard to keep his balance in the wind. he is disturbed by our neighborhood and does not proceed at once to eat his meal. i see the tail of the fish hanging over the end of the limb. now and then he pecks at it. i see the white on the crown of the hawk. it is a very large black bird as seen against the sky. soon he sails 162 notes on new england birds away again, carrying his fish, as before, horizontally beneath his body, and he circles about over the adja cent pasture like a hawk hunting, though he can only be looking for a suitable place to eat his fish or waiting for us to be gone. looking under the limb on which he was perched, we find a piece of the skin of a sucker (?) or some other scaly fish which a hawk had dropped there long since. no doubt many a fish hawk has taken his meal on that sightly perch. it seems, then, that the fish hawk which you see soaring and sailing so leisurely about over the land — for this one soared quite high into the sky at one time — may have a fish in his talons all the while and only be waiting till you are gone for an opportunity to eat it on his accustomed perch. oct. 5, 1860. i see a fish hawk, skimming low over it,^ suddenly dive or stoop for one of those little fishes that rise to the surface so abundantly at this season. he then sits on a bare limb over the water, ready to swoop down again on his finny prey, presenting, as he sits erect, a long white breast and belly and a white head. no doubt he well knows the habits of these little fishes which dimple the surface of walden at this sea son, and i doubt if there is any better fishing-ground for him to resort to. he can easily find a perch over looking the lake and discern his prey in the clear water. [/see also under great blue heron, p. 79; general and miscellaneous, p. 418. j 1 [walden pond.] hawks 1g3 hawks (species unnamed) sept. 25, 1851. in these cooler, windier, crystal days the note of the jay sounds a little more native. stand ing on the cliffs, i see them flitting and screaming from pine to pine beneath, displaying their gaudy blue pin ions. hawks, too, i perceive, sailing about in the clear air, looking white against the green pines, like the seeds of the milkweed. there is almost always a pair of hawks. their shrill scream, that of the owls, and wolves ai-e all related. oct. 9, 1851. the circling hawk steers himself through the air like the skater, without a visible mo tion. dec. 20, 1851. saw a large hawk circling over a pine wood below me, and screaming, apparently that he might discover his prey by their flight. travelling ever by wider circles. what a symbol of the thoughts, now soar ing, now descending, taking larger and larger circles, or smaller and smaller! it flies not directly whither it is bound, but advances by circles, like a courtier of the skies. no such noble progress ! how it comes round, as with a wider sweep of thought ! but the majesty is in the imagination of the beholder, for the bird is intent on its prey. circling and ever circling, you cannot divine which way it will incline, till perchance it dives down straight as an arrow to its mark. it rises higlier above where i stand, and i see with beautiful distinct ness its wings against the sky, — primaries and second aries, and the rich tracery of the outline of the latter (?), its inner wings, or wing-linings, within the outer, — 164 notes on ne-w england birds like a great moth seen against the sky, a will-o'-the wind. following its path, as it were, through the vortices of the air. the poetry of motion. not as preferring one place to another, but enjoying each as long as possible. most gracefully so surveys new scenes and revisits the old. as if that hawk were made to be the symbol of my thought, how bravely he came round over those parts of the wood which he had not surveyed, taking in a new segment, annexing new territories ! without " heave yo ! " it trims its sail. it goes about without the creak ing of a block. that america yacht of the air that never makes a tack, though it rounds the globe itself, takes in and shakes out its reefs without a flutter, — its sky-scrapers all under its control. holds up one wing, as if to admire, and sweeps off this way, then holds up the other and sweeps that. if there are two concentri cally circling, it is such a regatta as southauipton wa ters never witnessed.* flights of imagination, coleridgean thoughts. so a man is said to soar in his thought, ever to fresh woods and pastures new. rises as in thought. what made the hawk mount ? did you perceive the manoeuvre ? did he fill himself with air ? before you were aware of it, he had mounted by his spiral path into the heavens. april 22, 1852. saw four hawks soaring high in the heavens over the swamp bridge brook. at first saw three ; said to myself there must be four, and found the ^ [the yacht america had in the preceding august won her famous cup in a race round the isle of wight.] hawks 165 fourth. glad are they, no doubt, to be out after being confined by the storm. april 29, 1852. i discover a hawk over my head by his shadow on the ground ; also small birds. t/une 15, 1852. i hear the scream of a gi*eat hawk, sailing with a ragged wing against the high wood-side, apparently to scare his prey and so detect it, — shrill, harsh, fitted to excite terror in sparrows and to issue from his split and curved bill. i see his open bill the while against the sky. spit with force from his mouth with an undulatory quaver imparted to it from his wings or motion as he flies. a hawk's ragged wing will grow whole again, but so will not a poet's. aiifjf. 31, 1852. i saw a small hawk fly along under the hillside and alight on the ground, its breast and belly pure downy white. it was a very handsome bird. though they are not fitted to walk much on the ground, but to soar, yet its feet, which are but claws to seize its prey and hold to its perch, are handsome appendages, and it is a very interesting sight on the ground. yet there is a certain unfitness in so fair a breast, so pure white, made to breast nothing less pure than the sky or clouds, coming so nearly in contact with the earth. never bespattered with the mud of earth. that was the im pression made on me, — of a very pure breast, accus tomed to float on the sky, in contact with the earth. it stood quite still, watching me, as if it was not easy for it to walk. sept. 16, 1852. what makes this such a day for hawks ? there are eight or ten in sight from the cliffs, large and small, one or more with a white rump. i de 166 notes on new england birds tected the transit of the first by his shadow on the rock, and i look toward the sun for him. though he is made light beneath to conceal him, his shadow betrays him. a hawk must get out of the wood, must get above it, where he can sail. it is narrow dodging for him amid the boughs. he cannot be a hawk there, but only perch gloomily. now i see a large one — perchance an eagle, i say to myself ! — down in the valley, circling and cir cling, higher and wider. this way he comes. how beau tiful does he repose on the air, in the moment when he is directly over you, and you see the form and tex ture of his wings ! how light he must make himself, how much earthy heaviness expel, before he can thus soar and sail ! he carries no useless clogs there with him. they are out by families ; while one is circling this way, another circles that. kites without strings. where is the boy that flies them ? are not the hawks most observed at this season ? march 30, 1853. the motions of a hawk correcting the flaws in the wind by raising his shoulder from time to time, are much like those of a leaf yielding to them. for the little hawks are hunting now. you have not to sit long on the cliffs before you see one. march 2, 1855. heard two hawks scream. there was something truly march-like in it, like a prolonged blast or whistling of the wind through a crevice in the sky, which, like a cracked blue saucer, overlaps the woods. such are the first rude notes which prelude the summer's quire, learned of the whistling march wind. oct. 22, 1855. i sat on a bank at the brook crossing, hawks 167 beyond the grove, to watch a flock of sen'w^os,* perhaps savannah sparrows, which, with some f. hyemalis"^ ^indi. other sparrows, were actively flitting about amid the alders and dogwood. . . . suddenly a pigeon hawk ' dashed over the bank very low and within a rod of me, and, striking its wings against the twigs with a clatter close to a sparrow, which escaped, it alighted amid the alders in front, within four rods of me. it was attracted by the same objects which attracted me. it sat a few moments, balancing itself and spreading its tail and wings, — a chubby little fellow. its back appeared a sort of deep chocolate-brown. every sparrow at once concealed itself, apparently deep in the bushes next the ground. once or twice he dashed down there amid the alders and tried to catch one. in a few minutes he skimmed along the hedge by the path and disappeared westward. but presently, hearing the sound of his wings amid the bushes, i looked up and saw him dash ing along through the willows and then out and up ward high over the meadow in pursuit of a sparrow (perhaps a seringo). the sparrow flew pretty high and kept doubling. when it flew direct, the hawk gained, and got within two or three feet of it ; but when it doubled, it gained on the hawk ; so the latter soon gave up the chase, and the little bird flew off high over my head, with a panting breath and a rippling ricochet flight, toward the high pine grove. when i passed ^ [see note to savannah sparrow, p. 290.] 2 [fringilla hyemalis, the slate-colored junco or snowbird, now known as junco hyemalis.] ■* was i sure ? 168 notes on new england birds along the path ten minutes after, i found that all those sparrows were still hid under the bushes by the ditch side, close to the ground, and i saw nothing of them till i scared them out by going within two or three feet. no doubt they warned each other by a peculiar note. what a corsair the hawk is to them ! — a little fellow hardly bigger than a quail. feh. 29, 1856. [minott] told again of the partridge hawk striking down a partridge which rose before him and flew across the run in the beech woods, — how suddenly he did it, — and he, hearing the fluttering of the partridge, came up and secured it, while the hawk kept out of gunshot. sept. 27, 1857. as i sit there i see the shadow of a hawk flying above and behind me. i think i see more hawks nowadays. perhaps it is both because the young are grown and their food, the small birds, are flying in flocks and are abundant. i need only sit still a few minutes on any spot which overlooks the river meadows, before i see some black circling mote beating along, circling along the meadow's edge, now lost for a mo ment as it turns edgewise in a peculiar light, now re appearing further or nearer. \_see also under wild goose, p. 59 ; fish hawk, pp. 150, 151; general and miscellaneous, pp. 409, 412.] ix owls long-eared owl june 24, 1857. went to farmer's swamp to look for the screech owl's * nest farmer had found. you go about forty-five rods on the first path to the left in the woods and then turn to the left a few rods. i found the nest at last near the top of a middling-sized white pine, about thirty feet from the ground. as i stood by the tree, the old bird dashed by within a couple of rods, uttering a peculiar mewing sound, which she kept up amid the bushes, a blackbird in close pursuit of her. i found the nest empty, on one side of the main stem but close to it, resting on some limbs. it was made of twigs rather less than an eighth of an inch thick and was almost flat above, only an inch lower in the middle than at the edge, about sixteen inches in diameter and six or eight inches thick, with the twigs in the midst, and beneath was mixed sphagnum and sedge from the swamp beneath, and the lining or flooring was coarse strips of grape-vine bark ; the whole pretty firmly matted together. how common and important a material is grape-vine bark for birds' nests ! nature wastes no thing. there were white droppings of the young on the nest and one lai-ge pellet of fur and small bones two ^ [the situation of the nest and thoreau's description of the notes indicate a long-eared owl rather than a screech owl.] 170 notes on new england birds and a half inches long. in the meanwhile, the old bird was uttering that hoarse worried note from time to time, somewhat like a partridge's, flying past from side to side and alighting amid the trees or bushes. when i had descended, i detected one young one two-thirds grown perched on a branch of the next tree, about fif teen feet from the ground, which was all the while star ing at me with its great yellow eyes. it was gray with gray horns and a dark beak. as i walked past near it, it turned its head steadily, always facing me, without moving its body, till it looked directly the opposite way over its back, but never offered to fly. just then i thought surely that i heard a puppy faintly barking at me four or five rods distant amid the bushes, hav ing tracked me into the swamp, — what what^ what what what. it was exactly such a noise as the barking of a very small dog or perhaps a fox. but it was the old owl, for i presently saw her making it. she re peated \_&ic\ perched quite near. she was generally reddish-brown or partridge-colored, the breast mottled with dark brown and fawn-color in downward strings \sic\^ and had plain fawn-colored thighs. shorteared owl dec. 8, 1853. at midday (3 p. m.) saw an owl fly from toward the river and alight on mrs. richardson's front-yard fence. got quite near it, and followed it to a rock on the heap of dirt at collier's cellar. a rather dark brown owl above (with a decided owl head (and eyes), though not very broad), with longitudinal tawny streaks (or the reverse), none transverse, growing barred owl 171 lighter down the breast, and at length clear rusty yel lowish or cream-color beneath and about feathered feet. wings large and long, with a distinct large black spot beneath ; bill and claws, i think, black. saw no ears. kept turning its head and great black eyes this way and that when it heard me, but appeared not to see me. saw my shadow better, for i ap[proached] on the sunny side. i am inclined to think it the short-eared owl, though i could see no ears, though it reminded me of what i had read of the hawk owl.^ it was a foot or more long and spread about three feet. flew somewhat flappingly, yet hawk-like. went within two or three rods of it. bakred owl dec. 14, 1858. i see at derby's shop a barred owl (^strix nebulosa) ,'^ taken in the woods west of the fac tory on the 11th, found (with its wing broke [s«c]) by a wood-chopper. it measures about three and a half feet in alar extent by eighteen to twenty inches lon^, or nearly the same as the cat owl, but is small and with out horns. it is very mild and quiet, bears handling perfectly well, and only snaps its bill with a loud sound at the sight of a cat or dog. it is apparently a female, since it is large and has white spots on the wings. the claws are quite dark rather than dark horn-color. it hopped into the basin of the scales, and i was surprised ^ [the description is that of the short-eared owl, except that the eyes of that species are yellow, not black. the pupils may have been dilated, however, so as to give a general impression of black eyea.] 2 [now strix varia.^ 172 notes on new england birds to find that it weighed only one pound and one ounce. it may be thin-fleshed on account of its broken wing, but how light-bodied these flyers are ! it has no yellow iris like the cat owl, and has the bristles about its yel low bill which the other has not. it has a very smooth and handsome round head, a brownish gray. solemnity is what they express, — fit representatives of the night.* sawwhet owl ; acadian owl jan. 6, 1859. miles had hanging in his barn a little owl (^strix acadica)^ which he caught alive with his hands about a week ago. he had forced it to eat, but it died. it was a funny little brown bird, spotted with white, seven and a half inches long to the end of the tail, or eight to the end of the claws, by nineteen in alar extent, — not so long by considerable as a robin, though much stouter. this one had three (not two)^ white bars on its tail, but no noticeable white at the tip. its cunning feet were feathered quite to the ex tremity of the toes, looking like whitish (or tawny white) mice, or as when one pulls stockings over his boots. as usual, the white spots on the upper sides of the wings are smaller and a more distinct white, while those beneath are much larger, but a subdued, satiny white. even a bird's wing has an upper and under side, and the last admits only of more subdued and tender colors. ^ [thoreau had once before seen a live barred owl, and he gives an account of it in the chapter on " winter visitors " in walden. this account does not appear in the published journal. it was probably ■written in one of those early journals ■which -were destroyed in the preparation of the week and walden.l ^ [now cryptoglaux acadica.] ^ nuttall says three. screech owl 173 screech owl aug.^ 1845. after the evening train has gone by and left the world to silence and to me, the whip-poor will chants her vespers for half an hour. and when all is still at night, the owls take up the strain, like mourn ing women their ancient ululu. their most dismal scream is truly ben -jon son i an. wise midnight hags ! it is no honest and blunt tu-whit tu-who of the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn graveyard ditty, — but the mutual consolations of suicide lovers remem bering the pangs and the delights of supernal love in the infernal groves. and yet i love to hear their wail ing, their doleful responses, trilled along the woodside, reminding me sometimes of music and singing birds, as if it were the dark and tearful side of music, the regrets and sighs, that would fain be sung. the spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen spirits who once in human shape night-walked the earth and did the deeds of darkness, now expiating with their wailing hymns, threnodiai, their sins in the very scen ery of their transgressions. they give me a new sense of the vastness and mystery of that nature which is the common dwelling of us both. " oh-o-o-o-o that i never had been bor-or-or-or-orn ! " sighs one on this side of the pond, and circles in the restlessness of despair to some new perch in the gray oaks. then, "that i never had been bor-or-or-or-orn!" echoes one on the further side, with a tremulous sincerity, and "bor-or-or-or-orn" comes faintly from far in the lin coln woods. 174 notes on new england bieds aug. 14, 1854. i hear the tremulous squealing scream of a screech owl in the holden woods, sounding somewhat like the neighing of a horse, not like the snipe. may 7, 1855. a short distance beyond this and the hawk's-nest pine, i observed a middling-sized red oak standing a little aslant on the side-hill over the swamp, with a pretty large hole in one side about fifteen feet from the ground, where apparently a limb on which a felled tree lodged had been cut some years before and so broke out a cavity. i thought that sucli a hole was too good a one not to be improved by some inhabit ant of the wood. perhaps the gray squirrels i had just seen had their nest there. or was not the entrance big enough to admit a screech owl ? so i thought i would tap on it and put my ear to the trunk and see if i could hear anything stirring within it, but i heard no thing. then i concluded to look into it. so i shinned up, and when i reached up one hand to the hole to pull myself up by it, the thought passed through my mind perhaps something may take hold my fingers, but no thing did. the first limb was nearly opposite to the hole, and, resting on this, i looked in, and, to my great surprise, there squatted, filling the hole, which was about six inches deep and five to six wide, a salmon brown bird not so big as a partridge, seemingly asleep within three inches of the top and close to my face. it was a minute or two before i made it out to be an owl. it was a salmon-brown or fawn (?) above, the feathers shafted with small blackish-brown somewhat hastate (?) marks, grayish toward the ends of the wings and tail, as far as i could see. a large white circular space screech owl 175 about or behind eye, banded in rear by a pretty broad (one third of an inch) and quite conspicuous perpendic ular dark-hrown stripe. egret/ say one and a quarter inches long, sharp, triangular, reddish-brown without mainly. it lay crowded in that small space, with its tail somewhat bent up and one side of its head turned up with one egret, and its large dark eye open only by a long slit about a sixteenth of an inch wide; visible breathing. after a little while i put in one hand and stroked it repeatedly, whereupon it reclined its head a little lower and closed its eye entirely. though curious to know what was under it, i disturbed it no farther at that time. in the meanwhile, the crows were making a great cawing amid and over the pine-tops beyond the swamp, and at intervals i heard the scream of a hawk, proba bly the surviving male hen-hawk, whom they were pes tering (unless they had discovered the male screech owl), and a part of them came cawing about me. this was a very fit place for hawks and owls to dwell in, — the thick woods just over a white spruce^ swamp, in which the glaucous kalmia grows; the gray squirrels, partridges, hawks, and owls, all together. it was prob ably these screech owls which i heard in moonlight nights hereabouts last fall. returning by owl's nest, about one hour before sun set, i climbed up and looked in again. the owl was gone, 1 [wilson used the term " egret " for the " ears," or " horns," of the owls.] 2 [black spruce. see note, p. 184.] 176 notes on new england birds but there were four nearly round dirty hroionish white * eggs, quite warm, on nothing but the bits of rotten wood which made the bottom of the hole. the eggs were very nearly as large at one end as the other, slightly oblong, 1| inches by 1|, as nearly as i could measure. i took out one. it would probably have hatched within a week, the young being considerably feathered and the bill remark ably developed. perhaps she heard me coming, and so left the nest. my bird corresponds in color, as far as i saw it, with wilson's strix asio, but not his ncevia, which nuttall and others consider a young (?) bird,^ though the egg was not pure white. i do not remember that my bird was barred or mottled at all. jh/ay. 12, 1855. as i approached the owl's nest, i saw her run past the hole up into that part of the hollow above it, and probably she was there when i thought she had flown on the 7th. i looked in, and at first did not know what i saw. one of the three remaining eggs was hatched, and a little downy white young one, two or three times as long as an egg, lay helpless between the ^ macgillivray describes no eg-gs of this color, — only white, — and the same with nuttall, except the great gray owl. [screech owl's eggs, when clean, are always white and the same is true of all our owls, includ ing the great gray owl.] ^ [the dichromatism of the screech owl gave our early ornitholo gists much trouble. the red phase was described as strix asio, and the gray, or mottled, phase was given the name of strix ncevia. wilson believed the two to be separate species, but nuttall, in his first edition, called the red the young of the mottled owl (not the other way round, as thoreau has it). in the edition of 1840, however, nuttall makes two species of the screech owl, as wilson had done before him, and it was left to later workers to discover that the two forms were only color phases of a single species, which is now known to bcience as otus asio.] screech owl 177 two remaining eggs. also a dead white-bellied mouse (^mus leucopus)^ lay with them, its tail curled round one of the eggs. may 25, 1855. scared a screech owl out of an apple tree on hill ; flew swiftly off at first like a pigeon wood pecker and lit near by facing me ; was instantly visited and spied at by a brown thrasher ; then flew into a hole high in a hickory near by, the thrasher following close to the tree. it was reddish or ferruginous. may 26, 1855. at the screech owl's nest i now find two young slumbering, almost uniformly gray above, about five inches long, with little dark-grayish tufts for incipient horns (?). their heads about as broad as their bodies. i handle them without their stirring or opening their eyes. there are the feathers of a small bird and the leg of the mus leucopus in the nest. sept. 23, 1855. 8 p. m. — i hear from my chamber a screech owl about monroe's house this bright moon light night, — a loud, piercing scream, much like the whinner of a colt perchance, a rapid trill, then subdued or smothered a note or two. oct. 28, 1855. as i paddle under the hemlock bank this cloudy afternoon, about 3 o'clock, i see a screech owl sitting on the edge of a hollow hemlock stump about three feet high, at the base of a large hemlock. it sits with its head drawn in, eying me, with its eyes partly open, about twenty feet off. when it hears me move, it turns its head toward me, perhaps one eye only open, with its great glaring golden iris. you see two whitish trian gular lines above the eyes meeting at the bill, with a sharp ^ [now known as peromyscus leucopus noveboracensisi] 178 notes on new england birds reddish-brown triangle between and a narrow curved line of black under each eye. at this distance and in this light, you see only a black spot where the eye is, and the question is whether the eyes are open or not. it sits on the lee side of the tree this raw and windy day. you would say that this was a bird without a neck. its short bill, which rests upon its breast, scarcely projects at all, but in a state of rest the whole upper part of the bird from the wings is rounded off smoothly, excepting the horns, which stand up conspicuously or are slanted back. after watching it ten minutes from the boat, i landed two rods above, and, stealing quietly up behind the hemlock, though from the windward, i looked carefully around it, and, to my surprise, saw the owl still sitting there. so i sprang round quickly, with my arm outstretched, and caught it in my hand. it was so surprised that it offered no resistance at first, only glared at me in mute astonish ment with eyes as big as saucers. but ere long it began to snap its bill, making quite a noise, and, as i rolled it up in my handkerchief and put it in my pocket, it bit my finger slightly. i soon took it out of my pocket and, tying the handkerchief, left it on the bottom of the boat. so i carried it home and made a small cage in which to keep it, for a night. when i took it up, it clung so tightly to my hand as to sink its claws into my fingers and bring blood. when alarmed or provoked most, it snaps its bill and hisses. it puffs up its feathers to nearly twice its usual size, stretches out its neck, and, with wide-open eyes, stares this way and that, moving its head slowly and undulatingly from side to side with a curious motion. screech owl 179 while i write this evening, i see that there is ground for much superstition in it. it looks out on me from a dusky corner of its box with its great solemn eyes, so perfectly still itself. i was surprised to find that i could imitate its note as i remember it, by a guttural whinnering. a remarkably squat figure, being very broad in pro portion to its length, with a short tail, and very cat-like in the face with its horns and great eyes. remarkably large feet and talons, legs thickly clothed with whitish down, down to the talons. it brought blood from my fingers by clinging to them. it would lower its head, stretch out its neck, and, bending it from side to side, peer at you with laughable circumspection ; from side to side, as if to catch or absorb into its eyes every ray of light, strain at you with complacent yet earnest scrutiny. raising and lowering its head and moving it from side to side in a slow and regular manner, at the same time snapping its bill smartly perhaps, and faintly hissing, and puffing itself up more and more, — cat-like, turtle-like, both in hissing and swelling. the slowness and gravity, not to say solemnity, of this motion are striking. there plainly is no jesting in this case. general color of the owl a rather pale and perhaps slightly reddish brown, the feathers centred with black. perches with two claws above and two below the perch. it is a slight body, covered with a mass of soft and light-lying feathers. its head muffled in a great hood. it must be quite comfortable in winter. dropped a pellet of fur and bones (?) in his cage. he sat, not really moping but trying to sleep, in a corner of his 180 notes on new england birds box all day, yet with one or both eyes slightly open all the while. i never once caught him with his eyes shut. ordinarily stood rather than sat on his perch. oct. 29, 1855. p. m. — up assabet. carried my owl to the hill again. had to shake him out of the box, for he did not go of his own accord. (he had learned to alight on his perch, and it was sur prising how lightly and noiselessly he would hop upon it.) there he stood on the grass, at first bewildered, with his horns pricked up and looking toward me. in this strong light the pupils of his eyes suddenly con tracted and the iris expanded till they were two great brazen orbs with a centre spot merely. his attitude expressed astonishment more than anything. i was obliged to toss him up a little that he might feel his wings, and then he flapped away low and heavily to a hickory on the hillside twenty rods off. (i had let him out in the plain just east of the hill.) thither i fol lowed and tried to start him again. he was now on the qui vive, yet would not start. he erected his head, showing some neck, narrower than the round head above. his eyes were broad brazen rings around bul lets of black. his horns stood quite an inch high, as not before. as i moved around him, he turned his head always toward me, till he looked directly behind himself as he sat crosswise on a bough. he behaved as if bewildered and dazzled, gathering all the light he could and ever straining his great eyes toward you to make out who you are, but not inclining to fly. i had to lift him again with a stick to make him fly, and then he only rose to a higher perch, where at last screech owl 181 he seemed to seek the shelter of a thicker cluster of the sere leaves, partly crouching there. he never appeared so much alarmed as surprised and aston ished. when i first saw him yesterday, he sat on the edge of a hollow hemlock stump about three feet high, at the bottom of a large hemlock, amid the darkness of the evergreens that cloudy day. (it threatened to rain every moment.) at the bottom of the hollow, or eight een inches beneath him, was a very soft bed of the fine green moss (hypnum) which grows on the bank close by, probably his own bed. it had been recently put there. when i moved him in his cage he would cling to the perch, though it was in a perpendicular position, one foot above another, suggesting his habit of clinging to and climbing the inside of hollow trees. i do not remember any perpendicular line in his eyes, as in those of the cat. july 10, 1856. as i was bathing under the swamp white oaks at 6 p. m., heard a suppressed sound often repeated, like, perhaps, the working of beer through a bung-hole, which i already suspected to be produced by owls. i was uncertain whether it was far or near. proceeding a dozen rods up-stream on the south side, toward where a catbird was incessantly mewing, i found myself suddenly within a rod of a gray screech owl sitting on an alder bough with horns erect, turning its head from side to side and up and down, and peer ing at me in that same ludicrously solemn and com placent way that i had noticed in one in captivity. 182 notes on new england birds another, more rej, also horned, rej^eated the same warning sound, or apparently call to its young, about the same distance off, in another direction, on an alder. when they took to flight they made some noise with their wings. with their short tails and squat figures they looked very clumsy, all head and shoulders. hear ing a fluttering under the alders, i drew near and found a young owl, a third smaller than the old, all gray, without obvious horns, only four or five feet distant. it flitted along two rods, and i followed it. i saw at least two or more young. all this was close by that thick hemlock grove, and they perched on alders and an apple tree in the thicket there. these birds kept opening their eyes when i moved, as if to get clearer sight of me. the young were very quick to notice any motion of the old, and so betrayed their return by look ing in that direction when they returned, though i had not heard it. though they permitted me to come so near with so much noise, as if bereft of half their senses, they at [once] noticed the coming and going of the old birds, even when i did not. there were four or five owls in all. i have heard a somewhat similar note, further off and louder, in the night. dec. 26, 1860. melvin sent to me yesterday a per fect strix aslo, or red owl of wilson, — not at all gray. this is now generally made the same with the ncevia, but, while some consider the red the old, others consider the red the young. this is, as wilson says, a bright " nut brown " like a hazelnut or dried hazel bur (not hazel). it is twenty-three inches in alar extent by about eleven long. feet extend one inch beyond great horned owl 183 tail. cabot makes the old bird red; audubon, the young. how well fitted these and other owls to with stand the winter ! a mere core in the midst of such a muff of feathers ! then the feet of this are feathered finely to the claws, looking like the feet of a furry quadruped. accordingly owls are common here in win ter ; hawks, scarce. great horned owl ; cat owl * nov. 18, 1851. surveying these days the ministerial lot. now at sundown i hear the hooting of an owl, — hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo. it sounds like the hooting of an idiot or a maniac broke loose. this is faintly answered in a different strain, apparently from a greater distance, almost as if it were the echo, i. e. so far as the succession is concerned. this is my music each evening. i heard it last evening. the men who help me call it the " hoot ing owl" and think it is the cat owl. it is a sound ad mirably suited to the swamp and to the twilight woods, suggesting a vast undeveloped nature which men have not recognized nor satisfied. i rejoice that there are owls. they represent the stark, twilight, unsatisfied thoughts i have. let owls do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. this sound faintly suggests the infi nite roominess of nature, that there is a world in which owls live. yet how few are seen, even by the hunters! ^ [from thoreau's descriptions of the notes of bis " hootingowls " it seems probable that they were all of this species. there appear to have been two pairs of these birds regnlarly settled in concord in thoreau's time, — one in the walden woods and one in the ministerial swamp in the southwestern part of the town.] 184 notes on new england birds the sun has shone for a day over this savage swamp, where the single spruce ^ stands covered with usnea moss, which a concord merchant mortgaged once to the trustees of the ministerial fund and lost, but now for a different race of creatures a new day dawns over this wilderness, which one would have thought was suf ficiently dismal before. here hawks also circle by day, and chickadees are heard, and rabbits and partridges abound. nov. 25, 1851. when surveying in the swamp on the 20th last, at sundown, i heard the owls. hosmer^ said : " if you ever minded it, it is about the surest sign of rain that there is. don't you know that last friday night you heard them and spoke of them, and the next day it rained ? " this time there were other signs of rain in abundance. "but night before last," said i, "when you were not here, they hooted louder than ever, and we have had no rain yet." at any rate, it rained hard the 21st, and by that rain the river was raised much higher than it has been this fall. feb. 3, 1852. my owl sounds hob hob hob^ hob.^ may 1, 1852. when leaving the woods * i heard the hooting of an owl, which sounded very much like a clown calling to his team. ^ [an old name for the white spruce. thoreau afterwards learned that he had been mistaken as to the identification and that the concord trees •were hlack spruces.] 2 [mr. joseph hosmer, an old citizen of concord, who was helping thoreau in his surveying'.] ' [this was at the cliffs of fairhaven hill near walden pond on a moonlight evening.] * [near walden pond.] great horned owl 185 june 23, 1852. i hear my old waklen owl. its first note is almost like a somewhat peevish scream or squeal of a child shrugging its shoulders, and then succeed two more moderate and musical ones. july 5, 1852. i hear my hooting owl now just before sunset.^ you can fancy it the most melancholy sound in nature, as if nature meant by this to stereotype and make permanent in her quire the dying moans of a human being, made more awful by a certain gurgling melodiousness. it reminds of ghouls and idiots and in sane bowlings. one answers from far woods in a strain made really sweet by distance. some poor weak relic of mortality who has left hope behind, and howls like an animal, yet with human sobs, on entering the dark valley. i find myself beginning with the letters gl when i try to imitate it. yet for the most part it is a sweet and melodious strain to me. april 2, 1853. heard the hooting owl in ministerial swamp. it sounded somewhat like the hounding or howling of some dogs, and as often as the whistle of the engine sounded i noticed a resemblance in the tone. a singular kind of squealing introduced into its note. april 9, 1853. beyond the desert,^ hear the hooting owl, which, as formerly, i at first mistook for the hound ing of a dog, — a squealing eee followed by hoo hoo hoo deliberately, and particularly sonorous and ringing. this at 2 p. m. now mated. pay their adcjresses by day, says brooks.^ 1 [at ministerial swamp.] 2 [dugan desert, near ministerial swamp.] 8 [george brooks, of concord, doubtless.] 186 notes on new england birds jan. 7, 1854. i went to these woods ^ partly to hear an owl, but did not ; but, now that i have left them nearly a mile behind, i hear one distinctly, hoorer hoo. strange that we should hear this sound so often, loud and far, — a voice which we call the owl, — and yet so rarely see the bird. oftenest at twilight. it has a sin gular prominence as a sound ; is louder than the voice of a dear friend. yet we see the friend perhaps daily and the owl but few times in our lives. it is a sound which the wood or the horizon makes. i see the cars almost as often as i hear the whistle. dec. 9, 1856. from a little east of wyman's i look over the pond westward. the sun is near setting, away beyond fair haven. a bewitching stillness reigns througfh all the woodland and over the snow-clad land scape. indeed, the winter day in the woods or fields has commonly the stillness of twilight. the pond is per fectly smooth and full of light. i hear only the strokes of a lingering woodchopper at a distance, and the me lodious hooting of an owl, which is as common and marked a sound as the axe or the locomotive whistle. yet where does the ubiquitous hooter sit, and who sees him? in whose wood-lot is he to be found? few eyes have rested on him hooting ; few on him silent on his perch even. yet cut away the woods never so much year after year, though the chopper has not seen him and only a grove or two is left, still his aboriginal voice is heard indefinitely far and sweet, mingled oft, in strange harmony, with the newly invented din of trade, like a sentence of allegri sounded in our streets, — 1 [ministerial swamp.] ^ [walden pond.] great horned owl 187 hooting from invisible perch at his foes the woodchop pers, who are invading his domains. as the earth only a few inches beneath the surface is undisturbed and what it was anciently, so are heard still some primeval sounds in the air. some of my townsmen i never see, and of a great proportion i do not hear the voices in a year, though they live within my horizon ; but every week almost i hear the loud voice of the hooting owl, though i do not see the bird more than once in ten years. dec. 15, 1856. i still recall to mind that character istic winter eve of december 9th ; the cold, dry, and wholesome diet my mind and senses necessarily fed on, — oak leaves, bleached and withered weeds that rose above the snow, the now dark green of the pines, and perchance the faint metallic chip of a single tree spar row ; the hushed stillness of the wood at sundown, aye, all the winter day ; the short boreal twilight ; the smooth serenity and the reflections of the pond, still alone free from ice; the melodious hooting of the owl, heard at the same time with the yet more distant whistle of a locomotive, more aboriginal, and perchance more en during here than that, heard above the voices of all the wise men of concord, as if they were not (how little he is anglicized !) ; the last strokes of the woodchopper, who presently bends his steps homeward; the gilded bar of cloud across the apparent outlet of the pond, conducting my thoughts into the eternal west ; the deep ening horizon glow ; and the hasty walk homeward to enjoy the long winter evening. the hooting of the owl i that is a sound which my red predecessors heard here more than a thousand years ago. it rings far and wide, 188 notes on new england birds occupying the spaces rightfully, — grand, primeval, aboriginal sound. there is no whisper in it of the buckleys, the flints, the hosmers who recently squatted here, nor of the first parish, nor of concord fight, nor of the last town meeting. dec. 19, 1856. as i stand here, i hear the hooting of my old acquaintance the owl in wheeler's wood.^ do i not oftenesthear it just before sundown ? this sound, heard near at hand, is more simply animal and guttural, without resonance or reverberation, but, heard here from out the depths of the wood, it sounds peculiarly hollow and drum-like, as if it struck on a tense skin drawn around, the tympanum of the wood, through which all we denizens of nature hear. thus it comes to us an ac credited and universal or melodious sound ; is more than the voice of the owl, the voice of the wood as well. the owl only touches the stops, or rather wakes the rever berations. for all nature is a musical instrument on which her creatures play, celebrating their joy or grief unconsciously often. it sounds now, hoo \ hoo hoo (very fast) i hoo-rer | hoo. 3fay 20, 1858. saw in the street a young cat owl, one of two which skinnei* killed in walden woods yes terday. it was almost ready to fly, at least two and a half feet in alar extent ; tawny with many black bars, and darker on wings. holmes, in patent office report,^ says they " pair early in february." so i visited the nest. it was in a large white pine close on the north side 1 [near walden pond.] 2 [1850, p. 122, in paper on "birds injurious to agriculture," by ezekiel holmes, m. d., of winthrop, maine, pp. 110-160.] great horned owl 189 of the path, some ten rods west of the old stratton cel lar in the woods. this is the largest pine thereabouts, and the nest is some thirty-five feet high on two limbs close to the main stem, and, according to skinner, was not much more than a foot across, made of small sticks, nearly flat, " without fine stuff ! " there were but two young. this is a path which somebody travels every half-day, at least, and only a stone's throw from the great road. there were many white droppings about and large rejected pellets containing the vertebrae and hair of a skunk. as i stood there, i heard the crows making a great noise some thirty or forty rods off, and immediately suspected that they were pestering one of the old owls, which skinner had not seen. it proved so, for, as i approached, the owl sailed away from amidst a white pine top, with the crows in full pursuit, and he looked very large, stately, and heavy, like a seventy-four among schooners. i soon knew by the loud cawing of the crows that he had alighted again some forty rods off, and there again i found him perched high on a white pine, the large tawny fellow with black dashes and large erect horns. away he goes again, and the crows after him. june 18, 1858. a boy climbs to the cat owl's nest and casts down what is left of it, — a few short sticks and some earthy almost turfy foundation, as if it were the accumulation of years. beside much black and white skunk-hair, there are many fishes' scales (!) intimately mixed with its substance, and some skunk's bones. jan. 30, 1859. how peculiar the hooting of an owl! it is not shrill and sharp like the scream of a hawk, but full, round, and sonorous, waking the echoes of the wood. cuckoos, kingfishers, and woodpeckers black-billed cuckoo ; st. domlffgo cuckoo^ june 18, 1853. found the nest of a cuckoo, — a long, slender, handsome bird, probably st. domingo cuckoo, — at the edge of the meadow on a bent sallow, not in a crotch, covered by the broad, shining leaves of a swamp white oak, whose boughs stretched over it, two feet or more from the ground. the nest was made of dry twigs and was small for the size of the bird and very shallow, but handsomely lined with an abundance of what looked like the dry yellowish-brown ( ?) catkins of the hickory, which made a pleasing contrast with the surrounding grayish twigs. there were some worm-eaten green leaves inwoven. it contained a single greenish-white elliptical q%%t an inch or more long. the bird flew off a little way and clow-clow-clowed. june 27, 1853. the cuckoo's nest is robbed, or per haps she broke her &gg because i found it. thus three out of half a dozen nests which i have revisited have been broken up. it is a very shallow nest, six or seven inches in diameter by two and a half or three deep, on a low bending willow, hardly half an inch deep within ; concealed by overlying leaves of a swamp white oak on ^ [the black-billed, or, as thoreau called it, after nuttall, the st. domingo, cuckoo being much the commoner of the two northern species in the concord region, it is probable that most if not all of his cuckoos were of this species.] black-billed cuckoo 191 the edge of the river meadow, two to three feet from ground, made of slender twigs which are prettily orna mented with much ramalina lichen, lined with hickory catkins and pitch pine needles. maij 14, 1854. a st. domingo cuckoo, black-billed with red round eye, a silent, long, slender, graceful bird, dark cinnamon ( ?) above, pure white beneath. it is in a leisurely manner picking the young caterjiillars out of a nest (now about a third of an inch long) with its long, curved bill. not timid. july 17, 1854. the cuckoo is a very neat, slender, and graceful bird. it belongs to the nobility of birds. it is elegant. june 5, 1856. acuckoo's nest with three light bluish green eggs partly developed, short with rounded ends, nearly of a size ; in the thicket up railroad this side high wood, in a black cherry that had been lopped three feet from ground, amid the thick sprouts ; a nest of nearly average depth ( ?), of twigs lined with green leaves, pine-needles, etc., and edged with some dry, branchy weeds. the bird stole off silently at first. aug. 20, 1857. as i stand there, i hear a peculiar sound which i mistake for a woodpecker's tapping, but i soon see a cuckoo hopping near suspiciously or in quisitively, at length within twelve feet, from time to time uttering a hard, dry note, very much like a wood pecker tapping a dead dry tree rapidly, its full clear white throat and breast toward me, and slowly lifting its tail from time to time. though somewhat allied to that throttled note it makes by night, it was quite different from that. 192 notes on new england birds belted kingfisher april 24, 1854. the kingfisher flies with a crack cr-r-r-ack and a limping oi' flitting flight from tree to tree before us, and finally, after a third of a mile, circles round to our rear. he sits rather low over the water. now that he has come i suppose that the fishes on which he preys rise within reach. april 15, 1855. saw and heard a kingfisher — do they not come with the smooth waters of april? — hur rying over the meadow as if on urgent business. april 22, 1855. the bluish band on the breast of the kingfisher leaves the pure white beneath in the form of a heart. april 11, 1856. saw a kingfisher on a tree over the water. does not its arrival mark some new movement in its finny prey ? he is the bright buoy that betrays it ! july 28, 1858. heard a kingfisher, which had been hovering over the river, plunge forty rods off. aug. 6, 1858. the kingfisher is seen hovering stead ily over one spot, or hurrying away with a small fish in his mouth, sounding his alarum nevertheless. hairy woodpecker april 9, 1855. heard a loud, long, dry, tremulous shriek which reminded me of a kingfisher, but which i found proceeded from a woodpecker which had just alighted on an elm ; also its clear whistle or chinjc afterward. it is probably the hairy woodpecker, and i am not so certain i have seen it earlier this year.* 1 [the kingfisher-like rattle is diagnostic of the hairy woodpecker.] hairy woodpecker 193 june 5, 1857. in that first apple tree at wyraan's an apparent hairy woodpecker's nest (from the size of the bird), about ten feet from ground. the bird darts away with a shrill, loud chirping of alarm, incessantly repeated, long before i get there, and keeps it up as long as i stay in the neighborhood. the yoiing keep up an incessant fine, breathing peep which can be heard across the road and is much increased when they hear you approach the hole, they evidently expecting the old bird. i perceive no offensive odor. i saw the bird fly out of this hole, may 1st, and probably the eggs were laid about that time. oct. 16, 1859. see a hairy woodpecker on a burnt pitch pine. he distinctly rests on his tail constantly. with what vigor he taps and bores the bark, making it fly far and wide, and then darts off with a sharp whistle ! may 18, 1860. a hairy woodpecker betrays its hole in an apple tree by its anxiety. the ground is strewn with the chips it has made, over a large space. the hole, so far as i can see, is exactly like that of the downy woodpecker, — the entrance (though not so round) and the conical form within above, — only larger. the bird scolds at me from a dozen rods off. downy woodpecker march 24, 1853. the downy (?) woodpeckers are quite numerous this morning,the skirts of their coats barred with white and a large, long white spot on their backs. they have a smart, shrill peep or whistle, some what like a robin, but more metallic. 194 notes on new england birds jan. 8, 1854. stood within a rod of a downy wood pecker on an apple tree. how curious and exciting the blood-red spot on its hindhead ! i ask why it is there, but no answer is rendered by these snow-clad fields. it is so close to the bark i do not see its feet. it looks be hind as if it had on a black cassock open behind and showing a white undergarment between the shoulders and down the back. it is briskly and incessantly tap ping all round the dead limbs, but rarely twice in a place, as if to sound the tree and so see if it has any worm in it, or perchance to start them. how much he deals with the bark of trees, all his life long tapping and inspecting it ! he it is that scatters those frag ments of bark and lichens about on the snow at the base of trees. what a lichenist he must be ! or rather, perhaps it is fungi makes his favorite study, for he deals most with dead limbs. how briskly he glides up or drops himself down a limb, creeping round and round, and hopping from limb to limb, and now flitting with a rippling sound of his wings to another tree ! april 4, 1855. the rows of white spots near the end of the wings of the downy [woodpecker] remind me of the lacings on the skirts of a soldier's coat. dec. 14, 1855. a little further i heard the sound of a downy woodpecker tapping a pitch pine in a little grove, and saw him inclining to dodge behind the stem. he flitted from pine to pine before me. frequently, when i pause to listen, i hear this sound in the orchards or streets. this was in one of these dense groves of young pitch pines. june 20, 1856. walking under an apple tree in the downy woodpecker 195 little baker farm peach orchard, heard an incessant shrill musical twitter or peeping, as from young hirds, over my head, and, looking up, saw a hole in an upright dead bough, some fifteen feet from ground. climbed up and, finding that the shrill twitter came from it, guessed it to be the nest of a downy woodpecker, which proved to be the case, — for it reminded me of the hiss ing squeak or squeaking hiss of young pigeon wood peckers, but this was more musical or bird-like. the bough was about four and a half inches in diameter, and the hole perfectly circular, about an inch and a quarter in diameter. apparently nests had been in holes above, now broken out, higher up. when i put my fingers in it, the young breathed their shrill twitter louder than ever. anon the old appeared, and came quite near, while i stood in the tree, keeping up an in cessant loud and shrill scolding note, and also after i descended ; not to be relieved. july 19, 1856. the downy woodpecker's nest which i got july 8th was in a dead and partly rotten upright apple bough four and three quarters inches in diam eter. hole 'perfectly elliptical (or oval) one and two sixteenths by one and five sixteenths inches ; whole depth below it eight inches. it is excavated directly in ward about three and a half inches, with a conical roof, also arching at back, with a recess in one side on level with the hole, where the bird turns. judging from an old hole in the same bough, directly above, it enlarges directly to a diameter of two and one fourth to two and one half inches, not in this case descending exactly in the middle of the bough, but leaving one side not a 196 notes on new england birds quarter of an inch thick. at the hole it is left one inch thick. at the nest it is about two and three eighths inches in diameter. i find nothing in the first but bits of rotten wood, remains of insects, etc., when i tip it up, — for i cannot see the bottom, — yet in the old one there is also quite a nest of fine stubble (?), bark shred (?), etc., mixed with the bits of rotten wood. [/s'ee also under general and miscellaneous, pp. 415, 416, 422.] akctic three-toed woodpecker oct. 8, 1860. standing by a pigeon-place on the north edge of damon's lot, i saw on the dead top of a white pine four or five rods off — which had been stripped for fifteen feet downward that it might die and afford with its branches a perch for the pigeons about the place, like the more artificial ones that were set up — two woodpecjiers that were new to me. they uttered a peculiar sharp hek kek on alighting (not so sharp as that of the hairy or downy woodpecker) and appeared to be about the size of the hairy woodpecker, or between that and the golden-winged. i had a good view of them with my glass as long as i desired. with the back to me, they were clear black all above, as well as their feet and bills, and each had a yellow or orange (or possibly orange-scarlet?) front (the anterior part of the head at the base of the upper mandible). a long white line along the side of the head to the neck, with a black one below it. the breast, as near as i could see, was gray specked with white, and the under side of the wing expanded was also gray, with small pileated woodpecker 197 white spots. the throat white and vent also white or whitish. is this the arctic three-toed ? ^ probably many trees dying on this large burnt tract will attract many woodpeckers to it. pileated woodpecilee july 25, 1857. our path up the bank here^ led by a large dead white pine, in whose trunk near the ground were great squarecornered holes made by the wood peckers, probably the red-headed. they were seven or eight inches long by four wide and reached to the heart of the tree through an inch or more of sound wood, and looked like great mortise-holes whose corners had been somewhat worn and rounded by a loose tenon. the tree for some distance was quite honeycombed by them. it suggested woodpeckers on a larger scale than ours, as were the trees and the forest.^ flicker; pigeon woodpecker april 3, 1842. i have just heard the flicker among the oaks on the hillside ushering in a new dynasty. it is the age and youth of time. why did nature set this lure for sickly mortals .? eternity could not begin with ^ [the birds must have been arctic three-toed woodpeckers, though thoreau misplaces the yellow crown-patch. this dpecies, usually very rare in massachusetts, visited the state in considerable numbers in this winter of 1860-1861.] 2 [on the west branch of the penobscot, maine.] ^ [these mortise-shaped holes, found abundantly in the forests of northern new england, are the work of the pileated woodpecker, wliich thoreau saw and heard in the maine woods, but somewhat hastily de nominated the red-headed woodpecker from the conspicuous red crest] 198 notes on new england birds more security and momentousness than the spring. the summer's eternity is reestablished by this note. all sisrhts and sounds are seen and heard both in time and eternity. and when the eternity of any sight or sound strikes the eye or ear, they are intoxicated with delight. april 23, 1852. heard the pigeon woodpecker to-day, that long-continued unmusical note, — somewhat like a robin's, heard afar, — yet pleasant to hear because as sociated with a more advanced stage of the season. april 6, 1853. returning by harrington's, saw a pigeon woodpecker flash away, showing the rich golden under side of its glancing wings and the large whitish spot on its back, and presently i heard its familiar long-repeated loud note, almost familiar as that of a barn-door fowl, which it somewhat resembles. june 21, 1853. where the other day i saw a pigeon woodpecker tapping and enlarging a hole in the dead limb of an apple tree, when as yet probably no egg was laid, to-day i see two well-grown young woodpeckers about as big as the old, looking out at the hole, show ing their handsome spotted breasts and calling lustily for something to eat, or, it may be, suffering from the heat. young birds in some situations must suffer greatly from heat these days, so closely packed in their nests and perhaps insufficiently shaded. it is a wonder they remain so long there patiently. i saw a yellow bird's ^ nest in the willows on the causeway this after noon and three young birds, nearly ready to fly, over flowing the nest, all holding up their open bills and ^ [the summer yellowbird, or yellow warbler.] flicker 199 keeping them steadily open for a minute or more, on noise of my approach. aug. 10, 1854. that is a peculiar and distinct hol low sound made by the pigeon woodpecker's wings, as it flies past near you. april 23, 1855. saw two pigeon woodpeckers ap proach and, i think, put their bills together and utter that 0-week, o-week. april 14, 1856. hear the flicker's cackle on the old aspen, and his tapping sounds afar over the water. their tapping resounds thus far, with this peculiar ring and distinctness, because it is a hollow tree they select to play on, as a drum or tambour. it is a hollow souud which rings distinct to a great distance, espe cially over water. april 22, 1856. going through hubbard's root-fence field, see a pigeon woodpecker on a fence-post. he shows his lighter back between his wings cassock-like and like the smaller woodpeckers. joins his mate on a tree and utters the wooing note o-week o-week, etc. april 27, 1856. the tapping of a woodpecker is made a more remarkable and emphatic sound by the houow ness of the trunk, the expanse of water which conducts the sound, and the morning hour at which i commonly hear it. i think that the pigeon woodpeckers must be building, they frequent the old aspen now so much. april 29, 1856. a pigeon woodpecker alights on a dead cedar top near me. its cackle, thus near, sounds like eh eh eh eh eh, etc., rapidly and emphatically re peated. june 10, 1856. in a hollow apple tree, hole eighteen 200 notes on new england birds inclies deep, young pigeon woodpeckers, large and well feathered. they utter their squeaking hiss whenever i cover the hole with my hand, apparently taking it for the approach of the mother. a strong, rank fetid smell issues from the hole. march 17, 1858. ah! there is the note of the first flicker, a prolonged, monotonous wick-wick-wick-wick wick-wick, etc., or, if you please, quick-quick, heard far over and through the dry leaves. but how that single sound peoples and enriches all the woods and fields ! they are no longer the same woods and fields that they were. this note really quickens what was dead. it seems to put a life into withered grass and leaves and bare twigs, and henceforth the days shall not be as they have been. it is as when a family, your neighbors, re turn to an empty house after a long absence, and you hear the cheerful hum of voices and the laughter of children, and see the smoke from the kitchen fire. the doors are thrown open, and children go screaming through the hall. so the flicker dashes through the aisles of the grove, throws up a window here and cackles out it, and then there, airing the house. it makes its voice ring up-stairs and down-stairs, and so, as it were, fits it for its habitation and ours, and takes possession. it is as good as a housewarming to all na ture. now i hear and see him louder and nearer on the top of the long-armed white oak, sitting very upright, as is their wont, as it were calling for some of his kind that may also have arrived. april 15, 1858. see a pair of woodpeckers on a rail and on the ground a-courting. one keeps hopping woodpeckers 201 near the other, and the latter hops away a few feet, and so they accompany one another a long distance, utter ing sometimes a faint or short a-toeek. march 23, 1859. the loud peop (?) of a pigeon woodpecker is heard . . . and anon the prolonged loud and shrill cackle^ calling the thin-wooded hillsides and pastures to life. it is like the note of an alarm-clock set last fall so as to wake nature up at exactly this date. up up up up up up up up up ! what a rustling it seems to make among the dry leaves ! may 4, 18g0. as i stood there i heard a thumping sound, which i referred to peter's, three quarters of a mile off over the meadow, but it was a pigeon wood pecker excavating its nest within a maple within a rod of me. though i had just landed and made a noise with my boat, he was too busy to hear me, but now he hears my tread, and i see him put out his head and then withdraw it warily and keep still, while i stay there. [/see also under general and miscellaneous, p. 426.] woodpeckers (species unnamed) jan. 26, 1852, the woodpeckers work in emerson's wood on the cliff-top, the trees being partly killed by the top, and the grubs having hatched under the bark. the woodpeckers have stripped a whole side of some trees, and in a sound red oak they have dug out a mor tise-hole with squarish shoulders, as if with a chisel. i have often seen these holes. march 22, 1853. the tapping of the woodpecker, rat-tat-tat., knocking at the door of some sluggish grub to tell him that the spring has arrived, and his fate, 202 notes on new england birds this is one of the season sounds, calling the roll of birds and insects, the reveille. may 10, 1853. how far the woodpecker's tapping is heard ! and no wonder, for he taps very hard as well as fast, to make a hole, and the dead, dry wood is very re sounding withal. now he taps on one part of the tree, and it yields one note ; then on that side, a few inches distant, and it yields another key ; propped on its tail the while. jan. 6, 1855. i see where a woodpecker has drilled a hole about two inches over in a decayed white maple ; quite recently, for the chippings are strewn over the ice beneath and were the first sign that betrayed it. the tree was hollow. is it for a nest next season ? ^ there was an old hole higher up. march 8, 1859. i see there a dead white pine, some twenty-five feet high, which has been almost entirely stripped of its bark by the woodpeckers. where any bark is left, the space between it and the wood is commonly closely packed with the gnawings of worms, which appear to have consumed the inner bark. but where the bark is gone, the wood also is eaten to some depth, and there are numerous holes penetrating deep into the wood. over all this portion, which is almost all the tree, the woodpeckers have knocked off the bark and enlarged the holes in pursuit of the worms. march 11, 1859. but methinks the sound of the woodpecker tapping is as much a spring note as any these mornings ; it echoes peculiarly in the air of a spring morning. [/isee also vnder robin, p. 391 ; general and miscel laneous, p. 431.] ^ [probably for winter quarters.] xi goatsuckers, swifts, and hummingbirds whip-poor-will june 11, 1851. the whip-poor-will suggests how wide asunder are the woods and the town. its note is very rarely heard by those who live on the street, and then it is thought to be of ill omen. only the dwellers on the outskirts of the village hear it occasionally. it sometimes comes into their yards. but go into the woods in a warm night at this season, and it is the pre vailing sound. i hear now five or six at once. it is no more of ill omen therefore here than the night and the moonlight are. it is a bird not only of the woods, but of the night side of the woods. new beings have usurped the air we breathe, round ing nature, filling her crevices with sound. to sleep where you may hear the whip-poor-will in your dreams ! i hear some whip-poor-wills on hills, others in thick wooded vales, which ring hollow and cavernous, like an apartment or cellar, with their note. as when i hear the working of some artisan from within an apart ment. june 13, 1851. it is not nightfall till the whip-poor wills begin to sing. june 14, 1851. from conant's summit i hear as many as fifteen whip-poor-wills — or whip-or-i-wills — 204 notes on new england birds at once, the succeeding cluck sounding strangely for eign, like a hewer at work elsewhere. aug. 12, 1851. there was a whip-poor-will in the road just beyond goodwin's, which flew up and lighted on the fence and kept alighting on the fence within a rod of me and circling round me with a slight squeak as if inquisitive about me. scjyt. 9, 1851. the whip-poor-wills now begin to sing in earnest about half an hour before sunrise, as if mak ing haste to improve the short time that is left them. as far as my observation goes, they sing for several hours in the early part of the night, are silent com monly at midnight, — though you may meet them then sitting on a rock or flitting silently about, — then sing again just before sunrise. \_see also wider screech owl, p. 173; wood thrush, p. 378.j nighthawk june 11, 1851. i hear the nighthawks uttering their squeaking notes high in the air now at nine o'clock p. m., and occasionally — what i do not remember to have heard so late — their booming note. it sounds more as if under a cope than by day. the sound is not so fugacious, going off to be lost amid the spheres, but is echoed hollowly to earth, making the low roof of heaven vibrate. such a sound is more confused and dissipated by day. ,/u7ie 23, 1851. it is a pleasant sound to me, the squeaking and the booming of nighthawks flying over high open fields in the woods. they fly like butterflies, wnii'-i'ook-wit.r, ox m:st w^^-^-w^m [\>. v, ''*fr*:*rvt t^- nighthawk distruiiki) wlllli: ( onkkim; kligs nigiithawk 205 not to avoid birds of prey but, apparently, to secure their own insect prey. there is a particular part of the railroad just below the shanty where they may be heard and seen in greatest numbers. but often you must look a long while before you can detect the mote in the sky from which the note proceeds. june 1, 1853. walking up this side-hill, i disturbed a nighthawk eight or ten feet from me, which went, half fluttering, half hopping, the mottled creature, like a winged toad, as nuttall says the french of louisi ana (?) call them,^ down the hill as far as i could see. without moving, i looked about and saw its two eggs on the bare ground, on a slight shelf of the hill, on the dead pine-needles and sand, without any cavity or nest whatever, very obvious when once you had detected them, but not easily detected from their color, a coarse gray formed of white spotted with a bluish or slaty brown or umber, — a stone — granite — color, like the places it selects. i advanced and put my hand on them, and while i stooped, seeing a shadow on the ground, looked up and saw the bird, which had flut tered down the hill so blind and helpless, circling low and swiftly past over my head, showing the white spot on each wing in true nighthawk fashion. when i had gone a dozen rods, it appeared again higher in the air, with its peculiar flitting, limping kind of flight, all the while noiseless, and suddenly descending, it dashed at me within ten feet of my head, like an imp of dark ness, then swept away high over the pond, dashing ^ [nuttall speaks of "the metaphorical french name of 'crapaud volansj' or flying toad."] 206 notes on new england birds now to this side uow to that, on different tacks, as if, in pursuit of its prey, it had already forgotten its eggs on the earth. i can see how it might easily come to be regarded with superstitious awe. june 7, 1853. visited my nighthawk on her nest. could hardly believe my eyes when i stood within seven feet and beheld her sitting on her eggs, her head to me. she looked so saturnian, so one with the earth, so sphinx-like, a relic of the reign of saturn which jupiter did not destroy, a riddle that might well cause a man to go dash his head against a stone. it was not an act ual living creature, far less a winged creature of the air, but a figure in stone or bronze, a fanciful production of art, like the gryphon or phoenix. in fact, with its breast toward me, and owing to its color or size no bill per ceptible, it looked like the end of a brand, such as are common in a clearing, its breast mottled or alternately waved with dark brown and gray, its flat, grayish, weather-beaten crown, its eyes nearly closed, purposely, lest those bright beads should betray it, with the stony cunning of the sphinx. a fanciful work in bronze to ornament a mantel. it was enough to fill one with awe. the sight of this creature sitting on its eggs impressed me with the venerableness of the globe. there was nothing novel about it. all the while, this seemingly sleeping bronze sphinx, as motionless as the earth, was watching me with intense anxiety through those narrow slits in its eyelids. another step, and it fluttered down the hill close to the ground, with a wabbling motion, as if touching the ground now with the tip of one wing, now with the other, so ten rods to the water, which it nighthawk 207 skimmed close over a few rods, then rose and soared in the air above me. wonderful creature, which sits mo tionless on its eggs on the barest, most exposed hills, through pelting storms of rain or hail, as if it were a rock or a part of the earth itself, the outside of the globe, with its eyes shut and its wings folded, and, after the two days' storm, when you think it has become a fit symbol of the rheumatism, it suddenly rises into the air a bird, one of the most aerial, supple, and graceful of creatures, without stiffness in its wings or joints ! it was a fit prelude to meeting prometheus bound to his rock on caucasus. june 17, 1853. one of the nighthawk's eggs is hatched. the young is unlike any that i have seen, ex actly like a pinch of rabbit's fur or down of that color dropped on the ground, not two inches long, with a dimpling or geometrical or somewhat regular arrange ment of minute feathers in the middle, destined to be come the wings and tail. yet even it half opened its eye, and peeped if i mistake not. was ever bird more com pletely protected, both by the color of its eggs and of its own body that sits on them, and of the young bird just hatched ? accordingly the eggs and young are rarely discovered. there was one o.g'g still, and by the side of it this little pinch of down, flattened out and not ob served at first, and a foot down the hill had rolled a half of the q.g^ it came out of. there was no callowness, as in the young of most birds. it seemed a singular place for a bird to begin its life, — to come out of its q^'g^ — this little pinch of down, — and lie still on the exact spot where the 2i^^ lay, on a flat exposed shelf on the side of 208 notes on new england birds a bare hill, with nothing but the whole heavens, the broad universe above, to brood it when its mother was away. june, 5, 1854. now, just before sundown, a night hawk is circling, imp-like, with undulating, irregular flight over the sprout-land on the cliff hill, with an oc casional squeak and showing the spots on his wings. he does not circle away from this place, and i associate him with two gray eggs somewhere on the ground beneath and a mate there sitting. this squeak and occasional booming is heard in the evening air, while the stillness on the side of tlie village makes more distinct the in creased hum of insects. may 31, 1856. as i return in the dusk, many night hawks, with their great spotted wings, are circling low over the river, as the swallows were when i went out. they skim within a rod of me. after dusk these greater swallows come forth, and circle and play about over the water like those lesser ones, or perhaps making a larger circuit, also uttering a louder note. it would not be safe for such great birds to fly so near and familiarly by day. may 26, 1857. as i am going down the footpath from britton's camp to the spring, i start a pair of nighthawks (they had the white on the wing) from amid the dry leaves at the base of a bush, a bunch of sprouts, and away they flitted in zigzag noiseless flight a few rods through the sprout-land, dexterously avoid ing the twigs, uttering a faint hollow wjiat^ as if made by merely closing the bill, and one alighted flat on a stump. nightiiawk 209 june 2, 1858.* the chewink sang before night, and this, as i have before observed, is a very common bird on mountain-tops. 2 it seems to love a cool atmosphere, and sometimes lingers quite late with us. and the wood thrush,^ indefinitely far or near, a little more distant and unseen, as great poets are. early in the evening the nighthawks were heard to spark ^ and boom over these bare gray rocks, and such was our serenade at first as we lay on our spruce bed. we were left alone with the nighthawks. these withdrawn bare rocks must be a very suitable place for them to lay their eggs, and their dry and unmusical, yet supramundane and spirit like, voices and sounds gave fit expression to this rocky mountain solitude. it struck the very key-note of the stern, gray, barren solitude. it was a thrumming of the mountain's rocky chords ; strains from the music of chaos, such as were heard when the earth was rent and these rocks heaved up. thus they went sparking and booming, while we were courting the first access of sleep, and i could imagine their dainty limping flight, circling over the kindred rock, with a spot of white quartz in their wings. no sound could be more in harmony with that scenery. though common below, it seemed peculiarly proper here. 1 [in camp near the summit of mt. monadnock.] 2 [this is true only of the lower summits in the latitude of new eng land. in " a walk to wachusett " he speaks of hearing the bird on or near the top of that mountain.] 3 [probably either the hermit thrush or the olive-backed thrush. see note on p. 377.] * [thoreau's word for the nighthawk's note, which to most persons sounds like speak or peent.] 210 notes on new england birds june 3, 1858. lying up there at this season, when the nighthawk is most musical, reminded me of what i had noticed before, that this bird is crepuscular in its habits. it was heard by night only up to nine or ten o'clock and again just before dawn, and marked those periods or seasons like a clock. its note very conven iently indicated the time of night. it was sufficient to hear the nighthawk booming when you awoke to know how the night got on, though you had no other evidence of the hour. july 17, 1860. the nighthawk's ripping sound, heard overhead these days, reminds us that the sky is, as it were, a roof, and that our world is limited on that side, it being reflected as from a roof back to earth. it does not suggest an infinite depth in the sky, but a nearness to the earth, as of a low roof echoing back its sounds. aug. 9, 1800. but, above all, this* was an excellent place to observe the habits of the nighthawks. they were heard and seen regularly at sunset, — one night it was at 7.10, or exactly at sunset, — coming upward from the lower and more shaded portion of the rocky surface below our camp, with their sparh sparky soon answered by a companion, for they seemed always to hunt in pairs, — yet both would dive and boom and, according to wilson, only the male utters this sound. they pursued their game thus a short distance apart and some sixty or one hundred feet above the gray rocky surface, in the twilight, and the constant spark sp)ark seemed to be a sort of call-note to advertise each other of their neigh borhood. suddenly one would hover and flutter more ^ [mt. monadnock again.] nighthawk 211 stationarlly for a moment, somewhat like a kingfisher, and then dive almost perpendicularly downward with a rush, for fifty feet, frequently within three or four rods of us, and the loud booming sound or rip was made just at the curve, as it ceased to fall, but whether volunta rily or involuntarily i know not. they appeared to be diving for their insect prey. what eyes they must have to be able to discern it beneath them against the rocks in the twilight! as i was walking about the camp, one flew low, within two feet of the surface, about me, and lit on the rock within three rods of me, and uttered a harsh note like c-o-w, c-o-w, — hard and gritty and al lied to their common notes, — which i thought expres sive of anxiety, or to alarm me, or for its mate. i suspect that their booming on a distant part of the mountain was the sound which i heard the first night which was like very distant thunder, or the fall of a pile of lumber. they did not fly or boom when there was a cloud or fog, and ceased pretty early in the night. they came up from the same quarter — the shaded rocks below — each night, two of them, and left off booming about 8 o'clock. whether they then ceased hunting or withdrew to another part of the mountaiu, i know not. yet i heard one the first night at 11.30 p. m., but, as it had been a rainy day and did not clear up here till some time late in the night, it may have been compelled to do its hunt ing then. they began to boom again at 4 a. m. (other birds about 4.30) and ceased about 4.20. by their color they are related to the gray rocks over which they flit and circle. 212 notes on new england birds chimney swift; chimney swallow july 29, 1856. pratt gave me a chimney swallow's nest, which he says fell down wesson's chimney with young in it two or three days ago. as it comes to me, it is in the form of the segment of the circumference of a sphere whose diameter is three and a half inches, the segment being two plus wide, one side, of course, longer than the other. it bears a little soot on the inner side. it may have been placed against a slanting part of the chimney, or perhaps some of the outer edge is broken off. it is composed wholly of stout twigs, one to two inches long, one sixteenth to one eighth inch in diameter, held quasi cob-fashion, so as to form a sort of basketwork one third to one half inch thick, without any lining, at least in this, but very open to the air. these twigs, which are quite knubby, seem to be of the apple, elm, and the like, and are firmly fastened together by a very conspicuous whitish semi-transparent glue, which is laid on pretty copiously, sometimes extending con tinuously one inch. it reminds me of the edible nests of the chinese swallow. who knows but their edibleness is due to a similar glue secreted by the bird and used still more profusely in building its nests ? the chimney swallow is said to break off the twigs as it flies. aug. 23, 1856. j. farmer says that he found that the gummed twig of a chimney swallow's nest, though it burned when held in a flame, went out immediately when taken out of it, and he thinks it owing to a pecul iarity in the gum, rendering the twig partly fire-proof, so that they cannot be ignited by the sparks in a chim ruby-throated hummingbird 213 ney. i suggested that these swallows had origiually built in hollow trees, but it would be interesting to as certain whether they constructed their nests in the same way and of the same material then. \_seealso under general and miscellaneous, p. 419.] ruby-throated hummingbird may 17, 1856. meanwhile i hear a loud hum and see a splendid male hummingbird coming zigzag in long tacks, like a bee, but far swifter, along the edge of the swamp, in hot haste. he turns aside to taste the honey of the andromeda calyculata ^ (already visited by bees) within a rod of me. this golden-green gem. its bur nished b^ck looks as if covered with green scales dusted with gold. it hovers, as it were stationary in the air, with an intense humming before each little flower-bell of the humble andromeda calyculata^ and inserts its long tongue in each, turning toward me that splendid ruby on its breast, that glowing ruby. even this is coal-black in some lights ! there, along with me in the deep, wild swamp, above the andromeda, amid the spruce. its hum was heard afar at first, like that of a large bee, bringing a larger summer. this sight and sound would make me think i was in the tropics, — in demerara or maracaibo. may 29, 1857. soon i hear the low all-pervading hum of an approaching hummingbird circling above the rock, which afterward i mistake several times for the gruff voices of men approaching, unlike as these sounds are in some respects, and i perceive the resem ^ [the cassandra, or leather-leaf, now known to botanists as •chanue daphne calyculata.^ 214 notes on new england lukds blance even when i know better. now i am sure it is a hummingbird, and now that it is two farmers approach ing. but presently the hum becomes more sharp and thrilling, and the little fellow suddenly perches on an ash twig within a rod of me, and plumes himself while the rain is fairly beginning. lie is quite out of proportion to the size of his perch. it does not acknowledge his weight. may 16, 1858. a hummingbird yesterday came into the next house and was caught. flew about our parlor to-day and tasted sophia's flowers. in some lights you saw none of the colors of its throat. in others, in the shade the throat was a clear bright scarlet, but in the sun it glowed with sjdendid matuwic, jiery reflections avjout the neck and throat. it uttered from time to time, as it flew, a faint squeaking chirp or chirrup. the hum sounded more hollow when it approached a flower. its wings fanned the air so forcibly that you felt the cool wind they raised a foot off, and nearer it was very re markable. does not this very motion of the wings keep a bird cool in hot weather? mayll, 1858. when the hummingbird flew about the room yesterday, his body and tail hung in a singular manner l>etween the wings, swinging ba<;k and forth with a sort of oscillating motion, not hanging directly down, but yet pulsating or teetering up and down. july 9, 1860. there is a smart shower at 5 p. m., and in the midst of it a hummingbird is busy about the flowers in the garden, unmindful of it, though you would think that each vjig drop that struck him would be a serious accident. \_see also under general and miscellaneous, p. 423.] xii flycatchers kingbird july 16, 1851. i hear the kingbird twittering or chat tering like a stout-chested swallow. may 29, 1853. how still the hot noon ! people have retired behind blinds. yet the kingbird — lively bird, with white belly and tail edged with white, and with its lively twittering — stirs and keeps the air brisk. june 2, 1854. are these not kingbird days, when, in clearer first june days full of light, this aerial, twitter ing bird flutters from willow to willow and swings on the twigs, showing his white-edged tail? june 5, 1854. i see at a distance a kingbird or black bird pursuing a crow lower down the hill, like a satel lite revolving about a black planet. june 14, 1855. a kingbird's nest with four eggs on a large horizontal stem or trunk of a black willow, four feet high, over the edge of the river, amid small shoots from the willow ; outside of niikania, roots, and knotty sedge, well lined with root-fibres and wiry weeds. jan. 2(j, 1856. a probable kingbird's nest, on a small horizontal branch of a young swamp white oak, amid the twigs, about ten feet from ground. this tree is very scraggy ; has numerous short twigs at various angles with tlie branches, making it unpleasant to climb and affording support to birds' nests. the nest is round, 216 notes on new england birds running to rather a sharp point on one side beneath. extreme diameter outside, four and a half to five inches ; within, three inches ; depth within, two inches ; without, four or more. the principal materials are ten, in the order of their abundance thus : — 1. reddish and gray twigs, some a foot and more in length, which are cranberry vines, with now and then a leaf on, probably such as were torn up by the rakers. some are as big round as a knitting-needle, and would be taken for a larger bush. these make the stiff' mass of the outside above and rim. 2. woody roots, rather coarser, intermixed from waterside shrubs. probably some are from cranberry vines. these are mixed with the last and with the bot tom. 3. softer and rather smaller roots and root-fibres of herbaceous plants, mixed with the last and a little fur ther inward, for the harshest are always most external. 4. (still to confine myself to the order of abundance) withered flowers and short bits of the graj'^ downy stems of the fragrant everlasting ; these more or less com pacted and apparently agglutinated from the mass of the solid bottom, and more loose, with the stems run down to a point on one side the bottom. 5. what i think is the fibrous growth of a willow, moss-like with a wiry dark-colored hair-like stem (pos sibly it is a moss). this, with or without the tuft, is the lining, and lies contiguous in the sides and bottom. kingbied 217 6. what looks like brown decayed leaves and con fervas from the dried bottom of the riverside, mixed with the everlasting-tops internally in the solid bottom. 7. some finer brown root-fibres, chiefly between the lining of no. 6 and hair and the coarser fibres of no. 3. 8. a dozen whitish cocoons, mixed with the ever lasting-tops and dangling about the bottom peak ex ternally ; a few within the solid bottom. also eight or ten very minute cocoons mixed with these, attached in a cluster to the top of an everlasting. 9. a few black much branched roots (?) (perhaps some utricularia from the dried bottom of river), mixed with nos. 2 and 3. 10. some horsehair, white and black, together with no. 5 forming the lining. there are also, with the cocoons and everlasting tops externally, one or two cotton-grass heads, one small white feather, and a little greenish-fuscous moss from the button-bush, and, in the bottom, a small shred of grape-vine bark. aug. 5, 1858. [the black willows on the river banks] resound still with the sprightly twitter of the kingbird, that aerial and spirited bird hovering over them, swallow-like, which loves best, methinks, to fly where the sky is reflected beneath him. also now from time to time you hear the chattering of young blackbirds or the li7ik of bobolinks there, or see the great bittern flap slowly away. the kingbird, by his activity and lively note and his white breast, keeps the air sweet. he sits now on a dead willow twig, akin to the flecks 218 notes on new england birds of mackerel sky, or its reflection in the water, or the white clamshell, wrong side out, opened by a musquash, or the fine particles of white quartz that may be found in the muddy river's sand. he is here to give a voice to all these. the willow's dead twig is aerial perch enough for him. even the swallows deign to perch on it. aug. 6, 1858. if our sluggish river, choked with potamogeton, might seem to have the slow-flying bit tern for its peculiar genius, it has also the sprightly and aerial kingbird to twitter over and lift our thoughts to clouds as white as its own breast. aug. 7, 1858. the sprightly kingbird glances and twitters above the glossy leaves of the swamp white oak. perchance this .tree, with its leaves glossy above and whitish beneath, best expresses the life of the kingbird and is its own tree. phcebe; pewee april 2, 1852. what ails the pewee's tail? it is loosely hung, pulsating with life. what mean these wag-tail birds? cats and dogs, too, express some of their life through their tails. for a long distance, as we paddle up the river, we hear the two-stanza'd lay of the pewee on the shore, — pee-wet^ pee-wee, etc. those are the two obvious facts to eye and ear, the river and the pewee. april 11, 1852. as i go over the railroad bridge, i hear the pewee singing pewet pewee, pee-wet jjee-wee. the last time rising on the last syllable, sometimes re peating it thus many times, pe-ioee. phcebe 219 april 6, 1856. just beyond wood's bridge, i hear the pewee. with what confidence after the lajjse of many months, i come out to this waterside, some warm and pleasant spring morning, and, listening, hear, from farther or nearer, through the still concave of the air, the note of the first pewee ! if there is one within half a mile, it will be here, and i shall be sure to hear its simple notes from those trees, borne over the water. it is remarkable how large a mansion of the air you can explore with your ears in the still morning by the waterside. april 1, 1859. at the pokelogan * up the assabet, i see my first phcebe, the mild bird. it flirts its tail and sings pre vit, pre vit, pre vit, pre vit incessantly, as it sits over the water, and then at last, rising on the last syllable, says pre-yeis., as if insisting on that with peculiar emphasis. may 5, 1860. see at lee's a pewee (phoebe) build ing. she has just woven in, or laid on the edge, a fresh sprig of saxifrage in flower. i notice that phoebes will build in the same recess in a cliff year after year. it is a constant thing here, though they are often dis turbed. think how many pewees must have built under the eaves of this cliff since pewees were created and this cliff itself built ! you can possibly find the ^ [a term evidently imported by thoreau from maine, where he learned it from, the loggers and indians. it is used to signify a little bay in the river-shore which leads nowhere and is perhaps derived from " poke " (= pouch or pocket) and " logan," a bay-like inlet to the river. " logan " is supposed to be a corruption of the word "lagoon." thoreau supposed " pokelogan " to be an indian word, but his indian guide told him there was " no indian in 'em."] 220 notes on new england bieds crumbling relics of how many, if you should look care fully enough ! it takes us many years to find out that nature repeats herself annually. but how perfectly regular and calculable all her phenomena must appear to a mind that has observed her for a thousand years ! • olive-sided flycatcher ; pe-pe jutie 6, 1857. as i sit on lee's cliff, i see a pe-pe^ on the topmost dead branch of a hickory eight or ten rods off. regularly, at short intervals, it utters its monotonous note like till-till-till, or pe-pe-pe. looking round for its prey and occasionally changing its perch, it every now and then darts off (phoebe-like), even five or six rods, toward the earth to catch an insect, and then returns to its favorite perch. if i lose it for a moment, i soon see it settling on the dead twigs again and hear its till^ till, till. it appears through the glass mouse-colored above and head (which is perhaps darker), white throat, and narrow white beneath, with no white on tail. wood pewee may 22, 1854. i hear also pe-a-wee pe-a-wee, and then occasionally pee-yu, the first syllable in a differ ent and higher key, emphasized, — all very sweet and naive and innocent. may 23, 1854. the wood pewee sings now in the woods behind the spring in the heat of the day (2 p. m.), ^ [this is one of nuttall's names for the olive-sided flycatcher. he indicated the pronunciation thus : pe-pe. thoreau had met with the bird in the spring migrations of the two preceding years.] \ wood pewee 221 sitting on a low limb near me, pe-a-wee, pe-a-wee^ etc., five or six times at short and regular intervals, look ing about all the while, and then, naively, ^>ee-a-oo, emphasizing the first syllable, and begins again. the last is, in emphasis, like the scream of a hen-hawk. it flies off occasionally a few feet, and catches an insect and returns to its perch between the bars, not allow ing this to interrupt their order. jkme 27, 1858. find two wood pewees' nests, made like the one i have. one on a dead horizontal limb of a small oak, fourteen feet from ground, just on a hori zontal fork and looking as old as the limb, color of the branch, three eggs far advanced. the other, with two eggs, was in a similar position exactly over a fork, but on a living branch of a slender white oak, eighteen feet from ground ; lichens without, then pine-needles, lined with usnea, willow down. both nests three to five feet from main stem. aug. 13, 1858. i come to get the now empty nests of the wood pewees found june 27th. in each case, on approaching the spot, i hear the sweet note of a pewee lingering about, and this alone would have guided me within four or five rods. i do not know why they should linger near the empty nest, but perhaps they have built again near there or intend to use the same nest again (?). their full strain \s pe-ah-ee' (perhaps repeated), rising on the last syllable and emphasizing that, then pe'-ee^ emphasizing the first and falling on the last, all very sweet and rather plaintive, suggesting innocence and confidence in you. in this case the bird uttered only its last strain, regularly at intervals. 222 notes on new england birds these two pewee nests are remarkably alike in their position and composition and form, though half a mile apart. they are both placed on a horizontal branch of a young oak (one about fourteen, the other about eighteen, feet from ground) and three to five feet from main trunk, in a young oak wood. both rest directly on a horizontal fork, and such is their form and com position that they have almost precisely the same color and aspect from below and from above. the first is on a dead limb, very much exposed, is three inches in diameter outside to outside, and two inches in diameter within, the rim being about a quarter of an inch thick, and it is now one inch deep within. its framework is white pine needles, especially in the rim, and a very little fine grass stem, covered on the rim and all without closely with small bits of lichen (cetraria ?), slate-colored without and blackish beneath, and some brown caterpillar (?) or cocoon (?) silk with small seed-vessels in it. they are both now thin and partially open at the bottom, so that i am not sure they contain all the original lining. this one has no distinct lining, unless it is a very little green usnea amid the loose pine-needles. the lichens of the nest would readily be confounded with the lichens of the limb. looking down on it, it is a remarkably round and neat nest. the second nest is rather more shallow now and half an inch wider without, is lined with much more usnea (the willow down which i saw in it june 27 is gone; perhaps they cast it out in warm weather !), and shows a little of some slender brown catkin (oak ?) be neath, witliout. wood pewee 223 these nests remind me of what i suppose to be the yellow-throat vireo's and hummingbird's. the lining of a nest is not in good condition — perhaps is partly gone — when the birds have done with it. aiig. 14, 1858. the more characteristic notes [of late] would appear to be the wood pewee's and the goldfinch's, with the squeal of young hawks. these might be called the pewee-days. aug. 18, 1858. i sit under the oaks at the east end of hubbard's grove, and hear two wood pewees sing ing close by. they are perched on dead oak twigs four or five rods apart, and their notes are so exactly alike that at first i thought there was but one. one appeared to answer the other, and sometimes they both sung to gether, — even as if the old were teaching her young. it was not the usual spring noteof this bird, but a simple, clear pe-e-eet, rising steadily with one impulse to the end. they were undistinguishable in tone and rhythm, though one which i thought might be the young was feebler. in the meanwhile, as it was perched on the twig, it was incessantly turning its head about, looking for insects, and suddenly would dart aside or downward a rod or two, and i could hear its bill snap as it caught one. then it returned to the same or an other perch. xiii larks, crows, and jays / shore lark march 24, 1858. returning about 5 p. m. across the depot field, i scare up from the ground a flock of about twenty birds, which fly low, making a short cir cuit to another part of the field. at first they remind me of bay-wings, except that they are in a flock, show no white in tail, are, i ^ee, a little larger, and utter a faint sveet sveet merely, a sort of sibilant chip. starting them again, i see that they have black tails, very conspicuous when they pass near. they fly in a flock somewhat like snow buntings, occasionally one surging upward a few feet in pursuit of another, and they alight about where they first were. it is almost impossible to discover them on the ground, they squat so flat and so much resemble it, running amid the stubble. but at length i stand within two rods of one and get a good view of its mark ings with my glass. they are the alauda alpestris,^ or shore lark, quite a sizable and handsome bird. oct. 4, 1859. going over the large hillside stubble field west of holden wood, i start up a large flock of shore larks ; hear their sveet sveet and sveet .sveet sveet^ and see their tails dark beneath. they are very wary, and run in the stubble for the most part invisible, while one or two appear to act the sentinel on rock, peeping ^ [now called otocoris alpestris.] blue jay 226 out behind it perhaps, and give their note of alarm, when away goes the whole flock. such a flock circled back and forth several times over my head, just like ducks reconnoitring before they alight. if you look with a glass you are surprised to see how alert these spies are. when they alight in some stubbly hollow they set a watch or two on the rocks to look out for foes. they have dusky bills and legs. blue jay 1846-47.^ the blue jays suffered few chestnuts to reach the ground, resorting to your single tree in flocks in the early morning, and picking them out of the burs at a great advantage. nov. 16, 1850. i hear deep amid the birches some row among the birds or the squirrels, where evidently some mystery is being developed to them. the jay is on the alert, mimicking every woodland note. what has happened ? who 's dead ? the twitter retreats be fore you, and you are never let into the secret. some tragedy surely is being enacted, but murder will out. how many little dramas are enacted in the depth of the woods at which man is not present ! dec. 31, 1850. the blue jays evidently notify each other of the presence of an intruder, and will some times make a great chattering about it, and so com municate the alarm to other birds and to beasts. july 8, 1852. the jay's note, resounding along a raw wood-side, suggests a singular wildness. feh. 2, 1854. the scream of the jay is a true winter ^ [undated entry in journal of this period.] 226 notes on new england birds sound. it is wholly without sentiment, and in harmony with winter. i stole up within five or six feet of a pitch pine behind which a downy woodpecker was pecking. from time to time he hopped round to the side and ob served me without fear. they are very confident birds, not easily scared, but incline to keep the other side of the bough to you, pei'haps. feb. 12, 1854. you hear the lisping tinkle of chick adees from time to time and the unrelenting steel-cold scream of a jay, unmelted, that never flows into a song, a sort of wintry trumpet, screaming cold ; hard, tense, frozen music, like the winter sky itself ; in the blue livery of winter's band. it is like a flourish of trumpets to the winter sky. there is no hint of incubation in the jay's scream. like the creak of a cart-wheel. march 12, 1854. i hear a jay loudly screaming j^ae phay phe-phay, — a loud, shrill chickadee's phehe. march 10, 1856. the pinched crows are feeding in the road to-day in front of the house and alighting on the elms, and blue jays also, as in the middle of the hardest winter, for such is this weather. the blue jays hop about in yards.' june 5, 1856. a blue jay's nest on a white pine, eight feet from ground, next to the stem, of twigs lined with root-fibres ; three fresh eggs, dark dull greenish, with dusky spots equally distributed all over, in hos mer ( ?) pines twenty-seven paces east of wall and fifty-seven from factory road by wall. jay screams as usual. sat till i got within ten feet at first. * [the jay is not so terrestrial in its habits as the crow and therefoife, unlike its relative, is a hopper, not a walker.] blue jay 227 oct. 11, 1856. in the woods i hear the note of the jay, a metallic, clanging sound, sometimes a mew. re fer any strange note to him. oct. 5, 1857. there is not that profusion and conse quent confusion of events which belongs to a summer's walk. there are few flowers, birds, insects, or fruits now, and hence what does occur affects us as more simple and significant. the cawing of a crow, the scream of a jay. the latter seems to scream more fitly and with more freedom now that some fallen maple leaves have made way for his voice. the jay's voice resounds through the vacancies occasioned by fallen maple leaves. nov. 3, 1858. the jay is the bird of october. i have seen it repeatedly flitting amid the bright leaves, of a different color from them all and equally bright, and taking its flight from grove to grove. it, too, with its bright color, stands for some ripeness in the bird harvest. and its scream ! it is as if it blowed on the edsfe of an october leaf. it is never more in its element and at home than when flitting amid these brilliant colors. no doubt it delights in bright color, and so has begged for itself a brilliant coat. it is not gathering seeds from the sod, too busy to look around, while flee ing the country. it is wide awake to what is going on, on the qui vive. it flies to some bright tree and bruits its splendors abroad. jvov. 10, 1858. hearing in the oak and near by a sound as if some one had broken a twig, i looked up and saw a jay pecking at an acorn. there were several jays busily gathering acorns on a scarlet oak. i could 228 notes on new england birds hear them break them off. they then flew to a suitable limb and, placing the acorn under one foot, hammered away at it busily, looking round from time to time to see if any foe was approaching, and soon reached the meat and nibbled at it, holding up their heads to swal low, while they held it very firmly with their claws. (their hammering made a sound like the woodpeck er's.) nevertheless it sometimes dropped to the ground before they had done with it. jv^ov. 13, 1858. i see some feathers of a blue jay scattered along a wood-path, and at length come to the body of the bird. what a neat and delicately orna mented creature, finer than any work of art in a lady's boudoir, with its soft light purplish-blue crest and its dark-blue or purplish secondaries (the narrow half) finely barred with dusky. it is the more glorious to live in concord because the jay is so splendidly painted. june 10, 1859. surveying for d. b. clark on " col lege road," so called in peter temple's deed in 1811, clark thought from a house so called once standing on it. cut a line, and after measured it, in a thick wood, which passed within two feet of a blue jay's nest which was about four feet up a birch, beneath the leafy branches and quite exposed. the bird sat perfectly still with its head up and bill open upon its pretty large young, not moving in the least, while we drove a stake close by, within three feet, and cut and measured, being about there twenty minutes at least. oct. '21, 1860. as i am coming out of this,^ looking for seedling oaks, i see a jay, which was screaming at ^ [a white pine wood.] american crow 229 me, fly to a white oak eight or ten rods from the wood in the pasture and directly alight on the ground, pick up an acorn, and fly back into the woods with it. this was one, perhaps the most effectual, way in which this wood was stocked with the numerous little oaks which i saw under that dense white pine grove. where will you look for a jay sooner than in a dense pine thicket ? it is there they commonly live, and build. what if the oaks are far off ? think how quickly a jay can come and go, and how man}' times in a day ! oct. 29, 1860. again, as day before yesterday, sitting on the edge of a pine wood, i see a jay fly to a white oak half a dozen rods off in the pasture, and, gathering an aeorn from the ground, hammer away at it under its foot on a limb of the oak, with an awkward and rapid seesaw or teetering motion, it has to lift its head so high to acquire the requisite momentum. the jays scold about almost every white oak tree, since we hinder their coming to it. \_see also under hawks, p. 163; general and mis cellaneous, pp. 414, 416.] american crow sept. 17, 1852. the crows congregate and pursue me through the half-covered woodland path, cawing loud and angrily above me, and when they cease, i hear the winnowing sound of their wings. what ragged ones ! nov. 1, 1853. as i return, i notice crows flying southwesterly in a very long straggling flock, of which 230 notes on new england birds i see probably neither end. a small flock of red-wings singing as in spring. jan. 8, 1855. i hear a few chickadees near at hand, and hear and see jays further off, and, as yesterday, a crow sitting sentinel on an apple tree. soon he gives the alarm, and several more take their places near him. then off they flap with their caw of various hoarseness. jan. 12, 1855. perhaps what most moves us in win ter is some reminiscence of far-off summer. how we leap by the side of the open brooks ! what beauty in the running brooks ! what life ! what society ! the cold is merely superficial ; it is summer still at the core, far, far within. it is in the cawing of the crow, the crowing of the cock, the warmth of the sun on our backs. i hear faintly the cawing of a crow far, far away, echoing from some unseen wood-side, as if dead ened by the springlike vapor which the sun is drawing from the ground. it mingles with the slight murmur of the village, the sound of children at play, as one stream empties gently into another, and the wild and tame are one. what a delicious sound ! it is not merely crow calling to crow, for it speaks to me too. i am part of one great creature with him ; if he has voice, i have ears. i can hear when he calls, and have engaged not to shoot nor stone him if he will caw to me each spring. on the one hand, it may be, is the sound of children at school saying their a, b, ab's, on the other, far in the weod-fringed horizon, the cawing of crows from tkeir blessed eternal vacation, out at their long recess, chil dren who have got dismissed i while the vaporous in cense goes up from all the fields of the spring — if it american crow 231 were spring. ah, bless the lord, o my soul! bless him for wildness, for crows that will not alight within guiv shot ! and bless him for hens, too, that croak and cackle in the yard ! may 5, 1855. looking over my book, i found i had done my errands, and said to myself i would find a crow's nest. (i had heard a crow scold at a passing hawk a quarter of an hour before.) i had hardly taken this resolution when, looking up, i saw a crow wending his way across an interval in the woods towards the highest pines in the swamp, on which he alighted. i directed my steps to them and was soon greeted with an angry caw^ and, within five minutes from my resolve, i detected a new nest close to the top of the tallest white pine in the swamp. a crow circled cawing about it within gunshot, then over me surveying, and, perching on an oak directly over my head within thirty-five feet, cawed angrily. but suddenly, as if having taken a new resolution, it flitted away, and was joined by its mate and two more, and they went oif silently a quarter of a mile or more and lit in a pasture, as if they had nothing to concern them in the wood. may 7, 1855. climbed to two crows' nests, — or maybe one of them a squirrel's, — in hubbard's grove. do they not sometimes use a squirrel's nest for a founda tion ? a ruby-crested wren is apparently attracted and eyes me. it is wrenching and fatiguing, as well as dirty, work to climb a tall pine with nothing, or maybe only dead twigs and stubs, to hold by. you must proceed with great deliberation and see well where you put your hands and your feet. 232 notes on new england bieds may 11, 1855. you can hardly walk in a thick pine wood now, especially a swamp, but presently you will have a crow or two over your head, either silently flit ting over, to spy what you would be at and if its nest is in danger, or angrily cawing. it is most impressive when, looking for their nests, you first detect the pre sence of the bird by its shadow. dec. 15, 1855. how like a bird of ill omen the crow behaves! still holding its ground in our midst like a powwow that is not to be exterminated! some times when i am going through the deep cut, i look up and see half a dozen black crows flitting silently across in front and ominously eying down ; passing from one wood to another, yet as if their passage had reference to me. jan. 22, 1856. somebody has been fishing in the pond this morning, and the water in the holes is be ginning to freeze. i see the track of a crow, the toes as usual less spread and the middle one making a more curved furrow in the snow than the partridge, as if they moved more unstably, recovering their balance, — feeble on their feet. the inner toe a little the nearest to the middle one. this track goes to every hole but one or two out of a dozen, — directly from hole to hole, sometimes flying a little, — and also to an apple-core on the snow. i am pretty sure that this bird was after the bait which is usually dropped on the ice or in the hole. e. garfield says they come regularly to his holes for bait as soon as he has left. so, if the american crow 233 pickerel are not fed, it is. it had even visited, on the wing, a hole, now frozen and snowed up, which i made far from this in the middle of the pond several days since, as i discovered by its droppings, the same kind that it had left about the first holes. i brought home and examined some of the droppings* of the crow mentioned [above] . they were brown and dry, though partly frozen. after long study with a mi croscope, i discovered that they consisted of the seeds and skins and other indigestible parts of red cedar berries and some barberries (i detected the imbricated scale-like leaves of a berry stem and then the seeds and the now black skins of the cedar berries, but easily the large seeds of the barberries) and perhaps some thing more, and i knew whence it had probably come, i. e. from the cedar woods and barberry bushes by flint's pond. these, then, make part of the food of crows in severe weather when the snow is deep, as at present. t/an. 24, 1856. i knew that a crow had that day plucked the cedar berries and barberries by flint's pond and then flapped silently through the trackless air to walden, where it dined on fisherman's bait, though there was no living creature to tell me. here are the tracks of a crow, like those of the 22d, with a long hind toe, nearly two inches. the two feet 1 [evidently the pellets of indigestible matter which the crow, in common with hawks, owls, gulls, and some other birds, disgorges from time to time.] 234 notes on new england birds are also nearly two inches apart. i see where the bird alighted, descending with an impetus and breaking through the slight crust, planting its feet side by side. how different this partridge-track, with its slight hind toe, open and wide-spread toes on each side, both feet forming one straight line, exactly thus : — (five inches from centre to centre.) the middle toe alternately curved to the right and to the left, and what is apparently the outer toe in each case shorter than the inner one. jan. 31, 1856. but what track is this, just under the bank? <i \ ^ i it must be a bird, which at last struck the snow with its wings and took to flight. there were but four hops in all, and then it ended as above, though there was nothing near enough for it to hop upon from the snow. the form of the foot was somewhat like that of a squirrel, though only the outline was distinguished. the foot was about two inches long, and it was about two inches from outside of one foot to outside of the other. sixteen inches from hop to hop, the rest in proportion. looking narrowly, i saw where one wing struck the bank ten feet ahead, thus : '==^, as it passed. y american crow 235 a quarter of a mile down-stream it occurred again, tlms: and near by still less of a track, 0>^ 'ir' but marks as if it had pecked in *i» ^ jjj the snow. could it be the track 'f'r/jfiw ®^ ^ crow with its toes unusually close together ? or was it an owl ? ' if^eb. 1, 1856. nut meadow brook open for some distance in the meadow. ... i see where a crow has walked along its side. in one place it hopped, and its feet were side by side, as in the track of yesterday, though a little more spread, the toes. i have but little doubt that yesterday's track was a crow's. the two inner toes are near together ; the mid dle, more or less curved often. i^eb. 6, 1856. goodwin says that he has caught two crows this winter in his traps set in water for mink, and baited with fish. the crows, probably put to it for food and looking along the very few open brooks, at tracted by this bait, got their feet into the traps. f'eb. 27, 1857. i see many crows on the hillside, with their sentinel on a tree. they are picking the cow dung scattered about, apparently for the worms, etc., it contains. they have done this in so many places that it looks as if the farmer had been at work with his maul. they must save him some trouble thus.^ sept. 30, 1857. i was telling him^ how some crows two or three weeks ago came flying with a scolding caw ^ probably a crow. vide feb. 1st. hardly a doubt of it. [the crow, though habitually a walker, sometimes hops when in a particular hurry.] ^ notice the like extensively early in march, 1860. 3 [george minott.] 236 notes on new england birds toward me as i stood on " cornel rock," and alighted within fifty feet on a dead tree above my head, un usually bold. then away go all but one, perchance, to a tall pine in the swamp, twenty rods off ; anon he fol lows. again they go quite out of sight amid the tree tops, leaving one behind. this one, at last, quite at his leisure, flaps away cawing, knowing well where to find his mates, though you might think he must winter alone. minott said that as he was going over to lincoln one day thirty or forty years ago, taking his way through ebby hubbard's woods, he heard a great flock of crows cawing over his head, and one alighted just within gun shot. he raised his little gun marked london, which he knew would fetch down anything that was within gunshot, and down came the crow ; but he was not killed, only so filled with shot that he could not fly. as he was going by john wyman's at the pond, with the live crow in his hand, wyman asked him what he was going to do with that crow, to which he answered, " nothing in particular," — he happened to alight within gunshot, and so he shot him. wyman said that he 'd like to have him. " what do you want to do with him?" asked m. "if you'll give him to me, i'll tell you," said the other. to which minott said, " you may have him and welcome." wyman then proceeded to inform him that the crows had eaten a great space in josh jones the blacksmith's corn-field, which minott had passed just below the almshouse, and that jones had told him that if he could kill a crow in his corn field he would give him half a bushel of rye. he could american crow 237 guess what he wanted the crow for. so wyman took the crow and the next time he went into town he tossed him over the wall into the corn-field and then shot him, and, carrying the dead crow to jones, he got his half bushel of rye. oct. 29, 1857. a flock of about eighty crows flies ramblingly over toward the sowing, cawing and loiter ing and making a great ado, apparently about nothing. nov. 18, 1857. crows will often come flying much out of their way to caw at me. jan. 18, 1859. p. m. — up assabet to bridge. two or more inches of snow fell last night. in the expanse this side mantatuket rock i see the tracks of a crow or crows in and about the button-bushes and willows. they have trampled and pecked much in some spots under the button-bushes where these seeds are still left and dibbled into the snow by them. it would seem, then, that they eat them. the only other seeds there can be there are those of the mikania, for i look for them. you will see a crow's track beginning in the middle of the river, where one alighted. i notice such a track as this, where one alighted, and ^ apparently struck its spread tail into 7 • the snow at the same time with its feet. i see afterward where a wing's qui have marked the snow much like a partridge's. the snow is very light, so that the tracks are rarely dis tinct, and as they often advance by hops some might mistake it for a squirrel's or mink's track. i suspect that they came here yesterday after minnows when the fishermen were gone, and that has brought them eet. \^' i • •••**>' 238 notes on new england birds here to-day in spite of the snow. they evidently look out sharp for a morsel of fish. i see where, by the red maple above pinxter swamp, they have picked over the fine dark-greenish moss from button-bush, and the leaves which had formed a squirrel's nest, knock ing it down on to the river and there treading about and pecking a small piece, apparently for some worms or insects that were in it, as if they were hard pushed. jan. 19, 1859. by the swamp between the hollow and peter's i see the tracks of a crow or crows, chiefly in the snow, two or more inches deep, on a broad frozen ditch where mud has been taken out. the perpendicu lar sides of the ditch expose a foot or two of dark, sooty mud which had attracted the crows, and i see where they have walked along beneath it and pecked it. even here also they have alighted on any bare spot where a foot of stubble was visible, or even a rock. where one walked yesterday, i see, notwithstanding the effect of the sun on it, not only the foot-tracks, but the distinct impression of its tail where it alighted, counting distinctly eleven (of probably twelve) feath ers, — about four inches of each, — the whole mark be ing some ten inches wide and six deep, or more like a semicircle than that of yesterday. the same crow, or one of the same, has come again to-day, and, the snow being sticky this warm weather, has left a very dis tinct track. the width of the whole track is about two and three quarters inches, length of pace about seven inches, length of true track some two inches (not includ ing the nails), but the mark made in setting down the foot and withdrawing it is in each case some fifteen or american crow 239 eighteen inches long, for its hind toe makes a sharp scratch four or five inches long before it settles, and when it lifts its foot again, it makes two other fine scratches with its middle and outer toe on each side, the first some nine inches long, the second six. the inner toe is commonly close to the middle one. it makes a peculiar curving track (or succession of curves), stepping round the planted foot each time with a sweep, thus: — you would say that it toed in decidedly and walked feebly. it must be that they require but little and glean that very assiduously. march 4, 1859. what a perfectly new england sound is this voice of the crow ! if you stand perfectly still anywhere in the outskirts of the town and listen, stilling the almost incessant hum of your own personal factory, this is perhaps the sound which you will be most sure to hear rising above all sounds of human industry and leading your thoughts to some far bay in the woods where the crow is venting his disgust. this bird sees the white man come and the indian with draw, but it withdraws not. its untamed voice is still heard above the tinkling of the forge. it sees a race pass away, but it passes not away. it remains to re mind us of aboriginal nature. march 5, 1859. i see crows walking about on the ice half covered with snow in the middle of the meadows, where there is no grass, apparently to pick up the worms and other insects left there since the midwinter freshet. 240 notes on new england birds dec. 31, 1859. crows yesterday flitted silently, if not ominously, over the street, just after the snow had fallen, as if men, being further within, were just as far off as usual. this is a phenomenon of both cold weather and snowy. you hear nothing ; you merely see these black apparitions, though they come near enough to look down your chimney and scent the boiling pot, and pass be tween the house and barn. jan. 30, 1860. there are certain sounds invariably heard in warm and thawing days in winter, such as the crowing of. cocks, the cawing of crows, and some times the gobbling of turkeys. the crow, flying high, touches the tympanum of the sky for us, and reveals the tone of it. what does it avail to look at a ther mometer or barometer compared with listening to his note? he informs me that nature is in the tenderest mood possible, and i hear the very flutterings of her heart. crows have singular wild and suspicious ways. you will see a couple flying high, as if about their business, but lo, they turn and circle and caw over your head again and again for a mile ; and this is their business, — as if a mile and an afternoon were nothing for them to throw away. this even in winter, when they have no nests to be anxious about. but it is affecting to hear them cawing about their ancient seat (as at f. wheeler's wood) which the choppers are laying low. march 2, 1860. see thirty or more crows come flying in the usual irregular zigzag manner in the strong wind, from over m. miles's, going northeast, — the first migra tion of them, — without cawing. american crow 241 3fay 13, 1860. see two crows pursuing and diving at a hen-bawk very high in the air over the river. he is steadily circling and rising. while they, getting above, dive down toward him, passing within a foot or two, mak ing a feint, he merely winks, as it were, bends or jerks his wings slightly as if a little startled, but never ceases soaring, nor once turns to pursue or shake them off. it seemed as if he was getting uncomfortably high for them. oct. 6, 1860. as i go over the hill, i see a large flock of crows on the dead white oak and on the ground under the living one. i find the ground strewn with white oak acorns, and many of these have just been broken in two, and their broken shells are strewn about, so that i suppose the crows have been eating them. some are merely scratched, as if they had been pecked at without being pierced ; also there are two of the large swamp white oak acorn-cups joined together dropped under this oak, perhaps by a crow, maybe a quarter of a mile from its tree, and that probably across the river. probably a crow had transported one or more swamp white oak acorns this distance. they must have been too heavy for a jay. the crow, methinks, is our only large bird that hovers and circles about in flocks in an irregular and straggling manner, filling the air over your head and sporting in it as if at home here. they often burst up above the woods where they were perching, like the black frag ments of a powder-mill just exploded. one crow lingers on a limb of the dead oak till i am within a dozen rods. there is strong and blustering northwest wind, and when it launches off to follow its 242 notes on new england birds comrades it is blown up and backward still nearer to me, and it is obliged to tack four or five times just like a vessel, a dozen rods or more each way, very deliberately, first to the right, then to the left, before it can get off ; for as often as it tries to fly directly forward against the wind, it is blown upward and backward within gunshot, and it only advances directly forward at last by stooping very low within a few feet of the ground where the trees keep off the wind. yet the wind is not remarkably strong. dec. 30, 1860. i saw the crows a week ago perched on the swamp white oaks over the road just beyond wood's bridge, and many acorns and bits of bark and moss, evidently dropped or knocked off by them, lay on the snow beneath. one sat within twenty feet over my head with what looked like a piece of acorn in his bill. to-day i see that they have carried these same white oak acorns, cups and all, to the ash tree by the riverside, some thirty rods southeast, and dropped them there. perhaps they find some grubs in the acorns, when they do not find meat. the crows now and of late frequent thus the large trees by the river, especially swamp white oak, and the snow beneath is strewn with bits of bark and moss and with acorns (commonly worthless). they are foraging. under the first swamp white oak in hub bard's great meadow (cyanean) i see a little snap-turtle (shell some one and a quarter inches in diameter — on his second year, then) on its back on the ice — shell, legs, and tail perfect, but head pulled off, and most of the inwards with it by the same hole (where the neck was). what is left smells quite fresh, and this head must have american crow 243 been torn off to-day — or within a day or two. i see two crows on the next swamp white oak westward, and i can scarcely doubt that they did it. probably one found the young turtle at an open and springy place in the meadow, or by the river, where they are constantly prey ing, and flew with it to this tree. yet it is possible (?) that it was frozen to death when they found it. jan. 11, 1861. horace mann brings me the contents of a crow's stomach in alcohol. it was killed in the vil lage within a day or two. it is quite a mass of frozen thawed apple, — pulp and skin, — with a good many pieces of skunk-cabbage berries one fourth inch or less in diameter, and commonly showing the pale-brown or blackish outside, interspersed, looking like bits of acorns, — never a whole or even half a berry, — and two little bones as of frogs (?) or mice (?) or tadpoles ; also a street pebble a quarter of an inch in diameter, hard to be distinguished in appearance from the cabbage seeds. [/s'ee also under herring gull, pp. 14, 17; ruffed grouse, p. 98 ; hen-hawks, p. 142 ; fish hawk, pp. 156, 157 ; blue jay, p. 226 ; general and miscellane ous, pp. 416, 427, 431, 433.] xiv blackbirds, orioles, etc. bobolink june 29, 1851. at a distance in the meadow i hear still, at long intervals, the hurried commencement of the bobolink's strain, the bird just dashing into song, which is as suddenly checked, as it were, by the warder of the seasons, and the strain is left incomplete forever. like human beings they are inspired to sing only for a short season.^ may 16, 1852. the bobolink sits on a hardback, swaying to and fro, uncertain whether to begin his strain, dropping a few bubbling notes by way of pre lude, — with which he overflows. aug. 15, 1852. some birds fly in flocks. i see a dense, compact flock of bobolinks going off in the air over a field. they cover the rails and alders, and go rustling off with a brassy, tinkling note like a ripe crop as i approach, revealing their yellow breasts and bellies. this is an autumnal sight, that small flock of grown birds in the afternoon sky. may 10, 1853. when i heard the first bobolink strain this morning i could not at first collect myself enough to tell what it was i heard, — a reminiscence of last may in all its prime occurring in the midst of the ex perience of this in its unripe state. suddenly, the season ^ i have since heard some complete strains. bobolink 246 being sufficiently advanced, the atmosphere in the right condition, these flashing, scintillating notes are struck out from it where that dark mote disappears through it, as sparks by a flint, with a tinkling sound. this flashing, tinkling meteor bursts through the expectant meadow air, leaving a train of tinkling notes behind. successive regiments of birds arrive and are disbanded in our fields, like soldiers still wearing their regimen tals. i doubted at first if it were not a strain brought on a few days in advance by an imitative catbird or thrush (?) from where he had been staying. may 12, 1853. this, too, is the era of the bobolink, now, when apple trees are ready to burst into bloom. may 17, 1853. the bobolink skims by before the wind how far without motion of his wings ! sometimes borne sidewise as he turns his head — for thus he can fly — and tinkling, linking^ incessantly all the way. may 25, 1857. it is interesting to hear the bobolinks from the meadow sprinkle their lively strain along amid the tree-tops as they fly over the wood above our heads. it resounds in a novel manner through the aisles of the wood, and at the end that fine buzzing, wiry note. june 1, 1857. i hear the note of a bobolink concealed in the top of an apple tree behind me. though this bird's full strain is ordinarily somewhat trivial, this one appears to be meditating a strain as yet unheard in meadow or orchard. paulo majora canarnus. he is just touching the strings of his theorbo, his glassichord, his water organ, and one or two notes globe themselves and fall in liquid bubbles from his teeming throat. it is as if he touched his harp within a vase of liquid melody, 246 notes on new england birds and when he lifted it out, the notes fell like bubbles from the trembling strings. methinks they are the most liquidly sweet and melodious sounds i ever heard. they are refreshing to my ear as the first distant tin kling and gurgling of a rill to a thirsty man. oh, never advance farther in your art, never let us hear your full strain, sir. but away he launches, and the meadow is all bespattered with melody. his notes fall with the apple blossoms, in the orchard. the very divinest part of his strain dropping from his overflowing breast sin gultim, in globes of melody. it is the foretaste of such strains as never fell on mortal ears, to hear which we should rush to our doors and contribute all that we possess and are. or it seemed as if in that vase full of melody some notes sphered themselves, and from time to time bubbled up to the surface and were with diffi culty repressed. june 2, 1857. that bobolink's song affected me as if one were endeavoring to keep down globes of melody within a vase full of liquid, but some bubbled up irre pressible, — kept thrusting them down with a stick, but they slipped and came up one side. june 26, 1857. i must be near bobolinks' nests many times these days, — in e. hosmer's meadow by the garlic and here in charles hubbard's, — but the birds are so overanxious, though you may be pretty far off, and so shy about visiting their nests while you are there, that you watch them in vain. the female flies close past and perches near you on a rock or stump and chirps whit tit, whit tit, whit it tit tit te incessantly. aiif/. 18, 1858. miss caroline pratt saw the white cowbird 247 bobolink yesterday where channing saw it the day be fore, in the midst of a large flock. i go by the place this afternoon and see very large flocks of them, cer tainly several hundreds in all, and one has a little white on his back, but i do not see the white one. almost every bush along this brook is now alive with these birds. you wonder where they were all hatched, for you may have failed to find a single nest. i know eight or ten active boys who have been searching for these nests the past season quite busily, and they have found but two at most. surely but a small fraction of these birds will ever return from the south. have they so many foes there? hawks must fare well at present. they go off^ in a straggling flock, and it is a long time before the last loiterer has left the bushes near you. july 15, 1860. i hear this forenoon the link link of the first bobolink going over our garden, — though i hear several full strains of bobolinks to-day, as in may, carrying me back to apple sunday, but they have been rare a long time. now as it were the very cope of the dark-glazed heavens yields a slightly metallic sound when struck. cowbird ; cow blackbird ; cow troopial july 16, 1851. the red-wings and crow blackbirds are heard chattering on the trees, and the cow troopials are accompanying the cows in the pastures for the sake of the insects they scare up. oftentimes the thought less sportsman has lodged his charge of shot in the cow's legs or body in his eagerness to obtain the birds. sept. 4, 1853. in potter's dry pasture i saw the 248 notes on new england birds ground black with blackbirds (troopials?). as i ap proach, the front rank rises and flits a little further back into the midst of the flock, — it rolls up on the edges, — and, being thus alarmed, they soon take to flight, with a loud rippling rustle, but soon alight again, the rear wheeling swiftly into place like well-drilled soldiers. instead of being an irregular and disorderly crowd, they appear to know and keep their places and wheel with the precision of drilled troops. june 11, 1854.* saw in and near some woods four or five cow blackbirds, with their light-brown heads, — their strain an imperfect, milky, gurgling conqueree^ an unsuccessful effort. it made me think, for some reason, of streams of milk bursting out a sort of music between the staves of a keg. july 13, 1856. in hubbard's euphorbia pasture, cow blackbirds about cows. at first the cows were resting and ruminating in the shade, and no birds were seen. then one after another got up and went to feeding, straggling into the midst of the field. with a chatter ing appeared a cowbird, and, vnth a long slanting flight, lit close to a cow's nose, within the shadow of it, and watched for insects, the cow still eating along and al most hitting it, taking no notice of it. soon it is joined by two or three more birds. sept. 6, 1858. going over clamshell plain, i see a very large flock of a hundred or more cowbirds about some cows. they whirl away on some alarm and alight on a neighboring rail fence, close together on the rails, one above another. then away they whirl and settle on a white oak top near me. half of them are evidently red-winged blackbird 249 quite young birds, having glossy black breasts with a drab line down middle. the heads of all are li^ht colored, perhaps a slaty drab, and some apparently wholly of this color. [see also under domestic fowl, p. 435.] red-winged blackbird oct. 5, 1851. i hear the red-wing blackbirds by the riverside again, as if it were a new spring. they appear to have come to bid farewell. the birds appear to de part with the coming of the frosts, which kill vegetation and, directly or indirectly, the insects on which they feed. april 22, 1852. the strain of the red-wing on the willow spray over the water to-night is liquid, bub bling, watery, almost like a tinkling fountain, in perfect harmony with the meadow. it oozes, trickles, tinkles, bubbles from his throat, — bob-y-lee-e-e, and then its shrill, fine whistle. may 7, 1852. the red-wing's shoulder, seen in a favorable light, throws all epaulets into the shade. it is general abercrombie, methinks, when they wheel partly with the red to me. may 8, 1852. the blackbirds have a rich sprayey warble now, sitting on the top of a willow or an elm. they possess the river now^ flying back and forth across it. march 19, 1853. this morning i hear the blackbird's fine clear whistle and also his sprayey note, as he is swayed back and forth on the twigs of the elm or of the black willow over the river. his first note may be a chuck, but his second is a rich gurgle or warble. 25.0 notes on new england birds may 14, 1853. the still dead-looking willows and button-bushes are alive with red-wings, now perched on a yielding twig, now pursuing a female swiftly over the meadow, now darting across the stream. no two have epaulets equally brilliant. some are small and almost white, and others a brilliant vermilion. they are handsomer than the golden robin, methinks. the yellowbird, kingbird, and pewee, beside many swal lows, are also seen. but the rich colors and the rich and varied notes of the blackbirds surpass them all. june 24, 1853. also got a blackbird's nest whose inhabitants had flown, hung by a kind of small dried rush (?) between two button-bushes which crossed above it ; of meadow-grass and sedge, dried mikania scandens vine, horse-tail, fish-lines, and a strip apparently of a lady's bathing-dress, lined with a somewhat finer grass ; of a loose and ragged texture to look at. green mikania running over it now. april 18, 1854. heard a red-wing sing his hohylee in new wise, as if he tossed up a fourpence and it rat tled on some counter in the air as it went up. may 16, 1854. looked into several red-wing black birds' nests which are now being built, but no eggs yet. they are generally hung between two twigs, say of button-bush. i noticed at one nest what looked like a tow string securely tied about a twig at each end about six inches apart, left loose in the middle. it was not a string, but i think a strip of milkweed pod, etc., — water asclepias probably, — maybe a foot long and very strong:. how remarkable that this bird should have rkd-wixckl) hlackbird red-wixged blackiurd's nest and ec.c: red-winged blackbird 251 found out the strength of this, which i was so slow to find out ! ^ may 13, 1855. i heard from 2i female red-wing that peculiar rich screwing warble — not o gurgle ee — made with r, not with i. june 14, 1855. see young red-wings; like grizzly black vultures, they are still so bald. june 1, 1857. a red-wing's nest, four eggs, low in a tuft of sedge in an open meadow. what champouion can translate the hieroglyphics on these eggs? it is always writing of the same character, though much diversified. while the bird picks up the material and lays the ^gg^ who determines the style of the marking? when you approach, away dashes the dark mother, be traying her nest, and then chatters her anxiety from a neighboring bush, where she is soon joined by the red shouldered male, who comes scolding over your head, chattering and uttering a sharp jpihe phee-e. march 19, 1858. by the river, see distinctly red wings and hear their conqueree. they are not associ ated with grackles.^ they are an age before their cousins, have attained to clearness and liquidity. they are officers, epauletted ; the others are rank and file. i distinguish one even by its flight, hovering slowly from tree-top to tree-top, as if ready to utter its liquid notes. their whistle is very clear and sharp, while the grackle's is ragged and split. it is a fine evening, as i stand on the bridge. the waters are quite smooth ; very little ice to be seen. the 1 [see under yellow warbler, pp. 350-352.] 2 [that is, rusty blackbirds. see note on p. 255.] 252 notes on new england birds red-wing and song sparrow are singing, and a flock of tree sparrows is pleasantly warbling. a new era has come. the red-wing's gurgle-ee is heard when smooth waters begin ; they come together. march 11, 1859. i see and hear a red-wing. it sings almost steadily on its perch there, sitting all alone, as if to attract companions (and i see two more, also soli tary, on different tree-tops within a quarter of a mile), calling the river to life and tempting ice to melt and trickle like its own sprayey notes. another flies over on high, with a tchuck and at length a clear whistle. the birds anticipate the spring; they come to melt the ice with their songs. march 15, 1860. here is a flock of red-wings. i heard one yesterday, and i see a female among these. ^ these are easily distinguished from grackles by the richness and clarity of their notes, as if they were a more developed bird. how handsome as they go by in a checker, each with a bright scarlet shoulder ! they are not so very shy, but mute when we come near. i think here are four or five grackles with them, which remain when the rest fly. they cover the apple trees like a black fruit. march 17, 1860. how handsome a flock of red-wings, ever changing its oval form as it advances, by the rear birds passing the others! april 29, 1860. i listen to a concert of red-wings, — their rich sprayey notes, amid which a few more ' [the date is, of course, a very early one for female red-winged blackbirds, which ordinarily do not arrive till some time after the males.] meadowlark; lark 253 liquid and deep in a lower tone or undertone, as if it bubbled up from the very water beneath the button bushes ; as if those singers sat lower. some old and skillful performer touches these deep and liquid notes, and the rest seem to get up a concert just to encourage him. yet it is ever a prelude or essay with him, as are all good things, and the melody he is capable of and which we did not hear this time is what we remem ber. the future will draw him out. the different in dividuals sit singing and pluming themselves and not appearing to have any conversation with one another. they are only tuning all at once ; they never seriously perform; the hour has not arrived. then all go off with a hurried and perhaps alarmed tchuck tchuck. [/s'ee also under blackbirds, pp. 260, 2g1, 263 ; robin, pp. 388, 390 ; bluebird, p. 401 ; general and miscellaneous, p. 426.] meadowlark; lark july 16, 1851. the lark sings in the meadow ; the very essence of the afternoon is in his strain. this is a new england sound, but the cricket is heard under all sounds. oct. 6, 1851.^ (i hear a lark singing this morn (oc tober 7th), and yesterday saw them in the meadows. both larks and blackbirds are heard again now occa sionally, seemingly after a short absence, as if come to bid farewell.) april 14, 1852. going down the railroad at nine a. m., i hear the lark singing from over the snow. this 1 [entered under this date, though written the next day.] 254 notes on new england birds for steady singing comes next to the robin now. it will come up very sweet from the meadows ere long. may 3, 1852. some of the notes, the trills, of the lark sitting amid the tussocks and stubble are like my seringo-bird.^ may these birds that live so low in the grass be called the cricket birds ? and does their song resemble the cricket's, an earth-song ? april 6, 1853. i cannot describe the lark's song. i used these syllables in the morning to remember it by, — heetar-su-e-oo. nov. 1, 1853. now that the sun is fairly risen, i see and hear a flock of larks in wheeler's meadow on left of the corner road, singing exactly as in spring and twittering also, but rather faintly or suppressedly, as if their throats had grown up or their courage were less. march 26, 1855. the lark sings, perched on the top of an apple tree, seel-yah seel-yah, and then perhaps seel yah-see-e^ and several other strains, quite sweet and plain tive, contrasting with the cheerless season and the bleak meadow. further off i hear one like ah-tick-seel-yah. march 28, 1858. the first lark of the 23d sailed through the meadow with that peculiar prolonged chip ping or twittering sound, perhaps sharp clucking. [^see also under slate-colored junco, p. 302.] baltimore oriole ; golden robin ; fiery hang bird may 8, 1852. two gold robins ; they chatter like blackbirds ; the fire bursts forth on their backs when they lift their wings. 1 [see note to savannali sparrow, p. 290. ] baltimore oriole 255 may 18, 1852. these days the golden robin is the important bird in the streets, on the ehns. may 10, 1853. you hear the clear whistle and see the red or fiery orange of the oriole darting through hosmer's orchard. but its note is not melodious and rich. it is at most a clear tone, the healthiest of your city beaux and belles. may 25, 1855. the golden robin keeps whistling something like eat it, potter, eat it f june 28, 1857. i hear on all hands these days, from the elms and other trees, the twittering peep of young gold robins, which have recently left their nests, and apparently indicate their locality to their parents by thus incessantly peeping all day long. dec. 22, 1859. as we passed under the elm beyond george heywood's, i looked up and saw a fiery hang bird's nest dangling over the road. what a reminis cence of summer, a fiery hangbird's nest dangling from an elm over the road when perhaps the thermometer is down to —20 ( ?), and the traveller goes beating his arms beneath it ! it is hard to recall the strain of that bird then. \_see also under general and miscellaneous, pp. 426, 430.] rusty blackbird ; rusty gkackle ; grackle ' april 9, 1855. wilson says that the only note of the rusty grackle is a chuck, though he is told that at hud son's bay, at the breeding-time, they sing with a fine ^ [so usually called by thoreau, who used only the name crow black bird for the bird now commonly called the bronzed grackle.] 256 notes on new england birds note.^ here they utter not only a chuck, hut a^ne shrill whistle. they cover the top o£ a tree now, and their concert is of this character : they all seem laboring to gether to get out a clear strain, as it were wetting their whistles against their arrival at hudson's bay. they begin as it were by disgorging or spitting it out, like so much tow, from a full throat, and conclude with a clear, fine, shrill, ear-piercing whistle. then away they go, all chattering together. april 11, 1856. going up the railroad, i see a male and female rusty grackle alight on an oak near me, the latter apparently a flaxen brown, with a black tail. she looks like a different species of bird. wilson had heard only a tchuck from the grackle, but this male, who was courting his mate, broke into incipient warbles, like a bubble burst as soon as it came to the surface, it was so aerated. its air would not be fixed long enough. oct. 14, 1857. i see a large flock of grackles, prob ably young birds, quite near me on william wheeler's apple trees, pruning themselves and trying to sing. they never succeed ; make a sort of musical splutter ing. most, i think, have brownish heads and necks, and some purple reflections from their black bodies. oct. 16, 1857. i saw some blackbirds, apparently grackles, singing, after their fashion, on a tree by the river. most had those grayish-brown heads and necks ; some, at least, much ferruginous or reddish brown reflected. they were pruning themselves and splitting their throats in vain, trying to sing as the other day. ^ [the only song they are known to possess is the whistle that thoreau here describes.] rusty blackbird 267 all the melody flew off in splinters. also a robin sings once or twice, just as in spring ! march 18, 1858. the blackbird — probably graokle this time — wings his way direct above the swamp north ward, with a regular tchuck, carrier haste, calling the summer months along, like a hen her chickens. oct. 16, 1858. see a large flock of grackles steer ing for a bare elm-top near the meadows. as they fly athwart my view, they appear successively rising half a foot or a foot above one another, though the flock is mov ing straight forward. i have not seen red-wings for a long while, but these birds, which went so much further north to breed, are still arriving from those distant re gions, fetching the year about. march 14, 1859. i see a large flock of grackles searching for food along the water's edge, just below dr. bartlett's. some wade in the water. they are within a dozen rods of me and the road. it must be something just washed up that they are searching for, for the water has just risen and is still rising fast. is it not insects and worms washed out of the grass ? and perhaps the snails ? when a grackle sings, it is as if his mouth were full of cotton, which he was trying to spit out. march 8, 1860. seeasmall flock of grackles on the wil low-row above railroad bridge. how they sit and make a business of chattering ! for itcannot be called singing, and no improvement from age to age perhaps. yet, as nature is a becoming, their notes may become melodious at last. at length, on my very near approach, they flit suspiciously away, uttering a few subdued notes as they hurry off. \^see also under blackbirds, p. 260.] 258 notes on new england birds bronzed grackle ; crow blackbird 3fay 11, 1854. now at last i see crow blackbirds without doubt. . . . they fly as if carrying or drag ging their precious long tails, broad at the end, through the air. their note is like a great rusty spring, and also a hoarse chuck. june 6, 1854. a crow blackbird's nest in a white maple this side the leaning hemlocks, in a crotch seven or eight feet from ground ; somewhat like a robin's, but larger, made of coarse weed stems, mikania, and cranberry vines (without leaves), fish-lines, etc., without, and of mud lined with finer fibres or roots within ; four large but blind young covered with dark down. ajyril 14, 1855. i see half a dozen crow blackbirds uttering their coarse rasping char char, like great rusty springs, on the top of an elm by the riverside ; and often at each char they open their great tails. they also attain to a clear whistle with some effort, but seem to have some difficulty in their throats yet. 3iay 11, 1855. a crow blackbird's nest, about eight feet up a white maple over water, — a large, loose nest without, some eight inches high, between a small twig and main trunk, composed of coarse bark shreds and dried last year's grass, without mud ; within deep and size of robin's nest ; with four pale-green eggs, streaked and blotched with black and brown. took one. young bird not begun to form. feb. 3, 1856. analyzed the crow blackbird's nest from which i took an egg last summer, eight or ten feet ;j. crow blackbird 259 up a white maple by river, opposite island. large, of an irregular form, appearing as if wedged in between a twig and two large contiguous trunks. from outside to outside it measures from six to eight inches ; inside, four ; depth, two ; height, six. the foundation is a loose mass of coarse strips of grape-vine bark chiefly, some eighteen inches long by five eighths of an inch wide ; also slender grass and weed stems, mikania stems, a few cellu lar river weeds, as rushes, sparganium, pipe-grass, and some soft, coarse, fibrous roots. the same coarse grape vine bark and grass and weed stems, together with some harder, wiry stems, form the sides and rim, the bark being passed around the twig. the nest is lined with the finer grass and weed stems, etc. the solid part of the nest is of half-decayed vegetable matter and mud, full of fine fibrous roots and wound internally with grass stems, etc., and some grape bark, being an inch and a half thick at bottom. pulled apart and lying loose, it makes a great mass of material. this, like similar nests, is now a great haunt for spiders. april 15, 1856. coming up from the riverside, i hear the harsh rasping char-r char-r of the crow blackbird, like a very coarsely vibrating metal, and, looking up, see three flying over. blackbirds (miscellaneous) may 8, 1852. the blackbirds fly in flocks and sing in concert on the willows, — what a lively, chattering concert ! a great deal of chattering with many liquid and rich warbling notes and clear whistles, — till now a hawk sails low, beating the bush, and they are silent 260 notes on new england birds or off, but soon begin again. do any other birds sing in such deafening concert ? march 18, 1853. several times i hear and see black birds flying north singly, high overhead, chucking as if to find their mates, migrating; or are they even now getting near their own breeding-place? perchance these are blackbirds that were hatched here, — that know me ! march 29, 1853. it would be worth the while to at tend more to the different notes of the blackbirds. me thinks i may have seen the female red-wing within a day or two ; or what are these purely black ones without the red shoulder ? * it is pleasant to see them scattered about on the drying meadow. the red-wings will stand close to the water's edge, looking larger than usual, with their red shoulders very distinct and handsome in that position, and sing okolee^ or hoh-y-lee, or what-not. others, on the tops of trees over your head, out of a fuzzy beginning spit forth a clear, shrill whistle inces santly, for what purpose i don't know. others, on the elms over the water, utter still another note, each time lifting their wings slightly. others are flying across the stream with a loud char-r^ char-r. aj)ril 4, 1853. after turning lee's cliff i heard, methinks, more birds singing even than in fair weather, — tree sparrows, whose song has the character of the canary's, j^. hyemalis' s cmll-lill, the sweet strain of the foxcolored sparrow, song' sparrows, a nuthatch, jays, crows, bluebirds, robins, and a large congregation of blackbirds. they suddenly alight with great din in a stubble-field just over the wall, not perceiving me and ^ [this was before he had learned to distinguish the rusty blackbird.] blackbirds 261 my umbrella behind the pitch pines, and there feed silently ; then, getting uneasy or anxious, they fly up on to an apple tree, where being reassured, commences a rich but deafening concert, o-gurgle-ee-e^ o-gurgle-ee-e^ some of the most liquid notes ever heard, as if pro duced by some of the water of the pierian spring, flow ing through some kind of musical water-pipe and at the same time setting in motion a multitude of fine vibrat ing metallic springs. like a shepherd merely meditat ing most enrapturing glees on such a water-pipe, a more liquid bagpipe or clarionet, immersed like bubbles in a thousand sprayey notes, the bubbles half lost in the spray. when i show myself, away they go with a loud harsh charr-r, charr-r. at first i had heard an in undation of blackbirds approaching, some beating time with a loud chuck, chuck, while the rest played a hur ried, gurgling fugue. june 11, 1853. probably blackbirds were never less numerous along our river than in these years. they do not depend on the clearing of the woods and the culti vation of orchards, etc. streams and meadows, in which they delight, always existed. most of the towns, soon after they were settled, were obliged to set a price upon their heads. in 1672, according to the town records of concord, instruction was given to the selectmen, " that incorigment be given for the destroying of blackbirds and jaies." (shattuck,^ page 45.) april 3, 1856. hear also squeaking notes of an ad vancing flock of red-wings,^ somewhere high in the sky. 1 [lemuel shattuck'a history of concord.] ^ or grackles ; am uncertain which makes that squeak. 262 notes on new england birds at lensrth detect them hi2:li overhead, advaneino: north o o o east in loose array, with a broad extended front, com peting with each other, winging their way to some northern meadow which they remember. the note of some is like the squeaking of many signs, while others accompany them with a steady dry tchuck. tchucjc. aug. 18, 1858. i also see large flocks of blackbirds, blackish birds with chattering notes. it is a fine sight when you can look down on them just as they are set tling on the ground with outspread wings, — a hovering flock. march 13, 1859. i see a small flock of blackbirds flying over, some rising, others falling, yet all advancing together, one flock but many birds, some silent, others tchucking, — incessant alternation. this harmonious movement as in a dance, this agreeing to differ, makes the charm of the spectacle to me. one bird looks frac tional, naked, like a single thread or ravelling from the web to which it belongs. alternation! alternation! heaven and hell! here again in the flight of a bird, its ricochet motion, is that undulation observed in so many marerials. as in the mackerel sky. march 28, 1859. as we were paddling over the great meadows, i saw at a distance, high in the air above the middle of the meadow, a very compact flock of black birds advancing: as^ainst the sun. though there were more than a hundred, they did not appear to occupy more than six feet in breadth, but the whole flock was dashincr first to the rio-ht and then to the left. when advancing straight toward me and the sun, they made but little impression on the eye, — so many fine dark blackbirds 263 points merely, seen against the sky, — but as often as they wheeled to the right or left, displaying their wings flatwise and the whole length of their bodies, they were a very conspicuous black mass. this fluctuation in the amount of dark surface was a very pleasing phenome non. it reminded me of those blinds whose sashes [-s/c] are made to move all together by a stick, now admitting nearly all the light and now entirely excluding it ; so the flock of blackbirds opened and shut. but at length they suddenly spread out and dispersed, some flying off this way, and others that, as, when a wave strikes against a cliff, it is dashed upward and lost in fine spray. so they lost their compactness and impetus and broke up suddenly in mid-air. april 25, 1860. i hear the greatest concerts of black birds — red-wings and crow blackbirds — nowadays, es pecially of the former (also the 22d and 29th). the maples and willows along the river, and the button bushes, are all alive with them. they look like a black fruit on the trees, distributed over the top at pretty equal distances. it is worth while to see how slyly they hide at the base of the thick and shaggy button-bushes at this stage of the water. they will suddenly cease their strains and flit away and secrete themselves low amid these bushes till you are past ; or you scare up an unexpectedly large flock from such a place, where you had seen none. i pass a large quire in full blast on the oaks, etc., on the island in the meadow northwest of peter's. sud denly they are hushed, and i hear the loud rippling rush made by their wings as they dash away, and, look 264 notes on new england birds ing up, i see what i take to be a sharp-shinned hawk just alighting on the trees where they were, having failed to catch one. they retreat some forty rods off, to another tree, and renew their concert there. the hawk plumes himself, and then flies off, rising gradually and beginning to circle, and soon it joins its mafe, and soars with it high in the sky and out of sight, as if the thought of so terrestrial a thing as a blackbird had never entered its head. it appeared to have a plain red dish-fawn breast. the size more than anything made me think it a sharp-shin. \_see also under general and miscellaneous, pp. 412, 413, 425.] xv finches pine grosbeak dec. 24, 1851. saw also some pine grosbeaks, mag nificent winter birds, among the weeds and on the apple trees ; like large catbirds at a distance, but, nearer at hand, some of them, when they flit by, are seen to have gorgeous heads, breasts, and rumps (?), with red or crimson reflections, more beautiful than a steady bright red would be. the note i heard, a rather faint and in nocent whistle of two bars. july 15, 1858. when half-way down the mountain,* amid the spruce, we saw two pine grosbeaks, male and female, close by the path, and looked for a nest, but in vain. they were remarkably tame, and the male a brilliant red orange, — neck, head, breast beneath, and rump, — blackish wings and tail, with two white bars on wings. (female, yellowish.) the male flew nearer inquisitively, uttering a low twitter, and perched fear lessly within four feet of us, eying us and pluming himself and plucking and eating the leaves of the amelanchier oligocarpa on which he sat, for several minutes. the female, meanwhile, was a rod off. they were evidently breeding there. yet neither wilson nor nuttall speak of their breeding in the united states. [/see also under general and miscellaneous.] * [mt. lafayette.] 2 [the pine grosbeak breeds very sparingly in the white moautsin 266 notes on new england birds purple finch oct. 7, 1842. a little girl has just brought me a purple finch, or american linnet. these birds are now moving south. it reminds me of the pine and spruce, and the juniper and cedar on whose berries it feeds. it has the crimson hues of the october evenings, and its plumage still shines as if it had caught and preserved some of their tints (beams?). we know it chiefly as a traveller. it reminds me of many things i had forgot ten. many a serene evening lies snugly packed under its wing. april 15, 1854. the arrival of the purple finches appears to be coincident with the blossoming of the elm, on whose blossom it feeds. may 24, 1855. heard a purple finch sing more than one minute without pause, loud and rich, on an elm over the street. another singing very faintly on a neighboring elm. april 12, 1856. there suddenly flits before me and alights on a small apple tree in mackay's field, as i go to my boat, a splendid purple finch. its glowing red ness is revealed when it lifts its wings, as when the ashes is blown from a coal of fire. just as the oriole displays its gold. region. mr. j. e. cabot's statement in the atlantic for december, 1857, that he had seen the bird " at the white mountains in august" seems to have escaped thoreau's attention. perhaps the descendants of these birds of thoreau's still haunt the mountain. thirty years later at least, in june, 18§8, the writer, in company with mr. bradford torrey, found several pine grosbeaks high up on lafayette and heard from two of them their beautiful song.] red crossbill 267 april 3, 1858. going down-town this morning, i am surprised by the rich strain of the purple finch from the elms. three or four have arrived and lodged asrainst the elms of our street, which runs east and west across their course, and they are now mingling their loud and rich strains with that of the tree sparrows, robins, bluebirds, etc. the hearing of this note implies some improvement in the acoustics of the air. it reminds me of that genial state of the air when the elms are in bloom. they sit still over the street and make a busi ness of warbling. they advertise me surely of some additional warmth and serenity. how their note rings over the roofs of the village! you wonder that even the sleepers are not awakened by it to inquire who is there, and yet probably not another than myself in all the town observes their coming, and not half a dozen ever distinguished them in their lives. and yet the very mob of the town know the hard names of germanians or swiss families which once sang here or elsewhere. red crossbill april 13, 1860. at first i had felt disinclined to make this excursion up the assabet, but it distinctly oc curred to me that, perhaps, if i came against my will, as it were, to look at the sweet-gale as a matter of business, i might discover something else interesting, as when i discovered the sheldrake. as i was paddling past the uppermost hemlocks i saw two peculiar and plump birds near me on the bank there which reminded me of the cow blackbird and of the oriole at first. i saw at once that they were new to me, and guessed 268 notes on new england birds that they were crossbills, which was the case, — male and female. the former was dusky-greenish (through a glass), orange, and red, the orange, etc., on head, breast, and rump, the vent white ; dark, large bill ; the female more of a dusky slate-color, and yellow instead of orange and red. they were very busily eating the seeds of the hemlock, whose cones were strewn on the ground, and they were very fearless, allowing me to ap proach quite near. when i returned this way i looked for them again, and at the larger hemlocks heard a peculiar note, caee^, cheep, cheep, cheep, in the rhythm of a fish hawk but faster and rather loud, and looking up saw them fly to the north side and alight on the top of a swamp white oak, while i sat in my boat close under the south bank. but immediately they recrossed and went to feeding on the bank within a rod of me. they were very parrot like both in color (especially the male, greenish and orange, etc.) and in their manner of feeding, — holding the hemlock cones in one claw and rapidly extracting the seeds with their bills, thus trying one cone after another very fast. but they kept their bills a-going so that, near as they were, i did not distinguish the cross. i should have looked at them in profile. at last the two hopped within six feet of me, and one within four feet, and they were coming still nearer, as if partly from curiosity, though nibbling the cones all the while, when my chain fell down and rattled loudly, — for the wind shook the boat, — and they flew off a rod. in bechstein^ 1 [j. m. bechstein, m. d., cage, and chamber-birds, translated from the german and edited by h. g. adams, london, 1853, p. 174.] lesser redpoll 269 i read that "it frequents fir and pine woods, but only when there are abundance of the cones." it may be that the abundance of white pine cones last fall had to do with their coming here. the hemlock cones were very abundant too, methinks. lesser redpoll; linaria wov. 12, 1852. saw a flock of little passenger birds * by walden, busily pecking at the white birch catkins ; about the size of a chickadee ; distinct white bar on wings ; most with dark pencilled breast, some with whit ish ; forked tail ; bright chestnut or crimson (?) front let ; yellowish shoulders or sack. when startled, they went off with a jingling sound somewhat like emptying a bag of coin. is it the yellow redpoll ? dec. 9, 1852. those little ruby-crowned wrens (?) ^ still about. they suddenly dash away from this side to that in flocks, with a tumultuous note, half jingle, half rattle, like nuts shaken in a bag, or a bushel of nut shells, soon returning to the tree they had forsaken on some alarm. they are oftenest seen on the white birch, apparently feeding on its seeds, scattering the scales about. jan. 3, 1853. the red-crowns here still. they ap pear to frequent one clump of birches a long time, for here the snow beneath is covered with the seeds they have loosened, while elsewhere there are none. they hang by the twigs while they peck the catkins, and others are busy on the snow beneath, picking up what 1 fringilla linaria [now called acanthis linaria, the redpoll]. 2 lesser redpolls. 270 notes on new england birds drops. they are continually in motion, with a jingling twitter and occasional mew, and suddenly, when dis turbed, go off with a loud jingle like the motion of a whole bag of nuts. march 5, 1853. f. brown * showed me to-day some lesser redpolls which he shot yesterday. thej^ turn out to be my falsely-called chestnut-frontleted bird of the winter. " linaria minor, ray. lesser redpoll linnet. from pennsylvania and new jersey to maine, in win ter ; inland to kentucky. breeds in maine, nova scotia,^ newfoundland, labrador, and the fur coun tries." — audubon's synopsis. they have a sharp bill, black legs and claws, and a bright-crimson crown or frontlet, in the male reaching to the base of the bill, with, in his case, a delicate rose or carmine on the breast and rump. though this is described by nuttall as an occasional visitor in the winter, it has been the prevailing bird here this winter. dec. 19, 1854. off clamshell i heard and saw a large flock of fringilla linaria over the meadow. . . . sud denly they turn aside in their flight and dash across the river to a large white birch fifteen rods off, which , plainly they had distinguished so far. i afterward saw many more in the potter swamp up the river. they were commonly brown or dusky above, streaked with yellowish white or ash, and more or less white or ash beneath. most had a crimson crown or frontlet, and a few a crimson neck and breast, very handsome. some ^ [frank brown, of concord, who made a collection of mounted birds.] 2 [there are no authentic records of the bird's breeding in maine or nova scotia.] lesser redpoll 271 with a bright-crimson crown and clear-white breasts. i suspect that these were young males. they keep up an incessant twittering, varied from time to time witli some mewing notes, and occasionally, for some unknown reason, they will all suddenly dash away with that uni versal loud note (twitter) like a bag of nuts. they are busily clustered in the tops of the birches, picking the seeds out of the catkins, and sustain themselves in all kinds of attitudes, sometimes head downwards, while about this. common as they are now, and were winter before last, i saw none last winter. jan. 19, 1855. it may be that the linarias come into the gardens now not only because all nature is a wilder ness to-day, but because the woods where the wind has not free play are so snowed up, the twigs are so deeply covered, that they cannot readily come at their food. jan. 20, 1855. i see the tracks of countless little birds, probably redpolls, where these have run over broad pastures and visited every weed, — johns wort and coarse grasses, — whose oat-like seed-scales or hulls they have scattered about. it is surprising they did not sink deeper in the light snow. often the impression is so faint that they seem to have been supported by their wings. jan. 24, 1860. see a large flock of lesser redpolls, eating the seeds of the birch (and perhaps alder) in dennis swamp by railroad. they are distinct enough from the goldfinch, their note more shelly and gen eral as they fly, and they are whiter, without the black wings, beside that some have the crimson head or head and breast. they alight on the birches, then swarm on 272 notes on new england bieds the snow beneath, busily picking up the seed in the copse. jan. 27, 1860. half a dozen redpolls busily picking the seeds out of the larch cones behind monroe's. they are pretty tame, and i stand near. they perch on the slender twigs which are beaded with cones, and swing and teeter there while they perseveringly peck at them, trying now this one, now that, and sometimes appearing to pick out and swallow them quite fast. i notice no red ness or carmine at first, but when the top of one's head comes between me and the sun it unexpectedly glows. jan. 29, 1860. to-day i see quite a flock of the les ser redpolls eating the seeds of the alder, picking them out of the cones just as they do the larch, often head downward ; and i see, under the alders, where they have run and picked up the fallen seeds, making chain like tracks, two parallel lines. [>isiee also under general and miscellaneous, pp. 419-421.] american goldfinch july 24, 1852. i heard this afternoon the cool water twitter of the goldfinch, and saw the bird. they come with the springing aftermath. it is refreshing as a cup of cold water to a thirsty man to hear them, now only one at a time. aug. 26, 1856. as i stand there, a young male gold finch darts away with a twitter from a spear thistle top close to my side, and, alighting near, makes frequent returns as near to me and the thistle as it dares pass, not yet knowing man well enough to fear him. american goldfinch 273 aug. 28, 1856. a goldfinch twitters away from every thistle now, and soon returns to it when i am past. i see the ground strewn with the thistle-down they have scattered on every side. april 19, 1858. i hear the pine warbler there, and also what i thought a variation of its note, quite differ ent, yet i thought not unfamiliar to me. afterwards, along the wall under the middle conantum cliff, i saw many goldfinches, male and female, the males singing in a very sprightly and varied manner, sitting still on bare trees. also uttered their watery twitter and their peculiar mewing. in the meanwhile i heard a faint thrasher's note, as if faintly but perfectly imitated by some bird twenty or thirty rods off. this surprised me very much. it was equally rich and varied, and yet i did not believe it to be a thrasher. determined to find out the singer, i sat still with my glass in hand, and at length detected the singer, a goldfinch sitting within gunshot all the while. this was the most varied and sprightly performer of any bird i have heard this year, and it is strange that i never heard the strain before. it may be this note which is taken for the thrasher's before the latter comes. aug. 9, 1858. edward bartlett shows me this morn ing a nest which he found yesterday. it is saddled on the lowest horizontal branch of an apple tree in abel heywood's orchard, against a small twig, and answers to nuttall's description of the goldfinch's nest, which it probably is. the eggs were five, pure white or with a faint bluish green tinge, just begun to be developed. i did not see the bird. 274 notes on new england birds it is but little you learn of a bird in this irregular way, — having its nest and eggs shown you. how much more suggestive the sight of the goldfinch going off on a jaunt over the hills, twittering to its plainer consort by its side ! the goldfinch nest of this forenoon is saddled on a horizontal twig of an apple, some seven feet from ground and one third of an inch in diameter, supported on one side by a yet smaller branch, also slightly attached to another small branch. it measures three and one half inches from outside to outside, one and three quarters inside, two and one-half from top to bottom, or to a little below the twig, and one and one half inside. it is a very compact, thick, and warmly lined nest, slightly incurving on the edge within. it is composed of fine shreds of bark — grape-vine and other — and one piece of twine, with, more externally, an abundance of pale brown slender catkins of oak (?) or hickory (?), mixed with effete apple blossoms and their peduncles, show ing little apples, and the petioles of apple leaves, some times with half-decayed leaves of this year attached, last year's heads of lespedeza, and some other heads of weeds, with a little grass stem or weed stem, all more or less disguised by a web of white spider or cater pillar silk, spread over the outside. it is thickly and very warmly lined with (apparently) short thistle-down, mixed with which you see some grape-vine bark, and the rim is composed of the same shreds of bark, catkins, and some fine fibrous stems, and two or three hairs (of horse) mixed with wool (?) ; for only the hollow is lined american goldfinch 275 with the looser or less tenacious thistle-down. this nest shows a good deal of art. aug. 11, 1858. heard a fine, sprightly, richly war bled strain from a bird perched on the top of a bean pole. it was at the same time novel yet familiar to me. i soon recognized it for the strain of the purple liucli, which i have not heard lately. but though it appeared as large, it seemed a different-colored bird. avith my glass, four rods oft", i saw it to be a goldfinch. it kept repeating this warble of the purple finch for several minutes. a very surprising note to be heard now, when birds generally are so silent. have not heard the purple finch of late. i conclude that the goldfinch is a very fine and powerful singer, and the most successful and remarkable mocking-bird that we have. in the spring i heard it imitate the thrasher exactly, before that bird had arrived, and now it imitates the purple finch as perfectly, after the latter bird has ceased to sing ! it is a surprising vocalist. it did not cease singing till i disturbed it by my nearer approach, and then it went off with its usual meio, succeeded by its watery twitter in its ricochet flight. aug. 14, 1858. the canada thistle down is now begun to fly, and i see the goldfinch upon it. cardu elis} often when i watch one go off, he flies at first one way, rising and falling, as if skimming close over un seen billows, but directly makes a great circuit as if he had changed his mind, and disappears in the opposite direction, or is seen to be joined there by his mate. dec. 22, 1858. p. m. — to walden. 1 [nuttall placed the american g-oldfinch with the european bird in the subgenus carduelis, from carduus, thistle.] 276 notes on new england birds i see in the cut near the shanty-site quite a flock of f. hyenialis ^ and goldfinches together, on the snow and weeds and ground. hear the well-known mew and watery twitter of the last and the drier chilt chilt of the former. these burning yellow birds with a little black and white on their coat-flaps look warm above the snow. there may be thirty goldfinches, very brisk and pretty tame. they hang head downwards on the weeds. i bear of their coming to pick sunflower seeds in melvin's garden these days. march 24, 1859. returning, above the railroad cause way, i see a flock of goldfinches, first of spring^ flitting along the causeway-bank. they have not yet the bright plumage they will have, but in some lights might be mistaken for sparrows. there is considerable difference in color between one and another, but the flaps of their coats are black, and their heads and shoulders more or less yellow. they are eating the seeds of the mullein and the large primrose, clinging to the plants sidewise in various positions and pecking at the seed-vessels. nov. 15, 1859. about the 23d of october i saw a large flock of goldfinches (judging from their motions and notes) on the tops of the hemlocks up the assabet, apparently feeding on their seeds, then falling. they were collected in great numbers on the very tops of these trees and flitting from one to another. rice has since described to me the same phenomenon as observed by him there since (says he saw the birds picking out the seeds), though he did not know what birds they were. william rice says that these birds get so much of the ^ [now called junco hyemalis, the slate-colored snowbird.] snow bunting 277 lettuce seed that you can hardly save any. they get sunflower seeds also. are called " lettuce-birds " in the books. snow bunting; arctic snowbird dec. 29, 1853. the driving snow blinds you, and where you are protected, you can see but little way, it is so thick. yet in spite, or on account, of all, i see the first flock of arctic snowbirds (^emheriza nivalis^ near the depot, white and black, with a sharp, whistle like note. . . . these are the true winter birds for you, these winged snowballs. i could hardly see them, the air was so full of driving snow. what hardy creatures! where do they spend the night? jan. 2, 1854. a flock of snow buntings flew over the fields with a rippling whistle, accompanied sometimes by a tender peep and a ricochet motion. jan. 2, 1856. crossing the railroad at the heywood meadow, i saw some snow buntings rise from the side of the embankment, and with surging, rolling flight wing their way up through the cut. returning, i saw, near the back road and railroad, a small flock of eight snow buntings feeding on the seeds of the pigweed, picking them from the snow, — appariently flat on the snow, their legs so short, — and, when i approached, alighting on the rail fence. they were pretty black, with white wings and a brown cres cent on their breasts. they have come with this deeper snow and colder weather. ^ [now called plectrophenax nivalis.] 278 notes on new england birds jan. 6, 1856. while i am making a path to the pump, i hear hurried rippling notes of birds, look up, and see quite a flock of snow buntings coming to alight amid the currant-tops in the yard. it is a sound almost as if made with their wings. what a pity our yard was made so tidy in the fall with rake and fire, and we have now no tall crop of weeds rising above this snow to invite these birds ! jan. 21, 1857. as i flounder along the corner road against the root fence, a very large flock of snow bunt ings alight with a wheeling flight amid the weeds rising above the snow in potter's heater piece,* — a hundred or two of them. they run restlessly amid the weeds, so that i can hardly get sight of them through my glass ; then suddenly all arise and fly only two or three rods, alighting within three rods of me. (they keep up a constant twittering.) it was as if they were any instant ready for a longer flight, but their leader had not so ordered it. suddenly away they sweep again, and i see them alight in a distant field where the weeds rise above the snow, but in a few minutes they have left that also and gone further north. beside their rijypling note, they have a vibratory twitter, and from the loiterers you hear quite a tender peep, as they fly after the vanishing flock. what independent creatures! they go seeking their food from north to south. if new hampshire and maine are covered deeply with snow, they scale down ^ [a " heater piece," in the parlance of old new england, is a tri angular plot of ground, so called from its resemblance in shape to a flat-iron heater, a triangular piece of cast iron which was heated and put into the old-fashioned flat-ironij snow bunting 279 to massachusetts for their breakfasts. not liking the grain in this field, away they clash to another distant one, attracted by the weeds rising above the snow. who can guess in what field, by what river or mountain they breakfasted this morning. they did not seem to regard me so near, but as they went off, their wave actually broke over me as a rock. they have the plea sure of society at their feasts, a hundred dining at once, busily talking while eating, remembering what occurred at grinnell land. as they flew past me they presented a pretty appearance, somewhat like broad bars of white alternating with bars of black. march 2, 1858. see a large flock of snow buntings, the white birds of the winter, rejoicing in the snow. i stand near a flock in an open field. they are trotting about briskly over the snow amid the weeds, — appar ently pigweed and roman wormwood, — as it were to keep their toes warm, hopping up to the weeds. then they restlessly take to wing again, and as they wheel about one, it is a very rich sight to see them dressed in black and white uniforms, alternate black and white, very distinct and regular. perhaps no colors would be more effective above the snow, black tips (considerably more) to wings, then clear white between this and the back, which is black or very dark again. one wonders if they are aware what a pleasing uniform appearance they make when they show their backs thus. they alight again equally near. their track is much like a small crow's track, showing a«long heel and furrowing the snow between with their toes. nov. 7, 1858. going up the lane beyond farmer's, 280 notes on new england birds i was surprised to see fly up from the white, stony road, two snow buntings, which alighted again close by, one on a large rock, the other on the stony ground. they had pale-brown or tawny touches on the white breast, on each side of the head, and on the top of the head, in the last place with some darker color. had light-yellowish bills. they sat quite motionless within two rods, and allowed me to approach within a rod, as if conscious that the white rocks, etc., concealed them. it seemed as if they were attracted to surfaces of the same color with themselves, — white and black (or quite dark) and tawny. one squatted flat, if not both. their soft rippling notes as they went off reminded me of the northeast snow-storms to which ere long they are to be an accompaniment. dec. 12, 1858. p. m. — up river on ice to fair haven hill. crossing the fields west of our texas * house, i see an immense flock of snow buntings, i think the largest that i ever saw. there must be a thousand or two at least. there is but three inches, at most, of crusted and dry frozen snow, and they are running amid the weeds which rise above it. the weeds are chiefly juncus tenuis (?), but its seeds are apparently gone. i find, however, the glumes of the piper grass ^ scattered about where they have been. the flock is at first about equally divided into two parts about twenty rods apart, but birds are 1 [" texas " was a part of copcord where the thoreau family lived from 1844 to 1850.] ^ [a local name for the couch, quitch, or witch grass {agropyron repens). see walden, riverside literature series, notes, p. 391.] snow bunting 281 incessantly flitting across the interval to join the pio neer flock, until all are united. they are very restless, running amid the weeds and continually changing their ground. they will suddenly rise again a few seconds after they have alighted, as if alarmed, but after a short wheel settle close by. flying from you, in some posi tions, you see only or chiefly the black part of their bodies, and then, as they wheel, the white comes into view, contrasted prettily with the former, and in all together at the same time. seen flying higher against a cloudy sky, they look like large snowflakes. when they rise all together their note is like the rattling of nuts in a bag, as if a whole binf ul were rolled from side to side. they also utter from time to time — i. e., individuals do — a clear rippling note, perhaps of alarm, or a call. it is remarkable that their notes above described should resemble the lesser redpoll's ! away goes this great wheeling, rambling flock, rolling through the air, and you cannot easily tell where they will settle. suddenly the pioneers (or a part not foremost) will change their course when in full career, and when at length they know it, the rushing flock on the other side will be fetched about as it were with an undulating jerk, as in the boys' game of snap-the-whip, and those that occupy the place of the snapper are gradually off after their leaders on the new tack. as far as i observe, they con fine themselves to upland, not alighting in the meadows. like a snow-storm they come rushing down from the north. the extremities of the wings are black, while tlio parts next their bodies are black [sic^. they are unusu ally abundant now. 282 notes on new england birds jan. 6, 1859. near nut meadow brook, on the jimmy miles road, i see a flock of snow buntings. they are feeding exclusively on . . . roman wormwood. their tracks where they sink in the snow are very long, i. e., have a very long heel, thus : or sometimes almost in a single straight line. they made notes when they went, — sharp, rippling, like a vibrat ing spring. they had run about to every such such \_sic\^ leaving distinct tracks raying from and to them, while the snow immediately about the weed was so tracked and pecked where the seeds fell that no track was distinct. and much more tracked up march 3, 1859. going by the solidago oak ^ at clam shell hill bank, i heard a faint rippling note and, look ing up, saw about fifteen snow buntings sitting in the top of the oak, all with their breasts toward me, — sitting so still and quite white, seen against the white cloudy sky, they did not look like birds but the ghosts of birds, and their boldness, allowing me to come quite ^ [a particular tree bo named by thoreau.] snow bunting 283 near, enhanced this impression. these were ahuost as white as snowballs, and from time to time i heard a low, soft rippling note from them. i could see no fea tures, but only the general outline of plump birds in white. it was a very spectral sight, and after i had watched them for several minutes, i can hardly say tiiat i was prepared to see them fly away like ordinary bunt ings when i advanced further. at first they were al most concealed by being almost the same color with the cloudy sky. dec. 23, 1859. in this slight snow i am surprised to see countless tracks of small birds, which have run over it in every direction from one end to the other of this great meadow since morning. by the length of the hind toe i know them to be snow buntings. indeed, soon after i see them running still on one side of the meadow. i was puzzled to tell what they got by running there. yet i [saw them] stopping repeatedly and picking up some thing. of course i thought of those caterpillars which are washed out by a rain and freshet at this season, but i could not find one of them. it rained on the 18th and again the 20th, and over a good part of the meadow the top of the stubble left by the scythe rises a little above the ice, i. e. an inch or two, not enough to disturb a skater. the birds have run here chiefly, visiting each little collection or tuft of stubble, and found their food chiefly in and about this thin stubble. i examined such places a long time and very carefully, but i could not find there the seed of any plant whatever. it was merely the stubble of sedge, with never any head left, and a few cranberry leaves projecting. all that i could find 284 notes on new england birds was pretty often (in some places very often) a little black, or else a brown, spider (sometimes quite a large one) motionless on the snow or ice ; and therefore i am constrained to think that they eat them, for i saw them running and picking in exactly such places a little way from me, and here were their tracks all around. yet they are called graminivorous [sic]. wilson says that he has seen them feeding on the seeds of aquatic plants on the seneca river, clinging to their heads. i think he means wool-grass. yet its seeds are too minute and in volved in the wool. though there was wool-grass here abouts, the birds did not go near it. to be sure, it has but little seed now. if they are so common at the ex treme north, where there is so little vegetation but per haps a great many spiders, is it not likely that they feed on these insects ? it is interesting to see how busy this flock is, explor ing this great meadow to-day. if it were not for this slight snow, revealing their tracks but hardly at all con cealing the stubble, i should not suspect it, though i might see them at their work. now i see them running briskly over the ice, most commonly near the shore, where there is most stubble (though very little) ; and they explore the ground so fast that they are continu ally changing their ground, and if i do not keep my eye on them i lose the direction. then here they come, with a stiff rip of their wings as they suddenly wheel, and those peculiar rippling notes, flying low quite across the meadow, half a mile even, to explore the other side, though that too is already tracked by them. not the fisher nor skater range the meadow a thousandth part vesper sparrow; bay-wing 285 so much in a week as these birds in a day. they hardly notice me as they come on. indeed, the flock, flyinj^ about as high as my head, divides, and half passes on each side of me. thus they sport over these broad meadows of ice this pleasant winter day. the spiders lie torpid and plain to see on the snow, and if it is they that they are after they never know what kills them. jan. 3, 1860. saw four snow buntings by the railroad causeway, just this side the cut, quite tame. they arose and alighted on the rail fence as we went by. very stout for their length. look very pretty when they fly and reveal the clear white space on their wings next the body, — white between the blacks. they were busily eating the seed of the piper grass on the embankment there, and it was strewn over the snow by them like oats in a stable. melvin speaks of seeing flocks of them on the river meadows in the fall, when they are of a dififer ent color. \^see also under vesper sparrow, below; general and miscellaneous, p. 431.] vesper sparrow ; grass finch ; baywing jan. 1, 1854. the white-in-tails, or grass finches, linger pretty late, flitting in flocks before, but they come so near winter only as the white in their tail indicates. they let it come near enough to whiten their tails, per chance, and they are off. the snow buntings and the tree sparrows are the true spirits of the snow-storm ; they are the animated beings that ride upon it and have their life in it. july 15, 1854. i hear a bay-wing on the wall near 286 notes on new england birds by, sounding far away, — a fainter song sparrow strain, somewhat. i see its open mouth and quivering throat, yet can hardly believe the seemingly distant strain pro ceeds from it, yaw yaw^ twee twee^ twitter twitter^ te twee twe tw tw tw, and so ends with a short and rapid trill. ajjril 29, 1855. this morning it snows, but the ground is not yet whitened. this will probably take the cold out of the air. many chip-birds are feeding in the yard, and one bay-wing. the latter incessantly scratches like a hen, all the while looking about for foes. the bay on its wings is not obvious except when it opens them. the white circle about the eye is visible afar. now it makes a business of pluming itself , doubling prettily upon itself, now touching the root of its tail, now thrusting its head under its wing, now between its wing and back above, and now between its legs and its belly ; and now it drops flat on its breast and belly and spreads and shakes its wings, nov stands up and repeatedly shakes its wings. it is either cleaning itself of dirt acquired in scratching and feeding, — for its feet are black with mud, — or it is oiling its feathers thus. it is rather better concealed by its color than the chip bird with its chestnut crown and light breast. the chip-bird scratches but slightly and rarely; it finds what it wants on the surface, keeps its head down more steadily, not looking about. i see the bay-wing eat some worms. april 13, 1856. i hear a bay-wing on the railroad fence sing — the rhythm — somewhat like, char char (or here here^, che che, chip chip chip (fast), chitter chitter chitter chit (very fast and jingling), tchea tchea vesper sparrow; baywing 287 (jinglingly). it has another strain, considerably differ ent, but a second also sings the above. two on different posts are steadily singing the same, as if contending with each other, notwithstanding the cold wind. june 23, 1856. bay-wings sang morning and even ing about r.'s house,* often sitting on a bean-pole and dropping down and running and singing on the bare ground amid the potatoes. its note somewhat like come^ here here, there there, — quick quick quick (fast), — or i ^m gone. may 12, 1857. while dropping beans in the garden at texas ^ just after sundown (may 13th), i hear from across the fields the note of the bay-wing. come here here there there quick quick quick or i 'm gone, (which i have no doubt sits on some fence-post or rail there), and it instantly translates me from the sphere of my work and repairs all the world that we jointly inhabit. it reminds me of so many country afternoons and even ings when this bird's strain was heard far over the fields, as i pursued it from field to field. the spirit of its earth-song, of its serene and true philosophy, was breathed into me, and i saw the world as through a glass, as it lies eternally. some of its aboriginal con tentment, even of its domestic felicity, possessed me. what he suggests is permanently true. as the bay-wing sang many a thousand years ago, so sang he to-night. in the beginning god heard his song and pronounced it good, and hence it has endured. it reminded me of 1 [mr. daniel ricketson's honse in new bedford, where thoreaa was visiting.] 2 [see note on p. 280.] 288 notes on new england birds many a summer sunset, of many miles of gray rails, of many a rambling pasture, of the farmhouse far in the fields, its milk-pans and well-sweep, and the cows com ing home from pasture. i would thus from time to time take advice of the birds, correct my human views by listening to their volucral (?). he is a brother poet, this small gray bird (or bard), whose muse inspires mine. his lay is an idyl or pastoral, older and sweeter than any that is classic. he sits on some gray perch like himself, on a stake, per chance, in the midst of the field, and you can hardly see him against the ploughed ground. you advance step by step as the twilight deepens, and lo ! he is gone, and in vain you strain your eyes to see whither, but anon his tinkling strain is heard from some other quarter. one with the rocks and with us. methinks i hear these sounds, have these reminis cences, only when well employed, at any rate only when i have no reason to be ashamed of my employment. i am often aware of a certain compensation of this kind for doing something from a sense of duty, even uncon sciously. our past experience is a never-failing capital which can never be alienated, of which each kindred future event reminds us. if you would have the song of the sparrow inspire you a thousand years hence, let your life be in harmony with its strain to-day. i ordinarily plod along a sort of whitewashed prison entry, subject to some indifferent or even grovelling mood. i do not distinctly realize my destiny. i have turned down my light to the merest glimmer and am doing some task which i have set myself. i take in vesper sparrow; bay-wing 289 credibly narrow views, live on the limits, and have no recollection of absolute truth. mushroom institutions hedge me in. but suddenly, in some fortunate moment, the voice of eternal wisdom reaches me, even in the strain of the sparrow, and liberates me, whets and clar ifies my senses, makes me a competent witness. april 2, 1858. on the side of fair haven hill i go looking for baywings, turning my glass to each spar row on a rock or tree. at last i see one, which flies right up straight from a rock eighty or one hundred feet and warbles a peculiar long and pleasant strain, after the manner of the skylark, methiuks, and close by i see another, apparently a bay-wing, though i do not see its white in tail, and it utters while sitting the same subdued, rather peculiar strain. april 15, 1859. the bay-wing now sings — the first i have been able to hear — both about the texas house and the fields this side of hayden's, both of them sim ilar dry and open pastures. i heard it just before noon, when the sun began to come out, and at 3 p. m., sing ing loud and clear and incessantly. it sings with a pleas ing deliberation, contrasting with the spring vivacity of the song sparrow, whose song many would confound it with. it comes to revive with its song the dry uplands and pastures and grass-fields about the skirts of vil lages. only think how finely our life is furnished in all its details, — sweet wild birds provided to fill its in terstices with song ! it is provided that while we are employed in our corporeal, or intellectual, or other, ex ercises we shall be lulled and amused or cheered by the sinoing: of birds. when the laborer rests on his 290 notes on new england birds . spade to-day, the sun having just come out, he is not left wholly to the mercy of his thoughts, nature is not a mere void to him, but he can hardly fail to hear the pleasing and encouraging notes of some newly arrived bird. the strain of the grass finch is very likely to fall on his ear and convince him, whether he is conscious of it or not, that the world is beautiful and life a fair enterprise to engage in. it will make him calm and contented. if you yield for a moment to the impres sions of sense, you hear some bird giving expression to its happiness in a pleasant strain. we are provided with singing birds and with ears to hear them. what an institution that ! nor are we obliged to catch and cage them, nor to be bird-fanciers in the common sense. whether a man's work be hard or easy, whether he be happy or unhappy, a bird is appointed to sing to a man while he is at his work. savannah sparrow; seringo-bird may 1, 1852. i hear the note of the shy savannah sparrow (i^. savanna),^ that plump bird with a dark ^ probably have seen it before, — seringo. [though here, where the '' seringo-bird " makes its first appearance in the journal, its identity •with the savannah sparrow seems to have been unquestioned by tho reau, it proved afterwards to be almost as puzzling to him as the ever elusive " night-warbler." the probability is that the " aeringo " in this and most other eases was the savannah sparrow, but it may some times have been the yellow-winged, or grasshopper, sparrow, or even, as thoreau once suspected, the grass finch, or vesper sparrow. it is quite likely that at times the bird he saw was not the bird he heard. passerculus sandivichensis savanna is the scientific name now in use. only a few of the many references to the bird in the journal are here given.] ^(»^•(i si'aukdw vespkr. sl'akiiow <)\ nkst savannah sparrow 201 streaked breast that runs and hides in the grass, whose note sounds so like a cricket's in the gi-ass. (i used to hear it when i walked by moonlight last summer.) i hear it now from deep in the sod, — for there is hardly grass yet. the bird keeps so low you do not see it. you do not suspect how many there are till at length their heads appear. the word seringo reminds me of its note, — as if it were produced by some kind of fine metallic spring. it is an earth-sound. march 18, 1853. with regard to my seringo-bird (and others), i think that my good genius withheld his dame that i might learn his character. april 22, 1856. the seringo also sits on a post, with a very distinct yellow line over the eye, and the rhythm of its strain is ker chick \ her che \ ker-char-r-r-r-r | chick, the last two bars being the part chiefly heard. tree sparrow april 2, 1853. the tree sparrows and a few blue snowbirds in company sing (the former) very sweetly in the garden this morning. i now see a faint spot on the breast. it says something like a twee twee, chit chit, chit chit chee var-r. jan. 1, 1854. the snow is the great betrayer. it not only shows the tracks of mice, otters, etc., etc., which else we should rarely if ever see, but the tree sparrows are more plainly seen against its white ground, and they in turn are attracted by the dark weeds which it reveals. it also drives the crows and other birds out of the woods to the villages for food. march 30, 1854. great flocks of tree sparrows and 292 notes on new england birds some f. hyemalis on the ground and trees on the island neck, making the air and bushes ring with their jin gling. the former — some of them — say somewhat like this : a che che^ ter twee twee, tweer tweer twa. it sounded like a new bird. aj)ril 19, 1854. hear the tree sparrows at willow hedgerow this morning, — ah ha ha yip yip yip yip, or twitter twitter twe twe twe, or ah ha ha twitter twit ter twe, — very canary-like, yet clear, as if aspirated vowels alone, — no t or r. dec. 4, 1856. saw and heard cheep faintly one little tree sparrow, the neat chestnut crowned and winged and white-barred bird, perched on a large and solitary white birch. so clean and tough, made to withstand the win ter. this color reminds me of the upper side of the shrub oak leaf. i love the few homely colors of nature at this season, — her strong wholesome browns, her sober and primeval grays, her celestial blue, her viva cious green, her pure, cold, snowy white. dec. 17, 1856. a flock of a dozen or more tree spar rows flitting through the edge of the birches, etc., by the meadow front of puffer's. they make excursions into the open meadow and, as i approach, take refuge in the brush. i hear their ia,\nt cheep, a very feeble evi dence of their existence, and also a pretty little sup pressed warbling from them. that feeble cheep of the tree sparrow, like the tin kling of an icicle, or the chafing of two hard shrub oak twigs, is probably a call to their mates, by which they keep together. these birds, when perched, look larger ( tree sparrow 293 than usual this cold and windy day : they are puffed up for warmth, have added a porch to their doors, jan. 6, 1857. though there is an extremely cold, cutting northwest wind, against which i see many trav ellers turning their backs, and so advancing, i hear and see an unusual numberof merry little tree sparrows about the few weeds that are to be seen. they look very chip per, flitting restlessly about and jerking their long tails. oct. 13, 1857. see a pretty large flock of tree spar rows, very lively and tame, drifting along and pursuing each other along a bushy fence and ditch like driving snow. two pursuing each other would curve upward like a breaker in the air and drop into the hedge again. nov. 20, 1857. the hardy tree sparrow has taken the place of the chipping and song sparrow, so much like the former that most do not know it is another. his faint lisping chip will keep our spirits up till an other spring. jan. 6, 1858. the north river ^ is not frozen over. i see tree sparrows twittering and moving with a low creeping and jerking motion amid the chenopodium in a field, upon the snow, so chubby or puffed out on ac count of the cold that at first i took them for the arctic birds, but soon i see their bright-chestnut crowns and clear white bars; as the poet says, "a thousand feeding like one," ^ — though there are not more than a dozen here. jan. 7, 1858. p. m. — i see some tree sparrows feed ing on the fine grass seed above the snow, near the road 1 [the assabet, or north branch of the concord river.] 2 [wordsworth said, '' there are forty feeding like one."] 294 notes on new england birds on the hillside below the dutch house. they are flit ting along one at a time, their feet commonly sunk in the snow, uttering occasionally a low sweet warble and seemingly as happy there, and with this wintry prospect before them for the night and several months to come, as any man by his fireside. one occasionally hops or flies toward another, and the latter suddenly jerks away from him. they are reaching or hopping up to the fine grass, or oftener picking the seeds from the snow. at length the whole ten have collected within a space a dozen feet square, but soon after, being alarmed, they utter a different and less musical chirp and flit away into an apple tree. march 20, 1858. a. m. — by river. the tree sparrow is perhaps the sweetest and most melodious warbler at present and for some days. it is peculiar, too, for singing in concert along the hedge rows, much like a canary, especially in the mornings. very clear, sweet, melodious notes, between a twitter and a warble, of which it is hard to catch the strain, for you commonly hear many at once. dec. 17, 1859. i see on the pure white snow what looks like dust for half a dozen inches under a twig. looking closely, i find that the twig is hardback and the dust its slender, light-brown, chaffy-looking seed, which falls still in copious showers, dusting the snow, when i jar it ; and here are the tracks of a sparrow * which has jarred the twig and picked the minute seeds a long time, making quite a hole in the snow. the seeds are so fine that it must have got more snow than seed at ^ [very likely the tree sparrow, which feeds largely on weed seeds.] tree sparrow 295 each peck. but they probably look large to its uiicro scopic eyes. i see, when i jar it, that a meadow-sweet close by has quite similar, but larger, seeds. this the reason, then, that these plants rise so high above the snow and retain their seed, dispersing it on the least jar over each successive layer of snow beneath them ; or it is carried to a distance by the wind. what abundance and what variety in the diet of these small granivorous birds, while i find only a few nuts still ! these stiff weeds which no snow can break down hold their provender. what the cereals are to men, these are to the sparrows. the only threshing they require is that the birds fly against their spikes or stalks. a little further i see the seed-box ( ?) (^ludwigid) full of still smaller, yellowish seeds. and on the ridge north is the track of a partridge amid the shrubs. it has hopped up to the low clusters of smooth sumach berries, sprinkled the snow with them, and eaten all but a few. also, here only, or where it has evidently jarred them down — whether intentionally or not, i am not sure — are the large oval seeds of the stiff stalked lespedeza, which i suspect it ate, with the sumach berries. there is much solid food in them. when the snow is deep the birds could easily pick the latter out of the heads as they stand on the snow. dec. 31, 1859. there is a great deal of hemlock scales scattered over the recent snow (at the hemlocks), evi dently by birds on the trees, and the wind has blown them southeast, — scales, seeds, and cones, — and i see the tracks of small birds that have apparently picked the seeds from the snow also. it may have been done by goldfinches. i see a tree sparrow hopping close by, and 296 notes on new england birds perhaps they eat them on the snow. some of the seeds have blown at least fifteen rods southeast. so the hem lock seed is important to some birds in the winter. jan. 16, 1860. i see a flock of tree sparrows busily picking something from the surface of the snow amid some bushes. i watch one attentively, and find that it is feeding on the very fine brown chaffy-looking seed of the panicled andromeda. it understands how to get its dinner, to make the plant give down, perfectly. it flies up and alights on one of the dense brown panicles of the hard berries, and gives it a vigorous shaking and beat ing with its claws and bill, sending down a shower of the fine chaffy-looking seed on to the snow beneath. it lies very distinct, though fine almost as dust, on the spotless snow. it then hops down and briskly picks up from the snow what it wants. how very clean and agree able to the imagination, and withal abundant, is this kind of food ! how delicately they fare ! these dry persistent seed-vessels hold their crusts of bread until shaken. the snow is the white table-cloth on which they fall. no anchorite with his water and his crust fares more simply. it shakes down a hundred times as much as it wants at each shrub, and shakes the same or an other cluster after each successive snow. how bounti fully nature feeds them ! no wonder they come to spend the winter with us, and are at ease with regard to their food. these shrubs ripen an abundant crop of seeds to supply the wants of these immigrants from the far north which annually come to spend the winter with us. how neatly and simply it feeds ! this shrub grows unobserved by most, only known tree sparrow 297 to botanists, and at length matures its hard, dry seed vessels, which, if noticed, are hardly supposed to contain seed. but there is no shrub nor weed which is not known to some bird. though you may have never noticed it, the tree sparrow comes from the north in the winter straight to this shrub, and confidently shakes its panicle, and then feasts on the fine shower of seeds that falls from it. jan. 24, 1860. as i stand at the south end of j. p. b.'s moraine, i watch six tree sparrows, which come from the wood and alight and feed on the ground, which is there bare. they are only two or three rods from me, and are incessantly picking and eating an abundance of the fine grass (short-cropped pasture grass) on that knoll, as a hen or goose does. i see the stubble an inch or two long in their bills, and how they stuff it down. perhaps they select chiefly the green parts. so they vary their fare and there is no danger of their starving. these six hopped round for five minutes over a space a rod square before i put them to flight, and then i noticed, in a space only some four feet square in that rod, at least eighteen droppings (white at one end, the rest more slate-colored). so wonderfully active are they in their movements, both external and internal. they do not suffer for want of a good digestion, surely. no doubt they eat some earth or gravel too. so do par tridges eat a great deal. these birds, though they have bright brown and buff backs, hop about amid the little inequalities of the pasture almost unnoticed, such is their color and so humble are they. \_see also under vesper sparrow, p. 285: song sparrow, pp. 309, 310 ; sparrows, pp. 323, 324.] 298 notes on new england birds chipping sparrow; chip-bird may 1, 1852. 5 a. m. — a smart frost in the night, the ploughed ground and platforms white with it. i hear the little forked-tail chipping sparrow (fringilla soci alist^ shaking out his rapid tchi-tchi-tchi-tchi-tchi-tchi, a little jingle, from the oak behind the depot. july 21, 1852. 4 a. m. — robins sing as loud as in spring, and the chip-bird breathes in the dawn. july 25, 1852. 4 a. m. — this early twitter or breath ing of chip-birds in the dawn sounds like something or ganic in the earth. this is a morning celebrated by birds. our bluebird sits on the peak of the house, and warbles as in the spring, but as he does not now by day. march 22, 1853. as soon as those spring mornings arrive in which the birds sing, i am sure to be an early riser. i am waked by my genius. i wake to inaudible melodies and am surprised to find myself expecting the dawn in so serene and joyful and expectant a mood. i have an appointment with spring. she comes to the window to wake me, and i go forth an hour or two earlier than usrfal. it is by especial favor that i am waked, — not rudely but gently, as infants should be waked. though as yet the trill of the chip-bird is not heard, — added, — like the sparkling bead which bursts on bottled cider or ale. april 9, 1853. the chipping sparrow, with its ashy white breast and white streak over eye and undivided chestnut crown, holds up its head and pours forth its che che che che che che. ^ [now known as spizella passerina.l chipping sparrow 299 june 2,1s5s. 3.30 a.m.— when i awake i hear the low universal chirping or twittering of the chip-birds, like the bursting bead on the surface of the uncorked day. first come, first served ! you must taste the first glass of the day's nectar, if you would get all the spirit of it. its fixed air begins to stir and escape. also the robin's morning song is heard as in the spring, earlier than the notes of most other birds, thus bringing back the spring ; now rarely heard or noticed in the course of the day. april 17, 1860. i hear this forenoon the soothing and simple, though monotonous, notes of the chip-bird, tell ing us better than our thermometers what degree of summer warmth is reached ; adds its humble but very pleasant contribution to the steadily increasing quire of the spring. it perches on a cherry tree, perchance, near the house, and unseen, by its steady che-che-che che-che-che, affecting us often without our distinctly hearing it, it blends all the other and previous sounds of the season together. it invites us to walk in the yard and inspect the springing plants. [/see also under vesper sparrow, p. 286 ; sparrows, p. 318 ; yellow warbler, p. 349.] field sparrow ; rush sparrow ; huckleberry-bird july 16, 1851. the rush sparrow jingles her small change, pure silver, on the counter of the pasture. april 27, 1852. heard the field or rush sparrow this morning (^fringilla juncorum),^ george minott's 1 [rush sparrow and fringilla juncoriim are nuttall's names, which he got from earlier authors. they seem singularly inappropriate for a 300 notes on new england birds " huckleberry-bird." it sits on a birch and sings at short intervals, apparently answered from a distance. it is clear and sonorous heard afar; but i found it quite im possible to tell from which side it came; sounding like phe^phe^phe,pher-j)her-tw-tw-tw-t-t-t-t, — the first three slow and loud, the next two syllables quicker, and the last part quicker and quicker, becoming a clear, sono rous trill or rattle, like a spoon in a saucer. ajyril 30, 1852. half an hour before sunset. the robins sing powerfully on the elms ; the little frogs peep ; the woodpecker's harsh and long-continued cry is heard from the woods ; the huckleberry-bird's simple, sono rous trill. may 1, 1852. the tinkle of the huckleberry-bird comes up from the shrub oak plain. he commonly lives away from the habitations of men, in retired bushy fields and sprout-lands. ajyril 13, 1854. on the hill near moore's hear the f. juncorum, — phe-pke-jihe-phe-pke^ pherjihe-e-e-e-e e-e-e. how sweet it sounds in a clear warm morning in a wood-side pasture amid the old corn-hills, or in sprout-lands, a [sic] clear and distinct, " like a spoon in a cup," the last part very fast and ringing. ju7ie 24, 1857. returning, heard a fine, clear note from a bird on a white birch near me, — whit whit, whit whit, whit whit, (very fast) ter phe phe phe, — sound ing perfectly novel. looking round, i saw it was the huckleberry-bird, for it was near and plain to be seen. api'il 22, 1859. when setting the pines at walden bird of the upland pastures. the scientific name now in use for the field sparrow is spizella pusilla.^ field sparrow 301 the last three days, i was sung to by the field sparrow. for music i heard their jingle from time to time. that the music the pines were set to, and i have no doubt they will build many a nest under their shelter. it would seem as if such a field as this — a dry open or half-open pasture in the woods, with small jjines scat tered in it — was well-nigh, if not quite, abandoned to this one alone among the sparrows. the surface of the earth is portioned out among them. by a beautiful law of distribution, one creature does not too much interfere with another. i do not hear the song sparrow here. as the pines gradually increase, and a wood-lot is formed, these birds will withdraw to new pastures, and the thrushes, etc., will take their place. yes, as the walls of cities are fabled to have been built by music, so my pines were established by the song of the field sparrow. they commonly place their nests here under the shelter of a little pine in the field. [^ee also under general and miscellaneous, p. 403.] slate-colored junco ; slate-colored snowbird ; fringilla hyemalis [ junco hyemalis] april 14, 1852. the slate-colored snowbird's (for they are still about) is a somewhat shrill jingle, like the sound of ramrods when the order has been given to a regiment to " return ramrods " and they obey strag glingly. 3farch 25, 1853. the fringilla hyemalis sing most in concert of any bird nowadays that i hear. sitting near together on an oak or pine in the woods or an elm in the village, they keep up a very pleasant, enlivening, 302 notes on new england birds and incessant jingling and twittering chill-lill-ull, so that it is difficult to distinguish a single bird's note, — parts of it much like a canary. this sound advances me furthest toward summer, unless it be the note of the lark, who, by the way, is the most steady singer at pre sent. notwithstanding the raw and windy mornings, it will sit on a low twig or tussock or pile of manure in the meadow and sing for hours, as sweetly and plaintively as in summer. march 28, 1853. the woods ring with the cheerful jingle of the f. hyemalis. this is a very trig and com pact little bird, and appears to be in good condition. the straight edge of slate on their breasts contrasts re markably with the white from beneath ; the short, light colored bill is also very conspicuous amid the dark slate ; and when they fly from you, the two white feathers in their tails are very distinct at a good distance. they are very lively, pursuing each other from bush to bush. dec. 1, 1856. slate-colored snowbirds flit before me in the path, feeding on the seeds on the snow, the count less little brown seeds that begin to be scattered over the snow, so much the more obvious to bird and beast. a hundred kinds of indigenous grain are harvested now, broadcast upon the surface of the snow. thus at a crit ical season these seeds are shaken down on to a clean white napkin, unmixed with dirt and rubbish, and ofp this the little pensioners pick them. their clean table is thus spread a few inches or feet above the ground. will wonder become extinct in me ? shall i become insen sible as a fungus ? oct. 26, 1857. at the hewing-place on the flat above, slate-colored snowbird; junco 303 many sparrows are flitting past amid the birches and sallows. they are chiefly fringilla hyemalis. how often they may be seen thus flitting along in a strag gling manner from bush to bush, so that the hedgerow will be all alive with them, each uttering a faint cjiip from time to time, as if to keep together, bewildering you so that you know not if the greater part are gone by or still to come ! one rests but a moment on the tree before you and is gone again. you wonder if they know whither they are bound, and how their leader is appointed. those sparrows, too, are thoughts i have. they come and go; they flit by quickly on their migrations, utter ing only a faint chip, i know not whither or why ex actly. one will not rest upon its twig for me to scruti nize it. the whole copse will be alive with my rambling thoughts, bewildering me by their very multitude, but they will be all gone directly without leaving me a feather. my loftiest thought is somewhat like an eagle that suddenly comes into the field of view, suggesting great things and thrilling the beholder, as if it were bound hitherward with a message for me ; but it comes no nearer, but circles and soars away, growing dimmer, dis appointing me, till it is lost behind a cliff or a cloud. may 20, 1858. the note of the f. hyemalis, ov chill lill, is a jingle, with also a shorter and drier crachling or shuffling chip as it flits by. june 2, 1858. some forty or fifty rods below the very apex southeast, or quite on the top of the mountain,' i ^ [mt. monadnock.] 304 notes on new england birds saw a little bird flit out from beneath a rock close by the path on the left of it, where there were only very few scattered dwarf black sprace* about, and, looking, i found a nest with three eggs. it was the fringilla hyemalis^ which soon disappeared around a projecting rock. it was near by a conspicuous spruce, six or eight feet high, on the west edge of a sort of hollow, where a vista opened south over the precipice, and the path as cended at once more steeply. the nest was sunk in the ground by the side of a tuft of grass, and was pretty deep, made of much fine dry grass or sedge (?) and lined with a little of a delicate bluish hair-like fibre (?) two or three inches long. the eggs were three, of a reg ular oval form, faint bluish-white, sprinkled with fine pale-brown dots, in two of the three condensed into a ring about the larger end. they had apparently just begun to develop. the nest and tuft were covered by a projecting rock. brewer says that only one nest is known to naturalists.^ we saw many of these birds flitting about the summit, perched on the rocks and the dwarf spruce, and disappearing behind the rocks. it is the prevailing bird now up there, i. e. on the summit. they are commonly said to go to the fur countries to breed, though wilson says that some breed in the alleghanies. the new york reports make them breed on the moun tains of oswego county and the catskills.^ this was a quite interesting discovery. they probably are never ^ [the red spruce of the uplands of northern new england was not generally distinguished from the black in thoreau's day.] 2 [" synopsis of the birds of north america," appended to the 1840 boston edition of wilson's american ornithology (p. 703). j ^ prevail in nova scotia according to bryant and cabot. song sparrow 305 seen in the surrounding low grounds at this season. the ancestors of this bird had evidently perceived on their flight northward that here was a small piece of arctic region, containing all the conditions they require, — coolness and suitable food, etc., etc., — and so for how long have builded here. for ages they have made their home here with the arenaria groenlandica and poun tilla tridentata. they discerned arctic isles sprinkled in our southern sky. i did not see any of them below the rocky and generally bare portion of the mountain. it finds here the same conditions as in the north of maine and in the fur countries, — labrador mosses, etc. now that the season is advanced, migrating birds have gone to the extreme north or gone to the mountain-tops. by its color it harmonized with the gray and brownish-gray rocks. we felt that we were so much nearer to peren nial spring and winter. [/see also under sparrows, etc., p. 323 ; general and miscellaneous, pp. 418, 428.] song sparrow 1837-47.^ the song sparrow, whose voice is one of the first heard in the spring, sings occasionally through out the season, — from a greater depth in the summer, as it were behind the notes of other birds. july 16, 1851. the song sparrow, the most familiar and new england bird, is heard in fields and pastures, setting this midsummer day to music, as if it were the music of a mossy rail or fence post ; a little stream of song, cooling, rippling through the noon, — the usually 1 [undated paragraph in journal transcript covering this period.] 306 notes on new england bieds unseen songster usually unheard like the cricket, it is so common, — like the poet's song, unheard by most men, whose ears are stopped with business, though perchance it sans: on the fence before the farmer's house this morn ing for an hour. there are little strains of poetry in our animals. march 18, 1852. this snow has not driven back the birds. i hear the song sparrow's simple strain, most genuine herald of the spring, and see flocks of chubby northern birds with the habit of snowbirds, passing north. april 1, 1852. as i come over the turnpike, the song spai'row's jingle comes up from every part of the meadow, as native as the tinkling rills or the blossoms of the spirea, the meadow-sweet, soon to spring. its cheep is like the sound of opening buds. the sparrow is continually singing on the alders along the brook-side, while the sun is continually setting. april 1, 1853. the three spots on breast of the song sparrow seem to mark a difference of sex.^ at least, the three-spotted is the one loftenest hear sing of late. the accompanying one is lighter beneath and one-spotted. one of the former by j. p. brown's meadow-side, select ing the top of a bush, after lurking and feeding under the alders, sang olit olit olit\ (faster) chip chip chip che char\ (fast) che wiss wiss loiss. the last bar was much varied, and sometimes one olit omitted in the first. this, i have no doubt, is my bird of march 18th. an other three-spotted sang vlt chit chit char\ weeter char \ tee chu. ^ [no sexual difference is recognized in the song sparrow's mark ings.] song sparrow 307 aijril 2, 1853. the song sparrows, the three-spotted, away by the meadow-sides, are very shy and cunning : instead of flying will frequently trot along the ground under the bushes, or dodge through a wall like a swal low; and i have observed that they generally bring some object, as a rail or branch, between themselves and the face of the walker, — often with outstretched necks will peep at him anxiously for five or ten minutes. may 11, 1853. i nearly stepped upon a song sparrow and a striped snake at the same time. the bird fluttered away almost as if detained. i thought it was a case of charming, without doubt, and should think so still if i had not found her nest with five eggs there, which will account for her being so near the snake that was about to devour her. oct. 30, 1853. by the bathing-place, i see a song sparrow. . . . he drops stealthily behind the wall and skulks amid the bushes ; now sits behind a post, and peeps round at me, ever restless and quirking his tail, and now and then uttering a faint ctiij). march 11, 1854. song sparrows toward the water, with at least two kinds or variations of their strain hard quick to imitate. ozit^ ozit, ozif., psa te te te te te ter twe ter is one ; the other began chip chip che we, etc., etc. march 16, 1854. a. m. — another fine morning. willows and alders along watercourses all alive these mornings and ringing with the trills and jingles and warbles of birds, even as the waters have lately broken loose and tinkle below, — song sparrows, blackbirds, not to mention robins, etc., etc. the song sparrows arc very 308 notes on new england birds abundant, peopling each bush, willow, or alder for a quarter of a mile, and pursuing each other as if now selecting their mates. it is their song which especially fills the air, made an incessant and undistinguishable trill and jingle by their numbers. march 20, 1855. a flurry of snow at 7 a. m. i go to turn my boat up. four or five song sparrows are flitting along amid the willows by the waterside. probably they came yesterday with the bluebirds. from distant trees and bushes i hear a faint tinkling te te te te te and at last a full strain whose rhythm is tohit whit whit, ter tche, tchear tche, deliberately sung, or measuredly, while the falling snow is beginning to whiten the ground, — not discouraged by such a reception. 3farch 21, 1855. the song sparrow is now seen dodging behind the wall, with a quirk of its tail, or flit ting along the alders or other bushes by the side of the road, especially in low ground, and its pleasant strain is heard at intervals in spite of the cold and blustering wind. it is the most steady and resolute singer as yet, its strain being heard at intervals throughout the day, more than any as yet peopling the hedgerows. march 22, 1855. i hear a song sparrow on an alder top sing ozit ozit oze-e-e \ (quick) tchip tchip tchip tchip tchay i te tchip ter che ter tchay ; also the same short ened and very much varied. heard one sing uninter ruptedly, i. e. without a pause, almost a minute. april 22, 1855. see a song sparrow getting its break fast in the water on the meadow like a wader. april 6, 1856. apparently song sparrows may have the dark splash on each side of the throat but be song spakrow 309 more or less brown on the breast and head. some are quite light, some quite dark. here is one of the light breasted on the top of an apple tree, sings uuweariedly at regular intervals something like tclmlp \ chilt chilt, chilt chilt^ (faster and faster) chilt chilt^ chilt chilt \ tuller tchay ter splay -ee. the last, or third, bar i am not sure about. it flew too soon for me. i only remember that the last part was sprinkled on the air like drops from a rill, as if its strain were moulded by the spray it sat upon. june 22, 1856. ricketson says that they say at new bedford that the song sparrow says. maids, maids, maids, — hang on your tea-kettle-ettle-ettle-ettle-ettle. jan. 21, 1857. minott tells me that sam barrgtt told him once when he went to mill that a song sparrow took up its quarters in his grist-mill and stayed there all winter. when it did not help itself he used to feed it with meal, for he was glad of its company ; so, what with the dashing water and the crumbs of meal, it must have fared well. jan. 28, 1857. am again surprised to see a song sparrow sitting for hours on our wood-pile in the yard, in the midst of. snow in the yard. it is unwilling to move. people go to the pump, and the cat and dog walk round the wood-pile without starting it. i examine it at my leisure through a glass. remarkable that the coldest of all winters these summer birds should remain. perhaps it is no more comfortable this season further south, where they are accustomed to abide. in the after noon this sparrow joined a flock of tree sparrows on the bare ground west of the house. it was amusing to 310 notes on new england birds see the tree sparrows wash themselves, standing in the puddles and tossing the water over themselves. minott says they wade in to where it is an inch deep and then " splutter splutter," throwing the water over them. they have had no opportunity to wash for a month, per haps, there having been no thaw. the song sparrow did not go off with them. feb. 2, 1858. still rains, after a rainy night with a little snow, forming slosh. as i return from the post office, i hear the hoarse, robin-like chirp of a song spar row on cheney's ground, and see him perched on the topmost twig of a heap of brush, looking forlorn and drabbled and solitary in the rain. march 18, 1858. 7 a.m. — by river. almost every bush has its song sparrow this morning, and their tinkling strains are heard on all sides. you see them just hopping under the bush or into some other covert, as you go by, turning with a jerk this way and that, or they flit away just above the ground, which they resemble. it is the prettiest strain i have heard yet. june 13, 1858. i see a song sparrow's nest here in a little spruce just by the mouth of the ditch.* it rests on the thick branches fifteen inches from the ground, firmly made of coarse sedge without, lined with finer, and then a little hair, small within, — a very thick, firm, and port able nest, an inverted cone ; — four eggs. they build them in a peculiar manner in these sphagnous swamps, elevated apparently on account of water and of differ ent materials. some of the eggs have quite a blue ground. ^ [at ledum swamp, in concord.] fox sparrow 311 march, 3, 1860. the first song sparrows are very inconspicuous and shy on the brown earth. you hear some weeds rustle, or think you see a mouse run amid the stubble, and then the sparrow flits low away. \^see also under robin, p. 387; bluebird, pp. 398, 399; general and miscellaneous, pp. 406, 413, 425, 426.] fox sparrow; fox-colored sparrow march 31, 1852. methinks i would share every crea ture's suffering for the sake of its experience and joy. the song sparrow and the transient fox-colored spar row, — have they brought me no message this year? do they go to lead heroic lives in rupert's land? they are so small, i think their destinies must be large. have i heard what this tiny passenger has to say, wliile it flits thus from tree to tree? is not the coming of the fox-colored sparrow something more earnest and sig nificant than i have dreamed of ? can i forgive myself if i let it go to rupert's land before i have appre ciated it? god did not make this world in jest ; no, nor in indifference. these migrating sparrows all bear mes sages that concern my life. i do not pluck the fruits in their season. i love the birds and beasts because they are mythologically in earnest. i see that the spar row cheeps and flits and sings adequately to the great design of tbe universe ; that man does not communi cate with it, understand its language, because he is not at one with nature. i reproach myself because i have regarded with indifference the passage of the birct ; i have thought them no better than i. 312 notes on new england birds march 14, 1854. a large company of fox-colored sparrows in heywood's maple swamp close by. i heard their loud, sweet, canary-like whistle thirty or forty rods off, sounding richer than anything yet ; some on the bushes singing, twee twee twa twa ter tweer tweer twa, — this is the scheme of it only, there being no dental grit to it. they were shy, flitting before me, and i heard a slight susurrus where many were busily scratch ing amid the leaves of the swamp, without seeing them, and also saw many indistinctly. wilson never heard but one sing, their common note there being a cheep. march 25, 1858. p. m. — to bank of great meadows by peter's. cold northwest wind as yesterday and before. . . . going across a. clark's field behind garfield's, i see many fox-colored sparrows flitting past in a strag gling manner into the birch and pitch pine woods on the left, and hear a sweet warble there from time to time. they are busily scratching like hens amid the dry leaves of that wood (not swampy), from time to time the rearmost moving forward, one or two at a time, while a few are perched here and there on the lower branches of a birch or other tree ; and i hear a very clear and sweet whistling strain, commonly hak-finished, from one every two or three minutes. it is too irregular to be readily caught, but methinks begins like ar tche tche tchear, te tche tchear, etc., etc., but is more clear than these words would indicate. the whole flock is moving along pretty steadily. [/see also under sparrows, etc., pp. 320, 321.] towhee; chewink 313 towhee; chewink; ground-robin 1850. many a time i have expected to find a wood chuck, or rabbit, or a gray squirrel, when it was the ground-robin rustling the leaves. 1850. i noticed a singular instance of ventriloquism to-day in a male chewink singing on the top of a young oak. it was difficult to believe that the last part of his strain, the concluding jingle, did not proceed from a different quarter, a woodside many rods off. hip-you^ he-he-he-he. it was long before i was satis fied that the last part was not the answer of his mate given in exact time. i endeavored to get between the two ; indeed, i seemed to be almost between them already. may 1, 1852. i hear the first towhee finch. he says to-wee, to-wee, and another, much farther oft' than i sup posed when i went in search of him, says whip your ch-r-r-r-r-r-r, with a metallic ring. may 23, 1853. how different the ramrod jingle of the chewink or any bird's note sounds now at 5 p. m. in the cooler, stiller air, when also the humming of insects is more distinctly heard, and perchance some impurity has begun to sink to earth strained by the air ! or is it, perchance, to be referred to the cooler, more clarified and pensive state of the mind, when dews have begun to descend in it and clarify it ? chaste eve ! a certain lateness in the sound, pleasing to hear, which releases me from the obligation to return in any particular season. i have passed the rubicon of staying out. 1 have said to myself, that way is not homeward ; i will 314 notes on new england birds wander further from what i have called my home — to the home which is forever iuviting: me. in such an hour the freedom of the woods is offered me, and the birds sing my dispensation. june 9,1855. achewink'snest sunk in ground under a bank covered with ferns, dead and green, and huckle berry bushes ; composed of dry leaves, then grass stub ble, and lined with a very few slender, reddish moss stems; four eggs, rather fresh; merely enough moss stems to indicate its choice. may 17, 1858. i see a chewink flit low across the road with its peculiar flirting, undulating motion. sept. 19, 1858. hear a chewink's chewink. but how ineffectual is the note of a bird now ! we hear it as if we heard it not, and forget it immediately. in spring it makes its due impression, and for a long time will not have done echoing, as it were, through our minds. it is even as if the atmosphere were in an unfavorable condition for this kind of music. every musician knows how much depends on this. [/s'ee also ww^^er nighthawk, p. 209; wood thrush, p. 378 ; general and miscellaneous, pp. 404, 414.] eose-beeasted geosbeak june 13, 1853. what was that rare and beautiful bird in the dark woods under the cliffs, with black above and white spots and bars, a large triangular blood-red spot on breast, and sides of breast and be neath white ? note a warble like the oriole, but softer and sweeter. it was quite tame. i cannot find this bird rose-breasted grosbeak 315 described, i think it must be a grosbeak.' at first i thought i saw a chewiuk, as it sat withiu a rod side ways to me, and i was going to call sophia to look at it, but then it turned its breast full toward me and i saw the blood-red breast, a large triangular painted spot occupying the greater part of the breast. it was in the cool, shaded underwood by the old path just under the cliff. it is a memorable event to meet with so rare a bird. birds answer to flowers, both in their abundance and their rareness. the meeting with a rare and beautiful bird like this is like meeting: with some rare and beautiful flower, which you may never find again, perchance, like the great purple fringed orchis, at least. how much it enhances the wildness and the richness of the forest to see in it some beautiful bird which you never detected before ! may 24, 1855. hear a rose-breasted grosbeak. at first thought it a tanager, but soon i perceived its more clear and instrumental — should say whistle, if one could whistle like a flute; a noble singer, reminding me also of a robin ; clear, loud and flute-like ; on the oaks, hillside south of great fields. black all above except white on wing, with a triangular red mark on breast but, as i saw, all white beneath this. female quite different, yellowish olivaceous above, more like a muscicapa. song not so sweet as clear and strong. saw it fly off and catch an insect like a flycatcher. 1 probably a rose-breasted grosbeak. [though the rose-breasted grosbeak was formerly much less common about houses than it is now, being chiefly confined to the woods, it is doubtful if it was quite so rare in concord as thoreau thought at the time.] 316 notes on new england birds may 21, 1856. saw two splendid rose-breasted gros beaks with females in the young wood in emerson's lot. what strong-colored fellows, black, white, and fiery rose-red breasts ! strong-natured, too, with their stout bills. a clear, sweet singer, like a tanager but hoarse somewhat,^ and not shy. july 15, 1858. at the base of the mountain,^ over the road, heard (and saw), at the same place where i heard him the evening before, a splendid rose-breasted grosbeak singing. i had before mistaken him at first for a tanager, then for a red-eye, but was not satisfied ; but now, with my glass, i distinguished him sitting quite still, high above the road at the entrance of the mountain-path in the deep woods, and singing stead ily for twenty minutes. it was remarkable for sitting so still and where yesterday. it was much richer and sweeter and, i think, more powerful than the note of the tanager or red-eye. it had not the hoarseness of the tanasfer, and more sweetness and fullness than the red-eye. wilson does not give their breeding-place. nuttall quotes pennant as saying that some breed in new york but most further north. they, too, appear to breed about the white mountains. june 2, 1859. found within three rods of flint's pond a rose-breasted grosbeak's nest. it was in a thicket where there was much cat-briar, in a high blue berry bush, some five feet from the ground, in the forks of the bush, and of very loose construction, being made 1 [the song, of course, is not really hoarse as compared with the tanager's. see p. 317.] 2 [mt. lafayette.] indigo-bird 317 of the (lead gray extremities of the cat-briar, with its tendrils (and some of this had dropped on the ground beneath), and this was lined merely with fine brown stems of weeds like pinweeds, without any leaves or anything else, — a slight nest on the whole. saw the birds. the male uttered a very peculiar sharp click ing or squeaking note of alarm while i was near the nest. june, 14, 1859. the rose-breasted grosbeak is com mon now in the flint's pond woods. it is not at all shy, and our richest singer, perhaps, after the wood thrush. the rhythm is very like that of the tanager, but the strain is perfectly clear and sweet. one sits on the bare dead twig of a chestnut, high over the road, at gourgas wood, and over my head, and sings clear and loud at regular intervals, — the strain about ten or fifteen seconds long, rising and swelling to the end, with various modulations. another, singing in emula tion, regularly answers it, alternating with it, from a distance, at least a quarter of a mile off. it sings thus long at a time, and i leave it singing there, regardless of me. july 9, 1860. see two handsome rose-breasted gros beaks on the corner causeway. one utters a peculiar squeaking or snapping note, and, both by form of bill and this note, and color, reminds me of some of those foreign birds with great bills in cages. indigo-bird june 9, 1857. in the sprout-land beyond the red huckleberry, an indigo-bird, which chij)s about me as 318 notes on new england birds if it had a nest there. this is a splendid and marked bird, high-colored as is the tanager, looking strange in this latitude. glowing indigo. it flits from top of one bush to another, chirping as if anxious. wilson says it sings, not like most other birds in the morning and evening chiefiy, but also in the middle of the day. in this i notice it is like the tanager, the other fiery-plu maged bird. they seem to love the heat. it probably had its nest in one of those bushes. sparrows, etc. (miscellaneous) 1837-47. it is a marvel how the birds contrive to survive in this world. these tender sparrows that flit from bush to bush this evening, though it is so late, do not seem improvident, [but appear] to have found a roost for the night. they must succeed by weakness and reliance, for they are not bold and enterprising, as their mode of life would seem to require, but very weak and tender creatures. i have seen a little chip ping sparrow, come too early in the spring, shivering on an apple twig, drawing in its head and striving to warm it in its muffled feathers ; and it had no voice to intercede with nature, but peeped as helpless as an in fant, and was ready to yield up its spirit and die with out any effort. and yet this was no new spring in the revolution of the seasons. nov. 9, 1850. a rusty sparrow or two only remains to people the drear spaces. it goes to roost without neighbors. june 30, 1851. the cuckoo is faintly heard from a neighboring grove. now that it is beginning to be dark, sparrows 319 as i am crossing a pasture i hear a happy, oricl<et-like, shrill little lay from a sparrow, either in the grass or else on that distant tree, as if it were the vibrations of a watch-spring; its vespers. sept. 28, 1851. flocks of small birds — apparently sparrows, bobolinks (or some bird of equal size with a pencilled breast which makes a musical clucking), and piping goldfinches — are flitting about like leaves and hopping up on to the bent grass stems in the garden, letting themselves down to the heavy heads, either shak ing or picking out a seed or two, then alighting to pick it up. i am amused to see them hop up on to the slen der, drooping grass stems; then slide down, or let them selves down, as it were foot over foot, with great flut tering, till they can pick at the head and release a few seeds; then alight to pick them up. they seem to pre fer a coarse grass which grows like a weed in the gar den between the potato-hills, also the amaranth. march 20, 1852. as to the winter birds, — those which came here in the winter, — i saw first that rusty sparrow-like bird flying in flocks with the smaller spar rows early in the winter and sliding down the grass stems to their seeds, which clucked like a hen, and f. brown thought to be the young of the purple finch ; then i saw, about thanksgiving time and later in the winter, the pine grosbeaks, large and carmine, a noble bird ; then, in midwinter, the snow bunting, the white snowbird, sweeping low like snowflakes from field to field over the walls and fences. and now, within a day or two, i have noticed the chubby slate-colored snow bird (^fringilla hyemalisf), and i drive the flocks be 320 notes on new england birds fore me on the railroad causeway as i walk. it has two white feathers in its tail. jan. 20, 1853. i see where snowbirds^ in troops have visited each withered chenopodium that rises above the snow in the yard — and some are large and bushlike — for its seeds, their well-filled granary now. there are a few tracks reaching from weed to weed, where some have run, but under the larger plants the snow is entirely trodden and blackened, proving that a large flock has been there and flown. . march 31, 1853. i afterward heard a fine concert of little songsters along the edge of the meadow. ap proached and watched and listened for more than half an hour. there were many little sparrows, difficult to detect, flitting and hopping along and scratching the ground like hens, under the alders, willows, and cor nels in a wet leafy place, occasionally alighting on a low twig and preening themselves. they had bright-bay crowns, two rather indistinct white bars on wings, an ashy breast and dark tail. these twittered sweetly, some parts very much like a canary and many together, making it the fullest and sweetest i have heard yet, — like a shopf ul of canaries. the blackbirds may make more noise. about the size of a song sparrow. i think these are the tree sparrow. also, mixed with them, and puzzling me to distinguish for a long time, were many of the fox-colored (?) sparrows mentioned above, with a creamy cinnamon-tinged ashy breast, cinnamon shoul derlet, ashy about side head and throat, a fox-colored * [thoreau used tlie term snowbird indefinitely, of any small sparrow like bird, seen in winter.] sparrows 321 tail ; a size larger than the others ; the spot on breast very marked. were evidently two birds intimately mixed. did not peabody confound them when he men tioned the mark on the breast of the tree sparrow ? ' the rich strain of the fox-colored sparrow, as i think it is, added much to the quire. the latter solos, the former in concert. i kept off a hawk by my presence. these were for a long time invisible to me, except when they flitted past. feh. 13, 1855. one of these pigweeds in the yard lasts the snowbirds all winter, and after every new storm they revisit it. how inexhaustible their granary ! march 14, 1855. i observe the tracks of sparrows leading to every little sprig of blue-curls amid the other weeds which (its seemingly empty pitchers) rises above the snow. there seems, however, to be a little seed left in them. this, then, is reason enough why these withered stems still stand, — that they may raise these sfranaries above the snow for the use of the snow birds. oct. 11, 1856. the sprout-land and stubble behind the cliffs are all alive with restless flocks of sparrows of various species. i distinguish f. hyemalis, song sparrow, apparently f. juncorum or maybe tree spar row, ^ and chip-birds (?). they are continually flitting past and surging upward, two or more in pursuit of each other, in the air, where they break like waves, and pass along with a faint cheep. on the least alarm many will rise from a juniper bush on to a shrub oak 1 [thoreau afterwards detected the breast spot of the tree sparrow.] 2 probably not. [too early in the season.] 322 notes on new england birds above it, and, when all is quiet, return into the juniper perhaps for its berries. it is often hard to detect them as they sit on the young trees, now beginning to be bare, for they are very nearly the color of the bark and are very cunning to hide behind the leaves. oct. 19, 1856. the fall, now and for some weeks, is the time for flocks of sparrows of various kinds flitting from bush to bush and tree to tree — and both bushes and trees are thinly leaved or bare — and from one seared meadow to another. they are mingled together, and their notes, even, being faint, are, as well as their colors and motions, much alike. the sparrow youth are on the wing. they are still further concealed by their resemblance in color to the gray twigs and stems, which are now beginning to be bare. i have often noticed the inquisitiveness of birds, as the other day of a sparrow, whose motions i should not have supposed to have any reference to me, if i had not watched it from first to last. i stood on the edge of a pine and birch wood. it flitted from seven or eight rods distant to a pine within a rod of me, where it hopped about stealthily and chirped awhile, then flew as many rods the other side and hopped about there a spell, then back to the pine again, as near me as it dared, and again to its first position, very restless all the while. generally i should have supposed that there was more than one bird, or that it was altogether acci dental, — that the chipping of this sparrow eight or ten rods [away] had no reference to me, — for i could see nothing peculiar about it. but when i brought my sparrows 323 glass to bear on it, i found that it was almost steadily eying me and was all alive with excitement. 3iarch 20, 1859. p. m. — i see under the east side of the house, amid the evergreens, where they were shel tered from the cold northwest wind, quite a parcel of sparrows, chiefly f. hyemalis, two or three tree sparrows, and one song sparrow, quietly feeding together. i watch them through a window within six or eight feut. they evidently love to be sheltered from the wind, and at least are not averse to each other's society. the tree sparrows sinf/ a little. one perches on a bush to sing, while others are feeding on the ground, but he is very restless on his perch, hopping about and stooping as if dodging those that fly over. he must perch on some bit of stubble or twig to sing. they are evidently pick ing up the seeds of weeds which lie on the surface of the ground invisible to our eyes. they suffer their wings to hang rather loose. the f. hi/nnalis is the largest of the three. they have remarkably distinct light-colored bills, and when they stretch, show very distinct clearwhite lateral tail-feathers. this stretching seems to be contagious among them, like yawning with us. they have considerable brown on the quill-feathers. the tree sparrows are much brighter brown and white than the song sparrow. the latter alone scratches once or twice, and is more inclined to hop or creep close to the ground, under the fallen weeds. perhaps it deserves most to be called the grou7id-hitd. ajiril 8, 1859. these windy days the sparrows resort to the pines and peach trees on the east side of our house for shelter, and there they sing all together, — 324 notes on new england birds tree sparrows, fox-colored sparrows, and song sparrows. the f. hyemalis with them do not sing so much of late. the first two are most commonly heard together, the fine canary-like twitter of the tree sparrow appearing to ripen or swell from time to time into the clear, rich whistle of the fox-colored sparrow, so that most refer both notes to one bird. [/see also under general and miscellaneous, p. 405.] xvi tanagers and swallows scarlet tanager july 8, 1852. i hear many scarlet tanagers, the first i have seen this season, which some might mistake for a red-eye. a hoarse, rough strain, comparatively, but more easily caught owing to its simplicity and sameness ; something like heer chip-er-way-heer chory chay. may 20, 1853. saw a tanager in sleepy hollow. it most takes the eye of any bird. you here have the red wing reversed, — the deepest scarlet of the red-wing spread over the whole body, not on the wing-coverts merely, while the wings are black. it flies through the green foliage as if it would ignite the leaves. may 23, 1853. at loring's wood heard and saw a tanager. that contrast of a refz bird with the green pines and the blue sky ! even when i have heard his note and look for him and find the bloody fellow, sitting on a dead twig of a pine, i am always startled. (they seem to love the darkest and thickest pines.) that in credible red, with the green and blue, as if these were the trinity we wanted. yet with his hoarse note he pays for his color. i am transported ; these are not the woods i ordinarily walk in. he sunk concord in his thought. how he enhances the wildness and wealth of the woods ! this and the emperor moth make the tropical phenomena 326 notes on new england birds of our zone. there is warmth in the pewee's strain, but this bird's colors and his note tell of brazil. may 29, 1853. at a. hosmer's hill on the union turnpike i see the tanager hoarsely warbling in the shade ; the surprising red bird, a small morsel of brazil, advanced picket of that brazilian army, — parrot-like. but no more shall we see ; it is only an affair of out posts. it appears as if he loved to contrast himself with the green of the forest. may 23, 1854. we soon get through with nature. she excites an expectation which she cannot satisfy. the merest child which has rambled into a copsewood dreams of a wilderness so wild and strange and inex haustible as nature can never show him. the red-bird which i saw on my companion's string on election days ^ i thought but the outmost sentinel of the wild, immor tal camp, — of the wild and dazzling infantry of the wilderness, — that the deeper woods abounded with red der birds still ; but, now that i have threaded all our woods and waded the swamps, i have never yet met with his compeer, still less his wilder kindred. the red-bird which is the last of nature is but the first of god. the ^ [" old election day " in massachusetts came on the last wednesday in may. it was the day when the legislature met, to organize, to count the vote for governor and liejitenant-governor, and to hear an " election sermon " in one of the boston churches. the actual voting for gov ernor, lieutenant-governor, and state senators came on the first monday in april, and the representatives to the general court were elected at different times in the different towns. the last of these may " elec tions " was held in 1831, but " old election day " was observed as a sort of holiday for years after, and it was the custom to conduct shooting matches on that day, when birds of all kinds were shot indiscriminately. see p. 358.] scarlet tanager 327 white mountains, likewise, were smooth molehills to my expectation. we condescend to climb the crags of earth. it is our weary legs alone that praise them. that forest on whose skirts the red-bird flits is not of earth. i expected a fauna more infinite and various, birds of more dazzling colors and more celestial song. may 28, 1855. i see a tanager, the most brilliant and tropical-looking bird we have, bright-scarlet with black wings, the scarlet appearing on the rump again between wingtips. he brings heat, or heat him, a re markable contrast with the green pines. at this dis tance he has the aspect and manners of a parrot, with a fullness about the head and throat and beak, indo lently inspecting the limbs and twigs — leaning over to it — and sitting still a long time. the female, too, is a neat and handsome bird, with the same indolent ways, but very differently colored from the male ; all yellow below with merely dusky wings, and a sort of clay(?) color on back. june 24, 1857. looked over farmer's eggs and list of names. he has several which i have not. is not his " chicklisee," after all, the maryland yellow-throat ? the eggs were numbered with a pen, — 1, 2, 3, etc., — and corresponding numbers written against the names on the cover of the pasteboard box in which were the eggs. among the rest i read, " fire never redder.'''' that must be the tanager. he laughed and said that this was the way he came to call it by that name : imany years ago, one election-day, when he and other boys, or young men, were out gunning to see how many birds they could kill, jonathan hildreth, who lived near by, 328 notes on new england birds saw one of these birds on the top of a tree before him in the woods, but he did not see a deep ditch that crossed his course between him and it. as he raised his gun, he exclaimed, " fire never redder i " and, taking a step or two forward, with his eye fixed on the bird, fell head long into the ditch, and so the name became a byword among his fellows. june 23, 1858. the tanager's nest of the 19th is four and a half to five inches wide and an inch or more deep, considerably open to look through ; the outside, of many very slender twigs, apparently of hemlock, some um belled pyrola with seed-vessels, everlasting, etc. ; within, quite round and regular, of very slender or fine stems, apparently pin weed or the like, and pine-needles ; hardly any grass stubble about it. the ^^^ is a regular oval, nine tenths of an inch long by twenty-seven fortieths, pale-blue, sprinkled with purplish-brown spots, thick est on the larger end. to-day there are three rather fresh eggs in this nest. neither going nor returning do we see anything of the tanager, and conclude it to be deserted, but perhaps she stays away from it long. may 24, 1860. as i sit just above the northwest end of the cliff, i see a tanager perched on one of the top most twigs of a hickory, holding by the tender leafets, now five inches long, and evidently come to spy after me, peeping behind a leaf et. he is between me and the sun, and his plumage is incredibly brilliant, all aglow. it is our highest-colored bird, — a deep scarlet (with a yellower reflection when the sun strikes him), in the midst of which his pure-black wings look high-colored cliff swallow 329 also. you can hardly believe that a living creature can wear such colors. a hickory, too, is the fittest perch for him. purple martin june 15, 1852. the chuckhng warble of martins heard over the meadow, from a village box. [/^ee also undet general and miscellaneous, pp. 408, 409.] cliff swallow; republican swallow 1850. returning, i saw in sudbury twenty-five nests of the new (cliff ?) swallow ' under the eaves of a barn. they seemed particularly social and loquacious neigh bors, though their voices are rather squeaking. their nests, built side by side, looked somewhat like large hornets' nests, enough so to prove a sort of connection. their activity, sociability, and chattiness make them fit pensioners and neighbors of man — summer com panions — for the barn-yard. nov. 9, 1857. mr. farmer tells me that one sunday he went to his barn, having nothing to do, and thought he would watch the swallows, republican swallows. the old bird was feeding her young, and he sat within fif teen feet, overlooking them. there were five young, and he was curious to know how each received its share ; ^ [this bird was then a comparatively recent addition to the avi fauna of eastern massachusetts, whither it had spread from its early home in the west. the name " republican " was given to it by audu bon on account of its social nesting habits. the notion that its irruption into the east was coincident with the rise of the republican party, and that this gave it its popular name, is, of course, a false one.] 330 notes on new england bikds and as often as the bird came with a fly, the one at the door (or opening) took it, and then they all hitched round one notch, so that a new one was presented at the door, who received the next fly; and this was the in variable order, the same one never receiving two flies in succession. at last the old bird brought a very small fly, and the young one that swallowed it did not desert his ground but waited to receive the next, but when the bird came with another, of the usual size, she com menced a loud and long scolding at the little one, till it resigned its place, and the next in succession received the fly. barn swallow may 19, 1852. a barn swallow accompanied me across the depot field, methinks attracted by the in sects which i started, though i saw them not, wheeling and tacking incessantly on all sides and repeatedly dashing within a rod of me. it is an agreeable sight to watch one. nothing lives in the air but is in rapid motion. april 30, 1855. i observed yesterday that the barn swallows confined themselves to one place, about fifteen rods in diameter, in willow bay, about the sharp rock. they kept circling about and flying up the stream (the wind easterly), about six inches above the water, — it was cloudy and almost raining, — yet i could not per ceive any insects there. those myriads of little fuzzy gnats mentioned on the 21st and 28th must afford an abundance of food to insectivorous birds. many new birds should have arrived about the 21st. there were barn swallows teee swallow 331 plenty of myrtle-birds and yellow redpolls' where the gnats were. the swallows were confined to this space when i passed up, and were still there when i returned, an hour and a half later. i saw them nowhere else. they uttered only a slight twitter from time to time and when they turned out for each other on meeting. get ting their meal seemed to be made a social affair. pray, how long will they continue to circle thus without rest ing? tree swallow; white-bellied swallow june 12, 1852. small white-bellied (?) swallows in a row (a dozen) on the telegraph-wire over the water by the bridge. this perch is little enough departure from unobstructed air to suit them. pluming themselves. if you could furnish a perch aerial enough, even birds of paradise would alight. swallows have forked tails, and wings and tails are about the same length. they do not alight on trees, methinks, unless on dead and bare boughs, but stretch a wire over water and they perch on it. this is among the phenomena that cluster about the telegraph. june 14, 1855. i told c." to look into an old mortise hole in wood's bridge for a whitebellied swallow's nest, as we were paddling under • but he laughed, in credulous. i insisted, and when he climbed up he scared out the bird. five eggs. "you see the feathers about, do you not?" "yes," said he. 1 [myrtle warblers and yellow palm warblers.] 2 [w. e, channing.] 332 notes on new england birds bank swallow may 23, 1854. saw in dakin's land, near the road, at the bend of the river, fifty-nine bank swallows' holes in a small upright bank within a space of twenty by one and a half feet (in the middle), part above and part below the sand-line. this would give over a hun dred birds to this bank. they continually circling about over the meadow and river in front, often in pairs, one pursuing the other, and filling the air with their twit tering. may 7, 1856. in the first hollow in the bank this side of clamshell, where sand has been dug for the meadow, are a hundred or more bank swallows at 2 p. m. (i suspect i have seen them for some time) engaged in prospecting and digging their holes and circling about. it is a snug place for them, — though the upright portion of the bank is only four or five feet high, — a semi-circular recess facing the southeast. some are within scratching out the sand, — i see it cast out of the holes behind them, — others hanging on to the en trance of the holes, others on the flat sandy space be neath in front, and others circling about, a dozen rods off over the meadow. theirs is a low, dry, grating twit ter, or rather rattle, less metallic or musical than the vite vite and twittering notes of barn and white-bellied swallows. they are white-bellied, dark winged and tailed, with a crescent of white [s^c] nearly around the lower part of the neck, and mouse-colored heads and backs. the upper and greater part of this bank is a coarse sliding gravel, and they build only in the per bank swallow 333 pendicular and sandy part (i sit and watch them within three or four rods) and close to the upper part of it. while i am looking, they all suddenly with one consent take to wing, and circle over the hillside and meadow, as if they chose to work at making their holes a little while at a time only. i find the holes on an average about a foot deep only as yet, some but a few inches. may 12, 1856. i see, in the road beyond luther hosmer's, in different places, two bank swallows which were undoubtedly killed by the four days' northeast rain we have just had. may 13, 1856. in the swallows' holes behind den nis's, i find two more dead bank swallows, and one on the sand beneath, and the feathers of two more which some creature has eaten. this makes at least seven dead bank swallows in consequence of the long, cold north east rain. a male harrier, skimming low, had nearly reached this sandpit before he saw me and wheeled. could it have been he that devoured the swallows ? the swallows were 10|-f alar extent, 4| inches long; a wing 4|+ by 1|. above they were a light brown on their backs, wings blackish, beneath white, with a dark-brown band over the breast and again white throat and side of neck ; bill small and black ; reddish brown legs, with long, sharp, slender claws. it chanced that each one of two i tried weighed between five and six sixteenths of an ounce, or between five and six drams avoirdupois. this seems to be the average weight, or say six drams because they have pined a little. a man who weighs one hundred and fifty pounds weighs sixty four hundred times as much as one. the wing of one 334 notes on new england birds contains about seven square inches, the body about five, or whole bird nineteen. if a man were to be provided with wings, etc., in proportion to his weight, they would measure about 844 square feet, and one wing would cover 311 feet, or be about 33 feet long by 14 wide. this is to say nothing of his muscles. dec. 4, 1856. i notice that the swallow-holes in the bank behind dennis's, which is partly washed away, are flat-elliptical, three times or more as wide horizon tally as they are deep vertically, or about three inches by one. nov. 20, 1857. some bank swallows' nests are ex posed by the caving of the bank at clamshell. the very smallest hole is about two and a half inches wide hori zontally, by barely one high. all are much wider than high (vertically). one nest, with an qg'g in it still, is completely exposed. the cavity at the end is shaped like a thick hoe-cake or lens, about six inches wide and two plus thick, vertically. the nest is a regular but shallow one made simply of stubble, about five inches in diameter, and three quarters of an inch deep. jan. 24, 1858. the inside of the swallow-holes there appears quite firm yet and regular, with marks where it was pecked or scratched by the bird, and the top is mottled or blotched, almost as if made firm in spots by the saliva of the bird. there is a low oven-like expan sion at the end, and a good deal of stubble for the nest. i find in one an empty black cherry stone and the re mains of a cricket or two. probably a mouse left them there. june 23, 1858. get an ^^^ out of a deserted bank swallows 335 swallow's nest, in a bank only about four feet high dug in the spring for a bank wall near everett's. the nest is flattish and lined abundantly with the small, some what downy, naturally curved feathers of poultry. egg pure white, long, oval, twenty-seven fortieths by eighteen fortieths of an inch. swallows (general and miscellaneous) july 16, 1851. the twittering of swallows is in the air, reminding me of water. july 23, 1851. the swallow's twitter is the sound of the lapsing waves of the air, or when they break and burst, as his wings represent the ripple. he has more air in his bones than other birds ; his feet are defective. the fish of the air. his note is the voice of the air. as fishes may hear the sound of waves lapsing on the sur face and see the outlines of the ripples, so we hear the note and see the flight of swallows. aug. 17, 1851. the birds seem to know that it will not rain just yet. the swallows skim low over the pas tures, twittering as they fly near me with forked tail, dashing near me as if i scared up insects for them. i see where a squirrel has been eating hazelnuts on a stump. aug. 4, 1855. just after bathing at the rock near the island this afternoon, after sunset, i saw a flock of thousands of barn swallows and some white-bellied, and perhaps others, for it was too dark to distinguish them. they came flying over the river in loose array, wheeled and flew round in a great circle over the bay there, about eighty feet high, with a loud twittering as if seek 336 notes on new england birds ing a resting-place, then flew up the stream. i was very much surprised at their numbers. directly after, hear ing a buzzing sound, we found them all alighted on the dense golden willow hedge at shattuck's shore, parallel with the shore, quite densely leaved and eighteen feet high. they were generally perched five or six feet from the top, amid the thick leaves, filling it for eight or ten rods. they were very restless, fluttering from one perch to another and about one another, and kept up a loud and remarkable buzzing or squeaking, breathing or hum, with only occasionally a regular twitter, now and then flitting alongside from one end of the row to the other. it was so dark we had to draw close to see them. at intervals they were perfectly still for a moment, as if at a signal. at length, after twenty or thirty minutes of bustle and hum, they all settled quietly to rest on their perches, i supposed for the night. we had rowed up within a rod of one end of the row, looking up so as to bring the birds between us and the sky, but they paid not the slightest attention to us. what was re markable was : first, their numbers ; second, their perch ing on densely leaved willows ; third, their buzzing or humming, like a hive of bees, even squeaking notes ; and fourth, their disregarding our nearness. i supposed that they were preparing to migrate, being the early broods. aug. 5, 1855. 4 a. m. — on river to see swallows. they are all gone ; yet fay saw them there last night after we passed. probably they started very early. i asked minott if he ever saw swallows migrating, not telling him what i had seen, and he said that he used swallows 337 to get up and go out to mow very early in the morning on his meadow, as early as he could see to strike, ruid once, at that hour, hearing a noise, he looked up and could just distinguish high overhead fifty thousand swallows. he thought it was in the latter part of august. april 30, 1856. about 3.30 p. m., when it was quite cloudy as well as raw, and i was measuring along the river just south of the bridge, i was surprised by the great number of swallows — white-bellied and barn swallows and perhaps republican — flying round and round, or skimming very low over the meadow, just laid bare, only a foot above the ground. either from the shape of the hollow or their circling, they seemed to form a circular flock three or four rods in diameter and one swallow deep. there were two or three of these centres and some birds equally low over the river. it looked like rain, but did not rain that day or the next. probably their insect food was flying at that height over the meadow at that time. there were a thousand or more of swallows, and i think that they had recently arrived together on their migration. only this could account for there being so many together. we were measuring through one little circular meadow, and many of them were not driven off by our nearness. tiie noise of their wings and their twittering was quite loud. may 11, 1856. there are many swallows circling low over the river behind monroe's, — bank swallows, barn, republican, chimney, and white-bellied. these are all circling together a foot or two over the water, passing 338 notes on new england birds within ten or twelve feet of me in my boat. it is re markable how social the different species of swallow are one with another. they recognize their affinity more than usual. july 29, 1856. pratt says he one day walked out with wesson, with their rifles, as far as hunt's bridge. looking down-stream, he saw a swallow sitting on a bush very far off, at which he took aim and fired with ball. he was surprised to see that he had touched the swallow, for it flew directly across the river toward simon brown's barn, always descending toward the earth or water, not being able to maintain itself ; but what surprised him most was to see a second swallow come flying behind and repeatedly strike the other with all his force beneath, so as to toss him up' as often as he approached the ground and enable him to continue his flight, and thus he continued to do till they were out of sight. pratt said he resolved that he would never fire at a swallow again. aug. 26, 1856. the flooded meadow, where the grass hoppers cling to the grass so thickly, is alive with swal lows skimming just over the surfaqp amid the grass tops and aii-parently snapping up insects there. a re they catching the grasshoppers as they cling to bare poles ? (i see the swallows equally thick there at 5 p. m. when i return also.) may 20, 1858. p. m.— up assabet. a cloudy afternoon, with a cool east wind, producing a mist. hundreds of swallows are now skimming close over the river, at its broadest part, where it is shallow and runs the swiftest, just below the island, for a dis swallows 889 tance of twenty rods. there are bank, barn, cliff, and chimney swallows, all mingled together and continually scaling back and forth, — a very lively sight. they keep descending or stooping to within a few inches of the water on a curving wing, without quite touching it, and i suppose are attracted by some small insects which hover close over it. they also stoop low about me as i stand on the flat island there, but i do not perceive the insects. they rarely rise more than five feet above the surface, and a general twittering adds to the impres sion of sociability. the principal note is the low grat ing sound of the bank swallow, and i hear the vit vit of the barn swallow. the cliff swallow, then, is here. are the insects in any measure confined to that part of the river? or are they congregated for the sake of society? i have also in other years noticed them over another swift place, at hubbard's bath, and also, when they first come, in smaller numbers, over the still and smooth water under the lee of the island wood. they are thick as the gnats which perhaps they catch. swallows are more confident and fly nearer to man than most birds. it may be because they are more protected by the senti ment and superstitions of men. xvii waxwings, shrikes, and vireos cedar waxwing ; cherry-bird june, 21, 1852. cherry-birds. i have not seen, though i think i have heard them before, — their fine seringo note, like a vibrating spring in the air. they are a hand some bird, with their crest and chestnut breasts. there is no keeping the run of their goings and comings, but they will be ready for the cherries when they shall be ripe. june 16, 1854. the note of the cherry-bird is fine and ringing, but peculiar and very noticeable. with its crest it is a resolute and combative-looking bird. june 14, 1855. a cherry-bird's nest and two eggs in an apple tree, fourteen feet from ground. one ^^;g^ round black spots and a few oblong, about equally but thinly dispersed over the whole, and a dim, internal, purplish tinge about the large end. it is difficult to see anything of the bird, for she steals away early, and you may neither see nor hear anything of her while ex amining the nest, and so think it deserted. approach very warily and look out for them a dozen or more rods off. march, 1, 1856. goodwin says that somewhere where he lived thiey called cherry-birds " port-royals." march, 20, 1858. on that same tree by conant's or chard, i see a flock of cherry-birds with that alert, chief northern shrike 341 tain-like look, and hear their seringo note, as if made by their swift flight through the air. they have been seen a week or two. \_see also under general and miscellaneous, p. 429]. northern shrike jpeo. 25, 1839. the shrike hark ! hark ! from out the thickest fog warbles with might and main the fearless shrike, as all agog to find in fog his gain. his steady sails he never furls at any time o' year. and, perched now on winter's curls, he whistles in his ear. dec. 24, 1850. saw a shrike pecking to pieces a small bird, apparently a snowbird. at length lie took him up in his bill, almost half as big as himself, and flew slowly off with his prey dangling from his beak. i find that i had not associated such actions with my idea of birds. it was not birdlike. feb. 3, 1856. returning, saw near the island a shrike glide by, cold and blustering as it was, with a remark ably even and steady sail or gliding motion like a hawk, eight or ten feet above the ground, and alight in a tree, from which at the same instant a small bird, perhaps a creeper or nuthatch, flitted timidly away. the shrike was apparently in pursuit. nov. 29, 1858. i see a living shrike caught to-day in the barn of the middlesex house. 342 notes on new england bieds nov. 30, 1858. the shrike was very violent for a long time, beating itself against the bars of its cage at stacy's. to-day it is quiet and has eaten raw meat. its plain dark ash-colored crown and back are separated by a very distinct line from the black wings. it has a powerful hawk-like beak, but slender legs and claws. close to, it looks more like a muscicapa^ than anything. march 7, 1859. 6.30 a. m. — to hiu. i come out to hear a spring bird, the ground gener ally covered with snow yet and the channel of the river only partly open. on the hill i hear first the tapping of a small woodpecker. i then see a bird alight on the dead top of the highest white oak on the hilltop, on the topmost point. it is a shrike. while i am watching him eight or ten rods off, i hear robins down below, west of the hill. then, to my surprise, the shrike begins to sing. it is at first a wholly ineffectual and inarticulate sound without any solid tone to it, a mere hoarse breathing, as if he were clearing his throat, unlike any bird that i know, — a shrill hissing. then he uttered a kind of mew, a very decided mewing, clear and wiry, between that of a catbird and the note of the nuthatch, as if to lure a nuthatch within his reach; then rose into the sharpest, shrillest vibratory or tremulous whistling or chirruping on the very highest key. this high gurgling jingle was like some of the notes of a robin singing in summer. but they were very short spurts in all these directions, though there was all this variety. unless you saw the shrike it would be hard to tell what bird it was. this variety of notes covered considerable time, but ^ [that is, a flycatcher.] northern shrike ;j43 were sparingly uttered with intervals. it was a decided chinking sound — the clearest strain — suggesting much ice in the stream. i heard this bird sing once before, but that was also in early spring, or about this time. it is said that they imitate the notes of the birds in order to attract them within their reach. why, then, have i never heard them sing in the winter? (i have seen seven or eight of them the past winter quite near.) the birds which it imitated — if it imitated any this morn ing — were the catbird and the robin, neither of which probably would it catch, — and the first is not here to be caught. hearing a peep, i looked up and saw three or four birds passing rather [sic], which suddenly de scended and settled on this oak-top. they were robins, but the shrike instantly hid himself behind a bough and in half a minute flew off to a walnut and alighted, as usual, on its very topmost twig, apparently afraid of its visitors. the robins kept their ground, one alighting on the very point which the shrike vacated. is not this, then, probably the spring note or pairing note or notes of the shrike ? dec. 18, 1859. i see three shrikes in different places to-day, — two on the top of apple trees, sitting still in the storm, on the lookout. they fly low to another tree when disturbed, much like a bluebird, and jerk their tails once or twice when they alight. dec. 30, 1859. going by dodd's, i see a shrike perched on the tip-top of the topmost upright twig of an english cherry tree before his house, standing s(juare on the topmost bud, balancing himself by a slight mo tion of his tail from time to time. i have noticed this 344 notes on new england birds habit of the bird before. you would suppose it incon venient for so large a bird to maintain its footing there. scared by my passing [?] in the road, it flew off, and i thought i would see if it alighted on a similar place. it flew toward a young elm, whose higher twigs were much more slender, though not quite so upright as those of the cherry, and i thought he might be excused if he alighted on the side of one ; but no, to my surprise, he alighted without any trouble upon the very top of one of the highest of all, and looked around as before. warbling vireo [/see under general and miscellaneous, p. 426.] yellow-throated vireo may 19, 1856. hear and see a yellow-throated vireo, which methinks i have heard before. going and coming, he is in the top of the same swamp white oak and sing ing indolently, ullia — eelya, and sometimes varied to eelyee. vireos (unspecified and unidentified) may 7, 1852. the vireo comes with warm weather, midwife to the leaves of the elms. jan. 13, 1856. took to pieces a pensile nest which i found the 11th on the south shore of walden on an oak sapling (red or black), about fifteen feet from the ground. though small, it measures three inches by three in the extreme, and was hung between two horizontal twigs or in a fork forming about a right angle, the third side being regularly rounded without any very stiff mate vireos 346 rial. the twigs extended two or three inches beyond the nest. the bulk of it is composed of fine shreds or fibres, pretty long (say three to six inches), of apparently inner oak (?) bark, judging from some scraps of the epidermis adhering. it looks at first sight like sedge or grass. the bottom, which i accidentally broke off and disturbed the arrangement of, was composed of this and white and pitch pine needles and little twigs about the same size and form, rough with little leaf-stalks or feet (probably hemlock (?)')5 ^^^ ^^so strips and curls of paper birch epidermis, and some hornet or other wasp nest used like the last. i mention the most abundant material first. probably the needles and twigs were used on account of theircurvedform and elasticity, to give shape to the bottom. the sides, which were not so thick, were composed of bark shreds, paper birch, and hornet-nest (the two latter chiefly outside, probably to bind and conceal and keep out the wind), agglutinated together. but most pains was taken with the thin edge and for three quarters of an inch down, where, beside the bark-fibres, birch paper, and hornets' nest, some silky reddish-brown and also white fibre was used to bind all with, almost spun into threads and passed over the twigs and agglutinated to them, or over the bark edge. the shreds of birch paper were smaller there, and the hornets' nest looked as if it had been reduced to a pulp by the bird and spread very thinly here and there over all, mixed with the brown silk. this last looked like cow's hair, but as i found a piece of a small brown cocoon, though a little paler, i suspect it was ^ yes, they are. ^ perhaps bent by the bird. 346 notes on new england birds from that.^ the white may have been from a cocoon, or else vegetable silk. probably a vireo's nest, maybe red-eye's. in our workshops we pride ourselves on discovering a use for what had previously been regarded as waste, but how partial and accidental our economy compared with nature's. in nature nothing is wasted. every decayed leaf and twig and fibre is only the better fitted to serve in some other department, and all at last are gathered in her compost-heap. what a wonderful gen ius it is that leads the vireo to select the tough fibres of the inner bark, instead of the more brittle grasses, for its basket, the elastic pine-needles and the twigs, curved as they dried to give it form, and, as i suppose, the silk of cocoons, etc., etc., to bind it together with! i suspect that extensive use is made of these abandoned cocoons by the birds, and they, if anybody, know where to find them. there were at least seven materials used in constructing this nest, and the bird visited as many distinct localities many times, always with the purpose or design to find some particular one of these materials, as much as if it had said to itself, "now i will go and get some old hornets' nest from one of those that i saw last fall down in the maple swamp — perhaps thrust my bill into them — or some silk from those cocoons i saw this morning." ^ some of the same on my red-eye's nest. i xviii warblers black and white warbler ; black and white creeper may 12, 1855. watched a black and white creeper from bittern cliff, a very neat and active bird, explor ing the limbs on all sides and looking three or four ways almost at once for insects. now and then it raises its head a little, opens its bill, and, without closing it, utters its faint seeser seeser seeser. may 30, 1857. in the midst of the shower, though it was not raining very hard, a black and white creeper came and inspected the limbs of a tree before my rock, in his usual zigzag, prying way, head downward often, and when it thundered loudest, heeded it not. birds ap pear to be but little incommoded by the rain. yet they do not often sing in it. may 16, 1860. near peter's i see a small creeper hopping along the branches of the oaks and pines, ever turning this way and that as it hops, making various angles with the bough ; then flies across to another bough, or to the base of another tree, and traces that up, zigzag and prying into the crevices. think how thoroughly the trees are thus explored by various birds ! you can hardly sit near one for five minutes now, but either a woodpecker or creeper comes and examines 348 notes on new england birds its bark rapidly, or a warbler — a summer yellowbird, for example — makes a pretty thorough exploration about all its expanding leafets, even to the topmost twig. the whole north american forest is being thus explored for insect food now by several hundred (?) species of birds. each is visited by many kinds, and thus the equilibrium of the insect and vegetable kingdom is preserved. per haps i may say that each opening bud is thus visited before it has fully expanded. l_see also under general and miscellaneous, p. 414.] yellow warbler; summer yellowbird 3fay 7, 1852. the first summer yellowbirds on the willow causeway. the birds i have lately mentioned come not singly, as the earliest, but all at once, i. e. many yellowbirds all over town. now i remember the yellowbird comes when the willows begin to leave out. so yellow. they bring summer with them and the sun, tche-tche-tche-tcha tcha-tchar. also they haunt the oaks, white and swamp white, where are not leaves. may 10, 1853. at this season the traveller passes through a golden gate on causeways where these willows are planted, as if he were approaching the entrance to fairyland ; and there will surely be found the yellow bird, and already from a distance is heard his note, a tche tche tche tcha tchartcha, — ah, willow, willow. could not he truly arrange for us the difficult family of the willows better than borrer, or barratt of middletown ? and as he passes between the portals, a sweet fragrance is wafted to him ; he not only breathes but scents and tastes the air, and'he hears the low humming or susurrus yellow warbler 349 of a myriad insects which are feeding on its sweets. it is, apparently, these that attract the yellowbird. may 12, 1853. the yellowbird has another note, tchut tchut tcjiar te tchit e war. june 24, 1853. a yellowbird's nest in a fork of a willow on hubbard's causeway, resting chiefly on the leading branch ; of fine grass, lined with hair, bottom outside puffing out with a fine, light, flax-like fibre, perhaps the bark of some weed, by which also it is fastened to the twigs. it is surprising that so many birds find hair enough to line their nests with. if i wish for a horsehair for my compass sights i must go to the stable, but the hair-bird,^ with her sharp eyes, goes to the road. jan. 18, 1856. analyzed a nest which i found janu ary 7th in an upright fork of a red maple sapling on the edge of hubbard's swamp wood, north side, near river, about eight feet from the ground, the deep grooves made by the twigs on each side. it may be a yellowbird's. extreme breadth outside, three inches ; inside, one and a half. extreme height outside, three inches ; in side, one and five eighths ; sides, three quarters of an inch thick. it is composed of seven principal materials. (i name the most abundant first ; i mean most abundant when compressed.) 1. small compact lengths of silvery pappus about seven eighths of an inch long, perhaps of erechthites, one half inch deep and nearly pure, a very warm bed, chiefly concealed, just beneath the lining inside. 1 [the chipping sparrow.] 350 notes on new england birds 2. slender catkins, often with the buds and twig ends (of perhaps hazel), throughout the whole bottom and sides, making it thick but open and light, mixed with (3) milkweed silk, i. e. fibres like flax, but white, being bleached, also in sides and rim, some of it almost threadlike, white with some of the dark epidermis. from the pods ? ^ 4. thin and narrow strips of grape-vine bark, chiefly in the rim and sides for three quarters of an inch down, and here and there throughout. 5. wads of apparently brown fern wool, mixed with the last three. 6. some finer pale-brown and thinner shreds of bark within the walls and bottom, apparently not grape. if this were added to the grape, these five materials would be not far from equally abundant. 7. some very fine pale-brown wiry fibres for a lining, just above the pappus and somewhat mixed with it, perhaps for coolness, being springy. directly beneath the pappus were considerable other shreds of grape and the other bark, short and broken. in the rim and sides some cotton ravellings and some short shreds of fish-line or crow-fence. a red maple leaf within the bottom ; a kernel of corn just under the lining of fibres (perhaps dropped by a crow or blackbird or jay or squirrel while the nest was building). a few short lengths of stubble or weed stems in the bottom and sides. a very little brown wool, like, apparently, that in the nest last described, which may be brown fern wool. * no, i am about certain, from comparison, that it is the fibres of the bark of the stem. vide 19th tnst. yellow warbler 861 the milkweed and fern wool conspicuous without the rim and about the twigs. i was most struck by that mass of pure pappus under the inside lining. jan. 19, 1856. gathered some dry water milkweed stems to compare with the materials of the bird's nest of the 18th. the bird used, i am almost certain, the fibres of the bark of the stem, — not the pods, — just beneath the epidermis ; only the bird's is older and more fuzzy and finer, like worn twine or string. the fibres and bark have otherwise the same appearance under the microscope. i stripped off some bark about one sixteenth of an inch wide and six inches long and, separating ten or twelve fibres from the epidermis, rolled it in my fingers, making a thread about the ordinary size. this i could not break by direct pulling, and no man could. i doubt if a thread of flax or hemp of the same size could be made so strong. what an admirable material for the indian's fish-line ! i can easily get much longer fibres. i hold a piece of the dead weed in my hands, strip off a narrow shred of the bark before my neigh bor's eyes and separate ten or twelve fibres as fine as a hair, roll them in my fingers, and offer him the thread to try its strength. he is surprised and mortified to find that he cannot break it. probably both the indian and the bird discovered for themselves this same (so to call it) wild hemp. the corresponding fibres of the mikania seem not so divisible, become not so fine and fuzzy ; though somewhat similar, are not nearly so strong. i have a hang-bird's nest from the riverside, made almost entirely of this, in narrow shreds or strips with the epi dermis on, wound round and round the twigs and woven 352 notes on new england birds into a basket. that is, this bird has used perhaps the strongest fibre which the fields afforded and which most civilized men have not detected. knocked down the bottom of that summer yellow bird's nest made on the oak at the island last sum mer. it is chiefly of fern wool and also, apparently, some sheep's wool (?), with a fine green moss (ap parently that which grows on button-bushes) inmixed, and some milkweed fibre, and all very firmly agglu tinated together. some shreds of grape-vine bark about it. do not know what portion of the whole nest it is. [/see also under flicker, p. 198.] myrtle warbler ; myrtle-bird may 6, 1855. myrtle-birds very numerous just be yond second division. they sing like an instrument, teee teee te^ttt^tt t, on very various keys, i. e. high or low, sometimes beginning like phe-he.^ as i sat by roadside one drew near, perched within ten feet, and dived once or twice with a curve to catch the little black flies about my head, coming once within three feet, not minding me much. i could not tell at first what attracted it toward me. it saw them from twenty five feet off. there was a little swarm of small flies, regularly fly-like with large shoulders, about my head. many white-throated sparrows there. ^ [the songthat thoreau heard was, of course, that of the white throated sparrows he saw at the same place. he was long in learning the real authorship of this song, which he at first credited to the chicka dee and then for several years to the " myrtle-bird."] myrtle wakbler 353 oct. 19, 1856. see quite a flock of myrtle-birds, — which i might carelessly have mistaken for slate-colored snowbirds, — flitting about on the rocky hillside under conantum clifif. they show about three white or light colored spots when they fly, commonly no bright yel low, though some are pretty bright. they perch on the side of the dead mulleins, on rocks, on the ground, and directly dart off, apparently in pursuit of some insect. i hear no note from them. they are thus near or on the ground, then, not as in spring. oct. 21, 1857. i see many myrtle-birds now about the house this forenoon, on the advent of cooler weather. they keep flying up against the house and the window and fluttering there, as if they would come in, or alight on the wood-pile or pump. they would commonly be mistaken for sparrows, but show more white when they fly, beside the yellow on the rump and sides of breast seen near to and two white bars on the wings. chubby birds. pine warbler april 23, 1852. i hear this morning, in the pine woods above the railroad bridge, for the first time, that delicious cool-sounding wetter-wetter-wetter-wetter wet' from that small bird (pine warbler?) in the tops of the pines. i associate it with the cool^ moist., ever green spring woods. april 2, 1853. heard and saw what i call the pine warbler, — vetter vetter vetter vetter vet, — the cool woodland sound. the first this year of the higher-col ored birds, after the bluebird and the blackbird's wing; is it not ? it so affects me as something more tender. 354 notes on new england birds april 8, 1853. saw and heard my small pine warbler shaking out his trills, or jingle, even like money com ing to its bearings. they appear much the smaller from perching high in the tops of white pines and flitting from tree to tree at that height. april 9, 1853. on a pitch [pine] on side of j. hos mer's river hill, a pine warbler, by ventriloquism sound ing farther off than it was, which was seven or eight feet, hopping and flitting from twig to twig, apparently picking the small flies at and about the base of the needles at the extremities of the twigs. saw two after ward on the walls by roadside. april 9, 1856. while i am looking at the hazel, i hear from the old locality, the edge of the great pines and oaks in the swamp by the railroad, the note of the pine warbler. it sounds far off and faint, but, coming out and sitting on the iron rail, i am surprised to see it within three or four rods, on the upper part of a white oak, where it is busily catching insects, hopping along toward the extremities of the limbs and looking off on all sides, twice darting off like a wood pewee two rods over the railroad after an insect and return ing to the oak, and from time to time uttering its simple, rapidly iterated, cool-sounding notes. when heard a little within the wood, as he hops to that side of the oak, they sound particularly cool and inspiring, like a part of the evergreen forest itself, the trickling of the sap. its bright-yellow or golden throat and breast, etc., are conspicuous at this season, — a greenish yellow above, with two white bars on its bluish-brown wings. it sits often with loose-hung wings and forked tail. pine warbler 355 april 11, 1856. hear in the old place, the pitch pine grove on the bank by the river, the pleasant ringing note of the pine warbler. its a-che, vitter vitter, vitter vitter, vitter vitter, vitter vitter, vet rings through the open pine grove very rapidly. i also heard it at the old place by the railroad, as i came along. it is re markable that i have so often heard it first in these two localities, i. e. where the railroad skirts the north edge of a small swamp densely filled with tall old white pines and a few white oaks, and in a young grove com posed wholly of pitch pines on the otherwise bare, very high and level bank of the assabet. when the season is advanced enough, i am pretty sure to hear its ring ing note in both those places. april 15, 1859. the warm pine woods are all alive this afternoon with the jingle of the pine warbler, the for the most part invisible minstrel. that wood, for example, at the punk oak, where we sit to hear it. it is surprising how quickly the earth, which was covered half an inch deep this morning, and since so wet, has become comparatively dry, so that we sit on the ground or on the dry leaves in woods at 3 p. m. and smell the pines and see and hear the flies, etc., buzz about, thougli the sun did not come out till 12 m. this morning, the aspect of winter; at mid-forenoon, the ground reeking with moisture ; at 3 p. m., sit on dry leaves and hear the flies buzz and smell the pines! that wood is now very handsome seen from the westerly side, the sun falling far through it, though some trunks are wholly in shade. this warbler impresses me as if it were calling the trees to life. i think of springing twigs. its 356 notes on new england bikds jingle rings through the wood at short intervals, as if, like an electric shock, it imparted a fresh spring life to them. you hear the same bird, now here now there, as .it incessantly flits about, commonly invisible and utter ing its simple jingle on very different keys, and from time to time a companion is heard farther or nearer. this is a peculiarly summer-like sound. go to a warm pine wood-side on a pleasant day at this season after storm, and hear it ring with the jingle of the pine warbler. oven-bird; golden-crowned thrush; " nightwarbler " ^ june 11, 1851. i hear the night-warbler breaking out as in his dreams, made so from the first for some mysterious reason. june 29, 1851. the nightwarbler sings the same strain at noon. may 10, 1853. p. m. — hear the night-warbler now distinctly. it does not soon repeat its note, and disap pears with the sound. june 19, 1853. heard my night-warbler on a soli tary white pine in the heywood clearing by the peak. discovered it at last, looking like a small piece of black bark curving partly over the limb. no fork to its tail. it appeared black beneath ; was very shy, not bigger than a yellowbird, and very slender. ^ [practically all of thoreau's references, however slight, to his mys terious " night-warbler " are here printed. he never satisfied himself as to the identity of the bird, but the accumulated evidence makes it clear that the night-warbler's song was no other than the flight-song of the oven-bird, though the somewhat similar aerial song of the mary land yellow-throat deceived him on one occasion.] oven-bird; "nightwarbler" 357 may 28, 1854. the night-warbler, after his strain, drops down almost perpendicularly into a tree-top and is lost. may 29, 1854. saw what i thought my nightwar bler, — sparrow -like with chestnut (?) stripes on breast, white or whitish below and about eyes, and perhaps chestnut (??) head. may 3, 1857. emerson says that brewer tells him my " night warbler " is probably the nashville war bler. may 12, 1857. a night-warbler, plainly light be neath. it always flies to a new perch immediately after its song. may 16, 1858. a golden-crowned thrush hops quite near. it is quite small, about the size of the creeper, with the upper part of its breast thickly and distinctly pencilled with black, a tawny head ; and utters now only a sharp cluck for a chip. see and hear a redstart, the rhythm of whose strain is tse,-tse, tse'-tse, tse\ em phasizing the last syllable of all and not ending with the common tsear. hear the night-warbler. may 17, 1858. just after hearing my night-warbler i see two birds on a tree. the one which i examined — as well as i could without a glass — had a white throat with a white spot on his wings, was dark above and moved from time to time like a creeper, and it was about the creeper's size. the other bird, which i did not examine particularly, was a little larger and more tawny. ^ may 19, 1858. heard the night-warbler begin his ^ perhaps golden-crowned thrush. 358 notes on new england birds strain just like an oven-bird ! i have noticed that when it drops down into the woods it darts suddenly one side to a perch when low. aug. 5, 1858. while passing there, i heard what i should call my night-warbler's note, and, looking up, saw the bird dropping to a bush on the hillside. looking through the glass, i saw that it was the maryland yellow-throat ! ! and it afterward flew to the button-bushes in the meadow. may 8, 1860. the night-warbler's note. may 18, 1860. the night-warbler is a powerful singer for so small a bird. it launches into the air above the forest, or over some hollow or open space in the woods, and challenges the attention of the woods by its rapid and impetuous warble, and then drops down swiftly into the tree-tops like a performer with drawing behind the scenes, and he is very lucky who detects where it alights. aug. 28, 1860. hear the night-warbler and the whip-poor-will. american redstart may 10, 1853. i hear, and have for a week, in the woods, the note of one or more small birds somewhat like a yellowbird's. what is it? is it the redstart? i now see one of these. the first i have distinguished. and now i feel pretty certain that my black and yellow warbler of may 1st was this. as i sit, it inquisitively hops nearer and nearer. it is one of the election-birds* of rare colors which i can remember, mingled dark and ^ [birds shot on election day. see p. 32g. ] american redstart 859 reddish. this reminds me that i supposed much more variety and fertility in nature before i had learned the numbers and the names of each order. i find that i had expected such fertility in our concord woods alone as not even the completest museum of stuffed birds of all the forms and colors from all parts of the world comes up to. [/see also under oven-bird, p. 357.] warblers (in general) april 19, 1854. within a few days the warblers have begun to come. they are of every hue. nature made them to show her colors with. there are as many as there are colors and shades. in certain lights, as yes terday against the snow, nothing can be more splendid and celestial than the color of the bluebird. xix titlaeks, thrashers, and wrens american pipit; titlark oct. 26, 1853. i hear a faint twittering of the spar rows in the grass, like crickets. those flitting spar rows ^ which we have had for some weeks, are they not the sober snowbirds (tree sparrows ?)? they fly in a great drifting flock, wheeling and dashing about, as if preluding or acting a snow-storm, with rapid te te te. they are as dry and rustling as the grass. jvov. 6, 1853. it is remarkable how little we attend to what is passing before us constantly, unless our gen ius directs our attention that way. there are these little sparrows with white in tail, perhaps the prevailing bird of late, which have flitted before me so many falls and springs,^ and yet they have been as it were stran gers to me, and i have not inquired whence they came or whither they were going, or what their habits were. it is surprising how little most of us are contented to know about the sparrows which drift about in the air before us just before the first snows. i hear the downy woodpecker's metallic tchip or peep. now i see where many a bird builded last spring or summer. these are leaves which do not fall. 1 [from other entries in the journal it is evident that these " spar ' rows " which thoreau saw in larg^e flocks in the fall were titlarks. j 2 [though common in the autumn, the titlark is rare in the spring' in new eng-land. thoreau was probably only taking it for granted that he had often seen these birds in the spring.] brown thrasher 361 mockingbird aitg. 18, 1854. i think i saw a mockingbird on a black cherry near pedrick's. size of and like a cat bird ; bluish-black side-head, a white spot on closed wings, lighter breast and beneath ; but he flew before i had fairly adjusted my glass. there were brown thrash ers with it making their clicking note. catbird may 8, 1852. i hear a catbird singing within a rod among the alders, but it is too dark to see him. now he stops and half angrily, half anxiously and inquisitively, inquires char-char^ sounding like the caw of a crow, not like a cat. may 21, 1852. the catbird sings like a robin some times, sometimes like a blackbird's sprayey warble. there is more of squeak or mew, and also of clear whistle^ than in the thrasher's note. \^see also under general and miscellaneous, p. 427.] brown thrasher may 3, 1852. hear the first brown thrasher, — two of them. . . . they drown all the rest. he says cher ruwit, cherruwit ; go ahead, go ahead ; give it to him, give it to him; etc., etc., etc. may 16, 1852. the thrasher has a sort of laugh in his strain which the catbird has not. may 18, 1852. this afternoon the brown thrashers are very numerous and musical. they plunge down ward when they leave their perch, in a peculiar way. 362 notes on new england birds it is a bird that appears to make a business of singing for its own amusement. there is great variety in its strains. it is not easy to detect any repetition. june 24, 1853. the brown thrasher's nest has been robbed, probably by some other bird. it rested on a branch of a swamp-pink and some grape-vines, effect ually concealed and protected by grape-vines and green-briar in a matted bower above it. the foundation of pretty stout twigs, eight or nine inches in diameter, surmounted by coarse strips of grape bark, giving form to the nest, and then lined with some harsh, wiry rootfibres ; within rather small and shallow, and the whole fabric of loose texture, not easy to remove. april 30, 1856. a fine morning. i hear the first brown thrasher singing within three or four rods of me on the shrubby hillside in front of the hadley place. i think i had a glimpse of one darting down from a sap ling-top into the bushes as i rode by the same place on the morning. of the 28th. this, i think, is the very place to hear them early, a dry hillside sloping to the south, covered with young wood and shrub oaks. i am the more attracted to that house as a' dwelling-place. to live where you would hear the first brown thrasher! first, perchance, you have a glimpse of one's ferruginous long brown back, instantly lost amid the shrub oaks, and are uncertain if it was a thrasher, or one of the other thrushes ; and your uncertainty lasts commonly a day or two, until its rich and varied strain is heard. surveying seemed a noble employment which brought me within hearing of this bird. i was trying to get the exact course of a winter wren 363 wall thickly beset with shrub oaks and birches, mak ing an opening through them with axe and knife, while the hillside seemed to quiver or pulsate with the sud den melody. again, it is with the side of the ear that you hear. the music or the beauty belong not to your work itself but some of its accompaniments. you would fain devote yourself to the melody, but you will hear more of it if you devote yourself toyour work. may 4, 1859. we hear a thrasher sing for half an hour steadily, — a very rich singer and heard a quarter of a mile off very distinctly. this is first heard com monly at plantingtime. he sings as if conscious of his power. june 19, 1860. observe a nest crowded full with four young brown thrashers half fledged. you would think they would die of heat, so densely packed and over flowing. three head one way, and the other lies across. how quickly a fox would gobble them up ! winter wren july 10, 1858. the fhngilla hyemalis was most common in the upper part of the ravine,' and i saw a large bird of prey, perhaps an eagle, sailing over the head of the ravine. the wood thrush and veery ' sang regularly, especially morning and evening. but, above all, the peculiar and memorable songster was that 1 [tuckerman's ravine on the side of mt. washingrton.] 2 [doubtless the olive-backed thrush and bicknell's thrush, which are the only thrushes found on the upper slopes of mt. washington. see note on wood thrush, p. 377.] 364 notes on new england birds monadnock-like one/ keeping up an exceedingly brisk and lively strain. it was remarkable for its incessant twittering flow. yet we never got sight of the bird, at least while singing, so that i could not identify it, and my lameness ^ prevented my pursuing it. i heard it afterward, even in the franconia notch, it was sur prising for its steady and uninterrupted flow, for when one stopped, another appeared to take up the strain. it reminded me of a fine corkscrew stream issuing with incessant lisping tinkle from a cork, flowing rapidly, and i said that he had pulled out the spile and left it running.^ that was the rhythm, but with a sharper tinkle of course. it had no more variety than that, but it was more remarkable for its continuance and mo notonousness than any bird's note i ever heard. it evi dently belongs only to cool mountainsides, high up amid the fir and spruce. i saw once flitting through the fir tops restlessly a small white and dark bird, sylvia-like, which may have been it. sometimes they appeared to be attracted by our smoke. the note was so incessant that at length you only noticed when it ceased. short-billed marsh wren aug. 5, 1858. just opposite this bay,* i heard a pe culiar note which i thought at first might be that of a kingbird, but soon saw for the first time a wren within ^ [on june 4 of the same year he had heard on mt. monadnock " a very peculiar lively and interesting' strain from some bird," but had been unable to see the singer.] ^ [he had sprained his ankle the day before.] ^ [the song described is evidently that of the winter wren.] * [lily bay in the sudbury river and in the town of sudbury.] short-billed marsh wren 365 two or three rods perched on the tall sedge or the wool grass and making it, — probably the short-billed marsh wren. it was peculiarly brisk and rasping, not at all musical, the rhythm something like shar te dittle ittle ittle ittle ittle, but the last part was drier or less liquid than this implies. it was a small bird, quite dark above and apparently plain ashy-white beneath, and held its head up when it sang, and also commonly its tail. it dropped into the deep sedge on our approach, but did not go off, as we saw by the motion of the grass ; then reappeared and uttered its brisk notes quite near us, and, flying off, was lost in the sedge again. [see also under general and miscellaneous, p. 424. j xx creepers, nuthatches, tits, and kinglets brown creeper nov. 26, 1859. i see here to-day one brown creeper busily inspecting the pitch pines. it begins at the base, and creeps rapidly upward by starts, adhering close to the bark and shifting a little from side to side often till near the top, then suddenly darts off downward to the base of another tree, where it repeats the same course. this has no black cockade, like the nuthatch. [/see also under general and miscellaneous, pp. 416, 422.] white-bellied nuthatch april 6, 1856. i went to the oaks. heard there a nuthatch's faint vibrating tut-tut, somewhat even like croaking of frogs, as it made its way up the oak bark and turned head down to peck. anon it answered its mate with a gnah gnah. dec. 5, 1856. as i walk along the side of the hill, a pair of nuthatches flit by toward a walnut,^ ajing low in midcourse and then ascending to the tree. i hear one's faint tut tut or gnah, gnah — no doubt heard a good way by its mate now flown into the next tree — as it is ascending the trunk or branch of a walnut in a zigzag manner, hitching along, prying into the crevices ^ [thoreau was accustomed to use the name walnut for the various species of hickory.] white-bellied nuthatch 367 of the bark ; and now it has found a savory morsel, which it pauses to devour, then flits to a new bough. it is a chubby bird, white, slate-color, and black. jan. 6, 1859. as i go over the causeway, near the railroad bridge, i hear a fine busy twitter, and, looking up, see a nuthatch hopping along and about a swamp white oak branch, inspecting every side of it, as readily hang ing head-downwards as standing upright, and then it utters a distinct gnah^ as if to attract a companion. indeed, that other, finer twitter seemed designed to keep some companion in tow, or else it was like a very busy man talking to himself. the companion was a single chickadee, which lisped six or eight feet off. there were, perhaps, no other birds than these two within a quarter of a mile. and when the nuthatch flitted to another tree two rods off, the chickadee un failingly followed. march 5, 1859. going down-town this forenoon, i heard a white-bellied nuthatch on an elm within twenty feet, uttering peculiar notes and more like a song than i remember to have heard from it. there was a cliick adee close by, to which it may have been addressed. it was something like to-ivhat what what what what^ rapidly repeated, and not the usual gnah gnah ; and this instant it occurs to me that this may be that earli est spring note which i hear, and have referred to a woodpecker ! (this is before / have chanced to see a bluebird, blackbird, or robin in concord this year.) it is the spring note of the nuthatch. it paused in its pro gress about the trunk or branch and uttered this lively but peculiarly inarticulate song, an awkward attempt to 368 notes on new england birds warble almost in the face of the chickadee, as if it were one of its kind. it was thus giving vent to the spring within it. if i am not mistaken, it is what i have heard in former springs or winters long ago, fabulously early in the season, when we men had but just begun to anti cipate the spring, — for it would seem that we, in our anticipations and sympathies, include in succession the moods and expressions of all creatures. when only the snow had begun to melt and no rill of song had broken loose, a note so dry and fettered still, so inartic ulate and half thawed out, that you might (and would commonly) mistake for the tapping of a woodpecker. as if the young nuthatch in its hole had listened only to the tapping of woodpeckers and learned that music, and now, when it would sing and give vent to its spring ecstasy, it can modulate only some notes like that. that is its theme still. that is its ruling idea of song and music, — only a little clangor and liquidity added to the tapping of the woodpecker. it was the handle by which my thoughts took firmly hold on spring. [see also under general and miscellaneous, pp. 415, 416.] chickadee [dated only 1838.] sometimes i hear the veery'3 silver clarion, or the brazen note of the impatient jay, or in secluded woods the chickadee doles out her scanty notes, which sing the praise of heroes, and set forth the loveliness of virtue evermore. — jphe-he. nov. 9, 1850. the chickadees, if i stand long enough, hop nearer and nearer inquisitively, from pine bough chickadee 369 to pine bough, till within four or five feet, occasionally lisping a note. oct. 10, 1851. as i stood amid the witch-hazels near flint's pond, a flock of a dozen chickadees came flitting and singing about me with great ado, — a most cheering and enlivening sound, — with incessant day day-day and a fine wiry strain betweenwhiles, flitting ever nearer and nearer and nearer, inquisitively, till the boldest was within five feet of me ; then suddenly, their curiosity satiated, they flit by degrees further away and disappear, and i hear with regret their re treating day-day-days. march 10, 1852. heard the phoebe note of the chickadee to-day for the first time. i had at first heard their day-day-day ungratefully, — ah! you but carry my thoughts back to winter, — but anon i found that they too had become spring birds ; they had changed their note. even they feel the influence of spring. oct. 23, 1852. the chickadees flit along, following me inquisitively a few rods with lisping, tinkling note, — flit within a few feet of me from curiosity, head downward on the pines. march 22, 1853. i hear the phoebe note of the chickadee, one taking it up behind another as in a catch, phe-hee phe-hee. dec. 1, 1853. those trees and shrubs which retain their withered leaves through the winter — shrub oaks and young white, red, and black oaks, the lower branches of larger trees of the last-mentioned species, hornbeam, etc., and young hickories — seem to form an interme diate class between deciduous and evergreen trees. they 370 notes on new england birds may almost be called the ever-reds. their leaves, which are falling all winter long, serve as a shelter to rabbits and partridges and other winter quadrupeds and birds. even the little chickadees love to skulk amid them and peep out from behind them. i hear their faint, silvery, lisping notes, like tinkling glass, and occasionally a sprightly day-day-day ^ as they inquisitively hop nearer and nearer to me. they are our most honest and inno cent little bird, drawing yet nearer to us as the winter advances, and deserve best of any of the walker. feb. 9, 1854. i do not hear therien's* axe far of late. the moment i came on his chopping-ground, the chick adees flew to me, as if glad to see me. they are a pecul iarly honest and sociable little bird. i saw them go to his pail repeatedly and peck his bread and butter. they came and went a dozen times while i stood there. he said that a great flock of them came round him the other day while he was eating his dinner and lit on his clothes "just like flies." one roosted on his finger, and another pecked a piece of bread in his hand. they are consid erable company for the woodchopper. i heard one wiry phe-he. they love to hop about wood freshly split. ap parently they do not leave his clearing all day. they were not scared when he threw down wood within a few feet of them. when i looked to see how much of his bread and butter they had eaten, i did not perceive that any was gone. he could afford to dine a hundred. jan. 7, 1855. here comes a little flock of titmice, plainly to keep me company, with their black caps and ^ [aleck therien, the french-canadian ■woodchopper celebrated in walden.] chickadee 371 throats making them look top-heavy, restlessly hopping along the alders, with a sharp, clear, lisping note. dec. 15, 1855. this morning it has begun to snow apparently in earnest. the air is quite thick and the view confined. it is quite still, yet some flakes come down from one side and some from another, crossing each other like woof and warp apparently, as they are falling in different eddies and currents of air. in the midst of it, i hear and see a few little chickadees prying about the twigs of the locusts in the graveyard. they have come into town with the snow. they now and then break forth into a short, sweet strain, and then seem suddenly to check themselves, as if they had done it be fore they thought. june 3, 1856. while running a line in the woods, close to the water, on the southwest side of loring's pond, i observed a chickadee sitting quietly within a few feet. suspecting a nest, i looked and found it in a small hollow maple stump which was about five inches in diameter and two feet high. i looked down about a foot and could just discern the eggs. breaking off a little, i managed to get my hand in and took out some eggs. there were seven, making by their number an unusual figure as they lay in the nest, a sort of ^gg ro sette, a circle around with one (or more) in the middle. in the meanwhile the bird sat silent, though rather rest less, within three feet. the nest was very thick and warm, of average depth, and made of the bluish-slate rabbit's (?) fur. the eggs were a perfect oval, five eighths inch long, white with small reddish-brown or rusty spots, especially about larger end, partly devel 372 notes on new england birds oped. the bird sat on the remaining eggs next day. i called off the boy in another direction that he might not find it. oct. 17, 1856. as i stood looking at emerson's bound under the railroad embankment, i heard a smart tche-day-day-day close to my ear, and, looking up, saw four of these birds, which had come to scrape acquaint ance with me, hopping amid the alders within three and four feet of me. i had heard them further off at first, and they had followed me along the hedge. they day day'di and lisped their faint notes alternately, and then, as if to make me think they had some other errand than to peer at me, they pecked the dead twigs with their bills, — the little top-heavy, black-crowned, volatile fellows. dec. 3, 1856. six weeks ago i noticed the advent of chickadees and their winter habits. as you walk along a wood-side, a restless little flock of them, whose notes you hear at a distance, will seem to say, " oh, there he goes ! let 's pay our respects to him." and they will flit after and close to you, and naively peck at the near est twig to you, as if they were minding their own busi ness all the while without any reference to you. nov. 8, 1857. i do not know exactly what that sweet word is which the chickadee says when it hops near to me now in those ravines. ifarch 21, 1858. standing by the mud-hole in the swamp, i hear the pleasant phebe note of the chickadee. it is, methinks, the most of a wilderness note of any yet. it is peculiarly interesting that this, which is one of our winter birds also, should have a note with which to welcome the spring. chickadee 373 nov. 7, 1858. we are left to the chickadee's familiar notes, and the jay for trumpeter. what struck me was a certain emptiness beyond, between the hemlocks and the hill, in the cool, washed air, as if i appreciated even here the absence of insects from it. it suggested agree ably to me a mere space in which to walk briskly. the fields are bleak, and they are, as it were, vacated. the very earth is like a house shut up for the winter, and i go knocking about it in vain. but just then i heard a chickadee on a hemlock, and was inexpressibly cheered to find that an old acquaintance was yet stirring about the premises, and was, i was assured, to be there all winter. all that is evergreen in me revived at once. dec. 28, 1858. i notice a few chickadees there in the edge of the pines, in the sun, lisping and twittering cheerfully to one another, with a reference to me, i think, — the cunning and innocent little birds. one a little further off utters the phoebe note. there is a foot more or less of clear open water at the edge here, and, seeing this, one of these birds hops down as if glad to find any open water at this season, and, after drinking, it stands in the water on a stone up to its belly and dips its head and flirts the water about vigorously, giving itself a good washing. i had not suspected this at this season. no fear that it will catch cold. oct. 15, 1859. the chickadees sing as if at home. they are not travelling singers hired by any barnum.' theirs is an honest, homely, heartfelt melody. shall not 1 [jenny lind made her american tour under an engagement with p. t. bamum in 1850-1851.] 374 notes on new england bikds the voice of man express as much content as the note of a bird? nov. 26, 1859. the chickadee is the bird of the wood the most unfailing. when, in a windy, or in any, day, you have penetrated some thick wood like this, you are pretty sure to hear its cheery note therein. at this sea son it is almost their sole inhabitant. dec. 12, 1859. seeing a little hole in the side of a dead white birch, about six feet from the ground, i broke it off and found it to be made where a rotten limb had broken off. the hole was about an inch over and was of quite irregular and probably natural outline, and, within, the rotten wood had been removed to the depth of two or three inches, and on one side of this cavity, under the hole, was quite a pile of bird-drop pings. the diameter of the birch was little more than two inches, — if at all. probably it was the roosting place of a chickadee. the bottom was an irregular sur face of the rotten wood, and there was nothing like a nest. jan. 12, 1860. as i stand by the hemlocks, i am greeted by the lively and unusually prolonged tche de de de de de of a little flock of chickadees. the snow has ceased falling, the sun comes out, and it is warm and still, and this flock of chickadees, little birds that perchance were born in their midst, feeling the influ ences of this genial season, have begun to flit amid the snow-covered fans of the hemlocks, jarring down -the snow, — for there are hardly bare twigs enough for them to rest on, — or they plume themselves in some snug recess on the sunny side of the tree, only pausing to utter their tche de de de. chickadee 876 jan. 18, 1860. standing under lee's cliff, several chickadees, uttering their faint notes, come flitting near to me as usual. they are busily prying under the bark of the pitch pines, occasionally knocking off a piece, while they cling with their claws on any side of the limb. of course they are in search of animal food, but i see one suddenly dart down to a seedless pine seed wing on the snow, and then up again. c* says that he saw them busy about these wings on the snow the other day, so i have no doubt that they eat this seed. jan. 20, 1860, the snow and ice under the hemlocks is strewn with cones and seeds and tracked with birds and squirrels. what a bountiful supply of winter food is here provided for them ! no sooner has fresh snow fallen and covered up the old crop than down comes a new supply all the more distinct on the spotless snow. here comes a little flock of chickadees, attracted by me as usual, and perching close by boldly; then, descending to the snow and ice, i see them pick up the hemlock seed which lies all around them. occasionally they take one to a twig and hammer at it there under their claws, perhaps to separate it from the wing, or even the shell. the snowy ice and the snow on shore have been black ened with these fallen cones several times over this winter. the snow along the sides of the river is also all dusted over with birch and alder seed, and i see where little birds have picked up the alder seed. \_see also under white-bellied nuthatch, p. 367 ; general and miscellaneous, p. 404.] 1 [w. e. channing.] 376 notes on new england birds ruby-crowned kinglet april 25, 1854. saw a golden-crested wren * in the woods near goose pond. it sounded far off and like an imitation of a robin,^ — a long strain and often repeated. i was quite near it before i was aware of it, it sounding still like a faint imitation of a robin. some chickadees and yellow redpolls were first apparent, then my wren on the pitch pines and young oaks. he appeared curi ous to observe me. a very interesting and active little fellow, darting about amid the tree-tops, and his song quite remarkable and rich and loud for his size. begins with a very fine note, before its pipes are filled, not audible at a little distance, then woriter weter, etc., etc., winding up with teter teter, all clear and round.-' this was at 4 p. m., when most birds do not sing. i saw it yesterday, pluming itself and stretching its little wings. 1 [" golden " crossed out in pencil and " ruby " substituted.] 2 and of a golden robin, wbich later i often mistook for him. ^ his song is comical and reminds me of the thrasher. xxi thrushes wood thrush^ july 27, 1840. the wood thrush is a more modern philosopher than plato and aristotle. they are now a dogma, but he preaches the doctrine of this hour. may 31, 1850. there is a sweet wild world which lies along the strain of the wood thrush — the rich intervales which border the stream of its sonjr — more thoroughly genial to my nature than any other. june 22, 1851. i hear around me, but never in sight, the many wood thrushes whetting their steel-like notes. such keen singers ! it takes a fiery heat, many dry pine leaves added to the furnace of the sun, to temper their strains ! always they are either rising or falling to a new strain. after what a moderate pause they deliver them selves again ! saying ever a new thing, avoiding repetition, methinks answering one another. while most other birds take their siesta, the wood thrush discharges his song. it is delivered like a bolas, or a piece of jingling steel. ^ [the hermit thrush as well as the wood thrush breeds in concord, but thoreau never learned to distinguish between the songs of the two species and they were all wood thrushes to him. in the white moun tains and the maine woods he mistook the olive-backed thrusli also for the wood thrush. it is not unlikely that some of the observations in cluded under this head belong of right to the hermit thrush, but oa they would apply equally well to the wood thrush they are retained here without question. those that from the date or some other evi % dence clearly refer to the hermit are placed under that species.] 378 notes on new england birds july 21, 1851. never yet did i chance to sit in a house, except my own house in the woods, and hear a wood thrush sing. would it not be well to sit in such a cham ber within sound of the finest songster of the grove? aug. 12, 1851. the birds utter a few languid and yawning notes, as if they had not left their perches, so sensible to light to wake so soon, — a faint peeping sound from i know not what kind, a slight, innocent, half-awake sound, like the sounds which a quiet house wife makes in the earliest dawn. nature preserves her innocence like a beautiful child. i hear a wood thrush even now, long before sunrise, as in the heat of the day. and the pewee and the catbird and the vireo (red eyed?). i do not hear — or do not mind, perchance — the crickets now. now whip-poor-wills commence to sing in earnest, considerably after the wood thrush. the wood thrush, that beautiful singer, inviting the day once more to enter his pine woods. (so you may hear the wood thrush and whip-poor-will at the same time.) now go by two whip-poor-wills, in haste seeking some coverts from the eye of day. and the bats are flying about on the edge of the wood, improving the last moments of their day in catching insects. the moon appears at length, not yet as a cloud, but with a frozen light, ominous of her fate. the early cars sound like a wind in the woods. the chewinks make a business now of waking each other up with their low yorrick in the neighboring low copse. june 23, 1852. the wood thrush sings at all hours. i associate it with the cool morning, sultry noon, and serene evening. at this hour ^ it suggests a cool vigor. ^ [early morning.] wood thrush 379 july 5, 1852. some birds are poets and sing all summer. they are the true singers. any man can write verses during the love season. i am reminded of this while we rest in the shade on the major heywood road and listen to a wood thrush, now just before sunset. we are most interested in those birds who sing for the love of the music and not of their mates ; who meditate their strains, and amuse themselves with singing ; the birds, the strains, of deeper sentiment ; not bobolinks, that lose their plumage, their bright colors, and their song so early. the robin, the red-eye, the veery, the wood thrush, etc., etc. the wood thrush's is no opera music ; it is not so much the composition as the strain, the tone, — cool bars of melody from the atmosphere of everlasting morning or evening. it is the quality of the song, not the sequence. in the peawai's * note there is some sul triness, but in the thrush's, though heard at noon, there is the liquid coolness of things that are just drawn from the bottom of springs. the thrush alone declares the immortal wealth and vigor that is in the forest. here is a bird in whose strain the story is told, though nature waited for the science of aesthetics to discover it to man. whenever a man hears it, he is young, and nature is in her spring. wherever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates of heaven 'are not shut against him. most other birds sing from the level of my ordinary cheerful hours — a carol ; but this bird never fails to speak to me out of an ether purer than that i breathe, of immortal beauty and ^ [the wood pewee.] 380 notes on new england birds vigor. he deepens the significance of all things seen in the light of his strain. he sings to make men take higher and truer views of things. he sings to amend their institutions ; to relieve the slave on the plantation and the prisoner in his dungeon, the slave in the house of luxury and the prisoner of his own low thoughts. july 27, 1852. how cool and assuaging the thrush's note after the fever of the day ! i doubt if they have anything so richly wild in europe. so long a civiliza tion must have banished it. it will only be heard in america, perchance, while our star is in the ascendant. i should be very much surprised if i were to hear in the strain of the nightingale such unexplored wildness and fertility, reaching to sundown, inciting to emigra tion. such a bird must itself have emigrated long ago. why, then, was i born in america? i might ask. may 17, 1853. the wood thrush has sung for some time. he touches a depth in me which no other bird's song does. he has learned to sing, and no thrumming of the strings or tuning disturbs you. other birds may whistle pretty well, but he is the master of a finer toned instrument. his song is musical, not from associa tion merely, not from variety, but the character of its tone. it is all divine, — a shakespeare among birds, and a homer too. june 12, 1853. the note of the wood thrush answers to some cool, unexhausted morning vigor in the hearer. june 14, 1853. the wood thrush launches forth his evening strains from the midst of the pines. i admire the moderation of this master. there is nothing tumul tuous in his song. he launches forth one strain with all wood thrush 381 his heart and life and soul, of pure and unmatchable melody, and then he pauses and gives the hearer and himself time to digest this, and then another and another at suitable intervals. men talk of the rich song of other birds, — the thrasher, mockingbird, nightingale. but i doubt, i doubt. they know not what they say ! there is as great an interval between the thrasher and the wood thrush as between thomson's " seasons " and homer. the sweetness of the day crystallizes in this morning coolness. june 22, 1853. as i come over the hill, i hear the wood thrush singing his evening lay. this is the only bird whose note affects me like music, affects the flow and tenor of my thought, my fancy and imagination. it lifts and exhilarates me. it is inspiring. it is a med icative draught to my soul. it is an elixir to my eyes and a fountain of youtli to all my senses. it changes all hours to an eternal morning. it banishes all trivialness. it reinstates me in my dominion, makes me the lord of creation, is chief musician of my court. this minstrel sings in a time, a heroic age, with which no event in the village can be contemporary. how can they be con temporary when only the latter is temporary at all? how can the infinite and eternal be contemporary with the finite and temporal? so there is something in the music of the cow-bell, something sweeter and more nutritious, than in the milk which the farmers drink. this thrush's song is a ranz des vetches to me. i long for wildness, a nature which i cannot put my foot through, woods where the wood thrush forever sings, where the hours are early morning ones, and there is 382 notes on new england birds dew on the grass, and the day is forever unproved, where i might have a fertile unknown for a soil about me. i would go after the cows, i would watch the flocks of admetus there forever, only for my board and clothes. a new hampshire everlasting and unfallen. all that was ripest and fairest in the wilderness and the wild man is preserved and transmitted to us in the strain of the wood thrush. it is the mediator be tween barbarism and civilization. it is unrepentant as greece. dec. 31, 1853. there are a few sounds still which never fail to affect me. the notes of the wood thrush and the sound of a vibrating chord, these affect me as many sounds once did often, and as almost all should. the strains of the seolian harp and of the wood thrush are the truest and loftiest preachers that i know now left on this earth. i know of no missionaries to us hea then comparable to them. they, as it were, lift us up in spite of ourselves. they intoxicate, they charm us. may 28, 1855. while we sit by the path in the depths of the woods three quarters of a mile beyond hayden's, confessing the influence of almost the first summer warmth, the wood thrush sings steadily for half an hour, now at 2.30 p. m., amid the pines, — loud and clear and sweet. while other birds are warbling between whiles and catching their prey, he alone appears to make a business of singing, like a true minstrel. july 31, 1858. got the wood thrush's nest of june 19th (now empty). it was placed between many small upright shoots, against the main stem of the slender wood thrush 383 maple, and measures four and a half to five inches in diameter from outside to outside of the rim, and on6 and three quarters deep within. it is quite firm (except the external leaves falling off), the rim about three quarters of an inch thick, and it is composed externally of leaves, apparently chiefly chestnut, very much de cayed, beneath which, in the place of the grass and stubble of which most nests are composed, are appar ently the midribs of the same leaves, whose whole pulp, etc., is gone, arranged as compactly and densely (in a curving manner) as grass or stubble could be, upon a core, not of mud, but a pale-brown composition quite firm and smooth (within), looking like inside of a cocoa nut-shell, and apparently composed of decayed leaf pulp (?), which the bird has perhaps mixed and ce mented with its saliva. this is about a quarter of an inch thick and about as regular as a half of a cocoanut shell. within this, the lower part is lined with consider able rather coarse black root-fibre and a very little fine stubble. from some particles of fine white sand, etc., on the pale-brown composition of the nest, i thought it was obtained from the pond shore. this composition, viewed through a microscope, has almost a cellular structure. aiig. 9, 1858. the wood thrush's was a peculiarly woodland nest, made solely of such materials as that unfrequented grove afforded, the refuse of the wood or shore of the pond. there was no horsehair, no twine nor paper nor other relics of art in it. \_see also under general and miscellaneous, pp. 404, 427.] 384 notes on new england birds veery; wilson's thrush june 19, 1853. in the middle of the path to wharf rock at flint's pond, the nest of a wilson's thrush, five or six inches high, between the green stems of three or four golden-rods, made of dried grass or fibres of bark, with dry oak leaves attached loosely, making the whole nine or ten inches wide, to deceive the eye. two blue eggs. like an accidental heap. who taught it to do thus? hermit thrush ^ june, 15, 1851. i sit in the shade of the pines to hear a wood thrush at noon. the ground smells of dry leaves ; the heat is oppressive. the bird begins on a low strain, i. e. it first delivers a strain on a lower key, then a moment after another a little higher, then another still varied from the others, — no two successive strains alike, but either ascending or descending.^ he confines himself to his few notes, in 'which he is unrivalled, as if his kind had learned this and no more anciently. april 30, 1852. i hear a wood thrush ^ here, with a fine metallic ring to his note. this sound most ade quately expresses the immortal beauty and wildness of the woods. i go in search of him. he sounds no nearer. ^ [see note to wood thrush, p. 377. the hermit thrush was a rare bird to thoreau. he detected it occasionally in spring and autumn, but he seems never to have suspected that it was a regular summer resident in concord and that he had often listened to its song.] ^ [the song described seems to be that of the hermit thrush.] ' [thoreau's april and very early may wood thrushes were all doubtless hermit thrushes.] hermit thrush 385 on a low bougli of a small maple near the brook in the swamp, he sits with ruffled feathers, singing more low or with less power, as it were ventriloquizing ; for though i am scarcely more than a rod off, he seems further off than ever. may 1, 1852. i hear the first catbird also, mewing, and the wood thrush, which still thrills me, — a sound to be heard in a new country, — from one side of a clearing. may 3, 1852. the wood thrush reminds me of cool mountain springs and morning walks. april 27, 1854. the wood thrush afar, — so superior a strain to that of other birds. i was doubting if it would affect me as of yore, but it did measurably. i did not believe there could be such differences. this is the gospel according to the wood thrush. he makes a sab bath out of a week-day. i could go to hear him, could buy a pew in his church. did he ever practice pulpit eloquence ? he is right on the slavery question. aiwil 21, 1855. at cliffs, i hear at a distance a wood thrush. it affects us as a part of our unfallen selves. june, 22, 1856. r. w. e. imitates the wood thrush by he willy willy — ha willy willy — willy 0. [^see also under nighthawk, p. 209.] american robin march 26, 1846. the change from foul weather to fair, from dark, sluggish hours to serene, elastic ones, is a memorable crisis which all things proclaim. the change from foulness to serenity is instantaneous. sud denly an influx of light, though it was late, filled my 386 notes on new england birds room. i looked out and saw that the pond was already calm and full of hope as on a summer evening, though the ice was dissolved but yesterday. there seemed to be some intelligence in the pond which responded to the unseen serenity in a distant horizon. i heard a robin in the distance, — the first i had heard this spring, — repeating the assurance. the green pitch pine sud denly looked brighter and more erect, as if now entirely washed and cleansed by the rain. i knew it would not rain any more. a serene summer-evening sky seemed darkly reflected in the pond, though the clear sky was nowhere visible overhead. it was no longer the end of a season, but the beginning. the pines and shrub oaks, which had before drooped and cowered the winter through with myself, now recovered their several char acters and in the landscape revived the expression of an immortal beauty. trees seemed all at once to be fitly grouped, to sustain new relations to men and to one another. there was somewhat cosmical in the arrange ment of nature. o the evening robin, at the close of a new england day ! if i could ever find the twig he sits upon! where does the minstrel really roost? we perceive it is not the bird of the ornithologist that is heard, — the turdus migratorius. july 27, 1851. after taking the road by webster's^ beyond south marshfield, i walked a long way at noon, hot and thirsty, before i could find a suitable place to sit and eat my dinner, — a place where the shade and the sward pleased me. at length i was obliged to put up with a small shade close to the ruts, where the only ^ [daniel webster's house at marshfield, mass.] american robin 387 stream i had seen for some time crossed the road. here, also, numerous robins came to cool and wash them selves and to drink. they stood in the water up to their bellies, from time to time wetting their wings and tails and also ducking their heads and sprinkling the water over themselves ; then they sat on a fence near by to dry. then a goldfinch came and did the same, accompanied by the less brilliant female. these birds evidently en joyed their bath greatly, and it seemed indispensable to them. april 1, 1852. i hear a robin singing in the woods south of hosmer's, just before sunset. it is a sound as sociated with new england village life. it brings to my thoughts summer evenings when the children are playing in the yards before the doors and their parents conversing at the open windows. it foretells all this now, before those summer hours are come. april 11, 1852. the song of a robin on an oak in hubbard's grove sounds far ofif. so i have heard a robin within three feet in a cage in a dark barroom (how unstained by all the filth of that place ?) with a kind of ventriloquism so singing that his song sounded far off on the elms. it was more 'pathetic still for this. the robins are singing now on all hands while the sun is setting. at what an expense any valuable work is per formed ! at the expense of a life ! if you do one thing well, what else are you good for in the meanwhile ? april 13, 1852. the robin is the only bird as yet that makes a business of singing, steadily singing, — sings continuously out of pure joy and melody of soul, carols. the jingle of the song sparrow, simple and 388 notes on new england birds sweet as it is, is not of sufficient volume nor sufficiently continuous to command and hold attention, and the bluebird's is but a transient warble, from a throat over flowing with azure and serene hopes ; but the song of the robin on the elms or oaks, loud and clear and heard afar through the streets of a village, makes a fit con clusion to a spring day. the larks are not yet in suf ficient numbers or sufficiently musical. the robin is the prime singer as yet. the blackbird's congweree, when first heard in the spring, is pleasant from the associa tions it awakens, and is best heard by one boating on the river. it belongs to the stream. the robin is the only bird with whose song the groves can be said to be now vocal morning and evening, for, though many other notes are heard, none fill the air like this bird. as yet no other thrushes. april 21, 1852. on the east side of ponkawtasset i hear a robin singing cheerily from some perch in the wood, in the midst of the rain, where the scenery is now wild and dreary. his song a singular antagonism and offset to the storm. as if nature said, " have faith ; these two things i can do." it sings with power, like a bird of great faith thai sees the bright future through the dark present, to reassure the race of man, like one to whom many talents were given and who will improve its talents. they are sounds to make a dying man live. they sing not their despair. it is a pure, immortal melody. the birds are singing in the rain about the small pond in front, the inquisitive chickadee that has flown american robin 389 at once to the alders to reconnoitre us, the blackbirds, the song sparrow, telling of expanding buds. but above all the robin sings here too, i know not at what dis tance in the wood. " did he sing thus in indian days ?" i ask myself ; for i have always associated this sound with the village and the clearing, but now i do detect the aboriginal wildness in his strain, and can im agine him a woodland bird, and that he sang thus when there was no civilized ear to hear him, a pure forest melody even like the wood thrush. every genuine thing retains this wild tone, which no true culture displaces. i heard him even as he might have sounded to the indian, singing at evening upon the elm above his wigwam, with which was associated in the red man's mind the events of an indian's life, his childhood. formerly i had heard in it only those strains which tell of the white man's village life ; now i heard those strains which remembered the red man's life, such as fell on the ears of indian children, — as he sang when these arrowheads, which the rain has made shine so on the lean stubble-field, were fastened to their shaft. thus the birds sing round this piece of water, some on the alders which fringe, some farther off and higher up the hills ; it is a centre to them. march 18, 1853. i stand still now to listen if i may hear the note of any new bird, for the sound of my steps hinders, and there are so few sounds at this sea son in a still afternoon like this that you are pretty sure to detect one within a considerable distance. hark ! did i not hear the note of some bird then ? methinks it could not have been my own breathing 390 notes on new england birds through my nose. no, there it is again, — a robin ; and we have put the winter so much further behind us. what mate does he call to in these deserted fields ? it is, as it were, a scared note as he whisks by, followed by the familiar but still anxious toot^ toot, toot. he does not sing as yet. there were one or two more fine bird like tinkling sounds i could not trace home, not to be referred to my breathing. march 21, 1853. how suddenly the newly arrived birds are dispersed over the whole town ! how numer ous they must be ! robins are now quite abundant, fly ing in flocks. one after another flits away before you from the trees, somewhat like grasshoppers in the grass, uttering their notes faintly, — ventriloquizing, in fact. i hear one meditating a bar to be sung anon, which sounds a quarter of a mile off, though he is within two rods. however, they do not yet get to melody. i thank the red-wing for a little bustle and commotion which he makes, trying to people the fields again. march 31, 1853. the robins sing at the very earli est dawn. i wake with their note ringing in my ear. april 4, 1853. last night, a sugaring of snow, which goes off in an hour or two in the rain. rains all day, . . . the robins sang this morning, nevertheless, and now more than ever hop about boldly in the garden in the rain, with full, broad, light cow-colored breasts. april 6, 1853. the robin is the singer at present, such is its power and universality, being found both in garden and wood. morning and evening it does not fail, perched on some elm or the like, and in rainy days it is one long morning or evening. the song spar american robin 391 row is still more universal but not so powerful. the lark, too, is equally constant, morning and evening, but con fined to certain localities, as is the blackbird to some ex tent. the bluebird, with feebler but not less sweet war bling, helps fill the air, and the phoebe does her part. the tree sparrow, f. hyemalis, and fox-colored sparrows make the meadow-sides or gardens where they are flit ting vocal, the first with its canary-like twittering, the second with its lively ringing trills or jingle. the third is a very sweet and more powerful singer, which would be memorable if we heard him long enough. the wood pecker's tapping, though not musical, suggests pleasant associations in the cool morning, — is inspiriting, en livening. the robins, too, now toward sunset, perched on the old apple trees in tarbell's orchard, twirl forth their evening lays unweariedly. oct. 10, 1853. this morning it is very pleasant and warm. there are many small birds in flocks on the elms in cheney's field, faintly warbling, — robins and purple finches and especially large flocks of small sparrows, which make a business of washing and pruning them selves in the puddles in the road, as if cleaning up after a long flight and the wind of yesterday. the faint sup pressed warbling of the robins sounds like a reminis cence of the spring. march 8, 1855. stopping in a sunny and sheltered place on a hillock in the woods, — for it was raw in the wind, — i heard the hasty, shuffling, as if frightened, note of a rohin from a dense birch wood, — a sort of 392 notes on new england birds tcjie tche tche tche tche^ — and then probably it dashed through the birches ; and so they fetch the year about. just fi'om the south shore, perchance, it alighted not in the village street, but in this remote birch wood. this sound reminds me of rainy, misty april days in past years. once or twice before, this afternoon, i thought i heard one and listened, but in vain. may 4, 1855. a robin sings when i, in the house, cannot distinguish the earliest dawning from the full moonlight. his song first advertised me of the daybreak, when i thought it was night, as i lay looking out into the full moonlight. i heard a robin begin his strain, and yielded the point to him, believing that he was better acquainted with the springs of the day than i, — with the signs of day. june 2, 1855. mr. hoar tells me that deacon far rar's son tells him that a white robin has her nest on an apple tree near their house. her mate is of the usual color. all the family have seen her, but at the last accounts she has not been seen on the nest. april 16, 1856. the robins sing with a will now. what a burst of melody ! it gurgles out of all conduits now ; they are choked with it. there is such a tide and rush of song as when a river is straightened between two rocky walls. it seems as if the morning's throat were not large enough to emit all this sound. the robin sings most before six o'clock now. i note where some suddenly cease their song, making a quite remarkable vacuum. feh. 27, 1857. before i opened the window this cold morning, i heard the peep of a robin, that sound so american robin 393 often heard in cheerless or else rainy weather, so often heard first borne on the cutting march wind or through sleet or rain, as if its coming were premature. oct. 21, 1857. i see a robin eating prinos * berries. is not the robin the principal berry-eating bird nowa days ? there must be more about the barberry bushes in melvin's preserve than anywhere. nov. 3, 1857. i see on many rocks, etc., the seeds of the barberry, which have been voided by birds, — robins, no doubt, chiefly. how many they must thus scatter over the fields, spreading the barberry far and wide ! that has been their business for a month. march 24, 1858. the chip of the ground-bird ^ re sembles that of a robin, i. e., its expression is the same, only fainter, and reminds me that the robin's peep, which sounds like a note of distress, is also a chi'p^ or call-note to its kind. june 3, 1858. they seemed to me wild robins that placed their nests in the spruce up there.^ i noticed one nest. william emerson, senior, says they do not breed on staten island. they do breed at least at hud son's bay. they are certainly a hardy bird, and are at home on this cool mountain-top. march 7, 1859. the first note which i heard from the robins, far under the hill, was 8veet sveet, suggesting a certain haste and alarm, and then a rich, hollow, some what plaintive ^eep or peep-eep-eep, as when in distress with young just flown. when you first see them alighted, they have a haggard, an anxious and hurried, look. 1 [black alder, or winterberry, {ilex verticillata) .] 2 that is, song sparrow. ^ [on mt. monadnock.] 394 notes on new england bieds oct. 5, 1861. this is a rainy or drizzling day at last, and the robins and sparrows are more numerous in the yard and about the house than ever. they swarm on the ground where stood the heap of weeds which was burned yesterday, picking up the seeds which rattled from it. why should these birds be so much more nu merous about the house such a day as this? i think of no other reason than because it is darker and fewer people are moving about to frighten them. our little mountain-ash is all alive with them. a dozen robins on it at once, busily reaching after and plucking the berries, actually make the whole tree shake. there are also some little birds (1 think purple finches) with them. a robin will swallow half a dozen berries, at least, in rapid succession before it goes off, and appar ently it soon comes back for more. [/s'ee also under chipping sparrow, p. 299 ; general and miscellaneous, pp. 403, 406, 419, 426, 427.j bluebird april 26, 1838. the bluebirds in the midst of the poplar that stands by our door we planted a bluebird box. and we hoped before the summer was o'er a transient pair to coax. one warm summer's day the bluebirds came and lighted on our tree, but at first the wand'rers were not so tame but they were afraid of me. bluebird 395 they seemed to come from the distant south, just over the walden wood, and they skimmed it along with open mouth close by where the bellows stood. warbling they swept round the distant cliff, and they warbled it over the lea, and over the blacksmith's shop in a jiff did they come warbling to me. they came and sat on the box's top without looking into the hole. and only from this side to that did they hop, as 't were a common well-pole. methinks i had never seen them before, nor indeed had they seen me, till i chanced to stand by our back door. and they came to the poplar tree. in course of time they built their nest and reared a happy brood, and every morn they piped their best as they flew away to the wood. thus wore the summer hours away to the bluebirds and to me. and every hour was a summer's day. so pleasantly lived we. they were a world within themselves, and i a world in me. 396 notes on new england birds up in the tree — the little elves — with their callow family. one morn the wind blowed cold and strong, and the leaves went whirling away ; the birds prepared for their journey long that raw and gusty day. boreas came blust'ring down from the north, and ruffled their azure smocks, so they launched them forth, though somewhat loth, by way of the old cliff rocks. meanwhile the earth jogged steadily on in her mantle of purest white, and anon another spring was born when winter was vanished quite. and i wandered forth o'er the steamy earth, and gazed at the mellow sky, but never before from the hour of my birth had i wandered so thoughtfully. ' for never before was the earth so still, and never so mild was the sky. the river, the fields, the woods, and the hill seemed to heave an audible sierh. *i3' i felt that the heavens were all around, and the earth was all below, as when in the ears there rushes a sound which thrills you from top to toe. bluebird 397 i dreamed that i was a waking thought, a something i hardly knew, not a solid piece, nor an empty nought, but a drop of morning dew. 't was the world and i at a game of bo-peep, as a man would dodge his shadow, an idea becalmed in eternity's deep, 'tween lima and segraddo. anon a faintly warbled note from out the azure deep into my ears did gently float as is the approach of sleep. it thrilled but startled not my soul ; across my mind strange mem'ries gleamed. as often distant scenes unroll when we have lately dreamed. the bluebird had come from the distant south to his box in the poplar tree. and he opened wide his slender mouth on purpose to sing to me. july 16, 1851. the plaintive, spring-restoring peep of a bluebird is occasionally heard. oct. 10, 1851. the air this morning is full of blue birds, and again it is spring. march 10, 1852. i see flocks of a dozen bluebirds together. the warble of this bird is innocent and ce lestial, like its color. saw a sparrow, perhaps a song 398 notes on new england birds sparrow, flitting amid the young oaks where the ground was covered with snow. i think that this is an indica tion that the ground is quite bare a little further south. probably the spring birds never fly far over a snow clad country. a woodchopper tells me he heard a robin this morning. march 15, 1852. a mild spring day. . . . the air is full of bluebirds. the ground almost entirely bare. the villagers are out in the sun, and every man is happy whose work takes him outdoors. ... i lean over a rail to hear what is in the air, liquid with the bluebirds' warble. april 3, 1852. the bluebird carries the sky on his back. march 10, 1853. what was that sound that came on the softened air? it was the warble of the first blue bird from that scraggy apple orchard yonder. when this is heard, then has spring arrived. march 18, 1853. i no sooner step out of the house than i hear the bluebirds in the air, and far and near, everywhere except in the woods, throughout the town you may hear them, — the blue curls of their warblings, — harbingers of serene and warm weather, little azure rills of melody trickling here and there from out the air, their short warble trilled in the air reminding of so many corkscrews assaulting and thawing the torpid mass of winter, assisting the ice and snow to melt and the streams to flow. the bluebird and song sparrow sing immediately on their arrival, and hence deserve to enjoy some preemi bluebird 399 nence. they give expression to the joy which the sea son inspires. but the robin and blackbird only peep and chuck at first, commonly, and the lark is silent and flitting. the bluebird at once fills the air with his sweet warbling, and the song sparrow from the top of a rail pours forth his most joyous strain. both express their delight at the weather which permits them to return to their favorite haunts. they are the more welcome to man for it. april 5, 1853. the bluebird comes to us bright in his vernal dress as a bridegroom. has he not got new feathers then? march 11, 1854. bluebirds' warbling curls in elms. march 19, 1855. when i reach my landing i hear my first bluebird, somewhere about cheney's trees by the river. i hear him out of the blue deeps, but do not yet see his blue body. he comes with a warble. now first generally heard in the village. april 9, 1856. meanwhile a bluebird sits on the same oak, three rods off, pluming its wings. i hear faintly the warbling of one, apparently a quarter of a mile off, and am very slow to detect that it is even this one before me, which, in the intervals of plum ing itself, is apparently practicing in an incredibly low voice. may 11, 1856. a bluebird's nest and five eggs in a hollow apple tree three feet from ground near the old bank swallow pit, made with much stubble and dried grass. can see the bird sitting from without. jubj 12, 1856. hear the plaintive note of young bluebirds, a reviving and gleaming of their blue ray. 400 notes on new england birds sept 27, 1856. the bluebird family revisit their box and warble as in spring. feb. 18, 1857. i am excited by this wonderful air and go listening for the note of the bluebird or other comer. the very grain of the air seems to have under gone a change and is ready to split into the form of the bluebird's warble. methinks if it were visible, or i could cast up some fine dust which would betray it, it would take a corresponding shape. the bluebird does not come till the air consents and his wedge will enter easily. the air over these fields is a foundry full of moulds for casting bluebirds' warbles. any sound uttered now would take that form, not of the harsh, vibrating, rending scream of the jay, but a softer, flow ing, curling warble, like a purling stream or the lobes of flowing sand and clay. here is the soft air, and the moist expectant apple trees, but not yet the bluebird. they do not quite attain to song. feb. 24, 1857. i am surprised to hear the strain of a song sparrow from the riverside, and as i cross from the causeway to the hill, thinking of the bluebird, i that instant hear one's note from deep in the softened air. it is already 40°, and by noon is between 50° and 60°. as the day advances i hear more bluebirds and see their azure flakes settling on the fence-posts. their short, rich, crispy warble curls through the air. its grain now lies parallel to the curve of the bluebird's warble, like boards of the same lot. march 2, 1859. the bluebird which some woodchop per or inspired walker is said to have seen in that sunny interval between the snow-storms is like a speck of clear bluebird 401 blue sky seen near the end of a storm, reminding us of an ethereal region and a heaven which we had forgotten. princes and magistrates are often styled serene, but what is their turbid serenity to that ethereal serenity which the bluebird embodies? his most serene bird ship! his soft warble melts in the ear, as the snow is melting in the valleys around. the bluebird comes and with his warble drills the ice and sets free the rivers and ponds and frozen ground. as the sand flows down the slopes a little way. assuming the forms of foliage where the frost comes out of the ground, so this little rill of melody flows a short way down the concave of the sky. the sharp whistle of the blackbird, too, is heard like single sparks or a shower of them shot up from the swamps and seen against the dark winter in the rear. march 7, 1859. there are few, if any, so coarse and insensible that they are not interested to hear that the bluebird has come. the irish laborer has learned to distinguish him and report his arrival. it is a part of the news of the season to the lawyer in his office and the mechanic in his shop, as well as to the farmer. one will remember, perchance, to tell you that he saw one a week ago in the next town or county. citizens just come into the country to live put up a bluebird box, and record in some kind of journal the date of the first ar rival observed, — though it may be rather a late one. the farmer can tell you when he saw the first one, if you ask him within a week. march 10, 1859. the bluebird on the apple tree, warbling so innocently to inquire if any of its mates are 402 notes on new england birds within call, — the angel of the spring ! fair and inno cent, yet the offspring of the earth. the color of the sky above and of the subsoil beneath. suggesting what sweet and innocent melody (terrestrial melody) may have its birthplace between the sky and the ground. l_see also under chipping sparrow, p. 298 ; warblers, p. 359 ; robin, p. 391 ; general and miscellaneous, pp. 403, 425.] xxii general and miscellaneous march 4, 1840. i learned to-day that my ornithology had done me no service. the birds i heard, which for tunately did not come within the scope of my science, sung as freshly as if it had been the first morning of creation, and had for background to their song an un trodden wilderness, stretching through many a carolina and mexico of the soul. april 25, 1841. a momentous silence reigns always in the woods, and their meaning seems just ripening into expression. but alas ! they make no haste. the rush sparrow,* nature's minstrel of serene hours, sings of an immense leisure and duration. when i hear a robin sing at sunset, i cannot help contrasting the equanimity of nature with the bustle and impatience of man. we return from the lyceum and caucus with such stir and excitement as if a crisis were at hand ; but no natural scene or sound sympathizes with us, for nature is always silent and unpretending as at the break of day. she but rubs her eyelids. sept. 29, 1842. to-day the lark sings again down in the meadow, and the robin peeps, and the bluebirds, old and young, have revisited their box, as if they would fain repeat the summer without the intervention of winter, if nature would let them. ^ [the field sparrow. see note on p. 299.] 404 notes on new england birds 1850. in all my rambles i have seen no landscape which can make me forget fair haven, i still sit on its cliff in a new spring day, and look over the awakening woods and the river, and hear the new birds sing, with the same delight as ever. it is as sweet a mystery to me as ever what this world is. fair haven lake in the south, with its pine-covered island and its meadows, the hickories putting out fresh young yellowish leaves, and the oaks light-grayish ones, while the oven-bird thrums his sawyer-like strain, and the chewink rustles through the dry leaves or repeats his jingle on a tree-top, and the wood thrush, the genius of the wood, whistles for the first time his clear and thrilling strain, — it sounds as it did the first time i heard it. the sight of these budding woods intoxicates me, — this diet drink. 1850. now, about the first of september, you will see flocks of small birds forming compact and distinct masses, as if they were not only animated by one spirit but actually held together by some invisible fluid or film, and will hear the sound of their wings rippling or fan ning the air as they flow through it, flying, the whole mass, ricochet like a single bird, — or as they flow over the fence. their mind must operate faster than man's, in proportion as their bodies do. nov. 8, 1850. everything stands silent and expectant. if i listen, i hear only the note of a chickadee, — our most common and i may say native bird, most identified with our forests, — or perchance the scream of a jay, or perchance from the solemn depths of these woods i hear tolling far away the knell of one departed. thought rushes in to fill the vacuum. as you walk, however, the general and miscellaneous 405 partridge still bursts away. the silent, dry, almost leafless, certainly fruitless woods. you wonder what cheer that bird can find in them. the partridge bursts away from the foot of a shrub oak like its own dry fruit, immortal bird ! this sound still startles us. jan. 7, 1851. the snow is sixteen inches deep at least, but it is a mild and genial afternoon, as if it were the beginning of a january thaw. take away the snow and it would not be winter but like many days in the fall. the birds acknowledge the difference in the air; the jays are more noisy, and the chickadees are of tener heard. june 13, 1851. i hear, just as the night sets in, faint notes from time to time from some sparrow (?) falling asleep, — a vesper hymn, — and later, in the woods, the chuckling, rattling sound of some unseen bird on the near trees. the nighthawk booms wide awake. june 14, 1851. now the sun is fairly gone, i hear tlie dreaming frog,* and the whip-poor-will from some darker wood, — it is not far from eight, — and the cuckoo. the song sparrows sing quite briskly among the willows, as if it were spring again, and the black bird's harsher note resounds over the meadows, and the veery's comes up from the wood. in conant's orchard i hear the faint cricket-like sons: of a sparrow saying its vespers, as if it were a link be tween the cricket and the bird. the robin sings now, though the moon shines silverly, and the veery jingles its trill. ^ toad ? [thoreau afterwards learned that his " dreaming frogs " were toads. in this case it was probably fowler's toad.] 406 notes on new england birds july 10, 1851. the swallows are improving this short day, twittering as they fly, and the huckleberry-bird ^ repeats his jingling strain, and the song sparrpw, more honest than most. july 12, 1851. i hear that sort of throttled or chuck ling note as of a bird flying high, now from this side, then from that.^ ... i am startled by the rapid transit of some wild animal across my path, a rabbit or a fox, — or you hardly know if it be not a bird. looking down from the clififs, the leaves of the tree-tops shine more than ever by day. here and there a lightning-bug shows his greenish light over the tops of the trees. as i return through the orchard, a foolish robin bursts away from his perch unnaturally, with the habits of man. july 13, 1851. i hear, 4 p. m,, a pigeon woodpecker on a dead pine near by, uttering a harsh and scolding scream, spying me. the chewink jingles on the tops of the bushes, and the rush sparrow,^ the vireo, and oven bird at a distance ; and a robin sings, superior to all ; and a barking dog has started something on the oppo site side of the river; and now the wood thrush sur passes them all. july 16, 1851. now, at 4 p. m., i hear the pewee in the woods, and the cuckoo reminds me of some silence among the birds i had not noticed. the vireo (red eyed ?} sings like a robin at even, incessantly, — for i 1 [the field sparrow. see pp. 299, 300.] ' [probably a cuckoo. see mr. gerald h. thayer's account of the nocturnal flights of the black-billed cuckoo in bird-lore. september october, 190o. vol. v, pp. 143-145.] 2 [the field sparrow. see note on p. 299.] general and miscellaneous 407 have now turned into conant's woods. the oven-bird helps fill some pauses. . . . here comes a small bird with a ricochet flight and a faint twittering note like a messenger from elysium. nov. 9, 1851. now the leaves are gone the birds' nests are revealed, the brood being fledged and flown. there is a perfect adaptation in the material used in constructing a nest. there is one which i took from a maple on the causeway at hubbard's bridge. it is fas tened to the twigs by white woolen strings (out of a shawl?), which it has picked up in the road, though it is more than half a mile from a house ; and the sharp eyes of the bird have discovered plenty of horsehairs out of the tail or mane, with which to give it form by their spring ; with fine meadow hay for body, and the reddish woolly material which invests the ferns in the spring (apparently) for lining. march 10, 1852. i was reminded, this morning be fore i rose, of those undescribed ambrosial mornings of summer which i can remember, when a thousand birds were heard gently twittering and ushering in the light, like the argument to a new canto of an epic and heroic poem. the serenity, the infinite promise, of such a morning ! the song or twitter of birds drips from the leaves like dew. then there was something divine and immortal in our life. when i have waked up on my couch in the woods and seen the day dawning, and heard the twittering of the birds. april 2, 1852. 6 a. m. — the sun is up. the water on the meadows is perfectly smooth and placid, reflect ing; the hills and clouds and trees. the air is full of 408 notes on new england birds the notes of birds, — song sparrows, red-wiugs, robins (singing a strain), bluebirds, — and i hear also a lark, — as if all the earth had burst forth into songf. the influence of this april morning has reached them, for thej^ live out-of-doors all the night, and there is no danger that they will oversleep themselves such a morning. ajyril 4, 1852. p. m. — going across ayheeler's large field beyond potter's, saw a large flock of small birds go by, i am not sure what kind, the near ones contin ually overtaking the foremost, so that the whole flock appeared to roll over as it went forward. when they lit on a tree, they appeared at a distance to clothe it like dead leaves. ajwil 17, 1852. gilpin says, " as the wheeling mo tion of the gull is beautiful, so also is the figured flight of the goose, the duck, and the widgeon ; all of which are highly ornamental to coast-views, bays, and estua ries." ^ a flight of ducks adds to the wildness of our wildest river scenery. undoubtedly the soaring and sailing of the hen-hawk, the red-shouldered buzzard (?), is the most ornamental, graceful, stately, beautiful to contemplate, of all the birds that ordinarily frequent our skies. the eag^le is but a rare and casual visitor. the goose, the osprey, the great heron, though interest ing, are either transient visitors or rarely seen ; they either move through the air as passengers or too exclu sively looking for their prey, but the hen-hawk soars like a creature of the air. the flight of martins is inter esting in the same way. when i was young and com ^ [^remarks on forest scenery.] general and miscellaneous 409 pelled to pass my sunday in the house without the aid of interesting books, i used to spend many an hour till the wished-for sundown watching the martins soar, from an attic window ; and fortunate indeed did i deem myself when a hawk appeared in the heavens, though far toward the horizon against a downy cloud, and i searched for hours till i had found his mate. they, at least, took my thoughts from earthly things. april 23, 1852. vegetation starts when the earth's axis is sufficiently inclined ; i. e., it follows the sun. in sects and all the smaller animals (as well as many larger) follow vegetation. the fishes, the small fry, start probably for this reason ; worms come out of the trees ; buffaloes finally seek new pastures ; water-bugs appear on the water, etc., etc. next, the large fish and fish hawks, etc., follow the small fry; flycatchers follow the insects and worms. (the granivorous birds, who can depend on the supplies of dry seeds of last year, are to some extent independent of the seasons, and can remain through the winter or come early in the spring, and they furnish food for a few birds of prey at that season.) indians follow the buffaloes ; trout, suckers, etc., follow the water-bugs, etc.; reptiles follow vege tation, insects, and worms ; birds of prey, the fly catchers, etc. man follows all, and all follow the sun. the greater or less abundance of food determines mi grations. if the buds are deceived and suffer from frost, then are the birds. the great necessary of life for the brute creation is food; next, perhaps, shelter, i. e. a suitable climate ; thirdly, perhaps, security from foes. may 3, 1852. it requires so much closer attention to 410 notes on new england birds the habits of the birds, that, if for that reason only, i am willing to omit the gun. may 7, 1852. i think that birds vary their notes con siderably with the seasons. when i hear a bird singing, i cannot think of any words that will imitate it. what word can stand in place of a bird's note ? you would have to bury [ ? ] it, or surround it with a chevaux de frise of accents, and exhaust the art of the musical com poser besides with your different bars, to represent it, and finally get a bird to sing it, to perform it. it has so little relation to words. the wood thrush ^ says ah tuuy-tully for one strain. there appear to be one or more little warblers in the woods this morning which are new to the season, about which i am in doubt, myrtle birds among them. for now, before the leaves, they begin to jaeople the trees in this warm weather. the first wave of summer from the south. june 4, 1852. the birds sing at dawn. what sounds to be awakened by ! if only our sleep, our dreams, are such as to harmonize with the song, the warbling, of the birds, ushering in the day ! they appear compara tively silent an hour or two later. june 25, 1852. i observe that young birds are usually of a duller color and more speckled than old ones, as if for their protection in their tender state. they have not yet the markings (and the beauty) which distinguish their species, and which betray it often, but by their colors are merged in the variety of colors of the season. july 7, 1852. 4 a. m. — the first really foggy morn ing. yet before i rise i hear the song of birds from out 1 [the hermit thrush ?j general and miscellaneous 411 it, like the bursting of its bubbles with music, the bead on liquids just uncorked. their song gilds thus the frostwork of the morning. as if the fog were a great sweet froth on the surface of land and water, whose fixed air escaped, whose bubbles burst with music. the sound of its evaporation, the fixed air of the morning just brought from the cellars of the night escaping. the morning twittering of birds in perfect harmony with it. . . . the fog condenses into fountains and streams of music, as into the strain of the bobolink which i hear, and runs off so. the music of the birds is the tinkling of the rills that flow from it. i cannot see twenty rods. july 30, 1852. what a gem is a bird's egg^ especially a blue or a green one, when you see one, broken or whole, in the woods ! i noticed a small blue egg this afternoon washed up by flint's pond and half buried by white sand, and as it lay there, alternately wet and dry, no color could be fairer, no gem could have a more advan tageous or favorable setting. probably it was shaken out of some nest which overhung the water. i fre quently meet with broken egg-shells where a crow, per chance, or some other thief has been marauding. and is not that shell something very precious that houses that winged life ? aug. 6, 1852. how different the feeble twittering of the birds here at sunrise from the full quire of the spring ! only the wood thrush, a huckleberry-bird or two, or chickadee, the scream of a flicker or a jay, or the caw of a crow, and commonly only an alarmed note of a robin. a solitary peawai ^ may be heard, per ^ [wood pewee.] 412 notes on new england birds chance, or a red-eye, but no thrashers, or catbirds, or oven-birds, or the jingle of the chewink. i hear the ominous twittering of the goldfinch over all. march 18, 1853. how eagerly the birds of passage penetrate the northern ice, watching for a crack by which to enter ! forthwith the swift ducks will be seen winging their way along the rivers and up the coast. they watch the weather more sedulously than the teamster. all nature is thus forward to move with the revolution of the seasons. now for some days the birds have been ready by myriads, a flight or two south, to invade our latitudes and, with this mild and serener weather, resume their flight. i came forth expecting to bear new birds, and i am not disappointed. we know well what to count upon. their coming is more sure than the arrival of the sailing and steaming packets. almost while i listen for this purpose, i hear the chuch, chuck of a blackbird in the sky, whom i cannot detect. so small an object is lost in the wide expanse of the heavens, though no obstacle intervenes. when your eye has detected it, you can follow it well enough, but it is difficult to bring your sight to bear on it, as to direct a telescope to a particular star. how many hawks may fly undetected, yet within sight, above our heads ! and there 's the great gull i came to see, already fishing in front of bittern cliff. now he stoops to the water for his prey, but sluggishly, methinks. he requires a high and perhaps a head wind to make his motions graceful. i see no mate. he must have come up, methinks, before the storm was over, general and miscellaneous 413 unless he started when i did. i believe it is only an easterly wind or storm brings him up. march 21, 1853. morning along the river. the air full of song sparrows, — swedlt swedit swedit and then a rapid jingle or trill, holding up its head with out fear of me, the innocent, humble bird, or one pur suing another through the alders by the waterside. why are the early birds found most along the water ? these song sparrows are now first heard commonly. the black birds, too, create some melody. and the bluebirds, how sweet their warble in the soft air, heard over the water ! the robin is heard further off, and seen flying rapidly, hurriedly through the orchard. and now the elms sud denly ring with the chill-lill-lill and canary -like notes of the fringilla hyem^alis^ which fill the air more than those of any bird yet, — a little strange they sound be cause they do not tarry to breed with us, — a ringing sound. march 22, 1853. already i hear from the railroad the plaintive strain of a lark or two. they sit now conspicuous on the bare russet ground. the tinkling bubbles of the song sparrow are wafted from distant fence-posts, — little rills of song that begin to flow and tinkle as soon as the frost is out of the ground. the blackbird tries to sing, as it were with a bone in his . throat, or to whistle and sing at once. whither so fast, the restless creature, — chuch, chuch, at every rod, and now and then whistle-ter-ee ? the chill-lill of the blue snowbirds is heard again. a partridge goes off on fair haven hill-side with a sudden whir like the wad of a six-pounder, keeping just level with the tops 414 notes on new england birds of the sprouts. these birds and quails go off like a report. april 16, 1853. birds loosen and expand their feath ers and look larger in the rain. 3fay 4, 1853. the woods and paths next them now ring with the silver jingle of the field sparrow, the medley of the brown thrasher, the honest qui vive of the ehewink, or his jingle from the top of a low copse tree, while his mate scratches in the dry leaves beneath ; the black and white creeper is hopping along the oak boughs, head downward, pausing from time to time to utter its note like a fine, delicate saw-sharpening ; and ever and anon rises clear over all the smooth, rich melody of the wood thrush. may 10, 1853. there is now a multiplicity of sounds, in which the few faint spring ones are drowned. the birds are in full blast, singing, warbling, chirping, humming. yet we do not receive more ideas through our ears than before. the storms and ducks of spring have swept by and left us to the repose of summer, the farmers to the ignoble pursuits of planting and hoeing corn and potatoes. the summer is not bracing, as when you hear the note of the jay in the cool air of october from the rustling chestnut woods. june 16, 1853. before 4 a. m., or sunrise, the sound of chip-birds and robins and bluebirds, etc., fills the air and is incessant. it is a crowing on the roost, rae thinks, as the cock crows before he goes abroad. they do not sing deliberately as at eve, but greet the morn ing with an incessant twitter. even the crickets seem to join the concert. yet i think it is not the same every general and miscellaneous 415 morning, though it may be fair. an hour or two later it is comparative silence. the awaking of the birds, a tumultuous twittering. nov. 8, 1853. birds generally wear the russet dress of nature at this season. they have their fall no less than the plants ; the bright tints depart from their foliage or feathers, and they flit past like withered leaves in rustling flocks. the sparrow is a withered leaf. dec. 5, 1853. saw and heard a downy woodpecker on an apple tree. have not many winter birds, like this and the chickadee, a sharp, note like tinkling glass or icicles ? the chip of the tree sparrow, also, and the whistle of the shrike, are they not wintry in the same way ? and the sonorous hooting owl ? but not so the jay and fringilla linaria^ and still less the crow. feb. 14, 1854. in stow's wood, by the deep cut, hear the gnah gnah of the white-breasted, black-capped nuthatch. i went up the bank and stood by the fence. a little family of titmice gathered about me, search ing for their food both on the ground and on the trees, with great industry and intentness, and now and then pursuing each other. there were two nuthatches at least, talking to each other. one hung with his head down on a large pitch pine, pecking the bark "for ia long time, — leaden blue above, with a black cap and white breast. it uttered almost constantly a faint but sharp quivet or creak, difficult to trace home, which ap peared to be answered by a baser and louder gnah gnah from the other. a downy woodpecker also, with the red spot on his hind head and his cassock open behind, 416 notes on new england birds showing his white robe, kept up an incessant loud tap ping on another pitch pine. all at once an active little brown creeper makes its appearance, a small, rather slender bird, with a long tail and sparrow-colored back, and white beneath. it commences at the bottom of a tree and glides up very rapidly, then suddenly darts to the bottom of a new tree and repeats the same move ment, not resting long in one place or on one tree. these birds are all feeding and flitting along together, but the chickadees are the most numerous and the most con fiding. i observe that three of the four thus associated, viz. the chickadee, nuthatch, and woodpecker, have black crowns, — at least the first two, very conspicuous black caps. i cannot but think that this sprightly association and readiness to burst into song has to do with the prospect of spring, — more light and warmth and thaw ing weather. the titmice keep up an incessant faint tinkling tchip : now and then one utters a lively day day day, and once or twice one commenced a gurgling strain quite novel, startling, and springlike. march 1, 1854. as for the birds of the past winter : i have seen but three hawks, — one early in the winter and two lately ; have heard the hooting owl pretty often late in the afternoon. crows have not been numerous, but their cawing was heard chiefly in pleasanter morn ings. blue jays have blown the trumpet of winter as usual, but they, as all birds, are most lively in spring like days. the chickadees have been the prevailing bird. the partridge common enough. one ditcher tells me that he saw two robins in moore's swamp a month ago. i have not seen a quail, though a few have been general and miscellaneous 417 killed in the thaws. four or five downy woodpeckers. the white-breasted nuthatch four or five times. tree sparrows one or more at a time, oftener than any bird that comes to us from the north. two pigeon wood peckers, i think, lately. one dead shrike, and perhaps one or two live ones. have heard of two white owls, — one about thanksgiving time and one in midwinter. one short-eared owl in december. several flocks of snow buntings for a week in the severest storm, and in december, last past. one grebe in walden just before it froze completely. and two brown creepers once in middle of february. channing says he saw a little olivaceous-green bird lately. i have not seen an f. linaria^ nor a pine grosbeak, nor an f. hyemalis this winter, though the first was the prevailing bird last winter. march 12, 1854. all these birds do their warbling especially in the still, sunny hour after sunrise, as rivers twinkle at their sources. now is the time to be abroad and hear them, as you detect the slightest ripple in smooth water. as with tinkling sounds the sources of streams burst their icy fetters, so the rills of music begin to flow and swell the general quire of spring. may 10, 1854. in boston yesterday an ornitholo gist said significantly, " if you held the bird in your hand — ; " but i would rather hold it in my affections. aug. 10, 1854. the tinkling notes of goldfinches and bobolinks which we hear nowadays are of one character and peculiar to the season. they are not voluminous flowers, but rather nuts, of sound, — ripened seeds of sound. it is the tinkling of ripened grains in nature's 418 notes on new england birds basket. it is like the sparkle on water, — a sound pro duced by friction on the crisped air. april 6, 1855. the banks of the river are alive with song sparrows and tree sparrows. they now sing in advance of vegetation, as the flowers will blossom, — those slight tinkling, twittering sounds called the sing ing of birds ; they have come to enliven the bare twigs before the buds show any signs of starting. may 3, 1855. humphrey buttrick, one of eight who alone returned from texas out of twenty-four, says he can find woodcock's eggs ; now knows of several nests ; has seen them setting with snow around them ; and that melvin has seen partridges' eggs some days ago. he has seen crows building this year. found in a hen hawk's nest once the legs of a cat. has known of several goshawks' nests (or what he calls some kind of eagle ; garfield called it the cape eagle) ; one in a shrub oak, with eggs.' last year his dog caught seven black ducks so far grown that he got sixty cents a pair for them ; takes a pretty active dog to catch such. he frequently finds or hears of them. knew of a nest this year. also finds wood ducks' nests. has very often seen partridges drimi close to him. has watched one for an hour. they strike the body with their wings. he shot a white headed eagle from carlisle bridge. it fell in the water, and his dog was glad to let it alone. he suggested that my fish hawks found pouts in holes made by ice. may ij, 1855. waked up at 2.30 by the peep of robins, which were aroused by a fire at the pail-factory ^ [there are no authentic records of the nesting of the goshawk in massachusetts.] general and miscellaneous 419 about two miles west. i hear that the air was full of birds singing thereabouts. it rained gently at the same time, though not steadily. aug. 5, 1855. 8 p. m. — on river to see swallows. at this hour the robins fly to high, thick oaks (as this swamp white oak) to roost for the night. the wings of the chimney swallows flying near me make a whis tling sound like a duck's. is not this peculiar among the swallows ? they flutter much for want of tail. i see martins about. now many swallows in the twilight, after circling eight feet high, come back two or three hundred feet high and then go down the river. sept. 15, 1855. three weeks ago saw many brown thrashers, catbirds, robins, etc., on wild cherries. they are worth raising for the birds about you, though ob jectionable on account of caterpillars. oct. 22, 1855. birds are certainly afraid of man. they [allow] all other creatures, — cows and horses, etc., — excepting only one or two kinds, birds or beasts of prey, to come near them, but not man. what does this fact signify ? does it not signify that man, too, is a beast of prey to them ? is he, then, a true lord of cre ation, whose subjects are afraid of him, and with rea son ? they know very well that he is not humane, as he pretends to be. dec. 11, 1855. standing there, though in this bare november landscape, i am reminded of the incredible phenomenon of small birds in winter, — that ere long, amid the cold powdery snow, as it were a fruit of the season, will come twittering a flock of delicate crimson tinged birds, lesser redpolls, to sport and feed on the 420 notes on new england birds seeds and buds now just ripe for them on the sunny side of a wood, shaking down the powdery snow there in their cheerful social feeding, as if it were high mid summer to them. these crimson aerial creatures have wings which would bear them quickly to the regions of summer, but here is all the summer they want. what a rich contrast! tropical colors, crimson breasts, on cold white snow ! such etherealness, such delicacy in their forms, such ripeness in their colors, in this stern and barren season ! it is as surprising as if you were to find a brilliant crimson flower which flourished amid snows. they greet the chopper and the hunter in their furs. their maker gave them the last touch and launched them forth the day of the great snow.^ he made this bitter, imprisoning cold before which man quails, but he made at the same time these warm and glowing creatures to twitter and be at home in it. he said not only. let there be linnets in winter, but linnets of rich plumage and pleasing twitter, bearing summer in their natures. the snow will be three feet deep, the ice will be two feet thick, and last night, perchance, the mercury sank to thirty degrees below zero. all the fountains of nature seem to be sealed up. the traveller is frozen on his way. but under the edge of yonder birch wood will be a little flock of crimson-breasted lesser redpolls, busily feeding on the seeds of the birch and shaking down the powdery snow ! as if a flower were created to be now in bloom, a peach to be now ^ [the " great snow " to which thoreau refers several times in his journal and in walden occurred in 1780, as we learn from the entry ■for march 28, 1856.] general and miscellaneous 421 first fully ripe on its stem. i am struck by the perfect confidence and success of nature. there is no qiiestion about the existence of these delicate creatures, their adaptedness to their circumstances. there is super added superfluous paintings and adornments, a crystal line, jewel-like health and soundness, like the colors reflected from ice-crystals. when some rare northern bird like the pine grosbeak is seen thus far south in the winter, he does not suggest poverty, but dazzles us with his beauty. there is in them a warmth akin to the warmth that melts the icicle. think of these brilliant, warm-colored, and richly war bling birds, birds of paradise, dainty-footed, downy-clad, in the midst of a new england, a canadian winter. the woods and fields, now somewhat solitary, being de serted by their more tender summer residents, are now frequented by these rich but delicately tinted and hardy northern immigrants of the air. here is no imperfection to be suggested. the winter, with its snow and ice, is not an evil to be corrected. it is as it was designed and made to be, for the artist has had leisure to add beauty to use. my acquaintances, angels from the north. i had a vision thus prospectively of these birds as i stood in the swamps. i saw this familiar — too familiar — fact at a different angle, and i was charmed and haunted by it. but i could only attain to be thrilled and enchanted, as by the sound of a strain of music dying away. i had seen into paradisaic regions, with their air and sky, and i was no longer wholly or merely a denizen of this vulgar earth. yet had i hardly a foothold there. i was only sure that i was charmed, and no mistake. it is only 422 notes on new england birds necessary to behold thus the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair's breadth aside froln our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, en chanted by its beauty and significance. only what we have touched and worn is trivial, — our scurf, repeti tion, tradition, conformity. to perceive freshly, with fresh senses, is to be inspired. great winter itself looked like a precious gem, reflecting rainbow colors from oue angle. dec. 21, 1855. going to the post-office at 9 a. m. this very pleasant morning, i hear and see tree sparrows on wheildon's pines, and just beyond scare a downy wood pecker and a brown creeper in company, from near the base of a small elm within three feet of me. the former dashes off with a loud rippling of the wing, and' the creeper flits across the street to the base of another small elm, whither i follow. at first he hides behind the base, but ere long works his way upward and comes in sight. he is a gray-brown, a low curve from point of beak to end of tail, resting flat against the tree. dec. 30, 1855. he who would study birds' nests must look for them in november and in winter as well as in midsummer, for then the trees are bare and he can see them, and the swamps and streams are frozen and he can approach new kinds. he will often be surprised to find how many have haunted where he little suspected, and will receive many hints accordingly, which he can act upon in the summer. i am surprised to find many new ones (/. e. not new species) in groves which i had examined several times with particular care in the summer. general and miscellaneous 423 jan. 18, 1856. observed some of those little hard galls on the high blueberry pecked or eaten into by some bird (ox iiossibhj mouse), for the little white gitibs which lie curled up in them. what entomologists the birds are ! most men do not suspect that there are grubs in them, and how secure the latter seem under these thick, dry shells ! yet there is no secret but it is confided to some one. feb. 4, 1856. i have often wondered how red cedars could have sprung up in some pastures which i knew to be miles distant from the nearest fruit-bearing cedar, but it now occurs to me that these and barberries, etc., may be planted by the crows, and probably other birds. feh. 8, 1856. e. garfield says there were many quails here last fall, but that they are suffering now. one night as he was spearing on conant's cranberry meadow, just north the pond, his dog caught a sheldrake in the water by the shore. some days ago he saw what he thought a hawk, as white as snow, fly over the pond, but it may have been a white owl (which last he never saw).^ he sometimes sees a hen-hawk in the winter, but never a partridge or other small hawk at this season. speaks again of that large speckled hawk he killed once, which some called a "cape eagle." had a hum bird's nest behind their house last summer, and was amused to see the bird drive off other birds ; would pur sue a robin and alight on his back ; let none come near. i. garfield saw one's nest on a horizontal branch of a white pine near the charles miles house, about seven ^ was it a gyrfalcon ? 424 notes on new england birds feet from ground. e. garfield spoke of the wren's nest as not uncommon, hang in the grass of the meadows, and how swiftly and easily the bird would run through a winrow of hay. ajjril 9, 1856. the air is full of birds, and as i go down the causeway, i distinguish the seringo note. you have only to come forth each morning to be surely ad vertised of each newcomer into these broad meadows. many a larger animal might be concealed, but a cun ning ear detects the arrival of each new species of bird. these birds give evidence that they prefer the fields of new england to all other climes, deserting for them the warm and fertile south. here is their paradise. it is here they express the most happiness by song and action. though these spring mornings may often be frosty and rude, they are exactly tempered to their con stitutions, and call forth the sweetest strains. june 6, 1856. how well suited the lining of a bird's nest, not only for the comfort of the young, but to keep the eggs from breaking ! fine elastic grass stems or root-fibres, pine-needles, or hair, or the like. these tender and brittle things which you can hardly carry in cotton lie there without harm. jf^eh. 20, 1857. what is the relation between a bird and the ear that appreciates its melody, to whom, per chance, it is more charming and significant than to any else ? certainly they are intimately related, and the one was made for the other. it is a natural fact. if i were to discover that a certain kind of stone by the pond shore was affected, say partially disintegrated, by a par ticular natural sound, as of a bird or insect, i see that general and miscellaneous 425 one could not be completely described without describ ing the other. i am that rock by the pond-side. sept. 7, 1857. returning to my boat, at the white maple, i see a small round flock of birds, perhaps black birds, dart through the air, as thick as a charge of shot, — now comparatively thin, with regular intervals of sky between them, like the holes in the strainer of a water ing-pot, now dense and dark, as if closing up their ranks when they roll over one another and stoop down ward. march 17, 1858. sitting' under the handsome scarlet oak beyond the hill, i hear a faint note far in the wood which reminds me of the robin. again i hear it ; it is he, — an occasional peep. these notes of the earliest birds seem to invite forth vegetation. no doubt the plants concealed in the earth hear them and rejoice. they wait for this assurance. march 18, 1858. how much more habitable a few birds make the fields ! at the end of winter, when the fields are bare and there is nothing to relieve the monotony of the withered vegetation, our life seems reduced to its lowest terms. but let a bluebird come and warble over them, and what a change ! the note of the first bluebird in the air answers to the purling rill of melted snow beneath. it is eminently soft and sooth ing, and, as surely as the thermometer, indicates a higher temperature. it is the accent of the south wind, its ver nacular. it is modulated by the south wind. the song sparrow is more sprightly, mingling its notes with the rustling of the brash along the watersides, but it is at the same time more terrene than the bluebird. the 426 notes on new england birds first woodpecker comes screaming into the empty house and throws open doors and windows wide, calling out each of them to let the neighbors know of its return. but heard further -off it is very suggestive of ineffable associations which cannot be distinctly recalled, — of long-drawn summer hours, — and thus it, also, has the effect of music. i was not aware that the capacity to hear the woodpecker had slumbered within me so long. when the blackbird gets to a conqueree he seems to be dreaming of the sprays that are to be and on which he is to perch. the robin does not come singing, but utters a somewhat anxious or inquisitive peep at first. the song sparrow is immediately most at home of any that i have named. i see this afternoon as many as a dozen bluebirds on the warm side of a wood. each new year is a surprise to us. we find that we had virtually forgotten the note of each bird, and when we hear it again it is remembered like a dream, remind ing us of a previous state of existence. how happens it that the associations it awakens are always pleasing, never saddening ; reminiscences of our sanest hours ? the voice of nature is always encouraging. 3fay 10, 1858. it is remarkable how many new birds have come all at once to-day. the hollow-sounding note of the oven-bird is heard from the depth of the wood. the warbling vireo cheers the elms with a strain for which they must have pined. the trees, in respect to these new arrivers, have been so many empty music halls. the oriole is seen darting like a bright flash with clear whistle from one tree-top to another over the general and miscellaneous 427 street. the very catbird's mew in the copse harmonizes with the bare twigs, as it were shaming them into life and verdure, and soon he mounts upon a tree and is a new creature. toward night the wood thrush ennobles the wood and the world with his strain. june 7, 1858. it is evidence enough against crows and hawks and owls, proving their propensity to rob birds' nests of eggs and young, that smaller birds pur sue them so often. you do not need the testimony of so many farmers' boys when you can see and hear the small birds daily crying " thief and murder " after these spoilers. what does it signify, the kingbird, blackbird, swallow, etc., etc., pursuing a crow ? they say plainly enough : " i know you of old, you villain ; you want to devour my eggs or young. i have often caught you at it, and i '11 publish you now." and probably the crow pursuing the fish hawk and eagle proves that the latter sometimes devour their young. june 16, 1858. no doubt thousands of birds' nests have been destroyed by the flood, — blackbirds', bobo links', song sparrows', etc. i see a robin's nest high above the water with the young just dead and the old bird in the water, apparently killed by the abundance of rain, and afterward i see a fresh song sparrow's nest which has been flooded and destroyed. july 16, 1858. about the mountains were wilder and rarer birds, more or less arctic, like the vegetation. i did not even hear the robin on them, and when i had left them a few miles behind, it was a great change and surprise to hear the lark, the wood jjewee, the robin, and the bobolink (for the last had not done singing). 428 notes on new england bieds on the mountains, especially at tuckerman's ravine, the notes even of familiar birds sounded strange to me. i hardly knew the wood thrush and veery and oven bird at first. they sing differently there.' in two in stances, — going down the mt. jefferson road and along the road in the franconia notch, — i started an f. hye malis within two feet, close to the roadside, but looked in vain for a nest. they alight and sit thus close. i doubt if the chipping sparrow is found about the moun tains. march 7, 1859. it is a good plan to go to some old orchard on the south side of a hill, sit down, and listen, especially in the morning when all is still. you can thus often hear the distant warble of some bluebird lately arrived, which, if you had been walking, would not have been audible to you. as i walk, these first mild spring days, with my coat thrown open, stepping over tinkling rills of melting snow, excited by the sight of the bare ground, especially the reddish subsoil where it is exposed by a cutting, and by the few green radical leaves, i stand still, shut my eyes, and listen from time to time, in order to hear the note of some bird of pas sage just arrived. april 8, 1859. when the question of the protection of birds comes up, the legislatures regard only a low use and never a high use ; the best-disposed legislators em ploy one, perchance, only to examine their crops and see how many grubs or cherries they contain, and never to study their dispositions, or the beauty of their plumage, ^ [his wood thrush and veery of tuckerman's ravine were prohably the olive-backed thrush and bicknell's thrush, respectively] general and miscellaneous 429 or listen and report on the sweetness of their song. the legislature will preserve a bird professedly not because it is a beautiful creature, but because it is a good scav enger or the like. this, at least, is the defense set up. it is as if the question were whether some celebrated singer of the human race — some jenny lind or an other — did more harm or good, should be destroyed, or not, and therefore a committee should be appointed, not to listen to her singing at all, but to examine the contents of her stomach and see if she devoured any thing which was injurious to the farmers and gardeners, or which they cannot spare. sept. 1, 1859. if you would study the birds now, go where their food is, i. e. the berries, especially to the wild black cherries, elder-berries, poke berries, moun tain-ash berries, and ere long the barberries, and for pigeons the acorns. in the sprout-land behind britton's camp, i came to a small black cherry full of fruit, and then, for the first time for a long while, i see and hear cherry-birds — their shrill and fine seringo* — and the note of robins, which of late are scarce. we sit near the tree and listen to the now unusual sounds of these birds, and from time to time one or two come dashing from out the sky toward this tree, till, seeing us, they whirl, disappointed, and perhaps alight on some neigh boring twigs and wait till we are gone. the cherry birds and robins seem to know the locality of every wild cherry in the town. you are as sure to find them on them now, as bees and butterflies on the thistles. if we stay ^ [thoreau's word for a note of the quality of the cedar waxwing's. see pp. 290 note, 291.] 430 notes on new england birds long, they go off with a fling, to some other cherry tree, which they know of but we do not. the neighborhood of a wild cherry full of fruit is now, for the notes of birds, a little spring come back again, and when, a mile or two from this, i was plucking a basketful of elder berries (for which it was rather early yet), there too, to my surprise, i came on a flock of golden robins and of bluebirds, apparently feeding on them. excepting the vacciniums, now past prime and drying up, the cherries and elder-berries are the two prevailing fruits now. we had remarked on the general scarcity and silence of the birds, but when we came to the localities of these fruits, there again we found the berry-eating birds assembled, — young (?) orioles and bluebirds at the elder-berries. nov. 11, 1859. also, october 24th, riding home from acton, i saw the withered leaves blown from an oak by the roadside dashing off, gyrating, and surging upward into the air, so exactly like a flock of birds sporting with one another that, for a minute at least, i could not be sure they were not birds ; and it suggested how far the motions of birds, like those of these leaves, might be determined by currents of air, i. e., how far the bird learns to conform to such currents. jan. 5, 1860. how much the snow reveals! i see where the downy woodpecker has worked lately by the chips of bark and rotten wood scattered over the snow, though i rarely see him in the winter. once to-day, how ever, i hear his sharp voice, even like a woodchuck's. also i have occasionally seen where (probably) a flock of goldfinches in the morning ^:ad settled on a hemlock's general and miscellaneous 431 top, by the snow strewn with scales, literally blackened or darkened with them for a rod. and now, about the hill in front of smith's, i see where the quails have run along the roadside, and can count the number of the bevy better than if i saw them. are they not peculiar in this, as compared with partridges, — that they run in company, while at this season i see but [one] or two partridges together? jan. 22, 1860. birds are commonly very rare in the winter. they are much more common at some times than at others. i see more tree sparrows in the begin ning of the winter (especially when snow is falling) than in the course of it. i think that by observation i could tell in what kind of weather afterward these were most to be seen. crows come about houses and streets in very cold weather and deep snows, and they are heard cawing in pleasant, thawing winter weather, and their note is then a pulse by which you feel the quality of the air, i. e., when cocks crow. for the most part, lesser redpolls and pine grosbeaks do not appear at all. snow buntings are very wandering. they were quite numer ous a month ago, and now seem to have quit the town. they seem to ramble about the country at will. jan. 29, 1860. not only the indian, but many wild birds and quadrupeds and insects, welcomed the apple tree to these shores. as it grew apace, the bluebird, robin, cherry-bird, kingbird, and many more came with a rush and built their nests in it, and so became orchard birds. the woodpecker found such a savory morsel under its bark that he perforated it in a ring quite round the tree, a thing he had never done before. it did not 432 notes on new england birds take the partridge long to find out how sweet its buds were, and every winter day she flew and still flies from the wood to pluck them, much to the farmer's sorrow. the rabbit too was not slow to learn the taste of its twigs and bark. the owl crept into the first one that became hollow, and fairly hooted with delight, finding it just the place for him. he settled down into it, and has remained there ever since. the lackey caterpillar sad dled her eggs on the very first twig that was formed, and it has since divided her affections with the wild cherry; and the canker-worm also in a measure aban doned the elm to feed on it. and when the fruit was ripe, the squirrel half carried, half rolled, it to his hole, and even the musquash crept up the bank and greedily devoured it ; and when it was frozen and thawed, the crow and jay did not disdain to peck it. and the beautiful wood duck, having made up her mind to stay a while longer with us, has concluded that there is no better place for her too. aug. 28, 1860. there was no prolonged melody of birds on the summit of monadnock. they for the most part emitted sounds there more in harmony with the silent rocks, — a faint chipping or chinking, often some what as of two stones struck together. sept. 1, 1860. see how artfully the seed of a cherry is placed in order that a bird may be compelled to transport it. it is placed in the very midst of a tempting pericarp, so that the creature that would devour a cherry must take a stone into its mouth. the bird is bribed with the pericarp to take the stone with it and do this little service for nature. cherries are especially birds' general and miscellaneous 433 food, and many kinds are called birds' cherry, and un less we plant the seeds occasionally, i shall think the birds have the best right to them. thus a bird's wing is added to the cherry-stone which was wingless, and it does not wait for winds to transport it. oct. 7, 1860. rice ^ says that when a boy, playing with darts with his brother israel, one of them sent up his dart when a flock of crows was going over. one of the crows followed it down to the earth, picked it up, and flew off with it a quarter of a mile before it dropped it. he has observed that young wood ducks swim faster than the old, which is a fortunate provision, for they can thus retreat and hide in the weeds while their parents fly off. he says that you must shoot the little dipper as soon as it comes up, — before the water is fairly off its eyes, — else it will dive at the flash. ^ [reuben rice, of concord.] xxiii domestic birds ducks april 7, 1853. approach near to simon brown's ducks, on river. they are continually bobbing their heads under water in a shallow part of the meadow, more under water than above. i infer that the wild employ themselves likewise. you are most struck with the apparent ease with which they glide away, — not seeing the motion of their feet, — as by their wills. june 29, 1856. a man by the riverside ^ told us that he had two young ducks which he let out to seek their food along the riverside at low tide that morning. at length he noticed that one remained stationary amid the grass or salt weeds and something prevented its follow ing the other. he went to its rescue and found its foot shut tightly in a quahog's shell amid the grass which the tide had left. he took up all together, carried to his house, and his wife opened the shell with a knife, re leased the duck, and cooked the quahog. [/s'ee also under horned grebe, pp. 1, 2; domestic fowl, p. 436.] domestic fowl july 11, 1851. and now, at half-past 10 o'clock, i hear the cockerels crow in hubbard's barns, and morn ^ [in new bedford, where thoreau was visiting mr. daniel ricket son.] domestic fowl 435 ing is already anticipated. it is the feathered, wakeful thought in us that anticipates the following day. this sound is wonderfully exhilarating at all times. these birds are worth far more to me for their crowing and cackling than for their drumsticks and eggs. how singular the connection of the hen with man, — that she leaves her eggs in his barns always ! she is a domes tic fowl, though still a little shyish of him. i cannot help looking at the whole as an experiment still and wondering that in each case it succeeds. there is no doubt at last but hens may be kept. they will put their eggs in your barn by a tacit agreement. they will not wander far from your yard. july 19, 1851. i see that hens, too, follow the cows feeding near the house, like the cow troopial, and for the same object. they cannot so well scare up insects for themselves. this is the dog the cowbird uses to start up its insect game. july 22, 1851. i hear the cockerels crow through it,* and the rich crow of young roosters, that sound in dicative of the bravest, rudest health, hoarse without cold, hoarse with rude health. that crow is all-nature compelling; famine and pestilence flee before it. jan. 15, 1852. it is good to see minott's hens peck ing and scratching the ground. what never-failing health they suggest ! even the sick hen is so naturally sick, — like a green leaf turning to brown. no wonder men love to have hens about them and hear their creak ing note. they are even laying eggs from time to time still, — the undespairing race! 1 [fog.] 436 notes on new england birds june 17, 1852. i hear the universal cock-crowing with surprise and pleasure, as if i never heard it before. what a tough fellow ! how native to the earth ! neither wet nor dry, cold nor warm, kills him. july 6, 1852. when the hen hatches ducks they do not mind her clucking. they lead the hen. chickens and ducks are well set on the earth. what great legs they have! this part is early developed. a perfect antseus is a young duck in this respect, deriving a steady stream of health and strength, for he rarely gets off it, ready either for land or water. nature is not on her last legs yet. a chick's stout legs ! if they were a little larger they would injure the globe's tender organi zation with their scratching. then, for digestion, consider their crops and what they put into them in the course of a day ! consider how well fitted to endure the fatigue of a day's excursion. a young chick will run all day in pur suit of grasshoppers and occasionally vary its exercise by scratching, go to bed at night with protuberant crop, and get up early in the morning ready for a new start. july 25, 1852. as i came along, the whole earth resounded with the crowing of cocks, from the eastern unto the western horizon, and as i passed a yard, i saw a white rooster on the topmost rail of a fence pouring forth his challenges for destiny to come on. this salu tation was travelling round the world ; some six hours since had resounded through england, france, and spain ; then the sun passed over a belt of silence where the atlantic flows, except a clarion here and there from some cooped-up cock upon the waves, till greeted with a general all-hail along the atlantic shore. i i domestic fowl 437 april 2, 1853. the farmers are trembling for their poultry nowadays. i heard the scream of hens, and a tumult among their mistresses (at dugan's}, calling them and scaring away the hawk, yesterday. they say they do not lose by hawks in midsummer. white quotes linnaeus as saying of hawks, " paciscuntur induciascum avibus, quamdiu cuculus cuculat," but white doubts it.* tlu7ie 2, 1853. the birds are wide awake, as if know ing that this fog presages a fair day. i ascend naw shawtuct from the north side. i am aware that i yield to the same influence which inspires the birds and the cockerels, whose hoarse courage i hear now vaunted. so men should crow in the morning. i would crow like chanticleer in the morning, with all the lustiness that the new day imparts, without thinking of the evening, when i and all of us shall go to roost, — with all the humility of the cock, that takes his perch upon the highest rail and wakes the country with his clarion. shall not men be inspii'ed as much as cockerels ? jvov. 23, 1853. the cocks are the only birds i hear, but they are a host. they crow as freshly and bravely as ever, while poets go down the stream, degenerate into science and prose. oct. 19, 1855. therien tells me, when i ask if he has seen or heard any large birds lately, that he heard a cock crow this morning, a wild one, in the woods. it seems a dozen fowls (chickens) were lost out of the cars here a fortnight ago. poland has caught some, and they ^ [gilbert white, natural history of selborne, letter of sept. 13, 1774, to daines barrington. " they make a truce with the birds as long as the cuckoo siugs."] 438 notes on new england birds have one at the shanty, but this cock, at least, is still abroad and can't be caught. if they could survive the win ter, i suppose we should have had wild hens before now. july 25, 1856. the haymakers getting in the hay from hubbard's meadow tell me the cock says we are going to have a long spell of dry weather or else very wet. " well, there 's some difference between them," i answer ; " how do you know it? " " i just heard a cock crow at noon, and that 's a sure sign it will either be very dry or very wet." dec. 4, 1856. sophia says that just before i came home min ^ caught a mouse and was playing with it in the yard. it had got away from her once or twice, and she had caught it again ; and now it was stealing off again, as she lay complacently watching it with her paws tucked under her, when her friend riordan's stout but solitary cock stepped up inquisitively, looked down at it with one eye, turning his head, then picked it up by the tail and gave it two or three whacks on the ground, and giving it a dexterous toss into the air, caught it in its open mouth, and it went head foremost and alive down his capacious throat in the twinkling of an eye, never again to be seen in this world, min, all the while, with paws comfortably tucked under her, looking on unconcerned. what matters it one mouse more or less to her? the cock walked off amid the currant bushes, stretched his neck up, and gulped once or twice, and the deed was accomplished, and then he crowed lustily in celebration of the exploit. it might be set down among the gesta (if not digesta) gallorum. ^ [the thoreaus' cat.j domestic fowl 439 there were several human witnesses. it is a question whether min ever understood where that mouse went to. feb. 4, 1857. minott says that dr. heywood used to have a crazy hen (and he, too, has had one). she went about by herself uttering a peevish craw craw, and did not lay. one day he was going along on the narrow penin sula of goose pond looking for ducks, away in walden woods a mile and a half from heywood's, when he met this very hen, which passed close by him, uttering as usual a faint craw craw. he knew her perfectly well, and says that he was never so surprised at anything in his life. how she had escaped the foxes and hawks was more than he knew. feb. 8, 1857. hiordan's solitary cock, standing on such an icy snow-heap, feels the influence of the soft ened air, and the steam from patches of bare ground here and there, and has found his voice again. the warm air has thawed the music in his throat, and he crows lustily and unweariedly, his voice rising to the last. april 26, 1857. riordan's cock follows close after me while spading in the garden, and hens commonly follow the gardener and ploughman, just as cowbirds the cattle in a pasture. sept. 30, 1857. talked with minott, who was sitting, as usual, in his wood-shed. his hen and chickens, find ing it cold these nights on the trees behind the house, had begun last night to roost in the shed, and one by one walked or hopped up a ladder within a foot of his shoulder to the loft above. he sits there so much like a fixture that they do not regard him. it has got to be 440 notes on new england birds so cool, then, that tender chickens seek a shelter at night ; but i saw the hens at clark's (the r. brown house) were still going to roost in the apple trees. oct. 1, 1858. let a full-grown but young cock stand near you. how full of life he is, from the tip of his bill through his trembling wattles and comb and his bright eye to the extremity of his clean toes ! how alert and restless, listening to every sound and watching every motion ! how various his notes, from the finest and shrillest alarum as a hawk sails over, surpassing the most accomplished violinist on the short strings, to a hoarse and terrene voice or cluck ! he has a word for every occasion, — for the dog that rushes past, and part let cackling in the barn. and then how, elevating him self and flapping his wings, he gathers impetus and air and launches forth that world-renowned ear-piercing strain ! not a vulgar note of defiance, but the mere effervescence of life, like the bursting of a bubble in a wine-cup. is any gem so bright as his eye ? aug. 6, 1860. i heard a cock crow very shrilly and distinctly early in the evening of the 8th. ^ this was the most distinct sound from the lower world that i heard up there at any time, not excepting even the railroad whistle, which was louder. it reached my ear perfectly, to each note and curl, — from some submontane cock. we also heard at this hour an occasional bleat from a sheep in some mountain pasture, and a lowing of a cow. and at last we saw a light here and there in a farmhouse window. we heard no sound of man except the railroad whistle and, on sunday, a church-bell. heard no dog ^ [id camp on the soiuiuit of mt. monadnock.] parrot 441 that i remember. therefore i should say that, of all the sounds of the farmhouse, the crowing of the cock could be heard furthest or most distinctly under these circumstances. it seemed to wind its way through the layers of air as a sharp gimlet through soft wood, and reached our ears with amusing distinctness. domestic pigeon april 16,1855. i am startled sometimes these morn ings to hear the sound of doves alighting on the roof just over my head; they come down so hard upon it, as if one had thrown a heavy stick on to it, and i wonder it does not injure their organizations. their legs must be cushioned in their sockets to save them from the shock ? parrot may 21, 1857. i saw yesterday a parrot exceedingly frightened in its cage at a window. it rushed to the bars and struggled to get out. a piece of board had been thrown from the window above to the ground, which probably the parrot's instinct had mistaken for a hawk. their eyes are very open to danger from above. foli index to map see oveli foi! isde.x to mm' .s££ oveu o note to map ok co\( ori) the material used in tins mai) "f ("oneoid has been derived from a variety of sources. the town ixniiids, streets, and residences liave ihcii taken from a township map of midcuesex connty made hy ii. f. walunp in 185(), reference also being had to a local maj) of concord by the same engineer, dated ks.vj, on which credit for the surveys of ^\'hite pond and walden pond is given to " ii. 1). thoreau, ("iv. eng'." the course of the concord river is drawn from an elaborate manuscript plan of tho reau's, based on earlier surveys, showing the river from east .sudbury to billerica uam. this plan, on which thoreau has entered the results of his investigation of tiie river in the summer of l.s.7.1, is now in the concord public library. tlie outlines of walden and white ponds have also been taken from thoreau's original surveys, now in the con cord library. loring's and hateman's ponds are according to surveys by mr. albert e. wood of concord, and flint's pond is from a survey for the t^oncord water works by mr. \\'illiani wlieeler, also of concord. all names of places are those used by thoreau, no attention being given to other names perhaps more current either in his own time or at ])resent. only such names of residents are given as are mentioned in the journal. a few old wood roads, pasture lanes, etc. (thoreau's preferred high ways), are indicated, as to their general direction, by dotted lines. the irregularity of the northeastern boundary of concord arose from the fact that when carlisle was set off from concord in 17.s0, the farmers living on the border were given the option of remaining within th« bounds of concord or of being included in the new town. in 1!m);< the massachusetts legislature abolished this old division and continued the straight line forming the western half of the boundary directly to the river. the identification of localities which were named by thoreau ai)par ently for his personal u.se alone has been accomplished, so far as it has proceeded, by a careful study of all the .lournal references to each local ity, an examination of a large number of thoreau's manuscript surveys, and an extended personal investigation on the ground. many of these locjilities are given more than one name in the journal, and in a few cases the same name is given to different localities. where doubt exists as to any particular location, the name is omitted from the map. hon. f. b. sanborn, judge john s. keyes, dr. edward w. emerson, the misses ilosmer, and others among the older residents of concord have been consulted in the invjiaration of the map, and have kindly supplied helpful information from their personal accjuaintancc! with thoreau. h. w. glkason. december, i'jog. index to map of concord fi"ures in parentheses correspond with fi^'ures on the map. a letter and ligure comhined indicate the space with in wlfich the locality may be found, this space liein^' determined by the intersection ot imaginary lines drawn irom the corresponding letter and figure in the margin. (5) (10) (11) (1-) (13) (1-1) (15) (ig) (17) (18) agricultural fair ground. f 7 alcott, a. biouson. f s almshouse. g t andromeda, or cassan dra, ponds. j t aunursnack hill. d 3 arethiisa meadow. h g assabet bath. e 5 assabet river, or north brancli. e5 assabet spring. e 5 assabet stone bridge. (see one-arch bridge.) austin, l. h. kio back road. 6 g baker, jacob. j 8 baker, james. j 8 baker bridge. j 8 baker farm. k 7 bairs hill. d'j bare hill. (see pine hill.) barrett, g. m. e4 barrett, nathan. d7 barrett, prescott. e5 barrett, sam. e 5 barrett's bar. d 8 barrett's pond. d5 barrett's saw and grist mills. ef) bartlett, dr. f 7 bateman's pond. c g battle-ground. (see old north bridge.) bear garden hill. h g bear hill. j '.) beaver pond. l 1 1 beck stow's swamp. e h bedford levels. f 10 bedford road (new). e 8 bedford road (old). e 9 bidens brook. (see pole brook.) bigelow, f. e. f 7 bittern, or tupelo, cliff. j g blood, perez. b 8 blood's pasture. b 8 boaz's meadow. c g boiling spring. h g boston, or lexington, road. f 8 botrychium swamp. (see yellow birch swamp.) boulder field. c 7 bound rock. l.5 brigham, j. g. kg brister's hill. g 8 bri.ster's spring. g 8 britton's camp. h 9 britton's hollow. g9 brooks, a. ft brooks, geo. d 4 brown, j. p. g 5 brown's (j. p.) pond hole, or cold pool. h4 brown, simon. e g brown, wm. b 5 bull, e. w. f 8 button-bush pond. (see clematis pond.) buttrick, abner. ds buttrick, stedman. d 7 buttrick's hill. c 8 calla swamp. bg (19) callitriche pool. g8 cambridge turnpike. g 8 canoe birch road. ko (20) cardinal shore. h g carlisle bridge. a 9 carlisle reach. b 9 cassandra ponds. (see andromeda ponds.) cedar hill. j 10 cedar swamp, white. d 4 (■21)channing, w. e. fg (22) cheney, j. m. f g (23) clamshell bank or hill. g (24) clamshell, or sunset, reach. g 5 clark, brooks. dg clark, d. dg clark, jo.seph, d g clematis brook. k 7 (25) clematis, bntton-bush, or nightshade, pond. k 7 (26) cliffs. j 7 (27) clintonia swamp. g 8 cold brook. l4 college road. d 4 (28) columbine cliff. j g (29) common. f 7 conant, e. j 5 (30) conant house, site of old. j g conantum, j g copan. d 9 corner bridge. (see lee's bridge.) corner road. h g corner spring. h 5 county house. f7 conrt-house. f7 creel brook. (see pole brook.) curly-pate hill. b g cyanean meadow. g 5 dakin, e. e 6 dakin, dea. l. k 3 dakin's brook. (see dodge's brook.) damon's mills. davis's hill. deep cut. dennis, s. dennis's lupine hill or promontory. derby, j. derby's bridge. diving-ash. dodge's, or dakin's, brook. dodd, j. m. dove rock. dugan, jenny. dugan desert. dunge hole brook. easterbrook country. (31) (32) (33) (34) (35) (36) (37) (38) (39) g.". c9 h7 g5 g5 f4 f4 d8 dg fg eg h4 h4 k5 cg (40) easterbrook house. site of. cg echo wood. (see holden wood.) eddy bridge. (see one-arcli bridge.) (41) egg rock. eg (42) eltin burial-groimd. g 4 emerson's cliff. h 8 emerson, r. w. f7 (43) everett, geo. g 9 fair haven hill. h 7 fair haven pond or bay. j 7 (44) fair haven pond island (at high water). j 7 farmer, j. b. d 5 farmer's cliff'. c farrar, dea. james. l7 (45) farrar's blacksmith shop. 6 g fitchburg railroad. g 7 flint, j. e7 flint's, or north, bridge. e7 flint's, or sandy, pond. j 10 fort pond brook. f2 fox castle swamp. (see owlnest swamp.) (4g) french's rock. e7 (47) frost, b. fg garfield, d. j 5 (48) garrison, j. f7 (49) gentian lane. e7 (50) goodwin, john. g g goose pond. h8 (51)gourgas, f. r. f7 gowing, j. f9 gowing"s swamp. f9 great fields. f 8 great meadows. d 8 green, lsaiah. a 7 groton road. e 3 hapeood, s. c 3 harrington, j. g 3 (52) harrington's spring. g3 hawthorne, nathaniel. f8 hayden, e. g 66 hayward,! j. e4 hayward.' r. g2 hayward's' pond. g2 (.53) heywood, a. b. e7 (.54) hey wood, geo. f7 (55) heywood's brook. j 7 (.5(;) heywood's meadow. j 7 (.57) heywood's peak. h 8 (.58) heywood's wood-lot. h8 hildreth, g. w. d6 hill. (see nawshawtuct.) (.59) hoar, e. rockwood. f fi (00) hoar, samuel. f7 hodgman, j. b8 (gl) '■ hogepen-walke." d4 (62) holbrook, j. ft holden, t. j 5 (g3) holden, or echo, wood. h6 holden spruce swamp. (see kalnila glauca swamp.) (g4) hollowell place. h 5 (g5) ho!t, the. d8 hosmer, abel. f 4 spelled " uey wood " by thoreau. {(jg) hosiiior, eclinuiij (before i ks.-.;;). g'.i husiiier, edmund (after | 1853). e(i hosiner, jesse. g 4 i hosiiier, john. g 5 hosmer. just-pli. vil howard's meadow. ( see hey wood's meadow.) hubbard, t". g li (g7) hubbard, ebbv. ft (g8) hubbard's bath. g (! j hubbard's bridge. h g hubbard's biook. gg hubbard's close. g 8 (g'.i) hubbard's grove. g 5 hubbard's hill. c 7 hunt, d. d7 hunt, wni. d7 hunt house, old, or win tlirop house. eg hunt's, or lied. bridge. e g (70) hunt's pasture. c 7 hutcliinson, peter. e8 (71) indian field. eg (72) inn kept by tlioreau's aunts. f 7 (73) i.sland,tlie (at liigli water). f g (74) jail. f7 jarvis, p'rancis. e 7 (75) jones, mrs. d7 kalmia glauca, or holden spruce, swamp. h g kettell place. e 10 (7g)keyes, j. s. ft kibbe place. b7 (77) laurel glen. h7 leaning hemlocks. e g (78) ledum swamp. h4 lee farm. e5 lee, i. s. kg lee's, or corner, bridge. k g lee's cliff. kg lee's hill. (see nawshawtuct.) legro.s8, j. lexington road. (see boston road.) lily bay.= (see willow bay.) (79) lime-kiln. (80) lime quarry. (81)linnrea hills. little goose pond ripple lake. (82) little truro. (83) lonely graveyard. loring's pond. lowell road. mackintosh, \v. (84) mantatuket point rock. marlborough road, old. h3 ma.son, j. b8 maynard's place. j 2 melvin, geo. d6 melvin, j. b5 melvin preserve. (see easterbrook country.) merriam, d. e 5 merrjam, j. e 10 b4 cg cg h4 hi) g5 gg f3 c5 j9 eg merriam, r. fo 85) merrick's pasture. f (! mile.s, charles. h5 miles, j. l5 miles, martial and war ren. h 4 (8g) miles's mill. warren. h 4 miles's run, charles. h5 miles swamp. h4 mill brook. f'.l (s7).mill-ilam. f7 mill road. j 4 ministerial swamp. ii .'1 minn's place. k .s (s.s)minolt, abel. k7 minott, geo. f7 (s;t) money-diggers" shore. g5 (im)) monroe, francis. fg (ui) monroe. wni. fg moore, j. b. f8 moore's swamp. e s mt. misery. k 7 mt. tabor k 10 nashoba brook. e2 nawshawtuct, or lee's, hill. fg nightshade pond. (see clematis pond.) north branch. (sec as.sabi't river.) (92) north i'.ridge. site of old. e 7 (battlf-oroinid.i north bridge, pre.sent. (see flint's bridge.) nut meadow' brook. h 4 one-arch, eddy, or assa bet stone, bridge. e4 (93) orchis swamj). j 7 (94) orthodox church. f 7 owl-nest, or fox castle, swamp. c (95) painted-cup meadow. e 4 peter's path. e8 pine hill (in concord). e 10 pine hill (in lincoln), or bare hill. j 9 (9c) pinxter swamp. eg pleasant meadow. j 7 pole, creel, or bidens, brook. k g ponkawta.sset hill. d 7 poplar hill. e 7 potter, jonas. g g (97) potter's field. h g (98) potter's swamp meadow. h g (99) pout" s ne&t, or wyman meadow. h8 pratt, minot. d7 (loo)prescott, g. l. e7 (lol)pricliard, m. f7 powder-mills. h 1 putter, b. h 5 (102) purple utricularia bay. k 7 (103) railroad depot (concord). f g railroad depot (lincoln). l 9 red bridge. (see hunt's bridge.) rice, israel. l 5 (104) rice, reuben. f7 (105) ripley, mrs. (-'old manse "). ripley hill. (sec poplar hill.) ripple lake (see little goose pond.) sandy pond. (see flint's pond). saw mill brook (n. e.). saw mill brook (s. e.).3 (log) school where thoreau taught. second division brook. (107) second division spring (108) seven-star lane. j5 (lou)shatturk, d. y ,; shattuck, h. l. d7 (110) shrub oak plain. j 7 sleepy hollow cemetery. k7 smith. ('. h id smith. j. a. in (uljsmith, j.m. kg smith's hill. g iii south bridge. (sep wood's bridge.) spanish brook. (see well meadow brook.) e 07 g9 f7 j 2 h2 spencer brook. (112) squam harbor. (113) staples, sam. stone bridge. (114) stow, cyrus strawberry hill sudbury sleadow sudbury road. sun.set reach. (see clamshell reach.) ( 1 15) swauip bridge brook. g ( tarl.ell, d. tarbell. w. (llg)tarbcll's spring. temjile's place. thoreau"s birthplace. (117) tlioreau's boat-landing. (ll.s)tlioreau's grave. tlioreau's h\it, site of. (119) tlioreau's home in the village. f fi (l'20)tlirreau's "texas" house. fg three friends', or lin coln. hill. (121) town hall. (1-22) trillium wood.s. tupelo cliff. (see bittern cliff.) tuttle. aug. union turnpike. (1'23) unitarian (first) church. virginia road. "waldeii pond. walden road. (124)waiden wood.s. (125) warner pail factory. well meadow. (12g)well meadow, or span c5 i) '.i f7 fg f7 b3 l5 h5 g4 (■'.) (;4 d4 elo f(. ft h7 jio f7 h7 g8 f5 f7 e9 hs g7 ht f3 j 7 isli, brook weston, daniel. wetherbee, l. wharf rock. wheeler, cyrus. wheeler, f. a. wheeler, samuel g. wheeler, t. (127) wlieeler's swamp. white pond. willis, j. (12s)winow bay. or lily bay (129) willow inland. winn, p. winthroj) hou.se. (see old hunt house. (130) withered vale or glade. wood, elijah. wood, .las. (131) wood's, or south. bridge. f ( j 10 b4 h 10 k5 .15 f5 g4 fg j 4 (i 2 . (;5 kg e g woodis park. (132)w.)od thru.sh path. wright, j. wynian me.idow. (see pout's nest.) yellow birch swamp. e 5 h 10 g9 2 this name was also siven to a bay on the river in siiillniry 3 this is the " saw .mill brook " most frequently mentioued by thi) appendix index to passages relating to birds in thoreao's works exclusive of the journal eiv. = riverside edition. wal. = walden edition. week = a week on the concord and merrimack rivers. walden ^ walden, or life in the woods. m. w. =: the maine woods. c. c. = cape cod. exc. = excursions. misc. = miscellanies. references in parentheses are to passages taken from the journal (and appearing in this book) but usually somewhat revised. bittern, riv. : week, 21 ; exc, 137. wal. : week, 17; exc, 111. blackbirds, riv. : week, 514. wal. : week, 417. bluebird, riv. : exc, 136. wal. : exc, 110. bunting, black-throated, riv. : c. c, 156. wal. : c. c, 131. chickadee, riv. : walden, 426 ; m. w., 130, 144 ; exc, 138. wal. : walden, 304; m. w., 108, 118 ; exc, 112. coots, sea, riv. : c. c, 134, 135. wal. : c. c, 113, 114. crow, riv. : exc, 139. wal. : exc, 113. " dipper," riv. : m. w., 226, 227. wal. : m. w., 184. duck, domestic, riv.: c. c, (100, 101). wal.: c. c, (86). duck, wood, riv. : exc, 328. wal. : exc, 268. ducks, wild, riv.: week, 6; walden, 385; exc, 135. wal.: week, 6; walden, 274,275; exc, 110. eagle, bald, riv. : m. w., 35, 36, 384. wal. : m. w., 30, 309. flicker, riv. : exc, (137). wal. : exc, (111). flycatcher, olive-sided, riv.: m. w., 226. wal. : m. w., 183. fowl, domestic, riv.: walden, 199, 200; exc, 301,302; misc, 360, 361. wal. : walden, 140, 141; exc, 246, 411, 412. general and miscellaneous, riv. : week, 70, 71, 208, 293, 419; walden, 135, 330, 478, 479; m. w., 143, 144, 178; c. c, 204, 222; exc, 134-140, 182, 218, (230), (360, 361). wal. : week, 56, 57, 167, 236, 237, 339 ; walden, 95, 234, 342 ; m. w., 118, 146, 184 ; c. c, 170, 184, 185; exc, 108-114, 149, 179, (187, 188), (293, 294). 444 appendix goldfinch, american, riv. : exc, 139. wal. : exc, 113. goose, canada, riv. : avalden, 385, 421, (482, 483). wal. : wal den, 274, 275, 300, (345). grouse, ruffed, riv.: walden, 352-354, 427, 435; exc, 134. wal. : walden, 250-252, 304, 305, 310, 311; exc, 109. gulls, riv. : c. c, 83, 84, 104, 105, 306. wal. : c. c, 71, 72, 89, 253. hawk, fish, riv.: m. w., 178; exc, 136, 137. wal: m. w., 146; exc, 110, 111. hawk, marsh, riv. : walden, 479. wal. : walden, 342. hawks, riv.: walden, 487,488; m. w., 298. wal.: walden, 348, 349 ; m. w., 240, 241. hen-hawks, riv. : walden, 248. wal. : walden, 176. heron, great blue, riv. : week, 514. wal. : week, 416, 417. heron, green, riv. : week, 309, 310, (311). wal. : week, 249, (250). jay, blue, riv. : walden, 425, 426 ; exc, 138, 243, 244. wal. walden, 303, 304 ; exc, 112, 199. jay, canada, riv. : m. w., 293. wal. : m. w., 237. loon, riv. : walden, 363-368 (mostly from journal) ; m. w., 225, 251, 307, 308, 362, 377 ; exc, 140. wal. : walden, 258-262 ; m. w., 182, 203, 247, 248, 291, 303, 304 ; exc, 114. merganser, american, riv. : m. w., 224, 225, 340, 343, 384, 385. wal. : m. w., 182, 274, 276, 309. nighthawk, riv. : walden, 247, 248. wal. : walden, 175, 176. owl, barred, riv. : walden, 411, 412. wal. : walden, 293. owl, great horned, riv. : walden (196, 197), 420, 421 ; m. w., 384. wal. : walden, (138, 139), 300, 301; m. w., 309. owl, screech, riv. : walden, (194, 195). wal. : walden, (138). owls, riv. : week, 70. wal. : week, 56. phalarope, riv. : c. c, 134. wal. : c. c, 113. phcebe, riv. : walden, 491; exc, 134 note, 138. wal. : walden, 351; exc, 109 note, 112. pigeon, passenger, riv. : week, 292; walden, (179), 248. wal. : week, 235, 236; walden, (127), 176. plover, piping, riv. : c. c, 82, 134, 222. wal. : c. c, 71, 113, 185. appendix 445 plover, upland, riv. : c. c, 156, 196. wal. : c. c, 131, 132, 164. robin, riv. : walden, (481); exc, 134. wal. : walden, (344) ; exc, 109. sandpiper, spotted, riv. : m. w., 178, 225. wal. : m. w., 146, 182. shrike, riv. : exc, 134. wal. : exc, 109. snipe, riv. : exc, 140. wal. : exc, 113. sparrow, song, riv. : walden, (480). wal. : walden, (343). sparrow, white-throated, riv. : m. w., 263, 264, 308. wal. : m. w., 213, 214, 248, 249. swallow, bank, riv. : c. c, 196. wal. : c. c, 164. teru (mackerel gull), riv. : c. c, 82. wal. • c. c, 71. thrasher, brown, riv. : walden, 246, 247. wal. : walden, 175. thrush, " wood," riv. : m. w., 229, 376. wal. : m. w., 186, 303. veery, riv. : exc, 138. wal. : exc, 112. vireo, riv. : exc, 138. wal. : exc, 112. whip-poor-will, riv. : walden, 194. wal. : walden, 137. woodcock, riv. : walden, 355. wal. : walden, 252, 253. woodpecker, pileated (" red-headed "), riv. : m. w., 384. wal. : m. w., 309. index america, the yacht, 164 note. apple tree, its welcome to these shores, 431, 432. audubon, john james, quoted and cited, 183, 270, 329 note. august, tinkling notes of, 417, 418. auk, little. see dovekie. autumn, colors of birds in, 415. barrett, samuel, 113 and note, 309. barroom, a robin in a, 387. bartlett, edward, 81, 128, 273. bay-wing. see sparrow, vesper. bechstein, dr. j. m., quoted, 268, 269. bird, in the hand, 417. bird-lore, cited, 103 note. bittern, the genius of the concord river, 218. bittern, american (stake-driver), 63-71 ; 3, 79. bittern, green. see heron, green. blackbird, cow. see cowbird. blackbird, crow. see grackle, bronzed. blackbird, red-winged, 249-253 ; 260,390,426; liquid notes of, 261; song belongs to the stream, 388. blackbird, rusty, (grackle), 255 257; 251,252, 260, 413. blackbirds (miscellaneous), 259 264 ; 399. blake, harrison g. o., 41. blueberry "trees," 108. bluebird, 394-402 ; 298, 388, 391, 403, 413,420,428, 430; the note of the first, 425. bobolink, 244-247; 379, 411. bob-white (quail), 94,95; 414, 416, 423, 431. boon plain, 138. bradshaw, mr., of wayland, 7, 8. brant, 46 note, 56. breast, of a hawk, the pure white, 165. brewer, dr. thomas m., quoted and cited, 124, 304, 357. brewster, william, 138 note. brooks, george, 113 and note, 116, 185. brown, frank, 47, 270, 319. buffle-head, 44, 45 ; 2 note. bunting, black-throated, 08 note. bunting, snow, 277-285; 285, 319, 417, 431. buttrick, humphrey, 104, 418. cabot, j. elliot, cited, 266 note. cape cod, 17, 18. cat, the thoreaus', 438. catbird, 361; 427. cedar, red, 423. channing, william euery, 2d, 52 and note, 59, 90-92, 105, 247, 331, 375. cherries, and the birds, 432, 433. cherry, wild, 419. cherry-bird. see waxwing, cedar, 48. chewink. see towhee. chickadee (titmouse), 368-375; 226, 367, 368, 388, 404, 415, 416. chickens. see fowl, domestic. clark, d. b., 228. climbing a tall pine, 231. cock. see fowl, domestic. conantum, 22. concord, history of, quoted, 261. coombs, of concord, 26, 116, 117. cooper, susan fenimore, her rural hours cited, 5 note. coot, american, 83. cowbird (cow blackbird, cow troopial), 247-249 ; 435. creeper, black and white. see warbler, black and white. creeper, brown, 366 ; 416, 422. crossbill, red, 267-269. crow, american, 229-243; 17, 142, 153, 175, 226, 416; teetering along the water's edge, 14; buffeting a fish hawk, 156; alert to detect fish hawks, 160, 161 ; pursued by small birds, 427 ; pursuing flsh hawk and eagle, 427; their note a pulse, 431; and a boy's dart, 433. 448 index cuckoo, black-billed (st. domingo), 190, 191; 111, 406; nocturnal flights of, 406 and note. dickcissel, 68 note. dipper, 1-3, 433. dove, mourning (turtle), 118, 119; 113. dovekie (little auk), 7, 8. duck, black, 36-40; 4, 14, 15, 25, 27, 34, go, 418. duck, buffle-head, 44, 45 ; 2 note. duck, wood (surumerj, 40-44; 68, 418, 432, 433. ducks, domestic, 434; 1, 2, 436. ducks, wild, (species unnamed), 45 51; 4, 61, 408, 412. dugan, of concord, 112 and note. eagle, 166 ; in captivity, 146 ; thought likened to, 303. eagle, bald (white-headed), 148 150; 158,418. eagle, cape, 418, 423. ear, the, the bird and, 424. east harbor river, 17. eggs, 411. election day, 326 and note. emerson. edward w., 118, 123, 128. emerson, ralph waldo, 357, 385. emerson, william, 393. ever-reds, the, 369, 370. farmer, jacob, 92, 102, 130 and note, 144, 212, 327, 329. feathers, of a hawk's tail-coverts, 143, 144. finch, grass. see sparrow, vesper. finch, purple, 266, 267. fire, birds awakened by a, 418, 419. flicker (pigeon woodpecker), 197 201; 406. flight, 408, 409. flint's pond, 24, 39, 108. flocks, solidarity of, 404; rolling over in flight, 408, 425. flycatcher, 01ive-suled,(pe-pe), 220. fog, bird-song in, 410, 411. fowl, domestic, 434-440 ; 231. franconia notch, 364. fringilla hyemalis. see junco, slate-colored. frog, dreaming, 405. frost, rev. barzillai, 71. garfield, daniel, 132. garfield, edward, 103, 232, 423, 424. garfield, isaac, 423. garfield, john, 71. genius, wildness of, 145. gilpin, william, quoted, 9, 10, 408. golden-eye (whistler), 24, 25, 28, 47. goldfinch, american, 272-277 ; 387, 412, 431. goodwin, john, 7, 43, 55, 83, 113, 235, 340. goosander. see merganser, ameri can. goose, canada, 51-62 ; 4, 72. goose pond, 4, 37, 40, 48, 58. goshawk, 418. grackle. see blackbird, rusty. grackle, bronzed, (crow blackbird), 258,259; 260. grebe, horned, 1, 2. grebe, pied-billed, 2, 3. see also dipper. grosbeak, pine, 265 ; 319 ; dazzling beauty of, 421. grosbeak, rose-breasted, 314-317. ground-robin. see towhee. grouse, ruffed, (partridge), 95-109 ; 47, 168, 405, 413, 414, 416, 431 ; tracks of, 234 ; drumming, 418 ; and apple buds, 432. gull, herring, 9-17 ; 46, 50, 61, 412, 413. gull, mackerel. see tern, common. gun, the, 410. hair, used in birds' nests, 349. hair-bird. see sparrow, chipping. hangbird, fiery. see oriole, balti more. hawk, cooper's, 130, 131. hawk, fish, 150-162; 110,418; skel eton of, 79. hawk, marsh, (frog hawk, hen harrier), 120-127; 333. hawk, red-shouldered, 138 note. hawk, red-tailed, (hen-hawk), 131 137. hawk, rough-legged, 146-148 hawk, sharp-shinned, 128-130;2&1. hawk, sparrow, 150. hawks (species unnamed), 163 168; 59, 409, 436; two at play, 150, 151. hayden, senior, of concord, 94. heater piece, 278 note. index 449 hen-harrier. see hawk, marsh. hen-hawks, 138-146; 418; flight of, 408. see also hawk, red-tailed. hens, 231. see also fowl, domestic. herbert, mr., 86. heron, great blue, 71-79; 3, 68, 69, 159. heron, green, (green bittern), 79 81. heywood, george, 111. hildreth, jonathan, 327, 328. hoar, mr., of concord, 88, 392. hoar, edward, 7. hodge, dr. c. f., 103 note. holmes, dr. ezekiel, quoted, 188. hosmer, abel, 115. hosmer, joseph, 184. huckleberry-bird. see sparrow, field. hummingbird, ruby-throated, 213, 214; 423. indian, the, and the robin, 389. indigo-bird, 317, 318. jay, blue, 225-229 ; 163, 368, 373, 414, 416. jones, josh, 236, 237. junco, slate-colored, (slate-colored snowbird, fringilla hyemalis), 301-305 ; 260, 276, 319, 320, 323, 324, 363, 391, 413, 428. kingbird, 215-218. kingfisher, belted, 192. kinglet, ruby-crowned, (ruby-crest ed wren), 376; 114 note. lark. see meadowlark. lark, shore, 224, 225. leaves, rustling of, 48; withered, like birds, 430. lightning-bug, 406. linaria. see redpoll, lesser. lind, jenny, 373 note. linnaeus, quoted, 436. loon, 3-6. loon, redrthroated, 7. loring, mr., of concord, 54. macgillivray, william, quoted, 133 136. maine woods, in the, 105. man, the birds' fear of, 419. mann, horace, jr., 70, 79, 243. marshfleld, 386. martin, purple, 329; watched from an attic window, 403, 409. meadow-hen. see rail, virginia. meadowlark (lark), 253, 254; 302, 391, 399, 413. melvin, george, 38, 105, 182, 285, 418. merganser, american, (sheldrake, goosander), 19-36; 14, 74, 423; in tensely white specks, 15 ; sunk low in the water, 50, 51 ; at home on the river, 50, 51. merganser, red-breasted, 33. merriam, joe, 39. miles, martial, 125 and note, 172. milkweed, water, fibres of, 250, 351, 352. minot's ledge, 18. minott, george, 37, 39, 56, 65, 69, 115, 117, 168, 235, 236, 299, 309, 310, 336, 337, 439. mockingbird, 361. moore, j. b., 49. morning, awakening of birds in, 414, 415. mornings, ambrosial, 407. mother-carey's-chicken. see pe trel, wilson's. mt. lafayette, 265 and note, 316. mt. monadnock, 209-211, 303-305, 364 note, 393 and note, 432, 440 and note. mt. tabor, 112. mt. washington, 363, 364, 427, 428. musketicook, 80 and note. myrtle-bird. see warbler, myrtle. nature, the voice of, 426. nests, adaptation in material of, 407; to be studied in winter, 422; linings of, 424. new bedford, 287 and note, 434 and note. nighthawk, 204-211; 405. night-warbler, 366-358 northeast carry, 105 note. nuthatch, white-bellied, 366-368; 415, 416. nuttall, thomas, quoted and cited, 129, 134, 172 note, 190 note, 205, 220 note, 265, 270, 299 note, 316. oriole, baltimore, (golden robin, fiery hangbird), 264, 255; 426, 430. 450 index ornithology, of no service, 403. oven-bird (golden-crowned thrush, "night-warbler"), 366-368; 404, 426. owl, barred, 171, 172. owl, great homed (cat), 183-189 ; 415, 416. owl, long-eared, 169, 170. owl, saw-whet, 172. owl, screech, 173-183; 432. owl, short-eared, 170, 171; 417. owl, snowy (white), 417. owls, eggs of, 176 and note; fitted to withstand the winter, 183. parrot, 441. partridge. see grouse, ruffed. peabody, w. b. o., his report on the birds of massachusetts cited, 64, 103, 321. peetweet. see sandpiper, spotted. pe-pe. see flycatcher, olive-sided. petrel, wilson's, (mother-carey's chicken), 18. pewee. see phoebe. pewee, wood, 220-223 ; 379. phoebe (pewee), 218-220. pigeon, domestic, 440-441. pigeon, passenger (wild), 110-118. piper grass, 280 and note. pipit, american, (titlark), 360. plover, 93. plover, upland, 91. plymouth, 67 note. pokelogan, 219 and note. pratt, miss caroline, 246. pratt, minot, 212, 338. protection of birds, 428, 429. puffer, of concord, 103. quahog, a duck caught by a, 434. quail. see bob-white. rabbit, 432. rail, carolina, 82. rail, virginia, (meadow-hen), 81. railroad, partridge run over on, 107, 108. rails (unidentified), 82 ; 3. redpoll, lesser, (linaria), 269-272 ; 417; the wonder of their presence in winter, 419-421. redstart, american, 368, 359. rice, israel, 16, 115, 433. rice, reuben, 117, 276, 433. rice, william, 276. ricketson, daniel, 287 note, 309. robin, american, 385-394; 14, 298 300, 343, 399, 403, 406, 413, 416, 418, 419, 425-427, 429. robin, golden. see oriole, balti more. rockport, 116 and note. sanborn, f. b., 56. sandpiper, solitary, 90, 91. sandpiper, spotted, (peetweet), 91 93. sawyer, e. j., 103 note. seringo-bird, 254. see also sparrow, savannah. shadows, of birds, 165. shattuck, henry, 94. shattuck, lemuel, his history of concord, quoted, 261. sheldrake. see merganser, ameri can. shrike, northern, 341-344;; 416, 417. skinner, the bamess-maker, 38, 188, 189 skinning and stuffing a bird, 23. sky, birds seen in, 412. sleepy hollow cemetery, 118. snares, 106. snipe, wilson's, 86-89; 84, 159. snow, tracks in, 99-102, 108, 232-235, 282-284, 321, 431; the great be trayer, 291, 430, 431. snowbird, slate-colored. see junco, slate-colored. sora, 82. sparrow, chipping, (chip-bird, hair bird), 298, 299; 286, 349; shivering on an apple twig, 318. sparrow, field, (rush sparrow, huckleberry-bird), 299-301; 406, 414; nature's minstrel of serene hours, 403. sparrow, fox, 311, 312; 260, 320, 321, 324, 391. sparrow, savannah, (seringo-bird), 290,291; 167. sparrow, song, 306-311; 14,324,387, 390, 391, 393, 398-400, 405, 406, 413, 418, 425-427; a true ground-bird, 323; rills of song from, 413. sparrow, tree, 291-297; 14, 260, 285, 309, 310, 320, 321. 323, 324, 391, 415, 418. index 461 sparrow, vesper, (grass finch, bay wing), 286-290. sparrow, white-throated, 352 and note. sparrows (miscellaneous), 318-324; 391, 394; pursued by a hawk, 167; a cricket-like song, 405. spruce, black and white, 175 and note, 184 and note. spy-glass, advantages of, 19, 149; purchase of, 149 note. stake-driver. see bittern, american. storms, wild life in, 49, 72, 158, 159. stow, iniass., 138 note. suckers, dead, 10. summer, reminiscence of, 230; the repose of, 414. sun, the, all things follow, 409. swallow, bank, 332; 337, 339. swallow, barn, 330, 331; 335-337, 339. swallow, chimney. see swift, chim ney. swallow, cliff (eave, republican), 329, 330; 337, 339. swallow, tree (white-bellied), 331; 46, 335-337. swallows (general and miscella neous), 335-339 ; 11, 63, 406. swift, chimney (chimney swallow), 212, 213 ; 337, 339, 419. tanager, scarlet, 326-329. teal, 4. telltale. see yellow-legs, greater. tern, common, (mackerel gull), 17. " texas," concord, 280 note, 287, 289. therien, aleck, 370, 437. thoreau, sophia e., 88, 438. thoughts, like birds, 303. thrasher, brown, 381-36s; 177, 361, 414 ; compared with the wood thrush, 381. thrush, bicknell's, 363 note, 428 note. thrush, golden-crowned. see oven bird. thrush, hermit, 384, 386; 209 note, 377 note, 410 note. thrush, olive-backed, 209 note, 263 note, 428 note. thrush, wilson's. -see veery. thrush, wood, 377-383; 406, 414; the genius of the wood, 404; enno bles the wood and the world, 427. thrush alley, 113. titlark. see pipit, american. titmouse. see chickadee. toad, fowler's, 405 note. towhee (chewink, ground-robin), 313, 314; 378, 404, 406, 414; on mountain-tops, 209. townsend, dr. charles w., cited, 124 note. tracks, in snow, 99-102, 108, 232-235, 282-284, 321, 431. troopial, cow. see cowbird. tuckerman's ravine, 303, 364, 428. turtle, snapping, 242, 243. umbrella, in a boat, 48 ; as a blind, 52, 53. veery (wilson's thrush), 384; 368, 405. vireo, red-eyed, 406. vireo, warbling, 426. vireo, yellow-throated, 344. vireos (unspecified and unidenti fied), 344-340. walden pond, 1, 3, 10, 31, 32, 47, 54, 55, 152, 162, 232, 233. warbler, black and avhite, (black and white creeper), 347, 348; song of, 414. warbler, myrtle, (myrtle-bird), 362, 363. warbler, pine, 363-366 ; 153. warbler, yellow, (summer yellow bird), 348-352; 198. warblers (in general), 369. waxwing, cedar,(cherry-bird), 340, 341; 429. wayland, 7, 8. wetherbee, 114. whip-poor-will, 203, 204; 173, 378. whistler. see golden-eye. white, gilbert. 436. white mountains, birds of, 427, 428. see also mt. lafayette and mt. washington. white t>ond, 39. wilson, alexander, quotations and citations from, 22, 55, 93, 102, 129, 144, 157 note, 182, 210, 265, 284, 312, 316, 318. winter, birds of a, 416, 417; beauti ful birds in, 419-422. woodcock, 84-86; 418. 452 index woodpecker, arctic three-toed, 196, 197. woodpecker, downy, 193-196 ; 360, 415-417, 422, 430; keeps the other side of the bough, 226. woodpecker, hairy, 192, 193. woodpecker, pigeon. see flicker. woodpecker, pileated, 197. woodpeckers (species unnamed), 201-202 ; 391, 431 ; arrival of the first, 426. wren, ruby-crested. see kinglet, ruby-crowned. wren, short-billed marsh, 364, 365; 424. wren, winter, 363, 364. wyman, john, 236, 237. yellowbird, summer. see warbler, yellow. yellow-legs, greater, (telltale), 89, 90. yellow-throat, maryland, 356 note, 358. young birds, in august, 68; colors of, 410. cambridge . massachusetts u . s . a university of california southern regional library facility 405 hilgard avenue, los angeles, ca 90024-1388 return this material to the library from which it was borrowed. form 30 uc southern regional library facility a 000 031 776 8 univ s( i